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"Good morning. How are you?(Laughter)It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.(Laughter)There have been three themes running through the conference which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — Actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.(Laughter)If you work in education, you're not asked.(Laughter)And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, ""What do you do?"" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, ""Oh my God,"" you know, ""Why me?""(Laughter)""My one night out all week.""(Laughter)But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have — their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.(Applause) Thank you.(Applause)That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.(Laughter)So, 15 minutes left.(Laughter)Well, I was born... no.(Laughter)I heard a great story recently — I love telling it — of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, ""What are you drawing?"" And the girl said, ""I'm drawing a picture of God."" And the teacher said, ""But nobody knows what God looks like."" And the girl said, ""They will, in a minute.""(Laughter)When my son was four in England — Actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.(Laughter)If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story?(Laughter)No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.(Laughter)""Nativity II."" But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: ""James Robinson IS Joseph!"" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, ""You OK with that?"" And he said, ""Yeah, why? Was that wrong?"" They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, ""I bring you gold."" And the second boy said, ""I bring you myrrh."" And the third boy said, ""Frank sent this.""(Laughter)What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was.(Laughter)Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?(Laughter)How annoying would that be?(Laughter)""Must try harder.""(Laughter)Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, ""Go to bed, now! And put the pencil down.""(Laughter)""And stop speaking like that.""(Laughter)""It's confusing everybody.""(Laughter)Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month.(Laughter)Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. He was really upset on the plane, he said, ""I'll never find another girl like Sarah."" And we were rather pleased about that, frankly —(Laughter)Because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.(Laughter)But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?(Laughter)Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say ""What's it for, public education?"" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.(Laughter)And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There's something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.(Laughter)Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.(Laughter)If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night.(Laughter)And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.(Laughter)Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.(Laughter)Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about — technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home — which is not often, thankfully.(Laughter)No, she's good at some things, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. I say, ""Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here.""(Laughter)""Give me a break.""(Laughter)Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt recently, which said, ""If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?""(Laughter)And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called ""Epiphany,"" which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did ""Cats"" and ""Phantom of the Opera."" She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, ""How did you get to be a dancer?"" It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, ""We think Gillian has a learning disorder."" She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition.(Laughter)People weren't aware they could have that.(Laughter)Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about the problems Gillian was having at school. Because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, and said, ""I've listened to all these things your mother's told me, I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long,"" and they went and left her.But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out, he said to her mother, ""Just stand and watch her."" And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, ""Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school.""I said, ""What happened?"" She said, ""She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think."" Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.(Applause)What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, ""If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."" And he's right.What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity
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"Thank you so much, Chris. And it's truly a great honor to have the opportunity to come to this stage twice; I'm extremely grateful. I have been blown away by this conference, and I want to thank all of you for the many nice comments about what I had to say the other night. And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that.(Laughter)Put yourselves in my position.(Laughter)I flew on Air Force Two for eight years.(Laughter)Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane!(Laughter)(Applause)I'll tell you one quick story to illustrate what that's been like for me.(Laughter)It's a true story — every bit of this is true.Soon after Tipper and I left the — (Mock sob) White House —(Laughter)we were driving from our home in Nashville to a little farm we have 50 miles east of Nashville. Driving ourselves.(Laughter)I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but —(Laughter)I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. There was no motorcade back there.(Laughter)You've heard of phantom limb pain?(Laughter)This was a rented Ford Taurus.(Laughter)It was dinnertime, and we started looking for a place to eat. We were on I-40. We got to Exit 238, Lebanon, Tennessee. We got off the exit, we found a Shoney's restaurant. Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it. We went in and sat down at the booth, and the waitress came over, made a big commotion over Tipper.(Laughter)She took our order, and then went to the couple in the booth next to us, and she lowered her voice so much, I had to really strain to hear what she was saying. And she said ""Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper."" And the man said, ""He's come down a long way, hasn't he?""(Laughter)(Applause)There's been kind of a series of epiphanies.(Laughter)The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville. And I told it pretty much the same way I've just shared it with you: Tipper and I were driving ourselves, Shoney's, low-cost family restaurant chain, what the man said — they laughed. I gave my speech, then went back out to the airport to fly back home. I fell asleep on the plane until, during the middle of the night, we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling. I woke up, they opened the door, I went out to get some fresh air, and I looked, and there was a man running across the runway. And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, ""Call Washington! Call Washington!"" And I thought to myself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic, what in the world could be wrong in Washington? Then I remembered it could be a bunch of things.(Laughter)But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. It was printed in Monterey, I checked.(Laughter)And the story began, ""Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday,"" quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant'"" —(Laughter)""'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.'""(Laughter)Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on — one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, ""One more burger with fries!""(Laughter)Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, ""Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!""(Laughter)We like to celebrate each other's successes in life.(Laughter)I was going to talk about information ecology. But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time.(Applause)Chris Anderson: It's a deal!(Applause)Al Gore: I want to focus on what many of you have said you would like me to elaborate on: What can you do about the climate crisis? I want to start with a couple of — I'm going to show some new images, and I'm going to recapitulate just four or five. Now, the slide show. I update the slide show every time I give it. I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. It's like beach-combing, you know? Every time the tide comes in and out, you find some more shells. Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. This is just for the United States of America. Historical average for Januarys is 31 degrees; last month was 39.5 degrees.Now, I know that you wanted some more bad news about the environment — I'm kidding. But these are the recapitulation slides, and then I'm going to go into new material about what you can do. But I wanted to elaborate on a couple of these. First of all, this is where we're projected to go with the U.S. contribution to global warming, under business as usual. Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. Efficiency and conservation — it's not a cost; it's a profit. The sign is wrong. It's not negative; it's positive. These are investments that pay for themselves. But they are also very effective in deflecting our path.Cars and trucks — I talked about that in the slideshow, but I want you to put it in perspective. It's an easy, visible target of concern — and it should be — but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. And so we should address that. But it's part of the puzzle. Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks. Renewables at the current levels of technological efficiency can make this much difference. And with what Vinod, and John Doerr and others, many of you here — there are a lot of people directly involved in this — this wedge is going to grow much more rapidly than the current projection shows it. Carbon Capture and Sequestration — that's what CCS stands for — is likely to become the killer app that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels in a way that is safe. Not quite there yet. OK. Now, what can you do?Reduce emissions in your home. Most of these expenditures are also profitable. Insulation, better design. Buy green electricity where you can. I mentioned automobiles — buy a hybrid. Use light rail. Figure out some of the other options that are much better. It's important.Be a green consumer. You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life. Those of you who are good at branding, I'd love to get your advice and help on how to say this in a way that connects with the most people. It is easier than you think. It really is. A lot of us in here have made that decision, and it is really pretty easy. It means reduce your carbon dioxide emissions with the full range of choices that you make, and then purchase or acquire offsets for the remainder that you have not completely reduced. And what it means is elaborated at climatecrisis.net.There is a carbon calculator. Participant Productions convened — with my active involvement — the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. You can very precisely calculate what your CO2 emissions are, and then you will be given options to reduce. And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets.Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. Again, some of us have done that, and it's not as hard as you think. Integrate climate solutions into all of your innovations, whether you are from the technology, or entertainment, or design and architecture community. Invest sustainably. Majora mentioned this. Listen, if you have invested money with managers who you compensate on the basis of their annual performance, don't ever again complain about quarterly report CEO management. Over time, people do what you pay them to do. And if they judge how much they're going to get paid on your capital that they've invested, based on the short-term returns, you're going to get short-term decisions. A lot more to be said about that.Become a catalyst of change. Teach others, learn about it, talk about it. The movie is a movie version of the slideshow I gave two nights ago, except it's a lot more entertaining. And it comes out in May. Many of you here have the opportunity to ensure that a lot of people see it. Consider sending somebody to Nashville. Pick well. And I am personally going to train people to give this slideshow — re-purposed, with some of the personal stories obviously replaced with a generic approach, and it's not just the slides, it's what they mean. And it's how they link together. And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. Working with Larry Lessig, it will be, somewhere in that process, posted with tools and limited-use copyrights, so that young people can remix it and do it in their own way.(Applause)Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? It doesn't mean that if you're a Republican, that I'm trying to convince you to be a Democrat. We need Republicans as well. This used to be a bipartisan issue, and I know that in this group it really is. Become politically active. Make our democracy work the way it's supposed to work. Support the idea of capping carbon dioxide emissions — global warming pollution — and trading it. Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. Once it becomes a closed system, with U.S. participation, then everybody who's on a board of directors — how many people here serve on the board of directors of a corporation? Once it's a closed system, you will have legal liability if you do not urge your CEO to get the maximum income from reducing and trading the carbon emissions that can be avoided. The market will work to solve this problem — if we can accomplish this. Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. We have to change the minds of the American people. Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done.And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. We have to buy a lot of those ads. Let's re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested. I like ""climate crisis"" instead of ""climate collapse,"" but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this. Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination.(Laughter)That's really true.I said the other night, and I'll repeat now: this is not a political issue. Again, the Republicans here — this shouldn't be partisan. You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do. This is an opportunity. Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them. We are one.Thank you very much, I appreciate it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_on_averting_climate_crisis
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"(Music: ""The Sound of Silence,"" Simon & Garfunkel)Hello voice mail, my old friend.(Laughter)I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss's warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold, and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I've still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac, and it constantly hangs and bombs — it erased my ROMs! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me.(Laughter)And you listen to the sounds of silence.(Music)(Applause)Thank you.Good evening and welcome to: ""Spot the TED Presenter Who Used to Be a Broadway Accompanist.""(Laughter)When I was offered the Times column six years ago, the deal was like this: you'll be sent the coolest, hottest, slickest new gadgets. Every week, it'll arrive at your door. You get to try them out, play with them, evaluate them until the novelty wears out, before you have to send them back, and you'll get paid for it. You can think about it, if you want. So, I've always been a technology nut, and I absolutely love it. The job, though, came with one small downside, and that is, they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column. And what I've noticed is — first of all, you get an incredible amount of email.If you ever are feeling lonely, get a New York Times column, because you will get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails. And the email I'm getting a lot today is about frustration. People are feeling like things — Ok, I just had an alarm come up on my screen. Lucky you can't see it. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like it's too much technology, too fast. It may be good technology, but I feel like there's not enough of a support structure. There's not enough help. There's not enough thought put into the design of it to make it easy and enjoyable to use. One time I wrote a column about my efforts to reach Dell Technical Support, and within 12 hours, there were 700 messages from readers on the feedback boards on the Times website, from users saying, """"Me too, and here's my tale of woe."" I call it ""software rage."" And man, let me tell you, whoever figures out how to make money off of this frustration will — Oh, how did that get up there? Just kidding.(Laughter)Ok, so why is the problem accelerating? And part of the problem is, ironically, because the industry has put so much thought into making things easier to use. I'll show you what I mean. This is what the computer interface used to look like, DOS. Over the years, it's gotten easier to use. This is the original Mac operating system. Reagan was President. Madonna was still a brunette. And the entire operating system — this is the good part — the entire operating system fit in 211 k. You couldn't put the Mac OS X logo in 211 k!(Laughter)So the irony is, that as these things became easier to use, a less technical, broader audience was coming into contact with this equipment for the first time.I once had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Apple call center for a day. The guy had a duplicate headset for me to listen to. And the calls that — you know how they say, ""Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?"" Uh-uh. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD.(Laughter)Which they do.(Laughter)And I have a copy.(Laughter)It's in your gift bag. No, no. With your voices on it!So, some of the stories are just so classic, and yet so understandable. A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was squeaking. Making a squeaking noise. And the technician said,""Well, ma'am, what do you mean your mouse is squeaking?""She says, ""All I can tell you is that it squeaks louder, the faster I move it across the screen.""(Laughter)And the technician's like, ""Ma'am, you've got the mouse up against the screen?""She goes, ""Well, the message said, 'Click here to continue.'""(Laughter)Well, if you like that one — how much time have we got? Another one, a guy called — this is absolutely true — his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it, no matter how many times he typed ""11."" And the technician said, ""What? Why are you typing 11?"" He said, ""The message says, 'Error Type 11.'""(Laughter)So, we must admit that some of the blame falls squarely at the feet of the users. But why is the technical overload crisis, the complexity crisis, accelerating now?In the hardware world, it's because we the consumers want everything to be smaller, smaller, smaller. So the gadgets are getting tinier and tinier, but our fingers are essentially staying the same size. So it gets to be more and more of a challenge. Software is subject to another primal force: the mandate to release more and more versions. When you buy a piece of software, it's not like buying a vase or a candy bar, where you own it. It's more like joining a club, where you pay dues every year, and every year, they say, ""We've added more features, and we'll sell it to you for $99."" I know one guy who's spent $4,000 just on Photoshop over the years. And software companies make 35 percent of their revenue from just these software upgrades. I call it the Software Upgrade Paradox — which is that if you improve a piece of software enough times, you eventually ruin it.I mean, Microsoft Word was last just a word processor in, you know, the Eisenhower administration.(Laughter)But what's the alternative? Microsoft actually did this experiment. They said, ""Well, wait a minute. Everyone complains that we're adding so many features. Let's create a word processor that's just a word processor: Simple, pure; does not do web pages, is not a database."" And it came out, and it was called Microsoft Write. And none of you are nodding in acknowledgment, because it died. It tanked. No one ever bought it. I call this the Sport Utility Principle. People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power, right? They don't need the database and the website, but they're like, ""Well, I'll upgrade, because, I might, you know, I might need that someday."" So the problem is: as you add more features, where are they going to go? Where are you going to stick them? You only have so many design tools. You can do buttons, you can do sliders, pop-up menus, sub-menus. But if you're not careful about how you choose, you wind up with this.(Laughter)This is an un-retouched — this is not a joke — un-retouched photo of Microsoft Word, the copy that you have, with all the toolbars open. You've obviously never opened all the toolbars, but all you have to type in is this little, teeny window down here.(Laughter)And we've arrived at the age of interface matrices, where there are so many features and options, you have to do two dimensions, you know: a vertical and a horizontal. You guys all complain about how Microsoft Word is always bulleting your lists and underlining your links automatically. The off switch is in there somewhere. I'm telling you — it's there. Part of the art of designing a simple, good interface, is knowing when to use which one of these features. So, here is the log-off dialogue box for Windows 2000. There are only four choices, so why are they in a pop-up menu? It's not like the rest of the screen is so full of other components that you need to collapse the choices. They could have put them all out in view.Here's Apple's take on the exact same dialogue box.(Applause)Thank you — yes, I designed the dialogue box. No, no. Already, we can see that Apple and Microsoft have a severely divergent approach to software design. Microsoft's approach to simplicity tends to be: let's break it down; let's just make it more steps. There are these ""wizards"" everywhere. And you know, there's a new version of Windows coming out this fall. If they continue at this pace, there's absolutely no telling where they might wind up.[Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard](Laughter)(Applause)""Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard."" Ok, I'll bite. Let's click ""Next"" to continue.(Laughter)(Applause)From the drop-down menu, choose the first letter you want to type. Ok.(Laughter)So there is a limit that we don't want to cross. So what is the answer? How do you pack in all these features in a simple, intelligent way? I believe in consistency, when possible, real-world equivalents, trash can folder, when possible, label things, mostly. But I beg of the designers here to break all those rules if they violate the biggest rule of all, which is intelligence. Now what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you some examples where intelligence makes something not consistent, but it's better.If you are buying something on the web, you're supposed to put in your address, and you're supposed to choose what country you're from, ok? There are 200 countries in the world. We like to think of the Internet as a global village. I'm sorry; it's not one yet. It's mainly like, the United States, Europe, and Japan. So why is ""United States"" in the ""U""s?(Laughter)You have to scroll, like, seven screensful to get to it. Now, it would be inconsistent to put ""United States"" first, but it would be intelligent.This one's been touched on before, but why in God's name do you shut down a Windows PC by clicking a button called ""Start?""(Laughter)Here's another pet one of mine: you have a printer. Most of the time, you want to print one copy of your document, in page order, on that printer. So why in God's name do you see this every time you print? It's like a 747 shuttle cockpit.(Laughter)And one of the buttons at the bottom, you'll notice, is not ""Print.""(Laughter)(Applause)Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the only company who has embraced the cult of simplicity. Palm is also, especially in the old days, wonderful about this. I actually got to speak to Palm when they were flying high in the '90s, and after the talk, I met one of the employees. He says, ""Nice talk."" And I said, ""Thank you. What do you do here?"" He said, ""I'm a tap counter."" I'm like, ""You're a what?"" He goes, ""Well Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter."" So, I'm going to show you an example of a company that does not have a tap counter.(Laughter)This is Microsoft Word. Ok, when you want to create a new blank document in Word — it could happen.(Laughter)You go up to the ""File"" menu and you choose ""New."" Now, what happens when you choose ""New?"" Do you get a new blank document? You do not. On the opposite side of the monitor, a task bar appears, and somewhere in those links — by the way, not at the top — somewhere in those links is a button that makes you a new document. Ok, so that is a company not counting taps. You know, I don't want to just stand here and make fun of Microsoft ... Yes, I do.(Laughter)(Applause)The Bill Gates song!(Piano music)I've been a geek forever and I wrote the very first DOS. I put my software and IBM together; I got profit and they got the loss.(Laughter)I write the code that makes the whole world run. I'm getting royalties from everyone. Sometimes it's garbage, but the press is snowed. You buy the box; I'll sell the code. Every software company is doing Microsoft's R&D. You can't keep a good idea down these days. Even Windows is a hack. We're kind of based loosely on the Mac. So it's big, so it's slow. You've got nowhere to go. I'm not doing this for praise. I write the code that fits the world today. Big mediocrity in every way. We've entered planet domination mode. You'll have no choice; you'll buy my code. I am Bill Gates and I write the code.(Applause)But actually, I believe there are really two Microsofts. There's the old one, responsible for Windows and Office. They're dying to throw the whole thing out and start fresh, but they can't. They're locked in, because so many add-ons and other company stuff locks into the old 1982 chassis. But there's also a new Microsoft, that's really doing good, simple interface designs. I liked the Media Center PC. I liked the Microsoft SPOT Watch. The Wireless Watch flopped miserably in the market, but it wasn't because it wasn't simply and beautifully designed. But let's put it this way: would you pay $10 a month to have a watch that has to be recharged every night like your cell phone, and stops working when you leave your area code?(Laughter)So, the signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse. So is there any hope? The screens are getting smaller, people are illuminating, putting manuals in the boxes, things are coming out at a faster pace. It's funny — when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, after 12 years away, it was the MacWorld Expo — he came to the stage in that black turtleneck and jeans, and he sort of did this. The crowd went wild, but I had just seen — I'm like, where have I seen this before? I had just seen the movie ""Evita"" —(Laughter)with Madonna, and I'm like, you know what? I've got to do one about Steve Jobs.(Music)It won't be easy. You'll think I'm strange.(Laughter)When I try to explain why I'm back, after telling the press Apple's future is black. You won't believe me. All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named Woz.(Laughter)You try rhyming with garage!(Laughter)Don't cry for me, Cupertino.(Laughter)The truth is, I never left you. I know the ropes now, know what the tricks are. I made a fortune over at Pixar.(Laughter)Don't cry for me, Cupertino. I've still got the drive and vision. I still wear sandals in any weather. It's just that these days, they're Gucci leather.(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you.So Steve Jobs had always believed in simplicity and elegance and beauty. And the truth is, for years I was a little depressed, because Americans obviously did not value it, because the Mac had three percent market share, Windows had 95 percent market share — people did not think it was worth putting a price on it. So I was a little depressed. And then I heard Al Gore's talk, and I realized I didn't know the meaning of depressed.(Laughter)But it turns out I was wrong, right? Because the iPod came out, and it violated every bit of common wisdom. Other products cost less; other products had more features, they had voice recorders and FM transmitters. The other products were backed by Microsoft, with an open standard, not Apple's propriety standard. But the iPod won — this is the one they wanted. The lesson was: simplicity sells. And there are signs that the industry is getting the message. This is a little company that's done very well with simplicity and elegance. The Sonos thing — it's catching on.I've got just a couple examples. Physically, a really cool, elegant thinking coming along lately. When you have a digital camera, how do you get the pictures back to your computer? Well, you either haul around a USB cable, or you buy a card reader and haul that around. Either one, you're going to lose. What I do is, I take out the memory card, and I fold it in half, revealing USB contacts. I just stick it in the computer, offload the pictures, put it right back in the camera. I never have to lose anything. Here's another example. Chris, you're the source of all power. Will you be my power plug?Chris Anderson: Oh yeah. DP: Hold that and don't let go. You might've seen this, this is Apple's new laptop. This the power cord. It hooks on like this. And I'm sure every one of you has done this at some point in your lives, or one of your children. You walk along — and I'm about to pull this onto the floor. I don't care. It's a loaner. Here we go. Whoa! It's magnetic — it doesn't pull the laptop onto the floor.(Applause)In my very last example — I do a lot of my work using speech recognition software. And I'll just — you have to be kind of quiet because the software is nervous. Speech recognition software is really great for doing emails very quickly; period. Like, I get hundreds of them a day; period. And it's not just what I dictate that it writes down; period. I also use this feature called voice macros; period. Correct ""dissuade."" Not ""just."" Ok, this is not an ideal situation, because it's getting the echo from the hall and stuff. The point is, I can respond to people very quickly by saying a short word, and having it write out a much longer thing. So if somebody sends me a fan letter, I'll say, ""Thanks for that.""[Thank you so much for taking the time to write ...](Laughter)(Applause)And conversely, if somebody sends me hate mail — which happens daily — I say, ""Piss off.""(Laughter)[I admire your frankness ...](Laughter)(Applause)So that's my dirty little secret. Don't tell anyone.(Laughter)So the point is — this is a really interesting story. This is version eight of this software, and do you know what they put in version eight? No new features. It's never happened before in software! The company put no new features. They just said, ""We'll make this software work right."" Right? Because for years, people had bought this software, tried it out — 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong — and they'd put it in their drawer. And the company got sick of that, so they said, ""This version, we're not going to do anything, but make sure it's darned accurate."" And so that's what they did.This cult of doing things right is starting to spread. So, my final advice for those of you who are consumers of this technology: remember, if it doesn't work, it's not necessarily you, ok? It could be the design of the thing you're using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you're among the people who create this stuff: Easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps. Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add, it's deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells.CA: Bravo. DP: Thank you very much.CA: Hear, hear!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells
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"If you're here today — and I'm very happy that you are — you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger.The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog — an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city.So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx.And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times, into a $3 million park.And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved.(Audience whistles)Thank you very much.(Applause)That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time.(Laughter)(Applause)But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. We feel the problems right now, and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy.Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common?Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking.(Laughter)Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good.(Laughter)But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other.So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad — a Pullman porter, son of a slave — bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions — dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding.Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home, and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough.Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was ""planning"" — in quotes — that did not have our best interests in mind.Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue — and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that.As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs — and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development.We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban ""heat island"" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions — which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends![Butterfly](Laughter)So cool!Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx.[Green is the new black ...](Laughter) (Applause)I like that, too.Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway —(Laughter)(Applause)OK. Katrina.Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two, like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine?Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later, if you want to know.(Laughter)But — I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the ""triple bottom line"" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up.At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues.Now let's get this straight: I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And, but I don't have —(Laughter)You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to.(Laughter)So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins — both heroes of mine by the way — have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities, is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization.Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogotanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped, because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. We have no excuse in this country, I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. But Bogota's example has the power to change that.You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time!Listen — when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer.(Applause)What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money.(Laughter)But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count.(Applause)I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.Ciao, bellos!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_s_tale_of_urban_renewal
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"About 10 years ago, I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students. That was after having spent about 20 years together with African institutions studying hunger in Africa, so I was sort of expected to know a little about the world. And I started in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. But when you get that opportunity, you get a little nervous. I thought, these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in Swedish college systems — so I thought, maybe they know everything I'm going to teach them about. So I did a pre-test when they came. And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: ""Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?""I put them together, so that in each pair of country, one has twice the child mortality of the other. And this means that it's much bigger a difference than the uncertainty of the data. I won't put you at a test here, but it's Turkey, which is highest there, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. And these were the results of the Swedish students. I did it so I got the confidence interval, which is pretty narrow, and I got happy, of course: a 1.8 right answer out of five possible. That means that there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course.(Laughter)But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.(Laughter)Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. They would be right half of the cases. But the students are not there. The problem for me was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas.I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute, that hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzee there.(Laughter)This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate, because the data of what's happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware.We did this software which displays it like this: every bubble here is a country. This country over here is China. This is India. The size of the bubble is the population, and on this axis here, I put fertility rate. Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, ""What do you really think about the world?"" Well, I first discovered that the textbook was Tintin, mainly.(Laughter)And they said, ""The world is still 'we' and 'them.' And 'we' is Western world and 'them' is Third World."" ""And what do you mean with Western world?"" I said. ""Well, that's long life and small family, and Third World is short life and large family.""So this is what I could display here. I put fertility rate here: number of children per woman: one, two, three, four, up to about eight children per woman. We have very good data since 1962 — 1960 about — on the size of families in all countries. The error margin is narrow. Here, I put life expectancy at birth, from 30 years in some countries up to about 70 years. And 1962, there was really a group of countries here that was industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. And these were the developing countries: they had large families and they had relatively short lives. Now, what has happened since 1962? We want to see the change. Are the students right? Is it still two types of countries? Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here? Or have they got longer lives and live up there?Let's see. We stopped the world then. This is all U.N. statistics that have been available. Here we go. Can you see there? It's China there, moving against better health there, improving there. All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families. Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get longer life, but not larger families. The Africans are the green here. They still remain here. This is India; Indonesia is moving on pretty fast.(Laughter)In the '80s here, you have Bangladesh still among the African countries. But now, Bangladesh — it's a miracle that happens in the '80s: the imams start to promote family planning. They move up into that corner. And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries and all the rest of them move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world.(Applause)(Applause ends)Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 1964. America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. And this is what happens: the data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. By the end of the year, the family planning started in Vietnam; they went for smaller families. And the United States up there is getting for longer life, keeping family size. And in the '80s now, they give up Communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. If we don't look in the data, I think we all underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economical change.Let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of the income. This is the world distribution of income of people. One dollar, 10 dollars or 100 dollars per day. There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth. There's a little hump here. But there are people all the way. And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent the world's annual income. And the richest 20 percent, they take out of that about 74 percent. And the poorest 20 percent, they take about two percent. And this shows that the concept of developing countries is extremely doubtful. We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. But in the middle, we have most of the world population, and they have now 24 percent of the income.We heard it in other forms. And who are these? Where are the different countries? I can show you Africa. This is Africa. 10% the world population, most in poverty. This is OECD. The rich country. The country club of the U.N. And they are over here on this side. Quite an overlap between Africa and OECD. And this is Latin America. It has everything on this Earth, from the poorest to the richest in Latin America. And on top of that, we can put East Europe, we can put East Asia, and we put South Asia.And how did it look like if we go back in time, to about 1970? Then there was more of a hump. And we have most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians. The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia. And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen, and we will not have a divided world. We'll have most people in the middle.Of course it's a logarithmic scale here, but our concept of economy is growth with percent. We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase. If I change this, and take GDP per capita instead of family income, and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product, and I take the regions down here, the size of the bubble is still the population. And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. Now I have money on that axis, and I have the possibility of children to survive there. In some countries, 99.7% of children survive to five years of age; others, only 70. And here, it seems, there is a gap between OECD, Latin America, East Europe, East Asia, Arab states, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The linearity is very strong between child survival and money.But let me split sub-Saharan Africa. Health is there and better health is up there. I can go here and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries. And when it burst, the size of its country bubble is the size of the population. Sierra Leone down there. Mauritius is up there. Mauritius was the first country to get away with trade barriers, and they could sell their sugar — they could sell their textiles — on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America.There's a huge difference between Africa. And Ghana is here in the middle. In Sierra Leone, humanitarian aid. Here in Uganda, development aid. Here, time to invest; there, you can go for a holiday. It's a tremendous variation within Africa which we rarely often make — that it's equal everything. I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. But a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I can split Arab states. How are they? Same climate, same culture, same religion — huge difference. Even between neighbors. Yemen, civil war. United Arab Emirates, money, which was quite equally and well used. Not as the myth is. And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country.Data is often better than you think. Many people say data is bad. There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data. East Europe: Soviet economy for a long time, but they come out after 10 years very, very differently. And there is Latin America. Today, we don't have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America. Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now. Here, we have high-income countries in the OECD.And we get the whole pattern here of the world, which is more or less like this. And if we look at it, how the world looks, in 1960, it starts to move. This is Mao Tse-tung. He brought health to China. And then he died. And then Deng Xiaoping came and brought money to China, and brought them into the mainstream again. And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world.But I would like to bring you back to about here, at 1960. I would like to compare South Korea, which is this one, with Brazil, which is this one. The label went away for me here. And I would like to compare Uganda, which is there. And I can run it forward, like this. And you can see how South Korea is making a very, very fast advancement, whereas Brazil is much slower.And if we move back again, here, and we put on trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less in the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. They came from here, a mineral country. They cached all the oil; they got all the money; but health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population. And Sheikh Zayed did that in a fairly good way. In spite of falling oil prices, he brought this country up here. So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past.Now, this is, more or less, if you look at the average data of the countries — they are like this. Now that's dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries. So if I go and look here, we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was in 1960. If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. These are the quintiles of Uganda. The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there. The poorest are down there. If I split South Africa, it's like this. And if I go down and look at Niger, where there was such a terrible famine, lastly, it's like this. The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss on what solutions there should be in Africa. Everything in this world exists in Africa. And you can't discuss universal access to HIV [medicine] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it's not relevant to have it on regional level. We must be much more detailed. We find that students get very excited when they can use this.And even more, policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why doesn't this take place? Why are we not using the data we have? We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other non-governmental organizations. Because the data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the Internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively.All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics.(Laughter)And this won't work.(Applause)So what is needed? We have the databases. It's not the new database you need. We have wonderful design tools, and more and more are added up here. So we started a nonprofit venture which, linking data to design, we called Gapminder, from the London Underground, where they warn you, ""mind the gap."" So we thought Gapminder was appropriate. And we started to write software which could link the data like this. And it wasn't that difficult. It took some person years, and we have produced animations. You can take a data set and put it there. We are liberating U.N. data, some few U.N. organization.Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world, but what we really need is, of course, a search function. A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. And what do we hear when we go around? I've done anthropology on the main statistical units. Everyone says, ""It's impossible. This can't be done. Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched. We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world.""But this is what we would like to see, isn't it? The publicly-funded data is down here. And we would like flowers to grow out on the Net. And one of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tool to animate it there. And I have pretty good news for you. I have good news that the present, new Head of U.N. Statistics, he doesn't say it's impossible. He only says, ""We can't do it.""(Laughter)And that's a quite clever guy, huh?(Laughter)So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. This is the income distribution of China, 1970. This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. Almost no overlap. And what has happened? What has happened is this: that China is growing, it's not so equal any longer, and it's appearing here, overlooking the United States. Almost like a ghost, isn't it?(Laughter)It's pretty scary.(Laughter)But I think it's very important to have all this information. We need really to see it. And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the Internet users per 1,000. In this software, we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily. It takes some time to change for this, but on the axises, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. But this is hypothesis-generating.I end now with the world. There, the Internet is coming. The number of Internet users are going up like this. This is the GDP per capita. And it's a new technology coming in, but then amazingly, how well it fits to the economy of the countries. That's why the $100 computer will be so important. But it's a nice tendency. It's as if the world is flattening off, isn't it? These countries are lifting more than the economy and will be very interesting to follow this over the year, as I would like you to be able to do with all the publicly funded data.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen
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"Thank you. I have to tell you I'm both challenged and excited. My excitement is: I get a chance to give something back. My challenge is: the shortest seminar I usually do is 50 hours.(Laughter)I'm not exaggerating. I do weekends — I do more, obviously, I also coach people — but I'm into immersion, because how did you learn language? Not just by learning principles, you got in it and you did it so often that it became real.The bottom line of why I'm here, besides being a crazy mofo, is that — I'm not here to motivate you, you don't need that, obviously. Often that's what people think I do, and it's the furthest thing from it. What happens, though, is people say to me, ""I don't need any motivation."" But that's not what I do. I'm the ""why"" guy. I want to know why you do what you do.What is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life today? Not 10 years ago. Are you running the same pattern? Because I believe that the invisible force of internal drive, activated, is the most important thing. I'm here because I believe emotion is the force of life. All of us here have great minds. Most of us here have great minds, right? We all know how to think. With our minds we can rationalize anything. We can make anything happen.I agree with what was described a few days ago, that people work in their self-interest. But we know that that's bullshit at times. You don't work in your self-interest all the time, because when emotion comes into it, the wiring changes in the way it functions. So it's wonderful to think intellectually about how the life of the world is, especially those who are very smart can play this game in our head. But I really want to know what's driving you.What I would like to invite you to do by the end of this talk is explore where you are today, for two reasons. One: so that you can contribute more. And two: that hopefully we can not just understand other people more, but appreciate them more, and create the kinds of connections that can stop some of the challenges that we face today. They're only going to get magnified by the very technology that connects us, because it's making us intersect. That intersection doesn't always create a view of ""everybody now understands everybody, and everybody appreciates everybody.""I've had an obsession basically for 30 years, ""What makes the difference in the quality of people's lives? What in their performance?"" I got hired to produce the result now. I've done it for 30 years. I get the phone call when the athlete is burning down on national television, and they were ahead by five strokes and now they can't get back on the course. I've got to do something right now or nothing matters. I get the phone call when the child is going to commit suicide, I've got to do something. In 29 years, I'm very grateful to tell you I've never lost one. It doesn't mean I won't some day, but I haven't yet. The reason is an understanding of these human needs.When I get those calls about performance, that's one thing. How do you make a change? I'm also looking to see what is shaping the person's ability to contribute, to do something beyond themselves. Maybe the real question is, I look at life and say there's two master lessons. One is: there's the science of achievement, which almost everyone here has mastered amazingly. ""How do you take the invisible and make it visible,"" How do you make your dreams happen? Your business, your contribution to society, money — whatever, your body, your family.The other lesson that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment. Because science is easy, right? We know the rules, you write the code and you get the results. Once you know the game, you just up the ante, don't you? But when it comes to fulfillment — that's an art. The reason is, it's about appreciation and contribution. You can only feel so much by yourself.I've had an interesting laboratory to try to answer the real question how somebody's life changes if you look at them like those people that you've given everything to? Like all the resources they say they need. You gave not a 100-dollar computer, but the best computer. You gave them love, joy, were there to comfort them. Those people very often — you know some of them — end up the rest of their life with all this love, education, money and background going in and out of rehab. Some people have been through ultimate pain, psychologically, sexually, spiritually, emotionally abused — and not always, but often, they become some of the people that contribute the most to society.The question we've got to ask ourselves really is, what is it? What is it that shapes us? We live in a therapy culture. Most of us don't do that, but the culture's a therapy culture, the mindset that we are our past. And you wouldn't be in this room if you bought that, but most of society thinks biography is destiny. The past equals the future. Of course it does if you live there. But what we know and what we have to remind ourselves — because you can know something intellectually and then not use it, not apply it.We've got to remind ourselves that decision is the ultimate power. When you ask people, have you failed to achieve something significant in your life?Say, ""Aye."" Audience: Aye.TR: Thanks for the interaction on a high level there. But if you ask people, why didn't you achieve something? Somebody who's working for you, or a partner, or even yourself. When you fail to achieve, what's the reason people say? What do they tell you? Didn't have the knowledge, didn't have the money, didn't have the time, didn't have the technology. I didn't have the right manager.Al Gore: Supreme Court. TR: The Supreme Court.(Laughter)(Applause) (Cheering)(Applause continues)TR: And —(Applause)What do all those, including the Supreme Court, have in common?(Laughter)They are a claim to you missing resources, and they may be accurate. You may not have the money, or the Supreme Court, but that is not the defining factor.(Applause) (Laughter)And you correct me if I'm wrong. The defining factor is never resources; it's resourcefulness. And what I mean specifically, rather than just some phrase, is if you have emotion, human emotion, something that I experienced from you the day before yesterday at a level that is as profound as I've ever experienced and I believe with that emotion you would have beat his ass and won.Audience: Yeah!(Applause) (Cheering)How easy for me to tell him what he should do.(Laughter)Idiot, Robbins. But I know when we watched the debate at that time, there were emotions that blocked people's ability to get this man's intellect and capacity. And the way that it came across to some people on that day — because I know people that wanted to vote in your direction and didn't, and I was upset. But there was emotion there. Do you know what I'm talking about?Say, ""Aye."" Audience: Aye.TR: So, emotion is it. And if we get the right emotion, we can get ourselves to do anything. If you're creative, playful, fun enough, can you get through to anybody, yes or no?If you don't have the money, but you're creative and determined, you find the way. This is the ultimate resource. But this is not the story that people tell us. They tell us a bunch of different stories. They tell us we don't have the resources, but ultimately, if you take a look here, they say, what are all the reasons they haven't accomplished that? He's broken my pattern, that son-of-a-bitch.(Laughter)But I appreciated the energy, I'll tell you that.(Laughter)What determines your resources? We've said decisions shape destiny, which is my focus here. If decisions shape destiny, what determines it is three decisions. What will you focus on? You have to decide what you're going to focus on. Consciously or unconsciously. the minute you decide to focus, you must give it a meaning, and that meaning produces emotion. Is this the end or the beginning? Is God punishing me or rewarding me, or is this the roll of the dice? An emotion creates what we're going to do, or the action.So, think about your own life, the decisions that have shaped your destiny. And that sounds really heavy, but in the last five or 10 years, have there been some decisions that if you'd made a different decision, your life would be completely different? How many can think about it? Better or worse. Say, ""Aye.""Audience: Aye.So the bottom line is, maybe it was where to go to work, and you met the love of your life there, a career decision. I know the Google geniuses I saw here — I mean, I understand that their decision was to sell their technology. What if they made that decision versus to build their own culture? How would the world or their lives be different, their impact? The history of our world is these decisions. When a woman stands up and says, ""No, I won't go to the back of the bus."" She didn't just affect her life. That decision shaped our culture. Or someone standing in front of a tank. Or being in a position like Lance Armstrong, ""You've got testicular cancer."" That's pretty tough for any male, especially if you ride a bike.(Laughter)You've got it in your brain; you've got it in your lungs. But what was his decision of what to focus on? Different than most people. What did it mean? It wasn't the end; it was the beginning. He goes off and wins seven championships he never once won before the cancer, because he got emotional fitness, psychological strength. That's the difference in human beings that I've seen of the three million I've been around.In my lab, I've had three million people from 80 countries over the last 29 years. And after a while, patterns become obvious. You see that South America and Africa may be connected in a certain way, right? Others say, ""Oh, that sounds ridiculous."" It's simple. So, what shaped Lance? What shapes you? Two invisible forces. Very quickly. One: state. We all have had times, you did something, and after, you thought to yourself, ""I can't believe I said or did that, that was so stupid."" Who's been there? Say, ""Aye."" Audience: Aye.Or after you did something, you go, ""That was me!""(Laughter)It wasn't your ability; it was your state. Your model of the world is what shapes you long term. Your model of the world is the filter. That's what's shaping us. It makes people make decisions. To influence somebody, we need to know what already influences them. It's made up of three parts. First, what's your target? What are you after? It's not your desires. You can get your desires or goals. Who has ever got a goal or desire and thought, is this all there is?Say, ""Aye."" Audience: Aye.It's needs we have. I believe there are six human needs. Second, once you know what the target that's driving you is and you uncover it for the truth — you don't form it — then you find out what's your map, what's the belief systems that tell you how to get those needs. Some people think the way to get them is to destroy the world, some people, to build, create something, love someone. There's the fuel you pick. So very quickly, six needs.Let me tell you what they are. First one: certainty. These are not goals or desires, these are universal. Everyone needs certainty they can avoid pain and at least be comfortable. Now, how do you get it? Control everybody? Develop a skill? Give up? Smoke a cigarette? And if you got totally certain, ironically, even though we need that — you're not certain about your health, or your children, or money. If you're not sure the ceiling will hold up, you won't listen to any speaker. While we go for certainty differently, if we get total certainty, we get what? What do you feel if you're certain? You know what will happen, when and how it will happen, what would you feel? Bored out of your minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise. How many of you here love surprises? Say, ""Aye.""Audience: Aye.TR: Bullshit. You like the surprises you want. The ones you don't want, you call problems, but you need them. So, variety is important. Have you ever rented a video or a film that you've already seen? Who's done this? Get a fucking life.(Laughter)Why are you doing it? You're certain it's good because you read or saw it before, but you're hoping it's been long enough you've forgotten, and there's variety.Third human need, critical: significance. We all need to feel important, special, unique. You can get it by making more money or being more spiritual. You can do it by getting yourself in a situation where you put more tattoos and earrings in places humans don't want to know. Whatever it takes. The fastest way to do this, if you have no background, no culture, no belief and resources or resourcefulness, is violence. If I put a gun to your head and I live in the 'hood, instantly I'm significant. Zero to 10. How high? 10. How certain am I that you're going to respond to me? 10. How much uncertainty? Who knows what's going to happen next? Kind of exciting. Like climbing up into a cave and doing that stuff all the way down there. Total variety and uncertainty. And it's significant, isn't it? So you want to risk your life for it. So that's why violence has always been around and will be around unless we have a consciousness change as a species. You can get significance a million ways, but to be significant, you've got to be unique and different.Here's what we really need: connection and love, fourth need. We all want it; most settle for connection, love's too scary. Who here has been hurt in an intimate relationship? If you don't raise your hand, you've had other shit, too. And you're going to get hurt again. Aren't you glad you came to this positive visit? Here's what's true: we need it. We can do it through intimacy, friendship, prayer, through walking in nature. If nothing else works for you, don't get a cat, get a dog, because if you leave for two minutes, it's like you've been gone six months, when you come back 5 minutes later.These first four needs, every human finds a way to meet. Even if you lie to yourself, you need to have split personalities. I call the first four needs the needs of the personality. The last two are the needs of the spirit. And this is where fulfillment comes. You won't get it from the first four. You'll figure a way, smoke, drink, do whatever, meet the first four. But number five, you must grow. We all know the answer. If you don't grow, you're what? If a relationship or business is not growing, if you're not growing, doesn't matter how much money or friends you have, how many love you, you feel like hell. And I believe the reason we grow is so we have something to give of value.Because the sixth need is to contribute beyond ourselves. Because we all know, corny as that sounds, the secret to living is giving. We all know life is not about me, it's about we. This culture knows that, this room knows that. It's exciting. When you see Nicholas talking about his $100 computer, the most exciting thing is: here's a genius, but he's got a calling now. You can feel the difference in him, and it's beautiful. And that calling can touch other people.My life was touched because when I was 11 years old, Thanksgiving, no money, no food, we were not going to starve, but my father was totally messed up, my mom was letting him know how bad he messed up, and somebody came to the door and delivered food. My father made three decisions, I know what they were, briefly. His focus was ""This is charity. What does it mean? I'm worthless. What do I have to do? Leave my family,"" which he did. It was one of the most painful experiences of life. My three decisions gave me a different path. I set focus on ""There's food."" What a concept!(Laughter)But this is what changed my life, shaped me as a human being. Somebody's gift, I don't even know who it is. My father always said, ""No one gives a shit."" And now somebody I don't know, they're not asking for anything, just giving us food, looking out for us. It made me believe this: that strangers care. And that made me decide, if strangers care about me and my family, I care about them. I'm going to do something to make a difference. So when I was 17, I went out on Thanksgiving, it was my target for years to have enough money to feed two families. The most fun and moving thing I ever did in my life. Next year, I did four, then eight. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing, I wasn't doing it for brownie points. But after eight, I thought I could use some help.So I went out, got my friends involved, then I grew companies, got 11, and I built the foundation. 18 years later, I'm proud to tell you last year we fed 2 million people in 35 countries through our foundation. All during the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, in different countries around the world.(Applause)Thank you. I don't tell you that to brag, but because I'm proud of human beings because they get excited to contribute once they've had the chance to experience it, not talk about it.So, finally — I'm about out of time. The target that shapes you — Here's what's different about people. We have the same needs. But are you a certainty freak, is that what you value most, or uncertainty? This man couldn't be a certainty freak if he climbed through those caves. Are you driven by significance or love? We all need all six, but what your lead system is tilts you in a different direction. And as you move in a direction, you have a destination or destiny. The second piece is the map. The operating system tells you how to get there, and some people's map is, ""I'm going to save lives even if I die for other people,"" and they're a fireman, and somebody else says, ""I'm going to kill people to do it."" They're trying to meet the same needs of significance. They want to honor God or honor their family. But they have a different map.And there are seven different beliefs; I can't go through them, because I'm done. The last piece is emotion. One of the parts of the map is like time. Some people's idea of a long time is 100 years. Somebody else's is three seconds, which is what I have. And the last one I've already mentioned that fell to you. If you've got a target and a map — I can't use Google because I love Macs, and they haven't made it good for Macs yet. So if you use MapQuest — how many have made this fatal mistake of using it? You use this thing and you don't get there. Imagine if your beliefs guarantee you can never get to where you want to go.(Laughter)The last thing is emotion. Here's what I'll tell you about emotion. There are 6,000 emotions that we have words for in the English language, which is just a linguistic representation that changes by language. But if your dominant emotions — If I have 20,000 people or 1,000 and I have them write down all the emotions that they experience in an average week, and I give them as long as they need, and on one side they write empowering emotions, the other's disempowering, guess how many emotions they experience? Less than 12. And half of those make them feel like shit. They have six good feelings. Happy, happy, excited, oh shit, frustrated, frustrated, overwhelmed, depressed. How many of you know somebody who, no matter what happens, finds a way to get pissed off?(Laughter)Or no matter what happens, they find a way to be happy or excited. How many of you know somebody like this?When 9/11 happened, I'll finish with this, I was in Hawaii. I was with 2,000 people from 45 countries, we were translating four languages simultaneously for a program I was conducting, for a week. The night before was called Emotional Mastery. I got up, had no plan for this, and I said — we had fireworks, I do crazy shit, fun stuff, and at the end, I stopped. I had this plan, but I never know what I'm going to say. And all of a sudden, I said, ""When do people really start to live? When they face death."" And I went through this whole thing about, if you weren't going to get off this island, if nine days from now, you were going to die, who would you call, what would you say, what would you do? That night is when 9/11 happened.One woman had come to the seminar, and when she came there, her previous boyfriend had been kidnapped and murdered. Her new boyfriend wanted to marry her, and she said no.He said, ""If you go to that Hawaii thing, it's over with us."" She said, ""It's over."" When I finished that night, she called him and left a message at the top of the World Trade Center where he worked, saying, ""I love you, I want you to know I want to marry you. It was stupid of me."" She was asleep, because it was 3 a.m. for us, when he called her back, and said, ""Honey, I can't tell you what this means. I don't know how to tell you this, but you gave me the greatest gift, because I'm going to die."" And she played the recording for us in the room. She was on Larry King later. And he said, ""You're probably wondering how on Earth this could happen to you twice. All I can say is this must be God's message to you. From now on, every day, give your all, love your all. Don't let anything ever stop you."" She finishes, and a man stands up, and he says, ""I'm from Pakistan, I'm a Muslim. I'd love to hold your hand and say I'm sorry, but frankly, this is retribution."" I can't tell you the rest, because I'm out of time.(Laughter)Are you sure?(Laughter)10 seconds!(Laughter and applause)10 seconds, I want to be respectful. All I can tell you is, I brought this man on stage with a man from New York who worked in the World Trade Center, because I had about 200 New Yorkers there. More than 50 lost their entire companies, friends, marking off their Palm Pilots. One financial trader, woman made of steel, bawling — 30 friends crossing off that all died. And I said, ""What are we going to focus on? What does this mean and what are we going to do?""And I got the group to focus on: if you didn't lose somebody today, your focus is going to be how to serve somebody else. Then one woman stood up and was so angry, screaming and yelling. I found out she wasn't from New York, she's not an American, doesn't know anybody here. I asked, ""Do you always get angry?"" She said, ""Yes."" Guilty people got guilty, sad people got sad. I took these two men and I did an indirect negotiation. Jewish man with family in the occupied territory, someone in New York who would have died if he was at work that day, and this man who wanted to be a terrorist, and I made it very clear. This integration is on a film, which I'd be happy to send you, instead of my verbalization, but the two of them not only came together and changed their beliefs and models of the world, but worked together to bring, for almost four years now, through various mosques and synagogues, the idea of how to create peace. And he wrote a book, called ""My Jihad, My Way of Peace."" So, transformation can happen.My invitation to you is: explore your web, the web in here — the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you, for two reasons: so there's more of you to give, and achieve, too, but I mean give, because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate — not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind, but appreciate what's driving other people. It's the only way our world's going to change.God bless you, thank you. I hope this was of service.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tony_robbins_asks_why_we_do_what_we_do
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"On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday, I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something, and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said, ""Hey, happy birthday!"" And I said, ""I'm seven."" And my father smiled and said, ""Well, you know what that means, don't you?"" And I said, ""Yeah, that I'm going to have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents?"" And my dad said, ""Well, yes. But more importantly, being seven means that you've reached the age of reason, and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man.""(Laughter)Now, I had heard this phrase, ""age of reason,"" before. Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about my second-grade class at school. But when she said it, the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession, and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil. And anyway, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase, ""age of reason."" So, I said, ""Yeah, yeah, age of reason. What does that mean again?"" And my dad said, ""Well, we believe, in the Catholic Church, that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong, but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better. So, you've grown up and reached the age of reason, and now God will start keeping notes on you, and begin your permanent record.""(Laughter)And I said, ""Oh ... Wait a minute. You mean all that time, up till today, all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it?"" And my mom said, ""Well, I noticed it.""(Laughter)And I thought, ""How could I not have known this before? How could it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me? All that being good and no real credit for it. And worst of all, how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me?"" So I said, ""Well, Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus? I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?"" And my dad said, ""Yeah, but, honey, I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas."" And my mother said, ""Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven. Julie, there is no Santa Claus.""(Laughter)Now, this was actually not that upsetting to me. My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus: how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve, like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning, our family would give Santa more time. Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high mass on Christmas morning, but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss. Which made me very suspicious. It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents. I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style, and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's.(Laughter)Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's? There was only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence: our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit, and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment, this humiliation of rejection by Santa, who was jolly — but let's face it, he was also very judgmental. So to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all was actually sort of a relief.I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa, but rather, I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing. It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else, someone who could use the information. They had to fit two criteria: they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason, and not yet seven. The answer was clear: my brother Bill. He was six. Well, I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground. It was a Saturday, and he was all by himself, just kicking a ball against the side of a wall. I ran up to him and said, ""Bill! I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven, and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man."" And Bill said, ""So?"" And I said, ""So, you're six. You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won't notice it."" And he said, ""So?"" And I said, ""So? So everything!"" And I turned to run. I was so angry with him. But when I got to the top of the steps, I turned around dramatically and said, ""Oh, by the way, Bill — there is no Santa Claus.""(Laughter)Now, I didn't know it at the time, but I really wasn't turning seven on September 10th. For my 13th birthday, I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends, but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said, ""I need to speak to you privately. September 10th is not your birthday. It's October 10th."" And I said, ""What?""(Laughter)And she said ...(Laughter)""Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15th.""(Laughter)""So I told them that your birthday was September 10th, and then I wasn't sure that you weren't just going to go blab it all over the place, so I started to tell you your birthday was September 10th. But, Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey. You were so ready."" I thought about it, and when I was four, I was already the oldest of four children, and my mother even had another child to come, so what I think she — understandably — really meant was that she was so ready, she was so ready. Then she said, ""Don't worry, Julie. Every year on October 10th, when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it, I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day.""(Laughter)Which was comforting, but troubling. My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me, without me.(Laughter)What was so upsetting about this new piece of information was not that I had to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends. What was most upsetting was that this meant I was not a Virgo. I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom. And I read my horoscope every single day, and it was so totally me.(Laughter)And this meant that I was a Libra? So, I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster. The Virgo poster is a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair, sort of lounging by some water, but the Libra poster is just a huge scale. This was around the time that I started filling out physically, and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls, and frankly, the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing.(Laughter)But I got the new Libra poster, and I started to read my new Libra horoscope, and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me.(Laughter)It wasn't until years later, looking back on this whole age-of-reason, change-of-birthday thing, that it dawned on me: I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven. I had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to before God started keeping tabs on me. Oh, life can be so cruel. One day, two Mormon missionaries came to my door. Now, I just live off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles, and my block is — well, it's a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door to door. Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven. And sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang and just start robbing people, if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them. So normally, I just ignore the doorbell, but on this day, I answered. And there stood two boys, each about 19, in white, starched short-sleeved shirts, and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they said they had a message for me, from God. I said, ""A message for me? From God?"" And they said, ""Yes."" Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and, you know, I've worked with them and even dated them, but I never really knew the doctrine, or what they said to people when they were out on a mission, and I guess I was sort of curious, so I said, ""Well, please, come in."" And they looked really happy, because I don't think this happens to them all that often.(Laughter)And I sat them down, and I got them glasses of water — Ok, I got it, I got it. I got them glasses of water. Don't touch my hair, that's the thing.(Laughter)You can't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair. Ok.(Laughter)So I sat them down and I got them glasses of water, and after niceties, they said, ""Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart?"" And I thought, ""Well, of course I believe in God, but you know, I don't like that word 'heart,' because it anthropomorphizes God, and I don't like the word, 'his,' either, because that sexualizes God."" But I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys, so after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said, ""Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved."" And they looked at each other and smiled, like that was the right answer. And then they said, ""Do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet?"" And I said, ""Yes, I do."" And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly. And they said, ""Well, then we have a story to tell you.""And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi, who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. Now, apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC, everyone was completely bad and evil. Every single one of them: man, woman, child, infant, fetus. And God came to Lehi and said to him, ""Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here."" And God did lead them. He led them to America. I said, ""America?(Laughter)From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC?"" And they said, ""Yes.""(Laughter)Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced, and over the course of 600 years, there were two great races of them, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and the Nephites were totally good — each and every one of them — and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil — every single one of them just bad to the bone.Then, after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, on his way up to heaven, he stopped by America and visited the Nephites.(Laughter)And he told them that if they all remained totally, totally good — each and every one of them — they would win the war against the evil Lamanites. But apparently somebody blew it, because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites. All but one guy, this guy named Mormon, who managed to survive by hiding in the woods. And he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates, which he then buried near Palmyra, New York.(Laughter)Well, I was just on the edge of my seat.(Laughter)I said, ""What happened to the Lamanites?"" And they said, ""Well, they became our Native Americans, here in the U.S."" And I said, ""So, you believe the Native Americans are descended from a people who were totally evil?"" And they said, ""Yes."" Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates right in his backyard, and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into, and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English.Well, at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch.(Laughter)I wanted to say —(Applause)""Ok, don't start with this story.""(Laughter)I mean, even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start —(Applause)telling people all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. Then, they said, ""Do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets?"" And I said, ""No, I don't,"" because I was sort of upset about this Lamanite story and this crazy gold plate story, but the truth was, I hadn't really thought this through, so I backpedaled a little and I said, ""Well, what exactly do you mean by 'righteous'? And what do you mean by prophets? Like, could the prophets be women?"" And they said, ""No."" And I said, ""Why?"" And they said, ""Well, it's because God gave women a gift that is so spectacular, it is so wonderful, that the only gift he had left over to give men was the gift of prophecy."" What is this wonderful gift God gave women, I wondered? Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt?(Laughter)Women's longer lifespan? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men? But no — it wasn't any of these gifts. They said, ""Well, it's her ability to bear children."" I said, ""Oh, come on. I mean, even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45, assuming they didn't die from exhaustion, it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God."" And they said, ""No.""(Laughter)Well, then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more, but they had more to say. They said, ""Well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon, and if you're in good standing with the church, when you die, you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity."" And I said, ""Oh, dear.(Laughter)That wouldn't be such a good incentive for me.""(Laughter)And they said, ""Oh.(Laughter)Hey! Well, we also believe that when you go to heaven, you get your body restored to you in its best original state. Like, if you'd lost a leg, well, you get it back. Or, if you'd gone blind, you could see."" I said, ""Oh. Now, I don't have a uterus, because I had cancer a few years ago. So does this mean that if I went to heaven, I would get my old uterus back?"" And they said, ""Sure."" And I said, ""I don't want it back. I'm happy without it."" Gosh. What if you had a nose job and you liked it?(Laughter)Would God force you to get your old nose back? Then they gave me this Book of Mormon, told me to read this chapter and that chapter, and said they'd come back and check in on me, and I think I said something like, ""Please don't hurry,"" or maybe just, ""Please don't,"" and they were gone.Ok, so I initially felt really superior to these boys, and smug in my more conventional faith. But then the more I thought about it, the more I had to be honest with myself. If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, ""We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us.""(Laughter)""And she had a baby, and that's the son of God,"" I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous. I'm just so used to that story.(Laughter)So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. But the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head: Did I believe that God loved me with all his heart? Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. Now, if they had asked me, ""Do you feel that God loves you with all his heart?"" Well, that would have been much different, I think I would have instantly answered, ""Yes, yes, I feel it all the time. I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused, and I feel consoled and cared for. I take shelter in God's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits, and I feel God's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see."" But since they asked me that question with the word ""believe"" in it, somehow it was all different, because I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt.","https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_sweeney_on_letting_go_of_god
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"I'm going to present three projects in rapid fire. I don't have much time to do it. And I want to reinforce three ideas with that rapid-fire presentation.The first is what I like to call a hyper-rational process. It's a process that takes rationality almost to an absurd level, and it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people would call, sort of a rational conclusion to something. And it concludes in something that you see here, that you actually wouldn't expect as being the result of rationality.The second — the second is that this process does not have a signature. There is no authorship. Architects are obsessed with authorship. This is something that has editing and it has teams, but in fact, we no longer see within this process, the traditional master architect creating a sketch that his minions carry out.And the third is that it challenges — and this is, in the length of this, very hard to support why, connect all these things — but it challenges the high modernist notion of flexibility. High modernists said we will create sort of singular spaces that are generic, almost anything can happen within them. I call it sort of ""shotgun flexibility"" — turn your head this way; shoot; and you're bound to kill something. So, this is the promise of high modernism: within a single space, actually, any kind of activity can happen. But as we're seeing, operational costs are starting to dwarf capital costs in terms of design parameters. And so, with this sort of idea, what happens is, whatever actually is in the building on opening day, or whatever seems to be the most immediate need, starts to dwarf the possibility and sort of subsume it, of anything else could ever happen. And so we're proposing a different kind of flexibility, something that we call ""compartmentalized flexibility."" And the idea is that you, within that continuum, identify a series of points, and you design specifically to them. They can be pushed off-center a little bit, but in the end you actually still get as much of that original spectrum as you originally had hoped. With high modernist flexibility, that doesn't really work.Now I'm going to talk about — I'm going to build up the Seattle Central Library in this way before your eyes in about five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you'll see. With the library staff and the library board, we settled on two core positions. This is the first one, and this is showing, over the last 900 years, the evolution of the book, and other technologies. This diagram was our sort of position piece about the book, and our position was, books are technology — that's something people forget — but it's a form of technology that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media.The second premise — and this was something that was very difficult for us to convince the librarians of at first — is that libraries, since the inception of Carnegie Library tradition in America, had a second responsibility, and that was for social roles. Ok, now, this I'll come back to later, but something — actually, the librarians at first said, ""No, this isn't our mandate. Our mandate is media, and particularly the book.""So what you're seeing now is actually the design of the building. The upper diagram is what we had seen in a whole host of contemporary libraries that used high modernist flexibility. Sort of, any activity could happen anywhere. We don't know the future of the library; we don't know the future of the book; and so, we'll use this approach.And what we saw were buildings that were very generic, and worse — not only were they very generic — so, not only does the reading room look like the copy room look like the magazine area — but it meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf every other activity that was happening in it. And in this case, what was getting engulfed were these social responsibilities by the expansion of the book. And so we proposed what's at the lower diagram. Very dumb approach: simply compartmentalize. Put those things whose evolution we could predict — and I don't mean that we could say what would actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of what would happen in the future — put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things that we can't predict on the rooftops. So that was the core idea.Now, we had to convince the library that social roles were equally important to media, in order to get them to accept this. What you're seeing here is actually their program on the left. That's as it was given to us in all of its clarity and glory. Our first operation was to re-digest it back to them, show it to them and say, ""You know what? We haven't touched it, but only one-third of your own program is dedicated to media and books. Two-thirds of it is already dedicated — that's the white band below, the thing you said isn't important — is already dedicated to social functions."" So once we had presented that back to them, they agreed that this sort of core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles — that's the third diagram. We recombined everything. And then we started making new decisions.What you're seeing on the right is the design of the library, specifically in terms of square footage. On the left of that diagram, here, you'll see a series of five platforms — sort of combs, collective programs. And on the right are the more indeterminate spaces; things like reading rooms, whose evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can't predict. So that literally was the design of the building. They signed it, and to their chagrin, we came back a week later, and we presented them this. And as you can see, it is literally the diagram on the right.(Laughter)We just sized — no, really, I mean that, literally. The things on the left-hand side of the diagram, those are the boxes. We sized them into five compartments. They're super-efficient. We had a very low budget to work with. We pushed them around on the site to make very literal contextual relationships. The reading room should be able to see the water. The main entrance should have a public plaza in front of it to abide by the zoning code, and so forth.So, you see the five platforms, those are the boxes. within each one, a very discrete thing is happening. The area in between is sort of an urban continuum, these things that we can't predict their evolution to the same degree. To give you some sense of the power of this idea, the biggest block is what we call the book spiral. It's literally built in a very inexpensive way — it is a parking garage for books. It just so happens to be on the 6th through 10th floors of the building, but that is not necessarily an expensive approach. And it allows us to organize the entire Dewey Decimal System on one continuous run; no matter how it grows or contracts within the building, it will always have its clarity to end the sort of trail of tears that we've all experienced in public libraries.(Laughter)And so this was the final operation, which was to take these blocks as they were all pushed off kilter, and to hold onto them with a skin. That skin serves double duty, again, for economics. One, it is the lateral stability for the entire building; it's a structural element. But its dimensions were designed not only for structure, but also for holding on every piece of glass. The glass was then — I'll use the word impregnated — but it had a layer of metal that was called ""stretched metal."" That metal acts as a microlouver, so from the exterior of the building, the sun sees it as totally opaque, but from the interior, it's entirely transparent.So now I'm going to take you on a tour of the building. Let me see if I can find it. For anyone who gets motion sickness, I apologize. So, this is the building. And I think what's important is, when we first unveiled the building, the public saw it as being totally about our whim and ego. And it was defended, believe it or not, by the librarians. They said, ""Look, we don't know what it is, but we know it's everything that we need it to be, based on the observations that we've done about the program."" This is going into one of the entries. So, it's an unusual building for a public library, obviously.So now we're going into what we call the living room. This is actually a program that we invented with the library. It was recognizing that public libraries are the last vestige of public free space. There are plenty of shopping malls that allow you to get out of the rain in downtown Seattle, but there are not so many free places that allow you to get out of the rain. So this was an unprogrammed area where people could pretty much do anything, including eat, yell, play chess and so forth.Now we're moving up into what we call the mixing chamber. That was the main technology area in the building. You'll have to tell me if I'm going too fast for you. And now up. This is actually the place that we put into the building so I could propose to my wife, right there.(Laughter)She said yes.(Laughter)I'm running out of time, so I'm actually going to stop. I can show this to you later. But let's see if I can very quickly get into the book spiral, because I think it's, as I said, the most — this is the main reading room — the most unique part of the building. You dizzy yet? Ok, so here, this is the book spiral. So, it's very indiscernible, but it's actually a continuous stair-stepping. It allows you to, on one city block, go up one full floor, so that it's on a continuum.Ok, now I'm going to go back, and I'm going to hit a second project. I'm going to go very, very quickly through this. Now this is the Dallas Theater. It was an unusual client for us, because they came to us and they said, ""We need you to do a new building. We've been working in a temporary space for 30 years, but because of that temporary space, we've become an infamous theater company. Theater is really focused in New York, Chicago and Seattle, with the exception of the Dallas Theater Company."" And the very fact that they worked in a provisional space meant that for Beckett, they could blow out a wall; they could do ""Cherry Orchard"" and blow a hole through the floor, and so forth.So it was a very daunting task for us to do a brand-new building that could be a pristine building, but keep this kind of experimental nature. And the second is, they were what we call a multi-form theater, they do different kinds of performances in repertory. So they in the morning will do something in arena, then they'll do something in proscenium and so forth. And so they needed to be able to quickly transform between different theater organizations, and for operational budget reasons, this actually no longer happens in pretty much any multi-form theater in the United States, so we needed to figure out a way to overcome that.So our thought was to literally put the theater on its head: to take those things that were previously defined as front-of-house and back-of-house and stack them above house and below house, and to create what we called a theater machine. We invest the money in the operation of the building. It's almost as though the building could be placed anywhere, wherever you place it, the area under it is charged for theatrical performances. And it allowed us to go back to first principles, and redefine fly tower, acoustic enclosure, light enclosure and so forth. And at the push of a button, it allows the artistic director to move between proscenium, thrust, and in fact, arena and traverse and flat floor, in a very quick transfiguration.So in fact, using operational budget, we can — sorry, capital cost — we can actually achieve what was no longer achievable in operational cost. And that means that the artistic director now has a palette that he or she can choose from, between a series of forms and a series of processions, because that enclosure around the theater that is normally trapped with front-of-house and back-of-house spaces has been liberated. So an artistic director has the ability to have a performance that enters in a Wagnerian procession, shows the first act in thrust, the intermission in a Greek procession, second act in arena, and so forth.So I'm going to show you what this actually means. This is the theater up close. Any portion around the theater actually can be opened discretely. The light enclosure can be lifted separate to the acoustic enclosure, so you can do Beckett with Dallas as the backdrop. Portions can be opened, so you can now actually have motorcycles drive directly into the performance, or you can even just have an open-air performance, or for intermissions. The balconies all move to go between those configurations, but they also disappear. The proscenium line can also disappear. You can bring enormous objects in, so in fact, the Dallas Theater Company — their first show will be a play about Charles Lindbergh, and they'll want to bring in a real aircraft. And then it also provides them, in the off-season, the ability to actually rent out their space for entirely different things. This is it from a distance. Open up entire portions for different kinds of events. And at night. Again, remove the light enclosure; keep the acoustic enclosure. This is a monster truck show.I'm going to show now the last project. This also is an unusual client. They inverted the whole idea of development. They came to us and they said — unlike normal developers — they said, ""We want to start out by providing a contemporary art museum in Louisville. That's our main goal."" And so instead of being a developer that sees an opportunity to make money, they saw an ability to be a catalyst in their downtown. And the fact that they wanted to support the contemporary art museum actually built their pro forma, so they worked in reverse. And that pro forma led us to a mixed-use building that was very large, in order to support their aspirations of the art, but it also opened up opportunities for the art itself to collaborate, interact with commercial spaces that actually artists more and more want to work within. And it also charged us with thinking about how to have something that was both a single building and a credible sort of sub-building.So this is Louisville's skyline, and I'm going to take you through the various constraints that led to the project. First: the physical constraints. We actually had to operate on three discrete sites, all of them well smaller than the size of the building. We had to operate next to the new Muhammad Ali Center, and respect it. We had to operate within the 100-year floodplain. Now, this area floods three to four times a year, and there's a levee behind our site, similar to the ones that broke in New Orleans. Had to operate behind the I-64 corridor, a street that cuts through the middle of these separate sites. So we're starting to build a sort of nightmare of constraints in a bathtub. Underneath the bathtub are the city's main power lines. And there is a pedestrian corridor that they wanted to add, that would link a series of cultural buildings, and a view corridor — because this is the historic district — that they didn't want to obstruct with a new building.(Laughter)And now we're going to add 1.1 million square feet. And if we did the traditional thing, that 1.1 million square feet — these are the different programs — the traditional thing would be to identify the public elements, place them on sites, and now we'd have a really terrible situation: a public thing in the middle of a bathtub that floods. And then we would size all the other elements — the different commercial elements: hotel, luxury housing, offices and so forth — and dump it on top. And we would create something that was unviable. In fact — and you know this — this is called the Time Warner Building.(Laughter)So our strategy was very simple. Just lift the entire block, flip some of the elements over, reposition them so they have appropriate views and relationships to downtown, and make circulation connections and reroute the road. So that's the basic concept, and now I'm going to show you what it leads to.Ok, it seems a very formal, willful gesture, but something derived entirely out of the constraints. And again, when we unveiled it, there was a sort of nervousness that this was about an architect making a statement, not an architect who was attempting to solve a series of problems. Now, within that center zone, as I said, we have the ability to mix a series of things. So here, this is sort of an x-ray — the towers are totally developer-driven. They told us the dimensions, the sizes and so forth, and we focused on taking all the public components — the lobbies, the bars — everything that different commercial elements would have, and combined it in the center, in the sort of subway map, in the transfer zone that would also include the contemporary art museum.So it creates a situation like this, where you have artists who can operate within an art space that also has an amazing view on the 22nd floor, but it also has proximity that the curator can either open or close. It allows people on exercise bicycles to be seen, or to see the art, and so forth. It also means that if an artist wants to invade something like a swimming pool, they can begin to do their exhibition in a swimming pool, so they're not forced to always work within the confines of a contemporary gallery space.So, how to build this. It's very simple: it's a chair. So, we begin by building the cores. As we're building the cores, we build the contemporary art museum at grade. That allows us to have incredible efficiency and cost efficiency. This is not a high-budget building. The moment the cores get to mid level, we finish the art museum; we put all the mechanical equipment in it; and then we jack it up into the air. This is how they build really large aircraft hangars, for instance, the ones that they did for the A380. Finish the cores, finish the meat and you get something that looks like this.Now I only have about 30 seconds, so I want to start an animation, and we'll conclude with that.Thank you.(Applause)Chris asked me to add — the theater is under construction, and this project will start construction in about a year, and finish in 2010.[identify public elements][insert public elements at grade][optimize tower dimensions][place towers on site][lift program][flip!][optimize program adjacencies][connect to context][redirect 7th street]","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_on_seattle_s_library
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"It's wonderful to be back. I love this wonderful gathering. And you must be wondering, ""What on earth? Have they put up the wrong slide?"" No, no. Look at this magnificent beast, and ask the question: Who designed it?This is TED; this is Technology, Entertainment, Design, and there's a dairy cow. It's a quite wonderfully designed animal. And I was thinking, how do I introduce this? And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know: ""Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree."" And you might say, ""Well, God designed the cow.""But, of course, God got a lot of help. This is the ancestor of cattle. This is the aurochs. And it was designed by natural selection, the process of natural selection, over many millions of years. And then it became domesticated, thousands of years ago. And human beings became its stewards, and, without even knowing what they were doing, they gradually redesigned it and redesigned it and redesigned it. And then more recently, they really began to do reverse engineering on this beast and figure out just what the parts were, how they worked and how they might be optimized — how they might be made better.Now, why am I talking about cows? Because I want to say that much the same thing is true of religions. Religions are natural phenomena — they're just as natural as cows. They have evolved over millennia. They have a biological base, just like the aurochs. They have become domesticated, and human beings have been redesigning their religions for thousands of years. This is TED, and I want to talk about design. Because what I've been doing for the last four years — really since the first time you saw me — some of you saw me at TED when I was talking about religion — and in the last four years, I've been working just about non-stop on this topic. And you might say it's about the reverse engineering of religions. Now that very idea, I think, strikes terror in many people, or anger, or anxiety of one sort or another. And that is the spell that I want to break.I want to say, no, religions are an important natural phenomenon. We should study them with the same intensity that we study all the other important natural phenomena, like global warming, as we heard so eloquently last night from Al Gore. Today's religions are brilliantly designed — brilliantly designed. They are immensely powerful social institutions and many of their features can be traced back to earlier features that we can really make sense of by reverse engineering. And, as with the cow, there's a mixture of evolutionary design — designed by natural selection itself — and intelligent design — more or less intelligent design — and redesigned by human beings who are trying to redesign their religions.You don't do book talks at TED, but I'm going to have just one slide about my book, because there is one message in it which I think this group really needs to hear. And I would be very interested to get your responses to this. It's the one policy proposal that I make in the book, at this time, when I claim not to know enough about religion to know what other policy proposals to make. And it's one that echoes remarks that you've heard already today.Here's my proposal, I'm going to just take a couple of minutes to explain it: Education on world religions for all of our children — in primary school, in high school, in public schools, in private schools and in home schooling. So what I'm proposing is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world — about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music, their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. And this should be presented factually, straightforwardly, with no particular spin, to all of the children in the country. And as long as you teach them that, you can teach them anything else you like. That, I think, is maximal tolerance for religious freedom. As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you may — and as early as you like and whatever you like — teach them whatever creed you want them to learn. But also let them know about other religions.Now, why do I say that? Because democracy depends on an informed citizenship. Informed consent is the very bedrock of our understanding of democracy. Misinformed consent is not worth it. It's like a coin flip; it doesn't count, really. Democracy depends on informed consent. This is the way we treat people as responsible adults. Now, children below the age of consent are a special case. Parents — I'm going to use a word that Pastor Rick just used — parents are stewards of their children. They don't own them. You can't own your children. You have a responsibility to the world, to the state, to them, to take care of them right. You may teach them whatever creed you think is most important, but I say you have a responsibility to let them be informed about all the other creeds in the world, too.The reason I've taken this time is I've been fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. One reviewer for a Roman Catholic newspaper called it ""totalitarian."" It strikes me as practically libertarian. Is it totalitarian to require reading, writing and arithmetic? I don't think so. All I'm saying is — and facts, facts only; no values, just facts — about all the world's religions. Another reviewer called it ""hilarious."" Well, I'm really bothered by the fact that anybody would think that was hilarious. It seems to me to be such a plausible, natural extension of the democratic principles we already have that I'm shocked to think anybody would find that just ridiculous. I know many religions are so anxious about preserving the purity of their faith among their children that they are intent on keeping their children ignorant of other faiths. I don't think that's defensible. But I'd really be pleased to get your answers on that — any reactions to that — later.But now I'm going to move on. Back to the cow. This picture, which I pulled off the web — the fellow on the left is really an important part of this picture. That's the steward. Cows couldn't live without human stewards — they're domesticated. They're a sort of ectosymbiont. They depend on us for their survival. And Pastor Rick was just talking about sheep. I'm going to talk about sheep, too. There's a lot of serendipitous convergence here. How clever it was of sheep to acquire shepherds!(Laughter)Think of what this got them. They could outsource all their problems: protection from predators, food-finding ...(Laughter)... health maintenance.(Laughter)The only cost in most flocks — not even this — a loss of free mating. What a deal! ""How clever of sheep!"" you might say. Except, of course, it wasn't the sheep's cleverness. We all know sheep are not exactly rocket scientists — they're not very smart. It wasn't the cleverness of the sheep at all. They were clueless. But it was a very clever move. Whose clever move was it? It was the clever move of natural selection itself.Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, once joked about what he called Orgel's Second Rule. Leslie Orgel is a molecular biologist, brilliant guy, and Orgel's Second Rule is: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Now, that is not Intelligent Design — not from Francis Crick. Evolution is cleverer than you are. If you understand Orgel's Second Rule, then you understand why the Intelligent Design movement is basically a hoax.The designs discovered by the process of natural selection are brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Again and again biologists are fascinated with the brilliance of what's discovered. But the process itself is without purpose, without foresight, without design. When I was here four years ago, I told the story about an ant climbing a blade of grass. And why the ant was doing it was because its brain had been infected with a lancet fluke that was needed to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to reproduce. So it was sort of a spooky story.And I think some people may have misunderstood. Lancet flukes aren't smart. I submit that the intelligence of a lancet fluke is down there, somewhere between petunia and carrot. They're not really bright. They don't have to be. The lesson we learn from this is: you don't have to have a mind to be a beneficiary. The design is there in nature, but it's not in anybody's head. It doesn't have to be. That's the way evolution works. Question: Was domestication good for sheep? It was great for their genetic fitness.And here I want to remind you of a wonderful point that Paul MacCready made at TED three years ago. Here's what he said: ""Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, human population, plus livestock and pets, was approximately a tenth of one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate landmass."" That was just 10,000 years ago. Yesterday, in biological terms. What is it today? Does anybody remember what he told us? 98 percent. That is what we have done on this planet.Now, I talked to Paul afterwards — I wanted to check to find out how he'd calculated this, and get the sources and so forth — and he also gave me a paper that he had written on this. And there was a passage in it which he did not present here and I think it is so good, I'm going to read it to you: ""Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life: complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans — a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature — have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush."" We heard about the atmosphere as a thin layer of varnish. Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on this planet. And we're the ones that hold the paintbrush. And how can we do that?The key to our domination of the planet is culture. And the key to culture is religion. Suppose Martian scientists came to Earth. They would be puzzled by many things. Anybody know what this is? I'll tell you what it is. This is a million people gathering on the banks of the Ganges in 2001, perhaps the largest single gathering of human beings ever, as seen from satellite photograph. Here's a big crowd. Here's another crowd in Mecca. Martians would be amazed by this. They'd want to know how it originated, what it was for and how it perpetuates itself.Actually, I'm going to pass over this. The ant isn't alone. There's all sorts of wonderful cases of species which — in that case — A parasite gets into a mouse and needs to get into the belly of a cat. And it turns the mouse into Mighty Mouse, makes it fearless, so it runs out in the open, where it'll be eaten by a cat. True story. In other words, we have these hijackers — you've seen this slide before, from four years ago — a parasite that infects the brain and induces even suicidal behavior, on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness.Does that ever happen to us? Yes, it does — quite wonderfully. The Arabic word ""Islam"" means ""submission."" It means ""surrender of self-interest to the will of Allah."" But I'm not just talking about Islam. I'm talking also about Christianity. This is a parchment music page that I found in a Paris bookstall 50 years ago. And on it, it says, in Latin: ""Semen est verbum Dei. Sator autem Christus."" The word of God is the seed and the sower of the seed is Christ. Same idea. Well, not quite. But in fact, Christians, too ... glory in the fact that they have surrendered to God. I'll give you a few quotes. ""The heart of worship is surrender. Surrendered people obey God's words, even if it doesn't make sense."" Those words are by Rick Warren. Those are from ""The Purpose Driven Life.""And I want to turn now, briefly, to talk about that book, which I've read. You've all got a copy, and you've just heard the man. And what I want to do now is say a bit about this book from the design standpoint, because I think it's actually a brilliant book. First of all, the goal — and you heard just now what the goal is — it's to bring purpose to the lives of millions, and he has succeeded. Is it a good goal? In itself, I'm sure we all agree, it is a wonderful goal. He's absolutely right. There are lots of people out there who don't have purpose in their life, and bringing purpose to their life is a wonderful goal. I give him an A+ on this.(Laughter)Is the goal achieved? Yes. Thirty million copies of this book. Al Gore, eat your heart out.(Laughter)Just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing. This is a fantastic achievement. And the means — how does he do it?It's a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes — updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features. This is the evolution of religion that's been going on for thousands of years, and he's just the latest brilliant practitioner of it. I don't have to tell you this; you just heard the man. Excellent insights into human psychology, wise advice on every page. Moreover, he invites us to look under the hood. I really appreciated that. For instance, he has an appendix where he explains his choice of translations of different Bible verses. The book is clear, vivid, accessible, beautifully formatted. Just enough repetition. That's really important. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain.(Laughter)With me, everybody —(Audience and Dan Dennett) Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain.Thank you.And now we come to my problem. Because I'm absolutely sincere in my appreciation of all that I said about this book. But I wish it were better. I have some problems with the book. And it would just be insincere of me not to address those problems. I wish he could do this with a revision, a Mark 2 version of his book. ""The truth will set you free."" That's what it says in the Bible, and it's something that I want to live by, too.My problem is, some of the bits in it I don't think are true. Now some of this is a difference of opinion. And that's not my main complaint, that's worth mentioning. Here's a passage — it's very much what he said, anyway: ""If there was no God we would all be accidents, the result of astronomical random chance in the Universe. You could stop reading this book because life would have no purpose or meaning or significance. There would be no right or wrong and no hope beyond your brief years on Earth."" Now, I just do not believe that. By the way, I find — Homer Groening's film presented a beautiful alternative to that very claim. Yes, there is meaning and a reason for right or wrong. We don't need a belief in God to be good or to have meaning in us. But that, as I said, is just a difference of opinion. That's not what I'm really worried about.How about this: ""God designed this planet's environment just so we could live in it."" I'm afraid that a lot of people take that sentiment to mean that we don't have to do the sorts of things that Al Gore is trying so hard to get us to do. I am not happy with that sentiment at all. And then I find this: ""All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact."" Well, that's Michael Denton. He's a creationist. And here, I think, ""Wait a minute."" I read this again. I read it three or four times and I think, ""Is he really endorsing Intelligent Design? Is he endorsing creationism here?"" And you can't tell. So I'm sort of thinking, ""Well, I don't know, I don't know if I want to get upset with this yet.""But then I read on, and I read this: ""First, Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up."" I wish that sentence weren't in there, because I think it is false. And I think that thinking this way about the history of the planet, after we've just been hearing about the history of the planet over millions of years, discourages people from scientific understanding. Now, Rick Warren uses scientific terms and scientific factoids and information in a very interesting way.Here's one: ""God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA cocktail that created you."" I think that's false. Now, maybe we want to treat it as metaphorical. Here's another one: ""For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second."" Well, it would be interesting to find the interpretation where I would accept that. There might be some way of treating that as true. ""Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hardwired by God into the very fiber of our being — an inbuilt need to connect with God."" Well, the sense of which I agree with him, except I think it has an evolutionary explanation.And what I find deeply troubling in this book is that he seems to be arguing that if you want to be moral, if you want to have meaning in your life, you have to be an Intelligent Designer, you have to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection. And I think, on the contrary, that it is very important to solving the world's problems that we take evolutionary biology seriously. Whose truth are we going to listen to? Well, this is from ""The Purpose Driven Life"": ""The Bible must become the authoritative standard for my life: the compass I rely on for direction, the counsel I listen to for making wise decisions, and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything."" Well maybe, OK, but what's going to follow from this?And here's one that does concern me. Remember I quoted him before with this line: ""Surrendered people obey God's word, even if it doesn't make sense."" And that's a problem.(Sighs)""Don't ever argue with the Devil. He's better at arguing than you are, having had thousands of years to practice."" Now, Rick Warren didn't invent this clever move. It's an old move. It's a very clever adaptation of religions. It's a wild card for disarming any reasonable criticism. ""You don't like my interpretation? You've got a reasonable objection to it? Don't listen, don't listen! That's the Devil speaking."" This discourages the sort of reasoning citizenship it seems to me that we want to have.I've got one more problem, then I'm through. And I'd really like to get a response if Rick is able to do it. ""In the Great Commission, Jesus said, 'Go to all people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've told you.'"" The Bible says Jesus is the only one who can save the world. We've seen many wonderful maps of the world in the last day or so. Here's one, not as beautiful as the others; it simply shows the religions of the world. Here's one that shows the sort of current breakdown of the different religions.Do we really want to commit ourselves to engulfing all the other religions, when their holy books are telling them, ""Don't listen to the other side, that's just Satan talking!""? It seems to me that that's a very problematic ship to get on for the future. I found this sign as I was driving to Maine recently, in front of a church: ""Good without God becomes zero."" Sort of cute. A very clever little meme. I don't believe it and I think this idea, popular as it is — not in this guise, but in general — is itself one of the main problems that we face.If you are like me, you know many wonderful, committed, engaged atheists, agnostics, who are being very good without God. And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. So, I wish we could drop this meme. I wish this meme would go extinct.Thanks very much for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_s_response_to_rick_warren
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"I'm often asked, ""What surprised you about the book?"" And I say, ""That I got to write it."" I would have never imagined that. Not in my wildest dreams did I think — I don't even consider myself to be an author. And I'm often asked, ""Why do you think so many people have read this? This thing's selling still about a million copies a month.""And I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. I think inside at some point, we put our heads down on the pillow and we go, ""There's got to be more to life than this."" Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, go to parties on weekends. A lot of people say, ""I'm living."" No, you're not living — that's just existing. Just existing. I really think that there's this inner desire. I do believe what Chris said; I believe that you're not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but I believe God did. I think there are accidental parents; there's no doubt about that. I don't think there are accidental kids. And I think you matter.I think you matter to God; I think you matter to history; I think you matter to this universe. And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living, and the significance level of living is: Do you figure out, ""What on Earth am I here for?"" I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, ""But why can't I figure out my problems?"" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, ""Why don't I feel more fulfilled? Why do I feel like a fake? Why do I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm more than I really am?"" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. I think it comes down to this issue of: ""Why am I here? What am I here for? Where am I going?"" These are not religious issues. They're human issues.I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does, because it makes my life work a whole lot easier. As a pastor, I do see a lot of kooks. And I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on that, but there are plenty of religious kooks. There are secular kooks; there are smart kooks, dumb kooks. There are people — a lady came up to me the other day, and she had a white piece of paper — Michael, you'll like this one — and she said, ""What do you see in it?"" And I looked at it and I said, ""Oh, I don't see anything."" And she goes, ""Well, I see Jesus,"" and started crying and left. I'm going, ""OK,"" you know? ""Fine.""(Laughter)Good for you.When the book became the best-selling book in the world for the last three years, I kind of had my little crisis. And that was: What is the purpose of this? Because it brought in enormous amounts of money. When you write the best-selling book in the world, it's tons and tons of money. And it brought in a lot of attention, neither of which I wanted. When I started Saddleback Church, I was 25 years old. I started it with one other family in 1980. And I decided that I was never going to go on TV, because I didn't want to be a celebrity. I didn't want to be a, quote, ""evangelist, televangelist"" — that's not my thing. And all of the sudden, it brought a lot of money and a lot of attention. I don't think — now, this is a worldview, and I will tell you, everybody's got a worldview.Everybody's betting their life on something. You're betting your life on something, you just better know why you're betting what you're betting on. So, everybody's betting their life on something. And when I, you know, made a bet, I happened to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. And I believe in a pluralistic society, everybody's betting on something. And when I started the church, you know, I had no plans to do what it's doing now. And then when I wrote this book, and all of a sudden, it just took off, and I started saying, now, what's the purpose of this? Because as I started to say, I don't think you're given money or fame for your own ego, ever. I just don't believe that. And when you write a book that the first sentence of the book is, ""It's not about you,"" then, when all of a sudden it becomes the best-selling book in history, you've got to figure, well, I guess it's not about me. That's kind of a no-brainer. So, what is it for?And I began to think about what I call the ""stewardship of affluence"" and the ""stewardship of influence."" So I believe, essentially, leadership is stewardship. That if you are a leader in any area — in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area — you don't own it. You are a steward of it. For instance, that's why I believe in protecting the environment. This is not my planet. It wasn't mine before I was born, it's not going to be mine after I die, I'm just here for 80 years and then that's it.I was debating the other day on a talk show, and the guy was challenging me and he'd go, ""What's a pastor doing on protecting the environment?"" And I asked this guy, I said, ""Well, do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation? Do you think we have a stewardship here, to take the environment seriously?"" And he said, ""No."" I said, ""Oh, you don't?"" I said, ""Let me make this clear again: Do you believe that as human beings — I'm not talking about religion — do you believe that as human beings, it is our responsibility to take care of this planet, and make it just a little bit better for the next generation?"" And he said, ""No. Not any more than any other species."" When he said the word ""species,"" he was revealing his worldview. And he was saying, ""I'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is."" Well now, I know a lot of times we act like ducks, but you're not a duck. You're not a duck. And you are responsible — that's my worldview. And so, you need to understand what your worldview is.The problem is most people never really think it through. They never really ... codify it or qualify it or quantify it, and say, ""This is what I believe in. This is why I believe what I believe."" I don't personally have enough faith to be an atheist. But you may, you may. Your worldview, though, does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions; it determines your relationships; it determines your level of confidence. It determines, really, everything in your life. What we believe, obviously — and you know this — determines our behavior, and our behavior determines what we become in life.So all of this money started pouring in, and all of this fame started pouring in. And I'm going, what do I do with this? My wife and I first made five decisions on what to do with the money. We said, ""First, we're not going to use it on ourselves."" I didn't go out and buy a bigger house. I don't own a guesthouse. I still drive the same four year-old Ford that I've driven. We just said, we're not going to use it on us. The second thing was, I stopped taking a salary from the church that I pastor. Third thing is, I added up all that the church had paid me over the last 25 years, and I gave it back. And I gave it back because I didn't want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money — I don't. In fact, personally, I've never met a priest or a pastor or a minister who does it for money. I know that's the stereotype; I've never met one of them. Believe me, there's a whole lot easier ways to make money.Pastors are like on 24 hours-a-day call, they're like doctors. I left late today — I'd hoped to be here yesterday — because my father-in-law is in his last, probably, 48 hours before he dies of cancer. And I'm watching a guy who's lived his life — he's now in his mid-80s — and he's dying with peace. You know, the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times. The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral. And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals, it makes a difference. It makes a difference what you believe.So, we gave it all back, and then we set up three foundations, working on some of the major problems of the world: illiteracy, poverty, pandemic diseases — particularly HIV/AIDS — and set up these three foundations, and put the money into that. The last thing we did is we became what I call ""reverse tithers."" And that is, when my wife and I got married 30 years ago, we started tithing. Now, that's a principle in the Bible that says give 10 percent of what you get back to charity, give it away to help other people. So, we started doing that, and each year we would raise our tithe one percent. So, our first year of marriage we went to 11 percent, second year we went to 12 percent, and the third year we went to 13 percent, and on and on and on. Why did I do that? Because every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life.Materialism is all about getting — get, get, get, get all you can, can all you get, sit on the can and spoil the rest. It's all about more, having more. And we think that the good life is actually looking good — that's most important of all — looking good, feeling good and having the goods. But that's not the good life. I meet people all the time who have those, and they're not necessarily happy. If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. And that I know, personally, I know, is not true. It's just not true.So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good. Giving your life away. Significance in life doesn't come from status, because you can always find somebody who's got more than you. It doesn't come from sex. It doesn't come from salary. It comes from serving. It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning, we find significance. That's the way we were wired, I believe, by God. And so we began to give away, and now after 30 years, my wife and I are reverse tithers — we give away 90 percent and live on 10. That, actually, was the easy part. The hard part is, what do I do with all this attention? Because I started getting all kinds of invitations. I just came off a nearly month-long speaking tour on three different continents, and I won't go into that, but it was an amazing thing. And I'm going, what do I do with this notoriety that the book has brought?And, being a pastor, I started reading the Bible. There's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72, and it's Solomon's prayer for more influence. When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish, self-centered. He says, ""God, I want you to make me famous."" That's what he prays. He said, ""I want you to make me famous. I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land, I want you to give me power. I want you to make me famous, I want you to give me influence."" And it just sounds like the most egotistical request you could make, if you were going to pray. Until you read the whole psalm, the whole chapter. And then he says, ""So that the king ..."" — he was the king of Israel at that time, at its apex in power — ""... so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support the oppressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner, those in prison."" Basically, he's talking about all the marginalized in society.And as I read that, I looked at it, and I thought, you know, what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. The purpose of influence is not to build your ego. Or your net worth. And, by the way, your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth. Your value is not based on your valuables. It's based on a whole different set of things. And so the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And I had to admit: I can't think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans. They're not on my radar. I pastor a church in one of the most affluent areas of America — a bunch of gated communities. I have a church full of CEOs and scientists. And I could go five years and never, ever see a homeless person. They're just not in my pathway. Now, they're 13 miles up the road in Santa Ana. So I had to say, ok, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those.You know, there's a story in the Bible about Moses, whether you believe it's true or not, it really doesn't matter to me. But Moses, if you saw the movie, ""The Ten Commandments,"" Moses goes out, and there's this burning bush, and God talks to him, and God says, ""Moses, what's in your hand?"" I think that's one of the most important questions you'll ever be asked: What's in your hand? Moses says, ""It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff."" And God says, ""Throw it down."" And if you saw the movie, you know, he throws it down and it becomes a snake. And then God says, ""Pick it up."" And he picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. Now, I'm reading this thing, and I'm going, what is that all about? OK. What's that all about? Well, I do know a couple of things. Number one, God never does a miracle to show off. It's not just, ""Wow, isn't that cool?"" And, by the way, my God doesn't have to show up on cheese bread. You know, if God's going to show up, he's not going to show up on cheese bread.(Laughter)Ok? I just, this is why I love what Michael does, because it's like, if he's debunking it, then I don't have to. But God — my God — doesn't show up on sprinkler images. He's got a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do. But he doesn't do miracles just to show off.Second thing is, if God ever asks you a question, he already knows the answer. Obviously, if he's God, then that would mean that when he asks the question, it's for your benefit, not his. So he's going, ""What's in your hand?"" Now, what was in Moses' hand? Well, it was a shepherd's staff. Now, follow me on this.This staff represented three things about Moses' life. First, it represented his identity; he was a shepherd. It's the symbol of his own occupation: I am a shepherd. It's a symbol of his identity, his career, his job. Second, it's a symbol of not only his identity, it's a symbol of his income, because all of his assets are tied up in sheep. In those days, nobody had bank accounts, or American Express cards, or hedge funds. Your assets are tied up in your flocks. So it's a symbol of his identity, and it's a symbol of his income. And the third thing: it's a symbol of his influence. What do you do with a shepherd's staff? Well, you know, you move sheep from point A to point B with it, by hook or by crook. You pull them or you poke them. One or the other. So, he's saying, ""You're going to lay down your identity. What's in your hand? You've got identity, you've got income, you've got influence. What's in your hand?"" And he's saying, ""If you lay it down, I'll make it come alive. I'll do some things you could never imagine possible."" And if you've watched that movie, ""Ten Commandments,"" all of those big miracles that happen in Egypt are done through this staff.Last year, I was invited to speak at the NBA All-Stars game. And so, I'm talking to the players, because most of the NBA teams, NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose, based on the book. And I asked them, I said, ""What's in your hand? So, what's in your hand?"" I said, ""It's a basketball. And that basketball represents your identity, who you are: you're an NBA player. It represents your income: you're making a lot of money off that little ball. And it represents your influence. And even though you're only going to be in the NBA for a few years, you're going to be an NBA player for the rest of your life. And that gives you enormous influence. So, what are you going to do with what you've been given?""And I guess that's the main reason I came up here today, to all of you very bright people at TED — it is to say, ""What's in your hand?"" What do you have that you've been given? Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. What are you doing with what you've been given? That, to me, is the primary question about life. That, to me, is what being purpose-driven is all about. In the book, I talk about how you're wired to do certain things, you're ""SHAPED"" with — a little acrostic: Spiritual gifts, Heart, Ability, Personality and Experiences. These things shape you. And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life, you need to look at your shape — ""What am I wired to do?"" Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it? If you're wired to be an anthropologist, you'll be an anthropologist. If you're wired to be an undersea explorer, you'll be an undersea explorer. If you're wired to make deals, you make deals. If you're wired to paint, you paint.Did you know that God smiles when you be you? When my little kids — when my kids were little — they're all grown now, I have grandkids — I used to go in and sit on the side of their bed, and I used to watch my kids sleep. And I just watched their little bodies rise and lower, rise and lower. And I would look at them: ""This is not an accident."" Rise and lower. And I got joy out of just watching them sleep. Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, ""spiritual things,"" like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that. The bottom line is, God gets pleasure watching you be you. Why? He made you. And when you do what you were made to do, he goes, ""That's my boy! That's my girl! You're using the talent and ability that I gave you.""So my advice to you is: look at what's in your hand — your identity, your influence, your income — and say, ""It's not about me. It's about making the world a better place.""Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_warren_on_a_life_of_purpose
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"I'm going to take you on a journey very quickly. To explain the wish, I'm going to have to take you somewhere where many people haven't been, and that's around the world. When I was about 24 years old, Kate Stohr and myself started an organization to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work, not only about responding to natural disasters, but involved in systemic issues. We believe that where the resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable design can really make a difference in people's lives.So I started my life as an architect, or training as an architect, and I was always interested in socially responsible design, and how you can really make an impact. But when I went to architecture school, it seemed that I was a black sheep in the family. Many architects seemed to think that when you design, you design a jewel, and it's a jewel that you try and crave for; whereas I felt that when you design, you either improve or you create a detriment to the community in which you're designing. So you're not just doing a building for the residents or for the people who are going to use it, but for the community as a whole.And in 1999, we started by responding to the issue of the housing crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo. And I didn't know what I was doing — like I said, mid-20s — and I'm the Internet generation, so we started a website. We put a call out there, and to my surprise, in a couple of months, we had hundreds of entries from around the world. That led to a number of prototypes being built and really experimenting with some ideas. Two years later we started doing a project on developing mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. That led to 550 entries from 53 countries. We also have designers from around the world that participate. And we had an exhibit of work that followed that. 2004 was the tipping point for us. We started responding to natural disasters and getting involved in Iran, in Bam, also following up on our work in Africa.Working within the United States — most people look at poverty and they see the face of a foreigner. But I live in Bozeman, Montana — go up to the north plains on the reservations, or go down to Alabama or Mississippi, pre-Katrina, and I could have shown you places that have far worse conditions than many developing countries that I've been to. So we got involved in and worked in inner cities and elsewhere;and also, I will go into some more projects. 2005: Mother Nature kicked our ass. I think we can pretty much assume that 2005 was a horrific year when it comes to natural disasters. And because of the Internet, and because of connections to blogs and so forth, within literally hours of the tsunami, we were already raising funds, getting involved, working with people on the ground. We run from a couple of laptops, and in the first couple of days, I had 4,000 emails from people needing help. So we began to get involved in projects there, and I'll talk about some others. And then of course, this year we've been responding to Katrina, as well as following up on our reconstruction work.So this is a brief overview. In 2004, I really couldn't manage the number of people who wanted to help, or the number of requests that I was getting. It was all coming into my laptop and cell phone. So we decided to embrace an open-source model of business — so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could start a local chapter, and they can get involved in local problems. Because I believe there is no such thing as Utopia. All problems are local. All solutions are local. So that means, you know, somebody who's based in Mississippi knows more about Mississippi than I do. So what happened is, we used Meetup and all these other Internet tools, and we ended up having 40 chapters starting up, thousands of architects in 104 countries. So the bullet point — sorry, I never do a suit, so I knew that I was going to take this off. OK, because I'm going to do it very quick.This isn't just about nonprofit. What it showed me is that there's a grassroots movement going on, of socially responsible designers who really believe that this world has got a lot smaller, and that we have the opportunity — not the responsibility, but the opportunity — to really get involved in making change.(Laughter)(Laughter)I'm adding that to my time.(Laughter)So what you don't know is, we've got these thousands of designers working around the world, connected basically by a website, and we have a staff of three. The fact that nobody told us we couldn't do it, we did it. And so there's something to be said about naïveté. So seven years later, we've developed so that we've got advocacy, instigation and implementation. We advocate for good design, not only through student workshops and lectures and public forums, op-eds; we have a book on humanitarian work; but also disaster mitigation and dealing with public policy. We can talk about FEMA, but that's another talk. Instigation, developing ideas with communities and NGOs, doing open-source design competitions. Referring, matchmaking with communities. And then implementing — actually going out there and doing the work, because when you invent, it's never a reality until it's built. So it's really important that if we're designing and trying to create change, we build that change.So here's a select number of projects. Kosovo. This is Kosovo in '99. We did an open design competition, like I said. It led to a whole variety of ideas. And this wasn't about emergency shelter, but transitional shelter that would last five to 10 years, that would be placed next to the land the resident lived in, and that they would rebuild their own home. This wasn't imposing an architecture on a community; this was giving them the tools and the space to allow them to rebuild and regrow the way they want to. We had from the sublime to the ridiculous, but they worked. This is an inflatable hemp house. It was built; it works.This is a shipping container. Built and works. And a whole variety of ideas that not only dealt with architectural building, but also the issues of governance, and the idea of creating communities through complex networks.So we've engaged not just designers, but also a whole variety of technology-based professionals. Using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes. Using straw bale construction, creating heat walls. And then something remarkable happened in '99.We went to Africa originally to look at the housing issue. Within three days, we realized the problem was not housing; it was the growing pandemic of HIV/AIDS. And it wasn't doctors telling us this; it was actual villagers that we were staying with. And so we came up with the bright idea that instead of getting people to walk 10, 15 kilometers to see doctors, you get the doctors to the people. And we started engaging the medical community, and you know, we thought we were real bright sparks — ""We've come up with this great idea: mobile health clinics, widely distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa."" And the medical community there said, ""We've said this for the last decade. We know this. We just don't know how to show this."" So in a way, we had taken pre-existing needs and shown solutions. And so again, we had a whole variety of ideas that came in.This one I personally love, because the idea is that architecture is not just about solutions, but about raising awareness. This is a kenaf clinic. You get seed and you grow it in a plot of land, and it grows 14 feet in a month. And on the fourth week, the doctors come and they mow out an area, put a tensile structure on the top, and when the doctors have finished treating and seeing patients and villagers, you cut down the clinic and you eat it. It's an eat-your-own-clinic.So it's dealing with the fact that if you have AIDS, you also need to have nutrition rates, and the idea of nutrition is as important as getting antiretrovirals out there. So you know, this is a serious solution. This one I love. The idea is it's not just a clinic, it's a community center. This looked at setting up trade routes and economic engines within the community, so it can be a self-sustaining project.Every one of these projects is sustainable. That's not because I'm a tree-hugging green person. It's because when you live on four dollars a day, you're living on survival and you have to be sustainable. You have to know where your energy is coming from, you have to know where your resource is coming from, and you have to keep the maintenance down. So this is about getting an economic engine, and then at night, it turns into a movie theater. So it's not an AIDS clinic. It's a community center. So you can see ideas. And these ideas developed into prototypes, and they were eventually built. And currently, as of this year, there are clinics rolling out in Nigeria and Kenya.From that, we also developed Siyathemba. The community came to us and said, ""The problem is that the girls don't have education."" And we're working in an area where young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have a 50 percent HIV/AIDS rate. And that's not because they're promiscuous, it's because there's no knowledge.And so we decided to look at the idea of sports, and create a youth sports center that doubled as an HIV/AIDS outreach center, and the coaches of the girls' team were also trained doctors. So that there would be a very slow way of developing confidence in health care. And we picked nine finalists, and then those nine finalists were distributed throughout the entire region, and then the community picked their design. They said, this is our design, because it's not only about engaging a community; it's about empowering a community, and about getting them to be a part of the rebuilding process.So, the winning design is here. And then, of course, we actually go and work with the community and the clients.So this is the designer. He's out there working with the first ever women's soccer team in KwaZulu-Natal, Siyathemba. And they can tell it better.(A cappella singing in a South African language)Video: Well, my name is Cee Cee Mkhonza. I work at the Africa Centre, I'm an IT user consultant. I'm also the national football player for South Africa, Banyana Banyana. And I also play in the Vodacom League, for the team called Tembisa, which has now changed to Siyathemba. This is our home ground.Cameron Sinclair: I'm going to show that later because I'm running out of time. I can see Chris looking at me slyly.This was a connection, just a meeting with somebody who wanted to develop Africa's first telemedicine center, in Tanzania. And we met, literally, a couple of months ago. We've already developed a design. The team is over there, working in partnership. This was a matchmaking, thanks to a couple of TEDsters — Sun [Microsystems], Cheryl Heller and Andrew Zolli, who connected me with this amazing African woman. And we start construction in June, and it will be opened by TEDGlobal. So when you come to TEDGlobal, you can check it out.But what we're known probably most for is dealing with disasters and development, and we've been involved in a lot of issues, such as the tsunami and also things like Hurricane Katrina. This is a 370-dollar shelter that can be easily assembled. This is a community-designed community center. And what that means is we actually live and work with the community, and they're part of the design process. The kids actually get involved in mapping out where the community center should be. And then eventually, the community, through skills training, end up building the building with us.Here is another school. This is what the UN gave these guys for six months — 12 plastic tarps. This was in August. This was the replacement; that's supposed to last for two years. When the rain comes down, you can't hear a thing, and in the summer, it's about 140 degrees inside. So we said, if the rain's coming down, let's get fresh water. So every one of our schools has a rainwater collection system. Very low cost: three classrooms and rainwater collection is 5,000 dollars. This was raised by hot chocolate sales in Atlanta. It's built by the parents of the kids. The kids are out there on-site, building the buildings. And it opened a couple of weeks ago, and there's 600 kids that are now using the schools.(Applause)So, disaster hits home. We see the bad stories on CNN and Fox and all that, but we don't see the good stories. Here is a community that got together, and they said ""no"" to waiting. They formed a partnership, a diverse partnership of players, to actually map out East Biloxi, to figure out who's getting involved. We've had over 1,500 volunteers rebuilding, rehabbing homes. Figuring out what FEMA regulations are, not waiting for them to dictate to us how you should rebuild. Working with residents, getting them out of their homes, so they don't get ill. This is what they're cleaning up on their own. Designing housing. This house is going in in a couple of weeks. This is a rehabbed home, done in four days. This is a utility room for a woman who is on a walker. She's 70 years old. This is what FEMA gave her. 600 bucks, happened two days ago. We put together, very quickly, a washroom. It's built, it's running and she just started a business today, where she's washing other people's clothes.These are the Calhouns. They're photographers who had documented the Lower Ninth for the last 40 years. That was their home, and these are the photographs they took. And we're helping, working with them to create a new building. Projects we've done. Projects we've been a part of, support. Why don't aid agencies do this? This is the UN tent. This is the new UN tent, just introduced this year. Quick to assemble. It's got a flap — that's the invention. It took 20 years to design this and get it implemented in the field. I was 12 years old. There's a problem here.Luckily, we're not alone. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of architects and designers and inventors around the world that are getting involved in humanitarian work. More hemp houses — it's a theme in Japan, apparently. I'm not sure what they're smoking.(Laughter)This is a Grip Clip, designed by somebody who said, ""All you need is some way to attach membrane structures to physical support beams."" This guy designed for NASA, is now doing housing. I'm going to whip through this quickly, because I know I've got only a couple of minutes.So this is all done in the last two years. I showed you something that took 20 years to do. And this is just a selection of things that were built in the last couple of years. From Brazil to India, Mexico, Alabama, China, Israel, Palestine, Vietnam.The average age of a designer who gets involved in this project is 32 — that's how old I am. So it's a young — I just have to stop here, because Arup is in the room, and this is the best-designed toilet in the world. If you're ever, ever in India, go use this toilet.(Laughter)Chris Luebkeman will tell you why. I'm sure that's how he wanted to spend the party. But the future is not going to be the sky-scraping cities of New York, but this. And when you look at this, you see crisis. What I see is many, many inventors. One billion people live in abject poverty. We hear about them all the time. Four billion live in growing but fragile economies. One in seven live in unplanned settlements. If we do nothing about the housing crisis that's about to happen, in 20 years, one in three people will live in an unplanned settlement or a refugee camp. Look left, look right: one of you will be there. How do we improve the living standards of five billion people? With 10 million solutions.So I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve the living conditions for everyone.Chris Anderson: Wait a sec — that's your wish?CS: That's my wish.CA: That's his wish!(Applause)CS: We started Architecture for Humanity with 700 dollars and a website. So Chris somehow decided to give me 100,000. So why not this many people? Open-source architecture is the way to go. You have a diverse community of participants — and we're not just talking about inventors and designers, but we're talking about the funding model. My role is not as a designer; it's as a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian world. And what we need is something that replicates me globally, because I haven't slept in seven years.(Laughter)Secondly, what will this thing be? Designers want to respond to issues of humanitarian crisis, but they don't want some company in the West taking their idea and basically profiting from it. So Creative Commons has developed the Developing Nations license. And what that means is that a designer can — The Siyathemba project I showed was the first ever building to have a Creative Commons license on it. As soon as that is built, anyone in Africa or any developing nation can take the construction documents and replicate it for free.(Applause)So why not allow designers the opportunity to do this, but still protect their rights here? We want to have a community where you can upload ideas, and those ideas can be tested in an earthquake, in flood, in all sorts of austere environments. The reason that's important is I don't want to wait for the next Katrina to find out if my house works. That's too late, we need to do it now. So doing that globally — and I want this whole thing to work multi-lingually. When you look at the face of an architect, most people think a gray-haired white guy. I don't see that; I see the face of the world. So I want everyone from all over the planet to be able to be a part of this design and development. The idea of needs-based competitions — XPRIZE for the other 98 percent, if you want to call it that.We also want to look at ways of matchmaking and putting funding partners together, and the idea of integrating manufacturers — fab labs in every country. When I hear about the $100 laptop and it's going to educate every child — educate every designer in the world. Put one in every favela, every slum settlement. Because you know what? Innovation will happen. And I need to know that. It's called the leap-back. We talk about leapfrog technologies.I write with Worldchanging, and the one thing we've been talking about is, I learn more on the ground than I've ever learned here. So let's take those ideas, adapt them, and we can use them. These ideas are supposed to be adaptable; they should have the potential for evolution; they should be developed by every nation in the world and useful for every nation in the world. What will it take?There should be a sheet. I don't have time to read this, because I'm going to be yanked off.CA: Let's just leave it up for a sec.CS: Well, what will it take? You guys are smart. So it's going to take a lot of computing power, because I want the idea that any laptop anywhere in the world can plug into the system and be able to not only participate in developing these designs, but utilize the designs. Also, a process of reviewing the designs. I want every Arup engineer in the world to check and make sure that we're doing stuff that's standing, because those guys are the best in the world. Plug. And so, you know, I want these —I just should note: I have two laptops and one of them is there, and that has 3000 designs on it. If I drop that laptop ... What happens? So it's important to have these proven ideas put up there, easy to use, easy to get ahold of. My mom once said, ""There's nothing worse than being all mouth and no trousers.""(Laughter)I'm fed up of talking about making change. You only make it by doing it. We've changed FEMA guidelines; we've changed public policy; we've changed international response — based on building things. So for me, it's important that we create a real conduit for innovation, and that it's free innovation. Think of free culture — this is free innovation. Somebody said this a couple of years back. I will give points for those who know it. But I think the man was maybe 25 years too early.So let's do it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_sinclair_on_open_source_architecture
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"I can't help but this wish: to think about when you're a little kid, and all your friends ask you, ""If a genie could give you one wish in the world, what would it be?"" And I always answered, ""Well, I'd want the wish to have the wisdom to know exactly what to wish for."" Well, then you'd be screwed, because you'd know what to wish for, and you'd use up your wish, and now, since we only have one wish — unlike last year they had three wishes — I'm not going to wish for that.So let's get to what I would like, which is world peace. And I know what you're thinking: You're thinking, ""The poor girl up there, she thinks she's at a beauty pageant. She's not. She's at the TED Prize."" (Laughter) But I really do think it makes sense. And I think that the first step to world peace is for people to meet each other. I've met a lot of different people over the years, and I've filmed some of them, from a dotcom executive in New York who wanted to take over the world, to a military press officer in Qatar, who would rather not take over the world. If you've seen the film ""Control Room"" that was sent out, you'd understand a little bit why. (Applause) Thank you. Wow! Some of you watched it. That's great. That's great.So basically what I'd like to talk about today is a way for people to travel, to meet people in a different way than — because you can't travel all over the world at the same time. And a long time ago — well, about 40 years ago — my mom had an exchange student. And I'm going to show you slides of the exchange student. This is Donna. This is Donna at the Statue of Liberty. This is my mother and aunt teaching Donna how to ride a bike. This is Donna eating ice cream. And this is Donna teaching my aunt how to do a Filipino dance. I really think as the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry. And I know that we can't all do exchange programs, and I can't force everybody to travel; I've already talked about that to Chris and Amy, and they said that there's a problem with this: You can't force people, free will. And I totally support that, so we're not forcing people to travel. But I'd like to talk about another way to travel that doesn't require a ship or an airplane, and just requires a movie camera, a projector and a screen. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today.I was asked that I speak a little bit about where I personally come from, and Cameron, I don't know how you managed to get out of that one, but I think that building bridges is important to me because of where I come from. I'm the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father. So I'm the living product of two cultures coming together. No pun intended. (Laughter) And I've also been called, as an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian American with a Persian name, the ""Middle East Peace Crisis.""So maybe me starting to take pictures was some kind of way to bring both sides of my family together — a way to take the worlds with me, a way to tell stories visually. It all kind of started that way, but I think that I really realized the power of the image when I first went to the garbage-collecting village in Egypt, when I was about 16. My mother took me there. She's somebody who believes strongly in community service, and decided that this was something that I needed to do. And so I went there and I met some amazing women there. There was a center there, where they were teaching people how to read and write, and get vaccinations against the many diseases you can get from sorting through garbage. And I began teaching there. I taught English, and I met some incredible women there. I met people that live seven people to a room, barely can afford their evening meal, yet lived with this strength of spirit and sense of humor and just incredible qualities.I got drawn into this community and I began to take pictures there. I took pictures of weddings and older family members — things that they wanted memories of. About two years after I started taking these pictures, the UN Conference on Population and Development asked me to show them at the conference. So I was 18; I was very excited. It was my first exhibit of photographs and they were all put up there, and after about two days, they all came down except for three. People were very upset, very angry that I was showing these dirty sides of Cairo, and why didn't I cut the dead donkey out of the frame? And as I sat there, I got very depressed. I looked at this big empty wall with three lonely photographs that were, you know, very pretty photographs and I was like, ""I failed at this."" But I was looking at this intense emotion and intense feeling that had come out of people just seeing these photographs. Here I was, this 18-year-old pipsqueak that nobody listened to, and all of a sudden, I put these photographs on the wall, and there were arguments, and they had to be taken down. And I saw the power of the image, and it was incredible. And I think the most important reaction that I saw there was actually from people that would never have gone to the garbage village themselves, that would never have seen that the human spirit could thrive in such difficult circumstances. And I think it was at that point that I decided I wanted to use photography and film to somehow bridge gaps, to bridge cultures, bring people together, cross borders. And so that's what really kind of started me off.Did a stint at MTV, made a film called ""Startup.com,"" and I've done a couple of music films. But in 2003, when the war in Iraq was about to start, it was a very surreal feeling for me, because before the war started, there was kind of this media war that was going on. And I was watching television in New York, and there seemed to be just one point of view that was coming across, and the coverage went from the US State Department to embedded troops. And what was coming across on the news was that there was going to be this clean war and precision bombings, and the Iraqis would be greeting the Americans as liberators, and throwing flowers at their feet in the streets of Baghdad. And I knew that there was a completely other story that was taking place in the Middle East, where my parents were. I knew that there was a completely other story being told, and I was thinking, ""How are people supposed to communicate with each other when they're getting completely different messages, and nobody knows what the other's being told? How are people supposed to have any kind of common understanding or know how to move together into the future? So I knew that I had to go there. I just wanted to be in the center. I had no plan. I had no funding. I didn't even have a camera at the time — I had somebody bring it there, because I wanted to get access to Al Jazeera, George Bush's favorite channel, and a place which I was very curious about because it's disliked by many governments across the Arab world, and also called the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden by some people in the US government.So I was thinking, this station that's hated by so many people has to be doing something right. I've got to go see what this is all about. And I also wanted to go see Central Command, which was 10 minutes away. And that way, I could get access to how this news was being created — on the Arab side, reaching the Arab world, and on the US and Western side, reaching the US.And when I went there and sat there, and met these people that were in the center of it, and sat with these characters, I met some surprising, very complex people. And I'd like to share with you a little bit of that experience of when you sit with somebody and you film them, and you listen to them, and you allow them more than a five-second sound bite. The amazing complexity of people emerges.Samir Khader: Business as usual. Iraq, and then Iraq, and then Iraq. But between us, if I'm offered a job with Fox, I'll take it. To change the Arab nightmare into the American dream. I still have that dream. Maybe I will never be able to do it, but I have plans for my children. When they finish high school, I will send them to America to study there. I will pay for their study. And they will stay there. Josh Rushing: The night they showed the POWs and the dead soldiers — Al Jazeera showed them — it was powerful, because America doesn't show those kinds of images. Most of the news in America won't show really gory images and this showed American soldiers in uniform, strewn about a floor, a cold tile floor. And it was revolting. It was absolutely revolting. It made me sick at my stomach. And then what hit me was, the night before, there had been some kind of bombing in Basra, and Al Jazeera had shown images of the people. And they were equally, if not more, horrifying — the images were. And I remember having seen it in the Al Jazeera office, and thought to myself, ""Wow, that's gross. That's bad."" And then going away, and probably eating dinner or something. And it didn't affect me as much. So, the impact that had on me — me realizing that I just saw people on the other side, and those people in the Al Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't as bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe that we're in a world that can live without war yet.Jehane Noujaim: I was overwhelmed by the response of the film. We didn't know whether it would be able to get out there. We had no funding for it. We were incredibly lucky that it got picked up. And when we showed the film in both the United States and the Arab world, we had such incredible reactions. It was amazing to see how people were moved by this film. In the Arab world — and it's not really by the film, it's by the characters — I mean, Josh Rushing was this incredibly complex person who was thinking about things. And when I showed the film in the Middle East, people wanted to meet Josh. He kind of redefined us as an American population. People started to ask me, ""Where is this guy now?"" Al Jazeera offered him a job. (Laughter) And Samir, on the other hand, was also quite an interesting character for the Arab world to see, because it brought out the complexities of this love-hate relationship that the Arab world has with the West.In the United States, I was blown away by the motivations, the positive motivations of the American people when they'd see this film. You know, we're criticized abroad for believing we're the saviors of the world in some way, but the flip side of it is that, actually, when people do see what is happening abroad and people's reactions to some of our policy abroad, we feel this power, that we need to — we feel like we have to get the power to change things. And I saw this with audiences. This woman came up to me after the screening and said, ""You know, I know this is crazy. I saw the bombs being loaded on the planes, I saw the military going out to war, but you don't understand people's anger towards us until you see the people in the hospitals and the victims of the war, and how do we get out of this bubble?How do we understand what the other person is thinking?"" Now, I don't know whether a film can change the world. But I know the power of it, I know that it starts people thinking about how to change the world.Now, I'm not a philosopher, so I feel like I shouldn't go into great depth on this, but let film speak for itself and take you to this other world. Because I believe that film has the ability to take you across borders, I'd like you to just sit back and experience for a couple of minutes being taken into another world. And these couple clips take you inside of two of the most difficult conflicts that we're faced with today. [The last 48 hours of two Palestinian suicide bombers.] [Paradise Now][Man: As long as there is injustice, someone must make a sacrifice!][Woman: That's no sacrifice, that's revenge!] [If you kill, there's no difference between victim and occupier.][Man: If we had airplanes, we wouldn't need martyrs, that's the difference.][Woman: The difference is that the Israeli military is still stronger.][Man: Then let us be equal in death.] [We still have Paradise.][Woman: There is no Paradise! It only exists in your head!][Man: God forbid!] [May God forgive you.] [If you were not Abu Azzam's daughter ...] [Anyway, I'd rather have Paradise in my head than live in this hell!] [In this life, we're dead anyway.][One only chooses bitterness when the alternative is even bitterer.][Woman: And what about us? The ones who remain?] [Will we win that way?] [Don't you see what you're doing is destroying us?] [And that you give Israel an alibi to carry on?][Man: So with no alibi, Israel will stop?][Woman: Perhaps. We have to turn it into a moral war.][Man: How, if Israel has no morals?][Woman: Be careful!] [And the real people building peace through non-violence] [Encounter Point] Video: (Ambulance siren) [Tel Aviv, Israel 1996][Tzvika: My wife Ayelet called me and said, ] [""There was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.""][Ayelet: What do you know about the casualties?] [Tzvika off-screen: We're looking for three girls.][We have no information.][Ayelet: One is wounded here, but we haven't heard from the other three.][Tzvika: I said, ""OK, that's Bat-Chen, that's my daughter.] [Are you sure she is dead?""] [They said yes.] Video: (Police siren and shouting over megaphone) [Bethlehem, Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2003][George: On that day, at around 6:30] [I was driving with my wife and daughters to the supermarket.] [When we got to here ...] [we saw three Israeli military jeeps parked on the side of the road.] [When we passed by the first jeep ...] [they opened fire on us.] [And my 12-year-old daughter Christine] [was killed in the shooting.] [Bereaved Families Forum, Jerusalem][Tzvika: I'm the headmaster for all parts.][George: But there is a teacher that is in charge?] [Tzvika: Yes, I have assistants.] [I deal with children all the time.] [One year after their daughters' deaths both Tzvika and George join the forum][George: At first, I thought it was a strange idea.] [But after thinking logically about it, ] [I didn't find any reason why not to meet them] [and let them know of our suffering.][Tzvika: There were many things that touched me.] [We see that there are Palestinians who suffered a lot, who lost children,] [and still believe in the peace process and in reconciliation.] [If we who lost what is most precious can talk to each other,] [and look forward to a better future,] [then everyone else must do so, too.] [From South Africa: A Revolution Through Music] [Amandla] (Music)(Video) Man: Song is something that we communicated with people who otherwise would not have understood where we're coming from. You could give them a long political speech, they would still not understand. But I tell you, when you finish that song, people will be like, ""Damn, I know where you niggas are coming from. I know where you guys are coming from. Death unto apartheid!""Narrator: It's about the liberation struggle. It's about those children who took to the streets — fighting, screaming, ""Free Nelson Mandela!"" It's about those unions who put down their tools and demanded freedom. Yes. Yes! (Music and singing) (Singing) Freedom! (Applause)Jehane Noujaim: I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation. And what I'd like to talk about is how can we use that feeling to actually create a movement through film? I've been listening to the talks in the conference, and Robert Wright said yesterday that if we have an appreciation for another person's humanity, then they will have an appreciation for ours. And that's what this is about. It's about connecting people through film, getting these independent voices out there. Now, Josh Rushing actually ended up leaving the military and taking a job with Al Jazeera. (Laughter) So his feeling is that he's at Al Jazeera International because he feels like he can actually use media to bridge the gap between East and West. And that's an amazing thing. But I've been trying to think about ways to give power to these independent voices, to give power to the filmmakers, to give power to people who are trying to use film for change. And there are incredible organizations that are out there doing this already. There's Witness, that you heard from earlier. There's Just Vision, that are working with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace, and documenting that process and getting interviews out there and using this film to take to Congress to show that it's a powerful tool, to show that this is a woman who's had her daughter killed in an attack, and she believes that there are peaceful ways to solve this. There's Working Films and there's Current TV, which is an incredible platform for people around the world to be able to put their — (Applause) Yeah, it's amazing. I've watched it and I'm blown away by it and its potential to bring voices from around the world — independent voices from around the world — and create a truly democratic, global television.So what can we do to create a platform for these organizations, to create some momentum, to get everybody in the world involved in this movement? I'd like for us to imagine for a second. Imagine a day when you have everyone coming together from around the world. You have towns and villages and theaters — all from around the world, getting together, and sitting in the dark, and sharing a communal experience of watching a film, or a couple of films, together. Watching a film which maybe highlights a character that is fighting to live, or just a character that defies stereotypes, makes a joke, sings a song. Comedies, documentaries, shorts. This amazing power can be used to change people and to bond people together; to cross borders, and have people feel like they're having a communal experience. So if you imagine this day when all around the world, you have theaters and places where we project films. If you imagine projecting from Times Square to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the same film in Ramallah, the same film in Jerusalem. You know, we've been talking to a friend of mine about using the side of the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China. It's endless what you can imagine, in terms of where you can project films and where you can have this communal experience. And I believe that this one day, if we can create it, this one day can create momentum for all of these independent voices. There isn't an organization which is connecting the independent voices of the world to get out there, and yet I'm hearing throughout this conference that the biggest challenge in our future is understanding the other, and having mutual respect for the other and crossing borders. And if film can do that, and if we can get all of these different locations in the world to watch these films together — this could be an incredible day.So we've already made a partnership, set up through somebody from the TED community, John Camen, who introduced me to Steven Apkon, from the Jacob Burns Film Center. And we started calling up everybody. And in the last week, there have been so many people that have responded to us, from as close as Palo Alto, to Mongolia and to India. There are people that want to be a part of this global day of film; to be able to provide a platform for independent voices and independent films to get out there. Now, we've thought about a name for this day, and I'd like to share this with you. Now, the most amazing part of this whole process has been sharing ideas and wishes, and so I invite you to give brainstorms onto how does this day echo into the future? How do we use technology to make this day echo into the future, so that we can build community and have these communities working together, through the Internet? There was a time, many, many years ago, when all of the continents were stuck together. And we call that landmass Pangea. So what we'd like to call this day of film is Pangea Cinema Day. And if you just imagine that all of these people in these towns would be watching, then I think that we can actually really make a movement towards people understanding each other better.I know that it's very intangible, touching people's hearts and souls, but the only way that I know how to do it, the only way that I know how to reach out to somebody's heart and soul all across the world, is by showing them a film. And I know that there are independent filmmakers and films out there that can really make this happen. And that's my wish. I guess I'm supposed to give you my one-sentence wish, but we're way out of time.Chris Anderson: That is an incredible wish. Pangea Cinema: The day the world comes together.JN: It's more tangible than world peace, and it's certainly more immediate. But it would be the day that the world comes together through film, the power of film.CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Jehane Noujaim.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jehane_noujaim_inspires_a_global_day_of_film
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"I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to see the last case of killer smallpox in the world. I was in India this past year, and I may have seen the last cases of polio in the world. There's nothing that makes you feel more — the blessing and the honor of working in a program like that — than to know that something that horrible no longer exists. So I'm going to tell you — (Applause) so I'm going to show you some dirty pictures. They are difficult to watch, but you should look at them with optimism, because the horror of these pictures will be matched by the uplifting quality of knowing that they no longer exist.But first, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own journey. My background is not exactly the conventional medical education that you might expect. When I was an intern in San Francisco, I heard about a group of Native Americans who had taken over Alcatraz Island, and a Native American who wanted to give birth on that island, and no other doctor wanted to go and help her give birth. I went out to Alcatraz, and I lived on the island for several weeks. She gave birth; I caught the baby; I got off the island; I landed in San Francisco; and all the press wanted to talk to me, because my three weeks on the island made me an expert in Indian affairs. (Laughter)I wound up on every television show. Someone saw me on television; they called me up; and they asked me if I'd like to be in a movie and to play a young doctor for a bunch of rock and roll stars who were traveling in a bus ride from San Francisco to England. And I said, yes, I would do that, so I became the doctor in an absolutely awful movie called ""Medicine Ball Caravan."" (Laughter) Now, you know from the '60s, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus; I was on the bus. My wife of 37 years and I joined the bus. Our bus ride took us from San Francisco to London, then we switched buses at the big pond. We then got on two more buses and we drove through Turkey and Iran, Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, like every other young doctor. This is us at the Khyber Pass, and that's our bus. We had some difficulty getting over the Khyber Pass. But we wound up in India. And then, like everyone else in our generation, we went to live in a Himalayan monastery.(Laughter)This is just like a residency program, for those of you that are in medical school. (Laughter) And we studied with a wise man, a guru named Karoli Baba, who then told me to get rid of the dress, put on a three-piece suit, go join the United Nations as a diplomat and work for the World Health Organization. And he made an outrageous prediction that smallpox would be eradicated, and that this was God's gift to humanity, because of the hard work of dedicated scientists. And that prediction came true. This little girl is Rahima Banu, and she was the last case of killer smallpox in the world. And this document is the certificate that the global commission signed, certifying the world to have eradicated the first disease in history.The key to eradicating smallpox was early detection, early response. I'm going to ask you to repeat that: early detection, early response. Can you say that?Audience: Early detection, early response.Larry Brilliant: Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history. In the last century, it killed 500 million people. You're reading about Larry Page already. Somebody reads very fast. (Laughter) In the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin — with whom I have a certain affection and a new affiliation — in the year in which they were born, two million people died of smallpox. We declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. This is the most important slide that I've ever seen in public health, [Sovereigns killed by smallpox] because it shows you to be the richest and the strongest, and to be kings and queens of the world, did not protect you from dying of smallpox. Never can you doubt that we are all in this together.But to see smallpox from the perspective of a sovereign is the wrong perspective. You should see it from the perspective of a mother, watching her child develop this disease and standing by helplessly. Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six. You're a mother and you're watching your child, and on day six, you see pustules that become hard. Day seven, they show the classic scars of smallpox umbilication. Day eight.And Al Gore said earlier that the most photographed image in the world, the most printed image in the world, was that of the Earth. But this was in 1974, and as of that moment, this photograph was the photograph that was the most widely printed, because we printed two billion copies of this photograph, and we took them hand to hand, door to door, to show people and ask them if there was smallpox in their house, because that was our surveillance system. We didn't have Google, we didn't have web crawlers, we didn't have computers.By day nine — you look at this picture and you're horrified; I look at this picture and I say, ""Thank God,"" because it's clear that this is only an ordinary case of smallpox, and I know this child will live. And by day 13, the lesions are scabbing, his eyelids are swollen, but you know this child has no other secondary infection. And by day 20, while he will be scarred for life, he will live.There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that. This is confluent smallpox, in which there isn't a single place on the body where you could put a finger and not be covered by lesions. Flat smallpox, which killed 100 percent of people who got it. And hemorrhagic smallpox, the most cruel of all, which had a predilection for pregnant women. I've probably had 50 women die. They all had hemorrhagic smallpox. I've never seen anybody die from it who wasn't a pregnant woman.In 1967, the WHO embarked on what was an outrageous program to eradicate a disease. In that year, there were 34 countries affected with smallpox. By 1970, we were down to 18 countries. 1974, we were down to five countries. But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India. And India was the place where smallpox made its last stand. In 1974, India had a population of 600 million. There are 21 linguistic states in India, which is like saying 21 different countries. There are 20 million people on the road at any time, in buses and trains, walking; 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house, because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity, Shitala Mata, the cooling mother, and it was wrong to bring strangers into your house when the deity was in the house. No incentive to report smallpox.It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities; smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world. So, how we eradicated smallpox was — mass vaccination wouldn't work. You could vaccinate everybody in India, but one year later there'd be 21 million new babies, which was then the population of Canada. It wouldn't do just to vaccinate everyone. You had to find every single case of smallpox in the world at the same time, and draw a circle of immunity around it. And that's what we did. In India alone, my 150,000 best friends and I went door to door, with that same picture, to every single house in India. We made over one billion house calls.And in the process, I learned something very important. Every time we did a house-to-house search, we had a spike in the number of reports of smallpox. When we didn't search, we had the illusion that there was no disease. When we did search, we had the illusion that there was more disease. A surveillance system was necessary, because what we needed was early detection, early response. So we searched and we searched, and we found every case of smallpox in India. We had a reward. We raised the reward. We continued to increase the reward. We had a scorecard that we wrote on every house. And as we did that, the number of reported cases in the world dropped to zero. And in 1980, we declared the globe free of smallpox.It was the largest campaign in United Nations history, until the Iraq war. 150,000 people from all over the world — doctors of every race, religion, culture and nation, who fought side by side, brothers and sisters, with each other, not against each other, in a common cause to make the world better. But smallpox was the fourth disease that was intended for eradication. We failed three other times. We failed against malaria, yellow fever and yaws. But soon we may see polio eradicated. But the key to eradicating polio is early detection, early response. This may be the year we eradicate polio. That will make it the second disease in history. And David Heymann, who's watching this on the webcast — David, keep on going. We're close! We're down to four countries.(Applause)I feel like Hank Aaron. Barry Bonds can replace me any time.Let's get another disease off the list of terrible things to worry about. I was just in India working on the polio program. The polio surveillance program is four million people going door to door. That is the surveillance system. But we need to have early detection, early response. Blindness, the same thing. The key to discovering blindness is doing epidemiological surveys and finding out the causes of blindness, so you can mount the correct response.The Seva Foundation was started by a group of alumni of the Smallpox Eradication Programme, who, having climbed the highest mountain, tasted the elixir of the success of eradicating a disease, wanted to do it again. And over the last 27 years, Seva's programs in 15 countries have given back sight to more than two million blind people. Seva got started because we wanted to apply these lessons of surveillance and epidemiology to something which nobody else was looking at as a public health issue: blindness, which heretofore had been thought of only as a clinical disease.In 1980, Steve Jobs gave me that computer, which is Apple number 12, and it's still in Kathmandu, and it's still working, and we ought to go get it and auction it off and make more money for Seva. And we conducted the first Nepal survey ever done for health, and the first nationwide blindness survey ever done, and we had astonishing results. Instead of finding out what we thought was the case — that blindness was caused mostly by glaucoma and trachoma — we were astounded to find out that blindness was caused instead by cataract. You can't cure or prevent what you don't know is there.In your TED packages there's a DVD, ""Infinite Vision,"" about Dr. V and the Aravind Eye Hospital. I hope that you will take a look at it. Aravind, which started as a Seva project, is now the world's largest and best eye hospital. This year, that one hospital will give back sight to more than 300,000 people in Tamil Nadu, India. (Applause) Bird flu. I stand here as a representative of all terrible things — this might be the worst. The key to preventing or mitigating pandemic bird flu is early detection and rapid response. We will not have a vaccine or adequate supplies of an antiviral to combat bird flu if it occurs in the next three years. WHO stages the progress of a pandemic. We are now at stage three on the pandemic alert stage, with just a little bit of human-to-human transmission, but no human-to-human-to-human sustained transmission.The moment WHO says we've moved to category four — this will not be like Katrina. The world as we know it will stop. There'll be no airplanes flying. Would you get in an airplane with 250 people you didn't know, coughing and sneezing, when you knew that some of them might carry a disease that could kill you, for which you had no antivirals or vaccine? I did a study of the top epidemiologists in the world in October. I asked them — these are all fluologists and specialists in influenza — and I asked them the questions you'd like to ask them: What do you think the likelihood is that there'll be a pandemic? If it happens, how bad do you think it will be?Fifteen percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within three years. But much worse than that, 90 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within your children or your grandchildren's lifetime. And they thought that if there was a pandemic, a billion people would get sick. As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression as our just-in-time inventory system and the tight rubber band of globalization broke, and the cost to our economy of one to three trillion dollars would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their job and their healthcare benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable. And it's getting worse, because travel is getting so much better.Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like. So we know what we're talking about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly. You get two or three discrete locations. Then there'll be secondary outbreaks, and the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks it will be everywhere in the world. Now, if we had an ""undo"" button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started — if we could find it early, and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail — that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. And let me show you why that is.We have a joke. This is an epidemic curve, and everyone in medicine, I think, ultimately gets to know what it is. But the joke is, an epidemiologist likes to arrive at an epidemic right here and ride to glory on the downhill curve. (Laughter) But you don't get to do that usually. You usually arrive right about here. What we really want is to arrive right here, so we can stop the epidemic. But you can't always do that. But there's an organization that has been able to find a way to learn when the first cases occur, and that is called GPHIN; it's the Global Public Health Information Network. And that simulation that I showed you that you thought was bird flu — that was SARS. And SARS is the pandemic that did not occur. And it didn't occur because GPHIN found the pandemic-to-be of SARS three months before WHO actually announced it, and because of that, we were able to stop the SARS pandemic. And I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to GPHIN and to Ron St. John, who I hope is in the audience some place — over there — who's the founder of GPHIN.(Applause)Hello, Ron!(Applause)And TED has flown Ron here from Ottawa, where GPHIN is located, because not only did GPHIN find SARS early, but you may have seen last week that Iran announced that they had bird flu in Iran, but GPHIN found the bird flu in Iran not February 14 — but last September. We need an early-warning system to protect us against the things that are humanity's worst nightmare. And so my TED wish is based on the common denominator of these experiences. Smallpox — early detection, early response. Blindness, polio — early detection, early response. Pandemic bird flu — early detection, early response. It is a litany. It is so obvious that our only way of dealing with these new diseases is to find them early and to kill them before they spread.So, my TED wish is for you to help build a global system — an early-warning system — to protect us against humanity's worst nightmares. And what I thought I would call it is ""Early Detection,"" But it should really be called ... ""Total Early Detection."" [TED](Laughter) What?(Applause) What? (Applause)But in all seriousness, because this idea is birthed in TED, I would like it to be a legacy of TED, and I'd like to call it the ""International System for Total Early Disease Detection."" [INSTEDD] And INSTEDD then becomes our mantra. So instead of a hidden pandemic of bird flu, we find it and immediately contain it. Instead of a novel virus caused by bio-terror or bio-error, or shift or drift, we find it and we contain it. Instead of industrial accidents like oil spills or the catastrophe in Bhopal, we find them, and we respond to them. Instead of famine, hidden until it is too late, we detect it, and we respond. And instead of a system which is owned by a government, and hidden in the bowels of government, let's build an early detection system that's freely available to anyone in the world in their own language.Let's make it transparent, non-governmental, not owned by any single country or company, housed in a neutral country, with redundant backup in a different time zone and a different continent. And let's build it on GPHIN. Let's start with GPHIN. Let's increase the websites that they crawl from 20,000 to 20 million. Let's increase the languages they crawl from seven to 70, or more. Let's build in outbound confirmation messages, using text messages or SMS or instant messaging to find out from people who are within 100 meters of the rumor that you hear, if it is, in fact, valid. And let's add satellite confirmation. And we'll add Gapminder's amazing graphics to the front end.And we'll grow it as a moral force in the world, finding out those terrible things before anybody else knows about them, and sending our response to them, so that next year, instead of us meeting here, lamenting how many terrible things there are in the world, we will have pulled together, used the unique skills and the magic of this community, and be proud that we have done everything we can to stop pandemics, other catastrophes, and change the world, beginning right now.(Applause)Chris Anderson: An amazing presentation. First of all, just so everyone understands: you're saying that by creating web crawlers, looking on the Internet for patterns, they can detect something suspicious before WHO, before anyone else can see it? Give an example of how that could possibly be true.Larry Brilliant: You're not mad about the copyright violation?CA: No. I love it.(Laughter)LB: Well, as Ron St. John — I hope you'll go and meet him in the dinner afterwards and talk to him. When he started GPHIN — In 1997, there was an outbreak of bird flu — H5N1. It was in Hong Kong. And a remarkable doctor in Hong Kong responded immediately, by slaughtering 1.5 million chickens and birds, and they stopped that outbreak in its tracks. Immediate detection, immediate response. Then a number of years went by, and there were a lot of rumors about bird flu. Ron and his team in Ottawa began to crawl the web — only crawling 20,000 different websites, mostly periodicals — and they read about and heard about a concern, of a lot of children who had high fever and symptoms of bird flu.They reported this to WHO.WHO took a little while taking action, because WHO will only receive a report from a government, because it's the United Nations. But they were able to point to WHO and let them know that there was this surprising and unexplained cluster of illnesses that looked like bird flu. That turned out to be SARS. That's how the world found out about SARS. And because of that, we were able to stop SARS. Now, what's really important is that, before there was GPHIN, 100 percent of all the world's reports of bad things — whether you're talking about famine or you're talking about bird flu or you're talking about Ebola — 100 percent of all those reports came from nations.The moment these guys in Ottawa — on a budget of 800,000 dollars a year — got cracking, 75 percent of all the reports in the world came from GPHIN, 25 percent of all the reports in the world came from all the other 180 nations. Now, here's what's really interesting: after they'd been working for a couple years, what do you think happened to those nations? They felt pretty stupid. So they started sending in their reports early. And now, their reporting percentage is down to 50 percent, because other nations have started to report. So, can you find diseases early by crawling the web? Of course you can. Can you find it even earlier than GPHIN does now? Of course you can. You saw that they found SARS using their Chinese web crawler a full six weeks before they found it using their English web crawler. Well, they're only crawling in seven languages. These bad viruses really don't have any intention of showing up first in English or Spanish or French.(Laughter)So yes, I want to take GPHIN, I want to build on it. I want to add all the languages of the world that we possibly can. I want to make this open to everybody, so that the health officer in Nairobi or in Patna, Bihar will have as much access to it as the folks in Ottawa or in CDC. And I want to make it part of our culture that there is a community of people who are watching out for the worst nightmares of humanity, and that it's accessible to everyone.","https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_wants_to_stop_pandemics
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"I'm really excited to be here today. I'll show you some stuff that's just ready to come out of the lab, literally, and I'm really glad that you guys are going to be among the first to see it in person, because I really think this is going to really change the way we interact with machines from this point on.Now, this is a rear-projected drafting table. It's about 36 inches wide and it's equipped with a multi-touch sensor. Normal touch sensors that you see, like on a kiosk or interactive whiteboards, can only register one point of contact at a time. This thing allows you to have multiple points at the same time. They can use both my hands; I can use chording actions; I can just go right up and use all 10 fingers if I wanted to. You know, like that.Now, multi-touch sensing isn't completely new. People like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s. However, the approach I built here is actually high-resolution, low-cost, and probably most importantly, very scalable. So, the technology, you know, isn't the most exciting thing here right now, other than probably its newfound accessibility. What's really interesting here is what you can do with it and the kind of interfaces you can build on top of it. So let's see.So, for instance, we have a lava lamp application here. Now, you can see, I can use both of my hands to kind of squeeze and put the blobs together. I can inject heat into the system here, or I can pull it apart with two of my fingers. It's completely intuitive; there's no instruction manual. The interface just kind of disappears. This started out as a screensaver app that one of the Ph.D. students in our lab, Ilya Rosenberg, made. But I think its true identity comes out here.Now what's great about a multi-touch sensor is that, you know, I could be doing this with as many fingers here, but of course multi-touch also inherently means multi-user. Chris could be interacting with another part of Lava, while I play around with it here. You can imagine a new kind of sculpting tool, where I'm kind of warming something up, making it malleable, and then letting it cool down and solidifying in a certain state. Google should have something like this in their lobby.(Laughter)I'll show you a little more of a concrete example here, as this thing loads. This is a photographer's light-box application. Again, I can use both of my hands to interact and move photos around. But what's even cooler is that if I have two fingers, I can actually grab a photo and then stretch it out like that really easily. I can pan, zoom and rotate it effortlessly. I can do that grossly with both of my hands, or I can do it just with two fingers on each of my hands together. If I grab the canvas, I can do the same thing — stretch it out. I can do it simultaneously, holding this down, and gripping on another one, stretching this out.Again, the interface just disappears here. There's no manual. This is exactly what you expect, especially if you haven't interacted with a computer before. Now, when you have initiatives like the $100 laptop, I kind of cringe at the idea of introducing a whole new generation to computing with this standard mouse-and-windows-pointer interface. This is something that I think is really the way we should be interacting with machines from now on.(Applause)Now, of course, I can bring up a keyboard.(Laughter) And I can bring that around, put that up there. Obviously, this is a standard keyboard, but of course I can rescale it to make it work well for my hands. That's really important, because there's no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device. That leads to bad things, like RSI. We have so much technology nowadays that these interfaces should start conforming to us. There's so little applied now to actually improving the way we interact with interfaces from this point on. This keyboard is probably actually the really wrong direction to go. You can imagine, in the future, as we develop this kind of technology, a keyboard that kind of automatically drifts as your hand moves away, and really intelligently anticipates which key you're trying to stroke. So — again, isn't this great?(Laughter)Audience: Where's your lab?Jeff Han: I'm a research scientist at NYU in New York.Here's an example of another kind of app. I can make these little fuzz balls. It'll remember the strokes I'm making. Of course I can do it with all my hands. It's pressure-sensitive. What's neat about that is, I showed that two-finger gesture that zooms in really quickly. Because you don't have to switch to a hand tool or the magnifying glass tool, you can just continuously make things in real multiple scales, all at the same time. I can create big things out here, but I can go back and really quickly go back to where I started, and make even smaller things here.This is going to be really important as we start getting to things like data visualization. For instance, I think we all enjoyed Hans Rosling's talk, and he really emphasized the fact I've been thinking about for a long time: We have all this great data, but for some reason, it's just sitting there. We're not accessing it. And one of the reasons why I think that is will be helped by things like graphics and visualization and inference tools, but I also think a big part of it is going to be having better interfaces, to be able to drill down into this kind of data, while still thinking about the big picture here.Let me show you another app here. This is called WorldWind. It's done by NASA. We've all seen Google Earth; this is an open-source version of that. There are plug-ins to be able to load in different data sets that NASA's collected over the years. As you can see, I can use the same two-fingered gestures to go down and go in really seamlessly. There's no interface, again. It really allows anybody to kind of go in — and it just does what you'd expect, you know? Again, there's just no interface here. The interface just disappears. I can switch to different data views. That's what's neat about this app here. NASA's really cool. These hyper-spectral images are false-colored so you can — it's really good for determining vegetative use. Well, let's go back to this.The great thing about mapping applications — it's not really 2D, it's 3D. So, again, with a multi-point interface, you can do a gesture like this — so you can be able to tilt around like that —(Surprised laughter)It's not just simply relegated to a kind of 2D panning and motion. This gesture is just putting two fingers down — it's defining an axis of tilt — and I can tilt up and down that way. We just came up with that on the spot, it's probably not the right thing to do, but there's such interesting things you can do with this interface. It's just so much fun playing around with it, too.(Laughter)And so the last thing I want to show you is — I'm sure we can all think of a lot of entertainment apps that you can do with this thing. I'm more interested in the creative applications we can do with this. Now, here's a simple application here — I can draw out a curve. And when I close it, it becomes a character. But the neat thing about it is I can add control points. And then what I can do is manipulate them with both of my fingers at the same time. And you notice what it does. It's kind of a puppeteering thing, where I can use as many fingers as I have to draw and make —Now, there's a lot of actual math going on under here for this to control this mesh and do the right thing. This technique of being able to manipulate a mesh here, with multiple control points, is actually state of the art. It was released at SIGGRAPH last year. It's a great example of the kind of research I really love: all this compute power to make things do the right things, intuitive things, to do exactly what you expect.So, multi-touch interaction research is a very active field right now in HCI. I'm not the only one doing it, a lot of other people are getting into it. This kind of technology is going to let even more people get into it, I'm looking forward to interacting with all of you over the next few days and seeing how it can apply to your respective fields.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen
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"I've been at MIT for 44 years. I went to TED I. There's only one other person here, I think, who did that. All the other TEDs — and I went to them all, under Ricky's regime — I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it.And if you read the press, last week it actually said I quit the Media Lab. I didn't quit the Media Lab, I stepped down as chairman — which was a kind of ridiculous title, but someone else has taken it on — and one of the things you can do as a professor is you stay on as a professor. And I will now do for the rest of my life the One Laptop Per Child, which I've sort of been doing for a year and a half, anyway. So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why we're doing it, how we're doing it and then what we're doing. And at some point I'll even pass around what the $100 laptop might be like.I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues, and so I figured I'd start with the three that at least drove me to do this. And the first is pretty obvious. It's amazing when you meet a head of state, and you say, ""What is your most precious natural resource?"" They will not say ""children"" at first, and then when you say, ""children,"" they will pretty quickly agree with you. And so that isn't very hard.(Laughter)Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education and can never be without some element of education. So that's certainly part of it.And the third is a little bit less obvious. And that is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up and reach it. Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen through teaching, whether it's people standing up, like I'm doing now, or a book, or something. But it was really through teaching. And one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking, in the sense that a lot of it is driven by the learner himself or herself.So with those as the principles — some of you may know Seymour Papert. This is back in 1982, when we were working in Senegal. Because some people think that the $100 laptop just happened a year ago, or two years ago, or we were struck by lightning — this actually has gone back a long time, and in fact, back to the '60s. Here we're in the '80s. Steve Jobs had given us some laptops. We were in Senegal. It didn't scale but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries and learning pretty quickly that these kids, even though English wasn't their language, the Latin alphabet barely was their language, but they could just swim like fish. They could play these like pianos.A little bit more recently, I got involved personally. And these are two anecdotes — one was in Cambodia, in a village that has no electricity, no water, no television, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. And these kids, their first English word is ""Google"" and they only know Skype. They've never heard of telephony. They just use Skype. And they go home at night — they've got a broadband connection in a hut that doesn't have electricity. The parents love it, because when they open up the laptops, it's the brightest light source in the house. And talk about where metaphors and reality mix — this is the actual school.In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine to legislate one laptop per child in the year 2002. Now at the time, I think it's fair to say that 80 percent of the teachers were — let me say, apprehensive. Really, they were actually against it. And they really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, more schools, whatever.And now, three and a half years later, guess what? They're reporting five things: drop of truancy to almost zero, attending parent-teacher meetings — which nobody did and now almost everybody does — drop in discipline problems, increase in student participation. Teachers are now saying it's kind of fun to teach. Kids are engaged — they have laptops! — and then the fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night because the teachers are getting too much email from the kids asking them for help. So when you see that kind of thing — this is not something that you have to test. The days of pilot projects are over, when people say, ""We'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works."" Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. And this is what we're doing.(Laughter) (Applause)So, One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. It's a nonprofit association. It raised about 20 million dollars to do the engineering to just get this built, and then have it produced afterwards. Scale is truly important. And it's not important because you can buy components at a lower price, OK? It's because you can go to a manufacturer — and I will leave the name out — but we wanted a small display, doesn't have to have perfect color uniformity. It can even have a pixel or two missing. It doesn't have to be that bright. And this particular manufacturer said, ""We're not interested in that. We're interested in the living room. We're interested in perfect color uniformity. We're interested in big displays, bright displays. You're not part of our strategic plan."" And I said, ""That's kind of too bad, because we need 100 million units a year.""(Laughter)And they said, ""Oh, well, maybe we could become part of your strategic plan."" And that's why scale counts. And that's why we will not launch this without five to 10 million units in the first run. And the idea is to launch with enough scale that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that's why I said seven to 10 million there. And we're doing it without a sales-and-marketing team. I mean, you're looking at the sales-and-marketing team. We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree and launch it, and then the others can follow. We have partners. It's not hard to guess Google would be one. The others are all playing to pending. And this has been in the press a great deal. It's the so-called Green Machine that we introduced with Kofi Annan in November at the World Summit that was held in Tunisia.Now once people start looking at this, they say, ""Ah, this is a laptop project."" Well, no, it's not a laptop project. It's an education project. And the fun part — and I'm quite focused on it — I tell people I used to be a light bulb, but now I'm a laser — I'm just going to get that thing built, and it turns out it's not so hard. Because laptop economics are the following: I say 50 percent here — it's more like 60, 60 percent of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing, distribution and profit. Now we have none of those, OK? None of those figure into our cost, because first of all, we sell it at cost, and the governments distribute it. It gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. So that piece disappears. Then you have display and everything else. Now the display on your laptop costs, in rough numbers, 10 dollars a diagonal inch. That can drop to eight; it can drop to seven but it's not going to drop to two, or to one and a half, unless we do some pretty clever things. It's the rest — that little brown box — that is pretty fascinating, because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. It's a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity.(Laughter)And we have a situation today which is incredible. I've been using laptops since their inception. And my laptop runs slower, less reliably and less pleasantly than it ever has before. And this year is worse.(Applause)People clap, sometimes you even get standing ovations, and I say, ""What the hell's wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there?"" And somebody — to remain nameless — called our laptop a ""gadget"" recently. And I said, ""God, our laptop's going to go like a bat out of hell. When you open it up, it's going to go 'bing.'"" It'll be on. It'll be just like it was in 1985, when you bought an Apple Macintosh 512. It worked really well. And we've been going steadily downhill.Now, people ask all the time what it is. That's what it is. The two pieces that are probably notable: it'll be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network, and then just need one or two points of backhaul. You can serve a couple of thousand kids with two megabits. So you really can bring into a village, and then the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well.The dual mode display — the idea is to have a display that both works outdoors — isn't it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? Well, you can't see it. And one of the reasons you can't see it is because it's backlighting most of the time, most cell phones. Now, what we're doing is, we're doing one that will be both frontlit and backlit. And whether you manually switch it or you do it in the software is to be seen. But when it's backlit, it's color. And when it's frontlit, it's black and white at three times the resolution.Is it all worked out? No. That's why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. And in about 30 days, we'll know for sure whether this works. Probably the most important piece there is that the kids really can do the maintenance. And this is again something that people don't believe, but I really think it's quite true. That's the machine we showed in Tunis. This is more the direction that we're going to go. And it's something that we didn't think was possible. Now, I'm going to pass this around. This isn't a design, OK? So this is just a mechanical engineering sort of embodiment of it for you to play with. And it's clearly just a model. The working one is at MIT. I'm going to pass it to this handsome gentleman. At least you can decide whether it goes left or —Chris Anderson: Before you do it, for the people down in simulcast —Nicholas Negroponte: Sorry! I forgot. CA: Just show it off a bit.So wherever the camera is — OK, good point. Thank you, Chris.The idea was that it would be not only a laptop, but that it could transform into an electronic book. So it's sort of an electronic book. This is where when you go outside, it's in black and white. The games buttons are missing, but it'll also be a games machine, book machine. Set it up this way, and it's a television set. Etc., etc. — is that enough for simulcast? OK, sorry. I'll let Jim decide which way to send it afterwards. OK. Seven countries.(Laughter)I say ""maybe"" for Massachusetts, because they actually have to do a bid. By law you've got to bid, and so on and so forth. So I can't quite name them. In the other cases, they don't have to do bids. They can decide — it's the federal government in each case. It's kind of agonizing, because a lot of people say, ""Let's do it at the state level,"" because states are more nimble than the feds, just because of size. And yet we count. We're really dealing with the federal government. We're really dealing with ministries of education. And if you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls. Everybody thinks they know about education, a lot of culture is built into it as well. It's really hard. And so it's certainly the hard road. If you look at the countries, they're pretty geoculturally distributed.Have they all agreed? No, not completely. Probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active and most agreed. We're purposely not signing anything with anybody until we actually have the working ones. And since I visit each one of those countries within at least every three months, I'm just going around the world every three weeks. Here's sort of the schedule and I put at the bottom we might give some away free in two years at this meeting. Everybody says it's a $100 laptop — you can't do it. Well, guess what, we're not. We're coming in probably at 135, to start, then drift down. And that's very important, because so many things hit the market at a price and then drift up. It's kind of the loss leader, and then as soon as it looks interesting, it can't be afforded, or it can't be scaled out. So we're targeting 50 dollars in 2010.The gray market's a big issue. And one of the ways — just one — but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market is to make something that is so utterly unique — It's a little bit like the fact that automobiles — thousands of automobiles are stolen every day in the United States. Not one single post-office truck is stolen.(Laughter)And why? Because there's no market for post-office trucks. It looks like a post-office truck. You can spray paint it. You can do anything you want. I just learned recently: in South Africa, no white Volvos are stolen. Period. None. Zero. So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo.Each government has a task force. This perhaps is less interesting, but we're trying to get the governments to all work together and it's not easy. The economics of this is to start with the federal governments and then later, to subsequently go to other — whether it's child-to-child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe of the same gender, maybe of the same age. An uncle gives a niece or a nephew that as a birthday present. I mean, there are all sorts of things that will happen, and they'll be very, very exciting.And everybody says — I say — it's an education project. Are we providing the software? The answer is: The system certainly has software, but no, we're not providing the education content. That is really done in the countries. But we are certainly constructionists. And we certainly believe in learning by doing and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968, to more modern things, like Scratch, if you've ever even heard of it, are very, very much part of it. And that's the rollout.Are we dreaming? Is this real? It actually is real. The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort, a nonprofit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually.(Laughter)But the one thing that people could criticize was, ""Great idea, but these guys can't do it."" And that could either mean these guys, professors and so on couldn't do it, or that it's not possible. Well, on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one-third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared. So it's not a matter of whether it's going to happen. It is going to happen. And if it comes out at 138 dollars, so what? If it comes out six months late, so what? That's a pretty soft landing.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child
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"(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)(Applause ends)Hi, everyone. I'm Sirena. I'm 11 years old and from Connecticut. (Audience cheers)(Applause)Well, I'm not really sure why I'm here.(Laughter)I mean, what does this have to do with technology, entertainment and design? Well, I count my iPod, cellphone and computer as technology, but this has nothing to do with that.So I did a little research on it. Well, this is what I found. Of course, I hope I can memorize it.(Clears throat)The violin is made of a wood box and four metal strings. By pulling a string, it vibrates and produces a sound wave, which passes through a piece of wood called a bridge, and goes down to the wood box and gets amplified, but ... let me think.(Laughter)Placing your finger at different places on the fingerboard changes the string length, and that changes the frequency of the sound wave. (Sighs) Oh, my gosh!(Laughter)OK, this is sort of technology, but I can call it a 16th-century technology. But actually, the most fascinating thing that I found was that even the audio system or wave transmission nowadays are still based on the same principle of producing and projecting sound. Isn't that cool?(Laughter)(Applause)Design — I love its design. I remember when I was little, my mom asked me, ""Would you like to play the violin or the piano?"" I looked at that giant monster and said to myself — ""I am not going to lock myself on that bench the whole day!""(Laughter)This is small and lightweight. I can play from standing, sitting or walking. And, you know what? The best of all is that if I don't want to practice, (Whispering) I can hide it.(Laughter)The violin is very beautiful. Some people relate it as the shape of a lady. But whether you like it or not, it's been so for more than 400 years, unlike modern stuff [that] easily looks dated. But I think it's very personal and unique that, although each violin looks pretty similar, no two violins sound the same — even from the same maker or based on the same model.Entertainment — I love the entertainment. But actually, the instrument itself isn't very entertaining. I mean, when I first got my violin and tried to play around on it, it was actually really bad, because it didn't sound the way I'd heard from other kids — it was so horrible and so scratchy. So, it wasn't entertaining at all. But besides, my brother found this very funny: Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!(Laughter)A few years later, I heard a joke about the greatest violinist, Jascha Heifetz. After Mr. Heifetz's concert, a lady came over and complimented him: ""Oh, Mr. Heifetz, your violin sounded so great tonight!"" And Mr. Heifetz was a very cool person, so he picked up his violin and said, ""Funny — I don't hear anything.""(Laughter)Now I realize that as the musician, we human beings, with our great mind, artistic heart and skill, can change this 16th-century technology and a legendary design to a wonderful entertainment. Now I know why I'm here.(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)At first, I thought I was just going to be here to perform, but unexpectedly, I learned and enjoyed much more. But ... although some of the talks were quite up there for me.(Laughter)Like the multi-dimension stuff. I mean, honestly, I'd be happy enough if I could actually get my two dimensions correct in school.(Laughter)But actually, the most impressive thing to me is that — well, actually, I would also like to say this for all children is to say thank you to all adults, for actually caring for us a lot, and to make our future world much better. Thank you.(Applause)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)(Applause ends)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sirena_huang_dazzles_on_violin
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"(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)Thank you!(Applause continues)Thank you very much. Like the speaker before me — I am a TED virgin, I guess. I'm also the first time here, and ...(Laughter)I don't know what to say!(Applause)I'm really happy that Mr. Anderson invited me. I'm really grateful that I get a chance to play for everyone. And the song that I just played was by Josef Hofmann. It's called ""Kaleidoscope."" And Hofmann is a Polish pianist and composer of the late 19th century, and he's widely considered one of the greatest pianists of all time.I have another piece that I'd like to play for you. It's called ""Abegg Variations,"" by Robert Schumann, a German 19th-century composer. The name ""Abegg"" is actually A-B-E-G-G, and that's the main theme in the melody. (Plays the notes A, B, E, G and G) That comes from the last name of one of Schumann's female friends.(Laughter)But he wrote that for his wife.(Laughter)So actually, if you listen carefully, there are supposed to be five variations on this Abegg theme. It's written around 1834, so even though it's old, I hope you'll like it.(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)Now comes the part that I hate. Well, because Mr. Anderson told me that this session is called ""Sync and Flow,"" I was wondering, ""What do I know that these geniuses don't?""(Laughter)So, I'll talk about musical composition, even though I don't know where to start.How do I compose? I think Yamaha does a really good job of teaching us how to compose. What I do first is, I make a lot of little musical ideas you can just improvise here at the piano — and I choose one of those to become my main theme, my main melody, like the Abegg that you just heard. And once I choose my main theme, I have to decide: Out of all the styles in music, what kind of style do I want? And this year, I composed a Romantic style. So for inspiration, I listened to Liszt and Tchaikovsky and all the great Romantic composers.Next, I make the structure of the entire piece with my teachers. They help me plan out the whole piece. And then the hard part is filling it in with musical ideas, because then you have to think.(Laughter)And then, when the piece takes somewhat of a solified form — solidified, excuse me — solidified form, you're supposed to actually polish the piece, polish the details, and then polish the overall performance of the composition.And another thing that I enjoy doing is drawing. Drawing, because I like to draw, you know, Japanese anime art. I think that's a craze among teens right now. And once I realized it, there's a parallel between creating music and creating art, because for your motive, or your little initial idea for your drawing, it's your character — you want to decide who you want to draw, or if you want to draw an original character. And then you want to decide: How are you going to draw the character? Like, am I going to use one page? Am I going to draw it on the computer? Am I going to use a two-page spread like a comic book? For a more grandiose effect, I guess. And then you have to do the initial sketch of the character, which is like your structure of a piece, and then you add pen and pencil, and whatever details that you need — that's polishing the drawing.And another thing that both of these have in common is your state of mind, because I know I'm one of those teenagers that are really easily distracted. So if I'm trying to do homework and I don't feel like it, I'll try to draw or, you know, waste my time. And then what happens is, sometimes I absolutely can't draw or I can't compose at all, and then it's like there's too much on your mind. You can't focus on what you're supposed to do. And sometimes, if you manage to use your time wisely and work on it, you'll get something out of it, but it doesn't come naturally.What happens is, if something magical happens, if something natural happens to you, you're able to produce all this beautiful stuff instantly, and then that's what I consider ""flow,"" because that's when everything clicks and you're able to do anything. You feel like you're on top of your game and you can do anything you want.I'm not going to play my own composition today because, although I did finish it, it's way too long. Instead, I'd like to try something called ""improvisation."" I have here seven note cards, one with each note of the musical alphabet. And I'd like someone to come up here and choose five — anyone to come up here and choose five — and then I can make it into some sort of melody, and I'll improvise it. Wow. A volunteer, yay!(Laughter)(Applause)Jennifer Lin: Nice to meet you.Goldie Hawn: Thank you. Choose five?JL: Yes, five cards. Any five cards.GH: OK, one. JL: OK.GH: Two. JL: Yes.GH: Three.GH: Oh, D and F — too familiar.(Laughter)JL: One more. GH: OK. ""E"" for ""effort.""JL: Would you mind reading them out in the order that you chose them?GH: OK — C, G, B, A and E.JL: Thank you very much!GH: You're welcome. And what about these?JL: I won't use them. Thank you!(Applause)Now, she chose C, G, B, A, E. I'm going to try to put that in some sort of order.(Plays notes)OK, that's nice. So, I'm going to have a moment to think, and I'll try to make something out of it.(Plays the five notes)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)The next song, or the encore that I'm going to play is called ""Bumble Boogie,"" by Jack Fina.(Applause)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_lin_improvs_piano_magic
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"In terms of invention, I'd like to tell you the tale of one of my favorite projects. I think it's one of the most exciting that I'm working on, but I think it's also the simplest.It's a project that has the potential to make a huge impact around the world. It addresses one of the biggest health issues on the planet, the number one cause of death in children under five. Which is ...? Water-borne diseases? Diarrhea? Malnutrition? No. It's breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires — acute respiratory infections caused by this. Can you believe that?I find this shocking and somewhat appalling. Can't we make cleaner burning cooking fuels? Can't we make better stoves? How is it that this can lead to over two million deaths every year? I know Bill Joy was talking to you about the wonders of carbon nanotubes, so I'm going to talk to you about the wonders of carbon macro-tubes, which is charcoal.(Laughter)So this is a picture of rural Haiti. Haiti is now 98 percent deforested. You'll see scenes like this all over the island. It leads to all sorts of environmental problems and problems that affect people throughout the nation. A couple years ago there was severe flooding that led to thousands of deaths — that's directly attributable to the fact that there are no trees on the hills to stabilize the soil. So the rains come — they go down the rivers and the flooding happens.Now one of the reasons why there are so few trees is this: people need to cook, and they harvest wood and they make charcoal in order to do it. It's not that people are ignorant to the environmental damage. They know perfectly well, but they have no other choice. Fossil fuels are not available, and solar energy doesn't cook the way that they like their food prepared. And so this is what they do. You'll find families like this who go out into the forest to find a tree, cut it down and make charcoal out of it. So not surprisingly, there's a lot of effort that's been done to look at alternative cooking fuels.About four years ago, I took a team of students down to Haiti and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there. This is one such volunteer and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked. And the idea was that you could take waste paper; you could compress it and make briquettes that could be used for fuel. But this device was very slow. So our engineering students went to work on it and with some very simple changes, they were able to triple the throughput of this device. So you could imagine they were very excited about it. And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them. And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn. So it was a little discouraging to the students.(Laughter)And in fact, if you look closely, right here you can see it says, ""US Peace Corps."" As it turns out, there actually wasn't any waste paper in this village. And while it was a good use of government paperwork for this volunteer to bring it back with him to his village, it was 800 kilometers away. And so we thought perhaps there might be a better way to come up with an alternative cooking fuel.What we wanted to do is we wanted to make a fuel that used something that was readily available on the local level. You see these all over Haiti as well. They're small-scale sugar mills. And the waste product from them after you extract the juice from the sugarcane is called ""bagasse."" It has no other use. It has no nutritional value, so they don't feed it to the animals. It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill until eventually they burn it. What we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way to harness this waste resource and turn it into a fuel that would be something that people could easily cook with, something like charcoal. So over the next couple of years, students and I worked to develop a process.So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum. After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln, and then you end up with this carbonized material here. However, you can't burn this. It's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking. So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes. And conveniently, one of my students was from Ghana, and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called ""kokonte,"" which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root. And so what we did was we looked, and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of ""manioc."" In fact, it's grown all over the world — yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing — a very starchy root vegetable. And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it, which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes. So we did this. We went down to Haiti. These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Charbon, or Charcoal Institute. And these —(Laughter)That's right. So I'm actually an instructor at MIT as well as CIT. And these are the briquettes that we made.Now I'm going to take you to a different continent. This is India and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India. It's cow dung. And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires, and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel. Kids and women are especially affected by it, because they're the ones who are around the cooking fires.So we wanted to see if we could introduce this charcoal-making technology there. Well, unfortunately, they didn't have sugarcane and they didn't have cassava, but that didn't stop us. What we did was we found what were the locally available sources of biomass. And there was wheat straw and there was rice straw in this area. And what we could use as a binder was actually small amounts of cow manure, which they used ordinarily for their fuel. And we did side-by-side tests, and here you can see the charcoal briquettes and here the cow dung. And you can see that it's a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel. And in fact, it heats the water a lot more quickly. And so we were very happy, thus far. But one of the things that we found was when we did side-by-side comparisons with wood charcoal, it didn't burn as long. And the briquettes crumbled a little bit and we lost energy as they fell apart as they were cooking. So we wanted to try to find a way to make a stronger briquette so that we could compete with wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti.So we went back to MIT, we took out the Instron machine and we figured out what sort of forces you needed in order to compress a briquette to the level that you actually are getting improved performance out of it? And at the same time that we had students in the lab looking at this, we also had community partners in Haiti working to develop the process, to improve it and make it more accessible to people in the villages there. And after some time, we developed a low-cost press that allows you to produce charcoal, which actually now burns not only — actually, it burns longer, cleaner than wood charcoal.So now we're in a situation where we have a product, which is actually better than what you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace, which is a very wonderful place to be. In Haiti alone, about 30 million trees are cut down every year. There's a possibility of this being implemented and saving a good portion of those. In addition, the revenue generated from that charcoal is 260 million dollars. That's an awful lot for a country like Haiti — with a population of eight million and an average income of less than 400 dollars. So this is where we're also moving ahead with our charcoal project.And one of the things that I think is also interesting, is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley who's been doing risk analysis. And he's looked at the problem of the health impacts of burning wood versus charcoal. And he's found that worldwide, you could prevent a million deaths switching from wood to charcoal as a cooking fuel. That's remarkable, but up until now, there weren't ways to do it without cutting down trees. But now we have a way that's using an agricultural waste material to create a cooking fuel.One of the really exciting things, though, is something that came out of the trip that I took to Ghana just last month. And I think it's the coolest thing, and it's even lower tech than what you just saw, if you can imagine such a thing. Here it is. So what is this? This is corncobs turned into charcoal. And the beauty of this is that you don't need to form briquettes — it comes ready made. This is my $100 laptop, right here. And actually, like Nick, I brought samples.(Laughter)So we can pass these around. They're fully functional, field-tested, ready to roll out.(Laughter)And I think one of the things which is also remarkable about this technology, is that the technology transfer is so easy. Compared to the sugarcane charcoal, where we have to teach people how to form it into briquettes and you have the extra step of cooking the binder, this comes pre-briquetted. And this is about the most exciting thing in my life right now, which is perhaps a sad commentary on my life.(Laughter)But once you see it, like you guys in the front row — All right, yeah, OK. So anyway —(Laughter)Here it is. And this is, I think, a perfect example of what Robert Wright was talking about in those non-zero-sum things. So not only do you have health benefits, you have environmental benefits. But this is one of the incredibly rare situations where you also have economic benefits. People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products. They can generate income from this. They can save the money that they were going to spend on charcoal and they can produce excess and sell it in the market to people who aren't making their own. It's really rare that you don't have trade-offs between health and economics, or environment and economics. So this is a project that I just find extremely exciting and I'm really looking forward to see where it takes us.So when we talk about, now, the future we will create, one of the things that I think is necessary is to have a very clear vision of the world that we live in. And now, I don't actually mean the world that we live in. I mean the world where women spend two to three hours everyday grinding grain for their families to eat. I mean the world where advanced building materials means cement roofing tiles that are made by hand, and where, when you work 10 hours a day, you're still only earning 60 dollars in a month. I mean the world where women and children spend 40 billion hours a year fetching water. That's as if the entire workforce of the state of California worked full time for a year doing nothing but fetching water.It's a place where, for example, if this were India, in this room, only three of us would have a car. If this were Afghanistan, only one person in this room would know how the use the Internet. If this were Zambia — 300 of you would be farmers, 100 of you would have AIDS or HIV. And more than half of you would be living on less than a dollar a day. These are the issues that we need to come up with solutions for. These are the issues that we need to be training our engineers, our designers, our business people, our entrepreneurs to be facing. These are the solutions that we need to find.I have a few areas that I believe are especially important that we address. One of them is creating technologies to promote micro-finance and micro-enterprise, so that people who are living below the poverty line can find a way to move out — and that they're not doing it using the same traditional basket making, poultry rearing, etc. But there are new technologies and new products that they can make on a small scale.The next thing I believe is that we need to create technologies for poor farmers to add value to their own crops. And we need to rethink our development strategies, so that we're not promoting educational campaigns to get them to stop being farmers, but rather to stop being poor farmers. And we need to think about how we can do that effectively. We need to work with the people in these communities and give them the resources and the tools that they need to solve their own problems. That's the best way to do it. We shouldn't be doing it from outside. So we need to create this future, and we need to start doing it now.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you, incredible. Stay here. Tell us — just while we see if someone has a question — just tell us about one of the other things that you've worked on.Amy Smith: Some of the other things we're working on are ways to do low-cost water quality testing, so that communities can maintain their own water systems, know when they're working, know when they treat them, etc. We're also looking at low-cost water-treatment systems. One of the really exciting things is looking at solar water disinfection and improving the ability to be able to do that.CA: What's the bottleneck preventing this stuff getting from scale? Do you need to find entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists, or what do you need to take what you've got and get it to scale?AS: I think it's large numbers of people moving it forward. It's a difficult thing — it's a marketplace which is very fragmented and a consumer population with no income. So you can't use the same models that you use in the United States for making things move forward. And we're a pretty small staff, which is me.(Laughter)So, you know, I do what I can with the students. We have 30 students a year go out into the field and try to implement this and move it forward. The other thing is you have to do things with a long time frame, as, you know, you can't expect to get something done in a year or two years; you have to be looking five or 10 years ahead. But I think with the vision to do that, we can move forward.","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_smith_shares_simple_lifesaving_design
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"My name is Lovegrove. I only know nine Lovegroves, two of which are my parents. They are first cousins, and you know what happens when, you know —(Laughter)So there's a terribly weird freaky side to me, which I'm fighting with all the time. So to try and get through today, I've kind of disciplined myself with an 18-minute talk. I was hanging on to have a pee. I thought perhaps if I was hanging on long enough, that would guide me through the 18 minutes.(Laughter)OK. I am known as Captain Organic and that's a philosophical position as well as an aesthetic position. But today what I'd like to talk to you about is that love of form and how form can touch people's soul and emotion. Not very long ago, not many thousands of years ago, we actually lived in caves, and I don't think we've lost that coding system. We respond so well to form. But I'm interested in creating intelligent form. I'm not interested at all in blobism or any of that superficial rubbish that you see coming out as design. This artificially induced consumerism — I think it's atrocious.My world is the world of people like Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, James Watson. I'm in that world, but I work purely instinctively. I'm not a scientist. I could have been, perhaps, but I work in this world where I trust my instincts. So I am a 21st-century translator of technology into products that we use everyday and relate beautifully and naturally with. And we should be developing things — we should be developing packaging for ideas which elevate people's perceptions and respect for the things that we dig out of the earth and translate into products for everyday use. So, the water bottle.I'll begin with this concept of what I call DNA. DNA: Design, Nature, Art. These are the three things that condition my world. Here is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years ago, before photography. It shows how observation, curiosity and instinct work to create amazing art. Industrial design is the art form of the 21st century. People like Leonardo — there have not been many — had this amazingly instinctive curiosity. I work from a similar position. I don't want to sound pretentious saying that, but this is my drawing made on a digital pad a couple of years ago — well into the 21st century, 500 years later. It's my impression of water. Impressionism being the most valuable art form on the planet as we know it: 100 million dollars, easily, for a Monet.I use, now, a whole new process. A few years ago I reinvented my process to keep up with people like Greg Lynn, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas — all these people that I think are persevering and pioneering with fantastic new ideas of how to create form. This is all created digitally. Here you see the machining, the milling of a block of acrylic. This is what I show to the client to say, ""That's what I want to do."" At that point, I don't know if that's possible at all. It's a seductor, but I just feel in my bones that that's possible.So we go, we look at the tooling. We look at how that is produced. These are the invisible things that you never see in your life. This is the background noise of industrial design. That is like an Anish Kapoor flowing through a Richard Serra. It is more valuable than the product in my eyes. I don't have one. When I do make some money, I'll have one machined for myself. This is the final product. When they sent it to me, I thought I'd failed. It felt like nothing. It has to feel like nothing. It was when I put the water in that I realized that I'd put a skin on water itself. It's an icon of water itself, and it elevates people's perception of contemporary design. Each bottle is different, meaning the water level will give you a different shape. It's mass individualism from a single product. It fits the hand. It fits arthritic hands. It fits children's hands. It makes the product strong, the tessellation. It's a millefiori of ideas. In the future, they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life. Biopolymers, these new ideas for materials, will come into play in probably a decade. It doesn't look as cool, does it? But I can live up to that. I don't have a problem with that. I design for that condition, biopolymers. It's the future.I took this video in Cape Town last year. This is the freaky side coming out. I have this special interest in things like this, which blow my mind. I don't know whether to, you know, drop to my knees, cry; I don't know what I think. But I just know that nature — nature improves with ever-greater purpose that which once existed, and that strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking. When I look at these things, they look pretty normal to me. But these things evolved over many years, and what we're trying to do — I get three weeks to design a telephone. How the hell do I do that, when you get these things that take hundreds of millions of years to evolve? How do you condense that?It comes back to instinct. I'm not talking about designing telephones that look like that and I'm not looking at designing architecture like that. I'm just interested in natural growth patterns and the beautiful forms that only nature really creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I'm trying to understand.This is a scan through the human forearm. It's then blown up through rapid prototyping to reveal its cellular structure. I have these in my office. My office is a mixture of the Natural History Museum and a NASA space lab. It's a weird, kind of freaky place. This is one of my specimens.This is made — bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers. I studied cooking in school for four years, and in that experience, which was called ""domestic science,"" it was a bit of a cheap trick for me to try and get a science qualification.(Laughter)Actually, I put marijuana in everything I cooked —(Laughter)And I had access to all the best girls. It was fabulous. All the guys in the rugby team couldn't understand. Anyway — this is a meringue. This is another sample I have. A meringue is made exactly the same way, in my estimation, as a bone. It's made from polysaccharides and proteins. If you pour water on that, it dissolves. Could we be manufacturing from foodstuffs in the future? Not a bad idea. I don't know. I need to talk to Janine and a few other people about that, but I believe instinctively that that meringue can become something, a car — I don't know.I'm also interested in growth patterns: the unbridled way that nature grows things so you're not restricted by form at all. These interrelated forms, they do inspire everything I do, although I might end up making something incredibly simple. This is a detail of a chair that I've designed in magnesium. It shows this interlocution of elements and the beauty of, kind of, engineering and biological thinking, shown pretty much as a bone structure. Any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as some kind of art object.It's the world's first chair made in magnesium. It cost 1.7 million dollars to develop. It's called ""Go,"" by Bernhardt, USA. It went into Time magazine in 2001 as the new language of the 21st century. Boy. For somebody growing up in Wales in a little village, that's enough. It shows how you make one holistic form, like the car industry, and then you break up what you need. This is an absolutely beautiful way of working. It's a godly way of working. It's organic and it's essential. It's an absolutely fat-free design, and when you look at it, you see human beings.When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form. This is an idea for a gas-injected, one-piece polymer chair. What nature does is it drills holes in things. It liberates form. It takes away anything extraneous. That's what I do. I make organic things which are essential. And they look funky, too — but I don't set out to make funky things because I think that's an absolute disgrace.I set out to look at natural forms. If you took the idea of fractal technology further, take a membrane, shrinking it down constantly like nature does — that could be a seat for a chair. It could be a sole for a sports shoe. It could be a car blending into seats. Wow. Let's go for it. That's the kind of stuff. This is what exists in nature. Observation now allows us to bring that natural process into the design process every day. That's what I do.This is a show that's currently on in Tokyo. It's called ""Superliquidity."" It's my sculptural investigation. It's like 21st-century Henry Moore. When you see a Henry Moore, still, your hair stands up. There's some amazing spiritual connect. If he was a car designer, phew, we'd all be driving one. In his day, he was the highest taxpayer in Britain.That is the power of organic design. It contributes immensely to our — sense of being, our sense of relationships with things, our sensuality and, you know, the sort of — even the sort of socio-erotic side, which is very important. This is my artwork. This is all my process. These actually are sold as artwork. They're very big prints. But this is how I get to that object.Ironically, that object was made by the Killarney process, which is a brand-new process here for the 21st century, and I can hear Greg Lynn laughing his socks off as I say that. I'll tell you about that later.When I look into these data images, I see new things. It's self-inspired. Diatomic structures, radiolaria, the things that we couldn't see but we can do now — these, again, are cored out. They're made virtually from nothing. They're made from silica. Why not structures from cars like that? Coral, all these natural forces, take away what they don't need and they deliver maximum beauty. We need to be in that realm. I want to do stuff like that.This is a new chair which should come on the market in September. It's for a company called Moroso in Italy. It's a gas-injected polymer chair. Those holes you see there are very filtered-down, watered-down versions of the extremity of the diatomic structures. It goes with the flow of the polymer and you'll see — there's an image coming up right now that shows the full thing. It's great to have companies in Italy who support this way of dreaming. If you see the shadows that come through that, they're actually probably more important than the product, but it's the minimum it takes. The coring out of the back lets you breathe. It takes away any material you don't need and it actually garners flexure too.I was going to break into a dance then.This is some current work I'm doing. I'm looking at single-surface structures and how they stretch and flow. It's based on furniture typologies, but that's not the end motivation. It's made from aluminum ... as opposed to aluminium, and it's grown. It's grown in my mind, and then it's grown in terms of the whole process that I go through.This is two weeks ago in CCP in Coventry, who build parts for Bentleys and so on. It's being built as we speak and it will be on show in Phillips next year in New York. I have a big show with Phillips Auctioneers. When I see these animations, oh Jesus, I'm blown away. This is what goes on in my studio everyday. I walk — I'm traveling. I come back. Some guy's got that on a computer — there's this like, oh my goodness. So I try to create this energy of invention every day in my studio. This kind of effervescent — fully charged sense of soup that delivers ideas.Single-surface products. Furniture's a good one. How you grow legs out of a surface. I would love to build this one day and perhaps I'd like to build it also out of flour, sugar, polymer, wood chips — I don't know, human hair. I don't know. I'd love a go at that. I don't know. If I just got some time. That's the weird side coming out again. A lot of companies don't understand that.Three weeks ago I was with Sony in Tokyo. They said, ""Give us the dream. What is our dream? How do we beat Apple?"" I said, ""You don't copy Apple, that's for sure. You get into biopolymers."" They looked straight through me. What a waste. Anyway.(Laughter)No, it's true. Fuck them. You know, I mean —(Laughter)I'm delivering; they're not taking. I've had this image 20 years. I've had this image of a water droplet for 20 years, sitting on a hot bed. That is an image of a car for me. That's the car of the future. It's a water droplet. I've been banging on about this like I can't believe. Cars are all wrong.I'm going to show you something a bit weird now. They laughed everywhere over the world I showed this. The only place that didn't laugh was Moscow. Cars are made from 30,000 components. How ridiculous is that? Couldn't you make that from 300? It's got a vacuum-formed, carbon-nylon pan. Everything's holistically integrated. It opens and closes like a bread bin. There is no engine. There's a solar panel on the back and there are batteries in the wheels; they're fitted like Formula 1. You take them off your wall, you plug them in. Off you go. A three-wheeled car: slow, feminine, transparent, so you can see the people in there. You drive different. You see that thing. You do. You do. And not anesthetized, separated from life. There's a hole at the front and there's a reason for that. It's a city car. You drive along. You get out. You drive on to a proboscis. You get out. It lifts you up. It presents the solar panel to the sun, and at night, it's a street lamp.(Applause)That's what happens if you get inspired by the street lamp first, and do the car second. I can see these bubbles with these hydrogen packages, floating around on the ground, driven by AI. When I showed this in South Africa, everybody afterwards was going, ""Hey, car on a stick. Like this."" Can you imagine? A car on a stick.(Laughter)If you put it next to contemporary architecture, it feels totally natural to me. And that's what I do with my furniture. I'm not putting Charles Eames' furniture in buildings anymore. I'm trying to build furniture which fits architecture. I'm trying to build transportation systems. I work on aircraft for Airbus, I do all this sort of stuff trying to force these natural, inspired-by-nature dreams home.I'm going to finish on two things. This is the stereolithography of a staircase. It's a little bit of a dedication to James, James Watson. I built this thing for my studio. It cost me 250,000 dollars to build this. Most people go and buy the Aston Martin. I built this. This is the data that goes with that. Incredibly complex. Took about two years, because I'm looking for fat-free design. Lean, efficient things. Healthy products. This is built by composites. It's a single element which rotates around to create a holistic element, and this is a carbon-fiber handrail which is only supported in two places. Modern materials allow us to do modern things.This is a shot in the studio. This is how it looks pretty much every day. You wouldn't want to have a fear of heights coming down it. There is virtually no handrail. It doesn't pass any standards.(Laughter)Who cares?(Laughter)And it has an internal handrail which gives it its strength. It's this holistic integration. That's my studio. It's subterranean. It's in Notting Hill, next to all the crap — the prostitutes and all that stuff. It's next to David Hockney's original studio. It has a lighting system that changes throughout the day. My guys go out for lunch. The door's open. They come back in, because it's normally raining and they prefer to stay in.This is my studio. Elephant skull from Oxford University, 1988. I bought that last year. They're very difficult to find. If anybody's got a whale skeleton they want to sell me, I'll put it in the studio.So I'm just going to interject a little bit with some of the things that you'll see in the video. It's a homemade video, made it myself at three o'clock in the morning just to show you how my real world is. You never see that. You never see architects or designers showing you their real world.This is called a ""Plasnet."" It's a new bio-polycarbonate chair I'm doing in Italy.World's first bamboo bike with folding handlebars. We should all be riding one of these. As China buys all these crappy cars, we should be riding things like this. Counterbalance.Like I say, it's a cross between Natural History Museum and a NASA laboratory. It's full of prototypes and objects. It's self-inspirational, again. I mean, the rare times when I'm there, I do enjoy it. And I get lots and lots of kids coming. I'm a contaminator for all those children of investment bankers — wankers. Sorry.(Laughter)That's a solar seed. It's a concept for new architecture. That thing on the top is the world's first solar-powered garden lamp — the first produced. Giles Revell should be talking here today — amazing photography of things you can't see.The first sculptural model I made for that thing in Tokyo.Lots of stuff. There's a little leaf chair — that golden looking thing is called ""Leaf."" It's made from Kevlar.On the wall is my book called ""Supernatural,"" which allows me to remember what I've done, because I forget.There's an aerated brick I did in Limoges last year, in Concepts for New Ceramics in Architecture.Gernot Oberfell, working at three o'clock in the morning — and I don't pay overtime. Overtime is the passion of design, so join the club or don't.(Laughter)No, it's true. People like Tom and Greg — we're traveling like you can't — we fit it all in. I don't know how we do it.Next week I'm at Electrolux in Sweden, then I'm in Beijing on Friday. You work that one out. And when I see Ed's photographs, I think, why the hell am I going to China? It's true. It's true. Because there's a soul in this whole thing. We need to have a new instinct for the 21st century. We need to combine all this stuff. If all the people who were talking over this period worked on a car together, it would be a joy, absolute joy.So there's a new X-light system I'm doing in Japan.There's Tuareg shoes from North Africa. There's a Kifwebe mask.These are my sculptures.A copper jelly mold.(Laughter)It sounds like some quiz show or something, doesn't it? So, it's going to end. Thank you, James, for your great inspiration.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ross_lovegrove_shares_organic_designs
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"Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical — it should stop being safe. But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962, it was anything but radical: still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia. Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.And that's what we're doing. So Wikipedia — you just saw the little demonstration of it — it's a freely licensed encyclopedia. It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages. It's written using wiki software — which is the type of software he just demonstrated — so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff. So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization, he's exactly describing Wikipedia. And what I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside.So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization. And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And so, if you think about what that means, it means a lot more than just building a cool website. We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions. And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet. And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model, because that empowers local entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to — they can take our content and do anything they like with it — you can copy it, redistribute it — and you can do it commercially or non-commercially.So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world. We're funded by donations from the public, and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia. So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was. And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is. But first, I'll show you how big it is. So we've got over 600,000 articles in English. We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages. The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French — all the Western-European languages are quite big. But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia, which is surprising to a lot of people. A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet, but for us, we're truly global. We're in many, many languages. How popular we've gotten to be — we're a top-50 website and we're more popular than the New York Times. So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion.This shows the growth of Wikipedia — we're the blue line there — and this is the New York Times over there. And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge, enormous corporate operation with I have no idea how many hundreds of employees. We have exactly one employee, and that employee is our lead software developer. And he's only been our employee since January 2005, all the other growth before that ... So the servers are managed by a ragtag band of volunteers. All the editing is done by volunteers. And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine. People are always asking, ""Well, who's in charge of this?"" or ""Who does that?"" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in. It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something, anything about the servers. You could never afford to do this in a company. You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia.So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly, so it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers. And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars. And that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee. We hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia, so we actually hired him, so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes. So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is, why isn't it all rubbish? Why is the website as good as it is?First of all, how good is it? Well, it's pretty good. It isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect, given our completely chaotic model. So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me, you think, ""Oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish."" But when we've seen quality tests — and there haven't been enough of these yet and I'm really encouraging people to do more, comparing Wikipedia to traditional things — we win hands down.So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia, which is much, much smaller than English, to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus multimedial, and we won across the board. They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality, and we were very pleased with that result.So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy. The media has covered this somewhat extensively. It started out with an article in Red Herring. The reporters called me up and they — I mean, I have to say they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious, it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community. And so they quote me as saying, ""They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia."" What I actually said is they're not contentious at all. So it's a slight misquote.(Laughter)The articles were edited quite heavily. And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. Time magazine recently reported that ""Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004."" This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for — occasionally a little bit here and there. So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really controversies at all.Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities. The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004, and it wasn't because they were contentious; it was just because there was routine vandalism — which happens sometimes even on stage ...(Laughter)Sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalized Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly. And I said — you know, I always say, please don't do that. That's not a good thing. So how do we do this? How do we manage the quality control? How does it work?So there's a few elements, mostly social policies and some elements of the software. So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point of view policy. This is something that I set down, from the very beginning, as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. It's a social concept of cooperation, so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity. The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the ""truth"" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. But we have this jargon term of neutrality, which has its own long history within the community, which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. So this neutrality policy is really important for us because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done.So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right. If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community.So, real-time peer review. Every single change on the site goes to the ""Recent changes"" page. So as soon as he made his change, it went to the ""Recent changes"" page. That recent changes page was also fed into an IRC channel, which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools. And people can get RSS feeds — they can get email notifications of changes. And then users can set up their own personal watch list. So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists, because it is sometimes vandalized. And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change.There's a ""new pages feed,"" for example, so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it's created. This is really important because a lot of new pages are just garbage that has to be deleted, you know, ""ASDFASDF."" But also, that's some of the most interesting and fun things, some of the new articles. People will start an article on some interesting topic, other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better.So we do have edits by anonymous users, which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia. So, Chris was able to do his change — he didn't have to log in or anything; he just went on the website and made a change. But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. And that's a really important thing to understand: the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists. All these people know each other. They communicate. We have off-line meetings.These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site, and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing. The standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality. We don't always meet those standards, but that's what we're striving for.And so that tight community is who really cares for the site, and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met. It's my job to say that, but it's actually true. The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people.The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us — allow us, meaning the community — to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. This is an example of a page history on ""flat Earth,"" and you can see some changes that were made. What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see, ""OK, I understand now."" When somebody goes and looks at — they see that someone, an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page. That sounds suspicious. Who is this person? Somebody looks at it — they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place — to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this. So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page.Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended. Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software. All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages. And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. The example I've got up here is the Votes for Deletion page. So, I mentioned earlier, people type ""ASDFASDF"" — it needs to be deleted. Cases like that, the administrators just delete it. There's no reason to have a big argument about it. But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is, is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia? Is the information verifiable? Is it a hoax? Is it true? Is it what? So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this. And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page. And in the particular example we have here, it's a film, ""Twisted Issues,"" and the first person says, ""Now this is supposedly a film. It fails the Google test miserably."" The Google test is you look in Google and see if it's there, because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't exist at all. It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research. So somebody says, ""Delete it, please. Delete it — it's not notable."" And then somebody says, ""Wait, I found it. I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide: the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'"" So the next persons says, ""Clean it up."" Somebody says, ""I've found it on IMDB. Keep, keep, keep.""And what's interesting about this is that the software is — these votes are just text typed into a page. This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue. Now it is true that at the end of the day, an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say, ""OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it."" But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it, because if those last two keeps say, ""Wait a minute. Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book, and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow, so please don't delete it,"" then it would survive.And it also matters who the people are who are voting. Like I say, it's a tight-knit community. Down here at the bottom, ""Keep, real movie,"" RickK. RickK is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes and votes for deletion. His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he's doing. So how is all this governed? People really want to know about administrators, things like that. So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but workable mix of consensus — meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral — some amount of democracy — all of the administrators — these are the people who have the ability to delete pages. That doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages. They still have to follow all the rules — but they're elected by the community.Sometimes people — random trolls on the Internet — like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. There's a certain amount of aristocracy. You got a hint of that when I mentioned, like, RickK's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know.I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected to the board from the community — to the Board of the Foundation, with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it. And I always embarrass her because I say, ""Well, Angela, for example, could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia, because she's so admired and so powerful."" But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person who you know would never, ever break any rules of Wikipedia. And I also like to say she's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ... And then there's monarchy, and that's my role on the community, so ...(Laughter)I was describing this in Berlin once, and the next day in the newspaper the headline said, ""I am the Queen of England.""(Laughter)And that's not exactly what I said, but —(Laughter)the point is my role in the community — Within the free software world, there's been a long-standing tradition of the ""benevolent dictator"" model. So if you look at most of the major free software projects, they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator. Well, I don't like the term ""benevolent dictator,"" and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world. It just isn't appropriate. But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy, a certain amount of — sometimes we have to make a decision and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes.So as an example of how this can be important: we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia, and they said, ""Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website, and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like. And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send — we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted."" Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up. That's neo-Nazi math for you. They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18. But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article. Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18, so there was no real danger to our democratic processes. On the other hand, people said, ""But what are we going to do? I mean, this could happen. What if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote?"" Then I said, ""Well, fuck it, we'll just change the rules."" That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. And so, as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave — I can't tell anyone what to do.So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, it's important to understand that our wiki model is the way we work, but we are not fanatical web anarchists. In fact, we're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately, the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it.Thank you.(Applause)Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders. Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success. It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased. Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers and how do you see Wikipedia changing education?Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia. There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it. And that turns out to not be true. The last time I got an email from a journalist saying, ""Why do academics hate Wikipedia?"" I sent it from my Harvard email address because I was recently appointed a fellow there. And I said, ""Well, they don't all hate it.""(Laughter)But I think there's going to be huge impacts. And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the Wikibooks project, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. And that's a much bigger project. It's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition.But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. We don't mean we're going to Spam them with AOL-style CDs. We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use. And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it. The Wikibooks project is an effort to do that. And I think that we're going to see — it may not even come from us; there's all kinds of innovation going on. But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia
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"I'm Rich Baraniuk and what I'd like to talk a little bit about today are some ideas that I think have just tremendous resonance with all the things that have been talked about the last two days. So many different points of resonance that it's going to be difficult to bring them all up, but I'll try to do my best. Does anybody remember these?(Laughter)OK, so these are LP records and they've been replaced, right? They've been swept away over the last two decades by these types of world-flattening digitization technologies, right? And I think it was best witnessed when Thomas was playing the music as we came in the room today. What's happened in the music world is there's a culture, or an ecosystem that's been created that, if you take some words from Apple, the catchphrase — that we create, rip, mix and burn. What I mean by that is that anyone in the world is free and allowed to create new music and musical ideas. Anyone in the world is allowed to rip or copy musical ideas, use them in innovative ways. Anyone is allowed to mix them in different types of ways, draw connections between musical ideas, and people can burn them or create final products and continue the circle. And what that's done is it's created, like I said, a vibrant community that's very inclusive, with people continually working to connect musical ideas, innovate them and keep things constantly up to date. Today's hit single is not last year's hit single.But I'm not here to talk about music today. I'm here to talk about books. In particular, textbooks and the kind of educational materials that we use every day in school. Has anyone here ever been to school?(Laughter)OK, does anybody realize there's a crisis in our schools, around the world? I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but what I want to talk about is some of the disconnects that appear when an author publishes a book. That in fact, the publishing process — just because of the fact that it's complicated, it's heavy, books are expensive — creates a sort of a wall between authors of books and the ultimate users of books, be they teachers, students or just general readers. And this is even more true if you happen to speak a language other than one of the world's major languages, and especially English. I'm going to call these people below the barrier ""shutouts"" because they're really shut out of the process of being able to share their knowledge with the world. And so what I want to talk about today is trying to take these ideas that we've seen in the musical culture and try to bring these towards reinventing the way we think about writing books, using them and teaching from them. So, that's what I'd like to talk about and, really, how we get from where we are now to where we need to go.The first thing I'd like you to do is a little thought experiment. Imagine taking all the world's books. OK, everybody imagine books and imagine just tearing out the pages. So, liberating these pages and imagine digitizing them and then storing them in a vast, interconnected, global repository. Think of it as a massive iTunes for book-type content. And then take that material and imagine making it all open, so that people can modify it, play with it, improve it. Imagine making it free, so that anyone in the world can have access to all of this knowledge, and imagine using information technology so that you can update this content, improve it, play with it, on a timescale that's more on the order of seconds instead of years. Instead of editions of a book coming out every two years, imagine them coming out every 25 seconds.So, imagine we could do that and imagine we could put people into this. So that we could truly build an ecosystem with not just authors, but all the people who could be or want to be authors in all the different languages of the world, and I think if you could do this, it would be called — I'm just going to refer to it as a knowledge ecosystem. So, really, this is the dream, and in a sense what you can think of it is we're trying to enable anyone in the world, I mean anyone in the world —(Laughter)to be their own educational DJ, creating educational materials, sharing them with the world, constantly innovating on them. So, this is the dream.In fact, this dream is actually being realized. Over the last six-and-a-half years, we've been working really hard at Rice University on a project called Connexions, and so what I'd like to do for the rest of the talk is just tell you a little bit about what people are doing with Connexions, which you can kind of think of as the counterpoint to Nicholas Negroponte's talk yesterday, where they're working on the hardware of bringing education to the world. We're working on the open-source tools and the content. So, that's sort of to put it in perspective here.So, create. What are some of the people that are using these kind of tools? Well, the first thing is, there's a community of engineering professors, from Cambridge to Kyoto, who are developing engineering content in electrical engineering to develop what you can think of as a massive, super textbook that covers the entire area of electrical engineering. And not only that — it can be customized for use in each of their own individual institutions. If people like Kitty Jones, a shut-out — a private music teacher and mom from Champagne, Illinois, who wanted to share her fantastic music content with the world, on how to teach kids how to play music — Her material is now used over 600,000 times per month. Tremendous use. In fact, a lot of this use coming from United States K-12 schools, because anyone who's involved in a school scale back, the first thing that's cut is the music curriculum. And so this is just indicating the tremendous thirst for this kind of open, free content. A lot of teachers are using this stuff.What about ripping? What about copying, reusing? A team of volunteers at the University of Texas at El Paso — graduate students translating this engineering super textbook ideas. And within about a week, having this be some of our most popular material in widespread use all over Latin America, and in particular in Mexico, because of the open, extensible nature of this. People, volunteers and even companies that are translating materials into Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Thai, to spread the knowledge even further.OK, what about people who are mixing? What does ""mixing"" mean? ""Mixing"" means building customized courses, means building customized books. Companies like National Instruments, who are embedding very powerful, interactive simulations into the materials, so that we can go way beyond our regular kind of textbook to an experience that all the teaching materials are things you can actually interact with and play around with and actually learn as you do.We've been working with Teachers Without Borders, who are very interested in mixing our materials. They're going to be using Connexions as their platform to develop and deliver teaching materials for teaching teachers how to teach in 84 countries around the world. TWB is currently in Iraq, training 20,000 teachers supported by USAID. And to them, this idea of being able to remix and customize to the local context is extraordinarily important, because just providing free content to people has actually been likened by people in the developing world to a kind of cultural imperialism — that if you don't empower people with the ability to re-contextualize the material, translate it into their own language and take ownership of it, it's not good.OK, other organizations we've been working with, UC Merced — people know about UC Merced. It's a new university in California, in the Central Valley, working very closely with community colleges. They're actually developing a lot of their science and engineering curriculum to spread widely around the world in our system. And they're also trying to develop all of their software tools completely open-source. We've been working with AMD, which has a project called 50x15, which is trying to bring Internet connectivity to 50 percent of the world's population by 2015. We're going to be providing content to them in a whole range of different languages. And we've also been working with a number of other organizations. In particular, a bunch of the projects that are funded by Hewlett Foundation, who have taken a real leadership role in this area of open content.OK, burn — I think this is, sort of, quite interesting. ""Burn"" is the idea of trying to create the physical instantiation of one of these courses. And I think a lot of you received — I think all of you received one of these music books in your gift pack. A little present for you. Just to tell you quickly about it: this is an engineering textbook. It's about 300 pages long, hardbound. This costs — anybody guess? How much would it cost in a bookstore?(Audience) 65 dollars.Richard Baraniuk: OK. This costs 22 dollars to the student. Why does it cost 22 dollars? Because it's published on demand and it's developed from this repository of open materials. If this book were to be published by a regular publisher, it would cost at least 122 dollars.So what we're seeing is moving this burning or publication process from the regular, sort of single-authored book towards community-authored materials that are modular, that are customized to each individual class and published on demand very inexpensively, either pushed out through Amazon or published directly through an on-demand press, like QOOP. And I think that this is an extraordinarily interesting area because there is tremendous area under this long tail in publishing. We're not talking about the Harry Potter end, right at the left side. We're talking about books on hypergeometric partial differential equations. Books that might sell 100 copies a year, 1,000 copies a year. There is tremendous sustaining revenue under this long tail to sustain open projects like ours, but also to sustain this new emergence of on-demand publishers, like QOOP, who produced these two books. And I think one of the things that you should take away from this talk is that there's an impending cut-out-the-middle-man disintermediation, that's going to be happening in the publishing industry. And it's going to reach a crescendo over the next few years, and I think that it's for our benefit, really, and for the world's benefit.OK, so what are the enablers? What's really making all of this happen? There's tons of technology, and the only piece of technology that I really want to talk about is XML. How many people know about XML? Oh, great. So it's the future of the web, right? It's semantic representation of content. And what you can really think of XML in this case is it's the packaging that we're putting around these pages. Remember we took the book, tore the pages out? Well, what the XML is going to do is it's going to turn those pages into Lego blocks. XML are the nubs on the Lego that allow us to combine the content together in a myriad different ways, and it provides us a framework to share content. So, it lets you take this ecosystem in its primordial state of all this content, all the pages you've torn out of books, and create highly sophisticated learning machines: books, courses, course packs.It gives you the ability to personalize the learning experience to each individual student, so that every student can have a book or a course that's customized to their learning style, their context, their language and the things that excite them. It lets you reuse the same materials in multiple different ways, and surprising new ways. It lets you interconnect ideas, indicating how fields relate to each other. And I'll just give you my personal story. We came up with this six-and-a-half years ago because I teach the stuff in the red box.And my day job, as Chris said — I'm an electrical engineering professor. I teach signal processing and my challenge was to show that this math — Wow, about half of you have already fallen asleep just looking at the equation.(Laughter)But this seemingly dry math is actually the center of this tremendously powerful web that links technology — that links really cool applications like music synthesizers to tremendous economic opportunities, but also governed by intellectual property. And the thing that I realized is there was no way that I, as an engineer, could write this book that would get all of this across. We needed a community to do it and we needed new tools to be able to interconnect these ideas. And I think that really, in a sense, what we're trying to do is make Minsky's dream come to a reality, where you can imagine all the books in a library actually starting to talk to each other. And people who are teachers out here — whoever taught, you know this — it's the interconnections between ideas that teaching is really all about.OK, back to math. Imagine — this is possible: that every single equation that you click on in one of your new e-texts is something that you're going to be able to explore and experiment with. So imagine your kid's algebra textbook in seventh grade. You can click on every single equation and bring up a little tool to be able to experiment with it, tinker with it, understand it. Because we really don't understand until we do. The same type of mark-up, like MathML, for chemistry. Imagine chemistry textbooks that actually understand the structure of how molecules are formed. Imagine Music XML that actually lets you delve into the semantic structure of music, play with it, understand it. It's no wonder that everybody's getting into it, right? Even the three wise men.(Laughter)OK, the second big enabler, and this is where I told a big lie. The second big enabler is intellectual property. Because, in fact, I got up here and I talked about how great the music culture is. We can share and rip, mix and burn, but in fact, that's all illegal. And we would be accused of [piracy] for doing that, because this music has been propertized. It's now owned, much of it by big industries. So, really, the key thing here is we can't let this happen. We can't let this Napster thing happen here. So, what we have to do is get it right from the very beginning. And what we have to do is find an intellectual property framework that makes sharing safe and makes it easily understandable. And the inspiration here is taken from open-source software. Things like Linux and the GPL.The Creative Commons licenses. How many people have heard of creative commons? If you have not, you must learn about it. Creativecommons.org. At the bottom of every piece of material in Connexions and in lots of other projects, you can find their logo. Clicking on that logo takes you to an absolute no-nonsense, human-readable document, a deed, that tells you exactly what you can do with this content. In fact, you're free to share it, to do all of these things: to copy it, to change it, even to make commercial use of it, as long as you attribute the author. Because in academic publishing and much of educational publishing, it's really this idea of sharing knowledge and making impact. That's why people write, not necessarily making bucks. We're not talking about Harry Potter, right? We're at the long tail end here. Behind that is the legal code, very carefully constructed.And Creative Commons is taking off — over 43 million things out there, licensed with a Creative Commons license. Not just text, but music, images, video. And there's actually a tremendous uptake of the number of people that are actually licensing music to make it free for people who do this whole idea of re-sampling, ripping, mixing, burning and sharing.OK, I'd like to conclude with just the last few points. So, we've built this idea of a commons. People are using it. We get over 500,000 unique visitors per month, just to our particular site. MIT OpenCourseWare, which is another large open-content site, gets a similar number of hits. But how do we protect this? How do we protect it into the future? And the first thing that people are probably thinking is quality control, right? Because we're saying that anybody can contribute things to this commons. Anybody can contribute anything. So that could be a problem.It didn't take long until people started contributing materials, for example, on lingerie, which is actually a pretty good module. The only problem is it's plagiarized from a major French feminist journal, and when you go to the supposed course website, it points to a lingerie-selling website. So this is a little bit of a problem. So we clearly need some kind of idea of quality control and this is really where the idea of review and peer review comes in. You come to TED. Why do you come to TED? Because Chris and his team have ensured that things are very, very high quality, right? And so we need to be able to do the same thing. And we need to be able to design structures, and what we're doing is designing social software to enable anyone to build their own peer review process, and we call these things ""lenses."" And basically what they allow is anyone out there can develop their own peer-review process, so that they can focus on the content in the repository that they think is really important. And you can think of TED as a potential lens.So I'd just like to end by saying: you can really view this as a call to action. Connexions and open content is all about sharing knowledge. All of you here are tremendously imbued with tremendous amounts of knowledge, and what I'd like to do is invite each and every one of you to contribute to this project and other projects of its type, because I think together we can truly change the landscape of education and educational publishing.So, thanks very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning
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"You know, when Chris first approached me to speak at TED, I said no, because I felt like I wasn't going to be able to make that personal connection, you know, that I wanted to. It's such a large conference. But he explained to me that he was in a bind, and that he was having trouble finding the kind of sex appeal and star power that the conference was known for.So I said fine, Ted — I mean Chris. I'll come on two conditions. One: I want to speak as early in the morning as possible. And two: I want to pick the theme for TED 2006. And luckily he agreed. And the theme, in two years, is going to be ""Cute Pictures Of Puppies.""(Video) (Music)[How to Dance Properly BASIC TWIRL][NEW SCHOOL][OLD SCHOOL][WHO'S YOUR DADDY?][""RIDE THE PONY""][MAKE LOVE TO THE CROWD][SMACKING THAT ASS][STIR THE POT OF LOVE][HANGING OUT ... CASUAL][WORD.](Applause)I invented the Placebo Camera.(Laughter)It doesn't actually take pictures, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, and you still feel like you were there.(Laughter)(Clears his throat)(Laughter)""Dear Sir, good day, compliments of the day, and my best wishes to you and family.(Breathes in)I know this letter will come to you surprisingly, but let it not be a surprise to you, for nature has a way of arriving unannounced, and, as an adage says, originals are very hard to find, but their echoes sound ouder. So I decided to contact you myself, for you to assure me of safety and honesty, if I have to entrust any amount of money under your custody. I am Mr Micheal Bangura, the son of late Mr Thaimu Bangura who was the Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone but was killed during the civil war.(Laughter)Knowing your country to be economical conducive for investment, and your people as transparent and trustworthy to engage in business, on which premise I write you.(Laughter)Before my father death, he had the sum of 23 million United States dollars, which he kept away from the rebel leaders during the course of the war.(Laughter)This fund was supposed to be used for the rehabilitation of water reserves all over the country, before the outbreak of war. When the war broke out, the rebel leader demanded the fund be given to him, my father insisted it was not in his possession, and he was killed because of his refusal to release the fund. Meanwhile, my mother and I is the only person who knows about it because my father always confide in me.(Sighs)I made an arrangement with a Red Cross relief worker, who used his official van to transport the money to Lungi Airport, Freetown, although he did not know the real contents of the box.(Laughter)The fund was deposited as a family reasure, in a safe, reliable security company in Dakar, Senegal, where I was only given temporary asylum. I do not wish to invest the money in Senegal due to unfavorable economic climate, and so close to my country. The only assistance I need from you, which I know you would do for me, are the following: one, be a silent partner and receive the funds in your account in trust; two, provide a bank account under your control to which the funds will be remitted; three, receive the funds into your account in trust; take out your commission; and leave the rest of the money until I arrive, after the transfer is complete. Sincerely, Mr Micheal Bangura.""(Laughter)(Applause)This is really embarrassing. I was told backstage that I have 18 minutes. I only prepared 15.(Laughter)So if it's cool, I'd like to just wait for three.(Laughter)(Laughter ends)I'm really sorry.(Laughter)(Applause)What's your name?(Laughter)Mark Surfas. It's pretty cool, huh? Pursuing happiness.(Laughter)Are you a virgin? Virgin?I mean — no, I mean like in the TED sense?(Laughter)Are you? Oh, yeah? So what are you, like, a thousand, two thousand, somewhere in there? Huh? Oh? You don't know what I'm talking about?(Laughter)Ah, Mark —(Laughter)Surfas.(Laughter)1,860 — am I good?And that's nothing to be ashamed of. That's nothing to be ashamed of.(Applause)Yeah, I was hanging out with some Google guys last night. Really cool, we were getting wasted.(Laughter)And they were telling me that Google software has gotten so advanced that, based on your interaction with Google over your lifetime, they can actually predict what you are going to say —(Laughter)next.And I was like, ""Get the fuck out of here. That's crazy.""(Laughter)But they said, ""No, but don't show anyone.""But they slipped up. And they said that I could just type in ""What was I going to say next?"" and my name, and it would tell me. And I have to tell you, this is an unadulterated piece of software, this is a real Internet browser and this is the actual Google site, and we're going to test it out live today. What was I going to say next? And ""Ze Frank"" — that's me. Am I feeling lucky?(Laughter)(Shouting) Am I feeling lucky?Audience: Yes! Yeah!(Sighs)(Laughter)Ze Frank: Oh! Amazing.(Laughter)In March of 2001 —(Laughter)I filmed myself dancing to Madonna's ""Justify My Love."" On a Thursday, I sent out a link to a website that featured those clips to 17 of my closest friends, as part of an invitation to my — an invitation to my th — th — 26th birthday party.(Laughter)(Clears throat)By Monday, over a million people were coming to this site a day.(Sighs)(Laughter)Within a week, I received a call from Earthlink that said, due to a 10 cents per megabyte overage charge, I owed them 30,000 dollars.(Laughter)Needless to say, I was able to leave my job.[WAS LAID OFF](Laughter)And, finally, you know, become freelance.(Laughter)[UNEMPLOYED]But some people refer to me more as, like, an Internet guru or —[JACKASS]swami.(Laughter)I knew I had something. I'd basically distilled a very difficult-to-explain and complex philosophy, which I won't get into here, because it's a little too deep for all of you, but —(Laughter)It's about what makes websites popular, and, you know, it's —[DANCE LIKE AN IDIOT AND DON'T SELL ANYTHING]It's unfortunate that I don't have more time. Maybe I can come back next year, or something like that.(Laughter)I'm obsessed with email. I get a lot of it. Four years later, I still get probably two or three hundred emails a day from people I don't know, and it's been an amazing opportunity to kind of get to know different cultures, you know? It's like a microscope to the rest of the world. You can kind of peer into other people's lives. And I also feel like I get a lot of inspiration from the average user. For example, somebody wrote, ""Hey Ze, if you ever come to Boulder, you should rock out with us,"" and I said, ""Why wait?""[rocking out](Video) (Music)And they said, ""Hey Ze, thanks for rocking out, but I meant the kind of rocking out where we'd be naked.""(Laughter)And that was embarrassing. But you know, it's kind of a collaboration between me and the fans, so I said, ""Sure.""[rocking out naked](Video) (Music)(Laughter)I hear a lot of you whispering.(Laughter)And I know what you're saying, ""Holy crap! How is his presentation so smooth?""(Laughter)And I have to say that it's not all me this year. I guess Chris has to take some credit here, because in years past, I guess there's been some sort of subpar speakers at TED. I don't know.And so, this year, Chris sent us a TED conference simulator.(Laughter)Which really allowed us as speakers to get there, in the trenches, and practice at home so that we would be ready for this experience. And I've got to say that, you know, it's really, really great to be here.(Pre-recorded applause)I'd like to tell all of you a little joke.(Pre-recorded applause and cheering)Not just the good stuff, though. You can do heckler mode.Voice: Hey, moron, get off the stage!ZF: You get off the stage.(Laughter)Voice: We want Malcolm Gladwell.(Laughter)(Baby cooing)(Huge crowd applauding)In case you run over time.(Heroic music)Just one last thing I'd like to say, I'd, really —(Laughter)I'd like to thank all of you for being here.(Loud music)(Laughter)And frog mode.(Singing)(Sings) ""Ah, the first time that I made love to a rock shrimp —""(Laughter)[Spam jokes are the new airplane jokes](Sighs)It's true. Some people say to me, ""Ze, you're doing all this stuff, this Internet stuff, and you're not making any money.""(Laughter)""Why?"" And I say, ""Mom, Dad —(Laughter)I'm trying."" I don't know if you're all aware of this, but the video game market, kids are playing these video games, but, supposedly, there's tons of money. I mean, like, I think, 100,000 dollars or so a year is being spent on these things. So I decided to try my hand. I came up with a few games.(Laughter)This is called ""Atheist."" I figured it would be popular with the young kids. OK. Look, I'll move around and say some things.(Sighs)[Game over. There is no replay.](Laughter)So that didn't go over so well.(Laughter)I don't really understand why you're laughing.(Laughter)Should have done this before I tried to pitch it. ""Buddhist,"" of course, looks very, very similar to ""Atheist.""(Laughter)But you come back as a duck.(Laughter)And this is great because, you know, for a quarter, you can play this for a long time.(Laughter)And Chris had said in an email that we should really bring something new to TED, something that we haven't shown anyone. So, I made this for TED. It's ""Christian."" It's the third in the series. I'm hoping it's going to do well this year.(Sighs)(Laughter)Do you have a preference?(Laughter)Good choice.(Laughter)So you can wait for the Second Coming,which is a random number between one and 500 million.(Laughter)So really, what are we talking about here? Oh, tech joy.(Laughter)Tech joy, to me, means something, because I get a lot of joy out of tech. And in fact, making things using technology — and I'm being serious here, even though I'm using my sarcastic voice — I won't — hold on. Making things, you know — making things actually does give me a lot of joy. It's the process of creation that keeps me sort of a bubble and a half above perpetual anxiety in my life, and it's that feeling of being about 80 percent complete on a project — where you know you still have something to do, but it's not finished, and you're not starting something — that really fills my entire life.And so, what I've done is,I started getting interested in creating online social spaces to share that feeling with people who don't consider themselves artists. We're in a culture of guru-ship. It's so hard to use some software because, you know, it's unapproachable, people feel like they have to read the manual. So I try to create these very minimal activities that allow people to express themselves, and, hopefully —(""The End"" by The Doors)Whoa! I'm like — on the page, but it doesn't exist.(Laughter)It's, like — seriously, though —(Laughter)I try to create meaningful environments for people to express themselves.(Laughter)Here I created a contest called, ""When Office Supplies Attack,"" which, I think, really resonated with the working population.(Laughter)Over 500 entries in three weeks. Toilet paper fashion.(Laughter)Again, people from all over the country. The watch is particularly incredible.(Laughter)Online drawing tools — you've probably seen a lot of them. I think they're wonderful. It's a chance for people to get to play with crayons and all that kind of stuff. But I'm interested in the process of creating, as the real event that I'm interested in. And the problem is that a lot of people suck at drawing, and they get bummed out at this, sort of, you know, stick figure, awful little thing that they created. And eventually, it just makes them stop playing with it, or they draw penises and things like that.(Laughter)So, the Scribbler is an attempt to create a generative tool. In other words, it's a helping tool. You can draw your simple stick figure, and it collaborates with you to create sort of a post-war German etching.(Laughter)In fact, it's tuned to be better at drawing things that look worse. So, we go ahead, and we start scribbling. So the idea is that you can really, you know, partake in this process, but watch something really crappy look beautiful. And here are some of my favorites. This is the little trap marionette that was submitted to me. Very cool.(Laughter)Darling. Beautiful stuff. I mean this is incredible. An 11-year-old girl drew this and submitted it. It's just gorgeous.(Laughter)I'm dead serious here. This is not a joke.(Laughter)But, I think it's a really fun and wonderful thing. So this is called the ""Fiction Project."" This is an online space, which is basically a refurbished message board that encourages collaborative fiction writing. These are haikus. None of the haikus were written by the same person. In fact, each line is contributed by a different person at a different time. I think that the ""now tied up, tied down, mistress cruel approaches me, now tied down, it's up."" It's an amazing way, and I'll tell you, if you come home, and your spouse, or whoever it is, says, ""Let's talk"" — That, like, chills you to the very core.(Laughter)But it's peripheral activities like these that allow people to get together, doing fun things. They actually get to know each other, and it's sort of like low-threshold peripheral activities that I think are the key to bringing up some of our bonding social capital that we're lacking. And very, very quickly — I love puppets. Here's a puppet. It dances to music. Lotte Reiniger, an amazing shadow puppeteer in the 20s, that started doing more elaborate things. I became interested in puppets, and I just want to show one last thing to you. Oh, this is how you make puppets.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ze Frank.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_s_nerdcore_comedy
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"Over the past couple of days, as I've been preparing for my speech, I've become more and more nervous about what I'm going to say and about being on the same stage as all these fascinating people. Being on the same stage as Al Gore, who was the first person I ever voted for. And —(Laughter)So I was getting pretty nervous and, you know, I didn't know that Chris sits on the stage, and that's more nerve-racking. But then I started thinking about my family. I started thinking about my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, and I realized that I had all of these Teds going through my bloodstream —(Laughter)that I had to consider this ""my element.""So, who am I? Chris kind of mentioned I started a company with my husband. We have about 125 people internationally. If you looked in the book, you saw this ...(Laughter)which I really was appalled by.(Laughter)And because I wanted to impress you all with slides, since I saw the great presentations yesterday with graphs, I made a graph that moves, and I talk about the makeup of me.(Laughter)So, besides this freakish thing, this is my science slide. This is math, and this is science, this is genetics. This is my grandmother, and this is where I get this mouth.(Laughter)So — I'm a blogger, which, probably, to a lot of you, means different things. You may have heard about the Kryptonite lock brouhaha, where a blogger talked about how you hack or break into a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen, and it spread all over. Kryptonite had to adjust the lock, and they had to address it to avoid too many customer concerns. You may have heard about Rathergate, which was basically the result of bloggers realizing that the ""th"" in 111 is not typeset on an old typewriter; it's on Word. Bloggers exposed this, or they worked hard to expose this. You know, blogs are scary. This is what you see. I see this, and I'm sure scared — I swear on stage — shitless about blogs, because this is not something that's friendly. But there are blogs that are changing the way we read news and consume media, and these are great examples. These people are reaching thousands, if not millions, of readers, and that's incredibly important. During the hurricane, you had MSNBC posting about the hurricane on their blog, updating it frequently. This was possible because of the easy nature of blogging tools.You have my friend, who has a blog on PVRs, personal recorders. He makes enough money just by running ads, to support his family up in Oregon. That's all he does now, and this is something that blogs have made possible. And then you have something like this, which is Interplast. It's a wonderful organization of people and doctors who go to developing nations to offer plastic surgery to those who need it. Children with cleft palates get it, and they document their story. This is wonderful. I am not that caring.(Laughter)I talk about myself. That's what I am. I'm a blogger. I have always decided that I was going to be an expert on one thing, and I am an expert on this person, and so I write about it. So, the short story about my blog: it started in 2001, I was 23. I wasn't happy with my job, because I was a designer, but I wasn't being really stimulated. I was an English major in college. I didn't have any use for it, but I missed writing. So, I started to write a blog and I started to create things like these little stories. This was an illustration about my camp experience when I was 11 years old, and how I went to a YMCA camp, Christian camp, and basically by the end, I had made my friends hate me so much that I hid in a bunk, They couldn't find me, they sent a search party, and I overheard people saying they wish I had killed myself — jumped off Bible Peak.You can laugh, this is OK.(Laughter)This is me. This is what happened to me. And when I started my blog, it was really this one goal — I said, ""I am not going to be famous to the world, but I could be famous to people on the Internet."" And I set a goal. I said, ""I'm going to win an award,"" because I had never won an award in my entire life. And I said, ""I'm going to win the South by Southwest Weblog award."" And I won it — I reached all of these people, and I had tens of thousands of people reading about my life every day.And then I wrote a post about a banjo. I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo — a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money. And I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, ""I could do that."" And I said to my husband, ""Ben, can I buy a banjo?"" And he's like, ""No.""And my husband —(Laughter)this is my husband, who is very hot — he won an award for being hot.(Laughter)He told me, ""You cannot buy a banjo. You're just like your dad,"" who collects instruments. And I wrote a post about how I was so mad at him, he was such a tyrant — he would not let me buy this banjo. And those people who know me understood my joke — this is Mena, this is how I make a joke at people. Because the joke in this is that this person is not a tyrant, this person is so loving and so sweet that he lets me dress him up and post pictures of him to my blog.(Laughter)And if he knew I was showing this right now — I put this in today — he would kill me.But the thing was, my friends read it, and they're like, ""Oh, that Mena, she wrote a post about wanting a stupid thing and being stupid."" But I got emails from people that said, ""Oh my God, your husband is such an asshole. How much money does he spend on beer in a year? You could take that money and buy your banjo. Why don't you open a separate account?"" I've been with him since I was 17, we've never had a separate bank account. They said, ""Separate your bank account. Spend your money; spend his money, that's it."" And then I got people saying, ""Leave him.""(Laughter)I was like, ""OK, what? Who are these people? And why are they reading this?"" And I realized: I don't want to reach these people. I don't want to write for this public audience. And I started to kill my blog slowly. I'm like, I don't want to write this anymore. Slowly and slowly —And I did tell personal stories from time to time. I wrote this one, and I put this up because of Einstein today. I'm going to get choked up, because this is my first pet, and she passed away two years ago. And I decided to break from, ""I don't really write about my public life,"" because I wanted to give her a little memorial. But anyways, it's these sorts of personal stories — You know, you read the blogs about politics or about media, and gossip and all these things. These are out there, but it's more of the personal that interests me, and this is who I am.You see Norman Rockwell, and you have art critics say, ""Norman Rockwell is not art. Norman Rockwell hangs in living rooms and bathrooms, and this is not something to be considered high art."" And I think this is one of the most important things to us as humans. These things resonate with us, and, if you think about blogs, you think of high art blogs, the history paintings about, you know, all the biblical stories, and then you have this. These are the blogs that interest me: the people that just tell stories.One story is about this baby, and his name is Odin. His father was a blogger. And he was writing his blog one day, and his wife gave birth to her baby at 25 weeks. And he never expected this. One day, it was normal; the next day, it was hell. And this is a one-pound baby. So Odin was documented every single day.Pictures were taken every day: day one, day two ... You have day nine — they're talking about his apnea; day 39 — he gets pneumonia. His baby is so small, and I've never encountered such a — just — a disturbing image, but just so heartfelt. And you're reading this as it happens, so on day 55, everybody reads that he's having failures: breathing failures and heart failures, and it's slowing down, and you don't know what to expect.But then it gets better. Day 96, he goes home. And you see this post. That's not something you're going to see in a paper or magazine but this is something this person feels, and people are excited about it — 28 comments. That's not a huge amount of people reading, but 28 people matter. And today, he is a healthy baby, who, if you read his blog — it's snowdeal.org, his father's blog — he is taking pictures of him still, because he is still his son and he is, I think, at his age level right now because he had received such great treatment from the hospital.So, blogs. So what? You've probably heard these things before. We talked about the WELL, and about all these sorts of things throughout our online history. But I think blogs are basically just an evolution, and that's where we are today. It's this record of who you are, your persona. You have your Google search, where you say, ""What is Mena Trott?"" And then you find these things and you're happy or unhappy. But then you also find people's blogs, and those are the records of people that are writing daily — not necessarily about the same topic, but things that interest them. And we talk about the world flattens, being in this panel, and I am very optimistic — whenever I think about blogs, I'm like, ""We've got to reach all these people."" Hundreds of millions and billions of people. We're getting into China, we want to be there, but there are so many people that won't have the access to write a blog. But to see something like the $100 computer is amazing, because blogging software is simple. We have a successful company because of timing, and because of perseverance, but it's simple stuff — it's not rocket science. And so, that's an amazing thing to consider. So — the life record of a blog is something that I find incredibly important.And we started with a slide of my Teds, and I had to add this slide, because I knew the minute I showed this, my mom — my mom will see this, because she does read my blog and she'll say, ""Why wasn't there a picture of me?"" This is my mom. So, I have all the people that I know of. But this is basically the extent of the family that I know in terms of my direct line. I showed a Norman Rockwell painting before, and this one, I grew up with, looking at constantly. I would spend hours looking at the connections, saying, ""Oh, the little kid up at the top has red hair; so does that first generation up there."" And it's just these little things. This is not science, but this was enough for me to be really interested in how we have evolved and how we can trace our line. So that has always influenced me.I have this record, this 1910 census, of another Grabowski — that's my maiden name — and there's a Theodore, because there's always a Theodore. This is all I have, a couple of facts about somebody. I have their date of birth, their age, what they did in their household, if they spoke English, and that's it, that's all I know of these people. And it's pretty sad, because I only go back five generations, and that's it. I don't even know what happens on my mom's side, because she's from Cuba and I don't have that many things. Just doing this, I spent time in the archives — that's why my husband's a saint — I spent time in the Washington archives, just sitting there, looking for these things. Now it's online, but he sat through that.And so you have this record and — This is my great-great-grandmother. This is the only picture I have. And to think of what we have the ability to do with our blogs; to think about the people that are on those $100 computers, talking about who they are, sharing these personal stories — this is an amazing thing.Another photo that has greatly influenced me, or a series of photos, is this project that's done by an Argentinean man and his wife. And he's basically taking a picture of his family every day for the past, what is '76? — 20 ... Oh my God, I'm '77 — 29 years? Twenty-nine years.There was a joke, originally, about my graph that I left out, which is: You see all this math? I'm just happy I was able to add it up to 100, because that's my skill set.(Laughter)So you have these people aging, and now this is them today, or last year. And that's a powerful thing to have, to be able to track this. I wish that I would have this of my family. I know that one day my children will be wondering — or my grandchildren, or my great-grandchildren, if I ever have children — what I am going to — who I was. So I do something that's very narcissistic —I am a blogger — that is an amazing thing for me, because it captures a moment in time every day. I take a picture of myself — I've been doing this since last year — every single day. And, you know, it's the same picture; it's basically the same person.Only a couple of people read it. I don't write this for this audience; I'm showing it now, but I would go insane if this was really public. About four people probably read it, and they tell me, ""You haven't updated."" I'm probably going to get people telling me I haven't updated. But this is amazing, because I can go back to a day — to April 2005, and say, what was I doing this day? I look at it, I know exactly. It's this visual cue that is so important to what we do. I put the bad pictures up too, because there are bad pictures.(Laughter)And I remember instantly: I am in Germany in this — I had to go for a one-day trip. I was sick, and I was in a hotel room, and I wanted not to be there. And so you see these things, it's not just always smiling. Now I've kind of evolved it, so I have this look. If you look at my driver's license, I have the same look, and it's a pretty disturbing thing, but it's something that is really important.And the last story I really want to tell is this story, because this is probably the one that means the most to me in all of what I'm doing. I'll probably get choked up, because I tend to when I talk about this. So, this woman, her name was Emma, and she was a blogger on our service, TypePad. And she was a beta tester, so she was there right when we opened — you know, there was 100 people. And she wrote about her life dealing with cancer. She was writing and writing, and we all started reading it, because we had so few blogs on the service, we could keep track of everyone.And she was writing one day, and then she disappeared for a little bit. And her sister came on, and she said that Emma had passed away. And all of our support staff who had talked to her were really emotional, and it was a very hard day at the company.And this was one of those instances where I realized how much blogging affects our relationship, and flattening this sort of world. That this woman is in England, and she lives — she lived — a life where she was talking about what she was doing. But the big thing that really influenced us was, her sister wrote to me, and she said — and she wrote on this blog — that writing her blog during the last couple of months of her life was probably the best thing that had happened to her, and being able to talk to people and to share what was going on, and being able to write and receive comments. And that was amazing, to be able to know that we had empowered that, and that blogging was something that she felt comfortable doing, and the idea that blogging doesn't have to be scary, that we don't always have to be attack of the blogs, that we can be people who are open, and wanting to help and talk to people. That was an amazing thing.And so I printed out and sent a PDF of her blog to her family, and they passed it out at her memorial service, and even in her obituary, they mentioned her blog, because it was such a big part of her life. And that's a huge thing.So, this is her legacy, and I think that my call to action to all of you is: think about blogs, think about what they are, think about what you've thought of them, and then actually do it, because it's something that's really going to change our lives.So, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mena_trott_tours_her_blog_world
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"I'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years. But I want to start with my work on romantic love, because that's my most recent work. What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. And so I want to tell you about that first, and then go on into where I think love is going.(Laughter)""What 'tis to love?"" Shakespeare said. I think our ancestors — I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of the psychological research and as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is, a person begins to take on what I call, ""special meaning."" As a truck driver once said to me, ""The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne.""George Bernard Shaw said it differently. ""Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another."" And indeed, that's what we do.(Laughter)And then you just focus on this person. You can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, ""Love is blind.""In trying to understand romantic love, I decided I would read poetry from all over the world, and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot — their car is different from every other car in the parking lot. Their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party. And in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat.And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Zhen. ""I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out."" He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me.But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, ""I felt like jumping in the sky."" You're up all night. You're walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, ""Anything she liked, I liked."" Simple. Romantic love is very simple.You become extremely sexually possessive. You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think there's a Darwinian purpose to this. The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team.But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. It would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in the brain begins to crank, and you want this person.And last but not least, it is an obsession. Before I put these people in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions. But my most important question was always the same. It was: ""What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?"" And indeed, they would say, ""All day. All night. I can never stop thinking about him or her.""And then, the very last question — I would always have to work myself up to this question, because I'm not a psychologist. I don't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation. My final question was always the same. I would say, ""Would you die for him or her?"" And, indeed, these people would say ""Yes!"" as if I had asked them to pass the salt. I was just staggered by it.So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph, with a distraction task in between. So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. And indeed, that's exactly what happens.I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of part of the mind when you're reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It's a drive.And in fact, I think it's more powerful than the sex drive. You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you, and they say, ""No, thank you,"" you certainly don't kill yourself or slip into a clinical depression. But certainly, around the world, people who are rejected in love will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system. I have come to think it's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.And I've also come to think that it's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive: the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden called it an ""intolerable neural itch,"" and indeed, that's what it is. It keeps bothering you a little bit, like being hungry. The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love. And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner.And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. You can feel it when you're just driving along in your car. It can be focused on nobody. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise a child together as a team. So with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends. One of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner.The first is women working, moving into the workforce. I've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Everywhere in the world, 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market — sometimes very, very slowly, but they are moving into the job market — and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education. It's very slow.For every trend on this planet, there's a counter-trend. We all know of them, but nevertheless — the Arabs say, ""The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on."" And, indeed, that caravan is moving on. Women are moving back into the job market. And I say back into the job market, because this is not new. For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. In short, we're really moving forward to the past.Then, women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they're moving back into the job market. In short, they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal. And it's going to have an impact.I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community. I'll say just a couple of things, and then go on to sex and love. There's a lot of gender differences; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child. I don't know why they want to think that men and women are alike. There's much we have in common, but there's a whole lot that we do not have in common.We are — in the words of Ted Hughes, ""I think that we are like two feet. We need each other to get ahead."" But we did not evolve to have the same brain. And we're finding more and more gender differences in the brain. I'll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love. One of them is women's verbal ability. Women can talk.Women's ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak. But even at menstruation, they're better than the average man. Women can talk. They've been doing it for a million years; words were women's tools. They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. And, indeed, they're becoming a very powerful force.Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism. And I think that the television is like the global campfire. We sit around it and it shapes our minds. Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producer who calls me, who negotiates what we're going to say, is a woman. In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, ""To have a great writer is to have another government.""Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women. It's one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market. They've got incredible people skills, negotiating skills. They're highly imaginative. We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning. They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers.Men tend to — and these are averages — tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern. They're both perfectly good ways of thinking. We need both of them to get ahead. In fact, there's many more male geniuses in the world. And there's also many more male idiots in the world.(Laughter)When the male brain works well, it works extremely well. And what I really think that we're doing is, we're moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed.But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life. Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality. I'm always astonished when people come to me and say, ""Why is it that men are so adulterous?"" ""Why do you think more men are adulterous than women?"" ""Well, men are more adulterous!"" And I say, ""Who do you think these men are sleeping with?""(Laughter)And — basic math!Anyway. In the Western world, women start sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones. We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression. And, indeed, once again we're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today.We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality. They're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the ""symmetrical marriage,"" or the ""pure marriage,"" or the ""companionate marriage."" This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit.We're also seeing a rise of romantic love. 91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner, if they were not in love with that person. People around the world, in a study of 37 societies, want to be in love with the person that they marry. Indeed, arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life.I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend. The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population. They're now saying that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85. Because in that highest age category of 76 to 85, as much as 40 percent of people have nothing really wrong with them. So we're seeing there's a real extension of middle age.For one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies. And as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce. So the divorce rate right now is stable in America, and it's actually beginning to decline. It may decline some more. I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women — women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable. And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages, that time is now.However, there's always kinds of complications in this. These three brain systems — lust, romantic love and attachment — don't always go together. They can go together, by the way. That's why casual sex isn't so casual. With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine. Dopamine's associated with romantic love, and you can just fall in love with somebody who you're just having casual sex with. With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin — those are associated with attachment. This is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you've made love to them.But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we're capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else. It's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do. So I don't think, honestly, we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find, we make. And I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other.So I want to conclude with two things. I want to conclude with a worry, and with a wonderful story. The worry is about antidepressants. Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States. And these drugs are going generic. They are seeping around the world. I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants — since she was 13. She's 23. She's been on them ever since she was 13.I've got nothing against people who take them short term, when they're going through something horrible. They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else. I would recommend it. But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term. And indeed, what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin. And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit. Everybody knows that. Dopamine is associated with romantic love. Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit, but they kill the sex drive. And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm. And when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment. The things are connected in the brain. And when you tamper with one brain system, you're going to tamper with another. I'm just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place.So now —(Applause)Thank you.I want to end with a story. And then, just a comment. I've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years. I'm an identical twin; I am interested in why we're all alike. Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike. And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them. I said, ""I don't know anything about personality. You know? I don't know. Do you think you've got the right person?"" They said, ""Yes."" It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another.That's my current project; it will be my next book. There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another. Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your ""love map,"" an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems. And that's what I'm now contributing to this.But I want to tell you a story, to illustrate. I've been carrying on here about the biology of love. I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it, too, the magic of it. It's a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one — probably a true story. It was a graduate student — I'm at Rutgers and my two colleagues — Art Aron is at SUNY Stony Brook. That's where we put our people in the MRI machine.And this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student, and she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing. And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain, and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love.(Laughter)So he decided he'd put science to work. And he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him.And sure enough — I've never been in one, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it's crazy and it's noisy and it's exciting. He figured that this would drive up the dopamine, and she'd fall in love with him. So off they go and she's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw, and she throws her hands up and she says, ""Wasn't that wonderful?"" And, ""Wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome!""(Laughter)(Applause)There's magic to love!(Applause)But I will end by saying that millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called ""this mortal coil.""Thank you.Chris Anderson: Helen Fisher!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat
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"I bet you're worried.(Laughter)I was worried. That's why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried what we think about vaginas and even more worried that we don't think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context, a culture, a community of other vaginas. There is so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them. Like the Bermuda Triangle, nobody ever reports back from there.(Laughter)In the first place, it's not so easy to even find your vagina. Women go days, weeks, months, without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman; she told me she didn't have time. ""Looking at your vagina,"" she said, ""is a full day's work.""(Laughter)""You've got to get down there on your back, in front of a mirror, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position with the perfect light, which then becomes shadowed by the angle you're at. You're twisting your head up, arching your back, it's exhausting."" She was busy; she didn't have time. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas. They began as casual vagina interviews, and they turned into vagina monologues. I talked with over 200 women. I talked to older women, younger women, married women, lesbians, single women. I talked to corporate professionals, college professors, actors, sex workers. I talked to African-American women, Asian-American women, Native-American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women.OK, at first women were a little shy, a little reluctant to talk. Once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women love to talk about their vaginas, they do. Mainly because no one's ever asked them before.(Laughter)Let's just start with the word ""vagina"" — vagina, vagina. It sounds like an infection, at best. Maybe a medical instrument. ""Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina!""(Laughter)Vagina, vagina, vagina.It doesn't matter how many times you say the word, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It's a completely ridiculous, totally un-sexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct, ""Darling, would you stroke my vagina,"" you kill the act right there.(Laughter)I'm worried what we call them and don't call them. In Great Neck, New York, they call it a Pussycat. A woman told me there her mother used to tell her, ""Don't wear panties, dear, underneath your pajamas. You need to air out your Pussycat.""(Laughter)In Westchester, they call it a Pooki, in New Jersey, a twat. There's Powderbox, derriere, a Pooky, a Poochi, a Poopi, a Poopelu, a Pooninana, a Padepachetchki, a Pal, and a Piche.(Laughter)There's Toadie, Dee Dee, Nishi, Dignity, Coochi Snorcher, Cooter, Labbe, Gladys Seagelman, VA, Wee wee, Horsespot, Nappy Dugout, Mongo, Ghoulie, Powderbox, a Mimi in Miami, a Split Knish in Philadelphia ...(Laughter)and a Schmende in the Bronx.(Laughter)I am worried about vaginas. This is how the ""Vagina Monologues"" begins. But it really didn't begin there. It began with a conversation with a woman. We were having a conversation about menopause, and we got onto the subject of her vagina, which you'll do if you're talking about menopause. And she said things that really shocked me about her vagina — that it was dried-up and finished and dead — and I was kind of shocked. So I said to a friend casually, ""Well, what do you think about your vagina?"" And that woman said something more amazing, and then the next woman said something more amazing, and before I knew it, every woman was telling me I had to talk to somebody about their vagina because they had an amazing story, and I was sucked down the vagina trail.(Laughter)And I really haven't gotten off of it. I think if you had told me when I was younger that I was going to grow up, and be in shoe stores, and people would scream out, ""There she is, the Vagina Lady!"" I don't know that that would have been my life ambition.(Laughter)But I want to talk a little bit about happiness, and the relationship to this whole vagina journey, because it has been an extraordinary journey that began eight years ago. I think before I did the ""Vagina Monologues,"" I didn't really believe in happiness. I thought that only idiots were happy, to be honest. I remember when I started practicing Buddhism 14 years ago, and I was told that the end of this practice was to be happy, I said, ""How could you be happy and live in this world of suffering and live in this world of pain?"" I mistook happiness for a lot of other things, like numbness or decadence or selfishness. And what happened through the course of the ""Vagina Monologues"" and this journey is, I think I have come to understand a little bit more about happiness.There are three qualities I want to talk about. One is seeing what's right in front of you, and talking about it, and stating it. I think what I learned from talking about the vagina and speaking about the vagina, is it was the most obvious thing — it was right in the center of my body and the center of the world — and yet it was the one thing nobody talked about. The second thing is that what talking about the vagina did is it opened this door which allowed me to see that there was a way to serve the world to make it better. And that's where the deepest happiness has actually come from. And the third principle of happiness, which I've realized recently:Eight years ago, this momentum and this energy, this ""V-wave"" started — and I can only describe it as a ""V-wave"" because, to be honest, I really don't understand it completely; I feel at the service of it. But this wave started, and if I question the wave, or try to stop the wave or look back at the wave, I often have the experience of whiplash or the potential of my neck breaking. But if I go with the wave, and I trust the wave and I move with the wave, I go to the next place, and it happens logically and organically and truthfully. And I started this piece, particularly with stories and narratives, and I was talking to one woman and that led to another woman and that led to another woman. And then I wrote those stories down, and I put them out in front of other people.And every single time I did the show at the beginning, women would literally line up after the show, because they wanted to tell me their stories. And at first I thought, ""Oh great, I'll hear about wonderful orgasms, and great sex lives, and how women love their vaginas."" But in fact, that's not what women lined up to tell me. What women lined up to tell me was how they were raped, and how they were battered, and how they were beaten, and how they were gang-raped in parking lots, and how they were incested by their uncles. And I wanted to stop doing the ""Vagina Monologues,"" because it felt too daunting. I felt like a war photographer who takes pictures of terrible events, but doesn't intervene on their behalf.And so in 1997, I said, ""Let's get women together. What could we do with this information that all these women are being violated?"" And it turned out, after thinking and investigating, that I discovered — and the UN has actually said this recently — that one out of every three women on this planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. That's essentially a gender; that's essentially the resource of the planet, which is women. So in 1997 we got all these incredible women together and we said, ""How can we use the play, this energy, to stop violence against women?"" And we put on one event in New York City, in the theater, and all these great actors came — from Susan Sarandon, to Glenn Close, to Whoopi Goldberg — and we did one performance on one evening, and that catalyzed this wave, this energy.And within five years, this extraordinary thing began to happen. One woman took that energy and she said, ""I want to bring this wave, this energy, to college campuses,"" and so she took the play and she said, ""Let's use the play and have performances once a year, where we can raise money to stop violence against women in local communities all around the world."" And in one year, it went to 50 colleges, and then it expanded. And over the course of the last six years, it's spread and it's spread and it's spread around the world.What I have learned is two things: one, that the epidemic of violence towards women is shocking; it's global; it is so profound and it is so devastating, and it is so in every little pocket of every little crater, of every little society that we don't even recognize it, because it's become ordinary. This journey has taken me to Afghanistan, where I had the extraordinary honor and privilege to go into parts of Afghanistan under the Taliban. I was dressed in a burqa and I went in with an extraordinary group, called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. And I saw firsthand how women had been stripped of every single right that was possible to strip women of — from being educated, to being employed, to being actually allowed to eat ice cream. For those of you who don't know, it was illegal to eat ice cream under the Taliban. And I actually saw and met women who had been flogged for being caught eating vanilla ice cream. I was taken to the secret ice cream-eating place in a little town, where we went to a back room, and women were seated and a curtain was pulled around us, and they were served vanilla ice cream. And women lifted their burqas and ate this ice cream. And I don't think I ever understood pleasure until that moment, and how women have found a way to keep their pleasure alive.It has taken me, this journey, to Islamabad, where I have witnessed and met women with their faces melted off. It has taken me to Juarez, Mexico, where I was a week ago, where I have literally been there in parking lots, where bones of women have washed up and been dumped next to Coca-Cola bottles. It has taken me to universities all over this country, where girls are date-raped and drugged. I have seen terrible, terrible, terrible violence. But I have also recognized, in the course of seeing that violence, that being in the face of things and seeing actually what's in front of us is the antidote to depression, and to a feeling that one is worthless and has no value.Because before the ""Vagina Monologues,"" I will say that 80 percent of my consciousness was closed off to what was really going on in this reality, and that closing-off closed off my vitality and my life energy. What has also happened is in the course of these travels — and it's been an extraordinary thing — is that every single place that I have gone to in the world, I have met a new species. And I really love hearing about all these species at the bottom of the sea. And I was thinking about how being with these extraordinary people on this particular panel, that it's beneath, beyond and between, and the vagina kind of fits into all those categories.(Laughter)But one of the things I've seen is this species — and it is a species, and it is a new paradigm, and it doesn't get reported in the press or in the media because I don't think good news ever is news, and I don't think people who are transforming the planet are what gets the ratings on TV shows. But every single country I have been to — and in the last six years, I've been to about 45 countries, and many tiny little villages and cities and towns — I have seen something what I've come to call ""vagina warriors."" A ""vagina warrior"" is a woman, or a vagina-friendly man, who has witnessed incredible violence or suffered it, and rather than getting an AK-47 or a weapon of mass destruction or a machete, they hold the violence in their bodies; they grieve it; they experience it; and then they go out and devote their lives to making sure it doesn't happen to anybody else.I have met these women everywhere on the planet, and I want to tell a few stories, because I believe that stories are the way that we transmit information, where it goes into our bodies. And I think one of the things about being at TED that's been very interesting is that I live in my body a lot, and I don't live in my head very much anymore. And this is a very heady place. And it's been really interesting to be in my head for the last two days; I've been very disoriented —(Laughter)because I think the world, the V-world, is very much in your body. It's a body world, and the species really exists in the body. And I think there's a real significance in us attaching our bodies to our heads, that that separation has created a divide that is often separating purpose from intent. And the connection between body and head often brings those things into union.I want to talk about three particular people that I've met, vagina warriors, who really transformed my understanding of this whole principle and species, and one is a woman named Marsha Lopez. Marsha Lopez was a woman I met in Guatemala. She was 14 years old, and she was in a marriage and her husband was beating her on a regular basis. And she couldn't get out, because she was addicted to the relationship, and she had no money. Her sister was younger than her, and she applied — we had a ""Stop Rape"" contest a few years ago in New York — and she applied, hoping that she would become a finalist and she could bring her sister. She did become a finalist; she brought Marsha to New York.And at that time, we did this extraordinary V-Day at Madison Square Garden, where we sold out the entire testosterone-filled dome — 18,000 people standing up to say ""Yes"" to vaginas, which was really a pretty incredible transformation. And she came, and she witnessed this, and she decided that she would go back and leave her husband, and that she would bring V-Day to Guatemala. She was 21 years old. I went to Guatemala and she had sold out the National Theater of Guatemala. And I watched her walk up on stage in her red short dress and high heels, and she stood there and said, ""My name is Marsha. I was beaten by my husband for five years. He almost murdered me. I left and you can, too."" And the entire 2,000 people went absolutely crazy.There's a woman named Esther Chávez who I met in Juarez, Mexico. And Esther Chávez was a brilliant accountant in Mexico City. She was 72 years old and she was planning to retire. She went to Juarez to take care of an ailing aunt, and in the course of it, she began to discover what was happening to the murdered and disappeared women of Juarez. She gave up her life; she moved to Juarez. She started to write the stories which documented the disappeared women. 300 women have disappeared in a border town because they're brown and poor. There has been no response to the disappearance, and not one person has been held accountable. She began to document it. She opened a center called Casa Amiga, and in six years, she has literally brought this to the consciousness of the world. We were there a week ago, when there were 7,000 people in the street, and it was truly a miracle. And as we walked through the streets, the people of Juarez, who normally don't even come into the streets, because the streets are so dangerous, literally stood there and wept, to see that other people from the world had showed up for that particular community.There's another woman, named Agnes. And Agnes, for me, epitomizes what a vagina warrior is. I met her three years ago in Kenya. And Agnes was mutilated as a little girl; she was circumcised against her will when she was 10 years old, and she really made a decision that she didn't want this practice to continue anymore in her community. So when she got older, she created this incredible thing: it's an anatomical sculpture of a woman's body, half a woman's body. And she walked through the Rift Valley, and she had vagina and vagina replacement parts, where she would teach girls and parents and boys and girls what a healthy vagina looks like, and what a mutilated vagina looks like.And in the course of her travel — she walked literally for eight years through the Rift Valley, through dust, through sleeping on the ground, because the Maasai are nomads, and she would have to find them, and they would move, and she would find them again — she saved 1,500 girls from being cut.And in that time, she created an alternative ritual, which involved girls coming of age without the cut. When we met her three years ago, we said, ""What could V-Day do for you?"" And she said, ""Well, if you got me a jeep, I could get around a lot faster.""(Laughter)So we bought her a jeep. And in the year that she had the jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. So we said to her, ""What else could we do for you?"" She said, ""Well, Eve, if you gave me some money, I could open a house and girls could run away, and they could be saved."" And I want to tell this little story about my own beginnings, because it's very interrelated to happiness and Agnes.When I was a little girl — I grew up in a wealthy community; it was an upper-middle class white community, and it had all the trappings and the looks of a perfectly nice, wonderful, great life. And everyone was supposed to be happy in that community, and, in fact, my life was hell. I lived with an alcoholic father who beat me and molested me, and it was all inside that. And always as a child I had this fantasy that somebody would come and rescue me. And I actually made up a little character whose name was Mr. Alligator. I would call him up when things got really bad, and say it was time to come and pick me up. And I would pack a little bag and wait for Mr. Alligator to come.Now, Mr. Alligator never did come, but the idea of Mr. Alligator coming actually saved my sanity and made it OK for me to keep going, because I believed, in the distance, there would be someone coming to rescue me.Cut to 40-some odd years later, we go to Kenya, and we're walking, we arrive at the opening of this house. And Agnes hadn't let me come to the house for days, because they were preparing this whole ritual.I want to tell you a great story. When Agnes first started fighting to stop female genital mutilation in her community, she had become an outcast, and she was exiled and slandered, and the whole community turned against her. But being a vagina warrior, she kept going, and she kept committing herself to transforming consciousness. And in the Maasai community, goats and cows are the most valued possession. They're like the Mercedes-Benz of the Rift Valley. And she said two days before the house opened, two different people arrived to give her a goat each, and she said to me, ""I knew then that female genital mutilation would end one day in Africa.""Anyway, we arrived, and when we arrived, there were hundreds of girls dressed in red homemade dresses — which is the color of the Maasai and the color of V-Day — and they greeted us. They had made up these songs that they were singing, about the end of suffering and the end of mutilation, and they walked us down the path. It was a gorgeous day in the African sun, and the dust was flying and the girls were dancing, and there was this house, and it said, ""V-Day Safe House for the Girls.""And it hit me in that moment that it had taken 47 years, but that Mr. Alligator had finally shown up. And he had shown up, obviously, in a form that it took me a long time to understand, which is that when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.And I feel, in the last eight years, that this journey — this miraculous vagina journey — has taught me this really simple thing, which is that happiness exists in action; it exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is; and it exists in giving away what you want the most. And I feel that knowledge and that journey has been an extraordinary privilege, and I feel really blessed to have been here today to communicate that to you.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_on_happiness_in_body_and_soul
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"We've been told to go out on a limb and say something surprising. So I'll try and do that, but I want to start with two things that everyone already knows. And the first one, in fact, is something that has been known for most of recorded history, and that is, that the planet Earth, or the solar system, or our environment or whatever, is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution — or creation, as it used to be thought — and our present existence, and most important, our future survival.Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on, and we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on.Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very un-typical place, uniquely suited and so on, and the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false.(Laughter)And they are. So let me start with the second one: ""Typical."" Well, is this a typical place? Well, let's look around, you know, look in a random direction, and we see a wall, and chemical scum —(Laughter)and that's not typical of the universe at all. All you've got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction and look back, and you won't see any walls or chemical scum at all — all you see is a blue planet. And if you go further than that, you'll see the Sun, the solar system and the stars and so on, but that's still not typical of the universe, because stars come in galaxies. And most places in the universe, a typical place in the universe, is nowhere near any galaxies.So let's go out further, till we're outside the galaxy, and look back, and yeah, there's the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us. And at this point, we've come 100,000 light-years from here. But we're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe. To get to a typical place, you've got to go 1,000 times as far as that, into intergalactic space. And so, what does that look like — ""typical?"" What does a ""typical"" place in the universe look like? Well, at enormous expense, TED has arranged a high-resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of the view from intergalactic space. Can we have the lights off, please, so we can see it?Well, not quite, not quite perfect.You see, intergalactic space is completely dark, pitch dark. It's so dark, that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you, and that star were to explode as a supernova, and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you, you still wouldn't be able to see even a glimmer. That's how big and how dark the universe is. And that's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright, so brilliant an event, that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light-years.(Laughter)And yet, from intergalactic space, it's so far away you wouldn't even see it. It's also very cold out there — less than three degrees above absolute zero. And it's very empty. The vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on Earth can currently create. So that's how different a typical place is from this place. And that is how un-typical this place is. So can we have the lights back on please? Thank you.Now, how do we know about an environment that's so far away and so different and so alien from anything we're used to? Well, the Earth — our environment, in the form of us — is creating knowledge. Well, what does that mean? Well, look out even further than we've just been — I mean from here, with a telescope — and you'll see things that look like stars, they're called quasars. ""Quasars"" originally meant ""quasi-stellar object,"" which means ""things that look a bit like stars.""(Laughter)But they're not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago and billions of light-years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse and some of the matter back out in the form of tremendous jets, which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of — I think it's a trillion — suns.Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn't survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time.(Laughter)And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe and model and predict and explain, above all — there's your reference — what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other, the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.Now, that is knowledge. And if that weren't amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property, that physical objects as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time.So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world.Now how does the solar system — our environment, in the form of us — acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe? Well, one thing that's true about Stephen Hawking's remark — I mean, it is true, but it's the wrong emphasis. One thing that's true about it is that it doesn't do it with any special physics, there's no special dispensation, no miracles involved. It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance. One of them is matter, because the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing. Information processing is computation, computation requires a computer — there's no known way of making a computer without matter. We also need energy to make the computer, and most important, to make the media, in effect, onto which we record the knowledge that we discover.And then thirdly, less tangible but just as essential for the open-ended creation of knowledge, of explanations, is evidence. Now, our environment is inundated with evidence. We happen to get round to testing, let's say, Newton's Law of Gravity, about 300 years ago. But the evidence that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the Earth for billions of years before that, and will continue to fall for billions of years afterwards. And the same is true for all the other sciences. As far as we know, evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking, on our planet.Our location is saturated with evidence and also with matter and energy. Out in intergalactic space, those three prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply — as I said, it's empty, it's cold and it's dark out there. Or is it? Now actually, that's just another parochial misconception.(Laughter)Because imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space, the same size as our home, the solar system. Now that cube is very empty by human standards, but that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter. And a million tons is enough to make, say, a self-contained space station, on which there's a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open-ended stream of knowledge, and so on.Now, it's way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space and form it into other elements and so on. But the thing is, in a comprehensible universe, if something isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, then what could possibly prevent us from doing it, other than knowing how? In other words, it's a matter of knowledge, not resources. If we could do that, we'd automatically have an energy supply, because this transmutation would be a fusion reactor.And evidence? Well, again, it's dark out there to human senses, but all you've got to do is take a telescope, even one of present-day design, look out, and you'll see the same galaxies as we do from here. And with a more powerful telescope, you'll be able to see stars and planets in those galaxies, you'll be able to do astrophysics and learn the laws of physics. And locally there you could build particle accelerators, and learn elementary particle physics and chemistry, and so on. Probably the hardest science to do would be biology field trips —(Laughter)because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life-bearing planet and back. But I have to tell you — and sorry, Richard — but I never did like biology field trips much,(Laughter)and I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years.(Laughter)So in fact, intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge. Any such cube anywhere in the universe could become the same kind of hub that we are, if the knowledge of how to do so were present there. So, we're not in a uniquely hospitable place. If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open-ended stream of explanations, then so is almost every other environment, so is the Earth. So is a polluted Earth. And the limiting factor, there and here, is not resources, because they're plentiful, but knowledge, which is scarce.Now this cosmic knowledge-based view may — and I think ought to — make us feel very special. But it should also make us feel vulnerable, because it means that without the specific knowledge that's needed to survive the ongoing challenges of the universe, we won't survive them. All it takes is for a supernova to go off a few light-years away, and we'll all be dead!Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things, from astrophysics, to scientific experiments gone wrong, and most importantly, to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. And he thinks that civilization has only a 50 percent chance of surviving this century. I think he's going to talk about that later in the conference.Now, I don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in, but I do agree with him about this: We can survive and we can fail to survive. But it depends not on chance, but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time. The danger is not at all unprecedented. Species go extinct all the time. Civilizations end. The overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history. And if we want to be the exception to that, then logically, our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species and civilization from all the others — namely, our special relationship with the laws of physics, our ability to create new explanations, new knowledge — to be a hub of existence.So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster, because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age, in which billions would die.Now, the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee.Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches.(Laughter)If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature — and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research; they're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right — not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely — is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival.So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: ""Problems are soluble."" And on the other one, carve: ""Problems are inevitable.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_on_our_place_in_the_cosmos
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"My title: ""Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science."" ""Queerer than we can suppose"" comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, ""Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy."" Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories — experimental predictions — to specifying the width of North America to within one hair's breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory has got to be, in some sense, true. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, ""If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory.""It's so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it. David Deutsch, who's talking here, in ""The Fabric of Reality,"" embraces the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel, mutually undetectable, except through the narrow porthole of quantum mechanical experiments. And that's Richard Feynman.The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example. Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. (Laughter) It's just elementary probability theory.(Laughter)The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls, or bladdersful, in the world. And of course, there's nothing special about Cromwell or bladders — you have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree.""Queerer than we can suppose."" What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything about what we can suppose? Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle, ungraspable by any mind, however superior? The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. We're now so used to the idea that the Earth spins, rather than the Sun moves across the sky, it's hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. After all, it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun, small and mobile. But it's worth recalling Wittgenstein's remark on the subject: ""Tell me,"" he asked a friend, ""why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went 'round the Earth, rather than that the Earth was rotating?"" And his friend replied, ""Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth."" Wittgenstein replied, ""Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?""(Laughter)Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like ""solidity"" and ""impenetrability,"" because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate.Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding Einstein. I want to give the name ""Middle World"" to the medium-scaled environment in which we've evolved the ability to take act — nothing to do with ""Middle Earth"" — Middle World.(Laughter)We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. We find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object like a rock, it knocks itself out.May I introduce Major General Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military intelligence in 1983.""...[He] stared at his wall in Arlington, Virginia, and decided to do it. As frightening as the prospect was, he was going into the next office. He stood up and moved out from behind his desk. 'What is the atom mostly made of?' he thought, 'Space.' He started walking. 'What am I mostly made of? Atoms.' He quickened his pace, almost to a jog now. 'What is the wall mostly made of?'(Laughter)'Atoms!' All I have to do is merge the spaces. Then, General Stubblebine banged his nose hard on the wall of his office. Stubblebine, who commanded 16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure to walk through the wall. He has no doubt that this ability will one day be a common tool in the military arsenal. Who would screw around with an army that could do that?""That's from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day.(Laughter)I have every reason to think it's true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself, had an article in it.(Laughter)Unaided human intuition, schooled in Middle World, finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object, air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. And that's because in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we'd evolved in a vacuum, we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle-Worlders are too big to notice Brownian motion. In the same way, our lives are dominated by gravity, but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse these priorities.Steve Grand — he's the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right. Steve Grand, in his book, ""Creation: Life and How to Make It,"" is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium: the ether. But we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock.In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai, there's a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It's what's technically known as a ""barchan,"" and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: You weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.So ""really"" isn't a word that we should use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors which couldn't walk through rocks. ""Really,"" for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of ""reallys."" What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world, but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world.The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole's software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider's brain doesn't need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond, in an Edwin Abbott flatland.I've speculated that bats may see color with their ears. The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world model that any flying bird — a day-flying bird like a swallow — needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I've even suggested, use perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes — perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces, furry or smooth and so on — in the same way as swallows or indeed, we, use those perceived hues — redness and blueness, etc. — to label long and short wavelengths of light. There's nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength.The point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory modality involved. J.B.S. Haldane himself had something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair of carbon atoms in the chain. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes. Now, there's another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. A dog that had never met capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we've heard a trumpet play before. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other smell-oriented animals smell in color. And the argument would be exactly the same as for the bats.Middle World — the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with — is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors. We're blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. Miracles are just events that are extremely improbable. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Because there are so many of them, and because there's no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the atoms in the hand could all just happen to move the same way at the same time, and again and again. In this case, the hand would move, and we'd see it waving at us in Middle World. The odds against it, of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeros to this day.Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events; we don't live long enough. In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time, that which seems impossible in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. One way to think about that is by counting planets. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about 10 to the 20, or 100 billion billion. And that gives us a nice way to express our estimate of life's improbability. We could make some sort of landmark points along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic spectrum we just looked at.If life has arisen only once on any — life could originate once per planet, could be extremely common or it could originate once per star or once per galaxy or maybe only once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here. And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince, and similar magical things like that. If life has arisen on only one planet in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet, because here we are talking about it. And that means that if we want to avail ourselves of it, we're allowed to postulate chemical events in the origin of life which have a probability as low as one in 100 billion billion. I don't think we shall have to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life is quite common in the universe. And when I say quite common, it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another, which is a sad thought.How shall we interpret ""queerer than we can suppose?"" Queerer than can in principle be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitations of our brain's evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as mathematical understanding of the very small and the very large? I genuinely don't know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games beginning in early childhood, which had a make-believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings-on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make-believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. And similarly, a relativistic computer game, in which objects on the screen manifest the Lorentz contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves — to get children into the way of thinking about it.I want to end by applying the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other. Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind: we're the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are, our hormones are the way they are. We'd be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person, like a child-murderer, should be something like: this unit has a faulty component; it needs repairing. That's not what we say. What we say — and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me — what we say is, ""Vile monster, prison is too good for you."" Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. In short, when we're thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines, like computers or cars. But when we revert to being human, we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson, when it wouldn't start on ""Gourmet Night.""(Laughter)The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people — a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people, with the universe as a whole.(Laughter)If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe
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"You'll be happy to know that I'll be talking not about my own tragedy, but other people's tragedy. It's a lot easier to be lighthearted about other people's tragedy than your own, and I want to keep it in the spirit of the conference.So, if you believe the media accounts, being a drug dealer in the height of the crack cocaine epidemic was a very glamorous life, in the words of Virginia Postrel. There was money, there was drugs, guns, women, you know, you name it — jewelry, bling-bling — it had it all.What I'm going to tell you today is that, in fact, based on 10 years of research, a unique opportunity to go inside a gang — to see the actual books, the financial records of the gang — that the answer turns out not to be that being in the gang was a glamorous life. But I think, more realistically, that being in a gang — selling drugs for a gang — is perhaps the worst job in all of America. And that's what I'd like to convince you of today.So there are three things I want to do. First, I want to explain how and why crack cocaine had such a profound influence on inner-city gangs. Secondly, I want to tell you how somebody like me came to be able to see the inner workings of a gang — an interesting story, I think. And then third, I want to tell you, in a very superficial way, about some of the things we found when we actually got to look at the financial records, the books, of the gang.So before I do that, just one warning, which is that this presentation has been rated 'R' by the Motion Picture Association of America. It contains adult themes, adult language. Given who is up on the stage, you'll be delighted to know that, in fact, there'll be no nudity —(Laughter)Unexpected wardrobe malfunctions aside.(Laughter)So let me start by talking about crack cocaine, and how it transformed the gang. To do that, you have to actually go back to a time before crack cocaine, in the early '80s, and look at it from the perspective of a gang leader. Being a gang leader in the inner city wasn't such a bad deal in the mid-'80s — the early '80s, let me say.Now, you had a lot of power, and you got to beat people up — you got a lot of prestige, a lot of respect. But the thing is, there was no money in it. The gang had no way to make money. You couldn't charge dues to the people in the gang, because the people in the gang didn't have any money. You couldn't really make any money selling marijuana — marijuana's too cheap, it turns out. You can't get rich selling marijuana. You couldn't sell cocaine; cocaine's a great product — powdered cocaine — but you've got to know rich white people. And most of the inner-city gang members didn't know any rich white people, so couldn't sell to that market. You couldn't really do petty crime, either. Turns out, petty crime's a terrible way to make a living.As a result, as a gang leader, you had, you know, power — it's a pretty good life — but the thing was, in the end, you were living at home with your mother. And so it wasn't really a career. There were limits to how powerful and important you could be if you had to live at home with your mother.Then along comes crack cocaine. And in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, crack cocaine was the extra-chunky version of tomato sauce for the inner city.(Laughter)Because crack cocaine was an unbelievable innovation. I don't have time to talk about it today, but if you think about it, I would say that in the last 25 years, of every invention or innovation that's occurred in this country, the biggest one in terms of impact on the well-being of people who live in the inner city, was crack cocaine. And for the worse — not for the better, but for the worse. It had a huge impact on life.So what was it about crack cocaine? It was a brilliant way of getting the brain high. Because you could smoke crack cocaine — you can't smoke powdered cocaine — and smoking is a much more efficient mechanism of delivering a high than snorting it. And it turned out there was this audience that didn't know it wanted crack cocaine, but when it came, it really did. And it was a perfect drug; you could buy the cocaine that went into it for a dollar, sell it for five dollars. Highly addictive — the high was very short. So for fifteen minutes, you get this great high, and then when you come down, all you want to do is get high again.It created a wonderful market. And for the people who were there running the gang, it was a great way, seemingly, to make a lot of money. At least for the people on the top.So this is where we enter the picture. Not really me — I'm really a bit player in all this. My co-author, Sudhir Venkatesh, is the main character. He was a math major in college who had a good heart, and decided he wanted to get a sociology PhD, came to the University of Chicago. Now, the three months before he came to Chicago, he had spent following the Grateful Dead. And in his own words, he ""looked like a freak."" He's a South Asian — very dark-skinned South Asian. Big man, and he had hair, in his words, ""down to his ass."" Defied all kinds of boundaries: Was he black or white? Was he man or woman? He was really a curious sight to be seen.So he showed up at the University of Chicago, and the famous sociologist William Julius Wilson was doing a book that involved surveying people all across Chicago. He took one look at Sudhir, who was going to go do some surveys for him, and decided he knew exactly the place to send him, which was to one of the toughest, most notorious housing projects not just in Chicago, but in the entire United States.So Sudhir, the suburban boy who had never really been in the inner city, dutifully took his clipboard and walked down to this housing project, gets to the first building. The first building? Well, there's nobody there. But he hears some voices up in the stairwell, so he climbs up the stairwell, comes around the corner, and finds a group of young African-American men playing dice.This is about 1990, peak of the crack epidemic. This is a very dangerous job, being in a gang. You don't like to be surprised. You don't like to be surprised by people who come around the corner. And the mantra was: shoot first; ask questions later. Now, Sudhir was lucky — he was such a freak, and that clipboard probably saved his life, because they figured no other rival gang member would be coming up to shoot at them with a clipboard.(Laughter)So his greeting was not particularly warm, but they did say, well, OK — let's hear your questions on your survey. So — I kid you not — the first question on the survey that he was sent to ask was: ""How do you feel about being poor and Black in America?""(Laughter)Makes you wonder about academics.(Laughter)So the choice of answers were:[A) Very Good B) Good C) Bad D) Very Bad](Laughter)What Sudhir found out is, in fact, that the real answer was the following: [A) Very Good B) Good C) Bad D) Very Bad E) Fuck you](Laughter)The survey was not, in the end, going to be what got Sudhir off the hook. He was held hostage overnight in the stairwell. There was a lot of gunfire, there were a lot of philosophical discussions he had with the gang members. By morning, the gang leader arrived, checked out Sudhir, decided he was no threat, and they let him go home. So Sudhir went home, took a shower, took a nap.And you and I, probably, faced with the situation, would think, ""I guess I'm going to write my dissertation on The Grateful Dead, I've been following them for the last three months.""(Laughter)Sudhir, on the other hand, got right back, walked down to the housing project, went up to the second floor, and said: ""Hey, guys, I had so much fun hanging out with you last night, I wonder if I could do it again tonight."" And that was the beginning of what turned out to be a beautiful relationship that involved Sudhir living in the housing project on and off for 10 years, hanging out in crack houses, going to jail with the gang members, having the windows shot out of his car, having the police break into his apartment and steal his computer disks — you name it. But ultimately, the story has a happy ending for Sudhir, who became one of the most respected sociologists in the country. And especially for me, as I sat in my office with my Excel spreadsheet open, waiting for Sudhir to come and deliver to me the latest load of data that he would get from the gang.(Laughter)It was one of the most unequal co-authoring relationships ever —(Laughter)But I was glad to be the beneficiary of it.So what did we find? What did we find in the gang? Well, let me say one thing: We really got access to everybody in the gang. We got an inside look at the gang, from the very bottom up to the very top. They trusted Sudhir, in ways that really no academic has ever — or really anybody, any outsider — has ever earned the trust of these gangs, to the point where they actually opened up what was most interesting for me — their books, the financial records they kept. They made them available to us, and we not only could study them, but we could ask them questions about what was in them.So if I have to kind of summarize very quickly in the short time I have what the bottom line of what I take away from the gang is, it's that, if I had to draw a parallel between the gang and any other organization, it would be that the gang is just like McDonald's, in a lot of different respects — the restaurant McDonald's.So first, in one way, which isn't maybe the most interesting way, but it's a good way to start — is in the way it's organized, the hierarchy of the gang, the way it looks. So here's what the org chart of the gang looks like. I don't know if you know much about org charts, but if you were to assign a stripped-down and simplified McDonald's org chart, this is exactly what it would look like. It's amazing, but the top level of the gang, they actually call themselves the ""Board of Directors.""(Laughter)And Sudhir says it's not like these guys had a very sophisticated view of what happened in American corporate life, but they had seen movies like ""Wall Street,"" and they had learned a little bit about what it was like to be in the real world. Now, below that board of directors, you've got essentially what are regional VPs — people who control, say, the South Side of Chicago, or the West Side of Chicago.Sudhir got to know very well the guy who had the unfortunate assignment of trying to take the Iowa franchise, which, it turned out, for this black gang, was not one of the more brilliant financial endeavors they undertook.(Laughter)But the thing that really makes the gang seem like McDonald's is its franchisees. The guys who are running the local gangs — the four-square-block by four-square-block areas — they're just like the guys, in some sense, who are running the McDonald's. They are the entrepreneurs. They get the exclusive property rights to control the drug-selling. They get the name of the gang behind them, for merchandising and marketing. And they're the ones who basically make the profit or lose a profit, depending on how good they are at running the business.Now, the group I really want you to think about, though, are the ones at the bottom — the foot soldiers. These are the teenagers, typically, who'd be standing out on the street corner, selling the drugs. Extremely dangerous work. And important to note is that almost all of the weight, all of the people in this organization are at the bottom — just like McDonald's. So in some sense, the foot soldiers are a lot like the people who are taking your order at McDonald's, and it's not just by chance that they're like them. In fact, in these neighborhoods, they'd be the same people. So the same kids who are working in the gang were actually, at the very same time, typically working part-time at a place like McDonald's. Which already foreshadows the main result that I've talked about, about what a crappy job it was, being in the gang. Because obviously, if being in the gang were such a wonderful, lucrative job, why in the world would these guys moonlight at McDonald's?So what do the wages look like? You might be surprised. But based on being able to talk to them and to see their records, this is what it looks like in terms of the wages. The hourly wage the foot soldiers were earning was $3.50 an hour. It was below the minimum wage. And this is well-documented. It's easy to see by the patterns of consumption they have. It really is not fiction — it's fact. There was very little money in the gang, especially at the bottom.Now if you managed to rise up, say, and be that local leader, the guy who's the equivalent of the McDonald's franchisee, you'd be making 100,000 dollars a year. And that, in some ways, was the best job you could hope to get if you were growing up in one of these neighborhoods as a young black male. If you managed to rise to the very top, 200,000 or 400,000 dollars a year is what you'd hope to make. Truly, you would be a great success story.And one of the sad parts of this is that, indeed, among the many other ramifications of crack cocaine is that the most talented individuals in these communities — this is what they were striving for. They weren't trying to make it in legitimate ways, because there were no legitimate channels out. This was the best way out. And it actually was the right choice, probably, to try to make it out this way.You look at this, the relationship to McDonald's breaks down here. The money looks about the same. Why is it such a bad job? Well, the reason it's such a bad job is that there's somebody shooting at you a lot of the time. So, with shooting at you, what are the death rates? We found, in our gang — and admittedly, this was not really a standard situation; this was a time of intense violence, of a lot of gang wars, as this gang actually became quite successful. But there were costs. And so the death rate — not to mention the rate of being arrested, sent to prison, being wounded — the death rate in our sample was seven percent per person per year. You're in the gang for four years, you expect to die with about a 25 percent likelihood. That is about as high as you can get.So for comparison's purposes, let's think about some other walk of life you may expect might be extremely risky. Let's say that you were a murderer and you were convicted of murder, and you're sent to death row. It turns out, the death rates on death row from all causes, including execution: two percent a year.(Laughter)So it's a lot safer being on death row than it is selling drugs out on the street.That gives you some pause, for those of you who believe that a death penalty's going to have an enormous deterrent effect on crime. To give you a sense of just how bad the inner city was during crack — and I'm not really focusing on the negatives, but really, there's another story to tell you there — if you look at the death rates just of random, young black males growing up in the inner city in the United States, the death rates during crack were about one percent. That's extremely high. And this is violent death — it's unbelievable, in some sense.To put it into perspective: if you compare this to the soldiers in Iraq, for instance, right now fighting the war: 0.5 percent. So in some very literal way, the young black men who were growing up in this country were living in a war zone, very much in the sense that the soldiers over in Iraq are fighting in a war.So why in the world, you might ask, would anybody be willing to stand out on a street corner selling drugs for $3.50 an hour, with a 25 percent chance of dying over the next four years? Why would they do that? And I think there are a couple answers.I think the first one is that they got fooled by history. It used to be the gang was a rite of passage; that the young people controlled the gang; that as you got older, you dropped out of the gang. So what happened was, the people who happened to be in the right place at the right time — the people who happened to be leading the gang in the mid-to-late-'80s — became very, very wealthy. And so the logical thing to think was that they are going to age out of the gang like everybody else has, and the next generation is going to take over and get the wealth.There are striking similarities, I think, to the Internet boom. The first set of people in Silicon Valley got very, very rich. And then all of my friends said, ""Maybe I should go do that, too."" And they were willing to work very cheap for stock options that never came. In some sense, that's what happened, exactly, to the set of people we were looking at. They were willing to start at the bottom, just like, say, a first-year lawyer at a law firm is willing to start at the bottom, work 80-hour weeks for not that much money, because they think they're going to make partner. But the rules changed, and they never got to make partner.Indeed, the same people who were running all of the major gangs in the late 1980s are still running the major gangs in Chicago today. They never passed on any of the wealth, So everybody got stuck at that $3.50-an-hour job, and it turned out to be a disaster.The other thing the gang was very good at was marketing and trickery. And so for instance, one thing the gang would do is — the gang leaders would have big entourages, and they'd drive fancy cars and have fancy jewelry. So what Sudhir eventually realized as he hung out with them more, is that, really, they didn't own those cars — they just leased them, because they couldn't afford to own the fancy cars. And they didn't really have gold jewelry, they had gold-plated jewelry. It goes back to, you know, the real-real versus the fake-real.And really, they did all sorts of things to trick the young people into thinking what a great deal the gang was going to be. So for instance, they would give a 14-year-old kid a whole roll of bills to hold. That 14-year-old kid would say to his friends, ""Hey, look at all the money I got in the gang."" It wasn't his money — until he spent it, and then he was in debt to the gang, and was sort of an indentured servant for a while. So I have a couple minutes.Let me do one last thing I hadn't thought I'd have time to do, which is to talk about what we learned more generally about economics, from the study of the gang.So, economists tend to talk in technical words. Often, our theories fail quite miserably when we over the data, but what's kind of interesting is that in this setting, it turned out that some of the economic theories that worked not so well in the real economy worked very well in the drug economy, in some sense, because it's unfettered capitalism. Here's an economic principle. This is one of the basic ideas in labor economics, called a ""compensating differential."" It's the idea that the increment to wages that a worker requires to leave him indifferent between performing two tasks, one which is more unpleasant than the other. Compensating differential — it's why we think garbagemen might be paid more than people who work in parks.The words of one of the members of the gang, I think, make this clear. So it turns out — I'm sort of getting ahead of myself — it turns out, in the gang, when there's a war going on, they actually pay the foot soldiers twice as much money. It's exactly this concept. Because they're not willing to be at risk. And the words of a gang member capture it quite nicely, he says: ""Would you stand around here when all this shit ..."" — the shooting — ""... if all this shit's going on? No, right? So if I gonna be asked to put my life on the line, then front me the cash, man."" I think the gang member says it much more articulately than the economist, about what's going on.(Laughter)Here's another one. Economists talk about game theory, that every two-person game has a Nash equilibrium. Here's the translation you get from the gang member. They're talking about the decision of why they don't go shoot — One thing that turns out to be a great business tactic in the gang: if you go and just shoot guns in the air in the other gang's territory — people are afraid to go buy drugs there, they're going to come into your neighborhood.Here's what he says about why they don't do that: ""If we start shooting around there, the other gang's territory, nobody, I mean, you dig it, nobody gonna step on their turf. But we gotta be careful, 'cause they can shoot around here too and then we all fucked.""(Laughter)So that's the same concept. Then again, sometimes economists get it wrong. One thing we observed in the data is that it looked like — the gang leader always got paid. No matter how bad it was economically, he always got himself paid.We had some theories related to cash flow, and lack of access to capital markets, and things like that. Then we asked the gang member, ""Why is it you always get paid and your workers don't always get paid?"" His response is, ""You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig? If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit."" And I thought about it and said, ""CEOs often pay themselves million-dollar bonuses, even when companies are losing a lot of money. And it never would really occur to an economist that this idea of 'weak and shit' could really be important.""(Laughter)Maybe ""weak and shit"" is an important hypothesis that needs more analysis.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics
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"I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called ""Blink,"" and it's about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate.(Laughter)But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it's not really about happiness. So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce.Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning gray hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history. And by profession, he's a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship.(Laughter)As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was Pepsi. This is many years ago, back in the early 70s. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, ""You know, there's this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink."" Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him, ""We're working with a band between eight and 12 percent. Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough; anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet. We want to know: what's the sweet spot between 8 and 12?"" Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness — eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 — and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration, right? Really simple.Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn't make any sense. It's a mess. It's all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, ""Well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola's not that easy."" ""You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way."" ""You know, let's just make an educated guess,"" and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, ""What was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?""And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafé. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and say, ""You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You're wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis."" And people would look at him blankly and say, ""What are you talking about? Craziness."" And they would say, ""Move! Next!"" Tried to get business, nobody would hire him — he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression ""To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish."" This was his horseradish.(Laughter)He was obsessed with it!And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, ""Doctor Moskowitz, we want to make the perfect pickle."" And he said, ""There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles."" And he came back to them and he said, ""You don't just need to improve your regular; you need to create zesty."" And that's where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him: Campbell's Soup. And this was even more important.In fact, Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragù, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s. In the industry — I don't know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this. But it was, technically speaking — this is an aside — Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragù. The quality of the tomato paste is much better; the spice mix is far superior; it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. In fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the 70s with Ragù and Prego. You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragù would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That's called ""adherence."" And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling.So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tomatoey-ness, by tartness, by sourness, by visible solids — my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business.(Laughter)Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York, to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and over the course of that two hours, he gave them ten bowls. Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was.At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data. Did he look for the most popular variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky.And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, ""You're telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?"" And he said ""Yes!""(Laughter)And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.Everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, ""Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!"" And that's when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil. And then eventually even Ragù hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragù that he did for Prego. And today, if you go to a really good supermarket, do you know how many Ragùs there are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional — Extra-Chunky Garden.(Laughter)That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people.Now why is that important?(Laughter)It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you why. What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat, what will make people happy, is to ask them. And for years and years and years, Ragù and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit you down, and they would say, ""What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce."" And for all those years — 20, 30 years — through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did.(Laughter)People don't know what they want! As Howard loves to say, ""The mind knows not what the tongue wants."" It's a mystery!(Laughter)And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want, deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say, ""I want a dark, rich, hearty roast."" It's what people always say when you ask them. ""What do you like?"" ""Dark, rich, hearty roast!"" What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee.(Laughter)But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want that ""I want a milky, weak coffee.""So that's number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize — it's another very critical point — he made us realize the importance of what he likes to call ""horizontal segmentation."" Why is this critical? Because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Used to be, there were two mustards: French's and Gulden's. What were they? Yellow mustard. What's in it? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it's made in Oxnard, California.(Laughter)And instead of charging a dollar fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. And they had those ads. With the guy in the Rolls Royce, eating the Grey Poupon. Another pulls up, and says, ""Do you have any Grey Poupon?"" And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!And everyone's take-home lesson from that was that the way to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy.(Laughter)A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, ""That's wrong!"" Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks.Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish.(Laughter)What do I mean by that?(Laughter)For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don't give you five options on the reduction. They don't say, ""Do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or ...?"" No! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. ""This is the way it ought to be."" And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, ""You know what? You're wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant.""Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a Platonic notion of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended; it's thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about ""authentic tomato sauce"" in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce, we talked about the earliest Ragùs, which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, you just put a little bit and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That's what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A. And B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that's what would please the maximum number of people.In other words, people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don't want to know, necessarily, just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying, ""This same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce."" And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks.I'll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is — oh, I'm sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren't just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafé. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee — a type of coffee, a brew — that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce
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"When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the ""frontal lobe."" Particularly, a part called the ""pre-frontal cortex."" What does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?It turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is an experience simulator. Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall.(Laughter)All of you have done this. Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, ""Yuck."" It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say ""yuck"" before you make it.Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic.(Laughter)Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the ""impact bias,"" which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. This almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, ""I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me."" What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a ""psychological immune system."" A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it.We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence. I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. Here are three guys synthesizing happiness. ""I'm better off physically, financially, mentally ... ""I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience."" ""I believe it turned out for the best.""Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later? ""I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way."" What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there.Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He'd spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. [He was ultimately released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] What did he say about his experience? ""I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience."" Glorious! He is not saying, ""Well, there were some nice guys. They had a gym."" ""Glorious,"" a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by two brothers named McDonalds. And he thought, ""That's a really neat idea!"" So he went to find them. They said, ""We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks."" Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker, to loan him the $3,000, and his brother's immortal words were, ""You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers."" He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course, six months later Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea. It turns out people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America.And then, finally, some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed — yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician — he had this to say: ""I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles.""Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it.(Laughter)Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.(Laughter)Third: make somebody else really, really rich. And finally: never ever join the Beatles.(Laughter) Yeah, right. Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, ""Yeah right, you never really wanted the job."" ""Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face."" We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call ""natural happiness.""What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don't want stuff enough.(Laughter)I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data.Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. It's a 50-year-old paradigm called the ""free choice paradigm."" It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because this experiment uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: ""We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four,"" we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four.Sometime later — it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days — the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. ""Tell us how much you like them now."" What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! ""The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!"" That's the synthesis of happiness.(Laughter)Now, what's the right response to that? ""Yeah, right!"" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I hope this is going to convince you that ""Yeah, right!"" was not the right response.We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis. They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are.We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, ""Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three."" We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour.(Laughter)Back into the room, we say, ""Hi, we're back."" The patients, bless them, say, ""Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember."" ""Really, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?"" ""Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue."" ""No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least.""What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup.Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show — that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form — ""The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought."" Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result.These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. ""Yeah, right"" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it.When psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom, the ability to make up your mind and change your mind, is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind, is the enemy of synthetic happiness.And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. ""Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?"" ""My printer prints a blank page after every document."" ""Why complain about getting free paper?"" ""Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?"" ""Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!"" ""Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!"" ""What are you doing?"" ""I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change."" Indeed.The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage. You go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake! You find a way to be happy with what's happened.(Laughter)Now, what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage.Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, ""Which one would you like to give up?"" ""I have to give one up?"" ""Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one.""Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, ""But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters"" — Yeah, ""headquarters"" — ""I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable."" The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: ""Make your choice, and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again."" Half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find.First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating — ""Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?"" — have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the [reversible] condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, ""You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?"" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows.The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: ""'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so."" It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? (Laughter) That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same.In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: ""The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another — Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice."" In other words: yes, some things are better than others.We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly.The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data, is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy
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"I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them.But I want to start with what I call the ""official dogma."" The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us.This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. 175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system — speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier — and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six-and-a-half-million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store.You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. In other domains — the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone. You didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one — the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch.(Laughter)And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is ""no."" It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, ""Well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits, and these risks. B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do?"" And you say, ""Doc, what should I do?"" And the doc says, ""A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?"" And you say, ""If you were me, Doc, what would you do?"" And the doc says, ""But I'm not you."" And the result is — we call it ""patient autonomy,"" which makes it sound like a good thing, but it really is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something — namely, the doctor — to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions — namely, the patient. There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed.Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after.Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, ""Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?"" All of these are consuming questions. And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer.Work — we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet — except the Randolph Hotel.(Laughter)(Applause)There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, ""Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?"" And even if the answer to the question is ""no,"" it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been.So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. [Well, actually, they are written in stone.] That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this.[The Ten Commandments DYI Kit]And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? And the answer is, ""yes.""(Laughter)We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this: a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual-fund company of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer 50 funds — 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution.So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this.[And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?](Laughter)You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or the wrong salad dressing. So that's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it's not perfect — and what salad dressing is? — it's easy to imagine you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.Second, what economists call ""opportunity costs."" Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example.[I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th street]Sorry if you're not New Yorkers. Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons. Very expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? ""Well, damn it,"" this guy is thinking, ""It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. I could be parking right in front of my building."" And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs.Here's another example.(Laughter)Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things that may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive.Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, they were incredibly uncomfortable, if you wore them and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones, and I said, ""I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size."" And the shopkeeper said, ""Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? You want boot cut, tapered, blah blah."" On and on he went. My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, ""I want the kind that used to be the only kind.""(Laughter)He had no idea what that was,(Laughter)so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store — truth! — with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better.All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But — I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. The reason —(Laughter)The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. Nobody in the world of marketing knows this.[It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.]Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this.[Everything was better back when everything was worse]The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in — we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation — the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness — this is what you all came for — the secret to happiness is low expectations.(Laughter)[You'll do](Applause)(Laughter)I want to say — just a little autobiographical moment — that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing.Finally — One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why, who's responsible? It is equally clear that the answer to the question is ""you."" You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves.Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant — not the only, but a significant — contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you. This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare.Now, as a policy matter — I'm almost done — as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help. It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices — it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off.If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also, which is what economists call a ""Pareto-improving move."" Income redistribution will make everyone better off — not just poor people — because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be — no limits] You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say, ""Ah! What does this fish know? You know, nothing is possible in this fishbowl."" Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world — and that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction.Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited — perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice
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"Thank you. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here spending my last day as a teenager. Today I want to talk to you about the future, but first I'm going to tell you a bit about the past. My story starts way before I was born. My grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp. And she was going along the tracks, and the tracks split. And somehow — we don't really know exactly the whole story — but the train took the wrong track and went to a work camp rather than the death camp. My grandmother survived and married my grandfather. They were living in Hungary, and my mother was born. And when my mother was two years old, the Hungarian revolution was raging, and they decided to escape Hungary. They got on a boat, and yet another divergence — the boat was either going to Canada or to Australia. They got on and didn't know where they were going, and ended up in Canada. So, to make a long story short, they came to Canada. My grandmother was a chemist. She worked at the Banting Institute in Toronto, and at 44 she died of stomach cancer. I never met my grandmother, but I carry on her name — her exact name, Eva Vertes — and I like to think I carry on her scientific passion, too.I found this passion not far from here, actually, when I was nine years old. My family was on a road trip and we were in the Grand Canyon. And I had never been a reader when I was young — my dad had tried me with the Hardy Boys; I tried Nancy Drew; I tried all that — and I just didn't like reading books. And my mother bought this book when we were at the Grand Canyon called ""The Hot Zone."" It was all about the outbreak of the Ebola virus. And something about it just kind of drew me towards it. There was this big sort of bumpy-looking virus on the cover, and I just wanted to read it. I picked up that book, and as we drove from the edge of the Grand Canyon to Big Sur, and to, actually, here where we are today, in Monterey, I read that book, and from when I was reading that book, I knew that I wanted to have a life in medicine. I wanted to be like the explorers I'd read about in the book, who went into the jungles of Africa, went into the research labs and just tried to figure out what this deadly virus was. So from that moment on, I read every medical book I could get my hands on, and I just loved it so much. I was a passive observer of the medical world.It wasn't until I entered high school that I thought, ""Maybe now, you know — being a big high school kid — I can maybe become an active part of this big medical world."" I was 14, and I emailed professors at the local university to see if maybe I could go work in their lab. And hardly anyone responded. But I mean, why would they respond to a 14-year-old, anyway? And I got to go talk to one professor, Dr. Jacobs, who accepted me into the lab. At that time, I was really interested in neuroscience and wanted to do a research project in neurology — specifically looking at the effects of heavy metals on the developing nervous system. So I started that, and worked in his lab for a year, and found the results that I guess you'd expect to find when you feed fruit flies heavy metals — that it really, really impaired the nervous system. The spinal cord had breaks. The neurons were crossing in every which way. And from then I wanted to look not at impairment, but at prevention of impairment.So that's what led me to Alzheimer's. I started reading about Alzheimer's and tried to familiarize myself with the research, and at the same time when I was in the — I was reading in the medical library one day, and I read this article about something called ""purine derivatives."" And they seemed to have cell growth-promoting properties. And being naive about the whole field, I kind of thought, ""Oh, you have cell death in Alzheimer's which is causing the memory deficit, and then you have this compound — purine derivatives — that are promoting cell growth."" And so I thought, ""Maybe if it can promote cell growth, it can inhibit cell death, too."" And so that's the project that I pursued for that year, and it's continuing now as well, and found that a specific purine derivative called ""guanidine"" had inhibited the cell growth by approximately 60 percent. So I presented those results at the International Science Fair, which was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life. And there I was awarded ""Best in the World in Medicine,"" which allowed me to get in, or at least get a foot in the door of the big medical world.And from then on, since I was now in this huge exciting world, I wanted to explore it all. I wanted it all at once, but knew I couldn't really get that. And I stumbled across something called ""cancer stem cells."" And this is really what I want to talk to you about today — about cancer. At first when I heard of cancer stem cells, I didn't really know how to put the two together. I'd heard of stem cells, and I'd heard of them as the panacea of the future — the therapy of many diseases to come in the future, perhaps. But I'd heard of cancer as the most feared disease of our time, so how did the good and bad go together? Last summer I worked at Stanford University, doing some research on cancer stem cells. And while I was doing this, I was reading the cancer literature, trying to — again — familiarize myself with this new medical field. And it seemed that tumors actually begin from a stem cell. This fascinated me. The more I read, the more I looked at cancer differently and almost became less fearful of it.It seems that cancer is a direct result to injury. If you smoke, you damage your lung tissue, and then lung cancer arises. If you drink, you damage your liver, and then liver cancer occurs. And it was really interesting — there were articles correlating if you have a bone fracture, and then bone cancer arises. Because what stem cells are — they're these phenomenal cells that really have the ability to differentiate into any type of tissue. So, if the body is sensing that you have damage to an organ and then it's initiating cancer, it's almost as if this is a repair response. And the cancer, the body is saying the lung tissue is damaged, we need to repair the lung. And cancer is originating in the lung trying to repair — because you have this excessive proliferation of these remarkable cells that really have the potential to become lung tissue. But it's almost as if the body has originated this ingenious response, but can't quite control it. It hasn't yet become fine-tuned enough to finish what has been initiated. So this really, really fascinated me.And I really think that we can't think about cancer — let alone any disease — in such black-and-white terms. If we eliminate cancer the way we're trying to do now, with chemotherapy and radiation, we're bombarding the body or the cancer with toxins, or with radiation, trying to kill it. It's almost as if we're getting back to this starting point. We're removing the cancer cells, but we're revealing the previous damage that the body has tried to fix. Shouldn't we think about manipulation, rather than elimination? If somehow we can cause these cells to differentiate — to become bone tissue, lung tissue, liver tissue, whatever that cancer has been put there to do — it would be a repair process. We'd end up better than we were before cancer. So, this really changed my view of looking at cancer. And while I was reading all these articles about cancer, it seemed that the articles — a lot of them — focused on, you know, the genetics of breast cancer, and the genesis and the progression of breast cancer — tracking the cancer through the body, tracing where it is, where it goes.But it struck me that I'd never heard of cancer of the heart, or cancer of any skeletal muscle for that matter. And skeletal muscle constitutes 50 percent of our body, or over 50 percent of our body. And so at first I kind of thought, ""Well, maybe there's some obvious explanation why skeletal muscle doesn't get cancer — at least not that I know of."" So, I looked further into it, found as many articles as I could, and it was amazing — because it turned out that it was very rare. Some articles even went as far as to say that skeletal muscle tissue is resistant to cancer, and furthermore, not only to cancer, but of metastases going to skeletal muscle. And what metastases are is when the tumor — when a piece — breaks off and travels through the blood stream and goes to a different organ. That's what a metastasis is. It's the part of cancer that is the most dangerous. If cancer was localized, we could likely remove it, or somehow — you know, it's contained. It's very contained. But once it starts moving throughout the body, that's when it becomes deadly. So the fact that not only did cancer not seem to originate in skeletal muscles, but cancer didn't seem to go to skeletal muscle — there seemed to be something here. So these articles were saying, you know, ""Skeletal — metastasis to skeletal muscle — is very rare."" But it was left at that. No one seemed to be asking why.So I decided to ask why. At first — the first thing I did was I emailed some professors who specialized in skeletal muscle physiology, and pretty much said, ""Hey, it seems like cancer doesn't really go to skeletal muscle. Is there a reason for this?"" And a lot of the replies I got were that muscle is terminally differentiated tissue. Meaning that you have muscle cells, but they're not dividing, so it doesn't seem like a good target for cancer to hijack. But then again, this fact that the metastases didn't go to skeletal muscle made that seem unlikely. And furthermore, that nervous tissue — brain — gets cancer, and brain cells are also terminally differentiated. So I decided to ask why. And here's some of, I guess, my hypotheses that I'll be starting to investigate this May at the Sylvester Cancer Institute in Miami. And I guess I'll keep investigating until I get the answers. But I know that in science, once you get the answers, inevitably you're going to have more questions. So I guess you could say that I'll probably be doing this for the rest of my life.Some of my hypotheses are that when you first think about skeletal muscle, there's a lot of blood vessels going to skeletal muscle. And the first thing that makes me think is that blood vessels are like highways for the tumor cells. Tumor cells can travel through the blood vessels. And you think, the more highways there are in a tissue, the more likely it is to get cancer or to get metastases. So first of all I thought, you know, ""Wouldn't it be favorable to cancer getting to skeletal muscle?"" And as well, cancer tumors require a process called angiogenesis, which is really, the tumor recruits the blood vessels to itself to supply itself with nutrients so it can grow. Without angiogenesis, the tumor remains the size of a pinpoint and it's not harmful. So angiogenesis is really a central process to the pathogenesis of cancer.And one article that really stood out to me when I was just reading about this, trying to figure out why cancer doesn't go to skeletal muscle, was that it had reported 16 percent of micro-metastases to skeletal muscle upon autopsy. 16 percent! Meaning that there were these pinpoint tumors in skeletal muscle, but only .16 percent of actual metastases — suggesting that maybe skeletal muscle is able to control the angiogenesis, is able to control the tumors recruiting these blood vessels. We use skeletal muscles so much. It's the one portion of our body — our heart's always beating. We're always moving our muscles. Is it possible that muscle somehow intuitively knows that it needs this blood supply? It needs to be constantly contracting, so therefore it's almost selfish. It's grabbing its blood vessels for itself. Therefore, when a tumor comes into skeletal muscle tissue, it can't get a blood supply, and can't grow.So this suggests that maybe if there is an anti-angiogenic factor in skeletal muscle — or perhaps even more, an angiogenic routing factor, so it can actually direct where the blood vessels grow — this could be a potential future therapy for cancer. And another thing that's really interesting is that there's this whole — the way tumors move throughout the body, it's a very complex system — and there's something called the chemokine network. And chemokines are essentially chemical attractants, and they're the stop and go signals for cancer. So a tumor expresses chemokine receptors, and another organ — a distant organ somewhere in the body — will have the corresponding chemokines, and the tumor will see these chemokines and migrate towards it. Is it possible that skeletal muscle doesn't express this type of molecules? And the other really interesting thing is that when skeletal muscle — there's been several reports that when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what correlates with metastases going to skeletal muscle.And, furthermore, when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what causes chemokines — these signals saying, ""Cancer, you can come to me,"" the ""go signs"" for the tumors — it causes them to highly express these chemokines. So, there's so much interplay here. I mean, there are so many possibilities for why tumors don't go to skeletal muscle. But it seems like by investigating, by attacking cancer, by searching where cancer is not, there has got to be something — there's got to be something — that's making this tissue resistant to tumors. And can we utilize — can we take this property, this compound, this receptor, whatever it is that's controlling these anti-tumor properties and apply it to cancer therapy in general? Now, one thing that kind of ties the resistance of skeletal muscle to cancer — to the cancer as a repair response gone out of control in the body — is that skeletal muscle has a factor in it called ""MyoD."" And what MyoD essentially does is, it causes cells to differentiate into muscle cells. So this compound, MyoD, has been tested on a lot of different cell types and been shown to actually convert this variety of cell types into skeletal muscle cells. So, is it possible that the tumor cells are going to the skeletal muscle tissue, but once in contact inside the skeletal muscle tissue, MyoD acts upon these tumor cells and causes them to become skeletal muscle cells? Maybe tumor cells are being disguised as skeletal muscle cells, and this is why it seems as if it is so rare.It's not harmful; it has just repaired the muscle. Muscle is constantly being used — constantly being damaged. If every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way, cancer occurred — I mean, everybody would have cancer almost. And I hate to say that. But it seems as though muscle cell, possibly because of all its use, has adapted faster than other body tissues to respond to injury, to fine-tune this repair response and actually be able to finish the process which the body wants to finish. I really believe that the human body is very, very smart, and we can't counteract something the body is saying to do.It's different when a bacteria comes into the body — that's a foreign object — we want that out. But when the body is actually initiating a process and we're calling it a disease, it doesn't seem as though elimination is the right solution. So even to go from there, it's possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could almost think of cancer being used as a therapy. If those diseases where tissues are deteriorating — for example Alzheimer's, where the brain, the brain cells, die and we need to restore new brain cells, new functional brain cells — what if we could, in the future, use cancer? A tumor — put it in the brain and cause it to differentiate into brain cells?That's a very far-fetched idea, but I really believe that it may be possible. These cells are so versatile, these cancer cells are so versatile — we just have to manipulate them in the right way. And again, some of these may be far-fetched, but I figured if there's anywhere to present far-fetched ideas, it's here at TED, so thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eva_vertes_looks_to_the_future_of_medicine
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"18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit, so I'm going to dive straight in, right at the point where I get this thing to work. Here we go. I'm going to talk about five different things. I'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable. I'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together, and actually talk about this a bit more than we do. I'm going to talk about feasibility as well, of course. I'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging. And then I'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about, you know, how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong, namely, by actually doing something about it.I'm going to do that in two steps. The first one I'm going to talk about is how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension — which I'm going to define as 30 years, applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start — to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging. Namely, essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year — or indeed, to get sick in the first place. And of course, the last thing I'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step, that point of maybe 30 years life extension.So I'm going to start with why we should. Now, I want to ask a question. Hands up: anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria? That was easy. OK. OK. Hands up: anyone in the audience who's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing? OK. So we all think malaria is a bad thing. That's very good news, because I thought that was what the answer would be. Now the thing is, I would like to put it to you that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging. And here is that characteristic. The only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does.Now, I like in an audience, in Britain especially, to talk about the comparison with foxhunting, which is something that was banned after a long struggle, by the government not very many months ago. I mean, I know I'm with a sympathetic audience here, but, as we know, a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic. And this is actually a rather good comparison, it seems to me. You know, a lot of people said, ""Well, you know, city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time. It's a traditional part of the way of life, and we should be allowed to carry on doing it. It's ecologically sound; it stops the population explosion of foxes."" But ultimately, the government prevailed in the end, because the majority of the British public, and certainly the majority of members of Parliament, came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society.And I think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades. What part of this do people not understand? It's not just about life, of course — (Laughter) — it's about healthy life, you know — getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun. So really, this is how I would like to describe it. It's a global trance. These are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging. And, I mean, OK, I'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless. There are some good points to be made here, things that we ought to be thinking about, forward planning so that nothing goes too — well, so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging.But these are completely crazy, when you actually remember your sense of proportion. You know, these are arguments; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about. But the question is, are they so dangerous — these risks of doing something about aging — that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite, namely, leaving aging as it is? Are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death? You know, if you haven't got an argument that's that strong, then just don't waste my time, is what I say. (Laughter)Now, there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong, and here it is. People worry about overpopulation; they say, ""Well, if we fix aging, no one's going to die to speak of, or at least the death toll is going to be much lower, only from crossing St. Giles carelessly. And therefore, we're not going to be able to have many kids, and kids are really important to most people."" And that's true. And you know, a lot of people try to fudge this question, and give answers like this. I don't agree with those answers. I think they basically don't work. I think it's true, that we will face a dilemma in this respect. We will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate, or a high death rate. A high death rate will, of course, arise from simply rejecting these therapies, in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids.And, I say that that's fine — the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice. What's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future. If we vacillate, hesitate, and do not actually develop these therapies, then we are condemning a whole cohort of people — who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies, but will not be, because we haven't developed them as quickly as we could — we'll be denying those people an indefinite life span, and I consider that that is immoral. That's my answer to the overpopulation question.Right. So the next thing is, now why should we get a little bit more active on this? And the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks. It's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging. Aging is ghastly, but it's inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way to put it out of our minds, and it's rational to do anything that we might want to do, to do that. Like, for example, making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all. But of course, that only works when we have both of these components. And as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear — and we might be in range of doing something about aging — this becomes part of the problem. This pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things. And that's why we have to really talk about this a lot — evangelize, I will go so far as to say, quite a lot — in order to get people's attention, and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard. So that's all I'm going to say about that.I'm now going to talk about feasibility. And the fundamental reason, I think, why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that I'm giving here. A very simple definition. Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place, which is to say, metabolism. This is not a completely tautological statement; it's a reasonable statement. Aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars, and it also happens to us, despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms, because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect.So basically, metabolism, which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next, has side effects. Those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology. That's a fine definition. So we can put it this way: we can say that, you know, we have this chain of events. And there are really two games in town, according to most people, with regard to postponing aging. They're what I'm calling here the ""gerontology approach"" and the ""geriatrics approach."" The geriatrician will intervene late in the day, when pathology is becoming evident, and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time, and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon. Of course, it's a very short-term-ist strategy; it's a losing battle, because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on.The gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface, because, you know, prevention is better than cure. But unfortunately the thing is that we don't understand metabolism very well. In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work — even cells we're not really too good on yet. We've discovered things like, for example, RNA interference only a few years ago, and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work. Basically, gerontology is a fine approach in the end, but it is not an approach whose time has come when we're talking about intervention. So then, what do we do about that? I mean, that's a fine logic, that sounds pretty convincing, pretty ironclad, doesn't it?But it isn't. Before I tell you why it isn't, I'm going to go a little bit into what I'm calling step two. Just suppose, as I said, that we do acquire — let's say we do it today for the sake of argument — the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age, let's say 55. I'm going to call that ""robust human rejuvenation."" OK. What would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today — or equivalently, of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive — would actually live? In order to answer that question — you might think it's simple, but it's not simple. We can't just say, ""Well, if they're young enough to benefit from these therapies, then they'll live 30 years longer."" That's the wrong answer. And the reason it's the wrong answer is because of progress.There are two sorts of technological progress really, for this purpose. There are fundamental, major breakthroughs, and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs. Now, they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames. Fundamental breakthroughs: very hard to predict how long it's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough. It was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun, and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it. But after that, things were pretty steady and pretty uniform. I think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight. We can think, really, that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one, if you like. The incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore.This is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough. And you see it in all sorts of technologies. Computers: you can look at a more or less parallel time line, happening of course a bit later. You can look at medical care. I mean, hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics — you know, the same sort of time frame. So I think that actually step two, that I called a step a moment ago, isn't a step at all. That in fact, the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension, even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive, will be at some sort of cusp. They will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years. In other words, they will be staying ahead of the game. The therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us.This is a very important point for me to get across. Because, you know, most people, when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more, they think that I'm saying that we're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough. They'll never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of, before we have any 200-year-olds. And the same for 300 and 400 and so on. I decided to give this a little name, which is ""longevity escape velocity."" (Laughter) Well, it seems to get the point across.So, these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live, in terms of remaining life expectancy, as measured by their health, for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive. If you're already 100, or even if you're 80 — and an average 80-year-old, we probably can't do a lot for you with these therapies, because you're too close to death's door for the really initial, experimental therapies to be good enough for you. You won't be able to withstand them. But if you're only 50, then there's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and, you know — (Laughter) — eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense, in terms of your youthfulness, both physical and mental, and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes. And of course, if you're a bit younger than that, then you're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes.So this is a genuine conclusion that I come to, that the first 150-year-old — we don't know how old that person is today, because we don't know how long it's going to take to get these first-generation therapies. But irrespective of that age, I'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 — subject of course, to, you know, global catastrophes — is actually, probably, only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old. And that's quite a thought.Alright, so finally I'm going to spend the rest of the talk, my last seven-and-a-half minutes, on step one; namely, how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity? And in order to do that, I need to talk about mice a little bit. I have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation. I'm calling it ""robust mouse rejuvenation,"" not very imaginatively. And this is what it is. I say we're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse, which basically means mice that live about three years on average. We do exactly nothing to them until they're already two years old. And then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them, and with those therapies, we get them to live, on average, to their fifth birthday. So, in other words, we add two years — we treble their remaining lifespan, starting from the point that we started the therapies.The question then is, what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone I talked about earlier for humans? Which we can now, as I've explained, equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity. Secondly, what does it mean for the public's perception of how long it's going to take for us to get to those things, starting from the time we get the mice? And thirdly, the question is, what will it do to actually how much people want it? And it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question, and it's extremely hard to answer. One has to be very speculative, and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation, that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more.I say that's nonsense. I say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this. We need to give our best guess as to the time frame, in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities. So, I say that we have a 50/50 chance of reaching this RHR milestone, robust human rejuvenation, within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation. 15 years from the robust mouse. The public's perception will probably be somewhat better than that. The public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are. So they'll probably think it's five years away. They'll be wrong, but that actually won't matter too much. And finally, of course, I think it's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance I spoke about earlier, the coping strategy. That will be history at this point, because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans, since it's been postponed so very effectively in mice. So we're likely to end up with a very strong change in people's attitudes, and of course that has enormous implications.So in order to tell you now how we're going to get these mice, I'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging. I'm going to use this word ""damage"" to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology. Because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology, the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life, starting before we're born. But it is not part of metabolism itself. And this turns out to be useful. Because we can re-draw our original diagram this way. We can say that, fundamentally, the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage. And I'm going to explain exactly what damage is in concrete biological terms in a moment. And geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology. And the reason it's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate.So there's a third approach, if we look at it this way. We can call it the ""engineering approach,"" and I claim that the engineering approach is within range. The engineering approach does not intervene in any processes. It does not intervene in this process or this one. And that's good because it means that it's not a losing battle, and it's something that we are within range of being able to do, because it doesn't involve improving on evolution. The engineering approach simply says, ""Let's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage — not necessarily repair them completely, but repair them quite a lot, so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist, that causes it to be pathogenic."" We know that this threshold exists, because we don't get age-related diseases until we're in middle age, even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born.Why do I say that we're in range? Well, this is basically it. The point about this slide is actually the bottom. If we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging, we will be here all night, because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another. This list is just for illustration; it is incomplete. The list on the right is also incomplete. It's a list of types of pathology that are age-related, and it's just an incomplete list. But I would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete — this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage, side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end, or that might cause pathology. And there are only seven of them. They're categories of things, of course, but there's only seven of them. Cell loss, mutations in chromosomes, mutations in the mitochondria and so on.First of all, I'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete. Of course one can make a biological argument. One can say, ""OK, what are we made of?"" We're made of cells and stuff between cells. What can damage accumulate in? The answer is: long-lived molecules, because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage, but then the molecule is destroyed — like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis — then the damage is gone, too. It's got to be long-lived molecules. So, these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news, because it means that, you know, we've come a long way in biology in these 20 years, so the fact that we haven't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there's no extension to be done. However, it's better than that; we actually know how to fix them all, in mice, in principle — and what I mean by in principle is, we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade. Some of them are partially implemented already, the ones at the top.I haven't got time to go through them at all, but my conclusion is that, if we can actually get suitable funding for this, then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years, but we do need to get serious about it. We do need to really start trying. So of course, there are some biologists in the audience, and I want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have. You may have been dissatisfied with this talk, but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff. I've published a great deal on this; I cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based, and there's quite a lot of detail there. The detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that I'm predicting here. So if you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong.And of course the main thing is that you shouldn't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because, as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field, you know, you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously. So, you know, you've got to actually do your homework, in order to understand whether this is true.And we'll just end with a few things. One thing is, you know, you'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time, and everyone said, ""Well, it's obviously impossible."" And you know what happened. So, you know, this does happen. We have various strategies — there's the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which is basically an incentive to innovate, and to do what you think is going to work, and you get money for it if you win. There's a proposal to actually put together an institute. This is what's going to take a bit of money. But, I mean, look — how long does it take to spend that on the war in Iraq? Not very long. OK. (Laughter) It's got to be philanthropic, because profits distract biotech, but it's basically got a 90 percent chance, I think, of succeeding in this. And I think we know how to do it. And I'll stop there. Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: OK. I don't know if there's going to be any questions but I thought I would give people the chance. Audience: Since you've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it, why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man? (Laughter)AG: Because I am an old man. I am actually 158. (Laughter) (Applause)Audience: Species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate. However, as far as I know, all the species have evolved to actually die, so when cells divide, the telomerase get shorter, and eventually species die. So, why does — evolution has — seems to have selected against immortality, when it is so advantageous, or is evolution just incomplete?AG: Brilliant. Thank you for asking a question that I can answer with an uncontroversial answer. I'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question, which I happen to agree with, which is that, no, aging is not a product of selection, evolution; [aging] is simply a product of evolutionary neglect. In other words, we have aging because it's hard work not to have aging; you need more genetic pathways, more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly, and that carries on being true the longer you push it out. So, to the extent that evolution doesn't matter, doesn't care whether genes are passed on by individuals, living a long time or by procreation, there's a certain amount of modulation of that, which is why different species have different lifespans, but that's why there are no immortal species.CA: The genes don't care but we do?AG: That's right.Audience: Hello. I read somewhere that in the last 20 years, the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years. If I project that, that would make me think that I would live until 120 if I don't crash on my motorbike. That means that I'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old?AG: If you lose a bit of weight. (Laughter) Your numbers are a bit out. The standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade. So, it's not quite as good as you might think, you might hope. But I intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible.Audience: I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo, and that the brain cells last 80 years or so. If that is indeed true, biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation? If there are cells in my body that live all 80 years, as opposed to a typical, you know, couple of months?AG: There are technical implications certainly. Basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate, especially neurons, but we don't want to replace them any faster than that — or not much faster anyway, because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function. What I said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification. There are species that have no aging — Hydra for example — but they do it by not having a nervous system — and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells.","https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging
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"I'll just take you to Bangladesh for a minute.Before I tell that story, we should ask ourselves the question: Why does poverty exist? I mean, there is plenty of knowledge and scientific breakthroughs. We all live in the same planet, but there's still a great deal of poverty in the world. And I think — so I want to throw a perspective that I have, so that we can assess this project, or any other project, for that matter, to see whether it's contributing or — contributing to poverty or trying to alleviate it.Rich countries have been sending aid to poor countries for the last 60 years. And by and large, this has failed. And you can see this book, written by someone who worked in the World Bank for 20 years, and he finds economic growth in this country to be elusive. By and large, it did not work. So the question is, why is that?In my mind, there is something to learn from the history of Europe. I mean, even here, yesterday I was walking across the street, and they showed three bishops were executed 500 years ago, right across the street from here. So my point is, there's a lot of struggle has gone in Europe, where citizens were empowered by technologies. And they demanded authorities from — to come down from their high horses. And in the end, there's better bargaining between the authorities and citizens, and democracies, capitalism — everything else flourished. And so you can see, the real process of — and this is backed up by this 500-page book — that the authorities came down and citizens got up.But if you look, if you have that perspective, then you can see what happened in the last 60 years. Aid actually did the opposite. It empowered authorities, and, as a result, marginalized citizens. The authorities did not have the reason to make economic growth happen so that they could tax people and make more money for to run their business. Because they were getting it from abroad. And in fact, if you see oil-rich countries, where citizens are not yet empowered, the same thing goes — Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, all sorts of countries. Because the aid and oil or mineral money acts the same way. It empowers authorities, without activating the citizens — their hands, legs, brains, what have you.And if you agree with that, then I think the best way to improve these countries is to recognize that economic development is of the people, by the people, for the people. And that is the real network effect. If citizens can network and make themselves more organized and productive, so that their voices are heard, so then things would improve.And to contrast that, you can see the most important institution in the world, the World Bank, is an organization of the government, by the government, for the governments. Just see the contrast. And that is the perspective I have, and then I can start my story.Of course, how would you empower citizens? There could be all sorts of technologies. And one is cell phones. Recently ""The Economist"" recognized this, but I stumbled upon the idea 12 years ago, and that's what I've been working on. So 12 years ago, I was trying to be an investment banker in New York.We had — quite a few our colleagues were connected by a computer network. And we got more productive because we didn't have to exchange floppy disks; we could update each other more often. But one time it broke down. And it reminded me of a day in 1971. There was a war going on in my country. And my family moved out of an urban place, where we used to live, to a remote rural area where it was safer. And one time my mother asked me to get some medicine for a younger sibling. And I walked 10 miles or so, all morning, to get there, to the medicine man. And he wasn't there, so I walked all afternoon back. So I had another unproductive day.So while I was sitting in a tall building in New York, I put those two experiences together side by side, and basically concluded that connectivity is productivity — whether it's in a modern office or an underdeveloped village. So naturally, I — the implication of that is that the telephone is a weapon against poverty. And if that's the case, then the question is how many telephones did we have at that time?And it turns out, that there was one telephone in Bangladesh for every 500 people. And all those phones were in the few urban places. The vast rural areas, where 100 million people lived, there were no telephones. So just imagine how many man-months or man-years are wasted, just like I wasted a day. If you just multiply by 100 million people, let's say losing one day a month, whatever, and you see a vast amount of resource wasted. And after all, poor countries, like rich countries, one thing we've got equal, is their days are the same length: 24 hours. So if you lose that precious resource, where you are somewhat equal to the richer countries, that's a huge waste.So I started looking for any evidence that — does connectivity really increase productivity? And I couldn't find much, really, but I found this graph produced by the ITU, which is the International Telecommunication Union, based in Geneva. They show an interesting thing. That you see, the horizontal axis is where you place your country. So the United States or the UK would be here, outside. And so the impact of one new telephone, which is on the vertical axis, is very little.But if you come back to a poorer country, where the GNP per capita is, let's say, 500 dollars, or 300 dollars, then the impact is huge: 6,000 dollars. Or 5,000 dollars. The question was, how much did it cost to install a new telephone in Bangladesh? It turns out: 2,000 dollars. So if you spend 2,000 dollars, and let's say the telephone lasts 10 years, and if 5,000 dollars every year — so that's 50,000 dollars.So obviously this was a gadget to have. And of course, if the cost of installing a telephone is going down, because there's a digital revolution going on, then it would be even more dramatic.And I knew a little economics by then — it says Adam Smith taught us that specialization leads to productivity. But how would you specialize? Let's say I'm a fisherman and a farmer. And Chris is a fisherman farmer. Both are generalists. So the point is that we could only — the only way we could depend on each other, is if we can connect with each other. And if we are neighbors, I could just walk over to his house.But then we are limiting our economic sphere to something very small area. But in order to expand that, you need a river, or you need a highway, or you need telephone lines. But in any event, it's connectivity that leads to dependability. And that leads to specialization. That leads to productivity.So the question was, I started looking at this issue, and going back and forth between Bangladesh and New York. There were a lot of reasons people told me why we don't have enough telephones. And one of them is the lacking buying power. Poor people apparently don't have the power to buy.But the point is, if it's a production tool, why do we have to worry about that? I mean, in America, people buy cars, and they put very little money down. They get a car, and they go to work. The work pays them a salary; the salary allows them to pay for the car over time. The car pays for itself.So if the telephone is a production tool, then we don't quite have to worry about the purchasing power. And of course, even if that's true, then what about initial buying power? So then the question is, why can't we have some kind of shared access? In the United States, we have — everybody needs a banking service, but very few of us are trying to buy a bank. So it's — a bank tends to serve a whole community. So we could do that for telephones.And also people told me that we have a lot of important primary needs to meet: food, clothing, shelter, whatever. But again, it's very paternalistic. You should be raising income and let people decide what they want to do with their money.But the real problem is the lack of other infrastructures. See, you need some kind of infrastructure to bring a new thing. For instance, the Internet was booming in the U.S. because there were — there were people who had computers. They had modems. They had telephone lines, so it's very easy to bring in a new idea, like the Internet. But that's what's lacking in a poor country.So for example, we didn't have ways to have credit checks, few banks to collect bills, etc. But that's why I noticed Grameen Bank, which is a bank for poor people, and had 1,100 branches, 12,000 employees, 2.3 million borrowers. And they had these branches. I thought I could put cell towers and create a network.And anyway, to cut the time short — so I started — I first went to them and said, ""You know, perhaps I could connect all your branches and make you more efficient."" But you know, they have, after all, evolved in a country without telephones, so they are decentralized. I mean, of course there might be other good reasons, but this was one of the reasons — they had to be. And so they were not that interested to connect all their branches, and then to be — and rock the boat.So I started focusing. What is it that they really do? So what happens is that somebody borrows money from the bank. She typically buys a cow. The cow gives milk. And she sells the milk to the villagers, and pays off the loan. And this is a business for her, but it's milk for everybody else.And suddenly I realized that a cell phone could be a cow. Because some way she could borrow 200 dollars from the bank, get a phone and have the phone for everybody. And it's a business for her.So I wrote to the bank, and they thought for a while, and they said, ""It's a little crazy, but logical. If you think it can be done, come and make it happen."" So I quit my job; I went back to Bangladesh. I created a company in America called Gonofone, which in Bengali means ""people's phone.""And angel investors in America put in money into that. I flew around the world. After about a million — I mean, I got rejected from lots of places, because I was not only trying to go to a poor country, I was trying to go to the poor of the poor country.After about a million miles, and a meaningful — a substantial loss of hair, I eventually put together a consortium, and — which involved the Norwegian telephone company, which provided the know-how, and the Grameen Bank provided the infrastructure to spread the service.To make the story short, here is the coverage of the country. You can see it's pretty much covered. Even in Bangladesh, there are some empty places. But we are also investing around another 300 million dollars this year to extend that coverage.Now, about that cow model I talked about. There are about 115,000 people who are retailing telephone services in their neighborhoods. And it's serving 52,000 villages, which represent about 80 million people.And these phones are generating about 100 million dollars for the company. And two dollars profit per entrepreneur per day, which is like 700 dollars per year.And of course, it's very beneficial in a lot of ways. It increases income, improves welfare, etc. And the result is, right now, this company is the largest telephone company, with 3.5 million subscribers, 115,000 of these phones I talked about — that produces about a third of the traffic in the network. And 2004, the net profit, after taxes — very serious taxes — was 120 million dollars. And the company contributed about 190 million dollars to the government coffers.And again, here are some of the lessons. ""The government needs to provide economically viable services."" Actually, this is an instance where private companies can provide that. ""Governments need to subsidize private companies."" This is what some people think. And actually, private companies help governments with taxes. ""Poor people are recipients."" Poor people are a resource. ""Services cost too much for the poor."" Their involvement reduces the cost. ""The poor are uneducated and cannot do much."" They are very eager learners and very capable survivors. I've been very surprised. Most of them learn how to operate a telephone within a day. ""Poor countries need aid."" Businesses — this one company has raised the — if the ideal figures are even five percent true, this one company is raising the GNP of the country much more than the aid the country receives. And as I was trying to show you, as far as I'm concerned, aid does damages because it removes the government from its citizens.And this is a new project I have with Dean Kamen, the famous inventor in America. He has produced some power generators, which we are now doing an experiment in Bangladesh, in two villages where cow manure is producing biogas, which is running these generators. And each of these generators is selling electricity to 20 houses each. It's just an experiment. We don't know how far it will go, but it's going on.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/iqbal_quadir_says_mobiles_fight_poverty
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"I want to start with a story, a la Seth Godin, from when I was 12 years old. My uncle Ed gave me a beautiful blue sweater — at least I thought it was beautiful. And it had fuzzy zebras walking across the stomach, and Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru were kind of right across the chest, that were also fuzzy. And I wore it whenever I could, thinking it was the most fabulous thing I owned.Until one day in ninth grade, when I was standing with a number of the football players. And my body had clearly changed, and Matt, who was undeniably my nemesis in high school, said in a booming voice that we no longer had to go far away to go on ski trips, but we could all ski on Mount Novogratz. (Laughter) And I was so humiliated and mortified that I immediately ran home to my mother and chastised her for ever letting me wear the hideous sweater. We drove to the Goodwill and we threw the sweater away somewhat ceremoniously, my idea being that I would never have to think about the sweater nor see it ever again.Fast forward — 11 years later, I'm a 25-year-old kid. I'm working in Kigali, Rwanda, jogging through the steep slopes, when I see, 10 feet in front of me, a little boy — 11 years old — running toward me, wearing my sweater. And I'm thinking, no, this is not possible. But so, curious, I run up to the child — of course scaring the living bejesus out of him — grab him by the collar, turn it over, and there is my name written on the collar of this sweater.I tell that story, because it has served and continues to serve as a metaphor to me about the level of connectedness that we all have on this Earth. We so often don't realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know. I also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be. That this traveled into the Goodwill in Virginia, and moved its way into the larger industry, which at that point was giving millions of tons of secondhand clothing to Africa and Asia. Which was a very good thing, providing low cost clothing. And at the same time, certainly in Rwanda, it destroyed the local retailing industry. Not to say that it shouldn't have, but that we have to get better at answering the questions that need to be considered when we think about consequences and responses.So, I'm going to stick in Rwanda, circa 1985, 1986, where I was doing two things. I had started a bakery with 20 unwed mothers. We were called the ""Bad News Bears,"" and our notion was we were going to corner the snack food business in Kigali, which was not hard because there were no snacks before us. And because we had a good business model, we actually did it, and I watched these women transform on a micro-level. But at the same time, I started a micro-finance bank, and tomorrow Iqbal Quadir is going to talk about Grameen, which is the grandfather of all micro-finance banks, which now is a worldwide movement — you talk about a meme — but then it was quite new, especially in an economy that was moving from barter into trade.We got a lot of things right. We focused on a business model; we insisted on skin in the game. The women made their own decisions at the end of the day as to how they would use this access to credit to build their little businesses, earn more income so they could take care of their families better.What we didn't understand, what was happening all around us, with the confluence of fear, ethnic strife and certainly an aid game, if you will, that was playing into this invisible but certainly palpable movement inside Rwanda, that at that time, 30 percent of the budget was all foreign aid. The genocide happened in 1994, seven years after these women all worked together to build this dream. And the good news was that the institution, the banking institution, lasted. In fact, it became the largest rehabilitation lender in the country. The bakery was completely wiped out, but the lessons for me were that accountability counts — got to build things with people on the ground, using business models where, as Steven Levitt would say, the incentives matter. Understand, however complex we may be, incentives matter.So when Chris raised to me how wonderful everything that was happening in the world, that we were seeing a shift in zeitgeist, on the one hand I absolutely agree with him, and I was so thrilled to see what happened with the G8 — that the world, because of people like Tony Blair and Bono and Bob Geldof — the world is talking about global poverty; the world is talking about Africa in ways I have never seen in my life. It's thrilling. And at the same time, what keeps me up at night is a fear that we'll look at the victories of the G8 — 50 billion dollars in increased aid to Africa, 40 billion in reduced debt — as the victory, as more than chapter one, as our moral absolution.And in fact, what we need to do is see that as chapter one, celebrate it, close it, and recognize that we need a chapter two that is all about execution, all about the how-to. And if you remember one thing from what I want to talk about today, it's that the only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.And it was that — that whole philosophy — that encouraged me to start my current endeavor called ""Acumen Fund,"" which is trying to build some mini-blueprints for how we might do that in water, health and housing in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt. And I want to talk a little bit about that, and some of the examples, so you can see what it is that we're doing. But before I do this — and this is another one of my pet peeves — I want to talk a little bit about who the poor are. Because we too often talk about them as these strong, huge masses of people yearning to be free, when in fact, it's quite an amazing story. On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.That's who we talk about when we think about ""the poor."" If you aggregate it, it's the third largest economy on Earth, and yet most of these people go invisible. Where we typically work, there's people making between one and three dollars a day. Who are these people? They are farmers and factory workers. They work in government offices. They're drivers. They are domestics. They typically pay for critical goods and services like water, like healthcare, like housing, and they pay 30 to 40 times what their middleclass counterparts pay — certainly where we work in Karachi and Nairobi. The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity.So, two examples. One is in India, where there are 240 million farmers, most of whom make less than two dollars a day. Where we work in Aurangabad, the land is extraordinarily parched. You see people on average making 60 cents to a dollar. This guy in pink is a social entrepreneur named Ami Tabar. What he did was see what was happening in Israel, larger approaches, and figure out how to do a drip irrigation, which is a way of bringing water directly to the plant stock. But previously it's only been created for large-scale farms, so Ami Tabar took this and modularized it down to an eighth of an acre. A couple of principles: build small. Make it infinitely expandable and affordable to the poor.This family, Sarita and her husband, bought a 15-dollar unit when they were living in a — literally a three-walled lean-to with a corrugated iron roof. After one harvest, they had increased their income enough to buy a second system to do their full quarter-acre. A couple of years later, I meet them. They now make four dollars a day, which is pretty much middle class for India, and they showed me the concrete foundation they had just laid to build their house. And I swear, you could see the future in that woman's eyes. Something I truly believe.You can't talk about poverty today without talking about malaria bed nets, and I again give Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard huge kudos for bringing to the world this notion of his rage — for five dollars you can save a life. Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars — why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people?The question, though, is not ""Why can't we?"" The question is how can we help Africans do this for themselves? A lot of hurdles. One: production is too low. Two: price is too high. Three: this is a good road in — right near where our factory is located. Distribution is a nightmare, but not impossible. We started by making a 350,000-dollar loan to the largest traditional bed net manufacturer in Africa so that they could transfer technology from Japan and build these long-lasting, five-year nets. Here are just some pictures of the factory.Today, three years later, the company has employed another thousand women. It contributes about 600,000 dollars in wages to the economy of Tanzania. It's the largest company in Tanzania. The throughput rate right now is 1.5 million nets, three million by the end of the year. We hope to have seven million at the end of next year. So the production side is working. On the distribution side, though, as a world, we have a lot of work to do. Right now, 95 percent of these nets are being bought by the U.N., and then given primarily to people around Africa. We're looking at building on some of the most precious resources of Africa: people. Their women.And so I want you to meet Jacqueline, my namesake, 21 years old. If she were born anywhere else but Tanzania, I'm telling you, she could run Wall Street. She runs two of the lines, and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house. She makes about two dollars a day, is creating an education fund, and told me she is not marrying nor having children until these things are completed. And so, when I told her about our idea — that maybe we could take a Tupperware model from the United States, and find a way for the women themselves to go out and sell these nets to others — she quickly started calculating what she herself could make and signed up.We took a lesson from IDEO, one of our favorite companies, and quickly did a prototyping on this, and took Jacqueline into the area where she lives. She brought 10 of the women with whom she interacts together to see if she could sell these nets, five dollars apiece, despite the fact that people say nobody will buy one, and we learned a lot about how you sell things. Not coming in with our own notions, because she didn't even talk about malaria until the very end. First, she talked about comfort, status, beauty. These nets, she said, you put them on the floor, bugs leave your house. Children can sleep through the night; the house looks beautiful; you hang them in the window. And we've started making curtains, and not only is it beautiful, but people can see status — that you care about your children. Only then did she talk about saving your children's lives. A lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how we sell goods and services to the poor.I want to end just by saying that there's enormous opportunity to make poverty history. To do it right, we have to build business models that matter, that are scaleable and that work with Africans, Indians, people all over the developing world who fit in this category, to do it themselves. Because at the end of the day, it's about engagement. It's about understanding that people really don't want handouts, that they want to make their own decisions; they want to solve their own problems; and that by engaging with them, not only do we create much more dignity for them, but for us as well. And so I urge all of you to think next time as to how to engage with this notion and this opportunity that we all have — to make poverty history — by really becoming part of the process and moving away from an us-and-them world, and realizing that it's about all of us, and the kind of world that we, together, want to live in and share. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jacqueline_novogratz_invests_in_ending_poverty
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"Video: Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it's only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what's going on.Sasha Vucinic: It's a great clip, isn't it? And I found that in 29 seconds, it tells more about the power of, and importance of, independent media than I could say in an hour. So I thought that it will be good to start with it. And also start with a little bit of statistics. According to relevant researchers, 83 percent of the population of this planet lives in the societies without independent press. Think about that number: 83 percent of the population on the whole planet does not really know what is going on in their countries. The information they get gets filtered through somebody who either twists that information, or colors that information, does something with it. So they're deprived of understanding their reality. That is just to understand how big and important this problem is. Now those of you who are lucky enough to live in those societies that represent 17 percent, I think should enjoy it until it lasts. You know, Sunday morning, you flick the paper, get your cappuccino. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because as we heard yesterday, countries can lose stars from their flags, but they can also lose press freedom, as I guess Americans among us can tell us more about. But that's totally another and separate topic. So I can go back to my story.My story starts — the story I want to share — starts in 1991. At that time I was running B92, the only independent, for that matter the only electronic media, in the country. And I guess we were sharing — we had that regular life of the only independent media in the country, operating in hostile environment, where government really wants to make your life miserable. And there are different ways. Yeah, it was the usual cocktail: a little bit of threats, a little bit of friendly advice, a little bit of financial police, a little bit of text control, so you always have somebody who never leaves your office. But what they really do, which is very powerful, and that is what governments in the late '90s started doing if they don't like independent media companies — you know, they threaten your advertisers. Once they threaten your advertisers, market forces are actually, you know, destroyed, and the advertisers do not want to come — no matter how much does it make sense for them — do not want to come and advertise. And you have a problem making ends meet.At that time at the beginning of the '90s, we had that problem, which was, you know, survival below one side, but what was really painful for me was, remember, the beginning of the '90s, Yugoslavia is falling apart. We were sitting over there with a country in a downfall, in a slow-motion downfall. And we all had all of that on tapes. We had the ability to understand what was going on. We were actually recording history. The problem was that we had to re-tape that history a week later; because if we did not, we could not afford enough tapes to keep archives of that history. So if I gave you that picture, I don't want to go too long on that. In that context a gentleman came to my office at that time. It was still 1991. He was running a media systems organization which is still in business, the gentleman is still in business. And what did I know at that time about media systems? I would think media systems were organizations, which means they should help you. So I prepared two plans for that meeting, two strategic plans: the small one and the big one. The small one was, I just wanted him to help us get those damn tapes, so we can keep that archive for the next 50 years. The big plan was to ask him for a 1,000,000-dollar loan. Because I thought, I still maintain, that serious and independent media companies are great business. And I thought that B92 will survive and be a great company once Milosevic is gone, which turned out to be true. It's now probably either the biggest or the second biggest media company in the country. And I thought that the only thing that we needed at that time was 1,000,000-dollar loan to take us through those hard times.To make a long story short, the gentleman comes into the office, great suit and tie. I gave him what I thought was a brilliant explanation of the political situation and explained how hard and difficult the war will be. Actually, I underestimated the atrocities, I have to admit. Anyway, after that whole, big, long explanation, the only question he had for me — and this is not a joke — is, are we paying royalties after we broadcast music of Michael Jackson? That was really the only question he had. He left, and I remember being actually very angry at myself because I thought there must be an institution in the world that is providing loans to media companies. It's so obvious, straight in your face, and somebody must have thought of it. Somebody must have started something like that. And I thought, I'm just dumb and I cannot find it. You know, in my defense, there was no Google at that time; you could not just Google in '91. So I thought that that's actually my problem. Now we go from here, fast forward to 1995.I have — I left the country, I have a meeting with George Soros, trying for the third time to convince him that his foundation should invest in something that should operate like a media bank. And basically what I was saying is very simple. You know, forget about charity; it doesn't work. Forget about handouts; 20,000 dollars do not help anybody. What you should do is you should treat media companies as a business. It's business anywhere. Media business, or any other business, it needs to be capitalized. And what these guys need, actually, is access to capital. So third meeting, arguments are pretty well exercised. At the end of the meeting he says, look, it is not going to work; you will never see your money back; but my foundations will put 500,000 dollars so you can test the idea. See that it will not work. He said, I'll give you a rope to hang yourself. (Laughter) I knew two things after that meeting. First, under no circumstances I want to hang myself. And second, that I have no idea how to make it work. You see, at the level of a concept, it was a great concept. But it's one thing to have a concept; it's a totally separate thing to actually make it work.So I had absolutely no idea how that could actually work. Had the wrong idea; I thought that we can be a bank. You see banks — I don't know if there are any bankers over here; I apologize in advance — but it's the best job in the world. You know, you find somebody who is respectable and has a lot of money. You give them more money; they repay you that over a time. You collect interest and do nothing in between. So I thought, why don't we get into that business? (Laughter) So here we are having our first client, brilliant. First independent newspaper in Slovakia. The government cutting them off from all the printing facilities in Bratislava. So here's the daily newspaper that has to be printed 400 kilometers away from the capital. It's a daily newspaper with a deadline of 4 p.m. That means that they have no sports; they have no latest news; circulation goes down. It's a kind of very nice, sophisticated way how to economically strangle a daily newspaper. They come to us with a request for a loan. They want to — the only way for them to survive is to get a printing press. And we said, that's fine; let's meet; you'll bring us your business plan, which eventually they did.We start the meeting. I get these two pieces of paper, not like this, A4 format, so it's much bigger. A lot of numbers there. A lot of numbers. But however you put it, you know, the numbers do not make any sense. And that's the best they could do. We were the best that they could do. So that is how we understood what our method is. It's not a bank. We had to actually go into these companies and earn our return by fixing them — by establishing management systems, by providing all that knowledge, how do you run a business on one side — while they all know how to run, how to create content.Just quickly on the results. Over these 10 years, 40 million dollars in affordable financing, average interest rate five percent to six percent. Lately we are going wild, charging seven percent from time to time. We do it in 17 countries of the developing world. And here is the most stunning number. Return rate — the one that Soros was so worried about — 97 percent. 97 percent of all the scheduled repayments came back to us on time. What do we typically finance? We finance anything that a media company would need, from printing presses to transmitters. What is most important is we do it either in form of loans, equities, lease — whatever is appropriate for, you know, supporting anybody. But what is most important here is, who do we finance? We believe that in the last 10 years companies that we've financed are actually the best media companies in the developing world. That is a ""Who is Who"" list. And I could spend hours talking about them, because they're all kind of heroes. And I can, but I'll give you just, maybe one, and depending on time I may give you two examples who we work with.You see we started working in Eastern and Central Europe, and moved to Russia. Our first loan in Russia was in Chelyabinsk. I'll bet half of you have never heard of that place. In the south of Russia there's a guy called Boris Nikolayevich Kirshin, who is running an independent newspaper there. The city was closed until early '90s because, of all things, they were producing glass for Tupolev planes. Anyway, he's running independent newspaper there. After two years working with us, he becomes the most respected newspaper in that small place. Governor comes to him one day, actually invites him to come to his office. He goes and sees the governor. The governor says, Boris Nikolayevich, I understand you are doing a great job, and you are the most respected newspaper in our district. And I want to offer you a deal. Can you please give me your newspaper for the next nine months, because I have elections — there are elections coming up in nine months. I will not run, but it's very important for me who is going to succeed me. So give me the paper for nine months. I'll give it back to you. I have no interest in being in media business. How much would that cost? Boris Nikolayevich says, ""It's not for sale."" The governor says, ""We will close you."" Boris Nikolayevich says, ""No, you cannot do it."" Six months later the newspaper was closed. Luckily, we had enough time to help Boris Nikolayevich take all the assets out of that company and bring him into a new one, to get all the subscription lists, rehire staff. So what the governor got was an empty shell. But that is what happens if you're in business of independent media, and if you are a banker for independent media. So it sounds like a great story.Somewhere down the road we opened a media management center. We started our media lab, sounds like a real great story. But there is a second angle to that. The second angle, like in this clip. If you take the camera above, you start thinking about these numbers again. 40 million dollars over 10 years spread over 17 countries. That is not too much, is it? It's actually just a drop in the sea. Because when you think about the importance, some of the issues that we were talking about last night — this last session we had about Africa and his hypothetical 50 billion dollars destined for Africa. All of those, not all, half of those problems mentioned last night — government accountability, corruption, how do you fight corruption, giving voice to unheard, to poor — it's why independent media is in business. And it's why it was invented. So from that perspective, what we did is just really one drop in the sea of that need that we can identify. Now ours is just one story.I'm sure that in this room there are, like, 15 other wonderful stories of nonprofits doing spectacular work. Here is where the problem is, and I'll explain to you as well as I can what the problem is. And it's called fundraising. Imagine that this third of this room is filled with people who represent different foundations. Imagine two thirds over here running excellent organizations, doing very important work. Now imagine that every second person over here is deaf, does not hear, and switch the lights off. Now that is how difficult it is to match people from this side of the room with people of that side of the room. So we thought that some kind of a big idea is needed to reform, to totally rethink fundraising. You know, instead of people running in this dark, trying to find their own match, who will be willing, who has the same goals. Instead of all of that we thought there is — something new needs to be invented. And we came up with this idea of issuing bonds, press freedom bonds. If there are investors willing to finance U.S. government budget deficit, why wouldn't we find investors willing to finance press freedom deficit? We've decided to do it this fall; we will issue them, probably in denominations of 1,000 dollars. I don't want to advertise them too much; that's not the point. But the point is, if we ever survive to actually issue them, find enough investors that this can be considered a success, there's nothing stopping the next organization to start to issue bonds next spring. And those can be environmental bonds. And then two weeks later, Iqbal Quadir can issue his electricity in Bangladesh bonds. And before you know it, any social cause can be actually financed in this way.Now we do daydreaming in 11:30 with 55 seconds left. But let's take the idea further. You do it, you start it in the States, because it's, you know, concepts are very, very close to American minds. But you can actually bring it to Europe, too. You can bring it to Asia. You can, once you have all of those different points, you can make it easy for investors. Put all of those bonds at one place and they sit down and click. Once you have more than 10 of them you have to develop some kind of a matrix. What do investors get? On one side financial, on the other side social. So that brings the idea of some kind of rating agency, Morningstar type. It says, you know, social impact over here is spectacular, five stars. Financial, they give you one percent, only one star. Now take it to the last step. Once you have all of that put together, there's not one reason why you couldn't actually have a marketplace for all of that, where you cannot dispose of all of those bonds in a pretty quick way. And in that way you organize the financing so there are no dark rooms, no blind people running around to find each other.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/sasa_vucinic_invests_in_free_press
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"A public, Dewey long ago observed, is constituted through discussion and debate. If we are to call the tyranny of assumptions into question, and avoid doxa, the realm of the unquestioned, then we must be willing to subject our own assumptions to debate and discussion. It is in this spirit that I join into a discussion of one of the critical issues of our time, namely, how to mobilize different forms of capital for the project of state building.To put the assumptions very clearly: capitalism, after 150 years, has become acceptable, and so has democracy. If we looked in the world of 1945 and looked at the map of capitalist economies and democratic polities, they were the rare exception, not the norm. The question now, however, is both about which form of capitalism and which type of democratic participation. But we must acknowledge that this moment has brought about a rare consensus of assumptions. And that provides the ground for a type of action, because consensus of each moment allows us to act. And it is necessary, no matter how fragile or how provisional our consensus, to be able to move forward.But the majority of the world neither benefits from capitalism nor from democratic systems. Most of the globe experiences the state as repressive, as an organization that is concerned about denial of rights, about denial of justice, rather than provision of it. And in terms of experience of capitalism, there are two aspects that the rest of the globe experiences. First, extractive industry. Blood diamonds, smuggled emeralds, timber, that is cut right from under the poorest. Second is technical assistance. And technical assistance might shock you, but it's the worst form of — today — of the ugly face of the developed world to the developing countries. Tens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on building capacity with people who are paid up to 1,500 dollars a day, who are incapable of thinking creatively, or organically.Next assumption — and of course the events of July 7, I express my deep sympathy, and before that, September 11 — have reminded us we do not live in three different worlds. We live in one world. But that's easily said. But we are not dealing with the implications of the one world that we are living in. And that is that if we want to have one world, this one world cannot be based on huge pockets of exclusion, and then inclusion for some. We must now finally come to think about the premises of a truly global world, in relationship to the regime of rights and responsibilities and accountabilities that are truly global in scope. Otherwise we will be missing this open moment in history, where we have a consensus on both the form of politics and the form of economics.What is one of these organizations to pick? We have three critical terms: economy, civil society and the state. I will not deal with those first two, except to say that uncritical transfer of assumptions, from one context to another, can only make for disaster. Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy. The poverty of our knowledge must become the first basis of moving forward, and not imposition of the framework that works on the basis of mathematical modeling, for which I have enormous respect. My colleagues at Johns Hopkins were among the best.Second, instead of debating endlessly about what is the structure of the state, why don't we simplify and say, what are a series of functions that the state in the 21st century must perform? Clare Lockhart and I are writing a book on this; we hope to share that much widely with — and third is that we could actually construct an index to measure comparatively how well these functions that we would agree on are being performed in different places.So what are these functions? We propose 10. And it's legitimate monopoly of means of violence, administrative control, management of public finances, investment in human capital, provision of citizenship rights, provision of infrastructure, management of the tangible and intangible assets of the state through regulation, creation of the market, international agreements, including public borrowing, and then, most importantly, rule of law.I won't elaborate. I hope the questions will give me an opportunity. This is a feasible goal, basically because, contrary to widespread assumption, I would argue that we know how to do this. Who would have imagined that Germany would be either united or democratic today, if you looked at it from the perspective of Oxford of 1943? But people at Oxford prepared for a democratic Germany and engaged in planning. And there are lots of other examples.Now in order to do this — and this brings this group — we have to rethink the notion of capital. The least important form of capital, in this project, is financial capital — money. Money is not capital in most of the developing countries. It's just cash. Because it lacks the institutional, organizational, managerial forms to turn it into capital. And what is required is a combination of physical capital, institutional capital, human capital — and security, of course, is critical, but so is information.Now, the issue that should concern us here — and that's the challenge that I would like to pose to this group — is again, it takes 16 years in your countries to produce somebody with a B.S. degree. It takes 20 years to produce somebody with a Ph.D. The first challenge is to rethink, fundamentally, the issue of the time. Do we need to repeat the modalities that we have inherited? Our educational systems are inherited from the 19th century. What is it that we need to do fundamentally to re-engage in a project, that capital formation is rapid? The absolute majority of the world's population are below 20, and they are growing larger and faster. They need different ways of being approached, different ways of being enfranchised, different ways of being skilled. And that's the first thing.Second is, you're problem solvers, but you're not engaging your global responsibility. You've stayed away from the problems of corruption. You only want clean environments in which to function. But if you don't think through the problems of corruption, who will? You stay away from design for development. You're great designers, but your designs are selfish. It's for your own immediate use. The world in which I operate operates with designs regarding roads, or dams, or provision of electricity that have not been revisited in 60 years. This is not right. It requires thinking.But, particularly, what we need more than anything else from this group is your imagination to be brought to bear on problems the way a meme is supposed to work. As the work on paradigms, long time ago showed — Thomas Kuhn's work — it's in the intersection of ideas that new developments — true breakthroughs — occur. And I hope that this group would be able to deal with the issue of state and development and the empowerment of the majority of the world's poor, through this means. Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: So, Ashraf, until recently, you were the finance minister of Afghanistan, a country right at the middle of much of the world's agenda. Is the country gonna make it? Will democracy flourish? What scares you most?Ashraf Ghani: What scares me most is — is you, lack of your engagement. (Laughter) You asked me. You know I always give the unconventional answer. No. But seriously, the issue of Afghanistan first has to be seen as, at least, a 10- to 20-year perspective. Today the world of globalization is on speed. Time has been compressed. And space does not exist for most people. But in my world — you know, when I went back to Afghanistan after 23 years, space had expanded. Every conceivable form of infrastructure had broken down. I rode — traveled — travel between two cities that used to take three hours now took 12. So the first is when the scale is that, we need to recognize that just the simple things that are infrastructure — it takes six years to deliver infrastructure. In our world. Any meaningful sort of thing. But the modality of attention, or what is happening today, what's happening tomorrow.Second is, when a country has been subjected to one of the most immense, brutal forms of exercise of power — we had the Red Army for 10 continuous years, 110,000 strong, literally terrorizing. The sky: every Afghan sees the sky as a source of fear. We were bombed practically out of existence. Then, tens of thousands of people were trained in terrorism — from all sides. The United States, Great Britain, joined for instance, Egyptian intelligence service to train thousands of people in resistance and urban terrorism. How to turn a bicycle into an instrument of terror. How to turn a donkey, a carthorse, anything. And the Russians, equally. So, when violence erupts in a country like Afghanistan, it's because of that legacy. But we have to understand that we've been incredibly lucky. I mean, I really can't believe how lucky I am here, standing in front of you, speaking. When I joined as finance minister, I thought that the chances of my living more than three years would not be more than five percent. Those were the risks. They were worth it.I think we can make it, and the reason we can make it is because of the people. You see, because, I mean — I give you one statistic. 91 percent of the men in Afghanistan, 86 percent of the women, listen to at least three radio stations a day. In terms of their discourse, in terms of their sophistication of knowledge of the world, I think that I would dare say, they're much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans — because the world matters to them. And what is their predominant concern? Abandonment. Afghans have become deeply internationalist.You know, when I went back in December of 2001, I had absolutely no desire to work with the Afghan government because I'd lived as a nationalist. And I told them — my people, with the Americans here — separate. Yes, I have an advisory position with the U.N. I went through 10 Afghan provinces very rapidly. And everybody was telling me it was a different world. You know, they engage. They see engagement, global engagement, as absolutely necessary to the future of the ordinary people. And the thing that the ordinary Afghan is most concerned with is — Clare Lockhart is here, so I'll recite a discussion she had with an illiterate woman in Northern Afghanistan. And that woman said she didn't care whether she had food on her table. What she worried about was whether there was a plan for the future, where her children could really have a different life. That gives me hope. CA: How is Afghanistan going to provide alternative income to the many people who are making their living off the drugs trade?AG: Certainly. Well, the first is, instead of sending a billion dollars on drug eradication and paying it to a couple of security companies, they should give this hundred billion dollars to 50 of the most critically innovative companies in the world to ask them to create one million jobs. The key to the drug eradication is jobs. Look, there's a very little known fact: countries that have a legal average income per capita of 1,000 dollars don't produce drugs.Second, textile. Trade is the key, not aid. The U.S. and Europe should give us a zero percent tariff. The textile industry is incredibly mobile. If you want us to be able to compete with China and to attract investment, we could probably attract four to six billion dollars quite easily in the textile sector, if there was zero tariffs — would create the type of job. Cotton does not compete with opium; a t-shirt does. And we need to understand, it's the value chain. Look, the ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of hearing about microcredit. It is important, but what the ordinary women and men who engage in micro-production want is global access. They don't want to sell to the charity bazaars that are only for foreigners — and the same bloody shirt embroidered time and again. What we want is a partnership with the Italian design firms. Yeah, we have the best embroiderers in the world! Why can't we do what was done with northern Italy? With the Put Out system? So I think economically, the critical issue really is to now think through.And what I will say here is that aid doesn't work. You know, the aid system is broken. The aid system does not have the knowledge, the vision, the ability. I'm all for it; after all, I raised a lot of it. Yeah, to be exact, you know, I managed to persuade the world that they had to give my country 27.5 billion. They didn't want to give us the money.CA: And it still didn't work?AG: No. It's not that it didn't work. It's that a dollar of private investment, in my judgment, is equal at least to 20 dollars of aid, in terms of the dynamic that it generates. Second is that one dollar of aid could be 10 cents; it could be 20 cents; or it could be four dollars. It depends on what form it comes, what degrees of conditionalities are attached to it. You know, the aid system, at first, was designed to benefit entrepreneurs of the developed countries, not to generate growth in the poor countries. And this is, again, one of those assumptions — the way car seats are an assumption that we've inherited in governments, and doors. You would think that the US government would not think that American firms needed subsidizing to function in developing countries, provide advice, but they do. There's an entire weight of history vis-a-vis aid that now needs to be reexamined. If the goal is to build states that can credibly take care of themselves — and I'm putting that proposition equally; you know I'm very harsh on my counterparts — aid must end in each country in a definable period. And every year there must be progress on mobilization of domestic revenue and generation of the economy. Unless that kind of compact is entered into, you will not be able to sustain the consensus.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ashraf_ghani_on_rebuilding_broken_states
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"I want to start off by saying, Houston, we have a problem. We're entering a second generation of no progress in terms of human flight in space. In fact, we've regressed. We stand a very big chance of losing our ability to inspire our youth to go out and continue this very important thing that we as a species have always done. And that is, instinctively we've gone out and climbed over difficult places, went to more hostile places, and found out later, maybe to our surprise, that that's the reason we survived. And I feel very strongly that it's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that think that it's OK to look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration; they need to look forward to colonization; they need to look forward to breakthroughs. We need to inspire them, because they need to lead us and help us survive in the future.I'm particularly troubled that what NASA's doing right now with this new Bush doctrine to — for this next decade and a half — oh shoot, I screwed up. We have real specific instructions here not to talk about politics.(Laughter)What we're looking forward to is —(Applause)what we're looking forward to is not only the inspiration of our children, but the current plan right now is not really even allowing the most creative people in this country — the Boeing's and Lockheed's space engineers — to go out and take risks and try new stuff. We're going to go back to the moon ... 50 years later? And we're going to do it very specifically planned to not learn anything new. I'm really troubled by that. But anyway that's — the basis of the thing that I want to share with you today, though, is that right back to where we inspire people who will be our great leaders later. That's the theme of my next 15 minutes here. And I think that the inspiration begins when you're very young: three-year-olds, up to 12-, 14-year-olds. What they look at is the most important thing.Let's take a snapshot at aviation. And there was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened. It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, ""Ooh, hey, I can do that."" There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousand of pilots. Airplanes were invented by natural selection. Now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today, but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes. There were probably at least 30,000 different things tried, and when they crash and kill the pilot, don't try that again. The ones that flew and landed OK because there were no trained pilots who had good flying qualities by definition. So we, by making a whole bunch of attempts, thousands of attempts, in that four-year time period, we invented the concepts of the airplanes that we fly today. And that's why they're so safe, as we gave it a lot of chance to find what's good. That has not happened at all in space flying. There's only been two concepts tried — two by the U.S. and one by the Russians.Well, who was inspired during that time period? Aviation Week asked me to make a list of who I thought were the movers and shakers of the first 100 years of aviation. And I wrote them down and I found out later that every one of them was a little kid in that wonderful renaissance of aviation. Well, what happened when I was a little kid was — some pretty heavy stuff too. The jet age started: the missile age started. Von Braun was on there showing how to go to Mars — and this was before Sputnik. And this was at a time when Mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than it is now. We thought there'd be animals there; we knew there were plants there; the colors change, right? But, you know, NASA screwed that up because they've sent these robots and they've landed it only in the deserts.(Laughter)If you look at what happened — this little black line is as fast as man ever flew, and the red line is top-of-the-line military fighters and the blue line is commercial air transport. You notice here's a big jump when I was a little kid — and I think that had something to do with giving me the courage to go out and try something that other people weren't having the courage to try. Well, what did I do when I was a kid? I didn't do the hotrods and the girls and the dancing and, well, we didn't have drugs in those days. But I did competition model airplanes. I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around the world Voyager. I founded another company in '82, which is my company now. And we have developed more than one new type of airplane every year since 1982. And there's a lot of them that I actually can't show you on this chart.The most impressive airplane ever, I believe, was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet. Stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly, taken out of service. We retreated in '98 back to something that was developed in '56. What? The most impressive spaceship ever, I believe, was a Grumman Lunar Lander. It was a — you know, it landed on the moon, take off of the moon, didn't need any maintenance guys — that's kind of cool. We've lost that capability. We abandoned it in '72. This thing was designed three years after Gagarin first flew in space in 1961. Three years, and we can't do that now. Crazy.Talk very briefly about innovation cycles, things that grow, have a lot of activity; they die out when they're replaced by something else. These things tend to happen every 25 years. 40 years long, with an overlap. You can put that statement on all kinds of different technologies. The interesting thing — by the way, the speed here, excuse me, higher-speed travel is the title of these innovation cycles. There is none here. These two new airplanes are the same speed as the DC8 that was done in 1958. Here's the biggie, and that is, you don't have innovation cycles if the government develops and the government uses it. You know, a good example, of course, is the DARPA net. Computers were used for artillery first, then IRS. But when we got it, now you have all the level of activity, all the benefit from it. Private sector has to do it. Keep that in mind. I put down innovation — I've looked for innovation cycles in space; I found none.The very first year, starting when Gagarin went in space, and a few weeks later Alan Shepherd, there were five manned space flights in the world — the very first year. In 2003, everyone that the United States sent to space was killed. There were only three or four flights in 2003. In 2004, there were only two flights: two Russian Soyuz flights to the international manned station. And I had to fly three in Mojave with my little group of a couple dozen people in order to get to a total of five, which was the number the same year back in 1961. There is no growth. There's no activity. There's no nothing.This is a picture here taken from SpaceShipOne. This is a picture here taken from orbit. Our goal is to make it so that you can see this picture and really enjoy that. We know how to do it for sub-orbital flying now, do it safe enough — at least as safe as the early airlines — so that can be done. And I think I want to talk a little bit about why we had the courage to go out and try that as a small company.Well, first of all, what's going to happen next? The first industry will be a high volume, a lot of players. There's another one announced just last week. And it will be sub-orbital. And the reason it has to be sub-orbital is, there is not solutions for adequate safety to fly the public to orbit. The governments have been doing this — three governments have been doing this for 45 years, and still four percent of the people that have left the atmosphere have died. That's — You don't want to run a business with that kind of a safety record. It'll be very high volume; we think 100,000 people will fly by 2020. I can't tell you when this will start, because I don't want my competition to know my schedule. But I think once it does, we will find solutions, and very quickly, you'll see those resort hotels in orbit. And that real easy thing to do, which is a swing around the moon so you have this cool view. And that will be really cool. Because the moon doesn't have an atmosphere — you can do an elliptical orbit and miss it by 10 feet if you want. Oh, it's going to be so much fun.(Laughter)OK. My critics say, ""Hey, Rutan's just spending a lot of these billionaires' money for joyrides for billionaires. What's this? This is not a transportation system; it's just for fun."" And I used to be bothered by that, and then I got to thinking, well, wait a minute. I bought my first Apple computer in 1978 and I bought it because I could say, ""I got a computer at my house and you don't. 'What do you use it for?' Come over. It does Frogger."" OK.(Laughter)Not the bank's computer or Lockheed's computer, but the home computer was for games. For a whole decade it was for fun — we didn't even know what it was for. But what happened, the fact that we had this big industry, big development, big improvement and capability and so on, and they get out there in enough homes — we were ripe for a new invention. And the inventor is in this audience. Al Gore invented the Internet and because of that, something that we used for a whole year — excuse me — a whole decade for fun, became everything — our commerce, our research, our communication and, if we let the Google guys think for another couple weekends, we can add a dozen more things to the list. (Laughter) And it won't be very long before you won't be able to convince kids that we didn't always have computers in our homes. So fun is defendable.OK, I want to show you kind of a busy chart, but in it is my prediction with what's going to happen. And in it also brings up another point, right here. There's a group of people that have come forward — and you don't know all of them — but the ones that have come forward were inspired as young children, this little three- to 15-year-old age, by us going to orbit and going to the moon here, right in this time period. Paul Allen, Elan Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, the Ansari family, which is now funding the Russians' sub-orbital thing, Bob Bigelow, a private space station, and Carmack. These people are taking money and putting it in an interesting area, and I think it's a lot better than they put it in an area of a better cell phone or something — but they're putting it in very — areas and this will lead us into this kind of capability, and it will lead us into the next really big thing and it will allow us to explore. And I think eventually it will allow us to colonize and to keep us from going extinct.They were inspired by big progress. But look at the progress that's going on after that. There were a couple of examples here. The military fighters had a — highest-performance military airplane was the SR71. It went a whole life cycle, got too rusty to fly, and was taken out of service. The Concorde doubled the speed for airline travel. It went a whole life cycle without competition, took out of service. And we're stuck back here with the same kind of capability for military fighters and commercial airline travel that we had back in the late '50s.But something is out there to inspire our kids now. And I'm talking about if you've got a baby now, or if you've got a 10-year-old now. What's out there is there's something really interesting going to happen here. Relatively soon, you'll be able to buy a ticket and fly higher and faster than the highest-performance military operational airplane. It's never happened before. The fact that they have stuck here with this kind of performance has been, well, you know, you win the war in 12 minutes; why do you need something better? But I think when you guys start buying tickets and flying sub-orbital flights to space, very soon — wait a minute, what's happening here, we'll have military fighters with sub-orbital capability, and I think very soon this. But the interesting thing about it is the commercial guys are going to go first. OK, I look forward to a new ""capitalist's space race,"" let's call it.You remember the space race in the '60s was for national prestige, because we lost the first two milestones. We didn't lose them technically. The fact that we had the hardware to put something in orbit when we let Von Braun fly it — you can argue that's not a technical loss. Sputnik wasn't a technical loss, but it was a prestige loss. America — the world saw America as not being the leader in technology, and that was a very strong thing. And then we flew Alan Shepherd weeks after Gagarin, not months or decades, or whatever. So we had the capability. But America lost. We lost. And because of that, we made a big jump to recover it.Well, again, what's interesting here is we've lost to the Russians on the first couple of milestones already. You cannot buy a ticket commercially to fly into space in America — can't do it. You can buy it in Russia. You can fly with Russian hardware. This is available because a Russian space program is starving, and it's nice for them to get 20 million here and there to take one of the seats. It's commercial. It can be defined as space tourism. They are also offering a trip to go on this whip around the moon, like Apollo 8 was done. 100 million bucks — hey, I can go to the moon. But, you know, would you have thought back in the '60s, when the space race was going on, that the first commercial capitalist-like thing to do to buy a ticket to go to the moon would be in Russian hardware? And would you have thought, would the Russians have thought, that when they first go to the moon in their developed hardware, the guys inside won't be Russians? Maybe it'll probably be a Japanese or an American billionaire? Well, that's weird: you know, it really is. But anyway, I think we need to beat them again.I think what we'll do is we'll see a successful, very successful, private space flight industry. Whether we're first or not really doesn't matter. The Russians actually flew a supersonic transport before the Concorde. And then they flew a few cargo flights, and took it out of service. I think you kind of see the same kind of parallel when the commercial stuff is offered.OK, we'll talk just a little bit about commercial development for human space flight. This little thing says here: five times what NASA's doing by 2020. I want to tell you, already there's about 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion investment in private space flight that is not government at all — already, worldwide. If you read — if you Google it, you'll find about half of that money, but there's twice of that being committed out there — not spent yet, but being committed and planned for the next few years. Hey, that's pretty big. I'm predicting, though, as profitable as this industry is going to be — and it certainly is profitable when you fly people at 200,000 dollars on something that you can actually operate at a tenth of that cost, or less — this is going to be very profitable. I predict, also, that the investment that will flow into this will be somewhere around half of what the U.S. taxpayer spends for NASA's manned spacecraft work. And every dollar that flows into that will be spent more efficiently by a factor of 10 to 15. And what that means is before we know it, the progress in human space flight, with no taxpayer dollars, will be at a level of about five times as much as the current NASA budgets for human space flight. And that is because it's us. It's private industry. You should never depend on the government to do this sort of stuff — and we've done it for a long time. The NACA, before NASA, never developed an airliner and never ran an airline. But NASA is developing the space liner, always has, and runs the only space line, OK. And we've shied away from it because we're afraid of it. But starting back in June of 2004, when I showed that a little group out there actually can do it, can get a start with it, everything changed after that time.OK, thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/burt_rutan_sees_the_future_of_space
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"This is me. My name is Ben Saunders. I specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places.On May 11th last year, I stood alone at the North geographic Pole. I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America, five-and-a-half thousand square miles. More than 2,000 people have climbed Everest. 12 people have stood on the moon. Including me, only four people have skied solo to the North Pole. And I think the reason for that — (Applause) — thank you — I think the reason for that is that it's — it's — well, it's as Chris said, bonkers. It's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability. I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back. 800 miles in 10 weeks. And I was dragging all the food I needed, the supplies, the equipment, sleeping bag, one change of underwear — everything I needed for nearly three months. (Laughter) What we're going to try and do today, in the 16 and a bit minutes I've got left, is to try and answer three questions. The first one is, why? The second one is, how do you go to the loo at minus 40? ""Ben, I've read somewhere that at minus 40, exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute, so how do you answer the call of nature?"" I don't want to answer these now. I'll come on to them at the end. Third one: how do you top that? What's next?It all started back in 2001. My first expedition was with a guy called Pen Hadow — enormously experienced chap. This was like my polar apprenticeship. We were trying to ski from this group of islands up here, Severnaya Zemlya, to the North Pole. And the thing that fascinates me about the North Pole, geographic North Pole, is that it's slap bang in the middle of the sea. This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean. I'd spoken to all the experts. I'd read lots of books. I studied maps and charts. But I realized on the morning of day one that I had no idea exactly what I'd let myself in for.I was 23 years old. No one my age had attempted anything like this, and pretty quickly, almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. We were attacked by a polar bear on day two. I had frostbite in my left big toe. We started running very low on food. We were both pretty hungry, losing lots of weight. Some very unusual weather conditions, very difficult ice conditions. We had decidedly low-tech communications. We couldn't afford a satellite phone, so we had HF radio. You can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent. There's a wire dangling down either side. That was our HF radio antenna. We had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months. Ultimately, we ran out of time. We'd skied 400 miles. We were just over 200 miles left to go to the Pole, and we'd run out of time. We were too late into the summer; the ice was starting to melt; we spoke to the Russian helicopter pilots on the radio, and they said, ""Look boys, you've run out of time. We've got to pick you up."" And I felt that I had failed, wholeheartedly. I was a failure.The one goal, the one dream I'd had for as long as I could remember — I hadn't even come close. And skiing along that first trip, I had two imaginary video clips that I'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough, just to keep my motivation going. The first one was reaching the Pole itself. I could see vividly, I suppose, being filmed out of the door of a helicopter, there was, kind of, rock music playing in the background, and I had a ski pole with a Union Jack, you know, flying in the wind. I could see myself sticking the flag in a pole, you know — ah, glorious moment — the music kind of reaching a crescendo. The second video clip that I imagined was getting back to Heathrow airport, and I could see again, vividly, the camera flashbulbs going off, the paparazzi, the autograph hunters, the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal. And of course, neither of these things happened. We didn't get to the Pole, and we didn't have any money to pay anyone to do the PR, so no one had heard of this expedition.And I got back to Heathrow. My mum was there; my brother was there; my granddad was there — had a little Union Jack — (Laughter) — and that was about it. I went back to live with my mum. I was physically exhausted, mentally an absolute wreck, considered myself a failure. In a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition, and lying on my mum's sofa, day in day out, watching daytime TV. My brother sent me a text message, an SMS — it was a quote from the ""Simpsons."" It said, ""You tried your hardest and failed miserably. The lesson is: don't even try."" (Laughter)Fast forward three years. I did eventually get off the sofa, and start planning another expedition. This time, I wanted to go right across, on my own this time, from Russia, at the top of the map, to the North Pole, where the sort of kink in the middle is, and then on to Canada. No one has made a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean on their own. Two Norwegians did it as a team in 2000. No one's done it solo. Very famous, very accomplished Italian mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, tried it in 1995, and he was rescued after a week. He described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. So for some reason, this was what I wanted to have a crack at, but I knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece, let alone make it across to Canada, I had to take a radical approach. This meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off, sub-two-gram toothbrush, to working with one of the world's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new, revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch: 6,000 calories a day.And the expedition started in February last year. Big support team. We had a film crew, a couple of logistics people with us, my girlfriend, a photographer. At first it was pretty sensible. We flew British Airways to Moscow. The next bit in Siberia to Krasnoyarsk, on a Russian internal airline called KrasAir, spelled K-R-A-S. The next bit, we'd chartered a pretty elderly Russian plane to fly us up to a town called Khatanga, which was the sort of last bit of civilization. Our cameraman, who it turned out was a pretty nervous flier at the best of times, actually asked the pilot, before we got on the plane, how long this flight would take, and the pilot — Russian pilot — completely deadpan, replied, ""Six hours — if we live."" (Laughter) We got to Khatanga. I think the joke is that Khatanga isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there. (Laughter) It was supposed to be an overnight stay. We were stuck there for 10 days. There was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter, so we were stuck. We couldn't move. Finally, morning of day 11, we got the all-clear, loaded up the helicopters — two helicopters flying in tandem — dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice. We had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming, photography; while the helicopter was still there, I did an interview on the satellite phone; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter, wham, the door closed, and I was alone.And I don't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice. All I could think about was running back up to the door, banging on the door, and saying, ""Look guys, I haven't quite thought this through."" (Laughter) To make things worse, you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen; that's a full moon.Because we'd been held up in Russia, of course, the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides; when you're standing on the frozen surface of the sea, high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen — the ice is going to start moving around a bit. I was, you can see there, pulling two sledges. Grand total in all, 95 days of food and fuel, 180 kilos — that's almost exactly 400 pounds. When the ice was flat or flattish, I could just about pull both. When the ice wasn't flat, I didn't have a hope in hell. I had to pull one, leave it, and go back and get the other one. Literally scrambling through what's called pressure ice — the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean, the wind and the tides. NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began. And it's always drifting. The pack ice is always drifting. I was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks I was alone last year, and I was drifting backwards most of the time. My record was minus 2.5 miles. I got up in the morning, took the tent down, skied north for seven-and-a-half hours, put the tent up, and I was two and a half miles further back than when I'd started. I literally couldn't keep up with the drift of the ice.(Video): So it's day 22. I'm lying in the tent, getting ready to go. The weather is just appalling — oh, drifted back about five miles in the last — last night. Later in the expedition, the problem was no longer the ice. It was a lack of ice — open water. I knew this was happening. I knew the Artic was warming. I knew there was more open water. And I had a secret weapon up my sleeve. This was my little bit of bio-mimicry. Polar bears on the Artic Ocean move in dead straight lines. If they come to water, they'll climb in, swim across it. So we had a dry suit developed — I worked with a team in Norway — based on a sort of survival suit — I suppose, that helicopter pilots would wear — that I could climb into. It would go on over my boots, over my mittens, it would pull up around my face,  and seal pretty tightly around my face. And this meant I could ski over very thin ice, and if I fell through, it wasn't the end of the world. It also meant, if the worst came to the worst, I could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me. Some pretty radical technology, a radical approach —but it worked perfectly.Another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology. In 1912, Shackleton's Endurance expedition — there was — one of his crew, a guy called Thomas Orde-Lees. He said, ""The explorers of 2012, if there is anything left to explore, will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes."" Well, Orde-Lees guessed wrong by about eight years. This is my pocket wireless telephone, Iridium satellite phone. The wireless telescope was a digital camera I had tucked in my pocket. And every single day of the 72 days I was alone on the ice, I was blogging live from my tent, sending back a little diary piece, sending back information on the distance I'd covered — the ice conditions, the temperature — and a daily photo. Remember, 2001, we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world. Last year, blogging live from an expedition that's been described as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. It wasn't all high-tech. This is navigating in what's called a whiteout. When you get lots of mist, low cloud, the wind starts blowing the snow up. You can't see an awful lot. You can just see, there's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles. I'd navigate using the direction of the wind. So, kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech.I got to the Pole on the 11th of May. It took me 68 days to get there from Russia, and there is nothing there. (Laughter). There isn't even a pole at the Pole. There's nothing there, purely because it's sea ice. It's drifting. Stick a flag there, leave it there, pretty soon it will drift off, usually towards Canada or Greenland. I knew this, but I was expecting something. Strange mixture of feelings: it was extremely warm by this stage, a lot of open water around, and of course, elated that I'd got there under my own steam, but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to Canada, which was still 400 miles away, were slim at best. The only proof I've got that I was there is a blurry photo of my GPS, the little satellite navigation gadget. You can just see — there's a nine and a string of zeros here. Ninety degrees north — that is slap bang in the North Pole. I took a photo of that. Sat down on my sledge. Did a sort of video diary piece. Took a few photos. I got my satellite phone out. I warmed the battery up in my armpit. I dialed three numbers. I dialed my mum. I dialed my girlfriend. I dialed the CEO of my sponsor. And I got three voicemails. (Laughter) (Video): Ninety. It's a special feeling. The entire planet is rotating beneath my feet. The — the whole world underneath me. I finally got through to my mum. She was at the queue of the supermarket. She started crying. She asked me to call her back. (Laughter)I skied on for a week past the Pole. I wanted to get as close to Canada as I could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue. This was the last day I had on the ice. When I spoke to the — my project management team, they said, ""Look, Ben, conditions are getting too dangerous. There are huge areas of open water just south of your position. We'd like to pick you up. Ben, could you please look for an airstrip?"" This was the view outside my tent when I had this fateful phone call. I'd never tried to build an airstrip before. Tony, the expedition manager, he said, ""Look Ben, you've got to find 500 meters of flat, thick safe ice."" The only bit of ice I could find — it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip — was exactly 473 meters. I could measure it with my skis. I didn't tell Tony that. I didn't tell the pilots that. I thought, it'll have to do. (Video): Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.It just about worked. A pretty dramatic landing — the plane actually passed over four times, and I was a bit worried it wasn't going to land at all. The pilot, I knew, was called Troy. I was expecting someone called Troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy. I was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed — a pretty emotional moment. So I thought, I've got to compose myself for Troy. I'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type. The plane taxied up to where I was standing. The door opened. This guy jumped out. He's about that tall. He said, ""Hi, my name is Troy."" (Laughter). The co-pilot was a lady called Monica. She sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper. They were the least macho people I've ever met, but they made my day. Troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice; we took a few photos. He climbed up the ladder. He said, ""Just — just get in the back."" He threw his cigarette out as he got on the front, and I climbed in the back. (Laughter) Taxied up and down the runway a few times, just to flatten it out a bit, and he said, ""Right, I'm going to — I'm going to give it a go."" And he — I've now learned that this is standard practice, but it had me worried at the time. He put his hand on the throttle. You can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit. It's that little bar there. He put his hand on the throttle. Monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his. I thought, ""God, here we go. We're, we're — this is all or nothing."" Rammed it forwards. Bounced down the runway. Just took off. One of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway, banking. I could see into the cockpit, Troy battling the controls, and he just took one hand off, reached back, flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit, and it was the ""fasten seat belt"" sign you can see on the wall. (Laughter) And only from the air did I see the big picture. Of course, when you're on the ice, you only ever see one obstacle at a time, whether it's a pressure ridge or there's a bit of water. This is probably why I didn't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip. I mean, it really was starting to break up.Why? I'm not an explorer in the traditional sense. I'm not skiing along drawing maps; everyone knows where the North Pole is. At the South Pole there's a big scientific base. There's an airstrip. There's a cafe and there's a tourist shop. For me, this is about exploring human limits, about exploring the limits of physiology, of psychology and of technology. They're the things that excite me. And it's also about potential, on a personal level. This, for me, is a chance to explore the limits — really push the limits of my own potential, see how far they stretch. And on a wider scale, it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential, just doing three or four or five percent of what they're truly capable of. So, on a wider scale, I hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential, and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet. That's as close as I can come to summing that up.The next question is, how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40? The answer, of course, to which is a trade secret — and the last question, what's next? As quickly as possible, if I have a minute left at the end, I'll go into more detail. What's next: Antarctica. It's the coldest, highest, windiest and driest continent on Earth. Late 1911, early 1912, there was a race to be the first to the South Pole: the heart of the Antarctic continent. If you include the coastal ice shelves, you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf — it's the big one down here — the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France. Antarctica, if you include the ice shelves, is twice the size of Australia — it's a big place. And there's a race to get to the Pole between Amundsen, the Norwegian — Amundsen had dog sleds and huskies — and Scott, the British guy, Captain Scott. Scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs, all of which went wrong, and Scott and his team of four people ended up on foot. They got to the Pole late January 1912 to find a Norwegian flag already there. There was a tent, a letter to the Norwegian king. And they turned around, headed back to the coast, and all five of them died on the return journey. Since then, no one has ever skied — this was 93 years ago — since then, no one has ever skied from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole and back. Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing — no one has ever made a return journey. So that's the plan. Two of us are doing it. That's pretty much it.One final thought before I get to the toilet bit, is — is, I have a — and I meant to scan this and I've forgotten — but I have a — I have a school report. I was 13 years old, and it's framed above my desk at home. It says, ""Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile."" (Laughter) (Applause) I think if I've learned anything, it's this: that no one else is the authority on your potential. You're the only person that decides how far you go and what you're capable of. Ladies and gentlemen, that's my story. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_saunders_skis_to_the_north_pole
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"Well, as Alexander Graham Bell famously said on his first successful telephone call, ""Hello, is that Domino's Pizza?"" (Laughter) I just really want to thank you very much. As another famous man, Jerry Garcia, said, ""What a strange, long trip."" And he should have said, ""What a strange, long trip it's about to become."" At this very moment, you are viewing my upper half. My lower half is appearing at a different conference (Laughter) in a different country. You can, it turns out, be in two places at once. But still, I'm sorry I can't be with you in person. I'll explain at another time.And though I'm a rock star, I just want to assure you that none of my wishes will include a hot tub. But what really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution — this revolution — is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop. If you wanted to make a film, you needed a mass of equipment and a Hollywood budget. Now, you need a camera that fits in your palm, and a couple of bucks for a blank DVD. Imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints. And that really, really excites me. I'm excited when I glimpse that kind of thinking writ large.What I would like to see is idealism decoupled from all constraints. Political, economic, psychological, whatever. The geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world. From the ease with which you swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged. And that's actually what I'd like to talk about today. First, though, I should probably explain why, and how, I got to this place. It's a journey that started 20 years ago. You may remember that song, ""We Are the World,"" or, ""Do They Know It's Christmas?"" Band Aid, Live Aid. Another very tall, grizzled rock star, my friend Sir Bob Geldof, issued a challenge to ""feed the world."" It was a great moment, and it utterly changed my life. That summer, my wife, Ali, and myself went to Ethiopia. We went on the quiet to see for ourselves what was going on. We lived in Ethiopia for a month, working at an orphanage. The children had a name for me. They called me, ""The girl with the beard.""(Laughter)Don't ask. Anyway, we found Africa to be a magical place. Big skies, big hearts, big, shining continent. Beautiful, royal people. Anybody who ever gave anything to Africa got a lot more back. Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ""Would you take my son with you?"" He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die. It was the middle of that awful famine. Well, I turned him down. And it was a funny kind of sick feeling, but I turned him down. And it's a feeling I can't ever quite forget. And in that moment, I started this journey.In that moment, I became the worst thing of all: I became a rock star with a cause. (Laughter) Except this isn't the cause, is it? Six-and-a-half thousand Africans dying every single day from AIDS — a preventable, treatable disease — for lack of drugs we can get in any pharmacy. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa, 20 million by the end of the decade. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. Today, every day, 9,000 more Africans will catch HIV because of stigmatization and lack of education. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.The next thing I'd like to be clear about is what this problem is, and what this problem isn't. Because this is not all about charity. This is about justice. Really. This is not about charity. This is about justice. That's right. And that's too bad, because we're very good at charity. Americans, like Irish people, are good at it. Even the poorest neighborhoods give more than they can afford. We like to give, and we give a lot. Look at the response to the tsunami — it's inspiring. But justice is a tougher standard than charity. You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.As you heard in the film, anywhere else, not here. Not here, not in America, not in Europe. In fact, a head of state that you're all familiar with admitted this to me. And it's really true. There is no chance this kind of hemorrhaging of human life would be accepted anywhere else other than Africa. Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.You see, it's not as dramatic as the tsunami. It's crazy, really, when you think about it. Does stuff have to look like an action movie these days to exist in the front of our brain? The slow extinguishing of countless lives is just not dramatic enough, it would appear. Catastrophes that we can avert are not as interesting as ones we could avert. Funny, that. Anyway, I believe that that kind of thinking offends the intellectual rigor in this room. Six-and-a-half thousand people dying a day in Africa may be Africa's crisis, but the fact that it's not on the nightly news, that we in Europe, or you in America, are not treating it like an emergency — I want to argue with you tonight that that's our crisis. I want to argue that though Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, it could be soon. Every week, religious extremists take another African village. They're attempting to bring order to chaos. Well, why aren't we?Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn't it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? ""The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty."" And I didn't say that. Colin Powell said that. Now when the military are telling us that this is a war that cannot be won by military might alone, maybe we should listen. There's an opportunity here, and it's real. It's not spin. It's not wishful thinking. The problems facing the developing world afford us in the developed world a chance to re-describe ourselves to the world. We will not only transform other people's lives, but we will also transform the way those other lives see us. And that might be smart in these nervous, dangerous times.Don't you think that on a purely commercial level, that anti-retroviral drugs are great advertisements for Western ingenuity and technology? Doesn't compassion look well on us? And let's cut the crap for a second. In certain quarters of the world, brand EU, brand USA, is not at its shiniest. The neon sign is fizzing and cracking. Someone's put a brick through the window. The regional branch managers are getting nervous. Never before have we in the west been so scrutinized. Our values: do we have any? Our credibility? These things are under attack around the world. Brand USA could use some polishing. And I say that as a fan, you know? As a person who buys the products. But think about it. More anti-retrovirals make sense. But that's just the easy part, or ought to be.But equality for Africa — that's a big, expensive idea. You see, the scale of the suffering numbs us into a kind of indifference. What on earth can we all do about this? Well, much more than we think. We can't fix every problem, but the ones we can, I want to argue, we must. And because we can, we must. This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. It is not a theory. The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it: we do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off — we do not have to stand for this.(Applause)And let me say this without a trace of irony — before I back it up to a bunch of ex-hippies. Forget the '60s. We can change the world. I can't; you can't, as individuals; but we can change the world. I really believe that, the people in this room. Look at the Gates Foundation. They've done incredible stuff, unbelievable stuff. But working together, we can actually change the world. We can turn the inevitable outcomes, and transform the quality of life for millions of lives who look and feel rather like us, when you're up close. I'm sorry to laugh here, but you do look so different than you did in Haight-Ashbury in the '60s.(Laughter)But I want to argue that this is the moment that you are designed for. It is the flowering of the seeds you planted in earlier, headier days. Ideas that you gestated in your youth. This is what excites me. This room was born for this moment, is really what I want to say to you tonight. Most of you started out wanting to change the world, didn't you? Most of you did, the digital world. Well, now, actually because of you, it is possible to change the physical world. It's a fact. Economists confirm it, and they know much more than I do. So why, then, are we not pumping our fists into the air? Probably because when we admit we can do something about it, we've got to do something about it. It is a pain in the arse. This equality business is actually a pain in the arse. But for the first time in history, we have the technology; we have the know-how; we have the cash; we have the life-saving drugs.Do we have the will? I hope this is obvious, but I'm not a hippie. And I'm not really one for the warm, fuzzy feeling. I do not have flowers in my hair. Actually, I come from punk rock. The Clash wore big army boots, not sandals. But I know toughness when I see it. And for all the talk of peace and love on the West Coast, there was muscle to the movement that started out here. You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It's very real. It's very strong. And it's very present in a crowd like you.Last year at DATA, this organization I helped set up, we launched a campaign to summon this spirit in the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. We're calling it the ONE Campaign. It's based on our belief that the action of one person can change a lot, but the actions of many coming together as one can change the world. Well, we feel that now is the time to prove we're right. There are moments in history when civilization redefines itself. We believe this is one. We believe that this could be the time when the world finally decides that the wanton loss of life in Africa is just no longer acceptable. This could be the time that we finally get serious about changing the future for most people who live on planet Earth.Momentum has been building. Lurching a little, but it's building. This year is a test for us all, especially the leaders of the G8 nations, who really are on the line here, with all the world in history watching. I have been, of late, disappointed with the Bush Administration. They started out with such promise on Africa. They made some really great promises, and actually have fulfilled a lot of them. But some of them they haven't. They don't feel the push from the ground, is the truth. But my disappointment has much more perspective when I talk to American people, and I hear their worries about the deficit, and the fiscal well being of their country. I understand that. But there's much more push from the ground than you'd think, if we got organized.What I try to communicate, and you can help me if you agree, is that aid for Africa is just great value for money at a time when America really needs it. Putting it in the crassest possible terms, the investment reaps huge returns. Not only in lives saved, but in goodwill, stability and security that we'll gain. So this is what I hope that you will do, if I could be so bold, and not have it deducted from my number of wishes.(Laughter)What I hope is that beyond individual merciful acts, that you will tell the politicians to do right by Africa, by America and by the world. Give them permission, if you like, to spend their political capital and your financial capital, your national purse on saving the lives of millions of people. That's really what I would like you to do. Because we also need your intellectual capital: your ideas, your skills, your ingenuity. And you, at this conference, are in a unique position. Some of the technologies we've been talking about, you invented them, or at least revolutionized the way that they're used. Together you have changed the zeitgeist from analog to digital, and pushed the boundaries. And we'd like you to give us that energy. Give us that kind of dreaming, that kind of doing.As I say, there're two things on the line here. There's the continent Africa. But there's also our sense of ourselves. People are starting to figure this out. Movements are springing up. Artists, politicians, pop stars, priests, CEOs, NGOs, mothers' unions, student unions. A lot of people are getting together, and working under this umbrella I told you about earlier, the ONE Campaign. I think they just have one idea in their mind, which is, where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world.(Applause)History, like God, is watching what we do. When the history books get written, I think our age will be remembered for three things. Really, it's just three things this whole age will be remembered for. The digital revolution, yes. The war against terror, yes. And what we did or did not do to put out the fires in Africa. Some say we can't afford to. I say we can't afford not to. Thank you, thank you very much.(Applause)Okay, my three wishes. The ones that TED has offered to grant. You see, if this is true, and I believe it is, that the digital world you all created has uncoupled the creative imagination from the physical constraints of matter, this should be a piece of piss.(Laughter)I should add that this started out as a much longer list of wishes. Most of them impossible, some of them impractical and one or two of them certainly immoral.(Laughter)This business, it gets to be addictive, you know what I mean, when somebody else is picking up the tab. Anyway, here's number one. I wish for you to help build a social movement of more than one million American activists for Africa. That is my first wish. I believe it's possible. A few minutes ago, I talked about all the citizens' campaigns that are springing up. You know, there's lots out there. And with this one campaign as our umbrella, my organization, DATA, and other groups, have been tapping into the energy and the enthusiasm that's out there from Hollywood into the heartland of America. We know there's more than enough energy to power this movement. We just need your help in making it happen.We want all of you here, church America, corporate America, Microsoft America, Apple America, Coke America, Pepsi America, nerd America, noisy America. We can't afford to be cool and sit this one out. I do believe if we build a movement that's one million Americans strong, we're not going to be denied. We will have the ear of Congress. We'll be the first page in Condi Rice's briefing book, and right into the Oval Office. If there's one million Americans — and I really know this — who are ready to make phone calls, who are ready to be on email, I am absolutely sure that we can actually change the course of history, literally, for the continent of Africa. Anyway, so I'd like your help in getting that signed up. I know John Gage and Sun Microsystems are already on board for this, but there's lots of you we'd like to talk to.Right, my second wish, number two. I would like one media hit for every person on the planet who is living on less than one dollar a day. That's one billion media hits. Could be on Google, could be on AOL. Steve Case, Larry, Sergey — they've done a lot already. It could be NBC. It could be ABC. Actually we're talking to ABC today about the Oscars. We have a film, produced by Jon Kamen at Radical Media. But you know, we want, we need some airtime for our ideas. We need to get the math; we need to get the statistics out to the American people. I really believe that old Truman line, that if you give the American people the facts, they'll do the right thing. And, the other thing that's important is that this is not Sally Struthers. This has to be described as an adventure, not a burden.(Video): One by one they step forward, a nurse, a teacher, a homemaker, and lives are saved. The problem is enormous. Every three seconds one person dies. Another three seconds, one more. The situation is so desperate in parts of Africa, Asia, even America, that aid groups, just as they did for the tsunami, are uniting as one, acting as one. We can beat extreme poverty, starvation, AIDS. But we need your help. One more person, letter, voice will mean the difference between life and death for millions of people. Please join us by working together. Americans have an unprecedented opportunity. We can make history. We can start to make poverty history. One, by one, by one. Please visit ONE at this address. We're not asking for your money. We're asking for your voice.Bono: All right. I wish for TED to truly show the power of information, its power to rewrite the rules and transform lives, by connecting every hospital, health clinic and school in one African country. And I would like it to be Ethiopia. I believe we can connect every school in Ethiopia, every health clinic, every hospital — we can connect to the Internet. That is my wish, my third wish. I think it's possible. I think we have the money and brains in the room to do that. And that would be a mind-blowing wish to come true. I've been to Ethiopia, as I said earlier. It's actually where it all started for me. The idea that the Internet, which changed all of our lives, can transform a country — and a continent that has hardly made it to analog, let alone digital — blows my mind. But it didn't start out that way.The first long-distance line from Boston to New York was used in 1885 on the phone. It was just nine years later that Addis Ababa was connected by phone to Harare, which is 500 kilometers away. Since then, not that much has changed. The average waiting time to get a landline in Ethiopia is actually about seven or eight years. But wireless technology wasn't dreamt up then. Anyway, I'm Irish, and as you can see, I know how important talking is. Communication is very important for Ethiopia — will transform the country. Nurses getting better training, pharmacists being able to order supplies, doctors sharing their expertise in all aspects of medicine. It's a very, very good idea to get them wired. And that is my third and final wish for you at the TED conference. Thank you very much once again.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bono_s_call_to_action_for_africa
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"Walk around for four months with three wishes, and all the ideas will start to percolate up. I think everybody should do it — think that you've got three wishes. And what would you do? It's actually a great exercise to really drill down to the things that you feel are important, and really reflect on the world around us. And thinking that, can an individual actually do something, or come up with something, that may actually get some traction out there and make a difference? Inspired by nature — that's the theme here. And I think, quite frankly, that's where I started.I became very interested in the landscape as a Canadian. We have this Great North. And there was a pretty small population, and my father was an avid outdoorsman. So I really had a chance to experience that. And I could never really understand exactly what it was, or how it was informing me. But what I think it was telling me is that we are this transient thing that's happening, and that the nature that you see out there — the untouched shorelines, the untouched forest that I was able to see — really bring in a sense of that geological time, that this has gone on for a long time, and we're experiencing it in a different way.And that, to me, was a reference point that I think I needed to have to be able to make the work that I did. And I did go out, and I did this picture of grasses coming through in the spring, along a roadside. This rebirth of grass. And then I went out for years trying to photograph the pristine landscape. But as a fine-art photographer I somehow felt that it wouldn't catch on out there, that there would be a problem with trying to make this as a fine-art career. And I kept being sucked into this genre of the calendar picture, or something of that nature, and I couldn't get away from it. So I started to think of, how can I rethink the landscape? I decided to rethink the landscape as the landscape that we've transformed.I had a bit of an epiphany being lost in Pennsylvania, and I took a left turn trying to get back to the highway. And I ended up in a town called Frackville. I got out of the car, and I stood up, and it was a coal-mining town. I did a 360 turnaround, and that became one of the most surreal landscapes I've ever seen. Totally transformed by man. And that got me to go out and look at mines like this, and go out and look at the largest industrial incursions in the landscape that I could find. And that became the baseline of what I was doing. And it also became the theme that I felt that I could hold onto, and not have to re-invent myself — that this theme was large enough to become a life's work, to become something that I could sink my teeth into and just research and find out where these industries are.And I think one of the things I also wanted to say in my thanks, which I kind of missed, was to thank all the corporations who helped me get in. Because it took negotiation for almost every one of these photographs — to get into that place to make those photographs, and if it wasn't for those people letting me in at the heads of those corporations, I would have never made this body of work. So in that respect, to me, I'm not against the corporation. I own a corporation. I work with them, and I feel that we all need them and they're important. But I am also for sustainability.So there's this thing that is pulling me in both directions. And I'm not making an indictment towards what's happening here, but it is a slow progression. So I started thinking, well, we live in all these ages of man: the Stone Age, and the Iron Age, and the Copper Age. And these ages of man are still at work today. But we've become totally disconnected from them. There's something that we're not seeing there. And it's a scary thing as well. Because when we start looking at the collective appetite for our lifestyles, and what we're doing to that landscape — that, to me, is something that is a very sobering moment for me to contemplate.And through my photographs, I'm hoping to be able to engage the audiences of my work, and to come up to it and not immediately be rejected by the image. Not to say, ""Oh my God, what is it?"" but to be challenged by it — to say, ""Wow, this is beautiful,"" on one level, but on the other level, ""This is scary. I shouldn't be enjoying it."" Like a forbidden pleasure. And it's that forbidden pleasure that I think is what resonates out there, and it gets people to look at these things, and it gets people to enter it. And it also, in a way, defines kind of what I feel, too — that I'm drawn to have a good life. I want a house, and I want a car. But there's this consequence out there. And how do I begin to have that attraction, repulsion? It's even in my own conscience I'm having it, and here in my work, I'm trying to build that same toggle.These things that I photographed — this tire pile here had 45 million tires in it. It was the largest one. It was only about an hour-and-a-half away from me, and it caught fire about four years ago. It's around Westley, California, around Modesto. And I decided to start looking at something that, to me, had — if the earlier work of looking at the landscape had a sense of lament to what we were doing to nature, in the recycling work that you're seeing here was starting to point to a direction. To me, it was our redemption. That in the recycling work that I was doing, I'm looking for a practice, a human activity that is sustainable. That if we keep putting things, through industrial and urban existence, back into the system — if we keep doing that — we can continue on. Of course, listening at the conference, there's many, many things that are coming. Bio-mimicry, and there's many other things that are coming on stream — nanotechnology that may also prevent us from having to go into that landscape and tear it apart. And we all look forward to those things.But in the meantime, these things are scaling up. These things are continuing to happen. What you're looking at here — I went to Bangladesh, so I started to move away from North America; I started to look at our world globally. These images of Bangladesh came out of a radio program I was listening to. They were talking about Exxon Valdez, and that there was going to be a glut of oil tankers because of the insurance industries. And that those oil tankers needed to be decommissioned, and 2004 was going to be the pinnacle. And I thought, ""My God, wouldn't that be something?"" To see the largest vessels of man being deconstructed by hand, literally, in third-world countries. So originally I was going to go to India. And I was shut out of India because of a Greenpeace situation there, and then I was able to get into Bangladesh, and saw for the first time a third world, a view of it, that I had never actually thought was possible. 130 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin — people everywhere — the pollution was intense, and the working conditions were horrible.Here you're looking at some oil fields in California, some of the biggest oil fields. And again, I started to think that — there was another epiphany — that the whole world I was living in was a result of having plentiful oil. And that, to me, was again something that I started building on, and I continued to build on. So this is a series I'm hoping to have ready in about two or three years, under the heading of ""The Oil Party."" Because I think everything that we're involved in — our clothing, our cars, our roads, and everything — are directly a result. I'm going to move to some pictures of China. And for me China — I started photographing it four years ago, and China truly is a question of sustainability in my mind,not to mention that China, as well, has a great effect on the industries that I grew up around. I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work. But you know, to see China and the scale at which it's evolving, is quite something. So what you see here is the Three Gorges Dam, and this is the largest dam by 50 percent ever attempted by man. Most of the engineers around the world left the project because they said, ""It's just too big."" In fact, when it did actually fill with water a year and a half ago, they were able to measure a wobble within the earth as it was spinning. It took fifteen days to fill it. So this created a reservoir 600 kilometers long, one of the largest reservoirs ever created. And what was also one of the bigger projects around that was moving 13 full-size cities up out of the reservoir, and flattening all the buildings so they could make way for the ships.This is a ""before and after."" So that was before. And this is like 10 weeks later, demolished by hand. I think 11 of the buildings they used dynamite, everything else was by hand. That was 10 weeks later. And this gives you an idea. And it was all the people who lived in those homes, were the ones that were actually taking it apart and working, and getting paid per brick to take their cities apart. And these are some of the images from that. So I spent about three trips to the Three Gorges Dam, looking at that massive transformation of a landscape. And it looks like a bombed-out landscape, but it isn't. What it is, it's a landscape that is an intentional one. This is a need for power, and they're willing to go through this massive transformation, on this scale, to get that power.And again, it's actually a relief for what's going on in China because I think on the table right now, there's 27 nuclear power stations to be built. There hasn't been one built in North America for 20 years because of the ""NIMBY"" problem — ""Not In My BackYard."" But in China they're saying, ""No, we're putting in 27 in the next 10 years."" And coal-burning furnaces are going in there for hydroelectric power literally weekly. So coal itself is probably one of the largest problems. And one of the other things that happened in the Three Gorges — a lot of the agricultural land that you see there on the left was also lost; some of the most fertile agricultural land was lost in that. And 1.2 to 2 million people were relocated, depending on whose statistics you're looking at. And this is what they were building.This is Wushan, one of the largest cities that was relocated. This is the town hall for the city. And again, the rebuilding of the city — to me, it was sad to see that they didn't really grab a lot of, I guess, what we know here, in terms of urban planning. There were no parks; there were no green spaces. Very high-density living on the side of a hill. And here they had a chance to rebuild cities from the bottom up, but somehow were not connecting with them.Here is a sign that, translated, says, ""Obey the birth control law. Build our science, civilized and advanced idea of marriage and giving birth."" So here, if you look at this poster, it has all the trappings of Western culture. You're seeing the tuxedos, the bouquets. But what's really, to me, frightening about the picture and about this billboard is the refinery in the background. So it's like marrying up all the things that we have and it's an adaptation of our way of life, full stop. And again, when you start seeing that kind of embrace, and you start looking at them leading their rural lifestyle with a very, very small footprint and moving into an urban lifestyle with a much higher footprint, it starts to become very sobering.This is a shot in one of the biggest squares in Guangdong — and this is where a lot of migrant workers are coming in from the country. And there's about 130 million people in migration trying to get into urban centers at all times, and in the next 10 to 15 years, are expecting another 400 to 500 million people to migrate into the urban centers like Shanghai and the manufacturing centers. The manufacturers are — the domestics are usually — you can tell a domestic factory by the fact that they all use the same color uniforms. So this is a pink uniform at this factory. It's a shoe factory. And they have dorms for the workers. So they bring them in from the country and put them up in the dorms.This is one of the biggest shoe factories, the Yuyuan shoe factory near Shenzhen. It has 90,000 employees making shoes. This is a shift change, one of three. There's two factories of this scale in the same town. This is one with 45,000, so every lunch, there's about 12,000 coming through for lunch. They sit down; they have about 20 minutes. The next round comes in. It's an incredible workforce that's building there. Shanghai — I'm looking at the urban renewal in Shanghai, and this is a whole area that will be flattened and turned into skyscrapers in the next five years.What's also happening in Shanghai is — China is changing because this wouldn't have happened five years ago, for instance. This is a holdout. They're called dengzahoos — they're like pin tacks to the ground. They won't move. They're not negotiating. They're not getting enough, so they're not going to move. And so they're holding off until they get a deal with them. And they've been actually quite successful in getting better deals because most of them are getting a raw deal. They're being put out about two hours — the communities that have been around for literally hundreds of years, or maybe even thousands of years, are being broken up and spread across in the suburban areas outside of Shanghai. But these are a whole series of guys holding out in this reconstruction of Shanghai. Probably the largest urban-renewal project, I think, ever attempted on the planet.And then the embrace of the things that they're replacing it with — again, one of my wishes, and I never ended up going there, was to somehow tell them that there were better ways to build a house. The kinds of collisions of styles and things were quite something, and these are called the villas. And also, like right now, they're just moving. The scaffolding is still on, and this is an e-waste area, and if you looked in the foreground on the big print, you'd see that the industry — their industry — they're all recycling. So the industry's already growing around these new developments.This is a five-level bridge in Shanghai. Shanghai was a very intriguing city — it's exploding on a level that I don't think any city has experienced. In fact, even Shenzhen, the economic zone — one of the first ones — 15 years ago was about 100,000 people, and today it boasts about 10 to 11 million. So that gives you an idea of the kinds of migrations and the speed with which — this is just the taxis being built by Volkswagen. There's 9,000 of them here, and they're being built for most of the big cities, Beijing and Shanghai, Shenzhen. And this isn't even the domestic car market; this is the taxi market. And what we would see here as a suburban development — a similar thing, but they're all high-rises. So they'll put 20 or 40 up at a time, and they just go up in the same way as a single-family dwelling would go up here in an area.And the density is quite incredible. And one of the things in this picture that I wanted to point out is that when I saw these kinds of buildings, I was shocked to see that they're not using a central air-conditioning system; every window has an air conditioner in it. And I'm sure there are people here who probably know better than I do about efficiencies, but I can't imagine that every apartment having its own air conditioner is a very efficient way to cool a building on this scale. And when you start looking at that, and then you start factoring up into a city the size of Shanghai, it's literally a forest of skyscrapers. It's breathtaking, in terms of the speed at which this city is transforming. And you can see in the foreground of this picture, it's still one of the last areas that was being held up. Right now that's all cleared out — this was done about eight months ago — and high-rises are now going up into that central spot. So a skyscraper is built, literally, overnight in Shanghai.Most recently I went in, and I started looking at some of the biggest industries in China. And this is Baosteel, right outside of Shanghai. This is the coal supply for the steel factory — 18 square kilometers. It's an incredibly massive operation, I think 15,000 workers, five cupolas, and the sixth one's coming in here. So they're building very large blast furnaces to try to deal with the demand for steel in China. So this is three of the visible blast furnaces within that shot. And again, looking at these images, there's this constant, like, haze that you're seeing. This is going to show you, real time, an assembler. It's a circuit breaker. 10 hours a day at this speed. I think one of the issues that we here are facing with China, is that they're using a lot of the latest production technology.In that one, there were 400 people that worked on the floor. And I asked the manager to point out five of your fastest producers, and then I went and looked at each one of them for about 15 or 20 minutes, and picked this one woman. And it was just lightning fast; the way she was working was almost unbelievable. But that is the trick that they've got right now, that they're winning with, is that they're using all the latest technologies and extrusion machines, and bringing all the components into play, but the assembly is where they're actually bringing in — the country workers are very willing to work. They want to work. There's a massive backlog of people wanting their jobs. That condition's going to be there for the next 10 to 15 years if they realize what they want, which is, you know, 400 to 500 million more people coming into the cities.In this particular case — this is the assembly line that you saw; this is a shot of it. I had to use a very small aperture to get the depth of field. I had to have them freeze for 10 seconds to get this shot. It took me five fake tries because they were just going. To slow them down was literally impossible. They were just wound up doing these things all day long, until the manager had to, with a stern voice, say, ""Okay, everybody freeze."" It wasn't too bad, but they're driven to produce these things at an incredible rate.This is a textile mill doing synthetic silk, an oil byproduct. And what you're seeing here is, again, one of the most state-of-the-art textile mills. There are 500 of these machines; they're worth about 200,000 dollars each. So you have about 12 people running this, and they're just inspecting it — and they're just walking the lines. The machines are all running, absolutely incredible to see what the scale of industries are. And I started getting in further and further into the factories. And that's a diptych. I do a lot of pairings to try and get the sense of scale in these places. This is a line where they get the threads and they wind the threads together, pre-going into the textile mills.Here's something that's far more labor-intensive, which is the making of shoes. This floor has about 1,500 workers on this floor. The company itself had about 10,000 employees, and they're doing domestic shoes. It was very hard to get into the international companies because I had to get permission from companies like Nike and Adidas, and that's very hard to get. And they don't want to let me in. But the domestic was much easier to do. It just gives you a sense of, again — and that's where, really, the whole migration of jobs started going over to China and making the shoes. Nike was one of the early ones. It was such a high labor component to it that it made a lot of sense to go after that labor market.This is a high-tech mobile phone: Bird mobile phone, one of the largest mobile makers in China. I think mobile phone companies are popping up, literally, on a weekly basis, and they have an explosive growth in mobile phones. This is a textile where they're doing shirts — Youngor, the biggest shirt factory and clothing factory in China. And this next shot here is one of the lunchrooms. Everything is very efficient. While setting up this shot, people on average would spend eight to 10 minutes having a lunch. This was one of the biggest factories I've ever seen. They make coffeemakers here, the biggest coffeemaker and the biggest iron makers — they make 20 million of them in the world. There's 21,000 employees. This one factory — and they had several of them — is half a kilometer long. These are just recently shot — I just came back about a month ago, so you're the first ones to be seeing these, these new factory pictures I've taken.So it's taken me almost a year to gain access into these places. The other aspect of what's happening in China is that there's a real need for materials there. So a lot of the recycled materials that are collected here are being recycled and taken to China by ships. That's cubed metal. This is armatures, electrical armatures, where they're getting the copper and the high-end steel from electrical motors out, and recycling them. This is certainly connected to California and Silicon Valley. But this is what happens to most of the computers. Fifty percent of the world's computers end up in China to be recycled.It's referred to as ""e-waste"" there. And it is a bit of a problem. The way they recycle the boards is that they actually use the coal briquettes, which are used all through China, but they heat up the boards, and with pairs of pliers they pull off all the components. They're trying to get all the valued metals out of those components. But the toxic smells — when you come into a town that's actually doing this kind of burning of the boards, you can smell it a good five or 10 kilometers before you get there. Here's another operation. It's all cottage industries, so it's not big places — it's all in people's front porches, in their backyards, even in their homes they're burning boards,if there's a concern for somebody coming by — because it is considered in China to be illegal, doing it, but they can't stop the product from coming in. This portrait — I'm not usually known for portraits, but I couldn't resist this one, where she's been through Mao, and she's been through the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and now she's sitting on her porch with this e-waste beside her. It's quite something. This is a road where it's been shored up by computer boards in one of the biggest towns where they're recycling. So that's the photographs that I wanted to show you.(Applause)I want to dedicate my wishes to my two girls. They've been sitting on my shoulder the whole time while I've been thinking. One's Megan, the one of the right, and Katja there. And to me the whole notion — the things I'm photographing are out of a great concern about the scale of our progress and what we call progress. And as much as there are great things around the corner — and it's palpable in this room — of all of the things that are just about to break that can solve so many problems, I'm really hoping that those things will spread around the world and will start to have a positive effect. And it isn't something that isn't just affecting our world, but it starts to go up — because I think we can start correcting our footprint and bring it down — but there's a growing footprint that's happening in Asia, and is growing at a rapid, rapid rate, and so I don't think we can equalize it. So ultimately the strategy, I think, here is that we have to be very concerned about their evolution, because it is going to be connected to our evolution as well.So part of my thinking, and part of my wishes, is sitting with these thoughts in mind, and thinking about, ""How is their life going to be when they want to have children, or when they're ready to get married 20 years from now — or whatever, 15 years from now?"" And to me that has been the core behind most of my thinking — in my work, and also for this incredible chance to have some wishes. Wish one: world-changing. I want to use my images to persuade millions of people to join in the global conversation on sustainability. And it is through communications today that I believe that that is not an unreal idea. Oh, and I went in search — I wanted to put what I had in mind, hitch it onto something. I didn't want a wish just to start from nowhere.One of them I'm starting from almost nothing, but the other one, I wanted to find out what's going on that's working right now. And Worldchanging.com is a fantastic blog, and that blog is now being visited by close to half-a-million people a month. And it just started about 14 months ago. And the beauty of what's going on there is that the tone of the conversation is the tone that I like. What they're doing there is that they're not — I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out. Whereas this conversation that is going on in this blog is about positive movements, about how to change our world in a better way, quickly. And it's looking at technology, and it's looking at new energy-saving devices, and it's looking at how to rethink and how to re-strategize the movement towards sustainability.And so for me, one of the things that I thought would be to put some of my work in the service of promoting the Worldchanging.com website. Some of you might know, he's a TEDster — Stephen Sagmeister and I are working on some layouts. And this is still in preliminary stages; these aren't the finals. But these images, with Worldchanging.com, can be placed into any kind of media. They could be posted through the Web; they could be used as a billboard or a bus shelter, or anything of that nature. So we're looking at this as trying to build out. And what we ended up discussing was that in most media you get mostly an image with a lot of text, and the text is blasted all over.What was unusual, according to Stephen, is less than five percent of ads are actually leading with image. And so in this case, because it's about a lot of these images and what they represent, and the kinds of questions they bring up, that we thought letting the images play out and bring someone to say, ""Well, what's Worldchanging.com, with these images, have to do?"" And hopefully inspire people to go to that website. So Worldchanging.com, and building that blog, and it is a blog, and I'm hoping that it isn't — I don't see it as the kind of blog where we're all going to follow each other to death. This one is one that will spoke out, and will go out, and to start reaching. Because right now there's conversations in India, in China, in South America — there's entries coming from all around the world. I think there's a chance to have a dialogue, a conversation about sustainability at Worldchanging.com. And anything that you can do to promote that would be fantastic.Wish two is more of the bottom-up, ground-up one that I'm trying to work with. And this one is: I wish to launch a groundbreaking competition that motivates kids to invest ideas on, and invent ideas on, sustainability. And one of the things that came out — Allison, who actually nominated me, said something earlier on in a brainstorming. She said that recycling in Canada had a fantastic entry into our psyche through kids between grade four and six. And you think about it, you know, grade four — my wife and I, we say age seven is the age of reason, so they're into the age of reason. And they're pre-puberty. So it's this great window where they actually are — you can influence them. You know what happens at puberty? You know, we know that from earlier presentations.So my thinking here is that we try to motivate those kids to start driving home ideas. Let them understand what sustainability is, and that they have a vested interest in it to happen. And one of the ways I thought of doing it is to use my prize, so I would take 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of the winnings, and the rest is going to be to manage this project, but to use that as prizes for kids to get into their hands. But the other thing that I thought would be fantastic was to create these — call them ""prize targets."" And so one could be for the best sustainable idea for an in-school project, the best one for a household project, or it could be the best community project for sustainability.And I also thought there should be a nice prize for the best artwork for ""In My World."" And what would happen — it's a scalable thing. And if we can get people to put in things — whether it's equipment, like a media lab, or money to make the prize significant enough — and to open it up to all the schools that are public schools, or schools that are with kids that age, and make it a wide-open competition for them to go after those prizes and to submit them. And the prize has to be a verifiable thing, so it's not about just ideas. The art pieces are about the ideas and how they present them and do them, but the actual things have to be verifiable. In that way, what's happening is that we're motivating a certain age group to start thinking. And they're going to push that up, from the bottom — up into, I believe, into the households. And parents will be reacting to it, and trying to help them with the projects.And I think it starts to motivate the whole idea towards sustainability in a very positive way, and starts to teach them. They know about recycling now, but they don't really, I think, get sustainability in all the things, and the energy footprint, and how that matters. And to teach them, to me, would be a fantastic wish, and it would be something that I would certainly put my shoulder into. And again, in ""In My World,"" the competition — we would use the artwork that comes in from that competition to promote it. And I like the words, ""in my world,"" because it gives possession of the world to the person who's doing it. It is my world; it's not someone else's. I want to help it; I want to do something with it. So I think it has a great opportunity to engage the imaginations — and great ideas, I think, come from kids — and engage their imagination into a project, and do something for schools. I think all schools could use extra equipment, extra cash — it's going to be an incentive for them to do that. And these are some of the ideas in terms of where we could possibly put in some promotion for ""In My World.""And wish three is: Imax film. So I was told I should do one for myself, and I've always wanted to actually get involved with doing something. And the scale of my work, and the kinds of ideas I'm playing with — when I first saw an Imax film, I almost immediately thought, ""There's a real resonance between what I'm trying to do and the scale of what I try to do as a photographer."" And I think there's a real possibility to reach new audiences if I had a chance. So I'm looking, really, for a mentor, because I just had my birthday. I'm 50, and I don't have time to go back to school right now — I'm too busy. So I need somebody who can put me on a quick catch-up course on how to do something like that, and lead me through the maze of how one does something like this. That would be fantastic. So those are my three wishes.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_on_manufactured_landscapes
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"I'm going to discuss with you three of my inventions that can have an effect on 10 to a 100 million people, which we will hope to see happen. We discussed, in the prior film, some of the old things that we did, like stents and insulin pumps for the diabetic. And I'd like to talk very briefly about three new inventions that will change the lives of many people.At the present time, it takes an average of three hours after the first symptoms of a heart attack are recognized by the patient, before that patient arrives at an emergency room. And people with silent ischemia — which, translated into English, means they don't have any symptoms — it takes even longer for them to get to the hospital. The AMI, Acute Myocardial Infarction, which is a doctor's big word so they can charge you more money — (Laughter) — means a heart attack. Annual incidence: 1.2 million Americans. Mortality: 300,000 people dying each year. About half of them, 600,000, have permanent damage to their heart that will cause them to have very bad problems later on. Thus 900,000 people either have died or have significant damage to their heart muscle. Symptoms are often denied by the patient, particularly us men, because we are very brave. We are very brave, and we don't want to admit that I'm having a hell of a chest pain. Then, approximately 25 percent of all patients never have any symptoms. What are we going to do about them? How can we save their lives? It's particularly true of diabetics and elderly women.Well, what is needed for the earliest possible warning of a heart attack? A means to determine if there's a complete blockage of a coronary artery. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a heart attack. The means consist of noting something a little technical, ST segment elevation of the electrogram — translated into English, that means that if there's an electrical signal in the heart, and one part of the ECG — which we call the ST segment — elevates, that is a sure sign of a heart attack. And if we had a computer put into the body of a person who's at risk, we could know, before they even have symptoms, that they're having a heart attack, to save their life. Well, the doctor can program a level of this ST elevation voltage that will trigger an emergency alarm, vibration like your cell phone, but right by your clavicle bone. And when it goes beep, beep, beep, you better do something about it, because if you want to live you have to get to some medical treatment.So we have to try these devices out because the FDA won't just let us use them on people unless we try it out first, and the best model for this happens to be pigs. And what we tried with the pig was external electrodes on the skin, like you see in an emergency room, and I'm going to show you why they don't work very well. And then we put a lead, which is a wire, in the right ventricle inside the heart, which does the electrogram, which is the signal voltage from inside the heart. Well, with the pig, at the baseline, before we blocked the pig's artery to simulate a heart attack, that was the signal. After 43 seconds, even an expert couldn't tell the difference, and after three minutes — well, if you really studied it, you'd see a difference. But what happened when we looked inside the pig's heart, to the electrogram?There was the baseline — first of all, a much bigger and more reliable signal. Second of all, I'll bet even you people who are untrained can see the difference, and we see here an ST segment elevation right after this sharp line. Look at the difference there. It doesn't take much — every layperson could see that difference, and computers can be programmed to easily detect it. Then, look at that after three minutes. We see that the signal that's actually in the heart, we can use it to tell people that they're having a heart attack even before they have symptoms so we can save their life.Then we tried it with my son, Dr. Tim Fischell, we tried it on some human patients who had to have a stent put in. Well, he kept the balloon filled to block the artery, to simulate a blockage, which is what a heart attack is. And it's not hard to see that — the baseline is the first picture on the upper left. Next to it, at 30 seconds, you see this rise here, then this rise — that's the ST elevation. And if we had a computer that could detect it, we could tell you you're having a heart attack so early it could save your life and prevent congestive heart failure. And then he did it again. We filled the balloon again a few minutes later and here you see, even after 10 seconds, a great rise in this piece, which we can have computers inside, under your chest like a pacemaker, with a wire into your heart like a pacemaker. And computers don't go to sleep. We have a little battery and on this little battery that computer will run for five years without needing replacement.What does the system look like? Well, on the left is the IMD, which is Implantable Medical Device, and tonight in the tent you can see it — they've exhibited it. It's about this big, the size of a pacemaker. It's implanted with very conventional techniques. And the EXD is an External Device that you can have on your night table. It'll wake you up and tell you to get your tail to the emergency room when the thing goes off because, if you don't, you're in deep doo-doo. And then, finally, a programmer that will set the level of the stimulation, which is the level which says you are having a heart attack.The FDA says, OK, test this final device after it's built in some animal, which we said is a pig, so we had to get this pig to have a heart attack. And when you go to the farmyard, you can't easily get pigs to have heart attacks, so we said, well, we're experts in stents. Tonight you'll see some of our invented stents. We said, so we'll put in a stent, but we're not going to put in a stent that we'd put in people. We're putting in a copper stent, and this copper stent erodes the artery and causes heart attacks. That's not very nice, but, after all, we had to find out what the answer is. So we took two copper stents and we put it in the artery of this pig, and let me show you the result that's very gratifying as far as people who have heart disease are concerned.So there it was, Thursday morning we stopped the pig's medication and there is his electrogram, the signal from inside the pig's heart coming out by radio telemetry. Then, on Friday at 6:43, he began to get certain signs, which later we had the pig run around — I'm not going to go into this early stage. But look what happened at 10:06 after we removed this pig's medication that kept him from having a heart attack. Any one of you now is an expert on ST elevation. Can you see it there? Can you see it in the picture after the big rise of the QRS — you see ST elevation? This pig at 10:06 was having a heart attack. What happens after you have the heart attack, this blockage? Your rhythm becomes irregular, and that's what happened 45 minutes later. Then, ventricular fibrillation, the heart quivers instead of beats — this is just before death of the pig — and then the pig died; it went flat-line. But we had a little bit over an hour where we could've saved this pig's life. Well, because of the FDA, we didn't save the pig's life, because we need to do this type of animal research for humans. But when it comes to the sake of a human, we can save their life. We can save the lives of people who are at high risk for a heart attack.What is the response to acute myocardial infarction, a heart attack, today? Well, you feel some chest pain or indigestion. It's not all that bad; you decide not to do anything. Several hours pass and it gets worse, and even the man won't ignore it. Finally, you go to the emergency room. You wait as burns and other critical patients are treated, because 75 percent of the patients who go to an emergency room with chest pains don't have AMI, so you're not taken very seriously. They finally see you. It takes more time to get your electrocardiogram on your skin and diagnose it, and it's hard to do because they don't have the baseline data, which the computer we put in you gets. Finally, if you're lucky, you are treated in three or four hours after the incident, but the heart muscle has died. And that is the typical treatment in the advanced world — not Africa — that's the typical treatment in the advanced world today.So we developed the AngelMed Guardian System and we have a device inside this patient, called the Implanted AngelMed Guardian. And when you have a blockage, the alarm goes off and it sends the alarm and the electrogram to an external device, which gets your baseline electrogram from 24 hours ago and the one that caused the alarm, so you can take it to the emergency room and show them, and say, take care of me right away. Then it goes to a network operations center, where they get your data from your patient database that's been put in at some central location, say, in the United States. Then it goes to a diagnostic center, and within one minute of your heart attack, your signal appears on the screen of a computer and the computer analyzes what your problem is. And the person who's there, the medical practitioner, calls you — this is also a cell phone — and says, ""Mr. Smith, you're in deep doo-doo; you have a problem. We've called the ambulance. The ambulance is on the way. It'll pick you up, and then we're going to call your doctor, tell him about it. We're going to send him the signal that we have, that says you have a heart attack, and we're going to send the signal to the hospital and we're going to have it analyzed there, and there you're going to be with your doctor and you'll be taken care of so you won't die of a heart attack."" That's the first invention that I wanted to describe. (Applause)And now I want to talk about something entirely different. At first I didn't think migraine headaches were a big problem because I'd never had a migraine headache, but then I spoke to some people who have three or four every week of their life, and their lives are being totally ruined by it. We have a mission statement for our company doing migraine, which is, ""Prevent or ameliorate migraine headaches by the application of a safe, controlled magnetic pulse applied, as needed, by the patient."" Now, you're probably very few physicists here. If you're a physicist you'd know there's a certain Faraday's Law, which says if I apply a magnetic pulse on salt water — that's your brains by the way — it'll generate electric currents, and the electric current in the brain can erase a migraine headache. That's what we have discovered.So here's a picture of what we're doing. The patients who have a migraine preceded by an aura have a band of excited neurons — that's shown in red — that moves at three to five millimeters a minute towards the mid-brain. And when it hits the mid-brain, that's when the headache begins. There's this migraine that is preceded by a visual aura, and this visual aura, by the way — and I'll show you a picture — but it sort of begins with little dancing lights, gets bigger and bigger until it fills your whole visual field. And what we tried was this; here is a device called the Cadwell Model MES10. Weighs about 70 pounds, has a wire about an inch in diameter. And here's one of the patients who has an aura and always has a headache, bad one, after the aura. What do we do?This is what an aura looks like. It's sort of funny dancing lights, shown there on the left and right side. And that's a fully developed visual aura, as we see on top. In the middle, our experimentalist, the neurologist, who said, ""I'm going to move this down a little and I'm going to erase half your aura."" And, by God, the neurologist did erase it, and that's the middle picture: half of the aura erased by a short magnetic pulse. What does that mean? That means that the magnetic pulse is generating an electric current that's interfering with the erroneous electrical activity in the brain. And finally he says, ""OK, now I'm going to — "" all of the aura get erased with an appropriately placed magnetic pulse.What is the result? We designed a magnetic depolarizer that looks like this, that you could have — a lady, in her pocket book — and when you get an aura you can try it and see how it works. Well, the next thing they have to show is what was on ABC News, Channel 7, last week in New York City, in the 11 o'clock news.Anchor: For anyone who suffers from migraine headaches — and there are 30 million Americans who do — tonight: a possible answer. Eyewitness news reporter Stacy Sager tonight, with a small and portable machine that literally zaps your migraines away. Christina Sidebottom: Well, my first reaction was that it was — looked awfully gun-like, and it was very strange. Stacy Sager: But for Christina Sidebottom, almost anything was worth trying if it could stop a migraine. It may look silly or even frightening as you walk around with it in your purse, but researchers here in Ohio organizing clinical trials for this migraine zapper, say it is scientifically sound — that, in fact, when the average person gets a migraine, it's caused by something similar to an electrical impulse. The zapper creates a magnetic field to counteract that. Yousef Mohammed: In other words, we're treating electricity with electricity, rather than treating electricity with the chemicals that we're using nowadays. SS: But is it safe to use everyday? Experts say the research has actually been around for more than a decade, and more long-term studies need to be done. Christina now swears by it. CS: It's been the most wonderful thing for my migraine. SS: Researchers are hoping to present their studies to the FDA this summer.Robert Fischell: And that is the invention to treat migraines. (Applause) You see, the problem is, 30 million Americans have migraine headaches, and we need a means to treat it, and I think that we now have it. And this is the first device that we did, and I'm going to talk about my second wish, which has something to do with this. Our conclusions from our studies so far, at three research centers, is there is a marked improvement in pain levels after using it just once. The most severe headaches responded better after we did it several times, and the unexpected finding indicates that even established headaches, not only those with aura, get treated and get diminished. And auras can be erased and the migraine, then, does not occur. And that is the migraine invention that we are talking about and that we are working on. (Applause)The third and last invention began with an idea. Epilepsy can best be treated by responsive electrical stimulation. Now, why do we use — add on, nearly, an epileptic focus? Now, unfortunately, us technical people, unlike Mr. Bono, have to get into all these technical words. Well, ""responsive electrical stimulation"" means that we sense, at a place in your brain which is called an ""epileptic focus,"" which is where the epileptic seizure begins — we sense there, that it's going to happen, and then we respond by applying an electrical energy at that spot, which erases the errant signal so that you don't get the clinical manifestations of the migraine headache. We use current pacemaker defibrillator technology that's used for the heart. We thought we could adapt it for the brain. The device could be implanted under the scalp to be totally hidden and avoid wire breakage, which occurs if you put it in the chest and you try to move your neck around. Form a company to develop a neuro-pacemaker for epilepsy, as well as other diseases of the brain, because all diseases of the brain are a result of some electrical malfunction in it, that causes many, if not all, of brain disorders.We formed a company called NeuroPace and we started work on responsive neurostimulation, and this is a picture of what the device looked like, that's placed into the cranial bone. This is probably a better picture. Here we have our device in which we put in a frame. There's a cut made in the scalp; it's opened; the neurosurgeon has a template; he marks it around, and uses a dental burr to remove a piece of the cranial bone exactly the size of our device. And tonight, you'll be able to see the device in the tent. And then with four screws, we put in a frame, then we snap in the device and we run with wires — the one shown in green will go to the surface of the brain with electrodes, to the epileptic focus, the origin of the epilepsy, where we can sense the electrical signal and have computer analysis that tells us when to hit it with some electrical current to prevent the clinical manifestation of the seizure. In the blue wire, we see what's called a deep brain electrode. If that's the source of the epilepsy, we can attack that as well.The comprehensive solution: this is the device; it's about one inches by two inches and, oddly enough, just the thickness of most cranial bones. The advantages of responsive neurostimulation: It can detect and terminate seizures before the clinical symptoms occur, provide stimulation only when needed, can be turned off if seizures disappear; it has minimal side effects — as a matter of fact, in all our clinical trials to date, we've seen no side effects in the 40 or so patients in whom it's been implanted — and it's invisible, cosmetically hidden, so, if you have epilepsy and you have the device, no one will know it because you can't tell that it's there. And this shows what an electroencephalogram is, and on the left is the signal of a spontaneous seizure of one of the patients. Then we stimulated, and you see how that heavy black line and then you see the electroencephalogram signal going to normal, which means they did not get the epileptic seizure. That concludes my discussion of epilepsy, which is the third invention that I want to discuss here this afternoon. (Applause)I have three wishes. Well, I can't do much about Africa. I'm a tech; I'm into medical gadgetry, which is mostly high-tech stuff like Mr. Bono talked about. The first wish is to use the epilepsy responsive neurostimulator, called RNS, for Responsive NeuroStimulator — that's a brilliant acronym — for the treatment of other brain disorders. Well, if we're going to do it for epilepsy, why the hell not try it for something else? Then you saw what that device looked like, that the woman was using to fix her migraines? I tell you this: that's something which some research engineer like me would concoct, not a real designer of good equipment. (Laughter) We want to have some people, who really know how to do this, perform human engineering studies to develop the optimum design for the portable device for treating migraine headaches. And some of the sponsors of this TED meeting are such organizations. Then we're going to challenge the TED attendees to come up with a way to improve health care in the USA, where we have problems that Africa doesn't have. And by reducing malpractice litigation — malpractice litigation is not an African problem; it's an American problem. (Applause)So, to get quickly to my first wish — the brain operates by electrical signals. If the electrical signals create a brain disorder, electro-stimulation can overcome that disorder by acting on the brain's neurons. In other words, if you've screwed up electrical signals, maybe, by putting other electrical signals from a computer in the brain, we can counteract that. A signal in the brain that triggers brain dysfunction might be sensed as a trigger for electro-stimulation like we're doing with epilepsy. But even if there is no signal, electro-stimulation of an appropriate part of the brain can turn off a brain disorder. And consider treating psychotic disorders — and I want this involved with the TED group — such as obsessive-compulsive disorder that, presently, is not well treated with drugs, and includes five million Americans. And Mr. Fischer, and his group at NeuroPace, and myself believe that we can have a dramatic effect in improving OCD in America and in the world. That is the first wish. (Applause)The second wish is, at the present time, the clinical trials of transcranial magnetic stimulators — that's what TMS means, device to treat migraine headaches — appears to be quite successful. Well, that's the good news. The present portable device is far from optimally designed, both as to human factors as appearance. I think she said it looks like a gun. A lot of people don't like guns. (Laughter) Engage a company having prior successes for human factors engineering and industrial design to optimize the design of the first portable TMS device that will be sold to the patients who have migraine headaches. And that is the second wish. (Applause)And, of the 100,000-dollar prize money, that TED was so generous to give me, I am donating 50,000 dollars to the NeuroPace people to get on with the treatment of OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I'm making another 50,000 available for a company to optimize the design of the device for migraines. And that's how I'll use my 100,000-dollar prize money. (Applause)Well, the third and final wish is somewhat — unfortunately, it's much more complicated because it involves lawyers. (Laughter) Well, medical malpractice litigation in the US has escalated the cost of malpractice insurance, so that competent physicians are leaving their practice. Lawyers take cases on contingency with the hope of a big share of a big settlement by a sympathetic jury, because this patient really ended up badly. The high cost of health care in the US is partly due to litigation and insurance costs. I've seen pictures, graphs in today's USA Today showing it skyrocketing out of control, and this is one factor. Well, how can the TED community help with this situation?I have a couple of ideas to begin with. As a starting point for discussion with the TED group, a major part of the problem is the nature of the written extent of informed consent that the patient or spouse must read and sign. For example, I asked the epilepsy people what are they using for informed consent. Would you believe, 12 pages, single space, the patient has to read before they're in our trial to cure their epilepsy? What do you think someone has at the end of reading 12 single-spaced pages? They don't understand what the hell it's about. (Laughter) That's the present system. How about making a video? We have entertainment people here; we have people who know how to do videos, with visual presentation of the anatomy and procedure done with animation. Everybody knows that we can do better with a visual thing that can be interactive with the patient, where they see the video and they're being videoed and they press, do you understand this? No, I don't. Well, then let's go to a simpler explanation. Then there's a simpler one and, oh yes, I understand that. Well, press the button and you're on record, you understand. And that is one of the ideas.Now, also a video is done of the patient or spouse and medical presenter, with the patient agreeing that he understands the procedure to be done, including all the possible failure modes. The patient or spouse agrees not to file a lawsuit if one of the known procedure failures occurs. Now, in America, in fact, you cannot give up your right to trial by jury. However, if a video is there that everything was explained to you, and you have it all in the video file, it'll be much less likely that some hotshot lawyer will take this case on contingency, because it won't be nearly as good a case. If a medical error occurs, the patient or spouse agrees to a settlement for fair compensation by arbitration instead of going to court. That would save hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs in the United States and would decrease the cost of medicine for everyone.These are just some starting points. And, so there, that's the end of all my wishes. I wish I had more wishes but three is what I've got and there they are. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_fischell_on_medical_inventing
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"As other speakers have said, it's a rather daunting experience — a particularly daunting experience — to be speaking in front of this audience. But unlike the other speakers, I'm not going to tell you about the mysteries of the universe, or the wonders of evolution, or the really clever, innovative ways people are attacking the major inequalities in our world. Or even the challenges of nation-states in the modern global economy. My brief, as you've just heard, is to tell you about statistics — and, to be more precise, to tell you some exciting things about statistics. And that's — (Laughter) — that's rather more challenging than all the speakers before me and all the ones coming after me. (Laughter) One of my senior colleagues told me, when I was a youngster in this profession, rather proudly, that statisticians were people who liked figures but didn't have the personality skills to become accountants. (Laughter) And there's another in-joke among statisticians, and that's, ""How do you tell the introverted statistician from the extroverted statistician?"" To which the answer is, ""The extroverted statistician's the one who looks at the other person's shoes."" (Laughter) But I want to tell you something useful — and here it is, so concentrate now. This evening, there's a reception in the University's Museum of Natural History. And it's a wonderful setting, as I hope you'll find, and a great icon to the best of the Victorian tradition. It's very unlikely — in this special setting, and this collection of people — but you might just find yourself talking to someone you'd rather wish that you weren't. So here's what you do. When they say to you, ""What do you do?"" — you say, ""I'm a statistician."" (Laughter) Well, except they've been pre-warned now, and they'll know you're making it up. And then one of two things will happen. They'll either discover their long-lost cousin in the other corner of the room and run over and talk to them. Or they'll suddenly become parched and/or hungry — and often both — and sprint off for a drink and some food. And you'll be left in peace to talk to the person you really want to talk to.It's one of the challenges in our profession to try and explain what we do. We're not top on people's lists for dinner party guests and conversations and so on. And it's something I've never really found a good way of doing. But my wife — who was then my girlfriend — managed it much better than I've ever been able to. Many years ago, when we first started going out, she was working for the BBC in Britain, and I was, at that stage, working in America. I was coming back to visit her. She told this to one of her colleagues, who said, ""Well, what does your boyfriend do?"" Sarah thought quite hard about the things I'd explained — and she concentrated, in those days, on listening. (Laughter) Don't tell her I said that. And she was thinking about the work I did developing mathematical models for understanding evolution and modern genetics. So when her colleague said, ""What does he do?"" She paused and said, ""He models things."" (Laughter) Well, her colleague suddenly got much more interested than I had any right to expect and went on and said, ""What does he model?"" Well, Sarah thought a little bit more about my work and said, ""Genes."" (Laughter) ""He models genes.""That is my first love, and that's what I'll tell you a little bit about. What I want to do more generally is to get you thinking about the place of uncertainty and randomness and chance in our world, and how we react to that, and how well we do or don't think about it. So you've had a pretty easy time up till now — a few laughs, and all that kind of thing — in the talks to date. You've got to think, and I'm going to ask you some questions. So here's the scene for the first question I'm going to ask you. Can you imagine tossing a coin successively? And for some reason — which shall remain rather vague — we're interested in a particular pattern. Here's one — a head, followed by a tail, followed by a tail.So suppose we toss a coin repeatedly. Then the pattern, head-tail-tail, that we've suddenly become fixated with happens here. And you can count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 — it happens after the 10th toss. So you might think there are more interesting things to do, but humor me for the moment. Imagine this half of the audience each get out coins, and they toss them until they first see the pattern head-tail-tail. The first time they do it, maybe it happens after the 10th toss, as here. The second time, maybe it's after the fourth toss. The next time, after the 15th toss. So you do that lots and lots of times, and you average those numbers. That's what I want this side to think about.The other half of the audience doesn't like head-tail-tail — they think, for deep cultural reasons, that's boring — and they're much more interested in a different pattern — head-tail-head. So, on this side, you get out your coins, and you toss and toss and toss. And you count the number of times until the pattern head-tail-head appears and you average them. OK? So on this side, you've got a number — you've done it lots of times, so you get it accurately — which is the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail. On this side, you've got a number — the average number of tosses until head-tail-head.So here's a deep mathematical fact — if you've got two numbers, one of three things must be true. Either they're the same, or this one's bigger than this one, or this one's bigger than that one. So what's going on here? So you've all got to think about this, and you've all got to vote — and we're not moving on. And I don't want to end up in the two-minute silence to give you more time to think about it, until everyone's expressed a view. OK. So what you want to do is compare the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-head with the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-tail.Who thinks that A is true — that, on average, it'll take longer to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail? Who thinks that B is true — that on average, they're the same? Who thinks that C is true — that, on average, it'll take less time to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail? OK, who hasn't voted yet? Because that's really naughty — I said you had to. (Laughter) OK. So most people think B is true. And you might be relieved to know even rather distinguished mathematicians think that. It's not. A is true here. It takes longer, on average. In fact, the average number of tosses till head-tail-head is 10 and the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail is eight. How could that be? Anything different about the two patterns? There is. Head-tail-head overlaps itself. If you went head-tail-head-tail-head, you can cunningly get two occurrences of the pattern in only five tosses. You can't do that with head-tail-tail. That turns out to be important.There are two ways of thinking about this. I'll give you one of them. So imagine — let's suppose we're doing it. On this side — remember, you're excited about head-tail-tail; you're excited about head-tail-head. We start tossing a coin, and we get a head — and you start sitting on the edge of your seat because something great and wonderful, or awesome, might be about to happen. The next toss is a tail — you get really excited. The champagne's on ice just next to you; you've got the glasses chilled to celebrate. You're waiting with bated breath for the final toss. And if it comes down a head, that's great. You're done, and you celebrate. If it's a tail — well, rather disappointedly, you put the glasses away and put the champagne back. And you keep tossing, to wait for the next head, to get excited.On this side, there's a different experience. It's the same for the first two parts of the sequence. You're a little bit excited with the first head — you get rather more excited with the next tail. Then you toss the coin. If it's a tail, you crack open the champagne. If it's a head you're disappointed, but you're still a third of the way to your pattern again. And that's an informal way of presenting it — that's why there's a difference. Another way of thinking about it — if we tossed a coin eight million times, then we'd expect a million head-tail-heads and a million head-tail-tails — but the head-tail-heads could occur in clumps. So if you want to put a million things down amongst eight million positions and you can have some of them overlapping, the clumps will be further apart. It's another way of getting the intuition.What's the point I want to make? It's a very, very simple example, an easily stated question in probability, which every — you're in good company — everybody gets wrong. This is my little diversion into my real passion, which is genetics. There's a connection between head-tail-heads and head-tail-tails in genetics, and it's the following. When you toss a coin, you get a sequence of heads and tails. When you look at DNA, there's a sequence of not two things — heads and tails — but four letters — As, Gs, Cs and Ts. And there are little chemical scissors, called restriction enzymes which cut DNA whenever they see particular patterns. And they're an enormously useful tool in modern molecular biology. And instead of asking the question, ""How long until I see a head-tail-head?"" — you can ask, ""How big will the chunks be when I use a restriction enzyme which cuts whenever it sees G-A-A-G, for example? How long will those chunks be?""That's a rather trivial connection between probability and genetics. There's a much deeper connection, which I don't have time to go into and that is that modern genetics is a really exciting area of science. And we'll hear some talks later in the conference specifically about that. But it turns out that unlocking the secrets in the information generated by modern experimental technologies, a key part of that has to do with fairly sophisticated — you'll be relieved to know that I do something useful in my day job, rather more sophisticated than the head-tail-head story — but quite sophisticated computer modelings and mathematical modelings and modern statistical techniques. And I will give you two little snippets — two examples — of projects we're involved in in my group in Oxford, both of which I think are rather exciting. You know about the Human Genome Project. That was a project which aimed to read one copy of the human genome. The natural thing to do after you've done that — and that's what this project, the International HapMap Project, which is a collaboration between labs in five or six different countries. Think of the Human Genome Project as learning what we've got in common, and the HapMap Project is trying to understand where there are differences between different people.Why do we care about that? Well, there are lots of reasons. The most pressing one is that we want to understand how some differences make some people susceptible to one disease — type-2 diabetes, for example — and other differences make people more susceptible to heart disease, or stroke, or autism and so on. That's one big project. There's a second big project, recently funded by the Wellcome Trust in this country, involving very large studies — thousands of individuals, with each of eight different diseases, common diseases like type-1 and type-2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease, bipolar disease and so on — to try and understand the genetics. To try and understand what it is about genetic differences that causes the diseases. Why do we want to do that? Because we understand very little about most human diseases. We don't know what causes them. And if we can get in at the bottom and understand the genetics, we'll have a window on the way the disease works, and a whole new way about thinking about disease therapies and preventative treatment and so on. So that's, as I said, the little diversion on my main love.Back to some of the more mundane issues of thinking about uncertainty. Here's another quiz for you — now suppose we've got a test for a disease which isn't infallible, but it's pretty good. It gets it right 99 percent of the time. And I take one of you, or I take someone off the street, and I test them for the disease in question. Let's suppose there's a test for HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — and the test says the person has the disease. What's the chance that they do? The test gets it right 99 percent of the time. So a natural answer is 99 percent. Who likes that answer? Come on — everyone's got to get involved. Don't think you don't trust me anymore. (Laughter) Well, you're right to be a bit skeptical, because that's not the answer. That's what you might think. It's not the answer, and it's not because it's only part of the story. It actually depends on how common or how rare the disease is. So let me try and illustrate that. Here's a little caricature of a million individuals. So let's think about a disease that affects — it's pretty rare, it affects one person in 10,000. Amongst these million individuals, most of them are healthy and some of them will have the disease. And in fact, if this is the prevalence of the disease, about 100 will have the disease and the rest won't. So now suppose we test them all. What happens? Well, amongst the 100 who do have the disease, the test will get it right 99 percent of the time, and 99 will test positive. Amongst all these other people who don't have the disease, the test will get it right 99 percent of the time. It'll only get it wrong one percent of the time. But there are so many of them that there'll be an enormous number of false positives. Put that another way — of all of them who test positive — so here they are, the individuals involved — less than one in 100 actually have the disease. So even though we think the test is accurate, the important part of the story is there's another bit of information we need.Here's the key intuition. What we have to do, once we know the test is positive, is to weigh up the plausibility, or the likelihood, of two competing explanations. Each of those explanations has a likely bit and an unlikely bit. One explanation is that the person doesn't have the disease — that's overwhelmingly likely, if you pick someone at random — but the test gets it wrong, which is unlikely. The other explanation is that the person does have the disease — that's unlikely — but the test gets it right, which is likely. And the number we end up with — that number which is a little bit less than one in 100 — is to do with how likely one of those explanations is relative to the other. Each of them taken together is unlikely.Here's a more topical example of exactly the same thing. Those of you in Britain will know about what's become rather a celebrated case of a woman called Sally Clark, who had two babies who died suddenly. And initially, it was thought that they died of what's known informally as ""cot death,"" and more formally as ""Sudden Infant Death Syndrome."" For various reasons, she was later charged with murder. And at the trial, her trial, a very distinguished pediatrician gave evidence that the chance of two cot deaths, innocent deaths, in a family like hers — which was professional and non-smoking — was one in 73 million. To cut a long story short, she was convicted at the time. Later, and fairly recently, acquitted on appeal — in fact, on the second appeal. And just to set it in context, you can imagine how awful it is for someone to have lost one child, and then two, if they're innocent, to be convicted of murdering them. To be put through the stress of the trial, convicted of murdering them — and to spend time in a women's prison, where all the other prisoners think you killed your children — is a really awful thing to happen to someone. And it happened in large part here because the expert got the statistics horribly wrong, in two different ways.So where did he get the one in 73 million number? He looked at some research, which said the chance of one cot death in a family like Sally Clark's is about one in 8,500. So he said, ""I'll assume that if you have one cot death in a family, the chance of a second child dying from cot death aren't changed."" So that's what statisticians would call an assumption of independence. It's like saying, ""If you toss a coin and get a head the first time, that won't affect the chance of getting a head the second time."" So if you toss a coin twice, the chance of getting a head twice are a half — that's the chance the first time — times a half — the chance a second time. So he said, ""Here, I'll assume that these events are independent. When you multiply 8,500 together twice, you get about 73 million."" And none of this was stated to the court as an assumption or presented to the jury that way. Unfortunately here — and, really, regrettably — first of all, in a situation like this you'd have to verify it empirically. And secondly, it's palpably false. There are lots and lots of things that we don't know about sudden infant deaths. It might well be that there are environmental factors that we're not aware of, and it's pretty likely to be the case that there are genetic factors we're not aware of. So if a family suffers from one cot death, you'd put them in a high-risk group. They've probably got these environmental risk factors and/or genetic risk factors we don't know about. And to argue, then, that the chance of a second death is as if you didn't know that information is really silly. It's worse than silly — it's really bad science. Nonetheless, that's how it was presented, and at trial nobody even argued it. That's the first problem. The second problem is, what does the number of one in 73 million mean? So after Sally Clark was convicted — you can imagine, it made rather a splash in the press — one of the journalists from one of Britain's more reputable newspapers wrote that what the expert had said was, ""The chance that she was innocent was one in 73 million."" Now, that's a logical error. It's exactly the same logical error as the logical error of thinking that after the disease test, which is 99 percent accurate, the chance of having the disease is 99 percent. In the disease example, we had to bear in mind two things, one of which was the possibility that the test got it right or not. And the other one was the chance, a priori, that the person had the disease or not. It's exactly the same in this context. There are two things involved — two parts to the explanation. We want to know how likely, or relatively how likely, two different explanations are. One of them is that Sally Clark was innocent — which is, a priori, overwhelmingly likely — most mothers don't kill their children. And the second part of the explanation is that she suffered an incredibly unlikely event. Not as unlikely as one in 73 million, but nonetheless rather unlikely. The other explanation is that she was guilty. Now, we probably think a priori that's unlikely. And we certainly should think in the context of a criminal trial that that's unlikely, because of the presumption of innocence. And then if she were trying to kill the children, she succeeded. So the chance that she's innocent isn't one in 73 million. We don't know what it is. It has to do with weighing up the strength of the other evidence against her and the statistical evidence. We know the children died. What matters is how likely or unlikely, relative to each other, the two explanations are. And they're both implausible. There's a situation where errors in statistics had really profound and really unfortunate consequences. In fact, there are two other women who were convicted on the basis of the evidence of this pediatrician, who have subsequently been released on appeal. Many cases were reviewed. And it's particularly topical because he's currently facing a disrepute charge at Britain's General Medical Council.So just to conclude — what are the take-home messages from this? Well, we know that randomness and uncertainty and chance are very much a part of our everyday life. It's also true — and, although, you, as a collective, are very special in many ways, you're completely typical in not getting the examples I gave right. It's very well documented that people get things wrong. They make errors of logic in reasoning with uncertainty. We can cope with the subtleties of language brilliantly — and there are interesting evolutionary questions about how we got here. We are not good at reasoning with uncertainty. That's an issue in our everyday lives. As you've heard from many of the talks, statistics underpins an enormous amount of research in science — in social science, in medicine and indeed, quite a lot of industry. All of quality control, which has had a major impact on industrial processing, is underpinned by statistics. It's something we're bad at doing. At the very least, we should recognize that, and we tend not to. To go back to the legal context, at the Sally Clark trial all of the lawyers just accepted what the expert said. So if a pediatrician had come out and said to a jury, ""I know how to build bridges. I've built one down the road. Please drive your car home over it,"" they would have said, ""Well, pediatricians don't know how to build bridges. That's what engineers do."" On the other hand, he came out and effectively said, or implied, ""I know how to reason with uncertainty. I know how to do statistics."" And everyone said, ""Well, that's fine. He's an expert."" So we need to understand where our competence is and isn't. Exactly the same kinds of issues arose in the early days of DNA profiling, when scientists, and lawyers and in some cases judges, routinely misrepresented evidence. Usually — one hopes — innocently, but misrepresented evidence. Forensic scientists said, ""The chance that this guy's innocent is one in three million."" Even if you believe the number, just like the 73 million to one, that's not what it meant. And there have been celebrated appeal cases in Britain and elsewhere because of that.And just to finish in the context of the legal system. It's all very well to say, ""Let's do our best to present the evidence."" But more and more, in cases of DNA profiling — this is another one — we expect juries, who are ordinary people — and it's documented they're very bad at this — we expect juries to be able to cope with the sorts of reasoning that goes on. In other spheres of life, if people argued — well, except possibly for politics — but in other spheres of life, if people argued illogically, we'd say that's not a good thing. We sort of expect it of politicians and don't hope for much more. In the case of uncertainty, we get it wrong all the time — and at the very least, we should be aware of that, and ideally, we might try and do something about it. Thanks very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries
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"I'm Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, publisher of ""Skeptic"" magazine. We investigate claims of the paranormal, pseudo-science, fringe groups and cults, and claims of all kinds between, science and pseudo-science and non-science and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old non-sense. And unless you've been on Mars recently, you know there's a lot of that out there.Some people call us debunkers, which is kind of a negative term. But let's face it, there's a lot of bunk. We are like the bunko squads of the police departments out there — well, we're sort of like the Ralph Naders of bad ideas,(Laughter)trying to replace bad ideas with good ideas.I'll show you an example of a bad idea. I brought this with me, this was given to us by NBC Dateline to test. It's produced by the Quadro Corporation of West Virginia. It's called the Quadro 2000 Dowser Rod.(Laughter)This was being sold to high-school administrators for $900 apiece. It's a piece of plastic with a Radio Shack antenna attached to it. You could dowse for all sorts of things, but this particular one was built to dowse for marijuana in students' lockers.(Laughter)So the way it works is you go down the hallway, and you see if it tilts toward a particular locker, and then you open the locker. So it looks something like this. I'll show you.(Laughter)Well, it has kind of a right-leaning bias. Well, this is science, so we'll do a controlled experiment. It'll go this way for sure.(Laughter)Sir, do you want to empty your pockets, please, sir?(Laughter)So the question was, can it actually find marijuana in students' lockers? And the answer is, if you open enough of them, yes.(Laughter)(Applause)But in science, we have to keep track of the misses, not just the hits. And that's probably the key lesson to my short talk here: This is how psychics work, astrologers, tarot card readers and so on. People remember the hits and forget the misses. In science, we keep the whole database, and look to see if the number of hits somehow stands out from the total number you'd expect by chance.In this case, we tested it.We had two opaque boxes: one with government-approved THC marijuana, and one with nothing. And it got it 50 percent of the time —(Laughter)which is exactly what you'd expect with a coin-flip model. So that's just a fun little example here of the sorts of things we do.""Skeptic"" is the quarterly publication. Each one has a particular theme. This one is on the future of intelligence. Are people getting smarter or dumber? I have an opinion of this myself because of the business I'm in, but in fact, people, it turns out, are getting smarter. Three IQ points per 10 years, going up. Sort of an interesting thing.With science, don't think of skepticism as a thing, or science as a thing. Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things. Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.I mean, what's more likely: that extraterrestrial intelligences or multi-dimensional beings travel across vast distances of interstellar space to leave a crop circle in Farmer Bob's field in Puckerbrush, Kansas to promote skeptic.com, our web page? Or is it more likely that a reader of ""Skeptic"" did this with Photoshop? And in all cases we have to ask —(Laughter)What's the more likely explanation? Before we say something is out of this world, we should first make sure that it's not in this world. What's more likely: that Arnold had extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship, or that the ""World Weekly News"" makes stuff up?(Laughter)The same theme is expressed nicely here in this Sidney Harris cartoon. For those of you in the back, it says here: ""Then a miracle occurs. I think you need to be more explicit here in step two."" This single slide completely dismantles the intelligent design arguments. There's nothing more to it than that.(Applause)You can say a miracle occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or offer anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists.And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers — dark energy or dark matter, something like that — until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. It's the beginning of the causal chain for science. For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chain. So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even fakes?This is a UFO shot from my house in Altadena, California, looking down over Pasadena. And if it looks a lot like a Buick hubcap, it's because it is. You don't even need Photoshop or high-tech equipment, you don't need computers. This was shot with a throwaway Kodak Instamatic camera. You just have somebody off on the side with a hubcap ready to go. Camera's ready — that's it.(Laughter)So, although it's possible that most of these things are fake or illusions or so on, and that some of them are real, it's more likely that all of them are fake, like the crop circles.On a more serious note, in all of science we're looking for a balance between data and theory. In the case of Galileo, he had two problems when he turned his telescope to Saturn. First of all, there was no theory of planetary rings. Second of all, his data was grainy and fuzzy, and he couldn't quite make out what he was looking at. So he wrote that he had seen — ""I have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies."" And this is what he ended up concluding that he saw. So without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data, you can't have a good theory. It wasn't solved until 1655.This is Christiaan Huygens's book that catalogs all the mistakes people made trying to figure out what was going on with Saturn. It wasn't till Huygens had two things: He had a good theory of planetary rings and how the solar system operated, and he had better telescopic, more fine-grain data in which he could figure out that as the Earth is going around faster — according to Kepler's Laws — than Saturn, then we catch up with it. And we see the angles of the rings at different angles, there. And that, in fact, turns out to be true.The problem with having a theory is that it may be loaded with cognitive biases. So one of the problems of explaining why people believe weird things is that we have things, on a simple level, and then I'll go to more serious ones. Like, we have a tendency to see faces.This is the face on Mars. In 1976, where there was a whole movement to get NASA to photograph that area because people thought this was monumental architecture made by Martians. Here's the close-up of it from 2001. If you squint, you can still see the face. And when you're squinting, you're turning that from fine-grain to coarse-grain, so you're reducing the quality of your data. And if I didn't tell you what to look for, you'd still see the face, because we're programmed by evolution to see faces.Faces are important for us socially. And of course, happy faces, faces of all kinds are easy to see. You see the happy face on Mars, there.(Laughter)If astronomers were frogs, perhaps they'd see Kermit the Frog. Do you see him there? Little froggy legs. Or if geologists were elephants?Religious iconography.(Laughter)Discovered by a Tennessee baker in 1996. He charged five bucks a head to come see the nun bun till he got a cease-and-desist from Mother Teresa's lawyer. Here's Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Watsonville, just down the street, or is it up the street from here? Tree bark is particularly good because it's nice and grainy, branchy, black-and-white splotchy and you can get the pattern-seeking — humans are pattern-seeking animals.Here's the Virgin Mary on the side of a glass window in Sao Paulo. Here's when the Virgin Mary made her appearance on a cheese sandwich — which I got to actually hold in a Las Vegas casino — of course, this being America.(Laughter)This casino paid $28,500 on eBay for the cheese sandwich.(Laughter)But who does it really look like? The Virgin Mary?(Laughter)It has that sort of puckered lips, 1940s-era look.Virgin Mary in Clearwater, Florida. I actually went to see this one. There was a lot of people there. The faithful come in their wheelchairs and crutches, and so on. We went down and investigated. Just to give you a size, that's Dawkins, me and The Amazing Randi, next to this two, two and a half story-sized image. All these candles, thousands of candles people had lit in tribute to this. So we walked around the backside, to see what was going on. It turns out wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree, you get the effect. Here's the Virgin Mary on the backside, which they started to wipe off. I guess you can only have one miracle per building.(Laughter)So is it really a miracle of Mary, or is it a miracle of Marge?(Laughter)And now I'm going to finish up with another example of this, with auditory illusions. There's this film, ""White Noise,"" with Michael Keaton, about the dead talking back to us. By the way, the whole business of talking to the dead is not that big a deal. Anybody can do it, turns out. It's getting the dead to talk back that's the really hard part.(Laughter)In this case, supposedly, these messages are hidden in electronic phenomena. There's a ReverseSpeech.com web page where I downloaded this stuff. This is the most famous one of all of these. Here's the forward version of the very famous song.(Music with lyrics)If there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed now. It's just a spring clean for the May Queen. Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, There's still time to change the road you're on.(Music ends)Couldn't you just listen to that all day?All right, here it is backwards, and see if you can hear the hidden messages that are supposedly in there.(Music with unintelligible lyrics)(Lyrics) Satan!(Unintelligible lyrics continue)What did you get? Audience: Satan!Satan. OK, at least we got ""Satan"". Now, I'll prime the auditory part of your brain to tell you what you're supposed to hear, and then hear it again.(Music with lyrics)(Music ends)(Laughter)(Applause)You can't miss it when I tell you what's there.(Laughter)I'm going to just end with a positive, nice little story. The Skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization. We're always looking for little good things that people do.And in England, there's a pop singer. One of the top popular singers in England today, Katie Melua. And she wrote a beautiful song. It was in the top five in 2005, called, ""Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing."" It's a love story — she's sort of the Norah Jones of the UK — about how she much loves her guy, and compared to nine million bicycles, and so forth. And she has this one passage here.(Music)(Lyrics) We are 12 billion light-years from the edgeThat's a guess,No one can ever say it's true,But I know that I will always be with you.Michael Shermer: Well, that's nice. At least she got it close. In America it'd be, ""We're 6,000 light years from the edge.""(Laughter)But my friend, Simon Singh, the particle physicist now turned science educator, who wrote the book ""The Big Bang,"" and so on, uses every chance he gets to promote good science. And so he wrote an op-ed piece in ""The Guardian"" about Katie's song, in which he said, well, we know exactly how far from the edge. You know, it's 13.7 billion light years, and it's not a guess. We know within precise error bars how close it is. So we can say, although not absolutely true, it's pretty close to being true.And, to his credit, Katie called him up after this op-ed piece came out, and said, ""I'm so embarrassed. I was in the astronomy club. I should've known better."" And she re-cut the song. So I will end with the new version.(Music with lyrics)We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe. That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars. And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.(Laughter)How cool is that?(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things
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"Well, it's great to be here. We've heard a lot about the promise of technology, and the peril. I've been quite interested in both. If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030. We can't do that today because solar panels are heavy, expensive and very inefficient. There are nano-engineered designs, which at least have been analyzed theoretically, that show the potential to be very lightweight, very inexpensive, very efficient, and we'd be able to actually provide all of our energy needs in this renewable way. Nano-engineered fuel cells could provide the energy where it's needed. That's a key trend, which is decentralization, moving from centralized nuclear power plants and liquid natural gas tankers to decentralized resources that are environmentally more friendly, a lot more efficient and capable and safe from disruption.Bono spoke very eloquently, that we have the tools, for the first time, to address age-old problems of disease and poverty. Most regions of the world are moving in that direction. In 1990, in East Asia and the Pacific region, there were 500 million people living in poverty — that number now is under 200 million. The World Bank projects by 2011, it will be under 20 million, which is a reduction of 95 percent. I did enjoy Bono's comment linking Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley. Being from the Massachusetts high-tech community myself, I'd point out that we were hippies also in the 1960s, although we hung around Harvard Square. But we do have the potential to overcome disease and poverty, and I'm going to talk about those issues, if we have the will.Kevin Kelly talked about the acceleration of technology. That's been a strong interest of mine, and a theme that I've developed for some 30 years. I realized that my technologies had to make sense when I finished a project. That invariably, the world was a different place when I would introduce a technology. And, I noticed that most inventions fail, not because the R&D department can't get it to work — if you look at most business plans, they will actually succeed if given the opportunity to build what they say they're going to build — and 90 percent of those projects or more will fail, because the timing is wrong — not all the enabling factors will be in place when they're needed.So I began to be an ardent student of technology trends, and track where technology would be at different points in time, and began to build the mathematical models of that. It's kind of taken on a life of its own. I've got a group of 10 people that work with me to gather data on key measures of technology in many different areas, and we build models. And you'll hear people say, well, we can't predict the future. And if you ask me, will the price of Google be higher or lower than it is today three years from now, that's very hard to say. Will WiMax CDMA G3 be the wireless standard three years from now? That's hard to say. But if you ask me, what will it cost for one MIPS of computing in 2010, or the cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2012, or the cost of sending a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2014, it turns out that those are very predictable.There are remarkably smooth exponential curves that govern price performance, capacity, bandwidth. And I'm going to show you a small sample of this, but there's really a theoretical reason why technology develops in an exponential fashion. And a lot of people, when they think about the future, think about it linearly. They think they're going to continue to develop a problem or address a problem using today's tools, at today's pace of progress, and fail to take into consideration this exponential growth.The Genome Project was a controversial project in 1990. We had our best Ph.D. students, our most advanced equipment around the world, we got 1/10,000th of the project done, so how're we going to get this done in 15 years? And 10 years into the project, the skeptics were still going strong — says, ""You're two-thirds through this project, and you've managed to only sequence a very tiny percentage of the whole genome."" But it's the nature of exponential growth that once it reaches the knee of the curve, it explodes. Most of the project was done in the last few years of the project. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV — we sequenced SARS in 31 days. So we are gaining the potential to overcome these problems.I'm going to show you just a few examples of how pervasive this phenomena is. The actual paradigm-shift rate, the rate of adopting new ideas, is doubling every decade, according to our models. These are all logarithmic graphs, so as you go up the levels it represents, generally multiplying by factor of 10 or 100. It took us half a century to adopt the telephone, the first virtual-reality technology. Cell phones were adopted in about eight years. If you put different communication technologies on this logarithmic graph, television, radio, telephone were adopted in decades. Recent technologies — like the PC, the web, cell phones — were under a decade. Now this is an interesting chart, and this really gets at the fundamental reason why an evolutionary process — and both biology and technology are evolutionary processes — accelerate. They work through interaction — they create a capability, and then it uses that capability to bring on the next stage.So the first step in biological evolution, the evolution of DNA — actually it was RNA came first — took billions of years, but then evolution used that information-processing backbone to bring on the next stage. So the Cambrian Explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, took only 10 million years. It was 200 times faster. And then evolution used those body plans to evolve higher cognitive functions, and biological evolution kept accelerating. It's an inherent nature of an evolutionary process. So Homo sapiens, the first technology-creating species, the species that combined a cognitive function with an opposable appendage — and by the way, chimpanzees don't really have a very good opposable thumb — so we could actually manipulate our environment with a power grip and fine motor coordination, and use our mental models to actually change the world and bring on technology.But anyway, the evolution of our species took hundreds of thousands of years, and then working through interaction, evolution used, essentially, the technology-creating species to bring on the next stage, which were the first steps in technological evolution. And the first step took tens of thousands of years — stone tools, fire, the wheel — kept accelerating. We always used then the latest generation of technology to create the next generation. Printing press took a century to be adopted; the first computers were designed pen-on-paper — now we use computers. And we've had a continual acceleration of this process.Now by the way, if you look at this on a linear graph, it looks like everything has just happened, but some observer says, ""Well, Kurzweil just put points on this graph that fall on that straight line."" So, I took 15 different lists from key thinkers, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar on the same — and these people were not trying to make my point; these were just lists in reference works, and I think that's what they thought the key events were in biological evolution and technological evolution. And again, it forms the same straight line. You have a little bit of thickening in the line because people do have disagreements, what the key points are, there's differences of opinion when agriculture started, or how long the Cambrian Explosion took. But you see a very clear trend. There's a basic, profound acceleration of this evolutionary process. Information technologies double their capacity, price performance, bandwidth, every year. And that's a very profound explosion of exponential growth. A personal experience, when I was at MIT — computer taking up about the size of this room, less powerful than the computer in your cell phone. But Moore's Law, which is very often identified with this exponential growth, is just one example of many, because it's basically a property of the evolutionary process of technology.I put 49 famous computers on this logarithmic graph — by the way, a straight line on a logarithmic graph is exponential growth — that's another exponential. It took us three years to double our price performance of computing in 1900, two years in the middle; we're now doubling it every one year. And that's exponential growth through five different paradigms. Moore's Law was just the last part of that, where we were shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit, but we had electro-mechanical calculators, relay-based computers that cracked the German Enigma Code, vacuum tubes in the 1950s predicted the election of Eisenhower, discreet transistors used in the first space flights and then Moore's Law. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another paradigm came out of left field to continue the exponential growth. They were shrinking vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller. That hit a wall. They couldn't shrink them and keep the vacuum. Whole different paradigm — transistors came out of the woodwork. In fact, when we see the end of the line for a particular paradigm, it creates research pressure to create the next paradigm. And because we've been predicting the end of Moore's Law for quite a long time — the first prediction said 2002, until now it says 2022. But by the teen years, the features of transistors will be a few atoms in width, and we won't be able to shrink them any more. That'll be the end of Moore's Law, but it won't be the end of the exponential growth of computing, because chips are flat. We live in a three-dimensional world; we might as well use the third dimension. We will go into the third dimension and there's been tremendous progress, just in the last few years, of getting three-dimensional, self-organizing molecular circuits to work. We'll have those ready well before Moore's Law runs out of steam. Supercomputers — same thing. Processor performance on Intel chips, the average price of a transistor — 1968, you could buy one transistor for a dollar. You could buy 10 million in 2002.It's pretty remarkable how smooth an exponential process that is. I mean, you'd think this is the result of some tabletop experiment, but this is the result of worldwide chaotic behavior — countries accusing each other of dumping products, IPOs, bankruptcies, marketing programs. You would think it would be a very erratic process, and you have a very smooth outcome of this chaotic process. Just as we can't predict what one molecule in a gas will do — it's hopeless to predict a single molecule — yet we can predict the properties of the whole gas, using thermodynamics, very accurately. It's the same thing here. We can't predict any particular project, but the result of this whole worldwide, chaotic, unpredictable activity of competition and the evolutionary process of technology is very predictable. And we can predict these trends far into the future. Unlike Gertrude Stein's roses, it's not the case that a transistor is a transistor. As we make them smaller and less expensive, the electrons have less distance to travel. They're faster, so you've got exponential growth in the speed of transistors, so the cost of a cycle of one transistor has been coming down with a halving rate of 1.1 years. You add other forms of innovation and processor design, you get a doubling of price performance of computing every one year.And that's basically deflation — 50 percent deflation. And it's not just computers. I mean, it's true of DNA sequencing; it's true of brain scanning; it's true of the World Wide Web. I mean, anything that we can quantify, we have hundreds of different measurements of different, information-related measurements — capacity, adoption rates — and they basically double every 12, 13, 15 months, depending on what you're looking at. In terms of price performance, that's a 40 to 50 percent deflation rate. And economists have actually started worrying about that. We had deflation during the Depression, but that was collapse of the money supply, collapse of consumer confidence, a completely different phenomena. This is due to greater productivity, but the economist says, ""But there's no way you're going to be able to keep up with that. If you have 50 percent deflation, people may increase their volume 30, 40 percent, but they won't keep up with it."" But what we're actually seeing is that we actually more than keep up with it. We've had 28 percent per year compounded growth in dollars in information technology over the last 50 years. I mean, people didn't build iPods for 10,000 dollars 10 years ago. As the price performance makes new applications feasible, new applications come to the market. And this is a very widespread phenomena. Magnetic data storage — that's not Moore's Law, it's shrinking magnetic spots, different engineers, different companies, same exponential process.A key revolution is that we're understanding our own biology in these information terms. We're understanding the software programs that make our body run. These were evolved in very different times — we'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, ""Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well."" That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to actually turn that program off. They tried that in animals, and these mice ate ravenously and remained slim and got the health benefits of being slim. They didn't get diabetes; they didn't get heart disease; they lived 20 percent longer; they got the health benefits of caloric restriction without the restriction. Four or five pharmaceutical companies have noticed this, felt that would be interesting drug for the human market, and that's just one of the 30,000 genes that affect our biochemistry.We were evolved in an era where it wasn't in the interests of people at the age of most people at this conference, like myself, to live much longer, because we were using up the precious resources which were better deployed towards the children and those caring for them. So, life — long lifespans — like, that is to say, much more than 30 — weren't selected for, but we are learning to actually manipulate and change these software programs through the biotechnology revolution. For example, we can inhibit genes now with RNA interference. There are exciting new forms of gene therapy that overcome the problem of placing the genetic material in the right place on the chromosome. There's actually a — for the first time now, something going to human trials, that actually cures pulmonary hypertension — a fatal disease — using gene therapy. So we'll have not just designer babies, but designer baby boomers. And this technology is also accelerating. It cost 10 dollars per base pair in 1990, then a penny in 2000. It's now under a 10th of a cent. The amount of genetic data — basically this shows that smooth exponential growth doubled every year, enabling the genome project to be completed.Another major revolution: the communications revolution. The price performance, bandwidth, capacity of communications measured many different ways; wired, wireless is growing exponentially. The Internet has been doubling in power and continues to, measured many different ways. This is based on the number of hosts.Miniaturization — we're shrinking the size of technology at an exponential rate, both wired and wireless. These are some designs from Eric Drexler's book — which we're now showing are feasible with super-computing simulations, where actually there are scientists building molecule-scale robots. One has one that actually walks with a surprisingly human-like gait, that's built out of molecules. There are little machines doing things in experimental bases. The most exciting opportunity is actually to go inside the human body and perform therapeutic and diagnostic functions. And this is less futuristic than it may sound. These things have already been done in animals.There's one nano-engineered device that cures type 1 diabetes. It's blood cell-sized. They put tens of thousands of these in the blood cell — they tried this in rats — it lets insulin out in a controlled fashion, and actually cures type 1 diabetes. What you're watching is a design of a robotic red blood cell, and it does bring up the issue that our biology is actually very sub-optimal, even though it's remarkable in its intricacy. Once we understand its principles of operation, and the pace with which we are reverse-engineering biology is accelerating, we can actually design these things to be thousands of times more capable. An analysis of this respirocyte, designed by Rob Freitas, indicates if you replace 10 percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions, you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath. You could sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours — so, ""Honey, I'm in the pool,"" will take on a whole new meaning. It will be interesting to see what we do in our Olympic trials. Presumably we'll ban them, but then we'll have the specter of teenagers in their high schools gyms routinely out-performing the Olympic athletes. Freitas has a design for a robotic white blood cell. These are 2020-circa scenarios, but they're not as futuristic as it may sound. There are four major conferences on building blood cell-sized devices; there are many experiments in animals. There's actually one going into human trial, so this is feasible technology.If we come back to our exponential growth of computing, 1,000 dollars of computing is now somewhere between an insect and a mouse brain. It will intersect human intelligence in terms of capacity in the 2020s, but that'll be the hardware side of the equation. Where will we get the software? Well, it turns out we can see inside the human brain, and in fact not surprisingly, the spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year. And with the new generation of scanning tools, for the first time we can actually see individual inter-neural fibers and see them processing and signaling in real time — but then the question is, OK, we can get this data now, but can we understand it? Doug Hofstadter wonders, well, maybe our intelligence just isn't great enough to understand our intelligence, and if we were smarter, well, then our brains would be that much more complicated, and we'd never catch up to it. It turns out that we can understand it.This is a block diagram of a model and simulation of the human auditory cortex that actually works quite well — in applying psychoacoustic tests, gets very similar results to human auditory perception. There's another simulation of the cerebellum — that's more than half the neurons in the brain — again, works very similarly to human skill formation. This is at an early stage, but you can show with the exponential growth of the amount of information about the brain and the exponential improvement in the resolution of brain scanning, we will succeed in reverse-engineering the human brain by the 2020s. We've already had very good models and simulation of about 15 regions out of the several hundred.All of this is driving exponentially growing economic progress. We've had productivity go from 30 dollars to 150 dollars per hour of labor in the last 50 years. E-commerce has been growing exponentially. It's now a trillion dollars. You might wonder, well, wasn't there a boom and a bust? That was strictly a capital-markets phenomena. Wall Street noticed that this was a revolutionary technology, which it was, but then six months later, when it hadn't revolutionized all business models, they figured, well, that was wrong, and then we had this bust.All right, this is a technology that we put together using some of the technologies we're involved in. This will be a routine feature in a cell phone. It would be able to translate from one language to another.So let me just end with a couple of scenarios. By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.But if we go to 2029, we really have the full maturity of these trends, and you have to appreciate how many turns of the screw in terms of generations of technology, which are getting faster and faster, we'll have at that point. I mean, we will have two-to-the-25th-power greater price performance, capacity and bandwidth of these technologies, which is pretty phenomenal. It'll be millions of times more powerful than it is today. We'll have completed the reverse-engineering of the human brain, 1,000 dollars of computing will be far more powerful than the human brain in terms of basic raw capacity. Computers will combine the subtle pan-recognition powers of human intelligence with ways in which machines are already superior, in terms of doing analytic thinking, remembering billions of facts accurately. Machines can share their knowledge very quickly. But it's not just an alien invasion of intelligent machines. We are going to merge with our technology.These nano-bots I mentioned will first be used for medical and health applications: cleaning up the environment, providing powerful fuel cells and widely distributed decentralized solar panels and so on in the environment. But they'll also go inside our brain, interact with our biological neurons. We've demonstrated the key principles of being able to do this. So, for example, full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, the nano-bots shut down the signals coming from your real senses, replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment, and then it'll feel like you're in that virtual environment. You can go there with other people, have any kind of experience with anyone involving all of the senses. ""Experience beamers,"" I call them, will put their whole flow of sensory experiences in the neurological correlates of their emotions out on the Internet. You can plug in and experience what it's like to be someone else. But most importantly, it'll be a tremendous expansion of human intelligence through this direct merger with our technology, which in some sense we're doing already. We routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without our technology. Human life expectancy is expanding. It was 37 in 1800, and with this sort of biotechnology, nano-technology revolutions, this will move up very rapidly in the years ahead.My main message is that progress in technology is exponential, not linear. Many — even scientists — assume a linear model, so they'll say, ""Oh, it'll be hundreds of years before we have self-replicating nano-technology assembly or artificial intelligence."" If you really look at the power of exponential growth, you'll see that these things are pretty soon at hand. And information technology is increasingly encompassing all of our lives, from our music to our manufacturing to our biology to our energy to materials.We'll be able to manufacture almost anything we need in the 2020s, from information, in very inexpensive raw materials, using nano-technology. These are very powerful technologies. They both empower our promise and our peril. So we have to have the will to apply them to the right problems.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us
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"I don't know about you, but I haven't quite figured out exactly what technology means in my life. I've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about. Should I be pro-technology? Should I embrace it full arms? Should I be wary? Like you, I'm very tempted by the latest thing. But at the other hand, a couple of years ago I gave up all of my possessions, sold all my technology — except for a bicycle — and rode across 3,000 miles on the U.S. back roads under the power of my one body, fuelled mostly by Twinkies and junk food.(Laughter)And I've since then tried to keep technology at arm's length in many ways, so it doesn't master my life. At the same time, I run a website on cool tools, where I issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology. So I'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is as it relates to humanity, as it relates to nature, as it relates to the spiritual. And I'm not even sure we know what technology is. And one definition of technology is that which is first recorded. This is the first example of the modern use of technology that I can find. It was the suggested syllabus for dealing with the Applied Arts and Science at Cambridge University in 1829.Before that, obviously, technology didn't exist. But obviously it did. I like one of the definitions that Alan Kay has for technology. He says technology is anything that was invented after you were born.(Laughter)So it sums up a lot of what we're talking about. Danny Hillis actually has an update on that — he says technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet.(Laughter)Which also, I think, gets into a little bit of our current idea. But I was interested in another definition of technology. Something, again, that went back to something more fundamental. Something that was deeper. And as I struggled to understand that, I came up with a way of framing the question that seemed to work for me in my investigations. And I'm, this morning, going to talk about this for the first time. So this is a very rough attempt to think out loud.The question that I came up with was this question: what does technology want? And by that, I don't mean, does it want chocolate or vanilla? By what it wants, I mean, what are its inherent trends and biases? What are its tendencies over time? One way to think about this is thinking about biological organisms, which we've heard a lot about. And the trick that Richard Dawkins does, which is to say, to look at them as simply as genes, as vehicles for genes. So he's saying, what do genes want? The selfish gene. And I'm applying a similar trick to say, what if we looked at the universe in our culture through the eyes of technology? What does technology want? Obviously, this in an incomplete question, just as looking at an organism as only a gene is an incomplete way of looking at it. But it's still very, very productive. So I'm attempting to say, if we take technology's view of the world, what does it want? And I think once we ask that question we have to go back, actually, to life. Because obviously, if we keep extending the origins of technology far back, I think we come back to life at some point.So that's where I want to begin my little exploration, is in life. And like you heard from the previous speakers, we don't really know what life there is on Earth right now. We have really no idea. Craig Venter's tremendous and brilliant attempt to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great. Brian Farrell's work is all part of this agenda to try and actually discover all the species on Earth. And one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects, just to see what's on life. And if we did that with our little Martian probe, which we have not done on Earth, we would begin to see some incredible species.This is not on another planet. These are things that are hidden away on our planet. This is an ant that stores its colleagues' honey in its abdomen. Each one of these organisms that we've described — that you've seen from Jamie and others, these magnificent things — what they're doing, each one of them, is they're hacking the rules of life. I can't think of a single general principle of biology that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism. Every single thing that we can think of — and if you heard Olivia's talk about the sexual habits, you'll realize that there isn't anything we can say that's true for all life, because every single one of them is hacking something about it. This is a solar-powered sea slug. It's a nudibranch that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy. This is another version of that. This is a sea dragon, and the one on the bottom, the blue one, is a juvenile that has not yet swallowed the acid, has not yet taken in the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy.These are hacks, and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are, current consensus, six kingdoms. Six different broad approaches: the plants, the animals, the fungi, the protests — the little things — the bacteria and the Archaea bacteria. The Archaeas. Those are the general approaches to life. That's one way to look at life on Earth today.But a more interesting way, the current way to take the long view, is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective. And here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution go over the linear time, we have it coming out from the center. So in the center is the most primitive, and this is a genealogical chart of all life on earth. This is all the same six kingdoms. You see 4,000 representative species, and you can see where we are. But what I like about this is it shows that every living organism on Earth today is equally evolved. Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans. They've been around just as long and gone through just the same kind of trial and error to get here. But we see that each one of these is actually hacking, and has a different way of finding out how to do life.And if we take the long-term trends of life, if we begin to say, what does evolution want? There's several things that we see. One of the things about evolution is that nowhere on Earth have we ever been where we don't find life. We find life at the bottom of every long-term, long-distance drilling core into the center of rock that we bring up — and there's bacteria in the pores of that rock. And wherever life is, it never retreats. It's ubiquitous and it wants to be more. More and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life.The second thing is is we see diversity. We also see specialization. We see the movement from a general-purpose cell to the more specific and specialized. And we see a drift towards complexity that's very intuitive. And actually, we have current data that does show that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time. And the last thing, I bring back this nudibranch. One of the things we see about life is that it moves from the inner to increasing sociability. And by that it means that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life. Like those chloroplast cells — they're completely surrounded by other life. They never touch the inner matter. There is more and more co-evolution. And so the general, long-term trends of evolution are roughly these five: ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization. Now, I took that and said, OK, what are the long-term trends in technology?And again, my question is, what does technology want? And so, remarkably, I discovered that there's also a drift toward specialization. That we see there's a general hammer, and hammers become more and more specific over time. There's obviously diversity. Huge numbers of things. This is all the contents of a Japanese home. I actually had my daughter — gave her a tally counter, and I gave her an assignment last summer to go around and count the number of species of technology in our household. And it came up with 6,000 different species of products. I did some research and found out that the King of England, Henry VIII, had only about 7,000 items in his household. And he was the King of England, and that was the entire wealth of England at the time. So we're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things.This is a scene from Star Wars where the 3PO comes out and he sees machines making machines. How depraved! Well, this is actually what we're headed towards: world machines. And the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies. Most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology and not non-technology, or even life.And thirdly, the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex is at this point a cliche. And I'm happy to say, I was partly responsible for that cliche that machines are becoming biological, but that's pretty evident. So the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution. The same drives that we see towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization, towards complexity. That is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out, say, the evolution of armor, you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree. I suggest that, in fact, technology is the seventh kingdom of life. That its operations and how it works is so similar that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom. And so it would be sort of approximately up there, coming out of the animal kingdom. And if we were to do that, we would find out — we could actually approach technology in this way.This is Niles Eldredge. He was the co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. But as a sideline, he happens to collect cornets. He has one of the world's largest collections — about 500 of them. And he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites, or snails, and to do a morphological analysis, and try to derive their genealogical history over time. This is his chart, which is not quite published yet. But the most interesting aspect about this is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom, those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet that was no longer made. That does not happen in biology. When something is extinct, you can't have it as your parent. But that does happen in technology. And it turns out that that's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree, and you can actually use it to determine that this is a technological system versus a biological system.In fact, this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important that I began to think about what happens with old technology. And it turns out that, in fact, technologies don't die. So I suggested this to an historian of science, and he said, ""Well, what about, you know, come on, what about steam cars? They're not around anymore."" Well actually, they are. In fact, they're so around that you can buy new parts for a Stanley steam automobile. And this is a website of a guy who's selling brand new parts for the Stanley automobile. And the thing that I liked is sort of this one-click, add-to-your-cart button —(Laughter) —for buying steam valves. I mean, it was just — it was really there. And so, I began to think about, well, maybe that's just a random sample. Maybe I should do this sort of in a more conservative way.So I took the great big 1895 Montgomery Ward's catalog and I randomly went through it. And I took a page — not quite a random page — I took a page that was actually more difficult than others because lots of the pages are filled with things that are still being made. But I took this page and I said, how many of these things are still being made? And not antiques. I want to know how many of these things are still in production. And the answer is: all of them. All of them are still being produced. So you've got corn shellers. I don't know who needs a corn sheller. Be it corn shellers — you've got ploughs; you've got fan mills; all these things — and these are not, again, antiques. These are — you can order these. You can go to the web and you can buy them now, brand-new made. So in a certain sense, technologies don't die. In fact, you can buy, for 50 bucks, a stone-age knife made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago. It's short, bone handle, 50 bucks. And in fact, what's important is that this information actually never died out. It's not just that it was resurrected. It's continued all along. And in Papua New Guinea, they were making stone axes until two decades ago, just as a course of practical matters.Even when we try to get rid of a technology, it's actually very hard. So we've all heard about the Amish giving up cars. We've heard about the Japanese giving up guns. We've heard about this and that. But I actually went back and took what I could find, the examples in history where there have been prohibitions against technology, and then I tried to find out when they came back in, because they always came back in. And it turns out that the time, the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited, is decreasing over time. And that basically, you can delay technology, but you can't kill it. So this makes sense, because in a certain sense what culture is, is the accumulation of ideas. That's what it's for. It's so that ideas don't die out. And when we take that, we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long-term trajectory — again, in life's evolution — we find that each case — each of the major transitions in life — what they're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens. They're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated.So all these steps in evolution are increasing, basically, the evolution of evolvability. So what's happening over time in life is that the ways in which you generate these new ideas, these new hacks, are increasing. And the real tricks are ways in which you kind of explore the way of exploring. And then what we see in the singularity, that prophesized by Kurzweil and others — his idea that technology is accelerating evolution. It's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas. So if you have life hacking — life means hacking, the game of survival — then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game. And what technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an ""infinite game."" That's the definition of ""infinite game."" A finite game is play to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing. And I believe that technology is actually a cosmic force.The origins of technology was not in 1829, but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang, and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed. The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot, and it was so tight in there, there was no room for any difference at all. That's the definition. There was no temperature. There was no difference whatsoever. And at the Big Bang, what it expanded was the potential for difference. So as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences, diversity, options, choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. Those are all basically the same thing. And those are the things that technology brings us. That's what technology is bringing us: choices, possibilities, freedoms. That's what it's about. It's this expansion of room to make differences. And so a hammer, when we grab a hammer, that's what we're grabbing. And that's why we continue to grab technology — because we want those things. Those things are good. Differences, freedom, choices, possibilities. And each time we make a new opportunity place, we're allowing a platform to make new ones.And I think it's really important. Because if you can imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano was invented — what a loss to society there would be. Imagine Van Gogh being born before the technologies of cheap oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technologies of film. Somewhere, today, there are millions of young children being born whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented. We have a moral obligation to invent technology so that every person on the globe has the potential to realize their true difference. We want a trillion zillion species of one individuals. That's what technology really wants.I'm going to skip through some of the objections because I don't have answers to why there's deforestation. I don't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be bad technologies. I don't have an answer to how this impacts on our dignity, other than to suggest that maybe the seventh kingdom, because it's so close to what life is about, maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life. Maybe in some ways the fact that what we're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it. It's a terrible thing to spray DDT on cotton fields, but it's a really good thing to use to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village.Our humanity is actually defined by technology. All the things that we think that we really like about humanity is being driven by technology. This is the infinite game. That's what we're talking about. You see, technology is a way to evolve the evolution. It's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more. And it's actually a way of playing the game, of playing all the games. That's what technology wants. And so when I think about what technology wants, I think that it has to do with the fact that every person here — and I really believe this — every person here has an assignment. And your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is. That recursive nature is the infinite game. And if you play that well, you'll have other people involved, so even that game extends and continues even when you're gone. That is the infinite game. And what technology is is the medium in which we play that infinite game. And so I think that we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of our journey in finding out who we are.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_how_technology_evolves
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"I love trees, and I'm very lucky, because we live near a wonderful arboretum, and Sundays, usually, I'd go there with my wife and now, with my four-year-old, and we'd climb in the trees, we'd play hide and seek. The second school I was at had big trees too, had a fantastic tulip tree, I think it was the biggest in the country, and it also had a lot of wonderful bushes and vegetation around it, around the playing fields.One day I was grabbed by some of my classmates, and taken in the bushes — I was stripped; I was attacked; I was abused; and this came out of the blue. Now, the reason I say that, because, afterwards, I was thinking — well, I went back into the school — I felt dirty; I felt betrayed; I felt ashamed, but mainly — mainly, I felt powerless. And 30 years later I was sitting in an airplane, next to a lady called Veronica, who came from Chile, and we were on a human rights tour, and she was starting to tell me what it was like to be tortured, and, from my very privileged position, this was the only reference point that I had. And it was an amazing learning experience because, for me, human rights have been something in which I had, you know, a part-time interest, but, mainly, it was something that happened to other people over there.But I got a phone call from Bono in 1985 and, as you know, he's a great singer, but he's a magnificent hustler, and —(Laughter) —a very hard guy to say no to, and he was saying, you know, just after I'd done the Biko song, we're going to do a tour for Amnesty, you have to be on it, and really that was the first time that I'd been out and started meeting people who'd watched their family being shot in front of them, who'd had a partner thrown out of an airplane into an ocean, and suddenly this world of human rights arrived in my world, and I couldn't really walk away in quite the same way as before.So I got involved with this tour, which was for Amnesty, and then in '88 I took over Bono's job trying to learn how to hustle. I didn't do it as well, but we managed to get Youssou N'Dour, Sting, Tracy Chapman, and Bruce Springsteen to go 'round the world for Amnesty, and it was an amazing experience. And, once again, I got an extraordinary education, and it was the first time, really, that I'd met a lot of these people in the different countries, and these human rights stories became very physical, and, again, I couldn't really walk away quite so comfortably.But the thing that really amazed me, that I had no idea, was that you could suffer in this way and then have your whole experience, your story, denied, buried and forgotten. And it seemed that whenever there was a camera around, or a video or film camera, it was a great deal harder to do — for those in power to bury the story. And Reebok set up a foundation after these Human Rights Now tours and there was a decision then — well, we made a proposal, for a couple of years, about trying to set up a division that was going to give cameras to human rights activists. It didn't really get anywhere, and then the Rodney King incident happened, and people thought, OK, if you have a camera in the right place at the right time, or, perhaps, the wrong time, depending who you are, then you can actually start doing something, and campaigning, and being heard, and telling people about what's going on.So, WITNESS was started in '92 and it's since given cameras out in over 60 countries. And we campaign with activist groups and help them tell their story and, in fact, I will show you in a moment one of the most recent campaigns, and I'm afraid it's a story from Uganda, and, although we had a wonderful story from Uganda yesterday, this one isn't quite so good. In the north of Uganda, there are something like 1.5 million internally displaced people, people who are not refugees in another country, but because of the civil war, which has been going on for about 20 years, they have nowhere to live. And 20,000 kids have been taken away to become child soldiers, and the International Criminal Court is going after five of the leaders of the — now, what's it called? I forget the name of the of the army — it's Lord's Resistance Army, I believe — but the government, also, doesn't have a clean sheet, so if we could run the first video.(Music) Woman: Life in the camp is never simple. Even today life is difficult. We stay because of the fear that what pushed us into the camp ... still exists back home. Text: ""Between Two Fires: Torture and Displacement in Northern Uganda"" Man: When we were at home, it was Kony's [rebel] soldiers disturbing us. At first, we were safe in the camp. But later the government soldiers began mistreating us a lot.(Chanting) Jennifer: A soldier walked onto the road, asking where we'd been. Evelyn and I hid behind my mother. Evelyn: He ordered us to sit down, so we sat down. The other soldier also came. Jennifer: The man came and started undressing me. The other one carried Evelyn aside. The one who was defiling me then left me and went to rape Evelyn. And the one who was raping Evelyn came and defiled me also. Man: The soldiers with clubs this long beat us to get a confession. They kept telling us, ""Tell the truth!"" as they beat us. Woman: They insisted that I was lying. At that moment, they fired and shot off my fingers. I fell. They ran to join the others ... leaving me for dead.(Music) Text: Uganda ratified the Convention Against Torture in 1986. Torture is defined as any act by which severe pain of suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by a person acting in an official capacity to obtain information or a confession, to punish, coerce or intimidate.Peter Gabriel: So torture is not something that always happens on other soil. In my country, it was — we had been looking at pictures of British soldiers beating up young Iraqis; we've got Abu Ghraib; we've got Guantanamo Bay. I had a driver on my way to Newark Airport, and he told me a story that, in the middle of the night, 4 a.m., he'd been taken out of his home in Queens — taken to a place in the Midwest, that he was interrogated and tortured and returned to the street four weeks later, because he had the same — he was Middle Eastern, and he had the same name as one of the 9/11 pilots, and that may or may not be true — I didn't think he was a liar, though.And, I think, if we look around the world, as well as the polar ice caps melting, human rights, which have been fought for, for many hundreds of years in some cases, are, also, eroding very fast, and that is something that we need to take a look at and, maybe, start campaigning for. I mean, here, too, one of our partners was at Van Jones and the Books Not Bars project — they have managed, with their footage in California to change the youth correction systems employed, and it's much — much — I think, more humane methods are being looked at, how you should lock up young kids, and that's questionable to start off. And as the story of Mr. Morales, just down the road, excuse me, Mr. Gabriel, would you mind if we delayed your execution a little bit? No, not at all, no problem, take your time. But this, surely, whoever that man is, whatever he's done, this is cruel and unusual punishment.Anyway, WITNESS has been trying to arm the brave people who often put their lives at risk around the world, with cameras, and I'd like to show you just a little more of that. Thank you.(Thunder) Text: You can say a story is fabricated.(Music) Text: You can say a jury is corrupt. You can say a person is lying. You can say you don't trust newspapers. But you can't say what you just saw never happened. Help WITNESS give cameras to the world. Shoot a video; expose injustice; reveal the truth; show us what's wrong with the world; and maybe we can help make it right. WITNESS. All the video you have just seen was recorded by human rights groups working with WITNESS.(Applause)PG: WITNESS was born of technological innovation — in a sense the small, portable, DV cam was really what allowed it to come into being. And we've also been trying to get computers out to the world, so that groups can communicate much more effectively, campaign much more effectively, but now we have the wonderful possibility, which is given to us from the mobile phone with the camera in it, because that is cheap; it's ubiquitous; and it's moving fast all around the world — and it's very exciting for us.And so, the dream is that we could have a world in which anyone who has anything bad happen to them of this sort has a chance of getting their story uploaded, being seen, being watched, that they really know that they can be heard, that there would be a giant website, maybe, a little like Google Earth, and you could fly over and find out the realities of what's going, for the world's inhabitants. In a way what this technology is allowing is, really, that a lot of the problems of the world can have a human face, that we can actually see who's dying of AIDS or who's being beaten up, for the first time, and we can hear their stories in a way that the blogger culture — if we can move that into these sort of fields, I think we can really transform the world in all sorts of ways. There could be a new movement growing up, rising from the ground, reaching for the light, and growing strong, just like a tree. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_gabriel_fights_injustice_with_video
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"This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, ""What leads to success?"" And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer.So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick.And the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, ""I'm driven by my passion."" TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money.Carol Coletta says, ""I would pay someone to do what I do."" And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, ""It's all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun."" Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes!(Laughter)TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics.(Laughter)Good!(Applause)Alex Garden says, ""To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it."" There's no magic; it's practice, practice, practice.And it's focus. Norman Jewison said to me, ""I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing.""And push! David Gallo says, ""Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push."" You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt.Goldie Hawn says, ""I always had self-doubts. I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. I didn't think I'd make it.""Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers.(Laughter)(Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, ""My mother pushed me.""(Laughter)Serve! Sherwin Nuland says, ""It was a privilege to serve as a doctor.""A lot of kids want to be millionaires. The first thing I say is: ""OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. Because that's the way people really get rich.""Ideas! TEDster Bill Gates says, ""I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company."" I'd say it was a pretty good idea. And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. And I give lots of evidence.Persist! Joe Kraus says, ""Persistence is the number one reason for our success."" You've got to persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! Which of course means ""Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.""(Laughter)So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED.(Laughter)Or failing that, do the eight things — and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success.Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_st_john_s_8_secrets_of_success
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"I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well known actress tell a very well known interviewer on television, ""I'm really getting into the Internet lately. I just wish it were more organized."" So ... (Laughter) If I controlled the Internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay. Take the money; go to Amazon; buy a phonebook for a country you've never been to — call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language.(Laughter)If I were in charge of the Internet, you could Mapquest your lover's mood swings. Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, U-turn on silent treatment, all the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin'. You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection. Some days, I'm as shallow as a baking pan, but I still stretch miles in all directions. If I owned the Internet, Napster, Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website. That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you're really just chattin' with your pals.(Laughter)Heck, if I ran the Web, you could email dead people.(Laughter)They would not email you back (Laughter) — but you'd get an automated reply.(Laughter) Their name in your inbox (Laughter) — it's all you wanted anyway. And a message saying, ""Hey, it's me. I miss you.(Laughter)Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy. Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy."" If I designed the Internet, childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard, with a ski pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield, shouting, ""I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges."" Now follow me, OK?(Laughter)Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions. One, two, three. That links with hotdiggitydog.com. That is my grandfather. They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad. He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom, who downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges, who grows up to be me — the guy who usually goes too far. So if I were emperor of the Internet, I guess I'd still be mortal, huh? But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis (Laughter) — so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office. I wouldn't need it. I'd be like some kind of Internet genius, and me, I'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that — pop! — I'd go wireless.(Laughter)Huh? Maybe Google would hire this. I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise, as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle/oracle can get, but, ooh-eee, you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I'm rocking hot-shit-hot-shot-god.net? I guess it's just like life. It is not a question of if you can — it's: do ya? We can interfere with the interface. We can make ""You've got Hallelujah"" the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on. You don't say a prayer. You don't write a psalm. You don't chant an ""om."" You send one blessed email to whomever you're thinking of at dah-da-la-dat-da-dah-da-la-dat.com. Thank you, TED.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_controls_the_internet
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"With all the legitimate concerns about AIDS and avian flu — and we'll hear about that from the brilliant Dr. Brilliant later today — I want to talk about the other pandemic, which is cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension — all of which are completely preventable for at least 95 percent of people just by changing diet and lifestyle.And what's happening is that there's a globalization of illness occurring, that people are starting to eat like us, and live like us, and die like us. And in one generation, for example, Asia's gone from having one of the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity and diabetes to one of the highest. And in Africa, cardiovascular disease equals the HIV and AIDS deaths in most countries. So there's a critical window of opportunity we have to make an important difference that can affect the lives of literally millions of people, and practice preventive medicine on a global scale.Heart and blood vessel diseases still kill more people — not only in this country, but also worldwide — than everything else combined, and yet it's completely preventable for almost everybody. It's not only preventable; it's actually reversible. And for the last almost 29 years, we've been able to show that by simply changing diet and lifestyle, using these very high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be like — quantitative arteriography, before and after a year, and cardiac PET scans.We showed a few months ago — we published the first study showing you can actually stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer by making changes in diet and lifestyle, and 70 percent regression in the tumor growth, or inhibition of the tumor growth, compared to only nine percent in the control group. And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here, the prostate tumor activity is shown in red — you can see it diminishing after a year.Now there is an epidemic of obesity: two-thirds of adults and 15 percent of kids. What's really concerning to me is that diabetes has increased 70 percent in the past 10 years, and this may be the first generation in which our kids live a shorter life span than we do. That's pitiful, and it's preventable. Now these are not election returns, these are the people — the number of the people who are obese by state, beginning in '85, '86, '87 — these are from the CDC website — '88, '89, '90, '91 — you get a new category — '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, 2000, 2001 — it gets worse. We're kind of devolving. (Laughter)Now what can we do about this? Well, you know, the diet that we've found that can reverse heart disease and cancer is an Asian diet. But the people in Asia are starting to eat like we are, which is why they're starting to get sick like we are. So I've been working with a lot of the big food companies. They can make it fun and sexy and hip and crunchy and convenient to eat healthier foods, like — I chair the advisory boards to McDonald's, and PepsiCo, and ConAgra, and Safeway, and soon Del Monte, and they're finding that it's good business. The salads that you see at McDonald's came from the work — they're going to have an Asian salad. At Pepsi, two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods.And so if we can do that, then we can free up resources for buying drugs that you really do need for treating AIDS and HIV and malaria and for preventing avian flu. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_on_the_world_s_killer_diet
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"Let me show you some images of what I consider to be the cities of tomorrow. So, that's Kibera, the largest squatter community in Nairobi. This is the squatter community in Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Bombay, India, what's called Mumbai these days. This is Hosinia, the largest and most urbanized favela in Rio de Janeiro. And this is Sultanbelyi, which is one of the largest squatter communities in Istanbul. They are what I consider to be the cities of tomorrow, the new urban world.Now, why do I say that? To tell you about that I have to talk about this fellow here, his name is Julius. And I met Julius the last week that I was living in Kibera. So, I had been there almost three months, and I was touring around the city going to different squatter areas and Julius was tagging along, and he was bug eyed and at certain points we were walking around, he grabbed my hand for support, which is something most Kenyans would never consider doing. They're very polite and they don't get so forward so quickly. And I found out later that it was Julius' first day in Nairobi, and he's one of many.So, close to 200,000 people a day migrate from the rural to the urban areas. That's, and I'm going to be fair to the statisticians who talked this morning, not almost 1.5 million people a week, but almost 1.4 million people a week but I'm a journalist, and we exaggerate, so almost 1.5 million people a week, close to 70 million people a year. And if you do the math, that's 130 people every minute. So, that'll be — in the 18 minutes that I'm given to talk here, between two and three thousand people will have journeyed to the cities. And here are the statistics. Today — a billion squatters, one in six people on the planet. 2030 — two billion squatters, one in four people on the planet. And the estimate is that in 2050, there'll be three billion squatters, better than one in three people on earth. So, these are the cities of the future, and we have to engage them.And I was thinking this morning of the good life, and before I show you the rest of my presentation, I'm going to violate TED rules here, and I'm going to read you something from my book as quickly as I can. Because I think it says something about reversing our perception of what we think the good life is.So — ""The hut was made of corrugated metal, set on a concrete pad. It was a 10 by 10 cell. Armstrong O'Brian, Jr. shared it with three other men. Armstrong and his friends had no water — they bought it from a nearby tap owner — no toilet — the families in this compound shared a single pit-latrine — and no sewers or sanitation. They did have electricity, but it was illegal service tapped from someone else's wires, and could only power one feeble bulb. This was Southland, a small shanty community on the western side of Nairobi, Kenya. But it could've been anywhere in the city, because more than half the city of Nairobi lives like this. 1.5 million people stuffed into mud or metal huts with no services, no toilets, no rights.""Armstrong explained the brutal reality of their situation: they paid 1,500 shillings in rent, about 20 bucks a month, a relatively high price for a Kenyan shantytown, and they could not afford to be late with the money. 'In case you owe one month, the landlord will come with his henchmen and bundle you out. He will confiscate your things,' Armstrong said. 'Not one month, one day,' his roommate Hilary Kibagendi Onsomu, who was cooking ugali, the spongy white cornmeal concoction that is the staple food in the country, cut into the conversation. They called their landlord a Wabenzi, meaning that he is a person who has enough money to drive a Mercedes-Benz. Hilary served the ugali with a fry of meat and tomatoes; the sun slammed down on the thin steel roof; and we perspired as we ate.""After we finished, Armstrong straightened his tie, put on a wool sports jacket, and we headed out into the glare. Outside a mound of garbage formed the border between Southland and the adjacent legal neighborhood of Langata. It was perhaps eight feet tall, 40 feet long, and 10 feet wide. And it was set in a wider watery ooze. As we passed, two boys were climbing the mount Kenya of trash. They couldn't have been more than five or six years old. They were barefoot, and with each step their toes sank into the muck sending hundreds of flies scattering from the rancid pile. I thought they might be playing King of the Hill, but I was wrong. Once atop the pile, one of the boys lowered his shorts, squatted, and defecated. The flies buzzed hungrily around his legs. When 20 families — 100 people or so — share a single latrine, a boy pooping on a garbage pile is perhaps no big thing. But it stood in jarring contrast to something Armstrong had said as we were eating — that he treasured the quality of life in his neighborhood.""For Armstrong, Southland wasn't constrained by its material conditions. Instead, the human spirit radiated out from the metal walls and garbage heaps to offer something no legal neighborhood could: freedom. 'This place is very addictive,' he had said. 'It's a simple life, but nobody is restricting you. Nobody is controlling what you do. Once you have stayed here, you cannot go back.' He meant back beyond that mountain of trash, back in the legal city, of legal buildings, with legal leases and legal rights. 'Once you have stayed here,' he said, 'you can stay for the rest of your life.'""So, he has hope, and this is where these communities start.This is perhaps the most primitive shanty that you can find in Kibera, little more than a stick-and-mud hut next to a garbage heap. This is getting ready for the monsoon in Bombay, India. This is home improvement: putting plastic tarps on your roof.This is in Rio de Janeiro, and it's getting a bit better, right? We're seeing scavenged terra cotta tile and little pieces of signs, and plaster over the brick, some color, and this is Sulay Montakaya's house in Sultanbelyi, and it's getting even better. He's got a fence; he scavenged a door; he's got new tile on the roof.And then you get Rocinha and you can see that it's getting even better. The buildings here are multi-story. They develop — you can see on the far right one where it seems to just stack on top of each other, room, after room, after room. And what people do is they develop their home on one or two stories, and they sell their loggia or roof rights, and someone else builds on top of their building, and then that person sells the roof rights, and someone else builds on top of their building. All of these buildings are made out of reinforced concrete and brick.And then you get Sultanbelyi, in Turkey, where it's even built to a higher level of design. The crud in the front is mattress stuffing, and you see that all over Turkey. People dry out or air out their mattress stuffing on their roofs. But the green building, on behind, you can see that the top floor is not occupied, so people are building with the possibility of expansion. And it's built to a pretty high standard of design.And then you finally get squatter homes like this, which is built on the suburban model. Hey, that's a single family home in the squatter community. That's also in Istanbul, Turkey. They're quite vital places, these communities.This is the main drag of Rocinha, the Estrada da Gavea, and there's a bus route that runs through it, lots of people out on the street. These communities in these cities are actually more vital than the illegal communities. They have more things going on in them.This is a typical pathway in Rocinha called a ""beco"" — these are how you get around the community. It's on very steep ground. They're built on the hills, inland from the beaches in Rio, and you can see that the houses are just cantilevered over the natural obstructions. So, that's just a rock in the hillside. And these becos are normally very crowded, and people hump furniture up them, or refrigerators up them, all sorts of things. Beer is all carried in on your shoulders. Beer is a very important thing in Brazil.This is commerce in Kenya, right along the train tracks, so close to the train tracks that the merchants sometimes have to pull the merchandise out of the way. This is a marketplace, also in Kenya, Toi Market, lots of dealers, in almost everything you want to buy. Those green things in the foreground are mangoes.This is a shopping street in Kibera, and you can see that there's a soda dealer, a health clinic, two beauty salons, a bar, two grocery stores, and a church, and more. It's a typical downtown street; it just happens to be self-built. This here, on the right-hand side, is what's called a — if you look at the fine print under the awning — it's a hotel. And what hotel means, in Kenya and India, is an eating-place. So, that's a restaurant.People steal electrical power — this is Rio. People tap in and they have thieves who are called ""grillos"" or ""crickets,"" and they steal the electrical power and wire the neighborhood. People burn trash to get rid of the garbage, and they dig their own sewer channels. Talk about more plastic bags than plankton. And sometimes they have natural trash-disposal. And when they have more money they cement their streets, and they put in sewers and good water pipes, and stuff like that. This is water going to Rio. People run their water pipes all over the place, and that little hut right there has a pump in it, and that's what people do: they steal electricity; they install a pump and they tap into the water main, and pump water up to their houses.So, the question is how do you go from the mud-hut village, to the more developed city, to the even highly developed Sultanbelyi? I say there are two things. One is people need a guarantee they won't be evicted. That does not necessarily mean property rights, and I would disagree with Hernando de Soto on that question, because property rights create a lot of complications. They're most often sold to people, and people then wind up in debt and have to pay back the debt, and sometimes have to sell their property in order to pay back the debt. There's a whole variety of other reasons why property rights sometimes don't work in these cases, but they do need security of tenure. And they need access to politics, and that can mean two things. That can mean community organizing from below, but it can also mean possibilities from above. And I say that because the system in Turkey is notable.Turkey has two great laws that protect squatters. One is that — it's called ""gecekondu"" in Turkish, which means ""built overnight,"" and if you build your house overnight in Turkey, you can't be evicted without due process of law, if they don't catch you during the night. And the second aspect is that once you have 2,000 people in the community, you can petition the government to be recognized as a legal sub-municipality. And when you're a legal sub-municipality, you suddenly have politics. You're allowed to have an elected government, collect taxes, provide municipal services, and that's exactly what they do.So, these are the civic leaders of the future. The woman in the center is Geeta Jiwa. She lives in one of those tents on the highway median in Mumbai. That's Sureka Gundi; she also lives with her family on the tent along the same highway median. They're very outspoken. They're very active. They can be community leaders. This woman is Nine, which means ""grandma"" in Turkish. And there were three old ladies who lived in — that's her self-built house behind her — and they've lived there for 30 or 40 years, and they are the backbone of the community there.This is Richard Muthama Peter, and he is an itinerant street photographer in Kibera. He makes money taking pictures of the neighborhood, and the people in the neighborhood, and is a great resource in the community.And finally my choice to run for mayor of Rio is Cezinio, the fruit merchant with his two kids here, and a more honest and giving and caring man I don't know.The future of these communities is in the people and in our ability to work with those people. So, I think the message I take, from what I read from the book, from what Armstrong said, and from all these people, is that these are neighborhoods. The issue is not urban poverty. The issue is not the larger, over-arching thing. The issue is for us to recognize that these are neighborhoods — this is a legitimate form of urban development — and that cities have to engage these residents, because they are building the cities of the future.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_on_our_shadow_cities
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"What I'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world. I'm not going to talk about ""The Skeptical Environmentalist"" — probably that's also a good choice. (Laughter)But I am going talk about: what are the big problems in the world? And I must say, before I go on, I should ask every one of you to try and get out pen and paper because I'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that. So get out your pen and paper. Bottom line is, there is a lot of problems out there in the world. I'm just going to list some of them. There are 800 million people starving. There's a billion people without clean drinking water. Two billion people without sanitation. There are several million people dying of HIV and AIDS. The lists go on and on. There's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change — so on. There are many, many problems out there.In an ideal world, we would solve them all, but we don't. We don't actually solve all problems. And if we do not, the question I think we need to ask ourselves — and that's why it's on the economy session — is to say, if we don't do all things, we really have to start asking ourselves, which ones should we solve first? And that's the question I'd like to ask you. If we had say, 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world, where should we spend it? We identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world, and I will just briefly read them: climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, population migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers. We believe that these in many ways encompass the biggest problems in the world. The obvious question would be to ask, what do you think are the biggest things? Where should we start on solving these problems? But that's a wrong problem to ask. That was actually the problem that was asked in Davos in January.But of course, there's a problem in asking people to focus on problems. Because we can't solve problems. Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems, but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems. And that would be — of course that gets a little more complicated. To climate change that would be like Kyoto. To communicable diseases, it might be health clinics or mosquito nets. To conflicts, it would be U.N.'s peacekeeping forces, and so on. The point that I would like to ask you to try to do, is just in 30 seconds — and I know this is in a sense an impossible task — write down what you think is probably some of the top priorities. And also — and that's, of course, where economics gets evil — to put down what are the things we should not do, first. What should be at the bottom of the list? Please, just take 30 seconds, perhaps talk to your neighbor, and just figure out what should be the top priorities and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have to the world's biggest issues.The amazing part of this process — and of course, I mean, I would love to — I only have 18 minutes, I've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time, right? I'd love to go into, and get you to think about this process, and that's actually what we did. And I also strongly encourage you, and I'm sure we'll also have these discussions afterwards, to think about, how do we actually prioritize? Of course, you have to ask yourself, why on Earth was such a list never done before? And one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable. Nobody wants to do this. Of course, every organization would love to be on the top of such a list. But every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list. And since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list than there is number ones, it makes perfect sense not to want to do such a list. We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, which of them should we do first? So it doesn't mean that we are not prioritizing — any decision is a prioritization, so of course we are still prioritizing, if only implicitly — and that's unlikely to be as good as if we actually did the prioritization, and went in and talked about it.So what I'm proposing is really to say that we have, for a very long time, had a situation when we've had a menu of choices. There are many, many things we can do out there, but we've not had the prices, nor the sizes. We have not had an idea. Imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card, but you have no idea what the price is. You know, you have a pizza; you've no idea what the price is. It could be at one dollar; it could be 1,000 dollars. It could be a family-size pizza; it could be a very individual-size pizza, right? We'd like to know these things.And that is what the Copenhagen Consensus is really trying to do — to try to put prices on these issues. And so basically, this has been the Copenhagen Consensus' process. We got 30 of the world's best economists, three in each area. So we have three of world's top economists write about climate change. What can we do? What will be the cost and what will be the benefit of that? Likewise in communicable diseases. Three of the world's top experts saying, what can we do? What would be the price? What should we do about it, and what will be the outcome? And so on.Then we had some of the world's top economists, eight of the world's top economists, including three Nobel Laureates, meet in Copenhagen in May 2004. We called them the ""dream team."" The Cambridge University prefects decided to call them the Real Madrid of economics. That works very well in Europe, but it doesn't really work over here. And what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list. And then you ask, why economists? And of course, I'm very happy you asked that question — (Laughter) — because that's a very good question. The point is, of course, if you want to know about malaria, you ask a malaria expert. If you want to know about climate, you ask a climatologist. But if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first, you can't ask either of them, because that's not what they do. That is what economists do. They prioritize. They make that in some ways disgusting task of saying, which one should we do first, and which one should we do afterwards?So this is the list, and this is the one I'd like to share with you. Of course, you can also see it on the website, and we'll also talk about it more, I'm sure, as the day goes on. They basically came up with a list where they said there were bad projects — basically, projects where if you invest a dollar, you get less than a dollar back. Then there's fair projects, good projects and very good projects. And of course, it's the very good projects we should start doing. I'm going to go from backwards so that we end up with the best projects.These were the bad projects. As you might see the bottom of the list was climate change. This offends a lot of people, and that's probably one of the things where people will say I shouldn't come back, either. And I'd like to talk about that, because that's really curious. Why is it it came up? And I'll actually also try to get back to this because it's probably one of the things that we'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down.The reason why they came up with saying that Kyoto — or doing something more than Kyoto — is a bad deal is simply because it's very inefficient. It's not saying that global warming is not happening. It's not saying that it's not a big problem. But it's saying that what we can do about it is very little, at a very high cost. What they basically show us, the average of all macroeconomic models, is that Kyoto, if everyone agreed, would cost about 150 billion dollars a year. That's a substantial amount of money. That's two to three times the global development aid that we give the Third World every year. Yet it would do very little good. All models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100. So the guy in Bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106. Which is a little good, but not very much good. So the idea here really is to say, well, we've spent a lot of money doing a little good.And just to give you a sense of reference, the U.N. actually estimate that for half that amount, for about 75 billion dollars a year, we could solve all major basic problems in the world. We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet. So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good? Or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good? And that is really why it becomes a bad project. It's not to say that if we had all the money in the world, we wouldn't want to do it. But it's to say, when we don't, it's just simply not our first priority.The fair projects — notice I'm not going to comment on all these — but communicable diseases, scale of basic health services — just made it, simply because, yes, scale of basic health services is a great thing. It would do a lot of good, but it's also very, very costly. Again, what it tells us is suddenly we start thinking about both sides of the equation. If you look at the good projects, a lot of sanitation and water projects came in. Again, sanitation and water is incredibly important, but it also costs a lot of infrastructure. So I'd like to show you the top four priorities which should be at least the first ones that we deal with when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world.The fourth best problem is malaria — dealing with malaria. The incidence of malaria is about a couple of [million] people get infected every year. It might even cost up towards a percentage point of GDP every year for affected nations. If we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years, we could bring that incidence down to half. We could avoid about 500,000 people dying, but perhaps more importantly, we could avoid about a [million] people getting infected every year. We would significantly increase their ability to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with — of course, in the long run, also to deal with global warming.This third best one was free trade. Basically, the model showed that if we could get free trade, and especially cut subsidies in the U.S. and Europe, we could basically enliven the global economy to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year, half of which would accrue to the Third World. Again, the point is to say that we could actually pull two to three hundred million people out of poverty, very radically fast, in about two to five years. That would be the third best thing we could do.The second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition. Not just malnutrition in general, but there's a very cheap way of dealing with malnutrition, namely, the lack of micronutrients. Basically, about half of the world's population is lacking in iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A. If we invest about 12 billion dollars, we could make a severe inroad into that problem. That would be the second best investment that we could do.And the very best project would be to focus on HIV/AIDS. Basically, if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years, we could avoid 28 new million cases of HIV/AIDS. Again, what this does and what it focuses on is saying there are two very different ways that we can deal with HIV/AIDS. One is treatment; the other one is prevention. And again, in an ideal world, we would do both. But in a world where we don't do either, or don't do it very well, we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first. And treatment is much, much more expensive than prevention. So basically, what this focuses on is saying, we can do a lot more by investing in prevention. Basically for the amount of money that we spend, we can do X amount of good in treatment, and 10 times as much good in prevention. So again, what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment, at first rate.What this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities. I'd like to have you look at your priority list and say, did you get it right? Or did you get close to what we came up with here? Well, of course, one of the things is climate change again. I find a lot of people find it very, very unlikely that we should do that.We should also do climate change, if for no other reason, simply because it's such a big problem. But of course, we don't do all problems. There are many problems out there in the world. And what I want to make sure of is, if we actually focus on problems, that we focus on the right ones. The ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good. And I think, actually — Thomas Schelling, one of the participants in the dream team, he put it very, very well. One of things that people forget, is that in 100 years, when we're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be, people will be much, much richer. Even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the U.N. estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100 will be about as rich as we are today. Much more likely, they will be two to four times richer than we are. And of course, we'll be even richer than that.But the point is to say, when we talk about saving people, or helping people in Bangladesh in 2100, we're not talking about a poor Bangladeshi. We're actually talking about a fairly rich Dutch guy. And so the real point, of course, is to say, do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little, 100 years from now, a fairly rich Dutch guy? Or do we want to help real poor people, right now, in Bangladesh, who really need the help, and whom we can help very, very cheaply? Or as Schelling put it, imagine if you were a rich — as you will be — a rich Chinese, a rich Bolivian, a rich Congolese, in 2100, thinking back on 2005, and saying, ""How odd that they cared so much about helping me a little bit through climate change, and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather and my great grandfather, whom they could have helped so much more, and who needed the help so much more?""So I think that really does tell us why it is we need to get our priorities straight. Even if it doesn't accord to the typical way we see this problem. Of course, that's mainly because climate change has good pictures. We have, you know, ""The Day After Tomorrow"" — it looks great, right? It's a good film in the sense that I certainly want to see it, right, but don't expect Emmerich to cast Brad Pitt in his next movie digging latrines in Tanzania or something. (Laughter) It just doesn't make for as much of a movie. So in many ways, I think of the Copenhagen Consensus and the whole discussion of priorities as a defense for boring problems. To make sure that we realize it's not about making us feel good. It's not about making things that have the most media attention, but it's about making places where we can actually do the most good.The other objections, I think, that are important to say, is that I'm somehow — or we are somehow — positing a false choice. Of course, we should do all things, in an ideal world — I would certainly agree. I think we should do all things, but we don't. In 1970, the developed world decided we were going to spend twice as much as we did, right now, than in 1970, on the developing world. Since then our aid has halved. So it doesn't look like we're actually on the path of suddenly solving all big problems.Likewise, people are also saying, but what about the Iraq war? You know, we spend 100 billion dollars — why don't we spend that on doing good in the world? I'm all for that. If any one of you guys can talk Bush into doing that, that's fine. But the point, of course, is still to say, if you get another 100 billion dollars, we still want to spend that in the best possible way, don't we? So the real issue here is to get ourselves back and think about what are the right priorities. I should just mention briefly, is this really the right list that we got out? You know, when you ask the world's best economists, you inevitably end up asking old, white American men. And they're not necessarily, you know, great ways of looking at the entire world.So we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world to come and solve the same problem. The only two requirements were that they were studying at the university, and they spoke English. The majority of them were, first, from developing countries. They had all the same material but they could go vastly outside the scope of discussion, and they certainly did, to come up with their own lists. And the surprising thing was that the list was very similar — with malnutrition and diseases at the top and climate change at the bottom. We've done this many other times. There's been many other seminars and university students, and different things. They all come out with very much the same list. And that gives me great hope, really, in saying that I do believe that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities, and saying, what is the important thing in the world? Of course, in an ideal world, again we'd love to do everything. But if we don't do it, then we can start thinking about where should we start?I see the Copenhagen Consensus as a process. We did it in 2004, and we hope to assemble many more people, getting much better information for 2008, 2012. Map out the right path for the world — but also to start thinking about political triage. To start thinking about saying, ""Let's do not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost, not the things that we don't know how to do, but let's do the great things where we can do an enormous amount of good, at very low cost, right now.""At the end of the day, you can disagree with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these, but we have to be honest and frank about saying, if there's some things we do, there are other things we don't do. If we worry too much about some things, we end by not worrying about other things. So I hope this will help us make better priorities, and think about how we better work for the world. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities
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"You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art.But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara — this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago — or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world.All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. It's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species.And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere — and, if anything, at a far greater rate. No biologists, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, and yet that — the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity — scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss.When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. They're no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they're already dead. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue.And I know there's some of you who say, ""Well, wouldn't it be better, wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?"" And I say, ""Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. Let's make it Kogi."" And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language.And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, a brief journey through the ethnosphere, to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say ""different ways of being,"" I really do mean different ways of being.Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called ""linguistic exogamy:"" you must marry someone who speaks a different language. And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses, where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. They simply listen and then begin to speak.Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures, forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders. They speared each other. 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. We traced genealogies back eight generations, and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. (Laughter) But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing. Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind.In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment when I was asked by my professor at Harvard if I was interested in going down to Haiti, infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength and Tonton Macoutes, and securing the poison used to make zombies. In order to make sense out of sensation, of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult. On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. It's interesting. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever.There's always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it's this living relationship between the living and the dead. So, the living give birth to the spirits. The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. That's why the Voodooists like to say that ""You white people go to church and speak about God. We dance in the temple and become God."" And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit — how can you be harmed? So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation.Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic — or we might say the ecological — balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back and says, ""You see? It's really as I've told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect."" They call themselves the ""elder brothers"" and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world.Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the ""noble savage,"" which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation.Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here. It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire. What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources: on the one hand, this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic — to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness — but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called Psychotria viridis. This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. If you've ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. (Laughter) It doesn't create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality.In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes — who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s — I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. (Laughter)But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts?Well, we use that great euphemism, ""trial and error,"" which is exposed to be meaningless. But you ask the Indians, and they say, ""The plants talk to us.""Well, what does that mean? This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, ""I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?"" And I said, ""No."" Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. (Laughter)Now — (Applause) — the problem — the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life.And the problem is not technology itself. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan — a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak — a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest — or, in the case of the Yanomami, it's the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold.Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see it's a crude face of political domination. You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold.And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities.And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years. The Neolithic Revolution — which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy specialization surplus — is only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices.And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism.This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. This old man's grandfather refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. Talk about getting by with nothing. (Laughter)And this, in many ways — (Applause) — is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world. The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. An amazing example of how a nation-state can seek restitution with its people.And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. They're homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope.So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. We think that polemics — (Applause) — we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. 156 nations carry our television channel. Our magazines are read by millions. And what we're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures
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"A fact came out of MIT, couple of years ago. Ken Hale, who's a linguist, said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren't spoken by the children. So that in one generation, we're going to halve our cultural diversity. He went on to say that every two weeks, an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture. So an entire philosophy, a body of knowledge about the natural world that had been empirically gleaned over centuries, goes away. And this happens every two weeks.So for the last 20 years, since my dental experience, I have been traveling the world and coming back with stories about some of these people. What I'd like to do right now is share some of those stories with you. This is Tamdin. She is a 69-year-old nun. She was thrown in prison in Tibet for two years for putting up a little tiny placard protesting the occupation of her country. And when I met her, she had just taken a walk over the Himalayas from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, into Nepal, across to India — 30 days — to meet her leader, the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala, India. So I took this picture three days after she arrived, and she had this beat-up pair of tennis shoes on, with her toes sticking out. And she crossed in March, and there's a lot of snow at 18,500 feet in March.This is Paldin. Paldin is a 62-year-old monk. And he spent 33 years in prison. His whole monastery was thrown into prison at the time of the uprising, when the Dalai Lama had to leave Tibet. And he was beaten, starved, tortured — lost all his teeth while in prison. And when I met him, he was a kind gentle old man. And it really impressed me — I met him two weeks after he got out of prison — that he went through that experience, and ended up with the demeanor that he had.So I was in Dharamsala meeting these people, and I'd spent about five weeks there, and I was hearing these similar stories of these refugees that had poured out of Tibet into Dharamsala. And it just so happened, on the fifth week, there was a public teaching by the Dalai Lama. And I was watching this crowd of monks and nuns, many of which I had just interviewed, and heard their stories, and I watched their faces, and they gave us a little FM radio, and we could listen to the translation of his teachings. And what he said was: treat your enemies as if they were precious jewels, because it's your enemies that build your tolerance and patience on the road to your enlightenment. That hit me so hard, telling these people that had been through this experience.So, two months later, I went into Tibet, and I started interviewing the people there, taking my photographs. That's what I do. I interview and do portraits. And this is a little girl. I took her portrait up on top of the Jokhang Temple. And I'd snuck in — because it's totally illegal to have a picture of the Dalai Lama in Tibet — it's the quickest way you can get arrested. So I snuck in a bunch of little wallet-sized pictures of the Dalai Lama, and I would hand them out. And when I gave them to the people, they'd either hold them to their heart, or they'd hold them up to their head and just stay there. And this is — well, at the time — I did this 10 years ago — that was 36 years after the Dalai Lama had left.So I was going in, interviewing these people and doing their portraits. This is Jigme and her sister, Sonam. And they live up on the Chang Tang, the Tibetan Plateau, way in the western part of the country. This is at 17,000 feet. And they had just come down from the high pastures, at 18,000 feet. Same thing: gave her a picture, she held it up to her forehead. And I usually hand out Polaroids when I do these, because I'm setting up lights, and checking my lights, and when I showed her her Polaroid, she screamed and ran into her tent.This is Tenzin Gyatso; he was found to be the Buddha of Compassion at the age of two, out in a peasant's house, way out in the middle of nowhere. At the age of four, he was installed as the 14th Dalai Lama. As a teenager, he faced the invasion of his country, and had to deal with it — he was the leader of the country. Eight years later, when they discovered there was a plot to kill him, they dressed him up like a beggar and snuck him out of the country on horseback, and took the same trip that Tamdin did. And he's never been back to his country since. And if you think about this man, 46 years later, still sticking to this non-violent response to a severe political and human rights issue. And the young people, young Tibetans, are starting to say, listen, this doesn't work. You know, violence as a political tool is all the rage right now. And he still is holding this line. So this is our icon to non-violence in our world — one of our living icons.This is another leader of his people. This is Moi. This is in the Ecuadorian Amazon. And Moi is 35 years old. And this area of the Ecuadorian Amazon — oil was discovered in 1972. And in this period of time — since that time — as much oil, or twice as much oil as was spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident, was spilled in this little area of the Amazon, and the tribes in this area have constantly had to move. And Moi belongs to the Huaorani tribe, and they're known as very fierce, they're known as ""auca."" And they've managed to keep out the seismologists and the oil workers with spears and blowguns. And we spent — I was with a team — two weeks with these guys out in the jungle watching them hunt. This was on a monkey hunt, hunting with curare-tipped darts. And the knowledge that these people have about the natural environment is incredible. They could hear things, smell things, see things I couldn't see. And I couldn't even see the monkeys that they were getting with these darts.This is Yadira, and Yadira is five years old. She's in a tribe that's neighboring the Huaorani. And her tribe has had to move three times in the last 10 years because of the oil spills. And we never hear about that. And the latest infraction against these people is, as part of Plan Colombia, we're spraying Paraquat or Round Up, whatever it is — we're defoliating thousands of acres of the Ecuadorian Amazon in our war on drugs. And these people are the people who take the brunt of it.This is Mengatoue. He's the shaman of the Huaorani, and he said to us, you know, I'm an older man now; I'm getting tired, you know; I'm tired of spearing these oil workers. I wish they would just go away. And I was — I usually travel alone when I do my work, but I did this — I hosted a program for Discovery, and when I went down with the team, I was quite concerned about going in with a whole bunch of people, especially into the Huaorani, deep into the Huaorani tribe. And as it turned out, these guys really taught me a thing or two about blending in with the locals. (Laughter)One of the things I did just before 9/11 — August of 2001 — I took my son, Dax, who was 16 at the time, and I took him to Pakistan. Because at first I wanted — you know, I've taken him on a couple of trips, but I wanted him to see people that live on a dollar a day or less. I wanted him to get an experience in the Islamic world and I also wanted him to — I was going there to work with a group, do a story on a group called the Kalash, that are a group of animists, 3,000 animists, that live — very small area — surrounded by Islam — there's 3,000 of these Kalash left; they're incredible people. So it was a great experience for him. He stayed up all night with them, drumming and dancing. And he brought a soccer ball, and we had soccer every night in this little village.And then we went up and met their shaman. By the way, Mengatoue was the shaman of his tribe as well. And this is John Doolikahn, who's the shaman of the Kalash. And he's up in the mountains, right on the border with Afghanistan. In fact, on that other side is the area, Tora Bora, the area where Osama bin Laden's supposed to be. This is the tribal area. And we watched and stayed with John Doolikahn. And the shaman — I did a whole series on shamanism, which is an interesting phenomenon. But around the world, they go into trance in different ways, and in Pakistan, the way they do it is they burn juniper leaves and they sacrifice an animal, pour the blood of the animal on the leaves and then inhale the smoke. And they're all praying to the mountain gods as they go into trance.You know, getting kids used to different realities, I think, is so important. What Dan Dennett said the other day — having a curriculum where they study different religions, just to make a mental flexibility, give them a mental flexibility in different belief systems — I think this is so necessary in our world today as you see these clash of beliefs taking place. And all the security issues they cause us. So, one thing we did five years ago: we started a program that links kids in indigenous communities with kids in the United States. So we first hooked up a spot in the Navajo Nation with a classroom in Seattle. We now have 15 sites. We have one in Kathmandu, Nepal; Dharamsala, India; Takaungu, Kenya — Takaungu is one-third Christian, one-third Muslim and one-third animist, the community is — Ollantaytambo, Peru, and Arctic Village, Alaska.This is Daniel; he's one of our students in Arctic Village, Alaska. He lives in this log cabin — no running water, no heat other than — no windows and high-speed Internet connection. And this is — I see this rolling out all over — this is our site in Ollantaytambo, Peru, four years ago, where they first saw their first computers; now they have computers in their classrooms. And the way we've done this — we teach digital storytelling to these kids. And we have them tell stories about issues in their community in their community that they care about. And this is in Peru, where the kids told the story about a river that they cleaned up. And the way we do it is, we do it in workshops, and we bring people who want to learn digital workflow and storytelling, and have them work with the kids. And just this last year we've taken a group of teenagers in, and this has worked the best. So our dream is to bring teenagers together, so they'll have a community service experience as well as a cross-cultural experience, as they teach kids in these areas and help them build their communication infrastructure.This is teaching Photoshop in the Tibetan children's village in Dharamsala. We have the website, where the kids all get their homepage. This is all their movies. We've got about 60 movies that these kids have made, and they're quite incredible. The one I want to show you — after we get them to make the movies, we have a night where we show the movies to the community. And this is in Takaungu — we've got a generator and a digital projector, and we're projecting it up against a barn, and showing one of the movies that they made. And if you get a chance, you can go to our website, and you'll see the incredible work these kids do.The other thing: I wanted to give indigenous people a voice. That was one of the big motivating factors. But the other motivating factor is the insular nature of our country. National Geographic just did a Roper Study of 18 to 26 year olds in our country and in nine other industrialized countries. It was a two million dollar study. United States came in second to last in geographic knowledge. 70 percent of the kids couldn't find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map; 60 percent couldn't find India; 30 percent couldn't find the Pacific Ocean. And this is a study that was just done a couple of years ago.So what I'd like to show you now, in the couple of minutes I have left, is a film that a student made in Guatemala. We just had a workshop in Guatemala. A week before we got to the workshop, a massive landslide, caused by Hurricane Stan, last October, came in and buried 600 people alive in their village. And this kid lived in the village — he wasn't there at the time — and this is the little movie he put together about that. And he hadn't seen a computer before we did this movie. We taught him Photoshop and — yeah, we can play it.This is an old Mayan funeral chant that he got from his grandfather.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/phil_borges_on_endangered_cultures
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"If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. (Laughter) My talk will be in two parts. I'll talk first as an astronomer, and then as a worried member of the human race. But let's start off by remembering that Darwin showed how we're the outcome of four billion years of evolution. And what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before Darwin's simple beginning, to set our Earth in a cosmic context.And let me just run through a few slides. This was the impact that happened last week on a comet. If they'd sent a nuke, it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last Monday. So that's another project for NASA. That's Mars from the European Mars Express, and at New Year. This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon. It landed on the surface. This is pictures taken on the way down. That looks like a coastline. It is indeed, but the ocean is liquid methane — the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade. If we go beyond our solar system, we've learned that the stars aren't twinkly points of light. Each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it. And we can see places where stars are forming, like the Eagle Nebula. We see stars dying. In six billion years, the sun will look like that. And some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving remnants like that.On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges. Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang — a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos?I'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time, which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out. But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop. And we'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe. And we compare simulated universes like that — I'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk — with what we actually see in the sky. Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged.That's a challenge for 21st-century science. If my research group had a logo, it would be this picture here: an ouroboros, where you see the micro-world on the left — the world of the quantum — and on the right the large-scale universe of planets, stars and galaxies. We know our universes are united though — links between left and right. The everyday world is determined by atoms, how they stick together to make molecules. Stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together. And, as we've learned in the last few years, galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter: particles in huge swarms, far smaller even than atomic nuclei. But we'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top. The micro-world of the quantum is understood. On the right hand side, gravity holds sway. Einstein explained that. But the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory — symbolized, as it were, gastronomically at the top of that picture. (Laughter) And until we have that synthesis, we won't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom, quantum effects could shake everything.And so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small, which we don't yet have. One idea, incidentally — and I had this hazard sign to say I'm going to speculate from now on — is that our Big Bang was not the only one. One idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space, just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper. You can imagine ants on one of them thinking it's a two-dimensional universe, not being aware of another population of ants on the other. So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours, but we're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension, and we're imprisoned in our three. And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we've normally called our universe — the aftermath of our Big Bang. And here's another picture. Bottom right depicts our universe, which on the horizon is not beyond that, but even that is just one bubble, as it were, in some vaster reality. Many people suspect that just as we've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems, one galaxy to many galaxies, we have to go to many Big Bangs from one Big Bang, perhaps these many Big Bangs displaying an immense variety of properties.Well, let's go back to this picture. There's one challenge symbolized at the top, but there's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom. You want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small, but we want to understand the very complex. And the most complex things are ourselves, midway between atoms and stars. We depend on stars to make the atoms we're made of. We depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure. We clearly have to be large, compared to atoms, to have layer upon layer of complex structure. We clearly have to be small, compared to stars and planets — otherwise we'd be crushed by gravity. And in fact, we are midway. It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here. Well, most of you anyway. The science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all, greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right. And it's this science, which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world, but also transforming our world faster than ever. And more than that, it's engendering new kinds of change.And I now move on to the second part of my talk, and the book ""Our Final Century"" was mentioned. If I was not a self-effacing Brit, I would mention the book myself, and I would add that it's available in paperback.(Laughter)And in America it was called ""Our Final Hour"" because Americans like instant gratification.(Laughter)But my theme is that in this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years. It may change this century. It's new in our history. And the human impact on the global environment — greenhouse warming, mass extinctions and so forth — is unprecedented, too. And so, this makes this coming century a challenge. Bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects, while, nonetheless, reducing pressure on energy and resources. But they will have a dark side. In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind on disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure — error rather than terror. And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence.In fact, some years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over, etc. I don't go along with all that, but it's interesting that he had a simple solution. It was what he called ""fine-grained relinquishment."" He wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits. Now, that's absurdly naive for two reasons. First, any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones. And also, when a scientist makes a discovery, he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be. And so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science. We have to accept that there will be hazards. And I think we have to go back to what happened in the post-War era, post-World War II, when the nuclear scientists who'd been involved in making the atomic bomb, in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers.And they were inspired not by the young Einstein, who did the great work in relativity, but by the old Einstein, the icon of poster and t-shirt, who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws. He was premature. But he was a moral compass — an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control. And perhaps the greatest living person is someone I'm privileged to know, Joe Rothblatt. Equally untidy office there, as you can see. He's 96 years old, and he founded the Pugwash movement. He persuaded Einstein, as his last act, to sign the famous memorandum of Bertrand Russell. And he sets an example of the concerned scientist. And I think to harness science optimally, to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed, we need latter-day counterparts of people like Joseph Rothblatt.We need not just campaigning physicists, but we need biologists, computer experts and environmentalists as well. And I think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service, or company employees subject to commercial pressure. I wrote my book, ""Our Final Century,"" as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture — outside the American Bible Belt, anyway — (Laughter) but most people, even those who are familiar with evolution, aren't mindful that even more time lies ahead.The sun has been shining for four and a half billion years, but it'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out. On that schematic picture, a sort of time-lapse picture, we're halfway. And it'll be another six billion before that happens, and any remaining life on Earth is vaporized. There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria. The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go, here on Earth and probably far beyond. So we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our Earth and beyond. If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June — a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special, the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet.As I should have shown this earlier, it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. When Einstein died in 1955, one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post. The plaque reads, ""Albert Einstein lived here."" And I'd like to end with a vignette, as it were, inspired by this image. We've been familiar for 40 years with this image: the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. But let's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar, not just for 40 years, but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our Earth. What would they have seen? Over nearly all that immense time, Earth's appearance would have changed very gradually. The only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. Apart from those brief traumas, nothing happens suddenly.The continental landmasses drifted around. Ice cover waxed and waned. Successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct. But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history, the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years, the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture. Change has accelerated as human populations rose. Then other things happened even more abruptly. Within just 50 years — that's one hundredth of one millionth of the Earth's age — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise, and ominously fast.The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves — the total output from all TV and cell phones and radar transmissions. And something else happened. Metallic objects — albeit very small ones, a few tons at most — escaped into orbit around the Earth. Some journeyed to the moons and planets. A race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict Earth's final doom in another six billion years. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the Earth's life? These human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? If they continued their vigil, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will some spasm foreclose Earth's future? Or will the biosphere stabilize? Or will some of the metallic objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases, a post-human life elsewhere?The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein — humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth as depicted here. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_rees_asks_is_this_our_final_century
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"I've got apparently 18 minutes to convince you that history has a direction, an arrow; that in some fundamental sense, it's good; that the arrow points to something positive. Now, when the TED people first approached me about giving this upbeat talk — (Laughter) — that was before the cartoon of Muhammad had triggered global rioting. It was before the avian flu had reached Europe. It was before Hamas had won the Palestinian election, eliciting various counter-measures by Israel. And to be honest, if I had known when I was asked to give this upbeat talk that even as I was giving the upbeat talk, the apocalypse would be unfolding — (Laughter) — I might have said, ""Is it okay if I talk about something else?"" But I didn't, OK. So we're here. I'll do what I can. I'll do what I can.I've got to warn you: the sense in which my worldview is upbeat has always been kind of subtle, sometimes even elusive. (Laughter) The sense in which I can be uplifting and inspiring — I mean, there's always been a kind of a certain grim dimension to the way I try to uplift, so if grim inspiration — (Laughter) — if grim inspiration is not a contradiction in terms, that is, I'm afraid, the most you can hope for. OK, today — that's if I succeed. I'll see what I can do. OK?Now, in one sense, the claim that history has a direction is not that controversial. If you're just talking about social structure, OK, clearly that's gotten more complex a little over the last 10,000 years — has reached higher and higher levels. And in fact, that's actually sustaining a long-standing trend that predates human beings, OK, that biological evolution was doing for us. Because what happened in the beginning, this stuff encases itself in a cell, then cells start hanging out together in societies. Eventually they get so close, they form multicellular organisms, then you get complex multicellular organisms; they form societies.But then at some point, one of these multicellular organisms does something completely amazing with this stuff, which is it launches a whole second kind of evolution: cultural evolution. And amazingly, that evolution sustains the trajectory that biological evolution had established toward greater complexity. By cultural evolution we mean the evolution of ideas. A lot of you have heard the term ""memes."" The evolution of technology, I pay a lot of attention to, so, you know, one of the first things you got was a little hand axe. Generations go by, somebody says, hey, why don't we put it on a stick? (Laughter) Just absolutely delights the little ones. Next best thing to a video game.This may not seem to impress, but technological evolution is progressive, so another 10, 20,000 years, and armaments technology takes you here. (Laughter) Impressive. And the rate of technological evolution speeds up, so a mere quarter of a century after this, you get this, OK. (Laughter) And this. (Laughter) I'm sorry — it was a cheap laugh, but I wanted to find a way to transition back to this idea of the unfolding apocalypse, and I thought that might do it. (Applause)So, what threatens to happen with this unfolding apocalypse is the collapse of global social organization. Now, first let me remind you how much work it took to get us where we are, to be on the brink of true global social organization. Originally, you had the most complex societies, the hunter-gatherer village. Stonehenge is the remnant of a chiefdom, which is what you get with the invention of agriculture: multi-village polity with centralized rule. With the invention of writing, you start getting cities. This is blurry. I kind of like that because it makes it look like a one-celled organism and reminds you how many levels organic organization has already moved through to get to this point. And then you get to, you know, you get empires.I want to stress, you know, social organization can transcend political bounds. This is the Silk Road connecting the Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire. So you had social complexity spanning the whole continent, even if no polity did similarly. Today, you've got nation states. Point is: there's obviously collaboration and organization going on beyond national bounds. This is actually just a picture of the earth at night, and I'm just putting it up because I think it's pretty. Does kind of convey the sense that this is an integrated system.Now, I explained this growth of complexity by reference to something called ""non-zero sumness."" Assuming that a few of you did not do the assigned reading, very quickly, the key idea is the distinction between zero-sum games, in which correlations are inverse: always a winner and a loser. Non-zero-sum games in which correlations can be positive, OK. So like in tennis, usually it's win-lose; it always adds up to zero-zero-sum. But if you're playing doubles, the person on your side of the net, they're in the same boat as you, so you're playing a non-zero-sum game with them. It's either for the better or for the worse, OK. A lot of forms of non-zero-sum behavior in the realm of economics and so on in everyday life often leads to cooperation.The argument I make is basically that, well, non-zero-sum games have always been part of life. You have them in hunter-gatherer societies, but then through technological evolution, new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games, involving more people over larger territory. Social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential, so you get cities, you know, and you get all the non-zero-sum games you don't think about that are being played across the world. Like, have you ever thought when you buy a car, how many people on how many different continents contributed to the manufacture of that car? Those are people in effect you're playing a non-zero-sum game with. I mean, there are certainly plenty of them around.Now, this sounds like an intrinsically upbeat worldview in a way, because when you think of non-zero, you think win-win, you know, that's good. Well, there are a few reasons that actually it's not intrinsically upbeat. First of all, it can accommodate; it doesn't deny the existence of inequality exploitation war. But there's a more fundamental reason that it's not intrinsically upbeat, because a non-zero-sum game, all it tells you for sure is that the fortunes will be correlated for better or worse. It doesn't necessarily predict a win-win outcome.So, in a way, the question is: on what grounds am I upbeat at all about history? And the answer is, first of all, on balance I would say people have played their games to more win-win outcomes than lose-lose outcomes. On balance, I think history is a net positive in the non-zero-sum game department. And a testament to this is the thing that most amazes me, most impresses me, and most uplifts me, which is that there is a moral dimension to history; there is a moral arrow. We have seen moral progress over time.2,500 years ago, members of one Greek city-state considered members of another Greek city-state subhuman and treated them that way. And then this moral revolution arrived, and they decided that actually, no, Greeks are human beings. It's just the Persians who aren't fully human and don't deserve to be treated very nicely.But this was progress — you know, give them credit. And now today, we've seen more progress. I think — I hope — most people here would say that all people everywhere are human beings, deserve to be treated decently, unless they do something horrendous, regardless of race or religion. And you have to read your ancient history to realize what a revolution that has been, OK. This was not a prevalent view, few thousand years ago, and I attribute it to this non-zero-sum dynamic. I think that's the reason there is as much tolerance toward nationalities, ethnicities, religions as there is today. If you asked me, you know, why am I not in favor of bombing Japan, well, I'm only half-joking when I say they built my car. We have this non-zero-sum relationship, and I think that does lead to a kind of a tolerance to the extent that you realize that someone else's welfare is positively correlated with yours — you're more likely to cut them a break.I kind of think this is a kind of a business-class morality. Unfortunately, I don't fly trans-Atlantic business class often enough to know, or any other kind of business class really, but I assume that in business class, you don't hear many expressions of, you know, bigotry about racial groups or ethnic groups, because the people who are flying trans-Atlantic business class are doing business with all these people; they're making money off all these people. And I really do think that, in that sense at least, capitalism has been a constructive force, and more fundamentally, it's a non-zero-sumness that has been a constructive force in expanding people's realm of moral awareness. I think the non-zero-sum dynamic, which is not only economic by any means — it's not always commerce — but it has driven us to the verge of a moral truth, which is the fundamental equality of everyone. It has done that. As it has moved global, moved us toward a global level of social organization, it has driven us toward moral truth. I think that's wonderful.Now, back to the unfolding apocalypse. And you may wonder, OK, that's all fine, sounds great — moral direction in history — but what about this so-called clash of civilizations? Well, first of all, I would emphasize that it fits into the non-zero-sum framework, OK. If you look at the relationship between the so-called Muslim world and Western world — two terms I don't like, but can't really avoid; in such a short span of time, they're efficient if nothing else — it is non-zero-sum. And by that I mean, if people in the Muslim world get more hateful, more resentful, less happy with their place in the world, it'll be bad for the West. If they get more happy, it'll be good for the West. So that is a non-zero-sum dynamic.And I would say the non-zero-sum dynamic is only going to grow more intense over time because of technological trends, but more intense in a kind of negative way. It's the downside correlation of their fortunes that will become more and more possible. And one reason is because of something I call the ""growing lethality of hatred."" More and more, it's possible for grassroots hatred abroad to manifest itself in the form of organized violence on American soil. And that's pretty new, and I think it's probably going to get a lot worse — this capacity — because of trends in information technology, in technologies that can be used for purposes of munitions like biotechnology and nanotechnology. We may be hearing more about that today.And there's something I worry about especially, which is that this dynamic will lead to a kind of a feedback cycle that puts us on a slippery slope. What I have in mind is: terrorism happens here; we overreact to it. That, you know, we're not sufficiently surgical in our retaliation leads to more hatred abroad, more terrorism. We overreact because being human, we feel like retaliating, and it gets worse and worse and worse. You could call this the positive feedback of negative vibes, but I think in something so spooky, we really shouldn't have the word positive there at all, even in a technical sense. So let's call it the death spiral of negativity. (Laughter) I assure you if it happens, at the end, both the West and the Muslim world will have suffered.So, what do we do? Well, first of all, we can do a lot more with arms control, the international regulation of dangerous technologies. I have a whole global governance sermon that I will spare you right now, because I don't think that's going to be enough anyway, although it's essential. I think we're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world. I think you're just going to have to see less hatred among groups, less bigotry, and, you know, racial groups, religious groups, whatever. I've got to admit I feel silly saying that. It sounds so kind of Pollyannaish. I feel like Rodney King, you know, saying, why can't we all just get along? But hey, I don't really see any alternative, given the way I read the situation. There's going to have to be moral progress. There's going to have to be a lessening of the amount of hatred in the world, given how dangerous it's becoming. In my defense, I'd say, as naive as this may sound, it's ultimately grounded in cynicism.That is to say — (Laughter) — thank you, thank you. That is to say, remember: my whole view of morality is that it boils down to self-interest. It's when people's fortunes are correlated. It's when your welfare conduces to mine, that I decide, oh yeah, I'm all in favor of your welfare. That's what's responsible for this growth of this moral progress so far, and I'm saying we once again have a correlation of fortunes, and if people respond to it intelligently, we will see the development of tolerance and so on — the norms that we need, you know. We will see the further evolution of this kind of business-class morality.So, these two things, you know, if they get people's attention and drive home the positive correlation and people do what's in their self-interests, which is further the moral evolution, then they could actually have a constructive effect. And that's why I lump growing lethality of hatred and death spiral of negativity under the general rubric, reasons to be cheerful. (Laughter) Doing the best I can, OK. (Laughter) I never called myself Mr. Uplift. I'm just doing what I can here. (Laughter)Now, launching a moral revolution has got to be hard, right? I mean, what do you do? And I think the answer is a lot of different people are going to have to do a lot of different things. We all start where we are. Speaking as an American who has children whose security 10, 20, 30 years down the road I worry about — what I personally want to start out doing is figuring out why so many people around the world hate us, OK. I think that's a worthy research project myself. I also like it because it's an intrinsically kind of morally redeeming exercise. Because to understand why somebody in a very different culture does something — somebody you're kind of viewing as alien, who's doing things you consider strange in a culture you consider strange — to really understand why they do the things they do is a morally redeeming accomplishment, because you've got to relate their experience to yours. To really understand it, you've got to say, ""Oh, I get it. So when they feel resentful, it's kind of like the way I feel resentful when this happens, and for somewhat the same reasons."" That's true understanding. And I think that is an expansion of your moral compass when you manage to do that.It's especially hard to do when people hate you, OK, because you don't really, in a sense, want to completely understand why people hate you. I mean, you want to hear the reason, but you don't want to be able to relate to it. You don't want it to make sense, right? (Laughter) You don't want to say, ""Well, yeah, I can kind of understand how a human being in those circumstances would hate the country I live in."" That's not a pleasant thing, but I think it's something that we're going to have to get used to andwork on. Now, I want to stress that to understand, you know — there are people who don't like this whole business of understanding the grassroots, the root causes of things; they don't want to know why people hate us. I want to understand it. The reason you're trying to understand why they hate us, is to get them to quit hating us. The idea when you go through this moral exercise of really coming to appreciate their humanity and better understand them, is part of an effort to get them to appreciate your humanity in the long run. I think it's the first step toward that. That's the long-term goal.There are people who worry about this, and in fact, I, myself, apparently, was denounced on national TV a couple of nights ago because of an op-ed I'd written. It was kind of along these lines, and the allegation was that I have, quote, ""affection for terrorists."" Now, the good news is that the person who said it was Ann Coulter. (Laughter) (Applause) I mean, if you've got to have an enemy, do make it Ann Coulter. (Laughter) But it's not a crazy concern, OK, because understanding behavior can lead to a kind of empathy, and it can make it a little harder to deliver tough love, and so on. But I think we're a lot closer to erring on the side of not comprehending the situation clearly enough, than in comprehending it so clearly that we just can't, you know, get the army out to kill terrorists.So I'm not really worried about it. So — (Laughter) — I mean, we're going to have to work on a lot of fronts, but if we succeed — if we succeed — then once again, non-zero-sumness and the recognition of non-zero-sum dynamics will have forced us to a higher moral level. And a kind of saving higher moral level, something that kind of literally saves the world. If you look at the word ""salvation"" in the Bible — the Christian usage that we're familiar with — saving souls, that people go to heaven — that's actually a latecomer. The original meaning of the word ""salvation"" in the Bible is about saving the social system. ""Yahweh is our Savior"" means ""He has saved the nation of Israel,"" which at the time, was a pretty high-level social organization.Now, social organization has reached the global level, and I guess, if there's good news I can say I'm bringing you, it's just that all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interests in a disciplined and careful way. It's going to be hard. I say we give it a shot anyway because we've just come too far to screw it up now. Thanks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_wright_on_optimism
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"If you haven't ordered yet, I generally find the rigatoni with the spicy tomato sauce goes best with diseases of the small intestine.(Laughter)So, sorry — it just feels like I should be doing stand-up up here because of the setting. No, what I want to do is take you back to 1854 in London for the next few minutes, and tell the story — in brief — of this outbreak, which in many ways, I think, helped create the world that we live in today, and particularly the kind of city that we live in today. This period in 1854, in the middle part of the 19th century, in London's history, is incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. But I think the most important one is that London was this city of 2.5 million people, and it was the largest city on the face of the planet at that point. But it was also the largest city that had ever been built.And so the Victorians were trying to live through and simultaneously invent a whole new scale of living: this scale of living that we, you know, now call ""metropolitan living."" And it was in many ways, at this point in the mid-1850s, a complete disaster. They were basically a city living with a modern kind of industrial metropolis with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. So people, for instance, just to gross you out for a second, had cesspools of human waste in their basement. Like, a foot to two feet deep. And they would just kind of throw the buckets down there and hope that it would somehow go away, and of course it never really would go away. And all of this stuff, basically, had accumulated to the point where the city was incredibly offensive to just walk around in.It was an amazingly smelly city. Not just because of the cesspools, but also the sheer number of livestock in the city would shock people. Not just the horses, but people had cows in their attics that they would use for milk, that they would hoist up there and keep them in the attic until literally their milk ran out and they died, and then they would drag them off to the bone boilers down the street. So, you would just walk around London at this point and just be overwhelmed with this stench. And what ended up happening is that an entire emerging public health system became convinced that it was the smell that was killing everybody, that was creating these diseases that would wipe through the city every three or four years. And cholera was really the great killer of this period.It arrived in London in 1832, and every four or five years another epidemic would take 10,000, 20,000 people in London and throughout the U.K. And so the authorities became convinced that this smell was this problem. We had to get rid of the smell. And so, in fact, they concocted a couple of early, you know, founding public-health interventions in the system of the city, one of which was called the ""Nuisances Act,"" which they got everybody as far as they could to empty out their cesspools and just pour all that waste into the river. Because if we get it out of the streets, it'll smell much better, and — oh right, we drink from the river. So what ended up happening, actually, is they ended up increasing the outbreaks of cholera because, as we now know, cholera is actually in the water. It's a waterborne disease, not something that's in the air. It's not something you smell or inhale; it's something you ingest.And so one of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing. So this was the state of London in 1854, and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions, and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people, it was a very talented classic 19th century multi-disciplinarian named John Snow, who was a local doctor in Soho in London, who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was, in fact, a waterborne disease, and had basically convinced nobody of this. The public health authorities had largely ignored what he had to say. And he'd made the case in a number of papers and done a number of studies, but nothing had really stuck. And part of — what's so interesting about this story to me is that in some ways, it's a great case study in how cultural change happens, how a good idea eventually comes to win out over much worse ideas. And Snow labored for a long time with this great insight that everybody ignored.And then on one day, August 28th of 1854, a young child, a five-month-old girl whose first name we don't know, we know her only as Baby Lewis, somehow contracted cholera, came down with cholera at 40 Broad Street. You can't really see it in this map, but this is the map that becomes the central focus in the second half of my book. It's in the middle of Soho, in this working class neighborhood, this little girl becomes sick and it turns out that the cesspool, that they still continue to have, despite the Nuisances Act, bordered on an extremely popular water pump, local watering hole that was well known for the best water in all of Soho, that all the residents from Soho and the surrounding neighborhoods would go to.And so this little girl inadvertently ended up contaminating the water in this popular pump, and one of the most terrifying outbreaks in the history of England erupted about two or three days later. Literally, 10 percent of the neighborhood died in seven days, and much more would have died if people hadn't fled after the initial outbreak kicked in. So it was this incredibly terrifying event. You had these scenes of entire families dying over the course of 48 hours of cholera, alone in their one-room apartments, in their little flats. Just an extraordinary, terrifying scene. Snow lived near there, heard about the outbreak, and in this amazing act of courage went directly into the belly of the beast because he thought an outbreak that concentrated could actually potentially end up convincing people that, in fact, the real menace of cholera was in the water supply and not in the air. He suspected an outbreak that concentrated would probably involve a single point source. One single thing that everybody was going to because it didn't have the traditional slower path of infections that you might expect.And so he went right in there and started interviewing people. He eventually enlisted the help of this amazing other figure, who's kind of the other protagonist of the book — this guy, Henry Whitehead, who was a local minister, who was not at all a man of science, but was incredibly socially connected; he knew everybody in the neighborhood. And he managed to track down, Whitehead did, many of the cases of people who had drunk water from the pump, or who hadn't drunk water from the pump. And eventually Snow made a map of the outbreak. He found increasingly that people who drank from the pump were getting sick. People who hadn't drunk from the pump were not getting sick. And he thought about representing that as a kind of a table of statistics of people living in different neighborhoods, people who hadn't, you know, percentages of people who hadn't, but eventually he hit upon the idea that what he needed was something that you could see. Something that would take in a sense a higher-level view of all this activity that had been happening in the neighborhood.And so he created this map, which basically ended up representing all the deaths in the neighborhoods as black bars at each address. And you can see in this map, the pump right at the center of it and you can see that one of the residences down the way had about 15 people dead. And the map is actually a little bit bigger. As you get further and further away from the pump, the deaths begin to grow less and less frequent. And so you can see this something poisonous emanating out of this pump that you could see in a glance. And so, with the help of this map, and with the help of more evangelizing that he did over the next few years and that Whitehead did, eventually, actually, the authorities slowly started to come around. It took much longer than sometimes we like to think in this story, but by 1866, when the next big cholera outbreak came to London, the authorities had been convinced — in part because of this story, in part because of this map — that in fact the water was the problem.And they had already started building the sewers in London, and they immediately went to this outbreak and they told everybody to start boiling their water. And that was the last time that London has seen a cholera outbreak since. So, part of this story, I think — well, it's a terrifying story, it's a very dark story and it's a story that continues on in many of the developing cities of the world. It's also a story really that is fundamentally optimistic, which is to say that it's possible to solve these problems if we listen to reason, if we listen to the kind of wisdom of these kinds of maps, if we listen to people like Snow and Whitehead, if we listen to the locals who understand what's going on in these kinds of situations. And what it ended up doing is making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one.When people were looking at 10 percent of their neighborhoods dying in the space of seven days, there was a widespread consensus that this couldn't go on, that people weren't meant to live in cities of 2.5 million people. But because of what Snow did, because of this map, because of the whole series of reforms that happened in the wake of this map, we now take for granted that cities have 10 million people, cities like this one are in fact sustainable things. We don't worry that New York City is going to collapse in on itself quite the way that, you know, Rome did, and be 10 percent of its size in 100 years or 200 years. And so that in a way is the ultimate legacy of this map. It's a map of deaths that ended up creating a whole new way of life, the life that we're enjoying here today. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_tours_the_ghost_map
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"What I'm going to do, in the spirit of collaborative creativity, is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made, but do them — this is called ""creative collaboration;"" it's actually called ""borrowing"" — but do it through a particular perspective, and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that Jimmy and others have talked about.Let me just ask you, to start with, this simple question: who invented the mountain bike? Because traditional economic theory would say, well, the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big R&D lab where they were thinking up new projects, and it came out of there. It didn't come from there. Another answer might be, well, it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage, who, working away on different kinds of bikes, comes up with a bike out of thin air.It didn't come from there. The mountain bike came from users, came from young users, particularly a group in Northern California, who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes, which were those sort of bikes that Eddy Merckx rode, or your big brother, and they're very glamorous. But also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode, which sort of had big handlebars like that, and they were too heavy. So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. And for the first, I don't know, three to five years of their life, mountain bikes were known as ""clunkers."" And they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California.And then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business, start selling them to other people, and gradually another company emerged out of that, Marin, and it probably was, I don't know, 10, maybe even 15, years, before the big bike companies realized there was a market. Thirty years later, mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in America. That's 58 billion dollars.This is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn't see the need, the opportunity; they didn't have the incentive to innovate. The one thing I think I disagree with about Yochai's presentation is when he said the Internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive. It's when the Internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers — who are knowledgeable; they've got the incentive to innovate; they've got the tools; they want to — that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration. And out of that, you get the need for the kind of things that Jimmy was talking about, which is our new kinds of organization, or a better way to put it: how do we organize ourselves without organizations? That's now possible; you don't need an organization to be organized, to achieve large and complex tasks, like innovating new software programs.So this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about. The traditional view, still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity — in organizations, in government — is that creativity is about special people: wear baseball caps the wrong way round, come to conferences like this, in special places, elite universities, R&D labs in the forests, water, maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors, you know, bean bags, maybe the odd table-football table. Special people, special places, think up special ideas, then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers, who are passive. They can say ""yes"" or ""no"" to the invention. That's the idea of creativity. What's the policy recommendation out of that if you're in government, or you're running a large company? More special people, more special places. Build creative clusters in cities; create more R&D parks, so on and so forth. Expand the pipeline down to the consumers.Well this view, I think, is increasingly wrong. I think it's always been wrong, because I think always creativity has been highly collaborative, and it's probably been largely interactive. But it's increasingly wrong, and one of the reasons it's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they're often ahead of the producers. Why is that? Well, one issue is that radical innovation, when you've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people, have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them. The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest. And when you get a radical innovation, it's often very uncertain how it can be applied.The whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty. The very first landline telephones, the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from West End theaters. When the mobile telephone companies invented SMS, they had no idea what it was for; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use.So the more radical the innovation, the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for. All of our patents, our entire approach to patents and invention, is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for; we can say what it's for. More and more, the inventors of things will not be able to say that in advance. It will be worked out in use, in collaboration with users. We like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation: there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea. The truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative; like Wikipedia, it develops over a long period of time.The second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big, disruptive innovations. If you want to find the big new ideas, it's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets, in big organizations. And just look inside large organizations and you'll see why that is so. So, you're in a big corporation. You're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder. Do you go into your board and say, ""Look, I've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market, with consumers we've never dealt with before, and I'm not sure it's going to have a big payoff, but it could be really, really big in the future?"" No, what you do, is you go in and you say, ""I've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users, and I can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years.""Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They've got so much sunk in it that it's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets. Emerging new markets, then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users. Best example: who in the music industry, 30 years ago, would have said, ""Yes, let's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to. That sounds like a winner; we'll go with it."" (Laughter). So what happens? Rap music is created by the users. They do it on their own tapes, with their own recording equipment; they distribute it themselves. 30 years later, rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture — would never have come from the big companies. Had to start — this is the third point — with these pro-ams.This is the phrase that I've used in some stuff which I've done with a think tank in London called Demos, where we've been looking at these people who are amateurs — i.e., they do it for the love of it — but they want to do it to very high standards. And across a whole range of fields — from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing, so on and so forth — you find people who want to do things because they love it, but they want to do these things to very high standards. They work at their leisure, if you like. They take their leisure very seriously: they acquire skills; they invest time; they use technology that's getting cheaper — it's not just the Internet: cameras, design technology, leisure technology, surfboards, so on and so forth. Largely through globalization, a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper. More knowledgeable consumers, more educated, more able to connect with one another, more able to do things together. Consumption, in that sense, is an expression of their productive potential. Why, we found, people were interested in this, is that at work they don't feel very expressed. They don't feel as if they're doing something that really matters to them, so they pick up these kinds of activities. This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life.Take astronomy as an example, which Yochai has already mentioned. Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space. And there's a big telescope in Northern England called Jodrell Bank, and when I was a kid, it was amazing, because the moon shots would take off, and this thing would move on rails. And it was huge — it was absolutely enormous. Now, six amateur astronomers, working with the Internet, with Dobsonian digital telescopes — which are pretty much open source — with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years, the Internet — they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago. So here in astronomy, you have this vast explosion of new productive resources. The users can be producers.What does this mean, then, for our organizational landscape? Well, just imagine a world, for the moment, divided into two camps. Over here, you've got the old, traditional corporate model: special people, special places; patent it, push it down the pipeline to largely waiting, passive consumers. Over here, let's imagine we've got Wikipedia, Linux, and beyond — open source. This is open; this is closed. This is new; this is traditional. Well, the first thing you can say, I think with certainty, is what Yochai has said already — is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms. These people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding, because they're threatened by them. And so the debates about copyright, digital rights, so on and so forth — these are all about trying to stifle, in my view, these kinds of organizations. What we're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright. Meant to be a way to incentivize invention, meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge, they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place.Let me just give you two examples. The first is: imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying, ""I've got a fantastic idea. I've invented this brilliant new program that is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook."" Which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with Microsoft, with Microsoft Outlook? No one. That is why the competition with Microsoft is bound to come — will only come — from an open-source kind of project.So, there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation, because it's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly. There'll be huge professional arguments as well. Because the professionals, over here in these closed organizations — they might be academics; they might be programmers; they might be doctors; they might be journalists — my former profession — say, ""No, no — you can't trust these people over here.""When I started in journalism — Financial Times, 20 years ago — it was very, very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper. And you'd kind of look over their shoulder on the Tube to see if they were reading your article. Usually they were reading the share prices, and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor, or something like that, and you know, ""For heaven's sake, what are they doing! They're not reading my brilliant article!"" And we allowed users, readers, two places where they could contribute to the paper: the letters page, where they could write a letter in, and we would condescend to them, cut it in half, and print it three days later. Or the op-ed page, where if they knew the editor — had been to school with him, slept with his wife — they could write an article for the op-ed page. Those were the two places.Shock, horror: now, the readers want to be writers and publishers. That's not their role; they're supposed to read what we write. But they don't want to be journalists. The journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists; they don't want to be journalists; they just want to have a voice. They want to, as Jimmy said, they want to have a dialogue, a conversation. They want to be part of that flow of information. What's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding. So, there's going to be a tremendous struggle. But, also, there's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed.What you'll see, I think, is two things that are critical, and these, I think, are two challenges for the open movement. The first is: can we really survive on volunteers? If this is so critical, do we not need it funded, organized, supported in much more structured ways? I think the idea of creating the Red Cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea, but can we really organize that, just on volunteers? What kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible? What's the role of the BBC, for instance, in that world? What should be the role of public policy? And finally, what I think you will see is the intelligent, closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction. So it's not going to be a contest between two camps, but, in between them, you'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy. New organizational models coming about, mixing closed and open in tricky ways. It won't be so clear-cut; it won't be Microsoft versus Linux — there'll be all sorts of things in between. And those organizational models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful, and the people who can understand them will be very, very successful.Let me just give you one final example of what that means. I was in Shanghai, in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago — one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they've built in Shanghai in the last 10 years. And I was having dinner with this guy called Timothy Chan. Timothy Chan set up an Internet business in 2000. Didn't go into the Internet, kept his money, decided to go into computer games. He runs a company called Shanda, which is the largest computer games company in China. Nine thousand servers all over China, has 250 million subscribers. At any one time, there are four million people playing one of his games. How many people does he employ to service that population? 500 people. Well, how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees? Because basically, he doesn't service them. He gives them a platform; he gives them some rules; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation; he orchestrates the action. But actually, a lot of the content is created by the users themselves. And it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really, really powerful.The best measure of that: so you go into one of his games, you create a character that you develop in the course of the game. If, for some reason, your credit card bounces, or there's some other problem, you lose your character. You've got two options. One option: you can create a new character, right from scratch, but with none of the history of your player. That costs about 100 dollars. Or you can get on a plane, fly to Shanghai, queue up outside Shanda's offices — cost probably 600, 700 dollars — and reclaim your character, get your history back. Every morning, there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters. (Laughter) So this is about companies built on communities, that provide communities with tools, resources, platforms in which they can share. He's not open source, but it's very, very powerful.So here is one of the challenges, I think, for people like me, who do a lot of work with government. If you're a games company, and you've got a million players in your game, you only need one percent of them to be co-developers, contributing ideas, and you've got a development workforce of 10,000 people. Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain, and one percent of them were co-developers of education. What would that do to the resources available to the education system? Or if you got one percent of the patients in the NHS to, in some sense, be co-producers of health.The reason why — despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back — why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources. And one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_innovation
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"So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, ""If you say a word often enough, it becomes you."" And having grown up in a segregated city, Baltimore, Maryland, I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder — thank God for technology — to interview people, thinking that if I walked in their words — which is also why I don't wear shoes when I perform — if I walked in their words, that I could sort of absorb America. I was also inspired by Walt Whitman, who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him.So these four characters are going to be from that work that I've been doing for many years now, and well over, I don't know, a couple of thousand people I've interviewed. Anybody out here old enough to know Studs Terkel, that old radio man? So I thought he would be the perfect person to go to to ask about a defining moment in American history. You know, he was ""born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, greatest ship every built. Hits the tip of an iceberg, and bam, it went down. It went down and I came up. Wow, some century."" (Laughter)So this is his answer about a defining moment in American history. ""Defining moment in American history, I don't think there's one; you can't say Hiroshima, that's a big one — I can't think of any one moment I would say is a defining moment. The gradual slippage — 'slippage' is the word used by the people in Watergate, moral slippage — it's a gradual kind of thing, combination of things. You see, we also have the technology. I say, less and less the human touch.""Oh, let me kind of tell you a funny little play bit. The Atlanta airport is a modern airport, and they should leave the gate there. These trains that take you out to a concourse and on to a destination. And these trains are smooth, and they're quiet and they're efficient. And there's a voice on the train, you know the voice was a human voice. You see in the old days we had robots, robots imitated humans. Now we have humans imitating robots. So we got this voice on this train: Concourse One: Omaha, Lincoln. Concourse Two: Dallas, Fort Worth. Same voice. Just as a train is about to go, a young couple rush in and they're just about to close the pneumatic doors. And that voice, without losing a beat, says, 'Because of late entry, we're delayed 30 seconds.' Just then, everybody's looking at this couple with hateful eyes and the couple's going like this, you know, shrinking. Well, I'd happened to have had a couple of drinks before boarding — I do that to steel my nerves — and so I imitate a train call, holding my hand on my — 'George Orwell, your time has come,' you see. Well, some of you are laughing. Everybody laughs when I say that, but not on this train. Silence. And so suddenly they're looking at me. So here I am with the couple, the three of us shrinking at the foot of Calvary about to be up, you know.""Just then I see a baby, a little baby in the lap of a mother. I know it's Hispanic because she's speaking Spanish to her companion. So I'm going to talk to the baby. So I say to the baby, holding my hand over my mouth because my breath must be 100 proof, I say to the baby, 'Sir or Madam, what is your considered opinion of the human species?' And the baby looks, you know, the way babies look at you clearly, starts laughing, starts busting out with this crazy little laugh. I say, 'Thank God for a human reaction, we haven't lost yet.'""But you see, the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. You know, you see, you've got to question the official truth. You know the thing that was so great about Mark Twain — you know we honor Mark Twain, but we don't read him. We read 'Huck Finn,' of course, we read 'Huck Finn' of course. I mean, Huck, of course, was tremendous. Remember that great scene on the raft, remember what Huck did? You see, here's Huck; he's an illiterate kid; he's had no schooling, but there's something in him. And the official truth, the truth was, the law was, that a black man was a property, was a thing, you see.And Huck gets on the raft with a property named Jim, a slave, see. And he hears that Jim is going to go and take his wife and kids and steal them from the woman who owns them, and Huck says, 'Ooh, oh my God, ooh, ooh — that woman, that woman never did anybody any harm. Ooh, he's going to steal; he's going to steal; he's going to do a terrible thing.' Just then, two slavers caught up, guys chasing slaves, looking for Jim. 'Anybody up on that raft with you?' Huck says, 'Yeah.' 'Is he black or white?' 'White.' And they go off. And Huck said, 'Oh my God, oh my God, I lied, I lied, ooh, I did a terrible thing, did a terrible thing — why do I feel so good?'""But it's the goodness of Huck, that stuff that Huck's been made of, you see, all been buried; it's all been buried. So the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. So you ask about a defining moment — ain't no defining moment in American history for me. It's an accretion of moments that add up to where we are now, where trivia becomes news. And more and more, less and less awareness of the pain of the other. Huh. You know, I don't know if you could use this or not, but I was quoting Wright Morris, a writer from Nebraska, who says, 'We're more and more into communications and less and less into communication.' Okay, kids, I got to scram, got to go see my cardiologist."" And that's Studs Terkel. (Applause)So, talk about risk taking. I'm going to do somebody that nobody likes. You know, most actors want to do characters that are likeable — well, not always, but the notion, especially at a conference like this, I like to inspire people. But since this was called ""risk taking,"" I'm doing somebody who I never do, because she's so unlikeable that one person actually came backstage and told me to take her out of the show she was in. And I'm doing her because I think we think of risk, at a conference like this, as a good thing.But there are certain other connotations to the word ""risk,"" and the same thing about the word ""nature."" What is nature? Maxine Greene, who's a wonderful philosopher who's as old as Studs, and was the head of a philosophy — great, big philosophy kind of an organization — I went to her and asked her what are the two things that she doesn't know, that she still wants to know. And she said, ""Well, personally, I still feel like I have to curtsey when I see the president of my university. And I still feel as though I've got to get coffee for my male colleagues, even though I've outlived most of them."" And she said, ""And then intellectually, I don't know enough about the negative imagination. And September 11th certainly taught us that that's a whole area we don't investigate.""So this piece is about a negative imagination. It raises questions about what nature is, what Mother Nature is, and about what a risk can be. And I got this in the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women. Everything I do is word for word off a tape. And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems, and this is called ""A Mirror to Her Mouth."" And this is an inmate named Paulette Jenkins.""I began to learn how to cover it up, because I didn't want nobody to know that this was happening in my home. I want everybody to think we were a normal family. I mean we had all the materialistic things, but that didn't make my children pain any less; that didn't make their fears subside. I ran out of excuses about how we got black eyes and busted lips and bruises. I didn't had no more excuses. And he beat me too. But that didn't change the fact that it was a nightmare for my family; it was a nightmare. And I failed them dramatically, because I allowed it to go on and on and on.""But the night that Myesha got killed — and the intensity just grew and grew and grew, until one night we came home from getting drugs, and he got angry with Myesha, and he started beating her, and he put her in a bathtub. Oh, he would use a belt. He had a belt because he had this warped perverted thing that Myesha was having sex with her little brother and they was fondling each other — that would be his reason. I'm just talking about the particular night that she died. And so he put her in the bathtub, and I was in the bedroom with the baby.""And four months before this happened, four months before Myesha died, I thought I could really fix this man. So I had a baby by him — insane — thinking that if I gave him his own kid, he would leave mine alone. And it didn't work, didn't work. And I ended up with three children, Houston, Myesha and Dominic, who was four months old when I came to jail.""And I was in the bedroom. Like I said, he had her in the bathroom and he — he — every time he hit her, she would fall. And she would hit her head on the tub. It happened continuously, repeatedly. I could hear it, but I dared not to move. I didn't move. I didn't even go and see what was happening. I just sat there and listened. And then he put her in the hallway. He told her, just set there. And so she set there for about four or five hours. And then he told her, get up. And when she got up, she says she couldn't see. Her face was bruised. She had a black eye. All around her head was just swollen; her head was about two sizes of its own size. I told him, 'Let her go to sleep.' He let her go to sleep.""The next morning she was dead. He went in to check on her for school, and he got very excited. He says, 'She won't breathe.' I knew immediately that she was dead. I didn't even want to accept the fact that she was dead, so I went in and I put a mirror to her mouth — there was no thing, nothing, coming out of her mouth. He said, he said, he said, 'We can't, we can't let nobody find out about this.' He say, 'You've got to help me.' I agree. I agree.""I mean, I've been keeping a secret for years and years and years, so it just seemed like second hand to me, just to keep on keeping it a secret. So we went to the mall and we told a police that we had, like, lost her, that she was missing. We told a security guard that she was missing, though she wasn't missing. And we told the security guard what we had put on her and we went home and we dressed her in exactly the same thing that we had told the security guard that we had put on her.""And then we got the baby and my other child, and we drove out to, like, I-95. I was so petrified and so numb, all I could look was in the rear-view mirror. And he just laid her right on the shoulder of the highway. My own child, I let that happen to."" So that's an investigation of the negative imagination. (Applause)When I started this project called ""On the Road: A Search For an American Character"" with my tape recorder, I thought that I was going to go around America and find it in all its aspects — bull riders, cowboys, pig farmers, drum majorettes — but I sort of got tripped on race relations, because my first big show was a show about a race riot. And so I went to both — two race riots, one of which was the Los Angeles riot. And this next piece is from that. Because this is what I would say I've learned the most about race relations, from this piece. It's a kind of an aria, I would say, and in many tapes that I have.Everybody knows that the Los Angeles riots happened because four cops beat up a black man named Rodney King. It was captured on videotape — technology — and it was played all over the world. Everybody thought the four cops would go to jail. They did not, so there were riots. And what a lot of people forget, is there was a second trial, ordered by George Bush, Sr. And that trial came back with two cops going to jail and two cops declared innocent. I was at that trial. And I mean, the people just danced in the streets because they were afraid there was going to be another riot. Explosion of joy that this verdict had come back this way.So there was a community that didn't — the Korean-Americans, whose stores had been burned to the ground. And so this woman, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, I suppose will have taught me the most that I have learned about race. And she asks also a question that Studs talks about: this notion of the ""official truth,"" to question the ""official truth."" So what she's questioning here, she's taking a chance and questioning what justice is in society. And this is called, ""Swallowing the Bitterness.""""I used to believe America was the best. I watched in Korea many luxurious Hollywood lifestyle movie. I never saw any poor man, any black. Until 1992, I used to believe America was the best — I still do; I don't deny that because I am a victim. But at the end of '92, when we were in such turmoil, and having all the financial problems, and all the mental problems, I began to really realize that Koreans are completely left out of this society and we are nothing. Why? Why do we have to be left out? We didn't qualify for medical treatment, no food stamp, no GR,no welfare, anything. Many African-Americans who never work got minimum amount of money to survive. We didn't get any because we have a car and a house. And we are high taxpayer. Where do I find justice? ""OK. OK? OK. OK. Many African-Americans probably think that they won by the trial. I was sitting here watching them the morning after the verdict, and all the day they were having a party, they celebrated, all of South Central, all the churches. And they say, 'Well, finally justice has been done in this society.' Well, what about victims' rights? They got their rights by destroying innocent Korean merchants. They have a lot of respect, as I do, for Dr. Martin King. He is the only model for black community; I don't care Jesse Jackson. He is the model of non-violence, non-violence — and they would all like to be in his spirit.""But what about 1992? They destroyed innocent people. And I wonder if that is really justice for them, to get their rights in that way. I was swallowing the bitterness, sitting here alone and watching them. They became so hilarious, but I was happy for them. I was glad for them. At least they got something back, OK. Let's just forget about Korean victims and other victims who were destroyed by them. They fought for their rights for over two centuries, and maybe because they sacrifice other minorities, Hispanic, Asian, we would suffer more in the mainstream. That's why I understand; that's why I have a mixed feeling about the verdict.""But I wish that, I wish that, I wish that I could be part of the enjoyment. I wish that I could live together with black people. But after the riot, it's too much difference. The fire is still there. How do you say it? [Unclear]. Igniting, igniting, igniting fire. Igniting fire. It's still there; it can burst out anytime."" Mrs. Young-Soon Han. (Applause)The other reason that I don't wear shoes is just in case I really feel like I have to cuddle up and get into the feet of somebody, walking really in somebody else's shoes. And I told you that in — you know, I didn't give you the year, but in '79 I thought that I was going to go around and find bull riders and pig farmers and people like that, and I got sidetracked on race relations.Finally, I did find a bull rider, two years ago. And I've been going to the rodeos with him, and we've bonded. And he's the lead in an op-ed I did about the Republican Convention. He's a Republican — I won't say anything about my party affiliation, but anyway — so this is my dear, dear Brent Williams, and this is on toughness, in case anybody needs to know about being tough for the work that you do. I think there's a real lesson in this. And this is called ""Toughness.""""Well, I'm an optimist. I mean basically I'm an optimist. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like my wife, Jolene, her family's always saying, you know, you ever think he's just a born loser? It seems like he has so much bad luck, you know. But then when that bull stepped on my kidney, you know, I didn't lose my kidney — I could have lost my kidney, I kept my kidney, so I don't think I'm a born loser. I think that's good luck. (Laughter)""And, I mean, funny things like this happen. I was in a doctor's office last CAT scan, and there was a Reader's Digest, October 2002. It was like, 'seven ways to get lucky.' And it says if you want to get lucky, you know, you've got to be around positive people. I mean, like even when I told my wife that you want to come out here and talk to me, she's like, 'She's just talking; she's just being nice to you. She's not going to do that.'""And then you called me up and you said you wanted to come out here and interview me and she went and looked you up on the Internet. She said, 'Look who she is. You're not even going to be able to answer her questions.' (Laughter) And she was saying you're going to make me look like an idiot because I've never been to college, and I wouldn't be talking professional or anything. I said, 'Well look, the woman talked to me for four hours. You know, if I wasn't talking — you know, like, you know, she wanted me to talk, I don't think she would even come out here.'""Confidence? Well, I think I ride more out of determination than confidence. I mean, confidence is like, you know, you've been on that bull before; you know you can ride him. I mean, confidence is kind of like being cocky, but in a good way. But determination, you know, it's like just, you know, 'Fuck the form, get the horn.' (Laughter) That's Tuff Hedeman, in the movie '8 Seconds.' I mean, like, Pat O'Mealey always said when I was a boy, he say, 'You know, you got more try than any kid I ever seen.' And try and determination is the same thing. Determination is, like, you're going to hang on that bull, even if you're riding upside down. Determination's like, you're going to ride till your head hits the back of the dirt.""Freedom? It would have to be the rodeo.""Beauty? I don't think I know what beauty is. Well, you know, I guess that'd have to be the rodeo too. I mean, look how we are, the roughy family, palling around and shaking hands and wrestling around me. It's like, you know, racking up our credit cards on entry fees and gas. We ride together, we, you know, we, we eat together and we sleep together. I mean, I can't even imagine what it's going to be like the last day I rodeo. I mean, I'll be alright. I mean, I have my ranch and everything, but I actually don't even want to think the day that comes. I mean, I guess it just be like — I guess it be like the day my brother died.""Toughness? Well, we was in West Jordan, Utah, and this bull shoved my face right through the metal shoots in a — you know, busted my face all up and had to go to the hospital. And they had to sew me up and straighten my nose out. And I had to go and ride in the rodeo that night, so I didn't want them to put me under anesthesia, or whatever you call it. And so they sewed my face up. And then they had to straighten out my nose, and they took these rods and shoved them up my nose and went up through my brains and felt like it was coming out the top of my head, and everybody said that it should have killed me, but it didn't, because I guess I have a high tolerance for pain. (Laughter) But the good thing was, once they shoved those rods up there and straightened my nose out, I could breathe, and I hadn't been able to breathe since I broke my nose in the high school rodeo.""Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anna_deavere_smith_s_american_character
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"So anyway, who am I? I usually say to people, when they say, ""What do you do?"" I say, ""I do hardware,"" because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything I do. And I recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some Valley event, to which he replied, ""How quaint.""(Laughter)And I sort of really was dumbstruck. And I really should have said something smart. And now I've had a little bit of time to think about it, I would have said, ""Well, you know, if we look at the next 100 years and we've seen all these problems in the last few days, most of the big issues — clean water, clean energy — and they're interchangeable in some respects — and cleaner, more functional materials — they all look to me to be hardware problems. This doesn't mean we should ignore software, or information, or computation."" And that's in fact probably what I'm going to try and tell you about.So, this talk is going to be about how do we make things and what are the new ways that we're going to make things in the future. Now, TED sends you a lot of spam if you're a speaker about ""do this, do that"" and you fill out all these forms, and you don't actually know how they're going to describe you, and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist. And I've always been nervous about the term ""futurist,"" because you seem doomed to failure because you can't really predict it. And I was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues I have, and said, ""You know, well, if I have to talk about the future, what is it?"" And George Homsey, a great guy, said, ""Oh, the future is amazing. It is so much stranger than you think. We're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut, and we're going to make your poo smell like peppermint.""(Laughter)So, you may think that's sort of really crazy, but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening that make this possible. So, this isn't my work, but it's work of good friends of mine at MIT. This is called the registry of standard biological parts. This is headed by Drew Endy and Tom Knight and a few other very, very bright individuals. Basically, what they're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system. Literally, think of proteins as subroutines that you can string together to execute a program. Now, this is actually becoming such an interesting idea. This is a state diagram. That's an extremely simple computer.This one is a two-bit counter. So that's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches. And this is being built by a group of students at Zurich for a design competition in biology. And from the results of the same competition last year, a University of Texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off. So this is interesting in the sense that you can now do ""if-then-for"" statements in materials, in structure. This is a pretty interesting trend, because we used to live in a world where everyone's said glibly, ""Form follows function,"" but I think I've sort of grown up in a world — you listened to Neil Gershenfeld yesterday; I was in a lab associated with his — where it's really a world where information defines form and function.I spent six years thinking about that, but to show you the power of art over science — this is actually one of the cartoons I write. These are called ""HowToons."" I work with a fabulous illustrator called Nick Dragotta. Took me six years at MIT, and about that many pages to describe what I was doing, and it took him one page. And so this is our muse Tucker. He's an interesting little kid — and his sister, Celine — and what he's doing here is observing the self-assembly of his Cheerios in his cereal bowl. And in fact you can program the self-assembly of things, so he starts chocolate-dipping edges, changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity. In theory, if you program those sufficiently, you should be able to do something pretty interesting and make a very complex structure. In this case, he's done self-replication of a complex 3D structure. And that's what I thought about for a long time, because this is how we currently make things. This is a silicon wafer, and essentially that's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff, sort of layered up. The feature side is — you know, people will say, [unclear] down around about 65 nanometers now.On the right, that's a radiolara. That's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans. And that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers, and it's a complex 3D structure. We could do a lot more with computers and things generally if we knew how to build things this way. The secret to biology is, it builds computation into the way it makes things. So this little thing here, polymerase, is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating DNA. And the ribosome here is another little computer that helps in the translation of the proteins. I thought about this in the sense that it's great to build in biological materials, but can we do similar things? Can we get self-replicating-type behavior? Can we get complex 3D structure automatically assembling in inorganic systems? Because there are some advantages to inorganic systems, like higher speed semiconductors, etc.So, this is some of my work on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system. And this is sort of Babbage's revenge. These are little mechanical computers. These are five-state state machines. So, that's about three light switches lined up. In a neutral state, they won't bind at all. Now, if I make a string of these, a bit string, they will be able to replicate. So we start with white, blue, blue, white. That encodes; that will now copy. From one comes two, and then from two comes three. And so you've got this sort of replicating system. It was work actually by Lionel Penrose, father of Roger Penrose, the tiles guy. He did a lot of this work in the '60s, and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow as we went down the digital computer revolution, but it's now coming back.So now I'm going to show you the hands-free, autonomous self-replication. So we've tracked in the video the input string, which was green, green, yellow, yellow, green. We set them off on this air hockey table. You know, high science uses air hockey tables —(Laughter)— and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy, but what you're actually seeing is copies of that original string emerging from the parts bin that you have here. So we've got autonomous replication of bit strings. So, why would you want to replicate bit strings? Well, it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme, that you can take a linear string, which is a convenient thing to copy, and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3D structure. So I was trying to, you know, take the engineer's version: Can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing?So what I'm showing you here is that we can make a 2D shape — the B — assemble from a string of components that follow extremely simple rules. And the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here, and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design, was that you don't need digital logic to do computation. And that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips. So you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process.So, Neil Gershenfeld showed you this video on Wednesday, I believe, but I'll show you again. This is literally the colored sequence of those tiles. Each different color has a different magnetic polarity, and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out. Now, hopefully, those of you who know anything about graph theory can look at that, and that will satisfy you that that can also do arbitrary 3D structure, and in fact, you know, I can now take a dog, carve it up and then reassemble it so it's a linear string that will fold from a sequence. And now I can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits. So, you know, it's a pretty interesting world when you start looking at the world a little bit differently. And the universe is now a compiler. And so I'm thinking about, you know, what are the programs for programming the physical universe? And how do we think about materials and structure, sort of as an information and computation problem? Not just where you attach a micro-controller to the end point, but that the structure and the mechanisms are the logic, are the computers.Having totally absorbed this philosophy, I started looking at a lot of problems a little differently. With the universe as a computer, you can look at this droplet of water as having performed the computations. You set a couple of boundary conditions, like gravity, the surface tension, density, etc., and then you press ""execute,"" and magically, the universe produces you a perfect ball lens. So, this actually applied to the problem of — so there's a half a billion to a billion people in the world don't have access to cheap eyeglasses. So can you make a machine that could make any prescription lens very quickly on site? This is a machine where you literally define a boundary condition. If it's circular, you make a spherical lens. If it's elliptical, you can make an astigmatic lens. You then put a membrane on that and you apply pressure — so that's part of the extra program. And literally with only those two inputs — so, the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure — you can define an infinite number of lenses that cover the range of human refractive error, from minus 12 to plus eight diopters, up to four diopters of cylinder. And then literally, you now pour on a monomer. You know, I'll do a Julia Childs here. This is three minutes of UV light. And you reverse the pressure on your membrane once you've cooked it. Pop it out. I've seen this video, but I still don't know if it's going to end right.(Laughter)So you reverse this. This is a very old movie, so with the new prototypes, actually both surfaces are flexible, but this will show you the point. Now you've finished the lens, you literally pop it out. That's next year's Yves Klein, you know, eyeglasses shape. And you can see that that has a mild prescription of about minus two diopters. And as I rotate it against this side shot, you'll see that that has cylinder, and that was programmed in — literally into the physics of the system. So, this sort of thinking about structure as computation and structure as information leads to other things, like this.This is something that my people at SQUID Labs are working on at the moment, called ""electronic rope."" So literally, you think about a rope. It has very complex structure in the weave. And under no load, it's one structure. Under a different load, it's a different structure. And you can actually exploit that by putting in a very small number of conducting fibers to actually make it a sensor. So this is now a rope that knows the load on the rope at any particular point in the rope. Just by thinking about the physics of the world, materials as the computer, you can start to do things like this.I'm going to segue a little here. I guess I'm just going to casually tell you the types of things that I think about with this. One thing I'm really interested about this right now is, how, if you're really taking this view of the universe as a computer, how do we make things in a very general sense, and how might we share the way we make things in a general sense the same way you share open source hardware? And a lot of talks here have espoused the benefits of having lots of people look at problems, share the information and work on those things together. So, a convenient thing about being a human is you move in linear time, and unless Lisa Randall changes that, we'll continue to move in linear time. So that means anything you do, or anything you make, you produce a sequence of steps — and I think Lego in the '70s nailed this, and they did it most elegantly. But they can show you how to build things in sequence. So, I'm thinking about, how can we generalize the way we make all sorts of things, so you end up with this sort of guy, right? And I think this applies across a very broad — sort of, a lot of concepts.You know, Cameron Sinclair yesterday said, ""How do I get everyone to collaborate on design globally to do housing for humanity?"" And if you've seen Amy Smith, she talks about how you get students at MIT to work with communities in Haiti. And I think we have to sort of redefine and rethink how we define structure and materials and assembly things, so that we can really share the information on how you do those things in a more profound way and build on each other's source code for structure. I don't know exactly how to do this yet, but, you know, it's something being actively thought about.So, you know, that leads to questions like, is this a compiler? Is this a sub-routine? Interesting things like that. Maybe I'm getting a little too abstract, but you know, this is the sort of — returning to our comic characters — this is sort of the universe, or a different universe view, that I think is going to be very prevalent in the future — from biotech to materials assembly. It was great to hear Bill Joy. They're starting to invest in materials science, but these are the new things in materials science. How do we put real information and real structure into new ideas, and see the world in a different way? And it's not going to be binary code that defines the computers of the universe — it's sort of an analog computer. But it's definitely an interesting new worldview.I've gone too far. So that sounds like it's it. I've probably got a couple of minutes of questions, or I can show — I think they also said that I do extreme stuff in the introduction, so I may have to explain that. So maybe I'll do that with this short video.So this is actually a 3,000-square-foot kite, which also happens to be a minimal energy surface. So returning to the droplet, again, thinking about the universe in a new way. This is a kite designed by a guy called Dave Kulp. And why do you want a 3,000-square-foot kite? So that's a kite the size of your house. And so you want that to tow boats very fast. So I've been working on this a little, also, with a couple of other guys. But, you know, this is another way to look at the — if you abstract again, this is a structure that is defined by the physics of the universe. You could just hang it as a bed sheet, but again, the computation of all the physics gives you the aerodynamic shape. And so you can actually sort of almost double your boat speed with systems like that. So that's sort of another interesting aspect of the future.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/saul_griffith_on_everyday_inventions
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"This meeting has really been about a digital revolution, but I'd like to argue that it's done; we won. We've had a digital revolution but we don't need to keep having it. And I'd like to look after that, to look what comes after the digital revolution. So, let me start projecting forward. These are some projects I'm involved in today at MIT, looking what comes after computers.This first one, Internet Zero, up here — this is a web server that has the cost and complexity of an RFID tag — about a dollar — that can go in every light bulb and doorknob, and this is getting commercialized very quickly. And what's interesting about it isn't the cost; it's the way it encodes the Internet. It uses a kind of a Morse code for the Internet so you could send it optically; you can communicate acoustically through a power line, through RF. It takes the original principle of the Internet, which is inter-networking computers, and now lets devices inter-network. That we can take the whole idea that gave birth to the Internet and bring it down to the physical world in this Internet Zero, this internet of devices.So this is the next step from there to here, and this is getting commercialized today. A step after that is a project on fungible computers. Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded. So, half as much grain is half as much useful, but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer, and we've been trying to make computers that work that way. So, what you see in the background is a prototype. This was from a thesis of a student, Bill Butow, now at Intel, who wondered why, instead of making bigger and bigger chips, you don't make small chips, put them in a viscous medium, and pour out computing by the pound or by the square inch. And that's what you see here. On the left was postscript being rendered by a conventional computer; on the right is postscript being rendered from the first prototype we made, but there's no frame buffer, IO processor, any of that stuff — it's just this material. Unlike this screen where the dots are placed carefully, this is a raw material. If you add twice as much of it, you have twice as much display. If you shoot a gun through the middle, nothing happens. If you need more resource, you just apply more computer.So, that's the step after this — of computing as a raw material. That's still conventional bits, the step after that is — this is an earlier prototype in the lab; this is high-speed video slowed down. Now, integrating chemistry in computation, where the bits are bubbles. This is showing making bits, this is showing — once again, slowed down so you can see it, bits interacting to do logic and multiplexing and de-multiplexing. So, now we can compute that the output arranges material as well as information. And, ultimately, these are some slides from an early project I did, computing where the bits are stored quantum-mechanically in the nuclei of atoms, so programs rearrange the nuclear structure of molecules. All of these are in the lab pushing further and further and further, not as metaphor but literally integrating bits and atoms, and they lead to the following recognition.We all know we've had a digital revolution, but what is that? Well, Shannon took us, in the '40s, from here to here: from a telephone being a speaker wire that degraded with distance to the Internet. And he proved the first threshold theorem, that shows if you add information and remove it to a signal, you can compute perfectly with an imperfect device. And that's when we got the Internet. Von Neumann, in the '50s, did the same thing for computing; he showed you can have an unreliable computer but restore its state to make it perfect. This was the last great analog computer at MIT: a differential analyzer, and the more you ran it, the worse the answer got.After Von Neumann, we have the Pentium, where the billionth transistor is as reliable as the first one. But all our fabrication is down in this lower left corner. A state-of-the-art airplane factory rotating metal wax at fixed metal, or you maybe melt some plastic. A 10-billion-dollar chip fab uses a process a village artisan would recognize — you spread stuff around and bake it. All the intelligence is external to the system; the materials don't have information. Yesterday you heard about molecular biology, which fundamentally computes to build. It's an information processing system. We've had digital revolutions in communication and computation, but precisely the same idea, precisely the same math Shannon and Von Neuman did, hasn't yet come out to the physical world. So, inspired by that, colleagues in this program — the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT — which is a group of people, like me, who never understood the boundary between physical science and computer science. I would even go further and say computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science — (Laughter) — because the canon — computer science — many of them are great but the canon of computer science prematurely froze a model of computation based on technology that was available in 1950, and nature's a much more powerful computer than that.So, you'll hear, tomorrow, from Saul Griffith. He was one of the first students to emerge from this program. We started to figure out how you can compute to fabricate. This was just a proof of principle he did of tiles that interact magnetically, where you write a code, much like protein folding, that specifies their structure. So, there's no feedback to a tool metrology; the material itself codes for its structure in just the same ways that protein are fabricated. So, you can, for example, do that. You can do other things. That's in 2D. It works in 3D. The video on the upper right — I won't show for time — shows self-replication, templating so something can make something that can make something, and we're doing that now over, maybe, nine orders of magnitude. Those ideas have been used to show the best fidelity and direct rate DNA to make an organism, in functionalizing nanoclusters with peptide tails that code for their assembly — so, much like the magnets, but now on nanometer scales. Laser micro-machining: essentially 3D printers that digitally fabricate functional systems, all the way up to building buildings, not by having blueprints, but having the parts code for the structure of the building.So, these are early examples in the lab of emerging technologies to digitize fabrication. Computers that don't control tools but computers that are tools, where the output of a program rearranges atoms as well as bits. Now, to do that — with your tax dollars, thank you — I bought all these machines. We made a modest proposal to the NSF. We wanted to be able to make anything on any length scale, all in one place, because you can't segregate digital fabrication by a discipline or a length scale. So we put together focused nano beam writers and supersonic water jet cutters and excimer micro-machining systems.But I had a problem. Once I had all these machines, I was spending too much time teaching students to use them. So I started teaching a class, modestly called, ""How To Make Almost Anything."" And that wasn't meant to be provocative; it was just for a few research students. But the first day of class looked like this. You know, hundreds of people came in begging, all my life I've been waiting for this class; I'll do anything to do it. Then they'd ask, can you teach it at MIT? It seems too useful? And then the next — (Laughter) — surprising thing was they weren't there to do research. They were there because they wanted to make stuff. They had no conventional technical background. At the end of a semester they integrated their skills.I'll show an old video. Kelly was a sculptor, and this is what she did with her semester project.(Video): Kelly: Hi, I'm Kelly and this is my scream buddy. Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you really have to scream, but you can't because you're at work, or you're in a classroom, or you're watching your children, or you're in any number of situations where it's just not permitted? Well, scream buddy is a portable space for screaming. When a user screams into scream buddy, their scream is silenced. It is also recorded for later release where, when and how the user chooses. (Scream) (Laughter) (Applause)So, Einstein would like this. This student made a web browser for parrots — lets parrots surf the Net and talk to other parrots. This student's made an alarm clock you wrestle to prove you're awake; this is one that defends — a dress that defends your personal space. This isn't technology for communication; it's technology to prevent it. This is a device that lets you see your music. This is a student who made a machine that makes machines, and he made it by making Lego bricks that do the computing. Just year after year — and I finally realized the students were showing the killer app of personal fabrication is products for a market of one person. You don't need this for what you can get in Wal-Mart; you need this for what makes you unique. Ken Olsen famously said, nobody needs a computer in the home. But you don't use it for inventory and payroll; DEC is now twice bankrupt. You don't need personal fabrication in the home to buy what you can buy because you can buy it. You need it for what makes you unique, just like personalization. So, with that, in turn, 20 million dollars today does this; 20 years from now we'll make Star Trek replicators that make anything. The students hijacked all the machines I bought to do personal fabrication.Today, when you spend that much of your money, there's a government requirement to do outreach, which often means classes at a local school, a website — stuff that's just not that exciting. So, I made a deal with my NSF program managers that instead of talking about it, I'd give people the tools. This wasn't meant to be provocative or important, but we put together these Fab Labs. It's about 20,000 dollars in equipment that approximate both what the 20 million dollars does and where it's going. A laser cutter to do press-fit assembly with 3D from 2D, a sign cutter to plot in copper to do electromagnetics, a micron scale, numerically-controlled milling machine for precise structures, programming tools for less than a dollar, 100-nanosecond microcontrollers. It lets you work from microns and microseconds on up, and they exploded around the world. This wasn't scheduled, but they went from inner-city Boston to Pobal in India, to Secondi-Takoradi on Ghana's coast to Soshanguve in a township in South Africa, to the far north of Norway, uncovering, or helping uncover, for all the attention to the digital divide, we would find unused computers in all these places. A farmer in a rural village — a kid needs to measure and modify the world, not just get information about it on a screen. That there's really a fabrication and an instrumentation divide bigger than the digital divide. And the way you close it is not IT for the masses but IT development for the masses.So, in place after place we saw this same progression: that we'd open one of these Fab Labs, where we didn't — this is too crazy to think of. We didn't think this up, that we would get pulled to these places; we'd open it. The first step was just empowerment. You can see it in their face, just this joy of, I can do it. This is a girl in inner-city Boston who had just done a high-tech on-demand craft sale in the inner city community center. It goes on from there to serious hands-on technical education informally, out of schools. In Ghana we had set up one of these labs. We designed a network sensor, and kids would show up and refuse to leave the lab. There was a girl who insisted we stay late at night — (Video): Kids: I love the Fab Lab. — her first night in the lab because she was going to make the sensor. So she insisted on fabbing the board, learning how to stuff it, learning how to program it. She didn't really know what she was doing or why she was doing it, but she knew she just had to do it. There was something electric about it. This is late at, you know, 11 o'clock at night and I think I was the only person surprised when what she built worked the first time. And I've shown this to engineers at big companies, and they say they can't do this. Any one thing she's doing, they can do better, but it's distributed over many people and many sites and they can't do in an afternoon what this little girl in rural Ghana is doing. (Video): Girl: My name is Valentina Kofi; I am eight years old. I made a stacking board. And, again, that was just for the joy of it.Then these labs started doing serious problem solving — instrumentation for agriculture in India, steam turbines for energy conversion in Ghana, high-gain antennas in thin client computers. And then, in turn, businesses started to grow, like making these antennas. And finally, the lab started doing invention. We're learning more from them than we're giving them. I was showing my kids in a Fab Lab how to use it. They invented a way to do a construction kit out of a cardboard box — which, as you see up there, that's becoming a business — but their design was better than Saul's design at MIT, so there's now three students at MIT doing their theses on scaling the work of eight-year-old children because they had better designs. Real invention is happening in these labs.And I still kept — so, in the last year I've been spending time with heads of state and generals and tribal chiefs who all want this, and I keep saying, but this isn't the real thing. Wait, like, 20 years and then we'll be done. And I finally got what's been going on. This is Kernigan and Ritchie inventing UNIX on a PDP. PDPs came between mainframes and minicomputers. They were tens of thousands of dollars, hard to use, but they brought computing down to work groups, and everything we do today happened there. These Fab Labs are the cost and complexity of a PDP. The projection of digital fabrication isn't a projection for the future; we are now in the PDP era. We talked in hushed tones about the great discoveries then. It was very chaotic, it wasn't, sort of, clear what was going on. In the same sense we are now, today, in the minicomputer era of digital fabrication. The only problem with that is it breaks everybody's boundaries.In DC, I go to every agency that wants to talk, you know; in the Bay Area, I go to every organization you can think of — they all want to talk about it, but it breaks their organizational boundaries. In fact, it's illegal for them, in many cases, to equip ordinary people to create rather than consume technology. And that problem is so severe that the ultimate invention coming from this community surprised me: it's the social engineering. That the lab in far north of Norway — this is so far north its satellite dishes look at the ground rather than the sky because that's where the satellites are — the lab outgrew the little barn that it was in. It was there because they wanted to find animals in the mountains but it outgrew it, so they built this extraordinary village for the lab. This isn't a university; it's not a company. It's essentially a village for invention; it's a village for the outliers in society, and those have been growing up around these Fab Labs all around the world.So this program has split into an NGO foundation, a Fab Foundation to support the scaling, a micro VC fund. The person who runs it nicely describes it as ""machines that make machines need businesses that make businesses:"" it's a cross between micro-finance and VC to do fan-out, and then the research partnerships back at MIT for what's making it possible.So I'd like to leave you with two thoughts. There's been a sea change in aid, from top-down mega-projects to bottom-up, grassroots, micro-finance investing in the roots, so that everybody's got that that's what works. But we still look at technology as top-down mega-projects. Computing, communication, energy for the rest of the planet are these top-down mega-projects. If this room full of heroes is just clever enough, you can solve the problems. The message coming from the Fab Labs is that the other five billion people on the planet aren't just technical sinks; they're sources. The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems. I thought that's the projection 20 years hence into the future, but it's where we are today. It breaks every organizational boundary we can think of. The hardest thing at this point is the social engineering and the organizational engineering, but it's here today.And, finally, any talk like this on the future of computing is required to show Moore's law, but my favorite version — this is Gordon Moore's original one from his original paper — and what's happened is, year after year after year, we've scaled and we've scaled and we've scaled and we've scaled, and we've scaled and we've scaled, and we've scaled and we've scaled, and there's this looming bug of what's going to happen at the end of Moore's law; this ultimate bug is coming. But we're coming to appreciate, is the transition from 2D to 3D, from programming bits to programming atoms, turns the ends of Moore's law scaling from the ultimate bug to the ultimate feature. So, we're just at the edge of this digital revolution in fabrication, where the output of computation programs the physical world. So, together, these two projects answer questions I hadn't asked carefully. The class at MIT shows the killer app for personal fabrication in the developed world is technology for a market of one: personal expression in technology that touches a passion unlike anything I've seen in technology for a very long time. And the killer app for the rest of the planet is the instrumentation and the fabrication divide: people locally developing solutions to local problems. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs
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"What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. Because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. So ... so I did a spot on CNN the other day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. And I think that — that's not really surprising though, is it? Because that's kind of the world that we live in now, a world stuck in fast-forward.A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is in my bio there; I'll just toss it out again — ""These days even instant gratification takes too long."" (Laughter) And if you think about how we to try to make things better, what do we do? No, we speed them up, don't we? So we used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow — we try and speed them up too. So I was in New York recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course, a new evening course. And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. So this — the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, salute the sun, but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. I mean, these are sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at.But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives — on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life, instead of the good life. And I think for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness. You know, a burnout, or eventually the body says, ""I can't take it anymore,"" and throws in the towel. Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to listen to them.And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slow down — you know, I'd be speed reading ""The Cat In The Hat."" I'd be — you know, I'd be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page, and of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills, a clash between my speed and his slowness. And this went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people. And one of them made reference to a series of books called ""The One-Minute Bedtime Story."" And I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, ""Hallelujah — what a great idea! This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more."" But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different, and I took a step back, and I thought, ""Whoa — you know, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day?"" And I put away the newspaper — and I was getting on a plane — and I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time — which is I did nothing. I just thought, and I thought long and hard. And by the time I got off that plane, I'd decided I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else.And I had two questions in my head. The first was, how did we get so fast? And the second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Now, if you think about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. You think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But I think if you cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. ""Time is money,"" as Benjamin Franklin said. And I think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation. Time is scarce, so what do we do? Well — well, we speed up, don't we? We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line — a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mindset? And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best.Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that, although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're road kill, the opposite turns out to be true: that by slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better. And, in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration, lie what a lot of people now refer to as the ""International Slow Movement.""Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what's going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement. Started in Italy, but has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. And it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance of farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. They want to get back to slower rhythms. And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space.And in some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. It's saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of healing. Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstream approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. And blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them.Sex. There's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? I was coming to — well — no pun intended there. I was making my way, let's say, slowly to Oxford, and I went through a news agent, and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it said on the front, ""How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds."" So, you know, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, you know, I like a quickie as much as the next person, but I think that there's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex — from slowing down in the bedroom. You know, you tap into that — those deeper, sort of, psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with the buildup. You can get more bang for your buck, let's say. I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn't they, when they sang the praises of ""a lover with a slow hand."" Now, we all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. And of course, in Italy where — I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure — they've launched an official Slow Sex movement.The workplace. Right across much of the world — North America being a notable exception — working hours have been coming down. And Europe is an example of that, and people finding that their quality of life improves as they're working less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. Now, clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in France — too much, too soon, too rigid. But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. And Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on Earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy. And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro-company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug — to take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys and laptops — you at the back — mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought.It's not just, though, these days, adults who overwork, though, is it? It's children, too. I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid-'80s, and I look at kids now, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill. But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and you're finding that, you know, towns in the United States are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month, so that people can, you know, decompress and have some family time, and slow down.Homework is another thing. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more. So there was a case up in Scotland recently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, ""What are you — you know, our kids will fall"" — the headmaster said, ""No, no, your children need to slow down at the end of the day."" And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math, science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. And I think what's very revealing is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks; they have CVs jammed with extracurriculars, to the point that would make your eyes water. But they lack spark; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside — they don't know how to dream. And so what these Ivy League schools, and Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. And in Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter to undergraduates — freshmen — telling them that they'll get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes, if they do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them. And even if they sometimes do nothing at all. And that letter is called — very revealing, I think — ""Slow Down!"" — with an exclamation mark on the end.So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same: that less is very often more, that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticket while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true, but that's not all of it. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. And if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. And if any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going.(Laughter)But why is it so hard to slow down? I think there are various reasons. One is that speed is fun, you know, speed is sexy. It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension — that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. We fill our head with distraction, with busyness, so that we don't have to ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? Another reason — although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason — why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. ""Slow"" is a dirty word in our culture. It's a byword for ""lazy,"" ""slacker,"" for being somebody who gives up. You know, ""he's a bit slow."" It's actually synonymous with being stupid.I guess what the Slow Movement — the purpose of the Slow Movement, or its main goal, really, is to tackle that taboo, and to say that yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as ""bad slow."" You know, I got stuck on the M25, which is a ring road around London, recently, and spent three-and-a-half hours there. And I can tell you, that's really bad slow. But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea, of the Slow Movement, is that there is such a thing as ""good slow,"" too. And good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV switched off. Or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life.Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. And I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world — you know, business press, but also big companies and leadership organizations. Because people at the top of the chain, people like you, I think, are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system, there's too much busyness, and it's time to find, or get back to that lost art of shifting gears. Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it's not just in the developed world that this idea's been taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status — China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on — these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement, many people in them, and there's a debate going on in their media, on the streets. Because I think they're looking at the West, and they're saying, ""Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that.""So all of that said, is it, I guess, is it possible? That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic. I still love speed. You know, I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busyness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. I play squash and ice hockey, two very fast sports, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise.(Laughter)And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. I no longer hear time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. I can actually hear it now, because I see my time is ticking off. And the upshot of all of that is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive than I ever have. I feel like I'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it. And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger.And for me, I guess, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's sort of where the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. You know, at the end of the day, I go into my son's room. I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just slow down to his pace and we read. And because children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. They need you to move at their rhythm. I find that 10 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, ""You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me."" And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. It's become my reward at the end of the day, something I really cherish. And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this:a few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, and my son came down the stairs and he'd made a card for me. And he was carrying it. He'd gone and stapled two cards, very like these, together, and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. And he said to me, or he handed this to me, and I read it, and it said, ""To Daddy, love Benjamin."" And I thought, ""Aw, that's really sweet. Is that a good luck on the book tour card?"" And he said, ""No, no, no, Daddy — this is a card for being the best story reader in the world."" And I thought, ""Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work.""Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_praises_slowness
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"I thought in getting up to my TED wish I would try to begin by putting in  perspective what I try to do and how it fits with what they try to do. We live in a world that everyone knows is interdependent, but insufficient in three major ways. It is, first of all, profoundly unequal: half the world's people still living on less than two dollars a day; a billion people with no access to clean water; two and a half billion no access to sanitation; a billion going to bed hungry every night; one in four deaths every year from AIDS, TB, malaria and the variety of infections associated with dirty water — 80 percent of them under five years of age.Even in wealthy countries it is common now to see inequality growing. In the United States, since 2001 we've had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity growth in the workplace, but median wages are stagnant and the percentage of working families dropping below the poverty line is up by four percent. The percentage of working families without health care up by four percent. So this interdependent world which has been pretty good to most of us — which is why we're all here in Northern California doing what we do for a living, enjoying this evening — is profoundly unequal. It is also unstable. Unstable because of the threats of terror, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of global disease and a sense that we are vulnerable to it in a way that we weren't not so many years ago. And perhaps most important of all, it is unsustainable because of climate change, resource depletion and species destruction.When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities — locally, nationally and globally — that share the characteristics of all successful communities: a broadly shared, accessible set of opportunities, a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the common enterprise and a genuine sense of belonging. All easier said than done. When the terrorist incidents occurred in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago, I think even though they didn't claim as many lives as we lost in the United States on 9/11, I think the thing that troubled the British most was that the perpetrators were not invaders, but homegrown citizens whose religious and political identities were more important to them than the people they grew up with, went to school with, worked with, shared weekends with, shared meals with. In other words, they thought their differences were more important than their common humanity. It is the central psychological plague of humankind in the 21st century.Into this mix, people like us, who are not in public office, have more power to do good than at any time in history, because more than half the world's people live under governments they voted in and can vote out. And even non-democratic governments are more sensitive to public opinion. Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree. When the tsunami hit South Asia, the United States contributed 1.2 billion dollars. 30 percent of our households gave. Half of them gave over the Internet. The median contribution was somewhere around 57 dollars. And thirdly, because of the rise of non-governmental organizations. They, businesses, other citizens' groups, have enormous power to affect the lives of our fellow human beings. When I became president in 1993, there were none of these organizations in Russia. There are now a couple of hundred thousand. None in India. There are now at least a half a million active. None in China. There are now 250,000 registered with the government, probably twice again that many who are not registered for political reasons.When I organized my foundation, and I thought about the world as it is and the world that I hope to leave to the next generation, and I tried to be realistic about what I had cared about all my life that I could still have an impact on. I wanted to focus on activities that would help to alleviate poverty, fight disease, combat climate change, bridge the religious, racial and other divides that torment the world, but to do it in a way that would either use whatever particular skills we could put together in our group to change the way some public good function was performed so that it would sweep across the world more.You saw one reference to that in what we were able to do with AIDS drugs. And I want to say that the head of our AIDS effort, and the person who also is primarily active in the wish I'll make tonight, Ira Magaziner, is here with me and I want to thank him for everything he's done. He's over there. (Applause) When I got out of office and was asked to work, first in the Caribbean, to try to help deal with the AIDS crisis, generic drugs were available for about 500 dollars a person a year. If you bought them in vast bulks, you could get them at a little under 400 dollars. The first country we went to work in, the Bahamas, was paying 3,500 dollars for these drugs. The market was so terribly disorganized that they were buying this medicine through two agents who were gigging them sevenfold. So the very first week we were working, we got the price down to 500 dollars. And all of a sudden, they could save seven times as many lives for the same amount of money.Then we went to work with the manufacturers of AIDS medicines, one of whom was cited in the film, and negotiated a whole different change in business strategy, because even at 500 dollars, these drugs were being sold on a high-margin, low-volume, uncertain-payment basis. So we worked on improving the productivity of the operations and the supply chain, and went to a low-margin, high-volume, absolutely certain-payment business. I joked that the main contribution we made to the battle against AIDS was to get the manufacturers to change from a jewelry store to a grocery store strategy. But the price went to 140 dollars from 500. And pretty soon, the average price was 192 dollars. Now we can get it for about 100 dollars. Children's medicine was 600 dollars, because nobody could afford to buy any of it. We negotiated it down to 190. Then, the French imposed their brilliantly conceived airline tax to create a something called UNITAID, got a bunch of other countries to help. That children's medicine is now 60 dollars a person a year.The only thing that is keeping us from basically saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive are the absence of systems necessary to diagnose, treat and care for people and deliver this medicine. We started a childhood obesity initiative with the Heart Association in America. We tried to do the same thing by negotiating industry-right deals with the soft drink and the snack food industry to cut the caloric and other dangerous content of food going to our children in the schools. We just reorganized the markets. And it occurred to me that in this whole non-governmental world, somebody needs to be thinking about organizing public goods markets. And that is now what we're trying to do, and working with this large cities group to fight climate change, to negotiate huge, big, volume deals that will enable cities which generate 75 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, to drastically and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is good economics. And this whole discussion as if it's some sort of economic burden, is a mystery to me. I think it's a bird's nest on the ground.When Al Gore won his well-deserved Oscar for the ""Inconvenient Truth"" movie, I was thrilled, but I had urged him to make a second movie quickly. For those of you who saw ""An Inconvenient Truth,"" the most important slide in the Gore lecture is the last one, which shows here's where greenhouse gases are going if we don't do anything, here's where they could go. And then there are six different categories of things we can do to change the trajectory. We need a movie on those six categories. And all of you need to have it embedded in your brains and to organize yourselves around it. So we're trying to do that.So organizing these markets is one thing we try to do. Now we have taken on a second thing, and this gets to my wish. It has been my experience in working in developing countries that while the headlines may all be — the pessimistic headlines may say, well, we can't do this, that or the other thing because of corruption — I think incapacity is a far bigger problem in poor countries than corruption, and feeds corruption. We now have the money, given these low prices, to distribute AIDS drugs all over the world to people we cannot presently reach. Today these low prices are available in the 25 countries where we work, and in a total of 62 countries, and about 550,000 people are getting the benefits of them. But the money is there to reach others. The systems are not there to reach the people.So what we have been trying to do, working first in Rwanda and then in Malawi and other places — but I want to talk about Rwanda tonight — is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with AIDS, TB, malaria, other infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and a whole range of health issues poor people are grappling with in the developing world, that can first be scaled for the whole nation of Rwanda, and then will be a model that could literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world.And the test is: one, will it do the job? Will it provide high quality care? And two, will it do it at a price that will enable the country to sustain a health care system without foreign donors after five to 10 years? Because the longer I deal with these problems, the more convinced I am that we have to — whether it's economics, health, education, whatever — we have to build systems. And the absence of systems that function break the connection which got you all in this seat tonight. You think about whatever your life has been, however many obstacles you have faced in your life, at critical junctures you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved. In a world with no systems, with chaos, everything becomes a guerilla struggle, and this predictability is not there. And it becomes almost impossible to save lives, educate kids, develop economies, whatever.The person, in my view, who has done the best job of this in the health care area, of building a system in a very poor area, is Dr. Paul Farmer, who, many of you know, has worked for now 20 years with his group, Partners in Health, primarily in Haiti where he started, but they've also worked in Russia, in Peru and other places around the world. As poor as Haiti is, in the area where Farmer's clinic is active — and they serve a catchment area far greater than the medical professionals they have would indicate they could serve — since 1988, they have not lost one person to tuberculosis, not one. And they've achieved a lot of other amazing health results. So when we decided to work in Rwanda on trying to dramatically increase the income of the country and fight the AIDS problem, we wanted to build a healthcare network, because it had been totally destroyed during the genocide in 1994, and the per capita income was still under a dollar a day. So I rang up, asked Paul Farmer if he would help. Because it seemed to me if we could prove there was a model in Haiti and a model in Rwanda that we could then take all over the country, number one, it would be a wonderful thing for a country that has suffered as much as any on Earth in the last 15 years, and number two, we would have something that could then be adapted to any other poor country anywhere in the world. And so we have set about doing that.Now, we started working together 18 months ago. And we're working in an area called Southern Kayonza, which is one of the poorest areas in Rwanda, with a group that originally includes about 400,000 people. We're essentially implementing what Paul Farmer did in Haiti: he develops and trains paid community health workers who are able to identify health problems, ensure that people who have AIDS or TB are properly diagnosed and take their medicine regularly, who work on bringing about health education, clean water and sanitation, providing nutritional supplements and moving people up the chain of health care if they have problems of the severity that require it. The procedures that make this work have been perfected, as I said, by Paul Farmer and his team in their work in rural Haiti over the last 20 years. Recently we did an evaluation of the first 18 months of our efforts in Rwanda. And the results were so good that the Rwandan government has now agreed to adopt the model for the entire country, and has strongly supported and put the full resources of the government behind it.I'll tell you a little bit about our team because it's indicative of what we do. We have about 500 people around the world working in our AIDS program, some of them for nothing — just for transportation, room and board. And then we have others working in these other related programs. Our business plan in Rwanda was put together under the leadership of Diana Noble, who is an unusually gifted woman, but not unusual in the type of people who have been willing to do this kind of work. She was the youngest partner at Schroder Ventures in London in her 20s. She was CEO of a successful e-venture — she started and built Reed Elsevier Ventures — and at 45 she decided she wanted to do something different with her life. So she now works full-time on this for very little pay. She and her team of former business people have created a business plan that will enable us to scale this health system up for the whole country. And it would be worthy of the kind of private equity work she used to do when she was making a lot more money for it.When we came to this rural area, 45 percent of the children under the age of five had stunted growth due to malnutrition. 23 percent of them died before they reached the age of five. Mortality at birth was over two-and-a-half percent. Over 15 percent of the deaths among adults and children occurred because of intestinal parasites and diarrhea from dirty water and inadequate sanitation — all entirely preventable and treatable. Over 13 percent of the deaths were from respiratory illnesses — again, all preventable and treatable. And not a single soul in this area was being treated for AIDS or tuberculosis.Within the first 18 months, the following things happened: we went from zero to about 2,000 people being treated for AIDS. That's 80 percent of the people who need treatment in this area. Listen to this: less than four-tenths of one percent of those being treated stopped taking their medicine or otherwise defaulted on treatment. That's lower than the figure in the United States. Less than three-tenths of one percent had to transfer to the more expensive second-line drugs. 400,000 pregnant women were brought into counseling and will give birth for the first time within an organized healthcare system. That's about 43 percent of all the pregnancies. About 40 percent of all the people — I said 400,000. I meant 40,000. About 40 percent of all the people who need TB treatment are now getting it — in just 18 months, up from zero when we started. 43 percent of the children in need of an infant feeding program to prevent malnutrition and early death are now getting the food supplements they need to stay alive and to grow.We've started the first malaria treatment programs they've ever had there. Patients admitted to a hospital that was destroyed during the genocide that we have renovated along with four other clinics, complete with solar power generators, good lab technology. We now are treating 325 people a month, despite the fact that almost 100 percent of the AIDS patients are now treated at home. And the most important thing is because we've implemented Paul Farmer's model, using community health workers, we estimate that this system could be put into place for all of Rwanda for between five and six percent of GDP, and that the government could sustain that without depending on foreign aid after five or six years. And for those of you who understand healthcare economics you know that all wealthy countries spend between nine and 11 percent of GDP on health care, except for the United States, we spend 16 — but that's a story for another day. (Laughter)We're now working with Partners in Health and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda and our Foundation folks to scale this system up. We're also beginning to do this in Malawi and Lesotho. And we have similar projects in Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia with other partners trying to achieve the same thing: to save as many lives as quickly as we can, but to do it in a systematic way that can be implemented nationwide and then with a model that can be implemented in any country in the world. We need initial upfront investment to train doctors, nurses, health administration and community health workers throughout the country, to set up the information technology, the solar energy, the water and sanitation, the transportation infrastructure. But over a five- to 10-year period, we will take down the need for outside assistance and eventually it will be phased out.My wish is that TED assist us in our work and help us to build a high-quality rural health system in a poor country, Rwanda, that can be a model for Africa, and indeed, for any poor country anywhere in the world. My belief is that this will help us to build a more integrated world with more partners and fewer terrorists, with more productive citizens and fewer haters, a place we'd all want our kids and our grandchildren to grow up in. It has been an honor for me, particularly, to work in Rwanda where we also have a major economic development project in partnership with Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish philanthropist, where last year we, using the same thing with AIDS drugs, cut the cost of fertilizer and the interest rates on microcredit loans by 30 percent and achieved three- to four-hundred percent increases in crop yields with the farmers.These people have been through a lot and none of us, most of all me, helped them when they were on the verge of destroying each other. We're undoing that now, and they are so over it and so into their future. We're doing this in an environmentally responsible way. I'm doing my best to convince them not to run the electric grid to the 35 percent of the people that have no access, but to do it with clean energy. To have responsible reforestation projects, the Rwandans, interestingly enough, have been quite good, Mr. Wilson, in preserving their topsoil. There's a couple of guys from southern farming families — the first thing I did when I went out to this place was to get down on my hands and knees and dig in the dirt and see what they'd done with it.We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive, quality health care with minimal outside help. I am grateful for this prize, and I will use it to that end. We could use some more help to do this, but think of what it would mean if we could have a world-class health system in Rwanda — in a country with a less-than-one-dollar-a-day-per-capita income, one that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the next decade if applied to every similarly situated country on Earth. It's worth a try and I believe it would succeed. Thank you and God bless you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_clinton_on_rebuilding_rwanda
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"I have all my life wondered what ""mind-boggling"" meant. After two days here, I declare myself boggled, and enormously impressed, and feel that you are one of the great hopes — not just for American achievement in science and technology, but for the whole world. I've come, however, on a special mission on behalf of my constituency, which are the 10-to-the-18th-power — that's a million trillion — insects and other small creatures, and to make a plea for them. If we were to wipe out insects alone, just that group alone, on this planet — which we are trying hard to do — the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. And within a few months. Now, how did I come to this particular position of advocacy?As a little boy, and through my teenage years, I became increasingly fascinated by the diversity of life. I had a butterfly period, a snake period, a bird period, a fish period, a cave period and finally and definitively, an ant period. By my college years, I was a devoted myrmecologist, a specialist on the biology of ants, but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on Earth in general — including all that it means to us as a species, how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it.Out of that broader study has emerged a concern and an ambition, crystallized in the wish that I'm about to make to you. My choice is the culmination of a lifetime commitment that began with growing up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, on the Florida peninsula. As far back as I can remember, I was enchanted by the natural beauty of that region and the almost tropical exuberance of the plants and animals that grow there. One day when I was only seven years old and fishing, I pulled a ""pinfish,"" they're called, with sharp dorsal spines, up too hard and fast, and I blinded myself in one eye. I later discovered I was also hard of hearing, possibly congenitally, in the upper registers. So in planning to be a professional naturalist — I never considered anything else in my entire life — I found that I was lousy at bird watching and couldn't track frog calls either. So I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world. In so doing, I reached a frontier of biology so strange, so rich, that it seemed as though it exists on another planet. In fact, we live on a mostly unexplored planet. The great majority of organisms on Earth remain unknown to science.In the last 30 years, thanks to explorations in remote parts of the world and advances in technology, biologists have, for example, added a full one-third of the known frog and other amphibian species, to bring the current total to 5,400, and more continue to pour in. Two new kinds of whales have been discovered, along with two new antelopes, dozens of monkey species and a new kind of elephant — and even a distinct kind of gorilla. At the extreme opposite end of the size scale, the class of marine bacteria, the Prochlorococci — that will be on the final exam — although discovered only in 1988, are now recognized as likely the most abundant organisms on Earth, and moreover, responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean. These bacteria were not uncovered sooner because they are also among the smallest of all Earth's organisms — so minute that they cannot be seen with conventional optical microscopy. Yet life in the sea may depend on these tiny creatures.These examples are just the first glimpse of our ignorance of life on this planet. Consider the fungi — including mushrooms, rusts, molds and many disease-causing organisms. 60,000 species are known to science, but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist. Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms. About 16,000 species of nematode worms have been discovered and diagnosed by scientists; there could be hundreds of thousands of them, even millions, still unknown. This vast domain of hidden biodiversity is increased still further by the dark matter of the biological world of bacteria, which within just the last several years still were known from only about 6,000 species of bacteria worldwide. But that number of bacteria species can be found in one gram of soil, just a little handful of soil, in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there. It's been estimated that a single ton of soil — fertile soil — contains approximately four million species of bacteria, all unknown.So the question is: what are they all doing? The fact is, we don't know. We are living on a planet with a lot of activities, with reference to our living environment, done by faith and guess alone. Our lives depend upon these creatures. To take an example close to home: there are over 500 species of bacteria now known — friendly bacteria — living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria.At this point I think we have a little impressionistic film that was made especially for this occasion. And I'd like to show it. Assisted in this by Billie Holiday. (Video)And that may be just the beginning! The viruses, those quasi-organisms among which are the prophages, the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria, are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology, a world unto themselves. What constitutes a viral species is still unresolved, although they're obviously of enormous importance to us. But this much we can say: the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined. Nowadays, in addressing microbial biodiversity, scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the Pacific Ocean.But that is changing rapidly with the aid of new genomic technology. Already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours. Soon we will be in a position to go forth in the field with sequencers on our backs — to hunt bacteria in tiny crevices of the habitat's surface in the way you go watching for birds with binoculars. What will we find as we map the living world, as, finally, we get this underway seriously? As we move past the relatively gigantic mammals, birds, frogs and plants to the more elusive insects and other small invertebrates and then beyond to the countless millions of organisms in the invisible living world enveloped and living within humanity? Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms: true bacteria and one-celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to.Some serious biologists, and I count myself among them, have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms, one might — just might — find aliens among them. True aliens, stocks that arrived from outer space. They've had billions of years to do it, but especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet. We do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment, including hard radiation strong enough and maintained long enough to crack the Pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria. There may be a temptation to treat the biosphere holistically and the species that compose it as a great flux of entities hardly worth distinguishing one from the other. But each of these species, even the tiniest Prochlorococci, are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine. We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence — and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy.My own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953, while a Harvard graduate student, searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of Cuba, ants that shine in the sunlight — metallic green or metallic blue, according to species, and one species, I discovered, metallic gold. I found my magical ants, but only after a tough climb into the mountains where the last of the native Cuban forests hung on, and were then — and still are — being cut back. I realized then that these species and a large part of the other unique, marvelous animals and plants on that island — and this is true of practically every part of the world — which took millions of years to evolve, are in the process of disappearing forever. And so it is everywhere one looks.The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere by a combination of forces that can be summarized by the acronym ""HIPPO,"" the animal hippo. H is for habitat destruction, including climate change forced by greenhouse gases. I is for the invasive species like the fire ants, the zebra mussels, broom grasses and pathogenic bacteria and viruses that are flooding every country, and at an exponential rate — that's the I. The P, the first one in ""HIPPO,"" is for pollution. The second is for continued population, human population expansion. And the final letter is O, for over-harvesting — driving species into extinction by excessive hunting and fishing. The HIPPO juggernaut we have created, if unabated, is destined — according to the best estimates of ongoing biodiversity research — to reduce half of Earth's still surviving animal and plant species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century. Human-forced climate change alone — again, if unabated — could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades. What will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded? Huge potential sources of scientific information yet to be gathered, much of our environmental stability and new kinds of pharmaceuticals and new products of unimaginable strength and value — all thrown away.The loss will inflict a heavy price in wealth, security and yes, spirituality for all time to come, because previous cataclysms of this kind — the last one, that ended the age of dinosaurs — took, normally, five to 10 million years to repair. Sadly, our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered. For example, even in the United States, the 200,000 species known currently actually has been found to be only partial in coverage; it is mostly unknown to us in basic biology. Only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status. Of the 15 percent evaluated, 20 percent are classified as ""in peril,"" that is, in danger of extinction. That's in the United States. We are, in short, flying blind into our environmental future. We urgently need to change this. We need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it. We need to settle down before we wreck the planet. And we need that knowledge.This should be a big science project equivalent to the Human Genome Project. It should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable. So this brings me to my wish for TEDsters, and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk. I wish we will work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity. And let us call it the ""Encyclopedia of Life."" What is the ""Encyclopedia of Life?"" A concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be looked at seriously? It is an encyclopedia that lives on the Internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. Amateurs can do it also. It has an indefinitely expandable page for each species.It makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, on demand, anywhere in the world. I've written about this idea before, and I know there are people in this room who have expended significant effort on it in the past. But what excites me is that since I first put forward this particular idea in that form, science has advanced. Technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making such an encyclopedia, regardless of the magnitude of the information put into it, are within reach. Indeed, in the past year, a group of influential scientific institutions have begun mobilizing to realize this dream. I wish you would help them. Working together, we can make this real.The encyclopedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications. It will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness, and sense of human need. It will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity. And most of all, it can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started, for me personally, 60 years ago: to search for life, to understand it and finally, above all, to preserve it. That is my wish. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/e_o_wilson_on_saving_life_on_earth
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"As someone who has spent his entire career trying to be invisiblestanding in front of an audience is a cross between an out-of-body experience and a deer caught in the headlights, so please forgive me for violating one of the TED commandments by relying on words on paper, and I only hope I'm not struck by lightning bolts before I'm done. I'd like to begin by talking about some of the ideas that motivated me to become a documentary photographer.I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and on a personal level, an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging; the Civil Rights Movement was under way; and pictures had a powerful influence on me. Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing, and photographers were telling us another. I believed the photographers, and so did millions of other Americans. Their images fueled resistance to the war and to racism. They not only recorded history; they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable.I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus both the benefits and the cost of political policies. It can give credit to sound decision-making, adding momentum to success. In the face of poor political judgment or political inaction, it becomes a kind of intervention, assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior. It puts a human face on issues which from afar can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one.And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. And as a reaction, it stimulates public opinion and gives impetus to public debate, thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda, much as they would like to. Coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly. The press is certainly a business, and in order to survive it must be a successful business, but the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibility.Society's problems can't be solved until they're identified. On a higher plane, the press is a service industry, and the service it provides is awareness. Every story does not have to sell something. There's also a time to give. That was a tradition I wanted to follow. Seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved and that visual journalism could actually become a factor in conflict resolution — I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer. But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph.I'd like to take you on a visual journey through some of the events and issues I've been involved in over the past 25 years. In 1981, I went to Northern Ireland. 10 IRA prisoners were in the process of starving themselves to death in protest against conditions in jail. The reaction on the streets was violent confrontation. I saw that the front lines of contemporary wars are not on isolated battlefields, but right where people live. During the early '80s, I spent a lot of time in Central America, which was engulfed by civil wars that straddled the ideological divide of the Cold War.In Guatemala, the central government — controlled by a oligarchy of European decent — was waging a scorched Earth campaign against an indigenous rebellion, and I saw an image that reflected the history of Latin America: conquest through a combination of the Bible and the sword. An anti-Sandinista guerrilla was mortally wounded as Commander Zero attacked a town in Southern Nicaragua. A destroyed tank belonging to Somoza's national guard was left as a monument in a park in Managua, and was transformed by the energy and spirit of a child. At the same time, a civil war was taking place in El Salvador, and again, the civilian population was caught up in the conflict.I've been covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 1981. This is a moment from the beginning of the second intifada, in 2000, when it was still stones and Molotovs against an army. In 2001, the uprising escalated into an armed conflict, and one of the major incidents was the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin. Without the political will to find common ground, the continual friction of tactic and counter-tactic only creates suspicion and hatred and vengeance, and perpetuates the cycle of violence.In the '90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia fractured along ethnic fault lines, and civil war broke out between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. This is a scene of house-to-house fighting in Mostar, neighbor against neighbor. A bedroom, the place where people share intimacy, where life itself is conceived, became a battlefield. A mosque in northern Bosnia was destroyed by Serbian artillery and was used as a makeshift morgue. Dead Serbian soldiers were collected after a battle and used as barter for the return of prisoners or Bosnian soldiers killed in action. This was once a park. The Bosnian soldier who guided me told me that all of his friends were there now.At the same time in South Africa, after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, the black population commenced the final phase of liberation from apartheid. One of the things I had to learn as a journalist was what to do with my anger. I had to use it, channel its energy, turn it into something that would clarify my vision, instead of clouding it. In Transkei, I witnessed a rite of passage into manhood, of the Xhosa tribe. Teenage boys lived in isolation, their bodies covered with white clay. After several weeks, they washed off the white and took on the full responsibilities of men. It was a very old ritual that seemed symbolic of the political struggle that was changing the face of South Africa.Children in Soweto playing on a trampoline. Elsewhere in Africa there was famine. In Somalia, the central government collapsed and clan warfare broke out. Farmers were driven off their land, and crops and livestock were destroyed or stolen. Starvation was being used as a weapon of mass destruction — primitive but extremely effective. Hundreds of thousands of people were exterminated, slowly and painfully. The international community responded with massive humanitarian relief, and hundreds of thousands of more lives were saved. American troops were sent to protect the relief shipments, but they were eventually drawn into the conflict, and after the tragic battle in Mogadishu, they were withdrawn. In southern Sudan, another civil war saw similar use of starvation as a means of genocide.Again, international NGOs, united under the umbrella of the U.N., staged a massive relief operation and thousands of lives were saved. I'm a witness, and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent, and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people I'm photographing. This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up, and if he didn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope? In 1994, after three months of covering the South African election, I saw the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, and it was the most uplifting thing I've ever seen. It exemplified the best that humanity has to offer. The next day I left for Rwanda, and it was like taking the express elevator to hell.This man had just been liberated from a Hutu death camp. He allowed me to photograph him for quite a long time, and he even turned his face toward the light, as if he wanted me to see him better. I think he knew what the scars on his face would say to the rest of the world. This time, maybe confused or discouraged by the military disaster in Somalia, the international community remained silent, and somewhere around 800,000 people were slaughtered by their own countrymen — sometimes their own neighbors — using farm implements as weapons.Perhaps because a lesson had been learned by the weak response to the war in Bosnia and the failure in Rwanda, when Serbia attacked Kosovo, international action was taken much more decisively. NATO forces went in, and the Serbian army withdrew. Ethnic Albanians had been murdered, their farms destroyed and a huge number of people forcibly deported. They were received in refugee camps set up by NGOs in Albania and Macedonia. The imprint of a man who had been burned inside his own home. The image reminded me of a cave painting, and echoed how primitive we still are in so many ways.Between 1995 and '96, I covered the first two wars in Chechnya from inside Grozny. This is a Chechen rebel on the front line against the Russian army. The Russians bombarded Grozny constantly for weeks, killing mainly the civilians who were still trapped inside. I found a boy from the local orphanage wandering around the front line. My work has evolved from being concerned mainly with war to a focus on critical social issues as well. After the fall of Ceausescu, I went to Romania and discovered a kind of gulag of children, where thousands of orphans were being kept in medieval conditions. Ceausescu had imposed a quota on the number of children to be produced by each family, thereby making women's bodies an instrument of state economic policy. Children who couldn't be supported by their families were raised in government orphanages. Children with birth defects were labeled incurables, and confined for life to inhuman conditions.As reports began to surface, again international aid went in. Going deeper into the legacy of the Eastern European regimes, I worked for several months on a story about the effects of industrial pollution, where there had been no regard for the environment or the health of either workers or the general population. An aluminum factory in Czechoslovakia was filled with carcinogenic smoke and dust, and four out of five workers came down with cancer.After the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, I began to explore conditions of poverty in a country that was on its way towards modernization. I spent a good deal of time with a man who lived with his family on a railway embankment and had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident. When the story was published, unsolicited donations poured in. A trust fund was established, and the family now lives in a house in the countryside and all their basic necessities are taken care of. It was a story that wasn't trying to sell anything. Journalism had provided a channel for people's natural sense of generosity, and the readers responded. I met a band of homeless children who'd come to Jakarta from the countryside, and ended up living in a train station. By the age of 12 or 14, they'd become beggars and drug addicts. The rural poor had become the urban poor, and in the process, they'd become invisible.These heroin addicts in detox in Pakistan reminded me of figures in a play by Beckett: isolated, waiting in the dark, but drawn to the light. Agent Orange was a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to deny cover to the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army. The active ingredient was dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical that was sprayed in vast quantities, and whose effects passed through the genes to the next generation. In 2000, I began documenting global health issues, concentrating first on AIDS in Africa. I tried to tell the story through the work of caregivers. I thought it was important to emphasize that people were being helped, whether by international NGOs or by local grassroots organizations.So many children have been orphaned by the epidemic that grandmothers have taken the place of parents, and a lot of children had been born with HIV. A hospital in Zambia. I began documenting the close connection between HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. This is an MSF hospital in Cambodia. My pictures can play a supporting role to the work of NGOs by shedding light on the critical social problems they're trying to deal with. I went to Congo with MSF, and contributed to a book and an exhibition that focused attention on a forgotten war in which millions of people have died, and exposure to disease without treatment is used as a weapon. A malnourished child being measured as part of the supplemental feeding program.In the fall of 2004 I went to Darfur. This time I was on assignment for a magazine, but again worked closely with MSF. The international community still hasn't found a way to create the pressure necessary to stop this genocide. An MSF hospital in a camp for displaced people. I've been working on a long project on crime and punishment in America. This is a scene from New Orleans. A prisoner on a chain gang in Alabama was punished by being handcuffed to a post in the midday sun. This experience raised a lot of questions, among them questions about race and equality and for whom in our country opportunities and options are available. In the yard of a chain gang in Alabama.I didn't see either of the planes hit, and when I glanced out my window, I saw the first tower burning, and I thought it might have been an accident. A few minutes later when I looked again and saw the second tower burning, I knew we were at war. In the midst of the wreckage at Ground Zero, I had a realization. I'd been photographing in the Islamic world since 1981 — not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia and Europe. At the time I was photographing in these different places, I thought I was covering separate stories, but on 9/11 history crystallized, and I understood I'd actually been covering a single story for more than 20 years, and the attack on New York was its latest manifestation.The central commercial district of Kabul, Afghanistan at the end of the civil war, shortly before the city fell to the Taliban. Land mine victims being helped at the Red Cross rehab center being run by Alberto Cairo. A boy who lost a leg to a leftover mine. I'd witnessed immense suffering in the Islamic world from political oppression, civil war, foreign invasions, poverty, famine. I understood that in its suffering, the Islamic world had been crying out. Why weren't we listening? A Taliban fighter shot during a battle as the Northern Alliance entered the city of Kunduz. When war with Iraq was imminent, I realized the American troops would be very well covered, so I decided to cover the invasion from inside Baghdad. A marketplace was hit by a mortar shell that killed several members of a single family. A day after American forces entered Baghdad, a company of Marines began rounding up bank robbers and were cheered on by the crowds — a hopeful moment that was short lived.For the first time in years, Shi'ites were allowed to make the pilgrimage to Karbala to observe Ashura, and I was amazed by the sheer number of people and how fervently they practiced their religion. A group of men march through the streets cutting themselves with knives. It was obvious that the Shi'ites were a force to be reckoned with, and we would do well to understand them and learn how to deal with them. Last year I spent several months documenting our wounded troops, from the battlefield in Iraq all the way home.This is a helicopter medic giving CPR to a soldier who had been shot in the head. Military medicine has become so efficient that the percentage of troops who survive after being wounded is much higher in this war than in any other war in our history. The signature weapon of the war is the IED, and the signature wound is severe leg damage. After enduring extreme pain and trauma, the wounded face a grueling physical and psychological struggle in rehab. The spirit they displayed was absolutely remarkable. I tried to imagine myself in their place, and I was totally humbled by their courage and determination in the face of such catastrophic loss. Good people had been put in a very bad situation for questionable results. One day in rehab someone, started talking about surfing and all these guys who'd never surfed before said, ""Hey, let's go."" And they went surfing.Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what's going on. Sometimes they put their lives on the line, because they believe your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts, generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable. My TED wish: there's a vital story that needs to be told, and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_s_searing_pictures_of_war
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"Good morning everyone. First of all, it's been fantastic being here over these past few days. And secondly, I feel it's a great honor to kind of wind up this extraordinary gathering of people, these amazing talks that we've had. I feel that I've fitted in, in many ways, to some of the things that I've heard. I came directly here from the deep, deep tropical rainforest in Ecuador, where I was out — you could only get there by a plane — with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses, where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies, and keep the roads, out of their forests. They're fighting to develop their own way of living within the forest in a world that's clean, a world that isn't contaminated, a world that isn't polluted. And what was so amazing to me, and what fits right in with what we're all talking about here at TED, is that there, right in the middle of this rainforest, was some solar panels — the first in that part of Ecuador — and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women wouldn't have to go down. The water was cleaned, but because they got a lot of batteries, they were able to store a lot of electricity. So every house — and there were, I think, eight houses in this little community — could have light for, I think it was about half an hour each evening. And there is the Chief, in all his regal finery, with a laptop computer. (Laughter) And this man, he has been outside, but he's gone back, and he was saying, ""You know, we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era, and we didn't even know about the white man 50 years ago, and now here we are with laptop computers, and there are some things we want to learn from the modern world. We want to know about health care. We want to know about what other people do — we're interested in it. And we want to learn other languages. We want to know English and French and perhaps Chinese, and we're good at languages."" So there he is with his little laptop computer, but fighting against the might of the pressures — because of the debt, the foreign debt of Ecuador — fighting the pressure of World Bank, IMF, and of course the people who want to exploit the forests and take out the oil. And so, coming directly from there to here. But, of course, my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization — I can't really call it a civilization. A different way of life, a different being. We've talked earlier — this wonderful talk by Wade Davis about the different cultures of the humans around the world — but the world is not composed only of human beings; there are also other animal beings. And I propose to bring into this TED conference, as I always do around the world, the voice of the animal kingdom. Too often we just see a few slides, or a bit of film, but these beings have voices that mean something. And so, I want to give you a greeting, as from a chimpanzee in the forests of Tanzania — Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh! (Applause) I've been studying chimpanzees in Tanzania since 1960. During that time, there have been modern technologies that have really transformed the way that field biologists do their work. For example, for the first time, a few years ago, by simply collecting little fecal samples we were able to have them analyzed — to have DNA profiling done — so for the first time, we actually know which male chimps are the fathers of each individual infant. Because the chimps have a very promiscuous mating society. So this opens up a whole new avenue of research. And we use GSI — geographic whatever it is, GSI — to determine the range of the chimps. And we're using — you can see that I'm not really into this kind of stuff — but we're using satellite imagery to look at the deforestation in the area. And of course, there's developments in infrared, so you can watch animals at night, and equipment for recording by video, and tape recording is getting lighter and better. So in many, many ways, we can do things today that we couldn't do when I began in 1960. Especially when chimpanzees, and other animals with large brains, are studied in captivity, modern technology is helping us to search for the upper levels of cognition in some of these non-human animals. So that we know today, they're capable of performances that would have been thought absolutely impossible by science when I began. I think the chimpanzee in captivity who is the most skilled in intellectual performance is one called Ai in Japan — her name means love — and she has a wonderfully sensitive partner working with her. She loves her computer — she'll leave her big group, and her running water, and her trees and everything. And she'll come in to sit at this computer — it's like a video game for a kid; she's hooked. She's 28, by the way, and she does things with her computer screen and a touch pad that she can do faster than most humans. She does very complex tasks, and I haven't got time to go into them, but the amazing thing about this female is she doesn't like making mistakes. If she has a bad run, and her score isn't good, she'll come and reach up and tap on the glass — because she can't see the experimenter — which is asking to have another go. And her concentration — she's already concentrated hard for 20 minutes or so, and now she wants to do it all over again, just for the satisfaction of having done it better. And the food is not important — she does get a tiny reward, like one raisin for a correct response — but she will do it for nothing, if you tell her beforehand. So here we are, a chimpanzee using a computer. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans also learn human sign language. But the point is that when I was first in Gombe in 1960 — I remember so well, so vividly, as though it was yesterday — the first time, when I was going through the vegetation, the chimpanzees were still running away from me, for the most part, although some were a little bit acclimatized — and I saw this dark shape, hunched over a termite mound, and I peered with my binoculars. It was, fortunately, one adult male whom I'd named David Greybeard — and by the way, science at that time was telling me that I shouldn't name the chimps; they should all have numbers; that was more scientific. Anyway, David Greybeard — and I saw that he was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest. And not only that — he would sometimes pick a leafy twig and strip the leaves — modifying an object to make it suitable for a specific purpose — the beginning of tool-making. The reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. When I was at school, we were defined as man, the toolmaker. So that when Louis Leakey, my mentor, heard this news, he said, ""Ah, we must now redefine 'man,' redefine 'tool,' or accept chimpanzees as humans."" (Laughter) We now know that at Gombe alone, there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes. Moreover, we know that in different parts of Africa, wherever chimps have been studied, there are completely different tool-using behaviors. And because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice — that is a definition of human culture. What we find is that over these 40-odd years that I and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes, and, as I say, other mammals with complex brains and social systems, we have found that after all, there isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very wuzzy line. It's getting wuzzier all the time as we find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was just human. The chimps — there's no time to discuss their fascinating lives — but they have this long childhood, five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother, and then another three, four or five years of emotional dependence on her, even when the next child is born. The importance of learning in that time, when behavior is flexible — and there's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society. The long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother, with the brothers and sisters, and which can last through a lifetime, which may be up to 60 years. They can actually live longer than 60 in captivity, so we've only done 40 years in the wild so far. And we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism. We find in their non-verbal communication — this is very rich — they have a lot of sounds, which they use in different circumstances, but they also use touch, posture, gesture, and what do they do? They kiss; they embrace; they hold hands. They pat one another on the back; they swagger; they shake their fist — the kind of things that we do, and they do them in the same kind of context. They have very sophisticated cooperation. Sometimes they hunt — not that often, but when they hunt, they show sophisticated cooperation, and they share the prey. We find that they show emotions, similar to — maybe sometimes the same — as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness, sadness, fear, despair. They know mental as well as physical suffering. And I don't have time to go into the information that will prove some of these things to you, save to say that there are very bright students, in the best universities, studying emotions in animals, studying personalities in animals. We know that chimpanzees and some other creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors — ""self"" as opposed to ""other."" They have a sense of humor, and these are the kind of things which traditionally have been thought of as human prerogatives. But this teaches us a new respect — and it's a new respect not only for the chimpanzees, I suggest, but some of the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet. Once we're prepared to admit that after all, we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and above all feelings, and then we start to think about ways we use and abuse so many other sentient, sapient creatures on this planet, it really gives cause for deep shame, at least for me. So, the sad thing is that these chimpanzees — who've perhaps taught us, more than any other creature, a little humility — are in the wild, disappearing very fast. They're disappearing for the reasons that all of you in this room know only too well. The deforestation, the growth of human populations, needing more land. They're disappearing because some timber companies go in with clear-cutting. They're disappearing in the heart of their range in Africa because the big multinational logging companies have come in and made roads — as they want to do in Ecuador and other parts where the forests remain untouched — to take out oil or timber. And this has led in Congo basin, and other parts of the world, to what is known as the bush-meat trade. This means that although for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, people have lived in those forests, or whatever habitat it is, in harmony with their world, just killing the animals they need for themselves and their families — now, suddenly, because of the roads, the hunters can go in from the towns. They shoot everything, every single thing that moves that's bigger than a small rat; they sun-dry it or smoke it. And now they've got transport; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it. And people will pay more for bush-meat, as it's called, than for domestic meat — it's culturally preferred. And it's not sustainable, and the huge logging camps in the forest are now demanding meat, so the Pygmy hunters in the Congo basin who've lived there with their wonderful way of living for so many hundreds of years are now corrupted. They're given weapons; they shoot for the logging camps; they get money. Their culture is being destroyed, along with the animals upon whom they depend. So, when the logging camp moves, there's nothing left. We talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity, and I've seen it happening with my own eyes. And the grim picture in Africa — I love Africa, and what do we see in Africa? We see deforestation; we see the desert spreading; we see massive hunger; we see disease and we see population growth in areas where there are more people living on a certain piece of land than the land can possibly support, and they're too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Were the people that we heard about yesterday, on the Easter Island, who cut down their last tree — were they stupid? Didn't they know what was happening? Of course, but if you've seen the crippling poverty in some of these parts of the world it isn't a question of ""Let's leave the tree for tomorrow."" ""How am I going to feed my family today? Maybe I can get just a few dollars from this last tree which will keep us going a little bit longer, and then we'll pray that something will happen to save us from the inevitable end."" So, this is a pretty grim picture. The one thing we have, which makes us so different from chimpanzees or other living creatures, is this sophisticated spoken language — a language with which we can tell children about things that aren't here. We can talk about the distant past, plan for the distant future, discuss ideas with each other, so that the ideas can grow from the accumulated wisdom of a group. We can do it by talking to each other; we can do it through video; we can do it through the written word. And we are abusing this great power we have to be wise stewards, and we're destroying the world. In the developed world, in a way, it's worse, because we have so much access to knowledge of the stupidity of what we're doing. Do you know, we're bringing little babies into a world where, in many places, the water is poisoning them? And the air is harming them, and the food that's grown from the contaminated land is poisoning them. And that's not just in the far-away developing world; that's everywhere. Do you know we all have about 50 chemicals in our bodies we didn't have about 50 years ago? And so many of these diseases, like asthma and certain kinds of cancers, are on the increase around places where our filthy toxic waste is dumped. We're harming ourselves around the world, as well as harming the animals, as well as harming nature herself — Mother Nature, that brought us into being; Mother Nature, where I believe we need to spend time, where there's trees and flowers and birds for our good psychological development. And yet, there are hundreds and hundreds of children in the developed world who never see nature, because they're growing up in concrete and all they know is virtual reality, with no opportunity to go and lie in the sun, or in the forest, with the dappled sun-specks coming down from the canopy above. As I was traveling around the world, you know, I had to leave the forest — that's where I love to be. I had to leave these fascinating chimpanzees for my students and field staff to continue studying because, finding they dwindled from about two million 100 years ago to about 150,000 now, I knew I had to leave the forest to do what I could to raise awareness around the world. And the more I talked about the chimpanzees' plight, the more I realized the fact that everything's interconnected, and the problems of the developing world so often stem from the greed of the developed world, and everything was joining together, and making — not sense, hope lies in sense, you said — it's making a nonsense. How can we do it? Somebody said that yesterday. And as I was traveling around, I kept meeting young people who'd lost hope. They were feeling despair, they were feeling, ""Well, it doesn't matter what we do; eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Everything is hopeless — we're always being told so by the media."" And then I met some who were angry, and anger that can turn to violence, and we're all familiar with that. And I have three little grandchildren, and when some of these students would say to me at high school or university, they'd say, ""We're angry,"" or ""We're filled with despair, because we feel you've compromised our future, and there's nothing we can do about it."" And I looked in the eyes of my little grandchildren, and think how much we've harmed this planet since I was their age. I feel this deep shame, and that's why in 1991 in Tanzania, I started a program that's called Roots and Shoots. There's little brochures all around outside, and if any of you have anything to do with children and care about their future, I beg that you pick up that brochure. And Roots and Shoots is a program for hope. Roots make a firm foundation. Shoots seem tiny, but to reach the sun they can break through brick walls. See the brick walls as all the problems that we've inflicted on this planet. Then, you see, it is a message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through, and can make this a better world. And the most important message of Roots and Shoots is that every single individual makes a difference. Every individual has a role to play. Every one of us impacts the world around us everyday, and you scientists know that you can't actually — even if you stay in bed all day, you're breathing oxygen and giving out CO2, and probably going to the loo, and things like that — you're making a difference in the world. So, the Roots and Shoots program involves youth in three kinds of projects. And these are projects to make the world around them a better place. One project to show care and concern for your own human community. One for animals, including domestic animals — and I have to say, I learned everything I know about animal behavior even before I got to Gombe and the chimps from my dog, Rusty, who was my childhood companion. And the third kind of project: something for the local environment. So what the kids do depends first of all, how old are they — and we go now from pre-school right through university. It's going to depend whether they're inner-city or rural. It's going to depend if they're wealthy or impoverished. It's going to depend which part, say, of America they're in. We're in every state now, and the problems in Florida are different from the problems in New York. It's going to depend on which country they're in — and we're already in 60-plus countries, with about 5,000 active groups — and there are groups all over the place that I keep hearing about that I've never even heard of, because the kids are taking the program and spreading it themselves. Why? Because they're buying into it, and they're the ones who get to decide what they're going to do. It isn't something that their parents tell them, or their teachers tell them. That's effective, but if they decide themselves, ""We want to clean this river and put the fish back that used to be there. We want to clear away the toxic soil from this area and have an organic garden. We want to go and spend time with the old people and hear their stories and record their oral histories. We want to go and work in a dog shelter. We want to learn about animals. We want ... "" You know, it goes on and on, and this is very hopeful for me. As I travel around the world 300 days a year, everywhere there's a group of Roots and Shoots of different ages. Everywhere there are children with shining eyes saying, ""Look at the difference we've made."" And now comes the technology into it, because with this new way of communicating electronically these kids can communicate with each other around the world. And if anyone is interested to help us, we've got so many ideas but we need help — we need help to create the right kind of system that will help these young people to communicate their excitement. But also — and this is so important — to communicate their despair, to say, ""We've tried this and it doesn't work, and what shall we do?"" And then, lo and behold, there's another group answering these kids who may be in America, or maybe this is a group in Israel, saying, ""Yeah, you did it a little bit wrong. This is how you should do it."" The philosophy is very simple. We do not believe in violence. No violence, no bombs, no guns. That's not the way to solve problems. Violence leads to violence, at least in my view. So how do we solve? The tools for solving the problems are knowledge and understanding. Know the facts, but see how they fit in the big picture. Hard work and persistence —don't give up — and love and compassion leading to respect for all life. How many more minutes? Two, one? Chris Anderson: One — one to two. Jane Goodall: Two, two, I'm going to take two. (Laughter) Are you going to come and drag me off? (Laughter) Anyway — so basically, Roots and Shoots is beginning to change young people's lives. It's what I'm devoting most of my energy to. And I believe that a group like this can have a very major impact, not just because you can share technology with us, but because so many of you have children. And if you take this program out, and give it to your children, they have such a good opportunity to go out and do good, because they've got parents like you. And it's been so clear how much you all care about trying to make this world a better place. It's very encouraging. But the kids do ask me — and this won't take more than two minutes, I promise — the kids say, ""Dr. Jane, do you really have hope for the future? You travel, you see all these horrible things happening."" Firstly, the human brain — I don't need to say anything about that. Now that we know what the problems are around the world, human brains like yours are rising to solve those problems. And we've talked a lot about that. Secondly, the resilience of nature. We can destroy a river, and we can bring it back to life. We can see a whole area desolated, and it can be brought back to bloom again, with time or a little help. And thirdly, the last speaker talked about — or the speaker before last, talked about the indomitable human spirit. We are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible. Nelson Mandela — I take a little piece of limestone from Robben Island Prison, where he labored for 27 years, and came out with so little bitterness, he could lead his people from the horror of apartheid without a bloodbath. Even after the 11th of September — and I was in New York and I felt the fear — nevertheless, there was so much human courage, so much love and so much compassion. And then as I went around the country after that and felt the fear — the fear that was leading to people feeling they couldn't worry about the environment any more, in case they seemed not to be patriotic — and I was trying to encourage them, somebody came up with a little quotation from Mahatma Gandhi, ""If you look back through human history, you see that every evil regime has been overcome by good."" And just after that a woman brought me this little bell, and I want to end on this note. She said, ""If you're talking about hope and peace, ring this. This bell is made from metal from a defused landmine, from the killing fields of Pol Pot — one of the most evil regimes in human history — where people are now beginning to put their lives back together after the regime has crumbled. So, yes, there is hope, and where is the hope? Is it out there with the politicians? It's in our hands. It's in your hands and my hands and those of our children. It's really up to us. We're the ones who can make a difference. If we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints, if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and don't buy the things that are not, we can change the world overnight. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_on_what_separates_us_from_the_apes
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"I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company called Silk tripled their sales; how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact; to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years — a record label I started that had a CD called ""Sauce.""Before I can do that I've got to tell you about sliced bread, and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on the patent part and the making part. And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this — that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure. And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everything we've talked about at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like — it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not. And I think that the way you're going to get what you want, or cause the change that you want to change, to happen, is to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread.And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual, or you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. I think that all this stuff applies to everybody regardless of what we do. That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion. That people who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. When I talk about it I usually pick business, because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation, and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples because I'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do.At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV. TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it the ""TV-industrial complex."" The way the TV-industrial complex works, is you buy some ads, interrupt some people, that gets you distribution. You use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes around and around and around, the same way that the military-industrial complex worked a long time ago. That model of, and we heard it yesterday — if we could only get onto the homepage of Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, or grab that person by the throat, and tell them about what we want to do. If we did that then everyone would pay attention, and we would win. Well, this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours. I mean, all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren't expecting, in a way they didn't necessarily want, with an ad, over and over again until they bought it.And the thing that's happened is, they canceled the TV-industrial complex. That just over the last few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it's not working the way that it used to. This picture is really fuzzy, I apologize; I had a bad cold when I took it.(Laughter)But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child. I go to the deli; I'm sick; I need to buy some medicine. The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and Spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff — all so I could ignore every single message. And I ignored every message because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff in the yellow box because I always have. And I'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her problem, because I don't care.Here's a magazine called ""Hydrate."" It's 180 pages about water.(Laughter)Articles about water, ads about water. Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago, with just the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water. New product from Coke Japan: water salad.(Laughter)Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks, because they have no idea what's going to work and what's not. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days ago — I circled the important parts so you can see them here. They've come out... Arby's is going to spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get people to go to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich.(Laughter)Now, I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold, that would get you to get in your car, drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich.(Laughter)Now, this is Copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea. ""The world revolves around me."" Me, me, me, me. My favorite person — me. I don't want to get email from anybody; I want to get ""memail.""(Laughter)So consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway; I mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something, or people at, you know, the New Yorker who might print your article. Consumers don't care about you at all; they just don't care. Part of the reason is — they've got way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say — ""Oh, look, a cow."" Nobody.(Laughter)But if the cow was purple — isn't that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want. If the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you'd get bored with those, too. The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: ""Is it remarkable?"" And ""remarkable"" is a really cool word, because we think it just means ""neat,"" but it also means ""worth making a remark about."" And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going. That two of the hottest cars in the United States is a 55,000-dollar giant car, big enough to hold a Mini in its trunk. People are paying full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't have anything in common.(Laughter)Every week, the number one best-selling DVD in America changes. It's never ""The Godfather,"" it's never ""Citizen Kane,"" it's always some third-rate movie with some second-rate star. But the reason it's number one is because that's the week it came out. Because it's new, because it's fresh. People saw it and said ""I didn't know that was there"" and they noticed it. Two of the big success stories of the last 20 years in retail — one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them. The only thing they have in common is that they're different.We're now in the fashion business, no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion business. And people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business — they're used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it's not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. But it's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread, and which ones don't. They sold a billion dollars' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair from something the purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbol about where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poilâne, the most famous baker in the world — he died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year, he sold 10 million dollars' worth of French bread. Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker at a time, in a wood-fired oven. And when Lionel started his bakery, the French pooh-pooh-ed it. They didn't want to buy his bread. It didn't look like ""French bread."" It wasn't what they expected. It was neat; it was remarkable; and slowly, it spread from one person to another person until finally, it became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by FedEx all around the world.What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. Smooth out the edges; go for the center; that's the big market. They would ignore the geeks, and God forbid, the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world where the TV-industrial complex is broken, I don't think that's a strategy we want to use any more. I think the strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they're really good at ignoring you. But market to these people because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with something. And when you talk to them, they'll listen, because they like listening — it's about them. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread to the entire curve.They have something I call ""otaku"" — it's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to say, drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place, because that's what they do: they get obsessed with it. To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really, desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends. There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku. That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard — you could make interesting mustard — but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out. It has a strategy, and what they do is, they enter a city, they talk to the people, with the otaku, and then they spread through the city to the people who've just crossed the street.This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars, but it sleeps for 12 minutes. Not everybody wants it but they don't care. They want to talk to the people who do, and maybe it'll spread. These guys make the loudest car stereo in the world.(Laughter)It's as loud as a 747 jet.You can't get in, the car's got bulletproof glass, because it'll blow out the windshield otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car, if they've got the otaku or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this.It's really simple — you sell to the people who are listening, and just maybe, those people tell their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote, who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial — that's the only thing keeping his company in business — it's that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial, and then tell their friends. Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in the last two years. Every one made a profit. How? They only sell them on their website. Those people who buy them have the otaku, and then they tell their friends, and it spreads and it spreads. This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars, 10 times the standard. But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model. Hard Candy nail polish, doesn't appeal to everybody, but to the people who love it, they talk about it like crazy. This paint can right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company, making them a fortune. It costs 35 percent more than regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about, because it's remarkable. They didn't just slap a new ad on the product; they changed what it meant to build a paint product. AmIhotornot.com — everyday 250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and I can tell you they are hard graders —(Laughter)They didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being remarkable, sometimes a little too remarkable. And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the wall. My father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildren everyday, changing constantly. And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing ended up on his desk. And one person at a time, the idea spreads. These are not diamonds, not really. They're made from ""cremains."" After you're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem.(Laughter)Oh, you like my ring? It's my grandmother.(Laughter)Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to be Ozzie Osborne — you don't have to be super-outrageous to do this. What you have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them.A couple of quick rules to wrap up. The first one is: Design is free when you get to scale. The people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them. Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people. That's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable. And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album, or you're an architect, or you have a tract on sociology. If it's very good, it's not going to work, because no one's going to notice it.So my three stories. Silk put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in the refrigerated section. Sales tripled. Why? Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk — not milk. For the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They didn't triple their sales with advertising; they tripled it by doing something remarkable. That is a remarkable piece of art. You don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York City is remarkable.(Laughter)Frank Gehry didn't just change a museum; he changed an entire city's economy by designing one building that people from all over the world went to see. Now, at countless meetings at, you know, the Portland City Council, or who knows where, they said, we need an architect — can we get Frank Gehry? Because he did something that was at the fringes. And my big failure? I came out with an entire —(Music)A record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD, this remarkable new format — and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000-dollar stereos. People with 20,000-dollar stereos don't like new music.(Laughter)So what you need to do is figure out who does care. Who is going to raise their hand and say, ""I want to hear what you're doing next,"" and sell something to them. The last example I want to give you. This is a map of Soap Lake, Washington. As you can see, if that's nowhere, it's in the middle of it.(Laughter)But they do have a lake. And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake. They don't anymore. So the founding fathers said, ""We've got some money to spend. What can we build here?"" And like most committees, they were going to build something pretty safe. And then an artist came to them — this is a true artist's rendering — he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the center of town. That's a purple cow; that's something worth noticing. I don't know about you, but if they build it, that's where I'm going to go.Thank you very much for your attention.","https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread
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"Well, I thought there would be a podium, so I'm a bit scared. (Laughter) Chris asked me to tell again how we found the structure of DNA. And since, you know, I follow his orders, I'll do it. But it slightly bores me. (Laughter) And, you know, I wrote a book. So I'll say something — (Laughter) — I'll say a little about, you know, how the discovery was made, and why Francis and I found it. And then, I hope maybe I have at least five minutes to say what makes me tick now.In back of me is a picture of me when I was 17. I was at the University of Chicago, in my third year, and I was in my third year because the University of Chicago let you in after two years of high school. So you — it was fun to get away from high school — (Laughter) — because I was very small, and I was no good in sports, or anything like that.But I should say that my background — my father was, you know, raised to be an Episcopalian and Republican, but after one year of college, he became an atheist and a Democrat. (Laughter) And my mother was Irish Catholic, and — but she didn't take religion too seriously. And by the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.And at the University of Chicago I was a zoology major, and thought I would end up, you know, if I was bright enough, maybe getting a Ph.D. from Cornell in ornithology. Then, in the Chicago paper, there was a review of a book called ""What is Life?"" by the great physicist, Schrodinger. And that, of course, had been a question I wanted to know. You know, Darwin explained life after it got started, but what was the essence of life?And Schrodinger said the essence was information present in our chromosomes, and it had to be present on a molecule. I'd never really thought of molecules before. You know chromosomes, but this was a molecule, and somehow all the information was probably present in some digital form. And there was the big question of, how did you copy the information?So that was the book. And so, from that moment on, I wanted to be a geneticist — understand the gene and, through that, understand life. So I had, you know, a hero at a distance. It wasn't a baseball player; it was Linus Pauling. And so I applied to Caltech and they turned me down. (Laughter) So I went to Indiana, which was actually as good as Caltech in genetics, and besides, they had a really good basketball team. (Laughter) So I had a really quite happy life at Indiana. And it was at Indiana I got the impression that, you know, the gene was likely to be DNA. And so when I got my Ph.D., I should go and search for DNA.So I first went to Copenhagen because I thought, well, maybe I could become a biochemist, but I discovered biochemistry was very boring. It wasn't going anywhere toward, you know, saying what the gene was; it was just nuclear science. And oh, that's the book, little book. You can read it in about two hours. And — but then I went to a meeting in Italy. And there was an unexpected speaker who wasn't on the program, and he talked about DNA. And this was Maurice Wilkins. He was trained as a physicist, and after the war he wanted to do biophysics, and he picked DNA because DNA had been determined at the Rockefeller Institute to possibly be the genetic molecules on the chromosomes. Most people believed it was proteins. But Wilkins, you know, thought DNA was the best bet, and he showed this x-ray photograph. Sort of crystalline. So DNA had a structure, even though it owed it to probably different molecules carrying different sets of instructions. So there was something universal about the DNA molecule. So I wanted to work with him, but he didn't want a former birdwatcher, and I ended up in Cambridge, England.So I went to Cambridge, because it was really the best place in the world then for x-ray crystallography. And x-ray crystallography is now a subject in, you know, chemistry departments. I mean, in those days it was the domain of the physicists. So the best place for x-ray crystallography was at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. And there I met Francis Crick. I went there without knowing him. He was 35. I was 23. And within a day, we had decided that maybe we could take a shortcut to finding the structure of DNA. Not solve it like, you know, in rigorous fashion, but build a model, an electro-model, using some coordinates of, you know, length, all that sort of stuff from x-ray photographs. But just ask what the molecule — how should it fold up?And the reason for doing so, at the center of this photograph, is Linus Pauling. About six months before, he proposed the alpha helical structure for proteins. And in doing so, he banished the man out on the right, Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was the Cavendish professor. This is a photograph several years later, when Bragg had cause to smile. He certainly wasn't smiling when I got there, because he was somewhat humiliated by Pauling getting the alpha helix, and the Cambridge people failing because they weren't chemists. And certainly, neither Crick or I were chemists, so we tried to build a model. And he knew, Francis knew Wilkins. So Wilkins said he thought it was the helix. X-ray diagram, he thought was comparable with the helix.So we built a three-stranded model. The people from London came up. Wilkins and this collaborator, or possible collaborator, Rosalind Franklin, came up and sort of laughed at our model. They said it was lousy, and it was. So we were told to build no more models; we were incompetent. (Laughter) And so we didn't build any models, and Francis sort of continued to work on proteins. And basically, I did nothing. And — except read. You know, basically, reading is a good thing; you get facts. And we kept telling the people in London that Linus Pauling's going to move on to DNA. If DNA is that important, Linus will know it. He'll build a model, and then we're going to be scooped.And, in fact, he'd written the people in London: Could he see their x-ray photograph? And they had the wisdom to say ""no."" So he didn't have it. But there was ones in the literature. Actually, Linus didn't look at them that carefully. But about, oh, 15 months after I got to Cambridge, a rumor began to appear from Linus Pauling's son, who was in Cambridge, that his father was now working on DNA. And so, one day Peter came in and he said he was Peter Pauling, and he gave me a copy of his father's manuscripts. And boy, I was scared because I thought, you know, we may be scooped. I have nothing to do, no qualifications for anything. (Laughter)And so there was the paper, and he proposed a three-stranded structure. And I read it, and it was just — it was crap. (Laughter) So this was, you know, unexpected from the world's — (Laughter) — and so, it was held together by hydrogen bonds between phosphate groups. Well, if the peak pH that cells have is around seven, those hydrogen bonds couldn't exist. We rushed over to the chemistry department and said, ""Could Pauling be right?"" And Alex Hust said, ""No."" So we were happy. (Laughter)And, you know, we were still in the game, but we were frightened that somebody at Caltech would tell Linus that he was wrong. And so Bragg said, ""Build models."" And a month after we got the Pauling manuscript — I should say I took the manuscript to London, and showed the people. Well, I said, Linus was wrong and that we're still in the game and that they should immediately start building models. But Wilkins said ""no."" Rosalind Franklin was leaving in about two months, and after she left he would start building models. And so I came back with that news to Cambridge, and Bragg said, ""Build models."" Well, of course, I wanted to build models. And there's a picture of Rosalind. She really, you know, in one sense she was a chemist, but really she would have been trained — she didn't know any organic chemistry or quantum chemistry. She was a crystallographer.And I think part of the reason she didn't want to build models was, she wasn't a chemist, whereas Pauling was a chemist. And so Crick and I, you know, started building models, and I'd learned a little chemistry, but not enough. Well, we got the answer on the 28th February '53. And it was because of a rule, which, to me, is a very good rule: Never be the brightest person in a room, and we weren't. We weren't the best chemists in the room. I went in and showed them a pairing I'd done, and Jerry Donohue — he was a chemist — he said, it's wrong. You've got — the hydrogen atoms are in the wrong place. I just put them down like they were in the books. He said they were wrong.So the next day, you know, after I thought, ""Well, he might be right."" So I changed the locations, and then we found the base pairing, and Francis immediately said the chains run in absolute directions. And we knew we were right. So it was a pretty, you know, it all happened in about two hours. From nothing to thing. And we knew it was big because, you know, if you just put A next to T and G next to C, you have a copying mechanism. So we saw how genetic information is carried. It's the order of the four bases. So in a sense, it is a sort of digital-type information. And you copy it by going from strand-separating. So, you know, if it didn't work this way, you might as well believe it, because you didn't have any other scheme. (Laughter)But that's not the way most scientists think. Most scientists are really rather dull. They said, we won't think about it until we know it's right. But, you know, we thought, well, it's at least 95 percent right or 99 percent right. So think about it. The next five years, there were essentially something like five references to our work in ""Nature"" — none. And so we were left by ourselves, and trying to do the last part of the trio: how do you — what does this genetic information do? It was pretty obvious that it provided the information to an RNA molecule, and then how do you go from RNA to protein? For about three years we just — I tried to solve the structure of RNA. It didn't yield. It didn't give good x-ray photographs. I was decidedly unhappy; a girl didn't marry me. It was really, you know, sort of a shitty time. (Laughter)So there's a picture of Francis and I before I met the girl, so I'm still looking happy. (Laughter) But there is what we did when we didn't know where to go forward: we formed a club and called it the RNA Tie Club. George Gamow, also a great physicist, he designed the tie. He was one of the members. The question was: How do you go from a four-letter code to the 20-letter code of proteins? Feynman was a member, and Teller, and friends of Gamow. But that's the only — no, we were only photographed twice. And on both occasions, you know, one of us was missing the tie. There's Francis up on the upper right, and Alex Rich — the M.D.-turned-crystallographer — is next to me. This was taken in Cambridge in September of 1955. And I'm smiling, sort of forced, I think, because the girl I had, boy, she was gone. (Laughter)And so I didn't really get happy until 1960, because then we found out, basically, you know, that there are three forms of RNA. And we knew, basically, DNA provides the information for RNA. RNA provides the information for protein. And that let Marshall Nirenberg, you know, take RNA — synthetic RNA — put it in a system making protein. He made polyphenylalanine, polyphenylalanine. So that's the first cracking of the genetic code, and it was all over by 1966. So there, that's what Chris wanted me to do, it was — so what happened since then? Well, at that time — I should go back. When we found the structure of DNA, I gave my first talk at Cold Spring Harbor. The physicist, Leo Szilard, he looked at me and said, ""Are you going to patent this?"" And — but he knew patent law, and that we couldn't patent it, because you couldn't. No use for it. (Laughter)And so DNA didn't become a useful molecule, and the lawyers didn't enter into the equation until 1973, 20 years later, when Boyer and Cohen in San Francisco and Stanford came up with their method of recombinant DNA, and Stanford patented it and made a lot of money. At least they patented something which, you know, could do useful things. And then, they learned how to read the letters for the code. And, boom, we've, you know, had a biotech industry. And, but we were still a long ways from, you know, answering a question which sort of dominated my childhood, which is: How do you nature-nurture?And so I'll go on. I'm already out of time, but this is Michael Wigler, a very, very clever mathematician turned physicist. And he developed a technique which essentially will let us look at sample DNA and, eventually, a million spots along it. There's a chip there, a conventional one. Then there's one made by a photolithography by a company in Madison called NimbleGen, which is way ahead of Affymetrix. And we use their technique. And what you can do is sort of compare DNA of normal segs versus cancer. And you can see on the top that cancers which are bad show insertions or deletions. So the DNA is really badly mucked up, whereas if you have a chance of surviving, the DNA isn't so mucked up. So we think that this will eventually lead to what we call ""DNA biopsies."" Before you get treated for cancer, you should really look at this technique, and get a feeling of the face of the enemy. It's not a — it's only a partial look, but it's a — I think it's going to be very, very useful.So, we started with breast cancer because there's lots of money for it, no government money. And now I have a sort of vested interest: I want to do it for prostate cancer. So, you know, you aren't treated if it's not dangerous. But Wigler, besides looking at cancer cells, looked at normal cells, and made a really sort of surprising observation. Which is, all of us have about 10 places in our genome where we've lost a gene or gained another one. So we're sort of all imperfect. And the question is well, if we're around here, you know, these little losses or gains might not be too bad. But if these deletions or amplifications occurred in the wrong gene, maybe we'll feel sick.So the first disease he looked at is autism. And the reason we looked at autism is we had the money to do it. Looking at an individual is about 3,000 dollars. And the parent of a child with Asperger's disease, the high-intelligence autism, had sent his thing to a conventional company; they didn't do it. Couldn't do it by conventional genetics, but just scanning it we began to find genes for autism. And you can see here, there are a lot of them. So a lot of autistic kids are autistic because they just lost a big piece of DNA. I mean, big piece at the molecular level. We saw one autistic kid, about five million bases just missing from one of his chromosomes. We haven't yet looked at the parents, but the parents probably don't have that loss, or they wouldn't be parents. Now, so, our autism study is just beginning. We got three million dollars. I think it will cost at least 10 to 20 before you'd be in a position to help parents who've had an autistic child, or think they may have an autistic child, and can we spot the difference? So this same technique should probably look at all. It's a wonderful way to find genes.And so, I'll conclude by saying we've looked at 20 people with schizophrenia. And we thought we'd probably have to look at several hundred before we got the picture. But as you can see, there's seven out of 20 had a change which was very high. And yet, in the controls there were three. So what's the meaning of the controls? Were they crazy also, and we didn't know it? Or, you know, were they normal? I would guess they're normal. And what we think in schizophrenia is there are genes of predisposure, and whether this is one that predisposes — and then there's only a sub-segment of the population that's capable of being schizophrenic.Now, we don't have really any evidence of it, but I think, to give you a hypothesis, the best guess is that if you're left-handed, you're prone to schizophrenia. 30 percent of schizophrenic people are left-handed, and schizophrenia has a very funny genetics, which means 60 percent of the people are genetically left-handed, but only half of it showed. I don't have the time to say. Now, some people who think they're right-handed are genetically left-handed. OK. I'm just saying that, if you think, oh, I don't carry a left-handed gene so therefore my, you know, children won't be at risk of schizophrenia. You might. OK? (Laughter)So it's, to me, an extraordinarily exciting time. We ought to be able to find the gene for bipolar; there's a relationship. And if I had enough money, we'd find them all this year. I thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_watson_on_how_he_discovered_dna
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"We're going to talk — my — a new lecture, just for TED — and I'm going show you some illusions that we've created for TED, and I'm going to try to relate this to happiness. What I was thinking about with happiness is, what gives happiness — or happiness, which I equate with joy in my particular area, and I think there's something very fundamental. And I was thinking about this. And it's in terms of both illusions and movies that we go see and jokes and magic shows is that there's something about these things where our expectations are violated in some sort of pleasing way. You go see a movie. And it has an unexpected twist — something that you didn't expect — and you find a joyful experience. You look at those sort of illusions in my book and it's not as what you'd expect. And there's something joyful about it. And it's the same thing with jokes and all these sorts of things. So, what I'm going to try and do in my lecture is go a little bit further and see if I can violate your expectations in a pleasing way. I mean, sometimes expectations that are violated are not pleasant, but I'm going to try to do it in a pleasant way, in a very primal way, so I can make the audience here happy.So I'm going to show you some ways that we can violate your expectations. First of all, I want to show you the particular illusion here. I want you first of all when it pops up on the screen to notice that the two holes are perpendicular to each other. These are all perceptual tricks. These are real objects that I'm going to show you. Now I'm going to show you how it is done. I've looped the film here so you can get a very interesting experience. I want you to see how this illusion is constructed, and it's going to rotate so you see that it's inside out. Now watch, as it rotates back, how quickly your perception snaps. OK now. Watch it as it rotates back again. And this is a very bright audience, all right? See if you can stop it from happening, even though you know 100 percent it's true that — bam! You can't undo it. What does that tell you about yourselves? We're going to do it again. No doubt about it. See if you can stop it from happening. No. It's difficult.And we can violate your expectations in a whole variety of ways about representation, about shape, about color and so forth and it's very primal. And it's an interesting question to ponder, why these things — we find these things joyful. Why would we find them joyful? So, here's something that Lionel did a while ago. I like these sort of little things like this.Again, this is not an optical trick. This is what you would see. In other words, it's not a camera cut. It's a perceptual trick. OK. We can violate your expectations about shape. We can violate your expectations on representation — what an image represents. What do you see here? How many of you here see dolphins? Raise your hand if you see dolphins. OK, those people who raised their hands, afterwards, the rest of the audience, go talk to them, all right? Actually, this is the best example of priming by experience that I know. If you are a child under the age of 10 who haven't been ruined yet, you will look at this image and see dolphins. Now, some of you adults here are saying, ""What dolphins? What dolphins?"" But in fact, if you reversed the figure ground — in other words, the dark areas here — I forgot to ask for a pointer — but if you reverse it, you'll see a whole series of little dolphins. By the way, if you're also a student at CalTech — they also tend to just see the dolphins. It's based on experience.Now, something like this can be used because this is after all talk about design, too. This was done by Saatchi and Saatchi, and they actually got away with this ad in Australia. So, if you look at this ad for beer, all those people are in sort of provocative positions. But they got it passed, and actually won the Clio awards, so it's funny how you can do these things. Remember that sort of, um. This is the joke I did when the Florida ballot was going around. You know, count the dots for Gore; count the dots for Bush; count 'em again ...You can violate your expectations about experience. Here is an outside water fountain that I created with some friends of mine, but you can stop the water in drops and — actually make all the drops levitate. This is something we're building for, you know, amusement parks and that kind of stuff. Now let's take a static image. Can you see this? Do you see the middle section moving down and the outer sections moving up? It's completely static. It's a static image. How many people see this illusion? It's completely static. Right. Now, when — it's interesting that when we look at an image we see, you know, color, depth, texture. And you can look at this whole scene and analyze it. You can see the woman is in closer than the wall and so forth. But the whole thing is actually flat. It's painted. It's trompe l'oeil. And it was such a good trompe l'oeil that people got irritated when they tried to talk to the woman and she wouldn't respond.Now, you can make design mistakes. Like this building in New York. So that when you see it from this side, it looks like the balconies tilt up, and when you walk around to the other side it looks like the balconies go down. So there are cases where you have mistakes in design that incorporate illusions. Or, you take this particular un-retouched photograph. Now, interestingly enough, I get a lot of emails from people who say, ""Is there any perceptual difference between males and females?"" And I really say, ""No."" I mean, women can navigate through the world just as well as males can — and why wouldn't they? However, this is the one illusion that women can consistently do better than males: in matching which head because they rely on fashion cues. They can match the hat.Okay, now getting to a part — I want to show design in illusions. I believe that the first example of illusions being used purposely was by da Vinci in this anamorphic image of an eye. So that when you saw from one little angle was like this. And this little technique got popular in the 16th century and the 17th century to disguise hidden meanings, where you could flip the image and see it from one little point of view like this. But these are early incorporations of illusions brought to — sort of high point with Hans Holbein's ""Ambassadors."" And Hans Holbein worked for Henry VIII. This was hung on a wall where you could walk down from the stair and you can see this hidden skull.All right, now I'm going to show you some designers who work with illusions to give that element of surprise. One of my favorites is Scott Kim. I worked with Scott to create some illusions for TED that I hope you will enjoy. We have one here on TED and happiness. OK now. Arthur [Ganson] hasn't talked yet, but his is going to be a delightful talk and he has some of his really fantastic machines outside. And so, we — Scott created this wonderful tribute to Arthur Ganson.Well, there's analog and digital. Thought that was appropriate here. And figure goes to ground. And for the musicians. And of course, since happiness — we want ""joy to the world."" Now, another great designer — he's very well known in Japan — Shigeo Fukuda. And he just builds some fantastic things. This is simply amazing. This is a pile of junk that when you view it from one particular angle, you see its reflection in the mirror as a perfect piano. Pianist transforms to violinist. This is really wild. This assemblage of forks, knives and spoons and various cutlery, welded together. It gives a shadow of a motorcycle. You learn something in the sort of thing that I do, which is there are people out there with a lot of time on their hands.Ken Knowlton does wonderful composite images, like creating Jacques Cousteau out of seashells — un-retouched seashells, but just by rearranging them. He did Einstein out of dice because, after all, Einstein said, ""God does not play dice with the universe."" Bert Herzog out of un-retouched keyboards. Will Shortz, crossword puzzle. John Cederquist does these wonderful trompe l'oeil cabinets.Now, I'm going to skip ahead since I'm sort of running [behind]. I want to show you quickly what I've created, some new type of illusions. I've done something with taking the Pixar-type illusions. So you see these kids the same size here, running down the hall. The two table tops of the same size. They're looking out two directions at once. You have a larger piece fitting in with a smaller. And that's something for you to think about, all right? So you see larger pieces fitting in within smaller pieces here. Does everyone see that? Which is impossible. You can see the two kids are looking out simultaneously out of two different directions at once. Now can you believe these two table tops are the same size and shape? They are. So, if you measured them, they would be. And as I say, those two figures are identical in size and shape. And it's interesting, by doing this in this sort of rendered fashion, how much stronger the illusions are. Any case, I hope this has brought you a little joy and happiness, and if you're interested in seeing more cool effects, see me outside. I'd be happy to show you lots of things.","https://www.ted.com/talks/al_seckel_says_our_brains_are_mis_wired
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"As you pointed out, every time you come here, you learn something. This morning, the world's experts from I guess three or four different companies on building seats, I think concluded that ultimately, the solution is, people shouldn't sit down. I could have told them that. (Laughter) Yesterday, the automotive guys gave us some new insights. They pointed out that, I believe it was between 30 and 50 years from today, they will be steering cars by wire, without all that mechanical stuff. (Laughter) That's reassuring. (Applause) They then pointed out that there'd be, sort of, the other controls by wire, to get rid of all that mechanical stuff. That's pretty good, but why not get rid of the wires? Then you don't need anything to control the car, except thinking about it. I would love to talk about the technology, and sometime, in what's past the 15 minutes, I'll be happy to talk to all the techno-geeks around here about what's in here. But if I had one thing to say about this, before we get to first, it would be that from the time we started building this, the big idea wasn't the technology. It really was a big idea in technology when we started applying it in the iBOT for the disabled community. The big idea here is, I think, a new piece of a solution to a fairly big problem in transportation. And maybe to put that in perspective: there's so much data on this, I'll be happy to give it to you in different forms. You never know what strikes the fancy of whom, but everybody is perfectly willing to believe the car changed the world. And Henry Ford, just about 100 years ago, started cranking out Model Ts. What I don't think most people think about is the context of how technology is applied. For instance, in that time, 91 percent of America lived either on farms or in small towns. So, the car — the horseless carriage that replaced the horse and carriage — was a big deal; it went twice as fast as a horse and carriage. It was half as long. And it was an environmental improvement, because, for instance, in 1903 they outlawed horses and buggies in downtown Manhattan, because you can imagine what the roads look like when you have a million horses, and a million of them urinating and doing other things, and the typhoid and other problems created were almost unimaginable. So the car was the clean environmental alternative to a horse and buggy. It also was a way for people to get from their farm to a farm, or their farm to a town, or from a town to a city. It all made sense, with 91 percent of the people living there. By the 1950s, we started connecting all the towns together with what a lot of people claim is the eighth wonder of the world, the highway system. And it is certainly a wonder. And by the way, as I take shots at old technologies, I want to assure everybody, and particularly the automotive industry — who's been very supportive of us — that I don't think this in any way competes with airplanes, or cars. But think about where the world is today. 50 percent of the global population now lives in cities. That's 3.2 billion people. We've solved all the transportation problems that have changed the world to get it to where we are today. 500 years ago, sailing ships started getting reliable enough; we found a new continent. 150 years ago, locomotives got efficient enough, steam power, that we turned the continent into a country. Over the last hundred years, we started building cars, and then over the 50 years we've connected every city to every other city in an extraordinarily efficient way, and we have a very high standard of living as a consequence of that. But during that entire process, more and more people have been born, and more and more people are moving to cities. China alone is going to move four to six hundred million people into cities in the next decade and a half. And so, nobody, I think, would argue that airplanes, in the last 50 years, have turned the continent and the country now into a neighborhood. And if you just look at how technology has been applied, we've solved all the long-range, high-speed, high-volume, large-weight problems of moving things around. Nobody would want to give them up. And I certainly wouldn't want to give up my airplane, or my helicopter, or my Humvee, or my Porsche. I love them all. I don't keep any of them in my living room. The fact is, the last mile is the problem, and half the world now lives in dense cities. And people spend, depending on who they are, between 90 and 95 percent of their energy getting around on foot. I think there's — I don't know what data would impress you, but how about, 43 percent of the refined fuel produced in the world is consumed by cars in metropolitan areas in the United States. Three million people die every year in cities due to bad air, and almost all particulate pollution on this planet is produced by transportation devices, particularly sitting in cities. And again, I say that not to attack any industry, I think — I really do — I love my airplane, and cars on highways moving 60 miles an hour are extraordinarily efficient, both from an engineering point of view, an energy consumption point of view, and a utility point of view. And we all love our cars, and I do. The problem is, you get into the city and you want to go four blocks, it's neither fun nor efficient nor productive. It's not sustainable. If — in China, in the year 1998, 417 million people used bicycles; 1.7 million people used cars. If five percent of that population became, quote, middle class, and wanted to go the way we've gone in the last hundred years at the same time that 50 percent of their population are moving into cities of the size and density of Manhattan, every six weeks — it isn't sustainable environmentally; it isn't sustainable economically — there just ain't enough oil — and it's not sustainable politically. I mean, what are we fighting over right now? We can make it complicated, but what's the world fighting over right now? So it seemed to me that somebody had to work on that last mile, and it was dumb luck. We were working on iBOTs, but once we made this, we instantly decided it could be a great alternative to jet skis. You don't need the water. Or snowmobiles. You don't need the snow. Or skiing. It's just fun, and people love to move around doing fun things. And every one of those industries, by the way — just golf carts alone is a multi-billion-dollar industry. But rather than go license this off, which is what we normally do, it seemed to me that if we put all our effort not into the technology, but into an understanding of a world that's solved all its other problems, but has somehow come to accept that cities — which, right back from ancient Greece on, were meant to walk around, cities that were architected and built for people — now have a footprint that, while we've solved every other transportation problem — and it's like Moore's law. I mean, look at the time it took to cross a continent in a Conestoga wagon, then on a railroad, then an airplane. Every other form of transportation's been improved. In 5,000 years, we've gone backwards in getting around cities. They've gotten bigger; they're spread out. The most expensive real estate on this planet in every city — Wilshire Boulevard, or Fifth Avenue, or Tokyo, or Paris — the most expensive real estate is their downtowns. 65 percent of the landmass of our cities are parked cars. The 20 largest cities in the world. So you wonder, what if cities could give to their pedestrians what we take for granted as we now go between cities? What if you could make them fun, attractive, clean, environmentally friendly? What if it would make it a little bit more palatable to have access via this, as that last link to mass transit, to get out to your cars so we can all live in the suburbs and use our cars the way we want, and then have our cities energized again? We thought it would be really neat to do that, and one of the problems we really were worried about is: how do we get legal on the sidewalk? Because technically I've got motors; I've got wheels — I'm a motor vehicle. I don't look like a motor vehicle. I have the same footprint as a pedestrian; I have the same unique capability to deal with other pedestrians in a crowded space. I took this down to Ground Zero, and knocked my way through crowds for an hour. I'm a pedestrian. But the law typically lags technology by a generation or two, and if we get told we don't belong on the sidewalk, we have two choices. We're a recreational vehicle that doesn't really matter, and I don't spend my time doing that kind of stuff. Or maybe we should be out in the street in front of a Greyhound bus or a vehicle. We've been so concerned about that, we went to the Postmaster General of the United States, as the first person we ever showed on the outside, and said, ""Put your people on it. Everybody trusts their postman. And they belong on the sidewalks, and they'll use it seriously."" He agreed. We went to a number of police departments that want their police officers back in the neighborhood on the beat, carrying 70 pounds of stuff. They love it. And I can't believe a policeman is going to give themselves a ticket. (Laughter) So we've been working really, really hard, but we knew that the technology would not be as hard to develop as an attitude about what's important, and how to apply the technology. We went out and we found some visionary people with enough money to let us design and build these things, and in hopefully enough time to get them accepted. So, I'm happy, really, I am happy to talk about this technology as much as you want. And yes, it's really fun, and yes, you should all go out and try it. But if I could ask you to do one thing, it's not to think about it as a piece of technology, but just imagine that, although we all understand somehow that it's reasonable that we use our 4,000-pound machine, which can go 60 miles an hour, that can bring you everywhere you want to go, and somehow it's also what we used for the last mile, and it's broken, and it doesn't work. One of the more exciting things that occurred to us about why it might get accepted, happened out here in California. A few weeks ago, after we launched it, we were here with a news crew on Venice Beach, zipping up and back, and he's marveling at the technology, and meanwhile bicycles are zipping by, and skateboarders are zipping by, and a little old lady — I mean, if you looked in the dictionary, a little old lady — came by me — and now that I'm on this, I'm the height of a normal adult now — and she just stops, and the camera is there, and she looks up at me and says, ""Can I try that?"" And what was I — you know, how are you going to say anything? And so I said, ""Sure."" So I get off, and she gets on, and with a little bit of the usual, ah, then she turns around, and she goes about 20 feet, and she turns back around, and she's all smiles. And she comes back to me and she stops, and she says, ""Finally, they made something for us."" And the camera is looking down at her. I'm thinking, ""Wow, that was great — (Laughter) — please lady, don't say another word."" (Laughter) And the camera is down at her, and this guy has to put the microphone in her face, said, ""What do you mean by that?"" And I figured, ""It's all over now,"" and she looks up and she says, ""Well,"" she's still watching these guys go; she says, ""I can't ride a bike,"" no, she says, ""I can't use a skateboard, and I've never used roller blades,"" she knew them by name; she says, ""And it's been 50 years since I rode a bicycle."" Then she looks up, she's looking up, and she says, ""And I'm 81 years old, and I don't drive a car anymore. I still have to get to the store, and I can't carry a lot of things."" And it suddenly occurred to me, that among my many fears, were not just that the bureaucracy and the regulators and the legislators might not get it — it was that, fundamentally, you believe there's pressure among the people not to invade the most precious little bit of space left, the sidewalks in these cities. When you look at the 36 inches of legal requirement for sidewalk, then the eight foot for the parked car, then the three lanes, and then the other eight feet — it's — that little piece is all that's there. But she looks up and says this, and it occurs to me, well, kids aren't going to mind these things, and they don't vote, and business people and then young adults aren't going to mind these things — they're pretty cool — so I guess subliminally I was worried that it's the older population that's going to worry. So, having seen this, and having worried about it for eight years, the first thing I do is pick up my phone and ask our marketing and regulatory guys, call AARP, get an appointment right away. We've got to show them this thing. And they took it to Washington; they showed them; and they're going to be involved now, watching how these things get absorbed in a number of cities, like Atlanta, where we're doing trials to see if it really can, in fact, help re-energize their downtown. (Applause) The bottom line is, whether you believe the United Nations, or any of the other think tanks — in the next 20 years, all human population growth on this planet will be in cities. In Asia alone, it will be over a billion people. They learned to start with cell phones. They didn't have to take the 100-year trip we took. They start at the top of the technology food chain. We've got to start building cities and human environments where a 150-pound person can go a couple of miles in a dense, rich, green-space environment, without being in a 4,000-pound machine to do it. Cars were not meant for parallel parking; they're wonderful machines to go between cities, but just think about it: we've solved all the long-range, high-speed problems. The Greeks went from the theater of Dionysus to the Parthenon in their sandals. You do it in your sneakers. Not much has changed. If this thing goes only three times as fast as walking — three times — a 30-minute walk becomes 10 minutes. Your choice, when living in a city, if it's now 10 minutes — because at 30 minutes you want an alternative, whether it's a bus, a train — we've got to build an infrastructure — a light rail — or you're going to keep parking those cars. But if you could put a pin in most cities, and imagine how far you could, if you had the time, walk in one half-hour, it's the city. If you could make it fun, and make it eight or 10 minutes, you can't find your car, un-park your car, move your car, re-park your car and go somewhere; you can't get to a cab or a subway. We could change the way people allocate their resources, the way this planet uses its energy, make it more fun. And we're hoping to some extent history will say we were right. That's Segway. This is a Stirling cycle engine; this had been confused by a lot of things we're doing. This little beast, right now, is producing a few hundred watts of electricity. Yes, it could be attached to this, and yes, on a kilogram of propane, you could drive from New York to Boston if you so choose. Perhaps more interesting about this little engine is it'll burn any fuel, because some of you might be skeptical about the capability of this to have an impact, where most of the world you can't simply plug into your 120-volt outlet. We've been working on this, actually, as an alternative energy source, starting way back with Johnson & Johnson, to run an iBOT, because the best batteries you could get — 10 watt-hours per kilogram in lead, 20 watt-hours per kilogram nickel-cadmium, 40 watt-hours per kilogram in nickel-metal hydride, 60 watt-hours per kilogram in lithium, 8,750 watt-hours of energy in every kilogram of propane or gasoline — which is why nobody drives electric cars. But, in any event, if you can burn it with the same efficiency — because it's external combustion — as your kitchen stove, if you can burn any fuel, it turns out to be pretty neat. It makes just enough electricity to, for instance, do this, which at night is enough electricity, in the rest of the world, as Mr. Holly — Dr. Holly — pointed out, can run computers and a light bulb. But more interestingly, the thermodynamics of this say, you're never going to get more than 20 percent efficiency. It doesn't matter much — it says if you get 200 watts of electricity, you'll get 700 or 800 watts of heat. If you wanted to boil water and re-condense it at a rate of 10 gallons an hour, it takes about 25, a little over 25.3 kilowatt — 25,000 watts of continuous power — to do it. That's so much energy, you couldn't afford to desalinate or clean water in this country that way. Certainly, in the rest of the world, your choice is to devastate the place, turning everything that will burn into heat, or drink the water that's available. The number one cause of death on this planet among humans is bad water. Depending on whose numbers you believe, it's between 60 and 85,000 people per day. We don't need sophisticated heart transplants around the world. We need water. And women shouldn't have to spend four hours a day looking for it, or watching their kids die. We figured out how to put a vapor-compression distiller on this thing, with a counter-flow heat exchanger to take the waste heat, then using a little bit of the electricity control that process, and for 450 watts, which is a little more than half of its waste heat, it will make 10 gallons an hour of distilled water from anything that comes into it to cool it. So if we put this box on here in a few years, could we have a solution to transportation, electricity, and communication, and maybe drinkable water in a sustainable package that weighs 60 pounds? I don't know, but we'll try it. I better shut up. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_on_inventing_and_giving
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"I'm supposed to scare you, because it's about fear, right? And you should be really afraid, but not for the reasons why you think you should be. You should be really afraid that — if we stick up the first slide on this thing — there we go — that you're missing out. Because if you spend this week thinking about Iraq and thinking about Bush and thinking about the stock market, you're going to miss one of the greatest adventures that we've ever been on. And this is what this adventure's really about. This is crystallized DNA. Every life form on this planet — every insect, every bacteria, every plant, every animal, every human, every politician — (Laughter) is coded in that stuff. And if you want to take a single crystal of DNA, it looks like that. And we're just beginning to understand this stuff. And this is the single most exciting adventure that we have ever been on. It's the single greatest mapping project we've ever been on. If you think that the mapping of America's made a difference, or landing on the moon, or this other stuff, it's the map of ourselves and the map of every plant and every insect and every bacteria that really makes a difference. And it's beginning to tell us a lot about evolution. (Laughter)It turns out that what this stuff is — and Richard Dawkins has written about this — is, this is really a river out of Eden. So, the 3.2 billion base pairs inside each of your cells is really a history of where you've been for the past billion years. And we could start dating things, and we could start changing medicine and archeology. It turns out that if you take the human species about 700 years ago, white Europeans diverged from black Africans in a very significant way. White Europeans were subject to the plague. And when they were subject to the plague, most people didn't survive, but those who survived had a mutation on the CCR5 receptor. And that mutation was passed on to their kids because they're the ones that survived, so there was a great deal of population pressure. In Africa, because you didn't have these cities, you didn't have that CCR5 population pressure mutation. We can date it to 700 years ago. That is one of the reasons why AIDS is raging across Africa as fast as it is, and not as fast across Europe. And we're beginning to find these little things for malaria, for sickle cell, for cancers. And in the measure that we map ourselves, this is the single greatest adventure that we'll ever be on. And this Friday, I want you to pull out a really good bottle of wine, and I want you to toast these two people. Because this Friday, 50 years ago, Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA, and that is almost as important a date as the 12th of February when we first mapped ourselves, but anyway, we'll get to that.I thought we'd talk about the new zoo. So, all you guys have heard about DNA, all the stuff that DNA does, but some of the stuff we're discovering is kind of nifty because this turns out to be the single most abundant species on the planet. If you think you're successful or cockroaches are successful, it turns out that there's ten trillion trillion Pleurococcus sitting out there. And we didn't know that Pleurococcus was out there, which is part of the reason why this whole species-mapping project is so important. Because we're just beginning to learn where we came from and what we are. And we're finding amoebas like this. This is the amoeba dubia. And the amoeba dubia doesn't look like much, except that each of you has about 3.2 billion letters, which is what makes you you, as far as gene code inside each of your cells, and this little amoeba which, you know, sits in water in hundreds and millions and billions, turns out to have 620 billion base pairs of gene code inside. So, this little thingamajig has a genome that's 200 times the size of yours. And if you're thinking of efficient information storage mechanisms, it may not turn out to be chips. It may turn out to be something that looks a little like that amoeba.And, again, we're learning from life and how life works. This funky little thing: people didn't used to think that it was worth taking samples out of nuclear reactors because it was dangerous and, of course, nothing lived there. And then finally somebody picked up a microscope and looked at the water that was sitting next to the cores. And sitting next to that water in the cores was this little Deinococcus radiodurans, doing a backstroke, having its chromosomes blown apart every day, six, seven times, restitching them, living in about 200 times the radiation that would kill you. And by now you should be getting a hint as to how diverse and how important and how interesting this journey into life is, and how many different life forms there are, and how there can be different life forms living in very different places, maybe even outside of this planet. Because if you can live in radiation that looks like this, that brings up a whole series of interesting questions.This little thingamajig: we didn't know this thingamajig existed. We should have known that this existed because this is the only bacteria that you can see to the naked eye. So, this thing is 0.75 millimeters. It lives in a deep trench off the coast of Namibia. And what you're looking at with this namibiensis is the biggest bacteria we've ever seen. So, it's about the size of a little period on a sentence. Again, we didn't know this thing was there three years ago. We're just beginning this journey of life in the new zoo.This is a really odd one. This is Ferroplasma. The reason why Ferroplasma is interesting is because it eats iron, lives inside the equivalent of battery acid, and excretes sulfuric acid. So, when you think of odd life forms, when you think of what it takes to live, it turns out this is a very efficient life form, and they call it an archaea. Archaea means ""the ancient ones."" And the reason why they're ancient is because this thing came up when this planet was covered by things like sulfuric acid in batteries, and it was eating iron when the earth was part of a melted core. So, it's not just dogs and cats and whales and dolphins that you should be aware of and interested in on this little journey.Your fear should be that you are not, that you're paying attention to stuff which is temporal. I mean, George Bush — he's going to be gone, alright? Life isn't. Whether the humans survive or don't survive, these things are going to be living on this planet or other planets. And it's just beginning to understand this code of DNA that's really the most exciting intellectual adventure that we've ever been on.And you can do strange things with this stuff. This is a baby gaur. Conservation group gets together, tries to figure out how to breed an animal that's almost extinct. They can't do it naturally, so what they do with this thing is they take a spoon, take some cells out of an adult gaur's mouth, code, take the cells from that and insert it into a fertilized cow's egg, reprogram cow's egg — different gene code. When you do that, the cow gives birth to a gaur. We are now experimenting with bongos, pandas, elands, Sumatran tigers, and the Australians — bless their hearts — are playing with these things.Now, the last of these things died in September 1936. These are Tasmanian tigers. The last known one died at the Hobart Zoo. But it turns out that as we learn more about gene code and how to reprogram species, we may be able to close the gene gaps in deteriorate DNA. And when we learn how to close the gene gaps, then we can put a full string of DNA together. And if we do that, and insert this into a fertilized wolf's egg, we may give birth to an animal that hasn't walked the earth since 1936. And then you can start going back further, and you can start thinking about dodos, and you can think about other species. And in other places, like Maryland, they're trying to figure out what the primordial ancestor is. Because each of us contains our entire gene code of where we've been for the past billion years, because we've evolved from that stuff, you can take that tree of life and collapse it back, and in the measure that you learn to reprogram, maybe we'll give birth to something that is very close to the first primordial ooze. And it's all coming out of things that look like this.These are companies that didn't exist five years ago. Huge gene sequencing facilities the size of football fields. Some are public. Some are private. It takes about 5 billion dollars to sequence a human being the first time. Takes about 3 million dollars the second time. We will have a 1,000-dollar genome within the next five to eight years. That means each of you will contain on a CD your entire gene code. And it will be really boring. It will read like this. (Laughter) The really neat thing about this stuff is that's life. And Laurie's going to talk about this one a little bit. Because if you happen to find this one inside your body, you're in big trouble, because that's the source code for Ebola. That's one of the deadliest diseases known to humans. But plants work the same way and insects work the same way, and this apple works the same way. This apple is the same thing as this floppy disk. Because this thing codes ones and zeros, and this thing codes A, T, C, Gs, and it sits up there, absorbing energy on a tree, and one fine day it has enough energy to say, execute, and it goes [thump]. Right? (Laughter) And when it does that, pushes a .EXE, what it does is, it executes the first line of code, which reads just like that, AATCAGGGACCC, and that means: make a root. Next line of code: make a stem. Next line of code, TACGGGG: make a flower that's white, that blooms in the spring, that smells like this. In the measure that you have the code and the measure that you read it — and, by the way, the first plant was read two years ago; the first human was read two years ago; the first insect was read two years ago.The first thing that we ever read was in 1995: a little bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae. In the measure that you have the source code, as all of you know, you can change the source code, and you can reprogram life forms so that this little thingy becomes a vaccine, or this little thingy starts producing biomaterials, which is why DuPont is now growing a form of polyester that feels like silk in corn. This changes all rules. This is life, but we're reprogramming it. This is what you look like. This is one of your chromosomes. And what you can do now is, you can outlay exactly what your chromosome is, and what the gene code on that chromosome is right here, and what those genes code for, and what animals they code against, and then you can tie it to the literature. And in the measure that you can do that, you can go home today, and get on the Internet, and access the world's biggest public library, which is a library of life. And you can do some pretty strange things because in the same way as you can reprogram this apple, if you go to Cliff Tabin's lab at the Harvard Medical School, he's reprogramming chicken embryos to grow more wings. Why would Cliff be doing that? He doesn't have a restaurant. (Laughter)The reason why he's reprogramming that animal to have more wings is because when you used to play with lizards as a little child, and you picked up the lizard, sometimes the tail fell off, but it regrew. Not so in human beings: you cut off an arm, you cut off a leg — it doesn't regrow. But because each of your cells contains your entire gene code, each cell can be reprogrammed, if we don't stop stem cell research and if we don't stop genomic research, to express different body functions. And in the measure that we learn how chickens grow wings, and what the program is for those cells to differentiate, one of the things we're going to be able to do is to stop undifferentiated cells, which you know as cancer, and one of the things we're going to learn how to do is how to reprogram cells like stem cells in such a way that they express bone, stomach, skin, pancreas. And you are likely to be wandering around — and your children — on regrown body parts in a reasonable period of time, in some places in the world where they don't stop the research.How's this stuff work? If each of you differs from the person next to you by one in a thousand, but only three percent codes, which means it's only one in a thousand times three percent, very small differences in expression and punctuation can make a significant difference. Take a simple declarative sentence. (Laughter) Right? That's perfectly clear. So, men read that sentence, and they look at that sentence, and they read this. Okay? Now, women look at that sentence and they say, uh-uh, wrong. This is the way it should be seen. (Laughter) That's what your genes are doing. That's why you differ from this person over here by one in a thousand. Right? But, you know, he's reasonably good looking, but... I won't go there. You can do this stuff even without changing the punctuation. You can look at this, right? And they look at the world a little differently. They look at the same world and they say... (Laughter) That's how the same gene code — that's why you have 30,000 genes, mice have 30,000 genes, husbands have 30,000 genes. Mice and men are the same. Wives know that, but anyway. You can make very small changes in gene code and get really different outcomes, even with the same string of letters. That's what your genes are doing every day. That's why sometimes a person's genes don't have to change a lot to get cancer.These little chippies, these things are the size of a credit card. They will test any one of you for 60,000 genetic conditions. That brings up questions of privacy and insurability and all kinds of stuff, but it also allows us to start going after diseases, because if you run a person who has leukemia through something like this, it turns out that three diseases with completely similar clinical syndromes are completely different diseases. Because in ALL leukemia, that set of genes over there over-expresses. In MLL, it's the middle set of genes, and in AML, it's the bottom set of genes. And if one of those particular things is expressing in your body, then you take Gleevec and you're cured. If it is not expressing in your body, if you don't have one of those types — a particular one of those types — don't take Gleevec. It won't do anything for you. Same thing with Receptin if you've got breast cancer. Don't have an HER-2 receptor? Don't take Receptin. Changes the nature of medicine. Changes the predictions of medicine. Changes the way medicine works.The greatest repository of knowledge when most of us went to college was this thing, and it turns out that this is not so important any more. The U.S. Library of Congress, in terms of its printed volume of data, contains less data than is coming out of a good genomics company every month on a compound basis. Let me say that again: A single genomics company generates more data in a month, on a compound basis, than is in the printed collections of the Library of Congress. This is what's been powering the U.S. economy. It's Moore's Law. So, all of you know that the price of computers halves every 18 months and the power doubles, right? Except that when you lay that side by side with the speed with which gene data's being deposited in GenBank, Moore's Law is right here: it's the blue line. This is on a log scale, and that's what superexponential growth means. This is going to push computers to have to grow faster than they've been growing, because so far, there haven't been applications that have been required that need to go faster than Moore's Law. This stuff does.And here's an interesting map. This is a map which was finished at the Harvard Business School. One of the really interesting questions is, if all this data's free, who's using it? This is the greatest public library in the world. Well, it turns out that there's about 27 trillion bits moving inside from the United States to the United States; about 4.6 trillion is going over to those European countries; about 5.5's going to Japan; there's almost no communication between Japan, and nobody else is literate in this stuff. It's free. No one's reading it. They're focusing on the war; they're focusing on Bush; they're not interested in life. So, this is what a new map of the world looks like. That is the genomically literate world. And that is a problem. In fact, it's not a genomically literate world. You can break this out by states. And you can watch states rise and fall depending on their ability to speak a language of life, and you can watch New York fall off a cliff, and you can watch New Jersey fall off a cliff, and you can watch the rise of the new empires of intelligence. And you can break it out by counties, because it's specific counties. And if you want to get more specific, it's actually specific zip codes. (Laughter)So, you want to know where life is happening? Well, in Southern California it's happening in 92121. And that's it. And that's the triangle between Salk, Scripps, UCSD, and it's called Torrey Pines Road. That means you don't need to be a big nation to be successful; it means you don't need a lot of people to be successful; and it means you can move most of the wealth of a country in about three or four carefully picked 747s.Same thing in Massachusetts. Looks more spread out but — oh, by the way, the ones that are the same color are contiguous. What's the net effect of this? In an agricultural society, the difference between the richest and the poorest, the most productive and the least productive, was five to one. Why? Because in agriculture, if you had 10 kids and you grow up a little bit earlier and you work a little bit harder, you could produce about five times more wealth, on average, than your neighbor. In a knowledge society, that number is now 427 to 1. It really matters if you're literate, not just in reading and writing in English and French and German, but in Microsoft and Linux and Apple. And very soon it's going to matter if you're literate in life code. So, if there is something you should fear, it's that you're not keeping your eye on the ball. Because it really matters who speaks life. That's why nations rise and fall.And it turns out that if you went back to the 1870s, the most productive nation on earth was Australia, per person. And New Zealand was way up there. And then the U.S. came in about 1950, and then Switzerland about 1973, and then the U.S. got back on top — beat up their chocolates and cuckoo clocks. And today, of course, you all know that the most productive nation on earth is Luxembourg, producing about one third more wealth per person per year than America. Tiny landlocked state. No oil. No diamonds. No natural resources. Just smart people moving bits. Different rules.Here's differential productivity rates. Here's how many people it takes to produce a single U.S. patent. So, about 3,000 Americans, 6,000 Koreans, 14,000 Brits, 790,000 Argentines. You want to know why Argentina's crashing? It's got nothing to do with inflation. It's got nothing to do with privatization. You can take a Harvard-educated Ivy League economist, stick him in charge of Argentina. He still crashes the country because he doesn't understand how the rules have changed. Oh, yeah, and it takes about 5.6 million Indians. Well, watch what happens to India. India and China used to be 40 percent of the global economy just at the Industrial Revolution, and they are now about 4.8 percent. Two billion people. One third of the global population producing 5 percent of the wealth because they didn't get this change, because they kept treating their people like serfs instead of like shareholders of a common project. They didn't keep the people who were educated. They didn't foment the businesses. They didn't do the IPOs. Silicon Valley did. And that's why they say that Silicon Valley has been powered by ICs. Not integrated circuits: Indians and Chinese. (Laughter)Here's what's happening in the world. It turns out that if you'd gone to the U.N. in 1950, when it was founded, there were 50 countries in this world. It turns out there's now about 192. Country after country is splitting, seceding, succeeding, failing — and it's all getting very fragmented. And this has not stopped. In the 1990s, these are sovereign states that did not exist before 1990. And this doesn't include fusions or name changes or changes in flags. We're generating about 3.12 states per year. People are taking control of their own states, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. And the really interesting thing is, you and your kids are empowered to build great empires, and you don't need a lot to do it. (Music) And, given that the music is over, I was going to talk about how you can use this to generate a lot of wealth, and how code works. Moderator: Two minutes. (Laughter) Juan Enriquez: No, I'm going to stop there and we'll do it next year because I don't want to take any of Laurie's time. But thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_on_genomics_and_our_future
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"About 15 years ago, I went to visit a friend in Hong Kong. And at the time I was very superstitious. So, upon landing — this was still at the old Hong Kong airport that's Kai Tak, when it was smack in the middle of the city — I thought, ""If I see something good, I'm going to have a great time here in my two weeks. And if I see something negative, I'm going to be miserable, indeed.""So the plane landed in between the buildings and got to a full stop in front of this little billboard. (Laughter) And I actually went to see some of the design companies in Hong Kong in my stay there. And it turned out that — I just went to see, you know, what they are doing in Hong Kong.But I actually walked away with a great job offer. And I flew back to Austria, packed my bags, and, another week later, I was again on my way to Hong Kong still superstitions and thinking, ""Well, if that 'Winner' billboard is still up, I'm going to have a good time working here. (Laughter) But if it's gone, it's going to be really miserable and stressful."" So it turned out that not only was the billboard still up but they had put this one right next to it. (Laughter) On the other hand, it also taught me where superstition gets me because I really had a terrible time in Hong Kong. (Laughter)However, I did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life — of, you know, I think what the conference brochure refers to as ""moments that take your breath away."" And since I'm a big list maker, I actually listed them all. (Laughter) Now, you don't have to go through the trouble of reading them and I won't read them for you. I know that it's incredibly boring to hear about other people's happinesses. (Laughter)What I did do, though is, I actually looked at them from a design standpoint and just eliminated all the ones that had nothing to do with design. And, very surprisingly, over half of them had, actually, something to do with design.So there are, of course, two different possibilities. There's one from a consumer's point of view — where I was happy while experiencing design. And I'll just give you one example. I had gotten my first Walkman. This is 1983. My brother had this great Yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely. And The Police's ""Synchronicity"" cassette had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of Bregenz. So you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting The Police on the new Sony Walkman. (Laughter) And I remember it as a true moment of happiness. You know, of course, they are related to this combination of at least two of them being, you know, design objects. And, you know, there's a scale of happiness when you talk about in design but the motorcycle incident would definitely be, you know, situated somewhere here — right in there between Delight and Bliss.Now, there is the other part, from a designer's standpoint — if you're happy while actually doing it. And one way to see how happy designers are when they're designing could be to look at the authors' photos on the back of their monographs? (Laughter) So, according to this, the Australians and the Japanese as well as the Mexicans are very happy. (Laughter) While, somewhat, the Spaniards ... and, I think, particularly, the Swiss (Laughter), don't seem to be doing all that well. (Laughter)Last November, a museum opened in Tokyo called The Mori Museum, in a skyscraper, up on the 56th floor. And their inaugural exhibit was called ""Happiness."" And I went, very eagerly, to see it, because — well, also, with an eye on this conference. And they interestingly sectioned the exhibit off into four different areas. Under ""Arcadia,"" they showed things like this, from the Edo period — a hundred ways to write ""happiness"" in different forms. Or they had this apple by Yoko Ono — that, of course, later on was, you know, made into the label for The Beatles.Under ""Nirvana"" they showed this Constable painting. And there was a little — an interesting theory about abstraction. This is a blue field — it's actually an Yves Klein painting. And the theory was that if you abstract an image, you really, you know open as much room for the un-representable — and, therefore, you know, are able to involve the viewer more.Then, under ""Desire,"" they showed these Shunsho paintings — also from the Edo period — ink on silk. And, lastly, under ""Harmony,"" they had this 13th-century mandala from Tibet.Now, what I took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the mandala most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness. And I felt a little bit cheated, because the visualization — that's a really easy thing to do. And, you know, my studio — we've done it all the time. This is, you know, a book. A happy dog — and you take it out, it's an aggressive dog. It's a happy David Byrne and an angry David Byrne. Or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face. You know, that's not a big deal to accomplish.It has gotten to the point where, you know, within advertising or within the movie industry, ""happy"" has gotten such a bad reputation that if you actually want to do something with the subject and still appear authentic, you almost would have to, you know, do it from a cynical point of view. This is, you know, the movie poster. Or we, a couple of weeks ago, designed a box set for The Talking Heads where the happiness visualized on the cover definitely has, very much, a dark side to it.Much, much more difficult is this, where the designs actually can evoke happiness — and I'm going to just show you three that actually did this for me. This is a campaign done by a young artist in New York, who calls himself ""True."" Everybody who has ridden the New York subway system will be familiar with these signs? True printed his own version of these signs. Met every Wednesday at a subway stop with 20 of his friends. They divided up the different subway lines and added their own version. (Laughter) So this is one. (Laughter)Now, the way this works in the system is that nobody ever looks at these signs. So you're (Laughter) you're really bored in the subway, and you kind of stare at something. And it takes you a while until it actually — you realize that this says something different than what it normally says. (Laughter) I mean, that's, at least, how it made me happy. (Laughter)Now, True is a real humanitarian. He didn't want any of his friends to be arrested, so he supplied everybody with this fake volunteer card. (Laughter) And also gave this fake letter from the MTA to everybody — sort of like pretending that it's an art project financed by The Metropolitan Transit Authority. (Laughter)Another New York project. This is at P.S. 1 — a sculpture that's basically a square room by James Turrell, that has a retractable ceiling. Opens up at dusk and dawn every day. You don't see the horizon. You're just in there, watching the incredible, subtle changes of color in the sky. And the room is truly something to be seen. People's demeanor changes when they go in there. And, for sure, I haven't looked at the sky in the same way after spending an hour in there.There are, of course, more than those three projects that I'm showing here. I would definitely say that observing Vik Muniz' ""Cloud"" a couple of years ago in Manhattan for sure made me happy, as well. But my last project is, again, from a young designer in New York. He's from Korea originally. And he took it upon himself to print 55,000 speech bubbles — empty speech bubbles stickers, large ones and small ones. And he goes around New York and just puts them, empty as they are, on posters. (Laughter) And other people go and fill them in. (Laughter)This one says, ""Please let me die in peace."" (Laughter) I think that was — the most surprising to myself was that the writing was actually so good. This is on a musician poster, that says: ""I am concerned that my CD will not sell more than 200,000 units and that, as a result, my recoupable advance from my label will be taken from me, after which, my contract will be cancelled, and I'll be back doing Journey covers on Bleecker Street."" (Laughter)I think the reason this works so well is because everybody involved wins. Jee gets to have his project; the public gets a sweeter environment; and different public gets a place to express itself; and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads. (Laughter)Well, there was a question, of course, that was on my mind for a while: You know, can I do more of the things that I like doing in design and less of the ones that I don't like to be doing? Which brought me back to my list making — you know, just to see what I actually like about my job.You know, one is: just working without pressure. Then: working concentrated, without being frazzled. Or, as Nancy said before, like really immerse oneself into it. Try not to get stuck doing the same thing — or try not get stuck behind the computer all day. This is, you know, related to it: getting out of the studio. Then, of course, trying to, you know, work on things where the content is actually important for me. And being able to enjoy the end results.And then I found another list in one of my diaries that actually contained all the things that I thought I learned in my life so far. And, just about at that time, an Austrian magazine called and asked if we would want to do six spreads — design six spreads that work like dividing pages between the different chapters in the magazine? And the whole thing just fell together. So I just picked one of the things that I thought I learned — in this case, ""Everything I do always comes back to me"" — and we made these spreads right out of this. So it was: ""Everything I do always comes back to me.""A couple of weeks ago, a (Laughter) French company asked us to design five billboards for them. Again, we could supply the content for it. So I just picked another one. And this was two weeks ago. We flew to Arizona — the designer who works with me, and myself — and photographed this one. So it's: ""Trying to look good limits my life.""And then we did one more of these. This is, again, for a magazine, dividing pages. This is: ""Having"" — this is the same thing; it's just, you know, photographed from the side. This is from the front. Then it's: ""guts."" Again, it's the same thing — ""guts"" is just the same room, reworked. Then it's: ""always works out."" Then it's ""for,"" with the light on. (Laughter) And it's ""me.""Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_shares_happy_design
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"When I'm starting talks like this, I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don't know what that is. This is a crowd that does know what it is, so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right? So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know? Fill in the blanks. So, you know, sustainability, small planet. Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun. You know, about a million years ago, a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees, got a little clever, harnessed fire, invented the printing press, made, you know, luggage with wheels on it. And, you know, built the society that we now live in. Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt, the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created, it's got some major, major flaws.One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. We're using up about five planets. If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. Clearly we don't have 10 planets. Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet, 10 planets, one planet. Right? We don't have that. So that's one problem.The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. And, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. And people simply do not have enough to survive. This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing. And there's more and more people on the way. Right? So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years. It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people.So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. A third of the people on this planet are kids. And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. And they may not want to live exactly like us. They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet. And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque, we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable.Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios. I don't need to go into that. But I will ask the question, what's the alternative? And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable. You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable; on the other hand we have the unimaginable. We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face. We don't know how to do this yet.So what's Worldchanging? Well, Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future. You know, what we're out there doing is looking for examples of tools, models and ideas, which, if widely adopted, would change the game. A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of, but most people haven't. So I thought today I'd do something a little different, and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know, rather than giving you tried-and-true examples. Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out. Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook. And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick. So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right?So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city. One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities. We're already an urban planet; that's especially true in the developed world. And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff. If we can change the dynamic, by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ... Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there, you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city. And they are doing density, new density, better than probably anybody else on the planet right now. They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars, which is a pretty great thing. So you have density. You also have growth management. You leave aside what is natural to be natural.This is in Portland. That is an actual development. That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity. They've bounded the city with a line. Nature, city. Nothing changes. Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments. You can start doing things like, you know, transit systems that actually work to transport people, in effective and reasonably comfortable manners. You can also start to change what you build. This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place. We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity, that recycle much of their water, that are much more comfortable than standard buildings, use all-natural light, etc., and, over time, cost less. Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much.But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other, one of the things you can do is — as information technologies develop — you can start to have smart places. You can start to know where things are. When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them. When you share them, you end up using less. So one great example is car-share clubs, which are really starting to take off in the U.S., have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example. If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week, do you really need your own car?Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using. So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use, which I think is a pretty cool concept, although I think it ought to work the other way around, that it gets brighter the more you don't use. But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach. We could just re-label things. This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods, and on the other hand, off. How we build things can change as well. This is a bio-morphic building. It takes its inspiration in form from life. Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful, and also much more effective. This is an example of bio-mimicry, which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for. In this case, you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective. There's a lot of this stuff happening; it's really pretty remarkable. I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it. We're starting to cover this more and more. There's also neo-biological design, where more and more we're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry. So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae. So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in, and turn them into Bright Green cities.But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in. They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world. And there's a statistic I often like to use, which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days, a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days. I was giving a talk about two months ago, and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me and was really flustered, and he said, look, you've got that totally wrong; it's totally wrong. It's every seven days. So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days, and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in. Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly. They don't have existing infrastructure; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty, and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways.So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities? Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging. And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere. The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology. One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right? All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones, skipping the whole landline stage. If there are landlines in many developing world cities, they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money. So I rather like this picture here. I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone. So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society. We've heard all about this here this week, so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies.The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don't have capital. Right? So, you know, we have open source software, we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions. And those things lead to things like this. This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo. This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software, cheap, sort of hacked-together machines, and basically sort of abandoned buildings — has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in, get high-speed internet access, learn computer programming skills for free. And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo. And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo. I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back. (Laughter)So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion. And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself, and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room. So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right? You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels. It's doing something new. There's new things happening. There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things. Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie ""City of God?"" Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it. And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way.You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out. These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda. And who are waving their first books in the air, which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know? So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways, in ways that haven't happened before. And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week, are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions, is we've got to craft new political realities.And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. Another world is possible. And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right? We tweak that a lot. We talk about how another world isn't just possible; another world's here. That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different, vague possibility out there, but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility. We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil. How many people knew of Lula before today? OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that. So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions, but one of the things that he's doing is, he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration. I would keep your eye on this fellow.Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call ""serious play."" We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. This is from ""A Force More Powerful."" It's a little screenshot. ""A Force More Powerful"" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. (Laughter) Here's another one. This is from a game called ""Food Force,"" which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp. These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world, in people's interest in and passion for democracy. We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt. And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough. But it's happening all over the place, and these tools are part of what's making it possible.Now when you add all those things together, when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools, you know, second superpower stuff, etc., what do you get? Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world. You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world. You get — this is a building in Hyderabad, India. It's the greenest building in the world. You get grassroots solutions, things that work for people who have no capital or limited access. You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains. You get access to distance medicine. These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner. You get new tools for people in the developing world. These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there, for whom nightfall means darkness, to have a new means of operating. These are refrigerators that require no electricity; they're pot within a pot design.And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems. Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap and available to people in the developing world. Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight. Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area, will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable. Here's a way of transporting water. I just love this, you know — I mean carrying water is such a drag, and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right? I mean, that's a great design. This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw. Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips. So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this. This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever. This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout, which pumps water as kids play. You know? Seriously — give that one a hand, it's pretty great. And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right?We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. How do we help people like that? Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet. Some of those designs include models for acting, such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps. New models for pedagogy for the displaced. And we have new tools. This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere. Does anyone know what this is?Audience: It detects landmines.Alex Steffen: Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower. If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered, you can fling these seeds out into the field. And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines, their roots will detect the chemicals in them, and where the flowers turn red you don't step. Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know?(Applause)I also love it because it seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. You know, that it's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got. And I think that we will. Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, I think that better things are on the way. I think that, in fact, that ""all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning. All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."" I hope that that turns out to be true. The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_steffen_sees_a_sustainable_future
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"I don't know your name. Audience Member: Howard. Howard.Thom Mayne: Howard? I'm sitting next to Howard. I don't know Howard, obviously, and he's going, I hope you're not next.(Laughter)Amazing. Amazing performance. I kind of erased everything in my brain to follow that. Let me start some place. I'm interested — I kind of do the same thing, but I don't move my body. (Laughter) And instead of using human figures to develop ideas of time and space, I work in the mineral world. I work with more or less inert matter. And I organize it. And, well, it's also a bit different because an architect versus, let's say, a dance company finally is a negotiation between one's private world, one's conceptual world, the world of ideas, the world of aspirations, of inventions, with the relationship of the exterior world and all the limitations, the naysayers. Because I have to say, for my whole career, if there's anything that's been consistent, it's been that you can't do it. No matter what I've done, what I've tried to do, everybody says it can't be done. And it's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas.And to be an architect, somehow you have to negotiate between left and right, and you have to negotiate between this very private place where ideas take place and the outside world, and then make it understood. I can start any number of places, because this process is also — I think — very different from some of the morning sessions, which you had such a kind of very clear, such a lineal idea, like the last one, say, with Howard, that I think the creative process in architecture, the design process, is extremely circuitous. It's labyrinthine. It's Calvino's idea of the quickest way between two points is the circuitous line, not the straight line. And definitely my life has been part of that. I'm going to start with some simple kind of notions of how we organize things.But basically, what we do is, we try to give coherence to the world. We make physical things, buildings that become a part in an accretional process; they make cities. And those things are the reflection of the processes, and the time that they are made. And what I'm doing is attempting to synthesize the way one sees the world and the territories which are useful as generative material. Because, really, all I'm interested in, always, as an architect, is the way things are produced because that's what I do. Right? And it's not based on an a priori notion. I have no interest at all in conceiving something in my brain and saying, ""This is what it looks like."" In fact, somebody mentioned — Ewan, maybe it was you in your introduction — about this is what architects — did somebody say it's what business people come to, it's what the corporate world comes to when they want to make it look like something at the end of the line? Huh. Wow. It doesn't work that way for me at all. I have no interest in that whatsoever.Architecture is the beginning of something, because it's — if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration. And I've nothing wrong with cake decoration and cake decorators, if anybody's involved in cake decorations — it's not what I'm interested in doing. (Laughter) And so, in the formation of things, in giving it form, in concretizing these things, it starts with some notion of how one organizes. And I've had for 30 years an interest in a series of complexities where a series of forces are brought to bear, and to understand the nature of the final result of that, representing the building itself. There's been a continual relationship between inventions, which are private, and reality, which has been important to me.A project which is part of an exhibition in Copenhagen 10 years ago, which was the modeling of a hippocampus — the territory of the brain that records short-term memory — and the documentation of that, the imaginative and documentation of that through a series of drawings which literally attempt to organize that experience. And it had to do with the notion of walking a kilometer, observing every kilometer a particular object of desire, and then placing that within this. And the notion was that I could make an organization not built on normal coherencies, but built on non-sequiturs, built on randomness. And I'd been extremely interested in this notion of randomness as it produces architectural work and as it definitely connects to the notion of the city, an accretional notion of the city, and that led to various ideas of organization. And then this led to broader ideas of buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems.And it's not any single system that makes the work. It's the relationship — it's the dynamics between the systems — which have the power to transform and invent and produce an architecture that is — that would otherwise not exist. And those systems could be identified, and they could be grouped together. And of course, today, with the technology of the computer and with the rapid prototyping, etc., we have the mechanisms to understand and to respond to these systems, and to allow them to adjust to the various accommodations of functionalities because that's all we do. We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.This is a project that we just finished in Penang for a very, very large city project that came directly out of this process, which is the result of the multiplicity of forces that produce it. And the project — again, enormous, enormous competition — on the Hudson River and in New York that we were asked to do three years ago, which uses these processes. And what you're looking at are possibilities that have to do with the generation of the city as one applies a methodology that uses notions of these multiple forces, that deals with the enormity of the problem, the complexity of the problem, when we're designing cities at larger and larger aggregates. Because one of the issues today is that the economic aggregate is driving the development aggregate, and as the aggregates get larger we require more and more complex investigation processes to solve these problems. And that led us directly to the Olympic Village.I was in New York on Monday presenting it to the IOC. We won the competition — what was it, nine months ago? Again, a direct reflection from using these processes to develop extremely complicated, very large-scale organisms. And then, also, was working with broad strategies. In this case, we only used 15 of the 60 acres of land, and the 45 acres was a park and would become the legacy of the Olympic Village. And it would become the second largest park in the boroughs, etc. Its position, of course, in the middle of Manhattan — it's on Hunter's Point. And then the broader ideas of city-making start having direct influences on architecture, on the elements that make up the broader scheme, the buildings themselves, and start guiding us. Architecture for me has been an investigation of a multiplicity of forces that could come from literally any place. And so I can start this discussion in any number of places, and I've chosen three or four to talk about. And it has also to do with an interest in the vast kind of territory that architecture touches. It literally is connected to anything in terms of knowledge base. There's just no place that it doesn't somehow have a connective tissue to.This is Jim Dine, and it's the absence of presence, etc. It's the clothing, the skin, without the presence of the character. It became kind of an idea for the notion of the surface of a work, and it was used in a project where we could unravel that surface, and it was a figurative idea that was going to be folded and made into a very, kind of complex space. And the idea was the relationship of the space, which was made up of the fold of the image, and the dialectic or the conflict between the figuration, and the clarity of the image and the complexity of the space, which were in dialog. And it made us rethink the whole notion of how we work and how we make things, and it led us to ideas that were closer to fashion design as we flattened out surfaces, and then brought them back together as they could make spatial combinations. And this was the first prototype in Korea, as we're dealing with a dynamic envelope, and then the same characteristic of the fabric. It has a material identity and it's translucent and it's porous, and it allows us for a very different notion of what a skin of a building is. And that turned right away into another project.This is the Caltrans building in Los Angeles. And now we're seeing as the skin and the body is differentiated. Again, it's a very, very simple notion. If you look at most buildings, what you look at is the building, the facade, and it is the building. And all of a sudden we're kind of moving away, and we're separating the skin from the body, and that's going to lead to broader performance criteria, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And you're looking at how it drapes over and differentiates from the body. And then, again, the building itself, middle of Los Angeles, right across from City Hall. And as it moves, it takes pieces of the earth with it. It bends up. It's part of a sign system, which was part of the kind of legacy of Los Angeles — the two-dimension, three-dimension signing, etc. And then it allows one to penetrate the work itself. It's transparent, and it allows you to understand, I think, what is always the most interesting thing in any building, which is the actual constructional processes that make it.And it's probably the most intense kind of territory of the work, which is not occupied, because architecture is always the most interesting in some mechanism when it's separated from function, and this is an area that allows for that. And then the skin starts transforming into other materials. We're using light as a building material in this case. We're working with Keith Sonnier in New York, and we're making this large outside room, which is possible in Los Angeles, and which is very much reflective of the urban, the contemporary urban environments that you would find in Shibuya or you'd find in Mexico City or Sao Paulo, etc., that have to do with activating the city over a longer span of time. And that was very much part of the notion of the urban objective of this project in Los Angeles.And, again, all of it promoting transparency. And an image which may be closest talks about the use of light as a medium, that light becomes literally a building material. Well, that immediately turned into something much broader, and as a scope. And again, we're looking at an early sketch where I'm understanding now that the skin can be a transition between the ground and the tower. This is a building in San Francisco which is under construction. And now it turned into something much, much broader as a problem, and it has to do with performance. This will be the first building in the United States that took — well, I can't say it took the air conditioning out. It's a hybrid. I wanted a pure thing, and I can't get it. It's a wrong attitude, actually, because the hybrid is probably more interesting.But we took the air conditioning out of the tower. There's some air conditioning left in the base, but the skin now moves on hydraulics. It forces air through a Venturi force if there's no wind. It adjusts continually. And we removed the air conditioning. Huge, huge thing. Half a million dollars a year delta. 10 of these — it's just under a million square feet — 800 and some thousand square feet — 10 of these would power Sausalito — the delta on this. And so now what we're looking at, as the projects get larger in scale, as they interface with broader problems, that they expand the capabilities in terms of their performance. Well, I could also start here. We could talk about the relationship at a more biological sense of the relationship of building and ground.Well, our research — my generation for sure, people who were going to school in the late '60s — made very much a shift out of the internal focus of architecture, looking at architecture within its own territory, and we were much more affected by film, by what was going on in the art world, etc. This is, of course, Michael Heizer. And when I saw this, first an image and then visited, it completely changed the way I thought after that point. And I understood that building really could be the augmentation of the Earth's surface, and it completely shifted the notion of building ground in the most basic sense. And then — well, he was probably looking at this — this is Nazca; this is 700 years ago — the most amazing four-kilometer land sculptures. They're just totally incredible. And that led us to then completely rethinking how we draw, how we work.This is the first sketch of a high school in Pomona — well, whatever it is, a model, a conceptual, kind of idea. And it's the reshaping of the Earth to make it occupiable. So it puts 200,000 square feet of stuff that make a high school work in the surface of that Earth. There it is modeled as it was developing into a piece of work. And there it is, again, as it's starting to get resolved tectonically, and then there's the school. And, of course, we're interested in participating with education. I have absolutely no interest in producing a building that just accommodates X, Y and Z function. What I'm interested in are how these ideas participate in the educational process of young people. It demands some sort of notion of inquiry because it's a system that's developed not sculpturally.It's an idea that started from my first discussion. It has to do with a broad, consistent logic, and that logic could be understood as one occupies the building. And there's an overt — at least, there's an attempt to make a very overt notion of a building that connects to the land in a very different way because I was interested in a very didactic approach to the problem, as one would understand that. And the second project that was just finished in Los Angeles that uses some of the same ideas. It uses landscape as a major idea. Then, again, we're doing the headquarters for NOAA — National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency — outside of Washington in Maryland. And this is how they see the world. They have 22 satellites zipping around at plus or minus 100 miles, and the site's in red.And what we really want to do — well, the architects, if there are architects out there, this is the Laugier Hut; this is the primitive hut that's been around for so long — and what we wanted to do is really build this, because they see themselves as the caretakers of the world, and we wanted them to look down at their satellite, how they see their own site, that eight-acre site, and we wanted nothing left. We wanted it to stay green. There's actually three baseball fields on it right now, and they're going to stay there. We put one piece directly north-south, and it holds the dishes at the ears, right? And then right below that the processing, and the mission lift, and the mission control room, and all the other spaces are underground. And what you look at is an aircraft carrier that's performance-driven by the cone vision of these satellite dishes. And that the building itself is occupied in the lower portion, broken up by a series of courts, and it's five acres of uninterrupted, horizontal space for their administrative offices. And then that, in turn, propelled us to look at larger-scale projects where this notion of landscape building interface becomes a connective tissue.The new capital competition for Berlin, four years ago. And again we just finished the ECB — actually Coop Himmelblau in Vienna just won this project, where the building was separated into a series of landscape elements that became part of a connective tissue of a park, which is parallel to the river, and develops ideas of the buildings themselves and becomes part of the connective fabric — the social, cultural and the landscape, recreational fabric of the city. And the building is no longer seen as an autonomous thing, but something that's only inextricably connected to this city and this place at this time.And a project that was realized in Austria, the Hooper Bank, which again used this idea of connecting typology, the traditional buildings, and morphology, or the relationship of the development of land as an idea, into a complex, which is a piece of a city where we can see part of it is literally just this augmenting, this movement of the land that's a very simple idea of just lifting it up and occupying it, and other parts are much more energetic and intense. And talk about that intensity in terms of the collisions of the kind of events they make that have to do with putting a series of systems together, and then where part of it is in the ground, part of it is oppositional lifts. One enters the building as it lifts off the ground, and it becomes part of the idea. And then the skin — the edges of this — all promote the dynamic, the movement of the building as a series of seismic shifts, geologic shifts. Right?And it makes for event space and then it breaks in places that allow you to peer into the interior, and those interiors, again, are promoting transparency for the workplace, which has been a continual interest of ours. And then, again, in a more, kind of traditional setting, this is a graduate student housing in Toronto, and it's very much about the relationship of a building as it makes a connective tissue to the city. The main idea was the gateway, where it breaks the site, and the building occupies both the public space and the private space. And it's that territory of — it's this thing. I visited the site many times, and everybody, kind of — you can see this from two kilometers away; it's an exact center of the street, and the whole notion is to engage the public, to engage buildings as part of the public tissue of the city.And finally, one of the most interesting projects — it's a courthouse. And what I want to talk about — this is the Supreme Court, of course — and, well, I'm dealing with Michael Hogan, the Chief Justice of Oregon. You could not proceed without making this negotiation between one's own values and the relationship of the character you're working with and how he understands the court, because I'm showing him, of course, Corbusier at Savoy, which is 1928, which is the beginning of modern architecture. Well, then we get to this image. And this is where the project started. Because I'm going, I'm interested in the phenomenon that's taking place in here. And really what we're talking about is constructing reality.And I'm a character that's extremely interested in understanding the nature of that constructed reality because there's no such thing as nature any more. Nature is gone. Nature in the 19th-century sense, alright? Nature is only a cultural edifice today, right? We construct it and we construct those ideas. And then of course, this one, our governor at the moment. And we spent some time with Conan, believe it or not, and then that led us to, kind of, the very differences of our worlds from a legal and an artistic, architectural. And it forced us to talk about notions of how we work, and the dynamics of that, and what other sources of the work is. And it led us to the project, the courthouse, which is absolutely a part of a negotiation between tradition and pieces of the traditional courthouse. You'll find a stair that's the same length as the Supreme Court. Here's a piano nobile, which is a device used in the Renaissance. The courts were made of that. The skin is this series of layers that reflect even rusticated stonework, but which were embedded with fragments of the Constitution, which were part of the little process, all set on a plinth that defined it from the community. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thom_mayne_on_architecture_as_connection
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"What I want to talk about is, as background, is the idea that cars are art. This is actually quite meaningful to me, because car designers tend to be a little bit low on the totem pole — we don't do coffee table books with just one lamp inside of it — and cars are thought so much as a product that it's a little bit difficult to get into the aesthetic side under the same sort of terminology that one would discuss art. And so cars, as art, brings it into an emotional plane — if you accept that — that you have to deal with on the same level you would with art with a capital A.Now at this point you're going to see a picture of Michelangelo. This is completely different than automobiles. Automobiles are self-moving things, right? Elevators are automobiles. And they're not very emotional; they solve a purpose; and certainly automobiles have been around for 100 years and have made our lives functionally a lot better in many ways; they've also been a real pain in the ass, because automobiles are really the thing we have to solve. We have to solve the pollution, we have to solve the congestion — but that's not what interests me in this speech.What interests me in this speech is cars. Automobiles may be what you use, but cars are what we are, in many ways. And as long as we can solve the problems of automobiles, and I believe we can, with fuel cells or hydrogen, like BMW is really hip on, and lots of other things, then I think we can look past that and try and understand why this hook is in many of us — of this car-y-ness — and what that means, what we can learn from it. That's what I want to get to. Cars are not a suit of clothes; cars are an avatar. Cars are an expansion of yourself: they take your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, and they multiply it — your anger, whatever. It's an avatar. It's a super-waldo that you happen to be inside of, and if you feel sexy, the car is sexy. And if you're full of road rage, you've got a ""Chevy: Like a Rock,"" right?Cars are a sculpture — did you know this? That every car you see out there is sculpted by hand. Many people think, ""Well, it's computers, and it's done by machines and stuff like that."" Well, they reproduce it, but the originals are all done by hand. It's done by men and women who believe a lot in their craft. And they put that same kind of tension into the sculpting of a car that you do in a great sculpture that you would go and look at in a museum. That tension between the need to express, the need to discover, then you put something new into it, and at the same time you have bounds of craftsmanship. Rules that say, this is how you handle surfaces; this is what control is all about; this is how you show you're a master of your craft. And that tension, that discovery, that push for something new — and at the same time, that sense of obligation to the regards of craftsmanship — that's as strong in cars as it is in anything. We work in clay, which hasn't changed much since Michelangelo started screwing around with it, and there's a very interesting analogy to that too. Real quickly — Michelangelo once said he's there to ""discover the figure within,"" OK? There we go, the automobile. That was 100 years right there — did you catch that? Between that one there, and that one there, it changed a lot didn't it? OK, it's not marketing; there's a very interesting car concept here, but the marketing part is not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about this. Why it means you have to wash a car, what is it, that sensuality you have to touch about it? That's the sculpture that goes into it. That sensuality. And it's done by men and women working just like this, making cars.Now this little quote about sculpture from Henry Moore, I believe that that ""pressure within"" that Moore's talking about — at least when it comes to cars — comes right back to this idea of the mean. It's that will to live, that need to survive, to express itself, that comes in a car, and takes over people like me. And we tell other people, ""Do this, do this, do this,"" until this thing comes alive. We are completely infected. And beauty can be the result of this infectiousness; it's quite wonderful. This sculpture is, of course, at the heart of all of it, and it's really what puts the craftsmanship into our cars. And it's not a whole lot different, really, when they're working like this, or when somebody works like this. It's that same kind of commitment, that same kind of beauty.Now, now I get to the point. I want to talk about cars as art. Art, in the Platonic sense, is truth; it's beauty, and love. Now this is really where designers in car business diverge from the engineers. We don't really have a problem talking about love. We don't have a problem talking about truth or beauty in that sense. That's what we're searching for — when we're working our craft, we are really trying to find that truth out there. We're not trying to find vanity and beauty. We're trying to find the beauty in the truth. However, engineers tend to look at things a little bit more Newtonian, instead of this quantum approach. We're dealing with irrationalisms, and we're dealing with paradoxes that we admit exist, and the engineers tend to look things a little bit more like two and two is four, and if you get 4.0 it's better, and 4.000 is even better. And that sometimes leads to bit of a divergence in why we're doing what we're doing. We've pretty much accepted the fact, though, that we are the women in the organization at BMW — BMW is a very manly type business, — men, men, men; it's engineers. And we're kind of the female side to that. That's OK, that's cool. You go off and be manly. We're going to be a little bit more female. Because what we're interested in is finding form that's more than just a function.We're interested in finding beauty that's more than just an aesthetic; it's really a truth. And I think this idea of soul, as being at the heart of great cars, is very applicable. You all know it. You know a car when you've seen it, with soul. You know how strong this is. Well, this experience of love, and the experience of design, to me, are interchangeable. And now I'm coming to my story.I discovered something about love and design through a project called Deep Blue. And first of all, you have to go with me for a second, and say, you know, you could take the word ""love"" out of a lot of things in our society, put the word ""design"" in, and it still works, like this quote here, you know. It kind of works, you know? You can understand that. It works in truisms. ""All is fair in design and war."" Certainly we live in a competitive society. I think this one here, there's a pop song that really describes Philippe Starck for me, you know, this is like you know, this is like puppy love, you know, this is cool right? Toothbrush, cool. It really only gets serious when you look at something like this. OK?(Laughter)This is one substitution that I believe all of us, in design management, are guilty of. And this idea that there is more to love, more to design, when it gets down to your neighbor, your other, it can be physical like this, and maybe in the future it will be. But right now it's in dealing with our own people, our own teams who are doing the creating. So, to my story. The idea of people-work is what we work with here, and I have to make a bond with my designers when we're creating BMWs. We have to have a shared intimacy, a shared vision — that means we have to work as one family; we have to understand ourselves that way. There's good times; there's interesting times; and there's some stress times too. You want to do cars, you've got to go outside. You've got to do cars in the rain; you've got to do cars in the snow. That's, by the way, is a presentation we made to our board of directors. We haul their butts out in the snow, too. You want to know cars outside? Well, you've got to stand outside to do this. And because these are artists, they have very artistic temperaments. All right? Now one thing about art is, art is discovery, and art is discovering yourself through your art. Right? And one thing about cars is we're all a little bit like Pygmalion, we are completely in love with our own creations. This is one of my favorite paintings, it really describes our relationship with cars. This is sick beyond belief.(Laughter)But because of this, the intimacy with which we work together as a team takes on a new dimension, a new meaning. We have a shared center; we have a shared focus — that car stays at the middle of all our relationships. And it's my job, in the competitive process, to narrow this down. I heard today about Joseph's death genes that have to go in and kill cell reproduction. You know, that's what I have to do sometimes. We start out with 10 cars; we narrow it down to five cars, down to three cars, down to two cars, down to one car, and I'm in the middle of that killing, basically. Someone's love, someone's baby. This is very difficult, and you have to have a bond with your team that permits you to do this, because their life is wrapped up in that too. They've got that gene infected in them as well, and they want that to live, more than anything else.Well, this project, Deep Blue, put me in contact with my team in a way that I never expected, and I want to pass it on to you, because I want you to reflect on this, perhaps in your own relationships. We wanted to a do a car which was a complete leap of faith for BMW. We wanted to do a team which was so removed from the way we'd done it, that I only had a phone number that connected me to them. So, what we did was: instead of having a staff of artists that are just your wrist, we decided to free up a team of creative designers and engineers to find out what's the successor to the SUV phenomenon in America. This is 1996 we did this project. And so we sent them off with this team name, Deep Blue. Now many people know Deep Blue from IBM — we actually stole it from them because we figured if anybody read our faxes they'd think we're talking about computers. It turned out it was quite clever because Deep Blue, in a company like BMW, has a hook — ""Deep Blue,"" wow, cool name. So people get wrapped up in it. And we took a team of designers, and we sent them off to America. And we gave them a budget, what we thought was a set of deliverables, a timetable, and nothing else. Like I said, I just had a phone number that connected me to them.And a group of engineers worked in Germany, and the idea was they would work separately on this problem of what's the successor to the SUV. They would come together, compare notes. Then they would work apart, come together, and they would produce together a monumental set of diverse opinions that didn't pollute each other's ideas — but at the same time came together and resolved the problems. Hopefully, really understand the customer at its heart, where the customer is, live with them in America. So — sent the team off, and actually something different happened. They went other places.(Laughter)They disappeared, quite honestly, and all I got was postcards. Now, I got some postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, and I got some postcards of these guys in the Grand Canyon, and I got these postcards of Niagara Falls, and pretty soon they're in New York, and I don't know where else. And I'm telling myself, ""This is going to be a great car, they're doing research that I've never even thought about before."" Right? And they decided that instead of, like, having a studio, and six or seven apartments, it was cheaper to rent Elizabeth Taylor's ex-house in Malibu. And — at least they told me it was her house, I guess it was at one time, she had a party there or something. But anyway, this was the house, and they all lived there. Now this is 24/7 living, half-a-dozen people who'd left their — some had left their wives behind and families behind, and they literally lived in this house for the entire six months the project was in America, but the first three months were the most intensive. And one of the young women in the project, she was a fantastic lady, she actually built her room in the bathroom. The bathroom was so big, she built the bed over the bathtub — it's quite fascinating.On the other hand, I didn't know anything about this. OK? Nothing. This is all going on, and all I'm getting is postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, or whatever, saying, ""Don't worry Chris, this is really going to be good."" OK? So my concept of what a design studio was probably — I wasn't up to speed on where these guys were.However, the engineers back in Munich had taken on this kind of Newtonian solution, and they were trying to find how many cup holders can dance on the head of a pin, and, you know, these really serious questions that are confronting the modern consumer. And one was hoping that these two teams would get together, and this collusion of incredible creativity, under these incredible surroundings, and these incredibly stressed-out engineers, would create some incredible solutions. Well, what I didn't know was, and what we found out was — these guys, they can't even like talk to each other under those conditions. You get a divergence of Newtonian and quantum thinking at that point, you have a split in your dialog that is so deep, and so far, that they cannot bring this together at all.And so we had our first meeting, after three months, in Tiburon, which is just up the road from here — you know Tiburon? And the idea was after the first three months of this independent research they would present it all to Dr. Goschel — who is now my boss, and at that time he was co-mentor on the project — and they would present their results. We would see where we were going, we would see the first indication of what could be the successive phenomenon to the SUV in America. And so I had these ideas in my head, that this is going to be great. I mean, I'm going to see so much work, it's so intense — I know probably Las Vegas meant a lot about it, and I'm not really sure where the Grand Canyon came in either — but somehow all this is going to come together, and I'm going to see some really great product. So we went to Tiburon, after three months, and the team had gotten together the week before, many days ahead of time. The engineers flew over, and designers got together with them, and they put their presentation together.Well, it turns out that the engineers hadn't done anything. And they hadn't done anything because — kind of, like in car business, engineers are there to solve problems, and we were asking them to create a problem. And the engineers were waiting for the designers to say, ""This is the problem that we've created, now help us solve it."" And they couldn't talk about it. So what happened was, the engineers showed up with nothing. And the engineers told the designers, ""If you go in with all your stuff, we'll walk out, we'll walk right out of the project.""So I didn't know any of this, and we got a presentation that had an agenda, looked like this. There was a whole lot of dialog. We spent four hours being told all about vocabulary that needs to be built between engineers and designers. And here I'm expecting at any moment, ""OK, they're going to turn the page, and I'm going to see the cars, I'm going to see the sketches, I'm going to see maybe some idea of where it's going."" Dialog kept on going, with mental maps of words, and pretty soon it was becoming obvious that instead of being dazzled with brilliance, I was seriously being baffled with bullshit. And if you can imagine what this is like, to have these months of postcard indication of how great this team is working, and they're out there spending all this money, and they're learning, and they're doing all this stuff. I went fucking ballistic, right? I went nuts. You can probably remember Tiburon, it used to look like this.After four hours of this, I stood up, and I took this team apart. I screamed at them, I yelled at them, ""What the hell are you doing? You're letting me down, you're my designers, you're supposed to be the creative ones, what the hell is going on around here?"" It was probably one of my better tirades, I have some good ones, but this was probably one of my better ones. And I went into these people; how could they take BMW's money, how could they have a holiday for three months and produce nothing, nothing? Because of course they didn't tell us that they had three station wagons full of drawings, model concepts, pictures — everything I wanted, they'd locked up in the cars, because they had shown solidarity with the engineers — and they'd decided not to show me anything, in order to give the chance for problem solving a chance to start, because they hadn't realized, of course, that they couldn't do problem creating. So we went to lunch —(Laughter)And I've got to tell you, this was one seriously quiet lunch. The engineers all sat at one end of the table, the designers and I sat at the other end of the table, really quiet. And I was just fucking furious, furious. OK? Probably because they had all the fun and I didn't, you know. That's what you get furious about right? And somebody asked me about Catherine, my wife, you know, did she fly out with me or something? I said, ""No,"" and it triggered a set of thoughts about my wife. And I recalled that when Catherine and I were married, the priest gave a very nice sermon, and he said something very important. He said, ""Love is not selfish,"" he said, ""Love does not mean counting how many times I say, 'I love you.' It doesn't mean you had sex this many times this month, and it's two times less than last month, so that means you don't love me as much. Love is not selfish."" And I thought about this, and I thought, ""You know, I'm not showing love here. I'm seriously not showing love. I'm in the air, I'm in the air without trust. This cannot be. This cannot be that I'm expecting a certain number of sketches, and to me that's my quantification method for qualifying a team. This cannot be.""So I told them this story. I said, ""Guys, I'm thinking about something here, this isn't right. I can't have a relationship with you guys based on a premise that is a quantifiable one. Based on a dictate premise that says, 'I'm a boss, you do what I say, without trust.'"" I said ""This can't be."" Actually, we all broke down into tears, to be quite honest about it, because they still could not tell me how much frustration they had built up inside of them, not being able to show me what I wanted, and merely having to ask me to trust them that it would come. And I think we felt much closer that day, we cut a lot of strings that didn't need to be there, and we forged the concept for what real team and creativity is all about. We put the car back at the center of our thoughts, and we put love, I think, truly back into the center of the process.By the way, that team went on to create six different concepts for the next model of what would be the proposal for the next generation after SUVs in America. One of those was the idea of a crossover coupes — you see it downstairs, the X Coupe — they had a lot of fun with that. It was the rendition of our motorcycle, the GS, as Carl Magnusson says, ""brute-iful,"" as the idea of what could be a motorcycle, if you add two more wheels. And so, in conclusion, my lesson that I wanted to pass on to you, was this one here. I'm also going to steal a little quote out of ""Little Prince."" There's a lot to be said about trust and love, if you know that those two words are synonymous for design. I had a very, very meaningful relationship with my team that day, and it's stayed that way ever since. And I hope that you too find that there's more to design, and more towards the art of the design, than doing it yourself. It's true that the trust and the love, that makes it worthwhile.Thanks so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_bangle_says_great_cars_are_art
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"I'd like to begin this song I wrote about ceaseless yearning and never-ending want with a poem of popular Petrarchan paradoxes by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder: ""I find no peace, and all my war is done; I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice; I fly above the wind, and yet I cannot arise; And naught I have, and all the world I seize upon.""♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I don't have ♫♫ It feels like all I got is loss on a bad back ♫♫ Gone with the last train, honey don't you fret ♫♫ Every cloud has a silver lining ♫♫ Just a little rain, just a little rain, just a little rain ♫♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I don't have ♫♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫♫ Nobody knows how to hold me ♫♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says, ♫♫ ""Good things come to those who wait"" ♫♫ And I can't stand in ... ♫♫ I can't stand in line forever ♫♫ Stand the cold air ♫♫ Glad-handed ♫♫ Sick and tired of the ""Later, maybe"" ♫♫ Take it, fake it, take it, take-it-or-leave-it life ♫♫ And I gotta just tame it ♫♫ I gotta just name it ♫♫ I gotta just seize, so please, oh please, oh please, oh please ♫♫ Oh please me right, 'cause ♫♫ My mind won't stop ♫♫ And my heart says go ♫♫ Nobody knows how to hold me ♫♫ My mind won't stop — and my heart says go-ooooo ... ♫♫ Good things must be here — yes, right here ♫♫ Here, right here, right here ♫♫ I won't live this life forever ♫♫ One time round is all the offer is ♫♫ Sick and tired of the ""Later, maybe"" ♫♫ Take it, fake it, make it, leave it life ♫♫ And I gotta just name it, I gotta just claim it ♫♫ I gotta just seize ♫♫ Oh please, oh please, oh please me right ♫♫ I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I don't have — you know that ♫♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫♫ Nobody knows how to hold me, no ♫♫ My mind won't stop, and my heart says go ♫♫ 'Cause I want what I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I — have what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have what I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I don't have, what I want ♫♫ What I can't have, need what I can't want ♫♫ Have but I don't have what I want ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nora_york_sings_what_i_want
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"Hello. Actually, that's ""hello"" in Bauer Bodoni for the typographically hysterical amongst us. One of the threads that seems to have come through loud and clear in the last couple of days is this need to reconcile what the Big wants — the ""Big"" being the organization, the system, the country — and what the ""Small"" wants — the individual, the person. And how do you bring those two things together? Charlie Ledbetter, yesterday, I thought, talked very articulately about this need to bring consumers, to bring people into the process of creating things. And that's what I want to talk about today. So, bringing together the Small to help facilitate and create the Big, I think, is something that we believe in — something I believe in, and something that we kind of bring to life through what we do at Ideo.I call this first chapter — for the Brits in the room — the ""Blinding Glimpse of the Bleeding Obvious."" Often, the good ideas are so staring-at-you-right-in-the-face that you kind of miss them. And I think, a lot of times, what we do is just, sort of, hold the mirror up to our clients, and sort of go, ""Duh! You know, look what's really going on."" And rather than talk about it in the theory, I think I'm just going to show you an example. We were asked by a large healthcare system in Minnesota to describe to them what their patient experience was. And I think they were expecting — they'd worked with lots of consultants before — I think they were expecting some kind of hideous org chart with thousands of bubbles and systemic this, that and the other, and all kinds of mappy stuff. Or even worse, some kind of ghastly death-by-Powerpoint thing with WowCharts and all kinds of, you know, God knows, whatever.The first thing we actually shared with them was this. I'll play this until your eyeballs completely dissolve. This is 59 seconds into the film. This is a minute 59. 3:19. I think something happens. I think a head may appear in a second. 5:10. 5:58. 6:20. We showed them the whole cut, and they were all completely, what is this? And the point is when you lie in a hospital bed all day, all you do is look at the roof, and it's a really shitty experience. And just putting yourself in the position of the patient —this is Christian, who works with us at Ideo. He just lay in the hospital bed, and, kind of, stared at the polystyrene ceiling tiles for a really long time. That's what it's like to be a patient in the hospital. And they were sort, you know, blinding glimpse of bleeding obvious. Oh, my goodness. So, looking at the situation from the point of view of the person out — as opposed to the traditional position of the organization in — was, for these guys, quite a revelation. And so, that was a really catalytic thing for them. So they snapped into action. They said, OK, it's not about systemic change. It's not about huge, ridiculous things that we need to do. It's about tiny things that can make a huge amount of difference.So we started with them prototyping some really little things that we could do to have a huge amount of impact. The first thing we did was we took a little bicycle mirror and we Band-Aided it here, onto a gurney, a hospital trolley, so that when you were wheeled around by a nurse or by a doctor, you could actually have a conversation with them. You could, kind of, see them in your rear-view mirror, so it created a tiny human interaction. Very small example of something that they could do. Interestingly, the nurses themselves, sort of, snapped into action — said, OK, we embrace this. What can we do? The first thing they do is they decorated the ceiling. Which I thought was really — I showed this to my mother recently. I think my mother now thinks that I'm some sort of interior decorator. It's what I do for a living, sort of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Not particularly the world's best design solution for those of us who are real, sort of, hard-core designers, but nonetheless, a fabulous empathic solution for people. Things that they started doing themselves — like changing the floor going into the patient's room so that it signified, ""This is my room. This is my personal space"" — was a really interesting sort of design solution to the problem.So you went from public space to private space. And another idea, again, that came from one of the nurses — which I love — was they took traditional, sort of, corporate white boards, then they put them on one wall of the patient's room, and they put this sticker there. So that what you could actually do was go into the room and write messages to the person who was sick in that room, which was lovely. So, tiny, tiny, tiny solutions that made a huge amount of impact. I thought that was a really, really nice example.So this is not particularly a new idea, kind of, seeing opportunities in things that are around you and snapping and turning them into a solution. It's a history of invention based around this. I'm going to read this because I want to get these names right. Joan Ganz Cooney saw her daughter — came down on a Saturday morning, saw her daughter watching the test card, waiting for programs to come on one morning and from that came Sesame Street. Malcolm McLean was moving from one country to another and was wondering why it took these guys so long to get the boxes onto the ship. And he invented the shipping container. George de Mestral — this is not bugs all over a Birkenstock — was walking his dog in a field and got covered in burrs, sort of little prickly things, and from that came Velcro.And finally, for the Brits, Percy Shaw — this is a big British invention — saw the cat's eyes at the side of the road, when he was driving home one night and from that came the Catseye. So there's a whole series of just using your eyes, seeing things for the first time, seeing things afresh and using them as an opportunity to create new possibilities. Second one, without sounding overly Zen, and this is a quote from the Buddha: ""Finding yourself in the margins, looking to the edges of things, is often a really interesting place to start."" Blinkered vision tends to produce, I think, blinkered solutions. So, looking wide, using your peripheral vision, is a really interesting place to look for opportunity.Again, another medical example here. We were asked by a device producer — we did the Palm Pilot and the Treo. We did a lot of sexy tech at Ideo — they'd seen this and they wanted a sexy piece of technology for medical diagnostics. This was a device that a nurse uses when they're doing a spinal procedure in hospital. They'll ask the nurses to input data. And they had this vision of the nurse, kind of, clicking away on this aluminum device and it all being incredibly, sort of, gadget-lustish. When we actually went and watched this procedure taking place — and I'll explain this in a second — it became very obvious that there was a human dimension to this that they really weren't recognizing. When you're having a four-inch needle inserted into your spine — which was the procedure that this device's data was about; it was for pain management — you're shit scared; you're freaking out. And so the first thing that pretty much every nurse did, was hold the patient's hand to comfort them. Human gesture — which made the fabulous two-handed data input completely impossible.So, the thing that we designed, much less sexy but much more human and practical, was this. So, it's not a Palm Pilot by any stretch of the imagination, but it has a thumb-scroll so you can do everything with one hand. So, again, going back to this — the idea that a tiny human gesture dictated the design of this product. And I think that's really, really important. So, again, this idea of workarounds. We use this phrase ""workarounds"" a lot, sort of, looking around us. I was actually looking around the TED and just watching all of these kind of things happen while I've been here. This idea of the way that people cobble together solutions in our life — and the things we kind of do in our environment that are somewhat subconscious but have huge potential — is something that we look at a lot.We wrote a book recently, I think you might have received it, called ""Thoughtless Acts?"" It's been all about these kind of thoughtless things that people do, which have huge intention and huge opportunity. Why do we all follow the line in the street? This is a picture in a Japanese subway. People consciously follow things even though, why, we don't know. Why do we line up the square milk carton with the square fence? Because we kind of have to — we're just compelled to. We don't know why, but we do. Why do we wrap the teabag string around the cup handle? Again, we're sort of using the world around us to create our own design solutions. And we're always saying to our clients: ""You should look at this stuff. This stuff is really important. This stuff is really vital."" This is people designing their own experiences. You can draw from this. We sort of assume that because there's a pole in the street, that it's okay to use it, so we park our shopping cart there. It's there for our use, on some level.So, again, we sort of co-opt our environment to do all these different things. We co-opt other experiences — we take one item and transfer it to another. And this is my favorite one. My mother used to say to me, ""Just because your sister jumps in the lake doesn't mean you have to."" But, of course, we all do. We all follow each other every day. So somebody assumes that because somebody else has done something, that's permission for them to do the same thing. And there's almost this sort of semaphore around us all the time. I mean, shopping bag equals ""parking meter out of order."" And we all, kind of, know how to read these signals now. We all talk to one another in this highly visual way without realizing what we're doing. Third section is this idea of not knowing, of consciously putting yourself backwards. I talk about unthinking situations all the time. Sort of having beginner's mind, scraping your mind clean and looking at things afresh.A friend of mine was a designer at IKEA, and he was asked by his boss to help design a storage system for children. This is the Billy bookcase — it's IKEA's biggest selling product. Hammer it together. Hammer it together with a shoe, if you're me, because they're impossible to assemble. But big selling bookcase. How do we replicate this for children? The reality is when you actually watch children, children don't think about things like storage in linear terms. Children assume permission in a very different way. Children live on things. They live under things. They live around things, and so their spatial awareness relationship, and their thinking around storage is totally different. So the first thing you have to do — this is Graham, the designer — is, sort of, put yourself in their shoes. And so, here he is sitting under the table. So, what came out of this? This is the storage system that he designed. So what is this? I hear you all ask. No, I don't.(Laughter)It's this, and I think this is a particularly lovely solution. So, you know, it's a totally different way of looking at the situation. It's a completely empathic solution — apart from the fact that teddy's probably not loving it.(Laughter)But a really nice way of re-framing the ordinary, and I think that's one of the things. And putting yourself in the position of the person, and I think that's one of the threads that I've heard again from this conference is how do we put ourselves in other peoples' shoes and really feel what they feel? And then use that information to fuel solutions? And I think that's what this is very much about. Last section: green armband. We've all got them. It's about this really. I mean, it's about picking battles big enough to matter but small enough to win. Again, that's one of the themes that I think has come through loud and clear in this conference is: Where do we start? How do we start? What do we do to start? So, again, we were asked to design a water pump for a company called ApproTEC, in Kenya. They're now called KickStart.And, again, as designers, we wanted to make this thing incredibly beautiful and spend a lot of time thinking of the form. And that was completely irrelevant. When you put yourself in the position of these people, things like the fact that this has to be able to fold up and fit on a bicycle, become much more relevant than the form of it. The way it's produced, it has to be produced with indigenous manufacturing methods and indigenous materials. So it had to be looked at completely from the point of view of the user. We had to completely transfer ourselves over to their world. So what seems like a very clunky product is, in fact, incredibly useful. It's powered a bit like a Stairmaster — you pump up and down on it. Children can use it. Adults can use it. Everybody uses it. It's turning these guys — again, one of the themes — it's turning them into entrepreneurs.These guys are using this very successfully. And for us, it's been great because it's won loads of design awards. So we actually managed to reconcile the needs of the design company, the needs of the individuals in the company, to feel good about a product we were actually designing, and the needs of the individuals we were designing it for. There it is, pumping water from 30 feet. So as a final gesture we handed out these bracelets to all of you this morning. We've made a donation on everybody's behalf here to kick start, no pun intended, their next project. Because, again, I think, sort of, putting our money where our mouth is, here. We feel that this is an important gesture. So we've handed out bracelets. Small is the new big. I hope you'll all wear them. So that's it. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bennett_finds_design_in_the_details
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"I was asked to come here and speak about creation. And I only have 15 minutes, and I see they're counting already. And I can — in 15 minutes, I think I can touch only a very rather janitorial branch of creation, which I call ""creativity."" Creativity is how we cope with creation. While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable, or even pointless, creativity is always meaningful. See, for instance, in this picture. You know, creation is what put that dog in that picture, and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his hindquarters.When you think about — you know, creativity has a lot to do with causality too. You know, when I was a teenager, I was a creator. I just did things. Then I became an adult and started knowing who I was, and tried to maintain that persona — I became creative. It wasn't until I actually did a book and a retrospective exhibition, that I could track exactly — looks like all the craziest things that I had done, all my drinking, all my parties — they followed a straight line that brings me to the point that actually I'm talking to you at this moment. Though it's actually true, you know, the reason I'm talking to you right now is because I was born in Brazil. If I was born in Monterey, probably would be in Brazil.You know, I was born in Brazil and grew up in the '70s under a climate of political distress, and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way — in a sort of a semiotic black market. You couldn't really say what you wanted to say; you had to invent ways of doing it. You didn't trust information very much. That led me to another step of why I'm here today, is because I really liked media of all kinds. I was a media junkie, and eventually got involved with advertising. My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards, and based on speed, angle of approach and actually blocks of text. It was very — actually, it was a very good study, and got me a job in an ad agency. And they also decided that I had to — to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it.And another point — why I'm here — is that the day I went to pick up the Plexiglas trophy, I rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life, picked the thing — didn't have any friends. On my way out, I had to break a fight apart. Somebody was hitting somebody else with brass knuckles. They were in tuxedos, and fighting. It was very ugly. And also — advertising people do that all the time — (Laughter) — and I — well, what happened is when I went back, it was on the way back to my car, the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun — I don't know why he had a gun — and shoot the first person he decided to be his aggressor. The first person was wearing a black tie, a tuxedo. It was me. Luckily, it wasn't fatal, as you can all see. And, even more luckily, the guy said that he was sorry and I bribed him for compensation money, otherwise I press charges. And that's how — with this money I paid for a ticket to come to the United States in 1983, and that's very — the basic reason I'm talking to you here today: because I got shot. (Laughter) (Applause)Well, when I started working with my own work, I decided that I shouldn't do images. You know, I became — I took this very iconoclastic approach. Because when I decided to go into advertising, I wanted to do — I wanted to airbrush naked people on ice, for whiskey commercials, that's what I really wanted to do. (Laughter) But I — they didn't let me do it, so I just — you know, they would only let me do other things. But I wasn't into selling whiskey; I was into selling ice. The first works were actually objects. It was kind of a mixture of found object, product design and advertising. And I called them relics. They were displayed first at Stux Gallery in 1983.This is the clown skull. Is a remnant of a race of — a very evolved race of entertainers. They lived in Brazil, long time ago. (Laughter) This is the Ashanti joystick. Unfortunately, it has become obsolete because it was designed for Atari platform. A Playstation II is in the works, maybe for the next TED I'll bring it. The rocking podium. (Laughter) This is the pre-Columbian coffeemaker. (Laughter) Actually, the idea came out of an argument that I had at Starbucks, that I insisted that I wasn't having Colombian coffee; the coffee was actually pre-Columbian. The Bonsai table. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica bound in a single volume, for travel purposes. And the half tombstone, for people who are not dead yet.I wanted to take that into the realm of images, and I decided to make things that had the same identity conflicts. So I decided to do work with clouds. Because clouds can mean anything you want. But now I wanted to work in a very low-tech way, so something that would mean at the same time a lump of cotton, a cloud and Durer's praying hands — although this looks a lot more like Mickey Mouse's praying hands. But I was still, you know — this is a kitty cloud. They're called ""Equivalents,"" after Alfred Stieglitz's work. ""The Snail."" But I was still working with sculpture, and I was really trying to go flatter and flatter. ""The Teapot.""I had a chance to go to Florence, in — I think it was '94, and I saw Ghiberti's ""Door of Paradise."" And he did something that was very tricky. He put together two different media from different periods of time. First, he got an age-old way of making it, which was relief, and he worked this with three-point perspective, which was brand-new technology at the time. And it's totally overkill. And your eye doesn't know which level to read. And you become trapped into this kind of representation. So I decided to make these very simple renderings, that at first they are taken as a line drawing — you know, something that's very — and then I did it with wire. The idea was to — because everybody overlooks white — like pencil drawings, you know? And they would look at it — ""Ah, it's a pencil drawing."" Then you have this double take and see that it's actually something that existed in time. It had a physicality, and you start going deeper and deeper into sort of narrative that goes this way, towards the image. So this is ""Monkey with Leica."" ""Relaxation."" ""Fiat Lux.""And the same way the history of representation evolved from line drawings to shaded drawings. And I wanted to deal with other subjects. I started taking that into the realm of landscape, which is something that's almost a picture of nothing. I made these pictures called ""Pictures of Thread,"" and I named them after the amount of yards that I used to represent each picture. These always end up being a photograph at the end, or more like an etching in this case. So this is a lighthouse. This is ""6,500 Yards,"" after Corot. ""9,000 Yards,"" after Gerhard Richter. And I don't know how many yards, after John Constable.Departing from the lines, I decided to tackle the idea of points, like which is more similar to the type of representation that we find in photographs themselves. I had met a group of children in the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, and I did work and play with them. I got some photographs from them. Upon my arrival in New York, I decided — they were children of sugar plantation workers. And by manipulating sugar over a black paper, I made portraits of them. These are — (Applause) — Thank you. This is ""Valentina, the Fastest."" It was just the name of the child, with the little thing you get to know of somebody that you meet very briefly. ""Valicia."" ""Jacynthe.""But another layer of representation was still introduced. Because I was doing this while I was making these pictures, I realized that I could add still another thing I was trying to make a subject — something that would interfere with the themes, so chocolate is very good, because it has — it brings to mind ideas that go from scatology to romance. And so I decided to make these pictures, and they were very large, so you had to walk away from it to be able to see them. So they're called ""Pictures of Chocolate."" Freud probably could explain chocolate better than I. He was the first subject. And Jackson Pollock also.Pictures of crowds are particularly interesting, because, you know, you go to that — you try to figure out the threshold with something you can define very easily, like a face, goes into becoming just a texture. ""Paparazzi."" I used the dust at the Whitney Museum to render some pieces of their collection. And I picked minimalist pieces because they're about specificity. And you render this with the most non-specific material, which is dust itself. Like, you know, you have the skin particles of every single museum visitor. They do a DNA scan of this, they will come up with a great mailing list. This is Richard Serra.I bought a computer, and [they] told me it had millions of colors in it. You know an artist's first response to this is, who counted it? You know? And I realized that I never worked with color, because I had a hard time controlling the idea of single colors. But once they're applied to numeric structure, then you can feel more comfortable. So the first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches. They end up being very large pictures, and I photographed with a very large camera — an 8x10 camera. So you can see the surface of every single swatch — like in this picture of Chuck Close. And you have to walk very far to be able to see it. Also, the reference to Gerhard Richter's use of color charts — and the idea also entering another realm of representation that's very common to us today, which is the bit map. I ended up narrowing the subject to Monet's ""Haystacks.""This is something I used to do as a joke — you know, make — the same like — Robert Smithson's ""Spiral Jetty"" — and then leaving traces, as if it was done on a tabletop. I tried to prove that he didn't do that thing in the Salt Lake. But then, just doing the models, I was trying to explore the relationship between the model and the original. And I felt that I would have to actually go there and make some earthworks myself. I opt for very simple line drawings — kind of stupid looking.And at the same time, I was doing these very large constructions, being 150 meters away. Now I would do very small ones, which would be like — but under the same light, and I would show them together, so the viewer would have to really figure it out what one he was looking. I wasn't interested in the very large things, or in the small things. I was more interested in the things in between, you know, because you can leave an enormous range for ambiguity there. This is like you see — the size of a person over there. This is a pipe. A hanger.And this is another thing that I did — you know working — everybody loves to watch somebody draw, but not many people have a chance to watch somebody draw in — a lot of people at the same time, to evidence a single drawing. And I love this work, because I did these cartoonish clouds over Manhattan for a period of two months. And it was quite wonderful, because I had an interest — an early interest — in theater, that's justified on this thing. In theater, you have the character and the actor in the same place, trying to negotiate each other in front of an audience. And in this, you'd have like a — something that looks like a cloud, and it is a cloud at the same time. So they're like perfect actors.My interest in acting, especially bad acting, goes a long way. Actually, I once paid like 60 dollars to see a very great actor to do a version of ""King Lear,"" and I felt really robbed, because by the time the actor started being King Lear, he stopped being the great actor that I had paid money to see. On the other hand, you know, I paid like three dollars, I think — and I went to a warehouse in Queens to see a version of ""Othello"" by an amateur group. And it was quite fascinating, because you know the guy — his name was Joey Grimaldi — he impersonated the Moorish general — you know, for the first three minutes he was really that general, and then he went back into plumber, he worked as a plumber, so — plumber, general, plumber, general — so for three dollars, I saw two tragedies for the price of one.See, I think it's not really about impression, making people fall for a really perfect illusion, as much as it is to make — I usually work at the lowest threshold of visual illusion. Because it's not about fooling somebody, it's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief: how much you want to be fooled. That's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that. Well, I think that's it. My time is nearly up. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/vik_muniz_makes_art_with_wire_sugar
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"I want to talk today about — I've been asked to take the long view, and I'm going to tell you what I think are the three biggest problems for humanity from this long point of view. Some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers, which is encouraging. It seems that there's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important.The first is — death is a big problem. If you look at the statistics, the odds are not very favorable to us. So far, most people who have lived have also died. Roughly 90 percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now. So the annual death rate adds up to 150,000 — sorry, the daily death rate — 150,000 people per day, which is a huge number by any standard. The annual death rate, then, becomes 56 million. If we just look at the single, biggest cause of death — aging — it accounts for roughly two-thirds of all human people who die. That adds up to an annual death toll of greater than the population of Canada. Sometimes, we don't see a problem because either it's too familiar or it's too big. Can't see it because it's too big. I think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem.Once you think about it, you see this is not statistical points; these are — let's see, how far have I talked? I've talked for three minutes. So that would be, roughly, 324 people have died since I've begun speaking. People like — it's roughly the population in this room has just died. Now, the human cost of that is obvious, once you start to think about it — the suffering, the loss — it's also, economically, enormously wasteful. I just look at the information, and knowledge, and experience that is lost due to natural causes of death in general, and aging, in particular.Suppose we approximated one person with one book? Now, of course, this is an underestimation. A person's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book. But let's suppose we did this. 52 million people die of natural causes each year corresponds, then, to 52 million volumes destroyed. Library of Congress holds 18 million volumes. We are upset about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember, even today. But this is the equivalent of three Libraries of Congress — burnt down, forever lost — each year.So that's the first big problem. And I wish Godspeed to Aubrey de Grey, and other people like him, to try to do something about this as soon as possible. Existential risk — the second big problem. Existential risk is a threat to human survival, or to the long-term potential of our species. Now, why do I say that this is a big problem? Well, let's first look at the probability — and this is very, very difficult to estimate — but there have been only four studies on this in recent years, which is surprising. You would think that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big, but it's a very neglected area.But there have been four studies — one by John Lesley, wrote a book on this. He estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century: 50 percent. Similarly, the Astronomer Royal, whom we heard speak yesterday, also has a 50 percent probability estimate. Another author doesn't give any numerical estimate, but says the probability is significant that it will fail. I wrote a long paper on this. I said assigning a less than 20 percent probability would be a mistake in light of the current evidence we have. Now, the exact figures here, we should take with a big grain of salt, but there seems to be a consensus that the risk is substantial. Everybody who has looked at this and studied it agrees.Now, if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point — not very much — so that's equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count the currently living people, the current generation. Now one percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that's a large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up, then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could eventually colonize a chunk of the universe — the Virgo supercluster — maybe it will take us 100 million years to get there, but if we go extinct we never will. Then, even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number — 10 to the power of 32.So if you take into account future generations as much as our own, every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve. And even if you just look at the current people, and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct, it should still have a high priority. Now, let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem, because it's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp. Think about some time in your life — some people might never have experienced it — but some people, there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic.It might have been at the moment of some great, creative inspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage. Or when you understood something you had never done before. Or perhaps in the ecstasy of romantic love. Or an aesthetic experience — a sunset or a great piece of art. Every once in a while we have these moments, and we realize just how good life can be when it's at its best. And you wonder, why can't it be like that all the time? You just want to cling onto this. And then, of course, it drifts back into ordinary life and the memory fades. And it's really difficult to recall, in a normal frame of mind, just how good life can be at its best. Or how bad it can be at its worst.The third big problem is that life isn't usually as wonderful as it could be. I think that's a big, big problem. It's easy to say what we don't want. Here are a number of things that we don't want — illness, involuntary death, unnecessary suffering, cruelty, stunted growth, memory loss, ignorance, absence of creativity. Suppose we fixed these things — we did something about all of these. We were very successful. We got rid of all of these things. We might end up with something like this, which is — I mean, it's a heck of a lot better than that. But is this really the best we can dream of? Is this the best we can do?Or is it possible to find something a little bit more inspiring to work towards? And if we think about this, I think it's very clear that there are ways in which we could change things, not just by eliminating negatives, but adding positives. On my wish list, at least, would be: much longer, healthier lives, greater subjective well-being, enhanced cognitive capacities, more knowledge and understanding, unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits, better relationships, an unbounded potential for spiritual, moral and intellectual development.If we want to achieve this, what, in the world, would have to change? And this is the answer — we would have to change. Not just the world around us, but we, ourselves. Not just the way we think about the world, but the way we are — our very biology. Human nature would have to change. Now, when we think about changing human nature, the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies — growth hormone therapy, cosmetic surgery, stimulants like Ritalin, Adderall, anti-depressants, anabolic steroids, artificial hearts. It's a pretty pathetic list. They do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition, but for most people, they don't really transform what it is to be human. And they also all seem a little bit — most people have this instinct that, well, sure, there needs to be anti-depressants for the really depressed people. But there's a kind of queasiness that these are unnatural in some way.It's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use. We have skin enhancements, clothing. As far as I can see, all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room, so that's a great thing. Mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial — caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, immune system enhancement, vision enhancement, anesthetics — we take that very much for granted, but just think about how great progress that is — like, having an operation before anesthetics was not fun. Contraceptives, cosmetics and brain reprogramming techniques — that sounds ominous,but the distinction between what is a technology — a gadget would be the archetype — and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle. So if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read, you're actually, literally rewriting your own brain. You're changing the microstructure of your brain as you go along. So in a broad sense, we don't need to think about technology as only little gadgets, like these things here, but even institutions and techniques, psychological methods and so forth. Forms of organization can have a profound impact on human nature.Looking ahead, there is a range of technologies that are almost certain to be developed sooner or later. We are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are, but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws, laws of chemistry, etc. It's possible to assume, setting aside a possibility of catastrophe, that sooner or later we will develop all of these. And even just a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition.So let's look at some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to leave room for improvement. Health span is a big and urgent thing, because if you're not alive, then all the other things will be to little avail. Intellectual capacity — let's take that box, which falls into a lot of different sub-categories: memory, concentration, mental energy, intelligence, empathy. These are really great things. Part of the reason why we value these traits is that they make us better at competing with other people — they're positional goods. But part of the reason — and that's the reason why we have ethical ground for pursuing these — is that they're also intrinsically valuable. It's just better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with, and to remember what you have learned. Modalities and special faculties. Now, the human mind is not a single unitary information processor, but it has a lot of different, special, evolved modules that do specific things for us. If you think about what we normally take as giving life a lot of its meaning — music, humor, eroticism, spirituality, aesthetics, nurturing and caring, gossip, chatting with people —all of these, very likely, are enabled by a special circuitry that we humans have, but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these. We're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and enjoy it. All of these would enable, in principle — be amenable to enhancement. Some people have a better musical ability and ability to appreciate music than others have. It's also interesting to think about what other things are — so if these all enabled great values, why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be?Imagine a species that just didn't have this neural machinery for processing music. And they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance, like the one we just heard — because of people making stupid movements, and they would be really irritated and wouldn't see what we were up to. But maybe they have another faculty, something else that would seem equally irrational to us, but they actually tap into some great possible value there. But we are just literally deaf to that kind of value. So we could think of adding on different, new sensory capacities and mental faculties. Bodily functionality and morphology and affective self-control. Greater subjective well-being. Be able to switch between relaxation and activity — being able to go slow when you need to do that, and to speed up. Able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do — easier to achieve the flow state, when you're totally immersed in something you are doing. Conscientiousness and sympathy. The ability to — it's another interesting application that would have large social ramification, perhaps. If you could actually choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person, undiminished through time, so that wouldn't have to — love would never have to fade if you didn't want it to. That's probably not all that difficult. It might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this.It's been done in voles. You can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it's naturally polygamous. It's just a single gene. Might be more complicated in humans, but perhaps not that much. This is the last picture that I want to — now we've got to use the laser pointer. A possible mode of being here would be a way of life — a way of being, experiencing, thinking, seeing, interacting with the world. Down here in this little corner, here, we have the little sub-space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings — beings with our biological capacities. It's a part of the space that's accessible to animals; since we are animals, we are a subset of that.And then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities. There would be different modes of being you could experience if you were able to stay alive for, say, 200 years. Then you could live sorts of lives and accumulate wisdoms that are just not possible for humans as we currently are. So then, you move off to this larger sphere of ""human +,"" and you could continue that process and eventually explore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being.Now, why is that a good thing to do? Well, we know already that in this little human circle there, there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being — human life at its best is wonderful. We have no reason to believe that within this much, much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being, perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability even to imagine or dream about. And so, to fix this third problem, I think we need — slowly, carefully, with ethical wisdom and constraint — develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it and find the great values that might hide there. Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_on_our_biggest_problems
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"It is a thrill to be here at a conference that's devoted to ""Inspired by Nature"" — you can imagine. And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section. Did you notice this section is foreplay? Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters, which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance. I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it, and my partner and I have a rowing shell. And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along. And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together, the two of them, the two mates, and they begin to run underwater. They paddle faster, and faster, and faster, until they're going so fast that they literally lift up out of the water, and they're standing upright, sort of paddling the top of the water. And one of these Grebes came along while we were rowing. And so we're in a skull, and we're moving really, really quickly. And this Grebe, I think, sort of, mistaked us for a prospect, and started to run along the water next to us, in a courtship dance — for miles. It would stop, and then start, and then stop, and then start. Now that is foreplay. (Laughter)I came this close to changing species at that moment. Obviously, life can teach us something in the entertainment section. Life has a lot to teach us. But what I'd like to talk about today is what life might teach us in technology and in design. What's happened since the book came out — the book was mainly about research in biomimicry — and what's happened since then is architects, designers, engineers — people who make our world — have started to call and say, we want a biologist to sit at the design table to help us, in real time, become inspired. Or — and this is the fun part for me — we want you to take us out into the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us.So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater. And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there. What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry. We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said, well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature. That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology: using an organism to do your wastewater treatment is an old, old technology called ""domestication."" This is learning something, learning an idea, from an organism and then applying it. And so they still weren't getting it.So we went for a walk on the beach and I said, well, give me one of your big problems. Give me a design challenge, sustainability speed bump, that's keeping you from being sustainable. And they said scaling, which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes. And they said, you know what happens is, mineral — just like at your house — mineral builds up. And then the aperture closes, and we have to flush the pipes with toxins, or we have to dig them up. So if we had some way to stop this scaling — and so I picked up some shells on the beach. And I asked them, what is scaling? What's inside your pipes? And they said, calcium carbonate. And I said, that's what this is; this is calcium carbonate.And they didn't know that. They didn't know that what a seashell is, it's templated by proteins, and then ions from the seawater crystallize in place to create a shell. So the same sort of a process, without the proteins, is happening on the inside of their pipes. They didn't know. This is not for lack of information; it's a lack of integration. You know, it's a silo, people in silos. They didn't know that the same thing was happening. So one of them thought about it and said, OK, well, if this is just crystallization that happens automatically out of seawater — self-assembly — then why aren't shells infinite in size? What stops the scaling? Why don't they just keep on going? And I said, well, in the same way that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization — and then they all sort of leaned in — they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization. It literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal. And, in fact, there is a product called TPA that's mimicked that protein — that stop-protein — and it's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes.That changed everything. From then on, you could not get these engineers back in the boat. The first day they would take a hike, and it was, click, click, click, click. Five minutes later they were back in the boat. We're done. You know, I've seen that island. After this, they were crawling all over. They would snorkel for as long as we would let them snorkel. What had happened was that they realized that there were organisms out there that had already solved the problems that they had spent their careers trying to solve.Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world — that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field-testing. 10 to 30 — Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million — well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth — the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking — although Al is trying to get the hairdo going — it's not a slavish mimicry; it's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it.Now, in a group with so many IT people, I do have to mention what I'm not going to talk about, and that is that your field is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things, on the software side. So there's computers that protect themselves, like an immune system, and we're learning from gene regulation and biological development. And we're learning from neural nets, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing. That's on the software side. But what's interesting to me is that we haven't looked at this, as much. I mean, these machines are really not very high tech in my estimation in the sense that there's dozens and dozens of carcinogens in the water in Silicon Valley. So the hardware is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success. So what can we learn about making — not just computers, but everything? The plane you came in, cars, the seats that you're sitting on. How do we redesign the world that we make, the human-made world? More importantly, what should we ask in the next 10 years? And there's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has.What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat — that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up; you beat it with high pressures; you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat.Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all.What in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture, to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we're in? I'm going to try to go through 12, really quickly.One that's exciting to me is self-assembly. Now, you've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology. Back to that shell: the shell is a self-assembling material. On the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl forming out of seawater. It's a layered structure that's mineral and then polymer, and it makes it very, very tough. It's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics. But what's really interesting: unlike our ceramics that are in kilns, it happens in seawater. It happens near, in and near, the organism's body. This is Sandia National Labs. A guy named Jeff Brinker has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process. Imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature by simply dipping something into a liquid, lifting it out of the liquid, and having evaporation force the molecules in the liquid together, so that they jigsaw together in the same way as this crystallization works. Imagine making all of our hard materials that way. Imagine spraying the precursors to a PV cell, to a solar cell, onto a roof, and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light.Here's an interesting one for the IT world: bio-silicon. This is a diatom, which is made of silicates. And so silicon, which we make right now — it's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips — this is a bio-mineralization process that's now being mimicked. This is at UC Santa Barbara. Look at these diatoms. This is from Ernst Haeckel's work. Imagine being able to — and, again, it's a templated process, and it solidifies out of a liquid process — imagine being able to have that sort of structure coming out at room temperature. Imagine being able to make perfect lenses. On the left, this is a brittle star; it's covered with lenses that the people at Lucent Technologies have found have no distortion whatsoever. It's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of. And there's many of them, all over its entire body. What's interesting, again, is that it self-assembles. A woman named Joanna Aizenberg, at Lucent, is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create these sort of lenses. She's also looking at fiber optics. That's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic. Down at the very base of it, there's fiber optics that work better than ours, actually, to move light, but you can tie them in a knot; they're incredibly flexible.Here's another big idea: CO2 as a feedstock. A guy named Geoff Coates, at Cornell, said to himself, you know, plants do not see CO2 as the biggest poison of our time. We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way — he's found a catalyst — and he's found a way to take CO2 and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics out of CO2 — how plant-like.Solar transformations: the most exciting one. There are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting, lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up — basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell and in a reversible fuel cell. In our fuel cells, we do it with platinum; life does it with a very, very common iron. And a team has now just been able to mimic that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase. That's very exciting for fuel cells — to be able to do that without platinum.Power of shape: here's a whale. We've seen that the fins of this whale have tubercles on them. And those little bumps actually increase efficiency in, for instance, the edge of an airplane — increase efficiency by about 32 percent. Which is an amazing fossil fuel savings, if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing. Color without pigments: this peacock is creating color with shape. Light comes through, it bounces back off the layers; it's called thin-film interference. Imagine being able to self-assemble products with the last few layers playing with light to create color. Imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface, so that it's self-cleaning with just water. That's what a leaf does. See that up-close picture? That's a ball of water, and those are dirt particles. And that's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf. There's a company making a product called Lotusan, which mimics — when the building facade paint dries, it mimics the bumps in a self-cleaning leaf, and rainwater cleans the building.Water is going to be our big, grand challenge: quenching thirst. Here are two organisms that pull water. The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog. The one on the right is a pill bug — pulls water out of air, does not drink fresh water. Pulling water out of Monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in Atlanta, before it gets into a building, are key technologies.Separation technologies are going to be extremely important. What if we were to say, no more hard rock mining? What if we were to separate out metals from waste streams, small amounts of metals in water? That's what microbes do; they chelate metals out of water. There's a company here in San Francisco called MR3 that is embedding mimics of the microbes' molecules on filters to mine waste streams. Green chemistry is chemistry in water. We do chemistry in organic solvents. This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful? Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. To figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset of the periodic table, and create miracle materials like that cell, is the task of green chemistry.Timed degradation: packaging that is good until you don't want it to be good anymore, and dissolves on cue. That's a mussel you can find in the waters out here, and the threads holding it to a rock are timed; at exactly two years, they begin to dissolve.Healing: this is a good one. That little guy over there is a tardigrade. There is a problem with vaccines around the world not getting to patients. And the reason is that the refrigeration somehow gets broken; what's called the ""cold chain"" gets broken. A guy named Bruce Rosner looked at the tardigrade — which dries out completely, and yet stays alive for months and months and months, and is able to regenerate itself. And he found a way to dry out vaccines — encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules as the tardigrade has within its cells — meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated. They can be put in a glove compartment, OK. Learning from organisms. This is a session about water — learning about organisms that can do without water, in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration.I'm not going to get to 12. But what I am going to do is tell you that the most important thing, besides all of these adaptations, is the fact that these organisms have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do while taking care of the place that's going to take care of their offspring. When they're involved in foreplay, they're thinking about something very, very important — and that's having their genetic material remain, 10,000 generations from now. And that means finding a way to do what they do without destroying the place that'll take care of their offspring. That's the biggest design challenge. Luckily, there are millions and millions of geniuses willing to gift us with their best ideas. Good luck having a conversation with them.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Talk about foreplay, I — we need to get to 12, but really quickly.Janine Benyus: Oh really? CA: Yeah. Just like, you know, like the 10-second version of 10, 11 and 12. Because we just — your slides are so gorgeous, and the ideas are so big, I can't stand to let you go down without seeing 10, 11 and 12.JB: OK, put this — OK, I'll just hold this thing. OK, great. OK, so that's the healing one. Sensing and responding: feedback is a huge thing. This is a locust. There can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer, and yet they don't collide with one another. And yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year. (Laughter) Right. There's a person at Newcastle who has figured out that it's a very large neuron. And she's actually figuring out how to make a collision-avoidance circuitry based on this very large neuron in the locust.This is a huge and important one, number 11. And that's the growing fertility. That means, you know, net fertility farming. We should be growing fertility. And, oh yes — we get food, too. Because we have to grow the capacity of this planet to create more and more opportunities for life. And really, that's what other organisms do as well. In ensemble, that's what whole ecosystems do: they create more and more opportunities for life. Our farming has done the opposite. So, farming based on how a prairie builds soil, ranching based on how a native ungulate herd actually increases the health of the range, even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh not only cleans the water, but creates incredibly sparkling productivity.This is the simple design brief. I mean, it looks simple because the system, over 3.8 billion years, has worked this out. That is, those organisms that have not been able to figure out how to enhance or sweeten their places, are not around to tell us about it. That's the twelfth one. Life — and this is the secret trick; this is the magic trick — life creates conditions conducive to life. It builds soil; it cleans air; it cleans water; it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and I need to live. And it does that in the middle of having great foreplay and meeting their needs. So it's not mutually exclusive. We have to find a way to meet our needs, while making of this place an Eden.CA: Janine, thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_shares_nature_s_designs
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"At the break, I was asked by several people about my comments about the aging debate. And this will be my only comment on it. And that is, I understand that optimists greatly outlive pessimists. (Laughter)What I'm going to tell you about in my 18 minutes is how we're about to switch from reading the genetic code to the first stages of beginning to write the code ourselves. It's only 10 years ago this month when we published the first sequence of a free-living organism, that of haemophilus influenzae. That took a genome project from 13 years down to four months. We can now do that same genome project in the order of two to eight hours. So in the last decade, a large number of genomes have been added: most human pathogens, a couple of plants, several insects and several mammals, including the human genome. Genomics at this stage of the thinking from a little over 10 years ago was, by the end of this year, we might have between three and five genomes sequenced; it's on the order of several hundred. We just got a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to sequence 130 genomes this year, as a side project from environmental organisms. So the rate of reading the genetic code has changed.But as we look, what's out there, we've barely scratched the surface on what is available on this planet. Most people don't realize it, because they're invisible, but microbes make up about a half of the Earth's biomass, whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass. And maybe it's something that people in Oxford don't do very often, but if you ever make it to the sea, and you swallow a mouthful of seawater, keep in mind that each milliliter has about a million bacteria and on the order of 10 million viruses.Less than 5,000 microbial species have been characterized as of two years ago, and so we decided to do something about it. And we started the Sorcerer II Expedition, where we were, as with great oceanographic expeditions, trying to sample the ocean every 200 miles. We started in Bermuda for our test project, then moved up to Halifax, working down the U.S. East Coast, the Caribbean Sea, the Panama Canal, through to the Galapagos, then across the Pacific, and we're in the process now of working our way across the Indian Ocean. It's very tough duty; we're doing this on a sailing vessel, in part to help excite young people about going into science. The experiments are incredibly simple. We just take seawater and we filter it, and we collect different size organisms on different filters, and then take their DNA back to our lab in Rockville, where we can sequence a hundred million letters of the genetic code every 24 hours. And with doing this, we've made some amazing discoveries.For example, it was thought that the visual pigments that are in our eyes — there was only one or two organisms in the environment that had these same pigments. It turns out, almost every species in the upper parts of the ocean in warm parts of the world have these same photoreceptors, and use sunlight as the source of their energy and communication. From one site, from one barrel of seawater, we discovered 1.3 million new genes and as many as 50,000 new species.We've extended this to the air now with a grant from the Sloan Foundation. We're measuring how many viruses and bacteria all of us are breathing in and out every day, particularly on airplanes or closed auditoriums. (Laughter) We filter through some simple apparatuses; we collect on the order of a billion microbes from just a day filtering on top of a building in New York City. And we're in the process of sequencing all that at the present time.Just on the data collection side, just where we are through the Galapagos, we're finding that almost every 200 miles, we see tremendous diversity in the samples in the ocean. Some of these make logical sense, in terms of different temperature gradients. So this is a satellite photograph based on temperatures — red being warm, blue being cold — and we found there's a tremendous difference between the warm water samples and the cold water samples, in terms of abundant species. The other thing that surprised us quite a bit is these photoreceptors detect different wavelengths of light, and we can predict that based on their amino acid sequence. And these vary tremendously from region to region. Maybe not surprisingly, in the deep ocean, where it's mostly blue, the photoreceptors tend to see blue light. When there's a lot of chlorophyll around, they see a lot of green light. But they vary even more, possibly moving towards infrared and ultraviolet in the extremes.Just to try and get an assessment of what our gene repertoire was, we assembled all the data — including all of ours thus far from the expedition, which represents more than half of all the gene data on the planet — and it totaled around 29 million genes. And we tried to put these into gene families to see what these discoveries are: Are we just discovering new members of known families, or are we discovering new families? And it turns out we have about 50,000 major gene families, but every new sample we take in the environment adds in a linear fashion to these new families. So we're at the earliest stages of discovery about basic genes, components and life on this planet.When we look at the so-called evolutionary tree, we're up on the upper right-hand corner with the animals. Of those roughly 29 million genes, we only have around 24,000 in our genome. And if you take all animals together, we probably share less than 30,000 and probably maybe a dozen or more thousand different gene families. I view that these genes are now not only the design components of evolution. And we think in a gene-centric view — maybe going back to Richard Dawkins' ideas — than in a genome-centric view, which are different constructs of these gene components.Synthetic DNA, the ability to synthesize DNA, has changed at sort of the same pace that DNA sequencing has over the last decade or two, and is getting very rapid and very cheap. Our first thought about synthetic genomics came when we sequenced the second genome back in 1995, and that from mycoplasma genitalium. And we have really nice T-shirts that say, you know, ""I heart my genitalium."" This is actually just a microorganism. But it has roughly 500 genes. Haemophilus had 1,800 genes. And we simply asked the question, if one species needs 800, another 500, is there a smaller set of genes that might comprise a minimal operating system?So we started doing transposon mutagenesis. Transposons are just small pieces of DNA that randomly insert in the genetic code. And if they insert in the middle of the gene, they disrupt its function. So we made a map of all the genes that could take transposon insertions and we called those ""non-essential genes."" But it turns out the environment is very critical for this, and you can only define an essential or non-essential gene based on exactly what's in the environment. We also tried to take a more directly intellectual approach with the genomes of 13 related organisms, and we tried to compare all of those, to see what they had in common. And we got these overlapping circles. And we found only 173 genes common to all 13 organisms. The pool expanded a little bit if we ignored one intracellular parasite; it expanded even more when we looked at core sets of genes of around 310 or so. So we think that we can expand or contract genomes, depending on your point of view here, to maybe 300 to 400 genes from the minimal of 500.The only way to prove these ideas was to construct an artificial chromosome with those genes in them, and we had to do this in a cassette-based fashion. We found that synthesizing accurate DNA in large pieces was extremely difficult. Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison, my colleagues on this, developed an exciting new method that allowed us to synthesize a 5,000-base pair virus in only a two-week period that was 100 percent accurate, in terms of its sequence and its biology. It was a quite exciting experiment — when we just took the synthetic piece of DNA, injected it in the bacteria and all of a sudden, that DNA started driving the production of the virus particles that turned around and then killed the bacteria. This was not the first synthetic virus — a polio virus had been made a year before — but it was only one ten-thousandth as active and it took three years to do. This is a cartoon of the structure of phi X 174. This is a case where the software now builds its own hardware, and that's the notions that we have with biology.People immediately jump to concerns about biological warfare, and I had recent testimony before a Senate committee, and a special committee the U.S. government has set up to review this area. And I think it's important to keep reality in mind, versus what happens with people's imaginations. Basically, any virus that's been sequenced today — that genome can be made. And people immediately freak out about things about Ebola or smallpox, but the DNA from this organism is not infective. So even if somebody made the smallpox genome, that DNA itself would not cause infections. The real concern that security departments have is designer viruses. And there's only two countries, the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, that had major efforts on trying to create biological warfare agents. If that research is truly discontinued, there should be very little activity on the know-how to make designer viruses in the future.I think single-cell organisms are possible within two years. And possibly eukaryotic cells, those that we have, are possible within a decade. So we're now making several dozen different constructs, because we can vary the cassettes and the genes that go into this artificial chromosome. The key is, how do you put all of the others? We start with these fragments, and then we have a homologous recombination system that reassembles those into a chromosome.This is derived from an organism, deinococcus radiodurans, that can take three million rads of radiation and not be killed. It reassembles its genome after this radiation burst in about 12 to 24 hours, after its chromosomes are literally blown apart. This organism is ubiquitous on the planet, and exists perhaps now in outer space due to all our travel there. This is a glass beaker after about half a million rads of radiation. The glass started to burn and crack, while the microbes sitting in the bottom just got happier and happier. Here's an actual picture of what happens: the top of this shows the genome after 1.7 million rads of radiation. The chromosome is literally blown apart. And here's that same DNA automatically reassembled 24 hours later. It's truly stunning that these organisms can do that, and we probably have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different species on this planet that are capable of doing that. After these genomes are synthesized, the first step is just transplanting them into a cell without a genome.So we think synthetic cells are going to have tremendous potential, not only for understanding the basis of biology but for hopefully environmental and society issues. For example, from the third organism we sequenced, Methanococcus jannaschii — it lives in boiling water temperatures; its energy source is hydrogen and all its carbon comes from CO2 it captures back from the environment. So we know lots of different pathways, thousands of different organisms now that live off of CO2, and can capture that back. So instead of using carbon from oil for synthetic processes, we have the chance of using carbon and capturing it back from the atmosphere, converting that into biopolymers or other products. We have one organism that lives off of carbon monoxide, and we use as a reducing power to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Also, there's numerous pathways that can be engineered metabolizing methane. And DuPont has a major program with Statoil in Norway to capture and convert the methane from the gas fields there into useful products.Within a short while, I think there's going to be a new field called ""Combinatorial Genomics,"" because with these new synthesis capabilities, these vast gene array repertoires and the homologous recombination, we think we can design a robot to make maybe a million different chromosomes a day. And therefore, as with all biology, you get selection through screening, whether you're screening for hydrogen production, or chemical production, or just viability. To understand the role of these genes is going to be well within reach.We're trying to modify photosynthesis to produce hydrogen directly from sunlight. Photosynthesis is modulated by oxygen, and we have an oxygen-insensitive hydrogenase that we think will totally change this process. We're also combining cellulases, the enzymes that break down complex sugars into simple sugars and fermentation in the same cell for producing ethanol. Pharmaceutical production is already under way in major laboratories using microbes. The chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce. I think future engineered species could be the source of food, hopefully a source of energy, environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry.Let me just close with ethical and policy studies. We delayed the start of our experiments in 1999 until we completed a year-and-a-half bioethical review as to whether we should try and make an artificial species. Every major religion participated in this. It was actually a very strange study, because the various religious leaders were using their scriptures as law books, and they couldn't find anything in them prohibiting making life, so it must be OK. The only ultimate concerns were biological warfare aspects of this, but gave us the go ahead to start these experiments for the reasons we were doing them.Right now the Sloan Foundation has just funded a multi-institutional study on this, to work out what the risk and benefits to society are, and the rules that scientific teams such as my own should be using in this area, and we're trying to set good examples as we go forward. These are complex issues. Except for the threat of bio-terrorism, they're very simple issues in terms of, can we design things to produce clean energy, perhaps revolutionizing what developing countries can do and provide through various simple processes. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_on_dna_and_the_sea
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"Imagine spending seven years at MIT and research laboratories, only to find out that you're a performance artist.(Laughter)I'm also a software engineer, and I make lots of different kinds of art with the computer. And I think the main thing that I'm interested in is trying to find a way of making the computer into a personal mode of expression. And many of you out there are the heads of Macromedia and Microsoft, and in a way those are my bane: I think there's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think about what's possible on the computer. Of course, it's also a great liberating force that makes possible, you know, publishing and so forth, and standards, and so on. But, in a way, the computer makes possible much more than what most people think, and my art has just been about trying to find a personal way of using the computer, and so I end up writing software to do that.Chris has asked me to do a short performance, and so I'm going to take just this time — maybe 10 minutes — to do that, and hopefully at the end have just a moment to show you a couple of my other projects in video form.Thank you.(Applause)We've got about a minute left. I'd just like to show a clip from a most recent project. I did a performance with two singers who specialize in making strange noises with their mouths. And this just came off last September at ARS Electronica; we repeated it in England. And the idea is to visualize their speech and song behind them with a large screen. We used a computer vision tracking system in order to know where they were. And since we know where their heads are, and we have a wireless mic on them that we're processing the sound from, we're able to create visualizations which are linked very tightly to what they're doing with their speech. This will take about 30 seconds or so. He's making a, kind of, cheek-flapping sound.Well, suffice it to say it's not all like that, but that's part of it.Thanks very much. There's always lots more. I'm overtime, so I just wanted to say you can, if you're in New York, you can check out my work at the Whitney Biennial next week, and also at Bitforms Gallery in Chelsea. And with that, I think I should give up the stage, so, thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/golan_levin_on_software_as_art
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"I work with a species called ""Bonobo."" And I'm happy most of the time, because I think this is the happiest species on the planet. It's kind of a well-kept secret. This species lives only in the Congo. And they're not in too many zoos, because of their sexual behavior. Their sexual behavior is too human-like for most of us to be comfortable with.(Laughter)But —(Laughter)actually, we have a lot to learn from them, because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society. And sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they sort of set aside. It permeates their entire life. And it's used for communication. And it's used for conflict resolution. And I think perhaps somewhere in our history we sort of, divided our lives up into lots of parts. We divided our world up with lots of categories. And so everything sort of has a place that it has to fit. But I don't think that we were that way initially.There are many people who think that the animal world is hard-wired and that there's something very, very special about man. Maybe it's his ability to have causal thought. Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to have language. Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to make tools or to have mathematics. Well, I don't know. There were Tasmanians who were discovered around the 1600s and they had no fire. They had no stone tools. To our knowledge they had no music. So when you compare them to the Bonobo, the Bonobo is a little hairier. He doesn't stand quite as upright. But there are a lot of similarities. And I think that as we look at culture, we kind of come to understand how we got to where we are. And I don't really think it's in our biology; I think we've attributed it to our biology, but I don't really think it's there.So what I want to do now is introduce you to a species called the Bonobo. This is Kanzi. He's a Bonobo. Right now, he's in a forest in Georgia. His mother originally came from a forest in Africa. And she came to us when she was just at puberty, about six or seven years of age.Now this shows a Bonobo on your right, and a chimpanzee on your left. Clearly, the chimpanzee has a little bit harder time of walking. The Bonobo, although shorter than us and their arms still longer, is more upright, just as we are. This shows the Bonobo compared to an australopithecine like Lucy. As you can see, there's not a lot of difference between the way a Bonobo walks and the way an early australopithecine would have walked. As they turn toward us you'll see that the pelvic area of early australopithecines is a little flatter and doesn't have to rotate quite so much from side to side. So the — the bipedal gait is a little easier. And now we see all four.Video: Narrator: The wild Bonobo lives in central Africa, in the jungle encircled by the Congo River. Canopied trees as tall as 40 meters, 130 feet, grow densely in the area. It was a Japanese scientist who first undertook serious field studies of the Bonobo, almost three decades ago. Bonobos are built slightly smaller than the chimpanzee. Slim-bodied, Bonobos are by nature very gentle creatures. Long and careful studies have reported many new findings on them. One discovery was that wild Bonobos often walk bidpedally. What's more, they are able to walk upright for long distances. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh (video): Let's go say hello to Austin first and then go to the A frame.SS: This is Kanzi and I, in the forest. None of the things you will see in this particular video are trained. None of them are tricks. They all happened to be captured on film spontaneously, by NHK of Japan. We have eight Bonobos.Video: Look at all this stuff that's here for our campfire.SS: An entire family at our research centre.Video: You going to help get some sticks? Good. We need more sticks, too. I have a lighter in my pocket if you need one. That's a wasps' nest. You can get it out. I hope I have a lighter. You can use the lighter to start the fire.SS: So Kanzi is very interested in fire. He doesn't do it yet without a lighter, but I think if he saw someone do it, he might be able to do — make a fire without a lighter. He's learning about how to keep a fire going. He's learning the uses for a fire, just by watching what we do with fire.(Laughter)This is a smile on the face of a Bonobo. These are happy vocalizations.Video: You're happy. You're very happy about this part. You've got to put some water on the fire. You see the water? Good job.SS: Forgot to zip up the back half of his backpack. But he likes to carry things from place to place.Video: Austin, I hear you saying ""Austin.""SS: He talks to other Bonobos at the lab, long-distance, farther than we can hear. This is his sister. This is her first time to try to drive a golf cart.Video: Goodbye.(Laughter)SS: She's got the pedals down, but not the wheel. She switches from reverse to forward and she holds onto the wheel, rather than turns it.(Laughter)Like us, she knows that that individual in the mirror is her.(Music)Video: Narrator: By raising Bonobos in a culture that is both Bonobo and human, and documenting their development across two decades, scientists are exploring how cultural forces(Laughter)may have operated during human evolution.His name is Nyota. It means ""star"" in Swahili.(Music)Panbanisha is trying to give Nyota a haircut with a pair of scissors. In the wild, the parent Bonobo is known to groom its offspring. Here Panbanisha uses scissors, instead of her hands, to groom Nyota. Very impressive. Subtle maneuvering of the hands is required to perform delicate tasks like this. Nyota tries to imitate Panbanisha by using the scissors himself. Realizing that Nyota might get hurt, Panbanisha, like any human mother, carefully tugs to get the scissors back.He can now cut through tough animal hide.SS: Kanzi's learned to make stone tools.Video: Kanzi now makes his tools, just as our ancestors may have made them, two-and-a-half million years ago — by holding the rocks in both hands, to strike one against the other. He has learned that by using both hands and aiming his glancing blows, he can make much larger, sharper flakes. Kanzi chooses a flake he thinks is sharp enough. The tough hide is difficult to cut, even with a knife. The rock that Kanzi is using is extremely hard and ideal for stone tool making, but difficult to handle, requiring great skill. Kanzi's rock is from Gona, Ethiopia and is identical to that used by our African ancestors two-and-a-half million years ago. These are the rocks Kanzi used and these are the flakes he made. The flat sharp edges are like knife blades. Compare them to the tools our ancestors used; they bear a striking resemblance to Kanzi's.Panbanisha is longing to go for a walk in the woods. She keeps staring out the window.SS: This is — let me show you something we didn't think they would do.Video: For several days now, Panbanisha has not been outside.SS: I normally talk about language.Video: Then Panbanisha does something unexpected.SS: But since I'm advised not to do what I normally do, I haven't told you that these apes have language. It's a geometric language.Video: She takes a piece of chalk and begins writing something on the floor. What is she writing?SS: She's also saying the name of that, with her voice.Video: Now she comes up to Dr. Sue and starts writing again.SS: These are her symbols on her keyboard.(Music)They speak when she touches them.Video: Panbanisha is communicating to Dr. Sue where she wants to go. ""A frame"" represents a hut in the woods. Compare the chalk writing with the lexigram on the keyboard. Panbanisha began writing the lexigrams on the forest floor. SS (video): Very nice. Beautiful, Panbanisha.SS: At first we didn't really realize what she was doing, until we stood back and looked at it and rotated it.Video: This lexigram also refers to a place in the woods. The curved line is very similar to the lexigram. The next symbol Panbanisha writes represents ""collar."" It indicates the collar that Panbanisha must wear when she goes out.SS: That's an institutional requirement.Video: This symbol is not as clear as the others, but one can see Panbanisha is trying to produce a curved line and several straight lines. Researchers began to record what Panbanisha said, by writing lexigrams on the floor with chalk. Panbanisha watched. Soon she began to write as well. The Bonobo's abilities have stunned scientists around the world. How did they develop?SS (video): We found that the most important thing for permitting Bonobos to acquire language is not to teach them. It's simply to use language around them, because the driving force in language acquisition is to understand what others, that are important to you, are saying to you. Once you have that capacity, the ability to produce language comes rather naturally and rather freely. So we want to create an environment in which Bonobos, like all of the individuals with whom they are interacting — we want to create an environment in which they have fun, and an environment in which the others are meaningful individuals for them. Narrator: This environment brings out unexpected potential in Kanzi and Panbanisha.Panbanisha is enjoying playing her harmonica, until Nyota, now one year old, steals it. Then he peers eagerly into his mother's mouth. Is he looking for where the sound came from? Dr. Sue thinks it's important to allow such curiosity to flourish. This time Panbanisha is playing the electric piano. She wasn't forced to learn the piano; she saw a researcher play the instrument and took an interest.Researcher: Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm listening. Do that real fast part that you did. Yeah, that part.Narrator: Kanzi plays the xylophone; using both hands he enthusiastically accompanies Dr. Sue's singing. Kanzi and Panbanisha are stimulated by this fun-filled environment, which promotes the emergence of these cultural capabilities.(Laughter)Researcher: OK, now get the monsters. Get them. Take the cherries too. Now watch out, stay away from them now. Now you can chase them again. Time to chase them. Now you have to stay away. Get away. Run away. Run. Now we can chase them again. Go get them. Oh no! Good Kanzi. Very good. Thank you so much.Narrator: None of us, Bonobo or human, can possibly even imagine?SS: So we have a bi-species environment, we call it a ""panhomoculture."" We're learning how to become like them. We're learning how to communicate with them, in really high-pitched tones. We're learning that they probably have a language in the wild. And they're learning to become like us. Because we believe that it's not biology; it's culture. So we're sharing tools and technology and language with another species.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write
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"Nature's my muse and it's been my passion. As a photographer for National Geographic, I've portrayed it for many. But five years ago, I went on a personal journey. I wanted to visualize the story of life. It's the hardest thing I've ever attempted, and there have been plenty of times when I felt like backing out. But there were also revelations. And one of those I'd like to share with you today.I went down to a remote lagoon in Australia, hoping to see the Earth the way it was three billion years ago, back before the sky turned blue. There's stromatolites down there — the first living things to capture photosynthesis — and it's the only place they still occur today. Going down there was like entering a time capsule, and I came out with a different sense of myself in time. The oxygen exhaled by those stromatolites is what we all breathe today.Stromatolites are the heroes in my story. I hope it's a story that has some resonance for our time. It's a story about you and me, nature and science. And with that said, I'd like to invite you for a short, brief journey of life through time. Our journey starts in space, where matter condenses into spheres over time ... solidifying into surface, molded by fire. The fire gave way, Earth emerged — but this was an alien planet. The moon was closer; things were different. Heat from within made geysers erupt — that is how the oceans were born. Water froze around the poles and shaped the edges of the Earth. Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars.But this planet is different — it's roiling inside. And where that energy touches water, something new emerges: life. It arises around cracks in the Earth. Mud and minerals become substrate; there are bacteria. Learn to multiply, thickening in places ... Growing living structures under an alien sky ... Stromatolites were the first to exhale oxygen. And they changed the atmosphere. A breath that's fossilized now as iron.Meteorites delivered chemistry, and perhaps membranes, too. Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate. These are diatoms, single-celled phytoplankton with skeletons of silicon ... circuit boards of the future. Shallow seas nurtured life early on, and that's where it morphed into more complex forms. It grew as light and oxygen increased. Life hardened and became defensive. It learned to move and began to see. The first eyes grew on trilobites. Vision was refined in horseshoe crabs, among the first to leave the sea. They still do what they've done for ages, their enemies long gone.Scorpions follow prey out of the sea. Slugs became snails. Fish tried amphibian life. Frogs adapted to deserts. Lichens arose as a co-op. Fungi married algae ... clinging to rock, and eating it too ... transforming barren land. True land plants arose, leafless at first. Once they learn how to stay upright, they grew in size and shape. The fundamental forms of ferns followed, to bear spores that foreshadowed seeds. Life flourished in swamps.On land, life turned a corner. Jaws formed first; teeth came later. Leatherbacks and tuataras are echoes from that era. It took time for life to break away from water, and it still beckons all the time. Life turned hard so it could venture inland. And the dragons that arose are still among us today. Jurassic Park still shimmers in part of Madagascar, and the center of Brazil, where plants called ""cycads"" remain rock hard. Forests arose and nurtured things with wings. One early form left an imprint, like it died only yesterday. And others fly today like echoes of the past. In birds, life gained new mobility. Flamingos covered continents. Migrations got underway.Birds witnessed the emergence of flowering plants. Water lilies were among the first. Plants began to diversify and grew, turning into trees. In Australia, a lily turned into a grass tree, and in Hawaii, a daisy became a silver sword. In Africa, Gondwana molded Proteas. But when that ancient continent broke up, life got lusher. Tropical rainforests arose, sparking new layers of interdependence. Fungi multiplied. Orchids emerged, genitalia shaped to lure insects ... a trick shared by the largest flower on Earth. Co-evolution entwined insects and birds and plants forever. When birds can't fly, they become vulnerable. Kiwis are, and so are these hawks trapped near Antarctica.Extinction can come slowly, but sometimes it arrives fast. An asteroid hits, and the world went down in flames. But there were witnesses, survivors in the dark. When the skies cleared, a new world was born. A world fit for mammals. From tiny shrews [came] tenrecs, accustomed to the dark. New forms became bats. Civets. New predators, hyenas, getting faster and faster still.Grasslands created opportunities. Herd safety came with sharpened senses. Growing big was another answer, but size always comes at a price. Some mammals turned back to water. Walruses adapted with layers of fat. Sea lions got sleek. And cetaceans moved into a world without bounds. There are many ways to be a mammal. A 'roo hops in Oz; a horse runs in Asia; and a wolf evolves stilt legs in Brazil. Primates emerge from jungles, as tarsiers first, becoming lemurs not much later. Learning became reinforced. Bands of apes ventured into the open. And forests dried out once more. Going upright became a lifestyle.So who are we? Brothers of masculine chimps, sisters of feminine bonobos? We are all of them, and more. We're molded by the same life force. The blood veins in our hands echoed a course of water traces on the Earth. And our brains — our celebrated brains — reflect a drainage of a tidal marsh.Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin. And where it doesn't, as in Greenland in winter, Mars is still not very far. But that likelihood fades as long as ice melts again. And where water is liquid, it becomes a womb for cells green with chlorophyll — and that molecular marvel is what's made a difference — it powers everything. The whole animal world today lives on a stockpile of bacterial oxygen that is cycled constantly through plants and algae, and their waste is our breath, and vice versa. This Earth is alive, and it's made its own membrane. We call it ""atmosphere."" This is the icon of our journey. And you all here today can imagine and will shape where we go next. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_lanting_s_lyrical_nature_photos
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"If you'd like to learn how to play the lobster, we have some here. And that's not a joke, we really do. So come up afterwards and I'll show you how to play a lobster.So, actually, I started working on what's called the mantis shrimp a few years ago because they make sound. This is a recording I made of a mantis shrimp that's found off the coast of California. And while that's an absolutely fascinating sound, it actually turns out to be a very difficult project. And while I was struggling to figure out how and why mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, make sound, I started to think about their appendages. And mantis shrimp are called ""mantis shrimp"" after the praying mantises, which also have a fast feeding appendage. And I started to think, well, maybe it will be interesting, while listening to their sounds, to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes. And so today I'll talk about the extreme stomatopod strike, work that I've done in collaboration with Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell.So, mantis shrimp come in two varieties: there are spearers and smashers. And this is a spearing mantis shrimp, or stomatopod. And he lives in the sand, and he catches things that go by overhead. So, a quick strike like that. And if we slow it down a bit, this is the mantis shrimp — the same species — recorded at 1,000 frames a second, played back at 15 frames per second. And you can see it's just a really spectacular extension of the limbs, exploding upward to actually just catch a dead piece of shrimp that I had offered it. Now, the other type of mantis shrimp is the smasher stomatopod, and these guys open up snails for a living. And so this guy gets the snail all set up and gives it a good whack.(Laughter)So, I'll play it one more time. He wiggles it in place, tugs it with his nose, and smash. And a few smashes later, the snail is broken open, and he's got a good dinner. So, the smasher raptorial appendage can stab with a point at the end, or it can smash with the heel. And today I'll talk about the smashing type of strike.And so the first question that came to mind was, well, how fast does this limb move? Because it's moving pretty darn fast on that video. And I immediately came upon a problem. Every single high-speed video system in the biology department at Berkeley wasn't fast enough to catch this movement. We simply couldn't capture it on video. And so this had me stymied for quite a long period of time. And then a BBC crew came cruising through the biology department, looking for a story to do about new technologies in biology. And so we struck up a deal. I said, ""Well, if you guys rent the high-speed video system that could capture these movements, you guys can film us collecting the data."" And believe it or not, they went for it. (Laughter) So we got this incredible video system. It's very new technology — it just came out about a year ago — that allows you to film at extremely high speeds in low light. And low light is a critical issue with filming animals, because if it's too high, you fry them. (Laughter)So this is a mantis shrimp. There are the eyes up here, and there's that raptorial appendage, and there's the heel. And that thing's going to swing around and smash the snail. And the snail's wired to a stick, so he's a little bit easier to set up the shot. And — yeah.(Laughter)I hope there aren't any snail rights activists around here.(Laughter)So this was filmed at 5,000 frames per second, and I'm playing it back at 15. And so this is slowed down 333 times. And as you'll notice, it's still pretty gosh darn fast slowed down 333 times. It's an incredibly powerful movement. The whole limb extends out. The body flexes backwards — just a spectacular movement. And so what we did is, we took a look at these videos, and we measured how fast the limb was moving to get back to that original question. And we were in for our first surprise. So what we calculated was that the limbs were moving at the peak speed ranging from 10 meters per second all the way up to 23 meters per second. And for those of you who prefer miles per hour, that's over 45 miles per hour in water. And this is really darn fast. In fact, it's so fast we were able to add a new point on the extreme animal movement spectrum. And mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system. So our first surprise.(Applause)So that was really cool and very unexpected. So, you might be wondering, well, how do they do it? And actually, this work was done in the 1960s by a famous biologist named Malcolm Burrows. And what he showed in mantis shrimp is that they use what's called a ""catch mechanism,"" or ""click mechanism."" And what this basically consists of is a large muscle that takes a good long time to contract, and a latch that prevents anything from moving. So the muscle contracts, and nothing happens. And once the muscle's contracted completely, everything's stored up — the latch flies upward, and you've got the movement. And that's basically what's called a ""power amplification system."" It takes a long time for the muscle to contract, and a very short time for the limb to fly out. And so I thought that this was sort of the end of the story. This was how mantis shrimps make these very fast strikes.But then I took a trip to the National Museum of Natural History. And if any of you ever have a chance, backstage of the National Museum of Natural History is one of the world's best collections of preserved mantis shrimp. And what —(Laughter)this is serious business for me.(Laughter)So, this — what I saw, on every single mantis shrimp limb, whether it's a spearer or a smasher, is a beautiful saddle-shaped structure right on the top surface of the limb. And you can see it right here. It just looks like a saddle you'd put on a horse. It's a very beautiful structure. And it's surrounded by membranous areas. And those membranous areas suggested to me that maybe this is some kind of dynamically flexible structure. And this really sort of had me scratching my head for a while. And then we did a series of calculations, and what we were able to show is that these mantis shrimp have to have a spring. There needs to be some kind of spring-loaded mechanism in order to generate the amount of force that we observe, and the speed that we observe, and the output of the system. So we thought, OK, this must be a spring — the saddle could very well be a spring. And we went back to those high-speed videos again, and we could actually visualize the saddle compressing and extending. And I'll just do that one more time. And then if you take a look at the video — it's a little bit hard to see — it's outlined in yellow. The saddle is outlined in yellow. You can actually see it extending over the course of the strike, and actually hyperextending. So, we've had very solid evidence showing that that saddle-shaped structure actually compresses and extends, and does, in fact, function as a spring.The saddle-shaped structure is also known as a ""hyperbolic paraboloid surface,"" or an ""anticlastic surface."" And this is very well known to engineers and architects, because it's a very strong surface in compression. It has curves in two directions, one curve upward and opposite transverse curve down the other, so any kind of perturbation spreads the forces over the surface of this type of shape. So it's very well known to engineers, not as well known to biologists. It's also known to quite a few people who make jewelry, because it requires very little material to build this type of surface, and it's very strong. So if you're going to build a thin gold structure, it's very nice to have it in a shape that's strong.Now, it's also known to architects. One of the most famous architects is Eduardo Catalano, who popularized this structure. And what's shown here is a saddle-shaped roof that he built that's 87 and a half feet spanwise. It's two and a half inches thick, and supported at two points. And one of the reasons why he designed roofs this way is because it's — he found it fascinating that you could build such a strong structure that's made of so few materials and can be supported by so few points. And all of these are the same principles that apply to the saddle-shaped spring in stomatopods. In biological systems it's important not to have a whole lot of extra material requirements for building it. So, very interesting parallels between the biological and the engineering worlds. And interestingly, this turns out — the stomatopod saddle turns out to be the first described biological hyperbolic paraboloid spring. That's a bit long, but it is sort of interesting.So the next and final question was, well, how much force does a mantis shrimp produce if they're able to break open snails? And so I wired up what's called a load cell. A load cell measures forces, and this is actually a piezoelectronic load cell that has a little crystal in it. And when this crystal is squeezed, the electrical properties change and it — which — in proportion to the forces that go in. So these animals are wonderfully aggressive, and are really hungry all the time. And so all I had to do was actually put a little shrimp paste on the front of the load cell, and they'd smash away at it. And so this is just a regular video of the animal just smashing the heck out of this load cell. And we were able to get some force measurements out. And again, we were in for a surprise.I purchased a 100-pound load cell, thinking, no animal could produce more than 100 pounds at this size of an animal. And what do you know? They immediately overloaded the load cell. So these are actually some old data where I had to find the smallest animals in the lab, and we were able to measure forces of well over 100 pounds generated by an animal about this big. And actually, just last week I got a 300-pound load cell up and running, and I've clocked these animals generating well over 200 pounds of force. And again, I think this will be a world record. I have to do a little bit more background reading, but I think this will be the largest amount of force produced by an animal of a given — per body mass. So, really incredible forces. And again, that brings us back to the importance of that spring in storing up and releasing so much energy in this system. But that was not the end of the story.Now, things — I'm making this sound very easy, this is actually a lot of work. And I got all these force measurements, and then I went and looked at the force output of the system. And this is just very simple — time is on the X-axis and the force is on the Y-axis. And you can see two peaks. And that was what really got me puzzled. The first peak, obviously, is the limb hitting the load cell. But there's a really large second peak half a millisecond later, and I didn't know what that was. So now, you'd expect a second peak for other reasons, but not half a millisecond later. Again, going back to those high-speed videos, there's a pretty good hint of what might be going on. Here's that same orientation that we saw earlier. There's that raptorial appendage — there's the heel, and it's going to swing around and hit the load cell. And what I'd like you to do in this shot is keep your eye on this, on the surface of the load cell, as the limb comes flying through. And I hope what you are able to see is actually a flash of light.Audience: Wow.Sheila Patek: And so if we just take that one frame, what you can actually see there at the end of that yellow arrow is a vapor bubble. And what that is, is cavitation. And cavitation is an extremely potent fluid dynamic phenomenon which occurs when you have areas of water moving at extremely different speeds. And when this happens, it can cause areas of very low pressure, which results in the water literally vaporizing. And when that vapor bubble collapses, it emits sound, light and heat, and it's a very destructive process. And so here it is in the stomatopod. And again, this is a situation where engineers are very familiar with this phenomenon, because it destroys boat propellers. People have been struggling for years to try and design a very fast rotating boat propeller that doesn't cavitate and literally wear away the metal and put holes in it, just like these pictures show.So this is a potent force in fluid systems, and just to sort of take it one step further, I'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail. This is taken at 20,000 frames per second, and I have to give full credit to the BBC cameraman, Tim Green, for setting this shot up, because I could never have done this in a million years — one of the benefits of working with professional cameramen. You can see it coming in, and an incredible flash of light, and all this cavitation spreading over the surface of the snail. So really, just an amazing image, slowed down extremely, to extremely slow speeds. And again, we can see it in slightly different form there, with the bubble forming and collapsing between those two surfaces. In fact, you might have even seen some cavitation going up the edge of the limb.So to solve this quandary of the two force peaks: what I think was going on is: that first impact is actually the limb hitting the load cell, and the second impact is actually the collapse of the cavitation bubble. And these animals may very well be making use of not only the force and the energy stored with that specialized spring, but the extremes of the fluid dynamics. And they might actually be making use of fluid dynamics as a second force for breaking the snail. So, really fascinating double whammy, so to speak, from these animals.So, one question I often get after this talk — so I figured I'd answer it now — is, well, what happens to the animal? Because obviously, if it's breaking snails, the poor limb must be disintegrating. And indeed it does. That's the smashing part of the heel on both these images, and it gets worn away. In fact, I've seen them wear away their heel all the way to the flesh. But one of the convenient things about being an arthropod is that you have to molt. And every three months or so these animals molt, and they build a new limb and it's no problem. Very, very convenient solution to that particular problem.So, I'd like to end on sort of a wacky note.(Laughter)Maybe this is all wacky to folks like you, I don't know.(Laughter)So, the saddles — that saddle-shaped spring — has actually been well known to biologists for a long time, not as a spring but as a visual signal. And there's actually a spectacular colored dot in the center of the saddles of many species of stomatopods. And this is quite interesting, to find evolutionary origins of visual signals on what's really, in all species, their spring. And I think one explanation for this could be going back to the molting phenomenon.So these animals go into a molting period where they're unable to strike — their bodies become very soft. And they're literally unable to strike or they will self-destruct. This is for real. And what they do is, up until that time period when they can't strike, they become really obnoxious and awful, and they strike everything in sight; it doesn't matter who or what. And the second they get into that time point when they can't strike any more, they just signal. They wave their legs around. And it's one of the classic examples in animal behavior of bluffing. It's a well-established fact of these animals that they actually bluff. They can't actually strike, but they pretend to. And so I'm very curious about whether those colored dots in the center of the saddles are conveying some kind of information about their ability to strike, or their strike force, and something about the time period in the molting cycle. So sort of an interesting strange fact to find a visual structure right in the middle of their spring.So to conclude, I mostly want to acknowledge my two collaborators, Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell, who worked closely with me on this. And also the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, which gave me three years of funding to just do science all the time, and for that I'm very grateful. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheila_patek_clocks_the_fastest_animals
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"Okay.♫ Strolling along in Central Park ♫♫ Everyone's out today ♫♫ The daisies and dogwoods are all in bloom ♫♫ Oh, what a glorious day ♫♫ For picnics and Frisbees and roller skaters, ♫♫ Friends and lovers and lonely sunbathers ♫♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫(Laughter) (Applause)♫ I brought the iced tea; ♫♫ Did you bring the bug spray? ♫♫ The flies are the size of your head ♫♫ Next to the palm tree, ♫♫ Did you see the 'gators ♫♫ Looking happy and well fed? ♫♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫(Whistling)Everyone!(Whistling) (Laughter)♫ My preacher said, ♫♫ Don't you worry ♫♫ The scientists have it all wrong ♫♫ And so, who cares it's winter here? ♫♫ And I have my halter-top on ♫♫ I have my halter-top on ♫♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January. ♫(Applause)Chris Anderson: Jill Sobule!","https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_sobule_sings_to_al_gore
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"Thank you very much. Now, I've got a story for you. When I arrived off the plane, after a very long journey from the West of England, my computer, my beloved laptop, had gone mad, and had — oh! — a bit like that! — and the display on it — anyway, the whole thing had burst. And I went to the IT guys here and a gentleman mended my computer, and then he said, ""What are you doing here?"" and I said ""I'm playing the cello and I'm doing a bit of singing,"" and he said, ""Oh, I sort of play the cello as well."" And I said, ""Do you really?"" Anyway, so you're in for a treat, because he's fantastic, and his name's Mark.(Applause)I am also joined by my partner in crime, Thomas Dolby.(Applause)This song is called ""Farther than the Sun.""(Music)♫ Strung in the wind I called you ♫♫ but you did not hear ... ♫♫ And you're a plant that needs poor soil ♫♫ and I have treated you too well ♫♫ to give up flowers ... ♫♫ Oh, I have been too rich for you ... ♫♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ You are not worthy ... ♫♫ With your calculating eyes ♫♫ spinning figures ♫♫ you cannot see me ♫♫ You cannot see me ... ♫♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫♫ I'll believe it ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ The sea, it freezes over ... ♫♫ to trap the light ♫♫ And I'm in love with being in love ♫♫ and you were never quite the one ♫♫ In Gerda's eyes ♫♫ Fragments of what you've become ♫♫ And all the moths that fly at night ♫♫ believe electric light is bright ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ With your calculating eyes ♫♫ Spinning figures ♫♫ You cannot see me, no ♫♫ And if I tell myself enough ♫♫ I'll believe it ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ Farther than the sun from me ♫♫ Farther than I'd have you be ♫♫ And I go north, I get so cold ♫♫ My heart is lava under stone ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ You are not worthy ♫♫ With your calculating eyes ♫♫ Spinning figures ♫♫ You cannot see me, no ... ♫♫ And if I tell myself enough, I'll believe it ♫(Applause)Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/caroline_lavelle_casts_a_spell_on_cello
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"So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher.(Laughter)When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, ""I'm a professor,"" their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, ""philosophy"" — their eyes glaze over.(Laughter)When I go to a philosopher's party(Laughter)and they ask me what I work on and I say, ""consciousness,"" their eyes don't glaze over — their lips curl into a snarl.(Laughter)And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, ""That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness."" The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question.My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, ""Philosophical Explanations,"" is commenting on the ethos of philosophy — the way philosophers go about their business. And he says, you know, ""Philosophers love rational argument."" And he says, ""It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die. Their heads explode."" The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents. But in fact that doesn't change people's minds at all.It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games. They all have an idea for a video game, even if they're not experts. But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions. I'm sure that people here who work on, say, climate change and global warming, or on the future of the Internet, encounter people who have very strong opinions about what's going to happen next. But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise. They're just strongly held opinions. But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, ""I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this."" And so, you tell them your theory and they say, ""No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong."" And they say this with an amazing confidence.And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling — I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds — that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here.Now, this nice picture shows a thought-balloon, a thought-bubble. I think everybody understands what that means. That's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness. This is my favorite picture of consciousness that's ever been done. It's a Saul Steinberg of course — it was a New Yorker cover. And this fellow here is looking at the painting by Braque. That reminds him of the word baroque, barrack, bark, poodle, Suzanne R. — he's off to the races. There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man. What I particularly like about this picture, too, is that Steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style.Which reminds us, as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday: what we are, what each of us is — what you are, what I am — is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots. That's what we're made of. No other ingredients at all. We're just made of cells, about 100 trillion of them. Not a single one of those cells is conscious; not a single one of those cells knows who you are, or cares. Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells — not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them — the result is this. I mean, just look at it. The content — there's color, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history. And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons. How is that possible? Many people just think it isn't possible at all. They think, ""No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness.""This is a lovely book by a friend of mine named Lee Siegel, who's a professor of religion, actually, at the University of Hawaii, and he's an expert magician, and an expert on the street magic of India, which is what this book is about, ""Net of Magic."" And there's a passage in it which I would love to share with you. It speaks so eloquently to the problem. ""'I'm writing a book on magic,' I explain, and I'm asked, 'Real magic?' By 'real magic,' people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. 'No,' I answer. 'Conjuring tricks, not real magic.' 'Real magic,' in other words, refers to the magic that is not real; while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.""(Laughter)Now, that's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness.(Laughter)Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks. If you're going to explain this as a bag of tricks, then it's not real consciousness, whatever it is. And, as Marvin said, and as other people have said, ""Consciousness is a bag of tricks."" This means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness. So this is the problem. So I have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. How many of you here, if somebody — some smart aleck — starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears and say, ""No, no, I don't want to know! Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be mystified. Don't tell me the answer."" A lot of people feel that way about consciousness, I've discovered. And I'm sorry if I impose some clarity, some understanding on you. You'd better leave now if you don't want to know some of these tricks.But I'm not going to explain it all to you. I'm going to do what philosophers do. Here's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick. You know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick? The philosopher says, ""I'm going to explain to you how that's done. You see, the magician doesn't really saw the lady in half.""(Laughter)""He merely makes you think that he does."" And you say, ""Yes, and how does he do that?"" He says, ""Oh, that's not my department, I'm sorry.""(Laughter)So now I'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness. But I'm going to try to also show you that consciousness isn't quite as marvelous — your own consciousness isn't quite as wonderful — as you may have thought it is. This is something, by the way, that Lee Siegel talks about in his book. He marvels at how he'll do a magic show, and afterwards people will swear they saw him do X, Y, and Z. He never did those things. He didn't even try to do those things. People's memories inflate what they think they saw. And the same is true of consciousness.Now, let's see if this will work. All right. Let's just watch this. Watch it carefully. I'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named Nick Deamer, and this is a little demo that he's done for me, part of a larger project some of you may be interested in. We're looking for a backer. It's a feature-length documentary on consciousness. OK, now, you all saw what changed, right? How many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color? Every one. I'll just show you by running it again. Even when you know that they're all going to change color, it's very hard to notice. You have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all.Now, this is an example — one of many — of a phenomenon that's now being studied quite a bit. It's one that I predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book, ""Consciousness Explained,"" where I said if you did experiments of this sort, you'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes. If there's time at the end, I'll show you the much more dramatic case. Now, how can it be that there are all those changes going on, and that we're not aware of them? Well, earlier today, Jeff Hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades, the way your eye moves around three or four times a second. He didn't mention the speed. Your eye is constantly in motion, moving around, looking at eyes, noses, elbows, looking at interesting things in the world. And where your eye isn't looking, you're remarkably impoverished in your vision. That's because the foveal part of your eye, which is the high-resolution part, is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length. That's the detail part. It doesn't seem that way, does it? It doesn't seem that way, but that's the way it is. You're getting in a lot less information than you think.Here's a completely different effect. This is a painting by Bellotto. It's in the museum in North Carolina. Bellotto was a student of Canaletto's. And I love paintings like that — the painting is actually about as big as it is right here. And I love Canalettos, because Canaletto has this fantastic detail, and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting. And I started across the hall in North Carolina, because I thought it was probably a Canaletto, and would have all that in detail. And I noticed that on the bridge there, there's a lot of people — you can just barely see them walking across the bridge. And I thought as I got closer I would be able to see all the detail of most people, see their clothes, and so forth. And as I got closer and closer, I actually screamed. I yelled out because when I got closer, I found the detail wasn't there at all. There were just little artfully placed blobs of paint. And as I walked towards the picture, I was expecting detail that wasn't there. The artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things, and my brain had taken the suggestion.You're familiar with a more recent technology, which is — There, you can get a better view of the blobs. See, when you get close they're really just blobs of paint. You will have seen something like this — this is the reverse effect. I'll just give that to you one more time.Now, what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion? When an artful blob of paint or two, by an artist, suggests a person — say, one of Marvin Minsky's little society of mind — do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere? I don't think so. Not a chance. But then, how on Earth is it done? Well, remember the philosopher's explanation of the lady? It's the same thing. The brain just makes you think that it's got the detail there. You think the detail's there, but it isn't there. The brain isn't actually putting the detail in your head at all. It's just making you expect the detail.Let's just do this experiment very quickly. Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right, rotated? Yes. How many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind's eye, to see if it matched up with the one on the right? How many of you rotated the one on the right? OK. How do you know that's what you did?(Laughter)There's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science — various experiments started by Roger Shepherd, who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images. Yes, it's possible to do that. But the details of the process are still in significant controversy. And if you read that literature, one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you're the subject in the experiment, you don't know. You don't know how you do it. You just know that you have certain beliefs. And they come in a certain order, at a certain time. And what explains the fact that that's what you think? Well, that's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician.This is a figure that I love: Bradley, Petrie, and Dumais. You may think that I've cheated, that I've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there. How many of you see that sort of boundary, with the Necker cube floating in front of the circles? Can you see it? Well, you know, in effect, the boundary's really there, in a certain sense. Your brain is actually computing that boundary, the boundary that goes right there. But now, notice there are two ways of seeing the cube, right? It's a Necker cube. Everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube? OK. Can you see the four ways of seeing the cube? Because there's another way of seeing it. If you're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles, some black circles, there's another way of seeing it. As a cube, on a black background, as seen through a piece of Swiss cheese.(Laughter)Can you get it? How many of you can't get it? That'll help.(Laughter)Now you can get it. These are two very different phenomena. When you see the cube one way, behind the screen, those boundaries go away. But there's still a sort of filling in, as we can tell if we look at this. We don't have any trouble seeing the cube, but where does the color change? Does your brain have to send little painters in there? The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who's going to paint that bit behind the curtain? No. Your brain just lets it go. The brain doesn't need to fill that in. When I first started talking about the Bradley, Petrie, Dumais example that you just saw — I'll go back to it, this one — I said that there was no filling-in behind there. And I supposed that that was just a flat truth, always true. But Rob Van Lier has recently shown that it isn't.Now, if you think you see some pale yellow — I'll run this a few more times. Look in the gray areas, and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there — yeah, it's amazing. There's nothing there. It's no trick. [""Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes"" slide] This is Ron Rensink's work, which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book. Let me just pause this for a second if I can.This is change-blindness. What you're going to see is two pictures, one of which is slightly different from the other. You see here the red roof and the gray roof, and in between them there will be a mask, which is just a blank screen, for about a quarter of a second. So you'll see the first picture, then a mask, then the second picture, then a mask. And this will just continue, and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change. So, show the original picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. Show the next picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. And keep going, until the subject presses the button, saying, ""I see the change.""So now we're going to be subjects in the experiment. We're going to start easy. Some examples. No trouble there. Can everybody see? All right. Indeed, Rensink's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button. Can you see that one? 2.9 seconds. How many don't see it still? What's on the roof of that barn?(Laughter)It's easy. Is it a bridge or a dock? There are a few more really dramatic ones, and then I'll close. I want you to see a few that are particularly striking. This one because it's so large and yet it's pretty hard to see. Can you see it?Audience: Yes.Dan Dennett: See the shadows going back and forth? Pretty big. So 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there.I love this one. I'll end with this one, just because it's such an obvious and important thing. How many still don't see it? How many still don't see it? How many engines on the wing of that Boeing?(Laughter)Right in the middle of the picture! Thanks very much for your attention. What I wanted to show you is that scientists, using their from-the-outside, third-person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of, and that, in fact, you're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are. And we're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind.Jeff Hawkins, this morning, was describing his attempt to get theory, and a good, big theory, into the neuroscience. And he's right. This is a problem. Harvard Medical School once — I was at a talk — director of the lab said, ""In our lab, we have a saying. If you work on one neuron, that's neuroscience. If you work on two neurons, that's psychology.""(Laughter)We have to have more theory, and it can come as much from the top down.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness
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"I'm not quite sure whether I really want to see a snare drum at nine o'clock or so in the morning.(Laughter)But anyway, it's just great to see such a full theater, and really, I must thank Herbie Hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation.(Applause)One of the interesting things, of course, is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology, and what he said about listening to our young people.Of course, my job is all about listening. And my aim, really, is to teach the world to listen. That's my only real aim in life. And it sounds quite simple, but actually, it's quite a big, big job. Because you know, when you look at a piece of music, for example, if I just open my little motorbike bag — we have here, hopefully, a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page. And, you know, we open it up ... And I read the music. So technically, I can actually read this. I will follow the instructions, the tempo markings, the dynamics. I will do exactly as I'm told. And so therefore, because time is short, if I just played you, literally, the first, maybe, two lines or so — It's very straightforward; there's nothing too difficult about the piece. But here, I'm being told that the piece of music is very quick. I'm being told where to play on the drum. I'm being told which part of the stick to use. And I'm being told the dynamic. And I'm also being told that the drum is without snares. Snares on, snares off. So therefore, if I translate this piece of music, we have this idea.(Drum sounds)(Drum sounds end)And so on. My career would probably last about five years.(Laughter)However, what I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music; everything that there isn't time to learn from a teacher, or to talk about, even, from a teacher. But it's the things you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that, in fact, become so interesting, and that you want to explore through this tiny, tiny surface of a drum. So there, we experience the translation. Now we'll experience the interpretation.(Drum sounds)(Drum sounds end)(Applause)Now my career may last a little longer.(Laughter)But in a way, you know, it's the same if I look at you and I see a nice, bright young lady with a pink top on. I see that you're clutching a teddy bear, etc., etc. So I get a basic idea as to what you might be about, what you might like, what you might do as a profession, etc., etc. However, that's just the initial idea I may have that we all get when we actually look and we try to interpret. But actually it's so unbelievably shallow. In the same way, I look at the music; I get a basic idea; I wonder what technically might be hard, or, you know, what I want to do. Just the basic feeling.However, that is simply not enough. And I think what Herbie said: please listen, listen. We have to listen to ourselves, first of all. If I play, for example, holding the stick — where literally I do not let go of the stick —(Drum sound)you'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm. And you feel really quite — believe it or not — detached from the instrument and from the stick, even though I'm actually holding the stick quite tightly.(Drum sound)By holding it tightly, I feel strangely more detached. If I just simply let go and allow my hand, my arm, to be more of a support system, suddenly —(Drum sound)I have more dynamic with less effort. Much more —(Drum sound)and I just feel, at last, one with the stick and one with the drum. And I'm doing far, far less.So in the same way that I need time with this instrument, I need time with people in order to interpret them. Not just translate them, but interpret them. If, for example, I play just a few bars of a piece of music for which I think of myself as a technician — that is, someone who is basically a percussion player —(Marimba sounds)(Marimba sounds end)And so on, if I think of myself as a musician —(Marimba sounds)(Marimba sounds end)And so on. There is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just —(Applause)thinking about.And I remember when I was 12 years old, and I started playing timpani and percussion, and my teacher said, ""Well, how are we going to do this? You know, music is about listening."" And I said, ""Yes, I agree with that, so what's the problem?"" And he said, ""Well, how are you going to hear this? How are you going to hear that?"" And I said, ""Well, how do you hear it?"" He said, ""Well, I think I hear it through here."" And I said, ""Well, I think I do too, but I also hear it through my hands, through my arms, cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs and so on.""And so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums, in particular, the kettle drums, or timpani to such a narrow pitch interval, so something like —(Marimba sounds)that of a difference. Then gradually:(Marimba sounds)And gradually:(Marimba sounds)And it's amazing that when you do open your body up, and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through, that in fact the tiny, tiny difference —(Marimba sounds)can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger, there.And so what we would do is that I would put my hands on the wall of the music room, and together, we would ""listen"" to the sounds of the instruments, and really try to connect with those sounds far, far more broadly than simply depending on the ear. Because of course, the ear is subject to all sorts of things. The room we happen to be in, the amplification, the quality of the instrument, the type of sticks —(Marimba sounds)(Marimba sounds end)Etc., etc., they're all different.(Marimba sounds)(Marimba sounds end)Same amount of weight, but different sound colors. And that's basically what we are; we're just human beings, but we all have our own little sound colors, as it were, that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things.And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, ""Well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue, you know, of the future of a so-called 'deaf musician.'"" And I just couldn't quite accept that. And so therefore, I said to them, ""Well, look, if you refuse — if you refuse me through those reasons, as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound — then we have to think very, very hard about the people you do actually accept."" And as a result, once we got over a little hurdle, and having to audition twice, they accepted me. And not only that, what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the United Kingdom.Under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms, no legs — they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand. No circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry. And every single entry had to be listened to, experienced, and then, based on the musical ability, then that person could either enter or not. And so therefore, this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions, and I have to say, many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world. The interesting thing about this as well, though —(Applause)is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound — which is basically all of us — we well know that music really is our daily medicine.I say ""music,"" but actually I mean ""sound."" Because some of the extraordinary things I've experienced as a musician — when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges, who may not be able to control his movements, who may be deaf, who may be blind, etc., etc. — suddenly, if that young lad sits close to this instrument, and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba, and you play something that's so incredibly organ-like, almost — I don't really have the right sticks, perhaps — but something like this — let me change —(Soft marimba sounds)(Soft marimba sounds end)Something that's so unbelievably simple — but he would be experiencing something that I wouldn't be, because I'm on top of the sound. I have the sound coming this way. He would have the sound coming through the resonators. If there were no resonators on here, we would have:(Marimba sounds)So he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows wouldn't experience, those of you in the back few rows wouldn't experience, either. Every single one of us, depending on where we're sitting, will experience this sound quite, quite differently. And of course, being the participator of the sound, and that is, starting from the idea of what type of sound I want to produce, for example, this sound:(No sound)Can you hear anything? Exactly — because I'm not even touching it.(Laughter)But yet, we get the sensation of something happening. In the same way that when I see a tree moves, then I imagine that tree making a rustling sound. Do you see what I mean? Whatever the eye sees, then there's always sound happening. So there's always, always that huge — I mean, just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from.So all of my performances are based on entirely what I experience, and not by learning a piece of music, putting on someone else's interpretation of it, buying all the CDs possible of that particular piece of music, and so on and so forth, because that isn't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic, and something that I can fully experience the journey of. So it may be that, in certain halls, this dynamic may well work.(Soft marimba sounds)(Soft marimba sounds end)It may be that in other halls, they're simply not going to experience that at all, and so therefore, my level of soft, gentle playing may have to be —(Marimba sounds)(Marimba sounds end)Do you see what I mean? So, because of this explosion in access to sound, especially through the Deaf community, this has not only affected how music institutions, how schools for the deaf treat sound, and not just as a means of therapy — although, of course, being a participator of music, that definitely is the case as well — but it's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together. There are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics, dare I say. But by that I mean, where you can absolutely do anything you imagine. The tiniest, softest, softest sound to something that is so broad, so huge, so incredible. There's always something: it may sound good up there, may not be so good there; it may be great there, but terrible up there; maybe terrible over there, but not too bad there, etc., etc.So to find an actual hall is incredible — for which you can play exactly what you imagine, without it being cosmetically enhanced. So therefore, acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired, and who are participators of sound. And this is quite interesting. I cannot give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls, but it's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years, we've been saying, ""Well, how on earth can they experience music? They're deaf."" We go like that, and we imagine that's what deafness is about. Or we go like that, and we imagine that's what blindness is about. If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk. In a year's time, it could be two extra steps. In another year's time, three extra steps.Those are hugely important aspects to think about. So when we do listen to each other, it's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills, to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber, to stop the judgment. For me, as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music, it's very easy for me to say, ""Oh yes, I like that piece. No, I don't like that piece,"" and so on. And I just find that I have to give those pieces of music real time. It may be that the chemistry isn't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music, but that doesn't mean I have the right to say it's a bad piece of music. And you know, one of the great things about being a musician is that it is so unbelievably fluid. So there are no rules, no right, no wrong, this way, that way.If I asked you to clap — maybe I can do this. If I can just say, ""Please clap and create the sound of thunder."" I'm assuming we've all experienced thunder. Now, I don't mean just the sound; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves. And please try to create that through your clapping. Try, just — please try.(Loud clapping sounds)(Clapping ends)Snow.(Laughter)Snow.(Soft clapping sounds)Have you ever heard snow?Audience: No.Evelyn Glennie: Well, then, stop clapping.(Laughter)Try again. Try again: snow.(No sound)See, you're awake.Rain.(Light clapping sounds)EG: (Laughs)Not bad. Not bad. The interesting thing here, though, is that I asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question. Now — great imagination, thank you very much. However, not one of you got out of your seats to think, ""Right! How can I clap? OK, maybe:(Clapping sounds)Maybe I can use my jewelry to create extra sounds. Maybe I can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds."" Not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands. In the same way, when we listen to music, we assume that it's all being fed through here. This is how we experience music. Of course, it's not.We experience thunder, thunder, thunder. Think, think, think. Listen, listen, listen. Now, what can we do with thunder? I remember my teacher, when I first started, my very first lesson, I was all prepared with sticks, ready to go. And instead of him saying, ""OK, Evelyn, please, feet slightly apart, arms at a more or less 90-degree angle, sticks in a more or less V shape, keep this amount of space here, etc. Please keep your back straight, etc., etc., etc."" — where I was just probably going to end up absolutely rigid, frozen, and I would not be able to strike the drum because I was thinking of so many other things, he said, ""Evelyn, take this drum away for seven days, and I'll see you next week.""So — heavens! What was I to do? I no longer required the sticks. I wasn't allowed to have these sticks. I had to basically look at this particular drum, see how it was made, what these little lugs did, what the snares did. Turned it upside down, experimented with the shell.(Drum sounds)Experimented with the head.(Drum sounds)Experimented with my body.(Drum sounds)Experimented with jewelry. Experimented with all sorts of things.(Drum sounds)(Drum sounds end)And of course, I returned with all sorts of bruises.(Laughter)But nevertheless, it was such an unbelievable experience, because where on earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music? Where on earth are you going to experience that in a study book? So we never, ever dealt with actual study books. So for example, one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player as opposed to a musician, is basically, straightforward single-stroke rolls.(Drum sounds)Like that, and then we get a little faster —(Drum sounds)and a little faster —(Drum sounds)and a little faster, and so on and so forth. What does this piece require? Single-stroke rolls.(Drum sound)So why can't I then do that whilst learning a piece of music? And that's exactly what he did. And interestingly, the older I became, and when I became a full-time student at a so-called ""music institution,"" all of that went out of the window. We had to study from study books. And constantly, the question, ""Well, why? Why? What is this relating to? I need to play a piece of music."" ""Well, this will help your control."" ""Well, how? Why do I need to learn that? I need to relate it to a piece of music. You know, I need to say something.Why am I practicing paradiddles?(Drum sounds)Is it just literally for control, for hand-stick control? Why am I doing that? I need to have the reason, and the reason has to be by saying something through the music."" And by saying something through music, which basically is sound, we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people. But I don't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage. That's up to you, when you walk through a hall, because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things. I may feel sorrowful, or happy, or exhilarated, or angry when I play certain pieces of music, but I'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing. So please, the next time you go to a concert, just allow your body to open up, allow your body to be this resonating chamber. Be aware that you're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is.The performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound, because they're hearing the contact of the stick —(Drum sound)on the drum, or the mallet on the bit of wood, or the bow on the string, etc., or the breath that's creating the sound from wind and brass. They're experiencing that rawness there. But yet they're experiencing something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound is actually happening. Please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike, or breath, is being pulled. Just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that I wished I'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference, rather than just arriving last night. But I hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses. But thank you very much for having me!(Applause)(Applause ends)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen
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"In 1962, with Rachel Carson's ""Silent Spring,"" I think for people like me in the world of the making of things, the canary in the mine wasn't singing. And so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared. And the question was, were the birds singing? Now, I'm not a scientist, that'll be really clear. But, you know, we've just come from this discussion of what a bird might be. What is a bird? Well, in my world, this is a rubber duck. It comes in California with a warning — ""This product contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."" This is a bird. What kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children? I think we have a design problem.Someone heard the six hours of talk that I gave called ""The Monticello Dialogues"" on NPR, and sent me this as a thank you note — ""We realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence, and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we, in a way, need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet, and I think the exciting part of that is the good news that's there, because the news is the news of abundance, and not the news of limits, and I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share."" That was a nice thing to get. That was one sentence. Henry James would be proud. This is — I put it down at the bottom, but that was extemporaneous, obviously.The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions. So what are our intentions, and what would our intentions be — if we wake up in the morning, we have designs on the world — well, what would our intention be as a species now that we're the dominant species? And it's not just stewardship and dominion debate, because really, dominion is implicit in stewardship — because how could you dominate something you had killed? And stewardship's implicit in dominion, because you can't be steward of something if you can't dominate it.So the question is, what is the first question for designers? Now, as guardians — let's say the state, for example, which reserves the right to kill, the right to be duplicitous and so on — the question we're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant, how are we meant, to secure local societies, create world peace and save the environment? But I don't know that that's the common debate.Commerce, on the other hand, is relatively quick, essentially creative, highly effective and efficient, and fundamentally honest, because we can't exchange value for very long if we don't trust each other. So we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work, but the question we bring to it is, how do we love all the children of all species for all time? And so we start our designs with that question. Because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, ""Well, I didn't intend to cause global warming on the way here,"" and we say, ""That's not part of my plan,"" then we realize it's part of our de facto plan. Because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan.And I was at the White House for President Bush, meeting with every federal department and agency, and I pointed out that they appear to have no plan. If the end game is global warming, they're doing great. If the end game is mercury toxification of our children downwind of coal fire plants as they scuttled the Clean Air Act, then I see that our education programs should be explicitly defined as, ""Brain death for all children. No child left behind.""(Applause)So, the question is, how many federal officials are ready to move to Ohio and Pennsylvania with their families? So if you don't have an endgame of something delightful, then you're just moving chess pieces around, if you don't know you're taking the king. So perhaps we could develop a strategy of change, which requires humility. And in my business as an architect, it's unfortunate the word ""humility"" and the word ""architect"" have not appeared in the same paragraph since ""The Fountainhead."" So if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this — it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. So, as Kevin Kelly pointed out, there is no endgame. There is an infinite game, and we're playing in that infinite game. And so we call it ""cradle to cradle,"" and our goal is very simple.This is what I presented to the White House. Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, clean water, soil and power — economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed, period.(Applause)What don't you like about this? Which part of this don't you like? So we realized we want full diversity, even though it can be difficult to remember what De Gaulle said when asked what it was like to be President of France. He said, ""What do you think it's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese?"" But at the same time, we realize that our products are not safe and healthy.So we've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million. This is a baby blanket by Pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of Alzheimer's later in life. We can ask ourselves, what is justice, and is justice blind, or is justice blindness? And at what point did that uniform turn from white to black? Water has been declared a human right by the United Nations. Air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes. Is there anybody here who doesn't breathe? Clean soil is a critical problem — the nitrification, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. A fundamental issue that's not being addressed. We've seen the first form of solar energy that's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the Great Plains, and so that hegemony is leaving. And if we remember Sheikh Yamani when he formed OPEC, they asked him, ""When will we see the end of the age of oil?"" I don't know if you remember his answer, but it was, ""The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones."" We see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that don't. We see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect. This is a hospital monitor from Los Angeles, sent to China. This woman will expose herself to toxic phosphorous, release four pounds of toxic lead into her childrens' environment, which is from copper.On the other hand, we see great signs of hope. Here's Dr. Venkataswamy in India, who's figured out how to do mass-produced health. He has given eyesight to two million people for free. We see in our material flows that car steels don't become car steel again because of the contaminants of the coatings — bismuth, antimony, copper and so on. They become building steel. On the other hand, we're working with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Shaw Carpet, the largest carpet company in the world. We've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable, down to the parts per million. The upper is Nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam, the bottom, a polyolephine — infinitely recyclable thermoplastic. Now if I was a bird, the building on my left is a liability. The building on my right, which is our corporate campus for The Gap with an ancient meadow, is an asset — its nesting grounds.Here's where I come from. I grew up in Hong Kong, with six million people in 40 square miles. During the dry season, we had four hours of water every fourth day. And the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries. You can't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow. My childhood summers were in the Puget Sound of Washington, among the first growth and big growth. My grandfather had been a lumberjack in the Olympics, so I have a lot of tree karma I am working off. I went to Yale for graduate school, studied in a building of this style by Le Corbusier, affectionately known in our business as Brutalism. If we look at the world of architecture, we see with Mies' 1928 tower for Berlin, the question might be, ""Well, where's the sun?"" And this might have worked in Berlin, but we built it in Houston, and the windows are all closed. And with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use, this is actually a vertical gas chamber.When I went to Yale, we had the first energy crisis, and I was designing the first solar-heated house in Ireland as a student, which I then built — which would give you a sense of my ambition. And Richard Meier, who was one of my teachers, kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism, and he would say, ""Bill, you've got to understand- — solar energy has nothing to do with architecture."" I guess he didn't read Vitruvius. In 1984, we did the first so-called ""green office"" in America for Environmental Defense. We started asking manufacturers what were in their materials. They said, ""They're proprietary, they're legal, go away."" The only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace.So, all of a sudden, here I am, graduating from high school in 1969, and this happens, and we realize that ""away"" went away. Remember we used to throw things away, and we'd point to away? And yet, NOAA has now shown us, for example — you see that little blue thing above Hawaii? That's the Pacific Gyre. It was recently dragged for plankton by scientists, and they found six times as much plastic as plankton. When asked, they said, ""It's kind of like a giant toilet that doesn't flush."" Perhaps that's away. So we're looking for the design rules of this — this is the highest biodiversity of trees in the world, Irian Jaya, 259 species of tree, and we described this in the book, ""Cradle to Cradle."" The book itself is a polymer. It is not a tree. That's the name of the first chapter — ""This Book is Not a Tree."" Because in poetics, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, ""we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears."" And with so much polymer, what we really need is technical nutrition, and to use something as elegant as a tree — imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, why don't we knock that down and write on it?(Laughter)So, we're looking at the same criteria as most people — you know, can I afford it? Does it work? Do I like it? We're adding the Jeffersonian agenda, and I come from Charlottesville, where I've had the privilege of living in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson. We're adding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now if we look at the word ""competition,"" I'm sure most of you've used it. You know, most people don't realize it comes from the Latin competere, which means strive together. It means the way Olympic athletes train with each other. They get fit together, and then they compete. The Williams sisters compete — one wins Wimbledon. So we've been looking at the idea of competition as a way of cooperating in order to get fit together. And the Chinese government has now — I work with the Chinese government now — has taken this up. We're also looking at survival of the fittest, not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground, but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good.Now most environmentalists don't say growth is good, because, in our lexicon, asphalt is two words: assigning blame. But if we look at asphalt as our growth, then we realize that all we're doing is destroying the planetary's fundamental underlying operating system. So when we see E equals mc squared come along, from a poet's perspective, we see energy as physics, chemistry as mass, and all of a sudden, you get this biology. And we have plenty of energy, so we'll solve that problem, but the biology problem's tricky, because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge, we will never be able to recover that. And as Francis Crick pointed out, nine years after discovering DNA with Mr. Watson, that life itself has to have growth as a precondition — it has to have free energy, sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals. So we're asking for human artifice to become a living thing, and we want growth, we want free energy from sunlight and we want an open metabolism for chemicals. Then, the question becomes not growth or no growth, but what do you want to grow? So instead of just growing destruction, we want to grow the things that we might enjoy, and someday the FDA will allow us to make French cheese.So therefore, we have these two metabolisms, and I worked with a German chemist, Michael Braungart, and we've identified the two fundamental metabolisms. The biological one I'm sure you understand, but also the technical one, where we take materials and put them into closed cycles. We call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition. Technical nutrition will be in an order of magnitude of biological nutrition. Biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans, which means that if we all wore Birkenstocks and cotton, the world would run out of cork and dry up. So we need materials in closed cycles, but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, disruption of our immune systems, biodegradation, persistence, heavy metal content, knowledge of how we're making them and their production and so on.Our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry. Using those intellectual filters, we eliminated [7,962.] We were left with 38 chemicals. We have since databased the 4000 most commonly used chemicals in human manufacturing, and we're releasing this database into the public in six weeks. So designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health.(Applause)We've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains, because when we asked most companies we work with — about a trillion dollars — and say, ""Where does your stuff come from?"" They say, ""Suppliers."" ""And where does it go?"" ""Customers."" So we need some help there.So the biological nutrients, the first fabrics — the water coming out was clean enough to drink. Technical nutrients — this is for Shaw Carpet, infinitely reusable carpet. Here's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet. Biotechnical nutrients — the Model U for Ford Motor, a cradle to cradle car — concept car. Shoes for Nike, where the uppers are polyesters, infinitely recyclable, the bottoms are biodegradable soles. Wear your old shoes in, your new shoes out. There is no finish line. The idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever, some of the materials go back to soil — it's all solar-powered.Here's a building at Oberlin College we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water. Here's a building for The Gap, where the ancient grasses of San Bruno, California, are on the roof.And this is our project for Ford Motor Company. It's the revitalization of the River Rouge in Dearborn. This is obviously a color photograph. These are our tools. These are how we sold it to Ford. We saved Ford 35 million dollars doing it this way, day one, which is the equivalent of the Ford Taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars. Here it is. It's the world's largest green roof, 10 and a half acres. This is the roof, saving money, and this is the first species to arrive here. These are killdeer. They showed up in five days. And we now have 350-pound auto workers learning bird songs on the Internet. We're developing now protocols for cities — that's the home of technical nutrients. The country — the home of biological. And putting them together.And so I will finish by showing you a new city we're designing for the Chinese government. We're doing 12 cities for China right now, based on cradle to cradle as templates. Our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years. We did a mass energy balance — if they use brick, they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal. They'll have cities with no energy and no food. We signed a Memorandum of Understanding — here's Madam Deng Nan, Deng Xiaoping's daughter — for China to adopt cradle to cradle. Because if they toxify themselves, being the lowest-cost producer, send it to the lowest-cost distribution — Wal-Mart — and then we send them all our money, what we'll discover is that we have what, effectively, when I was a student, was called mutually assured destruction.Now we do it by molecule. These are our cities. We're building a new city next to this city; look at that landscape. This is the site. We don't normally do green fields, but this one is about to be built, so they brought us in to intercede. This is their plan. It's a rubber stamp grid that they laid right on that landscape. And they brought us in and said, ""What would you do?"" This is what they would end up with, which is another color photograph. So this is the existing site, so this is what it looks like now, and here's our proposal.(Applause)So the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully. We studied the biota, the ancient biota, the current farming and the protocols. We studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air, fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day. We then take the parks and lay them out as ecological infrastructure. We lay out the building areas. We start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be. The transportation is all very simple, everybody's within a five-minute walk of mobility. We have a 24-hour street, so that there's always a place that's alive. The waste systems all connect. If you flush a toilet, your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants, which are sold as assets, not liabilities. Because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas? The waters are all taken in to construct the wetlands for habitat restorations. And then it makes natural gas, which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city. So this is — these are fertilizer gas plants. And then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city, where we've got farming, because what we've done is lifted up the city, the landscape, into the air to — to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings. The solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city.And this is the concept for the top of the city. We've lifted the earth up onto the roofs. The farmers have little bridges to get from one roof to the next. We inhabit the city with work/live space on all the ground floors. And so this is the existing city, and this is the new city.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_mcdonough_on_cradle_to_cradle_design
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"When you think about resilience and technology it's actually much easier. You're going to see some other speakers today, I already know, who are going to talk about breaking-bones stuff, and, of course, with technology it never is. So it's very easy, comparatively speaking, to be resilient. I think that, if we look at what happened on the Internet, with such an incredible last half a dozen years, that it's hard to even get the right analogy for it. A lot of how we decide, how we're supposed to react to things and what we're supposed to expect about the future depends on how we bucket things and how we categorize them.And so I think the tempting analogy for the boom-bust that we just went through with the Internet is a gold rush. It's easy to think of this analogy as very different from some of the other things you might pick. For one thing, both were very real. In 1849, in that Gold Rush, they took over $700 million worth of gold out of California. It was very real. The Internet was also very real. This is a real way for humans to communicate with each other. It's a big deal. Huge boom. Huge boom. Huge bust. Huge bust. You keep going, and both things are lots of hype. I don't have to remind you of all the hype that was involved with the Internet — like GetRich.com.But you had the same thing with the Gold Rush. ""Gold. Gold. Gold."" Sixty-eight rich men on the Steamer Portland. Stacks of yellow metal. Some have 5,000. Many have more. A few bring out 100,000 dollars each. People would get very excited about this when they read these articles. ""The Eldorado of the United States of America: the discovery of inexhaustible gold mines in California."" And the parallels between the Gold Rush and the Internet Rush continue very strongly. So many people left what they were doing. And what would happen is — and the Gold Rush went on for years.People on the East Coast in 1849, when they first started to get the news, they thought, ""Ah, this isn't real."" But they keep hearing about people getting rich, and then in 1850 they still hear that. And they think it's not real. By about 1852, they're thinking, ""Am I the stupidest person on Earth by not rushing to California?"" And they start to decide they are. These are community affairs, by the way. Local communities on the East Coast would get together and whole teams of 10, 20 people would caravan across the United States, and they would form companies. These were typically not solitary efforts. But no matter what, if you were a lawyer or a banker, people dropped what they were doing, no matter what skill set they had, to go pan for gold.This guy on the left, Dr. Richard Beverley Cole, he lived in Philadelphia and he took the Panama route. They would take a ship down to Panama, across the isthmus, and then take another ship north. This guy, Dr. Toland, went by covered wagon to California. This has its parallels, too. Doctors leaving their practices. These are both very successful — a physician in one case, a surgeon in the other. Same thing happened on the Internet. You get DrKoop.com.(Laughter)In the Gold Rush, people literally jumped ship. The San Francisco harbor was clogged with 600 ships at the peak because the ships would get there and the crews would abandon to go search for gold. So there were literally 600 captains and 600 ships. They turned the ships into hotels, because they couldn't sail them anywhere. You had dotcom fever. And you had gold fever. And you saw some of the excesses that the dotcom fever created and the same thing happened. The fort in San Francisco at the time had about 1,300 soldiers. Half of them deserted to go look for gold. And they wouldn't let the other half out to go look for the first half because they were afraid they wouldn't come back.(Laughter)And one of the soldiers wrote home, and this is the sentence that he put: ""The struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and 75 dollars a day is a rather severe one."" They had bad burn rate in the Gold Rush. A very bad burn rate. This is actually from the Klondike Gold Rush. This is the White Pass Trail. They loaded up their mules and their horses. And they didn't plan right. And they didn't know how far they would really have to go, and they overloaded the horses with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of stuff. In fact it was so bad that most of the horses died before they could get where they were going. It got renamed the ""Dead Horse Trail.""And the Canadian Minister of the Interior wrote this at the time: ""Thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under the cliffs, with pack saddles and packs where they've fallen from the rock above, sometimes in tangled masses, filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march, often, I regret to say, exhausted, but still alive, a fact we were unaware of, until after the miserable wretches turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade. The eyeless sockets of the pack animals everywhere account for the myriads of ravens along the road. The inhumanity which this trail has been witness to, the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone, cannot be imagined. They certainly cannot be described.""And you know, without the smell that would have accompanied that, we had the same thing on the Internet: very bad burn rate calculations. I'll just play one of these and you'll remember it. This is a commercial that was played on the Super Bowl in the year 2000.(Video): Bride #1: You said you had a large selection of invitations. Clerk: But we do. Bride #2: Then why does she have my invitation? Announcer: What may be a little thing to some ... Bride #3: You are mine, little man. Announcer: Could be a really big deal to you. Husband #1: Is that your wife? Husband #2: Not for another 15 minutes. Announcer: After all, it's your special day. OurBeginning.com. Life's an event. Announce it to the world.Jeff Bezos: It's very difficult to figure out what that ad is for.(Laughter)But they spent three and a half million dollars in the 2000 Super Bowl to air that ad, even though, at the time, they only had a million dollars in annual revenue. Now, here's where our analogy with the Gold Rush starts to diverge, and I think rather severely. And that is, in a gold rush, when it's over, it's over. Here's this guy: ""There are many men in Dawson at the present time who feel keenly disappointed. They've come thousands of miles on a perilous trip, risked life, health and property, spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them.""And that was, of course, the very common story. Because when you take out that last piece of gold — and they did incredibly quickly. I mean, if you look at the 1849 Gold Rush — the entire American river region, within two years — every stone had been turned. And after that, only big companies who used more sophisticated mining technologies started to take gold out of there. So there's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic and that analogy is the electric industry. And there are a lot of similarities between the Internet and the electric industry. With the electric industry you actually have to — one of them is that they're both sort of thin, horizontal, enabling layers that go across lots of different industries. It's not a specific thing.But electricity is also very, very broad, so you have to sort of narrow it down. You know, it can be used as an incredible means of transmitting power. It's an incredible means of coordinating, in a very fine-grained way, information flows. There's a bunch of things that are interesting about electricity. And the part of the electric revolution that I want to focus on is sort of the golden age of appliances. The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about — they weren't putting electricity into the home; they were putting lighting into the home. And, but it really — it got the electricity. It took a long time.This was a huge — as you would expect — a huge capital build out. All the streets had to be torn up. This is work going on down in lower Manhattan where they built some of the first electric power generating stations. And they're tearing up all the streets. The Edison Electric Company, which became Edison General Electric, which became General Electric, paid for all of this digging up of the streets. It was incredibly expensive. But that is not the — and that's not the part that's really most similar to the Web. Because, remember, the Web got to stand on top of all this heavy infrastructure that had been put in place because of the long-distance phone network. So all of the cabling and all of the heavy infrastructure — I'm going back now to, sort of, the explosive part of the Web in 1994, when it was growing 2,300 percent a year. How could it grow at 2,300 percent a year in 1994 when people weren't really investing in the Web? Well, it was because that heavy infrastructure had already been laid down.So the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure, and then home appliances started coming into being. And this was huge. The first one was the electric fan — this was the 1890 electric fan. And the appliances, the golden age of appliances really lasted — it depends how you want to measure it — but it's anywhere from 40 to 60 years. It goes on a long time. It starts about 1890. And the electric fan was a big success. The electric iron, also very big. By the way, this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit.(Laughter)There's asbestos under that handle there. This is the first vacuum cleaner, the 1905 Skinner Vacuum, from the Hoover Company. And this one weighed 92 pounds and took two people to operate and cost a quarter of a car. So it wasn't a big seller. This was truly, truly an early-adopter product — (Laughter) the 1905 Skinner Vacuum. But three years later, by 1908, it weighed 40 pounds. Now, not all these things were highly successful.(Laughter)This is the electric tie press, which never really did catch on. People, I guess, decided that they would not wrinkle their ties. These never really caught on either: the electric shoe warmer and drier. Never a big seller. This came in, like, six different colors.(Laughter)I don't know why. But I thought, you know, sometimes it's just not the right time for an invention; maybe it's time to give this one another shot. So I thought we could build a Super Bowl ad for this. We'd need the right partner. And I thought that really — (Laughter) I thought that would really work, to give that another shot. Now, the toaster was huge because they used to make toast on open fires, and it took a lot of time and attention. I want to point out one thing. This is — you guys know what this is. They hadn't invented the electric socket yet. So this was — remember, they didn't wire the houses for electricity. They wired them for lighting. So your — your appliances would plug in. They would — each room typically had a light bulb socket at the top. And you'd plug it in there.In fact, if you've seen the Carousel of Progress at Disney World, you've seen this. Here are the cables coming up into this light fixture. All the appliances plug in there. And you would just unscrew your light bulb if you wanted to plug in an appliance. The next thing that really was a big, big deal was the washing machine. Now, this was an object of much envy and lust. Everybody wanted one of these electric washing machines. On the left-hand side, this was the soapy water. And there's a rotor there — that this motor is spinning. And it would clean your clothes. This is the clean rinse-water. So you'd take the clothes out of here, put them in here, and then you'd run the clothes through this electric wringer. And this was a big deal. You'd keep this on your porch. It was a little bit messy and kind of a pain. And you'd run a long cord into the house where you could screw it into your light socket.(Laughter)And that's actually kind of an important point in my presentation, because they hadn't invented the off switch. That was to come much later — the off switch on appliances — because it didn't make any sense. I mean, you didn't want this thing clogging up a light socket. So you know, when you were done with it, you unscrewed it. That's what you did. You didn't turn it off. And as I said before, they hadn't invented the electric outlet either, so the washing machine was a particularly dangerous device. And there are — when you research this, there are gruesome descriptions of people getting their hair and clothes caught in these devices. And they couldn't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house.(Laughter) And there was no off switch, so it wasn't very good. And you might think that that was incredibly stupid of our ancestors to be plugging things into a light socket like this. But, you know, before I get too far into condemning our ancestors, I thought I'd show you: this is my conference room. This is a total kludge, if you ask me. First of all, this got installed upside down. This light socket — (Laughter) and so the cord keeps falling out, so I taped it in.(Laughter)This is supposed — don't even get me started. But that's not the worst one. This is what it looks like under my desk. I took this picture just two days ago. So we really haven't progressed that much since 1908.(Laughter)It's a total, total mess. And, you know, we think it's getting better, but have you tried to install 802.11 yourself?(Laughter)I challenge you to try. It's very hard. I know Ph.D.s in Computer Science — this process has brought them to tears, absolute tears. (Laughter) And that's assuming you already have DSL in your house. Try to get DSL installed in your house. The engineers who do it everyday can't do it. They have to — typically, they come three times. And one friend of mine was telling me a story: not only did they get there and have to wait, but then the engineers, when they finally did get there, for the third time, they had to call somebody. And they were really happy that the guy had a speakerphone because then they had to wait on hold for an hour to talk to somebody to give them an access code after they got there. So we're not — we're pretty kludge-y ourselves.By the way, DSL is a kludge. I mean, this is a twisted pair of copper that was never designed for the purpose it's being put to — you know it's the whole thing — we're very, very primitive. And that's kind of the point. Because, you know, resilience — if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.And if you believe that, then you believe that where we are — this is what I think — I believe that where we are with the incredible kludge — and I haven't even talked about user interfaces on the Web — but there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff — we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.And if you believe that, then stuff like this doesn't bother you. This is 1996: ""All the negatives add up to making the online experience not worth the trouble."" 1998: ""Amazon.toast."" In 1999: ""Amazon.bomb."" My mom hates this picture.(Laughter)She — but you know, if you really do believe that it's the very, very beginning, if you believe it's the 1908 Hurley washing machine, then you're incredibly optimistic. And I do think that that's where we are. And I do think there's more innovation ahead of us than there is behind us. And in 1917, Sears — I want to get this exactly right. This was the advertisement that they ran in 1917. It says: ""Use your electricity for more than light."" And I think that's where we are. We're very, very early. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_on_the_next_web_innovation
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"Mockingbirds are badass.(Laughter) They are. Mockingbirds — that's Mimus polyglottos — are the emcees of the animal kingdom.They listen and mimic and remix what they like. They rock the mic outside my window every morning. I can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring. I mean, if you can talk it, a mockingbird can squawk it. So check it, I'm gonna to catch mockingbirds. I'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird Molotov cocktails.(Laughter)Yeah. And as I drive through a neighborhood, say, where people got-a-lotta, I'll take a mockingbird I caught in a neighborhood where folks ain't got nada and just let it go, you know. Up goes the bird, out come the words, ""Juanito, Juanito, vente a comer mi hijo!"" Oh, I'm going to be the Johnny Appleseed of sound.(Laughter)Cruising random city streets, rocking a drop-top Cadillac with a big backseat, packing like 13 brown paper Walmart bags full of loaded mockingbirds, and I'll get everybody.(Laughter)I'll get the nitwit on the network news saying, ""We'll be back in a moment with more on the crisis."" I'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the ice is. I'll get that lady at the laundromat who always seems to know what being nice is. I'll get your postman making dinner plans. I'll get the last time you lied. I'll get, ""Baby, just give me the frickin' TV guide."" I'll get a lonely, little sentence with real error in it, ""Yeah, I guess I could come inside, but only for a minute.""(Laughter)I'll get an ESL class in Chinatown learning ""It's Raining, It's Pouring."" I'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring. I'll get your ex-lover telling someone else, ""Good morning."" I'll get everyone's good mornings. I don't care how you make 'em. Aloha. Konichiwa. Shalom. Ah-Salam Alaikum. Everybody means everybody, means everybody here. And so maybe I'll build a gilded cage. I'll line the bottom with old notebook pages. Inside it, I will place a mockingbird for — short explanation, hippie parents.(Laughter)What does a violin have to do with technology? Where in the world is this world heading? On one end, gold bars — on the other, an entire planet. We are 12 billion light years from the edge. That's a guess. Space is length and breadth continued indefinitely, but you cannot buy a ticket to travel commercially to space in America because countries are beginning to eat like us, live like us and die like us. You might wanna avert your gaze, because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb, and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing. There's about 10 million phage per job. It's a very strange world inside a nanotube. Women can talk; black men ski; white men build strong buildings; we build strong suns. The surface of the Earth is absolutely riddled with holes, and here we are, right in the middle.(Laughter)It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn. When all the little mockingbirds fly away, they're going to sound like the last four days. I will get uptown gurus, downtown teachers, broke-ass artists and dealers, and Filipino preachers, leaf blowers, bartenders, boob-job doctors, hooligans, garbage men, your local Congressmen in the spotlight, guys in the overhead helicopters. Everybody gets heard. Everybody gets this one, honest mockingbird as a witness. And I'm on this. I'm on this 'til the whole thing spreads, with chat rooms and copycats and moms maybe tucking kids into bed singing, ""Hush, little baby, don't say a word. Wait for the man with the mockingbird.""(Laughter)Yeah. And then come the news crews, and the man-in-the-street interviews, and the letters to the editor. Everybody asking, just who is responsible for this citywide, nationwide mockingbird cacophony, and somebody finally is going to tip the City Council of Monterey, California off to me, and they'll offer me a key to the city. A gold-plated, oversized key to the city and that is all I need, 'cause if I get that, I can unlock the air. I'll listen for what's missing, and I'll put it there. Thank you, TED.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Wow.(Applause)Wow.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_remixes_ted2006
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"This is about a place in London called Kiteflyer's Hill where I used to go and spend hours going ""When is he coming back? When is he coming back?"" So this is another one dedicated to that guy ... who I've got over. But this is ""Kiteflyer's Hill."" It's a beautiful song written by a guy called Martin Evan, actually, for me.Boo Hewerdine, Thomas Dolby, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a blessing singing for you. Thank you very much.♫ Do you remember when we used to go ♫♫ up to Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫♫ Those summer nights, so still ♫♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫♫ Some nights I think of you ♫♫ and then I go up ♫♫ on Kiteflyer's Hill ♫♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫♫ And somewhere in the city beneath me ♫♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫♫ and I wonder if ever just briefly ♫♫ do I creep in your dreams now and then ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ My wild summer love ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ Have the years been kind? ♫♫ And do you think of me sometimes ♫♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫♫ Oh, I pray you one day will ♫♫ We won't say a word ♫♫ We won't need them ♫♫ Sometimes silence is best ♫♫ We'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ My wild summer love ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ Do you think of me sometimes? ♫♫ And do you ever make that climb? ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ My wild summer love ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ Have the years been kind? ♫♫ And do you ever make that climb ♫♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? Kiteflyer's ... ♫♫ [French] ♫♫ Where are you? Where are you now? ♫♫ Where are you now? ♫♫ Kiteflyer's ... ♫(Applause)Gracias. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/eddi_reader_sings_kiteflyer_s_hill
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"This song is one of Thomas' favorites, called ""What You Do with What You've Got.""♫ You must know someone like him ♫♫ He was tall and strong and lean ♫♫ With a body like a greyhound ♫♫ and a mind so sharp and keen ♫♫ But his heart, just like laurel ♫♫ grew twisted around itself ♫♫ Till almost everything he did ♫♫ brought pain to someone else ♫♫ It's not just what you're born with ♫♫ It's what you choose to bear ♫♫ It's not how big your share is ♫♫ It's how much you can share ♫♫ It's not the fights you dreamed of ♫♫ It's those you really fought ♫♫ It's not what you've been given ♫♫ It's what you do with what you've got ♫♫ What's the use of two strong legs ♫♫ if you only run away? ♫♫ And what's the use of the finest voice ♫♫ if you've nothing good to say? ♫♫ What's the use of strength and muscle ♫♫ if you only push and shove? ♫♫ And what's the use of two good ears ♫♫ if you can't hear those you love? ♫♫ What's the use of two strong legs ♫♫ if you only run away? ♫♫ And what's the use of the finest voice ♫♫ if you've nothing good to say? ♫♫ What's the use of strength and muscle ♫♫ if you only push and shove? ♫♫ And what's the use of two good ears ♫♫ if you can't hear those you love? ♫♫ Between those who use their neighbors ♫♫ and those who use the cane ♫♫ Between those in constant power ♫♫ and those in constant pain ♫♫ Between those who run to glory ♫♫ and those who cannot run ♫♫ Tell me which ones are the cripples ♫♫ and which ones touch the sun ♫♫ Which ones touch the sun ♫♫ Which ones touch the sun ♫(Applause) Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/eddi_reader_sings_about_what_you_ve_got
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"I am a vicar in the Church of England. I've been a priest in the Church for 20 years. For most of that time, I've been struggling and grappling with questions about the nature of God. Who is God? And I'm very aware that when you say the word ""God,"" many people will turn off immediately. And most people, both within and outside the organized church, still have a picture of a celestial controller, a rule maker, a policeman in the sky who orders everything, and causes everything to happen. He will protect his own people, and answer the prayers of the faithful.And in the worship of my church, the most frequently used adjective about God is ""almighty."" But I have a problem with that. I have become more and more uncomfortable with this perception of God over the years. Do we really believe that God is the kind of male boss that we've been presenting in our worship and in our liturgies over all these years?Of course, there have been thinkers who have suggested different ways of looking at God. Exploring the feminine, nurturing side of divinity. Suggesting that God expresses Himself or Herself through powerlessness, rather than power. Acknowledging that God is unknown and unknowable by definition. Finding deep resonances with other religions and philosophies and ways of looking at life as part of what is a universal and global search for meaning. These ideas are well known in liberal academic circles, but clergy like myself have been reluctant to air them, for fear of creating tension and division in our church communities, for fear of upsetting the simple faith of more traditional believers. I have chosen not to rock the boat.Then, on December 26th last year, just two months ago, that underwater earthquake triggered the tsunami. And two weeks later, Sunday morning, 9th of January, I found myself standing in front of my congregation — intelligent, well meaning, mostly thoughtful Christian people — and I needed to express, on their behalf, our feelings and our questions. I had my own personal responses, but I also have a public role, and something needed to be said. And this is what I said.Shortly after the tsunami I read a newspaper article written by the Archbishop of Canterbury — fine title — about the tragedy in Southern Asia. The essence of what he said was this: the people most affected by the devastation and loss of life do not want intellectual theories about how God let this happen. He wrote, ""If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier, or safer, or more confident in God?""If the man in the photograph that appeared in the newspapers, holding the hand of his dead child was standing in front of us now, there are no words that we could say to him. A verbal response would not be appropriate. The only appropriate response would be a compassionate silence and some kind of practical help. It isn't a time for explanation, or preaching, or theology; it's a time for tears.This is true. And yet here we are, my church in Oxford, semi-detached from events that happened a long way away, but with our faith bruised. And we want an explanation from God. We demand an explanation from God. Some have concluded that we can only believe in a God who shares our pain. In some way, God must feel the anguish, and grief, and physical pain that we feel. In some way the eternal God must be able to enter into the souls of human beings and experience the torment within. And if this is true, it must also be that God knows the joy and exaltation of the human spirit, as well. We want a God who can weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who rejoice.This seems to me both a deeply moving and a convincing re-statement of Christian belief about God. For hundreds of years, the prevailing orthodoxy, the accepted truth, was that God the Father, the Creator, is unchanging and therefore by definition cannot feel pain or sadness. Now the unchanging God feels a bit cold and indifferent to me. And the devastating events of the 20th century have forced people to question the cold, unfeeling God. The slaughter of millions in the trenches and in the death camps have caused people to ask, ""Where is God in all this? Who is God in all this?""And the answer was, ""God is in this with us, or God doesn't deserve our allegiance anymore."" If God is a bystander, observing but not involved, then God may well exist, but we don't want to know about Him. Many Jews and Christians now feel like this, I know. And I am among them.So we have a suffering God — a God who is intimately connected with this world and with every living soul. I very much relate to this idea of God. But it isn't enough. I need to ask some more questions, and I hope they are questions that you will want to ask, as well, some of you.Over the last few weeks I have been struck by the number of times that words in our worship have felt a bit inappropriate, a bit dodgy. We have a pram service on Tuesday mornings for mums and their pre-school children. And last week we sang with the children one of their favorite songs, ""The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock."" Perhaps some of you know it. Some of the words go like this: ""The foolish man built his house upon the sand / And the floods came up / And the house on the sand went crash."" Then in the same week, at a funeral, we sang the familiar hymn ""We Plow the Fields and Scatter,"" a very English hymn. In the second verse comes the line, ""The wind and waves obey Him."" Do they? I don't feel we can sing that song again in church, after what's happened.So the first big question is about control. Does God have a plan for each of us? Is God in control? Does God order each moment? Does the wind and the waves obey Him? From time to time, one hears Christians telling the story of how God organized things for them, so that everything worked out all right — some difficulty overcome, some illness cured, some trouble averted, a parking space found at a crucial time. I can remember someone saying this to me, with her eyes shining with enthusiasm at this wonderful confirmation of her faith and the goodness of God.But if God can or will do these things — intervene to change the flow of events — then surely he could have stopped the tsunami. Do we have a local God who can do little things like parking spaces, but not big things like 500 mile-per-hour waves? That's just not acceptable to intelligent Christians, and we must acknowledge it. Either God is responsible for the tsunami, or God is not in control.After the tragedy, survival stories began to emerge. You probably heard some of them: the man who surfed the wave, the teenage girl who recognized the danger because she had just been learning about tsunamis at school. Then there was the congregation who had left their usual church building on the shore to hold a service in the hills. The preacher delivered an extra long sermon, so that they were still out of harm's way when the wave struck. Afterwards someone said that God must have been looking after them.So the next question is about partiality. Can we earn God's favor by worshipping Him or believing in Him? Does God demand loyalty, like any medieval tyrant? A God who looks after His own, so that Christians are OK, while everyone else perishes? A cosmic us and them, and a God who is guilty of the worst kind of favoritism? That would be appalling, and that would be the point at which I would hand in my membership. Such a God would be morally inferior to the highest ideals of humanity.So who is God, if not the great puppet-master or the tribal protector? Perhaps God allows or permits terrible things to happen, so that heroism and compassion can be shown. Perhaps God is testing us: testing our charity, or our faith. Perhaps there is a great, cosmic plan that allows for horrible suffering so that everything will work out OK in the end. Perhaps, but these ideas are all just variations on God controlling everything, the supreme commander toying with expendable units in a great campaign. We are still left with a God who can do the tsunami and allow Auschwitz.In his great novel, ""The Brothers Karamazov,"" Dostoevsky gives these words to Ivan, addressed to his naive and devout younger brother, Alyosha: ""If the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price. We cannot afford to pay so much for admission. It is not God that I do not accept. I merely, most respectfully, return Him the ticket.""Or perhaps God set the whole universe going at the beginning and then relinquished control forever, so that natural processes could occur, and evolution run its course. This seems more acceptable, but it still leaves God with the ultimate moral responsibility. Is God a cold, unfeeling spectator? Or a powerless lover, watching with infinite compassion things God is unable to control or change? Is God intimately involved in our suffering, so that He feels it in His own being?If we believe something like this, we must let go of the puppet-master completely, take our leave of the almighty controller, abandon traditional models. We must think again about God. Maybe God doesn't do things at all. Maybe God isn't an agent like all of us are agents. Early religious thought conceived God as a sort of superhuman person, doing things all over the place. Beating up the Egyptians, drowning them in the Red Sea, wasting cities, getting angry. The people knew their God by His mighty acts.But what if God doesn't act? What if God doesn't do things at all? What if God is in things? The loving soul of the universe. An in-dwelling compassionate presence, underpinning and sustaining all things. What if God is in things? In the infinitely complex network of relationships and connections that make up life. In the natural cycle of life and death, the creation and destruction that must happen continuously. In the process of evolution. In the incredible intricacy and magnificence of the natural world. In the collective unconscious, the soul of the human race. In you, in me, mind and body and spirit. In the tsunami, in the victims. In the depth of things. In presence and in absence. In simplicity and complexity. In change and development and growth.How does this in-ness, this innerness, this interiority of God work? It's hard to conceive, and begs more questions. Is God just another name for the universe, with no independent existence at all? I don't know. To what extent can we ascribe personality to God? I don't know. In the end, we have to say, ""I don't know."" If we knew, God would not be God.To have faith in this God would be more like trusting an essential benevolence in the universe, and less like believing a system of doctrinal statements. Isn't it ironic that Christians who claim to believe in an infinite, unknowable being then tie God down in closed systems and rigid doctrines?How could one practice such a faith? By seeking the God within. By cultivating my own inwardness. In silence, in meditation, in my inner space, in the me that remains when I gently put aside my passing emotions and ideas and preoccupations. In awareness of the inner conversation.And how would we live such a faith? How would I live such a faith? By seeking intimate connection with your inwardness. The kind of relationships when deep speaks to deep. If God is in all people, then there is a meeting place where my relationship with you becomes a three-way encounter. There is an Indian greeting, which I'm sure some of you know: ""Namaste,"" accompanied by a respectful bow, which, roughly translated means, ""That which is of God in me greets that which of God is in you."" Namaste.And how would one deepen such a faith? By seeking the inwardness which is in all things. In music and poetry, in the natural world of beauty and in the small ordinary things of life, there is a deep, indwelling presence that makes them extraordinary. It needs a profound attentiveness and a patient waiting, a contemplative attitude and a generosity and openness to those whose experience is different from my own.When I stood up to speak to my people about God and the tsunami, I had no answers to offer them. No neat packages of faith, with Bible references to prove them. Only doubts and questioning and uncertainty. I had some suggestions to make — possible new ways of thinking about God. Ways that might allow us to go on, down a new and uncharted road. But in the end, the only thing I could say for sure was, ""I don't know,"" and that just might be the most profoundly religious statement of all.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_honey_on_god_and_the_tsunami
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"That splendid music, the coming-in music, ""The Elephant March"" from ""Aida,"" is the music I've chosen for my funeral.(Laughter)And you can see why. It's triumphal. I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here.Can you understand my quaint English accent?(Laughter)Like everybody else, I was entranced yesterday by the animal session. Robert Full and Frans Lanting and others; the beauty of the things that they showed. The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, ""the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth."" Now of course, we know that he didn't really mean that, but in this country at the moment, you can't be too careful.(Laughter)I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In professional circles everywhere, it's of course universally accepted. In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility —(Laughter)it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it.If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside.(Laughter)Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called ""Intelligent Design,"" or ID. Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. It's just creationism under another name, rechristened — I choose the word advisedly —(Laughter)for tactical, political reasons.The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. They see us as rocking the boat, and you can understand why. Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism: Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual ""pre-version.""(Laughter)In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. This book, ""Finding Darwin's God,"" by Kenneth Miller, is one of the most effective attacks on Intelligent Design that I know and it's all the more effective because it's written by a devout Christian. People like Kenneth Miller could be called a ""godsend"" to the evolution lobby,(Laughter)because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. People like me, on the other hand, rock the boat.But here, I want to say something nice about creationists. It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully.(Laughter)I think they're right about one thing. I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.I've already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they're deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith. Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir.No, what I want to urge upon you —(Laughter)Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism.(Laughter)(Applause)But that's putting it too negatively. If I was a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science generally, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic.Now, the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things. Statistical improbability in the direction of good design — ""complexity"" is another word for this. The standard creationist argument — there is only one; they're all reduced to this one — takes off from a statistical improbability. Living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance; therefore, they must have had a designer. This argument of course, shoots itself in the foot. Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers — favor our side in a war —(Laughter)disapprove of our sex lives, and so on.(Laughter)Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity. Essentially, it does it by providing a smooth ramp of gradual, step-by-step increment. But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion, precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. It has the sinewy economy of a beautiful suspension bridge.The God theory is not just a bad theory. It turns out to be — in principle — incapable of doing the job required of it.So, returning to tactics and the evolution lobby, I want to argue that rocking the boat may be just the right thing to do. My approach to attacking creationism is — unlike the evolution lobby — my approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole. And at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited.(Richard Saul Wurman: He was.)Richard Dawkins: He was. Good. I thought he must have been.He begins this speech, which was tape recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died — he begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on.I quote, ""Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. You're just not. Why not? Because you're not.""(Laughter)""Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe — no, that's holy. So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas, and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it."" —He meant me, not that one.""Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally, there's no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.""And that's the end of the quote from Douglas.In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations, and blinds them to the wonderful, real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith, instead of always insisting on evidence.There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, ""Last Chance to See."" Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology. And I'm going to put together, as guest editor, a special issue on the question, ""Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?"" And the first paper is a standard scientific paper, presenting evidence, ""Iridium layer at the K-T boundary, and potassium argon dated crater in Yucatan, indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."" Perfectly ordinary scientific paper. Now, the next one. ""The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.""(Laughter)""It has been privately revealed to Professor Huxtanethat an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.""(Laughter)""Professor Hordley was brought up to have total and unquestioning faith"" —(Laughter) —""that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."" ""Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.""(Laughter)That's inconceivable, of course.But suppose —[Supporters of the Asteroid Theory cannot be patriotic citizens](Laughter)(Applause)In 1987, a reporter asked George Bush, Sr. whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. ""No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.""Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. He stood by it in the face of repeated calls for clarification or withdrawal. He really meant it. More to the point, he knew it posed no threat to his election — quite the contrary. Democrats as well as Republicans parade their religiousness if they want to get elected. Both parties invoke ""one nation under God."" What would Thomas Jefferson have said?[In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty]Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison.(Applause)In practice, what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.(Laughter)(Applause)And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub. And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority.Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. She clearly feels in a beleaguered minority. But actually, how do American atheists stack up numerically? The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion's share of the population, with nearly 160 million. But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Jews with 2.8 million, Muslims at 1.1 million, Hindus, Buddhists and all other religions put together? The second largest group, with nearly 30 million, is the one described as non-religious or secular.You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby — the state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote — while at the same time, consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle?Well, so much for quantity. How about quality? Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious?[Them folks misunderestimated me](Laughter)The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote — ""Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief, and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious."" Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies, and I can't comment on that meta-analysis, but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. And I know that there are — if I could put a little plug here — there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up, for what it's worth.But let me know show you some data that have been properly published and analyzed, on one special group — namely, top scientists. In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists. Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality. Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. Physical scientists, it's 7.5 percent. I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such as history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different.So, we've reached a truly remarkable situation, a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it — the intelligentsia — unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly: American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.(Laughter)(Applause)I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done.(Laughter)And I've already hinted what that something is. From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. Again, I fear it will cost money. We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists.(Laughter)This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists.On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. There could be non-linearities, threshold effects. When a critical mass has been obtained, there's an abrupt acceleration in recruitment. And again, it will need money.I suspect that the word ""atheist"" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. So, what other words might be used to smooth the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill? Darwin himself preferred ""agnostic"" — and not only out of loyalty to his friend Huxley, who coined the term.Darwin said, ""I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind.""He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism — incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate ""Das Kapital"" to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling. What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers, and a letter from Darwin saying, ""My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me,"" was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. It's a sort of urban myth, that Marx tried to dedicate ""Kapital"" to Darwin.Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling. ""Why do you call yourselves atheists?"" ""'Agnostic, '"" retorted Aveling, ""was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive."" Darwin complained, ""But why should you be so aggressive?"" Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, ""ripe for it."" Which is, of course, our old friend, the ""don't rock the boat"" argument. It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse.(Laughter)But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. You'd think we might have grown up since then. Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a ""tooth-fairy agnostic."" He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but ""agnostic"" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence.So, my friend is strictly agnostic about the tooth fairy, but it isn't very likely, is it? Like God. Hence the phrase, ""tooth-fairy agnostic."" Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence.The list of things which we strictly have to be agnostic about doesn't stop at tooth fairies and teapots; it's infinite. If you want to believe one particular one of them — unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh — the onus is on you to say why. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. We, who are atheists, are also a-fairyists and a-teapotists.(Laughter)But we don't bother to say so. And this is why my friend uses ""tooth-fairy agnostic"" as a label for what most people would call atheist. Nonetheless, if we want to attract deep-down atheists to come out publicly, we're going to have find something better to stick on our banner than ""tooth-fairy"" or ""teapot agnostic.""So, how about ""humanist""? This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. My problem with it is only its apparent anthropocentrism. One of the things we've learned from Darwin is that the human species is only one among millions of cousins, some close, some distant.And there are other possibilities, like ""naturalist,"" but that also has problems of confusion, because Darwin would have thought naturalist — ""Naturalist"" means, of course, as opposed to ""supernaturalist"" — and it is used sometimes — Darwin would have been confused by the other sense of ""naturalist,"" which he was, of course, and I suppose there might be others who would confuse it with ""nudism"".(Laughter)Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob, which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile.(Laughter)I think the best of the available alternatives for ""atheist"" is simply ""non-theist."" It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth-fairy agnostics. It's completely compatible with the God of the physicists. When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word ""God,"" they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. ""Non-theist"" will do for all that, yet unlike ""atheist,"" it doesn't have the same phobic, hysterical responses. But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word ""atheism"" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word ""atheist"" than with the word ""non-theist,"" or some other non-confrontational word. But if we did achieve it with that dread word ""atheist"" itself, the political impact would be even greater.Now, I said that if I were religious, I'd be very afraid of evolution — I'd go further: I would fear science in general, if properly understood. And this is because the scientific worldview is so much more exciting, more poetic, more filled with sheer wonder than anything in the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination. As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, ""How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.""Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural belief that we should respect religion. But I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do.(Laughter)If you're one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I'm asking you to stop being polite, come out, and say so. And if you happen to be rich, give some thought to ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations — to say nothing of all the tax benefits — by foundations, such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton to step forward. If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself.People are always going on about, ""How did September the 11th change you?""Well, here's how it changed me.Let's all stop being so damned respectful.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism
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"I just want to say, over the last few years I've been — had the opportunity to do this closing conference. And I've had some incredible warm-up acts. About eight years ago, Billy Graham opened for me. And I thought that there was —(Laughter)I thought that there was absolutely no way in hell to top that. But I just wanted to say — and I mean this without irony — I think I can speak for everybody in the audience when I say that I wish to God that you were the President of the United States.(Applause)OK, this is the title of my talk today.(Laughter)I just want to give you a quick overview. First of all, please remember I'm completely politically correct, and I mean everything with great affection. If any of you have sensitive stomachs or are feeling queasy, now is the time to check your Blackberry.(Laughter)Just to review, this is my TEDTalk. We're going to do some jokes, some gags, some little skits — and then we're going to talk about the L1 point.(Laughter)So, one of the questions I ask myself is, was this the most distressing TED ever? Let's try and sum things up, shall we? Images of limb regeneration and faces filled with smallpox: 21 percent of the conference.(Laughter)Mentions of polar bears drowning: four percent. Images of the earth being wiped out by flood or bird flu: 64 percent.(Laughter)And David Pogue singing show tunes.(Applause)Because this is the most distressing TED ever, I've been working with Neil Gershenfeld on next year's TED Bag. And if the — if the conference is anywhere near this distressing, then we're going to have a scream bag next year.(Laughter)It's going to be a cradle-to-cradle scream bag, of course.(Laughter)So you're going to be able to go like this.(Laughter)Bring it over here and open it up. Aaaah!(Laughter)Meanwhile, back at TED University, this wonderful woman is teaching you how to chop Sun Chips.(Laughter) So Robert Wright — I don't know,I felt like if there was anyone that Helen needed to give antidepressants to, it might have been him. I want to deliberately interfere with his dopamine levels.(Laughter)He was talking about morality. Economy class morality is, we want to bomb you back to the Stone Age. Business class morality is, don't bomb Japan — they built my car. And first-class morality is, don't bomb Mexico — they clean my house.(Laughter)Yes, it is politically incorrect. All right, now I want to do a little bit of a thing for you ...(Laughter)All right, now these are the wha — I'd say, [mumble, mumble — mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble] — ahh!(Laughter)So I wanted to show you guys — I wanted to talk about a revolutionary new computer interface that lets you work with images just as easily as you — as a completely natural user interface.(Laughter)And you can — you can use really natural hand gestures to like, go like this.(Applause)Now we had a Harvard professor here — she was from Harvard, I just wanted to mention and — and she was actually a professor from Harvard. And she was talking about seven-dimensional, inverted universes. With, you know, of course, there's the gravity brain. There's the weak brain. And then there's my weak brain, which is too — too — absolutely too weak to understand what the fuck she was talking about.(Laughter)Now —(Laughter)one of the things that is very important to me is to try and figure out what on Earth am I here for. And that's why I went out and I picked up a best-selling business book. You know, it basically uses as its central premise Greek mythology. And it's by a guy named Pastor Rick Warren, and it's called ""The Porpoise Driven Life.""(Laughter)And Rick is as a pagan god, which I thought was kind of appropriate, in a certain way. And now we're going to have kind of a little more visualization about Rick Warren. OK.(Laughter)All right. Now, red is Rick Warren, and green is Daniel Dennett, OK?(Laughter)The scales here are religiosity from zero percent, or atheist, to 100 percent, Bible literally true. And then this is books sold — the logarithmic scale.(Laughter)30,000, 300,000, three million, 30 million, 300 million. OK, now they're duking it out. Now they're duking it out.(Laughter)And Rick Warren's kind of pulling ahead, kind of pulling ahead. Yup, and his installed base is getting a little bigger.(Laughter)But Darwin's dangerous idea is coming back. It's coming back. Let me turn the trails on, so you can see that a little bit better.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, one of the things that's very important is, Nicholas Negroponte talked to us about one lap dance per — I'm sorry —(Laughter)about One Laptop Per Child. Now let's talk about some of the characteristics that are important for this revolutionary device. I'll tell you a little bit about the design parameters, and then I'll show it to you in person. First of all, it needs to be small. It needs to be flat, so it's transportable. Lightweight. Portable. Uses very, very little power. Very, very high resolution. Has to be visible in bright daylight. Will work anywhere. And broadly applicable across many platforms.Now, we've actually done some research — Neil Gershenfeld and the Fab Labs went out into the market. They did some research; we came back; and we think we have the perfect prototype of what the students in the field are actually asking for. And here it is, the $100 computer.(Laughter)OK, OK, OK, OK — excellent, excellent. Now, I bought this device from Clifford Stoll for about 900 bucks. And he and his team of junior-high school students were doing real science. So we're trying to check and trying to douse here, and see who uses marijuana.(Laughter)See who uses marijuana. Are we going to be able to find any marijuana, Jim Young? Only if we open enough locker doors.(Laughter)OK, now smallpox is an extremely distressing illness. We had Dr. Larry Brilliant talking about how we eradicated smallpox. I wanted to show you the stages of smallpox. We start. This is day one.(Laughter)Day two. Day three, she gets a massively big pox on her shoulder. Day three. Day four.(Laughter)Day five and day six.(Laughter)Now the good news is, because I'm a trained medical professional, I know that even though she'll be scarred for life, she's going to make a full recovery.(Laughter)Now the good news about Architects for Humanity is they're really kind of the most amazing group. They've been sponsoring a design competition to come up with innovative medical housing solutions, clinic solutions, in Africa, and they've had a design competition. Now the wonderful thing is, Larry Brilliant was just appointed the head of the Google Foundation, and so he decided that he would support — he would support Cameron's work. And the way he decided to support that work was by shipping over 50,000 shipping containers of Google snacks.(Laughter)So I want to show you some prototypes. The U.N. — you know, they took 20 years just to add a flap to a tent, but I think we have some more exciting things. This is a home made entirely out of Fruit Roll-Ups.(Laughter)(Applause)And those roll-up cookies coated with white chocolate. And the really wonderful thing about this is, when you're done, well — you can eat it. But the thing that I'm really, really excited about is this incredible granola house.(Laughter)And the granola house has a special Sun Chip roof to collect water and recycle it. And it's — well, on this side it has regular Sour Patch Kids and Gummy Bears to let in the light.(Laughter)But on this side, it has sugary Gummy Bears, to diffuse the light more slightly. And we — we wanted just to show you what this might look like in situ.(Laughter)(Applause)So, Einstein — Einstein, tell me — what's your favorite song? No, I said what's your favorite song? No, I said what's your favorite song? ""Free Bird.""(Laughter)(Applause)OK, so, Einstein, what's your favorite singing group? Could you say that again? What's your favorite singing group? OK, one more time — I'm just going to give you a little help. Your favorite singing group — it's Diana Ross and the —Audience: Supremes!Tom Reilly: Exactly.(Applause)Could we have the sound up on the laptop, please?(Laughter)""Free Bird"" kind of reminds me that if you — if you listen to ""Free Bird"" backwards, this is what you might hear.Computer: Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. Satan. TR: Now it's a little hard to hear the whole message, so I wanted to —(Laughter)so I wanted to help you a little bit.Computer: My sweet Satan. Dan Dennett worships Satan. Buy ""The Purpose-Driven Life,"" or Satan will take your soul.(Laughter)TR: So, we've talked a lot about global warming, but, you know, as Jill said, it sounds kind of nice — good weather in the wintertime, and New York City. And as Jay Walker pointed out, that is just not scary enough. So Al, I actually think I'm rather good at branding. So I've tried to figure out a good design process to come up with a new term to replace ""global warming.""So we started with Babel Fish. We put in global warming. And then we decided that we'd change it from English to Dutch — into ""Het globale Verwarmen."" From Dutch to [Korean], into ""Hordahordaneecheewa.""(Laughter)[Korean] to Portuguese: Aquecer-se Global. Then Portuguese to Pig Latin.(Laughter)Aquecer-se ucked-fay. And then finally back into the English, which is, we're totally fucked.(Laughter)(Applause)Now I don't know about you, but Michael Shermer talked about the willingness for human beings — evolutionarily, they're designed to see patterns in things. For example, in cheese sandwiches. Now can you look at that carefully and see if you see the Virgin Mary? I tried to make it a little bit clearer.(Laughter)Is it the Virgin Mary? Or is it Mena Trott?So, I talked to Josh Prince-Ramus about the convention center and the conferences. It's getting awfully big. It's getting just a little bit too big. It's bursting at the seams here a little bit. So we tried to come up with a program — how we could remake this structure to better accommodate TED. So first of all we decided —(Laughter)that we needed about one-third bookstore, one-third Google cafe, about 20 percent registration, 80 percent luxury hotel, about five percent for restrooms. And then of course, we wanted to have the simulcast lounge, the lobby and the Steinbeck forum.Now let me show you how that literally translated into the design program. So first, one of the problems with Monterey is that if there is global warming and Greenland melts as you say, the ocean level is going to rise 20 feet and flood the hell out of the convention center. So we're going to build this new building on stilts. So we build this building on stilts, then up here —(Laughter)is where we're going to put the new Steinbeck auditorium.(Laughter)And the wonderful thing about the new bookstore is, it's going to be shaped in a spiral that's organized by the Dewey Decimal System.(Laughter)Then we're going to make an escalator that helps you get up there. And finally, we're going to put the Marriott Hotel and the Portola Plaza on the top.(Applause)Now I don't know about you, but sometimes I have these images in my head of separated at birth. I don't know about you, but when I see Aubrey de Grey, I immediately go to Gandalf the Grey.(Laughter)OK. Now, we've heard, of course, that we're all soldiers here. So what I'd really, really like you to do now is, pick up your white piece of paper. Does everybody have their white piece of paper? And I want you to get out a pen, and I want you to write a terrorist note.(Laughter)If we put up the ELMO for a moment — if we put up the ELMO, then we'll get, you know, I'll give you a model that you can work from, OK?(Laughter)And then I want you to fold that note into a paper airplane. And once you've folded it into a paper airplane, I want you to take some anthrax —(Laughter)and I want you to put that in the paper airplane. And then I want you to throw it on Jim Young.(Laughter)Luckily, I was the recipient of the TED Prize this year. And I wanted to see — I want to dedicate this film to my father, Homer. OK.Now this film isn't really hard enough, so I wanted to make it a little bit harder. So I'm going to try and do this while reciting pi.(Laughter)3.1415, 2657, 753, 8567, 24972 — — 85871, 25871, 3928, 5657, 2592, 5624.(Applause)Can we cue the music please?(Applause)Now I wanted to use this talk to talk about global warming a little bit. Back in 1968, you can see that the mountain range of Brokeback Mountain was covered in 151 inches of snow pack. Parenthetically, over there on the slopes, I did want to show you that black men ski.(Laughter)But over the years, 10 years later, the snow packs eroded, and, if you notice, the trees have started turning yellow. The water level of the lake has started drying up. A few years later, there's no snow left at all. And all the trees have turned brown. This year, unfortunately the lakebed's turned into an absolute cracked dry bed. And I fear, if we do nothing for our planet, in 20 years, it's going to look like this.(Laughter)Mr. Vice President, I wish I knew how to quit you.(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_rielly_delivers_a_comic_send_up_of_ted2006
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"Thomas Dolby: For pure pleasure please welcome the lovely, the delectable, and the bilingual Rachelle Garniez.(Applause)(Bells)(Trumpet)Rachelle Garniez: ♫ Quand il me prend dans ses bras ♫♫ Il me parle tout bas, ♫♫ Je vois la vie en rose. ♫♫ Il me dit des mots d'amour, ♫♫ Des mots de tous les jours, ♫♫ Et ca me fait quelque chose. ♫♫ Il est entre dans mon coeur ♫♫ Une part de bonheur ♫♫ Dont je connais la cause. ♫♫ C'est lui pour moi. Moi pour lui ♫♫ Dans la vie, ♫♫ Il me l'a dit, l'a jure [pour] la vie. ♫♫ Et des que je l'apercois ♫♫ Alors je sens en moi ♫♫ Mon coeur qui bat ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_dolby_and_rachelle_garniez
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"I'd like to speak about technology trends, which is something that many of you follow — but we also follow, for related reasons. Obviously, being a technology magazine, technology trends are something that we write about and need to know about.But also it's part of being any monthly magazine — you live in the future. And we have a long lead-time. We have to plan issues many months in advance; we have to guess at what public appetites are going to be six months, nine months down the road. So we're in the forecasting business.We also, like a lot of companies, create a product that's based on technology trends. In this case, ours is about ideas and information, and, if we're lucky, some entertainment. But the concept's quite the same. And so we have to understand not only why tech's important, where it's going, but also, very importantly, when — the timing is everything.And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or Internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or Internet advertising, they were all right — they were just wrong in time. Almost every one of those has come true just a few years later. But the difference of a few years on stock-market valuations is obviously extreme. And that's why timing is everything.You've probably seen something like this before. This is the classic Gartner Hype Curve, which talks about kind of the trajectory of a technology's lifespan. And just for fun, we put a bunch of technologies on it, to show whether they were kind of rising for the first high peak, or whether they were about to crash into the trough of disillusionment, or rise back in the slope of enlightenment, etc. And this is one way to do technology forecasting: get a sense of where technology is and then anticipate the next upturn.We tend to do any technology that we think is sufficiently important; we'll typically do it twice. Once, we want to do it first. We want to be the first to do it, for the geeks who appreciate that, we'll catch it right there at the technology-trigger. You can see in 1997, we put Linux on the cover. But then it comes back. And sufficiently big technologies are going to hit the mainstream, and they're going to burst out. And then it's time to do it again. Last year. And that's one way that we try to time technology trends.I'd like to talk about a way of thinking about technology trends that I call my ""grand unified theory of predicting the future,"" but it's closer to a petite unified theory of predicting the future. It's based on the presumption, the observation even, that all important technologies go through four stages in their life — at least one of the four stages, sometimes all four of the stages. And at each one of these stages, can be seen as a collision — a collision with something else — for example, a critical price-line that changes both the technology and also changes its effect on the world. It's an inflection point. And these are the inflection points that tell you what the next chapter in that technology's life is going to be, and maybe how you can do something about it.The first is the critical price. The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price. After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration. Many technologies, at that point, displace another technology, and that's another important point. And then finally, a lot of technologies commoditize. Towards the end of their life, they become nearly free.Each one of those is an opportunity to do something about it; it's an opportunity for the technology to change. And even if you missed, you know, the first boom of Wi-Fi — you know, Wi-Fi did the critical price, it did the critical mass, but hasn't done displacement yet, and hasn't done free yet — there's still more opportunity in that.I'd like to demonstrate what I mean by this by telling the story of the DVD, which is a technology which has done all of these. The DVD, as you know, was introduced in the mid-1990s and it was quite expensive. But you can see that by 1998, it had fallen below 400 dollars, and 400 dollars was a psychological threshold. And it started to take off. And you can see that the units started to trend up, the hidden inflection point — it was taking off.The next thing it hit, a year later, was critical mass. In this case, 20 percent is often a good proxy for critical mass in a household. And what's interesting here is that something else took off along with it: home-theater units. Suddenly you have a DVD in the house; you've got high-quality digital video; you have a reason to have a big-screen television; you have a reason for Dolby 5.1 surround-sound. And maybe you have reasons for starting to connect them, and bring the rest of your entertainment in. What's interesting also is — note that Netflix was founded in 1999. Reed Hastings is here. He clearly saw that that was a moment, that was an inflection point that he could do something with.The next phase it hit was displacement. You can see around 2001 it finally out-sold the VCR. And here too, you can see the implications in the world at large. Netflix was right — the Netflix model could capitalize on the DVD in a way that the video-rental stores couldn't. Among the DVD's many assets is that it's very small; you can stick it in the mailer and post it cheaply. That gave an advantage; that was an implication of the technology's rise that wasn't obvious to everybody.And then finally, DVDs are approaching free. There's a company called Apex, a no-name Chinese firm, who has, several times in the past year, been the number-one DVD seller in America. Their average price, for last year, was 48 dollars. You're aware of the perhaps apocryphal Wal-Mart stampede over the 30-dollar DVD. But they're getting very, very cheap, and look at the interesting implication of it. As they get cheaper, the premium brands, the Sonys and such, are losing market share, and the no-names, the Apexes, are gaining them. They're being commodified, and that's what happens when things go to zero. It's a tough market out there. (Laughter)Now they've introduced these four ways of looking at technology, these four stages of technology's life. I'd like to talk about some other technologies out there, just technologies on our radar — and I'll use this lens, these four, as a way to kind of tell you where each one of those technologies is in its development. They're not necessarily the top-10 technologies out there — they're just examples of technologies that are in each one of these periods. But I think that the implications of them approaching these crossovers, these intersections, are interesting to think about.Start with gene sequencing. As you probably know, gene sequencing — in a large part, because it's built on computers — is falling in price at a kind of a Moore's Law-like level. It is now possible — will be possible, and if Craig Venter indeed comes today, he may tell you something about this — to sequence the human genome for 40 million dollars by the end of this year. That's as opposed to billions just a few years ago. You know, our ability to capture the tools of creation is getting closer and closer.What's interesting is that at the same time, the number of genes that we're discovering is rising very quickly. Each one of these genes has potential diagnostic test. There will come a day when you can have hundreds of thousands of tests done, very cheaply, if you want to know. You can learn about your own mosaic.Here's another technology that's approaching a critical price. This is a fascinating research from WHO that shows the effect of generic drugs on anti-retroviral drug compounds and cocktails. In January 2000, the price was 10,000 dollars, or 27 dollars a day. The generics came in, first in Brazil and elsewhere, and the effect was just dramatic on pricing. Today it's less than 50 cents a day. And what's interesting is if you look at the price elasticity, if you look at the correlation between these two, as the anti-retrovirals come down, the number of people you can treat goes radically up. And the Clinton Foundation and WHO believe that they can treat three million people worldwide by 2005 — two million in sub-Saharan Africa. And the falling price of drugs has a lot to do with that.Linux is another good example. Now we've switched to critical mass. These are now technologies that are hitting critical mass. If you look here, here's Linux in red, and it's hit 20 percent. Interestingly, it's done a crossover before, but not the crossovers that matter. The crossover that's going to matter is the one with the blue. But you can look and see the direction those lines are going, you can see that at the 20 percent, it's now taken seriously. It's not just for the geeks any more. That is, I imagine, what people in Redmond wake up in the middle of the night thinking about. (Laughter)Another technology that we see all around us out here is hybrid cars. I don't know whether anybody has a Prius 2004, but they're fantastic. And if you look at the trends here, by about 2008 — and I don't think this is a crazy forecast — they'll be two percent of auto sales. Two percent isn't 20 percent, but in the car business, which is slow moving, that's huge; that's arrival. At two percent, you start seeing them on the roads everywhere.And what's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry. It's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years. And once you have electric motors, you can do anything: you can change the structure of the car in any way you want. You can have regenerative braking; you can have drive-by-wire; you can have replaceable body shapes — it's a little thing that starts with a hybrid, but it can lead to a whole new era of the car.Voice Over IP is something you may have heard something about. Again, it's kind of coming out of nowhere; it's a little hard to use right now. There's a company created by the Kazaa founders called Skype. Look at these numbers. They launched it in August of last year; they already have nearly four million registered users — that's critical mass. And the same thing's happening on the carrier side. You're looking at IP taking over from some of the traditional telecom standards. This is a tipping point — if Malcolm's here, forgive me — and it's going to change the economics, and the speed, and the players in the industry. It's going to look a little bit like that.And finally, free. Free is really, really interesting. Free is something that comes with digital, because the reproduction costs are essentially free. It comes with IP, because it's such an efficient protocol. It comes with fiber optics, because there's so much bandwidth. Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force; it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity. Free is probably the most interesting thing.And here you have just the number of songs that can be stored on a hard drive. You know, there could be a film's [unclear] there, but it's basically, every song ever made could be stored on 400 dollars worth of storage by 2008. It takes that entire element, the physical element, of songs off the table. And you've seen the numbers. I mean, you know, the music industry is imploding in front of our very eyes, and Hollywood's worried as well. They're facing a force that they haven't faced before. And their response is draconian, and not necessarily the one that's going to get them out of this.And finally, I'll give you one last example of free — perhaps the most powerful of all. I mentioned fiber optics — their abundance tends to make things free. This is the price of a phone call to India per minute. And what's interesting is that it was just 1990 when it was more than two dollars a minute. India had, still has, a regulated phone system and so did we. It was surprisingly non-innovative, moved very slowly, but then there was just so much fiber out there, you couldn't hold back, and look how quickly the price fell. It's seven cents a minute, in many cases.And the consequence of cheap phone calling, free phone calling, to India, is the pissed-off programmer, is the outsourcing. It is probably one of the most dramatic shifts in globalization and one of the most powerful economic tools that we're seeing in our world today. The force of India, and then China, and any other country that can contact our markets and will work with our companies — because the communications are free — is just beginning to be felt. And I think that's probably one of the most important technology trends that we're looking at today. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_of_wired_on_tech_s_long_tail
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♫ Like the heather ♫♫ on the hillside ♫♫ as they drove us ♫♫ from the Highlands ♫♫ Like the ice flow ♫♫ from the Arctic ♫♫ where we landed ♫♫ in Newfoundland ♫♫ There's a color ♫♫ to my sorrow ♫♫ There's a name for ♫♫ all this sadness ♫♫ Like the ocean ♫♫ in between us ♫♫ I am blue ♫♫ Blue is a river ♫♫ Blue remembered ♫♫ Blue water ♫♫ running clear ♫♫ Blue like a planet ♫♫ to a spaceman ♫♫ Blue river ♫♫ of my tears ♫(Fiddle and synthesizer)♫ So I came here ♫♫ to the city ♫♫ where the dream burns ♫♫ like a furnace ♫♫ And I dazzled ♫♫ in these dark streets ♫♫ like a diamond ♫♫ in a coalface ♫♫ Then the cold wind ♫♫ from the islands ♫♫ blew a storm cloud ♫♫ across the new moon ♫♫ Like the gun smoke ♫♫ above the houses ♫♫ in my home ♫♫ Blue is a river ♫♫ Blue remembered ♫♫ Blue water ♫♫ running clear ♫♫ Blue like a planet ♫♫ to a spaceman ♫♫ Blue river ♫♫ of my tears ♫♫ Blue river ♫♫ of my tears ♫(Fiddle and synthesizer)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_macmaster_fiddles_in_reel_time
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"Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that's been pressing on many of your minds. We spoke to you last several years ago. And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way. The answer is boxers. Now I hope all of you feel better.Do you know what this might be? Does anyone know what that is?Audience: Yes.SB: What is it?Audience: It's people logging on to Google around the world.SB: Wow, OK. I didn't really realize what it was when I first saw it. But this is what helped me see it. This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time. Here it's slightly logged. But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that. And they're labeled by color right now, by language.So you can see: here we are in the U.S., and they're all coming up red. There we are in Monterey — hopefully I can get it right. You can see that Japan is busy at night, right there. We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese. There's a lot of activity in China. There's a lot of activity in India. There's some in the Middle East, the little pockets. And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages.Now you can also see, if I turn this around here — hopefully I won't shake the world too much. But you can also see, there are places where there's not so much. Australia, because there just aren't very many people there. And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities. But basically, what we've noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power. And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet. And even in Antarctica — well, at least this time of year — we from time to time will see a query rising up. And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it, too.So this is some of the challenge that we have here, is you can see that it's actually kind of hard to get the — there we go. This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. You can see that there's a lot of data running around. It has to go all over the world: through fibers, through satellites, through all kinds of connections. And it's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to. Hopefully your experience is good. But you can see also, once again — so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth.Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like. And if we can switch to slides — all right, here we go. So this is slowed down. This is what one second looks like. And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load. Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own. I mean, it could be somebody's health, it could be somebody's career, something important to them. And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup.So this is a query that we had — I guess it's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others. You can see that it got started right here. In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time. But it didn't have quite the same pickup in the U.S. as it did in Spain. And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it. And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too. And I just wanted to play it for you.Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves — hopefully that search will work. As a part of — you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches. And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated. More animals, if they start doing searches as well. But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we're embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we're in the process of setting that up.We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there. And it's something I'm very excited to be a part of. In fact, many of the organizations that are here — the Acumen Fund, I think ApproTEC we have running, I'm not sure if that one's up yet — and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants. They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know.One of the earlier results that we got — we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor. Now does anybody know who this is? A-ha!Audience: Orkut.SB: Yes! Somebody got it. This is Orkut. Is anybody here on Orkut? Do we have any? Okay, not very many people know about it. I'll explain it in a second. This is one of our engineers. We find that they work better when they're submerged and covered with leaves. That's how we churn those products out. Orkut had a vision to create a social network. I know all of you are thinking, ""Yet another social network."" But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them. So this is what he built. We just released it in a test phase last month, and it's been taking off.This is our VP of Engineering. You can see the red hair, and I don't know if you can see the nose ring there. And these are all of his friends. So this is how — we just deployed it — we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service, and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out. And now we've grown to over 100,000 members. And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S.You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here — though, by the way, search-wise, it's only about 30 percent of our traffic — but it's already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries. So it's a fun little project. There are a variety of demographics. I won't bore you with these. But it's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes. And — well, I'll leave you in suspense. Larry, you can explain this one.Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey. So one of the things — both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google. And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this — at Google, we've embodied this as ""the 20 percent time,"" and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you're working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do. And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News. And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this. Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics — as a hobby, basically. So many, many useful things come out of this.And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher. And he just — he — after 9/11, he got really interested in the news. And he said, ""Why don't I look at the news better?"" And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it. And then, besides just looking cute on a baby's bottom, we made it a Googlette, which is basically a small project at Google.So it'd be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product. And we wouldn't really be sure if it's going to work or not. And in News' case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it. And now it's a real, full-blown project with more people on it. And this is how we keep our innovation running.I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects. And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, ""Oh, we really need a new concept."" You know, the Googlettes — that's a small project that we're not quite sure if it's going to work or not, but we hope it will, and if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out, such as News.But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them — and these are kind of made up. Don't really pay attention to them. For example, the ""Buy Iceland"" was from a media article. We would never do such a crazy thing, but — in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized.The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities. I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about. And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar. So this is a new — how many of you use the Google Toolbar? Raise your hands.How many of you use the Deskbar? All right, see? You guys should try it out. But if you go to our site and search for ""Deskbar,"" you'll get this. And the idea is, instead of a toolbar, it's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom, and you can do searches really easily. And it's sort of like a better version of the toolbar. Thank you, Sergey.This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it's really, really a great product, and really taking off. Google Answers is something we started, which is really cool, which lets you — for five to 100 dollars, you can type a question in, and then there's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you, and it's guaranteed and all that, and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself.Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things. But all of these — well, these were all sort of innovative things that we did that — you know, we try many, many different things in our company. We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they're noisy, so people shut them off. And we didn't like that, so we actually, in maybe a couple of weeks, we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors, and so we can leave them on all the time and they're completely silent. And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting.And as we become more of a global company, we find these things really affect us — you know, can we work effectively with people who aren't in the room? And things like that. And simple things like this can really make a big difference. We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should. And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines, for our younger employees especially, and ... we also allow dogs and things like that, and we've had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they're doing.This is actually our ""cult picture."" I just wanted to show quickly. We had this on our website for a while, but we found that after we put it on our website, we didn't get any job applications anymore. But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip. A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other, and informally. And I think we've done a good job encouraging that. It makes it a really fun place to work.Along with our logos, too, which I think really embody our culture when we change things. In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you'd never want to change your logo. You want it to be consistent. And we said, ""Well, that doesn't sound so much fun. Why don't we try changing it every day?""One of the things that really excites me about what we're doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing — this is from before Dean dropped out. But the idea is, like, on a newspaper, for example, we show you relevant ads. And this is hard to read, but this says ""Battle for New Hampshire: Howard Dean for President"" — articles on Howard Dean. And these ads are generated automatically — like in this case, on the Washington Post — from the content on the site. And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that's most relevant to what you're actually looking at, much as we do on search. So the idea is we can make advertising useful, not just annoying, right?And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of websites have signed up, and this let's them really make money. And I — you know, there's a number of people I met — I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, ""You know, I wasn't making any money. I just put this thing on my site and I'm making 10,000 dollars a month. And, you know, thank you. I don't have to do my other job now."" And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better. It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content.So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I'd thought I'd talk at least briefly about it. And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search, you really have to be smart. Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right? But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence. And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. It would be artificial intelligence. And so that's something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that's really their goal. So we always hope that Google will be smart, but we're always surprised when other people think that it is.And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this. This is a blog from Iraq, and it's not really what I'm going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example. Maybe, Sergey, you can highlight this. So we decided — actually, the highlight's right there. Oh, thank you.So, ""related searches,"" right there. You can't see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called ""related searches."" And so we'd say, you know, ""Did you mean 'search for'"" — what is this, in this case, ""Saddam Hussein,"" because this blog is about Iraq — and you know, in addition to the ads, and we thought this would be a great idea.And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed, and he said, ""You know, I'm sleeping a lot."" He was just kind of writing about his life. And our algorithms — not a person, of course, but our algorithms, our computers — read his blog and decided that the related search was, ""I am bored."" And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, ""You know, what are these, you know, bastards at Google doing? Why don't they like my blog?"" And so then we read his blog, which was getting — you know, sort of going from bad to worse, and we said the related search was, ""Retards."" And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote — like, started swearing and so on. And then we produced ""You suck."" And finally, it ended with ""Kiss my ass."" And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn't quite work, and we don't have this feature anymore.So with that, maybe I can switch back to the world. I wanted to end just by saying that there's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google, and one of those is that we're able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn't expect from that was that we're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about, you know, places that don't have as much money. So we don't have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. — for example, with the drug industry.And I think we're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that's a tremendous, tremendous benefit. The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine — that we should provide very objective information.And so in our search results, we never accept payment for our search results. We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such. And that's unlike many of our competitors. And I think decisions we're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google. So thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/sergey_brin_and_larry_page_on_google
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"Has anyone ever been to Aspen, Colorado? It's not a joke yet; those aren't the jokes. Is this thing off? I went to Aspen recently and stumbled into this song.♫ Black men go to Aspen ♫♫ and rent colorful chalets. ♫♫ Giggle at the questions ♫♫ their mere presence seems to raise. ♫♫ Get taken for men ♫♫ we don't resemble in the least. ♫""Are you ... ?"" ""No.""♫ It's a winter wonderland ♫♫ in the belly of the beast. ♫♫ And black men ski. ♫♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Black men send back sushi ♫♫ with a scorned Yakuza's flair. ♫♫ We make postmodern art ♫♫ with bacon grease ♫♫ and hot combed hair. ♫♫ We secretly play Beethoven ♫♫ inside our bassmobiles. ♫♫ We can tell you how cool looks ♫♫ but cannot show you how it feels ♫♫ when black men ski. ♫ ♫ When black men ski. ♫♫ Black men now are students ♫♫ of gay sensibility. ♫♫ We wear ironic T-shirts ♫♫ drenched in code unknown to thee. ♫♫ We get baptized in Walden Pond ♫♫ amongst a searing mob ♫♫ because the cleansing blood of Jesus ♫♫ could not do a thorough job. ♫♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Chinese guys can jump real high ♫♫ and Germans cook soul food. ♫♫ White boys rap and hippies nap ♫♫ their dreads up to look rude. ♫♫ Jazz is now suburban ♫♫ it's Marsalisly clean. ♫♫ And now we've got Viagra ♫♫ everyone's a sex machine. ♫♫ So black men ski. ♫What else can we do?♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Some kids I'll describe as friends ♫♫ say I am race-obsessed. ♫♫ The luxury of your opinion ♫♫ shows that you are blessed. ♫♫ See, I have poems about sunsets ♫♫ flowers and the rain. ♫♫ I've read them to policemen ♫♫ but it was all in vain. ♫♫ So black men ski. ♫♫ Black men ski ... ♫ elegantly.♫ Black men ski. ♫♫ Black men ski. ♫","https://www.ted.com/talks/stew_says_black_men_ski
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"The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this. And mostly, I want to persuade you that we have to do better if we're going to continue the project of civilization in America. By the way, this doesn't help. Nobody's having a better day down here because of that.There are a lot of ways you can describe this. You know, I like to call it ""the national automobile slum."" You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. You can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck. And it's a tremendous problem for us. The outstanding — the salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about. We're going to talk about that some more. A sense of place: your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are.The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there. The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the 1,000-year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design. This is a body of knowledge, method, skill and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided we don't need that anymore; we're not going to use it. And consequently, we can see the result all around us. The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture. Where we've come from, what kind of people we are, and it needs to, by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we're going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present. And if there is one tremendous — if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we've built, the human environments we've made for ourselves in the last 50 years, it is that it has deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present.The environments we are living in, more typically, are like these. You know, this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town. And remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. So how is that being accomplished here? If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart over here and try to look at the Target store over here, you can't see it because of the curvature of the Earth. (Laughter) That's nature's way of telling you that you're doing a poor job of defining space. Consequently, these will be places that nobody wants to be in. These will be places that are not worth caring about.We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending. And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like Iraq, spilling their blood in the sand, and ask yourself, ""What is their last thought of home?"" I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for. (Applause) We need better places in this country.Public space. This is a good public space. It's a place worth caring about. It's well defined. It is emphatically an outdoor public room. It has something that is terribly important — it has what's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge. That's a fancy way of saying it's got shops, bars, bistros, destinations — things go in and out of it. It's permeable. The beer goes in and out, the waitresses go in and out, and that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in. You know, in these places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them. We don't have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. (Laughter) You know, you don't have to have a Kwanzaa festival. People just go because it's pleasurable to be there. But this is how we do it in the United States.Probably the most significant public space failure in America, designed by the leading architects of the day, Harry Cobb and I.M. Pei: Boston City Hall Plaza. A public place so dismal that the winos don't even want to go there. (Laughter) And we can't fix it because I.M. Pei's still alive, and every year Harvard and M.I.T. have a joint committee to repair it. And every year they fail to because they don't want to hurt I.M. Pei's feelings.This is the other side of the building. This was the winner of an international design award in, I think, 1966, something like that. It wasn't Pei and Cobb, another firm designed this, but there's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel OK about going down this block. This is the back of Boston City Hall, the most important, you know, significant civic building in Albany — excuse me — in Boston. And what is the message that is coming, what are the vocabularies and grammars that are coming, from this building and how is it informing us about who we are?This, in fact, would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building, because then we'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us. You know, that it's a despotic building; it wants us to feel like termites. (Laughter) This is it on a smaller scale: the back of the civic center in my town, Saratoga Springs, New York. By the way, when I showed this slide to a group of Kiwanians in my town, they all rose in indignation from their creamed chicken, (Laughter) and they shouted at me and said, ""It was raining that day when you took that picture!"" Because this was perceived to be a weather problem. (Laughter)You know, this is a building designed like a DVD player. (Laughter) Audio jack, power supply — and look, you know these things are important architectural jobs for firms, right? You know, we hire firms to design these things. You can see exactly what went on, three o'clock in the morning at the design meeting. You know, eight hours before deadline, four architects trying to get this building in on time, right? And they're sitting there at the long boardroom table with all the drawings, and the renderings, and all the Chinese food caskets are lying on the table, and — I mean, what was the conversation that was going on there? (Laughter) Because you know what the last word was, what the last sentence was of that meeting. It was: ""Fuck it."" (Laughter) (Applause)That — that is the message of this form of architecture. The message is: We don't give a fuck! We don't give a fuck. So I went back on the nicest day of the year, just to — you know — do some reality testing, and in fact, he will not even go down there because (Laughter) it's not interesting enough for his clients, you know, the burglars, the muggers. It's not civically rich enough for them to go down there. OK.The pattern of Main Street USA — in fact, this pattern of building downtown blocks, all over the world, is fairly universal. It's not that complicated: buildings more than one story high, built out to the sidewalk edge, so that people who are, you know, all kinds of people can get into the building. Other activities are allowed to occur upstairs, you know, apartments, offices, and so on. You make provision for this activity called shopping on the ground floor. They haven't learned that in Monterey. If you go out to the corner right at the main intersection right in front of this conference center, you'll see an intersection with four blank walls on every corner. It's really incredible.Anyway, this is how you compose and assemble a downtown business building, and this is what happened when in Glens Falls, New York, when we tried to do it again, where it was missing, right? So the first thing they do is they pop up the retail a half a story above grade to make it sporty. OK. That completely destroys the relationship between the business and the sidewalk, where the theoretical pedestrians are. (Laughter) Of course, they'll never be there, as long as this is in that condition. Then because the relationship between the retail is destroyed, we pop a handicapped ramp on that, and then to make ourselves feel better, we put a nature Band-Aid in front of it. And that's how we do it. I call them ""nature Band-Aids"" because there's a general idea in America that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature. And in fact, the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings. Not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. You know, that's not good enough. We have to do good buildings.The street trees have really four jobs to do and that's it: To spatially denote the pedestrian realm, to protect the pedestrians from the vehicles in the carriageway, to filter the sunlight onto the sidewalk, and to soften the hardscape of the buildings and to create a ceiling — a vaulted ceiling — over the street, at its best. And that's it. Those are the four jobs of the street trees. They're not supposed to be a cartoon of the North Woods; they're not supposed to be a set for ""The Last of the Mohicans.""You know, one of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing. And we're not going to cure the problems of the urban by dragging the country into the city, which is what a lot of us are trying to do all the time. Here you see it on a small scale — the mothership has landed, R2-D2 and C-3PO have stepped out to test the bark mulch to see if they can inhabit this planet. (Laughter)A lot of this comes from the fact that the industrial city in America was such a trauma that we developed this tremendous aversion for the whole idea of the city, city life, and everything connected with it. And so what you see fairly early, in the mid-19th century, is this idea that we now have to have an antidote to the industrial city, which is going to be life in the country for everybody. And that starts to be delivered in the form of the railroad suburb: the country villa along the railroad line, which allows people to enjoy the amenity of the city, but to return to the countryside every night. And believe me, there were no Wal-Marts or convenience stores out there then, so it really was a form of country living.But what happens is, of course, it mutates over the next 80 years and it turns into something rather insidious. It becomes a cartoon of a country house, in a cartoon of the country. And that's the great non-articulated agony of suburbia and one of the reasons that it lends itself to ridicule. Because it hasn't delivered what it's been promising for half a century now.And these are typically the kind of dwellings we find there, you know. Basically, a house with nothing on the side because this house wants to state, emphatically, ""I'm a little cabin in the woods. There's nothing on either side of me. I don't have any eyes on the side of my head. I can't see."" So you have this one last facade of the house, the front, which is really a cartoon of a facade of a house. Because — notice the porch here. Unless the people that live here are Munchkins, nobody's going to be using that. This is really, in fact, a television broadcasting a show 24/7 called ""We're Normal."" We're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. Please respect us, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal.But we know what's going on in these houses, you know. We know that little Skippy is loading his Uzi down here, getting ready for homeroom. (Laughter) We know that Heather, his sister Heather, 14 years old, is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit. Because these places, these habitats, are inducing immense amounts of anxiety and depression in children, and they don't have a lot of experience with medication. So they take the first one that comes along, often. These are not good enough for Americans. These are the schools we are sending them to: The Hannibal Lecter Central School, Las Vegas, Nevada. This is a real school! You know, but there's obviously a notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out, that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver. So every effort is made to keep them within the building. Notice that nature is present. (Laughter)We're going to have to change this behavior whether we like it or not. We are entering an epochal period of change in the world, and — certainly in America — the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era. It is going to change absolutely everything. Chris asked me not to go on too long about this, and I won't, except to say there's not going to be a hydrogen economy. Forget it. It's not going to happen. We're going to have to do something else instead. We're going to have to down-scale, re-scale, and re-size virtually everything we do in this country and we can't start soon enough to do it. We're going to have — (Applause) — we're going to have to live closer to where we work. We're going to have to live closer to each other. We're going have to grow more food closer to where we live. The age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end. We're going to have to — we have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of! We gotta do better than that!And we should have started two days before yesterday. We are fortunate that the new urbanists were there, for the last 10 years, excavating all that information that was thrown in the garbage by our parents' generation after World War II. Because we're going to need it if we're going to learn how to reconstruct towns. We're going to need to get back this body of methodology and principle and skill in order to re-learn how to compose meaningful places, places that are integral, that allow — that are living organisms in the sense that they contain all the organs of our civic life and our communal life, deployed in an integral fashion.So that, you know, the residences make sense deployed in relation to the places of business, of culture and of governance. We're going to have to re-learn what the building blocks of these things are: the street, the block, how to compose public space that's both large and small, the courtyard, the civic square and how to really make use of this property. We can see some of the first ideas for retro-fitting some of the catastrophic property that we have in America. The dead malls: what are we going to do with them? Well, in point of fact, most of them are not going to make it. They're not going to be retro-fitted; they're going to be the salvage yards of the future.Some of them we're going to fix, though. And we're going to fix them by imposing back on them street and block systems and returning to the building lot as the normal increment of development. And if we're lucky, the result will be revivified town centers and neighborhood centers in our existing towns and cities. And by the way, our towns and cities are where they are, and grew where they were because they occupy all the important sites. And most of them are still going to be there, although the scale of them is probably going to be diminished.We've got a lot of work to do. We're not going to be rescued by the hyper-car; we're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels. No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it. We're going to have to do everything very differently. And America's not prepared. We are sleepwalking into the future. We're not ready for what's coming at us. So I urge you all to do what you can. Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens.One final thing — I've been very disturbed about this for years, but I think it's particularly important for this audience. Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as ""consumers."" OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word consumer in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face. So thank you very much. Please go out and do what you can to make this a land full of places that are worth caring about and a nation that will be worth defending. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia
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"There's a lot of exciting things happening in the design world and at IDEO this past year, and I'm pleased to get a chance to share some of those with you.I didn't attend the first TED back in 1984 but I've been to a lot of them since that time. I thought it [would] kind of be interesting to think back to that time when Richard got the whole thing started. Thank you very much, Richard; it's been a big, enjoyable part of my life, coming here.And so thinking back, I was thinking those of us in Silicon Valley were really focused on products or objects — certainly technological objects. And so it was great fun in those days, and some of those of you who are in the audience were my clients. We'd come in with some prototype underneath a black cloth and we'd put it on the conference table, and we'd pull off the black cloth and everybody would ""ooh"" and ""ah."" That was a really good time.And so we'll continue to focus on products, as we always have. And if you were here last year, I probably wrestled you to the floor and tried to show you my new EyeModule 2, which was a camera that plugged into the Handspring. And I took a lot of pictures last year; very few people knew what I was up to, but I took a lot of pictures. This year — maybe you could show the slides — this year we're carrying this Treo, which we had a lot to do with and helped Handspring design it. Also, though we designed it a few years ago — it's just become ubiquitous in the last year or so — this Heartstream defibrillator which is saving lives. Maybe you've seen them in the airports? They seem to be everywhere now. Lots of lives are being saved by those. And, we're just about to announce the Zinio Reader product that I believe will make magazines even more enjoyable to read. So, we really will continue to focus on products.But something's happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED, and that's that people like us — I know people in other places have caught onto this for a long time, but for us, we've really just started ... we've kind of climbed Maslow's hierarchy a little bit — and so we're now focused more and more on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design. That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products. And I think you're starting to see that, and it's making our job even more enjoyable.Interestingly enough, we used to primarily build 3-D models — you know, you've seen some today — and 3-D renderings. Then we'd go and we'd show those as communicating our ideas. But firms like ours are having to move to a point where we get those objects that we're designing and get them in motion, showing how they'll be used. And so in order to do that we've been forming internal video-production groups in order to make these kind of experience prototypes that show just what we mean about the man-machine relationship. And it's a much better way to see. It's kind of like architects who show people in their houses, as opposed to them being empty.So I thought that I would show you a few videos to show off this new, broader definition of design in products and services and environments. I have a few of them — they're no more than a minute or a minute-and-a-half apiece — but I thought you might be interested in seeing some of our work over the last year, and how it responds in video.So, Prada New York: we were asked by Rem Koolhaas and OMA to help us conceive the technology that's in their retail store in New York. He wanted a new kind of store — a new one — a store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one. And that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use.So, there're lots of things. Everything has RF tags: there's RF tags on the user, on the cards, there's the staff devices that are all around the store. You pick them up, and once you see something that you're interested in, the staff person can scan them in and then they can be shown on any screen throughout the store. You can look at color, and sizes, and how it appeared on the runway, or whatever. And so then the object — the merchandise that you're interested in — can be scanned. It's taken into the dressing room, and in the dressing room there are scanners so that we know exactly what clothing you have in the dressing room. We can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that, and get more information about the clothing that you're interested in as you're trying it on. It's been used a lot of places, but I particularly like the use here of liquid crystal displays in the changing room.The last time I went to see this store, there was a huge buzz about people standing outside and wondering, ""Am I going to actually get to see the people changing clothes here?"" But if you push the button, of course, the whole wall goes dark. So you can try to get approval, or not, for whatever you're wearing. And then one of my favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror, where you put on the clothes. There's a big display in the mirror, and you can turn around — but there's a three second delay. So you can see what you look like from the back or all the way around, as you look. (Applause)About a year and a half ago we were asked to design an installation in the museum — this is a new wing of the Science Museum in London, and it's primarily about digital and biomedical issues. And a group at Itch, which is now part of IDEO, designed this interactive wall that's about four stories tall. I don't know if anybody's seen this — it's pretty spectacular in the room.Anyway, it's based on the London subway system. And so you can see that the goal is to bring some of the feedback that the people who had gone to the museum were giving, and get it up on the wall so everybody could see. Just for everybody to see. So you enter your information. Then, like the London tube system, the little trains go around with what you're thinking about. And then when you get to a station, it's expanded so that you can actually read it.Then when you exit the IMAX theatre on the fourth floor — mostly teenagers coming out of there — there's this big open space that has these tables in it that have interactive games which are quite fun, also designed by Durrell [Bishop] and Andrew [Hirniak] of Itch. And the topics include things that the museum is about: male fertility, choosing the sex of your baby or what a driverless car might be like. There's lots of room, so people can come up and understand what it is before they get involved.And also, it's not shown in the video, but these are very beautiful. They go to the top of the wall and when they reach all the way to the top, after they've bounced around, they disperse into bits and go off into the atmosphere.The next video is not done by us. This is CBS Sunday Morning that aired about two weeks ago. Scott Adams ran into us and asked us if we wouldn't help to design the ultimate cubicle for Dilbert, which sounded like a fun thing and so we couldn't pass it up. He's always been interested in technology in the future.(Video: Scott Adams: I realized that at some point I might be the world's expert on what's wrong with cubicles. So we thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to get together with some of the smartest design guys in the world and try to figure out if we could make the cubicle better?Narrator: Though they work in a wide-open office space spectacularly set under San Francisco's Oakland Bay Bridge, the team built their own little cubicles to fully experience the problems.Woman: A one-way mirror. I can look out; you can look at yourself.Narrator: They took pictures.Woman: You feel so trapped, when someone kind of leans over and you're sort of held captive there for a minute.SA: So far it's chaos, but a lot of people are doing stuff, so that's good. We'll see what happens.Narrator: The first group builds a cubicle in which the walls are screens for the computer and for family photos. In the second group's scenario, the walls are alive and actually give Dilbert a group hug. (Laughter) Behind the humor is the idea of making the cubicle more human.)David Kelley: So here's the final thing, complete with orange lighting that follows the sun across — that follows the tracks of the sun — across the sky. So you feel that in your cubicle. And my favorite feature, which is a flower in a vase that wilts when you leave in disappointment, and then when you come back, it comes up to greet you, happy to see you.(SA: The storage is built right into the wall.)DK: You know, it has homey touches like a built-in fish tank in the walls, or something to be aggressive with to release tension.(SA: Customizable for the boss of your choice.)DK: And of course: a hammock for your afternoon nap that stretches across your cubicle.(SA: Life would be sweet in a cubicle like this.)DK: This next project, we were asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the recycling of the water on the Millennium Dome in London. The dome has an incredible amount of water that washes off of it, as well as wastewater. So this building actually celebrates the water as it comes out of the recycling plant and goes into the reed bed so that it can be filtered for the final time.The pavilion's design goal was to be kind of quiet and peaceful. In contrast to if you went inside the dome, where it's kind of wild and crazy and everybody's learning all kinds of things, or fooling around, or whatever they're doing. But it was intended to be quite quiet. And then you would wander around and gather information, in a straightforward fashion, about the recycling process and what's being done, and how they're going to reuse the water once it comes through the plant. And then, if you saw, the panels actually rotate. So you can get the information on the front side, but as they rotate, you can see the actual recycling plant behind, with all the machines as they actually process the water. You can see: there's the plant. These are all very low-budget videos, like quick prototypes.And we're announcing a new product here tonight, which is the first time this has ever been shown in public. It's called Spyfish, and it's a company called H2Eye, started by Nigel Jagger in London. And it's a company that's trying to bring the experience — many people have boats, or enjoy being on boats, but a very small percentage of people actually have the capability or the interest in going under the water and actually seeing what's there, and enjoying what scuba divers do. This product, it has two cameras. You throw it over the side of your boat and you basically scuba dive without getting wet.For us — there's the object — for us, it was two projects. One, to design the interface so that the interface doesn't get in your way. You could have that kind of immersive experience of being underwater — of feeling like you're underwater — seeing what's going on. And the other one was to design the object and make sure that it was a consumer product and not a research tool. And so we spent a lot of time — this has been going on for about seven or eight years, this project — and [we're] just ready to start building them.(Narrator: The Spyfish is a revolutionary subaquatic video camera. It can dive to 500 feet, to where sunlight does not penetrate, and is equipped with powerful lights. It becomes your eyes and ears as you venture into the deep. The battery-powered Spyfish sends the live video-feed through a slender cable.)DK: This slender cable was a huge technological advancement and it allowed the whole thing to be the size that it is.(Narrator: And this central box connects the whole system together. Maneuvering the Spyfish is simple with the wireless remote control. You watch the video with superimposed graphics that indicate your depth and compass heading. The fluid graphics and ambient sounds combine to help you completely lose yourself underwater.) (Applause)DK: And the last thing I'll talk about is ApproTEC, which is a project that I'm very excited about. ApproTEC is a company started by Dr. Martin Fisher, who's a good friend of mine. He's a Ph.D. from Stanford. He found himself in Kenya on a Fulbright and he had a very interesting insight, which is that he said, ""There must be entrepreneurs in Kenya; there must be entrepreneurs everywhere."" And he noticed that for weddings and funerals there they could find enough money to put something together. So he decided to start manufacturing products in Kenya with Kenyan manufacturers — designed by people like us, but taken there. And to this date — he's been gone for only a few years — he's started 19,000 companies. He's made 30,000 new jobs. And just the sales of the products — this is a non-profit — the sales of these products is now .6% of the GDP of Kenya. This is one guy doing this. This is a pretty spectacular thing.So we're in the process of helping them design deep-well, low-cost manual pumps in order for these people who have a quarter acre of land to be able to grow crops in the off-season. What they do now is: they can grow crops in the rainy season but they can't grow them in the off-season. And so by doing that, the woman that you saw in the first thing — she's a school teacher — always wanted to send her kids to college and she's going to be able to do it because of these things. So with seed-squeezers, and pumps, and hay-balers and very straightforward things that we're designing — my students are doing this as class projects and IDEO has donated their time to do this kind of work — it's really amazing to see his success, Martin's.We also were thinking about the experience of Richard, and so — (Laughter) — we designed this hat, because I knew I'd be the last one in the day and I needed to deal with him. So I just have one more thing to say. (Laughter) Can you read it? (Laughter) Well, it's always kind of funny when he comes up and hovers. You know, you don't want to be rude to him and you don't want to feel guilty, and so I thought this would do it, where I just sit here. (Laughter) (Applause)So we saw a lot of interesting things being designed today in this session, and from all the different presenters. And in my own practice, from product to ApproTEC, it's really exciting that we're taking a more human-centered approach to design, that we're including behaviors and personalities in the things we do, and I think this is great. Designers are more trusted and more integrated into the business strategy of companies, and I have to say, for one, I feel very lucky at the progress that design has made since the first TED. Thanks a lot.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_on_human_centered_design
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"Basically, there's a major demographic event going on. And it may be that passing the 50 percent urban point is an economic tipping point. So the world now is a map of connectivity.It used to be that Paris and London and New York were the largest cities. What we have now is the end of the rise of the West. That's over. The aggregate numbers are overwhelming. So what's really going on? Well, villages of the world are emptying out.The question is, why? And here's the unromantic truth — and the city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany. So some people go to places like Shanghai but most go to the squatter cities where aesthetics rule. And these are not really a people oppressed by poverty. They're people getting out of poverty as fast as they can. They're the dominant builders and to a large extent, the dominant designers. They have home-brewed infrastructure and vibrant urban life.One-sixth of the GDP in India is coming out of Mumbai. They are constantly upgrading, and in a few cases, the government helps. Education is the main event that can happen in cities. What's going on in the street in Mumbai? Al Gore knows. It's basically everything. There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.So here's the first punch line: cities have defused the population bomb.And here's the second punch line. That's the news from downtown. Here it is in perspective. Stars have shined down on earth's life for billions of years. Now we're shining right back up.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_on_squatter_cities
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"I do two things: I design mobile computers and I study brains. Today's talk is about brains and — (Audience member cheers) Yay! I have a brain fan out there.(Laughter) If I could have my first slide, you'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations. So what I'm going to talk about is why we don't have a good brain theory, why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it. I'll try to do all that in 20 minutes. I have two affiliations. Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days, but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park. We study theoretical neuroscience and how the neocortex works. I'm going to talk all about that.I have one slide on my other life, the computer life, and that's this slide here. These are some of the products I've worked on over the last 20 years, starting from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on, ending up most recently with the Treo, and we're continuing to do this. I've done this because I believe mobile computing is the future of personal computing, and I'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things. But this was, I admit, all an accident. I really didn't want to do any of these products. Very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry.Before that, I just have to tell you about this picture of Graffiti I picked off the web the other day. I was looking for a picture for Graffiti that'll text input language. I found a website dedicated to teachers who want to make script-writing things across the top of their blackboard, and they had added Graffiti to it, and I'm sorry about that.(Laughter)So what happened was, when I was young and got out of engineering school at Cornell in '79, I went to work for Intel and was in the computer industry, and three months into that, I fell in love with something else. I said, ""I made the wrong career choice here,"" and I fell in love with brains. This is not a real brain. This is a picture of one, a line drawing. And I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I have one recollection, which was pretty strong in my mind. In September of 1979, Scientific American came out with a single-topic issue about the brain. It was one of their best issues ever. They talked about the neuron, development, disease, vision and all the things you might want to know about brains. It was really quite impressive.One might've had the impression we knew a lot about brains. But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame. Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. And he wrote a story basically saying, this is all well and good, but you know, we don't know diddly squat about brains, and no one has a clue how they work, so don't believe what anyone tells you. This is a quote from that article, he says: ""What is conspicuously lacking"" — he's a very proper British gentleman — ""What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches."" I thought the word ""framework"" was great. He didn't say we didn't have a theory. He says we don't even know how to begin to think about it. We don't even have a framework. We are in the pre-paradigm days, if you want to use Thomas Kuhn. So I fell in love with this. I said, look: We have all this knowledge about brains — how hard can it be? It's something we can work on in my lifetime; I could make a difference. So I tried to get out of the computer business, into the brain business.First, I went to MIT, the AI lab was there. I said, I want to build intelligent machines too, but I want to study how brains work first. And they said, ""Oh, you don't need to do that. You're just going to program computers, that's all. I said, you really ought to study brains. They said, ""No, you're wrong."" I said, ""No, you're wrong,"" and I didn't get in.(Laughter)I was a little disappointed — pretty young — but I went back again a few years later, this time in California, and I went to Berkeley. And I said, I'll go in from the biological side. So I got in the PhD program in biophysics. I was like, I'm studying brains now. Well, I want to study theory. They said, ""You can't study theory about brains. You can't get funded for that. And as a graduate student, you can't do that."" So I said, oh my gosh. I was depressed; I said, but I can make a difference in this field. I went back in the computer industry and said, I'll have to work here for a while. That's when I designed all those computer products.(Laughter)I said, I want to do this for four years, make some money, I was having a family, and I would mature a bit, and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit. Well, it took longer than four years. It's been about 16 years. But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it. So why should we have a good brain theory? Well, there's lots of reasons people do science. The most basic one is, people like to know things. We're curious, and we go out and get knowledge. Why do we study ants? It's interesting. Maybe we'll learn something useful, but it's interesting and fascinating. But sometimes a science has other attributes which makes it really interesting.Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves; it'll tell us who we are. Evolution did this and Copernicus did this, where we have a new understanding of who we are. And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain. Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we need to understand brains. Another thing is sometimes science leads to big societal benefits, technologies, or businesses or whatever. This is one, too, because when we understand how brains work, we'll be able to build intelligent machines. That's a good thing on the whole, with tremendous benefits to society, just like a fundamental technology.So why don't we have a good theory of brains? People have been working on it for 100 years. Let's first take a look at what normal science looks like. This is normal science. Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists. The theorist guy says, ""I think this is what's going on,"" the experimentalist says, ""You're wrong."" It goes back and forth, this works in physics, this in geology. But if this is normal science, what does neuroscience look like? This is what neuroscience looks like. We have this mountain of data, which is anatomy, physiology and behavior. You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data, but no theory. There's a little wimpy box on top there.And theory has not played a role in any sort of grand way in the neurosciences. And it's a real shame. Now, why has this come about? If you ask neuroscientists why is this the state of affairs, first, they'll admit it. But if you ask them, they say, there's various reasons we don't have a good brain theory. Some say we still don't have enough data, we need more information, there's all these things we don't know. Well, I just told you there's data coming out of your ears. We have so much information, we don't even know how to organize it. What good is more going to do? Maybe we'll be lucky and discover some magic thing, but I don't think so. This is a symptom of the fact that we just don't have a theory. We don't need more data, we need a good theory.Another one is sometimes people say, ""Brains are so complex, it'll take another 50 years."" I even think Chris said something like this yesterday, something like, it's one of the most complicated things in the universe. That's not true — you're more complicated than your brain. You've got a brain. And although the brain looks very complicated, things look complicated until you understand them. That's always been the case. So we can say, my neocortex, the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells. But, you know what? It's very, very regular. In fact, it looks like it's the same thing repeated over and over again. It's not as complex as it looks. That's not the issue.Some people say, brains can't understand brains. Very Zen-like. Woo.(Laughter)You know, it sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point? It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver. It's got a lot of cells in it too, right? So, you know, I don't think there's anything to that. And finally, some people say, ""I don't feel like a bunch of cells — I'm conscious. I've got this experience, I'm in the world. I can't be just a bunch of cells."" Well, people used to believe there was a life force to be living, and we now know that's really not true at all. And there's really no evidence, other than that people just disbelieve that cells can do what they do. So some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, some really smart people, too, but we can reject all that.(Laughter)No, there's something else, something really fundamental, and it is: another reason why we don't have a good brain theory is because we have an intuitive, strongly held but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. There's something we believe that just, it's obvious, but it's wrong. Now, there's a history of this in science and before I tell you what it is, I'll tell you about the history of it in science. Look at other scientific revolutions — the solar system, that's Copernicus, Darwin's evolution, and tectonic plates, that's Wegener. They all have a lot in common with brain science.First, they had a lot of unexplained data. A lot of it. But it got more manageable once they had a theory. The best minds were stumped — really smart people. We're not smarter now than they were then; it just turns out it's really hard to think of things, but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand. My daughters understood these three theories, in their basic framework, in kindergarten. It's not that hard — here's the apple, here's the orange, the Earth goes around, that kind of stuff.Another thing is the answer was there all along, but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing. It was an intuitive, strongly held belief that was wrong. In the case of the solar system, the idea that the Earth is spinning, the surface is going a thousand miles an hour, and it's going through the solar system at a million miles an hour — this is lunacy; we all know the Earth isn't moving. Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour? If you said Earth was spinning around in space and was huge — they would lock you up, that's what they did back then. So it was intuitive and obvious. Now, what about evolution?Evolution, same thing. We taught our kids the Bible says God created all these species, cats are cats; dogs are dogs; people are people; plants are plants; they don't change. Noah put them on the ark in that order, blah, blah. The fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor. We all have a common ancestor with the plant in the lobby! This is what evolution tells us. And it's true. It's kind of unbelievable. And the same thing about tectonic plates. All the mountains and the continents are kind of floating around on top of the Earth. It doesn't make any sense.So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption, that's kept us from understanding brains? I'll tell you. It'll seem obvious that it's correct. That's the point. Then I'll make an argument why you're incorrect on the other assumption. The intuitive but obvious thing is: somehow, intelligence is defined by behavior; we're intelligent because of how we do things and how we behave intelligently. And I'm going to tell you that's wrong. Intelligence is defined by prediction.I'm going to work you through this in a few slides, and give you an example of what this means. Here's a system. Engineers and scientists like to look at systems like this. They say, we have a thing in a box. We have its inputs and outputs. The AI people said, the thing in the box is a programmable computer, because it's equivalent to a brain. We'll feed it some inputs and get it to do something, have some behavior. Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which essentially says, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human — a behavioral metric of what intelligence is that has stuck in our minds for a long time.Reality, though — I call it real intelligence. Real intelligence is built on something else. We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. When we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time. It's an internal metric; there's an internal metric about us, saying, do we understand the world, am I making predictions, and so on. You're all being intelligent now, but you're not doing anything. Maybe you're scratching yourself, but you're not doing anything. But you're being intelligent; you're understanding what I'm saying. Because you're intelligent and you speak English, you know the word at the end of this sentence.The word came to you; you make these predictions all the time. What I'm saying is, the internal prediction is the output in the neocortex, and somehow, prediction leads to intelligent behavior. Here's how that happens: Let's start with a non-intelligent brain. I'll argue a non-intelligent brain, we'll call it an old brain. And we'll say it's a non-mammal, like a reptile, say, an alligator; we have an alligator. And the alligator has some very sophisticated senses. It's got good eyes and ears and touch senses and so on, a mouth and a nose. It has very complex behavior. It can run and hide. It has fears and emotions. It can eat you. It can attack. It can do all kinds of stuff. But we don't consider the alligator very intelligent, not in a human sort of way.But it has all this complex behavior already. Now in evolution, what happened? First thing that happened in evolution with mammals is we started to develop a thing called the neocortex. I'm going to represent the neocortex by this box on top of the old brain. Neocortex means ""new layer."" It's a new layer on top of your brain. It's the wrinkly thing on the top of your head that got wrinkly because it got shoved in there and doesn't fit.(Laughter)Literally, it's about the size of a table napkin and doesn't fit, so it's wrinkly. Now, look at how I've drawn this. The old brain is still there. You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain. It's all those gut reactions you have. On top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex. And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain. So as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing. It's sitting there saying, I'm going to memorize all the things going on: where I've been, people I've seen, things I've heard, and so on. And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll start playing it back: ""Oh, I've been here before,"" and when you were here before, this happened next. It allows you to predict the future. It literally feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word ""sentence"" before I said it. And it's this feeding back into the old brain that will allow you to make more intelligent decisions.This is the most important slide of my talk, so I'll dwell on it a little. And all the time you say, ""Oh, I can predict things,"" so if you're a rat and you go through a maze, and you learn the maze, next time you're in one, you have the same behavior. But suddenly, you're smarter; you say, ""I recognize this maze, I know which way to go; I've been here before; I can envision the future."" That's what it's doing. This is true for all mammals — in humans, it got a lot worse. Humans actually developed the front of the neocortex, called the anterior part of the neocortex. And nature did a little trick. It copied the posterior, the back part, which is sensory, and put it in the front. Humans uniquely have the same mechanism on the front, but we use it for motor control.So we're now able to do very sophisticated motor planning, things like that. I don't have time to explain, but to understand how a brain works, you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works, how it is we store patterns and make predictions. Let me give you a few examples of predictions. I already said the word ""sentence."" In music, if you've heard a song before, when you hear it, the next note pops into your head already — you anticipate it. With an album, at the end of a song, the next song pops into your head. It happens all the time, you make predictions.I have this thing called the ""altered door"" thought experiment. It says, you have a door at home; when you're here, I'm changing it — I've got a guy back at your house right now, moving the door around, moving your doorknob over two inches. When you go home tonight, you'll put your hand out, reach for the doorknob, notice it's in the wrong spot and go, ""Whoa, something happened."" It may take a second, but something happened. I can change your doorknob in other ways — make it larger, smaller, change its brass to silver, make it a lever, I can change the door; put colors on, put windows in. I can change a thousand things about your door and in the two seconds you take to open it, you'll notice something has changed.Now, the engineering approach, the AI approach to this, is to build a door database with all the door attributes. And as you go up to the door, we check them off one at time: door, door, color ... We don't do that. Your brain doesn't do that. Your brain is making constant predictions all the time about what will happen in your environment. As I put my hand on this table, I expect to feel it stop. When I walk, every step, if I missed it by an eighth of an inch, I'll know something has changed. You're constantly making predictions about your environment. I'll talk about vision, briefly. This is a picture of a woman. When we look at people, our eyes saccade over two to three times a second. We're not aware of it, but our eyes are always moving. When we look at a face, we typically go from eye to eye to nose to mouth. When your eye moves from eye to eye, if there was something else there like a nose, you'd see a nose where an eye is supposed to be and go, ""Oh, shit!""(Laughter)""There's something wrong about this person."" That's because you're making a prediction. It's not like you just look over and say, ""What am I seeing? A nose? OK."" No, you have an expectation of what you're going to see.Every single moment. And finally, let's think about how we test intelligence. We test it by prediction: What is the next word in this ...? This is to this as this is to this. What is the next number in this sentence? Here's three visions of an object. What's the fourth one? That's how we test it. It's all about prediction.So what is the recipe for brain theory? First of all, we have to have the right framework. And the framework is a memory framework, not a computational or behavior framework, it's a memory framework. How do you store and recall these sequences of patterns? It's spatiotemporal patterns.Then, if in that framework, you take a bunch of theoreticians — biologists generally are not good theoreticians. Not always, but generally, there's not a good history of theory in biology. I've found the best people to work with are physicists, engineers and mathematicians, who tend to think algorithmically. Then they have to learn the anatomy and the physiology. You have to make these theories very realistic in anatomical terms. Anyone who tells you their theory about how the brain works and doesn't tell you exactly how it's working and how the wiring works — it's not a theory.And that's what we do at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. I'd love to tell you we're making fantastic progress in this thing, and I expect to be back on this stage sometime in the not too distant future, to tell you about it. I'm really excited; this is not going to take 50 years.What will brain theory look like? First of all, it's going to be about memory. Not like computer memory — not at all like computer memory. It's very different. It's a memory of very high-dimensional patterns, like the things that come from your eyes. It's also memory of sequences: you cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence. A song must be heard in sequence over time, and you must play it back in sequence over time. And these sequences are auto-associatively recalled, so if I see something, I hear something, it reminds me of it, and it plays back automatically. It's an automatic playback. And prediction of future inputs is the desired output. And as I said, the theory must be biologically accurate, it must be testable and you must be able to build it. If you don't build it, you don't understand it.One more slide. What is this going to result in? Are we going to really build intelligent machines? Absolutely. And it's going to be different than people think. No doubt that it's going to happen, in my mind. First of all, we're going to build this stuff out of silicon. The same techniques we use to build silicon computer memories, we can use here. But they're very different types of memories. And we'll attach these memories to sensors, and the sensors will experience real-live, real-world data, and learn about their environment.Now, it's very unlikely the first things you'll see are like robots. Not that robots aren't useful; people can build robots. But the robotics part is the hardest part. That's old brain. That's really hard. The new brain is easier than the old brain. So first we'll do things that don't require a lot of robotics. So you're not going to see C-3PO. You're going to see things more like intelligent cars that really understand what traffic is, what driving is and have learned that cars with the blinkers on for half a minute probably aren't going to turn.(Laughter)We can also do intelligent security systems. Anytime we're basically using our brain but not doing a lot of mechanics — those are the things that will happen first. But ultimately, the world's the limit. I don't know how this will turn out. I know a lot of people who invented the microprocessor. And if you talk to them, they knew what they were doing was really significant, but they didn't really know what was going to happen. They couldn't anticipate cell phones and the Internet and all this kind of stuff. They just knew like, ""We're going to build calculators and traffic-light controllers. But it's going to be big!"" In the same way, brain science and these memories are going to be a very fundamental technology, and it will lead to unbelievable changes in the next 100 years. And I'm most excited about how we're going to use them in science. So I think that's all my time — I'm over, and I'm going to end my talk right there.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing
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"I'd like to start tonight by something completely different, asking you to join me by stepping off the land and jumping into the open ocean for a moment. 90 percent of the living space on the planet is in the open ocean, and it's where life — the title of our seminar tonight — it's where life began. And it's a lively and a lovely place, but we're rapidly changing the oceans with our — not only with our overfishing, our irresponsible fishing, our adding of pollutants like fertilizer from our cropland, but also, most recently, with climate change, and Steve Schneider, I'm sure, will be going into greater detail on this. Now, as we continue to tinker with the oceans, more and more reports are predicting that the kinds of seas that we're creating will be conducive to low-energy type of animals, like jellyfish and bacteria. And this might be the kind of seas we're headed for.Now jellyfish are strangely hypnotic and beautiful, and you'll see lots of gorgeous ones at the aquarium on Friday, but they sting like hell, and jellyfish sushi and sashimi is just not going to fill you up. About 100 grams of jellyfish equals four calories. So it may be good for the waistline, but it probably won't keep you satiated for very long. And a sea that's just filled and teeming with jellyfish isn't very good for all the other creatures that live in the oceans, that is, unless you eat jellyfish. And this is this voracious predator launching a sneak attack on this poor little unsuspecting jellyfish there, a by-the-wind sailor. And that predator is the giant ocean sunfish, the Mola mola, whose primary prey are jellyfish.This animal is in ""The Guinness World Book of Records"" for being the world's heaviest bony fish. It reaches up to almost 5,000 pounds — on a diet of jellyfish, primarily. And I think it's kind of a nice little cosmological convergence here that the Mola mola — its common name is sunfish — that its favorite food is the moon jelly. So it's kind of nice, the sun and the moon getting together this way, even if one is eating the other. Now this is typically how you see sunfish, this is where they get their common name. They like to sunbathe, can't blame them. They just lay out on the surface of the sea and most people think they're sick or lazy, but that's a typical behavior, they lie out and bask on the surface.Their other name, Mola mola, is — it sounds Hawaiian, but it's actually Latin for millstone, and that's attributable to their roundish, very bizarre, cut-off shape. It's as if, as they were growing, they just forgot the tail part. And that's actually what drew me to the Mola in the first place, was this terribly bizarre shape. You know, you look at sharks, and they're streamlined, and they're sleek, and you look at tuna, and they're like torpedoes — they just give away their agenda. They're about migration and strength, and then you look at the sunfish.(Laughter)And this is just so elegantly mysterious, it's just — it really kind of holds its cards a lot tighter than say, a tuna. So I was just intrigued with what — you know, what is this animal's story? Well, as with anything in biology, nothing really makes sense except in the light of evolution. The Mola's no exception. They appeared shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago, at a time when whales still had legs, and they come from a rebellious little puffer fish faction — oblige me a little Kipling-esque storytelling here. Of course evolution is somewhat random, and you know, about 55 million years ago there was this rebellious little puffer fish faction that said, oh, the heck with the coral reefs — we're going to head to the high seas. And lots of generations, lots of tweaking and torquing, and we turn our puffer into the Mola. You know, if you give Mother Nature enough time, that is what she will produce.They look — maybe they look kind of prehistoric and unfinished, abridged perhaps, but in fact, in fact they are the — they vie for the top position of the most evolutionarily-derived fish in the sea, right up there with flat fish. They're — every single thing about that fish has been changed. And in terms of fishes — fishes appeared 500 million years ago, and they're pretty modern, just 50 million years ago, so — so interestingly, they give away their ancestry as they develop. They start as little eggs, and they're in ""The Guinness World Book of Records"" again for having the most number of eggs of any vertebrate on the planet. A single four-foot female had 300 million eggs, can carry 300 million eggs in her ovaries — imagine — and they get to be over 10 feet long. Imagine what a 10 foot one has. And from that little egg, they pass through this spiky little porcupine fish stage, reminiscent of their ancestry, and develop — this is their little adolescent stage. They school as adolescents, and become behemoth loners as adults. That's a little diver up there in the corner.They're in ""The Guinness World Book of Records"" again for being the vertebrate growth champion of the world. From their little hatching size of their egg, into their little larval stage till they reach adulthood, they put on 600 million times an increase in weight. 600 million. Now imagine if you gave birth to a little baby, and you had to feed this thing. That would mean that your child, you would expect it to gain the weight of six Titanics. Now I don't know how you'd feed a child like that but — we don't know how fast the Molas grow in the wild, but captive growth studies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium — one of the first places to have them in captivity — they had one that gained 800 lbs in 14 months. I said, now, that's a true American.(Laughter)(Applause)So being a loner is a great thing, especially in today's seas, because schooling used to be salvation for fishes, but it's suicide for fishes now. But unfortunately Molas, even though they don't school, they still get caught in nets as by-catch. If we're going to save the world from total jellyfish domination, then we've got to figure out what the jellyfish predators — how they live their lives, like the Mola. And unfortunately, they make up a large portion of the California by-catch — up to 26 percent of the drift net. And in the Mediterranean, in the swordfish net fisheries, they make up up to 90 percent. So we've got to figure out how they're living their lives. And how do you do that? How do you do that with an animal — very few places in the world. This is an open ocean creature. It knows no boundaries — it doesn't go to land.How do you get insight? How do you seduce an open ocean creature like that to spill its secrets? Well, there's some great new technology that has just recently become available, and it's just a boon for getting insight into open ocean animals. And it's pictured right here, that little tag up there. That little tag can record temperature, depth and light intensity, which is correlated with time, and from that we can get locations. And it can record this data for up to two years, and keep it in that tag, release at a pre-programmed time, float to the surface, upload all that data, that whole travelogue, to satellite, which relays it directly to our computers, and we've got that whole dataset. And we didn't even have — we just had to tag the animal and then we went home and you know, sat at our desks. So the great thing about the Mola is that when we put the tag on them — if you look up here — that's streaming off, that's right where we put the tag. And it just so happens that's a parasite hanging off the Mola.Molas are infamous for carrying tons of parasites. They're just parasite hotels; even their parasites have parasites. I think Donne wrote a poem about that. But they have 40 genera of parasites, and so we figured just one more parasite won't be too much of a problem. And they happen to be a very good vehicle for carrying oceanographic equipment. They don't seem to mind, so far. So what are we trying to find out? We're focusing on the Pacific. We're tagging on the California coast, and we're tagging over in Taiwan and Japan. And we're interested in how these animals are using the currents, using temperature, using the open ocean, to live their lives. We'd love to tag in Monterey. Monterey is one of the few places in the world where Molas come in large numbers. Not this time of year — it's more around October.And we'd love to tag here — this is an aerial shot of Monterey — but unfortunately, the Molas here end up looking like this because another one of our locals really likes Molas but in the wrong way. The California sea lion takes the Molas as soon as they come into the bay, rips off their fins, fashions them into the ultimate Frisbee, Mola style, and then tosses them back and forth. And I'm not exaggerating, it is just — and sometimes they don't eat them, it's just spiteful. And you know, the locals think it's terrible behavior, it's just horrible watching this happen, day after day. The poor little Molas coming in, getting ripped to shreds, so we head down south, to San Diego. Not so many California sea lions down there. And the Molas there, you can find them with a spotter plane very easily, and they like to hang out under floating rafts of kelp. And under those kelps — this is why the Molas come there because it's spa time for the Molas there. As soon as they get under those rafts of kelp, the exfoliating cleaner fish come. And they come and give the Molas — you can see they strike this funny little position that says, ""I'm not threatening, but I need a massage.""(Laughter)And they'll put their fins out and their eyes go in the back of their head, and the fish come up and they just clean, clean, clean — because the Molas, you know, there's just a smorgasbord of parasites. And it's also a great place to go down south because the water's warmer, and the Molas are kind of friendly down there. I mean what other kind of fish, if you approach it right, will say, ""Okay, scratch me right there."" You truly can swim up to a Mola — they're very gentle — and if you approach them right, you can give them a scratch and they enjoy it. So we've also tagged one part of the Pacific; we've gone over to another part of the Pacific, and we've tagged in Taiwan, and we tagged in Japan. And over in these places, the Molas are caught in set nets that line these countries. And they're not thrown back as by-catch, they're eaten. We were served a nine-course meal of Mola after we tagged. Well, not the one we tagged! And everything from the kidney, to the testes, to the back bone, to the fin muscle to — I think that ís pretty much the whole fish — is eaten.So the hardest part of tagging, now, is after you put that tag on, you have to wait, months. And you're just wondering, oh, I hope the fish is safe, I hope, I hope it's going to be able to actually live its life out during the course that the tag is recording. The tags cost 3500 dollars each, and then satellite time is another 500 dollars, so you're like, oh, I hope the tag is okay. And so the waiting is really the hardest part. I'm going to show you our latest dataset. And it hasn't been published, so it's totally privy information just for TED. And in showing you this, you know, when we're looking at this data, we're thinking, oh do these animals, do they cross the equator? Do they go from one side of the Pacific to the other? And we found that they kind of are homebodies. They're not big migrators. This is their track: we deployed the tag off of Tokyo, and the Mola in one month kind of got into the Kuroshio Current off of Japan and foraged there. And after four months, went up, you know, off of the north part of Japan. And that's kind of their home range. Now that's important, though, because if there's a lot of fishing pressure, that population doesn't get replenished. So that's a very important piece of data.But also what's important is that they're not slacker, lazy fish. They're super industrious. And this is a day in the life of a Mola, and if we — they're up and down, and up and down, and up and down, and up and up and down, up to 40 times a day. As the sun comes up, you see in the blue, they start their dive. Down — and as the sun gets brighter they go a little deeper, little deeper. They plumb the depths down to 600 meters, in temperatures to one degree centigrade, and this is why you see them on the surface — it's so cold down there. They've got to come up, warm, get that solar power, and then plunge back into the depths, and go up and down and up and down. And they're hitting a layer down there; it's called the deep scattering layer — which a whole variety of food's in that layer. So rather than just being some sunbathing slacker, they're really very industrious fish that dance this wild dance between the surface and the bottom and through temperature.We see the same pattern — now with these tags we're seeing a similar pattern for swordfishes, manta rays, tunas, a real three-dimensional play. This is part of a much larger program called the Census of Marine Life, where they're going to be tagging all over the world and the Mola's going to enter into that. And what's exciting — you all travel, and you know the best thing about traveling is to be able to find the locals, and to find the great places by getting the local knowledge. Well now with the Census of Marine Life, we'll be able to sidle up to all the locals and explore 90 percent of our living space, with local knowledge. It's never — it's really never been a more exciting, or a vital time, to be a biologist.Which brings me to my last point, and what I think is kind of the most fun. I set up a website because I was getting so many questions about Molas and sunfish. And so I just figured I'd have the questions answered, and I'd be able to thank my funders, like National Geographic and Lindbergh. But people would write into the site with all sorts of, all sorts of stories about these animals and wanting to help me get samples for genetic analysis. And what I found most exciting is that everyone had a shared — a shared love and an interest in the oceans. I was getting reports from Catholic nuns, Jewish Rabbis, Muslims, Christians — everybody writing in, united by their love of life. And to me that — I don't think I could say it any better than the immortal Bard himself: ""One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."" And sure, it may be just one big old silly fish, but it's helping. If it's helping to unite the world, I think it's definitely the fish of the future.","https://www.ted.com/talks/tierney_thys_swims_with_the_giant_sunfish
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"What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data.We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here and kind of seamlessly and continuously zooming in, panning through it, rearranging it in any way we want. And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are. Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. It's also very flexible architecture. This is an entire book, so this is an example of non-image data. This is ""Bleak House"" by Dickens. Every column is a chapter. To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture. Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book. I wouldn't recommend it.This is a more realistic case, an issue of The Guardian. Every large image is the beginning of a section. And this really gives you the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper, which is an inherently multi-scale kind of medium. We've done something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution — much higher than in an ordinary ad — and we've embedded extra content. If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here. Or other models, or even technical specifications. And this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate. We hope that this means no more pop-ups and other rubbish like that — shouldn't be necessary.Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this. And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. But those are all the roads in the U.S. superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image. So let's pull up, now, something else. This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out.This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies. One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W. and Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research. A very nice collaboration. And so this is live on the Web. It's powered by Seadragon. You can see that when we do these sorts of views, where we can dive through images and have this kind of multi-resolution experience.But the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful. The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots — all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies — all these shots were taken. So you see elements here of stabilized slide-show or panoramic imaging, and these things have all been related spatially. I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. Some are much more spatial. I would like to jump straight to one of Noah's original data-sets — this is from an early prototype that we first got working this summer — to show you what I think is really the punch line behind the Photosynth technology, It's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments we've put up on the website. We had to worry about the lawyers and so on.This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr. You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on. And each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model. And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way. We can just navigate in this very simple way.(Applause)(Applause ends)You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here.(Laughter)I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. If I can find some of the sort of weird ones — So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. Somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs — here we go. This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly. We can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment.What the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment. This is now taking data from everybody — from the entire collective memory, visually, of what the Earth looks like — and link all of that together. Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. You have a model that emerges of the entire Earth. Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's Virtual Earth work. And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it. Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered. If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory.Thank you so much.(Applause)(Applause ends)Chris Anderson: Do I understand this right? What your software is going to allow, is that at some point, really within the next few years, all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world are going to link together?BAA: Yes. What this is really doing is discovering, creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images. It's doing that based on the content inside the images. And that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information a lot of images have. Like when you do a web search for images, you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of. What if that picture links to all of your pictures? The amount of semantic interconnection and richness that comes out of that is really huge. It's a classic network effect.CA: Truly incredible. Congratulations.","https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth
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"I'm really scared. I don't think we're going to make it. Probably by now most of you have seen Al Gore's amazing talk. Shortly after I saw that, we had some friends over for dinner with the family. The conversation turned to global warming, and everybody agreed, there's a real problem. We've got a climate crisis. So, we went around the table to talk about what we should do. The conversation came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary. She said, ""I agree with everything that's been said. I'm scared and I'm angry."" And then she turned to me and said, ""Dad, your generation created this problem; you'd better fix it."" Wow. All the conversation stopped. All the eyes turned to me. (Laughter) I didn't know what to say. Kleiner's second law is, ""There is a time when panic is the appropriate response."" (Laughter) And we've reached that time. We cannot afford to underestimate this problem. If we face irreversible and catastrophic consequences, we must act, and we must act decisively. I've got to tell you, for me, everything changed that evening.And so, my partners and I, we set off on this mission to learn more, to try to do much more. So, we mobilized. We got on airplanes. We went to Brazil. We went to China and to India, to Bentonville, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. and to Sacramento. And so, what I'd like to do now is to tell you about what we've learned in those journeys. Because the more we learned, the more concerned we grew. You know, my partners at Kleiner and I were compulsive networkers, and so when we see a big problem or an opportunity like avian flu or personalized medicine, we just get together the smartest people we know. For this climate crisis, we assembled a network, really, of superstars, from policy activists to scientists and entrepreneurs and business leaders. Fifty or so of them. And so, I want to tell you about what we've learned in doing that and four lessons I've learned in the last year.The first lesson is that companies are really powerful, and that matters a lot. This is a story about how Wal-Mart went green, and what that means. Two years ago, the CEO, Lee Scott, believed that green is the next big thing, and so Wal-Mart made going green a top priority. They committed that they're going to take their existing stores and reduce their energy consumption by 20 percent, and their new stores by 30 percent, and do all that in seven years. The three biggest uses of energy in a store are heating and air conditioning, then lighting, and then refrigeration. So, look what they did. They painted the roofs of all their stores white. They put smart skylights through their stores so they could harvest the daylight and reduce the lighting demands. And, third, they put the refrigerated goods behind closed doors with LED lighting. I mean, why would you try to refrigerate a whole store? These are really simple, smart solutions based on existing technology.Why does Wal-Mart matter? Well, it's massive. They're the largest private employer in America. They're the largest private user of electricity. They have the second-largest vehicle fleet on the road. And they have one of the world's most amazing supply chains, 60,000 suppliers. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the sixth-largest trading partner with China. And maybe most important, they have a big effect on other companies.When Wal-Mart declares it's going to go green and be profitable, it has a powerful impact on other great institutions. So, let me tell you this: when Wal-Mart achieves 20 percent energy reductions, that's going to be a very big deal. But I'm afraid it's not enough. We need Wal-Mart and every other company to do the same.The second thing that we learned is that individuals matter, and they matter enormously. I've got another Wal-Mart story for you, OK? Wal-Mart has over 125 million U.S. customers. That's a third of the U.S. population. 65 million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year. And Wal-Mart has committed they're going to sell another 100 million light bulbs in the coming year. But it's not easy. Consumers don't really like these light bulbs. The light's kind of funny, they won't dim, takes a while for them to start up. But the pay-off is really enormous. 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs means that we'll save 600 million dollars in energy bills, and 20 million tons of CO2 every year, year in and year out. It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here. (Laughter)It's hard to change consumer behavior because consumers don't know how much this stuff costs. Do you know? Do you know how much CO2 you generated to drive here or fly here? I don't know, and I should. Those of us who care about all this would act better if we knew what the real costs were. But as long as we pretend that CO2 is free, as long as these uses are nearly invisible, how can we expect change? I'm really afraid, because I think the kinds of changes we can reasonably expect from individuals are going to be clearly not enough.The third lesson we learned is that policy matters. It really matters. In fact, policy is paramount. I've got a behind-the-scenes story for you about that green tech network I described. At the end of our first meeting, we got together to talk about what the action items would be, how we'd follow up. And Bob Epstein raised a hand. He stood up. You know, Bob's that Berkeley techie type who started Sybase. Well, Bob said the most important thing we could do right now is to make it clear in Sacramento, California that we need a market-based system of mandates that's going to cap and reduce greenhouse gases in California. It's necessary and, just as important, it's good for the California economy.So, eight of us went to Sacramento in August and we met with the seven undecided legislators and we lobbied for AB32. You know what? Six of those seven voted yes in favor of the bill, so it passed, and it passed by a vote of 47 to 32. (Applause) Please. Thank you. I think it's the most important legislation of 2006. Why? Because California was the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020. And the result of that is, we're going to generate 83,000 new jobs, four billion dollars a year in annual income, and reduce the CO2 emissions by 174 million tons a year. California emits only seven percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. It's only a percent and a half of the country's CO2 emissions. It's a great start, but I've got to tell you — where I started — I'm really afraid. In fact, I'm certain California's not enough.Here's a story about national policy that we could all learn from. You know Tom Friedman says, ""If you don't go, you don't know""? Well, we went to Brazil to meet Dr. Jose Goldemberg. He's the father of the ethanol revolution. He told us that Brazil's government mandated that every gasoline station in the country would carry ethanol. And they mandated that their new vehicles would be flex-fuel compatible, right? They'd run ethanol or ordinary gasoline. And so, here's what's happened in Brazil. They now have 29,000 ethanol pumps — this versus 700 in the U.S., and a paltry two in California — and in three years their new car fleet has gone from four percent to 85 percent flex-fuel. Compare that to the U.S.: five percent are flex-fuel. And you know what? Most consumers who have them don't even know it. So, what's happened in Brazil is, they've replaced 40 percent of the gasoline consumed by their automotive fleet with ethanol. That's 59 billion dollars since 1975 that they didn't ship to the Middle East. It's created a million jobs inside that country, and it's saved 32 million tons of CO2. It's really substantial. That's 10 percent of the CO2 emissions across their entire country. But Brazil's only 1.3 percent of the world's CO2 emission. So, Brazil's ethanol miracle, I'm really afraid, is not enough. In fact, I'm afraid all of the best policies we have are not going to be enough.The fourth and final lesson we've learned is about the potential of radical innovation. So, I want to tell you about a tragic problem and a breakthrough technology. Every year a million and a half people die of a completely preventable disease. That's malaria. 6,000 people a day. All for want of two dollars' worth of medications that we can buy at the corner drugstore. Well, two dollars, two dollars is too much for Africa. So, a team of Berkeley researchers with 15 million dollars from the Gates Foundation is engineering, designing a radical new way to make the key ingredient, called artemisinin, and they're going to make that drug 10 times cheaper. And in doing so, they'll save a million lives — at least a million lives a year. A million lives. Their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology. This leverages millions of years of evolution by redesigning bugs to make really useful products. Now, what you do is, you get inside the microbe, you change its metabolic pathways, and you end up with a living chemical factory.Now, you may ask, John, what has this got to go with green and with climate crisis? Well, I'll tell you — a lot. We've now formed a company called Amyris, and this technology that they're using can be used to make better biofuels. Don't let me skip over that. Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs. Alan Kay is famous for saying the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And, of course, at Kleiner we, kind of, apologize and say the second best way is to finance it. And that's why we're investing 200 million dollars in a wide range of really disruptive new technologies for innovation in green technologies. And we're encouraging others to do it as well. We're talking a lot about this.In 2005, there were 600 million dollars invested in new technologies of the sort you see here. It doubled in 2006 to 1.2 billion dollars. But I'm really afraid we need much, much more. For reference, fact one: Exxon's revenues in 2005 were a billion dollars a day. Do you know, they only invested 0.2 percent of revenues in R&D? Second fact: the President's new budget for renewable energy is barely a billion dollars in total. Less than one day of Exxon's revenues. Third fact: I bet you didn't know that there's enough energy in hot rocks under the country to supply America's energy needs for the next thousand years. And the federal budget calls for a measly 20 million dollars of R&D in geothermal energy. It is almost criminal that we are not investing more in energy research in this country. And I am really afraid that it's absolutely not enough.So, in a year's worth of learning we found a bunch of surprises. Who would have thought that a mass retailer could make money by going green? Who would have thought that a database entrepreneur could transform California with legislation? Who would have thought that the ethanol biofuel miracle would come from a developing country in South America? And who would have thought that scientists trying to cure malaria could come up with breakthroughs in biofuels? And who would have thought that all that is not enough? Not enough to stabilize the climate. Not enough to keep the ice in Greenland from crashing into the ocean. The scientists tell us — and they're only guessing — that we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one half, and do it as fast as possible. Now, we may have the political will to do this in the U.S., but I've got to tell you, we've got only one atmosphere, and so somehow we're going to have to find the political will to do this all around the world. The wild card in this deck is China.To size the problem, China's CO2 emissions today are 3.3 gigatons; the U.S. is 5.8. Business as usual means we'll have 23 gigatons from China by 2050. That's about as much CO2 as there is in the whole world. And if it's business as usual, we're going out of business. When I was in Davos, China's Mayor of Dalian was pressed about their CO2 strategy, and he said the following, ""You know, Americans use seven times the CO2 per capita as Chinese."" Then he asked, ""Why should China sacrifice our growth so that the West can continue to be profligate and stupid?"" Does anybody here have an answer for him? I don't. We've got to make this economic so that all people and all nations make the right outcome, the profitable outcome, and therefore the likely outcome. Energy's a six-trillion-dollar business worldwide. It is the mother of all markets. You remember that Internet?Well, I'll tell you what. Green technologies — going green — is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century. Moreover, if we succeed, it's going to be the most important transformation for life on the planet since, as Bill Joy says, we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere. Now, here's the hard question, if the trajectory of all the world's companies and individuals and policies and innovation is not going to be enough, what are we going to do? I don't know. Everyone here cares about changing the world and has made a difference in that one way or another.So, our call to action — my call to you — is for you to make going green your next big thing, your gig. What can you do? You can personally get carbon neutral. Go to ClimateCrisis.org or CarbonCalculator.com and buy carbon credits. You could join other leaders in mandating, lobbying for mandated cap and trade in U.S. greenhouse gas reductions. There's six bills right now in Congress. Let's get one of them passed.And the most important thing you can do, I think, is to use your personal power and your Rolodex to lead your business, your institution, in going green. Do it like Wal-Mart, get it to go green for its customers and its suppliers and for itself. Really think outside the box. Can you imagine what it would be like if Amazon or eBay or Google or Microsoft or Apple really went green and you caused that to happen? It could be bigger than Wal-Mart. I can't wait to see what we TEDsters do about this crisis. And I really, really hope that we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent and all of our influence to solve this problem. Because if we do, I can look forward to the conversation I'm going to have with my daughter in 20 years. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_doerr_sees_salvation_and_profit_in_greentech
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"Thank you very much, Chris. Everybody who came up here said they were scared. I don't know if I'm scared, but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this. And I don't have any smart technology for you to look at. There are no slides, so you'll just have to be content with me. (Laughter)What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa. Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV/AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters.While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much. And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why. This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to. This is the Africa of opportunity. This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies. And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today.And I want to start by telling you a story about that change in Africa. On 15th of September 2005, Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria, was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London. He was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family. This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria — led by one of our most able and courageous people: Mr. Nuhu Ribadu. Alamieyeseigha was arraigned in London. Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president — as in many countries — have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office.Today, Alams — as we call him for short — is in jail. This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders. This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite. And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa — corruption all the time — I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging.Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no. There's still a long way to go, but that there's a will there. And that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight. So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this — that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case. There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go.But the truth of the matter is that this is going on. The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving. A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries.And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance. That is that people talk about corruption, corruption. All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa. That's the image: African countries. But let me say this: if Alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in London — if the other people who had taken money, estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries — if they're able to do this, what is that? Is that not corruption? In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted? So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe — where the money's going and what can be done to stop it. I'm working on an initiative now, along with the World Bank, on asset recovery, trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad — developing countries' moneys — to get that sent back. Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together. (Applause)The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform. Africans, after — they're tired, we're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care. We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform. And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it. We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start. We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information.And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria. In fact, if you're not in Nigeria, you're not in Africa. I want to tell you that. (Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people — chaotic people — but very interesting people. You'll never be bored. (Laughter)What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves. And with the support of a leader who was willing, at the time, to do the reforms, we put forward a comprehensive reform program, which we developed ourselves. Not the International Monetary Fund. Not the World Bank, where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president. No one can do it for you. You have to do it for yourself.We put together a program that would, one: get the state out of businesses it had nothing — it had no business being in. The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it's inefficient and incompetent. So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises. (Applause) We — as a result, we decided to liberalize many of our markets. Can you believe that prior to this reform — which started at the end of 2003, when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister — we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history? (Laughter)Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury. You couldn't get it. You had to bribe. You had to do everything to get your phone. When President Obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector, we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million GSM lines, and counting. Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people. (Laughter)The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa. And in the three years that I was Finance Minister, they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year. 360 million in a market — in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita. So the market is there. When they kept this under wraps, but soon others got to know. Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in. But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know. So privatization is one of the things we've done.The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better. Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well. And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price. Before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in, because oil is the biggest, most revenue-earning sector in the economy: 70 percent of our revenues come from oil. We de-linked that, and once we did it, we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price. We didn't know we could pull it off; it was very controversial. But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development — where, even if oil prices were high, we would grow very fast. When they crashed, we crashed. And we could hardly even pay anything, any salaries, in the economy. That smoothened out. We were able to save, just before I left, 27 billion dollars. Whereas — and this went to our reserves — when I arrived in 2003, we had seven billion dollars in reserves. By the time I left, we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars. And as we speak now, we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances. And that shores up our economy, makes it stable.Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy. We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent. And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now. So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy.And what is more important, because we want to get away from oil and diversify — and there are so many opportunities in this one big country, as in many countries in Africa — what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone, but from non-oil. Agriculture grew at better than eight percent. As telecoms sector grew, housing and construction, and I could go on and on. And this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out, the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous.We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said. We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world. We have opportunities in housing and real estate. There was nothing in a country of 140 million people — no shopping malls as you know them here. This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people. And now, we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected.So, huge things in construction, real estate, mortgage markets. Financial services: we had 89 banks. Too many not doing their real business. We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital — share capital. And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars. The banks — these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside. Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million. Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million. And I can go on. Dollars, on and on, into the system.We are doing the same with the insurance sector. So in financial services, a great deal of opportunity. In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity. And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on. But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important.So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear. I'm trying to tell you that since the past three years, the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum. This is better than the performance of many OECD countries. So it's clear that things are changing.Conflicts are down on the continent; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago, we are down to three or four conflicts — one of the most terrible, of course, of which is Darfur. And, you know, you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected. But you should know that this continent is not — is a continent of many countries, not one country. And if we are down to three or four conflicts, it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable, growing, exciting economies where there's plenty of opportunity. And I want to just make one point about this investment.The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs. There's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children's lives. That's not what I'm saying. That is fine. But imagine the impact on a family: if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school, that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves. If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet, isn't that a wonderful opportunity? Isn't that the way to go? And I want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women. (Applause)I have a CD here. I'm sorry that I didn't say anything on time. Otherwise, I would have liked you to have seen this. It says, ""Africa: Open for Business."" And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year. Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June. But it shows you Africans, and particularly African women, who against all odds have developed businesses, some of them world-class.One of the women in this video, Adenike Ogunlesi, making children's clothes — which she started as a hobby and grew into a business. Mixing African materials, such as we have, with materials from elsewhere. So, she'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys, with African material mixed in. Very creative designs, has reached a stage where she even had an order from Wal-Mart. (Laughter) For 10,000 pieces. So that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing.And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard. I could go on giving examples: Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda, who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her. However, many of these are starved for capital to expand, because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary. Nobody thinks in terms of a market. Nobody thinks there's opportunity. But I'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now, will miss it forever.So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing. Think about the Beatrices, think about the Adenikes of this world, who are doing incredible things, that are bringing them into the global economy, whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed, and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income.So I invite you to explore the opportunities. When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ngozi_okonjo_iweala_on_doing_business_in_africa
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"So, I kind of believe that we're in like the ""cave-painting"" era of computer interfaces. Like, they're very kind of — they don't go as deep or as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be and I'd like to change all that. Hit me. OK. So I mean, this is the kind of status quo interface, right? It's very flat, kind of rigid. And OK, so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable Mac, you know, but really it's the kind of same old crap we've had for the last, you know, 30 years. (Laughter) (Applause) Like I think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers. I mean it's point and click, it's like the menus, icons, it's all the kind of same thing.And so one kind of information space that I take inspiration from is my real desk. It's so much more subtle, so much more visceral — you know, what's visible, what's not. And I'd like to bring that experience to the desktop. So I kind of have a — this is BumpTop. It's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing. So you can bump things — they're all physically, you know, manipulable and stuff. And instead of that point and click, it's like a push and pull, things collide as you'd expect them. Just like on my real desk, I can — let me just grab these guys — I can turn things into piles instead of just the folders that we have. And once things are in a pile I can browse them by throwing them into a grid, or you know, flip through them like a book or I can lay them out like a deck of cards. When they're laid out, I can pull things to new locations or delete things or just quickly sort a whole pile, you know, just immediately, right? And then, it's all smoothly animated, instead of these jarring changes you see in today's interfaces.Also, if I want to add something to a pile, well, how do I do that? I just toss it to the pile, and it's added right to the top. It's a kind of nice way. Also some of the stuff we can do is, for these individual icons we thought — I mean, how can we play with the idea of an icon, and push that further? And one of the things I can do is make it bigger if I want to emphasize it and make it more important.But what's really cool is that since there's a physics simulation running under this, it's actually heavier. So the lighter stuff doesn't really move but if I throw it at the lighter guys, right? (Laughter) So it's cute, but it's also like a subtle channel of conveying information, right? This is heavy so it feels more important. So it's kind of cool.Despite computers everywhere paper really hasn't disappeared, because it has a lot of, I think, valuable properties. And some of those we wanted to transfer to the icons in our system. So one of the things you can do to our icons, just like paper, is crease them and fold them, just like paper. Remember, you know, something for later. Or if you want to be destructive, you can just crumple it up and, you know, toss it to the corner. Also just like paper, around our workspace we'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later, and I can do the same thing here, and you know, you'll see post-it notes and things like that around people's offices. And I can pull them off when I want to work with them.So, one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that, you know, ""Okay, well my real desk is really messy. I don't want that mess on my computer."" So one thing we have for that is like a grid align, kind of — so you get that more traditional desktop. Things are kind of grid aligned. More boring, but you still have that kind of colliding and bumping. And you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop.Let's just break this shelf. Okay, that shelf broke. I think beyond the icons, I think another really cool domain for this software — I think it applies to more than just icons and your desktop — but browsing photographs. I think you can really enrich the way we browse our photographs and bring it to that kind of shoebox of, you know, photos with your family on the kitchen table kind of thing. I can toss these things around. They're so much more tangible and touchable — and you know I can double-click on something to take a look at it. And I can do all that kind of same stuff I showed you before. So I can pile things up, I can flip through it, I can, you know — okay, let's move this photo to the back, let's delete this guy here, and I think it's just a much more rich kind of way of interacting with your information.And that's BumpTop. Thanks!","https://www.ted.com/talks/anand_agarawala_demos_his_bumptop_desktop
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"Thank you. And I feel like this whole evening has been very amazing to me. I feel it's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient work from ancient India in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area, Vaishali, and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him. All the young people, actually, from the city. The old fogeys don't come because they're mad at Buddha, because when he came to their city he accepted — he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him, from whoever it is, and the local geisha, a movie-star sort of person, raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first.So he was hanging out with the movie star, and of course they were grumbling: ""He's supposed to be religious and all this. What's he doing over there at Amrapali's house with all his 500 monks,"" and so on. They were all grumbling, and so they boycotted him. They wouldn't go listen to him. But the young people all came. And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol, and they put it on the ground. And as soon as they had laid all these, all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India, he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium, the wonder of the universe. Everyone looked in that, and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes.And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets. So they don't — when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky — they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding. They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that.He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected. And then Leilei — I know his other name — told us about interconnection, and how we're all totally interconnected here, and how we've all known each other. And of course in the Buddhist universe, we've already done this already billions of times in many, many lifetimes in the past. And I didn't give the talk always. You did, and we had to watch you, and so forth. And we're all still trying to, I guess we're all trying to become TEDsters, if that's a modern form of enlightenment. I guess so. Because in a way, if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it's the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that's going on everywhere in the planet.And therefore it will become intolerable — what compassion is, is where it will become intolerable for us, totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoying the life of the mind or whatever it is, and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they cannot have a bite of food and they have no place, or they're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth. It just becomes intolerable. With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened.And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do. Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do, a little bit tired, we do suffer. We do enjoy our misery in a certain way. We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere, but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there. And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other, and each one tries to get out of their own, and ultimately it fails of course, and then we're back into this thing.Because our egocentric perception — from the Buddha's point of view, misperception — is that all we are is what is inside our skin. And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different. And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception, a little bit, right? You know, someone sitting next to you in a seat — that's OK because you're in a theater, but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you, you'd freak out. What do they want from me? Like, who's that? And so you wouldn't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it's you versus the universe — that's all Buddha discovered. Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone, each of us, and everyone else is different, then that puts us in an impossible situation, doesn't it? Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world? Who's going to get enough out of the world? Who's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings — if you're different from all the other beings?So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually, knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings. You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them. When you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel. Luckily, they say — I still am not sure — but luckily, they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the Buddhist literature, they say, ""Oh who would really want to be compassionate? How awful! I'm so miserable on my own. My head is aching. My bones are aching. I go from birth to death. I'm never satisfied. I never have enough, even if I'm a billionaire, I don't have enough. I need a hundred billion."" So I'm like that. Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering. It would be terrible.But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life. When you're no longer locked in yourself, and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life. And you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing.You know, we really learned everything in the '60s. Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they've been trying to suppress it since then. I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching. But when we're relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings. And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange. It's totally strange. The Dalai Lama always likes to say — he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence. It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know — and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets. Like, even when you're having a good time, when is the good time over? The good time is over when you think, how good is it? And then it's never good enough.I love that Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time, doing it by having a good time. I think the Dalai Lama should have heard that. I wish he'd been there to hear that. He once told me — he looked kind of sad; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots. He looked a little sad, because he said, well, a hundred years ago, they went and took everything away from the haves. You know, the big communist revolutions, Russia and China and so forth. They took it all away by violence, saying they were going to give it to everyone, and then they were even worse. They didn't help at all.So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today? And so then he looks at me. So I said, ""Well, you know, you're all in this yourself. You teach: it's generosity,"" was all I could think of. What is virtue? But of course, what you said, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun. It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key. Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he's fairly jolly. Even though his people are being genocided — and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun's head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it. He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays. I won't even say what they do. But he feels it. And yet he's very jolly. He's extremely jolly.Because when you open up like that, then you can't just — what good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery? You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed. Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man. She scared us with the lava man is coming, then the tsunami is coming, but then finally there were flowers and trees, and it was very beautiful. It's really lovely.So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion. The human being is almost out of time. The human being is compassion because what is our brain for? Now, Jim's brain is memorizing the almanac. But he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is, he will, he did. He could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings. And he would have tremendous fun doing that.So the first person who gets happy, when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of, how happy am I, where you're always dissatisfied — as Mick Jagger told us. You never get any satisfaction that way. So then you decide, ""Well, I'm sick of myself. I'm going to think of how other people can be happy. I'm going to get up in the morning and think, what can I do for even one other person, even a dog, my dog, my cat, my pet, my butterfly?"" And the first person who gets happy when you do that, you don't do anything for anybody else, but you get happier, you yourself, because your whole perception broadens and you suddenly see the whole world and all of the people in it. And you realize that this — being with these people — is the flower garden that Chiho showed us. It is Nirvana. And my time is up. And I know the TED commandments. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/bob_thurman_says_we_can_be_buddhas
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"Kurt Andersen: Like many architects, David is a hog for the limelight but is sufficiently reticent — or at least pretends to be — that he asked me to question him rather than speaking. In fact what we're going to talk about, I think, is in fact a subject that is probably better served by a conversation than an address. And I guess we have a bit of news clip to precede.Dan Rather: Since the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, many people have flocked to downtown New York to see and pay respects at what amounts to the 16-acre burial ground. Now, as CBS's Jim Axelrod reports, they're putting the finishing touches on a new way for people to visit and view the scene.Jim Axelrod: Forget the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. There's a new place in New York where the crowds are thickest — Ground Zero.Tourist: I've taken my step-daughter here from Indianapolis. This was — out of all the tourist sites in New York City — this was her number-one pick.JA: Thousands now line up on lower Broadway.Tourist: I've been wanting to come down here since this happened.JA: Even on the coldest winter days. To honor and remember.Tourist: It's reality, it's us. It happened here. This is ours.JA: So many, in fact, that seeing has become a bit of a problem.Tourist: I think that people are very frustrated that they're not able to get closer to see what's going on.JA: But that is about to change. In record time, a team of architects and construction workers designed and built a viewing platform to ease the frustration and bring people closer.Man: They'll get an incredible panorama and understand, I think more completely, the sheer totality of the destruction of the place.JA: If you think about it, Ground Zero is unlike most any other tourist site in America. Unlike the Grand Canyon or the Washington Monument, people come here to see what's no longer there.David Rockwell: The first experience people will have here when they see this is not as a construction site but as this incredibly moving burial ground.JA: The walls are bare by design, so people can fill them with their own memorials the way they already have along the current perimeter.Tourist: From our hearts, it affected us just as much.JA: The ramps are made of simple material — the kind of plywood you see at construction sites — which is really the whole point. In the face of America's worst destruction people are building again. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, New York.KA: This is not an obvious subject to be in the sensuality segment, but certainly David you are known as — I know, a phrase you hate — an entertainment architect. Your work is highly sensual, even hedonistic.DR: I like that word.KA: It's about pleasure — casinos and hotels and restaurants. How did the shock that all of us — and especially all of us in New York — felt on the 11th of September transmute into your desire to do this thing?DR: Well the truth of the matter is, post-September 11th, I felt myself in the role originally — first of all as someone who lives in Tribeca and whose neighborhood was devastated, and as someone who works less than a mile from there — that I was in the role of forcing 100 people who work with me in my firm, to continue to have the same level of enthusiasm about creating the places we had been creating. In fact we're finishing a book which is called ""Pleasure,"" which is about sensual pleasure in spaces.But I've got to tell you — it became impossible to do that. We were really paralyzed. And I found myself the Friday after September 11th — two days afterwards — literally unable to motivate anyone to do anything. We gave the office a few days off.And in discussing this with other architects, we had seen people saying in the press that they should rebuild the towers as they were — they should rebuild them 50 stories taller. And I thought it was astonishing to speculate, as if this were a competition, on something that was such a fresh wound. And I had a series of discussions — first with Rick Scofidio and Liz Diller, who collaborated with us on this, and several other people — and really felt like we had to find relevance in doing something. And that as people who create places, the ultimate way to help wasn't to pontificate or to make up scenarios, but to help right now. So we tried to come up with a way, as a group, to have a kind of design SWAT team. And that was the mission that we came up with.KA: Were you conscious of suddenly — as a designer whose work is all about fulfilling wants — suddenly fulfilling needs?DR: Well what I was aware of was, there was this overwhelming need to act now. And we were asked to participate in a few projects before this. There was a school, PS 234, that had been evacuated down at Ground Zero. They moved to an abandoned school. We took about 20 or 30 architects and designers and artists, and over four days — it was like this urban barn-raising — to renovate it, and everyone wanted to help. It was just extraordinary. Tom Otterness contributed, Maira Kalman contributed and it became this cathartic experience for us.KA: And that was done, effectively, by October 8 or something?DR: Yeah.KA: Obviously, what you faced in trying to do something as substantial as this project — and this is only one of four that you've designed to surround the site — you must have run up against the incredibly byzantine, entrenched bureaucracy and powers that be in New York real estate and New York politics.DR: Well, it's a funny thing. We finished PS 234, and had dinner with a small group. I was actually asked to be a committee chair on an AIA committee to rebuild. And I sat in on several meetings. And there were the most circuitous grand plans that had to do with long-term infrastructure and rebuilding the entire city. And the fact is that there were immediate wounds and needs that needed to be filled, and there was talk about inclusion and wanting it to be an inclusive process. And it wasn't an inclusive group. So we said, what is —KA: It was not an inclusive group?DR: It was not an inclusive group. It was predominantly a white, rich, corporate group that was not representative of the city.KA: Shocking.DR: Yeah, surprising. So Rick and Liz and Kevin and I came up with the idea. The city actually approached us. We first approached the city about Pier 94. We saw how PS 234 worked. The families — the victims of the families — were going to this pier that was incredibly dehumanizing.KA: On the Hudson River?DR: Yeah. And the city actually — through Tim Zagat initially, and then through Christyne Nicholas, then we got to Giuliani — said, ""You know we don't want to do anything with Pier 94 right now, but we have an observation platform for the families down at Ground Zero that we'd like to be a more dignified experience for the families, and a way to protect it from the weather.""So I went down there with Rick and Liz and Kevin, and I've got to say, it was the most moving experience of my life. It was devastating to see the simple plywood platform with a rail around it, where the families of the victims had left notes to them. And there was no mediation between us and the experience. There was no filter.And I remembered on September 11th, on 14th Street, the roof of our building — we can see the World Trade Towers prominently — and I saw the first building collapse from a conference room on the eighth floor on a TV that we had set up. And then everyone was up on the roof, so I ran up there. And it was amazing how much harder it was to believe in real life than it was on TV. There was something about the comfort of the filter and how much information was between us and the experience. So seeing this in a very simple, dignified way was a very powerful experience.So we went back to the city and said we're not particularly interested in the upgrade of this as a VIP platform, but we've spent some time down there. At the same time the city had this need. They were looking for a solution to deal with 30 or 40 thousand people a day who were going down there, that had nowhere to go. And there was no way to deal with the traffic around the site. So dealing with it is just an immediate master plan. There was a way — there had to be a way — to get people to move around the site.KA: But then you've got to figure out a way — we will skip over the insanely tedious process of getting permits and getting everybody on board — but simply funding this thing. It looks like a fairly simple thing, but this was a half a million dollar project?DR: Well, we knew that if it wasn't privately funded, it wasn't going to happen. And we also, frankly, knew that if it didn't happen by the end of the Giuliani administration, then everyone who we were dealing with at the DOT and the Police Department and all of the — we were meeting with 20 or 30 people with the city at a time, and it was set up by the Office of Emergency Management. This incredible act on their part, because they really wanted this, and they sensed that this needed to happen.KA: And there was therefore this ticking clock, because Giuliani was obviously out three months after that.DR: Yeah. So the first thing we had to do was find a way to get this — we had to work with the families of the victims, through the city, to make sure that they knew this was happening. Because this didn't want to be a surprise. And we also had to be as under the radar screen as we could be in New York, because the key was not raising a lot of objection and sort of working as quietly as possible.We came up with the idea of setting up a foundation, mainly because when we found a contractor who would build this, he would not agree to do this, even if we would pay him the money. There needed to be a foundation in place. So we came up with a foundation, and actually what happened was one major developer in New York —KA: Who shall remain nameless, I guess?DR: Yeah. His initials are JS, and he owns Rockefeller Center, if that helps anyone — volunteered to help. And we met with him. The prices from the contractors were between five to 700,000 dollars. And Atlantic-Heydt, who's the largest scaffolding contractor in the country, volunteered to do it at cost. So this developer said, ""You know what, we'll underwrite the entire expense."" And we said, ""That's incredible!""And I think this was the 21st, and we knew this had to be built and up by the 28th. And we had to start construction the next day. We had a meeting that evening with his contractor of choice, and the contractor showed up with the drawings of the platform about half the size that we had drawn it.KA: Sort of like the Spinal Tap scene where you get the tiny little Stonehenge, I guess? (Laughter)DR: In fact, it was as if this was going to be window-washing scaffolding. There was no sense of the fact that this is next to Saint Paul — that this is really a place that needs to be kind of dignified, and a place to reflect and remember. And I've got to say that we spent a lot of time in putting this together, watching the crowds that gathered at Saint Paul — which is just to the right — and moving around the site. And I live down there, so we spent a lot of time looking at the need.And I think people were amazed at two things — I think they were amazed at the destruction, but I think there was a sense of disbelief about the heroics of New Yorkers that I found very moving. Just the sort of everyday heroics of New Yorkers.So we were in this meeting and the contractor literally said, ""I'm going to lock the door, because this developer will not agree to have you leave till you've signed off on this."" And we said, ""Well, this is half the size, it doesn't have any of the design features that have been agreed upon by everyone — everyone in the city. We'd have to go back to the beginning to do this."" And I convinced him that we should leave the room with the agreement to build it as designed.The next day I got an email from the developer saying that he was withdrawing all funding. So we didn't know what to do, but we decided to cast a very wide net. We emailed out letters to as many people as we could — several people in the audience here — who were very helpful.KA: There was no thought of abandoning ship at that point?DR: No. In fact I told the contractor to go ahead. He had already ordered materials based on my go-ahead. We knew that one way or another this was going to happen. And we just felt it had to happen.KA: You were funding it yourself and with contributions and this foundation. Richard, I think very correctly, made the point at the beginning — before all the chair designers came out — about the history of chair designers imposing aesthetic solutions on this kind of universal, banal, common problem of sitting. It seems to me with this, that it was the opposite of that. This was an unprecedented, singular design problem.DR: Well here's the issue: we knew that this was not in the sense of — we think about the site, and think about the need for a memorial. It was important that this not be categorized as a memorial. That this was a place for people to reflect, to remember — a kind of quiet place.So it led us to using design solutions that created as few filters between the viewer — as we said about the families' platform — and the experience as possible. It's all incredibly humble material. It's scaffolding and plywood. And it allows — by sort of the procession of the movement, up by Saint Paul's and down the other side — it gives you about 300 feet to go up 13 feet from the ground to where you get the 360 degree view.But the design was driven by a need to be quick, cheap, safe, respectful, flexible. One of the other things is this is designed to be moveable. Because when we looked at the four platforms around the site, one of which is an upgrade of the families' platform, we knew that these had to be moveable to respond to changing conditions, and the changing definition of what Ground Zero is.KA: Your work — I mean, we've talked about this before — a lot of your work, I think, is informed by your belief in, or your focus on the temporariness of all things and the evanescence of things, and a kind of ""Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,"" sort of sense of existence. This is clearly not a work for the ages. You know, a couple of years this thing isn't going to be here. Did that require, as an architect, a new way of thinking about what you were doing? To think of it as this purely temporary installation?DR: No, I don't think so. I think this is, obviously, substantially different from anything we'd ever thought about doing before, just by the nature of it. Where it overlaps with thoughts about our work in general is, number one — the notion of collaboration as a sort of way to get things done. And Kevin Kennon, Rick Scofidio, Liz Diller and all the people within the city — Norman Lear, who I spoke to four hours before our deadline for funding, offered to give us a bridge loan to help us get through it. So the notion of collaboration — I think this reinforces how important that is.And in terms of the temporary nature of it, our goal was not to create something that would be there longer than it needed to be. I think what we were most interested in was promoting a kind of dialogue that we felt may not have been happening enough in this city, about what's really happening there.And a day or two before it opened was Giuliani's farewell address, where he proposed the idea of all of Ground Zero being a memorial. Which was very controversial, but it resonated with a lot of people. And I think regardless of what the position is about how this sacred piece of land is to be used, having it come out of actually seeing it in a real encounter, I think makes it a more powerful dialogue. And that's what we were interested in. So that, very much, is in the realm of things I've been interested in before.KA: It seems to me, among other things, a lovely piece of civic infrastructure. It enables that conversation to get serious. And six months after the fact — and only a few months away from the site being cleaned — we are very quickly, now, getting to the point where those conversations about what should go there are getting serious. Do you have — having been as physically involved in the site as you have been doing this project — have any ideas about what should or shouldn't be done?DR: Well, I think one thing that shouldn't be done is evaluate — I think right now the discussion is a very closed discussion on the master plan. The Protetch Gallery recently had a show on ideas for buildings, which had some sort of inventive ideas of buildings.KA: But it had some really terrible ideas.DR: And it also felt a little bit like a kind of competition of ideas, where I think the focus of ideas should be on master planning and uses. And I think there should be a broader — which there's starting to be — the dialogue is really opening up to, what does this site really want to be? And I truly believe until the issue of memorial is sorted out, that it's going to be very hard to have an intelligent discussion. There's a few discussions right now that I think are very positive, about depressing the West Side Highway and connecting this over, so that there's one uninterrupted piece of land.KA: Well, I think that's interesting. And it gets to another issue that was probably inappropriate to discuss six months ago, but perhaps isn't now, which is, not many of us love the World Trade Center as a piece of architecture, as what it had done to this city and that huge plaza. Is this an opportunity, is the silver lining — a silver lining, here — to rebuild some more traditional city grid, or not?DR: I think there's a real opportunity to engage in a discussion of why we live in cities. And why do we live in places where such dissimilar people collide up against us each day? I don't think it has much to do with 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 thousand new office spaces, regardless of what the number is. So yeah, I think there is a chance to re-look at how we think about cities.And in fact, there's a proposal on the table now for building number seven.KA: Which was the building just north of the Towers?DR: Right, which the towers fell into. And the reason that's been held up is essentially by community outrage that they're not re-opening the street to connect that back to the rest of the city. I think a public dialogue — I think, you know, I'd like to see an international competition, and a call for ideas for uses.KA: Whether it's arts, whether it's housing, whether it's what amount of shopping?DR: Right. And we're looking for other things. This small foundation we put together is looking for other ways to help. Including taking a small piece adjacent to the site and inviting 10 architects who currently don't have a voice in New York to do artist housing. And find other ways to encourage the discussion to be against sort of monolithic, single solutions, and more about a multiplicity of things.KA: Before we end, I know you have a piece of digital video of the experience of being on this platform?DR: John Kamen — who's here, actually — put together a two and a half minute piece that shows the platform in use. So I thought that would be good to end with.DR: We're looking from Fulton Street, west. One of the tricky issues we had with the Giuliani administration was I had forgotten how anti-graffiti he was. And essentially our structure was designed to be written on.KA: As you say, it's not a memorial. But were you conscious of memorials? The Vietnam Memorial? Those kinds of forms?DR: We certainly did as much research as we could, and we were conscious of other memorials. And also the complexity and length of time they really take to do. It's 350 people on the committee for Oklahoma City, which is why we thought of this as a sort of ad-hoc, spontaneous solution that expanded on Union Square and the places that were ad-hoc memorials in the city already.The scaffolding you can see built up over the street is de-mountable.What's interesting now is the nature of the site has totally changed, so that what you're aware of is not just the destruction of the buildings in Ground Zero, but all of the buildings around it — and the scars on the building around it, which are enormous. This shows Saint Paul's on the left.KA: I just want to thank you on behalf of New Yorkers for making this happen and getting this done. But the kind of virtually instantaneous nature of its erection, and its being there, almost before you could believe that a response of this magnitude could be accomplished, is part of its extraordinary — I don't know if beauty is the word — but presence.DR: It was an honor to do. And we were thrilled to be able to show it here.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_rockwell_builds_at_ground_zero
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"I get asked a lot what the difference between my work is and typical Pentagon long-range strategic planners. And the answer I like to offer is what they typically do is they think about the future of wars in the context of war. And what I've spent 15 years doing in this business — and it's taken me almost 14 to figure it out — is I think about the future of wars in the context of everything else. So I tend to specialize on the scene between war and peace. The material I'm going to show you is one idea from a book with a lot of ideas. It's the one that takes me around the world right now interacting with foreign militaries quite a bit. The material was generated in two years of work I did for the Secretary of Defense, thinking about a new national grand strategy for the United States. I'm going to present a problem and try to give you an answer.Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for if the United States fights somebody we're going to be huge. They're going to be small. And if they try to fight us in the traditional, straight-up manner we're going to kick their ass, which is why people don't try to do that any more. I met the last Air Force General who had actually shot down an enemy plane in combat. He's now a one star General. That's how distant we are from even meeting an air force willing to fly against ours. So that overmatched capability creates problems — catastrophic successes the White House calls them.(Laughter)And we're trying to figure that out, because it is an amazing capability. The question is, what's the good you can do with it? OK? The theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies — gobbledygook that we sell to Congress, because if we just told them we can kick anybody's asses they wouldn't buy us all the stuff we want. So we say, area-denial, anti-access asymmetrical strategies and their eyes glaze over.(Laughter)And they say, ""Will you build it in my district?""(Laughter)(Applause)Here's my parody and it ain't much of one. Let's talk about a battle space. I don't know, Taiwan Straits 2025. Let's talk about an enemy embedded within that battle space. I don't know, the Million Man Swim.(Laughter)The United States has to access that battle space instantaneously. They throw up anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. A banana peel on the tarmac.(Laughter)Trojan horses on our computer networks reveal all our Achilles' heels instantly. We say, ""China, it's yours."" Prometheus approach, largely a geographic definition, focuses almost exclusively on the start of conflict. We field the first-half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. That's the problem. We can run the score up against anybody, and then get our asses kicked in the second half — what they call fourth generation warfare.Here's the way I like to describe it instead. There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power?So there's no trouble accessing battle spaces. What we have trouble accessing is the transition space that must naturally follow, and creating the peace space that allows us to move on. Problem is, the Defense Department over here beats the hell out of you. The State Department over here says, ""Come on boy, I know you can make it."" And that poor country runs off that ledge, does that cartoon thing and then drops.(Laughter)This is not about overwhelming force, but proportional force. It's about non-lethal technologies, because if you fire real ammo into a crowd of women and children rioting you're going to lose friends very quickly. This is not about projecting power, but about staying power, which is about legitimacy with the locals. Who do you access in this transition space?You have to create internal partners. You have to access coalition partners. We asked the Indians for 17,000 peace keepers. I know their senior leadership, they wanted to give it to us. But they said to us, ""You know what? In that transition space you're mostly hat not enough cattle. We don't think you can pull it off, we're not going to give you our 17,000 peace keepers for fodder."" We asked the Russians for 40,000. They said no. I was in China in August, I said, ""You should have 50,000 peace keepers in Iraq. It's your oil, not ours."" Which is the truth. It's their oil. And the Chinese said to me, ""Dr. Barnett, you're absolutely right. In a perfect world we'd have 50,000 there. But it's not a perfect world, and your administration isn't getting us any closer."" But we have trouble accessing our outcomes.We lucked out, frankly, on the selection. We face different opponents across these three. And it's time to start admitting you can't ask the same 19-year-old to do it all, day in and day out. It's just too damn hard. We have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. We don't do the everything else so well. Frankly, we do it better than anybody and we still suck at it. We have a brilliant Secretary of War. We don't have a Secretary of Everything Else. Because if we did, that guy would be in front of the Senate, still testifying over Abu Ghraib. The problem is he doesn't exist. There is no Secretary of Everything Else. I think we have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. I call that the Leviathan Force. What we need to build is a force for the Everything Else. I call them the System Administrators.What I think this really represents is lack of an A to Z rule set for the world as a whole for processing politically bankrupt states. We have one for processing economically bankrupt states. It's the IMF Sovereign Bankruptcy Plan, OK? We argue about it every time we use it. Argentina just went through it, broke a lot of rules. They got out on the far end, we said, ""Fine, don't worry about it."" It's transparent. A certain amount of certainty gives the sense of a non-zero outcome. We don't have one for processing politically bankrupt states that, frankly, everybody wants gone. Like Saddam, like Mugabe, like Kim Jong-Il — people who kill in hundreds of thousands or millions. Like the 250,000 dead so far in Sudan.What would an A to Z system look like? I'm going to distinguish between what I call front half and back half. And let's call this red line, I don't know, mission accomplished.(Laughter)(Applause)What we have extant right now, at the beginning of this system, is the U.N. Security Council as a grand jury. What can they do? They can indict your ass. They can debate it. They can write it on a piece of paper. They can put it in an envelope and mail it to you, and then say in no uncertain terms, ""Please cut that out.""(Laughter)That gets you about four million dead in Central Africa over the 1990s. That gets you 250,000 dead in the Sudan in the last 15 months. Everybody's got to answer their grandchildren some day what you did about the holocaust in Africa, and you better have an answer. We don't have anything to translate that will into action.What we do have is the U.S.-enabled Leviathan Force that says, ""You want me to take that guy down? I'll take that guy down. I'll do it on Tuesday. It will cost you 20 billion dollars.""(Laughter)But here's the deal. As soon as I can't find anybody else to air out, I leave the scene immediately. That's called the Powell Doctrine. Way downstream we have the International Criminal Court. They love to put them on trial. They've got Milosević right now.What are we missing? A functioning executive that will translate will into action, because we don't have it. Every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this imminent threat thing. We haven't faced an imminent threat since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But we use this language from a bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we're a democracy and that's what it takes. And if that doesn't work we scream, ""He's got a gun!"" just as we rush in.(Laughter)And then we look over the body and we find an old cigarette lighter and we say, ""Jesus, it was dark.""(Laughter)Do you want to do it, France? France says, ""No, but I do like to criticize you after the fact.""What we need downstream is a great power enabled — what I call that Sys Admin Force. We should have had 250,000 troops streaming into Iraq on the heels of that Leviathan sweeping towards Baghdad. What do you get then? No looting, no military disappearing, no arms disappearing, no ammo disappearing, no Muqtada Al-Sadr — I'm wrecking his bones — no insurgency. Talk to anybody who was over there in the first six months. We had six months to feel the lob, to get the job done, and we dicked around for six months. And then they turned on us. Why? Because they just got fed up. They saw what we did to Saddam. They said, ""You're that powerful, you can resurrect this country. You're America.""What we need is an international reconstruction fund — Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, great idea. Model on the IMF. Instead of passing the hat each time, OK? Where are we going to find this guy? G20, that's easy. Check out their agenda since 9/11. All security dominated. They're going to decide up front how the money gets spent just like in the IMF. You vote according to how much money you put in the kitty. Here's my challenge to the Defense Department. You've got to build this force. You've got to seed this force. You've got to track coalition partners. Create a record of success. You will get this model. You tell me it's too hard to do. I'll walk this dog right through that six part series on the Balkans. We did it just like that. I'm talking about regularizing it, making it transparent. Would you like Mugabe gone? Would you like Kim Jong-Il, who's killed about two million people, would you like him gone? Would you like a better system? This is why it matters to the military. They've been experiencing an identity crisis since the end of the Cold War. I'm not talking about the difference between reality and desire, which I can do because I'm not inside the beltway.(Laughter)I'm talking about the 1990s. The Berlin Wall falls. We do Desert Storm. The split starts to emerge between those in the military who see a future they can live with, and those who see a future that starts to scare them, like the U.S. submarine community, which watches the Soviet Navy disappear overnight. Ah!(Laughter)So they start moving from reality towards desire and they create their own special language to describe their voyage of self-discovery and self-actualization.(Laughter)The problem is you need a big, sexy opponent to fight against. And if you can't find one you've got to make one up. China, all grown up, going to be a looker!(Laughter)The rest of the military got dragged down into the muck across the 1990s and they developed this very derisive term to describe it: military operations other than war. I ask you, who joins the military to do things other than war? Actually, most of them. Jessica Lynch never planned on shooting back. Most of them don't pick up a rifle. I maintain this is code inside the Army for, ""We don't want to do this."" They spent the 1990s working the messy scene between globalized parts of the world What I call the core and the gap. The Clinton administration wasn't interested in running this. For eight years, after screwing up the relationship on day one — inauguration day with gays in the military — which was deft.(Laughter)So we were home alone for eight years. And what did we do home alone? We bought one military and we operated another. It's like the guy who goes to the doctor and says, ""Doctor, it hurts when I do this.""(Laughter)The doctor says, ""Stop doing that you idiot.""I used to give this brief inside the Pentagon in the early 1990s. I'd say, ""You're buying one military and you're operating another, and eventually it's going to hurt. It's wrong. Bad Pentagon, bad!""(Laughter)And they'd say, ""Dr. Barnett, you are so right. Can you come back next year and remind us again?""(Laughter)Some people say 9/11 heals the rift — jerks the long-term transformation gurus out of their 30,000 foot view of history, drags them down in to the muck and says, ""You want a networked opponent? I've got one, he's everywhere, go find him."" It elevates MOOTW — how we pronounce that acronym — from crap to grand strategy, because that's how you're going to shrink that gap.Some people put these two things together and they call it empire, which I think is a boneheaded concept. Empire is about the enforcement of not just minimal rule sets, which you cannot do, but maximum rule sets which you must do. It's not our system of governance. Never how we've sought to interact with the outside world. I prefer that phrase System Administration. We enforce the minimal rule sets for maintaining connectivity to the global economy. Certain bad things you cannot do. How this impacts the way we think about the future of war. This is a concept which gets me vilified throughout the Pentagon. It makes me very popular as well. Everybody's got an opinion.Going back to the beginning of our country — historically, defenses meant protection of the homeland. Security has meant everything else. Written into our constitution, two different forces, two different functions. Raise an army when you need it, and maintain a navy for day-to-day connectivity. A Department of War, a Department of Everything Else. A big stick, a baton stick. Can of whup ass, the networking force. In 1947 we merged these two things together in the Defense Department. Our long-term rationale becomes, we're involved in a hair trigger stand off with the Soviets. To attack America is to risk blowing up the world. We connected national security to international security with about a seven minute time delay. That's not our problem now. They can kill three million in Chicago tomorrow and we don't go to the mattresses with nukes. That's the scary part.The question is how do we reconnect American national security with global security to make the world a lot more comfortable, and to embed and contextualize our employment of force around the planet? What's happened since is that bifurcation I described. We talked about this going all the way back to the end of the Cold War. Let's have a Department of War, and a Department of Something Else. Some people say, ""Hell, 9/11 did it for you."" Now we've got a home game and an away game.(Laughter)The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA — thousands standing around.(Laughter)I supported the war in Iraq. He was a bad guy with multiple priors. It's not like we had to find him actually killing somebody live to arrest him. I knew we'd kick ass in the war with the Leviathan Force. I knew we'd have a hard time with what followed. But I know this organization doesn't change until it experiences failure. What do I mean by these two different forces?This is the Hobbesian Force. I love this force. I don't want to see it go. That plus nukes rules out great power war. This is the military the rest of the world wants us to build. It's why I travel all over the world talking to foreign militaries.What does this mean? It means you've got to stop pretending you can do these two very disparate skill sets with the same 19-year-old. Switching back, morning, afternoon, evening, morning, afternoon, evening. Handing out aid, shooting back, handing out aid, shooting back. It's too much. The 19-year-olds get tired from the switching, OK?(Laughter)That force on the left, you can train a 19-year-old to do that. That force on the right is more like a 40-year-old cop. You need the experience. What does this mean in terms of operations?The rule is going to be this. That Sys Admin force is the force that never comes home, does most of your work. You break out that Leviathan Force only every so often. But here's the promise you make to the American public, to your own people, to the world. You break out that Leviathan Force, you promise, you guarantee that you're going to mount one hell of a — immediately — follow-on Sys Admin effort. Don't plan for the war unless you plan to win the peace.(Applause)Other differences. Leviathan traditional partners, they all look like the Brits and their former colonies.(Laughter)Including us, I would remind you. The rest — wider array of partners. International organizations, non-governmental organizations, private voluntary organizations, contractors. You're not going to get away from that. Leviathan Force, it's all about joint operations between the military services. We're done with that. What we need to do is inter-agency operations, which frankly Condi Rice was in charge of. And I'm amazed nobody asked her that question when she was confirmed.I call the Leviathan Force your dad's military. I like them young, male, unmarried, slightly pissed off.(Laughter)I call the Sys Admin Force your mom's military. It's everything the man's military hates. Gender balanced much more, older, educated, married with children. The force on the left, up or out. The force on the right, in and out. The force on the left respects Posse Comitatus restrictions on the use of force inside the U.S. The force on the right's going to obliterate it. That's where the National Guard's going to be. The force on the left is never coming under the purview of the International Criminal Court. Sys Admin Force has to. Different definitions of network centricity. One takes down networks, one puts them up. And you've got to wage war here in such a way to facilitate that.Do we need a bigger budget? Do we need a draft to pull this off? Absolutely not. I've been told by the Revolution of Military Affairs crowd for years, we can do it faster, cheaper, smaller, just as lethal. I say, ""Great, I'm going to take the Sys Admin budget out of your hide.""Here's the larger point. You're going to build the Sys Admin Force inside the U.S. Military first. But ultimately you're going to civilianize it, probably two thirds. Inter agency-ize it, internationalize it. So yes, it begins inside the Pentagon, but over time it's going to cross that river.(Laughter)I have been to the mountain top. I can see the future. I may not live long enough to get you there, but it's going to happen. We're going to have a Department of Something Else between war and peace.Last slide. Who gets custody of the kids? This is where the Marines in the audience get kind of tense. (Laughter) And this is when they think about beating the crap out of me after the talk.(Laughter)Read Max Boon. This is the history of the marines — small wars, small arms. The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole and they want to kill something.(Laughter)I don't want my Marines handing out aid. I want them to be Marines. That's what keeps the Sys Admin Force from being a pussy force. It keeps it from being the U.N. You shoot at these people the Marines are going to come over and kill you.(Laughter)(Applause)Department of Navy, strategic subs go this way, surface combatants are over there, and the news is they may actually be that small.(Laughter)I call it the Smart Dust Navy. I tell young officers, ""You may command 500 ships in your career. Bad news is they may not have anybody on them."" Carriers go both ways because they're a swing asset. You'll see the pattern — airborne, just like carriers. Armor goes this way. Here's the dirty secret of the Air Force, you can win by bombing. But you need lots of these guys on the ground to win the peace. Shinseki was right with the argument. Air force, strategic airlift goes both ways. Bombers, fighters go over here. Special Operations Command down at Tampa. Trigger-pullers go this way. Civil Affairs, that bastard child, comes over here. Return to the Army. The point about the trigger-pullers and Special Operations Command. No off season, these guys are always active. They drop in, do their business, disappear. See me now. Don't talk about it later.(Laughter)I was never here.(Laughter)The world is my playground.(Laughter)I want to keep trigger-pullers trigger-happy. I want the rules to be as loose as possible. Because when the thing gets prevented in Chicago with the three million dead that perverts our political system beyond all recognition, these are the guys who are going to kill them first. So it's better off to have them make some mistakes along the way than to see that.Reserve component — National Guard reserves overwhelmingly Sys Admin. How are you going to get them to work for this force? Most firemen in this country do it for free. This is not about money. This is about being up front with these guys and gals.Last point, intelligence community — the muscle and the defense agencies go this way. What should be the CIA, open, analytical, open source should come over here. The information you need to do this is not secret. It's not secret. Read that great piece in the New Yorker about how our echo boomers, 19 to 25, over in Iraq taught each other how to do Sys Admin work, over the Internet in chat rooms. They said, ""Al Qaeda could be listening."" They said, ""Well, Jesus, they already know this stuff.""(Laughter)Take a gift in the left hand. These are the sunglasses that don't scare people, simple stuff. Censors and transparency, the overheads go in both directions.Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_barnett_draws_a_new_map_for_peace
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"What I want to talk to you about today is virtual worlds, digital globes, the 3-D Web, the Metaverse. What does this all mean for us? What it means is the Web is going to become an exciting place again. It's going to become super exciting as we transform to this highly immersive and interactive world. With graphics, computing power, low latencies, these types of applications and possibilities are going to stream rich data into your lives. So the Virtual Earth initiative, and other types of these initiatives, are all about extending our current search metaphor.When you think about it, we're so constrained by browsing the Web, remembering URLs, saving favorites. As we move to search, we rely on the relevance rankings, the Web matching, the index crawling. But we want to use our brain! We want to navigate, explore, discover information. In order to do that, we have to put you as a user back in the driver's seat. We need cooperation between you and the computing network and the computer.So what better way to put you back in the driver's seat than to put you in the real world that you interact in every day? Why not leverage the learnings that you've been learning your entire life? So Virtual Earth is about starting off creating the first digital representation, comprehensive, of the entire world. What we want to do is mix in all types of data. Tag it. Attribute it. Metadata. Get the community to add local depth, global perspective, local knowledge. So when you think about this problem, what an enormous undertaking. Where do you begin? Well, we collect data from satellites, from airplanes, from ground vehicles, from people. This process is an engineering problem, a mechanical problem, a logistical problem, an operational problem.Here is an example of our aerial camera. This is panchromatic. It's actually four color cones. In addition, it's multi-spectral. We collect four gigabits per second of data, if you can imagine that kind of data stream coming down. That's equivalent to a constellation of 12 satellites at highest res capacity. We fly these airplanes at 5,000 feet in the air. You can see the camera on the front. We collect multiple viewpoints, vantage points, angles, textures. We bring all that data back in.We sit here — you know, think about the ground vehicles, the human scale — what do you see in person? We need to capture that up close to establish that what it's like-type experience. I bet many of you have seen the Apple commercials, kind of poking at the PC for their brilliance and simplicity. So a little unknown secret is — did you see the one with the guy, he's got the Web cam? The poor PC guy. They're duct taping his head. They're just wrapping it on him. Well, a little unknown secret is his brother actually works on the Virtual Earth team. (Laughter). So they've got a little bit of a sibling rivalry thing going on here. But let me tell you — it doesn't affect his day job.We think a lot of good can come from this technology. This was after Katrina. We were the first commercial fleet of airplanes to be cleared into the disaster impact zone. We flew the area. We imaged it. We sent in people. We took pictures of interiors, disaster areas. We helped with the first responders, the search and rescue. Often the first time anyone saw what happened to their house was on Virtual Earth. We made it all freely available on the Web, just to — it was obviously our chance of helping out with the cause.When we think about how all this comes together, it's all about software, algorithms and math. You know, we capture this imagery but to build the 3-D models we need to do geo-positioning. We need to do geo-registering of the images. We have to bundle adjust them. Find tie points. Extract geometry from the images. This process is a very calculated process. In fact, it was always done manual. Hollywood would spend millions of dollars to do a small urban corridor for a movie because they'd have to do it manually. They'd drive the streets with lasers called LIDAR. They'd collected information with photos. They'd manually build each building. We do this all through software, algorithms and math — a highly automated pipeline creating these cities. We took a decimal point off what it cost to build these cities, and that's how we're going to be able to scale this out and make this reality a dream.We think about the user interface. What does it mean to look at it from multiple perspectives? An ortho-view, a nadir-view. How do you keep the precision of the fidelity of the imagery while maintaining the fluidity of the model? I'll wrap up by showing you the — this is a brand-new peek I haven't really shown into the lab area of Virtual Earth. What we're doing is — people like this a lot, this bird's eye imagery we work with. It's this high resolution data. But what we've found is they like the fluidity of the 3-D model. A child can navigate with an Xbox controller or a game controller.So here what we're trying to do is we bring the picture and project it into the 3-D model space. You can see all types of resolution. From here, I can slowly pan the image over. I can get the next image. I can blend and transition. By doing this I don't lose the original detail. In fact, I might be recording history. The freshness, the capacity. I can turn this image. I can look at it from multiple viewpoints and angles.What we're trying to do is build a virtual world. We hope that we can make computing a user model you're familiar with, and really derive insights from you, from all different directions. I thank you very much for your time. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_lawler_tours_microsoft_virtual_earth
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"I told you three things last year. I told you that the statistics of the world have not been made properly available. Because of that, we still have the old mindset of developing in industrialized countries, which is wrong. And that animated graphics can make a difference. Things are changing and today, on the United Nations Statistic Division Home Page, it says, by first of May, full access to the databases. (Applause) And if I could share the image with you on the screen. So three things have happened. U.N. opened their statistic databases, and we have a new version of the software up working as a beta on the net, so you don't have to download it any longer.And let me repeat what you saw last year. The bubbles are the countries. Here you have the fertility rate — the number of children per woman — and there you have the length of life in years. This is 1950 — those were the industrialized countries, those were developing countries. At that time there was a ""we"" and ""them."" There was a huge difference in the world. But then it changed, and it went on quite well.And this is what happens. You can see how China is the red, big bubble. The blue there is India. And they go over all this — I'm going to try to be a little more serious this year in showing you how things really changed. And it's Africa that stands out as the problem down here, doesn't it? Large families still, and the HIV epidemic brought down the countries like this. This is more or less what we saw last year, and this is how it will go on into the future.And I will talk on, is this possible? Because you see now, I presented statistics that don't exist. Because this is where we are. Will it be possible that this will happen? I cover my lifetime here, you know? I expect to live 100 years. And this is where we are today. Now could we look here instead at the economic situation in the world? And I would like to show that against child survival. We'll swap the axis. Here you have child mortality — that is, survival — four kids dying there, 200 dying there. And this is GDP per capita on this axis. And this was 2007.And if I go back in time, I've added some historical statistics — here we go, here we go, here we go — not so much statistics 100 years ago. Some countries still had statistics. We are looking down in the archive, and when we are down into 1820, there is only Austria and Sweden that can produce numbers. (Laughter) But they were down here. They had 1,000 dollars per person per year. And they lost one-fifth of their kids before their first birthday.So this is what happens in the world, if we play the entire world. How they got slowly richer and richer, and they add statistics. Isn't it beautiful when they get statistics? You see the importance of that? And here, children don't live longer. The last century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most of this statistics is Europe. It was only by the turn of the century that more than 90 percent of the children survived their first year. This is India coming up, with the first data from India. And this is the United States moving away here, earning more money. And we will soon see China coming up in the very far end corner here. And it moves up with Mao Tse-Tung getting health, not getting so rich. There he died, then Deng Xiaoping brings money. It moves this way over here. And the bubbles keep moving up there, and this is what the world looks like today. (Applause)Let us have a look at the United States. We have a function here — I can tell the world, ""Stay where you are."" And I take the United States — we still want to see the background — I put them up like this, and now we go backwards. And we can see that the United States goes to the right of the mainstream. They are on the money side all the time. And down in 1915, the United States was a neighbor of India — present, contemporary India. And that means United States was richer, but lost more kids than India is doing today, proportionally. And look here — compare to the Philippines of today. The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as the United States during the First World War. But we have to bring United States forward quite a while to find the same health of the United States as we have in the Philippines. About 1957 here, the health of the United States is the same as the Philippines. And this is the drama of this world which many call globalized, is that Asia, Arabic countries, Latin America, are much more ahead in being healthy, educated, having human resources than they are economically.There's a discrepancy in what's happening today in the emerging economies. There now, social benefits, social progress, are going ahead of economical progress. And 1957 — the United States had the same economy as Chile has today. And how long do we have to bring United States to get the same health as Chile has today? I think we have to go, there — we have 2001, or 2002 — the United States has the same health as Chile. Chile's catching up! Within some years Chile may have better child survival than the United States. This is really a change, that you have this lag of more or less 30, 40 years' difference on the health.And behind the health is the educational level. And there's a lot of infrastructure things, and general human resources are there. Now we can take away this — and I would like to show you the rate of speed, the rate of change, how fast they have gone. And we go back to 1920, and I want to look at Japan. And I want to look at Sweden and the United States. And I'm going to stage a race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red Toyota down there, and the brownish Volvo. (Laughter) And here we go. Here we go. The Toyota has a very bad start down here, you can see, and the United States Ford is going off-road there. And the Volvo is doing quite fine. This is the war. The Toyota got off track, and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden — can you see that? And they are taking over Sweden, and they are now healthier than Sweden. That's the part where I sold the Volvo and bought the Toyota. (Laughter) And now we can see that the rate of change was enormous in Japan. They really caught up.And this changes gradually. We have to look over generations to understand it. And let me show you my own sort of family history — we made these graphs here. And this is the same thing, money down there, and health, you know? And this is my family. This is Sweden, 1830, when my great-great-grandma was born. Sweden was like Sierra Leone today. And this is when great-grandma was born, 1863. And Sweden was like Mozambique. And this is when my grandma was born, 1891. She took care of me as a child, so I'm not talking about statistic now — now it's oral history in my family. That's when I believe statistics, when it's grandma-verified statistics. (Laughter) I think it's the best way of verifying historical statistics. Sweden was like Ghana. It's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa. I told you last year, I'll tell you again, my mother was born in Egypt, and I — who am I? I'm the Mexican in the family. And my daughter, she was born in Chile, and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore, now the healthiest country on this Earth. It bypassed Sweden about two to three years ago, with better child survival. But they're very small, you know? They're so close to the hospital we can never beat them out in these forests. (Laughter) But homage to Singapore.Singapore is the best one. Now this looks also like a very good story. But it's not really that easy, that it's all a good story. Because I have to show you one of the other facilities. We can also make the color here represent the variable — and what am I choosing here? Carbon-dioxide emission, metric ton per capita. This is 1962, and United States was emitting 16 tons per person. And China was emitting 0.6, and India was emitting 0.32 tons per capita. And what happens when we moved on? Well, you see the nice story of getting richer and getting healthier — everyone did it at the cost of emission of carbon dioxide. There is no one who has done it so far. And we don't have all the updated data any longer, because this is really hot data today. And there we are, 2001.And in the discussion I attended with global leaders, you know, many say now the problem is that the emerging economies, they are getting out too much carbon dioxide. The Minister of the Environment of India said, ""Well, you were the one who caused the problem."" The OECD countries — the high-income countries — they were the ones who caused the climate change. ""But we forgive you, because you didn't know it. But from now on, we count per capita. From now on we count per capita. And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission.""This really shows you, we have not seen good economic and health progress anywhere in the world without destroying the climate. And this is really what has to be changed. I've been criticized for showing you a too positive image of the world, but I don't think it's like this. The world is quite a messy place. This we can call Dollar Street. Everyone lives on this street here. What they earn here — what number they live on — is how much they earn per day. This family earns about one dollar per day. We drive up the street here, we find a family here which earns about two to three dollars a day. And we drive away here — we find the first garden in the street, and they earn 10 to 50 dollars a day.And how do they live? If we look at the bed here, we can see that they sleep on a rug on the floor. This is what poverty line is — 80 percent of the family income is just to cover the energy needs, the food for the day. This is two to five dollars. You have a bed. And here it's a much nicer bedroom, you can see. I lectured on this for Ikea, and they wanted to see the sofa immediately here. (Laughter) And this is the sofa, how it will emerge from there. And the interesting thing, when you go around here in the photo panorama, you see the family still sitting on the floor there. Although there is a sofa, if you watch in the kitchen, you can see that the great difference for women does not come between one to 10 dollars. It comes beyond here, when you really can get good working conditions in the family. And if you really want to see the difference, you look at the toilet over here. This can change. This can change. These are all pictures and images from Africa, and it can become much better. We can get out of poverty.My own research has not been in IT or anything like this. I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine. And this is the result of the farmers-needs research. The nice thing here is that you can't see who are the researchers in this picture. That's when research functions in poor societies — you must really live with the people.When you're in poverty, everything is about survival. It's about having food. And these two young farmers, they are girls now — because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS — they discuss with a trained agronomist. This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi, Junatambe Kumbira, and he's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant — the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found. And they are very, very eagerly interested to get advice, and that's to survive in poverty. That's one context. Getting out of poverty. The women told us one thing. ""Get us technology. We hate this mortar, to stand hours and hours. Get us a mill so that we can mill our flour, then we will be able to pay for the rest ourselves."" Technology will bring you out of poverty, but there's a need for a market to get away from poverty. And this woman is very happy now, bringing her products to the market. But she's very thankful for the public investment in schooling so she can count, and won't be cheated when she reaches the market. She wants her kid to be healthy, so she can go to the market and doesn't have to stay home. And she wants the infrastructure — it is nice with a paved road. It's also good with credit. Micro-credits gave her the bicycle, you know. And information will tell her when to go to market with which product. You can do this.I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible. Africa has not done bad. In 50 years they've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe, with a functioning nation and state. I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years. Because we don't consider where they came from. It's this stupid concept of developing countries that puts us, Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago, and says that Mozambique did worse. We have to know a little more about the world. I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine. He knows everything. He knows the name of the grape, the temperature and everything. I only know two types of wine — red and white. (Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries — industrialized and developing. And I know 200, I know about the small data. But you can do that. (Applause)But I have to get serious. And how do you get serious? You make a PowerPoint, you know? (Laughter) Homage to the Office package, no? What is this, what is this, what am I telling? I'm telling you that there are many dimensions of development. Everyone wants your pet thing. If you are in the corporate sector, you love micro-credit. If you are fighting in a non-governmental organization, you love equity between gender. Or if you are a teacher, you'll love UNESCO, and so on. On the global level, we have to have more than our own thing. We need everything. All these things are important for development, especially when you just get out of poverty and you should go towards welfare.Now, what we need to think about is, what is a goal for development, and what are the means for development? Let me first grade what are the most important means. Economic growth to me, as a public-health professor, is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival. Governance. To have a government which functions — that's what brought California out of the misery of 1850. It was the government that made law function finally. Education, human resources are important. Health is also important, but not that much as a mean. Environment is important. Human rights is also important, but it just gets one cross.Now what about goals? Where are we going toward? We are not interested in money. Money is not a goal. It's the best mean, but I give it zero as a goal. Governance, well it's fun to vote in a little thing, but it's not a goal. And going to school, that's not a goal, it's a mean. Health I give two points. I mean it's nice to be healthy — at my age especially — you can stand here, you're healthy. And that's good, it gets two plusses. Environment is very, very crucial. There's nothing for the grandkid if you don't save up. But where are the important goals? Of course, it's human rights. Human rights is the goal, but it's not that strong of a mean for achieving development. And culture. Culture is the most important thing, I would say, because that's what brings joy to life. That's the value of living.So the seemingly impossible is possible. Even African countries can achieve this. And I've shown you the shot where the seemingly impossible is possible. And remember, please remember my main message, which is this: the seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world. I showed you the shots, I proved it in the PowerPoint, and I think I will convince you also by culture. (Laughter) (Applause) Bring me my sword! Sword swallowing is from ancient India. It's a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious. (Laughter) And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel — solid steel — this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war. And it's all solid steel — you can hear here. And I'm going to take this blade of steel, and push it down through my body of blood and flesh, and prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible. Can I request a moment of absolute silence? (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty
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"First place I'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world's deepest natural abyss. And I say believe because this process is still ongoing. Right now there are major expeditions being planned for next year that I'll talk a little bit about.One of the things that's changed here, in the last 150 years since Jules Verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like, is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about. We can now descend thousands of meters into the Earth with relative impunity. Along the way we've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight. When you go on a thing like this, we can usually be in the field for anywhere from two to four months, with a team as small as 20 or 30, to as big as 150.And a lot of people ask me, you know, what kind of people do you get for a project like this? While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA, it's nonetheless thorough. We're looking for competence, discipline, endurance, and strength. In case you're wondering, this is our strength test. (Laughter) But we also value esprit de corps and the ability to diplomatically resolve inter-personal conflict while under great stress in remote locations.We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance. From the entrance, this is nothing like a commercial cave. You're looking at Camp Two in a place called J2, not K2, but J2. We're roughly two days from the entrance at that point. And it's kind of like a high altitude mountaineering trip in reverse, except that you're now running a string of these things down. The idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you're down there, otherwise in damp, moist, cold conditions in utterly dark places. I should mention that everything you're seeing here, by the way, is artificially illuminated at great effort. Otherwise it is completely dark in these places.The deeper you go, the more you run into a conflict with water. It's basically like a tree collecting water coming down. And eventually you get to places where it is formidable and dangerous and unfortunately slides just don't do justice. So I've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s. So descend into Huautla Plateau in Mexico. (Video) Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous. We would not do this today unless we were doing it for film. (Laughter)Along that same line, I have to tell you that with the spate of Hollywood movies that came out last year, we have never seen monsters underground — at least the kind that eat you. If there is a monster underground, it is the crushing psychological remoteness that begins to hit every member of the team once you cross about three days inbound from the nearest entrance.Next year I'll be leading an international team to J2. We're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters — that's a little over 8,600 feet down — at 30 kilometers from the entrance. The lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight. I don't think there's been a mission like that in a long time.Eventually, if you keep going down in these things, probability says that you're going to run into a place like this. It's a place where there's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof. And when you used to find these things, they would put a label on a map that said terminal siphon. Now I remember that term really well for two reasons. Number one, it's the name of my rock band, and second, is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor. And we've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this.This is some life-support equipment closed-cycle. And you can use that now to go for many kilometers horizontally underwater and to depths of 200 meters straight down underwater. When you do this kind of stuff it's like doing EVA. It's like doing extra-vehicular activity in space, but at much greater distances, and at much greater physical peril. So it makes you think about how to design your equipment for long range, away from a safe haven.Here's a clip from a National Geographic movie that came out in 1999.(Video) Narrator: Exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before. This is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet. To experience it is a privilege.Bill Stone: That was taken in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Couple of things to note about that movie. Every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999. It was developed within a two-year period and used on actual exploratory projects. This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper, and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave, and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs. It was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world.This is Europa. Carolyn Porco mentioned another one called Enceladus the other day. This is one of the places where planetary scientists believe there is a highest probability of the detection of the first life off earth in the ocean that exists below there. For those who have never seen this story, Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago, called ""Aliens of the Deep."" There was a brief clip —(Video) Narrator: A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge. Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light, it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle. It has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice. Now we have to get through the ice. You need a melt probe. It's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo. The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep. Week after week, the melt probe will sink of its own weight through the ancient ice, until finally — Now, what are you going to do when you reach the surface of that ocean? You need an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle. It needs to be one smart puppy, able to navigate and make decisions on its own in an alien ocean.BS: What Jim didn't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV. I mean, I cut through three years of engineering meetings, design and system integration, and introduced DEPTHX — Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer. And as the movie says, this is one smart puppy. It's got 96 sensors, 36 onboard computers, 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code, packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent.This is the target site, the world's deepest hydrothermal spring at Cenote Zacaton in northern Mexico. It's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything. This is part of DEPTHX's mission.There are two primary targets we're doing here. One is, how do you do science autonomy underground? How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist? There are more stages involved here than I've got time to tell you about, but basically we drive through the space, we populate it with environmental variables — sulphide, halide, things like that. We calculate gradient surfaces, and drive the bot over to a wall where there's a high probability of life. We move along the wall, in what's called proximity operations, looking for changes in color. If we see something that looks interesting, we pull it into a microscope. If it passes the microscopic test, we go for a collection. We either draw in a liquid sample, or we can actually take a solid core from the wall. No hands at the wheel. This is all behavioral autonomy here that's being conducted by the robot on its own.The real hat trick for this vehicle, though, is a disruptive new navigation system we've developed, known as 3D SLAM, for simultaneous localization and mapping. DEPTHX is an all-seeing eyeball. Its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time, allowing it to do new exploration while it's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it's gone through already.What I'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that's ever been done. This May, we're going to go from minus 1,000 meters in Zacaton, and if we're very lucky, DEPTHX will bring back the first robotically-discovered division of bacteria. The next step after that is to test it in Antartica and then, if the funding continues and NASA has the resolution to go, we could potentially launch by 2016, and by 2019 we may have the first evidence of life off this planet.What then of manned space exploration? The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024. The successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots. It will leave us no further along in the general expansion of humanity into space than we were 50 years ago. Something fundamental has to change if we are to see common access to space in our lifetime.What I'm going to show you next are a couple of controversial ideas. And I hope you'll bear with me and have some faith that there's credibility behind what we're going to say here. There are three underpinnings of working in space privately. One of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport. The Bert Rutans and Richard Bransons of this world have got this in their sights and I salute them. Go, go, go.The next thing we need are places to stay on orbit. Orbital hotels to start with, but workshops for the rest of us later on. The final missing piece, the real paradigm-buster, is this: a gas station on orbit. It's not going to look like that. If it existed, it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning.Now, to give you a chance to understand why there is power in that statement, I've got to give you the basics of Space 101. And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram. Anybody drink one of these here this week? You'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit. That's more than you pay for TED, if Google dropped their sponsorship. (Laughter) The second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant. Thus, every time you'd want to do anything in space, you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator. Not even the guys at Tesla can fight that physics.So, what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price? There is a place where you can. In fact, you can get it better — you can get it at 14 times lower if you can find propellant on the moon. There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon, 13 years ago now, called Clementine. And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon. That signal was so strong, it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment, collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material.If we're going to get that, and make that gas station possible, we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space. We can't do that right now. The way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground, and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces. We have to beat that. We can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics. We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything. This is an idea that, again, came out of Livermore back in 1989, with Dr. Lowell Wood's group. And we can extend that now to just about everything. Bob Bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit. We can go much further. We can build space tugs, orbiting platforms for holding cryogens and water. There's another thing. When you're coming back from the moon, you have to deal with orbital mechanics. It says you're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station.You got two choices. You can burn rocket fuel to get there, or you can do something really incredible. You can dive into the stratosphere, and precisely dissipate that velocity, and come back out to the space station. It has never been done. It's risky and it's going to be one hell of a ride — better than Disney. The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon, you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there, without the return propellant, first — (Laughter) Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that. I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it so we're not going to burn the gear. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it, and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done. There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years. That's not true. In seven years, we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit.We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration. To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater, to mine the moon for resources, and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit.Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition. (Applause) It can be done in seven years with the right backing. Those who join me in making it happen will become a part of history and join other bold individuals from time past who, had they been here today, would have heartily approved.There was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier. We have collectively forgotten that lesson. Now we're at a time when boldness is required to move forward. 100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words, I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier, in our time, for all of us. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space
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"How many Creationists do we have in the room? Probably none. I think we're all Darwinians. And yet many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy — would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes. It's all right. You know spiderwebs? Sure, they are products of evolution. The World Wide Web? Not so sure. Beaver dams, yes. Hoover Dam, no. What do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves, fruits of the tree of life, and hence, in some sense, obeying evolutionary rules? And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking — to our thinking.And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that, keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here. So you're out in the woods, or you're out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass. It climbs up to the top, and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs — trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass. What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of? What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass? What's in it for the ant? And the answer is: nothing. There's nothing in it for the ant. Well then, why is it doing this? Is it just a fluke? Yeah, it's just a fluke. It's a lancet fluke. It's a little brain worm. It's a parasitic brain worm that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. Salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle. So there's nothing in it for the ant. The ant's brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior. Pretty scary.Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness, of course. Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means ""surrender,"" or ""submission of self-interest to the will of Allah."" Well, it's ideas — not worms — that hijack our brains. Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas? No, it's worse than that. Most people have. (Laughter) There are a lot of ideas to die for. Freedom, if you're from New Hampshire. (Laughter) Justice. Truth. Communism. Many people have laid down their lives for communism, and many have laid down their lives for capitalism. And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam. These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They're infectious.Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about ""infectious repititis."" It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking. It's ""infectious repetitis,"" and we might as well try to have a theory of what's going on when that happens so that we can understand the conditions of infection. Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. And you have to have a bumper sticker, you know. You have to have a statement. So, this is mine.The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. Most of us — now that the ""Me Decade"" is well in the past — now we actually do this. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives. This is what our summum bonum is. It's not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have. Now, this is a profound biological effect. It's the subordination of genetic interest to other interests. And no other species does anything at all like it.Well, how are we going to think about this? It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one. Unmistakable. Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this? Well, many theories. But how could something tie them together? The idea of replicating ideas; ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain. Richard Dawkins, whom you'll be hearing later in the day, invented the term ""memes,"" and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book ""The Selfish Gene."" Now here am I talking about his idea. Well, you see, it's not his. Yes — he started it. But it's everybody's idea now. And he's not responsible for what I say about memes. I'm responsible for what I say about memes.Actually, I think we're all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses. So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused. They're very easy to misuse. That's why they're dangerous. And it's just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another. So we have to keep plugging away, trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread. But it is a problem. We don't have much time, and I'm going to go over just a little bit of this and cut out, because there's a lot of other things that are going to be said.So let me just point out: memes are like viruses. That's what Richard said, back in '93. And you might think, ""Well, how can that be? I mean, a virus is — you know, it's stuff! What's a meme made of?"" Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications but — what's a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude. (Laughter) That is, there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that's what a meme is. It's an information packet with attitude. What's a meme made of? What are bits made of, Mom? Not silicon. They're made of information, and can be carried in any physical medium. What's a word made of? Sometimes when people say, ""Do memes exist?"" I say, ""Well, do words exist? Are they in your ontology?"" If they are, words are memes that can be pronounced.Then there's all the other memes that can't be pronounced. There are different species of memes. Remember the Shakers? Gift to be simple? Simple, beautiful furniture? And, of course, they're basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that among the creed of Shaker-dom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests. Everybody. Well, it's not so surprising that they've gone extinct. (Laughter) But in fact that's not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren't there. And there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could've gone on forever, with perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line.So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they're not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shaker-dom was essentially a sterilizing parasite. There are other parasites that do this — which render the host sterile. It's part of their plan. They don't have to have minds to have a plan.I'm just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend. I've not time to go into more of it. In Jared Diamond's wonderful book, ""Guns, Germs and Steel,"" he talks about how it was germs, more than guns and steel, that conquered the new hemisphere — the Western hemisphere — that conquered the rest of the world. When European explorers and travelers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to, that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, of living with domesticated animals who were the sources of those pathogens. And they just wiped out — these pathogens just wiped out the native people, who had no immunity to them at all.And we're doing it again. We're doing it this time with toxic ideas. Yesterday, a number of people — Nicholas Negroponte and others — spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out, thanks to all the new technology all over the world. And I agree. It is largely wonderful. Largely wonderful. But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas. Now, this has been realized for some time. Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the ideologues that inspired Osama bin Laden. ""One has only to glance at its press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations."" Memes.These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages. They are wiping out traditions and practices. And it's not our fault, anymore than it's our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven't developed the immunity. We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture. We're a free society, so we let pornography and all these things — we shrug them off. They're like a mild cold. They're not a big deal for us. But we should recognize that for many people in the world, they are a big deal. And we should be very alert to this. As we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is we're the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes — the memes that they are prepared to die for.Well now, how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes? That is not the job of the science of memetics. Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger. If you've had a friend who's died of AIDS, then you hate HIV. But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective.Get the facts. Work out the implications. There's plenty of room for moral passion once we've got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do. And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties. That's all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes
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"I'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope. When we go to the physician today — when we go to the doctor's office and we walk in, there are words that we just don't want to hear. There are words that we're truly afraid of. Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart failure, lung failure — things that we know are debilitating diseases, for which there's relatively little that can be done.And what I want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease, why it's important, why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already hasn't, and where we are clinically today, and where we might go tomorrow, and what some of the hurdles are. And we're going to do all of that in 18 minutes, I promise.I want to start with this slide, because this slide sort of tells the story the way Science Magazine thinks of it. This was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human. It was basically a regenerative medicine issue. Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand. It's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale. So we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there. We know that if we have a damaged hip, you can put an artificial hip in. And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover.This is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine. This is not regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is what Business Week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago. The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like — and I'll come back to that theme a few times — instead of doing that, we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue. So that at the end of the treatment, you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment.Very few good ideas — if you agree that this is a good idea — very few good ideas are truly novel. And this is just the same. If you look back in history, Charles Lindbergh, who was better known for flying airplanes, was actually one of the first people along with Alexis Carrel, one of the Nobel Laureates from Rockefeller, to begin to think about, could you culture organs? And they published this book in 1937, where they actually began to think about, what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs? We've come a long way since then. I'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that's going on.But before doing that, what I'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you. Many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life, and reducing poverty, and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe. One of the challenges is that the richer we are, the longer we live. And the longer we live, the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older.This is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65. And you can basically see that the richer a country is, the older the people are within it. Why is this important? And why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now? If the average age of your population is 30, then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again, maybe a little bit of asthma. If the average age in your country is 45 to 55, now the average person is looking at diabetes, early-onset diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease — things that are inherently more difficult to treat, and much more expensive to treat.Just have a look at the demographics in the U.S. here. This is from ""The Untied States of America."" In 1930, there were 41 workers per retiree. 41 people who were basically outside of being really sick, paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease. In 2010, two workers per retiree in the U.S. And this is matched in every industrialized, wealthy country in the world. How can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this?This is age versus cost of health care. And you can see that right around age 45, 40 to 45, there's a sudden spike in the cost of health care. It's actually quite interesting. If you do the right studies, you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care, plotted over your lifetime. And about seven years before you're about to die, there's a spike. And you can actually — (Laughter) — we won't get into that. (Laughter)There are very few things, very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what I would call healthy aging. I'd suggest there are four things, and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system. All those things do is change who pays. They don't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is.One thing you can do is not treat. You can ration health care. We won't talk about that anymore. It's too depressing. You can prevent. Obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention.But perhaps most interesting, to me anyway, and most important, is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression, and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom. Think of it in terms of diabetes, for instance. Today, with diabetes, what do we do? We diagnose the disease eventually, once it becomes symptomatic, and then we treat the symptom for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And we do OK. Insulin's a pretty good therapy. But eventually it stops working, and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease.Why couldn't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease, perhaps even before it was symptomatic? And it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it, but if it worked, we would truly be able to do something different.This video, I think, gets across the concept that I'm talking about quite dramatically. This is a newt re-growing its limb. If a newt can do this kind of thing, why can't we? I'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment. But what we're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body, for tissues and for organs themselves. So today's reality is that if we get sick, the message is we will treat your symptoms, and you need to adjust to a new way of life.I would pose to you that tomorrow — and when tomorrow is we could debate, but it's within the foreseeable future — we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation. There's a limb prosthetic up here, similar actually one on the soldier that's come back from Iraq. There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs. Imagine if instead of facing that, they could actually face the regeneration of that limb. It's a wild concept. I'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept.But it's applicable, again, to every organ system. How can we do that? The way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body. We need to learn to speak the body's language. And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus. A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy, will re-grow that limb. So our DNA has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms. It's a natural process, but it is lost as we age. In a child, before the age of about six months, if they lose their fingertip in an accident, they'll re-grow their fingertip. By the time they're five, they won't be able to do that anymore.So to engage in that conversation with the body, we need to speak the body's language. And there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today. I'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body.The first is cellular therapies. Clearly, we heal ourselves in a natural process, using cells to do most of the work. Therefore, if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body, they may do the healing. Secondly, we can use materials. We heard yesterday about the importance of new materials. If we can invent materials, design materials, or extract materials from a natural environment, then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself. And finally, we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal.I'm going to show you an example of each of these, and I'm going to start with materials. Steve Badylak — who's at the University of Pittsburgh — about a decade ago had a remarkable idea. And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig, if you threw away all the cells, and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active, may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself. And he asked a very important question. He asked the question, if I take that material, which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine, and I place it somewhere else on a person's body, would it give a tissue-specific response, or would it make small intestine if I tried to make a new ear?I wouldn't be telling you this story if it weren't compelling. The picture I'm about to show you is a compelling picture. (Laughter) However, for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish — even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends — the lights are down. This is a good time to look at your feet, check your Blackberry, do anything other than look at the screen. (Laughter)What I'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer. And although — it's good to laugh before we look at this. This is the reality of diabetes. I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics, diabetic ulcers, we just don't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment, which is amputation, if you can't heal it. So I'm going to put the slide up now. It won't be up for long. This is a diabetic ulcer. It's tragic. The treatment for this is amputation. This is an older lady. She has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes, and has decided to die with what' s left of her body intact.And this lady decided, after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer, that she would try this new therapy that Steve invented. That's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later. That material contained only natural signals. And that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it didn't have before.There's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you — I'll let you know when you can look again. This is a horse. The horse is not in pain. If the horse was in pain, I wouldn't show you this slide. The horse just has another nostril that's developed because of a riding accident. Just a few weeks after treatment — in this case, taking that material, turning it into a gel, and packing that area, and then repeating the treatment a few times — and the horse heals up. And if you took an ultrasound of that area, it would look great.Here's a dolphin where the fin's been re-attached. There are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds. Could you regenerate a limb? DARPA just gave Steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question.And I'll show you the 15 million dollar picture. This is a 78 year-old man who's lost the end of his fingertip. Remember that I mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips. After treatment that's what it looks like. This is happening today. This is clinically relevant today. There are materials that do this. Here are the heart patches.But could you go a little further? Could you, say, instead of using material, can I take some cells along with the material, and remove a damaged piece of tissue, put a bio-degradable material on there? You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish. This was done by Teruo Okano at Tokyo Women's Hospital. He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish. He chills the dish, it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish. It's the coolest stuff.Now I'm going to show you cell-based regeneration. And what I'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient. Again, if you're squeamish, you don't want to watch. But this one's kind of cool. So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference. In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient. And I'm standing up here because at one point I'm going to show you just how early this technology is. Here go the stem cells, right into the beating heart of the patient. And if you look really carefully, it's going to be right around this point you'll actually see a back-flush. You see the cells coming back out. We need all sorts of new technology, new devices, to get the cells to the right place at the right time.Just a little bit of data, a tiny bit of data. This was a randomized trial. At this time this was an N of 20. Now there's an N of about 100. Basically, if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass, they get a little bit better. If you give them stem cells as well as their bypass, for these particular patients, they became asymptomatic. These are now two years out. The coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early, and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state.This is the same procedure, but now done minimally invasively, with only three holes in the body where they're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure. There go the cells. We don't have time to go into all of those details, but basically, that works too. You can take patients who are less sick, and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy.Here's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn't quite clinical yet, but I think very soon will be. This is the work of Kacey Marra from Pittsburgh, along with a number of colleagues around the world. They've decided that liposuction fluid, which — in the United States, we have a lot of liposuction fluid. (Laughter) It's a great source of stem cells. Stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid. So you could go in, you could get your tummy-tuck. Out comes the liposuction fluid, and in this case, the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons. All done in the lab. And I think fairly soon, you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived, or adipose-derived, stem cells.I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease. Here's just one example before I close up. This is equally tragic. We have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the Institute for Surgical Research in the US Army, who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from Iraq. Many of those patients are very severely burned.And if there's anything that's been learned about burn, it's that we don't know how to treat it. Everything that is done to treat burn — basically we do a sodding approach. We make something over here, and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound, and we try and get the two to take. In this case here, a new, wearable bio-reactor has been designed — it should be tested clinically later this year at ISR — by Joerg Gerlach in Pittsburgh. And that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed. The gun that you see there sprays cells. That's going to spray cells over that area. The reactor will serve to fertilize the environment, deliver other things as well at the same time, and therefore we will seed that lawn, as opposed to try the sodding approach. It's a completely different way of doing it.So my 18 minutes is up. So let me finish up with some good news, and maybe a little bit of bad news. The good news is that this is happening today. It's very powerful work. Clearly the images kind of get that across. It's incredibly difficult because it's highly inter-disciplinary. Almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen.A number of governments, and a number of regions, have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease. The Japanese government were perhaps the first, when they decided to invest first 3 billion, later another 2 billion in this field. It's no coincidence. Japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age. They need this to work or their health system dies. So they're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area. The European Union, same thing. China, the same thing. China just launched a national tissue-engineering center. The first year budget was 250 million US dollars.In the United States we've had a somewhat different approach. (Laughter) Oh, for Al Gore to come and be in the real world as president. We've had a different approach. And the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along. But there's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way.And I'm going to finish up with a quote, maybe a little cheap shot, at the director of the NIH, who's a very charming man. Myself and Jay Vacanti from Harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago, to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he's going to get next year and focus it, in a strategic way, to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients. And at the end of a very testy meeting, what the NIH director said was, ""Your vision is larger than our appetite."" I'd like to close by saying that no one's going to change our vision, but together we can change his appetite. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_russell_on_regenerating_our_bodies
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"So I really consider myself a storyteller. But I don't really tell stories in the usual way, in the sense that I don't usually tell my own stories. Instead, I'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the world. I do this because I think that people actually have a lot in common. I think people are very similar, but I also think that we have trouble seeing that.You know, as I look around the world I see a lot of gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps. And we define ourselves by our gaps. There's language gaps, there's ethnicity and racial gaps, there's age gaps, there's gender gaps, there's sexuality gaps, there's wealth and money gaps, there's education gaps, there's also religious gaps. You know, we have all these gaps and I think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something, some smaller community. But I think that actually, despite our gaps, we really have a lot in common. And I think one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves. I think this is a very old human desire. It's nothing new.But the thing about self-expression is that there's traditionally been this imbalance between the desire that we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen.(Laughter)This, also, is nothing new. Since the dawn of human history, we've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them in to a newspaper, gossiping with friends. This is nothing new.What's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very traditional physical human activities, these acts of self-expression, have been moving onto the Internet. And as that's happened, people have been leaving behind footprints, footprints that tell stories of their moments of self-expression. And so what I do is, I write computer programs that study very large sets of these footprints, and then try to draw conclusions about the people who left them — what they feel, what they think, what's different in the world today than usual, these sorts of questions.One project that explores these ideas, which was made about a year ago, is a piece called We Feel Fine. This is a piece that every two or three minutes scans the world's newly-posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ""I feel"" or ""I am feeling."" And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the sentence up to the period, and then automatically tries to deduce the age, gender and geographical location of the person that wrote that sentence. Then, knowing the geographical location and the time, we can also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the sentence. All of this information is saved in a database that collects about 20,000 feelings a day. It's been running for about a year and a half. It's reached about seven-and-a-half million human feelings now. And I'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then visualized. So this is We Feel Fine.What you see here is a madly swarming mass of particles, each of which represents a single human feeling that was stated in the last few hours. The color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside — so that happy, positive feelings are brightly colored. And sad, negative feelings are darkly colored. The diameter of each dot represents the length of the sentence inside, so that the large dots contain large sentences, and the small dots contain small sentences. Any dot can be clicked and expanded. And we see here, ""I would just feel so much better if I could curl up in his arms right now and feel his affection for me in the embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips."" So it gets pretty hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions. And all of these are stated by people: ""I know that objectively it really doesn't mean much, but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big pond, it's nice to feel bigger again.""The dots exhibit human qualities. They kind of have their own physics, and they swarm wildly around, kind of exploring the world of life. And then they also exhibit curiosity. You can see a few of them are swarming around the cursor right now. You can see some other ones are swarming around the bottom left corner of the screen around six words. Those six words represent the six movements of We Feel Fine. We're currently seeing Madness. There's also Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds. And I'll walk you through a few of those now. Murmurs causes all of the feelings to fly to the ceiling. And then, one by one, in reverse chronological order, they excuse themselves, entering the scrolling list of feelings. ""I feel a bit better now.""(Laughter)""I feel confused and unsure of what the hell I want to do."" ""I feel gypped out of something awesome here."" ""I feel so free; I feel so good."" ""I feel like I'm in this fog of depression that I can't get out of."" And you can click any of these to go out and visit the blog from which it was collected. And in that way, you can connect with the authors of these statements if you feel some degree of empathy.The next movement is called Montage. Montage causes all of the feelings that contain photographs to become extracted and display themselves in a grid. This grid is then said to represent the picture of the world's feelings in the last few hours, if you will. Each of these can be clicked and we can blow it up. We see, ""I just feel like I'm not going to have fun if it's not the both of us."" That was from someone in Michigan. We see, ""I feel like I have been at a computer all day.""(Laughter)These are automatically constructed using the found objects: ""I think I feel a little full.""The next movement is called mobs. Mobs provides different statistical breakdowns of the population of the world's feelings in the last few hours. We see that ""better"" is the most frequent feeling right now, followed by ""good,"" ""bad,"" ""guilty,"" ""right,"" ""down,"" ""sick"" and so on. We can also get a gender breakdown. And we see that women are slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours than men. We can do an age breakdown, which gives us a histogram of the world's emotional distribution by age. We see people in their twenties are the most prolific, followed by teenagers, and then people in their thirties, and it dies out very quickly from there. In weather, the feelings assume the physical characteristics of the weather that they represent, so that the ones collected on a sunny day swirl around as if they're part of the sun. The cloudy ones float along as if they're on a breeze. The rainy ones fall down as if they're in a rainstorm, and the snowy ones kind of flutter to the ground.Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their positions on a world map showing the geographical distribution of feelings. Metrics provides more numerical views on the data. We see that the world is feeling ""used"" at 3.3 times the normal level right now.(Laughter)They're feeling ""warm"" at 2.9 times the normal level, and so on. Other views are also available. Here are gender, age, weather, location.The final movement is called Mounds. It's a bit different from the others. Mounds visualizes the entire dataset as large, gelatinous blobs which kind of jiggle. And if I hold down my cursor, they do a little dance. We see ""better"" is the most frequent feeling, followed by ""bad."" And then if I go over here, the list begins to scroll, and there are actually thousands of feelings that have been collected. You can see the little pink cursor moving along, representing our position. Here we see people that feel ""slipping,"" ""nauseous,"" ""responsible.""There's also a search capability, if you're interested in finding out about a certain population. For instance, you could find women who feel ""addicted"" in their 20s when it was cloudy in Bangladesh.(Laughter)But I'll spare you that. So here are some of my favorite montages that have been collected: ""I feel so much of my dad alive in me that there isn't even room for me."" ""I feel very lonely."" ""I need to be in some backwoods redneck town so that I can feel beautiful."" ""I feel invisible to you."" ""I wouldn't hide it if society didn't make me feel like I needed to."" ""I feel in love with Carolyn."" ""I feel so naughty."" ""I feel these weirdoes are actually an asset to college life.""(Laughter)""I love how I feel today.""So as you can see, We Feel Fine uses a technique that I call ""passive observation."" What I mean by that is that it passively observes people as they live their lives. It scans the world's blogs and looks at what people are writing, and these people don't know they're being watched or interviewed. And because of that, you end up getting very honest, candid, sincere responses that are often very moving. And this is a technique that I usually prefer in my work because people don't know they're being interviewed. They're just living life, and they end up just acting like that.Another technique is directly questioning people. And this is a technique that I explored in a different project, the Yahoo! Time Capsule, which was designed to take a fingerprint of the world in 2006. It was divided into ten very simple themes — love, anger, sadness and so on — each of which contained a single, very open-ended question put to the world: What do you love? What makes you angry? What makes you sad? What do you believe in? And so on. The time capsule was available for one month online, translated into 10 languages, and this is what it looked like. It's a spinning globe, the surface of which is entirely composed of the pictures and words and drawings of people that submitted to the time capsule. The ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule. You can sift through this data and see what people have submitted. This is in response to, What's beautiful? ""Miss World.""There are two modes to the time capsule. There's One World, which presents the spinning globe, and Many Voices, which splits the data out into film strips and lets you sift through them one by one. So this project was punctuated by a really amazing event, which was held in the desert outside Albuquerque in New Mexico at the Jemez Pueblo, where for three consecutive nights, the contents of the capsule were projected onto the sides of the ancient Red Rock Canyon walls, which stand about 200 feet tall. It was really incredible. And we also projected the contents of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer space. You can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a 45 degree angle there. This was amazing because the first night I looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that I talked about earlier — the differences in age, gender and wealth and so on.But, you know, as I looked at this more and more and more, and saw these images go across the rocks, I realized I was seeing the same archetypal events depicted again and again and again. You know: weddings, births, funerals, the first car, the first kiss, the first camel or horse — depending on the culture. And it was really moving. And this picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two miles away, where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into space. And there was something very moving about all of this human expression being shot off into the night sky.And it started to make me think a lot about the night sky, and how humans have always used the night sky to project their great stories. You know, as a child in Vermont, on a farm where I grew up, I would often look up into the dark sky and see the three star belt of Orion, the Hunter. And as an adult, I've been more aware of the great Greek myths playing out in the sky overhead every night. You know, Orion facing the roaring bull. Perseus flying to the rescue of Andromeda. Zeus battling Chronos for control of Mount Olympus. I mean, these are the great tales of the Greeks.And it caused me to wonder about our world today. And it caused me to wonder specifically, if we could make new constellations today, what would those look like? What would those be? If we could make new pictures in the sky, what would we draw? What are the great stories of today?And those are the questions that inspired my new project, which is debuting here today at TED. Nobody's seen this yet, publicly. It's called Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology. And it uses this metaphor of an interactive night sky. So, it's my great pleasure now to show this to you.So, Universe will open here. And you'll see that it leads with a shifting star field, and there's an Aurora Borealis in the background, kind of morphing with color. The color of the Aurora Borealis can be controlled using this single bar of color at the bottom, and we'll put it down here to red. So you see this kind of — these stars moving along.Now, these aren't just little points of light, little pixels. Each of those stars actually represents a specific event in the real world — a quote that was stated by somebody, an image, a news story, a person, a company. You know, some kind of heroic personality. And you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch some of these stars, that shapes begin to emerge. We see here there's a little man walking along, or maybe a woman. And we see here a photograph with a head. You can start to see words emerging here. And those are the constellations of today. And I can turn them all on, and you can see them moving across the sky now.This is the universe of 2007, the last two months. The data from this is global news coverage from thousands of news sources around the world. It's using the API of a really great company that I work with in New York, actually, called Daylife. And it's kind of the zeitgeist view at this level of the world's current mythology over the last couple of months.So we can see where it's emerging here, like President Ford, Iraq, Bush. And we can actually isolate just the words — I call them secrets — and we can cause them to form an alphabetical list. And we see Anna Nicole Smith playing a big role recently. President Ford — this is Gerald Ford's funeral. We can actually click anything in Universe and have it become the center of the universe, and everything else will enter its orbit. So, we'll click Ford, and now that becomes the center. And the things that relate to Ford enter its orbit and swirl around it.We can isolate just the photographs, and we now see those. We can click on one of those and have the photograph be the center of the universe. Now the things that relate to it are swirling around. We can click on this and we see this iconic image of Betty Ford kissing her husband's coffin.In Universe, there's kind of no end. It just goes infinitely, and you can just kind of click on stuff. This is a photographic representation, called Snapshots. But we can actually be more specific in defining our universe. So, if we want to, let's check out what Bill Clinton's universe looks like. And let's see, in the past week, what he's been up to. So now, we have a new universe, which is just constrained to all things Bill Clinton. We can have his constellations emerge here. We can pull out his secrets, and we see that it has a lot to do with candidates, Hillary, presidential, Barack Obama. We can see the stories that Bill Clinton is taking part in right now. Any of those can be opened up. So we see Obama and the Clintons meet in Alabama. You can see that this is an important story; there are a lot of things in its orbit. If we open this up, we get different perspectives on this story. You can click any of those to go out and read the article at the source. This one's from Al Jazeera.We can also see the superstars. These would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and heroines in the universe of Bill Clinton. So there's Bill Clinton, Hillary, Iraq, George Bush, Barack Obama, Scooter Libby — these are kind of the people of Bill Clinton. We can also see a world map, so this shows us the geographic reach of Bill Clinton in the last week or so. We can see he's been focused in America because he's been campaigning, probably, but a little bit of action over here in the Middle East. And then we can also see a timeline. So we see that he was a bit quiet on Saturday, but he was back to work on Sunday morning, and actually been tapering off since then this week.And it's not limited to just people or dates, but we can actually put in concepts also. So if I put in climate change for all of 2006, we'll see what that universe looks like. Here we have our star field. Here we have our shapes. Here we have our secrets. So we see again, climate change is large: Nairobi, global conference, environmental. And there are also quotes that you can see, if you're interested in reading about quotes on climate change. You know, this is really an infinite thing.The superstars of climate change in 2006: United States, Britain, China. You know, these are the towering countries that kind of define this concept. So this is a piece that demands exploration.This will be online in several days, probably next Tuesday. And you'll all be able to use it and kind of explore what your own personal mythology might be. You'll notice that in Daylife — rather, in Universe — it supports both the notion of a global mythology, which is represented by something as broad as, say, 2007, and also a personal mythology. As you search for the things that are important to you in your world, and then see what the constellations of those might look like.So it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories
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"So I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, that AIDS is a disease of poverty, and that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic. Using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms — the ABC campaign — they decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic.So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic, and I'm actually also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. To do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another.So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works.And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand is: how do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year — a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress — your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points.That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, they're being asked, ""Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?"" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change in a very short period of time.We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it. We see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases — two percentage points — not significant.This seems puzzling. But I'm going to argue that you shouldn't be surprised by this, and that to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does — as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine.But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But, you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change.But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria.So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you — in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria — what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria it decreases some — it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria — actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant.This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk.So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa.But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, in improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough, at least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior.So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective.And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence?Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, ""Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?"" You get on Google, you Google, and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women, which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year, because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse — some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing.Now in the last few years, we actually have done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983.So this is a problem for policy. It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past.To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here — this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development.But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population, but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are.So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see, almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent. And these are not trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group.I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower.And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections.So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade, is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectedness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia.And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. Areas with a lot of economic activity — with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization — those areas have higher prevalence than others.But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be — fortunately, I think — it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections.So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality — this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports — we can think about what the right kinds of policies are.But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty — at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development — it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence.So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period.There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s — and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series — the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections — you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987 they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade.So if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign.But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign. And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there are all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There are tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things.I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic in order to think about policy.But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data. And the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There are more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_oster_flips_our_thinking_on_aids_in_africa
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"I've always wanted to be a cyborg. One of my favorite shows as a kid was ""The Six Million Dollar Man,"" and this is a little bit closer to the 240-dollar man or so, but —(Laughter)At any rate, I would normally feel very self-conscious and geeky wearing this around, but a few days ago I saw one world-renowned statistician swallowing swords on stage here, so I figure it's OK amongst this group. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about toys, and the power that I see inherent in them.When I was a kid, I attended Montessori school up to sixth grade in Atlanta, Georgia. And at the time I didn't think much about it, but then later, I realized that that was the high point of my education. From that point on, everything else was pretty much downhill. And it wasn't until later, as I started making games, that — I really actually think of them more as toys. People call me a game designer, but I really think of these things more as toys. I started getting very interested in Maria Montessori and her methods, and the way she went about things, and the way she thought it very valuable for kids to discover things on their own rather than being taught these things overtly. And she would design these toys, where kids in playing with the toys would come to understand these deep principles of life and nature through play. And since they discovered this, it stuck with them so much more, and also they would experience their own failures. There was a failure-based aspect to learning there. It was very important. And so, the games that I do, I think of really more as modern Montessori toys. And I really kind of want them to be presented in a way to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles. So a few years ago,I started getting very interested in the SETI program. And that's the way I work. I get interested in different subjects, I dive in, research them, and then try to figure out how to craft a toy around that, so that other people can experience the same sense of discovery that I did as I was learning that subject. And it led me to astrobiology, the study of possible life in the universe. And then Drake's equation, looking at the probability of life arising on planets, how long it might last, how many planets are out there. And I started looking at how interesting Drake's equation was, because it spanned all these different subjects — physics, chemistry, sociology, economics, astronomy.And another thing that really impressed me a long time ago was ""Powers of Ten,"" Charles and Ray Eames' film. And I started putting those two together and wondering, could I build a toy where kids would trip across all these interesting principles of life, as it exists and as it might go in the future. Things where you might trip across things like the Copernican principle, the Fermi paradox, the anthropic principle, the origin of life.And so I'm going to show you a toy today that I've been working on, that I think of more as kind of a philosophy toy. Playing this toy will bring up philosophical questions in you.The game is ""Spore."" I've been working on it for several years. It's getting pretty close to finished now. It occurs at all these different scales, from very small to very large. I'm going to pop in at the start of the game. And you actually start this game in a drop of water, as a very, very small single-cell creature, and right off the bat you basically just have to live, survive, reproduce. So here we are, at a very microscopic scale, swimming around. And I actually realize that cells don't have eyes, but it helps to make it cute.The players are going to play through every generation of this species, and as you play the game, the creature is actually growing bit by bit. And as we start growing, the camera will actually start zooming out, and things that you see in the background there will start slowly pulling into the foreground, showing you a little bit of what you'll be interacting with as you grow. So as we eat, the camera starts pulling out, and then we start interacting with larger and larger organisms.We actually play through many generations here, at the cellular scale. I'm going to skip ahead here. At some point we get larger, and we actually get to a macroevolution scale. Now, at this point we're leaving the water, and one thing that's kind of important about this game is that, at every level, the player is designing their creature, and that's a fundamental aspect of this.Now, in the evolution game here, the creature scale, basically you have to eat, survive, and then reproduce. You know, very Darwinian. One thing we noticed with ""The Sims,"" a game I did earlier, is that players love making stuff. When they were able to make stuff in the game, they had a lot of empathy in connection to it. Even if it wasn't as pretty as a professional artist would make for games, it really stuck with them and they really cared about what would happen to it.At this point, we've left the water, and now with this little creature — we could bring up the volume a little bit — and now we might try to eat. We might sneak up on this little guy over here maybe, and try and eat him. OK, well, we fight.(Creatures grunting)OK, we got him. Now we get a meal. So really, at this part of the game, what we're doing is we're running around and surviving, and also getting to the next generation, because we're going to play through every generation of this creature. We can mate, so I'm going to see if one of these creatures wants to mate with me. Yeah.(Creatures grunting)We didn't want to replay actual evolution with humans and all that, because it's almost more interesting to look at alternate possibilities in evolution. Evolution is usually presented as this one path that we took through, but really it represents this huge set of possibilities. Now, once we mate, we click on the egg. And this is where the game starts getting interesting, because one of the things we really focused on here was giving the players very high-leverage tools, so that for very little effort, the player can make something very cool. And it involves a lot of intelligence on the tool side.But basically, this is the editor where we're going to design the next generation. So it has a little spine. I can move around, I can extend. I can also inflate or deflate it with the mouse wheel, so you sculpt it like clay. We have parts here that I can put on or pull off. The idea is that the player can basically design anything they can think of in this editor, and we'll basically bring it to life. So I might put some limbs on the character here. I'll inflate them kind of large. And in this case I might decide I'm going to put — I'll put mouths on the limbs.So pretty much players are encouraged to be very creative in the game. Here, I'll give it one eye in the middle, maybe scale it up a bit. Point it down. And I'll also give it a few legs. So in some sense we want this to feel like an amplifier for the player's imagination, so that with a very small number of clicks a player can create something that they didn't really think was possible before. This is almost like designing something like Maya — that an eight-year-old can use. But really the goal here was, within about a minute, I wanted somebody to replicate what typically takes a pictorial artist several weeks to create. OK, now I'll put some hands on it. OK, so here I've basically thrown together a little creature. Let me give it a little weapon on the tail here, so it can fight. OK, so that's the complete model. Now we can actually go to the painting phase.At this phase, the program has some understanding of the topology of this creature. It knows where the backbone is, where the spine, the limbs are, how stripes should run, how it should be shaded. And so we're procedurally generating the texture map, something a texture artist would take many days to work on. And then we can test it out, and see how it would move around. And so at this point the computer is procedurally animating this creature. It's looking at whatever I've designed. It will actually bring it to life. And I can see how it might dance.(Laughter)How it might show emotions, how it might fight. So it's acting with its two mouths there. I can even have it pose for a photo. Snap a little photo of it.(Laughter)So then I bring this back into the game. It's born, and I play the next generation of my creature through evolution. Now again, the empathy that the players have when they create the content is tremendous. When players create content in this game, it's automatically sent up to a server and then redistributed to all the other players transparently. So in fact, as I'm interacting in this world with other creatures, these creatures are transparently coming from other players as they play. So the process of playing the game is a process of building up this huge database of content. And pretty much everything you're going to see in this game, there's an editor for that the player can create, up through civilization. This is my baby. When I eat, I'll actually start growing.This is the next generation. But I'm going to skip ahead here. Normally what would happen is these creatures would work their way up, eventually become intelligent. I'd start dealing with tribes, cities and civilizations of them over time. I'm going to skip way ahead to the space phase. Eventually they would go out into space, and start colonizing and exploring the universe. Now, really, in some sense, I want the players to be building this world in their imagination, and then extracting it from them with the least amount of pain.So that's kind of what these tools are about. How do we make the gameplay, you know, basically the player's imagination amplifier? And how do we make these tools, these editors, something that are just as fun as the game itself? So this is the planet that we've been playing on up to this point in the game. So far the entire game has been played on the surface of this little world here.At this point we're actually dealing with a very little toy planet. Almost, again, like the Montessori toy idea. What happens if you give somebody a toy planet, and let them play with a lot of dynamics on it? What could they discover? What might they learn on this? This world was actually extracted from the player's imagination. So, this is the planet that the player evolved on. Things like the buildings, the vehicles, the architecture, civilizations were all designed by the player up to this point. So here's a little city with some of our guys walking around in it. And most games put the player in the role of Luke Skywalker, this protagonist playing through this story. This is more about putting the player in the role of George Lucas. I want them, after they've played this game, to have extracted an entire world that they're now interacting with.As we pull down here, we still have a whole set of creatures living on the surface of the planet. All these different dynamics going on here. I can look over here, and this is a little simplified food web that's going on with the creatures. I can open this up and then scan what exists on the surface.You get some sense of the diversity of creatures that were brought in. Some of these were created by the player, others by other players, automatically sent over here. But there's a very simple calculation of what's required, how many plants are required for the herbivores to live, how many herbivores for the carnivores to eat, etc., that you have to balance actively. Also with this phase, we're getting more and more God-like powers for the player, and you can experiment with this planet as a toy. So I can come in and I can do things, and just treat this planet as a lump of clay. We have very simple weather systems, simple geology. For instance, I could open one of my tools here and then carve out rivers. So this whole thing is kind of like a big lump of clay, a sculpture. I can also play with the dynamics in this world over time.So one of the things I can do is start pumping more CO2 gases into the atmosphere, and so that's what I'm doing here. There's actually a little readout down there of our planetary atmosphere, pressure and temperature. So as I start pumping in more atmosphere, we're going to start pushing up the greenhouse gases here and if you'll start noticing, we start seeing the ocean levels rise over time. And our cities are going to be at risk too, because a lot of these are coastal cities. You can see the ocean levels are rising now and as they encroach upon the cities, I'll start losing cities here.So basically, I want the players to be able to experiment and explore a huge amount of failure space. So there goes one city. Now, over time, this is going to heat up the planet. So at first what we're going to see is a global ocean rise here on this little toy planet, but then over time — I can speed it up — we'll see the heat impact of that as well.Not only will it get hotter, but at some point it's going to get so hot the oceans will evaporate. They'll go up, and then they'll evaporate, and that'll be my planet. So basically, what we're getting here is the sequel to ""An Inconvenient Truth,"" in about two minutes, and that actually brings up an interesting point about games. Now here, our entire oceans are evaporating off the surface, and as it keeps getting hotter, at some point the entire planet is going to melt down. Here it goes.So we're not only simulating biological dynamics — food webs and all that — but also geologic, you know, on a very simple core scale. And what's interesting to me about games is that I think we can take a lot of long-term dynamics and compress them into very short-term experiences. Because it's so hard for people to think 50 or 100 years out, but when you can give them a toy, and they can experience these long-term dynamics in just a few minutes, I think it's an entirely different point of view, where we're actually using the game to remap our intuition. It's almost in the same way that a telescope or microscope recalibrates your eyesight; I think computer simulations can recalibrate your instinct across vast scales of both space and time.So here's our little solar system, as we pull away from our melted planet here. We actually have a couple of other planets in this solar system. Let's fly to another one. We're going to have this unlimited number of worlds you can explore here. As we move into the future, and we start going out into space and doing stuff, we're drawing a lot from things like science fiction. And all my favorite science fiction movies I want to play out here as different dynamics.This planet actually has some life on it. Here it is, some indigenous life down here. One of the tools I can eventually earn for my UFO is a monolith that I can drop down.(Laughter)Now, as you can see, these guys are actually starting to go up and bow to it, and over time, once they touch it, they will become intelligent. So I can actually pick a species on a planet and then make them sentient. Now they've actually gone to tribal dynamics. And now, because I'm actually the one here, I can get out of the UFO and walk up, and they should be worshipping me at this point as a god. At first they're a little freaked out. OK, well maybe they're not worshipping me.(Laughter)I think I'll leave before they get hostile.But we basically want a diversity of activities the players can play through this. I want to be able to play ""The Day the Earth Stood Still,"" ""2001: A Space Odyssey,"" ""Star Trek,"" ""War Of the Worlds."" Now, as we pull away from this world — we're going to keep pulling away from the star now. One of the things that always frustrated me about astronomy when I was a kid is how it was always presented so two-dimensionally and so static. As we pull away from the star here, we're actually going now out into interstellar space, and we're getting a sense of the space around our home star.What I really wanted to do is to present this, basically, as wonderfully 3D as it is actually is. And also show the dynamics, and a lot of the interesting objects that you might find, like, in the Hubble, at pretty much realistic frequencies and scales. So most people have no idea of the difference between an emission nebula and a planetary nebula. But these are the things that we can put in this little galaxy here. So we're flying over here to what looks like a black hole. I want to basically have the entire zoo of Hubble objects that people can interact with and play with, again, as toys.So here's a little black hole that we probably don't want to get too close to. But we also have stars and things as well. If we pull all the way back, we start seeing the entire galaxy here, kind of slowly in motion. Typically, when people present galaxies, it's always beautiful photos, but they're always static. And when you bring it forward in time and start animating it, it's amazing what a galaxy would look like fast forwarded.This would be about a million years a second, because you have about one supernova every century. And so you'd have this wonderful sparkling thing, with the disk slowly rotating, and this is roughly what it would look like. Part of this is about bringing the beauty of the natural world to somebody in a very imaginative way, so that they can start calibrating their instinct across these vast scales of space and time.Chris was wondering what kind of gods the players would become. Because if you think about it, you're going to have 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds flying around this universe. They might be a nurturing god. They might be bootstrapping life on planets, trying to terraform and spread civilization. You might be a vengeful god, conquesting, because you actually can do that, you can attack other intelligent races. You might be a networking god, building alliances, or just curious, going around and wanting to explore as much as you possibly can.But basically, the reason why I make toys like this is because I think if there's one difference I could possibly make in the world, that I would choose to make, it's that I would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking. Because I think most of the problems that our world is facing right now are the result of short-term thinking, and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50, 100, or 1,000 years out. And I think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics, very long-term dynamics over the short term, and getting some sense of what we're doing now, what it's going to be like in 100 years, I think probably is the most effective thing I can be doing to help the world. And so that's why I think that toys can change the world.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/will_wright_makes_toys_that_make_worlds
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"This is a recent comic strip from the Los Angeles Times. The punch line? ""On the other hand, I don't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador."" This is a recent cover of New York Magazine. Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment, births, strokes, heart disease, hip replacements, 4 a.m. emergencies. And this is a song medley I put together —(Music)Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand? It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour.(Laughter)A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in this classic scene from ""The Godfather."" Coppola's script describes these guys as, ""exhausted in shirt sleeves. It is four in the morning.""(Laughter)A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's ""The House of the Spirits."" After the breathtaking green-haired Rosa is murdered, the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians' paste. They worked until four o'clock in the morning.A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like in last April's New Yorker magazine. This short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out, ""On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine, and Mohamed Atta's last day began."" For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day, four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press —(Laughter)across a lot of different media from a lot of big names. And it made me suspicious. I figured, surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world, really, aren't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it, right? Could it be there is something more going on here? Something deliberate, something secret, and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway? I say this guy — Alberto Giacometti, shown here with some of his sculptures on the Swiss 100 franc note. He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art. Its title — ""The Palace at Four in the Morning —(Laughter)1932. Not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning I can find. I believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it. I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive. No, feel free to follow along on your Blackberries or your iPhones if you've got them.It works a little something like — this is a recent Google search for four in the morning. Results vary, of course. This is pretty typical. The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young's song, ""It's Four in the Morning,"" three hits for Judi Dench's film, ""Four in the Morning,"" one hit for Wislawa Szymborska's poem, ""Four in the Morning."" But what, you may ask, do a Polish poet, a British Dame, a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent Google ranking?Well, let's start with Faron Young — who was born incidentally in 1932.(Laughter)In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth — which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday.(Laughter)But he didn't die on Dench's birthday. He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 — which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died.Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this? She has the world's most absolutely watertight alibi. On that very day, December 10, 1996 while Mr. Four in the Morning, Faron Young, was giving up the ghost in Nashville, Tennessee, Ms. Four in the Morning — or one of them anyway — Wislawa Szymborska was in Stockholm, Sweden, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. 100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself. Coincidence? No, it's creepy.(Laughter)Coincidence to me has a much simpler metric. That's like me telling you, ""Hey, you know the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, which coincidentally is the same year Alberto Giacometti was born?"" No, not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm, but that does not mean there's not something going on at the highest possible levels. In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we're about to see.(Laughter)Video: Homer Simpson: We have a tennis court, a swimming pool, a screening room — You mean if I want pork chops, even in the middle of the night, your guy will fry them up?Herbert Powell: Sure, that's what he's paid for. Now do you need towels, laundry, maids?HS: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait — let me see if I got this straight. It is Christmas Day, 4 a.m. There's a rumble in my stomach.Marge Simpson: Homer, please.Rives: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me see if I got this straight, Matt.(Laughter)When Homer Simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock, but the whole freaking calendar, he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the Baby Jesus. And no, I don't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things, but obviously I know a coded message when I see one.(Laughter)I said, I know a coded message when I see one. And folks, you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton's ""My Life"" from the bookstore here at TED. Parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want. Or you can go to the Random House website where there is this excerpt. And how far down into it you figure we'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket? Would you believe about a dozen paragraphs? This is page 474 on your paperbacks if you're following along: ""Though it was getting better, I still wasn't satisfied with the inaugural address. My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day, I was still changing it.""Sure you were, because you've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you. And then —(Laughter)three paragraphs later we get this little beauty: ""We went back to Blair House to look at the speech for the last time. It had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m."" Well, how could it have? By his own writing, this man was either asleep, at a prayer meeting with Al and Tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase. What happens to American presidents at 0400 on inauguration day? What happened to William Jefferson Clinton? We might not ever know. And I noticed, he's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions.(Laughter)It could get awkward, right? I mean after all, this whole business happened on his watch. But if he were here —(Laughter)he might remind us, as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography, that on this day Bill Clinton began a journey — a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades. In generations. The first since this man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election, way back in a simpler time, way back in 1932 — (Laughter)the year Alberto Giacometti(Laughter)made ""The Palace at Four in the Morning."" The year, let's remember, that this voice, now departed, first came a-cryin' into this big old crazy world of ours.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m
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"I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view. I've been watching, since I grew up, the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences. And while these are both wonderful things in their own right — they both have very wonderful things going for them — truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date. (Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-full things, by meaning they are things you can worship. They are ideals that are powerful. They are irreducible. They are unique. They are useful — sometimes, often a long time after the fact. And you can actually roll some of the pictures now, because I don't want to look at me on the screen.Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences. They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed. If you look at the math, E=mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe — these are things that are really difficult to understand.And what I've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator — since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor — I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood.Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they're taught is compartmentalized and it's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident. It's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone. We don't want to do that to our students. So we have an opportunity to really open up education.And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard. So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell — that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on. They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that's occupied by micro-machines.And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life. These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids. And these micro-machines power how a cell moves. They power how a cell replicates. They power our hearts. They power our minds.And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will — in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactic stuff — put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works.So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together. We worked with a theme, which is, you've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they're touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there's an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can't see and sense. But they get the information that causes them to stop, causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape, and try to get out of this capillary and find out what's going on.So these molecular motors — we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did. And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on, but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening.And so what I'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It's an ongoing project that's going to go another four or five years. And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures — these little walking machines, they're called kinesins — that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size. Run the movie, please.But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other. They pass information to each other. They cause different things to happen inside the cell. And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes. No life, from the smallest life to everybody here, would be possible without these little micro-machines. In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse. (Laughter) (Music)This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell. This little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it's needed in the cell — whether it's to a membrane, whether it's to an organelle, whether it's to build something or repair something. And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells. So no matter how lazy you feel, you're not really intrinsically doing nothing. (Laughter)So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are. And think about some of the things that we're learning about cellular mechanics. Once we figure out all that's going on — and believe me, we know almost a percent of what's going on — once we figure out what's going on, we're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health, with what we do with future generations, and how long we're going to live. And hopefully we'll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty. (Music)But it's really quite amazing that these cells, these micro-machines, are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding. They work together. They make the cell do what it needs to do. And their working together helps our bodies — huge entities that they will never see — function properly. Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bolinsky_animates_a_cell
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"Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it?Chris Anderson: No, you can't start the three minutes. Reset the three minutes, that's just not fair.AH: Oh my God, it's harsh up here. I mean I'm nervous enough as it is.But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago. Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery. Do you know that surgery? Electric saw, power drill, totally disgusting unless you're David Bolinsky, in which case it's all truth and beauty. Sure David, if it's not your hip, it's truth and beauty.Anyway, I did have a really big epiphany around the situation, so Chris invited me to tell you about it. But first you need to know two things about me. Just two things. I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids. Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system. That means we get our new hips for free. And being the youngest of seven, I have never been at the front of the line for anything. OK?So my hip had been hurting me for years. I finally went to the doctor, which was free. And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free. Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting — almost a year. That is what free gets you. I met the surgeon, and he took some free X-rays, and I got a good look at them. And you know, even I could tell my hip was bad, and I actually work in marketing. So he said, ""Allison, we've got to get you on the table. I'm going to replace your hip — it's about an 18-month wait."" 18 more months. I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months.You know, it's such a long wait that I actually started to even think about it in terms of TEDs. I wouldn't have my new hip for this TED. I wouldn't have my new hip for TEDGlobal in Africa. I would not have my new hip for TED2008. I would still be on my bad hip. That was so disappointing.So, I left his office and I was walking through the hospital, and that's when I had my epiphany. This youngest of seven had to get herself to the front of the line. Oh yeah.Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is? We do not think that way. We don't talk about it. It's not even a consideration. In fact, when we're traveling abroad, it's how we identify fellow Canadians. ""After you."" ""Oh, no, no. After you."" Hey, are you from Canada? ""Oh, me too! Hi!"" ""Great! Excellent!""So no, suddenly I wasn't averse to butting any geezer off the list. Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing, or gardening. No, no. Front of the line.So by now I was walking the lobby, and of course, that hurt, because of my hip, and I kind of needed a sign. And I saw a sign. In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, ""Volunteers Needed."" Hmm. Well, they signed me up immediately. No reference checks. None of the usual background stuff, no. They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75. Yeah. They needed some young blood.So, next thing you know, I had my bright blue volunteer vest, I had my photo ID, and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss. I worked alone. Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop. While ringing in hospital staff's Tic Tacs, I'd casually ask, ""What do you do?"" Then I'd tell them, ""Well, I'm getting my hip replaced — in 18 months. It's gonna be so great when the pain stops. Ow!"" All the staff got to know the plucky, young volunteer.My next surgeon's appointment was, coincidentally, right after a shift at the gift shop. So, naturally, I had my vest and my identification. I draped them casually over the chair in the doctor's office. And you know, when he walked in, I could just tell that he saw them. Moments later, I had a surgery date just weeks away, and a big fat prescription for Percocet.Now, word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line. And, you know, I'm not even ashamed of that. Two reasons. First of all, I am going to take such good care of this new hip. But also I intend to stick with the volunteering, which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all. Even when a Canadian cheats the system, they do it in a way that benefits society.","https://www.ted.com/talks/allison_hunt_gets_a_new_hip
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"Well, first of all, let me thank Emeka — as a matter of fact, TED Global — for putting this conference together. This conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century. Think African governments will put together a conference like this? You think the A.U. will put together a conference like this? Even before they do that they will ask for foreign aid. I would also like to pay homage and honor to the TED Fellows June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows. I call them the Cheetah Generation. The Cheetah Generation is a new breed of Africans who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is. They're not going to wait for government to do things for them. That's the Cheetah Generation, and Africa's salvation rests on the backs of these Cheetahs. In contrast, of course, we have the Hippo Generation.(Laughter)The Hippo Generation are the ruling elites. They are stuck in their intellectual patch. Complaining about colonialism and imperialism, they wouldn't move one foot. If you ask them to reform the economies, they're not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo. Now, there are a lot of Africans who are very angry, angry at the condition of Africa. Now, we're talking about a continent that is not poor. It is rich in mineral resources, natural mineral resources. But the mineral wealth of Africa is not being utilized to lift its people out of poverty. That's what makes a lot of Africans very angry. And in a way, Africa is more than a tragedy, in more ways than one. There's another enduring tragedy, and that tragedy is that there are so many people, so many governments, so many organizations who want to help the people in Africa. They don't understand. Now, we're not saying don't help Africa. Helping Africa is noble. But helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd. It's like the blind leading the clueless.(Laughter)There are certain things that we need to recognize. Africa's begging-bowl leaks. Did you know that 40 percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa? It's taken out of Africa. That's what the World Bank says. Look at Africa's begging-bowl. It leaks horribly. There are people who think that we should pour more money, more aid into this bowl which leaks. What are the leakages? Corruption alone costs Africa 148 billion dollars a year. Yes, put that aside. Capital flight out of Africa, 80 billion a year. Put that aside. Let's take food imports. Every year Africa spends 20 billion dollars to import food. Just add that up, all these leakages. That's far more than the 50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa. Now, back in the 1960s Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food. Not anymore.We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong. You know it, I know it, but let's not waste our time talking about these mistakes because we'll spend all day here. Let's move on, and flip over to the next chapter, and that's what this conference is all about — the next chapter. The next chapter begins with first of all, asking ourselves this fundamental question, ""Whom do we want to help in Africa?"" There is the people, and then there is the government or leaders. Now, the previous speaker before me, Idris Mohammed, indicated that we've had abysmal leadership in Africa. That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable.(Laughter)I belong to an Internet discussion forum, an African Internet discussion forum, and I asked them, I said, ""Since 1960, we've had exactly 204 African heads of state, since 1960."" And I asked them to name me just 20 good leaders, just 20 good leaders — you may want to take this leadership challenge yourself. I asked them to name me just 20. Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course. Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta — somebody mentioned Idi Amin.(Laughter)I let that pass.(Laughter)My point is, they couldn't go beyond 15. Even if they had been able to name me 20, what does that tell you? 20 out of 204 means that the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people. And if you look at them, the slate of the post-colonial leaders — an assortment of military fufu heads, Swiss-bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elites, quack revolutionaries.(Applause)Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that Africans have known for centuries. The second false premise that we make when we're trying to help Africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in Africa that cares about its people, serves the interests of the people, and represents the people. There is one particular quote — a Lesotho chief once said that ""Here in Lesotho, we've got two problems: rats and the government.""(Laughter)What you and I understand as a government doesn't exist in many African countries. In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states. Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa. A vampire state is the government — (Applause) — which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everybody else. The richest people in Africa are heads-of-state and ministers, and quite often the chief bandit is the head-of-state himself. Where do they get their money? By creating wealth? No. By raking it off the backs of their suffering people. That's not wealth creation. It's wealth redistribution.The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people, we must know where the African people are. Take any African economy. An African economy can be broken up into three sectors. There is the modern sector, there is the informal sector and the traditional sector. The modern sector is the abode of the elites. It's the seat of government. In many African countries the modern sector is lost. It's dysfunctional. It is a meretricious fandango of imported systems, which the elites themselves don't understand. That is the source of many of Africa's problems where the struggles for political power emanate and then spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector, claiming innocent lives.Now the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into. More than 80 percent of Ivory Coast's development went into the modern sector. The other sectors, the informal and the traditional sectors, are where you find the majority of the African people, the real people in Africa. That's where you find them. Now, obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people, you go where the people are. But that's not what we did. As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and the traditional sectors. Now, traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa can't feed itself, and that's why it must import food.All right, you cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors. And you can't develop the informal and the traditional sectors without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work. These two sectors, let me describe to you, have their own indigenous institutions. First one is the political system. Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny. If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types. The first one belongs to those ethnic societies who believe that the state was necessarily tyrannous, so they didn't want to have anything to do with any centralized authority. These societies are the Ibo, the Somali, the Kikuyus, for example. They have no chiefs.The other ethnic groups, which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power. In Ashanti tradition, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders. Without the council the chief can't pass any law, and if the chief doesn't govern according to the will of the people he will be removed. If not, the people will abandon the chief, go somewhere else and set up a new settlement. And even if you look in ancient African empires, they were all organized around one particular principle — the confederacy principle, which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority, decentralization of power.Now, this is what I have described to you. This is part of Africa's indigenous political heritage. Now, compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established on Africa. It is a total far cry. In the economic system in traditional Africa, the means of production is privately owned. It's owned by extended families. You see, in the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. The American will say, ""I am because I am, and I can damn well do anything I want, anytime."" The accent is on the ""I."" In Africa, the Africans say, ""I am, because we are."" The ""we"" connotes community — the extended family system. The extended family system pools its resources together.They own farms. They decide what to do, what to produce. They don't take any orders from their chiefs. They decide what to do. And when they produce their crops, they sell the surplus on marketplaces. When they make a profit it is theirs to keep, not for the chief to sequester it from them. So, in a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free-market system. There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu was one great big market town. Kano, Salaga — they were all there. Even if you go to West Africa, you notice that market activity in West Africa has always been dominated by women. So, it's quite appropriate that this section is called a marketplace. The market is not alien to Africa.What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism, but then after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a western institution, and the leaders said Africans were ready for socialism. Nonsense. And even then, what kind of socialism did they practice? The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of Swiss-bank socialism, which allowed the heads of states and the ministers to rape and plunder Africa's treasuries for deposit in Switzerland. That is not the kind of system Africans had known for centuries. What do we do now? Go back to Africa's indigenous institutions, and this is where we charge the Cheetahs to go into the informal sectors, the traditional sectors. That's where you find the African people.And I'd like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector, about the boat-building that I, myself, tried to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora to invest in. Could you please show that? The men are going fishing in these small boats. Yes, it's an enterprise. This is by a local Ghanaian entrepreneur, using his own capital. He's getting no assistance from the government, and he's building a second, bigger boat. A bigger boat will mean more fish will be caught and landed. It means that he will be able to employ more Ghanaians. It also means that he will be able to generate wealth. And then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy. All that you need to do, all that the elites need to do, is to move this operation into something that is enclosed so that the operation can be made more efficient.Now, it is not just this informal sector. There is also traditional medicine. 80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine. The modern healthcare sector has totally collapsed. Now, this is an area — I mean, there is a treasure trove of wealth in the traditional medicine area. This is where we need to mobilize Africans, in the Diaspora especially, to invest in this. We also need to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors, but to go into agriculture and also to instigate change from within. We were able to mobilize Ghanaians in the Diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana. And I know that with the Cheetahs, we can take Africa back one village at a time. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_ayittey_on_cheetahs_vs_hippos
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"It's very, very difficult to speak at the end of a conference like this, because everyone has spoken. Everything has been said. So I thought that what may be useful is to remind us of some of the things that have gone on here, and then maybe offer some ideas which we can take away, and take forward and work on. That's what I'd like to try and do. We came here saying we want to talk about ""Africa: the Next Chapter."" But we are talking about ""Africa: the Next Chapter"" because we are looking at the old and the present chapter — that we're looking at, and saying it's not such a good thing. The picture I showed you before, and this picture, of drought, death and disease is what we usually see. What we want to look at is ""Africa: the Next Chapter,"" and that's this: a healthy, smiling, beautiful African. And I think it's worth remembering what we've heard through the conference right from the first day, where I heard that all the important statistics have been given — about where we are now, about how the continent is doing much better. And the importance of that is that we have a platform to build on.So I'm not going to spend too much time — just to show you, refresh your memories that we are here for ""Africa: the Next Chapter"" because for the first time there really is a platform to build on. We really do have it going right that the continent is growing at rates that people had thought would not happen. After decades of 2 percent, we are now at 5 percent, and it's going to — projected — 6 and 7 percent even. And inflation has come down. External debt — something that I can tell you a long story about because I personally worked on one of the biggest debts on the continent — has come down dramatically. You know, as you can see, from almost 50 billion down to about 12 or 13 billion. Now this is a huge achievement.You know, we've built up reserves. Why is that important? It's because it shows off our economies, shows off our currencies and gives a platform on which people can plan and build, including businesses. We've also seen some evidence that all this is making a difference because private investment flows have increased. I want to remind you again — I know you saw these statistics before — from almost 6 billion we are now at about 18 billion. In 2005, remittances — I just took one country, Nigeria skyrocketing — skyrocketing is too dramatic, but increasing dramatically. And in many other countries this is happening. Why is this important? Because it shows confidence. People are now confident to bring — if your people in the diaspora bring their money back, it shows other people that, look, there is emerging confidence in your country. And instead of an outflow, you are now getting a net inflow.Now, why is all this important, to have to go really fast? It's important that we build this platform, that we have the president, Kikwete, and others of our leaders who are saying, ""Look, we must do something different."" Because we are confronted with a challenge. 62 percent of our population is below the age of 24. What does this mean? This means that we have to focus on how our youth are going to be engaged in productive endeavor in their lives. You have to focus on how to create jobs, make sure they don't fall into disease, and that they get an education. But most of all that they are productively engaged in life, and that they are creating the kind of productive environment in our countries that will make things happen. And to support this, I just recently — one of the things I've done since leaving government is to start an opinion research organization in Nigeria. Most of our countries don't even have any opinion research. People don't have voice. There is no way you can know what people want.One of the things we asked them recently was what's their top issue. Like in every other country where this has been done, jobs is the top issue. I want to leave this up here and come back to it. But before I get to this slide, I just wanted to run you through this. And to say that for me, the next stage of building this platform that now enables us to move forward — and we mustn't make light of it. It was only 5, 6, 7 years ago we couldn't even talk about the next chapter, because we were in the old chapter. We were going nowhere. The economies were not growing. We were having negative per capita growth. The microeconomic framework and foundation for moving forward was not even there. So let's not forget that it's taken a lot to build this, including all those things that we tried to do in Nigeria that Dele referred to. Creating our own program to solve problems, like fighting corruption, building institutions, stabilizing the micro economy.So now we have this platform we can build on. And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc. And someone stood up to say that one of the frustrating things is that it's been a simplistic debate. And that's not what the debate should be about. That's engaging in the wrong debate. The issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors, the private sector and ordinary African people taking charge of their own lives? How do we combine all this? To move our continent forward, to do the things that need doing that I talked about — getting young people employed. Getting the creative juices flowing on this continent, much of what you have seen here. So I'm afraid we've been engaging a little bit in the wrong debate. We need to bring it back to say, what is the combination of all these factors that is going to yield what we want? (Applause)And I want to tell you something. For me, the issue about aid — I don't think that Africans need to now go all the way over to the other side and feel bad about aid. Africa has been giving the other countries aid. Mo Ibrahim said at a debate we were at that he dreams one day when Africa will be giving aid. And I said, ""Mo, you're right. We have — no, but we've already been doing it! The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid.""(Applause)It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today! So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive. The issue is not that. The issue is how are we using what has been given back. How are we using it? Is it being directed effectively? I want to tell you a little story. Why I don't mind if we get aid, but we use it well. From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war — the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old. We spent much of our time with my mother cooking. For the army — my father joined the army as a brigadier — the Biafran army. We were on the Biafran side. And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did. At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad. We were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day. People, children were dying of kwashiorkor. I'm sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures. Well, I was in the middle of it.In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days. We thought she was going to die. My father was not there. He was in the army. So I was the oldest person in the house. My sister fell very ill with malaria. She was three years old and I was 15. And she had such a high fever. We tried everything. It didn't look like it was going to work. Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was looking at people and giving them meds. Now I put my sister on my back — burning — and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back. It was really hot. I was very hungry. I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman. We heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people. I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other. I got there and I saw huge crowds. Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door. She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in?I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window. And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in. This woman told me it was in the nick of time. By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving. She gave a shot of her chloroquine — what I learned was the chloroquine then — gave her some — it must have been a re-hydration — and some other therapies, and put us in a corner. In about two to three hours, she started to move. And then they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign. And then my sister woke up. And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home. I strapped her on my back. I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had. I was so happy — (Applause) — that my sister was alive! Today she's 41 years old, a mother of three, and she's a physician saving other lives.Why am I telling that? I'm telling you that because — when it is you or your person involved — you don't care where — whether it's aid. You don't care what it is! (Applause) You just want the person to be alive! And now let me become less sentimental, and say that saving lives — which some of the aid we get does on this continent — when you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy. And as an economist, we can also look at that side of the story. These are people who are productive agents in the economy. So if we save people from HIV/AIDS, if we save them from malaria, it means they can form the base of production for our economy. And by the same token — as someone said yesterday — if we don't and they die, their children will become a burden on the economy. So even from an economic standpoint, if we leave the social and the humanitarian, we need to save lives now. So that's one of the reasons, from a personal experience, that I say let's channel these resources we get into something productive. However, I will also tell you that I'm one of those who doesn't believe that this is the sole answer. That's why I said the debate has to get more sophisticated. You know, we have to use it well.What has happened in Europe? Do you all know that Spain — part of the EU — got 10 billion dollars in aid from the rest of the EU? Resources that were transferred to them — and were the Spanish ashamed of this? No! The EU transferred 10 billion. Where did they use it? Have you been to southern Spain lately? There are roads everywhere. Infrastructure everywhere. It is on the back of this that the whole of southern Spain has developed into a services economy. Did you know that Ireland got 3 billion dollars in aid? Ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union today. For which many people, even from other parts of the world, are going there to find jobs. What did they do with the 3 billion dollars in aid? They used it to build an information superhighway, gain infrastructure that enables them to participate in the information technology revolution, and to create jobs in their economy. They didn't say, ""No, you know, we're not going to take this."" Today, the European Union is busy transferring aid. My frustration is if they can build infrastructure in Spain — which is roads, highways, other things that they can build — I say then, why do they refuse to use the same aid to build the same infrastructure in our countries? (Applause)When we ask them and tell them what we need, one of my worries today is that we have many foundations now. Now we talk about the World Bank, IMF, and accountability, all that and the EU. We also have private citizens now who have a lot of money — some of them in this audience, with private foundations. And one day, these foundations have so much money, they will overtake the official aid that is being given. But I fear — and I'm very grateful to all of them for what they are trying to do on the continent — but I'm also worried. I wake up with a gnawing in my belly because I see a new set of aid entrepreneurs on the continent. And they're also going from country to country, and many times trying to find what to do. But I'm not really sure that their assistance is also being channeled in the right way. And many of them are not really familiar with the continent. They are just discovering. And many times I don't see Africans working with them. They are just going alone! (Applause)And many times I get the impression that they are not really even interested in hearing from Africans who might know. They want to visit us, see what's happening on the ground and make a decision. And now I'm maybe being harsh. But I worry because this money is so important. Now, who are they accountable to? Are we on their boards when they make decisions about where to channel money? Are we there? Will we make the same mistake that we made before? Have our presidents and our leaders — everyone is talking about — have they ever called these people together and said, ""Look, your foundation and your foundation — you have so much money, we are grateful. Let's sit down and really tell you where the money should be channeled and where this aid should go."" Have we done that? The answer is no. And each one is making their own individual effort. And then 10 years from now, billions will again have gone into Africa, and we would still have the same problems.This is what gives us the hopeless image. Our inability to take charge and say to all these people bringing their money, ""Sit down."" And we don't do it because there are so many of us. We don't coordinate. We've not called the Bill Gates, and the Soros, and everybody else who is helping and say, ""Sit down. Let's have a conference with you. As a continent, here are our priorities. Here is where we want you to channel this money."" Each one should not be an entrepreneur going out and finding what is best. We're not trying to stop them at all! But to help them help us better. And what is disappointing me is that we are not doing this. Ten years from now we will have the same story, and we will be repeating the same things. So our problem right now is, how can we leverage all this good will that is coming towards our way? How can we get government to combine properly with these private foundations, with the international organizations, and with our private sector.I firmly believe in that private sector thing too. But it cannot do it alone. So there might be a few ideas we could think of that could work. They said this is about proliferating and sharing ideas. So why don't we think of using some of this aid? Well, why don't we first say to those helping us out, ""Don't be shy about infrastructure. That health that you're working on cannot be sustainable without infrastructure. That education will work better if we've got electricity and railroads, and so on. That agriculture will work better if there are railroads to get the goods to market. Don't be shy of it. Invest some of your resources in that, too."" And then we can see that this is one combination of private, international, multilateral money, private sector and the African that we can put together as a partnership, so that aid can be a facilitator. That is all aid can be. Aid cannot solve our problems, I'm firmly convinced about that. But it can be catalytic. And if we fail to use it as catalytic, we would have failed.One of the reasons why China is a bit popular with Africans now — one of the reasons is not only just that, you know, these people are stupid and China is coming to take resources. It's because there's a little more leverage in terms of the Chinese. If you tell them, ""We need a road here,"" they will help you build it. They don't shy away from infrastructure. In fact, the Chinese minister of finance said to me, when I asked him what are we doing wrong in Nigeria. He said, ""There are two things you need only. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline. You are undisciplined."" (Applause) And I repeat it for the continent. It's the same. We need infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline. So we can make a catalytic to help us provide some of that. Now I realize — I'm not saying — health and education — no, you can also provide that as well. But I'm saying it's not either or. Let's see how aid can be a facilitator in partnership. One idea. Second thing, for the private sector, people are afraid to take risks on the continent. Why can't some of this aid be used as a kind of guarantee mechanisms, to enable people to take risk?(Applause)And finally, because they are both standing at my — I'm out of time. Am I out of time? OK, so let me not forget my punchline. One of the things I want everybody to collaborate on is to support women, to create jobs. (Applause) A lot has been said here about women, I don't need to repeat it. But there are people — women — creating jobs. And we know, studies have shown that when you put resources in the hand of the woman — in fact, there's an econometric study, the World Bank Review, done in 2000, showing that transfers into the hands of women result in healthier children, more for the household, more for the economy and all that. So I'm saying that one of the takeaways from here — I'm not saying the men are not important — obviously, if you leave the husbands out, what will they do? They'll come back home and get disgruntled, and it will result in difficulties we don't want. We don't want men beating their wives because they don't have a job, and so on.But at the margin, we also — I want to push this, because the reason is the men automatically — they get — not automatically, but they tend to get more support. But I want you to realize that resources in the hands of African women is a powerful tool. There are people creating jobs. Beatrice Gakuba has created 200 jobs from her flower business in Rwanda. We have Ibukun Awosika in Nigeria, with the chair company. She wants to expand. She needs another 20 million. She will create another 100, 200 more jobs. So take away from here is how are you going to put together the resources to put money in the hands of women in the middle who are ready — business people who want to expand and create more jobs. And lastly, what are you going to do to be part of this partnership of aid, government, private sector and the African as an individual? Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ngozi_okonjo_iweala_on_aid_versus_trade
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"Chris Anderson: William, hi. Good to see you.William Kamkwamba: Thanks.CA: So, we've got a picture, I think? Where is this?WK: This is my home. This is where I live.CA: Where? What country?WK: In Malawi, Kasungu. In Kasungu. Yeah, Mala.CA: OK. Now, you're 19 now?WK: Yeah. I'm 19 years now.CA: Five years ago you had an idea. What was that?WK: I wanted to make a windmill.CA: A windmill?WK: Yeah.CA: What, to power — for lighting and stuff?WK: Yeah.CA: So what did you do? How did you realize that?WK: After I dropped out of school, I went to library, and I read a book that would — ""Using Energy,"" and I get information about doing the mill. And I tried, and I made it.(Applause)CA: So you copied — you exactly copied the design in the book.WK: Ah, no. I just —CA: What happened?WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four — ah — three blades, and mine has got four blades.CA: The book had three, yours had four.WK: Yeah.CA: And you made it out of what?WK: I made four blades, just because I want to increase power.CA: OK.WK: Yeah.CA: You tested three, and found that four worked better?WK: Yeah. I test.CA: And what did you make the windmill out of? What materials did you use?WK: I use a bicycle frame, and a pulley, and plastic pipe, what then pulls —CA: Do we have a picture of that? Can we have the next slide?WK: Yeah. The windmill.CA: And so, and that windmill, what — it worked?WK: When the wind blows, it rotates and generates.CA: How much electricity?WK: 12 watts.CA: And so, that lit a light for the house? How many lights?WK: Four bulbs and two radios.CA: Wow.WK: Yeah.(Applause) CA: Next slide — so who's that?WK: This is my parents, holding the radio.CA: So what did they make of — that you were 14, 15 at the time — what did they make of this? They were impressed?WK: Yeah.CA: And so what's your — what are you going to do with this?WK: Um —CA: What do you — I mean — do you want to build another one?WK: Yeah, I want to build another one — to pump water and irrigation for crops.CA: So this one would have to be bigger?WK: Yeah.CA: How big?WK: I think it will produce more than 20 the watts.CA: So that would produce irrigation for the entire village?WK: Yeah.CA: Wow. And so you're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream?WK: Yeah, if they can help me with materials, yeah.CA: And as you think of your life going forward, you're 19 now, do you picture continuing with this dream of working in energy?WK: Yeah. I'm still thinking to work on energy.CA: Wow. William, it's a real honor to have you at the TED conference. Thank you so much for coming.WK: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_windmill
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"Welcome to Africa! Or rather, I should say, welcome home. Because this is where it all really began, isn't it? Looking at fossils dating back several millions of years — it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here. We are on an amazing journey the next four days. You're going to hear stories of ""Africa: The Next Chapter."" Fantastic tales, anecdotes from speakers. But I want to turn that upside down for a moment, and get something out on the table and clear the air so to say. What's the worst thing you've ever heard about Africa? And this is not a rhetorical question. I actually want answers from you. Go for it! The worst. Famine. Corruption. More. Genocide. AIDS. Slavery. That's enough.We've all heard these things. But this is about Africa, the story we have not heard. The stories that we want to know, and the stories that do exist about positive tales. A part of my talk is going to be about investment opportunities that exist on this continent, to separate the rhetoric from the reality, the fact from the fiction. To go to the actual data and statistics that exist about the actual things that are happening on the ground that make Africa a realistic investment opportunity and option for you. So let's get going because Africa, to some degree, is on a turnaround. A turnaround in terms of how it manages its image, and how it takes control of its own destiny. And turnarounds are part and parcel of what I have focused on for most of my professional career. And it all started almost a decade ago, as a young consultant at McKinsey & Company at their first African office in Johannesburg.And there we worked with leading CEOs on African issues, and African companies on turnarounds, making the companies not just the best in Africa but the best globally. But I really formalized this focus on turnarounds when I was completing my MBA in the United States. It all began with a fantastic phone call. It was from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School guru and a professor of mine. And she said, ""I want to write a case, Euvin — a case on a public-sector leader that has lessons for the corporate world."" And the leader that came to mind was Nelson Mandela. Because Nelson Mandela, as he took over power as the first democratically-elected president of South Africa, faced a situation of a country that could have slid into the abyss of chaos. But he started the country on a path of a positive cycle.Now the case, ""Nelson Mandela: Change Leader,"" became part of the research base for a chapter in Rosabeth's new book called ""Confidence."" And ""Confidence"" became a New York Times bestseller and topped Business Week's hardcover bestseller list. And why I tell you this story is because later, when I was interviewed on SABC Africa, on a pan-African broadcast, they asked, ""What is your key lesson, or the key thing you enjoy the most?"" — because it was a huge privilege to be part of such a project. The lesson from that was that it was Africa — an African story — that was used to share news with the rest of the world of what the benchmark can be for corporate turnarounds. Africa was being used as a success story!So I want to share with you a personal story about a turnaround or a transformation. And that has to do with me because in 1994, I packed a few things into a backpack and headed off for a year of travel in the middle of my university career. You should have seen my parents' reaction!(Laughter)But very soon, I found myself from the southern part of Africa, in South Africa — at the very north, in Egypt. And I sought out the most remote places. I went to the Siwa Oasis. That was one of my stops. And the Siwa Oasis is famous for several things, but the key thing is that it was the place that Alexander the Great went to when he wanted to find out what his destiny had in store for him. And legend has it that Alexander trekked through this desert. Half his battalion was wiped out in the sandstorm. And myth says that he had an audience with the oracle, and it foretold his destiny of greatness. This was 300 BC. So Africa had long been seen as a place to go to for answers.Now, the thing I remember about Siwa was the magical view of the sky at night. With no natural light source, Siva is one of these amazing places that when you look up you see a perfect tapestry. Fast forward to 2002. I'm sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Healthcare Development Conference. And I see the same picture, but from the opposite side. A satellite picture looking down at the earth. And it was that picture that made such a profound impact on me because I'll never forget it. I remember the very moment. And I wanted to share that image with you of what I saw at that point. The first thing that I saw was North America at night — glowing, in all its glory. A warm feeling. Light.And then I saw it — Africa. Quite literally the ""Dark Continent."" And while Africa may be dark, the thing that brought the message home to me was that this is the challenge we are facing, but it's also the opportunity. Because whilst Africa may be dark — other than the few specks that exist north and in the south and other areas — it's aglow with the light in the hearts of the millions of people that are there. Entrepreneurs, dynamic people, people with hope. It was George Kimble, the geographer, who said that, ""The only thing dark about Africa is our ignorance of it."" So let's start shedding light on this amazing eclectic continent that has so much to offer.Let's start unpacking it. Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia. It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people. In fact — coming back to the land mass — Africa is so big that you could fit in the continental United States, China, and the entire Europe into Africa, and still have space. Africa is home to over 1,000 languages — 2,000 is another estimate that's out there — with over 2,000 languages and dialects. But you could say, ""Invest in Africa in over 1,000 languages, and it wouldn't make a difference."" What does the data say? As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets. So I want to share with you some of these bellwether signals, or signs, and winds of change that are sweeping this continent.So let's start on that. And let's start at the high level, on the macro-factors. Inflation, in general, is coming down across Africa — that's the first sign — in many countries reaching double-digit figures. So let's start looking at some of those. I call it my Z.E.N. cluster. Zambia: from 2004 to 2006, moves from the 18 percent in inflation to the nine percent. Egypt: from the 16 percent to about 8.4 percent. Nigeria: a similar situation, from the 16 percent to the eight percent. Single digits. More fascinating, you have other countries — South Africa, Mauritius, Namibia — all in single digits. But that's just part of the story. You have a similar trend with currencies — currencies going through an extreme time of stability. But that's looking at the big picture. And the first myth to dispel is that Africa is not a country. It's made up —(Applause)It's made up of 53 different countries. So the very definition — to say ""invest in Africa"" is a no-go. It's meaningless. Each country has a unique value proposition. You can make money, you can lose money in Africa. But opportunities, boy oh boy, they exist. And this is what today is about — it's about discussing those very opportunities. So let's start getting into the countries and into the specific material and data. I was recently elected, as Emeka mentioned, as the President of the South African Chamber of Commerce in America. And I'm very proud and happy to be in that role because it is a fascinating position to be in. To hear this dialogue that's just increasing in tenor and velocity, of decisions about trade and companies wanting to come. So the first port of call: let's talk a little bit about South Africa. But not the South Africa we always talk about — the gold, the minerals, the First World infrastructure — a bit about the other side of it.For example, South Africa was recently voted as the top destination for the top 1,000 UK companies for offshore call-centers. Same language, timeline, et cetera. Makes sense. Other headlines that have recently reached South Africa were Bain Capital and KKR, the big boys of private equity. Headline in South Africa: ""They have landed."" Quite ominous. But what were they there for? To acquire assets. Bing Capital's acquisition of Edcon, a large retailer, is testimony to the confidence they are starting to place in the economy. Because it is actually a long-term play. Being a retailer, it is a play on the belief that this middle-class that's growing will continue to grow, that the boom and the confidence in consumer spending will continue. But the story of Africa, and my focus, is beyond South Africa because there's so much happening. Undoubtedly, Nigeria is clearly a hot spot. Challenges — and we will hear a lot about Nigeria in these four days.But looking at Goldman Sachs' work — we had the famous BRIC Report. The new report, ""The Next Eleven,"" highlights that by 2020 Nigeria is going to be amongst the top 10 economies in the world. It's an investment opportunity. Think about that. Is anyone — our banks, our investors — seriously thinking about going to Nigeria? If you haven't, why not? What's going on in Nigeria? A couple of things. I want to talk about it from the perspective of capital markets. Bellwether signs again. Guarantee Trust Bank recently issued the first Euro Bond out of Africa, and this excludes South Africa. But the first Eurobond, the raising of international capital offshore, off its own balance sheet, without any sovereign backing — that is an indication of the confidence that is taking place in that economy. Without any sovereign backing, a Nigerian company raising capital offshore. It's just a sign of things to come.Looking at the oil industry, Africa provides 18 percent of the U.S.'s oil supply, with the Middle East just 16 percent. It's an important strategic partner. Let's put Nigeria in perspective. 2.2 to 2.4 million barrels of oil a day — the same league as Kuwait, the same league as Venezuela. But with Africa, let's start being careful about this. And Emeka and I have had these discussions. We have to move away from what's called ""the curse of the commodities."" Because it's not about oil, it's not about commodities. For Africa to truly be sustainable, we have to move beyond to other industries.So let's unpack those very quickly, and I'm going to move through these very, very, very fast because I can see that clock counting down. What else is going on there? Egypt. Egypt is launching a first large industrial zone — 2.8 billion investment. The announcement just came out the last few weeks. Close to the Mediterranean, near Alexandria — textiles, petrochemicals. It's being managed by a Singaporean-based management company. So they want to emerge as an industrial powerhouse across the industries — away from oil.Let's look at agriculture. Let's look at forestry. What's going on there? In Tanzania last week, we had the launch of the East African Organic Produce Standard. Again, gathering together farmers, gathering together stakeholders in East Africa to get standards for organic produce. Better prices. It ties in with small-scale farmers in terms of no pesticides, no fertilizers. Again, opportunity to tackle markets to get that higher price. Uganda: the New Forest Company, replanting and redeveloping their forests. Why is that important? As the energy needs are met and electricity is needed [we will need] poles for rolling out electricity. But here is the sweetener in the deal. They're going to be tapping into carbon credits. Let's go back to Nigeria. The banking sector has undergone tremendous transformation, from over 80 banks to 25 banks. Strengthening of the system. But what's going on there? Only 10 percent of the country is banked. The largest population in Africa is in Nigeria. 135 million-plus people. Think about that. There are only 700 ATMs in the country. Opportunity.The same for telecoms across the country. Now let's look at the continent as a whole. People look at the roads, for example, and they'd say, ""Angola: 90 percent of roads are untarred. Ah, problem!"" It's more expensive to transport goods. Prices of goods go up, inflation is affected. Nigeria: 70 percent of roads are untarred. Zambia: 80 percent. In general, more than 50 percent of roads are untarred. This is an opportunity! Energy needs — it's an opportunity. So what are the signs that things are fundamentally changing? Let's look at the stock markets in Africa. If I had to ask you, ""In 2005 what was the best performing stock market or stock exchange in the world?"" Would Egypt come to mind? In 2005, the Egyptian stock exchange returned over 145 percent. What's going on in some of the other countries? Let's look at some 2006 numbers. Kenya: over 60 percent. Nigeria: over 40 percent. South Africa: in the 20 percents. High ones. These are the trends that are taking place. But in any investment decision, the key question is, ""What is my alternative investment?""Because in Africa today, we are competing globally for capital. And global capital is agnostic — it has no loyalties. There's an overhang of capital in the U.S., and the key is yield pickup. What Africa is providing is a diversification play, and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing. Now, when looking at Africa vis-a-vis other things, and countries in Africa vis-a-vis other things, comparisons become important. 10 years ago there, were very few countries that received sovereign ratings from the Standard & Poors, Moody's and Fitch's. Today, 16 African countries and growing have sovereign country ratings. What does this mean? Take Nigeria again: double B-minus — in the league of Ukraine and Turkey. Immediately we have a comparison. The backbone of making investment decisions for global holders of capital. Some other figures. South Africa: triple B-plus. Botswana: A-plus. Bakino Faso: B-minus. And so on.In fact, one of the big agencies is setting up an office in Africa. Why are they doing that? Because they expect investment to follow. So one of the big bellwethers, and one of my final points I want to mention, is the interesting thing I read is that CNBC has launched their first African channel. Why is CNBC doing this? It's the 24-hour rolling African news channel. They're doing it because they are expecting things to happen. Me and you, the investments we are going to be making, the investments the world is going to be making — that's the 24-hour news channel dedicated to Africa. So that's the change that's coming down the pipeline.So in conclusion, I want to turn back to that very slide that made such a deep impact on me all those years ago. This time [I'll] give you the entire picture that I saw in 2002, and ask you that when you think about what your role can be in Africa, think about your journey in terms of bringing light to this continent. Because there are amazing opportunities available. And think about the concept of transformation in the back of your mind because things can be turned around rather quickly.In 1899, Joseph Conrad released ""The Heart of Darkness,"" a tale of grim horror along the Congo River. If one looks carefully, on the Congo River is one of those bright lights. And that's the very Congo river generating light — the old heart of darkness now generating light with hydro-electric power. That is a transformation in power of ideas. So the next step, over the next four days, is us exploring more of these ideas. And perchance, if you can always keep this picture in your mind, that when we convene maybe in the distant future, in 2020, that picture will look very different. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/euvin_naidoo_on_investing_in_africa
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"Like many of you here, I am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in Africa. The question of transformation in Africa really is a question of leadership. Africa can only be transformed by enlightened leaders. And it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent. I want to tell you some stories that explain my view. We all heard about the importance of stories yesterday. An American friend of mine this year volunteered as a nurse in Ghana, and in a period of three months she came to a conclusion about the state of leadership in Africa that had taken me over a decade to reach. Twice she was involved in surgeries where they lost power at the hospital. The emergency generators did not start. There was not a flashlight, not a lantern, not a candle — pitch black. The patient's cut open, twice. The first time it was a C-section. Thankfully, baby was out — mother and child survived.The second time was a procedure that involved local anesthesia. Anesthetic wears off. The patient feels pain. He's crying. He's screaming. He's praying. Pitch black. Not a candle, not a flashlight. And that hospital could have afforded flashlights. They could have afforded to purchase these things, but they didn't. And it happened twice. Another time, she watched in horror as nurses watched a patient die because they refused to give her oxygen that they had. And so three months later, just before she returned to the United States, nurses in Accra go on strike. And her recommendation is take this opportunity to fire everyone, start all over again. Start all over again.Now what does this have to do with leadership? You see, the folks at the ministry of health, the hospital administrators, the doctors, the nurses — they are among just five percent of their peers who get an education after secondary school. They are the elite. They are our leaders. Their decisions, their actions matter. And when they fail, a nation literally suffers. So when I speak of leadership, I'm not talking about just political leaders. We've heard a lot about that. I'm talking about the elite. Those who've been trained, whose job it is to be the guardians of their society. The lawyers, the judges, the policemen, the doctors, the engineers, the civil servants — those are the leaders. And we need to train them right.Now, my first pointed and memorable experience with leadership in Ghana occurred when I was 16 years old. We had just had a military coup, and soldiers were pervasive in our society. They were a pervasive presence. And one day I go to the airport to meet my father, and as I walk up this grassy slope from the car park to the terminal building, I'm stopped by two soldiers wielding AK-47 assault weapons. And they asked me to join a crowd of people that were running up and down this embankment. Why? Because the path I had taken was considered out of bounds. No sign to this effect.Now, I was 16. I was very worried about what my peers at school might think if they saw me running up and down this hill. I was especially concerned of what the girls might think. And so I started to argue with these men. It was a little reckless, but you know, I was 16. I got lucky. A Ghana Airways pilot falls into the same predicament. Because of his uniform they speak to him differently, and they explain to him that they're just following orders. So he takes their radio, talks to their boss, and gets us all released. What lessons would you take from an experience like this? Several, for me. Leadership matters. Those men are following the orders of a superior officer. I learned something about courage. It was important not to look at those guns. And I also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls.(Laughter)So a few years after this event, I leave Ghana on a scholarship to go to Swarthmore College for my education. It was a breath of fresh air. You know, the faculty there didn't want us to memorize information and repeat back to them as I was used to back in Ghana. They wanted us to think critically. They wanted us to be analytical. They wanted us to be concerned about social issues. In my economics classes I got high marks for my understanding of basic economics. But I learned something more profound than that, which is that the leaders — the managers of Ghana's economy — were making breathtakingly bad decisions that had brought our economy to the brink of collapse. And so here was this lesson again — leadership matters. It matters a great deal.But I didn't really fully understand what had happened to me at Swarthmore. I had an inkling, but I didn't fully realize it until I went out into the workplace and I went to work at Microsoft Corporation. And I was part of this team — this thinking, learning team whose job it was to design and implement new software that created value in the world. And it was brilliant to be part of this team. It was brilliant. And I realized just what had happened to me at Swarthmore, this transformation — the ability to confront problems, complex problems, and to design solutions to those problems. The ability to create is the most empowering thing that can happen to an individual. And I was part of that.Now, while I was at Microsoft, the annual revenues of that company grew larger than the GDP of the Republic of Ghana. And by the way, it's continued to. The gap has widened since I left. Now, I've already spoken about one of the reasons why this has occurred. I mean, it's the people there who are so hardworking, persistent, creative, empowered. But there were also some external factors: free markets, the rule of law, infrastructure. These things were provided by institutions run by the people that I call leaders. And those leaders did not emerge spontaneously. Somebody trained them to do the work that they do. Now, while I was at Microsoft, this funny thing happened. I became a parent. And for the first time, Africa mattered more to me than ever before. Because I realized that the state of the African continent would matter to my children and their children. That the state of the world — the state of the world depends on what's happening to Africa, as far as my kids would be concerned.And at this time, when I was going through what I call my ""pre-mid-life crisis,"" Africa was a mess. Somalia had disintegrated into anarchy. Rwanda was in the throes of this genocidal war. And it seemed to me that that was the wrong direction, and I needed to be back helping. I couldn't just stay in Seattle and raise my kids in an upper-middle class neighborhood and feel good about it. This was not the world that I'd want my children to grow up in. So I decided to get engaged, and the first thing that I did was to come back to Ghana and talk with a lot of people and really try to understand what the real issues were. And three things kept coming up for every problem: corruption, weak institutions and the people who run them — the leaders.Now, I was a little scared because when you see those three problems, they seem really hard to deal with. And they might say, ""Look, don't even try."" But, for me, I asked the question, ""Well, where are these leaders coming from? What is it about Ghana that produces leaders that are unethical or unable to solve problems?"" So I went to look at what was happening in our educational system. And it was the same — learning by rote — from primary school through graduate school. Very little emphasis on ethics, and the typical graduate from a university in Ghana has a stronger sense of entitlement than a sense of responsibility. This is wrong.So I decided to engage this particular problem. Because it seems to me that every society, every society, must be very intentional about how it trains its leaders. And Ghana was not paying enough attention. And this is true across sub-Saharan Africa, actually. So this is what I'm doing now. I'm trying to bring the experience that I had at Swarthmore to Africa. I wish there was a liberal arts college in every African country. I think it would make a huge difference. And what Ashesi University is trying to do is to train a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders. We're trying to train leaders of exceptional integrity, who have the ability to confront the complex problems, ask the right questions, and come up with workable solutions.I'll admit that there are times when it seems like ""Mission: Impossible,"" but we must believe that these kids are smart. That if we involve them in their education, if we have them discuss the real issues that they confront — that our whole society confronts — and if we give them skills that enable them to engage the real world, that magic will happen. Now, a month into this project, we'd just started classes. And a month into it, I come to the office, and I have this email from one of our students. And it said, very simply, ""I am thinking now."" And he signs off, ""Thank you."" It's such a simple statement. But I was moved almost to tears because I understood what was happening to this young man. And it is an awesome thing to be a part of empowering someone in this way. I am thinking now.This year we challenged our students to craft an honor code themselves. There's a very vibrant debate going on on campus now over whether they should have an honor code, and if so, what it should look like. One of the students asked a question that just warmed my heart. Can we create a perfect society? Her understanding that a student-crafted honor code constitutes a reach towards perfection is incredible. Now, we cannot achieve perfection, but if we reach for it, then we can achieve excellence. I don't know ultimately what they will do. I don't know whether they will decide to have this honor code. But the conversation they're having now — about what their good society should look like, what their excellent society should look like, is a really good thing.Am I out of time? OK. Now, I just wanted to leave that slide up because it's important that we think about it. I'm very excited about the fact that every student at Ashesi University does community service before they graduate. That for many of them, it has been a life-altering experience. These young future leaders are beginning to understand the real business of leadership, the real privilege of leadership, which is after all to serve humanity. I am even more thrilled by the fact that least year our student body elected a woman to be the head of Student Government. It's the first time in the history of Ghana that a woman has been elected head of Student Government at any university. It says a lot about her. It says a lot about the culture that's forming on campus. It says a lot about her peers who elected her. She won with 75 percent of the vote.And it gives me a lot of hope. It turns out that corporate West Africa also appreciates what's happening with our students. We've graduated two classes of students to date. And every single one of them has been placed. And we're getting great reports back from corporate Ghana, corporate West Africa, and the things that they're most impressed about is work ethic. You know, that passion for what they're doing. The persistence, their ability to deal with ambiguity, their ability to tackle problems that they haven't seen before. This is good because over the past five years, there have been times when I've felt this is ""Mission: Impossible.""And it's just wonderful to see these glimmers of the promise of what can happen if we train our kids right. I think that the current and future leaders of Africa have an incredible opportunity to drive a major renaissance on the continent. It's an incredible opportunity. There aren't very many more opportunities like this in the world. I believe that Africa has reached an inflection point with a march of democracy and free markets across the continent. We have reached a moment from which can emerge a great society within one generation. It will depend on inspired leadership. And it is my contention that the manner in which we train our leaders will make all the difference. Thank you, and God bless.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_awuah_on_educating_leaders
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"I just heard the best joke about Bond Emeruwa. I was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago, and a Nigerian journalist comes — and this will only make sense if you've ever watched a James Bond movie — and a Nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes, ""Aha, we meet again, Mr. Bond!"" (Laughter) It was great.So, I've got a little sheet of paper here, mostly because I'm Nigerian and if you leave me alone, I'll talk for like two hours.I just want to say good afternoon, good evening. It's been an incredible few days. It's downhill from now on. I wanted to thank Emeka and Chris. But also, most importantly, all the invisible people behind TED that you just see flitting around the whole place that have made sort of this space for such a diverse and robust conversation. It's really amazing. I've been in the audience. I'm a writer, and I've been watching people with the slide shows and scientists and bankers, and I've been feeling a bit like a gangsta rapper at a bar mitzvah. (Laughter) Like, what have I got to say about all this? And I was watching Jane [Goodall] yesterday, and I thought it was really great, and I was watching those incredible slides of the chimpanzees, and I thought, ""Wow. What if a chimpanzee could talk, you know? What would it say?"" My first thought was, ""Well, you know, there's George Bush."" But then I thought, ""Why be rude to chimpanzees?"" I guess there goes my green card. (Laughter)There's been a lot of talk about narrative in Africa. And what's become increasingly clear to me is that we're talking about news stories about Africa; we're not really talking about African narratives. And it's important to make a distinction, because if the news is anything to go by, 40 percent of Americans can't — either can't afford health insurance or have the most inadequate health insurance, and have a president who, despite the protest of millions of his citizens — even his own Congress — continues to prosecute a senseless war. So if news is anything to go by, the U.S. is right there with Zimbabwe, right? Which it isn't really, is it? And talking about war, my girlfriend has this great t-shirt that says, ""Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."" It's amazing, isn't it?The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, ""Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points."" What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.In other words, it's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. And this is important to remember, because in Africa the complicated questions we want to ask about what all of this means has been asked from the rock paintings of the San people, through the Sundiata epics of Mali, to modern contemporary literature. If you want to know about Africa, read our literature — and not just ""Things Fall Apart,"" because that would be like saying, ""I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America."" That's very important. There's a poem by Jack Gilbert called ""The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."" He says, ""When the Sumerian tablets were first translated, they were thought to be business records. But what if they were poems and psalms? My love is like twelve Ethiopian goats standing still in the morning light. Shiploads of thuja are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark."" This is important.It's important because misreading is really the chance for complication and opportunity. The first Igbo Bible was translated from English in about the 1800s by Bishop Crowther, who was a Yoruba. And it's important to know Igbo is a tonal language, and so they'll say the word ""igwe"" and ""igwe"": same spelling, one means ""sky"" or ""heaven,"" and one means ""bicycle"" or ""iron."" So ""God is in heaven surrounded by His angels"" was translated as — [Igbo]. And for some reason, in Cameroon, when they tried to translate the Bible into Cameroonian patois, they chose the Igbo version. And I'm not going to give you the patois translation; I'm going to make it standard English. Basically, it ends up as ""God is on a bicycle with his angels."" This is good, because language complicates things.You know, we often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not — I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value. And language can't be understood in its abstraction. It can only be understood in the context of story, and everything, all of this is story. And it's important to remember that, because if we don't, then we become ahistorical. We've had a lot of — a parade of amazing ideas here. But these are not new to Africa. Nigeria got its independence in 1960. The first time the possibility for independence was discussed was in 1922, following the Aba women's market riots. In 1967, in the middle of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, Dr. Njoku-Obi invented the Cholera vaccine. So, you know, the thing is to remember that because otherwise, 10 years from now, we'll be back here trying to tell this story again.So, what it says to me then is that it's not really — the problem isn't really the stories that are being told or which stories are being told, the problem really is the terms of humanity that we're willing to bring to complicate every story, and that's really what it's all about. Let me tell you a Nigerian joke. Well, it's just a joke, anyway. So there's Tom, Dick and Harry and they're working construction. And Tom opens up his lunch box and there's rice in it, and he goes on this rant about, ""Twenty years, my wife has been packing rice for lunch. If she does it again tomorrow, I'm going to throw myself off this building and kill myself."" And Dick and Harry repeat this. The next day, Tom opens his lunchbox, there's rice, so he throws himself off and kills himself, and Tom, Dick and Harry follow. And now the inquest — you know, Tom's wife and Dick's wife are distraught. They wished they'd not packed rice. But Harry's wife is confused, because she said, ""You know, Harry had been packing his own lunch for 20 years."" (Laughter)This seemingly innocent joke, when I heard it as a child in Nigeria, was told about Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, with the Hausa being Harry. So what seems like an eccentric if tragic joke about Harry becomes a way to spread ethnic hatred. My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s. In fact, every time I read in Ireland, people get me all mistaken and they say, ""Oh, this is Chris O'Barney from Cork."" But he was also in Oxford in the '50s, and yet growing up as a child in Nigeria, my father used to say to me, ""You must never eat or drink in a Yoruba person's house because they will poison you."" It makes sense now when I think about it, because if you'd known my father, you would've wanted to poison him too. (Laughter)So I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels. So I had a very inventive teacher, a Pakistani Muslim, who wanted to teach us about this. So what he did was to teach us Jewish Holocaust history, and so huddled around books with photographs of people in Auschwitz, I learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people. I mean, picture this — really picture this. A Pakistani Muslim teaching Jewish Holocaust history to young Igbo children.Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody. And it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about Neo-Nazis taking over Nigeria to institute the Fourth Reich. It makes perfect sense. And they were to blow up strategic targets and take over the country, and they were foiled by a Nigerian James Bond called Coyote Williams, and a Jewish Nazi hunter. And it happened over four continents. And when the book came out, I was heralded as Africa's answer to Frederick Forsyth, which is a dubious honor at best. But also, the book was launched in time for me to be accused of constructing the blueprint for a foiled coup attempt. So at 18, I was bonded off to prison in Nigeria.I grew up very privileged, and it's important to talk about privilege, because we don't talk about it here. A lot of us are very privileged. I grew up — servants, cars, televisions, all that stuff. My story of Nigeria growing up was very different from the story I encountered in prison, and I had no language for it. I was completely terrified, completely broken, and kept trying to find a new language, a new way to make sense of all of this. Six months after that, with no explanation, they let me go. Now for those of you who have seen me at the buffet tables know that it was because it was costing them too much to feed me. (Laughter) But I mean, I grew up with this incredible privilege, and not just me — millions of Nigerians grew up with books and libraries. In fact, we were talking last night about how all of the steamy novels of Harold Robbins had done more for sex education of horny teenage boys in Africa than any sex education programs ever had. All of those are gone.We are squandering the most valuable resource we have on this continent: the valuable resource of the imagination. In the film, ""Sometimes in April"" by Raoul Peck, Idris Elba is poised in a scene with his machete raised, and he's being forced by a crowd to chop up his best friend — fellow Rwandan Army officer, albeit a Tutsi — played by Fraser James. And Fraser's on his knees, arms tied behind his back, and he's crying. He's sniveling. It's a pitiful sight. And as we watch it, we are ashamed. And we want to say to Idris, ""Chop him up. Shut him up."" And as Idris moves, Fraser screams, ""Stop! Please stop!"" Idris pauses, then he moves again, and Fraser says, ""Please! Please stop!"" And it's not the look of horror and terror on Fraser's face that stops Idris or us; it's the look in Fraser's eyes. It's one that says, ""Don't do this. And I'm not saying this to save myself, although this would be nice. I'm doing it to save you, because if you do this, you will be lost."" To be so afraid that you're standing in the face of a death you can't escape and that you're soiling yourself and crying, but to say in that moment, as Fraser says to Idris, ""Tell my girlfriend I love her."" In that moment, Fraser says, ""I am lost already, but not you ... not you."" This is a redemption we can all aspire to.African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves — how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent. The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation of what is possible.As a young middle-class Nigerian activist, I launched myself along with a whole generation of us into the campaign to stop the government. And I asked millions of people, without questioning my right to do so, to go up against the government. And I watched them being locked up in prison and tear gassed. I justified it, and I said, ""This is the cost of revolution. Have I not myself been imprisoned? Have I not myself been beaten?"" It wasn't until later, when I was imprisoned again, that I understood the real meaning of torture, and how easy your humanity can be taken from you, for the time I was engaged in war, righteous, righteous war. Excuse me.Sometimes I can stand before the world — and when I say this, transformation is a difficult and slow process — sometimes I can stand before the world and say, ""My name is Chris Abani. I have been human six days, but only sometimes."" But this is a good thing. It's never going to be easy. There are no answers. As I was telling Rachel from Google Earth, that I had challenged my students in America — I said, ""You don't know anything about Africa, you're all idiots."" And so they said, ""Tell me about Africa, Professor Abani."" So I went to Google Earth and learned about Africa. And the truth be told, this is it, isn't it? There are no essential Africans, and most of us are as completely ignorant as everyone else about the continent we come from, and yet we want to make profound statements about it. And I think if we can just admit that we're all trying to approximate the truth of our own communities, it will make for a much more nuanced and a much more interesting conversation. I want to believe that we can be agnostic about this, that we can rise above all of this.When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's ""Another Country,"" and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. ""Here,"" Jimmy said. ""Here is love, all of it."" The fact that it happens in ""Another Country"" takes you quite by surprise. My friend Ronald Gottesman says there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't. (Laughter) He also says that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.I want to leave you with a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa that speaks to transformation. It's called ""Ode to the Drum,"" and I'll try and read it the way Yusef would be proud to hear it read. ""Gazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch, for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper. Last night I heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet. You know it wasn't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell. Weeks ago, you broke me as a woman once shattered me into a song beneath her weight, before you slouched into that grassy hush. And now I'm tightening lashes, shaped in hide as if around a ribcage, shaped like five bowstrings. Ghosts cannot slip back inside the body's drum. You've been seasoned by wind, dusk and sunlight. Pressure can make everything whole again. Brass nails tacked into the ebony wood, your face has been carved five times. I have to drive trouble in the hills. Trouble in the valley, and trouble by the river too. There is no palm wine, fish, salt, or calabash. Kadoom. Kadoom. Kadoom. Ka-doooom. Now I have beaten a song back into you. Rise and walk away like a panther."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_on_the_stories_of_africa
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"I really am honored to be here, and as Chris said, it's been over 20 years since I started working in Africa. My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty, Ivory Coast morning. I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials — some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar — because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent.But literally within days of arriving I was told, in no uncertain terms, by a number of West African women, that Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me. I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn't really know Africa, and besides, my French was pitiful. And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening.I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there. And I did, and we ended up naming it Duterimbere, meaning ""to go forward with enthusiasm."" And while we were doing it, I realized that there weren't a lot of businesses that were viable and started by women, and so maybe I should try to run a business, too. And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes. And, being a little intrigued, I went to go meet this group, and what I found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive.And it was really the beginning of my understanding the power of language, and how what we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little. I also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business, that, in fact, it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person, who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods, and living on 50 cents a day, still in poverty. So, I made a deal with the women. I said, ""Look, we get rid of the charity side, and we run this as a business and I'll help you."" They nervously agreed. I nervously started, and, of course, things are always harder than you think they're going to be.First of all, I thought, well, we need a sales team, and we clearly aren't the A-Team here, so let's — I did all this training. And the epitome was when I literally marched into the streets of Nyamirambo, which is the popular quarter of Kigali, with a bucket, and I sold all these little doughnuts to people, and I came back, and I was like, ""You see?"" And the women said, ""You know, Jacqueline, who in Nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall American woman?"" And like — (Laughter) — it's a good point.So then I went the whole American way, with competitions, team and individual. Completely failed, but over time, the women learnt to sell on their own way. And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips, and banana chips, and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average. And with that confidence surge, I thought, ""Well, it's time to create a real bakery, so let's paint it."" And the women said, ""That's a really great idea."" And I said, ""Well, what color do you want to paint it?"" And they said, ""Well, you choose."" And I said, ""No, no, I'm learning to listen. You choose. It's your bakery, your street, your country — not mine."" But they wouldn't give me an answer. So, one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, ""Well, how about blue?"" And they said, ""Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue."" So, I went to the store, I brought Gaudence, the recalcitrant one of all, and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains, and on painting day, we all gathered in Nyamirambo, and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim, like a little French bakery. But that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky.So, blue, blue, everything became blue. The walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue. And Aretha Franklin was shouting ""R-E-S-P-E-C-T,"" the women's hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes, but it was their day. And at the end of it, we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done, and I said, ""It is so beautiful."" And the women said, ""It really is."" And I said, ""And I think the color is perfect,"" and they all nodded their head, except for Gaudence, and I said, ""What?"" And she said, ""Nothing."" And I said, ""What?"" And she said, ""Well, it is pretty, but, you know, our color, really, it is green."" And — (Laughter)— I learned then that listening isn't just about patience, but that when you've lived on charity and dependent your whole life long, it's really hard to say what you mean. And, mostly because people never really ask you, and when they do, you don't really think they want to know the truth. And so then I learned that listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions.And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life. And it taught me three lessons that I think are so important for us today, and certainly in the work that I do. The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. As Eleni has said, when people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity. But as human beings, we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that. The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.I think Andrew pretty well covered that, so I will move to the third point, which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty. Yes, we ran this as a business, but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training, and the management support, the strategic advice and, maybe most important of all, the access to new contacts, networks and new markets. And so, on a micro level, there's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy. And on a macro level — some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized. But, having had a father with heart disease, and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten, and having a good friend step in to help, I really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford. I think the market can help us figure that out, but there's got to be a charitable component, or I don't think we're going to create the kind of societies we want to live in.And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago. It's a nonprofit, venture capital fund for the poor, a few oxymorons in one sentence. It essentially raises charitable funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health, housing, energy, clean water to low income people in South Asia and Africa, so that they can make their own choices. We've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them.I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa. Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets. Both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise, and both of them, because they're manufacturers, create jobs directly, and create incomes indirectly, because they're in the malaria sector, and Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria. And so as people get healthier, they also get wealthier.The first one is called Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited. It's a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues. These are old-hand farmers who've gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in Kenya over the last 30 years. Now, this plant is an Artemisia plant; it's the basic component for artemisinin, which is the best-known treatment for malaria. It's indigenous to China and the Far East, but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in Africa, Patrick and his colleagues said, ""Let's bring it here, because it's a high value-add product."" The farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize.And so, using patient capital — money that they could raise early on, that actually got below market returns and was willing to go the long haul and be combined with management assistance, strategic assistance — they've now created a company where they purchase from 7,500 farmers. So that's about 50,000 people affected. And I think some of you may have visited — these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient. They buy it, they dry it and they bring it to this factory, which was purchased in part by, again, patient capital from Novartis, who has a real interest in getting the powder so that they can make Coartem. Acumen's been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital. And I really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so. Because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make Coartem, when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history.And we called all of the social investors we know. Now, some of these same social investors are really interested in Africa and understand the importance of agriculture, and they even helped the farmers. And even when we explained that if ABE goes away, all those 7,500 jobs go away too, we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social. And it's really time we start thinking more creatively about how they can be fused. So Acumen made not one, but two bridge loans, and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20-million-dollar round, to move it to the next level, and I think that this will be one of the more important companies in East Africa.This is Samuel. He's a farmer. He was actually living in the Kibera slums when his father called him and told him about Artemisia and the value-add potential. So he moved back to the farm, and, long story short, they now have seven acres under cultivation. Samuel's kids are in private school, and he's starting to help other farmers in the area also go into Artemisia production — dignity being more important than wealth.The next one, many of you know. I talked about it a little at Oxford two years ago, and some of you visited A to Z manufacturing, which is one of the great, real companies in East Africa. It's another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise. And this is really a story about a public-private solution that has really worked. It started in Japan. Sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide, so you could create a bed net, a malaria bed net, that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped.It could alter the vector, but like Artemisia, it had been produced only in East Asia. And as part of its social responsibility, Sumitomo said, ""Why don't we experiment with whether we can produce it in Africa, for Africans?"" UNICEF came forward and said, ""We'll buy most of the nets, and then we'll give them away, as part of the global fund's and the U.N.'s commitment to pregnant women and children, for free."" Acumen came in with the patient capital, and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in Africa, and Exxon provided the initial resin.Well, in looking around for entrepreneurs, there was none better that we could find on earth than Anuj Shah, in A to Z manufacturing company. It's a 40-year-old company, it understands manufacturing. It's gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it. And so, Anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in Africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria.And, long story short, again, they've been so successful. In our first year, the first net went off the line in October of 2003. We thought the hitting-it-out-of-the-box number was 150,000 nets a year. This year, they are now producing eight million nets a year, and they employ 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom are women, mostly unskilled. They're in a joint venture with Sumitomo. And so, from an enterprise perspective for Africa, and from a public health perspective, these are real successes.But it's only half the story if we're really looking at solving problems of poverty, because it's not long-term sustainable. It's a company with one big customer. And if avian flu hits, or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority, everybody loses. And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day. It costs, at manufacturing point, six dollars to produce these, and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it, so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net. Most people can't afford that, so let's give it away free. And we said, ""Well, there's another option. Let's use the market as the best listening device we have, and understand at what price people would pay for this, so they get the dignity of choice. We can start building local distribution, and actually, it can cost the public sector much less.""And so we came in with a second round of patient capital to A to Z, a loan as well as a grant, so that A to Z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace, and found a number of things. One, that people will pay different prices, but the overwhelming number of people will come forth at one dollar per net and make a decision to buy it. And when you listen to them, they'll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they don't like. And that some of the channels we thought would work didn't work. But because of this experimentation and iteration that was allowed because of the patient capital, we've now found that it costs about a dollar in the private sector to distribute, and a dollar to buy the net. So then, from a policy perspective, when you start with the market, we have a choice. We can continue going along at 12 dollars a net, and the customer pays zero, or we could at least experiment with some of it, to charge one dollar a net, costing the public sector another six dollars a net, give the people the dignity of choice, and have a distribution system that might, over time, start sustaining itself.We've got to start having conversations like this, and I don't think there's any better way to start than using the market, but also to bring other people to the table around it. Whenever I go to visit A to Z, I think of my grandmother, Stella. She was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines. She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn't have very much education. She moved to the United States, where she met my grandfather, who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies. My grandmother had tuberculosis, and she worked in a sewing machine shop, making shirts for about 10 cents an hour. She, like so many of the women I see at A to Z, worked hard every day, understood what suffering was, had a deep faith in God, loved her children and would never have accepted a handout. But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams.I look around at my siblings and my cousins — and as I said, there are a lot of us — and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers. One sister who makes other people's wishes come true. And my wish, when I see those women, I meet those farmers, and I think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day, is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility, and that they also can believe and get access to services, so that their children, too, can live those lives of great purpose. It shouldn't be that difficult. But what it takes is a commitment from all of us to essentially refuse trite assumptions, get out of our ideological boxes. It takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success. It takes opening your arms, both, wide, and expecting very little love in return, but demanding accountability, and bringing the accountability to the table as well. And most of all, most of all, it requires that all of us have the courage and the patience, whether we are rich or poor, African or non-African, local or diaspora, left or right, to really start listening to each other. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jacqueline_novogratz_on_patient_capitalism
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"I’d like to dedicate this one to all the women in South Africa — those women who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid. And, of course, I’m dedicating it also to my grandmother, whom I think really played quite a lot of important roles, especially for me when I was an activist, and being harassed by the police.You will recall that in 1976, June 16, the students of South Africa boycotted the language of Afrikaans as the medium of the oppressor, as they were sort of like really told that they must do everything in Afrikaans — biology, mathematics — and what about our languages? And the students wanted to speak to the government, and police answered with bullets. So every year, June 16, we will commemorate all those comrades or students who died. And I was very young then. I think I was 11 years, and I started asking questions, and that’s when my political education started. And I joined, later on, the youth organization under the African National Congress. So as part of organizing this and whatever, this commemoration, the police will round us up as they call us leaders. And I used to run away from home, when I know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of June or so. And my grandmother one time said, ""No, look, you’re not going to run away. This is your place, you stay here."" And indeed, the police came — because they’ll just arrest us and put us in jail and release us whenever they feel like, after the 20th or so.So it was on the 10th of June, and they came, and they surrounded the house, and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house, and opened the kitchen door. And she said to them, ""Vusi's here, and you're not going to take him tonight. I'm tired of you having to come here, harassing us, while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes. He is here, and you're not going to take him. I've got a bowl full of boiling water — the first one who comes in here, gets it."" And they left. (Applause) (Music)♫ Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama. ♫ ♫ Through the mist of the tears in your eyes on my childhood memory, ♫ ♫ I know the truth in your smile, ♫ ♫ I know the truth in your smile, ♫ ♫ piercing through the gloom of my ignorance. ♫ ♫ Oh, there is a mama lying down sleeping ♫ ♫ you're very ill and your heart crying. ♫ ♫ Wondering, wondering, wondering, wondering where is this world coming to. ♫ ♫ Is it right the children have to fend for themselves? No, no, no, no, no. no. ♫ ♫ Is it right heaping trouble on an old lady's head? ♫ ♫ So unlucky faceless people. ♫ ♫ Thula Mama Mama, Thula Mama. Thula Mama Mama. ♫ ♫ Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama Mama, Thula Mama ♫ ♫ Tomorrow it’s going to be better. ♫ ♫ Tomorrow it's going to be better to climb, Mama. ♫ ♫ Thula Mama, Thula Mama. ♫♫ Am I to break into the song like the blues man or troubadour. ♫ ♫ And then from long distance in no blues club am I to sing, ♫ ♫ baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby. ♫ ♫ Should I now stop singing of love, ♫ ♫ now that my memory’s surrounded by blood? ♫ ♫ Sister, why oh why do we at times mistake a pimple for a cancer? ♫ ♫ So who are they who says, no more love poems now? ♫♫ I want to sing a song of love ♫ ♫ for that woman who jumped the fences pregnant ♫ ♫ and still gave birth to a healthy child. ♫ ♫ Softly I walk into the sun rays of the smile ♫ ♫ that will ignite my love song, my song of life, ♫ ♫ my song of love, my song of life, my song of love, ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love, my song of life. ♫ ♫ Ooh, I’ve not tried to run away from song, ♫ ♫ I hear a persistent voice, more powerful than the enemy bombs. ♫ ♫ The song that washed our lives and the rains of our blood. ♫♫ My song of love and my song of life, my song of love, ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love, ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love — I want everybody to sing with me — ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love, my song of life — everybody sing with me — ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love — I can’t hear you — ♫ ♫ my song of love, my song of life — you can do better — ♫ ♫ my song of life, my song of love — keep singing, keep singing — ♫ ♫ my song of love, my song of life, yes, my song of love — ♫ ♫ you can do better than that — ♫ ♫ my song of life, yes, my song of love, my song of life, my song of love — ♫ ♫ keep singing, keep singing, keep singing — my song of love. ♫ ♫ Oh yeah. My song of — a love song, my song of life. Sing. A love song, my song of life. Sing. ♫ ♫ Love song, my song of life. Sing. Love song, my song of life. Sing. ♫ ♫ Love song, my song of life. Sing. Love song, my song of life. ♫ ♫ Love song, my song of life. ♫ (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vusi_mahlasela_sings_thula_mama
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"I've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years. And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call. In 2003, I was ready to do a talk about the Skoll Foundation and social entrepreneurship. No call. In 2004, I started Participant Productions and we had a really good first year, and no call. And finally, I get a call last year, and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams. (Laughter) You've got a cruel sense of humor, TED. (Laughter)When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings. But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood. (Laughter) And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company. And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols. (Laughter) Hollywood has its rivalries, and the Valley has its rivalries. Hollywood gathers around power tables, and the Valley gathers around power tables. So it turned out there was a lot more in common than I would have dreamed.But I'm actually here today to tell a story. And part of it is a personal story. When Chris invited me to speak, he said, people think of you as a bit of an enigma, and they want to know what drives you a bit. And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share. It's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability. And when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days, Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey, I think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that I like to call ""Humanity 2.0."" And it's also something that resides in each of us, to close what I think are the two big calamities in the world today.One is the gap in opportunity — this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven, unfair and unsustainable — and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us. But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap. And someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn't make a difference in the world. And I think that's just a horrible thing. And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us, because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps. And if the men and women of TED can't make a difference in the world, I don't know who can.And for me, a lot of this started when I was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate New York. And there really wasn't much to do there for the summer, except get beaten up by my sister or read books. And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand. And their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place. And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected, that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference.I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living, so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent, so I could write these stories as quickly as I could. I then had a bit of a wake-up call when I was 14. And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad. And what he said was, he wasn't so much afraid that he might die, but that he hadn't done the things that he wanted to with his life. And knock on wood, he's still alive today, many years later. But for a young man that made a real impression on me, that one never knows how much time one really has. So I set out in a hurry. I studied engineering. I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom.One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move, which is very well named, because people kept stealing the computers. (Laughter) So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business, so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there. And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize for this. This is a photo from the old days. And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other. And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree, I said, ""Pierre, what a stupid idea."" (Laughter) And needless to say, I was right. (Laughter)But right after that, Pierre — in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know. The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world. Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries, and so on. But for me, personally, it was a real change. I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers, to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources. And I wanted to figure out how I could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world.And around that time, I met John Gardner, who is a remarkable man. He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do, or anyone could do, to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity. And John said, ""Bet on good people doing good things. Bet on good people doing good things."" And that really resonated with me.I started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things. These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems. People today we call social entrepreneurs. And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus, who started the Grameen Bank, has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world, won the Nobel Peace Prize. But there's also a lot of people that you don't know. Folks like Ann Cotton, who started a group called CAMFED in Africa, because she felt girls' education was lagging. And she started it about 10 years ago, and today, she educates over a quarter million African girls. And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. And by 2010, she hopes to eliminate this disease, which is really a scourge in the developing world. And so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things.And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that I find really is powerful. It's what we call, ""Invest, connect and celebrate."" And invest: if you see good people doing good things, invest in them. Invest in their organizations, or in business. Invest in these folks. Connecting them together through conferences — like a TED — brings so many powerful connections, or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year. And celebrate them: tell their stories, because not only are there good people doing good work, but their stories can help close these gaps of hope.And it was this last part of the mission, the celebrate part, that really got me back to thinking when I was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all. And a light bulb went off, which was, first, that I didn't actually have to do the writing myself, I could find writers. And then the next light bulb was, better than just writing, what about film and TV, to get out to people in a big way? And I thought about the films that inspired me, films like ""Gandhi"" and ""Schindler's List."" And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today. And there really wasn't a specific company that was focused on the public interest.So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement. One of the lines of encouragement that I heard over and over was, ""The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you, who think you're going to come to this town and make movies."" And then of course, there was the other adage. ""The surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business."" (Laughter)Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest. And our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change. And we don't just want people to see our movies and say, that was fun, and forget about it. We want them to actually get involved in the issues. In 2005, we launched our first slate of films, ""Murder Ball,"" ""North Country,"" ""Syriana"" and ""Good Night and Good Luck."" And much to my surprise, they were noticed.We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films. And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy. Perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies. And we had an online component of that, our community sect called Participate.net. But with our social sector partners, like the ACLU and PBS and the Sierra Club and the NRDC, once people saw the film, there was actually something they could do to make a difference.One of these films in particular, called ""North Country,"" was actually kind of a box office disaster. But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment, domestic violence and so on. And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. And with screenings on the Hill, and discussions, and with our social sector partners, like the National Organization of Women, the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act. And that to me, spoke volumes, because it's — the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed, sued her employer, led to a landmark case that led to the Equal Opportunity Act, and the Violence Against Women Act and others. And then the movie about this person doing these things, then led to this greater renewal. And so again, it goes back to betting on good people doing good things.Speaking of which, our fellow TEDster, Al — I first saw Al do his slide show presentation on global warming in May of 2005. At that point, I thought I knew something about global warming. I thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem. And after we saw his slide show, it became clear that it was much more urgent. And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David, and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at the time. And with Al's blessing, we decided on the spot to turn it into a film, because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having Al go around the world, speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time.And you know, there's another adage in Hollywood, that nobody knows nothing about anything. And I really thought this was going to be a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative. And so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest, and today is mandatory viewing in schools in England and Scotland, and most of Scandinavia. We've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S. and it's really changed the debate on global warming. It was also a pretty good year for this guy. We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming. (Laughter)And for Participant, this is just the start. Everything we do looks at the major issues in the world. And we have 10 films in production right now, and dozens others in development. I'll quickly talk about a few coming up. One is ""Charlie Wilson's War,"" with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. And it's the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson, and how he funded the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. And we're also doing a movie called ""The Kite Runner,"" based on the book ""The Kite Runner,"" also about Afghanistan. And we think once people see these films, they'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the Middle East in general.We premiered a film called ""The Chicago 10"" at Sundance this year. It's based on the protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968, Abby Hoffman and crew, and, again, a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world. And a documentary that we're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years. And in particular, we've been following him on his recent book tour, which, as many of you know, has been very non-controversial — (Laughter) — which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie.In closing, I'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way. And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives, or their philanthropic work, or their other interests. And one thing that I've learned is that there's never one right way to make change. One can do it as a tech person, or as a finance person, or a nonprofit person, or as an entertainment person, but every one of us is all of those things and more.And I believe if we do these things, we can close the opportunity gaps, we can close the hope gaps. And I can imagine, if we do this, the headlines in 10 years might read something like these: ""New AIDS Cases in Africa Fall to Zero,"" ""U.S. Imports its Last Barrel of Oil"" — (Applause) — ""Israelis and Palestinians Celebrate 10 Years of Peaceful Coexistence."" (Applause) And I like this one, ""Snow Has Returned to Kilimanjaro."" (Laughter) And finally, an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show, now obsolete, museum piece. Please contact Al Gore. And I believe that, working together, we can make all of these things happen. And I want to thank you all for having me here today. It's been a real honor. Thank you. (Applause) Oh, thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_skoll_makes_movies_that_make_change
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"I got a visit almost exactly a year ago, a little over a year ago, from a very senior person at the Department of Defense. Came to see me and said, ""1,600 of the kids that we've sent out have come back missing at least one full arm. Whole arm. Shoulder disarticulation. And we're doing the same thing we did for — more or less, that we've done since the Civil War, a stick and a hook. And they deserve more than that."" And literally, this guy sat in my office in New Hampshire and said, ""I want you to give me something that we can put on these kids that'll pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, they'll be able to put it in their mouth without destroying either one, and they'll be able to know the difference without looking at it."" You know, had efferent, afferent, and haptic response.He finishes explaining that, and I'm waiting for the big 300 pound paper proposal, and he said, ""That's what I want from you."" I said, ""Look, you're nuts. That technology's just not available right now. And it can't be done. Not in an envelope of a human arm, with 21 degrees of freedom, from your shoulder to your fingertips."" He said, ""About two dozen of these 1,600 kids have come back bilateral. You think it's bad to lose one arm? That's an inconvenience compared to having both of them gone."" I got a day job, and my nights and weekends are already filled up with things like, let's supply water to the world, and power to the world, and educate all the kids, which, Chris, I will not talk about. I don't need another mission.I keep thinking about these kids with no arms. He says to me, ""We've done some work around the country. We've got some pretty amazing neurology and other people."" I said, ""I'll take a field trip, I'll go see what you got."" Over the next month I visited lots of places, some out here, around the country, found the best of the best. I went down to Washington. I saw these guys, and said, ""I did what you asked me. I looked at what's out there. I still think you're nuts. But not as nuts as I thought.""I put a team together, a little over 13 months ago, got up to 20 some-odd people. We said, we're going to build a device that does what he wants. We have 14 out of the 21 degrees of freedom; you don't need the ones in the last two fingers. We put this thing together. A couple of weeks ago we took it down to Walter Reed, which is unfortunately more in the news these days. We showed it to a bunch of guys. One guy who described himself as being lucky, because he lost his left arm, and he's a righty. He sat at a table with seven or eight of these other guys. Said he was lucky, because he had his good arm, and then he pushed himself back from the table. He had no legs. These kids have attitudes that you just can't believe.So I'm going to show you now, without the skin on it, a 30-second piece, and then I'm done. But understand what you're looking at we made small enough to fit on a 50th percentile female, so that we could put it in any of these people. It's going to go inside something that we use in CAT scans and MRIs of whatever is their good arm, to make silicon rubber, then coat it, and paint it in 3D — exact mirror image of their other limb. So, you won't see all the really cool stuff that's in this series elastic set of 14 actuators, each one which has its own capability to sense temperature and pressure. It also has a pneumatic cuff that holds it on, so the more they put themselves under load, the more it attaches. They take the load off, and it becomes, again, compliant. I'm going to show you a guy doing a couple of simple things with this that we demonstrated in Washington. Can we look at this thing?Watch the fingers grab. The thumb comes up. Wrist. This weighs 6.9 pounds. Going to scratch his nose. It's got 14 active degrees of freedom. Now he's going to pick up a pen with his opposed thumb and index finger. Now he's going to put that down, pick up a piece of paper, rotate all the degrees of freedom in his hand and wrist, and read it. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new_prosthetic_arm
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"Now, have any of y'all ever looked up this word? You know, in a dictionary? (Laughter) Yeah, that's what I thought. How about this word? Here, I'll show it to you. Lexicography: the practice of compiling dictionaries. Notice — we're very specific — that word ""compile."" The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite, out of a lump of rock. It's made up of lots of little bits. It's little discrete — that's spelled D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E — bits. And those bits are words.Now one of the perks of being a lexicographer — besides getting to come to TED — is that you get to say really fun words, like lexicographical. Lexicographical has this great pattern: it's called a double dactyl. And just by saying double dactyl, I've sent the geek needle all the way into the red. (Laughter) (Applause) But ""lexicographical"" is the same pattern as ""higgledy-piggledy."" Right? It's a fun word to say, and I get to say it a lot. Now, one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people don't usually have a kind of warm, fuzzy, snuggly image of the dictionary. Right? Nobody hugs their dictionaries. But what people really often think about the dictionary is, they think more like this. Just to let you know, I do not have a lexicographical whistle. But people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary, and keep the bad words out.But the thing is, I don't want to be a traffic cop. For one thing, I just do not do uniforms. And for another, deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy. And it's not very fun. And when parts of your job are not easy or fun, you kind of look for an excuse not to do them. So if I had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work, I would much rather be a fisherman. I want to throw my big net into the deep, blue ocean of English and see what marvelous creatures I can drag up from the bottom. But why do people want me to direct traffic, when I would much rather go fishing? Well, I blame the Queen. Why do I blame the Queen? Well, first of all, I blame the Queen because it's funny. But secondly, I blame the Queen because dictionaries have really not changed.Our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign. The only thing that Queen Victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the F-word, which has happened in American dictionaries since 1965. So, there's this guy, right? Victorian era. James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I do not have that hat. I wish I had that hat. So he's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today. When a guy who looks like that, in that hat, is the face of modernity, you have a problem. And so, James Murray could get a job on any dictionary today. There'd be virtually no learning curve.And of course, a few of us are saying: okay, computers! Computers! What about computers? The thing about computers is, I love computers. I mean, I'm a huge geek, I love computers. I would go on a hunger strike before I let them take away Google Book Search from me. But computers don't do much else other than speed up the process of compiling dictionaries. They don't change the end result. Because what a dictionary is, is it's Victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion. It's steampunk. What we have is an electric velocipede. You know, we have Victorian design with an engine on it. That's all! The design has not changed.And OK, what about online dictionaries, right? Online dictionaries must be different. This is the Oxford English Dictionary Online, one of the best online dictionaries. This is my favorite word, by the way. Erinaceous: pertaining to the hedgehog family; of the nature of a hedgehog. Very useful word. So, look at that. Online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen. This is flat. Look how many links there are in the actual entry: two! Right? Those little buttons, I had them all expanded except for the date chart. So there's not very much going on here. There's not a lot of clickiness. And in fact, online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability, you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for, because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.So — (Laughter) (Applause) — now, when you think about this, what we have here is a ham butt problem. Does everyone know the ham butt problem? Woman's making a ham for a big, family dinner. She goes to cut the butt off the ham and throw it away, and she looks at this piece of ham and she's like, ""This is a perfectly good piece of ham. Why am I throwing this away?"" She thought, ""Well, my mom always did this."" So she calls up mom, and she says, ""Mom, why'd you cut the butt off the ham, when you're making a ham?"" She says, ""I don't know, my mom always did it!"" So they call grandma, and grandma says, ""My pan was too small!"" (Laughter)So, it's not that we have good words and bad words. We have a pan that's too small! You know, that ham butt is delicious! There's no reason to throw it away. The bad words — see, when people think about a place and they don't find a place on the map, they think, ""This map sucks!"" When they find a nightspot or a bar, and it's not in the guidebook, they're like, ""Ooh, this place must be cool! It's not in the guidebook."" When they find a word that's not in the dictionary, they think, ""This must be a bad word."" Why? It's more likely to be a bad dictionary. Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan? So, you can't get a smaller ham. The English language is as big as it is.So, if you have a ham butt problem, and you're thinking about the ham butt problem, the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive: paper is the enemy of words. How can this be? I mean, I love books. I really love books. Some of my best friends are books. But the book is not the best shape for the dictionary. Now they're going to think ""Oh, boy. People are going to take away my beautiful, paper dictionaries?"" No. There will still be paper dictionaries. When we had cars — when cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn't round up all the horses and shoot them. You know, there're still going to be paper dictionaries, but it's not going to be the dominant dictionary. The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in. And it's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in.So, think about it this way: if you've got an artificial constraint, artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview. What if biologists could only study animals that made people go, ""Aww."" Right? What if we made aesthetic judgments about animals, and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study? We'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna, and not very much about much else. And I think this is a problem. I think we should study all the words, because when you think about words, you can make beautiful expressions from very humble parts. Lexicography is really more about material science. We are studying the tolerances of the materials that you use to build the structure of your expression: your speeches and your writing. And then, often people say to me, ""Well, OK, how do I know that this word is real?"" They think, ""OK, if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts, how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers? How can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer?"" They're just the right tools for the job.And so people say to me, ""How do I know if a word is real?"" You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction. It doesn't make a word any more real than any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real. So if we're not worrying about directing traffic, if we've transcended paper, if we are worrying less about control and more about description, then we can think of the English language as being this beautiful mobile. And any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes, is touched, any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation, you verb it, you make the mobile move. You didn't break it. It's just in a new position, and that new position can be just as beautiful.Now, if you're no longer a traffic cop — the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection, or the cars get confused. Right? But if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic, but maybe to count the cars that go by, then more eyeballs are better. You can ask for help! If you ask for help, you get more done. And we really need help. Library of Congress: 17 million books, of which half are in English. If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that's not in the dictionary in it, that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries.And I find an un-dictionaried word — a word like ""un-dictionaried,"" for example — in almost every book I read. What about newspapers? Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, 58.1 million newspaper pages. If only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it, it would be an entire other OED. That's 500,000 more words. So that's a lot. And I'm not even talking about magazines. I'm not talking about blogs — and I find more new words on BoingBoing in a given week than I do Newsweek or Time. There's a lot going on there.And I'm not even talking about polysemy, which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves. So if you think of the word ""set,"" a set can be a badger's burrow, a set can be one of the pleats in an Elizabethan ruff, and there's one numbered definition in the OED. The OED has 33 different numbered definitions for set. Tiny, little word, 33 numbered definitions. One of them is just labeled ""miscellaneous technical senses."" Do you know what that says to me? That says to me, it was Friday afternoon and somebody wanted to go down the pub. (Laughter) That's a lexicographical cop out, to say, ""miscellaneous technical senses.""So, we have all these words, and we really need help! And the thing is, we could ask for help — asking for help's not that hard. I mean, lexicography is not rocket science. See, I just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers, and this is more of a visual explanation. If we think of the dictionary as being the map of the English language, these bright spots are what we know about, and the dark spots are where we are in the dark. If that was the map of all the words in American English, we don't know very much. And we don't even know the shape of the language. If this was the dictionary — if this was the map of American English — look, we have a kind of lumpy idea of Florida, but there's no California! We're missing California from American English. We just don't know enough, and we don't even know that we're missing California. We don't even see that there's a gap on the map.So again, lexicography is not rocket science. But even if it were, rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days. You know? It can't be that hard to find some words! So, enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help, and they're doing a good job of it. For instance, there's eBird, where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings. And then, ornithologists can go and help track populations, migrations, etc.And there's this guy, Mike Oates. Mike Oates lives in the U.K. He's a director of an electroplating company. He's found more than 140 comets. He's found so many comets, they named a comet after him. It's kind of out past Mars. It's a hike. I don't think he's getting his picture taken there anytime soon. But he found 140 comets without a telescope. He downloaded data from the NASA SOHO satellite, and that's how he found them. If we can find comets without a telescope, shouldn't we be able to find words?Now, y'all know where I'm going with this. Because I'm going to the Internet, which is where everybody goes. And the Internet is great for collecting words, because the Internet's full of collectors. And this is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm. And words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn't that great? So there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now, but the problem with some of them is that they're not scientific enough. They show the word, but they don't show any context. Where did it come from? Who said it? What newspaper was it in? What book?Because a word is like an archaeological artifact. If you don't know the provenance or the source of the artifact, it's not science, it's a pretty thing to look at. So a word without its source is like a cut flower. You know, it's pretty to look at for a while, but then it dies. It dies too fast. So, this whole time I've been saying, ""The dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary."" Not ""a dictionary,"" or ""dictionaries."" And that's because, well, people use the dictionary to stand for the whole language. They use it synecdochically. And one of the problems of knowing a word like ""synecdochically"" is that you really want an excuse to say ""synecdochically."" This whole talk has just been an excuse to get me to the point where I could say ""synecdochically"" to all of you. So I'm really sorry. But when you use a part of something — like the dictionary is a part of the language, or a flag stands for the United States, it's a symbol of the country — then you're using it synecdochically. But the thing is, we could make the dictionary the whole language. If we get a bigger pan, then we can put all the words in. We can put in all the meanings. Doesn't everyone want more meaning in their lives? And we can make the dictionary not just be a symbol of the language — we can make it be the whole language.You see, what I'm really hoping for is that my son, who turns seven this month — I want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in. This is what dictionaries used to look like. I want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape. It's a format that died because it wasn't useful enough. It wasn't really what people needed. And the thing is, if we can put in all the words, no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad, we can really describe the language like scientists. We can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers. If we can do that, then I can spend all my time fishing, and I don't have to be a traffic cop anymore. Thank you very much for your kind attention.","https://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary
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"I am very, very happy to be amidst some of the most — the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they're reflecting on my glasses. I am very happy and honored to be amidst very, very innovative and intelligent people. I have listened to the three previous speakers, and guess what happened? Every single thing I planned to say, they have said it here, and it looks and sounds like I have nothing else to say.(Laughter)But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something, that bud is a young one. So, I will — since I am not young and am very old, I still will say something.We are hosting this conference at a very opportune moment, because another conference is taking place in Berlin. It is the G8 Summit. The G8 Summit proposes that the solution to Africa's problems should be a massive increase in aid, something akin to the Marshall Plan. Unfortunately, I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan. One, because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated. Its largest recipients were Germany and France, and it was only 2.5 percent of their GDP. An average African country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13, 15 percent of its GDP, and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries.But I want to say that there are two things we need to connect. How the media covers Africa in the West, and the consequences of that. By displaying despair, helplessness and hopelessness, the media is telling the truth about Africa, and nothing but the truth. However, the media is not telling us the whole truth. Because despair, civil war, hunger and famine, although they're part and parcel of our African reality, they are not the only reality. And secondly, they are the smallest reality.Africa has 53 nations. We have civil wars only in six countries, which means that the media are covering only six countries. Africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the Western media largely presents to its audience. But the effect of that presentation is, it appeals to sympathy. It appeals to pity. It appeals to something called charity. And, as a consequence, the Western view of Africa's economic dilemma is framed wrongly. The wrong framing is a product of thinking that Africa is a place of despair. What should we do with it? We should give food to the hungry. We should deliver medicines to those who are ill. We should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war. And in the process, Africa has been stripped of self-initiative.I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses. But equally, it has opportunities and a lot of potential. We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa, from a challenge of despair, which is called poverty reduction, to a challenge of hope. We frame it as a challenge of hope, and that is worth creation. The challenge facing all those who are interested in Africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty. It should be a challenge of creating wealth.Once we change those two things — if you say the Africans are poor and they need poverty reduction, you have the international cartel of good intentions moving onto the continent, with what? Medicines for the poor, food relief for those who are hungry, and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war. And in the process, none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms, not the causes of Africa's fundamental problems. Sending somebody to school and giving them medicines, ladies and gentlemen, does not create wealth for them. Wealth is a function of income, and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job.Now, once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa, our second challenge will be, who are the wealth-creating agents in any society? They are entrepreneurs. [Unclear] told us they are always about four percent of the population, but 16 percent are imitators. But they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship. So, where should we be putting the money? We need to put money where it can productively grow. Support private investment in Africa, both domestic and foreign. Support research institutions, because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation.But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today? They are throwing large sums of money for primary health, for primary education, for food relief. The entire continent has been turned into a place of despair, in need of charity. Ladies and gentlemen, can any one of you tell me a neighbor, a friend, a relative that you know, who became rich by receiving charity? By holding the begging bowl and receiving alms? Does any one of you in the audience have that person? Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another? Well, since I'm not seeing the hand, it appears that what I'm stating is true.(Bono: Yes!)Andrew Mwenda: I can see Bono says he knows the country. Which country is that?(Bono: It's an Irish land.)(Laughter)(Bono: [unclear])AM: Thank you very much. But let me tell you this. External actors can only present to you an opportunity. The ability to utilize that opportunity and turn it into an advantage depends on your internal capacity. Africa has received many opportunities. Many of them we haven't benefited much. Why? Because we lack the internal, institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations. I'll give you an example.Under the Cotonou Agreement, formerly known as the Lome Convention, African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods, duty-free, to the European Union market. My own country, Uganda, has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market. We haven't exported one kilogram yet. We import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from Brazil and Cuba. Secondly, under the beef protocol of that agreement, African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market. None of those countries, including Africa's most successful nation, Botswana, has ever met its quota.So, I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework. And all forms of intervention need support, the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth, the kinds of institutions that increase productivity. How do we begin to do that, and why is aid the bad instrument? Aid is the bad instrument, and do you know why? Because all governments across the world need money to survive. Money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order. You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order. And because many of our governments are quite dictatorial, they need really to have the army clobber the opposition. The second thing you need to do is pay your political hangers-on. Why should people support their government? Well, because it gives them good, paying jobs, or, in many African countries, unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption.The fact is no government in the world, with the exception of a few, like that of Idi Amin, can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule. Many countries in the [unclear], they need legitimacy. To get legitimacy, governments often need to deliver things like primary education, primary health, roads, build hospitals and clinics. If the government's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people, such a government is driven by self-interest to govern in a more enlightened fashion. It will sit with those who create wealth. Talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them. The problem with the African continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in Africa. The productive margin in our governments' search for revenue does not lie in the domestic economy, it lies with international donors.Rather than sit with Ugandan —(Applause) —rather than sit with Ugandan entrepreneurs, Ghanaian businessmen, South African enterprising leaders, our governments find it more productive to talk to the IMF and the World Bank. I can tell you, even if you have ten Ph.Ds., you can never beat Bill Gates in understanding the computer industry. Why? Because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business — it requires that you listen to the people, the private sector actors in that industry.Governments in Africa have therefore been given an opportunity, by the international community, to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens, and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank, and then it is the IMF and the World Bank that tell them what its citizens need. In the process, we, the African people, have been sidelined from the policy-making, policy-orientation, and policy- implementation process in our countries. We have limited input, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. The IMF, the World Bank, and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens, and therefore what our governments are doing, because they depend on aid, is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens.But I want to put a caveat on my argument, and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive. Some aid may have built a hospital, fed a hungry village. It may have built a road, and that road may have served a very good role. The mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success, generalize them, pour billions and trillions of dollars into them, and then spread them across the whole world, ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village, the skills, the practices, the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed — like in Sauri village, in Kenya, where Jeffrey Sachs is working — and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody.Aid increases the resources available to governments, and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have, as a person in Africa seeking a career. By increasing the political attractiveness of the state, especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa, aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie. Ladies and gentlemen, the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business. Governments are not changing it. Why? Because they don't need to talk to their own citizens. They talk to international donors. So, the most enterprising Africans end up going to work for government, and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid.I also want to say that it is important for us to note that, over the last 50 years, Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community, in the form of technical assistance, and financial aid, and all other forms of aid. Between 1960 and 2003, our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid, and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa. Where has all the aid gone?I want to use the example of my own country, called Uganda, and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there. In the 2006-2007 budget, expected revenue: 2.5 trillion shillings. The expected foreign aid: 1.9 trillion. Uganda's recurrent expenditure — by recurrent what do I mean? Hand-to-mouth is 2.6 trillion. Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue? It's because there's somebody there called foreign aid, who contributes for it. But this shows you that the government of Uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments, but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure. Public administration, which is largely patronage, takes 690 billion. The military, 380 billion. Agriculture, which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens, takes only 18 billion. Trade and industry takes 43 billion. And let me show you, what does public expenditure — rather, public administration expenditure — in Uganda constitute? There you go. 70 cabinet ministers, 114 presidential advisers, by the way, who never see the president, except on television.(Laughter)(Applause)And when they see him physically, it is at public functions like this, and even there, it is him who advises them.(Laughter)We have 81 units of local government. Each local government is organized like the central government — a bureaucracy, a cabinet, a parliament, and so many jobs for the political hangers-on. There were 56, and when our president wanted to amend the constitution and remove term limits, he had to create 25 new districts, and now there are 81. Three hundred thirty-three members of parliament. You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament. One hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies, all of which have directors and the cars. And the final thing, this is addressed to Mr. Bono. In his work, he may help us on this.A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters. Uganda has 961 sub-counties, each of them with a dispensary, none of which has an ambulance. So, the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers, the permanent secretaries, the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects, while the poor die without ambulances and medicine.Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here, I was told that the principle of TEDGlobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt. It should be short enough to arouse interest, but long enough to cover the subject. I hope I have achieved that.(Laughter)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mwenda_takes_a_new_look_at_africa
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"I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago. It's about making new forms of life. And these are made of this kind of tube — electricity tube, we call it in Holland. And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time.(Video) Narrator: Eventually, these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches. Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution.Theo Jansen: I want to put these forms of life on the beaches. And they should survive over there, on their own, in the future. Learning to live on their own — and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own.Narrator: The mechanical beasts will not get their energy from food, but from the wind. The wind will move feathers on their back, which will drive their feet. The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beach, with its nose pointed into the wind. As soon as it walks into either the rolling surf or the dry sand, it stops, and walks in the opposite direction.Evolution has generated many species.(Music)This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa.(Music)(Laughter)(Applause)TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetic codes. And it is a sort of race, and each and every animal is different, and the winning codes will multiply.This is the wave, going from left to right. You can see this one. Yes, and now it goes from left to right. This is a new generation, a new family, which is able to store the wind. So, the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles, which are on top of that. And they can use that energy in case the wind falls away, and the tide is coming up, and there is still a little bit of energy to reach the dunes and save their lives, because they are drowned very easily.(Laughter)I could show you this animal.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)So, the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. There are 11 numbers, which I call The 11 Holy Numbers. These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk that way. In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel. It works the same as a wheel. The axis of a wheel stays on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well. In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do. And the feet just step over the sand, and the wheel has to touch every piece of the ground in-between. So 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel, we have a new wheel. I will show you, in the next video — can you start it, please? — that very heavy loads can be moved. There's a guy pushing there, behind, but it can also walk on the wind very well. It's 3.2 tons.This is working on the stored wind in the bottles. It has a feeler, where it can feel obstacles and turn around. You see, it's going the other way.Can I have the feeler here? OK. Good. So, they have to survive all the dangers of the beach, and one of the big dangers is the sea. This is the sea. And it must feel the water of the sea. And this is the water feeler, and what's very important is this tube. It sucks in air normally, but when it swallows water, it feels the resistance of it. So, imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea. As soon as it touches the water — you should hear a sound of running air.(Sound of running air)Yes! So if it doesn't feel, it will be drowned, OK?Here we have the brain of the animal. In fact, it is a step counter, and it counts the steps. It's a binary step counter. So as soon it has been to the sea, it changes the pattern of zeroes and ones here. And it always knows where it is on the beach. So it's very simple brain. It says, well, there's the sea, there are dunes, and I'm here. So it's a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal.Thank you.One of the biggest enemies are the storms. This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere. When the nose of the animal is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. So when the storm is coming up, it drives a pin into the ground.(Laughter)Audience member: Wow!The nose is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. The wind may turn, but the animal will always turn its nose into the wind. Now, another couple of years, and these animals will survive on their own. I still have to help them a lot.Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/theo_jansen_creates_new_creatures
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"This is a picture of Maurice Druon, the Honorary Perpetual Secretary of L'Academie francaise, the French Academy. He is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform, befitting the role of the French Academy as legislating the correct usage in French and perpetuating the language. The French Academy has two main tasks: it compiles a dictionary of official French. They're now working on their ninth edition, which they began in 1930, and they've reached the letter P. They also legislate on correct usage, such as the proper term for what the French call ""email,"" which ought to be ""courriel."" The World Wide Web, the French are told, ought to be referred to as ""la toile d'araignee mondiale"" — the Global Spider Web — recommendations that the French gaily ignore.Now, this is one model of how language comes to be: namely, it's legislated by an academy. But anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit, that language, rather, emerges from human minds interacting from one another. And this is visible in the unstoppable change in language — the fact that by the time the Academy finishes their dictionary, it will already be well out of date.We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon, of the historical change in languages, in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages. So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature, so much as a window onto human nature. In a book that I'm currently working on, I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature, including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction. And I'm going to say a few words about each one this morning.Let me start off with a technical problem in language that I've worried about for quite some time — and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they're used. The problem is, which verbs go in which constructions? The verb is the chassis of the sentence. It's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted.Let me give you a quick reminder of something that you've long forgotten. An intransitive verb, such as ""dine,"" for example, can't take a direct object. You have to say, ""Sam dined,"" not, ""Sam dined the pizza."" A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there: ""Sam devoured the pizza."" You can't just say, ""Sam devoured."" There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type, each of which shapes its sentence. So, a problem in explaining how children learn language, a problem in teaching language to adults so that they don't make grammatical errors, and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions.For example, the dative construction in English. You can say, ""Give a muffin to a mouse,"" the prepositional dative. Or, ""Give a mouse a muffin,"" the double-object dative. ""Promise anything to her,"" ""Promise her anything,"" and so on. Hundreds of verbs can go both ways. So a tempting generalization for a child, for an adult, for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction, ""subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient"" can also be expressed as ""subject-verb-recipient-thing."" A handy thing to have, because language is infinite, and you can't just parrot back the sentences that you've heard. You've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences. This would be an example of how to do that.Unfortunately, there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions. You can say, ""Biff drove the car to Chicago,"" but not, ""Biff drove Chicago the car."" You can say, ""Sal gave Jason a headache,"" but it's a bit odd to say, ""Sal gave a headache to Jason."" The solution is that these constructions, despite initial appearance, are not synonymous, that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition, you see that there's a subtle difference in meaning between them. So, ""give the X to the Y,"" that construction corresponds to the thought ""cause X to go to Y."" Whereas ""give the Y the X"" corresponds to the thought ""cause Y to have X.""Now, many events can be subject to either construal, kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions, in which you can either pay attention to the particular object, in which case the space around it recedes from attention, or you can see the faces in the empty space, in which case the object recedes out of consciousness. How are these construals reflected in language? Well, in both cases, the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object, the noun after the verb. So, when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere — where you're doing something to the muffin — you say, ""Give the muffin to the mouse."" When you construe it as ""cause the mouse to have something,"" you're doing something to the mouse, and therefore you express it as, ""Give the mouse the muffin.""So which verbs go in which construction — the problem with which I began — depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change. To give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have. To drive the car only causes something to go, because Chicago's not the kind of thing that can possess something. Only humans can possess things. And to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache, but it's not as if you're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person, and implanting it in them. You may just be loud or obnoxious, or some other way causing them to have the headache. So, that's an example of the kind of thing that I do in my day job.So why should anyone care? Well, there are a number of interesting conclusions, I think, from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of English verbs. First, there's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence, that governs our use of language. You can think of this as the language of thought, or ""mentalese.""It seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts, which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs — not only in English, but in all other languages — fundamental concepts such as space, time, causation and human intention, such as, what is the means and what is the ends? These are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that Immanuel Kant argued are the basic framework for human thought, and it's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these Kantian categories. Doesn't care about perceptual qualities, such as color, texture, weight and speed, which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions.An additional twist is that all of the constructions in English are used not only literally, but in a quasi-metaphorical way. For example, this construction, the dative, is used not only to transfer things, but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas, as when we say, ""She told a story to me"" or ""told me a story,"" ""Max taught Spanish to the students"" or ""taught the students Spanish."" It's exactly the same construction, but no muffins, no mice, nothing moving at all. It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending. As when we say we ""gather"" our ideas, to ""put"" them ""into"" words, and if our words aren't ""empty"" or ""hollow,"" we might get these ideas ""across"" to a listener, who can ""unpack"" our words to ""extract"" their ""content.""And indeed, this kind of verbiage is not the exception, but the rule. It's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor. For example, you can use the verb ""go"" and the prepositions ""to"" and ""from"" in a literal, spatial sense. ""The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul."" You can also say, ""Biff went from sick to well."" He needn't go anywhere. He could have been in bed the whole time, but it's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving. Or, ""The meeting went from three to four,"" in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line. Likewise, we use ""force"" to indicate not only physical force, as in, ""Rose forced the door to open,"" but also interpersonal force, as in, ""Rose forced Sadie to go,"" not necessarily by manhandling her, but by issuing a threat. Or, ""Rose forced herself to go,"" as if there were two entities inside Rose's head, engaged in a tug of a war.Second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways, such as ""cause something to go to someone"" and ""causing someone to have something,"" I think is a fundamental feature of human thought, and it's the basis for much human argumentation, in which people don't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed. Just to give you a few examples: ""ending a pregnancy"" versus ""killing a fetus;"" ""a ball of cells"" versus ""an unborn child;"" ""invading Iraq"" versus ""liberating Iraq;"" ""redistributing wealth"" versus ""confiscating earnings."" And I think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts — such as objects, space, time, causation and intention — which are useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species, whose evolution you can well imagine, and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content — space, time and force — and apply them to new abstract domains, therefore allowing a species that evolved to deal with rocks and tools and animals, to conceptualize mathematics, physics, law and other abstract domains.Well, I said I'd talk about two windows on human nature — the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world, and now I'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction, again, as reflected in language. And I'll start out with a puzzle, the puzzle of indirect speech acts. Now, I'm sure most of you have seen the movie ""Fargo."" And you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer, is asked to show his driver's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet. And he says, ""I was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in Fargo,"" which everyone, including the audience, interprets as a veiled bribe. This kind of indirect speech is rampant in language. For example, in polite requests, if someone says, ""If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome,"" we know exactly what he means, even though that's a rather bizarre concept being expressed.(Laughter)""Would you like to come up and see my etchings?"" I think most people understand the intent behind that. And likewise, if someone says, ""Nice store you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it"" — (Laughter) — we understand that as a veiled threat, rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities. So the puzzle is, why are bribes, polite requests, solicitations and threats so often veiled? No one's fooled. Both parties know exactly what the speaker means, and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows, etc., etc. So what's going on?I think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships, and human relationships fall into a number of types. There's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist Alan Fiske, in which relationships can be categorized, more or less, into communality, which works on the principle ""what's mine is thine, what's thine is mine,"" the kind of mindset that operates within a family, for example; dominance, whose principle is ""don't mess with me;"" reciprocity, ""you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours;"" and sexuality, in the immortal words of Cole Porter, ""Let's do it.""Now, relationship types can be negotiated. Even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied, they can be stretched and extended. For example, communality applies most naturally within family or friends, but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it. For example, in brotherhoods, fraternal organizations, sororities, locutions like ""the family of man,"" you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin.Now, mismatches — when one person assumes one relationship type, and another assumes a different one — can be awkward. If you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss' plate, for example, that would be an awkward situation. Or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal, that would be rather awkward as well. In less blatant cases, there's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on. In the workplace, for example, there's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss, or refer to him or her on a first-name basis. If two friends have a reciprocal transaction, like selling a car, it's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness. In dating, the transition from friendship to sex can lead to, notoriously, various forms of awkwardness, and as can sex in the workplace, in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship ""sexual harassment.""Well, what does this have to do with language? Well, language, as a social interaction, has to satisfy two conditions. You have to convey the actual content — here we get back to the container metaphor. You want to express the bribe, the command, the promise, the solicitation and so on, but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person. The solution, I think, is that we use language at two levels: the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener, whereas the implicated content — the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform — allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context, which possibly initiates a changed relationship.The simplest example of this is in the polite request. If you express your request as a conditional — ""if you could open the window, that would be great"" — even though the content is an imperative, the fact that you're not using the imperative voice means that you're not acting as if you're in a relationship of dominance, where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person. On the other hand, you want the damn guacamole. By expressing it as an if-then statement, you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around.And in a more subtle way, I think, this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability: the bribes, threats, propositions, solicitations and so on. One way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language — where it could only be used literally. And you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix. Put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer. There's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer. If you don't bribe the officer, then you will get a traffic ticket — or, as is the case of ""Fargo,"" worse — whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In that case, the consequences are rather severe. On the other hand, if you extend the bribe, if the officer is dishonest, you get a huge payoff of going free. If the officer is honest, you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery. So this is a rather fraught situation.On the other hand, with indirect language, if you issue a veiled bribe, then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe, in which case you get the payoff of going free. The honest officer can't hold you to it as being a bribe, and therefore, you get the nuisance of the traffic ticket. So you get the best of both worlds. And a similar analysis, I think, can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation, and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset. I think this affirms something that's long been known by diplomats — namely, that the vagueness of language, far from being a bug or an imperfection, actually might be a feature of language, one that we use to our advantage in social interactions.So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another. And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_language_and_thought
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"Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are, where we've come from and the times we live in. During the twentieth century, we witnessed the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides, and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old, we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur and the daily horrors of Iraq. This has led to a common understanding of our situation, namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence, and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from, to our peril.Here is an example from an op-ed on Thanksgiving, in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago, where the writer wrote, ""The Indian life was a difficult one, but there were no employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, crime nearly non-existent, what warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter."" Now, you're all familiar with this treacle. We teach it to our children. We hear it on television and in storybooks. Now, the original title of this session was, ""Everything You Know Is Wrong,"" and I'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong, that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence.Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously. It's especially evident in the West, beginning with England and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment.Let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 — from the millennium scale to the year scale — to try to persuade you of this. Until 10,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, without permanent settlements or government. And this is the state that's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony. But the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers, which is our best source of evidence about this way of life, has shown a rather different conclusion.Here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging, or hunting and gathering societies. The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest. And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to, in the case of the Gebusi, only a 15 percent chance. The tiny, little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from United States and Europe in the twentieth century, and includes all the deaths of both World Wars. If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million.Also at the millennium scale, we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the Bible. And in this supposed source of our moral values, one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare, such as the following from Numbers 31: ""And they warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slew all the males. And Moses said unto them, 'Have you saved all the women alive? Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him, but all the women children that have not know a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.'"" In other words, kill the men; kill the children; if you see any virgins, then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them. You can find four or five passages in the Bible of this ilk. Also in the Bible, one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, talking back to your parents — (Laughter) — and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Well, let's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude, and look at the century scale. Although we don't have statistics for warfare throughout the Middle Ages to modern times, we know just from conventional history — the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence.For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment. The kind of infraction today that would give you a fine, in those days would result in your tongue being cut out, your ears being cut off, you being blinded, a hand being chopped off and so on. There were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment: burning at the stake, disemboweling, breaking on the wheel, being pulled apart by horses and so on. The death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes: criticizing the king, stealing a loaf of bread. Slavery, of course, was the preferred labor-saving device, and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment. Perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire, and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat, howling in pain, was burned to death.What about one-on-one murder? Well, there, there are good statistics, because many municipalities recorded the cause of death. The criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured all of the historical records across Europe for homicide rates in any village, hamlet, town, county that he could find, and he supplemented them with national data, when nations started keeping statistics. He plotted on a logarithmic scale, going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year, which was approximately the rate of homicide in the Middle Ages. And the figure plummets down to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year in seven or eight European countries. Then, there is a slight uptick in the 1960s. The people who said that rock 'n' roll would lead to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that. But there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present, and the elbow occurred in the early sixteenth century.Let's click down now to the decade scale. According to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics, since 1945, in Europe and the Americas, there has been a steep decline in interstate wars, in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms, and in military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars. The yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present. And, as you can see, the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade, as horrific as it is. Even in the year scale, one can see a decline of violence. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars, fewer genocides — indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post-World War II highs — and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime. This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics. You can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s, then it soared upward for several decades, and began a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s, so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960. President Clinton, if you're here, thank you. (Laughter)So the question is, why are so many people so wrong about something so important? I think there are a number of reasons. One of them is we have better reporting. The Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the Earth than sixteenth-century monks were. There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability that you assign to it. Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age. There are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets: no one ever attracted observers, advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better. (Laughter)There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. And of course, our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time. That's a process that seems to be continuing, but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards. So today, we get exercised — and rightly so — if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't consider that a couple of hundred years ago, they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes, and indeed, that that would have been repeated over and over again. Today, we look at capital punishment as evidence of how low our behavior can sink, rather than how high our standards have risen.Well, why has violence declined? No one really knows, but I have read four explanations, all of which, I think, have some grain of plausibility. The first is, maybe Thomas Hobbes got it right. He was the one who said that life in a state of nature was ""solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."" Not because, he argued, humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative, but because of the logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, there's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively, before they invade you. More recently, Thomas Schelling gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement. Being a good American, he has a pistol in the nightstand, pulls out his gun, and walks down the stairs. And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand. Now, each one of them is thinking, ""I don't really want to kill that guy, but he's about to kill me. Maybe I had better shoot him, before he shoots me, especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me, he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him before he kills me."" And so on. Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought, and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first.Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence. You don't strike first, but you have a publicly announced policy that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded. The only thing is that it's liable to having its bluff called, and therefore can only work if it's credible. To make it credible, you must avenge all insults and settle all scores, which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta. Life becomes an episode of ""The Sopranos."" Hobbes' solution, the ""Leviathan,"" was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency — a leviathan — then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack, because any kind of aggression will be punished, leaving its profitability as zero. That would remove the temptation to invade preemptively, out of fear of them attacking you first. It removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation to make your deterrent threat credible. And therefore, it would lead to a state of peace. Eisner — the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide — argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe coincided with the rise of centralized states. So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory. Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires, frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on.The second explanation is that in many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap. In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in one's own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general. This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne.A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game, and was worked out in the book ""Nonzero"" by the journalist Robert Wright. Wright points out that in certain circumstances, cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction, such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead, or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time. Wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in, by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people. The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, and violence declines for selfish reasons. As Wright put it, ""Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van."" (Laughter)The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called ""The Expanding Circle,"" by the philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy, an ability to treat other peoples' interests as comparable to one's own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle are treated as sub-human, and can be exploited with impunity. But, over history, the circle has expanded. One can see, in historical record, it expanding from the village, to the clan, to the tribe, to the nation, to other races, to both sexes, and, in Singer's own arguments, something that we should extend to other sentient species. The question is, if this has happened, what has powered that expansion?And there are a number of possibilities, such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that Robert Wright argues for. The logic of the golden rule — the more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can't say that my interests are special compared to yours, anymore than you can say that the particular spot that I'm standing on is a unique part of the universe because I happen to be standing on it that very minute. It may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, by histories, and journalism, and memoirs, and realistic fiction, and travel, and literacy, which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human, and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life, the sense that ""there but for fortune go I.""Whatever its causes, the decline of violence, I think, has profound implications. It should force us to ask not just, why is there war? But also, why is there peace? Not just, what are we doing wrong? But also, what have we been doing right? Because we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out what it is. Thank you very much. (Applause).Chris Anderson: I loved that talk. I think a lot of people here in the room would say that that expansion of — that you were talking about, that Peter Singer talks about, is also driven by, just by technology, by greater visibility of the other, and the sense that the world is therefore getting smaller. I mean, is that also a grain of truth?Steven Pinker: Very much. It would fit both in Wright's theory, that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation over larger and larger circles. But also, I think it helps us imagine what it's like to be someone else. I think when you read these horrific tortures that were common in the Middle Ages, you think, how could they possibly have done it, how could they have not have empathized with the person that they're disemboweling? But clearly, as far as they're concerned, this is just an alien being that does not have feelings akin to their own. Anything, I think, that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person.CA: Well, Steve, I would love every news media owner to hear that talk at some point in the next year. I think it's really important. Thank you so much.SP: My pleasure.","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence
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"Three years ago, I got a phone call, based on an earlier film I had made, with an offer to embed the New Hampshire National Guard. My idea — and literally, I woke up in the middle of the night, and we've all have those moments. You know, you go to sleep — I was excited, with this phone call. I was thinking, I just finished making another film about World War II vets, and I realized I'd gotten to know their stories, and I realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell a warrior's story as it unfolded. So I went to bed that night pretty excited. Not sure of all the details, but excited. It wasn't at four in the morning, but it was closer to midnight. Woke straight up. Wide-awake as could be. And I had this idea: what if I could, in effect, virtually embed, and create a permeable relationship with the soldiers? To tell the story from the inside out, versus the outside in?So, I called back Major Heilshorn, who's the public affairs officer of the New Hampshire National Guard. And he knew me, so I was like, ""Greg?"" He's like, ""Yes, Deborah?"" Told him my idea, and you know, he is one of the bravest men in the world, as is General Blair, who, in the end, gave me permission to try this experiment.Within 10 days, I was down at Fort Dix. He gave me my pick of units. I picked one unit — Charlie Company, Third of the 172nd, they're mountain infantry — for two reasons. One, they're infantry. Number two, they were going to be based at LSA Anaconda, so I knew they would have Internet access. The caveat for my access was I had to get the soldiers to volunteer. This was a big thing that I think when Major H told me, I wasn't really totally gathering what that would mean.So what that meant was, when I went down to Fort Dix, I had to hop out in front of 180 guys and tell them of my vision. You can imagine the hailstorm of questions I got. The opening one was, ""What the fuck do you know about the National Guard?"" I started with the 1607 Massachusetts Bay Colony Pequot Indian Wars. Gave them about a nine minute response, and there we went.So, I'd like to show the clip of the film. It's our trailer, because I know, obviously you guys are busy, many of you may not have had a chance to see it. So, I want to show the trailer, and then I'm going to take apart one scene in detail. If we could roll?(Video) Stephen Pink: This is Sergeant Stephen Pink.Michael Moriarty: Specialist Michael Moriarty.Zack Bazzi: Do I really want to go? Probably not.Soldier: We're not supposed to talk to the media.SP: I'm not the media, dammit!MM: The day is here. Life will change.Voice: The real deal, man! Narrator: You ready? Soldier: Bring it on! Narrator: You ready? Voice 2: Iraq, here we come!ZB: Every soldier eventually wants to go in combat. It's natural instinct.SP: If you let fear get to you, then you're not going to be doing your job.MM: Every single time you go out there, there's attacks. It's unbelievable.ZB: Hey, Nestor, your ass crack is right in my face.Soldiers: IV! Are we on fire? IV! Man down! Man down!MM: Keep going, brother. You wanna play?Michael Moriarty's Wife: It's really hard for him to not have his dad.MM: This little kid is in the middle of a war zone.Stephen Pink's Girlfriend: In the beginning, he's like, ""Write something dirty!""George W. Bush: The world's newest democracy.MM: They're shooting at me.SP: You don't put 150,000 troops in there, and say we're there to create democracy.Soldier: We've got a drive through window at Burger King now.SP: We're here to create money.MM: I support George Bush. We're not there for the oil.Jon Baril: The worst thing in my life.SP: Baril, don't look at it, bud.Michael Moriarty's Wife: He's not the same person anymore.MM: I will not go back.Kevin Shangraw: The Iraqi people are who we are there to help — and we just killed one.Soldiers: Sergeant Smith is down! Sergeant Smith is down? There they are! Right there! Fire, fire!JB: It'll be a better country in 20 years, 'cause we were there. I hope.(Applause) Deborah Scranton: Thank you. One of the things I'd like to talk to you about is having a conversation about something that is difficult to talk about. And I'd like to relate an experience I had here at TED. I don't know how many of you might imagine it, but there's actually a TEDster who recently got back from Iraq. Paul? Come on, stand up. This is Paul Anthony. He served — (Applause) — with the Marines, and I want to tell you a little, brief story. We were one of the lucky ones to get in the class with the Sony cameras and the Vista software. Right? And we started talking. People will see my tag, and they'll see ""The War Tapes,"" and then we'll start talking about war.We got in a conversation with some other people in the class, and it went on and on. I mean, we were there for an hour, talking. And it really highlighted something that I would like to ask you guys to think about and hopefully to help with, which is, I think a lot of us are very afraid to have conversations about war, and about politics. And really — because maybe we're going to disagree. Maybe it's going to get uncomfortable. How do we open it up to really be able to have a conversation? And you know, Paul was talking, and he then turned to Constance and said, ""You know, I wouldn't have this conversation if she weren't here, because I know she has my back.""And I want to say, I was nervous. Because I'm used to doing Q&As. I really related to what James was saying yesterday, because I'm behind the camera. You know, I can answer questions about my movie, but for me to come up and talk for 18 minutes is a really long time. So, I wanted to say, Paul, I'm happy you're here, because I know you have my back.This film was not about the Internet, but it could not have been made without it. The guys' tapes on average took two weeks to get from Iraq to me. In the meantime, the soldiers — we would email and IM. I didn't save all of them, because I didn't realize at the beginning that it would be something that I would want to keep track of. But there were 3,211 emails and IMs and text messages that I was able to save. The reason I quantify that is because we really embarked on this as a mutual journey to really get inside of it. So I wanted to show you a clip, and then I was going tell you a little bit of how it got put together. If we could roll the clip.(Video) SP: Today is sport. [Unclear] Radio: [Unclear] Christian soldiers. SP: We like to give these insurgents a fair chance. So, what we do, we ride with the windows down. Because, you know, we obviously have the advantage. I'm just kidding. We don't fucking ride with the goddam windows down. It's not true. Very unsafe. Whoa.Soldier: Right there.SP: All right, let's get over to that site. Be advised, we're leaving Taji right now. We believe that the blast was right outside the gate of Taji, we're heading to that location now.Soldier: That's a fucking car bomb!Soldier: Motherfuckers!Soldiers: Get your vest on! Hey, get over the fucking — yeah, yeah. Any one-four elements get to the gate!SP: Sheriff one-six, or any one-four elements, we need you at the gate of Taji right now, over.Soldier: I'll walk you through it. (Voices)SP: Stay low. Head over to the right. Get your bag, get your bag! (Screams)SP: It was mass casualties. Probably 20 dead, at least 20 or 30 wounded Iraqis.SP: It just looked like, you know, someone had thrown a quarter through a guy, and it was just like — there was no blood coming from the shrapnel wounds. Everything was cauterized, and it was just like there was a void going through the body. This is the scene north. They just removed a burnt body, or half a body from here. I don't think there was anything left from his abdominal down. This is blood. And you know, you walk, and you hear the pieces of skin. And that's it, that's all that's left. I remember giving three IVs, bandaging several wounded. Soldiers sitting in the corner of a sandbag wall, shaking and screaming. Medics who were terrified and couldn't perform. I later heard that Iraqi casualties were not to be treated in Taji. They can work on the post for pennies, but can't die there. They've got to die outside. If one of those incompetent medical officers told me to stop treatment, I would've slit his throat right there. 21:00 hours, and it's just our squad going through today's events in our heads, whether we want to or not.News Anchor: More violence in Iraq. Twin suicide car bombings killed eight Iraqis and wounded dozens more near a coalition base north of Baghdad.SP: We made the news. I feel exploited and proud at the same time. I've lost all faith in the media — a hapless joke I would much rather laugh at than become a part of. I should really thank God for saving my lucky ass. I'll do that, then I'm gonna jerk off. Because these pages smell like Linds, and there won't be any time for jerking off tomorrow. Another mission at 06:00.DS: Now — (Applause) — thanks. When I said earlier, to try and tell a story from the inside out, versus the outside in — part of what Chris said so eloquently in his introduction — is this melding. It's a new way of trying to make a documentary. When I met the guys, and 10 of them agreed to take cameras — in total, 21 ended up filming. Five soldiers filmed the entire time. There are three featured in the film.The way I learned about Taji was Steve Pink sent me an email, and in it, attached a photo of that burned body out at the car. And the tone from the email was, you know, it had been a very bad day, obviously. And I saw in my IM window that Mike Moriarty was at the base. So, I pinged Mike and I said, ""Mike, can you please go get that interview with Pink?"" Because the thing that very often is missing is, in the military what they call ""hot wash."" It's that immediate interview after something immediately happens, you know. And if you let time go by, it kind of softens and smooths the edges. And for me, I really wanted that.So, in order to get the intimacy, to share that experience with you, the guys — the two most popular mounts — there was a camera on the turret, the gun turret, and then on the dashboard of the Humvee. Most of the Humvees, we ended up mounting two cameras in them. So you get to experience that in real time, right? The interview that you see is the one that Mike went and did within 24 hours of that episode happening.Steve Pink reading his journal happened five months after he came home. I knew about that journal, but it was very, very private. And you know, you earn someone's trust, especially in doc filmmaking, through your relationship. So, it wasn't until five months after he was home that he would read that journal.Now, the news footage I put in there to try to show — you know, I think mainstream media tries to do the best they can in the format that they have. But the thing that I know you all have heard a lot of times, American soldiers saying, ""Why don't they talk about the good stuff that we do?"" OK, this is a perfect example. Pink's squad and another squad spent their entire day outside the wire. They didn't have to go outside the wire. There were not Americans hurt out there. They spent their entire day outside the wire trying to save Iraqi lives — the Iraqis who work on the post. So, when you may hear soldiers complaining, that's what they're talking about, you know? And I think it's such an amazing gift that they would share this as a way of bridging.And when I talk about that polarity I get at so many different Q&As, and people are really opinionated. But it seems like people don't want to hear so much, or listen, or try to have an exchange. And I'm as fiery as the next person, but I really think — you know, different speakers have talked about their concern for the world, and my concern is that we have to have these conversations. And we have to be able to go into scary places where we may, you know, we think we know. But we just have to leave that little bit of openness, to know. There's such a disconnect. And for me, it's trying to bridge that disconnect. I'll share one story. I get — I'm often asked, you know, for me, what have been some of the special moments from having worked on this film. And at screenings, inevitably — you know, as I'm sure all of you obviously do speaking stuff — usually you have people who hang around and want to ask you more questions. And usually, the first questions are, ""Oh, what kind of cameras did you use?"" Or you know, these things.But there's always a few guys, almost always, who are the last ones. And I've learned over time that those are always the soldiers. And they wait until pretty much everybody's gone. And for me, one of the most profound stories someone shared with me, that then became my story, was — for those of you who haven't seen the film, and it's not a spoiler — it's very common there are a lot of civilian accidents, where people get in front of Humvees and they get killed. In this film, there is a scene where an Iraqi woman is killed. A soldier came up to me and stood, you know really, pretty close, a foot away from me. He's a big guy. And he looked at me, and I smiled, and then I saw the tears start welling up in his eyes. And he wasn't going to blink. And he said, ""My gunner was throwing candy."" And I knew what he was going to say. The gunner was throwing candy. They used to throw candy to the kids. Kids got too close, very often. And he said, ""I killed a child. And I'm a father. I have children. I haven't been able to tell my wife. I'm afraid she's going to think I'm a monster."" I hugged him, of course, and I said, you know, ""It's going to be OK."" And he said, ""I'm going to bring her to see your film. And then I'm going to tell her.""So when I talk about a disconnect, it's not only for maybe those people who don't know a soldier, which there obviously are. You know, these days, it's not like World War II, where there was a war front and a home front, and everybody seemed involved. You can go for days here and not feel like there's a war going on. And often, I'll hear people say, who maybe know that I did this film, and they say, ""Oh, you know, I'm against the war, but I support the soldiers."" And I've started to ask them, ""Well, that's nice. What are you doing? Are you volunteering at a VA? You go and see anybody? Do you, if you find out your neighbor's been, do you spend some time? Not necessarily ask questions, but see if they want to talk? Do you give money to any of the charities?"" You know, obviously, like Dean Kamen's working on that amazing thing, but there's charities where you can sponsor computers for wounded soldiers.I think, I challenge us to say — to operationalize those terms, when we say we support someone, you know? Are you a friend to them? Do you really care? And I would just say it's my hope, and I would ask you guys to please, you know, reach out a hand. And really do give them a hug. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_scranton_on_her_war_tapes
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"I have 18 minutes to tell you what happened over the past six million years. All right. We all have come from a long way, here in Africa, and converged in this region of Africa, which is a place where 90 percent of our evolutionary process took place. And I say that not because I am African, but it's in Africa that you find the earliest evidence for human ancestors, upright walking traces, even the first technologies in the form of stone tools. So we all are Africans, and welcome home. All right.I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human. And today, I will use Selam, the earliest child ever discovered, to tell you a story of all of us. Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis. You don't need to remember that. That's the Lucy species, and was found by my research team in December of 2000 in an area called Dikika. It's in the northeastern part of Ethiopia. And Selam means peace in many Ethiopian languages. We use that name to celebrate peace in the region and in the planet. And the fact that it was the cover story of all these famous magazines gives you already an idea of her significance, I think.After I was invited by TED, I did some digging, because that's what we do, to know about my host. You don't just jump into an invitation. And I learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools, 2.6 million years ago. First entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old. And evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old — beads. And you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time. And DNA analysis of living humans and chimpanzees teaches us today that we diverged sometime around seven million years ago and that these two species share over 98 percent of the same genetic material. I think knowing this is a very useful context within which we can think of our ancestry.However, DNA analysis informs us only about the beginning and the end, telling us nothing about what happened in the middle. So, for us, paleoanthropologists, our job is to find the hard evidence, the fossil evidence, to fill in this gap and see the different stages of development. Because it's only when you do that, that you can talk about — (Laughter) — it's only when you do that, [that] you can talk about how we looked like and how we behaved at different times, and how those likes and looks and behaviors changed through time. That then gives you an access to explore the biological mechanisms and forces that are responsible for this gradual change that made us what we are today. But finding the hard evidence is a very complicated endeavor. It's a systematic and scientific approach, which takes you to places that are remote, hot, hostile and often with no access.Just to give you an example, when I went to Dikika, where Selam was found, in '99 — and it's about 500 kilometers from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. It took us only seven hours to do the first 470 kilometers of the 500, but took four, solid hours to do the last only 30 kilometers. With the help of the locals and using just shovels and picks, I made my way. I was the first person to actually drive a car to the spot. When you get there, this is what you see, and it's the vastness of the place which makes you feel helpless and vulnerable. And once you make it there, the big question is where to start. (Laughter) And you find nothing for years and years.When I go to places like this, which are paleontological sites, it's like going to a game park, an extinct game park. But what you find are not the human remains, such as Selam and Lucy, on a day-to-day basis. You find elephants, rhinos, monkeys, pigs, etc. But you could ask, how could these large mammals live in this desert environment? Of course, they cannot, but I'm telling you already that the environment and the carrying capacity of this region was drastically different from what we have today. A very important environmental lesson could be learned from this. Anyway, once we made it there, then it's a game park, as I said, an extinct game park. And our ancestors lived in that game park, but were just the minorities. They were not as successful and as widespread as the Homo sapiens that we are.To tell you just an example, an anecdote about their rarity, I was going to this place every year and would do fieldwork here, and the assistants, of course, helped me do the surveys. They would find a bone and tell me, ""Here is what you're looking for."" I would say, ""No, that's an elephant."" Again, another one, ""That's a monkey."" ""That's a pig,"" etc. So one of my assistants, who never went to school, said to me, ""Listen, Zeray. You either don't know what you're looking for, or you're looking in the wrong place,"" he said. (Laughter) And I said, ""Why?"" ""Because there were elephants and lions, and the people were scared and went somewhere else. Let's go somewhere else."" Well, he was very tired, and it's really tiring.It was then, after such hard work and many frustrating years that we found Selam, and you see the face here covered by sandstone. And here is actually the spinal column and the whole torso encased in a sandstone block, because she was buried by a river. What you have here seems to be nothing, but contains an incredible amount of scientific information that helps us explore what makes us human. This is the earliest and most complete juvenile human ancestor ever found in the history of paleoanthropology, an amazing piece of our long, long history. There were these three people and me, and I am taking the pictures, that's why I am not in.How would you feel if you were me? You have something extraordinary in your hand, but you are in the middle of nowhere? The feeling I had was a deep and quiet happiness and excitement, of course accompanied by a huge sense of responsibility, of making sure everything is safe.Here is a close-up of the fossil, after five years of cleaning, preparation and description, which was very long, as I had to expose the bones from the sandstone block I just showed you in the previous slide. It took five years. In a way, this was like the second birth for the child, after 3.3 million years, but the labor was very long. And here is full scale — it's a tiny bone. And in the middle is the minister of Ethiopian tourism, who came to visit the National Museum of Ethiopia while I was working there. And you see me worried and trying to protect my child, because you don't leave anyone with this kind of child, even a minister.So then, once you've done that, the next stage is to know what it is. (Laughter) Once that was done, then it was possible to compare. We were able to tell that she belonged to the human family tree because the legs, the foot, and some features clearly showed that she walked upright, and upright walking is a hallmark in humanity. But in addition, if you compare the skull with a comparably aged chimpanzee and little George Bush here, you see that you have vertical forehead. And you see that in humans, because of the development of the pre-frontal cortex, it's called. You don't see that in chimpanzees, and you don't see this very projecting canine. So she belongs to our family tree, but within that, of course, you do detailed analysis, and we know now that she belongs to the Lucy species, known as Australopithecus afarensis.The next exciting question is, girl or boy? And how old was she when she died? You can determine the sex of the individual based on the size of the teeth. How? You know, in primates, there is this phenomenon called sexual dimorphism, which simply means males are larger than females and males have larger teeth than the females. But to do that, you need the permanent dentition, which you don't see here, because what you have here are the baby teeth. But using the CT scanning technology, which is normally used for medical purposes, you can go deep into the mouth and come up with this beautiful image showing you both the baby teeth here and the still-growing adult teeth here. So when you measure those teeth, it was clear that she turned out to be a girl with very small canine teeth. And to know how old she was when she died, what you do is you do an informed estimate, and you say, how much time would be required to form this amount of teeth, and the answer was three. So, this girl died when she was about three, 3.3 million years ago.So, with all that information, the big question is — what do we actually — what does she tell us? To answer this question, we can phrase another question. What do we actually know about our ancestors? We want to know how they looked like, how they behaved, how they walked around, and how they lived and grew up. And among the answers that you can get from this skeleton are included: first, this skeleton documents, for the first time, how infants looked over three million years ago.And second, she tells us that she walked upright, but had some adaptation for tree climbing. And more interesting, however, is the brain in this child was still growing. At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth — faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we continue to grow our brains. That's why we need care from our parents. But that care means also you learn. You spend more time with your parents. And that's very characteristic of humans and it's called childhood, which is this extended dependence of human children on their family or parents. So, the still-growing brain in this individual tells us that childhood, which requires an incredible social organization, a very complex social organization, emerged over three million years ago.So, by being at the cusp of our evolutionary history, Selam unites us all and gives us a unique account on what makes us human. But not everything was human, and I will give you a very exciting example. This is called the hyoid bone. It's a bone which is right here. It supports your tongue from behind. It's, in a way, your voice box. It determines the type of voice you produce. It was not known in the fossil record, and we have it in this skeleton. When we did the analysis of this bone, it was clear that it looked very chimp-like, chimpanzee-like. So if you were there 3.3 million years ago, to hear when this girl was crying out for her mother, she would have sounded more like a chimpanzee than a human. Maybe you're wondering, ""So, you see this ape feature, human feature, ape feature. What does that tell us?"" You know, that is very exciting for us, because it demonstrates that things were changing slowly and progressively, and that evolution is in the making.To summarize the significance of this fossil, we can say the following. Up to now, the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because the fossils, the baby fossils, were missing. They don't preserve well, as you know. So the knowledge that we had about our ancestors, on how they looked like, how they behaved, was kind of biased toward adults. Imagine somebody coming from Mars and his job is to report on the type of people occupying our planet Earth, and you hide all the babies, the children, and he goes back and reports. Can you imagine how much biased his report would be? That's what somehow we were doing so far in the absence of the fossil children, so I think the new fossil fixes this problem.So, I think the most important question at the end is, what do we actually learn from specimens like this and from our past in general? Of course, in addition to extracting this huge amount of scientific information as to what makes us human, you know, the many human ancestors that have existed over the past six million years — and there are more than 10 — they did not have the knowledge, the technology and sophistications that we, Homo sapiens, have today. But if this species, ancient species, would travel in time and see us today, they would very much be very proud of their legacy, because they became the ancestors of the most successful species in the universe. And they were probably not aware of this future legacy, but they did great. Now the question is, we Homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet, possibly more. So the question is, are we up to the challenge? And can we really do better than these primitive, small-brained ancestors?Among the most pressing challenges that our species is faced with today are the chronic problems of Africa. Needless to list them here, and there are more competent people to talk about this. Still, in my opinion, we have two choices. One is to continue to see a poor, ill, crying Africa, carrying guns, that depends on other people forever, or to promote an Africa which is confident, peaceful, independent, but cognizant of its huge problems and great values at the same time. I am for the second option, and I'm sure many of you are. And the key is to promote a positive African attitude towards Africa.That's because we Africans concentrate — I am from Ethiopia, by the way — we concentrate too much on how we are seen from elsewhere, or from outside. I think it's important to promote in a more positive way on how we see ourselves. That's what I call positive African attitude. So finally, I would like to say, so let's help Africa walk upright and forward, then we all can be proud of our future legacy as a species.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zeresenay_alemseged_looks_for_humanity_s_roots
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"On simplicity. What a great way to start. First of all, I've been watching this trend where we have these books like such and such ""For Dummies."" Do you know these books, these such and such ""For Dummies?"" My daughters pointed out that I'm very similar looking, so this is a bit of a problem. (Laughter) But I was looking online at Amazon.com for other books like this. You know, there's also something called the ""Complete Idiot's Guide?"" There's a sort of business model around being stupid in some sense. We like to have technology make us feel bad, for some strange reason.But I really like that, so I wrote a book called ""The Laws of Simplicity."" I was in Milan last week, for the Italian launch. It's kind of a book about questions, questions about simplicity. Very few answers. I'm also wondering myself, what is simplicity? Is it good? Is it bad? Is complexity better? I'm not sure.After I wrote ""The Laws of Simplicity,"" I was very tired of simplicity, as you can imagine. And so in my life, I've discovered that vacation is the most important skill for any kind of over-achiever. Because your companies will always take away your life, but they can never take away your vacation — in theory. (Laughter)So, I went to the Cape last summer to hide from simplicity, and I went to the Gap, because I only have black pants. So I went and bought khaki shorts or whatever, and unfortunately, their branding was all about ""Keep It Simple."" (Laughter) I opened up a magazine, and Visa's branding was, ""Business Takes Simplicity."" I develop photographs, and Kodak said, ""Keep It Simple."" So, I felt kind of weird that simplicity was sort of following me around.So, I turned on the TV, and I don't watch TV very much, but you know this person? This is Paris Hilton, apparently. And she has this show, ""The Simple Life."" So I watched this. It's not very simple, a little bit confusing. (Laughter) So, I looked for a different show to watch. So, I opened up this TV Guide thing, and on the E! channel, this ""Simple Life"" show is very popular. They'll play it over, and over, and over. (Laughter) So it was traumatizing, actually.So, I wanted to escape again, so I went out to my car. And Cape Cod, there are idyllic roads, and all of us can drive in this room. And when you drive, these signs are very important. It's a very simple sign, it says, ""road"" and ""road approaching."" So I'm mostly driving along, okay, and then I saw this sign. (Laughter) So, I thought complexity was attacking me suddenly, so I thought, ""Ah, simplicity. Very important.""But then I thought, ""Oh, simplicity. What would that be like on a beach? What if the sky was 41 percent gray? Wouldn't that be the perfect sky?"" I mean that simplicity sky. But in reality, the sky looked like this. It was a beautiful, complex sky.You know, with the pinks and blues. We can't help but love complexity. We're human beings: we love complex things. We love relationships — very complex. So we love this kind of stuff.I'm at this place called the Media Lab. Maybe some of you guys have heard of this place. It's designed by I. M. Pei, one of the premier modernist architects. Modernism means white box, and it's a perfect white box. (Laughter) And some of you guys are entrepreneurs, etc., whatever. Last month, I was at Google, and, boy, that cafeteria, man. You guys have things here in Silicon Valley like stock options. See, in academia, we get titles, lots of titles.Last year at TED, these were all my titles. I had a lot of titles. I have a default title as a father of a bunch of daughters. This year at TED, I'm happy to report that I have new titles, in addition to my previous titles. Another ""Associate Director of Research."" And this also happened, so I have five daughters now. (Laughter) That's my baby Reina. (Applause) Thank you. And so, my life is much more complex because of the baby, actually, but that's okay. We will still stay married, I think.But looking way back, when I was a child — you see, I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle. Many of you may not like tofu because you haven't had good tofu, but tofu's a good food. It's a very simple kind of food. It's very hard work to make tofu. As a child, we used to wake up at 1 a.m. and work till 6 p.m., six days a week. My father was kind of like Andy Grove, paranoid of the competition. So often, seven days a week. Family business equals child labor.We were a great model. So, I loved going to school. School was great, and maybe going to school helped me get to this Media Lab place, I'm not sure. (Laughter) Thank you. But the Media Lab is an interesting place, and it's important to me because as a student, I was a computer science undergrad, and I discovered design later on in my life.And there was this person, Muriel Cooper. Who knows Muriel Cooper? Muriel Cooper? Wasn't she amazing? Muriel Cooper. She was wacky. And she was a TEDster, exactly, and she showed us, she showed the world how to make the computer beautiful again. And she's very important in my life, because she's the one that told me to leave MIT and go to art school. It was the best advice I ever got. So I went to art school, because of her. She passed away in 1994, and I was hired back to MIT to try to fill her shoes, but it's so hard. This amazing person, Muriel Cooper.When I was in Japan — I went to an art school in Japan — I had a nice sort of situation, because somehow I was connected to Paul Rand. Some of you guys know Paul Rand, the greatest graphic designer — I'm sorry — out there. The great graphic designer Paul Rand designed the IBM logo, the Westinghouse logo. He basically said, ""I've designed everything."" And also Ikko Tanaka was a very important mentor in my life — the Paul Rand of Japan. He designed most of the major icons of Japan, like Issey Miyake's brand and also Muji.When you have mentors — and yesterday, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar talked about mentors, these people in your life — the problem with mentors is that they all die. This is a sad thing, but it's actually a happy thing in a way, because you can remember them in their pure form. I think that the mentors that we all meet sort of humanize us. When you get older, and you're all freaked out, whatever, the mentors calm us down. And I'm grateful for my mentors, and I'm sure all of you are too.Because the human thing is very hard when you're at MIT. The T doesn't stand for ""human,"" it stands for ""technology."" And because of that, I always wondered about this human thing. So, I've always been Googling this word, ""human,"" to find out how many hits I get. And in 2001, I had 26 million hits, and for ""computer,"" because computers are against humans a bit,I have 42 million hits. Let me do an Al Gore here. So, if you sort of compare that, like this, you'll see that computer versus human — I've been tracking this for the last year — computer versus human over the last year has changed. It used to be kind of two to one. Now, humans are catching up. Very good, us humans! We're catching up with the computers. In the simplicity realm, it's also interesting. So if you compare complexities to simplicity, it's also catching up in a way, too. So, somehow humans and simplicity are intertwined, I think.I have a confession: I'm not a man of simplicity. I spent my entire early career making complex stuff. Lots of complex stuff. I wrote computer programs to make complex graphics like this. I had clients in Japan to make really complex stuff like this. And I've always felt bad about it, in a sense. So, I hid in a time dimension. I built things in a time-graphics dimension. I did this series of calendars for Shiseido. This is a floral theme calendar in 1997, and this is a firework calendar. So, you launch the number into space, because the Japanese believe that when you see fireworks, you're cooler for some reason. This is why they have fireworks in the summer. A very extreme culture. Lastly, this is a fall-based calendar, because I have so many leaves in my yard. So this is the leaves in my yard, essentially.And so I made a lot of these types of things. I've been lucky to have been there before people made these kind of things, and so I made all this kind of stuff that messes with your eyes. I feel kind of bad about that. Tomorrow, Paola Antonelli is speaking. I love Paola. She has this show right now at MoMA, where some of these early works are here on display at MoMA, on the walls. If you're in New York, please go and see that.But I've had a problem, because I make all this flying stuff and people say, ""Oh, I know your work. You're the guy that makes eye candy."" And when you're told this, you feel kind of weird. ""Eye candy"" — sort of pejorative, don't you think? So, I say, ""No, I make eye meat,"" instead. (Laughter) And eye meat is something different, something more fibrous, something more powerful, perhaps. But what could that be, eye meat?I've been interested in computer programs all my life, actually. Computer programs are essentially trees, and when you make art with a computer program, there's kind of a problem. Whenever you make art with a computer program, you're always on the tree, and the paradox is that for excellent art, you want to be off the tree. So, this is sort of a complication I've found.So, to get off the tree, I began to use my old computers. I took these to Tokyo in 2001 to make computer objects. This is a new way to type, on my old, color Classic. You can't type very much on this. I also discovered that an IR mouse responds to CRT emissions and starts to move by itself, so this is a self-drawing machine. And also, one year, the G3 Bondi Blue thing — that caddy would come out, like, dangerous, like, ""whack,"" like that. But I thought, ""This is very interesting. What if I make like a car crash test?"" So I have a crash test. (Laughter) And sort of measure the impact. Stuff like this are things I made, just to sort of understand what these things are. (Laughter)Shortly after this, 9/11 happened, and I was very depressed. I was concerned with contemporary art that was all about piss, and sort of really sad things, and so I wanted to think about something happy. So I focused on food as my area — these sort of clementine peel things. In Japan, it's a wonderful thing to remove the clementine peel just in one piece. Who's done that before? One-piece clementine? Oh, you guys are missing out, if you haven't done it yet. It was very good, and I discovered I can make sculptures out of this, actually, in different forms. If you dry them quick, you can make, like, elephants and steers and stuff, and my wife didn't like these, because they mold, so I had to stop that.So, I went back to the computer, and I bought five large fries, and scanned them all. And I was looking for some kind of food theme, and I wrote some software to automatically lay out french-fry images. And as a child, I'd hear that song, you know, ""Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,"" so I made this amber waves image. It's sort of a Midwest cornfield out of french fries.And also, as a child, I was the fattest kid in class, so I used to love Cheetos. Oh, I love Cheetos, yummy. So, I wanted to play with Cheetos in some way. I wasn't sure where to go with this. I invented Cheeto paint. Cheeto paint is a very simple way to paint with Cheetos. (Laughter) I discovered that Cheetos are good, expressive material. And with these Cheetos, I began to think, ""What can I make with these Cheetos?""And so, I began to crinkle up potato chip flecks, and also pretzels. I was looking for some kind of form, and in the end, I made 100 butter-fries. Do you get it? (Laughter) And each butter-fry is composed of different pieces. People ask me how they make the antenna. Sometimes, they find a hair in the food. That's my hair. My hair's clean — it's okay.I'm a tenured professor, which means, basically, I don't have to work anymore. It's a strange business model. I can come into work everyday and staple five pieces of paper and just stare at it with my latte. End of story. (Laughter) But I realized that life could be very boring, so I've been thinking about life, and I notice that my camera — my digital camera versus my car, a very strange thing. The car is so big, the camera is so small, yet the manual for the camera is so much bigger than the car manual. It doesn't make any sense. (Laughter)So, I was in the Cape one time, and I typed the word ""simplicity,"" and I discovered, in this weird, M. Night Shyamalan way, that I discovered [the] letters, M, I, T. You know the word? In the words ""simplicity"" and ""complexity,"" M, I, T occur in perfect sequence. It's a bit eerie, isn't it? So, I thought, maybe I'll do this for the next twenty years or something.And I wrote this book, ""The Laws of Simplicity."" It's a very short, simple book. There are ten laws and three keys. The ten laws and three keys — I won't go over them because that's why I have a book, and also that's why it's on the Web for free. But the laws are kind of like sushi in a way: there are all kinds. In Japan, they say that sushi is challenging. You know the uni is the most challenging, so number ten is challenging. People hate number ten like they hate uni, actually. The three keys are easy to eat, so this is anago, cooked already, so easy to eat. So enjoy your sushi meal later, with the laws of simplicity. Because I want to simplify them for you. Because that's what this is about. I have to simplify this thing.So, if I simplify the laws of simplicity, I have what's called the cookie versus laundry thing. Anyone who has kids knows that if you offer a kid a big cookie or a small cookie, which cookie are they going to take? The big cookie. You can say the small cookie has Godiva chocolate bits in it, but it doesn't work. They want the big cookie. But if you offer kids two piles of laundry to fold, the small pile or the big pile, which will they choose?Strangely, not the big pile. So, I think it's as simple as this. You know, when you want more, it's because you want to enjoy it. When you want less, it's because it's about work. And so, to boil it all down, simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain. I think this is sort of simple more versus less. Basically, it always depends. This book I wrote because I want to figure out life. I love life. I love being alive. I like to see things. And so life is a big question, I think, in simplicity, because you're trying to simplify your life.And I just love to see the world. The world is an amazing place. By being at TED, we see so many things at one time. And I can't help but enjoy looking at everything in the world. Like everything you see, every time you wake up. It's such a joy to sort of experience everything in the world. From everything from a weird hotel lobby, to Saran wrap placed over your window, to this moment where I had my road in front of my house paved dark black, and this white moth was sitting there dying in the sun.And so, this whole thing has struck me as exciting to be here, because life is finite. This was given to me by the chairman of Shiseido. He's an expert in aging. This horizontal axis is how old you are — twelve years old, twenty-four years old, seventy-four, ninety-six years old — and this is some medical data. So, brain strength increases up to 60, and then after 60, it sort of goes down. Kind of depressing in a way.Also, if you look at your physical strength. You know, I have a lot of cocky freshmen at MIT, so I tell them, ""Oh, your bodies are really getting stronger and stronger, but in your late twenties and mid-thirties, cells, they die."" OK. It gets them to work harder, sometimes. And if you have your vision, vision is interesting. As you age from infant age, your vision gets better, and maybe in your late teens, early twenties, you're looking for a mate, and your vision goes after that. (Laughter)Your social responsibility is very interesting. So, as you get older, you may, like, have kids, whatever. And then the kids graduate, and you have no responsibility any more — that's very good, too.But if any of you people ask, ""What actually goes up? Does anything go up? What's the positive part of this, you know?"" I think wisdom always goes up. I love these eighty-year-old, ninety-year-old guys and women. They have so many thoughts, and they have so much wisdom, and I think — you know, this TED thing, I've come here. And this is the fourth time, and I come here for this wisdom, I think. This whole TED effect, it sort of ups your wisdom, somehow. And I'm so glad to be here, and I'm very grateful to be here, Chris. And this is an amazing experience for me as well.","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_on_the_simple_life
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"The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary — to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. The science writers and editors — I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science — and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works.And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. And that's what I want to talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter)(Voice: Can we finish up a little early?)(Laughter) Yeah, we need the time! Stephen Petranek: At first, it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11 happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is going to end. Nobody wants to hear that. Not after this! And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to, who was a neuroscientist, said, ""You know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up,"" and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem. So, we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them. Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. Can we run that, Andrew?President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it.SP: I agree with the president. He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two-trillion-dollar federal budget, which will land us back into deficit spending real fast. But terrorists aren't the only threat we face. There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism, and what could've happened on September 11.I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget — which is two one hundredths of that budget — and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about, the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So, I hope you find this both fascinating — I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit — to me these are Richard's cockroaches.But I also hope, because I think the people in this room can literally change the world, I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy-duty money spent on some of these ideas.So let's start. Number 10: we lose the will to survive. We live in an incredible age of modern medicine. We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. People around the world are getting better medicine — but mentally, we're falling apart. The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced.Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan. A female child born tomorrow, on average — median — will live to age 83. Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide.So, what are the solutions? We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's — (Applause) — it's really a crime. Something like 98 percent of all people with depression, and I mean really severe depression — I have a friend with stunningly severe depression — this is a curable disease, with present medicine and present technology. But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people. You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and put down your 10-dollar copay, and get treated, just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It's ridiculous.Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago. We need a pump-push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science — NSF — and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs.Moving on. Number nine — don't laugh — aliens invade Earth. Ten years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer — well, very few astronomers — in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system. 1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 — we're finding about two or three a month. All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little, teeny, tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea.Remember, we've only been an advanced civilization — an industrial civilization, if you would — for 200 years. Although every time I go to Pompeii, I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner, too. So, I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood. I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, and I don't believe there are any aliens on the Earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own.Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it. We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, ""Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization."" If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization.So, what are the solutions to this? (Laughter) Thank God you can all read! It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species?Secondly — and you're going to hear more from me about this — we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. We have got to develop the idea that the Earth doesn't last forever, our sun doesn't last forever. If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way. And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. (Applause) It'll also help us a lot, if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight —(Voice: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED.) (Laughter) (Applause)SP: You've got it! You've got the job.Number eight: the ecosystem collapses. Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article. It wasn't really a research report; it was a screed. They said, we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we want to tell you they're not in trouble, they're near collapse. Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years. California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. There's really a tree like that out there. That's really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions?There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late. We need to know earlier that they're getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. And with the kind of computing power we have now, there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. National Science Foundation needs to say — you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. And they get to prioritize, you know? There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say, this is the most important thing. This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about.Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around. There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank, or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone. They can't fish there for a radius of 200 miles. And an amazing thing has happened: almost all the fish have come back, and they're reproducing like crazy. We're going to have to start doing this around the globe. We're going to have to have no-take zones. We're going to have to say, no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. Let it recover, before we start logging again. (Applause)Number seven: particle accelerator mishap. You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. This spring — there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island — this spring, it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. They are expecting to create little, tiny black holes. They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter)Other collider experiments — there's one that's going to take place next summer at CERN — have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter. Whenever they hit other matter, they destroy it and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right. But, all around the world, in Japan, in Canada, there's talk about this, of reviving this in the United States. We shut one down that was going to be big. But there's talk of building very big accelerators. What can we do about this? What are the solutions?We've got the fox watching the henhouse here. We need to — we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments.Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the Earth. We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons. And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth.Number six: biotech disaster. It's one of my favorite ones, because we've done several stories on Bt corn. Bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer. You may of heard of it — heard it called StarLink, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where Bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found Bt corn genes in wild corn plants. Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico. This is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn. This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world, from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order.So, what do we do about that? We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. When the StarLink disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy.Number five, one of my favorites: reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history. North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are — well, basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter)(Voice: Steve, I have some additional hats downstairs.)SP: So, what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue. It's been 780,000 years since this happened. So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago. Oh, and here's one other thing. Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent. So, maybe we're in the throes of it. One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have — you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer.So, there's a fairly simple solution to this. There's going to be a lot of cheap rocketry that's going to come online in about six or seven years that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms. If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. You don't need that much up there. We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer. (Applause)Number four: giant solar flares. Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles. So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this. Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity. But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long. And they think these are super-flares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our Sun so far.Obviously, we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it. In studying stars like our Sun, we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent. One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here. So, what can we do about this?(Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects. I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993. This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. Really more like 500 years to do it right. There's no reason why we shouldn't start now. (Laughter)Number three — isn't this stuff cool? (Laughter) A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand. In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. That was back when the population was around 100 million people. The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. AIDS is coming back. Ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We've all learned what — the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax.The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. And we know staph can do amazing things. A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. The danger is that some germ like staph will be — will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. That's happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease. So, what can we do about it?It is nuts. We give antibiotics — (Applause) — every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all. You know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it's all farmed. You know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it's a wild fish, cause they're not going to tell you. We're giving away the code. This is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code. We're telling the germs out there how to fight us. We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away.Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. We have a real, major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. Now, there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. But I don't think to any extent that it really needs to be done.Number two — my favorite — we meet a rogue black hole. You know, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, really, you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, ""You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy,"" and they're going to hoot you off the stage. And now, if you went into one of those conventions and you said, ""Well, I don't think black holes are out there,"" they'd hoot you off the stage. Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really — has just gained unbelievably in recent years.We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy. And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them. Most of them should be in orbit around something. But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. And also, space is incredibly vast. So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. But it only has to get close, about a billion miles away, one of these things. About a billion miles away, here's what happens to Earth's orbit: it becomes elliptical instead of circular. And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180. For three months out of the year, they go to 50 below zero. That won't work too well. What can we do about this? And this is my scariest. (Laughter) I don't have a good answer for this one. Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race.And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth. The important thing to remember here — this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles. It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years. In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth.Nothing to worry about, right? It passed directly through Earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier. A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up — Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing. An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions. We think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide. Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which — some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt. There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud. There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock — comets, really — out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin, in towards the Sun and pass reasonably close to us. Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall — they're making the first map of the universe, three-dimensional map of the universe — that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger. So you say, yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening? Andrew, can you put that chart up?This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwest Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done. Now look at the one right below that. Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. Could we have the solutions?NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks — that is like pocket change — to search for asteroids. Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth. And they're trying to do that. But it's going to take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then, they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued. Comets are a tougher act. We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. We really need a dedicated observatory. You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs. We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets.Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing. We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And these guys orbited a 30 — or no, about a 22-mile long asteroid called Eros. And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed. When the mission was over, they actually landed on the thing. We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal. Now, the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you don't have anything to push against in space, because there's no air. A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid, or vaporize it, would be more like it.But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth. This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it. I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. Yikes! So many big threats!The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11. We don't want to get caught flat-footed again. We know about this stuff. Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. Knowledge is power. The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_petranek_counts_down_to_armageddon
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"I am known best for human-powered flight, but that was just one thing that got me going in the sort of things that I'm working in now. As a youngster, I was very interested in model airplanes, ornithopters, autogyros, helicopters, gliders, power planes, indoor models, outdoor models, everything, which I just thought was a lot of fun, and wondered why most other people didn't share my same enthusiasm with them. And then, navy pilot training, and, after college, I got into sailplane flying, power plane flying, and considered the sailplanes as a sort of hobby and fun, but got tangled up with some great professor types, who convinced me and everybody else in the field that this was a good way to get into really deep science.While this was all going on, I was in the field of weather modification, although getting a Ph.D. in aeronautics. The weather modification subject was getting started, and as a graduate student, I could go around to the various talks that were being given, on a hitchhiker ride to the East Coast, and so on. And everybody would talk to me, but all the professionals in the field hated each other, and they wouldn't communicate. And as a result, I got the absolutely unique background in that field, and started a company, which did more research in weather modification than anybody, and there are a lot of things that I just can't go into. But then, 1971 started AeroVironment, with no employees — then one or two, three, and sort of fumbled along on trying to get interesting projects. We had AirDynamisis, who, like I, did not want to work for aerospace companies on some big, many year project, and so we did our small projects, and the company slowly grew.The thing that is exciting was, in 1976, I suddenly got interested in the human-powered airplane because I'd made a made a loan to a friend of 100,000 dollars, or I guaranteed the money at the bank. He needed them — he needed the money for starting a company. The company did not succeed, and he couldn't pay the money back, and I was the guarantor of the note. So, I had a $100,000 debt, and I noticed that the Kramer prize for human-powered flight, which had then been around for — (Laughter) — 17 years at the time, was 50,000 pounds, which, at the exchange rate, was just about 100,000 dollars.So suddenly, I was interested in human-powered flight — (Laughter) — and did not — the way I approached it, first, thinking about ways to make the planes, was just like they'd been doing in England, and not succeeding, and I gave it up. I figured, nah, there isn't any simple, easy way. But then, got off on a vacation trip, and was studying bird flight, just for the fun of it, and you can watch a bird soaring around in circles, and measure the time, and estimate the bank angle, and immediately, figure out its speed, and the turning radius, and so on, which I could do in the car, as we're driving along on a vacation trip — (Laughter) — with my three sons, young sons, helping me, but ridiculing the whole thing very much.But that began thinking about how birds went around, and then how airplanes would, how hang gliders would fly, and then other planes, and the idea of the Gossamer-Condor-type airplane quickly emerged, was so logical, one should have thought of it in the first place, but one didn't. And it was just, keep the weight down — 70 pounds was all it weighed — but let the size swell up, like a hang glider, but three times the span, three times the cord. You're down to a third of the speed, a third of the power, and a good bicyclist can put out that power, and that worked, and we won the prize a year later.We didn't — a lot of flying, a lot of experiments, a lot of things that didn't work, and ones that did work, and the plane kept getting a little better, a little better. Got a good pilot, Brian Allen, to operate it, and finally, succeeded. But unfortunately, about 65,000 dollars was spent on the project.(Laughter)And there was only about 30 to help retire the debt. But fortunately, Henry Kramer, who put up the prize for — that was a one-mile flight — put up a new prize for flying the English Channel, 21 miles. And he thought it would take another 18 years for somebody to win that. We realized that if you just cleaned up our Gossamer Condor a little bit, the power to fly would be decreased a little bit, and if you decrease the power required a little, the pilot can fly a much longer period of time. And Brian Allen was able, in a miraculous flight, to get the Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, and we won the 100,000-pound, 200,000-dollar prize for that. And when all expenses were paid, the debt was handled, and everything was fine. It turned out that giving the planes to the museum was worth much more than the debt, so for five years, six years, I only had to pay one third income tax. So, there were good economic reasons for the project, but — (Laughter) —that's not, well, the project was done entirely for economic reasons, and we have not been involved in any human-powered flight since then — (Laughter) — because the prizes are all over. (Laughter) But that sure started me thinking about various things, and immediately, we began making a solar-powered plane because we felt solar power was going to be so important for the country and the world, we didn't want the small funding in the government to be decreased, which is what the government was trying to do with it. And we thought a solar-powered plane wouldn't really make sense, but you could do it and it would get a lot of publicity for solar power and maybe help that field. And that project continued, did succeed, and we then got into other projects in aviation and mechanical things and ground devices.But while this was going on, in 1982, I got a prize from the Lindbergh Foundation — their annual prize — and I had to prepare a paper on it, which collected all my varied thoughts and varied interests over the years. This was the one chance that I had to focus on what I, really, was after, and what was important. And to my surprise, I realized the importance of environmental issues, which Charles Lindbergh devoted the last third of his life to, and preparing that paper did me a lot of good. I thought back about if I was a space traveler, and came and visited Earth every 5,000 years. And for a few thousand visits, I would see the same thing every time, the little differences in the Earth.But this last time, just coming round, right now, suddenly, there'd be huge changes in the environment, in the concentration of people, and it was just unbelievable, the amount of — all the change in it. I wanted to — well, one of the biggest changes is, 200 years ago, we began using coal from underground, which has a lot of pollution, and 100 years ago, began getting gasoline from underground, with a lot of pollution. And gasoline consumption, or production, will reach its limit in about ten years, and then go down, and we wonder what's going to happen with transportation.I wanted to show the slide — this slide, I think, is the most important one any of you will see, ever, because — (Laughter) (Applause) — it shows nature versus humans, and goes from 1850 to 2050. And so, the year 2000, you see there. And this is the weight of all air and land vertebrates. Humans and muskrats and giraffes and birds and so on, are — the red line goes up. That's the humans and livestock and pets portion. The green line goes down. That's the wild nature portion. Humans, livestock and pets are, now, 98 percent of the total world's mass of vertebrates on land and air. And you don't know what the future will hold, but it's not going to get a lower percentage. Ten thousand years ago, the humans and livestock and pets were not even one tenth of one percent and wouldn't even have been visible on such a curve. Now they are 98 percent, and it, I think, shows human domination of the Earth.I give a talk to some remarkable high school students each summer, and ask them, after they've asked me questions, and I give them a talk and so on. Then I ask them questions. What's the population of the Earth? What's the population of the Earth going to be when you're the age of your parents? Which I'd never, really — they had never, really, thought about but, now, they think about it. And then, what population of the Earth would be an equilibrium that could continue on, and be for 2050, 2100, 2150? And they form little groups, all fighting with each other, and when I leave, two hours later, most of them are saying about 2 billion people, and they don't have any clue about how to get down to 2 billion, nor do I, but I think they're right and this is a serious problem.Rachel Carson was thinking of these, and came out with ""Silent Spring,"" way back. ""Solar Manifesto"" by Hermann Scheer, in Germany, claims all energy on Earth can be derived, for every country, from solar energy and water, and so on. You don't need to dig down for these chemicals, and we can do things much more efficiently. Let's have the next slide. So this just summarizes it. ""Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life — complex and probable, wonderful and fragile.Suddenly, we humans, a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature, have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We, now, wield the paintbrush."" We're in charge. It's frightening. And I do a painting every 20 or 25 years. This is the last one. (Laughter) And [it] shows the Earth in a time flag: on the right, in trilobites and dinosaurs and so on; and over the triangle, we now get to civilization and TV and traffic jams and so on. I have no idea of what comes next, so I just used robotic and natural cockroaches as the future, as a little warning. And two weeks after this drawing was done, we actually had our first project contract, at AeroVironment, on robotic cockroaches, which was very frightening to me.(Laughter) (Paper rustling)Well, that'll be all the slides. As time went on, we stopped our environmental programs. We focused more on the really serious energy problems of the future, and we produced products for the company. And we developed the impact car that General Motors made, the EV1, out of — and got the Air Resources Board to have the regulations that stimulated the electric cars, but they've since come apart. And we've done a lot of things, small drone airplanes and so on. I have a Helios. We have the first video.(Video) Narrator: With a wingspan of 247 feet, this makes her larger than a Boeing 747.(Music)Her designers' attention to detail and her construction gives Helios' structure the flexibility and strength to deal with the turbulence encountered in the atmosphere. This enables her to easily ride through the air currents as if she's sliding along on the ocean waves.Paul MacCready: The wings could touch together on top and not break. We think.(Laughter)Narrator: And Helios now begins the process of turning her back to the sun, to maximize the power from her solar array.(Music) As the sky gets darker, and the outside air temperatures drop below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the most environmentally hostile segment of Helios's journey has gone by without notice, except for being recorded by specially designed data acquisition systems and their associated sensors. Approaching a peak radar altitude of 96,863 feet, at 4:12 p.m., Helios is standing on top of 98 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. This is more than 10,000 feet higher than the previous world's altitude record held by the SR-71 Blackbird.(Applause)PM: That plane has many purposes, but it's aimed for communications, and it can fly so slowly that it'll just stay up at 65,000 feet. Eventually, it will be able to have to stay up day, night, day, night, for six months at a time, acting like the synchronous satellite, but only ten miles above the Earth. Let's have the next video. This shows the other end of the spectrum.(Video) Narrator: A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer serves for surveillance. In effect a pair of roving eyeglasses, a cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble, and launch by hand. Battery-powered, it is silent and rarely noticed. It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With on-board GPS, it can navigate autonomously, and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage.PM: Okay, and let's have the next.(Applause)That plane is widely used by the military, now, in all their operations. Let's have the next video.(Video) (Music)Alan Alda: He's got it, he's got it, he's got it on his head.(Music)We're going to end our visit with Paul MacCready's flying circus by meeting his son, Tyler, who, with his two brothers, helped build the Gossamer Condor, 25 years ago.Tyler MacCready: You can chase it, like this, for hours.AA: When they got bored with their father's project, they invented an extraordinary little plane of their own.TM: And I can control it by putting the lift on one side of the wing, or on the other.AA: They called it their Walkalong Glider.(Music)I've never seen anything like that. How old were you when you invented that?TM: Oh, 10, 11. (AA: Oh my God.)TM: 12, something like that. (AA: That's amazing.)PM: And Tyler's here to show you the Walkalong.(Applause)TM: All right. You all got a couple of these in your gift bags, and one of the first things, the production version seemed to dive a little bit, and so I would just suggest you bend the wing tips up a little bit before you try flying it. I'll give you a demonstration of how it works. The idea is that it soars on the lift over your body, like a seagull soaring on a cliff. As the wind comes up, it has to go over the cliff, so as you walk through the air, it goes around your body, some has to go over you. And so you just keep the glider positioned in that up current. The launch is the difficult part: you've got to hold it high up, over your head, and you start walking forward, and just let go of it, and you can control it like that.(Laughter)And then also, like it said in the video, you can turn it left or right just by putting the lift under one wing or another. So I can do it — oops, that was going to be a right turn.(Laughter)Okay, this one will be a left turn. Here, but — (Applause) — anyway. (Applause) And that's it, so you can just control it, wherever you want, and it's just hours of fun. And these are no longer in production, so you have real collector's items.(Laughter)And this, we just wanted to show you — if we can get the video running on this, yeah — just an example of a little video surveillance.(Laughter)This was flying around in the party last night, and — (Laughter) — you can see how it just can fly around, and you can spy on anybody you want.(Laughter)And that's it. I was going to bring an airplane, but I was worried about hitting people in here, so I thought this would be a little bit more gentle. And that's it, yeah, just a few inventions. (Applause) All right.","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_maccready_flies_on_solar_wings
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"In the next 18 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey. And it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now, and it began some 50 years ago, when humans first stepped off our planet. And in those 50 years, not only did we literally, physically set foot on the moon, but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets — all eight of them — and we have landed on asteroids, we have rendezvoused with comets, and, at this point in time, we have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, the body formerly known as a planet. And all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey: a voyage to understand something, to get a sense of our cosmic place, to understand something of our origins, and how Earth, our planet, and we, living on it, came to be.And of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this, there's Saturn. And we have been to Saturn before — we visited Saturn in the early 1980s — but our investigations of Saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the Cassini spacecraft, traveling across interplanetary space for seven years, glided into orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004, and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the Sun.Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach. In fact, just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies. And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. And then, here's a beautiful composite of the Whirlpool Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.So the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us, and also how humans fit into that picture. And it pains me that I can't tell you all that we have learned with Cassini. I can't show you all the beautiful pictures that we've taken in the last two and a half years, because I simply don't have the time. So I'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around Saturn, and have been for the past two and a half years.Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons. They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S. Most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn, in fact, show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons. Here's Saturn with Dione, and then, here's Saturn showing the rings edge-on, showing you just how vertically thin they are, with the moon Enceladus. Now, two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts.And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system. And it is a body that has long intrigued people who've watched the planets. It has a very large, thick atmosphere, and in fact, its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the Earth, or at least had in the past, than any other body in the solar system. Its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen, like you are breathing here in this room, except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane. And these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down, and their products join together to make haze particles. This haze is ubiquitous. It's completely global and enveloping Titan. And that's why you cannot see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum.But these haze particles, it was surmised, before we got there with Cassini, over billions and billions of years, gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge. So like the equivalent, the Titan equivalent, of tar, or oil, or what — we didn't know what. But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan. And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth. It's a condensable in the atmosphere, and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities. You can have methane clouds, OK, and above those clouds, you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze, which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface. The temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.But despite that cold, you could have rain falling down on the surface of Titan. And doing on Titan what rain does on the Earth: it carves gullies; it forms rivers and cataracts; it can create canyons; it can pool in large basins and craters. It can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills, down into the lowlands. So stop and think for a minute. Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like. It's dark. High noon on Titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the Earth. It's cold, it's eerie, it's misty, it might be raining, and you might be standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner. (Laughter)That is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini, and I can tell you that what we have found on Titan, though it is not the same in detail, is every bit as fascinating as that story is. And for us, it has been like — the Cassini people — it has been like a Jules Verne adventure come true. As I said, it has a thick, extensive atmosphere. This is a picture of Titan, backlit by the Sun, with the rings as a beautiful backdrop. And yet another moon there — I don't even know which one it is. It's a very extensive atmosphere. We have instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere, and my camera system is one of them. And we have taken pictures like this. And what you see is bright and dark regions, and that's about as far as it got for us. It was so mystifying: we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan. When you look closer at this region, you start to see things like sinuous channels — we didn't know. You see a few round things. This, we later found out, is, in fact, a crater, but there are very few craters on the surface of Titan, meaning it's a very young surface. And there are features that look tectonic. They look like they've been pulled apart. Whenever you see anything linear on a planet, it means there's been a fracture, like a fault. And so it's been tectonically altered.But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan. And that was the deployment of the Huygens probe, the European-built Huygens probe that Cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system. We deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan, it took two and a half hours to descend, and it landed on the surface. And I just want to emphasize how significant an event this is. This is a device of human making, and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history. It is so significant that, in my mind, this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the U.S. and Europe, and sadly, that wasn't the case. (Laughter).It was significant for another reason. This is an international mission, and this event was celebrated in Europe, in Germany, and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents, and American accents, and German accents, and French and Italian and Dutch accents. It was a moving demonstration of what the words ""united nations"" are supposed to mean: a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good. And, in this case, it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet, and to come to understand a planetary system that, for all of human history, had been unreachable, and now humans had actually touched it. So it was — I mean, I'm getting goose bumps just talking about it. It was a tremendously emotional event, and it's something that I will personally never forget, and you shouldn't either. (Applause).But anyway, the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down, and it also took panoramic pictures. And I can't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of Titan's surface from the probe. And this is what we saw. And it was a shocker, because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be. It was an unambiguous pattern, a geological pattern. It's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids. And you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge. And they converge into this channel here, which drains into this region. You are looking at a shoreline. Was this a shoreline of fluids? We didn't know. But this is somewhat of a shoreline.This picture is taken at 16 kilometers. This is the picture taken at eight kilometers, OK? Again, the shoreline. Okay, now, 16 kilometers, eight kilometers — this is roughly an airline altitude. If you were going to take an airplane trip across the U.S., you would be flying at these altitudes. So, this is the picture you would have at the window of Titanian Airlines as you fly across the surface of Titan. (Laughter)And then finally, the probe came to rest on the surface, and I'm going to show you, ladies and gentlemen, the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system. And here is the horizon, OK? These are probably water ice pebbles, yes? (Applause). And obviously, it landed in one of these flat, dark regions and it didn't sink out of sight. So it wasn't fluid that we landed in. What the probe came down in was basically the Titan equivalent of a mud flat. This is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane. And it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw, and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins. And that is what the Huygens probe landed in.But still, there was no sign in our images, or even in the Huygens' images, of any large, open bodies of fluids. Where were they? It got even more puzzling when we found dunes. OK, so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan, showing these dunes. These are dunes that are 100 meters tall, separated by a few kilometers, and they go on for miles and miles and miles. There's hundreds, up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes. This is the Saharan desert of Titan. It's obviously a place which is very dry, or you wouldn't get dunes.So again, it got puzzling that there were no bodies of fluid, until finally, we saw lakes in the polar regions. And there is a lake scene in the south polar region of Titan. It's about the size of Lake Ontario. And then, only a week and a half ago, we flew over the north pole of Titan and found, again, we found a feature here the size of the Caspian Sea. So it seems that the liquids, for some reason we don't understand, or during at least this season, are apparently at the poles of Titan. And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth-like, and having Earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself.And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat. (Laughter). And Enceladus is very white, it's very bright, and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures. It is a very geologically active body. But the mother lode of discoveries on Enceladus was found at the south pole — and we're looking at the south pole here — where we found this system of fractures. And they're a different color because they're a different composition. They are coated. These fractures are coated with organic materials. Moreover, this whole, entire region, the south polar region, has elevated temperatures. It's the hottest place on the planet, on the body. That's as bizarre as finding that the Antarctic on the Earth is hotter than the tropics.And then, when we took additional pictures, we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine, icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space. And when we color-code this image, to bring out the faint light levels, we see that these jets feed a plume that, in fact, we see, in other images, goes thousands of miles into the space above Enceladus. My team and I have examined images like this, and like this one, and have thought about the other results from Cassini. And we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of Enceladus.So we have, possibly, liquid water, organic materials and excess heat. In other words, we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration, or in other words, an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms. And I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system, whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere, would have enormous cultural and scientific implications. Because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred not once, but twice, independently, in our solar system, then that means, by inference, it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the universe and its 13.7 billion year history.Right now, Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life. It is precious, it is unique, it is still, so far, the only home we've ever known. And if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s — and we'd forgive you, if you weren't, OK — you would remember this very famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. It was the first time that Earth was imaged from space, and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe, and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet.Well, we on Cassini have taken an equivalent first, a picture that no human eye has ever seen before. It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn. And in this impossibly beautiful picture, you see the main rings backlit by the Sun, you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created, in fact, by the exhalations of Enceladus. But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings.Now, there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar, and capturing the sight of our little, blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds. And that, and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that, may be, in the end, the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago. And thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn
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(Applause)(Music)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/kenichi_ebina_s_magic_moves
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"Chris Anderson: Welcome to TED.Richard Branson: Thank you very much. The first TED has been great.CA: Have you met anyone interesting?RB: Well, the nice thing about TED is everybody's interesting. I was very glad to see Goldie Hawn, because I had an apology to make to her. I'd had dinner with her about two years ago and I'd — she had this big wedding ring and I put it on my finger and I couldn't get it off. And I went home to my wife that night and she wanted to know why I had another woman's big, massive, big wedding ring on my finger. And, anyway, the next morning we had to go along to the jeweler and get it cut off. So — (Laughter) — so apologies to Goldie.CA: That's pretty good. So, we're going to put up some slides of some of your companies here. You've started one or two in your time. So, you know, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records — I guess it all started with a magazine called Student. And then, yes, all these other ones as well. I mean, how do you do this?RB: I read all these sort of TED instructions: you must not talk about your own business, and this, and now you ask me. So I suppose you're not going to be able to kick me off the stage, since you asked the question. (Laughter)CA: It depends what the answer is though.RB: No, I mean, I think I learned early on that if you can run one company, you can really run any companies. I mean, companies are all about finding the right people, inspiring those people, you know, drawing out the best in people. And I just love learning and I'm incredibly inquisitive and I love taking on, you know, the status quo and trying to turn it upside down. So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see — you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't, 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on. And so, you know, so got one secondhand 747 from Boeing and gave it a go.CA: Well, that was a bizarre thing, because you made this move that a lot of people advised you was crazy. And in fact, in a way, it almost took down your empire at one point. I had a conversation with one of the investment bankers who, at the time when you basically sold Virgin Records and invested heavily in Virgin Atlantic, and his view was that you were trading, you know, the world's fourth biggest record company for the twenty-fifth biggest airline and that you were out of your mind. Why did you do that?RB: Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line. We had — we were being attacked by British Airways. They were trying to put our airline out of business, and they launched what's become known as the dirty tricks campaign. And I realized that the whole empire was likely to come crashing down unless I chipped in a chip. And in order to protect the jobs of the people who worked for the airline, and protect the jobs of the people who worked for the record company, I had to sell the family jewelry to protect the airline.CA: Post-Napster, you're looking like a bit of a genius, actually, for that as well.RB: Yeah, as it turned out, it proved to be the right move. But, yeah, it was sad at the time, but we moved on.CA: Now, you use the Virgin brand a lot and it seems like you're getting synergy from one thing to the other. What does the brand stand for in your head?RB: Well, I like to think it stands for quality, that you know, if somebody comes across a Virgin company, they —CA: They are quality, Richard. Come on now, everyone says quality. Spirit?RB: No, but I was going to move on this. We have a lot of fun and I think the people who work for it enjoy it. As I say, we go in and shake up other industries, and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.CA: I mean, there are a few launches you've done where the brand maybe hasn't worked quite as well. I mean, Virgin Brides — what happened there? (Laughter)RB: We couldn't find any customers. (Laughter) (Applause)CA: I was actually also curious why — I think you missed an opportunity with your condoms launch. You called it Mates. I mean, couldn't you have used the Virgin brand for that as well? Ain't virgin no longer, or something.RB: Again, we may have had problems finding customers. I mean, we had — often, when you launch a company and you get customer complaints, you know, you can deal with them. But about three months after the launch of the condom company, I had a letter, a complaint, and I sat down and wrote a long letter back to this lady apologizing profusely. But obviously, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. And then six months later, or nine months after the problem had taken, I got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if I'd be godfather, which I became. So, it all worked out well.CA: Really? You should have brought a picture. That's wonderful.RB: I should have.CA: So, just help us with some of the numbers. I mean, what are the numbers on this? I mean, how big is the group overall? How much — what's the total revenue?RB: It's about 25 billion dollars now, in total.CA: And how many employees?RB: About 55,000.CA: So, you've been photographed in various ways at various times and never worrying about putting your dignity on the line or anything like that. What was that? Was that real?RB: Yeah. We were launching a megastore in Los Angeles, I think. No, I mean, I think — CA: But is that your hair? RB: No. CA: What was that one?RB: Dropping in for tea.CA: OK. (Laughter)RB: Ah, that was quite fun. That was a wonderful car-boat in which —CA: Oh, that car that we — actually we — it was a TEDster event there, I think. Is that — could you still pause on that one actually, for a minute? (Laughter)RB: It's a tough job, isn't it?CA: I mean, it is a tough job. (Laughter) When I first came to America, I used to try this with employees as well and they kind of — they have these different rules over here, it's very strange.RB: I know, I have — the lawyers say you mustn't do things like that, but —CA: I mean, speaking of which, tell us about —RB: ""Pammy"" we launched, you know — mistakenly thought we could take on Coca-Cola, and we launched a cola bottle called ""The Pammy"" and it was shaped a bit like Pamela Anderson. But the trouble is, it kept on tipping over, but — (Laughter)CA: Designed by Philippe Starck perhaps?RB: Of course.CA: So, we'll just run a couple more pictures here. Virgin Brides. Very nice. And, OK, so stop there. This was — you had some award I think?RB: Yeah, well, 25 years earlier, we'd launched the Sex Pistols' ""God Save The Queen,"" and I'd certainly never expected that 25 years later — that she'd actually knight us. But somehow, she must have had a forgetful memory, I think.CA: Well, God saved her and you got your just reward. Do you like to be called Sir Richard, or how?RB: Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.CA: OK. So can you use your knighthood for anything or is it just ...RB: No. I suppose if you're having problems getting a booking in a restaurant or something, that might be worth using it.CA: You know, it's not Richard Branson. It's Sir Richard Branson.RB: I'll go get the secretary to use it.CA: OK. So let's look at the space thing. I think, with us, we've got a video that shows what you're up to, and Virgin Galactic up in the air. (Video) So that's the Bert Rutan designed spaceship?RB: Yeah, it'll be ready in — well, ready in 12 months and then we do 12 months extensive testing. And then 24 months from now, people will be able to take a ride into space.CA: So this interior is Philippe Starcke designed?RB: Philippe has done the — yeah, quite a bit of it: the logos and he's building the space station in New Mexico. And basically, he's just taken an eye and the space station will be one giant eye, so when you're in space, you ought to be able to see this massive eye looking up at you. And when you land, you'll be able to go back into this giant eye. But he's an absolute genius when it comes to design.CA: But you didn't have him design the engine?RB: Philippe is quite erratic, so I think that he wouldn't be the best person to design the engine, no.CA: He gave a wonderful talk here two days ago.RB: Yeah? No, he is a —CA: Well, some people found it wonderful, some people found it completely bizarre. But, I personally found it wonderful.RB: He's a wonderful enthusiast, which is why I love him. But ...CA: So, now, you've always had this exploration bug in you. Have you ever regretted that?RB: Many times. I mean, I think with the ballooning and boating expeditions we've done in the past. Well, I got pulled out of the sea I think six times by helicopters, so — and each time, I didn't expect to come home to tell the tale. So in those moments, you certainly wonder what you're doing up there or —CA: What was the closest you got to — when did you think, this is it, I might be on my way out?RB: Well, I think the balloon adventures were — each one was, each one, actually, I think we came close. And, I mean, first of all we — nobody had actually crossed the Atlantic in a hot air balloon before, so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream, and we weren't quite sure, when a balloon actually got into the jet stream, whether it would actually survive the 200, 220 miles an hour winds that you can find up there. And so, just the initial lift off from Sugarloaf to cross the Atlantic, as we were pushing into the jet stream, this enormous balloon — the top of the balloon ended up going at a couple of hundred miles an hour, the capsule that we were in at the bottom was going at maybe two miles an hour, and it just took off. And it was like holding onto a thousand horses. And we were just crossing every finger, praying that the balloon would hold together, which, fortunately, it did. But the ends of all those balloon trips were, you know — something seemed to go wrong every time, and on that particular occasion, the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped, and left me holding on for dear life. (Laughter)CA: Did he tell you to jump, or he just said, ""I'm out of here!"" and ...RB: No, he told me jump, but once his weight had gone, the balloon just shot up to 12,000 feet and I ...CA: And you inspired an Ian McEwan novel I think with that.RB: Yeah. No, I put on my oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon, with my parachute, looking at the swirling clouds below, trying to pluck up my courage to jump into the North Sea, which — and it was a very, very, very lonely few moments. But, anyway, we managed to survive it.CA: Did you jump? Or it came down in the end?RB: Well, I knew I had about half an hour's fuel left, and I also knew that the chances were that if I jumped, I would only have a couple of minutes of life left. So I climbed back into the capsule and just desperately tried to make sure that I was making the right decision. And wrote some notes to my family. And then climbed back up again, looked down at those clouds again, climbed back into the capsule again. And then finally, just thought, there's a better way. I've got, you know, this enormous balloon above me, it's the biggest parachute ever, why not use it? And so I managed to fly the balloon down through the clouds, and about 50 feet, before I hit the sea, threw myself over. And the balloon hit the sea and went shooting back up to 10,000 feet without me. But it was a wonderful feeling being in that water and —CA: What did you write to your family?RB: Just what you would do in a situation like that: just I love you very much. And I'd already written them a letter before going on this trip, which — just in case anything had happened. But fortunately, they never had to use it.CA: Your companies have had incredible PR value out of these heroics. The years — and until I stopped looking at the polls, you were sort of regarded as this great hero in the U.K. and elsewhere. And cynics might say, you know, this is just a smart business guy doing what it takes to execute his particular style of marketing. How much was the PR value part of this? RB: Well, of course, the PR experts said that as an airline owner, the last thing you should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats, and crashing into the seas. (Laughter)CA: They have a point, Richard.RB: In fact, I think our airline took a full page ad at the time saying, you know, come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic. (Laughter)CA: To do all this, you must have been a genius from the get-go, right?RB: Well, I won't contradict that. (Laughter)CA: OK, this isn't exactly hardball. OK.Didn't — weren't you just terrible at school?RB: I was dyslexic. I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I — if I'm not interested in something, I don't grasp it. As somebody who's dyslexic, you also have some quite bizarre situations. I mean, for instance, I've had to — you know, I've been running the largest group of private companies in Europe, but haven't been able to know the difference between net and gross. And so the board meetings have been fascinating. (Laughter) And so, it's like, good news or bad news? And generally, the people would say, oh, well that's bad news.CA: But just to clarify, the 25 billion dollars is gross, right? That's gross? (Laughter)RB: Well, I hope it's net actually, having — (Laughter) — I've got it right.CA: No, trust me, it's gross. (Laughter)RB: So, when I turned 50, somebody took me outside the boardroom and said, ""Look Richard, here's a — let me draw on a diagram. Here's a net in the sea, and the fish have been pulled from the sea into this net. And that's the profits you've got left over in this little net, everything else is eaten."" And I finally worked it all out. (Laughter) (Applause)CA: But, I mean, at school — so as well as being, you know, doing pretty miserably academically, but you were also the captain of the cricket and football teams. So you were kind of a — you were a natural leader, but just a bit of a ... Were you a rebel then, or how would you ...RB: Yeah, I think I was a bit of a maverick and — but I ... And I was, yeah, I was fortunately good at sport, and so at least I had something to excel at, at school.CA: And some bizarre things happened just earlier in your life. I mean, there's the story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field, aged four, and saying ""OK, walk home."" Did this really happen?RB: She was, you know, she felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet from an early age. So she did things to us, which now she'd be arrested for, such as pushing us out of the car, and telling us to find our own way to Granny's, about five miles before we actually got there. And making us go on wonderful, long bike rides. And we were never allowed to watch television and the like.CA: But is there a risk here? I mean, there's a lot of people in the room who are wealthy, and they've got kids, and we've got this dilemma about how you bring them up. Do you look at the current generation of kids coming up and think they're too coddled, they don't know what they've got, we're going to raise a generation of privileged ...RB: No, I think if you're bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don't think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.CA: You didn't turn out too bad, I have to say, I'm ... Your headmaster said to you — I mean he found you kind of an enigma at your school — he said, you're either going to be a millionaire or go to prison, and I'm not sure which. Which of those happened first? (Laughter)RB: Well, I've done both. I think I went to prison first. I was actually prosecuted under two quite ancient acts in the U.K. I was prosecuted under the 1889 Venereal Diseases Act and the 1916 Indecent Advertisements Act. On the first occasion, for mentioning the word venereal disease in public, which — we had a center where we would help young people who had problems. And one of the problems young people have is venereal disease. And there's an ancient law that says you can't actually mention the word venereal disease or print it in public. So the police knocked on the door, and told us they were going to arrest us if we carried on mentioning the word venereal disease. We changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots, but nobody came with VD any more. So, we put it back to VD and promptly got arrested. And then subsequently, ""Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols,"" the word bollocks, the police decided was a rude word and so we were arrested for using the word bollocks on the Sex Pistols' album. And John Mortimer, the playwright, defended us. And he asked if I could find a linguistics expert to come up with a different definition of the word bollocks. And so I rang up Nottingham University, and I asked to talk to the professor of linguistics. And he said, ""Look, bollocks is not a — has nothing to do with balls whatsoever. It's actually a nickname given to priests in the eighteenth century."" (Laughter) And he went, ""Furthermore, I'm a priest myself."" And so I said, ""Would you mind coming to the court?"" And he said he'd be delighted. And I said — and he said, ""Would you like me to wear my dog collar?"" And I said, ""Yes, definitely. Please."" (Laughter)CA: That's great.RB: So our key witness argued that it was actually ""Never Mind the Priest, Here's the Sex Pistols."" (Laughter) And the judge found us — reluctantly found us not guilty, so ... (Laughter)CA: That is outrageous. (Applause) So seriously, is there a dark side? A lot of people would say there's no way that someone could put together this incredible collection of businesses without knifing a few people in the back, you know, doing some ugly things. You've been accused of being ruthless. There was a nasty biography written about you by someone. Is any of it true? Is there an element of truth in it?RB: I don't actually think that the stereotype of a businessperson treading all over people to get to the top, generally speaking, works. I think if you treat people well, people will come back and come back for more. And I think all you have in life is your reputation and it's a very small world. And I actually think that the best way of becoming a successful business leader is dealing with people fairly and well, and I like to think that's how we run Virgin.CA: And what about the people who love you and who see you spending — you keep getting caught up in these new projects, but it almost feels like you're addicted to launching new stuff. You get excited by an idea and, kapow! I mean, do you think about life balance? How do your family feel about each time you step into something big and new?RB: I also believe that being a father's incredibly important, so from the time the kids were very young, you know, when they go on holiday, I go on holiday with them. And so we spend a very good sort of three months away together. Yes, I'll, you know, be in touch. We're very lucky, we have this tiny little island in the Caribbean and we can — so I can take them there and we can bring friends, and we can play together, but I can also keep in touch with what's going on.CA: You started talking in recent years about this term capitalist philanthropy. What is that?RB: Capitalism has been proven to be a system that works. You know, the alternative, communism, has not worked. But the problem with capitalism is extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people, and therefore extreme responsibility, I think, goes with that wealth. And I think it's important that the individuals, who are in that fortunate position, do not end up competing for bigger and bigger boats, and bigger and bigger cars, but, you know, use that money to either create new jobs or to tackle issues around the world.CA: And what are the issues that you worry about most, care most about, want to turn your resources toward?RB: Well, there's — I mean there's a lot of issues. I mean global warming certainly is a massive threat to mankind and we are putting a lot of time and energy into, A, trying to come up with alternative fuels and, B, you know, we just launched this prize, which is really a prize in case we don't get an answer on alternative fuels, in case we don't actually manage to get the carbon emissions cut down quickly, and in case we go through the tipping point. We need to try to encourage people to come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. And we just — you know, there weren't really people working on that before, so we wanted people to try to — all the best brains in the world to start thinking about that, and also to try to extract the methane out of the Earth's atmosphere as well. And actually, we've had about 15,000 people fill in the forms saying they want to give it a go. And so we only need one, so we're hopeful.CA: And you're also working in Africa on a couple of projects?RB: Yes, I mean, we've got — we're setting up something called the war room, which is maybe the wrong word. We're trying to — maybe we'll change it — but anyway, it's a war room to try to coordinate all the attack that's going on in Africa, all the different social problems in Africa, and try to look at best practices. So, for instance, there's a doctor in Africa that's found that if you give a mother antiretroviral drugs at 24 weeks, when she's pregnant, that the baby will not have HIV when it's born. And so disseminating that information to around the rest of Africa is important.CA: The war room sounds, it sounds powerful and dramatic. And is there a risk that the kind of the business heroes of the West get so excited about — I mean, they're used to having an idea, getting stuff done, and they believe profoundly in their ability to make a difference in the world. Is there a risk that we go to places like Africa and say, we've got to fix this problem and we can do it, I've got all these billions of dollars, you know, da, da, da — here's the big idea. And kind of take a much more complex situation and actually end up making a mess of it. Do you worry about that?RB: Well, first of all, on this particular situation, we're actually — we're working with the government on it. I mean, Thabo Mbeki's had his problems with accepting HIV and AIDS are related, but this is a way, I think, of him tackling this problem and instead of the world criticizing him, it's a way of working with him, with his government. It's important that if people do go to Africa and do try to help, they don't just go in there and then leave after a few years. It's got to be consistent. But I think business leaders can bring their entrepreneurial know-how and help governments approach things slightly differently. For instance, we're setting up clinics in Africa where we're going to be giving free antiretroviral drugs, free TB treatment and free malaria treatment. But we're also trying to make them self-sustaining clinics, so that people pay for some other aspects.CA: I mean a lot of cynics say about someone like yourself, or Bill Gates, or whatever, that this is really being — it's almost driven by some sort of desire again, you know, for the right image, for guilt avoidance and not like a real philanthropic instinct. What would you say to them?RB: Well, I think that everybody — people do things for a whole variety of different reasons and I think that, you know, when I'm on me deathbed, I will want to feel that I've made a difference to other people's lives. And that may be a selfish thing to think, but it's the way I've been brought up. I think if I'm in a position to radically change other people's lives for the better, I should do so.CA: How old are you?RB: I'm 56.CA: I mean, the psychologist Erik Erikson says that — as I understand him and I'm a total amateur — but that during 30s, 40s people are driven by this desire to grow and that's where they get their fulfillment. 50s, 60s, the mode of operation shifts more to the quest for wisdom and a search for legacy. I mean, it seems like you're still a little bit in the growth phases, you're still doing these incredible new plans. How much do you think about legacy, and what would you like your legacy to be?RB: I don't think I think too much about legacy. I mean, I like to — you know, my grandmother lived to 101, so hopefully I've got another 30 or 40 years to go. No, I just want to live life to its full. You know, if I can make a difference, I hope to be able to make a difference. And I think one of the positive things at the moment is you've got Sergey and Larry from Google, for instance, who are good friends. And, thank God, you've got two people who genuinely care about the world and with that kind of wealth. If they had that kind of wealth and they didn't care about the world, it would be very worrying. And you know they're going to make a hell of a difference to the world. And I think it's important that people in that kind of position do make a difference.CA: Well, Richard, when I was starting off in business, I knew nothing about it and I also was sort of — I thought that business people were supposed to just be ruthless and that that was the only way you could have a chance of succeeding. And you actually did inspire me. I looked at you, I thought, well, he's made it. Maybe there is a different way. So I would like to thank you for that inspiration, and for coming to TED today. Thank you. Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_branson_s_life_at_30_000_feet
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"So, where are the robots? We've been told for 40 years already that they're coming soon. Very soon they'll be doing everything for us. They'll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren't here. Meanwhile, we have illegal immigrants doing all the work, but we don't have any robots. So what can we do about that? What can we say? So I want to give a little bit of a different perspective of how we can perhaps look at these things in a little bit of a different way. And this is an x-ray picture of a real beetle, and a Swiss watch, back from '88. You look at that — what was true then is certainly true today. We can still make the pieces. We can make the right pieces. We can make the circuitry of the right computational power, but we can't actually put them together to make something that will actually work and be as adaptive as these systems.So let's try to look at it from a different perspective. Let's summon the best designer, the mother of all designers. Let's see what evolution can do for us. So we threw in — we created a primordial soup with lots of pieces of robots — with bars, with motors, with neurons. Put them all together, and put all this under kind of natural selection, under mutation, and rewarded things for how well they can move forward. A very simple task, and it's interesting to see what kind of things came out of that.So if you look, you can see a lot of different machines come out of this. They all move around. They all crawl in different ways, and you can see on the right, that we actually made a couple of these things, and they work in reality. These are not very fantastic robots, but they evolved to do exactly what we reward them for:for moving forward. So that was all done in simulation, but we can also do that on a real machine. Here's a physical robot that we actually have a population of brains, competing, or evolving on the machine. It's like a rodeo show. They all get a ride on the machine, and they get rewarded for how fast or how far they can make the machine move forward. And you can see these robots are not ready to take over the world yet, but they gradually learn how to move forward, and they do this autonomously.So in these two examples, we had basically machines that learned how to walk in simulation, and also machines that learned how to walk in reality. But I want to show you a different approach, and this is this robot over here, which has four legs. It has eight motors, four on the knees and four on the hip. It has also two tilt sensors that tell the machine which way it's tilting.But this machine doesn't know what it looks like. You look at it and you see it has four legs, the machine doesn't know if it's a snake, if it's a tree, it doesn't have any idea what it looks like, but it's going to try to find that out. Initially, it does some random motion, and then it tries to figure out what it might look like. And you're seeing a lot of things passing through its minds, a lot of self-models that try to explain the relationship between actuation and sensing. It then tries to do a second action that creates the most disagreement among predictions of these alternative models, like a scientist in a lab. Then it does that and tries to explain that, and prune out its self-models.This is the last cycle, and you can see it's pretty much figured out what its self looks like. And once it has a self-model, it can use that to derive a pattern of locomotion. So what you're seeing here are a couple of machines — a pattern of locomotion. We were hoping that it wass going to have a kind of evil, spidery walk, but instead it created this pretty lame way of moving forward.But when you look at that, you have to remember that this machine did not do any physical trials on how to move forward, nor did it have a model of itself. It kind of figured out what it looks like, and how to move forward, and then actually tried that out. (Applause)So, we'll move forward to a different idea. So that was what happened when we had a couple of — that's what happened when you had a couple of — OK, OK, OK — (Laughter) — they don't like each other. So there's a different robot. That's what happened when the robots actually are rewarded for doing something. What happens if you don't reward them for anything, you just throw them in?So we have these cubes, like the diagram showed here. The cube can swivel, or flip on its side, and we just throw 1,000 of these cubes into a soup — this is in simulation —and don't reward them for anything, we just let them flip. We pump energy into this and see what happens in a couple of mutations. So, initially nothing happens, they're just flipping around there. But after a very short while, you can see these blue things on the right there begin to take over.They begin to self-replicate. So in absence of any reward, the intrinsic reward is self-replication. And we've actually built a couple of these, and this is part of a larger robot made out of these cubes. It's an accelerated view, where you can see the robot actually carrying out some of its replication process. So you're feeding it with more material — cubes in this case — and more energy, and it can make another robot. So of course, this is a very crude machine, but we're working on a micro-scale version of these, and hopefully the cubes will be like a powder that you pour in.OK, so what can we learn? These robots are of course not very useful in themselves, but they might teach us something about how we can build better robots, and perhaps how humans, animals, create self-models and learn. And one of the things that I think is important is that we have to get away from this idea of designing the machines manually, but actually let them evolve and learn, like children, and perhaps that's the way we'll get there. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hod_lipson_builds_self_aware_robots
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"What I am always thinking about is what this session is about, which is called simplicity. And almost, I would almost call it being simple-minded, but in the best sense of the word. I'm trying to figure out two very simple things: how to live and how to die, period. That's all I'm trying to do, all day long. And I'm also trying to have some meals, and have some snacks, and, you know, and yell at my children, and do all the normal things that keep you grounded.So, I was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child. My older sister was busy torturing my parents, and they were busy torturing her. I was lucky enough to be completely ignored, which is a fabulous thing, actually, I want to tell you. So, I was able to completely daydream my way through my life. And I finally daydreamed my way into NYU, at a very good time, in 1967, where I met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of NYU. And I was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him. And feminists hated us, and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end. But I kept writing bad poetry, and he didn't blow up the math building, but he went to Cuba. But I gave him the money, because I was from Riverdale so I had more money than he did. (Laughter) And that was a good thing to help, you know, the cause. But, then he came back, and things happened, and I decided I really hated my writing, that it was awful, awful, purple prose. And I decided that I wanted to tell — but I still wanted to tell a narrative story and I still wanted to tell my stories. So I decided that I would start to draw. How hard could that be? And so what happened was that I started just becoming an editorial illustrator through, you know, sheer whatever, sheer ignorance.And we started a studio. Well, Tibor really started the studio, called M&Co. And the premise of M&Co was, we don't know anything, but that's all right, we're going to do it anyway. And as a matter of fact, it's better not to know anything, because if you know too much, you're stymied. So, the premise in the studio was, there are no boundaries, there is no fear. And I — and my full-time job, I landed the best job on Earth, was to daydream, and to actually come up with absurd ideas that — fortunately, there were enough people there, and it was a team, it was a collective, it was not just me coming up with crazy ideas. But the point was that I was there as myself, as a dreamer. And so some of the things — I mean, it was a long history of M&Co, and clearly we also needed to make some money, so we decided we would create a series of products. And some of the watches there, attempting to be beautiful and humorous — maybe not attempting, hopefully succeeding. That to be able to talk about content, to break apart what you normally expect, to use humor and surprise, elegance and humanity in your work was really important to us. It was a very high, it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say, the content is what's important, not the package, not the wrapping. You really have to be journalists, you have to be inventors, you have to use your imagination more importantly than anything.So, the good news is that I have a dog and, though I don't know if I believe in luck — I don't know what I believe in, it's a very complicated question, but I do know that before I go away, I crank his tail seven times. So, whenever he sees a suitcase in the house, because everybody's always, you know, leaving, they're always cranking this wonderful dog's tail, and he runs to the other room. But I am able to make the transition from working for children and — from working for adults to children, and back and forth, because, you know, I can say that I'm immature, and in a way, that's true. I don't really — I mean, I could tell you that I didn't understand, I'm not proud of it, but I didn't understand let's say 95 percent of the talks at this conference. But I have been taking beautiful notes of drawings and I have a gorgeous onion from Murray Gell-Mann's talk. And I have a beautiful page of doodles from Jonathan Woodham's talk. So, good things come out of, you know, incomprehension — (Laughter) — which I will do a painting of, and then it will end up in my work. So, I'm open to the possibilities of not knowing and finding out something new.So, in writing for children, it seems simple, and it is. You have to condense a story into 32 pages, usually. And what you have to do is, you really have to edit down to what you want to say. And hopefully, you're not talking down to kids and you're not talking in such a way that you, you know, couldn't stand reading it after one time. So, I hopefully am writing, you know, books that are good for children and for adults. But the painting reflects — I don't think differently for children than I do for adults. I try to use the same kind of imagination, the same kind of whimsy, the same kind of love of language. So, you know, and I have lots of wonderful-looking friends.This is Andrew Gatz, and he walked in through the door and I said, ""You! Sit down there."" You know, I take lots of photos. And the Bertoia chair in the background is my favorite chair. So, I get to put in all of the things that I love. Hopefully, a dialog between adults and children will happen on many different levels, and hopefully different kinds of humor will evolve. And the books are really journals of my life. I never — I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning, you know, beginning, middle and end. It really scares me, because my life is too random and too confused, and I enjoy it that way.But anyway, so we were in Venice, and this is our room. And I had this dream that I was wearing this fantastic green gown, and I was looking out the window, and it was really a beautiful thing. And so, I was able to put that into this story, which is an alphabet, and hopefully go on to something else. The letter C had other things in it. I was fortunate also, to meet the man who's sitting on the bed, though I gave him hair over here and he doesn't have hair. Well, he has some hair but — well, he used to have hair. And with him, I was able to do a project that was really fantastic. I work for the New Yorker, and I do covers, and 9/11 happened and it was, you know, a complete and utter end of the world as we knew it.And Rick and I were on our way to a party in the Bronx, and somebody said Bronxistan, and somebody said Ferreristan, and we came up with this New Yorker cover, which we were able to — we didn't know what we were doing. We weren't trying to be funny, we weren't trying to be — well, we were trying to be funny actually, that's not true. We hoped we'd be funny, but we didn't know it would be a cover, and we didn't know that that image, at the moment that it happened, would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people. And it really became the — I don't know, you know, it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on. And from, you know, Fattushis, to Taxistan to, you know, for the Fashtoonks, Botoxia, Pashmina, Khlintunisia, you know, we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign, who are — what's going on over here? Who are these people? What are these tribes? And David Remnick, who was really wonderful about it, had one problem. He didn't like Al Zheimers, because he thought it would insult people with Alzheimer's. But you know, we said, ""David, who's going to know? They're not."" (Laughter) So it stayed in, and it was, and, you know, it was a good thing. You know, in the course of my life, I never know what's going to happen and that's kind of the beauty part.And we were on Cape Cod, a place, obviously, of great inspiration, and I picked up this book, ""The Elements of Style,"" at a yard sale. And I didn't — and I'd never used it in school, because I was too busy writing poems, and flunking out, and I don't know what, sitting in cafes. But I picked it up and I started reading it and I thought, this book is amazing. I said, people should know about this book. (Laughter) So I decided it needed a few — it needed a lift, it needed a few illustrations. And basically, I called the, you know, I convinced the White Estate, and what an intersection of like, you know, Polish Jew, you know, main WASP family. Here I am, saying, I'd like to do something to this book. And they said yes, and they left me completely alone, which was a gorgeous, wonderful thing. And I took the examples that they gave, and just did 56 paintings, basically. So, this is, I don't know if you can read this. ""Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in."" And when you're dealing with grammar, which is, you know, incredibly dry, E.B. White wrote such wonderful, whimsical — and actually, Strunk — and then you come to the rules and, you know, there are lots of grammar things. ""Do you mind me asking a question? Do you mind my asking a question?"" ""Would, could, should, or would, should, could."" And ""would"" is Coco Chanel's lover, ""should"" is Edith Sitwell, and ""could"" is an August Sander subject. And, ""He noticed a large stain in the center of the rug."" (Laughter)So, there's a kind of British understatement, murder-mystery theme that I really love very much. And then, ""Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand."" E.B. White wrote us a number of rules, which can either paralyze you and make you loathe him for the rest of time, or you can ignore them, which I do, or you can, I don't know what, you know, eat a sandwich. So, what I did when I was painting was I started singing, because I really adore singing, and I think that music is the highest form of all art. So, I commissioned a wonderful composer, Nico Muhly, who wrote nine songs using the text, and we performed this fantastic evening of — he wrote music for both amateurs and professionals. I played the clattering teacup and the slinky in the main reading room of the New York Public Library, where you're supposed to be very, very quiet, and it was a phenomenally wonderful event, which we hopefully will do some more.Who knows? The New York TimesSelect, the op-ed page, asked me to do a column, and they said, you can do whatever you want. So, once a month for the last year, I've been doing a column called ""The Principles of Uncertainty,"" which, you know, I don't know who Heisenberg is, but I know I can throw that around now. You know, it's the principles of uncertainty, so, you know. I'm going to read quickly — and probably I'm going to edit some, because I don't have that much time left — a few of the columns. And basically, I was so, you know, it was so amusing, because I said, ""Well, how much space do I have?"" And they said, ""Well, you know, it's the Internet."" And I said, ""Yes, but how much space do I have?"" And they said, ""It's unlimited, it's unlimited."" OK. So, the first one I was very timid, and I'll begin. ""How can I tell you everything that is in my heart? Impossible to begin. Enough. No. Begin with the hapless dodo."" And I talk about the dodo, and how the dodo became extinct, and then I talk about Spinoza. ""As the last dodo was dying, Spinoza was looking for a rational explanation for everything, called eudaemonia. And then he breathed his last, with loved ones around him, and I know that he had chicken soup also, as his last meal."" I happen to know it for a fact. And then he died, and there was no more Spinoza. Extinct.And then, we don't have a stuffed Spinoza, but we do have a stuffed Pavlov's dog, and I visited him in the Museum of Hygiene in St. Petersburg, in Russia. And there he is, with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic, decrepit palace. ""And I think it must have been a very, very dark day when the Bolsheviks arrived. Maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs, but Stalin was a paranoid man, even more than my father."" (Laughter) You don't even know. ""And decided his top people had to be extinctified."" Which I think I made up, which is a good thing. And so, this is a chart of, you know, just a small chart, because the chart would go on forever of all the people that he killed. So, shot dead, smacked over the head, you know, thrown away. ""Nabokov's family fled Russia. How could the young Nabokov, sitting innocently and elegantly in a red chair, leafing through a book and butterflies, imagine such displacement, such loss?"" And then I want to tell you that this is a map.So, ""My beautiful mother's family fled Russia as well. Too many pogroms. Leaving the shack, the wild blueberry woods, the geese, the River Sluch, they went to Palestine and then America."" And my mother drew this map for me of the United States of America, and that is my DNA over here, because that person who I grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever. Facts were actually banished from our home. And so, if you see that Texas — you know, Texas and California are under Canada, and that South Carolina is on top of North Carolina, this is the home that I grew up in, OK? So, it's a miracle that I'm here today. But actually, it's not. It's actually a wonderful thing. But then she says Tel Aviv and Lenin, which is the town they came from, and, ""Sorry, the rest unknown, thank you."" But in her lexicon, ""sorry, the rest unknown, thank you"" is ""sorry, the rest unknown, go to hell,"" because she couldn't care less. (Laughter)""The Impossibility of February"" is that February's a really wretched month in New York and the images for me conjure up these really awful things. Well, not so awful. I received a box in the mail and it was wrapped with newspaper and there was the picture of the man on the newspaper and he was dead. And I say, ""I hope he's not really dead, just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow, but the caption says he is dead."" And actually, he was. I think he's dead, though I don't know, maybe he's not dead. ""And this woman leans over in anguish, not about that man, but about all sad things. It happens quite often in February."" There's consoling. This man is angry because somebody threw onions all over the staircase, and basically — you know, I guess onions are a theme here. And he says, ""It is impossible not to lie. It is February and not lying is impossible."" And I really spend a lot of time wondering, how much truth do we tell? What is it that we're actually — what story are we actually telling? How do we know when we are ourselves? How do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories, you know, are real sentences? Or are they fake sentences that we think we ought to be saying?I'm going to quickly go through this. A quote by Bertrand Russell, ""All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?"" A complicated question. And so, you know, I talk to my friends and I go to plays where they're singing Russian songs. Oh my God, you know what? Could we have — no, we don't have time. I taped my aunt. I taped my aunt singing a song in Russian from the — you know, could we have it for a second? Do you have that? (Music) OK. I taped my — my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about 85. So — and that's a song about how everybody's miserable because, you know, we're from Russia. (Laughter)I went to visit Kitty Carlisle Hart, and she is 96, and when I brought her a copy of ""The Elements of Style,"" she said she would treasure it. And then I said — oh, and she was talking about Moss Hart, and I said, ""When you met him, you knew it was him."" And she said, ""I knew it was he."" (Laughter) So, I was the one who should have kept the book, but it was a really wonderful moment. And she dated George Gershwin, so, you know, get out. Gershwin died at the age of 38. He's buried in the same cemetery as my husband. I don't want to talk about that now. I do want to talk — the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the Barricini family mausoleum nearby. I think the Barricini family should open a store there and sell chocolate. (Laughter) And I would like to run it for them. And I went to visit Louise Bourgeoise, who's also still working, and I looked at her sink, which is really amazing, and left. And then I photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street. And a woman who lives on our street, Lolita. And then I go and have some tea. And then my Aunt Frances dies, and before she died, she tried to pay with Sweet'N Low packets for her bagel. (Laughter) And I wonder what the point is and then I know, and I see that Hy Meyerowitz, Rick Meyerowitz's father, a dry-cleaning supply salesman from the Bronx, won the Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in 1931. That's actually Hy. And I look at a beautiful bowl of fruit, and I look at a dress that I sewed for friends of mine. And it says, ""Ich habe genug,"" which is a Bach cantata, which I once thought meant ""I've had it, I can't take it anymore, give me a break,"" but I was wrong. It means ""I have enough."" And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive, end of discussion. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maira_kalman_the_illustrated_woman
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"I live and work from Tokyo, Japan. And I specialize in human behavioral research, and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways, and to design for that future. And you know, to be honest, I've been doing this for seven years, and I haven't got a clue what the future is going to be like. But I've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there.This is my office. It's out there. It's not in the lab, and it's increasingly in places like India, China, Brazil, Africa. We live on a planet — 6.3 billion people. About three billion people, by the end of this year, will have cellular connectivity. And it'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that. And I mention this because, if we want to design for that future, we need to figure out what those people are about. And that's, kind of, where I see what my job is and what our team's job is.Our research often starts with a very simple question. So I'll give you an example. What do you carry? If you think of everything in your life that you own, when you walk out that door, what do you consider to take with you? When you're looking around, what do you consider? Of that stuff, what do you carry? And of that stuff, what do you actually use?So this is interesting to us, because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you and end up using has some kind of spiritual, emotional or functional value. And to put it really bluntly, you know, people are willing to pay for stuff that has value, right? So I've probably done about five years' research looking at what people carry. I go in people's bags. I look in people's pockets, purses. I go in their homes. And we do this worldwide, and we follow them around town with video cameras. It's kind of like stalking with permission. And we do all this — and to go back to the original question, what do people carry?And it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff. OK, that's fair enough. But if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are — across cultures and across gender and across contexts — most people will say keys, money and, if they own one, a mobile phone. And I'm not saying this is a good thing, but this is a thing, right? I mean, I couldn't take your phones off you if I wanted to. You'd probably kick me out, or something. OK, it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask. But really, the question is, why? Right? So why are these things so important in our lives? And it turns out, from our research, that it boils down to survival — survival for us and survival for our loved ones.So, keys provide an access to shelter and warmth — transport as well, in the U.S. increasingly. Money is useful for buying food, sustenance, among all its other uses. And a mobile phone, it turns out, is a great recovery tool. If you prefer this kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yes, they do a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're very good at this. And in particular, it's the mobile phone's ability to allow people to transcend space and time. And what I mean by that is, you know, you can transcend space by simply making a voice call, right? And you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience, and someone else can pick it up at their convenience. And this is fairly universally appreciated, it turns out, which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected. And they value that connectivity.But actually, you can do this kind of stuff with PCs. And you can do them with phone kiosks. And the mobile phone, in addition, is both personal — and so it also gives you a degree of privacy — and it's convenient. You don't need to ask permission from anyone, you can just go ahead and do it, right? However, for these things to help us survive, it depends on them being carried. But — and it's a pretty big but — we forget. We're human, that's what we do. It's one of our features. I think, quite a nice feature. So we forget, but we're also adaptable, and we adapt to situations around us pretty well. And so we have these strategies to remember, and one of them was mentioned yesterday. And it's, quite simply, the point of reflection. And that's that moment when you're walking out of a space, and you turn around, and quite often you tap your pockets. Even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets. And you turn around, and you look back into the space, and some people talk aloud. And pretty much everyone does it at some point.OK, the next thing is — most of you, if you have a stable home life, and what I mean is that you don't travel all the time, and always in hotels, but most people have what we call a center of gravity. And a center of gravity is where you keep these objects. And these things don't stay in the center of gravity, but over time, they gravitate there. It's where you expect to find stuff. And in fact, when you're turning around, and you're looking inside the house, and you're looking for this stuff, this is where you look first, right? OK, so when we did this research, we found the absolutely, 100 percent, guaranteed way to never forget anything ever, ever again. And that is, quite simply, to have nothing to remember. (Laughter)OK, now, that sounds like something you get on a Chinese fortune cookie, right? But is, in fact, about the art of delegation. And from a design perspective, it's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people. And it turns out, delegation — if you want it to be — can be the solution for pretty much everything, apart from things like bodily functions, going to the toilet. You can't ask someone to do that on your behalf. And apart from things like entertainment, you wouldn't pay for someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf, or, at least, not yet. Maybe sometime in the future, we will.So, let me give you an example of delegation in practice, right. So this is — probably the thing I'm most passionate about is the research that we've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate. So, the U.N. estimated — this is 2004 figures — that there are almost 800 million people who can't read and write, worldwide. So, we've been conducting a lot of research. And one of the things we were looking at is — if you can't read and write, if you want to communicate over distances, you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with. It could be a phone number, it could be an e-mail address, it could be a postal address. Simple question: if you can't read and write, how do you manage your contact information?And the fact is that millions of people do it. Just from a design perspective, we didn't really understand how they did it, and so that's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing. And it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation. So they delegate that part of the task process to other people, the stuff that they can't do themselves. Let me give you another example of delegation. This one's a little bit more sophisticated, and this is from a study that we did in Uganda about how people who are sharing devices, use those devices. Sente is a word in Uganda that means money. It has a second meaning, which is to send money as airtime. OK?And it works like this. So let's say, June, you're in a village, rural village. I'm in Kampala and I'm the wage earner. I'm sending money back, and it works like this. So, in your village, there's one person in the village with a phone, and that's the phone kiosk operator. And it's quite likely that they'd have a quite simple mobile phone as a phone kiosk. So what I do is, I buy a prepaid card like this. And instead of using that money to top up my own phone, I call up the local village operator. And I read out that number to them, and they use it to top up their phone. So, they're topping up the value from Kampala, and it's now being topped up in the village. You take a 10 or 20 percent commission, and then you — the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission, and passes the rest over to you in cash.OK, there's two things I like about this. So the first is, it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone — anyone who has a mobile phone — essentially into an ATM machine. It brings rudimentary banking services to places where there's no banking infrastructure. And even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure, they wouldn't necessarily be considered viable customers, because they're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts. There's a second thing I like about this. And that is that despite all the resources at my disposal, and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication, I know I could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. OK?And, yes, there are things like Grameen Bank and micro-lending. But the difference between this and that is, there's no central authority trying to control this. This is just street-up innovation. So, it turns out the street is a never-ending source of inspiration for us. And OK, if you break one of these things here, you return it to the carrier. They'll give you a new one. They'll probably give you three new ones, right? I mean, that's buy three, get one free. That kind of thing. If you go on the streets of India and China, you see this kind of stuff. And this is where they take the stuff that breaks, and they fix it, and they put it back into circulation.This is from a workbench in Jilin City, in China, and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together. They reverse-engineer manuals. This is a kind of hacker's manual, and it's written in Chinese and English. They also write them in Hindi. You can subscribe to these. There are training institutes where they're churning out people for fixing these things as well. But what I like about this is, it boils down to someone on the street with a small, flat surface, a screwdriver, a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads — because they often get dust on the contact heads — and knowledge. And it's all about the social network of the knowledge, floating around. And I like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff, and build stuff, and potentially distribute stuff. It challenges the norms.OK, for me the street just raises so many different questions. Like, this is Viagra that I bought from a backstreet sex shop in China. And China is a country where you get a lot of fakes. And I know what you're asking — did I test it? I'm not going to answer that, OK. But I look at something like this, and I consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process. And we look at this and we think, well, how does that apply, for example, for the design of — the lessons from this — apply to the design of online services, future services in these markets?This is a pair of underpants from — (Laughter) — from Tibet. And I look at something like this, and honestly, you know, why would someone design underpants with a pocket, right? And I look at something like this and it makes me question, if we were to take all the functionality in things like this, and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network, how would we prioritize where to put stuff? And yes, this is quite trivial, but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks. And what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural Uganda. This doesn't have house numbers. This has phone numbers. So what does it mean when people's identity is mobile? When those extra three billion people's identity is mobile, it isn't fixed? Your notion of identity is out-of-date already, OK, for those extra three billion people. This is how it's shifting.And then I go to this picture here, which is the one that I started with. And this is from Delhi. It's from a study we did into illiteracy, and it's a guy in a teashop. You can see the chai being poured in the background. And he's a, you know, incredibly poor teashop worker, on the lowest rungs in the society. And he, somehow, has the appreciation of the values of Livestrong. And it's not necessarily the same values, but some kind of values of Livestrong, to actually go out and purchase them, and actually display them.For me, this kind of personifies this connected world, where everything is intertwined, and the dots are — it's all about the dots joining together. OK, the title of this presentation is ""Connections and Consequences,"" and it's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner, right? When everyone's connected.And there are four things. So, the first thing is the immediacy of ideas, the speed at which ideas go around. And I know TED is about big ideas, but actually, the benchmark for a big idea is changing. If you want a big idea, you need to embrace everyone on the planet, that's the first thing.The second thing is the immediacy of objects. And what I mean by that is, as these become smaller, as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater — things like banking, identity — these things quite simply move very quickly around the world. And so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid, in a way that we just totally cannot conceive, when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world's population.The next thing is that, however we design this stuff — carefully design this stuff — the street will take it, and will figure out ways to innovate, as long as it meets base needs — the ability to transcend space and time, for example. And it will innovate in ways that we cannot anticipate. In ways that, despite our resources, they can do it better than us. That's my feeling. And if we're smart, we'll look at this stuff that's going on, and we'll figure out a way to enable it to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design.And the last thing is that — actually, the direction of the conversation. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. And I think our relevance and TED's relevance is really about embracing that and learning how to listen, essentially. And we need to learn how to listen. So thank you very, very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jan_chipchase_on_our_mobile_phones
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"Well, as Chris pointed out, I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we'll understand how that happens.OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ? I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness. How does this happen? Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain. One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain. What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability. What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function. So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry's doing to generate that particular function. So that's what we're trying to do.So let me give you a few striking examples of this. In fact, I'm giving you three examples, six minutes each, during this talk. The first example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome. If you look at the first slide there, that's the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK — the lobes that constitute the brain. And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes — you can't see it there — is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And that's been called the face area in the brain, because when it's damaged, you can no longer recognize people's faces. You can still recognize them from their voice and say, ""Oh yeah, that's Joe,"" but you can't look at their face and know who it is, right? You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror. I mean, you know it's you because you wink and it winks, and you know it's a mirror, but you don't really recognize yourself as yourself.OK. Now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus. But there's another rare syndrome, so rare, in fact, that very few physicians have heard about it, not even neurologists. This is called the Capgras delusion, and that is a patient, who's otherwise completely normal, has had a head injury, comes out of coma, otherwise completely normal, he looks at his mother and says, ""This looks exactly like my mother, this woman, but she's an impostor. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother."" Now, why does this happen? Why would somebody — and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects, but when he sees his mother, his delusion kicks in and says, it's not mother.Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap — and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I'll just talk about guys. When you're a little baby, a young baby, you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the standard Freudian view. And then, as you grow up, the cortex develops, and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother. And then what happens is, there's a blow to your head, damaging the cortex, allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge, flaming to the surface, and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother. And you say, ""My God, if this is my mom, how come I'm being sexually turned on? She's some other woman. She's an impostor."" It's the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain.This has never made much sense to me, this argument. It's very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are — (Laughter) — but didn't make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion, about his pet poodle. (Laughter) He'll say, ""Doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi, but it's some other dog."" Right? Now, you try using the Freudian explanation there. (Laughter) You'll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans, or some such thing, which is quite absurd, of course.Now, what's really going on? So, to explain this curious disorder, we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain. Normally, visual signals come in, into the eyeballs, go to the visual areas in the brain. There are, in fact, 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision, and after processing all that, the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus, where you perceive faces. There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area's damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right?But from that area, the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, and that structure, called the amygdala, gauges the emotional significance of what you're looking at. Is it prey? Is it predator? Is it mate? Or is it something absolutely trivial, like a piece of lint, or a piece of chalk, or a — I don't want to point to that, but — or a shoe, or something like that? OK? Which you can completely ignore. So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you're going to create from muscular exertion. And that's fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating. So I can determine, when you're looking at something, whether you're excited or whether you're aroused, or not, OK? And I'll get to that in a minute.So my idea was, when this chap looks at an object, when he looks at his — any object for that matter, it goes to the visual areas and, however, and it's processed in the fusiform gyrus, and you recognize it as a pea plant, or a table, or your mother, for that matter, OK? And then the message cascades into the amygdala, and then goes down the autonomic nervous system. But maybe, in this chap, that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, is cut by the accident. So because the fusiform is intact, the chap can still recognize his mother, and says, ""Oh yeah, this looks like my mother."" But because the wire is cut to the emotional centers, he says, ""But how come, if it's my mother, I don't experience a warmth?"" Or terror, as the case may be? Right? (Laughter) And therefore, he says, ""How do I account for this inexplicable lack of emotions? This can't be my mother. It's some strange woman pretending to be my mother.""How do you test this? Well, what you do is, if you take any one of you here, and put you in front of a screen, and measure your galvanic skin response, and show pictures on the screen, I can measure how you sweat when you see an object, like a table or an umbrella. Of course, you don't sweat. If I show you a picture of a lion, or a tiger, or a pinup, you start sweating, right? And, believe it or not, if I show you a picture of your mother — I'm talking about normal people — you start sweating. You don't even have to be Jewish. (Laughter)Now, what happens if you show this patient? You take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response. Tables and chairs and lint, nothing happens, as in normal people, but when you show him a picture of his mother, the galvanic skin response is flat. There's no emotional reaction to his mother, because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut. So his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal, his emotions are normal — he'll laugh, he'll cry, so on and so forth — but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor. It's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do: take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain.By the way, if this patient then goes, and mother phones from an adjacent room — phones him — and he picks up the phone, and he says, ""Wow, mom, how are you? Where are you?"" There's no delusion through the phone. Then, she approaches him after an hour, he says, ""Who are you? You look just like my mother."" OK? The reason is there's a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers, and that's not been cut by the accident. So this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother, no problem. When he sees her in person, he says it's an impostor.OK, how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain? Is it nature, genes, or is it nurture? And we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb. And you all know what a phantom limb is. When an arm is amputated, or a leg is amputated, for gangrene, or you lose it in war — for example, in the Iraq war, it's now a serious problem — you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm, and that's called a phantom arm or a phantom leg. In fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body. Believe it or not, even with internal viscera. I've had patients with the uterus removed — hysterectomy — who have a phantom uterus, including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month. And in fact, one student asked me the other day, ""Do they get phantom PMS?"" (Laughter) A subject ripe for scientific enquiry, but we haven't pursued that.OK, now the next question is, what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments? One of the things we've found was, about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom. It'll pat his brother on the shoulder, it'll answer the phone when it rings, it'll wave goodbye. These are very compelling, vivid sensations. The patient's not delusional. He knows that the arm is not there, but, nevertheless, it's a compelling sensory experience for the patient. But however, about half the patients, this doesn't happen. The phantom limb — they'll say, ""But doctor, the phantom limb is paralyzed. It's fixed in a clenched spasm and it's excruciatingly painful. If only I could move it, maybe the pain will be relieved.""Now, why would a phantom limb be paralyzed? It sounds like an oxymoron. But when we were looking at the case sheets, what we found was, these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs, the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury. The actual nerve supplying the arm was severed, was cut, by say, a motorcycle accident. So the patient had an actual arm, which is painful, in a sling for a few months or a year, and then, in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm, the surgeon amputates the arm, and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains, right? And this is a serious clinical problem. Patients become depressed. Some of them are driven to suicide, OK?So, how do you treat this syndrome? Now, why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb? When I looked at the case sheet, I found that they had an actual arm, and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut, and the actual arm had been paralyzed, and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation, and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself.Why does this happen? When the arm was intact, but paralyzed, the brain sends commands to the arm, the front of the brain, saying, ""Move,"" but it's getting visual feedback saying, ""No."" Move. No. Move. No. Move. No. And this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain, and we call this learned paralysis, OK? The brain learns, because of this Hebbian, associative link, that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm. And then, when you've amputated the arm, this learned paralysis carries over into your body image and into your phantom, OK?Now, how do you help these patients? How do you unlearn the learned paralysis, so you can relieve him of this excruciating, clenching spasm of the phantom arm? Well, we said, what if you now send the command to the phantom, but give him visual feedback that it's obeying his command, right? Maybe you can relieve the phantom pain, the phantom cramp. How do you do that? Well, virtual reality. But that costs millions of dollars. So, I hit on a way of doing this for three dollars, but don't tell my funding agencies. (Laughter)OK? What you do is you create what I call a mirror box. You have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle, and then you put the phantom — so my first patient, Derek, came in. He had his arm amputated 10 years ago. He had a brachial avulsion, so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed, lying in a sling for a year, and then the arm was amputated. He had a phantom arm, excruciatingly painful, and he couldn't move it. It was a paralyzed phantom arm.So he came there, and I gave him a mirror like that, in a box, which I call a mirror box, right? And the patient puts his phantom left arm, which is clenched and in spasm, on the left side of the mirror, and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror, and makes the same posture, the clenched posture, and looks inside the mirror. And what does he experience? He looks at the phantom being resurrected, because he's looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror, and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected. ""Now,"" I said, ""now, look, wiggle your phantom — your real fingers, or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror."" He's going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving, right? That's obvious, but the astonishing thing is, the patient then says, ""Oh my God, my phantom is moving again, and the pain, the clenching spasm, is relieved.""And remember, my first patient who came in — (Applause) — thank you. (Applause) My first patient came in, and he looked in the mirror, and I said, ""Look at your reflection of your phantom."" And he started giggling, he says, ""I can see my phantom."" But he's not stupid. He knows it's not real. He knows it's a mirror reflection, but it's a vivid sensory experience. Now, I said, ""Move your normal hand and phantom."" He said, ""Oh, I can't move my phantom. You know that. It's painful."" I said, ""Move your normal hand."" And he says, ""Oh my God, my phantom is moving again. I don't believe this! And my pain is being relieved."" OK? And then I said, ""Close your eyes."" He closes his eyes. ""And move your normal hand."" ""Oh, nothing. It's clenched again."" ""OK, open your eyes."" ""Oh my God, oh my God, it's moving again!"" So, he was like a kid in a candy store.So, I said, OK, this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input, but I'm not going to get a Nobel Prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a completely useless ability, if you think about it. (Laughter) But then I started realizing, maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology, like stroke, focal dystonias — there may be a learned component to this, which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror.So, I said, ""Look, Derek"" — well, first of all, the guy can't just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain — I said, ""Look, Derek, take it home and practice with it for a week or two. Maybe, after a period of practice, you can dispense with the mirror, unlearn the paralysis, and start moving your paralyzed arm, and then, relieve yourself of pain."" So he said OK, and he took it home. I said, ""Look, it's, after all, two dollars. Take it home.""So, he took it home, and after two weeks, he phones me, and he said, ""Doctor, you're not going to believe this."" I said, ""What?"" He said, ""It's gone."" I said, ""What's gone?"" I thought maybe the mirror box was gone. (Laughter) He said, ""No, no, no, you know this phantom I've had for the last 10 years? It's disappeared."" And I said — I got worried, I said, my God, I mean I've changed this guy's body image, what about human subjects, ethics and all of that? And I said, ""Derek, does this bother you?"" He said, ""No, last three days, I've not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain, no clenching, no phantom forearm pain, all those pains are gone away. But the problem is I still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder, and your box doesn't reach."" (Laughter) ""So, can you change the design and put it on my forehead, so I can, you know, do this and eliminate my phantom fingers?"" He thought I was some kind of magician.Now, why does this happen? It's because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict. It's getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back. On the other hand, there's no proprioception, muscle signals saying that there is no arm, right? And your motor command saying there is an arm, and, because of this conflict, the brain says, to hell with it, there is no phantom, there is no arm, right? It goes into a sort of denial — it gates the signals. And when the arm disappears, the bonus is, the pain disappears because you can't have disembodied pain floating out there, in space. So, that's the bonus.Now, this technique has been tried on dozens of patients by other groups in Helsinki, so it may prove to be valuable as a treatment for phantom pain, and indeed, people have tried it for stroke rehabilitation. Stroke you normally think of as damage to the fibers, nothing you can do about it. But, it turns out some component of stroke paralysis is also learned paralysis, and maybe that component can be overcome using mirrors. This has also gone through clinical trials, helping lots and lots of patients.OK, let me switch gears now to the third part of my talk, which is about another curious phenomenon called synesthesia. This was discovered by Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He pointed out that certain people in the population, who are otherwise completely normal, had the following peculiarity: every time they see a number, it's colored. Five is blue, seven is yellow, eight is chartreuse, nine is indigo, OK? Bear in mind, these people are completely normal in other respects. Or C sharp — sometimes, tones evoke color. C sharp is blue, F sharp is green, another tone might be yellow, right?Why does this happen? This is called synesthesia. Galton called it synesthesia, a mingling of the senses. In us, all the senses are distinct. These people muddle up their senses. Why does this happen? One of the two aspects of this problem are very intriguing. Synesthesia runs in families, so Galton said this is a hereditary basis, a genetic basis. Secondly, synesthesia is about — and this is what gets me to my point about the main theme of this lecture, which is about creativity — synesthesia is eight times more common among artists, poets, novelists and other creative people than in the general population. Why would that be? I'm going to answer that question. It's never been answered before.OK, what is synesthesia? What causes it? Well, there are many theories. One theory is they're just crazy. Now, that's not really a scientific theory, so we can forget about it. Another theory is they are acid junkies and potheads, right? Now, there may be some truth to this, because it's much more common here in the Bay Area than in San Diego. (Laughter) OK. Now, the third theory is that — well, let's ask ourselves what's really going on in synesthesia. All right?So, we found that the color area and the number area are right next to each other in the brain, in the fusiform gyrus. So we said, there's some accidental cross wiring between color and numbers in the brain. So, every time you see a number, you see a corresponding color, and that's why you get synesthesia. Now remember — why does this happen? Why would there be crossed wires in some people? Remember I said it runs in families? That gives you the clue. And that is, there is an abnormal gene, a mutation in the gene that causes this abnormal cross wiring.In all of us, it turns out we are born with everything wired to everything else. So, every brain region is wired to every other region, and these are trimmed down to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain. So, if there's a gene causing this trimming and if that gene mutates, then you get deficient trimming between adjacent brain areas. And if it's between number and color, you get number-color synesthesia. If it's between tone and color, you get tone-color synesthesia. So far, so good.Now, what if this gene is expressed everywhere in the brain, so everything is cross-connected? Well, think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common, the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, ""It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun."" Well, you don't say, Juliet is the sun, does that mean she's a glowing ball of fire? I mean, schizophrenics do that, but it's a different story, right? Normal people say, she's warm like the sun, she's radiant like the sun, she's nurturing like the sun. Instantly, you've found the links.Now, if you assume that this greater cross wiring and concepts are also in different parts of the brain, then it's going to create a greater propensity towards metaphorical thinking and creativity in people with synesthesia. And, hence, the eight times more common incidence of synesthesia among poets, artists and novelists. OK, it's a very phrenological view of synesthesia. The last demonstration — can I take one minute? (Applause)OK. I'm going to show you that you're all synesthetes, but you're in denial about it. Here's what I call Martian alphabet. Just like your alphabet, A is A, B is B, C is C. Different shapes for different phonemes, right? Here, you've got Martian alphabet. One of them is Kiki, one of them is Bouba. Which one is Kiki and which one is Bouba? How many of you think that's Kiki and that's Bouba? Raise your hands. Well, it's one or two mutants. (Laughter) How many of you think that's Bouba, that's Kiki? Raise your hands. Ninety-nine percent of you.Now, none of you is a Martian. How did you do that? It's because you're all doing a cross-model synesthetic abstraction, meaning you're saying that that sharp inflection — ki-ki, in your auditory cortex, the hair cells being excited — Kiki, mimics the visual inflection, sudden inflection of that jagged shape. Now, this is very important, because what it's telling you is your brain is engaging in a primitive — it's just — it looks like a silly illusion, but these photons in your eye are doing this shape, and hair cells in your ear are exciting the auditory pattern, but the brain is able to extract the common denominator. It's a primitive form of abstraction, and we now know this happens in the fusiform gyrus of the brain, because when that's damaged, these people lose the ability to engage in Bouba Kiki, but they also lose the ability to engage in metaphor.If you ask this guy, what — ""all that glitters is not gold,"" what does that mean?"" The patient says, ""Well, if it's metallic and shiny, it doesn't mean it's gold. You have to measure its specific gravity, OK?"" So, they completely miss the metaphorical meaning. So, this area is about eight times the size in higher — especially in humans — as in lower primates. Something very interesting is going on here in the angular gyrus, because it's the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch, and it became enormous in humans. And something very interesting is going on. And I think it's a basis of many uniquely human abilities like abstraction, metaphor and creativity. All of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia, we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging, and by studying patients and asking the right questions. Thank you. (Applause) Sorry about that. (Laughter)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind
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"You know, there's a small country nestled in the Himalayan Mountains, far from these beautiful mountains, where the people of the Kingdom of Bhutan have decided to do something different, which is to measure their gross national happiness rather than their gross national product. And why not? After all, happiness is not just a privilege for the lucky few, but a fundamental human right for all. And what is happiness? Happiness is the freedom of choice. The freedom to chose where to live, what to do, what to buy, what to sell, from whom, to whom, when and how. Where does choice come from? And who gets to express it, and how do we express it?Well, one way to express choice is through the market. Well-functioning markets provide choices, and ultimately, the ability to express one's pursuit for happiness. The great Indian economist, Amartya Sen, was awarded the Nobel prize for demonstrating that famine is not so much about the availability of food supply, but rather the ability to acquire or entitle oneself to that food through the market. In 1984, in what can only be considered one of the greatest crimes of humanity, nearly one million people died of starvation in my country of birth, Ethiopia. Not because there was not enough food — because there was actually a surplus of food in the fertile regions of the south parts of the country — but because in the north, people could not access or entitle themselves to that food. That was a turning point for my life.Most Africans today, by far, are farmers. And most of Africa's farmers are, by and large, small farmers in terms of land that they operate, and very, very small farmers in terms of the capital they have at their disposal. African agriculture today is among, or is, the most under-capitalized in the world. Only seven percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 percent in Asia. African farmers only use some 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, compared to 144 in Asia. Road density is six times greater in Asia than it is in rural Africa. There are eight times more tractors in Latin America, and three times more tractors in Asia, than in Africa. The small farmer in Africa today lives a life without much choice, and therefore without much freedom. His livelihood is predetermined by the conditions of grinding poverty. He comes to the market when prices are lowest, with the meager fruits of his hard labor, just after the harvest, because he has no choice. She comes back to the market some months later, when prices are highest, in what we call the lean season — when food is scarce — because she has to feed her family and has no choice.The real question is, how can markets be developed in rural Africa to harness the power of innovation and entrepreneurship that we know exists? Another notable economist, Theodore Schultz, in 1974 won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that farmers are efficient, but poor. Meaning, in fact, that farmers are rational and profit-minded just like everybody else. Well, we don't need, now, any more Nobel prizes to know that farmers want a fair shake at the market and want to make money, just like everyone else. And one thing is clear, which is at least now we know that Africa is open for business. And that business is agriculture. Over two decades ago, the world insisted to Africa that markets must be liberalized, that economies must be structurally adjusted. This meant that governments were to remove themselves from the business of buying and selling — which they did rather inefficiently — and let the private market do its magic. Well, what happened over the last 25 years? Did Africa feed itself? Did our farmers turn into highly productive commercial actors?I think we're all in this room, probably, because we know that, in fact, Africa is the only region in the world where hunger and malnutrition are projected to go up over the next 10 years, where the food import bill is now double what it was 20 years ago, where food production per capita has stagnated, and where fertilizer use has declined rather than increased. So why didn't agriculture markets perform to expectations? The market reforms prompted by the West — and I've spent some 15 years traveling around the continent doing research on agricultural markets, and have interviewed traders in 10 to 15 countries in this continent, hundreds of traders — trying to understand what went wrong with our market reform. And it seems to me that the reforms might have thrown the baby out with the bath water.Like its agriculture, Africa's markets are highly under-capitalized and inefficient. We know from our work around the continent that transaction costs of reaching the market, and the risks of transacting in rural, agriculture markets, are extremely high. In fact, only one third of agricultural output produced in Africa even reaches the market. Africa's markets are weak not only because of weak infrastructure in terms of roads and telecommunications, but also because of the virtual absence of necessary market institutions, such as market information, grades and standards, and reliable ways to connect buyers and sellers. Because of this, commodity buyers and sellers typically transact in small circles, in narrow networks of people they know and trust. And because of that, as grain changes hands — and I've measured that it changes hands four, five times in its trajectory from the farmer to the consumer — every time it changes hands — and I've seen this all over rural Africa — it also changes sacks.And I thought that was incredibly peculiar. And really realized that that was because — as traders would tell me over and over — that's the only way people know what they're getting in terms of the quantity and the product quality. And that actually has huge implications for the ability of markets to quickly respond to price signals, and situations where there are deficits, for example. It also has very high cost implications. I have measured that 26 percent of the marketing margin is simply due to the fact that, because of the absence of grades and standards and market information, sacks have to be constantly changed. And this leads to very high handling costs. For their part, small farmers, who produce the bulk of our agricultural output in Africa, come to the market with virtually no information at all — blind — trusting that they're going to have some sort of demand for their produce, and completely at the mercy of the merchants in the only market, the nearest local market they know — where they're unable to negotiate better prices or reduce their risk.Speaking of risk, we have seen that price volatility of food crops in Africa is the highest in the world. In Africa, small farmers bear the brunt of this risk. In fact, in my view, there is no region of the world and no period in history that farmers have been expected to bear the kind of market risk that Africa's farmers have to bear. And in my view, there is simply no place in the world that has grown its agriculture on the kind of risk that our farmers in Africa today face. In Ethiopia, for example, the variation in maize prices from year to year is as much as 50 percent annually. This kind of market risk is mind-boggling, and has direct implications for not only the incentives of farmers to invest in higher productivity technology, such as modern seeds and fertilizers, but also direct implications for food security.To give you an example, between 2001 and 2002, Ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest. That in turn, because of the weak marketing system, led to an 80 percent collapse in maize prices in the country. This made it unprofitable for some farmers to even harvest the grain from the fields. And we calculated that some 300,000 tons of grain was left in the fields to rot in early 2002. Not six months later, in July 2002, Ethiopia announced a major food crisis, to the same proportions as 1984: 14 million people at risk of starvation. What also happened that year is in the areas where there were good rains, and where farmers had previously produced surplus grain, farmers had decided to withdraw from the fertilizer market, not use fertilizer and actually had dropped their use of fertilizer by 27 percent. This is a tragic example of arrested development, or a budding green revolution stopped in its tracks. And this is not just specific to Ethiopia, but happens over and over, all over Africa.Well, I'm not here today to lament about the situation, or wring my hands. I am here to tell you that change is in the air. Africa today is not the Africa waiting for aid solutions, or cookie-cutter foreign expert policy prescriptions. Africa has learned, or is learning somewhat slowly, that markets don't happen by themselves. In the 1980s, it was very fashionable to talk about getting prices right. There was a very influential book about that, which was mainly about getting governments out of the market. We now recognize that getting markets right is about not just price incentives, but also investing in the right infrastructure and the appropriate and necessary institutions to create the conditions to unleash the power of innovation in the market. When conditions are right, we know and see that that innovation is ready to explode in rural Africa, just like anywhere else.Nearly three years ago, I decided to leave my comfortable job as a World Bank senior economist in Washington and come back to my country of birth, Ethiopia, after nearly 30 years abroad. I did so for a simple reason. After having spent more than a decade understanding, studying, and trying to convince policymakers and donors about what was wrong with Africa's agricultural markets, I decided it was time to do something about it. I currently lead, in Ethiopia, an exciting new initiative to establish the first Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, or ECX. Now, the commodity exchange itself, that concept, is not new to the world. In fact, in 1848, 82 grain merchants and farmers got together in a small town at the crossroads of the Illinois River and Lake Michigan to establish a way to trade better amongst themselves.That was, of course, the birth of the Chicago Board of Trade, which is the most famous commodity exchange in the world. The Chicago Board of Trade was established then for precisely the same reasons that our farmers today would benefit from a commodity exchange. In the American Midwest, farmers used to load grain onto barges and send it upriver to the Chicago market. But once it arrived, if no buyer was to be found, or if prices suddenly dropped, farmers would incur tremendous losses. And in fact, would even dump the grain in Lake Michigan, rather than spend more money transporting it back to their farms. Well, the need to avoid these huge risks and tremendous losses led to the birth of the futures market, and the underlying system of grading grain and receipting — issuing warehouse receipts on the basis of which trade could be done.From there, the greatest innovation of all came about in this market, which is that buyers and sellers could transact grain without actually having to physically or visually inspect the grain. That meant that grain could be traded across tremendous distances, and even across time — as far forward as 18 months into the future. This innovation is at the heart of the transformation of American agriculture, and the rise of Chicago to a global market, agricultural market, superpower from where it was, a small regional town. Now, over the last century, we tend to think of commodity exchanges as the purview of Western industrialized countries, and that the reference prices for cotton, coffee, cocoa — products produced mainly in the south — are actually a reference price, or a price discovered in these organized commodity exchanges in the northern countries. But that is actually changing.And we're seeing a shift — powered mainly because of information technology — a shift in market dominance towards the emerging markets. And over the last decade, you see that the share of Western exchanges — and this is the U.S. share of exchanges in the world — has gone down by nearly half in just the last decade. Similarly, there's been explosive growth in India, for example, where rural farmers are using exchanges — growing here over the last three years by 270 percent a year. This is powered by low-cost VSAT technology, aggressively trying to reach farmers to bring them into the market. China's Dalian Commodity Exchange, three years ago, 2004, overtook the Chicago Board of Trade to become the second largest commodity exchange in the world. Now, in Ethiopia, we're in the process of designing the first organized Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. We're not trying to cut and paste the Chicago model or the India model, but creating a system uniquely tailored to Ethiopia's needs and realities, Ethiopia's small farmers.So, the ECX is an Ethiopian exchange for Ethiopia. We're creating a system that serves all market actors, that creates integrity, trust, efficiency, transparency and enables small farmers to manage the risks that I have described. In the design of our commodity exchange in Ethiopia, we've done something rather unique, which is to take the approach of an integrated perspective, or what we call the ECX Edge. The ECX Edge pretty much creates the entire ecosystem in which the market will develop itself. And this is because one of the things we've learned over the last decade of studying market development in Africa is that the piecemeal approach does not work. You've got one donor trying to develop market information, another trying to work on or sponsor grades and standards, another ICT, and yet another on warehousing, or warehouse receipts.In our approach in Ethiopia, we've decided to put together the entire ecosystem, or environment, in which trade takes place. That means that the exchange will operate a trading system, which will initially start as an open outcry, because we don't think the country's ready for full electronic trading. But at the same time, we'll do something which I think no exchange in the world has ever done, which is itself to operate something like an Internet cafe in the rural areas. So that farmers and small traders can actually come to a terminal center — what we call the remote access terminal centers — and actually, without having to buy a computer or figure out how to dial up or any of those things, simply see the trading that's happening on the Addis Ababa trading floor.At the same time, what's very fundamental to this market is that — and again, an innovation that we've designed for our exchange — is that the exchange will operate warehouses around the country, in which grade certification and warehouse receipting will be done. And in turn, we'll operate an in-house clearing system, to assure that payment is done appropriately, in the right amount and at the right time, so that basically, we create trust and integrity in the system. Obviously, we work with exchange actors, and as we're developing the exchange market itself, we're also developing the regulatory infrastructure and legal framework, the overarching legal framework for making this market work.So, in fact, our proclamation is going to parliament next month. What's really important is that the ECX will operate a market information system to disseminate prices in real time to farmers around the country, using VSAT technology to bring an electronic price dissemination directly to farmers. What this does is transforms, fundamentally, the farmers' relationship to the market. Whereas before the farmer used to think local — meaning that he or she would go to the nearest local market, eight to 10 kilometers away on average, and sell whatever they happened to have, without any idea of what the price premium or anything else was — now farmers come with knowledge of what prices are at the national market. And they start to think national, and even global. They start to make not only commercial marketing decisions, but also planting decisions, on the basis of information coming from the futures price market. And they come to the market knowing what grades their products will achieve in terms of a price premium.So all of this will transform farmers. It will also transform the way traders do business. It will stop them from doing simple, back-to-back, limited arbitrage to really thinking strategically about how to move grain across long distances from [surplus regions] to [deficit areas]. Can Ethiopia do this? It seems very ambitious. But it will create new opportunities. We believe that this initiative requires great political will, and we'll have to align the financial sector, as well as the ICT sector, and really even the underlying legal framework. We believe that the winds of change are here, and that we can do it. ECX is the market for Ethiopia's new millennium, which starts in about eight months.The last parliament of our century opened with our president announcing to the country that this was the most important economic initiative for the country today. We believe that the stakes are high, but that the returns will be even greater. ECX, moreover, can become a trading platform for a pan-African market in agricultural commodities. Ethiopia's domestic market is about one billion dollars of value. And we feel that over the next five years, if Ethiopia can capture even 40 percent, just 40 percent, of the domestic market, and add just 25 percent value to that market, the value of the market doubles. Ethiopia's agricultural market is 30 percent higher than South Africa's grain production, and, in fact, Ethiopia is the second largest maize producer in Africa. So the potential is there. The will is there. The commitment is there. So we feel that we have a winning value proposition to transform farmers' choices, to grow our agriculture, and to change Africa. So, we are in the business of finding our happiness. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elene_gabre_madhin_on_ethiopian_economics
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"I'd like to do pretty much what I did the first time, which is to choose a light-hearted theme. Last time, I talked about death and dying. This time, I'm going to talk about mental illness. But it has to be technological, so I'll talk about electroshock therapy. (Laughter)You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body. So, the way of treating these diseases in early times was to, in some way or other, exorcise those evil spirits, and this is still going on, as you know.But it wasn't enough to use the priests. When medicine became somewhat scientific, in about 450 BC, with Hippocrates and those boys, they tried to look for herbs, plants that would literally shake the bad spirits out. So, they found certain plants that could cause convulsions. And the herbals, the botanical books of up to the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance are filled with prescriptions for causing convulsions to shake the evil spirits out.Finally, in about the sixteenth century, a physician whose name was Theophrastus Bombastus Aureolus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, a name probably familiar to some people here — (Laughter) — good, old Paracelsus found that he could predict the degree of convulsion by using a measured amount of camphor to produce the convulsion. Can you imagine going to your closet, pulling out a mothball, and chewing on it if you're feeling depressed? It's better than Prozac, but I wouldn't recommend it.So what we see in the seventeenth, eighteenth century is the continued search for medications other than camphor that'll do the trick. Well, along comes Benjamin Franklin, and he comes close to convulsing himself with a bolt of electricity off the end of his kite. And so people begin thinking in terms of electricity to produce convulsions.And then, we fast-forward to about 1932, when three Italian psychiatrists, who were largely treating depression, began to notice among their patients, who were also epileptics, that if they had an epileptic — a series of epileptic fits, a lot of them in a row — the depression would very frequently lift. Not only would it lift, but it might never return. So they got very interested in producing convulsions, measured types of convulsions.And they thought, ""Well, we've got electricity, we'll plug somebody into the wall. That always makes hair stand up and people shake a lot."" So, they tried it on a few pigs, and none of the pigs were killed. So, they went to the police and they said, ""We know that at the Rome railroad station, there are all these lost souls wandering around, muttering gibberish. Can you bring one of them to us?"" Someone who is, as the Italians say, ""cagoots."" So they found this ""cagoots"" guy, a 39-year-old man who was really hopelessly schizophrenic, who was known, had been known for months, to be literally defecating on himself, talking nothing that made any sense, and they brought him into the hospital. So these three psychiatrists, after about two or three weeks of observation, laid him down on a table, connected his temples to a very small source of current. They thought, ""Well, we'll try 55 volts, two-tenths of a second. That's not going to do anything terrible to him."" So they did that.Well, I have the following from a firsthand observer, who told me this about 35 years ago, when I was thinking about these things for some research project of mine. He said, ""This fellow"" — remember, he wasn't even put to sleep — ""after this major grand mal convulsion, sat right up, looked at these three fellas and said, 'What the fuck are you assholes trying to do?' "" (Laughter) If I could only say that in Italian.Well, they were happy as could be, because he hadn't said a rational word in the weeks of observation. So they plugged him in again, and this time they used 110 volts for half a second. And to their amazement, after it was over, he began speaking like he was perfectly well. He relapsed a little bit, they gave him a series of treatments, and he was essentially cured. But of course, having schizophrenia, within a few months, it returned.But they wrote a paper about this, and everybody in the Western world began using electricity to convulse people who were either schizophrenic or severely depressed. It didn't work very well on the schizophrenics, but it was pretty clear in the '30s and by the middle of the '40s that electroconvulsive therapy was very, very effective in the treatment of depression.And of course, in those days, there were no antidepressant drugs, and it became very, very popular. They would anesthetize people, convulse them, but the real difficulty was that there was no way to paralyze muscles. So people would have a real grand mal seizure. Bones were broken. Especially in old, fragile people, you couldn't use it. And then in the 1950s, late 1950s, the so-called muscle relaxants were developed by pharmacologists, and it got so that you could induce a complete convulsion, an electroencephalographic convulsion — you could see it on the brain waves — without causing any convulsion in the body except a little bit of twitching of the toes. So again, it was very, very popular and very, very useful.Well, you know, in the middle '60s, the first antidepressants came out. Tofranil was the first. In the late '70s, early '80s, there were others, and they were very effective. And patients' rights groups seemed to get very upset about the kinds of things that they would witness. And so the whole idea of electroconvulsive, electroshock therapy disappeared, but has had a renaissance in the last 10 years. And the reason that it has had a renaissance is that probably about 10 percent of the people, severe depressives, do not respond, regardless of what is done for them.Now, why am I telling you this story at this meeting? I'm telling you this story, because actually ever since Richard called me and asked me to talk about — as he asked all of his speakers — to talk about something that would be new to this audience, that we had never talked about, never written about, I've been planning this moment. This reason really is that I am a man who, almost 30 years ago, had his life saved by two long courses of electroshock therapy. And let me tell you this story.I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word bad would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful. There are, I'm sure, enough divorced people in this room to know about the hostility, the anger, who knows what. Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence — it had to do with not quite poverty but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.So, as things got worse, as we really began to hate each other, I became progressively depressed over a period of a couple of years, trying to save this marriage, which was inevitably not to be saved. Finally, I would schedule — all my major surgical cases, I was scheduling them for 12, one o'clock in the afternoon, because I couldn't get out of bed before about 11 o'clock. And anybody who's been depressed here knows what that's like. I couldn't even pull the covers off myself.Well, you're in a university medical center, where everybody knows everybody, and it's perfectly clear to my colleagues, so my referrals began to decrease. As my referrals began to decrease, I clearly became increasingly depressed until I thought, my God, I can't work anymore. And, in fact, it didn't make any difference because I didn't have any patients anymore.So, with the advice of my physician, I had myself admitted to the acute care psychiatric unit of our university hospital. And my colleagues, who had known me since medical school in that place, said, ""Don't worry, chap. Six weeks, you're back in the operating room. Everything's going to be great."" Well, you know what bovine stercus is? That proved to be a lot of bovine stercus. I know some people who got tenure in that place with lies like that. (Laughter) So I was one of their failures.But it wasn't that simple. Because by the time I got out of that unit, I was not functional at all. I could hardly see five feet in front of myself. I shuffled when I walked. I was bowed over. I rarely bathed. I sometimes didn't shave. It was dreadful. And it was clear — not to me, because nothing was clear to me at that time anymore — that I would need long-term hospitalization in that awful place called a mental hospital. So I was admitted, in 1973, in the spring of 1973, to the Institute of Living, which used to be called the Hartford Retreat. It was founded in the eighteenth century, the largest psychiatric hospital in the state of Connecticut, other than the huge public hospitals that existed at that time.And they tried everything they had. They tried the usual psychotherapy. They tried every medication available in those days. And they did have Tofranil and other things — Mellaril, who knows what. Nothing happened except that I got jaundiced from one of these things. And finally, because I was well known in Connecticut, they decided they better have a meeting of the senior staff. All the senior staff got together, and I later found out what happened.They put all their heads together and they decided that there was nothing that could be done for this surgeon who had essentially separated himself from the world, who by that time had become so overwhelmed, not just with depression and feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, but with obsessional thinking, obsessional thinking about coincidences. And there were particular numbers that every time I saw them, just got me dreadfully upset — all kinds of ritualistic observances, just awful, awful stuff. Remember when you were a kid, and you had to step on every line? Well, I was a grown man who had all of these rituals, and it got so there was a throbbing, there was a ferocious fear in my head. You've seen this painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. Every moment was a scream. It was impossible. So they decided there was no therapy, there was no treatment. But there was one treatment, which actually had been pioneered at the Hartford hospital in the early 1940s, and you can imagine what it was. It was pre-frontal lobotomy. So they decided — I didn't know this, again, I found this out later — that the only thing that could be done was for this 43-year-old man to have a pre-frontal lobotomy.Well, as in all hospitals, there was a resident assigned to my case. He was 27 years old, and he would meet with me two or three times a week. And of course, I had been there, what, three or four months at the time. And he asked to meet with the senior staff, and they agreed to meet with him because he was very well thought of in that place. They thought he had a really extraordinary future.And he dug in his heels and said, ""No. I know this man better than any of you. I have met with him over and over again. You've just seen him from time to time. You've read reports and so forth. I really honestly believe that the basic problem here is pure depression, and all of the obsessional thinking comes out of it. And you know, of course, what'll happen if you do a pre-frontal lobotomy. Any of the results along the spectrum, from pretty bad to terrible, terrible, terrible is going to happen. If he does the best he can, he will have no further obsessions, probably no depression, but his affect will be dulled, he will never go back to surgery, he will never be the loving father that he was to his two children, his life will be changed. If he has the usual result, he will end up like 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' And you know about that, just essentially in a stupor the rest of his life.""Well, he said, ""Can't we try a course of electroshock therapy?"" And you know why they agreed? They agreed to humor him. They just thought, ""Well, we'll give a course of 10. And so we'll lose a little time. Big deal. It doesn't make any difference."" So they gave the course of 10, and the first — the usual course, incidentally, was six to eight and still is six to eight. Plugged me into the wires, put me to sleep, gave me the muscle relaxant. Six didn't work. Seven didn't work. Eight didn't work. At nine, I noticed — and it's wonderful that I could notice anything — I noticed a change. And at 10, I noticed a real change.And he went back to them, and they agreed to do another 10. Again, not a single one of them — I think there are about seven or eight of them — thought this would do any good. They thought this was a temporary change. But, lo and behold, by 16, by 17, there were demonstrable differences in the way I felt. By 18 and 19, I was sleeping through the night. And by 20, I had the sense, I really had the sense that I could overcome this, that I was now strong enough that by an act of will, I could blow the obsessional thinking away. I could blow the depression away.And I've never forgotten — I never will forget — standing in the kitchen of the unit, it was a Sunday morning in January of 1974, standing in the kitchen by myself and thinking, ""I've got the strength now to do this."" It was as though those tightly coiled wires in my head had been disconnected and I could think clearly. But I need a formula. I need some thing to say to myself when I begin thinking obsessionally, obsessively. Well, the Gilbert and Sullivan fans in this room will remember ""Ruddigore,"" and they will remember Mad Margaret, and they will remember that she was married to a fellow named Sir Despard Murgatroyd. And she used to go nuts, every five minutes or so in the play, and he said to her, ""We must have a word to bring you back to reality, and the word, my dear, will be 'Basingstoke.'"" So every time she got a little nuts, he would say, ""Basingstoke!"" And she would say, ""Basingstoke, it is."" And she would be fine for a little while.Well, you know, I'm from the Bronx. I can't say ""Basingstoke."" But I had something better. And it was very simple. It was, ""Ah, fuck it!"" (Laughter) Much better than ""Basingstoke,"" at least for me. And it worked — my God, it worked. Every time I would begin thinking obsessionally — again, once more, after 20 shock treatments — I would say, ""Ah, fuck it."" And things got better and better, and within three or four months, I was discharged from that hospital, and I joined a group of surgeons where I could work with other people in the community, not in New Haven, but fairly close by. I stayed there for three years. At the end of three years, I went back to New Haven, had remarried by that time. I brought my wife with me, actually, to make sure I could get through this. My children came back to live with us. We had two more children after that. Resuscitated the career, even better than it had been before. Went right back into the university and began to write books. Well, you know, it's been a wonderful life. It's been, as I said, close to 30 years. I stopped doing surgery about six years ago and became a full-time writer, as many people know. But it's been very exciting. It's been very happy.Every once in a while, I have to say, ""Ah, fuck it."" Every once in a while, I get somewhat depressed and a little obsessional. So, I'm not free of all of this. But it's worked. It's always worked. Why have I chosen, after never, ever talking about this, to talk about it now? Well, those of you who know some of these books know that one is about death and dying, one is about the human body and the human spirit, one is about the way mystical thoughts are constantly in our minds, and they have always to do with my own personal experiences. One might think reading these books — and I've gotten thousands of letters about them by people who do think this — that based on my life's history as I've portrayed in the books, my early life's history, I am someone who has overcome adversity. That I am someone who has drunk, drank, drunk of the bitter dregs of near-disaster in childhood and emerged not just unscathed but strengthened. I really have it figured out, so that I can advise people about death and dying, so that I can talk about mysticism and the human spirit.And I've always felt guilty about that. I've always felt that somehow I was an impostor because my readers don't know what I have just told you. It's known by some people in New Haven, obviously, but it is not generally known. So one of the reasons that I have come here to talk about this today is to — frankly, selfishly — unburden myself and let it be known that this is not an untroubled mind that has written all of these books. But more importantly, I think, is the fact that a very significant proportion of people in this audience are under 30, and there are many, of course, who are well over 30. For people under 30, and it looks to me like almost all of you — I would say all of you — are either on the cusp of a magnificent and exciting career or right into a magnificent and exciting career: anything can happen to you. Things change. Accidents happen. Something from childhood comes back to haunt you. You can be thrown off the track. I hope it happens to none of you, but it will probably happen to a small percentage of you.To those to whom it doesn't happen, there will be adversities. If I, with the bleakness of spirit, with no spirit, that I had in the 1970s and no possibility of recovery, as far as that group of very experienced psychiatrists thought, if I can find my way back from this, believe me, anybody can find their way back from any adversity that exists in their lives.And for those who are older, who have lived through perhaps not something as bad as this, but who have lived through difficult times, perhaps where they lost everything, as I did, and started out all over again, some of these things will seem very familiar. There is recovery. There is redemption. And there is resurrection. There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot.Perhaps the most popular resurrection theme, outside of specifically religious ones, is the one about the phoenix, the ancient story of the phoenix, who, every 500 years, resurrects itself from its own ashes to go on to live a life that is even more beautiful than it was before. Richard, thanks very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_electroshock_therapy
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"So, I guess it is a result of globalization that you can find Coca-Cola tins on top of Everest and a Buddhist monk in Monterey.(Laughter)And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. So I would like to invite you, also, for a while, to the Himalayas themselves. And to show the place where meditators, like me, who began with being a molecular biologist in Pasteur Institute, and found their way to the mountains.So these are a few images I was lucky to take and be there. There's Mount Kailash in Eastern Tibet — wonderful setting. This is from Marlboro country.(Laughter)This is a turquoise lake. A meditator. This is the hottest day of the year somewhere in Eastern Tibet, on August 1. And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, ""We are going to sleep outside."" And I said, ""Why? We have enough space in the tent."" They said, ""Yes, but it's summertime.""(Laughter)So now, we are going to speak of happiness. As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting.(Laughter)I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. And someone wrote an article saying, ""Don't impose on us the dirty work of happiness.""(Laughter)""We don't care about being happy. We need to live with passion. We like the ups and downs of life. We like our suffering because it's so good when it ceases for a while.""(Laughter)This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. It's about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time.(Laughter)Now, let's come to happiness or well-being. And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, ""May I suffer the whole day?""(Laughter)Which means that somehow, consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream — somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. As Pascal said, even the one who hangs himself, somehow, is looking for cessation of suffering. He finds no other way. But then, if you look in the literature, East and West, you can find incredible diversity of definition of happiness. Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. Some people say happiness is right now; it's the quality of the freshness of the present moment. And that led Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, ""All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that each of them could define their own terms.""Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. But now, if it is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life, then we better know what it is, have some clearer idea. And probably, the fact that we don't know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. Although we want to avoid suffering, it seems we are running somewhat towards it. And that can also come from some kind of confusions.One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. But if you look at the characteristics of those two, pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something that — changes of nature. Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust.(Laughter)That's the nature of things. We get tired. I used to be a fan of Bach. I used to play it on the guitar, you know. I can hear it two, three, five times. If I had to hear it 24 hours, non-stop, it might be very tiring. If you are feeling very cold, you come near a fire, it's so wonderful. After some moments, you just go a little back, and then it starts burning. It sort of uses itself as you experience it. And also, again, it can — also, it's something that you — it is not something that is radiating outside. Like, you can feel intense pleasure and some others around you can be suffering a lot.Now, what, then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. A state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states, and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level.Look at the waves coming near the shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression — there's no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean, like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy — that can be the spring of happiness. But there's also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone's suffering.So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often, we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, ""Everything to be happy — to have everything to be happy."" That very sentence already reveals the doom, destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong, we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know, by experience, that we can be what we call ""a little paradise,"" and yet, be completely unhappy within.The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal, and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere. So one evening, he said, ""Look, you are doing all these things, but isn't it nice, also, to build something within?"" And he said, ""[Without] that — even if you get a high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump."" So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who, in very difficult circumstances, manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. So now, if the inner conditions are stronger — of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. It's highly desirable. However, this is not enough. Those are just auxiliary, help conditions. The experience that translates everything is within the mind. So then, when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness, the inner conditions, and which are those which will undermine happiness. So then, this just needs to have some experience.We have to know from ourselves, there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing, to this well-being, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, flourishing. There are some which are adverse to this well-being. And so, if we look from our own experience, anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping, they don't leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it. And also, they are detrimental to others' happiness. So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. At the opposite, everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity, if from the distance, without anyone knowing anything about it, we could save a child's life, make someone happy. We don't need the recognition. We don't need any gratitude. Just the mere fact of doing that fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature. And we would like to be like that all the time.So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one's mind? Aren't those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? For that we have to ask, what is the nature of mind? And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that's just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise on it. You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. The mirror allows that, but the mirror is not tainted, is not modified, is not altered by those images. Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. This is the nature. It cannot be tainted intrinsically with hatred or jealousy because then, if it was always there — like a dye that would permeate the whole cloth — then it would be found all the time, somewhere. We know we're not always angry, always jealous, always generous.So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. That is the ground for mind training. Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot, in the same gesture, shake hand and give a blow. So, there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being. So that's the way to proceed. Rejoicing compared to jealousy. A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession. Benevolence, loving kindness against hatred. But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote.Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that's by looking at the very nature. Usually, when we feel annoyed, hatred or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then, it's a self-perpetuating process. So what we need to look for now is, instead of looking outward, we look inward. Look at anger itself. It looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm. We think we could sit on the cloud, but if you go there, it's just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. So this is the principal of mind training.Now, it takes time, because it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that's the only way to go. Mind transformation — that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is.So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, it was, I suppose, the subject of — we have to deal in such a short time — with brain plasticity. The brain was thought to be more or less fixed. All the nominal connections, in numbers and quantities, were thought, until the last 20 years, to be more or less fixed when we reached adult age. Now, recently, it has been found that it can change a lot. A violinist, as we heard, who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice, some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain changes a lot, increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections. So can we do that with human qualities? With loving kindness, with patience, with openness?So that's what those great meditators have been doing. Some of them who came to the labs, like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, did 20 to 40,000 hours of meditation. They do, like, three years' retreat, where they do meditate 12 hours a day. And then, the rest of their life, they will do three or four hours a day. They are real Olympic champions of mind training.(Laughter)This is the place where the meditators — you can see it's kind of inspiring. Now, here with 256 electrodes.(Laughter)So what did they find? Of course, same thing. The scientific embargo — if it's ever submitted to ""Nature,"" hopefully, it will be accepted. It deals with the state of compassion, unconditional compassion. We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years, to put their mind in a state where there's nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. Of course, during the training, we do that with objects. We think of people suffering, of people we love, but at some point, it can be a state which is all pervading. Here is the preliminary result, which I can show because it's already been shown. The bell curve shows 150 controls, and what is being looked at is the difference between the right and the left frontal lobe. In very short, people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed, withdrawn. They don't describe a lot of positive affect. It's the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. So there's a basic line for people. And also, it can be changed. If you see a comic movie, you go off to the left side. If you are happy about something, you'll go more to the left side. If you have a bout of depression, you'll go to the right side. Here, the -0.5 is the full standard deviation of a meditator who meditated on compassion. It's something that is totally out of the bell curve.So, I've no time to go into all the different scientific results. Hopefully, they will come. But they found that — this is after three and a half hours in an fMRI, it's like coming out of a space ship. Also, it has been shown in other labs — for instance, Paul Ekman's labs in Berkeley — that some meditators are able, also, to control their emotional response more than it could be thought. Like the startle experiments, for example. If you sit a guy on a chair with all this apparatus measuring your physiology, and there's kind of a bomb that goes off, it's such an instinctive response that, in 20 years, they never saw anyone who would not jump. Some meditators, without trying to stop it, but simply by being completely open, thinking that that bang is just going to be a small event like a shooting star, they are able not to move at all.So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. It's more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that's going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most — the way our mind functions — which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience.Now, compassion is supposed to be put in action. That's what we try to do in different places. Just this one example is worth a lot of work. This lady with bone TB, left alone in a tent, was going to die with her only daughter. One year later, how she is. Different schools and clinics we've been doing in Tibet.And just, I leave you with the beauty of those looks that tells more about happiness than I could ever say.(Laughter)And jumping monks of Tibet.(Laughter)Flying monks.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness
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"(Applause) I want to talk to you a little bit about user-generated content. I'm going to tell you three stories on the way to one argument that's going to tell you a little bit about how we open user-generated content up for business. So, here's the first story.1906. This man, John Philip Sousa, traveled to this place, the United States Capitol, to talk about this technology, what he called the, quote, ""talking machines."" Sousa was not a fan of the talking machines. This is what he had to say. ""These talking machines are going to ruin artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day, or the old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left,"" Sousa said. ""The vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.""Now, this is the picture I want you to focus on. This is a picture of culture. We could describe it using modern computer terminology as a kind of read-write culture. It's a culture where people participate in the creation and the re-creation of their culture. In that sense, it's read-write. Sousa's fear was that we would lose that capacity because of these, quote, ""infernal machines."" They would take it away. And in its place, we'd have the opposite of read-write culture, what we could call read-only culture. Culture where creativity was consumed but the consumer is not a creator. A culture which is top-down, owned, where the vocal chords of the millions have been lost.Now, as you look back at the twentieth century, at least in what we think of as the, quote, ""developed world"" — hard not to conclude that Sousa was right. Never before in the history of human culture had it been as professionalized, never before as concentrated. Never before has creativity of the millions been as effectively displaced, and displaced because of these, quote, ""infernal machines."" The twentieth century was that century where, at least for those places we know the best, culture moved from this read-write to read-only existence.So, second. Land is a kind of property — it is property. It's protected by law. As Lord Blackstone described it, land is protected by trespass law, for most of the history of trespass law, by presuming it protects the land all the way down below and to an indefinite extent upward. Now, that was a pretty good system for most of the history of the regulation of land, until this technology came along, and people began to wonder, were these instruments trespassers as they flew over land without clearing the rights of the farms below as they traveled across the country? Well, in 1945, Supreme Court got a chance to address that question.Two farmers, Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby, who raised chickens, had a significant complaint because of these technologies. The complaint was that their chickens followed the pattern of the airplanes and flew themselves into the walls of the barn when the airplanes flew over the land. And so they appealed to Lord Blackstone to say these airplanes were trespassing. Since time immemorial, the law had said, you can't fly over the land without permission of the landowner, so this flight must stop. Well, the Supreme Court considered this 100-years tradition and said, in an opinion written by Justice Douglas, that the Causbys must lose. The Supreme Court said the doctrine protecting land all the way to the sky has no place in the modern world, otherwise every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense, a rare idea in the law, but here it was. Common sense — (Laughter) — Revolts at the idea. Common sense.Finally. Before the Internet, the last great terror to rain down on the content industry was a terror created by this technology. Broadcasting: a new way to spread content, and therefore a new battle over the control of the businesses that would spread content. Now, at that time, the entity, the legal cartel, that controlled the performance rights for most of the music that would be broadcast using these technologies was ASCAP. They had an exclusive license on the most popular content, and they exercised it in a way that tried to demonstrate to the broadcasters who really was in charge. So, between 1931 and 1939, they raised rates by some 448 percent, until the broadcasters finally got together and said, okay, enough of this. And in 1939, a lawyer, Sydney Kaye, started something called Broadcast Music Inc. We know it as BMI. And BMI was much more democratic in the art that it would include within its repertoire, including African American music for the first time in the repertoire. But most important was that BMI took public domain works and made arrangements of them, which they gave away for free to their subscribers. So that in 1940, when ASCAP threatened to double their rates, the majority of broadcasters switched to BMI. Now, ASCAP said they didn't care. The people will revolt, they predicted, because the very best music was no longer available, because they had shifted to the second best public domain provided by BMI. Well, they didn't revolt, and in 1941, ASCAP cracked. And the important point to recognize is that even though these broadcasters were broadcasting something you would call second best, that competition was enough to break, at that time, this legal cartel over access to music.Okay. Three stories. Here's the argument. In my view, the most significant thing to recognize about what this Internet is doing is its opportunity to revive the read-write culture that Sousa romanticized. Digital technology is the opportunity for the revival of these vocal chords that he spoke so passionately to Congress about. User-generated content, spreading in businesses in extraordinarily valuable ways like these, celebrating amateur culture. By which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing and not for the money. I mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time. For when you think of what Sousa romanticized in the young people together, singing the songs of the day, of the old songs, you should recognize what your kids are doing right now. Taking the songs of the day and the old songs and remixing them to make them something different. It's how they understand access to this culture. So, let's have some very few examples to get a sense of what I'm talking about here.Here's something called Anime Music Video, first example, taking anime captured from television re-edited to music tracks. (Music) This one you should be — confidence. Jesus survives. Don't worry. (Music) (Laughter) And this is the best. (Music) My love ... There's only you in my life ... The only thing that's bright ... My first love ... You're every breath that I take ... You're every step I make ... And I .... I want to share all my love with you ... No one else will do ... And your eyes ... They tell me how much you care ... (Music) So, this is remix, right? (Applause) And it's important to emphasize that what this is not is not what we call, quote, ""piracy."" I'm not talking about nor justifying people taking other people's content in wholesale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner. I'm talking about people taking and recreating using other people's content, using digital technologies to say things differently. Now, the importance of this is not the technique that you've seen here. Because, of course, every technique that you've seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. It is now anybody with access to a $1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. It is how our kids think. It is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationship to themselves.Now, in response to this new use of culture using digital technologies, the law has not greeted this Sousa revival with very much common sense. Instead, the architecture of copyright law and the architecture of digital technologies, as they interact, have produced the presumption that these activities are illegal. Because if copyright law at its core regulates something called copies, then in the digital world the one fact we can't escape is that every single use of culture produces a copy. Every single use therefore requires permission; without permission, you are a trespasser. You're a trespasser with about as much sense as these people were trespassers. Common sense here, though, has not yet revolted in response to this response that the law has offered to these forms of creativity. Instead, what we've seen is something much worse than a revolt. There's a growing extremism that comes from both sides in this debate, in response to this conflict between the law and the use of these technologies.One side builds new technologies, such as one recently announced that will enable them to automatically take down from sites like YouTube any content that has any copyrighted content in it, whether or not there's a judgment of fair use that might be applied to the use of that content. And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong. Now, the balance that I try to fight for, I, as any good liberal, try to fight for first by looking to the government. Total mistake, right? (Laughter)Looked first to the courts and the legislatures to try to get them to do something to make the system make more sense. It failed partly because the courts are too passive, partly because the legislatures are corrupted, by which I don't mean that there's bribery operating to stop real change, but more the economy of influence that governs how Congress functions means that policymakers here will not understand this until it's too late to fix it. So, we need something different, we need a different kind of solution. And the solution here, in my view, is a private solution, a solution that looks to legalize what it is to be young again, and to realize the economic potential of that, and that's where the story of BMI becomes relevant. Because, as BMI demonstrated, competition here can achieve some form of balance. The same thing can happen now. We don't have a public domain to draw upon now, so instead what we need is two types of changes.First, that artists and creators embrace the idea, choose that their work be made available more freely. So, for example, they can say their work is available freely for non-commercial, this amateur-type of use, but not freely for any commercial use. And second, we need the businesses that are building out this read-write culture to embrace this opportunity expressly, to enable it, so that this ecology of free content, or freer content, can grow on a neutral platform where they both exist simultaneously, so that more-free can compete with less-free, and the opportunity to develop the creativity in that competition can teach one the lessons of the other.Now, I would talk about one particular such plan that I know something about, but I don't want to violate TED's first commandment of selling, so I'm not going to talk about this at all. I'm instead just going to remind you of the point that BMI teaches us. That artist choice is the key for new technology having an opportunity to be open for business, and we need to build artist choice here if these new technologies are to have that opportunity. But let me end with something I think much more important — much more important than business. It's the point about how this connects to our kids. We have to recognize they're different from us. This is us, right? (Laughter) We made mixed tapes; they remix music. We watched TV; they make TV.It is technology that has made them different, and as we see what this technology can do, we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, ""pirates."" And is that good? We live in this weird time. It's kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that's what I — we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better. Do better, at least for them, if not for opening for business. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity
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"There's an ancient and universal concept that words have power, that spells exist, and that if we could only pronounce the right words, then — whoosh! — you know, an avalanche would come and wipe out the hobbits, right? So this is a very attractive idea, because we're very lazy, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or the world's greatest computer programmer. This idea has a lot of traction with us.We love the idea that words, when pronounced, are little more than pure information, but they evoke physical action in the real world that helps us do work. So, of course, with lots of programmable computers and robots around, this is an easy thing to picture.How many of you know what I'm talking about? Raise your right hand. How many don't know what I'm talking about? Raise your left hand. So that's great. So that was too easy. You guys have very insecure computers, OK? So now the thing is, this is a different kind of spell. This is a computer program made of zeros and ones. It can be pronounced on a computer, does something like this. The important thing is we can write it in a high-level language.A computer magician can write this thing. It can be compiled into zeros and ones and pronounced by a computer. And that's what makes computers powerful, these high-level languages that can be compiled. And so, I'm here to tell you, you don't need a computer to actually have a spell. In fact, what you can do at the molecular level is that if you encode information — you encode a spell or program as molecules — then physics can actually directly interpret that information and run a program.It's what happens in proteins. When this amino-acid sequence gets pronounced as atoms, these little letters are sticky for each other. It collapses into a three-dimensional shape that turns it into a nanomachine that actually cuts DNA. The interesting thing is that if you change the sequence, you change the three-dimensional folding. You get, now, a DNA stapler, instead. These are the kind of molecular programs we want to be able to write. The problem is, we don't know the machine language of proteins or have a compiler for proteins.So I've joined a growing band of people that try to make molecular spells using DNA. We use DNA because it's cheaper, it's easier to handle, it's something we understand really well — so well, in fact, that we think we can actually write programming languages for DNA and have molecular compilers.So then, we think we can do that. One of my first questions doing this was: How can you make an arbitrary shape or pattern out of DNA? I decided to use a type of DNA origami, where you take a long strand of DNA and fold it into whatever shape or pattern you might want. So here's a shape. I actually spent about a year in my home in my underwear, coding, like Linus [Torvalds], in that picture before. This program takes a shape and spits out 250 DNA sequences. These short DNA sequences are what are going to fold the long strand into this shape that we want to make. So you send an e-mail with these sequences in it to a company, and the company pronounces them on a DNA synthesizer, a machine about the size of a photocopier. And they take your e-mail, and every letter in your e-mail, they replace with a 30-atom cluster — one for each letter, A, T, C and G in DNA.They string them up in the right sequence, and then they send them back to you via FedEx. So you get 250 of these in the mail in little tubes. I mix them together, add a little bit of salt water, and then add this long strand I was telling you about, that I've stolen from a virus. And then what happens is, you heat this whole thing up to about boiling. You cool it down to room temperature, and as you do, those short strands do the following thing: each one of them binds that long strand in one place, and then has a second half that binds that long strand in a distant place, and brings those two parts of the long strand close together so they stick together.So the net effect of all 250 of these strands is to fold the long strand into the shape you're looking for. It'll approximate that shape. We do this for real, in the test tube. In each little drop of water, you get 50 billion of these guys. With a microscope, you can see them on a surface. The neat thing is if you change the sequence and change the spell, just change the sequence of the staples, you can make a molecule that looks like this. And, you know, he likes to hang out with his buddies. A lot of them are actually pretty good.If you change the spell again, you change the sequence again, you get really nice, 130-nanometer triangles. If you do it again, you can get arbitrary patterns. So on a rectangle, you can paint patterns of North and South America, or the words, ""DNA.""So that's DNA origami. That's one way. There are many ways of casting molecular spells using DNA. What we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly so we can build anything, right? We want to be able to build technological artifacts that are maybe good for the world. We want to learn how to build biological artifacts, like people and whales and trees. And if it's the case that we can reach that level of complexity, if our ability to program molecules gets to be that good, then that will truly be magic.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_rothemund_casts_a_spell_with_dna
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"You've all seen lots of articles on climate change, and here's yet another New York Times article, just like every other darn one you've seen. It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you've seen. It even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you've seen. What's unusual about this one, maybe, is that it's from 1953. And the reason I'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent. That people have just sort of figured out about it, and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something, we may be on the road to a solution. The fact is — uh-uh. We've known about this problem for 50 years, depending on how you count it. We have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so. And we've accomplished close to zip.This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere. You've seen this in various forms, but maybe you haven't seen this one. What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating. And that it's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible, that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line. But in fact, they're growing faster.Here's some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice, and it's the lowest by far. And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models. So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel, and politicians signing treaties — in fact, you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative, because it's just consumed a lot of jet fuel. (Laughter) No, no! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing — our big economy — we've really hardly started. Really, we're doing this, basically. Really, not very much.I don't want to depress you too much. The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that's reasonably cheap. Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. So the problem is soluble, and the way we should go about solving it is, say, dealing with electricity production, which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of CO2 emissions. And we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation, and wind power, nuclear power and coal to CO2 capture, which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment, and work. All we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. Instead, we spend our time talking.But nevertheless, that's not what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing. And it's this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don't stop the emissions quickly enough. And you need to deal — somehow break the link between human actions that change climate, and the climate change itself. And that's particularly important because, of course, while we can adapt to climate change — and it's important to be honest here, there will be some benefits to climate change. Oh, yes, I think it's bad. I've spent my whole life working to stop it. But one of the reasons it's politically hard is there are winners and losers — not all losers. But, of course, the natural world, polar bears. I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic. They will completely lose. And there's no adaption.So this problem is absolutely soluble. This geo-engineering idea, in it's simplest form, is basically the following. You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles — sulfates — into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. And I know for certain that that will work. Not that there aren't side effects, but I know for certain it will work. And the reason is, it's been done. And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature.Here's Mount Pinatubo in the early '90s. That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud. The result of that was pretty dramatic. After that, and some previous volcanoes we have, you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere. So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes. But you'll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere and the surface, it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit. There's no big mystery about it. There's lots of mystery in the details, and there's some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer — and I'll get to that in a minute. But it clearly cools down. And one other thing: it's fast. It's really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do, like slowing emissions, are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions. And not only that, when you cut emissions, you don't cut concentrations, because concentrations, the amount of CO2 in the air, is the sum of emissions over time. So you can't step on the brakes very quickly. But if you do this, it's quick. And there are times you might like to do something quick.Another thing you might wonder about is, does it work? Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2, and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally? And the answer seems to be yes. So here are the graphs you've seen lots of times before. That's what the world looks like, under one particular climate model's view, with twice the amount of CO2 in the air. The lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight, and you're back to the original climate. And this graph from Ken Caldeira. It's important to say came, because Ken — at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid-'90s — Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said, ""Geo-engineering won't work."" And to the person who was promoting it said, ""The atmosphere's much more complicated."" Gave a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn't do a very good compensation. Ken went and ran his models, and found that it did.This topic is also old. That report that landed on President Johnson's desk when I was two years old — 1965. That report, in fact, which had all the modern climate science — the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering. It didn't even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. I'm not saying we shouldn't cut emissions. We should, but it made exactly this point. So, in a sense, there's not much new. The one new thing is this essay. So I should say, I guess, that since the time of that original President Johnson report, and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy — 1977, 1982, 1990 — people always talked about this idea. Not as something that was foolproof, but as an idea to think about.But when climate became, politically, a hot topic — if I may make the pun — in the last 15 years, this became so un-PC, we couldn't talk about it. It just sunk below the surface. We weren't allowed to speak about it. But in the last year, Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what's all been said before: that maybe, given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. He said roughly what's been said before. The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel prize for ozone chemistry. And so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts. And in fact, he had some ideas to make them go away.There was all sorts of press coverage, all over the world, going right down to ""Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth,"" from the Economist. And that got me thinking. I've worked on this topic on and off, but not so much technically. And I was actually lying in bed thinking one night. And I thought about this child's toy — hence, the title of my talk — and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin 'round in the child's radiometer, to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly. The other problem is they're right in the ozone layer, and I'd prefer them above the ozone layer. And it turns out, I woke up the next morning, and I started to calculate this. It was very hard to calculate from first principles. I was stumped. But then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere, about 100 kilometers up, that already have this effect.I'll tell you very quickly how the effect works. There are a lot of fun complexities that I'd love to spend the whole evening on, but I won't. But let's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it's unevenly heated. So the side facing the sun is warmer; the side away, cooler. Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it's warm. And so you see a net force away from the sun. That's called the photophoretic force. There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit. And of course, we may be wrong — this hasn't all been peer reviewed, we're in the middle of thinking about it — but so far, it seems good. But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes — much longer than before — because they're levitated. We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem. I'm sure there will be other problems that arise. Finally, we could make the particles migrate to over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles. Which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet, where we live, and do the maximum job of what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency, if you like.This is a new idea that's crept up that may be, essentially, a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in. Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right, I think it's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in. That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this, it's amazing how we can affect the planet. The one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage. This improved science and engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet, to control the planet, to give us weather and climate control — not because we plan it, not because we want it, just because science delivers it to us bit by bit, with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it.Now, suppose that space aliens arrived. Maybe they're going to land at the U.N. headquarters down the road here, or maybe they'll pick a smarter spot — but suppose they arrive and they give you a box. And the box has two knobs. One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature. Maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box. Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. We have no global governance. And different people will have different places they want it set. Now, I don't think that's going to happen. It's not very likely.But we're building that box. The scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece, in their labs. Even when they're doing it for other reasons. Even when they're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment. They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it — I do not — but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously. Because sooner or later, we'll be confronted with decisions about this, and it's better if we think hard about it, even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it.I'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this. We need a broader debate. A debate that involves musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are. So here's one way to think about it, which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. I guess the thing I haven't said about this is, it is absurdly cheap. It's conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I've come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. It's very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It's not a good idea, but it's just important. (Laughter) I'll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. And that calculation isn't much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. (Laughter)So because of this, we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions, and just as the concentrations go up, we can increase the amount of geo-engineering. I don't think anybody takes that seriously. Because under this scenario, we walk further and further away from the current climate. We have all sorts of other problems, like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere, anyway. Nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this.But here's a case which is harder to reject. Let's say that we don't do geo-engineering, we do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. But we don't really know how quickly we have to cut them. There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. So let's say that we work hard, and we actually don't just tap the brakes, but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations. And maybe someday — like 2075, October 23 — we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. And we have global celebrations, and we've actually started to — you know, we've seen the worst of it. But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years, and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. That's an absolutely possible scenario. We might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy, that it's a lot better than not geo-engineering. And that's a very different way to look at the problem. It's using this as risk control, not instead of action. It's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not that you'd use it as a substitute for action.But there is a problem with that view. And the problem is the following: knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome, and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. This is what economists call a moral hazard. And that's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about, and, in general, I think it's the underlying reason that it's been politically unacceptable to talk about this. But you don't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer.I'll leave you with three questions, and then one final quote. Should we do serious research on this topic? Should we have a national research program that looks at this? Not just at how you would do it better, but also what all the risks and downsides of it are. Right now, you have a few enthusiasts talking about it, some in a positive side, some in a negative side — but that's a dangerous state to be in because there's very little depth of knowledge on this topic. A very small amount of money would get us some. Many of us — maybe now me — think we should do that. But I have a lot of reservations. My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem, and I don't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. I think there is a serious problem: as you talk about this, people begin to think they don't need to work so hard to cut emissions.Another thing is, maybe we need a treaty. A treaty that decides who gets to do this. Right now we may think of a big, rich country like the U.S. doing this. But it might well be that, in fact, if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this, and they may just decide they'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world. And we'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision.So here's one last thought, which was said much, much better 25 years ago in the U.S. National Academy report than I can say today. And I think it really summarizes where we are here. That the CO2 problem, the climate problem that we've heard about, is driving lots of things — innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions — but also, I think, inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control, whether we like it or not. And it's time to begin thinking about it, even if the reason we're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn't do it. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change
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"What is bioenergy? Bioenergy is not ethanol. Bioenergy isn't global warming. Bioenergy is something which seems counterintuitive. Bioenergy is oil. It's gas. It's coal. And part of building that bridge to the future, to the point where we can actually see the oceans in a rational way, or put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or do microwaves or stuff, is going to depend on how we understand bioenergy and manage it. And to do that, you really have to look first at agriculture.So we've been planting stuff for 11,000 years. And in the measure that we plant stuff, what we learn from agriculture is you've got to deal with pests, you've got to deal with all types of awful things, you've got to cultivate stuff. In the measure that you learn how to use water to cultivate, then you're going to be able to spread beyond the Nile. You're going to be able to power stuff, so irrigation makes a difference.Irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant stuff where you want it, as opposed to where the rivers flood. You start getting this organic agriculture; you start putting machinery onto this stuff. Machinery, with a whole bunch of water, leads to very large-scale agriculture. You put together machines and water, and you get landscapes that look like this. And then you get sales that look like this. It's brute force. So what you've been doing in agriculture is you start out with something that's a reasonably natural system. You start taming that natural system. You put a lot of force behind that natural system. You put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides — (Laughter) — behind that natural system, and you end up with systems that look like this.And it's all brute force. And that's the way we've been approaching energy. So the lesson in agriculture is that you can actually change the system that's based on brute force as you start merging that system and learning that system and actually applying biology. And you move from a discipline of engineering, you move from a discipline of chemistry, into a discipline of biology. And probably one of the most important human beings on the planet is this guy behind me.This is a guy called Norman Borlaug. He won the Nobel Prize. He's got the Congressional Medal of Honor. He deserves all of this stuff. And he deserves this stuff because he probably has fed more people than any other human being alive because he researched how to put biology behind seeds. He did this in Mexico. The reason why India and China no longer have these massive famines is because Norman Borlaug taught them how to grow grains in a more efficient way and launched the Green Revolution. That is something that a lot of people have criticized. But of course, those are people who don't realize that China and India, instead of having huge amounts of starving people, are exporting grains.And the irony of this particular system is the place where he did the research, which was Mexico, didn't adopt this technology, ignored this technology, talked about why this technology should be thought about, but not really applied. And Mexico remains one of the largest grain importers on the planet because it doesn't apply technology that was discovered in Mexico. And in fact, hasn't recognized this man, to the point where there aren't statues of this man all over Mexico. There are in China and India. And the Institute that this guy ran has now moved to India. That is the difference between adopting technologies and discussing technologies. Now, it's not just that this guy fed a huge amount of people in the world. It's that this is the net effect in terms of what technology does, if you understand biology.What happened in agriculture? Well, if you take agriculture over a century, agriculture in about 1900 would have been recognizable to somebody planting a thousand years earlier. Yeah, the plows look different. The machines were tractors or stuff instead of mules, but the farmer would have understood: this is what the guy's doing, this is why he's doing it, this is where he's going. What really started to change in agriculture is when you started moving from this brute force engineering and chemistry into biology, and that's where you get your productivity increases. And as you do that stuff, here's what happens to productivity.Basically, you go from 250 hours to produce 100 bushels, to 40, to 15, to five. Agricultural labor productivity increased seven times, 1950 to 2000, whereas the rest of the economy increased about 2.5 times. This is an absolutely massive increase in how much is produced per person. The effect of this, of course, is it's not just amber waves of grain, it is mountains of stuff. And 50 percent of the EU budget is going to subsidize agriculture from mountains of stuff that people have overproduced.This would be a good outcome for energy. And of course, by now, you're probably saying to yourself, ""Self, I thought I came to a talk about energy and here's this guy talking about biology."" So where's the link between these two things? One of the ironies of this whole system is we're discussing what to do about a system that we don't understand. We don't even know what oil is. We don't know where oil comes from. I mean, literally, it's still a source of debate what this black river of stuff is and where it comes from. The best assumption, and one of the best guesses in this stuff, is that this stuff comes out of this stuff, that these things absorb sunlight, rot under pressure for millions of years, and you get these black rivers.Now, the interesting thing about that thesis — if that thesis turns out to be true — is that oil, and all hydrocarbons, turned out to be concentrated sunlight. And if you think of bioenergy, bioenergy isn't ethanol. Bioenergy is taking the sun, concentrating it in amoebas, concentrating it in plants, and maybe that's why you get these rainbows. And as you're looking at this system, if hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight, then bioenergy works in a different way. And we've got to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as part of these solar panels. Maybe that's one of the reasons why if you fly over west Texas, the types of wells that you're beginning to see don't look unlike those pictures of Kansas and those irrigated plots.This is how you farm oil. And as you think of farming oil and how oil has evolved, we started with this brute force approach. And then what did we learn? Then we learned we had to go bigger. And then what'd we learn? Then we have to go even bigger. And we are getting really destructive as we're going out and farming this bioenergy. These are the Athabasca tar sands, and there's an enormous amount — first of mining, the largest trucks in the world are working here, and then you've got to pull out this black sludge, which is basically oil that doesn't flow. It's tied to the sand. And then you've got to use a lot of steam to separate it, which only works at today's oil prices.Coal. Coal turns out to be virtually the same stuff. It is probably plants, except that these have been burned and crushed under pressure. So you take something like this, you burn it, you put it under pressure, and likely as not, you get this. Although, again, I stress: we don't know. Which is curious as we debate all this stuff. But as you think of coal, this is what burned wheat kernels look like. Not entirely unlike coal.And of course, coalmines are very dangerous places because in some of these coalmines, you get gas. When that gas blows up, people die. So you're producing a biogas out of coal in some mines, but not in others. Any place you see a differential, there're some interesting questions. There's some questions as to what you should be doing with this stuff. But again, coal. Maybe the same stuff, maybe the same system, maybe bioenergy, and you're applying exactly the same technology.Here's your brute force approach. Once you get through your brute force approach, then you just rip off whole mountaintops. And you end up with the single largest source of carbon emissions, which are coal-fired gas plants. That is probably not the best use of bioenergy. As you think of what are the alternatives to this system — it's important to find alternatives because it turns out that the U.S. is dwindling in its petroleum reserves, but it is not dwindling in its coal reserves, nor is China. There are huge coal reserves that are sitting out there, and we've got to start thinking of them as biological energy, because if we keep treating them as chemical energy, or engineering energy, we're going to be in deep doo-doo.Gas is a similar issue. Gas is also a biological product. And as you think of gas, well, you're familiar with gas. And here's a different way of mining coal. This is called coal bed methane. Why is this picture interesting? Because if coal turns out to be concentrated plant life, the reason why you may get a differential in gas output between one mine and another — the reason why one mine may blow up and another one may not blow up — may be because there's stuff eating that stuff and producing gas. This is a well-known phenomenon. (Laughter) You eat certain things, you produce a lot of gas. It may turn out that biological processes in coalmines have the same process. If that is true, then one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal may not be to rip whole mountaintops off, and it may not be to burn coal. It may be to have stuff process that coal in a biological fashion as you did in agriculture.That is what bioenergy is. It is not ethanol. It is not subsidies to a few companies. It is not importing corn into Iowa because you've built so many of these ethanol plants. It is beginning to understand the transition that occurred in agriculture, from brute force into biological force. And in the measure that you can do that, you can clean some stuff, and you can clean it pretty quickly. We already have some indicators of productivity on this stuff. OK, if you put steam into coal fields or petroleum fields that have been running for decades, you can get a really substantial increase, like an eight-fold increase, in your output. This is just the beginning stages of this stuff.And as you think of biomaterials, this guy — who did part of the sequencing of the human genome, who just doubled the databases of genes and proteins known on earth by sailing around the world — has been thinking about how you structure this. And there's a series of smart people thinking about this. And they've been putting together companies like Synthetic Genomics, like, a Cambria, like Codon, and what those companies are trying to do is to think of, how do you apply biological principles to avoid brute force? Think of it in the following terms. Think of it as beginning to program stuff for specific purposes. Think of the cell as a hardware. Think of the genes as a software. And in the measure that you begin to think of life as code that is interchangeable, that can become energy, that can become food, that can become fiber, that can become human beings, that can become a whole series of things, then you've got to shift your approach as to how you're going to structure and deal and think about energy in a very different way.What are the first principles of this stuff and where are we heading? This is one of the gentle giants on the planet. He's one of the nicest human beings you've ever met. His name is Hamilton Smith. He won the Nobel for figuring out how to cut genes — something called restriction enzymes. He was at Hopkins when he did this, and he's such a modest guy that the day he won, his mother called him and said, ""I didn't realize there was another Ham Smith at Hopkins. Do you know he just won the Nobel?"" (Laughter) I mean, that was Mom, but anyway, this guy is just a class act. You find him at the bench every single day, working on a pipette and building stuff. And one of the things this guy just built are these things.What is this? This is the first transplant of naked DNA, where you take an entire DNA operating system out of one cell, insert it into a different cell, and have that cell boot up as a separate species. That's one month old. You will see stuff in the next month that will be just as important as this stuff. And as you think about this stuff and what the implications of this are, we're going to start not just converting ethanol from corn with very high subsidies. We're going to start thinking about biology entering energy. It is very expensive to process this stuff, both in economic terms and in energy terms.This is what accumulates in the tar sands of Alberta. These are sulfur blocks. Because as you separate that petroleum from the sand, and use an enormous amount of energy inside that vapor — steam to separate this stuff — you also have to separate out the sulfur. The difference between light crude and heavy crude — well, it's about 14 bucks a barrel. That's why you're building these pyramids of sulfur blocks. And by the way, the scale on these things is pretty large.Now, if you can take part of the energy content out of doing this, you reduce the system, and you really do start applying biological principles to energy. This has to be a bridge to the point where you can get to wind, to the point where you can get to solar, to the point where you can get to nuclear — and hopefully you won't build the next nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an earthquake fault. (Laughter) Just a thought.But in the meantime, for the next decade at least, the name of the game is hydrocarbons. And be that oil, be that gas, be that coal, this is what we're dealing with. And before I make this talk too long, here's what's happening in the current energy system. 86 percent of the energy we consume are hydrocarbons. That means 86 percent of the stuff we're consuming are probably processed plants and amoebas and the rest of the stuff. And there's a role in here for conservation. There's a role in here for alternative stuff, but we've also got to get that other portion right. How we deal with that other portion is our bridge to the future. And as we think of this bridge to the future, one of the things you should ponder is: we are leaving about two-thirds of the oil today inside those wells. So we're spending an enormous amount of money and leaving most of the energy down there. Which, of course, requires more energy to go out and get energy. The ratios become idiotic by the time you get to ethanol. It may even be a one-to-one ratio on the energy input and the energy output. That is a stupid way of managing this system.Last point, last graph. One of the things that we've got to do is to stabilize oil prices. This is what oil prices look like, OK? This is a very bad system because what happens is your hurdle rate gets set very low. People come up with really smart ideas for solar panels, or for wind, or for something else, and then guess what? The oil price goes through the floor. That company goes out of business, and then you can bring the oil price back up.So if I had one closing and modest suggestion, let's set a stable oil price in Europe and the United States. How do you do that? Well, let's put a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax, and it basically says for the next 20 years, the price of oil will be — whatever you want, 35 bucks, 40 bucks. If the OPEC price falls below that, we tax it. If the OPEC price goes above that, the tax goes away. What does that do for entrepreneurs? What does it do for companies? It tells people, if you can produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel, or less than 40 bucks a barrel, or less than 50 bucks a barrel — let's debate it — you will have a business. But let's not put people through this cycle where it doesn't pay to research because your company will go out of business as OPEC drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from happening. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_wants_to_grow_energy
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"I'm going to try to give you a view of the world as I see it, the problems and the opportunities that we face, and then ask the question if we should be optimistic or pessimistic. And then I'll let you in on a secret, which is why I am an incurable optimist. Let me start off showing you an Al Gore movie that you may have seen before. Now, you've all seen ""Inconvenient Truth."" This is a little more inconvenient.(Video): Man: ... extremely dangerous questions. Because, with our present knowledge, we have no idea what would happen. Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release, through factories and automobiles every year, of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide — which helps air absorb heat from the sun — our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer. This is bad? Well, it's been calculated a few degrees' rise in the earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps. And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water. For, in weather, we're not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself.Larry Brilliant: Should we feel good, or should we feel bad that 50 years of foreknowledge accomplished so little? Well, it depends, really, on what your goals are. And I think, as my goals, I always go back to Gandhi's talisman. When Mahatma Gandhi was asked, ""How do you know if the next act that you are about to do is the right one or the wrong one?"" he said, ""Consider the face of the poorest, most vulnerable human being that you ever chanced upon, and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person. And if it will be, it's the right thing to do, and if not, rethink it.""For those of us in this room, it's not just the poorest and the most vulnerable individual, it's the community, it's the culture, it's the world itself. And the trends for those who are at the periphery of our society, who are the poorest and the most vulnerable, the trends give rise to a great case for pessimism. But there's also a wonderful case for optimism. Let's review them both. First of all, the megatrends. There's two degrees, or three degrees of climate change baked into the system. It will cause rising seas. It will cause saline deposited into wells and into lands. It will disproportionately harm the poorest and the most vulnerable, as will the increasing rise of population. Even though we've dodged Paul Ehrlich's population bomb, and we will not see 20 billion people in this decade, as he had forecast, we eat as if we were 20 billion. And we consume so much that again, a rise of 6.5 billion to 9.5 billion in our grandchildren's lifetime will disproportionately hurt the poorest and the most vulnerable.That's why they migrate to cities. That's why in June of this year, we passed, as a species, 51 percent of us living in cities, and bustees, and slums, and shantytowns. The rural areas are no longer producing as much food as they did. The green revolution never reached Africa. And with desertification, sandstorms, the Gobi Desert, the Ogaden, we are finding increasing difficulty of a hectare to produce as many calories as it did even 15 years ago.So humans are turning more towards animal consumption. In Africa last year, Africans ate 600 million wild animals, and consumed two billion kilograms of bush meat. And every kilogram of bush meat contained hundreds of thousands of novel viruses that have never been charted, the genomic sequences of which we don't know. Their fitness for creating pandemics we are unaware of, but we are ripe for zoonotic-borne, emerging communicable diseases.Increasingly, I would say explosive growth of technology. Most of us are the beneficiaries of that growth. But it has a dark side — in bioweapons, and in technology that puts us on a collision course to magnify any anger, hatred or feeling of marginalization. And in fact, with increasing globalization — for which there are big winners and even bigger losers — today the world is more diverse and unfair than perhaps it has ever been in history.One percent of us own 40 percent of all the goods and services. What will happen if the billion people today who live on less than one dollar a day rise to three billion in the next 30 years? The one percent will own even more than 40 percent of all the world's goods and services. Not because they've grown richer, but because the rest of the world has grown increasingly poorer. Last week, Bill Clinton at the TED Awards said, ""This situation is unprecedented, unequal, unfair and unstable.""So there's lots of reason for pessimism. Darfur is, at its origin, a resource war. Last year, there were 85,000 riots in China, 230 a day, that required police or military intervention. Most of them were about resources. We are facing an unprecedented number, scale of disasters. Some are weather-related, human-rights related, epidemics. And the newly emerging diseases may make H5N1 and bird flu a quaint forerunner of things to come. It's a destabilized world. And unlike destabilized world in the past, it will be broadcast to you on YouTube, you will see it on digital television and on your cell phones. What will that lead to? For some, it will lead to anger, religious and sectarian violence and terrorism. For others, withdrawal, nihilism, materialism. For us, where does it take us, as social activists and entrepreneurs? As we look at these trends, do we become despondent, or will we become energized?Let's look at one case, the case of Bangladesh. First, even if carbon dioxide emissions stopped today, global warming would continue. And even with global warming — if you can see these blue lines, the dotted line shows that even if emissions of greenhouse gasses stopped today, the next decades will see rising sea levels. A minimum of 20 to 30 inches of increase in sea levels is the best case that we can hope for, and it could be 10 times that. What will that do to Bangladesh? Let's take a look. So here's Bangladesh. 70 percent of Bangladesh is at less than five feet above sea level. Let's go up and take a look at the Himalayas. And we'll watch as global warming makes them melt. More water comes down, the deforested areas, here in the Tarai, will be unable to absorb the effluent, because trees are like straws that suck up the extra seasonal water. Now we're looking down south, through the Kali Gandaki. Many of you, I think, have probably trekked here. And we're going to cruise down and take a look at Bangladesh and see what the impact will be of twin increases in water coming from the north, and in the seas rising from the south. Looking at the five major rivers that feed Bangladesh. And now let's look from the south, looking up, and let's see this in relief. A minimum of 20 to 40 inches of increase in seas, coupled with increasing flows from the Himalayas. And take a look at this. As many as 100 million refugees from Bangladesh could be expected to migrate into India and into China. This is the difficulty that one country faces.But if you look at the globe, all around the earth, wherever there is low-lying area, populated areas near the water, you will find increase in sea level that will challenge our way of life. Sub-Saharan Africa, and even our own San Francisco Bay Area. We're all in this together. This is not something that happens far away to people that we don't know. Global warming is something that happens to all of us, all at once.As are these newly emerging communicable diseases, names that you hadn't heard 20 years ago: ebola, lhasa fever, monkey pox. With the erosion of the green belt separating animals from humans, we live in each other's viral environment. Do you remember, 20 years ago, no one had ever heard of West Nile fever? And then we watched, as one case arrived on the East Coast of the United States and it marched every year, westwardly. Do you remember no one had heard of ebola until we heard of hundreds of people dying in Central Africa from it? It's just the beginning, unfortunately. There have been 30 novel emerging communicable diseases that begin in animals that have jumped species in the last 30 years. It's more than enough reason for pessimism.But now let's look at the case for optimism. (Laughter) Enough of the bad news. Human beings have always risen to the challenge. You just need to look at the list of Nobel laureates to remind ourselves. We've been here before, paralyzed by fear, paralyzed into inaction, when some — probably one of you in this room — jumped into the breach and created an organization like Physicians for Social Responsibility, which fought against the nuclear threat, Medicins Sans Frontieres, that renewed our commitment to disaster relief, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the tremendous hope and optimism that he brought all of us, and our own Muhammad Yunus.We've seen the eradication of smallpox. We may see the eradication of polio this year. Last year, there were only 2,000 cases in the world. We may see the eradication of guinea worm next year — there are only 35,000 cases left in the world. 20 years ago, there were three and a half million. And we've seen a new disease, not like the 30 novel emerging communicable diseases. This disease is called sudden wealth syndrome. (Laughter) It's an amazing phenomenon. All throughout the technology world, we're seeing young people bitten by this disease of sudden wealth syndrome. But they're using their wealth in a way that their forefathers never did. They're not waiting until they die to create foundations. They're actively guiding their money, their resources, their hearts, their commitments, to make the world a better place. Certainly, nothing can give you more optimism than that.More reasons to be optimistic: in the '60s, and I am a creature of the '60s, there was a movement. We all felt that we were part of it, that a better world was right around the corner, that we were watching the birth of a world free of hatred and violence and prejudice. Today, there's another kind of movement. It's a movement to save the earth. It's just beginning. Five weeks ago, a group of activists from the business community gathered together to stop a Texas utility from building nine coal-fired electrical plants that would have contributed to destroying the environment. Six months ago, a group of business activists gathered together to join with the Republican governor in California to pass AB 32, the most far-reaching legislation in environmental history.Al Gore made presentations in the House and the Senate as an expert witness. Can you imagine? (Laughter) We're seeing an entente cordiale between science and religion that five years ago I would not have believed, as the evangelical community has understood the desperate situation of global warming. And now 4,000 churches have joined the environmental movement. It is something to be greatly optimistic about. The European 20-20-20 plan is an amazing breakthrough, something that should make all of us feel that hope is on the horizon. And on April 14th, there will be Step Up Day, where there will be a thousand individual mobilized social activist movements in the United States on protest against legislation — pushing for legislation to stop global warming. And on July 7th, around the world, I learned only yesterday, there will be global Live Earth concerts. And you can feel this optimistic move to save the earth in the air.Now, that doesn't mean that people understand that global warming hurts the poorest and the weakest the most. That means that people are beginning the first step, which is acting out of their own self-interest. But I am seeing in the major funders, in CARE, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett, Mercy Corps, you guys, Google, so many other organizations, a beginning of understanding that we need to work not just on primary prevention of global warming, but on the secondary prevention of the consequences of global warming on the poorest and the most vulnerable.But for me, I have another reason to be an incurable optimist. And you've heard so many inspiring stories here, and I heard so many last night that I thought I would share a little bit of mine. My background is not exactly conventional medical training. And I lived in a Himalayan monastery, and I studied with a very wise teacher, who kicked me out of the monastery one day and told me that it was my destiny — it felt like Yoda — it is your destiny to go to work for WHO and to help eradicate smallpox, at a time when there was no smallpox program.It should make you optimistic that smallpox no longer exists because it was the worst disease in history. In the last century — that's the one that was seven years ago — half a billion people died from smallpox: more than all the wars in history, more than any other infectious disease in the history of the world. In the Summer of Love, in 1967, two million people, children, died of smallpox. It's not ancient history. When you read the biblical plague of boils, that was smallpox. Pharaoh Ramses the Fifth, whose picture is here, died of smallpox. To eradicate smallpox, we had to gather the largest United Nations army in history. We visited every house in India, searching for smallpox — 120 million houses, once every month, for nearly two years. In a cruel reversal, after we had almost conquered smallpox — and this is what you must learn as a social entrepreneur, the realm of the final inch.When we had almost eradicated smallpox, it came back again, because the company town of Tatanagar drew laborers, who could come there and get employment. And they caught smallpox in the one remaining place that had smallpox, and they went home to die. And when they did, they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic. And we had to start all over again. But, in the end, we succeeded, and the last case of smallpox: this little girl, Rahima Banu — Barisal, in Bangladesh — when she coughed or breathed, and the last virus of smallpox left her lungs and fell on the dirt and the sun killed that last virus, thus ended a chain of transmission of history's greatest horror.How can that not make you optimistic? A disease which killed hundreds of thousands in India, and blinded half of all of those who were made blind in India, ended. And most importantly for us here in this room, a bond was created. Doctors, health workers, from 30 different countries, of every race, every religion, every color, worked together, fought alongside each other, fought against a common enemy, didn't fight against each other. How can that not make you feel optimistic for the future? Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_brilliant_makes_the_case_for_optimism
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"I want you to imagine that you're a student in my lab. What I want you to do is to create a biologically inspired design. And so here's the challenge: I want you to help me create a fully 3D, dynamic, parameterized contact model. The translation of that is, could you help me build a foot? And it is a true challenge, and I do want you to help me. Of course, in the challenge there is a prize. It's not quite the TED Prize, but it is an exclusive t-shirt from our lab. So please send me your ideas about how to design a foot.Now if we want to design a foot, what do we have to do? We have to first know what a foot is. If we go to the dictionary, it says, ""It's the lower extremity of a leg that is in direct contact with the ground in standing or walking"" That's the traditional definition. But if you wanted to really do research, what do you have to do? You have to go to the literature and look up what's known about feet. So you go to the literature. (Laughter)Maybe you're familiar with this literature. The problem is, there are many, many feet. How do you do this? You need to survey all feet and extract the principles of how they work. And I want you to help me do that in this next clip. As you see this clip, look for principles, and also think about experiments that you might design in order to understand how a foot works.See any common themes? Principles? What would you do? What experiments would you run? Wow. (Applause) Our research on the biomechanics of animal locomotion has allowed us to make a blueprint for a foot. It's a design inspired by nature, but it's not a copy of any specific foot you just looked at, but it's a synthesis of the secrets of many, many feet.Now it turns out that animals can go anywhere. They can locomote on substrates that vary as you saw — in the probability of contact, the movement of that surface and the type of footholds that are present. If you want to study how a foot works, we're going to have to simulate those surfaces, or simulate that debris. When we did that, here's a new experiment that we did: we put an animal and had it run — this grass spider — on a surface with 99 percent of the contact area removed. But it didn't even slow down the animal. It's still running at the human equivalent of 300 miles per hour.Now how could it do that? Well, look more carefully. When we slow it down 50 times we see how the leg is hitting that simulated debris. The leg is acting as a foot. And in fact, the animal contacts other parts of its leg more frequently than the traditionally defined foot. The foot is distributed along the whole leg. You can do another experiment where you can take a cockroach with a foot, and you can remove its foot. I'm passing some cockroaches around. Take a look at their feet. Without a foot, here's what it does. It doesn't even slow down. It can run the same speed without even that segment. No problem for the cockroach — they can grow them back, if you care. How do they do it? Look carefully: this is slowed down 100 times, and watch what it's doing with the rest of its leg. It's acting, again, as a distributed foot — very effective.Now, the question we had is, how general is a distributed foot? And the next behavior I'll show you of this animal just stunned us the first time that we saw it. Journalists, this is off the record; it's embargoed. Take a look at what that is! That's a bipedal octopus that's disguised as a rolling coconut. It was discovered by Christina Huffard and filmed by Sea Studios, right here from Monterey.We've also described another species of bipedal octopus. This one disguises itself as floating algae. It walks on two legs and it holds the other arms up in the air so that it can't be seen. (Applause) And look what it does with its foot to get over challenging terrain. It uses that beautiful distributed foot to make it as if those obstacles are not even there — truly extraordinary.In 1951, Escher made this drawing. He thought he created an animal fantasy. But we know that art imitates life, and it turns out nature, three million years ago, evolved the next animal. It's a shrimp-like animal called the stomatopod, and here's how it moves on the beaches of Panama: it actually rolls, and it can even roll uphill. It's the ultimate distributed foot: its whole body in this case is acting like its foot.So, if we want to then, to our blueprint, add the first important feature, we want to add distributed foot contact. Not just with the traditional foot, but also the leg, and even of the body. Can this help us inspire the design of novel robots? We biologically inspired this robot, named RHex, built by these extraordinary engineers over the last few years. RHex's foot started off to be quite simple, then it got tuned over time, and ultimately resulted in this half circle. Why is that? The video will show you. Watch where the robot, now, contacts its leg in order to deal with this very difficult terrain. What you'll see, in fact, is that it's using that half circle leg as a distributed foot. Watch it go over this. You can see it here well on this debris. Extraordinary. No sensing, all the control is built right into the tuned legs. Really simple, but beautiful.Now, you might have noticed something else about the animals when they were running over the rough terrain. And my assistant's going to help me here. When you touched the cockroach leg — can you get the microphone for him? When you touched the cockroach leg, what did it feel like? Did you notice something?Boy: Spiny.Robert Full: It's spiny, right? It's really spiny, isn't it? It sort of hurts. Maybe we could give it to our curator and see if he'd be brave enough to touch the cockroach. (Laughter)Chris Anderson: Did you touch it?RF: So if you look carefully at this, what you see is that they have spines and until a few weeks ago, no one knew what they did. They assumed that they were for protection and for sensory structures. We found that they're for something else — here's a segment of that spine. They're tuned such that they easily collapse in one direction to pull the leg out from debris, but they're stiff in the other direction so they capture disparities in the surface.Now crabs don't miss footholds, because they normally move on sand — until they come to our lab. And where they have a problem with this kind of mesh, because they don't have spines. The crabs are missing spines, so they have a problem in this kind of rough terrain. But of course, we can deal with that because we can produce artificial spines. We can make spines that catch on simulated debris and collapse on removal to easily pull them out. We did that by putting these artificial spines on crabs, as you see here, and then we tested them. Do we really understand that principle of tuning? The answer is, yes! This is slowed down 20-fold, and the crab just zooms across that simulated debris. (Laughter) (Applause) A little better than nature.So to our blueprint, we need to add tuned spines. Now will this help us think about the design of more effective climbing robots? Well, here's RHex: RHex has trouble on rails — on smooth rails, as you see here. So why not add a spine? My colleagues did this at U. Penn. Dan Koditschek put some steel nails — very simple version — on the robot, and here's RHex, now, going over those steel — those rails. No problem! How does it do it? Let's slow it down and you can see the spines in action. Watch the leg come around, and you'll see it grab on right there. It couldn't do that before; it would just slip and get stuck and tip over. And watch again, right there — successful.Now just because we have a distributed foot and spines doesn't mean you can climb vertical surfaces. This is really, really difficult. But look at this animal do it! One of the ones I'm passing around is climbing up this vertical surface that's a smooth metal plate. It's extraordinary how fast it can do it — but if you slow it down, you see something that's quite extraordinary. It's a secret. The animal effectively climbs by slipping and look — and doing, actually, terribly, with respect to grabbing on the surface. It looks, in fact, like it's swimming up the surface. We can actually model that behavior better as a fluid, if you look at it. The distributed foot, actually, is working more like a paddle.The same is true when we looked at this lizard running on fluidized sand. Watch its feet. It's actually functioning as a paddle even though it's interacting with a surface that we normally think of as a solid. This is not different from what my former undergraduate discovered when she figured out how lizards can run on water itself. Can you use this to make a better robot? Martin Buehler did — who's now at Boston Dynamics — he took this idea and made RHex to be Aqua RHex. So here's RHex with paddles, now converted into an incredibly maneuverable swimming robot.For rough surfaces, though, animals add claws. And you probably feel them if you grabbed it. Did you touch it?CA: I did.RF: And they do really well at grabbing onto surfaces with these claws. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford University, one of my collaborators, is an extraordinary engineer who developed this technique called Shape Deposition Manufacturing, where he can imbed claws right into an artificial foot. And here's the simple version of a foot for a new robot that I'll show you in a bit. So to our blueprint, let's attach claws. Now if we look at animals, though, to be really maneuverable in all surfaces, the animals use hybrid mechanisms that include claws, and spines, and hairs, and pads, and glue, and capillary adhesion and a whole bunch of other things. These are all from different insects. There's an ant crawling up a vertical surface. Let's look at that ant.This is the foot of an ant. You see the hairs and the claws and this thing here. This is when its foot's in the air. Watch what happens when the foot goes onto your sandwich. You see what happens? That pad comes out. And that's where the glue is. Here from underneath is an ant foot, and when the claws don't dig in, that pad automatically comes out without the ant doing anything. It just extrudes. And this was a hard shot to get — I think this is the shot of the ant foot on the superstrings. So it's pretty tough to do. This is what it looks like close up — here's the ant foot, and there's the glue.And we discovered this glue may be an interesting two-phase mixture. It certainly helps it to hold on. So to our blueprint, we stick on some sticky pads. Now you might think for smooth surfaces we get inspiration here. Now we have something better here. The gecko's a really great example of nanotechnology in nature. These are its feet. They're — almost look alien. And the secret, which they stick on with, involves their hairy toes. They can run up a surface at a meter per second, take 30 steps in that one second — you can hardly see them. If we slow it down, they attach their feet at eight milliseconds, and detach them in 16 milliseconds. And when you watch how they detach it, it is bizarre. They peel away from the surface like you'd peel away a piece of tape. Very strange. How do they stick?If you look at their feet, they have leaf-like structures called linalae with millions of hairs. And each hair has the worst case of split ends possible. It has a hundred to a thousand split ends, and that's the secret, because it allows intimate contact. The gecko has a billion of these 200-nanometer-sized split ends. And they don't stick by glue, or they don't work like Velcro, or they don't work with suction. We discovered they work by intermolecular forces alone. So to our blueprint, we split some hairs. This has inspired the design of the first self-cleaning dry adhesive — the patent issued, we're happy to say. And here's the simplest version in nature, and here's my collaborator Ron Fearing's attempt at an artificial version of this dry adhesive made from polyurethane. And here's the first attempt to have it work on some load.There's enormous interest in this in a variety of different fields. You could think of a thousand possible uses, I'm sure. Lots of people have, and we're excited about realizing this as a product. We have imagined products; for example, this one: we imagined a bio-inspired Band-Aid, where we took the glue off the Band-Aid. We took some hairs from a molting gecko; put three rolls of them on here, and then made this Band-Aid.This is an undergraduate volunteer — we have 30,000 undergraduates so we can choose among them — that's actually just a red pen mark. But it makes an incredible Band-Aid. It's aerated, it can be peeled off easily, it doesn't cause any irritation, it works underwater. I think this is an extraordinary example of how curiosity-based research — we just wondered how they climbed up something — can lead to things that you could never imagine. It's just an example of why we need to support curiosity-based research. Here you are, pulling off the Band-Aid.So we've redefined, now, what a foot is. The question is, can we use these secrets, then, to inspire the design of a better foot, better than one that we see in nature? Here's the new project: we're trying to create the first climbing search-and-rescue robot — no suction or magnets — that can only move on limited kinds of surfaces. I call the new robot RiSE, for ""Robot in Scansorial Environment"" — that's a climbing environment — and we have an extraordinary team of biologists and engineers creating this robot. And here is RiSE. It's six-legged and has a tail. Here it is on a fence and a tree. And here are RiSE's first steps on an incline. You have the audio? You can hear it go up. And here it is coming up at you, in its first steps up a wall. Now it's only using its simplest feet here, so this is very new. But we think we got the dynamics right of the robot.Mark Cutkosky, though, is taking it a step further. He's the one able to build this shape-deposition manufactured feet and toes. The next step is to make compliant toes, and try to add spines and claws and set it for dry adhesives. So the idea is to first get the toes and a foot right, attempt to make that climb, and ultimately put it on the robot. And that's exactly what he's done. He's built, in fact, a climbing foot-bot inspired by nature.And here's Cutkosky's and his amazing students' design. So these are tuned toes — there are six of them, and they use the principles that I just talked about collectively for the blueprint. So this is not using any suction, any glue, and it will ultimately, when it's attached to the robot — it's as biologically inspired as the animal — hopefully be able to climb any kind of a surface. Here you see it, next, going up the side of a building at Stanford. It's sped up — again, it's a foot climbing. It's not the whole robot yet, we're working on it — now you can see how it's attaching. These tuned structures allow the spines, friction pads and ultimately the adhesive hairs to grab onto very challenging, difficult surfaces. And so they were able to get this thing — this is now sped up 20 times — can you imagine it trying to go up and rescue somebody at that upper floor? OK? You can visualize this now; it's not impossible. It's a very challenging task. But more to come later.To finish: we've gotten design secrets from nature by looking at how feet are built. We've learned we should distribute control to smart parts. Don't put it all in the brain, but put some of the control in tuned feet, legs and even body. That nature uses hybrid solutions, not a single solution, to these problems, and they're integrated and beautifully robust. And third, we believe strongly that we do not want to mimic nature but instead be inspired by biology, and use these novel principles with the best engineering solutions that are out there to make — potentially — something better than nature.So there's a clear message: whether you care about a fundamental, basic research of really interesting, bizarre, wonderful animals, or you want to build a search-and-rescue robot that can help you in an earthquake, or to save someone in a fire, or you care about medicine, we must preserve nature's designs. Otherwise these secrets will be lost forever. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_animal_movement
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"I want to start my story in Germany, in 1877, with a mathematician named Georg Cantor. And Cantor decided he was going to take a line and erase the middle third of the line, and then take those two resulting lines and bring them back into the same process, a recursive process. So he starts out with one line, and then two, and then four, and then 16, and so on. And if he does this an infinite number of times, which you can do in mathematics, he ends up with an infinite number of lines, each of which has an infinite number of points in it. So he realized he had a set whose number of elements was larger than infinity. And this blew his mind. Literally. He checked into a sanitarium. (Laughter) And when he came out of the sanitarium, he was convinced that he had been put on earth to found transfinite set theory because the largest set of infinity would be God Himself. He was a very religious man. He was a mathematician on a mission.And other mathematicians did the same sort of thing. A Swedish mathematician, von Koch, decided that instead of subtracting lines, he would add them. And so he came up with this beautiful curve. And there's no particular reason why we have to start with this seed shape; we can use any seed shape we like. And I'll rearrange this and I'll stick this somewhere — down there, OK — and now upon iteration, that seed shape sort of unfolds into a very different looking structure. So these all have the property of self-similarity: the part looks like the whole. It's the same pattern at many different scales.Now, mathematicians thought this was very strange because as you shrink a ruler down, you measure a longer and longer length. And since they went through the iterations an infinite number of times, as the ruler shrinks down to infinity, the length goes to infinity. This made no sense at all, so they consigned these curves to the back of the math books. They said these are pathological curves, and we don't have to discuss them. (Laughter) And that worked for a hundred years.And then in 1977, Benoit Mandelbrot, a French mathematician, realized that if you do computer graphics and used these shapes he called fractals, you get the shapes of nature. You get the human lungs, you get acacia trees, you get ferns, you get these beautiful natural forms. If you take your thumb and your index finger and look right where they meet — go ahead and do that now — — and relax your hand, you'll see a crinkle, and then a wrinkle within the crinkle, and a crinkle within the wrinkle. Right? Your body is covered with fractals. The mathematicians who were saying these were pathologically useless shapes? They were breathing those words with fractal lungs. It's very ironic. And I'll show you a little natural recursion here. Again, we just take these lines and recursively replace them with the whole shape. So here's the second iteration, and the third, fourth and so on.So nature has this self-similar structure. Nature uses self-organizing systems. Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, ""This is fabulous! I wonder why?"" And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why. So I got a Fulbright scholarship to just travel around Africa for a year asking people why they were building fractals, which is a great job if you can get it. (Laughter)And so I finally got to this city, and I'd done a little fractal model for the city just to see how it would sort of unfold — but when I got there, I got to the palace of the chief, and my French is not very good; I said something like, ""I am a mathematician and I would like to stand on your roof."" But he was really cool about it, and he took me up there, and we talked about fractals. And he said, ""Oh yeah, yeah! We knew about a rectangle within a rectangle, we know all about that."" And it turns out the royal insignia has a rectangle within a rectangle within a rectangle, and the path through that palace is actually this spiral here. And as you go through the path, you have to get more and more polite. So they're mapping the social scaling onto the geometric scaling; it's a conscious pattern. It is not unconscious like a termite mound fractal.This is a village in southern Zambia. The Ba-ila built this village about 400 meters in diameter. You have a huge ring. The rings that represent the family enclosures get larger and larger as you go towards the back, and then you have the chief's ring here towards the back and then the chief's immediate family in that ring. So here's a little fractal model for it. Here's one house with the sacred altar, here's the house of houses, the family enclosure, with the humans here where the sacred altar would be, and then here's the village as a whole — a ring of ring of rings with the chief's extended family here, the chief's immediate family here, and here there's a tiny village only this big. Now you might wonder, how can people fit in a tiny village only this big? That's because they're spirit people. It's the ancestors. And of course the spirit people have a little miniature village in their village, right? So it's just like Georg Cantor said, the recursion continues forever.This is in the Mandara mountains, near the Nigerian border in Cameroon, Mokoulek. I saw this diagram drawn by a French architect, and I thought, ""Wow! What a beautiful fractal!"" So I tried to come up with a seed shape, which, upon iteration, would unfold into this thing. I came up with this structure here. Let's see, first iteration, second, third, fourth. Now, after I did the simulation, I realized the whole village kind of spirals around, just like this, and here's that replicating line — a self-replicating line that unfolds into the fractal. Well, I noticed that line is about where the only square building in the village is at. So, when I got to the village, I said, ""Can you take me to the square building? I think something's going on there."" And they said, ""Well, we can take you there, but you can't go inside because that's the sacred altar, where we do sacrifices every year to keep up those annual cycles of fertility for the fields."" And I started to realize that the cycles of fertility were just like the recursive cycles in the geometric algorithm that builds this. And the recursion in some of these villages continues down into very tiny scales.So here's a Nankani village in Mali. And you can see, you go inside the family enclosure — you go inside and here's pots in the fireplace, stacked recursively. Here's calabashes that Issa was just showing us, and they're stacked recursively. Now, the tiniest calabash in here keeps the woman's soul. And when she dies, they have a ceremony where they break this stack called the zalanga and her soul goes off to eternity. Once again, infinity is important.Now, you might ask yourself three questions at this point. Aren't these scaling patterns just universal to all indigenous architecture? And that was actually my original hypothesis. When I first saw those African fractals, I thought, ""Wow, so any indigenous group that doesn't have a state society, that sort of hierarchy, must have a kind of bottom-up architecture."" But that turns out not to be true.I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry. You can see on the pottery and the baskets. Here's an aerial photograph of one of the Anasazi ruins; you can see it's circular at the largest scale, but it's rectangular at the smaller scale, right? It is not the same pattern at two different scales.Second, you might ask, ""Well, Dr. Eglash, aren't you ignoring the diversity of African cultures?"" And three times, the answer is no. First of all, I agree with Mudimbe's wonderful book, ""The Invention of Africa,"" that Africa is an artificial invention of first colonialism, and then oppositional movements. No, because a widely shared design practice doesn't necessarily give you a unity of culture — and it definitely is not ""in the DNA."" And finally, the fractals have self-similarity — so they're similar to themselves, but they're not necessarily similar to each other — you see very different uses for fractals. It's a shared technology in Africa.And finally, well, isn't this just intuition? It's not really mathematical knowledge. Africans can't possibly really be using fractal geometry, right? It wasn't invented until the 1970s. Well, it's true that some African fractals are, as far as I'm concerned, just pure intuition. So some of these things, I'd wander around the streets of Dakar asking people, ""What's the algorithm? What's the rule for making this?"" and they'd say, ""Well, we just make it that way because it looks pretty, stupid."" (Laughter) But sometimes, that's not the case. In some cases, there would actually be algorithms, and very sophisticated algorithms. So in Manghetu sculpture, you'd see this recursive geometry. In Ethiopian crosses, you see this wonderful unfolding of the shape.In Angola, the Chokwe people draw lines in the sand, and it's what the German mathematician Euler called a graph; we now call it an Eulerian path — you can never lift your stylus from the surface and you can never go over the same line twice. But they do it recursively, and they do it with an age-grade system, so the little kids learn this one, and then the older kids learn this one, then the next age-grade initiation, you learn this one. And with each iteration of that algorithm, you learn the iterations of the myth. You learn the next level of knowledge.And finally, all over Africa, you see this board game. It's called Owari in Ghana, where I studied it; it's called Mancala here on the East Coast, Bao in Kenya, Sogo elsewhere. Well, you see self-organizing patterns that spontaneously occur in this board game. And the folks in Ghana knew about these self-organizing patterns and would use them strategically. So this is very conscious knowledge.Here's a wonderful fractal. Anywhere you go in the Sahel, you'll see this windscreen. And of course fences around the world are all Cartesian, all strictly linear. But here in Africa, you've got these nonlinear scaling fences. So I tracked down one of the folks who makes these things, this guy in Mali just outside of Bamako, and I asked him, ""How come you're making fractal fences? Because nobody else is."" And his answer was very interesting. He said, ""Well, if I lived in the jungle, I would only use the long rows of straw because they're very quick and they're very cheap. It doesn't take much time, doesn't take much straw."" He said, ""but wind and dust goes through pretty easily. Now, the tight rows up at the very top, they really hold out the wind and dust. But it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of straw because they're really tight."" ""Now,"" he said, ""we know from experience that the farther up from the ground you go, the stronger the wind blows."" Right? It's just like a cost-benefit analysis. And I measured out the lengths of straw, put it on a log-log plot, got the scaling exponent, and it almost exactly matches the scaling exponent for the relationship between wind speed and height in the wind engineering handbook. So these guys are right on target for a practical use of scaling technology.The most complex example of an algorithmic approach to fractals that I found was actually not in geometry, it was in a symbolic code, and this was Bamana sand divination. And the same divination system is found all over Africa. You can find it on the East Coast as well as the West Coast, and often the symbols are very well preserved, so each of these symbols has four bits — it's a four-bit binary word — you draw these lines in the sand randomly, and then you count off, and if it's an odd number, you put down one stroke, and if it's an even number, you put down two strokes. And they did this very rapidly, and I couldn't understand where they were getting — they only did the randomness four times — I couldn't understand where they were getting the other 12 symbols. And they wouldn't tell me. They said, ""No, no, I can't tell you about this."" And I said, ""Well look, I'll pay you, you can be my teacher, and I'll come each day and pay you."" They said, ""It's not a matter of money. This is a religious matter.""And finally, out of desperation, I said, ""Well, let me explain Georg Cantor in 1877."" And I started explaining why I was there in Africa, and they got very excited when they saw the Cantor set. And one of them said, ""Come here. I think I can help you out here."" And so he took me through the initiation ritual for a Bamana priest. And of course, I was only interested in the math, so the whole time, he kept shaking his head going, ""You know, I didn't learn it this way."" But I had to sleep with a kola nut next to my bed, buried in sand, and give seven coins to seven lepers and so on. And finally, he revealed the truth of the matter. And it turns out it's a pseudo-random number generator using deterministic chaos. When you have a four-bit symbol, you then put it together with another one sideways. So even plus odd gives you odd. Odd plus even gives you odd. Even plus even gives you even. Odd plus odd gives you even. It's addition modulo 2, just like in the parity bit check on your computer. And then you take this symbol, and you put it back in so it's a self-generating diversity of symbols. They're truly using a kind of deterministic chaos in doing this. Now, because it's a binary code, you can actually implement this in hardware — what a fantastic teaching tool that should be in African engineering schools.And the most interesting thing I found out about it was historical. In the 12th century, Hugo of Santalla brought it from Islamic mystics into Spain. And there it entered into the alchemy community as geomancy: divination through the earth. This is a geomantic chart drawn for King Richard II in 1390. Leibniz, the German mathematician, talked about geomancy in his dissertation called ""De Combinatoria."" And he said, ""Well, instead of using one stroke and two strokes, let's use a one and a zero, and we can count by powers of two."" Right? Ones and zeros, the binary code. George Boole took Leibniz's binary code and created Boolean algebra, and John von Neumann took Boolean algebra and created the digital computer. So all these little PDAs and laptops — every digital circuit in the world — started in Africa. And I know Brian Eno says there's not enough Africa in computers, but you know, I don't think there's enough African history in Brian Eno. (Laughter) (Applause)So let me end with just a few words about applications that we've found for this. And you can go to our website, the applets are all free; they just run in the browser. Anybody in the world can use them. The National Science Foundation's Broadening Participation in Computing program recently awarded us a grant to make a programmable version of these design tools, so hopefully in three years, anybody'll be able to go on the Web and create their own simulations and their own artifacts. We've focused in the U.S. on African-American students as well as Native American and Latino. We've found statistically significant improvement with children using this software in a mathematics class in comparison with a control group that did not have the software. So it's really very successful teaching children that they have a heritage that's about mathematics, that it's not just about singing and dancing. We've started a pilot program in Ghana. We got a small seed grant, just to see if folks would be willing to work with us on this; we're very excited about the future possibilities for that.We've also been working in design. I didn't put his name up here — my colleague, Kerry, in Kenya, has come up with this great idea for using fractal structure for postal address in villages that have fractal structure, because if you try to impose a grid structure postal system on a fractal village, it doesn't quite fit. Bernard Tschumi at Columbia University has finished using this in a design for a museum of African art. David Hughes at Ohio State University has written a primer on Afrocentric architecture in which he's used some of these fractal structures.And finally, I just wanted to point out that this idea of self-organization, as we heard earlier, it's in the brain. It's in the — it's in Google's search engine. Actually, the reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy. It's also in some bad things. Self-organization is why the AIDS virus is spreading so fast. And if you don't think that capitalism, which is self-organizing, can have destructive effects, you haven't opened your eyes enough. So we need to think about, as was spoken earlier, the traditional African methods for doing self-organization. These are robust algorithms. These are ways of doing self-organization — of doing entrepreneurship — that are gentle, that are egalitarian. So if we want to find a better way of doing that kind of work, we need look only no farther than Africa to find these robust self-organizing algorithms. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals
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"You will understand nothing with my type of English. It's good for you because you can have a break after all these fantastic people. I must tell you I am like that, not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless. I mean, I feel useless. Now after Carolyn, and all the other guys, I feel like shit. And definitively, I don't know why I am here, but — you know the nightmare you can have, like you are an impostor, you arrive at the opera, and they push you, ""You must sing!"" I don't know. (Laughter)So, so, because I have nothing to show, nothing to say, we shall try to speak about something else. We can start, if you want, by understanding — it's just to start, it's not interesting, but — how I work. When somebody comes to me and ask for what I am known, I mean, yes, lemon squeezer, toilet brush, toothpick, beautiful toilet seats, and why not — a toothbrush? I don't try to design the toothbrush. I don't try to say, ""Oh, that will be a beautiful object,"" or something like that. That doesn't interest me.Because there is different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, la laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just the weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more: it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design.After, there is the narcissistic design: it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. (Laughter) After, there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are so ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it. If we take the toothbrush — I don't think about the toothbrush. I think, ""What will be the effect of the brush in the mouth?"" And to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth, I must imagine: Who owns this mouth? What is the life of the owner of this mouth? In what society [does] this guy live? What civilization creates this society? What animal species creates this civilization? When I arrive — and I take one minute, I am not so intelligent — when I arrive at the level of animal species, that becomes real interesting.Me, I have strictly no power to change anything. But when I come back, I can understand why I shall not do it, because today to not do it, it's more positive than do it, or how I shall do it. But to come back, where I am at the animal species, there is things to see. There is things to see, there is the big challenge. The big challenge in front of us. Because there is not a human production which exists outside of what I call ""the big image."" The big image is our story, our poetry, our romanticism. Our poetry is our mutation, our life. We must remember, and we can see that in any book of my son of 10 years old, that life appears four billion years ago, around — four billion point two?Voice offstage: Four point five.Yes, point five, OK, OK, OK! (Laughter) I'm a designer, that's all, of Christmas gifts. And before, there was this soup, called ""soupe primordiale,"" this first soup — bloop bloop bloop — sort of dirty mud, no life, nothing. So then — pshoo-shoo — lightning — pshoo — arrive — pshoo-shoo — makes life — bloop bloop — and that dies. Some million years after — pshoo-shoo, bloop-bloop — ah, wake up! At the end, finally, that succeeds, and life appears. We was so, so stupid. The most stupid bacteria. Even, I think, we copy our way to reproduce, you know what I mean, and something of — oh no, forget it.After, we become a fish; after, we become a frog; after, we become a monkey; after, we become what we are today: a super-monkey, and the fun is, the super-monkey we are today, is at half of the story. Can you imagine? From that stupid bacteria to us, with a microphone, with a computer, with an iPod: four billion years. And we know, and especially Carolyn knows, that when the sun will implode, the earth will burn, explode, I don't know what, and this is scheduled for four, four billion years? Yes, she said, something like that. OK, that means we are at half of the story. Fantastic! It's a beauty! Can you imagine? It's very symbolic. Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years. And this territory is fantastic.That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It's our romanticism. Mu-ta-tion. We are mutants. And if we don't deeply understand, if we don't integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. Because every generation thinks we are the final one. We have a way to look at Earth like that, you know, ""I am the man. The final man. You know, we mutate during four billion years before, but now, because it's me, we stop. Fin. (Laughter) For the end, for the eternity, it is one with a red jacket."" Something like that. I am not sure of that. (Laughter) Because that is our intelligence of mutation and things like that. There is so many things to do; it's so fresh.And here is something: nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate. And to participate, for a mutant, there is a minimum of exercise, a minimum of sport. We can say that. The first, if you want — there is so many — but one which is very easy to do, is the duty of vision. I can explain you. I shall try. If you walk like that, it's OK, it's OK, you can walk, but perhaps, because you walk with the eyes like that, you will not see, oh, there is a hole. And you will fall, and you will die. Dangerous.That's why, perhaps, you will try to have this angle of vision. OK, I can see, if I found something, up, up, and they continue, up up up. I raise the angle of vision, but it's still very — selfish, selfish, egoiste — yes, selfish. You, you survive. It's OK. If you raise the level of your eyes a little more you go, ""I see you, oh my God you are here, how are you, I can help you, I can design for you a new toothbrush, new toilet brush,"" something like that. I live in society; I live in community. It's OK. You start to be in the territory of intelligence, we can say. From this level, the more you can raise this angle of view, the more you will be important for the society. The more you will rise, the more you will be important for the civilization. The more you will rise, to see far and high, like that, the more you will be important for the story of our mutation. That means intelligent people are in this angle. That is intelligence. From this to here, that, it's genius. Ptolemy, Eratosthenes, Einstein, things like that. Nobody's obliged to be a genius. It's better, but nobody.Take care, in this training, to be a good mutant. There is some danger, there is some trap. One trap: the vertical. Because at the vertical of us, if you look like that, ""Ah! my God, there is God. Ah! God!"" God is a trap. God is the answer when we don't know the answer. That means, when your brain is not enough big, when you don't understand, you go, ""Ah, it's God, it's God."" That's ridiculous. That's why — jump, like that? No, don't jump. Come back. Because, after, there is another trap. If you look like that, you look to the past, or you look inside if you are very flexible, inside yourself. It's called schizophrenia, and you are dead also.That's why every morning, now, because you are a good mutant, you will raise your angle of view. Out, more of the horizontal. You are an intelligence. Never forget — like that, like that. It's very, very, very important. What, what else we can say about that? Why do that? It's because we — if we look from far, we see our line of evolution. This line of evolution is clearly positive. From far, this line looks very smooth, like that. But if you take a lens, like that, this line is ack, ack, ack, ack, ack. Like that. It's made of light and shadow. We can say light is civilization, shadow is barbaria. And it's very important to know where we are. Because some cycle, there is a spot in the cycle, and you have not the same duty in the different parts of the cycle.That means, we can imagine — I don't say it was fantastic, but in the '80s, there was not too much war, like that, it was — we can imagine that the civilization can become civilized. In this case, people like me are acceptable. We can say, ""It's luxurious time."" We have time to think, we have time to I don't know what, speak about art and things like that. It's OK. We are in the light. But sometimes, like today, we fall, we fall so fast, so fast to shadow, we fall so fast to barbaria. With many, many, many, many face of barbaria. Because it's not, the barbaria we have today, it's perhaps not the barbaria we think. There is different type of barbaria. That's why we must adapt. That means, when barbaria is back, forget the beautiful chairs, forget the beautiful hotel, forget design, even — I'm sorry to say — forget art. Forget all that. There is priority; there is urgency. You must go back to politics, you must go back to radicalization, I'm sorry if that's not very English. You must go back to fight, to battle.That's why today I'm so ashamed to make this job. That's why I am here, to try to do it the best possible. But I know that even I do it the best possible — that's why I'm the best — it's nothing. Because it's not the right time. That's why I say that. I say that, because, I repeat, nothing exist if it's not in the good reason, the reason of our beautiful dream, of this civilization. And because we must all work to finish this story. Because the scenario of this civilization — about love, progress, and things like that — it's OK, but there is so many different, other scenarios of other civilizations. This scenario, of this civilization, was about becoming powerful, intelligent, like this idea we have invented, this concept of God. We are God now. We are. It's almost done. We have just to finish the story. That is very, very important. And when you don't understand really what's happened, you cannot go and fight and work and build and things like that. You go to the future back, back, back, back, like that. And you can fall, and it's very dangerous. No, you must really understand that.Because we have almost finished, I'll repeat this story. And the beauty of this, in perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism. With billions of people who have been born, worked, lived and died before us, these people who have worked so much, we have now bring beautiful things, beautiful gifts, we know so many things. We can say to our children, OK, done, that was our story. That passed. Now you have a duty: invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story. We give you white pages. Invent. We give you the best tools, the best tools, and now, do it. That's why I continue to work, even if it's for toilet brush.","https://www.ted.com/talks/philippe_starck_thinks_deep_on_design
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"Thank you for putting up these pictures of my colleagues over here. (Laughter) We'll be talking about them. Now, I'm going try an experiment. I don't do experiments, normally. I'm a theorist. But I'm going see what happens if I press this button. Sure enough. OK. I used to work in this field of elementary particles. What happens to matter if you chop it up very fine? What is it made of? And the laws of these particles are valid throughout the universe, and they're very much connected with the history of the universe.We know a lot about four forces. There must be a lot more, but those are at very, very small distances, and we haven't really interacted with them very much yet. The main thing I want to talk about is this: that we have this remarkable experience in this field of fundamental physics that beauty is a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory. And why on earth could that be so?Well, here's an example from my own experience. It's fairly dramatic, actually, to have this happen. Three or four of us, in 1957, put forward a partially complete theory of one of these forces, this weak force. And it was in disagreement with seven — seven, count them, seven experiments. Experiments were all wrong.And we published before knowing that, because we figured it was so beautiful, it's gotta be right! The experiments had to be wrong, and they were. Now our friend over there, Albert Einstein, used to pay very little attention when people said, ""You know, there's a man with an experiment that seems to disagree with special relativity. DC Miller. What about that?"" And he would say, ""Aw, that'll go away."" (Laughter)Now, why does stuff like that work? That's the question. Now, yeah, what do we mean by beautiful? That's one thing. I'll try to make that clear — partially clear. Why should it work, and is this something to do with human beings? I'll let you in on the answer to the last one that I offer, and that is, it has nothing to do with human beings. Somewhere in some other planet, orbiting some very distant star, maybe in a another galaxy, there could well be entities that are at least as intelligent as we are, and are interested in science. It's not impossible; I think there probably are lots.Very likely, none is close enough to interact with us. But they could be out there, very easily. And suppose they have, you know, very different sensory apparatus, and so on. They have seven tentacles, and they have 14 little funny-looking compound eyes, and a brain shaped like a pretzel. Would they really have different laws? There are lots of people who believe that, and I think it is utter baloney. I think there are laws out there, and we of course don't understand them at any given time very well — but we try. And we try to get closer and closer.And someday, we may actually figure out the fundamental unified theory of the particles and forces, what I call the ""fundamental law."" We may not even be terribly far from it. But even if we don't run across it in our lifetimes, we can still think there is one out there, and we're just trying to get closer and closer to it. I think that's the main point to be made. We express these things mathematically. And when the mathematics is very simple — when in terms of some mathematical notation, you can write the theory in a very brief space, without a lot of complication — that's essentially what we mean by beauty or elegance.Here's what I was saying about the laws. They're really there. Newton certainly believed that. And he said, here, ""It is the business of natural philosophy to find out those laws."" The basic law, let's say — here's an assumption. The assumption is that the basic law really takes the form of a unified theory of all the particles. Now, some people call that a theory of everything. That's wrong because the theory is quantum mechanical. And I won't go into a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and what it's like, and so on. You've heard a lot of wrong things about it anyway. (Laughter) There are even movies about it with a lot of wrong stuff.But the main thing here is that it predicts probabilities. Now, sometimes those probabilities are near certainties. And in a lot of familiar cases, they of course are. But other times they're not, and you have only probabilities for different outcomes. So what that means is that the history of the universe is not determined just by the fundamental law. It's the fundamental law and this incredibly long series of accidents, or chance outcomes, that are there in addition.And the fundamental theory doesn't include those chance outcomes; they are in addition. So it's not a theory of everything. And in fact, a huge amount of the information in the universe around us comes from those accidents, and not just from the fundamental laws. Now, it's often said that getting closer and closer to the fundamental laws by examining phenomena at low energies, and then higher energies, and then higher energies, or short distances, and then shorter distances, and then still shorter distances, and so on, is like peeling the skin of an onion. And we keep doing that, and build more powerful machines, accelerators for particles. We look deeper and deeper into the structure of particles, and in that way we get probably closer and closer to this fundamental law.Now, what happens is that as we do that, as we peel these skins of the onion, and we get closer and closer to the underlying law, we see that each skin has something in common with the previous one, and with the next one. We write them out mathematically, and we see they use very similar mathematics. They require very similar mathematics. That is absolutely remarkable, and that is a central feature of what I'm trying to say today. Newton called it — that's Newton, by the way — that one.This one is Albert Einstein. Hi, Al! And anyway, he said, ""nature conformable to herself"" — personifying nature as a female. And so what happens is that the new phenomena, the new skins, the inner skins of the slightly smaller skins of the onion that we get to, resemble the slightly larger ones. And the kind of mathematics that we had for the previous skin is almost the same as what we need for the next skin. And that's why the equations look so simple. Because they use mathematics we already have.A trivial example is this: Newton found the law of gravity, which goes like one over the square of the distance between the things gravitated. Coulomb, in France, found the same law for electric charges. Here's an example of this similarity. You look at gravity, you see a certain law. Then you look at electricity. Sure enough. The same rule. It's a very simple example. There are lots of more sophisticated examples. Symmetry is very important in this discussion. You know what it means. A circle, for example, is symmetric under rotations about the center of the circle. You rotate around the center of the circle, the circle remains unchanged. You take a sphere, in three dimensions, you rotate around the center of the sphere, and all those rotations leave the sphere alone. They are symmetries of the sphere. So we say, in general, that there's a symmetry under certain operations if those operations leave the phenomenon, or its description, unchanged.Maxwell's equations are of course symmetrical under rotations of all of space. Doesn't matter if we turn the whole of space around by some angle, it doesn't leave the — doesn't change the phenomenon of electricity or magnetism. There's a new notation in the 19th century that expressed this, and if you use that notation, the equations get a lot simpler. Then Einstein, with his special theory of relativity, looked at a whole set of symmetries of Maxwell's equations, which are called special relativity. And those symmetries, then, make the equations even shorter, and even prettier, therefore.Let's look. You don't have to know what these things mean, doesn't make any difference. But you can just look at the form. (Laughter) You can look at the form. You see above, at the top, a long list of equations with three components for the three directions of space: x, y and z. Then, using vector analysis, you use rotational symmetry, and you get this next set. Then you use the symmetry of special relativity and you get an even simpler set down here, showing that symmetry exhibits better and better. The more and more symmetry you have, the better you exhibit the simplicity and elegance of the theory.The last two, the first equation says that electric charges and currents give rise to all the electric and magnetic fields. The next — second — equation says that there is no magnetism other than that. The only magnetism comes from electric charges and currents. Someday we may find some slight hole in that argument. But for the moment, that's the case.Now, here is a very exciting development that many people have not heard of. They should have heard of it, but it's a little tricky to explain in technical detail, so I won't do it. I'll just mention it. (Laughter) But Chen Ning Yang, called by us ""Frank"" Yang — (Laughter) — and Bob Mills put forward, 50 years ago, this generalization of Maxwell's equations, with a new symmetry. A whole new symmetry. Mathematics very similar, but there was a whole new symmetry. They hoped that this would contribute somehow to particle physics — didn't. It didn't, by itself, contribute to particle physics.But then some of us generalized it further. And then it did! And it gave a very beautiful description of the strong force and of the weak force. So here we say, again, what we said before: that each skin of the onion shows a similarity to the adjoining skins. So the mathematics for the adjoining skins is very similar to what we need for the new one. And therefore it looks beautiful because we already know how to write it in a lovely, concise way.So here are the themes. We believe there is a unified theory underlying all the regularities. Steps toward unification exhibit the simplicity. Symmetry exhibits the simplicity. And then there is self-similarity across the scales — in other words, from one skin of the onion to another one. Proximate self-similarity. And that accounts for this phenomenon. That will account for why beauty is a successful criterion for selecting the right theory.Here's what Newton himself said: ""Nature is very consonant and conformable to her self."" One thing he was thinking of is something that most of us take for granted today, but in his day it wasn't taken for granted. There's the story, which is not absolutely certain to be right, but a lot of people told it. Four sources told it. That when they had the plague in Cambridge, and he went down to his mother's farm — because the university was closed — he saw an apple fall from a tree, or on his head or something. And he realized suddenly that the force that drew the apple down to the earth could be the same as the force regulating the motions of the planets and the moon.That was a big unification for those days, although today we take it for granted. It's the same theory of gravity. So he said that this principle of nature, consonance: ""This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, lest I should be accounted an extravagant freak ... "" That's what we all have to watch out for, (Laughter) especially at this meeting. "" ... and so prejudice my readers against all those things which were the main design of the book.""Now, who today would claim that as a mere conceit of the human mind? That the force that causes the apple to fall to the ground is the same force that causes the planets and the moon to move around, and so on? Everybody knows that. It's a property of gravitation. It's not something in the human mind. The human mind can, of course, appreciate it and enjoy it, use it, but it's not — it doesn't stem from the human mind. It stems from the character of gravity. And that's true of all the things we're talking about. They are properties of the fundamental law. The fundamental law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another, and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin.I say here that Newton did a lot of things that year: gravity, the laws of motion, the calculus, white light composed of all the colors of the rainbow. And he could have written quite an essay on ""What I Did Over My Summer Vacation."" (Laughter) So we don't have to assume these principles as separate metaphysical postulates. They follow from the fundamental theory. They are what we call emergent properties. You don't need — you don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means.Life can emerge from physics and chemistry, plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. It doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know that they follow from more fundamental things, plus accidents. That's a general rule, and it's critically important to realize that. You don't need something more in order to get something more. People keep asking that when they read my book, ""The Quark and the Jaguar,"" and they say, ""Isn't there something more beyond what you have there?"" Presumably, they mean something supernatural. Anyway, there isn't. (Laughter) You don't need something more to explain something more. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics
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"The old story about climate protection is that it's costly, or it would have been done already. So government needs to make us do something painful to fix it. The new story about climate protection is that it's not costly, but profitable. This was a simple sign error, because it's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel, as is well known to companies that do it all the time — for example, Dupont, SD micro electronics. Many other firms — IBM — are reducing their energy intensity routinely six percent a year by fixing up their plants, and they get their money back in two or three years. That's called a profit.Now, similarly, the old story about oil is that if we wanted to save very much of it, it would be expensive, or we would have done it already, because markets are essentially perfect. If, of course, that were true, there would be no innovation, and nobody could make any money. But the new story about oil is the government doesn't have to force us to do painful things to get off oil — not just incrementally, but completely — quite the contrary. The United States, for example, can completely eliminate its use of oil and rejuvenate the economy at the same time, led by business for profit, because it's so much cheaper to save and substitute for the oil than to keep on buying it. This process will also be catalyzed by the military for its own reasons of combat effectiveness and preventing conflict, particularly over oil.This thesis is set out in a book called ""Winning the Oil Endgame"" that four colleagues and I wrote and have posted for free at Oilendgame.com — about 170,000 downloads so far. And it was co-sponsored by the Pentagon — it's independent, it's peer-reviewed and all of the backup calculations are transparently posted for your perusal. Now, a bit of economic history, I think, may be helpful here. Around 1850, one of the biggest U.S. industries was whaling. And whale oil lit practically every building. But in the nine years before Drake struck oil, in 1859, at least five-sixths of that whale oil-illuminating market disappeared, thanks to fatal competitors, chiefly oil and gas made from coal, to which the whalers had not been paying attention. So, very unexpectedly, they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. The remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists.(Laughter)And it's funny — it feels a bit like this now for oil. We've been spending the last few decades accumulating a very powerful backlog of technologies for saving and substituting for oil, and no one had bothered to add them up before. So when we did, we found some very surprising things. Now, there are two big reasons to be concerned about oil. Both national competitiveness and national security are at risk. On the competitiveness front, we all know that Toyota has more market cap than the big three put together. And serious competition from Europe, from Korea, and next is China, which will soon be a major net exporter of cars. How long do you think it will take before you can drive home your new wally-badged Shanghai automotive super-efficient car? Maybe a decade, according to my friends in Detroit. China has an energy policy based on radical energy efficiency and leap-frog technology. They're not going to export your uncle's Buick.And after that comes India. The point here is, these cars are going to be made super efficient. The question is, who will make them? Will we in the United States continue to import efficient cars to replace foreign oil, or will we make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the cars? That seems to make more sense. The more we keep on using the oil, particularly the imported oil, the more we face a very obvious array of problems. Our analysis assumes that they all cost nothing, but nothing is not the right number. It could well be enough to double the oil price, for example. And one of the worst of these is what it does to our standing in the world if other countries think that everything we do is about oil, if we have to treat countries that have oil differently than countries that don't have oil.And our military get quite unhappy with having to stand guard on pipelines in Far-off-istan when what they actually signed up for was to protect American citizens. They don't like fighting over oil, they don't like being in the sands and they don't like where the oil money goes and what sort of instability it creates. Now, in order to avoid these problems, whatever you think they're worth, it's actually not that complicated. We can save half the oil by using it more efficiently, at a cost of 12 dollars per saved barrel. And then we can replace the other half with a combination of advanced bio-fuels and safe natural gas. And that costs on average under 18 dollars a barrel. And compared with the official forecast, that oil will cost 26 dollars a barrel in 2025, which is half of what we've been paying lately,that will save 70 billion dollars a year, starting quite soon. Now, in order to do this we need to invest about 180 billion dollars: half of it to retool the car, truck and plane industries; half of it to build the advanced bio-fuel industry. In the process, we will gain about a million good jobs, mainly rural. And protect another million jobs now at risk, mainly in auto-making. And we'll also get returns over 150 billion dollars a year. So that's a very handsome return. It's financeable in the private capital market. But if you want it for the reasons I just mentioned, to happen sooner and with higher confidence, then — and also to expand choice and manage risk — then you might like some light-handed public policies that support rather than distorting or opposing the business logic. And these policies work fine without taxes, subsidies or mandates. They make a little net money for the treasury.They have a broad trans-ideological appeal, and because we want them actually to happen, we figured out ways to do them that do not require much, if any, federal legislation, and can, indeed, be done administratively or at a state level. Just to illustrate what to do about the nub of the problem, namely, light vehicles, here are four ultra-light carbon-composite concept cars with low drag, and all but the one at the upper left have hybrid drive. You can sort of have it all with these things. For example, this Opel two-seater does 155 miles an hour at 94 miles a gallon. This muscle car from Toyota: 408 horsepower in an ultra-light that does zero to 60 in well under four seconds, and still gets 32 miles a gallon. I'll say more later about this.And in the upper left, a pioneering effort 14 years ago by GM — 84 miles a gallon without even using a hybrid, in a four-seater. Well, saving that fuel, 69 percent of the fuel in light vehicles costs about 57 cents per saved gallon. But it's even a better deal for heavy trucks, where you save a similar amount at 25 cents a gallon, with better aerodynamics and tires and engines, and so on, and taking out weight so you can put it into payload. So you can double efficiency with a 60 percent internal rate of return. Then you can go even further, almost tripling efficiency with some operational improvements, double the big haulers' margins. And we intend to use those numbers to create demand pull, and flip the market.In the airplane business, it's again a similar story where the first 20 percent fuel saving is free, as Boeing is now demonstrating in its new Dreamliner. But then the next generation of planes saves about half. Again, much cheaper than buying the fuel. And if you go over the next 15 years or so to a blended-wing body, kind of a flying wing with internal engines, then you get about a factor three efficiency improvement at comparable or lower cost. Let me focus a minute on the light vehicles, the cars and light trucks, because we all know the most about those; probably everybody here drives one. And yet we may not realize that in a standard sedan, of all the fuel energy you feed into the car, seven-eighths never gets to the wheels; it's lost first in the engine, idling at zero miles a gallon, the power train and accessories.So then of the energy that does get to the wheels, only an eighth of it, half of that, goes to heat the tires on the road, or to heat the air the car pushes aside. And only this little bit, only six percent actually ends up accelerating the car and then heating the brakes when you stop. In fact, since 95 percent of the weight you're moving is the car not the driver, less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver. This is not very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort.(Laughter)(Applause)Moreover, three-fourths of the fuel use is caused by the weight of the car. And it's obvious from the diagram that every unit of energy you save at the wheels is going to avoid wasting another seven units of energy getting that energy to the wheels. So there's huge leverage for making the car a lot lighter. And the reason this has not been very seriously examined before is there was a common assumption in the industry that — well, then it might not be safe if you got whacked by a heavy car, and it would cost a lot more to make, because the only way we know how to make cars much lighter was to use expensive light metals like aluminum and magnesium. But these objections are now vanishing through advances in materials.For example, we use a lot of carbon-fiber composites in sporting goods. And it turns out that these are quite remarkable for safety. Here's a handmade McLaren SLR carbon car that got t-boned by a Golf. The Golf was totaled. The McLaren just popped off and scratched the side panel. They'll pop it back on and fix the scratch later. But if this McLaren were to run into a wall at 65 miles an hour, the entire crash energy would be absorbed by a couple of woven carbon-fiber composite cones, weighing a total of 15 pounds, hidden in the front end. Because these materials could actually absorb six to 12 times as much energy per pound as steel, and do so a lot more smoothly.And this means we've just cracked the conundrum of safety and weight. We could make cars bigger, which is protective, but make them light. Whereas if we made them heavy, they'd be both hostile and inefficient. And when you make them light in the right way, that can be simpler and cheaper to make. You can end up saving money, and lives, and oil, all at the same time. I showed here two years ago a little bit about a design of your basic, uncompromised, quintupled-efficiency suburban-assault vehicle — (Laughter) — and this is a complete virtual design that is production-costed manufacturable.And the process needed to make it is actually coming toward the market quite nicely. We figured out a kind of a digital inkjet printer for this very stiff, strong, carbon-composite material, and then ways to thermoform it, because it's a combination of carbon and nylon, into whatever complex shapes you want, like the one just shown at the auto show by one of the tier-one suppliers. And the manufacturing you can do this way gets radically simplified. Because the auto body has only, say, 14 parts, instead of 100, 150. Each one is formed by one fairly cheap die set, instead of four expensive ones for stamping steel. Each of the parts can be easily lifted with no hoist. They snap together like a kid's toy. So you got rid of the body shop.And if you want, you can lay color in the mold, and get rid of the paint shop. Those are the two hardest and costliest parts of making a car. So you end up with at least two-fifths lower capital intensity than the leanest plant in the industry, which GM has in Lansing. The plant also gets smaller. Now, when you go through a similar analysis for every way we use oil, including buildings, industry, feedstocks and so on, you find that of the 28 million barrels a day the government says we will need in 2025, well, about eight of that can be removed by efficiency by then, with another seven still being saved as the vehicle stocks turn over, at an average cost of only 12 bucks a barrel, instead of 26 for buying the oil. And then another six can be made robustly, competitively, from cellulosic ethanol and a little bio-diesel, without interfering at all with the water or land needs of crop production.There is a huge amount of gas to be saved, about half the projected gas at about an eighth of its price. And here are some no-brainer substitutions of it, with lots left over. So much, in fact, that after you've handled the domestic oil forecast from areas already approved, you have only this little bit left, and let's see how we can meet that, because there's a pretty flexible menu of ways. We could, of course, buy more efficiency. Maybe you ought to buy efficiency at 26 bucks instead of 12. Or wait to capture the second half of it. Or we could, of course, just get this little bit by continuing to import some Canadian and Mexican oil, or the ethanol the Brazilians would love to sell us. But they'll sell it to Japan and China instead, because we have tariff barriers to protect our corn farmers, and they don't.Or we could use the saved gas directly to cover all of this balance, or if we used it as hydrogen, which is more profitable and efficient, we'd get rid of the domestic oil too. And that doesn't even count, for example, that available land in the Dakotas can cost effectively make enough wind power to run every highway vehicle in the country. So we have lots of options. And the choice of menu and timing is quite flexible. Now, to make this happen quicker and with higher confidence, there is a few ways government could help. For example, fee-bates, a combination of a fee and a rebate in any size class of vehicle you want, can increase the price of inefficient vehicles and correspondingly pay you a rebate for efficient vehicles. You're not paid to change size class. You are paid to pick efficiency within a size class, in a way equivalent to looking at all fourteen years of life-cycle fuel savings rather than just the first two or three.This expands choice rapidly in the market, and actually makes more money for automakers as well. I'd like to deal with the lack of affordable personal mobility in this country by making it very cheaply possible for low-income families to get efficient, reliable, warranted new cars that they could otherwise never get. And for each car so financed, scrap almost one clunker, preferably the dirtiest ones. This creates a new million-car-a-year market for Detroit from customers they weren't going to get otherwise, because they weren't creditworthy and could never afford a new car. And Detroit will make money on every unit. It turns out that if, say, African-American and white households had the same car ownership, it would cut employment disparity about in half by providing better access to job opportunities. So this is a huge social win, too.Governments buy hundreds of thousands of cars a year. There are smart ways to buy them and to aggregate that purchasing power to bring very efficient vehicles into the market faster. And we could even do an X Prize-style golden carrot that's worth stretching further for. For example, a billion-dollar prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 200,000 really advanced vehicles, like some you saw earlier. Then the legacy airlines can't afford to buy the efficient new planes they desperately need to cut their fuel bills, but if you felt philosophically you wanted to do anything about that, there are ways to finance it.And at the same time to scrap inefficient old planes, so that if they were otherwise to come back in the air, they would waste more oil, and block the uptake of efficient, new planes. Those part inefficient planes are worth more to society dead than alive. We ought to take them out back and shoot them, and put bounty hunters after them. Then there's an important military role. That in creating the move to high-volume, low-cost commercial production of these kinds of materials, or for that matter, ultra-light steels that are a good backup technology, the military can do the trick it did in turning DARPAnet into the Internet. Just turn it over to the private sector, and we have an Internet.The same for GPS. The same for the modern semi-conductor industry. That is, military science and technology that they need can create the advanced materials-industrial cluster that transforms its civilian economy and gets the country off oil, which would be a huge contribution to eliminating conflict over oil and advancing national and global security. Then we need to retool the car industry and do retraining, and shift the convergence of the energy and ag-value chains to shift faster from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates, and get out of our own way in other ways. And make the transition to more efficient vehicles go faster.But here's how the whole thing fits together. Instead of official forecasts of oil use and oil imports going forever up, they can turn down with the 12 dollars a barrel efficiency, down steeply by adding the supply-side substitutions at 18 bucks, all implemented at slower rates than we've done before when we paid attention. And if we start adding tranches of hydrogen in there, we are rapidly off imports and completely off oil in the 2040s.And the one thing I'd like to point out here is that we've done this before. In this eight-year period, 1977 to 85, when we last paid attention, the economy grew 27 percent, oil use fell 17 percent, oil imports fell 50 percent, oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. They would have been gone if we'd kept that up one more year. Well, that was with very old technologies and delivery methods.We could rerun that play a lot better now. And yet what we proved then is the U.S. has more market power than OPEC. Ours is on the demand side. We are the Saudi Arabia of ""nega-barrels."" (Laughter) We can use less oil faster than they can conveniently sell less oil.(Applause)Whatever your reason for wanting to do this, whether you're concerned about national security or price volatility — (Laughter) — or jobs, or the planet, or your grand-kids, it seems to me that this is an oil endgame that we should all be playing to win. Please download your copy, and thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_on_winning_the_oil_endgame
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"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Art Benjamin, and I am a ""mathemagician."" What that means is, I combine my loves of math and magic to do something I call ""mathemagics.""But before I get started, I have a quick question for the audience. By any chance, did anyone happen to bring with them this morning a calculator? Seriously, if you have a calculator with you, raise your hand. Raise your hand. Did your hand go up? Now bring it out, bring it out. Anybody else? I see, I see one way in the back. You sir, that's three. And anybody on this side here? OK, over there on the aisle. Would the four of you please bring out your calculators, then join me up on stage. Let's give them a nice round of applause.(Applause)That's right. Now, since I haven't had the chance to work with these calculators, I need to make sure that they are all working properly. Would somebody get us started by giving us a two-digit number, please? How about a two-digit number?Audience: 22.AB: 22. And another two-digit number, sir?Audience: 47.AB: Multiply 22 times 47, make sure you get 1,034, or the calculators are not working. Do all of you get 1,034? 1,034?Volunteer: No.AB: 594. Let's give three of them a nice round of applause there.(Applause)Would you like to try a more standard calculator, just in case? OK, great. What I'm going to try and do then — I notice it took some of you a little bit of time to get your answer. That's OK. I'll give you a shortcut for multiplying even faster on the calculator. There is something called the square of a number, which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself. For instance, five squared would be?Audience: 25.AB: 25. The way we can square on most calculators — let me demonstrate with this one — is by taking the number, such as five, hitting ""times"" and then ""equals,"" and on most calculators that will give you the square. On some of these ancient RPN calculators, you've got an ""x squared"" button on it, will allow you to do the calculation even faster. What I'm going to try and do now is to square, in my head, four two-digit numbers faster than they can do on their calculators, even using the shortcut method. What I'll use is the second row this time, and I'll get four of you to each yell out a two-digit number, and if you would square the first number, and if you would square the second, the third and the fourth, I will try and race you to the answer. OK? So quickly, a two-digit number please.Audience: 37.Arthur Benjamin: 37 squared, OK.Audience: 23.AB: 23 squared, OK.Audience: 59.AB: 59 squared, OK, and finally?Audience: 93.AB: 93 squared. Would you call out your answers, please?Volunteer: 1369. AB: 1369.Volunteer: 529. AB: 529.Volunteer: 3481. AB: 3481.Volunteer: 8649.AB: Thank you very much.(Applause)Let me try to take this one step further. I'm going to try to square some three-digit numbers this time. I won't even write these down — I'll just call them out as they're called out to me. Anyone I point to, call out a three-digit number. Anyone on our panel, verify the answer. Just give some indication if it's right. A three-digit number, sir, yes?Audience: 987.AB: 987 squared is 974,169.(Laughter)AB: Yes? Good. Another three-digit —(Applause) — another three-digit number, sir?Audience: 457.AB: 457 squared is 205,849. 205,849? AB: Yes? OK, another, another three-digit number, sir?Audience: 321.AB: 321 is 103,041. 103,041. Yes? One more three-digit number please.Audience: Oh, 722.AB: 722 is 500, that's a harder one. Is that 513,284?Volunteer: Yes.AB: Yes? Oh, one more, one more three-digit number please.Audience: 162. 162 squared is 26,244.Volunteer: Yes.Thank you very much.(Applause)(Applause ends)Let me try to take this one step further.(Laughter)I'm going to try to square a four-digit number this time. You can all take your time on this; I will not beat you to the answer on this one, but I will try to get the answer right. To make this a little bit more random, let's take the fourth row this time, let's say, one, two, three, four. If each of you would call out a single digit between zero and nine, that will be the four-digit number that I'll square.Nine.Seven.Five.Eight. 9,758, this will take me a little bit of time, so bear with me. 95 million —(Sighs) 218,564?Volunteer: Yes!AB: Thank you very much.(Applause)(Applause ends)Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number — and I can — but unfortunately, most calculators cannot.(Laughter)Eight-digit capacity — don't you hate that? So, since we've reached the limits of our calculators — what's that? Does yours go higher?Volunteer: I don't know.AB: Oh, yours does?Volunteer: I can probably do it. AB: I'll talk to you later. In the meanwhile, let me conclude the first part of my show by doing something a little trickier. Let's take the largest number on the board here, 8649. Would you each enter that on your calculator? And instead of squaring it this time, I want you to take that number and multiply it by any three-digit number that you want, but don't tell me what you're multiplying by — just multiply it by any random three-digit number. So you should have as an answer either a six-digit or probably a seven-digit number. How many digits do you have, six or seven?Seven, and yours?Seven? Seven? And, uncertain.Seven. Is there any possible way that I could know what seven-digit numbers you have? Say ""No.""(Laughter)Good, then I shall attempt the impossible — or at least the improbable. What I'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits, any six of them, in any order you'd like.(Laughter)One digit at a time, I shall try and determine the digit you've left out. Starting with your seven-digit number, call out any six of them please.Volunteer: 1, 9, 7, 0, 4, 2.AB: Did you leave out the number 6?Good, OK, that's one. You have a seven-digit number, call out any six of them please.Volunteer: 4, 4, 8, 7, 5.I think I only heard five numbers. I — wait — 44875 — did you leave out the number 6?Same as she did, OK. You've got a seven-digit number — call out any six of them loud and clear.Volunteer: 0, 7, 9, 0, 4, 4.I think you left out the number 3?AB: That's three. The odds of me getting all four of these right by random guessing would be one in 10,000: 10 to the fourth power. OK, any six of them.(Laughter)Really scramble them up this time, please.Volunteer: 2, 6, 3, 9, 7, 2.Did you leave out the number 7? And let's give all four of these people a nice round of applause. Thank you very much.(Applause)(Applause ends) For my next number —(Laughter)while I mentally recharge my batteries, I have one more question for the audience. By any chance, does anybody here happen to know the day of the week that they were born on? If you think you know your birth day, raise your hand. Let's see, starting with — let's start with a gentleman first. What year was it, first of all? That's why I pick a gentleman first.Audience: 1953.1953, and the month? November what? 23rd — was that a Monday?Audience: Yes.Good. Somebody else? I haven't seen any women's hands up. OK, how about you, what year? 1949, and the month? October what? Fifth — was that a Wednesday? Yes! I'll go way to the back right now, how about you? Yell it out, what year?Audience: 1959.1959, OK — and the month?Audience: February. February what?Sixth — was that a Friday? Audience: Yes.Good, how about the person behind her? Call out, what year was it?Audience: 1947. AB: 1947, and the month?Audience: May. AB: May what?Seventh — would that be a Wednesday?Audience: Yes. AB: Thank you very much.(Applause)Anybody here who'd like to know the day of the week they were born? We can do it that way. Of course, I could just make up an answer and you wouldn't know, so I come prepared for that. I brought with me a book of calendars. It goes as far back into the past as 1800, because you never know.(Laughter)I didn't mean to look at you, sir — you were just sitting there.(Laughter)Anyway, Chris, you can help me out here, if you wouldn't mind. This is a book of calendars. Who wanted to know their birth day? What year was it, first of all?Audience: 1966.66 — turn to the calendar with 1966. And what month?Audience: April. AB: April what?Audience: 17th.I believe that was a Sunday. Can you confirm, Chris?Chris Anderson: Yes.AB: I'll tell you what, Chris: as long as you have that book in front of you, do me a favor, turn to a year outside of the 1900s, either into the 1800s or way into the 2000s — that'll be a much greater challenge for me. AB: What year would you like? CA: 1824.AB: 1824, OK. AB: And what month?CA: June.AB: June what? CA: Sixth.AB: Was that a Sunday?CA: It was. AB: And it was cloudy.(Laughter)Good, thank you very much.(Applause)(Applause ends)But I'd like to wrap things up now by alluding to something from earlier in the presentation. There was a gentleman up here who had a 10-digit calculator. Where is he, would you stand up, 10-digit guy? OK, stand up for me just for a second, so I can see where you are. You have a 10-digit calculator, sir, as well? OK, what I'm going to try and do, is to square in my head a five-digit number requiring a 10-digit calculator. But to make my job more interesting for you, as well as for me, I'm going to do this problem thinking out loud. So you can actually, honestly hear what's going on in my mind while I do a calculation of this size.Now, I have to apologize to our magician friend Lennart Green. I know as a magician we're not supposed to reveal our secrets, but I'm not too afraid that people are going to start doing my show next week, so — I think we're OK.(Laughter)(Applause)So, let's see, let's take a different row of people, starting with you. I'll get five digits: one, two, three, four. Oh, I did this row already. Let's do the row before you, starting with you: one, two, three, four, five. Call out a single digit — that will be the five-digit number that I will try to square, go ahead.Five.Seven.Six.Eight.Three. 57,683 — squared. Yuck.Let me explain to you how I'm going to attempt this problem. I'm going to break the problem down into three parts. I'll do 57,000 squared, plus 683 squared, plus 57,000 times 683 times two. Add all those numbers together, and with any luck, arrive at the answer. Now, let me recap.(Laughter)Thank you.(Laughter)While I explain something else —(Laughter)— I know, that you can use, right?(Laughter)While I do these calculations, you might hear certain words, as opposed to numbers, creep into the calculation. Let me explain what that is. This is a phonetic code, a mnemonic device that I use, that allows me to convert numbers into words. I store them as words, and later on retrieve them as numbers. I know it sounds complicated; it's not. I don't want you to think you're seeing something out of ""Rain Man.""(Laughter)There's definitely a method to my madness — definitely, definitely. Sorry.(Laughter)If you want to talk to me about ADHD afterwards, you can talk to me then. By the way, one last instruction, for my judges with the calculators — you know who you are — there is at least a 50 percent chance that I will make a mistake here. If I do, don't tell me what the mistake is; just say, ""you're close,"" or something like that, and I'll try and figure out the answer — which could be pretty entertaining in itself. If, however, I am right, whatever you do, don't keep it to yourself, OK?(Laughter)Make sure everybody knows that I got the answer right, because this is my big finish, OK. So, without any more stalling, here we go. I'll start the problem in the middle, with 57 times 683. 57 times 68 is 3,400, plus 476 is 3876, that's 38,760 plus 171, 38,760 plus 171 is 38,931. 38,931; double that to get 77,862. 77,862 becomes cookie fission, cookie fission is 77,822. That seems right, I'll go on. Cookie fission, OK. Next, I do 57 squared, which is 3,249, so I can say, three billion. Take the 249, add that to cookie, 249, oops, but I see a carry coming — 249 — add that to cookie, 250 plus 77, is 327 million — fission, fission, OK, finally, we do 683 squared, that's 700 times 666, plus 17 squared is 466,489, rev up if I need it, rev up, take the 466, add that to fission, to get, oh gee — 328,489.Audience: Yeah! AB: Good.Thank you very much.(Applause) I hope you enjoyed mathemagics.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic
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"You know, I'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of TED is compassion, these very moving demonstrations we've just seen: HIV in Africa, President Clinton last night. And I'd like to do a little collateral thinking, if you will, about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal. I'm a psychologist, but rest assured, I will not bring it to the scrotal.(Laughter)There was a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don't other times. A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in — to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. Half were given random Bible topics. Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon. As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help?The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all. What turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in — were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about. And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives: that we don't take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction.There's a new field in brain science, social neuroscience. This studies the circuitry in two people's brains that activates while they interact. And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel ""with"" automatically. And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we're automatically prepared to help. At least that's the argument.But then the question is: Why don't we? And I think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and to compassion. And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves, if we're preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day, we don't really fully notice the other. And this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle.I was doing my taxes the other day, and I got to the point where I was listing all of the donations I gave, and I had an epiphany, it was — I came to my check to the Seva Foundation and I noticed that I thought, boy, my friend Larry Brilliant would really be happy that I gave money to Seva. Then I realized that what I was getting from giving was a narcissistic hit — that I felt good about myself. Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized that I went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus to altruistic joy, to feeling good for the people that were being helped. I think that's a motivator.But this distinction between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is one that I encourage us all to pay attention to. You can see it at a gross level in the world of dating. I was at a sushi restaurant a while back and I overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman, who was in the singles scene. And this woman says, ""My brother is having trouble getting dates, so he's trying speed dating."" I don't know if you know speed dating? Women sit at tables and men go from table to table, and there's a clock and a bell, and at five minutes, bingo, the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up. And this woman says, ""My brother's never gotten a card, and I know exactly why. The moment he sits down, he starts talking non-stop about himself; he never asks about the woman.""And I was doing some research in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times, looking at the back stories of marriages — because they're very interesting — and I came to the marriage of Alice Charney Epstein. And she said that when she was in the dating scene, she had a simple test she put people to. The test was: from the moment they got together, how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word ""you"" in it. And apparently Epstein aced the test, therefore the article.(Laughter)Now this is a — it's a little test I encourage you to try out at a party. Here at TED there are great opportunities. The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called ""The Human Moment,"" about how to make real contact with a person at work. And they said, well, the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person. There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist. The word is ""pizzled"": it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off.(Laughter)I think it's quite apt. It's our empathy, it's our tuning in which separates us from Machiavellians or sociopaths. I have a brother-in-law who's an expert on horror and terror — he wrote the Annotated Dracula, the Essential Frankenstein — he was trained as a Chaucer scholar, but he was born in Transylvania and I think it affected him a little bit. At any rate, at one point my brother-in-law, Leonard, decided to write a book about a serial killer. This is a man who terrorized the very vicinity we're in many years ago. He was known as the Santa Cruz strangler. And before he was arrested, he had murdered his grandparents, his mother and five co-eds at UC Santa Cruz.So my brother-in-law goes to interview this killer and he realizes when he meets him that this guy is absolutely terrifying. For one thing, he's almost seven feet tall. But that's not the most terrifying thing about him. The scariest thing is that his IQ is 160: a certified genius. But there is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy, feeling with the other person. They're controlled by different parts of the brain.So at one point, my brother-in-law gets up the courage to ask the one question he really wants to know the answer to, and that is: how could you have done it? Didn't you feel any pity for your victims? These were very intimate murders — he strangled his victims. And the strangler says very matter-of-factly, ""Oh no. If I'd felt the distress, I could not have done it. I had to turn that part of me off. I had to turn that part of me off.""And I think that that is very troubling, and in a sense, I've been reflecting on turning that part of us off. When we focus on ourselves in any activity, we do turn that part of ourselves off if there's another person. Think about going shopping and think about the possibilities of a compassionate consumerism. Right now, as Bill McDonough has pointed out, the objects that we buy and use have hidden consequences. We're all unwitting victims of a collective blind spot. We don't notice and don't notice that we don't notice the toxic molecules emitted by a carpet or by the fabric on the seats. Or we don't know if that fabric is a technological or manufacturing nutrient; it can be reused or does it just end up at landfill? In other words, we're oblivious to the ecological and public health and social and economic justice consequences of the things we buy and use. In a sense, the room itself is the elephant in the room, but we don't see it. And we've become victims of a system that points us elsewhere. Consider this.There's a wonderful book called Stuff: The Hidden Life of Everyday Objects. And it talks about the back story of something like a t-shirt. And it talks about where the cotton was grown and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences for soil of that fertilizer. And it mentions, for instance, that cotton is very resistant to textile dye; about 60 percent washes off into wastewater. And it's well known by epidemiologists that kids who live near textile works tend to have high rates of leukemia. There's a company, Bennett and Company, that supplies Polo.com, Victoria's Secret — they, because of their CEO, who's aware of this, in China formed a joint venture with their dye works to make sure that the wastewater would be properly taken care of before it returned to the groundwater. Right now, we don't have the option to choose the virtuous t-shirt over the non-virtuous one. So what would it take to do that?Well, I've been thinking. For one thing, there's a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store. You can track it back to the factory. Once you can track it back to the factory, you can look at the manufacturing processes that were used to make it, and if it's virtuous, you can label it that way. Or if it's not so virtuous, you can go into — today, go into any store, put your scanner on a palm onto a barcode, which will take you to a website. They have it for people with allergies to peanuts. That website could tell you things about that object. In other words, at point of purchase, we might be able to make a compassionate choice.There's a saying in the world of information science: ultimately everybody will know everything. And the question is: will it make a difference? Some time ago when I was working for The New York Times, it was in the '80s, I did an article on what was then a new problem in New York — it was homeless people on the streets. And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me — what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where, when we see, when we're passing someone who's homeless in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery. We don't notice and therefore we don't act.One day soon after that — it was a Friday — at the end of the day, I went down — I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs. And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side, shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him — hundreds and hundreds of people. And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened, I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong. The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy. And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn't speak any English, he had no money, he'd been wandering the streets for days, starving, and he'd fainted from hunger. Immediately someone went to get orange juice, someone brought a hotdog, someone brought a subway cop. This guy was back on his feet immediately. But all it took was that simple act of noticing, and so I'm optimistic.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goleman_on_compassion
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"So I thought, ""I will talk about death."" Seemed to be the passion today. Actually, it's not about death. It's inevitable, terrible, but really what I want to talk about is, I'm just fascinated by the legacy people leave when they die. That's what I want to talk about.So Art Buchwald left his legacy of humor with a video that appeared soon after he died, saying, ""Hi! I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died."" And Mike, who I met at Galapagos, a trip which I won at TED, is leaving notes on cyberspace where he is chronicling his journey through cancer. And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook. In the last two years of his life, when he was sick, he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me. He wrote about my strengths, weaknesses, and gentle suggestions for improvement, quoting specific incidents, and held a mirror to my life.After he died, I realized that no one writes to me anymore. Handwriting is a disappearing art. I'm all for email and thinking while typing, but why give up old habits for new? Why can't we have letter writing and email exchange in our lives? There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him, and trade all those years for one hug. But too late. But that's when I take out his letters and I read them, and the paper that touched his hand is in mine, and I feel connected to him.So maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy, and not a financial one. A value for things with a personal touch — an autographed book, a soul-searching letter. If a fraction of this powerful TED audience could be inspired to buy a beautiful paper — John, it'll be a recycled one — and write a beautiful letter to someone they love, we actually may start a revolution where our children may go to penmanship classes.So what do I plan to leave for my son? I collect autographed books, and those of you authors in the audience know I hound you for them — and CDs too, Tracy. I plan to publish my own notebook. As I witnessed my father's body being swallowed by fire, I sat by his funeral pyre and wrote. I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but I am committed to compiling his thoughts and mine into a book, and leave that published book for my son.I'd like to end with a few verses of what I wrote at my father's cremation. And those linguists, please pardon the grammar, because I've not looked at it in the last 10 years. I took it out for the first time to come here. ""Picture in a frame, ashes in a bottle, boundless energy confined in the bottle, forcing me to deal with reality, forcing me to deal with being grown up. I hear you and I know that you would want me to be strong, but right now, I am being sucked down, surrounded and suffocated by these raging emotional waters, craving to cleanse my soul, trying to emerge on a firm footing one more time, to keep on fighting and flourishing just as you taught me. Your encouraging whispers in my whirlpool of despair, holding me and heaving me to shores of sanity, to live again and to love again."" Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/lakshmi_pratury_on_letter_writing
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"Welcome to ""Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do."" I don't have children. I borrow my friends' children, so —(Laughter)take all this advice with a grain of salt. I'm Gever Tulley. I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of. So we build a lot of things, and I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders. So if you're thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School, they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody.(Laughter)You know, we live in a world that's subjected to ever more stringent child safety regulations. There doesn't seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get. We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10.So where does this trend stop? When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object, every pokey bit in the world, then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp, or not made out of round plastic, they'll hurt themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can.(Laughter)So despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about safety, and about some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative, confident and in control of the environment around them. And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress. The book is called ""50 Dangerous Things."" This is ""Five Dangerous Things.""Thing number one: Play with fire. Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history. Whether we remember it or not, it's the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it. So, playing with fire. This is like one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. From playing with it, they learn some basic principles about fire, about intake, combustion, exhaust. These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. You don't know what they're going to learn from playing with it. Let them fool around with it on their own terms and trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys.(Laughter)Number two: Own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing.(Laughter)Your first pocketknife is like the first universal tool that you're given. You know, it's a spatula, it's a pry bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah. And it's a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives — like, as soon as they're toddlers, they have knives. These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board film when I was 10, and it left a lasting impression, to see babies playing with knives. And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. You lay down a couple of very simple rules — always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it — and these are things kids can understand and practice with. And yeah, they're going to cut themselves. I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself. But you know, they're young. They heal fast.(Laughter)Number three: Throw a spear. It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things, and like muscles, if you don't use parts of your brain, they tend to atrophy over time. But when you exercise them, any given muscle adds strength to the whole system, and that applies to your brain, too. So practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal and parietal lobes, which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding, and structural problem solving, so it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive ability. And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it's very good for that kind of whole-body training. These kinds of target-based practices also help kids develop attention and concentration skills, so those are great.Number [four]: Deconstruct appliances. There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. Next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. Take it apart with your kid, or send him to my school, and we'll take it apart with them. Even if you don't know what the parts are, puzzling out what they might be for is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart, and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them. And that means that eventually, they can understand all of them. It's a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them.Number five: Two-parter. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.(Laughter)There are laws beyond safety regulations that attempt to limit how we can interact with the things that we own — in this case, digital media. It's a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. You've just broken a law. Technically, the RIAA could come and prosecute you. It's an important lesson for kids to understand, that some of these laws get broken by accident, and that laws have to be interpreted. That's something we often talk about with the kids when we're fooling around with things and breaking them open, and taking them apart and using them for other things. And also when we go out and drive a car. Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate —(Laughter)For those of you who aren't comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. This is a great stage for a kid. This happens about the same time that they get latched onto things like dinosaurs, these big things in the outside world, that they're trying to get a grip on. A car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. And that really gives them a handle on a world in a way that they don't often have access to. And it's perfectly legal. Find a big empty lot, make sure there's nothing in it, and that it's on private property, and let them drive your car. It's very safe actually. And it's fun for the whole family.(Laughter)Let's see, I think that's it. That's number five and a half. OK.","https://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids
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"Thank you so much. It's really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart. I'm here to tell you a few tales of passion. There's a Jewish saying that I love. What is truer than truth? Answer: The story. I'm a storyteller. I want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity. All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom. I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.In the last 20 years I have published a few books, but I have lived in anonymity until February of 2006, when I carried the Olympic flag in the Winter Olympics in Italy. That made me a celebrity. Now people recognize me in Macy's, and my grandchildren think that I'm cool. (Laughter) Allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame. One of the organizers of the Olympic ceremony, of the opening ceremony, called me and said that I had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers. I replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity because I'm as far as you can get from being an athlete. Actually, I wasn't even sure that I could go around the stadium without a walker. (Laughter) I was told that this was no laughing matter. This would be the first time that only women would carry the Olympic flag. Five women, representing five continents, and three Olympic gold medal winners. My first question was, naturally, what was I going to wear? (Laughter) A uniform, she said, and asked for my measurements. My measurements. I had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak, looking like the Michelin Man. (Laughter)By the middle of February, I found myself in Turin, where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the 80 Olympic teams was in the street. Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games. They all deserved to win, but there's the element of luck. A speck of snow, an inch of ice, the force of the wind, can determine the result of a race or a game. However, what matters most — more than training or luck — is the heart. Only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal. It is all about passion. The streets of Turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the Olympics.Passion lives here. Isn't it always true? Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. People like all of you in this room. Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. (Laughter) They only make good former spouses. (Laughter) (Applause)In the green room of the stadium, I met the other flag bearers: three athletes, and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren. Also, two women with passionate hearts: Wangari Maathai, the Nobel prizewinner from Kenya who has planted 30 million trees. And by doing so, she has changed the soil, the weather, in some places in Africa, and of course the economic conditions in many villages. And Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist who fights passionately against child prostitution. When she was 14 years old, her grandfather sold her to a brothel. She told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them from AIDS. And of brothels where children are forced to receive five, 15 clients per day, and if they rebel, they are tortured with electricity. In the green room I received my uniform. It was not the kind of outfit that I normally wear, but it was far from the Michelin Man suit that I had anticipated. Not bad, really. I looked like a refrigerator. (Laughter) But so did most of the flag-bearers, except Sophia Loren, the universal symbol of beauty and passion. Sophia is over 70 and she looks great. She's sexy, slim and tall, with a deep tan. Now, how can you have a deep tan and have no wrinkles? I don't know. When asked in a TV interview, ""How could she look so good?"" She replied, ""Posture. My back is always straight, and I don't make old people's noises."" (Laughter) So, there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on earth. No grunting, no coughing, no wheezing, no talking to yourselves, no farting. (Laughter) Well, she didn't say that exactly. (Laughter)At some point around midnight, we were summoned to the wings of the stadium, and the loudspeakers announced the Olympic flag, and the music started — by the way, the same music that starts here, the Aida March. Sophia Loren was right in front of me — she's a foot taller than I am, not counting the poofy hair. (Laughter) She walked elegantly, like a giraffe on the African savannah, holding the flag on her shoulder. I jogged behind (Laughter) — on my tiptoes — holding the flag on my extended arm, so that my head was actually under the damn flag. (Laughter) All the cameras were, of course, on Sophia. That was fortunate for me, because in most press photos I appear too, although often between Sophia's legs. (Laughter) A place where most men would love to be. (Laughter) (Applause)The best four minutes of my entire life were those in the Olympic stadium. My husband is offended when I say this — although I have explained to him that what we do in private usually takes less than four minutes — (Laughter) — so he shouldn't take it personally. I have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes, because I don't want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells.I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics — passion. So here's a tale of passion. The year is 1998, the place is a prison camp for Tutsi refugees in Congo. By the way, 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls. We can call this place in Congo a death camp, because those who are not killed will die of disease or starvation. The protagonists of this story are a young woman, Rose Mapendo, and her children. She's pregnant and a widow. Soldiers have forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed. Somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive, and a few months later, she gives birth to premature twins. Two tiny little boys. She cuts the umbilical cord with a stick, and ties it with her own hair. She names the twins after the camp's commanders to gain their favor, and feeds them with black tea because her milk cannot sustain them. When the soldiers burst in her cell to rape her oldest daughter, she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go, even when they hold a gun to her head. Somehow, the family survives for 16 months, and then, by extraordinary luck, and the passionate heart of a young American man, Sasha Chanoff, who manages to put her in a U.S. rescue plane, Rose Mapendo and her nine children end up in Phoenix, Arizona, where they're now living and thriving.Mapendo, in Swahili, means great love. The protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like Rose Mapendo. I don't make them up. There's no need for that. I look around and I see them everywhere. I have worked with women and for women all my life. I know them well. I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist — although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. (Laughter) I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom, and for questioning the patriarchy. But I was happy to pay it, because for every blow that I received, I was able to deliver two. (Laughter) Once, when my daughter Paula was in her twenties, she said to me that feminism was dated, that I should move on. We had a memorable fight. Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor — they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed. They have no control over their bodies or their lives. They have no education and no freedom. They are raped, beaten up and sometimes killed with impunity. For most Western young women of today, being called a feminist is an insult. Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men. (Laughter) Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it.So here's another tale of passion, and this is a sad one. The place is a small women's clinic in a village in Bangladesh. The year is 2005. Jenny is a young American dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during her three-week vacation. She's prepared to clean teeth, but when she gets there, she finds out that there are no doctors, no dentists, and the clinic is just a hut full of flies. Outside, there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated. The first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars. Jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth. She's not licensed for that; she has never done it. She risks a lot and she's terrified. She doesn't even have the proper instruments, but fortunately she has brought some Novocaine. Jenny has a brave and passionate heart. She murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation. At the end, the relieved patient kisses her hands. That day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth. The next morning, when she comes again to the so-called clinic, her first patient is waiting for her with her husband. The woman's face looks like a watermelon. It is so swollen that you can't even see the eyes. The husband, furious, threatens to kill the American. Jenny is horrified at what she has done, but then the translator explains that the patient's condition has nothing to do with the operation. The day before, her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him.Millions of women live like this today. They are the poorest of the poor. Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets. They are paid less than men for the same work if they're paid at all, and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence, and they are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence and abuse. It is a fact that giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country.Wangari Maathai goes to a village in Kenya. She talks with the women and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees. She gets the women to plant new trees and water them, drop by drop. In a matter of five or six years, they have a forest, the soil is enriched, and the village is saved. The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down. Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy. For every dollar given to a women's program, 20 dollars are given to men's programs. Women are 51 percent of humankind. Empowering them will change everything — more than technology and design and entertainment. I can promise you that women working together — linked, informed and educated — can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet. In any war today, most of the casualties are civilians, mainly women and children. They are collateral damage. Men run the world, and look at the mess we have.What kind of world do we want? This is a fundamental question that most of us are asking. Does it make sense to participate in the existing world order? We want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged. In January I saw an exhibit of Fernando Botero's paintings at the UC Berkeley library. No museum or gallery in the United States, except for the New York gallery that carries Botero's work, has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the Abu Ghraib prison. They are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power, in the voluminous Botero style. I have not been able to get those images out of my mind or my heart. What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. In our species, the alpha males define reality, and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules. The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them, and in this case, the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly. Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom. Women and children, especially the poor, are at the bottom. Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse — a woman or a child. I'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender, income, race, and class.I think that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization. But for real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. I'm talking about men with young minds, of course. Old guys are hopeless; we have to wait for them to die off. (Laughter) Yes, I would love to have Sophia Loren's long legs and legendary breasts. But given a choice, I would rather have the warrior hearts of Wangari Maathai, Somaly Mam, Jenny and Rose Mapendo. I want to make this world good. Not better, but to make it good. Why not? It is possible. Look around in this room — all this knowledge, energy, talent and technology. Let's get off our fannies, roll up our sleeves and get to work, passionately, in creating an almost perfect world. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion
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"We are going to talk today about the sequel of ""Inconvenient Truth."" It's time again to talk about ""Inconvenient Truth,"" a truth that everyone is concerned about, but nobody is willing to talk about. Somebody has to take the lead, and I decided to do it. If you are scared by global warming, wait until we learn about local warming. We will talk today about local warming.Important health message: blogging may be hazardous to your health, especially if you are a male. This message is given as a public service. Blogging affects your posture. We start with the posture. This is the posture of ladies who are not blogging; this is the posture of ladies who are blogging. (Laughter) This is the natural posture of a man sitting, squatting for ventilation purposes. (Laughter) And this is the natural posture of a standing man, and I think this picture inspired Chris to insert me into the lateral thinking session. This is male blogging posture sitting, and the result is, ""For greater comfort, men naturally sit with their legs farther apart than women, when working on laptop. However, they will adopt a less natural posture in order to balance it on their laps, which resulted in a significant rise of body heat between their thighs."" This is the issue of local warming. (Laughter)This is a very serious newspaper; it's Times of England — very serious. This is a very — (Laughter) — gentlemen and ladies, be serious. This is a very serious research, that you should read the underline. And be careful, your genes are in danger. Will geeks become endangered species? The fact: population growth in countries with high laptop — (Laughter) I need Hans Rosling to give me a graph. (Applause) Global warming fun. (Laughter) But let's keep things in proportion.How to take care in five easy steps: first of all, you can use natural ventilation. You can use body breath. You should stay cool with the appropriate clothing. You should care about your posture — this is not right. Can you extract from Chris another minute and a half for me, because I have a video I have to show you. (Applause)You are great. This is the correct posture. Another benefit of Wi-Fi, we learned yesterday about the benefits of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi enables you to avoid the processor. And there are some enhanced protection measures, which I would like to share with you, and I would like, in a minute, to thank Philips for helping. This is a research which was done in '86, but it's still valid. Scrotal temperature reflects intratesticular temperature and is lowered by shaving.By the way, I must admit, my English is not so good, I didn't know what is scrotal; I understand it's a scrotum. I guess in plural it's scrotal, like medium and media. Digital scrotum, digital media. And only last year I recognized that I'm a proud scrotum owner. (Laughter)And this research is being precipitated by the U.S. government, so you can see that your tax man is working for good causes.Video: Man: The Philips Bodygroom has a sleek, ergonomic design for a safe and easy way to trim those scruffy underarm hairs, the untidy curls on and around your [bleep], as well as the hard to reach locks on the underside of your [bleep] and [bleep]. Once you use the Bodygroom, the world looks different. And so does your [bleep]. These days, with a hair-free back, well-groomed shoulders and an extra optical inch on my [bleep], well, let's just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy.Yossi Vardi: This is one of the most popular viral advertisement of last year, known as the optical inch by Philips. Let's applaud Philips — (Applause) — for this gesture for humanity. And this is how they are promoting the product. This is — I didn't touch it, this is original. Laptop use to solve overpopulation. And if everything failed, there are some secondary uses.And then our next talk, our next TED if you invite me will be why you should not carry a cell phone in your pocket. And this is what the young generation says. (Applause) And I just want to show you that I'm not just preaching, but I also practice. (Laughter) 4 am in the morning. (Laughter) You cannot use this picture. (Applause)Now, I have some mini TED Prizes, this is the Philips Bodygroom, one for our leader. (Applause) Anybody feels threatened, anybody really need it? (Laughter) Any lady, any lady? Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yossi_vardi_fights_local_warming
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"I study ants, and that's because I like to think about how organizations work. And in particular, how the simple parts of organizations interact to create the behavior of the whole organization. So, ant colonies are a good example of an organization like that, and there are many others. The web is one. There are many biological systems like that — brains, cells, developing embryos.There are about 10,000 species of ants. They all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens, and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers. And all ant colonies have in common that there's no central control. Nobody tells anybody what to do. The queen just lays the eggs. There's no management. No ant directs the behavior of any other ant. And I try to figure out how that works. And I've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern Arizona.Here's my study site. This is really a picture of ants, and the rabbit just happens to be there. And these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds. This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance. And they forage maybe for about 20 meters away, gather up the seeds and bring them back to the nest, and store them. And every year I go there and make a map of my study site. This is just a road. And it's not very big: it's about 250 meters on one side, 400 on the other. And every colony has a name, which is a number, which is painted on a rock. And I go there every year and look for all the colonies that were alive the year before, and figure out which ones have died, and put all the new ones on the map. And by doing this I know how old they all are. And because of that, I've been able to study how their behavior changes as the colony gets older and larger.So I want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony. Ants never make more ants; colonies make more colonies. And they do that by each year sending out the reproductives — those are the ones with wings — on a mating flight. So every year, on the same day — and it's a mystery exactly how that happens — each colony sends out its virgin, unmated queens with wings, and the males, and they all fly to a common place. And they mate. And this shows a recently virgin queen. Here's her wings. And she's in the process of mating with this male, and there's another male on top waiting his turn. Often the queens mate more than once. And after that, the males all die. That's it for them.(Laughter)And then the newly mated queens fly off somewhere, drop their wings, dig a hole and go into that hole and start laying eggs. And they will live for 15 or 20 years, continuing to lay eggs using the sperm from that original mating. So the queen goes down in there. She lays eggs, she feeds the larvae — so an ant starts as an egg, then it's a larva. She feeds the larvae by regurgitating from her fat reserves. Then, as soon as the ants — the first group of ants — emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants. They go out, they get the food, they dig the nest, and the queen never comes out again.So this is a one-year-old colony — this happens to be 536. There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale. So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer. This is a three-year-old colony. There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale. They make a midden, a pile of refuse — mostly the husks of the seeds that they eat. This is a five-year-old colony. This is the nest entrance, here's a pencil for scale. This is about as big as they get, about a meter across. And then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes — so this is about 10,000 worker ants — changes as a function of colony age, in years. So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five. And it stays that size until the queen dies and there's nobody to make more ants, when she's about 15 or 20 years old. And it's when they reach this stable size, in numbers of ants, that they start to reproduce. That is, to send more winged queens and males to that year's mating flight. And I know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because I've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants. (Laughter) So that's not the most fun part of this research, although it's interesting.(Laughter)Really the question that I think about with these ants is what I call task allocation. That's not just how is the colony organized, but how does it change what it's doing? How is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change? So, things happen to an ant colony. When it rains in the summer, it floods in the desert. There's a lot of damage to the nest, and extra ants are needed to clean up that mess. When extra food becomes available — and this is what everybody knows about picnics — then extra ants are allocated to collect the food. So, with nobody telling anybody what to do, how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task? And that's the process that I call task allocation.And in harvester ants, I divide the tasks of the ants I see just outside the nest into these four categories: where an ant is foraging, when it's out along the foraging trail, searching for food or bringing food back. The patrollers — that's supposed to be a magnifying glass — are an interesting group that go out early in the morning before the foragers are active. They somehow choose the direction that the foragers will go, and by coming back — just by making it back — they tell the foragers that it's safe to go out. Then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest, and I wanted to say that the nests look a lot like Bill Lishman's house. That is, that there are chambers inside, they line the walls of the chambers with moist soil and it dries to a kind of an adobe-like surface in it. It also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the Hopi people that are in that area. And the nest maintenance workers do that inside the nest, and then they come out of the nest carrying bits of dry soil in their mandibles. So you see the nest maintenance workers come out with a bit of sand, put it down, turn around, and go back in. And finally, the midden workers put some kind of territorial chemical in the garbage. So what you see the midden workers doing is making a pile of refuse. On one day, it'll all be here, and then the next day they'll move it over there, and then they'll move it back. So that's what the midden workers do. And these four groups are just the ants outside the nest. So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants.So, an ant starts out somewhere near the queen. And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests. And then there's another long tunnel and a chamber, where we often find the queen, after eight hours of hacking away at the rock with pickaxes. I don't think that chamber has evolved because of me and my backhoe and my crew of students with pickaxes, but instead because when there's flooding, occasionally the colony has to go down deep. So there's this whole network of chambers. The queen's in there somewhere; she just lays eggs. There's the larvae, and they consume most of the food. And this is true of most ants — that the ants you see walking around don't do much eating. They bring it back and feed it to the larvae. When the foragers come in with food, they just drop it into the upper chamber, and other ants come up from below, get the food, bring it back, husk the seeds, and pile them up. There are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest. And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing. So, despite what it says in the Bible, about, you know, ""Look to the ant, thou sluggard,"" in fact, you could think of those ants as reserves. That is to say, if something happened — and I've never seen anything like this happen, but I've only been looking for 20 years — if something happened, they might all come out if they were needed. But in fact, mostly they're just hanging around in there.And I think it's a very interesting question — what is there about the way the colony is organized that might give some function to a reserve of ants who are doing nothing? And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside. And if you mark ants that are working outside, and dig up a colony, you never see them deep down. So what's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they're younger. They somehow get into this reserve. And then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce. And once they belong to the ants that work outside, they never go back down. Now ants — most ants, including these, don't see very well. They have eyes, they can distinguish between light and dark, but they mostly work by smell. So just to reinforce that what you might have thought about ant queens isn't true — you know, even if the queen did have the intelligence to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to tell the ants outside what to do, there is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers that we actually see outside the nest. So that's one way that we know the queen isn't directing the behavior of the colony.So when I first set out to work on task allocation, my first question was, ""What's the relationship between the ants doing different tasks? Does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing? Does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing?"" And I was working in the context of a view of ant colonies in which each ant was somehow dedicated to its task from birth and sort of performed independently of the others, knowing its place on the assembly line. And instead I wanted to ask, ""How are the different task groups interdependent?""So I did experiments where I changed one thing. So for example, I created more work for the nest maintenance workers by putting out a pile of toothpicks near the nest entrance, early in the morning when the nest maintenance workers are first active. This is what it looks like about 20 minutes later. Here it is about 40 minutes later. And the nest maintenance workers just take all the toothpicks to the outer edge of the nest mound and leave them there. And what I wanted to know was, ""OK, here's a situation where extra nest maintenance workers were recruited — is this going to have any effect on the workers performing other tasks?"" Then we repeated all those experiments with the ants marked. So here's some blue nest maintenance workers. And lately we've gotten more sophisticated and we have this three-color system. And we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which. We started out with model airplane paint and then we found these wonderful little Japanese markers, and they work really well. And so just to summarize the result, well it turns out that yes, the different tasks are interdependent. So, if I change the numbers performing one task, it changes the numbers performing another. So for example, if I make a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up, then I see fewer ants out foraging. And this was true for all the pair-wise combinations of tasks.And the second result, which was surprising to a lot of people, was that ants actually switch tasks. The same ant doesn't do the same task over and over its whole life. So for example, if I put out extra food, everybody else — the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food, they become foragers. The nest maintenance workers become foragers. The patrollers become foragers. But not every transition is possible. And this shows how it works. Like I just said, if there is more food to collect, the patrollers, the midden workers, the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage. If there's more patrolling to do — so I created a disturbance, so extra patrollers were needed — the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol. But if more nest maintenance work is needed — for example, if I put out a bunch of toothpicks — then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance, they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest. So foraging acts as a sink, and the ants inside the nest act as a source. And finally, it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not.So, for example, when there's extra nest maintenance work to do, it's not that the foragers switch over. I know that they don't do that. But the foragers somehow decide not to come out. And here was the most intriguing result: the task allocation. This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this. When I do these experiments with older colonies — so ones that are five years or older — they're much more consistent from one time to another and much more homeostatic. The worse things get, the more I hassle them, the more they act like undisturbed colonies. Whereas the young, small colonies — the two-year-old colonies of just 2,000 ants — are much more variable. And the amazing thing about this is that an ant lives only a year. It could be this year, or this year. So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony. It's not due to the experience of older, wiser ants. Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older. And the obvious thing that's changing is its size.So since I've had this result, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kinds of decision rules — very simple, local, probably olfactory, chemical rules could an ant could be using, since no ant can assess the global situation — that would have the outcome that I see, these predictable dynamics, in who does what task. And it would change as the colony gets larger. And what I've found out is that ants are using a network of antennal contact. So anybody who's ever looked at ants has seen them touch antennae. They smell with their antennae. When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony-specific odor. And what we're learning is that an ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts, the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks, in deciding what to do. And so what the message is, is not any message that they transmit from one ant to another, but the pattern. The pattern itself is the message. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that.But first you might be wondering: how is it that an ant can tell, for example, I'm a forager. I expect to meet another forager every so often. But if instead I start to meet a higher number of nest maintenance workers, I'm less likely to forage. So it has to know the difference between a forager and a nest maintenance worker. And we've learned that, in this species — and I suspect in others as well — these hydrocarbons, this layer of grease on the outside of ants, is different as ants perform different tasks. And we've done experiments that show that that's because the longer an ant stays outside, the more these simple hydrocarbons on its surface change, and so they come to smell different by doing different tasks. And they can use that task-specific odor in cuticular hydrocarbons — they can use that in their brief antennal contacts to somehow keep track of the rate at which they're meeting ants of certain tasks. And we've just recently demonstrated this by putting extract of hydrocarbons on little glass beads, and dropping the beads gently down into the nest entrance at the right rate. And it turns out that ants will respond to the right rate of contact with a glass bead with hydrocarbon extract on it, as they would to contact with real ants.So I want now to show you a bit of film — and this will start out, first of all, showing you the nest entrance. So the idea is that ants are coming in and out of the nest entrance. They've gone out to do different tasks, and the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance determines, or influences, each ant's decision about whether to go out, and which task to perform. This is taken through a fiber optics microscope. It's down inside the nest. In the beginning you see the ants just kind of engaging with the fiber optics microscope. But the idea is that the ants are in there, and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it — a stream of contacts with other ants. And the pattern of these interactions determines whether the ant comes back out, and what it does when it comes back out. You can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these. Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants. And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in.So, what's interesting about this system is that it's messy. It's variable. It's noisy. And, in particular, in two ways. The first is that the experience of the ant — of each ant — can't be very predictable. Because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside. And the second thing is that an ant's ability to assess this pattern must be very crude because no ant can do any sophisticated counting. So, we do a lot of simulation and modeling, and also experimental work, to try to figure out how those two kinds of noise combine to, in the aggregate, produce the predictable behavior of ant colonies.Again, I don't want to say that this kind of haphazard pattern of interactions produces a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork. In fact, if you watch ants at all, you end up trying to help them because they never seem to be doing anything exactly the way that you think that they ought to be doing it. So it's not really that out of these haphazard contacts, perfection arises. But it works pretty well. Ants have been around for several hundred million years. They cover the earth, except for Antarctica. Something that they're doing is clearly successful enough that this pattern of haphazard contacts, in the aggregate, produces something that allows ants to make a lot more ants. And one of the things that we're studying is how natural selection might be acting now to shape this use of interaction patterns — this network of interaction patterns — to perhaps increase the foraging efficiency of ant colonies.So the one thing, though, that I want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you'd expect to be closely connected to colony size. The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony — and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like ""I expect to meet another forager every three seconds."" But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet. So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_digs_ants
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"Here's my thing. Hold on. There I go. Hey. I want to start today — talk about the structure of a polypeptide.(Laughter)I get a lot of people asking me, in terms of ""Lost,"" you know, ""What the hell's that island?"" You know, it's usually followed by, ""No, seriously, what the hell is that island?""Why so many mysteries? What is it about mystery that I seem to be drawn to? And I was thinking about this, what to talk about at TED. When I talked to the kind rep from TED, and I said, ""Listen, you know, what should I talk about?"" He said, ""Don't worry about it. Just be profound.""(Laughter)And I took enormous comfort in that. So thank you, if you're here.I was trying to think, what do I talk about? Good question. Why do I do so much stuff that involves mystery? And I started trying to figure it out. And I started thinking about why do I do any of what I do, and I started thinking about my grandfather. I loved my grandfather. Harry Kelvin was his name, my mother's father. He died in 1986. He was an amazing guy. And one of the reasons he was amazing: After World War II, he began an electronics company. He started selling surplus parts, kits, to schools and stuff. So he had this incredible curiosity. As a kid, I saw him come over to me with radios and telephones and all sorts of things. And he'd open them up, he'd unscrew them and reveal the inner workings — which many of us, I'm sure, take for granted. But it's an amazing gift to give a kid. To open up this thing and show how it works and why it works and what it is. He was the ultimate deconstructor, in many ways. And my grandfather was a kind of guy who would not only take things apart, but he got me interested in all sorts of different odd crafts, like, you know, printing, like the letter press. I'm obsessed with printing. I'm obsessed with silk-screening and bookbinding and box making. When I was a kid, I was always, like, taking apart boxes and stuff.And last night in the hotel, I took apart the Kleenex box. I was just looking at it. And I'm telling you —(Laughter)It's a beautiful thing. I swear to God. I mean, when you look at the box and you sort of see how it works. Rives is here, and I met him years ago at a book fair; he does pop-up books. And I'm obsessed with engineering of paper. The scoring of it, the printing of it, where the thing gets glued, the registration marks for the ink. I just love boxes. My grandfather was the guy who kind of got me into all sorts of these things. He would also supply me with tools. He was this amazing encourager — this patron, sort of, to make stuff. And he got me a Super 8 camera when I was 10 years old. And in 1976, that was sort of an anomaly, to be a 10-year-old kid that had access to a camera. And you know, he was so generous; I couldn't believe it. He wasn't doing it entirely without some manipulation. I mean, I would call him, and I'd be like, ""Listen, Grandpa, I really need this camera. You don't understand. This is, like, I want to make movies. I'll get invited to TED one day —""(Laughter)And, you know, my grandmother was the greatest. Because she'd be like, you know — she'd get on the phone. She'd be like, ""Harry, it's better than the drugs. She was fantastic. So I found myself getting this stuff, thanks to her assist, and suddenly, you know, I had a synthesizer when I was 14 years old — this kind of stuff. And it let me make things, which, to me, was sort of the dream. He sort of humored my obsession to other things too, like magic. The thing is, we'd go to this magic store in New York City called Lou Tannen's Magic. It was this great magic store. It was a crappy little building in Midtown, but you'd be in the elevator, the elevator would open — there'd be this little, small magic store. You'd be in the magic store. And it was a magical place. So I got all these magic tricks. Here. I'll show you. This is the kind of thing. So it would be like, you know. Which is good, but now I can't move. Now, I have to do the rest of the thing like this. I'm like, ""Oh, wow. Look at my computer over there!""(Laughter)So one of the things that I bought at the magic store was this: Tannen's Mystery Magic Box. The premise behind the Mystery Magic Box was the following: 15 dollars buys you 50 dollars worth of magic. Which is a savings.(Laughter)Now, I bought this decades ago and I'm not kidding. If you look at this, you'll see it's never been opened. But I've had this forever. Now, I was looking at this, it was in my office, as it always is, on the shelf, and I was thinking, why have I not opened this? And why have I kept it? Because I'm not a pack rat. I don't keep everything, but for some reason I haven't opened this box. And I felt like there was a key to this, somehow, in talking about something at TED that I haven't discussed before, and bored people elsewhere. So I thought, maybe there's something with this. And there was this giant question mark. I love the design, for what it's worth, of this thing. And I started thinking, why haven't I opened it?And I realized that I haven't opened it because it represents something important — to me. It represents my grandfather. Am I allowed to cry at TED? Because — no, I'm not going to cry.(Laughter)But —(Laughter)The thing is that it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most ground-breaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge. I started getting interested in this.And so I started thinking about ""Lost"" and the stuff that we do, and I realized, oh my God, mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do! In the creation of ""Lost,"" Damon Lindelof and I, who created the show with me, we were basically tasked with creating this series that we had very little time to do. We had 11 and a half weeks to write it, cast it, crew it, shoot it, cut it, post it, turn in a two-hour pilot. So it was not a lot of time. And that sense of possibility — what could this thing be? There was no time to develop it. I'm sure you're all familiar with people who tell you what you can't do and what you should change. There was no time for that, which is kind of amazing. And so we did this show, and for those of you who haven't seen it, or don't know it, I can show you one little clip from the pilot, just to show you some stuff that we did.(Engine roaring)(Video) Claire: Help!Please help me! Help me! Please, help me!Jack: Get him out of here! Get him away from the engine! Get him out of here!(Engine roaring)C: Help me, please! I'm having contractions!J: How many months pregnant are you?C: I'm only eight months.J: And how far apart are they coming?C: I don't know. I think it just happened.Man: Hey! Hey! Hey, get away from —JJ Abrams: 10 years ago, if we wanted to do that, we'd have to kill a stuntman.(Laughter)It would be harder. Take two would be a bitch.(Laughter)So the amazing thing was, we were able to do this thing. And part of that was the amazing availability of technology, knowing we could do anything. I mean, we could never have done that. We might have been able to write it; we wouldn't have been able to depict it like we did. So part of the amazing thing for me is in the creative process, technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me. I realize that that blank page is a magic box, you know? It needs to be filled with something fantastic.I used to have the ""Ordinary People"" script that I'd flip through. The romance was amazing to me; it would inspire me. I wanted to try and fill pages with the same kind of spirit and thought and emotion that that script did. So, you know, I love Apple computers. I'm obsessed. So the Apple computer — the PowerBook — this computer, it challenges me. It basically says, what are you going to write worthy of me? I feel this — I'm compelled.(Laughter)And I often am like, you know, dude, today I'm out. I got nothing. You know? So there's that.In terms of the content of it, you look at stories, you think, what are stories but mystery boxes? There's a fundamental question — in TV, the first act is called the teaser. It's literally the teaser. It's the big question. So you're drawn into it. Then there's another question. And it goes on. Look at ""Star Wars."" The droids meet the mysterious woman. Who's that? We don't know. Mystery box! Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the droid, you see the holographic image. You learn it's a message. She wants to find Obi Wan Kenobi. He's her only hope. But who's Obi Wan Kenobi? Mystery box! So then he meets Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi is Obi Wan Kenobi. Holy shit! So it keeps us —(Laughter)Have you guys not seen that?(Laughter)It's huge! Anyway — So there's this thing with mystery boxes that I started feeling compelled. Then there's the thing of mystery in terms of imagination — the withholding of information. You know, doing that intentionally is much more engaging. Whether it's like the shark in ""Jaws"" — if Spielberg's mechanical shark, Bruce, had worked, it would not be remotely as scary; you would have seen it too much. In ""Alien"", they never really showed the alien: terrifying! Even in a movie like a romantic comedy, ""The Graduate,"" they're having that date, and they're in the car, and it's loud, and so they put the top up. You don't hear anything they're saying! You can't hear a word! But it's the most romantic date ever. And you love it because you don't hear it.So to me, there's that. And then, finally, there's this idea — stretching the paradigm a little bit — but the idea of the mystery box. Meaning, what you think you're getting, then what you're really getting. And it's true in so many movies and stories. Look at ""E.T.,"" for example — ""E.T."" is this unbelievable movie about what? It's about an alien who meets a kid, right? Well, it's not. ""E.T."" is about divorce. ""E.T."" is about a heartbroken, divorce-crippled family, and ultimately, this kid who can't find his way. ""Die Hard,"" right? Crazy, great, fun, action-adventure movie in a building. It's about a guy who's on the verge of divorce. He's showing up to L.A., tail between his legs. There are great scenes — maybe not the most amazing dramatic scenes in the history of time, but pretty great scenes. There's a half an hour of investment in character before you get to the stuff that you're expecting.When you look at a movie like ""Jaws,"" the scene that you expect — we have the screen? These are the kind of scenes that you remember and expect from ""Jaws."" And she's being eaten; there's a shark.(Woman screaming)The thing about ""Jaws"" is, it's really about a guy who is sort of dealing with his place in the world — with his masculinity, with his family, how he's going to, you know, make it work in this new town. This is one of my favorite scenes ever, and this is a scene that you wouldn't necessarily think of when you think of ""Jaws."" But it's an amazing scene.(Video) Father: C'mere. Give us a kiss.Son: Why?Father: 'Cause I need it.JJA: Come on. ""Why? 'Cause I need it""? Best scene ever, right?(Laughter)Come on! So you think of ""Jaws"" — so that's the kind of stuff that, like, you know — the investment of character, which is the stuff that really is inside the box, you know? It's why when people do sequels, or rip off movies, you know, of a genre, they're ripping off the wrong thing. You're not supposed to rip off the shark or the monster. You know, if you rip something off — rip off the character. Rip off the stuff that matters. I mean, look inside yourself and figure out what is inside you. Because ultimately, the mystery box is all of us.So there's that. Then the distribution. What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You know? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything. The moment the lights go down is often the best part. And you're full of that amazing — that feeling of excited anticipation. And often, the movie's there and it's going, and then something happens and you go, ""Oh —"", and then, ""Mmm ..."" When it's a great movie, you're along for the ride because you're willing to give yourself to it.So to me, whether it's a TV, an iPod, computer, cell phone — It's funny, I'm an — as I said, Apple fanatic — and one day, about a year or so ago, I was signing on online in the morning to watch Steve Jobs' keynote, because I always do. And he came on, he was presenting the video iPod, and what was on the enormous iPod behind him? ""Lost""! I had no idea! And I realized, holy shit, it'd come full circle. The inspiration I get from the technology is now using the stuff that I do to sell technology. It's nuts!(Laughter)I was going to show you a couple of other things I'm going to skip. I'll show you one other thing that has nothing to do with anything. This is something online; six years ago, they did this. This is an online thing done by guys who had some visual effects experience. But the point was, that they were doing things that were using these mystery boxes that they had — everyone has now. What I've realized is what my grandfather did for me when I was a kid, everyone has access to now. You don't need to have my grandfather, though you wish you had. But I have to tell you — this is a guy doing stuff on a Quadra 950 computer — the resolution's a little bit low — using Infinity software they stopped making 15 years ago. He's doing stuff that looks as amazing as stuff I've seen released from Hollywood.The most incredible sort of mystery, I think, is now the question of what comes next. Because it is now democratized. So now, the creation of media — it's everywhere. The stuff that I was lucky and begging for to get when I was a kid is now ubiquitous. And so, there's an amazing sense of opportunity out there. And when I think of the filmmakers who exist out there now who would have been silenced, you know — who have been silenced in the past — it's a very exciting thing.I used to say in classes and lectures and stuff, to someone who wants to write, ""Go! Write! Do your thing."" It's free, you don't need permission. But now I can say, ""Go make your movie!"" There's nothing stopping you from going out there and getting the technology. You can lease, rent, buy stuff off the shelf that is either as good, or just as good, as the stuff that's being used by the, you know, ""legit people."" No community is best served when only the elite have control. And I feel like this is an amazing opportunity to see what else is out there.When I did ""Mission: Impossible III,"" we had amazing visual effects. ILM did the effects; it was incredible. And sort of my dream to be involved. And there are a couple of sequences in the movie, like these couple of moments I'll show you. There's that.(Video) Luther: Ethan, move!(Explosion)Obviously, I have an obsession with big crazy explosions. So my favorite visual effect in the movie is the one I'm about to show you. It's a scene in which Tom's character wakes up. He's drowsy. He's crazy. And the guy wakes up, and he shoves this gun in his nose and shoots this little capsule into his brain that he's going to use later to kill him, as bad guys do.(Video) Brownway: Good morning.JJA: OK, now. When we shot that scene, the actor who had the gun, an English actor, Eddie Marsan — sweetheart, great guy — he kept taking the gun and putting it into Tom's nose, and it was hurting Tom's nose. And I learned this very early on in my career: Don't hurt Tom's nose.(Laughter)There are three things you don't want to do. Number two is: Don't hurt Tom's nose. So Eddie has this gun — and he's this sweet English guy. He's like, ""Sorry, I don't want to hurt you."" I'm like, ""We have to make this look good."" And I realized that we had to do something because it wasn't working. And I thought back to what I would have done using the Super 8 camera that my grandfather got me sitting in that room, and I realized that hand didn't have to be Eddie Marsan's. It could be Tom's. And Tom would know just how hard to push the gun. He wouldn't hurt himself.So we took his hand and we painted it to look a little bit more like Eddie's. We put it in Eddie's sleeve, and so the hand that you see — that's not Eddie's hand, that's Tom's. So Tom is playing two roles.(Laughter)And he didn't ask for any more money. So here, here. Watch it again. There he is. He's waking up. He's drowsy, been through a lot.(Video) Brownway: Good morning.JJA: Tom's hand. Tom's hand. Tom's hand. Anyway. So ...(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)So you don't need the greatest technology to do things that can work in movies. And the mystery box, in honor of my grandfather, stays closed.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box
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"We're going to go on a dive to the deep sea, and anyone that's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down, it's a perfectly positively pitch-black world. And we used to see the most mysterious animals out the window that you couldn't describe: these blinking lights — a world of bioluminescence, like fireflies. Dr. Edith Widder — she's now at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association — was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals, and that's what you're seeing here on the screen.That's all bioluminescence. Like I said: just like fireflies. There's a flying turkey under a tree.(Laughter)I'm a geologist by training. But I love that. And you see, some of the bioluminescence they use to avoid being eaten, some they use to attract prey, but all of it, from an artistic point of view, is just positively amazing. And a lot of what goes on inside — There's a fish with glowing eyes, pulsating eyes. Some of the colors are designed to hypnotize, these lovely patterns. And then this last one, one of my favorites, this pinwheel design. Just absolutely amazing, every single dive.That's the unknown world, and today we've only explored about 3 percent of what's out there in the ocean. Already we've found the world's highest mountains, the world's deepest valleys, underwater lakes, underwater waterfalls — a lot of that we shared with you from the stage. And in a place where we thought no life at all, we find more life, we think, and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest, which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all. There's still 97 percent, and either that 97 percent is empty or just full of surprises.But I want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing. Cephalopods — head-foots. As a kid I knew them as calamari, mostly.(Laughter)This is an octopus. This is the work of Dr. Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab, and it's just fascinating how cephalopods can, with their incredible eyes, sense their surroundings, look at light, look at patterns. Here's an octopus moving across the reef, finds a spot to settle down, curls up and then disappears into the background. Tough thing to do.In the next bit, we're going to see a couple squid. Now males, when they fight, if they're really aggressive, they turn white. And these two males are fighting. They do it by bouncing their butts together, which is an interesting concept. Now, here's a male on the left and a female on the right, and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder, gentler squid in him.(Laughter)Let's take a look at it again. Watch the coloration: white on the right, brown on the left. He takes a step back, he's keeping off the other males by splitting his body, and comes up on the other side — Bingo! Now, I'm told that's not not just a squid phenomenon with males, but I don't know.(Laughter)Cuttlefish. I love cuttlefish. This is a Giant Australian Cuttlefish. And there he is, his droopy little eyes up here. But they can do pretty amazing things, too. Here we're going to see one backing into a crevice, and watch his tentacles — he just pulls them in, makes them look just like algae. Disappears right into the background. Positively amazing. Here's two males fighting. Once again, they're smart enough, these cephalopods; they know not to hurt each other. But look at the patterns that they can do with their skin. That's an amazing thing.Here's an octopus. Sometimes they don't want to be seen when they move, because predators can see them. This guy can make himself look like a rock, and, looking at his environment, can actually slide across the bottom, using the waves and the shadows so he can't be seen. His motion blends right into the background — the moving rock trick.So, we're learning lots new from the shallow water. Still exploring the deep, but learning lots from the shallow water. There's a good reason why: the shallow water's full of predators — here's a barracuda — and if you're an octopus or a cephalopod, you need to really understand how to use your surroundings to hide.In the next scene, you're going to see a nice coral bottom. And you see that an octopus would stand out very easily there if you couldn't use your camouflage, use your skin to change color and texture. Here's some algae in the foreground — and an octopus. Ain't that amazing?Now, Roger spooked him, so he took off in a cloud of ink, and when he lands, the octopus says, ""Oh, I've been seen. The best thing to do is to get as big as I can get."" That big brown makes his eyespot very big. So, he's bluffing. Let's do it backwards. I thought he was joking when he first showed it to me. I thought it was all graphics. So here it is in reverse. Watch the skin color; watch the skin texture. Just an amazing animal, it can change color and texture to match the surroundings. Watch him blend right into this algae. One, two, three.(Applause)And now he's gone, and so am I. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_gallo_shows_underwater_astonishments
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"Those of us who believe in heaven have some sort of idea of what heaven would be. And in my idea, heaven is satisfied curiosity. I think of heaven as a really comfortable cloud where I can just lie down with my belly down, like I was watching TV when I was a child, and my elbows up. And I can basically look everywhere I want, see every movie I've always wanted to see. And in the same kind of trance that you can feel sometimes in the subway in New York when you're reading, there's something really soothing and easy.Well, the funny thing is that I already have that kind of life, in a way, because I discovered ... it took me a while to understand it, but when I discovered around 24 years of age that I was much more comfortable with objects than with people, I finally decided to really embrace this passion. And I basically live my life in sort of a trance, and I look around and everything I see is just the beginning of a long story.Just to give you an example: this is the exhibition, Humble Masterpieces, as it was at MoMA in 2004. We were in Queens, we were building the big, big, big, big building in Midtown, so we were in the small, small, small boondocks. That was one of the funnest moments of my career.But it's not only that. The typeface — the typeface is Helvetica; it's its 50th anniversary this year. And so I start thinking — Max Miedinger and all those Swiss designers together, trying to outdo Akzidenz-Grotesk, and come up with a new sans-serif typeface — and the movie starts playing in my head already. And of course, you can imagine, with Humble Masterpieces it was the same thing multiplied by a hundred. And I do hope, by the way, that the real goal of the exhibition is going to have the same effect on you.The exhibition was meant to be a way to have children think of doing ... you know when they do homeworks at home? Instead of having a tray with two peas, I was hoping that they would go into the kitchen cabinet or the mother's handbag and do their museum-quality design collection on a tray.So, everybody's always suggesting new humble masterpieces, and at MoMA we put out some books just for people to suggest their own humble masterpieces. And when you do that, usually you get 80 percent porn and 20 percent real suggestions, and instead it was all — almost — all good suggestions.And a lot of nationalism came in. For instance, I didn't know that the Spaniards invented the mop, but they were very proud so every Spaniard said ""la frego."" And Italians did the pizza. And I wanted to show you, also, the suggestions from Kentucky are pretty good — they had moonshine, laundry detergents and liquid nails.And I keep it going, and I just got, (Laughter) also, this suggestion from Milan: it's our traffic divider, which we call ""panettone,"" and it's painted; it's these beautiful concrete things that you use around Milan to define all the lanes of traffic. So, think of your own, send them on if you want to — they're always welcome.But an exhibition like that made me understand even more what I've been thinking of for 13 years ever since I got to MoMA. I'm Italian. In Italy, design is normal. Different parts of the world have a knack for different things. I was just recently in Argentina and in Uruguay, and the default way of building homes in the country is a beautiful modernism that you don't see elsewhere, but the contemporary art was terrible.In Italy, in Milan especially, contemporary art really doesn't have that much of a place. But design — oh, my God. What you find at the store at the corner, without going to any kind of fancy store, is the kind of refined design that makes everybody think that we are all so sophisticated. It's just what you find at the store.And New York has another kind of knack for contemporary art. I'm always amazed — three-year-olds know who Richard Serra is and take you to the galleries. But design, for some reason, is still misunderstood for decoration. It's really interesting: what many people think when I say the word ""design"" is they think of this kind of overdesigned — in this case, it's overdesigned on purpose, but — decoration, interior decoration. They think of somebody choosing fabrics.Design can be that, of course, but it can also be this. It can be a school of design in Jerusalem that tries to find a better way to design gas masks for people, because, as you know, Israel deploys one gas mask per person including babies. So, what these designers do is they find a way to lower the neckline, so that instead of being completely strangled, a teenager can also sip a Coke.They tried to make a toddler's gas mask in such a way that the toddler can be held by the parent because proximity of the body is so important. And then they make a little tent for the baby. However cruel, however ruthless you can think this is it's a great design, and it is miles away from the fancy furniture, but still, it's part of my same field of passion.What I've been doing at MoMA since the beginning is to try to harness the power of MoMA because it's great to work there. You really have power in that people usually tend to know about your exhibition or see the exhibitions, and that is power because in a design museum I wouldn't have as many visitors. I'm very well aware that 80 percent of my public is there to see Picasso and Matisse, and then they stumble upon my show and I keep them there.But what I've been trying to do is something that the curators at MoMA in my department have been doing ever since the museum was founded in 1929, which is to try and see what's going on in the world and try to use that authority in order to make things better. There have been many episodes, and actually Eames Demetrius may be here in the audience, but in two instances, his great-grandfather, grandfather — I'm always a little perplexed about the relation, exactly — Charles Eames the first time and then Charles and Ray Eames the second time were involved in two competitions: one in 1940, it was about organic furniture, and the second one in 1948 was low-cost furniture for the GIs coming back from the war that then sparked a whole line of furniture. And then there was good design for very low price. There were a lot of programs in architecture and design that were about pointing people in the direction of a better design for a better life.So, I started out in '95 with this exhibition that was called Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. It was about a new phase, in my opinion, in the world of design in that materials could be customized by the designers themselves. And that put me in touch with such diverse design examples as the aerogels from the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California; at that time, they were beginning to be brought into the civilian market. And at the same time, the gorgeous work of Takeshi Ishiguro, who did these beautiful salt-and-pepper containers that are made of rice dough. So you see, the range is really quite diverse.And then, for instance, this other exhibition that was entitled Workspheres in 2001, where I asked different designers to come up with ideas for the new type of work styles that were happening in the world at that time. And you see IDEO there. It was beautiful — it was called Personal Skies. The idea was that if you had a cubicle, you could project a sky on top of your head and have your own ""Cielo in Una Stanza"" — a sky in a room — it's a very famous Italian song.And other examples: this was Marti Guixe about working on the go, and Hella Jongerius, my favorite, about how to work at home. And this lets me introduce a very important idea about design: designers are the biggest synthesizers in the world. What they do best is make a synthesis of human needs, current conditions in economy, in materials, in sustainability issues, and then what they do at the end — if they are good — is much more than the sum of its parts.Hella Jongerius is a person that is able to make a synthesis that is really quite amazing and also quite hilarious. The idea behind her work was that at that time, everybody was saying you have to really divide your life. Instead, she said, ""No, no. Work and leisure can be together."" Yeah, that's particularly gorgeous — it's the TV dinner of 2001.There have been many other exhibitions in the meantime, but I don't want to focus on my shows. I would like, instead, to talk about how great some designers are. I've always had a hard time with the word ""maverick."" I came to the United States 13 years ago, and to this day I have to ask, ""What does that mean?"" So, this morning I went to see on the dictionary and it said that there was this gentleman that was not branding its cattle. Therefore, he was not following everybody's lead, and therefore, he was a maverick. So, designers do need to be mavericks, because the best way to design a successful object — and also an object that we were missing before — is to pretend that either it never existed or that people will be able to have a new behavior with it.So, Safe is the last exhibition that I did at MoMA and it ended at the beginning of last year. It was about design that deals with safety and deals with protection. It's a long story because it started before 2001 and it was called Emergency. And then when 9/11 happened, I had a shock and I canceled the exhibition until, slowly but surely, it came back — as a half-full glass instead of half-empty — and it was about protection and safety.But it ranged from such items as a complete de-mining equipment to these kind of water-sterilizing straws, so it was really wide-ranging. It also had ... you know, Cameron and I worked a little bit together, and some of the entries that you see in his website were actually in the exhibition. But what is interesting is that we don't need to talk about design and art anymore; design uses whatever tools it has at its disposal in order to make a point. It's a sense of economy and a sense, also, of humor.This is a beautiful project by Ralph Borland, who's South African. It's a suit for civil disobedience. The idea is that when you have a riot or a protest and the police comes towards you, you're wearing this thing — it's like a big heart and it has a loudspeaker over your heart so your heartbeat is amplified — and the police is reminded; it's like having a flower in front of the rifle. And also, you can imagine, a whole group of people with the same suit will have this mounting collective heartbeat that will be scary to the police.So, designers sometimes don't do things that are immediately functional, but they're functional to our understanding of issues. Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby did this series of objects that are about our anguish and our paranoia, like this hideaway furniture that's made in the same wood as your floor so it disappears completely and you can hide away; or even better, the huggable atomic mushroom, which got me an article on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the United States — I don't think it ever happened before at MoMA; or this Faraday Chair that is supposed to protect you from radiations.But the interesting thing in the exhibition is the discovery that the ultimate shelter is your sense of self, and there are quite a few designers that are working on this particular topic. This is Cindy van den Bremen, who is a Dutch designer that's done this series of Capsters. They are athletic gear for Muslim women that enable them to ski, play tennis, do whatever they want to do without having to uncap themselves.And sometimes by doing this kind of research, you encounter such beautiful ideas of design. Twan Verdonck is really young, I think he's 27, and working together with some psychologist he did a series of toys that are for sensorial stimulation for children that have psychological impairments. They're quite beautiful. They range from this fluffy toy that is about hugging you — because autistic children like to be hugged tight, so it has a spring inside — all the way to this doll with a mirror so the child can see him or herself in the mirror and regain a sense of self.Design really looks upon the whole world and it considers the world in all of its different ranges. I was recently at a conference on luxury organized by the Herald Tribune in Istanbul. And it was really interesting because I was the last speaker and before me there were people that were really talking about luxury, and I didn't want to be a party pooper but at the same time I felt that I had to kind of bring back the discourse to reality.And the truth is that there are very different kinds of luxury, and there's luxury that is relative for people that don't have that much. I want to make this point by showing you two examples of design coming from a sense of economy — very, very clear limits. This is Cuba, and this is the recycling of a squeaky toy as a bicycle bell, and this is a raincoat that is made out of rice sacks. So they're quite beautiful, but they're beautiful because they're so smart and economical.And here is the work of two brothers from Sao Paulo, Fernando and Humberto Campana, who got inspired by the poverty and smartness that they saw around them to do pieces of furniture that now are selling for an enormous amount of money. But that's because of the kind of strangeness of the market itself.So really, design takes everything into account, and the interesting thing is that as the technology advances, as we become more and more wireless and impalpable, designers, instead, want us to be hands-on. Sometimes hammer-on. This is a whole series of furniture that wants to engage you physically. Even this chair that you have to open up and then sit on so that it takes your imprint, all the way to this beautiful series of objects that are considered design by Ana Mir in Barcelona. From this kind of bijou made with human hair to these chocolate nipples to these intra-toe candies that your lover is supposed to suck from your toes. (Laughter)It's quite beautiful because somehow, this is a gorgeous moment for design. Many years ago I heard a mathematician from Vienna, whose name was Marchetti, explain how the innovation in the military industry — therefore, secret innovation — and the innovation in the civilian society are two sinusoids that are kind of opposed. And that makes sense. In moments of war there's great technological innovation, and in the world you have to do without — well, during the Second World War, you had to do without steel, you had to do without aluminum. And then as peace comes, all of these technologies get all of a sudden available for the civilian market. Many of you might know that the Potato Chip Chair by Charles and Ray Eames comes exactly from that kind of instance: fiberglass was available for civilian use all of a sudden.I think that this is a strange moment. The rhythm of the sinusoids has changed tremendously, just like the rhythm of our life in the past 25 years, so I'm not sure anymore what the wavelength is. But it surely is a very important moment for design, because not only is the technology proceeding, not only is computing technology making open-source possible also in the world of design, but also the idea of sustainability — which is not only sustainability from the viewpoint of CO2 emissions and footprint, but also sustainability of human interrelationships — is very much part of the work of so many designers. And that's why designers, more and more, are working on behaviors rather than on objects. Especially the good ones, not all of them.I wanted to show you, for instance, the work of Mathieu Lehanneur, which is quite fantastic. He's another young designer from France who's working — and at this point he's working, also, with pharmaceutical companies — on new ways to engage patients, especially children, in taking their medicines with constancy and with certainty.For instance, this is a beautiful container for asthma medicine that kind of inflates itself when it's time for you to take the medicine, so the child has to go — pffff! — to release and relieve the container itself. And this other medicine is something that you can draw on your skin, so intradermal delivery enables you to joyfully be involved in this particular kind of delivery. Similarly, there's the work of people like Marti Guixe that tries to involve you in a way that is really about making everything pass through your mouth so that you learn from your mistakes or from your taste, orally.The next show that I'm going to work on — and I've been bugging a lot of you about this here — is about the relationship between design and science. I'm trying to find not the metaphors, but, rather, the points in common — the common gripes, the common issues, the common preoccupations — and I think that it will enable us to go a little further in this idea of design as an instruction, as a direction rather than a prescription of form.And I am hoping that many of you will respond to this. I've sent an email already to quite a few of you. But design and science and the possibility of visualizing different scales, and therefore, really work at the scale of the very small to make it very big and very meaningful. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_treats_design_as_art
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"Frank Gehry: I listened to this scientist this morning. Dr. Mullis was talking about his experiments, and I realized that I almost became a scientist. When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water. (Laughter) So, I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator, and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in. (Laughter) And the glass — luckily I turned around — I had it all in my back and I was about 15 feet away. The wall was covered with ... I had an explosion.Richard Saul Wurman: Really?FG: People on the street came and knocked on the door to see if I was okay. RSW: ... huh. (Laughter)I'd like to start this session again. The gentleman to my left is the very famous, perhaps overly famous, Frank Gehry. (Laughter) (Applause) And Frank, you've come to a place in your life, which is astonishing. I mean it is astonishing for an artist, for an architect, to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time. I mean you have become, whether you can giggle at it because it's a funny ... you know, it's a strange thought, but your building is an icon — you can draw a little picture of that building, it can be used in ads — and you've had not rock star status, but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life. And I know the road was extremely difficult. And it didn't seem, at least, that your sell outs, whatever they were, were very big. You kept moving ahead in a life where you're dependent on working for somebody. But that's an interesting thing for a creative person. A lot of us work for people; we're in the hands of other people. And that's one of the great dilemmas — we're in a creativity session — it's one of the great dilemmas in creativity: how to do work that's big enough and not sell out. And you've achieved that and that makes your win doubly big, triply big. It's not quite a question but you can comment on it. It's a big issue.FG: Well, I've always just ... I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head. And when I started out, I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff. And I realized when I'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people in the time. And actually, it was responding to clients that I had who didn't have very much money, so they couldn't afford very much. I think it was circumstantial.Until I got to my house, where the client was my wife. We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand I built a house around it. And a few people got excited about it. I was visiting with an artist, Michael Heizer, out in the desert near Las Vegas somewhere. He's building this huge concrete place. And it was late in the evening. We'd had a lot to drink. We were standing out in the desert all alone and, thinking about my house, he said, ""Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent, somewhere in 2000 years somebody's going to like it?"" (Laughter) So, I thought, ""Yeah, that's probably a good idea."" Luckily I started to get some clients that had a little more money, so the stuff was a little more permanent. But I just found out the world ain't going to last that long, this guy was telling us the other day. So where do we go now? Back to — everything's so temporary.I don't see it the way you characterized it. For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going — if I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it. I discard it. So I approach it with the same trepidation. Obviously, over time I have a lot more confidence that it's going to be OK. I do run a kind of a business — I've got 120 people and you've got to pay them, so there's a lot of responsibility involved — but the actual work on the project is with, I think, a healthy insecurity.And like the playwright said the other day — I could relate to him: you're not sure. When Bilbao was finished and I looked at it, I saw all the mistakes, I saw ... They weren't mistakes; I saw everything that I would have changed and I was embarrassed by it. I felt an embarrassment — ""How could I have done that? How could I have made shapes like that or done stuff like that?"" It's taken several years to now look at it detached and say — as you walk around the corner and a piece of it works with the road and the street, and it appears to have a relationship — that I started to like it.RSW: What's the status of the New York project?FG: I don't really know. Tom Krens came to me with Bilbao and explained it all to me, and I thought he was nuts. I didn't think he knew what he was doing, and he pulled it off. So, I think he's Icarus and Phoenix all in one guy. (Laughter) He gets up there and then he ... comes back up. They're still talking about it. September 11 generated some interest in moving it over to Ground Zero, and I'm totally against that. I just feel uncomfortable talking about or building anything on Ground Zero I think for a long time.RSW: The picture on the screen, is that Disney?FG: Yeah.RSW: How much further along is it than that, and when will that be finished?FG: That will be finished in 2003 — September, October — and I'm hoping Kyu, and Herbie, and Yo-Yo and all those guys come play with us at that place. Luckily, today most of the people I'm working with are people I really like. Richard Koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that Disney Hall came to me. He's been a cheerleader for quite a long time. There aren't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients. If you think about the world, and even just in this audience, most of us are involved with buildings. Nothing that you would call architecture, right? And so to find one, a guy like that, you hang on to him. He's become the head of Art Center, and there's a building by Craig Ellwood there. I knew Craig and respected him. They want to add to it and it's hard to add to a building like that — it's a beautiful, minimalist, black steel building — and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it's a lot of acreage. I convinced him to let me bring in another architect from Portugal: Alvaro Siza.RSW: Why did you want that?FG: I knew you'd ask that question.It was intuitive. (Laughter)Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is probably considered the Portuguese main guy in architecture. I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work, and his early work had a resemblance to my early work. When I came out of college, I started to try to do things contextually in Southern California, and you got into the logic of Spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that. I tried to understand that language as a beginning, as a place to jump off, and there was so much of it being done by spec builders and it was trivialized so much that it wasn't ... I just stopped. I mean, Charlie Moore did a bunch of it, but it didn't feel good to me. Siza, on the other hand, continued in Portugal where the real stuff was and evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language. And I always felt that he should come to Southern California and do a building. I tried to get him a couple of jobs and they didn't pan out. I like the idea of collaboration with people like that because it pushes you. I've done it with Claes Oldenburg and with Richard Serra, who doesn't think architecture is art. Did you see that thing? RSW: No. What did he say?FG: He calls architecture ""plumbing."" (Laughter)FG: Anyway, the Siza thing. It's a richer experience. It must be like that for Kyu doing things with musicians — it's similar to that I would imagine — where you ... huh?Audience: Liquid architecture.FG: Liquid architecture. (Laughter) Where you ... It's like jazz: you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city.RSW: Is it going to be near the current campus? Or is it going to be down near ...FG: No, it's near the current campus. Anyway, he's that kind of patron. It's not his money, of course. (Laughter)RSW: What's his schedule on that?FG: I don't know. What's the schedule, Richard? Richard Koshalek: [Unclear] starts from 2004.FG: 2004. You can come to the opening. I'll invite you. No, but the issue of city building in democracy is interesting because it creates chaos, right? Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment, and if you can figure out how to work off each other — if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other's work and play off each other, you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect. Like the Rockefeller Center model, which is kind of from another era.RSW: I found the most remarkable thing. My preconception of Bilbao was this wonderful building, you go inside and there'd be extraordinary spaces. I'd seen drawings you had presented here at TED. The surprise of Bilbao was in its context to the city. That was the surprise of going across the river, of going on the highway around it, of walking down the street and finding it. That was the real surprise of Bilbao.FG: But you know, Richard, most architects when they present their work — most of the people we know, you get up and you talk about your work, and it's almost like you tell everybody you're a good guy by saying, ""Look, I'm worried about the context, I'm worried about the city, I'm worried about my client, I worry about budget, that I'm on time."" Blah, blah, blah and all that stuff. And it's like cleansing yourself so that you can ... by saying all that, it means your work is good somehow. And I think everybody — I mean that should be a matter of fact, like gravity. You're not going to defy gravity. You've got to work with the building department. If you don't meet the budgets, you're not going to get much work. If it leaks — Bilbao did not leak. I was so proud. (Laughter) The MIT project — they were interviewing me for MIT and they sent their facilities people to Bilbao. I met them in Bilbao. They came for three days.RSW: This is the computer building?FG: Yeah, the computer building. They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around — I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things, and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden, you know? People put buckets out ... I was clean. There wasn't a bloody leak in the place, it was just fantastic. But you've got to — yeah, well up until then every building leaked, so this ... (Laughter)RSW: Frank had a sort of ...FG: Ask Miriam!RW: ... sort of had a fame. His fame was built on that in L.A. for a while. (Laughter)FG: You've all heard the Frank Lloyd Wright story, when the woman called and said, ""Mr. Wright, I'm sitting on the couch and the water's pouring in on my head."" And he said, ""Madam, move your chair."" (Laughter) So, some years later I was doing a building, a little house on the beach for Norton Simon, and his secretary, who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady, called me and said, ""Mr. Simon's sitting at his desk and the water's coming in on his head."" And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story.RSW: Didn't get a laugh.FG: No. Not now either. (Laughter)But my point is that ... and I call it the ""then what?"" OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you're a good guy, you're a good person ... and then what? What do you bring to it? And I think that's what I've always been interested in, is that — which is a personal kind of expression. Bilbao, I think, shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city. That's what reminded me of it. And I think that's the issue, you know; it's the ""then what"" that most clients who hire architects — most clients aren't hiring architects for that. They're hiring them to get it done, get it on budget, be polite, and they're missing out on the real value of an architect.RSW: At a certain point a number of years ago, people — when Michael Graves was a fashion, before teapots ...FG: I did a teapot and nobody bought it. (Laughter)RSW: Did it leak?FG: No. (Laughter)RSW: ... people wanted a Michael Graves building. Is that a curse, that people want a Bilbao building?FG: Yeah. Since Bilbao opened, which is now four, five years, both Krens and I have been called with at least 100 opportunities — China, Brazil, other parts of Spain — to come in and do the Bilbao effect. And I've met with some of these people. Usually I say no right away, but some of them come with pedigree and they sound well-intentioned and they get you for at least one or two meetings. In one case, I flew all the way to Malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city, and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port. I asked them what kind of building it was. ""When you get here we'll explain it."" Blah, blah, blah. So four of us went. And they took us — they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay, and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor. Each one was more beautiful than the other. And then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in Malaga. Just before going to lunch with the mayor, we went to the harbor commissioner. It was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here, and I was here, and my guys. We sat down, and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet. And the guy looked at me and said, ""Now what can I do for you, Mr. Gehry?"" (Laughter)RSW: Oh, my God. FG: So, I got up. I said to my team, ""Let's get out of here."" We stood up, we walked out. They followed — the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said, ""You mean you're not going to have lunch with the mayor?"" I said, ""Nope."" ""You're not going to have dinner at all?"" They just brought us there to hustle this group, you know, to create a project. And we get a lot of that. Luckily, I'm old enough that I can complain I can't travel. (Laughter) I don't have my own plane yet.RSW: Well, I'm going to wind this up and wind up the meeting because it's been very long. But let me just say a couple words.FG: Can I say something? Are you going to talk about me or you? (Laughter) (Applause)RSW: Once a shit, always a shit!FG: Because I want to get a standing ovation like everybody, so ...RSW: You're going to get one! You're going to get one! (Laughter)I'm going to make it for you!FG: No, no. Wait a minute! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frank_gehry_asks_then_what
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"(Applause)It's really quite an honor to be here tonight, and I'm really glad that I stayed here and listened because I've really been inspired. And I'm going to play some songs for you tonight that are, literally, world premieres. I've been working on my new record and I've never played these songs for anybody except the microphone.This is a song that I wrote about the meaning of technology, which goes perfectly with this gathering. I started thinking about — when I was in college, especially as a blind person, doing a research paper was a major undertaking. You had to go to the library, see if you could get them to find the books for you, you know, footnotes and all that. Now you can just go on Google. Just look it up. I wish I had that when I was in college. Anyway, this is a song about: we have all this, but what are we going to do with it? It's called ""All the Answers.""♫ What is the weather in Cincinnati? ♫♫ What is the time in Tokyo? ♫♫ Who is this little child's daddy? ♫♫ And who the hell needs to know? ♫♫ Why do memories of you linger ♫♫ when I'm trying to reach my goal? ♫♫ And why must I move my fingers ♫♫ to the music in my soul? ♫♫ I don't know. ♫♫ I don't have to know. ♫♫ 'Cause here I go ... ♫♫ and I got all the answers ♫♫ right here in my hand. ♫♫ And I got all the answers ♫♫ and I don't have to understand ♫♫ 'cause I got all the answers. ♫♫ Think I'll rummage through the century ♫♫ while I listen to the sea. ♫♫ Oh, it's good to be so free, ♫♫ so free. ♫♫ Who was mayor of Chicago ♫♫ back in 1964? ♫♫ And why did Shakespeare create Iago ♫♫ to tear apart a love so pure? ♫♫ How can my dreams be so vivid ♫♫ in a psychosonic way? ♫♫ Why must I become so livid ♫♫ about the news I hear today? ♫♫ I don't know. ♫♫ I don't have to know. ♫♫ And here I go ... ♫♫ 'cause I got all the answers ♫♫ right here in my hand. ♫♫ And I got all the answers. ♫♫ See, I don't have to understand ♫♫ 'cause I got all the answers. ♫♫ I think I'll browse on through ♫♫ the tabloid news ♫♫ while I sip my tea. ♫♫ Mm, it's good to be so free. ♫(Trumpet sounds)♫ I never ever have to be alone. ♫♫ I can do it all right here in my home. ♫♫ Yeah, mm-hmm ... ♫♫ Everything that's ever been known, ♫♫ I can punch it up right here on my phone. ♫♫ Freedom train, coming soon ♫♫ right here in my living room ♫♫ from Baton Rouge to Saskatoon ♫♫ and all points in between. ♫♫ 'Cause I got all the answers ♫♫ right here on my screen. ♫♫ And I got all the answers, yeah. ♫♫ I got every book and magazine. ♫♫ I got all, I got all, I got all ... ♫♫ I got all the answers, ♫♫ all the answers, oh yeah. ♫♫ Uh-huh ... ♫♫ But I tell you what I'm going to do: ♫♫ I'm going to find the capitol of Peru ♫♫ or the latitude of Kathmandu. ♫♫ I'm gonna Google it ♫♫ 'cause everybody's doing it. ♫♫ And then I'll rummage through the century. ♫♫ I got all, I got all, I got all ... ♫♫ I got all the answers. ♫♫ Yeah, yeah ♫♫ I got all the answers. ♫(Applause)Thank you. Whew! It's a miracle I didn't make any mistakes on that song. That's the first time I've ever played it. (Applause) It's a ""feel the fear and do it anyway"" kind of thing. This next song is a songthat started out as a dream — a childhood dream. It was one of the titles that I was sort of thinking about calling my record, except there's a couple of problems. One thing is, it's unpronounceable. And it's a made-up word. It's called ""Tembererana."" And the song is based on what I think was my first childhood attempts to think about invisible forces. So ""tembererana"" was these dreams, in which I would be running away from bad feelings — is the only way I can put it. So this is called ""Tembererana."" It's based on an Argentinian rhythm called ""carnivalito.""♫ A dream within a dream, ♫♫ a world within a world, ♫♫ the sound of a primal scream ♫♫ travels out across the land. ♫♫ Images flickering, ♫♫ the sound of the war machine, ♫♫ a procession of limousines ♫♫ travels slowly across the land. ♫♫ Another child could use a hand. ♫♫ Reaching out from within ♫♫ tembererana, hey, tembererana ... ♫♫ Annihilation moves. ♫♫ The earth is an open tomb. ♫♫ The sound of the final boom ♫♫ rumbles fiercely across the land. ♫♫ Fear, you're the enemy. ♫♫ Obliterating all but thee. ♫♫ You see what you want to see. ♫♫ Before I'm blinded, I will toast ♫♫ the shade of power that I love most, ♫♫ the power of creation. ♫♫ Tembererana, hey, tembererana ... ♫♫ Da, da, da, da ♫♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da ♫♫ As a child, alone and afraid, ♫♫ escaping the impressions every feeling made, ♫♫ I would run, run away ♫♫ into a world where the good was the aim of the game ♫♫ and the sum of invisible power ♫♫ had a name. ♫♫ It's the same name. ♫♫ Tembererana, hey, tembererana ... ♫♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da ♫♫ Tembere, tembere, tembere, tembererana ♫♫ Tembere, tembere, tembere, tembererana, hey ♫♫ Tembererana, hey ♫♫ Tembererana ... ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raul_midon_plays_all_the_answers_and_tembererana
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"It's a great honor to be here with you. The good news is I'm very aware of my responsibilities to get you out of here because I'm the only thing standing between you and the bar. (Laughter) And the good news is I don't have a prepared speech, but I have a box of slides. I have some pictures that represent my life and what I do for a living. I've learned through experience that people remember pictures long after they've forgotten words, and so I hope you'll remember some of the pictures I'm going to share with you for just a few minutes.The whole story really starts with me as a high school kid in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a tough neighborhood that everybody gave up on for dead. And on a Wednesday afternoon, I was walking down the corridor of my high school kind of minding my own business. And there was this artist teaching, who made a great big old ceramic vessel, and I happened to be looking in the door of the art room — and if you've ever seen clay done, it's magic — and I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. So, I walked in the art room and I said, ""What is that?"" And he said, ""Ceramics. And who are you?"" And I said, ""I'm Bill Strickland. I want you to teach me that."" And he said, ""Well, get your homeroom teacher to sign a piece of paper that says you can come here, and I'll teach it to you."" And so for the remaining two years of my high school, I cut all my classes. (Laughter) But I had the presence of mind to give the teachers' classes that I cut the pottery that I made, (Laughter) and they gave me passing grades. And that's how I got out of high school.And Mr. Ross said, ""You're too smart to die and I don't want it on my conscience, so I'm leaving this school and I'm taking you with me."" And he drove me out to the University of Pittsburgh where I filled out a college application and got in on probation. Well, I'm now a trustee of the university, and at my installation ceremony I said, ""I'm the guy who came from the neighborhood who got into the place on probation. Don't give up on the poor kids, because you never know what's going to happen to those children in life.""What I'm going to show you for a couple of minutes is a facility that I built in the toughest neighborhood in Pittsburgh with the highest crime rate. One is called Bidwell Training Center; it is a vocational school for ex-steel workers and single parents and welfare mothers. You remember we used to make steel in Pittsburgh? Well, we don't make any steel anymore, and the people who used to make the steel are having a very tough time of it. And I rebuild them and give them new life.Manchester Craftsmen's Guild is named after my neighborhood. I was adopted by the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese during the riots, and he donated a row house. And in that row house I started Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, and I learned very quickly that wherever there are Episcopalians, there's money in very close proximity. (Laughter) And the Bishop adopted me as his kid. And last year I spoke at his memorial service and wished him well in this life. I went out and hired a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and I asked him to build me a world class center in the worst neighborhood in Pittsburgh. And my building was a scale model for the Pittsburgh airport. And when you come to Pittsburgh — and you're all invited — you'll be flying into the blown-up version of my building. That's the building. Built in a tough neighborhood where people have been given up for dead.My view is that if you want to involve yourself in the life of people who have been given up on, you have to look like the solution and not the problem. As you can see, it has a fountain in the courtyard. And the reason it has a fountain in the courtyard is I wanted one and I had the checkbook, so I bought one and put it there. (Laughter) And now that I'm giving speeches at conferences like TED, I got put on the board of the Carnegie Museum. At a reception in their courtyard, I noticed that they had a fountain because they think that the people who go to the museum deserve a fountain. Well, I think that welfare mothers and at-risk kids and ex-steel workers deserve a fountain in their life. And so the first thing that you see in my center in the springtime is water that greets you — water is life and water of human possibility — and it sets an attitude and expectation about how you feel about people before you ever give them a speech. So, from that fountain I built this building.As you can see, it has world class art, and it's all my taste because I raised all the money. (Laughter) I said to my boy, ""When you raise the money, we'll put your taste on the wall."" That we have quilts and clay and calligraphy and everywhere your eye turns, there's something beautiful looking back at you, that's deliberate. That's intentional. In my view, it is this kind of world that can redeem the soul of poor people.We also created a boardroom, and I hired a Japanese cabinetmaker from Kyoto, Japan, and commissioned him to do 60 pieces of furniture for our building. We have since spun him off into his own business. He's making a ton of money doing custom furniture for rich people. And I got 60 pieces out of it for my school because I felt that welfare moms and ex-steel workers and single parents deserved to come to a school where there was handcrafted furniture that greeted them every day. Because it sets a tone and an attitude about how you feel about people long before you give them the speech.We even have flowers in the hallway, and they're not plastic. Those are real and they're in my building every day. And now that I've given lots of speeches, we had a bunch of high school principals come and see me, and they said, ""Mr. Strickland, what an extraordinary story and what a great school. And we were particularly touched by the flowers and we were curious as to how the flowers got there."" I said, ""Well, I got in my car and I went out to the greenhouse and I bought them and I brought them back and I put them there."" You don't need a task force or a study group to buy flowers for your kids. What you need to know is that the children and the adults deserve flowers in their life. The cost is incidental but the gesture is huge. And so in my building, which is full of sunlight and full of flowers, we believe in hope and human possibilities. That happens to be at Christmas time.And so the next thing you'll see is a million dollar kitchen that was built by the Heinz company — you've heard of them? They did all right in the ketchup business. And I happen to know that company pretty well because John Heinz, who was our U.S. senator — who was tragically killed in a plane accident — he had heard about my desire to build a new building, because I had a cardboard box and I put it in a garbage bag and I walking all over Pittsburgh trying to raise money for this site. And he called me into his office — which is the equivalent of going to see the Wizard of Oz (Laughter) — and John Heinz had 600 million dollars, and at the time I had about 60 cents. And he said, ""But we've heard about you. We've heard about your work with the kids and the ex-steel workers, and we're inclined to want to support your desire to build a new building. And you could do us a great service if you would add a culinary program to your program."" Because back then, we were building a trades program. He said, ""That way we could fulfill our affirmative action goals for the Heinz company."" I said, ""Senator, I'm reluctant to go into a field that I don't know much about, but I promise you that if you'll support my school, I'll get it built and in a couple of years, I'll come back and weigh out that program that you desire."" And Senator Heinz sat very quietly and he said, ""Well, what would your reaction be if I said I'd give you a million dollars?"" I said, ""Senator, it appears that we're going into the food training business."" (Laughter) And John Heinz did give me a million bucks. And most importantly, he loaned me the head of research for the Heinz company. And we kind of borrowed the curriculum from the Culinary Institute of America, which in their mind is kind of the Harvard of cooking schools, and we created a gourmet cooks program for welfare mothers in this million dollar kitchen in the middle of the inner city. And we've never looked back.I would like to show you now some of the food that these welfare mothers do in this million dollar kitchen. That happens to be our cafeteria line. That's puff pastry day. Why? Because the students made puff pastry and that's what the school ate every day. But the concept was that I wanted to take the stigma out of food. That good food's not for rich people — good food's for everybody on the planet, and there's no excuse why we all can't be eating it. So at my school, we subsidize a gourmet lunch program for welfare mothers in the middle of the inner city because we've discovered that it's good for their stomachs, but it's better for their heads. Because I wanted to let them know every day of their life that they have value at this place I call my center.We have students who sit together, black kids and white kids, and what we've discovered is you can solve the race problem by creating a world class environment, because people will have a tendency to show you world class behavior if you treat them in that way. These are examples of the food that welfare mothers are doing after six months in the training program. No sophistication, no class, no dignity, no history. What we've discovered is the only thing wrong with poor people is they don't have any money, which happens to be a curable condition. It's all in the way that you think about people that often determines their behavior. That was done by a student after seven months in the program, done by a very brilliant young woman who was taught by our pastry chef. I've actually eaten seven of those baskets and they're very good. (Laughter) They have no calories. That's our dining room. It looks like your average high school cafeteria in your average town in America. But this is my view of how students ought to be treated, particularly once they have been pushed aside.We train pharmaceutical technicians for the pharmacy industry, we train medical technicians for the medical industry, and we train chemical technicians for companies like Bayer and Calgon Carbon and Fisher Scientific and Exxon. And I will guarantee you that if you come to my center in Pittsburgh — and you're all invited — you'll see welfare mothers doing analytical chemistry with logarithmic calculators 10 months from enrolling in the program. There is absolutely no reason why poor people can't learn world class technology. What we've discovered is you have to give them flowers and sunlight and food and expectations and Herbie's music, and you can cure a spiritual cancer every time.We train corporate travel agents for the travel industry. We even teach people how to read. The kid with the red stripe was in the program two years ago — he's now an instructor. And I have children with high school diplomas that they can't read. And so you must ask yourself the question: how is it possible in the 21st century that we graduate children from schools who can't read the diplomas that they have in their hands? The reason is that the system gets reimbursed for the kids they spit out the other end, not the children who read. I can take these children and in 20 weeks, demonstrated aptitude; I can get them high school equivalent. No big deal. That's our library with more handcrafted furniture. And this is the arts program I started in 1968.Remember I'm the black kid from the '60s who got his life saved with ceramics. Well, I went out and decided to reproduce my experience with other kids in the neighborhood, the theory being if you get kids flowers and you give them food and you give them sunshine and enthusiasm, you can bring them right back to life. I have 400 kids from the Pittsburgh public school system that come to me every day of the week for arts education. And these are children who are flunking out of public school. And last year I put 88 percent of those kids in college and I've averaged over 80 percent for 15 years. We've made a fascinating discovery: there's nothing wrong with the kids that affection and sunshine and food and enthusiasm and Herbie's music can't cure. For that I won a big old plaque — Man of the Year in Education. I beat out all the Ph.D.'s because I figured that if you treat children like human beings, it increases the likelihood they're going to behave that way. And why we can't institute that policy in every school and in every city and every town remains a mystery to me.Let me show you what these people do. We have ceramics and photography and computer imaging. And these are all kids with no artistic ability, no talent, no imagination. And we bring in the world's greatest artists — Gordon Parks has been there, Chester Higgins has been there — and what we've learned is that the children will become like the people who teach them. In fact, I brought in a mosaic artist from the Vatican, an African-American woman who had studied the old Vatican mosaic techniques, and let me show you what they did with the work. These were children who the whole world had given up on, who were flunking out of public school, and that's what they're capable of doing with affection and sunlight and food and good music and confidence.We teach photography. And these are examples of some of the kids' work. That boy won a four-year scholarship on the strength of that photograph. This is our gallery. We have a world class gallery because we believe that poor kids need a world class gallery, so I designed this thing. We have smoked salmon at the art openings, we have a formal printed invitation, and I even have figured out a way to get their parents to come. I couldn't buy a parent 15 years ago so I hired a guy who got off on the Jesus big time. He was dragging guys out of bars and saving those lives for the Lord. And I said, ""Bill, I want to hire you, man. You have to tone down the Jesus stuff a little bit, but keep the enthusiasm. (Laughter) (Applause) I can't get these parents to come to the school."" He said, ""I'll get them to come to the school."" So, he jumped in the van, he went to Miss Jones' house and said, ""Miss Jones, I knew you wanted to come to your kid's art opening but you probably didn't have a ride. So, I came to give you a ride."" And he got 10 parents and then 20 parents. At the last show that we did, 200 parents showed up and we didn't pick up one parent. Because now it's become socially not acceptable not to show up to support your children at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild because people think you're bad parents. And there is no statistical difference between the white parents and the black parents. Mothers will go where their children are being celebrated, every time, every town, every city. I wanted you to see this gallery because it's as good as it gets. And by the time I cut these kids loose from high school, they've got four shows on their resume before they apply to college because it's all up here.You have to change the way that people see themselves before you can change their behavior. And it's worked out pretty good up to this day. I even stuck another room on the building, which I'd like to show you. This is brand new. We just got this slide done in time for the TED Conference. I gave this little slide show at a place called the Silicon Valley and I did all right. And the woman came out of the audience, she said, ""That was a great story and I was very impressed with your presentation. My only criticism is your computers are getting a little bit old."" And I said, ""Well, what do you do for a living?"" She said, ""Well, I work for a company called Hewlett-Packard."" And I said, ""You're in the computer business, is that right?"" She said, ""Yes, sir."" And I said, ""Well, there's an easy solution to that problem."" Well, I'm very pleased to announce to you that HP and a furniture company called Steelcase have adopted us as a demonstration model for all of their technology and all their furniture for the United States of America. And that's the room that's initiating the relationship. We got it just done in time to show you, so it's kind of the world debut of our digital imaging center. (Applause) (Music)I only have a couple more slides, and this is where the story gets kind of interesting. So, I just want you to listen up for a couple more minutes and you'll understand why he's there and I'm here. In 1986, I had the presence of mind to stick a music hall on the north end of the building while I was building it. And a guy named Dizzy Gillespie showed up to play there because he knew this man over here, Marty Ashby. And I stood on that stage with Dizzy Gillespie on sound check on a Wednesday afternoon, and I said, ""Dizzy, why would you come to a black-run center in the middle of an industrial park with a high crime rate that doesn't even have a reputation in music?"" He said, ""Because I heard you built the center and I didn't believe that you did it, and I wanted to see for myself. And now that I have, I want to give you a gift."" I said, ""You're the gift."" He said, ""No, sir. You're the gift. And I'm going to allow you to record the concert and I'm going to give you the music, and if you ever choose to sell it, you must sign an agreement that says the money will come back and support the school."" And I recorded Dizzy. And he died a year later, but not before telling a fellow named McCoy Tyner what we were doing. And he showed up and said, ""Dizzy talking about you all over the country, man, and I want to help you."" And then a guy named Wynton Marsalis showed up. Then a bass player named Ray Brown, and a fellow named Stanley Turrentine, and a piano player named Herbie Hancock, and a band called the Count Basie Orchestra, and a fellow named Tito Puente, and a guy named Gary Burton, and Shirley Horn, and Betty Carter, and Dakota Staton and Nancy Wilson all have come to this center in the middle of an industrial park to sold out audiences in the middle of the inner city. And I'm very pleased to tell you that, with their permission, I have now accumulated 600 recordings of the greatest artists in the world, including Joe Williams, who died, but not before his last recording was done at my school. And Joe Williams came up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, ""God's picked you, man, to do this work. And I want my music to be with you."" And that worked out all right.When the Basie band came, the band got so excited about the school they voted to give me the rights to the music. And I recorded it and we won something called a Grammy. And like a fool, I didn't go to the ceremony because I didn't think we were going to win. Well, we did win, and our name was literally in lights over Madison Square Garden. Then the U.N. Jazz Orchestra dropped by and we recorded them and got nominated for a second Grammy back to back. So, we've become one of the hot, young jazz recording studios in the United States of America (Laughter) in the middle of the inner city with a high crime rate.That's the place all filled up with Republicans. (Laughter) (Applause) If you'd have dropped a bomb on that room, you'd have wiped out all the money in Pennsylvania because it was all sitting there. Including my mother and father, who lived long enough to see their kid build that building. And there's Dizzy, just like I told you. He was there. And he was there, Tito Puente. And Pat Metheny and Jim Hall were there and they recorded with us. And that was our first recording studio, which was the broom closet. We put the mops in the hallway and re-engineered the thing and that's where we recorded the first Grammy.And this is our new facility, which is all video technology. And that is a room that was built for a woman named Nancy Wilson, who recorded that album at our school last Christmas. And any of you who happened to have been watching Oprah Winfrey on Christmas Day, he was there and Nancy was there singing excerpts from this album, the rights to which she donated to our school. And I can now tell you with absolute certainty that an appearance on Oprah Winfrey will sell 10,000 CDs. (Laughter) We are currently number four on the Billboard Charts, right behind Tony Bennett. And I think we're going to be fine.This was burned out during the riots — this is next to my building — and so I had another cardboard box built and I walked back out in the streets again. And that's the building, and that's the model, and on the right's a high-tech greenhouse and in the middle's the medical technology building. And I'm very pleased to tell you that the building's done. It's also full of anchor tenants at 20 dollars a foot — triple that in the middle of the inner city. And there's the fountain. (Laughter) Every building has a fountain. And the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are anchor tenants and they took half the building, and we now train medical technicians through all their system. And Mellon Bank's a tenant. And I love them because they pay the rent on time. (Laughter) And as a result of the association, I'm now a director of the Mellon Financial Corporation that bought Dreyfus.And this is in the process of being built as we speak. Multiply that picture times four and you will see the greenhouse that's going to open in October this year because we're going to grow those flowers in the middle of the inner city. And we're going to have high school kids growing Phalaenopsis orchids in the middle of the inner city. And we have a handshake with one of the large retail grocers to sell our orchids in all 240 stores in six states. And our partners are Zuma Canyon Orchids of Malibu, California, who are Hispanic. So, the Hispanics and the black folks have formed a partnership to grow high technology orchids in the middle of the inner city. And I told my United States senator that there was a very high probability that if he could find some funding for this, we would become a left-hand column in the Wall Street Journal, to which he readily agreed. And we got the funding and we open in the fall. And you ought to come and see it — it's going to be a hell of a story.And this is what I want to do when I grow up. (Laughter) The brown building is the one you guys have been looking at and I'll tell you where I made my big mistake. I had a chance to buy this whole industrial park — which is less than 1,000 feet from the riverfront — for four million dollars and I didn't do it. And I built the first building, and guess what happened? I appreciated the real estate values beyond everybody's expectations and the owners of the park turned me down for eight million dollars last year, and said, ""Mr. Strickland, you ought to get the Civic Leader of the Year Award because you've appreciated our property values beyond our wildest expectations. Thank you very much for that."" The moral of the story is you must be prepared to act on your dreams, just in case they do come true.And finally, there's this picture. This is in a place called San Francisco. And the reason this picture's in here is I did this slide show a couple years ago at a big economics summit, and there was a fellow in the audience who came up to me. He said, ""Man, that's a great story. I want one of those."" I said, ""Well, I'm very flattered. What do you do for a living?"" He says, ""I run the city of San Francisco. My name's Willie Brown."" And so I kind of accepted the flattery and the praise and put it out of my mind. And that weekend, I was going back home and Herbie Hancock was playing our center that night — first time I'd met him. And he walked in and he says, ""What is this?"" And I said, ""Herbie, this is my concept of a training center for poor people."" And he said, ""As God as my witness, I've had a center like this in my mind for 25 years and you've built it. And now I really want to build one."" I said, ""Well, where would you build this thing?"" He said, ""San Francisco."" I said, ""Any chance you know Willie Brown?"" (Laughter) As a matter of fact he did know Willie Brown, and Willie Brown and Herbie and I had dinner four years ago, and we started drawing out that center on the tablecloth. And Willie Brown said, ""As sure as I'm the mayor of San Francisco, I'm going to build this thing as a legacy to the poor people of this city."" And he got me five acres of land on San Francisco Bay and we got an architect and we got a general contractor and we got Herbie on the board, and our friends from HP, and our friends from Steelcase, and our friends from Cisco, and our friends from Wells Fargo and Genentech.And along the way, I met this real short guy at my slide show in the Silicon Valley. He came up to me afterwards, he said, ""Man, that's a fabulous story. I want to help you."" And I said, ""Well, thank you very much for that. What do you do for a living?"" He said, ""Well, I built a company called eBay."" I said, ""Well, that's very nice. Thanks very much, and give me your card and sometime we'll talk."" I didn't know eBay from that jar of water sitting on that piano, but I had the presence of mind to go back and talk to one of the techie kids at my center. I said, ""Hey man, what is eBay?"" He said, ""Well, that's the electronic commerce network."" I said, ""Well, I met the guy who built the thing and he left me his card."" So, I called him up on the phone and I said, ""Mr. Skoll, I've come to have a much deeper appreciation of who you are (Laughter) and I'd like to become your friend."" (Laughter) And Jeff and I did become friends, and he's organized a team of people and we're going to build this center.And I went down into the neighborhood called Bayview-Hunters Point, and I said, ""The mayor sent me down here to work with you and I want to build a center with you, but I'm not going to build you anything if you don't want it. And all I've got is a box of slides."" And so I stood up in front of 200 very angry, very disappointed people on a summer night, and the air conditioner had broken and it was 100 degrees outside, and I started showing these pictures. And after about 10 pictures they all settled down. And I ran the story and I said, ""What do you think?"" And in the back of the room, a woman stood up and she said, ""In 35 years of living in this God forsaken place, you're the only person that's come down here and treated us with dignity. I'm going with you, man."" And she turned that audience around on a pin. And I promised these people that I was going to build this thing, and we're going to build it all right. And I think we can get in the ground this year as the first replication of the center in Pittsburgh.But I met a guy named Quincy Jones along the way and I showed him the box of slides. And Quincy said, ""I want to help you, man. Let's do one in L.A."" And so he's assembled a group of people. And I've fallen in love with him, as I have with Herbie and with his music. And Quincy said, ""Where did the idea for centers like this come from?"" And I said, ""It came from your music, man. Because Mr. Ross used to bring in your albums when I was 16 years old in the pottery class, when the world was all dark, and your music got me to the sunlight."" And I said, ""If I can follow that music, I'll get out into the sunlight and I'll be OK. And if that's not true, how did I get here?""I want you all to know that I think the world is a place that's worth living. I believe in you. I believe in your hopes and your dreams, I believe in your intelligence and I believe in your enthusiasm. And I'm tired of living like this, going into town after town with people standing around on corners with holes where eyes used to be, their spirits damaged. We won't make it as a country unless we can turn this thing around. In Pennsylvania it costs 60,000 dollars to keep people in jail, most of whom look like me. It's 40,000 dollars to build the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. It's 20,000 dollars cheaper to build a medical school than to keep people in jail. Do the math — it will never work. I am banking on you and I'm banking on guys like Herbie and Quincy and Hackett and Richard and very decent people who still believe in something. And I want to do this in my lifetime, in every city and in every town. And I don't think I'm crazy. I think we can get home on this thing and I think we can build these all over the country for less money than we're spending on prisons. And I believe we can turn this whole story around to one of celebration and one of hope. In my business it's very difficult work. You're always fighting upstream like a salmon — never enough money, too much need — and so there is a tendency to have an occupational depression that accompanies my work. And so I've figured out, over time, the solution to the depression: you make a friend in every town and you'll never be lonely. And my hope is that I've made a few here tonight. And thanks for listening to what I had to say. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_strickland_makes_change_with_a_slide_show
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"""Jó napot, pacák"" Which, as somebody here must surely know, means ""What's up, guys?"" in Magyar, that peculiar non-Indo-European language spoken by Hungarians for which, given the fact that cognitive diversity is at least as threatened as biodiversity on this planet, few would have imagined much of a future even a century or two ago. But there it is: ""Jó napot, pacák"" I said somebody here must surely know, because despite the fact that there aren't that many Hungarians to begin with, and the further fact that, so far as I know, there's not a drop of Hungarian blood in my veins, at every critical juncture of my life there has been a Hungarian friend or mentor there beside me. I even have dreams that take place in landscapes I recognize as the landscapes of Hungarian films, especially the early movies of Miklos Jancso.So, how do I explain this mysterious affinity? Maybe it's because my native state of South Carolina, which is not much smaller than present-day Hungary, once imagined a future for itself as an independent country. And as a consequence of that presumption, my hometown was burned to the ground by an invading army, an experience that has befallen many a Hungarian town and village throughout its long and troubled history. Or maybe it's because when I was a teenager back in the '50s, my uncle Henry — having denounced the Ku Klux Klan and been bombed for his trouble and had crosses burned in his yard, living under death threat — took his wife and children to Massachusetts for safety and went back to South Carolina to face down the Klan alone. That was a very Hungarian thing to do, as anyone will attest who remembers 1956. And of course, from time to time Hungarians have invented their own equivalent of the Klan.Well, it seems to me that this Hungarian presence in my life is difficult to account for, but ultimately I ascribe it to an admiration for people with a complex moral awareness, with a heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado. It's not a typical mindset for most Americans, but it is perforce typical of virtually all Hungarians. So, ""Jó napot, pacák!""I went back to South Carolina after some 15 years amid the alien corn at the tail end of the 1960s, with the reckless condescension of that era thinking I would save my people. Never mind the fact that they were slow to acknowledge they needed saving. I labored in that vineyard for a quarter century before making my way to a little kingdom of the just in upstate South Carolina, a Methodist-affiliated institution of higher learning called Wofford College. I knew nothing about Wofford and even less about Methodism, but I was reassured on the first day that I taught at Wofford College to find, among the auditors in my classroom, a 90-year-old Hungarian, surrounded by a bevy of middle-aged European women who seemed to function as an entourage of Rhinemaidens.His name was Sandor Teszler. He was a puckish widower whose wife and children were dead and whose grandchildren lived far away. In appearance, he resembled Mahatma Gandhi, minus the loincloth, plus orthopedic boots. He had been born in 1903 in the provinces of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, in what later would become Yugoslavia. He was ostracized as a child, not because he was a Jew — his parents weren't very religious anyhow — but because he had been born with two club feet, a condition which, in those days, required institutionalization and a succession of painful operations between the ages of one and 11. He went to the commercial business high school as a young man in Budapest, and there he was as smart as he was modest and he enjoyed a considerable success. And after graduation when he went into textile engineering, the success continued. He built one plant after another. He married and had two sons. He had friends in high places who assured him that he was of great value to the economy.Once, as he had left instructions to have done, he was summoned in the middle of the night by the night watchman at one of his plants. The night watchman had caught an employee who was stealing socks — it was a hosiery mill, and he simply backed a truck up to the loading dock and was shoveling in mountains of socks. Mr. Teszler went down to the plant and confronted the thief and said, ""But why do you steal from me? If you need money you have only to ask."" The night watchman, seeing how things were going and waxing indignant, said, ""Well, we're going to call the police, aren't we?"" But Mr. Teszler answered, ""No, that will not be necessary. He will not steal from us again.""Well, maybe he was too trusting, because he stayed where he was long after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria and even after the arrests and deportations began in Budapest. He took the simple precaution of having cyanide capsules placed in lockets that could be worn about the necks of himself and his family. And then one day, it happened: he and his family were arrested and they were taken to a death house on the Danube. In those early days of the Final Solution, it was handcrafted brutality; people were beaten to death and their bodies tossed into the river. But none who entered that death house had ever come out alive. And in a twist you would not believe in a Steven Spielberg film — the Gauleiter who was overseeing this brutal beating was the very same thief who had stolen socks from Mr. Teszler's hosiery mill. It was a brutal beating. And midway through that brutality, one of Mr. Teszler's sons, Andrew, looked up and said, ""Is it time to take the capsule now, Papa?"" And the Gauleiter, who afterwards vanishes from this story, leaned down and whispered into Mr. Teszler's ear, ""No, do not take the capsule. Help is on the way."" And then resumed the beating.But help was on the way, and shortly afterwards a car arrived from the Swiss Embassy. They were spirited to safety. They were reclassified as Yugoslav citizens and they managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers for the duration of the War, surviving burnings and bombings and, at the end of the War, arrest by the Soviets. Probably, Mr. Teszler had gotten some money into Swiss bank accounts because he managed to take his family first to Great Britain, then to Long Island and then to the center of the textile industry in the American South. Which, as chance would have it, was Spartanburg, South Carolina, the location of Wofford College. And there, Mr. Teszler began all over again and once again achieved immense success, especially after he invented the process for manufacturing a new fabric called double-knit.And then in the late 1950s, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, when the Klan was resurgent all over the South, Mr. Teszler said, ""I have heard this talk before."" And he called his top assistant to him and asked, ""Where would you say, in this region, racism is most virulent?"" ""Well, I don't rightly know, Mr. Teszler. I reckon that would be Kings Mountain."" ""Good. Buy us some land in Kings Mountain and announce we are going to build a major plant there."" The man did as he was told, and shortly afterwards, Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain. Now, you should know that at that time, the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated. The white mayor visited Mr. Teszler and said, ""Mr. Teszler, I trust you’re going to be hiring a lot of white workers."" Mr. Teszler told him, ""You bring me the best workers that you can find, and if they are good enough, I will hire them."" He also received a visit from the leader of the black community, a minister, who said, ""Mr. Teszler, I sure hope you're going to hire some black workers for this new plant of yours."" He got the same answer: ""You bring the best workers that you can find, and if they are good enough, I will hire them."" As it happens, the black minister did his job better than the white mayor, but that's neither here or there. Mr. Teszler hired 16 men: eight white, eight black.They were to be his seed group, his future foremen. He had installed the heavy equipment for his new process in an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain, and for two months these 16 men would live and work together, mastering the new process. He gathered them together after an initial tour of that facility and he asked if there were any questions. There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet, and then one of the white workers stepped forward and said, ""Well, yeah. We’ve looked at this place and there's only one place to sleep, there's only one place to eat, there's only one bathroom, there's only one water fountain. Is this plant going to be integrated or what?"" Mr. Teszler said, ""You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?"" ""No, I reckon I don't."" And two months later when the main plant opened and hundreds of new workers, white and black, poured in to see the facility for the first time, they were met by the 16 foremen, white and black, standing shoulder to shoulder. They toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions, and inevitably the same question arose: ""Is this plant integrated or what?"" And one of the white foremen stepped forward and said, ""You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers in this industry in this region and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?""And there were none. In one fell swoop, Mr. Teszler had integrated the textile industry in that part of the South. It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi, conducted with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint. In his eighties, Mr. Teszler, having retired from the textile industry, adopted Wofford College, auditing courses every semester, and because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved, becoming affectionately known as ""Opi"" — which is Magyar for grandfather — by all and sundry. Before I got there, the library of the college had been named for Mr. Teszler, and after I arrived in 1993, the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler Professor of the College — partly because at that point he had already taken all of the courses in the catalog, but mainly because he was so conspicuously wiser than any one of us. To me, it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe. Wise he was, indeed, but he also had a wonderful sense of humor. And once for an interdisciplinary class, I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman's ""The Seventh Seal."" As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild goose chase of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden, only to find the specter of death waiting for him, Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students. And as death opened his cloak to embrace the knight in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice: ""Uh oh,"" he said, ""This doesn't look so good."" (Laughter)But it was music that was his greatest passion, especially opera. And on the first occasion that I visited his house, he gave me honor of deciding what piece of music we would listen to. And I delighted him by rejecting ""Cavalleria Rusticana"" in favor of Bela Bartok's ""Bluebeard's Castle."" I love Bartok's music, as did Mr. Teszler, and he had virtually every recording of Bartok's music ever issued. And it was at his house that I heard for the first time Bartok's Third Piano Concerto and learned from Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville, North Carolina in the last year of the composer's life. He was dying of leukemia and he knew it, and he dedicated this concerto to his wife, Dita, who was herself a concert pianist. And into the slow, second movement, marked ""adagio religioso,"" he incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard outside his window in what he knew would be his last spring; he was imagining a future for her in which he would play no part. And clearly this composition is his final statement to her — it was first performed after his death — and through her to the world. And just as clearly, it is saying, ""It's okay. It was all so beautiful. Whenever you hear this, I will be there.""It was only after Mr. Teszler's death that I learned that the marker on the grave of Bela Bartok in Hartsdale, New York was paid for by Sandor Teszler. ""Jó napot, Bela!"" Not long before Mr. Teszler’s own death at the age of 97, he heard me hold forth on human iniquity. I delivered a lecture in which I described history as, on the whole, a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality, and Mr. Teszler came up to me afterwards with gentle reproach and said, ""You know, Doctor, human beings are fundamentally good."" And I made a vow to myself, then and there, that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise had reached that conclusion, I would not presume to differ until he released me from my vow. And now he's dead, so I'm stuck with my vow. ""Jó napot, Sandor!""I thought my skein of Hungarian mentors had come to an end, but almost immediately I met Francis Robicsek, a Hungarian doctor — actually a heart surgeon in Charlotte, North Carolina, then in his late seventies — who had been a pioneer in open-heart surgery, and, tinkering away in his garage behind his house, had invented many of the devices that are standard parts of those procedures. He's also a prodigious art collector, beginning as an intern in Budapest by collecting 16th- and 17th-century Dutch art and Hungarian painting, and when he came to this country moving on to Spanish colonial art, Russian icons and finally Mayan ceramics. He's the author of seven books, six of them on Mayan ceramics. It was he who broke the Mayan codex, enabling scholars to relate the pictographs on Mayan ceramics to the hieroglyphs of the Mayan script.On the occasion of my first visit, we toured his house and we saw hundreds of works of museum quality, and then we paused in front of a closed door and Dr. Robicsek said, with obvious pride, ""Now for the piece De resistance."" And he opened the door and we walked into a windowless 20-by-20-foot room with shelves from floor to ceiling, and crammed on every shelf his collection of Mayan ceramics. Now, I know absolutely nothing about Mayan ceramics, but I wanted to be as ingratiating as possible so I said, ""But Dr. Robicsek, this is absolutely dazzling."" ""Yes,"" he said. ""That is what the Louvre said. They would not leave me alone until I let them have a piece, but it was not a good one."" (Laughter)Well, it occurred to me that I should invite Dr. Robicsek to lecture at Wofford College on — what else? — Leonardo da Vinci. And further, I should invite him to meet my oldest trustee, who had majored in French history at Yale some 70-odd years before and, at 89, still ruled the world's largest privately owned textile empire with an iron hand. His name is Roger Milliken. And Mr. Milliken agreed, and Dr. Robicsek agreed. And Dr. Robicsek visited and delivered the lecture and it was a dazzling success. And afterwards we convened at the President's House with Dr. Robicsek on one hand, Mr. Milliken on the other. And it was only at that moment, as we were sitting down to dinner, that I recognized the enormity of the risk I had created, because to bring these two titans, these two masters of the universe together — it was like introducing Mothra to Godzilla over the skyline of Tokyo. If they didn't like each other, we could all get trampled to death.But they did, they did like each other. They got along famously until the very end of the meal, and then they got into a furious argument. And what they were arguing about was this: whether the second Harry Potter movie was as good as the first. (Laughter) Mr. Milliken said it was not. Dr. Robicsek disagreed. I was still trying to take in the notion that these titans, these masters of the universe, in their spare time watch Harry Potter movies, when Mr. Milliken thought he would win the argument by saying, ""You just think it's so good because you didn't read the book."" And Dr. Robicsek reeled back in his chair, but quickly gathered his wits, leaned forward and said, ""Well, that is true, but I'll bet you went to the movie with a grandchild."" ""Well, yes, I did,"" conceded Mr. Milliken. ""Aha!"" said Dr. Robicsek. ""I went to the movie all by myself."" (Laughter) (Applause)And I realized, in this moment of revelation, that what these two men were revealing was the secret of their extraordinary success, each in his own right. And it lay precisely in that insatiable curiosity, that irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the subject, no matter what the cost, even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 93 years from now. ""Live each day as if it is your last,"" said Mahatma Gandhi. ""Learn as if you'll live forever."" This is what I'm passionate about. It is precisely this. It is this inextinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience, no matter how risible, no matter how esoteric, no matter how seditious it might seem. This defines the imagined futures of our fellow Hungarians — Robicsek, Teszler and Bartok — as it does my own. As it does, I suspect, that of everybody here.To which I need only add, ""Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves."" This is our task; we know it will be hard. ""Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves. Jó napot, pacák!"" (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_dunlap_talks_about_a_passionate_life
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"Ladies and gentlemen, the history of music and television on the Internet in three minutes. A TED medley — a TEDley.♫ It's nine o' clock on a Saturday ♫♫ The record store's closed for the night ♫♫ So I fire up the old iTunes music store ♫♫ And soon I am feelin' all right ♫♫ I know Steve Jobs can find me a melody ♫♫ With one dollar pricing that rocks ♫♫ I can type in the track and get album names back ♫♫ While still in my PJs and socks ♫♫ Sell us a song, you're the music man ♫♫ My iPod's still got 10 gigs to go ♫♫ Yes, we might prefer more compatibility ♫♫ But Steve likes to run the whole show ♫♫ I heard ""Desperate Housewives"" was great last night ♫♫ But I had a bad piece of cod ♫♫ As I threw up my meal, I thought, ""It's no big deal"" ♫♫ I'll watch it tonight on my 'Pod ♫♫ And now all of the networks are joining in ♫♫ Two bucks a show without ads ♫♫ It's a business those guys always wanted to try ♫♫ But only Steve Jobs had the 'nads ♫♫ They say we're young, don't watch TV ♫♫ They say the Internet is all we see ♫♫ But that's not true; they've got it wrong ♫♫ See, all our shows are just two minutes long ♫♫ Hey ♫♫ I got YouTube ♫♫ I got YouTube ♫And now, ladies and gentlemen, a tribute to the Recording Industry Association of America — the RIAA!♫ Young man, you were surfin' along ♫♫ And then, young man, you downloaded a song ♫♫ And then, dumb man, copied it to your 'Pod ♫♫ Then a phone call came to tell you ... ♫♫ You've just been sued by the R-I-A-A ♫♫ You've just been screwed by the R-I-A-A ♫♫ Their attorneys say you committed a crime ♫♫ And there'd better not be a next time ♫♫ They've lost their minds at the R-I-A-A ♫♫ Justice is blind at the R-I-A-A ♫♫ You're depriving the bands ♫♫ You are learning to steal ♫♫ You can't do whatever you feel ♫♫ CD sales have dropped every year ♫♫ They're not greedy, they're just quaking with fear ♫♫ Yes indeedy, what if their end is near ♫♫ And we download all our music ♫♫ Yeah, that would piss off the R-I-A-A ♫♫ No plastic discs from the R-I-A-A ♫♫ What a way to make friends ♫♫ It's a plan that can't fail ♫♫ All your customers off to jail ♫♫ Who'll be next for the R-I-A-A? ♫♫ What else is vexing the R-I-A-A? ♫♫ Maybe whistling a tune ♫♫ Maybe humming along ♫♫ Maybe mocking 'em in a song ♫","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_on_the_music_wars
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"I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some advertising, all with the same concept. And it's about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture, and the importance of the image: celebrity is born of photography.I'm going to start with how I started with this concept seven years ago, when Princess Diana died. There was a sort of a standstill in Britain the moment of her death, and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way. I was fascinated by this phenomenon, so I wondered: could one erase the image of Diana, actually quite crudely and physically? So, I got a gun and started to shoot at the image of Diana, but I couldn't erase this from my memory and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche. Momentum was being built. The press wrote about her death in rather, I felt, pornographic ways — like, ""Which bit of artery left which bit of body?"" and ""How did she die in the back of the car?"" — and I was intrigued by this sort of mass voyeurism, so I made these rather gory images.I then went on wondering whether I could actually replace her image, so I got a look-alike of Diana and posed her in the right positions and angles and created something that was in, or existed in, the public imagination. So people were wondering: was she going to marry Dodi? Was she in love with him? Was she pregnant? Did she want his baby? Was she pregnant when she died? So I created this image of Diana, Dodi and their imaginary mixed-race child and this image came out, which caused a huge public outcry at the time.I then went on to make more comments on the media and press imagery, so I started making reference to media imagery — made it grainy, shot through doorways and so on and so forth — to titillate the public or the viewer further in terms of trying to make the viewer more aware of their own voyeurism. So, this is an image of Diana looking at Camilla kissing her husband, and this was a sequence of images. And this gets shown in art galleries like this, as a sequence. And similarly with the Di-Dodian baby imagery — this is another art gallery installation.I'm particularly interested in how you can't rely on your own perception. This is Jane Smith and Jo Bloggs, for instance, but you think it's Camilla and the Queen, and I'm fascinated how what you think is real isn't necessarily real. And the camera can lie, and it makes it very, very easy with the mass bombardment of imagery to tell untruths. So, I continued to work on this project of how photography seduces us and is more interesting to look at than the actual real subject matter. And at the same time, it removes us from the real subject matter,and this acts as a sort of titillating thing. So, the photograph becomes this teaser and incites desire and voyeurism; what you can't have, you want more. In the photograph, the real subject doesn't exist so it makes you want that person more. And that is the way, I think, that celebrity magazines work now: the more pictures you see of these celebrities, the more you feel you know them, but you don't know them and you want to know them further.Of course, the Queen goes to her stud often to watch her horses ... watch her horses. (Laughter). And then I was sort of making imagery. In England there's an expression: ""you can't imagine the Queen on the loo."" So I'm trying to penetrate that. Well, here is the image.All this imagery was creating a lot of fuss and I was cited as a disgusting artist. The press were writing about this, giving full pages about how terrible this was. Which I found very interesting that it was going full cycle: I was making comments about the press and about how we know facts and information only by media — because we don't know the real people; very few of us know the real people — but it was going back into the press and they were publicizing, effectively, my filthy work. So, these are broadsheets, tabloids, debates were being had all about this work, films were being banned before people had actually had the look at the work, politicians were getting involved — all sorts of things — great headlines.Then suddenly, it started to get on front pages. I was being asked and paid to do front covers. Suddenly I was becoming sort of acceptable, which I found also fascinating. How one moment — it was disgusting — journalists would lie to me to get a story or a photograph of me, saying my work was wonderful, and the next minute there were terrible headlines about me. But then this changed suddenly.I then started to work for magazines and newspapers. This was, for example, an image that went into Tatler. This was another newspaper image. It was an April fool actually, and to this day some people think it's real. I was sitting next to someone at dinner the other day, and they were saying there's this great image of the Queen sitting outside William Hill. They thought it was real.I was exploring, at the time, the hyperbole of icons — and Diana and Marilyn — and the importance of celebrity in our lives. How they wheedle their way into the collective psyche without us even knowing, and how that should happen. I explored with actually dressing up as the celebrities myself. There's me as Diana — I look like the mass murderer Myra Hindley, I think, in this one. (Laughter). And me as the Queen. I then continued on to make a whole body of work about Marilyn — the biggest icon of all — and trying to titillate by shooting through doorways and shutters and so on and so forth, and only showing certain angles to create a reality that, obviously, is completely constructed. This is the look-alike, so the crafting elements of this is completely enormous. She looks nothing like Marilyn, but by the time we've made her up and put wigs and makeup on, she looks exactly like Marilyn, to the extent that her husband couldn't recognize her — or recognize this look-alike — in these photographs, which I find quite interesting. So, all this work is getting shown in art galleries. Then I made a book. I was also making a TV series for the BBC at the time. Stills from the TV series went into this book.But there was a real legal problem because it looks real, but how do you get over that? Because obviously it's making a comment about our culture right now: that we can't tell what's real. How do we know when we're looking at something whether it's real or not? So, from my point of view, it's important to publish it, but at the same time it does cause a confusion — intentional on my behalf, but problematic for any outlet that I'm working with. So a big disclaimer is put on everything that I do, and I made narratives about all the European or Brit celebrities and comments about our public figures. You know, what does Tony Blair get up to in private with his fashion guru? And also dealing with the perceptions that are put about Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the links that were put about pre-Iraq war. And what is going to happen to the monarchy? Because obviously the British public, I think, would prefer William to Charles on the throne.And it's that wish, or that desire, that I suppose I'm dealing with in my work. I'm not really interested in the celebrity themselves. I'm interested in the perception of the celebrity. And with some look-alikes, they are so good you don't know whether they're real or not.I did an advertising campaign for Schweppes, which is Coca-Cola, and so that was very interesting in terms of the legalities. It's highly commercial. But it was a difficulty for me — because this is my artwork; should I do advertising? — at the time. So I made sure the work was not compromised in any way and that the integrity of the work remained the same. But the meanings changed in the sense that with the logo on, you're closing all the lines of interpretation down to selling a product and that's all you're doing. When you take the logo off, you're opening up the interpretations and making the work inconclusive, opposed to conclusive when you are advertising.This image is quite interesting, actually, because I think we made it three years ago. And it's Camilla in her wedding dress, which, again, nearly got re-used now, recently prior to her wedding. Tony Blair and Cherie. And again, the legalities — we had to be very careful. It's obviously a very big commercial company, and so this little, ""Shh — it's not really them,"" was put on the side of the imagery. And Margaret Thatcher visiting Jeffery Archer in jail.I then was asked by Selfridges to do a series of windows for them, so I built a sauna bath in one of their windows and created little scenes — live scenes with look-alikes inside the windows, and the windows were all steamed up. So, it's Tony Blair reading and practicing his speech; I've got them doing yoga inside there with Carole Caplin; Sven making out with Ulrika Jonsson, who he was having an affair with at that time. This was a huge success for them because the imagery got shown in the press the day after in every single newspaper, broadsheets and tabloids. It was a bit of a road stopper, which was problematic because the police kept on trying to clear away the crowds, but huge fun — it was great for me to do a performance. Also, people were taking photographs of this, so it was being texted around the world extremely quickly, all this imagery. And the press were interviewing, and I was signing my book. (Laughter).Further imagery. I'm making a new book now with Taschen that I'm working on really for a sort of global market — my previous book was only for the U.K. market — that I suppose it could be called humorous. I suppose I come from a sort of non-humorous background with serious intent, and then suddenly my work is funny. And I think it doesn't really matter that my work is considered humorous, in a way; I think it's a way in for me to deal with the importance of imagery and how we read all our information through imagery. It's an extremely fast way of getting information. It's extremely difficult if it's constructed correctly, and there are techniques of constructing iconic imagery.This image, for example, is sort of spot-on because it exactly sums up what Elton may be doing in private, and also what might be happening with Saddam Hussein, and George Bush reading the Koran upside-down. For example, George Bush target practice — shooting at Bin Laden and Michael Moore. And then you change the photograph he's shooting at, and it suddenly becomes rather grim and maybe less accessible. (Laughter). Tony Blair being used as a mounting block, and Rumsfeld and Bush laughing with some Abu Ghraib photos behind, and the seriousness, or the intellect, of Bush. And also, commenting on the behind the scenes — well, as we know now — what goes on in prisons. And in fact, George Bush and Tony Blair are having great fun during all of this.And really commenting, you know, based on the perception we have of the celebrities. What Jack Nicholson might be up to in his celebrity life, and the fact that he tried to ... he had a bit of road rage and golf-clubbed a driver the other day. I mean, it's extremely difficult to find these look-alikes, so I'm constantly going up to people in the street and trying to ask people to come and be in one of my photographs or films. And sometimes asking the real celebrity, mistaking them for someone who just looks like the real person, which is highly embarrassing. (Laughter).I've also been working with The Guardian on a topical basis — a page a week in their newspaper — which has been very interesting, working topically. So, Jamie Oliver and school dinners; Bush and Blair having difficulty getting alongside Muslim culture; the whole of the hunting issue, and the royal family refusing to stop hunting; and the tsunami issues; and obviously Harry; Blair's views on Gordon Brown, which I find very interesting; Condi and Bush. This image I've decided to show having a reservation about it. I made it a year ago. And just how meanings change, and there were a terrible thing that has happened, but the fear is lurking around in our minds prior to that. That's why this image was made one year ago, and what it means today. So, I'll leave you with these clips to have a look. (Music)Chris Anderson: Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/alison_jackson_looks_at_celebrity
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"This is your conference, and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now, in this transition period, about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for a bit. So, I'm just going to grab a chair here.Two years ago at TED, I think — I've come to this conclusion — I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion. I think that I may have believed unconsciously, then, that I was kind of a business hero. I had this company that I'd spent 15 years building. It's called Future; it was a magazine publishing company. It had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars, a number I didn't really understand. A magazine I'd recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory, busy pumping hot air into the bubble. (Laughter) And I was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more. And all this had come from nothing. Fifteen years earlier, I was a science journalist who people just laughed at when I said, ""I really would like to start my own computer magazine."" And 15 years later, there are 100 of them and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times. The date was February 2000. I thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law — ever upward and to the right — it was going to go on forever. I mean, it had to. Right? I was in for quite a surprise.The dotcom, ironically called Snowball, was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of business hell. I watched everything that I'd built crumbling, and it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing. And it was gut wrenching. It took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to reach 350 employees, something which I was very proud of in the business. February 2001 — in one day we laid off 350 people, and before the bloodshed was finished, 1,000 people had lost their jobs from my companies. I felt sick. I watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18 months. And worse than that, far worse than that, my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating. I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: ""LOSER."" (Laughter) And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back, is how the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing?Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball, but I was, at that point, ready to move on. And to cut a long story short, here's where I came to. And the reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations, that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster — emotional rollercoaster — in the last couple years. This has been a big, big transition time, and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever's next. The theme next year is re-birth.It was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED. And at about the same time, and I think partly because of that, I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus: I started to read again. And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business games, there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest: cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology to ... all this stuff had changed. And the way in which you could think about us as a species and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting. And what was really most exciting — and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did — was that all this stuff is connected. It's connected; it all hooks into each other.We talk about this a lot, and I thought about trying to give an example of this. So, just one example: Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president, was famously asked once, ""What do you most desire?"" And she answered, ""A penis."" And when you think about it, it's very true: what we all most desire is a penis — or ""happiness"" as we say in English. (Laughter) And something ... good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room. (Laughter) (Applause)But something as basic as happiness, which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue, today it turns out that there's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it, which are really interesting. You can ask about what causes it biochemically: neuroscience, serotonin, all that stuff. You can ask what are the psychological causes of it: nature? Nurture? Current circumstance? Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing. You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial intelligence problem: do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly? You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness, and whereas almost all the rest of them, regardless of how much money they have — whether it's two dollars a day or whatever — are almost equally happy on average? Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing: did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate? Are we the victims of a mass delusion? And so on, and so on.To understand even something as important to us as happiness, you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions, and there's nowhere that I've discovered — other than TED — where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions. And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about: to understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits; a little bit about everything that surrounds it. And so, gradually over these three days, you start off kind of trying to figure out, ""Why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff?"" And at the end of the four days, your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited, and it's because all these different bits have been put together. It's the total brain experience, we're going to ... it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage. (Laughter) Every mental organ addressed. It really is.Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right? So, I will. Here's the vision for TED.Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it. Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me, ""Chris, TED is a really great conference. You're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad."" (Laughter) So, I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason, and I will promise you right here and now that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with. Truth, curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit, no bandwagoning, no platforms. Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies, across all the disciplines that are represented here. That's not going to be changed at all.Number two: I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year. The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines. There's a year to do this, and already — I hope to show you a bit later — there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year. And I'm getting fantastic help from the community; this is just such a great community. And combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who's interesting in the country, if not the planet. It's true.Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit. And one key way that we're going to do this is to introduce this book club. Books kind of saved me in the last couple years, and that's a gift that I would like to pass on. So, when you sign up for TED2003, every six weeks you'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they're linked to TED. They may well be by a TED speaker, and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual, emotional journey. I think it will be great.And then, fourthly: I want to mention the Sapling Foundation, which is the new owner of TED. What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for. And more important, I think, the ideas that are exhibited and realized here are ideas that the foundation can use, because there's fantastic synergy. Already, just in the last few days, we've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about, that they're passionate about, that can make a difference in the world, and the idea of getting this group of people together — some of the causes that we believe in, the money that this conference can raise and the ideas — I really believe that that combination will, over time, make a difference. I'm incredibly excited about that. In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've been as excited by anything ever in my life. I'm in this for the long run, and I would be greatly honored and excited if you'll come on this journey with me.","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_shares_his_vision_for_ted
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"I'm going to talk about two stories today. One is how we need to use market-based pricing to affect demand and use wireless technologies to dramatically reduce our emissions in the transportation sector. And the other is that there is an incredible opportunity if we choose the right wireless technologies; how we can generate a new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce C02 in the other sectors.I'm really scared. We need to reduce C02 emissions in ten to fifteen years by 80 percent in order to avert catastrophic effects. And I am astounded that I'm standing here to tell you that. What are catastrophic effects? A three degree centigrade climate change rise that will result in 50 percent species extinction. It's not a movie. This is real life. And I'm really worried, because when people talk about cars — which I know something about — the press and politicians and people in this room are all thinking, ""Let's use fuel-efficient cars."" If we started today, 10 years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel-efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by four percent. That is not enough.But now I'll talk about some more pleasant things. Here are some ways that we can make some dramatic changes. So, Zipcar is a company that I founded seven years ago, but it's an example of something called car sharing. What Zipcar does is we park cars throughout dense urban areas for members to reserve, by the hour and by the day, instead of using their own car. How does it feel to be a person using a Zipcar? It means that I pay only for what I need. All those hours when a car is sitting idle, I'm not paying for it. It means that I can choose a car exactly for that particular trip. So, here's a woman that reserved MiniMia, and she had her day. I can take a BMW when I'm seeing clients. I can drive my Toyota Element when I'm going to go on that surfing trip.And the other remarkable thing is it's, I think, the highest status of car ownership. Not only do I have a fleet of cars available to me in seven cities around the world that I can have at my beck and call, but heaven forbid I would ever maintain or deal with the repair or have anything to do with it. It's like the car that you always wanted that your mom said that you couldn't have. I get all the good stuff and none of the bad.So, what is the social result of this? The social result is that today's Zipcar has 100,000 members driving 3,000 cars parked in 3,000 parking spaces. Instead of driving 12,000 miles a year, which is what the average city dweller does, they drive 500 miles a year. Are they happy? The company has been doubling in size ever since I founded it, or greater. People adore the company. And it's better, you know? They like it. So, how is it that people went from the 12,000 miles a year to 500 miles? It's because they said, ""It's eight to 10 dollars an hour and 65 dollars a day. If I'm going to go buy some ice cream, do I really want to spend eight dollars to go buy the ice cream? Or maybe I'll do without. Maybe I would have bought the ice cream when I did some other errand."" So, people really respond very quickly to it, to prices.And the last point I want to make is Zipcar would never be possible without technology. It required that it was completely trivial: that it takes 30 seconds to reserve a car, go get it, drive it. And for me, as a service provider, I would never be able to provide you a car for an hour if the transaction cost was anything. So, without these wireless technologies, this, as a concept, could never happen.So, here's another example. This company is GoLoco — I'm launching it in about three weeks — and I hope to do for ridesharing what I did for car sharing. This will apply to people across all of America. Today, 75 percent of the trips are single-occupancy vehicles, yet 12 percent of trips to work are currently carpool. And I think that we can apply social networks and online payment systems to completely change how people feel about ridesharing and make that trip much more efficient.And so when I think about the future, people will be thinking that sharing the ride with someone is this incredibly great social event out of their day. You know, how did you get to TED? You went with other TEDsters. How fabulous. Why would you ever want to go by yourself in your own car? How did you go food shopping? You went with your neighbor, what a great social time. You know it's going to really transform how we feel about travel, and it will also, I think, enhance our freedom of mobility. Where can I go today and who can I do it with? Those are the types of things that you will look at and feel.And the social benefits: the rate of single-occupancy vehicles is, I told you, 75 percent; I think we can get that down to 50 percent. The demand for parking, of course, is down, congestion and the CO2 emissions. One last piece about this, of course, is that it's enabled by wireless technologies. And it's the cost of driving that's making people want to be able to do this. The average American spends 19 percent of their income on their car, and there's a pressure for them to reduce that cost, yet they have no outlet today.So, the last example of this is congestion pricing, very famously done in London. It's when you charge a premium for people to drive on congested roads. In London, the day they turned the congestion pricing on, there was a 25 percent decrease in congestion overnight, and that's persisted for the four years in which they've been doing congestion pricing. And again, do people like the outcome? Ken Livingstone was reelected. So again, we can see that price plays an enormous role in people's willingness to reduce their driving behavior. We've tripled the miles that we drive since 1970 and doubled them since 1982. There's a huge slack in that system; with the right pricing we can undo that.Congestion pricing is being discussed in every major city around the world and is, again, wirelessly enabled. You weren't going to put tollbooths around the city of London and open and shut those gates. And what congestion pricing is is that it's a technology trial and a psychological trial for something called road pricing. And road pricing is where we're all going to have to go, because today we pay for our maintenance and wear and tear on our cars with gas taxes. And as we get our cars more fuel-efficient, that's going to be reducing the amount of revenue that you get off of those gas taxes, so we need to charge people by the mile that they drive. Whatever happens with congestion pricing and those technologies will be happening with road pricing.Why do we travel too much? Car travel is underpriced and therefore we over-consumed. We need to put this better market feedback. And if we have it, you'll decide how many miles to drive, what mode of travel, where to live and work. And wireless technologies make this real-time loop possible.So, I want to move now to the second part of my story, which is: when are we going to start doing this congestion pricing? Road pricing is coming. When are we going to do it? Are we going to wait 10 to 15 years for this to happen or are we going to finally have this political will to make it happen in the next two years? Because I'm going to say, that is going to be the tool that's going to turn our usage overnight.And what kind of wireless technology are we going to use? This is my big vision. There is a tool that can help us bridge the digital divide, respond to emergencies, get traffic moving, provide a new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce CO2 emissions in every sector. And this is a moment from ""The Graduate."" Do you remember this moment? You guys are going to be the handsome young guy and I'm going to be the wise businessman. ""I want to say one word to you, just one word."" ""Yes, sir?"" ""Are you listening?"" ""Yes I am."" ""Ad-hoc peer-to-peer self-configuring wireless networks."" (Laughter) These are also called mesh networks. And in a mesh, every device contributes to and expands the network, and I think you might have heard a little bit about it before.I'm going to give you some examples. You'll be hearing later today from Alan Kay. These laptops, when a child opens them up, they communicate with every single child in the classroom, within that school, within that village. And what is the cost of that communication system? Zero dollars a month. Here's another example: in New Orleans, video cameras were mesh-enabled so that they could monitor crime in the downtown French Quarter. When the hurricane happened, the only communication system standing was the mesh network. Volunteers flew in, added a whole bunch of devices, and for the next 12 months, mesh networks were the only wireless that was happening in New Orleans.Another example is in Portsmouth, U.K. They mesh-enabled 300 buses and they speak to these smart terminals. You can look at the terminal and be able to see precisely where your bus is on the street and when it's coming, and you can buy your tickets in real time. Again, all mesh-enabled. Monthly communication cost: zero. So, the beauty of mesh networks: you can have these very low-cost devices. Zero ongoing communication costs. Highly scalable; you can just keep adding them, and as in Katrina, you can keep subtracting them — as long as there's some, we can still communicate. They're resilient; their redundancy is built into this fabulous decentralized design.What are the incredible weaknesses? There isn't anybody in Washington lobbying to make it happen — or in those municipalities, to build out their cities with these wireless networks — because there's zero ongoing communications cost. So, the examples that I gave you are these islands of mesh networks, and networks are interesting only as they are big.How do we create a big network? Are you guys ready again — ""The Graduate""? This time you will still play the handsome young thing, but I'll be the sexy woman. These are the next two lines in the movie. ""Where did you do it?"" ""In his car."" So you know, when you stick this idea ... (Laughter) where would we expect me, Robin Chase, to be thinking is imagine if we put a mesh-network device in every single car across America. We could have a coast-to-coast, free wireless communication system. I guess I just want you to think about that.And why is this going to happen? Because we're going to do congestion pricing, we are going to do road tolls, gas taxes are going to become road pricing. These things are going to happen. What's the wireless technology we're going to use? Maybe we should use a good one. When are we going to do it? Maybe we shouldn't wait for the 10 or 15 years for this to happen. We should pull it forward.So, I'd like us to launch the wireless Internet interstate wireless mesh system, and require that this network be accessible to everyone, with open standards. Right now in the transportation sector, we're creating these wireless devices — I guess you guys might have Fast Pass here or Easy Lane — that are single-purpose devices in these closed networks. What is the point? We're transferring just a few little data bits when we're doing road controlling, road pricing. We have this incredible excess capacity. So, we can provide the lowest-cost means of going wireless coast-to-coast, we can have resilient nationwide communication systems, we have a new tool for creating efficiencies in all sectors. Imagine what happens when the cost of getting information from anywhere to anywhere is close to zero. What you can do with that tool: we can create an economic engine. Information should be free, and access to information should be free, and we should be charging people for carbon.I think this is a more powerful tool than the Interstate Highway Act, and I think this is as important and world changing to our economy as electrification. And if I had my druthers, we would have an open-source version in addition to open standards. And this open-source version means that it could be — if we did a brilliant job of it — it could be used around the world very quickly. So, going back to one of my earlier thoughts. Imagine if every one of these buses in Lagos was part of the mesh network. When I went this morning to Larry Brilliant's TEDTalk prize — his fabulous networks — imagine if there was an open-source mesh communications device that can be put into those networks, to make all that happen. And we can be doing it if we could just get over the fact that this little slice of things is going to be for free. We could make billions of dollars on top of it, but this one particular slice of communications needs to be open source.So, let's take control of this nightmare: implement a gas tax immediately; transition across the nation to road-tolling with this wireless mesh; require that the mesh be open to all, with open standards; and, of course, use mesh networks. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_chase_on_zipcar_and_her_next_big_idea
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"I hope you'll understand my English. In the mornings it is terrible, and the afternoon is worst. (Laughter) During many years, I made some speeches starting with this saying: ""City is not a problem, it's a solution."" And more and more, I'm convinced that it's not only a solution for a country, but it's a solution for the problem of climate change.But we have a very pessimistic approach about the cities. I'm working in cities for almost 40 years, and where every mayor is trying to tell me his city is so big, or the other mayors say, ""We don't have financial resources,"" I would like to say from the experience I had: every city in the world can be improved in less than three years. There's no matter of scale. It's not a question of scale, it's not a question of financial resources. Every problem in a city has to have its own equation of co-responsibility and also a design.So to start, I want to introduce some characters from a book I made for teenagers. The best example of quality of life is the turtle because the turtle is an example of living and working together. And when you realize that the casque of the turtle looks like an urban tessitura, and can we imagine, if we cut the casque of the turtle, how sad she's going to be? And that's what we're doing in our cities: living here, working here, having leisure here. And most of the people are leaving the city and living outside of the city.So, the other character is Otto, the automobile. He is invited for a party — he never wants to leave. The chairs are on the tables and still drinking, and he drinks a lot. (Laughter) And he coughs a lot. Very egotistical: he carries only one or two people and he asks always for more infrastructure. Freeways. He's a very demanding person. And on the other hand, Accordion, the friendly bus, he carries 300 people — 275 in Sweden; 300 Brazilians. (Laughter)Speaking about the design: every city has its own design. Curitiba, my city: three million in the metropolitan area, 1,800,000 people in the city itself. Curitiba, Rio: it's like two birds kissing themselves. Oaxaca, San Francisco — it's very easy: Market Street, Van Ness and the waterfront. And every city has its own design. But to make it happen, sometimes you have to propose a scenario and to propose a design — an idea that everyone, or the large majority, will help you to make it happen. And that's the structure of the city of Curitiba.And it's an example of living and working together. And this is where we have more density; it's where we have more public transport. So, this system started in '74. We started with 25,000 passengers a day, now it's 2,200,000 passengers a day. And it took 25 years until another city ... which is Bogota, and they did a very good job. And now there's 83 cities all over the world that they are doing what they call the BRT of Curitiba. And one thing: it's important not for only your own city; every city, besides its normal problems, they have a very important role in being with the whole humanity. That means mostly two main issues — mobility and sustainability — are becoming very important for the cities.And this is an articulated bus, double-articulated. And we are very close to my house. You can come when you are in Curitiba and have a coffee there. And that's the evolution of the system. What in the design that made the difference is the boarding tubes: the boarding tube gives to the bus the same performance as a subway. That's why, I'm trying to say, it's like metro-nizing the bus. This is the design of the bus, and you can pay before entering the bus you're boarding. And for handicapped, they can use this as a normal system.What I'm trying to say is the major contribution on carbon emissions are from the cars — more than 50 percent — so when we depend only on cars, it's ... — that's why when we're talking about sustainability, it's not enough, green buildings. It's not enough, a new materials. It's not enough, new sources of energy. It's the concept of the city, the design of the city, that's also important, too. And also, how to teach the children. I'll speak on this later on.Our idea of mobility is trying to make the connections between all the systems. We started in '83, proposing for the city of Rio how to connect the subway with the bus. The subway was against, of course. And 23 years after, they called us to develop — we're developing this idea. And you can understand how different it's going to be, the image of Rio with the system — one-minute frequency. And it's not Shanghai, it's not being colored during the day, only at night it will look this way.And before you say it's a Norman Foster design, we designed this in '83. And this is the model, how it's going to work. So, it's the same system; the vehicle is different. And that's the model. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not trying to prove which system of transport is better. I'm trying to say we have to combine all the systems, and with one condition: never — if you have a subway, if you have surface systems, if you have any kind of system — never compete in the same space.And coming back to the car, I always used to say that the car is like your mother-in-law: you have to have good relationship with her, but she cannot command your life. So, when the only woman in your life is your mother-in-law, you have a problem. (Laughter) So, all the ideas about how to transform through design — old quarries and open universities and botanic garden — all of it's related to how we teach the children. And the children, we teach during six months how to separate their garbage. And after, the children teach their parents. And now we have 70 percent — since 20 years, it's the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world. Seven zero. (Applause) So teach the children.I would like to say, if we want to have a sustainable world we have to work with everything what's said, but don't forget the cities and the children. I'm working in a museum and also a multi-use city, because you cannot have empty places during 18 hours a day. You should have always a structure of living and working together. Try to understand the sectors in the city that could play different roles during the 24 hours.Another issue is, a city's like our family portrait. We don't rip our family portrait, even if we don't like the nose of our uncle, because this portrait is you. And these are the references that we have in any city. This is the main pedestrian mall; we did it in 72 hours. Yes, you have to be fast. And these are the references from our ethnic contribution. This is the Italian portal, the Ukrainian park, the Polish park, the Japanese square, the German park. All of a sudden, the Soviet Union, they split. And since we have people from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, [unclear], we have to stop the program. (Laughter)Don't forget: creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget. If you cut two zeros, it's much better. And this is the Wire Opera theater. We did it in two months. Parks — old quarries that they were transformed into parks. Quarries once made the nature, and sometimes we took this and we transformed. And every part can be transformed; every frog can be transformed in a prince.So, in a city, you have to work fast. Planning takes time. And I'm proposing urban acupuncture. That means me, with some focal ideas to help the normal process of planning. And this is an acupuncture note — or I.M. Pei's. Some small ones can make the city better. The smallest park in New York, the most beautiful: 32 meters.So, I want just to end saying that you can always propose new materials — new sustainable materials — but keep in mind that we have to work fast to the end, because we don't have the whole time to plan. And I think creativity, innovation is starting. And we cannot have all the answers. So when you start — and we cannot be so prepotent on having all the answers — it's important starting and having the contribution from people, and they could teach you if you're not in the right track.At the end, I would like if you can help me to sing the sustainable song. OK? Please, allow me just two minutes. You're going to make the music and the rhythm.♫ Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! ♫♫ Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! ♫♫ It's possible! It's possible! You can do it! You can do it! ♫♫ Use less your car! Make this decision! ♫♫ Avoid carbon emission! It's possible! It's possible! ♫♫ You can do it! You can do it! ♫♫ Live closer to work! ♫♫ Work closer to home! Save energy in your home! ♫♫ It's possible! It's possible! You can do it! ♫♫ You can do it! Separate your garbage! ♫♫ Organic, schmorganic! Save more! Waste less! It's possible! ♫♫ You can do it! Please, do it now! ♫Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jaime_lerner_sings_of_the_city
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"I draw to better understand things. Sometimes I make a lot of drawings and I still don't understand what it is I'm drawing. Those of you who are comfortable with digital stuff and even smug about that relationship might be amused to know that the guy who is best known for ""The Way Things Work,"" while preparing for part of a panel for called Understanding, spent two days trying to get his laptop to communicate with his new CD burner. Who knew about extension managers? I've always managed my own extensions so it never even occurred to me to read the instructions, but I did finally figure it out. I had to figure it out, because along with the invitation came the frightening reminder that there would be no projector, so bringing those carousels would no longer be necessary but some alternate form of communication would.Now, I could talk about something that I'm known for, something that would be particularly appropriate for many of the more technically minded people here, or I could talk about something I really care about. I decided to go with the latter. I'm going to talk about Rome. Now, why would I care about Rome, particularly? Well, I went to Rhode Island School of Design in the second half of the '60s to study architecture. I was lucky enough to spend my last year, my fifth year, in Rome as a student. It changed my life. Not the least reason was the fact that I had spent those first four years living at home, driving into RISD everyday, driving back. I missed the '60s. I read about them; (Laughter) I understand they were pretty interesting. I missed them, but I did spend that extraordinary year in Rome, and it's a place that is never far from my mind. So, whenever given an opportunity, I try to do something in it or with it or for it.I also make drawings to help people understand things. Things that I want them to believe I understand. And that's what I do as an illustrator, that's my job. So, I'm going to show you some pictures of Rome. I've made a lot of drawings of Rome over the years. These are just drawings of Rome. I get back as often as possible — I need to. All different materials, all different styles, all different times, drawings from sketchbooks looking at the details of Rome. Part of the reason I'm showing you these is that it sort of helps illustrate this process I go through of trying to figure out what it is I feel about Rome and why I feel it.These are sketches of some of the little details. Rome is a city full of surprises. I mean, we're talking about unusual perspectives, we're talking about narrow little winding streets that suddenly open into vast, sun-drenched piazzas — never, though, piazzas that are not humanly scaled. Part of the reason for that is the fact that they grew up organically. That amazing juxtaposition of old and new, the bits of light that come down between the buildings that sort of create a map that's traveling above your head of usually blue — especially in the summer — compared to the map that you would normally expect to see of conventional streets.And I began to think about how I could communicate this in book form. How could I share my sense of Rome, my understanding of Rome? And I'm going to show you a bunch of dead ends, basically. The primary reason for all these dead ends is when if you're not quite sure where you're going, you're certainly not going to get there with any kind of efficiency.Here's a little map. And I thought of maps at the beginning; maybe I should just try and do a little atlas of my favorite streets and connections in Rome. And here's a line of text that actually evolves from the exhaust of a scooter zipping across the page. Here that same line of text wraps around a fountain in an illustration that can be turned upside down and read both ways. Maybe that line of text could be a story to help give some human aspect to this. Maybe I should get away from this map completely, and really be honest about wanting to show you my favorite bits and pieces of Rome and simply kick a soccer ball in the air — which happens in so many of the squares in the city — and let it bounce off of things. And I'll simply explain what each of those things is that the soccer ball hits. That seemed like a sort of a cheap shot. But even though I just started this presentation, this is not the first thing that I tried to do and I was getting sort of desperate.Eventually, I realized that I had really no content that I could count on, so I decided to move towards packaging. (Laughter) I mean, it seems to work for a lot of things. So I thought a little box set of four small books might do the trick. But one of the ideas that emerged from some of those sketches was the notion of traveling through Rome in different vehicles at different speeds in order to show the different aspects of Rome. Sort of an overview of Rome and the plan that you might see from a dirigible. Quick snapshots of things you might see from a speeding motor scooter, and very slow walking through Rome, you might be able to study in more detail some of the wonderful surfaces and whatnot that you come across.Anyways, I went back to the dirigible notion. Went to Alberto Santos-Dumont. Found one of his dirigibles that had enough dimensions so I could actually use it as a scale that I would then juxtapose with some of the things in Rome. This thing would be flying over or past or be parked in front of, but it would be like having a ruler — sort of travel through the pages without being a ruler. Not that you know how long number 11 actually is, but you would be able to compare number 11 against the Pantheon with number 11 against the Baths of Caracalla, and so on and so forth. If you were interested.This is Beatrix. She has a dog named Ajax, she has purchased a dirigible — a small dirigible — she's assembling the structure, Ajax is sniffing for holes in the balloon before they set off. She launches this thing above the Spanish Steps and sets off for an aerial tour of the city. Over the Spanish Steps we go. A nice way to show that river, that stream sort of pouring down the hill. Unfortunately, just across the road from it or quite close by is the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the diameter of the dirigible makes an impression, as you can see, as she starts trying to read the story that spirals around the Column of Marcus Aurelius — gets a little too close, nudges it. This gives me a chance to suggest to you the structure of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is really no more than a pile of quarters high — thick quarters. Over the Piazza of Saint Ignacio, completely ruining the symmetry, but that aside a spectacular place to visit. A spectacular framework, inside of which you see, usually, extraordinary blue sky. Over the Pantheon and the 26-foot diameter Oculus. She parks her dirigible, lowers the anchor rope and climbs down for a closer look inside. The text here is right side and upside down so that you are forced to turn the book around, and you can see it from ground point of view and from her point of view — looking in the hole, getting a different kind of perspective, moving you around the space. Particularly appropriate in a building that can contain perfectly a sphere dimensions of the diameter being the same as the distance from the center of the floor to the center of the Oculus.Unfortunately for her, the anchor line gets tangled around the feet of some Boy Scouts who are visiting the Pantheon, and they are immediately yanked out and given an extraordinary but terrifying tour of some of the domes of Rome, which would, from their point of view, naturally be hanging upside down. They bail out as soon as they get to the top of Saint Ivo, that little spiral structure you see there. She continues on her way over Piazza Navona. Notices a lot of activity at the Tre Scalini restaurant, is reminded that it is lunchtime and she's hungry. They keep on motoring towards the Campo de' Fiori, which they soon reach. Ajax the dog is put in a basket and lowered with a list of food into the marketplace, which flourishes there until about one in the afternoon, and then is completely removed and doesn't appear again until six or seven the following morning. Anyway, the pooch gets back to the dirigible with the stuff. Unfortunately, when she goes to unwrap the prosciutto, Ajax makes a lunge for it. She's managed to save the prosciutto, but in the process she loses the tablecloth, which you can see flying away in the upper left-hand corner. They continue without their tablecloth, looking for a place to land this thing so that they can actually have lunch. They eventually discover a huge wall that's filled with small holes, ideal for docking a dirigible because you've got a place to tie up. Turns out to be the exterior wall — that part of it that remains — of the Coliseum, so they park themselves there and have a terrific lunch and have a spectacular view.At the end of lunch, they untie the anchor, they set off through the Baths of Caracalla and over the walls of the city and then an abandoned gatehouse and decide to take one more look at the Pyramid of Cestius, which has this lightning rod on top. Unfortunately, that's a problem: they get a little too close, and when you're in a dirigible you have to be very careful about spikes. So that sort of brings her little story to a conclusion. Marcello, on the other hand, is sort of a lazy guy, but he's not due at work until about noon. So, the alarm goes off and it's five to 12 or so. He gets up, leaps onto his scooter, races through the city past the church of Santa Maria della Pace, down the alleys, through the streets that tourists may be wandering through, disturbing the quiet backstreet life of Rome at every turn. That speed with which he is moving, I hope I have suggested in this little image, which, again, can be turned around and read from both sides because there's text on the bottom and text on the top, one of which is upside down in this image.So, he keeps on moving, approaching an unsuspecting waiter who is trying to deliver two plates of linguine in a delicate white wine clam sauce to diners who are sitting at a table just outside of a restaurant in the street. Waiter catches on, but it's too late. And Marcello keeps moving in his scooter. Everything he sees from this point on is slightly affected by the linguine, but keeps on moving because this guy's got a job to do. Removes some scaffolding. One of the reasons Rome remains the extraordinary place it is that because of scaffolding and the determination to maintain the fabric, it is a city that continues to grow and adapt to the needs of the particular time in which it finds itself, or we find it. Right through the Piazza della Rotonda, in front of the Pantheon — again wreaking havoc — and finally getting to work. Marcello, as it turns out, is the driver of the number 64 bus, and if you've been on the number 64 bus, you know that it's driven with the same kind of exuberance as Marcello demonstrated on his scooter.And finally Carletto. You see his apartment in the upper left-hand corner. He's looking at his table; he's planning to propose this evening to his girlfriend of 40 years, (Laughter) and he wants it to be perfect. He's got candles out, he's got flowers in the middle and he's trying to figure out where to put the plates and the glasses. But he's not happy; something's wrong. The phone rings anyway, he's called to the palazzo. He saunters — he saunters at a good clip, but as compared to all the traveling we've just seen, he's sauntering. Everybody knows Carletto, because he's in entertainment, actually; he's in television. He's actually in television repair, which is why people know him. So they all have his number. He arrives at the palazzo, arrives at the big front door. Enters the courtyard and talks to the custodian, who tells him that there's been a disaster in the palazzo; nobody's TVs are working and there's a big soccer game coming up, and the crowd is getting a little restless and a little nervous.He goes down to the basement and starts to check the wiring, and then gradually works his way up to the top of the building, apartment by apartment, checking every television, checking every connection, hoping to find out what this problem is. He works his way up, finally, the grand staircase and then a smaller staircase until he reaches the attic. He opens the window of the attic, of course, and there's a tablecloth wrapped around the building's television antenna. He removes it, the problems are solved, everybody in the palazzo is happy. And of course, he also solves his own problem. All he has to do now, with a perfect table, is wait for her to arrive.That was the first attempt, but it didn't seem substantial enough to convey whatever it was I wanted to convey about Rome. So I thought, well, I'll just do piazzas, and I'll get inside and underneath and I'll show these things growing and show why they're shaped the way they are and so on. And then I thought, that's too complicated. No, I'll just take my favorite bits and pieces and I'll put them inside the Pantheon but keep the scale, so you can see the top of Sant'Ivo and the Pyramid of Cestius and the Tempietto of Bramante all side by side in this amazing space. Now that's one drawing, so I thought maybe it's time for Piranesi to meet Escher. (Laughter)You see that I'm beginning to really lose control here and also hope. There's a very thin blue line of exhaust that sort of runs through this thing that would be kind of the trail that holds it all together. Then I thought, ""Wait a minute, what am I doing?"" A book is not only a neat way of collecting and storing information, it's a series of layers. I mean, you always peel one layer off another; we think of them as pages, doing it a certain way. But think of them as layers. I mean, Rome is a place of layers — horizontal layers, vertical layers — and I thought, well just peeling off a page would allow me to — if I got you thinking about it the right way — would allow me to sort of show you the depth of layers. The stucco on the walls of most of the buildings in Rome covers the scars; the scars of centuries of change as these structures have been adapted rather than being torn down. If I do a foldout page on the left-hand side and let you just unfold it, you see behind it what I mean by scar tissue. You can see that in 1635, it became essential to make smaller windows because the bad guys were coming or whatever. Adaptations all get buried under the stucco. I could peel out a page of this palazzo to show you what's going on inside of it. But more importantly, I could also show you what it looks like at the corner of one of those magnificent buildings with all the massive stone blocks, or the fake stone blocks done with brick and stucco, which is more often the case.So it becomes slightly three-dimensional. I could take you down one of those narrow little streets into one of those surprising piazzas by using a double gate fold — double foldout page — which, if you were like me reading a pop-up book as a child, you hopefully stick your head into. You wrap the pages around your head and are in that piazza for that brief period of time. And I've really not done anything much more complicated than make foldout pages. But then I thought, maybe I could be simpler here. Let's look at the Pantheon and the Piazza della Rotonda in front of it. Here's a book completely wide open. OK, if I don't open the book the whole way, if I just open it 90 degrees, we're looking down the front of the Pantheon, and we're looking sort of at the top, more or less down on the square. And if I turn the book the other way, we're looking across the square at the front of the Pantheon. No foldouts, no tricks — just a book that isn't open the whole way. That seemed promising. I thought, maybe I'll do it inside and I can even combine the foldouts with the only partially opened book. So we get inside the Pantheon and it grows and so on and so forth. And I thought, maybe I'm on the right track, but it sort of lost its human quality.So I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way. ""Pigeon's Progress"" struck me as a catchy title. If it was a homing pigeon, it would be called ""Homer's Odyssey."" But it was the journey of the ... (Laughter) I mean, if a title works, use it. But it would be a journey that went through Rome and showed all the things that I like about Rome. It's a pigeon sitting on top of a church. Goes off during the day and does normal pigeon stuff. Comes back, the whole place is covered with scaffolding and green netting and there's no way this pigeon can get home. So it's a homeless pigeon now and it's going to have to find another place to live, and that allows me to go through my catalog of favorite things, and we start with the tall ones and so on. Maybe it has to go back and live with family members; that's not always a good thing, but it does sort of bring pigeons together again. And I thought, that's sort of interesting, but maybe there's a person who should be involved in this in some way.So I kind of came up with this old guy who spends his life looking after sick pigeons. He'll go anywhere to get them — dangerous places and whatnot — and they become really friends with this guy, and learn to do tricks for him and entertain him at lunchtime and stuff like that. There's a real bond that develops between this old man and these pigeons. But unfortunately he gets sick. He gets really sick at the end of the story. He's taught them to spell his name, which is Aldo. They show up one day after three or four days of not seeing him — he lives in this little garret — and they spell his name and fly around. And he finally gets enough strength together to climb up the ladder onto the roof, and all the pigeons, a la Red Balloon, are there waiting for him and they carry him off over the walls of the city. And I forgot to mention this: whenever he lost a pigeon, he would take that pigeon out beyond the walls of the city. In the old Roman custom, the dead were never buried within the walls. And I thought that's a really cheery story. (Laughter). That's really going to go a long way.So anyway, I went through ... And again, if packaging doesn't work and if the stories aren't going anywhere, I just come up with titles and hope that a title will sort of kick me off in the right direction. And sometimes it does focus me enough and I'll even do a title page. So, these are all title pages that eventually led me to the solution I settled on, which is the story of a young woman who sends a message on a homing pigeon — she lives outside the walls of the city of Rome — to someone in the city. And the pigeon is flying down above the Appian Way here. You can see the tombs and pines and so on and so forth along the way. If you see the red line, you are seeing the trail of the pigeon; if you don't see the red line, you are the pigeon. And it becomes necessary and possible, at this point, to try to convey what that sense would be like of flying over the city without actually moving. Past the Pyramid of Cestius — these will seem very familiar to you, even if you haven't been to Rome recently — past the gatehouse. This is something that's a little bit unusual. This pigeon does something that most homing pigeons do not do: it takes the scenic route, (Laughter) which was a device that I felt was necessary to actually extend this book beyond about four pages.So, we circle around the Coliseum, past the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin and the Temple of Hercules towards the river. We almost collide with the cornice of the Palazzo Farnese — designed by Michelangelo, built of stone taken from the Coliseum — narrow escape. We swoop down over the Campo de' Fiori. This is one of those things I show to my students because it's a complete bastardization — a denial of any rules of perspective. The only rule of perspective that I think matters is if it looks believable, you've succeeded. But you try and figure out where the vanishing points meet here; a couple are on Mars and a couple of others in Cremona. But into the piazza in front of Santa Maria della Pace, where invariably a soccer game is going on, and we're hit by a soccer ball. Now this is a terrible illustration of being hit by a soccer ball. I have all the pieces: there's Santa Maria della Pace, there's a soccer ball, there's a little bit of a bird's wing — nothing's happening, so I had to rethink it. And if you do want to see Santa Maria della Pace, these books are really flexible, incredibly interactive — just turn it around and look at it the other way.Through the alley, we can see the impact is captured in the red line. And then bird manages to pull itself together past this medieval tower — one of the few remaining medieval towers — towards the church of Sant'Agnese and around the dome looking down into Piazza Navona — which we've already mentioned and seen and flown over a couple of times; there's the Bernini statue of the Four Rivers — and then past the wonderful Borromini Sant'Ivo, stopping just long enough on the 26-foot diameter Oculus of the Pantheon to catch our breath. And then we can swoop inside and around; and because we're flying, we don't really have to worry about gravity at this particular moment in time, so this drawing can be oriented in any way on the page.We get a little exuberant as we pass Gesu; it's not surprising to sort of mimic the architecture in this way. Past the wonderful wall filled with the juxtaposition that I was talking about; beautiful carvings set into the walls above the neon ""Ristorante"" sign, and so on. And eventually, we arrive at the courtyard of the palazzo, which is our destination. Straight up through the courtyard into a little window into the attic, where somebody is working at the drawing board. He removes the message from the leg of the bird; this is what it says. As we look at the drawing board, we see what he's working on is, in fact, a map of the journey that the pigeon has just taken, and the red line extends through all the sights. And if you want the information, so that we complete this cycle of understanding, all you have to do is read these paragraphs. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_macaulay_s_rome_antics
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"It's a simple idea about nature. I want to say a word for nature because we haven't talked that much about it the last couple days. I want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals, and tell you about a tool, a very simple tool that I have found. Although it's really nothing more than a literary conceit; it's not a technology. It's very powerful for, I think, changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend. And that tool is very simply, as Chris suggested, looking at us and the world from the plants' or the animals' point of view. It's not my idea, other people have hit on it, but I've tried to take it to some new places.Let me tell you where I got it. Like a lot of my ideas, like a lot of the tools I use, I found it in the garden; I'm a very devoted gardener. And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May — this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they're just white clouds above. I was here, planting my chunks, cutting up potatoes and planting it, and the bees were working on this tree; bumblebees, just making this thing vibrate.And one of the things I really like about gardening is that it doesn't take all your concentration, you really can't get hurt — it's not like woodworking — and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation. And the question I asked myself that afternoon in the garden, working alongside that bumblebee, was: what did I and that bumblebee have in common? How was our role in this garden similar and different? And I realized we actually had quite a bit in common: both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another, and both of us — probably, if I can imagine the bee's point of view — thought we were calling the shots. I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant — I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was — and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it. And that bee, no doubt, assumed that it had decided, ""I'm going for that apple tree, I'm going for that blossom, I'm going to get the nectar and I'm going to leave.""We have a grammar that suggests that's who we are; that we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me. I plant the potatoes, I weed the garden, I domesticate the species. But that day, it occurred to me: what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? Because, of course, the bee thinks he's in charge or she's in charge, but we know better. We know that what's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. And when I say manipulated, I'm talking about in a Darwinian sense, right? I mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits — color, scent, flavor, pattern — that has lured that bee in. And the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg, and going off to the next blossom. The bee is not calling the shots. And I realized then, I wasn't either.I had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its — into spreading its genes, giving it a little bit more habitat. And that's when I got the idea, which was, ""Well, what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us?"" And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. The competition of grasses, right? And suddenly everything looked different. And suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience.I had thought always — and in fact, had written this in my first book; this was a book about gardening — that lawns were nature under culture's boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex. And that's what the lawn was. But then I realized, ""No, this is exactly what the grasses want us to do. I'm a dupe. I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight."" And so by getting us to mow the lawn, we keep the trees from coming back, which in New England happens very, very quickly.So I started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called ""The Botany of Desire."" And I realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees — that they like sweetness, that they like this color and not that color, that they like symmetry — what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing? That a certain kind of potato, a certain kind of drug, a sativa-indica Cannabis cross has something to say about us. And that, wouldn't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world?Now, the test of any idea — I said it was a literary conceit — is what does it get us? And when you're talking about nature, which is really my subject as a writer, how does it meet the Aldo Leopold test? Which is, does it make us better citizens of the biotic community? Get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota, rather than its destruction? And I would submit that this idea does this. So, let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way, besides some entertaining insights about human desire.As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is — and this is in the realm of intellectual history — which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago ... Ugh. Mini-Me. (Laughter) We have this intellectual, this Darwinian revolution in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many; evolution is working on us the same way it's working on all the others; we are acted upon as well as acting; we are really in the fiber, the fabric of life. But the weird thing is, we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later; none of us really believes this. We are still Cartesians — the children of Descartes — who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart; that the world is divided into subjects and objects; that there is nature on one side, culture on another. As soon as you start seeing things from the plant's point of view or the animal's point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that — is the idea that nature is opposed to culture, the idea that consciousness is everything — and that's another very important thing it does.Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness — which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness — is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. But, you know, there's a comedian who said, ""Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? Well, consciousness."" So when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools and they're just as interesting.I'll give you two examples, also from the garden: lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have — while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry. And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine. Their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at, and I think it's really the scandal of the Human Genome Project. You know, we went into it thinking, 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000. Just to give you grounds for comparison, rice: 35,000 genes. So who's the more sophisticated species? Well, we're all equally sophisticated. We've been evolving just as long, just along different paths. So, cure for self-importance, way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea. And that's really what I do as a writer, as a storyteller, is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically.Now, the other use of this is practical. And I'm going to take you to a farm right now, because I used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what I learned, in fact, is that we are all, now, being manipulated by corn. And the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today, to me, is the final triumph of corn over good sense. (Laughter) (Applause) It is part of corn's scheme for world domination. (Laughter) And you will see, the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we've decided ethanol is going to help us.So it helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. It's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want. Let me take you to a very different kind of farm.This is a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species' point of view are actually implemented, and I found it in a man. The farmer's name is Joel Salatin. And I spent a week as an apprentice on his farm, and I took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that I've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature. And that is this: the farm is called Polyface, which means ... the idea is he's got six different species of animals, as well as some plants, growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement.It's permaculture, those of you who know a little bit about this, such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the ... what else does he have? All the six different species — rabbits, actually — are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another. It's a very elaborate and beautiful dance, but I'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it, and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens, his laying hens. And I'll show you, if you take this approach, what you get, OK? And this is a lot more than growing food, as you'll see; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion, the Cartesian idea that either nature's winning or we're winning, and that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished.So, one day, cattle in a pen. The only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing: relatively new, hooked to a car battery; even I could carry a quarter-acre paddock, set it up in 15 minutes. Cows graze one day. They move, OK? They graze everything down, intensive grazing. He waits three days, and then we towed in something called the Eggmobile. The Eggmobile is a very rickety contraption — it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards — but it houses 350 chickens. He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank — clucking, gossiping as chickens will — and they make a beeline for the cow patties.And what they're doing is very interesting: they're digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies. And the reason he's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day, those larvae will hatch and he'll have a huge fly problem. But he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens' favorite form of protein.So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they're spreading the manure out. Very useful second ecosystem service. And third, while they're in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field. They then move out to the next one, and in the course of just a few weeks, the grass just enters this blaze of growth. And within four or five weeks, he can do it again. He can graze again, he can cut, he can bring in another species, like the lambs, or he can make hay for the winter.Now, I want you to just look really close up onto what's happened there. So, it's a very productive system. And what I need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef; 30,000 pounds of pork; 25,000 dozen eggs; 20,000 broilers; 1,000 turkeys; 1,000 rabbits — an immense amount of food.You know, you hear, ""Can organic feed the world?"" Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of ... again, give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness. Put that in play.But look at it from the point of view of the grass, now. What happens to the grass when you do this? When a ruminant grazes grass, the grass is cut from this height to this height, and it immediately does something very interesting. Any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio, and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy. So when they lose a lot of leaf mass, they shed roots; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die. And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them — the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria — and the result is new soil. This is how soil is created. It's created from the bottom up. This is how the prairies were built, the relationship between bison and grasses.And what I realized when I understood this — and if you ask Joel Salatin what he is, he'll tell you he's not a chicken farmer, he's not a sheep farmer, he's not a cattle rancher; he's a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species of such a system — is that, if you think about it, this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads, which is that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. More for us, less for nature. Here, all this food comes off this farm, and at the end of the season there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity.It's a remarkably hopeful thing to do. There are a lot of farmers doing this today. This is well beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system, more or less. And what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil, that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea — because there is no technology involved here except for those fences, which are so cheap they could be all over Africa in no time — that we can take the food we need from the Earth and actually heal the Earth in the process.This is a way to reanimate the world, and that's what's so exciting about this perspective. When we really begin to feel Darwin's insights in our bones, the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pollan_gives_a_plant_s_eye_view
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"I'm here to enlist you in helping reshape the story about how humans and other critters get things done. Here is the old story — we've already heard a little bit about it: biology is war in which only the fiercest survive; businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition;politics is about your side winning at all costs. But I think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge. It's a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines, in which cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role. And the central, but not all-important, role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room.I started thinking about the relationship between communication, media and collective action when I wrote ""Smart Mobs,"" and I found that when I finished the book, I kept thinking about it. In fact, if you look back, human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time. Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilizationin small family groups. Nomadic hunters bring down rabbits, gathering food. The form of wealth in those days was enough food to stay alive. But at some point, they banded together to hunt bigger game. And we don't know exactly how they did this, although they must have solved some collective action problems; it only makes sense that you can't hunt mastodons while you're fighting with the other groups.And again, we have no way of knowing, but it's clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged. More protein than a hunter's family could eat before it rotted. So that raised a social question that I believe must have driven new social forms. Did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families? And if so, how did they make arrangements? Again, we can't know, but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication must have been involved.Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.Not too much longer after that, the alphabet was invented. And this powerful tool was really reserved, for thousands of years, for the elite administrators (Laughter) who kept track of accounts for the empires. And then another communication technology enabled new media: the printing press came along, and within decades, millions of people became literate. And from literate populations, new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge, religion and politics. We saw scientific revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before. Not created by the printing press, but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy. And again, new forms of wealth emerged.Now, commerce is ancient. Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.Now of course, the enabling technologies are based on the Internet, and in the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a marketplace. Evolution is speeding up. More recently, that power is untethering and leaping off the desktops, and very, very quickly, we're going to see a significant proportion, if not the majority of the human race, walking around holding, carrying or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be broadband today.Now, when I started looking into collective action, the considerable literature on it is based on what sociologists call ""social dilemmas."" And there are a couple of mythic narratives of social dilemmas. I'm going to talk briefly about two of them: the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons.Now, when I talked about this with Kevin Kelly, he assured me that everybody in this audience pretty much knows the details of the prisoner's dilemma, so I'm just going to go over that very, very quickly. If you have more questions about it, ask Kevin Kelly later. (Laughter)The prisoner's dilemma is actually a story that's overlaid on a mathematical matrix that came out of the game theory in the early years of thinking about nuclear war: two players who couldn't trust each other. Let me just say that every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner's dilemma. Person with the goods, person with the money, because they can't trust each other, are not going to exchange. Neither one wants to be the first one or they're going to get the sucker's payoff, but both lose, of course, because they don't get what they want. If they could only agree, if they could only turn a prisoner's dilemma into a different payoff matrix called an assurance game, they could proceed.Twenty years ago, Robert Axelrod used the prisoner's dilemma as a probe of the biological question: if we are here because our ancestors were such fierce competitors, how does cooperation exist at all? He started a computer tournament for people to submit prisoner's dilemma strategies and discovered, much to his surprise, that a very, very simple strategy won — it won the first tournament, and even after everyone knew it won, it won the second tournament — that's known as tit for tat.Another economic game that may not be as well known as the prisoner's dilemma is the ultimatum game, and it's also a very interesting probe of our assumptions about the way people make economic transactions. Here's how the game is played: there are two players; they've never played the game before, they will not play the game again, they don't know each other, and they are, in fact, in separate rooms. First player is offered a hundred dollars and is asked to propose a split: 50/50, 90/10, whatever that player wants to propose. The second player either accepts the split — both players are paid and the game is over — or rejects the split — neither player is paid and the game is over.Now, the fundamental basis of neoclassical economics would tell you it's irrational to reject a dollar because someone you don't know in another room is going to get 99. Yet in thousands of trials with American and European and Japanese students, a significant percentage would reject any offer that's not close to 50/50. And although they were screened and didn't know about the game and had never played the game before, proposers seemed to innately know this because the average proposal was surprisingly close to 50/50.Now, the interesting part comes in more recently when anthropologists began taking this game to other cultures and discovered, to their surprise, that slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the Amazon or nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia or a dozen different cultures — each had radically different ideas of what is fair. Which suggests that instead of there being an innate sense of fairness, that somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions, whether we know that or not.The other major narrative of social dilemmas is the tragedy of the commons. Garrett Hardin used it to talk about overpopulation in the late 1960s. He used the example of a common grazing area in which each person by simply maximizing their own flock led to overgrazing and the depletion of the resource. He had the rather gloomy conclusion that humans will inevitably despoil any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it.Now, Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, in 1990 asked the interesting question that any good scientist should ask, which is: is it really true that humans will always despoil commons? So she went out and looked at what data she could find. She looked at thousands of cases of humans sharing watersheds, forestry resources, fisheries, and discovered that yes, in case after case, humans destroyed the commons that they depended on. But she also found many instances in which people escaped the prisoner's dilemma; in fact, the tragedy of the commons is a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma. And she said that people are only prisoners if they consider themselves to be. They escape by creating institutions for collective action. And she discovered, I think most interestingly, that among those institutions that worked, there were a number of common design principles, and those principles seem to be missing from those institutions that don't work.I'm moving very quickly over a number of disciplines. In biology, the notions of symbiosis, group selection, evolutionary psychology are contested, to be sure. But there is really no longer any major debate over the fact that cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology, from the level of the cell to the level of the ecology. And again, our notions of individuals as economic beings have been overturned. Rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor. In fact, people will act to punish cheaters, even at a cost to themselves.And most recently, neurophysiological measures have shown that people who punish cheaters in economic games show activity in the reward centers of their brain. Which led one scientist to declare that altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together.Now, I've been talking about how new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped create new economic forms. Commerce is ancient. Markets are very old. Capitalism is fairly recent; socialism emerged as a reaction to that. And yet we see very little talk about how the next form may be emerging. Jim Surowiecki briefly mentioned Yochai Benkler's paper about open source, pointing to a new form of production: peer-to-peer production. I simply want you to keep in mind that if in the past, new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth, we may be moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different from previous ones.Very briefly, let's look at some businesses. IBM, as you know, HP, Sun — some of the most fierce competitors in the IT world are open sourcing their software, are providing portfolios of patents for the commons. Eli Lilly — in, again, the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical world — has created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems. Toyota, instead of treating its suppliers as a marketplace, treats them as a network and trains them to produce better, even though they are also training them to produce better for their competitors. Now none of these companies are doing this out of altruism; they're doing it because they're learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest.Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them. Google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through AdSense. Amazon has opened its Application Programming Interface to 60,000 developers, countless Amazon shops. They're enriching others, not out of altruism but as a way of enriching themselves. eBay solved the prisoner's dilemma and created a market where none would have existed by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner's dilemma game into an assurance game.Instead of, ""Neither of us can trust each other, so we have to make suboptimal moves,"" it's, ""You prove to me that you are trustworthy and I will cooperate."" Wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopedia with a million and a half articles in 200 languages in just a couple of years.We've seen that ThinkCycle has enabled NGOs in developing countries to put up problems to be solved by design students around the world, including something that's being used for tsunami relief right now: it's a mechanism for rehydrating cholera victims that's so simple to use it, illiterates can be trained to use it. BitTorrent turns every downloader into an uploader, making the system more efficient the more it is used.Millions of people have contributed their desktop computers when they're not using them to link together through the Internet into supercomputing collectives that help solve the protein folding problem for medical researchers — that's Folding@home at Stanford — to crack codes, to search for life in outer space.I don't think we know enough yet. I don't think we've even begun to discover what the basic principles are, but I think we can begin to think about them. And I don't have enough time to talk about all of them, but think about self-interest. This is all about self-interest that adds up to more. In El Salvador, both sides that withdrew from their civil war took moves that had been proven to mirror a prisoner's dilemma strategy.In the U.S., in the Philippines, in Kenya, around the world, citizens have self-organized political protests and get out the vote campaigns using mobile devices and SMS. Is an Apollo Project of cooperation possible? A transdisciplinary study of cooperation? I believe that the payoff would be very big. I think we need to begin developing maps of this territory so that we can talk about it across disciplines. And I am not saying that understanding cooperation is going to cause us to be better people — and sometimes people cooperate to do bad things — but I will remind you that a few hundred years ago, people saw their loved ones die from diseases they thought were caused by sin or foreigners or evil spirits.Descartes said we need an entire new way of thinking. When the scientific method provided that new way of thinking and biology showed that microorganisms caused disease, suffering was alleviated. What forms of suffering could be alleviated, what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation? I don't think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen; it's going to require effort. So I enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration
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"(Music)(Applause)Thank you. Ooh, I'm like, ""Phew, phew, calm down. Get back into my body now."" (Laughter)Usually when I play out, the first thing that happens is people scream out, ""What's she doing?!"" I'll play at these rock shows, be on stage standing completely still, and they're like, ""What's she doing?! What's she doing?!"" And then I'll kind of be like — (Vvvwow!) — and then they're like, ""Whoa!"" (Laughter)I'm sure you're trying to figure out, ""Well, how does this thing work?"" Well, what I'm doing is controlling the pitch with my left hand. See, the closer I get to this antenna, the higher the note gets — (Portamento) — and you can get it really low. And with this hand I'm controlling the volume, so the further away my right hand gets, the louder it gets. (Tones) So basically, with both of your hands you're controlling pitch and volume and kind of trying to create the illusion that you're doing separate notes, when really it's continuously going ... (Flourish ... Beep) (Laughter)Sometimes I startle myself: I'll forget that I have it on, and I'll lean over to pick up something, and then it goes like — (Blip) — ""Oh!"" And it's like a funny sound effect that follows you around if you don't turn the thing off. (Laughter)Maybe we'll go into the next tune, because I totally lost where this is going. We're going to do a song by David Mash called ""Listen: the Words Are Gone,"" and maybe I'll have words come back into me afterwards if I can relax.(Music)(Applause)So, I'm trying to think of some of the questions that are commonly asked; there are so many. And ... Well, I guess I could tell you a little of the history of the theremin. It was invented around the 1920s, and the inventor, Léon Theremin — he also was a musician besides an inventor — he came up with the idea for making the theremin, I think, when he was working on some shortwave radios. And there'd be that sound in the signal — it's like (Screeching) — and he thought, ""Oh, what if I could control that sound and turn it into an instrument, because there are pitches in it."" And so somehow through developing that, he eventually came to make the theremin the way it is now.And a lot of times, even kids nowadays, they'll make reference to a theremin by going, ""Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo,"" because in the '50s it was used in the sci-fi horror movies, that sound that's like ... (Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo) (Laughter) It's kind of a funny, goofy sound to do.And sometimes if I have too much coffee, then my vibrato gets out of hand. You're really sensitive to your body and its functions when you're behind this thing. You have to stay so still if you want to have the most control. It reminds me of the balancing act earlier on — what Michael was doing — because you're fighting so hard to keep the balance with what you're playing with and stay in tune, and at the same time you don't want to focus so much on being in tune all the time; you want to be feeling the music.And then also, you're trying to stay very, very, very still because little movements with other parts of your body will affect the pitch, or sometimes if you're holding a low note — (Tone rising out of key) — and breathing will make it ...(Laughter)If I pass out on the next song ... (Laughter)I think of it almost like like a yoga instrument because it makes you so aware of every little crazy thing your body is doing, or just aware of what you don't want it to be doing while you're playing; you don't want to have any sudden movements. And if I go to a club and play a gig, people are like, ""Here, have some drinks on us!"" And it's like, ""Well, I'm about to go on soon; I don't want to be like — (Teetering tones) — you know?""It really does reflect the mood that you're in also, if you're ... it's similar to being a vocalist, except instead of it coming out of your throat, you're controlling it just in the air and you don't really have a point of reference; you're always relying on your ears and adjusting constantly. You just have to always adjust to what's happening and realize you'll have bummer notes come here and there and listen to it, adjust it, and just move on, or else you'll get too tied up and go crazy. Like me.I think we will play another tune now. I'm going to do ""Lush Life."" It's one of my favorite tunes to play.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pamelia_kurstin_plays_the_theremin
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"I'm a historian. Steve told us about the future of little technology; I'm going to show you some of the past of big technology. This was a project to build a 4,000-ton nuclear bomb-propelled spaceship and go to Saturn and Jupiter. This took place in my childhood, 1957-65. It was deeply classified. I'm going to show you some stuff that not only has not been declassified, but has now been reclassified.(Laughter)If all goes well, next year I'll be back, and I'll have a lot more to show you, and if all doesn't go well, I'll be in jail, like Wen Ho Lee.(Laughter)So, this ship was basically the size of the Marriott Hotel, a little taller and a little bigger. And one of the people who worked on it at the beginning was my father, Freeman, there in the middle. That's me and my sister, Esther, who's a frequent TEDster. I didn't like nuclear bomb-propelled spaceships. I mean, I thought it was a great idea, but I started building kayaks. So we had a few kayaks. Just so you know that I am not Dr. Strangelove.But all the time I was out there doing these strange kayak voyages in odd, beautiful parts of this planet, I always thought in the back of my mind about Project Orion, and how my father and his friends were going to build these big ships. They were actually going to go — Ted Taylor, who led the project, was going to take his children. My father was not going to take his children, that was one of the reasons we sort of had a falling out for a few years.(Laughter)The project began in '57 at General Atomics there, that's right on the coast at La Jolla. Look at that central building right in the middle of the picture. That's the 130-foot diameter library. That is exactly the size of the base of the spaceship. So put that library at the bottom of that ship — that's how big the thing was going to be. It would take two or three thousand bombs. The people who worked on it were a lot of the Los Alamos people who had done the hydrogen bomb work. It was the first project funded by ARPA. That's the contract where ARPA gave the first million dollars to get this thing started. ""Spaceship project officially begun. Job waiting for you. Dyson."" That's July '58. Two days later, the space traveler's manifesto explaining why — just like we heard yesterday — why we need to go into space: ""... trips to satellites of the outer planets. August 20, 1958.""These are the statistics of what would be the good places to go and stop. Some of the sizes of the ships, ranging all the way up to ship mass of 8 million tons. So that was the outer extreme. Here was version two: 2,000 bombs. These are five-kiloton yield bombs, about the size of small Volkswagens; it would take 800 to get into orbit. Here we see a 10,000-ton ship will deliver 1,300 tons to Saturn and back — essentially, a five-year trip. Possible departure dates: October 1960 to February 1967. These are trajectories going to Mars. All this was done by hand, with slide rules. The little Orion ship, and what it would take to do what Orion does with chemicals: you have a ship the size of the Empire State Building.NASA had no interest; they tried to kill the project. The people who supported it were the Air Force, which meant that it was all secret. And that's why when you get something declassified, that's what it looks like. Military weapon versions that carried hydrogen bombs that could destroy half the planet. There's another version there that sends retaliatory strikes at the Soviet Union. This is the really secret stuff: how to get directed energy explosions. So you're sending the energy of a nuclear explosion — not like just a stick of dynamite, but you're directing it at the ship. And this is still a very active subject. It's quite dangerous, but I believe it's better to have dangerous things in the open than think you're going to keep them secret.This is what happened at 600 microseconds. The Air Force started to build smaller models and actually started doing this. The guys in La Jolla said, ""We've got to get started now."" They built a high-explosive propelled model. These are stills from film footage that was saved by someone who was supposed to destroy it but didn't, and kept it in their basement for the last 40 years. So, these are three-pound charges of C4; that's about 10 times what the guy had in his shoes.(Laughter)This is Ed Day putting — So each of these coffee cans has three pounds of C4 in it. They're building a system that ejects these at quarter-second intervals. That's my dad in the sport coat there, holding the briefcase. So, they had a lot of fun doing this. But no children were allowed; my dad could tell me he was building a spaceship and going to go to Saturn, but he could not say anything more about it.So all my life I have wanted to find this stuff out, and spent the last four years tracking these old guys down. These are stills from the video. Jeff Bezos kindly, yesterday, said he'll put this video up on the Amazon site — some little clip of it.(Applause)So, thanks to him. They got quite serious about the engineering of this. The size of that mass, for us, is really large technology in a way we're never going to go back to. If you saw the 1959 — this is what it would feel like in the passenger compartment; that's acceleration profile.(Laughter)And pulse-system yield: we're looking at 20-kiloton yield for an effective thrust of 10 million newtons. Well, here we have a little problem, the radiation doses at the crew station: 700 rads per shot.(Laughter)Fission yields during development: they were hoping to get clean bombs; they didn't. Eyeburn: this is what happens to the people in Miami who are looking up.(Laughter)Personnel compartment noise: that's not too bad; it's very low frequencies, it's basically like these sub-woofers. And now we have ground-hazard assessments when you have a blow-up on the pad. Finally, at the very end in 1964, NASA steps in and says, ""OK, we'll support a feasibility study for a small version that could be launched with Saturn Vs in sections and pieced together.""So this is what NASA did, getting an eight-man version that would go to Mars. They liked it because the guys could kind of live there and be like, ""It's like living in a submarine."" This is crew compartment. It switches, so what's upside down is right side up when you go to artificial gravity mode. The scientists were still going to go along; they would take seven astronauts and seven scientists. This is a 20-man version for going to Jupiter: bunks, storm cellars, exercise room. You know, it was going to be a nice, long trip.The Air Force version: here we have a military version. This is the kind of stuff that's not been declassified, just that people managed to sneak home and after, you know, on their deathbed, basically, gave me that. The sort of artist conceptions. These are basically PowerPoint presentations given to the Air Force 40 years ago. Look at the little guys there outside the vehicle. And one part of NASA was interested in it, but the headquarters in NASA, they killed the project. So finally, at the end, we can see the thing followed its sort of design path right up to 1965, and then all those paths came to a halt.Results: none. This project is hereby terminated. So that's the end.All I can say in closing is: we heard yesterday that one of the 10 bad things that could happen to us is an asteroid with our name on it. And one of the bad things that could happen to NASA is if that asteroid shows up with our name on it nine months out, and everybody says, ""Well, what are we going to do?"" And Orion is really one of the only, if not the only, off-the-shelf technologies that could do something.(Laughter)So I'm going to tell you the good news and the bad news. The good news is that NASA has a small, secret contingency-plan division that is looking at this, trying to keep knowledge of Orion preserved in the event of such a misfortune. Maybe keep a few little bombs of plutonium on the side. That's the good news. The bad news is, when I got in contact with these people to try and get some documents from them, they went crazy because I had all this stuff that they don't have, and NASA purchased 1,759 pages of this stuff from me. So that's the state we're at; it's not very good.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion
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"So, what I'd like to talk about is something that was very dear to Kahn's heart, which is: how do we discover what is really particular about a project? How do you discover the uniqueness of a project as unique as a person? Because it seems to me that finding this uniqueness has to do with dealing with the whole force of globalization; that the particular is central to finding the uniqueness of place and the uniqueness of a program in a building.And so I'll take you to Wichita, Kansas, where I was asked some years ago to do a science museum on a site, right downtown by the river. And I thought the secret of the site was to make the building of the river, part of the river. Unfortunately, though, the site was separated from the river by McLean Boulevard so I suggested, ""Let's reroute McLean,"" and that gave birth instantly to Friends of McLean Boulevard. (Laughter) And it took six months to reroute it.The first image I showed the building committee was this astronomic observatory of Jantar Mantar in Jaipur because I talked about what makes a building a building of science. And it seemed to me that this structure — complex, rich and yet totally rational: it's an instrument — had something to do with science, and somehow a building for science should be different and unique and speak of that. And so my first sketch after I left was to say, ""Let's cut the channel and make an island and make an island building."" And I got all excited and came back, and they sort of looked at me in dismay and said, ""An island? This used to be an island — Ackerman Island — and we filled in the channel during the Depression to create jobs."" (Laughter)And so the process began and they said, ""You can't put it all on an island; some of it has to be on the mainland because we don't want to turn our back to the community."" And there emerged a design: the galleries sort of forming an island and you could walk through them or on the roof. And there were all kinds of exciting features: you could come in through the landside buildings, walk through the galleries into playgrounds in the landscape. If you were cheap you could walk on top of a bridge to the roof, peek in the exhibits and then get totally seduced, come back and pay the five dollars admission. (Laughter) And the client was happy — well, sort of happy because we were four million dollars over the budget, but essentially happy.But I was still troubled, and I was troubled because I felt this was capricious. It was complex, but there was something capricious about its complexity. It was, what I would say, compositional complexity, and I felt that if I had to fulfill what I talked about — a building for science — there had to be some kind of a generating idea, some kind of a generating geometry. And this gave birth to the idea of having toroidal generating geometry, one with its center deep in the earth for the landside building and a toroid with its center in the sky for the island building. A toroid, for those who don't know, is the surface of a doughnut or, for some of us, a bagel. And out of this idea started spinning off many, many kinds of variations of different plans and possibilities, and then the plan itself evolved in relationship to the exhibits, and you see the intersection of the plan with the toroidal geometry.And finally the building — this is the model. And when there were complaints about budget, I said, ""Well, it's worth doing the island because you get twice for your money: reflections."" And here's the building as it opened, with a channel overlooking downtown, and as seen from downtown. And the bike route's going right through the building, so those traveling the river would see the exhibits and be drawn to the building. The toroidal geometry made for a very efficient building: every beam in this building is the same radius, all laminated wood. Every wall, every concrete wall is resisting the stresses and supporting the building. Every piece of the building works. These are the galleries with the light coming in through the skylights, and at night, and on opening day.Going back to 1976. (Applause) In 1976, I was asked to design a children's memorial museum in a Holocaust museum in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which you see here the campus. I was asked to do a building, and I was given all the artifacts of clothing and drawings. And I felt very troubled. I worked on it for months and I couldn't deal with it because I felt people were coming out of the historic museum, they are totally saturated with information and to see yet another museum with information, it would make them just unable to digest. And so I made a counter-proposal:I said, ""No building."" There was a cave on the site; we tunnel into the hill, descend through the rock into an underground chamber. There's an anteroom with photographs of children who perished and then you come into a large space. There is a single candle flickering in the center; by an arrangement of reflective glasses, it reflects into infinity in all directions. You walk through the space, a voice reads the names, ages and place of birth of the children. This voice does not repeat for six months. And then you descend to light and to the north and to life.Well, they said, ""People won't understand, they'll think it's a discotheque. You can't do that."" And they shelved the project. And it sat there for 10 years, and then one day Abe Spiegel from Los Angeles, who had lost his three-year-old son at Auschwitz, came, saw the model, wrote the check and it got built 10 years later.So, many years after that in 1998, I was on one of my monthly trips to Jerusalem and I got a call from the foreign ministry saying, ""We've got the Chief Minister of the Punjab here. He is on a state visit. We took him on a visit to Yad Vashem, we took him to the children's memorial; he was extremely moved. He's demanding to meet the architect. Could you come down and meet him in Tel Aviv?"" And I went down and Chief Minister Badal said to me, ""We Sikhs have suffered a great deal, as you have Jews. I was very moved by what I saw today. We are going to build our national museum to tell the story of our people; we're about to embark on that. I'd like you to come and design it.""And so, you know, it's one of those things that you don't take too seriously. But two weeks later, I was in this little town, Anandpur Sahib, outside Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, and the temple and also next to it the fortress that the last guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind, died in as he wrote the Khalsa, which is their holy scripture. And I got to work and they took me somewhere down there, nine kilometers away from the town and the temple, and said, ""That's where we have chosen the location.""And I said, ""This just doesn't make any sense. The pilgrims come here by the hundreds of thousands — they're not going to get in trucks and buses and go down there. Let's get back to the town and walk to the site."" And I recommended they do it right there, on that hill and this hill, and bridge all the way into the town. And, as things are a little easier in India, the site was purchased within a week and we were working. (Laughter)And my proposal was to split the museum into two — the permanent exhibits at one end, the auditorium, library, and changing exhibitions on the other — to flood the valley into a series of water gardens and to link it all to the fort and to the downtown. And the structures rise from the sand cliffs — they're built in concrete and sandstones; the roofs are stainless steel — they are facing south and reflecting light towards the temple itself, pedestrians crisscross from one side to the other. And as you come from the north, it is all masonry growing out of the sand cliffs as you come from the Himalayas and evoking the tradition of the fortress.And then I went away for four months and there was going to be groundbreaking. And I came back and, lo and behold, the little model I'd left behind had been built ten times bigger for public display on site and ... the bridge was built! (Laughter) Within the working drawings! And half a million people gathered for the celebrations; you can see them on the site itself as the foundations are beginning. I was renamed Safdie Singh. And there it is under construction; there are 1,800 workers at work and it will be finished in two years.Back to Yad Vashem three years ago. After all this episode began, Yad Vashem decided to rebuild completely the historic museum because now Washington was built — the Holocaust Museum in Washington — and that museum is so much more comprehensive in terms of information. And Yad Vashem needs to deal with three million visitors a year at this point. They said, ""Let's rebuild the museum."" But of course, the Sikhs might give you a job on a platter — the Jews make it hard: international competition, phase one, phase two, phase three. (Laughter)And again, I felt kind of uncomfortable with the notion that a building the size of the Washington building — 50,000 square feet — will sit on that fragile hill and that we will go into galleries — rooms with doors and sort of familiar rooms — to tell the story of the Holocaust. And I proposed that we cut through the mountain. That was my first sketch. Just cut the whole museum through the mountain — enter from one side of the mountain, come out on the other side of the mountain — and then bring light through the mountain into the chambers.And here you see the model: a reception building and some underground parking. You cross a bridge, you enter this triangular room, 60 feet high, which cuts right into the hill and extends right through as you go towards the north. And all of it, then, all the galleries are underground, and you see the openings for the light. And at night, just one line of light cuts through the mountain, which is a skylight on top of that triangle. And all the galleries, as you move through them and so on, are below grade. And there are chambers carved in the rock — concrete walls, stone, the natural rock when possible — with the light shafts. This is actually a Spanish quarry, which sort of inspired the kind of spaces that these galleries could be. And then, coming towards the north, it opens up: it bursts out of the mountain into, again, a view of light and of the city and of the Jerusalem hills.I'd like to conclude with a project I've been working on for two months. It's the headquarters for the Institute of Peace in Washington, the U.S. Institute of Peace. The site chosen is across from the Lincoln Memorial; you see it there directly on the Mall. It's the last building on the Mall, on access of the Roosevelt Bridge that comes in from Virginia. That too was a competition, and it is something I'm just beginning to work on.But one recognized the kind of uniqueness of the site. If it were to be anywhere in Washington, it would be an office building, a conference center, a place for negotiating peace and so on — all of which the building is — but by virtue of the choice of putting it on the Mall and by the Lincoln Memorial, this becomes the structure that is the symbol of peace on the Mall. And that was a lot of heat to deal with.The first sketch recognizes that the building is many spaces — spaces where research goes on, conference centers, a public building because it will be a museum devoted to peacemaking — and these are the drawings that we submitted for the competition, the plans showing the spaces which radiate outwards from the entry. You see the structure as, in the sequence of structures on the Mall, very transparent and inviting and looking in. And then as you enter it again, looking in all directions towards the city. And what I felt about that building is that it really was a building that had to do with a lightness of being — to quote Kundera — that it had to do with whiteness, it had to do with a certain dynamic quality and it had to do with optimism. And this is where it is; it's sort of evolving.Studies for the structure of the roof, which demands maybe new materials: how to make it white, how to make it translucent, how to make it glowing, how to make it not capricious. And here studying, in three dimensions, how to give some kind, again, of order, a structure; not something you feel you could just change because you stop the design of that particular process. And so it goes.I'd like to conclude by saying something ... (Applause) I'd like to conclude by relating all of what I've said to the term ""beauty."" And I know it is not a fashionable term these days, and certainly not fashionable in the discourse of architectural schools, but it seems to me that all this, in one way or the other, is a search for beauty. Beauty in the most profound sense of fit. I have a quote that I like by a morphologist, 1917, Theodore Cook, who said, ""Beauty connotes humanity. We call a natural object beautiful because we see that its form expresses fitness, the perfect fulfillment of function."" Well, I would have said the perfect fulfillment of purpose. Nevertheless, beauty as the kind of fit; something that tells us that all the forces that have to do with our natural environment have been fulfilled — and our human environment — for that.Twenty years ago, in a conference Richard and I were at together, I wrote a poem, which seems to me to still hold for me today. ""He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity. He who seeks order shall find gratification. He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed. He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression. He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance. Arrogance is incompatible with nature. Through nature, the nature of the universe and the nature of man, we shall seek truth. If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.""Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/moshe_safdie_on_building_uniqueness
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"♫ Jill Sobule: At a conference in Monterey by the big, big jellyfish tank, ♫♫ I first saw you and I got so shy. ♫♫ You see, I was a little paranoid 'cause I might have been high. ♫♫ And I hadn't done that in ages and I won't do that again. ♫♫ But that's another story. ♫♫ Loved you forever and I've been a big fan, ♫♫ the one-woman shows, I even rented ""Pat."" ♫♫ I got enough nerve to come up to you, ♫♫ but little did I know one year later we'd be doing this show. ♫♫ I sing. Julia Sweeney: I tell stories. Together: The Jill and Julia Show. ♫♫ Sobule: Sometimes it works. Sweeney: Sometimes it doesn't. ♫♫ Together: The Jill and Julia Show. ♫♫ Sweeney: At a conference in Monterey next to the big, big jellyfish tank, ♫♫ I first saw you and I wasn't so shy. ♫I made a beeline for you and told you what a huge fan I was ever since I was writing that pilot for Fox, and Wendy and I wanted you to do the theme song. And then the pilot didn't go and I was so sad, but I kept remaining a fan of yours. And then when I went through that big, horrible breakup with Carl and I couldn't get off the couch, I listened to your song, ♫ ""Now That I Don't Have You,"" ♫ over and over and over and over again. And I can't believe you're here and that I'm meeting you here at TED. And also, I can't believe that we're eating sushi in front of the fish tank, which, personally, I think is really inappropriate. (Laughter) (Applause)And little did I know that one year later ... ♫ we'd be doing this show. ♫♫ Sobule: I sing. Sweeney: I tell stories. Together: The Jill and Julia Show. ♫Sobule: Hey, they asked us back! Sweeney: Can you stand it?!♫ Together: The Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia Show. ♫♫ Sobule: Why are all our heroes so imperfect? ♫♫ Why do they always bring me down? ♫♫ Why are all our heroes so imperfect? ♫♫ Statue in the park has lost his crown. ♫♫ William Faulkner, drunk and depressed. ♫ Sweeney: Mmm.♫ Dorothy Parker, mean, drunk and depressed. ♫ Sweeney: I know.♫ And that guy, ""Seven Years in Tibet,"" turned out to be a Nazi. ♫ Sweeney: Yeah.♫ Founding fathers all had slaves. ♫ Sweeney: I know.♫ The explorers slaughtered the braves. ♫ Sweeney: Horribly.♫ Sobule: The Old Testament God can be so petty. ♫Sweeney: Don't get me started on that. (Laughter)♫ Sobule: Paul McCartney, jealous of John, even more so now that he's gone. ♫♫ Dylan was so mean to Donovan in that movie. ♫♫ Pablo Picasso, cruel to his wives. ♫ Sweeney: Horrible.♫ Sobule: My favorite poets took their own lives. ♫♫ Orson Welles peaked at twenty-five, below before our eyes. ♫♫ And he sold bad wine. ♫♫ Together: Why are all our heroes so imperfect? Yeah ♫♫ Why do they always bring me down? ♫♫ Sobule: Heard Babe Ruth was full of malice. ♫ Sweeney: Oh.♫ Lewis Carroll I'm sure did Alice. ♫ Sweeney: What?!♫ Plato in the cave with those very young boys. ♫ Sweeney: Ooh...♫ Sobule: Hillary supported the war. ♫♫ Sweeney: Even Thomas Friedman supported the war. ♫ (Laughter)♫ Sobule: Colin Powell turned out to be ... Together: ... such a pussy. ♫ (Laughter) (Applause)♫ Sobule: William Faulkner, drunk and depressed, ♫♫ Tennessee Williams, drunk and depressed. ♫ Sweeney: Yeah.♫ Sobule: Take it, Julia. ♫Sweeney: Okay. Oprah was never necessarily a big hero of mine. I mean, I watch Oprah mostly when I'm home in Spokane visiting my mother. And to my mother, Oprah is a greater moral authority than the Pope, which is actually saying something because she's a devout Catholic. Anyway, I like Oprah — I like her girlfriendy-ness, I like her weight issues, I like how she's transformed talk television, I like how she's brought reading back to America — but there was something that happened the last two weeks that was ... I call it the Soon-Yi moment: it is the moment when I cannot continue supporting someone. And that was that she did two entire shows promoting that movie ""The Secret."" Do you guys know about that movie ""The Secret""? It makes ""What the Bleep Do We Know"" seem like a doctoral dissertation from Harvard on quantum mechanics — that's how bad it is. It makes ""The DaVinci Code"" seem like ""War and Peace."" That movie is so horrible. It promotes such awful pseudoscience. And the basic idea is that there's this law of attraction, and your thoughts have this vibrating energy that goes out into the universe and then you attract good things to happen to you. On a scientific basis, it's more than just ""Power of Positive Thinking"" — it has a horrible, horrible dark side. Like if you get ill, it's because you've just been thinking negative thoughts. Yeah, stuff like that was in the movie and she's promoting it. And all I'm saying is that I really wish that Murray Gell-Mann would go on Oprah and just explain to her that the law of attraction is, in fact, not a law. So that's what I have to say. (Laughter)(Applause)♫ Sobule: I sing. Sweeney: I tell stories. Together: The Jill and Julia Show. ♫♫ Sobule: Sometimes it works. Sweeney: Sometimes it doesn't. ♫♫ Together: The Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia Show. ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_jill_and_julia_show
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"Dan Holzman: Please throw out the beanbag chairs. Here we go.Barry Friedman: There are all kinds of high-tech chairs here today, but this is really, I think, when it reached its peak as far as ergonomics, comfort, design, flexibility ...DH: Now obviously, this is not something we do on our regular show; it's something we just kind of learned for this, so we're going to try. But can we have some inspirational music for the beanbag chairs?BF: Nice show, Daniel, nice show. You are the man! Nice show. Man, that was good! DH: Thank you. BF: You know, sometimes when people do those, they go all the way down. You actually just did that. (Laughter) That's the kind of extra effort that's gotten us where we are today ...DH: All right, let's show them something special.BF: ... without a MacArthur grant. Yeah, look at this. You know, all kinds of different ... TED is about invention, let's be honest. Right? DH: Yeah, it is.BF: Last night, Michael Moschen showed some juggling props he has invented and working on. Right now, Dan's going to show something he actually invented.DH: A type of juggling I actually invented, right after I saw another juggler do it.BF: Shut up. (Laughter)DH: And this is a small excerpt from a longer piece.(Laughter)(Applause)Folks, this is shaker cup juggling. It's not a showstopper but it certainly slows it down.BF: Oh yeah, it does. (Drum roll) BF: Oh, Daniel.(Applause)DH: One more? (Drum roll) Perfect. (Drum roll) Perfect. (Drum roll) BF: OK. DH: Oh! All right.(Applause)I'm now pushing my luck: I'm skipping right to six cups. In order to do six cups, I must have perfect control over three with my right hand. (Drum roll)BF: Also three with his left.DH: Perfect.(Laughter)And now, all six cups. Should I do it on the first try or should I miss once on purpose? (Laughter)BF: First try? Once on purpose?(Audience: Once on purpose!)DH: How about if I try first and then decide?BF: Good idea. (Laughter) Let's leave that. We'll leave that door open.(Laughter) (Applause)DH: He's looking at me.BF: That's all right, he does that. All right.DH: Oh! It's time for Richard's help. (Laughter) Oh, good. All right.BF: You know, over the years, every year at the conference, it's kind of become a tradition for us to do something dangerous with Richard. And we've always done something with the bullwhips in our act. It's funny, for years I did it with Daniel holding balloons. And then we thought, ""How stupid.""DH: Excuse me, could we work on the design of the microphone?BF: I think that's the next session.DH: Next session?BF: Yeah. And so we've actually found a way to incorporate Richard in this. He actually assumes more of the danger in this.DH: Please stand up, Richard. (Whip cracks)Oh, sorry. (Laughter)DH: Now Richard, please ... (Whip cracks)BF: OK, sorry.DH: Jesus Christ. Richard, please stand in front of me.Richard Wurman: Can I say something? BF: Sure.RW: In all past years I've rehearsed with them, the things that have happened to me — I have no idea what's going to happen and that's the truth.DH: All right, please stand here in front ... God, I hate that. Put your hands out like this, please.(Laughter)BF: No, come stay up with him. Dan used to actually hold them but now he's got you for protection. It's kind of neat. OK.(Laughter)DH: Wow, you've been working out.BF: No, shut up!(Laughter)Having a little bit of Richard time. That's nice, that's good. OK, here we go. Have him hold your wrist so I can ...DH: Please hold my wrist, will you. BF: Yeah, hold this a minute.There you go.(Laughter) OK.OK, hold on.RW: Hmmm.(Laughter)DH: First one.BF: All those mid-year phone calls are coming back to me now, Richard.(Laughter)DH: So Richard, what were we on the list? Like 1,020?(Laughter)What happened there?BF: I think we were just outside.DH: I don't get it. (Applause)(Laughter)DH: Sorry. BF: Having some bad flashbacks.RW: Do you want me to hold you or not? DH: Don't hold me that hard.BF: Here we go, I'm taking it. (Balloon pops) (Applause)DH: One more, one more.BF: We've got one more we're going to do.RW: Do I get to hold them?BF: You don't want to hold these, trust me.DH: Could you spread your legs a little bit?(Laughter)BF: Gloria, you want to do it? It's very cool.(Laughter)(Applause)(Laughter)One more try. Man, I don't want to get too close.(Laughter)Could you just push that?(Applause)DH: Wow! Boy!BF: That's cool. I always wanted to try that.(Laughter)DH: Let's jump this way, though. Now, we risked Richard's life, it's only fair we risk our own lives. So to do that, I will juggle these three razor-sharp sickles. And if that wasn't enough, and judging by your response, it's not ...(Laughter)DH: Wow! BF: Hoping for a little more build.DH: True. Barry ...BF: I'm going to run up behind him.DH: Leap over my shoulder.BF: Up and over his shoulders.DH: Grab the blades in mid-air, land right there in a pool of blood ...(Laughter)Still juggling. (Laughter) Impossible, you say?BF: Incredible, you say?DH: Why bother, you say?BF: Here we go.DH: Just do it juggler boys, you say?BF: This guy, this guy invented air. DH: I think so, that's right. Even the pencil.BF: He invented the pencil.DH: All right, we'll do this trick, but please remember it took us over 10 years to perfect.BF: Ten years to perfect, which you're about to see.DH: It's not that difficult, we just don't like to practice that much.BF: No, it's a hassle. Traveling too much. Actually, we will take a second to prove — this could be fake — that the blades are indeed razor-sharp.DH: Will someone please throw a small farm animal up onto the stage?(Laughter)Or a virgin for a sacrifice?BF: Anything?DH: Where's Gloria? (Laughter)BF: No, she's got ... farm animal.DH: Do you have a small farm animal? Just trying to play the odds. All right, here we go.BF: Over the top, over the top.DH: How you feeling, Barry? You feeling all right?BF: Yeah, it's all right.DH: Do you feel everything's OK? The atmosphere, the ...BF: Yeah, a little sketchy.DH: Everything up here's OK?BF: Yeah.DH: Then here we go.BF: This one's a little ... Who's doing the lights? Could you point that a little more directly into my eyeballs? Is that possible? (Laughter) I can still see a little.DH: And turn up the intensity; we're still pink in the middle. We went too far. (Laughter)BF: Yeah, it's too far. It's too much of a visual. The design of the body is a whole different thing.DH: Ready, Barry? BF: Over the top.DH: May we have our jumping music please? (Silence) May we have it a bit louder?(Laughter)BF: They're a good crew! Whoa!DH: Whoa, sorry. All right.BF: We're going on.DH: All right, we'll try again.BF: All right? Oh my gosh. Oh.DH: All right, here we go. Sorry about that.BF: I thought I had the hard part. OK.DH: Whenever you're ready.BF: There we go!(Applause)All right, get up! Come on and dance! DH: Dance, come on. BF: Come on and dance! Somebody dance! Come on!(Applause)Wow, wow, OK, stop. Weird, no one dances. We're two guys doing this. (Laughter) I think that's uncomfortable for everyone.DH: The French judge ...BF: One more quick thing.DH: The French judge gives it a 5.2.(Laughter)BF: Well, you know ...DH: There you go ... BF: Oh, yeah. Another one coming in.DH: Tell them about our bio and stuff.BF: Yeah. In our bio, some of you may have read that we've won two world juggling championships. And believe it or not, you don't win juggling champions for doing things with bullwhips or shaker cups. We're going to show you right now an excerpt from a routine that we used to wipe out the other juggling team competition.DH: That's right.BF: Good.DH: I know what you're thinking: other juggling teams must really suck.(Laughter)BF: Juggling's got a bad rap.DH: But wait, Barry, there's still one more club lying there by my foot. And look, it has a twin!BF: Shut up. (Laughter)DH: There's still one more by my foot. What do you want me to do with it?BF: Richard you tell him, it's your last year. (Laughter)DH: That's a pretty good setup, Richard.BF: Yeah, it's a good setup. That's a big setup.DH: You can't get any better than that. All right. What I will do: I will use my panther-like reflexes.BF: Nice.DH: I got that — to reach down and grab that club in my grip of steel.BF: Nice.DH: I touched it, Barry. That should be enough.BF: It's progress, that's the thing.(Laughter)DH: How about that? I'll do it again. Oh wait, it's on your side, Barry. And it's awfully windy over there.BF: It is, it's weird. You wouldn't think it would affect half the stage, but it is. It's weird. Watch this: what I'm going to do is slide the seventh one onto my foot.DH: Wow! What a great trick, Barry! Oh, look how it lies there. Oh, Barry, is there nothing you can't do?(Laughter)You are my hero. You're my Jim Shea, Jr. Too much Olympics.BF: From my foot, I'll attempt to kick the seventh club. Here we go.DH: Where, Barry? Where? Tell us, Barry. [Unclear] eagerly awaits your next syllable. What will it be? What gem of knowledge? What pearl of wisdom? Do you want to buy a vowel, Barry? Is that your final answer?BF: All right! You have to turn off the TV from time to time.DH: I do, I do. BF: From my foot, the kick up in the seven. DH: We will juggle seven.BF: From six to seven. DH: That's a world's record. BF: Really? DH: For us.BF: Yes.DH: Whenever you're ready there, big guy. Put your tongue away, Barry.BF: Oh, oh, whoa.(Applause)DH: Please, please stay seated. Stay seated. Thank you. Because now, to make this twice as difficult, we'll juggle the seven clubs back ...BF: Seven-club juggling.DH: ... to back.BF: Thank you, that's it.BF: Thank you guys!DH: Thank you very much!","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_raspyni_brothers_juggle_and_jest
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"My name is Joseph, a Member of Parliament in Kenya. Picture a Maasai village, and one evening, government soldiers come, surround the village and ask each elder to bring one boy to school. That's how I went to school — pretty much a government guy pointing a gun and told my father, ""You have to make a choice."" I walked very comfortably to this missionary school, that was run by an American missionary. The first thing the American missionary gave me was a candy. I had never in my life ever tasted candy. So I said to myself, with all these hundred other boys, this is where I belong.(Laughter) I stayed.When everybody else was dropping out. My family moved; we're nomads. It was a boarding school, I was seven — Every time it closed you had to travel to find them. 40-50 miles, it doesn't matter. You slept in the bush, but you kept going.And I stayed. I don't know why, but I did. All of a sudden I passed the national examination, found myself in a very beautiful high school in Kenya. And I finished high school. And just walking, I found a man who gave me a full scholarship to the United States. My mother still lived in a cow-dung hut, none of my brothers were going to school, and this man told me, ""Here, go.""I got a scholarship to St. Lawrence University, Upstate New York; finished that. And after that I went to Harvard Graduate School; finished that. Then I worked in DC a little bit: I wrote a book for National Geographic and taught U.S. history. And every time, I kept going back home, listening to their problems — sick people, people with no water, all this stuff — every time I go back to America, I kept thinking about them.Then one day, an elder gave me a story that went like this: long time ago, there was a big war between tribes. This specific tribe was really afraid of this other Luhya tribe. Every time, they sent scouts to make sure no one attacked them. So one day, the scouts came running and told the villagers, ""The enemies are coming. Only half an hour away, they'll be here."" So people scrambled, took their things and ready to go, move out. But there were two men: one man was blind, one man had no legs — he was born like that. The leader of the chiefs said, ""No, sorry. We can't take you. You'll slow us down. We have to flee our women and children, we have to run."" And they were left behind, waiting to die.But these two people worked something out. The blind man said, ""Look, I'm a very strong man but I can't see."" The man with no legs says, ""I can see as far as the end of the world, but I can't save myself from a cat, or whatever animals."" The blind man went down on his knees like this, and told the man with no legs to go over his back, and stood up. The man on top can see, the blind man can walk. These guys took off, followed the footsteps of the villagers until they found and passed them.So, this was told to me in a setup of elders. And it's a really poor area. I represent Northern Kenya: the most nomadic, remote areas you can even find. And that man told me, ""So, here you are. You've got a good education from America, you have a good life in America; what are you going to do for us? We want you to be our eyes, we'll give you the legs. We'll walk you, you lead us.""The opportunity came. I was always thinking about that: ""What can I do to help my people? Every time you go to an area where for 43 years of independence, we still don't have basic health facilities. A man has to be transported in a wheelbarrow 30 km for a hospital. No clean drinking water.So I said, ""I'm going to dedicate myself. I'm leaving America. I'm going to run for office."" Last June, I moved from America, ran in July election and won. And I came for them, and that's my goal.Right now I have in place, for the last nine months, a plan that in five years, every nomad will have clean drinking water. We're building dispensaries across that constituency. I'm asking my friends from America to help with bringing nurses or doctors to help us out. I'm trying to improve infrastructure. I'm using the knowledge I received from the United States and from my community to move them forward. I'm trying to develop homegrown solutions to our issues because people from outside can come and help us, but if we don't help ourselves, there's nothing to do.My plan right now as I continue with introducing students to different fields — some become doctors, some lawyers — we want to produce a comprehensive group of people, students who can come back and help us see a community grow that is in the middle of a huge economic recession.As I continue to be a Member of Parliament and as I continue listening to all of you talking about botany, health, democracy, new inventions, I'm hoping that one day in my own little community — which is 26,000 square km, maybe five times Rhode Island — with no roads, we'll be able to become a model to help others develop.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_lekuton_tells_a_parable_for_kenya
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"By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets. I love photography, I love rockets. I'm going to talk about a hobby that can scale and show you photos I've taken over the years with kids like these, that hopefully will grow up to love rocketry and eventually become a Richard Branson or Diamandis. My son designed a rocket that became stable, a golf ball rocket. I thought it was quite an interesting experiment in the principles of rocket science. And it flies straight as an arrow.Baking soda and vinegar. Night shots are beautiful, piercing the Big Dipper and the Milky Way. 2-stage rockets with video cameras on them, onboard computers logging their flights, rocket gliders that fly back to Earth. I use RockSim to simulate flights before they go to see if they'll break supersonic, then fly them with onboard computers to verify performance.To launch the big stuff, you go to the middle of nowhere: Black Rock Desert, where dangerous things happen. The boys and the rockets get bigger. They use motors used on cruise-missile boosters. They rumble the belly and leave even photographers in awe, watching the spectacle. These rockets use experimental motors like nitrous oxide. They use solid propellant most frequently. It's a strange kind of love.RocketMavericks.com with my photos, if you want to learn about this, participate, be a spectator. We had to call it Rocket Mavericks. This one was great, went to 100,000 feet — but didn't quite. Actually, it went 11 feet into solid clay and became a bunker-buster. It had to be dug out.Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them. Here was a drag race. At night you can see what happened in a second; in daytime, we call them land sharks. Sometimes they just explode before your eyes or come down supersonic.(Laughter)To take this shot, I did what I often do, which is go way beyond the pads, where none of the spectators are. And if we can run the video, I'll show you what it took to get this DreamWorks shot.(Video) Voices: Woo-hoo! Yeah. Nice.Steve Jurvetson: They realize the computer failed, they're yelling ""Deploy!"" (Video) Man: Oh, shit.SJ: This is when they realize everything's gone haywire.(Video) Man: It's going ballistic.SJ: I'll just be quiet.(Video) Woman: No! Come on, come on, come on.SJ: And that's me over there, taking photos the whole way. Things often go wrong. Some people watch this because of a NASCAR-like fascination with things bumping and grinding. Burning the parachute as it fell. That was last weekend. This guy went up, went supersonic, ripped the fin can off. The art sale in the sky. A burning metal hunk coming back. These things dropped down from above all through the weekend of rocket launch after rocket launch. It's a cadence you can't quite imagine. I try to capture the mishaps; it's a challenge in photography when these things take place in a fraction of a second.Why do it? For things like this: Gene from Alabama drives out there with this rocket he's built with X-ray sensors, video cameras, festooned with electronics. He succeeds getting to 100,000 feet, leaving the atmosphere, seeing a thin blue line of space.It is this breathtaking image — success, of course — that motivates us and motivates kids to follow and understand rocket science, understand the importance of physics and math and, in many ways, to have that awe at exploration of the frontiers of the unknown.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jurvetson_on_model_rocketry
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"Roy Gould: Less than a year from now, the world is going to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, which marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope. In a few months, the world is also going to celebrate the launch of a new invention from Microsoft Research, which I think is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago. It's called the WorldWide Telescope, and I want to thank TED and Microsoft for allowing me to bring it to your attention. And I want to urge you, when you get a chance, to give it a closer look at the TED Lab downstairs.The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe. It's going to change the way we do astronomy, it's going to change the way we teach astronomy and I think most importantly it's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe.If we were having this TED meeting in our grandparents' day, that might not be so big a claim. In 1920, for example, you weren't allowed to drink; if you were a woman, you weren't allowed to vote; and if you looked up at the stars and the Milky Way on a summer night, what you saw was thought to be the entire universe. In fact, the head of Harvard's observatory back then gave a great debate in which he argued that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe.Harvard was wrong, big time. (Laughter) Of course, we know today that galaxies extend far beyond our own galaxy. We can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe, all the way back in time, almost to the moment of the Big Bang itself. We can see across the entire spectrum of light, revealing worlds that had previously been invisible. We see these magnificent star nurseries, where nature has somehow arranged for just the right numbers and just the right sizes of stars to be born for life to arise. We see alien worlds, we see alien solar systems — 300 now, and still counting — and they're not like us. We see black holes at the heart of our galaxy, in the Milky Way, and elsewhere in the universe, where time itself seems to stand still. But until now, our view of the universe has been disconnected and fragmented, and I think that many of the marvelous stories that nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks. And that's changing.I want to just briefly mention three reasons why my colleagues and I, in astronomy and in education, are so excited about the WorldWide Telescope and why we think it's truly transformative. First, it enables you to experience the universe: the WorldWide Telescope, for me, is a kind of magic carpet that lets you navigate through the universe where you want to go. Second: you can tour the universe with astronomers as your guides. And I'm not talking here about just experts who are telling you what you're seeing, but really people who are passionate about the various nooks and crannies of the universe, who can share their enthusiasm and can make the universe a welcoming place. And third, you can create your own tours — you can share them with friends, you can create them with friends — and that's the part that I think I'm most excited about because I think that at heart, we are all storytellers. And in telling stories, each of us is going to understand the universe in our own way. We're going to have a personal universe. I think we're going to see a community of storytellers evolve and emerge.Before I introduce the person responsible for the WorldWide Telescope, I just want to leave you with this brief thought: when I ask people, ""How does the night sky make you feel?"" they often say, ""Oh, tiny. I feel tiny and insignificant."" Well, our gaze fills the universe. And thanks to the creators of the WorldWide Telescope, we can now start to have a dialogue with the universe. I think the WorldWide Telescope will convince you that we may be tiny, but we are truly, wonderfully significant. Thank you. (Applause)I can't tell you what a privilege it is to introduce Curtis Wong from Microsoft. (Applause)Curtis Wong: Thank you, Roy. So, what you're seeing here is a wonderful presentation, but it's one of the tours. And actually this tour is one that was created earlier. And the tours are all totally interactive, so that if I were to go somewhere ... you may be watching a tour and you can pause anywhere along the way, pull up other information — there are lots of Web and information sources about places you might want to go — you can zoom in, you can pull back out. The whole resources are there available for you.So, Microsoft — this is a project that — WorldWide Telescope is dedicated to Jim Gray, who's our colleague, and a lot of his work that he did is really what makes this project possible. It's a labor of love for us and our small team, and we really hope it will inspire kids to explore and learn about the universe. So basically, kids of all ages, like us.And so WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring. It'll be a free download — thank you, Craig Mundie — and it'll be available at the website WorldWideTelescope.org, which is something new. And so, what you've seen today is less than a fraction of one percent of what is in here, and in the TED Lab, we have a tour that was created by a six-year-old named Benjamin that will knock your socks off. (Laughter) So we'll see you there. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roy_gould_and_curtis_wong_preview_the_worldwide_telescope
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"A great way to start, I think, with my view of simplicity is to take a look at TED. Here you are, understanding why we're here, what's going on with no difficulty at all. The best A.I. in the planet would find it complex and confusing, and my little dog Watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point. (Laughter) He would have a great time. And of course, if you're a speaker here, like Hans Rosling, a speaker finds this complex, tricky. But in Hans Rosling's case, he had a secret weapon yesterday, literally, in his sword swallowing act. And I must say, I thought of quite a few objects that I might try to swallow today and finally gave up on, but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing.So Puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense, but that we're easily fooled. In fact, what Shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled, so we're actually looking forward to it. We go to magic shows in order to be fooled. And this makes many things fun, but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves.And our friend, Betty Edwards, the ""Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"" lady, shows these two tables to her drawing class and says, ""The problem you have with learning to draw is not that you can't move your hand, but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty. It's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what's there."" And to prove it, she says, ""The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you."" She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and ... Now having seen that — and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give — I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either.So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. They measure very, very carefully. And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size. And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, ""We see things not as they are, but as we are."" I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then, if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion.So if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are, then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here. It's a waking dream, and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history. And what that means: ""simple and understandable"" might not be actually simple or understandable, and things we think are ""complex"" might be made simple and understandable. Somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws. We can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel. The way I think of it is, we can't learn to see until we admit we're blind. Once you start down at this very humble level, then you can start finding ways to see things. And what's happened, over the last 400 years in particular, is that human beings have invented ""brainlets"" — little additional parts for our brain — made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways. And these are in the form of sensory apparatus — telescopes, microscopes — reasoning apparatus — various ways of thinking — and, most importantly, in the ability to change perspective on things.I'll talk about that a little bit. It's this change in perspective on what it is we think we're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history. And yet, it is not taught in any K through 12 curriculum in America that I'm aware of.So one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more. We like more. If we do more in a kind of a stupid way, the simplicity gets complex and, in fact, we can keep on doing it for a very long time. But Murray Gell-Mann yesterday talked about emergent properties; another name for them could be ""architecture"" as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious, non-simple ways of combining it. And in fact, what Murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature — of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar — all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish, and they're in violent motion. Those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world.But how simple? So, when I saw Roslings' Gapminder stuff a few years ago, I just thought it was the greatest thing I'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply. But then I had a thought of, ""Boy, maybe it's too simple."" And I put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side, and I found that they matched up very well. So the Roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what's important about the data.Whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell, as a former molecular biologist, I didn't like that at all. Not because it wasn't beautiful or anything, but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology, and that is: why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed? And what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous; they just swooped in the air and bound, and something happened. But in fact, those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second; they're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds; they're completely crowded together, they're jammed, they're bashing up against each other. And if you don't understand that in your mental model of this stuff, what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous, and I think that's exactly the wrong image for when you're trying to teach science.So, another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle. So a kid who's 14 in high school gets this version of the Pythagorean theorem, which is a truly subtle and interesting proof, but in fact it's not a good way to start learning about mathematics. So a more direct one, one that gives you more of the feeling of math, is something closer to Pythagoras' own proof, which goes like this: so here we have this triangle, and if we surround that C square with three more triangles and we copy that, notice that we can move those triangles down like this. And that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious ... and bingo. That is all you have to do. And this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the, literally, 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of Pythagoras' theorem that have been discovered.Now let's go to young children. This is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher, but was a natural mathematician. So she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician; she just had a feeling for math. And here are her six-year-olds, and she's got them making shapes out of a shape. So they pick a shape they like — like a diamond, or a square, or a triangle, or a trapezoid — and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape, and the next larger shape. You can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there.And what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project, and then something like science. So they had created these artifacts. Now she had them look at them and do this ... laborious, which I thought for a long time, until she explained to me was to slow them down so they'll think. So they're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up.But the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out. ""What have you noticed about what you did?"" And so six-year-old Lauren there noticed that the first one took one, and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one, the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one, and then the next one. She saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two, so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there. And she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six, where she wasn't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was, but then she was confident again. So that's what Lauren did.And then the teacher, Gillian Ishijima, had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor, and everybody went batshit: ""Holy shit! They're the same!"" No matter what the shapes were, the growth law is the same. And the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation, derived by six-year-olds. Well, that's pretty amazing. That isn't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds.So, let's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this. And so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do. I'm using the software that we're putting on the $100 laptop. So I'd like to draw a little car here — I'll just do this very quickly — and put a big tire on him. And I get a little object here and I can look inside this object, I'll call it a car. And here's a little behavior: car forward. Each time I click it, car turn. If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again, I just drag these guys out and set them going. And I can try steering the car here by ... See the car turn by five here? So what if I click this down to zero? It goes straight. That's a big revelation for nine-year-olds. Make it go in the other direction. But of course, that's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car, so the kids want to do a steering wheel; so they draw a steering wheel. And we'll call this a wheel. See this wheel's heading here? If I turn this wheel, you can see that number over there going minus and positive. That's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here, and now I can steer the car with the steering wheel.And it's interesting. You know how much trouble the children have with variables, but by learning it this way, in a situated fashion, they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it. And we can reflect here the way Gillian Ishijima did. So if you look at the little script here, the speed is always going to be 30. We're going to move the car according to that over and over again. And I'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things; they're evenly spaced because they're 30 apart. And what if I do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying, ""OK, I'm going to increase the speed by two each time, and then I'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time? What do I get there?"" We get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration.So how do the children do science?(Video) Teacher: [Choose] objects that you think will fall to the Earth at the same time.Student 1: Ooh, this is nice.Teacher: Do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing. Who's got the apple?Alan Kay: They've got little stopwatches. Student 2: What did you get? What did you get? AK: Stopwatches aren't accurate enough.Student 3: 0.99 seconds.Teacher: So put ""sponge ball"" ...Student 4l: [I decided to] do the shot put and the sponge ball because they're two totally different weights, and if you drop them at the same time, maybe they'll drop at the same speed.Teacher: Drop. Class: Whoa!AK: So obviously, Aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because, of course, he didn't bother doing the experiment, and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas. And it was not until Galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child, only 400 years ago. We get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase.Now, what if we want to look at this more closely? We can take a movie of what's going on, but even if we single stepped this movie, it's tricky to see what's going on. And so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up. So when the children see this, they say, ""Ah! Acceleration,"" remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways, and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is. So what I'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image, about a fifth of a second later, like that. And they're getting faster and faster each time, and if I stack these guys up, then we see the differences; the increase in the speed is constant. And they say, ""Oh, yeah. Constant acceleration. We've done that already."" And how shall we look and verify that we actually have it? So you can't tell much from just making the ball drop there, but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time, we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model.Galileo, by the way, did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute. I pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a Newton and the apple type story, but it's a great story. And I thought I would do just one thing on the $100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here. So once you have gravity, here's this — increase the speed by something, increase the ship's speed. If I start the little game here that the kids have done, it'll crash the space ship. But if I oppose gravity, here we go ... Oops! (Laughter) One more. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, OK?I guess the best way to end this is with two quotes: Marshall McLuhan said, ""Children are the messages that we send to the future,"" but in fact, if you think of it, children are the future we send to the future. Forget about messages; children are the future, and children in the first and second world and, most especially, in the third world need mentors. And this summer, we're going to build five million of these $100 laptops, and maybe 50 million next year. But we couldn't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life. That means that we, once again, have a thing where we can put technology out, but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new iChat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing. I believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface, and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars. It sounds like a lot, but it is literally 18 minutes of what we're spending in Iraq — we're spending 8 billion dollars a month; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars — so this is actually cheap. And Einstein said, ""Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler."" Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_about_ideas
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"You know, I've talked about some of these projects before — about the human genome and what that might mean, and discovering new sets of genes. We're actually starting at a new point: we've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life.So, we've always been trying to ask big questions. ""What is life?"" is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. We've tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years; when we sequenced the human genome, it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. Now we're trying to ask, ""Can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe?""This is the map of a small organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory, and we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome. We're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here. When we look at its metabolic map, it's relatively simple compared to ours — trust me, this is simple — but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time, it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell. So we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions. And so we started down the road of: can we synthesize a chromosome? Can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before? And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome? A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material. So, our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace.Our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing, and our latest point would put it on, now, an exponential curve. We started this over 15 years ago. It took several stages, in fact, starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments. But it turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA — 30 to 50 letters in length — and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. So we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors.And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information of the genome of phi X174. It's a small virus that kills bacteria. We designed the pieces, went through our error correction and had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters. The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria, and the bacteria started to read this genetic code, made the viral particles. The viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the E. coli. I was talking to the oil industry recently and I said they clearly understood that model.(Laughter)They laughed more than you guys are. (Laughter)And so, we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system. But we wanted to go much larger: we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome — it's over 580,000 letters of genetic code — so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are. Design is critical, and if you're starting with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really accurate. When we first sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs. We actually found, on resequencing it, 30 errors; had we used that original sequence, it never would have been able to be booted up. Part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together. We design unique elements into this.You may have read that we put watermarks in. Think of this: we have a four-letter genetic code — A, C, G and T. Triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids, such that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids. So we can use the genetic code to write out words, sentences, thoughts. Initially, all we did was autograph it. Some people were disappointed there was not poetry. We designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together. And we started making pieces, starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters, put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces, then put sets of those going up to 72,000.At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute. We're trying to get to the point of automation. So, this looks like a basketball playoff. When we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs, they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli — it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology — and so we turned to other mechanisms. We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair DNA that can put pieces together. Here's an example of it: there's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation.You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart. Twelve to 24 hours later, it put it back together exactly as it was before. We have thousands of organisms that can do this. These organisms can be totally desiccated; they can live in a vacuum. I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment. In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there.Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes, actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in; yeast puts them together automatically. This is not an electron micrograph; this is just a regular photomicrograph. It's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope. These are pictures over about a six-second period.So, this is the publication we had just a short while ago. This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code; it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure. It's over 300 million molecular weight. If we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing, it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code. Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this? Obviously, with a virus it's pretty simple; it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria. It's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves: you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one, and that's what you've all heard about with cloning. With bacteria and Archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell, but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We purified a chromosome from one microbial species — roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice — we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome, we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins, and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell — and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here. The new chromosome went into the cell. In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went, but we tried to design the process a little bit further.This is a major mechanism of evolution right here. We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology.There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one; the chromosome we put in does. It got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material, chewed it up, and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome. It turned blue because of the genes we put in it. And with a very short period of time, all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell. All the proteins changed, the membranes changed; when we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in.So, this may sound like genomic alchemy, but we can, by moving the software of DNA around, change things quite dramatically. Now I've argued, this is not genesis; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution. And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design.Why do this? I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. We're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years. To put it in context for myself: I was born in 1946. There are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946; within 40 years, there'll be four. We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine. We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion-plus barrels of oil — that's a hundred million barrels a day. When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it's going to be a huge challenge. Then of course, there's all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere.We now, from our discovery around the world, have a database with about 20 million genes, and I like to think of these as the design components of the future. The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that. We're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination. We now have techniques, because of these rapid methods of synthesis, to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics. We have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day. When you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals, new vaccines, we can just with a small team, do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science. And it's just standard selection: we can select for viability, chemical or fuel production, vaccine production, etc.This is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer. You know, we don't know necessarily what it'll look like: we know exactly what their genetic code looks like. We're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels. You've seen recently, corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment. We have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar, to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol.But the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock, and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road. And we think we'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months. Sunlight and CO2 is one method ... (Applause) but in our discovery around the world, we have all kinds of other methods.This is an organism we described in 1996. It lives in the deep ocean, about a mile and a half deep, almost at boiling-water temperatures. It takes CO2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source. We're looking to see if we can take captured CO2, which can easily be piped to sites, convert that CO2 back into fuel to drive this process.So, in a short period of time, we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of ""What is life?"" We truly, you know, have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry —(Laughter) (Applause)Yeah. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? —(Laughter)become a major source of energy ... But also, we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines. You've seen this year with flu; we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine. I think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance. Here's what the future may begin to look like with changing, now, the evolutionary tree, speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria, Archaea and, eventually, eukaryotes. We're a ways away from improving people: our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life
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"In this rather long sort of marathon presentation, I've tried to break it up into three parts: the first being a whole lot of examples on how it can be a little bit more pleasurable to deal with a computer and really address the qualities of the human interface. And these will be some simple design qualities and they will also be some qualities of, if you will, the intelligence of interaction. Then the second part will really just be examples of new technologies — new media falling very much into that mold. Again, I will go through them as fast as possible. And then the last one will be some examples I've been able to collect, which I think illustrate this at least as best I can, in the world of entertainment. People have this belief — and I share most of it — that we will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. But then you think, ""My God! What a terrible image you get when you look at still pictures on TV."" Well, it doesn't have to be terrible. And that is a slide taken from a TV set and it was pre-processed to be very sympathetic to the TV medium, and it absolutely looks beautiful.Well, what's happened? How did people get into this mess? Where you are now, all of a sudden, sitting in front of personal computers and video text — teletext systems, and somewhat horrified by what you see on the screen? Well, you have to remember that TV was designed to be looked at eight times the distance of the diagonal. So you get a 13-inch, 19-inch, whatever, TV, and then you should multiply that by eight and that's the distance you should sit away from the TV set. Now we've put people 18 inches in front of a TV, and all the artifacts that none of the original designers expected to be seen, all of a sudden, are staring you in the face: the shadow mask, the scan lines, all of that. And they can be treated very easily; there are actually ways of getting rid of them, there are actually ways of just making absolutely beautiful pictures. I'm talking here a little bit about display technologies.Let me talk about how you might input information. And my favorite example is always fingers. I'm very interested in touch-sensitive displays. High-tech, high-touch. Isn't that what some of you said? It's certainly a very important medium for input, and a lot of people think that fingers are a very low-resolution sort of stylus for inputting to a display. In fact, they're not: it's really a very, very high-resolution input medium — you have to just do it twice, you have to touch the screen and then rotate your finger slightly — and you can move a cursor with great accuracy. And so when you see on the market these systems that have just a few light emitting diodes on the side and are very low resolution, it's nice that they exist because it still is better than nothing. But it, in some sense, misses the point: namely, that fingers are a very, very high-resolution input medium. Now, what are some of the other advantages? Well, the one advantage is that you don't have to pick them up, and people don't realize how important that is — not having to pick up your fingers to use them. (Laughter)When you think for a second of the mouse on Macintosh — and I will not criticize the mouse too much — when you're typing — what you have — you want to now put something — first of all, you've got to find the mouse. You have to probably stop. Maybe not come to a grinding halt, but you've got to sort of find that mouse. Then you find the mouse, and you're going to have to wiggle it a little bit to see where the cursor is on the screen. And then when you finally see where it is, then you've got to move it to get the cursor over there, and then — ""Bang"" — you've got to hit a button or do whatever. That's four separate steps versus typing and then touching and typing and just doing it all in one motion — or one-and-a-half, depending on how you want to count. Again, what I'm trying to do is just illustrate the kinds of problems that I think face the designers of new computer systems and entertainment systems and educational systems from the perspective of the quality of that interface.And another advantage, of course, of using fingers is you have 10 of them. And we have never known how to do this technically, so this slide is a fake slide. We never succeeded in using ten fingers, but there are certain things you can do, obviously, with more than one-finger input, which is rather fascinating. What we did stumble across was something ... Again, which is typical of the computer field, is when you have a bug that you can't get rid of you turn it into a feature. And maybe ... (Laughter) maybe a mouse is a new kind of bug. But the bug in our case was in touch-sensitive displays: we wanted to be able to draw — you know, rub your finger across the screen to input continuous points — and there was just too much friction created between your finger and the glass — if glass was the substrate, which it usually is.So we found that that actually was a feature in the sense you could build a pressure-sensitive display. And when you touch it with your finger, you can actually, then, introduce all the forces on the face of that screen, and that actually has a certain amount of value. Let me see if I can load another disc and show you, quickly, an example. Now, imagine a screen, which is not only touch-sensitive now, it's pressure-sensitive. And it's pressure-sensitive to the forces both in the plane of the screen — X, Y, and Z at least in one direction; we couldn't figure out how to come in the other direction. But let me get rid of the slide, and let's see if this comes on. OK. So there is the pressure-sensitive display in operation. The person's just, if you will, pushing on the screen to make a curve. But this is the interesting part.I want to stop it for a second because the movie is very badly made. And the particular display was built about six years ago, and when we moved from one room to another room, a rather large person sat on it and it got destroyed. So all we have is this record. (Laughter) But imagine that screen having lots of objects on it and the person has touched an object — one of N — like he did there, and then pushed on it. Now, imagine a program where some of those objects are physically heavy and some are light: one is an anvil on a fuzzy rug and the other one is a ping-pong ball on a sheet of glass. And when you touch it, you have to really push very hard to move that anvil across the screen, and yet you touch the ping-pong ball very lightly and it just scoots across the screen. And what you can do — oops, I didn't mean to do that — what you can do is actually feed back to the user the feeling of the physical properties. So again, they don't have to be weight; they could be a general trying to move troops, and he's got to move an aircraft carrier versus a little boat. In fact, they funded it for that very reason.(Laughter)The whole notion, then, is one that at the interface there are physical properties in that transducer — in this case it's pressure and touches — that allow you to present things to the user that you could never present before. So it's not simply looking at the quality or, if you will, the luxury of that interface, but it's actually looking at the idea of presenting things that previously couldn't be presented before. I want to move on to another example, which is one of a different sort, where we're trying to use computer and video disc technology now to come up with a new kind of book. Here, the idea is that you're going to take this book, if you will, and it's going to come alive. You're going to sort of breathe life into it. We are so used to doing monologues. Filmmakers, for example, are the experts in monologue making: you make a film and it has a well-formed beginning, middle and end, and in some sense the art of it is that. And you then say, ""There's an opportunity for making conversational movies."" Well, what does that mean? And it sort of nibbles at the core of the whole profession and all the assumptions of that medium. So, book writing is the same thing.What I'll show you very quickly is a new kind of book where it is mixed now with ... all sorts of things live in there, but you have to keep a few things in mind. One is that this book knows about itself. Each frame of the movie has information about itself. So it knows, or at least there is computer-readable information in the medium itself. It's just not a static movie frame. That's one thing. The other is that you have to realize that it is a random access medium, and you can, in fact, branch and expand and elaborate and shrink. And here — again, my favorite example — is the cookbook, the ""Larousse Gastronomique."" And I think I use the example all too often, but it's a great one because there is a classic ending in that little encyclopedia-style cookbook that tells you how to do something like penguin, and you get to the end of the recipe and it says, ""Cook until done."" Now, that would be, if you will, the top green track, which doesn't mean too much. But you might have to elaborate for me or for somebody who isn't an expert, and say, ""Cook at 380 degrees for 45 minutes."" And then for a real beginner, you would go down even further and elaborate more — say, ""Open the oven, preheat, wait for the light to go out, open the door, don't leave it open too long, put the penguin in and shut the door ..."" (Laughter) whatever. And that's a much more elaborate one than you dribble back.That's one kind of use of random access. And the other is where you want to explain the same thing in different ways. If you're in a classroom situation and somebody asks a question, the last thing you do is repeat what you just said. You try and think of a different way of saying the same thing, or if you know the particular student and that student's cognitive style, then you might say it in a way that you think would have a good impedance match with that student. There are all sorts of techniques you will use — and again, this is a different kind of branching. So, what I will show you is ... it's a rather boring book, but I'm afraid sometimes you have to do boring books because your sponsors aren't necessarily interested in fiction and entertainment. And this is a book on how to repair a transmission. Now, I don't even know what vintage the transmission is, but let me just show you very quickly some of it, and we'll move on.(Video) Narrator: And continue to get descriptions for each of these chapters. Nicholas Negroponte: Now, this is his table of contents. Just a picture of the transmission, and as you rub your finger across the transmission it highlights the various parts.Narrator: When I find a chapter that I want to see, I just touch the text and the system will format pages for me to read. The words or phrases that are lit up in red are glossary words, so I can get a different definition by just touching the word, and the definition appears, superimposed over the illustration.NN: This is about the oil pan, or the oil filter and all that. This is relatively important because it sets the page ...Narrator: This is another example of a page with glossary words highlighted in red. I can get a definition of these words just by touching them, and the definition will appear in the illustration corner. I can get back to the illustration, but in this case it's not a single frame, but it's actually a movie of someone coming into the frame and doing the repair that's described in the text. The two-headed slider is a speed control that allows me to watch the movie at various speeds, in forward or reverse. And the movie is displayed as a full frame movie. I can go back to the beginning ... and play the movie at full speed. Here's another step-by-step procedure, only in this case —NN: Okay, this movie is ... Everybody's heard of sound-sync movies — this is text-sync movies, so as the movie plays, the text gets highlighted. We highlight the text as we go through the movie. Repairman: ... Not too far out. Front poles, preferably. Don't loosen them too far. If you loosen them too far, you'll have a big mess. NN: I suspect that some of you might not even understand that language.(Laughter)OK. I'm at the third and last part of this, which I said I would make an attempt to at least give you some examples that may be more directly related to the world of entertainment. And of course, good education has got to be good entertainment, so my first example will be drawn from a very recent experiment that we've been doing — in this case, in Senegal — where we have tried to use personal computers as a pedagogical medium. But not as teaching machines at all; the whole notion is to use this as an instrument where there is a complete reversal of roles — the child is, if you will, the teacher and the machine is the student — and the art of computer programming is a vehicle that sort of approximates thinking about thinking. But teaching kids programming per se is utterly irrelevant. And there are just a few slides I want to go through,but there's a story I'd like to tell. And that was when, before we did this in any developing countries — we're doing it, in fact, in three developing countries right now: Pakistan, Colombia and Senegal — we did it in some pretty rough areas of New York City. And one child, whose name I've forgotten, was about seven or eight years old, absolutely considered mentally handicapped — couldn't read, didn't even make it in the lowest section of the school's classes — and was pretty much not in school, though physically there. But did hang around the, quote, ""computer room,"" where there were quite a few computers, and learned this particular language called Logo — and learned it with great ease and found it a lot of fun, it was very interesting. And one day, by chance, some visitors from the NIE came by in their double-breasted suits looking at this setup, and none of the children who were normally there, except for this one child, were there.He was, and he said, ""Let me show you how this works,"" and they got an absolutely ingenuous, wonderful description of Logo. And the child was just zipping right through it, showing them all sorts of things until they asked him how to do something which he couldn't explain and so he flipped through the manual, found the explanation and typed the command and got it to do what they asked. They were delighted, and by the time it was time to go see the principal, whom they'd actually come to see — not the computer room — they went upstairs and they said, ""This is absolutely remarkable! That child was very articulate and showed us and even dealt with the things he couldn't do automatically with that manual. It was just absolutely fantastic.""The principal said, ""There's a dreadful mistake, because that child can't read. And you obviously have been hoodwinked or you've talked about somebody else."" And they all got up and they all went downstairs and the child was still there. And they did something very intelligent: they asked the child, ""Can you read?"" And the child said, ""No, I can't."" And then they said, ""But wait a minute. You just looked through that manual and you found ... "" and he said, ""Oh, but that's not reading."" And so they said, ""Well, what's reading then?"" He says, ""Well, reading is this junk they give me in little books to read. It's absolutely irrelevant, (Laughter) and I get nothing for it. But here, with a little bit of effort I get a lot of return.""And it really meant something to the child. The child read beautifully, it turned out, and was really very competent. So it actually meant something. And that story has many other anecdotes that are similar, but wow. The key to the future of computers in education is right there, and it is: when does it mean something to a child? There is a myth, and it truly is a myth: we believe — and I'm sure a lot of you believe in this room — that it is harder to read and write than it is to learn how to speak. And it's not, but we think speech — ""My God, little children pick it up somehow, and by the age of two they're doing a mediocre job, and by three and four they're speaking reasonably well. And yet you've got to go to school to learn how to read, and you have to sit in a classroom and somebody has to teach you. Hence, it must be harder."" Well, it's not harder. What the truth is is that speaking has great value to a child; the child can get a great deal by talking to you.Reading and writing is utterly useless. There is no reason for a child to read and write except blind faith, and that it's going to help you. (Laughter) So what happens is you go to school and people say, ""Just believe me, you're going to like it. You're going to like reading,"" and just read and read. On the other hand, you give a kid — a three-year-old kid — a computer and they type a little command and — Poof! — something happens. And all of a sudden ... You may not call that reading and writing, but a certain bit of typing and reading stuff on the screen has a huge payoff, and it's a lot of fun. And in fact, it's a powerful educational instrument. Well, in Senegal we found that this was the traditional classroom: 120 kids — three per desk — one teacher, a little bit of chalk. This student was one of our first students, and it's the girl on the left leaning with her chalkboard, and she came ... within two days — I want to show you the program she wrote, and remember her hairstyle. And that is the program she made.That's what meant something to her, is doing the hair pattern, and actually did it within two days — an hour each day — and found it was, to her, absolutely the most meaningful piece ... But rooted in that, little did she know how much knowledge she was acquiring about geometry and just math and logic and all the rest. And again, I could talk for three hours about this subject. I will come to my last example and then quit. And my last example — as some of my former colleagues, whom I see in the room, can imagine what it will be. Yes, it is. It's our work — that was a while ago, and it still is my favorite project — of teleconferencing. And the reason it remains a favorite project is that we were asked to do a teleconferencing system where you had the following situation: you had five people at five different sites — they were known people — and you had to have these people in teleconference, such that each one was utterly convinced that the other four were physically present. Now, that is sufficiently zany that we would, obviously, jump to the bait, and we did. And the fact that we knew the people — we had to take a page out of the history of Walt Disney — we actually went so far as to build CRTs in the shapes of the people's faces. So if I wanted to call my friend Peter Sprague on the phone, my secretary would get his head out and bring it and set it on the desk,(Laughter)and that would be the TV used for the occasion. And it's uncanny: there's no way I can explain to you the amount of eye contact you get with that physical face projected on a 3D CRT of that sort. The next thing that we had to do is to persuade them that there needed to be spatial correspondence, which is straightforward, but again, it's something that didn't fall naturally out of a telecommunications or computing style of thinking; it was a very, if you will, architectural or spatial concept. And that was to recognize that when you sit around the table, the actual location of the people becomes rather important. And when somebody gets up, in fact, to go answer a phone or use a bathroom or something, the empty seat becomes, if you will, that person. And you point frequently to the empty seat and you say, ""He or she wouldn't agree,"" and the empty chair is that person and the spatiality is crucial. So we said, ""Well, these will be on round tables and the order around the table had to be the same, so that at my site, I would be, if you will, real and then at each other's site you'd have these plastic heads. And the plastic heads, sometimes you want to project them. And there are a number of schemes, which I don't want to dwell on,but this is the one that we finally used where we projected onto rear screen material that was molded in the face — literally in the face of the person. And I'll show you one more slide, where this is actually made from something called a solid photograph and is the screen. Now, we track, on the person's head, the head motions — so we transmit with a video the head positions — and so this head moves in about two axes. So if I, all of a sudden, turn to the person to my left and start talking to that person, then at the person to my right's site, he'll see these two plastic heads talking to each other. And then if that person interrupts, then those two heads may turn. And it really is reconstructing, quite accurately, teleconferencing.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_in_1984_makes_5_predictions
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"I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion?So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, ""What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?""So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day, but then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain.(Groaning, laughter)So this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities. Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy.Assistant: It has been.(Laughter)Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about ""right here, right now."" Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.My left hemisphere, our left hemisphere, is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, ""Hey, you've got to remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning."" It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, ""I am. I am.""And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me ""I am,"" I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me — and then it released me. And then it just gripped me — and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, ""OK, I'll just start my normal routine.""So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, ""That's very peculiar."" And I looked down at my body and I thought, ""Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing."" And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perception, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, ""OK. You muscles, you've got to contract. You muscles, you relax.""And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy — energy.And I'm asking myself, ""What is wrong with me? What is going on?"" And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, ""Hey! We've got a problem! We've got to get some help."" And I'm going, ""Ahh! I've got a problem!""(Laughter)So it's like, ""OK, I've got a problem."" But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness — and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.So here I am in this space, and my job, and any stress related to my job — it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those — they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! (Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria — euphoria. It was beautiful.And again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, ""Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help."" And I'm thinking, ""I've got to get help. I've got to focus."" So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, ""I've got to get to work. Can I drive?""And in that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, ""Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke!"" And the next thing my brain says to me is, Wow! This is so cool!(Laughter)This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?""(Laughter)And then it crosses my mind, ""But I'm a very busy woman!""(Laughter)""I don't have time for a stroke!"" So I'm like, ""OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I've got to call help. I've got to call work."" I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have.So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, ""Yes, I've already dialed that number.""Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, ""Woo woo woo woo."" (Laughter)(Laughter)And I think to myself, ""Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!""(Laughter)And so I say to him — clear in my mind, I say to him: ""This is Jill! I need help!"" And what comes out of my voice is, ""Woo woo woo woo woo."" I'm thinking, ""Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever."" So I couldn't know — I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help.And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just I felt my spirit surrender.And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition.When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.But then I realized, ""But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana."" And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres — and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in, and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the ""we"" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight
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"I'm going to go right into the slides. And all I'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that I do just very straight stuff. And my ideas are — in my head, anyway — they're very logical and relate to what's going on and problem solving for clients. I either convince clients at the end that I solve their problems, or I really do solve their problems, because usually they seem to like it.Let me go right into the slides. Can you turn off the light? Down. I like to be in the dark. I don't want you to see what I'm doing up here.(Laughter)Anyway, I did this house in Santa Monica, and it got a lot of notoriety. In fact, it appeared in a porno comic book, which is the slide on the right.(Laughter)This is in Venice. I just show it because I want you to know I'm concerned about context. On the left-hand side, I had the context of those little houses, and I tried to build a building that fit into that context. When people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird, and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they're photographed or seen in that space. And then, once I deal with the context, I then try to make a place that's comfortable and private and fairly serene, as I hope you'll find that slide on the right.And then I did a law school for Loyola in downtown L.A. I was concerned about making a place for the study of law. And we continue to work with this client. The building on the right at the top is now under construction. The garage on the right — the gray structure — will be torn down, finally, and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we've created, this campus. And it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place. They wanted a sense of place. And so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown, in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into. And it was my theory, or my point of view, that one didn't upstage the neighborhood — one made accommodations. I tried to be inclusive, to include the buildings in the neighborhood, whether they were buildings I liked or not.In the '60s I started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in Bloomingdale's. We even made flooring, walls and everything, out of cardboard. And the success of it threw me for a loop. I couldn't deal with the success of furniture — I wasn't secure enough as an architect — and so I closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like.(Laughter)So, nobody would like this. And it was in this, preliminary to these pieces of furniture, that Ricky and I worked on furniture by the slice. And after we failed, I just kept failing.(Laughter)The piece on the left — and that ultimately led to the piece on the right — happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket. And I put a piece of tape around it, as you see there, and realized you could sit on it, and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on. So, it was an accidental discovery.I got into fish.(Laughter)I mean, the story I tell is that I got mad at postmodernism — at po-mo — and said that fish were 500 million years earlier than man, and if you're going to go back, we might as well go back to the beginning. And so I started making these funny things. And they started to have a life of their own and got bigger — as the one glass at the Walker. And then, I sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what I was learning about the form of the fish and the movement. And a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it — accidental, again — it was an intuitive kind of thing, and I just kept going with it, and made this proposal for a building, which was only a proposal.I did this building in Japan. I was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed. And I love sake and Kobe and all that stuff. And after I got — I was really drunk — I was asked to do some sketches on napkins.(Laughter)And I made some sketches on napkins — little boxes and Morandi-like things that I used to do. And the client said, ""Why no fish?"" And so I made a drawing with a fish, and I left Japan. Three weeks later, I received a complete set of drawings saying we'd won the competition.(Laughter)Now, it's hard to do. It's hard to translate a fish form, because they're so beautiful — perfect — into a building or object like this. And Oldenburg, who I work with a little once in a while, told me I couldn't do it, and so that made it even more exciting. But he was right — I couldn't do the tail. I started to get the head OK, but the tail I couldn't do. It was pretty hard. The thing on the right is a snake form, a ziggurat. And I put them together, and you walk between them. It was a dialog with the context again. Now, if you saw a picture of this as it was published in Architectural Record — they didn't show the context, so you would think, ""God, what a pushy guy this is."" But a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant. Couldn't find it. So ...(Laughter)As for craft and technology and all those things that you've all been talking about, I was thrown for a complete loop. This was built in six months. The way we sent drawings to Japan: we used the magic computer in Michigan that does carved models, and we used to make foam models, which that thing scanned. We made the drawings of the fish and the scales. And when I got there, everything was perfect — except the tail. So, I decided to cut off the head and the tail.And I made the object on the left for my show at the Walker. And it's one of the nicest pieces I've ever made, I think. And then Jay Chiat, a friend and client, asked me to do his headquarters building in L.A. For reasons we don't want to talk about, it got delayed. Toxic waste, I guess, is the key clue to that one. And so we built a temporary building — I'm getting good at temporary — and we put a conference room in that's a fish.And, finally, Jay dragged me to my hometown, Toronto, Canada. And there is a story — it's a real story — about my grandmother buying a carp on Thursday, bringing it home, putting it in the bathtub when I was a kid. I played with it in the evening. When I went to sleep, the next day it wasn't there. And the next night, we had gefilte fish.(Laughter)And so I set up this interior for Jay's offices and I made a pedestal for a sculpture. And he didn't buy a sculpture, so I made one. I went around Toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother's, and I put the fish in. It was a joke.(Laughter)I play with funny people like [Claes] Oldenburg. We've been friends for a long time. And we've started to work on things. A few years ago, we did a performance piece in Venice, Italy, called ""Il Corso del Coltello"" — the Swiss Army knife. And most of the imagery is —(Laughter)Claes', but those two little boys are my sons, and they were Claes' assistants in the play. He was the Swiss Army knife. He was a souvenir salesman who always wanted to be a painter, and I was Frankie P. Toronto. P for Palladio. Dressed up like the AT&T building by Claes —(Laughter)with a fish hat. The highlight of the performance was at the end. This beautiful object, the Swiss Army knife, which I get credit for participating in. And I can tell you — it's totally an Oldenburg. I had nothing to do with it. The only thing I did was, I made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal, because I love sailing.(Laughter)We made it into a sailing craft.I've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing. I do it because it's a curious thing in the culture, when things are made in such great quantities, absorbed in such great quantities, and there's so much denial about them. People hate it. And I'm fascinated with that, which, like the paper furniture — it's one of those materials. And I'm always drawn to that. And so I did a lot of dirty things with chain link, which nobody will forgive me for. But Claes made homage to it in the Loyola Law School. And that chain link is really expensive. It's in perspective and everything.And then we did a camp together for children with cancer. And you can see, we started making a building together. Of course, the milk can is his. But we were trying to collide our ideas, to put objects next to each other. Like a Morandi — like the little bottles — composing them like a still life. And it seemed to work as a way to put he and I together.Then Jay Chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in Venice, and I started with this three-piece thing, and you entered in the middle. And Jay asked me what I was going to do with the piece in the middle. And he pushed that. And one day I had a — oh, well, the other way. I had the binoculars from Claes, and I put them there, and I could never get rid of them after that. Oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal. It made my building look sick. And it was this interaction between that kind of, up-the-ante stuff that became pretty interesting. It led to the building on the left. And I still think the Time magazine picture will be of the binoculars, you know, leaving out the — what the hell.I use a lot of metal in my work, and I have a hard time connecting with the craft. The whole thing about my house, the whole use of rough carpentry and everything, was the frustration with the crafts available. I said, ""If I can't get the craft that I want, I'll use the craft I can get."" There were plenty of models for that, in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials. I went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture. And it was all of one material, and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls. The metalworkers, for the most part, do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff. I was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the metalworkers' unions of America and Canada in Washington, and I did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings, etc. etc. And it's working very well to have these people, these craftsmen, interested in it. I just tell the stories. It's a way of connecting, at least, with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture.The metal continued into a building — Herman Miller, in Sacramento. And it's just a complex of factory buildings. And Herman Miller has this philosophy of having a place — a people place. I mean, it's kind of a trite thing to say, but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be, where the people would come and where the people working would interact. So it's out in the middle of nowhere, and you approach it. It's copper and galvanize. I used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge, so it would buckle. I spent a lot of time undoing Richard Meier's aesthetic. Everybody's trying to get the panels perfect, and I always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy. And they end up looking like stone. This is the central area. There's a ramp.And that little dome in there is a building by Stanley Tigerman. Stanley was instrumental in my getting this job. And when I was awarded the contract I, at the very beginning, asked the client if they would let Stanley do a cameo piece with me. Because these were ideas that we were talking about, building things next to each other, making — it's all about [a] metaphor for a city, maybe. And so Stanley did the little dome thing. And we did it over the phone and by fax. He would send me a fax and show me something. He'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower. I told him, ""No, no, that's too ongepotchket. I don't want the tower."" So he came back with a simpler building, but he put some funny details on it, and he moved it closer to my building. And so I decided to put him in a depression. I put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in. And so then he put two bridges — this all happened on the fax, going back and forth over a couple of weeks' period. And he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it. And so then I put this big billboard behind it. And I call it, ""David and Goliath."" And that's my cafeteria.In Boston, we had that old building on the left. It was a very prominent building off the freeway, and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of — I thought — the language of the neighborhood, which had these cornices, projecting cornices. Mine got a little exuberant, but I used lead copper, which is a beautiful material, and it turns green in 100 years. Instead of, like, copper in 10 or 15. We redid the side of the building and re-proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space. And it surprised both Boston and myself that we got it approved, because they have very strict kind of design guideline, and they wouldn't normally think I would fit them. The detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building.In Barcelona, on Las Ramblas for some film festival, I did the Hollywood sign going and coming, made a building out of it, and they built it. I flew in one night and took this picture. But they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me.And then more metal and some chain link in Santa Monica — a little shopping center.And this is a laser laboratory at the University of Iowa, in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back. It's the support labs, which, by some coincidence, required no windows. And the shape fit perfectly. I just joined the points. In the curved part there's all the mechanical equipment. That solid wall behind it is a pipe chase — a pipe canyon — and so it was an opportunity that I seized, because I didn't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form. It gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it.This is a small house somewhere. They've been building it so long I don't remember where it is. It's in the West Valley. And we started with the stream and built the house along the stream — dammed it up to make a lake. These are the models. The reality, with the lake — the workmanship is pretty bad. And it reminded me why I play defensively in things like my house. When you have to do something really cheaply, it's hard to get perfect corners and stuff. That big metal thing is a passage, and in it is — you go downstairs into the living room and then down into the bedroom, which is on the right. It's kind of like a whole built town.I was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at Yale. I thought it was fitting for me to be doing that.This is a house next to a Philip Johnson house in Minnesota. The owners had a dilemma — they asked Philip to do it. He was too busy. He didn't recommend me, by the way.(Laughter)We ended up having to make it a sculpture, because the dilemma was, how do you build a building that doesn't look like the language? Is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub-divided? Etc. etc. You've got the idea. And so we finally ended up making it. These people are art collectors. And we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side. And the building is very sculptural as you walk around it. It's made of metal and the brown stuff is Fin-Ply — it's that formed lumber from Finland. We used it at Loyola on the chapel, and it didn't work. I keep trying to make it work. In this case we learned how to detail it.In Cleveland, there's Burnham Mall, on the left. It's never been finished. Going out to the lake, you can see all those new buildings we built. And we had the opportunity to build a building on this site. There's a railroad track. This is the city hall over here somewhere, and the courthouse. And the centerline of the mall goes out. Burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built, and so we followed. Sohio is on the axis here, and we followed the axis, and they're two kind of goalposts. And this is our building, which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company. We collaborated with Oldenburg and put the newspaper on top, folded. The health club is fastened to the garage with a C-clamp, for Cleveland.(Laughter)You drive down. So it's about a 10-story C-clamp. And all this stuff at the bottom is a museum, and an idea for a very fancy automobile entry. This owner has a pet peeve about bad automobile entries. And this would be a hotel. So, the centerline of this thing — we'd preserve it, and it would start to work with the scale of the new buildings by Pelli and Kohn Pederson Fox, etc., that are underway. It's hard to do high-rise. I feel much more comfortable down here.This is a piece of property in Brentwood. And a long time ago, about '82 or something, after my house — I designed a house for myself that would be a village of several pavilions around a courtyard — and the owner of this lot worked for me and built that actual model on the left. And she came back, I guess wealthier or something — something happened — and asked me to design a house for her on this site. And following that basic idea of the village, we changed it as we got into it. I locked the house into the site by cutting the back end — here you see on the photographs of the site — slicing into it and putting all the bathrooms and dressing rooms like a retaining wall, creating a lower level zone for the master bedroom, which I designed like a kind of a barge, looking like a boat. And that's it, built. The dome was a request from the client. She wanted a dome somewhere in the house. She didn't care where. When you sleep in this bedroom, I hope — I mean, I haven't slept in it yet. I've offered to marry her so I could sleep there, but she said I didn't have to do that. But when you're in that room, you feel like you're on a kind of barge on some kind of lake. And it's very private. The landscape is being built around to create a private garden. And then up above there's a garden on this side of the living room, and one on the other side.These aren't focused very well. I don't know how to do it from here. Focus the one on the right. It's up there. Left — it's my right.Anyway, you enter into a garden with a beautiful grove of trees. That's the living room. Servants' quarters. A guest bedroom, which has this dome with marble on it. And then you enter into the living room and then so on. This is the bedroom. You come down from this level along the stairway, and you enter the bedroom here, going into the lake. And the bed is back in this space, with windows looking out onto the lake. These Stonehenge things were designed to give foreground and to create a greater depth in this shallow lot. The material is lead copper, like in the building in Boston. And so it was an intent to make this small piece of land — it's 100 by 250 — into a kind of an estate by separating these areas and making the living room and dining room into this pavilion with a high space in it. And this happened by accident that I got this right on axis with the dining room table. It looks like I got a Baldessari painting for free. But the idea is, the windows are all placed so you see pieces of the house outside. Eventually this will be screened — these trees will come up — and it will be very private. And you feel like you're in your own kind of village.This is for Michael Eisner — Disney. We're doing some work for him.And this is in Anaheim, California, and it's a freeway building. You go under this bridge at about 65 miles an hour, and there's another bridge here. And you're through this room in a split second, and the building will sort of reflect that. On the backside, it's much more humane — entrance, dining hall, etc. And then this thing here — I'm hoping as you drive by you'll hear the picket fence effect of the sound hitting it. Kind of a fun thing to do.I'm doing a building in Switzerland, Basel, which is an office building for a furniture company. And we struggled with the image. These are the early studies, but they have to sell furniture to normal people, so if I did the building and it was too fancy, then people might say, ""Well, the furniture looks OK in his thing, but no, it ain't going to look good in my normal building."" So we've made a kind of pragmatic slab in the second phase here, and we've taken the conference facilities and made a villa out of them so that the communal space is very sculptural and separate. And you're looking at it from the offices and you create a kind of interaction between these pieces.This is in Paris, along the Seine. Palais des Sports, the Gare de Lyon over here. The Minister of Finance — the guy that moved from the Louvre — goes in here. There's a new library across the river. And back in here, in this already treed park, we're doing a very dense building called the American Center, which has a theater, apartments, dance school, an art museum, restaurants and all kinds of — it's a very dense program — bookstores, etc. In a very tight, small — this is the ground level. And the French have this extraordinary way of screwing things up by taking a beautiful site and cutting the corner off. They call it the plan coupe. And I struggled with that thing — how to get around the corner.These are the models for it. I showed you the other model, the one — this is the way I organized myself so I could make the drawing — so I understood the problem. I was trying to get around this plan coupe — how do you do it? Apartments, etc. And these are the kind of study models we did. And the one on the left is pretty awful. You can see why I was ready to commit suicide when this one was built. But out of it came finally this resolution, where the elevator piece worked frontally to this, parallel to this street, and also parallel to here. And then this kind of twist, with this balcony and the skirt, kind of like a ballerina lifting her skirt to let you into the foyer. The restaurants here — the apartments and the theater, etc. So it would all be built in stone, in French limestone, except for this metal piece. And it faces into a park. And the idea was to make this express the energy of this. On the side facing the street it's much more normal, except I slipped a few mansards down, so that coming on the point, these housing units made a gesture to the corner. And this will be some kind of high-tech billboard. If any of you guys have any ideas for it, please contact me. I don't know what to do.Jay Chiat is a glutton for punishment, and he hired me to do a house for him in the Hamptons. And it's got a fish. And I keep thinking, ""This is going to be the last fish."" It's like a drug addict. I say, ""I'm not going to do it anymore — I don't want to do it anymore — I'm not going to do it."" And then I do it.(Laughter)There it is. But it's the living room. And this piece here is — I don't know what it is. I just added it so that we'd have enough money in the budget so we could take something out.(Applause)This is Euro Disney, and I've worked with all of the guys that presented to you earlier. We've had a lot of fun working together. I think I'm from Mars for them, and they are for me, but somehow we all manage to work together, and I think, productively. So far. This is a shopping thing. You come into the Magic Kingdom and the hotel that Tony Baxter's group is doing out here. And then this is a kind of a shopping mall, with a rodeo and restaurants. And another restaurant. What I did — because of the Paris skies being quite dull, I made a light grid that's perpendicular to the train station, to the route of the train. It looks like it's kind of been there, and then crashed all these simpler forms into it. The light grid will have a light, be lit up at night and give a kind of light ceiling. In Switzerland — Germany, actually — on the Rhine across from Basel, we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum.And I tried to — there's a Nick Grimshaw building over here, there's an Oldenburg sculpture over here — I tried to make a relationship urbanistically. And I don't gave good slides to show — it's just been completed — but this piece here is this building, and these pieces here and here. And as you pass by it's always part — you see it as all of these pieces accrue and become part of an overall neighborhood. It's plaster and just zinc. And you wonder, if this is a museum, what it's going to be like inside? If it's going to be so busy and crazy that you wouldn't show anything, and just wait. I'm so cunning and clever — I made it quiet and wonderful. But on the outside it does scream out at you a bit. It's actually basically three square rooms with a couple of skylights and stuff. And from the building in the back, you see it as an iceberg floating by in the hills. I know I'm over time. See, that skylight goes down and becomes that one. So it's pretty quiet inside.This is the Disney Hall — the concert hall. It's a complicated project. It has a chamber hall. It's related to an existing Chandler Pavilion that was built with a lot of love and tears and caring. And it's not a great building, but I approached it optimistically, that we would make a compositional relationship between us that would strengthen both of us. And the plan of this — it's a concert hall. This is the foyer, which is kind of a garden structure. There's commercial at the ground floor. These are offices, which, really, in the competition, we didn't have to design. But finally, there's a hotel there. These were the kind of relationships made to the Chandler, composing these elevations together and relating them to the buildings that existed — to MOCA, etc.The acoustician in the competition gave us criteria, which led to this compartmentalized scheme, which we found out after the competition would not work at all. But everybody liked these forms and liked the space, and so that's one of the problems of a competition. You have to then try and get that back in some way. And we studied many models. This was our original model. These were the three buildings that were the ideal — the Concertgebouw, Boston and Berlin. Everybody liked the surround. Actually, this is the smallest hall in size, and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies. Our client doesn't want balconies, so — and when we met our new acoustician, he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape. And we tried many shapes, trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical, acceptable format. We finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the Concertgebouw with the sloping outside walls, which the acoustician said were crucial to this and later decided they weren't, but now we have them.(Laughter)And our idea is to make the seating carriage very sculptural and out of wood and like a big boat sitting in this plaster room. That's the idea. And the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural. And the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of proscenium from wherever you sit, and create intimacy. Now, this is not a final design — these are just on the way to being — and so I wouldn't take it literally, except the feeling of the space. We studied the acoustics with laser stuff, and they bounce them off this and see where it all works. But you get the sense of the hall in section. Most halls come straight down into a proscenium. In this case we're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners. And so it will be quite a different shape.(Laughter)The original building, because it was frog-like, fit nicely on the site and cranked itself well. When you get into a box, it's harder to do it — and here we are, struggling with how to put the hotel in. And this is a teapot I designed for Alessi. I just stuck it on there. But this is how I do work. I do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away. And of course it's not going to look like that, but it is the crazy way I tend to work.And then finally, in L.A. I was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of Interstate Bank Tower, the highest building in L.A. Larry Halprin is doing the stairs. And I was asked to do a fish, and so I did a snake.(Laughter)It's a public space, and I made it kind of a garden structure, and you can go in it. It's a kiva, and Larry's putting some water in there, and it works much better than a fish.In Barcelona I was asked to do a fish, and we're working on that, at the foot of a Ritz-Carlton Tower being done by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. And the Ritz-Carlton Tower is being designed with exposed steel, non-fire proof, much like those old gas tanks. And so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it, perverted it, into the form of the fish, and created a kind of a 19th-century contraption that looks like, that will sit — this is the beach and the harbor out in front, and this is really a shopping center with department stores. And we split these bridges. Originally, this was all solid with a hole in it. We cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel. We showed this to the hotel people the other day, and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the Ritz-Carlton anymore, because of this fish.(Laughter)And finally, I just threw these in — Lou Danziger. I didn't expect Lou Danziger to be here, but this is a building I did for him in 1964, I think. A little studio — and it's sadly for sale. Time goes on.And this is my son working with me on a small fast-food thing. He designed the robot as the cashier, and the head moves, and I did the rest of it. And the food wasn't as good as the stuff, and so it failed. It should have been the other way around — the food should have been good first. It didn't work.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/frank_gehry_as_a_young_rebel
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"Thank you so much everyone from TED, and Chris and Amy in particular. I cannot believe I'm here. I have not slept in weeks. Neil and I were sitting there comparing how little we've slept in anticipation for this. I've never been so nervous — and I do this when I'm nervous, I just realized. (Laughter) So, I'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organization called 826 Valencia, and then I'm going to talk about how we all might join in and do similar things.Back in about 2000, I was living in Brooklyn, I was trying to finish my first book, I was wandering around dazed every day because I wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. So I would walk around in a daze during the day. I had no mental acuity to speak of during the day, but I had flexible hours. In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I lived in, Park Slope, there are a lot of writers — it's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people. Meanwhile, I had grown up around a lot of teachers. My mom was a teacher, my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching. And so I was always hearing them talk about their lives and how inspiring they were, and they were really sort of the most hard-working and constantly inspiring people I knew.But I knew so many of the things they were up against, so many of the struggles they were dealing with. And one of them was that so many of my friends that were teaching in city schools were having trouble with their students keeping up at grade level, in their reading and writing in particular. Now, so many of these students had come from households where English isn't spoken in the home, where a lot of them have different special needs, learning disabilities. And of course they're working in schools which sometimes and very often are under-funded. And so they would talk to me about this and say, ""You know, what we really need is just more people, more bodies, more one-on-one attention, more hours, more expertise from people that have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one.""Now, I would say, ""Well, why don't you just work with them one-on-one?"" And they would say, ""Well, we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each. This can lead up to 150, 180, 200 students a day. How can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one-on-one attention?"" You'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers. And so we started talking about this. And at the same time, I thought about this massive group of people I knew: writers, editors, journalists, graduate students, assistant professors, you name it. All these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the English word — I hope to have an interest in the English language, but I'm not speaking it well right now. (Laughter) I'm trying. That clock has got me. But everyone that I knew had an interest in the primacy of the written word in terms of nurturing a democracy, nurturing an enlightened life. And so they had, you know, their time and their interest, but at the same time there wasn't a conduit that I knew of in my community to bring these two communities together.So when I moved back to San Francisco, we rented this building. And the idea was to put McSweeney's — McSweeney's Quarterly, that we published twice or three times a year, and a few other magazines — we were going to move it into an office for the first time. It used to be in my kitchen in Brooklyn. We were going to move it into an office, and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center. So we thought, ""We'll have all these writers and editors and everybody — sort of a writing community — coming into the office every day anyway, why don't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school, get extra help on their written homework, so you have basically no border between these two communities?"" So the idea was that we would be working on whatever we're working on, at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you're doing, or you trade, or you work a little bit later or whatever it is. You give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood.So, we had this place, we rented it, the landlord was all for it. We did this mural, that's a Chris Ware mural, that basically explains the entire history of the printed word, in mural form — it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road. So we rented this space. And everything was great except the landlord said, ""Well, the space is zoned for retail; you have to come up with something. You've gotta sell something. You can't just have a tutoring center."" So we thought, ""Ha ha! Really!"" And we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell, but we did all the necessary research. It used to be a weight room, so there were rubber floors below, acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights. We took all that down, and we found beautiful wooden floors, whitewashed beams and it had the look — while we were renovating this place, somebody said, ""You know, it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship."" And we looked around and somebody else said, ""Well, you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer."" (Laughter)And so this is what we did. So it made everybody laugh, and we said, ""There's a point to that. Let's sell pirate supplies."" This is the pirate supply store. You see, this is sort of a sketch I did on a napkin. A great carpenter built all this stuff and you see, we made it look sort of pirate supply-like. Here you see planks sold by the foot and we have supplies to combat scurvy. We have the peg legs there, that are all handmade and fitted to you. Up at the top, you see the eyepatch display, which is the black column there for everyday use for your eyepatch, and then you have the pastel and other colors for stepping out at night — special occasions, bar mitzvahs and whatever.So we opened this place. And this is a vat that we fill with treasures that students dig in. This is replacement eyes in case you lose one. These are some signs that we have all over the place: ""Practical Joking with Pirates."" While you're reading the sign, we pull a rope behind the counter and eight mop heads drop on your head. That was just my one thing — I said we had to have something that drops on people's heads. It became mop heads. And this is the fish theater, which is just a saltwater tank with three seats, and then right behind it we set up this space, which was the tutoring center. So right there is the tutoring center, and then behind the curtain were the McSweeney's offices, where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that.The kids would come in — or we thought they would come in. I should back up. We set the place up, we opened up, we spent months and months renovating this place. We had tables, chairs, computers, everything. I went to a dot-com auction at a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto and I bought 11 G4s with a stroke of a paddle. Anyway, we bought 'em, we set everything up and then we waited. It was started with about 12 of my friends, people that I had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood. And we sat. And at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalk and it just said, ""Free Tutoring for Your English-Related and Writing-Related Needs — Just Come In, It's All Free."" And we thought, ""Oh, they're going to storm the gates, they're gonna love it."" And they didn't. And so we waited, we sat at the tables, we waited and waited. And everybody was becoming very discouraged because it was weeks and weeks that we waited, really, where nobody came in.And then somebody alerted us to the fact that maybe there was a trust gap, because we were operating behind a pirate supply store. (Laughter) We never put it together, you know? And so then, around that time, I persuaded a woman named Nineveh Caligari, a longtime San Francisco educator — she was teaching in Mexico City, she had all the experience necessary, knew everything about education, was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood — I convinced her to move up from Mexico City where she was teaching. She took over as executive director. Immediately, she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything, and so suddenly it was actually full every day.And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students. You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher. And so most of these students, English is not spoken in the home. They come there, many times their parents — you can't see it, but there's a church pew that I bought in a Berkeley auction right there — the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored. So that was the basis of it, was one-on-one attention. And we found ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m., 2:30 p.m., you will get run over, often, by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space,which is very strange, because it's school, in a way. But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the ""Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help,"" or something like that. It was 826 Valencia. First of all, it was a pirate supply store, which is insane. And then secondly, there's a publishing company in the back. And so our interns were actually working at the same tables very often, and shoulder-to-shoulder, computer-next-to-computer with the students.And so it became a tutoring center — publishing center, is what we called it — and a writing center. They go in, and they might be working with a high school student actually working on a novel — because we had very gifted kids, too. So there's no stigma. They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor. They're seeing adults. They're modeling their behavior. These adults, they're working in their field. They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other. There's a lot of cross-pollination. The only problem, especially for the adults working at McSweeney's who hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up, was that there was just the one bathroom. (Laughter) With like 60 kids a day, this is a problem.But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention — they go home, they're finished. They don't stall. They don't do their homework in front of the TV. They're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m., enjoy their family, enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play. And that makes a happy family. A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community. A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world. So the key to it all is homework! (Laughter) (Applause) There you have it, you know — one-on-one attention.So we started off with about 12 volunteers, and then we had about 50, and then a couple hundred. And we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster. And we make it incredibly easy to volunteer. The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before. So we said, ""Even if you have two hours one Sunday every six months, it doesn't matter. That's going to be enough."" So that's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast.Then we said, ""Well, what are we going to do with the space during the day, because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m.?"" So we started bringing in classes during the day. So every day, there's a field trip where they together create a book — you can see it being typed up above. This is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing. You just point a camera at a class, and it always looks like this. So this is one of the books that they do. Notice the title of the book, ""The Book That Was Never Checked Out: Titanic."" And the first line of that book is, ""Once there was a book named Cindy that was about the Titanic."" So, meanwhile, there's an adult in the back typing this up, taking it completely seriously, which blows their mind.So then we still had more tutors to use. This is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events. The teachers that we work with — and everything is different to teachers — they tell us what to do. We went in there thinking, ""We're ultimately, completely malleable. You're going to tell us. The neighborhood's going to tell us, the parents are going to tell us. The teachers are going to tell us how we're most useful.""So then they said, ""Why don't you come into the schools? Because what about the students that wouldn't come to you, necessarily, who don't have really active parents that are bringing them in, or aren't close enough?"" So then we started saying, ""Well, we've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster. Let's just put out the word."" A teacher will say, ""I need 12 tutors for the next five Sundays. We're working on our college essays. Send them in."" So we put that out on the wire: 1,400 tutors. Whoever can make it signs up. They go in about a half an hour before the class. The teacher tells them what to do, how to do it, what their training is, what their project is so far. They work under the teacher's guide, and it's all in one big room. And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students. Then another school said, ""Well, what if we just give you a classroom and you can staff it all day?""So this is the Everett Middle School Writers' Room, where we decorated it in buccaneer style. It's right off the library. And there we serve all 529 kids in this middle school. This is their newspaper, the ""Straight-Up News,"" that has an ongoing column from Mayor Gavin Newsom in both languages — English and Spanish. So then one day Isabel Allende wrote to us and said, ""Hey, why don't you assign a book with high school students? I want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world."" And so we went into Thurgood Marshall High School, which is a school that we had worked with on some other things, and we gave that assignment to the students. And we said, ""Isabel Allende is going to read all your essays at the end. She's going to publish them in a book. She's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form. It's going to be available in all the bookstores in the Bay Area and throughout the world, on Amazon and you name it."" So these kids worked harder than they've ever worked on anything in their lives, because there was that outside audience, there was Isabel Allende on the other end. I think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with them and so this worked out incredibly well. We had a big party at the end. This is a book that you can find anywhere. So that led to a series of these. You can see Amy Tan sponsored the next one, ""I Might Get Somewhere."" And this became an ongoing thing. More and more books.Now we're sort of addicted to the book thing. The kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their life if they know it's going to be permanent, know it's going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said, that we've honored their words, honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts — all this attention that we give to their thoughts. And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level, they can never go back. It's absolutely transformative. And so then they're all sold in the store. This is near the planks. We sell all the student books. Where else would you put them, right? So we sell 'em, and then something weird had been happening with the stores. The store, actually — even though we started out as just a gag — the store actually made money. So it was paying the rent. And maybe this is just a San Francisco thing — I don't know, I don't want to judge. But people would come in — and this was before the pirate movies and everything! It was making a lot of money. Not a lot of money, but it was paying the rent, paying a full-time staff member there. There's the ocean maps you can see on the left.And it became a gateway to the community. People would come in and say, ""What the —? What is this?"" I don't want to swear on the web. (Laughter) Is that a rule? I don't know. They would say, ""What is this?"" And people would come in and learn more about it. And then right beyond — there's usually a little chain there — right beyond, they would see the kids being tutored. This is a field trip going on. And so they would be shopping, and they might be more likely to buy some lard, or millet for their parrot, or, you know, a hook, or hook protector for nighttime, all of these things we sell. So the store actually did really well. But it brought in so many people — teachers, donors, volunteers, everybody — because it was street level. It was open to the public. It wasn't a non-profit buried, you know, on the 30th floor of some building downtown. It was right in the neighborhood that it was serving, and it was open all the time to the public. So, it became this sort of weird, happy accident.So all the people I used to know in Brooklyn, they said, ""Well, why don't we have a place like that here?"" And a lot of them had been former educators or would-be educators, so they combined with a lot of local designers, local writers, and they just took the idea independently and they did their own thing. They didn't want to sell pirate supplies. They didn't think that that was going to work there. So, knowing the crime-fighting community in New York, they opened the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. This is Sam Potts' great design that did this. And this was to make it look sort of like one of those keysmith's shops that has to have every service they've ever offered, you know, all over there. So they opened this place. Inside, it's like a Costco for superheroes — all the supplies in kind of basic form. These are all handmade. These are all sort of repurposed other products, or whatever. All the packaging is done by Sam Potts.So then you have the villain containment unit, where kids put their parents. You have the office. This is a little vault — you have to put your product in there, it goes up an electric lift and then the guy behind the counter tells you that you have to recite the vow of heroism, which you do, if you want to buy anything. And it limits, really, their sales. Personally, I think it's a problem. Because they have to do it hand on heart and everything. These are some of the products. These are all handmade. This is a secret identity kit. If you want to take on the identity of Sharon Boone, one American female marketing executive from Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a full dossier on everything you would need to know about Sharon Boone. So, this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape, and then you walk up these three steel-graded steps and then we turn on three hydraulic fans from every side and then you can see the cape in action. There's nothing worse than, you know, getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that. So then, the secret door — this is one of the shelves you don't see when you walk in, but it slowly opens. You can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks. It opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back. (Applause) So you can see the full effect!But this is — I just want to emphasize — locally funded, locally built. All the designers, all of the builders, everybody was local, all the time was pro-bono. I just came and visited and said, ""Yes, you guys are doing great,"" or whatever. That was it. You can see the time in all five boroughs of New York in the back. (Laughter) (Applause) So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas. And this switch is flicked in their heads when they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store, right? So it's school, but it's not school. It's clearly not school, even though they're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables, pencils and papers, whatever.This is one of the students, Khaled Hamdan. You can read this quote. Addicted to video games and TV. Couldn't concentrate at home. Came in. Got this concentrated attention. And he couldn't escape it. So, soon enough, he was writing. He would finish his homework early — got really addicted to finishing his homework early. It's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it, and to have it checked, and to know he's going to achieve the next thing and be prepared for school the next day. So he got hooked on that, and then he started doing other things. He's now been published in five books. He co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroes called ""Super-Has-Beens."" He wrote a series on ""Penguin Balboa,"" which is a fighting — a boxing — penguin. And then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at Symphony Space, at a benefit for 826 New York. So he's there every day. He's evangelical about it. He brings his cousins in now. There's four family members that come in every day.So, I'll go through really quickly. This is L.A., The Echo Park Time Travel Mart: ""Whenever You Are, We're Already Then."" (Laughter) This is sort of a 7-Eleven for time travelers. So you see everything: it's exactly as a 7-Eleven would be. Leeches. Mammoth chunks. They even have their own Slurpee machine: ""Out of Order. Come Back Yesterday."" (Laughter) (Applause)Anyway. So I'm going to jump ahead. These are spaces that are only affiliated with us, doing this same thing: Word St. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Ink Spot in Cincinnati; Youth Speaks, San Francisco, California, which inspired us; Studio St. Louis in St. Louis; Austin Bat Cave in Austin; Fighting Words in Dublin, Ireland, started by Roddy Doyle, this will be open in April. Now I'm going to the TED Wish — is that okay?All right, I've got a minute. So, the TED Wish: I wish that you — you personally and every creative individual and organization you know — will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have a thousand examples — a thousand! — of transformative partnerships. Profound leaps forward! And these can be things that maybe you're already doing. I know that so many people in this room are already doing really interesting things. I know that for a fact. So, tell us these stories and inspire others on the website.We created a website. I'm going to switch to ""we,"" and not ""I,"" hope: We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools. We hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community. Always let the teachers lead the way. They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out. There are a million ways. You can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers. They'll always tell you how to help. So, this is with Hot Studio in San Francisco, they did this phenomenal job. This website is already up, it's already got a bunch of stories, a lot of ideas. It's called ""Once Upon a School,"" which is a great title, I think. This site will document every story, every project that comes out of this conference and around the world. So you go to the website, you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired by and then you add your own projects once you get started. Hot Studio did a great job in a very tight deadline. So, visit the site. If you have any questions, you can ask this guy, who's our director of national programs. He'll be on the phone. You email him, he'll answer any question you possibly want. And he'll get you inspired and get you going and guide you through the process so that you can affect change.And it can be fun! That's the point of this talk — it needn't be sterile. It needn't be bureaucratically untenable. You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join us. Thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school
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"Well, this is such an honor. And it's wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world. And I'm intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today.And I'm also rather surprised, because when I look back on my life the last thing I ever wanted to do was write, or be in any way involved in religion. After I left my convent, I'd finished with religion, frankly. I thought that was it. And for 13 years I kept clear of it. I wanted to be an English literature professor. And I certainly didn't even want to be a writer, particularly. But then I suffered a series of career catastrophes, one after the other, and finally found myself in television. (Laughter) I said that to Bill Moyers, and he said, ""Oh, we take anybody."" (Laughter)And I was doing some rather controversial religious programs. This went down very well in the U.K., where religion is extremely unpopular. And so, for once, for the only time in my life, I was finally in the mainstream. But I got sent to Jerusalem to make a film about early Christianity. And there, for the first time, I encountered the other religious traditions: Judaism and Islam, the sister religions of Christianity. And while I found I knew nothing about these faiths at all — despite my own intensely religious background, I'd seen Judaism only as a kind of prelude to Christianity, and I knew nothing about Islam at all.But in that city, that tortured city, where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together, you also become aware of the profound connection between them. And it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be, and actually enabled me to look at my own faith in a different light.And I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days when I thought I'd had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract. And to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief — which we make such a fuss about today — is only a very recent religious enthusiasm that surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word ""belief"" itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century, it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I'm exploring in a book I'm writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions, a credo. ""I believe:"" it did not mean, ""I accept certain creedal articles of faith."" It meant: ""I commit myself. I engage myself."" Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Quran, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as ""zanna:"" self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other, but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. (Laughter)So if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I've found, across the board, is that religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something. You behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice.Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion — the ability to feel with the other in the way we've been thinking about this evening — is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call ""God"" or the ""Divine."" It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we're ready to see the Divine.And in particular, every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted — has said — and put at the core of their tradition what's become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ: ""Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you."" That, he said, was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was — the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called ""ren,"" human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too. There's a famous story about the great rabbi, Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus. A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, ""That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it."" (Laughter)And ""go and study it"" was what he meant. He said, ""In your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule."" The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of Scripture which led to hatred and disdain, or contempt of other people — any people whatsoever — was illegitimate.Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. Scripture, he says, ""teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it."" And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life. (Applause)But now look at our world. And we are living in a world that is — where religion has been hijacked. Where terrorists cite Quranic verses to justify their atrocities. Where instead of taking Jesus' words, ""Love your enemies. Don't judge others,"" we have the spectacle of Christians endlessly judging other people, endlessly using Scripture as a way of arguing with other people, putting other people down. Throughout the ages, religion has been used to oppress others, and this is because of human ego, human greed. We have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things.So the traditions also insisted — and this is an important point, I think — that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group: your own nation, your own co-religionists, your own fellow countrymen. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called ""jian ai"": concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you, says the Quran, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another.And this, again — this universal outreach — is getting subdued in the strident use of religion — abuse of religion — for nefarious gains. Now, I've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when I say to them what I do for a living, inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history. Wrong. The causes of our present woes are political.But, make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line, and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem. Our modernity has been exceedingly violent. Between 1914 and 1945, 70 million people died in Europe alone as a result of armed conflict. And so many of our institutions, even football, which used to be a pleasant pastime, now causes riots where people even die. And it's not surprising that religion, too, has been affected by this violent ethos.There's also a great deal, I think, of religious illiteracy around. People seem to think, now equate religious faith with believing things. As though that — we call religious people often believers, as though that were the main thing that they do. And very often, secondary goals get pushed into the first place, in place of compassion and the Golden Rule. Because the Golden Rule is difficult. I sometimes — when I'm speaking to congregations about compassion, I sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate. (Laughter)Now — but that's not the whole story. Since September the 11th, when my work on Islam suddenly propelled me into public life, in a way that I'd never imagined, I've been able to sort of go all over the world, and finding, everywhere I go, a yearning for change. I've just come back from Pakistan, where literally thousands of people came to my lectures, because they were yearning, first of all, to hear a friendly Western voice. And especially the young people were coming. And were asking me — the young people were saying, ""What can we do? What can we do to change things?"" And my hosts in Pakistan said, ""Look, don't be too polite to us. Tell us where we're going wrong. Let's talk together about where religion is failing.""Because it seems to me that with — our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that doesn't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. And religion, with its wide following ... Here in the United States, people may be being religious in a different way, as a report has just shown — but they still want to be religious. It's only Western Europe that has retained its secularism, which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned.But people want to be religious, and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world, which it can and should be — because of the Golden Rule. ""Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you"": an ethos that should now be applied globally. We should not treat other nations as we would not wish to be treated ourselves.And these — whatever our wretched beliefs — is a religious matter, it's a spiritual matter. It's a profound moral matter that engages and should engage us all. And as I say, there is a hunger for change out there. Here in the United States, I think you see it in this election campaign: a longing for change. And people in churches all over and mosques all over this continent after September the 11th, coming together locally to create networks of understanding. With the mosque, with the synagogue, saying, ""We must start to speak to one another."" I think it's time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other.I'd — there's one story I'd just like to mention. This comes from ""The Iliad."" But it tells you what this spirituality should be. You know the story of ""The Iliad,"" the 10-year war between Greece and Troy. In one incident, Achilles, the famous warrior of Greece, takes his troops out of the war, and the whole war effort suffers. And in the course of the ensuing muddle, his beloved friend, Patroclus, is killed — and killed in single combat by one of the Trojan princes, Hector. And Achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge, and he mutilates the body. He kills Hector, he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family, which means that, in Greek ethos, Hector's soul will wander eternally, lost. And then one night, Priam, king of Troy, an old man, comes into the Greek camp incognito, makes his way to Achilles' tent to ask for the body of his son. And everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering and shows himself. And Achilles looks at him and thinks of his father. And he starts to weep. And Priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons, and he, too, starts to weep. And the sound of their weeping filled the house. The Greeks believed that weeping together created a bond between people. And then Achilles takes the body of Hector, he hands it very tenderly to the father, and the two men look at each other, and see each other as divine.That is the ethos found, too, in all the religions. It's what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies, and beginning to appreciate the other. It's of great importance that the word for ""holy"" in Hebrew, applied to God, is ""Kadosh"": separate, other. And it is often, perhaps, the very otherness of our enemies which can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is God.And now, here's my wish: I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule. We need to create a movement among all these people that I meet in my travels — you probably meet, too — who want to join up, in some way, and reclaim their faith, which they feel, as I say, has been hijacked. We need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos, and to give guidelines. This Charter would not be a massive document. I'd like to see it — to give guidelines as to how to interpret the Scriptures, these texts that are being abused. Remember what the rabbis and what Augustine said about how Scripture should be governed by the principle of charity. Let's get back to that. And the idea, too, of Jews, Christians and Muslims — these traditions now so often at loggerheads — working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand, at least, of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world.And you are the people. I'm just a solitary scholar. Despite the idea that I love a good time, which I was rather amazed to see coming up on me — I actually spend a great deal of time alone, studying, and I'm not very — you're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody, everybody on the planet. I've had some preliminary talks, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, is very happy to give his name to this, as is Imam Feisal Rauf, the Imam in New York City. Also, I would be working with the Alliance of Civilizations at the United Nations. I was part of that United Nations initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations, which was asked by Kofi Annan to diagnose the causes of extremism, and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism.And the Alliance has told me that they are very happy to work with it. The importance of this is that this is — I can see some of you starting to look worried, because you think it's a slow and cumbersome body — but what the United Nations can do is give us some neutrality, so that this isn't seen as a Western or a Christian initiative, but that it's coming, as it were, from the United Nations, from the world — who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this.And so I do urge you to join me in making — in this charter — to building this charter, launching it and propagating it so that it becomes — I'd like to see it in every college, every church, every mosque, every synagogue in the world, so that people can look at their tradition, reclaim it, and make religion a source of peace in the world, which it can and should be. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_wish_the_charter_for_compassion
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"It was an incredible surprise to me to find out that there was actually an organization that cared about both parts of my life. Because, basically, I work as a theoretical physicist. I develop and test models of the Big Bang, using observational data. And I've been moonlighting for the last five years helping with a project in Africa. And, I get a lot of flak for this at Cambridge. People wonder, you know, ""How do you have time to do this?"" And so on. And so it was simply astonishing to me to find an organization that actually appreciated both those sides.So I thought I'd start off by just telling you a little bit about myself and why I lead this schizophrenic life. Well, I was born in South Africa and my parents were imprisoned for resisting the racist regime. When they were released, we left and we went as refugees to Kenya and Tanzania. Both were very young countries then, and full of hope for the future.We had an amazing childhood. We didn't have any money, but we were outdoors most of the time. We had fantastic friends and we saw the wonders of the world, like Kilimanjaro, Serengeti and the Olduvai Gorge. Well, then we moved to London for high school. And after that — there's nothing much to say about that. It was rather dull. But I came back to Africa at the age of 17, as a volunteer teacher to Lesotho, which is a tiny country, surrounded at that time by apartheid South Africa.Well, 80 percent of the men in Lesotho worked in the mines over the border, in brutal conditions. Nevertheless, I — as I'm sure — as a rather irritating young, white man coming into their village, I was welcomed with incredible hospitality and warmth. But the kids were the best part. The kids were amazing: extremely eager and often very bright. And I'm just going to tell you one story, which got through to me.I used to try to take the kids outside as often as possible, to try to connect the academic stuff with the real world. And they weren't used to that. But I took them outside one day and I said, ""I want you to estimate the height of the building."" And I expected them to put a ruler next to the wall, size it up with a finger, and make an estimate of the height. But there was one little boy, very small for his age. He was the son of one of the poorest families in the village. And he wasn't doing that. He was scribbling with chalk on the pavement. And so, I said — I was annoyed — I said, ""What are you doing? I want you to estimate the height of the building."" He said, ""OK. I measured the height of a brick. I counted the number of bricks and now I'm multiplying."" Well — (Laughter) — I hadn't thought of that one.And many experiences like this happened to me. Another one is that I met a miner. He was home on his three-month leave from the mines. Sitting next to him one day, he said, ""There's only one thing that I really loved at school. And you know what it was? Shakespeare."" And he recited some to me. And these and many similar experiences convinced me that there are just tons of bright kids in Africa — inventive kids, intellectual kids — and starved of opportunity. And if Africa is going to get fixed, it's by them, not by us. Well, after — (Applause) — that's the truth.Well, after Lesotho, I traveled across Africa before returning to England — so gray and depressing, in comparison. And I went to Cambridge. And there, I fell for theoretical physics. Well, I'm not going to explain this equation, but theoretical physics is really an amazing subject. We can write down all the laws of physics we know in one line. And, admittedly, it's in a very shorthand notation. And it contains 18 free parameters, OK, which we have to fit to the data.So it's not the final story, but it's an incredibly powerful summary of everything we know about nature at the most basic level. And apart from a few very important loose ends, which you've heard about here — like dark energy and dark matter — this equation describes, seems to describe everything about the universe and what's in it.But there's one big puzzle remaining, and this was most succinctly put to me by my primary school math teacher in Tanzania, who's a wonderful Scottish lady who I still stay in touch with. And she's now in her 80s. And when I try to explain my work to her, she waved away all the details, and she said, ""Neil, there's only one question that really matters. What banged?"" (Laughter) ""Everyone talks about the Big Bang. What banged?""And she's right. It's a question we've all been avoiding. The standard explanation is that the universe somehow sprang into existence, full of a strange kind of energy — inflationary energy — which blew it up. But the puzzle of why the universe emerged in that peculiar state is completely unsolved. Now, I worked on that theory for a while, with Stephen Hawking and others. But then I began to explore another alternative. The alternative is that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning. Perhaps the universe existed before the bang, and the bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe.Well, this possibility is actually suggested by the latest theories, the unified theories, which try to explain all those 18 free parameters in a single framework, which will hopefully predict all of them. And I'll just share a cartoon of this idea here. It's all I can convey. According to these theories, there are extra dimensions of space, not just the three we're familiar with, but at every point in the room there are more dimensions. And in particular, there's one rather strange one, in the most elegant unified theories we have. The strange one looks likes this: that we live in a three-dimensional world. We live in one of these worlds, and I can only show it as a sheet, but it's really three-dimensional.And a tiny distance away, there's another sheet, also three-dimensional, and they're separated by a gap. The gap is very tiny, and I've blown it up so you can see it. But it's really a tiny fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus. I won't go into the details of why we think the universe is like this, but it comes out of the math and trying to explain the physics that we know. Well, I got interested in this because it seemed to me that it was an obvious question. Which is, what happens if these two, three-dimensional worlds should actually collide? And if they collide, it would look a lot like the Big Bang. But it's slightly different than in the conventional picture. The conventional picture of the Big Bang is a point. Everything comes out of a point; you have infinite density. And all the equations break down. No hope of describing that.In this picture, you'll notice, the bang is extended. It's not a point. The density of matter is finite, and we have a chance of a consistent set of equations that can describe the whole process. So, to cut a long story short, we've explored this alternative. We've shown that it can fit all of the data that we have about the formation of galaxies, the fluctuations in the microwave background. Furthermore, there's an experimental way to tell this theory, apart from the inflationary explanation that I told you before. It involves gravitational waves.And in this scenario, not only was the Big Bang not the beginning, as you can see from the picture, it can happen over and over again. It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there've been bangs in the past, and there will be bangs in the future. And maybe we live in an endless universe. Well, making and testing models of the universe is, for me, the best way I have of enjoying and appreciating the universe. We need to make the best mathematical models we can, the most consistent ones. And then we scrutinize them, logically and with data. And we try to convince ourselves — we really try to convince ourselves they're wrong. That's progress: when we prove things wrong. And gradually, we hopefully move closer and closer to understanding the world.As I pursued my career, something was always gnawing away inside me. What about Africa? What about those kids I'd left behind? Instead of developing, as we'd all hoped in the '60s, things had gotten worse. Africa was gripped by poverty, disease and war. This is very graphically shown by the Worldmapper website and project. And so the idea is to represent each country on a map, but scale the area according to some quantity.So here's just the standard area map of the world. By the way, Africa is very large. And the next map now shows Africa's GDP in 1960, around the time of independence for many African states. Now, this is 1990, and then 2002. And here's a projection for 2015. Big changes are happening in the world, but they're not helping Africa.What about Africa's population? The population isn't out of proportion to its area, but Africa leads the world in deaths from often preventable causes: malnutrition, simple infections and birth complications. Then there's HIV/AIDS. And then there are deaths from war. OK, currently there are 45,000 people a month dying in the Congo, as a consequence of the war there over coltan and diamonds and other things. It's still going on.What about Africa's capacity to do something about these problems? Well, here's the number of physicians in Africa. Here's the number of people in higher education. And here — most shocking to me — the number of scientific research papers coming out of Africa. It just doesn't exist scientifically. And this was very eloquently argued at TED Africa: that all of the aid that's been given has completely failed to put Africa onto its own two feet.Well, the transition to democracy in South Africa in 1994 was literally a dream come true for many of us. My parents were both elected to the first parliament, alongside Nelson and Winnie Mandela. They were the only other couple. And in 2001, I took a research leave to visit them. And while I was busy working — I was working on these colliding worlds, in the day. But I learned that there was a desperate shortage of skills, especially mathematical skills, in industry, in government, in education.The ability to make and test models has become essential, not only to every single area of science today, but also to modern society itself. And if you don't have math, you're not going to enter the modern age. So I had an idea. And the idea was very simple. The idea was to set up an African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, or AIMS. And let's recruit students from the whole of Africa, bring them together with lecturers from all over the world, and we'll try to give them a fantastic education.Well, as a Cambridge professor, I had many contacts. And to my astonishment, they backed me 100 percent. They said, ""Go and do it, and we'll come and lecture."" And I knew it would be amazing fun to bring brilliant students from these countries — where they don't have any opportunities — together with the best lecturers in the world — who I knew would come, because of the interest in Africa — and put them together and just let the sparks fly. So we bought a derelict hotel near Cape Town. It's an 80-room Art Deco hotel from the 1920s. The area was kind of seedy, so we got an 80-room hotel for 100,000 dollars. It's a beautiful building. We decided we would refurbish it and then put out the word: we're going to start the best math institute in Africa in this hotel.Well, the new South Africa is a very exciting country. And those of you who haven't been there, you should go. It's very, very interesting what's happening. And we recruited wonderful staff, highly motivated staff. The other thing that's happened, which was good for us, is the Internet. Even though the Internet is very expensive all over Africa, there are Internet cafes everywhere. And bright young Africans are desperate to join the global community, to be successful — and they're very ambitious. They want to be the next Einstein.And so when word came out that AIMS was opening, it spread very quickly via e-mail and our website. And we got lots of applicants. Well, we designed AIMS as a 24-hour learning environment, and it was fantastic to start a university from the beginning. You have to rethink, what is the university for? And that's really exciting. So we designed it to have interactive teaching. No droning on at the chalkboard. We emphasize problem-solving, working in groups, every student discovering and maximizing their own potential and not chasing grades.Everyone lives together in this hotel — lecturers and students — and it's not surprising at all to find an impromptu tutorial at 1 a.m. The students don't usually leave the computer lab till 2 or 3 a.m. And then they're up again at eight in the morning. Lectures, problem-solving and so on. It's an extraordinary place. We especially emphasize areas of great relevance to Africa's development, because, in those areas, scientists working in Africa will have a competitive advantage. They'll publish, be invited to conferences. They'll do well. They'll have successful careers.And AIMS has done extremely well. Here is a list of last year's graduates, graduated in June, and what they're currently doing — 48 of them. And where they are is indicated over here. And where they've gone. So these are all postgraduate students. And they've all gone on to master's and Ph.D. degrees in excellent places. Five students can be educated at AIMS for the cost of educating one in the U.S. or Europe. But more important, the pan-African student body is a continual source of strength, pride and commitment to Africa. We illustrate AIMS' progress by coloring in the countries of Africa.So here you can see behind this list. When a county is colored yellow, we've received an application; orange, we've accepted an application; and green, a student has graduated. So here is where we were after the first graduation in 2004. And we set ourselves a goal of turning the continent green. So there's 2005, -6, -7, -8. (Applause) We're well on the way to achieving our initial goal.We had some of the students filmed at home before they came to AIMS. And I'll just show you one. Tendai Mugwagwa: My name is Tendai Mugwagwa. I have a Bachelor of Science with an education degree. I will be attending AIMS. My understanding of the course is that it covers quite a lot. You know, from physics to medicine, in particular, epidemiology and also mathematical modeling. Neil Turok: So Tendai came to AIMS and did very well. And I'll let her take it from there.TM: My name is Tendai Mugwagwa and I was a student at AIMS in 2003 and 2004. After leaving AIMS, I went on to do a master's in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. After that, I came to the Netherlands where I'm now doing a Ph.D. in theoretical immunology.Professor: Tendai is working very independently. She communicates well with the immunologists at the hospital. So all in all I have a very good Ph.D. student from South Africa. So I'm happy she's here.NT: Another student in the first year of AIMS was Shehu. And he's shown here with his favorite high school teacher. And then entering university in northern Nigeria. And after AIMS, Shehu wanted to do high-energy physics, and he came to Cambridge. He's about to finish his Ph.D., and he was filmed recently with someone you all know.Shehu: And from there we will be able to, hopefully, make better predictions and then we compare it to the graph and also make some predictions.Stephen Hawking: That is nice.NT: Here are the current students at AIMS. There are 53 of them from 20 different countries, including 20 women. So now I'm going to get to my TED business. Well, we had a party. This is Africa — we have good parties in Africa. And last month, they threw a surprise party for me. Here's somebody you've seen already. (Applause) I want to point out a few other exceptional people in this picture. So, we were having a party, as you can see they're completely eclipsing me at this point. This is Ezra. She's from Darfur. She's a physicist, and somehow stays smiling, in spite of everything going on back home. But she wants to continue in physics, and she's doing extremely well. This is Lydia. Lydia is the first ever woman to graduate in mathematics in the Central African Republic. And she's now at AIMS. (Applause)So now let me get to our TED wish. Well, it's not my TED wish; it's our wish, as you've already gathered. And our wish has two parts: one is a dream and the other's a plan. OK. Our TED dream is that the next Einstein will be African. (Applause) In striving for the heights of creative genius, we want to give thousands of people the motivation, the encouragement and the courage to obtain the high-level skills they need to help Africa. Among them will be not only brilliant scientists — I'm sure of that from what we've seen at AIMS — they'll also be the African Gates, Brins and Pages of the future.Well, I said we also have a plan. And our plan is quite simple. AIMS is now a proven model. And what we need to do is to replicate it. We want to roll out 15 AIMS centers in the next five years, all over Africa. Each will have a pan-African student body, but specialize in a different area of science. We want to use science to overcome the national and cultural barriers, as it does at AIMS. And we want to add elements to the curriculum. We want to add entrepreneurship and policy skills.The expanded AIMS will be a coherent pan-African institution, and its graduates will form a powerful network, working together for peace and progress across the continent. Over the last year, we've been visiting sites in Africa, looking at potential sites for new AIMS centers. And here are the ones we've selected. And each of these centers has a strong local team, each is in a beautiful place, an interesting place, which international lecturers will be happy to visit. And our partners across Africa are extremely enthusiastic about this. Everyone wants an AIMS center in their country.And last November, the conference of all the African ministers of science and technology, held in Mombasa, called for a comprehensive plan to roll out AIMS. So we have political support right across the continent. It won't be easy. At every site there will be huge challenges. Local scientists must play leading roles and governments must be persuaded to buy in. Conditions are very difficult, but we cannot afford to compromise on those principles which made AIMS work.And we summarize them this way: the institutes have got to be relevant, innovative, cost-effective and high quality. Why? Because we want Africa to be rich. Easy to remember the basic rules we need. So, just in ending, let me say the only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa's future. Over time, they will contribute to African development and to science in ways we can only imagine. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_turok_makes_his_ted_prize_wish
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"As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. The green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day. And I'd like to share some experience over the last 40 years — we celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year — and to explore and to touch on some observations about the nature of sustainability. How far you can anticipate, what follows from it, what are the threats, what are the possibilities, the challenges, the opportunities? I think that — I've said in the past, many, many years ago, before anybody even invented the concept of a green agenda, that it wasn't about fashion — it was about survival.But what I never said, and what I'm really going to make the point is, that really, green is cool. I mean, all the projects which have, in some way, been inspired by that agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle, in a way celebrating the places and the spaces which determine the quality of life. I rarely actually quote anything, so I'm going to try and find a piece of paper if I can, [in] which somebody, at the end of last year, ventured the thought about what for that individual, as a kind of important observer, analyst, writer — a guy called Thomas Friedman, who wrote in the Herald Tribune, about 2006. He said, ""I think the most important thing to happen in 2006 was that living and thinking green hit Main Street. We reached a tipping point this year where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geo-political and competitive thing they could do. Hence my motto: green is the new red, white and blue.""And I asked myself, in a way, looking back, ""When did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear?"" And I think it was July 20, 1969, when, for the first time, man could look back at planet Earth. And, in a way, it was Buckminster Fuller who coined that phrase. And before the kind of collapse of the communist system, I was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in Space City and other places in Russia. And interestingly, as I think back, they were the first true environmentalists. They were filled with a kind of pioneering passion, fired about the problems of the Aral Sea. And at that period it was — in a way, a number of things were happening. Buckminster Fuller was the kind of green guru — again, a word that had not been coined. He was a design scientist, if you like, a poet, but he foresaw all the things that are happening now. It's another subject. It's another conversation. You can go back to his writings: it's quite extraordinary. It was at that time, with an awareness fired by Bucky's prophecies, his concerns as a citizen, as a kind of citizen of the planet, that influenced my thinking and what we were doing at that time.And it's a number of projects. I select this one because it was 1973, and it was a master plan for one of the Canary Islands. And this probably coincided with the time when you had the planet Earth's sourcebook, and you had the hippie movement. And there are some of those qualities in this drawing, which seeks to sum up the recommendations. And all the components are there which are now in common parlance, in our vocabulary, you know, 30-odd years later: wind energy, recycling, biomass, solar cells. And in parallel at that time, there was a very kind of exclusive design club. People who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, and the objects that he would create for the company called Braun. This is going back the mid-'50s, '60s. And despite Bucky's prophecies that everything would be miniaturized and technology would make an incredible style — access to comfort, to amenities — it was very, very difficult to imagine that everything that we see in this image, would be very, very stylishly packaged. And that, and more besides, would be in the palm of your hand.And I think that that digital revolution now is coming to the point where, as the virtual world, which brings so many people together here, finally connects with the physical world, there is the reality that that has become humanized, so that digital world has all the friendliness, all the immediacy, the orientation of the analog world. Probably summed up in a way by the stylish or alternative available here, as we generously had gifted at lunchtime, the [unclear], which is a further kind of development — and again, inspired by the incredible sort of sensual feel. A very, very beautiful object. So, something which in [the] '50s, '60s was very exclusive has now become, interestingly, quite inclusive. And the reference to the iPod as iconic, and in a way evocative of performance, delivery — quite interesting that [in] the beginning of the year 2007, the Financial Times commented that the Detroit companies envy the halo effect that Toyota has gained from the Prius as the hybrid, energy-conscious vehicle, which rivals the iPod as an iconic product.And I think it's very tempting to, in a way, seduce ourselves — as architects, or anybody involved with the design process — that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. Buildings are important, but they're only a component of a much bigger picture. In other words, as I might seek to demonstrate, if you could achieve the impossible, the equivalent of perpetual motion, you could design a carbon-free house, for example. That would be the answer. Unfortunately, it's not the answer. It's only the beginning of the problem. You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit. For example, if, in that Bucky-inspired phrase, we draw back and we look at planet Earth, and we take a kind of typical, industrialized society, then the energy consumed would be split between the buildings, 44 percent, transport, 34 percent, and industry. But again, that only shows part of the picture. If you looked at the buildings together with the associated transport, in other words, the transport of people, which is 26 percent, then 70 percent of the energy consumption is influenced by the way that our cites and infrastructure work together.So the problems of sustainability cannot be separated from the nature of the cities, of which the buildings are a part. For example, if you take, and you make a comparison between a recent kind of city, what I'll call, simplistically, a North American city — and Detroit is not a bad example, it is very car dependent. The city goes out in annular rings, consuming more and more green space, and more and more roads, and more and more energy in the transport of people between the city center — which again, the city center, as it becomes deprived of the living and just becomes commercial, again becomes dead. If you compared Detroit with a city of a Northern European example — and Munich is not a bad example of that, with the greater dependence on walking and cycling — then a city which is really only twice as dense, is only using one-tenth of the energy. In other words, you take these comparable examples and the energy leap is enormous.So basically, if you wanted to generalize, you can demonstrate that as the density increases along the bottom there, that the energy consumed reduces dramatically. Of course you can't separate this out from issues like social diversity, mass transit, the ability to be able to walk a convenient distance, the quality of civic spaces. But again, you can see Detroit, in yellow at the top, extraordinary consumption, down below Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, although it's a dense city, is not dense compared with the really dense cities. In the year 2000, a rather interesting thing happened. You had for the first time mega-cities, [of] 5 million or more, which were occurring in the developing world. And now, out of typically 46 cities, 33 of those mega-cities are in the developing world. So you have to ask yourself — the environmental impact of, for example, China or India. If you take China, and you just take Beijing, you can see on that traffic system, and the pollution associated with the consumption of energy as the cars expand at the price of the bicycles. In other words, if you put onto the roads, as is currently happening, 1,000 new cars every day — statistically, it's the biggest booming auto market in the world — and the half a billion bicycles serving one and a third billion people are reducing.And that urbanization is extraordinary, accelerated pace. So, if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities, which took 200 years, then that same process is happening in 20 years. In other words, it is accelerating by a factor of 10. And quite interestingly, over something like a 60-year period, we're seeing the doubling in life expectancy, over that period where the urbanization has trebled. If I pull back from that global picture, and I look at the implication over a similar period of time in terms of the technology — which, as a tool, is a tool for designers, and I cite our own experience as a company, and I just illustrate that by a small selection of projects — then how do you measure that change of technology? How does it affect the design of buildings? And particularly, how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy, create less pollution and are more socially responsible?That story, in terms of buildings, started in the late '60s, early '70s. The one example I take is a corporate headquarters for a company called Willis and Faber, in a small market town in the northeast of England, commuting distance with London. And here, the first thing you can see is that this building, the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket, a kind of insulating garden, which is also about the celebration of public space. In other words, for this community, they have this garden in the sky. So the humanistic ideal is very, very strong in all this work, encapsulated perhaps by one of my early sketches here, where you can see greenery, you can see sunlight, you have a connection with nature. And nature is part of the generator, the driver for this building. And symbolically, the colors of the interior are green and yellow. It has facilities like swimming pools, it has flextime, it has a social heart, a space, you have contact with nature. Now this was 1973.In 2001, this building received an award. And the award was about a celebration for a building which had been in use over a long period of time. And the people who'd created it came back: the project managers, the company chairmen then. And they were saying, you know, ""The architects, Norman was always going on about designing for the future, and you know, it didn't seem to cost us any more. So we humored him, we kept him happy."" The image at the top, what it doesn't — if you look at it in detail, really what it is saying is you can wire this building. This building was wired for change. So, in 1975, the image there is of typewriters. And when the photograph was taken, it's word processors. And what they were saying on this occasion was that our competitors had to build new buildings for the new technology. We were fortunate, because in a way our building was future-proofed. It anticipated change, even though those changes were not known. Round about that design period leading up to this building, I did a sketch, which we pulled out of the archive recently. And I was saying, and I wrote, ""But we don't have the time, and we really don't have the immediate expertise at a technical level.""In other words, we didn't have the technology to do what would be really interesting on that building. And that would be to create a kind of three-dimensional bubble — a really interesting overcoat that would naturally ventilate, would breathe and would seriously reduce the energy loads. Notwithstanding the fact that the building, as a green building, is very much a pioneering building. And if I fast-forward in time, what is interesting is that the technology is now available and celebratory. The library of the Free University, which opened last year, is an example of that. And again, the transition from one of the many thousands of sketches and computer images to the reality. And a combination of devices here, the kind of heavy mass concrete of these book stacks, and the way in which that is enclosed by this skin, which enables the building to be ventilated, to consume dramatically less energy, and where it's really working with the forces of nature.And what is interesting is that this is hugely popular by the people who use it. Again, coming back to that thing about the lifestyle, and in a way, the ecological agenda is very much at one with the spirit. So it's not a kind of sacrifice, quite the reverse. I think it's a great — it's a celebration. And you can measure the performance, in terms of energy consumption, of that building against a typical library. If I show another aspect of that technology then, in a completely different context — this apartment building in the Alps in Switzerland. Prefabricated from the most traditional of materials, but that material — because of the technology, the computing ability, the ability to prefabricate, make high-performance components out of timber — very much at the cutting edge. And just to give a sort of glimpse of that technology, the ability to plot points in the sky and to transmit, to transfer that information now, directly into the factory.So if you cross the border — just across the border — a small factory in Germany, and here you can see the guy with his computer screen, and those points in space are communicated. And on the left are the cutting machines, which then, in the factory, enable those individual pieces to be fabricated and plus or minus very, very few millimeters, to be slotted together on site. And then interestingly, that building to then be clad in the oldest technology, which is the kind of hand-cut shingles. One quarter of a million of them applied by hand as the final finish. And again, the way in which that works as a building, for those of us who can enjoy the spaces, to live and visit there. If I made the leap into these new technologies, then how did we — what happened before that? I mean, you know, what was life like before the mobile phone, the things that you take for granted?Well, obviously the building still happened. I mean, this is a glimpse of the interior of our Hong Kong bank of 1979, which opened in 1985, with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here. And in the absence of computers, you have to physically model. So for example, we would put models under an artificial sky. For wind tunnels, we would literally put them in a wind tunnel and blast air, and the many kilometers of cable and so on. And the turning point was probably, in our terms, when we had the first computer. And that was at the time that we sought to redesign, reinvent the airport. This is Terminal Four at Heathrow, typical of any terminal — big, heavy roof, blocking out the sunlight, lots of machinery, big pipes, whirring machinery.And Stansted, the green alternative, which uses natural light, is a friendly place: you know where you are, you can relate to the outside. And for a large part of its cycle, not needing electric light — electric light, which in turn creates more heat, which creates more cooling loads and so on. And at that particular point in time, this was one of the few solitary computers. And that's a little image of the tree of Stansted. Not going back very far in time, 1990, that's our office. And if you looked very closely, you'd see that people were drawing with pencils, and they were pushing, you know, big rulers and triangles. It's not that long ago, 17 years, and here we are now. I mean, major transformation.Going back in time, there was a lady called Valerie Larkin, and in 1987, she had all our information on one disk. Now, every week, we have the equivalent of 84 million disks, which record our archival information on past, current and future projects. That reaches 21 kilometers into the sky. This is the view you would get, if you looked down on that. But meanwhile, as you know, wonderful protagonists like Al Gore are noting the inexorable rise in temperature, set in the context of that, interestingly, those buildings which are celebratory and very, very relevant to this place.Our Reichstag project, which has a very familiar agenda, I'm sure, as a public place where we sought to, in a way, through a process of advocacy, reinterpret the relationship between society and politicians, public space. And maybe its hidden agenda, an energy manifesto — something that would be free, completely free of fuel as we know it. So it would be totally renewable. And again, the humanistic sketch, the translation into the public space, but this very, very much a part of the ecology. But here, not having to model it for real. Obviously the wind tunnel had a place, but the ability now with the computer to explore, to plan, to see how that would work in terms of the forces of nature: natural ventilation, to be able to model the chamber below, and to look at biomass. A combination of biomass, aquifers, burning vegetable oil — a process that, quite interestingly, was developed in Eastern Germany, at the time of its dependence on the Soviet Bloc.So really, retranslating that technology and developing something which was so clean, it was virtually pollution-free. You can measure it again. You can compare how that building, in terms of its emission in tons of carbon dioxide per year — at the time that we took that project, over 7,000 tons — what it would have been with natural gas and finally, with the vegetable oil, 450 tons. I mean, a 94 percent reduction — virtually clean. We can see the same processes at work in terms of the Commerce Bank — its dependence on natural ventilation, the way that you can model those gardens, the way they spiral around. But again, very much about the lifestyle, the quality — something that would be more enjoyable as a place to work. And again, we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption.There is an evolution here between the projects, and Swiss Re again develops that a little bit further — the project in the city in London. And this sequence shows the buildup of that model. But what it shows first, which I think is quite interesting, is that here you see the circle, you see the public space around it. What are the other ways of putting the same amount of space on the site? If, for example, you seek to do a building which goes right to the edge of the pavement, it's the same amount of space. And finally, you profile this, you cut grooves into it. The grooves become the kind of green lungs which give views, which give light, ventilation, make the building fresher. And you enclose that with something that also is central to its appearance, which is a mesh of triangulated structures — again, in a long connection evocative of some of those works of Buckminster Fuller, and the way in which triangulation can increase performance and also give that building its sense of identity.And here, if we look at a detail of the way that the building opens up and breathes into those atria, the way in which now, with a computer, we can model the forces, we can see the high pressure, the low pressure, the way in which the building behaves rather like an aircraft wing. So it also has the ability, all the time, regardless of the direction of the wind, to be able to make the building fresh and efficient. And unlike conventional buildings, the top of the building is celebratory. It's a viewing place for people, not machinery. And the base of the building is again about public space. Comparing it with a typical building, what happens if we seek to use such design strategies in terms of really large-scale thinking? And I'm just going to give two images out of a kind of company research project.It's been well known that the Dead Sea is dying. The level is dropping, rather like the Aral Sea. And the Dead Sea is obviously much lower than the oceans and seas around it. So there has been a project which rescues the Dead Sea by creating a pipeline, a pipe, sometimes above the surface, sometimes buried, that will redress that, and will feed from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Dead Sea. And our translation of that, using a lot of the thinking built up over the 40 years, is to say, what if that, instead of being just a pipe, what if it is a lifeline? What if it is the equivalent, depending on where you are, of the Grand Canal, in terms of tourists, habitation, desalination, agriculture? In other words, water is the lifeblood.And if you just go back to the previous image, and you look at this area of volatility and hostility, that a unifying design idea as a humanitarian gesture could have the affect of bringing all those warring factions together in a united cause, in terms of something that would be genuinely green and productive in the widest sense. Infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication. And whether that communication is the virtual world or it is the physical world, then it's absolutely central to society. And how do we make more legible in this growing world, especially in some of the places that I'm talking about — China, for example, which in the next ten years will create 400 new airports. Now what form do they take? How do you make them more friendly at that scale?Hong Kong I refer to as a kind of analog experience in a digital age, because you always have a point of reference. So what happens when we take that and you expand that further into the Chinese society? And what is interesting is that that produces in a way perhaps the ultimate mega-building. It is physically the largest project on the planet at the moment. 250 — excuse me, 50,000 people working 24 hours, seven days. Larger by 17 percent than every terminal put together at Heathrow — built — plus the new, un-built Terminal Five. And the challenge here is a building that will be green, that is compact despite its size and is about the human experience of travel, is about friendly, is coming back to that starting point, is very, very much about the lifestyle. And perhaps these, in the end, as celebratory spaces.As Hubert was talking over lunch, as we sort of engaged in conversation, talked about this, talked about cities. Hubert was saying, absolutely correctly, ""These are the new cathedrals."" And in a way, one aspect of this conversation was triggered on New Year's Eve, when I was talking about the Olympic agenda in China in terms of its green ambitions and aspirations. And I was voicing the thought that — it just crossed my mind that New Year's Eve, a sort of symbolic turning point as we move from 2006 to 2007 — that maybe, you know, the future was the most powerful, innovative sort of nation. The way in which somebody like Kennedy inspirationally could say, ""We put a man on the moon.""You know, who is going to say that we cracked this thing of the dependence on fossil fuels, with all that being held to ransom by rogue regimes, and so on. And that's a concerted platform. It's more than one device, you know, it's renewable. And I voiced the thought that maybe at the turn of the year, I thought that the inspiration was more likely to come from those other, larger countries out there — the Chinas, the Indias, the Asian-Pacific tigers. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/norman_foster_s_green_agenda
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"Hi. I'm going to ask you to raise your arms and wave back, just the way I am — kind of a royal wave. You can mimic what you can see. You can program the hundreds of muscles in your arm. Soon, you'll be able to look inside your brain and program, control the hundreds of brain areas that you see there. I'm going to tell you about that technology.People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years. Well, coming out of the research labs just now, for our generation, is the possibility to do that. People envision this as being very difficult. You had to take a spaceship, shrink it down, inject it into the bloodstream. It was terribly dangerous. (Laughter) You could be attacked by white blood cells in the arteries. But now, we have a real technology to do this.We're going to fly into my colleague Peter's brain. We're going to do it non-invasively using MRI. We don't have to inject anything. We don't need radiation. We will be able to fly into the anatomy of Peter's brain — literally, fly into his body — but more importantly, we can look into his mind. When Peter moves his arm, that yellow spot you see there is the interface to the functioning of Peter's mind taking place. Now you've seen before that with electrodes you can control robotic arms, that brain imaging and scanners can show you the insides of brains. What's new is that that process has typically taken days or months of analysis. We've collapsed that through technology to milliseconds, and that allows us to let Peter to look at his brain in real time as he's inside the scanner. He can look at these 65,000 points of activation per second. If he can see this pattern in his own brain, he can learn how to control it.There have been three ways to try to impact the brain: the therapist's couch, pills and the knife. This is a fourth alternative that you are soon going to have. We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you. If we can look at the activation in the brain that's producing the pain, we can form 3D models and watch in real time the brain process information, and then we can select the areas that produce the pain. So put your arms back up and flex your bicep.Now imagine that you will soon be able to look inside your brain and select brain areas to do that same thing. What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain. They're learning to flex this system that releases their own endogenous opiates. As they do it, in the upper left is a display that's yoked to their brain activation of their own pain being controlled. When they control their brain, they can control their pain. This is an investigational technology, but, in clinical trials, we're seeing a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain patients.This is not ""The Matrix."" You can only do this to yourself. You take control. I've seen inside my brain. You will too, soon. When you do, what do you want to control? You will be able to look at all the aspects that make you yourself, all your experiences. These are some of the areas we're working on today that I don't have time to go into in detail. But I want to leave with you the big question. We are the first generation that's going to be able to enter into, using this technology, the human mind and brain. Where will we take it?","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_decharms_scans_the_brain_in_real_time
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"I'm delighted to be here. I'm honored by the invitation, and thanks. I would love to talk about stuff that I'm interested in, but unfortunately, I suspect that what I'm interested in won't interest many other people. First off, my badge says I'm an astronomer. I would love to talk about my astronomy, but I suspect that the number of people who are interested in radiative transfer in non-gray atmospheres and polarization of light in Jupiter's upper atmosphere are the number of people who'd fit in a bus shelter. So I'm not going to talk about that. (Laughter)It would be just as much fun to talk about some stuff that happened in 1986 and 1987, when a computer hacker is breaking into our systems over at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. And I caught the guys, and they turned out to be working for what was then the Soviet KGB, and stealing information and selling it. And I'd love to talk about that — and it'd be fun — but, 20 years later ... I find computer security, frankly, to be kind of boring. It's tedious. I'm —The first time you do something, it's science. The second time, it's engineering. A third time, it's just being a technician. I'm a scientist. Once I do something, I do something else. So, I'm not going to talk about that. Nor am I going to talk about what I think are obvious statements from my first book, ""Silicon Snake Oil,"" or my second book, nor am I going to talk about why I believe computers don't belong in schools.I feel that there's a massive and bizarre idea going around that we have to bring more computers into schools. My idea is: no! No! Get them out of schools, and keep them out of schools. And I'd love to talk about this, but I think the argument is so obvious to anyone who's hung around a fourth grade classroom that it doesn't need much talking about — but I guess I may be very wrong about that, and everything else that I've said. So don't go back and read my dissertation. It probably has lies in it as well.Having said that, I outlined my talk about five minutes ago. (Laughter) And if you look at it over here, the main thing I wrote on my thumb was the future. I'm supposed to talk about the future, yes? Oh, right. And my feeling is, asking me to talk about the future is bizarre, because I've got gray hair, and so, it's kind of silly for me to talk about the future. In fact, I think that if you really want to know what the future's going to be, if you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code.No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher. They know. In fact, don't ask just any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one. They're the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation. I don't. Nor, I suspect, do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring. Certainly, all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there. But to me, things aren't the future. What I ask myself is, what's society is going to be like, when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together?Change is happening, and the change that is happening is not one that is in software. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'd love to talk about it, it'd be fun, but I want to talk about what I'm doing now. What am I doing now? Oh — the other thing that I think I'd like to talk about is right over here. Right over here. Is that visible? What I'd like to talk about is one-sided things. I would dearly love to talk about things that have one side. Because I love Mobius loops. I not only love Mobius loops, but I'm one of the very few people, if not the only person in the world, that makes Klein bottles. Right away, I hope that all of your eyes glaze over. This is a Klein bottle. For those of you in the audience who know, you roll your eyes and say, yup, I know all about it. It's one sided. It's a bottle whose inside is its outside. It has zero volume. And it's non-orientable. It has wonderful properties. If you take two Mobius loops and sew their common edge together, you get one of these, and I make them out of glass. And I'd love to talk to you about this, but I don't have much in the way of ... things to say because — (Laughter)(Chris Anderson: I've got a cold.)However, the ""D"" in TED of course stands for design. Just two weeks ago I made — you know, I've been making small, medium and big Klein bottles for the trade. But what I've just made — and I'm delighted to show you, first time in public here. This is a Klein bottle wine bottle, which, although in four dimensions it shouldn't be able to hold any fluid at all, it's perfectly capable of doing so because our universe has only three spatial dimensions. And because our universe is only three spatial dimensions, it can hold fluids. So it's highly — that one's the cool one. That was a month of my life. But although I would love to talk about topology with you, I'm not going to. (Laughter)Instead, I'm going to mention my mom, who passed away last summer. Had collected photographs of me, as mothers will do. Could somebody put this guy up? And I looked over her album and she had collected a picture of me, standing — well, sitting — in 1969, in front of a bunch of dials. And I looked at it, and said, oh my god, that was me, when I was working at the electronic music studio! As a technician, repairing and maintaining the electronic music studio at SUNY Buffalo. And wow! Way back machine. And I said to myself, oh yeah! And it sent me back.Soon after that, I found in another picture that she had, a picture of me. This guy over here of course is me. This man is Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, who passed away this past August. Robert Moog was a generous, kind person, extraordinarily competent engineer. A musician who took time from his life to teach me, a sophomore, a freshman at SUNY Buffalo. He'd come up from Trumansburg to teach me not just about the Moog synthesizer, but we'd be sitting there — I'm studying physics at the time. This is 1969, 70, 71. We're studying physics, I'm studying physics, and he's saying, ""That's a good thing to do. Don't get caught up in electronic music if you're doing physics."" Mentoring me. He'd come up and spend hours and hours with me. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me to get into graduate school. In the background, my bicycle. I realize that this picture was taken at a friend's living room. Bob Moog came by and hauled a whole pile of equipment to show Greg Flint and I things about this. We sat around talking about Fourier transforms, Bessel functions, modulation transfer functions, stuff like this. Bob's passing this past summer has been a loss to all of us. Anyone who's a musician has been profoundly influenced by Robert Moog. (Applause) And I'll just say what I'm about to do. What I'm about to do — I hope you can recognize that there's a distorted sine wave, almost a triangular wave upon this Hewlett-Packard oscilloscope.Oh, cool. I can get to this place over here, right? Kids. Kids is what I'm going to talk about — is that okay? It says kids over here, that's what I'd like to talk about. I've decided that, for me at least, I don't have a big enough head. So I think locally and I act locally. I feel that the best way I can help out anything is to help out very, very locally. So Ph.D. this, and degree there, and the yadda yadda. I was talking about this stuff to some schoolteachers about a year ago. And one of them, several of them would come up to me and say, ""Well, how come you ain't teaching?"" And I said, ""Well, I've taught graduate — I've had graduate students, I've taught undergraduate classes."" No, they said, ""If you're so into kids and all this stuff, how come you ain't over here on the front lines? Put your money where you mouth is.""Is true. Is true. I teach eighth-grade science four days a week. Not just showing up every now and then. No, no, no, no, no. I take attendance. I take lunch hour. (Applause) This is not — no, no, no, this is not claps. I strongly suggest that this is a good thing for each of you to do. Not just show up to class every now and then. Teach a solid week. Okay, I'm teaching three-quarters time, but good enough. One of the things that I've done for my science students is to tell them, ""Look, I'm going to teach you college-level physics. No calculus, I'll cut out that. You won't need to know trig. But you will need to know eighth-grade algebra, and we're going to do serious experiments. None of this open-to-chapter-seven-and-do-all-the-odd-problem-sets. We're going to be doing genuine physics."" And that's one of the things I thought I'd do right now. (High-pitched tone)Oh, before I even turn that on, one of the things that we did about three weeks ago in my class — this is through the lens, and one of the things we used a lens for was to measure the speed of light. My students in El Cerrito — with my help, of course, and with the help of a very beat up oscilloscope — measured the speed of light. We were off by 25 percent. How many eighth graders do you know of who have measured the speed of light? In addition to that, we've measured the speed of sound. I'd love to measure the speed of light here. I was all set to do it and I was thinking, ""Aw man,"" I was just going to impose upon the powers that be, and measure the speed of light. And I'm all set to do it. I'm all set to do it, but then it turns out that to set up here, you have like 10 minutes to set up! And there's no time to do it. So, next time, maybe, I'll measure the speed of light!But meanwhile, let's measure the speed of sound! Well, the obvious way to measure the speed of sound is to bounce sound off something and look at the echo. But, probably — one of my students, Ariel [unclear], said, ""Could we measure the speed of light using the wave equation?"" And all of you know the wave equation is the frequency times the wavelength of any wave ... is a constant. When the frequency goes up, the wavelength comes down. Wavelength goes up, frequency goes down. So, if we have a wave here — over here, that's what's interesting — as the pitch goes up, things get closer, pitch goes down, things stretch out. Right? This is simple physics. All of you know this from eighth grade, remember? What they didn't tell you in physics — in eighth-grade physics — but they should have, and I wish they had, was that if you multiply the frequency times the wavelength of sound or light, you get a constant. And that constant is the speed of sound. So, in order to measure the speed of sound, all I've got to do is know its frequency. Well, that's easy. I've got a frequency counter right here. Set it up to around A, above A, above A. There's an A, more or less. Now, so I know the frequency. It's 1.76 kilohertz. I measure its wavelength. All I need now is to flip on another beam, and the bottom beam is me talking, right? So anytime I talk, you'd see it on the screen. I'll put it over here, and as I move this away from the source, you'll notice the spiral. The slinky moves. We're going through different nodes of the wave, coming out this way. Those of you who are physicists, I hear you rolling your eyes, but bear with me. (Laughter)To measure the wavelength, all I need to do is measure the distance from here — one full wave — over to here. From here to here is the wavelength of sound. So, I'll put a measuring tape here, measuring tape here, move it back over to here. I've moved the microphone 20 centimeters. 0.2 meters from here, back to here, 20 centimeters. OK, let's go back to Mr. Elmo. And we'll say the frequency is 1.76 kilohertz, or 1760. The wavelength was 0.2 meters. Let's figure out what this is. (Laughter) (Applause) 1.76 times 0.2 over here is 352 meters per second. If you look it up in the book, it's really 343. But, here with kludgy material, and lousy drink — we've been able to measure the speed of sound to — not bad. Pretty good.All of which comes to what I wanted to say. Go back to this picture of me a million years ago. It was 1971, the Vietnam War was going on, and I'm like, ""Oh my God!"" I'm studying physics: Landau, Lipschitz, Resnick and Halliday. I'm going home for a midterm. A riot's going on on campus. There's a riot! Hey, Elmo's done: off. There's a riot going on on campus, and the police are chasing me, right? I'm walking across campus. Cop comes and looks at me and says, ""You! You're a student."" Pulls out a gun. Goes boom! And a tear gas canister the size of a Pepsi can goes by my head. Whoosh! I get a breath of tear gas and I can't breathe. This cop comes after me with a rifle. He wants to clunk me over the head! I'm saying, ""I got to clear out of here!"" I go running across campus quick as I can. I duck into Hayes Hall. It's one of these bell-tower buildings. The cop's chasing me. Chasing me up the first floor, second floor, third floor. Chases me into this room. The entranceway to the bell tower. I slam the door behind me, climb up, go past this place where I see a pendulum ticking. And I'm thinking, ""Oh yeah, the square root of the length is proportional to its period."" (Laughter)I keep climbing up, go back. I go to a place where a dowel splits off. There's a clock, clock, clock, clock. The time's going backwards because I'm inside of it. I'm thinking of Lorenz contractions and Einsteinian relativity. I climb up, and there's this place, way in the back, that you climb up this wooden ladder. I pop up the top, and there's a cupola. A dome, one of these ten-foot domes. I'm looking out and I'm seeing the cops bashing students' heads, shooting tear gas, and watching students throwing bricks. And I'm asking, ""What am I doing here? Why am I here?"" Then I remember what my English teacher in high school said. Namely, that when they cast bells, they write inscriptions on them. So, I wipe the pigeon manure off one of the bells, and I look at it. I'm asking myself, ""Why am I here?""So, at this time, I'd like to tell you the words inscribed upon the Hayes Hall tower bells: ""All truth is one. In this light, may science and religion endeavor here for the steady evolution of mankind, from darkness to light, from narrowness to broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance. It is the voice of life, which calls us to come and learn."" Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything
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"Good morning. Let's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all, Leonardo da Vinci. We're all familiar with his fantastic work — his drawings, his paintings, his inventions, his writings. But we do not know his face. Thousands of books have been written about him, but there's controversy, and it remains, about his looks. Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians.So, what do you think? Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn't it? Let's find out. Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him. He drew people, anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, buildings, water, everything. But no faces? I find that hard to believe. His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here — en face or three-quarters. So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time. So let's try to find them.I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us. So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits. There are about 120, you see them here. Which ones of these could be self-portraits? Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. So we can eliminate all the profiles. It also has to be sufficiently detailed. So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized. And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man. So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. (Laughter)And look what happens — only three candidates remain that fit the bill. And here they are. Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus. And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, ""The Musician.""Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them. I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 — 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. (Laughter) But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces. OK, now let's look at these three portraits. And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces, remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin.I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw that. There is no reason why these portraits should look alike. All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar. Now, are they made in the right order? The young man should be made first. And as you see here from the years that they were created, it is indeed the case. They are made in the right order. What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit? Yes, it does. He was 33, 38 and 63 when these were made.So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time. But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? Well, we need a reference. And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted. It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15. And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again. The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces.Ladies and gentlemen, this story has not yet been published. It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first. The icon of icons finally has a face. Here he is: Leonardo da Vinci. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/siegfried_woldhek_shows_how_he_found_the_true_face_of_leonardo
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"Fifty years ago in the old Soviet Union, a team of engineers was secretly moving a large object through a desolate countryside. With it, they were hoping to capture the minds of people everywhere by being the first to conquer outer space. The rocket was huge. And packed in its nose was a silver ball with two radios inside.On October 4, 1957, they launched their rocket. One of the Russian scientists wrote at the time: ""We are about to create a new planet that we will call Sputnik. In the olden days, explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus had the good fortune to open up the terrestrial globe. Now we have the good fortune to open up space. And it is for those in the future to envy us our joy.""You're watching snippets from ""Sputnik,"" my fifth documentary feature, which is just about completed. It tells the story of Sputnik, and the story of what happened to America as a result. For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space.But just three days later, on a day they called Red Monday, the media and the politicians told us, and we believed, that Sputnik was proof that our enemy had beaten us in science and technology, and that they could now attack us with hydrogen bombs, using their Sputnik rocket as an IBM missile.All hell broke loose. Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America — historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. It provoked the missile gap. It exploded an arms race. It began the space race. Within a year, Congress funded huge weapons increases, and we went from 1,200 nuclear weapons to 20,000. And the reactions to Sputnik went far beyond weapons increases.For example, some here will remember this day, June 1958, the National Civil Defense Drill, where tens of millions of people in 78 cities went underground. Or the Gallup Poll that showed that seven in 10 Americans believed that a nuclear war would happen, and that at least 50 percent of our population was going to be killed.But Sputnik provoked wonderful changes as well. For example, some in this room went to school on scholarship because of Sputnik. Support for engineering, math and science — education in general — boomed. And Vint Cerf points out that Sputnik led directly to ARPA, and the Internet, and, of course, NASA.My feature documentary shows how a free society can be stampeded by those who know how to use media. But it also shows how we can turn what appears at first to be a bad situation, into something that was overall very good for America. ""Sputnik"" will soon be released.In closing, I would like to take a moment to thank one of my investors: longtime TEDster, Jay Walker. And I'd like to thank you all.(Applause).Thank you, Chris.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_hoffman_shares_his_sputnik_mania
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"I’m working a lot with motion and animation, and also I'm an old DJ and a musician. So, music videos are something that I always found interesting, but they always seem to be so reactive. So I was thinking, can you remove us as creators and try to make the music be the voice and have the animation following it? So with two designers, Tolga and Christina, at my office, we took a track — many of you probably know it. It’s about 25 years old, and it's David Byrne and Brian Eno — and we did this little animation. And I think that it's maybe interesting, also, that it deals with two problematic issues, which are rising waters and religion.Song: Before God destroyed the people on the Earth, he warned Noah to build an Ark. And after Noah built his Ark, I believe he told Noah to warn the people that they must change all their wicked ways before he come upon them and destroy them. And when Noah had done built his Ark, I understand that somebody began to rend a song. And the song began to move on I understand like this. And when Noah had done built his Ark ... Move on ... In fact ... Concern ... So they get tired, has come dark and rain; they get weary and tired. And then he went and knocked an old lady house. And old lady ran to the door and say, ""Who is it?"" Jack say, ""Me, Mama-san, could we spend the night here? Because we’re far from home, we’re very tired."" And the old lady said, ""Oh yes, come on in."" It was come dark and rain, will make you weary and tired.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jakob_trollback_rethinks_the_music_video
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"There is nothing bigger or older than the universe. The questions I would like to talk about are: one, where did we come from? How did the universe come into being? Are we alone in the universe? Is there alien life out there? What is the future of the human race?Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time. Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding. Distant galaxies were moving away from us. This meant they must have been closer together in the past. If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.But was there anything before the Big Bang? If not, what created the universe? Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did? We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time. And second, there was no question of the initial state of the universe.We have made good progress on the first part, and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions. But until recently, we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe. However, this division into laws of evolution and initial conditions depends on time and space being separate and distinct. Under extreme conditions, general relativity and quantum theory allow time to behave like another dimension of space. This removes the distinction between time and space, and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state. The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.Moreover, we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states. These predictions are in excellent agreement with observations by the WMAP satellite of the cosmic microwave background, which is an imprint of the very early universe. We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence.I now turn to the second big question: are we alone, or is there other life in the universe? We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.But we don't know how life first appeared. We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing. The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of a planet of Earth type. This suggests that the probability of life appearing is reasonably high. If it was very low, one would have expected it to take most of the ten billion years available.On the other hand, we don't seem to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting the reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet.This brings me to the last of the big questions: the future of the human race. If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. The answers to these big questions show that we have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. That is why I am in favor of manned — or should I say,  personned — space flight.All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions. I have been very lucky that my disability has not been a serious handicap. Indeed, it has probably given me more time than most people to pursue the quest for knowledge. The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe, and we are making good progress. Thank you for listening.Chris Anderson: Professor, if you had to guess either way, do you now believe that it is more likely than not that we are alone in the Milky Way, as a civilization of our level of intelligence or higher? This answer took seven minutes, and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED.Stephen Hawking: I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves. The alternative is that civilizations don't last very long, but destroy themselves.CA: Professor Hawking, thank you for that answer. We will take it as a salutary warning, I think, for the rest of our conference this week. Professor, we really thank you for the extraordinary effort you made to share your questions with us today. Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe
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"I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times. I'm giving a short slide show this morning that I'm giving for the very first time, so — well it's — I don't want or need to raise the bar, I'm actually trying to lower the bar. Because I've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session.And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief, but about behavior. Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. How dare we be optimistic? Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture. As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, ""You must become the change you wish to see in the world."" And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word ""behavior"" is also, I think, sometimes misunderstood in this context. I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff. But, as important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws. And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. And we have one.I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. I was reminded of that recently, by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her 70s, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction, also just staring at me. And so I said, ""How do you do?"" And she said, ""You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore."" (Laughter)Many years ago, when I was a young congressman, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control — the nuclear arms race. And the military historians taught me, during that quest, that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global, world war — strategic conflicts. And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model. Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories, and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems, like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic, and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources.Let me show you these slides here. I thought I would start with the logo. What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. Greenland remains. Twenty-eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap — the North Polar ice cap — looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox. This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory. This is what's happened in the last 28 years. To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically — doesn't look quite the same size — but it is exactly the same size as the United States, minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice — vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland. Already, around the Arctic Circle — this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California.""They were the best of times, they were the worst of times"": the most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger, but essentially the same size. They have exactly the same amount of carbon. But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus, most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average. On Venus, it's 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, and putting it into the atmosphere. It's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. It's three times hotter than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. Now, briefly, here's an image you've seen, as one of the only old images, but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate.The global scientific community says: man-made global warming pollution, put into the atmosphere, thickening this, is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. You all know that. At the last IPCC summary, the scientists wanted to say, ""How certain are you?"" They wanted to answer that ""99 percent."" The Chinese objected, and so the compromise was ""more than 90 percent."" Now, the skeptics say, ""Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun."" If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in. If it's more being trapped on the way out, then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the lower atmosphere. Here's the stratosphere: cooler. CSI: Climate.Now, here's the good news. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. What is missing is a sense of urgency. If you agree with the factual analysis, but you don't feel the sense of urgency, where does that leave you? Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with Current TV — who did this pro bono — did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. This is the winner.NBC — I'll show all of the networks here — the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates: two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions, two about the climate crisis. Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. From laughs to tears — this is one of the older tobacco commercials. So here's what we're doing. This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. But it's not just the developed nations. The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia — over thirty years.This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. '70s. '80s. '90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. We have the technologies. We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution.People say, ""What's the solution?"" Here it is. Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck — and some things have changed since the 19th century. In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis.But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy plants, linked in a so-called ""supergrid"" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing countries — high-voltage DC currents. This is not pie in the sky; this can be done.We need to do it for our own economy. The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these, so I'll have a disclaimer there. But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation.You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. The only two countries that didn't ratify — and now there's only one. Australia had an election. And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. Lot of other things contributed to it, but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. This is Lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture. Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S. are up to 780 — and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this — which is good news.Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice — just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. We now have a culture of distraction. But we have a planetary emergency. And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission. I wish I could find the words to convey this. This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. We can do this. Don't tell me that we don't have the capacity to do it. If we had just one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War, we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. We have the capacity to do it.One final point: I'm optimistic, because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, ""Oh, this is so terrible. What a burden we have."" I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.Let's do that. Thank you very much.Chris Anderson: For so many people at TED, there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form — one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. That hurts.Al Gore: You have no idea. (Laughter)CA: When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now — I mean, there's — are you excited by their plans on global warming?AG: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee — certain nominee — John McCain, and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination — all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that — as illustrated by the questions — that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters, by the way, the analysis of all the questions — and, by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, ""Clean Coal."" Has anybody noticed that? Every single debate has been sponsored by ""Clean Coal."" ""Now, even lower emissions!""The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. So they're saying the right things and they may — whichever of them is elected — may do the right thing, but let me tell you: when I came back from Kyoto in 1997, with a feeling of great happiness that we'd gotten that breakthrough there, and then confronted the United States Senate, only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm, to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say.This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization. CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. So that's why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. Demand — change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy — this — We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. Have a moratorium — we shouldn't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren't able to capture and store CO2, which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible. This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign — grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper — with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen.We need help. We need help.CA: In terms of your own personal role going forward, Al, is there something more than that you would like to be doing?AG: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? Buckminster Fuller once wrote, ""If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? How would I be?"" It does depend on all of us, but again, not just with the light bulbs. We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. We can change things, but we have to actively change. What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness. And that's hard to — that's hard to create — but it is coming. There's an old African proverb that some of you know that says, ""If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."" We have to go far, quickly. So we have to have a change in consciousness. A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge.CA: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED.AG: Thank you. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_s_new_thinking_on_the_climate_crisis
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"So, as researchers, something that we often do is use immense resources to achieve certain capabilities, or achieve certain goals. And this is essential to the progress of science, or exploration of what is possible. But it creates this unfortunate situation where a tiny, tiny fraction of the world can actually participate in this exploration or can benefit from that technology. Something that motivates me, and gets me really excited about my research, is when I see simple opportunities to drastically change that distribution and make the technology accessible to a much wider percentage of the population.I'm going to show you two videos that have gotten a lot of attention that I think embody this philosophy. And they actually use the Nintendo Wii Remote. For those of you who aren't familiar with this device, it's a $40 video game controller. And it's mostly advertised for its motion-sensing capabilities: so you can swing a tennis racket, or hit a baseball bat. But what actually interests me a lot more is the fact that in the tip of each controller is a relatively high-performing infrared camera. And I'm going to show you two demos of why this is useful.So here, I have my computer set up with the projector, and I have a Wii Remote sitting on top of it. And, for example, if you're in a school that doesn't have a lot money, probably a lot of schools, or if you're in an office environment, and you want an interactive whiteboard, normally these cost about two to three thousand dollars. So I'm going to show you how to create one with a Wii Remote. Now, this requires another piece of hardware, which is this infrared pen. You can probably make this yourself for about five dollars with a quick trip to the Radio Shack. It's got a battery, a button and an infrared LED — you guys can't see it — but it turns on whenever I push the button. Now, what this means is that if I run this piece of software, the camera sees the infrared dot, and I can register the location of the camera pixels to the projector pixels. And now this is like an interactive whiteboard surface.(Applause)So for about $50 of hardware, you can have your own whiteboard. This is Adobe Photoshop.(Applause)Thank you.(Laughter)The software for this I've actually put on my website and have let people download it for free. In the three months this project has been public, it's been downloaded over half a million times. So teachers and students all around the world are already using this.(Applause)Although it does do it for 50 dollars, there are some limitations of this approach. You get about 80 percent of the way there, for one percent of the cost. Another nice thing is that a camera can see multiple dots, so this is actually a multi-touch, interactive whiteboard system as well.(Applause)For the second demo, I have this Wii Remote that's actually next to the TV. So it's pointing away from the display, rather than pointing at the display. And why this is interesting is that if you put on, say, a pair of safety glasses, that have two infrared dots in them, they are going to give the computer an approximation of your head location. And why this is interesting is I have this sort of application running on the computer monitor, which has a 3D room, with some targets floating in it. And you can see that it looks like a 3D room. kind of like a video game, it sort of looks 3D, but for the most part, the image looks pretty flat, and bound to the surface of the screen. But if we turn on head tracking — the computer can change the image that's on the screen and make it respond to the head movements. So let's switch back to that.(Laughter)(Applause)So this has actually been a little bit startling to the game-development community.(Laughter)Because this is about 10 dollars of additional hardware if you already have a Nintendo Wii. So I'm looking forward to seeing some games, and actually Louis Castle, that's him down there, last week announced that Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers, is releasing a game in May that has a little Easter egg feature for supporting this type of head tracking. And that's from less than five months from a prototype in my lab to a major commercial product.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)But actually, to me, what's almost more interesting than either of these two projects is how people actually found out about them. YouTube has really changed the way, or changed the speed, in which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world. I'm doing some research in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week, a million people had seen this work, and literally within days, engineers, teachers and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system or derivatives of this work. So I hope to see more of that in the future, and hope online video distribution to be embraced by the research community.So thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks
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"The first idea I'd like to suggest is that we all love music a great deal. It means a lot to us. But music is even more powerful if you don't just listen to it, but you make it yourself. So, that's my first idea. And we all know about the Mozart effect — the idea that's been around for the last five to 10 years — that just by listening to music or by playing music to your baby [in utero], that it'll raise our IQ points 10, 20, 30 percent.Great idea, but it doesn't work at all. So, you can't just listen to music, you have to make it somehow. And I'd add to that, that it's not just making it, but everybody, each of us, everybody in the world has the power to create and be part of music in a very dynamic way, and that's one of the main parts of my work. So, with the MIT Media Lab, for quite a while now, we've been engaged in a field called active music. What are all the possible ways that we can think of to get everybody in the middle of a musical experience, not just listening, but making music?And we started by making instruments for some of the world's greatest performers — we call these hyperinstruments — for Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Gabriel, Prince, orchestras, rock bands. Instruments where they're all kinds of sensors built right into the instrument, so the instrument knows how it's being played. And just by changing the interpretation and the feeling, I can turn my cello into a voice, or into a whole orchestra, or into something that nobody has ever heard before.When we started making these, I started thinking, why can't we make wonderful instruments like that for everybody, people who aren't fantastic Yo-Yo Mas or Princes? So, we've made a whole series of instruments. One of the largest collections is called the Brain Opera. It's a whole orchestra of about 100 instruments, all designed for anybody to play using natural skill. So, you can play a video game, drive through a piece of music, use your body gesture to control huge masses of sound, touch a special surface to make melodies, use your voice to make a whole aura. And when we make the Brain Opera, we invite the public to come in, to try these instruments and then collaborate with us to help make each performance of the Brain Opera. We toured that for a long time. It is now permanently in Vienna, where we built a museum around it.And that led to something which you probably do know. Guitar Hero came out of our lab, and my two teenage daughters and most of the students at the MIT Media Lab are proof that if you make the right kind of interface, people are really interested in being in the middle of a piece of music, and playing it over and over and over again.So, the model works, but it's only the tip of the iceberg, because my second idea is that it's not enough just to want to make music in something like Guitar Hero. And music is very fun, but it's also transformative. It's very, very important. Music can change your life, more than almost anything. It can change the way you communicate with others, it can change your body, it can change your mind. So, we're trying to go to the next step of how you build on top of something like Guitar Hero. We are very involved in education. We have a long-term project called Toy Symphony, where we make all kinds of instruments that are also addictive, but for little kids, so the kids will fall in love with making music, want to spend their time doing it, and then will demand to know how it works, how to make more, how to create. So, we make squeezy instruments, like these Music Shapers that measure the electricity in your fingers, Beatbugs that let you tap in rhythms — they gather your rhythm, and like hot potato, you send your rhythm to your friends, who then have to imitate or respond to what your doing — and a software package called Hyperscore, which lets anybody use lines and color to make quite sophisticated music. Extremely easy to use, but once you use it, you can go quite deep — music in any style. And then, by pressing a button, it turns into music notation so that live musicians can play your pieces.We've had good enough, really, very powerful effects with kids around the world, and now people of all ages, using Hyperscore. So, we've gotten more and more interested in using these kinds of creative activities in a much broader context, for all kinds of people who don't usually have the opportunity to make music. So, one of the growing fields that we're working on at the Media Lab right now is music, mind and health. A lot of you have probably seen Oliver Sacks' wonderful new book called ""Musicophilia"". It's on sale in the bookstore. It's a great book. If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading. He's a pianist himself, and he details his whole career of looking at and observing incredibly powerful effects that music has had on peoples' lives in unusual situations.So we know, for instance, that music is almost always the last thing that people with advanced Alzheimer's can still respond to. Maybe many of you have noticed this with loved ones, you can find somebody who can't recognize their face in the mirror, or can't tell anyone in their family, but you can still find a shard of music that that person will jump out of the chair and start singing. And with that you can bring back parts of people's memories and personalities. Music is the best way to restore speech to people who have lost it through strokes, movement to people with Parkinson's disease. It's very powerful for depression, schizophrenia, many, many things.So, we're working on understanding those underlying principles and then building activities which will let music really improve people's health. And we do this in many ways. We work with many different hospitals. One of them is right near Boston, called Tewksbury Hospital. It's a long-term state hospital, where several years ago we started working with Hyperscore and patients with physical and mental disabilities. This has become a central part of the treatment at Tewksbury hospital, so everybody there clamors to work on musical activities. It's the activity that seems to accelerate people's treatment the most and it also brings the entire hospital together as a kind of musical community. I wanted to show you a quick video of some of this work before I go on. Video: They're manipulating each other's rhythms. It's a real experience, not only to learn how to play and listen to rhythms, but to train your musical memory and playing music in a group. To get their hands on music, to shape it themselves, change it, to experiment with it, to make their own music. So Hyperscore lets you start from scratch very quickly. Everybody can experience music in a profound way, we just have to make different tools.The third idea I want to share with you is that music, paradoxically, I think even more than words, is one of the very best ways we have of showing who we really are. I love giving talks, although strangely I feel more nervous giving talks than playing music. If I were here playing cello, or playing on a synth, or sharing my music with you, I'd be able to show things about myself that I can't tell you in words, more personal things, perhaps deeper things.I think that's true for many of us, and I want to give you two examples of how music is one of the most powerful interfaces we have, from ourselves to the outside world. The first is a really crazy project that we're building right now, called Death and the Powers. And it's a big opera, one of the larger opera projects going on in the world right now. And it's about a man, rich, successful, powerful, who wants to live forever. So, he figures out a way to download himself into his environment, actually into a series of books. So this guy wants to live forever, he downloads himself into his environment. The main singer disappears at the beginning of the opera and the entire stage becomes the main character. It becomes his legacy.And the opera is about what we can share, what we can pass on to others, to the people we love, and what we can't. Every object in the opera comes alive and is a gigantic music instrument, like this chandelier. It takes up the whole stage. It looks like a chandelier, but it's actually a robotic music instrument. So, as you can see in this prototype, gigantic piano strings, each string is controlled with a little robotic element — either little bows that stroke the strings, propellers that tickle the strings, acoustic signals that vibrate the strings. We also have an army of robots on stage. These robots are the kind of the intermediary between the main character, Simon Powers, and his family. There are a whole series of them, kind of like a Greek chorus. They observe the action. We've designed these square robots that we're testing right now at MIT called OperaBots. These OperaBots follow my music. They follow the characters. They're smart enough, we hope, not to bump into each other. They go off on their own. And then they can also, when you snap, line up exactly the way you'd like to. Even though they're cubes, they actually have a lot of personality.The largest set piece in the opera is called The System. It's a series of books. Every single book is robotic, so they all move, they all make sound, and when you put them all together, they turn into these walls, which have the gesture and the personality of Simon Powers. So he's disappeared, but the whole physical environment becomes this person. This is how he's chosen to represent himself. The books also have high-packed LEDs on the spines. So it's all display. And here's the great baritone James Maddalena as he enters The System. This is a sneak preview. This premieres in Monaco — it's in September 2009. If by any chance you can't make it, another idea with this project — here's this guy building his legacy through this very unusual form, through music and through the environment. But we're also making this available both online and in public spaces, as a way of each of us to use music and images from our lives to make our own legacy or to make a legacy of someone we love. So instead of being grand opera, this opera will turn into what we're thinking of as personal opera.And, if you're going to make a personal opera, what about a personal instrument? Everything I've shown you so far — whether it's a hyper-cello for Yo-Yo Ma or squeezy toy for a child — the instruments stayed the same and are valuable for a certain class of person: a virtuoso, a child. But what if I could make an instrument that could be adapted to the way I personally behave, to the way my hands work, to what I do very skillfully, perhaps, to what I don't do so skillfully? I think that this is the future of interface, it's the future of music, the future of instruments.And I'd like now to invite two very special people on the stage, so that I can give you an example of what personal instruments might be like. So, can you give a hand to Adam Boulanger, Ph.D. student from the MIT Media Lab, and Dan Ellsey. Dan, thanks to TED and to Bombardier Flexjet, Dan is here with us today all the way from Tewksbury. He's a resident at Tewksbury Hospital. This is by far the farthest he's strayed from Tewksbury Hospital, I can tell you that, because he's motivated to meet with you today and show you his own music. So, first of all, Dan, do you want to say hi to everyone and tell everyone who you are?Dan Ellsey: Hello. My name is Dan Ellsey. I am 34 years old and I have cerebral palsy. I have always loved music and I am excited to be able to conduct my own music with this new software.Tod Machover: And we're really excited to have you here, really Dan. (Applause)So we met Dan about three years ago, three and a half years ago, when we started working at Tewksbury. Everybody we met there was fantastic, did fantastic music. Dan had never made music before, and it turned out he was really fantastic at it. He's a born composer. He's very shy, too. So, turned out he's a fantastic composer, and over the last few years has been a constant collaborator of ours. He has made many, many pieces. He makes his own CDs. Actually, he is quite well known in the Boston area — mentors people at the hospital and children, locally, in how to make their own music. And I'll let Adam tell you. So, Adam is a Ph.D. student at MIT, an expert in music technology and medicine. And Adam and Dan have become close collaborators. What Adam's been working on for this last period is not only how to have Dan be able easily to make his own pieces, but how he can perform his piece using this kind of personal instrument. So, you want to say a little bit about how you guys work?Adam Boulanger: Yes. So, Tod and I entered into a discussion following the Tewksbury work and it was really about how Dan is an expressive person, and he's an intelligent and creative person. And it's in his face, it's in his breathing, it's in his eyes. How come he can't perform one of his pieces of music? That's our responsibility, and it doesn't make sense.So we started developing a technology that will allow him with nuance, with precision, with control, and despite his physical disability, to be able to do that, to be able to perform his piece of music. So, the process and the technology — basically, first we needed an engineering solution. So, you know, we have a FireWire camera, it looked at an infrared pointer. We went with the type of gesture metaphor that Dan was already used to with his speaking controller. And this was actually the least interesting part of the work, you know, the design process. We needed an input; we needed continuous tracking; in the software, we look at the types of shapes he's making.But, then was the really interesting aspect of the work, following the engineering part, where, basically, we're coding over Dan's shoulder at the hospital extensively to figure out, you know, how does Dan move? What's useful to him as an expressive motion? You know, what's his metaphor for performance? What types of things does he find important to control and convey in a piece of music? So all the parameter fitting, and really the technology was stretched at that point to fit just Dan. And, you know, I think this is a perspective shift. It's not that our technologies — they provide access, they allow us to create pieces of creative work. But what about expression? What about that moment when an artist delivers that piece of work? You know, do our technologies allow us to express? Do they provide structure for us to do that? And, you know, that's a personal relationship to expression that is lacking in the technological sphere. So, you know, with Dan, we needed a new design process, a new engineering process to sort of discover his movement and his path to expression that allow him to perform. And so that's what we'll do today.TM: So let's do it. So Dan do you want to tell everyone about what you're going to play now?DE: This is ""My Eagle Song."" TM: So Dan is going to play a piece of his, called ""My Eagle Song"". In fact, this is the score for Dan's piece, completely composed by Dan in Hyperscore. So he can use his infrared tracker to go directly into Hyperscore. He's incredibly fast at it, too, faster than I am, in fact.(Laughter)TM: He's really modest, too. So he can go in Hyperscore. You start out by making melodies and rhythms. He can place those exactly where he wants. Each one gets a color. He goes back into the composition window, draws the lines, places everything the way he wants to. Looking at the Hyperscore, you can see it also, you can see where the sections are, something might continue for a while, change, get really crazy and then end up with a big bang at the end.So that's the way he made his piece, and as Adam says, we then figured out the best way to have him perform his piece. It's going to be looked at by this camera, analyze his movements, it's going to let Dan bring out all the different aspects of his music that he wants to. And you're also going to notice a visual on the screen. We asked one of our students to look at what the camera is measuring. But instead of making it very literal, showing you exactly the camera tracing, we turned it into a graphic that shows you the basic movement, and shows the way it's being analyzed.I think it gives an understanding of how we're picking out movement from what Dan's doing, but I think it will also show you, if you look at that movement, that when Dan makes music, his motions are very purposeful, very precise, very disciplined and they're also very beautiful. So, in hearing this piece, as I mentioned before, the most important thing is the music's great, and it'll show you who Dan is. So, are we ready Adam?AB: Yeah.TM: OK, now Dan will play his piece ""My Eagle Song"" for you. (Applause)TM: Bravo. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tod_machover_and_dan_ellsey_play_new_music
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"One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change. And so, to start helping that, I want to take us back to 1835. In 1835, James Gordon Bennett founded the first mass-circulation newspaper in New York City. And it cost about 500 dollars to start it, which was about the equivalent of 10,000 dollars of today. By 15 years later, by 1850, doing the same thing — starting what was experienced as a mass—circulation daily paper — would come to cost two and a half million dollars. 10,000, two and a half million, 15 years. That's the critical change that is being inverted by the Net. And that's what I want to talk about today, and how that relates to the emergence of social production.Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers — who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization — and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce. Now, the term ""information society,"" ""information economy,"" for a very long time has been used as the thing that comes after the industrial revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what's happening today, that's wrong. Because for 150 years, we've had an information economy. It's just been industrial, which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those two and a half million dollars, and later, more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years.Now, let me tell you a different story. Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. The Japanese had, for the first time, created the fastest supercomputer — the NEC Earth Simulator — taking the primary from the U.S., and about two years later — this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating-point operations per second that the computer's capable of running — sigh of relief: IBM [Blue Gene] has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. All of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period, there's another supercomputer running in the world — SETI@home. Four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes.What this picture suggests to us is that we've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it's become less capital intensive — that there's less money that's required — but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these, or something rather like it — a computer. They're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. And computation, storage and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person — and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet.What this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important means, the most important components of the core economic activities — remember, we are in an information economy — of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we've seen since the industrial revolution. So we've got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population, and we've got human creativity, human wisdom, human experience — the other major experience, the other major input — which unlike simple labor — stand here turning this lever all day long — is not something that's the same or fungible among people. Any one of you who has taken someone else's job, or tried to give yours to someone else, no matter how detailed the manual, you cannot transmit what you know, what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances. In that we're unique, and each of us holds this critical input into production as we hold this machine.What's the effect of this? So, the story that most people know is the story of free or open source software. This is market share of Apache Web server — one of the critical applications in Web-based communications. In 1995, two groups of people said, ""Wow, this is really important, the Web! We need a much better Web server!"" One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided, you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what — well, we're gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. The other was Microsoft.Now, if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people, who didn't control anything that they produced, acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line, it would be amazing! Right? Think of it in minivans. A group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with Toyota. Right? But, in fact, of course, the story is it's the 70 percent, including the major e-commerce site — 70 percent of a critical application on which Web-based communications and applications work is produced in this form, in direct competition with Microsoft. Not in a side issue — in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the Net. Software has done this in a way that's been very visible, because it's measurable. But the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the Web.So, NASA, at some point, did an experiment where they took images of Mars that they were mapping, and they said, instead of having three or four fully trained Ph.D.s doing this all the time, let's break it up into small components, put it up on the Web, and see if people, using a very simple interface, will actually spend five minutes here, 10 minutes there, clicking. After six months, 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in, which was, quote, ""practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained Ph.D.,"" once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average.Now, if you have a little girl, and she goes and writes to — well, not so little, medium little — tries to do research on Barbie. And she'll come to Encarta, one of the main online encyclopedias. This is what you'll find out about Barbie. This is it, there's nothing more to the definition, including, ""manufacturers"" — plural — ""now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls, like this black Barbie."" Which is vastly better than what you'll find in the encyclopedia.com, which is Barbie, Klaus. (Laughter) On the other hand, if they go to Wikipedia, they'll find a genuine article — and I won't talk a lot about Wikipedia, because Jimmy Wales is here — but roughly equivalent to what you would find in the Britannica, differently written, including the controversies over body image and commercialization, the claims about the way in which she's a good role model, etc.Another portion is not only how content is produced, but how relevance is produced. The claim to fame of Yahoo! was, we hire people to look — originally, not anymore — we hire people to look at websites and tell you — if they're in the index, they're good. This, on the other hand, is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the Open Directory Project, each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about, to say, this is good. So, this is the Open Directory Project, with 60,000 volunteers, each one spending a little bit of time, as opposed to a few hundred fully paid employees. No one owns it, no one owns the output, it's free for anyone to use and it's the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting.This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing — the decision about what's relevant — to the community of the Web as a whole, doing whatever they want to do: so, page rank. The critical innovation here is instead of our engineers, or our people saying which is the most relevant, we're going to go out and count what you, people out there on the Web, for whatever reason — vanity, pleasure — produced links, and tied to each other. We're going to count those, and count them up. And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, Adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every size. A contested cultural object, which you won't find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market-based mechanism: whoever pays the most is highest on the list.So, all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. But remember, the computers were also physical. Just physical materials — our PCs — we share them together. We also see this in wireless. It used to be wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed or based on property. What we're seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we're developing algorithms to let people own machines, like Wi-Fi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle: When I'm listening, when I'm not using, I can help you transfer your messages; and when you're not using, you'll help me transfer yours. And this is not an idealized version. These are working models that at least in some places in the United States are being implemented, at least for public security.If in 1999 I told you, let's build a data storage and retrieval system. It's got to store terabytes. It's got to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's got to be available from anywhere in the world. It has to support over 100 million users at any given moment. It's got to be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files, armed seizure of some major nodes. You'd say that would take years. It would take millions. But of course, what I'm describing is P2P file sharing. Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it's a distributed data storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something.So, essentially what we're seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. If things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms, if you wanted to be in the market — or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society. That was not about society itself. That was, in fact, economic.But what we're seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. Not that it's the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. It's that it's the first time that it's having major economic impact. What characterizes them is decentralized authority. You don't have to ask permission, as you do in a property-based system. May I do this? It's open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. But it's not the only one.Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market: information flows to decide what are interesting problems; who's available and good for something; motivation structures — remember, money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. (Laughter)It also requires certain new organizational approaches. And in particular, what we've seen is task organization. You have to hire people who know what they're doing. You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. Now, take the same problem, chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. Five minutes, instead of watching TV? Five minutes I'll spend just because it's interesting. Just because it's fun. Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations.So, a new social phenomenon is emerging. It's creating, and it's most visible when we see it as a new form of competition. Peer-to-peer networks assaulting the recording industry; free and open source software taking market share from Microsoft; Skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms; Wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias. But it's also a new source of opportunities for businesses. As you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging, you have new opportunities. Some of them are toolmakers. Instead of building well-behaved appliances — things that you know what they'll do in advance — you begin to build more open tools. There's a new set of values, a new set of things people value. You build platforms for self-expression and collaboration. Like Wikipedia, like the Open Directory Project, you're beginning to build platforms, and you see that as a model. And you see surfers, people who see this happening, and in some sense build it into a supply chain, which is a very curious one. Right?You have a belief: stuff will flow out of connected human beings. That'll give me something I can use, and I'm going to contract with someone. I will deliver something based on what happens. It's very scary — that's what Google does, essentially. That's what IBM does in software services, and they've done reasonably well.So, social production is a real fact, not a fad. It is the critical long-term shift caused by the Internet. Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon. In some contexts, it's even more efficient because of the quality of the information, the ability to find the best person, the lower transaction costs. It's sustainable and growing fast.But — and this is the dark lining — it is threatened by — in the same way that it threatens — the incumbent industrial systems. So next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it's not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced. Because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model, and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics
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"It is interesting that in the United States, the most significant health-care budget goes to cardiovascular disease care, whether it's private or public. There's no comparison at all. In Africa — where it is a major killer — it is totally ignored.And that situation cannot be right. We must do something about it. A health status of a nation parallels development of that nation. 17 million people die every year from heart disease. 32 million heart attacks and strokes occur. Most of this is in developing countries, and the majority is in Africa. 85 percent of global disease burden for cardiovascular disease is in developing countries — not in the West — and yet 90 percent of the resources are in the West.Who is at risk? People like you. It's not just the Africans that should be concerned about that. All friends of Africa, that will have reason to be in Africa at some point in time, should be very concerned about this deplorable situation. Has anyone here wondered what will happen if you go back to your room at night, and you start getting chest pains, shortness of breath, sweating? You're having a heart attack. What are you going to do? Will you fly back to the U.S., Germany, Europe? No, you will die. 50 percent will die within 24 hours, if not treated.This is what's going on. In a look at the map of the U.S. — the graph here, 10 million people here, 10 million here. By the time you get to 50, it's almost no one left in Nigeria — life expectancy is 47. It's not because some people don't survive childhood illnesses — they do — but they do not survive after the time that they reach about 45 years old and 50 years old. And those are the times they're most productive. Those are the times that they should be contributing to Africa's development. But they're not there. The best way to spiral into a cycle of poverty is to kill the parents. If you cannot secure the parents, you cannot guarantee the security of the African child.What are the risk factors? It's very well known. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on those. These are just for information: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, lack of exercise. The usual suspects. Right here in Tanzania, 30 percent of individuals have hypertension. 20 percent are getting treated. Only less than one percent are adequately treated. If we can treat hypertension alone in Africa, we'll save 250,000 lives a year. That's quite significant!Easy to treat. Look at the situation in Mauritius. In eight short years — we're here talking about HIV, malaria, which is all good. We cannot make the mistakes we've made with malaria and HIV. In eight short years, non-communicable diseases will become the leading causes of death in Africa.That is something to keep in mind. We can't deal with it with situations like this. This is a typical African hospital. We can't depend on the elites — they go to USA, Germany, U.K. for treatment. Unbelievable. You can't depend on foreign aid alone. Here is the situation: countries are turning inwards. Post-9/11, [the] United States has had a lot of trouble to deal with, their own internal issues. So, they spend their money trying to fix those problems. You can't rightly — it's not their responsibility, it is my responsibility. I have to take care of my own problems. If they help, that's good! But that is not my expectation. These worsening indices of health care or health studies in Africa demand a new look. We cannot keep on doing things the way we've always done them. If they have not worked, we have to look for alternative solutions.I'm here to talk to you about solutions. This has been — what has been a difficult sign to some of us. Several years ago, we started thinking about it. Everyone knows the problem. No one knows what the solutions are. We decided that we needed to put our money where our mouth is. Everyone is ready to throw in money, in terms of free money aid to developing countries. Talk about sustainable investment, no one is interested. You can't raise money. I have done businesses in healthcare in the United States — I live in Nashville, Tennessee, health care capital of America. [It's] very easy to raise money for health-care ventures. But start telling them, you know, we're going to try to do it in Nigeria — everyone runs away. That is totally wrong. Those of you in the audience here, if you want to help Africa, invest money in sustainable development.Let me lead you through a day in the life of the Heart Institute, so you get a glimpse of what we do, and I'll talk a little bit more about it. What we have done is to show that high-quality health care, comparable to the best anywhere in the world, can be done in a developing country environment. We have 25 positions right now — all of them trained, board certified in the USA, Canada or Britain. We have every modality that can be done in Vanderbilt, Cleveland Clinic — everywhere in the U.S. — and we do it for about 10 percent of the cost that you will need to do those things in the United States. (Applause)Additionally, we have a policy that no one is ever turned away because of ability to pay. We take care of everyone. (Applause) Whether you have one dollar, two dollars — it doesn't matter. And I will tell you how we're able to do it.We make sure that we select our equipment properly. We go for modular units. Units that have multi-modality functions have modular components. Easy to repair, and because of that, we do not take things that are not durable and cannot last. We emphasize training, and we make sure that this process is regenerative. Very soon we will all be dead and gone, but the problems will stay, unless we have people taking over from where we stopped.We made sure that we produced some things ourselves. We do not buy unit doses of radiopharmaceuticals. We get the generators from the companies. We manufacture them in-house, ourselves. That keeps the costs down. So, for a radiopharmaceutical in the U.S. — that you'll get a unit dose for 250 dollars — when we're finished manufacturing it in-house, we come at a price of about two dollars. (Applause)We recognize that the only way to bridge the gap between the rich and poor countries is through education and technology. All these problems we're talking about — if we bring development, they will all disappear. Technology is a great equalizer. How do we make it work? It's been proved: self-care is cost-effective. It extends opportunity to the rural centers, and we can use expertise in a very smart way.This is the way our centers are set up. We currently have three locations in the Caribbean, and we're planning a fourth one. And we have now decided to go into Africa. We will be doing the West African Heart Institute in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. That project will be starting within the next few months. We hope to open in 2008-09. And we will do other centers. This model can be adapted to every disease process. All the units, all the centers, are linked through a switched hub to a central server, and all the images are populated to review stations. And we designed this telemedicine solution. It's proprietary to us, and we are happy to share what we have learned with anyone who is interested in doing it. You can still be profitable.We make sure that the telemedicine platform gives access to expert medical specialists anywhere in the world, just by a click of the button. I'll lead you through, to see how this happens. This is at the Heart Institute. The doctors from anywhere can log in. I can call you in Switzerland and say, ""Listen, go into our system. Look at Mrs. Jones. Look at the study, tell me what you think."" They'll give me that information, and we'll make the care of the patient better. The patient doesn't have to travel. He doesn't have to experience the anxiety of not knowing because of limited expertise.We also use [an] electronic medical record system. I'm happy to say that the things we have implemented — 80 percent of U.S. practices do not have them, and yet the technology is there. But you know, they have that luxury. Because if you can't get it in Nashville, you can travel to Birmingham, two hours away, and you'll get it. If you can't get it in Cleveland, you can go to Cincinnati. We don't have that luxury, so we have to make it happen. When we do it, we will put the cost of care down. And we'll extend it to the rural centers and make it affordable. And everyone will get the care they deserve.It cannot just be technology, we recognize that. Prevention must be part of the solution — we emphasize that. But, you know, you have to tell people what can be done. It's not possible to tell people to do what is going to be expensive, and they go home and can't do it. They need to be alive, they need to feed. We recommend exercise as the most effective, simple, easy thing to do. We have had walks every year — every March, April. We form people into groups and make them go into challenges. Which group loses the most weight, we give them prizes. Which groups record more walking distance by pedometer, we give them prizes. We do this constantly. We encourage them to bring children. That way we start exposing the children from very early on, on what these issues are. Because once they learn it,they will stay with it. In doing this we have created at least 100 skilled jobs in Jamaica alone, and these are physicians with expertise and special training. We have taken care of over 1,000 indigent patients that could have died, including four free pacemakers in patients with complete heart block. For those that understand cardiology, complete heart block means certain death. If you don't get this pacemaker, you will be dead. So we are pleased with that.Indirectly, we have saved the government of Jamaica five million dollars from people that would have gone to Miami or Atlanta for care. And we've hopefully saved a lot of lives. By the end of this year, we would have contributed over one million dollars in indigent care. In the first four months, it's been 340,000 dollars, averaging 85,000 dollars a month. The government will not do that, because they have competing needs. They need to put resources elsewhere. But we can still do it. People say, ""How can you do that?"" This is how we can do that. At least 4,000 rich Jamaicans that were heading to Miami for treatment have self-confessed that they did not go to Miami because of the Heart Institute of the Caribbean. And, if they went to Miami, they will spend significantly more — eight to 10 times more. And they feel happy spending it at home, getting the same quality of care. And for that money — for every one patient that has the money to pay, it gives us an opportunity to take care of at least four people that do not have the resources to pay. (Applause)For this to work, this progress must be sustainable. So, we emphasize training. Training is critical. We have gone further: we have formed a relationship with the University of Technology, Jamaica, where I now have an appointment. And we are starting a biomedical engineering program, so that we will train people locally, who can repair that equipment. That way we're not going to deal with obsolescence and all those kinds of issues. We're also starting ancillary health-care technology training programs — training people in echocardiography, cardiac ultrasound, those kinds of things. Now, with that kind of training, it gives people motivation. Because now they will get a bachelors degree in medical imaging and all that kind of stuff. In the process, I want you to just hear from the trainees themselves what it has meant for them.(Video) Dr. Jason Topping: My name is Jason Topping. I'm a senior resident in anesthesia in intensive care at the University Hospital of the West Indies. I came to the Heart Institute in 2006, as part of my elective in my anesthesia and intensive care program. I spent three months at the Heart Institute. There's been no doubt around my colleagues about the utility of the training I received here, and I think there's been an increased interest now in — particularly in echocardiography and its use in our setting.Sharon Lazarus: I am an echocardiographer at the Heart Institute of the Caribbean, since the past two years. I received training at this institution. I think this aspect of training in cardiology that the Heart Institute of the Caribbean has introduced in Jamaica is very important in terms of diagnosing cardiac diseases.Ernest Madu: The lesson in this is that it can be done, and it can be sustained, and you can make it possible for everyone. Who are we to decide that poor people cannot get the best care? When have you been appointed to play God? It is not my decision. My job is to make sure that every person, no matter what fate has assigned to you, will have the opportunity to get the best quality health care in life. Next stop is West African Heart Institute, that we are going to be doing in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, as I said before. We will do other centers across West Africa. We will extend the same system into other areas, like dialysis treatment. And anyone who is interested in doing it in any health care situation, we will be happy to assist you and tell you how we've done it,and how you can do it. If we do this, we can change the face of health care in Africa. Africa has been good to us; it is time for us to give back to Africa. I am going. Those who want to come, I welcome you to come along with me. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ernest_madu_on_world_class_health_care
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"The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. (Laughter) OK.So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually — the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares.Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk — van Gogh syndrome — that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody — I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't — I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different.I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else? And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist. And I had a miniature poodle. And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative. Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book. And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words.Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me. That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age. I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure.But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14. And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors. And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it. My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that. But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart. And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses — she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. There was a reason for everything. And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything. You become very creative, in a survival sense.And this, then, led to my big questions. And they're the same ones that I have today. And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen? And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen? It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking. It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe.And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out — years and years, oftentimes. So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life. And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on.And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence. But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning. And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning.There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (Laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing. And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about. You won't discover anything. And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there. Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety. (Laughter) And they all operate at the same time.There is also a big question of ambiguity. And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there. And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. It is constantly there. And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said, ""Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life."" A very famous Chinese saying, she said. And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. So, there was another one that I came across, and it's ""saving fish from drowning."" And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything. And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die.Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors — actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: ""save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life."" And it was a warning — don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck. OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them. But, both of these sayings — saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning — to me they had to do with intentions.And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. And then we have intentions. There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been. Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? What are we supposed to do? Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it? That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called ""Saving Fish From Drowning.""I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place. I got these hints everywhere. And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been. And what I need, in effect, is a focus. And when I have the question, it is a focus. And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. And it seems like it's happening all the time. You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe. And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. And you are noticing it more often.But you apply this. You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions. Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him? Why or why not? It may be something that is perhaps more serious — as I said, human rights in Burma. I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. And then, after a while, I had to ask myself, ""Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us?"" And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book — and I just would have to face that later, when the time came.We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling? Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide. This leads to this question. When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child — and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe?It seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother.There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book. In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location. And I needed to find something historically that would match that. And I took down this book, and I — first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed — was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God.You wonder, are these things random chance? Well, what is random? What is chance? What is luck? What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain? And that goes into the story, too. These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen. But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen.Another chance encounter is when I went to a place — I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine. And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book. And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley. For some reason I wrote about cairns — stacks of rocks — that a man was building. And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this. And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. And I asked him, ""How is it possible to do this?"" And he said, ""Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance."" And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. I had so many examples — I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it. Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant?A big thing that I also think about is accidents. And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. What is the nature of accidents? And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law? I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. And I saw this beautiful place. I knew I wanted to come back. And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority. And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident. A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm. 60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. Responsibility was assigned to the family. The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed. And, of course, as Westerners, we say, ""Well, it was an accident. That's not fair. It's the son, not the father.""When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility. I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years. And it was to send some men — a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen.So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me — to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life. Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED. The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book. It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently. But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life?And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point. I also believe that in thinking about things — my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces — I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined — and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before.So, there are never complete answers. Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only — there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating.And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story — in one story — then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that. We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. There she is. Thank you very much! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_tan_on_creativity
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"In the year 1919, a virtually unknown German mathematician, named Theodor Kaluza suggested a very bold and, in some ways, a very bizarre idea. He proposed that our universe might actually have more than the three dimensions that we are all aware of. That is in addition to left, right, back, forth and up, down, Kaluza proposed that there might be additional dimensions of space that for some reason we don't yet see. Now, when someone makes a bold and bizarre idea, sometimes that's all it is — bold and bizarre, but it has nothing to do with the world around us. This particular idea, however — although we don't yet know whether it's right or wrong, and at the end I'll discuss experiments which, in the next few years, may tell us whether it's right or wrong — this idea has had a major impact on physics in the last century and continues to inform a lot of cutting-edge research.So, I'd like to tell you something about the story of these extra dimensions. So where do we go? To begin we need a little bit of back story. Go to 1907. This is a year when Einstein is basking in the glow of having discovered the special theory of relativity and decides to take on a new project, to try to understand fully the grand, pervasive force of gravity. And in that moment, there are many people around who thought that that project had already been resolved. Newton had given the world a theory of gravity in the late 1600s that works well, describes the motion of planets, the motion of the moon and so forth, the motion of apocryphal of apples falling from trees, hitting people on the head. All of that could be described using Newton's work.But Einstein realized that Newton had left something out of the story, because even Newton had written that although he understood how to calculate the effect of gravity, he'd been unable to figure out how it really works. How is it that the Sun, 93 million miles away, [that] somehow it affects the motion of the Earth? How does the Sun reach out across empty inert space and exert influence? And that is a task to which Einstein set himself — to figure out how gravity works. And let me show you what it is that he found. So Einstein found that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself. The idea goes like this: imagine space is a substrate of all there is.Einstein said space is nice and flat, if there's no matter present. But if there is matter in the environment, such as the Sun, it causes the fabric of space to warp, to curve. And that communicates the force of gravity. Even the Earth warps space around it. Now look at the Moon. The Moon is kept in orbit, according to these ideas, because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that the Sun and the Moon and the Earth can all create by virtue of their presence. We go to a full-frame view of this. The Earth itself is kept in orbit because it rolls along a valley in the environment that's curved because of the Sun's presence. That is this new idea about how gravity actually works.Now, this idea was tested in 1919 through astronomical observations. It really works. It describes the data. And this gained Einstein prominence around the world. And that is what got Kaluza thinking. He, like Einstein, was in search of what we call a unified theory. That's one theory that might be able to describe all of nature's forces from one set of ideas, one set of principles, one master equation, if you will. So Kaluza said to himself, Einstein has been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space — in fact, space and time, to be more precise. Maybe I can play the same game with the other known force, which was, at that time, known as the electromagnetic force — we know of others today, but at that time that was the only other one people were thinking about. You know, the force responsible for electricity and magnetic attraction and so forth.So Kaluza says, maybe I can play the same game and describe electromagnetic force in terms of warps and curves. That raised a question: warps and curves in what? Einstein had already used up space and time, warps and curves, to describe gravity. There didn't seem to be anything else to warp or curve. So Kaluza said, well, maybe there are more dimensions of space. He said, if I want to describe one more force, maybe I need one more dimension. So he imagined that the world had four dimensions of space, not three, and imagined that electromagnetism was warps and curves in that fourth dimension. Now here's the thing: when he wrote down the equations describing warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions, not three, he found the old equations that Einstein had already derived in three dimensions — those were for gravity — but he found one more equation because of the one more dimension. And when he looked at that equation, it was none other than the equation that scientists had long known to describe the electromagnetic force. Amazing — it just popped out. He was so excited by this realization that he ran around his house screaming, ""Victory!"" — that he had found the unified theory.Now clearly, Kaluza was a man who took theory very seriously. He, in fact — there is a story that when he wanted to learn how to swim, he read a book, a treatise on swimming — (Laughter) — then dove into the ocean. This is a man who would risk his life on theory. Now, but for those of us who are a little bit more practically minded, two questions immediately arise from his observation. Number one: if there are more dimensions in space, where are they? We don't seem to see them. And number two: does this theory really work in detail, when you try to apply it to the world around us? Now, the first question was answered in 1926 by a fellow named Oskar Klein. He suggested that dimensions might come in two varieties — there might be big, easy-to-see dimensions, but there might also be tiny, curled-up dimensions, curled up so small, even though they're all around us, that we don't see them.Let me show you that one visually. So, imagine you're looking at something like a cable supporting a traffic light. It's in Manhattan. You're in Central Park — it's kind of irrelevant — but the cable looks one-dimensional from a distant viewpoint, but you and I all know that it does have some thickness. It's very hard to see it, though, from far away. But if we zoom in and take the perspective of, say, a little ant walking around — little ants are so small that they can access all of the dimensions — the long dimension, but also this clockwise, counter-clockwise direction. And I hope you appreciate this. It took so long to get these ants to do this.(Laughter)But this illustrates the fact that dimensions can be of two sorts: big and small. And the idea that maybe the big dimensions around us are the ones that we can easily see, but there might be additional dimensions curled up, sort of like the circular part of that cable, so small that they have so far remained invisible. Let me show you what that would look like. So, if we take a look, say, at space itself — I can only show, of course, two dimensions on a screen. Some of you guys will fix that one day, but anything that's not flat on a screen is a new dimension, goes smaller, smaller, smaller, and way down in the microscopic depths of space itself, this is the idea, you could have additional curled up dimensions —here is a little shape of a circle — so small that we don't see them. But if you were a little ultra microscopic ant walking around, you could walk in the big dimensions that we all know about — that's like the grid part — but you could also access the tiny curled-up dimension that's so small that we can't see it with the naked eye or even with any of our most refined equipment. But deeply tucked into the fabric of space itself, the idea is there could be more dimensions, as we see there. Now that's an explanation about how the universe could have more dimensions than the ones that we see. But what about the second question that I asked: does the theory actually work when you try to apply it to the real world?Well, it turns out that Einstein and Kaluza and many others worked on trying to refine this framework and apply it to the physics of the universe as was understood at the time, and, in detail, it didn't work. In detail, for instance, they couldn't get the mass of the electron to work out correctly in this theory. So many people worked on it, but by the '40s, certainly by the '50s, this strange but very compelling idea of how to unify the laws of physics had gone away. Until something wonderful happened in our age. In our era, a new approach to unify the laws of physics is being pursued by physicists such as myself, many others around the world, it's called superstring theory, as you were indicating. And the wonderful thing is that superstring theory has nothing to do at first sight with this idea of extra dimensions, but when we study superstring theory, we find that it resurrects the idea in a sparkling, new form.So, let me just tell you how that goes. Superstring theory — what is it? Well, it's a theory that tries to answer the question: what are the basic, fundamental, indivisible, uncuttable constituents making up everything in the world around us? The idea is like this. So, imagine we look at a familiar object, just a candle in a holder, and imagine that we want to figure out what it is made of. So we go on a journey deep inside the object and examine the constituents. So deep inside — we all know, you go sufficiently far down, you have atoms. We also all know that atoms are not the end of the story. They have little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus with neutrons and protons. Even the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them known as quarks. That is where conventional ideas stop.Here is the new idea of string theory. Deep inside any of these particles, there is something else. This something else is this dancing filament of energy. It looks like a vibrating string — that's where the idea, string theory comes from. And just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns, these can also vibrate in different patterns. They don't produce different musical notes. Rather, they produce the different particles making up the world around us. So if these ideas are correct, this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like. It's built up of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy, vibrating in different frequencies. The different frequencies produce the different particles. The different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us.And there you see unification, because matter particles, electrons and quarks, radiation particles, photons, gravitons, are all built up from one entity. So matter and the forces of nature all are put together under the rubric of vibrating strings. And that's what we mean by a unified theory. Now here is the catch. When you study the mathematics of string theory, you find that it doesn't work in a universe that just has three dimensions of space. It doesn't work in a universe with four dimensions of space, nor five, nor six. Finally, you can study the equations, and show that it works only in a universe that has 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time. It leads us right back to this idea of Kaluza and Klein — that our world, when appropriately described, has more dimensions than the ones that we see.Now you might think about that and say, well, OK, you know, if you have extra dimensions, and they're really tightly curled up, yeah, perhaps we won't see them, if they're small enough. But if there's a little tiny civilization of green people walking around down there, and you make them small enough, and we won't see them either. That is true. One of the other predictions of string theory — no, that's not one of the other predictions of string theory.(Laughter)But it raises the question: are we just trying to hide away these extra dimensions, or do they tell us something about the world? In the remaining time, I'd like to tell you two features of them. First is, many of us believe that these extra dimensions hold the answer to what perhaps is the deepest question in theoretical physics, theoretical science. And that question is this: when we look around the world, as scientists have done for the last hundred years, there appear to be about 20 numbers that really describe our universe. These are numbers like the mass of the particles, like electrons and quarks, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force — a list of about 20 numbers that have been measured with incredible precision, but nobody has an explanation for why the numbers have the particular values that they do.Now, does string theory offer an answer? Not yet. But we believe the answer for why those numbers have the values they do may rely on the form of the extra dimensions. And the wonderful thing is, if those numbers had any other values than the known ones, the universe, as we know it, wouldn't exist. This is a deep question. Why are those numbers so finely tuned to allow stars to shine and planets to form, when we recognize that if you fiddle with those numbers — if I had 20 dials up here and I let you come up and fiddle with those numbers, almost any fiddling makes the universe disappear. So can we explain those 20 numbers? And string theory suggests that those 20 numbers have to do with the extra dimensions. Let me show you how. So when we talk about the extra dimensions in string theory, it's not one extra dimension, as in the older ideas of Kaluza and Klein. This is what string theory says about the extra dimensions. They have a very rich, intertwined geometry.This is an example of something known as a Calabi-Yau shape — name isn't all that important. But, as you can see, the extra dimensions fold in on themselves and intertwine in a very interesting shape, interesting structure. And the idea is that if this is what the extra dimensions look like, then the microscopic landscape of our universe all around us would look like this on the tiniest of scales. When you swing your hand, you'd be moving around these extra dimensions over and over again, but they're so small that we wouldn't know it. So what is the physical implication, though, relevant to those 20 numbers?Consider this. If you look at the instrument, a French horn, notice that the vibrations of the airstreams are affected by the shape of the instrument. Now in string theory, all the numbers are reflections of the way strings can vibrate. So just as those airstreams are affected by the twists and turns in the instrument, strings themselves will be affected by the vibrational patterns in the geometry within which they are moving. So let me bring some strings into the story. And if you watch these little fellows vibrating around — they'll be there in a second — right there, notice that they way they vibrate is affected by the geometry of the extra dimensions.So, if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions look like — we don't yet, but if we did — we should be able to calculate the allowed notes, the allowed vibrational patterns. And if we could calculate the allowed vibrational patterns, we should be able to calculate those 20 numbers. And if the answer that we get from our calculations agrees with the values of those numbers that have been determined through detailed and precise experimentation, this in many ways would be the first fundamental explanation for why the structure of the universe is the way it is. Now, the second issue that I want to finish up with is: how might we test for these extra dimensions more directly? Is this just an interesting mathematical structure that might be able to explain some previously unexplained features of the world, or can we actually test for these extra dimensions? And we think — and this is, I think, very exciting — that in the next five years or so we may be able to test for the existence of these extra dimensions.Here's how it goes. In CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, a machine is being built called the Large Hadron Collider. It's a machine that will send particles around a tunnel, opposite directions, near the speed of light. Every so often those particles will be aimed at each other, so there's a head-on collision. The hope is that if the collision has enough energy, it may eject some of the debris from the collision from our dimensions, forcing it to enter into the other dimensions. How would we know it? Well, we'll measure the amount of energy after the collision, compare it to the amount of energy before, and if there's less energy after the collision than before, this will be evidence that the energy has drifted away. And if it drifts away in the right pattern that we can calculate, this will be evidence that the extra dimensions are there.Let me show you that idea visually. So, imagine we have a certain kind of particle called a graviton — that's the kind of debris we expect to be ejected out, if the extra dimensions are real. But here's how the experiment will go. You take these particles. You slam them together. You slam them together, and if we are right, some of the energy of that collision will go into debris that flies off into these extra dimensions. So this is the kind of experiment that we'll be looking at in the next five, seven to 10 years or so. And if this experiment bears fruit, if we see that kind of particle ejected by noticing that there's less energy in our dimensions than when we began, this will show that the extra dimensions are real.And to me this is a really remarkable story, and a remarkable opportunity. Going back to Newton with absolute space — didn't provide anything but an arena, a stage in which the events of the universe take place. Einstein comes along and says, well, space and time can warp and curve — that's what gravity is. And now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see. And this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime. Amazing possibility. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_on_string_theory
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"This is the Large Hadron Collider. It's 27 kilometers in circumference. It's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. What we do is we accelerate protons — so, hydrogen nuclei — around 99.999999 percent the speed of light. Right? At that speed, they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. We collide them inside giant detectors.They're essentially digital cameras. And this is the one that I work on, ATLAS. You get some sense of the size — you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath.(Laughter)You get some sense of the size: 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector — immense numbers. And if you see those metal bits there — those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles, so it can measure how fast they're traveling. This is a picture about a year ago. Those magnets are in there. And, again, a EU standard-size, real person, so you get some sense of the scale. And it's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created, sometime in the summer this year.And actually, this morning, I got an email saying that we've just finished, today, building the last piece of ATLAS. So as of today, it's finished. I'd like to say that I planned that for TED, but I didn't. So it's been completed as of today.(Applause)Yeah, it's a wonderful achievement. So, you might be asking, ""Why? Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began?"" Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything's made of, and how everything sticks together. And by everything I mean, of course, me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.Now you might say, ""Well, OK, but why not just look at it? You know? If you want to know what I'm made of, let's look at me."" Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. Now, there's no real reason I'm aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple and understandable. All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things — human brains — are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we've observed, it was very simple.It's almost like ... imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it's an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it'll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that, actually, it was just made of H20, water. So it's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. And, as of today, it's made of these things. Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. The electron — the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus — held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force that's carried by this thing, the photon. The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons.And these guys, here, they're the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. But, without it, the sun wouldn't shine. And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail — about a square centimeter — there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. But you don't feel them, because the weak force is correctly named — very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you.And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the tau neutrino, in the year 2000. Actually just — I was going to say, just up the road in Chicago. I know it's a big country, America, isn't it? Just up the road. Relative to the universe, it's just up the road.(Laughter)So, this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it's a relatively recent picture. One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we've discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. You know, they're a step in size from the entire observable universe. So, 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away — a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. Absolutely, exquisitely minute, and yet we've discovered pretty much the full set.So, one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said, ""All science is either physics or stamp collecting."" Now, I don't think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it's possible.(Laughter)But what he meant was that what we've done, really, is stamp collect there. OK, we've discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern — you know, why it's built the way it is — really you've done stamp collecting. You haven't done science. Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern. It's the Newton's laws, if you want, of particle physics. It's called the standard model — beautifully simple mathematical equation. You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. This is it.(Laughter)I've been a little disingenuous, because I've expanded it out in all its gory detail. This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything — other than gravity — that happens in the universe. So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together — in principle, you've got a big enough computer — why DNA is the shape it is. In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation.But there's a problem. Can anyone see what it is? A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. I'll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up. Basically, each of these terms refers to some of the particles. So those Ws there refer to the Ws, and how they stick together. These carriers of the weak force, the Zs, the same. But there's an extra symbol in this equation: H. Right, H. H stands for Higgs particle. Higgs particles have not been discovered. But they're necessary: they're necessary to make that mathematics work. So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn't be possible without an extra bit. So it's a prediction: a prediction of a new particle.What does it do? Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies. And back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said, ""If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you're doing, you can have the money. I want to know what this Higgs particle does."" And we came up with this analogy, and it seemed to work. Well, what the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. And the picture is that the whole universe — and that doesn't mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you — the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. Higgs particles, if you will.The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. But imagine someone who's not very popular moves through the room. Then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They're massless. And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room. They're surrounded by people, and their passage through the room is impeded. It's almost like they get heavy. They get massive. And that's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy, in a sense, and massive, because they're surrounded by Higgs particles. They're interacting with the Higgs field.If that picture's true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. If it's not true — because it's quite a convoluted mechanism, although it's the simplest we've been able to think of — then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. So, that's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine. I'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher. Actually, I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but — (Laughter) anyway. So that's one thing. That's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find.There are many other things. You've heard many of the big problems in particle physics. One of them you heard about: dark matter, dark energy. There's another issue, which is that the forces in nature — it's quite beautiful, actually — seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. Well, they do change in strength. So, the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. The strong force, the strong nuclear force, which sticks nuclei together, gets weaker. And what you see is the standard model — you can calculate how these change — is the forces, the three forces, other than gravity, almost seem to come together at one point. It's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. But they just miss.Now there's a theory called super-symmetry, which doubles the number of particles in the standard model, which, at first sight, doesn't sound like a simplification. But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the Big Bang — absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn't built to do that, but it seems to do it. Also, those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. So a very compelling theory that's really mainstream physics. And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on — in a very unscientific way — that that these things would also crop up at the LHC. Many other things that the LHC could discover.But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think — what particle physics really means to me — particle physics and cosmology. And that's that I think it's given us a wonderful narrative — almost a creation story, if you'd like — about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades. And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north. This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful.The story goes like this: we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second — I think I got that right — after the Big Bang. Gravity separated away from the other forces. The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass. The universe continued to expand and cool. After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That's all. The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium. It still is today.It continued to expand about 300 million years. Then light began to travel through the universe. It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God. After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. So the elements of life — carbon, and oxygen and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up — were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then ran out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets.And on some of those planets, the oxygen, which had been created in that first generation of stars, could fuse with hydrogen to form water, liquid water on the surface. On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually left a footprint on another world. And built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into light, and you can see the civilization from space. As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things — and actually, not only these, but I was looking around — these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature and science — these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years.Absolutely remarkable. And, the laws of physics. Right? So, the right laws of physics — they're beautifully balanced. If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn't be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe. And I think that's a wonderful and significant story. 50 years ago, I couldn't have told that story, because we didn't know it. It makes me really feel that that civilization — which, as I say, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics, and a few hydrogen atoms — then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable.So that's the LHC. The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, going to write the next chapter of that book. And I'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider
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"(Bass guitar) (Bass guitar and accordion)♫ You're older than you've ever been ♫♫ and now you're even older ♫♫ and now you're even older ♫♫ and now you're even older. ♫♫ You're older than you've even been ♫♫ and now you're even older ♫♫ and now you're older still. ♫♫ Time ♫♫ is marching on ♫♫ and time ♫♫ is still marching on. ♫♫ This day will soon be at an end ♫♫ and now it's even sooner ♫♫ and now it's even sooner ♫♫ and now it's even sooner. ♫♫ This day will soon be at an end ♫♫ and now it's even sooner ♫♫ and now it's sooner still. ♫♫ You're older than you've ever been ♫♫ and now you're even older ♫♫ and now you're even older ♫♫ and now you're even older. ♫♫ You're older than you've ever been ♫♫ and now you're even older ♫♫ and now you're older still. ♫Thank you very much. Good morning everybody. We are They Might Be Giants.(Applause)I am wearing the Al Gore in-ear monitors he wore on the Larry King show and I'm hearing that transmission and not mine. But I guess that's in keeping, so now we'll just move to the PowerPoint presentation, ladies and gentlemen.This is a brand new song. In the spirit of TED, we're bringing you something that has not been released. John, do you want to introduce the song? This is a song about a creature called a hummingbird moth which imitates another creature which imitates yet another creature. It's completely fucked up and can only be explained in song.♫ Everyone is crying at the dread hypnotic flying ♫♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫♫ You can't walk, you can't ramble ♫♫ 'cause you're gonna have to scramble ♫♫ from the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫♫ Catbird is a cat ♫♫ but he's got bugness in his veins. ♫♫ Manhouse lives within himself ♫♫ with thoughtful human brains. ♫♫ Neither one is equal  ♫♫ to the challenge of the freak we'll call ♫♫ the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫♫ Now the moth ♫♫ defeats the mouse and man. ♫♫ It's messing with the plan. ♫♫ It can't be believed ♫♫ 'cause it's just a hummingbird moth ♫♫ who's acting like the bird ♫♫ that thinks it's a bee. ♫♫ Got a brand new shipment ♫♫ of electrical equipment ♫♫ it's addressed to the bottom of the sea. ♫♫ Send a tangerine-colored ♫♫ nuclear submarine ♫♫ with a sticker that says STP. ♫♫ Windshield wiper washer fluid ♫♫ spraying in the air ... ♫♫ headlights under head lice ♫♫ under hats lie everywhere. ♫♫ Subatomic waves ♫♫ to the underwater caves ♫♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫♫ Now the moth defeats the mouse and man. ♫♫ It's messing with the plan. ♫♫ It can't be believed ♫♫ 'cause it's just a hummingbird moth ♫♫ who's acting like a bird ♫♫ that thinks it's a bee. ♫♫ Is it us or is this messed up? ♫♫ Everyone's deforming ♫♫ in the presence of the swarming ♫♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫♫ Protozoa, snakes and horses ♫♫ have enlisted in the forces ♫♫ of the bee of bird of the moth. ♫♫ Catbug is a cat ♫♫ but he's got bugness in his veins. ♫♫ Manhouse lives within himself ♫♫ with thoughtful human brains. ♫♫ Neither one is equal ♫♫ to the challenge of the freak we'll call ♫♫ the bee of the bird of the moth. ♫(Applause)Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.So we are past our 1,000th show. Probably somewhere around 1,500. It's hard to know. We've only done two shows in 2007 so far, but our first show was actually the coldest performance we've ever had. It was 19 degrees in St. Louis about a month ago and I'm happy to report that this performance you are seeing today is the earliest we have ever performed. So thank you. We are cultural test pilots, ladies and gentlemen. How early can a rock performance begin? Not all the facts are in about performing at 8.30 in the morning. I can tell you the 19 degree thing was fantastic. All right.So we don't know that much about the history of violinists but we do know that when we entered the state of New Jersey there is an uptick in violence. This song is called ""Asbury Park."" It's based on a real life experience.♫ I ♫♫ I got ♫♫ I got kicked ♫♫ I got kicked in the head ♫♫ backstage at the Stone. ♫♫ Stone Pone. ♫♫ Stone Pony. ♫♫ I got kicked in the head ♫♫ backstage at the Stone Pony ♫♫ where I swore to the guy ♫♫ that the guy who took his beer wasn't me. ♫♫ Me got ♫♫ Me got kicked ♫♫ Me got kicked in the head ♫♫ backstage at the Stone. ♫♫ Stone Pone. ♫♫ Stone Pony. ♫♫ Me got kicked in the head ♫♫ backstage at the Stone Pony ♫♫ where I swore to the guy ♫♫ that the guy who took his beer ♫♫ was a guy dressed like me. ♫♫ Not me! ♫♫ Not me! ♫♫ Not me! ♫Thank you. Marty Beller on the drums over there.(Applause)We want to get in as many songs as possible during our brief time here so this is the one to play. This song is called ""Fingertips.""♫ Everything is catching on fire ♫♫ Yes, everything is catching on fire ♫♫ Yes, everything is catching on fire. ♫♫ Fingertips ♫♫ Fingertips ♫♫ Fingertips ♫♫ I hear the wind blow ♫♫ I hear the wind blow ♫♫ It seems to say ♫♫ Hello ♫♫ Hello ♫♫ I'm the one who loves you so. ♫♫ Hey, now everybody, now. ♫♫ Hey, now everybody ♫♫ Hey, now everybody, now ♫♫ Who's that standing ♫♫ at the window?♫♫ I found a new friend ♫♫ underneath my pillow. ♫♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫♫ Come on and wreck my car ♫♫ Aren't you the guy who hit me in the eye? ♫♫ Aren't you the guy who hit me in the eye? ♫♫ Please pass the milk, please. ♫♫ Please pass the milk, please. ♫♫ Please pass the milk, please. ♫♫ Leave me alone, leave me alone. ♫♫ Who's knocking on the wall? ♫♫ All alone, all alone. ♫♫ All by myself. ♫♫ What's that blue thing doing here? ♫♫ Something grabbed ahold of my hand ♫♫ I didn't know what had my hand ♫♫ but that's when all my troubles began. ♫♫ I don't understand you ♫♫ I don't understand you ♫♫ I cannot understand you ♫♫ I cannot understand you ♫♫ I don't understand the things you say ♫♫ I can't understand a single word ♫♫ I don't understand you ♫♫ I don't understand you ♫♫ I just don't understand you ♫♫ I don't understand you ♫♫ I do not understand you ♫♫ Don't understand you ♫♫ Don't understand you ♫♫ I turn around ♫♫ See the sound ♫♫ Turn around and see the thing ♫♫ that made the sound. ♫♫ Mysterious whisper ♫♫ Mysterious whisper ♫♫ Mysterious whisper ♫♫ Mysterious whisper ♫♫ The day that love came to play. ♫♫ I'm having a heart attack ♫♫ I'm having a heart attack ♫♫ I'm having a heart attack ♫♫ I'm having a ... ♫♫ Fingertips ♫♫ Fingertips ♫♫ I walk along darkened corridors ♫♫ And I walk along darkened corridors ♫Thank you very much — ""Fingertips.""(Applause)♫ We're taking calls — from the dead. ♫♫ We're taking calls — from the dead. ♫♫ We're taking phone calls from the dead. ♫♫ They're calling from beyond the grave. ♫♫ Beyond the grave. ♫♫ They have some questions ♫♫ And things to share ♫♫ From underneath the cold, cold ground. ♫We're soliciting phone calls from dead people as a special TED presentation. We're taking calls live on stage here at TED in Monterey. And I think we have a caller coming in here. Hello there. You're live. Hello. Who's there, please? Am I on the air? Hi there. You're on with They Might Be Giants. This is Eleanor Roosevelt. Hello, Eleanor, please ... I want to talk to ... Please turn off your radio, Eleanor. I wanna talk to Randi. I've got a question for Randi. What's your question, please? I want to talk to the Amazing Randi. Do you have a laminated badge, Eleanor? I want my million dollars. Eleanor, I'm sorry, do you have a laminated badge? No, I don't have a badge. Well, I think we're going to stop that part of the show.Here's a song we like to think of as the future anthem of TED. It's actually a children's song but like so many projects for children it's really just a Trojan horse for adult work. This song is called ""The Alphabet ... Of Nations!""♫ Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, ♫♫ Egypt, France, The Gambia ♫♫ Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, ♫♫ Libya and Mongolia. ♫♫ Norway, Oman, Pakistan, ♫♫ Qatar, Russia, Suriname, ♫♫ Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, ♫♫ West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe. ♫♫ Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, ♫♫ Egypt, France, The Gambia, ♫♫ Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, ♫♫ Libya and Mongolia. ♫♫ Norway, Oman, Pakistan, ♫♫ Qatar, Russia, Suriname, ♫♫ Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, ♫♫ West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe. ♫♫ Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Canada, ♫♫ Australia, Belgium, Chad, ♫♫ Afghanistan, Brunei, China, Denmark, ♫♫ Ecuador, Fiji, Guatemala, ♫♫ Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, ♫♫ Egypt, France, The Gambia, ♫♫ Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, ♫♫ Libya and Mongolia. ♫♫ Norway, Oman, Pakistan, ♫♫ Qatar, Russia, Suriname, ♫♫ Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, ♫♫ West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe. ♫Thank you so much. You've been a wonderful 8:30 audience. Have a great session. Thank you all.","https://www.ted.com/talks/they_might_be_giants_play_at_8_30_am
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"You know, one of the things that I'd like to say upfront is that I'm really here by accident. And what I mean — not at TED — that I'm — at this point in my life, truly my set of circumstances I would truly consider an accident. But what I'd like to talk to you about today is perhaps a way in which we could use technology to make those accidents happen often. Because I really think, when I look back at how I actually ended up in this accident, technology played a big role in that.So, what I'd like to do today is tell you a little bit about myself, because I'd like to put in context what I'm going to tell you. And I think you will see why the two greatest passions in my life today are children and education. And once I put that in context, I'd like to tell you a little bit about technology: why I believe technology is a tremendous enabler; a very powerful tool to help address some of these challenges. Then, about the initiative that Chris mentioned, that we decided to launch at AMD that we call 50x15. And then I'll come back to the beginning, and tell you a little bit more — hopefully convince you — that I believe that in today's world, it is really important for business leaders not only to have an idea of what their business is all about, but to have a passion for something that is meaningful.So, with that in mind, first of all let me tell you, I'm one of five children. I'm the oldest, the other four are women. So I grew up in a family of women. I learned a lot about how to deal with that part of the world. (Laughter) And, as you can imagine, if you can picture this: I was born in a very small village in Mexico, in, unfortunately, very poor surroundings, and my parents did not have a college education. But I was fortunate to be able to have one, and so were my four sisters. That kind of tells you a little bit of an idea of the emphasis that my parents placed on education. My parents were fanatics about learning, and I'll come back to that a little bit later.But one of the things that exposed me early to learning, and a tremendous curiosity that was instilled in me as a child, was through a technology which is on the screen — is a Victrola. My father found that in a junkyard, and was able to repair it and make it work. And somehow — to this day, I frankly don't know how he was so aware of what was going on in the world — but, by inviting me to sit down with him when I was only a few years old, and playing records in this Victrola by Mozart, and he would tell me how Mozart was the most romantic of all the classic composers ever, and how Claire de Lune, which was one of his favorites, was a real exposure to me to classical music. He explained to me about Johann Strauss, and how he created the waltzes that became so famous in the world. And would tell me a little bit about history too, when he'd play the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky on this little Victrola, and he would tell me about Russia and all the things that were happening in Russia at those times and why this music, in some way, represented a little bit of that history. And even as a child, he was able to instill in me a lot of curiosity. And perhaps to you this product may not look like high tech, but if you can imagine the time when this occurred — it was in the mid '40s — this was really, in his view, a pretty piece of high tech.Well, one of the things that is really critical to try to distill from that experience is that in addition to that, people ask me and say, ""Well, how did your parents treat you when you were a child?"" And I always said that they were really tough on me. And not tough in the sense that most people think of, where your parents yell at you or hit you or whatever. They were tough in the sense that, as I grew up, both my mother and father would always say to me, it's really important that you always remember two things. First of all, when you go to bed at night, you've got to look back on the day and make sure that you felt the day was a day which you contributed something, and that you did everything you could to do it the best way you could. And the second thing they said: and we trust you, that no matter where you are or where you go, you will always do the right thing. Now, I don't know how many of you have ever done that with your kids, but if you do, please trust me, it's the most pressure you can put on a child, to say — (Laughter) — we trust you that you will always do the right thing. When I was out with my friends drinking beer, I always was very aware of those words — (Laughter)— and very careful. One of the things that has happened with technology is that it can only be helpful if it is useful, of course, but it can only be helpful too if it's accessible, and it can only be helpful if it's affordable. And in today's world, being useful, affordable and accessible is not necessarily what happens in a lot of the technology that is done today. So, one of our passions in our company, and now one of my personal passions, is to be able to really work hard at making the technology useful, accessible and affordable. And to me, that is very, very critical.Now, technology has changed a lot since the Victrola days. You know, we now have, of course, incredibly powerful computers. A tremendous thing that people refer to as a killer app is called the Internet. Although frankly speaking, we don't believe the Internet is the killer app. What we believe is that the Internet, frankly, is a connection of people and ideas. The Internet happens to be just the medium in which those people and ideas get connected. And the power of connecting people and ideas can be pretty awesome. And so, we believe that through all the changes that have occurred, that we're faced today with a tremendous opportunity. If we can connect people and ideas more intensely — and although you've seen a plethora and a myriad of products that have come to the market today, the key to me is how many of these products are able to provide people connectivity, in a useful way, accessibility, in an easy manner, and also affordability, that regardless of the economic status that a person could have, that they could have the opportunity to afford this technology.So, when you look at that, we said, well, we would like to, then, enable that a little bit. We would like to create an initiative. And a couple of years ago at AMD, we came up with this idea of saying, what if we create this initiative we call 50x15, where we are going to aim, that by the year 2015, half of the world will be connected to the Internet so that people and ideas can get connected. We knew we couldn't do it by ourselves, and by no means did we ever intend to imply that we at AMD could do it alone. We always felt that this was something that could be done through partnerships with governments, industry, educational institutions, a myriad of other companies and, frankly, even competitors. So, it is really a rather lofty initiative, if you want to think that way, but we felt that we had to put a real stake up in the years ahead, that was bold enough and courageous enough that it would force us all to think of ways to do things differently. And I'll come back to that in a minute, because I think the results so far have been remarkable, and I can only anticipate and get real excited about what I think is going to happen in the next eight years, while we get to the 2015 initiative.Where are we today? That's year by year. This comes from our friends at Gapminder.com. Those of you who've never looked at their website, you should look at it. It's really impressive. And you can see how the Internet penetration has changed over the years. And so when we gave ourselves this scorecard to say well, where are we related to our goal towards 2015, the thing that becomes apparent is three pieces. One is the Western world, defined mostly by Western Europe and the United States, has made an awful lot of progress. The connectivity in these parts of the world are really truly phenomenal and continue to increase.As a matter of fact, we think reaching 100 percent is very doable, even before the 2015 timeframe. In other parts of emerging countries, such as India and China, the progress has been good — has been solid, has been good. But in places that are not as developed, places like Africa, Latin America and other places in the world, the progress has been rather slow. As a matter of fact, I was just recently visiting South Africa. I had the opportunity to have a discussion with President Mbeki, and one of the things that we talked about is, what is it that's keeping this connectivity goal from moving ahead faster? And one of the reasons is, in South Africa, it costs 100 dollars a month to have a broadband connectivity. It is impossible, even in the United States, for that cost, to be able to enable the connectivity that we're all trying to reach. So, we talked about ways in which perhaps one could partner to be able to bring the cost of this technology down. So, when you look at this chart, you look at the very last — it's a logarithmic chart on a horizontal scale — you look at the very end: we've got quite a long way to go to get to the 2015 goal of 50 percent. But we're excited in our company; we're motivated. We really think it's a phenomenal driver of things, to force us to do things differently, and we look forward to being able to actually, working with so many partners around the world, to be able to reach that goal.Now, one of the things I'd like to explain [about] 50x15, which I think is really critical, is that it is not a charity. It is actually a business venture. Let's take a small segment of this, of this unconnected world, and call it the education market. When you look at elementary-school children, we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of children around the world that could benefit tremendously from being able to be connected to the Internet. Therefore, when we see that, we see an opportunity to have a business that addresses the need of that segment. And when we embarked in this initiative, from the very beginning we said it very clearly: this is not a charity. This is really a business venture, one that addresses a very challenging segment of the market. Because what we have learned in the last three years is that this segment of the market, whether it's education or under-developed nations, either way, it's a segment that demands incredibly high quality, incredibly high reliability, tremendous low cost and access, and a lot of challenges that frankly, without actually doing it, it would be very difficult to understand, and I'll explain that in just a minute.It is an initiative that is focused on simple, accessible and human-centric solutions. What we mean by that is, you know, frankly, the PC was invented in 1980, roughly speaking more or less, and for 20-odd years, it hasn't changed. It is still, in most places, a gray or black box, and it looks the same. And frankly — and I know that sometimes I offend some of my customers when I say this, but I truly mean it — if you could take the name of the computer off the top of it, it would be very difficult to judge who made it, because they're all highly commoditized but they're all different. So, there has not been a human-centric approach to addressing this segment of the market, so we really believe it is critical to think of it.It reminded me a lot of the talk we heard this morning, about this operating room machinery that was designed specifically for Africa. We're talking about something very similar here. And it has to be based on a geo-sensitive approach. What I mean by that is that in some parts of the world, the government plays a key role in the development of technology. In other parts, it doesn't. In other parts of the world, you have an infrastructure that allows for manufacturing to take place. In other parts, it doesn't. And then we have to be sensitive about how this technology can be developed and put into action in those regions. And the last piece, which is really important — and this is an opinion that we have, not shared by many, this is one where we seem to stand alone, on this one — is that we really believe that the greatest success of this initiative can come by fostering local, integrated, end-to-end ecosystems.What I mean by that, and let me use this example, the country of South Africa, because I was just there, therefore I'm a little bit familiar with some of the challenges they have. It's a country of 45 million people. It's an economy that's emerging. It's beginning to grow tremendously. They have an objective to lowering the cost of connectivity. They have a computer company that makes computers in South Africa. They're developing a software-training environment in their universities. What a place, what an ideal place to create an ecosystem that could build the hardware and the software needed for their schools. And to my surprise, I learned in South Africa they have 18 dialects, I always thought they only had two — English and Afrikaans — but it turns out they have 18 dialects. And to be able to meet the needs of this rather complex educational system, it could only be done from inside. I don't think this segment of the market can be addressed by companies parachuting from another place of the world, and just dumping product and selling into the markets. So, we believe that in those regions of the world where the population is large, and there's an infrastructure that can provide it, that a local, integrated, end-to-end system is really critical for its success.This is a picture of a classroom that we outfitted with computers in Mexico, in my home country. This particular classroom happens to be in the state of Michoacan. Those of you that might be familiar with Mexico — Michoacan is a very colorful state. Children dress with very colorful, colorful clothes, and it is incredible to see the power that this has in the hands of kids, in a computer. And I have to tell you that it's so easy to appreciate the impact that access to technology and connectivity can have in the lives and education of these kids. We just recently opened a learning laboratory in a school in the West Cape in South Africa, in a school that's called Nelson Mandela School, and when you see the faces and activities of these children being able to access computers, it's just phenomenal. And recently, they've written us letters, telling us how excited they are about the impact that this has had on their lives, on their educational dreams, on their capabilities, and it's just phenomenal.We have now deployed 30 different technologists in 18 different countries, and we have been able to connect millions of people in an effort to continue to learn what this particular segment of the market needs and demands. And I have to tell you that although millions doesn't sound like a lot in terms of the billions that need to be connected, it's a start. And we are learning a lot. And we're learning a tremendous amount about what we believe this segment needs to be able to be effective.One example of this has been the One Laptop per Child. Some of you are familiar with this. This is a partnership between MIT and a group of companies — Google is involved, Red Hat — and AMD is a key player. The electronics behind the One Laptop per Child are based on AMD technology; it's a microprocessor. But to give you an idea how creative this group of people can be, one of the objectives of the One Laptop per Child is to be able to achieve a 10-hour battery life. Because it was felt that a school day would last at least eight hours, and you wanted the child to have the ability to use the laptop for at least one full day without having to recharge it. The engineers have done a phenomenal amount of innovation on this part, and battery life on this product is now 15 hours — just through a lot of innovative work people have done because they're passionate and motivated to be able to do this. We expect this to be deployed towards the end of this year, and we're very excited at the opportunities that this is going to offer in the field of education. It's a highly focused product aimed at strictly the education market, not only in the developing countries, but actually in the developed regions as well, because there are parts of the United States where this can have also a huge impact on the ability to make education more fun and more efficient.We also have partnered with TED in this project, with Architecture for Humanity, and along with the TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair, we're having a contest that we have issued to the architectural community to come up with the best design for a computer lab for an emerging region. And we're really thrilled about the opportunity to be part of this, and can't wait to see what comes out of this exciting, exciting activity.Let me come back to the beginning, to end this presentation. I'll tell you that one of the things that I feel is really critical for us in industry, in business, is to be able to be passionate about solving these problems. I don't think it's enough to be able to put them on a spreadsheet, and look at numbers and say, yes, that's a good business. I really believe that you have to have a passion for it.And one of the things that I learned, too, from my parents — and I'll give you a little anecdote — especially from my father. And it took me a while to understand it, but he said to me, when I went to college, he said, ""You're the first person in the family to go to college. And it's really important you understand that for civilization to make progress, each generation has to do better than the last one. And therefore, this is your opportunity to do better than my generation."" Frankly, I don't know that I really understood what he told me at the time. I was eager to go off to college, and go find girls, and study, and girls, and study, but then I finished college and I fell in love. I graduated. I decided to get married. And on my wedding day, my father came to me again and said, ""You know, I'm going to remind you again, that each generation has to do better than the last one. You have to be a better husband than I was, because that's how you make progress."" And now he began to make sense. Because I knew what a great husband he was, and now he was once again beginning to put pressure on me, like he did when I was a little kid. And then a few years later, I had a child, my first child, and again, my father comes to the hospital, and we're looking at the glass, and see all the children on the other side, and he said, ""I've got to remind you again, that for each generation to do better, you're going to have to be a better father than I was."" That's when it dawned on me the tremendous challenge that he was placing on me, because he was a great father. But the key is that he instilled in me a passion to really get up every day in the morning and want to do better, to really get up and think that my role in life is not just to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It's got to be that someday I can look back, and this place is truly better through some small contribution that perhaps each of us could make. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hector_ruiz_on_connecting_the_world
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"I love a challenge, and saving the Earth is probably a good one. We all know the Earth is in trouble. We have now entered in the 6X, the sixth major extinction on this planet. I often wondered, if there was a United Organization of Organisms — otherwise known as ""Uh-Oh"" — (Laughter) — and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet, or off the planet? I think that vote is occurring right now.I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium. The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature — the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mcyelium — so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs.Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday, this is where we go to church. I'm in love with the old-growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those. Most of you are familiar with Portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle. When I mention mushrooms to somebody, they immediately think Portobellos or magic mushrooms, their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. So, I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia, the irrational fear of the unknown, when it comes to fungi.Mushrooms are very fast in their growth. Day 21, day 23, day 25. Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta — a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here is a mushroom that's past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium.And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium.This is photomicrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory and then it begins the net. I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I have thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium, I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes. And in these cavities, these micro-cavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbial communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet. When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing — Internet engineers maybe call them hot points — there are alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris. So, I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven, biologically successful model. The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit, and we now, being the top organism on this planet, are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life; life becomes single cells; single cells become strings; strings become chains; chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible? It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil. Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So, fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix.This was first discovered in 1859. This is a photograph by Franz Hueber. This photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about three feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom. Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years.Now, we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward — 65 million years ago — most of you know about it — we had an asteroid impact. The Earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth. Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So, the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a forgone conclusion, at least in my own mind.The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon. I couldn't miss it. It was 2,200 acres in size: 2,200 acres in size, 2,000 years old. The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large, and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us? The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom — it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt. We were involved with several experiments. I'm going to show you six, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world. Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham, Washington. There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste: one was a control pile; one pile was treated with enzymes; one pile was treated with bacteria; and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium. The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes — peroxidases — that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So, the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned six weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates — fungal sugars.Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They're very large. They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained. But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. Whereas the other three piles were dead, dark and stinky, and the PAH's — the aromatic hydrocarbons — went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks. The last image we don't have. The entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species, vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.So I invented burlap sacks, bunker spawn — and putting the mycelium — using storm blown debris, you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration. So, we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms. And I'll show you a graph here. This is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the eighth power. There's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to the third power is around 1,000. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris — and we can guarantee that we will have storms every year.So, this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty, with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis — Agarikon. It's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington State, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large — let's get closer. This is extremely rare fungus. Our team — and we have a team of experts that go out — we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year. We found one sample to be able to get into culture.Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old-growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health. I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites. And a few years ago, we received these results. We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active. 10 or greater are considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There's a vetted press release that you can read — it's vetted by DOD — if you Google ""Stamets"" and ""smallpox."" Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview.So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses. And so, for the first time, I am showing this. We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here's the selectivity index numbers — against pox, you saw 10s and 20s — now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses — H1N1, H3N2 — as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index. (Applause) I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense. (Applause)I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi — fungi that kill insects. Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants. So, I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chased the mycelium, when it stopped producing spores. These are spores — this is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form. And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form. And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever.And then — a delicate dance between dinner and death — the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head. (Laughter) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So, the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So, you have a near-permanent solution for reinvasion of termites. And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants. Then we tried extracts, and lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent — and this is a big one. It's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent. It covers over 200,000 species. This is the most disruptive technology — I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry — that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.And so I came up with a Life Box, because I needed a delivery system. The Life Box — you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference — you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom. The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium. And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing — potentially — an old-growth forest from a cardboard box.I want to reinvent the delivery system, and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there's a YouTube-like site that you could put up, you could make it interactive, zip code specific — where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes.You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water — I developed this for the refugee community — corns, beans and squash and onions. I took several containers — my wife said, if I could do this, anybody could — and I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds — and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this — and then you're harvesting the seed garden. Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels. I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corncobs. Now, three corncobs, no other grain — lots of mushrooms begin to form. Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank, and so this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here. The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol.Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary — and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels. So, we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils. These are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world
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"What I'd like to do is just drag us all down into the gutter, and actually all the way down into the sewer because I want to talk about diarrhea. And in particular, I want to talk about the design of diarrhea. And when evolutionary biologists talk about design, they really mean design by natural selection. And that brings me to the title of the talk, ""Using Evolution to Design Disease Organisms Intelligently."" And I also have a little bit of a sort of smartass subtitle to this. But I'm not just doing this to be cute. I really think that this subtitle explains what somebody like me, who's sort of a Darwin wannabe, how they actually look at one's role in sort of coming into this field of health sciences and medicine. It's really not a very friendly field for evolutionary biologists. You actually see a great potential, but you see a lot of people who are sort of defending their turf, and may actually be very resistant, when one tries to introduce ideas.So, all of the talk today is going to deal with two general questions. One is that, why are some disease organisms more harmful? And a very closely related question, which is, how can we take control of this situation once we understand the answer to the first question? How can we make the harmful organisms more mild? And I'm going to be talking, to begin with, as I said, about diarrheal disease organisms. And the focus when I'm talking about the diarrheal organisms, as well as the focus when I'm talking about any organisms that cause acute infectious disease, is to think about the problem from a germ's point of view, germ's-eye view. And in particular, to think about a fundamental idea which I think makes sense out of a tremendous amount of variation in the harmfulness of disease organisms. And that idea is that from the germ's-eye point of view, disease organisms have to get from one host to another, and often they have to rely on the well-being of the host to move them to another host.But not always. Sometimes, you get disease organisms that don't rely on host mobility at all for transmission. And when you have that, then evolutionary theory tells us that natural selection will favor the more exploitative, more predator-like organisms. So, natural selection will favor organisms that are more likely to cause damage. If instead transmission to another host requires host mobility, then we expect that the winners of the competition will be the milder organisms. So, if the pathogen doesn't need the host to be healthy and active, and actual selection favors pathogens that take advantage of those hosts, the winners in the competition are those that exploit the hosts for their own reproductive success. But if the host needs to be mobile in order to transmit the pathogen, then it's the benign ones that tend to be the winners.So, I'm going to begin by applying this idea to diarrheal diseases. Diarrheal disease organisms get transmitted in basically three ways. They can be transmitted from person-to-person contact, person-to-food-then-to-person contact, when somebody eats contaminated food, or they can be transmitted through the water. And when they're transmitted through the water, unlike the first two modes of transmission, these pathogens don't rely on a healthy host for transmission. A person can be sick in bed and still infect tens, even hundreds of other individuals. To sort of illustrate that, this diagram emphasizes that if you've got a sick person in bed, somebody's going to be taking out the contaminated materials. They're going to wash those contaminated materials, and then the water may move into sources of drinking water. People will come in to those places where you've got contaminated drinking water, bring things back to the family, may drink right at that point. The whole point is that a person who can't move can still infect many other individuals.And so, the theory tells us that when diarrheal disease organisms are transported by water, we expect them to be more predator-like, more harmful. And you can test these ideas. So, one way you can test is just look at all diarrheal bacteria, and see whether or not the ones that tend to be more transmitted by water, tend to be more harmful. And the answer is — yep, they are. Now I put those names in there just for the bacteria buffs, but the main point here is that — (Laughter) there's a lot of them here, I can tell — the main point here is that those data points all show a very strong, positive association between the degree to which a disease organism is transmitted by water, and how harmful they are, how much death they cause per untreated infection. So this suggests we're on the right track. But this, to me, suggests that we really need to ask some additional questions.Remember the second question that I raised at the outset was, how can we use this knowledge to make disease organisms evolve to be mild? Now, this suggests that if you could just block waterborne transmission, you could cause disease organisms to shift from the right-hand side of that graph to the left-hand side of the graph. But it doesn't tell you how long. I mean, if this would require thousands of years, then it's worthless in terms of controlling of these pathogens. But if it could occur in just a few years, then it might be a very important way to control some of the nasty problems that we haven't been able to control. In other words, this suggests that we could domesticate these organisms. We could make them evolve to be not so harmful to us.And so, as I was thinking about this, I focused on this organism, which is the El Tor biotype of the organism called Vibrio cholerae. And that is the species of organism that is responsible for causing cholera. And the reason I thought this is a really great organism to look at is that we understand why it's so harmful. It's harmful because it produces a toxin, and that toxin is released when the organism gets into our intestinal tract. It causes fluid to flow from the cells that line our intestine into the lumen, the internal chamber of our intestine, and then that fluid goes the only way it can, which is out the other end. And it flushes out thousands of different other competitors that would otherwise make life difficult for the Vibrios.So what happens, if you've got an organism, it produces a lot of toxin. After a few days of infection you end up having — the fecal material really isn't so disgusting as we might imagine. It's sort of cloudy water. And if you took a drop of that water, you might find a million diarrheal organisms. If the organism produced a lot of toxin, you might find 10 million, or 100 million. If it didn't produce a lot of this toxin, then you might find a smaller number. So the task is to try to figure out how to determine whether or not you could get an organism like this to evolve towards mildness by blocking waterborne transmission, thereby allowing the organism only to be transmitted by person-to-person contact, or person-food-person contact — both of which would really require that people be mobile and fairly healthy for transmission.Now, I can think of some possible experiments. One would be to take a lot of different strains of this organism — some that produce a lot of toxins, some that produce a little — and take those strains and spew them out in different countries. Some countries that might have clean water supplies, so that you can't get waterborne transmission: you expect the organism to evolve to mildness there. Other countries, in which you've got a lot of waterborne transmission, there you expect these organisms to evolve towards a high level of harmfulness, right? There's a little ethical problem in this experiment. I was hoping to hear a few gasps at least. That makes me worry a little bit.(Laughter)But anyhow, the laughter makes me feel a little bit better. And this ethical problem's a big problem. Just to emphasize this, this is what we're really talking about. Here's a girl who's almost dead. She got rehydration therapy, she perked up, within a few days she was looking like a completely different person. So, we don't want to run an experiment like that. But interestingly, just that thing happened in 1991. In 1991, this cholera organism got into Lima, Peru, and within two months it had spread to the neighboring areas. Now, I don't know how that happened, and I didn't have anything to do with it, I promise you. I don't think anybody knows, but I'm not averse to, once that's happened, to see whether or not the prediction that we would make, that I did make before, actually holds up. Did the organism evolve to mildness in a place like Chile, which has some of the most well protected water supplies in Latin America? And did it evolve to be more harmful in a place like Ecuador, which has some of the least well protected? And Peru's got something sort of in between.And so, with funding from the Bosack-Kruger Foundation, I got a lot of strains from these different countries and we measured their toxin production in the lab. And we found that in Chile — within two months of the invasion of Peru you had strains entering Chile — and when you look at those strains, in the very far left-hand side of this graph, you see a lot of variation in the toxin production. Each dot corresponds to an islet from a different person — a lot of variation on which natural selection can act. But the interesting point is, if you look over the 1990s, within a few years the organisms evolved to be more mild. They evolved to produce less toxin. And to just give you a sense of how important this might be, if we look in 1995, we find that there's only one case of cholera, on average, reported from Chile every two years.So, it's controlled. That's how much we have in America, cholera that's acquired endemically, and we don't think we've got a problem here. They didn't — they solved the problem in Chile. But, before we get too confident, we'd better look at some of those other countries, and make sure that this organism doesn't just always evolve toward mildness. Well, in Peru it didn't. And in Ecuador — remember, this is the place where it has the highest potential waterborne transmission — it looked like it got more harmful. In every case there's a lot of variation, but something about the environment the people are living in, and I think the only realistic explanation is that it's the degree of waterborne transmission, favored the harmful strains in one place, and mild strains in another.So, this is very encouraging, it suggests that something that we might want to do anyhow, if we had enough money, could actually give us a much bigger bang for the buck. It would make these organisms evolve to mildness, so that even though people might be getting infected, they'd be infected with mild strains. It wouldn't be causing severe disease. But there's another really interesting aspect of this, and this is that if you could control the evolution of virulence, evolution of harmfulness, then you should be able to control antibiotic resistance. And the idea is very simple. If you've got a harmful organism, a high proportion of the people are going to be symptomatic, a high proportion of the people are going to be going to get antibiotics. You've got a lot of pressure favoring antibiotic resistance, so you get increased virulence leading to the evolution of increased antibiotic resistance. And once you get increased antibiotic resistance, the antibiotics aren't knocking out the harmful strains anymore. So, you've got a higher level of virulence.So, you get this vicious cycle. The goal is to turn this around. If you could cause an evolutionary decrease in virulence by cleaning up the water supply, you should be able to get an evolutionary decrease in antibiotic resistance. So, we can go to the same countries and look and see. Did Chile avoid the problem of antibiotic resistance, whereas did Ecuador actually have the beginnings of the problem? If we look in the beginning of the 1990s, we see, again, a lot of variation. In this case, on the Y-axis, we've just got a measure of antibiotic sensitivity — and I won't go into that. But we've got a lot of variation in antibiotic sensitivity in Chile, Peru and Ecuador, and no trend across the years. But if we look at the end of the 1990s, just half a decade later, we see that in Ecuador they started having a resistance problem. Antibiotic sensitivity was going down. And in Chile, you still had antibiotic sensitivity.So, it looks like Chile dodged two bullets. They got the organism to evolve to mildness, and they got no development of antibiotic resistance. Now, these ideas should apply across the board, as long as you can figure out why some organisms evolved to virulence. And I want to give you just one more example, because we've talked a little bit about malaria. And the example I want to deal with is, or the idea I want to deal with, the question is, what can we do to try to get the malarial organism to evolve to mildness? Now, malaria's transmitted by a mosquito, and normally if you're infected with malaria, and you're feeling sick, it makes it even easier for the mosquito to bite you.And you can show, just by looking at data from literature, that vector-borne diseases are more harmful than non-vector-borne diseases. But I think there's a really fascinating example of what one can do experimentally to try to actually demonstrate this. In the case of waterborne transmission, we'd like to clean up the water supplies, see whether or not we can get those organisms to evolve towards mildness. In the case of malaria, what we'd like to do is mosquito-proof houses. And the logic's a little more subtle here. If you mosquito-proof houses, when people get sick, they're sitting in bed — or in mosquito-proof hospitals, they're sitting in a hospital bed — and the mosquitoes can't get to them.So, if you're a harmful variant in a place where you've got mosquito-proof housing, then you're a loser. The only pathogens that get transmitted are the ones that are infecting people that feel healthy enough to walk outside and get mosquito bites. So, if you were to mosquito proof houses, you should be able to get these organisms to evolve to mildness. And there's a really wonderful experiment that was done that suggests that we really should go ahead and do this. And that experiment was done in Northern Alabama. Just to give you a little perspective on this, I've given you a star at the intellectual center of the United States, which is right there in Louisville, Kentucky. And this really cool experiment was done about 200 miles south of there, in Northern Alabama, by the Tennessee Valley Authority. They had dammed up the Tennessee River. They'd caused the water to back up, they needed electric, hydroelectric power. And when you get stagnant water, you get mosquitoes. They found in the late '30s — 10 years after they'd made these dams — that the people in Northern Alabama were infected with malaria, about a third to half of them were infected with malaria.This shows you the positions of some of these dams. OK, so the Tennessee Valley Authority was in a little bit of a bind. There wasn't DDT, there wasn't chloroquines: what do they do? Well, they decided to mosquito proof every house in Northern Alabama. So they did. They divided Northern Alabama into 11 zones, and within three years, about 100 dollars per house, they mosquito proofed every house. And these are the data. Every row across here represents one of those 11 zones. And the asterisks represent the time at which the mosquito proofing was complete. And so what you can see is that just the mosquito-proofed housing, and nothing else, caused the eradication of malaria. And this was, incidentally, published in 1949, in the leading textbook of malaria, called ""Boyd's Malariology."" But almost no malaria experts even know it exists. This is important, because it tells us that if you have moderate biting densities, you can eradicate malaria by mosquito proofing houses.Now, I would suggest that you could do this in a lot of places. Like, you know, just as you get into the malaria zone, sub-Saharan Africa. But as you move to really intense biting rate areas, like Nigeria, you're certainly not going to eradicate. But that's when you should be favoring evolution towards mildness. So to me, it's an experiment that's waiting to happen, and if it confirms the prediction, then we should have a very powerful tool. In a way, much more powerful than the kind of tools we're looking at, because most of what's being done today is to rely on things like anti-malarial drugs. And we know that, although it's great to make those anti-malarial drugs available at really low cost and high frequency, we know that when you make them highly available you're going to get resistance to those drugs. And so it's a short-term solution. This is a long-term solution.What I'm suggesting here is that we could get evolution working in the direction we want it to go, rather than always having to battle evolution as a problem that stymies our efforts to control the pathogen, for example with anti-malarial drugs. So, this table I've given just to emphasize that I've only talked about two examples. But as I said earlier, this kind of logic applies across the board for infectious diseases, and it ought to. Because when we're dealing with infectious diseases, we're dealing with living systems. We're dealing with living systems; we're dealing with systems that evolve. And so if you do something with those systems, they're going to evolve one way or another. And all I'm saying is that we need to figure out how they'll evolve, so that — we need to adjust our interventions to get the most bang for the intervention buck, so that we can get these organisms to evolve in the direction we want them to go.So, I don't really have time to talk about those things, but I did want to put them up there, just to give you a sense that there really are solutions to controlling the evolution of harmfulness of some of the nasty pathogens that we're confronted with. And this links up with a lot of the other ideas that have been talked about. So, for example, earlier today there was discussion of, how do you really lower sexual transmission of HIV? What this emphasizes is that we need to figure out how it will work. Will it maybe get lowered if we alter the economy of the area? It may get lowered if we intervene in ways that encourage people to stay more faithful to partners, and so on.But the key thing is to figure out how to lower it, because if we lower it, we'll get an evolutionary change in the virus. And the data really do support this: that you actually do get the virus evolving towards mildness. And that will just add to the effectiveness of our control efforts. So the other thing I really like about this, besides the fact that it brings a whole new dimension into the study of control of disease, is that often the kinds of interventions that you want, that it indicates should be done, are the kinds of interventions that people want anyhow. But people just haven't been able to justify the cost.So, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. If we know that we're going to get extra bang for the buck from providing clean water, then I think that we can say, let's push the effort into that aspect of the control, so that we can actually solve the problem, even though, if you just look at the frequency of infection, you would suggest that you can't solve the problem well enough just by cleaning up water supply. Anyhow, I'll end that there, and thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs
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"I started juggling a long time ago, but long before that, I was a golfer, and that's what I was, a golfer. And as a golfer and as a kid, one of the things that really sort of seeped into my pores, that I sort of lived my whole life, is process. And it's the process of learning things. One of the great things was that my father was an avid golfer, but he was lefty. And he had a real passion for golf, and he also created this whole mythology about Ben Hogan and various things. Well, I learned a lot about interesting things that I knew nothing about at the time, but grew to know stuff about. And that was the mythology of skill.So, one of the things that I love to do is to explore skill. And since Richard put me on this whole thing with music — I'm supposed to actually be doing a project with Tod Machover with the MIT Media Lab — it relates a lot to music. But Tod couldn't come and the project is sort of somewhere, I'm not sure whether it's happening the way we thought, or not. But I'm going to explore skill, and juggling, and basically visual music, I guess. OK, you can start the music, thanks.(Music)(Applause)Thanks. Thank you. Now, juggling can be a lot of fun; play with skill and play with space, play with rhythm. And you can turn the mike on now. I'm going to do a couple of pieces. I do a big piece in a triangle and these are three sections from it. Part of the challenge was to try to understand rhythm and space using not just my hands — because a lot of juggling is hand-oriented — but using the rhythm of my body and feet, and controlling the balls with my feet.(Applause)Thanks. Now, this next section was an attempt to explore space. You see, I think Richard said something about people that are against something. Well, a lot of people think jugglers defy gravity or do stuff. Well, I kind of, from my childhood and golf and all that, it's a process of joining with forces. And so what I'd like to do is try to figure out how to join with the space through the technique. So juggling gravity — up, down. If you figure out what up and down really are, it's a complex physical set of skills to be able to throw a ball down and up and everything, but then you add in sideways.(Applause)Now, I look at it somewhat as a way — when you learn juggling what you learn is how to feel with your eyes, and see with your hands because you're not looking at your hands, you're looking at where the balls are or you're looking at the audience. So this next part is really a way of understanding space and rhythm, with the obvious reference to the feet, but it's also time — where the feet were, where the balls were.(Applause)Thanks. So, visual music: rhythm and complexity. I'm going to build towards complexity now. Juggling three balls is simple and normal.(Laughter)Excuse me.(Laughter)We're jugglers, OK. And remember, you're transposing, you're getting into a subculture here.(Laughter)And juggling — the balls cross and all that. OK, if you keep them in their assigned paths you get parallel lines of different heights, but then hopefully even rhythm. And you can change the rhythm — good, Michael. You can change the rhythm, if you get out of the lights. OK? Change the rhythm, so it's even. Or you can go back and change the height. Now, skill. But you're boxed in, if you can only do it up and down that way. So, you've got to go after the space down there. OK, then you've got to combine them, because then you have the whole spatial palette in front of you. And then you get crazy.(Applause)Now, I'm actually going to ask you to try something, so you've got to pay attention. Complexity: if you spend enough time doing something, time slows down or your skill increases, so your perceptions change. It's learning skills — like being in a high-speed car crash. Things slow down as you learn, as you learn, as you learn. You may not be able to affect it, it almost drifts on you. It goes. But that's the closest approximation I can have to it.So, complexity. Now, how many here are jugglers? OK, so most of you are going to have a similar reaction to this. OK? And whoever laughed there — you understood it completely, right?(Laughter)No, it looks like a mess. It looks like a mess with a guy there, who's got his hands around that mess, OK. Well, that's what juggling is about, right? It's being able to do something that other people can't do or can't understand. All right. So, that's one way of doing it, which is five balls down. OK? Another way is the outside. And you could play with the rhythm. Same pattern. Make it faster and smaller. Make it wider. Make it narrower. Bring it back up. OK. It's done. Thanks.(Applause)Now, what I wanted to get to is that you're all very bright, very tactile. I have no idea how computer-oriented or three-dimensionally-oriented you are, but let's try something. OK, so since you all don't understand what the five-ball pattern is, I'm going to give you a little clue. Enough of a clue? So, you get the pattern, right? OK.(Laughter)You're not getting off that easy. All right? Now, do me a favor: follow the ball that I ask you to follow. Green. Yellow. Pink. White. OK, you can do that? Yeah? OK.Now, let's actually learn something. Actually, let me put you in that area of learning, which is very insecure. You want to do it? Yeah? OK. Hands out in front of you. Palms up, together. What you're going to learn is this.(Laughter)OK? So what I want you to do is just listen to me and do it. Index finger, middle finger, ring, little. Little, ring, middle, index. And then open. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. A little bit faster. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger.(Laughter)All right. A lot of different learning processes going on in here.(Laughter)One learning process that I see is this —(Laughter)OK. Another learning process that I see is this —(Laughter)OK. So, everybody take a deep breath in, breath out. OK. Now, one more time, and — finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Open. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. OK. Shake your hands out.Now, I assume a lot of you spend a lot of time at a computer. OK? So, what you're doing is, you're going la, la, la, and you're getting this. OK? So that's exactly what I'm going to ask you to do, but in a slightly different way. You're going to combine it. So what I want you to do is — fingers. I'll tell you what to do with your fingers, same thing. But I want you to do is also, with your eyes, is follow the colored ball that I ask you to follow.(Laughter)OK? Here we go. So, we're going to start off looking at the white ball — and I'm going to tell you which color, and I'm also going to tell you to go with your fingers. OK? So white ball and — finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Pink. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Green. Finger, finger, finger, finger. Yellow. Finger, finger, finger, pink or finger. Pink, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. All right.(Applause)How did you do? Well? OK. The reason I wanted you to do this is because that's actually what most people face throughout their lives, a moment of learning, a moment of challenge. It's a moment that you can't make sense of. Why the hell should I learn this? OK? Does it really have anything to do with anything in my life? You know, I can't decipher — is it fun? Is it challenging? Am I supposed to cheat?(Laughter)You know, what are you supposed to do? You've got somebody up here who is the operative principle of doing that for his whole life. OK? Trying to figure that stuff out. But is it going to get you anywhere? It's just a moment. That's all it is, a moment. OK? I'm going to change the script for one second. Just let me do this. I don't need music for it. Talking about time in a moment. There's a piece that I recently developed which was all about that, a moment. And what I do as a creative artist is I develop vocabularies or languages of moving objects.What I've done for you here, I developed a lot of those tricks and I put the choreography together, but they're not original techniques. Now, I'm going to start showing you some original techniques that come from the work that I've developed. OK? So, a moment, how would you define a moment? Well, as a juggler, what I wanted to do was create something that was representational of a moment.Ahhh. All right, I'm going to get on my knees and do it. So, a moment.(Rattling)OK? And then, what I did as a juggler was say, OK, what can I do to make that something that is dependent on something else, another dynamic.(Rattling)So, a moment.(Rattling)Another moment.(Rattling)Excuse me, still getting there. A moment that travels.(Rattling)A moment — no, we'll try that again. It separates, and comes back together. Time. How can you look at time? And what do you dedicate it to, in exploring a particular thing? Well, obviously, there's something in here, and you can all have a guess as to what it is. There's a mystery. There's a mystery in the moment. And it has to settle. And then it's dependent on something else. And then it comes to rest. Just a little thing about time.Now, this has expanded into a much bigger piece, because I use ramps of different parabolas that I roll the balls on while I'm keeping time with this. But I just thought I'd talk about a moment.(Applause)All right. OK. Can we show the video of the triangle? Are we ready to do that? Yes? This is the piece that I told you about. It's a much bigger piece that I do exploring the space of a geometric triangle.(Applause)Thanks. The only thing I'll say about the last session is, you ever try juggling and driving the car with your knees at 120 miles an hour?(Laughter)The only other thing is, it was a real shock. I always drove motorcycles. And when I bought my first car, it shocked me that it cost three times more than my parents' house. Interesting.Anyway, balance: constant movement to find an approach to stillness. Cheating.(Laughter)Balance: making up the rules so you can't cheat, so you learn to approach stillness with different parts of your body. To have a conversation with it. To speak. To listen.(Laughter)Hup. Now, it's dependent on rhythm, and keeping a center of balance. When it falls, going underneath. So, there's a rhythm to it. The rhythm can get much smaller. As your skill increases, you learn to find those tinier spaces, those tinier movements. Thanks.(Applause)Now, I'm going to show you the beginnings of a piece that is about balance in some ways, and also — oh, actually, if you're bored, not here, here's one use for it.(Laughter)You can go with the ""Sticks One"" music.(Music)(Applause)Thanks. That has a certain kind of balance to it, which is all about plumb. I apprenticed with a carpenter and learned about plumb, square and level. And they influenced that, and this next piece, which I'll do a little segment of. ""Two Sticks,"" you can go with it. Thanks. Which is again exploring space, or the lines in space.(Music)(Applause)Working with space and the lines in space in a different way. Oh, let's see here.(Applause)So, I'll come back to that in a second. But working with one ball, now, what if you attach something to it, or change it. This is a little thing that I made because I really like the idea of curves and balls together. And then creating space and the rhythm of space, using the surface of the balls, the surface of the arms. Just a little toy. Which leads me to the next thing, which is — what have I got here? OK. All right.I'm actually leading up to something, the newest thing that I'm working on. This is not it. This is exploring geometry and the rhythm of shape.(Applause)Now, what I just did was I worked with the mathematics — the diameter and the circumference. Sometimes these pieces are mathematical, in that way that I look at a shape and say, what about if I use this and this and this. Sometimes what happens in life affects my choice of objects that I try to work with.The next piece that I'm going to do — which is the cylinders piece, if you want to get that up — it has to do with cylinder seals from about 5,000 years ago, which were stones with designs that were used to roll over wet clay with all sorts of great designs. I love ceramics and all of that. It's a combination of that, the beauty of that, the shape, and the stories that were involved in it, as well as the fact that they protected the contents.The second influence on this piece came from recycling and looking into a tin can recycling bin and seeing all that beautiful emptiness. So, if you want to go with the music for cylinders.(Music)(Applause)Talking about geometry and everything, if you take the circle and you split it in half — can you run ""S-Curve music?"" I'm going to do just a short version of it. Circles split in half and rotated, and mythology.(Music)(Applause)Anyway, that piece also has a kinetic sculpture in the middle of it, and I dance around a small stage so — two minutes, just to end? The latest piece that I'm working on — what I love is that I never know what I'm working on, why I'm working on it. They're not ideas, they're instincts. And the latest thing that I'm working on —(Clattering) —is something really — I don't know what it is yet. And that's good. I like not to know for as long as possible. Well, because then it tells me the truth, instead of me imposing the truth. And what it is, is working with both positive and negative space but also with these curves. And what it involves, and I don't know if my hands are too beaten up to do it or not, but I'll do a little bit of it.It initially started off with me stacking these things, bunches of them, and then playing with the sense of space, of filling in the space. And then it started changing, and become folding on themselves. And then changing levels. Because my attempt is to make visual instruments, not to just make — I'll try one other thing. For work in three dimensions, with your perceptions of space and time. Now, I don't know exactly where it's going, but I've got a bit of effort involved in this thing. And it's going to change as I go through it. But I really like it, it feels right. This may not be the right shape, and — look at this shape, and then I'll show you the first design I ever put to it, just to see, just to play, because I love all different kinds of things to play with. Let's see here. To work with the positive and negative in a different way. And to change, and to change.So, I'm off in my new direction with this to explore rhythm and space. We'll see what I come up with. Thanks for having me.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_moschen_juggles_rhythm_and_motion
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"How many of you have seen the Alfred Hitchcock film ""The Birds""? Any of you get really freaked out by that? You might want to leave now.(Laughter)So this is a vending machine for crows. Over the past few days, many of you have been asking, ""How did you come to this? How did you get started doing this?"" It started, as with many great ideas, or many ideas you can't get rid of, anyway, at a cocktail party. About 10 years ago, I was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine. We were sitting there, and he was complaining about the crows that were all over his yard and making a big mess. And he was telling me we ought to eradicate these things, kill them, because they're making a mess. I said that was stupid, maybe we should just train them to do something useful. And he said that was impossible.And I'm sure I'm in good company in finding that tremendously annoying, when someone tells you it's impossible. So I spent the next 10 years reading about crows in my spare time.(Laughter)And after 10 years of this, my wife said, ""You've got to do this thing you've been talking about, and build the vending machine."" So I did. But part of the reason I found this interesting is, I started noticing that we're very aware of all the species that are going extinct on the planet as a result of human habitation expansion, and no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living; they're surviving. And I'm talking specifically about synanthropic species, which have adapted specifically for human ecologies, species like rats and cockroaches and crows.And as I started looking at them, I was finding that they had hyper-adapted. They'd become extremely adept at living with us. And in return, we just tried to kill them all the time.(Laughter)And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism. We were giving them all sorts of reasons to adapt new ways. So, for example, rats are incredibly responsive breeders. And cockroaches, as anyone who's tried to get rid of them knows, have become really immune to the poisons that we're using. So I thought, let's build something that's mutually beneficial; something that we can both benefit from, and find some way to make a new relationship with these species. So I built the vending machine.But the story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows. It turns out, crows aren't just surviving with human beings; they're actually thriving. They're found everywhere on the planet except for the Arctic and the southern tip of South America. And in all that area, they're only rarely found breeding more than five kilometers away from human beings. So we may not think about them, but they're always around. And not surprisingly, given the human population growth, more than half of the human population is living in cities now. And out of those, nine-tenths of the human growth population is occurring in cities. We're seeing a population boom with crows. So bird counts are indicating that we might be seeing up to exponential growth in their numbers. So that's no great surprise.But what was really interesting to me was to find out that the birds were adapting in a pretty unusual way. And I'll give you an example of that. This is Betty. She's a New Caledonian crow. And these crows use sticks in the wild to get insects and whatnot out of pieces of wood. Here, she's trying to get a piece of meat out of a tube. But the researchers had a problem. They messed up and left just a stick of wire in there. And she hadn't had the opportunity to do this before. You see, it wasn't working very well. So she adapted.Now, this is completely unprompted; she had never seen this done before. No one taught her to bend this into a hook or had shown her how it could happen. But she did it all on her own. So keep in mind — she's never seen this done.(Laughter)Right.(Laughter)Yeah. All right.(Applause)So that's the part where the researchers freak out.(Laughter)It turns out, we've been finding more and more that crows are really intelligent. Their brains are in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are. There's all kinds of anecdotes for the different kinds of intelligence they have. For example, in Sweden, crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice. And when the fishermen move off, the crows fly down, reel up the lines, and eat the fish or the bait. It's pretty annoying for the fishermen.On an entirely different tack, at University of Washington a few years ago, they were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus. Some students went out, netted some crows, brought them in, weighed and measured them, and let them back out again. And they were entertained to discover that for the rest of the week, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them and run around, and make their life kind of miserable.(Laughter)They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week. And the next month. And after summer break. Until they finally graduated and left campus, and — glad to get away, I'm sure — came back sometime later, and found the crows still remembered them.(Laughter)So, the moral being: don't piss off crows. So now, students at the University of Washington that are studying these crows, do so with a giant wig and a big mask.(Laughter)It's fairly interesting.(Laughter)So we know these crows are really smart, but the more I dug into this, the more I found that they actually have an even more significant adaptation.Video: Crows have become highly skilled at making a living in these new urban environments. In this Japanese city, they have devised a way of eating a food that normally they can't manage: drop it among the traffic. The problem now is collecting the bits, without getting run over. Wait for the light to stop the traffic. Then, collect your cracked nut in safety.(Laughter)(Applause)Joshua Klein: Yeah, pretty interesting. What's significant about this isn't that crows are using cars to crack nuts. In fact, that's old hat for crows. This happened about 10 years ago in a place called Sendai City, at a driving school in the suburbs of Tokyo. And since that time, all the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior. Now every crow within five kilometers is standing by a sidewalk, waiting to collect its lunch.So they're learning from each other. And research bears this out. Parents seem to be teaching their young. They learn from their peers, they learn from their enemies. If I have a little extra time, I'll tell you about a case of crow infidelity that illustrates that nicely. The point being, they've developed cultural adaptation. And as we heard yesterday, that's the Pandora's box that's getting human beings in trouble, and we're starting to see it with them. They're able to very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment, which is really useful if you live in a city.So we know that there's lots of crows. We found out they're really smart and they can teach each other. When all this became clear, I realized the only obvious thing to do is build a vending machine. So that's what we did. This is a vending machine for crows. And it uses Skinnerian training to shape their behavior over four stages. It's pretty simple. Basically, what happens is that we put this out in a field or someplace where there's lots of crows. We put coins and peanuts all around the base of the machine. Crows eventually come by, eat the peanuts, and get used to the machine being there. Eventually, they eat all the peanuts. Then they see peanuts here on the feeder tray, and hop up and help themselves. Then they leave, the machine spits up more coins and peanuts, and life is dandy if you're a crow — you can come back anytime and get yourself a peanut.So when they get really used to that, we move on to the crows coming back. Now they're used to the sound of the machine; they keep coming back and digging out peanuts from the pile of coins that's there. When they get really happy about this, we stymie them.We move to the third stage, where we only give them a coin. Now, like most of us who have gotten used to a good thing, this really pisses them off. So they do what they do in nature when they're looking for something: sweep things out of the way with their beak. They do that here, and that knocks the coins down the slot. When that happens, they get a peanut. This goes on for some time. The crows learn that all they have to do is show up, wait for the coin to come out, put it in the slot, then get their peanut.When they're good and comfortable with that, we move to the final stage, where they show up and nothing happens. This is where we see the difference between crows and other animals. Squirrels, for example, would show up, look for the peanut, go away. Come back, look for the peanut, go away. They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored, and then they go off and play in traffic.Crows, on the other hand, show up and they try and figure it out. They know this machine has been messing with them through three different stages of behavior.(Laughter)They figure there must be more to it. So they poke at it and peck at it. And eventually some crow gets a bright idea: ""Hey, there's lots of coins lying around from the first stage, hops down, picks it up, drops it in the slot, and we're off to the races. That crow enjoys a temporary monopoly on peanuts, until his friends figure out how to do it, and then there we go.So, what's significant about this to me isn't that we can train crows to pick up peanuts. Mind you, there's 216 million dollars' worth of change lost every year, but I'm not sure I can depend on that ROI from crows.(Laughter)Instead, I think we should look a little bit larger. I think crows can be trained to do other things. For example, why not train them to pick up garbage after stadium events? Or find expensive components from discarded electronics? Or maybe do search and rescue? The main point of all this for me is, we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. We can find ways to interact with these other species that doesn't involve exterminating them, but involves finding an equilibrium with them that's a useful balance.Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows
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"How does the news shape the way we see the world? Here's the world based on the way it looks — based on landmass. And here's how news shapes what Americans see. This map — (Applause) — this map shows the number of seconds that American network and cable news organizations dedicated to news stories, by country, in February of 2007 — just one year ago. Now, this was a month when North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities. There was massive flooding in Indonesia. And in Paris, the IPCC released its study confirming man's impact on global warming. The U.S. accounted for 79 percent of total news coverage. And when we take out the U.S. and look at the remaining 21 percent, we see a lot of Iraq — that's that big green thing there — and little else. The combined coverage of Russia, China and India, for example, reached just one percent.When we analyzed all the news stories and removed just one story, here's how the world looked. What was that story? The death of Anna Nicole Smith. This story eclipsed every country except Iraq, and received 10 times the coverage of the IPCC report. And the cycle continues; as we all know, Britney has loomed pretty large lately.So, why don't we hear more about the world? One reason is that news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half. Aside from one-person ABC mini-bureaus in Nairobi, New Delhi and Mumbai, there are no network news bureaus in all of Africa, India or South America — places that are home to more than two billion people.The reality is that covering Britney is cheaper. And this lack of global coverage is all the more disturbing when we see where people go for news. Local TV news looms large, and unfortunately only dedicates 12 percent of its coverage to international news.And what about the web? The most popular news sites don't do much better. Last year, Pew and the Colombia J-School analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on Google News' front page. And they, in fact, covered the same 24 news events. Similarly, a study in e-content showed that much of global news from U.S. news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters, and don't put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it.So, if you put it all together, this could help explain why today's college graduates, as well as less educated Americans, know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago. And if you think it's simply because we are not interested, you would be wrong. In recent years, Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50 percent.The real question: is this distorted worldview what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world? I know we can do better. And can we afford not to? Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/alisa_miller_shares_the_news_about_the_news
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"I write about food. I write about cooking. I take it quite seriously, but I'm here to talk about something that's become very important to me in the last year or two. It is about food, but it's not about cooking, per se. I'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow. I'm not a vegetarian — this is the old Nixon line, right? But I still think that this — (Laughter) — may be this year's version of this.Now, that is only a little bit hyperbolic. And why do I say it? Because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined. There was the bomb, and there's now. And where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives, but whether, if we could see the Earth a century from now, we'd recognize it. It's a holocaust of a different kind, and hiding under our desks isn't going to help. Start with the notion that global warming is not only real, but dangerous. Since every scientist in the world now believes this, and even President Bush has seen the light, or pretends to, we can take this is a given.Then hear this, please. After energy production, livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production — more than transportation. Now, you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts, but methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2, and it's not just methane. Livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation, air and water pollution, water shortages and loss of biodiversity. There's more. Like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people, but to animals. But lists like this become kind of numbing, so let me just say this: if you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green, or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian. Now, I'm no more anti-cattle than I am anti-atom, but it's all in the way we use these things. There's another piece of the puzzle, which Ann Cooper talked about beautifully yesterday, and one you already know.There's no question, none, that so-called lifestyle diseases — diabetes, heart disease, stroke, some cancers — are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world. And that's the direct result of eating a Western diet. Our demand for meat, dairy and refined carbohydrates — the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day — our demand for these things, not our need, our want, drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us. And those calories are in foods that cause, not prevent, disease. Now global warming was unforeseen. We didn't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility. Maybe a few lung diseases here and there, but, you know, that's not such a big deal. The current health crisis, however, is a little more the work of the evil empire. We were told, we were assured, that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate, the healthier we'd be.No. Overconsumption of animals, and of course, junk food, is the problem, along with our paltry consumption of plants. Now, there's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here, but the evidence is that plants — and I want to make this clear — it's not the ingredients in plants, it's the plants. It's not the beta-carotene, it's the carrot. The evidence is very clear that plants promote health. This evidence is overwhelming at this point. You eat more plants, you eat less other stuff, you live longer. Not bad. But back to animals and junk food. What do they have in common? One: we don't need either of them for health. We don't need animal products, and we certainly don't need white bread or Coke. Two: both have been marketed heavily, creating unnatural demand. We're not born craving Whoppers or Skittles. Three: their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and Earth-friendly diet.Now, let's imagine a parallel. Let's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy, while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy, knowing all the while that the result would be pollution, war and rising costs. Incredible, isn't it? Yet they do that. And they do this here. It's the same deal. The sad thing is, when it comes to diet, is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us, they fail. Either they're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness, or they are puppets of agribusiness. So, when the USDA finally acknowledged that it was plants, rather than animals, that made people healthy, they encouraged us, via their overly simplistic food pyramid, to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, along with more carbs. What they didn't tell us is that some carbs are better than others, and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food. But industry lobbyists would never let that happen. And guess what? Half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness. So, instead of substituting plants for animals, our swollen appetites simply became larger, and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged. So-called low-fat diets, so-called low-carb diets — these are not solutions.But with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local, or whether we're being nice to animals, the most important issues just aren't being addressed. Now, don't get me wrong. I like animals, and I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well, when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. That's our number. 10 billion. If you strung all of them — chickens, cows, pigs and lambs — to the moon, they'd go there and back five times, there and back. Now, my math's a little shaky, but this is pretty good, and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long, but you get the idea. That's just the United States. And with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease, kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of the animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left.Another red herring might be exemplified by the word ""locavore,"" which was just named word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Seriously. And locavore, for those of you who don't know, is someone who eats only locally grown food — which is fine if you live in California, but for the rest of us it's a bit of a sad joke. Between the official story — the food pyramid — and the hip locavore vision, you have two versions of how to improve our eating. (Laughter).They both get it wrong, though. The first at least is populist, and the second is elitist. How we got to this place is the history of food in the United States. And I'm going to go through that, at least the last hundred years or so, very quickly right now. A hundred years ago, guess what? Everyone was a locavore: even New York had pig farms nearby, and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion. Every family had a cook, usually a mom. And those moms bought and prepared food. It was like your romantic vision of Europe. Margarine didn't exist. In fact, when margarine was invented, several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink, so we'd all know that it was a fake. There was no snack food, and until the '20s, until Clarence Birdseye came along, there was no frozen food. There were no restaurant chains. There were neighborhood restaurants run by local people, but none of them would think to open another one. Eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic. And fancy food was entirely French. As an aside, those of you who remember Dan Aykroyd in the 1970s doing Julia Child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide. (Laughter)Back in those days, before even Julia, back in those days, there was no philosophy of food. You just ate. You didn't claim to be anything. There was no marketing. There were no national brands. Vitamins had not been invented. There were no health claims, at least not federally sanctioned ones. Fats, carbs, proteins — they weren't bad or good, they were food. You ate food. Hardly anything contained more than one ingredient, because it was an ingredient. The cornflake hadn't been invented. (Laughter) The Pop-Tart, the Pringle, Cheez Whiz, none of that stuff. Goldfish swam. (Laughter) It's hard to imagine. People grew food, and they ate food. And again, everyone ate local. In New York, an orange was a common Christmas present, because it came all the way from Florida. From the '30s on, road systems expanded, trucks took the place of railroads, fresh food began to travel more. Oranges became common in New York. The South and West became agricultural hubs, and in other parts of the country, suburbs took over farmland. The effects of this are well known. They are everywhere. And the death of family farms is part of this puzzle, as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato, even in summer. Eventually, California produced too much food to ship fresh, so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods. Thus arrived convenience. It was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework.Now, I know everybody over the age of, like 45 — their mouths are watering at this point. (Laughter) (Applause) If we had a slide of Salisbury steak, even more so, right? (Laughter) But this may have cut down on housework, but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well. Many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad. I, for one — and I'm not kidding — didn't eat real spinach or broccoli till I was 19. Who needed it though? Meat was everywhere. What could be easier, more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak? But by then cattle were already raised unnaturally. Rather than spending their lives eating grass, for which their stomachs were designed, they were forced to eat soy and corn. They have trouble digesting those grains, of course, but that wasn't a problem for producers. New drugs kept them healthy. Well, they kept them alive. Healthy was another story.Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we're only realizing just now. Listen to this, between 1950 and 2000, the world's population doubled. Meat consumption increased five-fold. Now, someone had to eat all that stuff, so we got fast food. And this took care of the situation resoundingly. Home cooking remained the norm, but its quality was down the tubes. There were fewer meals with home-cooked breads, desserts and soups, because all of them could be bought at any store. Not that they were any good, but they were there. Most moms cooked like mine: a piece of broiled meat, a quickly made salad with bottled dressing, canned soup, canned fruit salad. Maybe baked or mashed potatoes, or perhaps the stupidest food ever, Minute Rice. For dessert, store-bought ice cream or cookies. My mom is not here, so I can say this now. This kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself. (Laughter)It wasn't all bad. By the '70s, forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients. We tended gardens, we became interested in organic food, we knew or we were vegetarians. We weren't all hippies, either. Some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well. Meanwhile, food production had become industrial. Industrial. Perhaps because it was being produced rationally, as if it were plastic, food gained magical or poisonous powers, or both. Many people became fat-phobic. Others worshiped broccoli, as if it were God-like. But mostly they didn't eat broccoli. Instead they were sold on yogurt, yogurt being almost as good as broccoli. Except, in reality, the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream. Similarly, let's look at a granola bar. You think that that might be healthy food, but in fact, if you look at the ingredient list, it's closer in form to a Snickers than it is to oatmeal. Sadly, it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma, if not actually killed — the beginning of the heyday of value-added food, which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it.Think of the frozen chicken nugget. The chicken is fed corn, and then its meat is ground up, and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder, and then it's fried in corn oil. All you do is nuke it. What could be better? And zapped horribly, pathetically. By the '70s, home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like McNuggets and Hot Pockets — and we all have our favorites, actually — made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home. At the same time, masses of women were entering the workforce, and cooking simply wasn't important enough for men to share the burden. So now, you've got your pizza nights, you've got your microwave nights, you've got your grazing nights, you've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on.Leading the way — what's leading the way? Meat, junk food, cheese: the very stuff that will kill you. So, now we clamor for organic food. That's good. And as evidence that things can actually change, you can now find organic food in supermarkets, and even in fast-food outlets. But organic food isn't the answer either, at least not the way it's currently defined. Let me pose you a question. Can farm-raised salmon be organic, when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet, even if the feed itself is supposedly organic, and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens, swimming in their own filth? And if that salmon's from Chile, and it's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles, whatever, dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere? I don't know. Packed in Styrofoam, of course, before landing somewhere in the United States, and then being trucked a few hundred more miles. This may be organic in letter, but it's surely not organic in spirit. Now here is where we all meet. The locavores, the organivores, the vegetarians, the vegans, the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food. Even though we've come to this from different points, we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food.We need to start acting. And this is not only an issue of social justice, as Ann Cooper said — and, of course, she's completely right — but it's also one of global survival. Which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue, the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food. As I said, 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production. How much livestock do you need to produce this? 70 percent of the agricultural land on Earth, 30 percent of the Earth's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we'll eat. And this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so.And if the numbers coming in from China are anything like what they look like now, it's not going to be 40 years. There is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do. And I say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life. The most common argument is that we need nutrients — even though we eat, on average, twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed USDA recommends. But listen: experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week.What do you think we eat per day? Half a pound. But don't we need meat to be big and strong? Isn't meat eating essential to health? Won't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless, sissy, liberals? (Laughter) Some of us might think that would be a good thing. But, no, even if we were all steroid-filled football players, the answer is no. In fact, there's no diet on Earth that meets basic nutritional needs that won't promote growth, and many will make you much healthier than ours does. We don't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition, we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition, and it's killing us. To suggest that in the interests of personal and human health Americans eat 50 percent less meat — it's not enough of a cut, but it's a start.It would seem absurd, but that's exactly what should happen, and what progressive people, forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating, along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants. I've been writing about food more or less omnivorously — one might say indiscriminately — for about 30 years. During that time, I've eaten and recommended eating just about everything. I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly.Ann Cooper's right. The USDA is not our ally here. We have to take matters into our own hands, not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone — and that's the hard part — but by improving our own. And that happens to be quite easy. Less meat, less junk, more plants. It's a simple formula: eat food. Eat real food. We can continue to enjoy our food, and we continue to eat well, and we can eat even better. We can continue the search for the ingredients we love, and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals. We'll reduce not only calories, but our carbon footprint. We can make food more important, not less, and save ourselves by doing so. We have to choose that path. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat
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"The first question is this. Our country has two exploration programs. One is NASA, with a mission to explore the great beyond, to explore the heavens, which we all want to go to if we're lucky. And you can see we have Sputnik, and we have Saturn, and we have other manifestations of space exploration. Well, there's also another program, in another agency within our government, in ocean exploration. It's in NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And my question is this: ""why are we ignoring the oceans?"" Here's the reason, or not the reason, but here's why I ask that question. If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one-year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years. Why? Why are we looking up? Is it because it's heaven? And hell is down here? Is it a cultural issue? Why are people afraid of the ocean? Or do they just assume the ocean is just a dark, gloomy place that has nothing to offer?I'm going to take you on a 16-minute trip on 72 percent of the planet, so buckle up. OK. And what we're going to do is we're going to immerse ourselves in my world. And what I'm going to try — I hope I make the following points. I'm going to make it right now in case I forget. Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school. And most of all, it was not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and all my Earth science books when I was a student — I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap. In today's context, it was a bunch of crap, but it was the law of geology, vertical tectonics. All the things we're going to walk through in our explorations and discoveries of the oceans were mostly discoveries made by accident. Mostly discoveries made by accident. We were looking for something and found something else. And everything we're going to talk about represents a one tenth of one percent glimpse, because that's all we've seen.I have a characterization. This is a characterization of what it would look like if you could remove the water. It gives you the false impression it's a map. It is not a map. In fact, I have another version at my office and I ask people, ""Why are there mountains here, on this area here, but there are none over here?"" And they go, ""Well, gee, I don't know,"" saying, ""Is it a fracture zone? Is it a hot spot?"" No, no, that's the only place a ship's been. Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing. All right. So we're going to immerse ourselves in the 72 percent of the planet because, you know, it's really naive to think that the Easter Bunny put all the resources on the continents.(Laughter)You know, it's just ludicrous. We are always, constantly playing the zero sum game. You know, we're going to do this, we're going to take it away from something else. I believe in just enriching the economy. And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet. And as I will point out later in the presentation, 50 percent of the United States of America lies beneath the sea. 50 percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent. Why? OK. Now, I began my explorations the hard way. Back then — actually my first expedition was when I was 17 years old. It was 49 years ago. Do the math, I'm 66. And I went out to sea on a Scripps ship and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave, and I was too young to be — you know, I thought it was great! I was a body surfer and I thought, ""Wow, that was an incredible wave!"" And we almost sank the ship, but I became enraptured with mounting expeditions. And over the last 49 years, I've done about 120, 121 — I keep doing them — expeditions.But in the early days, the only way I could get to the bottom was to crawl into a submarine, a very small submarine, and go down to the bottom. I dove in a whole series of different deep diving submersibles. Alvin and Sea Cliff and Cyana, and all the major deep submersibles we have, which are about eight. In fact, on a good day, we might have four or five human beings at the average depth of the Earth — maybe four or five human beings out of whatever billions we've got going. And so it's very difficult to get there, if you do it physically. But I was enraptured, and in my graduate years was the dawn of plate tectonics. And we realized that the greatest mountain range on Earth lies beneath the sea.The mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam on a baseball. This is on a Mercator projection. But if you were to put it on an equal area projection, you'd see that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23 percent of the Earth's total surface area. Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet. And our interest in this mountain range, as Earth scientists in those days, was not only because of its tremendous size, dominating the planet, but the role it plays in the genesis of the Earth's outer skin. Because it's along the axis of the mid-ocean ridge where the great crustal plates are separating. And like a living organism, you tear it open, it bleeds its molten blood, rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere, hardens, forms new tissue and moves laterally.But no one had actually gone down into the actual site of the boundary of creation as we call it — into the Rift Valley — until a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973, 1974 and were the first human beings to enter the Great Rift Valley. We went down into the Rift Valley. This is all accurate except for one thing — it's pitch black. It's absolutely pitch black, because photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean, which is 12,000 feet. In the Rift Valley, it's 9,000 feet. Most of our planet does not feel the warmth of the sun. Most of our planet is in eternal darkness. And for that reason, you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea. And with the absence of photosynthesis you have no plant life, and as a result, you have very little animal life living in this underworld. Or so we thought. And so in our initial explorations, we were totally focused on exploring the boundary of creation, looking at the volcanic features running along that entire 42,000 miles. Running along this entire 42,000 miles are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. Tens of thousands of active volcanoes. There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude. So, it's a phenomenally active region, it's not just a dark, boring place. It's a very alive place. And it's then being ripped open.But we were dealing with a particular scientific issue back then. We couldn't understand why you had a mountain under tension. In plate tectonic theory, we knew that if you had plates collide, it made sense: they would crush into one another, you would thicken the crust, you'd uplift it. That's why you get, you know, you get seashells up on Mount Everest. It's not a flood, it was pushed up there. We understood mountains under compression, but we could not understand why we had a mountain under tension. It should not be. Until one of my colleagues said, ""It looks to me like a thermal blister, and the mid-ocean ridge must be a cooling curve."" We said, ""Let's go find out."" We punched a bunch of heat probes. Everything made sense, except, at the axis, there was missing heat. It was missing heat. It was hot. It wasn't hot enough. So, we came up with multiple hypotheses: there's little green people down there taking it; there's all sorts of things going on. But the only logical [explanation] was that there were hot springs. So, there must be underwater hot springs.We mounted an expedition to look for the missing heat. And so we went along this mountain range, in an area along Galapagos Rift, and did we find the missing heat. It was amazing. These giant chimneys, huge giant chimneys. We went up to them with our submersible. We wanted to get a temperature probe, we stuck it in there, looked at it — it pegged off scale. The pilot made this great observation: ""That's hot.""(Laughter)And then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff — it could have melted. But it turns out the exiting temperature was 650 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead. This is what a real one looks like, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. What you're looking at is an incredible pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean. Everything you see in this picture is commercial grade: copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold. So the Easter Bunny has put things in the ocean floor, and you have massive heavy metal deposits that we're making in this mountain range. We're making huge discoveries of large commercial-grade ore along this mountain range, but it was dwarfed by what we discovered. We discovered a profusion of life, in a world that it should not exist [in]. Giant tube worms, 10 feet tall. I remember having to use vodka — my own vodka — to pickle it because we don't carry formaldehyde. We went and found these incredible clam beds sitting on the barren rock. Large clams, and when we opened them, they didn't look like a clam. And when we cut them open, they didn't have the anatomy of a clam. No mouth, no gut, no digestive system. Their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism, a bacterium, that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark, through a process we now call chemosynthesis. None of it in our textbooks. None of this in our textbooks. We did not know about this life system. We were not predicting it. We stumbled on it, looking for some missing heat.So, we wanted to accelerate this process. We wanted to get away from this silly trip, up and down on a submarine: average depth of the ocean, 12,000 feet; two and half hours to get to work in the morning; two and half hours to get to home. Five hour commute to work. Three hours of bottom time, average distance traveled — one mile.(Laughter)On a 42,000 mile mountain range. Great job security, but not the way to go. So, I began designing a new technology of telepresence, using robotic systems to replicate myself, so I wouldn't have to cycle my vehicle system. We began to introduce that in our explorations, and we continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies. Again, looking for something else, moving from one part of the mid-ocean ridge to another. The scientists were off watch and they came across incredible life forms. They came across new creatures they had not seen before. But more importantly, they discovered edifices down there that they did not understand. That did not make sense. They were not above a magma chamber. They shouldn't be there. And we called it Lost City.And Lost City was characterized by these incredible limestone formations and upside down pools. Look at that. How do you do that? That's water upside down. We went in underneath and tapped it, and we found that it had the pH of Drano. The pH of 11, and yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria living in it and at this extreme environment. And the hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment. All the way at the other end, in an alkaline environment, at a pH of 11, life existed. So life was much more creative than we had ever thought. Again, discovered by accident. Just two years ago working off Santorini, where people are sunning themselves on the beach, unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby, we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and more life systems. This was two miles from where people go to sunbathe, and they were oblivious to the existence of this system. Again, you know, we stop at the water's edge.Recently, diving off — in the Gulf of Mexico, finding pools of water, this time not upside down, right side up. Bingo. You'd think you're in air, until a fish swims by. You're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs. Near that was methane. I've never seen volcanoes of methane. Instead of belching out lava, they were belching out big, big bubbles of methane. And they were creating these volcanoes, and there were flows, not of lava, but of the mud coming out of the Earth but driven by — I've never seen this before.Moving on, there's more than just natural history beneath the sea — human history. Our discoveries of the Titanic. The realization that the deep sea is the largest museum on Earth. It contains more history than all of the museums on land combined. And yet we're only now penetrating it. Finding the state of preservation. We found the Bismarck in 16,000 feet. We then found the Yorktown. People always ask, ""Did you find the right ship?"" It said Yorktown on the stern.(Laughter)More recently, finding ancient history. How many ancient mariners have had a bad day? The number's a million. We've been discovering these along ancient trade routes, where they're not supposed to be. This shipwreck sank 100 years before the birth of Christ. This one sank carrying a prefabricated, Home Depot Roman temple. And then here's one that sank at the time of Homer, at 750 B.C. More recently, into the Black Sea, where we're exploring. Because there's no oxygen there, it's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on Earth. Shipwrecks are perfectly preserved. All their organics are perfectly preserved. We begin to excavate them. We expect to start hauling out the bodies in perfect condition with their DNA. Look at the state of preservation — still the ad mark of a carpenter. Look at the state of those artifacts. You still see the beeswax dripping. When they dropped, they sealed it. This ship sank 1,500 years ago.Fortunately, we've been able to convince Congress. We begin to go on the Hill and lobby. And we stole recently a ship from the United States Navy. The Okeanos Explorer on its mission. Its mission is as good as you could get. Its mission is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth. And I was looking at it yesterday, it's up in Seattle. OK.(Applause)It comes online this summer, and it begins its journey of exploration. But we have no idea what we're going find when we go out there with our technology. But certainly, it's going to be going to the unknown America. This is that part of the United States that lies beneath the sea. We own all of that blue and yet, like I say, particularly the western territorial trust, we don't have maps of them. We don't have maps of them. We have maps of Venus, but not of the western territorial trust. The way we're going to run this — we have no idea what we're going to discover. We have no idea what we're going to discover. We're going to discover an ancient shipwreck, a Phoenician off Brazil, or a new rock formation, a new life. So, we're going to run it like an emergency hospital.We're going to connect our command center, via a high-bandwidth satellite link to a building we're building at the University of Rhode Island, called the Interspace Center. And within that, we're going to run it just like you run a nuclear submarine, blue-gold team, switching them off and on, running 24 hours a day. A discovery is made, that discovery is instantly seen in the command center a second later. But then it's connected through Internet too — the new Internet highway that makes Internet one look like a dirt road on the information highway — with 10 gigabits of bandwidth. We'll go into areas we have no knowledge of. It's a big blank sheet on our planet. We'll map it within hours, have the maps disseminated out to the major universities. It turns out that 90 percent of all the oceanographic intellect in this country are at 12 universities. They're all on I-2. We can then build a command center. This is a remote center at the University of Washington. She's talking to the pilot. She's 5,000 miles away, but she's assumed command.But the beauty of this, too, is we can then disseminate it to children. We can disseminate. They can follow this expedition. I've started a program — where are you Jim? Jim Young who helped me start a program called the Jason Project. More recently, we've started a program with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, so that we can use exploration, and the excitement of live exploration, to motivate them and excite them and then give them what they're already ready for. I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take over control of my vehicle system.(Applause)Because we want to create — we want to create the classroom of tomorrow. We have stiff competition and we need to motivate and it's all being done. You win or lose an engineer or a scientist by eighth grade. The game is not over — it's over by the eighth grade, it's not beginning. We need to be not only proud of our universities. We need to be proud of our middle schools. And when we have the best middle schools in the world, we'll have the best kids pumped out of that system, let me tell you. Because this is what we want. This is what we want. This is a young lady, not watching a football game, not watching a basketball game. Watching exploration live from thousands of miles away, and it's just dawning on her what she's seeing. And when you get a jaw drop, you can inform. You can put so much information into that mind, it's in full [receiving] mode.(Applause)This, I hope, will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battle for truth. And my final question, my final question — why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build habitation on Mars, and we have programs to look at colonizing the moon, but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet? And the technology is at hand.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_ballard_on_exploring_the_oceans
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"Being a child, and sort of crawling around the house, I remember these Turkish carpets, and there were these scenes, these battle scenes, these love scenes. I mean, look, this animal is trying to fight back this spear from this soldier. And my mom took these pictures actually, last week, of our carpets, and I remember this to this day. There was another object, this sort of towering piece of furniture with creatures and gargoyles and nudity — pretty scary stuff, when you're a little kid.What I remember today from this is that objects tell stories, so storytelling has been a really strong influence in my work. And then there was another influence. I was a teenager, and at 15 or 16, I guess like all teenagers, we want to just do what we love and what we believe in. And so, I fused together the two things I loved the most, which was skiing and windsurfing. Those are pretty good escapes from the drab weather in Switzerland.So, I created this compilation of the two: I took my skis and I took a board and I put a mast foot in there, and some foot straps, and some metal fins, and here I was, going really fast on frozen lakes. It was really a death trap. I mean, it was incredible, it worked incredibly well, but it was really dangerous. And I realized then I had to go to design school. (Laughter) I mean, look at those graphics there. (Laughter)So, I went to design school, and it was the early '90s when I finished. And I saw something extraordinary happening in Silicon Valley, so I wanted to be there, and I saw that the computer was coming into our homes, that it had to change in order to be with us in our homes. And so I got myself a job and I was working for a consultancy, and we would get in to these meetings, and these managers would come in, and they would say, ""Well, what we're going to do here is really important, you know."" And they would give the projects code names, you know, mostly from ""Star Wars,"" actually: things like C3PO, Yoda, Luke. So, in anticipation, I would be this young designer in the back of the room, and I would raise my hand, and I would ask questions. I mean, in retrospect, probably stupid questions, but things like, ""What's this Caps Lock key for?"" or ""What's this Num Lock key for?"" You know, that thing? ""You know, do people really use it? Do they need it? Do they want it in their homes?"" (Laughter)What I realized then is, they didn't really want to change the legacy stuff; they didn't want to change the insides. They were really looking for us, the designers, to create the skins, to put some pretty stuff outside of the box. And I didn't want to be a colorist. It wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be a stylist in this way. And then I saw this quote: ""advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal."" (Laughter)So, I had to start on my own. So I moved to San Francisco, and I started a little company, fuseproject. And what I wanted to work on is important stuff. And I wanted to really not just work on the skins, but I wanted to work on the entire human experience. And so the first projects were sort of humble, but they took technology and maybe made it into things that people would use in a new way, and maybe finding some new functionality.This is a watch we made for Mini Cooper, the car company, right when it launched, and it's the first watch that has a display that switches from horizontal to vertical. And that allows me to check my timer discretely, here, without bending my elbow. And other projects, which were really about transformation, about matching the human need. This is a little piece of furniture for an Italian manufacturer, and it ships completely flat, and then it folds into a coffee table and a stool and whatnot. And something a little bit more experimental: this is a light fixture for Swarovski, and what it does is, it changes shape. So, it goes from a circle, to a round, to a square, to a figure eight. And just by drawing on a little computer tablet, the entire light fixture adjusts to what shape you want.And then finally, the leaf lamp for Herman Miller. This is a pretty involved process; it took us about four and a half years. But I really was looking for creating a unique experience of light, a new experience of light. So, we had to design both the light and the light bulb. And that's a unique opportunity, I would say, in design. And the new experience I was looking for is giving the choice for the user to go from a warm, sort of glowing kind of mood light, all the way to a bright work light. So, the light bulb actually does that. It allows the person to switch, and to mix these two colorations. And it's done in a very simple way: one just touches the base of the light, and on one side, you can mix the brightness, and on the other, the coloration of the light.So, all of these projects have a humanistic sense to them, and I think as designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship between our work and the world, whether it's for business, or, as I'm going to show, on some civic-type projects. Because I think everybody agrees that as designers we bring value to business, value to the users also, but I think it's the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value. And the values we bring can be about environmental issues, about sustainability, about lower power consumption. You know, they can be about function and beauty; they can be about business strategy. But designers are really the glue that brings these things together.So Jawbone is a project that you're familiar with, and it has a humanistic technology. It feels your skin. It rests on your skin, and it knows when it is you're talking. And by knowing when it is you're talking, it gets rid of the other noises that it knows about, which is the environmental noises.But the other thing that is humanistic about Jawbone is that we really decided to take out all the techie stuff, and all the nerdy stuff out of it, and try to make it as beautiful as we can. I mean, think about it: the care we take in selecting sunglasses, or jewelry, or accessories is really important, so if it isn't beautiful, it really doesn't belong on your face. And this is what we're pursuing here.But how we work on Jawbone is really unique. I want to point at something here, on the left. This is the board, this is one of the things that goes inside that makes this technology work. But this is the design process: there's somebody changing the board, putting tracers on the board, changing the location of the ICs, as the designers on the other side are doing the work. So, it's not about slapping skins, anymore, on a technology. It's really about designing from the inside out. And then, on the other side of the room, the designers are making small adjustments, sketching, drawing by hand, putting it in the computer. And it's what I call being design driven. You know, there is some push and pull, but design is really helping define the whole experience from the inside out.And then, of course, design is never done. And this is — the other new way that is unique in how we work is, because it's never done, you have to do all this other stuff. The packaging, and the website, and you need to continue to really touch the user, in many ways. But how do you retain somebody, when it's never done? And Hosain Rahman, the CEO of Aliph Jawbone, you know, really understands that you need a different structure. So, in a way, the different structure is that we're partners, it's a partnership. We can continue to work and dedicate ourselves to this project, and then we also share in the rewards.And here's another project, another partnership-type approach. This is called Y Water, and it's this guy from Los Angeles, Thomas Arndt, Austrian originally, who came to us, and all he wanted to do was to create a healthy drink, or an organic drink for his kids, to replace the high-sugar-content sodas that he's trying to get them away from. So, we worked on this bottle, and it's completely symmetrical in every dimension. And this allows the bottle to turn into a game. The bottles connect together, and you can create different shapes, different forms. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)And then while we were doing this, the shape of the bottle upside down reminded us of a Y, and then we thought, well these words, ""why"" and ""why not,"" are probably the most important words that kids ask. So we called it Y Water. And so this is another place where it all comes together in the same room: the three-dimensional design, the ideas, the branding, it all becomes deeply connected. And then the other thing about this project is, we bring intellectual property, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff, but I think, at the end of the day, what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with. And it's especially rewarding when your design work becomes a creative endeavor, when others can be creative and do more with it.Here's another project, which I think really emulates that. This is the One Laptop per Child, the $100 laptop. This picture is incredible. In Nigeria, people carry their most precious belongings on their heads. This girl is going to school with a laptop on her head. I mean, to me, it just means so much. But when Nicholas Negroponte — and he has spoken about this project a lot, he's the founder of OLPC — came to us about two and a half years ago, there were some clear ideas. He wanted to bring education and he wanted to bring technology, and those are pillars of his life, but also pillars of the mission of One Laptop per Child. But the third pillar that he talked about was design. And at the time, I wasn't really working on computers. I didn't really want to, from the previous adventure. But what he said was really significant, is that design was going to be why the kids were going to love this product, how we were going to make it low cost, robust. And plus, he said he was going to get rid of the Caps Lock key — (Laughter) — and the Num Lock key, too.So, I was convinced. We designed it to be iconic, to look different. To look like it's for a kid, but not like a toy. And then the integration of all these great technologies, which you've heard about, the Wi-Fi antennas that allow the kids to connect; the screen, which you can read in sunlight; the keyboard, which is made out of rubber, and it's protected from the environment.You know, all these great technologies really happened because of the passion and the OLPC people and the engineers. They fought the suppliers, they fought the manufacturers. I mean, they fought like animals for this to remain they way it is. And in a way, it is that will that makes projects like this one — allows the process from not destroying the original idea. And I think this is something really important.So, now you get these pictures — you get up in the morning, and you see the kids in Nigeria and you see them in Uruguay with their computers, and in Mongolia. And we went away from obviously the beige. I mean it's colorful, it's fun. In fact, you can see each logo is a little bit different. It's because we were able to run, during the manufacturing process, 20 colors for the X and the O, which is the name of the computer, and by mixing them on the manufacturing floor, you get 20 times 20: you get 400 different options there. So, the lessons from seeing the kids using them in the developing world are incredible.But this is my nephew, Anthony, in Switzerland, and he had the laptop for an afternoon, and I had to take it back. It was hard. (Laughter) And it was a prototype. And a month and a half later, I come back to Switzerland, and there he is playing with his own version. (Laughter) Like paper, paper and cardboard.So, I'm going to finish with one last project, and this is a little bit more of adult play. (Laughter) Some of you might have heard about the New York City condom. It's actually just launched, actually launched on Valentine's Day, February 14, about 10 days ago. So, the Department of Health in New York came to us, and they needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free to the citizens of New York. So a pretty big endeavor, and we worked on the dispensers. These are the dispensers. There's this friendly shape. It's a little bit like designing a fire hydrant, and it has to be easily serviceable: you have to know where it is and what it does. And we also designed the condoms themselves.And I was just in New York at the launch, and I went to see all these places where they're installed: this is at a Puerto Rican little mom-and-pop store; at a bar in Christopher Street; at a pool hall. I mean, they're being installed in homeless clinics — everywhere. Of course, clubs and discos, too. And here's the public service announcement for this project. (Music) (Laughter) Get some. (Applause)So, this is really where design is able to create a conversation. I was in these venues, and people were, you know, really into getting them. They were excited. It was breaking the ice, it was getting over a stigma, and I think that's also what design can do. So, I was going to throw some condoms in the room and whatnot, but I'm not sure it's the etiquette here. (Laughter) Yeah? All right, all right. I have only a few. (Laughter) (Applause) So, I have more, you can always ask me for some more later. (Laughter) And if anybody asks why you're carrying a condom, you can just say you like the design. (Laughter)So, I'll finish with just one thought: if we all work together on creating value, but if we really keep in mind the values of the work that we do, I think we can change the work that we do. We can change these values, can change the companies we work with, and eventually, together, maybe we can change the world. So, thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yves_behar_on_designing_objects_that_tell_stories
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"A few words about how I got started, and it has a lot to do with happiness, actually. When I was a very young child, I was extremely introverted and very much to myself. And, kind of as a way of surviving, I would go into my own very personal space, and I would make things. I would make things for people as a way of, you know, giving, showing them my love. I would go into these private places, and I would put my ideas and my passions into objects — and sort of learning how to speak with my hands. So, the whole activity of working with my hands and creating objects is very much connected with not only the idea realm, but also with very much the feeling realm. And the ideas are very disparate.I'm going to show you many different kinds of pieces, and there's no real connection between one or the other, except that they sort of come out of my brain, and they're all different sort of thoughts that are triggered by looking at life, and seeing nature and seeing objects, and just having kind of playful random thoughts about things.When I was a child, I started to explore motion. I fell in love with the way things moved, so I started to explore motion by making little flipbooks. And this is one that I did, probably like when I was around seventh grade, and I remember when I was doing this, I was thinking about that little rock there, and the pathway of the vehicles as they would fly through the air, and how the characters —(Laughter) —would come shooting out of the car, so, on my mind, I was thinking about the trajectory of the vehicles. And of course, when you're a little kid, there's always destruction. So, it has to end with this —(Laughter) —gratuitous violence.(Laughter)So that was how I first started to explore the way things moved, and expressed it.Now, when I went to college, I found myself making fairly complicated, fragile machines. And this really came about from having many different kinds of interests. When I was in high school, I loved to program computers, so I sort of liked the logical flow of events. I was also very interested in perhaps going into surgery and becoming a surgeon, because it meant working with my hands in a very focused, intense way. So, I started taking art courses, and I found a way to make sculpture that brought together my love for being very precise with my hands, with coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system. And also, working with wire — everything that I did was both a visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time. So, I was able to sort of exercise all of that.Now, this kind of machine is as close as I can get to painting. And it's full of many little trivial end points, like there's a little foot here that just drags around in circles and it doesn't really mean anything. It's really just for the sort of joy of its own triviality. The connection I have with engineering is the same as any other engineer, in that I love to solve problems. I love to figure things out, but the end result of what I'm doing is really completely ambiguous.(Laughter)That's pretty ambiguous.(Laughter)The next piece that is going to come up is an example of a kind of machine that is fairly complex. I gave myself the problem. Since I'm always liking to solve problems, I gave myself the problem of turning a crank in one direction, and solving all of the mechanical problems for getting this little man to walk back and forth. So, when I started this, I didn't have an overall plan for the machine, but I did have a sense of the gesture, and a sense of the shape and how it would occupy space. And then it was a matter of starting from one point and sort of building to that final point. That little gear there switches back and forth to change direction. And that's a little found object.So a lot of the pieces that I've made, they involve found objects. And it really — it's almost like doing visual puns all the time. When I see objects, I imagine them in motion. I imagine what can be said with them.This next one here, ""Machine with Wishbone,"" it came about from playing with this wishbone after dinner. You know, they say, never play with your food — but I always play with things. So, I had this wishbone, and I thought, it's kind of like a cowboy who's been on his horse for too long.(Laughter)And I started to make him walk across the table, and I thought, ""Oh, I can make a little machine that will do that."" So, I made this device, linked it up, and the wishbone walks. And because the wishbone is bone — it's animal — it's sort of a point where I think we can enter into it. And that's the whole piece.(Laughter)That's about that big.(Applause)This kind of work is also very much like puppetry, where the found object is, in a sense, the puppet, and I'm the puppeteer at first, because I'm playing with an object. But then I make the machine, which is sort of the stand-in for me, and it is able to achieve the action that I want.The next piece I'll show you is a much more conceptual thought, and it's a little piece called ""Cory's Yellow Chair."" I had this image in my mind, when I saw my son's little chair, and I saw it explode up and out. And — so the way I saw this in my mind at first, was that the pieces would explode up and out with infinite speed, and the pieces would move far out, and then they would begin to be pulled back with a kind of a gravitational feel, to the point where they would approach infinite speed back to the center. And they would coalesce for just a moment, so you could perceive that there was a chair there. For me, it's kind of a feeling about the fleetingness of the present moment, and I wanted to express that. Now, the machine is — in this case, it's a real approximation of that, because obviously you can't move physical matter infinitely with infinite speed and have it stop instantaneously. This whole thing is about four feet wide, and the chair itself is only about a few inches.(Applause)Now, this is a funny sort of conceptual thing, and yesterday we were talking about Danny Hillis' ""10,000 Year Clock."" So, we have a motor here on the left, and it goes through a gear train. There are 12 pairs of 50:1 reductions, so that means that the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take two trillion years to turn once. So I've invented it in concrete, because it doesn't really matter.(Laughter)Because it could run all the time.(Laughter)Now, a completely different thought. I'm always imagining myself in different situations. I'm imagining myself as a machine. What would I love? I would love to be bathed in oil.(Laughter)So, this machine does nothing but just bathe itself in oil.(Laughter)(Applause)And it's really, just sort of — for me, it was just really about the lusciousness of oil.(Laughter)And then, I got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art, and I didn't have any pieces. But when she suggested to be in the show, this piece came to mind. So, it's sort of related, but you can see it's much more overtly erotic. And this one I call ""Machine with Grease."" It's just continually ejaculating, and it's —(Laughter) —this is a happy machine, I'll tell you.(Laughter)It's definitely happy.From an engineering point of view, this is just a little four-bar linkage. And then again, this is a found object, a little fan that I found. And I thought, what about the gesture of opening the fan, and how simply could I state something. And, in a case like this, I'm trying to make something which is clear but also not suggestive of any particular kind of animal or plant.For me, the process is very important, because I'm inventing machines, but I'm also inventing tools to make machines, and the whole thing is all sort of wrapped up from the beginning. So this is a little wire-bending tool. After many years of bending gears with a pair of pliers, I made that tool, and then I made this other tool for sort of centering gears very quickly — sort of developing my own little world of technology. My life completely changed when I found a spot welder.(Laughter)And that was that tool. It completely changed what I could do. Now here, I'm going to do a very poor job of silver soldering. This is not the way they teach you to silver solder when you're in school. I just like, throw it in. I mean, real jewelers put little bits of solder in. So, that's a finished gear.When I moved to Boston, I joined a group called the World Sculpture Racing Society.(Laughter)And the idea, their premise was that we wanted to show pieces of sculpture on the street, and there'd be no subjective decision about what was the best. It would be — whatever came across the finish line first would be the winner.(Laughter)So I made — this is my first racing sculpture, and I thought, ""Oh, I'm going to make a cart, and I'm going to have it — I'm going to have my hand writing 'faster,' so as I run down the street, the cart's going to talk to me and it's going to go, 'Faster, faster!' "" So, that's what it does.(Laughter)But then in the end, what I decided was every time you finish writing the word, I would stop and I would give the card to somebody on the side of the road. So I would never win the race because I'm always stopping. But I had a lot of fun.(Applause)Now, I only have two and a half minutes — I'm going to play this. This is a piece that, for me, is in some ways the most complete kind of piece. Because when I was a kid, I also played a lot of guitar. And when I had this thought, I was imagining that I would make — I would have a whole machine theater evening, where I would — you would have an audience, the curtain would open, and you'd be entertained by machines on stage. So, I imagined a very simple gestural dance that would be between a machine and just a very simple chair, and ... When I'm making these pieces, I'm always trying to find a point where I'm saying something very clearly and it's very simple, but also at the same time it's very ambiguous. And I think there's a point between simplicity and ambiguity which can allow a viewer to perhaps take something from it.And that leads me to the thought that all of these pieces start off in my own mind, in my heart, and I do my best at finding ways to express them with materials, and it always feels really crude. It's always a struggle, but somehow I manage to sort of get this thought out into an object, and then it's there, OK. It means nothing at all. The object itself just means nothing. Once it's perceived, and someone brings it into their own mind, then there's a cycle that has been completed. And to me, that's the most important thing because, ever since being a kid, I've wanted to communicate my passion and love. And that means the complete cycle of coming from inside, out to the physical, to someone perceiving it. So I'll just let this chair come down.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_ganson_makes_moving_sculpture
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"Just to put everything in context, and to kind of give you a background to where I'm coming from, so that a lot of the things I'm going to say, and the things I'm going to do — or things I'm going to tell you I've done — you will understand exactly why and how I got motivated to be where I am. I graduated high school in Cleveland, Ohio, 1975. And just like my parents did when they finished studying abroad, we went back home. Finished university education, got a medical degree, 1986. And by the time I was an intern house officer, I could barely afford to maintain my mother's 13-year-old car — and I was a paid doctor. This brings us to why a lot of us, who are professionals, are now, as they say, in diaspora. Now, are we going to make that a permanent thing, where we all get trained, and we leave, and we don't go back? Perhaps not, I should certainly hope not — because that is not my vision.All right, for good measure, that's where Nigeria is on the African map, and just there is the Delta region that I'm sure everybody's heard of. People getting kidnapped, where the oil comes from, the oil that sometimes I think has driven us all crazy in Nigeria. But, critical poverty: this slide is from a presentation I gave not that long ago. Gapminder.org tells the story of the gap between Africa and the rest of the world in terms of health care. Very interesting.How many people do you think are on that taxi? And believe it or not, that is a taxi in Nigeria. And the capital — well, what used to be the capital of Nigeria — Lagos, that's a taxi, and you have police on them. So, tell me, how many policemen do you think are on this taxi? And now? Three. So, when these kind of people — and, believe me, it's not just the police that use these taxis in Lagos. We all do. I've been on one of these, and I didn't have a helmet, either. And it just reminds me of the thought of what happens when one of us on a taxi like this falls off, has an accident and needs a hospital.Believe it or not, some of us do survive. Some of us do survive malaria; we do survive AIDS. And like I tell my family, and my wife reminds me every time, ""You're risking your life, you know, every time you go to that country."" And she's right. Every time you go there, you know that if you actually need critical care — critical care of any sort — if you have an accident — of which there are many, there are accidents everywhere — where do they go? Where do they go when they need help for this kind of stuff? I'm not saying instead of, I'm saying as well as, AIDS, TB, malaria, typhoid — the list goes on. I'm saying, where do they go when they're like me? When I go back home — and I do all kinds of things, I teach, I train — but I catch one of these things, or I'm chronically ill with one of those, where do they go? What's the economic impact when one of them dies or becomes disabled?I think it's quite significant. This is where they go. These are not old pictures and these are not from some downtrodden — this is a major hospital. In fact, it's from a major teaching hospital in Nigeria. Now that is less than a year old, in an operating room. That's sterilizing equipment in Nigeria. You remember all that oil? Yes, I'm sorry if it upsets some of you, but I think you need to see this. That's the floor, OK? You can say some of this is education. You can say it's hygiene. I'm not pleading poverty. I'm saying we need more than just, you know, vaccination, malaria, AIDS, because I want to be treated in a proper hospital if something happens to me out there. In fact, when I start running around saying, ""Hey, boys and girls, you're cardiologists in the U.S., can you come home with me and do a mission?"" I want them to think, ""Well there's some hope.""Now, have a look at that. That's the anesthesiology machine. And that's my specialty, right? Anesthesiology and critical care — look at that bag. It's been taped with tape that we even stopped using in the U.K. And believe me, these are current pictures. Now, if something like this, which has happened in the U.K., that's where they go. This is the intensive care unit in which I work.All right, this is a slide from a talk I gave about intensive care units in Nigeria, and jokingly we refer to it as ""Expensive Scare."" Because it's scary and it's expensive, but we need to have it, OK? So, these are the problems. There are no prizes for telling us what the problems are, are there? I think we all know. And several speakers before and speakers after me are going to tell us even more problems. These are a few of them. So, what did I do?There we go — we're going on a mission. We're going to do some open-heart surgery. I was the only Brit, on a team of about nine American cardiac surgeons, cardiac nurse, intensive care nurse. We all went out and did a mission and we've done three of them so far. Just so you know, I do believe in missions, I do believe in aid and I do believe in charity. They have their place, but where do they go for those things we talked about earlier? Because it's not everyone that's going to benefit from a mission. Health is wealth, in the words of Hans Rosling. You get wealthier faster if you are healthy first.So, here we are, mission. Big trouble. Open-heart surgery in Nigeria — big trouble. That's Mike, Mike comes out from Mississippi. Does he look like he's happy? It took us two days just to organize the place, but hey, you know, we worked on it. Does he look happy? Yes, that's the medical advice the committee chairman says, ""Yes, I told you, you weren't going to be able to, you can't do this, I just know it."" Look, that's the technician we had. So yes, you go on, all right?(Laughter)I got him to come with me — anesthesia tech — come with me from the U.K. Yes, let's just go work this thing out. See, that's one of the problems we have in Nigeria and in Africa generally. We get a lot of donated equipment. Equipment that's obsolete, equipment that doesn't quite work, or it works and you can't fix it. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as we use it and we move on.But we had problems with it. We had severe problems there. He had to get on the phone. This guy was always on the phone. So what we going to do now? It looks like all these Americans are here and yes, one Brit, and he's not going to do anything — he thinks he's British actually, and he's actually Nigerian, I just thought about that. We eventually got it working, is the truth, but it was one of these. Even older than the one you saw.The reason I have this picture here, this X-ray, it's just to tell you where and how we were viewing X-rays. Do you figure where that is? It was on a window. I mean, what's an X-ray viewing box? Please. Well, nowadays everything's on PAX anyway. You look at your X-rays on a screen and you do stuff with them, you email them. But we were still using X-rays, but we didn't even have a viewing box! And we were doing open-heart surgery.OK, I know it's not AIDS, I know it's not malaria, but we still need this stuff. Oh yeah, echo — this was just to get the children ready and the adults ready. People still believe in Voodoo. Heart disease, VSD, hole in the heart, tetralogies. You still get people who believe in it and they came. At 67 percent oxygen saturation, the normal is about 97. Her condition, open-heart surgery that as she required, would have been treated when she was a child. We had to do these for adults. So, we did succeed and we still do. We've done three. We're planning another one in July in the north of the country. So, we certainly still do open-heart, but you can see the contrast between everything that was shipped in — we ship everything, instruments. We had explosions because the kit was designed and installed by people who weren't used to it. The oxygen tanks didn't quite work right.But how many did we do the first one? 12. We did 12 open-heart surgical patients successfully. Here is our very first patient, out of intensive care, and just watch that chair, all right? This is what I mean about appropriate technology. That's what he was doing, propping up the bed because the bed simply didn't work. Have you seen one of those before? No? Yes? Doesn't matter, it worked. I'm sure you've all seen or heard this before: ""We, the willing, have been doing so much with so little for so long —(Applause) — we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.""(Applause)Thank you. Sustainable Solutions — this was my first company. This one's sole aim is to provide the very things that I think are missing. So, we put my hand in my pocket and say, ""Guys, let's just buy stuff. Let's go set up a company that teaches people, educates them, gives them the tools they need to keep going.""And that's a perfect example of one. Usually when you buy a ventilator in a hospital, you buy a different one for children, you buy a different one for transport. This one will do everything, and it will do it at half the price and doesn't need compressed air. If you're in America and you don't know about this one, we do, because we make it our duty to find out what's appropriate technology for Africa — what's appropriately priced, does the job, and we move on. Anesthesia machine: multi-parameter monitor, operating lights, suction. This little unit here — remember your little 12-volt plug in the car, that charges your, whatever, Game Boy, telephone? That's exactly how the outlets are designed. Yes, it will take a solar panel. Yes a solar panel will charge it. But if you've got mains as well, it will charge the batteries in there. And guess what? We have a little pedal charger too, just in case. And guess what, if it all fails, if you can find a car that's still got a live battery and you stick it in, it will still work. Then you can customize it. Is it dental surgery you want? General surgery you want? Decide which instruments, stock it up with consumables.And currently we're working on oxygen — oxygen delivery on-site. The technology for oxygen delivery is not new. Oxygen concentrators are very old technology. What is new, and what we will have in a few months, I hope, is that ability to use this same renewable energy system to provide and produce oxygen on site. Zeolite — it's not new — zeolite removes nitrogen from air and nitrogen is 78 percent of air. If you take nitrogen out, what's left? Oxygen, pretty much. So that's not new. What we're doing is applying this technology to it.These are the basic features of my device, or our device. This is what makes it so special. Apart from the awards it's won, it's portable and it's certified. It's registered, the MHRA — and the CE mark, for those who don't know, for Europe, is the equivalent of the FDA in the U.S. If you compare it with what's on the market, price-wise, size-wise, ease of use, complexity ...This picture was taken last year. These are members of my graduating class, 1986. It was in this gentleman's house in the Potomac, for those of you who are familiar with Maryland. There are too many of us outside and everybody, just to borrow a bit from Hans — Hans Rosling, he's my guy — if the size of the text represents what gets the most attention, it's the problems. But what we really need are African solutions that are appropriate for Africa — looking at the culture, looking at the people, looking at how much money they've got. African people, because they will do it with a passion, I hope. And lots and lots of that little bit down there, sacrifice. You have to do it. Africans have to do it, in conjunction with everyone else.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dr_seyi_oyesola_tours_a_hospital_in_nigeria
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"So, can we dare to be optimistic? Well, the thesis of ""The Bottom Billion"" is that a billion people have been stuck living in economies that have been stagnant for 40 years, and hence diverging from the rest of mankind. And so, the real question to pose is not, ""Can we be optimistic?"" It's, ""How can we give credible hope to that billion people?"" That, to my mind, is the fundamental challenge now of development.What I'm going to offer you is a recipe, a combination of the two forces that changed the world for good, which is the alliance of compassion and enlightened self-interest. Compassion, because a billion people are living in societies that have not offered credible hope. That is a human tragedy. Enlightened self-interest, because if that economic divergence continues for another 40 years, combined with social integration globally, it will build a nightmare for our children. We need compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get ourselves serious. That's the alliance that changes the world.So, what does it mean to get serious about providing hope for the bottom billion? What can we actually do? Well, a good guide is to think, ""What did we do last time the rich world got serious about developing another region of the world?"" That gives us, it turns out, quite a good clue, except you have to go back quite a long time. The last time the rich world got serious about developing another region was in the late 1940s. The rich world was you, America, and the region that needed to be developed was my world, Europe. That was post-War Europe.Why did America get serious? It wasn't just compassion for Europe, though there was that. It was that you knew you had to, because, in the late 1940s, country after country in Central Europe was falling into the Soviet bloc, and so you knew you'd no choice. Europe had to be dragged into economic development.So, what did you do, last time you got serious? Well, yes, you had a big aid program. Thank you very much. That was Marshall aid: we need to do it again. Aid is part of the solution. But what else did you do? Well, you tore up your trade policy, and totally reversed it. Before the war, America had been highly protectionist. After the war, you opened your markets to Europe, you dragged Europe into the then-global economy, which was your economy, and you institutionalized that trade liberalization through founding the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. So, total reversal of trade policy.Did you do anything else? Yes, you totally reversed your security policy. Before the war, your security policy had been isolationist. After the war, you tear that up, you put 100,000 troops in Europe for over 40 years. So, total reversal of security policy. Anything else? Yes, you tear up the ""Eleventh Commandment"" — national sovereignty. Before the war, you treated national sovereignty as so sacrosanct that you weren't even willing to join the League of Nations. After the war, you found the United Nations, you found the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, you found the IMF, you encouraged Europe to create the European Community — all systems for mutual government support. That is still the waterfront of effective policies: aid, trade, security, governments. Of course, the details of policy are going to be different, because the challenge is different. It's not rebuilding Europe, it's reversing the divergence for the bottom billion, so that they actually catch up. Is that easier or harder? We need to be at least as serious as we were then.Now, today I'm going to take just one of those four. I'm going to take the one that sounds the weakest, the one that's just motherhood and apple pie — governments, mutual systems of support for governments — and I'm going to show you one idea in how we could do something to strengthen governance, and I'm going to show you that that is enormously important now. The opportunity we're going to look to is a genuine basis for optimism about the bottom billion, and that is the commodity booms. The commodity booms are pumping unprecedented amounts of money into many, though not all, of the countries of the bottom billion. Partly, they're pumping money in because commodity prices are high, but it's not just that. There's also a range of new discoveries. Uganda has just discovered oil, in about the most disastrous location on Earth; Ghana has discovered oil; Guinea has got a huge new exploitation of iron ore coming out of the ground. So, a mass of new discoveries. Between them, these new revenue flows dwarf aid. Just to give you one example: Angola alone is getting 50 billion dollars a year in oil revenue. The entire aid flows to the 60 countries of the bottom billion last year were 34 billion. So, the flow of resources from the commodity booms to the bottom billion are without precedent. So there's the optimism.The question is, how is it going to help their development? It's a huge opportunity for transformational development. Will it be taken? So, here comes a bit of science, and this is a bit of science I've done since ""The Bottom Billion,"" so it's new. I've looked to see what is the relationship between higher commodity prices of exports, and the growth of commodity-exporting countries. And I've looked globally, I've taken all the countries in the world for the last 40 years, and looked to see what the relationship is. And the short run — say, the first five to seven years — is just great. In fact, it's hunky dory: everything goes up. You get more money because your terms of trade have improved, but also that drives up output across the board. So GDP goes up a lot — fantastic! That's the short run. And how about the long run? Come back 15 years later. Well, the short run, it's hunky dory, but the long run, it's humpty dumpty. You go up in the short run, but then most societies historically have ended up worse than if they'd had no booms at all. That is not a forecast about how commodity prices go; it's a forecast of the consequences, the long-term consequences, for growth of an increase in prices.So, what goes wrong? Why is there this ""resource curse,"" as it's called? And again, I've looked at that, and it turns out that the critical issue is the level of governance, the initial level of economic governance, when the resource booms accrue. In fact, if you've got good enough governance, there is no resource boom. You go up in the short term, and then you go up even more in the long term. That's Norway, the richest country in Europe. It's Australia. It's Canada. The resource curse is entirely confined to countries below a threshold of governance. They still go up in the short run. That's what we're seeing across the bottom billion at the moment. The best growth rates they've had — ever. And the question is whether the short run will persist. And with bad governance historically, over the last 40 years, it hasn't. It's countries like Nigeria, which are worse off than if they'd never had oil.So, there's a threshold level above which you go up in the long term, and below which you go down. Just to benchmark that threshold, it's about the governance level of Portugal in the mid 1980s. So, the question is, are the bottom billion above or below that threshold? Now, there's one big change since the commodity booms of the 1970s, and that is the spread of democracy. So I thought, well, maybe that is the thing which has transformed governance in the bottom billion. Maybe we can be more optimistic because of the spread of democracy. So, I looked. Democracy does have significant effects — and unfortunately, they're adverse. Democracies make even more of a mess of these resource booms than autocracies.At that stage I just wanted to abandon the research, but — (Laughter) — it turns out that democracy is a little bit more complicated than that. Because there are two distinct aspects of democracy: there's electoral competition, which determines how you acquire power, and there are checks and balances, which determine how you use power. It turns out that electoral competition is the thing that's doing the damage with democracy, whereas strong checks and balances make resource booms good. And so, what the countries of the bottom billion need is very strong checks and balances. They haven't got them. They got instant democracy in the 1990s: elections without checks and balances.How can we help improve governance and introduce checks and balances? In all the societies of the bottom billion, there are intense struggles to do just that. The simple proposal is that we should have some international standards, which will be voluntary, but which would spell out the key decision points that need to be taken in order to harness these resource revenues. We know these international standards work because we've already got one. It's called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. That is the very simple idea that governments should report to their citizens what revenues they have. No sooner was it proposed than reformers in Nigeria adopted it, pushed it and published the revenues in the paper. Nigerian newspapers circulations spiked. People wanted to know what their government was getting in terms of revenue.So, we know it works. What would the content be of these international standards? I can't go through all of them, but I'll give you an example. The first is how to take the resources out of the ground — the economic processes, taking the resources out of the ground and putting assets on top of the ground. And the first step in that is selling the rights to resource extraction. You know how rights to resource extraction are being sold at the moment, how they've been sold over the last 40 years? A company flies in, does a deal with a minister. And that's great for the company, and it's quite often great for the minister — (Laughter) — and it's not great for their country. There's a very simple institutional technology which can transform that, and it's called verified auctions. The public agency with the greatest expertise on Earth is of course the treasury — that is, the British Treasury. And the British Treasury decided that it would sell the rights to third-generation mobile phones by working out what those rights were worth. They worked out they were worth two billion pounds. Just in time, a set of economists got there and said, ""Why not try an auction? It'll reveal the value."" It went for 20 billion pounds through auction. If the British Treasury can be out by a factor of 10, think what the ministry of finance in Sierra Leone is going to be like. (Laughter) When I put that to the President of Sierra Leone, the next day he asked the World Bank to send him a team to give expertise on how to conduct auctions.There are five such decision points; each one needs an international standard. If we could do it, we would change the world. We would be helping the reformers in these societies, who are struggling for change. That's our modest role. We cannot change these societies, but we can help the people in these societies who are struggling and usually failing, because the odds are so stacked against them. And yet, we've not got these rules. If you think about it, the cost of promulgating international rules is zilch — nothing. Why on Earth are they not there? I realized that the reason they're not there is that until we have a critical mass of informed citizens in our own societies, politicians will get away with gestures. That unless we have an informed society, what politicians do, especially in relation to Africa, is gestures: things that look good, but don't work. And so I realized we had to go through the business of building an informed citizenry.That's why I broke all the professional rules of conduct for an economist, and I wrote an economics book that you could read on a beach. (Laughter). However, I have to say, the process of communication does not come naturally to me. This is why I'm on this stage, but it's alarming. I grew up in a culture of self-effacement. My wife showed me a blog comment on one of my last talks, and the blog comment said, ""Collier is not charismatic — (Laughter) — but his arguments are compelling."" (Laughter) (Applause) If you agree with that sentiment, and if you agree that we need a critical mass of informed citizenry, you will realize that I need you. Please, become ambassadors. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_collier_shares_4_ways_to_help_the_bottom_billion
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"Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for any species to let loose on its planet. By the time you realize what's happening, the child is a toddler, up and causing havoc, and it's too late to put it back. We humans are Earth's Pandoran species. We're the ones who let the second replicator out of its box, and we can't push it back in. We're seeing the consequences all around us.Now that, I suggest, is the view that comes out of taking memetics seriously. And it gives us a new way of thinking about not only what's going on on our planet, but what might be going on elsewhere in the cosmos. So first of all, I'd like to say something about memetics and the theory of memes, and secondly, how this might answer questions about who's out there, if indeed anyone is.So, memetics: memetics is founded on the principle of Universal Darwinism. Darwin had this amazing idea. Indeed, some people say it's the best idea anybody ever had. Isn't that a wonderful thought, that there could be such a thing as a best idea anybody ever had? Do you think there could? Audience: No. (Laughter) Susan Blackmore: Someone says no, very loudly, from over there. Well, I say yes, and if there is, I give the prize to Darwin.Why? Because the idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. I would say not just biological design, but all of the design that we think of as human design. It's all just the same thing happening. What did Darwin say? I know you know the idea, natural selection, but let me just paraphrase ""The Origin of Species,"" 1859, in a few sentences.What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and that can't be doubted — I've been to the Galapagos, and I've measured the size of the beaks and the size of the turtle shells and so on, and so on. And 100 pages later. (Laughter) And if there is a struggle for life, such that nearly all of these creatures die — and this can't be doubted, I've read Malthus and I've calculated how long it would take for elephants to cover the whole world if they bred unrestricted, and so on and so on. And another 100 pages later. And if the very few that survive pass onto their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all this happened than their parents were.You see the idea? If, if, if, then. He had no concept of the idea of an algorithm, but that's what he described in that book, and this is what we now know as the evolutionary algorithm. The principle is you just need those three things — variation, selection and heredity. And as Dan Dennett puts it, if you have those, then you must get evolution. Or design out of chaos, without the aid of mind.There's one word I love on that slide. What do you think my favorite word is? Audience: Chaos. SB: Chaos? No. What? Mind? No. Audience: Without. SB: No, not without. (Laughter) You try them all in order: Mmm...? Audience: Must. SB: Must, at must. Must, must. This is what makes it so amazing. You don't need a designer, or a plan, or foresight, or anything else. If there's something that is copied with variation and it's selected, then you must get design appearing out of nowhere. You can't stop it. Must is my favorite word there.Now, what's this to do with memes? Well, the principle here applies to anything that is copied with variation and selection. We're so used to thinking in terms of biology, we think about genes this way. Darwin didn't, of course; he didn't know about genes. He talked mostly about animals and plants, but also about languages evolving and becoming extinct. But the principle of Universal Darwinism is that any information that is varied and selected will produce design.And this is what Richard Dawkins was on about in his 1976 bestseller, ""The Selfish Gene."" The information that is copied, he called the replicator. It selfishly copies. Not meaning it kind of sits around inside cells going, ""I want to get copied."" But that it will get copied if it can, regardless of the consequences. It doesn't care about the consequences because it can't, because it's just information being copied. And he wanted to get away from everybody thinking all the time about genes, and so he said, ""Is there another replicator out there on the planet?"" Ah, yes, there is.Look around you — here will do, in this room. All around us, still clumsily drifting about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator. Information that we copy from person to person, by imitation, by language, by talking, by telling stories, by wearing clothes, by doing things. This is information copied with variation and selection. This is design process going on. He wanted a name for the new replicator. So, he took the Greek word ""mimeme,"" which means that which is imitated. Remember that, that's the core definition: that which is imitated. And abbreviated it to meme, just because it sounds good and made a good meme, an effective spreading meme. So that's how the idea came about. It's important to stick with that definition.The whole science of memetics is much maligned, much misunderstood, much feared. But a lot of these problems can be avoided by remembering the definition. A meme is not equivalent to an idea. It's not an idea. It's not equivalent to anything else, really. Stick with the definition. It's that which is imitated, or information which is copied from person to person. So, let's see some memes.Well, you sir, you've got those glasses hung around your neck in that particularly fetching way. I wonder whether you invented that idea for yourself, or copied it from someone else? If you copied it from someone else, it's a meme. And what about, oh, I can't see any interesting memes here. All right everyone, who's got some interesting memes for me? Oh, well, your earrings, I don't suppose you invented the idea of earrings. You probably went out and bought them. There are plenty more in the shops. That's something that's passed on from person to person. All the stories that we're telling — well, of course, TED is a great meme-fest, masses of memes.The way to think about memes, though, is to think, why do they spread? They're selfish information, they will get copied, if they can. But some of them will be copied because they're good, or true, or useful, or beautiful. Some of them will be copied even though they're not. Some, it's quite hard to tell why.There's one particular curious meme which I rather enjoy. And I'm glad to say, as I expected, I found it when I came here, and I'm sure all of you found it, too. You go to your nice, posh, international hotel somewhere, and you come in and you put down your clothes and you go to the bathroom, and what do you see? Audience: Bathroom soap. SB: Pardon? Audience: Soap. SB: Soap, yeah. What else do you see? Audience: (Inaudible) SB: Mmm mmm. Audience: Sink, toilet! SB: Sink, toilet, yes, these are all memes, they're all memes, but they're sort of useful ones, and then there's this one. (Laughter) What is this one doing? (Laughter) This has spread all over the world. It's not surprising that you all found it when you arrived in your bathrooms here. But I took this photograph in a toilet at the back of a tent in the eco-camp in the jungle in Assam. (Laughter) Who folded that thing up there, and why? (Laughter) Some people get carried away. (Laughter) Other people are just lazy and make mistakes. Some hotels exploit the opportunity to put even more memes with a little sticker. (Laughter) What is this all about? I suppose it's there to tell you that somebody's cleaned the place, and it's all lovely. And you know, actually, all it tells you is that another person has potentially spread germs from place to place. (Laughter)So, think of it this way. Imagine a world full of brains and far more memes than can possibly find homes. The memes are all trying to get copied — trying, in inverted commas — i.e., that's the shorthand for, if they can get copied, they will. They're using you and me as their propagating, copying machinery, and we are the meme machines.Now, why is this important? Why is this useful, or what does it tell us? It gives us a completely new view of human origins and what it means to be human, all conventional theories of cultural evolution, of the origin of humans, and what makes us so different from other species. All other theories explaining the big brain, and language, and tool use and all these things that make us unique, are based upon genes. Language must have been useful for the genes. Tool use must have enhanced our survival, mating and so on. It always comes back, as Richard Dawkins complained all that long time ago, it always comes back to genes.The point of memetics is to say, ""Oh no, it doesn't."" There are two replicators now on this planet. From the moment that our ancestors, perhaps two and a half million years ago or so, began imitating, there was a new copying process. Copying with variation and selection. A new replicator was let loose, and it could never be — right from the start — it could never be that human beings who let loose this new creature, could just copy the useful, beautiful, true things, and not copy the other things. While their brains were having an advantage from being able to copy — lighting fires, keeping fires going, new techniques of hunting, these kinds of things — inevitably they were also copying putting feathers in their hair, or wearing strange clothes, or painting their faces, or whatever.So, you get an arms race between the genes which are trying to get the humans to have small economical brains and not waste their time copying all this stuff, and the memes themselves, like the sounds that people made and copied — in other words, what turned out to be language — competing to get the brains to get bigger and bigger. So, the big brain, on this theory, is driven by the memes.This is why, in ""The Meme Machine,"" I called it memetic drive. As the memes evolve, as they inevitably must, they drive a bigger brain that is better at copying the memes that are doing the driving. This is why we've ended up with such peculiar brains, that we like religion, and music, and art. Language is a parasite that we've adapted to, not something that was there originally for our genes, on this view. And like most parasites, it can begin dangerous, but then it coevolves and adapts, and we end up with a symbiotic relationship with this new parasite.And so, from our perspective, we don't realize that that's how it began. So, this is a view of what humans are. All other species on this planet are gene machines only, they don't imitate at all well, hardly at all. We alone are gene machines and meme machines as well. The memes took a gene machine and turned it into a meme machine.But that's not all. We have a new kind of memes now. I've been wondering for a long time, since I've been thinking about memes a lot, is there a difference between the memes that we copy — the words we speak to each other, the gestures we copy, the human things — and all these technological things around us? I have always, until now, called them all memes, but I do honestly think now we need a new word for technological memes.Let's call them techno-memes or temes. Because the processes are getting different. We began, perhaps 5,000 years ago, with writing. We put the storage of memes out there on a clay tablet, but in order to get true temes and true teme machines, you need to get the variation, the selection and the copying, all done outside of humans. And we're getting there. We're at this extraordinary point where we're nearly there, that there are machines like that. And indeed, in the short time I've already been at TED, I see we're even closer than I thought we were before.So actually, now the temes are forcing our brains to become more like teme machines. Our children are growing up very quickly learning to read, learning to use machinery. We're going to have all kinds of implants, drugs that force us to stay awake all the time. We'll think we're choosing these things, but the temes are making us do it. So, we're at this cusp now of having a third replicator on our planet. Now, what about what else is going on out there in the universe? Is there anyone else out there? People have been asking this question for a long time. We've been asking it here at TED already. In 1961, Frank Drake made his famous equation, but I think he concentrated on the wrong things. It's been very productive, that equation. He wanted to estimate N, the number of communicative civilizations out there in our galaxy, and he included in there the rate of star formation, the rate of planets, but crucially, intelligence.I think that's the wrong way to think about it. Intelligence appears all over the place, in all kinds of guises. Human intelligence is only one kind of a thing. But what's really important is the replicators you have and the levels of replicators, one feeding on the one before. So, I would suggest that we don't think intelligence, we think replicators.And on that basis, I've suggested a different kind of equation. A very simple equation. N, the same thing, the number of communicative civilizations out there [that] we might expect in our galaxy. Just start with the number of planets there are in our galaxy. The fraction of those which get a first replicator. The fraction of those that get the second replicator. The fraction of those that get the third replicator. Because it's only the third replicator that's going to reach out — sending information, sending probes, getting out there, and communicating with anywhere else.OK, so if we take that equation, why haven't we heard from anybody out there? Because every step is dangerous. Getting a new replicator is dangerous. You can pull through, we have pulled through, but it's dangerous. Take the first step, as soon as life appeared on this earth. We may take the Gaian view. I loved Peter Ward's talk yesterday — it's not Gaian all the time. Actually, life forms produce things that kill themselves. Well, we did pull through on this planet.But then, a long time later, billions of years later, we got the second replicator, the memes. That was dangerous, all right. Think of the big brain. How many mothers do we have here? You know all about big brains. They are dangerous to give birth to, are agonizing to give birth to. (Laughter) My cat gave birth to four kittens, purring all the time. Ah, mm — slightly different. (Laughter)But not only is it painful, it kills lots of babies, it kills lots of mothers, and it's very expensive to produce. The genes are forced into producing all this myelin, all the fat to myelinate the brain. Do you know, sitting here, your brain is using about 20 percent of your body's energy output for two percent of your body weight? It's a really expensive organ to run. Why? Because it's producing the memes.Now, it could have killed us off. It could have killed us off, and maybe it nearly did, but you see, we don't know. But maybe it nearly did. Has it been tried before? What about all those other species? Louise Leakey talked yesterday about how we're the only one in this branch left. What happened to the others? Could it be that this experiment in imitation, this experiment in a second replicator, is dangerous enough to kill people off?Well, we did pull through, and we adapted. But now, we're hitting, as I've just described, we're hitting the third replicator point. And this is even more dangerous — well, it's dangerous again. Why? Because the temes are selfish replicators and they don't care about us, or our planet, or anything else. They're just information, why would they? They are using us to suck up the planet's resources to produce more computers, and more of all these amazing things we're hearing about here at TED. Don't think, ""Oh, we created the Internet for our own benefit."" That's how it seems to us. Think, temes spreading because they must. We are the old machines.Now, are we going to pull through? What's going to happen? What does it mean to pull through? Well, there are kind of two ways of pulling through. One that is obviously happening all around us now, is that the temes turn us into teme machines, with these implants, with the drugs, with us merging with the technology. And why would they do that? Because we are self-replicating. We have babies. We make new ones, and so it's convenient to piggyback on us, because we're not yet at the stage on this planet where the other option is viable. Although it's closer, I heard this morning, it's closer than I thought it was. Where the teme machines themselves will replicate themselves. That way, it wouldn't matter if the planet's climate was utterly destabilized, and it was no longer possible for humans to live here. Because those teme machines, they wouldn't need — they're not squishy, wet, oxygen-breathing, warmth-requiring creatures. They could carry on without us.So, those are the two possibilities. The second, I don't think we're that close. It's coming, but we're not there yet. The first, it's coming too. But the damage that is already being done to the planet is showing us how dangerous the third point is, that third danger point, getting a third replicator. And will we get through this third danger point, like we got through the second and like we got through the first? Maybe we will, maybe we won't. I have no idea. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was an incredible talk. SB: Thank you. I scared myself. CA: (Laughter)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes
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"So, I'm in Chile, in the Atacama desert, sitting in a hotel lobby, because that's the only place that I can get a Wi-Fi connection, and I have this picture up on my screen, and a woman comes up behind me. She says, ""Oh, that's beautiful. What is it? Is that Jackson Pollock?"" And unfortunately, I can be a little too honest. I said, ""No, it's — it's penguin shit.""(Laughter)And, you know, ""Excuse me!"" And I could sense that she thought I was speaking synecdochically.(Laughter)So, I said, ""No, no, really — it's penguin shit.""(Laughter)Because I had just been in the Falkland Islands taking pictures of penguins. This is a Gentoo penguin. And she was still skeptical. So, literally, a few minutes before that, I downloaded this scientific paper about calculations on avian defecation, which is really quite interesting, because it turns out you can model this as something called ""Poiseuille flow,"" and you can learn an awful lot about the physics of the avian rectum. Actually, technically, it's not a rectum. It's called a cloaca.At this point, she stops me, and she says, ""Who are you? Wha — what do you do?"" And I was stuck, because I didn't have any way to describe what I do. And so, in some sense, this talk today is my answer to that. It's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that I do. And it's very hard for me to make sense of it, so I'm not sure that you can. It's the kind of thing that I sit up late at night thinking about sometimes — often at four in the morning.So, some people are afraid of what I do. Some people think I am the nerd Tony Soprano, and in response, I have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector. I'm not sure what these people think, because I don't speak Norsk.(Laughter)But I'm not thinking ""monsteret"" is a good thing. I don't know, you know? So, one of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, ""Well, really, what were they thinking?""And recently, I was in Easter Island, which is an incredibly beautiful place, and an incredibly mysterious place, because no matter where you go in Easter Island, you're struck by these statues, called the moai. The place is 64 square miles. They made, so far as we can tell, 900 of them. Why on Earth? And if you haven't read Jared Diamond's book, ""Collapse,"" I totally recommend that you do. He's got a great chapter about it. Basically, these people committed ecological suicide in order to make more of these. And somewhere along the line, somebody said, ""I know! Let's cut down the last tree and commit suicide, because we need more identical statues.""(Laughter)And, one thing that isn't a mystery, actually, was when I grew up — because when I was a little kid, I'd seen these pictures — and I thought, ""Well, why that look on the face? Why that brow?"" I mean, it's such a powerful thing. Where did they get that inspiration? And then I met Yoyo, who is the native Rapa Nui-an guide, and if you look at Yoyo's face, you kind of figure out where they got it.There's many mysteries, these statues. Everyone wants to know, how did they make them, how did they transport them? This woman in the foreground is Jo Anne Van Tilberg. She's the leading archaeologist working Easter Island today. And she has studied the statues for 20-some years, and she has detailed records of every single statue. The one on the page here is the same that's up there. One interesting problem is the stone isn't very hard. So, this used to be completely smooth. In fact, in many of the statues, when you excavate them, the backs are totally smooth — almost glass smooth. But after 1,000 years out in the weather, they look like this.Jo Anne and I have just embarked on a project to digitize them all, and we're going to do a very high-res digitization, first because it's a way of preserving them. Second, we have these ideas about how you can algorithmically, then, learn a few of the mysteries about them. How long have they been standing in what positions? And maybe, indirectly, get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are. While I was in Easter Island, comet McNaught was there also, so you get a gratuitous picture of a moai with a comet.I also have an archaeological project going on in Egypt. ""Going on"" is perhaps a little bit strong. We're trying to get all of the permissions to get everything all set, to get it going. So, I'll talk about it at a future TED. But there's some amazing opportunities in Egypt as well. Another thing I do is I invent stuff. In fact, I design nuclear reactors. Not a joke. This is the conventional nuclear fuel cycle. The red line is what is done in most nuclear reactors. It's called the open fuel cycle. The white lines are what's called an advance fuel cycle, where you reprocess.Now, this is the normal way it's done. It's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution. It has a lot of disadvantages: each one of these steps is extremely expensive, it's potentially dangerous and they have the interesting property that the step cannot be performed in anyone's backyard, which is a problem. So, our reactor eliminates these steps, which, if we can actually make it work, is a really cool thing. Now, it's kind of nuts to work on a new nuclear reactor. There's — no reactor's been even built to an old design, much less a new one, in the United States for 25 years. It's the kind of very high-risk, but potentially very high-return thing that we do.Changing into a totally different field, we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics, particularly in an area called metamaterials. A metamaterial is an artificial material, which manipulates, in this case, electromagnetic radiation, in a way that you couldn't otherwise. So, this device here is an invisibility cloak. It may not seem that, but if you were a microwave, this is how you would view it. Rays of light — in this case, microwave light — come in, and they just squish around the cell, and they come back the other side. Now, you could do that with mirrors from one angle. The cool thing is, this does it from all angles. Metamaterials, unfortunately — A, it only works on microwave, and B, it doesn't work all that well yet. But metamaterials are an incredibly exciting field. It's — you know, today I'd like to say it's a zero billion dollar business, but, in fact, it's negative. But some day, some day, maybe it's going to work.We do a lot of work in biomedical fields. In this case, we're working with a major medical foundation to develop inexpensive ways of diagnosing diseases in developing countries. So, they say the eyes are the windows of the soul — turns out they're a window to a whole lot more stuff. And these happen to be my eyes, by the way.Now, I'm also very interested in cooking. While I was at Microsoft, I took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in France. I used to work, also while at Microsoft, at a leading restaurant in Seattle, so I do a lot of cooking. I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to — there's tremendous traditions, there's secrecy. And I'm trying to use a very scientific approach. So, this is my latest cooker, and if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor, that's because it is. But if you get to play with all those knobs and dials — and of course, really the controller over there does it all on software — you can make some terrific ribs.(Laughter)This is a high-speed centrifuge. You should all have one in your kitchen, beside your Turbochef. This subjects food to a force about 50,000 times that of normal gravity, and oh boy, does it clarify chicken stock. You would not believe it! I perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food — in this case, trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are. It turns out, A, it's useful, and for a geek like me, it's fun. Theory is red, black is experiment. So, I'm either really good at faking it, or this particular model seems to work.So, another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie ""Contact,"" which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way. In fact, almost everybody in the movie is based on a real character, a real person. So, the Jodie Foster character here is actually this woman, Jill Tarter, and Jill has dedicated her life to this. You know, a lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years — may not ever. So, I like to support people that are risking their lives.After the movie came out, of course, there was a lot of interest in SETI. My kids saw the movie, and afterwards they came to me and they said, ""So, Dad, so — so — that character — that's Jill, right?"" I said, ""Oh, yeah, yeah — absolutely."" ""And that other person, that's someone — "" I said, ""Yes."" They said, ""Well, you know that creepy rich guy in the movie? Is that you?"" I said, ""Well, you know, it's just a movie! Come on.""(Laughter)So, the SETI Institute, with a little bit of help from me, and a lot of help from Paul Allen and a variety of other people, is building a dedicated radio telescope in Hat Creek, California, so they can do this SETI work. Now, I travel a lot, and I change cell phones a lot, and the one person who always gets updated on all my cell phones and pagers and everything else is Jill, because I really don't want to miss ""the call.""(Laughter)I mean, can you imagine? E.T.'s phoning home, and I'm not, like, there? You know, horrible! So, I do a lot of work on dinosaurs. I'm known to TEDsters as the guy that has sex with dinosaurs. And I resemble that remark. I'm going to talk about a different aspect of dinosaurs, which is the finding of them. Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs. So, you always find dinosaurs in deserts or badlands, areas that have very little plant growth and have flash floods in the spring. You know, skiers pray for snow? Paleontologists pray for erosion.So, you hike around and — this is after you dig them up, they look like this. You hike around, you see something like this. Now, this is something I found, so look at it very closely here. You've got this bentonite clay, which is — sort of swells up and expands. And there's some stuff poking out. So, you look at that, and you look up close, and you say, ""Well, gee, that's kind of interesting. What are all of these pieces?"" Well, if you look closely, you can recognize, actually, from the shape, that these are skull fragments. And then when you look at this, you say, ""That's a tooth. It's a big tooth."" It's about the size of a banana. It has a big serration on the edge. This is what Tyrannosaurus rex looks like in the ground. And this is what it's like to find a Tyrannosaurus rex, which I was lucky enough to do a few years ago.Now, this is what Tyrannosaurus rex looks like in my living room. Not the same one, actually. This is a cast, which I had bought, and then, after buying the cast, I found my own, and I don't have room for two. You know. So, the thing that's wonderful for me about finding dinosaurs is that it is both an intellectual thing, because you're trying to reconstruct the environment of millions of years ago. It's something that can inform all sorts of science in unexpected ways. The study of dinosaurs led to the realization that there's a problem with asteroid impact, for example. The study of dinosaurs may, literally, one day save the planet.Study of the ancient climate is very important. In fact, the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs lived, had much higher CO2 than today, was much warmer than today, and is one of the interesting proof points for the effects of CO2 on climate. But, besides being intellectually and scientifically interesting, it's also very different than the other things I do, because you get to hike around in the badlands. This is actually what most dinosaur research looks like. This is one of my papers: ""A pygostyle from a non-avian theropod."" It's not as gripping as dinosaur sex, so we're not going to go into it further.Now, I'm also really big on photography. I travel all over the world taking pictures — some of them good, most of them not. These days, bits are cheap. Unfortunately, that means you've got to spend more time sorting through them. Here's a picture I took in the Falkland Islands of king penguins on a beach. Here's a picture I took in Alaska, a few years ago, of Orcas. I'd gone up to photograph Orcas, and we had looked for a week, and we hadn't seen a damn Orca. And the last day, the sun comes out, the Orcas come, they're right by the boat. It's fantastic. And I get lots of pictures like this. Then, a little bit later, I start getting some pictures like this. Now, to a human audience, I need to explain that if Penthouse magazine had a marine mammal edition, this would be the centerfold. It's true. So, there's more and more activity near the boat, and all of a sudden somebody shouts, ""What's that in the water?"" I said, ""Well, I think that's what you call a free willy.""(Laughter)There's a variety of things you can learn from watching whales have sex.(Laughter) The first thing you learn is the overwhelming importance of hands. They don't have them.(Laughter)I think Paul Simon is in the audience, and he has — he may not realize it, but he wrote a song all about whale sex, ""Slip-Slidin' Away."" That's kind of what it's like. The other interesting thing that I learned about whale sex: they curl their toes too.(Laughter)So — where do you go putting all of these disparate pieces together? You know, there's a tremendous amount of wisdom in finding a great thing, passion in life, and focusing all your energy on it, and I've never been able to do that. I just — you know, because, yes, I'll focus passion on something, but then there will be something else, and then there's something else again. And for a long time I fought this, and I thought, ""Well, gee, I really ought to buckle down."" And you know, when I was at Microsoft, that was so engrossing, and the whole industry was expanding so much, that it did tend to crowd out most of the other things in my life.But ultimately, I decided that what I really ought to do is not fight being who I am, but embrace it. And say, ""Yeah, you know, I — this whole talk has been a mile wide and an inch deep, but that's really what works for me."" And regardless of whether it's nuclear reactors or metamaterials or whale sex, the common — or lowest common denominator — is me. That's it, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_on_archeology_animal_photography_bbq
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"You know, culture was born of the imagination, and the imagination — the imagination as we know it — came into being when our species descended from our progenitor, Homo erectus, and, infused with consciousness, began a journey that would carry it to every corner of the habitable world. For a time, we shared the stage with our distant cousins, Neanderthal, who clearly had some spark of awareness, but — whether it was the increase in the size of the brain, or the development of language, or some other evolutionary catalyst — we quickly left Neanderthal gasping for survival. By the time the last Neanderthal disappeared in Europe, 27,000 years ago, our direct ancestors had already, and for 5,000 years, been crawling into the belly of the earth, where in the light of the flickers of tallow candles, they had brought into being the great art of the Upper Paleolithic.And I spent two months in the caves of southwest France with the poet Clayton Eshleman, who wrote a beautiful book called ""Juniper Fuse."" And you could look at this art and you could, of course, see the complex social organization of the people who brought it into being. But more importantly, it spoke of a deeper yearning, something far more sophisticated than hunting magic. And the way Clayton put it was this way. He said, ""You know, clearly at some point, we were all of an animal nature, and at some point, we weren't."" And he viewed proto-shamanism as a kind of original attempt, through ritual, to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So, he saw this art not as hunting magic, but as postcards of nostalgia. And viewed in that light, it takes on a whole other resonance.And the most amazing thing about the Upper Paleolithic art is that as an aesthetic expression, it lasted for almost 20,000 years. If these were postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very long farewell indeed. And it was also the beginning of our discontent, because if you wanted to distill all of our experience since the Paleolithic, it would come down to two words: how and why. And these are the slivers of insight upon which cultures have been forged. Now, all people share the same raw, adaptive imperatives. We all have children. We all have to deal with the mystery of death, the world that waits beyond death, the elders who fall away into their elderly years. All of this is part of our common experience, and this shouldn't surprise us, because, after all, biologists have finally proven it to be true, something that philosophers have always dreamt to be true. And that is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth. All of humanity, probably, is descended from a thousand people who left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago.But the corollary of that is that, if we all are brothers and sisters and share the same genetic material, all human populations share the same raw human genius, the same intellectual acuity. And so whether that genius is placed into — technological wizardry has been the great achievement of the West — or by contrast, into unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth, is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. There is no progression of affairs in human experience. There is no trajectory of progress. There's no pyramid that conveniently places Victorian England at the apex and descends down the flanks to the so-called primitives of the world. All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life itself. But what do I mean by different visions of life making for completely different possibilities for existence?Well, let's slip for a moment into the greatest culture sphere ever brought into being by the imagination, that of Polynesia. 10,000 square kilometers, tens of thousands of islands flung like jewels upon the southern sea. I recently sailed on the Hokulea, named after the sacred star of Hawaii, throughout the South Pacific to make a film about the navigators. These are men and women who, even today, can name 250 stars in the night sky. These are men and women who can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon, simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their vessel, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its unique refractive pattern that can be read with the same perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint. These are sailors who in the darkness, in the hull of the vessel, can distinguish as many as 32 different sea swells moving through the canoe at any one point in time, distinguishing local wave disturbances from the great currents that pulsate across the ocean, that can be followed with the same ease that a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea. Indeed, if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.And if we slip from the realm of the sea into the realm of the spirit of the imagination, you enter the realm of Tibetan Buddhism. And I recently made a film called ""The Buddhist Science of the Mind."" Why did we use that word, science? What is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2,500 years of empirical observation as to the nature of mind? I travelled for a month in Nepal with our good friend, Matthieu Ricard, and you'll remember Matthieu famously said to all of us here once at TED, ""Western science is a major response to minor needs."" We spend all of our lifetime trying to live to be 100 without losing our teeth. The Buddhist spends all their lifetime trying to understand the nature of existence.Our billboards celebrate naked children in underwear. Their billboards are manuals, prayers to the well-being of all sentient creatures. And with the blessing of Trulshik Rinpoche, we began a pilgrimage to a curious destination, accompanied by a great doctor. And the destination was a single room in a nunnery, where a woman had gone into lifelong retreat 55 years before. And en route, we took darshan from Rinpoche, and he sat with us and told us about the Four Noble Truths, the essence of the Buddhist path. All life is suffering. That doesn't mean all life is negative. It means things happen. The cause of suffering is ignorance. By that, the Buddha did not mean stupidity; he meant clinging to the illusion that life is static and predictable. The third noble truth said that ignorance can be overcome. And the fourth and most important, of course, was the delineation of a contemplative practice that not only had the possibility of a transformation of the human heart, but had 2,500 years of empirical evidence that such a transformation was a certainty.And so, when this door opened onto the face of a woman who had not been out of that room in 55 years, you did not see a mad woman. You saw a woman who was more clear than a pool of water in a mountain stream. And of course, this is what the Tibetan monks told us. They said, at one point, you know, we don't really believe you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do. And if we move from the realm of the spirit to the realm of the physical, to the sacred geography of Peru — I've always been interested in the relationships of indigenous people that literally believe that the Earth is alive, responsive to all of their aspirations, all of their needs. And, of course, the human population has its own reciprocal obligations.I spent 30 years living amongst the people of Chinchero and I always heard about an event that I always wanted to participate in. Once each year, the fastest young boy in each hamlet is given the honor of becoming a woman. And for one day, he wears the clothing of his sister and he becomes a transvestite, a waylaka. And for that day, he leads all able-bodied men on a run, but it's not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet. You run down to the base of the sacred mountain, Antakillqa. You run up to 15,000 feet, descend 3,000 feet. Climb again over the course of 24 hours. And of course, the waylakama spin, the trajectory of the route, is marked by holy mounds of Earth, where coke is given to the Earth, libations of alcohol to the wind, the vortex of the feminine is brought to the mountaintop. And the metaphor is clear: you go into the mountain as an individual, but through exhaustion, through sacrifice, you emerge as a community that has once again reaffirmed its sense of place in the planet. And at 48, I was the only outsider ever to go through this, only one to finish it. I only managed to do it by chewing more coca leaves in one day than anyone in the 4,000-year history of the plant.But these localized rituals become pan-Andean, and these fantastic festivals, like that of the Qoyllur Rit'i, which occurs when the Pleiades reappear in the winter sky. It's kind of like an Andean Woodstock: 60,000 Indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the sacred valley, called the Sinakara, which is dominated by three tongues of the great glacier. The metaphor is so clear. You bring the crosses from your community, in this wonderful fusion of Christian and pre-Columbian ideas. You place the cross into the ice, in the shadow of Ausangate, the most sacred of all Apus, or sacred mountains of the Inca. And then you do the ritual dances that empower the crosses.Now, these ideas and these events allow us even to deconstruct iconic places that many of you have been to, like Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was never a lost city. On the contrary, it was completely linked in to the 14,000 kilometers of royal roads the Inca made in less than a century. But more importantly, it was linked in to the Andean notions of sacred geography. The intiwatana, the hitching post to the sun, is actually an obelisk that constantly reflects the light that falls on the sacred Apu of Machu Picchu, which is Sugarloaf Mountain, called Huayna Picchu. If you come to the south of the intiwatana, you find an altar. Climb Huayna Picchu, find another altar. Take a direct north-south bearing, you find to your astonishment that it bisects the intiwatana stone, goes to the skyline, hits the heart of Salcantay, the second of the most important mountains of the Incan empire. And then beyond Salcantay, of course, when the southern cross reaches the southernmost point in the sky, directly in that same alignment, the Milky Way overhead. But what is enveloping Machu Picchu from below? The sacred river, the Urubamba, or the Vilcanota, which is itself the Earthly equivalent of the Milky Way, but it's also the trajectory that Viracocha walked at the dawn of time when he brought the universe into being. And where does the river rise? Right on the slopes of the Koariti.So, 500 years after Columbus, these ancient rhythms of landscape are played out in ritual. Now, when I was here at the first TED, I showed this photograph: two men of the Elder Brothers, the descendants, survivors of El Dorado. These, of course, are the descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization. If those of you who are here remember that I mentioned that they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood, but the training for the priesthood is extraordinary. Taken from their families, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness for 18 years — two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to evoke the nine months they spend in the natural mother's womb. All that time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as they are taught the values of their society. Values that maintain the proposition that their prayers, and their prayers alone, maintain the cosmic balance. Now, the measure of a society is not only what it does, but the quality of its aspirations.And I always wanted to go back into these mountains, to see if this could possibly be true, as indeed had been reported by the great anthropologist, Reichel-Dolmatoff. So, literally two weeks ago, I returned from having spent six weeks with the Elder Brothers on what was clearly the most extraordinary trip of my life. These really are a people who live and breathe the realm of the sacred, a baroque religiosity that is simply awesome. They consume more coca leaves than any human population, half a pound per man, per day. The gourd you see here is — everything in their lives is symbolic. Their central metaphor is a loom. They say, ""Upon this loom, I weave my life."" They refer to the movements as they exploit the ecological niches of the gradient as ""threads."" When they pray for the dead, they make these gestures with their hands, spinning their thoughts into the heavens.You can see the calcium buildup on the head of the poporo gourd. The gourd is a feminine aspect; the stick is a male. You put the stick in the powder to take the sacred ashes — well, they're not ashes, they're burnt limestone — to empower the coca leaf, to change the pH of the mouth to facilitate the absorption of cocaine hydrochloride. But if you break a gourd, you cannot simply throw it away, because every stroke of that stick that has built up that calcium, the measure of a man's life, has a thought behind it. Fields are planted in such an extraordinary way, that the one side of the field is planted like that by the women. The other side is planted like that by the men. Metaphorically, you turn it on the side, and you have a piece of cloth. And they are the descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization, the greatest goldsmiths of South America, who in the wake of the conquest, retreated into this isolated volcanic massif that soars to 20,000 feet above the Caribbean coastal plain.There are four societies: the Kogi, the Wiwa, the Kankwano and the Arhuacos. I traveled with the Arhuacos, and the wonderful thing about this story was that this man, Danilo Villafane — if we just jump back here for a second. When I first met Danilo, in the Colombian embassy in Washington, I couldn't help but say, ""You know, you look a lot like an old friend of mine."" Well, it turns out he was the son of my friend, Adalberto, from 1974, who had been killed by the FARC. And I said, ""Danilo, you won't remember this, but when you were an infant, I carried you on my back, up and down the mountains."" And because of that, Danilo invited us to go to the very heart of the world, a place where no journalist had ever been permitted. Not simply to the flanks of the mountains, but to the very iced peaks which are the destiny of the pilgrims.And this man sitting cross-legged is now a grown-up Eugenio, a man who I've known since 1974. And this is one of those initiates. No, it's not true that they're kept in the darkness for 18 years, but they are kept within the confines of the ceremonial men's circle for 18 years. This little boy will never step outside of the sacred fields that surround the men's hut for all that time, until he begins his journey of initiation. For that entire time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as he is taught the values of society, including this notion that their prayers alone maintain the cosmic balance. Before we could begin our journey, we had to be cleansed at the portal of the Earth. And it was extraordinary to be taken by a priest. And you see that the priest never wears shoes because holy feet — there must be nothing between the feet and the Earth for a mamo. And this is actually the place where the Great Mother sent the spindle into the world that elevated the mountains and created the homeland that they call the heart of the world.We traveled high into the paramo, and as we crested the hills, we realized that the men were interpreting every single bump on the landscape in terms of their own intense religiosity. And then of course, as we reached our final destination, a place called Mamancana, we were in for a surprise, because the FARC were waiting to kidnap us. And so we ended up being taken aside into these huts, hidden away until the darkness. And then, abandoning all our gear, we were forced to ride out in the middle of the night, in a quite dramatic scene. It's going to look like a John Ford Western. And we ran into a FARC patrol at dawn, so it was quite harrowing. It will be a very interesting film. But what was fascinating is that the minute there was a sense of dangers, the mamos went into a circle of divination.And of course, this is a photograph literally taken the night we were in hiding, as they divine their route to take us out of the mountains. We were able to, because we had trained people in filmmaking, continue with our work, and send our Wiwa and Arhuaco filmmakers to the final sacred lakes to get the last shots for the film, and we followed the rest of the Arhuaco back to the sea, taking the elements from the highlands to the sea. And here you see how their sacred landscape has been covered by brothels and hotels and casinos, and yet, still they pray. And it's an amazing thing to think that this close to Miami, two hours from Miami, there is an entire civilization of people praying every day for your well-being. They call themselves the Elder Brothers. They dismiss the rest of us who have ruined the world as the Younger Brothers. They cannot understand why it is that we do what we do to the Earth.Now, if we slip to another end of the world, I was up in the high Arctic to tell a story about global warming, inspired in part by the former Vice President's wonderful book. And what struck me so extraordinary was to be again with the Inuit — a people who don't fear the cold, but take advantage of it. A people who find a way, with their imagination, to carve life out of that very frozen. A people for whom blood on ice is not a sign of death, but an affirmation of life. And yet tragically, when you now go to those northern communities, you find to your astonishment that whereas the sea ice used to come in in September and stay till July, in a place like Kanak in northern Greenland, it literally comes in now in November and stays until March. So, their entire year has been cut in half.Now, I want to stress that none of these peoples that I've been quickly talking about here are disappearing worlds. These are not dying peoples. On the contrary, you know, if you have the heart to feel and the eyes to see, you discover that the world is not flat. The world remains a rich tapestry. It remains a rich topography of the spirit. These myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being new, failed attempts at being modern. They're unique facets of the human imagination. They're unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And when asked that question, they respond with 6,000 different voices. And collectively, those voices become our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia.Our industrial society is scarcely 300 years old. That shallow history shouldn't suggest to anyone that we have all of the answers for all of the questions that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. The myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being us. They are unique answers to that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And there is indeed a fire burning over the Earth, taking with it not only plants and animals, but the legacy of humanity's brilliance.Right now, as we sit here in this room, of those 6,000 languages spoken the day that you were born, fully half aren't being taught to children. So, you're living through a time when virtually half of humanity's intellectual, social and spiritual legacy is being allowed to slip away. This does not have to happen. These peoples are not failed attempts at being modern — quaint and colorful and destined to fade away as if by natural law.In every case, these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. That's actually an optimistic observation, because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be, and must be, the facilitators of cultural survival.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_the_worldwide_web_of_belief_and_ritual
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"Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics. In fact, mostly now in other things.One thing is distant relationships among human languages. And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families. They don't like that. They think it's crank. I don't think it's crank. And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads.Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago? And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages? How far back does that go? How far back does modern language go? How many tens of thousands of years does it go back?Chris Anderson: Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is?Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further.But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind. It's what we call a bottleneck.CA: Well, Philip Anderson may have been right. You may just know more about everything than anyone. So, it's been an honor. Thank you Murray Gell-Mann. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of_language
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"Last year, I told you the story, in seven minutes, of Project Orion, which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked, but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened. So it didn't happen. It was a dream that did not happen. This year I'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing. This was a perfect introduction. And it's a story that did work. It did happen, and the machines are all around us. And it was a technology that was inevitable. If the people I'm going to tell you the story about, if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So, it was sort of the right idea at the right time.This is Barricelli's universe. This is the universe we live in now. It's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things, including changing biology. I'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at Trinity, which was the Manhattan Project. It was a little bit like TED: it brought a whole lot of very smart people together. And three of the smartest people were Stan Ulam, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. And it was Von Neumann who said, after the bomb, he was working on something much more important than bombs: he's thinking about computers. So, he wasn't only thinking about them; he built one. This is the machine he built.(Laughter)He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later — this is 1679 — showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution. And Leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the tracks. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons.And then we jump to Von Neumann, 1945, when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing. And 1945, after the war, the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine. So June 1945 — actually, the bomb hasn't even been dropped yet — and Von Neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing, which also goes back to Turing, who, before that, gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless, little, finite state machine, just reading a tape in and reading a tape out. The other sort of genesis of what Von Neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather. Lewis Richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people, giving them each a little chunk, and putting it together. Here, we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will, but capable of only two ideas.(Laughter)And that's really the simplest computer. It's basically why you need the qubit, because it only has two ideas.And you put lots of those together, you get the essentials of the modern computer: the arithmetic unit, the central control, the memory, the recording medium, the input and the output. But, there's one catch. This is the fatal — you know, we saw it in starting these programs up. The instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail. So, the programming has to be perfect, or it won't work.If you look at the origins of this, the classic history sort of takes it all back to the ENIAC here. But actually, the machine I'm going to tell you about, the Institute for Advanced Study machine, which is way up there, really should be down there. So, I'm trying to revise history, and give some of these guys more credit than they've had. Such a computer would open up universes, which are, at the present, outside the range of any instruments. So it opens up a whole new world, and these people saw it. The guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle, Vladimir Zworykin, from RCA. RCA, in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time, decided not to go into computers. But the first meetings, November 1945, were at RCA's offices. RCA started this whole thing off, and said, you know, televisions are the future, not computers.The essentials were all there — all the things that make these machines run. Von Neumann, and a logician, and a mathematician from the army put this together. Then, they needed a place to build it. When RCA said no, that's when they decided to build it in Princeton, where Freeman works at the Institute. That's where I grew up as a kid. That's me, that's my sister Esther, who's talked to you before, so we both go back to the birth of this thing. That's Freeman, a long time ago, and that was me. And this is Von Neumann and Morgenstern, who wrote the ""Theory of Games."" All these forces came together there, in Princeton. Oppenheimer, who had built the bomb. The machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations. And Julian Bigelow, who took Zworkykin's place as the engineer, to actually figure out, using electronics, how you would build this thing. The whole gang of people who came to work on this, and women in front, who actually did most of the coding, were the first programmers. These were the prototype geeks, the nerds. They didn't fit in at the Institute. This is a letter from the director, concerned about — ""especially unfair on the matter of sugar.""(Laughter)You can read the text.(Laughter)This is hackers getting in trouble for the first time.(Laughter).These were not theoretical physicists. They were real soldering-gun type guys, and they actually built this thing.And we take it for granted now, that each of these machines has billions of transistors, doing billions of cycles per second without failing. They were using vacuum tubes, very narrow, sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes. They actually used 6J6, the common radio tube, because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes. And what they did at the Institute was publish every step of the way. Reports were issued, so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world. And it really was. It was the original microprocessor. All the computers now are copies of that machine. The memory was in cathode ray tubes — a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube — very, very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances. So, there's 40 of these tubes, like a V-40 engine running the memory.(Laughter)The input and the output was by teletype tape at first. This is a wire drive, using bicycle wheels. This is the archetype of the hard disk that's in your machine now. Then they switched to a magnetic drum. This is modifying IBM equipment, which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry, later at IBM. And this is the beginning of computer graphics. The ""Graph'g-Beam Turn On."" This next slide, that's the — as far as I know — the first digital bitmap display, 1954.So, Von Neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud, doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components. Those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks, trying to get this thing to work, with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time. And that's what I've been doing, this last six months, is going through the logs. ""Running time: two minutes. Input, output: 90 minutes."" This includes a large amount of human error. So they are always trying to figure out, what's machine error? What's human error? What's code, what's hardware?That's an engineer gazing at tube number 36, trying to figure out why the memory's not in focus. He had to focus the memory — seems OK. So, he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running, let alone having, you know, software problems.""No use, went home."" (Laughter)""Impossible to follow the damn thing, where's a directory?""So, already, they're complaining about the manuals: ""before closing down in disgust ... """"The General Arithmetic: Operating Logs."" Burning lots of midnight oil.""MANIAC,"" which became the acronym for the machine, Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator, ""lost its memory.""""MANIAC regained its memory, when the power went off."" ""Machine or human?""""Aha!"" So, they figured out it's a code problem.""Found trouble in code, I hope.""""Code error, machine not guilty.""""Damn it, I can be just as stubborn as this thing.""(Laughter)""And the dawn came."" So they ran all night. Twenty-four hours a day, this thing was running, mainly running bomb calculations.""Everything up to this point is wasted time."" ""What's the use? Good night.""""Master control off. The hell with it. Way off."" (Laughter)""Something's wrong with the air conditioner — smell of burning V-belts in the air.""""A short — do not turn the machine on.""""IBM machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards. The tar is from the roof."" So they really were working under tough conditions.(Laughter)Here, ""A mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack, set blower to vibrating. Result: no more mouse.""(Laughter)""Here lies mouse. Born: ?. Died: 4:50 a.m., May 1953.""(Laughter)There's an inside joke someone has penciled in: ""Here lies Marston Mouse."" If you're a mathematician, you get that, because Marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there.""Picked a lightning bug off the drum."" ""Running at two kilocycles."" That's two thousand cycles per second — ""yes, I'm chicken"" — so two kilocycles was slow speed. The high speed was 16 kilocycles. I don't know if you remember a Mac that was 16 Megahertz, that's slow speed.""I have now duplicated both results. How will I know which is right, assuming one result is correct? This now is the third different output. I know when I'm licked.""(Laughter)""We've duplicated errors before.""""Machine run, fine. Code isn't.""""Only happens when the machine is running.""And sometimes things are okay. ""Machine a thing of beauty, and a joy forever."" ""Perfect running.""""Parting thought: when there's bigger and better errors, we'll have them.""So, nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs. They're designing hydrogen bombs. But someone in the logbook, late one night, finally drew a bomb. So, that was the result. It was Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, in 1952. That was designed on that machine, in the woods behind the Institute.So Von Neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems. Barricelli, he came to do what we now call, really, artificial life, trying to see if, in this artificial universe — he was a viral-geneticist, way, way, way ahead of his time. He's still ahead of some of the stuff that's being done now. Trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer. Began — his universe started March 3, '53. So it's almost exactly — it's 50 years ago next Tuesday, I guess. And he saw everything in terms of — he could read the binary code straight off the machine. He had a wonderful rapport. Other people couldn't get the machine running. It always worked for him. Even errors were duplicated.(Laughter)""Dr. Barricelli claims machine is wrong, code is right.""So he designed this universe, and ran it. When the bomb people went home, he was allowed in there. He would run that thing all night long, running these things, if anybody remembers Stephen Wolfram, who reinvented this stuff. And he published it. It wasn't locked up and disappeared. It was published in the literature. ""If it's that easy to create living organisms, why not create a few yourself?"" So, he decided to give it a try, to start this artificial biology going in the machines. And he found all these, sort of — it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny, 5,000-byte universe, and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world, in biology. This is some of the generations of his universe. But they're just going to stay numbers; they're not going to become organisms. They have to have something. You have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype. They have to go out and do something. And he started doing that, started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with — playing chess with other machines and so on. And they did start to evolve. And he went around the country after that. Every time there was a new, fast machine, he started using it, and saw exactly what's happening now. That the programs, instead of being turned off — when you quit the program, you'd keep running and, basically, all the sorts of things like Windows is doing, running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines, he envisioned all that happening. And he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process. It wasn't any sort of creator intelligence, but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence. And he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike, or a new kind of life. It just was another version of the same thing happening. And there's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago. And could you do it again now?So, when I went into these archives looking at this stuff, lo and behold, the archivist came up one day, saying, ""I think we found another box that had been thrown out."" And it was his universe on punch cards. So there it is, 50 years later, sitting there — sort of suspended animation. That's the instructions for running — this is actually the source code for one of those universes, with a note from the engineers saying they're having some problems. ""There must be something about this code that you haven't explained yet."" And I think that's really the truth. We still don't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity. What's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive? These cards, now, thanks to me showing up, are being saved. And the question is, should we run them or not? You know, could we get them running? Do you want to let it loose on the Internet? These machines would think they — these organisms, if they came back to life now — whether they've died and gone to heaven, there's a universe. My laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when Barricelli quit the project.He was thinking far ahead, to how this would really grow into a new kind of life. And that's what's happening! When Juan Enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth, of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab, that's what Barricelli imagined: that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code — it already is coding from nucleic acids. We've been doing that since, you know, since we started PCR and synthesizing small strings of DNA. And real soon, we're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins, and, like Steve showed us, that just opens an entirely new world.It's a world that Von Neumann himself envisioned. This was published after he died: his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines, what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce. It took really three people: Barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing; Von Neumann saw how you could build the machines — that now, last count, four million of these Von Neumann machines is built every 24 hours; and Julian Bigelow, who died 10 days ago — this is John Markoff's obituary for him — he was the important missing link, the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work. And all our computers have, inside them, the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day, sort of on pencil and paper. And we owe a tremendous credit to that. And he explained, in a very generous way, the spirit that brought all these different people to the Institute for Advanced Study in the '40s to do this project, and make it freely available with no patents, no restrictions, no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world.That's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down, July 1958. And it's Julian Bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off. And that's the end.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_at_the_birth_of_the_computer
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"My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously, on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about, and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday. It's like when you're mean to your wife because you're mad at somebody else. Or when you drink a little too much at a party, just out of anxiety. Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever. And when we do these kind of things, when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors, then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants, and no one intended. And that's what I look at with my photographic work.This is an image I just recently completed, that is — when you stand back at a distance, it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic, cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution. And as you get a little bit closer, it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant, or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange. And as you get all the way up close, you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups. And in fact, this is one million plastic cups, which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every six hours. We use four million cups a day on airline flights, and virtually none of them are reused or recycled. They just don't do that in that industry.Now, that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day, and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages, most of which is coffee. I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas, but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like. That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption. And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life, that's the size it would be. And there's an hour's worth of our cups. And there's a day's worth of our cups. You can still see the little people way down there. That's as high as a 42-story building, and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference.Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America, right now, has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on Earth. One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison are Americans, imprisoned in our country. And I wanted to show the number. The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005. And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet. So, I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms, and in the actual print of this piece, each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge. They're tiny. They're barely visible as a piece of material, and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print. And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide. This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York — those are my parents looking at the piece. (Laughter) Every time I look at this piece, I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad, ""He finally folded his laundry."" (Laughter)I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction. And this particular one is about cigarette addiction. I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking. More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year from smoking cigarettes. And so, this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes. And, as you slowly step back, you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called ""Skull with Cigarette."" It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9/11, when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died. And do you remember the response? It reverberated around the world, and will continue to reverberate through time. It will be something that we talk about in 100 years. And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking. And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking. And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died. And today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking. And we aren't talking about it — we dismiss it. The tobacco lobby, it's too strong. We just dismiss it out of our consciousness. And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes, we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters, to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking. And this is what the next piece is about.This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes, which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month, and every month in the U.S. More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under begin smoking every year.One more strange epidemic in the United States that I want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs. This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin. Well, actually, I only had one Vicodin that I scanned lots and lots of times. (Laughter) And so, as you stand back, you see 213,000 Vicodin pills, which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the United States, attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. — and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything — one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications. A strange phenomenon.This is a piece that I just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon, this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery. 384,000 women, American women, last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery. It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift, given to young girls who are about to go off to college. So, I made this image out of Barbie dolls, and so, as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern, and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls, which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the U.S. each month. The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21. And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction, and most of that is being done by men.Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples. I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues. They're just examples. And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fear that we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now. There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing. Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen. And one of the causes of this, I think, is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview, this holoptical worldview, this holographic image that we're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers.As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend. We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics. And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they'll matter to us more than they do now. And if we can find that, then we'll be able to find, within each one of us, what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is: how do we change? That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now: how do we change? How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues. I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way. I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now. And if there are things that we see that we don't like about our culture, then we have a choice. The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface, to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon, as we show up for the question of how do we change — it's already defining us as individuals and as a nation, and it will continue to do that, on into the future. And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions. I'm not speaking abstractly about this, I'm speaking — this is who we are in this room, right now, in this moment.Thank you and good afternoon. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats
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"One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown. Another is to change our lifestyles. And what we're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be, that you don't have to wait very long to see the benefits. When you eat healthier, manage stress, exercise and love more, your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen. But more than that, your brain gets measurably bigger. Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now. This was figured out by Robin Williams a few years before the rest of us.Now, there's some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells. Some of my favorite things, like chocolate and tea, blueberries, alcohol in moderation, stress management and cannabinoids found in marijuana. I'm just the messenger. (Laughter) What were we just talking about? (Laughter) And other things that can make it worse, that can cause you to lose brain cells. The usual suspects, like saturated fat and sugar, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, too much alcohol and chronic stress.Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle, so you age less quickly. Your skin doesn't wrinkle as much. Your heart gets more blood flow. We've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease. That these clogged arteries that you see on the upper left, after only a year become measurably less clogged. And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left, the blue means no blood flow. A year later — orange and white is maximum blood flow. We've shown you may be able to stop and reverse the progression of early prostate cancer and, by extension, breast cancer, simply by making these changes. We've found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes, whereas only nine percent in the comparison group.These differences were highly significant. Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, so you increase sexual potency. One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services, showing that nicotine, which constricts your arteries, can cause a heart attack or a stroke, but it also causes impotence. Half of guys who smoke are impotent. How sexy is that?Now we're also about to publish a study — the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer. This is what's called a heat map — and the different colors — and along the side, on the right, are different genes. And we found that over 500 genes were favorably changed — in effect, turning on the good genes, the disease-preventing genes, turning off the disease-promoting genes.And so these findings I think are really very powerful, giving many people new hope and new choices. And companies like Navigenics and DNA Direct and 23andMe, that are giving you your genetic profiles, are giving some people a sense of, ""Gosh, well, what can I do about it?"" Well, our genes are not our fate, and if we make these changes — they're a predisposition — but if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise, we can actually change how our genes are expressed. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_says_your_genes_are_not_your_fate
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"Welcome. If I could have the first slide, please? Contrary to calculations made by some engineers, bees can fly, dolphins can swim, and geckos can even climb up the smoothest surfaces. Now, what I want to do, in the short time I have, is to try to allow each of you to experience the thrill of revealing nature's design. I get to do this all the time, and it's just incredible. I want to try to share just a little bit of that with you in this presentation. The challenge of looking at nature's designs — and I'll tell you the way that we perceive it, and the way we've used it. The challenge, of course, is to answer this question: what permits this extraordinary performance of animals that allows them basically to go anywhere? And if we could figure that out, how can we implement those designs?Well, many biologists will tell engineers, and others, organisms have millions of years to get it right; they're spectacular; they can do everything wonderfully well. So, the answer is bio-mimicry: just copy nature directly. We know from working on animals that the truth is that's exactly what you don't want to do — because evolution works on the just-good-enough principle, not on a perfecting principle. And the constraints in building any organism, when you look at it, are really severe. Natural technologies have incredible constraints. Think about it. If you were an engineer and I told you that you had to build an automobile, but it had to start off to be this big, then it had to grow to be full size and had to work every step along the way. Or think about the fact that if you build an automobile, I'll tell you that you also — inside it — have to put a factory that allows you to make another automobile.(Laughter)And you can absolutely never, absolutely never, because of history and the inherited plan, start with a clean slate. So, organisms have this important history. Really evolution works more like a tinkerer than an engineer. And this is really important when you begin to look at animals. Instead, we believe you need to be inspired by biology. You need to discover the general principles of nature, and then use these analogies when they're advantageous. This is a real challenge to do this, because animals, when you start to really look inside them — how they work — appear hopelessly complex. There's no detailed history of the design plans, you can't go look it up anywhere. They have way too many motions for their joints, too many muscles. Even the simplest animal we think of, something like an insect, and they have more neurons and connections than you can imagine.How can you make sense of this? Well, we believed — and we hypothesized — that one way animals could work simply, is if the control of their movements tended to be built into their bodies themselves. What we discovered was that two-, four-, six- and eight-legged animals all produce the same forces on the ground when they move. They all work like this kangaroo, they bounce. And they can be modeled by a spring-mass system that we call the spring mass system because we're biomechanists. It's actually a pogo stick. They all produce the pattern of a pogo stick. How is that true? Well, a human, one of your legs works like two legs of a trotting dog, or works like three legs, together as one, of a trotting insect, or four legs as one of a trotting crab. And then they alternate in their propulsion, but the patterns are all the same. Almost every organism we've looked at this way — you'll see next week, I'll give you a hint, there'll be an article coming out that says that really big things like T. rex probably couldn't do this, but you'll see that next week.Now, what's interesting is the animals, then — we said — bounce along the vertical plane this way, and in our collaborations with Pixar, in ""A Bug's Life,"" we discussed the bipedal nature of the characters of the ants. And we told them, of course, they move in another plane as well. And they asked us this question. They say, ""Why model just in the sagittal plane or the vertical plane, when you're telling us these animals are moving in the horizontal plane?"" This is a good question. Nobody in biology ever modeled it this way. We took their advice and we modeled the animals moving in the horizontal plane as well. We took their three legs, we collapsed them down as one. We got some of the best mathematicians in the world from Princeton to work on this problem. And we were able to create a model where animals are not only bouncing up and down, but they're also bouncing side to side at the same time. And many organisms fit this kind of pattern. Now, why is this important to have this model? Because it's very interesting. When you take this model and you perturb it, you give it a push, as it bumps into something, it self-stabilizes, with no brain or no reflexes, just by the structure alone. It's a beautiful model. Let's look at the mathematics.(Laughter)That's enough!(Laughter)The animals, when you look at them running, appear to be self-stabilizing like this, using basically springy legs. That is, the legs can do computations on their own; the control algorithms, in a sense, are embedded in the form of the animal itself. Why haven't we been more inspired by nature and these kinds of discoveries? Well, I would argue that human technologies are really different from natural technologies, at least they have been so far. Think about the typical kind of robot that you see. Human technologies have tended to be large, flat, with right angles, stiff, made of metal. They have rolling devices and axles. There are very few motors, very few sensors. Whereas nature tends to be small, and curved, and it bends and twists, and has legs instead, and appendages, and has many muscles and many, many sensors. So it's a very different design. However, what's changing, what's really exciting — and I'll show you some of that next — is that as human technology takes on more of the characteristics of nature, then nature really can become a much more useful teacher.And here's one example that's really exciting. This is a collaboration we have with Stanford. And they developed this new technique, called Shape Deposition Manufacturing. It's a technique where they can mix materials together and mold any shape that they like, and put in the material properties. They can embed sensors and actuators right in the form itself. For example, here's a leg: the clear part is stiff, the white part is compliant, and you don't need any axles there or anything. It just bends by itself beautifully. So, you can put those properties in. It inspired them to show off this design by producing a little robot they named Sprawl. Our work has also inspired another robot, a biologically inspired bouncing robot, from the University of Michigan and McGill named RHex, for robot hexapod, and this one's autonomous. Let's go to the video, and let me show you some of these animals moving and then some of the simple robots that have been inspired by our discoveries. Here's what some of you did this morning, although you did it outside, not on a treadmill. Here's what we do.(Laughter)This is a death's head cockroach. This is an American cockroach you think you don't have in your kitchen. This is an eight-legged scorpion, six-legged ant, forty-four-legged centipede. Now, I said all these animals are sort of working like pogo sticks — they're bouncing along as they move. And you can see that in this ghost crab, from the beaches of Panama and North Carolina. It goes up to four meters per second when it runs. It actually leaps into the air, and has aerial phases when it does it, like a horse, and you'll see it's bouncing here. What we discovered is whether you look at the leg of a human like Richard, or a cockroach, or a crab, or a kangaroo, the relative leg stiffness of that spring is the same for everything we've seen so far. Now, what good are springy legs then? What can they do? Well, we wanted to see if they allowed the animals to have greater stability and maneuverability. So, we built a terrain that had obstacles three times the hip height of the animals that we're looking at. And we were certain they couldn't do this. And here's what they did. The animal ran over it and it didn't even slow down! It didn't decrease its preferred speed at all. We couldn't believe that it could do this. It said to us that if you could build a robot with very simple, springy legs, you could make it as maneuverable as any that's ever been built.Here's the first example of that. This is the Stanford Shape Deposition Manufactured robot, named Sprawl. It has six legs — there are the tuned, springy legs. It moves in a gait that an insect uses, and here it is going on the treadmill. Now, what's important about this robot, compared to other robots, is that it can't see anything, it can't feel anything, it doesn't have a brain, yet it can maneuver over these obstacles without any difficulty whatsoever. It's this technique of building the properties into the form. This is a graduate student. This is what he's doing to his thesis project — very robust, if a graduate student does that to his thesis project.(Laughter)This is from McGill and University of Michigan. This is the RHex, making its first outing in a demo.(Laughter)Same principle: it only has six moving parts, six motors, but it has springy, tuned legs. It moves in the gait of the insect. It has the middle leg moving in synchrony with the front, and the hind leg on the other side. Sort of an alternating tripod, and they can negotiate obstacles just like the animal.(Laughter)(Voice: Oh my God.)(Applause)Robert Full: It'll go on different surfaces — here's sand — although we haven't perfected the feet yet, but I'll talk about that later. Here's RHex entering the woods.(Laughter)Again, this robot can't see anything, it can't feel anything, it has no brain. It's just working with a tuned mechanical system, with very simple parts, but inspired from the fundamental dynamics of the animal. (Voice: Ah, I love him, Bob.) RF: Here's it going down a pathway. I presented this to the jet propulsion lab at NASA, and they said that they had no ability to go down craters to look for ice, and life, ultimately, on Mars. And he said — especially with legged-robots, because they're way too complicated. Nothing can do that. And I talk next. I showed them this video with the simple design of RHex here. And just to convince them we should go to Mars in 2011, I tinted the video orange just to give them the sense of being on Mars.(Laughter)(Applause)Another reason why animals have extraordinary performance, and can go anywhere, is because they have an effective interaction with the environment. The animal I'm going to show you, that we studied to look at this, is the gecko. We have one here and notice its position. It's holding on. Now I'm going to challenge you. I'm going show you a video. One of the animals is going to be running on the level, and the other one's going to be running up a wall. Which one's which? They're going at a meter a second. How many think the one on the left is running up the wall?(Applause)Okay. The point is it's really hard to tell, isn't it? It's incredible, we looked at students do this and they couldn't tell. They can run up a wall at a meter a second, 15 steps per second, and they look like they're running on the level. How do they do this? It's just phenomenal. The one on the right was going up the hill. How do they do this? They have bizarre toes. They have toes that uncurl like party favors when you blow them out, and then peel off the surface, like tape. Like if we had a piece of tape now, we'd peel it this way. They do this with their toes. It's bizarre! This peeling inspired iRobot — that we work with — to build Mecho-Geckos. Here's a legged version and a tractor version, or a bulldozer version. Let's see some of the geckos move with some video, and then I'll show you a little bit of a clip of the robots. Here's the gecko running up a vertical surface. There it goes, in real time. There it goes again. Obviously, we have to slow this down a little bit.You can't use regular cameras. You have to take 1,000 pictures per second to see this. And here's some video at 1,000 frames per second. Now, I want you to look at the animal's back. Do you see how much it's bending like that? We can't figure that out — that's an unsolved mystery. We don't know how it works. If you have a son or a daughter that wants to come to Berkeley, come to my lab and we'll figure this out. Okay, send them to Berkeley because that's the next thing I want to do. Here's the gecko mill.(Laughter)It's a see-through treadmill with a see-through treadmill belt, so we can watch the animal's feet, and videotape them through the treadmill belt, to see how they move. Here's the animal that we have here, running on a vertical surface. Pick a foot and try to watch a toe, and see if you can see what the animal's doing. See it uncurl and then peel these toes. It can do this in 14 milliseconds. It's unbelievable. Here are the robots that they inspire, the Mecho-Geckos from iRobot. First we'll see the animals toes peeling — look at that. And here's the peeling action of the Mecho-Gecko. It uses a pressure-sensitive adhesive to do it. Peeling in the animal. Peeling in the Mecho-Gecko — that allows them climb autonomously. Can go on the flat surface, transition to a wall, and then go onto a ceiling. There's the bulldozer version. Now, it doesn't use pressure-sensitive glue. The animal does not use that. But that's what we're limited to, at the moment.What does the animal do? The animal has weird toes. And if you look at the toes, they have these little leaves there, and if you blow them up and zoom in, you'll see that's there's little striations in these leaves. And if you zoom in 270 times, you'll see it looks like a rug. And if you blow that up, and zoom in 900 times, you see there are hairs there, tiny hairs. And if you look carefully, those tiny hairs have striations. And if you zoom in on those 30,000 times, you'll see each hair has split ends. And if you blow those up, they have these little structures on the end. The smallest branch of the hairs looks like spatulae, and an animal like that has one billion of these nano-size split ends, to get very close to the surface. In fact, there's the diameter of your hair — a gecko has two million of these, and each hair has 100 to 1,000 split ends. Think of the contact of that that's possible.We were fortunate to work with another group at Stanford that built us a special manned sensor, that we were able to measure the force of an individual hair. Here's an individual hair with a little split end there. When we measured the forces, they were enormous. They were so large that a patch of hairs about this size — the gecko's foot could support the weight of a small child, about 40 pounds, easily. Now, how do they do it? We've recently discovered this. Do they do it by friction? No, force is too low. Do they do it by electrostatics? No, you can change the charge — they still hold on. Do they do it by interlocking? That's kind of a like a Velcro-like thing. No, you can put them on molecular smooth surfaces — they don't do it. How about suction? They stick on in a vacuum. How about wet adhesion? Or capillary adhesion? They don't have any glue, and they even stick under water just fine. If you put their foot under water, they grab on. How do they do it then? Believe it or not, they grab on by intermolecular forces, by Van der Waals forces.You know, you probably had this a long time ago in chemistry, where you had these two atoms, they're close together, and the electrons are moving around. That tiny force is sufficient to allow them to do that because it's added up so many times with these small structures. What we're doing is, we're taking that inspiration of the hairs, and with another colleague at Berkeley, we're manufacturing them. And just recently we've made a breakthrough, where we now believe we're going to be able to create the first synthetic, self-cleaning, dry adhesive. Many companies are interested in this.(Laughter)We also presented to Nike even.(Laughter)(Applause)We'll see where this goes. We were so excited about this that we realized that that small-size scale — and where everything gets sticky, and gravity doesn't matter anymore — we needed to look at ants and their feet, because one of my other colleagues at Berkeley has built a six-millimeter silicone robot with legs. But it gets stuck. It doesn't move very well. But the ants do, and we'll figure out why, so that ultimately we'll make this move. And imagine: you're going to be able to have swarms of these six-millimeter robots available to run around. Where's this going? I think you can see it already.Clearly, the Internet is already having eyes and ears, you have web cams and so forth. But it's going to also have legs and hands. You're going to be able to do programmable work through these kinds of robots, so that you can run, fly and swim anywhere. We saw David Kelly is at the beginning of that with his fish. So, in conclusion, I think the message is clear. If you need a message, if nature's not enough, if you care about search and rescue, or mine clearance, or medicine, or the various things we're working on, we must preserve nature's designs, otherwise these secrets will be lost forever. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_on_engineering_and_evolution
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"This is a work in process, based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine.(Video): [On this planet 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity refrigeration or stored fuels this is a problem it impacts: the spread of disease the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life. So here's the plan ... inexpensive refrigeration that doesn't use electricity, propane, gas, kerosene or consumables time for some thermodynamics And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator]Adam Grosser: So 29 years ago, I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration, one of those things that stuck in my head, a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. It was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carré, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools at the time.This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall, in 1928. It was a really neat idea, and I'll get to why it didn't work, but here's how it works. There's two spheres and they're separated in distance. One has a working fluid, water and ammonia, and the other is a condenser. You heat up one side, the hot side. The ammonia evaporates and it recondenses in the other side. You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia reevaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side, it creates a powerful cooling effect. So it was a great idea that didn't work at all. They blew up.(Laughter)Because you're using ammonia, you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong; it topped 400 psi. The ammonia was toxic, it sprayed everywhere. But it was kind of an interesting thought.So the great thing about 2006, there's a lot of really great computational work you can do. So we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved — a lot of computational fluid dynamics. We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong. We found some nontoxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. We brought in a team from the UK — a lot of great refrigeration people, it turns out, in the UK — and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low-pressure, nontoxic refrigerator.So this is the way it works. You put it on a cooking fire. Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood. It heats up for about 30 minutes, cools for an hour. You put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours. It looks like this. This is the fifth prototype, it's not quite done. It weighs about eight pounds, and this is the way it works. You put it into a 15-liter vessel, about three gallons, and it'll cool it down to just above freezing — three degrees above freezing — for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment. It's really cheap. We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars, in low volumes for about 40 dollars. And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grosser_and_his_sustainable_fridge
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"Once upon a time, there was a dread disease that afflicted children. And in fact, among all the diseases that existed in this land, it was the worst. It killed the most children. And along came a brilliant inventor, a scientist, who came up with a partial cure for that disease. And it wasn't perfect. Many children still died, but it was certainly better than what they had before. And one of the good things about this cure was that it was free, virtually free, and was very easy to use. But the worst thing about it was that you couldn't use it on the youngest children, on infants, and on one-year-olds.And so, as a consequence, a few years later, another scientist — perhaps maybe this scientist not quite as brilliant as the one who had preceded him, but building on the invention of the first one — came up with a second cure. And the beauty of the second cure for this disease was that it could be used on infants and one-year-olds. And the problem with this cure was it was very expensive, and it was very complicated to use. And although parents tried as hard as they could to use it properly, almost all of them ended up using it wrong in the end. But what they did, of course, since it was so complicated and expensive, they only used it on the zero-year-olds and the one-year-olds. And they kept on using the existing cure that they had on the two-year-olds and up.And this went on for quite some time. People were happy. They had their two cures. Until a particular mother, whose child had just turned two, died of this disease. And she thought to herself, ""My child just turned two, and until the child turned two, I had always used this complicated, expensive cure, you know, this treatment. And then the child turned two, and I started using the cheap and easy treatment, and I wonder"" — and she wondered, like all parents who lose children wonder — ""if there isn't something that I could have done, like keep on using that complicated, expensive cure."" And she told all the other people, and she said, ""How could it possibly be that something that's cheap and simple works as well as something that's complicated and expensive?"" And the people thought, ""You know, you're right. It probably is the wrong thing to do to switch and use the cheap and simple solution."" And the government, they heard her story and the other people, and they said, ""Yeah, you're right, we should make a law. We should outlaw this cheap and simple treatment and not let anybody use this on their children."" And the people were happy. They were satisfied.For many years this went along, and everything was fine. But then along came a lowly economist, who had children himself, and he used the expensive and complicated treatment. But he knew about the cheap and simple one. And he thought about it, and the expensive one didn't seem that great to him. So he thought, ""I don't know anything about science, but I do know something about data, so maybe I should go and look at the data and see whether this expensive and complicated treatment actually works any better than the cheap and simple one."" And lo and behold, when he went through the data, he found that it didn't look like the expensive, complicated solution was any better than the cheap one, at least for the children who were two and older — the cheap one still didn't work on the kids who were younger.And so, he went forth to the people and he said, ""I've made this wonderful finding: it looks as if we could just use the cheap and simple solution, and by doing so we could save ourselves 300 million dollars a year, and we could spend that on our children in other ways."" And the parents were very unhappy, and they said, ""This is a terrible thing, because how can the cheap and easy thing be as good as the hard thing?"" And the government was very upset. And in particular, the people who made this expensive solution were very upset because they thought, ""How can we hope to compete with something that's essentially free? We would lose all of our market."" And people were very angry, and they called him horrible names. And he decided that maybe he should leave the country for a few days, and seek out some more intelligent, open-minded people in a place called Oxford, and come and try and tell the story at that place.And so, anyway, here I am. It's not a fairy tale. It's a true story about the United States today, and the disease I'm referring to is actually motor vehicle accidents for children. And the free cure is adult seatbelts, and the expensive cure — the 300-million-dollar-a-year cure — is child car seats. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is some of the evidence why I believe this to be true: that for children two years old and up, there really is no real benefit — proven benefit — of car seats, in spite of the incredible energy that has been devoted toward expanding the laws and making it socially unacceptable to put your children into seatbelts. And then talk about why — what is it that makes that true? And then, finally talk a little bit about a third way, about another technology, which is probably better than anything we have, but which — there hasn't been any enthusiasm for adoption precisely because people are so enamored with the current car seat solution. OK.So, many times when you try to do research on data, it records complicated stories — it's hard to find in the data. It doesn't turn out to be the case when you look at seatbelts versus car seats. So the United States keeps a data set of every fatal accident that's happened since 1975. So in every car crash in which at least one person dies, they have information on all of the people. So if you look at that data — it's right up on the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's website — you can just look at the raw data, and begin to get a sense of the limited amount of evidence that's in favor of car seats for children aged two and up. So, here is the data. Here I have, among two- to six-year-olds — anyone above six, basically no one uses car seats, so you can't compare — 29.3 percent of the children who are unrestrained in a crash in which at least one person dies, themselves die. If you put a child in a car seat, 18.2 percent of the children die. If they're wearing a lap-and-shoulder belt, in this raw data, 19.4 percent die. And interestingly, wearing a lap-only seatbelt, 16.7 percent die. And actually, the theory tells you that the lap-only seatbelt's got to be worse than the lap-and-shoulder belt. And that just reminds you that when you deal with raw data, there are hundreds of confounding variables that may be getting in the way.So what we do in the study is — and this is just presenting the same information, but turned into a figure to make it easier. So the yellow bar represents car seats, the orange bar lap-and-shoulder, and the red bar lap-only seatbelts. And this is all relative to unrestrained — the bigger the bar, the better. Okay. So, this is the data I just showed, OK? So the highest bar is what you're striving to beat. So you can control for the basic things, like how hard the crash was, what seat the child was sitting in, etc., the age of the child. And that's that middle set of bars. And so, you can see that the lap-only seatbelts start to look worse once you do that. And then finally, the last set of bars, which are really controlling for everything you could possibly imagine about the crash, 50, 75, 100 different characteristics of the crash.And what you find is that the car seats and the lap-and-shoulder belts, when it comes to saving lives, fatalities look exactly identical. And the standard error bands are relatively small around these estimates as well. And it's not just overall. It's very robust to anything you want to look at. One thing that's interesting: if you look at frontal-impact crashes — when the car crashes, the front hits into something — indeed, what you see is that the car seats look a little bit better. And I think this isn't just chance. In order to have the car seat approved, you need to pass certain federal standards, all of which involve slamming your car into a direct frontal crash. But when you look at other types of crashes, like rear-impact crashes, indeed, the car seats don't perform as well. And I think that's because they've been optimized to pass, as we always expect people to do, to optimize relative to bright-line rules about how affected the car will be.And the other thing you might argue is, ""Well, car seats have got a lot better over time. And so if we look at recent crashes — the whole data set is almost 30 years' worth of data — you won't see it in the recent crashes. The new car seats are far, far better."" But indeed, in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts, actually, are doing even better than the car seats. They say, ""Well, that's impossible, that can't be."" And the line of argument, if you ask parents, is, ""But car seats are so expensive and complicated, and they have this big tangle of latches, how could they possibly not work better than seatbelts because they are so expensive and complicated?"" It's kind of an interesting logic, I think, that people use. And the other logic, they say, ""Well, the government wouldn't have told us [to] use them if they weren't much better.""But what's interesting is the government telling us to use them is not actually based on very much. It really is based on some impassioned pleas of parents whose children died after they turned two, which has led to the passage of all these laws — not very much on data. So you can only get so far, I think, in telling your story by using these abstract statistics. And so I had some friends over to dinner, and I was asking — we had a cookout — I was asking them what advice they might have for me about proving my point. They said, ""Why don't you run some crash tests?"" And I said, ""That's a great idea."" So we actually tried to commission some crash tests. And it turns out that as we called around to the independent crash test companies around the country, none of them wanted to do our crash test because they said, some explicitly, some not so explicitly, ""All of our business comes from car seat manufacturers. We can't risk alienating them by testing seatbelts relative to car seats.""Now, eventually, one did. Under the conditions of anonymity, they said they would be happy to do this test for us — so anonymity, and 1,500 dollars per seat that we crashed. And so, we went to Buffalo, New York, and here is the precursor to it. These are the crash test dummies, waiting for their chance to take the center stage. And then, here's how the crash test works. Here, they don't actually crash the entire car, you know — it's not worth ruining a whole car to do it. So they just have these bench seats, and they strap the car seat and the seatbelt onto it. So I just wanted you to look at this. And I think this gives you a good idea of why parents think car seats are so great. Look at the kid in the car seat. Does he not look content, ready to go, like he could survive anything? And then, if you look at the kid in back, it looks like he's already choking before the crash even happens. It's hard to believe, when you look at this, that that kid in back is going to do very well when you get in a crash. So this is going to be a crash where they're going to slam this thing forward into a wall at 30 miles an hour, and see what happens. OK?So, let me show you what happens. These are three-year-old dummies, by the way. So here — this is the car seat. Now watch two things: watch how the head goes forward, and basically hits the knees — and this is in the car seat — and watch how the car seat flies around, in the rebound, up in the air. The car seat's moving all over the place. Bear in mind there are two things about this. This is a car seat that was installed by someone who has installed 1,000 car seats, who knew exactly how to do it. And also it turned out these bench seats are the very best way to install car seats. Having a flat back makes it much easier to install them. And so this is a test that's very much rigged in favor of the car seat, OK? So, that kid in this crash fared very well.The federal standards are that you have to score below a 1,000 to be an approved car seat on this crash, in some metric of units which are not important. And this crash would have been about a 450. So this car seat was actually an above-average car seat from Consumer Reports, and did quite well. So the next one. Now, this is the kid, same crash, who is in the seatbelt. He hardly moves at all, actually, relative to the other child. The funny thing is, the cam work is terrible because they've only set it up to do the car seats, and so, they actually don't even have a way to move the camera so you can see the kid that's on the rebound. Anyway, it turns out that those two crashes, that actually the three-year-old did slightly worse. So, he gets about a 500 out of — you know, on this range — relative to a 400 and something. But still, if you just took that data from that crash to the federal government, and said, ""I have invented a new car seat. I would like you to approve it for selling,"" then they would say, ""This is a fantastic new car seat, it works great. It only got a 500, it could have gotten as high up as a 1,000."" And this seatbelt would have passed with flying colors into being approved as a car seat.So, in some sense, what this is suggesting is that it's not just that people are setting up their car seats wrong, which is putting children at risk. It's just that, fundamentally, the car seats aren't doing much. So here's the crash. So these are timed at the same time, so you can see that it takes much longer with the car seat — at rebound, it takes a lot longer — but there's just a lot less movement for child who's in the seatbelt. So, I'll show you the six-year-old crashes as well. The six-year-old is in a car seat, and it turns out that looks terrible, but that's great. That's like a 400, OK? So that kid would do fine in the crash. Nothing about that would have been problematic to the child at all. And then here's the six-year-old in the seatbelt, and in fact, they get exactly within, you know, within one or two points of the same. So really, for the six-year-old, the car seat did absolutely nothing whatsoever.That's some more evidence, so in some sense — I was criticized by a scientist, who said, ""You could never publish a study with an n of 4,"" meaning those four crashes. So I wrote him back and I said, ""What about an n of 45,004?"" Because I had the other 45,000 other real-world crashes. And I just think that it's interesting that the idea of using real-world crashes, which is very much something that economists think would be the right thing to do, is something that scientists don't actually, usually think — they would rather use a laboratory, a very imperfect science of looking at the dummies, than actually 30 years of data of what we've seen with children and with car seats.And so I think the answer to this puzzle is that there's a much better solution out there, that's gotten nobody excited because everyone is so delighted with the way car seats are presumably working. And if you think from a design perspective, about going back to square one, and say, ""I just want to protect kids in the back seat."" I don't there's anyone in this room who'd say, ""Well, the right way to start would be, let's make a great seat belt for adults. And then, let's make this really big contraption that you have to rig up to it in this daisy chain."" I mean, why not start — who's sitting in the back seat anyway except for kids? But essentially, do something like this, which I don't know exactly how much it would cost to do, but there's no reason I could see why this should be much more expensive than a regular car seat. It's just actually — you see, this is folding up — it's behind the seat. You've got a regular seat for adults, and then you fold it down, and the kid sits on top, and it's integrated. It seems to me that this can't be a very expensive solution, and it's got to work better than what we already have.So the question is, is there any hope for adoption of something like this, which would presumably save a lot of lives? And I think the answer, perhaps, lies in a story. The answer both to why has a car seat been so successful, and why this may someday be adopted or not, lies in a story that my dad told me, relating to when he was a doctor in the U.S. Air Force in England. And this is a long time ago: you were allowed to do things then you can't do today. So, my father would have patients come in who he thought were not really sick. And he had a big jar full of placebo pills that he would give them, and he'd say, ""Come back in a week, if you still feel lousy."" OK, and most of them would not come back, but some of them would come back. And when they came back, he, still convinced they were not sick, had another jar of pills. In this jar were huge horse pills. They were almost impossible to swallow. And these, to me, are the analogy for the car seats. People would look at these and say, ""Man, this thing is so big and so hard to swallow. If this doesn't make me feel better, you know, what possibly could?""And it turned out that most people wouldn't come back, because it worked. But every once in a while, there was still a patient convinced that he was sick, and he'd come back. And my dad had a third jar of pills. And the jar of pills he had, he said, were the tiniest little pills he could find, so small you could barely see them. And he would say, listen, I know I gave you that huge pill, that complicated, hard-to-swallow pill before, but now I've got one that's so potent, that is really tiny and small and almost invisible. It's almost like this thing here, which you can't even see.""And it turned out that never, in all the times my dad gave out this pill, the really tiny pill, did anyone ever come back still complaining of sickness. So, my dad always took that as evidence that this little, teeny, powerful pill had the ultimate placebo effect. And in some sense, if that's the right story, I think integrated car seats you will see, very quickly, becoming something that everyone has. The other possible conclusion is, well, maybe after coming to my father three times, getting sent home with placebos, he still felt sick, he went and found another doctor. And that's completely possible. And if that's the case, then I think we're stuck with conventional car seats for a long time to come. Thank you very much.(Applause)(Audience: I just wanted to ask you, when we wear seatbelts we don't necessarily wear them just to prevent loss of life, it's also to prevent lots of serious injury. Your data looks at fatalities. It doesn't look at serious injury. Is there any data to show that child seats are actually less effective, or just as effective as seatbelts for serious injury? Because that would prove your case.)Steven Levitt: Yeah, that's a great question. In my data, and in another data set I've looked at for New Jersey crashes, I find very small differences in injury. So in this data, it's statistically insignificant differences in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts. In the New Jersey data, which is different, because it's not just fatal crashes, but all crashes in New Jersey that are reported, it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries, but generally they're the minor injuries. Now, what's interesting, I should say this as a disclaimer, there is medical literature that is very difficult to resolve with this other data, which suggests that car seats are dramatically better.And they use a completely different methodology that involves — after the crash occurs, they get from the insurance companies the names of the people who were in the crash, and they call them on the phone, and they asked them what happened. And I really can't resolve, yet, and I'd like to work with these medical researchers to try to understand how there can be these differences, which are completely at odds with one another. But it's obviously a critical question. The question is even if — are there enough serious injuries to make these cost-effective? It's kind of tricky. Even if they're right, it's not so clear that they're so cost-effective.","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats
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"Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote, ""Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes."" And the other one wrote, ""Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet.""(Laughter)Now, there's a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet. And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. Actually, it's not really an experiment, because I know the outcome.(Laughter)But it's like an experiment. Now, before we start —(Laughter)Before we start, I need to do two things. One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano. Maybe you have this child at home. He sounds something like this.(Music)(Music ends)I see some of you recognize this child. Now, if he practices for a year and takes lessons, he's now eight and he sounds like this.(Music)(Music ends)He practices for another year and takes lessons — he's nine.(Music)(Music ends)Then he practices for another year and takes lessons — now he's 10.(Music)(Music ends)At that point, they usually give up.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this.(Music)(Music ends)Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. What actually happened was the impulses were reduced. You see, the first time, he was playing with an impulse on every note.(Music)And the second, with an impulse every other note.(Music)You can see it by looking at my head.(Laughter)The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes.(Music)The 10-year-old, on every eight notes.(Music)And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase.(Music)I don't know how we got into this position.(Laughter)I didn't say, ""I'm going to move my shoulder over, move my body."" No, the music pushed me over, which is why I call it one-buttock playing.(Music)It can be the other buttock.(Music)You know, a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing, when I was working with a young pianist. He was the president of a corporation in Ohio. I was working with this young pianist, and said, ""The trouble with you is you're a two-buttock player. You should be a one-buttock player."" I moved his body while he was playing. And suddenly, the music took off. It took flight. The audience gasped when they heard the difference. Then I got a letter from this gentleman. He said, ""I was so moved. I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company.""(Laughter)Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. There are 1,600 people, I believe. My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. You adore classical music. Your FM is always on that classical dial. You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. You can't imagine your life without classical music. That's the first group, quite small. Then there's another bigger group. The people who don't mind classical music.(Laughter)You know, you've come home from a long day, and you take a glass of wine, and you put your feet up. A little Vivaldi in the background doesn't do any harm. That's the second group. Now comes the third group: people who never listen to classical music. It's just simply not part of your life. You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport ...(Laughter)— and maybe a little bit of a march from ""Aida"" when you come into the hall. But otherwise, you never hear it. That's probably the largest group.And then there's a very small group. These are the people who think they're tone-deaf. Amazing number of people think they're tone-deaf. Actually, I hear a lot, ""My husband is tone-deaf.""(Laughter)Actually, you cannot be tone-deaf. Nobody is tone-deaf. If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your car, in a stick shift car. You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome. And the telephone. The telephone. If your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, ""Hello,"" you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. So nobody is tone-deaf.But I tell you what. It doesn't work for me to go on with this thing, with such a wide gulf between those who understand, love and are passionate about classical music, and those who have no relationship to it at all. The tone-deaf people, they're no longer here. But even between those three categories, it's too wide a gulf. So I'm not going to go on until every single person in this room, downstairs and in Aspen, and everybody else looking, will come to love and understand classical music. So that's what we're going to do.Now, you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work, if you look at my face, right? It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, ""I have a dream. Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it.""(Laughter)All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin. Some of you will know it.(Music)Do you know what I think probably happened here? When I started, you thought, ""How beautiful that sounds.""(Music)""I don't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year.""(Laughter)It's funny, isn't it? It's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head. And of course —(Applause)Of course, if the piece is long and you've had a long day, you might actually drift off. Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say, ""Wake up! It's culture!"" And then you feel even worse.(Laughter)But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you, but because of us? Did anybody think while I was playing, ""Why is he using so many impulses?"" If I'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it.(Music)(Music ends)And for the rest of your life, every time you hear classical music, you'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses.So let's see what's really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. The next note is a C. And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn't it?(Laughter)Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes.(Music)But basically, it's just a B, with four sads.(Laughter)Now, it goes down to A. Now to G. And then to F. So we have B, A, G, F. And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next?(Music)That might have been a fluke. Let's try it again.(Music)Oh, the TED choir.(Laughter)And you notice nobody is tone-deaf, right? Nobody is. You know, every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China — everybody knows: da, da, da, da — da. Everybody knows, who's expecting that E.Chopin didn't want to reach the E there, because what will have happened? It will be over, like Hamlet. Do you remember? Act One, scene three, he finds out his uncle killed his father. He keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him. And then he backs away, he goes up to him again, almost kills him. The critics sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion, so they say, ""Hamlet is a procrastinator."" Or they say, ""Hamlet has an Oedipus complex."" No, otherwise the play would be over, stupid.(Laughter)That's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet — Ophelia going mad, the play within the play, and Yorick's skull, and the gravediggers. That's in order to delay — until Act Five, he can kill him.It's the same with the Chopin. He's just about to reach the E, and he says, ""Oops, better go back up and do it again."" So he does it again. Now, he gets excited.(Music)That's excitement, don't worry about it. Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord — because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does ... Now, we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us. I tell my students, ""If you have a deceptive cadence, raise your eyebrows, and everybody will know.""(Laughter)(Applause)Right. He gets to E, but it's the wrong chord. Now, he tries E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries the E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries E again, and that doesn't work. And then finally ... There was a gentleman in the front row who went, ""Mmm.""(Laughter)It's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says, ""Aah, I'm home."" Because we all know where home is.So this is a piece which goes from away to home. I'm going to play it all the way through and you're going to follow. B, C, B, C, B, C, B — down to A, down to G, down to F. Almost goes to E, but otherwise the play would be over. He goes back up to B, he gets very excited. Goes to F-sharp. Goes to E. It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. And finally goes to E, and it's home. And what you're going to see is one-buttock playing.(Laughter)Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E.You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. What was he thinking about? Lunch? No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. This is about vision. This is about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath, all right? So now, you're going to follow the line all the way from B to E. And I've one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say.(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)Now, you may be wondering —(Applause)(Applause ends)You may be wondering why I'm clapping. Well, I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders, 12-year-olds. I did exactly what I did with you, and I explained the whole thing. At the end, they went crazy, clapping. I was clapping. They were clapping. Finally, I said, ""Why am I clapping?"" And one of them said, ""Because we were listening.""(Laughter)Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. Now, that is something. Am I sure that every single person followed that, understood it, was moved by it? Of course, I can't be sure.But I'll tell you what happened to me in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them — a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, ""You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that shopping piece ...""(Laughter)He said, ""My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. And I felt the tears streaming down my face. And it felt really good to cry for my brother."" So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody. Everybody.Now, how would you walk — my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. They say three percent of the population likes classical music. If only we could move it to four percent, our problems would be over.(Laughter)How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? If you thought, ""Three percent of the population likes classical music, if only we could move it to four percent."" How would you walk or talk? How would you be? If you thought, ""Everybody loves classical music — they just haven't found out about it yet."" See, these are totally different worlds.Now, I had an amazing experience. I was 45 years old, I'd been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD —(Laughter)But the conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. It was totally life-changing. People in my orchestra said, ""Ben, what happened?"" That's what happened. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. How do you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. You could light up a village with this guy's eyes.(Laughter)Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world.Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week, we're going back into the world. And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question, who are we being as we go back out into the world? And you know, I have a definition of success. For me, it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me.So now, I have one last thought, which is that it really makes a difference what we say — the words that come out of our mouth. I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old. And ... And her brother was eight, and the parents were lost. And she told me this, she said, ""We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?'"" The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him, because she never saw him again. He did not survive. And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. She told me this. She said, ""I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, ""I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say."" Now, can we do that? No. And we'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong. But it is a possibility to live into.Thank you.(Applause)Shining eyes.(Applause)Shining eyes.(Applause)Thank you, thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion
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"Most people don't know that when I went to high school in this country — I applied for university at a time when I was convinced I was going to be an artist and be a sculptor. And I came from a very privileged background. I was very lucky. My family was wealthy, and my father believed in one thing, and that was to give us all as much education as we wanted. And I announced I wanted to be a sculptor in Paris. And he was a clever man. He sort of said, ""Well, that's OK, but you've done very well in your math SATs."" In fact, I'd got an 800. And he thought I did very well — and I did, too — in the arts: this was my passion. And he said ""If you go to MIT,"" to which I had been given early admission, ""I will pay for every year you're at MIT, in graduate or undergraduate — as much as you want — I will pay for an equal number of years for you to live in Paris."" And I thought that was the best deal in town, so I accepted it immediately. And I decided that if I was good in art, and I was good in mathematics, I'd study architecture, which was the blending of the two.I went and told my headmaster that, at prep school. And I said to him what I was doing, that I was going to go study architecture because it was art and mathematics put together. He said to me something that just went completely over my head. He said, ""You know, I like grey suits, and I like pin-striped suits, but I don't like grey pin-striped suits."" And I thought, ""What a turkey this guy is,"" and I went off to MIT. I studied architecture, then did a second degree in architecture, and then actually quickly realized that it wasn't architecture. That really, the mixing of art and science was computers, and that that really was the place to bring both, and enjoyed a career doing that.And probably, if I were to fill out Jim Citrin's scale, I'd put 100 percent on the side of the equation where you spend time making it possible for others to be creative. And after doing this for a long time, and the Media Lab passing the baton on, I thought, ""Well, maybe it's time for me to do a project. Something that would be important, but also something that would take advantage of all of these privileges that one had."" And in the case of the Media Lab, knowing a lot of people, knowing people who were either executives or wealthy, and also not having, in my own case, a career to worry about anymore. My career, I mean, I'd done my career. Didn't have to worry about earning money. Didn't have to worry about what people thought about me. And I said, ""Boy, let's really do something that takes advantage of all these features,"" and thought that if we could address education, by leveraging the children, and bringing to the world the access of the computers, that that was really the thing we should do. Never shown this picture before, and probably going to be sued for it. It's taken at three o'clock in the morning, without the permission of the company. It's about two weeks old. There they are, folks.(Applause)If you look at the picture, you'll see they're stacked up. Those are conveyor belts that go around. This is one of the conveyor belts with the thing going by, but then you'll see the ones up above. What happens is, they burn into flash memory the software, and then test them for a few hours. But you've got to have the thing moving on the assembly line, because it's constant. So they go around in this loop, which is why you see them up there. So this was great for us because it was a real turning point. But it goes back. This picture was taken in 1982, just before the IBM PC was even announced. Seymour Papert and I were bringing computers to schools and developing nations at a time when it was way ahead of itself. But one thing we learned was that these kids can absolutely jump into it just the same way as our kids do here.And when people tell me, ""Who's going to teach the teachers to teach the kids?"" I say to myself, ""What planet do you come from?"" Okay, there's not a person in this room — I don't care how techie you are — there's not a person in this room that doesn't give their laptop or cell phone to a kid to help them debug it. OK? We all need help, even those of us who are very seasoned. This picture of Seymour — 25 years ago. Seymour made a very simple observation in 1968, and then basically presented it in 1970 — April 11 to be precise — called ""Teaching Children Thinking."" What he observed was that kids who write computer programs understand things differently, and when they debug the programs, they come the closest to learning about learning. That was very important, and in some sense, we've lost that. Kids don't program enough and boy, if there's anything I hope this brings back, it's programming to kids.It's really important. Using applications is OK, but programming is absolutely fundamental. This is being launched with three languages in it: Squeak, Logo, and a third, that I've never even seen before. The point being, this is going to be very, very intensive on the programming side. This photograph is very important because it's much later. This is in the early 2000s. My son, Dimitri — who's here, many of you know Dimitri — went to Cambodia, set up this school that we had built, just as the school connected it to the Internet. And these kids had their laptops. But it was really what spirited this, plus the influence of Joe and others. We started One Laptop per Child. This is the same village in Cambodia, just a couple of months ago. These kids are real pros. There were just 7,000 machines out there being tested by kids. Being a nonprofit is absolutely fundamental.Everybody advised me not to be a nonprofit, but they were all wrong. And the reason being a nonprofit is important is actually twofold. There are many reasons, but the two that merit the little bit of time is: one, the clarity of purpose is there. The moral purpose is clear. I can see any head of state, any executive I want, at any time, because I'm not selling laptops. OK? I have no shareholders. Whether we sell, it doesn't make any difference whatsoever. The clarity of purpose is absolutely critical. And the second is very counterintuitive — you can get the best people in the world. If you look at our professional services, including search firms, including communications, including legal services, including banking, they're all pro bono. And it's not to save money. We've got money in the bank. It's because you get the best people. You get the people who are doing it because they believe in the mission, and they're the best people.We couldn't afford to hire a CFO. We put out a job description for a CFO at zero salary, and we had a queue of people. It allows you to team up with people. The U.N.'s not going to be our partner if we're profit making. So announcing this with Kofi Annan was very important, and the U.N. allowed us to basically reach all the countries. And this was the machine we were showing before I met Yves Behar. And while this machine in some sense is silly, in retrospect, it actually served a very important purpose. That pencil-yellow crank was remembered by everybody. Everybody remembered the pencil-yellow crank. It's different. It was getting its power in a different way. It's kind of childlike. Even though this wasn't the direction we went because the crank — it really is stupid to have it on board, by the way. In spite of what some people in the press don't get it, didn't understand it, we didn't take it off because we didn't want to do — having it on the laptop itself is really not what you want. You want a separate thing, like the AC adaptor. I didn't bring one with me, but they really work much better off-board. And then, I could tell you lots about the laptop, but I decided on just four things.Just keep in mind — because there are other people, including Bill Gates, who said, ""Gee, you've got a real computer."" That computer is unlike anything you've had, and does things — there are four of them — that you don't come close to. And it's very important to be low power, and I hope that's picked up more by the industry. That the reason that you want to be below two watts is that's roughly what you can generate with your upper body. Dual-mode display — that sunlight display's fantastic. We were using it at lunch today in the sunlight, and the more sunlight the better. And that was really critical. The mesh network, it'll become commonplace. And of course, ""rugged"" goes without saying. And the reason I think design matters isn't because I wanted to go to art school.And by the way, when I graduated from MIT, I thought the worst and silliest thing to do would be to go to Paris for six years. (Laughter) So, I didn't do that. But design matters for a number of reasons. The most important being that it is the best way to make an inexpensive product. Most people make inexpensive products by taking cheap design, cheap labor, cheap components, and making a cheap laptop. And, in English, the word ""cheap"" has a double meaning, which is really appropriate, because it's cheap, in the pejorative sense, as well as inexpensive. But if you take a different approach, and you think of very large-scale integration, very advanced materials, very advanced manufacturing — so you're pouring chemicals in one end, iPods are spewing out the other — and really cool design, that's what we wanted to do.And I can race through these and save a lot of time because Yves and I obviously didn't compare notes. These are his slides, and so I don't have to talk about them. But it was really, to us, very important as a strategy. It wasn't just to kind of make it cute, because somebody — you know, good design is very important. Yves showed one of the power-generating devices. The mesh network, the reason I — and I won't go into it in great detail — but when we deliver laptops to kids in the remotest and poorest parts of the world, they're connected. There's not just laptops. And so, we have to drop in satellite dishes. We put in generators. It's a lot of stuff that goes behind these. These can talk to each other. If you're in a desert, they can talk to each other about two kilometers apart. If you're in the jungle, it's about 500 meters. So if a kid bicycles home, or walks a few miles, they're going to be off the grid, so to speak. They're not going to be near another laptop, so you have to nail these onto a tree, and sort of, get it.You don't call Verizon or Sprint. You build your own network. And that's very important, the user interface. We are launching with 18 keyboards. English is by far the minority. Latin is relatively rare, too. You just look at some of the languages. I'm willing to suspect some of you hadn't even heard of them before. Is there anybody in the room, one person, unless you work with OLPC, is there anybody in the room that can tell me what language the keyboard is that's on the screen? There's only one hand — so you get it. Yes, you're right. He's right. It's Amharic, it's Ethiopian. In Ethiopia, there's never been a keyboard. There is no keyboard standard because there's no market. And this is the big difference.Again, when you're a nonprofit, you look at children as a mission, not as a market. So we went to Ethiopia, and we helped them make a keyboard. And this will become the standard Ethiopian keyboard. So what I want to end with is sort of what we're doing to roll it out. And we changed strategy completely. I decided at the beginning — it was a pretty good thing to decide in the beginning, it's not what we're doing now — is to go to six countries. Big countries, one of them is not so big, but it's rich. Here's the six. We went to the six, and in each case the head of state said he would do it, he'd do a million. In the case of Gaddafi, he'd do 1.2 million, and that they would launch it. We thought, this is exactly the right strategy, get it out, and then the little countries could sort of piggyback on these big countries.And so I went to each of those countries at least six times, met with the head of state probably two or three times. In each case, got the ministers, went through a lot of the stuff. This was a period in my life where I was traveling 330 days per year. Not something you'd envy or want to do. In the case of Libya, it was a lot of fun meeting Gaddafi in his tent. The camel smells were unbelievable. And it was 45 degrees C. I mean, this was not what you'd call a cool experience. And former countries — I say former, because none of them really came through this summer — there was a big difference between getting a head of state to have a photo opportunity, make a press release. So we went to smaller ones. Uruguay, bless their hearts. Small country, not so rich. President said he'd do it, and guess what? He did do it. The tender had nothing in it that related to us, nothing specific about sunlight-readable, mesh-network, low-power, but just a vanilla laptop proposal. And guess what? We won it hands down. When it was announced that they were going to do every child in Uruguay, the first 100,000, boom, went to OLPC. The next day — the next day, not even 24 hours had passed — in Peru, the president of Peru said, ""We'll do 250."" And boom, a little domino effect.The president of Rwanda stepped in and said he would do it. The president of Ethiopia said he would do it. And boom, boom, boom. The president of Mongolia. And so what happens is, these things start to happen with these countries — still not enough. Add up all those countries, it didn't quite get to thing, so we said, ""Let's start a program in the United States."" So, end of August, early September, we decide to do this. We announced it near the middle, end — just when the Clinton Initiative was taking place. We thought that was a good time to announce it. Launched it on the 12 of November. We said it would be just for a short period until the 26. We've extended it until the 31. And the ""Give One, Get One"" program is really important because it got a lot of people absolutely interested.The first day it was just wild. And then we said, ""Well, let's get people to give many. Not just one, and get one, but maybe give 100, give 1,000."" And that's where you come in. And that's where I think it's very important. I don't want you all to go out and buy 400 dollars worth of laptops. Okay? Do it, but that's not going to help. Okay? If everybody in this room goes out tonight and orders one of these things for 400 dollars, whatever it is, 300 people in the room doing it — yeah, great. I want you do something else. And it's not to go out and buy 100 or 1,000, though, I invite you to do that, and 10,000 would be even better.Tell people about it! It's got to become viral, OK? Use your mailing lists. People in this room have extraordinary mailing lists. Get your friends to give one, get one. And if each one of you sends it to 300 or 400 people, that would be fantastic. I won't dwell on the pricing at all. Just to say that when you do the ""Give One, Get One,"" a lot of press is a bit about, ""They didn't make it, it's 188 dollars, it's not 100."" It will be 100 in two years. It will go below 100. We've pledged not to add features, but to bring that price down. But it was the countries that wanted it to go up, and we let them push it up for all sorts of reasons. So what you can do — I've just said it. Don't just give one, get one.I just want to end with one last one. This one is not even 24-hours old, or maybe it's 24-hours. The first kids got their laptops. They got them by ship, and I'm talking now about 7,000, 8,000 at a time went out this week. They went to Uruguay, Peru, Mexico. And it's been slow coming, and we're only making about 5,000 a week, but we hope, we hope, sometime in next year, maybe by the middle of the year, to hit a million a month. Now put that number, and a million isn't so much. It's not a big number. We're selling a billion cell phones worldwide this year. But a million a month in laptop-land is a big number. And the world production today, everybody combined, making laptops, is five million a month. So I'm standing here telling you that sometime next year, we're going to make 20 percent of the world production. And if we do that, there are going to be a lot of lucky kids out there. And we hope if you have EG two years from now, or whenever you have it again, I won't have bad breath, and I will be invited back, and will have, hopefully by then, maybe 100 million out there to children. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on
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"But anyway, this is about the evils of science, so I think it’s perfect.♫ My oh my, walking by, who’s the apple of my eye? ♫♫ Why, it's my very own Clonie. ♫♫ Oh, if I should stroll the hood, who knew I could look so good ♫♫ just talking on the phone to Clonie. ♫♫ We are pals, it's cool, 'cause we're not lonely, ♫♫ shallow gene pool is nothing to my only Clonie. ♫♫ Me and you, hustling through, holding on through thick and thin, ♫♫ just day by day, our DNA, so the Olson twins got nothing on us. ♫♫ We'll survive, side by side. Mother Nature, don’t you call her phony, she’s my Clonie. ♫♫ Was wealthy, but not healthy, had no one to dwell with me, ♫♫ so look who I got born — Clonie. ♫♫ Far from broke, bored, rich folk, we don't need no natural yolk — ♫♫ our babies come full-formed, Clonie. ♫♫ We'll be huggable, get a publicist ♫♫ and show them, be the most lovable thing since fucking Eminem. ♫♫ Oh my friend, multiply, we’re a franchise, like Walt Disney or Hannibal Lecter. ♫♫ We can tell our cancer cells are more benign than old Phil Spector. ♫♫ We’ll survive side by side, should have signed with Verve instead of Sony. ♫♫ You’re my Clonie. ♫ ""Oh Clonie, how I love you.""""Ha, I'm the only person I ever loved.""♫ Gee, that's swell. I guess you're just my fatal attraction-ie. You’re my Clonie. ♫Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nellie_mckay_sings_clonie_1
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"Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier. So when I had the chance to give the world's expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity, it was incredible. And I want to tell you that story. I first met him through the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics. It's a competition we're holding, the second X PRIZE, for the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. We have something called the Genome 100 — 100 individuals we're sequencing as part of that. Craig Venter chairs that event.And I met Professor Hawking, and he said his dream was to travel into space. And I said, ""I can't take you there, but I can take you into weightlessness into zero-g. And he said, on the spot, ""Absolutely, yes."" Well, the only way to experience zero-g on Earth is actually with parabolic flight, weightless flight. You take an airplane, you fly over the top, you're weightless for 25 seconds. Come back down, you weigh twice as much. You do it again and again. You can get eight, 10 minutes of weightlessness — how NASA's trained their astronauts for so long. We set out to do this. It took us 11 years to become operational. And we announced that we were going to fly Stephen Hawking. We had one government agency and one company aircraft operator say, you're crazy, don't do that, you're going kill the guy.(Laughter)And he wanted to go. We worked hard to get all the permissions. And six months later, we sat down at Kennedy Space Center. We had a press conference, we announced our intent to do one zero-g parabola, give him 25 seconds of zero-g. And if it went really well, we might do three parabolas. Well, we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this. And what he said, for me, was very moving. He said, ""Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster ... I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space."" We took him out to the Kennedy Space Center, up inside the NASA vehicle, into the back of the zero-g airplane.We had about 20 people who made donations — we raised $150,000 in donations for children's charities — who flew with us. A few TEDsters here. We set up a whole ER. We had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane. We were monitoring his PO2 of his blood, his heart rate, his blood pressure. We had everything all set in case of an emergency; God knows, you don't want to hurt this world-renowned expert. We took off from the shuttle landing facility, where the shuttle takes off and lands.And my partner Byron Lichtenberg and I carefully suspended him into zero-g. Once he was there, [we] let him go to experience what weightlessness was truly like. And after that first parabola, you know, the doc said everything is great. He was smiling, and we said go. So we did a second parabola.(Laughter)(Applause)And a third.(Applause)We actually floated an apple in homage to Sir Isaac Newton because Professor Hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did. And we did a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth.(Laughter)And a seventh and an eighth. And this man does not look like a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound man.(Laughter)He was so happy. We are living on a precious jewel, and it's during our lifetime that we're moving off this planet. Please join us in this epic adventure. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_on_stephen_hawking_in_zero_g
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"Some of you have heard the story before, but, in fact, there's somebody in the audience who's never heard this story in front of an audience before, so I'm a little more nervous than I normally am telling this story. I used to be a photographer for many years. In 1978, I was working for ""TIME Magazine"" and I was given a three-day assignment to photograph Amerasian children, children who had been fathered by American GIs all over Southeast Asia, and then abandoned — 40,000 children all over Asia. I had never heard the word Amerasian before. I spent a few days photographing children in different countries, and like a lot of photographers and a lot of journalists, I always hoped that when my pictures are published, they might actually have an effect on a situation, instead of just documenting it.So, I was so disturbed by what I saw and I was so unhappy with the article that ran afterwards, that I decided I would take six months off. I was 28 years old. I decided I would find six children in different countries, and actually go spend some time with the kids, and try to tell their story a little bit better than I thought I had done for Time magazine. In the course of doing the story, I was looking for children who hadn't been photographed before, and the Pearl Buck Foundation told me that they worked with a lot of Americans who were donating money to help some of these kids. And a man told me, who ran the Pearl Buck Foundation in Korea, that there was a young girl, who was 11 years old, being raised by her grandmother. And the grandmother had never let any Westerners see her. Every time any Westerners came to the village, she hid the girl. Of course, I was immediately intrigued. I saw photographs of her and I thought I wanted to go. And the guy just told me, ""This grandmother — there's no way she's ever going to let you meet this girl that's she's raising.""I took a translator with me and went to this village, found the grandmother, sat down with her. And to my astonishment, she agreed to let me photograph her granddaughter. And I was paying for this myself, so I asked the translator if it would be OK if I stayed for the week. I had a sleeping bag. The family had a small shed on the side of the house, so I said, ""Could I sleep in my sleeping bag in the evenings?"" And I just told the little girl, whose name was Eun-Sook Lee, that if I ever did anything to embarrass her — she didn't speak a word of English, although she looked very American — she could put up her hand and say, ""Stop,"" and I would stop taking pictures. Then my translator left. I couldn't speak a word of Korean. This is the first night I met Eun-Sook. Her mother was still alive. She was not raising her, her grandmother was raising her. And what struck me immediately was how in love the two of these people were. The grandmother was incredibly fond, deeply in love with this little girl. They slept on the floor at night. The way they heat their homes in Korea is to put bricks under the floors, so the heat radiates from underneath the floor. Eun-Sook was 11 years old.I had photographed, as I said, a lot of these kids. Eun-Sook was the fifth child that I found to photograph. And almost universally, amongst all the kids, they were really psychologically damaged by having been made fun of, ridiculed, picked on and been rejected. And Korea was probably the place I found to be the worst for these kids. And what struck me immediately in meeting Eun-Sook was how confident she appeared to be, how happy she seemed to be in her own skin. And remember this picture, because I'm going to show you another picture later. She looks much like her grandmother, although she looks so Western.I decided to follow her to school. This is the first morning I stayed with her. This is on the way to school. This is the morning assembly outside her school. And I noticed that she was clowning around. When the teachers would ask questions, she'd be the first person to raise her hand. Again, not at all shy or withdrawn, or anything like the other children that I'd photographed. The first one to go to the blackboard to answer questions. Getting in trouble for whispering into her best friend's ears. And one of the other things I said to her through the translator — again, this thing about saying stop — was to not pay attention to me. So she really just completely ignored me most of the time. I noticed that at recess, she was the girl who picked the other girls to be on her team. It was very obvious, from the beginning, that she was a leader. This is on the way home. And that's North Korea up along the hill. This is up along the DMZ. They would actually cover the windows every night, so that light couldn't be seen, because the South Korean government has said for years that the North Koreans may invade at any time. So the closer you were to North Korea, the more terrifying it was.Very often at school, I'd be taking pictures, and she would whisper into her girlfriends' ears, and then look at me and say, ""Stop."" And I would stand at attention, and all the girls would crack up, and it was sort of a little joke.(Laughter)The end of the week came and my translator came back, because I'd asked her to come back, so I could formally thank the grandmother and Eun-Sook. And in the course of the grandmother talking to the translator, the grandmother started crying. And I said to my translator, ""What's going on, why is she crying?"" And she spoke to the grandmother for a moment, and then she started getting tears in her eyes. And I said, ""What did I do? Why is everyone crying?"" And the translator said, ""The grandmother says that she thinks she's dying, and she wants to know if you would take Eun-Sook to America with you."" And I said, ""I'm 28 years old and I live in hotels, and I'm not married."" I mean, I had fallen in love with this girl, but you know, emotionally I was about 12 years old. If you know of photographers, the joke is it's the finest form of delayed adolescence ever invented. ""Sorry, I have to go on an assignment, I'll be back"" — and then you never come back.So I asked the translator why she thought she was dying. Can I get her to a hospital? Could I pay to get her a doctor? And she refused any help at all. So when I got outside, I gave the translator some money and said, ""Go back and see if you can do something."" And I gave the grandmother my business card. And I said, ""If you're serious, I will try to find a family for her."" And I immediately wrote a letter to my best friends in Atlanta, Georgia, who had an 11-year-old son. And my best friend had mistakenly one day said something about wishing he had another child. So my friends Gene and Gayle had not heard from me in about a year, and suddenly I was calling, saying ""I'm in Korea and I've met this extraordinary girl."" And I said, ""The grandmother thinks she's sick, but I think maybe we would have to bring the grandmother over also."" And I said, ""I'll pay for the ... "" I mean, I had this whole sort of picture. So anyway, I left. And my friends actually said they were very interested in adopting her. And I said, ""Look, I think I'll scare the grandmother to death, if I tell her that you're willing to adopt her. I want to go back and talk to her."" But I was off on assignment. I figured I'd come back in a couple of weeks and talk to the grandmother.And on Christmas Day, I was in Bangkok with a group of photographers and got a telegram — back in those days, you got telegrams — from Time magazine saying someone in Korea had died and left their child in a will to me. Did I know anything about this? Because I hadn't told them what I was doing, because I was so upset with the story they'd run. So, I went back to Korea, and I went back to Eun-Sook's village, and she was gone. And the house that I had spent time in was empty. It was incredibly cold. No one in the village would tell me where Eun-Sook was, because the grandmother had always hidden her from Westerners. And they had no idea about this request that she'd made of me. So I finally found Myung Sung, her best friend that she used to play with after school every day. And Myung Sung, under some pressure from me and the translator, gave us an address on the outside of Seoul. And I went to that address and knocked on the door, and a man answered the door. It was not a very nice area of Seoul, there were mud streets outside of it. And I knocked on the door and Eun-Sook answered the door, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she seemed to be in shock. She didn't recognize me — there was no recognition whatsoever. And this man came to the door and kind of barked something in Korean. And I said to the translator, ""What did he say?"" And she said, ""He wants to know who you are."" And I said, ""Tell him that I am a photographer."" I started explaining who I was, and he interrupted. And she said, ""He says he knows who you are, what do you want?"" I said, ""Well, tell him that I was asked by this little girl's grandmother to find a family for her."" And he said, ""I'm her uncle, she's fine, you can leave now.""So I was — The door was being slammed in my face, it's incredibly cold, and I'm trying to think, ""What would the hero do in a movie, if I was writing this as a movie script?"" So I said, ""It's really cold, I've come a very long way, do you mind if I come in for a minute? I'm freezing."" So the guy reluctantly let us in and we sat down on the floor. And as we started talking, I saw him yell something, and Eun-Sook came and brought us some food. And I had this whole mental picture of — sort of like Cinderella. I sort of had this picture of this incredibly wonderful, bright, happy little child, who now appeared to be very withdrawn, being enslaved by this family. And I was really appalled, and I couldn't figure out what to do. And the more I tried talking to him, the less friendly he was getting. So finally I said ""Look,"" — this is all through the translator, because, you know, I don't speak a word of Korean — and I said, ""Look, I'm really glad that Eun-Sook has a family to live with. I was very worried about her. I made a promise to her grandmother, your mother, that I would find a family, and I'm so happy that you're going to take care of her. But I bought an airline ticket and I'm stuck here for a week. I'm staying in a hotel downtown. Would you like to come and have lunch tomorrow? And you can practice your English."" Because he told me — I was trying to ask him questions about himself.And so I went to the hotel, and I found two older Amerasians. A girl whose mother had been a prostitute, and she was a prostitute, and a boy who'd been in and out of jail. And I said to them, ""Look, there's a little girl who has a tiny chance of getting out of here and going to America. I don't know if it's the right decision or not, but I would like you to come to lunch tomorrow and tell the uncle what it's like to walk down the street, what people say to you, what you do for a living. I want him to understand what happens if she stays here. And I could be wrong, I don't know, but I wish you would come tomorrow.""So, these two came to lunch and we got thrown out of the restaurant. They were yelling at him, it got to be really ugly. We went outside, and he was just furious. And I knew I had totally blown this thing. Here I was again, trying to figure out what to do. And he started yelling at me, and I said to the translator, ""Tell him to calm down, what is he saying?"" And she said, ""He's saying, 'Who the hell are you to walk into my house, some rich American with your cameras around your neck, accusing me of enslaving my niece? This is my niece, I love her, she's my sister's daughter. Who the hell are you to accuse me of something like this?'"" And I said, you know, ""Look, you're absolutely right. I don't pretend to understand what's going on here. All I know is, I've been photographing a lot of these children. I'm in love with your niece, I think she's an incredibly special child."" And I said, ""Look, I will fly my friends over here from the United States if you want to meet them, to see if you approve of them. I just think that — what little I know about the situation, she has very little chance here of having the kind of life that you probably would like her to have.""So, everyone told me afterwards that inviting the prospective parents over was, again, the stupidest thing I could have possibly done, because who's ever good enough for your relative? But he invited me to come to a ceremony they were having that day for her grandmother. And they actually take items of clothing and photographs, and they burn them as part of the ritual. And you can see how different she looks just in three months. This was now, I think, early February. And the pictures before were taken in September. Well, there was an American Maryknoll priest that I had met in the course of doing the story, who had 75 children living in his house. He had three women helping him take care of these kids. And so I suggested to the uncle that we go down and meet Father Keane to find out how the adoption process worked. Because I wanted him to feel like this was all being done very much above board.So, this is on the way down to the orphanage. This is Father Keane. He's just a wonderful guy. He had kids from all over Korea living there, and he would find families for these kids. This is a social worker interviewing Eun-Sook. Now, I had always thought she was completely untouched by all of this, because the grandmother, to me, appeared to be sort of the village wise woman — throughout the day, I noticed people kept coming to visit her grandmother. And I always had this mental picture that even though they may have been one of the poorer families in the village, they were one of the most respected. And I always felt that the grandmother had kind of demanded, and insisted, that the villagers treat Eun-Sook with the same respect they treated her. Eun-Sook stayed at Father Keane's, and her uncle agreed to let her stay there until the adoption went through. He actually agreed to the adoption.And I went off on assignment and came back a week later, and Father Keane said, ""I've got to talk to you about Eun-Sook."" I said, ""Oh God, now what?"" And he takes me into this room, closes the door and says, ""I have 75 children here in the orphanage, and it's total bedlam."" There's clothes, there's kids. Three adults and 75 kids — you can imagine. And he said, ""The second day she was here she made up a list of all of the names of the older kids and the younger kids. And she assigned one of the older kids to each of the younger kids. And then she set up a work detail list of who cleaned the orphanage on what day."" And he said, ""She's telling me that I'm messy and I have to clean up my room."" And he said, ""I don't know who raised her, but she's running the orphanage, and she's been here three days.""(Laughter)This was movie day that she organized where all the kids went to the movies. A lot of the kids who had been adopted wrote back to the other kids, telling them what their life was like with their new families. So it was a really big deal when the letters showed up. This is a woman who is now working at the orphanage, whose son had been adopted. Gene and Gayle started studying Korean the moment they had gotten my first letter. They really wanted to be able to welcome Eun-Sook into their family. And one of the things Father Keane told me when I came back from one of these trips — Eun-Sook had chosen the name Natasha, which I understood was from her watching a ""Rocky and Bullwinkle"" cartoon on the American Air Force station. This may be one of those myth-buster things that we'll have to clear up here, in a minute.So, my friend Gene flew over with his son, Tim. Gayle couldn't come. And they spent a lot of time huddled over a dictionary. And this was Gene showing the uncle where Atlanta was on the map, where he lived. This is the uncle signing the adoption papers. Now, we went out to dinner that night to celebrate. The uncle went back to his family and Natasha and Tim and Gene and I went out to dinner. And Gene was showing Natasha how to use a knife and fork, and then Natasha was returning the utensil lessons. We went back to our hotel room, and Gene was showing Natasha also where Atlanta was. This is the third night we were in Korea. The first night we'd gotten a room for the kids right next to us.I'd been staying in this room for about three months — it was a little 15-story Korean hotel. The second night, we didn't keep the kids' room, because we slept on the floor with all the kids at the orphanage. And the third night, we came back — we'd just gone out to dinner, where you saw the pictures — and we got to the front desk, and the guy said, ""There's no other free rooms on your floor tonight, you can put the kids five floors below you."" And Gene and I looked at each other and said, ""We don't want two 11-year-olds five floors away."" So his son said, ""I have a sleeping bag, I'll sleep on the floor."" And I said, ""I have one too."" So Tim and I slept on the floor, Natasha got one bed, Gene got the other — kids pass out, it's been very exciting for three days.We're lying in bed, and Gene and I are talking about how cool we are. We said, ""That was so great, we saved this little girl's life."" We were just like, you know, just full of ourselves. And we fall asleep — and I've been in this room for a couple of months now. And they always overheat the hotels in Korea terribly, so during the day I always left the window open. And then about midnight, they turn the heat off in the hotel. So at 1am, the whole room would be like 20 below zero, and I'd get up. I'd been doing this every night I'd been there. So, sure enough, it's one o'clock, room's freezing, I go to close the window and I hear people shouting outside, and I thought, ""Oh, the bars must have just gotten out."" I don't speak Korean, but I'm hearing these voices, and I'm not hearing anger, I'm hearing terror. So I open the window and I look out, and there's flames coming up the side of our hotel, and the hotel's on fire. So I run over to Gene and I wake him up, and I say, ""Don't freak out, I think the hotel's on fire."" And now there's smoke and flames coming by our windows — we're on the 11th floor. So the two of us were just like, ""Oh my God, oh my God.""So we're trying to get Natasha up, and we can't talk to her. You know what kids are like when they've been asleep for like an hour, it's like they took five Valiums — they're all over the place. And we can't talk to her. His son had the L.L.Bean bootlaces, and we're trying to do up his laces. So we try to get to the door, we run to the door, we open the door, and it's like walking into a blast furnace. There's people screaming, the sound of glass breaking, weird thumps. And the whole room filled with smoke in about two seconds. And Gene turns around and says, ""We're not going to make it."" And he closes the door, and the whole room is now filled with smoke. We're all choking, and there's smoke pouring through the vents, under the doors. There's people screaming. I just remember this unbelievable — just utter chaos.I remember sitting near the bed, and I had two overwhelming feelings. One was absolute terror. ""Oh, please God, I just want to wake up. This has got to be a nightmare, this can't be happening. Please, I just want to wake up."" And the other is unbelievable guilt. Here I've been playing God with my friends' lives, my friends' son, with Natasha's life, and this what you get when you try playing God, is you hurt people. I remember just being so frightened and terrified. And Gene, who's lying on the floor, says, ""We've got to soak towels."" I said, ""What?"" ""We've got to soak towels. We're going to die from the smoke."" So got towels and put them over our faces and the kids' faces. Then he said, ""Do you have gaffer's tape?"" ""What?"" ""Do you have gaffer's tape?"" I said, ""Somewhere in my Halliburton."" He says, ""We've got to stop the smoke. That's all we can do."" I mean, Gene — thank God for Gene. So we put the room service menus over the vents in the wall, we put blankets at the bottom of the door, we put the kids on the windowsill to try to get some air. And there was a new building, going up, that was being built right across the street from our hotel. And there, in the building, were photographers, waiting for people to jump. Eleven people ended up dying in the fire. Five people jumped and died, other people were killed by the smoke. And there's this loud thumping on the door after about 45 minutes in all this, and people were shouting in Korean. And I remember — Natasha didn't want us opening the door — sorry, I was trying not to open the door, because we'd spent so much time barricading the room. I didn't know who it was, I didn't know what they wanted, and Natasha could tell they were firemen trying to get us out. I remember a sort of a tussle at the door, trying to get the door open.In any case, 12 hours later — I mean, they put us in the lobby. Gene ended up using his coat, and his fist in the coat, to break open a liquor cabinet. People were lying on the floor. It was one of just the most horrifying nights. And then 12 hours later, we rented a car, as we had planned to, and drove back to Natasha's village. And we kept saying, ""Do you realize we were dying in a hotel fire, like eight hours ago?"" It's so weird how life just goes on. Natasha wanted to introduce her brother and father to all the villagers, and the day we showed up turned out to be a 60-year-old man's birthday. This guy's 60 years old. So it turned into a dual celebration, because Natasha was the first person from this village ever to go to the United States. So, these are the greenhouse tents. This is the elders teaching Gene their dances. We drank a lot of rice wine. We were both so drunk, I couldn't believe it.This is the last picture before Gene and Tim headed back. The adoption people told us it was going to take a year for the adoption to go through. Like, what could you do for a year? So I found out the name of every official on both the Korean and American side, and I photographed them, and told them how famous they were going to be when this book was done. And four months later, the adoption papers came through. This is saying goodbye to everybody at the orphanage. This is Father Keane with Natasha at the bus stop. Her great aunt at the airport. I had a wonderful deal with Cathay Pacific airlines for many years, where they gave me free passes on all their airlines in return for photography. It was like the ultimate perk. And the pilot, I actually knew — because they used to let me sit in the jump seat, to tell you how long ago this was. This is a TriStar, and so they let Natasha actually sit in the jump seat. And the pilot, Jeff Cowley, actually went back and adopted one of the other kids at the orphanage after meeting Natasha.This is 28 hours later in Atlanta. It's a very long flight. Just to make things even crazier, Gayle, Natasha's new mom, was three days away from giving birth to her own daughter. You know, if you were writing this, you'd say, ""No, we've got to write the script differently."" This is the first night showing Natasha her new cousins and uncles and aunts. Gene and Gayle know everyone in Atlanta — they're the most social couple imaginable. So, at this point, Natasha doesn't speak a word of English, other than what little Father Keane taught her. This is Kylie, her sister, who's now a doctor, on the right. This is a deal I had with Natasha, which is that when we got to Atlanta she could cut off my beard. She never liked it very much.She learned English in three months. She entered seventh grade at her own age level. Pledge of Allegiance for the first time. This is her cooking teacher. Natasha told me a lot of the kids thought she was stuck up, because they would talk to her and she wouldn't answer, and they didn't realize she didn't speak English very well. But what I noticed, again as an observer, was she was choosing who was going to be on her team, and seemed to be very popular very, very quickly. Now, remember the picture, how much she looked like her grandmother, at the beginning? People were always telling Natasha how much she looks like her mother, Gayle.(Laughter)This is a tense moment in the first football game, I think. And Kylie — I mean, it was almost like Kylie was her own child. She's being baptized. Now, a lot of parents, when they adopt, actually want to erase their children's history. And Gayle and Gene did the complete opposite. They were studying Korean; they bought Korean clothes. Gene even did a little tile work in the kitchen, which was that, ""Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl that came from the hills of Korea to live happily ever after in Atlanta.""She hates this picture — it was her first job. She bought a bright red Karmann Ghia with the money she made working at Burger King. The captain of the cheerleaders. Beauty pageant. Used to do their Christmas card every year. Gene's been restoring this car for a million years.Kodak hired Natasha to be a translator for them at the Olympics in Korea. Her future husband, Jeff, was working for Canon cameras, and met Natasha at the Olympic Village. This is her first trip back to Korea. So there's her uncle. This is her half sister. She went back to the village. That's her best friend's mother. And I always thought that was a very Annie Hall kind of outfit.(Laughter)It's just, you know, it was just so interesting, just to watch — this is her mother in the background there. This is Natasha's wedding day. Gene is looking a little older. This is Sydney, who's going to be three years old in a couple of days. And there's Evan.And Natasha, would you just come up, for a second, just maybe to say hello to everybody?(Applause)Natasha's actually never heard me tell the story. You know, we've looked at the pictures together.Natasha: I've seen pictures millions of times, but today was the first time I'm actually seeing him give the whole presentation. I started crying.Rick Smolan: There's about 40 things she's going to tell me, ""That wasn't what happened."" Natasha: I'll tell you that later.RS: Anyway, thank you, Mike and Richard, so much for letting us tell the story.Thank you, all of you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_smolan_tells_the_story_of_a_girl
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"♫ Picture yourself in a world where there's no one else, ♫♫ nobody anywhere. ♫♫ A moment ago, there were voices and faces to look upon, ♫♫ you can't see them anywhere. ♫♫ Nothing more to say ♫♫ and no one left to say it to, anyway. ♫♫ Oh, listen to what I say. ♫♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫♫ Now picture a world where the people all feel their worth. ♫♫ Children are everywhere. ♫♫ Now there is a reason for everyone's time on Earth. ♫♫ Wondering why you should care, yeah. ♫♫ Nothing more to say ♫♫ and only love can see us through, anyway. ♫♫ Oh, listen what I say, yeah. ♫♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫♫ Everybody is free to make a difference. ♫♫ You don't have to be a big celebrity ♫♫ to feel the power, the power in your soul, no. ♫♫ You don't have to be a big star on MTV ♫♫ to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see. ♫♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫♫ You can make a little difference in this world. ♫♫ I can make a little difference in this world. ♫♫ She can make a little difference in this world. ♫♫ He can make a little difference in this world. ♫♫ You can, I can, she can, he can, ♫♫ we can make a little bit of difference in this world. ♫♫ Everybody gonna make a little ♫♫ little difference, yeah. ♫♫ Talking 'bout everybody gonna make a little difference. ♫♫ Everybody gonna make a little difference in this world, ♫♫ oh yeah. ♫(Applause)Thank you so much.(Applause)This is a song that came about because I think it's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what's going on, and the wars and so forth. This song kind of came out of all of that. And I wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record, which I still stand by, but this has got something else in it. It's called ""Peace on Earth.""♫ There is no hope. ♫♫ There is no future. ♫♫ No faith in God to save the day. ♫♫ There is no reason, no understanding ♫♫ no sacred place to hide away. ♫♫ There is no earnest conversation. ♫♫ No words of wisdom from the wise. ♫♫ There is no reconciliation ♫♫ and no collective compromise. ♫♫ Peace on Earth, ♫♫ that's what we want. ♫♫ Peace on Earth, ♫♫ that's what we all say. ♫♫ Peace on Earth. ♫♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫♫ and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫♫ There is no darkness, no sunshine. ♫♫ There is no great society. ♫♫ There is no freedom without conviction. ♫♫ There is no freedom to be free. ♫♫ There is no heaven, no fire and brimstone. ♫♫ There is no brotherhood of man. ♫♫ There is no country, no one religion. ♫♫ There is no universal plan. ♫♫ Peace on Earth, ♫♫ that's what we want. ♫♫ Peace on Earth, ♫♫ that's what we all say. ♫♫ Peace on Earth. ♫♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫♫ and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫♫ The answer is ♫♫ mutual-assured destruction, ♫♫ a balance of power, ♫♫ a weapon for everyone. ♫♫ Mutual-assured destruction ♫♫ bringing peace to everyone. ♫(Trumpet sounds)(Trumpet sounds)♫ Peace on Earth, ♫♫ that's what we want. ♫♫ Peace on Earth, ♫♫ that's what we all say. ♫♫ Peace on Earth. ♫♫ There in the hallway, ♫♫ peace on Earth. ♫♫ Peace on Earth. ♫♫ Peace on Earth. ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raul_midon_plays_everybody_and_peace_on_earth
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"I don't speak English. I start speaking English, learning English, about a year ago. I speak French and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais. I'm born in the Western Congo, in an area around here, and then went to university in Kisangani. And after I finished, I went to this area, the Ituri Forest. But what I've been doing — when I was about 14, I grew in my uncle's house. And my father was a soldier, and my uncle was a fisherman and also a poacher. What I've been doing from 14 to 17 was, I was assisting them collecting ivory tusk, meat and whatever they were killing, poaching, hunting in the forest, bring it in the main city to get access to the market.But finally, I got myself involved. Around 17 to 20 years, I became, myself, a poacher. And I wanted to do it, because — I believed — to continue my studies. I wanted to go to university, but my father was poor, my uncle even. So, I did it. And for three to four years, I went to university. For three times, I applied to biomedical science, to be a doctor. I didn't succeed. I was having my inscriptions, my admission to biology. And I said, ""No way, I'm not doing it. My family's poor, my area don't have better health care. I want to be a doctor to serve them."" Three times, that means three years, and I start getting old. I say, ""Oh, no, I continue."" So, I did tropical ecology and plant botany. When I finished, I went to the Ituri Forest for my internship. It's where I really getting passion with what I'm doing right up to now — I'm standing in front of you — doing botany and wildlife conservation.That time the Ituri Forest was created as a forest reserve with some animals and also plants. And the training center there was built around the scientific Congolese staff and some American scientists also. So, the Okapi Faunal Reserve protects number — I think that is the largest number of elephants we have right now in protected areas in Congo. It has also chimpanzees. And it has been named Okapi Faunal Reserve because of this beautiful creature. That is a forest giraffe. I think you guys know it quite well. Here we have savanna giraffes, but through evolution we have this forest giraffe that lives only in Congo. It has also some beautiful primates. Thirteen species — highest diversity we can find in one single area in Africa. And it has the Ituri Forest itself — about 1,300 species of plants, so far known.I joined the Wildlife Conservation Society, working there, in 1995, but I started working with them as a student in 1991. I was appointed as a teaching assistant at my university because I accomplished with honor. But I didn't like the way — the instruction I got was very poor. And I wanted to be formed to a training center and a research center. With the end of the dictatorship regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, that most of you know, life became very, very difficult. And the work we have been doing was completely difficult to do and to achieve it.When Kabila started his movement to liberate Congo, so Mobutu soldiers started moving and retreated. So they started fleeing from the east to the west. And the Okapi Faunal Reserve is there, so there was a road from Goma, somewhere here, and coming like this. So they might go through, pass through the Okapi Faunal Reserve. Congo has five of the world's richest sites of protected area, and the Okapi Faunal Reserve is one of them. So soldier was fleeing in the Okapi Faunal Reserve. On their way, they looted everything. Torture, wars — oh, my God, you can't believe. Every person was looking his way — where to go, we don't know. And it was for us, the young, the first time really we hear the language of war, of guns. And even people who faced the rebellion of 1963, after our independence, they didn't believe what was happening. They were killing people. They were doing whatever they want because they have power. Who have been doing that? Young children. Child soldiers. You can't ask him how old he is because he has guns.But I was from the west, working in the east. I even [at] that time was not speaking Swahili. And when they came, they looted everything. You can't speak Lingala because Lingala was from Mobutu, and everyone speaking Lingala is soldier. And I was from the same area to him. All my friends said, we are leaving because we are a target. But I'm not going to the east, because I don't know Swahili. I stay. If I go, I will be killed. I can't go back to my area — it's more than 1,000 kilometers [away].I stayed after they looted everything. We have been doing research on botany, and we have a small herbarium of 4,500 sheets of plants. We cut, we dry and we packed them, we mounted them on a folder. Purpose: so that we start them for agriculture, for medicine, for whatever, and for science, for the study of the flora and the change of the forest. That is people moving around, that's even Pygmies. And this is a bright guy, hard-working person, and Pygmy. I've been working with him about 10 years. And with soldiers, they went to the forest for poaching elephants. Because he's Pygmy, he knows how to track elephants in the forest. He has been attacked by a leopard and they abandon him in the forest. They came to told me, I have to save him. And what I did, I gave him just antibiotics that we care for tuberculosis. And fortunately, I saved his life.And that was the language of the war. Everywhere there has been constant extraction of mineral, killing animals, the logging timbers and so on. And what of important things — I think all of you here have a cell phone. That mineral has killed a lot: five millions of Congolese have gone because of this Colombo-Tantalite — they call it Coltan — that they use it to make cell phones and it has been in that area, all over in Congo. Extraction, and good, big business of the war.And what I did for the first war, after we have lost everything, I have to save something, even myself, my life and life of the staff. I buried some of our new vehicle engines, I buried it to save it. And some of equipment went with them, on the top of the canopy, to save it. He's not collecting plants, he's going to save our equipment on the canopy. And with the material that's left — because they wanted to destroy it, to burn it, they didn't understand it, they didn't go to school — I packed it. And that is me, going to, hurrying to Uganda, to try to save that 4,000 material, with people carrying them on the bikes, bicycles. And after that, we succeeded. I housed that 4,000 material at the herbarium of Makerere University. And after the war, I have been able to bring it back home, so that we continue our studies.The second war came while we didn't expect it. With friends, we had been sitting and watching match football, and having some good music with WorldSpace radio, when it started, I think. So, it was so bad. We heard that now from the east again the war started, and it's going fast. This time I think Kabila will go in place of, as he did with Mobutu. And the reserve was a target to the rebels. Three different movements and two militia acting in the same area and competing for natural resources. And there was no way to work. They destroy everything. Poaching — oh, no way. And that's the powerful men. We have to meet and to talk to them. What's the regulation of the reserve and what is the regulation of the parks? And they can't do what they are doing. So we went to meet them. That is Coltan extraction, gold mining.So, we started talking with them, convincing them that we are in a protected area. There are regulations that it's prohibited to do logging, mining and poaching, specifically. But they said, ""You guys, you think that soldiers who are dying are not important, and your animals you are protecting are most important. We don't think so. We have to do it, because to let our movement advance."" I say, ""No way, you are not going to do it here."" We started talking with them and I was negotiating. Tried to protect our equipment, tried to protect our staff and the villages of about 1,500 people. And we continued.But I was doing that, negotiating with them. Sometimes we are having meeting and they are talking with Jean-Pierre Bemba, with Mbusa Nyamwisi, with Kabila, and I'm there. Sometimes, they talk to my own language, that is, Lingala. I hear it and what strategy they are doing, what they are planning. Sometimes, they are having a helicopter to supply them with ammunition and so on. They used me to carry that, and I was doing counting, what comes from where, and where, and where. I had only this equipment — my satellite phone, my computer and a plastic solar panel — that I hide it in the forest. And every time, daily, after we have meeting, what compromise we have, whatever, I go, I write a short email, send it. I don't know how many people I had on my address. I sent the message: what is going about the progress of the war and what they are planning to do. They started suspecting that what we do on the morning, and the afternoon, it's on the news, BBC, RFI. (Laughter) Something might be going on. And one day, we went for a meeting. (Applause) Sorry.One day, we went to meet the Chief Commander. He had the same iridium cell phone like me. And he asked me, ""Do you know how to use this?"" I said, ""I have never seen it. (Laughter) I don't know."" And I had mine on my pocket. So, it was a chance that they trusted me a lot. They didn't — they was not looking on me. So I was scared. And when we finished the meeting, I went to return it in the forest. And I was sending news, doing whatever, reporting daily to the U.N., to UNESCO, to our institution in New York, what have been going. And for that, they have been having big pressure to leave, to free the area. Because there was no way — whatever they do, it's known the same time.During the first two rebellions, they killed all animals in the zoo. We have a zoo of 14 Okapis, and one of them was pregnant. And during the war, after a week of heavy war, fighting in the area, we succeeded: we had the first Okapi. This is the only trouser and shirt remind me of this. This is not local population, this is rebels. They are now happy sending the news that they have protected the Okapi with the war, because we sent the news that they are killing and poaching everywhere. After a week, we celebrated the birthday of that Okapi, they killed an elephant, just 50 meters to the area where the zoo, where Okapi was born. And I was mad. I oppose it — that they are now going to dissect it, until I do my report and then I see the Chief Commander. And I succeeded. The elephant just decayed and they just got the tusks.What we are doing after that — that was the situation of the war — we have to rebuild. I had some money. I was paid 150 dollars. I devoted half of it to rebuild the herbarium, because we didn't have good infrastructure to start plants. Wildlife Conservation Society more dealing with plants. I started this with 70 dollars, and start fundraising money to where I've been going. I had opportunity to go all over, where herbarium for my African material is. And they supported me a bit, and I built this. Now, it's doing work to train young Congolese.And also, what one of the speciality we are doing, my design is tracking the global warming effect on biodiversity, and what the impacts of the Ituri Forest is playing to uptake carbon. This is one of the studies we are doing on a 40-hectare plot, where we have tagged trees and lianas from one centimeters, and we are tracking them. We have now data of about 15 years, to see how that forest is contributing to the carbon reductions. And that is — I think it's difficult for me. This is a very embarrassing talk, I know. I don't know where to start, where to finish it.When I was thinking to come here, what best title I wanted to say to my talk, I didn't find this. But now I think that I would have titled it, ""The Language of Guns."" Where are you people? Now we are talking about reconstitution, rebuild Africa. But is gun industries a tool to rebuild, or is it a game? I think we see the war like a game — like soccer, football. Everybody is happy, but see what it's doing, see what is going in Darfur. Now we say, oh, my God. See what the wars in Rwanda. That's because of the language of guns. I don't think that someone may blame Google, because it's doing the right things, even if people like Al-Qaeda are using Google to connect between them. But it's serving millions for the best. But what is doing with gun industries? Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you, thank you. Just wait over there. It's an amazing story. I suspect a lot of people here have the same question I have. How can we help you?Corneille Ewango: That's really embarrassing questions. I think that now I feel nervous. And I think, helping us, people are acting sometimes by ignorance. I did it myself. If I know when I was young, that [by] killing an elephant, I'm destroying biodiversity, I would not have done it. Many, many of you have seen the talents of Africans, but there are few who are going to school. Many are dying because of all those kind of pandemics, HIV, malaria, poverty, not going to school. What you can assist us, it's by building capacities. How many have got opportunity like me to go to U.S., do a master's? And go — now, I'm in the Netherlands to do a Ph.D. But many of them are just here, because they don't have money. And they can't go even to university. They can't even attain the bachelor's degree. Building capacities for the young generation is going to make a better generation and a better future tomorrow for Africa.CA: Thank you, thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/corneille_ewango_is_a_hero_of_the_congo_forest
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"I'm going to talk about a technology that we're developing at Oxford now, that we think is going to change the way that computer games and Hollywood movies are being made. That technology is simulating humans. It's simulated humans with a simulated body and a simulated nervous system to control that body. Now, before I talk more about that technology, let's have a quick look at what human characters look like at the moment in computer games. This is a clip from a game called ""Grand Theft Auto 3."" We already saw that briefly yesterday. And what you can see is — it is actually a very good game. It's one of the most successful games of all time. But what you'll see is that all the animations in this game are very repetitive. They pretty much look the same. I've made him run into a wall here, over and over again. And you can see he looks always the same. The reason for that is that these characters are actually not real characters. They are a graphical visualization of a character.To produce these animations, an animator at a studio has to anticipate what's going to happen in the actual game, and then has to animate that particular sequence. So, he or she sits down, animates it, and tries to anticipate what's going to happen, and then these particular animations are just played back at appropriate times in the computer game. Now, the result of that is that you can't have real interactivity. All you have is animations that are played back at more or less the appropriate times. It also means that games aren't really going to be as surprising as they could be, because you only get out of it, at least in terms of the character, what you actually put into it. There's no real emergence there.And thirdly, as I said, most of the animations are very repetitive because of that. Now, the only way to get around that is to actually simulate the human body and to simulate that bit of the nervous system of the brain that controls that body. And maybe, if I could have you for a quick demonstration to show what the difference is — because, I mean, it's very, very trivial. If I push Chris a bit, like this, for example, he'll react to it. If I push him from a different angle, he'll react to it differently, and that's because he has a physical body, and because he has the motor skills to control that body. It's a very trivial thing. It's not something you get in computer games at the moment, at all. Thank you very much. Chris Anderson: That's it?Torsten Reil: That's it, yes. So, that's what we're trying to simulate — not Chris specifically, I should say, but humans in general. Now, we started working on this a while ago at Oxford University, and we tried to start very simply. What we tried to do was teach a stick figure how to walk. That stick figure is physically stimulated. You can see it here on the screen. So, it's subject to gravity, has joints, etc. If you just run the simulation, it will just collapse, like this. The tricky bit is now to put an AI controller in it that actually makes it work. And for that, we use the neural network, which we based on that part of the nervous system that we have in our spine that controls walking in humans. It's called the central pattern generator. So, we simulated that as well, and then the really tricky bit is to teach that network how to walk. For that we used artificial evolution — genetic algorithms.We heard about those already yesterday, and I suppose that most of you are familiar with that already. But, just briefly, the concept is that you create a large number of different individuals — neural networks, in this case — all of which are random at the beginning. You hook these up — in this case, to the virtual muscles of that two-legged creature here — and hope that it does something interesting. At the beginning, they're all going to be very boring. Most of them won't move at all, but some of them might make a tiny step. Those are then selected by the algorithm, reproduced with mutation and recombinations to introduce sex as well. And you repeat that process over and over again, until you have something that walks — in this case, in a straight line, like this. So that was the idea behind this. When we started this, I set up the simulation one evening. It took about three to four hours to run the simulation. I got up the next morning, went to the computer and looked at the results, and was hoping for something that walked in a straight line, like I've just demonstrated, and this is what I got instead.(Laughter)So, it was back to the drawing board for us. We did get it to work eventually, after tweaking a bit here and there. And this is an example of a successful evolutionary run. So, what you'll see in a moment is a very simple biped that's learning how to walk using artificial evolution. At the beginning, it can't walk at all, but it will get better and better over time. So, this is the one that can't walk at all.(Laughter)Now, after five generations of applying evolutionary process, the genetic algorithm is getting a tiny bit better.(Laughter)Generation 10 and it'll take a few steps more — still not quite there. But now, after generation 20, it actually walks in a straight line without falling over. That was the real breakthrough for us. It was, academically, quite a challenging project, and once we had reached that stage, we were quite confident that we could try and do other things as well with this approach — actually simulating the body and simulating that part of the nervous system that controls it. Now, at this stage, it also became clear that this could be very exciting for things like computer games or online worlds. What you see here is the character standing there, and there's an obstacle that we put in its way. And what you see is, it's going to fall over the obstacle. Now, the interesting bit is, if I move the obstacle a tiny bit to the right, which is what I'm doing now, here, it will fall over it in a completely different way. And again, if you move the obstacle a tiny bit, it'll again fall differently.(Laughter)Now, what you see, by the way, at the top there, are some of the neural activations being fed into the virtual muscles. Okay. That's the video. Thanks. Now, this might look kind of trivial, but it's actually very important because this is not something you get at the moment in any interactive or any virtual worlds. Now, at this stage, we decided to start a company and move this further, because obviously this was just a very simple, blocky biped. What we really wanted was a full human body. So we started the company. We hired a team of physicists, software engineers and biologists to work on this, and the first thing we had to work on was to create the human body, basically. It's got to be relatively fast, so you can run it on a normal machine, but it's got to be accurate enough, so it looks good enough, basically.So we put quite a bit of biomechanical knowledge into this thing, and tried to make it as realistic as possible. What you see here on the screen right now is a very simple visualization of that body. I should add that it's very simple to add things like hair, clothes, etc., but what we've done here is use a very simple visualization, so you can concentrate on the movement. Now, what I'm going to do right now, in a moment, is just push this character a tiny bit and we'll see what happens. Nothing really interesting, basically. It falls over, but it falls over like a rag doll, basically. The reason for that is that there's no intelligence in it. It becomes interesting when you put artificial intelligence into it. So, this character now has motor skills in the upper body — nothing in the legs yet, in this particular one. But what it will do — I'm going to push it again. It will realize autonomously that it's being pushed. It's going to stick out its hands. It's going to turn around into the fall, and try and catch the fall. So that's what you see here.Now, it gets really interesting if you then add the AI for the lower part of the body as well. So here, we've got the same character. I'm going to push it a bit harder now, harder than I just pushed Chris. But what you'll see is — it's going to receive a push now from the left. What you see is it takes steps backwards, it tries to counter-balance, it tries to look at the place where it thinks it's going to land. I'll show you this again. And then, finally hits the floor. Now, this becomes really exciting when you push that character in different directions, again, just as I've done. That's something that you cannot do right now. At the moment, you only have empty computer graphics in games. What this is now is a real simulation. That's what I want to show you now.So, here's the same character with the same behavior I've just shown you, but now I'm just going to push it from different directions. First, starting with a push from the right. This is all slow motion, by the way, so we can see what's going on. Now, the angle will have changed a tiny bit, so you can see that the reaction is different. Again, a push, now this time from the front. And you see it falls differently. And now from the left — and it falls differently. That was really exciting for us to see that. That was the first time we've seen that. This is the first time the public sees this as well, because we have been in stealth mode. I haven't shown this to anybody yet. Now, just a fun thing: what happens if you put that character — this is now a wooden version of it, but it's got the same AI in it — but if you put that character on a slippery surface, like ice. We just did that for a laugh, just to see what happens.(Laughter)And this is what happens.(Laughter)(Applause)It's nothing we had to do about this. We just took this character that I just talked about, put it on a slippery surface, and this is what you get out of it. And that's a really fascinating thing about this approach. Now, when we went to film studios and games developers and showed them that technology, we got a very good response. And what they said was, the first thing they need immediately is virtual stuntmen. Because stunts are obviously very dangerous, they're very expensive, and there are a lot of stunt scenes that you cannot do, obviously, because you can't really allow the stuntman to be seriously hurt. So, they wanted to have a digital version of a stuntman and that's what we've been working on for the past few months. And that's our first product that we're going to release in a couple of weeks. So, here are just a few very simple scenes of the guy just being kicked. That's what people want. That's what we're giving them.(Laughter)You can see, it's always reacting. This is not a dead body. This is a body who basically, in this particular case, feels the force and tries to protect its head. Only, I think it's quite a big blow again. You feel kind of sorry for that thing, and we've seen it so many times now that we don't really care any more.(Laughter)There are much worse videos than this, by the way, which I have taken out, but ... Now, here's another one. What people wanted as a behavior was to have an explosion, a strong force applied to the character, and have the character react to it in midair. So that you don't have a character that looks limp, but actually a character that you can use in an action film straight away, that looks kind of alive in midair as well. So this character is going to be hit by a force, it's going to realize it's in the air, and it's going to try and, well, stick out its arm in the direction where it's landing. That's one angle; here's another angle. We now think that the realism we're achieving with this is good enough to be used in films.And let's just have a look at a slightly different visualization. This is something I just got last night from an animation studio in London, who are using our software and experimenting with it right now. So this is exactly the same behavior that you saw, but in a slightly better rendered version. So if you look at the character carefully, you see there are lots of body movements going on, none of which you have to animate like in the old days. Animators had to actually animate them. This is all happening automatically in the simulation. This is a slightly different angle, and again a slow motion version of this. This is incredibly quick. This is happening in real time. You can run this simulation in real time, in front of your eyes, change it, if you want to, and you get the animation straight out of it. At the moment, doing something like this by hand would take you probably a couple of days.This is another behavior they requested. I'm not quite sure why, but we've done it anyway. It's a very simple behavior that shows you the power of this approach. In this case, the character's hands are fixed to a particular point in space, and all we've told the character to do is to struggle. And it looks organic. It looks realistic. You feel kind of sorry for the guy. It's even worse — and that is another video I just got last night — if you render that a bit more realistically.Now, I'm showing this to you just to show you how organic it actually can feel, how realistic it can look. And this is all a physical simulation of the body, using AI to drive virtual muscles in that body. Now, one thing which we did for a laugh was to create a slightly more complex stunt scene, and one of the most famous stunts is the one where James Bond jumps off a dam in Switzerland and then is caught by a bungee. Got a very short clip here.Yes, you can just about see it here. In this case, they were using a real stunt man. It was a very dangerous stunt. It was just voted, I think in the Sunday Times, as one of the most impressive stunts. Now, we've just tried and — looked at our character and asked ourselves, ""Can we do that ourselves as well?"" Can we use the physical simulation of the character, use artificial intelligence, put that artificial intelligence into the character, drive virtual muscles, simulate the way he jumps off the dam, and then skydive afterwards, and have him caught by a bungee afterwards? We did that. It took about altogether just two hours, pretty much, to create the simulation. And that's what it looks like, here. Now, this could do with a bit more work. It's still very early stages, and we pretty much just did this for a laugh, just to see what we'd get out of it. But what we found over the past few months is that this approach — that we're pretty much standard upon — is incredibly powerful. We are ourselves surprised what you actually get out of the simulations. There's very often very surprising behavior that you didn't predict before.There's so many things we can do with this right now. The first thing, as I said, is going to be virtual stuntmen. Several studios are using this software now to produce virtual stuntmen, and they're going to hit the screen quite soon, actually, for some major productions. The second thing is video games. With this technology, video games will look different and they will feel very different. For the first time, you'll have actors that really feel very interactive, that have real bodies that really react. I think that's going to be incredibly exciting. Probably starting with sports games, which are going to become much more interactive. But I particularly am really excited about using this technology in online worlds, like there, for example, that Tom Melcher has shown us. The degree of interactivity you're going to get is totally different, I think, from what you're getting right now.A third thing we are looking at and very interested in is simulation. We've been approached by several simulation companies, but one project we're particularly excited about, which we're starting next month, is to use our technology — and in particular, the walking technology — to help aid surgeons who work on children with cerebral palsy, to predict the outcome of operations on these children. As you probably know, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome of an operation is if you try and correct the gait.The classic quote is, I think, it's unpredictable at best, is what people think right now, is the outcome. Now, what we want to do with our software is allow our surgeons to have a tool. We're going to simulate the gait of a particular child and the surgeon can then work on that simulation and try out different ways to improve that gait, before he actually commits to an actual surgery. That's one project we're particularly excited about, and that's going to start next month. Just finally, this is only just the beginning. We can only do several behaviors right now. The AI isn't good enough to simulate a full human body. The body yes, but not all the motor skills that we have. And, I think, we're only there if we can have something like ballet dancing. Right now, we don't have that but I'm very sure that we will be able to do that at some stage.We do have one unintentional dancer actually, the last thing I'm going to show you. This was an AI contour that was produced and evolved — half-evolved, I should say — to produce balance, basically. So, you kick the guy and the guy's supposed to counter-balance. That's what we thought was going to come out of this. But this is what emerged out of it, in the end.(Music)Bizarrely, this thing doesn't have a head. I'm not quite sure why. So, this was not something we actually put in there. He just started to create that dance himself. He's actually a better dancer than I am, I have to say. And what you see after a while — I think he even goes into a climax right at the end. And I think — there you go.(Laughter)So, that all happened automatically. We didn't put that in there. That's just the simulation creating this itself, basically. So it's just —(Applause)Thanks. Not quite John Travolta yet, but we're working on that as well, so thanks very much for your time. Thanks.(Applause)CA: Incredible. That was really incredible.TR: Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/torsten_reil_studies_biology_to_make_animation
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"I had a fire nine days ago. My archive: 175 films, my 16-millimeter negative, all my books, my dad's books, my photographs. I'd collected — I was a collector, major, big-time. It's gone. I just looked at it, and I didn't know what to do. I mean, this was — was I my things? I always live in the present — I love the present.I cherish the future. And I was taught some strange thing as a kid, like, you've got to make something good out of something bad. You've got to make something good out of something bad. This was bad! Man, I was — I cough. I was sick. That's my camera lens. The first one — the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago. That's my feature film. ""King, Murray"" won Cannes Film Festival 1970 — the only print I had. That's my papers.That was in minutes — 20 minutes. Epiphany hit me. Something hit me. ""You've got to make something good out of something bad,"" I started to say to my friends, neighbors, my sister. By the way, that's ""Sputnik."" I ran it last year. ""Sputnik"" was downtown, the negative. It wasn't touched. These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film, which opens in New York in two weeks downtown. I called my sister. I called my neighbors. I said, ""Come dig."" That's me at my desk. That was a desk took 40-some years to build. You know — all the stuff. That's my daughter, Jean. She came. She's a nurse in San Francisco.""Dig it up,"" I said. ""Pieces. I want pieces. Bits and pieces."" I came up with this idea: a life of bits and pieces, which I'm just starting to work on — my next project. That's my sister. She took care of pictures, because I was a big collector of snapshot photography that I believed said a lot. And those are some of the pictures that — something was good about the burnt pictures. I didn't know. I looked at that — I said, ""Wow, is that better than the —"" That's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle. I made that movie for television. It's the only copy I had. Pieces of it. Idea about women.So I started to say, ""Hey, man, you are too much! You could cry about this."" I really didn't. I just instead said, ""I'm going to make something out of it, and maybe next year ... "" And I appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who've already given me so much solace, and just say to TEDsters: I'm proud of me. That I take something bad, I turn it, and I'm going to make something good out of this, all these pieces. That's Arthur Leipzig's original photograph I loved. I was a big record collector — the records didn't make it. Boy, I tell you, film burns. Film burns. I mean, this was 16-millimeter safety film. The negatives are gone.That's my father's letter to me, telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20. That's my daughter and me. She's still there. She's there this morning, actually. That's my house. My family's living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley. That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I did. My children, Davey and Henry. My son, Davey, in the hotel two nights ago.So, my message to you folks, from my three minutes, is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you. I will be back. I love being at TED. I came to live it, and I am living it. That's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz, in Bonny Doon, just 35 miles from here. Thank you everybody.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_hoffman_on_losing_everything
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"How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is, if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. You found something. It can be private or public. It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. But you get these resources together. You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group.More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor — and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination — there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system, without regard to institutional models. So, that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes.So, I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other, and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? So, in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade; people come from all over the city; people get all dressed up. Some people get less dressed up. Young and old, dancing in the streets. Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. I didn't take them. How did I get them? And the answer is: I got them from Flickr.Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. Tagging was pioneered by Delicious and Joshua Schachter. Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. So, I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged ""Mermaid Parade."" There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow.Now, what hard problem is being solved here? And it's — in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. How do we get those people together to contribute that work? The classic answer is to form an institution, right? To draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals. And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route.First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? No good just hiring employees, you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. Right? You have to have economic structure. You have to have legal structure. You have to have physical structure. And that creates additional costs. Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. You can't hire everyone in a company, right? You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. You have to exclude some people. And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. We've gone from people with photos to photographers. Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade, or whatever else they're sent out to photograph.When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals, rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome, without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems.Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, ""I'll call you when I get there."" ""Call me when you get off work."" Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be, or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well-enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do.So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. These are photos on Flickr tagged ""Iraq."" And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. There are more pictures. There are more photographers. It's taken over a wider geographic area. The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important — because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters.What matters is this. This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos, and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each.This is called a power-law distribution. It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like — this is often what you get. Right? The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. So, we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. So, the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail.And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily: if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken — just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. If you go down to five percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. If you go down to one percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all.This is the math underlying the 80/20 rule. Right? Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources — this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires — great, that's what I'll do. The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people. Build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount.So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled ""Iraq."" And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, ""Bad Day at Work."" Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or no. The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee?And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution-as-enabler world. You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. But when you're down here, where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle.Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation. And the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n. Right? So, when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages — (Laughter) — of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase.Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. There's a wonderful, small example going on right now. In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. You can follow this in the Guardian. It's actually quite entertaining.The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? Right? How do you capture that? And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, ""Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing."" Right? You can hear this distribution under that complaint. And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. (Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter)The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? What if it was a security patch? What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some, [but] several? Do you want that patch, right? The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing,of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers — classic affinity groups. The inventors don't know what the invention is. Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? Stay-at-home moms. Right? In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods. So they're reinventing it, using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys — pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy.I think this is a revolution. I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. And I use that word advisedly. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. It's a whole new way of doing things, which includes new downsides. In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources — she's a reporter for the New York Times — her sources, in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case. And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. The shield laws are our laws — pretty much a patchwork of state laws — that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of Web logging. Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. It has de-professionalized publishing. Want to publish globally anything you think today? It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. And so the shield law, as much as we want it — we want a professional class of truth-tellers — it is becoming increasingly incoherent, because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. So as much as we want the shield laws, the background — the institution to which they were attached — is becoming incoherent.Here's another example. Pro-ana, the pro-ana groups. These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on Web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. They post pictures of thin models, which they call ""thinspiration."" They have little slogans, like ""Salvation through Starvation."" They even have Lance Armstrong-style bracelets, these red bracelets, which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass.We're used to support groups being beneficial. We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kinds of goals.So, there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs, and taking advantage of these. This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week.Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. (Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state.Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives — like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive — the more leverage they'll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific.And so the point here is not, ""This is wonderful,"" or ""We're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework."" It's going to be much more complicated than that. But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially: we might as well get good at it. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration
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"♫ Feminists don't have a sense of humor. ♫♫ Feminists just want to be alone — boo hoo, hoo, hoo. ♫♫ Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors. ♫♫ They have a tumor on their funny bone. ♫♫ They say child molestation isn't funny — ha, ha, ha, ha. ♫♫ Rape and degradation's just a crime — lighten up, ladies. ♫♫ Rampant prostitution's sex for money — what’s wrong with that? ♫♫ Can't these chicks do anything but whine? ♫♫ Dance break! Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫♫ Woo-hoo! ♫♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da — ♫♫ yeah, take it off. ♫♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, dum. ♫♫ They say cheap objectification isn’t witty — it’s hot! ♫♫ Equal work and wages worth the fight — ♫♫ sing us a new one. ♫♫ On-demand abortion every city — OK, but no gun control. ♫♫ Won’t these women ever get a life? ♫♫ Feminists don’t have a sense of humor — poor Hillary. ♫♫ Feminists and vegetarians — make mine a Big Mac. ♫♫ Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors. ♫♫ They're far too sensitive to ever be a ham, ♫♫ that's why these feminists just need to find a man. ♫♫ Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. ♫I’m Dennis Kucinich and I approved this message. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.I asked my mother, you know, should I say anything in support of anyone? And she said, ""Oh no! Just dis everybody, except Ralph Nader.""(Laughter)♫ I could show the world how to smile, ♫♫ I could be glad all of the while. ♫♫ I could turn the gray skies to blue, if I had you. ♫♫ I could leave the old days behind, ♫♫ leave all my pals, I’d never mind. ♫♫ I could start my life all anew, if I had you. ♫♫ I could climb the snow-capped mountains, ♫♫ sail the mighty ocean wide. ♫♫ I could cross the burning desert, if I had you by my side. ♫♫ I could be a king, dear, uncrowned, humble or poor, rich or renowned. ♫♫ There is nothing I couldn’t do, if I had you. ♫Thank you. Well, thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nellie_mckay_sings_feminists_and_if_i_had_you
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"How will we be remembered in 200 years? I happen to live in a little town, Princeton, in New Jersey, which every year celebrates the great event in Princeton history: the Battle of Princeton, which was, in fact, a very important battle. It was the first battle that George Washington won, in fact, and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence. It happened 225 years ago. It was actually a terrible disaster for Princeton. The town was burned down; it was in the middle of winter, and it was a very, very severe winter. And about a quarter of all the people in Princeton died that winter from hunger and cold, but nobody remembers that. What they remember is, of course, the great triumph, that the Brits were beaten, and we won, and that the country was born. And so I agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered. And that's what we're going through at this time.I wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology, because I think I know very little about that — I'm not a biologist — so everything I know about it can be said in one minute. (Laughter) What I'm saying is that we should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry, that what really turned computers into a great success, in the world as a whole, is toys. As soon as computers became toys, when kids could come home and play with them, then the industry really took off. And that has to happen with biotech.There's a huge — (Laughter) (Applause) — there's a huge community of people in the world who are practical biologists, who are dog breeders, pigeon breeders, orchid breeders, rose breeders, people who handle biology with their hands, and who are dedicated to producing beautiful things, beautiful creatures, plants, animals, pets. These people will be empowered with biotech, and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology. That will blow away a lot of the opposition. When people have this technology in their hands, you have a do-it-yourself biotech kit, grow your own — grow your dog, grow your own cat. (Laughter) (Applause) Just buy the software, you design it. I won't say anymore, you can take it on from there. It's going to happen, and I think it has to happen before the technology becomes natural, becomes part of the human condition, something that everybody's familiar with and everybody accepts.So, let's leave that aside. I want to talk about something quite different, which is what I know about, and that is astronomy. And I'm interested in searching for life in the universe. And it's open to us to introduce a new way of doing that, and that's what I'll talk about for 10 minutes, or whatever the time remains. The important fact is, that most of the real estate that's accessible to us — I'm not talking about the stars, I'm talking about the solar system, the stuff that's within reach for spacecraft and within reach of our earthbound telescopes — most of the real estate is very cold and very far from the Sun.If you look at the solar system, as we know it today, it has a few planets close to the Sun. That's where we live. It has a fairly substantial number of asteroids between the orbit of the Earth out through — to the orbit of Jupiter. The asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate, but not very large. And it's not very promising for life, since most of it consists of rock and metal, mostly rock. It's not only cold, but very dry. So the asteroids we don't have much hope for.There stand some interesting places a little further out: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Particularly, there's a place called Europa, which is — Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter, where we see a very level ice surface, which looks as if it's floating on top of an ocean. So, we believe that on Europa there is, in fact, a deep ocean. And that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore. Ocean — probably the most likely place for life to originate, just as it originated on the Earth. So we would love to explore Europa, to go down through the ice, find out who is swimming around in the ocean, whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters — whatever there may be that's exciting —- or cephalopods. But that's hard to do. Unfortunately, the ice is thick. We don't know just how thick it is, probably miles thick, so it's very expensive and very difficult to go down there — send down your submarine or whatever it is — and explore. That's something we don't yet know how to do. There are plans to do it, but it's hard.Go out a bit further, you'll find that beyond the orbit of Neptune, way out, far from the Sun, that's where the real estate really begins. You'll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which, in what we call the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud — these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the Sun. Mostly, they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system, but they are biologically very interesting indeed, because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals, which are just the right ones for developing life. So if life could be established out there, it would have all the essentials — chemistry and sunlight — everything that's needed.So, what I'm proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life, rather than on Mars, although Mars is, of course, also a very promising and interesting place. But we can look outside, very cheaply and in a simple fashion. And that's what I'm going to talk about. There is a — imagine that life originated on Europa, and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years. It's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface, just as it did on the Earth. Staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for 2 billion years, finally came out onto the land. And then of course it had great — much greater freedom, and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean. And the step from the ocean to the land was not easy, but it happened.Now, if life had originated on Europa in the ocean, it could also have moved out onto the surface. There wouldn't have been any air there — it's a vacuum. It is out in the cold, but it still could have come. You can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice, growing on the surface. What would they need in order to grow on the surface? They'd need, first of all, to have a thick skin to protect themselves from losing water through the skin. So they would have to have something like a reptilian skin. But better — what is more important is that they would have to concentrate sunlight. The sunlight in Jupiter, on the satellites of Jupiter, is 25 times fainter than it is here, since Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun. So they would have to have — these creatures, which I call sunflowers, which I imagine living on the surface of Europa, would have to have either lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight, so they could keep themselves warm on the surface. Otherwise, they would be at a temperature of minus 150, which is certainly not favorable for developing life, at least of the kind we know. But if they just simply could grow, like leaves, little lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight, then they could keep warm on the surface. They could enjoy all the benefits of the sunlight and have roots going down into the ocean; life then could flourish much more. So, why not look? Of course, it's not very likely that there's life on the surface of Europa. None of these things is likely, but my, my philosophy is, look for what's detectable, not for what's probable.There's a long history in astronomy of unlikely things turning out to be there. And I mean, the finest example of that was radio astronomy as a whole. This was — originally, when radio astronomy began, Mr. Jansky, at the Bell labs, detected radio waves coming from the sky. And the regular astronomers were scornful about this. They said, ""It's all right, you can detect radio waves from the Sun, but the Sun is the only object in the universe that's close enough and bright enough actually to be detectable. You can easily calculate that radio waves from the Sun are fairly faint, and everything else in the universe is millions of times further away, so it certainly will not be detectable. So there's no point in looking."" And that, of course, that set back the progress of radio astronomy by about 20 years. Since there was nothing there, you might as well not look. Well, of course, as soon as anybody did look, which was after about 20 years, when radio astronomy really took off. Because it turned out the universe is absolutely full of all kinds of wonderful things radiating in the radio spectrum, much brighter than the Sun. So, the same thing could be true for this kind of life, which I'm talking about, on cold objects: that it could in fact be very abundant all over the universe, and it's not been detected just because we haven't taken the trouble to look.So, the last thing I want to talk about is how to detect it. There is something called pit lamping. That's the phrase which I learned from my son George, who is there in the audience. You take — that's a Canadian expression. If you happen to want to hunt animals at night, you take a miner's lamp, which is a pit lamp. You strap it onto your forehead, so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal. So, if you go out at night, you shine a flashlight, the animals are bright. You see the red glow in their eyes, which is the reflection of the flashlight. And then, if you're one of these unsporting characters, you shoot the animals and take them home. And of course, that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime, so in Canada that's illegal. In New Zealand, it's legal, because the New Zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits, because the rabbits compete with the sheep in New Zealand. So, the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps, and shine the headlights, and anything that doesn't look like a sheep, you shoot. (Laughter)So I have proposed to apply the same trick to looking for life in the universe. That if these creatures who are living on cold surfaces — either on Europa, or further out, anywhere where you can live on a cold surface — those creatures must be provided with reflectors. In order to concentrate sunlight, they have to have lenses and mirrors — in order to keep themselves warm. And then, when you shine sunlight at them, the sunlight will be reflected back, just as it is in the eyes of an animal. So these creatures will be bright against the cold surroundings. And the further out you go in this, away from the Sun, the more powerful this reflection will be. So actually, this method of hunting for life gets stronger and stronger as you go further away, because the optical reflectors have to be more powerful so the reflected light shines out even more in contrast against the dark background. So as you go further away from the Sun, this becomes more and more powerful. So, in fact, you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the Earth. Why aren't we doing it? Simply because nobody thought of it yet.But I hope that we shall look, and with any — we probably won't find anything, none of these speculations may have any basis in fact. But still, it's a good chance. And of course, if it happens, it will transform our view of life altogether. Because it means that — the way life can live out there, it has enormous advantages as compared with living on a planet. It's extremely hard to move from one planet to another. We're having great difficulties at the moment and any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck. Especially if you breathe air, it's very hard to get from planet A to planet B, because there's no air in between. But if you breathe air — (Laughter) — you're dead — (Laughter) — as soon as you're off the planet, unless you have a spaceship.But if you live in a vacuum, if you live on the surface of one of these objects, say, in the Kuiper Belt, this — an object like Pluto, or one of the smaller objects in the neighborhood of Pluto, and you happened — if you're living on the surface there, and you get knocked off the surface by a collision, then it doesn't change anything all that much. You still are on a piece of ice, you can still have sunlight and you can still survive while you're traveling from one place to another. And then if you run into another object, you can stay there and colonize the other object. So life will spread, then, from one object to another. So if it exists at all in the Kuiper Belt, it's likely to be very widespread. And you will have then a great competition amongst species — Darwinian evolution — so there'll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision. And there'll be advantages for spreading out long, sort of kelp-like forest of vegetation. I call these creatures sunflowers. They look like, maybe like sunflowers. They have to be all the time pointing toward the Sun, and they will be able to spread out in space, because gravity on these objects is weak. So they can collect sunlight from a big area. So they will, in fact, be quite easy for us to detect.So, I hope in the next 10 years, we'll find these creatures, and then, of course, our whole view of life in the universe will change. If we don't find them, then we can create them ourselves. (Laughter) That's another wonderful opportunity that's opening. We can — as soon as we have a little bit more understanding of genetic engineering, one of the things you can do with your take-it-home, do-it-yourself genetic engineering kit — (Laughter) — is to design a creature that can live on a cold satellite, a place like Europa, so we could colonize Europa with our own creatures. That would be a fun thing to do. (Laughter) In the long run, of course, it would also make it possible for us to move out there. What's going to happen in the end, it's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe. And if life is already there, it makes it much more exciting, in the short run. But in the long run, if there's no life there, we create it ourselves. We transform the universe into something much more rich and beautiful than it is today. So again, we have a big and wonderful future to look forward. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/freeman_dyson_says_let_s_look_for_life_in_the_outer_solar_system
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"I and my colleagues Art Aron and Lucy Brown and others, have put 37 people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were happily in love, 15 who had just been dumped, and we're just starting our third experiment: studying people who report that they're still in love after 10 to 25 years of marriage. So, this is the short story of that research.In the jungles of Guatemala, in Tikal, stands a temple. It was built by the grandest Sun King, of the grandest city-state, of the grandest civilization of the Americas, the Mayas. His name was Jasaw Chan K'awiil. He stood over six feet tall. He lived into his 80s, and he was buried beneath this monument in 720 AD. And Mayan inscriptions proclaim that he was deeply in love with his wife. So, he built a temple in her honor, facing his. And every spring and autumn, exactly at the equinox, the sun rises behind his temple, and perfectly bathes her temple with his shadow. And as the sun sets behind her temple in the afternoon, it perfectly bathes his temple with her shadow. After 1,300 years, these two lovers still touch and kiss from their tomb.Around the world, people love. They sing for love, they dance for love, they compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love. As Walt Whitman once said, ""O I would stake all for you."" Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.But love isn't always a happy experience. In one study of college students, they asked a lot of questions about love, but the two that stood out to me the most were: ""Have you ever been rejected by somebody who you really loved?"" And the second question was: ""Have you ever dumped somebody who really loved you?"" And almost 95 percent of both men and women said yes to both. Almost nobody gets out of love alive.So, before I start telling you about the brain, I want to read for you what I think is the most powerful love poem on Earth. There's other love poems that are, of course, just as good, but I don't think this one can be surpassed. It was told by an anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern Alaska to a missionary in 1896. And here it is. I've never had the opportunity to say it before. ""Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you, consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain — where are you going with my love? I am told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye."" Emily Dickinson once wrote, ""Parting is all we need to know of hell."" How many people have suffered in all the millions of years of human evolution? How many people around the world are dancing with elation at this very minute? Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth.So, several years ago, I decided to look into the brain and study this madness. Our first study of people who were happily in love has been widely publicized, so I'm only going to say very little about it. We found activity in a tiny, little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. We found activity in some cells called the A10 cells, cells that actually make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and spray it to many brain regions. Indeed, this part, the VTA, is part of the brain's reward system. It's way below your cognitive thinking process. It's below your emotions. It's part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, with motivation, with focus and with craving. In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine.But romantic love is much more than a cocaine high — at least you come down from cocaine. Romantic love is an obsession, it possesses you. You lose your sense of self. You can't stop thinking about another human being. Somebody is camping in your head. As an eighth-century Japanese poet said, ""My longing had no time when it ceases."" Wild is love. And the obsession can get worse when you've been rejected.So, right now, Lucy Brown and I, the neuroscientists on our project, are looking at the data of the people who were put into the machine after they had just been dumped. It was very difficult actually, putting these people in the machine, because they were in such bad shape.(Laughter)So anyway, we found activity in three brain regions. We found activity in the brain region, in exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love. What a bad deal. You know, when you've been dumped, the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being, and then go on with your life — but no, you just love them harder. As the poet Terence, the Roman poet once said, he said, ""The less my hope, the hotter my love."" And indeed, we now know why. Two thousand years later, we can explain this in the brain. That brain system — the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus — becomes more active when you can't get what you want. In this case, life's greatest prize: an appropriate mating partner.We found activity in other brain regions also — in a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses. You're lying there, you're looking at the picture, and you're in this machine, and you're calculating what went wrong. What have I lost? As a matter of fact, Lucy and I have a little joke about this. It comes from a David Mamet play, and there's two con artists in the play, and the woman is conning the man, and the man looks at the woman and says, ""Oh, you're a bad pony, I'm not going to bet on you."" And indeed, it's this part of the brain, the core of the nucleus accumbens, that is becoming active as you're measuring your gains and losses. It's also the brain region that becomes active when you're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses.Last but not least, we found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual. No wonder people suffer around the world, and we have so many crimes of passion. When you've been rejected in love, not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love, but you're feeling deep attachment to this individual. Moreover, this brain circuit for reward is working, and you're feeling intense energy, intense focus, intense motivation and the willingness to risk it all, to win life's greatest prize.So, what have I learned from this experiment that I would like to tell the world? Foremost, I have come to think that romantic love is a drive, a basic mating drive. Not the sex drive — the sex drive gets you looking for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy, and start the mating process with this single individual. I think of all the poetry that I've read about romantic love, what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato over 2,000 years ago. He said, ""The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need, it is an urge, it is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it's almost impossible to stamp out."" I've also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction: a perfectly wonderful addiction when it's going well, and a perfectly horrible addiction when it's going poorly.And indeed, it has all of the characteristics of addiction. You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. And it's got the three main characteristics of addiction: tolerance, you need to see them more, and more, and more; withdrawals; and last: relapse. I've got a girlfriend who's just getting over a terrible love affair. It's been about eight months, she's beginning to feel better. And she was driving along in her car the other day, and suddenly she heard a song on the car radio that reminded her of this man. Not only did the instant craving come back, but she had to pull over from the side of the road and cry. So, one thing I would like the medical community, and the legal community, and even the college community, to see if they can understand, that indeed, romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.I would also like to tell the world that animals love. There's not an animal on this planet that will copulate with anything that comes along. Too old, too young, too scruffy, too stupid, and they won't do it. Unless you're stuck in a laboratory cage — and you know, if you spend your entire life in a little box, you're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with, but I've looked in a hundred species, and everywhere in the wild, animals have favorites. As a matter of fact, ethologists know this. There are over eight words for what they call ""animal favoritism:"" selective proceptivity, mate choice, female choice, sexual choice. And indeed, there are now three academic articles in which they've looked at this attraction, which may only last for a second, but it's a definite attraction, and either this same brain region, this reward system, or the chemicals of that reward system are involved. In fact, I think animal attraction can be instant — you can see an elephant instantly go for another elephant. And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call ""love at first sight.""People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. And I just simply say, ""Hardly."" You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake, and then when you sit down and eat that cake, you can still feel that joy. And certainly, I make all the same mistakes that everybody else does too, but it's really deepened my understanding and compassion, really, for all human life. As a matter of fact, in New York, I often catch myself looking in baby carriages and feeling a little sorry for the tot. And in fact, sometimes I feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate, when I think of how intense this brain system is. Our newest experiment has been hatched by my colleague, Art Aron — putting people who are reporting that they are still in love, in a long-term relationship, into the functional MRI. We've put five people in so far, and indeed, we found exactly the same thing. They're not lying. The brain areas associated with intense romantic love still become active, 25 years later.There are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love. The question that I'm working on right this minute — and I'm only going to say it for a second, and then end — is, why do you fall in love with one person, rather than another? I never would have even thought to think of this, but Match.com, the Internet dating site, came to me three years ago and asked me that question. And I said, I don't know. I know what happens in the brain, when you do become in love, but I don't know why you fall in love with one person rather than another. And so, I've spent the last three years on this. And there are many reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another, that psychologists can tell you. And we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background, the same general level of intelligence, of good looks, the same religious values. Your childhood certainly plays a role, but nobody knows how. And that's about it, that's all they know. No, they've never found the way two personalities fit together to make a good relationship.So, it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another. And I have concocted a questionnaire to see to what degree you express dopamine, serotonin, estrogen and testosterone. I think we've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain. And on this dating site that I have created, called Chemistry.com, I ask you first a series of questions to see to what degree you express these chemicals, and I'm watching who chooses who to love. And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America. About 600,000 people have taken it in 33 other countries. I'm putting the data together now, and at some point — there will always be magic to love, but I think I will come closer to understanding why it is you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background, your same general level of intelligence, good looks, and you don't feel pulled towards all of them. I think there's biology to that. I think we're going to end up, in the next few years, to understand all kinds of brain mechanisms that pull us to one person rather than another.So, I will close with this. These are my older people. Faulkner said, ""The past is not dead, it's not even past."" Indeed, we carry a lot of luggage from our yesteryear in the human brain. And so, there's one thing that makes me pursue my understanding of human nature, and this reminds me of it. These are two women. Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do. Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking. We swivel towards each other, we do what we call the ""anchoring gaze"" and we talk. This is intimacy to women. I think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing. As soon as one guy looks up, the other guy will look away.(Laughter)I think it comes from millions of years sitting behind the bush, looking straight ahead, trying to hit that buffalo on the head with a rock. I think, for millions of years, men faced their enemies, they sat side-by-side with friends. So my final statement is: love is in us. It's deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love
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"As a clergyman, you can imagine how out of place I feel. I feel like a fish out of water, or maybe an owl out of the air.(Laughter)I was preaching in San Jose some time ago, and my friend Mark Kvamme, who helped introduce me to this conference, brought several CEOs and leaders of some of the companies here in the Silicon Valley to have breakfast with me, or I with them. And I was so stimulated. And had such — it was an eye-opening experience to hear them talk about the world that is yet to come through technology and science. I know that we're near the end of this conference, and some of you may be wondering why they have a speaker from the field of religion. Richard can answer that, because he made that decision.But some years ago I was on an elevator in Philadelphia, coming down. I was to address a conference at a hotel. And on that elevator a man said, ""I hear Billy Graham is staying in this hotel."" And another man looked in my direction and said, ""Yes, there he is. He's on this elevator with us."" And this man looked me up and down for about 10 seconds, and he said, ""My, what an anticlimax!""(Laughter)I hope that you won't feel that these few moments with me is not a — is an anticlimax, after all these tremendous talks that you've heard, and addresses, which I intend to listen to every one of them. But I was on an airplane in the east some years ago, and the man sitting across the aisle from me was the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. His name was John Belk. Some of you will probably know him. And there was a drunk man on there, and he got up out of his seat two or three times, and he was making everybody upset by what he was trying to do. And he was slapping the stewardess and pinching her as she went by, and everybody was upset with him. And finally, John Belk said, ""Do you know who's sitting here?"" And the man said, ""No, who?"" He said, ""It's Billy Graham, the preacher."" He said, ""You don't say!"" And he turned to me, and he said, ""Put her there!"" He said, ""Your sermons have certainly helped me.""(Laughter)And I suppose that that's true with thousands of people.(Laughter)I know that as you have been peering into the future, and as we've heard some of it here tonight, I would like to live in that age and see what is going to be. But I won't, because I'm 80 years old. This is my eightieth year, and I know that my time is brief. I have phlebitis at the moment, in both legs, and that's the reason that I had to have a little help in getting up here, because I have Parkinson's disease in addition to that, and some other problems that I won't talk about.(Laughter)But this is not the first time that we've had a technological revolution. We've had others. And there's one that I want to talk about. In one generation, the nation of the people of Israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the Near East. A man by the name of David came to the throne, and King David became one of the great leaders of his generation. He was a man of tremendous leadership. He had the favor of God with him. He was a brilliant poet, philosopher, writer, soldier — with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today.But about two centuries before David, the Hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron, and, slowly, that skill spread. But they wouldn't allow the Israelis to look into it, or to have any. But David changed all of that, and he introduced the Iron Age to Israel. And the Bible says that David laid up great stores of iron, and which archaeologists have found, that in present-day Palestine, there are evidences of that generation. Now, instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones, Israel now had iron plows, and sickles, and hoes and military weapons. And in the course of one generation, Israel was completely changed. The introduction of iron, in some ways, had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation. And David found that there were many problems that technology could not solve.There were many problems still left. And they're still with us, and you haven't solved them, and I haven't heard anybody here speak to that. How do we solve these three problems that I'd like to mention? The first one that David saw was human evil. Where does it come from? How do we solve it? Over again and again in the Psalms, which Gladstone said was the greatest book in the world, David describes the evils of the human race. And yet he says, ""He restores my soul."" Have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are? On one hand, we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology, as this conference vividly demonstrates. We've seen under the sea, three miles down, or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future.But on the other hand, something is wrong. Our battleships, our soldiers, are on a frontier now, almost ready to go to war with Iraq. Now, what causes this? Why do we have these wars in every generation, and in every part of the world? And revolutions? We can't get along with other people, even in our own families. We find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we can't break. Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death. Even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle. I would like to see Oracle take up that, or some other technological geniuses work on this. How do we change man, so that he doesn't lie and cheat, and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever?The Bible says the problem is within us, within our hearts and our souls. Our problem is that we are separated from our Creator, which we call God, and we need to have our souls restored, something only God can do. Jesus said, ""For out of the heart come evil thoughts: murders, sexual immorality, theft, false testimonies, slander."" The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was not a religious man, but he said, ""It's in our hearts that the evil lies, and it's from our hearts that it must be plucked out."" Albert Einstein — I was just talking to someone, when I was speaking at Princeton, and I met Mr. Einstein. He didn't have a doctor's degree, because he said nobody was qualified to give him one.(Laughter)But he made this statement. He said, ""It's easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man."" And many of you, I'm sure, have thought about that and puzzled over it. You've seen people take beneficial technological advances, such as the Internet we've heard about tonight, and twist them into something corrupting. You've seen brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down whole systems. The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it. King David said that he knew the depths of his own soul. He couldn't free himself from personal problems and personal evils that included murder and adultery. Yet King David sought God's forgiveness, and said, ""You can restore my soul.""You see, the Bible teaches that we're more than a body and a mind. We are a soul. And there's something inside of us that is beyond our understanding. That's the part of us that yearns for God, or something more than we find in technology. Your soul is that part of you that yearns for meaning in life, and which seeks for something beyond this life. It's the part of you that yearns, really, for God. I find [that] young people all over the world are searching for something. They don't know what it is. I speak at many universities, and I have many questions and answer periods, and whether it's Cambridge, or Harvard, or Oxford — I've spoken at all of those universities. I'm going to Harvard in about three or four — no, it's about two months from now — to give a lecture. And I'll be asked the same questions that I was asked the last few times I've been there. And it'll be on these questions: where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What's life all about? Why am I here?Even if you have no religious belief, there are times when you wonder that there's something else. Thomas Edison also said, ""When you see everything that happens in the world of science, and in the working of the universe, you cannot deny that there's a captain on the bridge."" I remember once, I sat beside Mrs. Gorbachev at a White House dinner. I went to Ambassador Dobrynin, whom I knew very well. And I'd been to Russia several times under the Communists, and they'd given me marvelous freedom that I didn't expect. And I knew Mr. Dobrynin very well, and I said, ""I'm going to sit beside Mrs. Gorbachev tonight. What shall I talk to her about?"" And he surprised me with the answer. He said, ""Talk to her about religion and philosophy. That's what she's really interested in."" I was a little bit surprised, but that evening that's what we talked about, and it was a stimulating conversation. And afterward, she said, ""You know, I'm an atheist, but I know that there's something up there higher than we are.""The second problem that King David realized he could not solve was the problem of human suffering. Writing the oldest book in the world was Job, and he said, ""Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward."" Yes, to be sure, science has done much to push back certain types of human suffering. But I'm — in a few months, I'll be 80 years of age. I admit that I'm very grateful for all the medical advances that have kept me in relatively good health all these years. My doctors at the Mayo Clinic urged me not to take this trip out here to this — to be here. I haven't given a talk in nearly four months. And when you speak as much as I do, three or four times a day, you get rusty. That's the reason I'm using this podium and using these notes. Every time you ever hear me on the television or somewhere, I'm ad-libbing. I'm not reading. I never read an address. I never read a speech or a talk or a lecture. I talk ad lib. But tonight, I've got some notes here so that if I begin to forget, which I do sometimes, I've got something I can turn to.But even here among us, most — in the most advanced society in the world, we have poverty. We have families that self-destruct, friends that betray us. Unbearable psychological pressures bear down on us. I've never met a person in the world that didn't have a problem or a worry. Why do we suffer? It's an age-old question that we haven't answered. Yet David again and again said that he would turn to God. He said, ""The Lord is my shepherd."" The final problem that David knew he could not solve was death. Many commentators have said that death is the forbidden subject of our generation. Most people live as if they're never going to die. Technology projects the myth of control over our mortality. We see people on our screens. Marilyn Monroe is just as beautiful on the screen as she was in person, and our — many young people think she's still alive. They don't know that she's dead. Or Clark Gable, or whoever it is. The old stars, they come to life. And they're — they're just as great on that screen as they were in person. But death is inevitable.I spoke some time ago to a joint session of Congress, last year. And we were meeting in that room, the statue room. About 300 of them were there. And I said, ""There's one thing that we have in common in this room, all of us together, whether Republican or Democrat, or whoever."" I said, ""We're all going to die. And we have that in common with all these great men of the past that are staring down at us."" And it's often difficult for young people to understand that. It's difficult for them to understand that they're going to die. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, he said, there's every activity under heaven. There's a time to be born, and there's a time to die. I've stood at the deathbed of several famous people, whom you would know. I've talked to them. I've seen them in those agonizing moments when they were scared to death.And yet, a few years earlier, death never crossed their mind. I talked to a woman this past week whose father was a famous doctor. She said he never thought of God, never talked about God, didn't believe in God. He was an atheist. But she said, as he came to die, he sat up on the side of the bed one day, and he asked the nurse if he could see the chaplain. And he said, for the first time in his life he'd thought about the inevitable, and about God. Was there a God? A few years ago, a university student asked me, ""What is the greatest surprise in your life?"" And I said, ""The greatest surprise in my life is the brevity of life. It passes so fast."" But it does not need to have to be that way. Wernher von Braun, in the aftermath of World War II concluded, quote: ""science and religion are not antagonists. On the contrary, they're sisters."" He put it on a personal basis. I knew Dr. von Braun very well. And he said, ""Speaking for myself, I can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm a belief in the certainty of a creator."" He also said, ""In our search to know God, I've come to believe that the life of Jesus Christ should be the focus of our efforts and inspiration. The reality of this life and His resurrection is the hope of mankind.""I've done a lot of speaking in Germany and in France, and in different parts of the world — 105 countries it's been my privilege to speak in. And I was invited one day to visit Chancellor Adenauer, who was looked upon as sort of the founder of modern Germany, since the war. And he once — and he said to me, he said, ""Young man."" He said, ""Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?"" And I said, ""Sir, I do."" He said, ""So do I."" He said, ""When I leave office, I'm going to spend my time writing a book on why Jesus Christ rose again, and why it's so important to believe that."" In one of his plays, Alexander Solzhenitsyn depicts a man dying, who says to those gathered around his bed, ""The moment when it's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying."" How should one live in order not to feel regret when one is dying?Blaise Pascal asked exactly that question in seventeenth-century France. Pascal has been called the architect of modern civilization. He was a brilliant scientist at the frontiers of mathematics, even as a teenager. He is viewed by many as the founder of the probability theory, and a creator of the first model of a computer. And of course, you are all familiar with the computer language named for him. Pascal explored in depth our human dilemmas of evil, suffering and death. He was astounded at the phenomenon we've been considering: that people can achieve extraordinary heights in science, the arts and human enterprise, yet they also are full of anger, hypocrisy and have — and self-hatreds. Pascal saw us as a remarkable mixture of genius and self-delusion. On November 23, 1654, Pascal had a profound religious experience. He wrote in his journal these words: ""I submit myself, absolutely, to Jesus Christ, my redeemer.""A French historian said, two centuries later, ""Seldom has so mighty an intellect submitted with such humility to the authority of Jesus Christ."" Pascal came to believe not only the love and the grace of God could bring us back into harmony, but he believed that his own sins and failures could be forgiven, and that when he died he would go to a place called heaven. He experienced it in a way that went beyond scientific observation and reason. It was he who penned the well-known words, ""The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not of.""Equally well known is Pascal's Wager. Essentially, he said this: ""if you bet on God, and open yourself to his love, you lose nothing, even if you're wrong. But if instead you bet that there is no God, then you can lose it all, in this life and the life to come."" For Pascal, scientific knowledge paled beside the knowledge of God. The knowledge of God was far beyond anything that ever crossed his mind. He was ready to face him when he died at the age of 39. King David lived to be 70, a long time in his era. Yet he too had to face death, and he wrote these words: ""even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.""This was David's answer to three dilemmas of evil, suffering and death. It can be yours, as well, as you seek the living God and allow him to fill your life and give you hope for the future. When I was 17 years of age, I was born and reared on a farm in North Carolina. I milked cows every morning, and I had to milk the same cows every evening when I came home from school. And there were 20 of them that I had — that I was responsible for, and I worked on the farm and tried to keep up with my studies. I didn't make good grades in high school. I didn't make them in college, until something happened in my heart.One day, I was faced face-to-face with Christ. He said, ""I am the way, the truth and the life."" Can you imagine that? ""I am the truth. I'm the embodiment of all truth."" He was a liar. Or he was insane. Or he was what he claimed to be. Which was he? I had to make that decision. I couldn't prove it. I couldn't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it. But by faith I said, I believe him, and he came into my heart and changed my life. And now I'm ready, when I hear that call, to go into the presence of God. Thank you, and God bless all of you.(Applause)Thank you for the privilege. It was great.Richard Wurman: You did it. Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering
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"I thought I'd tell you a little about what I like to write. And I like to immerse myself in my topics. I just like to dive right in and become sort of a human guinea pig. And I see my life as a series of experiments.So, I work for Esquire magazine, and a couple of years ago, I wrote an article called ""My Outsourced Life,"" where I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to live my life for me. So, they answered my emails. They answered my phone. They argued with my wife for me, and they read my son bedtime stories. It was the best month of my life, because I just sat back and I read books and watched movies. It was a wonderful experience.More recently, I wrote an article for Esquire called — about radical honesty. And this is a movement where — this is started by a psychologist in Virginia, who says that you should never, ever lie, except maybe during poker and golf, his only exceptions. And, more than that, whatever is on your brain should come out of your mouth. So, I decided I would try this for a month. This was the worst month of my life. (Laughter) I do not recommend this at all. To give you a sense of the experience, the article was called, ""I Think You're Fat."" (Laughter) So, that was hard.My most recent book — my previous book was called ""The Know-It-All,"" and it was about the year I spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z in my quest to learn everything in the world, or more precisely from Aak, which is a type of East Asian music, all the way to Zwyiec, which is — well, I don't want to ruin the ending. (Laughter) It's a very exciting twist ending, like an O. Henry novel, so I won't ruin it. But I love that one, because that was an experiment about how much information one human brain could absorb. Although, listening to Kevin Kelly, you don't have to remember anything. You can just Google it. So, I wasted some time there.I love those experiments, but I think that the most profound and life-changing experiment that I've done is my most recent experiment, where I spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the Bible, ""The Year of Living Biblically."" And I undertook this for two reasons. The first was that I grew up with no religion at all. As I say in my book, I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) So, not very. But I've become increasingly interested in religion. I do think it's the defining issue of our time, or one of the main ones. And I have a son. I want to know what to teach him. So, I decided to dive in head first, and try to live the Bible.The second reason I undertook this is because I'm concerned about the rise of fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, and people who say they take the Bible literally, which is, according to some polls, as high as 45 or 50 percent of America. So I decided, what if you really did take the Bible literally? I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally, without picking and choosing.The first thing I did was I got a stack of bibles. I had Christian bibles. I had Jewish bibles. A friend of mine sent me something called a hip-hop bible, where the twenty-third Psalm is rendered as, ""The Lord is all that,"" as opposed to what I knew it as, ""The Lord is my shepherd.""Then I went down and I read several versions, and I wrote down every single law that I could find. And this was a very long list — over 700 rules. And they range from the famous ones that I had heard of — The Ten Commandments, love your neighbor, be fruitful and multiply. So I wanted to follow those. And actually, I take my projects very seriously, because I had twins during my year, so I definitely take my projects seriously.But I also wanted to follow the hundreds of arcane and obscure laws that are in the Bible. There is the law in Leviticus, ""You cannot shave the corners of your beard."" I didn't know where my corners were, so I decided to let the whole thing grow, and this is what I looked like by the end. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time at airport security. (Laughter) My wife wouldn't kiss me for the last two months. So, certainly the challenge was there.The Bible says you cannot wear clothes made of mixed fibers, so I thought, ""Sounds strange, but I'll try it."" You only know if you try it. I got rid of all my poly-cotton T-shirts. The Bible says that if two men are in a fight, and the wife of one of those men grabs the testicles of the other man, then her hand shall be cut off. So, I wanted to follow that rule. (Laughter) That one I followed by default, by not getting in a fight with a man whose wife was standing nearby, looking like she had a strong grip. (Laughter) So — oh, there's another shot of my beard.I will say it was an amazing year because it really was life changing, and incredibly challenging. And there were two types of laws that were particularly challenging. The first was avoiding the little sins that we all commit every day. You know, I could spend a year not killing, but spending a year not gossiping, not coveting, not lying — you know, I live in New York, and I work as a journalist, so this was 75, 80 percent of my day I had to do it.But it was really interesting, because I was able to make some progress, because I couldn't believe how much my behavior changed my thoughts. This was one of the huge lessons of the year, is that I almost pretended to be a better person, and I became a little bit of a better person. So I had always thought, you know, ""You change your mind, and you change your behavior,"" but it's often the other way around. You change your behavior, and you change your mind. So, you know, if you want to become more compassionate, you visit sick people in the hospital, and you will become more compassionate. You donate money to a cause, and you become emotionally involved in that cause. So, it really was cognitive psychology — you know, cognitive dissonance — that I was experiencing. The Bible actually talks about cognitive psychology, very primitive cognitive psychology. In the Proverbs, it says that if you smile, you will become happier, which, as we know, is actually true.The second type of rule that was difficult to obey was the rules that will get you into a little trouble in twenty-first-century America. And perhaps the clearest example of this is stoning adulterers. (Laughter) But it's a big part of the Bible, so I figured I had to address it. So, I was able to stone one adulterer. It happened — I was in the park, and I was dressed in my biblical clothing, so sandals and sort of a white robe, you know, because again, the outer affects the inner. I wanted to see how dressing biblically affected my mind. And this man came up to me and he said, ""Why are you dressed like that?"" And I explained my project, and he said, ""Well, I am an adulterer, are you going to stone me?"" And I said, ""Well, that would be great!"" (Laughter) And I actually took out a handful of stones from my pocket that I had been carrying around for weeks, hoping for just this interaction — and, you know, they were pebbles — but he grabbed them out of my hand. He was actually an elderly man, mid-70s, just so you know. But he's still an adulterer, and still quite angry. He grabbed them out of my hand and threw them at my face, and I felt that I could — eye for an eye — I could retaliate, and throw one back at him.So that was my experience stoning, and it did allow me to talk about, in a more serious way, these big issues. How can the Bible be so barbaric in some places, and yet so incredibly wise in others? How should we view the Bible? Should we view it, you know, as original intent, like a sort of a Scalia version of the Bible? How was the Bible written? And actually, since this is a tech crowd, I talk in the book about how the Bible actually reminds me of the Wikipedia, because it has all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years. And it's sort of evolved. It's not a book that was written and came down from on high.So I thought I would end by telling you just a couple of the take-aways, the bigger lessons that I learned from my year. The first is, thou shalt not take the Bible literally. This became very, very clear, early on. Because if you do, then you end up acting like a crazy person, and stoning adulterers, or — here's another example. Well, that's another. I did spend some time shepherding. (Laughter) It's a very relaxing vocation. I recommend it.But this one is — the Bible says that you cannot touch women during certain times of the month, and more than that, you cannot sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat. And my wife thought this was very offensive, so she sat in every seat in our apartment, and I had to spend much of the year standing until I bought my own seat and carried it around.So, you know, I met with creationists. I went to the creationists' museum. And these are the ultimate literalists. And it was fascinating, because they were not stupid people at all. I would wager that their IQ is exactly the same as the average evolutionist. It's just that their faith is so strong in this literal interpretation of the Bible that they distort all the data to fit their model. And they go through these amazing mental gymnastics to accomplish this.And I will say, though, the museum is gorgeous. They really did a fantastic job. If you're ever in Kentucky, there's, you can see a movie of the flood, and they have sprinklers in the ceiling that will sprinkle on you during the flood scenes. So, whatever you think of creationism — and I think it's crazy — they did a great job. (Laughter)Another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks. And this one was a big lesson because I was praying, giving these prayers of thanksgiving, which was odd for an agnostic. But I was saying thanks all the time, every day, and I started to change my perspective. And I started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day, that I didn't even notice, that I took for granted, as opposed to focusing on the three or four that went wrong. So, this is actually a key to happiness for me, is to just remember when I came over here, the car didn't flip over, and I didn't trip coming up the stairs. It's a remarkable thing.Third, that thou shall have reverence. This one was unexpected because I started the year as an agnostic, and by the end of the year, I became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic, which I love. And I'm trying to start it as a movement. So, if anyone wants to join, the basic idea is, whether or not there is a God, there's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness, and that our rituals can be sacred. The Sabbath can be sacred. This was one of the great things about my year, doing the Sabbath, because I am a workaholic, so having this one day where you cannot work, it really, that changed my life. So, this idea of sacredness, whether or not there is a God.Thou shall not stereotype. This one happened because I spent a lot of time with various religious communities throughout America because I wanted it to be more than about my journey. I wanted it to be about religion in America. So, I spent time with evangelical Christians, and Hasidic Jews, and the Amish. I'm very proud because I think I'm the only person in America to out Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. (Laughter) After three and a half hours, he looked at his watch, he's like, ""I gotta go."" (Laughter) Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. Bless you, bless you.But it was interesting because I had some very preconceived notions about, for instance, evangelical Christianity, and I found that it's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it. There's a group I met with called the Red Letter Christians, and they focus on the red words in the Bible, which are the ones that Jesus spoke. That's how they printed them in the old Bibles. And their argument is that Jesus never talked about homosexuality. They have a pamphlet that says, ""Here's what Jesus said about homosexuality,"" and you open it up, and there's nothing in it. So, they say Jesus did talk a lot about helping the outcasts, helping poor people. So, this was very inspiring to me. I recommend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. They're very inspiring leaders, even though I disagree with much of what they say.Also, thou shalt not disregard the irrational. This one was very unexpected because, you know, I grew up with the scientific worldview, and I was shocked learning how much of my life is governed by irrational forces. And the thing is, if they're not harmful, they're not to be completely dismissed. Because I learned that — I was thinking, I was doing all these rituals, these biblical rituals, separating my wool and linen, and I would ask these religious people ""Why would the Bible possibly tell us to do this? Why would God care?"" And they said, ""We don't know, but it's just rituals that give us meaning."" And I would say, ""But that's crazy."" And they would say, ""Well, what about you? You blow out candles on top of a birthday cake. If a guy from Mars came down and saw, here's one guy blowing out the fire on top of a cake versus another guy not wearing clothes of mixed fabrics, would the Martians say, 'Well, that guy, he makes sense, but that guy's crazy?'"" So no, I think that rituals are, by nature, irrational. So the key is to choose the right rituals, the ones that are not harmful — but rituals by themselves are not to be dismissed.And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose. And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible. And I failed miserably. Because you can't. You have to pick and choose. And anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing. The key is to pick and choose the right parts. There's the phrase called cafeteria religion, and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way, and they'll say, ""Oh, it's just cafeteria religion. You're just picking and choosing."" But my argument is, ""What's wrong with cafeterias?"" I've had some great meals at cafeterias. I've also had some meals that make me want to dry heave. So, it's about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion, about tolerance, about loving your neighbor, as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin, or intolerance, or violence, which are very much in the Bible as well. So if we are to find any meaning in this book, then we have to really engage it, and wrestle with it.And I thought I'd end with just a couple more. There's me reading the Bible. That's how I hailed taxicabs. (Laughter) Seriously, and it worked. And yes, that was actually a rented sheep, so I had to return that in the morning, but it served well for a day. So, anyway, thank you so much for letting me speak.","https://www.ted.com/talks/a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically
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"Brain magic. What's brain magic all about? Brain magic to me indicates that area of magic dealing with psychological and mind-reading effects. So unlike traditional magic, it uses the power of words, linguistic deception, non-verbal communication and various other techniques to create the illusion of a sixth sense.I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how. I want everybody downstairs also to join in with me and everybody. I want everybody to put out your hands like this for me, first of all. OK, clap them together, once. OK, reverse your hands. Now, follow my actions exactly. Now about half the audience has their left hand up. Why is that? OK, swap them around, put your right hand up. Cross your hands over, so your right hand goes over, interlace your fingers like this, then make sure your right thumb is outside your left thumb — that's very important. Yours is the other way around, so swap it around. Excellent, OK. Extend your fingers like this for me. All right. Tap them together once. OK, now, if you did not allow me to deceive your minds, you would all be able to do this.(Laughter)(Laughter ends)Now you can see how easy it is for me to manipulate the human mind, once you know how.(Laughter)Now, I remember when I was about 15,(Laughter)I read a copy of Life magazine, which detailed a story about a 75-year-old blind Russian woman who could sense printed letters — there's still people trying to do it —(Laughter)— who could sense printed letters and even sense colors, just by touch. And she was completely blind. She could also read the serial numbers on bills when they were placed, face down, on a hard surface. Now, I was fascinated, but at the same time, skeptical. How could somebody read using their fingertips? You know, if you actually think about it, if somebody is totally blind — a guy yesterday did a demonstration in one of the rooms, where people had to close their eyes and they could just hear things. And it's just a really weird thing to try and figure out. How could somebody read using their fingertips?Now earlier on, as part of a TV show that I have coming up on MTV, I attempted to give a similar demonstration of what is now known as second sight. So, let's take a look.(Video) Man: There we go. I'm going to guide you into the car.Kathryn Thomas: (Laughter)Man: You're OK, keep on going.KT: How are you?Keith Barry: Kathryn, it's Keith here. I'm going to take you to a secret location, OK? Kathryn, there was no way you could see through that blindfold.KT: OK, but don't say my name like that. KB: But you're OK?KT: Yes.KB: No way to see through it? KT: No.KB: I'll take it off. Do you want to take the rest off? Take it off, you're OK. We'll stop for a second.KT: I'm so afraid of what I'm going to see.KB: You're fine, take it off. You're OK. You're safe. Have you ever heard of second sight?KT: No.KB: Second sight is whereby a mind-control expert can see through somebody else's eyes. And I'm going to try that right now.KT: God.KB: Are you ready? Where is it? There's no way —KT: (Beep)KT: Oh, my God!KB: Don't say anything, I'm trying to see through your eyes. I can't see.KT: There's a wall, there's a wall.KB: Look at the road, look at the road.KT: OK, OK, OK. Oh, my God!KB: Now, anything coming at all? KT: No.KB: Sure there's not?KT: No, no, I'm just still looking at the road. I'm looking at the road, all the time. I'm not taking my eyes off the road.(Beep)(Beep)(Beep)KT: Oh, my God!KB: Where are we? Where are we? We're going uphill, are we going uphill?KT: Look at the road — (Beep) Still got that goddamn blindfold on.KB: What?KT: How are you doing this?KB: Just don't break my concentration.We're OK, though? KT: Yes. That's so weird. We're nearly there. Oh, my God!Oh, my God!KB: And I've stopped.KT: That is weird. You're like a freak-ass of nature. That was the most scary thing I've ever done in my life!(Applause)KB: Thank you. By the way, two days ago, we were going to film this down there, at the race course, and we got a guy into a car, and we got a camera man in the back, but halfway through the drive, he told me he had, I think it was a nine-millimeter, stuck to his leg. So, I stopped pretty quick, and that was it.So, do you believe it's possible to see through somebody else's eyes? That's the question. Now, most people here would automatically say no. OK, but I want you to realize some facts. I couldn't see through the blindfold. The car was not gimmicked or tricked in any way. The girl, I'd never met before, all right. So, I want you to just think about it for a moment. A lot of people try to come up with a logical solution to what just happened, all right. But because your brains are not trained in the art of deception, the solutions you come up with will, 99 percent of the time, be way off the mark.This is because magic is all about directing attention. If, for instance, I didn't want you to look at my right hand, then I don't look at it. But if I wanted you to look at my right hand, then I look at it, too. You see, it's very simple, once you know how, but very complicated in other ways.I'm going to give you some demonstrations right now. I need two people to help me out real quick. Can you come up? And let's see, down at the end, here, can you also come up, real quick? Do you mind? Yes, at the end. OK, give them a round of applause as they come up. You might want to use the stairs, there.(Applause)It's very important for everybody here to realize I haven't set anything up with you. You don't know what will happen, right? Would you mind just standing over here for a moment?Your name is? Nicole: Nicole.KB: Nicole, and?(Telephone ringing)KB: Actually, here's the thing, answer it, answer it, answer it.(Laughter)Is it a girl? Man: They've already gone.KB: OK, swap over positions. Can you stand over here? This will make it easier. Pity, I would have told them it was the ace of spades. OK, a little bit closer.(Laughter)OK, a little bit closer, come over — they look really nervous up here. Do you believe in witchcraft?Nicole: No.KB: Voodoo? Nicole: No.KB: Things that go bump in the night? Nicole: No.KB: Besides, who's next, no, OK. I want you to just stand exactly like this for me, pull up your sleeves, if you don't mind. OK, now, I want you to be aware of all the different sensations around you, because we'll try a voodoo experiment. I want you to be aware of the sensations, but don't say anything until I ask you, and don't open your eyes until I ask you. From this point onwards, close your eyes, do not say anything, do not open them, be aware of the sensations.Yes or no, did you feel anything?Nicole: Yes.KB: You did feel that? What did you feel?Nicole: A touch on my back.KB: How many times did you feel it?Nicole: Twice.KB: Twice. OK, extend your left arm out in front of you. Extend your left arm, OK. OK, keep it there. Be aware of the sensations, don't say anything, don't open your eyes, OK.Did you feel anything, there?Nicole: Yes. KB: What did you feel?Nicole: Three —KB: Like a tickling sensation? Nicole: Yes.KB: Can you show us where? OK, excellent. Open your eyes. I never touched you. I just touched his back, and I just touched his arm. A voodoo experiment.(Laughter)Yeah, I walk around nightclubs all night like this.(Laughter)You just take a seat over here for a second. I'm going to use you again, in a moment. Can you take a seat right over here, if you don't mind.Sit right here. Man: OK.KB: OK, take a seat. Excellent, OK. Now, what I want you to do is look directly at me, OK, just take a deep breath in through your nose, letting it out through your mouth, and relax. Allow your eyes to close, on five, four, three, two, one. Close your eyes right now. OK, now, I'm not hypnotizing you, I'm merely placing you in a heightened state of synchronicity, so our minds are along the same lines. And as you sink and drift and float into this relaxed state of mind, I'm going to take your left hand, and just place it up here.I want you to hold it there just for a moment, and I only want you to allow your hand to sink and drift and float back to the tabletop at the same rate and speed as you drift and float into this relaxed state of awareness, and allow it to go all the way down to the tabletop. That's it, all the way down, all the way down. and further, and further. Excellent. I want you to allow your hand to stick firmly to the tabletop. OK, now, allow it to stay there.OK, now, in a moment, you'll feel a certain pressure, OK, and I want you to be aware of the pressure. Just be aware of the pressure. And I only want you to allow your hand to float slowly back up from the tabletop as you feel the pressure release, but only when you feel the pressure release. Do you understand? Just answer yes or no.Man: Yes.KB: Hold it right there. And only when you feel the pressure go back, allow your hand to drift back to the tabletop, but only when you feel the pressure.(Laughter)OK, that was wonderfully done. Let's try it again.Excellent. Now that you've got the idea, let's try something even more interesting. Allow it to stick firmly to the tabletop, keep your eyes closed. Can you stand up? Just stand, stage forward. I want you to point directly at his forehead. OK. Imagine a connection between you and him. Only when you want the pressure to be released, make an upward gesture, like this, but only when you want it to be released. You can wait as long as you want, but only when you want the pressure released. OK, let's try it again. OK, now, imagine the connection, OK. Point directly at his forehead. Only when you want the pressure released, we'll try it again.OK, it worked that time, excellent. And hold it there, both of you. Only when you want the pressure to go back, make a downward gesture. You can wait as long as you want. You did it pretty quickly, but it went down, OK.Now, I want you to be aware that in a moment, when I snap my fingers, your eyes will open, again. It's OK to remember to forget, or forget to remember what happened. Most people ask you, ""What the hell just happened up here?"" But it's OK that even though you're not hypnotized, you will forget everything that happened. On five, four, three, two, one — open your eyes, wide awake. Give them a round of applause, as they go back to their seats.(Applause)OK, you can go back.(Applause)I once saw a film called ""The Gods Are Crazy."" Has anybody here seen that film? Yeah. Remember when they threw the Coke out of the airplane, and it landed on the ground, and it didn't break? Now, see, that's because Coke bottles are solid. It's nearly impossible to break a Coke bottle. Do you want to try it? Good job. She's not taking any chances.(Laughter)You see, psychokinesis is the paranormal influence of the mind on physical events and processes. For some magicians or mentalists, sometimes the spoon will bend or melt, sometimes it will not. Sometimes the object will slide across the table, sometimes it will not. It depends on how much energy you have that day, so on and so forth.We're going to try an experiment in psychokinesis, right now. Come right over here, next to me. Excellent. Now, have a look at the Coke bottle. Make sure it is solid, there's only one hole, and it's a normal Coke bottle. And you can whack it against the table, if you want; be careful. Even though it's solid, I'm standing away. I want you to pinch right here with two fingers and your thumb. Excellent. Now, I've got a shard of glass here, OK. I want you to examine the shard of glass. Careful, it's sharp. Just hold on to it for a moment. Now, hold it out here.I want you to imagine, right now, a broken relationship from many years ago. I want you to imagine all the negative energy from that broken relationship, from that guy, being imparted into the broken piece of glass, which will represent him, OK. But I want you to take this very seriously. Stare at the glass, ignore everybody right here. In a moment, you'll feel a certain sensation, OK, and when you feel that sensation, I want you to drop the piece of glass into the bottle. Think of that guy, that ba — that guy.(Laughter)I'm trying to be good here. OK, and when you feel the sensation — it might take a while — drop it into the glass. OK, drop it in.Now, imagine all that negative energy in there. Imagine his name and imagine him inside the glass. And I want you to release that negative energy by shaking it from side to side.(Burst)(Laughter)That was a lot of negative energy, built up in there.(Laughter)(Applause)I also want you to look at me and think of his name. OK, think of how many letters in the title of his name. There's five letters in the title. You didn't react to that, so it's four letters. Think of one of the letters in the title. There's a K in his name, there is a K. I knew that because my name starts with a K also, but his name doesn't start with a K, it starts with an M. Tell Mike I said hello, the next time you see him.Was that his name? Nicole: Mm-hmm.KB: OK, give her a round of applause.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)(Applause ends)I've got one more thing to share with you right now. Actually, Chris, I was going to pick you for this, but instead of picking you, can you hop up here and pick a victim for this next experiment? And it should be a male victim, that's the only thing.Chris Anderson: Oh, OK.KB: I was going to use you, but I decided I might want to come back another year.(Laughter)CA: Well, to reward him for saying ""eureka,"" and for selecting Michael Mercil to come and talk to us — Steve Jurvetson.KB: OK, Steve, come on up here.(Applause)CA: You knew!KB: OK, Steve, I want you to take a seat, right behind here. Excellent. Now, Steve — oh, you can check underneath. Go ahead, I've no fancy assistants underneath there. They insist that because I was a magician, put a nice, black tablecloth on. There you are, OK.(Laughter)I've got four wooden plinths here, Steve. One, two, three and four. Now, they're all the exact same except this one obviously has a stainless steel spike sticking out of it. I want you to examine it, and make sure it's solid. Happy?Steve Jurvetson: Mmm, yes.KB: OK. Now, Steve, I'm going to stand in front of the table, When I stand in front of the table, I want you to put the cups on the plinths, in any order you want, and then mix them all up, so nobody has any idea where the spike is, all right?SJ: No one in the audience?KB: Yes, and just to help you out, I'll block them from view, so nobody can see what you're doing. I'll also look away. So, go ahead and mix them up, now. OK, and tell me when you're done.(Laughter)(Laughter)KB: You done? SJ: Almost.KB: Almost, oh. OK, you're making sure that's well hidden. Oh, we've got one here, we've got one here.(Applause)So, all right, we'll leave them like that.(Laughter)I'm going to have the last laugh, though.(Laughter)Now, Steve, you know where the spike is, but nobody else, does? Correct? But I don't want you to know either, so swivel around on your chair. They'll keep an eye on me to make sure I don't do anything funny. No, stay around, OK. Now, Steve, look back. Now you don't know where the spike is, and I don't know where it is either. Now, is there any way to see through this blindfold?SJ: Put this on?KB: No, just, is there any way to see through it? No?SJ: No, I can't see through it. KB: Excellent. Now, I'm going to put on the blindfold. Don't stack them up, OK. Give them an extra mix up. Don't move the cups, I don't want anybody to see where the spike is, but give the plinths an extra mix up, and then line them up. I'll put the blindfold on. Give them an extra mix up. No messing around this time. OK, go ahead, mix them up. My hand is at risk here.(Laughter)Tell me when you're done. SJ: Done.KB: OK, where are you? Put out your hand. Your right hand. Tell me when I'm over a cup.SJ: You're over a cup. KB: I'm over a cup, right now?SJ: Mm-hmm.KB: Now, Steve, do you think it's here? Yes or no?SJ: Oh!(Laughter)KB: I told you I'd have the last laugh.(Laughter)SJ: I don't think it's there. KB: No? Good decision.(Laughter)(Applause)(Applause ends)Now, if I go this way, is there another cup over here?SJ: Can we do the left hand?KB: Oh, no, no, no. He asked me could he do the left hand. Absolutely not.(Laughter)KB: If I go this way, is there another cup?SJ: Yes. KB: Tell me when to stop.SJ: OK. KB: There?SJ: Yes, there's one.KB: OK. Do you think it's here, yes or no? This is your decision, not mine.(Laughter)SJ: I'm going to say no. KB: Good decision.(Laughter)OK, give me both hands. Now, put them on both cups. Do you think the spike is under your left or your right hand?SJ: Neither.KB: Neither, oh, OK. But if you were to guess.(Laughter)SJ: Under my right hand. KB: Under your right hand? Now, remember, you made all the decisions all along. Psychologists, figure this out.(SJ gasps)Have a look.SJ: Oh!(Applause)KB: Thank you.(Applause ends) If anybody wants to see some sleight of hand later on, I'll be outside. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic
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"When I was President of the American Psychological Association, they tried to media-train me. And an encounter I had with CNN summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today, which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic. The editor of Discover told us 10 of them; I'm going to give you the eleventh.So they came to me, CNN, and they said, ""Professor Seligman — would you tell us about the state of psychology today? We'd like to interview you about that."" And I said, ""Great."" And she said, ""But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite."" I said, ""Well, how many words do I get?"" And she said, ""Well, one.""(Laughter)And the cameras rolled, and she said, ""Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"" ""Good.""(Laughter)""Cut! Cut. That won't do. We'd really better give you a longer sound bite."" ""How many words do I get this time?"" ""Well, you get two.""(Laughter)""Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"" ""Not good.""(Laughter)""Look, Doctor Seligman, we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium. We'd better give you a real sound bite. This time you can have three words. Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"" ""Not good enough."" That's what I'm going to be talking about.I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good, and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough. And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology, about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar.So, why was psychology good? Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model. Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, they'd move away from me, because, quite rightly, they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony. And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.What was good about psychology — about the $30 billion investment NIMH made, about working in the disease model, about what you mean by psychology — is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable; it was entirely smoke and mirrors. And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable, two of them actually curable.And the other thing that happened is that a science developed, a science of mental illness. We found out we could take fuzzy concepts like depression, alcoholism, and measure them with rigor; that we could create a classification of the mental illnesses; that we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses. We could look across time at the same people — people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia — and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses.And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years, to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments. And then we were able to test them rigorously, in random-assignment, placebo-controlled designs, throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did.The conclusion of that is, psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it. But what was not good, the consequences of that, were three things.The first was moral; that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers; that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you. And we forgot that people made choices and decisions. We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost.The second cost was that we forgot about you people. We forgot about improving normal lives. We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive. And ""genius,"" ""high-talent,"" became a dirty word. No one works on that.And the third problem about the disease model is, in our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier — positive interventions.So that was not good. And so that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert, Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call, ""positive psychology,"" which has three aims. The first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness. It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. It should be interested in the best things in life. And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling, and with genius, with nurturing high talent.So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, a science of what makes life worth living. It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness. And any of you, for free, can go to that website —[www.authentichappiness.org]and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness. You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, how they're defined, how to diagnose them, what builds them and what gets in their way. We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity, as a cause of happiness.I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people, and I've asked the question: How do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you? And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people. How do they differ from the rest of us? It turns out there's one way, very surprising — they're not more religious, they're not in better shape, they don't have more money, they're not better looking, they don't have more good events and fewer bad events. The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social. They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning.(Laughter)They don't spend time alone. Each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends.But watch out here — this is merely correlational data, not causal, and it's about happiness in the first, ""Hollywood"" sense, I'm going to talk about, happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer. And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment. We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries, from the Buddha to Tony Robbins. About 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy. And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them, and we actually carry out random-assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies. That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier? In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results.But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, is, can psychology actually make people happier? And to ask that question — ""happy"" is not a word I use very much — we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about ""happy."" And I believe there are three different — I call them ""different"" because different interventions build them, it's possible to have one rather than the other — three different happy lives. The first happy life is the pleasant life. This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, and the skills to amplify it. The second is a life of engagement: a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure; time stops for you. That's what Aristotle was talking about. And third, the meaningful life. I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them.The first life is the pleasant life, and it's simply, as best we can find it, it's having as many of the pleasures as you can, as much positive emotion as you can, and learning the skills — savoring, mindfulness — that amplify them, that stretch them over time and space. But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology, and why it doesn't end here.The first drawback is, it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. So the different tricks that Matthieu and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed. It's all like French vanilla ice cream: the first taste is 100 percent; by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone. And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable.And this leads to the second life. I have to tell you about my friend Len, to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion, more than building pleasure. In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work. By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire and the head of an options trading company. Second, in play, he's a national champion bridge player. But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure. And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish.(Laughter)Len is an introvert. American women said to Len, when he dated them, ""You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost."" And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma. It turned out that — Len grew up in Long Island and he played football and watched football, and played bridge. Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities.The question is: Is Len unhappy? And I want to say, not. Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity, I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness, and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow. When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning, time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell. When the first card is played till 10 days later, when the tournament is over, time stops for Len.And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about, about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way: pleasure has raw feel — you know it's happening; it's thought and feeling. But what Mike told you yesterday — during flow ... you can't feel anything. You're one with the music. Time stops. You have intense concentration. And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life. And we think there's a recipe for it, and it's knowing what your highest strengths are — again, there's a valid test of what your five highest strengths are — and then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can. Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting.Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's. Hated the job. She's working her way through college. Her highest strength was social intelligence. So she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day. Now, obviously she failed. But what she did was to take her highest strengths, and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. You don't look like Debbie Reynolds. You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption.So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion; the second path is eudaemonian flow; and the third path is meaning. This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. And meaning, in this view, consists of — very parallel to eudaemonia — it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are.I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives — the pleasant life, the good life, the meaningful life — people are now hard at work on the question: Are there things that lastingly change those lives? And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it. It's being done in a rigorous manner. It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works. So we do random-assignment, placebo-controlled, long-term studies of different interventions. Just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect: when we teach people about the pleasant life, how to have more pleasure in your life, one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day, and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures. And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced.Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would. Close your eyes. I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. The person has to be alive. Now, OK, you can open your eyes. I hope all of you have such a person. Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit, is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, call them on the phone in Phoenix, ask if you can visit, don't tell them why. Show up at their door, you read the testimonial — everyone weeps when this happens. And what happens is, when we test people one week later, a month later, three months later, they're both happier and less depressed.Another example is a strengths date, in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test, and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths. We find this is a strengthener of relationships. And fun versus philanthropy. It's so heartening to be in a group like this, in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy. Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this, so we actually have people do something altruistic and do something fun, and contrast it. And what you find is when you do something fun, it has a square wave walk set. When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts. So those are examples of positive interventions.So the next to last thing I want to say is: we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. This is really what you're about. And that's our target variable. And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, how much life satisfaction do you get? So we ask — and we've done this in 15 replications, involving thousands of people: To what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life, the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction?And our results surprised us; they were backward of what we thought. It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction. The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. The pursuit of engagement is also very strong. Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. Which is to say, the full life — the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three. Conversely, if you have none of the three, the empty life, the sum is less than the parts.And what we're asking now is: Does the very same relationship — physical health, morbidity, how long you live and productivity — follow the same relationship? That is, in a corporation, is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning? Is health a function of positive engagement, of pleasure, and of meaning in life? And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes.So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard, and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this. I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much, which was one of the remarkable things. But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way: we all know that technology, entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes. We also know that technology, entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery. And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important. I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. And I never found that; I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero; that they were empty.And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life, the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning, are different from the skills of relieving misery. And so, the parallel thing holds with technology, entertainment and design, I believe. That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion. And that's typically how they've been used. But once you fractionate happiness the way I do — not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough — there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. As Laura Lee told us, design and, I believe, entertainment and technology, can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well.So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism, in addition to the space elevator, is that I think with technology, entertainment and design, we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet. And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough. If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion, meaning eudaemonia, it will be good enough. And if design can increase positive emotion, eudaemonia, and flow and meaning, what we're all doing together will become good enough.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology
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"The decorative use of wire in southern Africa dates back hundreds of years. But modernization actually brought communication and a whole new material, in the form of telephone wire. Rural to urban migration meant that newfound industrial materials started to replace hard-to-come-by natural grasses.So, here you can see the change from use — starting to use contemporary materials. These pieces date back from the '40s to the late '50s. In the '90s, my interest and passion for transitional art forms led me to a new form, which came from a squatter camp outside Durban.And I got the opportunity to start working with this community at that point, and started developing, really, and mentoring them in terms of scale, in terms of the design. And the project soon grew from five to 50 weavers in about a year. Soon we had outgrown the scrap yards, what they could provide, so we coerced a wire manufacturer to help us, and not only to supply the materials on bobbins, but to produce to our color specifications.At the same time, I was thinking, well, there's lots of possibility here to produce contemporary products, away from the ethnic, a little bit more contemporary. So I developed a whole range around — mass-produced range — that obviously fitted into a much higher-end decor market that could be exported and also service our local market.We started experimenting, as you can see, in terms of shapes, forms. The scale became very important, and it's become our pet project. It's successful, it's been running for 12 years. And we supply the Conran shops, and Donna Karan, and so it's kind of great.This is our group, our main group of weavers. They come on a weekly basis to Durban. They all have bank accounts. They've all moved back to the rural area where they came from. It's a weekly turnaround of production. This is the community that I originally showed you the slide of. And that's also modernized today, and it's supporting work for 300 weavers. And the rest says it all.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marisa_fick_jordan_shares_the_wonder_of_zulu_wire_art
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"My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us. Because I really believe that we're never more beautiful than when we're most ugly. Because that's really the moment we really know what we're made of. As Chris said, I grew up in Nigeria with a whole generation — in the '80s — of students who were protesting a military dictatorship, which has finally ended. So it wasn't just me, there was a whole generation of us.But what I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa, they have a phrase called Ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. But if you're like me, my humanity is more like a window. I don't really see it, I don't pay attention to it until there's, you know, like a bug that's dead on the window. Then suddenly I see it, and usually, it's never good. It's usually when I'm cussing in traffic at someone who is trying to drive their car and drink coffee and send emails and make notes. So what Ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people. It's really very simple, but really very complicated.So, I thought I should start with some stories. I should tell you some stories about remarkable people, so I thought I'd start with my mother. (Laughter) And she was dark, too. My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English. This is how English my mother is — or was, she just passed. She came out to California, to Los Angeles, to visit me, and we went to Malibu, which she thought was very disappointing. (Laughter) And then we went to a fish restaurant, and we had Chad, the surfer dude, serving us, and he came up and my mother said, ""Do you have any specials, young man?"" And Chad says, ""Sure, like, we have this, like, salmon, that's, like, rolled in this, like, wasabi, like, crust. It's totally rad."" And my mother turned to me and said, ""What language is he speaking?"" (Laughter) I said, ""English, mum."" And she shook her head and said, ""Oh, these Americans. We gave them a language, why don't they use it?"" (Laughter)So, this woman, who converted from the Church of England to Catholicism when she married my father — and there's no one more rabid than a Catholic convert — decided to teach in the rural areas in Nigeria, particularly among Igbo women, the Billings ovulation method, which was the only approved birth control by the Catholic Church. But her Igbo wasn't too good. So she took me along to translate. I was seven. (Laughter) So, here are these women, who never discuss their period with their husbands, and here I am telling them, ""Well, how often do you get your period?"" (Laughter) And, ""Do you notice any discharges?"" (Laughter) And, ""How swollen is your vulva?"" (Laughter) She never would have thought of herself as a feminist, my mother, but she always used to say, ""Anything a man can do, I can fix."" (Applause) And when my father complained about this situation, where she's taking a seven-year-old boy to teach this birth control, you know, he used to say, ""Oh, you're turning him into — you're teaching him how to be a woman."" My mother said, ""Someone has to."" (Laughter)This woman — during the Biafran war, we were caught in the war. It was my mother with five little children. It takes her one year, through refugee camp after refugee camp, to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country. At every single refugee camp, she has to face off soldiers who want to take my elder brother Mark, who was nine, and make him a boy soldier. Can you imagine this five-foot-two woman, standing up to men with guns who want to kill us? All through that one year, my mother never cried one time, not once. But when we were in Lisbon, in the airport, about to fly to England, this woman saw my mother wearing this dress, which had been washed so many times it was basically see through, with five really hungry-looking kids, came over and asked her what had happened. And she told this woman. And so this woman emptied out her suitcase and gave all of her clothes to my mother, and to us, and the toys of her kids, who didn't like that very much, but — (Laughter) — that was the only time she cried. And I remember years later, I was writing about my mother, and I asked her, ""Why did you cry then?"" And she said, ""You know, you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror. But the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.""The old women in my father's village, after this war had happened, memorized the names of every dead person, and they would sing these dirges, made up of these names. Dirges so melancholic that they would scorch you. And they would sing them only when they planted the rice, as though they were seeding the hearts of the dead into the rice. But when it came for harvest time, they would sing these joyful songs, that were made up of the names of every child who had been born that year. And then the next planting season, when they sang the dirge, they would remove as many names of the dead that equaled as many people that were born. And in this way, these women enacted a lot of transformation, beautiful transformation.Did you know, that before the genocide in Rwanda, the word for rape and the word for marriage was the same one? But today, women are rebuilding Rwanda. Did you also know that after apartheid, when the new government went into the parliament houses, there were no female toilets in the building? Which would seem to suggest that apartheid was entirely the business of men. All of this to say, that despite the horror, and despite the death, women are never really counted. Their humanity never seems to matter very much to us.When I was growing up in Nigeria — and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from — there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women, that's essentially what it is. And a lot of rituals involved killing, killing little animals, progressing along, so when I turned 13 — and, I mean, it made sense, it was an agrarian community, somebody had to kill the animals, there was no Whole Foods you could go and get kangaroo steak at — so when I turned 13, it was my turn now to kill a goat. And I was this weird, sensitive kid, who couldn't really do it, but I had to do it. And I was supposed to do this alone. But a friend of mine, called Emmanuel, who was significantly older than me, who'd been a boy soldier during the Biafran war, decided to come with me. Which sort of made me feel good, because he'd seen a lot of things. Now, when I was growing up, he used to tell me stories about how he used to bayonet people, and their intestines would fall out, but they would keep running. So, this guy comes with me. And I don't know if you've ever heard a goat, or seen one — they sound like human beings, that's why we call tragedies ""a song of a goat."" My friend Brad Kessler says that we didn't become human until we started keeping goats. Anyway, a goat's eyes are like a child's eyes. So when I tried to kill this goat and I couldn't, Emmanuel bent down, he puts his hand over the mouth of the goat, covers its eyes, so I don't have to look into them, while I kill the goat. It didn't seem like a lot, for this guy who'd seen so much, and to whom the killing of a goat must have seemed such a quotidian experience, still found it in himself to try to protect me. I was a wimp. I cried for a very long time. And afterwards, he didn't say a word. He just sat there watching me cry for an hour. And then afterwards he said to me, ""It will always be difficult, but if you cry like this every time, you will die of heartbreak. Just know that it is enough sometimes to know that it is difficult."" Of course, talking about goats makes me think of sheep, and not in good ways. (Laughter)So, I was born two days after Christmas. So growing up, you know, I had a cake and everything, but I never got any presents, because, born two days after Christmas. So, I was about nine, and my uncle had just come back from Germany, and we had the Catholic priest over, my mother was entertaining him with tea. And my uncle suddenly says, ""Where are Chris' presents?"" And my mother said, ""Don't talk about that in front of guests."" But he was desperate to show that he'd just come back, so he summoned me up, and he said, ""Go into the bedroom, my bedroom. Take anything you want out of the suitcase. It's your birthday present."" I'm sure he thought I'd take a book or a shirt, but I found an inflatable sheep. (Laughter) So, I blew it up and ran into the living room, my finger where it shouldn't have been, I was waving this buzzing sheep around, and my mother looked like she was going to die of shock. (Laughter) And Father McGetrick was completely unflustered, just stirred his tea and looked at my mother and said, ""It's all right Daphne, I'm Scottish."" (Laughter) (Applause)My last days in prison, the last 18 months, my cellmate — for the last year, the first year of the last 18 months — my cellmate was 14 years old. The name was John James, and in those days, if a family member committed a crime, the military would hold you as ransom till your family turned themselves in. So, here was this 14-year-old kid on death row. And not everybody on death row was a political prisoner. There were some really bad people there. And he had smuggled in two comics, two comic books — ""Spiderman"" and ""X-Men."" He was obsessed. And when he got tired of reading them, he started to teach the men in death row how to read, with these comic books. And so, I remember night after night, you'd hear all these men, these really hardened criminals, huddled around John James, reciting, ""Take that, Spidey!"" (Laughter) It's incredible. I was really worried. He didn't know what death row meant. I'd been there twice, and I was terribly afraid that I was going to die. And he would always laugh, and say, ""Come on, man, we'll make it out."" Then I'd say, ""How do you know?"" And he said, ""Oh, I heard it on the grapevine."" They killed him. They handcuffed him to a chair, and they tacked his penis to a table with a six-inch nail, then left him there to bleed to death. That's how I ended up in solitary, because I let my feelings be known. All around us, everywhere, there are people like this.The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god. But if the god became unruly and began to ask for human sacrifice, the Igbos would destroy the god. They would knock down the shrine, and they would stop saying the god's name. This is how they came to reclaim their humanity. Every day, all of us here, we're building gods that have gone rampant, and it's time we started knocking them down and forgetting their names. It doesn't require a tremendous thing. All it requires is to recognize among us, every day — the few of us that can see — are surrounded by people like the ones I've told you.There are some of you in this room, amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to our own humanity. I want to end with a poem by an American poet called Lucille Clifton. The poem is called ""Libation,"" and it's for my friend Vusi who is in the audience here somewhere. ""Libation, North Carolina, 1999. I offer to this ground, this gin. I imagine an old man crying here, out of the sight of the overseer. He pushes his tongue through a hole where his tooth would be, if he were whole. It aches in that space where his tooth would be, where his land would be, his house, his wife, his son, his beautiful daughter. He wipes sorrow from his face, and puts his thirsty finger to his thirsty tongue, and tastes the salt. I call a name that could be his. This is for you, old man. This gin, this salty earth."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity
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"Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape. This could be us. We belong to the family called the Hominidae. We are the species called Homo sapiens sapiens, and it's important to remember that, in terms of our place in the world today and our future on planet Earth.We are one species of about five and a half thousand mammalian species that exist on planet Earth today. And that's just a tiny fraction of all species that have ever lived on the planet in past times. We're one species out of approximately, or let's say, at least 16 upright-walking apes that have existed over the past six to eight million years. But as far as we know, we're the only upright-walking ape that exists on planet Earth today, except for the bonobos.And it's important to remember that, because the bonobos are so human, and they share 99 percent of their genes with us. And we share our origins with a handful of the living great apes. It's important to remember that we evolved. Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. We have a common past, and we have a common future. And it is important to remember that all of these great apes have come on as long and as interesting evolutionary journey as we ourselves have today. And it's this journey that is of such interest to humanity, and it's this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family, as we've been in East Africa looking for the fossil remains of our ancestors to try and piece together our evolutionary past.And this is how we look for them. A group of dedicated young men and women walk very slowly out across vast areas of Africa, looking for small fragments of bone, fossil bone, that may be on the surface. And that's an example of what we may do as we walk across the landscape in Northern Kenya, looking for fossils. I doubt many of you in the audience can see the fossil that's in this picture, but if you look very carefully, there is a jaw, a lower jaw, of a 4.1-million-year-old upright-walking ape as it was found at Lake Turkana on the west side. (Laughter) It's extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive and it is something that is going to involve a lot more people, to begin to piece together our past. We still really haven't got a very complete picture of it.When we find a fossil, we mark it. Today, we've got great technology: we have GPS. We mark it with a GPS fix, and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen, so we could essentially put it back on the surface, exactly where we found it. And we can bring all this information into big GIS packages, today. When we then find something very important, like the bones of a human ancestor, we begin to excavate it extremely carefully and slowly, using dental picks and fine paintbrushes. And all the sediment is then put through these screens, and where we go again through it very carefully, looking for small bone fragments, and it's then washed.And these things are so exciting. They are so often the only, or the very first time that anybody has ever seen the remains. And here's a very special moment, when my mother and myself were digging up some remains of human ancestors. And it is one of the most special things to ever do with your mother. (Laughter) Not many people can say that.But now, let me take you back to Africa, two million years ago. I'd just like to point out, if you look at the map of Africa, it does actually look like a hominid skull in its shape. Now we're going to go to the East African and the Rift Valley. It essentially runs up from the Gulf of Aden, or runs down to Lake Malawi. And the Rift Valley is a depression. It's a basin, and rivers flow down from the highlands into the basin, carrying sediment, preserving the bones of animals that lived there.If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you. (Laughter) OK, so it is absolutely surprising that we know as much as we do know today about our ancestors, because it's incredibly difficult, A, for these things to become — to be — preserved, and secondly, for them to have been brought back up to the surface. And we really have only spent 50 years looking for these remains, and begin to actually piece together our evolutionary story.So, let's go to Lake Turkana, which is one such lake basin in the very north of our country, Kenya. And if you look north here, there's a big river that flows into the lake that's been carrying sediment and preserving the remains of the animals that lived there. Fossil sites run up and down both lengths of that lake basin, which represents some 20,000 square miles. That's a huge job that we've got on our hands. Two million years ago at Lake Turkana, Homo erectus, one of our human ancestors, actually lived in this region. You can see some of the major fossil sites that we've been working in the north. But, essentially, two million years ago, Homo erectus, up in the far right corner, lived alongside three other species of human ancestor. And here is a skull of a Homo erectus, which I just pulled off the shelf there. (Laughter)But it is not to say that being a single species on planet Earth is the norm. In fact, if you go back in time, it is the norm that there are multiple species of hominids or of human ancestors that coexist at any one time. Where did these things come from? That's what we're still trying to find answers to, and it is important to realize that there is diversity in all different species, and our ancestors are no exception. Here's some reconstructions of some of the fossils that have been found from Lake Turkana.But I was very lucky to have been brought up in Kenya, essentially accompanying my parents to Lake Turkana in search of human remains. And we were able to dig up, when we got old enough, fossils such as this, a slender-snouted crocodile. And we dug up giant tortoises, and elephants and things like that. But when I was 12, as I was in this picture, a very exciting expedition was in place on the west side, when they found essentially the skeleton of this Homo erectus.I could relate to this Homo erectus skeleton very well, because I was the same age that he was when he died. And I imagined him to be tall, dark-skinned. His brothers certainly were able to run long distances chasing prey, probably sweating heavily as they did so. He was very able to use stones effectively as tools. And this individual himself, this one that I'm holding up here, actually had a bad back. He'd probably had an injury as a child. He had a scoliosis and therefore must have been looked after quite carefully by other female, and probably much smaller, members of his family group, to have got to where he did in life, age 12. Unfortunately for him, he fell into a swamp and couldn't get out. Essentially, his bones were rapidly buried and beautifully preserved.And he remained there until 1.6 million years later, when this very famous fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, walked along a small hillside and found that small piece of his skull lying on the surface amongst the pebbles, recognized it as being hominid. It's actually this little piece up here on the top. Well, an excavation was begun immediately, and more and more little bits of skull started to be extracted from the sediment. And what was so fun about it was this: the skull pieces got closer and closer to the roots of the tree, and fairly recently the tree had grown up, but it had found that the skull had captured nice water in the hillside, and so it had decided to grow its roots in and around this, holding it in place and preventing it from washing away down the slope. We began to find limb bones; we found finger bones, the bones of the pelvis, vertebrae, ribs, the collar bones, things that had never, ever been seen before in Homo erectus. It was truly exciting. He had a body very similar to our own, and he was on the threshold of becoming human.Well, shortly afterwards, members of his species started to move northwards out of Africa, and you start to see fossils of Homo erectus in Georgia, China and also in parts of Indonesia. So, Homo erectus was the first human ancestor to leave Africa and begin its spread across the globe. Some exciting finds, again, as I mentioned, from Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia. But also, surprising finds recently announced from the Island of Flores in Indonesia, where a group of these human ancestors have been isolated, and have become dwarfed, and they're only about a meter in height. But they lived only 18,000 years ago, and that is truly extraordinary to think about.Just to put this in terms of generations, because people do find it hard to think of time, Homo erectus left Africa 90,000 generations ago. We evolved essentially from an African stock. Again, at about 200,000 years as a fully-fledged us. And we only left Africa about 70,000 years ago. And until 30,000 years ago, at least three upright-walking apes shared the planet Earth.The question now is, well, who are we? We're certainly a polluting, wasteful, aggressive species, with a few nice things thrown in, perhaps. (Laughter) For the most part, we're not particularly pleasant at all. We have a much larger brain than our ape ancestors. Is this a good evolutionary adaptation, or is it going to lead us to being the shortest-lived hominid species on planet Earth?And what is it that really makes us us? I think it's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness. From very primitive beginnings, with a very crude tool kit of stones, we now have a very advanced tool kit, and our tool use has really reached unprecedented levels: we've got buggies to Mars; we've mapped the human genome; and recently even created synthetic life, thanks to Craig Venter.And we've also managed to communicate with people all over the world, from extraordinary places. Even from within an excavation in northern Kenya, we can talk to people about what we're doing. As Al Gore so clearly has reminded us, we have reached extraordinary numbers of people on this planet. Human ancestors really only survive on planet Earth, if you look at the fossil record, for about, on average, a million years at a time. We've only been around for the past 200,000 years as a species, yet we've reached a population of more than six and a half billion people.And last year, our population grew by 80 million. I mean, these are extraordinary numbers. You can see here, again, taken from Al Gore's book. But what's happened is our technology has removed the checks and balances on our population growth. We have to control our numbers, and I think this is as important as anything else that's being done in the world today. But we have to control our numbers, because we can't really hold it together as a species.My father so appropriately put it, that ""We are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species."" Can we hold it together? It's important to remember that we all evolved in Africa. We all have an African origin. We have a common past and we share a common future. Evolutionarily speaking, we're just a blip. We're sitting on the edge of a precipice, and we have the tools and the technology at our hands to communicate what needs to be done to hold it together today. We could tell every single human being out there, if we really wanted to. But will we do that, or will we just let nature take its course?Well, to end on a very positive note, I think evolutionarily speaking, this is probably a fairly good thing, in the end. I'll leave it at that, thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/louise_leakey_digs_for_humanity_s_origins
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"So I'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways. This is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life. You might enjoy the awkwardly tight, cut-off pajama bottoms with balloons. Anyway, it was a time when I was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories. So this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings I ever made. And recently I've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality — so, real stories. And specifically, I'm interested in collecting my own stories, stories from the Internet, and then recently, stories from life, which is kind of a new area of work that I've been doing recently. So I'll be talking about each of those today. So, first of all, my own stories. These are two of my sketchbooks. I have many of these books, and I've been keeping them for about the last eight or nine years. They accompany me wherever I go in my life, and I fill them with all sorts of things, records of my lived experience: so watercolor paintings, drawings of what I see, dead flowers, dead insects, pasted ticket stubs, rusting coins, business cards, writings. And in these books, you can find these short, little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that I meet. And, you know, after keeping these books for a number of years, I started to become very interested in collecting not only my own personal artifacts, but also the artifacts of other people. So, I started collecting found objects. This is a photograph I found lying in a gutter in New York City about 10 years ago. On the front, you can see the tattered black-and-white photo of a woman's face, and on the back it says, ""To Judy, the girl with the Bill Bailey voice. Have fun in whatever you do."" And I really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody's life. As opposed to knowing the whole story, just knowing a little bit of the story, and then letting your own mind fill in the rest. And that idea of a partial glimpse is something that will come back in a lot of the work I'll be showing later today. So, around this time I was studying computer science at Princeton University, and I noticed that it was suddenly possible to collect these sorts of personal artifacts, not just from street corners, but also from the Internet. And that suddenly, people, en masse, were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives. Blog posts, photographs, thoughts, feelings, opinions, all of these things were being expressed by people online, and leaving behind trails. So, I started to write computer programs that study very, very large sets of these online footprints. One such project is about a year and a half old. It's called ""We Feel Fine."" This is a project that scans the world's newly posted blog entries every two or three minutes, searching for occurrences of the phrases ""I feel"" and ""I am feeling."" And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the full sentence up to the period and also tries to identify demographic information about the author. So, their gender, their age, their geographic location and what the weather conditions were like when they wrote that sentence. It collects about 20,000 such sentences a day and it's been running for about a year and a half, having collected over 10 and a half million feelings now. This is, then, how they're presented. These dots here represent some of the English-speaking world's feelings from the last few hours, each dot being a single sentence stated by a single blogger. And the color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling inside, so the bright ones are happy, and the dark ones are sad. And the diameter of each dot corresponds to the length of the sentence inside. So the small ones are short, and the bigger ones are longer. ""I feel fine with the body I'm in, there'll be no easy excuse for why I still feel uncomfortable being close to my boyfriend,"" from a twenty-two-year-old in Japan. ""I got this on some trading locally, but really don't feel like screwing with wiring and crap."" Also, some of the feelings contain photographs in the blog posts. And when that happens, these montage compositions are automatically created, which consist of the sentence and images being combined. And any of these can be opened up to reveal the sentence inside. ""I feel good."" ""I feel rough now, and I probably gained 100,000 pounds, but it was worth it."" ""I love how they were able to preserve most in everything that makes you feel close to nature — butterflies, man-made forests, limestone caves and hey, even a huge python."" So the next movement is called mobs. This provides a slightly more statistical look at things. This is showing the world's most common feelings overall right now, dominated by better, then bad, then good, then guilty, and so on. Weather causes the feelings to assume the physical traits of the weather they represent. So the sunny ones swirl around, the cloudy ones float along, the rainy ones fall down, and the snowy ones flutter to the ground. You can also stop a raindrop and open the feeling inside. Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their spots on a world map, giving you a sense of their geographic distribution. So I'll show you now some of my favorite montages from ""We Feel Fine."" These are the images that are automatically constructed. ""I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe."" (Laughter) ""I've kissed numerous other boys and it hasn't felt good, the kisses felt messy and wrong, but kissing Lucas feels beautiful and almost spiritual."" ""I can feel my cancer grow."" ""I feel pretty."" ""I feel skinny, but I'm not."" ""I'm 23, and a recovering meth and heroin addict, and feel absolutely blessed to still be alive."" ""I can't wait to see them racing for the first time at Daytona next month, because I feel the need for speed."" (Laughter) ""I feel sassy."" ""I feel so sexy in this new wig."" As you can see, ""We Feel Fine"" collects very, very small-scale personal stories. Sometimes, stories as short as two or three words. So, really even challenging the notion of what can be considered a story. And recently, I've become interested in diving much more deeply into a single story. And that's led me to doing some work with the physical world, not with the Internet, and only using the Internet at the very last moment, as a presentation medium. So these are some newer projects that actually aren't even launched publicly yet. The first such one is called ""The Whale Hunt."" Last May, I spent nine days living up in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States, with a family of Inupiat Eskimos, documenting their annual spring whale hunt. This is the whaling camp here, we're about six miles from shore, camping on five and a half feet of thick, frozen pack ice. And that water that you see there is the open lead, and through that lead, bowhead whales migrate north each springtime. And the Eskimo community basically camps out on the edge of the ice here, waits for a whale to come close enough to attack. And when it does, it throws a harpoon at it, and then hauls the whale up under the ice, and cuts it up. And that would provide the community's food supply for a long time. So I went up there, and I lived with these guys out in their whaling camp here, and photographed the entire experience, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport in New York, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven and a half days later. I photographed that entire experience at five-minute intervals. So every five minutes, I took a photograph. When I was awake, with the camera around my neck. When I was sleeping, with a tripod and a timer. And then in moments of high adrenaline, like when something exciting was happening, I would up that photographic frequency to as many as 37 photographs in five minutes. So what this created was a photographic heartbeat that sped up and slowed down, more or less matching the changing pace of my own heartbeat. That was the first concept here. The second concept was to use this experience to think about the fundamental components of any story. What are the things that make up a story? So, stories have characters. Stories have concepts. Stories take place in a certain area. They have contexts. They have colors. What do they look like? They have time. When did it take place? Dates — when did it occur? And in the case of the whale hunt, also this idea of an excitement level. The thing about stories, though, in most of the existing mediums that we're accustomed to — things like novels, radio, photographs, movies, even lectures like this one — we're very accustomed to this idea of the narrator or the camera position, some kind of omniscient, external body through whose eyes you see the story. We're very used to this. But if you think about real life, it's not like that at all. I mean, in real life, things are much more nuanced and complex, and there's all of these overlapping stories intersecting and touching each other. And so I thought it would be interesting to build a framework to surface those types of stories. So, in the case of ""The Whale Hunt,"" how could we extract something like the story of Simeon and Crawford, involving the concepts of wildlife, tools and blood, taking place on the Arctic Ocean, dominated by the color red, happening around 10 a.m. on May 3, with an excitement level of high? So, how to extract this order of narrative from this larger story? I built a web interface for viewing ""The Whale Hunt"" that attempts to do just this. So these are all 3,214 pictures taken up there. This is my studio in Brooklyn. This is the Arctic Ocean, and the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. You can start to see some of the story here, told by color. So this red strip signifies the color of the wallpaper in the basement apartment where I was staying. And things go white as we move out onto the Arctic Ocean. Introduction of red down here, when whales are being cut up. You can see a timeline, showing you the exciting moments throughout the story. These are organized chronologically. Wheel provides a slightly more playful version of the same, so these are also all the photographs organized chronologically. And any of these can be clicked, and then the narrative is entered at that position. So here I am sleeping on the airplane heading up to Alaska. That's ""Moby Dick."" This is the food we ate. This is in the Patkotak's family living room in their house in Barrow. The boxed wine they served us. Cigarette break outside — I don't smoke. This is a really exciting sequence of me sleeping. This is out at whale camp, on the Arctic Ocean. This graph that I'm clicking down here is meant to be reminiscent of a medical heartbeat graph, showing the exciting moments of adrenaline. This is the ice starting to freeze over. The snow fence they built. And so what I'll show you now is the ability to pull out sub-stories. So, here you see the cast. These are all of the people in ""The Whale Hunt"" and the two whales that were killed down here. And we could do something as arbitrary as, say, extract the story of Rony, involving the concepts of blood and whales and tools, taking place on the Arctic Ocean, at Ahkivgaq camp, with the heartbeat level of fast. And now we've whittled down that whole story to just 29 matching photographs, and then we can enter the narrative at that position. And you can see Rony cutting up the whale here. These whales are about 40 feet long, and weighing over 40 tons. And they provide the food source for the community for much of the year. Skipping ahead a bit more here, this is Rony on the whale carcass. They use no chainsaws or anything; it's entirely just blades, and an incredibly efficient process. This is the guys on the rope, pulling open the carcass. This is the muktuk, or the blubber, all lined up for community distribution. It's baleen. Moving on. So what I'm going to tell you about next is a very new thing. It's not even a project yet. So, just yesterday, I flew in here from Singapore, and before that, I was spending two weeks in Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom nestled between Tibet and India. And I was doing a project there about happiness, interviewing a lot of local people. So Bhutan has this really wacky thing where they base most of their high-level governmental decisions around the concept of gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product, and they've been doing this since the '70s. And it leads to just a completely different value system. It's an incredibly non-materialistic culture, where people don't have a lot, but they're incredibly happy. So I went around and I talked to people about some of these ideas. So, I did a number of things. I asked people a number of set questions, and took a number of set photographs, and interviewed them with audio, and also took pictures. I would start by asking people to rate their happiness between one and 10, which is kind of inherently absurd. And then when they answered, I would inflate that number of balloons and give them that number of balloons to hold. So, you have some really happy person holding 10 balloons, and some really sad soul holding one balloon. But you know, even holding one balloon is like, kind of happy. (Laughter) And then I would ask them a number of questions like what was the happiest day in their life, what makes them happy. And then finally, I would ask them to make a wish. And when they made a wish, I would write their wish onto one of the balloons and take a picture of them holding it. So I'm going to show you now just a few brief snippets of some of the interviews that I did, some of the people I spoke with. This is an 11-year-old student. He was playing cops and robbers with his friends, running around town, and they all had plastic toy guns. His wish was to become a police officer. He was getting started early. Those were his hands. I took pictures of everybody's hands, because I think you can often tell a lot about somebody from how their hands look. I took a portrait of everybody, and asked everybody to make a funny face. A 17-year-old student. Her wish was to have been born a boy. She thinks that women have a pretty tough go of things in Bhutan, and it's a lot easier if you're a boy. A 28-year-old cell phone shop owner. If you knew what Paro looked like, you'd understand how amazing it is that there's a cell phone shop there. He wanted to help poor people. A 53-year-old farmer. She was chaffing wheat, and that pile of wheat behind her had taken her about a week to make. She wanted to keep farming until she dies. You can really start to see the stories told by the hands here. She was wearing this silver ring that had the word ""love"" engraved on it, and she'd found it in the road somewhere. A 16-year-old quarry worker. This guy was breaking rocks with a hammer in the hot sunlight, but he just wanted to spend his life as a farmer. A 21-year-old monk. He was very happy. He wanted to live a long life at the monastery. He had this amazing series of hairs growing out of a mole on the left side of his face, which I'm told is very good luck. He was kind of too shy to make a funny face. A 16-year-old student. She wanted to become an independent woman. I asked her about that, and she said she meant that she doesn't want to be married, because, in her opinion, when you get married in Bhutan as a woman, your chances to live an independent life kind of end, and so she had no interest in that. A 24-year-old truck driver. There are these terrifyingly huge Indian trucks that come careening around one-lane roads with two-lane traffic, with 3,000-foot drop-offs right next to the road, and he was driving one of these trucks. But all he wanted was to just live a comfortable life, like other people. A 24-year-old road sweeper. I caught her on her lunch break. She'd built a little fire to keep warm, right next to the road. Her wish was to marry someone with a car. She wanted a change in her life. She lives in a little worker's camp right next to the road, and she wanted a different lot on things. An 81-year-old itinerant farmer. I saw this guy on the side of the road, and he actually doesn't have a home. He travels from farm to farm each day trying to find work, and then he tries to sleep at whatever farm he gets work at. So his wish was to come with me, so that he had somewhere to live. He had this amazing knife that he pulled out of his gho and started brandishing when I asked him to make a funny face. It was all good-natured. A 10-year-old. He wanted to join a school and learn to read, but his parents didn't have enough money to send him to school. He was eating this orange, sugary candy that he kept dipping his fingers into, and since there was so much saliva on his hands, this orange paste started to form on his palms. (Laughter) A 37-year-old road worker. One of the more touchy political subjects in Bhutan is the use of Indian cheap labor that they import from India to build the roads, and then they send these people home once the roads are built. So these guys were in a worker's gang mixing up asphalt one morning on the side of the highway. His wish was to make some money and open a store. A 75-year-old farmer. She was selling oranges on the side of the road. I asked her about her wish, and she said, ""You know, maybe I'll live, maybe I'll die, but I don't have a wish."" She was chewing betel nut, which caused her teeth over the years to turn very red. Finally, this is a 26-year-old nun I spoke to. Her wish was to make a pilgrimage to Tibet. I asked her how long she planned to live in the nunnery and she said, ""Well, you know, of course, it's impermanent, but my plan is to live here until I'm 30, and then enter a hermitage."" And I said, ""You mean, like a cave?"" And she said, ""Yeah, like a cave."" And I said, ""Wow, and how long will you live in the cave?"" And she said, ""Well, you know, I think I'd kind of like to live my whole life in the cave."" I just thought that was amazing. I mean, she spoke in a way — with amazing English, and amazing humor, and amazing laughter — that made her seem like somebody I could have bumped into on the streets of New York, or in Vermont, where I'm from. But here she had been living in a nunnery for the last seven years. I asked her a little bit more about the cave and what she planned would happen once she went there, you know. What if she saw the truth after just one year, what would she do for the next 35 years in her life? And this is what she said. Woman: I think I'm going to stay for 35. Maybe — maybe I'll die. Jonathan Harris: Maybe you'll die? Woman: Yes. JH: 10 years? Woman: Yes, yes. JH: 10 years, that's a long time. Woman: Yes, not maybe one, 10 years, maybe I can die within one year, or something like that. JH: Are you hoping to? Woman: Ah, because you know, it's impermanent. JH: Yeah, but — yeah, OK. Do you hope — would you prefer to live in the cave for 40 years, or to live for one year? Woman: But I prefer for maybe 40 to 50. JH: 40 to 50? Yeah. Woman: Yes. From then, I'm going to the heaven. JH: Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. Woman: Thank you. JH: I hope it's everything that you hope it will be. So thank you again, so much. Woman: You're most welcome. JH: So if you caught that, she said she hoped to die when she was around 40. That was enough life for her. So, the last thing we did, very quickly, is I took all those wish balloons — there were 117 interviews, 117 wishes — and I brought them up to a place called Dochula, which is a mountain pass in Bhutan, at 10,300 feet, one of the more sacred places in Bhutan. And up there, there are thousands of prayer flags that people have spread out over the years. And we re-inflated all of the balloons, put them up on a string, and hung them up there among the prayer flags. And they're actually still flying up there today. So if any of you have any Bhutan travel plans in the near future, you can go check these out. Here are some images from that. We said a Buddhist prayer so that all these wishes could come true. You can start to see some familiar balloons here. ""To make some money and to open a store"" was the Indian road worker. Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_harris_collects_stories
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"To be new at TED — it's like being the last high-school virgin. (Laughter) You know that all of the cool people are — they're doing it. And you're on the outside, you're at home. You're like the Raspyni Brothers, where you've got your balls in cold water. And — (Laughter) — you just play with your fingers all day. And then you get invited. And you're on the inside, and it's everything you hoped it would be. It's exciting and there's music playing all of the time and then suddenly it's over. And it's only taken five minutes. And you want to go back and do it again. But I really appreciate being here. And thank you, Chris, and also, thank you, Deborah Patton, for making this possible.So anyway, today we'll talk about architecture a little bit, within the subject of creation and optimism. And if you put creation and optimism together, you've got two choices that you can talk about. You can talk about creationism — which I think wouldn't go down well with this audience, at least not from a view where you were a proponent of it — or you can talk about optimisations, spelled the British way, with an S, instead of a Z. And I think that's what I'd like to talk about today. But any kind of conversation about architecture — which is, in fact, what you were just talking about, what was going on here, setting up TED, small-scale architecture — at the present time can't really happen without a conversation about this, the World Trade Center, and what's been going on there, what it means to us.Because if architecture is what I believe it to be, which is the built form of our cultural ambitions, what do you do when presented with an opportunity to rectify a situation that represents somebody else's cultural ambitions relative to us? And our own opportunity to make something new there? This has been a really galvanizing issue for a long time. I think that the World Trade Center in, rather an unfortunate way, brought architecture into focus in a way that I don't think people had thought of in a long time, and made it a subject for common conversation. I don't remember, in my 20-year career of practicing and writing about architecture, a time when five people sat me down at a table and asked me very serious questions about zoning, fire exiting, safety concerns and whether carpet burns. These are just not things we talked about very often. And yet, now, it's talked about all the time. At the point where you can weaponize your buildings, you have to suddenly think about architecture in a very different way. And so now we're going to think about architecture in a very different way, we're going to think about it like this.How many of you saw USA Today, today? There it is. Looks like that. There's the World Trade Center site, on the front cover. They've made a selection. They've chosen a project by Daniel Libeskind, the enfant terrible of the moment of architecture. Child-prodigy piano player, he started on the squeezebox, and moved to a little more serious issue, a bigger instrument, and now to an even larger instrument, upon which to work his particular brand of deconstructivist magic, as you see here. He was one of six people who were invited to participate in this competition, after six previous firms struck out with things that were so stupid and banal that even the city of New York was forced to go, ""Oh, I'm really sorry, we screwed up."" Right. Can we do this again from the top, except use some people with a vague hint of talent, instead of just six utter boobs like we brought in last time, real estate hacks of the kind who usually plan our cities. Let's bring in some real architects for a change. And so we got this, or we had a choice of that. Oh, stop clapping.(Laughter)It's too late. That is gone. This was a scheme by a team called THINK, a New York-based team, and then there was that one, which was the Libeskind scheme. This one, this is going to be the new World Trade Center: a giant hole in the ground with big buildings falling into it. Now, I don't know what you think, but I think this is a pretty stupid decision, because what you've done is just made a permanent memorial to destruction by making it look like the destruction is going to continue forever. But that's what we're going to do. But I want you to think about these things in terms of a kind of ongoing struggle that American architecture represents, and that these two things talk about very specifically. And that is the wild divergence in how we choose our architects, in trying to decide whether we want architecture from the kind of technocratic solution to everything — that there is a large, technical answer that can solve all problems, be they social, be they physical, be they chemical — or something that's more of a romantic solution.Now, I don't mean romantic as in, this is a nice place to take someone on a date. I mean romantic in the sense of, there are things larger and grander than us. So, in the American tradition, the difference between the technocratic and the romantic, would be the difference between Thomas Jefferson's Cartesian grids spreading across the United States, that gives us basically the whole shape of every western state in the United States, as a really, truly, technocratic solution, a bowing to the — in Jefferson's time — current, popular philosophy of rationalism. Or the way we went to describe that later: manifest destiny. Now, which would you rather be? A grid, or manifest destiny? Manifest destiny.(Laughter)It's a big deal. It sounds big, it sounds important, it sounds solid. It sounds American. Ballsy, serious, male. And that kind of fight has gone on back and forth in architecture all the time. I mean, it goes on in our private lives, too, every single day. We all want to go out and buy an Audi TT, don't we? Everyone here must own one, or at least they craved one the moment they saw one. And then they hopped in it, turned the little electronic key, rather than the real key, zipped home on their new superhighway, and drove straight into a garage that looks like a Tudor castle.(Laughter)Why? Why? Why do you want to do that? Why do we all want to do that? I even owned a Tudor thing once myself.(Laughter)It's in our nature to go ricocheting back and forth between this technocratic solution and a larger, sort of more romantic image of where we are. So we're going to go straight into this. Can I have the lights off for a moment? I'm going to talk about two architects very, very briefly that represent the current split, architecturally, between these two traditions of a technocratic or technological solution and a romantic solution. And these are two of the top architectural practices in the United States today. One very young, one a little more mature. This is the work of a firm called SHoP, and what you're seeing here, is their isometric drawings of what will be a large-scale camera obscura in a public park. Does everybody know what a camera obscura is? Yeah, it's one of those giant camera lenses that takes a picture of the outside world — it's sort of a little movie, without any moving parts — and projects it on a page, and you can see the world outside you as you walk around it.This is just the outline of it, and you can see, does it look like a regular building? No. It's actually non-orthogonal: it's not up and down, square, rectangular, anything like that, that you'd see in a normal shape of a building. The computer revolution, the technocratic, technological revolution, has allowed us to jettison normal-shaped buildings, traditionally shaped buildings, in favor of non-orthogonal buildings such as this. What's interesting about it is not the shape. What's interesting about it is how it's made. How it's made. A brand-new way to put buildings together, something called mass customization. No, it is not an oxymoron. What makes the building expensive, in the traditional sense, is making individual parts custom, that you can't do over and over again. That's why we all live in developer houses. They all want to save money by building the same thing 500 times. That's because it's cheaper.Mass customization works by an architect feeding into a computer, a program that says, manufacture these parts. The computer then talks to a machine — a computer-operated machine, a cad-cam machine — that can make a zillion different changes, at a moment's notice, because the computer is just a machine. It doesn't care. It's manufacturing the parts. It doesn't see any excess cost. It doesn't spend any extra time. It's not a laborer — it's simply an electronic lathe, so the parts can all be cut at the same time. Meanwhile, instead of sending someone working drawings, which are those huge sets of blueprints that you've seen your whole life, what the architect can do is send a set of assembly instructions, like you used to get when you were a child, when you bought little models that said, ""Bolt A to B, and C to D."" And so what the builder will get is every single individual part that has been custom manufactured off-site and delivered on a truck to the site, to that builder, and a set of these instruction manuals. Just simple ""Bolt A to B"" and they will be able to put them together. Here's the little drawing that tells them how that works — and that's what will happen in the end.You're underneath it, looking up into the lens of the camera obscura. Lest you think this is all fiction, lest you think this is all fantasy, or romance, these same architects were asked to produce something for the central courtyard of PS1, which is a museum in Brooklyn, New York, as part of their young architects summer series. And they said, well, it's summer, what do you do? In the summer, you go to the beach. And when you go to the beach, what do you get? You get sand dunes. So let's make architectural sand dunes and a beach cabana. So they went out and they modeled a computer model of a sand dune. They took photographs, they fed the photographs into their computer program, and that computer program shaped a sand dune and then took that sand dune shape and turned it into — at their instructions, using standard software with slight modifications — a set of instructions for pieces of wood. And those are the pieces of wood. Those are the instructions. These are the pieces, and here's a little of that blown up.What you can see is there's about six different colors, and each color represents a type of wood to be cut, a piece of wood to be cut. All of which were delivered by flat bed, on a truck, and hand assembled in 48 hours by a team of eight people, only one of whom had ever seen the plans before. Only one of whom had ever seen the plans before. And here comes dune-scape, coming up out of the courtyard, and there it is fully built. There are only 16 different pieces of wood, only 16 different assembly parts here. Looks like a beautiful piano sounding board on the inside. It has its own built-in swimming pool, very, very cool. It's a great place for parties — it was, it was only up for six weeks. It's got little dressing rooms and cabanas, where lots of interesting things went on, all summer long.Now, lest you think that this is only for the light at heart, or just temporary installations, this is the same firm working at the World Trade Center, replacing the bridge that used to go across West Street, that very important pedestrian connection between the city of New York and the redevelopment of the West Side. They were asked to design, replace that bridge in six weeks, building it, including all of the parts, manufactured. And they were able to do it. That was their design, using that same computer modeling system and only five or six really different kinds of parts, a couple of struts, like this, some exterior cladding material and a very simple framing system that was all manufactured off-site and delivered by truck. They were able to create that. They were able to create something wonderful. They're now building a 16-story building on the side of New York, using the same technology. Here we're going to walk across the bridge at night. It's self-lit, you don't need any overhead lighting, so the neighbors don't complain about metal-halide lighting in their face. Here it is going across. And there, down the other side, and you get the same kind of grandeur.Now, let me show you, quickly, the opposite, if I may. Woo, pretty, huh. This is the other side of the coin. This is the work of David Rockwell from New York City, whose work you can see out here today. The current king of the romantics, who approaches his work in a very different fashion. It's not to create a technological solution, it's to seduce you into something that you can do, into something that will please you, something that will lift your spirits, something that will make you feel as if are in another world — such as his Nobu restaurant in New York, which is supposed to take you from the clutter of New York City to the simplicity of Japan and the elegance of Japanese tradition. ""When it's all said and done, it's got to look like seaweed,"" said the owner. Or his restaurant, Pod, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.I want you to know the room you're looking at is stark white. Every single surface of this restaurant is white. The reason it has so much color is that it changes using lighting. It's all about sensuality. It's all about transforming. Watch this — I'm not touching any buttons, ladies and gentlemen. This is happening by itself. It transforms through the magic of lighting. It's all about sensuality. It's all about touch. Rosa Mexicano restaurant, where he transports us to the shores of Acapulco, up on the Upper West Side, with this wall of cliff divers who — there you go, like that. Let's see it one more time. Okay, just to make sure that you've enjoyed it. And finally, it's about comfort, it's about making you feel good in places that you wouldn't have felt good before. It's about bringing nature to the inside.In the Guardian Tower of New York, converted to a W Union Square — I'm sorry I'm rushing — where we had to bring in the best horticulturists in the world to make sure that the interior of this dragged the garden space of the court garden of the Union Square into the building itself. It's about stimulation. This is a wine-buying experience simplified by color and taste. Fizzy, fresh, soft, luscious, juicy, smooth, big and sweet wines, all explained to you by color and texture on the wall. And finally, it's about entertainment, as in his headquarters for the Cirque du Soleil, Orlando, Florida, where you're asked to enter the Greek theater, look under the tent and join the magic world of Cirque du Soleil. And I think I'll probably leave it at that. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/reed_kroloff_on_modern_and_romantic_architecture
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"The Internet, the Web as we know it, the kind of Web — the things we're all talking about — is already less than 5,000 days old. So all of the things that we've seen come about, starting, say, with satellite images of the whole Earth, which we couldn't even imagine happening before, all these things rolling into our lives, just this abundance of things that are right before us, sitting in front of our laptop, or our desktop. This kind of cornucopia of stuff just coming and never ending is amazing, and we're not amazed. It's really amazing that all this stuff is here. (Laughter) It's in 5,000 days, all this stuff has come. And I know that 10 years ago, if I had told you that this was all coming, you would have said that that's impossible. There's simply no economic model that that would be possible. And if I told you it was all coming for free, you would say, this is simply — you're dreaming. You're a Californian utopian. You're a wild-eyed optimist. And yet it's here.The other thing that we know about it was that 10 years ago, as I looked at what even Wired was talking about, we thought it was going to be TV, but better. That was the model. That was what everybody was suggesting was going to be coming. And it turns out that that's not what it was. First of all, it was impossible, and it's not what it was. And so one of the things that I think we're learning — if you think about, like, Wikipedia, it's something that was simply impossible. It's impossible in theory, but possible in practice. And if you take all these things that are impossible, I think one of the things that we're learning from this era, from this last decade, is that we have to get good at believing in the impossible, because we're unprepared for it.So, I'm curious about what's going to happen in the next 5,000 days. But if that's happened in the last 5,000 days, what's going to happen in the next 5,000 days? So, I have a kind of a simple story, and it suggests that what we want to think about is this thing that we're making, this thing that has happened in 5,000 days — that's all these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers — basically what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. If there is only one machine, and our little handhelds and devices are actually just little windows into those machines, but that we're basically constructing a single, global machine.And so I began to think about that. And it turned out that this machine happens to be the most reliable machine that we've ever made. It has not crashed; it's running uninterrupted. And there's almost no other machine that we've ever made that runs the number of hours, the number of days. 5,000 days without interruption — that's just unbelievable. And of course, the Internet is longer than just 5,000 days; the Web is only 5,000 days. So, I was trying to basically make measurements. What are the dimensions of this machine? And I started off by calculating how many billions of clicks there are all around the globe on all the computers. And there is a 100 billion clicks per day. And there's 55 trillion links between all the Web pages of the world.And so I began thinking more about other kinds of dimensions, and I made a quick list. Was it Chris Jordan, the photographer, talking about numbers being so large that they're meaningless? Well, here's a list of them. They're hard to tell, but there's one billion PC chips on the Internet, if you count all the chips in all the computers on the Internet. There's two million emails per second. So it's a very big number. It's just a huge machine, and it uses five percent of the global electricity on the planet. So here's the specifications, just as if you were to make up a spec sheet for it: 170 quadrillion transistors, 55 trillion links, emails running at two megahertz itself, 31 kilohertz text messaging, 246 exabyte storage. That's a big disk. That's a lot of storage, memory. Nine exabyte RAM. And the total traffic on this is running at seven terabytes per second. Brewster was saying the Library of Congress is about twenty terabytes. So every second, half of the Library of Congress is swooshing around in this machine. It's a big machine.So I did something else. I figured out 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain. A quadrillion transistors is almost the same as the number of neurons in your brain. So to a first approximation, we have these things — twenty petahertz synapse firings. Of course, the memory is really huge. But to a first approximation, the size of this machine is the size — and its complexity, kind of — to your brain. Because in fact, that's how your brain works — in kind of the same way that the Web works. However, your brain isn't doubling every two years. So if we say this machine right now that we've made is about one HB, one human brain, if we look at the rate that this is increasing, 30 years from now, there'll be six billion HBs. So by the year 2040, the total processing of this machine will exceed a total processing power of humanity,in raw bits and stuff. And this is, I think, where Ray Kurzweil and others get this little chart saying that we're going to cross. So, what about that? Well, here's a couple of things. I have three kind of general things I would like to say, three consequences of this. First, that basically what this machine is doing is embodying. We're giving it a body. And that's what we're going to do in the next 5,000 days — we're going to give this machine a body. And the second thing is, we're going to restructure its architecture. And thirdly, we're going to become completely codependent upon it.So let me go through those three things. First of all, we have all these things in our hands. We think they're all separate devices, but in fact, every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. These are all basically portals into that one machine. The second thing is that — some people call this the cloud, and you're kind of touching the cloud with this. And so in some ways, all you really need is a cloudbook. And the cloudbook doesn't have any storage. It's wireless. It's always connected. There's many things about it. It becomes very simple, and basically what you're doing is you're just touching the machine, you're touching the cloud and you're going to compute that way. So the machine is computing.And in some ways, it's sort of back to the kind of old idea of centralized computing. But everything, all the cameras, and the microphones, and the sensors in cars and everything is connected to this machine. And everything will go through the Web. And we're seeing that already with, say, phones. Right now, phones don't go through the Web, but they are beginning to, and they will. And if you imagine what, say, just as an example, what Google Labs has in terms of experiments with Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, blah, blah, blah — all these things are going to become Web based. They're going through the machine. And I am suggesting that every bit will be owned by the Web. Right now, it's not. If you do spreadsheets and things at work, a Word document, they aren't on the Web, but they are going to be. They're going to be part of this machine. They're going to speak the Web language. They're going to talk to the machine. The Web, in some sense, is kind of like a black hole that's sucking up everything into it. And so every thing will be part of the Web. So every item, every artifact that we make, will have embedded in it some little sliver of Web-ness and connection, and it will be part of this machine, so that our environment — kind of in that ubiquitous computing sense — our environment becomes the Web. Everything is connected.Now, with RFIDs and other things — whatever technology it is, it doesn't really matter. The point is that everything will have embedded in it some sensor connecting it to the machine, and so we have, basically, an Internet of things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels, and a car as a chip with wheels, because basically most of the cost of manufacturing cars is the embedded intelligence and electronics in it, and not the materials. A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative, virtual existence, and that we would have the old economy of atoms. But in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two, where we embed the information, and the digital nature of things into the material world. That's what we're looking forward to. That is where we're going — this union, this convergence of the atomic and the digital.And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basically becomes one media platform. And while there's many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other. So that the laws of media, such as the fact that copies have no value, the value's in the uncopiable things, the immediacy, the authentication, the personalization. The media wants to be liquid. The reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are ""free"" as in ""beer,"" but ""free"" as in ""freedom."" And the network effects rule, meaning that the more you have, the more you get. The first fax machine — the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we're going to see. Attention is the currency.So those laws are going to kind of spread throughout all media. And the other thing about this embodiment is that there's kind of what I call the McLuhan reversal. McLuhan was saying, ""Machines are the extensions of the human senses."" And I'm saying, ""Humans are now going to be the extended senses of the machine,"" in a certain sense. So we have a trillion eyes, and ears, and touches, through all our digital photographs and cameras. And we see that in things like Flickr, or Photosynth, this program from Microsoft that will allow you to assemble a view of a touristy place from the thousands of tourist snapshots of it. In a certain sense, the machine is seeing through the pixels of individual cameras.Now, the second thing that I want to talk about was this idea of restructuring, that what the Web is doing is restructuring. And I have to warn you, that what we'll talk about is — I'm going to give my explanation of a term you're hearing, which is a ""semantic Web.""So first of all, the first stage that we've seen of the Internet was that it was going to link computers. And that's what we called the Net; that was the Internet of nets. And we saw that, where you have all the computers of the world. And if you remember, it was a kind of green screen with cursors, and there was really not much to do, and if you wanted to connect it, you connected it from one computer to another computer. And what you had to do was — if you wanted to participate in this, you had to share packets of information. So you were forwarding on. You didn't have control. It wasn't like a telephone system where you had control of a line: you had to share packets.The second stage that we're in now is the idea of linking pages. So in the old one, if I wanted to go on to an airline Web page, I went from my computer, to an FTP site, to another airline computer. Now we have pages — the unit has been resolved into pages, so one page links to another page. And if I want to go in to book a flight, I go into the airline's flight page, the website of the airline, and I'm linking to that page. And what we're sharing were links, so you had to be kind of open with links. You couldn't deny — if someone wanted to link to you, you couldn't stop them. You had to participate in this idea of opening up your pages to be linked by anybody. So that's what we were doing.We're now entering to the third stage, which is what I'm talking about, and that is where we link the data. So, I don't know what the name of this thing is. I'm calling it the one machine. But we're linking data. So we're going from machine to machine, from page to page, and now data to data. So the difference is, is that rather than linking from page to page, we're actually going to link from one idea on a page to another idea, rather than to the other page. So every idea is basically being supported — or every item, or every noun — is being supported by the entire Web. It's being resolved at the level of items, or ideas, or words, if you want. So besides physically coming out again into this idea that it's not just virtual, it's actually going out to things. So something will resolve down to the information about a particular person, so every person will have a unique ID. Every person, every item will have a something that will be very specific, and will link to a specific representation of that idea or item. So now, in this new one, when I link to it, I would link to my particular flight, my particular seat. And so, giving an example of this thing, I live in Pacifica, rather than — right now Pacifica is just sort of a name on the Web somewhere. The Web doesn't know that that is actually a town, and that it's a specific town that I live in, but that's what we're going to be talking about. It's going to link directly to — it will know, the Web will be able to read itself and know that that actually is a place, and that whenever it sees that word, ""Pacifica,"" it knows that it actually has a place, latitude, longitude, a certain population.So here are some of the technical terms, all three-letter things, that you'll see a lot more of. All these things are about enabling this idea of linking to the data. So I'll give you one kind of an example. There's like a billion social sites on the Web. Each time you go into there, you have to tell it again who you are and all your friends are. Why should you be doing that? You should just do that once, and it should know who all your friends are. So that's what you want, is all your friends are identified, and you should just carry these relationships around. All this data about you should just be conveyed, and you should do it once and that's all that should happen. And you should have all the networks of all the relationships between those pieces of data. That's what we're moving into — where it sort of knows these things down to that level. A semantic Web, Web 3.0, giant global graph — we're kind of trying out what we want to call this thing. But what's it's doing is sharing data. So you have to be open to having your data shared, which is a much bigger step than just sharing your Web page, or your computer. And all these things that are going to be on this are not just pages, they are things. Everything we've described, every artifact or place, will be a specific representation, will have a specific character that can be linked to directly. So we have this database of things. And so there's actually a fourth thing that we have not get to, that we won't see in the next 10 years, or 5,000 days, but I think that's where we're going to. And as the Internet of things — where I'm linking directly to the particular things of my seat on the plane — that that physical thing becomes part of the Web. And so we are in the middle of this thing that's completely linked, down to every object in the little sliver of a connection that it has.So, the last thing I want to talk about is this idea that we're going to be codependent. It's always going to be there, and the closer it is, the better. If you allow Google to, it will tell you your search history. And I found out by looking at it that I search most at 11 o'clock in the morning. So I am open, and being transparent to that. And I think total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is going to be the price. If you want to have total personalization, you have to be totally transparent. Google. I can't remember my phone number, I'll just ask Google. We're so dependent on this that I have now gotten to the point where I don't even try to remember things — I'll just Google it. It's easier to do that. And we kind of object at first, saying, ""Oh, that's awful."" But if we think about the dependency that we have on this other technology, called the alphabet, and writing, we're totally dependent on it, and it's transformed culture. We cannot imagine ourselves without the alphabet and writing. And so in the same way, we're going to not imagine ourselves without this other machine being there. And what is happening with this is some kind of AI, but it's not the AI in conscious AI, as being an expert, Larry Page told me that that's what they're trying to do, and that's what they're trying to do. But when six billion humans are Googling, who's searching who? It goes both ways. So we are the Web, that's what this thing is. We are going to be the machine. So the next 5,000 days, it's not going to be the Web and only better. Just like it wasn't TV and only better. The next 5,000 days, it's not just going to be the Web but only better — it's going to be something different. And I think it's going to be smarter. It'll have an intelligence in there, that's not, again, conscious. But it'll anticipate what we're doing, in a good sense. Secondly, it's become much more personalized. It will know us, and that's good. And again, the price of that will be transparency. And thirdly, it's going to become more ubiquitous in terms of filling your entire environment, and we will be in the middle of it. And all these devices will be portals into that.So the single idea that I wanted to leave with you is that we have to begin to think about this as not just ""the Web, only better,"" but a new kind of stage in this development. It looks more global. If you take this whole thing, it is a very big machine, very reliable machine, more reliable than its parts. But we can also think about it as kind of a large organism. So we might respond to it more as if this was a whole system, more as if this wasn't a large organism that we are going to be interacting with. It's a ""One."" And I don't know what else to call it, than the One. We'll have a better word for it. But there's a unity of some sort that's starting to emerge. And again, I don't want to talk about consciousness, I want to talk about it just as if it was a little bacteria, or a volvox, which is what that organism is.So, to do, action, take-away. So, here's what I would say: there's only one machine, and the Web is its OS. All screens look into the One. No bits will live outside the Web. To share is to gain. Let the One read it. It's going to be machine-readable. You want to make something that the machine can read. And the One is us. We are in the One. I appreciate your time. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web
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"I got my first computer when I was a teenager growing up in Accra, and it was a really cool device. You could play games with it. You could program it in BASIC. And I was fascinated. So I went into the library to figure out how did this thing work. I read about how the CPU is constantly shuffling data back and forth between the memory, the RAM and the ALU, the arithmetic and logic unit. And I thought to myself, this CPU really has to work like crazy just to keep all this data moving through the system.But nobody was really worried about this. When computers were first introduced, they were said to be a million times faster than neurons. People were really excited. They thought they would soon outstrip the capacity of the brain. This is a quote, actually, from Alan Turing: ""In 30 years, it will be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person."" This was in 1946. And now, in 2007, it's still not true. And so, the question is, why aren't we really seeing this kind of power in computers that we see in the brain?What people didn't realize, and I'm just beginning to realize right now, is that we pay a huge price for the speed that we claim is a big advantage of these computers. Let's take a look at some numbers. This is Blue Gene, the fastest computer in the world. It's got 120,000 processors; they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second. That's 10 to the sixteenth. And they consume one and a half megawatts of power. So that would be really great, if you could add that to the production capacity in Tanzania. It would really boost the economy. Just to go back to the States, if you translate the amount of power or electricity this computer uses to the amount of households in the States, you get 1,200 households in the U.S. That's how much power this computer uses.Now, let's compare this with the brain. This is a picture of, actually Rory Sayres' girlfriend's brain. Rory is a graduate student at Stanford. He studies the brain using MRI, and he claims that this is the most beautiful brain that he has ever scanned. (Laughter) So that's true love, right there. Now, how much computation does the brain do? I estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second, which is actually about very similar to what Blue Gene does. So that's the question. The question is, how much — they are doing a similar amount of processing, similar amount of data — the question is how much energy or electricity does the brain use? And it's actually as much as your laptop computer: it's just 10 watts. So what we are doing right now with computers with the energy consumed by 1,200 houses, the brain is doing with the energy consumed by your laptop.So the question is, how is the brain able to achieve this kind of efficiency? And let me just summarize. So the bottom line: the brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have. How is the brain able to do this? Let's just take a look about how the brain works, and then I'll compare that with how computers work. So, this clip is from the PBS series, ""The Secret Life of the Brain."" It shows you these cells that process information. They are called neurons. They send little pulses of electricity down their processes to each other, and where they contact each other, those little pulses of electricity can jump from one neuron to the other. That process is called a synapse. You've got this huge network of cells interacting with each other — about 100 million of them, sending about 10 quadrillion of these pulses around every second. And that's basically what's going on in your brain right now as you're watching this.How does that compare with the way computers work? In the computer, you have all the data going through the central processing unit, and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck, whereas in the brain, what you have is these neurons, and the data just really flows through a network of connections among the neurons. There's no bottleneck here. It's really a network in the literal sense of the word. The net is doing the work in the brain. If you just look at these two pictures, these kind of words pop into your mind. This is serial and it's rigid — it's like cars on a freeway, everything has to happen in lockstep — whereas this is parallel and it's fluid. Information processing is very dynamic and adaptive.So I'm not the first to figure this out. This is a quote from Brian Eno: ""the problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them."" (Laughter) Brian actually said this in 1995. And nobody was listening then, but now people are beginning to listen because there's a pressing, technological problem that we face. And I'll just take you through that a little bit in the next few slides.This is — it's actually really this remarkable convergence between the devices that we use to compute in computers, and the devices that our brains use to compute. The devices that computers use are what's called a transistor. This electrode here, called the gate, controls the flow of current from the source to the drain — these two electrodes. And that current, electrical current, is carried by electrons, just like in your house and so on. And what you have here is, when you actually turn on the gate, you get an increase in the amount of current, and you get a steady flow of current. And when you turn off the gate, there's no current flowing through the device. Your computer uses this presence of current to represent a one, and the absence of current to represent a zero.Now, what's happening is that as transistors are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, they no longer behave like this. In fact, they are starting to behave like the device that neurons use to compute, which is called an ion channel. And this is a little protein molecule. I mean, neurons have thousands of these. And it sits in the membrane of the cell and it's got a pore in it. And these are individual potassium ions that are flowing through that pore. Now, this pore can open and close. But, when it's open, because these ions have to line up and flow through, one at a time, you get a kind of sporadic, not steady — it's a sporadic flow of current. And even when you close the pore — which neurons can do, they can open and close these pores to generate electrical activity — even when it's closed, because these ions are so small, they can actually sneak through, a few can sneak through at a time. So, what you have is that when the pore is open, you get some current sometimes. These are your ones, but you've got a few zeros thrown in. And when it's closed, you have a zero, but you have a few ones thrown in.Now, this is starting to happen in transistors. And the reason why that's happening is that, right now, in 2007 — the technology that we are using — a transistor is big enough that several electrons can flow through the channel simultaneously, side by side. In fact, there's about 12 electrons can all be flowing this way. And that means that a transistor corresponds to about 12 ion channels in parallel. Now, in a few years time, by 2015, we will shrink transistors so much. This is what Intel does to keep adding more cores onto the chip. Or your memory sticks that you have now can carry one gigabyte of stuff on them — before, it was 256. Transistors are getting smaller to allow this to happen, and technology has really benefitted from that.But what's happening now is that in 2015, the transistor is going to become so small, that it corresponds to only one electron at a time can flow through that channel, and that corresponds to a single ion channel. And you start having the same kind of traffic jams that you have in the ion channel. The current will turn on and off at random, even when it's supposed to be on. And that means your computer is going to get its ones and zeros mixed up, and that's going to crash your machine.So, we are at the stage where we don't really know how to compute with these kinds of devices. And the only kind of thing — the only thing we know right now that can compute with these kinds of devices are the brain.OK, so a computer picks a specific item of data from memory, it sends it into the processor or the ALU, and then it puts the result back into memory. That's the red path that's highlighted. The way brains work, I told you all, you have got all these neurons. And the way they represent information is they break up that data into little pieces that are represented by pulses and different neurons. So you have all these pieces of data distributed throughout the network. And then the way that you process that data to get a result is that you translate this pattern of activity into a new pattern of activity, just by it flowing through the network. So you set up these connections such that the input pattern just flows and generates the output pattern.What you see here is that there's these redundant connections. So if this piece of data or this piece of the data gets clobbered, it doesn't show up over here, these two pieces can activate the missing part with these redundant connections. So even when you go to these crappy devices where sometimes you want a one and you get a zero, and it doesn't show up, there's redundancy in the network that can actually recover the missing information. It makes the brain inherently robust. What you have here is a system where you store data locally. And it's brittle, because each of these steps has to be flawless, otherwise you lose that data, whereas in the brain, you have a system that stores data in a distributed way, and it's robust.What I want to basically talk about is my dream, which is to build a computer that works like the brain. This is something that we've been working on for the last couple of years. And I'm going to show you a system that we designed to model the retina, which is a piece of brain that lines the inside of your eyeball. We didn't do this by actually writing code, like you do in a computer. In fact, the processing that happens in that little piece of brain is very similar to the kind of processing that computers do when they stream video over the Internet. They want to compress the information — they just want to send the changes, what's new in the image, and so on — and that is how your eyeball is able to squeeze all that information down to your optic nerve, to send to the rest of the brain.Instead of doing this in software, or doing those kinds of algorithms, we went and talked to neurobiologists who have actually reverse engineered that piece of brain that's called the retina. And they figured out all the different cells, and they figured out the network, and we just took that network and we used it as the blueprint for the design of a silicon chip. So now the neurons are represented by little nodes or circuits on the chip, and the connections among the neurons are represented, actually modeled by transistors. And these transistors are behaving essentially just like ion channels behave in the brain. It will give you the same kind of robust architecture that I described.Here is actually what our artificial eye looks like. The retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here. And the chip — I'm going to show you a video that the silicon retina put out of its output when it was looking at Kareem Zaghloul, who's the student who designed this chip. Let me explain what you're going to see, OK, because it's putting out different kinds of information, it's not as straightforward as a camera. The retina chip extracts four different kinds of information. It extracts regions with dark contrast, which will show up on the video as red. And it extracts regions with white or light contrast, which will show up on the video as green.This is Kareem's dark eyes and that's the white background that you see here. And then it also extracts movement. When Kareem moves his head to the right, you will see this blue activity there; it represents regions where the contrast is increasing in the image, that's where it's going from dark to light. And you also see this yellow activity, which represents regions where contrast is decreasing; it's going from light to dark. And these four types of information — your optic nerve has about a million fibers in it, and 900,000 of those fibers send these four types of information. So we are really duplicating the kind of signals that you have on the optic nerve.What you notice here is that these snapshots taken from the output of the retina chip are very sparse, right? It doesn't light up green everywhere in the background, only on the edges, and then in the hair, and so on. And this is the same thing you see when people compress video to send: they want to make it very sparse, because that file is smaller. And this is what the retina is doing, and it's doing it just with the circuitry, and how this network of neurons that are interacting in there, which we've captured on the chip.But the point that I want to make — I'll show you up here. So this image here is going to look like these ones, but here I'll show you that we can reconstruct the image, so, you know, you can almost recognize Kareem in that top part there. And so, here you go. Yes, so that's the idea. When you stand still, you just see the light and dark contrasts. But when it's moving back and forth, the retina picks up these changes. And that's why, you know, when you're sitting here and something happens in your background, you merely move your eyes to it. There are these cells that detect change and you move your attention to it. So those are very important for catching somebody who's trying to sneak up on you.Let me just end by saying that this is what happens when you put Africa in a piano, OK. This is a steel drum here that has been modified, and that's what happens when you put Africa in a piano. And what I would like us to do is put Africa in the computer, and come up with a new kind of computer that will generate thought, imagination, be creative and things like that. Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: Question for you, Kwabena. Do you put together in your mind the work you're doing, the future of Africa, this conference — what connections can we make, if any, between them?Kwabena Boahen: Yes, like I said at the beginning, I got my first computer when I was a teenager, growing up in Accra. And I had this gut reaction that this was the wrong way to do it. It was very brute force; it was very inelegant. I don't think that I would've had that reaction, if I'd grown up reading all this science fiction, hearing about RD2D2, whatever it was called, and just — you know, buying into this hype about computers. I was coming at it from a different perspective, where I was bringing that different perspective to bear on the problem. And I think a lot of people in Africa have this different perspective, and I think that's going to impact technology. And that's going to impact how it's going to evolve. And I think you're going to be able to see, use that infusion, to come up with new things, because you're coming from a different perspective. I think we can contribute. We can dream like everybody else.CA: Thanks Kwabena, that was really interesting. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kwabena_boahen_on_a_computer_that_works_like_the_brain
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"My talk is ""Flapping Birds and Space Telescopes."" And you would think that should have nothing to do with one another, but I hope by the end of these 18 minutes, you'll see a little bit of a relation. It ties to origami. So let me start. What is origami? Most people think they know what origami is. It's this: flapping birds, toys, cootie catchers, that sort of thing. And that is what origami used to be. But it's become something else. It's become an art form, a form of sculpture.The common theme — what makes it origami — is folding is how we create the form. You know, it's very old. This is a plate from 1797. It shows these women playing with these toys. If you look close, it's this shape, called a crane. Every Japanese kid learns how to fold that crane. So this art has been around for hundreds of years, and you would think something that's been around that long — so restrictive, folding only — everything that could be done has been done a long time ago. And that might have been the case.But in the twentieth century, a Japanese folder named Yoshizawa came along, and he created tens of thousands of new designs. But even more importantly, he created a language, a way we could communicate, a code of dots, dashes and arrows. Harkening back to Susan Blackmore's talk, we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection, and we know where that leads. And where it has led in origami is to things like this. This is an origami figure — one sheet, no cuts, folding only, hundreds of folds. This, too, is origami, and this shows where we've gone in the modern world. Naturalism. Detail. You can get horns, antlers — even, if you look close, cloven hooves.And it raises a question: what changed? And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art, which is math. That is, people applied mathematical principles to the art, to discover the underlying laws. And that leads to a very powerful tool. The secret to productivity in so many fields — and in origami — is letting dead people do your work for you.(Laughter)Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions. And I want to tell you how we did that in origami. Origami revolves around crease patterns. The crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure. And you can't just draw them arbitrarily. They have to obey four simple laws. And they're very simple, easy to understand. The first law is two-colorability. You can color any crease pattern with just two colors without ever having the same color meeting. The directions of the folds at any vertex — the number of mountain folds, the number of valley folds — always differs by two. Two more or two less. Nothing else. If you look at the angles around the fold, you find that if you number the angles in a circle, all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line, all the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line. And if you look at how the layers stack, you'll find that no matter how you stack folds and sheets, a sheet can never penetrate a fold. So that's four simple laws. That's all you need in origami. All of origami comes from that.And you'd think, ""Can four simple laws give rise to that kind of complexity?"" But indeed, the laws of quantum mechanics can be written down on a napkin, and yet they govern all of chemistry, all of life, all of history. If we obey these laws, we can do amazing things. So in origami, to obey these laws, we can take simple patterns — like this repeating pattern of folds, called textures — and by itself it's nothing. But if we follow the laws of origami, we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very, very simple, but when we put it together, we get something a little different. This fish, 400 scales — again, it is one uncut square, only folding. And if you don't want to fold 400 scales, you can back off and just do a few things, and add plates to the back of a turtle, or toes. Or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag, with 13 stripes. And if you want to go really crazy, 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake. And this guy's on display downstairs, so take a look if you get a chance.The most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures. And I can put it in this simple equation. We take an idea, combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure.(Laughter)What matters is what we mean by those symbols. And you might say, ""Can you really be that specific? I mean, a stag beetle — it's got two points for jaws, it's got antennae. Can you be that specific in the detail?"" And yeah, you really can. So how do we do that? Well, we break it down into a few smaller steps. So let me stretch out that equation. I start with my idea. I abstract it. What's the most abstract form? It's a stick figure. And from that stick figure, I somehow have to get to a folded shape that has a part for every bit of the subject, a flap for every leg. And then once I have that folded shape that we call the base, you can make the legs narrower, you can bend them, you can turn it into the finished shape.Now the first step, pretty easy. Take an idea, draw a stick figure. The last step is not so hard, but that middle step — going from the abstract description to the folded shape — that's hard. But that's the place where the mathematical ideas can get us over the hump. And I'm going to show you all how to do that so you can go out of here and fold something. But we're going to start small. This base has a lot of flaps in it. We're going to learn how to make one flap. How would you make a single flap? Take a square. Fold it in half, fold it in half, fold it again, until it gets long and narrow, and then we'll say at the end of that, that's a flap. I could use that for a leg, an arm, anything like that.What paper went into that flap? Well, if I unfold it and go back to the crease pattern, you can see that the upper left corner of that shape is the paper that went into the flap. So that's the flap, and all the rest of the paper's left over. I can use it for something else. Well, there are other ways of making a flap. There are other dimensions for flaps. If I make the flaps skinnier, I can use a bit less paper. If I make the flap as skinny as possible, I get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed. And you can see there, it needs a quarter-circle of paper to make a flap. There's other ways of making flaps. If I put the flap on the edge, it uses a half circle of paper. And if I make the flap from the middle, it uses a full circle. So, no matter how I make a flap, it needs some part of a circular region of paper. So now we're ready to scale up. What if I want to make something that has a lot of flaps? What do I need? I need a lot of circles.And in the 1990s, origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles. And here's where the dead people start to help us out, because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles. I can rely on that vast history of mathematicians and artists looking at disc packings and arrangements. And I can use those patterns now to create origami shapes. So we figured out these rules whereby you pack circles, you decorate the patterns of circles with lines according to more rules. That gives you the folds. Those folds fold into a base. You shape the base. You get a folded shape — in this case, a cockroach. And it's so simple.(Laughter)It's so simple that a computer could do it. And you say, ""Well, you know, how simple is that?"" But computers — you need to be able to describe things in very basic terms, and with this, we could. So I wrote a computer program a bunch of years ago called TreeMaker, and you can download it from my website. It's free. It runs on all the major platforms — even Windows.(Laughter)And you just draw a stick figure, and it calculates the crease pattern. It does the circle packing, calculates the crease pattern, and if you use that stick figure that I just showed — which you can kind of tell, it's a deer, it's got antlers — you'll get this crease pattern. And if you take this crease pattern, you fold on the dotted lines, you'll get a base that you can then shape into a deer, with exactly the crease pattern that you wanted. And if you want a different deer, not a white-tailed deer, but you want a mule deer, or an elk, you change the packing, and you can do an elk. Or you could do a moose. Or, really, any other kind of deer. These techniques revolutionized this art. We found we could do insects, spiders, which are close, things with legs, things with legs and wings, things with legs and antennae. And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square. She's eating him. I call it ""Snack Time.""And you can do more than just insects. This — you can put details, toes and claws. A grizzly bear has claws. This tree frog has toes. Actually, lots of people in origami now put toes into their models. Toes have become an origami meme, because everyone's doing it. You can make multiple subjects. So these are a couple of instrumentalists. The guitar player from a single square, the bass player from a single square. And if you say, ""Well, but the guitar, bass — that's not so hot. Do a little more complicated instrument."" Well, then you could do an organ.(Laughter)And what this has allowed is the creation of origami-on-demand. So now people can say, ""I want exactly this and this and this,"" and you can go out and fold it. And sometimes you create high art, and sometimes you pay the bills by doing some commercial work. But I want to show you some examples. Everything you'll see here, except the car, is origami.(Video)(Applause)Just to show you, this really was folded paper. Computers made things move, but these were all real, folded objects that we made. And we can use this not just for visuals, but it turns out to be useful even in the real world. Surprisingly, origami and the structures that we've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine, in science, in space, in the body, consumer electronics and more.And I want to show you some of these examples. One of the earliest was this pattern, this folded pattern, studied by Koryo Miura, a Japanese engineer. He studied a folding pattern, and realized this could fold down into an extremely compact package that had a very simple opening and closing structure. And he used it to design this solar array. It's an artist's rendition, but it flew in a Japanese telescope in 1995. Now, there is actually a little origami in the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's very simple. The telescope, going up in space, it unfolds in two places. It folds in thirds. It's a very simple pattern — you wouldn't even call that origami. They certainly didn't need to talk to origami artists.But if you want to go higher and go larger than this, then you might need some origami. Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab had an idea for a telescope much larger. They called it the Eyeglass. The design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up, 100-meter diameter lens. So, imagine a lens the size of a football field. There were two groups of people who were interested in this: planetary scientists, who want to look up, and then other people, who wanted to look down. Whether you look up or look down, how do you get it up in space? You've got to get it up there in a rocket. And rockets are small. So you have to make it smaller. How do you make a large sheet of glass smaller? Well, about the only way is to fold it up somehow. So you have to do something like this. This was a small model.Folded lens, you divide up the panels, you add flexures. But this pattern's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters. So the Livermore engineers, wanting to make use of the work of dead people, or perhaps live origamists, said, ""Let's see if someone else is doing this sort of thing."" So they looked into the origami community, we got in touch with them, and I started working with them. And we developed a pattern together that scales to arbitrarily large size, but that allows any flat ring or disc to fold down into a very neat, compact cylinder. And they adopted that for their first generation, which was not 100 meters — it was a five-meter. But this is a five-meter telescope — has about a quarter-mile focal length. And it works perfectly on its test range, and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle.Now, there is other origami in space. Japan Aerospace [Exploration] Agency flew a solar sail, and you can see here that the sail expands out, and you can still see the fold lines. The problem that's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination, but needs to be small for the journey. And that works whether you're going into space, or whether you're just going into a body. And this example is the latter. This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University. It holds open a blocked artery when it gets to its destination, but it needs to be much smaller for the trip there, through your blood vessels. And this stent folds down using an origami pattern, based on a model called the water bomb base.Airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space. And they want to do their design by simulation. So they need to figure out how, in a computer, to flatten an airbag. And the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation. And so they can do a simulation like this. Those are the origami creases forming, and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out, does it work? And that leads to a really interesting idea.You know, where did these things come from? Well, the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school. It's the same pattern, called the water bomb base. The airbag-flattening algorithm came from all the developments of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really developed just to create insects — things with legs. The thing is, that this often happens in math and science. When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world. And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life. Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_lang_folds_way_new_origami
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"Hello everyone. And so the two of us are here to give you an example of creation. And I'm going to be folding one of Robert Lang's models. And this is the piece of paper it will be made from, and you can see all of the folds that are needed for it. And Rufus is going to be doing some improvisation on his custom, five-string electric cello, and it's very exciting to listen to him. Are you ready to go? OK. Just to make it a little bit more exciting.All right. Take it away, Rufus.(Music)All right. There you go. (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruno_bowden_folds_while_rufus_cappadocia_plays
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"As a particle physicist, I study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level. For most of my research career, I've been using accelerators, such as the electron accelerator at Stanford University, just up the road, to study things on the smallest scale. But more recently, I've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale. Because, as I'll explain to you, the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected. So I'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe, what it's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are — at least some of the big questions.So, recently, we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe — and by ordinary matter, I mean you, me, the planets, the stars, the galaxies — the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe. Almost a quarter, or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe, is stuff that's invisible. By invisible, I mean it doesn't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't reflect. It doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what we use to detect things. It doesn't interact at all. So how do we know it's there? We know it's there by its gravitational effects. In fact, this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale, and I'll be telling you about the evidence for that.What about the rest of the pie? The rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy. More about that later, OK. So for now, let's turn to the evidence for dark matter. In these galaxies, especially in a spiral galaxy like this, most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy. This huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy. So we have these stars going around in circles like this. As you can imagine, even if you know physics, this should be intuitive, OK — that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here, OK.So what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars, that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside. In other words, if we measured speed as a function of distance — this is the only time I'm going to show a graph, OK — we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy. When those measurements are made, instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant, as a function of distance. If it's constant, that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see. In fact, this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter. And this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves, and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy. So we see the galaxy and fixate on that, but it's actually a cloud of dark matter that's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy.Galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space; they tend to cluster. And this is an example of a very, actually, famous cluster, the Coma cluster. And there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster. They're the white, fuzzy, elliptical things here. So these galaxy clusters — we take a snapshot now, we take a snapshot in a decade, it'll look identical. But these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds. They're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster, OK. So all of these galaxies are moving. We can measure the speeds of these galaxies, their orbital velocities, and figure out how much mass is in this cluster.And again, what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see. Or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see that there's a lot of gas in this cluster, as well. But that cannot account for the mass either. In fact, there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter, OK. It would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly. I'm just putting this big, blue blob on there, OK, to try to remind you that it's there. Can we see it more visually? Yes, we can.And so let me lead you through how we can do this. So here's an observer: it could be an eye; it could be a telescope. And suppose there's a galaxy out here in the universe. How do we see that galaxy? A ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye. Now, how do we deduce where the galaxy is? Well, we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye, right? We say, the ray of light came this way; the galaxy must be there, OK. Now, suppose I put in the middle a cluster of galaxies — and don't forget the dark matter, OK. Now, if we consider a different ray of light, one going off like this, we now need to take into account what Einstein predicted when he developed general relativity. And that was that the gravitational field, due to mass, will deflect not only the trajectory of particles, but will deflect light itself.So this light ray will not continue in a straight line, but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye. Where will this observer see the galaxy? You can respond. Up, right? We extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here. Is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer's eye from that galaxy? Yes, great. I see people going down like this. So a ray of light could go down, be bent up into the observer's eye, and the observer sees a ray of light here.Now, take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe, OK, a three-dimensional space. Are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye? Yes! The rays would lie on a — I'd like to see — yeah, on a cone. So there's a whole ray of light — rays of light on a cone — that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer's eye. If there is a cone of light coming into my eye, what do I see? A circle, a ring. It's called an Einstein ring. Einstein predicted that, OK. Now, it will only be a perfect ring if the source, the deflector and the eyeball, in this case, are all in a perfectly straight line. If they're slightly skewed, we'll see a different image.Now, you can do an experiment tonight over the reception, OK, to figure out what that image will look like. Because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise, that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect. We call this gravitational lensing. And so, this is your instrument, OK. (Laughter). But ignore the top part. It's the base that I want you to concentrate, OK. So, actually, at home, whenever we break a wineglass, I save the bottom, take it over to the machine shop. We shave it off, and I have a little gravitational lens, OK. So it's got the right shape to produce the lensing. And so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin. I grabbed a piece of graph paper — I'm a physicist. (Laughter) So, a napkin. Draw a little model galaxy in the middle. And now put the lens over the galaxy, and what you'll find is that you'll see a ring, an Einstein ring. Now, move the base off to the side, and the ring will split up into arcs, OK. And you can put it on top of any image. On the graph paper, you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted. And again, this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing.OK, so the question is: do we see this in the sky? Do we see arcs in the sky when we look at, say, a cluster of galaxies? And the answer is yes. And so, here's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the Hubble Space Telescope. Well, first of all, for the golden shape galaxies — those are the galaxies in the cluster. They're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions, or mirages, practically, of the background galaxies. So the streaks that you see, all these streaks, are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away.So what we can do, then, is based on how much distortion we see in those images, we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster. And it's an enormous amount of mass. And also, you can tell by eye, by looking at this, that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies. They are centered on some more spread out structure, and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded, OK. So this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye.OK, so, a quick review then, to see that you're following. So the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter — this gravitationally attracting stuff — is that galaxies, the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. The speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. And we see these gravitational lensing effects, these distortions that say that, again, clusters are embedded in dark matter.OK. So now, let's turn to dark energy. So to understand the evidence for dark energy, we need to discuss something that Stephen Hawking referred to in the previous session. And that is the fact that space itself is expanding. So if we imagine a section of our infinite universe — and so I've put down four spiral galaxies, OK — and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures, so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure, horizontal or vertical, for measuring where things are. If you could do this, what you would find that with each passing day, each passing year, each passing billions of years, OK, the distance between galaxies is getting greater. And it's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space. They're not necessarily moving through space. They're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger, OK. That's what the expansion of the universe or space means. So they're moving further apart.Now, what Stephen Hawking mentioned, as well, is that after the Big Bang, space expanded at a very rapid rate. But because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space, it tends to slow down the expansion of the space, OK. So the expansion slows down with time. So, in the last century, OK, people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever; whether it would slow down, you know, will be slowing down, but continue forever; slow down and stop, asymptotically stop; or slow down, stop, and then reverse, so it starts to contract again. So a little over a decade ago, two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down, OK. By how much less is it expanding today, compared to, say, a couple of billion years ago?The startling answer to this question, OK, from these experiments, was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago, OK. So the expansion of space is actually speeding up. This was a completely surprising result. There is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen, OK. No one was predicting ahead of time this is what's going to be found. It was the opposite of what was expected. So we need something to be able to explain that. Now it turns out, in the mathematics, you can put it in as a term that's an energy, but it's a completely different type of energy from anything we've ever seen before. We call it dark energy, and it has this effect of causing space to expand. But we don't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point, OK. So it's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in.Now, so at this point, then, what I want to really emphasize to you, is that, first of all, dark matter and dark energy are completely different things, OK. There are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe, and they have very different effects. Dark matter, because it gravitationally attracts, it tends to encourage the growth of structure, OK. So clusters of galaxies will tend to form, because of all this gravitational attraction. Dark energy, on the other hand, is putting more and more space between the galaxies, makes it, the gravitational attraction between them decrease, and so it impedes the growth of structure. So by looking at things like clusters of galaxies, and how they — their number density, how many there are as a function of time — we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming.In terms of dark matter, I said that we don't have any, you know, really persuasive argument for dark energy. Do we have anything for dark matter? And the answer is yes. We have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter. Now, what do I mean by well motivated? I mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon, OK, things that I haven't even talked about, that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting, new particle.So, this is exactly what you want in physics: where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else. But we don't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate, OK. One or both, who knows? Or it could be something completely different. Now, we look for these dark matter particles because, after all, they are here in the room, OK, and they didn't come in the door. They just pass through anything. They can come through the building, through the Earth — they're so non-interacting.So one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it. So a crystal that will ring if that happens. So one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector. And they've put it deep down in an iron mine in Minnesota, OK, deep under the ground, and in fact, in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far. They haven't seen anything, OK, but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are. There's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy, to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this. The Large Hadron Collider, a particle physics accelerator, that we'll be turning on later this year. It is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the Large Hadron Collider.Now, because they are so non-interactive, they will actually escape the detector, so their signature will be missing energy, OK. Now, unfortunately, there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy, so it will be hard to tell the difference. And finally, for future endeavors, there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy — ground-based telescopes, and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy. So in terms of the big questions: what is dark matter? What is dark energy? The big questions facing physics. And I'm sure you have lots of questions, which I very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours, while I'm here. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_burchat_leads_a_search_for_dark_energy
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"Jambo, bonjour, zdravstvujtye, dayo: these are a few of the languages that I've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks, as I've been to 17 countries I think I'm up to, on this crazy tour I've been doing, checking out various aspects of the project that we're doing. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about later on. And visiting some pretty incredible places, places like Mongolia, Cambodia, New Guinea, South Africa, Tanzania twice — I was here a month ago.And the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing, for lots of reasons. You see some incredible stuff. And you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe. And the thing that you really take away from that, the kind of surface thing that you take away from it, is not that we're all one, although I'm going to tell you about that, but rather how different we are. There is so much diversity around the globe. 6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people, all different colors, shapes, sizes. You walk down the street in any big city, you travel like that, and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species.How do we explain that diversity? Well, that's what I'm going to talk about today, is how we're using the tools of genetics, population genetics in particular, to tell us how we generated this diversity, and how long it took. Now, the problem of human diversity, like all big scientific questions — how do you explain something like that — can be broken down into sub-questions. And you can ferret away at those little sub-questions.First one is really a question of origins. Do we all share a common origin, in fact? And given that we do — and that's the assumption everybody, I think, in this room would make — when was that? When did we originate as a species? How long have we been divergent from each other?And the second question is related, but slightly different. If we do spring from a common source, how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe, and in the process generate all of this diversity, the different ways of life, the different appearances, the different languages around the world?Well, the question of origins, as with so many other questions in biology, seems to have been answered by Darwin over a century ago. In ""The Descent of Man,"" he wrote, ""In each great region of the world, the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It's therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.""So we're done, we can go home — finished the origin question. Well, not quite. Because Darwin was talking about our distant ancestry, our common ancestry with apes. And it is quite clear that apes originated on the African continent. Around 23 million years ago, they appear in the fossil record. Africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time, due to the vagaries of plate tectonics, floating around the Indian Ocean. Bumped into Eurasia around 16 million years ago, and then we had the first African exodus, as we call it. The apes that left at that time ended up in Southeast Asia, became the gibbons and the orangutans. And the ones that stayed on in Africa evolved into the gorillas, the chimpanzees and us. So, yes, if you're talking about our common ancestry with apes, it's very clear, by looking at the fossil record, we started off here.But that's not really the question I'm asking. I'm asking about our human ancestry, things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room. If they were peering over your shoulder, you wouldn't leap back, like that. What about our human ancestry? Because if we go far enough back, we share a common ancestry with every living thing on Earth. DNA ties us all together, so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back — over a billion years. What we're asking about though is human ancestry. How do we study that?Well, historically, it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology. Digging things up out of the ground, and largely on the basis of morphology — the way things are shaped, often skull shape — saying, ""This looks a little bit more like us than that, so this must be my ancestor. This must be who I'm directly descended from.""The field of paleoanthropology, I'll argue, gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but it doesn't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists. What do I mean by that? You're looking at a great example here. These are three extinct species of hominids, potential human ancestors. All dug up just west of here in Olduvai Gorge, by the Leakey family. And they're all dating to roughly the same time. From left to right, we've got Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus — now called Paranthropus boisei, the robust australopithecine. Three extinct species, same place, same time. That means that not all three could be my direct ancestor. Which one of these guys am I actually related to? Possibilities about our ancestry, but not the probabilities that we're really looking for.Well, a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently — again, largely skull shape. The first person to do this systematically was Linnaeus, Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist, who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet. You think you've got a tough job? And he did a pretty good job. He categorized about 12,000 species in ""Systema Naturae."" He actually coined the term Homo sapiens — it means wise man in Latin. But looking around the world at the diversity of humans, he said, ""Well, you know, we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories."" And he talked about Africans and Americans and Asians and Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he termed ""Monstrosus,"" which basically included all the people he didn't like, including imaginary folk like elves.It's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-Darwinian era. Except, if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity. Human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30, 40 years ago — Carlton Coon is the best example — had been diverging from each other — this was in the post-Darwinian era — for over a million years, since the time of Homo erectus. But based on what data? Very little. Very little. Morphology and a lot of guesswork.Well, what I'm going to talk about today, what I'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem. Instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry, digging things up out of the ground, possible ancestors, and saying it on the basis of morphology — which we still don't completely understand, we don't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation —what we need to do is turn the problem on its head. Because what we're really asking is a genealogical problem, or a genealogical question. What we're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today. And as any genealogist will tell you — anybody have a member of the family, or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree, trace back in time? You start in the present, with relationships you're certain about. You and your siblings, you have a parent in common. You and your cousins share a grandparent in common. You gradually trace further and further back into the past, adding these ever more distant relationships. But eventually, no matter how good you are at digging up the church records, and all that stuff, you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall. A point beyond which you don't know anything else about your ancestors, and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance.Who were these people who came before? We have no written record. Well, actually, we do. Written in our DNA, in our genetic code — we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species. And that's what we study.Now, a quick primer on DNA. I suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist. It is a very long, linear molecule, a coded version of how to make another copy of you. It's your blueprint. It's composed of four subunits: A, C, G and T, we call them. And it's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint. How long is it? Well, it's billions of these subunits in length. A haploid genome — we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes — a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length. And the whole thing, if you add it all together, is over six billion nucleotides long. If you take all the DNA out of one cell in your body, and stretch it end to end, it's around two meters long. If you take all the DNA out of every cell in your body, and you stretch it end to end, it would reach from here to the moon and back, thousands of times. It's a lot of information.And so when you're copying this DNA molecule to pass it on, it's a pretty tough job. Imagine the longest book you can think of, ""War and Peace."" Now multiply it by 100. And imagine copying that by hand. And you're working away until late at night, and you're very, very careful, and you're drinking coffee and you're paying attention, but, occasionally, when you're copying this by hand, you're going to make a little typo, a spelling mistake — substitute an I for an E, or a C for a T.Same thing happens to our DNA as it's being passed on through the generations. It doesn't happen very often. We have a proofreading mechanism built in. But when it does happen, and these changes get transmitted down through the generations, they become markers of descent. If you share a marker with someone, it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past, the person who first had that change in their DNA. And it's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation, the pattern of these markers in people all over the world, and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history, that we've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today.These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, tracing a purely maternal line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home message?Well, the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within Africa, among Africans. That means that Africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer. And what that means is that we originated in Africa. It's written in our DNA. Every piece of DNA we look at has greater diversity within Africa than outside of Africa. And at some point in the past, a sub-group of Africans left the African continent to go out and populate the rest of the world.Now, how recently do we share this ancestry? Was it millions of years ago, which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world? No, the DNA tells a story that's very clear. Within the last 200,000 years, we all share an ancestor, a single person — Mitochondrial Eve, you might have heard about her — in Africa, an African woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today.But what's even more amazing is that if you look at the Y-chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y-chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago. That's only about 2,000 human generations, the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. That tells us we were all still living in Africa at that time. This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world. It's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world. Such an amazing story. We're all effectively part of an extended African family.Now, that seems so recent. Why didn't we start to leave earlier? Why didn't Homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub-species rather, human races around the world? Why was it that we seem to have come out of Africa so recently? Well, that's a big question. These ""why"" questions, particularly in genetics and the study of history in general, are always the big ones, the ones that are tough to answer.And so when all else fails, talk about the weather. What was going on to the world's weather around 60,000 years ago? Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age. The last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago. It went up and down, and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago. Lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types, oxygen isotopes and so on. We hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago, but basically, from 70,000 years on, things were getting really tough, getting very cold. The Northern Hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets. New York City, Chicago, Seattle, all under a sheet of ice. Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick.Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet — about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn — and there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa. So what was going on here? We weren't covered in ice in Africa. Rather, Africa was drying out at that time. This is a paleo-climatological map of what Africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that I mentioned before. The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere. If you think about Antarctica, it's technically a desert, it gets so little precipitation.So the whole world was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails.And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, basically there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups. The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period.But then 50, 60, 70 thousand years ago, somewhere in that region, all hell breaks loose. Art makes its appearance. The stone tools become much more finely crafted. The evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species, at particular times of the year. The population size started to expand. Probably, according to what many linguists believe, fully modern language, syntactic language — subject, verb, object — that we use to convey complex ideas, like I'm doing now, appeared around that time. We became much more social. The social networks expanded.This change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in Africa, and they allowed us to start to expand around the world. We've been talking at this conference about African success stories. Well, you want the ultimate African success story? Look in the mirror. You're it. The reason you're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in Africa — probably somewhere in the region where we're sitting right now, around 60, 70 thousand years ago — allowing us not only to survive in Africa, but to expand out of Africa. An early coastal migration along the south coast of Asia, leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago, reaching Australia very rapidly, by 50,000 years ago. A slightly later migration up into the Middle East. These would have been savannah hunters.So those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours, you'll get to see what a real savannah is like. And it's basically a meat locker. People who would have specialized in killing the animals, hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs, moving up, following the grasslands into the Middle East around 45,000 years ago, during one of the rare wet phases in the Sahara. Migrating eastward, following the grasslands, because that's what they were adapted to live on.And when they reached Central Asia, they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway, a grassland super-highway. The grasslands at that time — this was during the last ice age — stretched basically from Germany all the way over to Korea, and the entire continent was open to them. Entering Europe around 35,000 years ago, and finally, a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable, Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle, during the last ice age — temperature was at -70, -80, even -100, perhaps — migrating into the Americas, ultimately reaching that final frontier.An amazing story, and it happened first in Africa. The changes that allowed us to do that, the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us, allowing us to create novel cultures, allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one I've just been on.Now, that story I just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world, the great Paleolithic wanderings of our species. And that's the story that I told a couple of years ago in my book, ""The Journey of Man,"" and a film that we made with the same title. And as we were finishing up that film — it was co-produced with National Geographic — I started talking to the folks at NG about this work. And they got really excited about it. They liked the film, but they said, ""You know, we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins, where we all came from, using the tools of DNA to map the migrations around the world. You know, the study of human origins is kind of in our DNA, and we want to take it to the next level. What do you want to do next?"" Which is a great question to be asked by National Geographic.And I said, ""Well, you know, what I've sketched out here is just that. It is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet. And it's based on a few thousand people we've sampled from, you know, a handful of populations around the world. Studied a few genetic markers, and there are lots of gaps on this map. We've just connected the dots. What we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more — hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people all over the world.""And that was the genesis of the Genographic Project. The project launched in April 2005. It has three core components. Obviously, science is a big part of it. The field research that we're doing around the world with indigenous peoples. People who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost. So my ancestors come from all over northern Europe. I live in the Eastern Seaboard of North America when I'm not traveling. Where am I indigenous to? Nowhere really. My genes are all jumbled up. But there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the DNA results.That's the focus of the field research, the centers that we've set up all over the world — 10 of them, top population geneticists. But, in addition, we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world. How often do you get to participate in a big scientific project? The Human Genome Project, or a Mars Rover mission.In this case, you actually can. You can go onto our website, Nationalgeographic.com/genographic. You can order a kit. You can test your own DNA. And you can actually submit those results to the database, and tell us a little about your genealogical background, have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort.Now, this is all a nonprofit enterprise, and so the money that we raise, after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components, gets plowed back into the project. The majority going to something we call the Legacy Fund. It's a charitable entity, basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational, cultural projects initiated by them. They apply to this fund in order to do various projects, and I'll show you a couple of examples.So how are we doing on the project? We've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world. The most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago, which has raised around five million dollars, the majority of which, at least half, is going back into the Legacy Fund.We've just awarded the first Legacy Grants totaling around 500,000 dollars. Projects around the world — documenting oral poetry in Sierra Leone, preserving traditional weaving patterns in Gaza, language revitalization in Tajikistan, etc., etc. So the project is going very, very well, and I urge you to check out the website and watch this space.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/spencer_wells_is_building_a_family_tree_for_all_humanity
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"Let's just start by looking at some great photographs. This is an icon of National Geographic, an Afghan refugee taken by Steve McCurry. But the Harvard Lampoon is about to come out with a parody of National Geographic, and I shudder to think what they're going to do to this photograph. Oh, the wrath of Photoshop.This is a jet landing at San Francisco, by Bruce Dale. He mounted a camera on the tail. A poetic image for a story on Tolstoy, by Sam Abell. Pygmies in the DRC, by Randy Olson. I love this photograph because it reminds me of Degas' bronze sculptures of the little dancer. A polar bear swimming in the Arctic, by Paul Nicklen. Polar bears need ice to be able to move back and forth — they're not very good swimmers — and we know what's happening to the ice. These are camels moving across the Rift Valley in Africa, photographed by Chris Johns. Shot straight down, so these are the shadows of the camels. This is a rancher in Texas, by William Albert Allard, a great portraitist. And Jane Goodall, making her own special connection, photographed by Nick Nichols. This is a soap disco in Spain, photographed by David Alan Harvey. And David said that there was lot of weird stuff happening on the dance floor. But, hey, at least it's hygienic. (Laughter) These are sea lions in Australia doing their own dance, by David Doubilet. And this is a comet, captured by Dr. Euan Mason. And finally, the bow of the Titanic, without movie stars, photographed by Emory Kristof. Photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today's saturated, media world, because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment.Here's an example. Four years ago, I was at the beach with my son, and he was learning how to swim in this relatively soft surf of the Delaware beaches. But I turned away for a moment, and he got caught into a riptide and started to be pulled out towards the jetty. I can stand here right now and see, as I go tearing into the water after him, the moments slowing down and freezing into this arrangement. I can see the rocks are over here. There's a wave about to crash onto him. I can see his hands reaching out, and I can see his face in terror, looking at me, saying, ""Help me, Dad."" I got him. The wave broke over us. We got back on shore; he was fine. We were a little bit rattled. But this flashbulb memory, as it's called, is when all the elements came together to define not just the event, but my emotional connection to it. And this is what a photograph taps into when it makes its own powerful connection to a viewer.Now I have to tell you, I was talking to Kyle last week about this, that I was going to tell this story. And he said, ""Oh, yeah, I remember that too! I remember my image of you was that you were up on the shore yelling at me."" (Laughter) I thought I was a hero. (Laughter)So, this represents — this is a cross-sample of some remarkable images taken by some of the world's greatest photojournalists, working at the very top of their craft — except one. This photograph was taken by Dr. Euan Mason in New Zealand last year, and it was submitted and published in National Geographic. Last year, we added a section to our website called ""Your Shot,"" where anyone can submit photographs for possible publication. And it has become a wild success, tapping into the enthusiast photography community. The quality of these amateur photographs can, at times, be amazing. And seeing this reinforces, for me, that every one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them.But to be a great photojournalist, you have to have more than just one or two great photographs in you. You've got to be able to make them all the time. But even more importantly, you need to know how to create a visual narrative. You need to know how to tell a story. So I'm going to share with you some coverages that I feel demonstrate the storytelling power of photography.Photographer Nick Nichols went to document a very small and relatively unknown wildlife sanctuary in Chad, called Zakouma. The original intent was to travel there and bring back a classic story of diverse species, of an exotic locale. And that is what Nick did, up to a point. This is a serval cat. He's actually taking his own picture, shot with what's called a camera trap. There's an infrared beam that's going across, and he has stepped into the beam and taken his photograph. These are baboons at a watering hole. Nick — the camera, again, an automatic camera took thousands of pictures of this. And Nick ended up with a lot of pictures of the rear ends of baboons. (Laughter) A lion having a late night snack — notice he's got a broken tooth. And a crocodile walks up a riverbank toward its den. I love this little bit of water that comes off the back of his tail.But the centerpiece species of Zakouma are the elephants. It's one of the largest intact herds in this part of Africa. Here's a photograph shot in moonlight, something that digital photography has made a big difference for. It was with the elephants that this story pivoted. Nick, along with researcher Dr. Michael Fay, collared the matriarch of the herd. They named her Annie, and they began tracking her movements. The herd was safe within the confines of the park, because of this dedicated group of park rangers. But once the annual rains began, the herd would begin migrating to feeding grounds outside the park.And that's when they ran into trouble. For outside the safety of the park were poachers, who would hunt them down only for the value of their ivory tusks. The matriarch that they were radio tracking, after weeks of moving back and forth, in and out of the park, came to a halt outside the park. Annie had been killed, along with 20 members of her herd. And they only came for the ivory. This is actually one of the rangers. They were able to chase off one of the poachers and recover this ivory, because they couldn't leave it there, because it's still valuable. But what Nick did was he brought back a story that went beyond the old-school method of just straight, ""Isn't this an amazing world?"" And instead, created a story that touched our audiences deeply. Instead of just knowledge of this park, he created an understanding and an empathy for the elephants, the rangers and the many issues surrounding human-wildlife conflicts.Now let's go over to India. Sometimes you can tell a broad story in a focused way. We were looking at the same issue that Richard Wurman touches upon in his new world population project. For the first time in history, more people live in urban, rather than rural, environments. And most of that growth is not in the cities, but in the slums that surround them. Jonas Bendiksen, a very energetic photographer, came to me and said, ""We need to document this, and here's my proposal. Let's go all over the world and photograph every single slum around the world."" And I said, ""Well, you know, that might be a bit ambitious for our budget."" So instead, what we did was we decided to, instead of going out and doing what would result in what we'd consider sort of a survey story — where you just go in and see just a little bit of everything — we put Jonas into Dharavi, which is part of Mumbai, India, and let him stay there, and really get into the heart and soul of this really major part of the city. What Jonas did was not just go and do a surface look at the awful conditions that exist in such places. He saw that this was a living and breathing and vital part of how the entire urban area functioned. By staying tightly focused in one place, Jonas tapped into the soul and the enduring human spirit that underlies this community. And he did it in a beautiful way.Sometimes, though, the only way to tell a story is with a sweeping picture. We teamed up underwater photographer Brian Skerry and photojournalist Randy Olson to document the depletion of the world's fisheries. We weren't the only ones to tackle this subject, but the photographs that Brian and Randy created are among the best to capture both the human and natural devastation of overfishing. Here, in a photo by Brian, a seemingly crucified shark is caught up in a gill net off of Baja. I've seen sort of OK pictures of bycatch, the animals accidentally scooped up while fishing for a specific species. But here, Brian captured a unique view by positioning himself underneath the boat when they threw the waste overboard. And Brian then went on to even greater risk to get this never-before-made photograph of a trawl net scraping the ocean bottom.Back on land, Randy Olson photographed a makeshift fish market in Africa, where the remains of filleted fish were sold to the locals, the main parts having already been sent to Europe. And here in China, Randy shot a jellyfish market. As prime food sources are depleted, the harvest goes deeper into the oceans and brings in more such sources of protein. This is called fishing down the food chain.But there are also glimmers of hope, and I think anytime we're doing a big, big story on this, we don't really want to go and just look at all the problems. We also want to look for solutions. Brian photographed a marine sanctuary in New Zealand, where commercial fishing had been banned — the result being that the overfished species have been restored, and with them a possible solution for sustainable fisheries.Photography can also compel us to confront issues that are potentially distressing and controversial. James Nachtwey, who was honored at last year's TED, took a look at the sweep of the medical system that is utilized to handle the American wounded coming out of Iraq. It is like a tube where a wounded soldier enters on one end and exits back home, on the other. Jim started in the battlefield. Here, a medical technician tends to a wounded soldier on the helicopter ride back to the field hospital. Here is in the field hospital. The soldier on the right has the name of his daughter tattooed across his chest, as a reminder of home. From here, the more severely wounded are transported back to Germany, where they meet up with their families for the first time. And then back to the States to recuperate at veterans' hospitals, such as here in Walter Reed. And finally, often fitted with high-tech prosthesis, they exit the medical system and attempt to regain their pre-war lives. Jim took what could have been a straight-up medical science story and gave it a human dimension that touched our readers deeply.Now, these stories are great examples of how photography can be used to address some of our most important topics. But there are also times when photographers simply encounter things that are, when it comes down to it, just plain fun. Photographer Paul Nicklin traveled to Antarctica to shoot a story on leopard seals. They have been rarely photographed, partly because they are considered one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean. In fact, a year earlier, a researcher had been grabbed by one and pulled down to depth and killed. So you can imagine Paul was maybe a little bit hesitant about getting into the water. Now, what leopard seals do mostly is, they eat penguins. You know of ""The March of the Penguins."" This is sort of the munch of the penguins. (Laughter) Here a penguin goes up to the edge and looks out to see if the coast is clear. And then everybody kind of runs out and goes out.But then Paul got in the water. And he said he was never really afraid of this. Well, this one female came up to him. She's probably — it's a shame you can't see it in the photograph, but she's 12 feet long. So, she is pretty significant in size. And Paul said he was never really afraid, because she was more curious about him than threatened. This mouthing behavior, on the right, was really her way of saying to him, ""Hey, look how big I am!"" Or you know, ""My, what big teeth you have."" (Laughter) Then Paul thinks that she simply took pity on him. To her, here was this big, goofy creature in the water that for some reason didn't seem to be interested in chasing penguins. So what she did was she started to bring penguins to him, alive, and put them in front of him. She dropped them off, and then they would swim away. She'd kind of look at him, like ""What are you doing?"" Go back and get them, and then bring them back and drop them in front of him. And she did this over the course of a couple of days, until the point where she got so frustrated with him that she started putting them directly on top of his head. (Laughter) Which just resulted in a fantastic photograph. (Laughter) Eventually, though, Paul thinks that she just figured that he was never going to survive. This is her just puffing out, you know, snorting out in disgust. (Laughter) And lost interest with him, and went back to what she does best.Paul set out to photograph a relatively mysterious and unknown creature, and came back with not just a collection of photographs, but an amazing experience and a great story. It is these kinds of stories, ones that go beyond the immediate or just the superficial that demonstrate the power of photojournalism. I believe that photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing our world today. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_griffin_on_how_photography_connects
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"My favorite topic is shortcuts. The master of shortcuts — it's, of course, nature. But I will demonstrate different ways to get rid of difficulties and go to the point, to find an answer probably much quicker than Arthur did. So, first, we violate the common sense, the logic. All of you, if you hold your hand like this, 90 degrees — all of you. Not you. All of you, right? Palm up. If you do this, the common, the logic says you must turn the wrist. Do you agree? Good. But I will first teach you a method, how you can do it without moving the wrist, and then the shortcut. You can do it immediately, right? Hold the hand like this, palm up. Don't move the wrist. The wrist is — I doesn't speak very many, but I do the best, what I are. Right-molded you say, with iron? That was a joke, actually, and I — OK. Hold the hand palm up. Do this, don't move the wrist. Over the heart, don't move the wrist. Forward, don't move the wrist. Up, don't move the wrist. Over the heart, don't move the wrist. And forward. Yeah. Now — (Laughter) — logic, logically, you have got to this position from this, without moving the wrist. (Laughter) Now, the shortcut. (Laughter) But it was six moves. Now with one move. I start here, palm down, you can follow. And then look at me. Yeah! (Laughter) One move. OK. So, that was the warming up.Now, I need an assistant. I talked to a nice girl before, Zoe. She has left. No! A big hand. (Applause)Good. Nice. And you can sit over there. One item here was water, right? And I will give my tribute to water. I think it's enough with water for me. The other guys can talk about — cheers. (Laughter) Beer has about — there's a lot of water in beer. (Laughter)So, now I will demonstrate different ways of memorizing, control cards and so on. And I think I'll take off this one. I work with a special method to do it, quick. I work with precision — oh, sorry — control and a very powerful ... memory system, right? (Laughter) So, if — I have studied the poker. I like to gamble. Officially, I don't gamble but ... So, if we are — if we have five person, and I will do a five-handed poker game.Now I will interact. So a different person all the time, so not the same person can answer. So we have an agreement. Which one shall have a good poker hand? Which number? One, two, three, four or five? (Audience: Three.)Lennart Green: Three — good. And here, I had a mat here to make it a little — the critical moment is — sorry. If a card shark gathers the cards together, immediately when he — before he deals the card. Now, so I think, number three, I have arranged them in a full house. (Laughter) With queens and — it's OK — queens and tens. That's a challenge. I like this. I will explain later. One, two, three, four, five. I start with three queens. So here you see the contrast when I treat the cards. And two tens. Yeah. Thank you. (Applause) But also the other hand is good, if all the other guys have good hands too. So these guys have actually a stronger hand — three aces and two kings. This guy beats them with four of a kind, or deuce — deuce. No reaction? That with even — OK, and this. These look in order, I'm probably — hopefully — yeah. Three, four, five, six, seven and ... But, of course, I will have the winning hand. Ten, jack, queen, king, ace. Yeah. So, good. (Laughter) So the hand that looks so good from the beginning, number three, at the end was actually the lowest hand. Such life. Right?So, please mix them. Now, if you are interested, I will demonstrate some underground techniques. Yes? I work with kind of estimation, shuffle tracking — ah, good. Impressive. Thank you. (Laughter)So, first, the first term is estimation. Here, I can estimate exactly how many cards are put between my royal flush. Of course, I can count the cards, but this is much quicker. Right? You agree. So here I have, actually — I know exactly where the cards are. So here, I can make a bet, and this is actually one of the points where I get my money. So here: 10, jack, queen, king, ace. OK. (Applause)Next is a term — I do it quick. I call this stealing. So here, I think I know about where the cards are. I will spread the cards and you'll say stop, when I point to them, right. Point, say stop.Zoe: Stop.LG: Here — you see some are missing? And that's the stealing cards, which I did. (Laughter)OK. Now, another term called shuffle tracking. Shuffle tracking means I keep track of the cards, even if another person shuffles. This is a little risky. So — because if you look, now, I can still see it. You agree? But if you square — square, and shuffle, and then a cut. So here, to follow my cards, I must look at the shuffle from the begin — ah, we are started together. It's OK, it's OK. Come to — no, no, no, no. I'm joking, yeah? Any style — yeah, good. Here I have to calculate, but actually, I don't like to calculate. I work direct with the right brain. If you pass the left brain, you have to take care of logic and common sense. Direct in the right brain, that's much better. And so — (Laughter) — Arthur Benjamin did a little of the same thing. And if you work with, in the right atmosphere, with humor, you have — that's the password to the cosmic bank of knowledge, where you can find any solution of any problem.OK. Now, I drop the cards, and you say stop anyway, right? Not at the last card.Zoe: Stop. LG: Yeah.When I'm sober, I do this much quicker, but we will check. (Laughter) Ah, not in order, it — that was a mistake. No, I'm kidding. (Applause) No, now and then I put in a mistake, just to emphasize how difficult it is. Right? Yeah, last night I forgot that. That was a mistake. But now I'm glad I remember it. So, this deck is bought here. Sorry. I have a little pad to make it a little softer. This deck is bought here in America. It's called ""Bicycle."" And this deck is very flexible, but not so many people know, if you check, if you press at the right spots, you see how thin and flexible this deck is, right? Now, you can carry this in your wallet, so ... You don't see it, make no reaction? (Laughter) So, but here, and — is the camera getting too much? No. (Laughter)Yeah? (Audience: It's getting too much.)LG: Pardon? But then, when we will have it back, you do this. But not too much. Then you have to push it down again. Here, please. If you push these heaps — everyone see — push them together so they are really interlaced, right? Yeah, good. Perfect. Just push them through, good. Thank you. And then, I will demonstrate a thing from Russian satellite, stealen — stolen, probably copied from America but we will see.Here — shortcuts. I talk about shortcuts. Now I go very quick through the deck and try to find some pattern. The new chaos theory is already old, right? But you know, I think you are familiar with fractals — the Mandelbrot spirals and all these things. And it's much easier to memorize cards in a pattern way, and not concentrate. If you concentrate and calculate, then you go to — then it's the left brain. But if you just look and talk in another language ... Yeah, great. I think I have it.So now, different persons, older, tap. Please name any card, anyone.(Audience: Jack of spades.) LG: Jack of spades.Jack of spades. I think jack of spades is number 12 from the top. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Yes, right. So — oh, jack of spades.You said spades? (Audience: Yes.) LG: Ah. My fault. Don't applaud, this was clubs. So, jack of spades. I think ... 23 — 24, sorry, 24. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 — ah, 25, yes. It's the last. Now, I do it quicker, better. OK. Another person. Oh, I forgot, I shouldn't shuffle but I think — (Laughter) — actually, my technique is to peek, all the time. When I lift the heap, I peek. You see, yeah, perfect. Three, four, five, six. Then I calculate — yeah, good. (Laughter)Another person, another card. (Audience: Seven of diamonds.)LG: Seven of diamonds. Perfect, my favorite, yeah, seven. So I will do it quick, very quick, but in slow motion, so you can follow. (Laughter)Seven of? (Audience: Diamonds.)LG: Diamonds, good. I start here. Good, thank you. (Applause) The thing I did — I peeked. I know where the card were, then I chose it. So another person, another card. (Laughter) Another person.(Audience: Ten of diamonds.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Ten of diamonds.)LG: Ten of diamonds, yeah. I think I do it the same way. I like to, so I know where it is. Ten of diamonds. But now I do it the regular speed, right? Ten of diamonds. Good. Maybe you will cut? Lift. Excellent. So, thank you. Another person, another card.(Audience: Five of clubs.)LG: Pardon? (Audience: Five of clubs.)LG: Five of clubs. It's not the same person, even if it's the same spot. We can take some over there later. So now, I will drop the cards. And you'll say stop, anywhere. Got it? Five of clubs. Not the last. Yes, that's difficult to find a card here. (Laughter) We do it again. The person who said five of clubs say stop, when the cards are in the air, right?(Audience: Stop.)LG: Very good. OK. (Applause)OK, I had to use a little force there. I think we save five of clubs. And now a card with a contrast of five of clubs.(Audience: Queen of hearts.) LG: Queen of hearts, yeah. Excellent. I love that card. Here, I will do the most difficult thing. For example, you are sitting in Las Vegas, and you're betting, and you let the other guys peek this card by mistake. Feel, it's just the regular, one card. And now, when I lift this card, it shall be your card. What was your card?(Audience: Queen of hearts.)LG: Queen of? Queen of hearts. So that's a tough challenge, right? So here, I grab — you know this? Five of clubs ... and queen of hearts. Yes! This is a tough one, because here I must take advantage of — I switch it with the five of clubs. So, now a false count. Which card shall I use? Queen or five?Zoe: The queen. LG: Queen, yes.So, I use the queen, and here's five of clubs. The false count — and the number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight — you say the same card all the time. Eight, nine, 10. This is a kind of optical deal, right? When I put one card at a table — look, it's not one card. It's — look, it's a bunch of cards that gives this impression. Yeah. Now some hard stuff. I think we keep the queen here, yes. Now, to the satellites things. This — oh sorry, don't look at the beam. My fault. (Laughter)This is high-frequency laser, and it's enough with a fraction of a second to destroy the retina completely. Right, sorry, my — I should have mentioned that, yeah. But you can relax, because it takes half an hour before it works, so you have plenty of time to see my whole performance. (Laughter) Now, I put the laser here, and — now, when I deal the cards in the laser, I know where they are but — yes? Did the camera got it? No? They didn't? What happened?(Audience: It disappeared.)LG: OK, I'll take another group. Do the cameras see the cards now?No? (Audience: No, they're all gone.)LG: But you see the hand. Ah, good, good, good. But now. So now, that was the reason, right? You see the cards? Yes. (Laughter) Yeah, good. Now — (Laughter) — one guy laughed. So now, to find the queen, do it this way: take back the other one, take back the queen. (Laughter) Yeah, interesting, but a little dangerous. (Laughter) I liked it. Now, a little more difficult. Name — anyone, name, please, any suit.(Audience: Spades.) LG: Spades? Spades, good.So here, here I have to peek, lots of cards. I think there are lots of — I don't know how many — but 10, 15 spades in a deck, at least, right? (Laughter) So every time I lift the heap, I peek, right. Then I arrange them so I can get them quick. Perfect, excellent. So I start with the ace — yeah, ace. Ah, yeah — spades? Same mistake as before, right? So — I arrange the spades — the clubs. I try to do this right here. First, I take the spades. You see, I don't work with prestige, so always do mistakes. It doesn't matter to me. And now and then, I get some extra sympathy points, right? One, two, three, four — yes, the camera got it? Five, six, seven, eight — ah — nine, 10, the jack, jack of spades, queen of — I like that laugh, yeah! Good. Queen. (Laughter) Wait, wait, wait — please take any card. Grab any one. Quick, quick, good. And we switch this to the king. Ace of diamonds. And now, look, ace of diamonds will guide. So I find ... king of spades. There was the place. And here is king of spades, correct? Yeah? OK. (Applause)Now, a little more difficult thing. Maybe you think I have the cards in order already, so you help me to shuffle again. Another suit, please.(Audience: Armani.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Armani.) (Laughter)LG: It was after the blindfold. I like this guy, yeah. OK. That should be my end effect, but OK. Armani — who said Armani? You? I drop the cards and you — which size? Which size? It's a piece of cake. I like challenges. Which size?(Audience: Extra large.) LG: Extra large, OK.Say stop. (Audience: Stop.) (Laughter)LG: Yeah, Armani. OK. (Applause) Ah, this is tough. OK, a suit. I had clubs before, spades.Another suit. (Audience: Diamonds.) LG: Diamonds, perfect.So, in this case, I try to locate diamonds. I look at the cards, and OK. We try. Yeah. You help me. If I drop the card face up, like this, you reverse it. Zoe: OK. LG: OK, now. Do with both hands, and quick. Yes, good, good. (Laughter) I think we have it now. Yeah, good, good. So here, diamonds, hearts — no, diamonds. Good, good. Stop. Do you see the pattern? No? Now? Yes, yes, OK. I work with pattern. Oh sorry, I dropped one. Maybe it's important — yeah — nine of diamonds, OK. So now — I always ask, why do I put myself in this position? I have to figure out so many outs, when I miss some cards, but I love it. So now, I will do it. I will try to find the diamonds, but I will do it the hard way. It's too easy to do it right away, right? I think I will do it ... blindfolded. At this distance, it works immediately. Aargh! (Laughter)Duct tape. I look — shake the cards, so I don't. Go ahead. Yeah, good. I like the empathy. Empathy. But it was — did you hear? It was women's voice. Hear the guy — yeah, more, more, more. (Laughter) Yeah, good. Yeah. You can take the nostril too, because some guys think — (Laughter) — some guys think I can peek through the nostril, so do more. Go, go. Right? Good. Satisfied? Looks good, like Batman. Ow! (Laughter) No, with dignity and elegance, right? But I like her, yeah. I said, be a little tough. And it was OK. One more? The last. OK. All right.Now you must agree that I'm — I must rely on other senses, right? I work with vibration. So, what was the card? Diamonds. Ah, I memorized hearts. So now I have to improvise again. Maybe I'll stand up. Half. Diamonds — I'll start with ace of diamonds. Just kidding, warming up — king of hearts. (Laughter) And I give you a diamonds, so they — so you put them here, in a nice row, right. And you can see, yeah? Good. Ace of diamonds, yes? Zoe: Yeah.LG: Good. Good. Two — (Applause) — thank you. I never ever miss two. This is interesting. Always I've found two, but the wrong color. Spades, sorry. And the deck is a gift to you after, so let the skepticals here, in this, examine them, right? Remind me. It's a gift. Two — and it was two of spades, right? Sorry, two of diamonds. I'll do it quick now. Three — three of diamonds. Yes! Four — I like challenges, yes. Yeah, good.Chris Anderson: You're peeking.LG: Pardon?CA: You're peeking. You just got to — this is a request from the lady in the back. (Laughter)Okay. Try that. LG: Yeah. Also listen. OK, now. This is maybe a little tough. We will try. Yes? Good? (Laughter) OK. So, how many cards? Five? Zoe: Four.LG: Four. Is five the next card?Zoe: Five of diamonds, yeah.LG: It's not here? Zoe: It's not there.LG: Oh. So here, all the cards are face down — you agree? (Audience: Yes.)LG: Yes? You see that in the screen? And this is face up, and it's not at the bottom here. So next card will be — was it five?Zoe: Five. LG: Yeah — I will reverse it face up here.Yes? Zoe: Yeah. LG: Six — six with the thumb. Seven. Yeah, I do this. I know where it is, because I peeked before and then I do this. Right? Eight. If — and then nine, right? Yeah. Yesterday — the day before yesterday, I was in Vegas, and I used this actually. Nine? Yeah? Correct? No? Yes! Ah, good, good. Ten — once again, I love this Jonny Wayne move. Yeah. Jack — you [unclear] with Jack? Jack of diamonds, correct? (Audience: No.)LG: Yes? And queen! Queen, with misdirection. Misdirection. (Applause) Yeah? And then, king, after exactly five seconds. Yeah. Five. Five seconds. One, two, three, four — mmm! Check it. Yes?CA: King of diamonds. LG: Ah! Good. Oh. Touch me, feel — ah, ah, you know!CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Lennart Green! LG: Okay, thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/lennart_green_does_close_up_card_magic
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"Dogs have interests. They have interest sniffing each other, chasing squirrels. And if we don't make that a reward in training, that will be a distraction. It's always sort of struck me as really a scary thought that if you see a dog in a park, and the owner is calling it, and the owner says, you know, ""Puppy, come here, come here,"" and the dog thinks, ""Hmm, interesting. I'm sniffing this other dog's rear end, the owner's calling."" It's a difficult choice, right? Rear end, owner. Rear end wins. I mean, you lose. You cannot compete with the environment, if you have an adolescent dog's brain. So, when we train, we're always trying to take into account the dog's point of view.Now, I'm here largely because there's kind of a rift in dog training at the moment that — on one side, we have people who think that you train a dog, number one, by making up rules, human rules. We don't take the dog's point of view into account. So the human says, ""You're going to act this way, damn it. We're going to force you to act against your will, to bend to our will."" Then, number two, we keep these rules a secret from the dog. And then number three, now we can punish the dog for breaking rules he didn't even know existed. So you get a little puppy, he comes. His only crime is he grew. When he was a little puppy, he puts his paws on your leg — you know, isn't that nice? And you go, ""Oh, there's a good boy."" You bend down, you pat him — you reward him for jumping up. His one mistake is he's a Tibetan mastiff, and a few months later, he weighs, you know, 80 pounds. Every time he jumps up, he gets all sorts of abuse. I mean, it is really very, very scary the abuse that dogs get.So, this whole dominance issue — number one, what we get in dog training is this Mickey-Mouse interpretation of a very complicated social system. And they take this stuff seriously. Male dogs are very serious about a hierarchy, because it prevents physical fights. Of course, female dogs, bitches, on the other hand, have several bitch amendments to male hierarchical rule. The number one is, ""I have it, you don't."" And what you will find is a very, very low-ranking bitch will quite easily keep a bone away from a high-ranking male. So, we get in dog training this notion of dominances, or of the alpha dog. I'm sure that you've heard this.Dogs get so abused. Dogs, horses and humans — these are the three species which are so abused in life. And the reason is built into their behavior — is to always come back and apologize. Like, ""Oh, I'm sorry you had to beat me. I'm really sorry, yes, it's my fault."" They are just so beatable, and that's why they get beaten. The poor puppy jumps up, you open the dog book, what does it say? ""Hold his front paws, squeeze his front paws, stamp on his hind feet, squirt him in the face with lemon juice, hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper, knee him in the chest, flip him over backwards."" Because he grew? And because he's performing a behavior you've trained him to do? This is insanity. I ask owners, ""Well, how would you like the dog to greet you?"" And people say, ""Well, I don't know, to sit, I guess."" I said, ""Let's teach him to sit."" And then we give him a reason for sitting. Because the first stage is basically teaching a dog ESL. I could speak to you and say, ""Laytay-chai, paisey, paisey."" Go on, something should happen now. Why aren't you responding? Oh, you don't speak Swahili. Well, I've got news for you. The dog doesn't speak English, or American, or Spanish, or French.So the first stage in training is to teach the dog ESL, English as a second language. And that's how we use the food lure in the hand, and we use food because we're dealing with owners. My wife doesn't need food — she's a great trainer, much better than I am. I don't need food, but the average owner says, ""Puppy, sit."" Or they go, ""Sit, sit, sit."" They're making a hand signal in front of the dog's rectum for some reason, like the dog has a third eye there — it's insane. You know, ""Sit, sit."" No, we go, ""Puppy, sit"" — boom, it's got it in six to 10 trials.Then we phase out the food as a lure, and now the dog knows that ""sit"" means sit, and you can actually communicate to a dog in a perfectly constructed English sentence. ""Phoenix, come here, take this, and go to Jamie, please."" And I've taught her ""Phoenix,"" ""come here,"" ""take this,"" ""go to"" and the name of my son, ""Jamie."" And the dog can take a note, and I've got my own little search-and-rescue dog. He'll find Jamie wherever he is, you know, wherever kids are, crushing rocks by a stream or something, and take him a little message that says, ""Hey, dinner's ready. Come in for dinner.""So, at this point, the dog knows what we want it to do. Will it do it? Not necessarily, no. As I said, if he's in the park and there's a rear end to sniff, why come to the owner? The dog lives with you, the dog can get you any time. The dog can sniff your butt, if you like, when he wants to. At the moment, he's in the park, and you are competing with smells, and other dogs, and squirrels.So the second stage in training is to teach the dog to want to do what we want him to do, and this is very easy. We use the Premack principle. Basically, we follow a low-frequency behavior — one the dog doesn't want to do — by a high-frequency behavior, commonly known as a behavior problem, or a dog hobby — something the dog does like to do. That will then become a reward for the lower-frequency behavior. So we go, ""sit,"" on the couch; ""sit,"" tummy-rub; ""sit,"" look, I throw a tennis ball; ""sit,"" say hello to that other dog. Yes, we put ""sniff butt"" on queue. ""Sit,"" sniff butt.So now all of these distractions that worked against training now become rewards that work for training. And what we're doing, in essence, is we're teaching the dog, kind of like — we're letting the dog think that the dog is training us. And I can imagine this dog, you know, speaking through the fence to, say, an Akita, saying, ""Wow, my owners, they are so incredibly easy to train. They're like Golden Retrievers. All I have to do is sit, and they do everything. They open doors, they drive my car, they massage me, they will throw tennis balls, they will cook for me and serve the food. It's like, if I just sit, that's my command. Then I have my own personal doorman, chauffeur, masseuse, chef and waiter."" And now the dog's really happy. And this, to me, is always what training is. So we really motivate the dog to want to do it, such that the need for punishment seldom comes up.Now we move to phase three, when now — there's times, you know, when daddy knows best. And I have a little sign on my fridge, and it says, ""Because I'm the daddy, that's why."" Sorry, no more explanation. ""I'm the daddy, you're not. Sit."" And there's times, for example, if my son's friends leave the door open, the dogs have to know you don't step across this line. This is a life-or-death thing. You leave this, the sanctity of your house, and you could be hit on the street. So some things we have to let the dog know, ""You mustn't do this.""And so we have to enforce, but without force. People here get very confused about what a punishment is. They think a punishment is something nasty. I bet a lot of you do, right? You think it's something painful, or scary, or nasty. It doesn't have to be. There's several definitions of what a punishment is, but one definition, the most popular, is: a punishment is a stimulus that reduces the immediately preceding behavior, such that it's less likely to occur in the future. It does not have to be nasty, scary or painful. And I would say, if it doesn't have to be, then maybe it shouldn't be.I was working with a very dangerous dog about a year ago. And this was a dog that put both his owners in hospital, plus the brother-in-law, plus the child. And I only agreed to work with it if they promised it would stay in their house, and they never took it outside. The dog is actually euthanized now, but this was a dog I worked with for a while. A lot of the aggression happened around the kitchen, so while I was there — this was on the fourth visit — we did a four and a half hour down-stay, with the dog on his mat. And he was kept there by the owner's calm insistence. When the dog would try to leave the mat, she would say, ""Rover, on the mat, on the mat, on the mat."" The dog broke his down-stay 22 times in four and a half hours, while she cooked dinner, because we had a lot of aggression related towards food. The breaks got fewer and fewer. You see, the punishment was working. The behavior problem was going away. She never raised her voice. If she did, she would have got bitten. It's not a good dog you shout at. And a lot of my friends train really neat animals, grizzly bears — if you've ever seen a grizzly bear on the telly or in film, then it's a friend of mine who's trained it — killer whales. I love it because it wires you up. How are you going to reprimand a grizzly bear? ""Bad bear, bad bear!"" Voom! Your head now is 100 yards away, sailing through the air, OK? This is crazy.So, where do we go from here? We want a better way. Dogs deserve better. But for me, the reason for this actually has to do with dogs. It has to do with watching people train puppies, and realizing they have horrendous interaction skills, horrendous relationship skills. Not just with their puppy, but with the rest of the family at class. I mean, my all-time classic is another ""come here"" one. You see someone in the park — and I'll cover my mic when I say this, because I don't want to wake you up — and there's the owner in the park, and their dog's over here, and they say, ""Rover, come here. Rover, come here. Rover, come here, you son of a bitch."" The dog says, ""I don't think so."" (Laughter) I mean, who in their right mind would think that a dog would want to approach them when they're screaming like that? Instead, the dog says, ""I know that tone. I know that tone. Previously, when I've approached, I've gotten punished there."" I was walking onto a plane — this, for me, was a pivotal moment in my career, and it really cemented what I wanted to do with this whole puppy-training thing, the notion of how to teach puppies in a dog-friendly way to want to do what we want to do, so we don't have to force them. You know, I puppy-train my child. And the seminal moment was, I was getting on a plane in Dallas, and in row two was a father, I presume, and a young boy about five, kicking the back of the chair. ""Johnny, don't do that."" Kick, kick, kick. ""Johnny, don't do that."" Kick, kick, kick. I'm standing right here with my bag. The father leans over, grabs him like this and gives him ugly face. And ugly face is this — when you go face-to-face with a puppy or a child, you say, ""What are you doing! Now stop it, stop it, stop it!"" And I went, ""Oh my God, do I do something?"" That child has lost everything — that one of the two people he can trust in this world has absolutely pulled the rug from under his feet. And I thought, ""Do I tell this jerk to quit it?"" I thought, ""Ian, stay out of it, stay out of it, you know, walk on."" I walked to the back of the plane, I sat down, and a thought came to me. If that had been a dog, I would have laid him out. (Laughter) If he had kicked a dog, I would have punched him out. He kicked a child, grabs the child like this and I let it go.And this is what it's all about. These relationship skills are so easy. I mean, we as humans, our shallowness when we choose a life-mate based on the three Cs — coat color, conformation, cuteness. You know, kind of like a little robot. This is how we go into a relationship, and it's hunky-dory for a year. And then, a little behavior problem comes up. No different from the dog barking. The husband won't clear up his clothes, or the wife's always late for meetings, whatever it is, OK? And it then starts, and we get into this thing, and our personal feedback — there's two things about it. When you watch people interacting with animals or other people, there is very little feedback, it's too infrequent. And when it happens, it's bad, it's nasty. You see it's especially in families, especially with spouses, especially with children, especially with parents. You see it especially in the workplace, especially from boss to employee. It's as if there's some schadenfreude there, that we actually take delight in people getting things wrong, so that we can then moan and groan and bitch at them.And this, I would say, is the biggest human foible that we have. It really is. We take the good for granted, and we moan and groan at the bad. And I think this whole notion of these skills should be taught. You know, calculus is wonderful. When I was a kid, I was a calculus whiz. I don't understand a thing about it now, but I could do it as a kid. Geometry, fantastic. You know, quantum mechanics — these are cool things. But they don't save marriages and they don't raise children.And my look to the future is, and what I want to do with this doggy stuff, is to teach people that you know, your husband's just as easy to train. Probably easier — if you got a Rottie — much easier to train. Your kids are easy to train. All you've got to do is to watch them, to time-sample the behavior, and say, every five minutes, you ask the question, ""Is it good, or is it bad?"" If it's good, say, ""That was really neat, thank you."" That is such a powerful training technique. This should be taught in schools. Relationships — how do you negotiate? How you do negotiate with your friend who wants your toy? You know, how to prepare you for your first relationship? How on earth about raising children? We think how we do it — one night in bed, we're pregnant, and then we're raising the most important thing in life, a child. No, this is what should be taught — the good living, the good habits, which are just as hard to break as bad habits. So, that would be my wish to the future. Ah, damn, I wanted to end exactly on time, but I got eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two — so thank you very much. That's my talk, thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ian_dunbar_on_dog_friendly_dog_training
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"I’d like to dedicate this next song to Carmelo, who was put to sleep a couple of days ago, because he got too old. But apparently he was a very nice dog and he always let the cat sleep in the dog bed.♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫♫ I'm just a'walking my dog, singing my song, strolling along. ♫♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong. ♫♫ My life was lonely and blue. ♫♫ Yeah, I was sad as a sailor, ♫♫ I was an angry 'un too. ♫♫ Then there was you — appeared when I was entangled with youth and fear, ♫♫ and nerves jingle jangled, vermouth and beer were getting me mangled up. ♫♫ But then I looked in your eyes ♫♫ and I was no more a failure. ♫♫ You looked so wacky and wise. ♫♫ And I said, ""Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I'm just a'walking my dog, ♫♫ catching some sun. We can't go wrong."" ♫♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, singing our song, strolling along. ♫♫ 'Cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫♫ and I don't care what the politicians spout. ♫♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫♫ 'cause that's what it's all about. ♫♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫♫ My life was tragic and sad. ♫♫ I was the archetypal loser. ♫♫ I was a pageant gone bad. ♫♫ And then there was you — on time, and wagging your tail ♫♫ in the cutest mime that you was in jail. ♫♫ I said, ""Woof, be mine!"" and you gave a wail and then ♫♫ I was no longer alone. ♫♫ And I was no more a boozer. ♫♫ We'll make the happiest home. ♫♫ And I said, ""Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I’m just a'walking my dog, ♫♫ singing my song, strolling along."" ♫♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong, ♫♫ 'cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫♫ and I don’t care what the politicians spout. ♫♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫♫ 'cause that's what it's all about, ♫♫ that's what it's all about, ♫♫ that's what it's all abou-BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW ♫♫ that's what it's all about. ♫♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫Good dog!Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nellie_mckay_sings_the_dog_song
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"Ninety-nine percent of us have the dream of listeners. Not being the musicians — the listeners, right? And we crave one thing, even though we kind of don't know it all the time. We crave to be in the room with the musician the day it was recorded, the day it was played. And we go to live concerts, and we get that as much as we can. But then we listen to the other 99 percent of our stuff recorded. And it turns out the further back you go in history, the little rougher it sounds. And so we said, there's a solution to this. Let's separate the performance, as a thing, out from the recording, which was how it was made. You know, the thing with microphones in the room and all that day. But the performance itself was how the musicians worked their fingers, and what instruments they were using. And it's the data hidden inside the recording. In order to do this, it's a lot of hardware and software that runs in a very high resolution. And Yamaha makes an incredible thing called the Disklavier Pro that looks like a nice grand piano there. And you probably didn't realize it's going to do all these things — but full of solenoids, and fiber optics, and computers and all this kind of stuff. The highest resolution out of Japan. And this just didn't work until we could cross this line that says high-definition. And we were able to cross this line, called the uncanny valley, in terms of — artificial intelligence terms. We have a process where we, you know, kind of put it into the computer and digitize it, and then a whole lot of analysis. And we look at every single note, and all the attributes of those notes: how hard they were struck, and how they were held down, and how you move the fingers. So we had to develop a whole new science of how you move your fingers. And, you know, it's a thing your piano teacher teaches you, but we never had a science behind these kinds of things.I'm going to start with Glenn Gould. He died 25 years ago this year, and was born 75 years ago this year. Was a beloved pianist, maybe the great cult pianist of the twentieth century. He just got tired of being in front of an audience, and felt like — a performing monkey was, in fact, his term. So he stepped back, and did nothing but the crafting of his work. And Gould's specialty was playing Bach. His maybe most famous recording was something called ""The Goldberg Variations."" Bach only wrote themes and variations one time. He wrote some early pieces, but late in his life, in his mature period, he said, ""Here's a theme — 30 variations."" In fact, the theme isn't even the melody, it's the bass line. And Gould recorded it in two major recordings that you may know about, one in mono, and one in stereo. And the one in mono, by the way, he used the pedal, and as he got older, he said, ""No, no, wait a minute. I'm going to get very scientific about this, and not use the pedal."" What I'd like you to hear live is the 1955 version, and we'll play the first couple pieces of it. Glenn Gould, 1955. (Music) How about that? (Applause)So let me tell you a little bit how this was done. First of all, let me get you to the end step. This is — we have a fairly complex process that, you know, software and musicians and so on, but when we're all done, we know that the ear is the final arbiter. We can play the original in one ear, and a new recording in the other. So I'm going to do this for you right now, what you just heard. And in the right speaker is going to be the original recording, and the left speaker is going to be the new recording, actually of an instrument just like that one, and I'm going to play them together at the same time. (Music) That's the original. [Unclear] That's the two together. (Music)Before ""Jurassic Park,"" there was no science for how skin hung off of muscle, right? So, in the video world, we've been able to invent, in our lifetimes, natural behavior. And this is kind of another example of putting a science behind natural behavior. And then you heard the original. Ultimately, I started with the experience. And the experience is: I want to be in the room and hear the musicians. Lots of you can afford to buy one of these. But, if not, there is now high-definition surround sound. And I got to tell you, if you haven't heard high-definition surround, go down to your audio dealer, your audiophile dealer. It's so involving compared to regular stereo. But if you don't have that, maybe you can listen on your headphones. And so on the same disk we have five recordings — Sony has five recordings. And you could listen in headphones with this thing called binaural recording. And it's a dummy head that sits in front of the instrument, and it's got microphones where the ears are. And when you put on headphones, and you listen to this, you're inside of Glenn Gould's body. And it is a chuckle until, you know, the musicians, who are musicians who play the piano, listen to this, say, ""I can't believe it! It's just what it's like to play the piano."" Except now you're inside Glenn Gould's body playing the piano, and it feels like your fingers are making the decisions and moving through the whole process. It's a game changer.Here's now something we know in spectacular quality. The whole process is very sensitive to temperature and humidity. What you heard today was not perfect. It's an amalgam of wood, and cast iron, and felt, and steel strings, and all these, and they're all amazingly sensitive to temperature and humidity. So when you go into the recording session, you get to stop after every piece and rebuild the piano if you need to. There's the whole action there, sitting, kind of, on the side, and the dummy head and our recording engineers standing around while we rebuild the piano. Without putting dates next to these things, step-by-step music will be turned into data, like every field that's occurred in the past 35 or 40 years. Audio has come very late to this game — I'm not talking about digitizing, and bits, and re-mastering. I'm talking about turn it into the data that it was made from, which is how it was performed. And audio came very late because our ears are so hard to fool — they're high-resolution, and they're wired straight to our emotions, and you can't trick them very easily. Your eyes are pretty happy with some color and movement, you know.All right, there's this episode of ""Star Trek."" (Laughter) I get it — it was all just laid in for me yesterday there. The episode of ""Star Trek"" for me was James Daly played Methuselah — remember this one? And at some point he's dancing with his — and I won't ruin the episode for you, from 1967. Right, do you know where I'm going? And Nimoy, I'm sorry, Spock sits down at the piano, and he starts playing this Brahms waltz, and they all dance to it. And then Spock turns round, he goes, ""James, I know all of the Brahms waltzes, and I don't believe this is one of them in the category."" That's where I'm at. I want to hear the waltzes Brahms didn't write. I want to hear the pieces that Horowitz didn't play. But I believe we're on a path now, when we get to data, that we can distill styles, and templates, and formulas, and all these kinds of things, again, that you've seen happen in the computer graphics world. It's now coming in this world. The transition will be this one. It says right now, we think music is notes and how they're played. And I believe this is coming. Because what you've just heard was a computer playing data — no Glenn Gould in the room. But yet, it was human. And I believe you'll get to the next step, the real dream of listeners. Every time you listen to a recording today, every time you take out your iPod and whatever, every time you listen to it, it's the same thing — it's frozen. Wouldn't it be cool if every time you listened, it could be different? This morning, you're sadder, you want to hear your song, the same song, played sadder than you did yesterday. You want to hear it played by different musicians. You want to hear it in different rooms and whatever.We've seen all these ""Star Treks,"" and they're all holodeck episodes as well. Every time I listen to that, I get goose bumps. It's so amazing, it's so exciting. Every time I listen to that recording it's like, ""Oh my God, I can't believe I'm in the same room. I can't believe this is happening."" It's a way better experience than whatever you're used to listening to, in whatever form. And lastly, I will wrap up with one minute of Art Tatum. So I've really overshot my budget here. We made a new recording of him playing in the Shrine Auditorium in September. It was a concert he recorded in the Shrine Auditorium in 1949. And I've got to tell you, we have this lab where we build and measure everything, back in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we flew out to Los Angeles. And as the president of the company, I didn't feel real comfortable about where we were. That's a real uncomfortable feeling, when all the equipment's come out and a whole Sony team, and people are going to be sitting there in the audience. And we put the piano on the sweet spot of the stage in the Shrine, which has not changed since 1949, still seats 6,000 people. And on the sweet spot on the stage, Tatum starts playing ... and every note, every beat, every slur, every accent, every pedal was perfect, because he played it for that room on that day. And we captured all that data all over again. And I want you to hear that right now. And fortunately, it's right in here. This is an encore he used to do. It's one minute long. It's an Irish jig, and I want you to hear his humor. (Music) (Applause) And that's just what the live audience did. (Applause) So thank you very much, Michael, thank you for the opportunity.","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_walker_re_creates_great_performances
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"I have a tough job to do. You know, when I looked at the profile of the audience here, with their connotations and design, in all its forms, and with so much and so many people working on collaborative and networks, and so on, that I wanted to tell you, I wanted to build an argument for primary education in a very specific context. In order to do that in 20 minutes, I have to bring out four ideas — it's like four pieces of a puzzle. And if I succeed in doing that, maybe you would go back with the thought that you could build on, and perhaps help me do my work.The first piece of the puzzle is remoteness and the quality of education. Now, by remoteness, I mean two or three different kinds of things. Of course, remoteness in its normal sense, which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center, you get to remoter areas. What happens to education? The second, or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world, you have pockets, like slums, or shantytowns, or poorer areas, which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city, so it's us and them. What happens to education in that context? So keep both of those ideas of remoteness.We made a guess. The guess was that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers. If they do have, they cannot retain those teachers. They do not have good enough infrastructure. And if they had some infrastructure, they have difficulty maintaining it. But I wanted to check if this is true. So what I did last year was we hired a car, looked up on Google, found a route into northern India from New Delhi which, you know, which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers. Drove out about 300 kilometers, and wherever we found a school, administered a set of standard tests, and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph. The graph was interesting, although you need to consider it carefully. I mean, this is a very small sample; you should not generalize from it. But it was quite obvious, quite clear, that for this particular route that I had taken, the remoter the school was, the worse its results seemed to be. That seemed a little damning, and I tried to correlate it with things like infrastructure, or with the availability of electricity, and things like that.To my surprise, it did not correlate. It did not correlate with the size of classrooms. It did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure. It did not correlate with the poverty levels. It did not correlate. But what happened was that when I administered a questionnaire to each of these schools, with one single question for the teachers — which was, ""Would you like to move to an urban, metropolitan area?"" — 69 percent of them said yes. And as you can see from that, they say yes just a little bit out of Delhi, and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of Delhi — because, you know, those are relatively better off areas — and then from 200 kilometers out of Delhi, the answer is consistently yes. I would imagine that a teacher who comes or walks into class every day thinking that, I wish I was in some other school, probably has a deep impact on what happens to the results. So it looked as though teacher motivation and teacher migration was a powerfully correlated thing with what was happening in primary schools, as opposed to whether the children have enough to eat, and whether they are packed tightly into classrooms and that sort of thing. It appears that way.When you take education and technology, then I find in the literature that, you know, things like websites, collaborative environments — you've been listening to all that in the morning — it's always piloted first in the best schools, the best urban schools, and, according to me, biases the result. The literature — one part of it, the scientific literature — consistently blames ET as being over-hyped and under-performing. The teachers always say, well, it's fine, but it's too expensive for what it does. Because it's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting, let's say, 80 percent of whatever they could do. You put in this new super-duper technology, and now they get 83 percent. So the principal looks at it and says, 3 percent for 300,000 dollars? Forget it. If you took the same technology and piloted it into one of those remote schools, where the score was 30 percent, and, let's say, took that up to 40 percent — that will be a completely different thing. So the relative change that ET, Educational Technology, would make, would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top, but we seem to be doing it the other way about.So I came to this conclusion that ET should reach the underprivileged first, not the other way about. And finally came the question of, how do you tackle teacher perception? Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine — it's impossible. I don't know why it's impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it's impossible — I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem. He said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine, should be. So, you know, it puts the teacher into a tough bind, you have to think. Anyway, so I'm proposing that an alternative primary education, whatever alternative you want, is required where schools don't exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough, for whatever reason. If you happen to live in a part of the world where none of this applies, then you don't need an alternative education. So far I haven't come across such an area, except for one case. I won't name the area, but somewhere in the world people said, we don't have this problem, because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools. There are such areas, but — anyway, I'd never heard that anywhere else.I'm going to talk about children and self-organization, and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like. They're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments. I'll have to really rush through this. They're a set of experiments. The first one was done in New Delhi in 1999. And what we did over there was pretty much simple. I had an office in those days which bordered a slum, an urban slum, so there was a dividing wall between our office and the urban slum. They cut a hole inside that wall — which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall — and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end, a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall, put it on high-speed Internet, put the Internet Explorer there, put it on Altavista.com — in those days — and just left it there.And this is what we saw. So that was my office in IIT. Here's the hole-in-the-wall. About eight hours later, we found this kid. To the right is this eight-year-old child who — and to his left is a six-year-old girl, who is not very tall. And what he was doing was, he was teaching her to browse. So it sort of raised more questions than it answered. Is this real? Does the language matter, because he's not supposed to know English? Will the computer last, or will they break it and steal it — and did anyone teach them? The last question is what everybody said, but you know, I mean, they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office, can you show me how to do it, and then somebody taught him.So I took the experiment out of Delhi and repeated it, this time in a city called Shivpuri in the center of India, where I was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything. (Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout. He came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad. Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen — and later on he told me, ""I have never seen a television where you can do something."" So he figured that out. It took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television. And then, as he was doing that, he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad — you'll see him do that. He did that, and the Internet Explorer changed page. Eight minutes later, he looked from his hand to the screen, and he was browsing: he was going back and forth. When that happened, he started calling all the neighborhood children, like, children would come and see what's happening over here. And by the evening of that day, 70 children were all browsing. So eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there.So we thought that this is what was happening: that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the Internet. But under what circumstances? At this time there was a — the main question was about English. People said, you know, you really ought to have this in Indian languages. So I said, have what, shall I translate the Internet into some Indian language? That's not possible. So, it has to be the other way about. But let's see, how do the children tackle the English language? I took the experiment out to northeastern India, to a village called Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all. And I built a similar hole-in-the-wall. One big difference in the villages, as opposed to the urban slums: there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk. In the urban slums, the girls tend to stay away. I left the computer there with lots of CDs — I didn't have any Internet — and came back three months later. So when I came back there, I found these two kids, eight- and 12-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. And as soon as they saw me they said, ""We need a faster processor and a better mouse."" (Laughter) I was real surprised. You know, how on earth did they know all this? And they said, ""Well, we've picked it up from the CDs."" So I said, ""But how did you understand what's going on over there?"" So they said, ""Well, you've left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English."" So then I measured, and they were using 200 English words with each other — mispronounced, but correct usage — words like exit, stop, find, save, that kind of thing, not only to do with the computer but in their day-to-day conversations. So, Madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to.Finally, I got some funding to try this experiment out to see if these results are replicable, if they happen everywhere else. India is a good place to do such an experiment in, because we have all the ethnic diversities, all the — you know, the genetic diversity, all the racial diversities, and also all the socio-economic diversities. So, I could actually choose samples to cover a cross section that would cover practically the whole world. So I did this for almost five years, and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of India. This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold. I also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors, and I was using regular, normal PCs, so I needed different climates, for which India is also great, because we have very cold, very hot, and so on. This is the desert to the west. Near the Pakistan border. And you see here a little clip of — one of these villages — the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the English alphabet.Then to central India — very warm, moist, fishing villages, where humidity is a very big killer of electronics. So we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power, so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running. I want to just cut this short. We did this over and over again. This sequence is also nice. This is a small child, a six-year-old, telling his eldest sister what to do. And this happens very often with these computers, that the younger children are found teaching the older ones.What did we find? We found that six- to 13-year-olds can self-instruct in a connected environment, irrespective of anything that we could measure. So if they have access to the computer, they will teach themselves, including intelligence. I couldn't find a single correlation with anything, but it had to be in groups. And that may be of great, you know, interest to this group, because all of you are talking about groups. So here was the power of what a group of children can do, if you lift the adult intervention.Just a quick idea of the measurements. We took standard statistical techniques, so I'm going to not talk about that. But we got a clean learning curve, almost exactly the same as what you would get in a school. I'll leave it at that, because, I mean, it sort of says it all, doesn't it? What could they learn to do? Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video. In short, what all of us do. And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer.So, how do they do that? If you calculated the actual time of access, it would work out to minutes per day, so that's not how it's happening. What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what they should do. If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. Around these four are usually a group of about 16 children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that's going on on the computer. And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing. It seems counter-intuitive to adult learning, but remember, eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told, don't do this, you know, don't touch the whiskey bottle. So what does the eight-year-old do? He observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched. And if you tested him, he would answer every question correctly on that topic. So, they seem to be able to acquire very quickly.So what was the conclusion over the six years of work? It was that primary education can happen on its own, or parts of it can happen on its own. It does not have to be imposed from the top downwards. It could perhaps be a self-organizing system, so that was the second bit that I wanted to tell you, that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective.The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly, I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them — I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions. We got all sorts of opinions. Yes, no or I don't know. I simply took those questions where I got 50 percent yeses and 50 percent noes — so I was able to get a collection of 16 such statements. These were areas where the children were clearly confused, because half said yes and half said no. A typical example being, ""Sometimes it is necessary to tell lies."" They don't have a way to determine which way to answer this question; perhaps none of us do. So I leave you with this third question. Can technology alter the acquisition of values? Finally, self-organizing systems, about which, again, I won't say too much because you've been hearing all about it. Natural systems are all self-organizing: galaxies, molecules, cells, organisms, societies — except for the debate about an intelligent designer. But at this point in time, as far as science goes, it's self-organization. But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency. And you know about the Internet-based self-organizing systems.So here are my four sentences then. Remoteness affects the quality of education. Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later. Values are acquired; doctrine and dogma are imposed — the two opposing mechanisms. And learning is most likely a self-organizing system. If you put all the four together, then it gives — according to me — it gives us a goal, a vision, for educational technology. An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized. As educationists, we have never asked for technology; we keep borrowing it. PowerPoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology, but it was not meant for education, it was meant for making boardroom presentations. We borrowed it. Video conferencing. The personal computer itself. I think it's time that the educationists made their own specs, and I have such a set of specs. This is a brief look at that. And such a set of specs should produce the technology to address remoteness, values and violence. So I thought I'd give it a name — why don't we call it ""outdoctrination."" And could this be a goal for educational technology in the future? So I want to leave that as a thought with you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves
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"So what's image got do with it? And I must say, I think Emeka is trying to send a lot of subliminal messages, because I'm going to keep harping on some of the issues that have come up. But I'm going to try and do something different, and try and just close the loop with some of my personal stories, and try and put a face to a lot of the issues that we've been talking about. So, Africa is a complex continent full of contradictions, as you can see. We're not the only ones.(Laughter)(Applause)And you know, it's amazing. I mean, we need a whole conference just devoted to telling the good stories about the continent. Just think about that, you know? And this is typically what we've been talking about, the role that the media plays in focusing just on the negative stuff. Now, why is that a problem? A typical disaster story: disease, corruption, poverty. And some of you might be standing here thinking, saying, ""OK, you know, Ory, you're Harvard-educated, and all you privileged people come here, saying, 'Forget the poor people. Let's focus on business and the markets, and whatever.' "" And they're all, ""There's the 80 percent of Africans who really need help.""And I want to tell you that this is my story, OK? And it's the story of many of the Africans who are here. We start with poverty. I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money, or being able to support family. Euvin was talking about bellwether signs. The bellwether for whether our family was broke or not was breakfast. You know, when things were good, we had eggs and sausages. When things were bad, we had porridge. And like many African families, my parents could never save because they supported siblings, cousins, you know, their parents, and things were always dicey. Now, when I was born, they realized they had a pretty smart kid, and they didn't want me to go to the neighborhood school, which was free.And they adopted a very interesting approach to education, which was they were going to take me to a school that they can barely afford. So they took me to a private, Catholic, elementary school, which set the foundation for what ended up being my career. And what happened was, because they could afford it sometimes, sometimes not, I got kicked out pretty much every term. You know, someone would come in with a list of the people who haven't paid school fees, and when they started getting pretty strict, you had to leave, until your school fees could be paid. And I remember thinking, I mean, why don't these guys just take me to a cheap school? Because you know, as a kid you're embarrassed and you're sensitive, and everyone knows you guys don't have money. But they kept at it, and I now understand why they did what they did.They talk about corruption. In Kenya, we have an entrance exam to go into high school. And there's national schools, which are like the best schools, and provincial schools. My dream school at that time was Kenya High School, a national school. I missed the cutoff by one point. And I was so disappointed, and I was like, ""Oh my God, you know, what am I going to do?"" And my father said, ""OK, listen. Let's go and try and talk to the headmistress. You know, it's just one point. I mean, maybe she'll let you in if that slot's still there."" So we went to the school, and because we were nobodies, and because we didn't have privilege, and because my father didn't have the right last name, he was treated like dirt. And I sat and listened to the headmistress talk to him, saying, you know, who do you think you are? And, you know, you must be joking if you think you can get a slot. And I had gone to school with other girls, who were kids of politicians, and who had done much, much worse than I did, and they had slots there. And there's nothing worse than seeing your parent being humiliated in front of you, you know? And we left, and I swore to myself, and I was like, ""I'm never, ever going to have to beg for anything in my life."" They called me two weeks later, they're like, oh, yeah, you can come now. And I told them to stuff it.(Laughter) (Applause)Final story, and I sort of have to speak quickly. Disease. My father, who I've been talking about, died of AIDS in 1999. He never told anyone that he had AIDS, his fear of the stigma was so strong. And I'm pretty much the one who figured it out, because I was a nerd. And I was in the States at the time, and they called me. He was very sick, the first time he got sick. And he had Cryptococcal meningitis. And so I went on to Google, Cryptococcal meningitis, you know. Because of doctor-patient privilege, they couldn't really tell us what was going on. But they were like, you know, this is a long-term thing. And when I went online and looked at the infectious — read about the disease, I pretty much realized what was going on.The first time he got sick, he recovered. But what happened was that he had to be on medication that, at that time — Diflucan, which in the States is used for yeast infections — cost 30 dollars a pill. He had to be on that pill for the rest of his life. You know, so money ran out. He got sick again. And up until that time, he had a friend who used to travel to India, and he used to import, bring him, could get him a generic version of it. And that kept him going. But the money ran out. He got sick again. He got sick on a Friday. At that time, there was only one bank that had ATMs in Kenya, and we could not get cash. The family couldn't get cash for him to start the treatment until Monday. The hospital put him on a water drip for three days. And finally, we figured, well, OK, we'd better just try and take him to a public hospital. At least he'll get treated while we try to figure out the money situation. And he died when the ambulance was coming to the hospital to take him.And, you know, now, imagine if — and I could go on and on — imagine if this is all you know about me. How would you look at me? With pity, you know. Sadness. And this is how you look at Africa. This is the damage it causes. You don't see the other side of me. You don't see the blogger, you don't see the Harvard-educated lawyer, the vibrant person, you know? And I just wanted to personalize that. Because we talk about it in big terms, and you wonder, you know, so what? But it's damaging. And I'm not unique, right? Imagine if all you knew about William was the fact that he grew up in a poor village. And you didn't know about the windmill, you know? And I was just moved. I was actually crying during his presentation. He was like, I try and I make. I was like Nike should hire him, you know, ""Just do it!""(Laughter)And this is, again, the point I'm trying to make. When you focus just on the disasters — (Laughter) (Applause) — we're ignoring the potential. So, what is to be done? First of all, Africans, we need to get better at telling our stories. We heard about that yesterday. We had some of them this morning. And this is an example, you know, blogging is one way of doing that. Afrigator is an aggregator of African blogs that was developed in South Africa. So we need to start getting better. If no one else will tell our stories, let's do it. And going back to the point I was trying to make, this is the Swahili Wikipedia. Swahili is spoken by about 50 million people in East Africa. It only has five contributors. Four of them are white males — non-native speakers. The other person is — Ndesanjo, if you're here, stand up — is a Tanzanian, [the] first Swahili blogger. He's the only African who's contributing to this.People, please. We can't whine and complain the West is doing this. What are we doing? Where are the rest of the Swahili speakers? Why are we not generating our own content? You know, it's not enough to complain. We need to act. Reuters now integrates African blogs into their coverage of Africa. So, that's a start, and we've heard of all their other initiatives. The cheetah generation. The aid approach, you know, is flawed. And after all the hoopla of Live 8, we're still not anywhere in the picture. No, you're not.(Laughter)But the point I'm trying to make, though, is that it's not enough for us to criticize. And for those of you in the diaspora who are struggling with where should I be, should I move back, should I stay? You know, just jump. The continent needs you. And I can't emphasize that enough, you know. I walked away from a job with one of the top firms in D.C., Covington and Burling, six figures. With two paychecks, or three paychecks, I could solve a lot of my family's problems. But I walked away from that, because my passion was here, and because I wanted to do things that were fulfilling. And because I'm needed here, you know? I probably can win a prize for the most ways to use a Harvard Law School degree because of all the things I'm doing.One is because I'm pretty aggressive, and I try and find, you know, opportunities. But there is such a need, you know? I'm a corporate lawyer most of the time for an organization called Enablis that supports entrepreneurs in South Africa. We're now moving into East Africa. And we give them business development services, as well as financing loan and equity. I've also set up a project in Kenya, and what we do is we track the performance of Kenyan MPs. My partner, M, who's a tech guru, hacked WordPress. It costs us, like, 20 dollars a month just for hosting. Everything else on there is a labor of love. We've manually entered all the data there. And you can get profiles of each MP, questions they've asked in parliament. We have a comment function, where people can ask their MPs questions. There are some MPs who participate, and come back and ask.And basically, we started this because we were tired of complaining about our politicians. You know, I believe that accountability stems from demand. You're not just going to be accountable out of the goodness of your heart. And we as Africans need to start challenging our leaders. What are they doing? You know, they're not going to change just out of nowhere. So we need new policies, we need — where's that coming from, you know? Another thing is that these leaders are a reflection of our society. We talk about African governments like they've been dropped from Mars, you know? They come from us. And what is it about our society that is generating leaders that we don't like? And how can we change that? So Mzalendo was one small way we thought we could start inspiring people to start holding their leaders accountable. Where do we go from here? I believe in the power of ideas. I believe in the power of sharing knowledge.And I'd ask all of you, when you leave here, please just share, and keep the ideas that you've gotten out of here going, because it can make a difference. The other thing I want to urge you to do is take an interest in the individual. I've had lots of conversations about things I think need to be happening in Africa. People are like, ""OK, if you don't do aid, I'm a bleeding heart liberal, what can I do?"" And when I talk about my ideas, they're like, ""BBut it's not scalable, you know. Give me something I can do with Paypal."" It's not that easy, you know? And sometimes just taking an interest in the individual, in the fellows you've met, and the businesspeople you've met, it can make a huge difference, especially in Africa, because usually the individual in Africa carries a lot of people behind them. Practically. I mean, when I was a first-year student in law school, my mom's business had collapsed, so I was supporting her. My sister was struggling to get through undergrad. I was helping her pay her tuition. My cousin ran out of school fees, and she's really smart. I was paying her school fees.A cousin of mine died of AIDS, left an orphan, so we said, well, what are we going to do with her? You know, she's now my baby sister. And because of the opportunities that were afforded to me, I am able to lift all those people. So, don't underestimate that. An example. This man changed my life. He's a professor. He's now at Vanderbilt. He's an undergrad professor, Mitchell Seligson. And because of him, I got into Harvard Law School, because he took an interest. I was taking a class of his, and he was just like, this is an overeager student, which we don't normally get in the United States, because everyone else is cynical and jaded. He called me to his office and said, ""What do you want to do when you grow up?"" I said, ""I want to be a lawyer."" And he was like, ""Why? You know, we don't need another lawyer in the United States."" And he tried to talk me out of it, but it was like, ""OK, I know nothing about applying to law school, I'm poli-sci Ph.D. But, you know, let's figure out what I need you to do, what I need to do to help you out.""It was like, ""Where do you want to go?"" And to me at that time university — I was at University of Pitts for undergrad, and that was like heaven, OK, because compared to what could have been in Kenya. So I'm like, ""Yeah, I'm just applying to Pitt for law school."" He was like, ""Why? You know, you're smart, you have all these things going for you."" And I'm like, ""Because I'm here and it's cheap, and you know, I kind of like Pittsburgh."" Like, that's the dumbest reason I've ever heard for applying to law school. And, you know, so he took me under his wing, and he encouraged me. And he said, ""Look, you can get into Harvard, you're that good, OK? And if they don't admit you, they're the ones who are messed up."" And he built me up, you know? And this is just an illustration.You can meet other individuals here. We just need a push. That's all I needed was a push to go to the next level. Basically, I want to end with my vision for Africa, you know? A gentleman spoke yesterday about the indignity of us having to leave the continent so that we can fulfill our potential. You know, my vision is that my daughter, and any other African child being born today, can be whoever they want to be here, without having to leave. And they can have the possibility of transcending the circumstances under which they were born. That's one thing you Americans take for granted, you know? That you can grow up, you know, not so good circumstances, and you can move. Just because you are born in rural Arkansas, whatever, that doesn't define who you are. For most Africans today, where you live, or where you were born, and the circumstances under which you were born, determine the rest of your life. I would like to see that change, and the change starts with us. And as Africans, we need to take responsibility for our continent. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ory_okolloh_on_becoming_an_activist
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"Stephanie White: I'm going to let her introduce herself to everybody. Can you tell everybody your name?Einstein: Einstein.SW: This is Einstein. Can you tell everyone ""hi""?E: Hello.SW: That's nice. Can you be polite?E: Hi, sweetheart.SW: Much better. Well, Einstein is very honored to be here at TED 2006, amongst all you modern-day Einsteins. In fact, she's very excited.E: Woo.SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Since we've arrived, there's been a constant buzz about all the exciting speakers here for the conference. This morning we've heard a lot of whispers about Tom Reilly's wrap-up on Saturday. Einstein, did you hear whispers?E: [Squawks]SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Einstein's especially interested in Penelope's talk. A lot of her research goes on in caves, which can get pretty dusty.E: Achoo!SW: It could make her sneeze. But more importantly, her research could help Einstein find a cure for her never-ending scratchy throat.Einstein: [Coughs]SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Well, Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level. Well, that's really cool, but what Einstein's really hoping is that maybe he'll genetically engineer a five-pound peanut.E: Oh, my God! My God! My God!SW: Yeah. She would get really, really excited. (Laughter) That is one big peanut. Since Einstein is a bird, she's very interested in things that fly. She thinks Burt Rutan is very impressive.E: Ooh.SW: Yeah. She especially likes his latest achievement, SpaceShipOne.Einstein, would you like to ride in Burt's spaceship? E: [Spaceship noise] SW: Even if it doesn't have a laser?E: [Laser noise] (Laughter)SW: Yeah, yeah. That was pretty funny, Einstein. Now, Einstein also thinks, you know, working in caves and travelling through space — it's all very dangerous jobs. It would be very dangerous if you fell down.E: Wheeeeeee! [Splat]SW: Yeah. (Laughter) Little splat at the end there. Einstein, did that hurt?E: Ow, ow, ow.SW: Yeah. It's all a lot of hard work.E: [Squawks]SW: Yeah. It can get a bird like Einstein frustrated.E: [Squawks]SW: Yeah, it sure can. But when Einstein needs to relax from her job educating the public, she loves to take in the arts. If the children of the Uganda need another dance partner, Einstein could sure fit the bill, because she loves to dance. Can you get down? E: [Bobbing head] (Laughter) SW: Let's get down for everybody. Come on now. She's going to make me do it, too. Ooh, ooh.Einstein: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.SW: Do your head now.E: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. (Laughter)SW: Or maybe Sirena Huang would like to learn some arias on her violin, and Einstein can sing along with some opera?E: [Operatic squawk]SW: Very good. (Laughter) Or maybe Stu just needs another backup singer? Einstein, can you also sing? I know, you need to get rid of that seed first. Can you sing?E: La, la.SW: There you go. And, of course, if all else fails, you can just run off and enjoy a fun fiesta.E: [Squawks]SW: All right. Well, Einstein was pretty embarrassed to admit this earlier, but she was telling me backstage that she had a problem.E: What's the matter?SW: No, I don't have a problem. You have the problem, remember? You were saying that you were really embarrassed, because you're in love with a pirate?E: Yar.SW: There you go. And what do pirates like to drink?E: Beer. SW: Yeah, that's right. But you don't like to drink beer, Einstein. You like to drink water.E: [Water sound]SW: Very good. Now, really, she is pretty nervous. Because one of her favorite folks from back home is here, and she's pretty nervous to meet him. She thinks Al Gore is a really good-looking man. What do you say to a good-looking man?E: Hey, baby. (Laughter)SW: And so do all the folks back home in Tennessee.E: Yee haw. (Laughter)SW: And since she's such a big fan, she knows that his birthday is coming up at the end of March. And we didn't think he'd be in town then, so Einstein wanted to do something special for him. So let's see if Einstein will sing ""Happy Birthday"" to Al Gore. Can you sing ""Happy Birthday"" to him?E: Happy birthday to you.SW: Again.E: Happy birthday to you.SW: Again.E: Happy birthday to you.SW: Big finish.E: Happy birthday to you.SW: Good job! (Applause) Well, before we wrap it up, she would like to give a shout out to all our animal friends back at the Knoxville Zoo. Einstein, do you want to say ""hi"" to all the owls?E: Woo, woo, woo.SW: What about the other birds?E: Tweet, tweet, tweet.SW: And the penguin?E: Quack, quack, quack. SW: There we go. (Laughter) Let's get that one out of there. How about a chimpanzee?E: Ooh, ooh, ooh. Aah, aah, aah.SW: Very good. (Laughter) What about a wolf?E: Ooooowww.SW: And a pig?E: Oink, oink, oink.SW: And the rooster?E: Cock-a-doodle-doo!SW: And how about those cats?E: Meow. (Laughter)SW: At the zoo we have big cats from the jungle.E: Grrrrr. (Laughter)SW: What about a skunk?E: Stinker. (Laughter)SW: She's a comedian. I suppose you think you're famous? Are you famous?E: Superstar.SW: Yeah. You are a superstar. (Laughter) Well, we would like to encourage all of you to do your part to help protect Einstein's animal friends, and to do your part to help protect their homes that they live [in]. Now, Einstein does say it best when we ask her. Why do we want to protect your home?E: I'm special.SW: You are very special. What would you like to say to all these nice people?E: I love you.SW: That's good. Can you blow them a kiss?E: [Kissing noise]SW: And what do you say when it's time to go?E: Goodbye.SW: Good job. Thank you all. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/einstein_the_parrot_talks_and_squawks
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"So, people argue vigorously about the definition of life. They ask if it should have reproduction in it, or metabolism, or evolution. And I don't know the answer to that, so I'm not going to tell you. I will say that life involves computation. So this is a computer program. Booted up in a cell, the program would execute, and it could result in this person; or with a small change, it could result in this person; or another small change, this person; or with a larger change, this dog, or this tree, or this whale.So now, if you take this metaphor [of] genome as program seriously, you have to consider that Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact, as is Jim Watson, Craig Venter, as are all of us. And in convincing yourself that this metaphor is true, there are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs that could help to convince you. But one, to me, that's most compelling is the peculiar sensitivity to small changes that can make large changes in biological development — the output. A small mutation can take a two-wing fly and make it a four-wing fly. Or it could take a fly and put legs where its antennae should be. Or if you're familiar with ""The Princess Bride,"" it could create a six-fingered man.Now, a hallmark of computer programs is just this kind of sensitivity to small changes. If your bank account's one dollar, and you flip a single bit, you could end up with a thousand dollars. So these small changes are things that I think that — they indicate to us that a complicated computation in development is underlying these amplified, large changes.So now, all of this indicates that there are molecular programs underlying biology, and it shows the power of molecular programs — biology does. And what I want to do is write molecular programs, potentially to build technology. And there are a lot of people doing this, a lot of synthetic biologists doing this, like Craig Venter. And they concentrate on using cells. They're cell-oriented. So my friends, molecular programmers, and I have a sort of biomolecule-centric approach. We're interested in using DNA, RNA and protein, and building new languages for building things from the bottom up, using biomolecules, potentially having nothing to do with biology. So, these are all the machines in a cell. There's a camera. There's the solar panels of the cell, some switches that turn your genes on and off, the girders of the cell, motors that move your muscles. My little group of molecular programmers are trying to refashion all of these parts from DNA. We're not DNA zealots, but DNA is the cheapest, easiest to understand and easy to program material to do this. And as other things become easier to use — maybe protein — we'll work with those.If we succeed, what will molecular programming look like? You're going to sit in front of your computer. You're going to design something like a cell phone, and in a high-level language, you'll describe that cell phone. Then you're going to have a compiler that's going to take that description and it's going to turn it into actual molecules that can be sent to a synthesizer and that synthesizer will pack those molecules into a seed. And what happens if you water and feed that seed appropriately, is it will do a developmental computation, a molecular computation, and it'll build an electronic computer. And if I haven't revealed my prejudices already, I think that life has been about molecular computers building electrochemical computers, building electronic computers, which together with electrochemical computers will build new molecular computers, which will build new electronic computers, and so forth.And if you buy all of this, and you think life is about computation, as I do, then you look at big questions through the eyes of a computer scientist. So one big question is, how does a baby know when to stop growing? And for molecular programming, the question is how does your cell phone know when to stop growing? (Laughter) Or how does a computer program know when to stop running? Or more to the point, how do you know if a program will ever stop? There are other questions like this, too. One of them is Craig Venter's question. Turns out I think he's actually a computer scientist. He asked, how big is the minimal genome that will give me a functioning microorganism? How few genes can I use? This is exactly analogous to the question, what's the smallest program I can write that will act exactly like Microsoft Word? (Laughter) And just as he's writing, you know, bacteria that will be smaller, he's writing genomes that will work, we could write smaller programs that would do what Microsoft Word does.But for molecular programming, our question is, how many molecules do we need to put in that seed to get a cell phone? What's the smallest number we can get away with? Now, these are big questions in computer science. These are all complexity questions, and computer science tells us that these are very hard questions. Almost — many of them are impossible. But for some tasks, we can start to answer them. So, I'm going to start asking those questions for the DNA structures I'm going to talk about next. So, this is normal DNA, what you think of as normal DNA. It's double-stranded, it's a double helix, has the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that pair to hold the strands together. And I'm going to draw it like this sometimes, just so I don't scare you. We want to look at individual strands and not think about the double helix. When we synthesize it, it comes single-stranded, so we can take the blue strand in one tube and make an orange strand in the other tube, and they're floppy when they're single-stranded. You mix them together and they make a rigid double helix. Now for the last 25 years, Ned Seeman and a bunch of his descendants have worked very hard and made beautiful three-dimensional structures using this kind of reaction of DNA strands coming together. But a lot of their approaches, though elegant, take a long time. They can take a couple of years, or it can be difficult to design.So I came up with a new method a couple of years ago I call DNA origami that's so easy you could do it at home in your kitchen and design the stuff on a laptop. But to do it, you need a long, single strand of DNA, which is technically very difficult to get. So, you can go to a natural source. You can look in this computer-fabricated artifact, and he's got a double-stranded genome — that's no good. You look in his intestines. There are billions of bacteria. They're no good either. Double strand again, but inside them, they're infected with a virus that has a nice, long, single-stranded genome that we can fold like a piece of paper. And here's how we do it.This is part of that genome. We add a bunch of short, synthetic DNAs that I call staples. Each one has a left half that binds the long strand in one place, and a right half that binds it in a different place, and brings the long strand together like this. The net action of many of these on that long strand is to fold it into something like a rectangle.Now, we can't actually take a movie of this process, but Shawn Douglas at Harvard has made a nice visualization for us that begins with a long strand and has some short strands in it. And what happens is that we mix these strands together. We heat them up, we add a little bit of salt, we heat them up to almost boiling and cool them down, and as we cool them down, the short strands bind the long strands and start to form structure. And you can see a little bit of double helix forming there. When you look at DNA origami, you can see that what it really is, even though you think it's complicated, is a bunch of double helices that are parallel to each other, and they're held together by places where short strands go along one helix and then jump to another one. So there's a strand that goes like this, goes along one helix and binds — it jumps to another helix and comes back. That holds the long strand like this.Now, to show that we could make any shape or pattern that we wanted, I tried to make this shape. I wanted to fold DNA into something that goes up over the eye, down the nose, up the nose, around the forehead, back down and end in a little loop like this. And so, I thought, if this could work, anything could work. So I had the computer program design the short staples to do this. I ordered them; they came by FedEx. I mixed them up, heated them, cooled them down, and I got 50 billion little smiley faces floating around in a single drop of water. And each one of these is just one-thousandth the width of a human hair, OK?So, they're all floating around in solution, and to look at them, you have to get them on a surface where they stick. So, you pour them out onto a surface and they start to stick to that surface, and we take a picture using an atomic-force microscope. It's got a needle, like a record needle, that goes back and forth over the surface, bumps up and down, and feels the height of the first surface. It feels the DNA origami. There's the atomic-force microscope working and you can see that the landing's a little rough. When you zoom in, they've got, you know, weak jaws that flip over their heads and some of their noses get punched out, but it's pretty good. You can zoom in and even see the extra little loop, this little nano-goatee.Now, what's great about this is anybody can do this. And so, I got this in the mail about a year after I did this, unsolicited. Anyone know what this is? What is it? It's China, right? So, what happened is, a graduate student in China, Lulu Qian, did a great job. She wrote all her own software to design and built this DNA origami, a beautiful rendition of China, which even has Taiwan, and you can see it's sort of on the world's shortest leash, right? (Laughter) So, this works really well and you can make patterns as well as shapes, OK? And you can make a map of the Americas and spell DNA with DNA.And what's really neat about it — well, actually, this all looks like nano-artwork, but it turns out that nano-artwork is just what you need to make nano-circuits. So, you can put circuit components on the staples, like a light bulb and a light switch. Let the thing assemble, and you'll get some kind of a circuit. And then you can maybe wash the DNA away and have the circuit left over. So, this is what some colleagues of mine at Caltech did. They took a DNA origami, organized some carbon nano-tubes, made a little switch, you see here, wired it up, tested it and showed that it is indeed a switch. Now, this is just a single switch and you need half a billion for a computer, so we have a long way to go. But this is very promising because the origami can organize parts just one-tenth the size of those in a normal computer. So it's very promising for making small computers.Now, I want to get back to that compiler. The DNA origami is a proof that that compiler actually works. So, you start with something in the computer. You get a high-level description of the computer program, a high-level description of the origami. You can compile it to molecules, send it to a synthesizer, and it actually works. And it turns out that a company has made a nice program that's much better than my code, which was kind of ugly, and will allow us to do this in a nice, visual, computer-aided design way.So, now you can say, all right, why isn't DNA origami the end of the story? You have your molecular compiler, you can do whatever you want. The fact is that it does not scale. So if you want to build a human from DNA origami, the problem is, you need a long strand that's 10 trillion trillion bases long. That's three light years' worth of DNA, so we're not going to do this. We're going to turn to another technology, called algorithmic self-assembly of tiles. It was started by Erik Winfree, and what it does, it has tiles that are a hundredth the size of a DNA origami. You zoom in, there are just four DNA strands and they have little single-stranded bits on them that can bind to other tiles, if they match. And we like to draw these tiles as little squares. And if you look at their sticky ends, these little DNA bits, you can see that they actually form a checkerboard pattern. So, these tiles would make a complicated, self-assembling checkerboard. And the point of this, if you didn't catch that, is that tiles are a kind of molecular program and they can output patterns. And a really amazing part of this is that any computer program can be translated into one of these tile programs — specifically, counting. So, you can come up with a set of tiles that when they come together, form a little binary counter rather than a checkerboard. So you can read off binary numbers five, six and seven.And in order to get these kinds of computations started right, you need some kind of input, a kind of seed. You can use DNA origami for that. You can encode the number 32 in the right-hand side of a DNA origami, and when you add those tiles that count, they will start to count — they will read that 32 and they'll stop at 32. So, what we've done is we've figured out a way to have a molecular program know when to stop going. It knows when to stop growing because it can count. It knows how big it is. So, that answers that sort of first question I was talking about. It doesn't tell us how babies do it, however.So now, we can use this counting to try and get at much bigger things than DNA origami could otherwise. Here's the DNA origami, and what we can do is we can write 32 on both edges of the DNA origami, and we can now use our watering can and water with tiles, and we can start growing tiles off of that and create a square. The counter serves as a template to fill in a square in the middle of this thing. So, what we've done is we've succeeded in making something much bigger than a DNA origami by combining DNA origami with tiles. And the neat thing about it is, is that it's also reprogrammable. You can just change a couple of the DNA strands in this binary representation and you'll get 96 rather than 32. And if you do that, the origami's the same size, but the resulting square that you get is three times bigger.So, this sort of recapitulates what I was telling you about development. You have a very sensitive computer program where small changes — single, tiny, little mutations — can take something that made one size square and make something very much bigger. Now, this — using counting to compute and build these kinds of things by this kind of developmental process is something that also has bearing on Craig Venter's question. So, you can ask, how many DNA strands are required to build a square of a given size? If we wanted to make a square of size 10, 100 or 1,000, if we used DNA origami alone, we would require a number of DNA strands that's the square of the size of that square; so we'd need 100, 10,000 or a million DNA strands. That's really not affordable. But if we use a little computation — we use origami, plus some tiles that count — then we can get away with using 100, 200 or 300 DNA strands. And so we can exponentially reduce the number of DNA strands we use, if we use counting, if we use a little bit of computation. And so computation is some very powerful way to reduce the number of molecules you need to build something, to reduce the size of the genome that you're building.And finally, I'm going to get back to that sort of crazy idea about computers building computers. If you look at the square that you build with the origami and some counters growing off it, the pattern that it has is exactly the pattern that you need to make a memory. So if you affix some wires and switches to those tiles — rather than to the staple strands, you affix them to the tiles — then they'll self-assemble the somewhat complicated circuits, the demultiplexer circuits, that you need to address this memory. So you can actually make a complicated circuit using a little bit of computation. It's a molecular computer building an electronic computer. Now, you ask me, how far have we gotten down this path? Experimentally, this is what we've done in the last year. Here is a DNA origami rectangle, and here are some tiles growing from it. And you can see how they count. One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, 10, 11, 12, 17. So it's got some errors, but at least it counts up. (Laughter)So, it turns out we actually had this idea nine years ago, and that's about the time constant for how long it takes to do these kinds of things, so I think we made a lot of progress. We've got ideas about how to fix these errors. And I think in the next five or 10 years, we'll make the kind of squares that I described and maybe even get to some of those self-assembled circuits.So now, what do I want you to take away from this talk? I want you to remember that to create life's very diverse and complex forms, life uses computation to do that. And the computations that it uses, they're molecular computations, and in order to understand this and get a better handle on it, as Feynman said, you know, we need to build something to understand it. And so we are going to use molecules and refashion this thing, rebuild everything from the bottom up, using DNA in ways that nature never intended, using DNA origami, and DNA origami to seed this algorithmic self-assembly.You know, so this is all very cool, but what I'd like you to take from the talk, hopefully from some of those big questions, is that this molecular programming isn't just about making gadgets. It's not just making about — it's making self-assembled cell phones and circuits. What it's really about is taking computer science and looking at big questions in a new light, asking new versions of those big questions and trying to understand how biology can make such amazing things. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_rothemund_details_dna_folding
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"My mission in life since I was a kid was, and is, to take the rest of you into space. It's during our lifetime that we're going to take the Earth, take the people of Earth and transition off, permanently. And that's exciting. In fact, I think it is a moral imperative that we open the space frontier. You know, it's the first time that we're going to have a chance to have planetary redundancy, a chance to, if you would, back up the biosphere. And if you think about space, everything we hold of value on this planet — metals and minerals and real estate and energy — is in infinite quantities in space.In fact, the Earth is a crumb in a supermarket filled with resources. The analogy for me is Alaska. You know, we bought Alaska. We Americans bought Alaska in the 1850s. It's called Seward's folly. We valued it as the number of seal pelts we could kill. And then we discovered these things — gold and oil and fishing and timber — and it became, you know, a trillion-dollar economy, and now we take our honeymoons there. The same thing will happen in space. We are on the verge of the greatest exploration that the human race has ever known.We explore for three reasons, the weakest of which is curiosity. You know, it's funded NASA's budget up until now. Some images from Mars, 1997. In fact, I think in the next decade, without any question, we will discover life on Mars and find that it is literally ubiquitous under the soils and different parts of that planet.The stronger motivator, the much stronger motivator, is fear. It drove us to the moon. We — literally in fear — with the Soviet Union raced to the moon. And we have these huge rocks, you know, killer-sized rocks in the hundreds of thousands or millions out there, and while the probability is very small, the impact, figured in literally, of one of these hitting the Earth is so huge that to spend a small fraction looking, searching, preparing to defend, is not unreasonable.And of course, the third motivator, one near and dear to my heart as an entrepreneur, is wealth. In fact, the greatest wealth. If you think about these other asteroids, there's a class of the nickel iron, which in platinum-group metal markets alone are worth something like 20 trillion dollars, if you can go out and grab one of these rocks. My plan is to actually buy puts on the precious metal market, and then actually claim that I'm going to go out and get one. And that will fund the actual mission to go and get one. But fear, curiosity and greed have driven us. And for me, this is — I'm the short kid on the right. This was — my motivation was actually during Apollo.And Apollo was one of the greatest motivators ever. If you think about what happened at the turn of — early 1960s, on May 25, JFK said, ""We're going to go to the moon."" And people left their jobs and they went to obscure locations to go and be part of this amazing mission. And we knew nothing about going to space. We went from having literally put Alan Shepard in suborbital flight to going to the moon in eight years, and the average age of the people that got us there was 26 years old. They didn't know what couldn't be done. They had to make up everything. And that, my friend, is amazing motivation. This is Gene Cernan, a good friend of mine, saying, ""If I can go to the moon"" — this is the last human on the moon so far — ""nothing, nothing is impossible."" But of course, we've thought about the government always as the person taking us there.But I put forward here, the government is not going to get us there. The government is unable to take the risks required to open up this precious frontier. The shuttle is costing a billion dollars a launch. That's a pathetic number. It's unreasonable. We shouldn't be happy in standing for that. One of the things that we did with the Ansari X PRIZE was take the challenge on that risk is OK, you know. As we are going out there and taking on a new frontier, we should be allowed to risk. In fact, anyone who says we shouldn't, you know, just needs to be put aside, because, as we go forward, in fact, the greatest discoveries we will ever know is ahead of us. The entrepreneurs in the space business are the furry mammals, and clearly the industrial-military complex — with Boeing and Lockheed and NASA — are the dinosaurs. The ability for us to access these resources to gain planetary redundancy — we can now gather all the information, the genetic codes, you know, everything stored on our databases, and back them up off the planet, in case there would be one of those disastrous situations.The difficulty is getting there, and clearly, the cost to orbit is key. Once you're in orbit, you are two thirds of the way, energetically, to anywhere — the moon, to Mars. And today, there's only three vehicles — the U.S. shuttle, the Russian Soyuz and the Chinese vehicle — that gets you there. Arguably, it's about 100 million dollars a person on the space shuttle. One of the companies I started, Space Adventures, will sell you a ticket. We've done two so far. We'll be announcing two more on the Soyuz to go up to the space station for 20 million dollars. But that's expensive and to understand what the potential is —(Laughter) —it is expensive. But people are willing to pay that! You know, one — we have a very unique period in time today. For the first time ever, we have enough wealth concentrated in the hands of few individuals and the technology accessible that will allow us to really drive space exploration. But how cheap could it get? I want to give you the end point. We know — 20 million dollars today, you can go and buy a ticket, but how cheap could it get?Let's go back to high school physics here. If you calculate the amount of potential energy, mgh, to take you and your spacesuit up to a couple hundred miles, and then you accelerate yourself to 17,500 miles per hour — remember, that one half MV squared — and you figure it out. It's about 5.7 gigajoules of energy. If you expended that over an hour, it's about 1.6 megawatts. If you go to one of Vijay's micro-power sources, and they sell it to you for seven cents a kilowatt hour — anybody here fast in math? How much will it cost you and your spacesuit to go to orbit? 100 bucks. That's the price-improvement curve that — we need some breakthroughs in physics along the way, I'll grant you that.(Laughter)But guys, if history has taught us anything, it's that if you can imagine it, you will get there eventually. I have no question that the physics, the engineering to get us down to the point where all of us can afford orbital space flight is around the corner. The difficulty is that there needs to be a real marketplace to drive the investment. Today, the Boeings and the Lockheeds don't spend a dollar of their own money in R&D. It's all government research dollars, and very few of those. And in fact, the large corporations, the governments, can't take the risk. So we need what I call an exothermic economic reaction in space. Today's commercial markets worldwide, global commercial launch market? 12 to 15 launches per year. Number of commercial companies out there? 12 to 15 companies. One per company. That's not it. There's only one marketplace, and I call them self-loading carbon payloads. They come with their own money. They're easy to make. It's people. The Ansari X PRIZE was my solution, reading about Lindbergh for creating the vehicles to get us there.We offered 10 million dollars in cash for the first reusable ship, carry three people up to 100 kilometers, come back down, and within two weeks, make the trip again. Twenty-six teams from seven countries entered the competition, spending between one to 25 million dollars each. And of course, we had beautiful SpaceShipOne, which made those two flights and won the competition. And I'd like to take you there, to that morning, for just a quick video.(Video) Pilot: Release our fire.Richard Searfoss: Good luck.(Applause)RS: We've got an altitude call of 368,000 feet.(Applause)RS: So in my official capacity as the chief judge of the Ansari X PRIZE competition, I declare that Mojave Aerospace Ventures has indeed earned the Ansari X PRIZE.(Applause)Peter Diamandis: Probably the most difficult thing that I had to do was raise the capital for this. It was literally impossible. We went — I went to 100, 200 CEOs, CMOs. No one believed it was done. Everyone said, ""Oh, what does NASA think? Well, people are going to die, how can you possibly going to put this forward?"" I found a visionary family, the Ansari family, and Champ Car, and raised part of the money, but not the full 10 million.And what I ended up doing was going out to the insurance industry and buying a hole-in-one insurance policy. See, the insurance companies went to Boeing and Lockheed, and said, ""Are you going to compete?"" No. ""Are you going to compete?"" No. ""No one's going to win this thing."" So, they took a bet that no one would win by January of '05, and I took a bet that someone would win.(Applause)So — and the best thing is they paid off and the check didn't bounce.(Laughter)We've had a lot of accomplishments and it's been a tremendous success. One of the things I'm most happy about is that the SpaceShipOne is going to hang in Air and Space Museum, next to the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright Flyer. Isn't that great? (Applause) So a little bit about the future, steps to space, what's available for you. Today, you can go and experience weightless flights. By '08, suborbital flights, the price tag for that, you know, on Virgin, is going to be about 200,000. There are three or four other serious efforts that will bring the price down very rapidly, I think, to about 25,000 dollars for a suborbital flight. Orbital flights — we can take you to the space station.And then I truly believe, once a group is in orbit around the Earth — I know if they don't do it, I am — we're going to stockpile some fuel, make a beeline for the moon and grab some real estate.(Laughter)Quick moment for the designers in the audience. We spent 11 years getting FAA approval to do zero gravity flights. Here are some fun images. Here's Burt Rutan and my good friend Greg Meronek inside a zero gravity — people think a zero gravity room, there's a switch on there that turns it off — but it's actually parabolic flight of an airplane. And turns out 7-Up has just done a little commercial that's airing this month. If we can get the audio up?(Video) Narrator: For a chance to win the first free ticket to space, look for specially marked packages of Diet 7-Up. When you want the taste that won't weigh you down, the only way to go is up.PD: That was filmed inside our airplane, and so, you can now do this. We're based down in Florida. Let me talk about the other thing I'm excited about. The future of prizes. You know, prizes are a very old idea. I had the pleasure of borrowing from the Longitude Prize and the Orteig Prize that put Lindbergh forward. And we have made a decision in the X PRIZE Foundation to actually carry that concept forward into other technology areas, and we just took on a new mission statement: ""to bring about radical breakthroughs in space and other technologies for the benefit of humanity."" And this is something that we're very excited about. I showed this slide to Larry Page, who just joined our board.And you know, when you give to a nonprofit, you might have 50 cents on the dollar. If you have a matching grant, it's typically two or three to one. If you put up a prize, you can get literally a 50 to one leverage on your dollars. And that's huge. And then he turned around and said, ""Well, if you back a prize institute that runs a 10 prize, you get 500 to one."" I said, ""Well, that's great."" So, we have actually — are looking to turn the X PRIZE into a world-class prize institute. This is what happens when you put up a prize, when you announce it and teams start to begin doing trials. You get publicity increase, and when it's won, publicity shoots through the roof — if it's properly managed — and that's part of the benefits to a sponsor. Then, when the prize is actually won, after it's moving, you get societal benefits, you know, new technology, new capability. And the benefit to the sponsors is the sum of the publicity and societal benefits over the long term. That's our value proposition in a prize.If you were going to go and try to create SpaceShipOne, or any kind of a new technology, you have to fund that from the beginning and maintain that funding with an uncertain outcome. It may or may not happen. But if you put up a prize, the beautiful thing is, you know, it's a very small maintenance fee, and you pay on success. Orteig didn't pay a dime out to the nine teams that went across — tried to go across the Atlantic, and we didn't pay a dime until someone won the Ansari X PRIZE. So, prizes work great. You know, innovators, the entrepreneurs out there, you know that when you're going for a goal, the first thing you have to do is believe that you can do it yourself. Then, you've got to, you know, face potential public ridicule of — that's a crazy idea, it'll never work. And then you have to convince others, so that they can, in fact, help you raise the funds, and then you've got to deal with the fact that you've got government bureaucracies and institutions that don't want you to move those things forward, and you have to deal with failures. What a prize does, what we've experienced a prize doing, is literally help to short-circuit or support all of these things, because a prize credentials the idea that this is a good idea. Well, it must be a good idea. Someone's offering 10 million dollars to go and do this thing.And each of these areas was something that we found the Ansari X PRIZE helped short-circuit these for innovation. So, as an organization, we put together a prize discovery process of how to come up with prizes and write the rules, and we're actually looking at creating prizes in a number of different categories. We're looking at attacking energy, environment, nanotechnology — and I'll talk about those more in a moment. And the way we're doing that is we're creating prize teams within the X PRIZE. We have a space prize team. We're going after an orbital prize.We are looking at a number of energy prizes. Craig Venter has just joined our board and we're doing a rapid genome sequencing prize with him, we'll be announcing later this fall, about — imagine being able to sequence anybody's DNA for under 1,000 dollars, revolutionize medicine. And clean water, education, medicine and even looking at social entrepreneurship. So my final slide here is, the most critical tool for solving humanity's grand challenges — it isn't technology, it isn't money, it's only one thing — it's the committed, passionate human mind.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_on_our_next_giant_leap
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"Well, good morning. You know, the computer and television both recently turned 60, and today I'd like to talk about their relationship. Despite their middle age, if you've been following the themes of this conference or the entertainment industry, it's pretty clear that one has been picking on the other. So it's about time that we talked about how the computer ambushed television, or why the invention of the atomic bomb unleashed forces that lead to the writers' strike. And it's not just what these are doing to each other, but it's what the audience thinks that really frames this matter.To get a sense of this, and it's been a theme we've talked about all week, I recently talked to a bunch of tweeners. I wrote on cards: ""television,"" ""radio,"" ""MySpace,"" ""Internet,"" ""PC."" And I said, just arrange these, from what's important to you and what's not, and then tell me why. Let's listen to what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television.(Video) Girl 1: Well, I think it's important but, like, not necessary because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time than watch programs.Peter Hirshberg: Which is more fun, Internet or TV?Girls: Internet. Girl 2: I think we — the reasons, one of the reasons we put computer before TV is because nowadays, like, we have TV shows on the computer. (Girl 3: Oh, yeah.) Girl 2: And then you can download onto your iPod.PH: Would you like to be the president of a TV network?Girl 4: I wouldn't like it. Girl 2: That would be so stressful. Girl 5: No.PH: How come?Girl 5: Because they're going to lose all their money eventually. Girl 3: Like the stock market, it goes up and down and stuff. I think right now the computers will be at the top and everything will be kind of going down and stuff.PH: There's been an uneasy relationship between the TV business and the tech business, really ever since they both turned about 30. We go through periods of enthrallment, followed by reactions in boardrooms, in the finance community best characterized as, what's the finance term? Ick pooey.Let me give you an example of this. The year is 1976, and Warner buys Atari because video games are on the rise. The next year they march forward and they introduce Qube, the first interactive cable TV system, and the New York Times heralds this as telecommunications moving to the home, convergence, great things are happening. Everybody in the East Coast gets in the pictures — Citicorp, Penney, RCA — all getting into this big vision. By the way, this is about when I enter the picture. I'm going to do a summer internship at Time Warner. That summer I'm all — I'm at Warner that summer — I'm all excited to work on convergence, and then the bottom falls out. Doesn't work out too well for them, they lose money. And I had a happy brush with convergence until, kind of, Warner basically has to liquidate the whole thing.That's when I leave graduate school, and I can't work in New York on kind of entertainment and technology because I have to be exiled to California, where the remaining jobs are, almost to the sea, to go to work for Apple Computer. Warner, of course, writes off more than 400 million dollars. Four hundred million dollars, which was real money back in the '70s. But they were onto something and they got better at it. By the year 2000, the process was perfected. They merged with AOL, and in just four years, managed to shed about 200 billion dollars of market capitalization, showing that they'd actually mastered the art of applying Moore's law of successive miniaturization to their balance sheet.(Laughter)Now, I think that one reason that the media and the entertainment communities, or the media community, is driven so crazy by the tech community is that tech folks talk differently. You know, for 50 years, we've talked about changing the world, about total transformation. For 50 years, it's been about hopes and fears and promises of a better world. And I got to thinking, you know, who else talks that way? And the answer is pretty clearly — it's people in religion and in politics.And so I realized that actually the tech world is best understood, not as a business cycle, but as a messianic movement. We promise something great, we evangelize it, we're going to change the world. It doesn't work out too well, and so we actually go back to the well and start all over again, as the people in New York and L.A. look on in absolute, morbid astonishment. But it's this irrational view of things that drives us on to the next thing.So, what I'd like to ask is, if the computer is becoming a principal tool of media and entertainment, how did we get here? I mean, how did a machine that was built for accounting and artillery morph into media?Of course, the first computer was built just after World War II to solve military problems, but things got really interesting just a couple of years later — 1949 with Whirlwind, built at MIT's Lincoln Lab. Jay Forrester was building this for the Navy, but you can't help but see that the creator of this machine had in mind a machine that might actually be a potential media star. So take a look at what happens when the foremost journalist of early television meets one of the foremost computer pioneers, and the computer begins to express itself.(Video) Journalist: It's a Whirlwind electronic computer. With considerable trepidation, we undertake to interview this new machine.Jay Forrester: Hello New York, this is Cambridge. And this is the oscilloscope of the Whirlwind electronic computer. Would you like if I used the machine?Journalist: Yes, of course. But I have an idea, Mr. Forrester. Since this computer was made in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, why don't we switch down to the Pentagon in Washington and let the Navy's research chief, Admiral Bolster, give Whirlwind the workout?Calvin Bolster: Well, Ed, this problem concerns the Navy's Viking rocket. This rocket goes up 135 miles into the sky. Now, at the standard rate of fuel consumption, I would like to see the computer trace the flight path of this rocket and see how it can determine, at any instant, say at the end of 40 seconds, the amount of fuel remaining, and the velocity at that set instant. JF: Over on the left-hand side, you will notice fuel consumption decreasing as the rocket takes off. And on the right-hand side, there's a scale that shows the rocket's velocity. The rocket's position is shown by the trajectory that we're now looking at. And as it reaches the peak of its trajectory, the velocity, you will notice, has dropped off to a minimum. Then, as the rocket dives down, velocity picks up again toward a maximum velocity and the rocket hits the ground.How's that? Journalist: What about that, Admiral? CB: Looks very good to me.JF: And before leaving, we would like to show you another kind of mathematical problem that some of the boys have worked out in their spare time, in a less serious vein, for a Sunday afternoon. (Music)Journalist: Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Forrester and the MIT lab.PH: You know, so much was worked out: the first real-time interaction, the video display, pointing a gun. It lead to the microcomputer, but unfortunately, it was too pricey for the Navy, and all of this would have been lost if it weren't for a happy coincidence.Enter the atomic bomb. We're threatened by the greatest weapon ever, and knowing a good thing when it sees it, the Air Force decides it needs the biggest computer ever to protect us. They adapt Whirlwind to a massive air defense system, deploy it all across the frozen north, and spend nearly three times as much on this computer as was spent on the Manhattan Project building the A-Bomb in the first place. Talk about a shot in the arm for the computer industry. And you can imagine that the Air Force became a pretty good salesman. Here's their marketing video.(Video) Narrator: In a mass raid, high-speed bombers could be in on us before we could determine their tracks. And then it would be too late to act. We cannot afford to take that chance. It is to meet this threat that the Air Force has been developing SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system, to strengthen our air defenses. This new computer, built to become the nerve center of a defense network, is able to perform all the complex mathematical problems involved in countering a mass enemy raid. It is provided with its own powerhouse containing large diesel-driven generators, air-conditioning equipment, and cooling towers required to cool the thousands of vacuum tubes in the computer.PH: You know, that one computer was huge. There's an interesting marketing lesson from it, which is basically, when you market a product, you can either say, this is going to be wonderful, it will make you feel better and enliven you. Or there's one other marketing proposition: if you don't use our product, you'll die. This is a really good example of that.This had the first pointing device. It was distributed, so it worked out — distributed computing and modems — so all these things could talk to each other. About 20 percent of all the nation's programmers were wrapped up in this thing, and it led to an awful lot of what we have today. It also used vacuum tubes. You saw how huge it was, and to give you a sense for this — because we've talked a lot about Moore's law and making things small at this conference, so let's talk about making things large. If we took Whirlwind and put it in a place that you all know, say, Century City, it would fit beautifully. You'd kind of have to take Century City out, but it could fit in there.But like, let's imagine we took the latest Pentium processor, the latest Core 2 Extreme, which is a four-core processor that Intel's working on, it will be our laptop tomorrow. To build that, what we'd do with Whirlwind technology is we'd have to take up roughly from the 10 to Mulholland, and from the 405 to La Cienega just with those Whirlwinds. And then, the 92 nuclear power plants that it would take to provide the power would fill up the rest of Los Angeles. That's roughly a third more nuclear power than all of France creates. So, the next time they tell you they're on to something, clearly they're not. So — and we haven't even worked out the cooling needs. But it gives you the kind of power that people have, that the audience has, and the reasons these transformations are happening.All of this stuff starts moving into industry. DEC kind of reduces all this and makes the first mini-computer. It shows up at places like MIT, and then a mutation happens. Spacewar! is built, the first computer game, and all of a sudden, interactivity and involvement and passion is worked out. Actually, many MIT students stayed up all night long working on this thing, and many of the principles of gaming today were worked out. DEC knew a good thing about wasting time. It shipped every one of its computers with that game.Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, by the mid-'50s, the business model of traditional broadcasting and cinema has been busted completely. A new technology has confounded radio men and movie moguls and they're quite certain that television is about to do them in. In fact, despair is in the air. And a quote that sounds largely reminiscent from everything I've been reading all week. RCA had David Sarnoff, who basically commercialized radio, said this, ""I don't say that radio networks must die. Every effort has been made and will continue to be made to find a new pattern, new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest the declining revenues. It may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio, but I don't know how."" And of course, as the computer industry develops interactively, producers in the emerging TV business actually hit on the same idea. And they fake it.(Video) Jack Berry: Boys and girls, I think you all know how to get your magic windows up on the set, you just get them out. First of all, get your Winky Dink kits out. Put out your Magic Window and your erasing glove, and rub it like this. That's the way we get some of the magic into it, boys and girls. Then take it and put it right up against the screen of your own television set, and rub it out from the center to the corners, like this. Make sure you keep your magic crayons handy, your Winky Dink crayons and your erasing glove, because you'll be using them during the show to draw like that. You all set? OK, let's get right to the first story about Dusty Man. Come on into the secret lab.PH: It was the dawn of interactive TV, and you may have noticed they wanted to sell you the Winky Dink kits. Those are the Winky Dink crayons. I know what you're saying. ""Pete, I could use any ordinary open-source crayon, why do I have to buy theirs?"" I assure you, that's not the case. Turns out they told us directly that these are the only crayons you should ever use with your Winky Dink Magic Window, other crayons may discolor or hurt the window. This proprietary principle of vendor lock-in would go on to be perfected with great success as one of the enduring principles of windowing systems everywhere. It led to lawsuits —(Laughter) —federal investigations, and lots of repercussions, and that's a scandal we won't discuss today.But we will discuss this scandal, because this man, Jack Berry, the host of ""Winky Dink,"" went on to become the host of ""Twenty One,"" one of the most important quiz shows ever. And it was rigged, and it became unraveled when this man, Charles van Doren, was outed after an unnatural winning streak, ending Berry's career. And actually, ending the career of a lot of people at CBS. It turns out there was a lot to learn about how this new medium worked.And 50 years ago, if you'd been at a meeting like this and were trying to understand the media, there was one prophet and only but one you wanted to hear from, Professor Marshall McLuhan. He actually understood something about a theme that we've been discussing all week. It's the role of the audience in an era of pervasive electronic communications. Here he is talking from the 1960s.(Video) Marshall McLuhan: If the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it's happy. It's like the old quiz shows. They were great TV because it gave the audience a role, something to do. They were horrified when they discovered they'd really been left out all the time because the shows were rigged. Now, then, this was a horrible misunderstanding of TV on the part of the programmers.PH: You know, McLuhan talked about the global village. If you substitute the word blogosphere, of the Internet today, it is very true that his understanding is probably very enlightening now. Let's listen in to him.(Video) MM: The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else's business and much involvement in everybody else's life. It's a sort of Ann Landers' column writ large. And it doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs. And so the global village is as big as a planet, and as small as a village post office.PH: We'll talk a little bit more about him later. We're now right into the 1960s. It's the era of big business and data centers for computing. But all that was about to change. You know, the expression of technology reflects the people and the time of the culture it was built in. And when I say that code expresses our hopes and aspirations, it's not just a joke about messianism, it's actually what we do. But for this part of the story, I'd actually like to throw it to America's leading technology correspondent, John Markoff.(Video) John Markoff: Do you want to know what the counterculture in drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and the anti-war movement had to do with computing? Everything. It all happened within five miles of where I'm standing, at Stanford University, between 1960 and 1975. In the midst of revolution in the streets and rock and roll concerts in the parks, a group of researchers led by people like John McCarthy, a computer scientist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Doug Engelbart, a computer scientist at SRI, changed the world. Engelbart came out of a pretty dry engineering culture, but while he was beginning to do his work, all of this stuff was bubbling on the mid-peninsula. There was LSD leaking out of Kesey's Veterans' Hospital experiments and other areas around the campus, and there was music literally in the streets. The Grateful Dead was playing in the pizza parlors. People were leaving to go back to the land. There was the Vietnam War. There was black liberation. There was women's liberation. This was a remarkable place, at a remarkable time. And into that ferment came the microprocessor.I think it was that interaction that led to personal computing. They saw these tools that were controlled by the establishment as ones that could actually be liberated and put to use by these communities that they were trying to build. And most importantly, they had this ethos of sharing information. I think these ideas are difficult to understand, because when you're trapped in one paradigm, the next paradigm is always like a science fiction universe — it makes no sense. The stories were so compelling that I decided to write a book about them. The title of the book is, ""What the Dormouse Said: How the '60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry."" The title was taken from the lyrics to a Jefferson Airplane song. The lyrics go, ""Remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head, feed your head, feed your head."" (Music)PH: By this time, computing had kind of leapt into media territory, and in short order much of what we're doing today was imagined in Cambridge and Silicon Valley. Here's the Architecture Machine Group, the predecessor of the Media Lab, in 1981. Meanwhile, in California, we were trying to commercialize a lot of this stuff. HyperCard was the first program to introduce the public to hyperlinks, where you could randomly hook to any kind of picture, or piece of text, or data across a file system, and we had no way of explaining it. There was no metaphor. Was it a database? A prototyping tool? A scripted language? Heck, it was everything. So we ended up writing a marketing brochure.We asked a question about how the mind works, and we let our customers play the role of so many blind men filling out the elephant. A few years later, we then hit on the idea of explaining to people the secret of, how do you get the content you want, the way you want it and the easy way? Here's the Apple marketing video.(Video) James Burke: You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there are several ways to create a HyperCard interactive video. The most involved method is to go ahead and produce your own videodisc as well as build your own HyperCard stacks. By far the simplest method is to buy a pre-made videodisc and HyperCard stacks from a commercial supplier. The method we illustrate in this video uses a pre-made videodisc but creates custom HyperCard stacks. This method allows you to use existing videodisc materials in ways which suit your specific needs and interests.PH: I hope you realize how subversive that is. That's like a Dick Cheney speech. You think he's a nice balding guy, but he's just declared war on the content business. Find the commercial stuff, mash it up, tell the story your way. Now, as long as we confine this to the education market, and a personal matter between the computer and the file system, that's fine, but as you can see, it was about to leap out and upset Jack Valenti and a lot of other people.By the way, speaking of the filing system, it never occurred to us that these hyperlinks could go beyond the local area network. A few years later, Tim Berners-Lee worked that out. It became a killer app of links, and today, of course, we call that the World Wide Web. Now, not only was I instrumental in helping Apple miss the Internet, but a couple of years later, I helped Bill Gates do the same thing. The year is 1993 and he was working on a book and I was working on a video to help him kind of explain where we were all heading and how to popularize all this. We were plenty aware that we were messing with media, and on the surface, it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things, but we also missed an awful lot. Let's take a look.(Video) Narrator: The pyramids, the Colosseum, the New York subway system and TV dinners, ancient and modern wonders of the man-made world all. Yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty-first-century technology, the Digital Superhighway. Once it was only a dream of technoids and a few long-forgotten politicians. The Digital Highway arrived in America's living rooms late in the twentieth century. Let us recall the pioneers who made this technical marvel possible. The Digital Highway would follow the rutted trail first blazed by Alexander Graham Bell. Though some were incredulous ... Man 1: The phone company! Narrator: Stirred by the prospects of mass communication and making big bucks on advertising, David Sarnoff commercializes radio. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: The medium introduced America to new products. Voice 1: Say, mom, Windows for Radio means more enjoyment and greater ease of use for the whole family. Be sure to enjoy Windows for Radio at home and at work. Narrator: In 1939, the Radio Corporation of America introduced television. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand.Narrator: Eventually, the race to the future took on added momentum with the breakup of the telephone company. And further stimulus came with the deregulation of the cable television industry, and the re-regulation of the cable television industry. Ted Turner: We did the work to build this, this cable industry, now the broadcasters want some of our money. I mean, it's ridiculous. Narrator: Computers, once the unwieldy tools of accountants and other geeks, escaped the backrooms to enter the media fracas. The world and all its culture reduced to bits, the lingua franca of all media. And the forces of convergence exploded.Finally, four great industrial sectors combined. Telecommunications, entertainment, computing and everything else. Man 3: We'll see channels for the gourmet and we'll see channels for the pet lover. Voice 2: Next on the gourmet pet channel, decorating birthday cakes for your schnauzer. Narrator: All of industry was in play, as investors flocked to place their bets. At stake: the battle for you, the consumer, and the right to spend billions to send a lot of information into the parlors of America. (Music)PH: We missed a lot. You know, you missed, we missed the Internet, the long tail, the role of the audience, open systems, social networks. It just goes to show how tough it is to come up with the right uses of media. Thomas Edison had the same problem. He wrote a list of what the phonograph might be good for when he invented it, and kind of only one of his ideas turned out to have been the right early idea. Well, you know where we're going on from here. We come into the era of the dotcom, the World Wide Web, and I don't need to tell you about that because we all went through that bubble together. But when we emerge from this and what we call Web 2.0, things actually are quite different. And I think it's the reason that TV's so challenged. If Internet one was about pages, now it's about people. It's a customer, it's an audience, it's a person who's participating. It's the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now.(Video) MM: Because it gave the audience a role, something to do.PH: In my own company, Technorati, we see something like 67,000 blog posts an hour come in. That's about 2,700 fresh, connective links across about 112 million blogs that are out there. And it's no wonder that as we head into the writers' strike, odd things happen. You know, it reminds me of that old saw in Hollywood, that a producer is anyone who knows a writer. I now think a network boss is anyone who has a cable modem. But it's not a joke. This is a real headline. ""Websites attract striking writers: operators of sites like MyDamnChannel.com could benefit from labor disputes."" Meanwhile, you have the TV bloggers going out on strike, in sympathy with the television writers. And then you have TV Guide, a Fox property, which is about to sponsor the online video awards — but cancels it out of sympathy with traditional television, not appearing to gloat. To show you how schizophrenic this all is, here's the head of MySpace, or Fox Interactive, a News Corp company, being asked, well, with the writers' strike, isn't this going to hurt News Corp and help you online?(Video) Man: But I, yeah, I think there's an opportunity. As the strike continues, there's an opportunity for more people to experience video on places like MySpace TV.PH: Oh, but then he remembers he works for Rupert Murdoch.(Video) Man: Yes, well, first, you know, I'm part of News Corporation as part of Fox Entertainment Group. Obviously, we hope that the strike is — that the issues are resolved as quickly as possible.PH: One of the great things that's going on here is the globalization of content really is happening. Here is a clip from a video, from a piece of animation that was written by a writer in Hollywood, animation worked out in Israel, farmed out to Croatia and India, and it's now an international series.(Video) Narrator: The following takes place between the minutes of 2:15 p.m. and 2:18 p.m., in the months preceding the presidential primaries.Voice 1: You'll have to stay here in the safe house until we get word the terrorist threat is over.Voice 2: You mean we'll have to live here, together? Voices 2, 3 and 4: With her? Voice 2: Well, there goes the neighborhood.PH: The company that created this, Aniboom, is an interesting example of where this is headed. Traditional TV animation costs, say, between 80,000 and 10,000 dollars a minute. They're producing things for between 1,500 and 800 dollars a minute. And they're offering their creators 30 percent of the back end, in a much more entrepreneurial manner. So, it's a different model. What the entertainment business is struggling with, the world of brands is figuring out.For example, Nike now understands that Nike Plus is not just a device in its shoe, it's a network to hook its customers together. And the head of marketing at Nike says, ""People are coming to our site an average of three times a week. We don't have to go to them."" Which means television advertising is down 57 percent for Nike. Or, as Nike's head of marketing says, ""We're not in the business of keeping media companies alive. We're in the business of connecting with consumers.""And media companies realize the audience is important also. Here's a man announcing the new Market Watch from Dow Jones, powered 100 percent by the user experience on the home page — user-generated content married up with traditional content. It turns out you have a bigger audience and more interest if you hook up with them. Or, as Geoffrey Moore once told me, it's intellectual curiosity that's the trade that brands need in the age of the blogosphere. And I think this is beginning to happen in the entertainment business.One of my heroes is songwriter, Ally Willis, who just wrote ""The Color Purple"" and has been an R and — rhythm and blues writer, and this is what she said about where songwriting's going.Ally Willis: Where millions of collaborators wanted the song, because to look at them strictly as spam is missing what this medium is about.PH: So, to wrap up, I'd love to throw it back to Marshall McLuhan, who, 40 years ago, was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change, and I think that, today, traditional Hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way that it was being framed before. But I don't need to tell you this, let's throw it back to him.(Video) Narrator: We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new. MM: The medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this. They don't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up. They think of the old medium, because the old medium is always the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV, and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies. And so every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content, and it is highly observable, highly noticeable, but the real, real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored.PH: I think it's a great time of enthrallment. There's been more raw DNA of communications and media thrown out there. Content is moving from shows to particles that are batted back and forth, and part of social communications, and I think this is going to be a time of great renaissance and opportunity. And whereas television may have gotten beat up, what's getting built is a really exciting new form of communication, and we kind of have the merger of the two industries and a new way of thinking to look at it.Thanks very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_hirshberg_on_tv_and_the_web
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"I'm going to try and explain why it is that perhaps we don't understand as much as we think we do. I'd like to begin with four questions. This is not some sort of cultural thing for the time of year. That's an in-joke, by the way. But these four questions, actually, are ones that people who even know quite a lot about science find quite hard. And they're questions that I've asked of science television producers, of audiences of science educators — so that's science teachers — and also of seven-year-olds, and I find that the seven-year-olds do marginally better than the other audiences, which is somewhat surprising.So the first question, and you might want to write this down, either on a bit of paper, physically, or a virtual piece of paper in your head. And, for viewers at home, you can try this as well. A little seed weighs next to nothing and a tree weighs a lot, right? I think we agree on that. Where does the tree get the stuff that makes up this chair, right? Where does all this stuff come from? (Knocks)And your next question is, can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery, a bulb and one piece of wire? And would you be able to, kind of, draw a — you don't have to draw the diagram, but would you be able to draw the diagram, if you had to do it? Or would you just say, that's actually not possible?The third question is, why is it hotter in summer than in winter? I think we can probably agree that it is hotter in summer than in winter, but why? And finally, would you be able to — and you can sort of scribble it, if you like — scribble a plan diagram of the solar system, showing the shape of the planets' orbits? Would you be able to do that? And if you can, just scribble a pattern.OK. Now, children get their ideas not from teachers, as teachers often think, but actually from common sense, from experience of the world around them, from all the things that go on between them and their peers, and their carers, and their parents, and all of that. Experience. And one of the great experts in this field, of course, was, bless him, Cardinal Wolsey. Be very careful what you get into people's heads because it's virtually impossible to shift it afterwards, right? (Laughter) I'm not quite sure how he died, actually. Was he beheaded in the end, or hung? (Laughter) Now, those questions, which, of course, you've got right, and you haven't been conferring, and so on. And I — you know, normally, I would pick people out and humiliate, but maybe not in this instance.A little seed weighs a lot and, basically, all this stuff, 99 percent of this stuff, came out of the air. Now, I guarantee that about 85 percent of you, or maybe it's fewer at TED, will have said it comes out of the ground. And some people, probably two of you, will come up and argue with me afterwards, and say that actually, it comes out of the ground. Now, if that was true, we'd have trucks going round the country, filling people's gardens in with soil, it'd be a fantastic business. But, actually, we don't do that. The mass of this comes out of the air. Now, I passed all my biology exams in Britain. I passed them really well, but I still came out of school thinking that that stuff came out of the ground.Second one: can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery bulb and one piece of wire? Yes, you can, and I'll show you in a second how to do that. Now, I have some rather bad news, which is that I had a piece of video that I was about to show you, which unfortunately — the sound doesn't work in this room, so I'm going to describe to you, in true ""Monty Python"" fashion, what happens in the video. And in the video, a group of researchers go to MIT on graduation day. We chose MIT because, obviously, that's a very long way away from here, and you wouldn't mind too much, but it sort of works the same way in Britain and in the West Coast of the USA. And we asked them these questions, and we asked those questions of science graduates, and they couldn't answer them. And so, there's a whole lot of people saying, ""I'd be very surprised if you told me that this came out of the air. That's very surprising to me."" And those are science graduates. And we intercut it with, ""We are the premier science university in the world,"" because of British-like hubris. (Laughter) And when we gave graduate engineers that question, they said it couldn't be done. And when we gave them a battery, and a piece of wire, and a bulb, and said, ""Can you do it?"" They couldn't do it. Right? And that's no different from Imperial College in London, by the way, it's not some sort of anti-American thing going on.As if. Now, the reason this matters is we pay lots and lots of money for teaching people — we might as well get it right. And there are also some societal reasons why we might want people to understand what it is that's happening in photosynthesis. For example, one half of the carbon equation is how much we emit, and the other half of the carbon equation, as I'm very conscious as a trustee of Kew, is how much things soak up, and they soak up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That's what plants actually do for a living. And, for any Finnish people in the audience, this is a Finnish pun: we are, both literally and metaphorically, skating on thin ice if we don't understand that kind of thing. Now, here's how you do the battery and the bulb. It's so easy, isn't it? Of course, you all knew that. But if you haven't played with a battery and a bulb, if you've only seen a circuit diagram, you might not be able to do that, and that's one of the problems.So, why is it hotter in summer than in winter? We learn, as children, that you get closer to something that's hot, and it burns you. It's a very powerful bit of learning, and it happens pretty early on. By extension, we think to ourselves, ""Why it's hotter in summer than in winter must be because we're closer to the Sun."" I promise you that most of you will have got that. Oh, you're all shaking your heads, but only a few of you are shaking your heads very firmly. Other ones are kind of going like this. All right. It's hotter in summer than in winter because the rays from the Sun are spread out more, right, because of the tilt of the Earth. And if you think the tilt is tilting us closer, no, it isn't. The Sun is 93 million miles away, and we're tilting like this, right? It makes no odds. In fact, in the Northern Hemisphere, we're further from the Sun in summer, as it happens, but it makes no odds, the difference.OK, now, the scribble of the diagram of the solar system. If you believe, as most of you probably do, that it's hotter in summer than in winter because we're closer to the Sun, you must have drawn an ellipse. Right? That would explain it, right? Except, in your — you're nodding — now, in your ellipse, have you thought, ""Well, what happens during the night?"" Between Australia and here, right, they've got summer and we've got winter, and what — does the Earth kind of rush towards the Sun at night, and then rush back again? I mean, it's a very strange thing going on, and we hold these two models in our head, of what's right and what isn't right, and we do that, as human beings, in all sorts of fields.So, here's Copernicus' view of what the solar system looked like as a plan. That's pretty much what you should have on your piece of paper. Right? And this is NASA's view. They're stunningly similar. I hope you notice the coincidence here. What would you do if you knew that people had this misconception, right, in their heads, of elliptical orbits caused by our experiences as children? What sort of diagram would you show them of the solar system, to show that it's not really like that? You'd show them something like this, wouldn't you? It's a plan, looking down from above. But, no, look what I found in the textbooks. That's what you show people, right? These are from textbooks, from websites, educational websites — and almost anything you pick up is like that. And the reason it's like that is because it's dead boring to have a load of concentric circles, whereas that's much more exciting, to look at something at that angle, isn't it? Right? And by doing it at that angle, if you've got that misconception in your head, then that two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional thing will be ellipses. So you've — it's crap, isn't it really? As we say. So, these mental models — we look for evidence that reinforces our models. We do this, of course, with matters of race, and politics, and everything else, and we do it in science as well. So we look, just look — and scientists do it, constantly — we look for evidence that reinforces our models, and some folks are just all too able and willing to provide the evidence that reinforces the models.So, being I'm in the United States, I'll have a dig at the Europeans. These are examples of what I would say is bad practice in science teaching centers. These pictures are from La Villette in France and the welcome wing of the Science Museum in London. And, if you look at the, kind of the way these things are constructed, there's a lot of mediation by glass, and it's very blue, and kind of professional — in that way that, you know, Woody Allen comes up from under the sheets in that scene in ""Annie Hall,"" and said, ""God, that's so professional."" And that you don't — there's no passion in it, and it's not hands on, right, and, you know, pun intended. Whereas good interpretation — I'll use an example from nearby — is San Francisco Exploratorium, where all the things that — the demonstrations, and so on, are made out of everyday objects that children can understand, it's very hands-on, and they can engage with, and experiment with. And I know that if the graduates at MIT and in the Imperial College in London had had the battery and the wire and the bit of stuff, and you know, been able to do it, they would have learned how it actually works, rather than thinking that they follow circuit diagrams and can't do it. So good interpretation is more about things that are bodged and stuffed and of my world, right? And things that — where there isn't an extra barrier of a piece of glass or machined titanium, and it all looks fantastic, OK? And the Exploratorium does that really, really well. And it's amateur, but amateur in the best sense, in other words, the root of the word being of love and passion.So, children are not empty vessels, OK? So, as ""Monty Python"" would have it, this is a bit Lord Privy Seal to say so, but this is — children are not empty vessels. They come with their own ideas and their own theories, and unless you work with those, then you won't be able to shift them, right? And I probably haven't shifted your ideas of how the world and universe operates, either. But this applies, equally, to matters of trying to sell new technology. For example, we are, in Britain, we're trying to do a digital switchover of the whole population into digital technology [for television]. And it's one of the difficult things is that when people have preconceptions of how it all works, it's quite difficult to shift those. So we're not empty vessels; the mental models that we have as children persist into adulthood. Poor teaching actually does more harm than good. In this country and in Britain, magnetism is understood better by children before they've been to school than afterwards, OK? Same for gravity, two concepts, so it's — which is quite humbling, as a, you know, if you're a teacher, and you look before and after, that's quite worrying. They do worse in tests afterwards, after the teaching. And we collude. We design tests, or at least in Britain, so that people pass them. Right? And governments do very well. They pat themselves on the back. OK? We collude, and actually if you — if someone had designed a test for me when I was doing my biology exams, to really understand, to see whether I'd understood more than just kind of putting starch and iodine together and seeing it go blue, and really understood that plants took their mass out of the air, then I might have done better at science. So the most important thing is to get people to articulate their models.Your homework is — you know, how does an aircraft's wing create lift? An obvious question, and you'll have an answer now in your heads. And the second question to that then is, ensure you've explained how it is that planes can fly upside down. Ah ha, right. Second question is, why is the sea blue? All right? And you've all got an idea in your head of the answer. So, why is it blue on cloudy days? Ah, see. (Laughter) I've always wanted to say that in this country. (Laughter) Finally, my plea to you is to allow yourselves, and your children, and anyone you know, to kind of fiddle with stuff, because it's by fiddling with things that you, you know, you complement your other learning. It's not a replacement, it's just part of learning that's important. Thank you very much. Now — oh, oh yeah, go on then, go on. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_on_what_we_think_we_know
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"Good afternoon, good evening, whatever. We can go, jambo, guten Abend, bonsoir, but we can also ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. That is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening. You hear it going from one side of the valley to the other, from one group of nests to the next.And I want to pick up with my talk this evening from where Zeray left off yesterday. He was talking about this amazing, three-year-old Australopithecine child, Selam. And we've also been hearing about the history, the family tree, of mankind through DNA genetic profiling. And it was a paleontologist, the late Louis Leakey, who actually set me on the path for studying chimpanzees. And it was pretty extraordinary, way back then. It's kind of commonplace now, but his argument was — because he'd been searching for the fossilized remains of early humans in Africa. And you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils, from the shape of the muscle attachments, something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them. But what about how they behaved? That's what he wanted to know. And of course, behavior doesn't fossilize. He argued — and it's now a fairly common theory — that if we found behavior patterns similar or the same in our closest living relatives, the great apes, and humans today, then maybe those behaviors were present in the ape-like, human-like ancestor some seven million years ago. And therefore, perhaps we had brought those characteristics with us from that ancient, ancient past.Well, if you look in textbooks today that deal with human evolution, you very often find people speculating about how early humans may have behaved, based on the behavior of chimpanzees. They are more like us than any other living creature, and we've heard about that during this TED Conference. So it remains for me to comment on the ways in which chimpanzees are so like us, in certain aspects of their behavior.Every chimpanzee has his or her own personality. Of course, I gave them names. They can live to be 60 years or more, although we think most of them probably don't make it to 60 in the wild. Mr. Wurzel. The female has her first baby when she's 11 or 12. Thereafter, she has one baby only every five or six years, a long period of childhood dependency when the child is nursing, sleeping with the mother at night, and riding on her back. And we believe that this long period of childhood is important for chimpanzees, just as it is for us, in relation to learning. As the brain becomes ever more complex during evolution in different forms of animals, so we find that learning plays an ever more important role in an individual's life history. And young chimpanzees spend a lot of time watching what their elders do. We know now that they're capable of imitating behaviors that they see. And we believe that it's in this way that the different tool-using behaviors — that have now been seen in all the different chimpanzee populations studied in Africa — how these are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice, so that we can describe these tool-using behaviors as primitive culture.Chimpanzees don't have a spoken language. We've talked about that. They do have a very rich repertoire of postures and gestures, many of which are similar, or even identical, to ours and formed in the same context. Greeting chimpanzees embracing. They also kiss, hold hands, pat one another on the back. And they swagger and they throw rocks. In chimpanzee society, we find many, many examples of compassion, precursors to love and true altruism. Unfortunately, they, like us, have a dark side to their nature. They're capable of extreme brutality, even a kind of primitive war. And these really aggressive behaviors, for the most part, are directed against individuals of the neighboring social group. They are very territorially aggressive. Chimpanzees, I believe, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that, after all, there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time as we make even more observations. The study that I began in 1960 is still continuing to this day. And these chimpanzees, living their complex social lives in the wild, have helped — more than anything else — to make us realize we are part of, and not separated from, the amazing animals with whom we share the planet. So it's pretty sad to find that chimpanzees, like so many other creatures around the world, are losing their habitats. This is just one photograph from the air, and it shows you the forested highlands of Gombe. And it was when I flew over the whole area, about 16 years ago, and realized that outside the park, this forest, which in 1960 had stretched almost unbroken along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, which is where the tiny, 30-square-mile Gombe National Park lies, that a question came to my mind. ""How can we even try to save these famous chimpanzees, when the people living around the National Park are struggling to survive?"" More people are living there than the land could possibly support. The numbers increased by refugees pouring in from Burundi and over the lake from Congo. And very poor people — they couldn't afford to buy food from elsewhere.This led to a program, which we call TACARE. It's a very holistic way of improving the lives of the people living in the villages around the park. It started small with 12 villages. It's now in 24. There isn't time to go into it, but it's including things like tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable to this now very degraded, almost desert-like land up in these mountains. Ways of controlling, preventing soil erosion. Ways of reclaiming overused farmland, so that within two years they can again be productive. Working to help the villagers obtain fresh water from wells. Perhaps build some schoolrooms. Most important of all, I believe, is working with small groups of women, providing them with opportunities for micro-credit loans. And we've got, as is the case around the world, about 95 percent of all loans returned. Empowering women, working with education, providing scholarships for girls so they can finish secondary school, in the clear understanding that, all around the world, as women's education improves, family size drops. We provide information about family planning and about HIV/AIDS.And as a result of this program, something's happening for conservation. What's happening for conservation is that the farmers living in these 24 villages, instead of looking on us as a bunch of white people coming to study a whole bunch of monkeys — and by the way, many of the staff are now Tanzanian — but when we began the TACARE program, it was a Tanzanian team going into the villages. It was a Tanzanian team talking to the villagers, asking what they were interested in. Were they interested in conservation? Absolutely not. They were interested in health; they were interested in education. And as time went on, and as their situation began to improve, they began to understand ever more about the need for conservation. They began to understand that as the upper levels of the hills were denuded of trees, so you've got this terrible soil erosion and mudslides.Today, we are developing what we call the Greater Gombe Ecosystem. This is an area way outside the National Park, stretching out into all these very degraded lands. And as these villages have a better standard of life, they are actually agreeing to put between 10 percent and 20 percent of their land in the highlands aside, so that once again, as the trees grow back, the chimpanzees will have leafy corridors through which they can travel to interact — as they must for genetic viability — with other remnant groups outside the National Park. So TACARE is a success. We're replicating it in other parts of Africa, around other wilderness areas which are faced with extreme population pressure.The problems in Africa, however, as we've been discussing for the whole of these first couple of days of TED, are major problems. There is a great deal of poverty. And when you get large numbers of people living in land that is not that fertile, particularly when you cut down trees, and you leave the soil open to the wind for erosion, as desperate populations cut down more and more trees, so that they can try and grow food for themselves and their families, what's going to happen? Something's got to give. And the other problems — in not only Africa, but the rest of the developing world and, indeed, everywhere — what are we doing to our planet? You know, the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson said that if every person on this planet attains the standard of living of the average European or American, we need three new planets. Today, they are saying four. But we don't have them. We've got one.And what's happened? I mean, the question here is, here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, capable of the kind of technology that is so well illustrated by these TED Conferences, and yet we're destroying the only home we have. The indigenous people around the world, before they made a major decision, used to sit around and ask themselves, ""How does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?"" Today, major decisions — and I'm not particularly talking about Africa here, but the developed world — major decisions involving millions of dollars, and millions of people, are often based on, ""How will this affect the next shareholders' meeting?"" And these decisions affect Africa.As I began traveling around Africa talking about the problems faced by chimpanzees and their vanishing forests, I realized more and more how so many of Africa's problems could be laid at the door of previous colonial exploitation. So I began traveling outside Africa, talking in Europe, talking in the United States, going to Asia. And everywhere there were these terrible problems. And you know the kind I'm talking about. I'm talking about pollution. The air that we breathe that often poisons us. The earth is poisoning our foods. The water — water is perhaps one of the most crucial issues that we're going to face in this century — and everywhere water is being polluted by agricultural, industrial and household chemicals that still are being sprayed around the world, seemingly with the inability to profit from past experience. The mangroves are being cut down; the effects of things like the tsunami get worse. We've talked about the soil erosion. We have the reckless burning of fossil fuels along with other greenhouse gasses, so called, leading to climate change. Finally, all around the world, people have begun to believe that there is something going on very wrong with our climate.All around the world climates are mixed up. And it's the poor people who are affected worse. It's Africa that already is affected. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the droughts are so much worse. And when the rain does come, it so often leads to flooding and added distress, and the cycle of poverty and hunger and disease. And the numbers of people living in an area that the land cannot support, who are too poor to buy food, who can't move away because the whole land is degraded. And so you get desertification — creeping, creeping, creeping — as the last of the trees are cut down. And this kind of thing is not just in Africa. It's all over the world.So it wasn't surprising to me that as I was traveling around the world I met so many young people who seemed to have lost hope. We seem to have lost wisdom, the wisdom of the indigenous people. I asked a question. ""Why?"" Well, do you think there could be some kind of disconnect between this extraordinarily clever brain, the kind of brain that the TED technologies exemplify, and the human heart? Talking about it in the non-scientific term, in terms of love and compassion. Is there some disconnect? And these young people, when I talk to them, basically they were either depressed or apathetic, or bitter and angry. And they said more or less the same thing, ""We feel this way because we feel you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it.""We have compromised their future. I've got three little grandchildren, and every time I look at them and I think how we've harmed this beautiful planet since I was their age, I feel this desperation. And that led to this program we call Roots and Shoots, which began right here in Tanzania and has now spread to 97 countries around the world. It's symbolic. Roots make a firm foundation. Shoots seem tiny; to reach the sun they can break through a brick wall. See the brick wall as all these problems we've inflicted on the planet, environmental and social. It's a message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through and can make this a better world for all living things. The most important message of Roots and Shoots: every single one of us makes a difference, every single day. We have a choice. Every one of us in this room, we have a choice as to what kind of difference we want to make. The very poor have no choice. It's up to us to change things so that the poor have choice as well.The Roots and Shoots groups all choose three projects. It depends on how old they are, and which country, whether they're in a city or rural, as to what kinds of projects. But basically, we have programs now from preschool right through university, with more and more adults starting their own Roots and Shoots groups. And every group chooses, between them, three different kinds of project to make this a better world, recognizing that all these different problems are interconnected and impinge on each other. So one of their projects will be to help their own human community. And then, if they're able, they may raise money to help communities in other parts of the world. One of their projects will be to help animals — not just wildlife, domestic animals as well. And one of their projects will be to help the environment that we all share. And woven throughout all of this is a message of learning to live in peace and harmony within ourselves, in our families, in our communities, between nations, between cultures, between religions and between us and the natural world. We need the natural world. We cannot go on destroying it at the rate we are. We not do have more than this one planet.Just picking one or two of the projects right here in Africa that the Roots and Shoots groups are doing, one or two projects only — in Tanzania, in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and other groups. And as I say, it's in 97 countries around the world. Of course, they're planting trees. They're growing organic vegetables. They're working in the refugee camps, with chickens and selling the eggs for a little amount of money, or just using them to feed their families, and feeling a sense of pride and empowerment, because they're no longer helpless and depending on others with their vegetables and their chickens. It's being used in Uganda to give some psychological help to ex-child soldiers. Doing projects like this is bringing them out of themselves. Once again, they're useful members of society. We have this program in prisons as well. So, there's no time for more Roots and Shoots now. But — oh, they're also working on HIV/AIDS. That's a very important component of Roots and Shoots, with older kids talking to younger ones. And unwanted pregnancies and things like that, which young people listen to better from other youth, rather than adults.Hope. That's the question I get asked as I'm going around the world: ""Jane, you've seen so many terrible things, you've seen your chimpanzees decrease in number from about one million, at the turn of the century, to no more than 150,000 now, and the same with so many other animals. Forests disappearing, deserts where once there was forest. Do you really have hope?"" Well, yes. You can't come to a conference like TED and not have hope, can you? And of course, there's hope. One is this amazing human brain.And I mean, think of the technologies. And I've just been so thrilled, finally, to come to people talking about compost latrines. It's one of my hobbyhorses. We just flush all this water down the lavatory, it's terrible. And then talking about renewable energy — desperately important. Do we care about the planet for our children? How many of us have children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews? Do we care about their future? And if we care about their future, we, as the elite around the world, we can do something about it. We can make choices as to how we live each day. What we buy. What we wear. And choose to make these choices with the question, how will this affect the environment around me? How will it affect the life of my child when he or she grows up? Or my grandchild, or whatever it is. So the human brain, coupled with the human heart, and we join hands around the world. And that's what TED is helping so well with, and Google who help us, and Esri are helping us with mapping in Gombe National Park. All of these technologies we can use.Now let's link them, and it's beginning to happen, isn't it? You've heard about it this afternoon. It's beginning to happen. This change, this change. To see change that we must have if we care about the future. And the next reason for hope — nature is amazingly resilient. You can take an area that's absolutely destroyed, with time and perhaps some help it can regenerate. And an example is the TACARE program. I told you, where a seemingly dead tree stump — if you stop hacking them for firewood, which you don't need to because you have wood lots, then in five years you can have a 30-foot tree. And animals, almost on the brink of extinction, can be given a second chance. That's my next book. It's inspiring. And it brings me to my last category of hope, and we've heard about this so much in the last two days: this indomitable human spirit. This determination of people, the resilience of the human spirit, So that people who you would think would be battered by poverty, or disease, or whatever, can pull themselves up out of it, sometimes with a helping hand, and take their part in society, and take their part in changing the world.And just to think of one or two people out of Africa who are just really inspiring. We could make a very long list, but obviously Nelson Mandela, emerging from 17 years of hard physical labor, 23 years of imprisonment, with this amazing ability to forgive, so that he could lead his nation out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath. Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Nigeria, who took on the giant oil companies, and although people around the world tried their best, was executed. People like this are so inspirational. People like this are the role models we need for young Africans. And we need some environmental role models as well, and I've been hearing some of them today. So I'm really grateful for this opportunity to share this message again, with everyone at TED. And I hope that some of us can get together and talk about some of these things, especially the Roots and Shoots program.And just a last word on that — the young woman who's running this entire conference center, I met her today. She came up so excited, with her certificate. She was [in] Roots and Shoots. She was in the leadership in Dar es Salaam. She said it's helped her to do what she's doing. And it was very, very exciting for me to meet her and see just one example of how young people, when they are empowered, given the opportunity to take action, to make the world a better place, truly are our hope for tomorrow. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_at_tedglobal_07
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"So, a big question that we're facing now and have been for quite a number of years now: are we at risk of a nuclear attack? Now, there's a bigger question that's probably actually more important than that, is the notion of permanently eliminating the possibility of a nuclear attack, eliminating the threat altogether. And I would like to make a case to you that over the years since we first developed atomic weaponry, until this very moment, we've actually lived in a dangerous nuclear world that's characterized by two phases, which I'm going to go through with you right now.First of all, we started off the nuclear age in 1945. The United States had developed a couple of atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project, and the idea was very straightforward: we would use the power of the atom to end the atrocities and the horror of this unending World War II that we'd been involved in in Europe and in the Pacific. And in 1945, we were the only nuclear power. We had a few nuclear weapons, two of which we dropped on Japan, in Hiroshima, a few days later in Nagasaki, in August 1945, killing about 250,000 people between those two.And for a few years, we were the only nuclear power on Earth. But by 1949, the Soviet Union had decided it was unacceptable to have us as the only nuclear power, and they began to match what the United States had developed. And from 1949 to 1985 was an extraordinary time of a buildup of a nuclear arsenal that no one could possibly have imagined back in the 1940s. So by 1985 — each of those red bombs up here is equivalent of a thousands warheads — the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads, and seven members of something that came to be known as the ""nuclear club.""And it was an extraordinary time, and I am going to go through some of the mentality that we — that Americans and the rest of the world were experiencing. But I want to just point out to you that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons at any particular time since 1985 — going forward, of course — were part of the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. After 1985, and before the break up of the Soviet Union, we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view. We began to counter-proliferate, and we dropped the number of nuclear warheads in the world to about a total of 21,000. It's a very difficult number to deal with, because what we've done is we've quote unquote ""decommissioned"" some of the warheads. They're still probably usable. They could be ""re-commissioned,"" but the way they count things, which is very complicated, we think we have about a third of the nuclear weapons we had before. But we also, in that period of time, added two more members to the nuclear club: Pakistan and North Korea.So we stand today with a still fully armed nuclear arsenal among many countries around the world, but a very different set of circumstances. So I'm going to talk about a nuclear threat story in two chapters. Chapter one is 1949 to 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, and what we were dealing with, at that point and through those years, was a superpowers' nuclear arms race. It was characterized by a nation-versus-nation, very fragile standoff. And basically, we lived for all those years, and some might argue that we still do, in a situation of being on the brink, literally, of an apocalyptic, planetary calamity. It's incredible that we actually lived through all that.We were totally dependent during those years on this amazing acronym, which is MAD. It stands for mutually assured destruction. So it meant if you attacked us, we would attack you virtually simultaneously, and the end result would be a destruction of your country and mine. So the threat of my own destruction kept me from launching a nuclear attack on you. That's the way we lived. And the danger of that, of course, is that a misreading of a radar screen could actually cause a counter-launch, even though the first country had not actually launched anything. During this chapter one, there was a high level of public awareness about the potential of nuclear catastrophe, and an indelible image was implanted in our collective minds that, in fact, a nuclear holocaust would be absolutely globally destructive and could, in some ways, mean the end of civilization as we know it. So this was chapter one.Now the odd thing is that even though we knew that there would be that kind of civilization obliteration, we engaged in America in a series — and in fact, in the Soviet Union — in a series of response planning. It was absolutely incredible. So premise one is we'd be destroying the world, and then premise two is, why don't we get prepared for it? So what we offered ourselves was a collection of things. I'm just going to go skim through a few things, just to jog your memories. If you're born after 1950, this is just — consider this entertainment, otherwise it's memory lane.This was Bert the Turtle. (Video) This was basically an attempt to teach our schoolchildren that if we did get engaged in a nuclear confrontation and atomic war, then we wanted our school children to kind of basically duck and cover. That was the principle. You — there would be a nuclear conflagration about to hit us, and if you get under your desk, things would be OK.(Laughter)I didn't do all that well in psychiatry in medical school, but I was interested, and I think this was seriously delusional.(Laughter)Secondly, we told people to go down in their basements and build a fallout shelter. Maybe it would be a study when we weren't having an atomic war, or you could use it as a TV room, or, as many teenagers found out, a very, very safe place for a little privacy with your girlfriend. And actually — so there are multiple uses of the bomb shelters. Or you could buy a prefabricated bomb shelter that you could simply bury in the ground. Now, the bomb shelters at that point — let's say you bought a prefab one — it would be a few hundred dollars, maybe up to 500, if you got a fancy one. Yet, what percentage of Americans do you think ever had a bomb shelter in their house? What percentage lived in a house with a bomb shelter?Less than two percent. About 1.4 percent of the population, as far as anyone knows, did anything, either making a space in their basement or actually building a bomb shelter. Many buildings, public buildings, around the country — this is New York City — had these little civil defense signs, and the idea was that you would run into one of these shelters and be safe from the nuclear weaponry. And one of the greatest governmental delusions of all time was something that happened in the early days of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, as we now know, and are well aware of their behaviors from Katrina. Here is their first big public announcement. They would propose — actually there were about six volumes written on this — a crisis relocation plan that was dependent upon the United States having three to four days warning that the Soviets were going to attack us. So the goal was to evacuate the target cities. We would move people out of the target cities into the countryside.And I'm telling you, I actually testified at the Senate about the absolute ludicrous idea that we would actually evacuate, and actually have three or four days' warning. It was just completely off the wall. Turns out that they had another idea behind it, even though this was — they were telling the public it was to save us. The idea was that we would force the Soviets to re-target their nuclear weapons — very expensive — and potentially double their arsenal, to not only take out the original site, but take out sites where people were going. This was what apparently, as it turns out, was behind all this. It was just really, really frightening.The main point here is we were dealing with a complete disconnect from reality. The civil defense programs were disconnected from the reality of what we'd see in all-out nuclear war. So organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility, around 1979, started saying this a lot publicly. They would do a bombing run. They'd go to your city, and they'd say, ""Here's a map of your city. Here's what's going to happen if we get a nuclear hit."" So no possibility of medical response to, or meaningful preparedness for all-out nuclear war. So we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive. This disconnect was never actually resolved. And what happened was — when we get in to chapter two of the nuclear threat era, which started back in 1945.Chapter two starts in 1991. When the Soviet Union broke up, we effectively lost that adversary as a potential attacker of the United States, for the most part. It's not completely gone. I'm going to come back to that. But from 1991 through the present time, emphasized by the attacks of 2001, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and the idea of a single event, act of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the scenario has changed very considerably, the fact is that we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war means. So I'm going to tell you what the implications of that are in just a second. So, what is a nuclear terror threat? And there's four key ingredients to describing that.First thing is that the global nuclear weapons, in the stockpiles that I showed you in those original maps, happen to be not uniformly secure. And it's particularly not secure in the former Soviet Union, now in Russia. There are many, many sites where warheads are stored and, in fact, lots of sites where fissionable materials, like highly enriched uranium and plutonium, are absolutely not safe. They're available to be bought, stolen, whatever. They're acquirable, let me put it that way. From 1993 through 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency documented 175 cases of nuclear theft, 18 of which involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the key ingredients to make a nuclear weapon. The global stockpile of highly enriched uranium is about 1,300, at the low end, to about 2,100 metric tons. More than 100 megatons of this is stored in particularly insecure Russian facilities. How much of that do you think it would take to actually build a 10-kiloton bomb? Well, you need about 75 pounds of it.So, what I'd like to show you is what it would take to hold 75 pounds of highly enriched uranium. This is not a product placement. It's just — in fact, if I was Coca Cola, I'd be pretty distressed about this — (Laughter) — but basically, this is it.This is what you would need to steal or buy out of that 100-metric-ton stockpile that's relatively insecure to create the type of bomb that was used in Hiroshima. Now you might want to look at plutonium as another fissionable material that you might use in a bomb. That — you'd need 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium. Now, plutonium, 10 to 13 pounds: this. This is enough plutonium to create a Nagasaki-size atomic weapon. Now this situation, already I — you know, I don't really like thinking about this, although somehow I got myself a job where I have to think about it. So the point is that we're very, very insecure in terms of developing this material. The second thing is, what about the know-how?And there's a lot of controversy about whether terror organizations have the know-how to actually make a nuclear weapon. Well, there's a lot of know-how out there. There's an unbelievable amount of know-how out there. There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb. There are plans for how to create a terror farm where you could actually manufacture and develop all the components and assemble it. All of this information is relatively available. If you have an undergraduate degree in physics, I would suggest — although I don't, so maybe it's not even true — but something close to that would allow you, with the information that's currently available, to actually build a nuclear weapon.The third element of the nuclear terror threat is that, who would actually do such a thing? Well, what we're seeing now is a level of terrorism that involves individuals who are highly organized. They are very dedicated and committed. They are stateless. Somebody once said, Al Qaeda does not have a return address, so if they attack us with a nuclear weapon, what's the response, and to whom is the response? And they're retaliation-proof. Since there is no real retribution possible that would make any difference, since there are people willing to actually give up their lives in order to do a lot of damage to us, it becomes apparent that the whole notion of this mutually assured destruction would not work.Here is Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Sulaiman was a key lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden. He wrote many, many times statements to this effect: ""we have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of whom should be children."" And we don't have to go overseas to find people willing to do harm, for whatever their reasons. McVeigh and Nichols, and the Oklahoma City attack in the 1990s was a good example of homegrown terrorists. What if they had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon? The fourth element is that the high-value U.S. targets are accessible, soft and plentiful.This would be a talk for another day, but the level of the preparedness that the United States has achieved since 9/11 of '01 is unbelievably inadequate. What you saw after Katrina is a very good indicator of how little prepared the United States is for any kind of major attack. Seven million ship cargo containers come into the United States every year. Five to seven percent only are inspected — five to seven percent.This is Alexander Lebed, who was a general that worked with Yeltsin, who talked about, and presented to Congress, this idea that the Russians had developed — these suitcase bombs. They were very low yield — 0.1 to one kiloton, Hiroshima was around 13 kilotons — but enough to do an unbelievable amount of damage. And Lebed came to the United States and told us that many, many — more than 80 of the suitcase bombs were actually not accountable. And they look like this. They're basically very simple arrangements. You put the elements into a suitcase. It becomes very portable. The suitcase can be conveniently dropped in your trunk of your car. You take it wherever you want to take it, and you can detonate it.You don't want to build a suitcase bomb, and you happen to get one of those insecure nuclear warheads that exist. This is the size of the ""Little Boy"" bomb that was dropped at Hiroshima. It was 9.8 feet long, weighed 8,800 pounds. You go down to your local rent-a-truck and for 50 bucks or so, you rent a truck that's got the right capacity, and you take your bomb, you put it in the truck and you're ready to go. It could happen. But what it would mean and who would survive? You can't get an exact number for that kind of probability, but what I'm trying to say is that we have all the elements of that happening. Anybody who dismisses the thought of a nuclear weapon being used by a terrorist is kidding themselves.I think there's a lot of people in the intelligence community — a lot of people who deal with this work in general think it's almost inevitable, unless we do certain things to really try to defuse the risk, like better interdiction, better prevention, better fixing, you know, better screening of cargo containers that are coming into the country and so forth. There's a lot that can be done to make us a lot safer. At this particular moment, we actually could end up seeing a nuclear detonation in one of our cities. I don't think we would see an all-out nuclear war any time soon, although even that is not completely off the table. There's still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the superpowers to destroy the Earth many, many times over. There are flash points in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in North Korea, other places where the use of nuclear weapons, while initially locally, could very rapidly go into a situation where we'd be facing all-out nuclear war. It's very unsettling.Here we go. OK. I'm back in my truck, and we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. We're coming down, and we bring that truck that you just saw somewhere in here, in the Financial District. This is a 10-kiloton bomb, slightly smaller than was used in Hiroshima. And I want to just conclude this by just giving you some information. I think — ""news you could use"" kind of concept here. So, first of all, this would be horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine. This is the ultimate. And if you're in the half-mile radius of where this bomb went off, you have a 90 percent chance of not making it. If you're right where the bomb went off, you will be vaporized. And that's — I'm just telling you, this is not good.(Laughter)You assume that. Two-mile radius, you have a 50 percent chance of being killed, and up to about eight miles away — now I'm talking about killed instantly — somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance of getting killed. The thing about this is that the experience of the nuclear detonation is — first of all, tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the core here, where it goes off, and an extraordinary amount of energy in the form of heat, acute radiation and blast effects. An enormous hurricane-like wind, and destruction of buildings almost totally, within this yellow circle here. And what I'm going to focus on, as I come to conclusion here, is that, what happens to you if you're in here? Well, if we're talking about the old days of an all-out nuclear attack, you, up here, are as dead as the people here. So it was a moot point. My point now, though, is that there is a lot that we could do for you who are in here, if you've survived the initial blast. You have, when the blast goes off — and by the way, if it ever comes up, don't look at it.(Laughter)If you look at it, you're going to be blind, either temporarily or permanently. So if there's any way that you can avoid, like, avert your eyes, that would be a good thing. If you find yourself alive, but you're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon, you have — that's gone off — you have 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size and exactly where it went off, to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up. In that 10 to 15 minutes, all you have to do — and I mean this seriously — is go about a mile away from the blast. And what happens is — this is — I'm going to show you now some fallout plumes. Within 20 minutes, it comes straight down. Within 24 hours, lethal radiation is going out with prevailing winds, and it's mostly in this particular direction — it's going northeast.And if you're in this vicinity, you've got to get away. So you're feeling the wind — and there's tremendous wind now that you're going to be feeling — and you want to go perpendicular to the wind [not upwind or downwind]. if you are in fact able to see where the blast was in front of you. You've got to get out of there. If you don't get out of there, you're going to be exposed to lethal radiation in very short order. If you can't get out of there, we want you to go into a shelter and stay there. Now, in a shelter in an urban area means you have to be either in a basement as deep as possible, or you have to be on a floor — on a high floor — if it's a ground burst explosion, which it would be, higher than the ninth floor. So you have to be tenth floor or higher, or in the basement. But basically, you've got to get out of town as quickly as possible. And if you do that, you actually can survive a nuclear blast.Over the next few days to a week, there will be a radiation cloud, again, going with the wind, and settling down for another 15 or 20 miles out — in this case, over Long Island. And if you're in the direct fallout zone here, you really have to either be sheltered or you have to get out of there, and that's clear. But if you are sheltered, you can actually survive. The difference between knowing information of what you're going to do personally, and not knowing information, can save your life, and it could mean the difference between 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities from something like this and half a million to 700,000 fatalities.So, response planning in the twenty-first century is both possible and is essential. But in 2008, there isn't one single American city that has done effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. Part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves, personally, are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe. They are paralyzed. You say ""nuclear"" to them, and they're thinking, ""Oh my God, we're all gone. What's the point? It's futile."" And we're trying to tell them, ""It's not futile. We can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things.""So the goal here is to minimize fatalities. And I just want to leave you with the personal points that I think you might be interested in. The key to surviving a nuclear blast is getting out, and not going into harm's way. That's basically all we're going to be talking about here. And the farther you are away in distance, the longer it is in time from the initial blast; and the more separation between you and the outside atmosphere, the better. So separation — hopefully with dirt or concrete, or being in a basement — distance and time is what will save you.So here's what you do. First of all, as I said, don't stare at the light flash, if you can. I don't know you could possibly resist doing that. But let's assume, theoretically, you want to do that. You want to keep your mouth open, so your eardrums don't burst from the pressures. If you're very close to what happened, you actually do have to duck and cover, like Bert told you, Bert the Turtle. And you want to get under something so that you're not injured or killed by objects, if that's at all possible. You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes. And shelter and place. You want to move [only] crosswind for 1.2 miles.You know, if you're out there and you see buildings horribly destroyed and down in that direction, less destroyed here, then you know that it was over there, the blast, and you're going this way, as long as you're going crosswise to the wind. Once you're out and evacuating, you want to keep as much of your skin, your mouth and nose covered, as long as that covering doesn't impede you moving and getting out of there. And finally, you want to get decontaminated as soon as possible. And if you're wearing clothing, you've taken off your clothing, you're going to get showered down some place and remove the radiation that would be — the radioactive material that might be on you. And then you want to stay in shelter for 48 to 72 hours minimum, but you're going to wait hopefully — you'll have your little wind-up, battery-less radio, and you'll be waiting for people to tell you when it's safe to go outside. That's what you need to do.In conclusion, nuclear war is less likely than before, but by no means out of the question, and it's not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is possible — it may be probable — but is survivable. And this is Jack Geiger, who's one of the heroes of the U.S. public health community. And Jack said the only way to deal with nuclear anything, whether it's war or terrorism, is abolition of nuclear weapons. And you want something to work on once you've fixed global warming, I urge you to think about the fact that we have to do something about this unacceptable, inhumane reality of nuclear weapons in our world.Now, this is my favorite civil defense slide, and I — (Laughter) — I don't want to be indelicate, but this — he's no longer in office. We don't really care, OK. This was sent to me by somebody who is an aficionado of civil defense procedures, but the fact of the matter is that America's gone through a very hard time. We've not been focused, we've not done what we had to do, and now we're facing the potential of bad, hell on Earth. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/irwin_redlener_warns_of_nuclear_terrorism
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"We really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. If we don't do that, we're going to get the generation we deserve. They're going to learn from whatever it is they have around them.And we, as now the elite, parents, librarians, professionals, whatever it is, a bunch of our activities are, in fact, in trying to get the best we have to offer within reach of those around us, or as broadly as we can. I'm going to start and end this talk with a couple things that are carved in stone. One is what's on the Boston Public Library. Carved above their door is, ""Free to All."" It's kind of an inspiring statement, and I'll go back at the end of this. I'm a librarian, and what I'm trying to do is bring all of the works of knowledge to as many people as want to read it. And the idea of using technology is perfect for us. I think we have the opportunity to one-up the Greeks. It's not easy to one-up the Greeks. But with the industriousness of the Egyptians, they were able to build the Library of Alexandria — the idea of a copy of every book of all the peoples of the world. The problem was you actually had to go to Alexandria to go to it. On the other hand, if you did, then great things happened. I think we can one-up the Greeks and achieve something. And I'm going to try to argue only one point today: that universal access to all knowledge is within our grasp. So if I'm successful, then you'll actually come away thinking, yeah, we could actually achieve the great vision of everything ever published, everything that was ever meant for distribution, available to anybody in the world that's ever wanted to have access to it.Yes, there's issues about how money should be distributed, and that's still being refigured out. But I'd say there's plenty of money, and there's plenty of demand, so we can actually achieve that. But I'm going to go over the technological, social and sort of where are we as a whole, trying to get to that particular vision. And the way I'm going to try to do this is do it like the Amazon.com website, the books, music, video and just go step — media type by media type, just go and say, all right, how're we doing on this?So if we start with books, you know, sort of where are we? Well, first you have to, as an engineer, scope the problem. How big is it? If you wanted to put all of the published works online so that anybody could have it available, well, how big a problem is it? Well, we don't really know, but the largest print library in the world is the Library of Congress. It's 26 million volumes, 26 million volumes. It is, by far and away, the largest print library in the world. And a book, if you had a book, is about a megabyte, so — you know, if you had it in Microsoft Word. So a megabyte, 26 million megabytes is 26 terabytes — it goes mega-, giga-, tera-. 26 terabytes. 26 terabytes fits in a computer system that's about this big, on spinning Linux drives, and it costs about 60,000 dollars. So for the cost of a house — or around here, a garage — you can put, you can have spinning all of the words in the Library of Congress. That's pretty neat.Then the question is, what do you get? You know, is it worth trying to get there? Do you actually want it online? Some of the first things that people do is they make book readers that allow you to search inside the books, and that's kind of fun. And you can download these things, and look around them in new and different ways. And you can get at them remotely, if you happen to have a laptop. There's starting to be some of these sort of page turn-y interfaces that look a whole lot like books in certain ways, and you can search them, make little tabs, and it's kind of cute — still very book-like — on your laptop. But I don't know, reading things on a laptop — whenever I pull up my laptop, it always feels like work. I think that's one of the reasons why the Kindle is so great. I don't have to feel like I'm at work to read a Kindle. It's starting to be a little bit more specified. But I have to say that there's older technologies that I tend to like. I like the physical book. And I think we can go and use our technology to go and digitize things, put them on the Net, and then download, print them and bind them, and end up with books again.And we sort of said, well, how hard is this? And it turns out to not be very hard. We actually went off to make a bookmobile. And a bookmobile — the size of a van with a satellite dish, a printer, binder and cutter, and kids make their own books. It costs about three dollars to download, print and bind a normal, old book. And they actually come out kind of nice looking. You can actually get really good-looking books for on the order of one penny per page, sort of the parts cost for doing this.So the idea of — this technology actually may end up putting books back in people's hands again. There are some other bookmobiles running around. This is Eric Eldred making books at Walden Pond — Thoreau's works. This is just before he got kicked out by the Parks Services, for competing with the bookstore there. In India, they've got another couple bookmobiles running around. And this is the opening day at the Library of Alexandria, the new Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It was quite popularly attended. And kids starting to make their own books, and a happy kid with the first book that he's ever owned. So the idea of being able to use this technology to end up with paper where I can handle sort of sounds a little retro, but I think it still has its place. And being from the Silicon Valley, sort of utopian sort of world, we thought, if we can make this technology work in rural Uganda, we might have something. So we actually got some funding from the World Bank to try it out. And we found in about 30 days we could go and take a couple folks from Silicon Valley, fly them to Uganda, buy a car, set up the first Internet connection at the National Library of Uganda, figure out what they wanted, and get a program going making books in rural Uganda. And it actually — so technologically, it works.What we found out of this is we didn't have the right books. So the books were in the library. We could get it to people, if they're digitized, but we didn't know how to quite get them digitized. Everybody thought the answer is, send things to India and China. And so we've tried that, and I'll go over that in a moment. There are some newer technologies for delivering that have happened that are actually quite exciting as well. One is a print-on-demand machine that looks like a Rube Goldberg machine. We have one of these things now. It's completely cool. It's all conveyor belt, and it makes a book. And it's called the ""Espresso Book Machine,"" and in about 10 minutes, you can press a button and make a book.Something else I'm quite excited about in this particular domain, beyond these sort of kiosk-y things where you can get books on demand, is some of these new little screens that are coming out. And one of my favorites in this is the $100 laptop. And I don't mean to steal any thunder here, but we've gone and used one of these things to be an e-book reader. So here's one of the beta units and you can — it actually turns out to be a really good-looking e-book reader. And we have a quick hack that we did to try to put one of our books on it, and it turns out that 200 dots per inch means that you can put scanned books on them that look really good. At 200 dots per inch, it's kind of the equivalent of a 300 dot print laser printer. We're in good enough shape. You actually can go and read scanned books quite easily.So the idea of electronic books is starting to come about. But how do you go about doing all this scanning? So we thought, okay, well, let's try out this send books to India thing. And there was a project with, funded by the National Science Foundation — sent a bunch of scanners, and the American libraries were supposed to send books. Well, they didn't. They didn't want to send their books. So we bought 100,000 books and sent them to India. And then we learned why you don't want to send books to India. The lesson we learned out of this is, scan your own books. If you really care about books, you're going to scan them better, especially if they're valuable books. If they're new books and you can just, you know, butcher them, because you could just buy another one, that's not such a big deal in terms of doing high-quality scanning. But do things that you love. But the Indians have been scanning a lot of their own books — about 300,000 now — doing very well. The Chinese did over a million, and the Egyptians are about 30,000.But we sent — thought, OK, if we're going to need to do this, let's do it in-library. How do we go and do this, and how do we get it down so that it's a cost point that we could afford? And we sort of picked the price point of 10 cents a page. If it's basically the cost of xeroxing to basically digitize, OCR, package it up, make it so that you could download, print and bind it — the whole shebang — we would have achieved something. So we started out trying to figure out. How do we get to 10 cents? And we tried these robot things, and they worked pretty well — sort of these auto-page-turning things. If we can have Mars Rovers, you'd think you could turn pages. But it actually turns out to be pretty hard to turn pages, and the volume isn't there. So anyway — so we ended up making our own book scanner, and with two digital, high-grade, professional digital cameras, controlled museum lighting, so even if it's a black and white book, you can go and get the proper intonation. So you basically do a beautiful, respectful job. This is not a fax, this is — the idea is to do a beautiful job as you're going through these libraries. And we've been able to achieve 10 cents a page if we run things in volume. This is what it looks like at the University of Toronto. And actually, it turns out to, you know, pay a living wage. People seem to love it. Yes, it's a little boring, but some people kind of get into the Zen of it. (Laughter) And especially if it's kind of interesting books that you care about, in languages that you can read. We actually have been able to do a pretty good job of this, at getting 10 cents a page. So 10 cents a page, 300 pages in your average book, 30 dollars a book. The Library of Congress, if you did the whole darn thing — 26 million books — is about 750 million dollars, right? But a million books, I think, actually would be a pretty good start, and that would cost 30 million dollars. That's not that big a bill.And what we've been able to do is get into libraries. We've now got eight of these scanning centers in three countries, and libraries are up for having their books scanned. The Getty here is moving their books to the UCLA, which is where we have one these scanning centers, and scanning their out-of-copyright books, which is fabulous. So we're starting to get the institutional responsibility. The thing we're missing is the 10 cents. If we can get the 10 cents, all the rest of it flows. We've scanned about 200,000 books. Now we're scanning about 15,000 books a month, and it's starting to gear up another factor of two from there.So all in all, that's going very well. And we're starting to move out of the just out-of-copyright into the out-of-print world. So I think of — we're kind of going from the out-of-copyright, library stuff, and Amazon.com is coming from the in-print world. And I think we'll meet in the middle some place, and have the classic thing that you have, which is a publishing system and a library system working in parallel. And so we're starting up a program to do out-of-print works, but loaning them. Exactly what loaning means, I'm not quite sure. But anyway, loaning out-of-print works from the Boston Public Library, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a few other libraries that are starting to participate in this program, to try out this model of where does a library stop and where does the bookstore take over. So all in all, it's possible to do this in large scale. We're also going back over microfilm and getting that online. So, we can do 10 cents a page, we're going 15,000 books a month and we've got about 250,000 books online, counting all the other projects that are starting to add in. So what I wanted to argue is, books are within our grasp. The idea of taking on the whole ball of wax is not that big a deal. Yes, it costs tens of millions, low hundreds of millions, but one time shot and we've got basically the history of printed literature online. And then, there's business model issues about how to try to effectively market it and get it to people. But it is within our grasp, technologically and law-wise, at least for the out of print and out of copyright, we suggest, to be able to get the whole darn thing online.Now let's go for audio, and I'm going to go through these. So how much is there? Well, as best we can tell, there are about two to three million disks having been published — so 78s, long-playing records and CDs — or at least that's the largest archives of published materials we've been able to sort of point at. It costs about 10 dollars a piece to go and take a disk and put it online, if you're doing things in volume. But we've found that the rights issues are really quite thorny. This is a fairly heavily litigated area, so we've found that there are niches in the music world that aren't served terribly well by the classic commercial publishing system. And we've been starting to make these available by going and offering shelf space on the Net. In the United States, it doesn't cost you to give something away. Right? If you give something to a charity or to the public, you get a pat on the back and a tax donation — except on the Net, where you can go broke. If you put up a video of your garage band, and it starts getting heavily accessed, you can lose your guitars or your house.This doesn't make any sense. So we've offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free, to anybody that has something to share that belongs in a library. And we've been getting a lot of takers. One is the rock 'n' rollers. The rock 'n' rollers had a tradition of sharing, as long as nobody made any money. You could — concert recordings, it's not the commercial recordings, but concert recordings, started by the Grateful Dead. And we get about two or three bands a day signing up. They give permission, and we get about 40 or 50 concerts a day. We have about 40,000 concerts, everything the Grateful Dead ever did, up on the Net, so that people can see it and listen to this material. So audio is possible to put up, but the rights issues are really pretty thorny. We've got a lot of collections now — a couple hundred thousand items — and it's growing over time.Moving images: if you think of theatrical releases, there are not that many of them. As best we can tell, there are about 150,000 to 200,000 movies ever that are really meant for a large-scale theatrical distribution. It's just not that many. But half of those were Indian. But anyway, it's doable, but we've only found about a thousand of these things that — to be out of copyright. So we've digitized those and made those available. But we've found that there's lots of other types of movies that haven't really seen the light of day — archival films. We've found, also, a lot of political films, a lot of amateur films, all sorts of things that are basically needing a home, a permanent home. So we've been starting to make these available and it's grown to be very popular. We're not quite a YouTube. We tended towards longer-term things and also things that people can reuse and make into new movies, which has just been great fun.Television comes quite a bit larger. We started recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day. It's sort of the biggest TiVo box you've ever seen. It's about a petabyte, so far, of worldwide television — Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC — 24 hours a day. We only put one week up, which is mostly for cost reasons, which is the 9/11, sort of from 9/11/2001. For one week, what did the world see? CNN was saying that Palestinians were dancing in the streets. Were they? Let's look at the Palestinian television and find out. How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? And television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable, except by Jon Stewart, who does a fabulous job. So anyway, television is, I would suggest, within our grasp. So 15 dollars per video hour, and also about 100 dollars to 150 dollars per celluloid hour, we're able to go and get materials online very inexpensively and have them up on the Net. And we've got, now, a lot of these materials. So we've got about 100,000 pieces up there. So books, music, video, software. There's only 50,000 titles of it. Mostly the issues there are legal issues and breaking copy protections. But we've worked through some of those, but we've still got real problems in Washington.Well, we're best known as the World Wide Web. We've been archiving the World Wide Web since 1996. We take a snapshot of every website and all of the pages on it, every two months. And actually, it's really been pioneered by Alexa Internet, which donates this collection to the Internet Archive. And it's been growing along for the last 11 years, and it's a fantastic resource. And we've made a Wayback Machine that you can then go and see old websites kind of the way they were. If you go and search on something — this is Google.com, the different versions of it that we have, this is what it looks like when it was an alpha release, and this is what it looked like at Stanford. So anyway, you've got basically an idea of where things came from. Mostly, people want to see their old stuff out of this. If there's one thing that we want to learn from the Library of Alexandria version one, which is probably best known for burning, is, don't just have one copy. So we've started to — we've made another copy of all of this and we actually put it back in the Library of Alexandria. So this is a picture of the Internet Archive at the Library of Alexandria. And we now have also another copy building up in Amsterdam. So, we should put it in the San Andreas Fault Line in San Francisco, flood zone in Amsterdam and in the Middle East. Right, so anyway ... so we're hedging our bets here. If we go and put it in a couple more places, I think we'll be in good shape.There's a political and social question out of this. Is all of this, as we go digital, is it going to be public or private? There's some large companies that have seen this vision, that are doing large-scale digitization, but they're locking up the public domain. The question is, is that the world that we really want to live in? What's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward? How do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future, just as we basically benefited as we were growing up? So universal access to all knowledge — I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind, like the man on the moon, or the Gutenberg Bible, or the Library of Alexandria. It could be something that we're remembered for, for millennia, for having achieved. And as I said before, I'll end with something that's carved above the door of the Carnegie Library. Carnegie — one of the great capitalists of this country — carved above his legacy, ""Free to the People."" Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library
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"(Applause) David Gallo: This is Bill Lange. I'm Dave Gallo. And we're going to tell you some stories from the sea here in video. We've got some of the most incredible video of Titanic that's ever been seen, and we're not going to show you any of it. (Laughter)The truth of the matter is that the Titanic — even though it's breaking all sorts of box office records — it's not the most exciting story from the sea. And the problem, I think, is that we take the ocean for granted. When you think about it, the oceans are 75 percent of the planet. Most of the planet is ocean water. The average depth is about two miles. Part of the problem, I think, is we stand at the beach, or we see images like this of the ocean, and you look out at this great big blue expanse, and it's shimmering and it's moving and there's waves and there's surf and there's tides, but you have no idea for what lies in there. And in the oceans, there are the longest mountain ranges on the planet. Most of the animals are in the oceans. Most of the earthquakes and volcanoes are in the sea, at the bottom of the sea. The biodiversity and the biodensity in the ocean is higher, in places, than it is in the rainforests. It's mostly unexplored, and yet there are beautiful sights like this that captivate us and make us become familiar with it.But when you're standing at the beach, I want you to think that you're standing at the edge of a very unfamiliar world. We have to have a very special technology to get into that unfamiliar world. We use the submarine Alvin and we use cameras, and the cameras are something that Bill Lange has developed with the help of Sony. Marcel Proust said, ""The true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes."" People that have partnered with us have given us new eyes, not only on what exists — the new landscapes at the bottom of the sea — but also how we think about life on the planet itself.Here's a jelly. It's one of my favorites, because it's got all sorts of working parts. This turns out to be the longest creature in the oceans. It gets up to about 150 feet long. But see all those different working things? I love that kind of stuff. It's got these fishing lures on the bottom. They're going up and down. It's got tentacles dangling, swirling around like that. It's a colonial animal. These are all individual animals banding together to make this one creature. And it's got these jet thrusters up in front that it'll use in a moment, and a little light. If you take all the big fish and schooling fish and all that, put them on one side of the scale, put all the jelly-type of animals on the other side, those guys win hands down.Most of the biomass in the ocean is made out of creatures like this. Here's the X-wing death jelly. (Laughter) The bioluminescence — they use the lights for attracting mates and attracting prey and communicating. We couldn't begin to show you our archival stuff from the jellies. They come in all different sizes and shapes.Bill Lange: We tend to forget about the fact that the ocean is miles deep on average, and that we're real familiar with the animals that are in the first 200 or 300 feet, but we're not familiar with what exists from there all the way down to the bottom. And these are the types of animals that live in that three-dimensional space, that micro-gravity environment that we really haven't explored. You hear about giant squid and things like that, but some of these animals get up to be approximately 140, 160 feet long. They're very little understood.DG: This is one of them, another one of our favorites, because it's a little octopod. You can actually see through his head. And here he is, flapping with his ears and very gracefully going up. We see those at all depths and even at the greatest depths. They go from a couple of inches to a couple of feet. They come right up to the submarine — they'll put their eyes right up to the window and peek inside the sub.This is really a world within a world, and we're going to show you two. In this case, we're passing down through the mid-ocean and we see creatures like this. This is kind of like an undersea rooster. This guy, that looks incredibly formal, in a way. And then one of my favorites. What a face! This is basically scientific data that you're looking at. It's footage that we've collected for scientific purposes. And that's one of the things that Bill's been doing, is providing scientists with this first view of animals like this, in the world where they belong. They don't catch them in a net. They're actually looking at them down in that world. We're going to take a joystick, sit in front of our computer, on the Earth, and press the joystick forward, and fly around the planet.We're going to look at the mid-ocean ridge, a 40,000-mile long mountain range. The average depth at the top of it is about a mile and a half. And we're over the Atlantic — that's the ridge right there — but we're going to go across the Caribbean, Central America, and end up against the Pacific, nine degrees north. We make maps of these mountain ranges with sound, with sonar, and this is one of those mountain ranges. We're coming around a cliff here on the right. The height of these mountains on either side of this valley is greater than the Alps in most cases. And there's tens of thousands of those mountains out there that haven't been mapped yet.This is a volcanic ridge. We're getting down further and further in scale. And eventually, we can come up with something like this.This is an icon of our robot, Jason, it's called. And you can sit in a room like this, with a joystick and a headset, and drive a robot like that around the bottom of the ocean in real time. One of the things we're trying to do at Woods Hole with our partners is to bring this virtual world — this world, this unexplored region — back to the laboratory. Because we see it in bits and pieces right now. We see it either as sound, or we see it as video, or we see it as photographs, or we see it as chemical sensors, but we never have yet put it all together into one interesting picture.Here's where Bill's cameras really do shine. This is what's called a hydrothermal vent. And what you're seeing here is a cloud of densely packed, hydrogen-sulfide-rich water coming out of a volcanic axis on the sea floor. Gets up to 600, 700 degrees F, somewhere in that range. So that's all water under the sea — a mile and a half, two miles, three miles down. And we knew it was volcanic back in the '60s, '70s. And then we had some hint that these things existed all along the axis of it, because if you've got volcanism, water's going to get down from the sea into cracks in the sea floor, come in contact with magma, and come shooting out hot. We weren't really aware that it would be so rich with sulfides, hydrogen sulfides. We didn't have any idea about these things, which we call chimneys.This is one of these hydrothermal vents. Six hundred degree F water coming out of the Earth. On either side of us are mountain ranges that are higher than the Alps, so the setting here is very dramatic.BL: The white material is a type of bacteria that thrives at 180 degrees C.DG: I think that's one of the greatest stories right now that we're seeing from the bottom of the sea, is that the first thing we see coming out of the sea floor after a volcanic eruption is bacteria. And we started to wonder for a long time, how did it all get down there? What we find out now is that it's probably coming from inside the Earth. Not only is it coming out of the Earth — so, biogenesis made from volcanic activity — but that bacteria supports these colonies of life. The pressure here is 4,000 pounds per square inch. A mile and a half from the surface to two miles to three miles — no sun has ever gotten down here. All the energy to support these life forms is coming from inside the Earth — so, chemosynthesis. And you can see how dense the population is. These are called tube worms.BL: These worms have no digestive system. They have no mouth. But they have two types of gill structures. One for extracting oxygen out of the deep-sea water, another one which houses this chemosynthetic bacteria, which takes the hydrothermal fluid — that hot water that you saw coming out of the bottom — and converts that into simple sugars that the tube worm can digest.DG: You can see, here's a crab that lives down there. He's managed to grab a tip of these worms. Now, they normally retract as soon as a crab touches them. Oh! Good going. So, as soon as a crab touches them, they retract down into their shells, just like your fingernails. There's a whole story being played out here that we're just now beginning to have some idea of because of this new camera technology.BL: These worms live in a real temperature extreme. Their foot is at about 200 degrees C and their head is out at three degrees C, so it's like having your hand in boiling water and your foot in freezing water. That's how they like to live. (Laughter)DG: This is a female of this kind of worm. And here's a male. You watch. It doesn't take long before two guys here — this one and one that will show up over here — start to fight. Everything you see is played out in the pitch black of the deep sea. There are never any lights there, except the lights that we bring. Here they go. On one of the last dive series, we counted 200 species in these areas — 198 were new, new species.BL: One of the big problems is that for the biologists working at these sites, it's rather difficult to collect these animals. And they disintegrate on the way up, so the imagery is critical for the science.DG: Two octopods at about two miles depth. This pressure thing really amazes me — that these animals can exist there at a depth with pressure enough to crush the Titanic like an empty Pepsi can. What we saw up till now was from the Pacific. This is from the Atlantic. Even greater depth. You can see this shrimp is harassing this poor little guy here, and he'll bat it away with his claw. Whack! (Laughter)And the same thing's going on over here. What they're getting at is that — on the back of this crab — the foodstuff here is this very strange bacteria that lives on the backs of all these animals. And what these shrimp are trying to do is actually harvest the bacteria from the backs of these animals. And the crabs don't like it at all. These long filaments that you see on the back of the crab are actually created by the product of that bacteria. So, the bacteria grows hair on the crab. On the back, you see this again. The red dot is the laser light of the submarine Alvin to give us an idea about how far away we are from the vents. Those are all shrimp. You see the hot water over here, here and here, coming out. They're clinging to a rock face and actually scraping bacteria off that rock face. Here's a tiny, little vent that's come out of the side of that pillar. Those pillars get up to several stories. So here, you've got this valley with this incredible alien landscape of pillars and hot springs and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, inhabited by these very strange animals that live only on chemical energy coming out of the ground. They don't need the sun at all.BL: You see this white V-shaped mark on the back of the shrimp? It's actually a light-sensing organ. It's how they find the hydrothermal vents. The vents are emitting a black body radiation — an IR signature — and so they're able to find these vents at considerable distances.DG: All this stuff is happening along that 40,000-mile long mountain range that we're calling the ribbon of life, because just even today, as we speak, there's life being generated there from volcanic activity. This is the first time we've ever tried this any place. We're going to try to show you high definition from the Pacific. We're moving up one of these pillars. This one's several stories tall. In it, you'll see that it's a habitat for a lot of different animals. There's a funny kind of hot plate here, with vent water coming out of it. So all of these are individual homes for worms.Now here's a closer view of that community. Here's crabs here, worms here. There are smaller animals crawling around. Here's pagoda structures. I think this is the neatest-looking thing. I just can't get over this — that you've got these little chimneys sitting here smoking away. This stuff is toxic as hell, by the way. You could never get a permit to dump this in the ocean, and it's coming out all from it. (Laughter) It's unbelievable. It's basically sulfuric acid, and it's being just dumped out, at incredible rates. And animals are thriving — and we probably came from here. That's probably where we evolved from.BL: This bacteria that we've been talking about turns out to be the most simplest form of life found. There are a number of groups that are proposing that life evolved at these vent sites. Although the vent sites are short-lived — an individual site may last only 10 years or so — as an ecosystem they've been stable for millions — well, billions — of years.DG: It works too well. You see there're some fish inside here as well. There's a fish sitting here. Here's a crab with his claw right at the end of that tube worm, waiting for that worm to stick his head out. (Laughter)BL: The biologists right now cannot explain why these animals are so active. The worms are growing inches per week!DG: I already said that this site, from a human perspective, is toxic as hell. Not only that, but on top — the lifeblood — that plumbing system turns off every year or so. Their plumbing system turns off, so the sites have to move. And then there's earthquakes, and then volcanic eruptions, on the order of one every five years, that completely wipes the area out. Despite that, these animals grow back in about a year's time. You're talking about biodensities and biodiversity, again, higher than the rainforest that just springs back to life. Is it sensitive? Yes. Is it fragile? No, it's not really very fragile.I'll end up with saying one thing. There's a story in the sea, in the waters of the sea, in the sediments and the rocks of the sea floor. It's an incredible story. What we see when we look back in time, in those sediments and rocks, is a record of Earth history. Everything on this planet — everything — works by cycles and rhythms. The continents move apart. They come back together. Oceans come and go. Mountains come and go. Glaciers come and go. El Nino comes and goes. It's not a disaster, it's rhythmic. What we're learning now, it's almost like a symphony. It's just like music — it really is just like music. And what we're learning now is that you can't listen to a five-billion-year long symphony, get to today and say, ""Stop! We want tomorrow's note to be the same as it was today."" It's absurd. It's just absurd. So, what we've got to learn now is to find out where this planet's going at all these different scales and work with it. Learn to manage it. The concept of preservation is futile. Conservation's tougher, but we can probably get there. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_gallo_on_life_in_the_deep_oceans
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"When I knew I was going to come to speak to you, I thought, ""I gotta call my mother."" I have a little Cuban mother — she's about that big. Four feet. Nothing larger than the sum of her figurative parts. You still with me? (Laughter) I called her up. ""Hello, how're you doing, baby?"" ""Hey, ma, I got to talk to you."" ""You're talking to me already. What's the matter?"" I said, ""I've got to talk to a bunch of nice people."" ""You're always talking to nice people, except when you went to the White House."" ""Ma, don't start!"" And I told her I was coming to TED, and she said, ""What's the problem?"" And I said, ""Well, I'm not sure."" I said, ""I have to talk to them about stories. It's 'Technology, Entertainment and Design.'"" And she said, ""Well, you design a story when you make it up, it's entertainment when you tell it, and you're going to use a microphone."" (Laughter) I said, ""You're a peach, ma. Pop there?"" ""What's the matter? The pearls of wisdom leaping from my lips like lemmings is no good for you?"" (Laughter) Then my pop got on there. My pop, he's one of the old souls, you know — old Cuban man from Camaguey. Camaguey is a province in Cuba. He's from Florida. He was born there in 1924. He grew up in a bohio of dirt floors, and the structure was the kind used by the Tainos, our old Arawak ancestors. My father is at once quick-witted, wickedly funny, and then poignancy turns on a dime and leaves you breathless. ""Papi, help."" ""I already heard your mother. I think she's right."" (Laughter) ""After what I just told you?"" My whole life, my father's been there. So we talked for a few minutes, and he said, ""Why don't you tell them what you believe?"" I love that, but we don't have the time. Good storytelling is crafting a story that someone wants to listen to. Great story is the art of letting go. So I'm going to tell you a little story. Remember, this tradition comes to us not from the mists of Avalon, back in time, but further still, before we were scratching out these stories on papyrus, or we were doing the pictographs on walls in moist, damp caves. Back then, we had an urge, a need, to tell the story. When Lexus wants to sell you a car, they're telling you a story. Have you been watching the commercials? Because every one of us has this desire, for once — just once — to tell our story and have it heard. There are stories you tell from stages. There's stories that you may tell in a small group of people with some good wine. And there's stories you tell late at night to a friend, maybe once in your life. And then there are stories that we whisper into a Stygian darkness. I'm not telling you that story. I'm telling you this one. It's called, ""You're Going to Miss Me."" It's about human connection. My Cuban mother, which I just briefly introduced you to in that short character sketch, came to the United States one thousand years ago. I was born in 19 — I forget, and I came to this country with them in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution. We went from Havana, Cuba to Decatur, Georgia. And Decatur, Georgia's a small Southern town. And in that little Southern town, I grew up, and grew up hearing these stories. But this story only happened a few years ago. I called my mom. It was a Saturday morning. And I was calling about how to make ajiaco. It's a Cuban meal. It's delicious. It's savory. It makes spit froth in the little corners of your mouth — is that enough? It makes your armpits juicy, you know? That kind of food, yeah. This is the sensory part of the program, people. I called my mother, and she said, ""Carmen, I need you to come, please. I need to go to the mall, and you know your father now, he takes a nap in the afternoon, and I got to go. I got an errand to run."" Let me parenthetically pause here and tell you — Esther, my mother, had stopped driving several years ago, to the collective relief of the entire city of Atlanta. Any vehicular outing with that woman from the time I was a young child, guys, naturally included flashing, blue lights. But she'd become adept at dodging the boys in blue, and when she did meet them, oh, she had wonderful, well, rapport. ""Ma'am, did you know that was a light you just ran?"" (Spanish) ""You don't speak English?"" ""No."" (Laughter) But eventually, every dog has its day, and she ended up in traffic court, where she bartered with the judge for a discount. There's a historical marker. But now she was a septuagenarian, she'd stopped driving. And that meant that everyone in the family had to sign up to take her to have her hair dyed, you know, that peculiar color of blue that matches her polyester pants suit, you know, same color as the Buick. Anybody? All right. Little picks on the legs, where she does her needlepoint, and leaves little loops. Rockports — they're for this. That's why they call them that. (Laughter) This is her ensemble. And this is the woman that wants me to come on a Saturday morning when I have a lot to do, but it doesn't take long because Cuban guilt is a weighty thing. I'm not going political on you but ... And so, I go to my mother's. I show up. She's in the carport. Of course, they have a carport. The kind with the corrugated roof, you know. The Buick's parked outside, and she's jingling, jangling a pair of keys. ""I got a surprise for you, baby!"" ""We taking your car?"" ""Not we, I."" And she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a catastrophe. Somebody's storytelling. Interactive art. You can talk to me. Oh, a driver's license, a perfectly valid driver's license. Issued, evidently, by the DMV in her own county of Gwinnett. Blithering fucking idiots. (Laughter) I said, ""Is that thing real?"" ""I think so."" ""Can you even see?"" ""I guess I must."" ""Oh, Jesus."" She gets into the car — she's sitting on two phone books. I can't even make this part up because she's that tiny. She's engineered an umbrella so she can — bam! — slam the door. Her daughter, me, the village idiot with the ice cream cone in the middle of her forehead, is still standing there, slack-jawed. ""You coming? You no coming?"" ""Oh, my God."" I said, ""OK, fine. Does pop know you're driving?"" ""Are you kidding me?"" ""How are you doing it?"" ""He's got to sleep sometime."" And so we left my father fast asleep, because I knew he'd kill me if I let her go by herself, and we get in the car. Puts it in reverse. Fifty-five out of the driveway, in reverse. I am buckling in seatbelts from the front. I'm yanking them in from the back. I'm doing double knots. I mean, I've got a mouth as dry as the Kalahari Desert. I've got a white-knuckle grip on the door. You know what I'm talking about? And she's whistling, and finally I do the kind of birth breathing — you know, that one? Only a couple of women are going uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Right. And I said, ""Ma, would you slow down?"" Because now she's picked up the Highway 285, the perimeter around Atlanta, which encompasses now — there's seven lanes, she's on all of them, y'all. I said, ""Ma, pick a lane!"" ""They give you seven lanes, they expect you to use them."" And there she goes, right. I don't believe for a minute she has been out and not been stopped. So, I think, hey, we can talk. It'll be a diversion. It'll help my breathing. It'll do something for my pulse, maybe. ""Mommy, I know you have been stopped."" ""No, no, what you talking about?"" ""You have a license. How long have you been driving?"" ""Four or five days."" ""Yeah. And you haven't been stopped?"" ""I did not get a ticket."" I said, ""Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but come on, come on, come on."" ""OK, so I stopped at a light and there's a guy, you know, in the back."" ""Would this guy have, like, a blue uniform and a terrified look on his face?"" ""You weren't there, don't start."" ""Come on. You got a ticket?"" ""No."" She explained, ""The man"" — I have to tell you as she did, because it loses something if I don't, you know — ""he come to the window, and he does a thing like this, which tells me he's pretty old, you know. So I look up and I'm thinking, maybe he's still going to think I'm kind of cute."" ""Ma, are you still doing that?"" ""If it works, it works, baby. So, I say, 'Perdon, yo no hablo ingles.' Well, wouldn't you know, he had been in Honduras for the Peace Corps."" (Laughter) So he's talking to her, and at some point she says, ""Then, you know, it was it. That was it. It was done."" ""Yeah? What? He gave you a ticket? He didn't give you a ticket? What?"" ""No, I look up, and the light, she change."" (Laughter) You should be terrified. Now, I don't know if she's toying with me, kind of like a cat batting back a mouse, batting back a mouse — left paw, right paw, left paw, right paw — but by now, we've reached the mall. Now, you have all been at a mall during the holidays, yes? Talk to me. Yes. Yes. You can say yes. Audience: Yes. Carmen Agra Deedy: All right, then you know that you have now entered parking lot purgatory, praying to that saint of perpetual availability that as you join that serpentine line of cars crawling along, some guy's going to turn on the brake lights just as you pull up behind him. But that doesn't happen most of the time, right? So, first I say, ""Ma, why are we here?"" ""You mean, like, in the car?"" ""No, don't — why are we here today? It's Saturday. It's the holidays."" ""Because I have to exchange your father's underwear."" Now, see, this is the kind of Machiavellian thinking, that you really have to — you know, in my mind, it's a rabbit's warren, this woman's mind. Do I want to walk in, because unless I have Ariadne's thread to anchor — enough metaphors for you? — somewhere, I may not get out. But you know. (Laughter) ""Why do we have to take pop's underwear back now? And why? What is wrong with his underwear?"" ""It will upset you."" ""It won't upset me. Why? What? Is something wrong with him?"" ""No, no, no. The only thing with him is, he's an idiot. I sent him to the store, which was my first mistake, and he went to buy underwear, and he bought the grippers, and he's supposed to buy the boxers."" ""Why?"" ""I read it on the Intersnet. You cannot have children."" ""Oh, my God!"" (Laughter) Olivia? Huh? Huh? By now, we have now crawled another four feet, and my mother finally says to me, ""I knew it, I knew it. I'm an immigrant. We make a space. What I tell you? Right there."" And she points out the passenger window, and I look out, and three — three — aisles down, ""Look, the Chevy."" You want to laugh, but you don't know — you're that politically corrected, have you noticed? Correct the other direction now, it's OK. ""Look, the Chevy — he's coming this way."" ""Mama, mama, mama, wait, wait, wait. The Chevy is three aisles away."" She looks at me like I'm her, you know, her moron child, the cretin, the one she's got to speak to very slowly and distinctly. ""I know that, honey. Get out of the car and go stand in the parking space till I get there."" OK, I want a vote. Come on, come on. No, no. How many of you once in your — you were a kid, you were an adult — you stood in a parking space to hold it for someone? See, we're a secret club with a secret handshake. (Laughter) And years of therapy later, we're doing great. We're doing great. We're doing fine. Well, I stood up to her. This is — you know, you'd think by now I'm — and still holding? I said, ""No way, ma, you have embarrassed me my entire life."" Of course, her comeback is, ""When have I embarrassed you?"" (Spanish) And she's still talking while she puts the car in park, hits the emergency brake, opens the door, and with a spryness astounding in a woman her age, she jumps out of the car, knocks out the phone books, and then she walks around — she's carrying her cheap Kmart purse with her — around the front of the car. She has amazing land speed for a woman her age, too. Before I know it, she has skiddled across the parking lot and in between the cars, and people behind me, with that kind of usual religious charity that the holidays bring us, wah-wah wah-wah. ""I'm coming."" Italian hand signals follow. I scoot over. I close the door. I leave the phone books. This is new and fast, just so you — are you still with us? We'll wait for the slow ones. OK. I start, and this is where a child says to me — and the story doesn't work if I tell you about her before, because this is my laconic child. A brevity, brevity of everything with this child. You know, she eats small portions. Language is something to be meted out in small phonemes, you know — just little hmm, hmm-hmm. She carries a mean spiral notebook and a pen. She wields great power. She listens, because that's what people who tell stories do first. But she pauses occasionally and says, ""How do you spell that? What year? OK."" When she writes the expose in about 20 years, don't believe a word of it. But this is my daughter, Lauren, my remarkable daughter, my borderline Asperger's kid. Bless you, Dr. Watson. She says, ""Ma, you got to look!"" Now, when this kid says I got to look, you know. But it isn't like I haven't seen this crime scene before. I grew up with this woman. I said, ""Lauren, you know what, give me a play-by-play. I can't."" ""No, mama, you got to look."" I got to look. You got to look. Don't you want to look? There she is. I look in bewildered awe: she's standing, those Rockports slightly apart, but grounded. She's holding out that cheap Kmart purse, and she is wielding it. She's holding back tons of steel with the sheer force of her little personality, in that crone-ish voice, saying things like, ""Back it up, buddy! No, it's reserved!"" (Laughter) Ready? Brace yourselves. Here it comes. ""No, my daughter, she's coming in the Buick. Honey, sit up so they can see you."" Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I finally come — and now, it's the South. I don't know what part of the country you live in. I think we all secretly love stories. We all secretly want our blankie and our Boo Bear. We want to curl up and say, ""Tell it to me, tell it to me. Come on, honey, tell it to me."" But in the South, we love a good story. People have pulled aside, I mean, they've come out of that queue line, they have popped their trunks, pulled out lawn chairs and cool drinks. Bets are placed. ""I'm with the little lady. Damn!"" (Laughter) And she's bringing me in with a slight salsa movement. She is, after all, Cuban. I'm thinking, ""Accelerator, break. Accelerator, break."" Like you've never thought that in your life? Right? Yeah. I pull in. I put the car in park. Engine's still running — mine, not the car. I jump out next to her going, ""Don't you move!"" ""I'm not going anywhere."" She's got front seat in a Greek tragedy. I come out, and there's Esther. She's hugging the purse. ""Que?"" Which means ""what,"" and so much more. (Laughter) ""Ma, have you no shame? People are watching us all around,"" right? Now, some of them you've got to make up, people. Secret of the trade. Guess what? Some of these stories I sculpt a little, here and there. Some, they're just right there, right there. Put them right there. She says this to me. After I say — let me refresh you — ""have you no shame?"" ""No. I gave it up with pantyhose — they're both too binding."" (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah, you can clap, but then you're about 30 seconds from the end. I'm about to snap like a brittle twig, when suddenly someone taps me on the shoulder. Intrepid soul. I'm thinking, ""This is my kid. How dare she? She jumped out of that car."" That's OK, because my mother yells at me, I yell at her. It's a beautiful hierarchy, and it works. (Laughter) I turn around, but it's not a child. It's a young woman, a little taller than I, pale green, amused eyes. With her is a young man — husband, brother, lover, it's not my job. And she says, ""Pardon me, ma'am"" — that's how we talk down there — ""is that your mother?"" I said, ""No, I follow little old women around parking lots to see if they'll stop. Yes, it's my mother!"" The boy, now, he says. ""Well, what my sister meant"" — they look at each other, it's a knowing glance — ""God, she's crazy!"" I said, (Spanish), and the young girl and the young boy say, ""No, no, honey, we just want to know one more thing."" I said, ""Look, please, let me take care of her, OK, because I know her, and believe me, she's like a small atomic weapon, you know, you just want to handle her really gingerly."" And the girl goes, ""I know, but, I mean, I swear to God, she reminds us of our mother."" I almost miss it. He turns to her on the heel of his shoe. It's a half-whisper, ""God, I miss her."" They turn then, shoulder to shoulder, and walk away, lost in their own reverie. Memories of some maddening woman who was the luck of their DNA draw. And I turn to Esther, who's rocking on those 'ports, and says, ""You know what, honey?"" ""What, ma?"" ""I'm going to drive you crazy probably for about 14, 15 more years, if you're lucky, but after that, honey, you're going to miss me."" (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carmen_agra_deedy_spins_stories
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"[SHIT]This is arguably the back end of the design of animals.(Laughter)But the reason I put this up here is because when I was in Africa last year, my wife and I were driving around, we had this wonderful guide, who showed us something that surprised both of us, and it was very revealing in terms of the fascination that comes with the design of animals. It turns out that in about the 1880s, the missionaries came to Africa to spread the word of Christianity, to teach English to the natives. And they brought blackboards and chalk. And I'd like you to imagine that that's a blackboard, and I just used some chalk on there. And they brought quite a bit of this stuff. But over the years, the blackboards were fine, but they ran out of chalk. And this is a real crisis for them.And that's where the hyena comes in. The hyena is probably the most perfectly designed scavenging animal in the world. It strip-mines carcasses, and it has amazing teeth, because it enables the hyena to essentially eat bones. Now, the end product of that action is up on the board here. What the missionaries would do is, they'd walk around and they'd pick up hyena shit. And the incredible thing about hyena shit is, it makes great chalk.(Laughter)That's not what I'm here to talk about, but it is a fascinating aspect of animal design. What I'm here to talk about is the camel. When I started talking to Richard about what I was going to speak about, I had recently come back from Jordan, where I had an amazing experience with a camel.(Laughter)And we were in the desert.Richard Wurman: That's the end! Keith Bellows: Yeah, yeah.We were in the desert, in Wadi Rum, in a small Jeep. There were four of us, two Bedouin drivers. You can just imagine, this expanse is an ocean of sand, 105 degrees, one water bottle. And we were driving in what they told us was their very, very best Jeep. Didn't look like it to me. And as we started to go through the desert, the Jeep broke down. The guys got out, they put the hood up, they started working under the hood, got it going again. About a hundred yards, it broke down. This went on about 6-7 times, we were getting more and more alarmed, we were also getting deeper and deeper into the desert.And eventually, our worst nightmare happened: they flooded the engine. And they said, ""Ah, no problem! We just get out and walk."" And we said, ""We get out and walk?"" One water bottle, remember, guys, four people. And they said, ""Yeah, yeah, we'll walk. We'll find some camels."" We got out and walked, and sure enough, about half a mile, we came over the crest of this hill, and there was a huge gathering of Bedouin with their camels. The guy went up and started dickering, and 10 dollars later, we had four camels. They went down like elevators; we got on them. They went back up, and the Bedouin, each Bedouin, four of them, got behind each of the camels with a little whip. And they started slashing away at the back of the camels, and they started galloping. And if you've ever been on a camel, it is a very, very uncomfortable ride. There's also one other aspect about these camels. About every 10 steps, they lean back and try to take a chunk out of your leg.(Laughter)So we kept on going, and this camel kept on trying to take a chunk out of my leg. And eventually, three miles later, we arrived at our destination, where a Jeep was supposed to meet us. And the camels come down again like elevators, we sort of clumsily get off, and they, obviously, try to take another chunk out of my leg. And I've developed a very wonderful relationship with this creature by this point, and I've realized that this is a mean son of a bitch. And much meaner, by the way, than the Bedouin who greeted me and tried to sell me one of his 26 daughters to take back to the States.So as we talked, Richard and I, I said, ""You know, maybe I should bring a camel. It's the best designed animal in the world."" He went, ""Nah. I don't think we want to be bringing a camel."" And you should be really glad we decided not to bring the camel. So I did the next best thing. I went to the Washington Zoo. Richard said, ""I want you to get up close and personal with this camel. I want you to inspect its mouth, look at its teeth. Go underneath it. Go above it. Go around it. Pull its tail up; take a look in there. I want you to get as close to that camel as you possibly can.""So, I got a National Geographic film crew. We went down there, and I took one look at this camel. It is a 2,000 pound creature who is in rut.(Laughter)Now, if you've ever seen a 2,000 pound camel in rut, it is a scary, scary thing to behold. And if Richard thought I was getting in the ring with that camel, someone was smoking Bedouin high grade.(Laughter)So we got as close to it as possible, and I'm going to share this. Chris, if you want to roll this film. Then I'm going to show you a little bit more about the design of camels.Do you want to roll the film?(Adventure music)(Video) Hello. This is Keith Bellows with the TED National Geographic Camel Investigation Unit. I'm here to look at the ultimate desert machine.(Music continues)Keith Bellows: And you'll note I started chewing gum because I was around this camel all day.(Video) That's it, OK. No! See, now he's getting a little overexcited. So we'll need to be very careful around him. Don't let him get you. Now, you can see copious amounts of saliva in there. I always called myself the unstable stable boy. Their nose, you can see his nose is flared right now. When they're in rut, they're similar to seals in the way, like, a seal has to open its nose to breathe. And they're similar. They have to consciously open their nose.KB: Ears?SK: They are small. But they have excellent hearing. But not big; for instance, in zebras, they have a huge ear that's very mobile, so they can actually turn them both around. And they use them in the same way we use our binocular vision. They use that to pinpoint sound. The desert's extremely windy as well as being very cold. So not only do they have the very long eyelashes, but there's the secondary — I guess you'd call it the [unclear] or whatever. It's this hair that's above the eyes, and below it, it's longer.Most people think that the humps store water. They don't. They store fat. Now, I'm not a chemist, but basically what happens is the fat is oxidized by their breathing. And that will turn it into actually usable water. Like a lot of predators, they walk on their toes. But there's a big fat pad in there that squishes out. They're like sun shoes, but, you know, with sand. Hooves? They don't have traditional hooves, but they do have one, like, big nail.(Audience laughter)You can't really see too clear. The fur's kind of grown over. But they use their tails a lot, especially in rut. He will urinate and spin his tail to spread the urine around and make him more attractive. I don't know why that would be, but it works for them. So, what the hell.(Audience laughter)Now, they will also defecate in certain areas. Generally, they poop wherever they want to, but during their rut, they will defecate in perimeter areas. I don't know if you've read or heard about the sub-sonic sounds from elephants, you know what I mean, like, ""Br-r-r!"" These big, big rumbling sounds. He will do the same thing. You can actually see, right here, it will vibrate. We weigh our animals. Unfortunately, he's a very aggressive animal, so he's actually destroyed some of the scales. We had these big things that I weigh the bison on, for instance. I'm guessing that he's at least 1,600 pounds. But I would put him closer to 2,000. He's basically a walking mulch pile. We're kind of like buds, but I'm also a male as well.KB: He sees you as competition? Senior Keeper: Yeah, exactly. And it makes him very dangerous at this time of year. Don't even think about it. Don't think about it!But now, we're going to meet. Out! Out! Out! No. Out!(Music)(Applause)KB: What I didn't show you was, you got that swinging thing going? Well, and you're glad I didn't show you this. One of the other things about the camel's beautiful design is that its penis points backwards. That way the camel can dip its tail in the stream, and just whacker the entire area around him. And that's how he really marks his territory. Now, what you also didn't see was that — and you may have noticed in the pen beside him and, by the way, the camel's name is Suki. In the pen beside him is Jasmine. Jasmine has been his mate for some time. But on this particular occasion, it was very, very clear that as horny as Suki was, Jasmine was having none of it. And so we started thinking. Well, if poor old Suki is in search of a mate, what would Suki do to find the perfect mate?I'm going to show you another film. But before I do, I just want to mention that this animal truly is a sort of the SUV of the sand, the ship of the desert. It's so vital to the inhabitants of the areas in which the camel is found, largely Mongolia and Sahara, that there are 160 words in Arabic to describe the camel. And if this is a creature that was designed by committee, it's certainly been like no committee I've ever been on. So here's what Suki would do in search of a mate. Can you roll it, please?Camel seeking camel Lusty beast desires attractive and sincere mate. I'm seven feet, 2,000 lbs., with brown hair and eyes, long legs — and I'm very well ... hung. I'm TED Camel. The perfect desert machine. I'm smartly designed. Eyelashes that keep out sand and a third eyelash that works like a windshield wiper. A distinguished nose — with nostrils lined to filter out sand and dust and a groove that catches moisture. Amazingly full lips — that allow me to eat practically anything that grows. Callouses on my knees that let me kneel comfortably. Leathery chest pads that beat the heat. Short fur that keeps my skin cool. Long legs that allow heat to escape. And my hump? Ogden Nash once wrote: ""The camel has a single hump; the dromedary two, or else the other way around. I'm never sure. Are you?"" Here's a hint: Bactarian. Dromedary. My hump contains up to 80 lbs. of fat, but doesn't store H2O. I'm built to last. I'm the go-to animal when the oasis is dry. I usually won't sweat until my body reaches 105 ºF, enough to fry an egg. I'm able to lose 40% of my weight without dying. (Most animals would if they lost half that much.) I'll drink 5 to 7 gallons of water a day. But go without for more than a month. I'm powerful. Able to pack up to 400 lbs. of cargo. Outrun a horse — And cover 26 miles on a good day. Camelot. Jackie O. once said that traveling by camel made riding an elephant seem like taking a jet plane. Yet my large, soft feet allow me to navigate sand. (Is that why the Bedouin claim I can dance?) I'm a good provider, too. Bedouins call the camel the Gift of God. No surprise. Tents and rugs are made of my hair. My dried bones are prized as a sort of ivory. My dung is burned as fuel. My milk is used for cheese. ""Camels are like angels,"" a Bedouin once said.(Applause)Thank you. I just want to leave you with one last thought, which is probably the most important thing to take away. Humans, the animal, are pretty lucky creatures because, by and large, we really don't have to adapt to our environment; we adapt our environment to us. And we've seen that repeatedly through this conference, not just this year, but in past years. But this creature that you've just seen ultimately adapts, and keeps adapting and adapting. I think when you look at the animal kingdom, that is one of the most remarkable things. It doesn't have an environment that adapts to it; it has to adapt to the environment.Ricky, thank you very much for having me.RW: That's terrific. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_bellows_on_the_camel_s_hump
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"My thing with school lunch is, it's a social justice issue. I'm the Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. I have 90 employees and 17 locations, 9,600 kids. I'm doing 7,100 meals a day and I've been doing it for two years, trying to change how we feed kids in America. And that's what I want to talk to you a little bit about today. These are some of my kids with a salad bar. I put salad bars in all of our schools when I got there. Everyone says it couldn't be done. Little kids couldn't eat off the salad bar, big kids would spit in it — neither happened.When I took over this, I tried to really figure out, like, what my vision would be. How do we really change children's relationship to food? And I'll tell you why we need to change it, but we absolutely have to change it. And what I came to understand is, we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet, healthy food and healthy kids. And that if we don't do that, the antithesis, although we've heard otherwise, is we're really going to become extinct, because we're feeding our children to death. That's my premise.We're seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker. And the reason this is happening, by and large, is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food, the way the government oversees our food, the way the USDA puts food on kids' plates that's unhealthy, and allows unhealthy food into schools. And by — tacitly, all of us send our kids, or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, to school and tell them to learn, you know, learn what's in those schools. And when you feed these kids bad food, that's what they're learning. So that's really what this is all about.The way we got here is because of big agribusiness. We now live in a country where most of us don't decide, by and large, what we eat. We see big businesses, Monsanto and DuPont, who brought out Agent Orange and stain-resistant carpet. They control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country. These are — 10 companies control much of what's in our grocery stores, much of what people eat. And that's really, really a problem.So when I started thinking about these issues and how I was going to change what kids ate, I really started focusing on what we would teach them. And the very first thing was about regional food — trying to eat food from within our region. And clearly, with what's going on with fossil fuel usage, or when — as the fossil fuel is going away, as oil hits its peak oil, you know, we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should, or could, be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it. So we talked to kids about that, and we really start to feed kids regional food.And then we talk about organic food. Now, most school districts can't really afford organic food, but we, as a nation, have to start thinking about consuming, growing and feeding our children food that's not chock-full of chemicals. We can't keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones. We can't keep doing that. You know, it doesn't work. And the results of that are kids getting sick.One of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics. Seventy percent of all antibiotics consumed in America is consumed in animal husbandry. We are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day. Seventy percent — it's unbelievable. And the result of it is, we have diseases. We have things like E. coli that we can't fix, that we can't make kids better when they get sick. And, you know, certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed, but it's an issue in the food supply. One of my favorite facts is that U.S. agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year. That means every one of us, and our children, consumes what would equal a five-pound bag — those bags you have at home. If I had one here and ripped it open, and that pile I would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply, because of the way we consume produce in America.The USDA allows these antibiotics, these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply, and the USDA paid for this ad in Time magazine. Okay, we could talk about Rachel Carson and DDT, but we know it wasn't good for you and me. And that is what the USDA allows in our food supply. And that has to change, you know. The USDA cannot be seen as the be-all and end-all of what we feed our kids and what's allowed. We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart. The antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food. That's what I really try and get people to understand. I really try and teach it to kids. I think it's the most important. It's consuming food in a way in which we'll still have a planet, in which kids will grow up to be healthy, and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we're seeing. It really is just a new idea. I mean, people toss around sustainability, but we have to figure out what sustainability is.In less than 200 years, you know, just in a few generations, we've gone from being 200 — being 100 percent, 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers. We now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers — 2.1 million prisoners, 1.9 million farmers. And we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison, and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child. It's no wonder, you know, we have criminals.(Laughter)And what's happening is, we're getting sick. We're getting sick and our kids are getting sick. It is about what we feed them. What goes in is what we are. We really are what we eat. And if we continue down this path, if we continue to feed kids bad food, if we continue not to teach them what good food is, what's going to happen? You know, what is going to happen? What's going to happen to our whole medical system? What's going to happen is, we're going to have kids that have a life less long than our own. The CDC, the Center for Disease Control, has said, of the children born in the year 2000 — those seven- and eight-year-olds today — one out of every three Caucasians, one out of every two African-Americans and Hispanics are going to have diabetes in their lifetime. And if that's not enough, they've gone on to say, most before they graduate high school. This means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade. Within a decade.What's going to happen? Well, the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents. And it's because of what we feed them. Because eight-year-olds don't get to decide — and if they do, you should be in therapy. You know, we are responsible for what kids eat. But oops, maybe they're responsible for what kids eat. Big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids. 20 billion dollars a year. 10,000 ads most kids see. They spend 500 dollars for every one dollar — 500 dollars marketing foods that kids shouldn't eat for every one dollar marketing healthy, nutritious food. The result of which is kids think they're going to die if they don't have chicken nuggets.You know that everybody thinks they should be eating more, and more, and more. This is the USDA portion size, that little, tiny thing. And the one over there, that's bigger than my head, is what McDonald's and Burger King and those big companies think we should eat. And why can they serve that much? Why can we have 29-cent Big Gulps and 99-cent double burgers? It's because of the way the government commodifies food, and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really, really cheap. Which is why I say it's a social justice issue.Now, I said I'm doing this in Berkeley, and you might think, ""Oh, Berkeley. Of course you can do it in Berkeley."" Well, this is the food I found 24 months ago. This is not even food. This is the stuff we were feeding our kids: Extremo Burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches. Everything came in plastic, in cardboard. The only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter. The only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher, because if it didn't come in a can, it came frozen in a box. The USDA allows this. The USDA allows all of this stuff. In case you can't tell, that's, like, pink Danish and some kind of cupcakes. Chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, chocolate milk with high fructose, canned fruit cocktail — a reimbursable meal.That's what the government says is okay to feed our kids. It ain't okay. You know what? It is not okay. And we, all of us, have to understand that this is about us, that we can make a difference here. Now I don't know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets, but I'm sure you're rich if you did. But whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart, a giraffe, a star? Well, Tyson did, because there's no chicken in the chicken. And that they could figure it out, that we could sell this stuff to kids. You know, what's wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken? But this is what most schools serve. In fact, this may be what a lot of parents serve, as opposed to — this is what we try and serve.We really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food. We really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe. You know, that vegetables are actually colorful, that they have flavor, that carrots grow in the ground, that strawberries grow in the ground. There's not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush. You know, we have to change the way we teach kids about these things. There's a lot of stuff we can do. There's a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs. There's a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools.Now, in Berkeley, we've gone totally fresh. We have no high-fructose corn syrup, no trans fats, no processed foods. We're cooking from scratch every day. We have 25 percent of our — (Applause) thank you — 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local. We cook. Those are my hands. I get up at 4 a.m. every day and go cook the food for the kids, because this is what we need to do. We can't keep serving kids processed crap, full of chemicals, and expect these are going to be healthy citizens. You're not going to get the next generation, or the generation after, to be able to think like this if they're not nourished. If they're eating chemicals all the time, they're not going to be able to think. They're not going to be smart. You know what? They're just going to be sick.Now one of the things that — what happened when I went into Berkeley is I realized that, you know, this was all pretty amazing to people, very, very different, and I needed to market it. I came up with these calendars that I sent home to every parent. And these calendars really started to lay out my program. Now I'm in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district. So this is a typical menu. This is what we're serving this week at the schools. And you see these recipes on the side? Those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes. They do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes. They also may be growing them. And we serve them in the cafeterias. If we're going to change children's relationship to food, it's delicious, nutritious food in the cafeterias, hands-on experience — you're looking in cooking and gardening classes — and academic curriculum to tie it all together.Now you've probably garnered that I don't love the USDA, and I don't have any idea what to do with their pyramid, this upside-down pyramid with a rainbow over the top, I don't know. You know, run up into the end of the rainbow, I don't know what you do with it. So, I came up with my own. This is available on my website in English and Spanish, and it's a visual way to talk to kids about food. The really tiny hamburger, the really big vegetables. We have to start changing this. We have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference. We have cooking classes — we have cooking classrooms in our schools. And why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation, maybe two, of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food, one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a TV or computer. What are kids learning? Where is the family time? Where is socialization? Where is discussion? Where is learning to talk? You know, we have to change it.I work with kids a lot. These are kids I work with in Harlem. EATWISE — Enlightened and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating. We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts aren't breakfast. We have to teach kids that if they're on a diet of refined sugar, they go up and down, just like if they're on a diet of crack. And we have to pull it all together. We have composting in all of our schools. We have recycling in all of our schools. You know, the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important, we have to teach kids about in school. It has to be so much a part of them that they really get it. Because, you know what, many of us are sort of at the end of our careers, and we need to be giving these kids — these young kids, the next generation — the tools to save themselves and save the planet.One of the things I do a lot is public-private partnerships. I work with private companies who are willing to do R & D with me, who are willing to do distribution for me, who are really willing to work to go into schools. Schools are underfunded. Most schools in America spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child. That comes down to under five dollars an hour. Most of you spend 10, 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them. So we're spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system. And if we're going to change it, and change how we feed kids, we really have to rethink that. So, public and private partnerships, advocacy groups, working with foundations. In our school district, the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services. And I think if every school district allocated a half to one percent, we could start to really fix this program.We really need to change it. It's going to take more money. Of course, it's not all about food; it's also about kids getting exercise. And one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch. It's sort of this ""duh"" thing. You know, if you have kids coming into lunch and all they're going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess, you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside. And then, at one in the afternoon, they're totally crashing. These are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up, because they haven't had lunch. So if the only thing they'd have to do after lunch is go to class, believe me, they're going to sit there and eat their lunch.We need to — we need to educate. We need to educate the kids. We need to educate the staff. I had 90 employees. Two were supposed to be cooks — none could. And, you know, I'm not that better off now. But we really have to educate. We have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again, because, of course, they don't — because we've had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long. We need 40-minute lunches — most schools have 20-minute lunches — and lunches that are time-appropriate. There was just a big study done, and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning. That is not lunchtime.You know, it's crazy. It's crazy what we're doing. And just remember, at very least tacitly, this is what we're teaching children as what they should be doing. I think if we're going to fix this, one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the National School Lunch Program. Instead of the National School Lunch Program being under the USDA, I think it should be under CDC. If we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative, and we started thinking about food as health, then I think we wouldn't have corn dogs as lunch.Okay, Finance 101 on this, and this — I'm sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece, because I think this is something we all have to understand. The National School Lunch Program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year. That number probably needs to double. People say, ""Oh my God, where are we going to get 8 billion?"" In this country, we're spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food. We spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids. We spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables, which is why we need all the diet aids. We spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today, with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes. 200 billion.So you know what, when we talk about needing 8 billion more, it's not a lot. That 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents — that's what the government allocates for lunch. Most school districts spend two thirds of that on payroll and overhead. That means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools — most schools, 80 to 90 cents. In L.A., it's 56 cents. So we're spending less than a dollar, OK, on lunch. Now I don't know about you, but I go to Starbucks and Pete's and places like that, and venti latte in San Francisco is five dollars. One gourmet coffee, one, is more — we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools.You know what? We should be ashamed. We, as a country, should be ashamed at that. The richest country. In our country, it's the kids that need it the most, who get this really, really lousy food. It's the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that can't even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food. And those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick. Those are the same kids who we should be taking care of.We can all make a difference. That every single one of us, whether we have children, whether we care about children, whether we have nieces or nephews, or anything — that we can make a difference. Whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids, whether you take your kids, or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers' market. Just do tastings with them. Sit down and care. And on the macro level, we're in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign, and of all the things we're asking all of these potential leaders, what about asking for the health of our children? Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches
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"Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy. They go to see Michelangelo's ""David,"" and when they finally come face to face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks. The first guy — we'll call him Adam — is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form. The second guy — we'll call him Bill — is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center. So here's my question for you: which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore?I don't need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes. We all know that it's Bill. And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality. It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. You can understand why artists are so different from accountants. You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of food they like to eat. Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee's, but not anybody that you know. (Laughter) This trait also tells us a lot about politics. The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae says that, ""Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views"" — they like a society which is open and changing — ""whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views.""This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. So here's the description of a group I found on the Web. What kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all? This is from some guy named Ted. (Laughter) Well, let's see now, if openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal? Let's find out. I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center — on social issues, we're talking about, primarily — or conservative, and I'll give a third option, because I know there are a number of libertarians in the audience. So, right now, please raise your hand — down in the simulcast rooms, too, let's let everybody see who's here — please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center. Please raise your hand high right now. OK. Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian. OK, about a — two dozen. And please raise your hand if you'd say you are right of center or conservative. One, two, three, four, five — about eight or 10.OK. This is a bit of a problem. Because if our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking. When the liberal team loses, as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. (Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. We think they must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. (Laughter) (Applause) So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix. And by the matrix, I mean literally the matrix, like the movie ""The Matrix.""But I'm here today to give you a choice. You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix. Now, because I know — (Applause) — OK, I assume that answers my question. I was going to ask you which one you picked, but no need. You're all high in openness to experience, and besides, it looks like it might even taste good, and you're all epicures. So anyway, let's go with the red pill. Let's study some moral psychology and see where it takes us.Let's start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. The best definition of innateness I've ever seen — this just clarifies so many things for me — is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. He says, ""The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."" OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind? To find out, my colleague, Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? That you find across cultures and even across species? We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.The first one is harm/care. We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity. There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. This Norman Rockwell painting is called ""The Golden Rule,"" and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED.The third foundation is in-group/loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings. It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.The fourth foundation is authority/respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called ""The Allegory Of Chastity,"" but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body.I believe these are the five best candidates for what's written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with, at least a preparedness to learn all of these things. But as my son, Max, grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised? And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in Lynchburg, Virginia? To think about culture variation, let's try a different metaphor. If there really are five systems at work in the mind — five sources of intuitions and emotions — then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel. And my colleagues, Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham, and I, made a questionnaire, which we put up on the Web at www.YourMorals.org. And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can too. Here are the results. Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens. On the left, I've plotted the scores for liberals; on the right, those for conservatives; in the middle, the moderates. The blue line shows you people's responses on the average of all the harm questions.So, as you see, people care about harm and care issues. They give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives — the line slopes down. Same story for fairness. But look at the other three lines. For liberals, the scores are very low. Liberals are basically saying, ""No, this is not morality. In-group, authority, purity — this stuff has nothing to do with morality. I reject it."" But as people get more conservative, the values rise. We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel, or two-foundation morality. Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality.We find this in every country we look at. Here's the data for 1,100 Canadians. I'll just flip through a few other slides. The U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity. Which shows that within any country, the disagreement isn't over harm and fairness. Everybody — I mean, we debate over what's fair — but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity.This effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question. In one recent study, we asked people to suppose you're about to get a dog. You picked a particular breed, you learned some new information about the breed. Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded, and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal? Well, if you are a liberal, you say, ""Hey, that's great!"" Because liberals like to say, ""Fetch, please."" (Laughter) But if you're conservative, that's not so attractive. If you're conservative, and you learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family, and doesn't warm up quickly to strangers, for conservatives, well, loyalty is good — dogs ought to be loyal. But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. (Laughter)So, you might say, OK, there are these differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes those three other foundations moral? Aren't those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and Puritanism? What makes them moral? The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, ""The Garden of Earthly Delights."" In the first panel, we see the moment of creation. All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, where they're supposed to be. But then, given the way of the world, things change. We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. Some of you might recognize this as the '60s. (Laughter) But the '60s inevitably gives way to the '70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. Of course, Bosch called this hell.So this triptych, these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy. But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here's the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in Nature a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter had people play a commons dilemma. A game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, and then the experimenter doubles what's in there, and then it's all divided among the players. So it's a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves don't really benefit from their own sacrifice. But you really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to a free ride. And what happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative — and this is all played anonymously. On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see, ""You know what, other people aren't doing so much though. I don't want to be a sucker. I'm not going to cooperate."" And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good, down to close to zero.But then — and here's the trick — Fehr and Gachter said, on the seventh round, they told people, ""You know what? New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that."" And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. It shoots up and it keeps going up. There's a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It's not enough to just appeal to people's good motives. It really helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate. There's even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior.Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other, and then being more effective at competing with other groups. I think that's probably right, although this is a controversial issue. But I'm particularly interested in religion, and the origin of religion, and in what it does to us and for us. Because I think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is really simple. It's just a lot of rock, and then a lot of water and wind, and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. It's not that complicated. This is what's really complicated, that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa, or on the frozen shores of Alaska, and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon, and Rome, and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen? This is an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon.The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you do need to be concerned about harm, you do need a psychology of justice. But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups, and if those sub-groups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends. And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Because liberals reject three of these foundations. They say ""No, let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership."" They say, ""Let's question authority."" And they say, ""Keep your laws off my body.""Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority, traditional morality can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don't fit in. So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. This guy's shirt says, ""Stop bitching, start a revolution."" If you're high in openness to experience, revolution is good, it's change, it's fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose. So as Edmund Burke said, ""The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights."" This was after the chaos of the French Revolution. So once you see this — once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability — then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix.This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Think about yin and yang. Yin and yang aren't enemies. Yin and yang don't hate each other. Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world. You find the same thing in Hinduism. There are many high gods in Hinduism. Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. This image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body. You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god. You have the markings of Shiva on the right, Shiva's the liberal god. And they work together. You find the same thing in Buddhism. These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. From the Zen master Seng-ts'an: ""If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease."" Now unfortunately, it's a disease that has been caught by many of the world's leaders. But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself, do you accept this? Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil? Can you be not for or against anything?So, what's the point? What should you do? Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. So what should you do? Am I telling you to not strive? Am I telling you to embrace Seng-ts'an and stop, stop with this struggle of for and against? No, absolutely not. I'm not saying that. This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight — to fight wrongs, to solve problems.But as we learned from Samantha Power, in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello, you can't just go charging in, saying, ""You're wrong, and I'm right."" Because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are — understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we're right — and then step out, even if it's just for a moment, step out — check in with Seng-ts'an. Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody does think they're right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons — even if you disagree with them — everybody has some reasons for what they're doing. Step out. And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition. Think about the Dalai Lama. Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama — and it comes from his moral humility.So I think the point — the point of my talk, and I think the point of TED — is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better. People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place. But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth. And so I think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
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"I think it'll be a relief to some people and a disappointment to others that I'm not going to talk about vaginas today. I began ""The Vagina Monologues"" because I was worried about vaginas. I'm very worried today about this notion, this world, this prevailing kind of force of security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Real security, security checks, security watch, security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? What does anyone mean when they talk about real security? And why have we, as Americans particularly, become a nation that strives for security above all else? In fact, I think that security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure. And that's actually the good news.This is, of course, unless your whole life is about being secure. I think that when that is the focus of your life, these are the things that happen. You can't travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle. You can't allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time, as they might confuse you or challenge you. You can't open yourself to new experiences, new people, new ways of doing things — they might take you off course. You can't not know who you are, so you cling to hard-matter identity. You become a Christian, Muslim, Jew. You're an Indian, Egyptian, Italian, American. You're a heterosexual or a homosexual, or you never have sex. Or at least, that's what you say when you identify yourself. You become part of an ""us."" In order to be secure, you defend against ""them."" You cling to your land because it is your secure place. You must fight anyone who encroaches upon it. You become your nation. You become your religion. You become whatever it is that will freeze you, numb you and protect you from doubt or change. But all this does, actually, is shut down your mind. In reality, it does not really make you safer.I was in Sri Lanka, for example, three days after the tsunami, and I was standing on the beaches and it was absolutely clear that, in a matter of five minutes, a 30-foot wave could rise up and desecrate a people, a population and lives. All this striving for security, in fact, has made you much more insecure because now you have to watch out all the time. There are people not like you — people who you now call enemies. You have places you cannot go, thoughts you cannot think, worlds that you can no longer inhabit. And so you spend your days fighting things off, defending your territory and becoming more entrenched in your fundamental thinking. Your days become devoted to protecting yourself. This becomes your mission. That is all you do. Ideas get shorter. They become sound bytes. There are evildoers and saints, criminals and victims.There are those who, if they're not with us, are against us. It gets easier to hurt people because you do not feel what's inside them. It gets easier to lock them up, force them to be naked, humiliate them, occupy them, invade them and kill them, because they are only obstacles now to your security. In six years, I've had the extraordinary privilege through V-Day, a global movement against [violence against] women, to travel probably to 60 countries, and spend a great deal of time in different portions. I've met women and men all over this planet, who through various circumstances — war, poverty, racism, multiple forms of violence — have never known security, or have had their illusion of security forever devastated. I've spent time with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who were essentially brutalized and censored. I've been in Bosnian refugee camps. I was with women in Pakistan who have had their faces melted off with acid. I've been with girls all across America who were date-raped, or raped by their best friends when they were drugged one night.One of the amazing things that I've discovered in my travels is that there is this emerging species. I loved when he was talking about this other world that's right next to this world. I've discovered these people, who, in V-Day world, we call Vagina Warriors. These particular people, rather than getting AK-47s, or weapons of mass destruction, or machetes, in the spirit of the warrior, have gone into the center, the heart of pain, of loss. They have grieved it, they have died into it, and allowed and encouraged poison to turn into medicine. They have used the fuel of their pain to begin to redirect that energy towards another mission and another trajectory.These warriors now devote themselves and their lives to making sure what happened to them doesn't happen to anyone else. There are thousands if not millions of them on the planet. I venture there are many in this room. They have a fierceness and a freedom that I believe is the bedrock of a new paradigm. They have broken out of the existing frame of victim and perpetrator. Their own personal security is not their end goal, and because of that, because, rather than worrying about security, because the transformation of suffering is their end goal, I actually believe they are creating real safety and a whole new idea of security. I want to talk about a few of these people that I've met.Tomorrow, I am going to Cairo, and I'm so moved that I will be with women in Cairo who are V-Day women, who are opening the first safe house for battered women in the Middle East. That will happen because women in Cairo made a decision to stand up and put themselves on the line, and talk about the degree of violence that is happening in Egypt, and were willing to be attacked and criticized. And through their work over the last years, this is not only happening that this house is opening, but it's being supported by many factions of the society who never would have supported it. Women in Uganda this year, who put on ""The Vagina Monologues"" during V-Day, actually evoked the wrath of the government.And, I love this story so much. There was a cabinet meeting and a meeting of the presidents to talk about whether ""Vaginas"" could come to Uganda. And in this meeting — it went on for weeks in the press, two weeks where there was huge discussion. The government finally made a decision that ""The Vagina Monologues"" could not be performed in Uganda. But the amazing news was that because they had stood up, these women, and because they had been willing to risk their security, it began a discussion that not only happened in Uganda, but all of Africa. As a result, this production, which had already sold out, every single person in that 800-seat audience, except for 10 people, made a decision to keep the money. They raised 10,000 dollars on a production that never occurred.There's a young woman named Carrie Rethlefsen in Minnesota. She's a high school student. She had seen ""The Vagina Monologues"" and she was really moved. And as a result, she wore an ""I heart my vagina"" button to her high school in Minnesota.(Laughter)She was basically threatened to be expelled from school. They told her she couldn't love her vagina in high school, that it was not a legal thing, that it was not a moral thing, that it was not a good thing. So she really struggled with this, what to do, because she was a senior and she was doing well in her school and she was threatened expulsion. So what she did is she got all her friends together — I believe it was 100, 150 students all wore ""I love my vagina"" T-shirts, and the boys wore ""I love her vagina"" T-shirts to school.(Laughter)Now this seems like a fairly, you know, frivolous, but what happened as a result of that, is that that school now is forming a sex education class. It's beginning to talk about sex, it's beginning to look at why it would be wrong for a young high school girl to talk about her vagina publicly or to say that she loved her vagina publicly.I know I've talked about Agnes here before, but I want to give you an update on Agnes. I met Agnes three years ago in the Rift Valley. When she was a young girl, she had been mutilated against her will. That mutilation of her clitoris had actually obviously impacted her life and changed it in a way that was devastating. She made a decision not to go and get a razor or a glass shard, but to devote her life to stopping that happening to other girls. For eight years, she walked through the Rift Valley. She had this amazing box that she carried and it had a torso of a woman's body in it, a half a torso, and she would teach people, everywhere she went, what a healthy vagina looked like and what a mutilated vagina looked like. In the years that she walked, she educated parents, mothers, fathers. She saved 1,500 girls from being cut.When V-Day met her, we asked her how we could support her and she said, ""Well, if you got me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster."" So, we bought her a Jeep. In the year she had the Jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. So, we said, what else could we do? She said, ""If you help me get money, I could open a house."" Three years ago, Agnes opened a safe house in Africa to stop mutilation. When she began her mission eight years ago, she was reviled, she was detested, she was completely slandered in her community. I am proud to tell you that six months ago, she was elected the deputy mayor of Narok.(Applause)I think what I'm trying to say here is that if your end goal is security, and if that's all you're focusing on, what ends up happening is that you create not only more insecurity in other people, but you make yourself far more insecure. Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist. Not running from loss, but entering grief, surrendering to sorrow. Real security is not knowing something, when you don't know it. Real security is hungering for connection rather than power. It cannot be bought or arranged or made with bombs. It is deeper, it is a process, it is acute awareness that we are all utterly inter-bended, and one action by one being in one tiny town has consequences everywhere. Real security is not only being able to tolerate mystery, complexity, ambiguity, but hungering for them and only trusting a situation when they are present.Something happened when I began traveling in V-Day, eight years ago. I got lost. I remember being on a plane going from Kenya to South Africa, and I had no idea where I was. I didn't know where I was going, where I'd come from, and I panicked. I had a total anxiety attack. And then I suddenly realized that it absolutely didn't matter where I was going, or where I had come from because we are all essentially permanently displaced people. All of us are refugees. We come from somewhere and we are hopefully traveling all the time, moving towards a new place. Freedom means I may not be identified as any one group, but that I can visit and find myself in every group. It does not mean that I don't have values or beliefs, but it does mean I am not hardened around them. I do not use them as weapons. In the shared future, it will be just that, shared. The end goal will [be] becoming vulnerable, realizing the place of our connection to one another, rather than becoming secure, in control and alone. Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: And how are you doing? Are you exhausted? On a typical day, do you wake up with hope or gloom? Eve Ensler: You know, I think Carl Jung once said that in order to survive the twentieth century, we have to live with two existing thoughts, opposite thoughts, at the same time. And I think part of what I'm learning in this process is that one must allow oneself to feel grief. And I think as long as I keep grieving, and weeping, and then moving on, I'm fine. When I start to pretend that what I'm seeing isn't impacting me, and isn't changing my heart, then I get in trouble. Because when you spend a lot of time going from place to place, country to country, and city to city, the degree to which women, for example, are violated, and the epidemic of it, and the kind of ordinariness of it, is so devastating to one's soul that you have to take the time, or I have to take the time now, to process that.CA: There are a lot of causes out there in the world that have been talked about, you know, poverty, sickness and so on. You spent eight years on this one. Why this one? EE: I think that if you think about women, women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them, they are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If you think that the U.N. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime, we're talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet, we're talking about the place where we come from, we're talking about parenting. Imagine that you've been raped and you're bringing up a boy child. How does it impact your ability to work, or envision a future, or thrive, as opposed to just survive? What I believe is if we could figure out how to make women safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.","https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_on_security
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"Good morning. My name is David Rose. I am a serial entrepreneur turned serial investor. And by the use of pitching PowerPoints to VCs, I have personally raised tens of millions of dollars from VCs through PowerPoint pitches. And turning to the other side of the equation, I've personally supervised the investment of tens of millions of dollars into companies who have pitched me with PowerPoint presentations. So I think it's safe to say I know a little bit about the process of pitching.So, the very first question you've got to figure out is: What is the single most important thing that a VC is looking for when you come to them pitching your new business idea? There are obviously all kinds of things — business models and financials and markets and this and that. Overall, of all the things that you have to do, what is the single most important thing the VC is going to be investing in? Somebody? What?Audience: People!David Rose: People! You! That's it — you are the person. Therefore, the entire purpose of a VC pitch is to convince them that you are the entrepreneur in whom they are going to invest their money and make a lot of money in return.Now, how do you do this? You can't just walk up and say, ""Hi, I'm a really good guy, good girl, and you should invest in me."" Right? So in the course of your VC pitch — you have a very few minutes; most VC pitches, angel pitches, are about 15 minutes, most should be less than half an hour — people's attention span, after 18 minutes, begins to drop off. Tests have shown. So in that 18 or 10 or five minutes, you have to convey a whole bunch of different characteristics, about 10 different characteristics, while you're standing up there. What's the single most important thing you've got to convey? What?Audience: Integrity.DR: Boy, oh boy, oh boy! That's a straight line, look at that! And I didn't even prompt him. Right, integrity. The key thing. I would much rather invest in, take a chance on, somebody who I know is straight than where there's any possible question of who are they looking out for, and what's going on. So the most important thing is integrity. What's the second most important thing? Let's see if you can get this one.Audience: Self-confidence.DR: Close enough. Passion. Right? Entrepreneurs, by definition, are people who are leaving something else, starting a new world, creating and putting their lifeblood into this thing. You've got to convey passion. If you're not passionate, why should anyone else be, or put money into your company if you're not passionate about it? Integrity, passion: the most important things.Then there's a whole panoply of other things you've got to wrap up in this package you're presenting to a VC. Experience: you've got to be able to say, ""Hey, you know, I've done this before."" ""Done this before"" is starting an enterprise, creating value, and taking something from beginning to end. That's why VCs love to fund serial entrepreneurs — even if you didn't do it right the first time, you've learned the lessons, which puts you in good stead the next time.Along with the experience of starting an enterprise or running something — doesn't have to be a business, it can be an organization in a school, a not-for-profit. But experience in creating an organization.Next: knowledge. If you tell me you're going to be the developer of the map of the human genome, you better know what a human genome is; I want you to have expertise. I don't want somebody who says, ""I've got a great idea in a business I know nothing about. I don't know who the players are, what the market is like."" You've got to know your market, your area.And you have to have the skills that it takes to get a company going. Those skills include everything from technical skills if it's a technology business, to marketing and sales and management and so on. But, you know, not everybody has all these skills. Very few people have the full set of skills it takes to run a company.What else do you require? Well, leadership. You've got to be able to convince us that you either have developed a team that has all those factors in it, or else you can. And you have the charisma and the management style and the ability to get people to follow your lead, to inspire them, to motivate them to be part of your team.Having done all that, what else do I want to know as a VC? I want to know that you have commitment. That you are going to be here to the end. I want you to say — or I want you to convey — that you are going to die if you have to, with your very last breath, your fingernails scratching as they draw you out. You'll keep my money alive and make more from it. I don't want someone who'll cut and run at the first opportunity. Bad things happen. There's never been a venture-funded company where bad things didn't happen. So know that you're committed to the very end.You've got to have vision to see where this is going. I don't want another ""me too"" product. I want somebody who can change the world out there. But on top of that, I need realism, Because while changing the world is great, it doesn't always happen. And before you get to change the world, bad things are going to take place; you have to deal with that. And you have to have rational projections.Finally, you're asking for my money — not just because it's my money, but because it's me. You need to be coachable. I need to know you have the ability to listen. We've had a lot of experience. People who are VCs or angels investing in you have had experience, and they'd like to know that you want to hear that experience.So how do you convey these 10 things in 10 minutes without saying them? You can't say, ""I've got integrity, invest in me!"" You've got to do a whole pitch that conveys this without conveying it. Think about your pitch as a timeline. It starts off, you walk in the door. They know nothing whatsoever about you. You can take them on an emotional — all pitches, all sales presentations, are emotional at some level. You can go up, you can go down, right? And it goes from beginning to end.You walk in, the first thing you've got to do, the overall arc of your presentation, it's got to start like a rocket. You've got maybe 10 seconds — between 10 and 30 seconds, depending on how long the pitch is — to get their attention. In my case, I've invested. I've gotten millions of dollars from PowerPoint pitches. ""I've invested millions."" That should get you right there. This can be a fact or something counterintuitive. It can be a story or an experience. But you've got to grab their emotional attention, focused on you, within that first few seconds. And then from there, you've got to take them on a very solid, steady, upward path, right from beginning to end. Everything has to reinforce this.And you've got to get better and better and better, revving up to the very end, then you've got to — boom! — knock them out of the park. You want to get them to such an emotional high they're ready to write you a check, throw money at you, before you leave.How do you do that? First of all, logical progression. Any time you go backwards, any time you skip a step — imagine walking up a staircase where some of the treads are missing, or the heights are different. You stop, you need to figure out a nice, logical progression. Start with what the market is: Why are you going to do X, Y or Z? And then you've got to tell me how you're going to do it, and what you're going to do. And it's got to flow from beginning to end.You've got to let me know there are touchstones, to tie in to the rest of the world out there. For example, reference companies I've heard of, or basic items in your business. I want to know about things that I can relate to: validators, or anything that tells me somebody else has approved this, or there's outside validation. It can be sales; it can be you got an award for something; it can be people have done it before; it can be your beta tests are going great, whatever. I want to know validation — not just what you're telling me, but that somebody or something else out there says this makes sense. And then, I'm looking for the upside; I need a believable upside. That's two parts; it's got to be upside and believable. The upside means if you tell me that five years out, you're making a million dollars a year, that's not really upside. Telling me you'll be making a billion dollars a year — that's not believable. So it's got to be both.On the other hand are things that take the emotional level down. You have to recover from those. For example, anything that I know is not true. ""We have no competition. Nobody makes a widget like this."" Odds are I know somebody who's made a widget, and the minute you tell me that, I discount half of what you're saying from then on. Anything I don't understand, where I have to make the leap myself, in my own head, will stop the flow of the presentation. So you've got to take me through like a sixth-grader — dub, dub, dub — but without patronizing me. And it's a very tricky path. But if you can do it, it works really well.Anything that's inconsistent within your concept — if you tell me sales of X, Y or Z are 10 million dollars, five slides later, they're five million dollars ... One may have been gross sales, one may have been net sales, but I want to know that all the numbers make sense together.And then, finally: anything that's an error or a typo, or a stupid mistake or a line that's in the wrong place — that shows me that if you can't do a presentation, how can you run a company? So this all feeds in together.The best way to do this is to look at our betters, people who have done this before. Let's look at the most successful technology executive in the business, and see how a presentation goes. Bill Gates's PowerPoint presentation over here. Here's Gates doing a thing for Windows. Is this how to do a PowerPoint presentation? What do you think? No. Who do you think we should look at as our role model?Oh, isn't that funny! There's another great one over here. OK, Steve Jobs. You want absolute — this is the Zen of presentation, right? Here he is, one little guy, black jeans and stuff, on a totally empty stage. What are you focusing on? You're focusing on him! This is Steve Jobs.So are these wonderful long bullet points, whole list of things good? No, they're not. The long bullet points are bad. What's good? Short. Short bullet points. But you know what? Even better than short bullet points are no bullet points. Just give me the headline. And you know what? How many bullet points does Steve Jobs use? Basically, none. What do you do? Best of all, images. Just a simple image. I look at the image; a picture's worth a thousand words. You look at the image and you've got the whole thing. Then you come back to me; you're focused on me, why I'm such a great guy, why you want to invest, why this all makes sense.That said, we only have a very short time, so let's run through the things to include in your presentation. First of all, none of these big, long-titled slides with blah, blah, I'm presenting to so-and-so on X date. I know the day, I know who I am — I don't need all that. Just give me your company logo. I look at the logo, and it ties it to my brain. Then I come back to you. I'm focused on you, OK? You give me your quick, 15-second or 30-second intro, grab my attention. Then you give me a quick business overview. This is not a five-minute pitch. This is, you know, two sentences. ""We build widgets for the X, Y, Z market."" Or, ""We sell services to help do X."" You know, whatever. And that is like the picture on the outside of a jigsaw puzzle box. That lets me know the context. It gives me the armature for the whole thing you'll be going through; it lets me put everything in relation to what you've told me.Then you've got to walk me through, show me who your management team is. I want to know the size of the market. Why is this market worth getting at? I want to know your product, that's very important. Now, this is not a product pitch or sales pitch. I don't want to know all the ins and outs, just what the heck is it? If it's a website, show me a screenshot of your website. Don't do a live demo. Never do a live demo. Do a canned demo, or something that lets me know why people are going to buy whatever it is.Now that I know what you're selling, tell me how you make money on it. For every X you sell, you get Y, or services of Z. I want to know what the business model is on a per-unit basis, or for the actual product you're selling. I want to know who you're selling to in terms of customers and if you have any special relationships that will help you, whether it's a distribution relationship or a producing partner. Again, validation. This helps to say you're bigger than just one little thing over here.But everybody has competition. There's never been a company with no competition, even if the competition is the old way of doing something. I want to know exactly what your competition is, and that will help me judge how you fit into the whole operation. I want to know how you're special.I know what your competition does — how are you going to prevent them from eating your lunch? All this ties into the financial overview. And you can't do a VC pitch without giving me your financials. I want to know a year or two back, or as long as you've been in existence. And I want to know four or five years forward. Five is a bit much. Probably four.And I want to know how that business model, on a product basis, will translate into a company model: How many widgets will you sell? You make X amount per widget. I want to know what the driver is. We'll have 1,000 customers this year and 10,000 the next, our revenues will do this and that. That gives me the whole picture for the next several years into which I'm investing. And I want to know how the money from me will help you get there. You're going to open an offshore plant in China, you're going to spend it all on sales and marketing, you're going to go to Tahiti, whatever.But then comes the ask, where you tell me how much you want. You're looking for 5 million — at what valuation? Two million? 100,000? What's the money in so far? Who invested? I hope you invested — if you can't invest in your own thing, why should I? So I like to know if you have friends and family, or angel investors, or more VCs before. What's the capital structure up until this point? Finally, having done all that, you've now told me the whole thing, so now you bring it back to that conclusion. This is that rocket going up. Hopefully everything has been positive. And everything you say clicks, it all makes sense. And I'm thinking, ""This is really great!""Then you take me back to just your logo on the screen. And I look at the logo — OK, good. Now I come back to you. Nothing else to look at, right? Now you've got to wrap it up to give me the final — boom! — the final pitch that's going to send me into space. Now, in the process of doing this, how do you remember the sequences and do it? You've noticed I'm not looking at the screen, right? The screen is in front of me, so I couldn't even see if I wanted to.So how do I know what's going on? Well, I have a laptop in front of me. You're looking at me and at this. What am I looking at? You think that I'm looking at that? No, I'm looking, actually, at a special version of PowerPoint over here, which shows me the slides ahead and behind, my notes, so I can see what's going on. PowerPoint has this built into every copy of it that's shipped. If you use Apple's Keynote, it's got an even better version. There's another program called Ovation you can get from Adobe that they bought last summer, which helps you run the timers and lets you figure out what's going on.So, here's my wrap-up to take you to the moon, right? I usually do a Top 10, but we don't have time, so: David's Top Five Presentation Tips. Number five: always use presenter mode, or Ovation, or presenter tools. It lets you know exactly where you're going, helps you pace yourself, gives you a timer, the whole bit.Number four: always use remote control. Have you seen me touch the computer? No. Why not? Because I'm using remote control. Always use remote control.Number three: the handouts you give are not your presentation. If you follow my suggestions, you'll have a very spare, Zen-like presentation, which is great to convey who you are and get people emotionally involved, but not good as a handout. You want a handout that gives more information; it has to stand without you.Number two: don't read your speech. Can you imagine?(Reading) ""You should invest in my company ... ""It doesn't work. And the number one presentation tip: never, ever look at the screen. You're making a connection with your audience, and you always want a one-on-one connection. The screen should come up behind you and supplement what you're doing, instead of replace you. And that is how to pitch to a VC.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_s_rose_on_pitching_to_vcs
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"If you ask people about what part of psychology do they think is hard, and you say, ""Well, what about thinking and emotions?"" Most people will say, ""Emotions are terribly hard. They're incredibly complex. They can't — I have no idea of how they work. But thinking is really very straightforward: it's just sort of some kind of logical reasoning, or something. But that's not the hard part.""So here's a list of problems that come up. One nice problem is, what do we do about health? The other day, I was reading something, and the person said probably the largest single cause of disease is handshaking in the West. And there was a little study about people who don't handshake, and comparing them with ones who do handshake. And I haven't the foggiest idea of where you find the ones that don't handshake, because they must be hiding. And the people who avoid that have 30 percent less infectious disease or something. Or maybe it was 31 and a quarter percent. So if you really want to solve the problem of epidemics and so forth, let's start with that. And since I got that idea, I've had to shake hundreds of hands. And I think the only way to avoid it is to have some horrible visible disease, and then you don't have to explain.Education: how do we improve education? Well, the single best way is to get them to understand that what they're being told is a whole lot of nonsense. And then, of course, you have to do something about how to moderate that, so that anybody can — so they'll listen to you. Pollution, energy shortage, environmental diversity, poverty. How do we make stable societies? Longevity. Okay, there're lots of problems to worry about.Anyway, the question I think people should talk about — and it's absolutely taboo — is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be? And it's a sort of choice we have to make.Most people are about 60 inches high or more, and there's these cube laws. So if you make them this big, by using nanotechnology, I suppose — (Laughter) — then you could have a thousand times as many. That would solve the problem, but I don't see anybody doing any research on making people smaller. Now, it's nice to reduce the population, but a lot of people want to have children. And there's one solution that's probably only a few years off. You know you have 46 chromosomes. If you're lucky, you've got 23 from each parent. Sometimes you get an extra one or drop one out, but — so you can skip the grandparent and great-grandparent stage and go right to the great-great-grandparent. And you have 46 people and you give them a scanner, or whatever you need, and they look at their chromosomes and each of them says which one he likes best, or she — no reason to have just two sexes any more, even. So each child has 46 parents, and I suppose you could let each group of 46 parents have 15 children. Wouldn't that be enough? And then the children would get plenty of support, and nurturing, and mentoring, and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy.Timesharing is a little further off in the future. And there's this great novel that Arthur Clarke wrote twice, called ""Against the Fall of Night"" and ""The City and the Stars."" They're both wonderful and largely the same, except that computers happened in between. And Arthur was looking at this old book, and he said, ""Well, that was wrong. The future must have some computers."" So in the second version of it, there are 100 billion or 1,000 billion people on Earth, but they're all stored on hard disks or floppies, or whatever they have in the future. And you let a few million of them out at a time. A person comes out, they live for a thousand years doing whatever they do, and then, when it's time to go back for a billion years — or a million, I forget, the numbers don't matter — but there really aren't very many people on Earth at a time. And you get to think about yourself and your memories, and before you go back into suspension, you edit your memories and you change your personality and so forth. The plot of the book is that there's not enough diversity, so that the people who designed the city make sure that every now and then an entirely new person is created. And in the novel, a particular one named Alvin is created. And he says, maybe this isn't the best way, and wrecks the whole system.I don't think the solutions that I proposed are good enough or smart enough. I think the big problem is that we're not smart enough to understand which of the problems we're facing are good enough. Therefore, we have to build super intelligent machines like HAL. As you remember, at some point in the book for ""2001,"" HAL realizes that the universe is too big, and grand, and profound for those really stupid astronauts. If you contrast HAL's behavior with the triviality of the people on the spaceship, you can see what's written between the lines. Well, what are we going to do about that? We could get smarter. I think that we're pretty smart, as compared to chimpanzees, but we're not smart enough to deal with the colossal problems that we face, either in abstract mathematics or in figuring out economies, or balancing the world around. So one thing we can do is live longer. And nobody knows how hard that is, but we'll probably find out in a few years. You see, there's two forks in the road. We know that people live twice as long as chimpanzees almost, and nobody lives more than 120 years, for reasons that aren't very well understood. But lots of people now live to 90 or 100, unless they shake hands too much or something like that. And so maybe if we lived 200 years, we could accumulate enough skills and knowledge to solve some problems. So that's one way of going about it. And as I said, we don't know how hard that is. It might be — after all, most other mammals live half as long as the chimpanzee, so we're sort of three and a half or four times, have four times the longevity of most mammals. And in the case of the primates, we have almost the same genes. We only differ from chimpanzees, in the present state of knowledge, which is absolute hogwash, maybe by just a few hundred genes.What I think is that the gene counters don't know what they're doing yet. And whatever you do, don't read anything about genetics that's published within your lifetime, or something. (Laughter) The stuff has a very short half-life, same with brain science. And so it might be that if we just fix four or five genes, we can live 200 years. Or it might be that it's just 30 or 40, and I doubt that it's several hundred. So this is something that people will be discussing and lots of ethicists — you know, an ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind. (Laughter) And it's very hard to find an ethicist who considers any change worth making, because he says, what about the consequences? And, of course, we're not responsible for the consequences of what we're doing now, are we? Like all this complaint about clones. And yet two random people will mate and have this child, and both of them have some pretty rotten genes, and the child is likely to come out to be average. Which, by chimpanzee standards, is very good indeed.If we do have longevity, then we'll have to face the population growth problem anyway. Because if people live 200 or 1,000 years, then we can't let them have a child more than about once every 200 or 1,000 years. And so there won't be any workforce. And one of the things Laurie Garrett pointed out, and others have, is that a society that doesn't have people of working age is in real trouble. And things are going to get worse, because there's nobody to educate the children or to feed the old. And when I'm talking about a long lifetime, of course, I don't want somebody who's 200 years old to be like our image of what a 200-year-old is — which is dead, actually.You know, there's about 400 different parts of the brain which seem to have different functions. Nobody knows how most of them work in detail, but we do know that there're lots of different things in there. And they don't always work together. I like Freud's theory that most of them are cancelling each other out. And so if you think of yourself as a sort of city with a hundred resources, then, when you're afraid, for example, you may discard your long-range goals, but you may think deeply and focus on exactly how to achieve that particular goal. You throw everything else away. You become a monomaniac — all you care about is not stepping out on that platform. And when you're hungry, food becomes more attractive, and so forth. So I see emotions as highly evolved subsets of your capability. Emotion is not something added to thought. An emotional state is what you get when you remove 100 or 200 of your normally available resources.So thinking of emotions as the opposite of — as something less than thinking is immensely productive. And I hope, in the next few years, to show that this will lead to smart machines. And I guess I better skip all the rest of this, which are some details on how we might make those smart machines and — (Laughter) — and the main idea is in fact that the core of a really smart machine is one that recognizes that a certain kind of problem is facing you. This is a problem of such and such a type, and therefore there's a certain way or ways of thinking that are good for that problem. So I think the future, main problem of psychology is to classify types of predicaments, types of situations, types of obstacles and also to classify available and possible ways to think and pair them up. So you see, it's almost like a Pavlovian — we lost the first hundred years of psychology by really trivial theories, where you say, how do people learn how to react to a situation? What I'm saying is, after we go through a lot of levels, including designing a huge, messy system with thousands of ports, we'll end up again with the central problem of psychology. Saying, not what are the situations, but what are the kinds of problems and what are the kinds of strategies, how do you learn them, how do you connect them up, how does a really creative person invent a new way of thinking out of the available resources and so forth.So, I think in the next 20 years, if we can get rid of all of the traditional approaches to artificial intelligence, like neural nets and genetic algorithms and rule-based systems, and just turn our sights a little bit higher to say, can we make a system that can use all those things for the right kind of problem? Some problems are good for neural nets; we know that others, neural nets are hopeless on them. Genetic algorithms are great for certain things; I suspect I know what they're bad at, and I won't tell you. (Laughter)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_human_mind
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"Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what makes people go wrong? Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. I grew up in the South Bronx, inner-city ghetto in New York, and I was surrounded by evil, as all kids are who grew up in an inner city. And I had friends who were really good kids, who lived out the Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde scenario — Robert Louis Stevenson. That is, they took drugs, got in trouble, went to jail. Some got killed, and some did it without drug assistance.So when I read Robert Louis Stevenson, that wasn't fiction. The only question is, what was in the juice? And more importantly, that line between good and evil — which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side, the others on the bad side — I knew that line was movable, and it was permeable. Good people could be seduced across that line, and under good and some rare circumstances, bad kids could recover with help, with reform, with rehabilitation.So I want to begin with this wonderful illusion by [Dutch] artist M.C. Escher. If you look at it and focus on the white, what you see is a world full of angels. But let's look more deeply, and as we do, what appears is the demons, the devils in the world. That tells us several things.One, the world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition. It tells me something else. If you remember, God's favorite angel was Lucifer. Apparently, Lucifer means ""the light."" It also means ""the morning star,"" in some scripture. And apparently, he disobeyed God, and that's the ultimate disobedience to authority. And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent to kick him out of heaven along with the other fallen angels. And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan, becomes the devil, and the force of evil in the universe begins.Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though. So, this arc of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into the Devil, for me, sets the context for understanding human beings who are transformed from good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil.So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives — the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are — leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that's the key: it's about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google ""evil,"" a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 136 million hits in a third of a second.A few years ago — I am sure all of you were shocked, as I was, with the revelation of American soldiers abusing prisoners in a strange place in a controversial war, Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And these were men and women who were putting prisoners through unbelievable humiliation. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised, because I had seen those same visual parallels when I was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study.Immediately the Bush administration military said what? What all administrations say when there's a scandal: ""Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers."" My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually. Maybe it was the barrel that was bad. But how am I going to deal with that hypothesis?I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick, and in that position, I had access to the dozen investigative reports. I had access to him. I could study him, have him come to my home, get to know him, do psychological analysis to see, was he a good apple or bad apple. And thirdly, I had access to all of the 1,000 pictures that these soldiers took. These pictures are of a violent or sexual nature. All of them come from the cameras of American soldiers. Because everybody has a digital camera or cell phone camera, they took pictures of everything, more than 1,000.And what I've done is I organized them into various categories. But these are by United States military police, army reservists. They are not soldiers prepared for this mission at all. And it all happened in a single place, Tier 1-A, on the night shift. Why? Tier 1-A was the center for military intelligence. It was the interrogation hold. The CIA was there. Interrogators from Titan Corporation, all there, and they're getting no information about the insurgency. So they're going to put pressure on these soldiers, military police, to cross the line, give them permission to break the will of the enemy, to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up, to take the gloves off. Those are the euphemisms, and this is how it was interpreted. Let's go down to that dungeon.(Typewriting)[Abu Ghraib Iraq Prison Abuses 2008 Military Police Guards' Photos][The following images include nudity and graphic depictions of violence](Camera shutter sounds)(Thuds)(Camera shutter)(Camera shutter)(Breathing)(Bells)(Bells end)So, pretty horrific. That's one of the visual illustrations of evil. And it should not have escaped you that the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out with Leonardo da Vinci's ode to humanity is that that prisoner was mentally ill. That prisoner covered himself with shit every day, they had to roll him in dirt so he wouldn't stink. But the guards ended up calling him ""Shit Boy."" What was he doing in that prison rather than in some mental institution?In any event, here's former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He comes down and says, ""I want to know, who is responsible? Who are the bad apples?"" Well, that's a bad question. You have to reframe it and ask, ""What is responsible?"" ""What"" could be the who of people, but it could also be the what of the situation, and obviously that's wrongheaded.How do psychologists try to understand such transformations of human character, if you believe that they were good soldiers before they went down to that dungeon? There are three ways. The main way is called dispositional. We look at what's inside of the person, the bad apples.This is the foundation of all of social science, the foundation of religion, the foundation of war. Social psychologists like me come along and say, ""Yeah, people are the actors on the stage, but you'll have to be aware of the situation. Who are the cast of characters? What's the costume? Is there a stage director?"" And so we're interested in what are the external factors around the individual — the bad barrel? Social scientists stop there and they miss the big point that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib. The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel makers.If you want to change a person, change the situation. And to change it, you've got to know where the power is, in the system. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformations with these three factors. And it's a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation?My recent book, ""The Lucifer Effect,"" is about, how do you understand how good people turn evil? And it has a lot of detail about what I'm going to talk about today. So Dr. Z's ""Lucifer Effect,"" although it focuses on evil, really is a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent, creative or destructive, and it makes some of us villains. And the good news that I'm going to hopefully come to at the end is that it makes some of us heroes. This wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker summarizes my whole talk: ""I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on the circumstances.""(Laughter)There's a study some of you think you know about, but very few people have ever read the story. You watched the movie. This is Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid from the Bronx, and he asked the question, ""Could the Holocaust happen here, now?"" People say, ""No, that's Nazi Germany, Hitler, you know, that's 1939."" He said, ""Yeah, but suppose Hitler asked you, 'Would you electrocute a stranger?' 'No way, I'm a good person.'"" He said, ""Why don't we put you in a situation and give you a chance to see what you would do?""And so what he did was he tested 1,000 ordinary people. 500 New Haven, Connecticut, 500 Bridgeport. And the ad said, ""Psychologists want to understand memory. We want to improve people's memory, because it is the key to success."" OK? ""We're going to give you five bucks — four dollars for your time. We don't want college students. We want men between 20 and 50."" In the later studies, they ran women. Ordinary people: barbers, clerks, white-collar people.So, you go down, one of you will be a learner, one will be a teacher. The learner's a genial, middle-aged guy. He gets tied up to the shock apparatus in another room. The learner could be middle-aged, could be as young as 20. And one of you is told by the authority, the guy in the lab coat, ""Your job as teacher is to give him material to learn. Gets it right, reward. Gets it wrong, you press a button on the shock box. The first button is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it."" That's the key. All evil starts with 15 volts. And then the next step is another 15 volts. The problem is, at the end of the line, it's 450 volts. And as you go along, the guy is screaming, ""I've got a heart condition! I'm out of here!""You're a good person. You complain. ""Sir, who will be responsible if something happens to him?"" The experimenter says, ""Don't worry, I will be responsible. Continue, teacher."" And the question is, who would go all the way to 450 volts? You should notice here, when it gets up to 375, it says, ""Danger. Severe Shock."" When it gets up to here, there's ""XXX"" — the pornography of power.So Milgram asks 40 psychiatrists, ""What percent of American citizens would go to the end?"" They said only one percent. Because that's sadistic behavior, and we know, psychiatry knows, only one percent of Americans are sadistic. OK. Here's the data. They could not be more wrong. Two thirds go all the way to 450 volts. This was just one study. Milgram did more than 16 studies. And look at this. In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way, 90 percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel. What about women? Study 13 — no different than men. So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of people to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to 450 volts. And it's like a dial on human nature. A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient, down to the majority, down to none.What are the external parallels? For all research is artificial. What's the validity in the real world? 912 American citizens committed suicide or were murdered by family and friends in Guyana jungle in 1978, because they were blindly obedient to this guy, their pastor — not their priest — their pastor, Reverend Jim Jones. He persuaded them to commit mass suicide. And so, he's the modern Lucifer effect, a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death. Milgram's study is all about individual authority to control people. Most of the time, we are in institutions, so the Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions to influence individual behavior. Interestingly, Stanley Milgram and I were in the same high school class in James Monroe in the Bronx, 1954.I did this study with my graduate students, especially Craig Haney — and it also began work with an ad. We had a cheap, little ad, but we wanted college students for a study of prison life. 75 people volunteered, took personality tests. We did interviews. Picked two dozen: the most normal, the most healthy. Randomly assigned them to be prisoner and guard. So on day one, we knew we had good apples. I'm going to put them in a bad situation.And secondly, we know there's no difference between the boys who will be guards and those who will be prisoners. To the prisoners, we said, ""Wait at home. The study will begin Sunday."" We didn't tell them that the city police were going to come and do realistic arrests.(Video) (Music)[Day 1]Student: A police car pulls up in front, and a cop comes to the front door, and knocks, and says he's looking for me. So they, right there, you know, they took me out the door, they put my hands against the car. It was a real cop car, it was a real policeman, and there were real neighbors in the street, who didn't know that this was an experiment. And there was cameras all around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car, then they drove me around Palo Alto. They took me to the basement of the police station. Then they put me in a cell. I was the first one to be picked up, so they put me in a cell, which was just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there, in this degrading little outfit. They were taking this experiment too seriously.Here are the prisoners, who are going to be dehumanized, they'll become numbers. Here are the guards with the symbols of power and anonymity. Guards get prisoners to clean the toilet bowls out with their bare hands, to do other humiliating tasks. They strip them naked. They sexually taunt them. They begin to do degrading activities, like having them simulate sodomy. You saw simulating fellatio in soldiers in Abu Ghraib. My guards did it in five days. The stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids we picked because they were healthy had breakdowns within 36 hours. The study ended after six days, because it was out of control. Five kids had emotional breakdowns.Does it make a difference if warriors go to battle changing their appearance or not? If they're anonymous, how do they treat their victims? In some cultures, they go to war without changing their appearance. In others, they paint themselves like ""Lord of the Flies."" In some, they wear masks. In many, soldiers are anonymous in uniform. So this anthropologist, John Watson, found 23 cultures that had two bits of data. Do they change their appearance? 15. Do they kill, torture, mutilate? 13. If they don't change their appearance, only one of eight kills, tortures or mutilates. The key is in the red zone. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13 — that's 90 percent — kill, torture, mutilate. And that's the power of anonymity.So what are the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil? Mindlessly taking the first small step. Dehumanization of others. De-individuation of self. Diffusion of personal responsibility. Blind obedience to authority. Uncritical conformity to group norms. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction, or indifference.And it happens when you're in a new or unfamiliar situation. Your habitual response patterns don't work. Your personality and morality are disengaged. ""Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing more difficult than understanding him,"" Dostoyevsky. Understanding is not excusing. Psychology is not excuse-ology.So social and psychological research reveals how ordinary, good people can be transformed without the drugs. You don't need it. You just need the social-psychological processes. Real world parallels? Compare this with this. James Schlesinger — I'm going to end with this — says, ""Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances."" That's the Lucifer effect. And he goes on to say, ""The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military operations."" If you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for abuse. They knew that, and let that happen.So another report, an investigative report by General Fay, says the system is guilty. In this report, he says it was the environment that created Abu Ghraib, by leadership failures that contributed to the occurrence of such abuse, and because it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time. Those abuses went on for three months. Who was watching the store? The answer is nobody, I think on purpose. He gave the guards permission to do those things, and they knew nobody was ever going to come down to that dungeon.So you need a paradigm shift in all of these areas. The shift is away from the medical model that focuses only on the individual. The shift is toward a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease. Bullying is a disease. Prejudice is a disease. Violence is a disease. Since the Inquisition, we've been dealing with problems at the individual level. It doesn't work. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, ""The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."" That means that line is not out there. That's a decision that you have to make, a personal thing.So I want to end very quickly on a positive note. Heroism as the antidote to evil, by promoting the heroic imagination, especially in our kids, in our educational system. We want kids to think, ""I'm a hero in waiting, waiting for the right situation to come along, and I will act heroically. My whole life, I'm now going to focus away from evil — that I've been in since I was a kid — to understanding heroes.Banality of heroism. It's ordinary people who do heroic deeds. It's the counterpoint to Hannah Arendt's ""Banality of Evil."" Our traditional societal heroes are wrong, because they are the exceptions. They organize their life around this. That's why we know their names. Our kids' heroes are also wrong models for them, because they have supernatural talents. We want our kids to realize most heroes are everyday people, and the heroic act is unusual. This is Joe Darby. He was the one that stopped those abuses you saw, because when he saw those images, he turned them over to a senior investigating officer. He was a low-level private, and that stopped it. Was he a hero? No. They had to put him in hiding, because people wanted to kill him, and then his mother and his wife. For three years, they were in hiding.This is the woman who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When I said it got out of control, I was the prison superintendent. I didn't know it was out of control. I was totally indifferent. She saw that madhouse and said, ""You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those boys. They're not prisoners nor guards, they're boys, and you are responsible."" And I ended the study the next day. The good news is I married her the next year.(Laughter)(Applause)I just came to my senses, obviously.So situations have the power to do [three things]. But the point is, this is the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination in some of us, that makes us perpetrators of evil, can inspire the heroic imagination in others. It's the same situation and you're on one side or the other. Most people are guilty of the evil of inaction, because your mother said, ""Don't get involved. Mind your own business."" And you have to say, ""Mama, humanity is my business.""So the psychology of heroism is — we're going to end in a moment — how do we encourage children in new hero courses, that I'm working on with Matt Langdon — he has a hero workshop — to develop this heroic imagination, this self-labeling, ""I am a hero in waiting,"" and teach them skills. To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always going against the conformity of the group. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. Who act.The key to heroism is two things. You have to act when other people are passive. B: You have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically. And I want to end with a known story about Wesley Autrey, New York subway hero. Fifty-year-old African-American construction worker standing on a subway. A white guy falls on the tracks. The subway train is coming. There's 75 people there. You know what? They freeze. He's got a reason not to get involved. He's black, the guy's white, and he's got two kids. Instead, he gives his kids to a stranger, jumps on the tracks, puts the guy between the tracks, lays on him, the subway goes over him. Wesley and the guy — 20 and a half inches height. The train clearance is 21 inches. A half an inch would have taken his head off. And he said, ""I did what anyone could do,"" no big deal to jump on the tracks.And the moral imperative is ""I did what everyone should do."" And so one day, you will be in a new situation. Take path one, you're going to be a perpetrator of evil. Evil, meaning you're going to be Arthur Andersen. You're going to cheat, or you're going to allow bullying. Path two, you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Path three, you become a hero. The point is, are we ready to take the path to celebrating ordinary heroes, waiting for the right situation to come along to put heroic imagination into action? Because it may only happen once in your life, and when you pass it by, you'll always know, I could have been a hero and I let it pass me by. So the point is thinking it and then doing it.So I want to thank you. Thank you. Let's oppose the power of evil systems at home and abroad, and let's focus on the positive. Advocate for respect of personal dignity, for justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing.Thanks so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil
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"Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine.And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. And I asked myself, why? I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? So, I decided to investigate.I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them. But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it.So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, ""Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids,"" but won't ask. I know a woman who's good at this. She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, ""I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids."" And he goes, ""Oh, this is great, this is great."" And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. And she said, ""Why wouldn't I thank it, even though they're supposed to do it?""So, the question is, why was I blocking it? Why were other people blocking it? Why can I say, ""I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes,"" but I won't say, ""Would you praise me this way?"" And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me. I'm telling you where I'm insecure. I'm telling you where I need your help. And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy. Because what can you do with that data? You could neglect me. You could abuse it. Or you could actually meet my need.And I took my bike into the bike store— I love this — same bike, and they'd do something called ""truing"" the wheels. The guy said, ""You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better."" I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. So, I'm going to challenge all of you. I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife — go ask her, what does she need? Go home to your husband — what does he need? Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you.And it's simple. And why should we care about this? We talk about world peace. How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? I think it starts household by household, under the same roof. So, let's make it right in our own backyard. And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job. And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_trice_suggests_we_all_say_thank_you
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"I'm a, or was, or kind of am a toy designer. And before I was a toy designer, oh, I was a mime, a street mime, actually. And then I was an entertainer, I guess. And before that, I was a silversmith, and before that, I was — I was out of the house at about 15 and a half, and I never wound up going into college. I didn't really — I didn't see the point at the time. I do now, after learning about all the quantum stuff.(Laughter) It's really cool.Anyway, I wanted to show you a little bit about the world of toy design, at least from my small aperture of the world. This is a video I made when I first started doing toy design. I'm in my garage, making weird stuff. And then you go to these toy companies and there's some guy across the table, and he goes, ""Pass. Pass. Pass."" You know, you think it's so cool, but they — anyway, I made this little tape that I'd always show when I go in. This is the name of my company, Giving Toys. So I used to work at Mattel, actually. And after I left Mattel, I started all these hamburger makers, and then got the license to make the maker. So this is a hamburger maker that you take the peanut butter and stuff and you put it in there, and it makes — and this is a French fry maker, little, tiny food you can eat. I beat up the pasta maker to make that. Then this is a McNugget maker, I think. This, now that's the McNugget maker, and this is a — this is my oldest daughter making a McApple Pie. And let's see, you can make the pie and cinnamon and sugar, and then you eat, and you eat, and you eat, and you — she's about 300 pounds now. No, she's not, she's beautiful. This is how they looked when they came out at the end. These are a — this is like a 15 million dollar line. And it got me through some — I didn't make any royalties on this, but it got me through.Next is a compilation of a bunch of stuff. That was a missile foam launcher that didn't get sold. This is a squishy head, for no apparent reason. This is some effects that I did for ""Wig, Rattle and Roll."" That was a robot eye thing controlling it in the back. That paid the rent for about a month. This is a walking Barbie — I said, ""Oh, this is it!"" And they go, ""Oh, that's really nice,"" and out it goes. So this is some fighting robots. I thought everyone would want these. They fight, they get back up, you know? Wouldn't this be cool? And they made it into a toy, and then they dropped it like a hot rock. They're pretty cool. This is a— we're doing some flight-testing on my little pug, seeing if this can really grab. It does pretty good. I'm using little phone connectors to make them so they can spin. It's how they, see, have those album things — kids don't know what they are. This is a clay maker. You know, I said — I went to Play-Doh, and said, ""Look, I can animate this."" They said, ""Don't talk to us about Play-Doh."" And then, I made a Lego animator. I thought, this would be so great! And you know, Lego — don't take Legos to Lego. That's the answer. They know everything about it.Then I started doing animatronics. I loved dinosaurs. I used to be in the film business, kind of, and actually, Nicholas Negroponte saw this when I was, like, 12, and anyway, so then they said, ""No, you have to make two and they have to fight."" You know, how — why would a kid want a dinosaur? This is me using [unclear] or 3-D Studio, back in the '80s. That's David Letterman. You can see how old this stuff is. That's my youngest cousin. This is a segment called, ""Dangerous Toys You Won't See at Christmas."" We had my first saw blade launcher and we had a flamethrower chair. My career basically peaked here. And in the back are foam-core cutouts of the people who couldn't make it to the show. This is MEK going through a windshield wiper motor. So this is a — I used to kind of be an actor. And I'm really not very good at it. But the — this is a guy named Dr. Yatz, who would take toys apart and show kids about engineering. And you can see the massively parallel processing Nintendos there. And over to the left is a view master of the CD-ROM. And a guy named Stan Reznikov did this as a pilot. This is a — you can see the little window there. You can actually see the Steadicam with a bubble on the bottom. You see the keyboard strapped to my wrist. Way ahead of my time here.(Video) I'm getting dizzy ... Narrator: I love toys!Caleb Chung: That's all I wanted to say there. I love toys. OK, so, so that was a, that was the first kind of a — that was the first batch of products. Most of them did not go. You get one out of 20, one out of 30 products. And every now and then, we do something like a, you know, an automated hair wrap machine, you know, that tangles your hair and pulls your scalp out, and — and we'd make some money on that, you know. And we'd give it out. But eventually, we left L.A., and we moved to Idaho, where there was actually a lot of peace and quiet. And I started working on this project — oh, I have to tell you about this real quick. Throughout this whole thing, making toys, I think there is a real correlation with innovation and art and science. There's some kind of a blend that happens that allows, you know, to find innovation. And I tried to sum this up in some kind of symbol that means something, to me anyway. And so, art and science have a kind of dynamic balance, that's where I think innovation happens. And actually, this is, to me, how I can come up with great ideas. But it's not how you actually get leverage. Actually, you have to put a circle around that, and call it business. And those three together, I think, give you leverage in the world. But moving on. So, this is a quick tale I'm going to tell. This is the Furby tale. As he said, I was co-inventor of the Furby. I did the body and creature — well, you'll see. So by way of showing you this, you can kind of get an understanding of what it is to, hopefully, try to create robotic life forms, or technology that has an emotional connection with the user. So this is my family. This is my wife, Christi, and Abby, and Melissa, and my 17-year-old now, Emily, who was just a pack of trouble. All right, there's that robot again. I came out of the movie business, as I said, and I said, let's make these animatronic robots. Let's make these things. And so I've always had a big interest in this. This one actually didn't go anywhere, but I got my feet wet doing this. This is a smaller one, and I have a little moving torso on there. A little, tiny guy walks along. More servo drives, lots of servo hacking, lots of mechanical stuff. There's another one. He actually has skeletor legs, I think, he's wearing there. Oh, this is a little pony, little pony — very cute little thing.The point of showing these is I've always been interested in little artificial life pieces. So the challenge was — I worked for Microsoft for a little bit, working on the Microsoft Barney. And this is a — you know, the purple dinosaur with kind of bloat wear. And, you know, they had lots, just lots of stuff in there that you didn't need, I thought. And then Microsoft can just fill a, you know, a warehouse full of this stuff and see if they sell. So it's a really strange business model compared to coming from a toy company. But anyway, a friend of mine and I, Dave Hampton, decided to see if we could do like a single-cell organism. What's the fewest pieces we could use to make a little life form? And that's our little, thirty-cent Mabuchi motor. And so, I have all these design books, like I'm sure many of you have. And throughout the books — this is the first page on Furby — I have kind of the art and science. I have the why over here, and the how over there. I try to do a lot of philosophy, a lot of thinking about all of these projects. Because they're not just ""bing"" ideas; you have to really dig deep in these things. So there's some real pseudo-code over here, and getting the idea of different kind of drives, things like that. And originally, Furby only had two eyes and some batteries on the bottom. And then we said, well, you're going to feed him, and he needs to talk, and it got more complicated. And then I had to figure out how I'm going to use that one motor to make the eyes move, and the ears move, and the body to move, and the mouth to move. And, you know, I want to make it blink and do all that at the same time. Well, I came up with this kind of linear expression thing with these cams and feedback. And that worked pretty well. Then I started to get a little more realistic and I have to start drawing the stuff. And there's my ""note to self"" at the top: ""lots of engineering."" So that turned out to be a little more than true. There's my first exploded view and all the little pieces and the little worm drive and all that stuff. And then I've got to start building it, so this is the real thing. I get up and start cutting my finger and gluing things together. And that's my little workshop. And there's the first little cam that drove Furby. And there's Furby on the half shell. You can see the little BB in the box is my tilt sensor. I just basically gnawed all this stuff out of plastic. So there's the back of his head with a billion holes in it. And there I am. I'm done. There's my little Furby. No, it's a little robot on heroin or something, I think. (Laughter) So right now, you see, I love little robots. So my wife says, ""Well, you may like it, but nobody else will."" So she comes to the rescue. This is my wife Christi, who is just, you know, my muse and my partner for eternity here. And she does drawings, right? She's an actual, you know, artist. And she starts doing all these different drawings and does color patterns and coloring books. And I like the guy with the cigar at the bottom there. He didn't test so well, but I like him. And then she started doing these other images. At that time, Beanie Babies was a big hit, and we thought, we'll do a bunch of different ones. So here's a little pink one, a little pouf on his head. And here's — this didn't do so well in testing either, I don't know why. There's my favorite, Demon Furby. That was a good one. Anyway, finally settled on kind of this kind of a look, little poufy body, a little imaginary character. And there he is, a little bush baby on — caught in the headlights there. I actually went to Toys""R""Us, got a little furry cat, ripped it apart and made this. And since then, every time I come home from Toys""R""Us with dolls or something, they disappear from my desk and they get hidden in the house. I have three girls and they just, they — it's like a rescue animal thing they're going there. (Laughter) So, a little tether coming off, it's just a control for the Fur's mouth and his eyes. It's just a little server control and I made a little video going: ""Hi, my name's Furby, and I'm good,"" you know, and then I'd reach my hand. He'd — you can tickle him. When I put my hand up, ""Ha, ha, ha, ha"" and that's how we sold him. And Hasbro actually said, I meant Tiger Electronics at the time, said, ""Yeah, we want to do this. We have, you know, 13 weeks or something to Toy Fair, and we're going to hire you guys to do this.""And so Dave and I got working. Mostly me, because it was all mechanics at this point. So now I have to really figure out all kinds of stuff I don't know how to do. And I started working with Solid Works and a whole other group to do that. And we started — this was way back before there was really much SLA going on, not a lot of rapid prototyping. We certainly didn't have the money to do this. They only paid me, like, a little bit of money to do this, so I had to call a friend of a friend who was running the GM prototype plant, SLA plant, that was down. And they said, ""Yeah, well, we'll run them."" So they ran all the shells for us, which was nice of them. And the cams I got cut at Hewlett Packard. We snuck in on the weekend. And so we just had a disc of the files. But they have a closed system, so you couldn't print the things out on the machine. So we actually printed them out on clear and taped them on the monitors. And on the weekend we ran the parts for that. So this is how they come out close to the end. And then they looked like little Garfields there. Eight months later — you may remember this, this was a — total, total, total chaos. For a while, they were making two million Furbys a month. They actually wound up doing about 40 million Furbys. I — it's unbelievable how — I don't know how that can be. And Hasbro made about, you know, a billion and a half dollars. And I just a little bit on each one.So full circle — why do I do this? Why do you, you know, try to do this stuff? And it's, of course, for your kids. And there's my youngest daughter with her Furbys. And she still actually has those. So I kind of retired, and we're already living in paradise up in Boise, on a river, you know. So and then I started another company called Toy Innovation and we did some projects with Mattel with actually with a lady who's here, Ivy Ross, and we did Miracle Moves Baby, made it in Wired magazine, did a bunch of other stuff. And then I started another company. We did a little hand-held device for teens that could hook up to the Internet, won ""Best Innovations"" at CES, but really I kind of slowed down and said, OK, I just ... After a while, I had this old tape of this dinosaur, and I gave it to this guy, and this other guy saw it, and then people started to want to do it. And they said they'd spend all this time. So I said, ""OK, let's try to do this dinosaur project."" The crazy idea is we're going to try to clone a dinosaur as much as we can with today's technology. And it's not really — but as close as we can do. And we're going to try to really pull this off, intentfully try to make something that seems like it's alive. Not a robot that kind of does, but let's really go for it. So I picked a Camarasaurus, because the Camarasaurus was the most abundant of the sauropods in North America. And you could actually find full fossil evidence of these. That's a juvenile. And so we actually went in. There's a book called ""Walking on Eggshells,"" where they found actual sauropod skin in Patagonia. And the picture from the book, so when I — I told the sculptor to use this bump pattern, whatever you can to copy that. Very, very obsessive. There's a kind of truncated Camarasaurus skeleton, but the geometry's correct. And then I went in, and measured all the geometry because I figured, hey, biomimicry. If I do it kind of right, it might move kind of like the real thing. So there's the motor. And about this time, you know, all these other people are starting to help. Here's an example of what we did with the skull. There's the skull, there's my drawing of a skull. There's kind of the skin version of the soft tissue. There's the mechanism that would go in there, kind of a Geneva drive. There's some Solid Works versions of it. Here's some SLA parts of the same thing. And then, these are really crude pieces. We were just doing some tests here. There's the skull, pretty much the same shape as the Camarasaurus. There's a photorealistic eye behind a lens. And there's kind of the first exploded view, or see-through view. There's the first SLA version, and it already kind of has the feel, it has kind of a cuteness already. And the thing about blending science and art in this multidisciplinary stuff is you can do a robot, and then you go back and do the shape, and then you go back and forth. The servos in the front legs, we had to shape those like muscles. They had to fit within the envelope. There was a tremendous amount of work to get all that working right. All the neck and the tail are cable, so it moves smoothly and organically. And then, of course, you're not done yet. You have to get the look for the skin. The skin's a whole another thing, probably the hardest part. So you hire artists, and you try to get the look and feel of the character. Now, this is not — we're character designers, right? And we're still trying to keep with the real character. So, now you go back and you cover the whole thing with clay. Now you start doing the sculpture for this. And you can see we got a guy from — who's just a fanatic about dinosaurs to do the sculpting for us, down to the spoon-shaped teeth and everything. And then more sculpting, and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting. And then, four years and 10 million dollars later, we have a little Pleo. John, do you want to bring him up?John Sosoka is our CTO, and is really the man that's done most of the work with our 40-person company. I'd like to give John a hand. He never gets recognition. This is John Sosoka. (Applause) So, thank you, John, thank you, and get back to work, all right, man? All right — (Laughter) — no, it's very painful, so — (Laughter) — these are little Pleos and you can probably see them. This — I on purpose — they go through life stages. So when you first get them, they're babies. And you — more you have them, kind of the older they get, and they kind of learn through their behavior. So this one, this one's actually asleep, and — hang on. Pleo, wake up. Pleo, come on. So this guy's listening to my voice here. But they have 40 sensors all over their body. They have seven processors, they have 14 motors, they have — but you don't care, do you? They're just cute, right? That's the idea, that's the idea. So you see — hey, come on. Hey, did you feel that? There's something big and loud over here. Hey. (Laughter) That's good, wake up, wake up, wake up. Yeah, they're like kids, you know. You, yeah, yeah. Okay, he's hungry. I'll show you what he's been doing for, for four years. Here, here, here. Have some money, Pleo. (Laughter) There you go. That's what the investors think, that it's just — (Laughter) — right, right. So they're really sweet little guys. And we're hoping that — you know, our belief is that humans need to feel empathy towards things in order to be more human. And we think we can help that out by having little creatures that you can love. Now these are not robots, they're kind of lovebots, you know. They do change over time. But mostly they evoke a feeling of caring. And we have a — I have a little something here. Now I do want to say that, you know, Ugobe is not there yet. We've just opened the door, and it's for all of you to step through it. We did include some things that are hopefully useful. Excuse me, Pleo. They — he has a USB and he has a SD card, so it's completely open architecture. So anyone can plug him — (Applause) — thank you. This is John over here. Anyone can take Pleo and they can totally redo his personality. You can make him bipolar, or as someone said, a — (Laughter) — you can change his homeostatic drives, or whatever you want to call them. Kids can just drag and drop, put in new sounds. We — actually, it's very hard to keep people from doing this. We have one animator who's taken it and he's done a take on the Budweiser beer commercial, and they're going, ""Whassup,"" you know? (Laughter) You — so it's — yes, he likes that. So they're a handful. We hope you get one. I don't know what I'm missing to say, but as a last thing, I'd like to say is that if we continue along this path, we are designing our children's best friends. And there's a lot of social responsibility in that. That's why Pleo's soft and gentle and loving. And so I just — I hope we all dream well. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caleb_chung_plays_with_pleo
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"A year ago, I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing, that has come out in the interim, and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired. The book is called ""The Blank Slate,"" based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience. The ""blank slate"" was an influential idea in the 20th century. Here are a few quotes indicating that: ""Man has no nature,"" from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset; ""Man has no instincts,"" from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu; ""The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none,"" from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould.There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense. As many people have told me over the years, anyone who's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents; it doesn't all come from the outside. Oh, and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child, exposed to speech, will acquire a human language, whereas the house pet won't, presumably because of some innate different between them. And anyone who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable. There are also, I think, increasing results from the scientific study of humans that, indeed, we're not born blank slates. One of them, from anthropology, is the study of human universals. If you've ever taken anthropology, you know that it's a — kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here. But if you instead look at what is common to the world's cultures, you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world's 6,000-odd cultures. The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all, and they range from aesthetics, affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning, weapons, weather, attempts to control, the color white and a worldview.Also, genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured. This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they — using MRI — measured the distribution of gray matter — that is, the outer layer of the cortex — in a large sample of pairs of people. They coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme, in which no difference is coded as purple, and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation. Well, this is what happens when you pair people up at random. By definition, two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex. This is what happens in people who share half of their DNA — fraternal twins. And as you can see, large amounts of the brain are not purple, showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region, so does his fraternal twin. And here's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their DNA — namely, clones or identical twins. And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter.Now, these aren't just differences in anatomy, like the shape of your ear lobes, but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by Charles Addams: ""Separated at birth, the Mallifert twins meet accidentally."" As you can see, there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap, meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney. Now, the cartoon is not such an exaggeration, because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities. And this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied — but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth. My favorite example is a pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany, the other brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad. When they walked into the lab in Minnesota, they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulettes; both of them liked to dip buttered toast in coffee, both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists, both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after, and both of them liked to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump. Now — the story might seem to good to be true, but when you administer batteries of psychological tests, you get the same results — namely, identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities.Now, given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question, why should it have been such an appealing notion? Well, there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial. The foremost is that if we're blank slates, then, by definition, we are equal, because zero equals zero equals zero. But if something is written on the slate, then some people could have more of it than others, and according to this line of thinking, that would justify discrimination and inequality.Another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates, we can perfect mankind — the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering. Whereas, if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence. Well, in the book, I argue that these are, in fact, non sequiturs. And just to make a long story short: first of all, the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness. And so when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, ""We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,"" he did not mean ""We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are clones."" Rather, that all men are equal in terms of their rights, and that every person ought to be treated as an individual, and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to. Also, even if we were born with certain ignoble motives, they don't automatically lead to ignoble behavior. That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts, and some of them can inhibit others. For example, there's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense, and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history. So even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed, that's not the only thing in the skull, and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them.In the book, I go over controversies such as this one, and a number of other hot buttons, hot zones, Chernobyls, third rails, and so on — including the arts, cloning, crime, free will, education, evolution, gender differences, God, homosexuality, infanticide, inequality, Marxism, morality, Nazism, parenting, politics, race, rape, religion, resource depletion, social engineering, technological risk and war. And needless to say, there were certain risks in taking on these subjects. When I wrote a first draft of the book, I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments, and here are some of the reactions that I got: ""Better get a security camera for your house."" ""Don't expect to get any more awards, job offers or positions in scholarly societies."" ""Tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio."" ""Do you have tenure?"" (Laughter)Well, the book came out in October, and nothing terrible has happened. I — I like — There was indeed reason to be nervous, and there were moments in which I did feel nervous, knowing the history of what has happened to people who've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences. There are many cases, some of which I talk about in the book, of people who have been slandered, called Nazis, physically assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings. And you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps. My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers, and published some data showing that left-handers are, on average, more susceptible to disease, more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan. It's not clear, by the way, since then, whether that is an accurate generalization, but the data at the time seemed to support that. Well, pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters, death threats, ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals, coming from irate left-handers and their advocates, and they were literally afraid to open their mail because of the venom and vituperation that they had inadvertently inspired.Well, the night is young, but the book has been out for half a year, and nothing terrible has happened. None of the dire professional consequences has taken place — I haven't been exiled from the city of Cambridge. But what I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that The Blank Slate has received. I'll just put that list up for a few seconds, and see if you can guess which two — I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews. It's not violence and war, it's not race, it's not gender, it's not Marxism, it's not Nazism. They are: the arts and parenting. (Laughter) So let me tell you what aroused such irate responses, and I'll let you decide if whether they — the claims are really that outrageous.Let me start with the arts. I note that among the long list of human universals that I presented a few slides ago are art. There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts — decoration of surfaces and bodies — appears to be a human universal. The telling of stories, music, dance, poetry — found in all cultures, and many of the motifs and themes that give us pleasure in the arts can be found in all human societies: a preference for symmetrical forms, the use of repetition and variation, even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world, you have lines that are very close to three seconds long, separated by pauses. Now, on the other hand, in the second half of the 20th century, the arts are frequently said to be in decline. And I have a collection, probably 10 or 15 headlines, from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time. I'll give you a couple of representative quotes: ""We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline, that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago, and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity."" That's a quote from T. S. Eliot, a little more than 50 years ago. And a more recent one: ""The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical. Serious book stores are losing their franchise, nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory, symphony orchestras are diluting their programs, public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sitcoms, classical radio stations are dwindling, museums are resorting to blockbuster shows, dance is dying."" That's from Robert Brustein, the famous drama critic and director, in The New Republic about five years ago.Well, in fact, the arts are not in decline. I don't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room, but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent. There are, of course, entirely new art forms and new media, many of which you've heard over these few days. By any economic standard, the demand for art of all forms is skyrocketing, as you can tell from the price of opera tickets, by the number of books sold, by the number of books published, the number of musical titles released, the number of new albums and so on. The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres. One of them is in elite art since the 1930s — say, the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras, where most of the repertory is before 1930, or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums. In literary criticism and analysis, probably 40 or 50 years ago, literary critics were a kind of cultural hero; now they're kind of a national joke. And the humanities and arts programs in the universities, which by many measures, indeed are in decline. Students are staying away in droves, universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities.Well, here's a diagnosis. They didn't ask me, but by their own admission, they need all the help that they can get. And I would like to suggest that it's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespread denial of human nature. A famous quotation can be found — if you look on the web, you can find it in literally scores of English core syllabuses — ""In or about December 1910, human nature changed."" A paraphrase of a quote by Virginia Woolf, and there's some debate as to what she actually meant by that. But it's very clear, looking at these syllabuses, that — it's used now as a way of saying that all forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries, or millennia, in the 20th century were discarded. The beauty and pleasure in art — probably a human universal — were — began to be considered saccharine, or kitsch, or commercial. Barnett Newman had a famous quote that ""the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty"" — which was considered bourgeois or tacky. And here's just one example. I mean, this is perhaps a representative example of the visual depiction of the female form in the 15th century; here is a representative example of the depiction of the female form in the 20th century. And, as you can see, there — something has changed in the way the elite arts appeal to the senses.Indeed, in movements of modernism and post-modernism, there was visual art without beauty, literature without narrative and plot, poetry without meter and rhyme, architecture and planning without ornament, human scale, green space and natural light, music without melody and rhythm, and criticism without clarity, attention to aesthetics and insight into the human condition. (Laughter) Let me give just you an example to back up that last statement. But here, there — one of the most famous literary English scholars of our time is the Berkeley professor, Judith Butler. And here is an example of one of her analyses: ""The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from the form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects ..."" Well, you get the idea. By the way, this is one sentence — you can actually parse it. Well, the argument in ""The Blank Slate"" was that elite art and criticism in the 20th century, although not the arts in general, have disdained beauty, pleasure, clarity, insight and style. People are staying away from elite art and criticism. What a puzzle — I wonder why. Well, this turned out to be probably the most controversial claim in the book. Someone asked me whether I stuck it in in order to deflect ire from discussions of gender and Nazism and race and so on. I won't comment on that. But it certainly inspired an energetic reaction from many university professors.Well, the other hot button is parenting. And the starting point is the — for that discussion was the fact that we have all been subject to the advice of the parenting industrial complex. Now, here is — here is a representative quote from a besieged mother: ""I'm overwhelmed with parenting advice. I'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so I can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they'll grow up to be healthy adults. And I'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual play so they'll grow up smart. And there are all kinds of play — clay for finger dexterity, word games for reading success, large motor play, small motor play. I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids."" I think anyone who's recently been a parent can sympathize with this mother.Well, here's some sobering facts about parenting. Most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless. They're useless because they don't control for heritability. They measure some correlation between what the parents do, how the children turn out and assume a causal relation: that the parenting shaped the child. Parents who talk a lot to their kids have kids who grow up to be articulate, parents who spank their kids have kids who grow up to be violent and so on. And very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for — that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on. Until the studies are redone with adoptive children, who provide an environment but not genes to their kids, we have no way of knowing whether these conclusions are valid.The genetically controlled studies have some sobering results. Remember the Mallifert twins: separated at birth, then they meet in the patent office — remarkably similar. Well, what would have happened if the Mallifert twins had grown up together? You might think, well, then they'd be even more similar, because not only would they share their genes, but they would also share their environment. That would make them super-similar, right? Wrong. Identical twins, or any siblings, who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together. Everything that happens to you in a given home over all of those years appears to leave no permanent stamp on your personality or intellect. A complementary finding, from a completely different methodology, is that adopted siblings reared together — the mirror image of identical twins reared apart, they share their parents, their home, their neighborhood, don't share their genes — end up not similar at all. OK — two different bodies of research with a similar finding.What it suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents over the long run, but in part — only in part — by their genes, in part by their culture — the culture of the country at large and the children's own culture, namely their peer group — as we heard from Jill Sobule earlier today, that's what kids care about — and, to a very large extent, larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge, by chance: chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero; chance events as you live your life.So let me conclude with just a remark to bring it back to the theme of choices. I think that the sciences of human nature — behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science — are going to, increasingly in the years to come, upset various dogmas, careers and deeply-held political belief systems. And that presents us with a choice. The choice is whether certain facts about humans, or topics, are to be considered taboos, forbidden knowledge, where we shouldn't go there because no good can come from it, or whether we should explore them honestly. I have my own answer to that question, which comes from a great artist of the 19th century, Anton Chekhov, who said, ""Man will become better when you show him what he is like."" And I think that the argument can't be put any more eloquently than that. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate
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"What I want to tell you about today is how I see robots invading our lives at multiple levels, over multiple timescales. And when I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere. Assuming — despite all the dire predictions from many people about our future — assuming we're still around, I can't imagine the world not being populated with robots. And then the question is, well, if they're going to be here in 500 years, are they going to be everywhere sooner than that? Are they going to be around in 50 years? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely — there's going to be lots of robots everywhere. And in fact I think that's going to be a lot sooner than that. I think we're sort of on the cusp of robots becoming common, and I think we're sort of around 1978 or 1980 in personal computer years, where the first few robots are starting to appear.Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play Pong, a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that. And we're starting to see that same sort of thing with robots: LEGO Mindstorms, Furbies — who here — did anyone here have a Furby? Yeah, there's 38 million of them sold worldwide. They are pretty common. And they're a little tiny robot, a simple robot with some sensors, a little bit of processing actuation.On the right there is another robot doll, who you could get a couple of years ago. And just as in the early days, when there was a lot of sort of amateur interaction over computers, you can now get various hacking kits, how-to-hack books. And on the left there is a platform from Evolution Robotics, where you put a PC on, and you program this thing with a GUI to wander around your house and do various stuff. And then there's a higher price point sort of robot toys — the Sony Aibo. And on the right there, is one that the NEC developed, the PaPeRo, which I don't think they're going to release. But nevertheless, those sorts of things are out there.And we've seen, over the last two or three years, lawn-mowing robots, Husqvarna on the bottom, Friendly Robotics on top there, an Israeli company. And then in the last 12 months or so we've started to see a bunch of home-cleaning robots appear. The top left one is a very nice home-cleaning robot from a company called Dyson, in the U.K. Except it was so expensive — 3,500 dollars — they didn't release it.But at the bottom left, you see Electrolux, which is on sale. Another one from Karcher. At the bottom right is one that I built in my lab about 10 years ago, and we finally turned that into a product. And let me just show you that. We're going to give this away I think, Chris said, after the talk. This is a robot that you can go out and buy, and that will clean up your floor. And it starts off sort of just going around in ever-increasing circles. If it hits something — you people see that? Now it's doing wall-following, it's following around my feet to clean up around me. Let's see, let's — oh, who stole my Rice Krispies? They stole my Rice Krispies! (Laughter) Don't worry, relax, no, relax, it's a robot, it's smart! (Laughter) See, the three-year-old kids, they don't worry about it. It's grown-ups that get really upset. (Laughter) We'll just put some crap here. (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) I don't know if you see — so, I put a bunch of Rice Krispies there, I put some pennies, let's just shoot it at that, see if it cleans up. Yeah, OK. So — we'll leave that for later. (Applause)Part of the trick was building a better cleaning mechanism, actually; the intelligence on board was fairly simple. And that's true with a lot of robots. We've all, I think, become, sort of computational chauvinists, and think that computation is everything, but the mechanics still matter. Here's another robot, the PackBot, that we've been building for a bunch of years. It's a military surveillance robot, to go in ahead of troops — looking at caves, for instance. But we had to make it fairly robust, much more robust than the robots we build in our labs. (Laughter) On board that robot is a PC running Linux. It can withstand a 400G shock. The robot has local intelligence: it can flip itself over, can get itself into communication range, can go upstairs by itself, et cetera. Okay, so it's doing local navigation there. A soldier gives it a command to go upstairs, and it does. That was not a controlled descent. (Laughter) Now it's going to head off. And the big breakthrough for these robots, really, was September 11th. We had the robots down at the World Trade Center late that evening. Couldn't do a lot in the main rubble pile, things were just too — there was nothing left to do. But we did go into all the surrounding buildings that had been evacuated, and searched for possible survivors in the buildings that were too dangerous to go into. Let's run this video. Reporter: ...battlefield companions are helping to reduce the combat risks. Nick Robertson has that story. Rodney Brooks: Can we have another one of these? Okay, good. So, this is a corporal who had seen a robot two weeks previously. He's sending robots into caves, looking at what's going on. The robot's being totally autonomous. The worst thing that's happened in the cave so far was one of the robots fell down ten meters.So one year ago, the US military didn't have these robots. Now they're on active duty in Afghanistan every day. And that's one of the reasons they say a robot invasion is happening. There's a sea change happening in how — where technology's going. Thanks. And over the next couple of months, we're going to be sending robots in production down producing oil wells to get that last few years of oil out of the ground. Very hostile environments, 150˚ C, 10,000 PSI. Autonomous robots going down, doing this sort of work. But robots like this, they're a little hard to program. How, in the future, are we going to program our robots and make them easier to use? And I want to actually use a robot here — a robot named Chris — stand up. Yeah. Okay. Come over here. Now notice, he thinks robots have to be a bit stiff. He sort of does that. But I'm going to — Chris Anderson: I'm just British. RB: Oh. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm going to show this robot a task. It's a very complex task. Now notice, he nodded there, he was giving me some indication he was understanding the flow of communication. And if I'd said something completely bizarre he would have looked askance at me, and regulated the conversation. So now I brought this up in front of him. I'd looked at his eyes, and I saw his eyes looked at this bottle top. And I'm doing this task here, and he's checking up. His eyes are going back and forth up to me, to see what I'm looking at — so we've got shared attention. And so I do this task, and he looks, and he looks to me to see what's happening next. And now I'll give him the bottle, and we'll see if he can do the task. Can you do that? (Laughter) Okay. He's pretty good. Yeah. Good, good, good. I didn't show you how to do that. Now see if you can put it back together. (Laughter) And he thinks a robot has to be really slow. Good robot, that's good.So we saw a bunch of things there. We saw when we're interacting, we're trying to show someone how to do something, we direct their visual attention. The other thing communicates their internal state to us, whether he's understanding or not, regulates a social interaction. There was shared attention looking at the same sort of thing, and recognizing socially communicated reinforcement at the end. And we've been trying to put that into our lab robots because we think this is how you're going to want to interact with robots in the future. I just want to show you one technical diagram here. The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing. So in the videos I'm about to show you, you're going to see a visual attention system on a robot which has — it looks for skin tone in HSV space, so it works across all human colorings. It looks for highly saturated colors, from toys. And it looks for things that move around. And it weights those together into an attention window, and it looks for the highest-scoring place — the stuff where the most interesting stuff is happening — and that is what its eyes then segue to. And it looks right at that. At the same time, some top-down sort of stuff: might decide that it's lonely and look for skin tone, or might decide that it's bored and look for a toy to play with. And so these weights change.And over here on the right, this is what we call the Steven Spielberg memorial module. Did people see the movie ""AI""? (Audience: Yes.)RB: Yeah, it was really bad, but —remember, especially when Haley Joel Osment, the little robot, looked at the blue fairy for 2,000 years without taking his eyes off it? Well, this gets rid of that, because this is a habituation Gaussian that gets negative, and more and more intense as it looks at one thing. And it gets bored, so it will then look away at something else. So, once you've got that — and here's a robot, here's Kismet, looking around for a toy. You can tell what it's looking at. You can estimate its gaze direction from those eyeballs covering its camera, and you can tell when it's actually seeing the toy. And it's got a little bit of an emotional response here. (Laughter) But it's still going to pay attention if something more significant comes into its field of view — such as Cynthia Breazeal, the builder of this robot, from the right. It sees her, pays attention to her. Kismet has an underlying, three-dimensional emotional space, a vector space, of where it is emotionally. And at different places in that space, it expresses — can we have the volume on here? Can you hear that now, out there? (Audience: Yeah.)Kismet: Do you really think so? Do you really think so? Do you really think so?RB: So it's expressing its emotion through its face and the prosody in its voice. And when I was dealing with my robot over here, Chris, the robot, was measuring the prosody in my voice, and so we have the robot measure prosody for four basic messages that mothers give their children pre-linguistically. Here we've got naive subjects praising the robot:Voice: Nice robot. You're such a cute little robot. (Laughter) RB: And the robot's reacting appropriately.Voice: ...very good, Kismet. (Laughter)Voice: Look at my smile.RB: It smiles. She imitates the smile. This happens a lot. These are naive subjects. Here we asked them to get the robot's attention and indicate when they have the robot's attention.Voice: Hey, Kismet, ah, there it is.RB: So she realizes she has the robot's attention. Voice: Kismet, do you like the toy? Oh.RB: Now, here they're asked to prohibit the robot, and this first woman really pushes the robot into an emotional corner.Voice: No. No. You're not to do that. No. (Laughter)Not appropriate. No. No. (Laughter)RB: I'm going to leave it at that.We put that together. Then we put in turn taking. When we talk to someone, we talk. Then we sort of raise our eyebrows, move our eyes, give the other person the idea it's their turn to talk. And then they talk, and then we pass the baton back and forth between each other. So we put this in the robot. We got a bunch of naive subjects in, we didn't tell them anything about the robot, sat them down in front of the robot and said, talk to the robot. Now what they didn't know was, the robot wasn't understanding a word they said, and that the robot wasn't speaking English. It was just saying random English phonemes. And I want you to watch carefully, at the beginning of this, where this person, Ritchie, who happened to talk to the robot for 25 minutes — (Laughter) — says, ""I want to show you something. I want to show you my watch."" And he brings the watch center, into the robot's field of vision, points to it, gives it a motion cue, and the robot looks at the watch quite successfully. We don't know whether he understood or not that the robot — Notice the turn-taking. Ritchie: OK, I want to show you something. OK, this is a watch that my girlfriend gave me. Robot: Oh, cool. Ritchie: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too. I almost lost it this week. (Laughter) RB: So it's making eye contact with him, following his eyes. Ritchie: Can you do the same thing? Robot: Yeah, sure. RB: And they successfully have that sort of communication.And here's another aspect of the sorts of things that Chris and I were doing. This is another robot, Cog. They first make eye contact, and then, when Christie looks over at this toy, the robot estimates her gaze direction and looks at the same thing that she's looking at. (Laughter) So we're going to see more and more of this sort of robot over the next few years in labs. But then the big questions, two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them, will we — will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over? (Laughter) And on the first — you know, this has been a very Hollywood theme with lots of movies. You probably recognize these characters here — where in each of these cases, the robots want more respect. Well, do you ever need to give robots respect? They're just machines, after all. But I think, you know, we have to accept that we are just machines. After all, that's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us. You don't see a description of how, you know, Molecule A, you know, comes up and docks with this other molecule. And it's moving forward, you know, propelled by various charges, and then the soul steps in and tweaks those molecules so that they connect. It's all mechanistic. We are mechanism. If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are. But I think for us to admit that, we have to give up on our special-ness, in a certain way. And we've had the retreat from special-ness under the barrage of science and technology many times over the last few hundred years, at least. 500 years ago we had to give up the idea that we are the center of the universe when the earth started to go around the sun; 150 years ago, with Darwin, we had to give up the idea we were different from animals. And to imagine — you know, it's always hard for us. Recently we've been battered with the idea that maybe we didn't even have our own creation event, here on earth, which people didn't like much. And then the human genome said, maybe we only have 35,000 genes. And that was really — people didn't like that, we've got more genes than that. We don't like to give up our special-ness, so, you know, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures — I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we're going to come to accept it over the next 50 years or so.And the second question is, will the machines want to take over? And here the standard scenario is that we create these things, they grow, we nurture them, they learn a lot from us, and then they start to decide that we're pretty boring, slow. They want to take over from us. And for those of you that have teenagers, you know what that's like. (Laughter) But Hollywood extends it to the robots. And the question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know — ""I accidentally built a 747."" I don't think that's going to happen. And I don't think — (Laughter) — I don't think we're going to deliberately build robots that we're uncomfortable with. We'll — you know, they're not going to have a super bad robot. Before that has to come to be a mildly bad robot, and before that a not so bad robot. (Laughter) And we're just not going to let it go that way. (Laughter) So, I think I'm going to leave it at that: the robots are coming, we don't have too much to worry about, it's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope you all enjoy the journey over the next 50 years. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_brooks_on_robots
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"I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. I learned very few things in addition since (Laughter) — but made a whole number of them into projects since. These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland: ""Everybody always thinks they are right."" They were combined in the media. ""Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on."" We're doing changing media. This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. You can't help but actually ripping that spider web apart. All of these things are pieces of graphic design. We do them for our clients. They are commissioned. I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there's always a client attached to them. These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that's lined with fashion stores. ""Worrying solves nothing."" ""Money does not make me happy"" appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. The printer lost the file, didn't tell us. When the magazine — actually, when I got the subscription — it was 12 following pages. It said, ""Money does does make me happy."" And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz. It just says ""Money,"" and if you look down the side street, it says, ""does not make me happy."" We had a show that just came down last week in New York. We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they've learned into the steam in the window. Everybody participated — Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli. Singapore was quite in discussion. This is a little spot that we filmed there that's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore. And, of course, it's one that's dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments — some banal, some a bit more profound — all originally had come out of my diary. And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. If it's — see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it. And the very last one is a billboard. This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. We let that lie around in the sun. As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said, ""Complaining is silly. Either act or forget."" Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. (Laughter) Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_on_what_he_has_learned
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"I want to argue to you that in fact, politics and religion, which are the two primary factors — not the sole, but overwhelmingly, the primary factors — which are driving towards a war which looks extremely likely — bordering on the inevitable at this point, whether one is in favor of that or not — that politics and religion are, in fact, themselves better conceptualized as kinds of technology, and subject to kinds of questions that we regularly consider in the space of conceptual design.Here's what I mean. Politics and — let's focus on the political system in particular question here, which is the system of democracy. Democracy, as a type of politics, is a technology for the control and deployment of power. You can deploy power in a wide range of ways. The famous ones — despotism is a good one; anarchy is a way to not deploy the power in any organized way, to do it in a radically diffused fashion; and democracy is a set of technologies, which have the effect of, in principle, diffusing the power source to a large number of people and then re-concentrating it in a smaller group of people who govern, and who themselves are, in principle, authorized to govern by virtue of what the broader public has done.Now, consider religion — in this case Islam, which is the religion that, in some direct sense, can be said to be precipitating what we're about to enter. Let me say parenthetically why I think that's the case, because I think it's a potentially controversial statement. I would put it in the following equation: no 9/11, no war. At the beginning of the Bush administration, when President Bush, now President Bush, was running for president, he made it very clear that he was not interested in intervening broadly in the world. In fact, the trend was for disengagement with the rest of the world. That's why we heard about the backing away from the Kyoto protocol, for example. After 9/11, the tables were turned. And the president decided, with his advisors, to undertake some kind of an active intervention in the world around us. That began with Afghanistan, and when Afghanistan went extremely smoothly and quickly, a decision was made through the technology of democracy — again, notice, not a perfect technology — but through the technology of democracy that this administration was going to push in the direction of another war — this time, a war in Iraq.Now, the reason I begin by saying ""no 9/11, no war"" is that we have to acknowledge that Islam, as interpreted by a very, very small, extremely radical group of people, was a precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks — the precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks — and as a consequence, at one degree of remove, the precipitating cause of the coming war that we're about to be engaged in. And I would add that bin Laden and his followers are consciously devoted to the goal of creating a conflict between democracy, or at least capitalist democracy, on the one hand, and the world of Islam as they see and define it.Now, how is Islam a technology in this conceptual apparatus? Well, it's a technology for, first, salvation in its most basic sense. It's meant to be a mechanism for construing the universe in a way that will bring about the salvation of the individual believer, but it's also meant by the Islamists — and I use that term to mean people who believe that Islam — they follow the slogan, Islam is the answer to a wide range of questions, whether they're social, or political, or personal, or spiritual. Within the sphere of people who have that view, and it's a large number of people in the Muslim world who disagree with bin Laden in his application, but agree that Islam is the answer. Islam represents a way of engaging the world through which one can achieve certain desirable goals. And the goals from the perspective of Muslims are, in principle, peace, justice and equality, but on terms that correspond to traditional Muslim teachings.Now, I don't want to leave a misimpression by identifying either of these propositions — rather, either of these phenomena, democracy or Islam — as technologies. I don't want to suggest that they are a single thing that you can point to. And I think a good way to prove this is simply to demonstrate to you what my thought process was when deciding what to put on the wall behind me when I spoke. And I ran immediately into a conceptual problem: you can't show a picture of democracy. You can show a slogan, or a symbol, or a sign that stands for democracy. You can show the Capitol — I had the same problem when I was designing the cover of my forthcoming book, in fact — what do you put on the cover to show democracy? And the same problem with respect to Islam. You can show a mosque, or you can show worshippers, but there's not a straightforward way of depicting Islam. That's because these are the kinds of concepts that are not susceptible to easy representation.Now, it follows from that, that they're deeply contestable. It follows from that that all of the people in the world who say that they are Muslims can, in principle, subscribe to a wide range of different interpretations of what Islam really is, and the same is true of democracy. In other words, unlike the word hope, which one could look up in a dictionary and derive origins for, and, perhaps, reach some kind of a consensual use analysis, these are essentially contested concepts. They're ideas about which people disagree in the deepest possible sense. And as a consequence of this disagreement, it's very, very difficult for anyone to say, ""I have the right version of Islam."" You know, post-9/11, we were treated to the amazing phenomenon of George W. Bush saying, ""Islam means peace."" Well, so says George W. Bush. Other people would say it means something else. Some people would say that Islam means submission. Other people would say it means an acknowledgement or recognition of God's sovereignty. There are a wide range of different things that Islam can mean. And ostensibly, the same is true of democracy. Some people say that democracy consists basically in elections. Other people say no, that's not enough, there have to be basic liberal rights: free speech, free press, equality of citizens. These are contested points, and it's impossible to answer them by saying, ""Ah ha, I looked in the right place, and I found out what these concepts mean.""Now, if Islam and democracy are at present in a moment of great confrontation, what does that mean? Well, you could fit it into a range of different interpretative frameworks. You could begin with the one that we began with a couple of days ago, which was fear. Fear is not an implausible reaction with a war just around the corner and with a very, very high likelihood that many, many people are going to die as a consequence of this confrontation — a confrontation which many, many people in the Muslim world do not want, many, many people in the American democracy do not want, many people elsewhere in the world do not want, but which nonetheless is favored by a large enough number of people — at least in the relevant space, which is the United States — to actually go forward. So fear is not a crazy response at all. And I think that that's, in fact, probably the first appropriate response.What I want to suggest to you, though, in the next couple of minutes is that there's also a hopeful response to this. And the hopeful response derives from recognizing that Islam and democracy are technologies. And by virtue of being technologies, they're manipulable. And they're manipulable in ways that can produce some extremely positive outcomes. What do I have in mind? Well, all over the Muslim world there are people who take Islam deeply seriously, people who care about Islam, for whom it's a source either of faith, or of civilization, or of deep values, or just a source of powerful personal identity, who think and are saying loudly that Islam and democracy are in fact not in conflict, but are in fact deeply compatible. And these Muslims — and it's the vast majority of Muslims — disagree profoundly with bin Laden's approach, profoundly. And they furthermore think overwhelmingly — again one can't speak of every person, but overwhelmingly, and one can find this by reading any of the sources that they have produced, and they're all over the Internet and in all sorts of languages — one can see that they're saying that their concern in their own countries is primarily to free up themselves to have choice in the spheres of personal life, in the sphere of economics, in the sphere of politics, and, yes, in the sphere of religion, which is itself closely regulated in most of the Muslim world.And many of these Muslims further say that their disagreement with the United States is that it, in the past and still in the present, has sided with autocratic rulers in the Muslim world in order to promote America's short-term interests. Now, during the Cold War, that may have been a defensible position for the United States to take. That's an academic question. It may be that there was a great war to be fought between West and East, and it was necessary on the axis of democracy against communism. And it was necessary in some way for these to contradict each other, and as a consequence you have to make friends wherever you can get them. But now that the Cold War is over, there's nearly universal consensus in the Muslim world — and pretty close to the same here in the United States, if you talk to people and ask them — that in principle, there's no reason that democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. And we see this among activist, practical Muslims, like the Muslims who are presently the elected, parliamentary, democratic government of Turkey, who are behaving pragmatically, not ideologically, who are promoting their own religious values, who are elected by their own people because they were perceived as honest and sincere because of their religious values, but who do not think that Islam and a democratic system of governance are fundamentally incompatible.Now, you may say, but surely, what we've seen on television about Saudi Islam convinces us that it can't possibly be compatible with what we consider the core of democracy — namely, free political choice, basic liberty and basic equality. But I'm here to tell you that technologies are more malleable than that. I'm here to tell you that many, many Muslims believe — the vast majority, in fact — in fact I think I would go so far as to say that many Muslims in Saudi Arabia believe that the core values of Islam, namely acknowledgement of God's sovereignty and basic human equality before God, are themselves compatible with liberty, equality and free political choice. And there are Muslims, many Muslims out there, who are saying precisely this. And they're making this argument wherever they're permitted to make it. But their governments, needless to say, are relatively threatened by this. And for the most part try to stop them from making this argument.So, for example, a group of young activists in Egypt try to form a party known as the Center Party, which advocated the compatibility of Islam and democracy. They weren't even allowed to form a party. They were actually blocked from even forming a party under the political system there. Why? Because they would have done extraordinarily well. In the most recent elections in the Muslim world — which are those in Pakistan, those in Morocco and those in Turkey — in each case, people who present themselves to the electorate as Islamic democrats were far and away the most successful vote-getters every place they were allowed to run freely. So in Morocco, for example, they finished third in the political race but they were only allowed to contest half the seats. So had they contested a larger number of the seats, they would have done even better. Now what I want to suggest to you is that the reason for hope in this case is that we are on the edge of a real transformation in the Muslim world. And that's a transformation in which many sincerely believing Muslims — who care very, very deeply about their traditions, who do not want to compromise those values — believe, through the malleability of the technology of democracy and the malleability and synthetic capability of the technology of Islam, that these two ideas can work together.Now what would that look like? What does it mean to say that there's an Islamic democracy? Well, one thing is, it's not going to look identical to democracy as we know it in the United States. That may be a good thing, in light of some of the criticisms we've heard today — for example, in the regulatory context — of what democracy produces. It will also not look exactly the way either the people in this room, or Muslims out in the rest of the world — I don't mean to imply there aren't Muslims here, there probably are — conceptualize Islam. It will be transformative of Islam as well. And as a result of this convergence, this synthetic attempt to make sense of these two ideas together, there's a real possibility that, instead of a clash of Islamic civilization — if there is such a thing — and democratic civilization — if there is such a thing — we'll in fact have close compatibility.Now, I began with the war because it's the elephant in the room, and you can't pretend that there isn't about to be a war if you're talking about these issues. The war has tremendous risks for the model that I'm describing because it's very possible that as a consequence of a war, many Muslims will conclude that the United States is not the kind of place that they want to emulate with respect to its forms of political government. On the other hand, there's a further possibility that many Americans, swept up in the fever of a war, will say, and feel, and think that Islam is the enemy somehow — that Islam ought to be construed as the enemy. And even though, for political tactical reasons, the president has been very, very good about saying that Islam is not the enemy, nonetheless, there's a natural impulse when one enters war to think of the other side as an enemy. And one furthermore has the impulse to generalize, as much as possible, in defining who that enemy is. So the risks are very great.On the other hand, the capacities for positive results in the aftermath of a war are also not to be underestimated, even by, and I would say especially by, people who are deeply skeptical about whether we should go to war in the first place. Those who oppose the war ought to realize that if a war happens, it cannot be the right strategy, either pragmatically, or spiritually, or morally, to say after the war, ""Well, let's let it all run itself out, and play out however it wants to play out, because we opposed the war in the first place."" That's not the way human circumstances operate. You face the circumstances you have in front of you and you go forward.Well, what I'm here to say then is, for people who are skeptical about the war, it's especially important to recognize that in the aftermath of the war there is a possibility for the government of the United States and the Muslim peoples with whom it interacts to create real forms of government that are truly democratic and also truly Islamic. And it is crucial — it is crucial in a practical, activist way — for people who care about these issues to make sure that within the technology of democracy, in this system, they exercise their preferences, their choices and their voices to encourage that outcome. That's a hopeful message, but it's a message that's hopeful only if you understand it as incurring serious obligation for all of us. And I think that we are capable of taking on that obligation, but only if we put what we can into it. And if we do, then I don't think that the hope will be unwarranted altogether.Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/noah_feldman_says_politics_and_religion_are_technologies
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"Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses.Our work is across media. The work comes in all shapes and sizes. It's small and large. This is an ashtray, a water glass. From urban planning and master planning to theater and all sorts of stuff. The thing that all the work has in common is that it challenges the assumptions about conventions of space. And these are everyday conventions, conventions that are so obvious that we are blinded by their familiarity. And I've assembled a sampling of work that all share a kind of productive nihilism that's used in the service of creating a particular special effect. And that is something like nothing, or something next to nothing. It's done through a form of subtraction or obstruction or interference in a world that we naturally sleepwalk through.This is an image that won us a competition for an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, near Geneva. And we wanted to use the water not only as a context, but as a primary building material. We wanted to make an architecture of atmosphere. So, no walls, no roof, no purpose — just a mass of atomized water, a big cloud. And this proposal was a reaction to the over-saturation of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions, which feeds, or has been feeding, our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity. High definition, in our opinion, has become the new orthodoxy. And we ask the question, can we use technology, high technology, to make an expo pavilion that's decidedly low definition, that also challenges the conventions of space and skin, and rethinks our dependence on vision?So this is how we sought to do it. Water's pumped from the lake and is filtered and shot as a fine mist through an array of high-pressure fog nozzles, 35,000 of them. And a weather station is on the structure. It reads the shifting conditions of temperature, humidity, wind direction, wind speed, dew point, and it processes this data in a central computer that calibrates the degree of water pressure and distribution of water throughout. And it's a responsive system that's trained on actual weather. So, this is just in construction, and there's a tensegrity structure. It's about 300 feet wide, the size of a football field, and it sits on just four very delicate columns. These are the fog nozzles, the interface, and basically the system is kind of reading the real weather, and producing kind of semi-artificial and real weather. So, we're very interested in creating weather. I don't know why.Now, here we go, one side, the outside and then from the inside of the space you can see what the quality of the space was. Unlike entering any normal space, entering Blur is like stepping into a habitable medium. It's formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, purposeless and dimensionless. All references are erased, leaving only an optical whiteout and white noise of the pulsing nozzles. So, this is an exhibition pavilion where there is absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do. And we pride ourselves — it's a spectacular anti-spectacle in which all the conventions of spectacle are turned on their head. So, the audience is dispersed, focused attention and dramatic build-up and climax are all replaced by a kind of attenuated attention that's sustained by a sense of apprehension caused by the fog. And this is very much like how the Victorian novel used fog in this way. So here the world is put out of focus, while our visual dependence is put into focus. The public, you know, once disoriented can actually ascend to the angel deck above and then just come down under those lips into the water bar. So, all the waters of the world are served there, so we thought that, you know, after being at the water and moving through the water and breathing the water, you could also drink this building.And so it is sort of a theme, but it goes a little bit, you know, deeper than that. We really wanted to bring out our absolute dependence on this master sense, and maybe share our kind of sensibility with our other senses. You know, when we did this project it was a kind of tough sell, because the Swiss said, ""Well, why are we going to spend, you know, 10 million dollars producing an effect that we already have in natural abundance that we hate?"" And, you know, we thought — well, we tried to convince them. And in the end, you know, they adapted this as a national icon that came to represent Swiss doubt, which we — you know, it was kind of a meaning machine that everybody kind of laid on their own meanings off of. Anyway, it's a temporary structure that was ultimately destroyed, and so it's now a memory of an apparition, actually, but it continues to live in edible form. And this is the highest honor to be bestowed upon an architect in Switzerland — to have a chocolate bar.Anyway, moving along. So in the '80s and '90s, we were mostly known for independent work, such as installation artist, architect, commissioned projects by museums and non-for-profit organizations. And we did a lot of media work, also a lot of experimental theater projects. In 2003, the Whitney mounted a retrospective of our work that featured a lot of this work from the '80s and '90s. However, the work itself resisted the very nature of a retrospective, and this is just some of the stuff that was in the show. This was a piece on tourism in the United States. This is ""Soft Sell"" for 42nd Street. This was something done at the Cartier Foundation. ""Master/Slave"" at the MOMA, the project series, a piece called ""Parasite."" And so there were many, many of these kinds of projects.Anyway, they gave us the whole fourth floor, and, you know, the problem of the retrospective was something we were very uncomfortable with. It's a kind of invention of the museum that's supposed to bring a kind of cohesive understanding to the public of a body of work. And our work doesn't really resolve itself into a body in any way at all. And one of the recurring themes, by the way, that in the work was a kind of hostility toward the museum itself, and asking about the conventions of the museum, like the wall, the white wall. So, what you see here is basically a plan of many installations that were put there. And we actually had to install white walls to separate these pieces, which didn't belong together. But these white walls became a kind of target and weapon at the same time. We used the wall to partition the 13 installations of the project and produce a kind of acoustic and visual separation.And what you see is — actually, the red dotted line shows the track of this performing element, which was a new piece that created — that we created for the — which was a robotic drill, basically, that went all the way around, cruised the museum, went all around the walls and did a lot of damage. So, the drill was mounted on this robotic arm. We worked with, by the way, Honeybee Robotics. This is the brain. Honeybee Robotics designed the Mars Driller, and it was really very much fun to work with them. They weren't doing their primary work, which was for the government, while they were helping us with this. In any case, the way it works is that an intelligent navigator basically maps the entire surface of these walls. So, unfolded it's about 300 linear feet. And it randomly generates points within a three-dimensional matrix. It selects a point, it guides the drill to that point, it pierces the dry wall, leaving a half-inch hole before traveling to the next location. Initially these holes were lone blemishes, and as the exhibition continued the walls became increasingly perforated.So eventually holes on both sides of the wall aligned, opening views from gallery to gallery. Clusters of holes randomly opened up sections of wall. And so this was a three-month performance piece in which the wall was made into kind of an increasingly unstable element. And also the acoustic separation was destroyed. Also the visual separation. And there was also this constant background groan, which was very annoying. And this is one of the blackout spaces where there's a video piece that became totally not useful. So rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display, the wall now actively competed for attention. And this acoustical nuisance and visual nuisance basically exposed the discomfort of the work to this encompassing nature of the retrospective. It was really great when it started to break up all of the curatorial text.Moving along to a project that we finished about a year ago. It's the ICA — the Institute of Contemporary Art — in Boston, which is on the waterfront. And there's not enough time to really introduce the building, but I'll simply say that the building negotiates between this outwardly focused nature of the site — you know, it's a really great waterfront site in Boston — and this contradictory other desire to have an inwardly focused museum. So, the nature of the building is that it looks at looking — I mean that's its primary objective, both its program and its architectural conceit. The building incorporates the site, but it dispenses it in very small doses in the way that the museum is choreographed. So, you come in and you're basically squeezed by the theater, by the belly of the theater, into this very compressed space where the view is turned off. Then you come up in this glass elevator right near the curtain wall. This elevator's about the size of a New York City studio apartment.And then, this is a view going up, and then you could come into the theater, which can actually deny the view or open it up and become a backdrop. And many musicians choose to use the theater glass walls totally open. The view is denied in the galleries where we receive just natural light, and then exposed again in the north gallery with a panoramic view. The original intention of this space, which was unfortunately never realized, was to use lenticular glass which allowed only a kind of perpendicular view out. In this very narrow space that connects east and west galleries the intention was really to not get a climax, but to have the view stalk you, so the view would open up as you walked from one end to the other. This was eliminated because the view was too good, and the mayor said, ""No, we just want this open."" The architect lost here.But culminating — and that's where this hooks into the theme of my little talk — is this Mediatheque, which is suspended from the cantilevered portion of the building. So this is an 80-foot cantilever — it's quite substantial. So, it's already sticking out into space enough, and then from that is this, is this small area called the Mediatheque. The Mediatheque has something like 16 stations where the public can get onto the server and look at digital artworks or also curated artworks off the web. And this was really a kind of very important part of this building, and here is a point where architecture — this is like technology-free — architecture is only a framing device, it only edits the harbor view, the industrial harbor just through its walls, its floors and its ceiling, to only expose the water itself, the texture of water, much like a hypnotic effect created by electronic snow or a lava lamp or something like that. And here is where we really felt that there was a great convergence of the technological and the natural in the project. But there is just no information, it's just — it's just hypnosis.Moving along to Lincoln Center. These are the guys that did the project in the first place, 50 years ago. We're taking over now, doing work that ranges in scale from small-scale repairs to major renovations and major facility expansions. But we're doing it with a lot less testosterone. This is the extent of the work that's to be completed by 2010. And for the purposes of this talk, I wanted to isolate just a part of a project that's even a part of a project that touches a little bit on this theme of architectural special effects, and it happens to be our current obsession, and it plays a little bit with the purging and adding of distraction. It's Alice Tully Hall, and it's tucked under the Juilliard Building and descends several levels under the street. So, this is the entrance to Tully Hall as it used to be, before the renovation, which we just started. And we asked ourselves, why couldn't it be exhibitionistic, like the Met, or like some of the other buildings at Lincoln Center? And one of the things that we were asked to do was give it a street identity, expand the lobbies and make it visually accessible. And this building, which is just naturally hermetic, we stripped. We basically did a striptease, architectural striptease, where we're framing with this kind of canopy — the underside of three levels of expansion of Juilliard, about 45,000 square feet — cutting it to the angle of Broadway, and then exposing, using that canopy to frame Tully Hall. Before and after shot. (Applause) Wait a minute, it's just in that state, we have a long way to go.But what I wanted to do was take a couple of seconds that I have left to just talk about the hall itself, which is kind of where we're really doing a massive amount of work. So, the hall is a multi-purpose hall. The clients have asked us to produce a great chamber music hall. Now, that's really tough to do with a hall that has 1,100 seats. Chamber and the notion of chamber has to do with salons and small-scale performances. They asked us to bring an intimacy. How do you bring an intimacy into a hall? Intimacy for us means a lot of different things. It means acoustic intimacy and it means visual intimacy.One thing is that the subway is running and rumbling right under the hall. Another thing that could be fixed is the shape of the hall. It's like a coffin, it basically sends all the sound, like a gutter-ball effect, down the aisles. The walls are made of absorptive surface, half absorptive, half reflective, which is not very good for concert sound.This is Avery Fisher Hall, but the notion of junk — visual junk — was very, very important to us, to get rid of visual noise. Because we can't eliminate a single seat, the architecture is restricted to 18 inches. So it's a very, very thin architecture. First we do a kind of partial box and box separation, to take away the distraction of the subway noise. Next we wrap the entire hall — almost like this Olivetti keyboard — with a material, with a wood material that basically covers all the surfaces: wall, ceiling, floor, stage, steps, everything, boxes. But it's acoustically engineered to focus the sound into the house and back to the stage. And here's an acoustic shelf. Looking up the hall. Just a section of the stage. Just everything is lined, it incorporates — every single thing that you could possibly imagine is tucked into this high-performance skin. But one more added feature.So now that we've stripped the hall of all visual distraction, everything that prevents this intimacy which is supposed to connect the house, the audience, with the performers, we add one little detail, one piece of architectural excess, a special effect: lighting. We very strongly believe that the theatrics of a concert hall is as much in the space of intermission and the space of arrival as it is when the concert starts. So what we wanted to do was produce this effect, this lighting effect, which made us have to bioengineer the wood walls. And what it entails is the use of resin, of this very thick resin with a veneer of the same kind of wood that's used throughout the hall, in a kind of seamless continuity that wraps the hall in light, like a belt of light: rather than separating, like a proscenium would separate the audience from performers, it connects audience with players.And this is a mockup that is in Salt Lake City that gives you a sense of what this is going to look like in full-scale. And this is a guy from Salt Lake City, this is what they look like out there. (Laughter) And for us, I mean it's really kind of a very strange thing, but the moments in the hall that the buzz kind of dies down when the audience is waiting for the performance to begin, very similar to the parting of curtains or the raising of a chandelier, the walls will just exude this glow, temporarily stealing attention from the stage. And this is Tully in construction now.I have no ending to say, except that I'm a couple of minutes over.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/liz_diller_plays_with_architecture
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"I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and — on a personal level — an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging, the Civil Rights movement was under way and pictures had a powerful influence on me. Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another.I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans. Their images fuelled resistance to the war and to racism. They not only recorded history — they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable.It puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one. And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice.My TED wish. There’s a vital story that needs to be told and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. Thank you very much.[ 10.3.08 — The story breaks. ] [ ""I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony."" ][ South Africa ][ This is happening now. ][ Cambodia ][ Swaziland ][ One person dies every 20 seconds. ][ Thailand ][ An ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form. ][ Siberia ][ Lesotho ][ Tuberculosis: the next pandemic? ][ India ][ TB is preventable and curable, ] [ but it is mutating due to inadequate treatment. ] [ XDR-TB: ] [ extreme drug resistant tuberculosis. ] [ There is no reliable cure. ] [ Patients often die within weeks of diagnosis. ] [ 49 countries have reported XDR-TB. ] [ XDR-TB is a critical threat to global health. ][ Extreme outbreak, suffering, affliction ] [ Extreme loss, pain, pandemic ] [ Extremely preventable. ] [ XDR-TB. ][ We can stop this now. ] [ Spread the story. Stop the disease. ] [ Go to XDRTB.org now. ] [ XDRTB.org: we are the treatment. ] [ We are the treatment. ][ Made possible through the kind support of BD. ]","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_fights_xdrtb
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"I grew up in Northern Ireland, right up in the very, very north end of it there, where it's absolutely freezing cold. This was me running around in the back garden mid-summer.(Laughter)I couldn't pick a career. In Ireland the obvious choice is the military, but to be honest it actually kind of sucks.(Laughter)My mother wanted me to be a dentist. But the problem was that people kept blowing everything up. So I actually went to school in Belfast, which was where all the action happened. And this was a pretty common sight. The school I went to was pretty boring. They forced us to learn things like Latin. The school teachers weren't having much fun, the sports were very dirty or very painful. So I cleverly chose rowing, which I got very good at.And I was actually rowing for my school here until this fateful day, and I flipped over right in front of the entire school. And that was the finishing post right there.(Laughter)So this was extremely embarrassing. But our school at that time got a grant from the government, and they got an incredible computer — the research machine 3DZ — and they left the programming manuals lying around. And so students like myself with nothing to do, we would learn how to program it. Also around this time, at home, this was the computer that people were buying. It was called the Sinclair ZX80. This was a 1K computer, and you'd buy your programs on cassette tape.Actually I'm just going to pause for one second, because I heard that there's a prerequisite to speak here at TED — you had to have a picture of yourself from the old days with big hair. So I brought a picture with big hair.(Laughter).I just want to get that out of the way. So after the Sinclair ZX80 came along the very cleverly named Sinclair ZX81.(Laughter)And — you see the picture at the bottom? There's a picture of a guy doing homework with his son. That's what they thought they had built it for. The reality is we got the programming manual and we started making games for it. We were programming in BASIC, which is a pretty awful language for games, so we ended up learning Assembly language so we could really take control of the hardware. This is the guy that invented it, Sir Clive Sinclair, and he's showing his machine. You had this same thing in America, it was called the Timex Sinclair1000.To play a game in those days you had to have an imagination to believe that you were really playing ""Battlestar Galactica."" The graphics were just horrible. You had to have an even better imagination to play this game, ""Death Rider."" But of course the scientists couldn't help themselves. They started making their own video games. This is one of my favorite ones here, where they have rabbit breeding, so males choose the lucky rabbit.It was around this time we went from 1K to 16K, which was quite the leap. And if you're wondering how much 16K is, this eBay logo here is 16K. And in that amount of memory someone programmed a full flight simulation program. And that's what it looked like. I spent ages flying this flight simulator, and I honestly believed I could fly airplanes by the end of it.Here's Clive Sinclair now launching his color computer. He's recognized as being the father of video games in Europe. He's a multi-millionaire, and I think that's why he's smiling in this photograph.So I went on for the next 20 years or so making a lot of different games. Some of the highlights were things like ""The Terminator,"" ""Aladdin,"" the ""Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles."" Because I was from the United Kingdom, they thought the word ninja was a little too mean for children, so they decided to call it hero instead. I personally preferred the Spanish version, which was ""Tortugas Ninja."" That was much better.(Laughter)Then the last game I did was based on trying to get the video game industry and Hollywood to actually work together on something — instead of licensing from each other, to actually work.Now, Chris did ask me to bring some statistics with me, so I've done that. The video game industry in 2005 became a 29 billion dollar business. It grows every year. Last year was the biggest year. By 2008, we're going to kick the butt of the music industry. By 2010, we're going to hit 42 billion. 43 percent of gamers are female. So there's a lot more female gamers than people are really aware.The average age of gamers? Well, obviously it's for children, right? Well, no, actually it's 30 years old. And interestingly, the people who buy the most games are 37. So 37 is our target audience. All video games are violent. Of course the newspapers love to beat on this. But 83 percent of games don't have any mature content whatsoever, so it's just not true.Online gaming statistics. I brought some stuff on ""World of Warcraft."" It's 5.5 million players. It makes about 80 million bucks a month in subscriptions. It costs 50 bucks just to install it on your computer, making the publisher about another 275 million. The game costs about 80 million dollars to make, so basically it pays for itself in about a month. A player in a game called ""Project Entropia"" actually bought his own island for 26,500 dollars. You have to remember that this is not a real island. He didn't actually buy anything, just some data. But he got great terms on it. This purchase included mining and hunting rights, ownership of all land on the island, and a castle with no furniture included.(Laughter)This market is now estimated at over 800 million dollars annually. And what's interesting about it is the market was actually created by the gamers themselves. They found clever ways to trade items and to sell their accounts to each other so that they could make money while they were playing their games. I dove onto eBay a couple of days ago just to see what was gong on, typed in World of Warcraft, got 6,000 items. I liked this one the best: a level 60 Warlock with lots of epics for 174,000 dollars. It's like that guy obviously had some pain while making it.So as far as popularity of games, what do you think these people are doing here? It turns out they're actually in Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles listening to the L.A. Philharmonic playing video game music. That's what the show looks like. You would expect it to be cheesy, but it's not. It's very, very epic and a very beautiful concert. And the people that went there absolutely loved it.What do you think these people are doing? They're actually bringing their computers so they can play games against each other. And this is happening in every city around the world. This is happening in your local cities too, you're probably just not aware of it.Now, Chris told me that you had a timeline video a few years ago here just to show how video game graphics have been improving. I wanted to update that video and give you a new look at it. But what I want you to do is to try to understand it. We're on this curve, and the graphics are getting so ridiculously better. And I'm going to show you up to maybe 2007. But I want you to try and think about what games could look like 10 years from now. So we're going to start that video.Video: Throughout human history people have played games. As man's intellect and technology have evolved so too have the games he plays.(Music)(Applause)David Perry: The thing again I want you to think about is, don't look at these graphics and think of that's the way it is. Think about that's where we are right now, and the curve that we're on means that this is going to continue to get better. This is an example of the kind of graphics you need to be able to draw if you wanted to get a job in the video game industry today. You need to be really an incredible artist. And once we get enough of those guys, we're going to want more fantasy artists that can create places we've never been to before, or characters that we've just never seen before.So the obvious thing for me to talk about today is graphics and audio. But if you were to go to a game developers conference, what they're all talking about is emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding and feeling. You'll hear about talks like, can a video game make you cry? And these are the kind of topics we really actually care about.I came across a student who's absolutely excellent at expressing himself, and this student agreed that he would not show his video to anybody until you here at TED had seen it. So I'd like to play this video. So this is a student's opinion on what his experience of games are.Video: I, like many of you, live somewhere between reality and video games. Some part of me — a true living, breathing person — has become programmed, electronic and virtual. The boundary of my brain that divides real from fantasy has finally begun to crumble. I'm a video game addict and this is my story.(Music)In the year of my birth the Nintendo Entertainment System also went into development. I played in the backyard, learned to read, and even ate some of my vegetables. Most of my childhood was spent playing with Legos. But as was the case for most of my generation, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Mr. Rogers, Walt Disney, Nick Junior, and roughly half a million commercials have undoubtedly left their mark on me.When my parents bought my sister and I our first Nintendo, whatever inherent addictive quality this early interactive electronic entertainment possessed quickly took hold of me. At some point something clicked.(Music)With the combination of simple, interactive stories and the warmth of the TV set, my simple 16-bit Nintendo became more than just an escape. It became an alternate existence, my virtual reality.(Music)I'm a video game addict, and it's not because of a certain number of hours I have spent playing, or nights I have gone without sleep to finish the next level. It is because I have had life-altering experiences in virtual space, and video games had begun to erode my own understanding of what is real and what is not. I'm addicted, because even though I know I'm losing my grip on reality, I still crave more.(Music)From an early age I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen. Today, after 20 years of watching TV geared to make me emotional, even a decent insurance commercial can bring tears to my eyes. I am just one of a new generation that is growing up. A generation who may experience much more meaning through video games than they will through the real world. Video games are nearing an evolutionary leap, a point where game worlds will look and feel just as real as the films we see in theatres, or the news we watch on TV. And while my sense of free will in these virtual worlds may still be limited, what I do learn applies to my real life. Play enough video games and eventually you will really believe you can snowboard, fly a plane, drive a nine-second quarter mile, or kill a man. I know I can.Unlike any pop culture phenomenon before it, video games actually allow us to become part of the machine. They allow us to sublimate into the culture of interactive, downloaded, streaming, HD reality. We are interacting with our entertainment. I have come to expect this level of interaction. Without it, the problems faced in the real world — poverty, war, disease and genocide — lack the levity they should. Their importance blends into the sensationalized drama of prime time TV.But the beauty of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics, the vibrating joysticks or virtual surround sound. It lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional. I have fought in wars, feared for my own survival, watched my cohorts die on beaches and woods that look and feel more real than any textbook or any news story.The people who create these games are smart. They know what makes me scared, excited, panicked, proud or sad. Then they use these emotions to dimensionalize the worlds they create. A well-designed video game will seamlessly weave the user into the fabric of the virtual experience. As one becomes more experienced the awareness of physical control melts away. I know what I want and I do it. No buttons to push, no triggers to pull, just me and the game. My fate and the fate of the world around me lie inside my hands. I know violent video games make my mother worry. What troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence, but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game.(Music)These are all troubles outside of myself. I, however, have a problem very close to home. Something has happened to my brain.(Music)Perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts, the things we know to do before we even think. While some of these instincts may be innate, most are learned, and all of them are hardwired into our brains. These instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds. Only in recent years has the technology behind video games allowed for a true overlap in stimuli. As gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life, only virtually. Consider this — my real life car has about 25,000 miles on it. In all my driving games, I've driven a total of 31,459 miles. To some degree I've learned how to drive from the game. The sensory cues are very similar. It's a funny feeling when you have spent more time doing something on the TV than you have in real life. When I am driving down a road at sunset all I can think is, this is almost as beautiful as my games are.For my virtual worlds are perfect. More beautiful and rich than the real world around us. I'm not sure what the implications of my experience are, but the potential for using realistic video game stimuli in repetition on a vast number of loyal participants is frightening to me. Today I believe Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with video games rather than just simply TVs. Video games are fun, engaging, and leave your brain completely vulnerable to re-programming. But maybe brainwashing isn't always bad.Imagine a game that teaches us to respect each other, or helps us to understand the problems we're all facing in the real world. There is a potential to do good as well. It is critical, as these virtual worlds continue to mirror the real world we live in, that game developers realize that they have tremendous responsibilities before them. I'm not sure what the future of video games holds for our civilization. But as virtual and real world experiences increasingly overlap there is a greater and greater potential for other people to feel the same way I do.What I have only recently come to realize is that beyond the graphics, sound, game play and emotion it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addictive to me. I know that I am losing my grip. Part of me is just waiting to let go. I know though, that no matter how amazing video games may become, or how flat the real world may seem to us, that we must stay aware of what our games are teaching us and how they leave us feeling when we finally do unplug.(Applause)DP: Wow.(Applause)I found that video very, very thought provoking, and that's why I wanted to bring it here for you guys to see. And what was interesting about it is the obvious choice for me to talk about was graphics and audio. But as you heard, Michael talked about all these other elements as well. Video games give an awful lot of other things too, and that's why people get so addicted. The most important one being fun.The name of this track is ""The Magic To Come."" Who is that going to come from? Is it going to come from the best directors in the world as we thought it probably would? I don't think so. I think it's going to come from the children who are growing up now that aren't stuck with all of the stuff that we remember from the past. They're going to do it their way, using the tools that we've created. The same with students or highly creative people, writers and people like that.As far as colleges go, there's about 350 colleges around the world teaching video game courses. That means there's literally thousands of new ideas. Some of the ideas are really dreadful and some of them are great. There's nothing worse than having to listen to someone try and pitch you a really bad video game idea.(Laughter)Chris Anderson: You're off, you're off. That's it. He's out of time.DP: I've just got a little tiny bit more if you'll indulge me.CA: Go ahead. I'm going to stay right here though.(Laughter)DP: This is just a cool shot, because this is students coming to school after class. The school is closed; they're coming back at midnight because they want to pitch their video game ideas. I'm sitting at the front of the class, and they're actually pitching their ideas. So it's hard to get students to come back to class, but it is possible.This is my daughter, her name's Emma, she's 17 months old. And I've been asking myself, what is Emma going to experience in the video game world? And as I've shown here, we have the audience. She's never going to know a world where you can't press a button and have millions of people ready to play. You know, we have the technology. She's never going to know a world where the graphics just aren't stunning and really immersive. And as the student video showed, we can impact and move. She's never going to know a world where video games aren't incredibly emotional and will probably make her cry. I just hope she likes video games.(Laughter)So, my closing thought. Games on the surface seem simple entertainment, but for those that like to look a little deeper, the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big. Where better to challenge those minds than here at TED?Thank you.Chris Anderson: David Perry. That was awesome.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_perry_on_videogames
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"So, indeed, I have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive. Waking up with Abraham Lincoln in the morning, thinking of Franklin Roosevelt when I went to bed at night. But when I try and think about what I've learned about the meaning in life, my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Erik Erikson.He taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play. And that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the other, is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age. Whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication, is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement, but with serenity.So since I tell stories, let me look back on the lives of two of the presidents I've studied to illustrate this point — Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. As for that first sphere of work, I think what Abraham Lincoln's life suggests is that fierce ambition is a good thing. He had a huge ambition. But it wasn't simply for office or power or celebrity or fame — what it was for was to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it.Even as a child, it seemed, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. He somehow had to escape that hard-scrabble farm from which he was born. No schooling was possible for him, except a few weeks here, a few weeks there. But he read books in every spare moment he could find. It was said when he got a copy of the King James Bible or ""Aesop's Fables,"" he was so excited he couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. The great poet Emily Dickinson once said, ""There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away."" How true for Lincoln.Though he never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to merry England, he went with Lord Byron's poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings. But there were so many losses in his early life that he was haunted by death. His mother died when he was only nine years old; his only sister, Sarah, in childbirth a few years later; and his first love, Ann Rutledge, at the age of 22. Moreover, when his mother lay dying, she did not hold out for him the hope that they would meet in an afterworld. She simply said to him, ""Abraham, I'm going away from you now, and I shall never return."" As a result he became obsessed with the thought that when we die our life is swept away — dust to dust.But only as he grew older did he develop a certain consolation from an ancient Greek notion — but followed by other cultures as well — that if you could accomplish something worthy in your life, you could live on in the memory of others. Your honor and your reputation would outlive your earthly existence. And that worthy ambition became his lodestar. It carried him through the one significant depression that he suffered when he was in his early 30s.Three things had combined to lay him low. He had broken his engagement with Mary Todd, not certain he was ready to marry her, but knowing how devastating it was to her that he did that. His one intimate friend, Joshua Speed, was leaving Illinois to go back to Kentucky because Speed's father had died. And his political career in the state legislature was on a downward slide. He was so depressed that friends worried he was suicidal. They took all knives and razors and scissors from his room. And his great friend Speed went to his side and said, ""Lincoln, you must rally or you will die."" He said that, ""I would just as soon die right now, but I've not yet done anything to make any human being remember that I have lived.""So fueled by that ambition, he returned to the state legislature. He eventually won a seat in Congress. He then ran twice for the Senate, lost twice. ""Everyone is broken by life,"" Ernest Hemingway once said, ""but some people are stronger in the broken places."" So then he surprised the nation with an upset victory for the presidency over three far more experienced, far more educated, far more celebrated rivals. And then when he won the general election, he stunned the nation even more by appointing each of these three rivals into his Cabinet. It was an unprecedented act at the time because everybody thought, ""He'll look like a figurehead compared to these people."" They said, ""Why are you doing this, Lincoln?"" He said, ""Look, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. The country is in peril. I need them by my side."" But perhaps my old friend Lyndon Johnson might have put it in less noble fashion: ""Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."" (Laughter)But it soon became clear that Abraham Lincoln would emerge as the undisputed captain of this unruly team. For each of them soon came to understand that he possessed an unparalleled array of emotional strengths and political skills that proved far more important than the thinness of his external résumé. For one thing, he possessed an uncanny ability to empathize with and to think about other peoples' point of view. He repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into permanent hostility. He shared credit with ease, assumed responsibility for the failure of his subordinates, constantly acknowledged his errors and learned from his mistakes. These are the qualities we should be looking for in our candidates in 2008. (Applause) He refused to be provoked by petty grievances. He never submitted to jealousy or brooded over perceived slights. And he expressed his unshakeable convictions in everyday language, in metaphors, in stories. And with a beauty of language — almost as if the Shakespeare and the poetry he had so loved as a child had worked their way into his very soul.In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, he brought his old friend, Joshua Speed, back to the White House, and remembered that conversation of decades before, when he was so sad. And he, pointing to the Proclamation, said, ""I believe, in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."" But as he was about to put his signature on the Proclamation his own hand was numb and shaking because he had shaken a thousand hands that morning at a New Year's reception. So he put the pen down. He said, ""If ever my soul were in an act, it is in this act. But if I sign with a shaking hand, posterity will say, 'He hesitated.'"" So he waited until he could take up the pen and sign with a bold and clear hand. But even in his wildest dreams, Lincoln could never have imagined how far his reputation would reach.I was so thrilled to find an interview with the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in a New York newspaper in the early 1900s. And in it, Tolstoy told of a trip that he'd recently made to a very remote area of the Caucasus, where there were only wild barbarians, who had never left this part of Russia. Knowing that Tolstoy was in their midst, they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history. So he said, ""I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar, and they loved it. But before I finished, the chief of the barbarians stood up and said, 'But wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all. We want to hear about that man who spoke with a voice of thunder, who laughed like the sunrise, who came from that place called America, which is so far from here, that if a young man should travel there, he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man. Tell us of Abraham Lincoln.'"" He was stunned. He told them everything he could about Lincoln. And then in the interview he said, ""What made Lincoln so great? Not as great a general as Napoleon, not as great a statesman as Frederick the Great."" But his greatness consisted, and historians would roundly agree, in the integrity of his character and the moral fiber of his being.So in the end that powerful ambition that had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood had been realized. That ambition that had allowed him to laboriously educate himself by himself, to go through that string of political failures and the darkest days of the war. His story would be told. So as for that second sphere, not of work, but of love — encompassing family, friends and colleagues — it, too, takes work and commitment. The Lyndon Johnson that I saw in the last years of his life, when I helped him on his memoirs, was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work, power and individual success, that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone.My relationship with him began on a rather curious level. I was selected as a White House Fellow when I was 24 years old. We had a big dance at the White House. President Johnson did dance with me that night. Not that peculiar — there were only three women out of the 16 White House Fellows. But he did whisper in my ear that he wanted me to work directly for him in the White House. But it was not to be that simple. For in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I'd been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and had written an article against Lyndon Johnson, which unfortunately came out in The New Republic two days after the dance in the White House. (Laugher) And the theme of the article was how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power. (Laughter) So I was certain he would kick me out of the program. But instead, surprisingly, he said, ""Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can."" So I did end up working for him in the White House. Eventually accompanied him to his ranch to help him on those memoirs, never fully understanding why he'd chosen me to spend so many hours with.I like to believe it was because I was a good listener. He was a great storyteller. Fabulous, colorful, anecdotal stories. There was a problem with these stories, however, which I later discovered, which is that half of them weren't true. But they were great, nonetheless. (Laughter) So I think that part of his attraction for me was that I loved listening to his tall tales. But I also worried that part of it was that I was then a young woman. And he had somewhat of a minor league womanizing reputation. So I constantly chatted to him about boyfriends, even when I didn't have any at all.Everything was working perfectly, until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship. Sounded very ominous when he took me nearby to the lake, conveniently called Lake Lyndon Baines Johnson. And there was wine and cheese and a red-checked tablecloth — all the romantic trappings. And he started out, ""Doris, more than any other woman I have ever known ... "" And my heart sank. And then he said, ""You remind me of my mother."" (Laughter)It was pretty embarrassing, given what was going on in my mind. But I must say, the older I've gotten, the more I realize what an incredible privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man. A victor in a thousand contests, three great civil rights laws, Medicare, aid to education. And yet, roundly defeated in the end by the war in Vietnam. And because he was so sad and so vulnerable, he opened up to me in ways he never would have had I known him at the height of his power — sharing his fears, his sorrows and his worries. And I'd like to believe that the privilege fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public figure, that I've tried to bring to each of my books since then.But it also brought home to me the lessons which Erik Erikson had tried to instill in all of us about the importance of finding balance in life. For on the surface, Lyndon Johnson should have had everything in the world to feel good about in those last years, in the sense that he had been elected to the presidency; he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity he wanted; he owned a spacious ranch in the countryside, a penthouse in the city, sailboats, speedboats. He had servants to answer any whim, and he had a family who loved him deeply.And yet, years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement he could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it. As his spirits sagged, his body deteriorated until, I believe, he slowly brought about his own death. In those last years, he said he was so sad watching the American people look toward a new president and forgetting him. He spoke with immense sadness in his voice, saying maybe he should have spent more time with his children, and their children in turn. But it was too late. Despite all that power, all that wealth, he was alone when he finally died — his ultimate terror realized.So as for that third sphere of play, which he never had learned to enjoy, I've learned over the years that even this sphere requires a commitment of time and energy — enough so that a hobby, a sport, a love of music, or art, or literature, or any form of recreation, can provide true pleasure, relaxation and replenishment. So deep, for instance, was Abraham Lincoln's love of Shakespeare, that he made time to spend more than a hundred nights in the theater, even during those dark days of the war. He said, when the lights went down and a Shakespeare play came on, for a few precious hours he could imagine himself back in Prince Hal's time.But an even more important form of relaxation for him, that Lyndon Johnson never could enjoy, was a love of — somehow — humor, and feeling out what hilarious parts of life can produce as a sidelight to the sadness. He once said that he laughed so he did not cry, that a good story, for him, was better than a drop of whiskey. His storytelling powers had first been recognized when he was on the circuit in Illinois. The lawyers and the judges would travel from one county courthouse to the other, and when anyone was knowing Lincoln was in town, they would come from miles around to listen to him tell stories. He would stand with his back against a fire and entertain the crowd for hours with his winding tales. And all these stories became part of his memory bank, so he could call on them whenever he needed to. And they're not quite what you might expect from our marble monument.One of his favorite stories, for example, had to do with the Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen. And as Lincoln told the story, Mr. Allen went to Britain after the war. And the British people were still upset about losing the Revolution, so they decided to embarrass him a little bit by putting a huge picture of General Washington in the only outhouse, where he'd have to encounter it. They figured he'd be upset about the indignity of George Washington being in an outhouse. But he came out of the outhouse not upset at all. And so they said, ""Well, did you see George Washington in there?"" ""Oh, yes,"" he said, ""perfectly appropriate place for him."" ""What do you mean?"" they said. ""Well,"" he said, ""there's nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George Washington."" (Laughter) (Applause)So you can imagine, if you are in the middle of a tense cabinet meeting — and he had hundreds of these stories — you would have to relax. So between his nightly treks to the theater, his story telling, and his extraordinary sense of humor and his love of quoting Shakespeare and poetry, he found that form of play which carried him through his days. In my own life, I shall always be grateful for having found a form of play in my irrational love of baseball. Which allows me, from the beginning of spring training to the end of the fall, to have something to occupy my mind and heart other than my work.It all began when I was only six years old, and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games — so that when he went to work in New York during the day, I could record for him the history of that afternoon's Brooklyn Dodgers game. Now, when you're only six years old, and your father comes home every single night and listens to you — as I now realize that I, in excruciating detail, recounted every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place that afternoon. But he made me feel I was telling him a fabulous story. It makes you think there's something magic about history to keep your father's attention.In fact, I'm convinced I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father. Because at first, I'd be so excited I would blurt out, ""The Dodgers won!"" or, ""The Dodgers lost!"" Which took much of the drama of this two-hour telling away. (Laughter) So I finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end. I must say, so fervent was my love of the old Brooklyn Dodgers in those days that I had to confess in my first confession two sins that related to baseball.The first occurred because the Dodgers' catcher, Roy Campanella, came to my hometown of Rockville Centre, Long Island, just as I was in preparation for my first Holy Communion. And I was so excited — first person I'd ever see outside of Ebbets Field. But it so happened he was speaking in a Protestant Church. When you are brought up as a Catholic, you think that if you ever set foot in a Protestant Church, you'll be struck dead at the threshold. So I went to my father in tears, ""What are we going to do?"" He said, ""Don't worry. He's speaking in a parish hall. We're sitting in folding chairs. He's talking about sportsmanship. It's not a sin."" But as I left that night, I was certain that somehow I'd traded the life of my everlasting soul for this one night with Roy Campanella. (Laughter) And there were no indulgences around that I could buy. So I had this sin on my soul when I went to my first confession. I told the priest right away. He said, ""No problem. It wasn't a religious service."" But then, unfortunately, he said, ""And what else, my child?""And then came my second sin. I tried to sandwich it in between talking too much in church, wishing harm to others, being mean to my sisters. And he said, ""To whom did you wish harm?"" And I had to say that I wished that various New York Yankees players would break arms, legs and ankles — (Laughter) — so that the Brooklyn Dodgers could win their first World Series. He said, ""How often do you make these horrible wishes?"" And I had to say, every night when I said my prayers. (Laughter) So he said, ""Look, I'll tell you something. I love the Brooklyn Dodgers, as you do, but I promise you some day they will win fairly and squarely. You do not need to wish harm on others to make it happen."" ""Oh yes,"" I said. But luckily, my first confession — to a baseball-loving priest! (Laughter)Well, though my father died of a sudden heart attack when I was still in my 20s, before I had gotten married and had my three sons, I have passed his memory — as well as his love of baseball — on to my boys. Though when the Dodgers abandoned us to come to L.A., I lost faith in baseball until I moved to Boston and became an irrational Red Socks fan. And I must say, even now, when I sit with my sons with our season tickets, I can sometimes close my eyes against the sun and imagine myself, a young girl once more, in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider.I must say there is magic in these moments. When I open my eyes and I see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see, but whose heart and soul they have come to know through all the stories I have told. Which is why, in the end, I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past. Allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life. Allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families, and the public figures we have respected in our history, just as Abraham Lincoln wanted to believe, really can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives. Thank you for letting me be that storyteller today. (Applause) Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/doris_kearns_goodwin_on_learning_from_past_presidents
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"I want to take you back basically to my hometown, and to a picture of my hometown of the week that ""Emergence"" came out. And it's a picture we've seen several times. Basically, ""Emergence"" was published on 9/11. I live right there in the West Village, so the plume was luckily blowing west, away from us. We had a two-and-a-half-day-old baby in the house that was ours — we hadn't taken it from somebody else.(Laughter)And one of the thoughts that I had dealing with these two separate emergences of a book and a baby, and having this event happen so close — that my first thought, when I was still kind of in the apartment looking out at it all or walking out on the street and looking out on it just in front of our building, was that I'd made a terrible miscalculation in the book that I'd just written. Because so much of that book was a celebration of the power and creative potential of density, of largely urban density, of connecting people and putting them together in one place, and putting them on sidewalks together and having them share ideas and share physical space together.And it seemed to me looking at that — that tower burning and then falling, those towers burning and falling — that in fact, one of the lessons here was that density kills. And that of all the technologies that were exploited to make that carnage come into being, probably the single group of technologies that cost the most lives were those that enable 50,000 people to live in two buildings 110 stories above the ground. If they hadn't been crowded — you compare the loss of life at the Pentagon to the Twin Towers, and you can see that very powerfully. And so I started to think, well, you know, density, density — I'm not sure if, you know, this was the right call.And I kind of ruminated on that for a couple of days. And then about two days later, the wind started to change a little bit, and you could sense that the air was not healthy. And so even though there were no cars still in the West Village where we lived, my wife sent me out to buy a, you know, a large air filter at the Bed Bath and Beyond, which was located about 20 blocks away, north. And so I went out. And obviously I'm physically a very strong person, as you can tell — (Laughter) — so I wasn't worried about carrying this thing 20 blocks. And I walked out, and this really miraculous thing happened to me as I was walking north to buy this air filter, which was that the streets were completely alive with people.There was an incredible — it was, you know, a beautiful day, as it was for about a week after, and the West Village had never seemed more lively. I walked up along Hudson Street — where Jane Jacobs had lived and written her great book that so influenced what I was writing in ""Emergence"" — past the White Horse Tavern, that great old bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and the Bleecker Street playground was filled with kids. And all the people who lived in the neighborhood, who owned restaurants and bars in the neighborhood, were all out there — had them all open. People were out. There were no cars, so it seemed even better, in some ways. And it was a beautiful urban day, and the incredible thing about it was that the city was working. The city was there. All the things that make a great city successful and all the things that make a great city stimulating — they were all on display there on those streets.And I thought, well, this is the power of a city. I mean, the power of the city — we talked about cities as being centralized in space, but what makes them so strong most of the time is they're decentralized in function. They don't have a center executive branch that you can take out and cause the whole thing to fail. If they did, it probably was right there at Ground Zero. I mean, you know, the emergency bunker was right there, was destroyed by the attacks, and obviously the damage done to the building and the lives. But nonetheless, just 20 blocks north, two days later, the city had never looked more alive. If you'd gone into the minds of the people, well, you would have seen a lot of trauma, and you would have seen a lot of heartache, and you would have seen a lot of things that would take a long time to recover.But the system itself of this city was thriving. So I took heart in seeing that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why that works so well, and how some of those reasons kind of map on to where the Web is going right now. The question that I found myself asking to people when I was talking about the book afterwards is — when you've talked about emergent behavior, when you've talked about collective intelligence, the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask, who builds a neighborhood? Who decides that Soho should have this personality and that the Latin Quarter should have this personality? Well, there are some kind of executive decisions, but mostly the answer is — everybody and nobody. Everybody contributes a little bit. No single person is really the ultimate actor behind the personality of a neighborhood.Same thing to the question of, who was keeping the streets alive post-9/11 in my neighborhood? Well, it was the whole city. The whole system kind of working on it, and everybody contributing a small little part. And this is increasingly what we're starting to see on the Web in a bunch of interesting ways — most of which weren't around, actually, except in very experimental things, when I was writing ""Emergence"" and when the book came out. So it's been a very optimistic time, I think, and I want to just talk about a few of those things. I think that there is effectively a new kind of model of interactivity that's starting to emerge online right now.And the old one looked like this. This is not the future King of England, although it looks like it. It's some guy, it's a GeoCities homepage of some guy that I found online who's interested, if you look at the bottom, in soccer and Jesus and Garth Brooks and Clint Beckham and ""my hometown"" — those are his links. But nothing really says this model of interactivity — which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 — than ""Click here for a picture of my dog."" That is — you know, there's no sentence that kind of conjures up that period better than that, I think, which is that you suddenly have the power to put up a picture of your dog and link to it, and somebody reading the page has the power to click on that link or not click on that link.And, you know, I don't want to belittle that. That, in a sense — to reference what Jeff was talking about yesterday — that was, in a sense, the kind of interface electricity that powered a lot of the explosion of interest in the Web: that you could put up a link, and somebody could click on it, and it could take you anywhere you wanted to go. But it's still a very one-to-one kind of relationship. There's one person putting up the link, and there's another person on the other end trying to decide whether to click on it or not. The new model is much more like this, and we've already seen a couple of references to this. This is what happens when you search ""Steven Johnson"" on Google. About two months ago, I had the great breakthrough — one of my great, kind of shining achievements — which is that my website finally became a top result for ""Steven Johnson."" There's some theoretical physicist at MIT named Steven Johnson who has dropped two spots, I'm happy to say.(Laughter)And, you know, I mean, I'll look at a couple of things like this, but Google is obviously the greatest technology ever invented for navel gazing. It's just that there are so many other people in your navel when you gaze. Because effectively, what's happening here, what's creating this page, obviously — and we all know this, but it's worth just thinking about it — is not some person deciding that I am the number one answer for Steven Johnson, but rather somehow the entire web of people putting up pages and deciding to link to my page or not link to it, and Google just sitting there and running the numbers. So there's this collective decision-making that's going on. This page is effectively, collectively authored by the Web, and Google is just helping us kind of to put the authorship in one kind of coherent place.Now, they're more innovative — well, Google's pretty innovative — but there are some new twists on this. There's this incredibly interesting new site — Technorati — that's filled with lots of little widgets that are expanding on these. And these are looking in the blog world and the world of weblogs. He's analyzed basically all the weblogs out there that he's tracking. And he's tracking how many other weblogs linked to those weblogs, and so you have kind of an authority — a weblog that has a lot of links to it is more authoritative than a weblog that has few links to it. And so at any given time, on any given page on the Web, actually, you can say, what does the weblog community think about this page? And you can get a list. This is what they think about my site; it's ranked by blog authority. You can also rank it by the latest posts.So when I was talking in ""Emergence,"" I talked about the limitations of the one-way linking architecture that, basically, you could link to somebody else but they wouldn't necessarily know that you were pointing to them. And that was one of the reasons why the web wasn't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two-way linking, you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things. Well, something like Technorati is supplying that. Now what's interesting here is that this is a quote from Dave Weinberger, where he talks about everything being purposive in the Web — there's nothing artificial. He has this line where he says, you know, you're going to put up a link there, if you see a link, somebody decided to put it there. And he says, the link to one site didn't just grow on the other page ""like a tree fungus.""And in fact, I think that's not entirely true anymore. I could put up a feed of all those links generated by Technorati on the right-hand side of my page, and they would change as the overall ecology of the Web changes. That little list there would change. I wouldn't really be directly in control of it. So it's much closer, in a way, to a data fungus, in a sense, wrapped around that page, than it is to a deliberate link that I've placed there. Now, what you're having here is basically a global brain that you're able to do lots of kind of experiments on to see what it's thinking. And there are all these interesting tools. Google does the Google Zeitgeist, which looks at search requests to test what's going on, what people are interested in, and they publish it with lots of fun graphs. And I'm saying a lot of nice things about Google, so I'll be I'll be saying one little critical thing.There's a problem with the Google Zeitgeist, which is it often comes back with news that a lot of people are searching for Britney Spears pictures, which is not necessarily news. The Columbia blows up, suddenly there are a lot of searches on Columbia. Well, you know, we should expect to see that. That's not necessarily something we didn't know already. So the key thing in terms of these new tools that are kind of plumbing the depths of the global brain, that are sending kind of trace dyes through that whole bloodstream — the question is, are you finding out something new?And one of the things that I experimented with is this thing called Google Share which is basically, you take an abstract term, and you search Google for that term, and then you search the results that you get back for somebody's name. So basically, the number of pages that mention this term, that also mention this page, the percentage of those pages is that person's Google Share of that term. So you can do kind of interesting contests. Like for instance, this is a Google Share of the TED Conference. So Richard Saul Wurman has about a 15 percent Google Share of the TED conference. Our good friend Chris has about a six percent — but with a bullet, I might add.(Laughter)But the interesting thing is, you can broaden the search a little bit. And it turns out, actually, that 42 percent is the Mola mola fish. I had no idea. No, that's not true. (Laughter) I made that up because I just wanted to put up a slide of the Mola mola fish.(Laughter)I also did — and I don't want to start a little fight in the next panel — but I did a Google Share analysis of evolution and natural selection. So right here — now this is a big category, you have smaller percentages, so this is 0.7 percent — Dan Dennett, who'll be speaking shortly. Right below him, 0.5 percent, Steven Pinker. So Dennett's in the lead a little bit there. But what's interesting is you can then broaden the search and actually see interesting things and get a sense of what else is out there. So Gary Bauer is not too far behind — has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection. And right behind him is L. Ron Hubbard. So — (Laughter) you can see we're in the ascot, which is always good. And by the way, Chris, that would've been a really good panel, I think, right there.(Laughter)Hubbard apparently started to reach, but besides that, I think it would be good next year. Another quick thing — this is a slightly different thing, but this analysis some of you may have seen. It just came out. This is bursty words, looking at the historical record of State of the Union Addresses. So these are words that suddenly start to appear out of nowhere, so they're kind of, you know, memes that start taking off, that didn't have a lot of historical precedent before. So the first one is — these are the bursty words around 1860s — slaves, emancipation, slavery, rebellion, Kansas. That's Britney Spears. I mean, you know, OK, interesting. They're talking about slavery in 1860. 1935 — relief, depression, recovery banks. And OK, I didn't learn anything new there as well — that's pretty obvious. 1985, right at the center of the Reagan years — that's, we're, there's, we've, it's.(Laughter)Now, there's one way to interpret this, which is to say that ""emancipation"" and ""depression"" and ""recovery"" all have a lot of syllables. So you know, you can actually download — it's hard to remember those. But seriously, actually, what you can see there, in a way that would be very hard to detect otherwise, is Reagan reinventing the political language of the country and shifting to a much more intimate, much more folksy, much more telegenic — contracting all those verbs. You know, 20 years before it was still, ""Ask not what you can do,"" but with Reagan, it's, ""that's where, there's Nancy and I,"" that kind of language. And so something we kind of knew, but you didn't actually notice syntactically what he was doing. I'll go very quickly. The question now — and this is the really interesting question — is, what kind of higher-level shape is emerging right now in the overall Web ecosystem — and particularly in the ecosystem of the blogs because they are really kind of at the cutting edge.And I think what happens there will also happen in the wider system. Now there was a very interesting article by Clay Shirky that got a lot of attention about a month ago, and this is basically the distribution of links on the web to all these various different blogs. It follows a power law, so that there are a few extremely well-linked to, popular blogs, and a long tail of blogs with very few links. So 20 percent of the blogs get 80 percent of the links. Now this is a very interesting thing. It's caused a lot of controversy because people thought that this was the ultimate kind of one man, one modem democracy, where anybody can get out there and get their voice heard.And so the question is, ""Why is this happening?"" It's not being imposed by fiat from above. It's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on — within seconds of Clay publishing this piece, people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links, and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started working on, literally as Shirky started — after he published his piece — was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours.So in a sense, bursty weblogs coming from new voices. So he's working on a tool right there that can actually change the overall system. And it creates a kind of planned emergence. You're not totally in control, but you're changing the underlying rules in interesting ways because you have an end result which is maybe a more democratic spread of voices. So the most amazing thing about this — and I'll end on this note — is, most emergent systems, most self-organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not. So the most wonderful thing, I think, about this whole debate about power laws and software that could change it is the fact that we're having the conversation. I hope it continues here. Thanks a lot.","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_on_the_web_as_a_city
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"Let's just get started here.Okay, just a moment.(Whirring)All right. (Laughter) Oh, sorry.(Music) (Beatboxing)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_burchfield_plays_invisible_turntables
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"Whoa, dude.(Laughter)Check out those killer equations. Sweet. Actually, for the next 18 minutes I'm going to do the best I can to describe the beauty of particle physics without equations. It turns out there's a lot we can learn from coral. A coral is a very beautiful and unusual animal. Each coral head consists of thousands of individual polyps. These polyps are continually budding and branching into genetically identical neighbors. If we imagine this to be a hyperintelligent coral, we can single out an individual and ask him a reasonable question. We can ask how exactly he got to be in this particular location compared to his neighbors — if it was just chance, or destiny, or what?Now, after admonishing us for turning the temperature up too high, he would tell us that our question was completely stupid. These corals can be kind of mean, you see, and I have surfing scars to prove that. But this polyp would continue and tell us that his neighbors were quite clearly identical copies of him. That he was in all these other locations as well, but experiencing them as separate individuals. For a coral, branching into different copies is the most natural thing in the world.Unlike us, a hyperintelligent coral would be uniquely prepared to understand quantum mechanics. The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works. And it tells us our reality is continually branching into different possibilities, just like a coral. It's a weird thing for us humans to wrap our minds around, since we only ever get to experience one possibility. This quantum weirdness was first described by Erwin Schrödinger and his cat. The cat likes this version better.(Laughter)In this setup, Schrödinger is in a box with a radioactive sample that, by the laws of quantum mechanics, branches into a state in which it is radiated and a state in which it is not.(Laughter)In the branch in which the sample radiates, it sets off a trigger that releases poison and Schrödinger is dead. But in the other branch of reality, he remains alive. These realities are experienced separately by each individual. As far as either can tell, the other one doesn't exist.This seems weird to us, because each of us only experiences an individual existence, and we don't get to see other branches. It's as if each of us, like Schrödinger here, are a kind of coral branching into different possibilities. The mathematics of quantum mechanics tells us this is how the world works at tiny scales. It can be summed up in a single sentence: Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't. What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.Now I'll go ahead and describe how we know about these particles, what they are and how this balance works. In this machine, a beam of protons and antiprotons are accelerated to near the speed of light and brought together in a collision, producing a burst of pure energy. This energy is immediately converted into a spray of subatomic particles, with detectors and computers used to figure out their properties. This enormous machine — the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva — has a circumference of 17 miles and, when it's operating, draws five times as much power as the city of Monterey. We can't predict specifically what particles will be produced in any individual collision. Quantum mechanics tells us all possibilities are realized. But physics does tell us what particles can be produced. These particles must have just as much mass and energy as is carried in by the proton and antiproton. Any particles more massive than this energy limit aren't produced, and remain invisible to us. This is why this new particle accelerator is so exciting. It's going to push this energy limit seven times beyond what's ever been done before, so we're going to get to see some new particles very soon.But before talking about what we might see, let me describe the particles we already know of. There's a whole zoo of subatomic particles. Most of us are familiar with electrons. A lot of people in this room make a good living pushing them around.(Laughter)But the electron also has a neutral partner called the neutrino, with no electric charge and a very tiny mass. In contrast, the up and down quarks have very large masses, and combine in threes to make the protons and neutrons inside atoms. All of these matter particles come in left- and right-handed varieties, and have antiparticle partners that carry opposite charges. These familiar particles also have less familiar second and third generations, which have the same charges as the first but have much higher masses. These matter particles all interact with the various force particles. The electromagnetic force interacts with electrically charged matter via particles called photons. There is also a very weak force called, rather unimaginatively, the weak force ...(Laughter)that interacts only with left-handed matter. The strong force acts between quarks which carry a different kind of charge, called color charge, and come in three different varieties: red, green and blue. You can blame Murray Gell-Mann for these names — they're his fault. Finally, there's the force of gravity, which interacts with matter via its mass and spin.The most important thing to understand here is that there's a different kind of charge associated with each of these forces. These four different forces interact with matter according to the corresponding charges that each particle has. A particle that hasn't been seen yet, but we're pretty sure exists, is the Higgs particle, which gives masses to all these other particles. The main purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to see this Higgs particle, and we're almost certain it will. But the greatest mystery is what else we might see. And I'm going to show you one beautiful possibility towards the end of this talk.Now, if we count up all these different particles using their various spins and charges, there are 226. That's a lot of particles to keep track of. And it seems strange that nature would have so many elementary particles. But if we plot them out according to their charges, some beautiful patterns emerge. The most familiar charge is electric charge. Electrons have an electric charge, a negative one, and quarks have electric charges in thirds. So when two up quarks and a down quark are combined to make a proton, it has a total electric charge of plus one. These particles also have antiparticles, which have opposite charges. Now, it turns out the electric charge is actually a combination of two other charges: hypercharge and weak charge. If we spread out the hypercharge and weak charge and plot the charges of particles in this two-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is where these particles sit along the vertical direction. The electromagnetic and weak forces interact with matter according to their hypercharge and weak charge, which make this pattern. This is called the unified electroweak model, and it was put together back in 1967.The reason most of us are only familiar with electric charge and not both of these is because of the Higgs particle. The Higgs, over here on the left, has a large mass and breaks the symmetry of this electroweak pattern. It makes the weak force very weak by giving the weak particles a large mass. Since this massive Higgs sits along the horizontal direction in this diagram, the photons of electromagnetism remain massless and interact with electric charge along the vertical direction in this charge space. So the electromagnetic and weak forces are described by this pattern of particle charges in two-dimensional space. We can include the strong force by spreading out its two charge directions and plotting the charges of the force particles in quarks along these directions. The charges of all known particles can be plotted in a four-dimensional charge space, and projected down to two dimensions like this so we can see them.Whenever particles interact, nature keeps things in a perfect balance along all four of these charge directions. If a particle and an antiparticle collide, it creates a burst of energy and a total charge of zero in all four charge directions. At this point, anything can be created as long as it has the same energy and maintains a total charge of zero. For example, this weak force particle and its antiparticle can be created in a collision. In further interactions, the charges must always balance. One of the weak particles could decay into an electron and an antineutrino, and these three still add to zero total charge. Nature always keeps a perfect balance. So these patterns of charges are not just pretty. They tell us what interactions are allowed to happen. And we can rotate this charge space in four dimensions to get a better look at the strong interaction, which has this nice hexagonal symmetry. In a strong interaction, a strong force particle, such as this one, interacts with a colored quark, such as this green one, to give a quark with a different color charge — this red one. And strong interactions are happening millions of times each second in every atom of our bodies, holding the atomic nuclei together.But these four charges corresponding to three forces are not the end of the story. We can also include two more charges corresponding to the gravitational force. When we include these, each matter particle has two different spin charges, spin-up and spin-down. So they all split and give a nice pattern in six-dimensional charge space. We can rotate this pattern in six dimensions and see that it's quite pretty. Right now, this pattern matches our best current knowledge of how nature is built at the tiny scales of these elementary particles. This is what we know for certain. Some of these particles are at the very limit of what we've been able to reach with experiments. From this pattern we already know the particle physics of these tiny scales — the way the universe works at these tiny scales is very beautiful.But now I'm going to discuss some new and old ideas about things we don't know yet. We want to expand this pattern using mathematics alone, and see if we can get our hands on the whole enchilada. We want to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe. And we want to use this picture to predict new particles that we'll see when experiments reach higher energies.So there's an old idea in particle physics that this known pattern of charges, which is not very symmetric, could emerge from a more perfect pattern that gets broken — similar to how the Higgs particle breaks the electroweak pattern to give electromagnetism. In order to do this, we need to introduce new forces with new charge directions. When we introduce a new direction, we get to guess what charges the particles have along this direction, and then we can rotate it in with the others. If we guess wisely, we can construct the standard charges in six charge dimensions as a broken symmetry of this more perfect pattern in seven charge dimensions.This particular choice corresponds to a grand unified theory introduced by Pati and Salam in 1973. When we look at this new unified pattern, we can see a couple of gaps where particles seem to be missing. This is the way theories of unification work. A physicist looks for larger, more symmetric patterns that include the established pattern as a subset. The larger pattern allows us to predict the existence of particles that have never been seen. This unification model predicts the existence of these two new force particles, which should act a lot like the weak force, only weaker.Now, we can rotate this set of charges in seven dimensions and consider an odd fact about the matter particles: the second and third generations of matter have exactly the same charges in six-dimensional charge space as the first generation. These particles are not uniquely identified by their six charges. They sit on top of one another in the standard charge space. However, if we work in eight-dimensional charge space, then we can assign unique new charges to each particle. Then we can spin these in eight dimensions and see what the whole pattern looks like. Here we can see the second and third generations of matter now, related to the first generation by a symmetry called ""triality.""This particular pattern of charges in eight dimensions is actually part of the most beautiful geometric structure in mathematics. It's a pattern of the largest exceptional Lie group, E8. This Lie group is a smooth, curved shape with 248 dimensions. Each point in this pattern corresponds to a symmetry of this very complex and beautiful shape. One small part of this E8 shape can be used to describe the curved space-time of Einstein's general relativity, explaining gravity. Together with quantum mechanics, the geometry of this shape could describe everything about how the universe works at the tiniest scales. The pattern of this shape living in eight-dimensional charge space is exquisitely beautiful, and it summarizes thousands of possible interactions between these elementary particles, each of which is just a facet of this complicated shape.As we spin it, we can see many of the other intricate patterns contained in this one. And with a particular rotation, we can look down through this pattern in eight dimensions along a symmetry axis and see all the particles at once. It's a very beautiful object, and as with any unification, we can see some holes where new particles are required by this pattern. There are 20 gaps where new particles should be, two of which have been filled by the Pati-Salam particles. From their location in this pattern, we know that these new particles should be scalar fields like the Higgs particle, but have color charge and interact with the strong force. Filling in these new particles completes this pattern, giving us the full E8.This E8 pattern has very deep mathematical roots. It's considered by many to be the most beautiful structure in mathematics. It's a fantastic prospect that this object of great mathematical beauty could describe the truth of particle interactions at the smallest scales imaginable. And this idea that nature is described by mathematics is not at all new. In 1623, Galileo wrote this: ""Nature's grand book, which stands continually open to our gaze, is written in the language of mathematics. Its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.""I believe this to be true, and I've tried to follow Galileo's guidance in describing the mathematics of particle physics using only triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. Of course, when other physicists and I actually work on this stuff, the mathematics can resemble a dark labyrinth. But it's reassuring that at the heart of this mathematics is pure, beautiful geometry. Joined with quantum mechanics, this mathematics describes our universe as a growing E8 coral, with particles interacting at every location in all possible ways according to a beautiful pattern. And as more of the pattern comes into view using new machines like the Large Hadron Collider, we may be able to see whether nature uses this E8 pattern or a different one.This process of discovery is a wonderful adventure to be involved in. If the LHC finds particles that fit this E8 pattern, that will be very, very cool. If the LHC finds new particles, but they don't fit this pattern — well, that will be very interesting, but bad for this E8 theory. And, of course, bad for me personally.(Laughter)Now, how bad would that be? Well, pretty bad.(Laughter)But predicting how nature works is a very risky game. This theory and others like it are long shots. One does a lot of hard work knowing that most of these ideas probably won't end up being true about nature. That's what doing theoretical physics is like: there are a lot of wipeouts. In this regard, new physics theories are a lot like start-up companies. As with any large investment, it can be emotionally difficult to abandon a line of research when it isn't working out. But in science, if something isn't working, you have to toss it out and try something else.Now, the only way to maintain sanity and achieve happiness in the midst of this uncertainty is to keep balance and perspective in life. I've tried the best I can to live a balanced life.(Laughter)I try to balance my life equally between physics, love and surfing — my own three charge directions.(Laughter)This way, even if the physics I work on comes to nothing, I still know I've lived a good life. And I try to live in beautiful places. For most of the past ten years I've lived on the island of Maui, a very beautiful place. Now, it's one of the greatest mysteries in the universe to my parents how I managed to survive all that time without engaging in anything resembling full-time employment.(Laughter)I'm going to let you in on that secret. This was a view from my home office on Maui. And this is another, and another. And you may have noticed that these beautiful views are similar, but in slightly different places. That's because this used to be my home and office on Maui.(Laughter)I've chosen a very unusual life. But not worrying about rent allowed me to spend my time doing what I love. Living a nomadic existence has been hard at times, but it's allowed me to live in beautiful places and keep a balance in my life that I've been happy with. It allows me to spend a lot of my time hanging out with hyperintelligent coral. But I also greatly enjoy the company of hyperintelligent people. So I'm very happy to have been invited here to TED.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Stay here one second.(Applause)I probably understood two percent of that, but I still absolutely loved it. So I'm going to sound dumb. Your theory of everything —Garrett Lisi: I'm used to coral.CA: That's right. The reason it's got a few people at least excited is because, if you're right, it brings gravity and quantum theory together. So are you saying that we should think of the universe, at its heart — that the smallest things that there are, are somehow an E8 object of possibility? I mean, is there a scale to it, at the smallest scale, or ...?GL: Well, right now the pattern I showed you that corresponds to what we know about elementary particle physics — that already corresponds to a very beautiful shape. And that's the one that I said we knew for certain. And that shape has remarkable similarities — and the way it fits into this E8 pattern, which could be the rest of the picture. And these patterns of points that I've shown for you actually represent symmetries of this high-dimensional object that would be warping and moving and dancing over the space-time that we experience. And that would be what explains all these elementary particles that we see.CA: But a string theorist, as I understand it, explains electrons in terms of much smaller strings vibrating — I know, you don't like string theory — vibrating inside it. How should we think of an electron in relation to E8?GL: Well, it would be one of the symmetries of this E8 shape. So what's happening is, as the shape is moving over space-time, it's twisting. And the direction it's twisting as it moves is what particle we see. So it would be —CA: The size of the E8 shape, how does that relate to the electron? I feel like I need that for my picture. Is it bigger? Is it smaller?GL: As far as we know, electrons are point particles, so this would be going down to the smallest possible scales. So the way these things are explained in quantum field theory is, all possibilities are expanding and developing at once. And this is why I use the analogy to coral. And — in this way, the way that E8 comes in is it will be as a shape that's attached at each point in the space-time. And, as I said, the way the shape twists — the directional along which way the shape is twisting as it moves over this curved surface — is what the elementary particles are, themselves. So through quantum field theory, they manifest themselves as points and interact that way. I don't know if I'll be able to make this any clearer.(Laughter)CA: It doesn't really matter. It's evoking a kind of sense of wonder, and I certainly want to understand more of this.But thank you so much for coming. That was absolutely fascinating.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_everything
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"I dabble in design. I'm a curator of architecture and design; I happen to be at the Museum of Modern Art. But what we're going to talk about today is really design. Really good designers are like sponges: they really are curious and absorb every kind of information that comes their way, and transform it so that it can be used by people like us. And so that gives me an opportunity, because every design show that I curate kind of looks at a different world. And it's great, because it seems like every time I change jobs.And what I'm going to do today is I'm going to give you a preview of the next exhibition that I'm working on, which is called ""Design and the Elastic Mind."" The world that I decided to focus on this particular time is the world of science and the world of technology. Technology always comes into play when design is involved, but science does a little less. But designers are great at taking big revolutions that happen and transforming them so that we can use them. And this is what this exhibition looks at.If you think about your life today, you go every day through many different scales, many different changes of rhythm and pace. You work over different time zones, you talk to very different people, you multitask. We all know it, and we do it kind of automatically. Some of the minds in this audience are super elastic, others are a little slower, others have a few stretch marks, but nonetheless this is a quite exceptional audience from that viewpoint. Other people are not as elastic. I can't get my father in Italy to work on the Internet. He doesn't want to put high-speed Internet at home. And that's because there's some little bit of fear, little bit of resistance or just clogged mechanisms. So designers work on this particular malaise that we have, these kinds of discomforts that we have, and try to make life easier for us. Elasticity of mind is something that we really need, you know, we really need, we really cherish and we really work on. And this exhibition is about the work of designers that help us be more elastic, and also of designers that really work on this elasticity as an opportunity. And one last thing is that it's not only designers, but it's also scientists.And before I launch into the display of some of the slides and into the preview, I would like to point out this beautiful detail about scientists and design. You can say that the relationship between science and design goes back centuries. You can of course talk about Leonardo da Vinci and many other Renaissance men and women — and there's a gigantic history behind it. But according to a really great science historian you might know, Peter Galison — he teaches at Harvard — what nanotechnology in particular and quantum physics have brought to designers is this renewed interest, this real passion for design.So basically, the idea of being able to build things bottom up, atom by atom, has made them all into tinkerers. And all of a sudden scientists are seeking designers, just like designers are seeking scientists. It's a brand-new love affair that we're trying to cultivate at MOMA. Together with Adam Bly, who is the founder of Seed magazine — that's now a multimedia company, you might know it — we founded about a year ago a monthly salon for designers and scientists, and it's quite beautiful. And Keith has come, and also Jonathan has come and many others. And it was great, because at the beginning was this apology fest — you know, scientists would tell designers, you know, I don't know what style is, I'm not really elegant. And designers would like, oh, I don't know how to do an equation, I don't understand what you're saying. And then all of a sudden they really started talking each others' language, and now we're already at the point that they collaborate.Paul Steinhardt, a physicist from New York, and Aranda/Lasch, architects, collaborated in an installation in London at the Serpentine. And it's really interesting to see how this happens. The exhibition will talk about the work of both designers and scientists, and show how they're presenting the possibilities of the future to us. I'm showing to you different sections of the show right now, just to give you a taste of it. Nanophysics and nanotechnology, for instance, have really opened the designer's mind. In this case I'm showing more the designers' work, because they're the ones that have really been stimulated. A lot of the objects in the show are concepts, not objects that exist already. But what you're looking at here is the work of some scientists from UCLA. This kind of alphabet soup is a new way to mark proteins — not only by color but literally by alphabet letters. So they construct it, and they can construct all kinds of formsat the nanoscale. This is the work of design students from the Royal College of Arts in London that have been working together with their tutor, Tony Dunne, and with a bunch of scientists around Great Britain on the possibilities of nanotechnology for design in the future. New sensing elements on the body — you can grow hairs on your nails, and therefore grab some of the particles from another person. They seem very, very obsessed with finding out more about the ideal mate. So they're working on enhancing everything: touch, smell — everything they can, in order to find the perfect mate.Very interesting. This is a typeface designer from Israel who has designed — he calls them ""typosperma."" He's thinking — of course it's all a concept — of injecting typefaces into spermatozoa, I don't know how to say it in English — spermatazoi — in order to make them become — to almost have a song or a whole poem written with every ejaculation. (Laughter) I tell you, designers are quite fantastic, you know.So, tissue design. In this case too, you have a mixture of scientists and designers. This here is part of the same lab at the Royal College of Arts. The RCA is really quite an amazing school from that viewpoint. One of the assignments for a year was to work with in-vitro meat. You know that already you can grow meat in vitro. In Australia they did it — this research company, called SymbioticA. But the problem is that it's a really ugly patty. And so, the assignment to the students was, how should the steak of tomorrow be? When you don't have to kill cows and it can have any shape, what should it be like? So this particular student, James King, went around the beautiful English countryside, picked the best, best cow that he could see, and then put her in the MRI machine. Then, he took the scans of the best organs and made the meat — of course, this is done with a Japanese resins food maker, but you know, in the future it could be made better — which reproduces the best MRI scan of the best cow he could find.Instead, this element here is much more banal. Something that you know can be done already is to grow bone tissue, so that you can make a wedding ring out of the bone tissue of your loved one — literally. So, this is indeed made of human bone tissue.This is SymbioticA, and they've been working — they were the first ones to do this in-vitro meat — and now they've also done an in-vitro coat, a leather coat. It's miniscule, but it's a real coat. It's shaped like one. So, we'll be able to really not have any excuse to be wearing everything leather in the future.One of the most important topics of the show — you know, as anything in our life today, we can look at it from many, many different viewpoints, and at different levels. One of the most interesting and most important concepts is the idea of scale. We change scale very often: we change resolution of screens, and we're not really fazed by it, we do it very comfortably. So you go, even in the exhibition, from the idea of nanotechnology and the nanoscale to the manipulation of really great amounts of data — the mapping and tagging of the universe and of the world. In this particular case a section will be devoted to information design. You see here the work of Ben Fry. This is ""Human vs. Chimps"" — the few chromosomes that distinguish us from chimps. It was a beautiful visualization that he did for Seed magazine. And here's the whole code of Pac-Man, visualized with all the go-to, go-back-to, also made into a beautiful choreography.And then also graphs by scientists, this beautiful diagraph of protein homology. Scientists are starting to also consider aesthetics. We were discussing with Keith Shrubb* this morning the fact that many scientists tend not to use anything beautiful in their presentations, otherwise they're afraid of being considered dumb blondes. So they pick the worst background from any kind of PowerPoint presentation, the worst typeface. It's only recently that this kind of marriage between design and science is producing some of the first ""pretty"" — if we can say so — scientific presentations. Another aspect of contemporary design that I think is mind-opening, promising and will really be the future of design, is the idea of collective design. You know, the whole XO laptop, from One Laptop per Child, is based on the idea of collaboration and mash and networking. So, the more the merrier. The more computers, the stronger the signal, and children work on the interface so that it's all based on doing things together, tasks together. So the idea of collective design is something that will become even bigger in the future, and this is chosen as an example.Related to the idea of collective design and to the new balance between the individual and the collectiveness, collectivity is the idea of existence maximum. That's a term that I coined a few years ago while I was thinking of how pressed we are together, and at the same time how these small objects, like the Walkman first and then the iPod, create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space. You can be in the subway and you can be completely isolated and have your own room in your iPod.And this is the work of several designers that really enhance the idea of solitude and expansion by means of various techniques. This is a spa telephone. The idea is that it's become so difficult to have a private conversation anywhere that you go to the spa, you have a massage, you have a facial, maybe a rub, and then you have this beautiful pool with this perfect temperature, and you can have this isolation tank phone conversation with whomever you've been wanting to talk with for a long time. And same thing here, Social Tele-presence. It's actually already used by the military a little bit, but it's the idea of being able to be somewhere else with your senses while you're removed from it physically. And this is called Blind Date. It's a [unclear], so if you're too shy to be really at the date, you can stay at a distance with your flowers and somebody else reenacts the date for you.Rapid manufacturing is another big area in which technology and design are, I think, bound to change the world. You've heard about it before many times. Rapid manufacturing is a computer file sent directly from the computer to the manufacturing machine. It used to be called rapid prototyping, rapid modeling. It started out in the '80s, but at the beginning it was machines carving out of a foam block a model that was very, very fragile, and could not have any real use. Slowly but surely, the materials became better — better resins. Techniques became better — not only carving but also stereolithography and laser — solidifying all kinds of resins, whether in powder or in liquid form. And the vats became bigger, to the point that now we can have actual chairs made by rapid manufacturing. It takes seven days today to manufacture a chair, but you know what? One day it will take seven hours. And then the dream is that you'll be able to, from home, customize your chair. You know, companies and designers will be designing the matrix or the margins that respect both solidity and brand, and design identity. And then you can send it to the Kinko's store at the cornerand go get your chair. Now, the implications of this are enormous, not only regarding the participation of the final buyer in the design process, but also no tracking, no warehousing, no wasted materials. Also, I can imagine many design manufacturers will have to retool their own business plans and maybe invest in this Kinko's store. But it really is a big change. And here I'm showing a picture that was in Wired Magazine — you know, the Artifacts of the Future section that I love so much — that shows you can have your desktop 3D printer and print your own basketball. But here instead are examples, you can already 3D-print textiles, which is very interesting. This is just a really nice touch — it's called slow prototyping. It's a designer that put 10,000 bees at work and they built this vase. They had a particular shape that they had to stay in.Mapping and tagging. As the capacity of computers becomes really, really big, and the capacity of our mind not that much bigger, we find that we need to tag as much as we can what we do in order to then retrace our path. Also, we do it in order to share with other people. Again, this communal sense of experience that seems to be so important today. So, various ways to map and tag are also the work of many designers nowadays. Also, the senses — designers and scientists all work on trying to expand our senses capabilities so that we can achieve more. And also animal senses in a way.This particular object that many people love so much is actually based on kind of a scientific experiment — the fact that bees have a very strong olfactory sense, and so — much like dogs that can smell certain kinds of skin cancer — bees can be trained by Pavlovian reflex to detect one type of cancer, and also pregnancy. And so this student at the RCA designed this beautiful blown-glass object where the bees move from one chamber to the other if they detect that particular smell that signifies, in this case, pregnancy. Another shape is made for cancer.Design for Debate is a very interesting new endeavor that designers have really shaped for themselves. Some designers don't design objects, products, things that we're going to actually use, but rather, they design scenarios that are object-based. They're still very useful. They help companies and other designers think better about the future. And usually they are accompanied by videos. This is quite beautiful. It's Dunne and Raby, ""All the Robots."" Those are a series of robots that are meant to be taken care of. We always think that robots will take care of us, and instead they designed these robots that are very, very needy. You need to take one in your arms and look at it in the eyes for about five minutes before it does something. Another one gets really, really nervous if you get in to the room, and starts shaking, so you have to calm it down. So it's really a way to make us think more about what robots mean to us. Noam Toran and ""Accessories for Lonely Men"": the idea is that when you lose your loved one or you go through a bad breakup, what you miss the most are those annoying things that you used to hate when you were with the other person. So he designed all these series of accessories. This one is something that takes away the sheets from you at night. Then there's another one that breathes on your neck. There's another one that throws plates and breaks them. So it's just this idea of what we really miss in life.Elio Caccavale: he took the idea of those dolls that explain leukemia. He's working on dolls that explain xenotransplantation, and also the spider gene into the goat, from a few years ago. He's working for the exhibition on a whole series of dolls that explain to children where babies come from today. Because it's not anymore Mom, Dad, the flowers and the bees, and then there's the baby. No, it can be two moms, three dads, in-vitro — there's the whole idea of how babies can be made today that has changed. So it's a series of dolls that he's working on right now.One of the most beautiful things is that designers really work on life, even though they take technology into account. And many designers have been working recently on the idea of death and mourning, and what we can do about it today with new technologies. Or how we should behave about it with new technologies. These three objects over there are hard drives with a Bluetooth connection. But they're in reality very, very beautiful sculpted artifacts that contain the whole desktop and computer memory of somebody who passed away. So instead of having only the pictures, you will be able to put this object next to the computer and all of a sudden have, you know, Gertrude's whole life and all of her files and her address book come alive.And this is even better. This is Auger-Loizeau, ""AfterLife."" It's the idea that some people don't believe in an afterlife. So to give them something tangible that shows that there is something after death, they take the gastric juices of people who passed away and concentrate them, and put them into a battery that can actually be used to power flashlights. They also go — you know, sex toys, whatever. It's quite amazing how these things can make you smile, can make you laugh, can make you cry sometimes. But I'm hoping that this particular exhibition will be able to trace a new portrait of where design is going — which is always, hopefully, a portrait a few years in advance of where the world is going. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_previews_design_and_the_elastic_mind
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"You might be wondering why I'm wearing sunglasses, and one answer to that is, because I'm here to talk about glamour. So, we all think we know what glamour is. Here it is. It's glamorous movie stars, like Marlene Dietrich. And it comes in a male form, too — very glamorous. Not only can he shoot, drive, drink — you know, he drinks wine, there actually is a little wine in there — and of course, always wears a tuxedo. But I think that glamour actually has a much broader meaning — one that is true for the movie stars and the fictional characters, but also comes in other forms.A magazine? Well, it's certainly not this one. This is the least glamorous magazine on the newsstand — it's all about sex tips. Sex tips are not glamorous. And Drew Barrymore, for all her wonderful charm, is not glamorous either. But there is a glamour of industry. This is Margaret Bourke-White's — one of her pictures she did. Fantastic, glamorous pictures of steel mills and paper mills and all kinds of glamorous industrial places. And there's the mythic glamour of the garage entrepreneur. This is the Hewlett-Packard garage. We know everyone who starts a business in a garage ends up founding Hewlett-Packard. There's the glamour of physics. What could be more glamorous than understanding the entire universe, grand unification? And, by the way, it helps if you're Brian Greene — he has other kinds of glamour.And there is, of course, this glamour. This is very, very glamorous: the glamour of outer space — and not the alien-style glamour, but the nice, clean, early '60s version. So what do we mean by glamour? Well, one thing you can do if you want to know what glamour means is you can look in the dictionary. And it actually helps a lot more if you look in a very old dictionary, in this case the 1913 dictionary. Because for centuries, glamour had a very particular meaning, and the word was actually used differently from the way we think of it. You had ""a"" glamour. It wasn't glamour as a quality — you ""cast a glamour."" Glamour was a literal magic spell. Not a metaphorical one, the way we use it today, but a literal magic spell associated with witches and gypsies and to some extent, Celtic magic. And over the years, around the turn of the 20th century, it started to take on this other kind of deception — this definition for any artificial interest in, or association with, an object through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified. But still, glamour is an illusion. Glamour is a magic spell. And there's something dangerous about glamour throughout most of history. When the witches cast a magic spell on you, it was not in your self-interest — it was to get you to act against your interest.Well of course, in the 20th century, glamour came to have this different meaning associated with Hollywood. And this is Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr said, ""Anyone can look glamorous, all you have to do is sit there and look stupid."" (Laughter) But in fact, with all due respect to Hedy — about whom we'll hear more later — there's a lot more to it. There was a tremendous amount of technical achievement associated with creating this Hollywood glamour. There were scores of retouchers and lighting experts and make-up experts. You can go to the museum of Hollywood history in Hollywood and see Max Factor's special rooms that he painted different colors depending on the complexion of the star he was going to make up. So you've got this highly stylized portrait of something that was not entirely of this earth — it was a portrait of a star. And actually, we see glamorized photos of stars all the time — they call them false color.Glamour is a form of falsification, but falsification to achieve a particular purpose. It may be to illuminate the star; it may be to sell a film. And it involves a great deal of technique. It's not — glamour is not something — you don't wake up in the morning glamorous. I don't care who you are. Even Nicole Kidman doesn't wake up in the morning glamorous. There is a process of ""idealization, glorification and dramatization,"" and it's not just the case for people. Glamour doesn't have to be people. Architectural photography — Julius Schulman, who has talked about transfiguration, took this fabulous, famous picture of the Kauffman House. Architectural photography is extremely glamorous. It puts you into this special, special world. This is Alex Ross's comic book art, which appears to be extremely realistic, as part of his style is he gives you a kind of realism in his comic art. Except that light doesn't work this way in the real world.When you stack people in rows, the ones in the background look smaller than the ones in the foreground — but not in the world of glamour. What glamour is all about — I took this from a blurb in the table of contents of New York magazine, which was telling us that glamour is back — glamour is all about transcending the everyday. And I think that that's starting to get at what the core that combines all sorts of glamour is. This is Filippino Lippi's 1543 portrait of Saint Apollonia. And I don't know who she is either, but this is the [16th] century equivalent of a supermodel. It's a very glamorous portrait. Why is it glamorous? It's glamorous, first, because she is beautiful — but that does not make you glamorous, that only makes you beautiful. She is graceful, she is mysterious and she is transcendent, and those are the central qualities of glamour. You don't see her eyes; they're looking downward. She's not looking away from you exactly, but you have to mentally imagine her world. She's encouraging you to contemplate this higher world to which she belongs, where she can be completely tranquil while holding the iron instruments of her death by torture. Mel Gibson's ""Passion Of The Christ"" — not glamorous. That's glamour: that's Michelangelo's ""Pieta,"" where Mary is the same age as Jesus and they're both awfully happy and pleasant.Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant — that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous — but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person. In some sense, there has to be something like us. So as I say, in religious art, you know, God is not glamorous. God cannot be glamorous because God is omnipotent, omniscient — too far above us. And yet you will see in religious art, saints or the Virgin Mary will often be portrayed — not always — in glamorous forms. As I said earlier, glamour does not have to be about people, but it has to have this transcendent quality. What is it about Superman? Aside from Alex Ross's style, which is very glamorous, one thing about Superman is he makes you believe that a man can fly.Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can't do a glamorized picture of traffic. You can do a glamorized picture of an airplane, but not the inside. The notion is that it's going to transport you, and the story is not about, you know, the guy in front of you in the airplane, who has this nasty little kid, or the big cough. The story is about where you're arriving, or thinking about where you're arriving. And this sense of being transported is one reason that we have glamour styling. This sort of streamlining styling is not just glamorous because we associate it with movies of that period, but because, in it's streamlining, it transports us from the everyday.The same thing — arches are very glamorous. Arches with stained glass — even more glamorous. Staircases that curve away from you are glamorous. I happen to find that particular staircase picture very glamorous because, to me, it captures the whole promise of the academic contemplative life — but maybe that's because I went to Princeton. Anyway, skylines are super glamorous, city streets — not so glamorous. You know, when you get, actually to this town it has reality. The horizon, the open road, is very, very glamorous. There are few things more glamorous than the horizon — except, possibly, multiple horizons. Of course, here you don't feel the cold, or the heat — you just see the possibilities. In order to pull glamour off, you need this Renaissance quality of sprezzatura, which is a term coined by Castiglione in his book, ""The Book Of The Courtier."" There's the not-glamorous version of what it looks like today, after a few centuries.And sprezzatura is the art that conceals art. It makes things look effortless. You don't think about how Nicole Kidman is maneuvering that dress — she just looks completely natural. And I remember reading, after the Lara Croft movies, how Angelina Jolie would go home completely black and blue. Of course, they covered that with make-up, because Lara Croft did all those same stunts — but she doesn't get black and blue, because she has sprezzatura. ""To conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort"": And this is one of the critical aspects of glamour. Glamour is about editing. How do you create the sense of transcendence, the sense of evoking a perfect world? The sense of, you know, life could be better, I could join this — I could be a perfect person, I could join this perfect world. We don't tell you all the grubby details.Now, this was kindly lent to me by Jeff Bezos, from last year. This is underneath Jeff's desk. This is what the real world of computers, lamps, electrical appliances of all kinds, looks like. But if you look in a catalog — particularly a catalog of modern, beautiful objects for your home — it looks like this. There are no cords. Look next time you get these catalogs in your mail — you can usually figure out where they hid the cord. But there's always this illusion that if you buy this lamp, you will live in a world without cords. (Laughter) And the same thing is true of, if you buy this laptop or you buy this computer — and even in these wireless eras, you don't get to live in the world without cords. You have to have mystery and you have to have grace. And there she is — Grace. This is the most glamorous picture, I think, ever. Part of the thing is that, in ""Rear Window,"" the question is, is she too glamorous to live in his world? And the answer is no, but of course it's really just a movie.Here's Hedy Lamarr again. And, you know, this kind of head covering is extremely glamorous because, like sunglasses, it conceals and reveals at the same time. Translucence is glamorous — that's why all these people wear pearls. It's why barware is glamorous. Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn't give us a completely clear picture. And I think if Grace Kelly is the most glamorous person, maybe a spiral staircase with glass block may be the most glamorous interior shot, because a spiral staircase is incredibly glamorous. It has that sense of going up and away, and yet you never think about how you would really trip if you were — particularly going down. And of course glass block has that sense of translucence. So, this session's supposed to be about pure pleasure but glamour's really partly about meaning. All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality.They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other — whatever it is — and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals. And the way we deal with that is we displace them — we put them into a golden world, an imagined world, an age of heroes, the world to come. And in the life of an individual, we often associate that with some object. The white picket fence, the perfect house. The perfect kitchen — no bills on the counter in the perfect kitchen. You know, you buy that Viking range, this is what your kitchen will look like. The perfect love life — symbolized by the perfect necklace, the perfect diamond ring. The perfect getaway in your perfect car. This is an interior design firm that is literally called Utopia. The perfect office — again, no cords, as far as I can tell. And certainly, no, it doesn't look a thing like my office. I mean, there's no paper on the desk. We want this golden world. And some people get rich enough, and if they have their ideals — in a sort of domestic sense, they get to acquire their perfect world.Dean Koontz built this fabulous home theater, which is — I don't think accidentally — in Art Deco style. That symbolizes this sense of being safe and at home. This is not always good, because what is your perfect world? What is your ideal, and also, what has been edited out? Is it something important? ""The Matrix"" is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on ""The Matrix"" and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look — sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world. This is another Margaret Bourke-White photo. This is from Soviet Union. Attractive. I mean, look how happy the people are, and good-looking too. You know, we're marching toward Utopia.I'm not a fan of PETA, but I think this is a great ad. Because what they're doing is they're saying, your coat's not so glamorous, what's been edited out is something important. But actually, what's even more important than remembering what's been edited out is thinking, are the ideals good? Because glamour can be very totalitarian and deceptive. And it's not just a matter of glamorizing cleaning your floor. This is from ""Triumph Of The Will"" — brilliant editing to cut together things. There's a glamour shot. National Socialism is all about glamour. It was a very aesthetic ideology. It was all about cleaning up Germany, and the West, and the world, and ridding it of anything unglamorous. So glamour can be dangerous.I think glamour has a genuine appeal, has a genuine value. I'm not against glamour. But there's a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life. And there is both a way to avoid the dangers of glamour and a way to broaden your appreciation of it. And that's to take Isaac Mizrahi's advice and confront the manipulation of it all, and sort of admit that manipulation is something that we enjoy, but also enjoy how it happens. And here's Hedy Lamarr. She's very glamorous but, you know, she invented spread-spectrum technology. So she's even more glamorous if you know that she really wasn't stupid, even though she thought she could look stupid.David Hockney talks about how the appreciation of this very glamorous painting is heightened if you think about the fact that it takes two weeks to paint this splash, which only took a fraction of a second to happen. There is a book out in the bookstore — it's called ""Symphony In Steel,"" and it's about the stuff that's hidden under the skin of the Disney Center. And that has a fascination. It's not necessarily glamorous, but unveiling the glamour has an appeal. There's a wonderful book called ""Crowns"" that's all these glamour pictures of black women in their church hats. And there's a quote from one of these women, and she talks about, ""As a little girl, I'd admire women at church with beautiful hats. They looked like beautiful dolls, like they'd just stepped out of a magazine. But I also knew how hard they worked all week. Sometimes under those hats there's a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow."" And, actually, you get more appreciation for glamour when you realize what went into creating it. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/virginia_postrel_on_glamour
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"This session is on natural wonders, and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness. I want to try to combine them all, because to me, healing is really the ultimate natural wonder. Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what’s causing the problem. And so, really, so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet.I love doing this work, because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they didn’t have before, and it allows us to talk about things that — not just diet, but that happiness is not — we're talking about the pursuit of happiness, but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions, what Aldous Huxley called the ""perennial wisdom,"" when you get past the named and forms and rituals that really divide people, it’s really about — our nature is to be happy; our nature is to be peaceful, our nature is to be healthy. And so it’s not something — happiness is not something you get, health is generally not something that you get. But rather all of these different practices — you know, the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn’t develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure, unclog your arteries, even though it can do all those things. They’re powerful tools for transformation, for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy, to be peaceful, to be joyful and to realize that it’s not something that you pursue and get, but rather it’s something that you have already until you disturb it.I studied yoga for many years with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda and people would say, ""What are you, a Hindu?"" He’d say, ""No, I’m an undo."" And it’s really about identifying what’s causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness, and then to allow that natural healing to occur. To me, that’s the real natural wonder.So, within that larger context, we can talk about diet, stress management — which are really these spiritual practices — moderate exercise, smoking cessation, support groups and community — which I’ll talk more about — and some vitamins and supplements. And it’s not a diet. You know, when most people think about the diet I recommend, they think it’s a really strict diet. For reversing disease, that’s what it takes, but if you’re just trying to be healthy, you have a spectrum of choices. And to the degree that you can move in a healthy direction, you’re going to live longer, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to lose weight, and so on. And in our studies, what we’ve been able to do is to use very expensive, high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost — and in many ways, ancient — interventions, can be.We first began by looking at heart disease, and when I began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago, it was thought that once you have heart disease it can only get worse. And what we found was that, instead of getting worse and worse, in many cases it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people had once realized.This is a representative patient who at the time was 73 — totally needed to have a bypass, decided to do this instead. We used quantitative arteriography, showing the narrowing. This is one of the arteries that feed the heart, one of the main arteries, and you can see the narrowing here. A year later, it’s not as clogged; normally, it goes the other direction. These minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent improvement in blood flow, and using cardiac positron emission tomography, or ""PET,"" scans, blue and black is no blood flow, orange and white is maximal.Huge differences can occur without drugs, without surgery. Clinically, he literally couldn’t walk across the street without getting severe chest pain; within a month, like most people, was pain-free, and within a year, climbing more than 100 floors a day on a Stairmaster. This is not unusual, and it’s part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes, because it makes such a big difference in their quality of life. Overall, if you looked at all the arteries in all the patients, they got worse and worse, from one year to five years, in the comparison group. This is the natural history of heart disease, but it’s really not natural because we found it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people had once thought. We also found that the more people change, the better they got. It wasn’t a function of how old or how sick they were — it was mainly how much they changed, and the oldest patients improved as much as the young ones.I got this as a Christmas card a few years ago from two of the patients in one of our programs. The younger brother is 86, the older one’s 95; they wanted to show me how much more flexible they were. And the following year they sent me this one, which I thought was kind of funny. (Laughter) You just never know. And what we found was that 99 percent of the patients start to reverse the progression of their heart disease. Now I thought, you know, if we just did good science, that would change medical practice. But, that was a little naive. It’s important, but not enough. Because we doctors do what we get paid to do, and we get trained to do what we get paid to do, so if we change insurance, then we change medical practice and medical education. Insurance will cover the bypass, it’ll cover the angioplasty; it won’t, until recently, cover diet and lifestyle.So, we began through our nonprofit institute's training hospitals around the country, and we found that most people could avoid surgery, and not only was it medically effective, it was also cost effective. And the insurance companies found that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars per patient, and Medicare is now in the middle of doing a demonstration project where they’re paying for 1,800 people to go through the program on the sites that we train. The fortuneteller says, ""I give smokers a discount because there’s not as much to tell."" (Laughter) I like this slide, because it’s a chance to talk about what really motivates people to change, and what doesn’t. And what doesn’t work is fear of dying, and that’s what’s normally used.Everybody who smokes knows it’s not good for you, and still 30 percent of Americans smoke — 80 percent in some parts of the world. Why do people do it? Well, because it helps them get through the day. And I’ll talk more about this, but the real epidemic isn’t just heart disease or obesity or smoking — it’s loneliness and depression. As one woman said, ""I’ve got 20 friends in this package of cigarettes, and they’re always there for me and nobody else is. You’re going to take away my 20 friends? What are you going to give me?"" Or they eat when they get depressed, or they use alcohol to numb the pain, or they work too hard, or watch too much TV. There are lots of ways we have of avoiding and numbing and bypassing pain, but the point of all of this is to deal with the cause of the problem. And the pain is not the problem: it’s the symptom. And telling people they’re going to die is too scary to think about, or, they’re going to get emphysema or heart attack is too scary, and so they don’t want to think about it, so they don’t.The most effective anti-smoking ad was this one. You’ll notice the limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and ""impotence"" — the headline is, ""Impotent"" — it’s not emphysema. What was the biggest selling drug of all time when it was introduced a few years ago? Viagra, right? Why? Because a lot of guys need it. It’s not like you say, ""Hey Joe, I’m having erectile dysfunction, how about you?"" And yet, look at the number of prescriptions that are being sold. It’s not so much psychological, it’s vascular, and nicotine makes your arteries constrict. So does cocaine, so does a high fat diet, so does emotional stress.So the very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired, lethargic, depressed and impotent, and that’s not much fun. But when you change those behaviors, your brain gets more blood, you think more clearly, you have more energy, your heart gets more blood in ways I’ve shown you. Your sexual function improves. And these things occur within hours. This is a study: a high fat meal, and within one or two hours blood-flow is measurably less — and you’ve all experienced this at Thanksgiving. When you eat a big fatty meal, how do you feel? You feel kind of sleepy afterwards. On a low-fat meal, the blood flow doesn’t go down — it even goes up. Many of you have kids, and you know that’s a big change in your lifestyle, and so people are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they’re worth it. And the paradox is that when you make big changes, you get big benefits, and you feel so much better so quickly. For many people, those are choices worth making — not to live longer, but to live better.I want to talk a little bit about the obesity epidemic, because it really is a problem. Two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent in the last 10 years. It’s no joke: it’s real. And just to show you this, this is from the CDC. These are not election returns; these are the percentage of people who are overweight. And if you see from '85 to '86 to '87, '88, '89, '90, '91 — you get a new category, 15 to 20 percent; '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97 — you get a new category; '98, '99, 2000, and 2001. Mississippi, more than 25 percent of people are overweight. Why is this? Well, this is one way to lose weight that works very well ... but it doesn’t last, which is the problem.(Laughter)Now, there’s no mystery in how you lose weight; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories. Now, one way to eat fewer calories is to eat less food, which is why you can lose weight on any diet if you eat less food, or if you restrict entire categories of foods. But the problem is, you get hungry, so it’s hard to keep it off. The other way is to change the type of food. And fat has nine calories per gram, whereas protein and carbs only have four. So, when you eat less fat, you eat fewer calories without having to eat less food. So you can eat the same amount of food, but you’ll be getting fewer calories because the food is less dense in calories. And it’s the volume of food that affects satiety, rather than the type of food.You know, I don’t like talking about the Atkins diet, but I get asked about it every day, and so I just thought I’d spend a few minutes on that. The myth that you hear about is, Americans have been told to eat less fat, the percent of calories from fat is down, Americans are fatter than ever, therefore fat doesn’t make you fat. It’s a half-truth. Actually, Americans are eating more fat than ever, and even more carbs. And so the percentage is lower, the actual amount is higher, and so the goal is to reduce both. Dr. Atkins and I debated each other many times before he died, and we agreed that Americans eat too many simple carbs, the ""bad carbs,"" and these are things like — (Laughter) — sugar, white flour, white rice, alcohol. And you get a double whammy: you get all these calories that don’t fill you up because you’ve removed the fiber, and they get absorbed quickly so your blood sugar zooms up. Your pancreas makes insulin to bring it back down, which is good. But insulin accelerates the conversion of calories into fat. So, the goal is not to go to pork rinds and bacon and sausages — these are not health foods — but to go from ""bad carbs"" to what are called ""good carbs."" And these are things like whole foods, or unrefined carbs: fruits, vegetables, whole wheat flour, brown rice, in their natural forms, are rich in fiber. And the fiber fills you up before you get too many calories, and it slows the absorption so you don’t get that rapid rise in blood sugar. So, and you get all the disease-protective substances.It’s not just what you exclude from your diet, but also what you include that’s protective. Just as all carbs are not bad for you, all fats are not bad for you. There are good fats. And these are predominantly what are called the Omega-3 fatty acids. You find these, for example, in fish oil. And the bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids and processed food and saturated fats, which we find in meat. If you don’t remember anything else from this talk, three grams a day of fish oil can reduce your risk of a heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent. Three grams a day. They come in one-gram capsules; more than that just gives you extra fat you don’t need. It also helps reduce the risk of the most common cancers like breast, prostate and colon cancer. Now, the problem with the Atkins diet, everybody knows people who have lost weight on it, but you can lose weight on amphetamines, you know, and fen-phen. I mean, there are lots of ways of losing weight that aren’t good for you. You want to lose weight in a way that enhances your health rather than the one that harms it. And the problem is that it’s based on this half-truth, which is that Americans eat too many simple carbs, so if you eat fewer simple carbs you’re going to lose weight. You’ll lose even more weight if you go to whole foods and less fat, and you’ll enhance your health rather than harming it. He says, ""I’ve got some good news. While your cholesterol level has remained the same, the research findings have changed.""(Laughter)Now, what happens to your heart when you go on an Atkins diet? The red is good at the beginning, and a year later — this is from a study done in a peer-reviewed journal called Angiology — there’s more red after a year on a diet like I would recommend, there’s less red, less blood flow after a year on an Atkins-type diet. So, yes, you can lose weight, but your heart isn’t happy. Now, one of the studies funded by the Atkins Center found that 70 percent of the people were constipated, 65 percent had bad breath, 54 percent had headaches – this is not a healthy way to eat. And so, you might start to lose weight and start to attract people towards you, but when they get too close it’s going to be a problem.(Laughter)And more seriously, there are case reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks on the Atkins diet — of bone disease, kidney disease, and so on. And that’s how your body excretes waste, is through your breath, your bowels and your perspiration. So when you go on these kinds of diet, they begin to smell bad. So, an optimal diet is low in fat, low in the bad carbs, high in the good carbs and enough of the good fats. And then, again, it’s a spectrum: when you move in this direction, you’re going to lose weight, you’re going to feel better and you’re going to gain health.Now, there are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too, whether it’s the deforestation of the Amazon, or making more protein available, to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day — not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have. So, there are lots of reasons for eating this way that go beyond just your health.Now, we’re about to publish the first study looking at the effects of this program on prostate cancer, and, in collaboration with Sloane-Kettering and with UCSF. We took 90 men who had biopsy-proven prostate cancer and who had elected, for reasons unrelated to the study, not to have surgery. We could randomly divide them into two groups, and then we could have one group that is a non-intervention control group to compare to, which we can’t do with, say, breast cancer, because everyone gets treated.What we found was that, after a year, none of the experimental group patients who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment, whereas six of the control-group patients needed surgery or radiation. When we looked at their PSA levels — which is a marker for prostate cancer — they got worse in the control group, but they actually got better in the experimental group, and these differences were highly significant.And then I wondered: was there any relationship between how much people changed their diet and lifestyle — whichever group they were in — and the changes in PSA? And sure enough, we found a dose-response relationship, just like we found in the arterial blockages in our cardiac studies. And in order for the PSA to go down, they had to make pretty big changes.I then wondered, well, maybe they’re just changing their PSA, but it’s not really affecting the tumor growth. So we took some of their blood serum and sent it down to UCLA; they added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture, and it inhibited the growth seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group — 70 versus 9 percent. And finally, I said, I wonder if there’s any relationship between how much people change and how it inhibited their tumor growth, whichever group they happened to be in. And this really got me excited because again, we found the same pattern: the more people change, the more it affected the growth of their tumors. And finally, we did MRI and MR spectroscopy scans on some of these patients, and the tumor activity is shown in red in this patient, and you can see clearly it’s better a year later, along with the PSA going down. So, if it’s true for prostate cancer, it’ll almost certainly be true for breast cancer as well. And whether or not you have conventional treatment, in addition, if you make these changes, it may help reduce the risk of recurrence.The last thing I want to talk about, apropos of the issue of the pursuit of happiness, is that study after study have shown that people who are lonely and depressed — and depression is the other real epidemic in our culture — are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely, in part because, as we talked about, they’re more likely to smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard and so on. But also, through mechanisms that we don’t fully understand, people who are lonely and depressed are many times — three to five to ten times, in some studies — more likely to get sick and die prematurely. And depression is treatable. We need to do something about that.Now, on the other hand, anything that promotes intimacy is healing. It can be sexual intimacy – I happen to think that healing energy and erotic energy are just different forms of the same thing. Friendship, altruism, compassion, service – all the perennial truths that we talked about that are part of all religion and all cultures — once you stop trying to see the differences, these are the things in our own self-interest, because they free us from our suffering and from disease. And it’s in a sense the most selfish thing that we can do.Just take a look at one study. This was done by David Spiegel at Stanford. He took women with metastatic breast cancer, randomly divided them into two groups. One group of people just met for an hour-and-a-half once a week in a support group. It was a nurturing, loving environment, where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood, because they were going through it too. They just met once a week for a year. Five years later, those women lived twice as long, and you can see that the people — and that was the only difference between the groups. It was a randomized control study published in The Lancet. Other studies have shown this as well. So, these simple things that create intimacy are really healing, and even the word healing, it comes from the root ""to make whole."" The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit, meaning ""union, to yoke, to bring together.""And the last slide I want to show you is from — I was — again, this swami that I studied with for so many years, and I did a combined oncology and cardiology Grand Rounds at the University of Virginia medical school a couple of years ago. And at the end of it, somebody said, ""Hey, Swami, what’s the difference between wellness and illness?"" And so he went up on the board and he wrote the word ""illness,"" and circled the first letter, and then wrote the word ""wellness,"" and circled the first two letters ... To me, it’s just shorthand for what we’re talking about: that anything that creates a sense of connection and community and love is really healing. And then we can enjoy our lives more fully without getting sick in the process. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_ornish_on_healing
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"You all know this story. In the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist and atomic-pile builder, went to lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory and joined some colleagues there, and asked them a question: ""Where is everybody?"" This confused his colleagues, obviously, because they were sitting right there with him. And then he had to clarify that he wasn't talking about them. He was talking about the space aliens.You see, this was only a few years after the supposed flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico. And even though that turned out to be nothing, nothing at all — (Laughter) — merely a downed weather balloon piloted by small hairless men with slits for mouths ... Still, America had gone saucer-mad, even famous scientists who were eating lunch. Fermi's reasoning, if I may paraphrase badly, is that the universe is so vast that it stands to reason, there should be other intelligent life out there. And the universe is so old that unless we were the very first civilization ever to evolve, we should have some evidence of their existence by now. And yet, to the best of our knowledge, we are alone.""Where is everybody?"" asked Fermi, and his colleagues had no answer. Fermi then went on with the same blunt logic to disprove fairies, Sasquatch, God, the possibility of love — and thereafter, as you know, Enrico Fermi ate alone. (Laughter) Now, I am not a scientist. I have never built an atomic pile. Although, I might argue that, technically, every pile is atomic.(Laughter)However, with respect, I might point out two possibilities that Enrico Fermi perhaps did not consider. One is that the aliens might be very far away. Perhaps, I dare say, even on other planets. The other possibility — (Laughter) — is, perhaps, Enrico Fermi himself was an alien.(Laughter)Think about it. Isn't it a little convenient that in the midst of the World War, out of nowhere, suddenly an Italian scientist showed up with an amazing new technology that would transform everything in the world and darken the history of the human species forever after? And isn't it a little strange that he required no payment for this? That he asked for only one thing — a gift of two healthy sperm whales? That's — that's not true. But it is strange.(Laughter)And if Enrico Fermi were indeed a space alien, wouldn't he be the first to have tried to convince his fellow scientists that the space aliens are not already here? For it is given in certain UFO-ology or UFOlogy circles, that the aliens are already here and have been for millennia; that they have walked among us in disguise, observing us, guiding our evolution from ape to man — if you believe in that sort of thing — and, occasionally, kidnapping us in their flying saucers and taking us away to have sex with us in pyramids.(Laughter)It's a difficult theory to discount, I think you'll agree.(Laughter)For even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain — happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life. For how else will you explain the amazing and absolutely true close encounters that I had and will describe to you now? Encounter one: Ocean City, New Jersey, 1980. This was the summer when the special edition of ""Close Encounters of the Third Kind"" was released. And I went on vacation with my parents to the Jersey shore. Within 12 hours, I was horribly sunburned, just like Richard Dreyfuss in the movie.(Laughter)And so I spent the rest of the vacation largely sitting outside our little rental house at night, the sidewalk still warm from the sun, watching the skies for UFOs. What did I see? Stars, satellites, blinking airplanes — typical sky junk. Occasionally, kids would come and join me and watch, but their necks soon got sore, and they would go off to the boardwalk to play video games and mingle with humans. I was pretty good at the video games. I was not very good at the other part, so I stayed alone with the cosmos.And that's when it happened. An elderly couple came walking down the street. I would say they were in their late seventies, and I would say that they were on a date, because he was wearing a very neat little suit with a yellow tie — a brown suit. And she was wearing a cardigan, because it was now fully night and a chill was coming in off the ocean. I remember, for some reason, that they were exactly the same height. And then they stopped, and the man turned to me and said, ""What are you looking for, flying saucers?""(Laughter)You have to admit, that's a pretty boss piece of detective work for an old man on a date. But what was stranger still — and even I realized it at the time, as a nine-year-old child — was that they stopped at all. That this old man would interrupt his moonlight stroll with his sweetheart with the precise reason of making fun of a child. ""Oh,"" he said, ""little green men."" And then his girlfriend joined in, too. ""There's no such thing as space men,"" she said. ""There's no such thing."" And then they both laughed. ""Ha, ha, ha."" I looked around. The street was entirely empty. I had stopped hearing the sound of the ocean. It was as though time had stopped. I did not know why they were teasing me. I looked into their strangely angry faces, and I remember wondering, are they wearing rubber masks?(Laughter)And what would be behind those rubber masks, if they were? Giant, almond-shaped, unblinking eyes? Slits for mouths? The old man crooked his finger as though he were firing a gun, and then he made laser sounds. ""Kew, kew, kew — watch out."" And they turned at once and walked away. The old man reached out his knobbly claw for the woman's hand, and found it, and left me alone. Now, you could describe this as a simple misunderstanding — a strange encounter among humans. Maybe it was swamp gas, but — (Laughter) — I know what I saw.Close encounter two: Brookline, Massachusetts, 1984. I went to see the movie ""Dune,"" and a girl talked to me. Now, on its face — (Laughter) — this is impossible on its face, I realize — but it is absolutely true. It was opening night, naturally. I went with my friend Tim McGonigal, who sat on my left. On my right was the girl in question. She had long, curly black hair, a blue jean jacket. I remember, she had some sort of injury to her ankle, an Ace bandage, and she had crutches. She was very tall, I would say. I was starting high school at the time. I would say she was a junior, but I had never seen her before. She didn't go to my school. I didn't know her name, and I never will. She was sitting with someone who I presume was her mother, and they were talking about the novel, ""Dune."" They were both big fans, mother and daughter — very unusual. They were talking about how their favorite characters were the giant sandworms. And then it got stranger. That's when she turned to me and said, ""Are you looking forward to seeing the movie?""(Laughter)First of all, I was embarrassed because I had not read the novel ""Dune"" at that time. I was merely a connoisseur of movies featuring desert planets, as I still am.(Laughter) But it was also the tone of how she asked the question: apropos of nothing, like she didn't even care about the answer, as though she just wanted to talk to me. I did not know what to say. I said, ""Yes."" I did not even turn my head. The movie began. I need not remind you that this was David Lynch's version of ""Dune,"" in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time.(Laughter)There was a character called the Third-Stage Guild Navigator, which was a kind of giant, floating fetus-creature that lived in a giant tank with this orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him, allowing him to bend space and time. He could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world. He had become, in his isolation, so deformed and so sexy, that he had to talk through a kind of old-timey radio to the outside world, and could never touch them. I mean, I liked him a lot better than the sandworms. The sandworms were fine, but your favorite character? Please.When the movie ended, everyone seemed very happy to get up and get out of the theatre as soon as possible. Except for the girl. As I walked out, her pace slowed. Perhaps it was the crutches, but it seemed — (Laughter) — it seemed as though she might want to talk to me again. When I say it out loud, it sounds so ridiculous, but I can only come to the conclusion that it was what, in the alien abductee community, they call a ""screen memory"": a ridiculous false recollection designed by their brain to cover up some trauma — say, of being kidnapped and flown off to a sex pyramid.(Laughter)And so I sure am glad I did not slow down to talk to her. I sure am glad I never saw her again.Close encounter three: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1989. In the mid-to-late '80s, the novelist Whitley Strieber wrote a book called ""Communion,"" in which he described his own lifelong experiences being abducted by aliens. And he also described the phenomenon known in this community as ""lost time,"" where Whitley Strieber would suddenly become aware that he could not remember the previous ten minutes, or the previous ten hours, or the previous ten days. And would come to the conclusion that that was when the aliens were taking him and giving him rectal probes.(Laughter)This book became, naturally, an enormous best-seller. This image by Ted Joseph was from that book, and was his, sort of, police sketch of what the creatures looked like that Whitley Strieber had described to him. And it was so successful that they made it into a movie. And in 1989, the way I remember it, I was in Philadelphia visiting my girlfriend, and we decided, apropos of nothing, to go see this movie. And the way I remember it, the movie featured these details. One: Whitley Strieber was played by Christopher Walken. Two: the alien was played by a rubber puppet.(Laughter)Three: there was a surprisingly long sequence of the film in which the rubber puppet gives Christopher Walken a rectal probe. Four: this was being shown in a regular movie theater in Center City, Philadelphia. Five: all of which is to say, they made a movie out of the book, ""Communion,"" and it starred Christopher Walken. Does something seem strange about this to you? Something odd? Something off? Something wrong with this picture? Think about it. Yes. The answer is: I had a girlfriend. What?(Laughter)How did this happen? When did this happen? I remember walking out of the theater and becoming suddenly aware of this fact, as we walked hand in hand, and pondering these very same questions. And to this day, I have no answer for you. Close encounter four: the Algarve, Portugal, 1991. Some years later, I and this woman — we'll call her ""Catherine Fletcher"" — (Laughter) — went traveling through the south of Portugal together. We stayed in old, crumbling, walled cities, in tiny little hotels, and we would climb up to the roof and drink Vinho Verde and watch the sun set and play checkers. What? Did we do this? Really? Does anyone do this? We went to some topless beaches. Excuse me? No, not in my life. For what it's worth, we went to Sagres, which was considered, at the time, to be the end of the world. And there I was chased by a pack of feral dogs on the dock, and the lead dog bit me on the ass, requiring me to go to a strange Portuguese clinic and receive an ass shot. Make of that what you will.(Laughter)Our last day in Portugal, we were in the district capital of Faro, and Catherine decided that she wanted to go to the beach one last time. Now, Faro is a bustling little city, and to get to the beach, she explained, you would have to take a bus and then a boat. And did I want to come with? But I was exhausted and dog-bitten, and so I said, ""No."" I remember what she looked like before she left. The freckles had grown and multiplied on her face and shoulders, clustering into a kind of a tan. A tan, we were both tan — is this true? Her eyes were extra bright and extra blue, as a result. She was smiling. She was a single woman about to go alone into a country, not even speaking the language, to travel alone by bus and boat to go to a beach she did not know or had never seen. I loved her, and then she went out into that strange, alien land.It took me some time to come to my senses. I had my own ""lost time"" moment, where I woke up and suddenly realized it was very late in the day, almost dinnertime, and she had not come back. Nervous, I went down to the street to look for her. Now, I did not speak Portuguese. I did not know where the beach was. I could not call her on a cell phone because this was 1991, and the aliens had not given us that technology yet.(Laughter)I realized that the day would only have two possible outcomes: either Catherine would come back to the hotel, or she would never come back to the hotel. And so I sat down to wait. I did not watch the skies, but the very end of the street where the buses and cars and pedestrians and little scooters were moving along. And I watched those constellations shift, hoping that they would part and I would see her face. It was at that moment, in that very small town of 30,000 or so, that I truly appreciated the vastness of the universe and the searching we might do in it. And that's when the Liberians came along. Five young men — all laughing, happy, traveling together, coming back to this hotel where they were staying.One of them was named Joseph, and he asked me what was I doing, and I explained. And he said, ""Don't worry."" He was sure that Catherine would be safe. But he did not seem so very sure, for he sat down to wait with me. And for the next two hours, they all waited with me: taking turns, going up to their room, coming back, telling me jokes, distracting me. Two hours, they gave me a message. We are not alone.And then, in the middle of a sentence, at the very birth of twilight, I turned and looked down the street. The stars aligned, and she came back. She was smiling. She did not understand why I was so worried. Neither did the Liberians, although there was a huge amount of relief in their laughter as they clapped us on the back, and went back up to their room and left us alone in the street, holding hands. An event like this leaves a scar on the memory, much like a piece of alien technology that has been inserted into your buttocks by a ""Portuguese doctor.""(Laughter)And even now, a decade and a half later, even now that we are married, I look for her still, whenever she is not in the room. And even though, I think you'll agree, it is probable that during the time she was away, she was kidnapped and replaced by an alien clone, I love her and wait for her still.Thank you for your kind attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hodgman_s_brief_digression
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"You hear that this is the era of environment — or biology, or information technology ... Well, it's the era of a lot of different things that we're in right now. But one thing for sure: it's the era of change. There's more change going on than ever has occurred in the history of human life on earth. And you all sort of know it, but it's hard to get it so that you really understand it. And I've tried to put together something that's a good start for this. I've tried to show in this — though the color doesn't come out — that what I'm concerned with is the little 50-year time bubble that you are in. You tend to be interested in a generation past, a generation future — your parents, your kids, things you can change over the next few decades — and this 50-year time bubble you kind of move along in. And in that 50 years, if you look at the population curve, you find the population of humans on the earth more than doubles and we're up three-and-a-half times since I was born. When you have a new baby, by the time that kid gets out of high school more people will be added than existed on earth when I was born. This is unprecedented, and it's big. Where it goes in the future is questioned. So that's the human part.Now, the human part related to animals: look at the left side of that. What I call the human portion — humans and their livestock and pets — versus the natural portion — all the other wild animals and just — these are vertebrates and all the birds, etc., in the land and air, not in the water. How does it balance? Certainly, 10,000 years ago, the civilization's beginning, the human portion was less than one tenth of one percent. Let's look at it now. You follow this curve and you see the whiter spot in the middle — that's your 50-year time bubble. Humans, livestock and pets are now 97 percent of that integrated total mass on earth and all wild nature is three percent. We have won. The next generation doesn't even have to worry about this game — it is over. And the biggest problem came in the last 25 years: it went from 25 percent up to that 97 percent. And this really is a sobering picture upon realizing that we, humans, are in charge of life on earth; we're like the capricious Gods of old Greek myths, kind of playing with life — and not a great deal of wisdom injected into it.Now, the third curve is information technology. This is Moore's Law plotted here, which relates to density of information, but it has been pretty good for showing a lot of other things about information technology — computers, their use, Internet, etc. And what's important is it just goes straight up through the top of the curve, and has no real limits to it. Now try and contrast these. This is the size of the earth going through that same — (Laughter) — frame. And to make it really clear, I've put all four on one graph. There's no need to see the little detailed words on it. That first one is humans-versus-nature; we've won, there's no more gain. Human population. And so if you're looking for growth industries to get into, that's not a good one — protecting natural creatures. Human population is going up; it's going to continue for quite a while. Good business in obstetricians, morticians, and farming, housing, etc. — they all deal with human bodies, which require being fed, transported, housed and so on. And the information technology, which connects to our brains, has no limit — now, that is a wonderful field to be in. You're looking for growth opportunity? It's just going up through the roof. And then, the size of the Earth. Somehow making these all compatible with the Earth looks like a pretty bad industry to be involved with.So, that's the stage out of all this. I find, for reasons I don't understand, I really do have a goal. And the goal is that the world be desirable and sustainable when my kids reach my age — and I think that's — in other words, the next generation. I think that's a goal that we probably all share. I think it's a hopeless goal. Technologically, it's achievable; economically, it's achievable; politically, it means sort of the habits, institutions of people — it's impossible. The institutions of the past with all their inertia are just irrelevant for the future, except they're there and we have to deal with them. I spend about 15 percent of my time trying to save the world, the other 85 percent, the usual — and whatever else we devote ourselves to. And in that 15 percent, the main focus is on human mind, thinking skills, somehow trying to unleash kids from the straightjacket of school, which is putting information and dogma into them, get them so they really think, ask tough questions, argue about serious subjects, don't believe everything that's in the book, think broadly or creative. They can be. Our school systems are very flawed and do not reward you for the things that are important in life or for the survival of civilization; they reward you for a lot of learning and sopping up stuff. We can't go into that today because there isn't time — it's a broad subject. One thing for sure, in the future there is an essential feature — necessary, but not sufficient — which is doing more with less. We've got to be doing things with more efficiency using less energy, less material. Your great-great grandparents got by on muscle power, and yet we all think there's this huge power that's essential for our lifestyle. And with all the wonderful technology we have we can do things that are much more efficient: conserve, recycle, etc.Let me just rush very quickly through things that we've done. Human-powered airplane — Gossamer Condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77, winning the Kremer prize in aviation history, followed by the Albatross. And we began making various odd planes and creatures. Here's a giant flying replica of a pterosaur that has no tail. Trying to have it fly straight is like trying to shoot an arrow with the feathered end forward. It was a tough job, and boy it made me have a lot of respect for nature. This was the full size of the original creature. We did things on land, in the air, on water — vehicles of all different kinds, usually with some electronics or electric power systems in them. I find they're all the same, whether its land, air or water. I'll be focusing on the air here. This is a solar-powered airplane — 165 miles carrying a person from France to England as a symbol that solar power is going to be an important part of our future. Then we did the solar car for General Motors — the Sunracer — that won the race in Australia. We got a lot of people thinking about electric cars, what you could do with them. A few years later, when we suggested to GM that now is the time and we could do a thing called the Impact, they sponsored it, and here's the Impact that we developed with them on their programs. This is the demonstrator. And they put huge effort into turning it into a commercial product.With that preamble, let's show the first two-minute videotape, which shows a little airplane for surveillance and moving to a giant airplane. Narrator: A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer serves for surveillance — in effect, a pair of roving eyeglasses. A cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble and launch by hand. Battery-powered, it is silent and rarely noticed. It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With onboard GPS, it can navigate autonomously, and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage. The modern sailplane is superbly efficient. Some can glide as flat as 60 feet forward for every foot of descent. They are powered only by the energy they can extract from the atmosphere — an atmosphere nature stirs up by solar energy. Humans and soaring birds have found nature to be generous in providing replenishable energy. Sailplanes have flown over 1,000 miles, and the altitude record is over 50,000 feet. (Music) The Solar Challenger was made to serve as a symbol that photovoltaic cells can produce real power and will be part of the world's energy future. In 1981, it flew 163 miles from Paris to England, solely on the power of sunbeams, and established a basis for the Pathfinder. (Music) The message from all these vehicles is that ideas and technology can be harnessed to produce remarkable gains in doing more with less — gains that can help us attain a desirable balance between technology and nature. The stakes are high as we speed toward a challenging future. Buckminster Fuller said it clearly: ""there are no passengers on spaceship Earth, only crew. We, the crew, can and must do more with less — much less.""Paul MacCready: If we could have the second video, the one-minute, put in as quickly as you can, which — this will show the Pathfinder airplane in some flights this past year in Hawaii, and will show a sequence of some of the beauty behind it after it had just flown to 71,530 feet — higher than any propeller airplane has ever flown. It's amazing: just on the puny power of the sun — by having a super lightweight plane, you're able to get it up there. It's part of a long-term program NASA sponsored. And we worked very closely with the whole thing being a team effort, and with wonderful results like that flight. And we're working on a bigger plane — 220-foot span — and an intermediate-size, one with a regenerative fuel cell that can store excess energy during the day, feed it back at night, and stay up 65,000 feet for months at a time. (Music) Ray Morgan's voice will come in here. There he's the project manager. Anything they do is certainly a team effort. He ran this program. Here's ... some things he showed as a celebration at the very end. Ray Morgan: We'd just ended a seven-month deployment of Hawaii. For those who live on the mainland, it was tough being away from home. The friendly support, the quiet confidence, congenial hospitality shown by our Hawaiian and military hosts — (Music) this is starting — made the experience enjoyable and unforgettable. PM: We have real-time IR scans going out through the Internet while the plane is flying. And it's exploring without polluting the stratosphere. That's its goal: the stratosphere, the blanket that really controls the radiation of the earth and permits life on earth to be the success that it is — probing that is very important. And also we consider it as a sort of poor man's stationary satellite, because it can stay right overhead for months at a time, 2,000 times closer than the real GFC synchronous satellite. We couldn't bring one here to fly it and show you.But now let's look at the other end. In the video you saw that nine-pound or eight-pound Pointer airplane surveillance drone that Keenan has developed and just done a remarkable job. Where some have servos that have gotten down to, oh, 18 or 25 grams, his weigh one-third of a gram. And what he's going to bring out here is a surveillance drone that weighs about 2 ounces — that includes the video camera, the batteries that run it, the telemetry, the receiver and so on. And we'll fly it, we hope, with the same success that we had last night when we did the practice. So Matt Keenan, just any time you're — all right — ready to let her go. But first, we're going to make sure that it's appearing on the screen, so you see what it sees. You can imagine yourself being a mouse or fly inside of it, looking out of its camera. Matt Keenan: It's switched on. PM: But now we're trying to get the video. There we go. MK: Can you bring up the house lights? PM: Yeah, the house lights and we'll see you all better and be able to fly the plane better. MK: All right, we'll try to do a few laps around and bring it back in. Here we go. (Applause) PM: The video worked right for the first few and I don't know why it — there it goes. Oh, that was only a minute, but I think you'd be safe to have that near the end of the flight, perhaps. We get to do the classic. All right. If this hits you, it will not hurt you. (Laughter) OK. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)But now, as they say in infomercials, we have something much better for you, which we're working on: planes that are only six inches — 15 centimeters — in size. And Matt's plane was on the cover of Popular Science last month, showing what this can lead to. And in a while, something this size will have GPS and a video camera in it. We've had one of these fly nine miles through the air at 35 miles an hour with just a little battery in it. But there's a lot of technology going. There are just milestones along the way of some remarkable things. This one doesn't have the video in it, but you get a little feel from what it can do. OK, here we go. (Laughter) MK: Sorry. OK. (Applause) PM: If you can pass it down when you're done. Yeah, I think — I lost a little orientation; I looked up into this light. It hit the building. And the building was poorly placed, actually. (Laughter) But you're beginning to see what can be done. We're working on projects now — even wing-flapping things the size of hawk moths — DARPA contracts, working with Caltech, UCLA.Where all this leads, I don't know. Is it practical? I don't know. But like any basic research, when you're really forced to do things that are way beyond existing technology, you can get there with micro-technology, nanotechnology. You can do amazing things when you realize what nature has been doing all along. As you get to these small scales, you realize we have a lot to learn from nature — not with 747s — but when you get down to the nature's realm, nature has 200 million years of experience. It never makes a mistake. Because if you make a mistake, you don't leave any progeny. We should have nothing but success stories from nature, for you or for birds, and we're learning a lot from its fascinating subjects.In concluding, I want to get back to the big picture and I have just two final slides to try and put it in perspective. The first I'll just read. At last, I put in three sentences and had it say what I wanted. Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life — complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans — a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature — have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush. And that's serious: we're not very bright. We're short on wisdom; we're high on technology. Where's it going to lead?Well, inspired by the sentences, I decided to wield the paintbrush. Every 25 years I do a picture. Here's the one — tries to show that the world isn't getting any bigger. Sort of a timeline, very non-linear scale, nature rates and trilobites and dinosaurs, and eventually we saw some humans with caves ... Birds were flying overhead, after pterosaurs. And then we get to the civilization above the little TV set with a gun on it. Then traffic jams, and power systems, and some dots for digital. Where it's going to lead — I have no idea. And so I just put robotic and natural cockroaches out there, but you can fill in whatever you want. This is not a forecast. This is a warning, and we have to think seriously about it. And that time when this is happening is not 100 years or 500 years. Things are going on this decade, next decade; it's a very short time that we have to decide what we are going to do. And if we can get some agreement on where we want the world to be — desirable, sustainable when your kids reach your age — I think we actually can reach it. Now, I said this was a warning, not a forecast. That was before — I painted this before we started in on making robotic versions of hawk moths and cockroaches, and now I'm beginning to wonder seriously — was this more of a forecast than I wanted? I personally think the surviving intelligent life form on earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based. And so where it all goes, I don't know.The one final bit of sparkle we'll put in at the very end here is an utterly impractical flight vehicle, which is a little ornithopter wing-flapping device that — rubber-band powered — that we'll show you. MK: 32 gram. Sorry, one gram. PM: Last night we gave it a few too many turns and it tried to bash the roof out also. It's about a gram. The tube there's hollow, about paper-thin. And if this lands on you, I assure you it will not hurt you. But if you reach out to grab it or hold it, you will destroy it. So, be gentle, just act like a wooden Indian or something. And when it comes down — and we'll see how it goes. We consider this to be sort of the spirit of TED. (Applause) And you wonder, is it practical? And it turns out if I had not been — (Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, we have some light bulb changes. We can probably get it down, but it's possible it's gone up to a greater destiny up there — (Laughter) — than it ever had. And I wanted to make — (Applause) just — (Applause)But I want to make just two points. One is, you think it's frivolous; there's nothing to it. And yet if I had not been making ornithopters like that, a little bit cruder, in 1939 — a long, long time ago — there wouldn't have been a Gossamer Condor, there wouldn't have been an Albatross, a Solar Challenger, there wouldn't be an Impact car, there wouldn't be a mandate on zero-emission vehicles in California. A lot of these things — or similar — would have happened some time, probably a decade later. I didn't realize at the time I was doing inquiry-based, hands-on things with teams, like they're trying to get in education systems. So I think that, as a symbol, it's important. And I believe that also is important. You can think of it as a sort of a symbol for learning and TED that somehow gets you thinking of technology and nature, and puts it all together in things that are — that make this conference, I think, more important than any that's taken place in this country in this decade. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_maccready_on_nature_vs_humans
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"I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me when I was between seven and 10 years old. And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them — how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war. So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance.I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and I didn't have money to go to a movie. But I found that on the — I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers [that] he was going to talk. And I thought, well, since I can't go to the movies, at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers. And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting. Instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans had been traumatized by the war, and now they're projecting flying saucers into the sky. He talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war. And this seemed very interesting to me. And I started reading his books after that lecture. And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about.Then I came to this country to study psychology and I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. This is a typical result that many people have presented, and there are many variations on it. But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn't changed at all. Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. But you find essentially the same results, namely, that after a certain basic point — which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level — increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are. In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness.So my research has been focused more on — after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience, I tried to understand: where — in everyday life, in our normal experience — do we feel really happy? And to start those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people — first artists and scientists, and so forth — trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s. And the interview was 40 pages long. But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview. And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state.Now, ""ecstasy"" in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement — whether it's China, Greece, the Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians — what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life. We know the temples they built, where people could come to experience a different reality. We know about the circuses, the arenas, the theaters. These are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form.Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this, which is also — this place, this arena, which is built like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also. We are participating in a reality that is different from that of the everyday life that we're used to. But this man doesn't need to go there. He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks, and as he does that, he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination. So once he gets to that point of beginning to create, like Jennifer did in her improvisation, a new reality — that is, a moment of ecstasy — he enters that different reality. Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. That's why you can't hear more than two people. You can't understand more than two people talking to you.Well, when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man is, he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness, because he doesn't have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that he exists. So existence is temporarily suspended. And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself. Now, I could look at my hand for two weeks, and I wouldn't feel any awe or wonder, because I can't compose. (Laughter)So what it's telling you here is that obviously this automatic, spontaneous process that he's describing can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it's mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. And because all of these people I started interviewing — this was an interview which is over 30 years old — so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that I called this type of experience the ""flow experience."" And it happens in different realms.For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky — a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked. But it happens in other activities. For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. You don't think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth.It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called ""Good Business,"" where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can't have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. It's kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you're working.This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product — they didn't have a product, they didn't have anything, but they had an idea. And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart's content. I couldn't improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace.Now, when we do studies — we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people — from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds — who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.In our studies, we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme. And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day, and whenever they go off you say what you're doing, how you feel, where you are, what you're thinking about. And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skill that they feel they have at that moment. So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram. That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else. But you have a kind of a set point there, which would be in the middle.If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do — play the piano, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you. And then the other areas become less and less positive.Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there. Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill. So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that's where they're pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that — going back to flow — then they develop higher skills. Control is also a good place to be, because there you feel comfortable, but not very excited. It's not very challenging any more. And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges. So those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into.The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal. Relaxation is fine — you still feel OK. Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative: you don't feel that you're doing anything, you don't use your skills, there's no challenge. Unfortunately, a lot of people's experience is in apathy. The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television; the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting. Even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it.So the question we are trying to address — and I'm way over time — is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel. And that is the kind of challenge that we're trying to understand. And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don't. And that's what our mandate is, in a way, to do.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow
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"When I first arrived in beautiful Zimbabwe, it was difficult to understand that 35 percent of the population is HIV positive. It really wasn't until I was invited to the homes of people that I started to understand the human toll of the epidemic. For instance, this is Herbert with his grandmother. When I first met him, he was sitting on his grandmother's lap. He has been orphaned, as both of his parents died of AIDS, and his grandmother took care of him until he too died of AIDS. He liked to sit on her lap because he said that it was painful for him to lie in his own bed. When she got up to make tea, she placed him in my own lap and I had never felt a child that was that emaciated. Before I left, I actually asked him if I could get him something. I thought he would ask for a toy, or candy, and he asked me for slippers, because he said that his feet were cold.This is Joyce who's — in this picture — 21. Single mother, HIV positive. I photographed her before and after the birth of her beautiful baby girl, Issa. And I was last week walking on Lafayette Street in Manhattan and got a call from a woman who I didn't know, but she called to tell me that Joyce had passed away at the age of 23. Joyce's mother is now taking care of her daughter, like so many other Zimbabwean children who've been orphaned by the epidemic. So a few of the stories. With every picture, there are individuals who have full lives and stories that deserve to be told. All these pictures are from Zimbabwe.Chris Anderson: Kirsten, will you just take one minute, just to tell your own story of how you got to Africa?Kirsten Ashburn: Mmm, gosh.CA: Just —KA: Actually, I was working at the time, doing production for a fashion photographer. And I was constantly reading the New York Times, and stunned by the statistics, the numbers. It was just frightening. So I quit my job and decided that that's the subject that I wanted to tackle. And I first actually went to Botswana, where I spent a month — this is in December 2000 — then went to Zimbabwe for a month and a half, and then went back again this March 2002 for another month and a half in Zimbabwe.CA: That's an amazing story, thank you.KB: Thanks for letting me show these.","https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_ashburn_s_heart_rending_pictures_of_aids
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"I think all of us have been interested, at one time or another, in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed, such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, Fertile Crescent society, Angor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and so on. And within the last decade or two, archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses. But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. So evidently, societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas. How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today, because today as well, there are some societies that have already collapsed, such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There are also societies today that may be close to collapse, such as Nepal, Indonesia and Columbia.What about ourselves? What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have? Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor. If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses, you know right away that they're an idiot. This is a complex subject. But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject? In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five-point framework — a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out — the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead.Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron. A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. In the case of the Vikings — in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit — the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time — did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well?The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country — Norway — and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway.The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit — the Eskimos sharing Greenland — with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year.And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn. So that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse.What about a society today? For the past five years, I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana, where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest. And Montana, at first sight, seems like the most pristine environment in the United States. But scratch the surface, and Montana suffers from serious problems. Going through the same checklist: human environmental impacts? Yes, acute in Montana. Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars. Problems from weeds, weed control, cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year. Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization, problems of forest management, problems of forest fires. Second item on my checklist: climate change. Yes — the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting — for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing — that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture.Third thing on my checklist: relations with friendlies that can sustain the society. In Montana today, more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana, but is derived from out of state: transfer payments from social security, investments and so on — which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States.Fourth: relations with hostiles. Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans, in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies, and terrorist attacks. And finally, last item on my checklist: question of how political, economic, social, cultural attitudes play into this. Montanans have long-held values, which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems. Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture, and to no government regulation; values that worked well in the past, but they don't seem to be working well today.So, I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies. Are there any general conclusions that arise? In a way, just like Tolstoy's statement about every unhappy marriage being different, every collapsed or endangered society is different — they all have different details. But nevertheless, there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today. One interesting common thread has to do with, in many cases, the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. There are many societies that don't wind down gradually, but they build up — get richer and more powerful — and then within a short time, within a few decades after their peak, they collapse. For example, the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s — literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments, and Maya population was greatest.Or again, the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade, of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power. An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish. These rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption, or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential. In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15/16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3/4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed. So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power.What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function — the wealth itself — but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function. That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation? It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors — some, rather subtle ones — that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils. But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999.So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. I'm now teaching a course at UCLA, to UCLA undergraduates, on these collapses of societies. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time? And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action? It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems — why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them. Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them?I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. For example, among the Greenland Norse — a competitive rank society — what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency. And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run.Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses. They are quite correct that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest.And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances. For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things — commitment to religion and strong social cohesion — also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit. Or today — Australia. One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity. But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength.What's going to be the outcome today? Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to — all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc., etc. — listing about 12 of them. And while these time bombs — none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades — some of them, in some places, have much shorter fuses. At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons. People often ask me, Jared, what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems? And my answer is, the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are a dozen things, any one of which could do us in. And we've got to get them all right, because if we solve 11, we fail to solve the 12th — we're in trouble. For example, if we solve our problems of water and soil and population, but don't solve our problems of toxics, then we are in trouble.The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course, which means, by definition, that it cannot be maintained. And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades. That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved, and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution, but our children and grandchildren certainly will. The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms: either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action, or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice — namely, by war, disease or starvation. But what's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades. In other words, since the theme of this session is choices, we have a choice. Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed? I draw the reverse conclusion.The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems. That then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems. In particular, what can all of us do? For those of you who are interested in these choices, there are lots of things you can do. There's a lot that we don't understand, and that we need to understand. And there's a lot that we already do understand, but aren't doing, and that we need to be doing. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse
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"This means, ""I'm smiling."" So does that. This means ""mouse."" ""Cat."" Here we have a story. The start of the story, where this means guy, and that is a ponytail on a passer-by. Here's where it happens. These are when. This is a cassette tape the girl puts into her cassette-tape player. She wears it every day. It's not considered vintage — she just likes certain music to sound a certain way. Look at her posture; it's remarkable. That's because she dances. Now he, the guy, takes all of this in, figuring, ""Honestly, geez, what are my chances?""(Laughter)And he could say, ""Oh my God!"" or ""I heart you!"" ""I'm laughing out loud."" ""I want to give you a hug."" But he comes up with that, you know. He tells her, ""I'd like to hand-paint your portrait on a coffee mug.""(Laughter)Put a crab inside it. Add some water. Seven different salts. He means he's got this sudden notion to stand on dry land, but just panhandle at the ocean. He says, ""You look like a mermaid, but you walk like a waltz."" And the girl goes, ""Wha'?"" So, the guy replies, ""Yeah, I know, I know. I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for inappropriate. At least, that's how it seems. I'm like a junior varsity cheerleader sometimes — for swearing, awkward silences, and very simple rhyme schemes.Right now, talking to you, I'm not even really a guy. I'm a monkey — (Laughter) — blowing kisses at a butterfly. But I'm still suggesting you and I should meet. First, soon, and then a lot. I'm thinking the southwest corner of 5th and 42nd at noon tomorrow, but I'll stay until you show up, ponytail or not. Hell, ponytail alone. I don't know what else to tell you. I got a pencil you can borrow. You can put it in your phone."" But the girl does not budge, does not smile, does not frown. She just says, ""No thank you."" You know? [ ""i don't need 2 write it down."" ](Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_tells_a_story_of_mixed_emoticons
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"Zach Kaplan: Keith and I lead a research team. We investigate materials and technologies that have unexpected properties. Over the last three years, we found over 200 of these things, and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for TED. Of these six, the first one that we're going to talk about is in the black envelope you're holding. It comes from a company in Japan called GelTech. Now go ahead and open it up.Keith Schacht: Now be sure and take the two pieces apart. What's unexpected about this is that it's soft, but it's also a strong magnet. Zach and I have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this. We spent a long time thinking about why this is, and it's just recently that we realized: it's when we see something unexpected, it changes our understanding of the way things work. As you're seeing this gel magnet for the first time, if you assume that all magnets had to be hard, then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could work.ZK: Now, it's important to understand what the unexpected properties are. But to really think about the implications of what this makes possible, we found that it helps to think about how it could be applied in the world. So, a first idea is to use it on cabinet doors. If you line the sides of the cabinets using the gel material — if a cabinet slams shut it wouldn't make a loud noise, and in addition the magnets would draw the cabinets closed. Imagine taking the same material, but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker. You know, this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door, in your closet, and you could literally stick your shoes up instead of using a shelf. For me, I really love this idea. (Laughter) If you come to my apartment and see my closet, I'm sure you'd figure out why: it's a mess.KS: Seeing the unexpected properties and then seeing a couple of applications — it helps you see why this is significant, what the potential is. But we've found that the way we present our ideas it makes a big difference.ZK: It was like six months ago that Keith and I were out in L.A., and we were at Starbucks having coffee with Roman Coppola. He works on mostly music videos and commercials with his company, The Directors Bureau. As we were talking, Roman told us that he's kind of an inventor on the side. And we were showing him the same gel magnet that you're holding in your hand — and you know, we shared the same ideas. And you could see it in his face: Roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folder; he opens it up and Keith and I look in, and he starts showing us concepts that he's been working on. These things just get him really excited. And so we're looking at these concepts, and we were just like, whoa, this guy's good. Because the way that he presented the concept — his approach was totally different than ours. He sold it to you as if it was for sale right now. When we were going in the car back to the airport, we were thinking: why was this so powerful? And as we thought about it more, we realized that it let you fill in all the details about the experience, just as if you saw it on TV. So, for TED we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to create a commercial for a product from the future.Narrator: Do you have a need for speed? Inventables Water Adventures dares you to launch yourself on a magnetically-levitating board down a waterslide so fast, so tall, that when you hit the bottom, it uses brakes to stop. Aqua Rocket: coming this summer.KS: Now, we showed the concept to a few people before this, and they asked us, when's it coming out? So I just wanted to let you know, it's not actually coming out, just the concept is.ZK: So now, when we dream up these concepts, it's important for us to make sure that they work from a technical standpoint. So I just want to quickly explain how this would work. This is the magnetically-levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial. The gel that you're holding would be lining the bottom of the board. Now this is important for two reasons. One: the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that, if it were to hit the rider in the head, it wouldn't injure him. In addition, you can see from the diagram on the right, the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet. So this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you're going down. The force of the water rushing down, in addition to that repulsion force, would make this slide go faster than any slide on the market. It's because of this that you need the magnetic braking system. When you get to the very bottom of the slide — (Laughter) — the rider passes through an aluminum tube. And I'm going to kick it to Keith to explain why that's important from a technical standpoint.KS: So I'm sure all you engineers know that even though aluminum is a metal, it's not a magnetic material. But something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube. So we set up a quick experiment here to show that to you. (Laughter) Now, you see the magnet fell really slowly. Now, I'm not going to get into the physics of it, but all you need to know is that the faster the magnet's falling, the greater the stopping force.ZK: Now, our next technology is actually a 10-foot pole, and I have it right here in my pocket. (Laughter) There're a few different versions of it. (Laughter) KS: Some of them automatically unroll like this one. They can be made to automatically roll up, or they can be made stable, like Zach's, to hold any position in between.ZK: As we were talking to the vendor — to try to learn about how you could apply these, or how they're being applied currently — he was telling us that, in the military they use this one so soldiers can keep it on their chests — very concealed — and then, when they're out on the field, erect it as an antenna to clearly send signals back to the base. In our brainstorms, we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal: so at the end of the game, you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bag. (Laughter)KS: Now, the interesting thing about this is, you don't have to be an engineer to appreciate why a 10-foot pole that can fit in your pocket is so interesting. (Laughter) So we decided to go out onto the streets of Chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with this.Man: I clean my ceiling fans with that and I get the spider webs off my house — I do it that way. Woman: I'd make my very own walking stick. Woman: I would create a ladder to use to get up on top of the tree. Woman: An olive server. Man: Some type of extension pole — like what the painters use. Woman: I would make a spear that, when you went deep sea diving, you could catch the fish really fast, and then roll it back up, and you could swim easier ... Yeah. (Laughter)ZK: Now, for our next technology we're going to do a little demonstration, and so we need a volunteer from the audience. You sir, come on up. (Laughter) Come on up. Tell everybody your name.Steve Jurvetson: Steve.ZK: It's Steve. All right Steve, now, follow me. We need you to stand right in front of the TED sign. Right there. That's great. And hold onto this. Good luck to you. (Laughter)KS: No, not yet. (Laughter)ZK: I'd just like to let you all know that this presentation has been brought to you by Target.KS: Little bit — that's perfect, just perfect. Now, Zach, we're going to demonstrate a water gun fight from the future. (Laughter) So here, come on up to the front. All right, so now if you'll see here — no, no, it's OK. So, describe to the audience the temperature of your shirt. Go ahead.SJ: It's cold.KS: Now the reason it's cold is that's it's not actually water loaded into these squirt guns — it's a dry liquid developed by 3M. It's perfectly clear, it's odorless, it's colorless. It's so safe you could drink this stuff. (Laughter) And the reason it feels cold is because it evaporates 25 times faster than water. (Laughter) All right, well thanks for coming up. (Laughter)ZK: Wait, wait, Steven — before you go we filled this with the dry liquid so during the break you can shoot your friends. SJ: Excellent, thank you.KS: Thanks for coming up. Let's give him a big round of applause. (Applause)So what's the significance of this dry liquid? Early versions of the fluid were actually used on a Cray Supercomputer. Now, the unexpected thing about this is that Zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectly innocent member of the audience without any concern that we'd damage the electronics, that we'd get him wet, that we'd hurt the books or the computers. It works because it's non-conductive. So you can see here, you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it wouldn't cause any damage. You can circulate it to draw the heat away. But today it's most widely used in office buildings — in the sprinkler system — as a fire-suppression fluid. Again, it's perfectly safe for people. It puts out the fires, doesn't hurt anything. But our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game. So during halftime, it could rain down on the players, cool everyone down, and in a matter of minutes it would dry. Wouldn't hurt the court.ZK: Our next technology comes to us from a company in Japan called Sekisui Chemical. One of their R&D engineers was working on a way to make plastic stiffer. While he was doing this, he noticed an unexpected thing. We have a video to show you.KS: So you see there, it didn't bounce back. Now, this was an unintended side effect of some experiments they were doing. It's technically called, ""shape-retaining property."" Now, think about your interactions with aluminum foil. Shape-retaining is common in metal: you bend a piece of aluminum foil, and it holds its place. Contrast that with a plastic garbage can — and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back.ZK: For example, you could make a watch that wraps around your wrist, but doesn't use a buckle. Taking it a little further, if you wove those strips together — kind of like a little basket — you could make a shape-retaining sheet, and then you could embed it in a cloth: so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table, so that way on a windy day it wouldn't blow away. For our next technology, it's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself, because it's an ink. So, we've prepared a video to show it applied to paper.KS: As this paper is bending, the resistance of the ink changes. So with simple electronics, you can detect how much the page is being bent. Now, to think about the potential for this, think of all the places ink is supplied: on business cards, on the back of cereal boxes, board games. Any place you use ink, you could change the way you interact with it.ZK: So my favorite idea for this is to apply the ink to a book. This could totally change the way that you interface with paper. You see the dark line on the side and the top. As you turn the pages of the book, the book can actually detect what page you're on, based on the curvature of the pages. In addition, if you were to fold in one of the corners, then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notes.KS: For our last technology, we worked again with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to develop a commercial from the future to explain how it works.Old Milk Carton: Oh yeah, it smells good. Who are you? New Milk Carton: I'm New Milk. OMC: I used to smell like you. Narrator: Fresh Watch, from Inventables Dairy Farms. Packaging that changes color when your milk's gone off. Don't let milk spoil your morning.ZK: Now, this technology was developed by these two guys: Professor Ken Suslick and Neil Rakow, of the University of Illinois.KS: Now the way it works: there's a matrix of color dyes. And these dyes change color in response to odors. So the smell of vanilla, that might change the four on the left to brown and the one on the right to yellow. This matrix can produce thousands of different color combinations to represent thousands of different smells. But like in the milk commercial, if you know what odor you want to detect, then they can formulate a specific dye to detect just that odor.ZK: Right. It was that that started a conversation with Professor Suslick and myself, and he was explaining to me the things that this is making possible, beyond just detecting spoiled food. It's really where the significance of it lies. His company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn, how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene? And he kind of comically explained that time after time, what the firemen would say is: they would rush to the scene of the crime; they would look around; if there were no dead policemen, it was OK to go. (Laughter) I mean, this is a true story. They're using policemen as canaries. (Laughter) But more seriously, they determined that you could develop a device that can smell better than the humans, and say if it's safe for the firemen. In addition, he's spun off a company from the University called ChemSensing, where they're working on medical equipment. So, a patient can come in and actually blow into their device. By detecting the odor of particular bacteria, or viruses, or even lung cancer, the dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results. This can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patients. Currently, they're using a method of trial and error, but this could tell you precisely what disease you have.KS: So that was the six we had for you today, but I hope you're starting to see why we find these things so fascinating. Because every one of these six changed our understanding of what was possible in the world. Prior to seeing this, we would have assumed: a 10-foot pole couldn't fit in your pocket; something as inexpensive as ink couldn't sense the way paper is being bent; every one of these things — and we're constantly trying to find more.ZK: This is something that Keith and I really enjoy doing. I'm sure it's obvious to you now, but it was actually yesterday that I was reminded of why. I was having a conversation with Steve Jurvetson, over downstairs by the escalators, and he was telling me that when Chris sent out that little box, one of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand — the sand that doesn't get wet. He said that he was playing with it with his son. And you know, his son was mesmerized, because he would dunk it in the water, he would take it out and it was bone dry. A few weeks later, he said that his son was playing with a lock of his mother's hair, and he noticed that there were some drops of water on the hair. And he took the thing and he looked up to Steve and he said, ""Look, hydrophobic string."" (Laughter) I mean, after hearing that story — that really summed it up for me. Thank you very much.KS: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/toys_from_the_future
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"This is very strange for me, because I’m not used to doing this: I usually stand on the other side of the light, and now I'm feeling the pressure I put other people into. And it's hard ... The previous speaker has, I think, really painted a very good background as to the impulse behind my work and what drives me, and my sense of loss, and trying to find the answer to the big questions.But this, for me, I mean, coming here to do this, feels like — there’s this sculptor that I like very much, Giacometti, who after many years of living in France — and learning, you know, studying and working — he returned home and he was asked, what did you produce? What have you done with so many years of being away? And he sort of, he showed a handful of figurines. And obviously they were, ""Is this what you spent years doing? And we expected huge masterpieces!"" But what struck me is the understanding that in those little pieces was the culmination of a man’s life, search, thought, everything — just in a reduced, small version. In a way, I feel like that. I feel like I’m coming home to talk about what I’ve been away doing for 20 years. And I will start with a brief taster of what I’ve been about: a handful of films — nothing much, two feature films and a handful of short films. So, we’ll go with the first piece.(Video) Woman: ""I destroy lives,"" mum said. I love her, you know. She’s not even my real mum. My real mum and dad dumped me and fucked off back to Nigeria. The devil is in me, Court. Court: Sleep. Woman: Have you ever been? Court: Where? Woman: Nigeria. Court: Never. My mum wanted to, couldn’t afford it. Woman: Wish I could. I have this feeling I’d be happy there. Why does everyone get rid of me? Court: I don't want to get rid of you. Woman: You don't need me. You’re just too blind to see it now.Boy: What do you do all day? Marcus: Read. Boy: Don't you get bored? And how come you ain't got a job anyway? Marcus: I am retired. Boy: So? Marcus: So I've done my bit for Queen and country, now I work for myself. Boy: No, now you sit around like a bum all day. Marcus: Because I do what I like? Boy: Look man, reading don't feed no one. And it particularly don't feed your spliff habit. Marcus: It feeds my mind and my soul. Boy: Arguing with you is a waste of time, Marcus. Marcus: You’re a rapper, am I right? Boy: Yeah. Marcus: A modern day poet. Boy: Yeah, you could say that. Marcus: So what do you talk about? Boy: What's that supposed to mean? Marcus: Simple. What do you rap about? Boy: Reality, man. Marcus: Whose reality? Boy: My fuckin' reality. Marcus: Tell me about your reality. Boy: Racism, oppression, people like me not getting a break in life. Marcus: So what solutions do you offer? I mean, the job of a poet is not just — Boy: Man, fight the power! Simple: blow the motherfuckers out of the sky. Marcus: With an AK-47? Boy: Man, if I had one, too fuckin' right. Marcus: And how many soldiers have you recruited to fight this war with you? Boy: Oh, Marcus, you know what I mean. Marcus: When a man resorts to profanities, it’s a sure sign of his inability to express himself. Boy: See man, you’re just taking the piss out of me now. Marcus: The Panthers. Boy: Panthers? Ass kickin' guys who were fed up with all that white supremacist, powers-that-be bullshit, and just went in there and kicked everybody's arse. Fuckin’ wicked, man. I saw the movie. Bad! What?Director 1: I saw his last film. Épuise, right? Woman 1: Yes. D1: Not to make a bad joke, but it was really épuisé. Epuisé — tired, exhausted, fed up. Director 2: Can you not shut up? Now, you talk straight to me, what’s wrong with my films? Let’s go. W1: They suck. Woman 2: They suck? What about yours? What, what, what, what about, what? What do you think about your movie? D1: My movies, they are OK, fine. They are better than making documentaries no one ever sees. What the fuck are you talking about? Did you ever move your fuckin' ass from Hollywood to go and film something real? You make people fuckin' sleep. Dream about bullshit.(Applause)Newton Aduaka: Thank you. The first clip, really, is totally trying to capture what cinema is for me, and where I'm coming from in terms of cinema. The first piece was, really, there's a young woman talking about Nigeria, that she has a feeling she'll be happy there. These are the sentiments of someone that's been away from home. And that was something that I went through, you know, and I'm still going through. I've not been home for quite a while, for about five years now. I've been away 20 years in total. And so it’s really — it's really how suddenly, you know, this was made in 1997, which is the time of Abacha — the military dictatorship, the worst part of Nigerian history, this post-colonial history. So, for this girl to have these dreams is simply how we preserve a sense of what home is. How — and it's sort of, perhaps romantic, but I think beautiful, because you just need something to hold on to, especially in a society where you feel alienated.Which takes us to the next piece, where the young man talks about lack of opportunity: living as a black person in Europe, the glass ceiling that we all know about, that we all talk about, and his reality. Again, this was my — this was me talking about — this was, again, the time of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, and there was this buzzword — and it was trying to say, what exactly does this multiculturalism mean in the real lives of people? And what would a child — what does a child like Jamie — the young boy — think, I mean, with all this anger that's built up inside of him? What happens with that? What, of course, happens with that is violence, which we see when we talk about the ghettos and we talk about, you know, South Central L.A. and this kind of stuff, and which eventually, when channeled, becomes, you know, evolves and manifests itself as riots — like the one in France two years ago, where I live, which shocked everybody, because everyone thought, ""Oh well, France is a liberal society."" But I lived in England for 18 years. I've lived in France for about four, and I feel actually thrown back 20 years, living in France. And then, the third piece. The third piece for me is the question: What is cinema to you? What do you do with cinema? There's a young director, Hollywood director, with his friends — fellow filmmakers — talking about what cinema means. I suppose that will take me to my last piece — what cinema means for me. My life started as a — I started life in 1966, a few months before the Biafran, which lasted for three years and it was three years of war. So that whole thing, that whole childhood echoes and takes me into the next piece.(Video) Voice: Onicha, off to school with your brother. Onicha: Yes, mama. Commander: Soldiers, you are going to fight a battle, so you must get ready and willing to die. You must get — ? Child Soldiers: Ready and willing to die. C: Success, the change is only coming through the barrel of the gun. CS: The barrel of the gun! C: This is the gun. CS: This is the gun. C: This is an AK-47 rifle. This is your life. This is your life. This is ... this is ... this is your life. Ezra: They give us the special drugs. We call it bubbles. Amphetamines. Soldiers: Rain come, sun come, soldier man dey go. I say rain come, sun come, soldier man dey go. We went from one village to another — three villages. I don’t remember how we got there. Witness: We walked and walked for two days. We didn't eat. There was no food, just little rice. Without food — I was sick. The injection made us not to have mind. God will forgive us. He knows we did not know. We did not know!Committee Chairman: Do you remember January 6th, 1999? Ezra: I don’t remember.Various Voices: You will die! You will die! (Screaming) Onicha: Ezra! (Ezra: Onicha! Onicha!) Various Voices: ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ No more trouble ♫ They killed my mother. The Mende sons of bastards. (Shouting) Who is she? Me. Why you giving these to me? So you can stop staring at me. My story is a little bit complicated. I’m interested. Mariam is pregnant. You know what you are? A crocodile. Big mouth. Short legs. In front of Rufus you are Ezra the coward. He’s not taking care of his troops. Troop, pay your last honor. Salute. Open your eyes, Ezra. A blind man can see that the diamonds end up in his pocket. ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ Get that idiot out! I take you are preparing a major attack? This must be the mine. Your girl is here. Well done, well done. That is what you are here for, no? You are planning to go back to fight are you? ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ No more trouble ♫ ♫ We don't need no more trouble ♫ ♫ No more trouble. ♫ Wake up! Everybody wake up. Road block! ♫ We don't need no more ... ♫Committee Chairman: We hope that, with your help and the help of others, that this commission will go a long way towards understanding the causes of the rebel war. More than that, begin a healing process and finally to — as an act of closure to a terrible period in this country’s history. The beginning of hope. Mr. Ezra Gelehun, please stand. State your name and age for the commission. Ezra: My name is Ezra Gelehun. I am 15 or 16. I don’t remember. Ask my sister, she is the witch, she knows everything. (Sister: 16.) CC: Mr. Gelehun, I’d like to remind you you’re not on trial here for any crimes you committed. E: We were fighting for our freedom. If killing in a war is a crime, then you have to charge every soldier in the world. War is a crime, yes, but I did not start it. You too are a retired General, not so? CC: Yes, correct. E: So you too must stand trial then. Our government was corrupt. Lack of education was their way to control power. If I may ask, do you pay for school in your country? CC: No, we don’t. E: You are richer than us. But we pay for school. Your country talks about democracy, but you support corrupt governments like my own. Why? Because you want our diamond. Ask if anyone in this room have ever seen real diamond before? No. CC: Mr. Gelehun, I'd like to remind you, you're not on trial here today. You are not on trial. E: Then let me go. CC: I can't do that, son. E: So you are a liar.(Applause)NA: Thank you. Just very quickly to say that my point really here, is that while we’re making all these huge advancements, what we're doing, which for me, you know, I think we should — Africa should move forward, but we should remember, so we do not go back here again. Thank you.Emeka Okafor: Thank you, Newton.(Applause)One of the themes that comes through very strongly in the piece we just watched is this sense of the psychological trauma of the young that have to play this role of being child soldiers. And considering where you are coming from, and when we consider the extent to which it’s not taken as seriously as it should be, what would you have to say about that?NA: In the process of my research, I actually spent a bit of time in Sierra Leone researching this. And I remember I met a lot of child soldiers — ex-combatants, as they like to be called. I met psychosocial workers who worked with them. I met psychiatrists who spent time with them, aid workers, NGOs, the whole lot. But I remember on the flight back on my last trip, I remember breaking down in tears and thinking to myself, if any kid in the West, in the western world, went through a day of what any of those kids have gone through, they will be in therapy for the rest of their natural lives. So for me, the thought that we have all these children — it’s a generation, we have a whole generation of children — who have been put through so much psychological trauma or damage, and Africa has to live with that. But I’m just saying to factor that in, factor that in with all this great advancement, all this pronouncement of great achievement. That’s really my thinking.EO: Well, we thank you again for coming to the TED stage. That was a very moving piece.NA: Thank you.EO: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/newton_aduaka_tells_the_story_of_ezra
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"One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy. I love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life. So when I thought about compassion, my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips, where he's lying there and he says, ""I really understand, and I really appreciate how one should love one's neighbor as one love's oneself. The only trouble is the people next door; I can't stand them."" This, in a way, is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea.We all, I think, believe in compassion. If you look at all the world religions, all the main world religions, you'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion. So in Judaism, we have, from our Torah, that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. And within Jewish teachings, the rabbinic teachings, we have Hillel, who taught that you shouldn't do to others what you don't like being done to yourself. And all the main religions have similar teachings. And again, within Judaism, we have a teaching about God, who is called the compassionate one, Ha-rachaman. After all, how could the world exist without God being compassionate? And we, as taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God, so we too have to be compassionate. But what does it mean? How does it impact on our everyday life? Sometimes, of course, being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control.I know there are many times when I've gone and conducted a funeral, or when I have been sitting with the bereaved, or with people who are dying, and I am overwhelmed by the sadness, by the difficulty, the challenge that is there for the family, for the person. And I'm touched, so that tears come to my eyes. And yet, if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I wouldn't be doing my job — because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen, that practicalities are seen to. And yet, on the other hand, if I didn't feel this compassion, then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi.And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world. Who cannot be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war, or famine, or earthquakes, or tsunamis? I know some people who say ""Well, you know there's just so much out there — I can't do anything, I'm not going to even begin to try."" And there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue. There are others who feel they can't confront compassion anymore, and so they turn off the television and don't watch. In Judaism, though, we tend to always say, there has to be a middle way.You have to, of course, be aware of the needs of others, but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people. So part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick. And, of course, you can't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more.And there's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation, which says that when God created the world, God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice. Because, after all, God is just. Therefore, there should be justice throughout the world. And then God looked to the future and realized, if the world was created just with justice, the world couldn't exist.So, God thought, ""Nope, I'm going to create the world just with compassion."" And then God looked to the future and realized that, in fact, if the world were just filled with compassion, there would be anarchy and chaos. There had to be limits to all things. The rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful, fragile glass bowl. If you put too much cold water in, it will shatter. If you put boiling water in, it will shatter. What do you have to do? Put in a mixture of the two. And so God put both of these possibilities into the world.There is something more though that has to be there. And that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world, into action. So, like Snoopy, we can't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors. We actually have to do something about it. And so there is also, within Judaism, this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important: ""chesed.""All these three things, then, have to be melded together. The idea of justice, which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what's right about life, what's right about living, what should we be doing, social justice. There has to be a willingness to do good deeds, but not, of course, at the expense of our own sanity. You know, there's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things. And balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion, which has to be there, if you like, at our very roots.This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one. What does this compassion entail? It entails understanding the pain of the other. But even more than that, it means understanding one's connection to the whole of creation: understanding that one is part of that creation, that there is a unity that underlies all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel. I call that unity God. And that unity is something that connects all of creation.And, of course, in the modern world, with the environmental movement, we're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa, that if I use too much of my carbon allowance, it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern Africa. So there is a connectivity, and I have to understand that — as part of the creation, as part of me being made in the image of God. And I have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs.This ""18 minutes"" business, I find quite fascinating. Because in Judaism, the number 18, in Hebrew letters, stands for life — the word ""life."" So, in a sense, the 18 minutes is challenging me to say, ""In life, this is what's important in terms of compassion."" But, something else as well: actually, 18 minutes is important. Because at Passover, when we have to eat unleavened bread, the rabbis say, what is the difference between dough that is made into bread, and dough that is made into unleavened bread, or ""matzah""? And they say ""It's 18 minutes."" Because that's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven. What does it mean, ""dough becomes leaven""? It means it gets filled with hot air. What's matzah? What's unleavened bread? You don't get it.Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air — our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world, and that everything should revolve round us. So we try and get rid of those, and so doing, try to get rid of the habits, the emotions, the ideas that enslave us, that make our eyes closed, give us tunnel vision so we don't see the needs of others — and free ourselves and free ourselves from that. And that too is a basis for having compassion, for understanding our place in the world.Now there is, in Judaism, a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day. And, as many people do, he was dozing off during the sermon. And as he was dozing off, they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah. And they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem, the priests used to have bread, which they used to place into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem. The man was asleep, but he heard the words bread, temple, God, and he woke up. He said, ""God wants bread. That's it. God wants bread. I know what God wants.""And he rushed home. And after the Sabbath, he made 12 loaves of bread, took them to the synagogue, went into the synagogue, opened the ark and said, ""God, I don't know why you want this bread, but here you are."" And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah. Then he went home.The cleaner came into the synagogue. ""Oh God, I'm in such trouble. I've got children to feed. My wife's ill. I've got no money. What can I do?"" He goes into the synagogue. ""God, will you please help me? Ah, what a wonderful smell."" He goes to the ark. He opens the ark. ""There's bread! God, you've answered my plea. You've answered my question."" Takes the bread and goes home.Meanwhile, the rich man thinks to himself, ""I'm an idiot. God wants bread? God, the one who rules the entire universe, wants my bread?"" He rushes to the synagogue. ""I'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it."" He goes in there, and it's not there. And he says, ""God, you really did want it. You wanted my bread. Next week, with raisins.""This went on for years. Every week, the man would bring bread with raisins, with all sorts of good things, put it into the ark. Every week, the cleaner would come. ""God you've answered my plea again."" Take the bread. Take it home.Went on until a new rabbi came. Rabbis always spoil things. The rabbi came in and saw what was going on. And he called the two of them to his office. And he said, you know, ""This is what's happening.""And the rich man — oh, dear — crestfallen. ""You mean God didn't want my bread?""And the poor man said, ""And you mean God didn't answer my pleas?""And the rabbi said, ""You've misunderstood me. You've misunderstood totally,"" he said. ""Of course, what you are doing,"" he said to the rich man, ""is answering God's plea that we should be compassionate. And God,"" he said to the poor man, ""is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give."" He looked at the rich man. He held the rich man's hands and said, ""Don't you understand?"" He said, ""These are the hands of God.""So that is the way I feel: that I can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate, of understanding that there is a connectivity, that there is a unity in this world; that I want to try and serve that unity, and that I can try and do that by understanding, I hope, trying to understand something of the pain of others; but understanding that there are limits, that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them; and that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy, to the giving I can give. I have to reevaluate them, try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me, so that I can see the world clearly.And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God. And so try to bring compassion to life in this world.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jackie_tabick
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"A human child is born, and for quite a long time is a consumer. It cannot be consciously a contributor. It is helpless. It doesn't know how to survive, even though it is endowed with an instinct to survive. It needs the help of mother, or a foster mother, to survive. It can't afford to doubt the person who tends the child. It has to totally surrender, as one surrenders to an anesthesiologist.It has to totally surrender. That implies a lot of trust. That implies the trusted person won't violate the trust. As the child grows, it begins to discover that the person trusted is violating the trust. It doesn't know even the word ""violation."" Therefore, it has to blame itself, a wordless blame, which is more difficult to really resolve — the wordless self-blame.As the child grows to become an adult: so far, it has been a consumer, but the growth of a human being lies in his or her capacity to contribute, to be a contributor. One cannot contribute unless one feels secure, one feels big, one feels: I have enough.To be compassionate is not a joke. It's not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. The self: you are self-aware. On that self, it should be centered — a bigness, a wholeness. Otherwise, compassion is just a word and a dream.You can be compassionate occasionally, more moved by empathy than by compassion. Thank God we are empathetic. When somebody's in pain, we pick up the pain.In a Wimbledon final match, these two guys fight it out. Each one has got two games. It can be anybody's game. What they have sweated so far has no meaning. One person wins. The tennis etiquette is, both the players have to come to the net and shake hands. The winner boxes the air and kisses the ground, throws his shirt as though somebody is waiting for it. (Laughter) And this guy has to come to the net. When he comes to the net, you see, his whole face changes. It looks as though he's wishing that he didn't win. Why? Empathy.That's human heart. No human heart is denied of that empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism — nothing can touch it because it is empathy. And that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people, you do something that makes a difference in somebody's life — even words, even time.Compassion is not defined in one form. There's no Indian compassion. There's no American compassion. It transcends nation, the gender, the age. Why? Because it is there in everybody. It's experienced by people occasionally.Then this occasional compassion, we are not talking about — it will never remain occasional. By mandate, you cannot make a person compassionate. You can't say, ""Please love me."" Love is something you discover. It's not an action, but in the English language, it is also an action. I will come to it later.So one has got to discover a certain wholeness. I am going to cite the possibility of being whole, which is within our experience, everybody's experience. In spite of a very tragic life, one is happy in moments which are very few and far between. And the one who is happy, even for a slapstick joke, accepts himself and also the scheme of things in which one finds oneself.That means the whole universe, known things and unknown things. All of them are totally accepted because you discover your wholeness in yourself. The subject — ""me"" — and the object — the scheme of things — fuse into oneness, an experience nobody can say, ""I am denied of,"" an experience common to all and sundry.That experience confirms that, in spite of all your limitations — all your wants, desires, unfulfilled, and the credit cards and layoffs and, finally, baldness — you can be happy. But the extension of the logic is that you don't need to fulfill your desire to be happy. You are the very happiness, the wholeness that you want to be.There's no choice in this: that only confirms the reality that the wholeness cannot be different from you, cannot be minus you. It has got to be you. You cannot be a part of wholeness and still be whole. Your moment of happiness reveals that reality, that realization, that recognition: ""Maybe I am the whole. Maybe the swami is right.Maybe the swami is right."" You start your new life. Then everything becomes meaningful. I have no more reason to blame myself. If one has to blame oneself, one has a million reasons plus many. But if I say, in spite of my body being limited — if it is black it is not white, if it is white it is not black: body is limited any which way you look at it. Limited.Your knowledge is limited, health is limited, and power is therefore limited, and the cheerfulness is going to be limited. Compassion is going to be limited. Everything is going to be limitless. You cannot command compassion unless you become limitless, and nobody can become limitless, either you are or you are not. Period. And there is no way of your being not limitless too.Your own experience reveals, in spite of all limitations, you are the whole. And the wholeness is the reality of you when you relate to the world. It is love first. When you relate to the world, the dynamic manifestation of the wholeness is, what we say, love. And itself becomes compassion if the object that you relate to evokes that emotion. Then that again transforms into giving, into sharing. You express yourself because you have compassion.To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate. To discover the capacity to give and share, you need to be giving and sharing. There is no shortcut: it is like swimming by swimming. You learn swimming by swimming. You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. (Laughter) You learn swimming by swimming. You learn cycling by cycling. You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook. (Laughter)And, therefore, what I say, you have to fake it and make it. (Laughter) You need to. My predecessor meant that. You have to act it out. You have to act compassionately.There is no verb for compassion, but you have an adverb for compassion. That's interesting to me. You act compassionately. But then, how to act compassionately if you don't have compassion? That is where you fake. You fake it and make it. This is the mantra of the United States of America. (Laughter)You fake it and make it. You act compassionately as though you have compassion: grind your teeth, take all the support system. If you know how to pray, pray. Ask for compassion. Let me act compassionately. Do it. You'll discover compassion and also slowly a relative compassion, and slowly, perhaps if you get the right teaching, you'll discover compassion is a dynamic manifestation of the reality of yourself, which is oneness, wholeness, and that's what you are.With these words, thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/swami_dayananda_saraswati
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"Compassion: what does it look like? Come with me to 915 South Bloodworth Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I grew up. If you come in you will see us: evening time, at table — set for ten but not always all seats filled — at the point when dinner is ready to be served. Since mom had eight kids, sometimes she said she couldn't tell who was who and where they were. Before we could eat, she would ask, ""Are all the children in?"" And if someone happened to be missing, we would have to, we say, ""Fix a plate"" for that person, put it in the oven, then we could say grace, and we could eat.Also, while we were at the table, there was a ritual in our family: when something significant had happened for any one of us — whether mom had just been elected as the president of the PTA, or whether dad had gotten an assignment at the college of our denomination, or whether someone had won the jabberwocky contest for talent — the ritual at the family was, once the announcement is made, we must take five, ten minutes to do what we call ""make over"" that person — that is, to make a fuss over the one who had been honored in some way. For when one is honored, all are honored.Also, we had to make a report on our extended ""visited"" members, that is, extended members of the family, sick and elderly, shut in. My task was, at least once a week, to visit Mother Lassiter who lived on East Street, Mother Williamson who lived on Bledsoe Avenue, and Mother Lathers who lived on Oberlin Road. Why? Because they were old and infirm, and we needed to go by to see if they needed anything. For mom said, ""To be family, is to care and share and to look out for one another. They are our family.""And, of course, sometimes there was a bonus for going. They would offer sweets or money. Mom says, ""If they ask you what it costs to either go shopping for them, you must always say, 'Nothing.' And if they insist, say, 'Whatever you mind to give me.'"" This was the nature of being at that table. In fact, she indicated that if we would do that, not only would we have the joy of receiving the gratitude from the members of the extended family, but she said, ""Even God will smile, and when God smiles, there is peace, and justice, and joy.""So, at the table at 915, I learned something about compassion. Of course, it was a minister's family, so we had to add God into it. And so, I came to think that mama eternal, mama eternal, is always wondering: Are all the children in? And if we had been faithful in caring and sharing, we had the sense that justice and peace would have a chance in the world.Now, it was not always wonderful at that table. Let me explain a point at which we did not rise to the occasion. It was Christmas, and at our family, oh, what a morning. Christmas morning, where we open up our gifts, where we have special prayers, and where we get to the old upright piano and we would sing carols. It was a very intimate moment. In fact, you could come down to the tree to get your gifts and get ready to sing, and then get ready for breakfast without even taking a bath or getting dressed, except that daddy messed it up.There was a member of his staff who did not have any place on that particular Christmas to celebrate. And daddy brought Elder Revels to the Christmas family celebration. We thought he must be out of his mind. This is our time. This is intimate time. This is when we can just be who we are, and now we have this stuffy brother with his shirt and tie on, while we are still in our PJs. Why would daddy bring Elder Revels? Any other time, but not to the Christmas celebration.And mom overheard us and said, ""Well, you know what? If you really understand the nature of this celebration, it is that this is a time where you extend the circle of love. That's what the celebration is all about. It's time to make space, to share the enjoyment of life in a beloved community."" So, we sucked up. (Laughter)But growing up at 915, compassion was not a word to be debated; it was a sensibility to how we are together. We are sisters and brothers united together. And, like Chief Seattle said, ""We did not spin the web of life. We're all strands in it. And whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves."" Now that's compassion.So, let me tell you, I kind of look at the world this way. I see pictures, and something says, ""Now, that's compassion."" A harvested field of grain, with some grain in the corners, reminding me of the Hebrew tradition that you may indeed harvest, but you must always leave some on the edges, just in case there's someone who has not had the share necessary for good nurture. Talk about a picture of compassion.I see — always, it stirs my heart — a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walking arm in arm with Andy Young and Rabbi Heschel and maybe Thich Nhat Hanh and some of the other saints assembled, walking across the bridge and going into Selma. Just a photograph. Arm in arm for struggle. Suffering together in a common hope that we can be brothers and sisters without the accidents of our birth or our ethnicity robbing us of a sense of unity of being.So, there's another picture. Here, this one. I really do like this picture. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, that day, everybody in my community was upset. You heard about riots all across the land. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to bring an inner city message in Indianapolis. This is the picture. They said, ""It's going to be too volatile for you to go."" He insisted, ""I must go.""So, sitting on a flatbed truck, the elders of the community are there, and Bobby stands up and says to the people, ""I have bad news for you. Some of you may not have heard that Dr. King has been assassinated. I know that you are angry, and I know that you would almost wish to have the opportunity to enter now into activities of revenge. But,"" he said, ""what I really want you to know is that I know how you feel. Because I had someone dear to me snatched away. I know how you feel."" And he said, ""I hope that you will have the strength to do what I did. I allowed my anger, my bitterness, my grief to simmer a while, and then I made up my mind that I was going to make a different world, and we can do that together."" That's a picture. Compassion? I think I see it.I saw it when the Dalai Lama came to the Riverside Church while I was a pastor, and he invited representatives of faith traditions from all around the world. He asked them to give a message, and they each read in their own language a central affirmation, and that was some version of the golden rule: ""As you would that others would do unto you, do also unto them."" Twelve in their ecclesiastical or cultural or tribal attire affirming one message. We are so connected that we must treat each other as if an action toward you is an action toward myself.One more picture while I'm stinking and thinking about the Riverside Church: 9/11. Last night at Chagrin Fall, a newspaperman and a television guy said, ""That evening, when a service was held at the Riverside Church, we carried it on our station in this city. It was,"" he said, ""one of the most powerful moments of life together. We were all suffering. But you invited representatives of all of the traditions to come, and you invited them. 'Find out what it is in your tradition that tells us what to do when we have been humiliated, when we have been despised and rejected.' And they all spoke out of their own traditions, a word about the healing power of solidarity, one with the other.""I developed a sense of compassion sort of as second nature, but I became a preacher. Now, as a preacher, I got a job. I got to preach the stuff, but I got to do it too. Or, as Father Divine in Harlem used to say to folks, ""Some people preach the Gospel. I have to tangibilitate the Gospel."" So, the real issue is: How do you tangibilitate compassion? How do you make it real?My faith has constantly lifted up the ideal, and challenged me when I fell beneath it. In my tradition, there is a gift that we have made to other traditions — to everybody around the world who knows the story of the ""Good Samaritan."" Many people think of it primarily in terms of charity, random acts of kindness. But for those who really study that text a little more thoroughly, you will discover that a question has been raised that leads to this parable.The question was: ""What is the greatest commandment?"" And, according to Jesus, the word comes forth, ""You must love yourself, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul, and your neighbor as yourself.""And then the person asked, ""Well, what do you mean, 'neighbor?'""And he answered it by telling the story of the man who fell among thieves, and how religious authorities went the other way, and how their supporters in the congregation went the other way; but an unsuspecting, despised person came along, saw the man in need, provided oil and wine for his wounds, put him on his own transportation, and took him to the inn and asked the innkeeper, ""Take care of him."" And he said, ""Here, this is the initial investment, but if needs continue, make sure that you provide them. And whatever else is needed, I will provide it and pay for it when I return.""This always seemed to me to be a deepening of the sense of what it means to be a Good Samaritan. A Good Samaritan is not simply one whose heart is touched in an immediate act of care and charity, but one who provides a system of sustained care — I like that, 'a system of sustained care ' — in the inn, take care. I think maybe it's one time when the Bible talks about a healthcare system and a commitment to do whatever is necessary — that all God's children would have their needs cared for, so that we could answer when mommy eternal asks, ""In regards to health, are all the children in?"" And we could say yes.Oh, what a joy it has been to be a person seeking to tangibilitate compassion. I recall that my work as a pastor has always involved caring for their spiritual needs; being concerned for housing, for healthcare, for the prisoners, for the infirm, for children — even the foster care children for whom no one can even keep a record where they started off, where they are going. To be a pastor is to care for these individual needs.But now, to be a Good Samaritan — and I always say, and to be a good American — for me, is not simply to congratulate myself for the individual acts of care. Compassion takes on a corporate dynamic. I believe that whatever we did around that table at Bloodworth Street must be done around tables and rituals of faith until we become that family, that family together that understands the nature of our unity. We are one people together.So, let me explain to you what I mean when I think about compassion, and why I think it is so important that right at this point in history. We would decide to establish this charter of compassion. The reason it's important is because this is a very special time in history. It is the time that, biblically, we would speak of as the day, or the year, of God's favor. This is a season of grace. Unusual things are beginning to happen. Please pardon me, as a black man, for celebrating that the election of Obama was an unusual sign of the fact that it is a year of favor. And yet, there is so much more that needs to be done. We need to bring health and food and education and respect for all God's citizens, all God's children, remembering mama eternal.Now, let me close my comments by telling you that whenever I feel something very deeply, it usually takes the form of verse. And so I want to close with a little song. I close with this song — it's a children's song — because we are all children at the table of mama eternal. And if mama eternal has taught us correctly, this song will make sense, not only to those of us who are a part of this gathering, but to all who sign the charter for compassion. And this is why we do it.The song says, ♫ ""I made heaven so happy today, ♫ ♫ Receiving God's love and giving it away ♫ ♫ When I looked up, heaven smiled at me ♫ ♫ Now, I'm so happy. Can't you see? ♫ ♫ I'm happy. Look at me. I'm happy. Can't you see? ♫ ♫ Sharing makes me happy, makes heaven happy too ♫ ♫ I'm happy. Look at me. I'm happy. Can't you see? ♫ ♫ Let me share my happy loving smile with you. ♫That's compassion. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_forbes
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"I'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view, and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion. The truth of the matter is otherwise.Our holy book, the Koran, consists of 114 chapters, and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala, the saying of ""In the name of God, the all compassionate, the all merciful,"" or, as Sir Richard Burton — not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the Sir Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature — translates it. ""In the name of God, the compassionating, the compassionate.""And in a saying of the Koran, which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity, God says to his prophet Muhammad — whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets, beginning with Adam, including Noah, including Moses, including Abraham, including Jesus Christ, and ending with Muhammad — that, ""We have not sent you, O Muhammad, except as a 'rahmah,' except as a source of compassion to humanity.""For us human beings, and certainly for us as Muslims, whose mission, and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet. And the prophet, in one of his sayings, said, ""Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God."" And because God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion — in fact, the Koran says that ""God decreed upon himself compassion,"" or, ""reigned himself in by compassion"" — therefore, our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion, activators of compassion, actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion.That is all well and good, but where do we go wrong, and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world? For the answer to this, we turn to our spiritual path. In every religious tradition, there is the outer path and the inner path, or the exoteric path and the esoteric path. The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism, or ""tasawwuf"" in Arabic. And these doctors or these masters, these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition, refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies.In one of the battles that the prophet waged, he told his followers, ""We are returning from the lesser war to the greater war, to the greater battle.""And they said, ""Messenger of God, we are battle-weary. How can we go to a greater battle?""He said, ""That is the battle of the self, the battle of the ego."" The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, ""I.""The famous Sufi master Rumi, who is very well known to most of you, has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend, and he knocks on the door, and a voice answers, ""Who's there?""""It's me,"" or, more grammatically correctly, ""It is I,"" as we might say in English.The voice says, ""Go away.""After many years of training, of disciplining, of search and struggle, he comes back. With much greater humility, he knocks again on the door.The voice asks, ""Who is there?""He said, ""It is you, O heartbreaker.""The door swings open, and the voice says, ""Come in, for there is no room in this house for two I's,"" — two capital I's, not these eyes — ""for two egos.""And Rumi's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path. In the presence of God, there is no room for more than one ""I,"" and that is the ""I"" of divinity. In a teaching — called a ""hadith qudsi"" in our tradition — God says that, ""My servant,"" or ""My creature, my human creature, does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do."" And those of you who are employers know exactly what I mean. You want your employees to do what you ask them to do, and if they've done that, then they can do extra. But don't ignore what you've asked them to do.""And,"" God says, ""my servant continues to get nearer to me, by doing more of what I've asked them to do"" — extra credit, we might call it — ""until I love him or love her. And when I love my servant,"" God says, ""I become the eyes by which he or she sees, the ears by which he or she listens, the hand by which he or she grasps, and the foot by which he or she walks, and the heart by which he or she understands."" It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions.Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism, the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path. When he says, ""I am the spirit, and I am the way,"" and when the prophet Muhammad said, ""Whoever has seen me has seen God,"" it is because they became so much an instrument of God, they became part of God's team — so that God's will was manifest through them, and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos. Compassion on earth is given, it is in us. All we have to do is to get our egos out of the way, get our egotism out of the way.I'm sure, probably all of you here, or certainly the very vast majority of you, have had what you might call a spiritual experience, a moment in your lives when, for a few seconds, a minute perhaps, the boundaries of your ego dissolved. And at that minute, you felt at one with the universe — one with that jug of water, one with every human being, one with the Creator — and you felt you were in the presence of power, of awe, of the deepest love, the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives.That is a moment which is a gift of God to us — a gift when, for a moment, he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on ""I, I, I, me, me, me,"" and instead, like the person in Rumi's story, we say, ""Oh, this is all you. This is all you. And this is all us. And us, and I, and us are all part of you. O, Creator! O, the Objective! The source of our being and the end of our journey, you are also the breaker of our hearts. You are the one whom we should all be towards, for whose purpose we live, and for whose purpose we shall die, and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings.""Our message today, and our purpose today, and those of you who are here today, and the purpose of this charter of compassion, is to remind. For the Koran always urges us to remember, to remind each other, because the knowledge of truth is within every human being.We know it all. We have access to it all. Jung may have called it ""the subconscious."" Through our subconscious, in your dreams — the Koran calls our state of sleep ""the lesser death,"" ""the temporary death"" — in our state of sleep we have dreams, we have visions, we travel even outside of our bodies, for many of us, and we see wonderful things. We travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it, and beyond the limitations of time as we know it. But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating, the compassionate.God, Bokh, whatever name you want to call him with, Allah, Ram, Om, whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity, it is the locus of absolute being, absolute love and mercy and compassion, and absolute knowledge and wisdom, what Hindus call ""satchidananda."" The language differs, but the objective is the same.Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and — and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. One is asking for angur — one is, say, an Englishman — one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. And they have a fight and an argument because — ""I want grapes."" ""I want eneb. ""I want angur."" — not knowing that the word that they're using refers to the same reality in different languages.There's only one absolute reality by definition, one absolute being by definition, because absolute is, by definition, single, and absolute and singular. There's this absolute concentration of being, the absolute concentration of consciousness, awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity.And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human. For what defines humanity, perhaps biologically, is our physiology, but God defines humanity by our spirituality, by our nature.And the Koran says, He speaks to the angels and says, ""When I have finished the formation of Adam from clay, and breathed into him of my spirit, then, fall in prostration to him."" The angels prostrate, not before the human body, but before the human soul. Why? Because the soul, the human soul, embodies a piece of the divine breath, a piece of the divine soul.This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image. What is the imagery of God? The imagery of God is absolute being, absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love.And therefore, for us to be human — in the greatest sense of what it means to be human, in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human — means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us, and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being, of being alive, of beingness; the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, of awareness; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings.This is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform on which we must all stand, and when we stand on this platform as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world.And I believe, personally, that we're on the verge and that, with the presence and help of people like you here, we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah. For he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore.We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option: we must, we must lower our egos, control our egos — whether it is individual ego, personal ego, family ego, national ego — and let all be for the glorification of the one.Thank you, and God bless you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/imam_feisal_abdul_rauf
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"I want to open by quoting Einstein's wonderful statement, just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us, and also calls us to this action. He said, ""A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, the 'universe,' — a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.""This insight of Einstein's is uncannily close to that of Buddhist psychology, wherein compassion — ""karuna,"" it is called — is defined as, ""the sensitivity to another's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering."" It pairs closely with love, which is the will for the other to be happy, which requires, of course, that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it. This is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion, the concern for others, and, further, it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy.The Dalai Lama often states that compassion is his best friend. It helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair. Compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute, most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others, even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings. In fact, suffering is so huge and enormous, his own becomes less and less monumental. And he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others. And this immediately cheers him up, as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion. Thus, he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion. He is a very good colleague of Einstein's, we must say.Now, I want to tell a story, which is a very famous story in the Indian and Buddhist tradition, of the great Saint Asanga who was a contemporary of Augustine in the West and was sort of like the Buddhist Augustine. And Asanga lived 800 years after the Buddha's time. And he was discontented with the state of people's practice of the Buddhist religion in India at that time.And so he said, ""I'm sick of all this. Nobody's really living the doctrine. They're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment, but they are acting selfish and pathetic. So, Buddha's teaching has lost its momentum. I know the next Buddha will come a few thousand years from now, but exists currently in a certain heaven"" — that's Maitreya — ""so, I'm going to go on a retreat and I'm going to meditate and pray until the Buddha Maitreya reveals himself to me, and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today.""So he went on this retreat. And he meditated for three years and he did not see the future Buddha Maitreya. And he left in disgust. And as he was leaving, he saw a man — a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain. And he had a lump of iron. And he was rubbing it with a cloth. And he became interested in that. He said, ""Well what are you doing?"" And the man said, ""I'm making a needle."" And he said, ""That's ridiculous. You can't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth."" And the man said, ""Really?"" And he showed him a dish full of needles. So he said, ""Okay, I get the point."" He went back to his cave. He meditated again.Another three years, no vision. He leaves again. This time, he comes down. And as he's leaving, he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge. And where it's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff, its feathers brushes the rock — and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in. There was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds. So he said, ""All right. I get the point."" He went back.Another three years. Again, no vision of Maitreya after nine years. And he again leaves, and this time: water dripping, making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream. And so, again, he goes back. And after 12 years there is still no vision. And he's freaked out. And he won't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision.And he comes to the town. He's a broken person. And there, in the town, he's approached by a dog who comes like this — one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries, even in America, I think, in some areas — and he's looking just terrible. And he becomes interested in this dog because it's so pathetic, and it's trying to attract his attention. And he sits down looking at the dog. And the dog's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore. Some of it is like gangrenous, and there are maggots in the flesh. And it's terrible. He thinks, ""What can I do to fix up this dog? Well, at least I can clean this wound and wash it.""So, he takes it to some water. He's about to clean, but then his awareness focuses on the maggots. And he sees the maggots, and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute. And they're maggoting happily in the dog's hindquarters there. ""Well, if I clean the dog, I'll kill the maggots. So how can that be? That's it. I'm a useless person and there's no Buddha, no Maitreya, and everything is all hopeless. And now I'm going to kill the maggots?""So, he had a brilliant idea. And he took a shard of something, and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, and he placed it on ground. He was not really thinking too carefully about the ASPCA. He was just immediately caught with the situation. So he thought, ""I will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh, then clean the dog's wounds, and then I'll figure out what to do with the maggots.""So he starts to do that. He can't grab the maggots. Apparently they wriggle around. They're kind of hard to grab, these maggots. So he says, ""Well, I'll put my tongue on the dog's flesh. And then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue"" — the dog is kind of used up — ""and then I'll spit them one by one down on the thing."" So he goes down, and he's sticking his tongue out like this. And he had to close his eyes, it's so disgusting, and the smell and everything.And then, suddenly, there's a pfft, a noise like that. He jumps back and there, of course, is the future Buddha Maitreya in a beautiful vision — rainbow lights, golden, jeweled, a plasma body, an exquisite mystic vision — that he sees. And he says, ""Oh."" He bows. But, being human, he's immediately thinking of his next complaint.So as he comes up from his first bow he says, ""My Lord, I'm so happy to see you, but where have you been for 12 years? What is this?""And Maitreya says, ""I was with you. Who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you, mister dense?"" (Laughter) ""Looking for the Buddha in person,"" he said. And he said, ""You didn't have, until this moment, real compassion. And, until you have real compassion, you cannot recognize love."" ""Maitreya"" means love, ""the loving one,"" in Sanskrit.And so he looked very dubious, Asanga did. And he said, ""If you don't believe me, just take me with you."" And so he took the Maitreya — it shrunk into a globe, a ball — took him on his shoulder. And he ran into town in the marketplace, and he said, ""Rejoice! Rejoice! The future Buddha has come ahead of all predictions. Here he is."" And then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him — it wasn't Chautauqua, it was some other town — because they saw a demented looking, scrawny looking yogi man, like some kind of hippie, with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder, shouting that the future Buddha had come.So, naturally, they chased him out of town. But on the edge of town, one elderly lady, a charwoman in the charnel ground, saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog, but she saw the jewel foot of the Maitreya, and she offered a flower. So that encouraged him, and he went with Maitreya.Maitreya then took him to a certain heaven, which is the typical way a Buddhist myth unfolds. And Maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years, dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion.And then I thought I would share with you what that method is, or one of them. A famous one, it's called the ""Sevenfold Causal Method of Developing Compassion."" And it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one — even animals too, but everyone is in human form. The animals are in one of their human lives. The humans are human. And then, among them, you think of your friends and loved ones, the circle at the table. And you think of your enemies, and you think of the neutral ones. And then you try to say, ""Well, the loved ones I love. But, you know, after all, they're nice to me. I had fights with them. Sometimes they were unfriendly. I got mad. Brothers can fight. Parents and children can fight. So, in a way, I like them so much because they're nice to me. While the neutral ones I don't know. They could all be just fine. And then the enemies I don't like because they're mean to me. But they are nice to somebody. I could be them.""And then the Buddhists, of course, think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives, actually. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life, although you don't remember it and neither do I, have been my mother — for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you. And also, actually, I've been your mother. I've been female, and I've been every single one of yours' mother in a previous life, the way the Buddhists reflect. So, my mother in this life is really great. But all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother. You gave me that expression; ""the eternal mama,"" you said. That's wonderful. So, that's the way the Buddhists do it. A theist Christian can think that all beings, even my enemies, are God's children. So, in that sense, we're related.So, they first create this foundation of equality. So, we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love — just in the meditation — and we open our mind to those we don't know. And we definitely reduce the hostility and the ""I don't want to be compassionate to them"" to the ones we think of as the bad guys, the ones we hate and we don't like. And we don't hate anyone, therefore. So we equalize. That's very important.And then the next thing we do is what is called ""mother recognition."" And that is, we think of every being as familiar, as family. We expand. We take the feeling about remembering a mama, and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation. And we see the mother in every being. We see that look that the mother has on her face, looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body, being a mammal, where she has true compassion, truly is the other, and identifies completely. Often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life. And that's why it's the most powerful form of altruism. The mother is the model of all altruism for human beings, in spiritual traditions. And so, we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings.People laugh at me because, you know, I used to say that I used to meditate on mama Cheney as my mom, when, of course, I was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in Iraq. I used to meditate on George Bush. He's quite a cute mom in a female form. He has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms. And you think of him as nursing you. And then Saddam Hussein's serious mustache is a problem, but you think of him as a mom.And this is the way you do it. You take any being who looks weird to you, and you see how they could be familiar to you. And you do that for a while, until you really feel that. You can feel the familiarity of all beings. Nobody seems alien. They're not ""other."" You reduce the feeling of otherness about beings. Then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general, if you can remember the kindness of your own mother, if you can remember the kindness of your spouse, or, if you are a mother yourself, how you were with your children. And you begin to get very sentimental; you cultivate sentimentality intensely. You will even weep, perhaps, with gratitude and kindness. And then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility. Every being, even the most mean looking ones, can be motherly.And then, third, you step from there to what is called ""a feeling of gratitude."" You want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you. And then the fourth step, you go to what is called ""lovely love."" In each one of these you can take some weeks, or months, or days depending on how you do it, or you can do them in a run, this meditation. And then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy, when they are satisfied. And every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness. Their face doesn't look like this. When they're angry, they look ugly, every being, but when they're happy they look beautiful. And so you see beings in their potential happiness. And you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy, even the enemy.We think Jesus is being unrealistic when he says, ""Love thine enemy."" He does say that, and we think he's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin. ""Nice for him to say it, but I can't do that."" But, actually, that's practical. If you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy. If your enemy was really happy, why would they bother to be your enemy? How boring to run around chasing you. They would be relaxing somewhere having a good time. So it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy, because they'll stop being your enemy because that's too much trouble.But anyway, that's the ""lovely love. "" And then finally, the fifth step is compassion, ""universal compassion."" And that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of. And you look at them, and you see how they are. And you realize how unhappy they are actually, mostly, most of the time. You see that furrowed brow in people. And then you realize they don't even have compassion on themselves. They're driven by this duty and this obligation. ""I have to get that. I need more. I'm not worthy. And I should do something."" And they're rushing around all stressed out. And they think of it as somehow macho, hard discipline on themselves. But actually they are cruel to themselves. And, of course, they are cruel and ruthless toward others. And they, then, never get any positive feedback. And the more they succeed and the more power they have, the more unhappy they are. And this is where you feel real compassion for them.And you then feel you must act. And the choice of the action, of course, hopefully will be more practical than poor Asanga, who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation, and whoever was in front of him, he wanted to help. But, of course, that is impractical. He should have founded the ASPCA in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots. And I'm sure he did that later. (Laughter) But that just indicates the state of mind, you know.And so the next step — the sixth step beyond ""universal compassion"" — is this thing where you're linked with the needs of others in a true way, and you have compassion for yourself also, and it isn't sentimental only. You might be in fear of something. Some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways. And in Buddhism, they catch it in the future life. Of course in theistic religion they're punished by God or whatever. And materialism, they think they get out of it just by not existing, by dying, but they don't. And so they get reborn as whatever, you know.Never mind. I won't get into that. But the next step is called ""universal responsibility."" And that is very important — the Charter of Compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion, what is called ""universal responsibility."" In the great teaching of his Holiness the Dalai Lama that he always teaches everywhere, he says that that is the common religion of humanity: kindness. But ""kindness"" means ""universal responsibility."" And that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us: we are responsible for that, and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it. We absolutely must do that. There is no way not to do it.And then, finally, that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy. One thing we mustn't think is that compassion makes you miserable. Compassion makes you happy. The first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself, even if you haven't done anything yet for anybody else. Although, the change in your mind already does something for other beings: they can sense this new quality in yourself, and it helps them already, and gives them an example.And that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it's all over.So, practice compassion, read the charter, disseminate it and develop it within yourself. Don't just think, ""Well, I'm compassionate,"" or ""I'm not compassionate,"" and sort of think you're stuck there. You can develop this. You can diminish the non-compassion, the cruelty, the callousness, the neglect of others, and take universal responsibility for them. And then, not only will God smile and the eternal mama will smile, but Karen Armstrong will smile.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_thurman_on_compassion
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"I'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective. I'm going to try to give you a little bit of a natural history of compassion and the golden rule. So, I'm going to be sometimes using kind of clinical language, and so it's not going to sound as warm and fuzzy as your average compassion talk. I want to warn you about that.So, I do want to say, at the outset, that I think compassion's great. The golden rule is great. I'm a big supporter of both. And I think it's great that the leaders of the religions of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths.At the same time, I think religions don't deserve all the credit. I think nature gave them a helping hand here. I'm going to argue tonight that compassion and the golden rule are, in a certain sense, built into human nature. But I'm also going to argue that once you understand the sense in which they are built into human nature, you realize that just affirming compassion, and affirming the golden rule, is really not enough. There's a lot of work to be done after that.OK so, a quick natural history, first of compassion. In the beginning, there was compassion, and I mean not just when human beings first showed up, but actually even before that. I think it's probably the case that, in the human evolutionary lineage, even before there were homo sapiens, feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool, and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened.It happened through a principle known as kin selection. And the basic idea of kin selection is that, if an animal feels compassion for a close relative, and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative, then, in the end, the compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself. So, from a biologist's point of view, compassion is actually a gene's way of helping itself. OK.I warned you this was not going to be very warm and fuzzy. I'll get there — I hope to get a little fuzzier. This doesn't bother me so much, that the underlying Darwinian rationale of compassion is kind of self-serving at the genetic level. Actually, I think the bad news about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion is naturally deployed only within the family. That's the bad news. The good news is compassion is natural. The bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family.Now, there's more good news that came along later in evolution, a second kind of evolutionary logic. Biologists call that ""reciprocal altruism."" OK. And there, the basic idea is that compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor. Again, I know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past, but from a biologist's point of view, this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion is ultimately self-serving too. It's not that people think that, when they feel the compassion. It's not consciously self-serving, but to a biologist, that's the logic. And so, you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies.I'm sure a lot of you, if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them, you feel really bad. But if you read in the newspaper that something really horrible happened to somebody you've never heard of, you can probably live with that. That's just human nature. So, it's another good news/bad news story. It's good that compassion was extended beyond the family by this kind of evolutionary logic. The bad news is this doesn't bring us universal compassion by itself. So, there's still work to be done.Now, there's one other result of this dynamic called reciprocal altruism, which I think is kind of good news, which is that the way that this is played out in the human species, it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule. I don't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes, but you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions, no exposure to ethical philosophy, and you'll find, if you spend time with these people, that, basically, they believe that one good turn deserves another, and that bad deeds should be punished. And evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes. So, they do understand that if you want to be treated well, you treat other people well. And it's good to treat other people well. That's close to being a kind of built-in intuition.So, that's good news. Now, if you've been paying attention, you're probably anticipating that there's bad news here; we still aren't to universal love, and it's true because, although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural, it's also natural to carve out exceptions to the golden rule.I mean, for example, none of us, probably, want to go to prison, but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison. Right? So, we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated. Now, we have a rationale for that. We say they did these bad things that make it just that they should go to prison.None of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion. We have the capacity to carve out exceptions, put people in a special category. And the problem is that — although in the case of sending people to prison, you have this impartial judiciary determining who gets excluded from the golden rule — that in everyday life, the way we all make these decisions about who we're not going to extend the golden rule to, is we use a much rougher and readier formula. Basically it's just like, if you're my enemy, if you're my rival — if you're not my friend, if you're not in my family — I'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you.We all do that, and you see it all over the world. You see it in the Middle East: people who, from Gaza, are firing missiles at Israel. They wouldn't want to have missiles fired at them, but they say, ""Well, but the Israelis, or some of them have done things that put them in a special category."" The Israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them, but they impose one on Gaza, and they say, ""Well, the Palestinians, or some of them, have brought this on themselves.""So, it's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world's trouble. And it's natural to do that. So, the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not, by itself, going to bring us universal love. It's not going to save the world.Now, there's one piece of good news I have that may save the world. Okay. Are you on the edges of your seats here? Good, because before I tell you about that good news, I'm going to have to take a little excursion through some academic terrain. So, I hope I've got your attention with this promise of good news that may save the world.It's this non-zero-sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about. It's just a quick introduction to game theory. This won't hurt. Okay. It's about zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. If you ask what kind of a situation is conducive to people becoming friends and allies, the technical answer is a non-zero-sum situation. And if you ask what kind of situation is conducive to people defining people as enemies, it's a zero-sum situation.So, what do those terms mean? Basically, a zero-sum game is the kind you're used to in sports, where there's a winner and a loser. So, their fortunes add up to zero. So, in tennis, every point is either good for you and bad for the other person, or good for them, bad for you. Either way, your fortunes add up to zero. That's a zero-sum game.Now, if you're playing doubles, then the person on your side of the net is in a non-zero-sum relationship with you, because every point is either good for both of you — positive, win-win — or bad for both of you, it's lose-lose. That's a non-zero-sum game. And in real life, there are lots of non-zero-sum games. In the realm of economics, say, if you buy something: that means you'd rather have the merchandise than the money, but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise. You both feel you've won. In a war, two allies are playing a non-zero-sum game. It's going to either be win-win or lose-lose for them.So, there are lots of non-zero-sum games in real life. And you could basically reformulate what I said earlier, about how compassion is deployed and the golden rule is deployed, by just saying, well, compassion most naturally flows along non-zero-sum channels where people perceive themselves as being in a potentially win-win situation with some of their friends or allies. The deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non-zero-sum channels. So, kind of webs of non-zero-sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic. With zero-sum channels you would expect something else.Okay. So, now you're ready for the good news that I said might save the world. And now I can admit that it might not too, now that I've held your attention for three minutes of technical stuff. But it may. And the good news is that history has naturally expanded these webs of non-zero-sumness, these webs that can be these channels for compassion. You can go back all the way to the stone age: technological evolution — roads, the wheel, writing, a lot of transportation and communication technologies — has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances. That's the story of civilization. It's why social organization has grown from the hunter-gatherer village to the ancient state, the empire, and now here we are in a globalized world. And the story of globalization is largely a story of non-zero-sumness.You've probably heard the term ""interdependence"" applied to the modern world. Well, that's just another term for non-zero-sum. If your fortunes are interdependent with somebody, then you live in a non-zero-sum relationship with them. And you see this all the time in the modern world. You saw it with the recent economic crash, where bad things happen in the economy — bad for everybody, for much of the world. Good things happen, and it's good for much of the world.And, you know, I'm happy to say, I think there's really evidence that this non-zero-sum kind of connection can expand the moral compass. I mean, if you look at the American attitudes toward Japanese during World War II — look at the depictions of Japanese in the American media as just about subhuman, and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs, really without giving it much of a thought — and you compare that to the attitude now, I think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence.Any form of interdependence, or non-zero-sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people. So, I think that's good. And the world is full of non-zero-sum dynamics. Environmental problems, in many ways, put us all in the same boat. And there are non-zero-sum relationships that maybe people aren't aware of.For example, probably a lot of American Christians don't think of themselves as being in a non-zero-sum relationship with Muslims halfway around the world, but they really are, because if these Muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it, that's good for Americans, because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten American security. If they get less and less happy, that will be bad for Americans.So, there's plenty of non-zero-sumness. And so, the question is: If there's so much non-zero-sumness, why has the world not yet been suffused in love, peace, and understanding? The answer's complicated. It's the occasion for a whole other talk. Certainly, a couple of things are that, first of all, there are a lot of zero-sum situations in the world. And also, sometimes people don't recognize the non-zero-sum dynamics in the world. In both of these areas, I think politicians can play a role.This isn't only about religion. I think politicians can help foster non-zero-sum relationships, Economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on, in this regard. And politicians can be aware, and should be aware that, when people around the world are looking at them, are looking at their nation and picking up their cues for whether they are in a zero-sum or a non-zero-sum relationship with a nation — like, say, America, or any other nation — human psychology is such that they use cues like: Do we feel we're being respected? Because, you know, historically, if you're not being respected, you're probably not going to wind up in a non-zero-sum, mutually profitable relationship with people. So, we need to be aware of what kind of signals we're sending out. And some of this, again, is in the realm of political work.If there's one thing I can encourage everyone to do, politicians, religious leaders, and us, it would be what I call ""expanding the moral imagination"" — that is to say, your ability to put yourself in the shoes of people in very different circumstances. This is not the same as compassion, but it's conducive to compassion. It opens the channels for compassion. And I'm afraid we have another good news/bad news story, which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature. That's good, but again we tend to deploy it selectively.Once we define somebody as an enemy, we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes, just naturally. So, if you want to take a particularly hard case for an American: somebody in Iran who is burning an American flag, and you see them on TV. Well, the average American is going to resist the moral exercise of putting themselves in that person's head and is going to resist the idea that they have much in common with that person. And if you tell them, ""Well, they think America disrespects them and even wants to dominate them, and they hate America. Has there ever been somebody who disrespected you so much that you kind of hated them briefly""? You know, they'll resist that comparison and that's natural, that's human.And, similarly, the person in Iran: when you try to humanize somebody in America who said that Islam is evil, they'll have trouble with that. So, it's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it doesn't naturally go. I think it's worth the trouble because, again, it just helps us to understand. If you want to reduce the number of people who are burning flags, it helps to understand what makes them do it. And I think it's good moral exercise.I would say here is where religious leaders come in, because religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people, at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think. I mean, religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business. It's their great calling right now, to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations, appreciating that in so many ways they're in the same boat.I would just sum up the way things look, at least from this secular perspective, as far as compassion and the golden rule go, by saying that it's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature. It's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed. And it's going to take real work to change that. But, nobody ever said that doing God's work was going to be easy. Thanks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_wright_the_evolution_of_compassion
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"I think the future of this planet depends on humans, not technology, and we already have the knowledge — we’re kind of at the endgame with knowledge. But we’re nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception. We still have one foot in the dark ages. And when you listen to some of the presentations here — and the extraordinary range of human capability, our understandings — and then you contrast it with the fact we still call this planet, ""Earth:"" it’s pretty extraordinary — we have one foot in the dark ages.Just quickly: Aristotle, his thing was, ""It’s not flat, stupid, it’s round."" Galileo — he had the Inquisition, so he had to be a little bit more polite — his was, ""It’s not in the middle, you know."" And Hawkes: ""it’s not earth, stupid, it’s ocean."" This is an ocean planet. T.S. Eliot really said it for me — and this should give you goose bumps: ""we shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time."" And the next lines are, ""Through the unknown remembered gate, where the last of earth discovered is that which is the beginning."" So I have one message. It seems to me that we’re all pointed in the wrong direction.For the rocketeers in the audience: I love what you’re doing, I admire the guts, I admire the courage — but your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction. (Laughter) And it’s all a question of perspective. Let me try and tell you — I don’t mean to insult you, but look, if I — and I’m not doing this for real because it would be an insult, so I’m going to pretend, and it softens the blow — I’m going to tell you what you’re thinking. If I held up a square that was one foot square and the color of earth, and I held up another square that was the root two square — so it’s 1.5 times bigger — and was the color of the oceans; and I said, what is the relative value of these two things? Well, it’s the relative importance. You would say — yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know this; water covers twice the area of the planet than dry land. But it’s a question of perception, and if that’s what you’re thinking, if that’s what you think I mean when I say, ""This is an ocean planet stupidly called 'Earth.'"" If you think that that’s the relative importance, two to one, you’re wrong by a factor of ten. Now, you’re not as thick as two short planks, but you sound like it when you say ""Earth,"" because that demonstration, if I turned around this way — that earth plane would be as thin as paper. It’s a thin film, two-dimensional existence. The ocean representation would have a depth to it. And if you hefted those two things you might find that the relative scale of those is 20 to 1.It turns out that something more than 94 percent of life on earth is aquatic. That means that us terrestrials occupy a minority. The problem we have in believing that is — you just have to give up this notion that this Earth was created for us. Because it’s a problem we have. If this is an ocean planet and we only have a small minority of this planet, it just interferes with a lot of what humanity thinks.Okay. Let me criticize this thing. I’m not talking about James Cameron — although I could, but I won’t. You really do have to go and see his latest film, ""Aliens of the Deep."" It’s incredible. It features two of these deep rovers, and I can criticize them because these sweet things are mine. This, I think, represents one of the most beautiful classic submersibles built. If you look at that sub, you’ll see a sphere. This is an acryclic sphere. It generates all of the buoyancy, all of the payload for the craft, and the batteries are down here hanging underneath, exactly like a balloon. This is the envelope, and this is the gondola, the payload. Also coming up later for criticism are these massive lights. And this one actually carries two great manipulators. It actually is a very good working sub — that’s what it was designed for. The problem with it is — and the reason I will never build another one like it — is that this is a product of two-dimensional thinking. It’s what we humans do when we go in the ocean as engineers; we take all our terrestrial hang-ups, all our constraints — importantly, these two-dimensional constraints that we have, and they’re so constrained we don’t even understand it — and we take them underwater. You notice that Jim Cameron is sitting in a seat. A seat works in a two-dimensional world, where gravity blasts down on that seat, OK? And in a two-dimensional world, we do know about the third dimension but we don’t use it because to go up requires an awful lot of energy against gravity. And then our mothers tell us, ""Careful you don’t fall down"" — because you’ll fall over.Now, go into the real atmosphere of this planet. This planet has an inner atmosphere of water; it’s its inner atmosphere. It has two atmospheres — a lesser, outer gaseous atmosphere, a lighter one. Most of life on earth is in that inner atmosphere. And that life enjoys a three-dimensional existence, which is alien to us. Fish do not sit in seats. (Laughter) They don’t. Their mothers don’t say to little baby fish, ""Careful you don’t fall over."" They don’t fall over. They don’t fall. They live in a three-dimensional world where there is no difference in energy between going this way, that way, that way or that way. It’s truly a three-dimensional space. And we’re only just beginning to grasp it. I don’t know of any other submersible, or even remote, that just takes advantage that this is a three-dimensional space.This is the way we should be going into the oceans. This is a three-dimensional machine. What we need to do is go down into the ocean with the freedom of the animals, and move in this three-dimensional space. OK, this is good stuff. This is man’s first attempt at flying underwater. Right now, I’m just coming down on this gorgeous, big, giant manta ray. She has twice the wingspan that I do. There I’m coming; she sees me. And just notice how she rolls under and turns; she doesn’t sit there and try and blow air into a tank and kind of flow up or sink down — she just rolls. And the craft that I’m in — this hasn’t been shown before. Chris asked us to show stuff that hasn’t been shown before. I wanted you to notice that she actually turned to come back up. There I am; I see her coming back, coming up underneath me. I put reverse thrust and I try and pull gently down. I’m trying to do everything very gently. We spent about three hours together and she’s beginning to trust me. And this ballet is controlled by this lady here. She gets about that close and then she pulls away. So now I try and go after her, but I’m practicing flying. This is the first flying machine. This was the first prototype. This was a fly by wire. It has wings. There’re no silly buoyancy tanks — it’s permanently, positively buoyant. And then by moving through the water it’s able to take that control. Now, look at that; look, it’s — she just blew me away. She just rolled right away from underneath. Really that’s the only real dive I’ve ever made in this machine.It took 10 years to build. But this lady here taught me, hah, taught me so much. We just learned so much in three hours in the water there. I just had to go and build another machine. But look here. Instead of blowing tanks and coming up slowly without thinking about it, it’s a little bit of back pressure, and that sub just comes straight back up out of the water.This is an internal Sony camera. Thank you, Sony. I don’t really look that ugly, but the camera is so close that it’s just distorted. Now, there she goes, right overhead. This is a wide-angle camera. She’s just a few inches off the top of my head. ""Aah, ha, oh, he just crossed over the top of my head about, oh, I don’t know, just so close."" I come back up, not for air. ""This is an incredible encounter with a manta. I’m speechless. We’ve been just feet apart. I’m going back down now."" Okay, can we cut that? Lights back up please. (Applause)Trying to fly and keep up with that animal — it wasn’t the lack of maneuverability that we had. It was the fact she was going so slow. I actually designed that to move faster through the water because I thought that was the thing that we needed to do: to move fast and get range. But after that encounter I really did want to go back with that animal and dance. She wanted to dance. And so what we needed to do was increase the wing area so that we just had more grip, develop higher forces.So the sub that was outside last year — this is the one. You see the larger wing area here. Also, clearly, it was such a powerful thing, we wanted to try and bring other people but we couldn't figure out how to do it. So we opened the world’s first flight school. The rational for the world’s first flight school goes something like: when the coastguards come up to me and say — they used to leave us alone when we were diving these goofy little spherical things, but when we started flying around in underwater jet fighters they got a little nervous — they would come up and say, ""Do you have a license for that?"" And then I’d put my sunglasses on, the beard that would all sprout out, and I would say, ""I don’t need no stinking license."" (Laughter) ""I write these stinking license,"" which I do. So Bob Gelfond's around here — but somebody in the audience here has license number 20. They’re one of the first subsea aviators. So we’ve run two flight schools. Where the hell that goes, I don’t know, but it’s a lot of fun. What comes next in 30 seconds? I can’t tell you.But the patent for underwater flight — Karen and I, we were looking at it, some business partners wanted us to patent it — we weren’t sure about that. We’ve decided we’re just going to let that go. It just seems wrong to try and patent — (Applause) — the freedom for underwater flight. So anybody who wants to copy us and come and join us, go for it. The other thing is that we’ve got much lower costs. We developed some other technology called spider optics, and Craig Ventner asked me to make an announcement here this morning: we’re going to be building a beautiful, little, small version of this — unmanned, super deep — for his boat to go and get back some deep sea DNA stuff. (Applause) Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hawkes_flies_through_the_ocean
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"This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. We stood on the railroad tracks that ran between my friend's house and the beach. The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, but at that point the water had receded to a level three or four feet below normal. I'd never seen the reef here before. There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. They were trying to catch fish. No one realized that this was a very bad idea. The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. I turned around to check on my friend's house. Then someone on the tracks screamed. Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running.The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. The children managed to run back onto the tracks. No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. It continued to rise. I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, and that he would rather die there than run. A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. The slum built on the railroad reservation between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, and no one was there when the water rose. But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around — all of this was from the houses in the slum. When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed.This may seem hard to believe — unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports — but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes and long-tail boats — mercilessly, without warning — and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. One of the scariest things about the tsunami that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps ... You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, to catch a boat to the hospital. We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. We don't think another wave is coming right away.At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, but I strained to listen for information. They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, which triggered the massive tsunami. Having this news was comforting in some small way to understand what had just happened to us. However, the report focused on what had already occurred and offered no information on what to expect now. In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours knew anything with any certainty. Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs that essentially sprang up after it occurred. I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami that also were shown on blogs. I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well.(Screaming)Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again.Voice 2: It's coming again?Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again.Voice 2: Come get inside here.Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! [Unclear](Screaming)They called me out here.James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, although initially — that is, in that first day — there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video and some people complained about this. They said, ""The blogsters let us down."" What became very clear was that, within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened in a way that we never had been able to get before. And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us.And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of — the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying — to the somewhat more mundane. Because when we think about blogs, I think for most of us who are concerned about them, we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. And I want to ask three questions in this talk, in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, about what motivates people to do things? The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility of accessing a kind of collective intelligence that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, or the dark side of blogs as we know them?OK, the first question: What do they tell us about why people do things? One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, and, of course, the Internet more generally — and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, but I think it is an important one to think about — is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, are doing so primarily for free. They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. And this is — at least, to a traditional economist — somewhat remarkable, because the traditional account of economic man would say that, basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. But instead, what we're finding on the Internet — and one of the great geniuses of it — is that people have found a way to work together without any money involved at all. They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity.The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called ""Coase's Penguin,"" talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, who are producing enormous amounts of material for no reason other than to tell their stories. That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities for organizing a whole host of activities down the road.So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good, but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products without any money at all changing hands. There are a few bloggers — somewhere maybe around 20, now — who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it or they love the attention, or whatever it is. So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this and, I think, is writing about this more, but this notion of voluntary cooperation is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about.The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, in terms of accessing collective intelligence? You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called ""The Wisdom of Crowds."" And the premise of ""The Wisdom of Crowds"" is that, under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. And they can actually often be smarter than even the smartest person within them. The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. If I had a jar of jellybeans and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, your average guess would be remarkably good. It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent of the number of beans in the jar, and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, but for the most part the group's guess would be better than just about all of you. And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work in many more complicated situations.For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. You know, if you think about something like Google, which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information — we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing we call the ""World Wide Web"" actually has a remarkable order, or a remarkable intelligence in it. And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere.Dan Gillmor — whose book ""We the Media"" is included in the gift pack — has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion that he or she knows better than everyone else. But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. So, that's the positive side of it. That's the positive side of what is sometimes called participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. — that, in fact, we are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped.But there is a dark side to this, and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things — that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is. But there's also a downside to this — a kind of dark side, in fact — and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent.One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values.So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions.The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. A lot of people talk about ants. You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. They're able to reach food as efficiently as possible, they're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule — just do what the ant in front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died. And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have to fear — is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die.Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami — in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself — is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_surowiecki_on_the_turning_point_for_social_media
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"(Music)(Applause)Thank you for being here. And I say ""thank you for being here"" because I was silent for 17 years. And the first words that I spoke were in Washington, D.C., on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. And my family and friends had gathered there to hear me speak. And I said, ""Thank you for being here."" My mother, out in the audience, she jumped up, ""Hallelujah, Johnny’s talking!""(Laughter)Imagine if you were quiet for 17 years and your mother was out in the audience, say. My dad said to me, ""That’s one"" — I’ll explain that. But I turned around because I didn’t recognize where my voice was coming from. I hadn’t heard my voice in 17 years, so I turned around and I looked and I said, ""God, who's saying what I’m thinking?"" And then I realized it was me, you know, and I kind of laughed. And I could see my father: ""Yeah, he really is crazy."" Well, I want to take you on this journey. And the journey, I believe, is a metaphor for all of our journeys. Even though this one is kind of unusual, I want you to think about your own journey.My journey began in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide beneath the Golden Gate, and a half a million gallons of oil spilled into the bay. It disturbed me so much that I decided that I was going to give up riding and driving in motorized vehicles. That’s a big thing in California. And it was a big thing in my little community of Point Reyes Station in Inverness, California, because there were only about 350 people there in the winter – this was back in '71 now. And so when I came in and I started walking around, people — they just knew what was going on. And people would drive up next to me and say, ""John, what are you doing?"" And I’d say, ""Well, I’m walking for the environment."" And they said, ""No, you’re walking to make us look bad, right? You’re walking to make us feel bad."" And maybe there was some truth to that, because I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow. Because of the oil, everybody talked about the polllution. And so I argued with people about that, I argued and I argued. I called my parents up. I said, ""I’ve given up riding and driving in cars."" My dad said, ""Why didn’t you do that when you were 16?""(Laughter)I didn’t know about the environment then. They’re back in Philadelphia. And so I told my mother, ""I’m happy though, I’m really happy."" She said, ""If you were happy, son, you wouldn’t have to say it."" Mothers are like that.And so, on my 27th birthday I decided, because I argued so much and I talk so much, that I was going to stop speaking for just one day — one day — to give it a rest. And so I did. I got up in the morning and I didn’t say a word. And I have to tell you, it was a very moving experience, because for the first time, I began listening — in a long time. And what I heard, it kind of disturbed me. Because what I used to do, when I thought I was listening, was I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I could — I knew what they were going to say, and so I stopped listening. And in my mind, I just kind of raced ahead and thought of what I was going to say back, while they were still finishing up. And then I would launch in. Well, that just ended communication.So on this first day I actually listened. And it was very sad for me, because I realized that for those many years I had not been learning. I was 27. I thought I knew everything. I didn’t. And so I decided I’d better do this for another day, and another day, and another day until finally, I promised myself for a year I would keep quiet because I started learning more and more and I needed to learn more. So for a year I said I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday I would reassess what I had learned and maybe I would talk again. Well, that lasted 17 years.Now during that time — those 17 years — I walked and I played the banjo and I painted and I wrote in my journal, and I tried to study the environment by reading books. And I decided that I was going to go to school. So I did. I walked up to Ashland, Oregon, where they were offering an environmental studies degree. It’s only 500 miles. And I went into the Registrar’s office and — ""What, what, what?"" I had a newspaper clipping. ""Oh, so you really want to go to school here? You don’t …? We have a special program for you."" They did. And in those two years, I graduated with my first degree — a bachelor’s degree. And my father came out, he was so proud. He said, ""Listen, we’re really proud of you son, but what are you going to do with a bachelor’s degree? You don’t ride in cars, you don’t talk — you’re going to have to do those things.""(Laughter)I hunched my shoulder, I picked my backpack up again and I started walking. I walked all the way up to Port Townsend, Washington, where I built a wooden boat, rode it across Puget Sound and walked across Washington [to] Idaho and down to Missoula, Montana. I had written the University of Montana two years earlier and said I'd like to go to school there. I said I'd be there in about two years.(Laughter)And I was there. I showed up in two years and they — I tell this story because they really helped me. There are two stories in Montana. The first story is I didn’t have any money — that’s a sign I used a lot. And they said,""Don't worry about that."" The director of the program said, ""Come back tomorrow."" He gave me 150 dollars, and he said, ""Register for one credit. You’re going to go to South America, aren’t you?"" And I said — Rivers and lakes, the hydrological systems, South America. So I did that. He came back; he said to me, ""OK John, now that you've registered for that one credit, you can have a key to an office, you can matriculate — you’re matriculating, so you can use the library. And what we’re going to do is, we’re going to have all of the professors allow you to go to class. They’re going to save your grade, and when we figure out how to get you the rest of the money, then you can register for that class and they’ll give you the grade."" Wow, they don’t do that in graduate schools, I don’t think. But I use that story because they really wanted to help me. They saw that I was really interested in the environment, and they really wanted to help me along the way.And during that time, I actually taught classes without speaking. I had 13 students when I first walked into the class. I explained, with a friend who could interpret my sign language, that I was John Francis, I was walking around the world, I didn’t talk and this was the last time this person’s going to be here interpreting for me. All the students sat around and they went ...(Laughter)I could see they were looking for the schedule, to see when they could get out. They had to take that class with me. Two weeks later, everyone was trying to get into our class.And I learned in that class — because I would do things like this ... and they were all gathered around, going, ""What's he trying to say?"" ""I don't know, I think he's talking about clear cutting."" ""Yeah, clear cutting."" ""No, no, no, that's not clear cutting, that’s — he's using a handsaw."" ""Well, you can’t clearcut with a ..."" ""Yes, you can clear cut ..."" ""No, I think he’s talking about selective forestry."" Now this was a discussion class and we were having a discussion. I just backed out of that, you know, and I just kind of kept the fists from flying. But what I learned was that sometimes I would make a sign and they said things that I absolutely did not mean, but I should have. And so what came to me is, if you were a teacher and you were teaching, if you weren’t learning you probably weren’t teaching very well. And so I went on.My dad came out to see me graduate and, you know, I did the deal, and my father said, ""We’re really proud of you son, but ... "" You know what went on, he said, ""You’ve got to start riding and driving and start talking. What are you going to do with a master’s degree?"" I hunched my shoulder, I got my backpack and I went on to the University of Wisconsin.I spent two years there writing on oil spills. No one was interested in oil spills. But something happened — Exxon Valdez. And I was the only one in the United States writing on oil spills. My dad came out again. He said, ""I don't know how you do this, son — I mean, you don't ride in cars, you don’t talk. My sister said maybe I should leave you alone, because you seem to be doing a lot better when you’re not saying anything.""(Laughter)Well, I put on my backpack again. I put my banjo on and I walked all the way to the East Coast, put my foot in the Atlantic Ocean — it was seven years and one day it took me to walk across the United States.And on Earth Day, 1990 — the 20th anniversary of Earth Day — that’s when I began to speak. And that’s why I said, ""Thank you for being here."" Because it's sort of like that tree in the forest falling; and if there's no one there to hear, does it really make a sound? And I’m thanking you, and I'm thanking my family because they had come to hear me speak. And that’s communication. And they also taught me about listening — that they listened to me. And it’s one of those things that came out of the silence, the listening to each other. Really, very important — we need to listen to each other. Well, my journey kept going on. My dad said, ""That’s one,"" and I still didn’t let that go.I worked for the Coastguard, was made a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador. I wrote regulations for the United States — I mean, I wrote oil spill regulations. 20 years ago, if someone had said to me, ""John, do you really want to make a difference?"" ""Yeah, I want to make a difference."" He said, ""You just start walking east; get out of your car and just start walking east."" And as I walked off a little bit, they'd say, ""Yeah, and shut up, too.""(Laughter)""You’re going to make a difference, buddy."" How could that be, how could that be? How could doing such a simple thing like walking and not talking make a difference?Well, my time at the Coast Guard was a really good time. And after that — I only worked one year — I said, ""That's enough. One year's enough for me to do that."" I got on a sailboat and I sailed down to the Caribbean, and walked through all of the islands, and to Venezuela. And you know, I forgot the most important thing, which is why I started talking, which I have to tell you. I started talking because I had studied environment. I’d studied environment at this formal level, but there was this informal level. And the informal level — I learned about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from just being about trees and birds and endangered species to being about how we treated each other. Because if we are the environment, then all we need to do is look around us and see how we treat ourselves and how we treat each other. And so that’s the message that I had. And I said, ""Well, I'm going to have to spread that message."" And I got in my sailboat, sailed all the way through the Caribbean — it wasn't really my sailboat, I kind of worked on that boat — got to Venezuela and I started walking.This is the last part of this story, because it’s how I got here, because I still didn't ride in motorized vehicles. I was walking through El Dorado — it's a prison town, famous prison, or infamous prison — in Venezuela, and I don’t know what possessed me, because this was not like me. There I am, walking past the guard gate and the guard stops and says, ""Pasaporte, pasaporte,"" and with an M16 pointed at me. And I looked at him and I said, ""Passport, huh? I don't need to show you my passport. It’s in the back of my pack. I'm Dr. Francis; I'm a U.N. Ambassador and I'm walking around the world."" And I started walking off. What possessed me to say this thing? The road turned into the jungle. I didn’t get shot. And I got to — I start saying, ""Free at last — thank God Almighty, I’m free at last."" ""What was that about,"" I’m saying. What was that about?It took me 100 miles to figure out that, in my heart, in me, I had become a prisoner. I was a prisoner and I needed to escape. The prison that I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. Now how could that be? Because when I started, it seemed very appropriate to me not to use motorized vehicles. But the thing that was different was that every birthday, I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to just use my feet. I had no idea I was going to become a U.N. Ambassador. I had no idea I would have a Ph.D.And so I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and that I was going to have to change. You know, we can do it. I was going to have to change. And I was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who only just walked. I was so used to that person that I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know who I would be if I changed. But I know I needed to. I know I needed to change, because it would be the only way that I could be here today. And I know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there’s another place for us to go. And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we’ve become, and go to the place of who we are becoming. And so, I want to encourage you to go to that next place, to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in, as comfortable as it may be, because we have to do something now. We have to change now. As our former Vice President said, we have to become activists. So if my voice can touch you, if my actions can touch you, if my being here can touch you, please let it be. And I know that all of you have touched me while I’ve been here.So, let’s go out into the world and take this caring, this love, this respect that we’ve shown each other right here at TED, and take this out into the world. Because we are the environment, and how we treat each other is really how we’re going to treat the environment. So I want to thank you for being here and I want to end this in five seconds of silence.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_francis_walks_the_earth
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"This is a guy named Bob McKim. He was a creativity researcher in the '60s and '70s, and also led the Stanford Design Program. And in fact, my friend and IDEO founder, David Kelley, who’s out there somewhere, studied under him at Stanford. And he liked to do an exercise with his students where he got them to take a piece of paper and draw the person who sat next to them, their neighbor, very quickly, just as quickly as they could.And in fact, we’re going to do that exercise right now. You all have a piece of cardboard and a piece of paper. It’s actually got a bunch of circles on it. I need you to turn that piece of paper over; you should find that it’s blank on the other side. And there should be a pencil. And I want you to pick somebody that’s seated next to you, and when I say, go, you’ve got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor, OK? So, everybody ready? OK. Off you go. You’ve got 30 seconds, you’d better be fast. Come on: those masterpieces ... OK? Stop. All right, now.(Laughter)Yes, lot’s of laughter. Yeah, exactly. Lots of laughter, quite a bit of embarrassment.(Laughter)Am I hearing a few ""sorry’s""? I think I’m hearing a few sorry’s. Yup, yup, I think I probably am. And that’s exactly what happens every time, every time you do this with adults. McKim found this every time he did it with his students. He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s.(Laughter)And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. And this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else.OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment — they’re the ones that feel most free to play.And if you’re starting a design firm, let’s say, then you probably also want to create a place where people have the same kind of security. Where they have the same kind of security to take risks. Maybe have the same kind of security to play.Before founding IDEO, David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as designers. And so, that decision to work with his friends — now he has 550 of them — was what got IDEO started.And our studios, like, I think, many creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed: familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment. So, whether it’s this microbus meeting room that we have in one our buildings at IDEO; or at Pixar, where the animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves; or at the Googleplex, where it’s famous for its [beach] volleyball courts, and even this massive dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos on it. Don’t know the reason for the pink flamingos, but anyway, they’re there in the garden. Or even in the Swiss office of Google, which perhaps has the most wacky ideas of all. And my theory is, that’s so the Swiss can prove to their Californian colleagues that they’re not boring. So they have the slide, and they even have a fireman’s pole. Don’t know what they do with that, but they have one.So all of these places have these symbols. Now, our big symbol at IDEO is actually not so much the place, it’s a thing. And it’s actually something that we invented a few years ago, or created a few years ago. It’s a toy; it’s called a ""finger blaster."" And I forgot to bring one up with me. So if somebody can reach under the chair that’s next to them, you’ll find something taped underneath it. That’s great. If you could pass it up. Thanks, David, I appreciate it.So this is a finger blaster, and you will find that every one of you has got one taped under your chair. And I’m going to run a little experiment. Another little experiment. But before we start, I need just to put these on. Thank you. All right. Now, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to see how — I can’t see out of these, OK. I’m going to see how many of you at the back of the room can actually get those things onto the stage. So the way they work is, you know, you just put your finger in the thing, pull them back, and off you go. So, don’t look backwards. That’s my only recommendation here. I want to see how many of you can get these things on the stage. So come on! There we go, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Oh. I have another idea. I wanted to — there we go.(Laughter)There we go.(Laughter)Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not bad, not bad. No serious injuries so far.(Laughter)Well, they’re still coming in from the back there; they’re still coming in. Some of you haven’t fired them yet. Can you not figure out how to do it, or something? It’s not that hard. Most of your kids figure out how to do this in the first 10 seconds, when they pick it up. All right. This is pretty good; this is pretty good. Okay, all right. Let’s — I suppose we'd better... I'd better clear these up out of the way; otherwise, I’m going to trip over them. All right. So the rest of you can save them for when I say something particularly boring, and then you can fire at me.(Laughter)All right. I think I’m going to take these off now, because I can’t see a damn thing when I’ve — all right, OK. So, ah, that was fun.(Laughter)All right, good.(Applause)So, OK, so why? So we have the finger blasters. Other people have dinosaurs, you know. Why do we have them? Well, as I said, we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them.Now, an adult encountering a new situation — when we encounter a new situation we have a tendency to want to categorize it just as quickly as we can, you know. And there’s a reason for that: we want to settle on an answer. Life’s complicated; we want to figure out what’s going on around us very quickly. I suspect, actually, that the evolutionary biologists probably have lots of reasons [for] why we want to categorize new things very, very quickly. One of them might be, you know, when we see this funny stripy thing: is that a tiger just about to jump out and kill us? Or is it just some weird shadows on the tree? We need to figure that out pretty fast. Well, at least, we did once. Most of us don’t need to anymore, I suppose.This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily.(Laughter)Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly — when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, ""What is it?"" Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, ""What can I do with it?"" And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?We’ve all told stories about how, on Christmas morning, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo — which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities that, as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.So another one of Bob McKim’s favorite exercises is called the ""30 Circles Test."" So we’re back to work. You guys are going to get back to work again. Turn that piece of paper that you did the sketch on back over, and you’ll find those 30 circles printed on the piece of paper. So it should look like this. You should be looking at something like this. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you minute, and I want you to adapt as many of those circles as you can into objects of some form. So for example, you could turn one into a football, or another one into a sun. All I’m interested in is quantity. I want you to do as many of them as you can, in the minute that I’m just about to give you. So, everybody ready? OK? Off you go.Okay. Put down your pencils, as they say. So, who got more than five circles figured out? Hopefully everybody? More than 10? Keep your hands up if you did 10. 15? 20? Anybody get all 30? No? Oh! Somebody did. Fantastic. Did anybody to a variation on a theme? Like a smiley face? Happy face? Sad face? Sleepy face? Anybody do that? Anybody use my examples? The sun and the football? Great. Cool. So I was really interested in quantity. I wasn’t actually very interested in whether they were all different. I just wanted you to fill in as many circles as possible. And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas.And in some cases, our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play. So now, Bob McKim did another version of this test in a rather famous experiment that was done in the 1960s. Anybody know what this is? It’s the peyote cactus. It’s the plant from which you can create mescaline, one of the psychedelic drugs. For those of you around in the '60s, you probably know it well.McKim published a paper in 1966, describing an experiment that he and his colleagues conducted to test the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity. So he picked 27 professionals — they were engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, furniture designers even, artists — and he asked them to come along one evening, and to bring a problem with them that they were working on. He gave each of them some mescaline, and had them listen to some nice, relaxing music for a while. And then he did what’s called the Purdue Creativity Test. You might know it as, ""How many uses can you find for a paper clip?"" It’s basically the same thing as the 30 circles thing that I just had you do.Now, actually, he gave the test before the drugs and after the drugs, to see what the difference was in people’s facility and speed with coming up with ideas. And then he asked them to go away and work on those problems that they’d brought. And they’d come up with a bunch of interesting solutions — and actually, quite valid solutions — to the things that they’d been working on. And so, some of the things that they figured out, some of these individuals figured out; in one case, a new commercial building and designs for houses that were accepted by clients; a design of a solar space probe experiment; a redesign of the linear electron accelerator; an engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder — you can tell this is a while ago; the completion of a line of furniture; and even a new conceptual model of the photon. So it was a pretty successful evening.In fact, maybe this experiment was the reason that Silicon Valley got off to its great start with innovation. We don’t know, but it may be. We need to ask some of the CEOs whether they were involved in this mescaline experiment. But really, it wasn’t the drugs that were important; it was this idea that what the drugs did would help shock people out of their normal way of thinking, and getting them to forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits.At IDEO we have brainstorming rules written on the walls. Edicts like, ""Defer judgment,"" or ""Go for quantity."" And somehow that seems wrong. I mean, can you have rules about creativity? Well, it sort of turns out that we need rules to help us break the old rules and norms that otherwise we might bring to the creative process. And we’ve certainly learnt that over time, you get much better brainstorming, much more creative outcomes when everybody does play by the rules. Now, of course, many designers, many individual designers, achieve this is in a much more organic way.I think the Eameses are wonderful examples of experimentation. And they experimented with plywood for many years without necessarily having one single goal in mind. They were exploring following what was interesting to them. They went from designing splints for wounded soldiers coming out of World War II and the Korean War, I think, and from this experiment they moved on to chairs.Through constant experimentation with materials, they developed a wide range of iconic solutions that we know today, eventually resulting in, of course, the legendary lounge chair. Now, if the Eameses had stopped with that first great solution, then we wouldn’t be the beneficiaries of so many wonderful designs today. And of course, they used experimentation in all aspects of their work, from films to buildings, from games to graphics. So, they’re great examples, I think, of exploration and experimentation in design.Now, while the Eameses were exploring those possibilities, they were also exploring physical objects. And they were doing that through building prototypes. And building is the next of the behaviors that I thought I’d talk about. So the average Western first-grader spends as much as 50 percent of their play time taking part in what’s called ""construction play."" Construction play — it’s playful, obviously, but also a powerful way to learn. When play is about building a tower out of blocks, the kid begins to learn a lot about towers. And as they repeatedly knock it down and start again, learning is happening as a sort of by-product of play. It’s classically learning by doing.Now, David Kelley calls this behavior, when it’s carried out by designers, ""thinking with your hands."" And it typically involves making multiple, low-resolution prototypes very quickly, often by bringing lots of found elements together in order to get to a solution. On one of his earliest projects, the team was kind of stuck, and they came up with a mechanism by hacking together a prototype made from a roll-on deodorant. Now, that became the first commercial computer mouse for the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh.So, they learned their way to that by building prototypes. Another example is a group of designers who were working on a surgical instrument with some surgeons. They were meeting with them; they were talking to the surgeons about what it was they needed with this device. And one of the designers ran out of the room and grabbed a white board marker and a film canister — which is now becoming a very precious prototyping medium — and a clothespin. He taped them all together, ran back into the room and said, ""You mean, something like this?"" And the surgeons grabbed hold of it and said, well, I want to hold it like this, or like that. And all of a sudden a productive conversation was happening about design around a tangible object. And in the end it turned into a real device.And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world, and having your thinking advanced as a result. At IDEO there’s a kind of a back-to-preschool feel sometimes about the environment. The prototyping carts, filled with colored paper and Play-Doh and glue sticks and stuff — I mean, they do have a bit of a kindergarten feel to them. But the important idea is that everything’s at hand, everything’s around. So when designers are working on ideas, they can start building stuff whenever they want. They don’t necessarily even have to go into some kind of formal workshop to do it. And we think that’s pretty important.And then the sad thing is, although preschools are full of this kind of stuff, as kids go through the school system it all gets taken away. They lose this stuff that facilitates this sort of playful and building mode of thinking. And of course, by the time you get to the average workplace, maybe the best construction tool we have might be the Post-it notes. It’s pretty barren. But by giving project teams and the clients who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily.This is a nurse using a very simple — as you can see — plasticine prototype, explaining what she wants out of a portable information system to a team of technologists and designers that are working with her in a hospital. And just having this very simple prototype allows her to talk about what she wants in a much more powerful way. And of course, by building quick prototypes, we can get out and test our ideas with consumers and users much more quickly than if we’re trying to describe them through words.But what about designing something that isn’t physical? Something like a service or an experience? Something that exists as a series of interactions over time? Instead of building play, this can be approached with role-play. So, if you’re designing an interaction between two people — such as, I don’t know — ordering food at a fast food joint or something, you need to be able to imagine how that experience might feel over a period of time. And I think the best way to achieve that, and get a feeling for any flaws in your design, is to act it out.So we do quite a lot of work at IDEO trying to convince our clients of this. They can be a little skeptical; I’ll come back to that. But a place, I think, where the effort is really worthwhile is where people are wrestling with quite serious problems — things like education or security or finance or health. And this is another example in a healthcare environment of some doctors and some nurses and designers acting out a service scenario around patient care. But you know, many adults are pretty reluctant to engage with role-play. Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, ""That’s just happening because they’re acting it out.""Research into kids' behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role-playing seriously. Because when children play a role, they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays ""store,"" and another one’s playing ""house,"" then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to quite quickly to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken.So when, as adults, we role-play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life, and they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good, when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity. So role-play is actually, I think, quite valuable when it comes to thinking about experiences. Another way for us, as designers, to explore role-play is to put ourselves through an experience which we’re designing for, and project ourselves into an experience.So here are some designers who are trying to understand what it might feel like to sleep in a confined space on an airplane. And so they grabbed some very simple materials, you can see, and did this role-play, this kind of very crude role-play, just to get a sense of what it would be like for passengers if they were stuck in quite small places on airplanes.This is one of our designers, Kristian Simsarian, and he’s putting himself through the experience of being an ER patient. Now, this is a real hospital, in a real emergency room. One of the reasons he chose to take this rather large video camera with him was because he didn’t want the doctors and nurses thinking he was actually sick, and sticking something into him that he was going to regret later. So anyhow, he went there with his video camera, and it’s kind of interesting to see what he brought back. Because when we looked at the video when he got back, we saw 20 minutes of this.(Laughter)And also, the amazing thing about this video — as soon as you see it you immediately project yourself into that experience. And you know what it feels like: all of that uncertainty while you’re left out in the hallway while the docs are dealing with some more urgent case in one of the emergency rooms, wondering what the heck’s going on. And so this notion of using role-play — or in this case, living through the experience as a way of creating empathy — particularly when you use video, is really powerful.Or another one of our designers, Altay Sendil: he’s here having his chest waxed, not because he’s very vain, although actually he is — no, I’m kidding — but in order to empathize with the pain that chronic care patients go through when they’re having dressings removed. And so sometimes these analogous experiences, analogous role-play, can also be quite valuable.So when a kid dresses up as a firefighter, you know, he’s beginning to try on that identity. He wants to know what it feels like to be a firefighter. We’re doing the same thing as designers. We’re trying on these experiences. And so the idea of role-play is both as an empathy tool, as well as a tool for prototyping experiences. And you know, we kind of admire people who do this at IDEO anyway. Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play.Playful exploration, playful building and role-play: those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I admit, this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play.So, remember the sketching task we did at the beginning? The kind of little face, the portrait you did? Well, imagine if you did the same task with friends while you were drinking in a pub. But everybody agreed to play a game where the worst sketch artist bought the next round of drinks. That framework of rules would have turned an embarrassing, difficult situation into a fun game. As a result, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time — but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together.But there aren’t just rules about how to play; there are rules about when to play. Kids don’t play all the time, obviously. They transition in and out of it, and good teachers spend a lot of time thinking about how to move kids through these experiences. As designers, we need to be able to transition in and out of play also. And if we’re running design studios we need to be able to figure out, how can we transition designers through these different experiences? I think this is particularly true if we think about the sort of —I think what’s very different about design is that we go through these two very distinctive modes of operation. We go through a sort of generative mode, where we’re exploring many ideas; and then we come back together again, and come back looking for that solution, and developing that solution. I think they’re two quite different modes: divergence and convergence. And I think it’s probably in the divergent mode that we most need playfulness. Perhaps in convergent mode we need to be more serious. And so being able to move between those modes is really quite important. So, it’s where there’s a more nuanced version view of play, I think, is required.Because it’s very easy to fall into the trap that these states are absolute. You’re either playful or you’re serious, and you can’t be both. But that’s not really true: you can be a serious professional adult and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or; it’s an ""and."" You can be serious and play. So to sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative. So, there’s a connection. And there are a series of behaviors that we’ve learnt as kids, and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers. They include exploration, which is about going for quantity; building, and thinking with your hands; and role-play, where acting it out helps us both to have more empathy for the situations in which we’re designing, and to create services and experiences that are seamless and authentic.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play
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"The fragrance that you will smell, you will never be able to smell this way again. It’s a fragrance called Beyond Paradise, which you can find in any store in the nation. Except here it’s been split up in parts by Estée Lauder and by the perfumer who did it, Calice Becker, and I'm most grateful to them for this. And it’s been split up in successive bits and a chord.So what you’re smelling now is the top note. And then will come what they call the heart, the lush heart note. I will show it to you. The Eden top note is named after the Eden Project in the U.K.The lush heart note, Melaleuca bark note — which does not contain any Melaleuca bark, because it’s totally forbidden.And after that, the complete fragrance. Now what you are smelling is a combination of — I asked how many molecules there were in there, and nobody would tell me. So I put it through a G.C., a Gas Chromatograph that I have in my office, and it’s about 400. So what you’re smelling is several hundred molecules floating through the air, hitting your nose.And do not get the impression that this is very subjective. You are all smelling pretty much the same thing, OK? Smell has this reputation of being somewhat different for each person. It’s not really true. And perfumery shows you that can’t be true, because if it were like that it wouldn’t be an art, OK?Now, while the smell wafts over you, let me tell you the history of an idea. Everything that you’re smelling in here is made up of atoms that come from what I call the Upper East Side of the periodic table — a nice, safe neighborhood. (Laughter) You really don’t want to leave it if you want to have a career in perfumery. Some people have tried in the 1920s to add things from the bad parts, and it didn’t really work.These are the five atoms from which just about everything that you’re going to smell in real life, from coffee to fragrance, are made of. The top note that you smelled at the very beginning, the cut-grass green, what we call in perfumery — they’re weird terms — and this would be called a green note, because it smells of something green, like cut grass.This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol. And I had to learn chemistry on the fly in the last three years. A very expensive high school chemistry education. This has six carbon atoms, so ""hexa,"" hexene-1-ol. It has one double bond, it has an alcohol on the end, so it’s ""ol,"" and that’s why they call it cis-3-hexene-1-ol. Once you figure this out, you can really impress people at parties.This smells of cut grass. Now, this is the skeleton of the molecule. If you dress it up with atoms, hydrogen atoms — that’s what it looks like when you have it on your computer — but actually it’s sort of more like this, in the sense that the atoms have a certain sphere that you cannot penetrate. They repel.OK, now. Why does this thing smell of cut grass, OK? Why doesn’t it smell of potatoes or violets? Well, there are really two theories. But the first theory is: it must be the shape. And that’s a perfectly reasonable theory in the sense that almost everything else in biology works by shape. Enzymes that chew things up, antibodies, it’s all, you know, the fit between a protein and whatever it is grabbing, in this case a smell. And I will try and explain to you what’s wrong with this notion.And the other theory is that we smell molecular vibrations. Now, this is a totally insane idea. And when I first came across it in the early '90s, I thought my predecessor, Malcolm Dyson and Bob Wright, had really taken leave of their senses, and I’ll explain to you why this was the case. However, I came to realize gradually that they may be right — and I have to convince all my colleagues that this is so, but I’m working on it.Here’s how shape works in normal receptors. You have a molecule coming in, it gets into the protein, which is schematic here, and it causes this thing to switch, to turn, to move in some way by binding in certain parts. And the attraction, the forces, between the molecule and the protein cause the motion. This is a shape-based idea.Now, what’s wrong with shape is summarized in this slide. The way —I expect everybody to memorize these compounds. This is one page of work from a chemist’s workbook, OK? Working for a fragrance company. He’s making 45 molecules, and he’s looking for a sandalwood, something that smells of sandalwood. Because there’s a lot of money in sandalwoods. And of these 45 molecules, only 4629 actually smells of sandalwood. And he puts an exclamation mark, OK? This is an awful lot of work. This actually is roughly, in man-years of work, 200,000 dollars roughly, if you keep them on the low salaries with no benefits. So this is a profoundly inefficient process. And my definition of a theory is, it’s not just something that you teach people; it’s labor saving. A theory is something that enables you to do less work. I love the idea of doing less work. So let me explain to you why — a very simple fact that tells you why this shape theory really does not work very well.This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol. It smells of cut grass. This is cis-3-hexene-1-thiol, and this smells of rotten eggs, OK? Now, you will have noticed that vodka never smells of rotten eggs. If it does, you put the glass down, you go to a different bar. This is — in other words, we never get the O-H — we never mistake it for an S-H, OK? Like, at no concentration, even pure, you know, if you smelt pure ethanol, it doesn’t smell of rotten eggs. Conversely, there is no concentration at which the sulfur compound will smell like vodka. It’s very hard to explain this by molecular recognition. Now, I showed this to a physicist friend of mine who has a profound distaste for biology, and he says, ""That’s easy! The things are a different color!"" (Laughter)We have to go a little beyond that. Now let me explain why vibrational theory has some sort of interest in it. These molecules, as you saw in the beginning, the building blocks had springs connecting them to each other. In fact, molecules are able to vibrate at a set of frequencies which are very specific for each molecule and for the bonds connecting them.So this is the sound of the O-H stretch, translated into the audible range. S-H, quite a different frequency. Now, this is kind of interesting, because it tells you that you should be looking for a particular fact, which is this: nothing in the world smells like rotten eggs except S-H, OK?Now, Fact B: nothing in the world has that frequency except S-H. If you look on this, imagine a piano keyboard. The S-H stretch is in the middle of a part of the keyboard that has been, so to speak, damaged, and there are no neighboring notes, nothing is close to it. You have a unique smell, a unique vibration.So I went searching when I started in this game to convince myself that there was any degree of plausibility to this whole crazy story. I went searching for a type of molecule, any molecule, that would have that vibration and that — the obvious prediction was that it should absolutely smell of sulfur. If it didn’t, the whole idea was toast, and I might as well move on to other things.Now, after searching high and low for several months, I discovered that there was a type of molecule called a Borane which has exactly the same vibration. Now the good news is, Boranes you can get hold of. The bad news is they’re rocket fuels. Most of them explode spontaneously in contact with air, and when you call up the companies, they only give you minimum ten tons, OK? (Laughter) So this was not what they call a laboratory-scale experiment, and they wouldn’t have liked it at my college.However, I managed to get a hold of a Borane eventually, and here is the beast. And it really does have the same — if you calculate, if you measure the vibrational frequencies, they are the same as S-H.Now, does it smell of sulfur? Well, if you go back in the literature, there’s a man who knew more about Boranes than anyone alive then or since, Alfred Stock, he synthesized all of them. And in an enormous 40-page paper in German he says, at one point — my wife is German and she translated it for me — and at one point he says, ""ganz widerlich Geruch,"" an ""absolutely repulsive smell,"" which is good. Reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide. So this fact that Boranes smell of sulfur had been known since 1910, and utterly forgotten until 1997, 1998.Now, the slight fly in the ointment is this: that if we smell molecular vibrations, we must have a spectroscope in our nose. Now, this is a spectroscope, OK, on my laboratory bench. And it’s fair to say that if you look up somebody’s nose, you’re unlikely to see anything resembling this. And this is the main objection to the theory.OK, great, we smell vibrations. How? All right? Now when people ask this kind of question, they neglect something, which is that physicists are really clever, unlike biologists. (Laughter) This is a joke. I’m a biologist, OK? So it’s a joke against myself.Bob Jacklovich and John Lamb at Ford Motor Company, in the days when Ford Motor was spending vast amounts of money on fundamental research, discovered a way to build a spectroscope that was intrinsically nano-scale. In other words, no mirrors, no lasers, no prisms, no nonsense, just a tiny device, and he built this device. And this device uses electron tunneling. Now, I could do the dance of electron tunneling, but I’ve done a video instead, which is much more interesting. Here’s how it works.Electrons are fuzzy creatures, and they can jump across gaps, but only at equal energy. If the energy differs, they can’t jump. Unlike us, they won’t fall off the cliff. OK. Now. If something absorbs the energy, the electron can travel. So here you have a system, you have something — and there’s plenty of that stuff in biology — some substance giving an electron, and the electron tries to jump, and only when a molecule comes along that has the right vibration does the reaction happen, OK? This is the basis for the device that these two guys at Ford built.And every single part of this mechanism is actually plausible in biology. In other words, I’ve taken off-the-shelf components, and I’ve made a spectroscope. What’s nice about this idea, if you have a philosophical bent of mind, is that then it tells you that the nose, the ear and the eye are all vibrational senses. Of course, it doesn’t matter, because it could also be that they’re not. But it has a certain — (Laughter) — it has a certain ring to it which is attractive to people who read too much 19th-century German literature.And then a magnificent thing happened: I left academia and joined the real world of business, and a company was created around my ideas to make new molecules using my method, along the lines of, let’s put someone else’s money where your mouth is. And one of the first things that happened was we started going around to fragrance companies asking for what they needed, because, of course, if you could calculate smell, you don’t need chemists. You need a computer, a Mac will do it, if you know how to program the thing right, OK? So you can try a thousand molecules, you can try ten thousand molecules in a weekend, and then you only tell the chemists to make the right one. And so that’s a direct path to making new odorants.And one of the first things that happened was we went to see some perfumers in France — and here’s where I do my Charles Fleischer impression — and one of them says, ""You cannot make a coumarin."" He says to me, ""I bet you cannot make a coumarin.""Now, coumarin is a very common thing, a material, in fragrance which is derived from a bean that comes from South America. And it is the classic synthetic aroma chemical, OK? It’s the molecule that has made men’s fragrances smell the way they do since 1881, to be exact.And the problem is it’s a carcinogen. So nobody likes particularly to — you know, aftershave with carcinogens. (Laughter) There are some reckless people, but it’s not worth it, OK?So they asked us to make a new coumarin. And so we started doing calculations. And the first thing you do is you calculate the vibrational spectrum of coumarin, and you smooth it out, so that you have a nice picture of what the sort of chord, so to speak, of coumarin is. And then you start cranking the computer to find other molecules, related or unrelated, that have the same vibrations.And we actually, in this case, I’m sorry to say, it happened — it was serendipitous. Because I got a phone call from our chief chemist and he said, look, I’ve just found this such a beautiful reaction, that even if this compound doesn’t smell of coumarin, I want to do it, it’s just such a nifty, one step — I mean, chemists have weird minds — one step, 90 percent yield, you know, and you get this lovely crystalline compound. Let us try it.And I said, first of all, let me do the calculation on that compound, bottom right, which is related to coumarin, but has an extra pentagon inserted into the molecule. Calculate the vibrations, the purple spectrum is that new fellow, the white one is the old one. And the prediction is it should smell of coumarin. They made it ... and it smelled exactly like coumarin. And this is our new baby, called tonkene. You see, when you’re a scientist, you’re always selling ideas. And people are very resistant to ideas, and rightly so. Why should new ideas be accepted? But when you put a little 10-gram vial on the table in front of perfumers and it smells like coumarin, and it isn’t coumarin, and you’ve found it in three weeks, this focuses everybody’s mind wonderfully. (Laughter) (Applause)And people often ask me, is your theory accepted? And I said, well, by whom? I mean most, you know — there’s three attitudes: You’re right, and I don’t know why, which is the most rational one at this point. You’re right, and I don’t care how you do it, in a sense; you bring me the molecules, you know. And: You’re completely wrong, and I’m sure you’re completely wrong.OK? Now, we’re dealing with people who only want results, and this is the commercial world. And they tell us that even if we do it by astrology, they’re happy. But we’re not actually doing it by astrology. But for the last three years, I’ve had what I consider to be the best job in the entire universe, which is to put my hobby — which is, you know, fragrance and all the magnificent things — plus a little bit of biophysics, a small amount of self-taught chemistry at the service of something that actually works.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/luca_turin_on_the_science_of_scent
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"So, about three years ago I was in London, and somebody called Howard Burton came to me and said, I represent a group of people, and we want to start an institute in theoretical physics. We have about 120 million dollars, and we want to do it well. We want to be in the forefront fields, and we want to do it differently. We want to get out of this thing where the young people have all the ideas, and the old people have all the power and decide what science gets done. It took me about 25 seconds to decide that that was a good idea.Three years later, we have the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s the most exciting job I’ve ever had. And it’s the first time I’ve had a job where I’m afraid to go away because of everything that’s going to happen in this week when I’m here. (Laughter) But in any case, what I’m going to do in my little bit of time is take you on a quick tour of some of the things that we talk about and we think about. So, we think a lot about what really makes science work? The first thing that anybody who knows science, and has been around science, is that the stuff you learn in school as a scientific method is wrong. There is no method. On the other hand, somehow we manage to reason together as a community, from incomplete evidence to conclusions that we all agree about. And this is, by the way, something that a democratic society also has to do.So how does it work? Well, my belief is that it works because scientists are a community bound together by an ethics. And here are some of the ethical principles. I’m not going to read them all to you because I’m not in teacher mode. I’m in entertain, amaze mode. (Laughter)But one of the principles is that everybody who is part of the community gets to fight and argue as hard as they can for what they believe. But we’re all disciplined by the understanding that the only people who are going to decide, you know, whether I’m right or somebody else is right, are the people in our community in the next generation, in 30 and 50 years. So it’s this combination of respect for the tradition and community we’re in, and rebellion that the community requires to get anywhere, that makes science work. And being in this process of being in a community that reasons from shared evidence to conclusions, I believe, teaches us about democracy. Not only is there a relationship between the ethics of science and the ethics of being a citizen in democracy, but there has been, historically, a relationship between how people think about space and time, and what the cosmos is, and how people think about the society that they live in.And I want to talk about three stages in that evolution. The first science of cosmology that was anything like science was Aristotelian science, and that was hierarchical. The earth is in the center, then there are these crystal spheres, the sun, the moon, the planets and finally the celestial sphere, where the stars are. And everything in this universe has a place. And Aristotle’s law of motion was that everything goes to its natural place, which was of course, the rule of the society that Aristotle lived in, and more importantly, the medieval society that, through Christianity, embraced Aristotle and blessed it. And the idea is that everything is defined. Where something is, is defined with respect to this last sphere, the celestial sphere, outside of which is this eternal, perfect realm, where lives God, who is the ultimate judge of everything.So that is both Aristotelian cosmology, and in a certain sense, medieval society. Now, in the 17th century there was a revolution in thinking about space and time and motion and so forth of Newton. And at the same time there was a revolution in social thought of John Locke and his collaborators. And they were very closely associated. In fact, Newton and Locke were friends. Their way of thinking about space and time and motion on the one hand, and a society on the other hand, were closely related.And let me show you. In a Newtonian universe, there’s no center — thank you. There are particles and they move around with respect to a fixed, absolute framework of space and time. It’s meaningful to say absolutely where something is in space, because that’s defined, not with respect to say, where other things are, but with respect to this absolute notion of space, which for Newton was God.Now, similarly, in Locke’s society there are individuals who have certain rights, properties in a formal sense, and those are defined with respect to some absolute, abstract notions of rights and justice, and so forth, which are independent of what else has happened in the society. Of who else there is, of the history and so forth. There is also an omniscient observer who knows everything, who is God, who is in a certain sense outside the universe, because he has no role in anything that happens, but is in a certain sense everywhere, because space is just the way that God knows where everything is, according to Newton, OK?So this is the foundations of what’s called, traditionally, liberal political theory and Newtonian physics. Now, in the 20th century we had a revolution that was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, and which is still going on. It was begun with the invention of relativity theory and quantum theory. And merging them together to make the final quantum theory of space and time and gravity, is the culmination of that, something that’s going on right now. And in this universe there’s nothing fixed and absolute. Zilch, OK. This universe is described by being a network of relationships.Space is just one aspect, so there’s no meaning to say absolutely where something is. There’s only where it is relative to everything else that is. And this network of relations is ever-evolving. So we call it a relational universe. All properties of things are about these kinds of relationships. And also, if you’re embedded in such a network of relationships, your view of the world has to do with what information comes to you through the network of relations. And there’s no place for an omniscient observer or an outside intelligence knowing everything and making everything. So this is general relativity, this is quantum theory. This is also, if you talk to legal scholars, the foundations of new ideas in legal thought. They’re thinking about the same things. And not only that, they make the analogy to relativity theory and cosmology often. So there’s an interesting discussion going on there. This last view of cosmology is called the relational view.So the main slogan here is that there’s nothing outside the universe, which means that there’s no place to put an explanation for something outside. So in such a relational universe, if you come upon something that’s ordered and structured, like this device here, or that device there, or something beautiful, like all the living things, all of you guys in the room — ""guys"" in physics, by the way, is a generic term: men and women. (Laughter)Then you want to know, you’re a person, you want to know how is it made. And in a relational universe the only possible explanation was, somehow it made itself. There must be mechanisms of self-organization inside the universe that make things. Because there’s no place to put a maker outside, as there was in the Aristotelian and the Newtonian universe. So in a relational universe we must have processes of self-organization.Now, Darwin taught us that there are processes of self-organization that suffice to explain all of us and everything we see. So it works. But not only that, if you think about how natural selection works, then it turns out that natural selection would only make sense in such a relational universe. That is, natural selection works on properties, like fitness, which are about relationships of some species to some other species. Darwin wouldn’t make sense in an Aristotelian universe, and wouldn’t really make sense in a Newtonian universe.So a theory of biology based on natural selection requires a relational notion of what are the properties of biological systems. And if you push that all the way down, really, it makes the best sense in a relational universe where all properties are relational. Now, not only that, but Einstein taught us that gravity is the result of the world being relational. If it wasn’t for gravity, there wouldn’t be life, because gravity causes stars to form and live for a very long time, keeping pieces of the world, like the surface of the Earth, out of thermal equilibrium for billions of years so life can evolve.In the 20th century, we saw the independent development of two big themes in science. In the biological sciences, they explored the implications of the notion that order and complexity and structure arise in a self-organized way. That was the triumph of Neo-Darwinism and so forth. And slowly, that idea is leaking out to the cognitive sciences, the human sciences, economics, et cetera. At the same time, we physicists have been busy trying to make sense of and build on and integrate the discoveries of quantum theory and relativity.And what we’ve been working out is the implications, really, of the idea that the universe is made up of relations. 21st-century science is going to be driven by the integration of these two ideas: the triumph of relational ways of thinking about the world, on the one hand, and self-organization or Darwinian ways of thinking about the world, on the other hand. And also, is that in the 21st century our thinking about space and time and cosmology, and our thinking about society are both going to continue to evolve. And what they’re evolving towards is the union of these two big ideas, Darwinism and relationalism.Now, if you think about democracy from this perspective, a new pluralistic notion of democracy would be one that recognizes that there are many different interests, many different agendas, many different individuals, many different points of view. Each one is incomplete, because you’re embedded in a network of relationships. Any actor in a democracy is embedded in a network of relationships. And you understand some things better than other things, and because of that there’s a continual jostling and give and take, which is politics. And politics is, in the ideal sense, the way in which we continually address our network of relations in order to achieve a better life and a better society.And I also think that science will never go away and — I’m finishing on this line. (Laughter) In fact, I’m finished. Science will never go away.","https://www.ted.com/talks/lee_smolin_on_science_and_democracy
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"I spent the better part of a decade looking at American responses to mass atrocity and genocide. And I'd like to start by sharing with you one moment that to me sums up what there is to know about American and democratic responses to mass atrocity.And that moment came on April 21, 1994. So 14 years ago, almost, in the middle of the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people would be systematically exterminated by the Rwandan government and some extremist militia. On April 21, in the New York Times, the paper reported that somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people had already been killed in the genocide. It was in the paper — not on the front page. It was a lot like the Holocaust coverage, it was buried in the paper. Rwanda itself was not seen as newsworthy, and amazingly, genocide itself was not seen as newsworthy.But on April 21, a wonderfully honest moment occurred. And that was that an American congresswoman named Patricia Schroeder from Colorado met with a group of journalists. And one of the journalists said to her, what's up? What's going on in the U.S. government? Two to 300,000 people have just been exterminated in the last couple of weeks in Rwanda. It's two weeks into the genocide at that time, but of course, at that time you don't know how long it's going to last. And the journalist said, why is there so little response out of Washington? Why no hearings, no denunciations, no people getting arrested in front of the Rwandan embassy or in front of the White House? What's the deal? And she said — she was so honest — she said, ""It's a great question. All I can tell you is that in my congressional office in Colorado and my office in Washington, we're getting hundreds and hundreds of calls about the endangered ape and gorilla population in Rwanda, but nobody is calling about the people. The phones just aren't ringing about the people.""And the reason I give you this moment is there's a deep truth in it. And that truth is, or was, in the 20th century, that while we were beginning to develop endangered species movements, we didn't have an endangered people's movement. We had Holocaust education in the schools. Most of us were groomed not only on images of nuclear catastrophe, but also on images and knowledge of the Holocaust. There's a museum, of course, on the Mall in Washington, right next to Lincoln and Jefferson. I mean, we have owned Never Again culturally, appropriately, interestingly. And yet the politicization of Never Again, the operationalization of Never Again, had never occurred in the 20th century.And that's what that moment with Patricia Schroeder I think shows: that if we are to bring about an end to the world's worst atrocities, we have to make it such. There has to be a role — there has to be the creation of political noise and political costs in response to massive crimes against humanity, and so forth. So that was the 20th century.Now here — and this will be a relief to you at this point in the afternoon — there is good news, amazing news, in the 21st century, and that is that, almost out of nowhere, there has come into being an anti-genocide movement, an anti-genocide constituency, and one that looks destined, in fact, to be permanent. It grew up in response to the atrocities in Darfur. It is comprised of students. There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it. ""Hotel Rwanda"" watchers have joined it. It is a cacophonous movement.To call it a movement, as with all movements, perhaps, is a little misleading. It's diverse. It's got a lot of different approaches. It's got all the ups and the downs of movements. But it has been amazingly successful in one regard, in that it has become, it has congealed into this endangered people's movement that was missing in the 20th century. It sees itself, such as it is, the it, as something that will create the impression that there will be political cost, there will be a political price to be paid, for allowing genocide, for not having an heroic imagination, for not being an upstander but for being, in fact, a bystander.Now because it's student-driven, there's some amazing things that the movement has done. They have launched a divestment campaign that has now convinced, I think, 55 universities in 22 states to divest their holdings of stocks with regard to companies doing business in Sudan. They have a 1-800-GENOCIDE number — this is going to sound very kitsch, but for those of you who may not be, I mean, may be apolitical, but interested in doing something about genocide, you dial 1-800-GENOCIDE and you type in your zip code, and you don't even have to know who your congressperson is. It will refer you directly to your congressperson, to your U.S. senator, to your governor where divestment legislation is pending. They've lowered the transaction costs of stopping genocide. I think the most innovative thing they've introduced recently are genocide grades. And it takes students to introduce genocide grades. So what you now have when a Congress is in session is members of Congress calling up these 19-year-olds or 24-year-olds and saying, I'm just told I have a D minus on genocide; what do I do to get a C? I just want to get a C. Help me. And the students and the others who are part of this incredibly energized base are there to answer that, and there's always something to do.Now, what this movement has done is it has extracted from the Bush administration from the United States, at a time of massive over-stretch — military, financial, diplomatic — a whole series of commitments to Darfur that no other country in the world is making. For instance, the referral of the crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush administration doesn't like. The expenditure of 3 billion dollars in refugee camps to try to keep, basically, the people who've been displaced from their homes by the Sudanese government, by the so-called Janjaweed, the militia, to keep those people alive until something more durable can be achieved. And recently, or now not that recently, about six months ago, the authorization of a peacekeeping force of 26,000 that will go.And that's all the Bush administration's leadership, and it's all because of this bottom-up pressure and the fact that the phones haven't stopped ringing from the beginning of this crisis. The bad news, however, to this question of will evil prevail, is that evil lives on. The people in those camps are surrounded on all sides by so-called Janjaweed, these men on horseback with spears and Kalashnikovs. Women who go to get firewood in order to heat the humanitarian aid in order to feed their families — humanitarian aid, the dirty secret of it is it has to be heated, really, to be edible — are themselves subjected to rape, which is a tool of the genocide that is being used. And the peacekeepers I've mentioned, the force has been authorized, but almost no country on Earth has stepped forward since the authorization to actually put its troops or its police in harm's way.So we have achieved an awful lot relative to the 20th century, and yet far too little relative to the gravity of the crime that is unfolding as we sit here, as we speak. Why the limits to the movement? Why is what has been achieved, or what the movement has done, been necessary but not sufficient to the crime? I think there are a couple — there are many reasons — but a couple just to focus on briefly.The first is that the movement, such as it is, stops at America's borders.  It is not a global movement. It does not have too many compatriots abroad who themselves are asking their governments to do more to stop genocide. And the Holocaust culture that we have in this country makes Americans, sort of, more prone to, I think, want to bring Never Again to life. The guilt that the Clinton administration expressed, that Bill Clinton expressed over Rwanda, created a space in our society for a consensus that Rwanda was bad and wrong and we wish we had done more, and that is something that the movement has taken advantage of. European governments, for the most part, haven't acknowledged responsibility, and there's nothing to kind of to push back and up against.So this movement, if it's to be durable and global, will have to cross borders, and you will have to see other citizens in democracies, not simply resting on the assumption that their government would do something in the face of genocide, but actually making it such. Governments will never gravitate towards crimes of this magnitude naturally or eagerly. As we saw, they haven't even gravitated towards protecting our ports or reigning in loose nukes. Why would we expect in a bureaucracy that it would orient itself towards distant suffering? So one reason is it hasn't gone global.The second is, of course, that at this time in particular in America's history, we have a credibility problem, a legitimacy problem in international institutions. It is structurally really, really hard to do, as the Bush administration rightly does, which is to denounce genocide on a Monday and then describe water boarding on a Tuesday as a no-brainer and then turn up on Wednesday and look for troop commitments. Now, other countries have their own reasons for not wanting to get involved. Let me be clear. They're in some ways using the Bush administration as an alibi. But it is essential for us to be a leader in this sphere, of course to restore our standing and our leadership in the world. The recovery's going to take some time.We have to ask ourselves, what now? What do we do going forward as a country and as citizens in relationship to the world's worst places, the world's worst suffering, killers, and the kinds of killers that could come home to roost sometime in the future? The place that I turned to answer that question was to a man that many of you may not have ever heard of, and that is a Brazilian named Sergio Vieira de Mello who, as Chris said, was blown up in Iraq in 2003. He was the victim of the first-ever suicide bomb in Iraq. It's hard to remember, but there was actually a time in the summer of 2003, even after the U.S. invasion, where, apart from looting, civilians were relatively safe in Iraq.Now, who was Sergio? Sergio Vieira de Mello was his name. In addition to being Brazilian, he was described to me before I met him in 1994 as someone who was a cross between James Bond on the one hand and Bobby Kennedy on the other. And in the U.N., you don't get that many people who actually manage to merge those qualities. He was James Bond-like in that he was ingenious. He was drawn to the flames, he chased the flames, he was like a moth to the flames. Something of an adrenalin junkie. He was successful with women. He was Bobby Kennedy-like because in some ways one could never tell if he was a realist masquerading as an idealist or an idealist masquerading as a realist, as people always wondered about Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy in that way.What he was was a decathlete of nation-building, of problem-solving, of troubleshooting in the world's worst places and in the world's most broken places. In failing states, genocidal states, under-governed states, precisely the kinds of places that threats to this country exist on the horizon, and precisely the kinds of places where most of the world's suffering tends to get concentrated. These are the places he was drawn to. He moved with the headlines. He was in the U.N. for 34 years. He joined at the age of 21. Started off when the causes in the wars du jour in the '70s were wars of independence and decolonization. He was there in Bangladesh dealing with the outflow of millions of refugees — the largest refugee flow in history up to that point. He was in Sudan when the civil war broke out there. He was in Cyprus right after the Turkish invasion. He was in Mozambique for the War of Independence. He was in Lebanon. Amazingly, he was in Lebanon — the U.N. base was used — Palestinians staged attacks out from behind the U.N. base. Israel then invaded and overran the U.N. base.Sergio was in Beirut when the U.S. Embassy was hit by the first-ever suicide attack against the United States. People date the beginning of this new era to 9/11, but surely 1983, with the attack on the US Embassy and the Marine barracks — which Sergio witnessed — those are, in fact, in some ways, the dawning of the era that we find ourselves in today. From Lebanon he went to Bosnia in the '90s. The issues were, of course, ethnic sectarian violence. He was the first person to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge. Talk about evil prevailing. I mean, here he was in the room with the embodiment of evil in Cambodia. He negotiates with the Serbs. He actually crosses so far into this realm of talking to evil and trying to convince evil that it doesn't need to prevail that he earns the nickname — not Sergio but Serbio while he's living in the Balkans and conducting these kinds of negotiations.He then goes to Rwanda and to Congo in the aftermath of the genocide, and he's the guy who has to decide — huh, OK, the genocide is over; 800,000 people have been killed; the people responsible are fleeing into neighboring countries — into Congo, into Tanzania. I'm Sergio, I'm a humanitarian, and I want to feed those — well, I don't want to feed the killers but I want to feed the two million people who are with them, so we're going to go, we're going to set up camps, and we're going to supply humanitarian aid. But, uh-oh, the killers are within the camps. Well, I'd like to separate the sheep from the wolves. Let me go door-to-door to the international community and see if anybody will give me police or troops to do the separation. And their response, of course, was no more than we wanted to stop the genocide and put our troops in harm's way to do that, nor do we now want to get in the way and pluck genocidaires from camps.So then you have to make the decision. Do you turn off the international spigot of life support and risk two million civilian lives? Or do you continue feeding the civilians, knowing that the genocidaires are in the camps, literally sharpening their knives for future battle? What do you do? It's all lesser-evil terrain in these broken places.Late '90s: nation-building is the cause du jour. He's the guy put in charge. He's the Paul Bremer or the Jerry Bremer of first Kosovo and then East Timor. He governs the places. He's the viceroy. He has to decide on tax policy, on currency, on border patrol, on policing. He has to make all these judgments. He's a Brazilian in these places. He speaks seven languages. He's been up to that point in 14 war zones so he's positioned to make better judgments, perhaps, than people who have never done that kind of work. But nonetheless, he is the cutting edge of our experimentation with doing good with very few resources being brought to bear in, again, the world's worst places.And then after Timor, 9/11 has happened, he's named U.N. Human Rights Commissioner, and he has to balance liberty and security and figure out, what do you do when the most powerful country in the United Nations is bowing out of the Geneva Conventions, bowing out of international law? Do you denounce? Well, if you denounce, you're probably never going to get back in the room. Maybe you stay reticent. Maybe you try to charm President Bush — and that's what he did. And in so doing he earned himself, unfortunately, his final and tragic appointment to Iraq — the one that resulted in his death.One note on his death, which is so devastating, is that despite predicating the war on Iraq on a link between Saddam Hussein and terrorism in 9/11, believe it or not, the Bush administration or the invaders did no planning, no pre-war planning, to respond to terrorism. So Sergio — this receptacle of all of this learning on how to deal with evil and how to deal with brokenness, lay under the rubble for three and a half hours without rescue. Stateless. The guy who tried to help the stateless people his whole career. Like a refugee. Because he represents the U.N.If you represent everyone, in some ways you represent no one. You're un-owned. And what the American — the most powerful military in the history of mankind was able to muster for his rescue, believe it or not, was literally these heroic two American soldiers went into the shaft. Building was shaking. One of them had been at 9/11 and lost his buddies on September 11th, and yet went in and risked his life in order to save Sergio. But all they had was a woman's handbag — literally one of those basket handbags — and they tied it to a curtain rope from one of the offices at U.N. headquarters, and created a pulley system into this shaft in this quivering building in the interests of rescuing this person, the person we most need to turn to now, this shepherd, at a time when so many of us feel like we're lacking guidance.And this was the pulley system. This was what we were able to muster for Sergio. The good news, for what it's worth, is after Sergio and 21 others were killed that day in the attack on the U.N., the military created a search and rescue unit that had the cutting equipment, the shoring wood, the cranes, the things that you would have needed to do the rescue. But it was too late for Sergio.I want to wrap up, but I want to close with what I take to be the four lessons from Sergio's life on this question of how do we prevent evil from prevailing, which is how I would have framed the question. Here's this guy who got a 34-year head start thinking about the kinds of questions we as a country are grappling with, we as citizens are grappling with now. What do we take away?First, I think, is his relationship to, in fact, evil is something to learn from. He, over the course of his career, changed a great deal. He had a lot of flaws, but he was very adaptive. I think that was his greatest quality. He started as somebody who would denounce harmdoers, he would charge up to people who were violating international law, and he would say, you're violating, this is the U.N. Charter. Don't you see it's unacceptable what you're doing? And they would laugh at him because he didn't have the power of states, the power of any military or police. He just had the rules, he had the norms, and he tried to use them. And in Lebanon, Southern Lebanon in '82, he said to himself and to everybody else, I will never use the word ""unacceptable"" again. I will never use it. I will try to make it such, but I will never use that word again. But he lunged in the opposite direction. He started, as I mentioned, to get in the room with evil, to not denounce, and became almost obsequious when he won the nickname Serbio, for instance, and even when he negotiated with the Khmer Rouge would black-box what had occurred prior to entering the room.But by the end of his life, I think he had struck a balance that we as a country can learn from. Be in the room, don't be afraid of talking to your adversaries, but don't bracket what happened before you entered the room. Don't black-box history. Don't check your principles at the door. And I think that's something that we have to be in the room, whether it's Nixon going to China or Khrushchev and Kennedy or Reagan and Gorbachev. All the great progress in this country with relation to our adversaries has come by going into the room. And it doesn't have to be an act of weakness. You can actually do far more to build an international coalition against a harmdoer or a wrongdoer by being in the room and showing to the rest of the world that that person, that regime, is the problem and that you, the United States, are not the problem.Second take-away from Sergio's life, briefly. What I take away, and this in some ways is the most important, he espoused and exhibited a reverence for dignity that was really, really unusual. At a micro level, the individuals around him were visible. He saw them. At a macro level, he thought, you know, we talk about democracy promotion, but we do it in a way sometimes that's an affront to people's dignity. We put people on humanitarian aid and we boast about it because we've spent three billion. It's incredibly important, those people would no longer be alive if the United States, for instance, hadn't spent that money in Darfur, but it's not a way to live. If we think about dignity in our conduct as citizens and as individuals with relation to the people around us, and as a country, if we could inject a regard for dignity into our dealings with other countries, it would be something of a revolution.Third point, very briefly. He talked a lot about freedom from fear. And I recognize there is so much to be afraid of. There are so many genuine threats in the world. But what Sergio was talking about is, let's calibrate our relationship to the threat. Let's not hype the threat; let's actually see it clearly. We have reason to be afraid of melting ice caps. We have reason to be afraid that we haven't secured loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. Let's focus on what are the legitimate challenges and threats, but not lunge into bad decisions because of a panic, of a fear. In times of fear, for instance, one of the things Sergio used to say is, fear is a bad advisor. We lunge towards the extremes when we aren't operating and trying to, again, calibrate our relationship to the world around us.Fourth and final point: he somehow, because he was working in all the world's worst places and all lesser evils, had a humility, of course, and an awareness of the complexity of the world around him. I mean, such an acute awareness of how hard it was. How Sisyphean this task was of mending, and yet aware of that complexity, humbled by it, he wasn't paralyzed by it. And we as citizens, as we go through this experience of the kind of, the crisis of confidence, crisis of competence, crisis of legitimacy, I think there's a temptation to pull back from the world and say, ah, Katrina, Iraq — we don't know what we're doing. We can't afford to pull back from the world. It's a question of how to be in the world.And the lesson, I think, of the anti-genocide movement that I mentioned, that is a partial success but by no means has it achieved what it has set out to do — it'll be many decades, probably, before that happens — but is that if we want to see change, we have to become the change. We can't rely upon our institutions to do the work of necessarily talking to adversaries on their own without us creating a space for that to happen, for having respect for dignity, and for bringing that combination of humility and a sort of emboldened sense of responsibility to our dealings with the rest of the world. So will evil prevail? Is that the question? I think the short answer is: no, not unless we let it.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/samantha_power_on_a_complicated_hero
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"I thought I'd start with telling you or showing you the people who started [Jet Propulsion Lab]. When they were a bunch of kids, they were kind of very imaginative, very adventurous, as they were trying at Caltech to mix chemicals and see which one blows up more. Well, I don't recommend that you try to do that now. Naturally, they blew up a shack, and Caltech, well, then, hey, you go to the Arroyo and really do all your tests in there.So, that's what we call our first five employees during the tea break, you know, in here. As I said, they were adventurous people. As a matter of fact, one of them, who was, kind of, part of a cult which was not too far from here on Orange Grove, and unfortunately he blew up himself because he kept mixing chemicals and trying to figure out which ones were the best chemicals. So, that gives you a kind of flavor of the kind of people we have there. We try to avoid blowing ourselves up.This one I thought I'd show you. Guess which one is a JPL employee in the heart of this crowd. I tried to come like him this morning, but as I walked out, then it was too cold, and I said, I'd better put my shirt back on. But more importantly, the reason I wanted to show this picture: look where the other people are looking, and look where he is looking. Wherever anybody else looks, look somewhere else, and go do something different, you know, and doing that. And that's kind of what has been the spirit of what we are doing.And I want to tell you a quote from Ralph Emerson that one of my colleagues, you know, put on my wall in my office, and it says, ""Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail."" And that's my recommendation to all of you: look what everybody is doing, what they are doing; go do something completely different. Don't try to improve a little bit on what somebody else is doing, because that doesn't get you very far.In our early days we used to work a lot on rockets, but we also used to have a lot of parties, you know. As you can see, one of our parties, you know, a few years ago. But then a big difference happened about 50 years ago, after Sputnik was launched. We launched the first American satellite, and that's the one you see on the left in there. And here we made 180 degrees change: we changed from a rocket house to be an exploration house. And that was done over a period of a couple of years, and now we are the leading organization, you know, exploring space on all of your behalf.But even when we did that, we had to remind ourselves, sometimes there are setbacks. So you see, on the bottom, that rocket was supposed to go upward; somehow it ended going sideways. So that's what we call the misguided missile. But then also, just to celebrate that, we started an event at JPL for ""Miss Guided Missile.""So, we used to have a celebration every year and select — there used to be competition and parades and so on. It's not very appropriate to do it now. Some people tell me to do it; I think, well, that's not really proper, you know, these days. So, we do something a little bit more serious. And that's what you see in the last Rose Bowl, you know, when we entered one of the floats. That's more on the play side. And on the right side, that's the Rover just before we finished its testing to take it to the Cape to launch it. These are the Rovers up here that you have on Mars now. So that kind of tells you about, kind of, the fun things, you know, and the serious things that we try to do. But I said I'm going to show you a short clip of one of our employees to kind of give you an idea about some of the talent that we have.Video: Morgan Hendry: Beware of Safety is an instrumental rock band. It branches on more the experimental side. There's the improvisational side of jazz. There's the heavy-hitting sound of rock. Being able to treat sound as an instrument, and be able to dig for more abstract sounds and things to play live, mixing electronics and acoustics. The music's half of me, but the other half — I landed probably the best gig of all. I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab. I'm building the next Mars Rover. Some of the most brilliant engineers I know are the ones who have that sort of artistic quality about them. You've got to do what you want to do. And anyone who tells you you can't, you don't listen to them. Maybe they're right - I doubt it. Tell them where to put it, and then just do what you want to do. I'm Morgan Hendry. I am NASA.Charles Elachi: Now, moving from the play stuff to the serious stuff, always people ask, why do we explore? Why are we doing all of these missions and why are we exploring them? Well, the way I think about it is fairly simple. Somehow, 13 billion years ago there was a Big Bang, and you've heard a little bit about, you know, the origin of the universe. But somehow what strikes everybody's imagination — or lots of people's imagination — somehow from that original Big Bang we have this beautiful world that we live in today.You look outside: you have all that beauty that you see, all that life that you see around you, and here we have intelligent people like you and I who are having a conversation here. All that started from that Big Bang. So, the question is: How did that happen? How did that evolve? How did the universe form? How did the galaxies form? How did the planets form? Why is there a planet on which there is life which have evolved? Is that very common? Is there life on every planet that you can see around the stars? So we literally are all made out of stardust. We started from those stars; we are made of stardust. So, next time you are really depressed, look in the mirror and you can look and say, hi, I'm looking at a star here. You can skip the dust part. But literally, we are all made of stardust.So, what we are trying to do in our exploration is effectively write the book of how things have came about as they are today. And one of the first, or the easiest, places we can go and explore that is to go towards Mars. And the reason Mars takes particular attention: it's not very far from us. You know, it'll take us only six months to get there. Six to nine months at the right time of the year. It's a planet somewhat similar to Earth. It's a little bit smaller, but the land mass on Mars is about the same as the land mass on Earth, you know, if you don't take the oceans into account. It has polar caps. It has an atmosphere somewhat thinner than ours, so it has weather. So, it's very similar to some extent, and you can see some of the features on it, like the Grand Canyon on Mars, or what we call the Grand Canyon on Mars. It is like the Grand Canyon on Earth, except a hell of a lot larger.So it's about the size, you know, of the United States. It has volcanoes on it. And that's Mount Olympus on Mars, which is a kind of huge volcanic shield on that planet. And if you look at the height of it and you compare it to Mount Everest, you see, it'll give you an idea of how large that Mount Olympus, you know, is, relative to Mount Everest. So, it basically dwarfs, you know, Mount Everest here on Earth. So, that gives you an idea of the tectonic events or volcanic events which have happened on that planet. Recently from one of our satellites, this shows that it's Earth-like — we caught a landslide occurring as it was happening. So it is a dynamic planet, and activity is going on as we speak today.And these Rovers, people wonder now, what are they doing today, so I thought I would show you a little bit what they are doing. This is one very large crater. Geologists love craters, because craters are like digging a big hole in the ground without really working at it, and you can see what's below the surface. So, this is called Victoria Crater, which is about a few football fields in size. And if you look at the top left, you see a little teeny dark dot. This picture was taken from an orbiting satellite. If I zoom on it, you can see: that's the Rover on the surface. So, that was taken from orbit; we had the camera zoom on the surface, and we actually saw the Rover on the surface. And we actually used the combination of the satellite images and the Rover to actually conduct science, because we can observe large areas and then you can get those Rovers to move around and basically go to a certain location.So, specifically what we are doing now is that Rover is going down in that crater. As I told you, geologists love craters. And the reason is, many of you went to the Grand Canyon, and you see in the wall of the Grand Canyon, you see these layers. And what these layers — that's what the surface used to be a million years ago, 10 million years ago, 100 million years ago, and you get deposits on top of them. So if you can read the layers it's like reading your book, and you can learn the history of what happened in the past in that location.So what you are seeing here are the layers on the wall of that crater, and the Rover is going down now, measuring, you know, the properties and analyzing the rocks as it's going down, you know, that canyon. Now, it's kind of a little bit of a challenge driving down a slope like this. If you were there you wouldn't do it yourself. But we really made sure we tested those Rovers before we got them down — or that Rover — and made sure that it's all working well.Now, when I came last time, shortly after the landing — I think it was, like, a hundred days after the landing — I told you I was surprised that those Rovers are lasting even a hundred days. Well, here we are four years later, and they're still working. Now you say, Charles, you are really lying to us, and so on, but that's not true. We really believed they were going to last 90 days or 100 days, because they are solar powered, and Mars is a dusty planet, so we expected the dust would start accumulating on the surface, and after a while we wouldn't have enough power, you know, to keep them warm.Well, I always say it's important that you are smart, but every once in a while it's good to be lucky. And that's what we found out. It turned out that every once in a while there are dust devils which come by on Mars, as you are seeing here, and when the dust devil comes over the Rover, it just cleans it up. It is like a brand new car that you have, and that's literally why they have lasted so long. And now we designed them reasonably well, but that's exactly why they are lasting that long and still providing all the science data. Now, the two Rovers, each one of them is, kind of, getting old. You know, one of them, one of the wheels is stuck, is not working, one of the front wheels, so what we are doing, we are driving it backwards. And the other one has arthritis of the shoulder joint, you know, it's not working very well, so it's walking like this, and we can move the arm, you know, that way. But still they are producing a lot of scientific data. Now, during that whole period, a number of people got excited, you know, outside the science community about these Rovers, so I thought I'd show you a video just to give you a reflection about how these Rovers are being viewed by people other than the science community.So let me go on the next short video. By the way, this video is pretty accurate of how the landing took place, you know, about four years ago. Video: Okay, we have parachute aligned. Okay, deploy the airbags. Open. Camera. We have a picture right now. Yeah! CE: That's about what happened in the Houston operation room. It's exactly like this. Video: Now, if there is life, the Dutch will find it. What is he doing? What is that? CE: Not too bad.So anyway, let me continue on showing you a little bit about the beauty of that planet. As I said earlier, it looked very much like Earth, so you see sand dunes. It looks like I could have told you these are pictures taken from the Sahara Desert or somewhere, and you'd have believed me, but these are pictures taken from Mars. But one area which is particularly intriguing for us is the northern region, you know, of Mars, close to the North Pole, because we see ice caps, and we see the ice caps shrinking and expanding, so it's very much like you have in northern Canada. And we wanted to find out — and we see all kinds of glacial features on it. So, we wanted to find out, actually, what is that ice made of, and could that have embedded in it some organic, you know, material.So we have a spacecraft which is heading towards Mars, called Phoenix, and that spacecraft will land 17 days, seven hours and 20 seconds from now, so you can adjust your watch. So it's on May 25 around just before five o'clock our time here on the West Coast, actually we will be landing on another planet. And as you can see, this is a picture of the spacecraft put on Mars, but I thought that just in case you're going to miss that show, you know, in 17 days, I'll show you, kind of, a little bit of what's going to happen.Video: That's what we call the seven minutes of terror. So the plan is to dig in the soil and take samples that we put them in an oven and actually heat them and look what gases will come from it. So this was launched about nine months ago. We'll be coming in at 12,000 miles per hour, and in seven minutes we have to stop and touch the surface very softly so we don't break that lander.Ben Cichy: Phoenix is the first Mars Scout mission. It's the first mission that's going to try to land near the North Pole of Mars, and it's the first mission that's actually going to try and reach out and touch water on the surface of another planet.Lynn Craig: Where there tends to be water, at least on Earth, there tends to be life, and so it's potentially a place where life could have existed on the planet in the past.Erik Bailey: The main purpose of EDL is to take a spacecraft that is traveling at 12,500 miles an hour and bring it to a screeching halt in a soft way in a very short amount of time. BC: We enter the Martian atmosphere. We're 70 miles above the surface of Mars. And our lander is safely tucked inside what we call an aeroshell.EB: Looks kind of like an ice cream cone, more or less.BC: And on the front of it is this heat shield, this saucer-looking thing that has about a half-inch of essentially what's cork on the front of it, which is our heat shield. Now, this is really special cork, and this cork is what's going to protect us from the violent atmospheric entry that we're about to experience.Rob Grover: Friction really starts to build up on the spacecraft, and we use the friction when it's flying through the atmosphere to our advantage to slow us down. BC: From this point, we're going to decelerate from 12,500 miles an hour down to 900 miles an hour.EB: The outside can get almost as hot as the surface of the Sun.RG: The temperature of the heat shield can reach 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit.EB: The inside doesn't get very hot. It probably gets about room temperature. Richard Kornfeld: There is this window of opportunity within which we can deploy the parachute.EB: If you fire the 'chute too early, the parachute itself could fail. The fabric and the stitching could just pull apart. And that would be bad.BC: In the first 15 seconds after we deploy the parachute, we'll decelerate from 900 miles an hour to a relatively slow 250 miles an hour. We no longer need the heat shield to protect us from the force of atmospheric entry, so we jettison the heat shield, exposing for the first time our lander to the atmosphere of Mars.LC: After the heat shield has been jettisoned and the legs are deployed, the next step is to have the radar system begin to detect how far Phoenix really is from the ground.BC: We've lost 99 percent of our entry velocity. So, we're 99 percent of the way to where we want to be. But that last one percent, as it always seems to be, is the tricky part.EB: Now the spacecraft actually has to decide when it's going to get rid of its parachute.BC: We separate from the lander going 125 miles an hour at roughly a kilometer above the surface of Mars: 3,200 feet. That's like taking two Empire State Buildings and stacking them on top of one another.EB: That's when we separate from the back shell, and we're now in free-fall. It's a very scary moment; a lot has to happen in a very short amount of time. LC: So it's in a free-fall, but it's also trying to use all of its actuators to make sure that it's in the right position to land.EB: And then it has to light up its engines, right itself, and then slowly slow itself down and touch down on the ground safely.BC: Earth and Mars are so far apart that it takes over ten minutes for a signal from Mars to get to Earth. And EDL itself is all over in a matter of seven minutes. So by the time you even hear from the lander that EDL has started it'll already be over.EB: We have to build large amounts of autonomy into the spacecraft so that it can land itself safely.BC: EDL is this immense, technically challenging problem. It's about getting a spacecraft that's hurtling through deep space and using all this bag of tricks to somehow figure out how to get it down to the surface of Mars at zero miles an hour. It's this immensely exciting and challenging problem.CE: Hopefully it all will happen the way you saw it in here. So it will be a very tense moment, you know, as we are watching that spacecraft landing on another planet.So now let me talk about the next things that we are doing. So we are in the process, as we speak, of actually designing the next Rover that we are going to be sending to Mars. So I thought I would go a little bit and tell you, kind of, the steps we go through. It's very similar to what you do when you design your product. As you saw a little bit earlier, when we were doing the Phoenix one, we have to take into account the heat that we are going to be facing. So we have to study all kinds of different materials, the shape that we want to do. In general we don't try to please the customer here. What we want to do is to make sure we have an effective, you know, an efficient kind of machine.First we start by we want to have our employees to be as imaginative as they can. And we really love being close to the art center, because we have, as a matter of fact, one of the alumni from the art center, Eric Nyquist, had put a series of displays, far-out displays, you know, in our what we call mission design or spacecraft design room, just to get people to think wildly about things. We have a bunch of Legos. So, as I said, this is a playground for adults, where they sit down and try to play with different shapes and different designs.Then we get a little bit more serious, so we have what we call our CAD/CAMs and all the engineers who are involved, or scientists who are involved, who know about thermal properties, know about design, know about atmospheric interaction, parachutes, all of these things, which they work in a team effort and actually design a spacecraft in a computer to some extent, so to see, does that meet the requirement that we need. On the right, also, we have to take into account the environment of the planet where we are going. If you are going to Jupiter, you have a very high-radiation, you know, environment. It's about the same radiation environment close by Jupiter as inside a nuclear reactor.So just imagine: you take your P.C. and throw it into a nuclear reactor and it still has to work. So these are kind of some of the little challenges, you know, that we have to face. If we are doing entry, we have to do tests of parachutes. You saw in the video a parachute breaking. That would be a bad day, you know, if that happened, so we have to test, because we are deploying this parachute at supersonic speeds. We are coming at extremely high speeds, and we are deploying them to slow us down. So we have to do all kinds of tests. To give you an idea of the size, you know, of that parachute relative to the people standing there.Next step, we go and actually build some kind of test models and actually test them, you know, in the lab at JPL, in what we call our Mars Yard. We kick them, we hit them, we drop them, just to make sure we understand how, where would they break. And then we back off, you know, from that point. And then we actually do the actual building and the flight. And this next Rover that we're flying is about the size of a car. That big shield that you see outside, that's a heat shield which is going to protect it. And that will be basically built over the next year, and it will be launched June a year from now. Now, in that case, because it was a very big Rover, we couldn't use airbags. And I know many of you, kind of, last time afterwards said well, that was a cool thing to have — those airbags. Unfortunately this Rover is, like, ten times the size of the, you know, mass-wise, of the other Rover, or three times the mass. So we can't use airbags. So we have to come up with another ingenious idea of how do we land it. And we didn't want to take it propulsively all the way to the surface because we didn't want to contaminate the surface; we wanted the Rover to immediately land on its legs.So we came up with this ingenious idea, which is used here on Earth for helicopters. Actually, the lander will come down to about 100 feet and hover above that surface for 100 feet, and then we have a sky crane which will take that Rover and land it down on the surface. Hopefully it all will work, you know, it will work that way. And that Rover will be more kind of like a chemist. What we are going to be doing with that Rover as it drives around, it's going to go and analyze the chemical composition of rocks. So it will have an arm which will take samples, put them in an oven, crush and analyze them. But also, if there is something that we cannot reach because it is too high on a cliff, we have a little laser system which will actually zap the rock, evaporate some of it, and actually analyze what's coming from that rock. So it's a little bit like ""Star Wars,"" you know, but it's real. It's real stuff. And also to help you, to help the community so you can do ads on that Rover, we are going to train that Rover to actually in addition to do this, to actually serve cocktails, you know, also on Mars.So that's kind of giving you an idea of the kind of, you know, fun things we are doing on Mars. I thought I'd go to ""The Lord of the Rings"" now and show you some of the things we have there. Now, ""The Lord of the Rings"" has two things played through it. One, it's a very attractive planet — it just has the beauty of the rings and so on. But for scientists, also the rings have a special meaning, because we believe they represent, on a small scale, how the Solar System actually formed. Some of the scientists believe that the way the Solar System formed, that the Sun when it collapsed and actually created the Sun, a lot of the dust around it created rings and then the particles in those rings accumulated together, and they formed bigger rocks, and then that's how the planets, you know, were formed.So, the idea is, by watching Saturn we're actually watching our solar system in real time being formed on a smaller scale, so it's like a test bed for it. So, let me show you a little bit on what that Saturnian system looks like. First, I'm going to fly you over the rings. By the way, all of this is real stuff. This is not animation or anything like this. This is actually taken from the satellite that we have in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini. And you see the amount of detail that is in those rings, which are the particles. Some of them are agglomerating together to form larger particles. So that's why you have these gaps, is because a small satellite, you know, is being formed in that location. Now, you think that those rings are very large objects. Yes, they are very large in one dimension; in the other dimension they are paper thin. Very, very thin. What you are seeing here is the shadow of the ring on Saturn itself. And that's one of the satellites which was actually formed on that one. So, think about it as a paper-thin, huge area of many hundreds of thousands of miles, which is rotating.And we have a wide variety of kind of satellites which will form, each one looking very different and very odd, and that keeps scientists busy for tens of years trying to explain this, and telling NASA we need more money so we can explain what these things look like, or why they formed that way. Well, there were two satellites which were particularly interesting. One of them is called Enceladus. It's a satellite which was all made of ice, and we measured it from orbit. Made of ice. But there was something bizarre about it. If you look at these stripes in here, what we call tiger stripes, when we flew over them, all of a sudden we saw an increase in the temperature, which said that those stripes are warmer than the rest of the planet.So as we flew by away from it, we looked back. And guess what? We saw geysers coming out. So this is a Yellowstone, you know, of Saturn. We are seeing geysers of ice which are coming out of that planet, which indicate that most likely there is an ocean, you know, below the surface. And somehow, through some dynamic effect, we're having these geysers which are being, you know, emitted from it. And the reason I showed the little arrow there, I think that should say 30 miles, we decided a few months ago to actually fly the spacecraft through the plume of that geyser so we can actually measure the material that it is made of. That was [unclear] also — you know, because we were worried about the risk of it, but it worked pretty well. We flew at the top of it, and we found that there is a fair amount of organic material which is being emitted in combination with the ice. And over the next few years, as we keep orbiting, you know, Saturn, we are planning to get closer and closer down to the surface and make more accurate measurements.Now, another satellite also attracted a lot of attention, and that's Titan. And the reason Titan is particularly interesting, it's a satellite bigger than our moon, and it has an atmosphere. And that atmosphere is very — as dense as our own atmosphere. So if you were on Titan, you would feel the same pressure that you feel in here. Except it's a lot colder, and that atmosphere is heavily made of methane. Now, methane gets people all excited, because it's organic material, so immediately people start thinking, could life have evolved in that location, when you have a lot of organic material. So people believe now that Titan is most likely what we call a pre-biotic planet, because it's so cold organic material did not get to the stage of becoming biological material, and therefore life could have evolved on it.So it could be Earth, frozen three billion years ago before life actually started on it. So that's getting a lot of interest, and to show you some example of what we did in there, we actually dropped a probe, which was developed by our colleagues in Europe, we dropped a probe as we were orbiting Saturn. We dropped a probe in the atmosphere of Titan. And this is a picture of an area as we were coming down. Just looked like the coast of California for me. You see the rivers which are coming along the coast, and you see that white area which looks like Catalina Island, and that looks like an ocean. And then with an instrument we have on board, a radar instrument, we found there are lakes like the Great Lakes in here, so it looks very much like Earth. It looks like there are rivers on it, there are oceans or lakes, we know there are clouds. We think it's raining also on it. So it's very much like the cycle on Earth except because it's so cold, it could not be water, you know, because water would have frozen. What it turned out, that all that we are seeing, all this liquid, [is made of] hydrocarbon and ethane and methane, similar to what you put in your car.So here we have a cycle of a planet which is like our Earth, but is all made of ethane and methane and organic material. So if you were on Mars — sorry, on Titan, you don't have to worry about four-dollar gasoline. You just drive to the nearest lake, stick your hose in it, and you've got your car filled up. On the other hand, if you light a match the whole planet will blow up. So in closing, I said I want to close by a couple of pictures. And just to kind of put us in perspective, this is a picture of Saturn taken with a spacecraft from behind Saturn, looking towards the Sun. The Sun is behind Saturn, so we see what we call ""forward scattering,"" so it highlights all the rings. And I'm going to zoom. There is a — I'm not sure you can see it very well, but on the top left, around 10 o'clock, there is a little teeny dot, and that's Earth. You barely can see ourselves. So what I did, I thought I'd zoom on it. So as you zoom in, you know, you can see Earth, you know, just in the middle here. So we zoomed all the way on the art center.So thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_elachi_on_the_mars_rovers
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"My name is Ursus Wehrli, and I would like to talk to you this morning about my project, Tidying Up Art. First of all — any questions so far? First of all, I have to say I'm not from around here. I'm from a completely different cultural area, maybe you noticed? I mean, I'm wearing a tie, first. And then secondly, I'm a little bit nervous because I'm speaking in a foreign language, and I want to apologize in advance, for any mistakes I might make. Because I'm from Switzerland, and I just don't hope you think this is Swiss German I'm speaking now here. This is just what it sounds like if we Swiss try to speak American. But don't worry — I don't have trouble with English, as such. I mean, it's not my problem, it's your language after all. (Laughter) I am fine. After this presentation here at TED, I can simply go back to Switzerland, and you have to go on talking like this all the time. (Laughter)So I've been asked by the organizers to read from my book. It's called ""Tidying Up Art"" and it's, as you can see, it's more or less a picture book. So the reading would be over very quickly. But since I'm here at TED, I decided to hold my talk here in a more modern way, in the spirit of TED here, and I managed to do some slides here for you. I'd like to show them around so we can just, you know — (Laughter) Actually, I managed to prepare for you some enlarged pictures — even better.So Tidying Up Art, I mean, I have to say, that's a relatively new term. You won't be familiar with it. I mean, it's a hobby of mine that I've been indulging in for the last few years, and it all started out with this picture of the American artist, Donald Baechler I had hanging at home. I had to look at it every day and after a while I just couldn't stand the mess anymore this guy was looking at all day long. Yeah, I kind of felt sorry for him. And it seemed to me even he felt really bad facing these unorganized red squares day after day. So I decided to give him a little support, and brought some order into neatly stacking the blocks on top of each other. (Laughter) Yeah. And I think he looks now less miserable. And it was great. With this experience, I started to look more closely at modern art. Then I realized how, you know, the world of modern art is particularly topsy-turvy.And I can show here a very good example. It's actually a simple one, but it's a good one to start with. It's a picture by Paul Klee. And we can see here very clearly, it's a confusion of color. (Laughter) Yeah. The artist doesn't really seem to know where to put the different colors. The various pictures here of the various elements of the picture — the whole thing is unstructured. We don't know, maybe Mr. Klee was probably in a hurry, I mean — (Laughter) — maybe he had to catch a plane, or something. We can see here he started out with orange, and then he already ran out of orange, and here we can see he decided to take a break for a square. And I would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture. (Laughter) We can see now what was barely recognizable in the original: 17 red and orange squares are juxtaposed with just two green squares. Yeah, that's great. So I mean, that's just tidying up for beginners. I would like to show you here a picture which is a bit more advanced. (Laughter)What can you say? What a mess. I mean, you see, everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space. If my room back home had looked like this, my mother would have grounded me for three days. So I'd like to — I wanted to reintroduce some structure into that picture. And that's really advanced tidying up. (Applause) Yeah, you're right. Sometimes people clap at this point, but that's actually more in Switzerland. (Laughter) We Swiss are famous for chocolate and cheese. Our trains run on time. We are only happy when things are in order.But to go on, here is a very good example to see. This is a picture by Joan Miro. And yeah, we can see the artist has drawn a few lines and shapes and dropped them any old way onto a yellow background. And yeah, it's the sort of thing you produce when you're doodling on the phone. (Laughter) And this is my — (Laughter) — you can see now the whole thing takes up far less space. It's more economical and also more efficient. With this method Mr. Miro could have saved canvas for another picture.But I can see in your faces that you're still a little bit skeptical. So that you can just appreciate how serious I am about all this, I brought along the patents, the specifications for some of these works, because I've had my working methods patented at the Eidgenössische Amt für Geistiges Eigentum in Bern, Switzerland. (Laughter) I'll just quote from the specification. ""Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht —"" It's not finished yet. ""Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht Götz von Ohlenhusen wird die Verfahrensweise rechtlich geschützt welche die Kunst durch spezifisch aufgeräumte Regelmässigkeiten des allgemeinen Formenschatzes neue Wirkungen zu erzielen möglich wird.""Ja, well I could have translated that, but you would have been none the wiser. I'm not sure myself what it means but it sounds good anyway. I just realized it's important how one introduces new ideas to people, that's why these patents are sometimes necessary. I would like to do a short test with you. Everyone is sitting in quite an orderly fashion here this morning. So I would like to ask you all to raise your right hand. Yeah. The right hand is the one we write with, apart from the left-handers. And now, I'll count to three. I mean, it still looks very orderly to me. Now, I'll count to three, and on the count of three I'd like you all to shake hands with the person behind you. OK? One, two, three. (Laughter)You can see now, that's a good example: even behaving in an orderly, systematic way can sometimes lead to complete chaos. So we can also see that very clearly in this next painting. This is a painting by the artist, Niki de Saint Phalle. And I mean, in the original it's completely unclear to see what this tangle of colors and shapes is supposed to depict. But in the tidied up version, it's plain to see that it's a sunburnt woman playing volleyball. (Laughter) Yeah, it's a — this one here, that's much better. That's a picture by Keith Haring. (Laughter) I think it doesn't matter. So, I mean, this picture has not even got a proper title. It's called ""Untitled"" and I think that's appropriate.So, in the tidied-up version we have a sort of Keith Haring spare parts shop. (Laughter) This is Keith Haring looked at statistically. One can see here quite clearly, you can see we have 25 pale green elements, of which one is in the form of a circle. Or here, for example, we have 27 pink squares with only one pink curve. I mean, that's interesting. One could extend this sort of statistical analysis to cover all Mr. Haring's various works, in order to establish in which period the artist favored pale green circles or pink squares. And the artist himself could also benefit from this sort of listing procedure by using it to estimate how many pots of paint he's likely to need in the future. (Laughter)One can obviously also make combinations. For example, with the Keith Haring circles and Kandinsky's dots. You can add them to all the squares of Paul Klee. In the end, one has a list with which one then can arrange. Then you categorize it, then you file it, put that file in a filing cabinet, put it in your office and you can make a living doing it. (Laughter) Yeah, from my own experience. So I'm — (Laughter) Actually, I mean, here we have some artists that are a bit more structured. It's not too bad. This is Jasper Johns. We can see here he was practicing with his ruler. (Laughter)But I think it could still benefit from more discipline. And I think the whole thing adds up much better if you do it like this. (Laughter) And here, that's one of my favorites. Tidying up Rene Magritte — this is really fun. You know, there is a — (Laughter) I'm always being asked what inspired me to embark on all this. It goes back to a time when I was very often staying in hotels. So once I had the opportunity to stay in a ritzy, five-star hotel. And you know, there you had this little sign — I put this little sign outside the door every morning that read, ""Please tidy room."" I don't know if you have them over here. So actually, my room there hasn't been tidied once daily, but three times a day. So after a while I decided to have a little fun, and before leaving the room each day I'd scatter a few things around the space. Like books, clothes, toothbrush, etc. And it was great. By the time I returned everything had always been neatly returned to its place. But then one morning, I hang the same little sign onto that picture by Vincent van Gogh. (Laughter) And you have to say this room hadn't been tidied up since 1888. And when I returned it looked like this. (Laughter) Yeah, at least it is now possible to do some vacuuming. (Laughter)OK, I mean, I can see there are always people that like reacting that one or another picture hasn't been properly tidied up. So we can make a short test with you. This is a picture by Rene Magritte, and I'd like you all to inwardly — like in your head, that is — to tidy that up. So it's possible that some of you would make it like this. (Laughter) Yeah? I would actually prefer to do it more this way. Some people would make apple pie out of it. But it's a very good example to see that the whole work was more of a handicraft endeavor that involved the very time-consuming job of cutting out the various elements and sticking them back in new arrangements. And it's not done, as many people imagine, with the computer, otherwise it would look like this. (Laughter)So now I've been able to tidy up pictures that I've wanted to tidy up for a long time. Here is a very good example. Take Jackson Pollock, for example. It's — oh, no, it's — that's a really hard one. But after a while, I just decided here to go all the way and put the paint back into the cans. (Applause) Or you could go into three-dimensional art. Here we have the fur cup by Meret Oppenheim. Here I just brought it back to its original state. (Laughter) But yeah, and it's great, you can even go, you know — Or we have this pointillist movement for those of you who are into art. The pointillist movement is that kind of paintings where everything is broken down into dots and pixels. And then I — this sort of thing is ideal for tidying up. (Laughter)So I once applied myself to the work of the inventor of that method, Georges Seurat, and I collected together all his dots. And now they're all in here. (Laughter) You can count them afterwards, if you like. You see, that's the wonderful thing about the tidy up art idea: it's new. So there is no existing tradition in it. There is no textbooks, I mean, not yet, anyway. I mean, it's ""the future we will create."" (Laughter) But to round things up I would like to show you just one more. This is the village square by Pieter Bruegel. That's how it looks like when you send everyone home. (Laughter) Yeah, maybe you're asking yourselves where old Bruegel's people went? Of course, they're not gone. They're all here. (Laughter) I just piled them up. (Laughter)So I'm — yeah, actually I'm kind of finished at that moment. And for those who want to see more, I've got my book downstairs in the bookshop. And I'm happy to sign it for you with any name of any artist. (Laughter) But before leaving I would like to show you, I'm working right now on another — in a related field with my tidying up art method. I'm working in a related field. And I started to bring some order into some flags. Here — that's just my new proposal here for the Union Jack. (Laughter) And then maybe before I leave you ... yeah, I think, after you have seen that I have to leave anyway. (Laughter) Yeah, that was a hard one. I couldn't find a way to tidy that up properly, so I just decided to make it a little bit more simpler. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ursus_wehrli_tidies_up_art
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"Welcome to 10,000 feet. Let me explain why we are here and why some of you have a pine cone close to you. Once upon a time, I did a book called ""How Buildings Learn."" Today's event you might call ""How Mountains Teach."" A little background: For 10 years I've been trying to figure out how to hack civilization so that we can get long-term thinking to be automatic and common instead of difficult and rare — or in some cases, non-existent. It would be helpful if humanity got into the habit of thinking of the now not just as next week or next quarter, but you know, next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years — basically civilization's story so far.So we have the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. It's an incubator for about a dozen projects, all having to do with continuity over the long term. Our core project is a rather ambitious folly — I suppose, a mythic undertaking: to build a 10,000-year clock that can really keep good time for that long a period. And the design problems of a project like that are just absolutely delicious. Go to the clock. And what we have here is something many of you saw here three years ago. It's the first working prototype of the clock. It's about nine feet high. Designed by Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose. It's presently in London, and is ticking away very deliberately at the science museum there.So the design problem for today is going to be, how do you house an eventual monumental clock like this so it can really tick, save time beautifully for 100 centuries? Well, this was the first solution. Alexander Rose came up with this idea of a spiraloid tower with continuous sloping ramps. And it looked like a way to go, until you start thinking about, what does deep time do to a building? Well, this is what deep time does to a building. This is the Parthenon. It's only 2,450 years old, and look what happened to it. Here's a beautiful project. They really knew it'd last forever, because they'd build it out of absolutely huge stones. And now it's a pathetic ruin and no one even knows what it was used for. That's what happens to buildings. They're vulnerable. Even the most durable and intactable buildings, like the pyramids of Giza, are in bad shape when you look up close. They've been looted inside and out. And they're built to protect things but they don't protect things.So we got to thinking, if you can't put things safely in a building, where can you safely put them? We thought, OK, underground. How about underground with a view? Underground in a place that's really solid. So the obvious answer was, we need a mountain. You don't want just any mountain. You need absolutely the right mountain if you're going to have a clock for 10,000 years. So here's an image of the long view of the search problem. And we got to thinking for various reasons it ought to be a desert mountain, so we got looking in the dry areas of the Southwest. We looked at mesas in New Mexico. We were looking at dead volcanoes in Arizona.Then Roger Kennedy, who was the director of the National Parks Service, led us to Eastern Nevada, to America's newest and oldest national park, which is called Great Basin National Park. It's right on the eastern border of Nevada. It's the highest range in the state — over 13,000 feet. And you'll notice that on the left, on the left, on the west, it's very steep, and on the right it's gentle. This place is remote. It's over 200 miles from any major city. It's nowhere near any Interstate or railroad. And it's — the only thing that goes by is what's called America's loneliest highway, U.S. 50.Now, inside the yellow line here, on the right is — that's all national park. Inside the green line is national forest. And then over to the left is Bureau of Land Management land and some private land. Now, as it happened, that two-mile-long strip right in the middle, this vertical, was available because it was private land. And thanks to Jay Walker who was here and Mitch Kapor who was here, who started the process, Long Now was able to get that two-mile-long strip of land. And now let's look at the grand truth of what's there.We're in Pole Canyon, looking west up the western escarpment of Mount Washington, which is 11,600 feet on top. Those white cliffs are a dense Cambrian limestone. That's a 2,000-foot thick formation, and it might be a beautiful place to hide a clock. It would be a pilgrimage to get to it; it would be a serious hike to get up to where the clock is. So last June, the Long Now board, some staff and some donors and advisors, made a two-week expedition to the mountain to explore it and investigate, one, if it's the right mountain, and two, if it's the right mountain, how it might actually work for us.Now Danny Hillis sort of framed the problem. He has a theory of how the overall clock experience should work. It's what he calls the seven stages of a mythic adventure. It starts with the image. The image is a picture you have in your mind of the goal at the end of the journey. In this case it might well be an image of the clock. Then there's the point of embarkation, that is, the point of transition from ordinary life to being a pilgrim on a quest. Then — this is a nice image of it, there's the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a concept, it's like a twilight zone, it's a place where it's difficult, where you get disoriented, maybe you get scared — but you have to go through it if you're going to get to some kind of deep reintegration. Then there should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth to finish the process of getting there.Now Brian Eno, who's been in the thick of the Long Now process, spent two years making a C.D. called ""January 7003,"" and it's ""Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now."" Based on — parts of it are based on an algorithm that Danny Hillis developed, so that a peal of 10 bells makes a different peal every day for 10,000 years. The Hillis algorithm. 10 factorial gives you that number. And in fact, pretty soon we'll hear the sound. January 7003. There it is.OK, back to Danny's list. Number five of the seven is the payoff. This is it. The climax. The goal. The main thing that you're trying to get to. And then Danny says a really great journey will have a secret payoff. Something you didn't expect that caps what you did expect. Then there's the return. You've got to have a gradual return to the ordinary world, so you have time to assimilate what you've learned. And then, how about a memento? Number seven. At the end of it there's something physical, a kind of reward that you take away. It might be a piece of a core drill of the mountain. Something that's just yours. How do you study a mountain for the kinds of things we're talking about? This is not a normal building project. What do you look for? What are the elements that will most affect your ideas and decisions?Start with borders. If you look on the left side of the cliffs here, that's national park. That's sacrosanct — you can't do anything with that. To the right of it is national forest. There's possibilities. The borders are important. Other elements were mines, weather, approaches and elevation. And especially trees. Look at those things up on top there. It turns out that Mount Washington is covered with bristlecone pines. They're the world's oldest living thing. People think they're just the size of shrubs, but that's not actually true. There are trees on that mountain that are 5,000 years old and still living. The wood is so solid it's like stone, and it lasts for a long time. So when you do tree ring studies of trunks that are on the mountain, some of them go back 10,000 years. The stone itself is absolutely beautiful, sculpted by millennia of very tough winters up there. We had tree ring analysts from the University of Arizona join us on the expedition.Now, if you guys have a pine cone handy, now's a good time to put it in your hand and feel it, especially on the end. That's interesting. You'll find out why it's called a bristlecone pine. A little sensory experience. Here's Danny Hillis in the midst of a bristlecone pine forest on Long Now land. I should say that the age of bristlecones was discovered, led by a theory. Edmund Schulman in the 1950s had been studying trees under great stress at Timberline, and came to the realization that he put in an article in Science magazine called, ""Longevity under Adversity in Conifers."" And then, based on that principle, he started looking around at the various trees at Timberline, and realized that the bristlecone pines — he found some in the White Mountains that were over 4,000 years old. Longevity under adversity is a pretty interesting design principle in its own right.OK, onto the mines. The first asking price for the property when we looked at it in 1998 was one billion dollars for 180 acres and a couple of mines. Because the owner said, ""There's one billion dollars of beryllium in that mountain."" And we said, ""Wow, that's great. Listen, we'll counter. How about zero?(Laughter)And we're a non-profit foundation, you can give us the property and take a hell of a tax deduction.(Laughter)All you have to do is prove to the government it's worth a billion dollars.""Well, a few years went by and there was some kind of back and forth, and by and by, thanks to Mitch and Jay, we were able to buy the whole property for 140,000 dollars. This is one of the mines. It doesn't have any beryllium in it. It's called the Pole Adit. And it does have tungsten, a little bit of tungsten, left over, that's the kind of mine it was. But it goes a mile-and-a-half in a straight line, due east into the range, into very interesting territory — except that, as you'll see when we go inside in a minute, we were hoping for limestone but in there is just shale. And shale is not quite completely competent rock. Competent rock is rock that will hold itself up without any shoring. The shale would like some shoring, and so parts of it are caved in in there.That's Ben Roberts from — he's the bat specialist from the National Park. But there are many wonders back in there, like this weird fungus on some of the collapsed timbers. OK, here's another mine that's up on top of the property, and it dates back to 1870. That's what the property was originally built around — it was a set of mining claims. It was a very productive silver mine. In fact, it was the highest-operating mine in Nevada, and it ran year round. You can imagine what it was like in the winter at 10,000 feet. You may recognize a couple of the miners there. There's Jeff Bezos on the right and Paul Saville on the left looking for galena, which is the lead-silver thing. They didn't find any. They both kept their day jobs. Here's the last mine.It's called the Bonanza Adit. It's down in a canyon. And Alexander Rose on the left there worked with a bunch of people from the National Park to survey the whole mine. It's a mile deep. And they also found four species of bats in there. Now, almost all those mines, by the way, meet underneath the mountain. They don't quite, but it's something to think about. They don't quite meet. Let's go to weather. Mountains specialize in interesting weather. Way more interesting than Monterey even today.And so one Tuesday morning last June, there we were. Woke up in the morning — the mountain was covered with snow. That was a great time to go up and visit our weather station which again, thanks to Mitch Kapor, we're building up there. And it's a pretty interesting scene. This is, on the left there, the joyful lady is Pat Irwin, who's the regional head of the National Forest Service, and they gave us the temporary use permit to be there. We want a temporary use permit for the clock, eventually — 10,000-year temporary use permit.(Laughter)The weather station's pretty interesting. Kurt Bollacker and Alexander Rose designed a radically wireless station. It runs on solar, and it sends a signal with that antenna and bounces it off of micrometeorite trails in the atmosphere to a place in Bozeman, Montana, where the data is taken down and then sent through landlines to San Francisco, where we put the data in real time up on our website. And there you see a week of weather at 9,400 feet on Mount Washington. Let's go to approaches. As it happens, there are no trails anywhere on Mount Washington, just a few old mining roads like this, so you have to bushwhack everywhere. But there's no bears, and there's no poison oak, and there's basically no people because this place has been empty for a long time. You can hike for days and not encounter anybody.Well, here's a potential approach. You need to come up the Lincoln Canyon. It's this beautiful world all of its own, surrounded by cliffs, and it's an easy hike to stroll up the canyon bottom, until you get to this barrier, and it actually presents a problem. So you can scratch Lincoln Canyon as an approach. Another possible approach is right up the western front of the mountain. You can see why we sometimes call it Long Mountain. And from where you're standing at 6,000 feet in the valley, it's an easy hike up to the mature pinyon and juniper forest through that knoll at the front at 7,600 feet. And you can carry right on up through meadows and steepening forest to the high base of the cliffs at 10,500 feet, where there's a bit of a problem.Now, Jeff Bezos advised us when he left at the end of the expedition, ""Make the clock inaccessible. The harder it is to get to, the more people will value it."" And check — those are 600-foot vertical walls there. So Alexander Rose wanted to explore this route, and he started over here on the left from his pickup truck at 8,900 feet and headed up the mountain. Now, as you gain elevation your IQ goes down —(Laughter)but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not. In fact, Danny Hillis can estimate altitude by how much math he can't do in his head.(Laughter)Now, I happened to be on the radio with Alexander when he got to this point at the base of the cliffs, and he said, quote, ""There's a hidden notch. I think I can get up a ways."" Now, he's a rock climber, but you know, he's our executive director. I don't want him killed. I know he's going to love cliffs. I'm saying, ""Be careful, be careful, be careful."" Then he starts going up, and the next thing I hear is, ""I'm half-way up. It's like climbing stairs. I'm going up 60 degrees. It's a secret passage. It's like something from Tolkien."" And I'm going, ""Careful, careful. Please be careful."" And then, of course, the next thing I hear is, ""I've made it to the top. You can see all of creation from up here."" And he dashed across the top of the mountains.In fact, there he is. That's Alexander Rose. First ascent of the western face to Mount Washington, and a solo ascent at that. This discovery changed everything about our sense of these cliffs and what to do with them. We realized that we had to name this thing that Alexander discovered. How about Zander's Crevice? No.(Laughter)So we finally decided on Alexander's Siq. Zander's Siq is named after — some of you have been to Petra, there's this wonderful slot canyon that leads into Petra called the Siq, and so this is the Siq. And it really is hidden. I can't find it in this image, and I'm not sure you can. Only when you get fresh snow can you see just along the rim there, and that brings it out.Now, Danny and I were up at this same area one day, and Danny looked over to the right and noticed something halfway up the cliffs, which is a kind of a porch or a cliff shelf with bristlecones on it, and supposed that people going up to the clock inside the mountain could come out onto that shelf and look down at the view. And the people toiling up the mountain could see them, these tiny little people up there, incredibly halfway up the cliff. How did they get there? Do I have to do that? And so that maybe becomes part of the draw and part of the labyrinth. You can get another angle on Danny's porch by going around to the south and looking north at the whole formation there. And you need to know that Danny's clock is to be kept accurate by a ray of sunshine, that perfect noon hitting it every sunny day, and the pulse of heat from that sets off a solar trigger which resets the clock to make it perfectly accurate. So even with the slowing of the rotation of the earth and so on, the clock will keep perfectly good time.So here we're looking from the south, look north. This is all Forest Service land. If you go up on top of those cliffs, that's some of the Long Now land in those trees. And if you go up there and look back, then you'll get a sense of what the view starts to be like from the top of the mountain. That's the long view. That's 80 miles to the horizon. And that's also timberline and those bristlecones really are shrubs. That's a different place to be. It's 11,400 feet and it's exquisite. Now, if you go over to the right from this image to looking at the edge of the cliffs, it's 600 foot, just about a yard to the left of Kurt Bollacker's foot, there is a 600-foot drop. He's ambling on over to Zander's Siq. That's what it looks like looking down it. We should probably put in a rail or something. Over on the eastern side it's gentle, as you can see. And that's not snow — that's what the white limestone looks like. You also see there a bighorn sheep. Their herd was reintroduced from Wyoming. And they're doing pretty well, but they've got a bit of trouble.This is Danny Hillis, and he's figuring out a design problem. he's trying to determine if where he is on a bit of Long Now land would appear from down in the valley to be the actual peak of the mountain. because the real peak is hidden around the corner. This is what in the infantry we used to call the military crest. And as it turned out the answer is, yes, that is from down below in the valley it does look like the peak, and that might be conjured with. We gradually realized we have three serious design domains to work on with this. One is the experience of the mountain. Another is the experience in the mountain. And the third is the experience from the mountain, which is really dominated by the view shed of the spring valley there behind Danny, and if you look off to the right, out there, 15 miles across to the Schell Creek range.In the front, there are 10 ranches strung right along the base of the mountains using the water from the mountains. In fact, there are artesian wells where water springs right into the air. One of the ranches is called the Kirkeby Ranch, and I'll take you there for a minute. It's a very nice ranch. Alfalfa and cattle, run by Paul and Ronnie Brenham, and it's pretty idyllic. It's also hard work. And most of these ranches are having trouble keeping going. This is their view to the west of the Schell Creek range. And if you go out to that line of trees at the far end, you'll see what the valley used to look like. This is Rocky Mountain junipers that have been there for thousands of years.And a scheme emerged that Long Now is looking to see if it might be possible to buy up the whole valley, because those 10 ranches with their 17,000 acres dominate a 500 square mile valley with their grazing allotments and so on, and there's a possibility that you could get the whole thing for five million dollars and gradually restore it to its wild condition, and somewhere in the process turn it back over to the National Park, and it would double the size of Great Basin National Park. That would be swell.OK, let's take one more look at the mountain itself. The clock experience should be profound, but from the outside it should be invisible. Now, at the base of the high cliffs there's this natural cave. It's only about 12 feet deep, but what if it were deepened from inside? You excavated from somewhere, came up from inside and deepened it. And then you could have an entrance which was very rough and narrow as you first went in, that gradually becomes more refined and then actually quite exquisite. And this stone takes a perfect polish. You'd have a polished set of passages and chambers in there eventually leading to the 10,000 year clock.And it's not a mine. This would be a nuanced evocation of the basic structure of the mountain, and you would be appreciating it as much from inside as you do from outside. This is architecture not made by building, but by what you very carefully take away. So that's what the mountain taught us. Most of the amazingness of the clock we can borrow from the amazingness of the mountain. All we have to do is highlight its spectacular features and blend in with them. It's not a clock in a mountain — it's a mountain clock. Now, the Tewa Indians in the Southwest have a saying for what you need to do when you want to think long term about anything. They say, ""pin peya obe"" — welcome to the mountain.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_on_the_long_now
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"I have, like, a thing about sleeping. I don't sleep that much, and I've come to this thing about, like, not sleeping much as being a great virtue, after years of kind of battling it as being a terrible detriment, or something. And now I really like sort of sitting up, you know. But for years I've been sitting up and I think that, like, my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia. I lie awake. I think thoughts. I walk aimlessly. Sometimes I used to walk more at night. I walk during the day and I follow people who I think look interesting. (Laughter)And sometimes — actually, once it was on Page Six in the Post, that I was cruising this guy, like, sort of, whatever, but I was actually just following because he had these really great shoes on. And so I was following this guy. And I took a picture of his shoes, and we thanked each other and just went on our way. But I do that all the time. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of my design ideas come from mistakes and tricks of the eye. Because I feel like, you know, there are so many images out there, so many clothes out there. And the only ones that look interesting to me are the ones that look slightly mistaken, of course, or very, very surprising. And often, I'm driving in a taxi and I see a hole in a shirt, or something that looks very interesting or pretty or functional in some way that I'd never seen happen before. And so I'd make the car stop, and I'd get out of the car and walk, and see that in fact there wasn't a hole, but it was a trick of my eye, it was a shadow, you know. Or if there was a hole I'd think like, oh damn, there was actually someone thought of that thought already. Someone made that mistake already so I can't do it anymore.I don't know where inspiration comes from. It does not come for me from research. I don't get necessarily inspired by research. As a matter of fact, one of the most fun things I've ever, ever done in my whole life, was this Christmas season at the Guggenheim in New York. I read ""Peter and the Wolf"" with this beautiful band from Juilliard. And I did like, you know, the narrator, and I read it. And I saw this really smart critic who I love. This woman, Joan Acocella, who's a friend of mine, and she came backstage and she said, oh, you know, Isaac, did you know that, talking about Stalinism and talking about, you know, like the '30s in Russia. And I said, how do I know about Stalinism? I know about a wolf and a bird and, you know, he ate the bird, and then in the end you hear, you know, you hear the bird squeaking, or something, you know?So I don't really know that. I don't really — actually I do my own kind of research, you know. If I'm commissioned to do the costumes for an 18th-century opera, or something like that, I will do a lot of research, because it's interesting, not because it's what I'm supposed to do. I'm very, very, very inspired by movies. The color of movies and the way light makes the colors, light from behind the projection, or light from the projection, makes the colors look so impossible. And anyway, roll this little clip, I'll just show you. I sit up at night and I watch movies and I watch women in movies a lot. And I think about, you know, their roles, and about how you have to, like, watch what your daughters look at. Because I look at the way women are portrayed all the time. Whether they're kind of glorified in this way, or whether they're kind of, you know, ironically glorified, or whether they're, you know, sort of denigrated, or ironically denigrated.I go back to color all the time. Color is something that motivates me a lot. It's rarely color that I find in nature, although, you know, juxtaposed next to artificial color, natural color is so beautiful. So that's what I do. I study color a lot. But for the most part, I think, like, how can I ever make anything that is as beautiful as that image of Natalie Wood? How can I ever make anything as beautiful as Greta Garbo? I mean, that's just not possible, you know. And so that's what makes me lie awake at night, I guess, you know. I want to show you — I'm also like a big — I go to astrologers and tarot card readers often, and that's another thing that motivates me a lot. People say, oh, do that. An astrologer tells me to do something. So I do it. (Laughter)When I was about 21, an astrologer told me that I was going to meet the man of my dreams, and that his name was going to be Eric, right? So, you know, for years I would go to bars and, sort of, anyone I met whose name was Eric I was humping immediately, or something. (Laughter) And there were times when I was actually so desperate I would just, you know, walk into a room and just go like, ""Eric!"" And anybody who would turn around I would, sort of, make a beeline for. (Laughter) And I had this really interesting tarot reading a long time ago. The last card he pulled, which was representing my destiny was this guy on like a straw boater with a cane and you know, sort of spats and this, you know, a minstrel singer, right? I want to show you this clip because I do this kind of crazy thing where I do a cabaret act. So actually, check this out. Very embarrassing. (Video): Thank you. We can do anything you ask.The name of the show is based on this story that I have to tell you about my mother. It's sort of an excerpt from a quote of hers. I was dating this guy, right? And this has to do with being happy, I swear. I was dating this guy and it was going on for about a year, right. And we were getting serious, so we decided to invite them all to dinner, our parents. And we, you know, sort of introduced them to each other. My mother was, sort of, very sensitive to his mother, who it seemed was a little bit skeptical about the whole alternative lifestyle thing. You know, homosexuality, right? So my mother was a little offended. She turned to her and she said, ""Are you kidding? They have the greatest life together. They eat out, they see shows."" They eat out, they see shows. (Laughter) That's the name of the show, they eat out, they — that's on my tombstone when I die. ""He ate out, he saw shows,"" right?So in editing these clips, I didn't have the audacity to edit a clip of me singing at Joe's Pub. So you'll have to, like, go check it out and come see me or something. Because it's mortifying, and yet it feels ... I don't know how to put this. I feel as little comfort as possible is a good thing, you know. And at least, you know, in my case, because if I just do one thing all the time, I don't know, I get very, very bored. I bore very easily. And you know, I don't say that I do everything well, I just say that I do a lot of things, that's all. And I kind of try not to look back, you know. Except, I guess, that's what staying up every night is about. Like, looking back and thinking, what a fool you made of yourself, you know. But I guess that's okay. Right? Because if you do many things you get to feel lousy about everything, and not just one, you know. You don't master feeling lousy about one thing. Yeah, exactly.I will show you this next thing, speaking of costumes for operas. I do work with different choreographers. I work with Twyla Tharp a lot, and I work with Mark Morris a lot, who is one of my best friends. And I designed three operas with him, and the most recent one, ""King Arthur."" I'd been very ingrained in the dance world since I was a teenager. I went to performing arts high school, where I was an actor. And many of my friends were ballet dancers. Again, I don't know where inspiration comes from. I don't know where it comes from. I started making puppets when I was a kid. Maybe that's where the whole inspiration thing started from, puppets, right. And then performing arts high school. There I was in high school, meeting dancers and acting.And somehow, from there, I got interested in design. I went to Parsons School of Design and then I began my career as a designer. I don't really think of myself as a designer, I don't really think of myself necessarily as a fashion designer. And frankly, I don't really know what to call myself. I think of myself as a ... I don't know what I think of myself as. It's just that. (Laughter) But I must say, this whole thing about being slightly bored all the time, that is what — I think that is a very important thing for a fashion designer. You always have to be slightly bored with everything. And if you're not, you have to pretend to be slightly bored with everything. (Laughter)But I am really a little bored with everything. I always say to my partner, Marisa Gardini, who books everything — she books everything and she makes everything happen. And she makes all the deals. And I always tell her that I find myself with a lot of time on the computer bridge program. Too much time on computer bridge, which is, you know, like that's so ... somehow, like, about ten years ago I thought that the most unboring place in the world would be like a T.V. studio, like for a day show. Some kind of day talk show. Because it's all of these things that I love all kind of in one place. And if you ever get bored you can look at another thing, and do another thing and talk about it, right?And so I had this T.V. show. And that was a very, very, very big part of my process. Actually, could you roll the clip, please? This is one of my favorite clips of Rosie.(Video) Isaac Mizrahi: We're back on the set. Hi there.Rosie O'Donnell: Hello, Ben.IM: Look how cute she looks with this, just a slick back.Man: Her grandmother says, ""Delish!""IM: Ah, wow, delish. All right. So now where should I position myself? I want to stay out of the way. I don't want to be — okay. Here we go. Do you get nervous, Ashleigh?Ashleigh: Doing what? ROD: Cutting hair.A: Cutting hair? Never, never. I don't think there was ever a day where I cut hair I was nervous. IM: You look so cute already, by the way. ROD: You like it? All right. IM: Do you have a problem with looking cute? You want to look cute.ROD: Of course I want to look cute. IM: Just checking, because some people want to look, you know, aggressively ugly.ROD: No, not me, no.IM: You read about all these people who have a lot of money and they have kids and the kids always end up somehow, like, really messed up, you know what I mean? And there's got to be some way to do that, Rosie. Because just because if you're fabulously rich, and fabulously famous, does that mean you shouldn't have kids, because you know they're going to end up getting messed up?ROD: No, but it means that your priority has to be their well-being first, I think. But you have to make the decision for yourself. My kids are seven, who the hell knows. They're going to be like 14 and in rehab. And they're going to be playing this clip: ""I'm such a good mother."" My God, this is the shortest I've ever had.IM: It looks good, yeah?A: I was going to ask you, has your hair ever been —ROD: No! It's all right — go crazy.IM: I feel like it needs to be a little closer down here.A: Oh no, we're just staging,ROD: We're just staging it.IM: Are you freaking out? You look so cute.ROD: No, I love it. It's the new me.IM: Oh, it's so fabulous!ROD: Flock of Rosie. Wooo!IM: So by the way. Of all the most unboring things in the world, right. I mean, like making someone who's already cute look terrible like that. That is not boring. That is nothing if it's not boring. Actually, I read this great quote the other day, which was, ""Style makes you feel great because it takes your mind off the fact that you're going to die."" Right? And then I realized, that was on my website, and then it said, like, you know, the quote was attributed to me and I thought, oh, I said something, you know, in an interview. I forgot that I said that. But it's really true.I want to show you this last clip because it's going to be my last goodbye. I'll tell you that I cook a lot also. I love to cook. And I often look at things as though they're food. Like I say, oh, you know, would you serve a rotten chicken? Then how could you serve, you know, a beat up old dress or something. How could you show a beat up old dress? I always relate things to kitchen-ry. And so I think that's what it all boils down to. Everything boils down to that.So check this out. This is what I've been doing because I think it's the most fun thing in the world. It's, like, this website. It's got a lot of different things on it. It's a polymathematical website. We actually shoot segments like T.V. show segments. And it's kind of my favorite thing in the world. And it just began like in the beginning of February. So who knows? And again, I don't say it's good, I just think it's not boring, right? And here is the last bit.(Video) IM: I have to tell you, I make buttermilk pancakes or buttermilk waffles all the time.Chef: Do you?IM: Yeah, but I can never find buttermilk, ever.Chef: Oh.IM: You can't find buttermilk at Citarella; you can't find buttermilk.Chef: You can't? IM: It's always low-fat buttermilk.Chef: No, but that's all it is. IM: Is that all it is?Chef: Oh, you don't know? Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something interesting.IM: You know what? Stop laughing. It's not funny. Just because I don't know that whole — that there's no such thing as whole buttermilk. Sorry, what?Chef: Well, here's the deal. Let me tell you the deal. In the old days when they used to make butter, you know how you make butter?IM: Churns?Chef: For cream?IM: Yeah, exactly.Chef: So you take heavy, high-fat milk, which is cream, and you churn it until it separates into these curds and water. The liquid is actually that clear liquid. If you've ever overbeaten your whipped cream, it's actually buttermilk. And that's what it was in the early days. And that's what people used for baking and all sorts of things. Now, the buttermilk that you get is actually low-fat or skim milk.IM: Excuse me, I didn't know. All right?Chef: The reason he thought that is because buttermilk is so wonderfully thick and delicious.IM: Yeah, it is, exactly. So who would think that it was low-fat?Well, that's it. Thank you very much. Happy TED. It's so wonderful here. I love it. I love it. I love it. Thanks. Bye.","https://www.ted.com/talks/isaac_mizrahi_on_fashion_and_creativity
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"I have a story, a story that I would like to share with you. And it's an African story. It is a story of hope, resilience and glamour.There was Hollywood. Then came Bollywood. Today we have Nollywood, the third-largest film industry in the world. In 2006 alone, almost 2,000 films were made in Nigeria. Now, try to imagine 40, 50 films wrapped, distributed, every week in the streets of Lagos, Nigeria and West Africa. Some estimates put the value of this industry at 250 million dollars. It has created thousands, if not tens of thousands of jobs. And it's expanding. But keep in mind that this was a grassroots movement. This is something that happened without foreign investment, without government aid, and actually, it happened against all odds, in one of the most difficult moments in Nigerian economy. The industry is 15 years old.And so maybe you're thinking now, why, how, an Italian filmmaker based in Boston is so interested in this story? And so I think I have to tell you just a few words, a few things about my personal life, because I think there is a connection. My grandfather lived most of his life and is buried in Zambia. My father also lived most of his adult life in East Africa. And I was born in Zambia. Even though I left when I was only three years old, I really felt that Africa was this big part of my life. And it really was a place where I learned to walk. I think I uttered the first words, and my family bought their first home. So when we came back to Italy, and one of the things that I remember the most is my family having this hard time to share stories. It seemed that for our neighbors and friends, Africa was either this exotic place, this imaginary land that probably exists only in their imagination, or the place of horror, famine. And so we were always caught in this stereotype. And I remember really this desire to talk about Africa as a place where we lived and people live and go about their lives, and have dreams like we all have. So when I read in a newspaper in the business page the story of Nollywood, I really felt this is an incredible opportunity to tell a story that goes against all these preconceived notions.Here I can tell a story of Africans making movies like I do, and actually I felt this was an inspiration for me. I have the good fortune of being a filmmaker-in-residence at the Center of Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. And we really look how digital technology is changing, and how young, independent filmmakers can make movies at a fraction of the cost. So when I proposed the story, I really had all the support to make this film. And not only had the support, I found two wonderful partners in crime in this adventure. Aimee Corrigan, a very talented and young photographer, and Robert Caputo, a friend and a mentor, who is a veteran of National Geographic, and told me, ""You know, Franco, in 25 years of covering Africa, I don't know if I have come across a story that is so full of hope and so fun.""So we went to Lagos in October 2005. And we went to Lagos to meet Bond Emeruwa, a wonderful, talented film director who is with us tonight. The plan was to give you a portrait of Nollywood, of this incredible film industry, following Bond in his quest to make an action movie that deals with the issue of corruption, called ""Checkpoint."" Police corruption. And he had nine days to make it. We thought this was a good story.In the meantime, we had to cover Nollywood, and we talked to a lot of filmmakers. But I don't want to create too many expectations. I would like to show you six minutes. And these are six minutes they really prepared for the TED audience. There are several themes from the documentary, but they are re-edited and made for you, OK? So I guess it's a world premier.(Video) Man: Action. Milverton Nwokedi: You cut a nice movie with just 10,000 dollars in Nigeria here. And you shoot in seven days. Peace Piberesima: We're doing films for the masses. We're not doing films for the elite and the people in their glass houses. They can afford to watch their ""Robocop"" and whatever. Mahmood Ali Balogun: I think filmmaking in Nigeria, for those who work in it, is a kind of subsistence filmmaking — what they do to make a living. It's not the fancy filmmaking where you say, oh, you want to put all the razzmatazz of Hollywood, and where you have big budgets.Here is that you make these films, it sells, you jump onto the location again to make another film, because if you don't make the next film, you're not going to feed. Bond Emeruwa: So while we're entertaining, we should be able to educate.I believe in the power of audiovisuals. I mean, 90 percent of the population will watch Nollywood. I think it's the most viable vehicle right now to pass information across a dedicated cable. So if you're making a movie, no matter what your topic is, put in a message in there. Woman: You still have to report the incident. He needs proper medical attention. PP: I keep trying to explain to people, it's not about the quality at the moment — the quality is coming. I mean, there are those films that people are making for quality, but the first thing you have to remember about this society is that Africa still has people that live on one dollar a day, and these are the people that really watch these films.Sonny McDon W: Nollywood is a fantastic industry that has just been born in this part of the world. Because nobody believed that Nollywood can come out of Africa. Lancelot Imasen: But our films, they are stories that our people can relate to themselves. They are stories about our people, for our people. And consistently, they are glued to their screen whenever they see the story. Narrator: Suspense, fun and intrigue. It's the blockbuster comedy. You'll crack your ribs.Bernard Pinayon Agbaosi: We have been so deep into the foreign movies. It's all about the foreign movies. But we can do something too. We can do something, something that when the world sees it, they say, wow, this is Nigeria. Man: Just arrest yourself, sergeant. Don't embarrass yourself. Come on. Don't run away. Come back. Come back.SMW: You can now walk the street and see a role model. It’s not just what you see in picture. You see the person live. You see how he talks. You see how he lives. He influences you really good, you know. It’s not just what you see in the picture. It is not what you hear, you know, from the Western press. Man: See you. Bye. Action.Saint Obi: I was so fascinated, you know, with those cowboy movies. But then when I discovered the situation in my country, at that time there was so much corruption. For a young man to really make it out here, you got to think of some negative things and all that, or some kind of vices. And I didn't want that, you know. And I discovered that I could be successful in life as an actor, without doing crime, without cheating nobody, without telling no lies. Just me and God-given talent. Man: Let's go. OK, it's time to kick some ass. Cover this. It's your own. Move it.Roboger Animadu: In big countries, when they do the movies, they have all these things in place. But here, we improvise these items, like the gunshots. Like they go, here, now, now, you see the gun there, but you won't see any guns shot, we use knock-out. Kevin Books Ikeduba: What I'm scared of is just the explosion will come up in my face. Woman: That's why I use enough masking tape. The masking tape will hold it. Wat, wait. Just hold this for me. KBI: I'm just telling her to make sure she places it well so that it won't affect my face — the explosion, you know. But she's a professional. She knows what she’s doing. I'm trying to protect my face too. This ain't going to be my last movie. You know, this is Nollywood, where the magic lives.RA: So now you're about to see how we do our own movies here, with or without any assistance from anybody. Man: Action. Cut. (Applause)Franco Sacchi: So many things to say, so little time. So many themes in this story. I just can't tell you — there’s one thing I want to tell you. I spent, you know, several weeks with all these actors, producers, and the problems they have to go through are unimaginable for, you know, a Westerner, a filmmaker who works in America or in Europe. But always with a smile, always with an enthusiasm, that is incredible.Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker said, ""I need to make movies like you need oxygen."" And I think they’re breathing. The Nigerian filmmakers really, really, are doing what they like. And so it's a very, very important thing for them, and for their audiences. A woman told me, ""When I see a Nollywood film, I can relax, I really — I can breathe better.""There is also another very important thing that I hope will resonate with this audience. It’s technology. I’m very interested in it and I really think that the digital non-linear editing has slashed, you know, the cost now is a fraction of what it used to be. Incredible cameras cost under 5,000 dollars. And this has unleashed tremendous energy. And guess what? We didn’t have to tell to the Nigerian filmmakers. They understood it, they embraced the technology and they run with it, and they’re successful. I hope that the Nollywood phenomenon will go both ways. I hope it will inspire other African nations to embrace the technology, look at the Nigerian model, make their films, create jobs, create a narrative for the population, something to identify, something positive, something that really is psychological relief and it's part of the culture. But I really think this is a phenomenon that can inspire us. I really think it goes both ways.Filmmakers, friends of mine, they look at Nollywood and they say, ""Wow, they are doing what we really want to do, and make a buck and live with this job."" So I really think it’s a lesson that we're actually learning from them. And there's one thing, one small challenge that I have for you, and should make us reflect on the importance of storytelling. And I think this is really the theme of this session. Try to imagine a world where the only goal is food and a shelter, but no stories. No stories around the campfire. No legends, no fairytales. Nothing. No novels. Difficult, eh? It's meaningless.So this is what I really think. I think that the key to a healthy society is a thriving community of storytellers, and I think that the Nigerian filmmakers really have proved this. I would like you to hear their voices. Just a few moments. It’s not an added sequence, just some voices from Nollywood.(Video) Toyin Alousa: Nollywood is the best thing that can happen to them. If you have an industry that puts a smile on people's face, that’s Nollywood. SO: I believe very soon, we’re not only going to have better movies, we'll have that original Nigerian movie. BE: It’s still the same basic themes. Love, action. But we're telling it our own way, our own Nigerian way, African way. We have diverse cultures, diverse cultures, there are so many, that in the natal lifetimes, I don't see us exhausting the stories we have.FS: My job ends here, and the Nollywood filmmakers really have now to work. And I really hope that there will be many, many collaborations, where we teach each other things. And I really hope that this will happen. Thank you very much. (Applause)Chris Anderson: Stop. I've got two questions. Franco, you described this as the world's third largest film industry. What does that translate to in terms of numbers of films, really?FS: Oh, yes. I think I mentioned briefly — it's close to 2,000 films. There is scientific data on this.CA: 2,000 films a year? FS: 2,000 films a year. 2005 or 6, the censor board has censored 1,600 films alone. And we know that there are more. So it’s safe to say that there are 2,000 films. So imagine 45 films per week. There are challenges. There are challenges. There is a glut of film, the quality has to be raised, they need to go to the next level, but I’m optimistic.CA: And these aren’t films that are primarily seen in cinemas?FS: Oh yes, of course. This is very important. Maybe, you know, for you to try to imagine this, these are films that are distributed directly in markets. They are bought in video shops. They can be rented for pennies.CA: On what format?FS: Oh, the format — thank you for the question. Yes, it's VCDs. It's a CD, it's a little bit more compressed image. They started with VHS. They actually didn't wait for, you know, the latest technology. They started in '92, '94. So there are 57 million VCRs in Nigeria that play, you know, VHS and these VCDs. It's a CD basically. It's a compact disc.CA: So on the streets, are film casts ... ?FS: You can be in a Lagos traffic jam and you can buy a movie or some bananas or some water. Yes. (Laughter) And I have to say, this really proves that storytelling, it's a commodity, it's a staple. There is no life without stories.CA: Franco, thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/franco_sacchi_on_nollywood
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"I thought I would think about changing your perspective on the world a bit, and showing you some of the designs that we have in nature. And so, I have my first slide to talk about the dawning of the universe and what I call the cosmic scene investigation, that is, looking at the relics of creation and inferring what happened at the beginning, and then following it up and trying to understand it.And so one of the questions that I asked you is, when you look around, what do you see? Well, you see this space that's created by designers and by the work of people, but what you actually see is a lot of material that was already here, being reshaped in a certain form. And so the question is: how did that material get here? How did it get into the form that it had before it got reshaped, and so forth? It's a question of what's the continuity? So one of the things I look at is, how did the universe begin and shape? What was the whole process in the creation and the evolution of the universe to getting to the point that we have these kinds of materials?So that's sort of the part, and let me move on then and show you the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. If you look at this picture, what you will see is a lot of dark with some light objects in it. And everything but — four of these light objects are stars, and you can see them there — little pluses. This is a star, this is a star, everything else is a galaxy, OK? So there's a couple of thousand galaxies you can see easily with your eye in here. And when I look out at particularly this galaxy, which looks a lot like ours, I wonder if there's an art design college conference going on, and intelligent beings there are thinking about, you know, what designs they might do, and there might be a few cosmologists trying to understand where the universe itself came from, and there might even be some in that galaxy looking at ours trying to figure out what's going on over here.But there's a lot of other galaxies, and some are nearby, and they're kind of the color of the Sun, and some are further away and they're a little bluer, and so forth. But one of the questions is — this should be, to you — how come there are so many galaxies? Because this represents a very clean fraction of the sky. This is only 1,000 galaxies. We think there's on the order — visible to the Hubble Space Telescope, if you had the time to scan it around — about 100 billion galaxies. Right? It's a very large number of galaxies. And that's roughly how many stars there are in our own galaxy.But when you look at some of these regions like this, you'll see more galaxies than stars, which is kind of a conundrum. So the question should come to your mind is, what kind of design, you know, what kind of creative process and what kind of design produced the world like that? And then I'm going to show you it's actually a lot more complicated. We're going to try and follow it up. We have a tool that actually helps us out in this study, and that's the fact that the universe is so incredibly big that it's a time machine, in a certain sense. We draw this set of nested spheres cut away so you see it. Put the Earth at the center of the nested spheres, just because that's where we're making observations. And the moon is only two seconds away, so if you take a picture of the moon using ordinary light, it's the moon two seconds ago, and who cares. Two seconds is like the present. The Sun is eight minutes ago. That's not such a big deal, right, unless there's solar flares coming then you want to get out the way. You'd like to have a little advance warning.But you get out to Jupiter and it's 40 minutes away. It's a problem. You hear about Mars, it's a problem communicating to Mars because it takes light long enough to go there. But if you look out to the nearest set of stars, to the nearest 40 or 50 stars, it's about 10 years. So if you take a picture of what's going on, it's 10 years ago. But you go and look to the center of the galaxy, it's thousands of years ago. If you look at Andromeda, which is the nearest big galaxy, and it's two million years ago. If you took a picture of the Earth two million years ago, there'd be no evidence of humans at all, because we don't think there were humans yet. I mean, it just gives you the scale. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we're looking at hundreds of millions of years to a billion years.But if we were capable to come up with an idea of how to look even further — there's some things even further, and that was what I did in a lot of my work, was to develop the techniques — we could look out back to even earlier epochs before there were stars and before there were galaxies, back to when the universe was hot and dense and very different. And so that's the sort of sequence, and so I have a more artistic impression of this. There's the galaxy in the middle, which is the Milky Way, and around that are the Hubble — you know, nearby kind of galaxies, and there's a sphere that marks the different times. And behind that are some more modern galaxies.You see the whole big picture? The beginning of time is funny — it's on the outside, right? And then there's a part of the universe we can't see because it's so dense and so hot, light can't escape. It's like you can't see to the center of the Sun; you have to use other techniques to know what's going on inside the Sun. But you can see the edge of the Sun, and the universe gets that way, and you can see that. And then you see this sort of model area around the outside, and that is the radiation coming from the Big Bang, which is actually incredibly uniform. The universe is almost a perfect sphere, but there are these very tiny variations which we show here in great exaggeration. And from them in the time sequence we're going to have to go from these tiny variations to these irregular galaxies and first stars to these more advanced galaxies, and eventually the solar system, and so forth.So it's a big design job, but we'll see about how things are going on. So the way these measurements were done, there's been a set of satellites, and this is where you get to see. So there was the COBE satellite, which was launched in 1989, and we discovered these variations. And then in 2000, the MAP satellite was launched — the WMAP — and it made somewhat better pictures. And later this year — this is the cool stealth version, the one that actually has some beautiful design features to it, and you should look — the Planck satellite will be launched, and it will make very high-resolution maps. And that will be the sequence of understanding the very beginning of the universe.And what we saw was, we saw these variations, and then they told us the secrets, both about the structure of space-time, and about the contents of the universe, and about how the universe started in its original motions. So we have this picture, which is quite a spectacular picture, and I'll come back to the beginning, where we're going to have some mysterious process that kicks the universe off at the beginning. And we go through a period of accelerating expansion, and the universe expands and cools until it gets to the point where it becomes transparent, then to the Dark Ages, and then the first stars turn on, and they evolve into galaxies, and then later they get to the more expansive galaxies. And somewhere around this period is when our solar system started forming. And it's maturing up to the present time. And there's some spectacular things. And this wastebasket part, that's to represent what the structure of space-time itself is doing during this period. And so this is a pretty weird model, right? What kind of evidence do we have for that?So let me show you some of nature's patterns that are the result of this. I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean. It's a marker of where the interesting waves are and whatever went on. So here is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showing the location of a million galaxies. So there's a dot on here for every galaxy. They go out and point a telescope at the sky, take a picture, identify what are stars and throw them away, look at the galaxies, estimate how far away they are, and plot them up. And just put radially they're going out that way. And you see these structures, this thing we call the Great Wall, but there are voids and those kinds of stuff, and they kind of fade out because the telescope isn't sensitive enough to do it.Now I'm going to show you this in 3D. What happens is, you take pictures as the Earth rotates, you get a fan across the sky. There are some places you can't look because of our own galaxy, or because there are no telescopes available to do it. So the next picture shows you the three-dimensional version of this rotating around. Do you see the fan-like scans made across the sky? Remember, every spot on here is a galaxy, and you see the galaxies, you know, sort of in our neighborhood, and you sort of see the structure. And you see this thing we call the Great Wall, and you see the complicated structure, and you see these voids. There are places where there are no galaxies and there are places where there are thousands of galaxies clumped together, right. So there's an interesting pattern, but we don't have enough data here to actually see the pattern. We only have a million galaxies, right? So we're keeping, like, a million balls in the air but, what's going on? There's another survey which is very similar to this, called the Two-degree Field of View Galaxy Redshift Survey.Now we're going to fly through it at warp a million. And every time there's a galaxy — at its location there's a galaxy — and if we know anything about the galaxy, which we do, because there's a redshift measurement and everything, you put in the type of galaxy and the color, so this is the real representation. And when you're in the middle of the galaxies it's hard to see the pattern; it's like being in the middle of life. It's hard to see the pattern in the middle of the audience, it's hard to see the pattern of this. So we're going to go out and swing around and look back at this. And you'll see, first, the structure of the survey, and then you'll start seeing the structure of the galaxies that we see out there. So again, you can see the extension of this Great Wall of galaxies showing up here.But you can see the voids, you can see the complicated structure, and you say, well, how did this happen? Suppose you're the cosmic designer. How are you going to put galaxies out there in a pattern like that? It's not just throwing them out at random. There's a more complicated process going on here. How are you going to end up doing that? And so now we're in for some serious play. That is, we have to seriously play God, not just change people's lives, but make the universe, right. So if that's your responsibility, how are you going to do that? What's the kind of technique? What's the kind of thing you're going to do?So I'm going to show you the results of a very large-scale simulation of what we think the universe might be like, using, essentially, some of the play principles and some of the design principles that, you know, humans have labored so hard to pick up, but apparently nature knew how to do at the beginning. And that is, you start out with very simple ingredients and some simple rules, but you have to have enough ingredients to make it complicated. And then you put in some randomness, some fluctuations and some randomness, and realize a whole bunch of different representations.So what I'm going to do is show you the distribution of matter as a function of scales. We're going to zoom in, but this is a plot of what it is. And we had to add one more thing to make the universe come out right. It's called dark matter. That is matter that doesn't interact with light the typical way that ordinary matter does, the way the light's shining on me or on the stage. It's transparent to light, but in order for you to see it, we're going to make it white. OK? So the stuff that's in this picture that's white, that is the dark matter. It should be called invisible matter, but the dark matter we've made visible. And the stuff that is in the yellow color, that is the ordinary kind of matter that's turned into stars and galaxies.So I'll show you the next movie. So this — we're going to zoom in. Notice this pattern and pay attention to this pattern. We're going to zoom in and zoom in. And you'll see there are all these filaments and structures and voids. And when a number of filaments come together in a knot, that makes a supercluster of galaxies. This one we're zooming in on is somewhere between 100,000 and a million galaxies in that small region. So we live in the boonies. We don't live in the center of the solar system, we don't live in the center of the galaxy and our galaxy's not in the center of the cluster.So we're zooming in. This is a region which probably has more than 100,000, on the order of a million galaxies in that region. We're going to keep zooming in. OK. And so I forgot to tell you the scale. A parsec is 3.26 light years. So a gigaparsec is three billion light years — that's the scale. So it takes light three billion years to travel over that distance. Now we're into a distance sort of between here and here. That's the distance between us and Andromeda, right? These little specks that you're seeing in here, they're galaxies.Now we're going to zoom back out, and you can see this structure that, when we get very far out, looks very regular, but it's made up of a lot of irregular variations. So they're simple building blocks. There's a very simple fluid to begin with. It's got dark matter, it's got ordinary matter, it's got photons and it's got neutrinos, which don't play much role in the later part of the universe. And it's just a simple fluid and it, over time, develops into this complicated structure. And so you know when you first saw this picture, it didn't mean quite so much to you. Here you're looking across one percent of the volume of the visible universe and you're seeing billions of galaxies, right, and nodes, but you realize they're not even the main structure. There's a framework, which is the dark matter, the invisible matter, that's out there that's actually holding it all together.So let's fly through it, and you can see how much harder it is when you're in the middle of something to figure this out. So here's that same end result. You see a filament, you see the light is the invisible matter, and the yellow is the stars or the galaxies showing up. And we're going to fly around, and we'll fly around, and you'll see occasionally a couple of filaments intersect, and you get a large cluster of galaxies. And then we'll fly in to where the very large cluster is, and you can see what it looks like. And so from inside, it doesn't look very complicated, right? It's only when you look at it at a very large scale, and explore it and so forth, you realize it's a very intricate, complicated kind of a design, right? And it's grown up in some kind of way.So the question is, how hard would it be to assemble this, right? How big a contractor team would you need to put this universe together, right? That's the issue, right? And so here we are. You see how the filament — you see how several filaments are coming together, therefore making this supercluster of galaxies. And you have to understand, this is not how it would actually look if you — first, you can't travel this fast, everything would be distorted, but this is using simple rendering and graphic arts kind of stuff. This is how, if you took billions of years to go around, it might look to you, right? And if you could see invisible matter, too.And so the idea is, you know, how would you put together the universe in a very simple way? We're going to start and realize that the entire visible universe, everything we can see in every direction with the Hubble Space Telescope plus our other instruments, was once in a region that was smaller than an atom. It started with tiny quantum mechanical fluctuations, but expanding at a tremendous rate. And those fluctuations were stretched to astronomical sizes, and those fluctuations eventually are the things we see in the cosmic microwave background. And then we needed some way to turn those fluctuations into galaxies and clusters of galaxies and make these kinds of structures go on.So I'm going to show you a smaller simulation. This simulation was run on 1,000 processors for a month in order to make just this simple visible one. So I'm going to show you one that can be run on a desktop in two days in the next picture. So you start out with teeny fluctuations when the universe was at this point, now four times smaller, and so forth. And you start seeing these networks, this cosmic web of structure forming. And this is a simple one, because it doesn't have the ordinary matter and it just has the dark matter in it. And you see how the dark matter lumps up, and the ordinary matter just trails along behind. So there it is. At the beginning it's very uniform. The fluctuations are a part in 100,000. There are a few peaks that are a part in 10,000, and then over billions of years, gravity just pulls in.This is light over density, pulls the material around in. That pulls in more material and pulls in more material. But the distances on the universe are so large and the time scales are so large that it takes a long time for this to form. And it keeps forming until the universe is roughly about half the size it is now, in terms of its expansion. And at that point, the universe mysteriously starts accelerating its expansion and cuts off the formation of larger-scale structure. So we're just seeing as large a scale structure as we can see, and then only things that have started forming already are going to form, and then from then on it's going to go on.So we're able to do the simulation, but this is two days on a desktop. We need, you know, 30 days on 1,000 processors to do the kind of simulation that I showed you before. So we have an idea of how to play seriously, creating the universe by starting with essentially less than an eyedrop full of material, and we create everything we can see in any direction, right, from almost nothing — that is, something extremely tiny, extremely small — and it is almost perfect, except it has these tiny fluctuations at a part in 100,000 level, which turn out to produce the interesting patterns and designs we see, that is, galaxies and stars and so forth.So we have a model, and we can calculate it, and we can use it to make designs of what we think the universe really looks like. And that design is sort of way beyond what our original imagination ever was. So this is what we started with 15 years ago, with the Cosmic Background Explorer — made the map on the upper right, which basically showed us that there were large-scale fluctuations, and actually fluctuations on several scales. You can kind of see that. Since then we've had WMAP, which just gives us higher angular resolution. We see the same large-scale structure, but we see additional small-scale structure. And on the bottom right is if the satellite had flipped upside down and mapped the Earth, what kind of a map we would have got of the Earth. You can see, well, you can, kind of pick out all the major continents, but that's about it.But what we're hoping when we get to Planck, we'll have resolution about equivalent to the resolution you see of the Earth there, where you can really see the complicated pattern that exists on the Earth. And you can also tell, because of the sharp edges and the way things fit together, there are some non-linear processes. Geology has these effects, which is moving the plates around and so forth. You can see that just from the map alone. We want to get to the point in our maps of the early universe we can see whether there are any non-linear effects that are starting to move, to modify, and are giving us a hint about how space-time itself was actually created at the beginning moments. So that's where we are today, and that's what I wanted to give you  a flavor of. Give you a different view about what the design and what everything else looks like. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_smoot_on_the_design_of_the_universe
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"What technology can we really apply to reducing global poverty? And what I found was quite surprising. We started looking at things like death rates in the 20th century, and how they'd been improved, and very simple things turned out. You'd think maybe antibiotics made more difference than clean water, but it's actually the opposite. And so very simple things — off-the-shelf technologies that we could easily find on the then-early Web — would clearly make a huge difference to that problem.But I also, in looking at more powerful technologies and nanotechnology and genetic engineering and other new emerging kind of digital technologies, became very concerned about the potential for abuse. If you think about it, in history, a long, long time ago we dealt with the problem of an individual abusing another individual. We came up with something — the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill. That's a, kind of a one-on-one thing. We organized into cities. We had many people. And to keep the many from tyrannizing the one, we came up with concepts like individual liberty. And then, to have to deal with large groups, say, at the nation-state level, and we had to have mutual non-aggression, or through a series of conflicts, we eventually came to a rough international bargain to largely keep the peace.But now we have a new situation, really what people call an asymmetric situation, where technology is so powerful that it extends beyond a nation-state. It's not the nation-states that have potential access to mass destruction, but individuals. And this is a consequence of the fact that these new technologies tend to be digital. We saw genome sequences. You can download the gene sequences of pathogens off the Internet if you want to, and clearly someone recently — I saw in a science magazine — they said, well, the 1918 flu is too dangerous to FedEx around. If people want to use it in their labs for working on research, just reconstruct it yourself, because, you know, it might break in FedEx. So that this is possible to do this is not deniable.So individuals in small groups super-empowered by access to these kinds of self-replicating technologies, whether it be biological or other, are clearly a danger in our world. And the danger is that they can cause roughly what's a pandemic. And we really don't have experience with pandemics, and we're also not very good as a society at acting to things we don't have direct and sort of gut-level experience with. So it's not in our nature to pre-act. And in this case, piling on more technology doesn't solve the problem, because it only super-empowers people more.So the solution has to be, as people like Russell and Einstein and others imagine in a conversation that existed in a much stronger form, I think, early in the 20th century, that the solution had to be not just the head but the heart. You know, public policy and moral progress. The bargain that gives us civilization is a bargain to not use power. We get our individual rights by society protecting us from others not doing everything they can do but largely doing only what is legal. And so to limit the danger of these new things, we have to limit, ultimately, the ability of individuals to have access, essentially, to pandemic power. We also have to have sensible defense, because no limitation is going to prevent a crazy person from doing something. And you know, and the troubling thing is that it's much easier to do something bad than to defend against all possible bad things, so the offensive uses really have an asymmetric advantage.So these are the kind of thoughts I was thinking in 1999 and 2000, and my friends told me I was getting really depressed, and they were really worried about me. And then I signed a book contract to write more gloomy thoughts about this and moved into a hotel room in New York with one room full of books on the Plague, and you know, nuclear bombs exploding in New York where I would be within the circle, and so on. And then I was there on September 11th, and I stood in the streets with everyone. And it was quite an experience to be there. I got up the next morning and walked out of the city, and all the sanitation trucks were parked on Houston Street and ready to go down and start taking the rubble away. And I walked down the middle, up to the train station, and everything below 14th Street was closed. It was quite a compelling experience, but not really, I suppose, a surprise to someone who'd had his room full of the books. It was always a surprise that it happened then and there, but it wasn't a surprise that it happened at all.And everyone then started writing about this. Thousands of people started writing about this. And I eventually abandoned the book, and then Chris called me to talk at the conference. I really don't talk about this anymore because, you know, there's enough frustrating and depressing things going on. But I agreed to come and say a few things about this. And I would say that we can't give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat, which is what we seem to be doing because of the present, the people that are in power, because that's to give up the thing that makes civilization. And we can't fight the threat in the kind of stupid way we're doing, because a million-dollar act causes a billion dollars of damage, causes a trillion dollar response which is largely ineffective and arguably, probably almost certainly, has made the problem worse. So we can't fight the thing with a million-to-one cost, one-to-a-million cost-benefit ratio.So after giving up on the book — and I had the great honor to be able to join Kleiner Perkins about a year ago, and to work through venture capital on the innovative side, and to try to find some innovations that could address what I saw as some of these big problems. Things where, you know, a factor of 10 difference can make a factor of 1,000 difference in the outcome. I've been amazed in the last year at the incredible quality and excitement of the innovations that have come across my desk. It's overwhelming at times. I'm very thankful for Google and Wikipedia so I can understand at least a little of what people are talking about who come through the doors.But I wanted to share with you three areas that I'm particularly excited about and that relate to the problems that I was talking about in the Wired article. The first is this whole area of education, and it really relates to what Nicholas was talking about with a $100 computer. And that is to say that there's a lot of legs left in Moore's Law. The most advanced transistors today are at 65 nanometers, and we've seen, and I've had the pleasure to invest in, companies that give me great confidence that we'll extend Moore's Law all the way down to roughly the 10 nanometer scale. Another factor of, say, six in dimensional reduction, which should give us about another factor of 100 in raw improvement in what the chips can do. And so, to put that in practical terms, if something costs about 1,000 dollars today, say, the best personal computer you can buy, that might be its cost, I think we can have that in 2020 for 10 dollars. Okay? Now, just imagine what that $100 computer will be in 2020 as a tool for education.I think the challenge for us is — I'm very certain that that will happen, the challenge is, will we develop the kind of educational tools and things with the net to let us take advantage of that device? I'd argue today that we have incredibly powerful computers, but we don't have very good software for them. And it's only in retrospect, after the better software comes along, and you take it and you run it on a ten-year-old machine, you say, God, the machine was that fast? I remember when they took the Apple Mac interface and they put it back on the Apple II. The Apple II was perfectly capable of running that kind of interface, we just didn't know how to do it at the time. So given that we know and should believe — because Moore's Law's been, like, a constant, I mean, it's just been very predictable progress over the last 40 years or whatever. We can know what the computers are going to be like in 2020. It's great that we have initiatives to say, let's go create the education and educate people in the world, because that's a great force for peace. And we can give everyone in the world a $100 computer or a $10 computer in the next 15 years.The second area that I'm focusing on is the environmental problem, because that's clearly going to put a lot of pressure on this world. We'll hear a lot more about that from Al Gore very shortly. The thing that we see as the kind of Moore's Law trend that's driving improvement in our ability to address the environmental problem is new materials. We have a challenge, because the urban population is growing in this century from two billion to six billion in a very short amount of time. People are moving to the cities. They all need clean water, they need energy, they need transportation, and we want them to develop in a green way. We're reasonably efficient in the industrial sectors. We've made improvements in energy and resource efficiency, but the consumer sector, especially in America, is very inefficient. But these new materials bring such incredible innovations that there's a strong basis for hope that these things will be so profitable that they can be brought to the market.And I want to give you a specific example of a new material that was discovered 15 years ago. If we take carbon nanotubes, you know, Iijima discovered them in 1991, they just have incredible properties. And these are the kinds of things we're going to discover as we start to engineer at the nano scale. Their strength: they're almost the strongest material, tensile strength material known. They're very, very stiff. They stretch very, very little. In two dimensions, if you make, like, a fabric out of them, they're 30 times stronger than Kevlar. And if you make a three-dimensional structure, like a buckyball, they have all sorts of incredible properties. If you shoot a particle at them and knock a hole in them, they repair themselves; they go zip and they repair the hole in femtoseconds, which is not — is really quick. (Laughter) If you shine a light on them, they produce electricity. In fact, if you flash them with a camera they catch on fire. If you put electricity on them, they emit light. If you run current through them, you can run 1,000 times more current through one of these than through a piece of metal. You can make both p- and n-type semiconductors, which means you can make transistors out of them. They conduct heat along their length but not across — well, there is no width, but not in the other direction if you stack them up; that's a property of carbon fiber also. If you put particles in them, and they go shooting out the tip — they're like miniature linear accelerators or electron guns. The inside of the nanotubes is so small — the smallest ones are 0.7 nanometers — that it's basically a quantum world. It's a strange place inside a nanotube.And so we begin to see, and we've seen business plans already, where the kind of things Lisa Randall's talking about are in there. I had one business plan where I was trying to learn more about Witten's cosmic dimension strings to try to understand what the phenomenon was going on in this proposed nanomaterial. So inside of a nanotube, we're really at the limit here. So what we see is with these and other new materials that we can do things with different properties — lighter, stronger — and apply these new materials to the environmental problems. New materials that can make water, new materials that can make fuel cells work better, new materials that catalyze chemical reactions, that cut pollution and so on. Ethanol — new ways of making ethanol. New ways of making electric transportation. The whole green dream — because it can be profitable. And we've dedicated — we've just raised a new fund, we dedicated 100 million dollars to these kinds of investments. We believe that Genentech, the Compaq, the Lotus, the Sun, the Netscape, the Amazon, the Google in these fields are yet to be found, because this materials revolution will drive these things forward.The third area that we're working on, and we just announced last week — we were all in New York. We raised 200 million dollars in a specialty fund to work on a pandemic in biodefense. And to give you an idea of the last fund that Kleiner raised was a $400 million fund, so this for us is a very substantial fund. And what we did, over the last few months — well, a few months ago, Ray Kurzweil and I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how publishing the 1918 genome was very dangerous. And John Doerr and Brook and others got concerned, [unclear], and we started looking around at what the world was doing about being prepared for a pandemic. And we saw a lot of gaps.And so we asked ourselves, you know, can we find innovative things that will go fill these gaps? And Brooks told me in a break here, he said he's found so much stuff he can't sleep, because there's so many great technologies out there, we're essentially buried. And we need them, you know. We have one antiviral that people are talking about stockpiling that still works, roughly. That's Tamiflu. But Tamiflu — the virus is resistant. It is resistant to Tamiflu. We've discovered with AIDS we need cocktails to work well so that the viral resistance — we need several anti-virals. We need better surveillance. We need networks that can find out what's going on. We need rapid diagnostics so that we can tell if somebody has a strain of flu which we have only identified very recently. We've got to be able to make the rapid diagnostics quickly. We need new anti-virals and cocktails. We need new kinds of vaccines. Vaccines that are broad spectrum. Vaccines that we can manufacture quickly. Cocktails, more polyvalent vaccines. You normally get a trivalent vaccine against three possible strains. We need — we don't know where this thing is going. We believe that if we could fill these 10 gaps, we have a chance to help really reduce the risk of a pandemic. And the difference between a normal flu season and a pandemic is about a factor of 1,000 in deaths and certainly enormous economic impact. So we're very excited because we think we can fund 10, or speed up 10 projects and see them come to market in the next couple years that will address this.So if we can address, use technology, help address education, help address the environment, help address the pandemic, does that solve the larger problem that I was talking about in the Wired article? And I'm afraid the answer is really no, because you can't solve a problem with the management of technology with more technology. If we let an unlimited amount of power loose, then we will — a very small number of people will be able to abuse it. We can't fight at a million-to-one disadvantage. So what we need to do is, we need better policy. And for example, some things we could do that would be policy solutions which are not really in the political air right now but perhaps with the change of administration would be — use markets.Markets are a very strong force. For example, rather than trying to regulate away problems, which probably won't work, if we could price into the cost of doing business, the cost of catastrophe, so that people who are doing things that had a higher cost of catastrophe would have to take insurance against that risk. So if you wanted to put a drug on the market you could put it on. But it wouldn't have to be approved by regulators; you'd have to convince an actuary that it would be safe. And if you apply the notion of insurance more broadly, you can use a more powerful force, a market force, to provide feedback. How could you keep the law? I think the law would be a really good thing to keep. Well, you have to hold people accountable. The law requires accountability. Today scientists, technologists, businessmen, engineers don't have any personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. So if you tie that — you have to tie that back with the law.And finally, I think we have to do something that's not really — it's almost unacceptable to say this — which, we have to begin to design the future. We can't pick the future, but we can steer the future. Our investment in trying to prevent pandemic flu is affecting the distribution of possible outcomes. We may not be able to stop it, but the likelihood that it will get past us is lower if we focus on that problem. So we can design the future if we choose what kind of things we want to have happen and not have happen, and steer us to a lower-risk place. Vice President Gore will talk about how we could steer the climate trajectory into a lower probability of catastrophic risk.But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things. And what we have to do to do that is we have to limit access to certain information. And growing up as we have, and holding very high the value of free speech, this is a hard thing for us to accept — for all of us to accept. It's especially hard for the scientists to accept who still remember, you know, Galileo essentially locked up, and who are still fighting this battle against the church. But that's the price of having a civilization. The price of retaining the rule of law is to limit the access to the great and kind of unbridled power. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_joy_muses_on_what_s_next
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"I went to Spain a few months ago and I had the best foie gras of my life. The best culinary experience of my life. Because what I saw, I'm convinced, is the future of cooking. Ridiculous, right? Foie gras and the future of cooking. There's not a food today that's more maligned than foie gras, right? I mean, it's crucified. It was outlawed in Chicago for a while. It's pending here in California, and just recently in New York. It's like if you're a chef and you put it on your menu, you risk being attacked. Really, it happened here in San Francisco to a famous chef.I'm not saying that there's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras. The reasons usually just boil down to the gavage, which is the force feeding. Basically you take a goose or a duck and you force feed a ton of grain down its throat. More grain in a couple of weeks than it would ever get in a lifetime. Its liver expands by eight times. Suffice to say it's like — it's not the prettiest picture of sustainable farming.The problem for us chefs is that it's so freakin' delicious. (Laughter) I mean, I love the stuff. It is fatty, it's sweet, it's silky, it's unctuous. It makes everything else you put it with taste incredible. Can we produce a menu that's delicious without foie gras? Yes, sure. You can also bike the Tour de France without steroids, right? (Laughter) Not a lot of people are doing it. And for good reason. (Laughter)So several months ago, a friend of mine sent me this link to this guy, Eduardo Sousa. Eduardo is doing what he calls natural foie gras. Natural foie gras. What's natural about foie gras? To take advantage of when the temperature drops in the fall, geese and ducks gorge on food to prepare for the harsh realities of winter. And the rest of the year they're free to roam around Eduardo's land and eat what they want. So no gavage, no force feeding, no factory-like conditions, no cruelty.And it's shockingly not a new idea. His great-granddad started — Patería de Sousa — in 1812. And they've been doing it quietly ever since. That is until last year, when Eduardo won the Coup de Coeur, the coveted French gastronomic prize. It's like the Olympics of food products. He placed first for his foie gras. Big, big problem. As he said to me, that really pissed the French off. (Laughter) He said it sort of gleefully.It was all over the papers. I read about it. It was in Le Monde. ""Spanish chef accused ... "" — and the French accused him. ""Spanish chef accused of cheating."" They accused him of paying off the judges. They implicated actually, the Spanish government, amazingly. Huh, amazing. A huge scandal for a few weeks. Couldn't find a shred of evidence. Now, look at the guy. He doesn't look like a guy who's paying off French judges for his foie gras. So that died down, and very soon afterward, new controversy. He shouldn't win because it's not foie gras. It's not foie gras because it's not gavage. There's no force feeding. So by definition, he's lying and should be disqualified.As funny as it sounds, articulating it now and reading about it — actually, if we had talked about it before this controversy, I would have said, ""That's kind of true."" You know, foie gras by definition, force feeding, it's gavage, and that's what you get when you want foie gras. That is, until I went to Eduardo's farm in Extremadura, 50 miles north of Seville, right on the Portugal border. I saw first-hand a system that is incredibly complex and then at the same time, like everything beautiful in nature, is utterly simple. And he said to me, really from the first moment, my life's work is to give the geese what they want. He repeated that about 50 times in the two days I was with him. I'm just here to give the geese what they want. Actually, when I showed up he was lying down with the geese with his cell phone taking pictures of them like his children in the grass. Amazing. He's really just in love with — he's at one with — he's the goose whisperer. (Laughter)And when I was speaking to him, you know, I thought, like I'm speaking to you now, right, but sort of in the middle of my questions, my excited questions, because the more I got to know him and his system, the more exciting this whole idea became. He kept going like this to me. And I thought, OK, excited Jew from New York, right? I'm talking a little too aggressively, whatever, so you know, I slowed down. And finally, by the end of the day I was like, Ed-uar-do, you know like this? But he was still going like this. I figured it out. I was speaking too loudly. So I hushed my voice. I kind of like asked these questions and chatted with him through a translator in kind of a half whisper. And he stopped doing this. And amazingly, the geese who were on the other side of the paddock when I was around — ""Get the hell away from this kid!"" — when I lowered my voice, they all came right up to us. Right up to us, like right up to here. Right along the fence line.And fence line was amazing in itself. The fence — like this conception of fence that we have it's totally backward with him. The electricity on this fiberglass fence is only on the outside. He rewired it. He invented it. I've never seen it. Have you? You fence in animals. You electrify the inside. He doesn't. He electrifies only the outside. Why? Because he said to me that he felt like the geese — and he proved this actually, not just a conceit, he proved this — the geese felt manipulated when they were imprisoned in their little paddocks. Even though they were imprisoned in this Garden of Eden with figs and everything else. He felt like they felt manipulated. So he got rid of the electricity, he got rid of current on the inside and kept it on the outside, so it would protect them against coyotes and other predators.Now, what happened? They ate, and he showed me on a chart, how they ate about 20 percent more feed to feed their livers. The landscape is incredible. I mean, his farm is incredible. It really is the Garden of Eden. There's figs and everything else there for the taking. And the irony of ironies is because Extremadura, the area — what does Extremadura mean? Extra hard land, right? Extra difficult. Extra hard. But over four generations, he and his family have literally transformed this extra hard land into a tasting menu. Upgrades the life for these geese. And they are allowed to take whatever they want.Another irony, the double irony is that on the figs and the olives, Eduardo can make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras. He doesn't care. He lets them take what they want and he says, ""Usually, it's about 50 percent. They're very fair."" The other 50 percent, he takes and he sells and he makes money on them. Part of the income for his farm. A big part of his income for his farm. But he never controls it. They get what they want, they leave the rest for me and I sell it.His biggest obstacle, really, was the marketplace, which demands these days bright yellow foie gras. That's how I've been trained. You want to look and see what good foie gras is, it's got to be bright yellow. It's the indication that it's the best foie gras. Well, because he doesn't force feed, because he doesn't gavage tons of corn, his livers were pretty grey. Or they were. But he found this wild plant called the Lupin bush. The Lupin bush, it's all around Extremadura. He let it go to seed, he took the seeds, he planted it on his 30 acres, all around. And the geese love the Lupin bush. Not for the bush, but for the seeds. And when they eat the seeds, their foie gras turns yellow. Radioactive yellow. Bright yellow. Of the highest quality foie gras yellow I've ever seen. (Laughter)So I'm listening to all this, you know, and I'm like, is this guy for real? Is he making some of this up? Is he like, you know — because he seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was always nature. It was never him. And I was like, you know, I always get a little, like, weirded out by people who deflect everything away from themselves. Because, really, they want you to look at themselves, right? But he deflected everything away from his ingenuity into working with his landscape.So it's like, here I am, I'm on the fence about this guy, but increasingly, eating up his every word. And we're sitting there, and I hear [clapping] from a distance, so I look over. And he grabs my arm and the translator's, and ducks us under a bush and says, ""Watch this."" ""Shush,"" he says again for the 500th time to me. ""Shush, watch this."" And this squadron of geese come over. [Clapping] And they're getting louder, louder, louder, like really loud, right over us. And like airport traffic control, as they start to go past us they're called back — and they're called back and back and back. And then they circle around. And his geese are calling up now to the wild geese. [Clapping] And the wild geese are calling down. [Clapping] And it's getting louder and louder and they circle and circle and they land. And I'm just saying, ""No way."" (Laughter) No way.And I look at Eduardo, who's near tears looking at this, and I say, ""You're telling me that your geese are calling to the wild geese to say come for a visit?"" And he says, ""No, no, no. They've come to stay."" They've come to stay? (Laughter) It's like the DNA of a goose is to fly south in the winter, right? I said that. I said ""Isn't that what they're put on this Earth for? To fly south in the winter and north when it gets warm?"" He said, ""No, no, no. Their DNA is to find the conditions that are conducive to life. To happiness. They find it here. They don't need anything more."" They stop. They mate with his domesticated geese, and his flock continues. Think about that for a minute. It's brilliant, right? Imagine — I don't know, imagine a hog farm in, like, North Carolina, and a wild pig comes upon a factory farm and decides to stay. (Laughter)So how did it taste? I finally got to taste it before I left. He took me to his neighborhood restaurant and he served me some of his foie gras, confit de foie gras. It was incredible. And the problem with saying that, of course, is that you know, at this point it risks hyperbole really easily. And I'd like to make a metaphor, but I don't have one really. I was drinking this guy's Kool-Aid so much, he could have served me goose feathers and I would have been like, this guy's a genius, you know? I'm really in love with him at this point.But it truly was the best foie gras of my life. So much so that I don't think I had ever really had foie gras until that moment. I'd had something that was called foie gras. But this was transformative. Really transformative. And I say to you, I might not stick to this, but I don't think I'll ever serve foie gras on my menu again because of that taste experience with Eduardo. It was sweet, it was unctuous. It had all the qualities of foie gras, but its fat had a lot of integrity and a lot of honesty.And you could taste herbs, you could taste spices. And I kept — I said, you know, I swear to God I tasted star anise. I was sure of it. And I'm not like some super taster, you know? But I can taste things. There's 100 percent star anise in there. And he says, ""No."" And I ended up like going down the spices, and finally, it was like, OK, salt and pepper, thinking he's salted and peppered his liver. But no. He takes the liver when he harvests the foie gras, he sticks them in this jar and he confits it. No salt, no pepper, no oil, no spices. What?We went back out for the final tour of the farm, and he showed me the wild pepper plants and the plants that he made sure existed on his farm for salinity. He doesn't need salt and pepper. And he doesn't need spices, because he's got this potpourri of herbs and flavors that his geese love to gorge on. I turned to him at the end of the meal, and it's a question I asked several times, and he hadn't, kind of, answered me directly, but I said, ""Now look, you're in Spain, some of the greatest chefs in the world are — Ferran Adria, the preeminent chef of the world today, not that far from you. How come you don't give him this? How come no one's really heard of you?"" And it may be because of the wine, or it may be because of my excitement, he answered me directly and he said, ""Because chefs don't deserve my foie gras."" (Laughter) And he was right. He was right.Chefs take foie gras and they make it their own. They create a dish where all the vectors point at us. With Eduardo it's about the expression of nature. And as he said, I think fittingly, it's a gift from God, with God saying, you've done good work. Simple. I flew home, I'm on the flight with my little black book and I took, you know, pages and pages of notes about it. I really was moved. And in the corner of one of these — one of my notes, is this note that says, when asked, what do you think of conventional foie gras? What do you think of foie gras that 99.99999 percent of the world eats? He said, ""I think it's an insult to history."" And I wrote, insult to history. I'm on the plane and I'm just tearing my hair out. It's like, why didn't I follow up on that? What the hell does that mean? Insult to history.So I did some research when I got back, and here's what I found. The history of foie gras. Jews invented foie gras. True story. True story. By accident. They were looking for an alternative to schmaltz. Gotten sick of the chicken fat. They were looking for an alternative. And they saw in the fall that there was this natural, beautiful, sweet, delicious fat from geese. And they slaughtered them, used the fat throughout the winter for cooking. The Pharaoh got wind of this — This is true, right off the Internet. The Pharaoh got — (Laughter) I swear to God. (Laughter) The Pharaoh got wind of this and wanted to taste it. He tasted it and fell in love with it. He started demanding it.And he didn't want it just in the fall, he wanted it all year round. And he demanded that the Jews supply enough for everyone. And the Jews, fearing for their life, had to come up with an ingenious idea, or at least try and satisfy the Pharaoh's wishes, of course. And they invented, what? Gavage. They invented gavage in a great moment of fear for their lives, and they provided the Pharaoh with gavage liver, and the good stuff they kept for themselves. Supposedly, anyway. I believe that one.That's the history of foie gras. And if you think about it, it's the history of industrial agriculture. It's the history of what we eat today. Most of what we eat today. Mega-farms, feed lots, chemical amendments, long-distance travel, food processing. All of it, our food system. That's also an insult to history. It's an insult to the basic laws of nature and of biology. Whether we're talking about beef cattle or we're talking about chickens, or we're talking about broccoli or Brussels sprouts, or in the case of this morning's New York Times, catfish — which wholesale are going out of business.Whatever it is, it's a mindset that is reminiscent of General Motors. It's rooted in extraction. Take more, sell more, waste more. And for the future it won't serve us. Jonas Salk has a great quote. He said, ""If all the insects disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would disappear within 50 years. If human beings disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would flourish.""And he's right. We need now to adopt a new conception of agriculture. Really new. One in which we stop treating the planet as if it were some kind of business in liquidation. And stop degrading resources under the guise of cheap food. We can start by looking to farmers like Eduardo. Farmers that rely on nature for solutions, for answers, rather than imposing solutions on nature. Listening as Janine Benyus, one of my favorite writers and thinkers about this topic says, ""Listening to nature's operating instructions."" That's what Eduardo does, and does so brilliantly. And what he showed me and what he can show all of us, I think, is that the great thing for chefs, the great blessing for chefs, and for people that care about food and cooking, is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food. Whether we're talking about Brussels sprouts or foie gras. And it's also almost always, and I haven't found an example otherwise, but almost always, the most delicious choice. That's serendipitous. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_s_surprising_foie_gras_parable
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"Great creativity. In times of need, we need great creativity. Discuss. Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful. Great creativity can spread tolerance, champion freedom, make education seem like a bright idea. (Laughter)Great creativity can turn a spotlight on deprivation, or show that deprivation ain't necessarily so. Great creativity can make politicians electable, or parties unelectable. It can make war seem like tragedy or farce.Creativity is the meme-maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips. It's the pathfinder that shows us a simple road through an impenetrable moral maze. Science is clever, but great creativity is something less knowable, more magical. And now we need that magic. This is a time of need.Our climate is changing quickly, too quickly. And great creativity is needed to do what it does so well: to provoke us to think differently with dramatic creative statements. To tempt us to act differently with delightful creative scraps. Here is one such scrap from an initiative I'm involved in using creativity to inspire people to be greener.(Video) Man: You know, rather than drive today, I'm going to walk.Narrator: And so he walked, and as he walked he saw things. Strange and wonderful things he would not otherwise have seen. A deer with an itchy leg. A flying motorcycle. A father and daughter separated from a bicycle by a mysterious wall. And then he stopped. Walking in front of him was her. The woman who as a child had skipped with him through fields and broken his heart. Sure, she had aged a little. In fact, she had aged a lot. But he felt all his old passion for her return. ""Ford,"" he called softly. For that was her name. ""Don't say another word, Gusty,"" she said, for that was his name. ""I know a tent next to a caravan, exactly 300 yards from here. Let's go there and make love. In the tent."" Ford undressed. She spread one leg, and then the other. Gusty entered her boldly and made love to her rhythmically while she filmed him, because she was a keen amateur pornographer. The earth moved for both of them. And they lived together happily ever after. And all because he decided to walk that day. (Applause)Andy Hobsbawm: We've got the science, we've had the debate. The moral imperative is on the table. Great creativity is needed to take it all, make it simple and sharp. To make it connect. To make it make people want to act. So this is a call, a plea, to the incredibly talented TED community. Let's get creative against climate change. And let's do it soon. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_hobsbawm_says_do_the_green_thing
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"Unless we do something to prevent it, over the next 40 years we’re facing an epidemic of neurologic diseases on a global scale. A cheery thought. On this map, every country that’s colored blue has more than 20 percent of its population over the age of 65. This is the world we live in. And this is the world your children will live in. For 12,000 years, the distribution of ages in the human population has looked like a pyramid, with the oldest on top. It’s already flattening out. By 2050, it’s going to be a column and will start to invert. This is why it’s happening. The average lifespan’s more than doubled since 1840, and it’s increasing currently at the rate of about five hours every day. And this is why that’s not entirely a good thing: because over the age of 65, your risk of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will increase exponentially. By 2050, there’ll be about 32 million people in the United States over the age of 80, and unless we do something about it, half of them will have Alzheimer’s disease and three million more will have Parkinson’s disease. Right now, those and other neurologic diseases — for which we have no cure or prevention — cost about a third of a trillion dollars a year. It will be well over a trillion dollars by 2050. Alzheimer’s disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami. So one approach we’re taking is to try to design drugs that function like molecular Scotch tape, to hold the protein into its proper shape. That would keep it from forming the tangles that seem to kill large sections of the brain when they do. Interestingly enough, other neurologic diseases which affect very different parts of the brain also show tangles of misfolded protein, which suggests that the approach might be a general one, and might be used to cure many neurologic diseases, not just Alzheimer’s disease. There’s also a fascinating connection to cancer here, because people with neurologic diseases have a very low incidence of most cancers. And this is a connection that most people aren’t pursuing right now, but which we’re fascinated by. Most of the important and all of the creative work in this area is being funded by private philanthropies. And there’s tremendous scope for additional private help here, because the government has dropped the ball on much of this, I’m afraid. In the meantime, while we’re waiting for all these things to happen, here’s what you can do for yourself. If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson’s disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson’s disease. And the Avian Flu is also not a good idea. As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer’s disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease. You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. It’s also the biggest risk factor for glaucoma, which is just Alzheimer’s disease of the eye. And of course, when it comes to cognitive effects, ""use it or lose it"" applies, so you want to stay mentally stimulated. But hey, you’re listening to me. So you’ve got that covered. And one final thing. Wish people like me luck, okay? Because the clock is ticking for all of us. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_petsko_on_the_coming_neurological_epidemic
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"The north coast of California has rainforests — temperate rainforests — where it can rain more than 100 inches a year. This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree. Its species name is Sequoia sempervirens. Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest living organism on Earth. The range of the species goes up to as much as 380 feet tall. That's 38 stories tall. These are trees that would stand out in midtown Manhattan. Nobody knows how old the oldest living Coast Redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings, and, in any case, the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow. But it's believed that the oldest living Redwoods are perhaps 2,500 years old — roughly the age of the Parthenon — although it's also suspected that there may be individual trees that are older than that.You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red. The largest individuals of this species, the dreadnoughts of their kind, live just on the north coast of California, where the rain is really intense. In recent historic times, about 96 percent of the Coast Redwood forest was cut down, especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging, clear-cutting that took place in the 1970s through the early 1990s. Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected — entirely protected — in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park. But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under-explored. Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.I'm going to do a little Gedanken experiment. I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism. And, Chris, if I could have you up here? I have a tape measure. It's a kind loaner from TED. And Chris, if you could take the end of that tape measure? We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is. Unfortunately, this tape isn't long enough — it's only a 25-foot tape. Chris, could you extend your arm out that way? There we go. OK. And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood. Now, let your imagination go upward into space. Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time.The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time: not human time, but what we might call Redwood time. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years. Plant this small seed, wait 2,000 years, and you get this: the Lost Monarch. It dwells in the Grove of Titans on the north coast, and was discovered in 1998. And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism. You're like a mouse looking at the foot of an elephant, and most of the organism is overhead, unseen.I became very interested, and I wrote about a couple. Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine are the principal explorers of the Redwood forest canopy. They're world-class athletes, and they also are world-class forest ecology scientists. Steve Sillett, when he was a 19-year-old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so-called Redwood desert. That is to say, at that time it was believed that there was nothing up there except the branches of Redwood trees. And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free-climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there. He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze. And then, from there, he climbed directly up the bark until he got to the top of the tree.His friend, a guy named Marwood Harris, was following behind. Neither one of them had noticed that there was a Yellow Jacket wasp's nest the size of a bowling ball hanging from the branch that Steve had jumped into. And when Marwood made the jump, he was covered with wasps stinging him in the face and eyes. He nearly let go. He would have fallen to his death, being 75 feet above the ground. But they made it to the top, and what they found was not a Redwood desert, but a lost world — a kind of three-dimensional labyrinth in the air, filled with unknown life. Now, I had been working on other topics: the emergence of infectious diseases, which come out of the natural ecosystems of the Earth, make a trans-species jump, and get into humans.After three books on this, it got to be a bit much, in a way. My wife and I adore our children. And I began climbing trees with my kids as just something to do with them, using the so-called arborist climbing technique, with ropes. You use ropes to get yourself up into the crown of a tree. Children are incredibly adept at climbing trees. That's my son, Oliver. They don't seem to suffer from the same fear of heights that humans do.(Laughter)If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe. We camped overnight in the trees, in tree boats. This is my daughter Laura, then 15, looking out of a tree boat. She's, by the way, tied in with a rope so she can't fall. Looking out of a tree boat in the morning and hearing birdsong coming in three dimensions around us. We had been visited in the night by flying squirrels, who don't seem to recognize humans for what they are because they've never seen them in the canopy before. And we practiced advanced techniques like sky-walking, where you can move from tree to tree through space, rather like Spiderman. It became a writing project.When Steve Sillett gets up into a big Redwood, he fires an arrow, which trails a fishing line, which gets over a branch in the tree, and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line. You ascend 30 stories. There are two people climbing this tree, Gaya, which is thought to be one of the oldest Redwoods. There they are. They are only one-seventh of the way up that tree. You do feel a sense of exposure. There is a small person right down there on the ground. You feel like you're climbing a wall of wood. But then you enter the Redwood canopy, and it's like coming through a layer of clouds. And all of a sudden, you lose sight of the ground, and you also lose sight of the sky, and you're in a three-dimensional labyrinth in the air filled with hanging gardens of ferns growing out of soil, which is populated with all kinds of small organisms.There are epiphytes, plants that grow on trees. These are huckleberry bushes. Many species of mosses, and then all sorts of lichens just plastering the tree. When you get near the top of the tree, you feel like you can't fall — in fact, it's difficult to move. You're worming your way through branches which are crowded with living things that don't occur near the ground. It's like scuba diving into a coral reef, except you're going upward instead of downward. And then the trees tend to flare out into platform-like areas at the top. Maria's sitting on one of them. These limbs could be five to six hundred years old. Redwoods grow very slowly in their tops. They also have a feature: thickets of huckleberry bushes that grow out of the tops of Redwood trees that are technically known as huckleberry afros, and you can sit there and snack on the berries while you're resting.Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood. Now, here we see a reiteration in Chronos, one of the older Redwoods. This reiteration is a huge flying buttress that comes out the tree itself. This buttress is less than halfway up the tree. And then it bursts into a forest of Redwoods. This particular extra trunk is a meter across at the base and extends upward for 150 feet. It's as big as any of the biggest trees east of the Mississippi River, and yet it's only a minor feature on Chronos.This three-dimensional map of the crown structure of a Redwood named Iluvatar, made by Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine and their colleagues, gives you an idea. What you're seeing here is a hierarchical schematic development of the trunks of this tree as it has elaborated itself over time into six layers of fractal, of trunks springing from trunks springing from trunks. I asked Steve to put a human being in this to give a sense of scale. There's the person, right there. The person is waving to us. I've wanted to ask Craig Venter if it would be possible to insert a synthetic chromosome into a human so that we could reiterate ourselves if we wanted to. And if we were able to reiterate, then the fingers of our hand would be people who looked like us, and they would have people on their hands and so on. And if we had Redwood-like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were. And it would be a lovely thing to be able to wave to someone and have all our reiterations wave at the same time.(Laughter)To reiterate the point, let's go closer into Iluvatar. We're looking at that yellow box. And this hallucinatory drawing shows you — everything you see in this drawing is Iluvatar. These are millennial structures — portions of the tree that are believed to be more than 1,000 years old. There are four humans in this shot — one, two, three, four. And there's also something that I want to show you. This is a flying buttress. Redwoods grow back into themselves as they expand into space, and this flying buttress is a limb shot out of that small trunk, going back into the main trunk and fusing with it. Flying buttresses, just as in a cathedral, help strengthen the crown of the tree and help the tree exist longer through time. The scientists are doing all kinds of experiments in these trees. They've wired them like patients in an ICU.They're finding out that Redwoods can move moisture out of the air and down into their trunks, possibly all the way into their root systems. They also have the ability to put roots anywhere in the tree itself. If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart. If we had Redwood-like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off. Canopy soil can occur up to a meter deep, hundreds of feet above the ground, and there are organisms in this soil that have, as yet, no names.This is an unnamed species of copepod. A copepod is a crustacean. These copepods are a major constituent of the oceans, and they are a major part of the diet of grazing baleen whales. What they're doing in the Redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean, or how they got there, is completely unknown. There are some interesting theories that, if I had time, I would tell you about. But as you go and you look closer at a tree, what you see is, you see increasing complexity. We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood. Gaya may be 3,000 to 5,000 years old, no one really knows, but its top has broken off and it's been rotting back now.This little Japanese garden-like creation probably took 700 years to form in its complexity that we see right now. As you look at a tree, it takes a magnifying glass to see a giant tree. I have to show you something unfortunately very sad at the conclusion of this talk. The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East. And we're moving in a full circle now. In the 1950s, a small organism appeared in Richmond, Virginia, called the Hemlock woolly adelgid. It made a trans-species jump out of some other organism in Asia, where it was living on Hemlock trees in Asia. When it moved into its new host, the Eastern Hemlock tree, it escaped its predators, and the new tree had no resistance to it. The Eastern Hemlock forest is being considered in some ways the last fragments of primeval rainforest east of the Mississippi River.I hadn't even known that there were rainforests in the east, but in Great Smoky Mountains National Park it can rain up to 100 inches of rain a year. And in the last two to three summers, these invasive organisms, this kind of Ebola of the trees, as it were, has swept through the primeval Hemlock forest of the east, and has absolutely wiped it out. I climbed there this past summer. This is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Hemlocks are dead as far as the eye can see. And what we're seeing is not just the potential death of the Eastern Hemlock species — that is to say, its extinction from nature due to this invading parasite — but we're also seeing the death of an incredibly complex ecosystem for which these trees are merely the substrate for the aerial labyrinth of the sky that exists in their crowns.It's absolutely heartbreaking to see. One of the things that is just — I almost can't conceive it — is the idea that the national news media hasn't picked this up at all, and this is the devastation of one of the most important ecosystems in North America. What can the Redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life — the necessity to love. But we're different from trees, and they can also teach us something about ourselves in the differences that we have. We are human, and we have the capacity to love, we have the capacity to wonder, and we have a sort of boundless curiosity, a restless inquisitiveness that so suits us as primates, I think.And at least for me, personally, the trees have taught me an entirely new way of loving my children. Exploring with them the forest canopy has been one of the most lovely things of my existence on Earth. And I think that one of the happiest things is the sense that with my children I've been able to introduce them into the very small circle of humans who are lucky enough, or possibly stupid enough, to still climb trees. Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: I think at a previous TED, I think it was Nathan Myhrvold who told me that it was thought that because these trees are like, 2,000 years and older, on many of them there are ecosystems where there are species that are not found anywhere on the Earth except on that one tree. Is that correct?Richard Preston: Yes, that is correct. I mentioned Hyperion, the world's tallest tree. And I was a member of a climbing team that made the first climb of it, in 2006. And while we were climbing Hyperion, Marie Antoine spotted an unknown species of golden-brown ant about halfway up the trunk. Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove. And in subsequent climbs they could never find that ant again, and so no specimens have ever been collected. We don't know what it is — we just know it's there.CA: So, you have to wonder when, you know, if some other species than us was recording the stories that mattered on Earth, you know, our stories are about Iraq and war and politics and celebrity gossip. You've just told us a different story of this tragic arms race that's happening, and maybe whole ecosystems gone forever. It's an amazing sense of wonder you've given me, and a sense of just how fragile this whole thing is.RP: It is fragile, and you know, I think about emerging human diseases — parasites that move into the human species. But that's just a very small facet of a much greater problem of invasions of species worldwide, all through the ecosystems, and you know, the Earth itself —CA: Partly caused by us, inadvertently.RP: Caused by humans. Caused by the movement of humans. You can think of the Earth's biosphere as a palace, and the continents are rooms in the palace, and the islands are small rooms. But lately, the doors of the palace have been flung open, and the walls are coming down.CA: Richard Preston, thank you very much, I think.RP: Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_preston_on_the_giant_trees
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"You know, we're going to do things a little differently. I'm not going to show you a presentation. I'm going to talk to you. And at the same time, we're going to look at just images from a photo stream that is pretty close to live of things that — snapshots from Second Life. So hopefully this will be fascinating. You can — I can compete for your attention with the strange pictures that you see on screen that come from there. I thought I'd talk a little bit about some just big ideas about this, and then get John back out here so we can talk interactively a little bit more and think and ask questions. You know, I guess the first question is, why build a virtual world at all? And I think the answer to that is always going to be at least driven to a certain extent by the people initially crazy enough to start the project, you know.So I can give you a little bit of first background just on me and what moved me as a — really going back as far as a teenager and then an adult, to actually try and build this kind of thing. I was a very creative kid who read a lot, and got into electronics first, and then later, programming computers, when I was really young. I was just always trying to make things. I was just obsessed with taking things apart and building things, and just anything I could do with my hands or with wood or electronics or metal or anything else. And so, for example — and it's a great Second Life thing — I had a bedroom. And every kid, you know, as a teenager, has got his bedroom he retreats to — but I wanted my door, I thought it would be cool if my door went up rather than opened, like on Star Trek. I thought it would be neat to do that. And so I got up in the ceiling and I cut through the ceiling joists, much to my parents' delight, and put the door, you know, being pulled up through the ceiling.I built — I put a garage-door opener up in the attic that would pull this door up. You can imagine the amount of time that it took me to do this to the house and the displeasure of my parents. The thing that was always striking to me was that we as people could have so many really amazing ideas about things we'd like to do, but are so often unable, in the real world, to actually do those things — to actually cobble together the materials and go through the actual execution phase of building something that you imagine from a design perspective. And so for me, I know that when the Internet came around and I was doing computer programming and just, you know, just generally trying to run my own little company and figure out what to do with the Internet and with computers, I was just immediately struck by how the ultimate thing that you would really want to do with the Internet and with computers would be to use the Internet and connected computers to simulate a world to sort of recreate the laws of physics and the rules of how things went together — the sort of — the idea of atoms and how to make things, and do that inside a computer so that we could all get in there and make stuff.And so for me that was the thing that was so enticing. I just wanted this place where you could build things. And so I think you see that in the genesis of what has happened with Second Life, and I think it's important. I also think that more generally, the use of the Internet and technology as a kind of a space between us for creativity and design is a general trend. It is a — sort of a great human progress. Technology is just generally being used to allow us to create in as shared and social a way as possible. And I think that Second Life and virtual worlds more generally represent the best we can do to achieve that right now. You know, another way to look at that, and related to the content and, you know, thinking about space, is to connect sort of virtual worlds to space. I thought that might be a fun thing to talk about for a second. If you think about going into space, it's a fascinating thing. So many movies, so many kids, we all sort of dream about exploring space. Now, why is that? Stop for a moment and ask, why that conceit? Why do we as people want to do that? I think there's a couple of things. It's what we see in the movies — you know, it's this dream that we all share.One is that if you went into space you'd be able to begin again. In some sense, you would become someone else in that journey, because there wouldn't be — you'd leave society and life as you know it, behind. And so inevitably, you would transform yourself — irreversibly, in all likelihood — as you began this exploration. And then the second thing is that there's this tangible sense that if you travel far enough, you can find out there — oh, yeah — you have no idea what you're going to find once you get there, into space. It's going to be different than here. And in fact, it's going to be so different than what we see here on earth that anything is going to be possible. So that's kind of the idea — we as humans crave the idea of creating a new identity and going into a place where anything is possible. And I think that if you really sit and think about it, virtual worlds, and where we're going with more and more computing technology, represent essentially the likely, really tactically possible version of space exploration. We are moved by the idea of virtual worlds because, like space, they allow us to reinvent ourselves and they contain anything and everything, and probably anything could happen there.You know, to give you a size idea about scale, you know, comparing space to Second Life, most people don't realize, kind of — and then this is just like the Internet in the early '90s. In fact, Second Life virtual worlds are a lot like the Internet in the early '90s today: everybody's very excited, there's a lot of hype and excitement about one idea or the next from moment to moment, and then there's despair and everybody thinks the whole thing's not going to work. Everything that's happening with Second Life and more broadly with virtual worlds, all happened in the early '90s. We always play a game at the office where you can take any article and find the same article where you just replace the words ""Second Life"" with ""Web,"" and ""virtual reality"" with ""Internet."" You can find exactly the same articles written about everything that people are observing. To give you an idea of scale, Second Life is about 20,000 CPUs at this point. It's about 20,000 computers connected together in three facilities in the United States right now, that are simulating this virtual space. And the virtual space itself — there's about 250,000 people a day that are wandering around in there, so the kind of, active population is something like a smallish city. The space itself is about 10 times the size of San Francisco, and it's about as densely built out.So it gives you an idea of scale. Now, it's expanding very rapidly — about five percent a month or so right now, in terms of new servers being added. And so of course, radically unlike the real world, and like the Internet, the whole thing is expanding very, very quickly, and historically exponentially. So that sort of space exploration thing is matched up here by the amount of content that's in there, and I think that amount is critical. It was critical with the virtual world that it be this space of truly infinite possibility. We're very sensitive to that as humans. You know, you know when you see it. You know when you can do anything in a space and you know when you can't. Second Life today is this 20,000 machines, and it's about 100 million or so user-created objects where, you know, an object would be something like this, possibly interactive. Tens of millions of them are thinking all the time; they have code attached to them. So it's a really large world already, in terms of the amount of stuff that's there and that's very important. If anybody plays, like, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft comes on, like, four DVDs. Second Life, by comparison, has about 100 terabytes of user-created data, making it about 25,000 times larger.So again, like the Internet compared to AOL, and the sort of chat rooms and content on AOL at the time, what's happening here is something very different, because the sheer scale of what people can do when they're enabled to do anything they want is pretty amazing. The last big thought is that it is almost certainly true that whatever this is going to evolve into is going to be bigger in total usage than the Web itself. And let me justify that with two statements. Generically, what we use the Web for is to organize, exchange, create and consume information. It's kind of like Irene talking about Google being data-driven. I'd say I kind of think about the world as being information. Everything that we interact with, all the experiences that we have, is kind of us flowing through a sea of information and interacting with it in different ways. The Web puts information in the form of text and images. The topology, the geography of the Web is text-to-text links for the most part. That's one way of organizing information, but there are two things about the way you access information in a virtual world that I think are the important ways that they're very different and much better than what we've been able to do to date with the Web.The first is that, as I said, the — well, the first difference for virtual worlds is that information is presented to you in the virtual world using the most powerful iconic symbols that you can possibly use with human beings. So for example, C-H-A-I-R is the English word for that, but a picture of this is a universal symbol. Everybody knows what it means. There's no need to translate it. It's also more memorable if I show you that picture, and I show you C-H-A-I-R on a piece of paper. You can do tests that show that you'll remember that I was talking about a chair a couple of days later a lot better. So when you organize information using the symbols of our memory, using the most common symbols that we've been immersed in all our lives, you maximally both excite, stimulate, are able to remember, transfer and manipulate data. And so virtual worlds are the best way for us to essentially organize and experience information.And I think that's something that people have talked about for 20 years — you know, that 3D, that lifelike environments are really important in some magical way to us. But the second thing — and I think this one is less obvious — is that the experience of creating, consuming, exploring that information is in the virtual world implicitly and inherently social. You are always there with other people. And we as humans are social creatures and must, or are aided by, or enjoy more, the consumption of information in the presence of others. It's essential to us. You can't escape it. When you're on Amazon.com and you're looking for digital cameras or whatever, you're on there right now, when you're on the site, with like 5,000 other people, but you can't talk to them. You can't just turn to the people that are browsing digital cameras on the same page as you, and ask them, ""Hey, have you seen one of these before? Because I'm thinking about buying it.""That experience of like, shopping together, just as a simple example, is an example of how as social creatures we want to experience information in that way. So that second point, that we inherently experience information together or want to experience it together, is critical to essentially, kind of, this trend of where we're going to use technology to connect us. And so I think, again, that it's likely that in the next decade or so these virtual worlds are going to be the most common way as human beings that we kind of use the electronics of the Internet, if you will, to be together, to consume information. You know, mapping in India — that's such a great example. Maybe the solution there involves talking to other people in real time. Asking for advice, rather than any possible way that you could just statically organize a map.So I think that's another big point. I think that wherever this is all going, whether it's Second Life or its descendants, or something broader that happens all around the world at a lot of different points — this is what we're going to see the Internet used for, and total traffic and total unique users is going to invert, so that the Web and its bibliographic set of text and graphical information is going to become a tool or a part of that consumption pattern, but the pattern itself is going to happen mostly in this type of an environment. Big idea, but I think highly defensible. So let me stop there and bring John back, and maybe we can just have a longer conversation. Thank you. John. That's great.(Applause)John Hockenberry: Why is the creation, the impulse to create Second Life, not a utopian impulse? Like for example, in the 19th century, any number of works of literature that imagined alternative worlds were explicitly utopian.Philip Rosedale: I think that's great. That's such a deep question. Yeah. Is a virtual world likely to be a utopia, would be one way I'd say it. The answer is no, and I think the reason why is because the Web itself as a good example is profoundly bottoms-up. That idea of infinite possibility, that magic of anything can happen, only happens in an environment where you really know that there's a fundamental freedom at the level of the individual actor, at the level of the Lego blocks, if you will, that make up the virtual world. You have to have that level of freedom, and so I'm often asked that, you know, is there a, kind of, utopian or, is there a utopian tendency to Second Life and things like it, that you would create a world that has a grand scheme to it? Those top-down schemes are alienating to just about everybody, even if you mean well when you build them. And what's more, human society, when it's controlled, when you set out a grand scheme of rules, a new way of people interacting, or a new way of laying out a city, or whatever, that stuff historically has never scaled much beyond, you know — I always laughingly say — the Mall of America, you know, which is like, the largest piece of centrally designed architecture that, you know, has been built.JH: The Kremlin was pretty big.PR: The Kremlin, yeah. That's true. The whole complex.JH: Give me a story of a tool you created at the beginning in Second Life that you were pretty sure people would want to use in the creation of their avatars or in communicating that people actually in practice said, no, I'm not interested in that at all, and name something that you didn't come up with that almost immediately people began to demand.PR: I'm sure I can think of multiple examples of both of those. One of my favorites. I had this feature that I built into Second Life — I was really passionate about it. It was an ability to kind of walk up close to somebody and have a more private conversation, but it wasn't instant messaging because you had to sort of befriend somebody. It was just this idea that you could kind of have a private chat. I just remember it was one of those examples of data-driven design. I thought it was such a good idea from my perspective, and it was just absolutely never used, and we ultimately — I think we've now turned it off, if I remember. We finally gave up, took it out of the code. But more generally, you know, one other example I think about this, which is great relative to the utopian idea. Second Life originally had 16 simulators. It now has 20,000.So when it only had 16, it was only about as big as this college campus. And we had — we zoned it, you know: we put a nightclub, we put a disco where you could dance, and then we had a place where you could fight with guns if you wanted to, and we had another place that was like a boardwalk, kind of a Coney Island. And we laid out the zoning, but of course, people could build all around it however they wanted to. And what was so amazing right from the start was that the idea that we had put out in the zoning concept, basically, was instantly and thoroughly ignored, and like, two months into the whole thing, — which is really a small amount of time, even in Second Life time — I remember the users, the people who were then using Second Life, the residents came to me and said, we want to buy the disco — because I had built it — we want to buy that land and raze it and put houses on it. And I sold it to them — I mean, we transferred ownership and they had a big party and blew up the entire building. And I remember that that was just so telling, you know, that you didn't know exactly what was going to happen. When you think about stuff that people have built that's popular —JH: CBGB's has to close eventually, you know. That's the rule.PR: Exactly. And it — but it closed on day one, basically, in Internet time. You know, an example of something — pregnancy. You can have a baby in Second Life. This is done entirely using, kind of, the tools that are built into Second Life, so the innate concept of becoming pregnant and having a baby, of course — Second Life is, at the platform level, at the level of the company — at Linden Lab — Second Life has no game properties to it whatsoever. There is no attempt to structure the experience, to make it utopian in that sense that we put into it. So of course, we never would have put a mechanism for having babies or, you know, taking two avatars and merging them, or something.But people built the ability to have babies and care for babies as a purchasable experience that you can have in Second Life and so — I mean, that's a pretty fascinating example of, you know, what goes on in the overall economy. And of course, the existence of an economy is another idea. I didn't talk about it, but it's a critical feature. When people are given the opportunity to create in the world, there's really two things they want. One is fair ownership of the things they create. And then the second one is — if they feel like it, and they're not going to do it in every case, but in many they are — they want to actually be able to sell that creation as a way of providing for their own livelihood. True on the Web — also true in Second Life. And so the existence of an economy is critical.JH: Questions for Philip Rosedale? Right here.(Audience: Well, first an observation, which is that you look like a character.)JH: The observation is, Philip has been accused of looking like a character, an avatar, in Second Life. Respond, and then we'll get the rest of your question.PR: But I don't look like my avatar.(Laughter)How many people here know what my avatar looks like? That's probably not very many.JH: Are you ripping off somebody else's avatar with that, sort of — PR: No, no. I didn't. One of the other guys at work had a fantastic avatar — a female avatar — that I used to be once in a while. But my avatar is a guy wearing chaps. Spiky hair — spikier than this. Kind of orange hair. Handlebar mustache. Kind of a Village People sort of a character. So, very cool.JH: And your question?(Audience: [Unclear].)JH: The question is, there appears to be a lack of cultural fine-tuning in Second Life. It doesn't seem to have its own culture, and the sort of differences that exist in the real world aren't translated into the Second Life map.PR: Well, first of all, we're very early, so this has only been going on for a few years. And so part of what we see is the same evolution of human behavior that you see in emerging societies. So a fair criticism — is what it is — of Second Life today is that it's more like the Wild West than it is like Rome, from a cultural standpoint. That said, the evolution of, and the nuanced interaction that creates culture, is happening at 10 times the speed of the real world, and in an environment where, if you walk into a bar in Second Life, 65 percent of the people there are not in the United States, and in fact are speaking their, you know, various and different languages. In fact, one of the ways to make money in Second Life is to make really cool translators that you drag onto your body and they basically, kind of, pop up on your screen and allow you to use Google or Babel Fish or one of the other online text translators to on-the-fly translate spoken — I'm sorry — typed text between individuals. And so, the multicultural nature and the sort of cultural melting pot that's happening inside Second Life is quite — I think, quite remarkable relative to what in real human terms in the real world we've ever been able to achieve. So, I think that culture will fine-tune, it will emerge, but we still have some years to wait while that happens, as you would naturally expect.JH: Other questions? Right here.(Audience: What's your demographic?)JH: What's your demographic? PR: So, the question is, what's the demographic. So, the average age of a person in Second Life is 32, however, the use of Second Life increases dramatically as your physical age increases. So as you go from age 30 to age 60 — and there are many people in their sixties using Second Life — this is also not a sharp curve — it's very, very distributed — usage goes up in terms of, like, hours per week by 40 percent as you go from age 30 to age 60 in real life, so there's not — many people make the mistake of believing that Second Life is some kind of an online game. Actually it's generally unappealing — I'm just speaking broadly and critically — it's not very appealing to people that play online video games, because the graphics are not yet equivalent to — I mean, these are very nice pictures, but in general the graphics are not quite equivalent to the fine-tuned graphics that you see in a Grand Theft Auto 4. So average age: 32. I mentioned 65 percent of the users are not in the United States. The distribution amongst countries is extremely broad.There's users from, you know, virtually every country in the world now in Second Life. The dominant ones are — if you take the UK and Europe, together they make up about 55 percent of the usage base in Second Life. In terms of psychographic — oh, men and women: men and women are almost equally matched in Second Life, so about 45 percent of the people online right now on Second Life are women. Women use Second Life, though, about 30 to 40 percent more, on an hours basis, than men do, meaning that more men sign up than women, and more women stay and use it than men. So that's another demographic fact. In terms of psychographic, you know, the people in Second Life are remarkably dissimilar relative to what you might think, when you go in and talk to them and meet them, and I would, you know, challenge you to just do this and find out. But it's not a bunch of programmers. It's not easy to describe as a demographic. If I had to just sort of paint a broad picture, I'd say, remember the people who were really getting into eBay in the first few years of eBay? Maybe a little bit like that: in other words, people who are early adopters. They tend to be creative. They tend to be entrepreneurial. A lot of them — about 55,000 people so far — are cash-flow positive: they're making money from what — I mean, real-world money — from what they're doing in Second Life, so it's a very build — still a creative, building things, build-your-own-business type of an orientation. So, that's it.JH: You describe yourself, Philip, as someone who was really creative when you were young and, you know, liked to make things. I mean, it's not often that you hear somebody describe themselves as really creative. I suspect that's possibly a euphemism for C student who spent a lot of time in his room? Is it possible?(Laughter)PR: I was a — there were times I was a C student. You know, it's funny. When I got to college — I studied physics in college — and I got really — it was funny, because I was definitely a more antisocial kid. I read all the time. I was shy. I don't seem like it now, but I was very shy. Moved around a bunch — had that experience too. So I did, kind of, I think, live in my own world, and obviously that helps, you know, engage your real interest in something.JH: So you're on your fifth life at this point?PR: If you count, yeah, cities. So — but I did — and I didn't do — I think I didn't do as well in school as I could have. I think you're right. I wasn't, like, an obsessed — you know, get A's kind of guy. I was going to say, I had a great social experience when I went to college that I hadn't had before, a more fraternal experience, where I met six or seven other guys who I studied physics with, and I was very competitive with them, so then I started to get A's. But you're right: I wasn't an A student.JH: Last question. Right here.(Audience: In the pamphlet, there's a statement — )JH: You want to paraphrase that?PR: Yeah, so let me restate that. So, you're saying that in the pamphlet there's a statement that we may come to prefer our digital selves to our real ones — our more malleable or manageable digital identities to our real identities — and that in fact, much of human life and human experience may move into the digital realm. And then that's kind of a horrifying thought, of course. That's a frightening change, frightening disruption. I guess, and you're asking, what do I think about that? How do I —JH: What's your response to the people who would say, that's horrifying?(Audience: If someone would say to you, I find that disturbing, what would be your response?)PR: Well, I'd say a couple of things. One is, it's disturbing like the Internet or electricity was. That is to say, it's a big change, but it isn't avoidable. So, no amount of backpedaling or intentional behavior or political behavior is going to keep these technology changes from connecting us together, because the basic motive that people have — to be creative and entrepreneurial — is going to drive energy into these virtual worlds in the same way that it has with the Web. So this change, I believe, is a huge disruptive change.Obviously, I'm the optimist and a big believer in what's going on here, but I think that as — even a sober, you know, the most sober, disconnected thinker about this, looking at it from the side, has to conclude, based on the data, that with those kinds of economic forces at play, there is definitely going to be a sea change, and that change is going to be intensely disruptive relative to our concept of our very lives and being, and our identities, as well. I don't think we can get away from those changes. I think generally, we were talking about this — I think that generally being present in a virtual world and being challenged by it, being — surviving there, having a good life there, so to speak, is a challenge because of the multiculturality of it, because of the languages, because of the entrepreneurial richness of it, the sort of flea market nature, if you will, of the virtual world today.It puts challenges on us to rise to. We must be better than ourselves, in many ways. We must learn things and, you know, be more tolerant, and be smarter and learn faster and be more creative, perhaps, than we are typically in our real lives. And I think that if that is true of virtual worlds, then these changes, though scary — and, I say, inevitable — are ultimately for the better, and therefore something that we should ride out. But I would say that — and many other authors and speakers about this, other than me, have said, you know, fasten your seat belts because the change is coming. There are going to be big changes. JH: Philip Rosedale, thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_inspiration_of_second_life
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"People love their automobiles. They allow us to go where we want to when we want to. They're a form of entertainment, they're a form of art, a pride of ownership. Songs are written about cars. Prince wrote a great song: ""Little Red Corvette."" He didn't write ""Little Red Laptop Computer"" or ""Little Red Dirt Devil."" He wrote about a car. One of my favorites has always been: ""Make Love to Your Man in a Chevy Van,"" because that was my vehicle when I was in college.The fact is, when we do our market research around the world, we see there's a nearly universal aspiration on the part of people to own an automobile — 750 million people in the world today own a car. And you say, boy, that's a lot. But you know what? That's just 12 percent of the population. We really have to ask the question: Can the world sustain that number of automobiles? And if you look at projections over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years, it looks like the world car park could grow to on the order of 1.1 billion vehicles. If you park those end to end and wrap them around the Earth, that would stretch around the Earth 125 times.Now, we've made great progress with automobile technology over the last 100 years. Cars are dramatically cleaner, dramatically safer, more efficient and radically more affordable than they were 100 years ago. But the fact remains: the fundamental DNA of the automobile has stayed pretty much the same. If we were to reinvent the automobile today, rather than 100 years ago, knowing what we know about the issues associated with our product and about the technologies that exist today, what would we do?We wanted something that was really affordable. The fuel cell looked great: one-tenth as many moving parts, a fuel-cell propulsion system as an internal combustion engine, and it emits just water. And we wanted to take advantage of Moore's Law with electronic controls and software, and we absolutely wanted our car to be connected. So we embarked upon the reinvention around an electrochemical engine, the fuel cell, and hydrogen as the energy carrier. First was Autonomy. Autonomy really set the vision for where we wanted to head. We embodied all of the key components of a fuel-cell propulsion system. We then had Autonomy drivable with Hy-Wire, and we showed Hy-Wire here at this conference last year. Hy-Wire is the world's first drivable fuel cell, and we have followed up that now with Sequel. And Sequel truly is a real car. So if we could run the video —(Futuristic music)[Reinventing the Automobile](Video) It truly is my great pleasure to introduce Sequel.[Acceleration][Cruising][Steering][Braking]But the real key question I'm sure that's on your mind: Where is the hydrogen going to come from? And secondly, when are these kinds of cars going to be available? So let me talk about hydrogen first. The beauty of hydrogen is it can come from so many different sources: it can come from fossil fuels, it can come from any way that you can create electricity, including renewables. And it can come from biofuels. And that's quite exciting. The vision here is to have each local community play to its natural strength in creating the hydrogen. A lot of hydrogen is produced today in the world. It's produced to get sulfur out of gasoline — which I find is somewhat ironic. It's produced in the fertilizer industry; it's produced in the chemical manufacturing industry. That hydrogen is being made because there's a good business reason for its use. But it tells us that we know how to create it, we know how to create it cost-effectively, we know how to handle it safely.We did an analysis where you would have a station in each city with each of the 100 largest cities in the United States, and located the stations so you'd be no more than two miles from a station at any time. We put one every 25 miles on the freeway, and it turns out that translates into about 12,000 stations. And at a million dollars each, that would be about 12 billion dollars. That's a lot of money. But if you built the Alaskan pipeline today, that's half of what the Alaskan pipeline would cost. But the real exciting vision that we see, truly, is home refueling, much like recharging your laptop or recharging your cell phone. So we're pretty excited about the future of hydrogen. We think it's a question of not whether, but a question of when.What we've targeted for ourselves — and we're making great progress toward this goal — is to have a propulsion system based on hydrogen and fuel cells, designed and validated, that can go head-to-head with the internal combustion engine. We're talking about obsoleting the internal combustion engine, and doing it in terms of affordability at scale volumes, its performance and its durability. So that's what we're driving to for 2010. We haven't seen anything yet in our development work that says that isn't possible. We actually think the future is going to be event-driven. So since we can't predict the future, we want to spend a lot of our time trying to create that future.I'm very, very intrigued by the fact that our cars and trucks sit idle 90 percent of the time: they're parked all around us. They're usually parked within 100 feet of the people that own them. Now, if you take the power-generating capability of an automobile and you compare that to the electric grid in the United States, it turns out that the power in four percent of the automobiles equals that of the electric grid of the US. That's a huge power-generating capability, a mobile power-generating capability. And hydrogen and fuel cells give us that opportunity to actually use our cars and trucks when they're parked to generate electricity for the grid.We talked about swarm networks earlier. Talk about the ultimate swarm — having all of the processors and all of the cars when they're sitting idle being part of a global grid for computing capability. We find that premise quite exciting. The automobile becomes, then, an appliance — not in a commodity sense, but an appliance, mobile power, mobile platform for information and computing and communication, as well as a form of transportation.And the key to all of this is to make it affordable, to make it exciting, to get it on a pathway where there's a way to make money doing it. And again, this is a pretty big march to take here. A lot of people say: How do you sleep at night when you're wrestling with a problem of that magnitude? I tell them I sleep like a baby: I wake up crying every two hours.(Laughter)Actually, the theme of this conference, I think, has hit on one of the major keys to pull that off, and that's relationships and working together. Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Larry, Larry — wait, wait, wait. Larry, wait one sec. I've got so many questions I could ask you. I just want to ask one. You know, I could be wrong about this, but my sense is that in the public mind today, GM is not viewed as as serious about some of these environmental ideas as some of your Japanese competitors, maybe even as Ford. Are you serious about it, and not just, you know, when the consumers want it, when the regulators force us to do it, we will go there? Will you guys really try and show leadership on this?Larry Burns: Absolutely. We're absolutely serious. We're into this over a billion dollars already, so I would hope people would think we're serious when we're spending that kind of money. And secondly, it's a fundamental business proposition. I'll be honest with you; we're into it for business growth opportunities. We can't grow our business unless we solve these problems. The growth of the auto industry will be capped by sustainability issues if we don't solve the problems. And there's a simple principle of strategy that says: Do unto yourself before others do unto you. If we can see this possible future, others can, too. And we want to be the first one to create it, Chris.","https://www.ted.com/talks/reinventing_the_car
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"In 1962, Buckminster Fuller presented the particularly audacious proposal for the Geoscope. It was a 200-foot diameter geodesic sphere to be suspended over the East River in New York City, in full view of the United Nations. It was a big idea, for sure, and it was one that he felt could truly inform and deeply affect the decision making of this body through animations of global data, trends and other information regarding the globe, on this sphere. And today, 45 years later, we clearly have no less need for this kind of clarity and perspective, but what we do have is improved technology.Today we don't need one million light bulbs to create a spherical display. We can use LEDs. LEDs are smaller, they're cheaper, they're longer lasting, they're more efficient. Most importantly for this, they're faster. And this speed, combined with today's high-performance micro-controllers, allows us to actually simulate, in this piece, over 17,000 LEDs — using just 64. And the way this happens is through the phenomenon of persistence of vision. But as this ring rotates at about 1,700 rpm — that's 28 times per second. The equator's speed is actually about 60 miles per hour. There are four on-board micro-controllers that, each time this ring rotates it, as it passes the rear of the display, it picks up a position signal. And from that, the on-board micro-controllers can extrapolate the position of the ring at all points around the revolution and display arbitrary bitmap images and animations.But this is really just the beginning. In addition to higher resolution versions of this display, my father and I are working on a new patent-pending design for a fully volumetric display using the same phenomenon. It achieves this by rotating LEDs about two axes. So as you can see here, this is a, eleven-inch diameter circuit board. These blocks represent LEDs. And so you could see that as this disc rotates about this axis, it will create a disc of light that we can control. That's nothing new: that's a propeller clock; that's the rims that you can buy for your car. But what is new is that, when we rotate this disc about this axis, this disc of light actually becomes a sphere of light. And so we can control that with micro-controllers and create a fully volumetric, three-dimensional display with just 256 LEDs.Now this piece is currently in process — due out in May — but what we've done is we've put together a small demo, just to show the geometric translation of points into a sphere. I've got a little video to show you, but keep in mind that this is with no electronic control, and this is also with only four LEDs. This is actually only about 1.5 percent of what the final display will be in May. So, take a look. And here you can see it's rotating about the vertical axis only, creating circles. And then, as the other axis kicks in, those actually blur into a volume. And the shutter speed of the camera actually makes it slightly less effective in this case.But this piece is due out in May. It'll be on display at the Interactive Telecommunications Spring Show in Greenwich Village in New York City — that's open to the public, definitely invite you all to come and attend — it's a fantastic show. There are hundreds of student innovators with fantastic projects. This piece, actually, will be on display down in the Sierra Simulcast Lounge in the breaks between now and the end of the show. So I'd love to talk to you all, and invite you to come down and take a closer look. It's an honor to be here. Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_sears_demos_the_orb
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"This is Aunt Zip from Sodom, North Carolina. She was 105 years old when I took this picture. She was always saying things that made me stop and think, like, ""Time may be a great healer, but it ain't no beauty specialist."" (Laughter) She said, ""Be good to your friends. Why, without them, you'd be a total stranger."" (Laughter)This is one of her songs. Let's see if we can get into the flow here and all do this one together. And I'm going to have Michael Manring play bass with me. Give him a big old hand. (Applause)One, two, three, four.(Music)Well, my true love's a black-eyed daisy; if I don't see her, I go crazy.My true love lives up the river; a few more jumps and I'll be with her.Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey black-eyed Susie, hey.Now you've got to picture Aunt Zip at 105 years old in Sodom, North Carolina. I'd go up and learn these old songs from her. She couldn't sing much, couldn't play anymore. And I'd pull her out on the front porch. Down below, there was her grandson plowing the tobacco field with a mule. A double outhouse over here on the side. And we'd sing this old song. She didn't have a whole lot of energy, so I'd sing, ""Hey, hey!"" and she'd just answer back with, ""Black-eyed Susie.""Oh, hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey.Well, she and I went blackberry picking. She got mad; I took a licking.Ducks on the millpond, geese in the ocean, Devil in the pretty girl when she takes a notion.Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey black-eyed Susie, hey.Let's have the banjo.Well, we'll get married next Thanksgiving. I'll lay around; she'll make a living.She'll cook blackjacks, I'll cook gravy; we'll have chicken someday, maybe.Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey!One more time now. Oh, hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey.(Applause) Thank you, Michael.This is Ralph Stanley. When I was going to college at University of California at Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies, taking majors in biology and art, he came to the campus. This was in 1968, I guess it was. And he played his bluegrass style of music, but near the end of the concert, he played the old timing style of banjo picking that came from Africa, along with the banjo. It's called claw-hammer style, that he had learned from his mother and grandmother. I fell in love with that. I went up to him and said, how can I learn that? He said, well, you can go back to Clinch Mountain, where I'm from, or Asheville or Mount Airy, North Carolina — some place that has a lot of music. Because there's a lot of old people still living that play that old style.So I went back that very summer. I just fell in love with the culture and the people. And you know, I came back to school, I finished my degrees and told my parents I wanted to be a banjo player. You can imagine how excited they were.So I thought I would just like to show you some of the pictures I've taken of some of my mentors. Just a few of them, but maybe you'll get just a little hint of some of these folks.And play a little banjo. Let's do a little medley. (Music)(Applause) Those last few pictures were of Ray Hicks, who just passed away last year. He was one of the great American folk tale-tellers. The Old Jack tales that he had learned — he talked like this, you could hardly understand him. But it was really wonderful. And he lived in that house that his great-grandfather had built. No running water, no electricity. A wonderful, wonderful guy.And you can look at more pictures. I've actually got a website that's got a bunch of photos that I've done of some of the other folks I didn't get a chance to show you. This instrument came up in those pictures. It's called the mouth bow. It is definitely the first stringed instrument ever in the world, and still played in the Southern mountains. Now, the old timers didn't take a fancy guitar string and make anything like this. They would just take a stick and a catgut and string it up. It was hard on the cats, but it made a great little instrument. It sounds something like this.(Music) Well, have you heard the many stories told by young and old with joy about the many deeds of daring that were done by the Johnson boys?You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal.Now, they were scouts in the rebels' army, they were known both far and wide.When the Yankees saw them coming, they'd lay down their guns and hide.You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal.Ain't that a sound? (Applause)Well, it was 1954, I guess it was. We were driving in the car outside of Gatesville, Texas, where I grew up in the early part of my life. Outside of Gatesville we were coming back from the grocery store. My mom was driving; my brother and I were in the back seat. We were really mad at my mom. We looked out the window. We were surrounded by thousands of acres of cotton fields. You see, we'd just been to the grocery store, and my mom refused to buy us the jar of Ovaltine that had the coupon for the Captain Midnight decoder ring in it. And, buddy, that made us mad. Well, my mom didn't put up with much either, and she was driving, and she said, ""You boys! You think you can have anything you want. You don't know how hard it is to earn money. Your dad works so hard. You think money grows on trees. You've never worked a day in your lives. You boys make me so mad. You're going to get a job this summer.""She pulled the car over; she said, ""Get out of the car."" My brother and I stepped out of the car. We were standing on the edge of thousands of acres of cotton. There were about a hundred black folks out there picking. My mom grabbed us by the shoulders. She marched us out in the field. She went up to the foreman; she said, ""I've got these two little boys never worked a day in their lives."" Of course, we were just eight and 10. (Laughter) She said, ""Would you put them to work?"" Well, that must have seemed like a funny idea to that foreman: put these two middle-class little white boys out in a cotton field in August in Texas — it's hot. So he gave us each a cotton sack, about 10 feet long, about that big around, and we started picking. Now, cotton is soft but the outside of the plant is just full of stickers. And if you don't know what you're doing, your hands are bleeding in no time. And my brother and I started to pick it, and our hands were startin' to bleed, and then — ""Mom!"" And Mom was just sitting by the car like this. She wasn't going to give up.Well, the foreman could see he was in over his head, I guess. He kind of just snuck up behind us and he sang out in a low voice. He just sang: ""Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind."" And from all around as people started singing and answering back, he sang: ""Good news, good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind."" Now, my brother and I had never heard anything like that in our whole lives. It was so beautiful. We sat there all day picking cotton, without complaining, without crying, while they sang things like: ""Oh, Mary, don't you weep, don't you moan"" and ""Wade in the water,"" and ""I done done,"" ""This little light of mine.""Finally, by the end of the day, we'd each picked about a quarter of a bag of cotton. But the foreman was kind enough to give us each a check for a dollar, but my mother would never let us cash it. I'm 57; still have the check. Now, my mother hoped that we learned from that the value of hard work. But if you have children, you know it doesn't often work that way. No, we learned something else. The first thing I learned that day was that I never ever wanted to work that hard again. (Laughter) And pretty much never did. But I also learned that some people in this world do have to work that hard every day, and that was an eye-opener. And I also learned that a great song can make hard work go a little easier. And it also can bring the group together in a way that nothing else can.Now, I was just a little eight-year-old boy that day when my mama put me out of the car in that hot Texas cotton field. I wasn't even aware of music — not even aware of it. But that day in the cotton field out there picking, when those people started singing, I realized I was in the very heart of real music, and that's where I've wanted to be ever since.Try this old song with me. I sing: Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know.You sing: Don't want it to leave me behind. Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind.Good news, good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me —It's been a while since you guys have been picking your last bale of cotton, isn't it? Let's try it one more time.There's a starry crown in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. There's a starry crown in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind.Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind.It was a few years ago, but I sort of remembered this story, and I told it at a concert. My mom was in the audience. After the — she was glad to have a story about herself, of course, but after the concert she came up and she said, ""David, I've got to tell you something. I set that whole thing up. I set it up with the foreman. I set it up with the owner of the land. I just wanted you boys to learn the value of hard work. I didn't know it was going to make you fall in love with music though.""Let's try. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind. (Applause)Well, this is the steel guitar. It's an American-made instrument. It was originally made by the Dopyera Brothers, who later on made the Dobro, which is a wood-bodied instrument with a metal cone for — where the sound comes from. It's usually played flat on your lap. It was made to play Hawaiian music back in the 1920s, before they had electric guitars, trying to make a loud guitar. And then African-American folks figured out you could take a broken bottle neck, just like that — a nice Merlot works very well. That wine we had yesterday would have been perfect. Break it off, put it on your finger, and slide into the notes. This instrument pretty much saved my life.Fifteen years ago, 14 years ago, I guess, this year, my wife and I lost our daughter, Sarah Jane, in a car accident, and it was the most — it almost took me out — it almost took me out of this world. And I think I learned a lot about what happiness was by going through such unbelievable grief, just standing on the edge of that abyss and just wanting to jump in. I had to make lists of reasons to stay alive. I had to sit down and make lists, because I was ready to go; I was ready to check out of this world. And you know, at the top of the list, of course, were Jenny, and my son, Zeb, my parents — I didn't want to hurt them. But then, when I thought about it beyond that, it was very simple things. I didn't care about — I had a radio show, I have a radio show on public radio, ""Riverwalk,"" I didn't care about that. I didn't care about awards or money or anything. Nothing. Nothing. On the list it would be stuff like, seeing the daffodils bloom in the spring, the smell of new-mown hay, catching a wave and bodysurfing, the touch of a baby's hand, the sound of Doc Watson playing the guitar, listening to old records of Muddy Waters and Uncle Dave Macon. And for me, the sound of a steel guitar, because one of my parents' neighbors just gave me one of these things. And I would sit around with it, and I didn't know how to play it, but I would just play stuff as sad as I could play. And it was the only instrument that, of all the ones that I play, that would really make that connection. This is a song that came out of that.(Music) Well, I hear you're having trouble. Lord, I hate to hear that news. If you want to talk about it, you know, I will listen to you through.Words no longer say it; let me tell you what I always do. I just break off another bottleneck and play these steel guitar blues.People say, ""Oh, snap out of it!"" Oh yeah, that's easier said than done. While you can hardly move, they're running around having all kinds of fun.Sometimes I think it's better just to sink way down in your funky mood 'til you can rise up humming these steel guitar blues.Now, you can try to keep it all inside with drink and drugs and cigarettes, but you know that's not going to get you where you want to get.But I got some medicine here that just might shake things loose. Call me in the morning after a dose of these steel guitar blues. Open up now. (Applause)Oh, I think I've got time to tell you about this. My dad was an inventor. We moved to California when Sputnik went up, in 1957. And he was working on gyroscopes; he has a number of patents for that kind of thing. And we moved across the street from Michael and John Whitney. They were about my age. John went on, and Michael did too, to become some of the inventors of computer animation. Michael's dad was working on something called the computer. This was 1957, I was a little 10-year-old kid; I didn't know what that was. But he took me down to see one, you know, what they were making. It was like a library, just full of vacuum tubes as far as you could see, just floors and floors of these things, and one of the engineers said, some day you're going to be able to put this thing in your pocket. I thought, damn, those are going to be some big pants! (Laughter)So that Christmas — maybe I've got time for this — that Christmas I got the Mister Wizard Fun-o-Rama chemistry set. Well, I wanted to be an inventor just like my dad; so did Michael. His great-granddad had been Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. So we looked in that — this was a commercial chemistry set. It had three chemicals we were really surprised to see: sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal. Man, we were only 10, but we knew that made gunpowder. We made up a little batch and we put it on the driveway and we threw a match and phew, it flared up. Ah, it was great.Well, obviously the next thing to do was build a cannon. So we went over into Michael's garage — his dad had all kinds of stuff, and we put a pipe in the vice there, and screwed a cap on the end of the pipe, drilled a hole in the back of the pipe, took some of our firecrackers, pulled out the fuses, tied them together, put them in the back there, and — down in that hole — and then stuffed some of our gunpowder down that pipe and put three ball bearings on the top, in the garage. (Laughter) We weren't stupid: we put up a sheet of plywood about five feet in front of it. We stood back, we lit that thing, and they flew out of there — they went through that plywood like it was paper. Through the garage. Two of them landed in the side door of his new Citroen. (Laughter) We tore everything down and buried it in his backyard. That was Pacific Palisades; it probably is still there, back there.Well, my brother heard that we had made gunpowder. He and his buddies, they were older, and they were pretty mean. They said they were going to beat us up if we didn't make some gunpowder for them. We said, well, what are you going to do with it? They said, we're going to melt it down and make rocket fuel. (Laughter) Sure. We'll make you a big batch. (Laughter) So we made them a big batch, and it was in my — now, we'd just moved here. We'd just moved to California. Mom had redone the kitchen; Mom was gone that day. We had a pie tin. It became Chris Berquist's job to do the melting down. Michael and I were standing way at the side of the kitchen. He said, ""Yeah, hey, it's melting. Yeah, the sulfur's melting. No problem. Yeah, you know."" It just flared up, and he turned around, and he looked like this. No hair, no eyelashes, no nothing. There were big welts all over my mom's kitchen cabinet; the air was the just full of black smoke. She came home, she took that chemistry set away, and we never saw it again. But we thought of it often, because every time she'd cook tuna surprise it made — tasted faintly of gunpowder.So I like to invent things too, and I think I'll close out my set with something I invented a good while back. When drum machines were new, I got to thinking, why couldn't you take the oldest form of music, the hambone rhythms, and combine it with the newest technology? I call this Thunderwear. At that time, drum triggers were new. And so I put them all together and sewed 12 of them in this suit. I showed you some of the hambone rhythms yesterday; I'm going to be doing some of the same ones. I have a trigger here, trigger here, here, here. Right there. It's going to really hurt if I don't take that off. Okay. Now, the drum triggers go out my tail here, into the drum machine, and they can make various sounds, like drums. So let me put them all together. And also, I can change the sounds by stepping on this pedal right here, and — let me just close out here by doing you a little hambone solo or something like this.Thank you, folks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_holt_plays_mountain_music
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"So I understand that this meeting was planned, and the slogan was From Was to Still. And I am illustrating Still. Which, of course, I am not agreeing with because, although I am 94, I am not still working. And anybody who asks me, ""Are you still doing this or that?"" I don't answer because I'm not doing things still, I'm doing it like I always did. I still have — or did I use the word still? I didn't mean that.(Laughter)I have my file which is called To Do. I have my plans. I have my clients. I am doing my work like I always did. So this takes care of my age. I want to show you my work so you know what I am doing and why I am here. This was about 1925. All of these things were made during the last 75 years.(Laughter)(Applause)But, of course, I'm working since 25, doing more or less what you see here. This is Castleton China. This was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This is now for sale at the Metropolitan Museum. This is still at the Metropolitan Museum now for sale. This is a portrait of my daughter and myself.(Applause)These were just some of the things I've made. I made hundreds of them for the last 75 years. I call myself a maker of things. I don't call myself an industrial designer because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept. The industrial design magazine, I believe, is called ""Innovation."" Innovation is not part of the aim of my work. Well, makers of things: they make things more beautiful, more elegant, more comfortable than just the craftsmen do. I have so much to say. I have to think what I am going to say. Well, to describe our profession otherwise, we are actually concerned with the playful search for beauty. That means the playful search for beauty was called the first activity of Man. Sarah Smith, who was a mathematics professor at MIT, wrote, ""The playful search for beauty was Man's first activity — that all useful qualities and all material qualities were developed from the playful search for beauty."" These are tiles. The word, ""playful"" is a necessary aspect of our work because, actually, one of our problems is that we have to make, produce, lovely things throughout all of life, and this for me is now 75 years.So how can you, without drying up, make things with the same pleasure, as a gift to others, for so long? The playful is therefore an important part of our quality as designer. Let me tell you some about my life. As I said, I started to do these things 75 years ago. My first exhibition in the United States was at the Sesquicentennial exhibition in 1926 — that the Hungarian government sent one of my hand-drawn pieces as part of the exhibit. My work actually took me through many countries, and showed me a great part of the world. This is not that they took me — the work didn't take me — I made the things particularly because I wanted to use them to see the world. I was incredibly curious to see the world, and I made all these things, which then finally did take me to see many countries and many cultures. I started as an apprentice to a Hungarian craftsman, and this taught me what the guild system was in Middle Ages.The guild system: that means when I was an apprentice, I had to apprentice myself in order to become a pottery master. In my shop where I studied, or learned, there was a traditional hierarchy of master, journeyman and learned worker, and apprentice, and I worked as the apprentice. The work as an apprentice was very primitive. That means I had to actually learn every aspect of making pottery by hand. We mashed the clay with our feet when it came from the hillside. After that, it had to be kneaded. It had to then go in, kind of, a mangle. And then finally it was prepared for the throwing. And there I really worked as an apprentice. My master took me to set ovens because this was part of oven-making, oven-setting, in the time. And finally, I had received a document that I had accomplished my apprenticeship successfully, that I had behaved morally, and this document was given to me by the Guild of Roof-Coverers, Rail-Diggers, Oven-Setters, Chimney Sweeps and Potters.(Laughter)I also got at the time a workbook which explained my rights and my working conditions, and I still have that workbook. First I set up a shop in my own garden, and made pottery which I sold on the marketplace in Budapest. And there I was sitting, and my then-boyfriend — I didn't mean it was a boyfriend like it is meant today — but my boyfriend and I sat at the market and sold the pots. My mother thought that this was not very proper, so she sat with us to add propriety to this activity.(Laughter)However, after a while there was a new factory being built in Budapest, a pottery factory, a large one. And I visited it with several ladies, and asked all sorts of questions of the director. Then the director asked me, why do you ask all these questions? I said, I also have a pottery. So he asked me, could he please visit me, and then finally he did, and explained to me that what I did now in my shop was an anachronism, that the industrial revolution had broken out, and that I rather should join the factory. There he made an art department for me where I worked for several months. However, everybody in the factory spent his time at the art department. The director there said there were several women casting and producing my designs now in molds, and this was sold also to America.I remember that it was quite successful. However, the director, the chemist, model maker — everybody — concerned himself much more with the art department — that means, with my work — than making toilets, so finally they got a letter from the center, from the bank who owned the factory, saying, make toilet-setting behind the art department, and that was my end. So this gave me the possibility because now I was a journeyman, and journeymen also take their satchel and go to see the world. So as a journeyman, I put an ad into the paper that I had studied, that I was a down-to-earth potter's journeyman and I was looking for a job as a journeyman. And I got several answers, and I accepted the one which was farthest from home and practically, I thought, halfway to America.And that was in Hamburg. Then I first took this job in Hamburg, at an art pottery where everything was done on the wheel, and so I worked in a shop where there were several potters. And the first day, I was coming to take my place at the turntable — there were three or four turntables — and one of them, behind where I was sitting, was a hunchback, a deaf-mute hunchback, who smelled very bad. So I doused him in cologne every day, which he thought was very nice, and therefore he brought bread and butter every day, which I had to eat out of courtesy. The first day I came to work in this shop there was on my wheel a surprise for me. My colleagues had thoughtfully put on the wheel where I was supposed to work a very nicely modeled natural man's organs. (Laughter) After I brushed them off with a hand motion, they were very — I finally was now accepted, and worked there for some six months. This was my first job. If I go on like this, you will be here till midnight.(Laughter)(Applause)So I will try speed it up a little(Laughter)Moderator: Eva, we have about five minutes.(Laughter)Eva Zeisel: Are you sure?Moderator: Yes, I am sure.EZ: Well, if you are sure, I have to tell you that within five minutes I will talk very fast. And actually, my work took me to many countries because I used my work to fill my curiosity. And among other things, other countries I worked, was in the Soviet Union, where I worked from '32 to '37 — actually, to '36. I was finally there, although I had nothing to do — I was a foreign expert. I became art director of the china and glass industry, and eventually under Stalin's purges — at the beginning of Stalin's purges, I didn't know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were arrested. So I was arrested quite early in Stalin's purges, and spent 16 months in a Russian prison. The accusation was that I had successfully prepared an Attentat on Stalin's life. This was a very dangerous accusation. And if this is the end of my five minutes, I want to tell you that I actually did survive, which was a surprise. But since I survived and I'm here, and since this is the end of the five minutes, I will —Moderator: Tell me when your last trip to Russia was. Weren't you there recently?EZ: Oh, this summer, in fact, the Lomonosov factory was bought by an American company, invited me. They found out that I had worked in '33 at this factory, and they came to my studio in Rockland County, and brought the 15 of their artists to visit me here. And they invited myself to come to the Russian factory last summer, in July, to make some dishes, design some dishes. And since I don't like to travel alone, they also invited my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter, so we had a lovely trip to see Russia today, which is not a very pleasant and happy view. Here I am now, if this is the end? Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eva_zeisel_on_the_playful_search_for_beauty
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"What I'd like you to do is, just really quickly, is just, sort of, nod to the person on your right, and then nod to the person on your left. (Laughter) Now, chances are that over the last winter, if you had been a beehive, either you or one of the two people you just nodded at would have died. Now, that's an awful lot of bees. And this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies, or we estimate we've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter.Now, that's a lot, a lot of bees, and that's really important. And most of those losses are because of things we know. We know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses, and we also have this new phenomenon, which I talked about last year, Colony Collapse Disorder. And here we see a picture on top of a hill in Central Valley last December. And below, you can see all these out yards, or temporary yards, where the colonies are brought in until February, and then they're shipped out to the almonds. And one documentary writer, who was here and looked at this two months after I was here, described this not as beehives but as a graveyard, with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them.Now, I'm going to sum up a year's worth of work in two sentences to say that we have been trying to figure out what the cause of this is. And what we know is that it's as if the bees have caught a flu. And this flu has wiped through the population of bees. In some cases, and in fact in most cases in one year, this flu was caused by a new virus to us, or newly identified by us, called Israeli Acute Paralysis virus. It was called that because a guy in Israel first found it, and he now regrets profoundly calling it that disease, because, of course, there's the implication. But we think this virus is pretty ubiquitous. It's also pretty clear that the bees sometimes catch other viruses or other flus, and so the question we're still struggling with, and the question that keeps us up at night, is why have the bees suddenly become so susceptible to this flu, and why are they so susceptible to these other diseases? And we don't have the answer to that yet, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. We think perhaps it's a combination of factors. We know from the work of a very large and dynamic working team that, you know, we're finding a lot of different pesticides in the hive, and surprisingly, sometimes the healthiest hives have the most pesticides. And so we discover all these very strange things that we can't begin to understand.And so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health. Now of course, if you lose a lot of colonies, beekeepers can replace them very quickly. And that's why we've been able to recover from a lot of loss. If we lost one in every three cows in the winter, you know, the National Guard would be out. But what beekeepers can do is, if they have one surviving colony, they can split that colony in two. And then the one half that doesn't have a queen, they can buy a queen. It comes in the mail; it can come from Australia or Hawaii or Florida, and you can introduce that queen. And in fact, America was the first country that ever did mail-delivery queens and in fact, it's part of the postal code that you have to deliver queens by mail in order to make sure that we have enough bees in this country. If you don't just want a queen, you can buy, actually, a three-pound package of bees, which comes in the mail, and of course, the Postal Office is always very concerned when they get, you know, your three-pound packages of bees. And you can install this in your hive and replace that dead-out. So it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead-outs, and so they've been able to cover those losses. So even though we've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year, the same number of colonies have existed in the country, at about 2.4 million colonies.Now, those losses are tragic on many fronts, and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper. And it's really important to talk about beekeepers first, because beekeepers are among the most fascinating people you'll ever meet. If this was a group of beekeepers, you would have everyone from the card-carrying NRA member who's, you know, live free or die, to the, you know, the self-expressed quirky San Francisco backyard pig farmer. (Laughter) And you get all of these people in the same room, and they're all engaged and they're getting along, and they're all there because of the passion for bees. Now, there's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers, the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone. And these tend to be some of the most independent, tenacious, intuitive, you know, inventive people you will ever meet. They're just fascinating. And they're like that all over the world.I had the privilege of working in Haiti just for two weeks earlier this year. And Haiti, if you've ever been there, is just a tragedy. I mean, there may be 100 explanations for why Haiti is the impoverished nation it is, but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor. But you meet this beekeeper, and I met this beekeeper here, and he is one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers I've ever met. No formal education, but very knowledgeable. We needed beeswax for a project we were working on; he was so capable, he was able to render the nicest block of beeswax I have ever seen from cow dung, tin cans and his veil, which he used as a screening, right in this meadow. And so that ingenuity is inspiring.We also have Dave Hackenberg, who is the poster child of CCD. He's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells. And he has a history of these trucks, and he's moved these bees up and down the coast. And a lot of people talk about trucks and moving bees, and that being bad, but we've done that for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians used to move bees up and down the Nile on rafts, so this idea of a movable bee force is not new at all. And one of our real worries with Colony Collapse Disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead-out colonies. And you can do that one year in a row, you may be able to do it two years in a row. But if you're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies, you can't survive three years in a row. And we're really worried about losing this segment of our industry.And that's important for many fronts, and one of them is because of that culture that's in agriculture. And these migratory beekeepers are the last nomads of America. You know, they pick up their hives; they move their families once or twice in a year. And if you look at Florida, in Dade City, Florida, that's where all the Pennsylvania beekeepers go. And then 20 miles down the road is Groveland, and that's where all the Wisconsin beekeepers go. And if you're ever in Central Valley in February, you go to this café at 10 o'clock in the morning, Kathy and Kate's. And that's where all the beekeepers come after a night of moving bees into the almond groves. They all have their breakfast and complain about everyone right there. And it's a great experience, and I really encourage you to drop in at that diner during that time, because that's quite essential American experience. And we see these families, these nomadic families, you know, father to son, father to son, and these guys are hurting. And they're not people who like to ask for help, although they are the most helpful people ever. If there's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul, everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies. And so, it's a very dynamic, and I think, historic and exciting community to be involved with.Of course, the real importance for bees is not the honey. And although I highly encourage you, all use honey. I mean, it's the most ethical sweetener, and you know, it's a dynamic and fun sweetener. But we estimate that about one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees. Now, I want to just illustrate that in the fact that if we look at the breakfast I had yesterday morning — a little cranberry juice, some fruits, some granola, I should have had whole wheat bread, I realized, but you know, jam on my Wonderbread, and some coffee — and had we taken out all those ingredients, — except for the almonds I wasn't going to pick out from the granola — if we had taken out all those ingredients the bees had indirectly or directly pollinated, we wouldn't have much on our plate. So if we did not have bees, it's not like we would starve, but clearly our diet would be diminished. It's said that for bees, the flower is the fountain of life, and for flowers bees are the messengers of love.And that's a really great expression, because really, bees are the sex workers for flowers. They are, you know — they get paid for their services. They get paid by pollen and nectar, to move that male sperm, the pollen, from flower to flower. And there are flowers that are self-infertile. That means they can't — the pollen in their bloom can't fertilize themselves. So in an apple orchard, for instance, you'll have rows of 10 apples of one variety, and then you have another apple tree that's a different type of pollen. And bees are very faithful. When they're out pollinating or gathering pollen from one flower, they stay to that crop exclusively, in order to help generate. And of course, they're made to carry this pollen. They build up a static electric charge and the pollen jumps on them and helps spread that pollen from bloom to bloom.However, honeybees are a minority. Honeybees are not native to America; they were introduced with the colonialists. And there are actually more species of bees than there are mammals and birds combined. In Pennsylvania alone, we have been surveying bees for 150 years, and very intensely in the last three years. We have identified over 400 species of bees in Pennsylvania. Thirty-two species have not been identified or found in the state since 1950. Now, that could be because we haven't been sampling right, but it does, I think, suggest that something's wrong with the pollinator force. And these bees are fascinating.We have bumblebees on the top. And bumblebees are what we call eusocial: they're not truly social, because only the queen is, over winter. We also have the sweat bees, and these are little gems flying around. They're like tiny little flies and they fly around. And then you have another type of bee, which we call kleptoparasites, which is a very fancy way of saying, bad-minded, murdering — what's the word I'm looking for? Murdering — Audience: Bee? Dennis vanEngelsdorp: Bee. Okay, thanks. (Laughter) What these bees do is, they sit there. These solitary bees, they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch, and they collect pollen and make it into a ball, and they lay an egg on it. Well, these bees hang out at that hole, and they wait for that mother to fly away, they go in, eat the egg, and lay their own egg there. So they don't do any work. And so, in fact, if you know you have these kleptoparasitic bees, you know that your environment is healthy, because they're top-of-the-food-chain bees. And in fact, there is now a red list of pollinators that we're worried have disappeared, and on top of that list are a lot of these kleptoparasites, but also these bumblebees. And in fact, if you guys live on the West Coast, go to these websites here, and they're really looking for people to look for some of these bumblebees, because we think some have gone extinct. Or some, the population has declined.And so it's not just honeybees that are in trouble, but we don't understand these native pollinators or all those other parts of our community. And of course, bees are not the only important factor here. There are other animals that pollinate, like bats, and bats are in trouble too. And I'm glad I'm a bee man and not a bat man, because there's no money to research the bat problems. And bats are dying at an extraordinary rate. White-nose syndrome has wiped out populations of bats. If there's a cave in New York that had 15,000 bats in it, and there are 1,000 left. That's like San Francisco becoming the population of half of this county in three years. And so that's incredible. And there's no money to do that.But I'm glad to say that I think we know the cause of all these conditions, and that cause is NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder. And that is that I think that what we have in our society is, we forgot our connection with nature. And I think if we reconnect to nature, we'll be able to have the resources and that interest to solve these problems. And I think that there is an easy cure for NDD. And that is, make meadows and not lawns. And I think we have lost our connection, and this is a wonderful way of reconnecting to our environment. I've had the privilege of living by a meadow for the last little while, and it is terribly engaging. And if we look at the history of lawns, it's actually rather tragic. It used to be, two, three hundred years ago, that a lawn was a symbol of prestige, and so it was only the very rich that could keep these green actually, deserts: they're totally sterile. Americans spent, in 2001 — 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns. Five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns.And so it's incredible the amount of resources we've spent keeping our lawns, which are these useless biosystems. And so we need to rethink this idea. In fact, you know, the White House used to have sheep in front in order to help fund the war effort in World War I, which probably is not a bad idea; it wouldn't be a bad idea. I want to say this not because I'm opposed completely to mowing lawns. I think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale, and I think we're encouraged to do that. But I also want to reinforce some of the ideas we've heard here, because having a meadow or living by a meadow is transformational. That it is amazing that connection we can have with what's there. These milkweed plants have grown up in my meadow over the last four years. Add to watch the different plants, or insects, that come to these flowers, to watch that — and we've heard about, you know, this relationship you can have with wine, this companion you can have as it matures and as it has these different fragrances. And this is a companion, and this is a relationship that never dries up. You never run out of that companion as you drink this wine, too. And I encourage you to look at that.Now, not all of us have meadows, or lawns that we can convert, and so you can always, of course, grow a meadow in a pot. Bees apparently, can be the gateway to, you know, other things. So I'm not saying that you should plant a meadow of pot, but a pot in a meadow. But you can also have this great community of city or building-top beekeepers, these beekeepers that live — This is in Paris where these beekeepers live. And everyone should open a beehive, because it is the most amazing, incredible thing. And if we want to cure ourselves of NDD, or Nature Deficit Disorder, I think this is a great way of doing it. Get a beehive and grow a meadow, and watch that life come back into your life. And so with that, I think that what we can do, if we do this, we can make sure that our future — our more perfect future — includes beekeepers and it includes bees and it includes those meadows. And that journey — that journey of transformation that occurs as you grow your meadow and as you keep your bees or you watch those native bees there — is an extremely exciting one. And I hope that you experience it and I hope you tell me about it one day. So thank you very much for being here.  Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dennis_vanengelsdorp_a_plea_for_bees
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"These rocks have been hitting our earth for about three billion years, and are responsible for much of what’s gone on on our planet. This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts. From a meteorite from space, we’re over here with an original Sputnik. This is one of the seven surviving Sputniks that was not launched into space. This is not a copy. The space age began 50 years ago in October, and that’s exactly what Sputnik looked like.And it wouldn’t be fun to talk about the space age without seeing a flag that was carried to the moon and back, on Apollo 11. The astronauts each got to carry about ten silk flags in their personal kits. They would bring them back and mount them. So this has actually been carried to the moon and back. So that’s for fun.The dawn of books is, of course, important. And it wouldn’t be interesting to talk about the dawn of books without having a copy of a Guttenberg Bible. You can see how portable and handy it was to have your own Guttenberg in 1455. But what’s interesting about the Guttenberg Bible, and the dawn of this technology, is not the book. You see, the book was not driven by reading. In 1455, nobody could read. So why did the printing press succeed? This is an original page of a Guttenberg Bible. So you’re looking here at one of the first printed books using movable type in the history of man, 550 years ago. We are living at the age here at the end of the book, where electronic paper will undoubtedly replace it.But why is this so interesting? Here’s the quick story. It turns out that in the 1450s, the Catholic Church needed money, and so they actually hand-wrote these things called indulgences, which were forgiveness’s on pieces of paper. They traveled all around Europe and sold by the hundreds or by the thousands. They got you out of purgatory faster. And when the printing press was invented what they found was they could print indulgences, which was the equivalent of printing money.And so all of Western Europe started buying printing presses in 1455 — to print out thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then ultimately millions of single, small pieces of paper that got you out of middle hell and into heaven. That is why the printing press succeeded, and that is why Martin Luther nailed his 90 theses to the door: because he was complaining that the Catholic Church had gone amok in printing out indulgences and selling them in every town and village and city in all of Western Europe.So the printing press, ladies and gentlemen, was driven entirely by the printing of forgivenesses and had nothing to do with reading. More tomorrow. I also have pictures coming of the library for those of you that have asked for pictures. We’re going to have some tomorrow. (Applause)Instead of showing an object from the stage I’m going to do something special for the first time. We are going to show, actually, what the library looks like, OK? So, I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world. You’re going to find out why in a minute, because when I went to see Eileen, this is what I said I wanted to build.This is the Library of Human Imagination. The room itself is three stories tall. In the glass panels are 5,000 years of human imagination that are computer controlled. The room is a theatre. It changes colors. And all throughout the library are different objects, different spaces. It’s designed like an Escher print. Here is some of the lower level of the library, where the exhibits constantly change. You can walk through. You can touch. You can see exactly how many of these types of items would fit in a room. There’s my very own Saturn V. Everybody should have one, OK? (Laughter) So you can see here in the lower level of the library the books and the objects. In the glass panels all along is sort of the history of imagination. There is a glass bridge that you walk across that’s suspended in space. So it’s a leap of imagination.How do we create? Part of the question that I have answered is, is we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli: with human achievement, with history, with the things that drive us and make us human — the passionate discovery, the bones of dinosaurs long gone, the maps of space that we’ve experienced, and ultimately the hallways that stimulate our mind and our imagination.So hopefully tomorrow I’ll show one or two more objects from the stage, but for today I just wanted to say thank you for all the people that came and talked to us about it. And Eileen and I are thrilled to open our home and share it with the TED community. (Applause) TED is all about patterns in the clouds. It’s all about connections. It’s all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before. And that’s really what discovery and imagination is all about.For example, we can look at a DNA molecule model here. None of us really have ever seen one, but we know it exists because we’ve been taught to understand this molecule. But we can also look at an Enigma machine from the Nazis in World War II that was a coding and decoding machine. Now, you might say, what does this have to do with this? Well, this is the code for life, and this is a code for death. These two molecules code and decode. And yet, looking at them, you would see a machine and a molecule. But once you’ve seen them in a new way, you realize that both of these things really are connected. And they’re connected primarily because of this here.You see, this is a human brain model, OK? And it’s rare, because we never really get to see a brain. We get to see a skull. But there it is. All of imagination — everything that we think, we feel, we sense — comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.And I’ll give you a quick example. We think about the Internet; we think about information that goes across the Internet. And we never think about the hidden connection. But I brought along here a lump of coal — right here, one lump of coal. And what does a lump of coal have to do with the Internet? You see, it takes the energy in one lump of coal to move one megabyte of information across the net. So every time you download a file, each megabyte is a lump of coal. What that means is, a 200-megabyte file looks like this, ladies and gentlemen. OK? So the next time you download a gigabyte, or two gigabytes, it’s not for free, OK? The connection is the energy it takes to run the web , and to make everything we think possible, possible. Thanks, Chris. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_s_library_of_human_imagination
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"We all make decisions every day; we want to know what the right thing is to do — in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic. And surely, if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times, that would be a tremendous gift.It turns out that, in fact, the world was given this gift in 1738 by a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli. And what I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is, and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn't made a damn bit of difference.Now, this is Bernoulli's gift. This is a direct quote. And if it looks like Greek to you, it's because, well, it's Greek. But the simple English translation — much less precise, but it captures the gist of what Bernoulli had to say — was this: The expected value of any of our actions — that is, the goodness that we can count on getting — is the product of two simple things: the odds that this action will allow us to gain something, and the value of that gain to us.In a sense, what Bernoulli was saying is, if we can estimate and multiply these two things, we will always know precisely how we should behave.Now, this simple equation, even for those of you who don't like equations, is something that you're quite used to. Here's an example: if I were to tell you, let's play a little coin toss game, and I'm going to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I'm going to pay you 10 dollars, but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me, most of you would say, sure, I'll take that bet. Because you know that the odds of you winning are one half, the gain if you do is 10 dollars, that multiplies to five, and that's more than I'm charging you to play. So, the answer is, yes. This is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet.Now, the idea is simple when we're applying it to coin tosses, but in fact, it's not very simple in everyday life. People are horrible at estimating both of these things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do, and those are errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed, and errors in estimating the value of their own success. Now, let me talk about the first one first. Calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy: there are six sides to a die, two sides to a coin, 52 cards in a deck. You all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads. But as it turns out, this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life. That's why Americans spend more — I should say, lose more — gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined. The reason is, this isn't how people do odds.The way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs. Now, the question I'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in Oxford. And of course, you all know that the answer is dogs. And the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you've seen dogs and pigs on leashes. It was very easy to remember seeing dogs, not so easy to remember pigs. And each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind, then dogs on leashes are more probable. That's not a bad rule of thumb, except when it is.So, for example, here's a word puzzle. Are there more four-letter English words with R in the third place or R in the first place? Well, you check memory very briefly, make a quick scan, and it's awfully easy to say to yourself, Ring, Rang, Rung, and very hard to say to yourself, Pare, Park: they come more slowly. But in fact, there are many more words in the English language with R in the third than the first place. The reason words with R in the third place come slowly to your mind isn't because they're improbable, unlikely or infrequent. It's because the mind recalls words by their first letter. You kind of shout out the sound, S — and the word comes. It's like the dictionary; it's hard to look things up by the third letter. So, this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability —how this idea could lead you astray. It's not just puzzles, though. For example, when Americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways — these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million U.S. citizens. And these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado, fireworks, asthma, drowning, etc. Compare these to the actual numbers.Now, you see a very interesting pattern here, which is first of all, two things are vastly over-estimated, namely tornadoes and fireworks. Two things are vastly underestimated: dying by drowning and dying by asthma. Why? When was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was, ""Boy dies of Asthma?"" It's not interesting because it's so common. It's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we've seen tornadoes devastating cities, or some poor schmuck who's blown his hands off with a firework on the Fourth of July. Drownings and asthma deaths don't get much coverage. They don't come quickly to mind, and as a result, we vastly underestimate them.Indeed, this is kind of like the Sesame Street game of ""Which thing doesn't belong?"" And you're right to say it's the swimming pool that doesn't belong, because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that's actually very dangerous. The way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide.The lottery is an excellent example, of course — an excellent test-case of people's ability to compute probabilities. And economists — forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet — which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything.Why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery? Well, there are many answers, but one answer surely is, we see a lot of winners. Right? When this couple wins the lottery, or Ed McMahon shows up at your door with this giant check — how the hell do you cash things that size, I don't know. We see this on TV; we read about it in the paper. When was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost? Indeed, if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner, the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say, ""Me? I lost."" ""Me? I lost."" Now, if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television — no sleep, no potty breaks — and you saw loss after loss after loss, and then at the end there's 30 seconds of, ""and I won,"" the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small.Look, I can prove this to you: here's a little lottery. There's 10 tickets in this lottery. Nine of them have been sold to these individuals. It costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and, if you win, you get 20 bucks. Is this a good bet? Well, Bernoulli tells us it is. The expected value of this lottery is two dollars; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money. And most people say, ""OK, I'll play.""Now, a slightly different version of this lottery: imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named Leroy. Leroy has nine tickets; there's one left. Do you want it? Most people won't play this lottery. Now, you can see the odds of winning haven't changed, but it's now fantastically easy to imagine who's going to win. It's easy to see Leroy getting the check, right? You can't say to yourself, ""I'm as likely to win as anybody,"" because you're not as likely to win as Leroy. The fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play, even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds.Now, estimating odds, as difficult as it may seem, is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value: trying to say what something is worth, how much we'll enjoy it, how much pleasure it will give us. I want to talk now about errors in value. How much is this Big Mac worth? Is it worth 25 dollars? Most of you have the intuition that it's not — you wouldn't pay that for it.But in fact, to decide whether a Big Mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one, and only one question, which is: What else can I do with 25 dollars? If you've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to Australia and realized that they're not going to serve you any food, but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the McDonald's bag, and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat, you think, I can't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours. I can't even set it on fire — they took my cigarette lighter! Suddenly, 25 dollars for a Big Mac might be a good deal.On the other hand, if you're visiting an underdeveloped country, and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal, it's exorbitant for a Big Mac. Why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no, before I'd even told you anything about the context? Because most of you compared the price of this Big Mac to the price you're used to paying. Rather than asking, ""What else can I do with my money,"" comparing this investment to other possible investments, you compared to the past. And this is a systematic error people make. What you knew is, you paid three dollars in the past; 25 is outrageous.This is an error, and I can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads. For example, this is, of course, one of the most delicious tricks in marketing, is to say something used to be higher, and suddenly it seems like a very good deal. When people are asked about these two different jobs: a job where you make 60K, then 50K, then 40K, a job where you're getting a salary cut each year, and one in which you're getting a salary increase, people like the second job better than the first, despite the fact they're all told they make much less money. Why? Because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages, even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period. Here's another nice example.Here's a $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package; it's now on sale for 1,600. Assuming you wanted to go to Hawaii, would you buy this package? Most people say they would. Here's a slightly different story: $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars, so you decide to mull it over for a week. By the time you get to the ticket agency, the best fares are gone — the package now costs 1,500. Would you buy it? Most people say, no. Why? Because it used to cost 700, and there's no way I'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week.This tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal. In other words, a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal.Here's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions. Imagine that you're going to the theater. You're on your way to the theater. In your wallet you have a ticket, for which you paid 20 dollars. You also have a 20-dollar bill. When you arrive at the theater, you discover that somewhere along the way you've lost the ticket. Would you spend your remaining money on replacing it? Most people answer, no. Now, let's just change one thing in this scenario. You're on your way to the theater, and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills. When you arrive you discover you've lost one of them. Would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket? Well, of course, I went to the theater to see the play. What does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do?Now, just in case you're not getting it, here's a schematic of what happened, OK? (Laughter) Along the way, you lost something. In both cases, it was a piece of paper. In one case, it had a U.S. president on it; in the other case it didn't. What the hell difference should it make? The difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself, I'm not paying twice for the same thing. You compare the cost of the play now — 40 dollars — to the cost that it used to have — 20 dollars — and you say it's a bad deal. Comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people's attempts to assign value. But even when we compare with the possible, instead of the past, we still make certain kinds of mistakes. And I'm going to show you one or two of them.One of the things we know about comparison: that when we compare one thing to the other, it changes its value. So in 1992, this fellow, George Bush, for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum, didn't seem like such a great guy. Suddenly, we're almost longing for him to return. (Laughter) The comparison changes how we evaluate him.Now, retailers knew this long before anybody else did, of course, and they use this wisdom to help you — spare you the undue burden of money. And so a retailer, if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine, and you see them here for eight, 27 and 33 dollars, what would you do? Most people don't want the most expensive, they don't want the least expensive. So, they will opt for the item in the middle. If you're a smart retailer, then, you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf, because suddenly the $33 wine doesn't look as expensive in comparison.So I'm telling you something you already knew: namely, that comparison changes the value of things. Here's why that's a problem: the problem is that when you get that $33 bottle of wine home, it won't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to. The comparisons we make when we are appraising value, where we're trying to estimate how much we'll like things, are not the same comparisons we'll be making when we consume them. This problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions.Let me just give you an example. I have to show you something from my own lab, so let me sneak this in. These are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions: How much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now? They're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them. For some of the subjects, sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of Godiva chocolates, and for others is a can of Spam. In fact, these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they're going to enjoy the potato chips. Namely, those who are looking at Spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty; those who are looking at Godiva chocolate think they won't be nearly so tasty. Of course, what happens when they eat the potato chips? Well, look, you didn't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy, salty, crispy, delicious snacks, what's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience. Nonetheless, their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience.You've all experienced this yourself, even if you've never come into our lab to eat potato chips. So here's a question: You want to buy a car stereo. The dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars, but if you drive across town, you can get it for 100 bucks. So would you drive to get 50 percent off, saving 100 dollars? Most people say they would. They can't imagine buying it for twice the price when, with one trip across town, they can get it for half off.Now, let's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo, and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000. But if you drove across town, you could get it for 30,900. Would you drive to get it? At this point, 0.003 savings — the 100 dollars. Most people say, no, I'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car?This kind of thinking drives economists crazy, and it should. Because this 100 dollars that you save — hello! — doesn't know where it came from. It doesn't know what you saved it on. When you go to buy groceries with it, it doesn't go, I'm the money saved on the car stereo, or, I'm the dumb money saved on the car. It's money. And if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks, it's worth 100 bucks no matter what you're saving it on. People don't think that way. That's why they don't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment, but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste.Now, you can see, this is the problem of shifting comparisons, because what you're doing is, you're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you're making, but when you go to spend that money you won't be making that comparison. You've all had this experience.If you're an American, for example, you've probably traveled in France. And at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown, and you thought, ""Oh, my God, these people are so warm. They're so nice to me. I mean, compared to all these people who hate me when I try to speak their language and hate me more when I don't, these people are just wonderful."" And so you tour France with them, and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner, and what do you find? Compared to your regular friends, they are boring and dull, right? Because in this new context, the comparison is very, very different. In fact, you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for French citizenship.Now, you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo. You go to the stereo store, you see two sets of speakers — these big, boxy, monoliths, and these little, sleek speakers, and you play them, and you go, you know, I do hear a difference: the big ones sound a little better. And so you buy them, and you bring them home, and you entirely violate the décor of your house. And the problem, of course, is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you'll never make again. What are the odds that years later you'll turn on the stereo and go, ""Sounds so much better than those little ones,"" which you can't even remember hearing.The problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time. People have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time. And what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules. So let me give you one very easy problem, a second very easy problem and then a third, hard, problem.Here's the first easy problem: You can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now. Which would you prefer? This is what we call a one-item IQ test, OK? All of us, I hope, prefer more money, and the reason is, we believe more is better than less.Here's the second problem: You can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month. Which would you prefer? Again, an easy decision, because we all know that now is better than later. What's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict. For example, when you're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month. This typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting, but you have to be patient. What do we know? What do people do in these kinds of situations? Well, by and large people are enormously impatient. That is, they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars. Maybe that isn't so remarkable, but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing when the delivery of these monetary units will happen. Imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year — that's 12 months — or 60 dollars in 13 months. What do we find now? People are gladly willing to wait: as long as they're waiting 12, they might as well wait 13.What makes this dynamic inconsistency happen? Comparison. Troubling comparison. Let me show you.This is just a graph showing the results that I just suggested you would show if I gave you time to respond, which is, people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they'll be delivered in now or one month, respectively — a 30-day delay — but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year. Now, why in the world do you get this pattern of results?These guys can tell us. What you see here are two lads, one of them larger than the other: the fireman and the fiddler. They are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon, and I want you to notice two things. At no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler. No point. However, the difference between them seems to be getting smaller. First it's an inch in your view, then it's a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, and then finally they go off the edge of the earth.Here are the results of what I just showed you. This is the subjective height — the height you saw of these guys at various points. And I want you to see that two things are true. One, the farther away they are, the smaller they look; and two, the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler. But watch what happens when we make some of them disappear. Right. At a very close distance, the fiddler looks taller than the fireman, but at a far distance their normal, their true, relations are preserved. As Plato said, what space is to size, time is to value. These are the results of the hard problem I gave you: 60 now or 50 in a month? And these are subjective values, and what you can see is, our two rules are preserved.People always think more is better than less: 60 is always better than 50, and they always think now is better than later: the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side. Watch what happens when we drop some out. Suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us. We have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month, but not if that decision is far in the future. Notice something interesting that this implies — namely, that when people get to the future, they will change their minds. That is, as that month 12 approaches, you will say, what was I thinking, waiting an extra month for 60 dollars? I'll take the 50 dollars now.Well, the question with which I'd like to end is this: If we're so damn stupid, how did we get to the moon? Because I could go on for about two hours with evidence of people's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value.The answer to this question, I think, is an answer you've already heard in some of the talks, and I dare say you will hear again: namely, that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living. They were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups, rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves, had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today.Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast. We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing — the only thing — that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures.Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: That was remarkable. We have time for some questions for Dan Gilbert. One and two.Bill Lyell: Would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us, and is there some way that we could counteract that?Dan Gilbert: I actually was consulting recently with the Department of Homeland Security, which generally believes that American security dollars should go to making borders safer. I tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people's psychological reaction to a set of events, and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified, rather than — not rather than, but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we're all concerned about. Surely the kinds of play that at least American media give to — and forgive me, but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents. We already know, for example, in the United States, more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes — because they were scared — and driving on highways, than were killed in 9/11. OK? If I told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 Americans next year, you might be alarmed if you didn't find out it was the flu. These are small-scale accidents, and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play, the kind of coverage, that they do. Surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they'll be hurt in these various ways, and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us.CA: Dan, I'd like to hear more on this. So, you're saying that our response to terror is, I mean, it's a form of mental bug? Talk more about it.DG: It's out-sized. I mean, look. If Australia disappears tomorrow, terror is probably the right response. That's an awful large lot of very nice people. On the other hand, when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed, more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country. Is terror the right response?CA: What causes the bug? Is it the drama of the event — that it's so spectacular? Is it the fact that it's an intentional attack by, quote, outsiders? What is it?DG: Yes. It's a number of things, and you hit on several of them. First, it's a human agent trying to kill us — it's not a tree falling on us by accident. Second, these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again. People are being killed for no reason instead of good reason — as if there's good reason, but sometimes people think there are. So there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event, but let's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read. So there's a large role here played by the media, who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can.CA: I mean, what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it?DG: Well, go to Israel. You know, go to Israel. And a mall blows up, and then everybody's unhappy about it, and an hour-and-a-half later — at least when I was there, and I was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up — I went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on. And as the Israeli mother said, she said, ""We never let them win by stopping weddings."" I mean, this is a society that has learned — and there are others too — that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it, shall I say, as those of us who have not had many terror attacks.CA: But is there a rational fear that actually, the reason we're frightened about this is because we think that the Big One is to come?DG: Yes, of course. So, if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be, there might be more and more buses of 30 people — we would probably not be nearly so frightened. I don't want to say — please, I'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying, ""Terrorism is fine and we shouldn't be so distressed."" That's not my point at all. What I'm saying is that, surely, rationally, our distress about things that happen, about threats, should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come. I think in the case of terrorism, it isn't. And many of the things we've heard about from our speakers today — how many people do you know got up and said, Poverty! I can't believe what poverty is doing to us. People get up in the morning; they don't care about poverty. It's not making headlines, it's not making news, it's not flashy. There are no guns going off. I mean, if you had to solve one of these problems, Chris, which would you solve? Terrorism or poverty? (Laughter) (Applause) That's a tough one.CA: There's no question. Poverty, by an order of magnitude, a huge order of magnitude, unless someone can show that there's, you know, terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come. The latest I've read, seen, thought is that it's incredibly hard for them to do that. If that turns out to be wrong, we all look silly, but with poverty it's a bit —DG: Even if that were true, still more people die from poverty.CA: We've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks. Is that because in the past, in the ancient past, we just didn't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth, and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things? People died; so be it. But if you got attacked, that was something you could do something about. And so we evolved these responses. Is that what happened?DG: Well, you know, the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves. My guess is that there's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past. But rather, if you're looking for an evolutionary explanation, you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic — that is, they're a little scared of stuff that's new and different. And there's a good reason to be, because old stuff didn't eat you. Right? Any animal you see that you've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you've never seen before. So, you know, when a school bus is blown up and we've never seen this before, our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated. I don't think it's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to, but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it.Jay Walker: You know, economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets. But I suspect you're making the exact same error you're accusing those people of, which is the error of value. I know, because I've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years. It turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning. That's what you think it is. All right? The average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year, so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose, and yet she buys 150 tickets a year. Why is that? It's not because she is stupid or he is stupid. It's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain, and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you've lost. Or, to put it another way, for the dollar investment, you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet, which you cannot have a good feeling from. Now, economists tend to — (Applause) — economists tend to view the world through their own lenses, which is: this is just a bunch of stupid people. And as a result, many people look at economists as stupid people. And so fundamentally, the reason we got to the moon is, we didn't listen to the economists. Thank you very much. (Applause)DG: Well, no, it's a great point. It remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery. Because remember, people who didn't buy tickets don't feel awful the next day either, even though they don't feel great during the drawing. I would disagree that people know they're not going to win. I think they think it's unlikely, but it could happen, which is why they prefer that to the flushing. But certainly I see your point: that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning. Now, I think there's many good reasons not to listen to economists. That isn't one of them, for me, but there's many others.CA: Last question.Aubrey de Grey: My name's Aubrey de Grey, from Cambridge. I work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills — I work on aging — and I'm interested in doing something about it, as we'll all hear tomorrow. I very much resonate with what you're saying, because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever. Do you have any advice? (Laughter)DG: For you or for them?AdG: In persuading them.DG: Ah, for you in persuading them. Well, it's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted. But one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly. One of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future. To the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future, people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way. So, would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you're 65 is a question that's very different than, imagine who you'll be when you're 65: will you be living, what will you look like, how much hair will you have, who will you be living with. Once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario, suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money. But these are tricks around the margins. I think in general you're battling a very fundamental human tendency, which is to say, ""I'm here today, and so now is more important than later.""CA: Dan, thank you. Members of the audience, that was a fantastic session. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness
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"I'm just going to play a brief video clip.Video: On the fifth of December 1985, a bottle of 1787 Lafitte was sold for 105,000 pounds — nine times the previous world record. The buyer was Kip Forbes, son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century. The original owner of the bottle turned out to be one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century. Château Lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world, the prince of any wine cellar.Benjamin Wallace: Now, that's about all the videotape that remains of an event that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world. And the mystery existed because of a gentleman named Hardy Rodenstock. In 1985, he announced to his friends in the wine world that he had made this incredible discovery. Some workmen in Paris had broken through a brick wall, and happened upon this hidden cache of wines — apparently the property of Thomas Jefferson. 1787, 1784. He wouldn't reveal the exact number of bottles, he would not reveal exactly where the building was and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building. The mystery persisted for about 20 years.It finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy. Bill Koch is a Florida billionaire who owns four of the Jefferson bottles, and he became suspicious. And he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-FBI and ex-Scotland Yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this. There's now ample evidence that Hardy Rodenstock is a con man, and that the Jefferson bottles were fakes.But for those 20 years, an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles. I think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world, must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world. I became increasingly, kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of you know, why do people spend these crazy amounts of money, not only on wine but on lots of things, and are they living a better life than me?So, I decided to embark on a quest. With the generous backing of a magazine I write for sometimes, I decided to sample the very best, or most expensive, or most coveted item in about a dozen categories, which was a very grueling quest,  as you can imagine.(Laughter)This was the first one. A lot of the Kobe beef that you see in the U.S. is not the real thing. It may come from Wagyu cattle, but it's not from the original, Appalachian Hyogo Prefecture in Japan. There are very few places in the U.S. where you can try real Kobe, and one of them is Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, Cut, in Los Angeles. I went there, and I ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars. And it arrived, and it was tiny. And I was outraged. It was like, 160 dollars for this? And then I took a bite, and I wished that it was tinier, because Kobe beef is so rich. It's like foie gras — it's not even like steak. I almost couldn't finish it. I was really happy when I was done.(Laughter)Now, the photographer who took the pictures for this project for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them, so that's why you're going to see this recurring character. Which, I guess, you know, communicates to you that I did not think that one was really worth the price.White truffles. One of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world. To try this, I went to a Mario Batali restaurant in Manhattan — Del Posto. The waiter, you know, came out with the white truffle knob and his shaver, and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said, you know, ""Would Signore like the truffles?"" And the charm of white truffles is in their aroma. It's not in their taste, really. It's not in their texture. It's in the smell. These white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles, this haunting, wonderful, nutty, mushroomy smell wafted up. 10 seconds passed and it was gone. And then I was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that, you know, their purpose had been served, and so I'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me. There were several — several of these items were disappointments.(Laughter)Yeah. The magazine wouldn't pay for me to go there.(Laughter)They did give me a tour, though. And this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet. It has 360-degree views. It has four balconies. It was designed by the architect I.M. Pei. It comes with its own Rolls Royce and driver. It comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from. When I took the tour, it actually included some Opus One, I was glad to see. 30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel.This is soap that's made from silver nanoparticles, which have antibacterial properties. I washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this. And it, you know, tickled a little bit and it smelled good, but I have to say that nobody here has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today.(Laughter)But then again, nobody has complimented me on the jeans I'm wearing. These ones GQ did spring for — I own these — but I will tell you, not only did I not get a compliment from any of you, I have not gotten a compliment from anybody in the months that I have owned and worn these. I don't think that whether or not you're getting a compliment should be the test of something's value, but I think in the case of a fashion item, an article of clothing, that's a reasonable benchmark. That said, a lot of work goes into these. They are made from handpicked organic Zimbabwean cotton that has been shuttle loomed and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times. But no compliments.(Laughter)Thank you.Armando Manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil from an olive that grows on a single slope in Tuscany. And he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light. He uses tiny bottles, the glass is tinted, he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas. And he actually — once he releases a batch of it, he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online, so you can go online and look at your batch number and see how the phenolics are developing, and, you know, gauge its freshness. I did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils. It tasted fine. It tasted interesting. It was very green, it was very peppery. But in the blind taste test, it came in last. The olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of Whole Foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove for six months.(Laughter)A recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from Japan — you'll start to notice.I don't play golf, so I couldn't actually road test these, but I did interview a guy who owns them. Even the people who market these clubs — I mean, they'll say these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed and thereby drive the ball farther — but they'll say, look, you know, you're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs. You're paying for the bling, that they're encrusted with gold and platinum. The guy who I interviewed who owns them did say that he's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them, so ...Oh, yeah, you know this one? This is a coffee made from a very unusual process. The luwak is an Asian Palm Civet. It's a cat that lives in trees, and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations. And apparently it's a very picky eater and it, you know, hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries. And then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans, and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats' leavings then go through the forest collecting the, you know, results and processing it into coffee — although you actually can buy it in the unprocessed form. That's right.Unrelatedly —(Laughter)Japan is doing crazy things with toilets.(Laughter)There is now a toilet that has an MP3 player in it. There's one with a fragrance dispenser. There's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl and transmits the results via email to your doctor. It's almost like a home medical center — and that is the direction that Japanese toilet technology is heading in. This one does not have those bells and whistles, but for pure functionality it's pretty much the best — the Neorest 600. And to try this — I couldn't get a loaner, but I did go into the Manhattan showroom of the manufacturer, Toto, and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use, which I used. It's fully automated — you walk towards it, and the seat lifts. The seat is preheated. There's a water jet that cleans you. There's an air jet that dries you. You get up, it flushes by itself. The lid closes, it self-cleans. Not only is it a technological leap forward, but I really do believe it's a bit of a cultural leap forward. I mean, a no hands, no toilet paper toilet. And I want to get one of these.(Laughter)This was another one I could not get a loaner of. Tom Cruise supposedly owns this bed. There's a little plaque on the end that, you know, each buyer gets their name engraved on it.(Laughter)To try this one, the maker of it let me and my wife spend the night in the Manhattan showroom. Lights glaring in off the street, and we had to hire a security guard and all these things. But anyway, we had a great night's sleep. And you spend a third of your life in bed. I don't think it's that bad of a deal.(Laughter)This was a fun one. This is the fastest street-legal car in the world and the most expensive production car. I got to drive this with a chaperone from the company, a professional race car driver, and we drove around the canyons outside of Los Angeles and down on the Pacific Coast Highway. And, you know, when we pulled up to a stoplight the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods. And it was really amazing. It was such a smooth ride. Most of the cars that I drive, if I get up to 80 they start to rattle. I switched lanes on the highway and the driver, this chaperone, said, ""You know, you were just going 110 miles an hour."" And I had no idea that I was one of those obnoxious people you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic, because it was just that smooth. And if I was a billionaire, I would get one.(Laughter)This is a completely gratuitous video I'm just going to show of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology. This is Tom Cruise arriving at the ""Mission: Impossible III"" premiere. When he tries to open the door, you could call it ""Mission: Impossible IV.""There was one object that I could not get my hands on, and that was the 1947 Cheval Blanc. The '47 Cheval Blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century. And Cheval Blanc is kind of an unusual wine for Bordeaux in having a significant percentage of the Cabernet Franc grape. And 1947 was a legendary vintage, especially in the right bank of Bordeaux. And just together, that vintage and that chateau took on this aura that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following. But it's 60 years old. There's not much of it left. What there is of it left you don't know if it's real — it's considered to be the most faked wine in the world. Not that many people are looking to pop open their one remaining bottle for a journalist.So, I'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these. I'd put out feelers to retailers, to auctioneers, and it was coming up empty. And then I got an email from a guy named Bipin Desai. Bipin Desai is a U.C. Riverside theoretical physicist who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings, and he said, ""I've got a tasting coming up where we're going to serve the '47 Cheval Blanc."" And it was going to be a double vertical — it was going to be 30 vintages of Cheval Blanc, and 30 vintages of Yquem. And it was an invitation you do not refuse. I went.It was three days, four meals. And at lunch on Saturday, we opened the '47. And you know, it had this fragrant softness, and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil. And then I tasted it, and it, you know, had this kind of unctuous, porty richness, which is characteristic of that wine — that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways. There were people at my table who thought it was, you know, fantastic. There were some people who were a little less impressed. And I wasn't that impressed. And I don't — call my palate a philistine palate — so it doesn't necessarily mean something that I wasn't impressed, but I was not the only one there who had that reaction. And it wasn't just to that wine. Any one of the wines served at this tasting, if I'd been served it at a dinner party, it would have been, you know, the wine experience of my lifetime, and incredibly memorable. But drinking 60 great wines over three days, they all just blurred together, and it became almost a grueling experience.And I just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study which came out earlier this year from some researchers at Stanford and Caltech. And they gave subjects the same wine, labeled with different price tags. A lot of people, you know, said that they liked the more expensive wine more — it was the same wine, but they thought it was a different one that was more expensive. But what was unexpected was that these researchers did MRI brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine, and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more — their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_wallace_on_the_price_of_happiness
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"The career that I started early on in my life was looking for exotic life forms in exotic places, and at that time I was working in the Antarctic and the Arctic, and high deserts and low deserts. Until about a dozen years ago, when I was really captured by caves, and I really re-focused most of my research in that direction.So I have a really cool day job— I get to do some really amazing stuff. I work in some of the most extreme cave environments on the planet. Many of them are trying to kill us from the minute we go into them, but nevertheless, they're absolutely gripping, and contain unbelievable biological wonders that are very, very different from those that we have on the planet. Apart from the intrinsic value of the biology and mineralogy and geo-microbiology that we do there, we're also using these as templates for figuring out how to go look for life on other planets. Particularly Mars, but also Europa, the small, icy moon around Jupiter. And perhaps, someday, far beyond our solar system itself.I'm very passionately interested in the human future, on the Moon and Mars particularly, and elsewhere in the solar system. I think it's time that we transitioned to a solar system-going civilization and species. And, as an outgrowth of all of this then, I wonder about whether we can, and whether we even should, think about transporting Earth-type life to other planets. Notably Mars, as a first example.Something I never talk about in scientific meetings is how I actually got to this state and why I do the work that I do. Why don't I have a normal job, a sensible job? And then of course, I blame the Soviet Union. Because in the mid-1950s, when I was a tiny child, they had the audacity to launch a very primitive little satellite called Sputnik, which sent the Western world into a hysterical tailspin. And a tremendous amount of money went into the funding of science and mathematics skills for kids. And I'm a product of that generation, like so many other of my peers. It really caught hold of us, and caught fire, and it would be lovely if we could reproduce that again now.Of course, refusing to grow up — — even though I impersonate a grown-up in daily life, but I do a fairly good job of that — but really retaining that childlike quality of not caring what other people think about what you're interested in, is really critical. The next element is the fact that I have applied a value judgment and my value judgment is that the presence of life is better than no life. And so, life is more valuable than no life. And so I think that that holds together a great deal of the work that people in this audience approach.I'm very interested in Mars, of course, and that was a product of my being a young undergraduate when the Viking Landers landed on Mars. And that took what had been a tiny little astronomical object in the sky, that you would see as a dot, and turned it completely into a landscape, as that very first primitive picture came rastering across the screen. And when it became a landscape, it also became a destination, and altered, really, the course of my life.In my graduate years I worked with my colleague and mentor and friend, Steve Schneider, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, working on global change issues. We've written a number of things on the role of Gaia hypothesis — whether or not you could consider Earth as a single entity in any meaningful scientific sense, and then, as an outgrowth of that, I worked on the environmental consequences of nuclear war.So, wonderful things and grim things. But what it taught me was to look at Earth as a planet with external eyes, not just as our home. And that is a wonderful stepping away in perspective, to try to then think about the way our planet behaves, as a planet, and with the life that's on it. And all of this seems to me to be a salient point in history. We're getting ready to begin to go through the process of leaving our planet of origin and out into the wider solar system and beyond.So, back to Mars. How hard is it going to be to find life on Mars? Well, sometimes it's really very hard for us to find each other, even on this planet. So, finding life on another planet is a non-trivial occupation and we spend a lot of time trying to think about that. Whether or not you think it's likely to be successful sort of depends on what you think about the chances of life in the universe. I think, myself, that life is a natural outgrowth of the increasing complexification of matter over time.So, you start with the Big Bang and you get hydrogen, and then you get helium, and then you get more complicated stuff, and you get planets forming — and life is a common, planetary-based phenomenon, in my view. Certainly, in the last 15 years, we've seen increasing numbers of planets outside of our solar system being confirmed, and just last month, a couple of weeks ago, a planet in the size-class of Earth has actually been found. And so this is very exciting news.So, my first bold prediction is that, is that in the universe, life is going to be everywhere. It's going to be everywhere we look — where there are planetary systems that can possibly support it. And those planetary systems are going to be very common. So, what about life on Mars? Well, if somebody had asked me about a dozen years ago what I thought the chances of life on Mars would be, I would've probably said, a couple of percent. And even that was considered outrageous at the time. I was once sneeringly introduced by a former NASA official, as the only person on the planet who still thought there was life on Mars. Of course, that official is now dead, and I'm not, so there's a certain amount of glory in outliving your adversaries.But things have changed greatly over the last dozen years. And the reason that they have changed is because we now have new information. The amazing Pathfinder mission that went in '97, and the MER Rover missions that are on Mars as we speak now and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, has taught us a number of amazing things. There is sub-surface ice on that planet. And so where there is water, there is a very high chance of our kind of life. There's clearly sedimentary rocks all over the place – one of the landers is sitting in the middle of an ancient seabed, and there are these amazing structures called blueberries, which are these little, rocky concretions that we are busy making biologically in my lab right now.So, with all of these things put together, I think that the chances of life are much greater than I would've ever thought. I think that the chance of life having arisen on Mars, sometime in its past, is maybe one in four to maybe even half and half. So this is a very bold statement. I think it's there, and I think we need to go look for it, and I think it's underground. So the game's afoot, and this is the game that we play in astro-biology. How do you try to get a handle on extraterrestrial life? How do you plan to look for it? How do you know it when you find it? Because if it's big and obvious, we would've already found it — it would've already bitten us on the foot, and it hasn't.So, we know that it's probably quite cryptic. Very critically, how do we protect it, if we find it, and not contaminate it? And also, even perhaps more critically, because this is the only home planet we have, how do we protect us from it, while we study it? So why might it be hard to find? Well, it's probably microscopic, and it's never easy to study microscopic things, although the amazing tools that we now have to do that allow us to study things in much greater depth, at much smaller scales than ever before. But it's probably hiding, because if you are out sequestering resources from your environment, that makes you yummy, and other things might want to eat you, or consume you. And so, there's a game of predator-prey that's going to be, essentially, universal, really, in any kind of biological system. It also may be very, very different in its fundamental properties – its chemistry, or its size.We say small, but what does that mean? Is it virus-sized? Is it smaller than that? Is it bigger than the biggest bacterium? We don't know. And speed of activity, which is something that we face in our work with sub-surface organisms, because they grow very, very slowly. If I were to take a swab off your teeth and plate it on a Petri plate, within about four or five hours, I would have to see growth. But the organisms that we work with, from the sub-surface of Earth, very often it's months — and in many cases, years — before we see any growth whatsoever. So they are, intrinsically, a slower life-form.But the real issue is that we are guided by our limited experience, and until we can think out of the box of our cranium and what we know, then we can't recognize what to look for, or how to plan for it. So, perspective is everything and, because of the history that I've just briefly talked to you about, I have learned to think about Earth as an extraterrestrial planet. And this has been invaluable in our approach to try to study these things.This is my favorite game on airplanes: where you're in an airplane and you look out the window, you see the horizon. I always turn my head on the side, and that simple change makes me go from seeing this planet as home, to seeing it as a planet. It's a very simple trick, and I never fail to do it when I'm sitting in a window seat. Well, this is what we apply to our work. This shows one of the most extreme caves that we work in. This is Cueva de Villa Luz in Tabasco, in Mexico, and this cave is saturated with sulfuric acid. There is tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfide coming into this cave from volcanic sources and from the breakdown of evaporite — minerals below the carbonates in which this cave is formed — and it is a completely hostile environment for us. We have to go in with protective suits and breathing gear, and 30 parts per million of H2S will kill you. This is regularly several hundred parts per million. So, it's a very hazardous environment, with CO as well, and many other gases. These extreme physical and chemical parameters make the biology that grows in these places very special. Because contrary to what you might think, this is not devoid of life.This is one of the richest caves that we have found on the planet, anywhere. It's bursting with life. The extremes on Earth are interesting in their own right, but one of the reasons that we're interested in them is because they represent, really, the average conditions that we may expect on other planets. So, this is part of the ability that we have, to try to stretch our imagination, in terms of what we may find in the future. There's so much life in this cave, and I can't even begin to scratch the surface of it with you.But one of the most famous objects out of this are what we call Snottites, for obvious reasons. This stuff looks like what comes out of your two-year-old's nose when he has a cold. And this is produced by bacteria who are actually making more sulfuric acid, and living at pHs right around zero. And so, this stuff is like battery acid. And yet, everything in this cave has adapted to it. In fact, there's so much energy available for biology in this cave, that there's actually a huge number of cavefish. And the local Zoque Indians harvest this twice a year, as part of their Easter week celebration and Holy Week celebration.This is very unusual for caves. In some of the other amazing caves that we work in — this is in Lechuguilla cave in New Mexico near Carlsbad, and this is one of the most famous caves in the world. It's 115 miles of mapped passage, it's pristine, it has no natural opening and it's a gigantic biological, geo-microbiological laboratory. In this cave, great areas are covered by this reddish material that you see here, and also these enormous crystals of selenite that you can see dangling down. This stuff is produced biologically. This is the breakdown product of the bedrock, that organisms are busy munching their way through. They take iron and manganese minerals within the bedrock and they oxidize them. And every time they do that, they get a tiny little packet of energy. And that tiny little packet of energy is what they use, then, to run their life processes. Interestingly enough, they also do this with uranium and chromium, and various other toxic metals.And so, the obvious avenue for bio-remediation comes from organisms like this. These organisms we now bring into the lab, and you can see some of them growing on Petri plates, and get them to reproduce the precise biominerals that we find on the walls of these caves. So, these are signals that they leave in the rock record. Well, even in basalt surfaces in lava-tube caves, which are a by-product of volcanic activity, we find these walls totally covered, in many cases, by these beautiful, glistening silver walls, or shiny pink or shiny red or shiny gold. And these are mineral deposits that are also made by bacteria. And you can see in these central images here, scanning electron micrographs of some of these guys — these are gardens of these bacteria.One of the interesting things about these particular guys is that they're in the actinomycete and streptomycete groups of the bacteria, which is where we get most of our antibiotics. The sub-surface of Earth contains a vast biodiversity. And these organisms, because they're very separate from the surface, make a vast array of novel compounds. And so, the potential for exploiting this for pharmaceutical and industrial chemical uses is completely untapped, but probably exceeds most of the rest of the biodiversity of the planet.So, lava-tube caves— I've just told you about organisms that live here on this planet. We know that on Mars and the Moon there are tons of these structures. We can see them. On the left you can see a lava tube forming at a recent eruption — Mount Etna in Sicily — and this is the way these tubes form. And when they hollow out, then they become habitats for organisms. These are all over the planet Mars, and we're busy cataloguing them now. And so, there's very interesting cave real estate on Mars, at least of that type.In order to access these sub-surface environments that we're interested in, we're very interested in developing the tools to do this. You know, it's not easy to get into these caves. It requires crawling, climbing, rope-work, technical rope-work and many other complex human motions in order to access these. We face the problem of, how can we do this robotically? Why would we want to do it robotically? Well, we're going to be sending robotic missions to Mars long in advance of human missions.And then, secondly, getting back to that earlier point that I made about the preciousness of any life that we may find on Mars, we don't want to contaminate it. And one of the best ways to study something without contaminating it is to have an intermediary. And in this case, we're imagining intermediary robotic devices that can actually do some of that front-end work for us, to protect any potential life that we find. I'm not going to go through all of these projects now, but we're involved in about half-a-dozen robotic development projects, in collaboration with a number of different groups. I want to talk specifically about the array that you see on the top.These are hopping microbot swarms. I'm working on this with the Field and Space Robotics Laboratory and my friend Steve Dubowsky at MIT, and we have come up with the idea of having little, jumping bean-like robots that are propelled by artificial muscle, which is one of the Dubowsky Lab's specialties — are the EPAMs, or artificial muscles. And these allow them to hop. They behave with a swarm behavior, where they relate to each other, modeled after insect swarm behavior, and they could be made very numerous. And so, one can send a thousand of them, as you can see in this upper left-hand picture, a thousand of them could fit into the payload bay that was used for one of the current MER Rovers. And these little guys — you could lose many of them. If you send a thousand of them, you could probably get rid of 90 percent of them and still have a mission. And so, that allows you the flexibility to go into very challenging terrain and actually make your way where you want to go.Now, to wrap this up, I want to talk for two seconds about caves and the human expansion beyond Earth as a natural outgrowth of the work that we do in caves. It occurred to us a number of years ago that caves have many properties that people have used and other organisms have used as habitat in the past. And perhaps it's time we started to explore those, in the context of future Mars and the Moon exploration.So, we have just finished a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Phase II study, looking at the irreducible set of technologies that you would need in order to actually allow people to inhabit lava tubes on the Moon or Mars. It turns out to be a fairly simple and small list, and we have gone in the relatively primitive technology direction. So, we're talking about things like inflatable liners that can conform to the complex topological shape on the inside of a cave, foamed-in-place airlocks to deal with this complex topology, various ways of getting breathing gases made from the intrinsic materials of these bodies. And the future is there for us to use these lava-tube caves on Mars. And right now we're in caves, and we're doing science and recreation, but I think in the future we'll be using them for habitat and science on these other bodies.Now, my view of what the current status of potential life on Mars is that it's probably been on the planet, maybe one in two chances. The question as to whether there is life on Mars that is related to life on Earth has now been very muddied, because we now know, from Mars meteorites that have made it to Earth, that there's material that can be exchanged between those two planets.One of the burning questions, of course, is if we go there and find life in the sub-surface, as I fully expect that we will, is that a second genesis of life? Did life start here and was it transported there? Did it start there and get transported here? This will be a fascinating puzzle as we go into the next half-century, and where I expect that we will have more and more Mars missions to answer these questions. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/penelope_boston
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"I was trying to think, how is sync connected to happiness, and it occurred to me that for some reason we take pleasure in synchronizing. We like to dance together, we like singing together. And so, if you'll put up with this, I would like to enlist your help with a first experiment today. The experiment is — and I notice, by the way, that when you applauded, that you did it in a typical North American way, that is, you were raucous and incoherent. You were not organized. It didn't even occur to you to clap in unison. Do you think you could do it? I would like to see if this audience would — no, you haven't practiced, as far as I know — can you get it together to clap in sync?(Clapping)Whoa! Now, that's what we call emergent behavior.(Laughter)So I didn't expect that, but — I mean, I expected you could synchronize. It didn't occur to me you'd increase your frequency. It's interesting.(Laughter)So what do we make of that? First of all, we know that you're all brilliant. This is a room full of intelligent people, highly sensitive. Some trained musicians out there. Is that what enabled you to synchronize? So to put the question a little more seriously, let's ask ourselves what are the minimum requirements for what you just did, for spontaneous synchronization. Do you need, for instance, to be as smart as you are? Do you even need a brain at all just to synchronize? Do you need to be alive? I mean, that's a spooky thought, right? Inanimate objects that might spontaneously synchronize themselves. It's real. In fact, I'll try to explain today that sync is maybe one of, if not one of the most, perhaps the most pervasive drive in all of nature. It extends from the subatomic scale to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. It's a deep tendency toward order in nature that opposes what we've all been taught about entropy. I mean, I'm not saying the law of entropy is wrong — it's not. But there is a countervailing force in the universe — the tendency towards spontaneous order. And so that's our theme.Now, to get into that, let me begin with what might have occurred to you immediately when you hear that we're talking about synchrony in nature, which is the glorious example of birds that flock together, or fish swimming in organized schools. So these are not particularly intelligent creatures, and yet, as we'll see, they exhibit beautiful ballets. This is from a BBC show called ""Predators,"" and what we're looking at here are examples of synchrony that have to do with defense. When you're small and vulnerable, like these starlings, or like the fish, it helps to swarm to avoid predators, to confuse predators. Let me be quiet for a second because this is so gorgeous. For a long time, biologists were puzzled by this behavior, wondering how it could be possible. We're so used to choreography giving rise to synchrony. These creatures are not choreographed. They're choreographing themselves.And only today is science starting to figure out how it works. I'll show you a computer model made by Iain Couzin, a researcher at Oxford, that shows how swarms work. There are just three simple rules. First, all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors. Second, all the individuals have a tendency to line up. And third, they're all attracted to each other, but they try to keep a small distance apart. And when you build those three rules in, automatically you start to see swarms that look very much like fish schools or bird flocks. Now, fish like to stay close together, about a body length apart. Birds try to stay about three or four body lengths apart. But except for that difference, the rules are the same for both.Now, all this changes when a predator enters the scene. There's a fourth rule: when a predator's coming, get out of the way. Here on the model you see the predator attacking. The prey move out in random directions, and then the rule of attraction brings them back together again, so there's this constant splitting and reforming. And you see that in nature. Keep in mind that, although it looks as if each individual is acting to cooperate, what's really going on is a kind of selfish Darwinian behavior. Each is scattering away at random to try to save its scales or feathers. That is, out of the desire to save itself, each creature is following these rules, and that leads to something that's safe for all of them. Even though it looks like they're thinking as a group, they're not. You might wonder what exactly is the advantage to being in a swarm, so you can think of several.As I say, if you're in a swarm, your odds of being the unlucky one are reduced as compared to a small group. There are many eyes to spot danger. And you'll see in the example with the starlings, with the birds, when this peregrine hawk is about to attack them, that actually waves of panic can propagate, sending messages over great distances. You'll see — let's see, it's coming up possibly at the very end — maybe not. Information can be sent over half a kilometer away in a very short time through this mechanism. Yes, it's happening here. See if you can see those waves propagating through the swarm. It's beautiful. The birds are, we sort of understand, we think, from that computer model, what's going on. As I say, it's just those three simple rules, plus the one about watch out for predators.There doesn't seem to be anything mystical about this. We don't, however, really understand at a mathematical level. I'm a mathematician. We would like to be able to understand better. I mean, I showed you a computer model, but a computer is not understanding. A computer is, in a way, just another experiment. We would really like to have a deeper insight into how this works and to understand, you know, exactly where this organization comes from. How do the rules give rise to the patterns?There is one case that we have begun to understand better, and it's the case of fireflies. If you see fireflies in North America, like so many North American sorts of things, they tend to be independent operators. They ignore each other. They each do their own thing, flashing on and off, paying no attention to their neighbors. But in Southeast Asia — places like Thailand or Malaysia or Borneo — there's a beautiful cooperative behavior that occurs among male fireflies. You can see it every night along the river banks. The trees, mangrove trees, are filled with fireflies communicating with light. Specifically, it's male fireflies who are all flashing in perfect time together, in perfect synchrony, to reinforce a message to the females. And the message, as you can imagine, is ""Come hither. Mate with me.""(Music)In a second I'm going to show you a slow motion of a single firefly so that you can get a sense. This is a single frame. Then on, and then off — a 30th of a second, there. And then watch this whole river bank, and watch how precise the synchrony is. On, more on and then off. The combined light from these beetles — these are actually tiny beetles — is so bright that fishermen out at sea can use them as navigating beacons to find their way back to their home rivers. It's stunning. For a long time it was not believed when the first Western travelers, like Sir Francis Drake, went to Thailand and came back with tales of this unbelievable spectacle. No one believed them. We don't see anything like this in Europe or in the West. And for a long time, even after it was documented, it was thought to be some kind of optical illusion. Scientific papers were published saying it was twitching eyelids that explained it, or, you know, a human being's tendency to see patterns where there are none. But I hope you've convinced yourself now, with this nighttime video, that they really were very well synchronized.Okay, well, the issue then is, do we need to be alive to see this kind of spontaneous order, and I've already hinted that the answer is no. Well, you don't have to be a whole creature. You can even be just a single cell. Like, take, for instance, your pacemaker cells in your heart right now. They're keeping you alive. Every beat of your heart depends on this crucial region, the sinoatrial node, which has about 10,000 independent cells that would each beep, have an electrical rhythm — a voltage up and down — to send a signal to the ventricles to pump. Now, your pacemaker is not a single cell. It's this democracy of 10,000 cells that all have to fire in unison for the pacemaker to work correctly.I don't want to give you the idea that synchrony is always a good idea. If you have epilepsy, there is an instance of billions of brain cells, or at least millions, discharging in pathological concert. So this tendency towards order is not always a good thing. You don't have to be alive. You don't have to be even a single cell. If you look, for instance, at how lasers work, that would be a case of atomic synchrony. In a laser, what makes laser light so different from the light above my head here is that this light is incoherent — many different colors and different frequencies, sort of like the way you clapped initially — but if you were a laser, it would be rhythmic applause. It would be all atoms pulsating in unison, emitting light of one color, one frequency.Now comes the very risky part of my talk, which is to demonstrate that inanimate things can synchronize. Hold your breath for me. What I have here are two empty water bottles. This is not Keith Barry doing a magic trick. This is a klutz just playing with some water bottles. I have some metronomes here. Can you hear that? All right, so, I've got a metronome, and it's the world's smallest metronome, the — well, I shouldn't advertise. Anyway, so this is the world's smallest metronome. I've set it on the fastest setting, and I'm going to now take another one set to the same setting. We can try this first. If I just put them on the table together, there's no reason for them to synchronize, and they probably won't.Maybe you'd better listen to them. I'll stand here. What I'm hoping is that they might just drift apart because their frequencies aren't perfectly the same. Right? They did. They were in sync for a while, but then they drifted apart. And the reason is that they're not able to communicate. Now, you might think that's a bizarre idea. How can metronomes communicate? Well, they can communicate through mechanical forces. So I'm going to give them a chance to do that. I also want to wind this one up a bit. How can they communicate? I'm going to put them on a movable platform, which is the ""Guide to Graduate Study at Cornell."" Okay? So here it is. Let's see if we can get this to work. My wife pointed out to me that it will work better if I put both on at the same time because otherwise the whole thing will tip over. All right. So there we go. Let's see. OK, I'm not trying to cheat — let me start them out of sync. No, hard to even do that.(Applause)All right. So before any one goes out of sync, I'll just put those right there.(Laughter) Now, that might seem a bit whimsical, but this pervasiveness of this tendency towards spontaneous order sometimes has unexpected consequences. And a clear case of that, was something that happened in London in the year 2000. The Millennium Bridge was supposed to be the pride of London — a beautiful new footbridge erected across the Thames, first river crossing in over 100 years in London. There was a big competition for the design of this bridge, and the winning proposal was submitted by an unusual team — in the TED spirit, actually — of an architect — perhaps the greatest architect in the United Kingdom, Lord Norman Foster — working with an artist, a sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, and an engineering firm, Ove Arup. And together they submitted a design based on Lord Foster's vision, which was — he remembered as a kid reading Flash Gordon comic books, and he said that when Flash Gordon would come to an abyss, he would shoot what today would be a kind of a light saber.He would shoot his light saber across the abyss, making a blade of light, and then scamper across on this blade of light. He said, ""That's the vision I want to give to London. I want a blade of light across the Thames."" So they built the blade of light, and it's a very thin ribbon of steel, the world's — probably the flattest and thinnest suspension bridge there is, with cables that are out on the side. You're used to suspension bridges with big droopy cables on the top. These cables were on the side of the bridge, like if you took a rubber band and stretched it taut across the Thames — that's what's holding up this bridge. Now, everyone was very excited to try it out. On opening day, thousands of Londoners came out, and something happened. And within two days the bridge was closed to the public. So I want to first show you some interviews with people who were on the bridge on opening day, who will describe what happened.Man: It really started moving sideways and slightly up and down, rather like being on the boat.Woman: Yeah, it felt unstable, and it was very windy, and I remember it had lots of flags up and down the sides, so you could definitely — there was something going on sideways, it felt, maybe.Interviewer: Not up and down? Boy: No.Interviewer: And not forwards and backwards? Boy: No.Interviewer: Just sideways. About how much was it moving, do you think?Boy: It was about —Interviewer: I mean, that much, or this much?Boy: About the second one.Interviewer: This much? Boy: Yeah.Man: It was at least six, six to eight inches, I would have thought.Interviewer: Right, so, at least this much? Man: Oh, yes.Woman: I remember wanting to get off.Interviewer: Oh, did you? Woman: Yeah. It felt odd.Interviewer: So it was enough to be scary? Woman: Yeah, but I thought that was just me.Interviewer: Ah! Now, tell me why you had to do this?Boy: We had to do this because, to keep in balance because if you didn't keep your balance, then you would just fall over about, like, to the left or right, about 45 degrees. Interviewer: So just show me how you walk normally. Right. And then show me what it was like when the bridge started to go. Right. So you had to deliberately push your feet out sideways and — oh, and short steps?Man: That's right. And it seemed obvious to me that it was probably the number of people on it.Interviewer: Were they deliberately walking in step, or anything like that?Man: No, they just had to conform to the movement of the bridge.Steven Strogatz: All right, so that already gives you a hint of what happened. Think of the bridge as being like this platform. Think of the people as being like metronomes. Now, you might not be used to thinking of yourself as a metronome, but after all, we do walk like — I mean, we oscillate back and forth as we walk. And especially if we start to walk like those people did, right? They all showed this strange sort of skating gait that they adopted once the bridge started to move. And so let me show you now the footage of the bridge. But also, after you see the bridge on opening day, you'll see an interesting clip of work done by a bridge engineer at Cambridge named Allan McRobie, who figured out what happened on the bridge, and who built a bridge simulator to explain exactly what the problem was. It was a kind of unintended positive feedback loop between the way the people walked and the way the bridge began to move, that engineers knew nothing about. Actually, I think the first person you'll see is the young engineer who was put in charge of this project. Okay.(Video) Interviewer: Did anyone get hurt? Engineer: No.Interviewer: Right. So it was quite small — Engineer: Yes. Interviewer: — but real?Engineer: Absolutely. Interviewer: You thought, ""Oh, bother.""Engineer: I felt I was disappointed about it.We'd spent a lot of time designing this bridge, and we'd analyzed it, we'd checked it to codes — to heavier loads than the codes — and here it was doing something that we didn't know about. Interviewer: You didn't expect. Engineer: Exactly.Narrator: The most dramatic and shocking footage shows whole sections of the crowd — hundreds of people — apparently rocking from side to side in unison, not only with each other, but with the bridge. This synchronized movement seemed to be driving the bridge. But how could the crowd become synchronized? Was there something special about the Millennium Bridge that caused this effect? This was to be the focus of the investigation.Interviewer: Well, at last the simulated bridge is finished, and I can make it wobble. Now, Allan, this is all your fault, isn't it? Allan McRobie: Yes.Interviewer: You designed this, yes, this simulated bridge, and this, you reckon, mimics the action of the real bridge?AM: It captures a lot of the physics, yes.Interviewer: Right. So if we get on it, we should be able to wobble it, yes?Allan McRobie is a bridge engineer from Cambridge who wrote to me, suggesting that a bridge simulator ought to wobble in the same way as the real bridge — provided we hung it on pendulums of exactly the right length.AM: This one's only a couple of tons, so it's fairly easy to get going. Just by walking. Interviewer: Well, it's certainly going now.AM: It doesn't have to be a real dangle. Just walk. It starts to go.Interviewer: It's actually quite difficult to walk. You have to be careful where you put your feet down, don't you, because if you get it wrong, it just throws you off your feet.AM: It certainly affects the way you walk, yes. You can't walk normally on it.Interviewer: No. If you try and put one foot in front of another, it's moving your feet away from under you. AM: Yes.Interviewer: So you've got to put your feet out sideways. So already, the simulator is making me walk in exactly the same way as our witnesses walked on the real bridge.AM: ... ice-skating gait. There isn't all this sort of snake way of walking.Interviewer: For a more convincing experiment, I wanted my own opening-day crowd, the sound check team. Their instructions: just walk normally. It's really intriguing because none of these people is trying to drive it. They're all having some difficulty walking. And the only way you can walk comfortably is by getting in step. But then, of course, everyone is driving the bridge. You can't help it. You're actually forced by the movement of the bridge to get into step, and therefore to drive it to move further.SS: All right, well, with that from the Ministry of Silly Walks, maybe I'd better end. I see I've gone over. But I hope that you'll go outside and see the world in a new way, to see all the amazing synchrony around us. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync
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"It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, ""What is your most precious natural resource?"" — they will not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you.(Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years.The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. And in some countries — let me pick Afghanistan — 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. And I don't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade — they don't go.So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children. We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops. That's smaller than I predicted — I predicted three to 10 million — but is still a very large number.In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops. It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived.And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. They've leapfrogged. The change is absolutely monumental, because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the world. Before, they were closed off.Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth. And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. Thirty-one countries in total are involved, and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop — a little green laptop.Now what are some of the results? Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties — not by us — skyrockets. Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. They own the laptops. They take them home. And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one of the three children brought her mother. And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write. Her mother had not gone to primary school. And this is such an inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change.So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. The reason you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. This is an education project, not a laptop project. They need to learn learning. And then, just think — they can have, let's say, 100 books. In a village, you have 100 laptops, each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. You and I didn't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school.Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do anyway. So we're once again doing ""Give One, Get One."" Last year, we ran a ""Give One, Get One"" program, and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to countries that can't afford it at all. And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia. Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc. And then we can actually roll out large numbers.So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. And think of the laptop as a vaccine. You don't vaccinate a few children. You vaccinate all the children in an area.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_takes_olpc_to_colombia
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"There are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy's, combined — 40,000, actually. Chinese restaurants have played an important role in American history, as a matter of fact. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved in a Chinese restaurant called Yenching Palace in Washington, DC, which unfortunately is closed now, and about to be turned into Walgreen's. And the house where John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is also now a Chinese restaurant called Wok and Roll, on H Street in Washington.(Laughter)And it's not completely gratuitous, because ""wok"" and ""roll"" — Chinese food and Japanese foods, so it kind of works out. And Americans love their Chinese food so much, they've actually brought it into space. NASA, for example, serves thermostabilized sweet-and-sour pork on its shuttle menu for its astronauts.So, let me present the question to you: If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, you should ask yourself: how often do you eat apple pie, versus how often do you eat Chinese food?(Laughter)And if you think about it, a lot of the foods that we or Americans think of as Chinese food are barely recognizable to Chinese. For example: beef with broccoli, egg rolls, General Tso's Chicken, fortune cookies, chop suey, the take-out boxes. For example, I took a whole bunch of fortune cookies back to China, gave them to Chinese to see how they would react.[What is this?][Should I try it?][Try it!][What is this called?][Fortune cookie.](Laughter)[There's a piece of paper inside!](Laughter)[What is this?][You've won a prize!][What is this?][It's a fortune!][Tasty!]So where are they from? The short answer is, actually, they're from Japan. And in Kyoto, outside, there are still small family-run bakeries that make fortune cookies, as they did over 100 years ago, 30 years before fortune cookies were introduced in the United States. If you see them side by side, there's yellow and brown. Theirs are actually flavored with miso and sesame paste, so they're not as sweet as our version. So how did they get to the US? Well, the short answer is, the Japanese immigrants came over, and a bunch of the bakers introduced them — including at least one in Los Angeles, and one here in San Francisco, called Benkyodo, which is on the corner of Sutter and Buchanan. Back then, they made fortune cookies using very much the similar kind of irons that we saw back in Kyoto.The interesting question is: How do you go from fortune cookies being something that is Japanese to being something that is Chinese? Well, we locked up all the Japanese during World War II, including those that made fortune cookies. So that's when the Chinese moved in, saw a market opportunity and took over.(Laughter)So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They're more American than anything else.Another of my favorite dishes: General Tso's Chicken — which, by the way, in the US Naval Academy is called Admiral Tso's Chicken.(Laughter)I love this dish. The original name of my book was ""The Long March of General Tso."" And he has marched very far indeed, because he is sweet, he is fried, and he is chicken — all things that Americans love.(Laughter)He has marched so far, actually, that the chef who originally invented the dish doesn't recognize it; he's kind of horrified.Video: (In Chinese)Audience: (Laughter)He's in Taiwan right now. He's retired, deaf and plays a lot of mah–jongg. After I showed him this, he got up, and says, ""mòmíngqímiào,"" which means, ""This is all nonsense,"" and goes back to play his mah-jongg game during the afternoon.Another dish, one of my favorites: beef with broccoli. Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable; in fact, it is originally an Italian vegetable. It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s, but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s. The Chinese have their own version of broccoli, called Chinese broccoli, but they've now discovered American broccoli, and are importing it as a sort of exotic delicacy.I guarantee you, General Tso never saw a stalk of broccoli in his life. That was a picture of General Tso. I went to his home town. This is a billboard that says: ""Welcome to the birthplace of General Tso."" And I went looking for chicken. Finally found a cow — and did find chicken. Believe it or not, these guys were actually crossing the road.(Laughter)And I found a whole bunch of General Tso's relatives who are still in the town. This guy is now five generations removed from the General; this guy is about seven. I showed them the pictures of General Tso Chicken, and they were like, ""We don't know this dish. Is this Chinese food?"" Because it doesn't look like Chinese food to them. But they weren't surprised I traveled around the world to visit them, because in their eyes he is, after all, a famous Qing dynasty military hero. He played an important role in the Taiping Rebellion, a war started by a guy who thought he was the son of God and baby brother of Jesus Christ. He caused a war that killed 20 million people — still the deadliest civil war in the world to this day. So, you know, I realized when I was there, General Tso is kind of a lot like Colonel Sanders in America, in that he's known for chicken and not war. But in China, this guy's actually known for war and not chicken.But the granddaddy of all the Chinese American dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey, which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century. According to the New York Times in 1904, there was an outbreak of Chinese restaurants all over town, and ""... the city has gone 'chop suey' mad."" So it took about 30 years before the Americans realized that chop suey is actually not known in China, and as this article points out, ""The average native of any city in China knows nothing of chop suey."" Back then it was a way to show you were sophisticated and cosmopolitan; a guy who wanted to impress a girl could take her on a chop suey date. I like to say chop suey is the biggest culinary joke one culture ever played on another, because ""chop suey,"" translated into Chinese, means ""jaahp-seui,"" which, translated back, means ""odds and ends."" So, these people are going around China asking for chop suey, which is sort of like a Japanese guy coming here and saying, ""I understand you have a very popular dish in your country called 'leftovers.'""(Laughter)Right?(Laughter)And not only that: ""This dish is particularly popular after that holiday you call 'Thanksgiving.'""(Laughter)So, why and where did chop suey come from? Let's go back to the mid-1800s, when the Chinese first came to America. Back then, Americans were not clamoring to eat Chinese food. In fact, they saw these people who landed at their shores as alien. These people weren't eating dogs, they were eating cats. If they weren't eating cats, they were eating rats. In fact, The New York Times, my esteemed employer, in 1883 ran an article that asked, ""Do Chinese eat rats?"" Not the most PC question to be asked today, but if you look at the popular imagery of the time, not so outlandish. This is actually a real advertisement for rat poison from the late 1800s. And if you see under the word ""Clears"" — very small — it says, ""They must go,"" which refers not only to the rats, but to the Chinese in their midst, because the way that the food was perceived was that these people who ate foods different from us must be different from us.Another way that you saw this antipathy towards the Chinese is through documents like this. This is in the Library of Congress. It's a pamphlet published by Samuel Gompers, hero of our American labor movement. It's called, ""Some Reason for Chinese Exclusion: Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism: Which shall survive?"" And it basically made the argument that Chinese men who ate rice would necessarily bring down the standard of living for American men who ate meat. And as a matter of fact, then, this is one of the reasons we must exclude them from this country. So, with sentiments like these, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed between 1882 and 1902, the only time in American history when a group was specifically excluded for its national origin or ethnicity. So in a way, because the Chinese were attacked, chop suey was created as a defense mechanism.Who came up with the idea of chop suey? There's a lot of different mysteries and legends, but of the ones I've found, the most interesting is this article from 1904. A Chinese guy named Lem Sen shows up in Chinatown, New York City, and says, ""I want you all to stop making chop suey, because I am the original creator and sole proprietor of chop suey. And the way he tells it, there was a famous Chinese diplomat that showed up, and he was told to make a dish that looked very popular and could, quote, ""pass"" as Chinese. And as he said — we would never print this today — but basically, the American man has become very rich. Lem Sen: ""I would've made this money, too, but I spent all this time looking for the American man who stole my recipe. Now I've found him and I want my recipe back, and I want everyone to stop making chop suey, or pay me for the right to do the same. So it was an early exercise of intellectual property rights.The thing is, this idea of Chinese-American food doesn't exist only in America. In fact, Chinese food is the most pervasive food on the planet, served on all seven continents, even Antarctica, because Monday night is Chinese food night at McMurdo Station, which is the main scientific station in Antarctica. You see different varieties of Chinese food. For example, there is French Chinese food, where they serve salt and pepper frog legs. There is Italian Chinese food, where they don't have fortune cookies, so they serve fried gelato. My neighbor, Alessandra, was shocked when I told her, ""Dude, fried gelato is not Chinese."" She's like, ""It's not? But they serve it in all the Chinese restaurants in Italy.""(Laughter)Even the Brits have their own version. This is a dish called ""crispy shredded beef,"" which has a lot of crisp, a lot of shred, and not a lot of beef. There is West Indian Chinese food, there's Jamaican Chinese food, Middle Eastern Chinese food, Mauritian Chinese food. This is a dish called ""Magic Bowl,"" that I discovered. There's Indian Chinese food, Korean Chinese food, Japanese Chinese food, where they take the bao, the little buns, and make them into pizza versions.(Laughter)And they totally randomly take Chinese noodle dishes, and just ramenize them. This is something that, in the Chinese version, has no soup. So, there's Peruvian Chinese food, which should not be mixed with Mexican Chinese food, where they basically take things and make it look like fajitas.(Laughter)And they have things like risotto chop suey. My personal favorite of all the restaurants I've encountered around the world was this one in Brazil, called ""Kung Food.""(Laughter)So, let's take a step back and understand what is to be appreciated in America. McDonald's has garnered a lot of attention, a lot of respect, for basically standardizing the menu, decor and dining experience in post-World War II America. But you know what? They did so through a centralized headquarters out of Illinois. Chinese restaurants have done largely the same thing, I would argue, with the menu and the decor, even the restaurant name, but without a centralized headquarters. So, this actually became very clear to me with the March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing, where they expected, based on the number of ticket sales they had, to have three or four second-place winners, people who match five or six Powerball numbers. Instead, they had 110, and they were completely shocked.They looked all across the country and discovered it couldn't be fraud, since it happened in different states, across different computer systems. Whatever it was, it caused people to behave in a mass-synchronized way. So, OK, maybe it had to do with the patterns on the pieces of paper, like it was a diamond, or diagonal. It wasn't that, so they're like, OK, let's look at television. So they looked at an episode of ""Lost."" Now, I don't have a TV, which makes me a freak, but very productive —(Laughter)And there's an episode of ""Lost"" where one guy has a lucky number, but it's not a lucky number, it's why he's on the island, but they looked and the numbers did not match. They looked at ""The Young and The Restless."" It wasn't that, either. It wasn't until the first guy shows up the next day and they ask him, ""Where did you get your number?"" He said, ""I got it from a fortune cookie."" This is a slip one of the winners had, because the Tennessee lottery security officials were like, ""Oh, no, this can't be true."" But it was true. Basically, of those 110 people, 104 of them or so had gotten their number from a fortune cookie.(Laughter)Yeah. So I went and started looking. I went across the country, looking for these restaurants where these people had gotten their fortune cookies from. There are a bunch of them, including Lee's China in Omaha — which is actually run by Koreans, but that's another point, and a bunch of them named ""China Buffet."" What's interesting is that their stories were similar, but different. It was lunch, it was take-out, it was sit-down, it was buffet, it was three weeks ago, it was three months ago. But at some point, all these people had a very similar experience that converged at a fortune cookie and a Chinese restaurant. And all these restaurants were serving fortune cookies, which, of course, aren't even Chinese to begin with. It's part of the phenomenon I called ""spontaneous self-organization,"" where, like in ant colonies, little decisions made on the micro level actually have a big impact on the macro level.A good contrast is Chicken McNuggets. McDonald's actually spent 10 years coming out with a chicken-like product. They did chicken pot pie, fried chicken, and finally introduced Chicken McNuggets. And the great innovation of Chicken McNuggets was not nuggifying them, that's kind of an easy concept. The trick was, they were able to remove the chicken from the bone in a cost-efficient manner, which is why it took so long for people to copy them — 10 years, then within a couple months, it was such a hit, they introduced it across the entire McDonald's system in the country.In contrast is General Tso's Chicken, which actually started in New York City in the early 1970s, as I was also started in this universe in New York City in the early 1970s.(Laughter)And this logo! So me, General Tso's Chicken and this logo are all karmicly related. But that dish also took about 10 years to spread across America from a restaurant in New York City. Someone's like, ""It's sweet, it's fried, it's chicken — Americans will love this.""So what I like to say, this being Bay Area, Silicon Valley, is that we think of McDonald's as sort of the Microsoft of dining experiences. We can think of Chinese restaurants perhaps as Linux, sort of an open-source thing, right?(Laughter)Where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system, that there can be specialized versions of Chinese food, depending on the region. For example, in New Orleans we have Cajun Chinese food, where they serve Sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish. And in Philadelphia, you have Philadelphia cheesesteak roll, which is like an egg roll on the outside and cheesesteak on the inside. I was surprised to discover that not only in Philadelphia, but also in Atlanta. What had happened was, a Chinese family had moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta, and brought that with them.So the thing is, our historical lore, because of the way we like narratives, is full of vast characters, such as Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc with McDonald's and Asa Candler with Coca-Cola. But, you know, it's very easy to overlook the smaller characters. For example, Lem Sen, who introduced chop suey, Chef Peng, who introduced General Tso's Chicken, and all the Japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies. So, the point of my presentation is to make you think twice; that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much, if not more, impact on what we eat today.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso
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"I'll just start talking about the 17th century. I hope nobody finds that offensive. I — you know, when I — after I had invented PCR, I kind of needed a change. And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started living down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in. They usually talk about the 17th century. You know, they get a real bad rap in the world. People think they're sort of lowbrows. One day, somebody suggested I read this book. It was called — it was called ""The Air Pump,"" or something like ""The Leviathan and The Air Pump."" It was a real weird book about the 17th century. And I realized, the roots of the way I sort of thought was just the only natural way to think about things. That — you know, I was born thinking about things that way, and I had always been like a little scientist guy. And when I went to find out something, I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised, you know, when they first told me how — how you were supposed to do science, because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever. But it didn't — it never occurred to me that it had to be invented and that it had been invented only 350 years ago. You know, it was — like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy sort of all at the same time. And the story of that, I thought, was really fascinating. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do. And it's, it's a kind of — You know, Charles I got beheaded somewhere early in the 17th century. And the English set up Cromwell and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever, and not the kind of Republicans we had. They changed the government, and it didn't work. And Charles II, the son, was finally put back on the throne of England. He was really nervous, because his dad had been, you know, beheaded for being the King of England And he was nervous about the fact that conversations that got going in, like, bars and stuff would turn to — this is kind of — it's hard to believe, but people in the 17th century in England were starting to talk about, you know, philosophy and stuff in bars. They didn't have TV screens, and they didn't have any football games to watch. And they would get really pissy, and all of a sudden people would spill out into the street and fight about issues like whether or not it was okay if Robert Boyle made a device called the vacuum pump. Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II. He was a Christian guy during the weekends, but during the week he was a scientist. (Laughter) Which was — back then it was sort of, you know, well, you know — if you made this thing — he made this little device, like kind of like a bicycle pump in reverse that could suck all the air out of — you know what a bell jar is? One of these things, you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal, and you can see inside of it, so you can see what's going on inside this thing. But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there, and see what would happen inside there. I mean, the first — I think one of the first experiments he did was he put a bird in there. And people in the 17th century, they didn't really understand the same way we do about you know, this stuff is a bunch of different kinds of molecules, and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that. I mean, fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air. But both started exploring it. One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out, and the bird died. So he said, hmm... He said — he called what he'd done as making — they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time. Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum. Right? And immediately, he got into trouble with the local clergy who said, you can't make a vacuum. Ah, uh — (Laughter) Aristotle said that nature abhors one. I think it was a poor translation, probably, but people relied on authorities like that. And you know, Boyle says, well, shit. I make them all the time. I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird — and I'm calling it a vacuum. And the religious people said that if God wanted you to make — I mean, God is everywhere, that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere. And a vacuum — there's nothing in a vacuum, so you've — God couldn't be in there. So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know. And Boyle said, bullshit. I mean, you want to call it Godless, you know, you call it Godless. But that's not my job. I'm not into that. I do that on the weekend. And like — what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens when you suck everything out of a compartment. And he did all these cute little experiments. Like he did one with — he had a little wheel, like a fan, that was sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself. He had another fan opposed to it that he had like a — I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a rubber band, and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan. I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings. It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside after he got the vacuum established, and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it, the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right? Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are — it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that, but that was what was going on at the time. And like, there was big arguments about it in the — you know, the gin houses and in the coffee shops and stuff. And Charles started not liking that. Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that — let's make a place where you can do this stuff where people don't get so — you know, we don't want the — we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so — because when they started talking about religion and science and stuff like that, that's when it had sort of gotten his father in trouble. And so, Charles said, I'm going to put up the money give you guys a building, come here and you can meet in the building, but just don't talk about religion in there. And that was fine with Boyle. He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings. And anybody who wants to do science is — this is about the time that Isaac Newton was starting to whip out a lot of really interesting things. And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society, they called it. You had to be dressed up pretty well. It wasn't like a TED conference. That was the only criteria, was that you be — you looked like a gentleman, and they'd let anybody could come. You didn't have to be a member then. And so, they would come in and you would do — Anybody that was going to show an experiment, which was kind of a new word at the time, demonstrate some principle, they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it. So they were — the really important part of this was, you were not supposed to talk about final causes, for instance. And God was out of the picture. The actual nature of reality was not at issue. You're not supposed to talk about the absolute nature of anything. You were not supposed to talk about anything that you couldn't demonstrate. So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine works, here's what we do, and then here's what happens. And seeing what happens, it was OK to generalize, and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime we make one of these things. And so you can start making up some rules. You say, anytime you have a vacuum state, you will discover that one wheel will not turn another one, if the only connection between them is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing. Candles can't burn in a vacuum, therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either. It's not clear; actually sparklers will, but they didn't know that. They didn't have sparklers. But, they — (Laughter) — you can make up rules, but they have to relate only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate. And most the demonstrations had to do with visuals. Like if you do an experiment on stage, and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky. I mean, reality is what you can see. That wasn't an explicit rule in the meeting, but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices, and they can't see and associate it with somebody, that person's probably not there. But the general idea that you could only — you could only really talk about things in that place that had some kind of experimental basis. It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local philosopher, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes. What's happening here, in the middle of the 17th century, was that what became my field — science, experimental science — was pulling itself away, and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here, but it was also what — it was an amazing thing that happened. Science had been all interlocked with theology, and philosophy, and — and — and mathematics, which is really not science. But experimental science had been tied up with all those things. And the mathematics part and the experimental science part was pulling away from philosophy. And — things — we never looked back. It's been so cool since then. I mean, it just — it just — untangled a thing that was really impeding technology from being developed. And, I mean, everybody in this room — now, this is 350 short years ago. Remember, that's a short time. It was 300,000, probably, years ago that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room came up out of Africa and turned to the left. You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those in the Japanese translation. But that happened very — a long time ago compared to 350 short years ago. But in that 350 years, the place has just undergone a lot of changes. In fact, everybody in this room probably, especially if you picked up your bag — some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags — but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room has got in their pocket, or back in their room, something that 350 years ago, kings would have gone to war to have. I mean, if you can think how important — If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites, it's not going to be much use. But, like — but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system in the 17th century some king would have gotten together an army and gone to get it, you know. If that person — Audience: For the teddy bear? The teddy bear? Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah. But — all of us own stuff. I mean, individuals own things that kings would have definitely gone to war to get. And this is just 350 years. Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff. You know, the important people — you can almost read about their lives, about all the really important people that made advances, you know. And, I mean — this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff came from that separation of this little sort of thing that we do — now I, when I was a boy was born sort of with this idea that if you want to know something — you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot, and my mother didn't really know much science, but I thought if you want to know something about stuff, you do it — you make an experiment, you know. You get — you get, like — I just had a natural feeling for science and setting up experiments. I thought that was the way everybody had always thought. I thought that anybody with any brains will do it that way. It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people — You know, I was one of those scientists that was — got into trouble the other night at dinner because of the post-modernism thing. And I didn't mean, you know — where is that lady? Audience: Here. (Laughter) KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument so much as just a lively discussion. I didn't take it personally, but — I just — I had — I naively had thought, until this surfing experience started me into the 17th century, I'd thought that's just the way people thought, and everybody did, and they recognized reality by what they could see or touch or feel or hear. At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this — I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma — This is about the time that George Dyson's dad was starting to blow nuclear — thinking about blowing up nuclear rockets and stuff. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs — little frogs — had aspirations of space travel, just like people. And I — (Laughter) I was looking for a — a propulsion system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of sight and then I wanted this little parachute to come back with the frog in it. And — I — I — I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (Laughter) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of — now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to — and how is it going to work. And we didn't have — like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any puffs of smoke out there, she'd lean out and admonish us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her — You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it. It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage. (Laughter) So, I went to the drug store and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals. Nowadays, it's no ma'am, check your shoes. And like — (Laughter) But then it wasn't — they didn't have any, but the guy had — I said, what kind of salts of potassium do you have? You know. And he had potassium nitrate. And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is. I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that manual. And so I — I did some experiments. You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire. Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together. And it — they burned. It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell, compared to other rocket fuels I had tried, that all had sulfur in them. And, it smelt like burnt candy. And then I tried the melting business, and I melted it. And then it melted into a little sort of syrupy liquid, brown. And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance, that when you lit that, it went off like a bat. I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down — you'd light it, and it would just start dancing around the yard. And I said, there is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go. (Laughter) So I started developing — you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my brother. But I — it took me about — it took me about, I'd say, six months to finally figure out all the little things. There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by — what I just— you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly build up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was — I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not — I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of noise, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the destruction of the planet. I hadn't heard about the 10 ways that we should be afraid of the — By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never — the frog would have died, you know. At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal — I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it. So, so I've got something else that's not personal. But that... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I — sometimes you do that, if you're going to write a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea — like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides, and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going — I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I heard from all my friends who were molecular biologists — I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an authority figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the results of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to change everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't — you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage. And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all — you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm basically honest. I have a fairly bad memory, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like — so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. Now, let's see... I've got another five minutes, right? OK. All scientists aren't like that. You know — and there is a lot — (Laughter) There is a lot — a lot has been going on since Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II in that same time period before, and as sure as hell afterwards, government got — realized that scientists aren't strange dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. They made faster things. They made bigger guns to shoot them down with. You know, they made drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process. They made all kinds of — and then finally one giant bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got involved in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into business — I mean, there are waves of — going into your high school, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not anymore. You want to be rich, you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think — they don't — they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth. And the people I'm talking about are people that like — they say that they're a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. And they — and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we're going to — how we're going to continually prove that the planet is getting warmer, when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. I mean, if you actually measure the temperature over a period — I mean, the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years — longer than that it's been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years, and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up. It's like, the average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit, because the nighttime temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. And it's that the weather stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And most responsible people that measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime, and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know — the first guy — the first guy that got the idea that we're going to fry ourselves here, actually, he didn't think of it that way. His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which he thought might — this is in 1900 — the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like, you know, like a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it, really, just energy coming down, energy leaving. And so he came up with this theory, and he said, this will be cool, because it'll be a longer growing season in Sweden, you know, and the surfers liked it, the surfers thought, that's a cool idea, because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and — but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know. But nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean, the temperature as measured — and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASAs records, and all the Weather Bureau's records, and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the temperature has just — the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up about .7 degrees in this century. But in fact, it was just coming up — it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up. So — and Arrhenius' theory — and all the global warmers think — they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too, if it's the greenhouse effect. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean — but people don't like things like this, so — most — I mean, you don't get all excited about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It's a paper that came out in February, and most of you probably hadn't heard about it. ""Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget."" Excuse me. Those papers were published by NASA, and some scientists at Columbia, and Viliki and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these — the conclusion in both of these papers, and in also the Science editor's, like, descriptions of these papers, for, you know, for the quickie, is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. I mean, what these guys were doing, and this is what — the NASA people have been saying this for a long time. They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up — it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And in this paper, they show something much more striking, and that was that they did what they call a radiation — and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy — we know how much that is — it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount. When it gets warm it generates — it makes redder energy — I mean, like infra-red, like something that's warm gives off infra-red. The whole business of the global warming — trash, really, is that — if the — if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to escape won't be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the — it's like 350 nanometers, which is where it's centered — that goes right through CO2. So you still get heated, but you don't dissipate any. Well, these guys measured all of those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff, and you can write these large reports, and you can get government money to do it, but these — they actually measured it, and it turns out that in the last 10 years — that's why they say ""decadal"" there — that the energy — that the level of what they call ""imbalance"" has been way the hell over what was expected. Like, the amount of imbalance — meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out that you would get from having double the CO2, which we're not anywhere near that, by the way. But if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would be increase the energy budget by about — in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out. So the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study — these two studies by two different teams — that five and a half watts per square meter had been coming in from 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer. So the theory's kaput — it's nothing. These papers should have been called, ""The End to the Global Warming Fiasco,"" you know. They're concerned, and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers, because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said, you know what? There isn't a problem with global warming any longer, so we can — you know, they're funding. And if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened... if they — if they — if they actually — if they actually said that, I'm getting out. (Laughter) I'll stand up too, and — (Laughter) (Applause) They have to say that. They had to be very cautious. But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted, because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly professional — really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking, was the global circulation model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor. It's not by a small one. They just — they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth — there's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it's big and horrible — and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about. So I mean, the reason I put those things all together, OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science — some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity. And there's a lot of things like global warming, and ozone hole and you know, a whole bunch of scientific public issues, that if you're interested in them, then you have to get down the details, and read the papers called, ""Large Decadal Variability in the..."" You have to figure out what all those words mean. And if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it, you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things. Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The — one of them — (Laughter) And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean, you've got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kary_mullis_on_what_scientists_do
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"I'm kind of tired of talking about simplicity, actually, so I thought I'd make my life more complex, as a serious play. So, I'm going to, like, go through some slides from way back when, and walk through them to give you a sense of how I end up here.So, basically it all began with this whole idea of a computer. Who has a computer? Yeah. O.K., so, everyone has a computer. Even a mobile phone, it's a computer. And — anyone remember this workbook, ""Instant Activities for Your Apple"" — free poster in each book? This was how computing began. Don't forget: a computer came out; it had no software. You'd buy that thing, you'd bring it home, you'd plug it in, and it would do absolutely nothing at all. So, you had to program it, and there were great programming, like, tutorials, like this. I mean, this was great. It's, like, you know, Herbie the Apple II. It's such a great way to — I mean, they should make Java books like this, and we've have no problem learning a program. But this was a great, grand time of the computer, when it was just a raw, raw, what is it? kind of an era. And, you see, this era coincided with my own childhood.I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle. Who of you grew up in a family business, suffered the torture? Yes, yes. The torture was good. Wasn't it good torture? It was just life-changing, you know. And so, in my life, you know, I was in the tofu; it was a family business. And my mother was a kind of a designer, also. She'd make this kind of, like, wall of tofu cooking, and it would confuse the customers, because they all thought it was a restaurant. A bad sort of branding thing, or whatever. But, anyway, that's where I grew up, in this little tofu factory in Seattle, and it was kind of like this: a small room where I kind of grew up. I'm big there in that picture.That's my dad. My dad was kind of like MacGyver, really: he would invent, like, ways to make things heavy. Like back here, there's like, concrete block technology here, and he would need the concrete blocks to press the tofu, because tofu is actually kind of a liquidy type of thing, and so you have to have heavy stuff to push out the liquid and make it hard. Tofu comes out in these big batches, and my father would sort of cut them by hand. I can't tell you — family business story: you'd understand this — my father was the most sincere man possible. He walked into a Safeway once on a rainy day, slipped, broke his arm, rushed out: he didn't want to inconvenience Safeway. So, instead, you know, my father's, like, arm's broken for two weeks in the store, and that week — now, those two weeks were when my older brother and I had to do everything. And that was torture, real torture. Because, you see, we'd seen my father taking the big block of tofu and cutting it, like, knife in, zap, zap, zap. We thought, wow. So, the first time I did that, I went, like, whoa! Like this. Bad blocks. But anyways, the tofu to me was kind of my origin, basically. And because working in a store was so hard, I liked going to school; it was like heaven. And I was really good at school.So, when I got to MIT, you know, as most of you who are creatives, your parents all told you not to be creative, right? So, same way, you know, I was good at art and good at math, and my father says, he's — John's good at math. I went to MIT, did my math, but I had this wonderful opportunity, because computers had just become visual. The Apple — Macintosh just came out; I had a Mac in hand when I went to MIT. And it was a time when a guy who, kind of, could cross the two sides — it was a good time.And so, I remember that my first major piece of software was on a direct copy of then-Aldus PageMaker. I made a desktop publishing system way back when, and that was, kind of, my first step into figuring out how to — oh, these two sides are kind of fun to mix. And the problem when you're younger — for all you students out there — is, your head gets kind of big really easy. And when I was making icons, I was, like, the icon master, and I was, like, yeah, I'm really good at this, you know. And then luckily, you know, I had the fortune of going to something called a library, and in the library I came upon this very book. I found this book. It's called, ""Thoughts on Design,"" by a man named Paul Rand. It's a little slim volume; I'm not sure if you've seen this. It's a very nice little book. It's about this guy, Paul Rand, who was one of the greatest graphic designers, and also a great writer as well. And when I saw this man's work, I realized how bad I was at design, or whatever I called it back then, and I suddenly had a kind of career goal, kind of in hot pursuit.So I kind of switched. I went to MIT, finished. I got my masters, and then went to art school after that. And just began to design stuff, like chopstick wrappers, napkins, menus — whatever I could get a handle on: sort of wheel-and-deal, move up in the design world, whatever. And isn't it that strange moment when you publish your design? Remember that moment — publishing your designs? Remember that moment? It felt so good, didn't it? So, I was published, you know, so, wow, my design's in a book, you know? After that, things kind of got strange, and I got thinking about the computer, because the computer to me always, kind of, bothered me. I didn't quite get it. And Paul Rand was a kind of crusty designer, you know, a crusty designer, like a good — kind of like a good French bread? You know, he wrote in one of his books: ""A Yale student once said, 'I came here to learn how to design, not how to use a computer.' Design schools take heed."" This is in the '80s, in the great clash of computer/non-computer people. A very difficult time, actually. And this to me was an important message from Rand.And so I began to sort of mess with the computer at the time. This is the first sort of play thing I did, my own serious play. I built a working version of an Adobe Illustrator-ish thing. It looks like Illustrator; it can, like, draw. It was very hard to make this, actually. It took a month to make this part. And then I thought, what if I added this feature, where I can say, this point, you can fly like a bird. You're free, kind of thing. So I could, sort of, change the kind of stability with a little control there on the dial, and I can sort of watch it flip around. And this is in 1993. And when my professors saw this, they were very upset at me. They were saying, Why's it moving? They were saying, Make it stop now. Now, I was saying, Well, that's the whole point: it's moving. And he says, Well, when's it going to stop? And I said, Never. And he said, Even worse. Stop it now. I started studying this whole idea, of like, what is this computer? It's a strange medium. It's not like print. It's not like video. It lasts forever. It's a very strange medium. So, I went off with this, and began to look for things even more.And so in Japan, I began to experiment with people. This is actually bad: human experiments. I would do these things where I'd have students become pens: there's blue pen, red pen, green pen, black pen. And someone sits down and draws a picture. They're laughing because he said, draw from the middle-right to the middle, and he kind of messed up. See, humans don't know how to take orders; the computer's so good at it. This guy figured out how to get the computer to draw with two pens at once: you know, you, pen, do this, and you, pen, do this. And so began to have multiple pens on the page — again, hard to do with our hands. And then someone discovered this ""a-ha moment"" where you could use coordinate systems. We thought, ah, this is when it's going to happen. In the end, he drew a house. It was the most boring thing. It became computerish; we began to think computerish — the X, Y system — and so that was kind of a revelation.And after this I wanted to build a computer out of people, called a human-powered computer. So, this happened in 1993. Sound down, please. It's a computer where the people are the parts. I have behind this wall a disk drive, a CPU, a graphics card, a memory system. They're picking up a giant floppy disk made of cardboard. It's put inside the computer. And that little program's on that cardboard disk. So, she wears the disk, and reads the data off the sectors of the disk, and the computer starts up; it sort of boots up, really. And it's a sort of a working computer. And when I built this computer, I had a moment of — what is it called? — the epiphany where I realized that the computer's just so fast. This computer appears to be fast - she's working pretty hard, and people are running around, and we think, wow, this is happening at a fast rate. And this computer's programmed to do only one thing, which is, if you move your mouse, the mouse changes on the screen. On the computer, when you move your mouse, that arrow moves around. On this computer, if you move the mouse, it takes half an hour for the mouse cursor to change. To give you a sense of the speed, the scale: the computer is just so amazingly fast, O.K.?And so, after this I began to do experiments for different companies. This is something I did for Sony in 1996. It was three Sony ""H"" devices that responded to sound. So, if you talk into the mike, you'll hear some music in your headphones; if you talk in the phone, then video would happen. So, I began to experiment with industry in different ways with this kind of mixture of skills. I did this ad. I don't believe in this kind of alcohol, but I do drink sometimes. And Chanel. So, getting to do different projects.And also, one thing I realized is that I like to make things. We like to make things. It's fun to make things. And so I never developed the ability to have a staff. I have no staff; it's all kind of made by hand — these sort of broken hands. And these hands were influenced by this man, Mr. Inami Naomi. This guy was my kind of like mentor. He was the first digital media producer in Tokyo. He's the guy that kind of discovered me, and kind of got me going in digital media. He was such an inspirational guy. I remember, like, we'd be in his studio, like, at 2 a.m., and then he'd show up from some client meeting. He'd come in and say, you know, If I am here, everything is okay. And you'd feel so much better, you know. And I'll never forget how, like, but — I'll never forget how, like, he had a sudden situation with his — he had an aneurysm. He went into a coma. And so, for three years he was out, and he could only blink, and so I realized at this moment, I thought, wow — how fragile is this thing we're wearing, this body and mind we're wearing, and so I thought, How do you go for it more? How do you take that time you have left and go after it? So, Naomi was pivotal in that.And so, I began to think more carefully about the computer. This was a moment where I was thinking about, so, you have a computer program, it responds to motion — X and Y — and I realized that each computer program has all these images inside the program. So, if you can see here, you know, that program you're seeing in the corner, if you spread it out, it's all these things all at once. It's real simultaneity. It's nothing we're used to working with. We're so used to working in one vector. This is all at the same time. The computer lives in so many dimensions. And also, at the same time I was frustrated, because I would go to all these art and design schools everywhere, and there were these, like, ""the computer lab,"" you know, and this is, like, in the late 1990s, and this is in Basel, a great graphic design school. And here's this, like, dirty, kind of, shoddy, kind of, dark computer room. And I began to wonder, Is this the goal? Is this what we want, you know?And also, I began to be fascinated by machines — you know, like copy machines — and so this is actually in Basel. I noticed how we spent so much time on making it interactive — this is, like, a touch screen — and I noticed how you can only touch five places, and so, ""why are we wasting so much interactivity everywhere?"" became a question. And also, the sound: I discovered I can make my ThinkPad pretend it's a telephone. You get it? No? O.K. And also, I discovered in Logan airport, this was, like, calling out to me. Do you hear that? It's like cows. This is at 4 a.m. at Logan.So, I was wondering, like, what is this thing in front of me, this computer thing? It didn't make any sense. So, I began to make things again. This is another series of objects made of old computers from my basement. I made — I took my old Macintoshes and made different objects out of them from Tokyo. I began to be very disinterested in computers themselves, so I began to make paintings out of PalmPilots. I made this series of works. They're paintings I made and put a PalmPilot in the middle as a kind of display that's sort of thinking, I'm abstract art. What am I? I'm abstract. And so it keeps thinking out loud of its own abstraction.I began to be fascinated by plastic, so I spent four months making eight plastic blocks perfectly optically transparent, as a kind of release of stress. Because of that, I became interested in blue tape, so in San Francisco, at C.C., I had a whole exhibition on blue tape. I made a whole installation out of blue tape — blue painters' tape. And at this point my wife kind of got worried about me, so I stopped doing blue tape and began to think, Well, what else is there in life? And so computers, as you know, these big computers, there are now tiny computers. They're littler computers, so the one-chip computers, I began to program one-chip computers and make objects out of P.C. boards, LEDs. I began to make LED sculptures that would live inside little boxes out of MDF. This is a series of light boxes I made for a show in Italy. Very simple boxes: you just press one button and some LED interaction occurs. This is a series of lamps I made. This is a Bento box lamp: it's sort of a plastic rice lamp; it's very friendly. I did a show in London last year made out of iPods — I used iPods as a material. So I took 16 iPod Nanos and made a kind of a Nano fish, basically. Recently, this is for Reebok. I've done shoes for Reebok as well, as a kind of a hobby for apparel.So anyways, there are all these things you can do, but the thing I love the most is to experience, taste the world. The world is just so tasty. We think we'll go to a museum; that's where all the tastes are. No, they're all out there. So, this is, like, in front of the Eiffel Tower, really, actually, around the Louvre area. This I found, where nature had made a picture for me. This is a perfect 90-degree angle by nature. In this strange moment where, like, these things kind of appeared. We all are creative people. We have this gene defect in our mind. We can't help but stop, right? This feeling's a wonderful thing. It's the forever-always-on museum. This is from the Cape last year. I discovered that I had to find the equation of art and design, which we know as circle-triangle-square. It's everywhere on the beach, I discovered. I began to collect every instance of circle-triangle-square. I put these all back, by the way. And I also discovered how . some rocks are twins separated at birth. This is also out there, you know. I'm, like, how did this happen, kind of thing? I brought you guys together again.So, three years ago I discovered, the letters M-I-T occurring in simplicity and complexity. My alma mater, MIT, and I had this moment — a kind of M. Night Shayamalan moment — where I thought, Whoa! I have to do this. And I went after it with passion. However, recently this RISD opportunity kind of arose — going to RISD — and I couldn't reconcile this real easy, because the letters had told me, MIT forever. But I discovered in the French word raison d'être. I was, like, aha, wait a second. And there RISD appeared. And so I realized it was O.K. to go.So, I'm going to RISD, actually. Who's a RISD alum out there? RISD alums? Yeah, RISD. There we go, RISD. Woo, RISD. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Art Center — Art Center is good, too. RISD is kind of my new kind of passion, and I'll tell you a little bit about that. So, RISD is — I was outside RISD, and some student wrote this on some block, and I thought, Wow, RISD wants to know what itself is. And I have no idea what RISD should be, actually, or what it wants to be, but one thing I have to tell you is that although I'm a technologist, I don't like technology very much. It's a, kind of, the qi thing, or whatever. People say, Are you going to bring RISD into the future? And I say, well, I'm going to bring the future back to RISD.There's my perspective. Because in reality, the problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make it more humane again. And if anything, I think RISD has a strange DNA. It's a strange exuberance about materials, about the world: a fascination that I think the world needs quite very much right now. So, thank you everyone.","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_on_design
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"Sixty-five million years ago, a very important and catastrophic event changed the course of life on land. And although we know that the land animals I'm going to talk about are just the scum of the Earth on the land — the little bits of land floating around — but they are important to us because they're sort of in our scale of experience from millimeters to meters. And these animals disappeared, and a separate life, mammals, radiated out to take their place. And so, we know this in extraordinary detail. And so this is a core from near Bermuda. We know that the tsunamis, the earthquakes, and the things that we've experienced in the entire record of humankind history can't really quite get around the kind of disaster that this represented for the Earth.So even before that impact was known, even before scientists in general came to an agreement over the theory of evolution, scientists and natural historians of all kinds of stripes actually had divided Earth's life's history into these two episodes: Mesozoic, the middle life, and the Cenozoic, the recent life. And as it turns out, it actually corresponds really nicely with geologic history. So we have a Mesozoic period, an age of fragmentation, and a Cenozoic period, an age of reconnection — South America to North America, India to Asia. And so my work, really, is trying to understand the character of that Mesozoic radiation compared to the Cenozoic radiation to see what mysteries we can understand from dinosaurs and from other animals about what life on drifting continents really can tell us about evolution.The work immediately begs the question, ""Why didn't they go into the waters?"" I mean, certainly mammals did. This is one example. You can go outside — see many other examples. Within five, 10 million years of the bolide impact we had a whole variety of animals going into the water. Why didn't they do that? Why didn't they hang around in trees at good size, and why didn't they burrow? Why didn't they do all these things, and if they didn't do all these things, what kinds of animals were in those spaces? And if there were no animals in those spaces, what does that tell us about, you know, how evolution works on land? Really interesting questions. I think a lot of it has to do with body size. In fact, I think that most of it has to do with body size — the size you are when you inherit a vacant ecospace from whatever natural disaster.Looking at dinosaur evolution and studying it, digging it up for many years, I end up looking at the mammal radiation, and it seems as though everything is quick time, just like technology, advancing by an order of magnitude. Dinosaur evolution proceeded at a stately pace, an order of magnitude slower on any way you want to measure it. You want to measure it by diversity? You want to measure it by the time it took to reach maximum body size? Yes, they do have larger body size, but many of them are smaller, but we're interested in the time it took them to achieve that. Fifty million years to achieve this maximum body size. And that is 10 times longer than it took the mammals to achieve maximum body size and invade all those habitats.So there's lessons to learn, and there's lessons to learn from the exception, the exception that we know very well today from the discoveries we've made, and many other scholars have made around the world. This slide was shown before. This is the famous Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx. We now know this transition is the one time that dinosaurs actually went below that body size — we're going to see where they began in a minute — and it is the one time that they rapidly invaded all the habitats I just told you that dinosaurs weren't in. They became marine. We now know them today from the ice caps. There's burrowing birds. They inhabit the trees at all body sizes, and, of course, they inhabit the land.So we were the first to actually name a bird from the famous series that later exploded onto the pages of Science and Nature. We called this bird Sinornis. It's a little bit more advanced than Archaeopteryx, and if you go to different layers, you find things that are less advanced than Archaeopteryx, and every grade in between, so that if you find something today, we're usually splitting hairs — or, more appropriately, feathers — as to decide whether it's actually a non-avian or an avian. It is the greatest transition that we have, actually, on land from one habitat to another, bar none, to understand how a bony, fairly heavy, kilogram or a couple-of-kilogram animal could make such a transition. It is really our greatest — one of our greatest — evolutionary sequences.Now, my work began at the beginning. I thought if I'm going to understand dinosaur evolution, I'd have to go back to those beds where they had picked up fragments, go back to a time and a place where the earliest dinosaurs existed. I'd like to call for this little video clip to give you some idea of, sort of, what we face. Normally, we get asked a lot of questions: ""Well, how do you find fossils in areas that look like this?"" If we could roll that first video clip. This is sort of a nice helicopter ride through those early beds, and they're located in Northeastern Argentina. And we're coming over a cliff, and at the top of that cliff, dinosaurs had basically taken over. At the bottom of the cliff, we find that they're rare as hens' teeth. That's where dinosaur origins is to be found: at the bottom of the cliff.You go into an area like this, you get a geologic map, you get a topographic map, and the best, most-inspired team you can bring to the area. And the rest is up to you. You've got to find fossils. You've got to dig a hole that's usually quite a bit bigger than that to get it out; you've got to climb those cliffs and find, really, everything that existed — not just the dinosaurs, but the entire story. If you're lucky, and you dig a place like that, you actually find the ash bed to dig it, and we did. 228 million years old, we found what really is the most primitive dinosaur: that's the Ur-dinosaur. A three-and-a-half foot thing, beautiful skull, predator, meat-eater, a two-legged animal. So, all the other dinosaurs that you know, or your kids know, at least, on four legs. This is sort of a look at the skull, and it's an absolutely fantastic thing about five or six inches long. It looks rather bird-like because it is. It's bird-like and hollow. A predator. Maybe 25 pounds, or 10 kilograms. That's where dinosaurs began. That's where the radiation began. That is 10 times larger than the mammal radiation, which was a four-legged radiation. We are extremely dinosaur-like, and unusual in our two-legged approach to life.Now, if you want to understand what happened then when the continents broke apart, and dinosaurs found — landlubbers, as they are — found themselves adrift. There's some missing puzzle pieces. Most of those missing puzzle pieces are southern continents, because it was those continents that are least explored. If you want to add to this picture and try and sketch it globally, you really have to force yourself to go down to the four corners of the Earth — Africa, India, Antarctica, Australia — and start putting together some of these pieces. I've been to some of those continents, but Africa was, in the words of Steven Pinker, was a blank slate, largely. But one with an immense chalkboard in the middle, with lots of little areas of dinosaur rock if you could survive an expedition.There's no roads into the Sahara. It's an enormous place. To be able to excavate the 80 tons of dinosaurs that we have in the Sahara and take them out, you really have to put together an expedition team that can handle the conditions. Some of them are political. Many of them are physical. Some of them — the most important — are mental. And you really have to be able to withstand conditions — you have to drive into the desert, you will see landscapes in many cases — you can see from what we've discovered — that nobody else has ever seen. And the kinds of teams they bring in? Well, they're composed of people who understand science as adventure with a purpose. They're usually students who've never seen a desert. Some of them are more experienced.Your job as a leader — this is definitely a team sport — your job as a leader is to try to inspire them to do more work than they've ever done in their life under conditions that they can't imagine. So, 125 degrees is normal. The ground surface at 150 — typical. So, you can't leave your normal metal tools out because you'll get a first-degree burn if you grab them sometimes. So, you are finding yourself also in an amazing cultural milieu. You're really rubbing shoulders with the world's last great nomadic people. These are the Tuareg nomads, and they're living their lives much as they have for centuries. Your job is to excavate things like this in the foreground, and make them enter the pages of history. To do that, you've got to actually transport them thousands of miles out of the desert.We're talking about Ethiopia, but let's talk about Niger — or Niger, in our English language — north of Nigeria — that's where this photograph was taken. Basically you're talking about a country that, when we started working there, did not have container traffic. You transported the bones out yourself to the coast of Africa, onto a boat, if you wanted to get them out of the middle of the Sahara. That's a 2,000 mile journey. So enormous excavations and a lot of work, and out of essentially a partial herd of dinosaurs that you saw buried there — 20 tons of material — we erect Jobaria, a sauropod dinosaur like we haven't seen on some other continents. It really is a little bit out of place temporally. It looks nothing like what we would find if we dug in contemporary beds in North America. Here's the animal that was causing it trouble.And, you know, on and on — a whole menagerie. When you pick up something like this — and some of you have had the chance to touch it — this is a piece of history. You're touching something that's 110 million years old. This is a thumb claw. There it was, moments after it was discovered. It is an incredible view of life, and it really began when we began to understand the depth of time. It's only been with us for less than a century, and in that time, that fourth dimension, when radioactive dating came about, less than a century ago, and we could actually tell how old some of these things were, is probably the most profound transformation, because it changes the way we look at ourselves and the world dramatically. When you pick up a piece of history like that, I think it can transform kids that are possibly interested in science.That's the animal that thumb claw came from: Suchomimus. Here's some others. This is something we found in Morocco, an immense animal. We prototyped by CAT-scanning the brain out of this animal. It turns out to have a forebrain one-fifteenth the size of a human. This was the cover of Science, because they thought that humans were more intelligent than these animals, but we can see by some in our administration that despite the enormous advantage in brain volume some of the attitudes remain the same. Anyway, smaller raptors. All the stuff from Jurassic Park that you know of — all those small animals — they all come from northern continents. This is the first skeleton from a southern continent, and guess what? You start preparing it. It has no big claw on its hind foot. It doesn't look like a Velociraptor. It's really a wholly separate radiation. So what we're trying to piece together here is a story. It involves flying reptiles like this Pterosaur that we reconstructed from Africa.Crocodiles, of course, and that's a nasty one we haven't named yet. And huge things — I mean, this is a lower jaw just laying there in the desert of this enormous crocodile. The crocodile is technically called Sarcosuchus. That's an adult Orinoco crocodile in its jaws. We had to try and reconstruct this. We had to actually look at recent crocodiles to understand how crocodiles scale. Could I have the second little video clip? Now, this field is just — and, of course, science in general — is just — adventure. We had to find and measure the largest crocodiles living today.Narrator: ... as long as their boat.Man: Look at that set of choppers! Yeah, he's a big one.Narrator: If they can just land it, this croc will provide useful data, helping Paul in his quest to understand Sarcosuchus.Man: OK, hand me some more here. Man 2: OK.Narrator: It falls to Paul to cover its eyes.Man: Watch out! Watch out! No, no, no, no. You're going to have to get on the back legs.Man: I got the back legs.Man 2: You have the back legs? No, you have the front legs, my friend. I've got it. I've got the back legs. Somebody get the front legs.Paul Sereno: Let's get this tape measure on him. Put it right there. Wow. Sixty-five. Wow. That's a big skull.Narrator: Big, but less than half the size of supercroc's skull.Man: Enormous. PS: You've got a ... 14-foot croc.Man: I knew it was big.PS: Don't get off. You don't get off, but don't worry about me.Narrator: Paul has his data, so they decide to release the animal back into the river.PS: Don't get off! Don't get off! Don't get off!Narrator: Paul has never seen a fossil do that.PS: Okay, when I say three, we move. One, two, three! Whoa!So — there were — (Applause) Well, you know, the — the fossil record is truly amazing because it really forces you to look at living animals in a new way. We proved with those measurements that crocodiles scaled isometrically. It depended on the shape of their skull, though, so we had to actually get those measurements to be sure that we had reconstructed and could prove to the scientific world that supercroc in fact is a 40-foot crocodile, probably a male. Anyway, you find other things, too. I'm going to lead an expedition to the Sahara to dig up Africa's largest neolithic site. We found this last year. Two hundred skeletons, tools, jewelry.This is a ceremonial disk. An amazing record of the colonization of the Sahara 5,000 years ago is been sitting out there waiting for us to go back. So, really exciting. And then work later is going to take us to Tibet. Now, we normally think of Tibet as a highland. It's really an island continent. It was a precursor to India, a messenger from Gondwana — a lost paradise of dinosaurs isolated for millions of years. No one's found them. We know where they are, and we're going to go and get them next year. They're only between 13 and 14,000 feet, but if you go in the warm part of the year, it's O.K. Now, I tried to suture together a dinosaur evolutionary history so that we can try to understand some basic patterns of evolution. I've talked about a few of them. We really need to take that further. We need to delve into this mass of anatomy that we've been compiling to understand where the changes are occurring and what this means. We can't predict, necessarily, what will happen in evolution, but we can learn some of the rules of the game, and that's really what we're trying to do.With regard to the biogeographic question, the Earth is dividing. These are all landlubbing animals. There's a couple of choices. You get divided, and a continent's division corresponds to a fork in the evolutionary tree, or you're crafty, and you manage to escape from one to the other and erase that division, or you're living peacefully on each side, and on one side you just go extinct, and you survive on the other side and create a difference. And the fourth thing is that you actually did one or the other of those three things, but the paleontologist never found you. And you take those four instances and you realize you have a complex problem. And so, in addition to digging, I think we have some answers from the dinosaur record. I think these dinosaurs migrated — we call it dispersal — around the globe, with the slightest land bridge. They did it within two or three degrees of the pole, to maintain similarity between continents. But when they were divided, indeed they were divided, and we do see the continents carving differences among dinosaurs.But there's one thing that's even more important, and I think that's extinction. We have downgraded this factor. It carves up the history of life, and gives us the differences that we see in the dinosaur world towards the end, right before the bolide impact. The best way to test this is to actually create a model. So if we move back, this is a two-dimensional typical tree of life. I want to give you three dimensions. So you see the tree of life, but now I've added the dimension of area. So the tree of life is normally divergence over time. Now we have divergence over time, but we've created the third dimension of area.This is a computer program which has three knobs. We can control those things that we're worried about: extinction, sampling, dispersal — going from one area to another. And ultimately we can control the branching to mimic what we think the continents were like, and run it a thousand times, so we can estimate the parameters, to answer the question whether we are on the mark or not, at least to know the barriers of the problems. So that's a little bit about the science.Today I'm going to spend the rest of my few minutes up here talking about the other stuff that I do in Chicago, which is related to the fact that I never — and actually, in talking to a lot of TEDsters, there's a number of you out there — I don't know that I'd get an answer honestly, if I asked you to raise your hand, but there are a number of you out there that started your scientific, technical, entertainment career as failures, by society's standards, as failures by schools. I was one of those. I was failed by my school — my school failed me. Who's pointing fingers? Several teachers nearly killed me. I found myself in art. I was a total failure in school, not really headed to graduate high school. And I went on — that's my first painting on canvas. I read a dictionary. I got into college. I became an artist. O.K., and started drawing. It became abstract. I worked up a portfolio, and I was headed to New York. Sometimes I would see bones when there was a body there. Something was going on in the background. I headed to New York to a studio. I took a side trip to the American Museum, and I never recovered.But really it's the same discipline — they're kindred disciplines. I mean, is there anything that is not visualizing what can't be seen, in terms of discovering this dinosaur bone from a small piece of it that's out there, or seeing the distortion that we try to see as evolutionary distortion in one animal to another? This is a very extraordinarily visual. I give you a human face because you're experts at that. It takes us years to understand how to do that with dinosaurs. They're really kindred disciplines. But what we're trying to create in Chicago is a way to get, collect together, those students who are least represented in our science and technology spheres. We all know, and there's been several allusions to it, that we are failing in our ability to produce enough scientists, engineers and technicians.We've known that for a long time. We've gone through the Sputnik phase, and now, as you see the increase in the pace of what we're doing, it becomes even more prominent.  Where are all these people going to come from? And a more general question for our society is, what's going to happen to all the rest that are left behind? What about all the kids like me that were in school — kids like some of you out there — that were in school and didn't get a chance and will never get a chance to participate in science and technology?Those are the questions I ask. And we talk about Ethiopia, and it's very important. Niger is equally important, and I'm trying desperately to do something in Niger. They have an AIDS problem. I asked — the U.S. State Department asked the government recently, What do you want to do? And they gave them two problems. Dinosaurs was one of them. Give us a museum of dinosaurs, and we will attract tourists, which is our number two industry. And I hope to God the United States government, me, or TED, or somebody helps us do that, because that would be an incredible thing for their country. But when we look back at our own country, we're looking back at our cities, the cities where most of you come from — certainly the city I come from — there's legions of kids out there like these. And the question is — and we started to address this question for centuries — as to how we get these kids involved in science.We've started in Chicago an organization — a non-profit organization — called Project Exploration. These are two kids from Project Exploration. We met them in their early stages in high school. They were — failing to poor students, and they are now — one at the University of Chicago, another in Illinois. We've got students at Harvard. We're six years old. And we created a track record. Because when you go out there as a scholar, and you try to find out longitudinal studies, track records like that, there essentially are very few, if none. So, we've created an incredible track record of 100 percent graduation, 90 percent going to college, many first-generation, 90 percent of those choosing science as a career. It's an impressive track record, and so we look back and we say, well, we didn't really exactly work this out theoretically from the start, but when we look back, there are theoretical movements in science education.It's gone through science as an inquiry, which was a big advance, and Dewey back at Chicago — you learn by doing. To — you learn by envisioning yourself as a scientist, and then you learn to envision yourself as a scientist. The next step is to learn the capability to make yourself a scientist. You have to have those steps. If you have — It's easy to get kids interested in science. It's hard to get them to envision themselves as a scientist, which involves standing up in front of people like we're doing here at this symposium and presenting something as a knowledgeable person, and then seeing yourself in the role as a scientist and giving yourself the tools to pursue that.And so, that's what we're going to do. We're planning a permanent home in Chicago. We have lots of ideas, but I guarantee you this one thing — and I've talked to some people here at TED — it's not going to look like anything you've seen before. It's going to be part-school, part-museum hall, part-conservatory, part-zoo, and part of an answer to the problem of how you interest kids in science. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_sereno_digs_up_dinosaurs
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"Many of you could ask the question, you know, why is a flying car, or maybe more accurately, a roadable aircraft, possible at this time? A number of years ago, Mr. Ford predicted that flying cars of some form would be available. Now, 60 years later, I'm here to tell you why it's possible. When I was about five years old, not very much — about a year after Mr. Ford made his predictions, I was living in a rural part of Canada, on the side of a mountain in a very isolated area. Getting to school, for a kid that was actually pretty short for his age, through the Canadian winter, was not a pleasant experience. It was a trying and scary thing for a young kid to be going through.At the end of my first year in school, in the summer of that year, I discovered a couple hummingbirds that were caught in a shed near my home. They'd worn themselves out, beating themselves against the window, and, well, they were easy to capture. I took them outside and as I let them go, that split second, even though they were very tired, that second I let them go they hovered for a second, then zipped off into the distance. I thought, what a great way to get to school.(Laughter)For a kid at that age, this was like infinite speed, disappearing, and I was very inspired by that. And so the next — over the next six decades, believe it or not, I've built a number of aircraft, with the goal of creating something that could do for you, or me, what the hummingbird does, and give you that flexibility. I've called this vehicle, generically, a volantor, after the Latin word ""volant,"" meaning, to fly in a light, nimble manner. Volantor-like helicopter, perhaps. The FAA, the controlling body above all, calls it a ""powered lift aircraft."" And they've actually issued a pilot's license — a powerlift pilot's license — for this type of aircraft. It's closer than you think. It's kind of remarkable when you consider that there are no operational powered lift aircraft. So for once, perhaps, the government is ahead of itself.The press calls my particular volantor a ""Skycar."" This is a little bit earlier version of it, that's why it's given the X designation, but it's a four-passenger aircraft that could take off vertically, like a helicopter — therefore it doesn't need an airfield. On the ground, it's powered electrically. It's actually classified as a motorcycle because of the three wheels, which is a great asset because it allows you, theoretically, to use this on the highways in most states, and actually in all cities. So that's an asset because if you've got to deal with the crash protection issues of the automobile, forget it — you're never going to fly it.(Laughter)One could say that a helicopter does pretty much what the hummingbird does, and gets around in much the same way, and it's true, but a helicopter is a very complex device. It's expensive — so expensive that very few people could own or use it. It's often been described because of its fragile nature and its complexity, as a series of parts — a large number of parts — flying in formation.(Laughter)Another difference, and I have to describe this, because it's very personal, another great difference between the helicopter and the volantor — in my case the Skycar volantor — is the experience that I've had in flying both of those. In a helicopter you feel — and it's still a remarkable sensation — you feel like you're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane. When you get in the Skycar — and I can tell you, there's only one other person that's flown it, but he had the same sensation — you really feel like you're being lifted up by a magic carpet, without any vibration whatsoever. The sensation is unbelievable. And it's been a great motivator. I only get to fly this vehicle occasionally, and only when I can persuade my stockholders to let me do so, but it's still one of those wonderful experiences that reward you for all that time.What we really need is something to replace the automobile for those 50-plus mile trips. Very few people realize that 50 mile-plus trips make up 85 percent of the miles traveled in America. If we can get rid of that, then the highways will now be useful to you, as contrasted by what's happening in many parts of the world today. On this next slide, is an interesting history of what we really have seen in infrastructure, because whether I give you a perfect Skycar, the perfect vehicle for use, it's going to have very little value to you unless you've got a system to use it in. I'm sure any of you have asked the question, yeah, are there great things up there — what am I going to do, get up there? It's bad enough on a highway, what's it going to be like to be in the air? This world that you're going to be talking about tomorrow is going to be completely integrated. You're not going to be a pilot, you're going to be a passenger. And it's the infrastructure that really determines whether this process goes forward.I can tell you, technically we can build Skycars — my God, we went to the moon! The technology there was much more difficult than what I'm dealing with here. But we have to have these priority changes, we have to have infrastructure to go with this. Historically you see that we got around 200 years ago by canals, and as that system disappeared, were replaced by railroads. As that disappeared we came in with highways. But if you look at that top corner — the highway system — you see where we are today. Highways are no longer being built, and that's a fact. You won't see any additional highways in the next 10 years. However, the next 10 years, if like the last 10 years, we're going to see 30 percent more traffic. And where is that going to lead you to? So the issue then, I've often asked, is when is it going to happen?When are we going to be able to have these vehicles? And of course, if you ask me, I'm going to give you a really optimistic view. After all, I've been spending 60 years here believing it's going to happen tomorrow. So, I'm not going to quote myself on this. I'd prefer to quote someone else, who testified with me before Congress, and in his position as head of NASA put forward this particular vision of the future of this type of aircraft. Now I would argue, actually, if you look at the fact that on the highways today, you're only averaging about 30 miles per hour — on average, according to the DOT — the Skycar travels at over 300 miles an hour, up to 25,000 feet. And so, in effect, you could see perhaps a tenfold increase in the ability to get around as far as speed is concerned.Unbeknownst to many of you, the highway in the sky that I'm talking about here has been under construction for 10 years. It makes use of the GPS — you're familiar with GPS in your automobile, but you may not be familiar with the fact that there's a GPS U.S., there's a Russian GPS, and there's a new GPS system going to Europe, called Galileo. With those three systems, you have what is always necessary — a level of redundancy that says, if one system fails, you'll still have a way to make sure that you're being controlled. Because if you're in this world, where computers are controlling what you're doing, it's going to be very critical that something can't fail on you.How would a trip in a Skycar work? Well, you can't right now take off from your home because it's too noisy. I mean to be able to take off from your home, you'd have to be extremely quiet. But it's still fairly quiet. You'd motor, electrically, to a vertiport, which may be a few blocks, maybe even a few miles away. This is clearly, as I said earlier, a roadable aircraft, and you're not going to spend that much time on the road. After all, if you can fly like that, why are you going to drive around on a highway? Go to a local vertiport, plug in your destination, delivered almost like a passenger. You can play computer games, you can sleep, you can read on the way. This is the world — there won't be you as a pilot. And I know the pilots in the audience aren't going to like that — and I've had a lot of bad feedback from people who want to be up there, flying around and experiencing that. And of course, I suppose like recreational parks you can still do that. But the vehicle itself is going to be a very, very controlled environment. Or it's going to have no use to you as a person who might use such a system.We flew the first vehicle for the international press in 1965, when I really got it started. I was a professor at the U.C. Davis System, and I got a lot of excitement around this, and I was able to fund the initiation of the program back in that time. And then through the various years we invented various vehicles. Actually the critical point was in 1989, when we demonstrated the stability of this vehicle — how completely stable it was in all circumstances, which is of course very critical. Still not a practical vehicle during all of this, but moving in the right direction, we believe. Finally, in the early part of — or actually the middle of 2002, we flew the 400 — M400, which was the four-passenger vehicle. In this case here, we're flying it remotely, as we always did at the beginning. And we had very small power plants in it at this time. We are now installing larger powerplants, which will make it possible for me to get back on board.A vertical-takeoff aircraft is not the safest vehicle during the test flight program. There's an old adage that applied for the years between 1950s and 1970s, when every aeronautical company was working on vertical-takeoff aircraft. A vertical-takeoff aircraft needs an artificial stabilization system — that's essential. At least for the hover, and the low-speed flight. If that single-stability system, that brain that flies that aircraft, fails, or if the engine fails, that vehicle crashes. There is no option to that. And the adage that I'm referring to, that applied at that time, was that nothing comes down faster than a VTOL aircraft upside down.(Laughter)That's a macabre comment because we lost a lot of pilots. In fact, the aircraft companies gave up on vertical-takeoff aircraft more or less for a number of years. And there's really only one operational aircraft in the world today that's a vertical-takeoff aircraft — as distinct from a helicopter — and that's the Hawker Harrier jump jet. A vertical-takeoff aircraft, like the hummingbird, has a very high metabolism, which means it requires a lot of energy. Getting that energy is very, very difficult. It all comes down to that power plant — how to get a large amount of power in a small package.Fortunately, Dr. Felix Wankel invented the rotary engine. A very unique engine — it's round, it's small, it's vibration-free. It fits exactly where we need to fit it, right in the center of the hubs of the ducts in the system — very critical. In fact that engine — for those who are into the automobile — know that it recently is applied to the RX8 — the Mazda. And that sportscar won Sports Car of the Year. Wonderful engine. In that application, it generates one horsepower per pound, which is twice as good as your car engine today, but only half of what we need. My company has spent 35 years and many millions of dollars taking that rotary engine, which was invented in the late '50s, and getting it to the point that we get over two horsepower per pound, reliably, and critical. We actually get 175 horsepower into one cubic foot. We have eight engines in this vehicle. We have four computers. We have two parachutes.Redundancy is the critical issue here. If you want to stay alive you've got to have backups. And we have actually flown this vehicle and lost an engine, and continued to hover. The computers back up each other. There's a voting system — if one computer is not agreeing with the other three, it's kicked out of the system. And then you have three — you still have the triple redundancy. If one of those fails, you still have a second chance. If you stick around, then good luck. There won't be a third chance. The parachutes are there — hopefully, more for psychological than real reasons, but they will be an ultimate backup if it comes to that.(Laughter)I'd like to show you an animation in this next one, which is one element of the Skycar's use, but it's one that demonstrates how it could be used. You could think of it personally in your own terms, of how you might use it. Video: Skycar dispatched, launch rescue vehicle for San Francisco. Paul Moller: I believe that personal transportation in something like the Skycar, probably in another volantor form as well, will be a significant part of our lives, as Dr. Goldin says, within the next 10 years. And it's going to change the demographics in a very significant way. If you can live 75 miles from San Francisco and get there in 15 minutes, you're going to sell your 700,000-dollar apartment, buy an upscale home on the side of a mountain, buy a Skycar, which I think would be priced at that time perhaps in the area of 100,000 dollars, put money in the bank ... that's a very significant incentive for getting out of San Francisco. But you better be the first one out of town as the real estate values go to hell.(Laughter)Developing the Skycar has been a real challenge. Obviously I'm dependent on a lot of other people believing in what I'm doing — both financially and in technical help. And that has — you run into situations where you have this great acceptance of what you're doing, and a lot of rejection of the same kind of thing. I characterized this emerging technology in an aphorism, as it's described, which really talks about what I've experienced, and I'm sure what other people may have experienced in emerging technologies.There's an interesting poll that came out recently under NAS — I think it's MSNBC — in which they asked the question, ""Are you in the market for a volantor?"" Twenty-three percent said, ""Yes, as soon as possible."" Forty-seven percent — yes, as soon as they could — price could come down. Twenty-three percent said, ""As soon as it's proven safe."" Only seven percent said that they wouldn't consider buying a Skycar. I'm encouraged by that. At least it makes me feel like, to some extent, it is becoming self-evident. That we need an alternative to the automobile, at least for those 50-mile trips and more, so that the highways become usable in today's world. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_moller_on_the_skycar
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"What I thought I would talk about today is the transition from one mode of thinking about nature to another that's tracked by architecture. What's interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature.So, for roughly 300 years, the hot debate in architecture was whether the number five or the number seven was a better proportion to think about architecture, because the nose was one-fifth of your head, or because your head was one-seventh of your body. And the reason that that was the model of beauty and of nature was because the decimal point had not been invented yet — it wasn't the 16th century — and everybody had to dimension a building in terms of fractions, so a room would be dimensioned as one-fourth of a facade; the structural dais of that might be dimensioned as 10 units, and you would get down to the small elements by fractional subdivision: finer and finer and finer.In the 15th century, the decimal point was invented; architects stopped using fractions, and they had a new model of nature. So, what's going on today is that there's a model of natural form which is calculus-based and which is using digital tools, and that has a lot of implications to the way we think about beauty and form, and it has a lot of implications in the way we think about nature. The best example of this would probably be the Gothic, and the Gothic was invented after the invention of calculus, although the Gothic architects weren't really using calculus to define their forms. But what was important is, the Gothic moment in architecture was the first time that force and motion was thought of in terms of form.So, examples like Christopher Wren's King's Cross: you can see that the structural forces of the vaulting get articulated as lines, so you're really actually seeing the expression of structural force and form. Much later, Robert Maillart's bridges, which optimize structural form with a calculus curvature almost like a parabola. The Hanging Chain models of Antonio Gaudi, the Catalan architect. The end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, and how that Hanging Chain model translates into archways and vaulting. So, in all of these examples, structure is the determining force. Frei Otto was starting to use foam bubble diagrams and foam bubble models to generate his Mannheim Concert Hall. Interestingly, in the last 10 years Norman Foster used a similar heat thermal transfer model to generate the roof of the National Gallery, with the structural engineer Chris Williams.In all these examples, there's one ideal form, because these are thought in terms of structure. And as an architect, I've always found these kinds of systems very limiting, because I'm not interested in ideal forms and I'm not interested in optimizing to some perfect moment.So, what I thought I would bring up is another component that needs to be thought of, whenever you think about nature, and that's basically the invention of generic form in genetic evolution. My hero is actually not Darwin; it's a guy named William Bateson, father of Greg Bateson, who was here for a long time in Monterey. And he was what you'd call a teratologist: he looked at all of the monstrosities and mutations to find rules and laws, rather than looking at the norms. So, instead of trying to find the ideal type or the ideal average, he'd always look for the exception. So, in this example, which is an example of what's called Bateson's Rule, he has two kinds of mutations of a human thumb. When I first saw this image, 10 years ago, I actually found it very strange and beautiful at the same time. Beautiful, because it has symmetry. So, what he found is that in all cases of thumb mutations, instead of having a thumb, you would either get another opposable thumb, or you would get four fingers. So, the mutations reverted to symmetry. And Bateson invented the concept of symmetry breaking, which is that wherever you lose information in a system, you revert back to symmetry. So, symmetry wasn't the sign of order and organization — which is what I was always understanding, and as is an architect — symmetry was the absence of information. So, whenever you lost information, you'd move to symmetry; whenever you added information to a system, you would break symmetry. So, this whole idea of natural form shifted at that moment from looking for ideal shapes to looking for a combination of information and generic form.You know, literally after seeing that image, and finding out what Bateson was working with, we started to use these rules for symmetry breaking and branching to start to think about architectural form. To just talk for a minute about the digital mediums that we're using now and how they integrate calculus: the fact that they're calculus-based means that we don't have to think about dimension in terms of ideal units or discreet elements.So, in architecture we deal with big assemblies of components, so there might be up to, say, 50,000 pieces of material in this room you're sitting in right now that all need to get organized. Now, typically you'd think that they would all be the same: like, the chairs you're sitting in would all be the same dimension. You know, I haven't verified this, but it's the norm that every chair would be a slightly different dimension, because you'd want to space them all out for everybody's sight lines. The elements that make up the ceiling grid and the lighting, they're all losing their modular quality, and moving more and more to these infinitesimal dimensions. That's because we're all using calculus tools for manufacturing and for design.Calculus is also a mathematics of curves. So, even a straight line, defined with calculus, is a curve. It's just a curve without inflection. So, a new vocabulary of form is now pervading all design fields: whether it's automobiles, architecture, products, etc., it's really being affected by this digital medium of curvature. The intricacies of scale that come out of that — you know, in the example of the nose to the face, there's a fractional part-to-whole idea. With calculus, the whole idea of subdivision is more complex, because the whole and the parts are one continuous series. It's too early in the morning for a lecture on calculus, so I brought some images to just describe how that works.This is a Korean church that we did in Queens. And in this example, you can see that the components of this stair are repetitive, but they're repetitive without being modular. Each one of the elements in this structure is a unique distance and dimension, and all of the connections are unique angles. Now, the only way we could design that, or possibly construct it, is by using a calculus-based definition of the form. It also is much more dynamic, so that you can see that the same form opens and closes in a very dynamic way as you move across it, because it has this quality of vector in motion built into it. So the same space that appears to be a kind of closed volume, when seen from the other side becomes a kind of open vista. And you also get a sense of visual movement in the space, because every one of the elements is changing in a pattern, so that pattern leads your eye towards the altar. I think that's one of the main changes, also, in architecture: that we're starting to look now not for some ideal form, like a Latin cross for a church, but actually all the traits of a church: so, light that comes from behind from an invisible source, directionality that focuses you towards an altar. It turns out it's not rocket science to design a sacred space. You just need to incorporate a certain number of traits in a very kind of genetic way. So, these are the different perspectives of that interior, which has a very complex set of orientations all in a simple form.In terms of construction and manufacturing, this is a kilometer-long housing block that was built in the '70s in Amsterdam. And here we've broken the 500 apartments up into small neighborhoods, and differentiated those neighborhoods. I won't go into too much description of any of these projects, but what you can see is that the escalators and elevators that circulate people along the face of the building are all held up by 122 structural trusses. Because we're using escalators to move people, all of these trusses are picking up diagonal loads. So, every one of them is a little bit different-shaped as you move down the length of the building. So, working with Bentley and MicroStation, we've written a custom piece of software that networks all of the components together into these chunks of information, so that if we change any element along the length of the building, not only does that change distribute through each one of the trusses, but each one of the trusses then distributes that information down the length of the entire facade of the building. So it's a single calculation for every single component of the building that we're adding onto. So, it's tens of millions of calculations just to design one connection between a piece of structural steel and another piece of structural steel. But what it gives us is a harmonic and synthesized relationship of all these components, one to another.This idea has, kind of, brought me into doing some product design, and it's because design firms that have connections to architects, like, I'm working with Vitra, which is a furniture company, and Alessi, which is a houseware company. They saw this actually solving a problem: this ability to differentiate components but keep them synthetic. So, not to pick on BMW, or to celebrate them, but take BMW as an example. They have to, in 2005, have a distinct identity for all their models of cars. So, the 300 series, or whatever their newest car is, the 100 series that's coming out, has to look like the 700 series, at the other end of their product line, so they need a distinct, coherent identity, which is BMW. At the same time, there's a person paying 30,000 dollars for a 300-series car, and a person paying 70,000 dollars for a 700 series, and that person paying more than double doesn't want their car to look too much like the bottom-of-the-market car. So they have to also discriminate between these products. So, as manufacturing starts to allow more design options, this problem gets exacerbated, of the whole and the parts.Now, as an architect, part-to-whole relationships is all I think about, but in terms of product design it's becoming more and more of an issue for companies. So, the first kind of test product we did was with Alessi, which was for a coffee and tea set. It's an incredibly expensive coffee and tea set; we knew that at the beginning. So, I actually went to some people I knew down south in San Diego, and we used an exploded titanium forming method that's used in the aerospace industry. Basically what we can do, is just cut a graphite mold, put it in an oven, heat it to 1,000 degrees, gently inflate titanium that's soft, and then explode it at the last minute into this form. But what's great about it is, the forms are only a few hundred dollars. The titanium's several thousand dollars, but the forms are very cheap. So, we designed a system here of eight curves that could be swapped, very similar to that housing project I showed you, and we could recombine those together, so that we always had ergonomic shapes that always had the same volume and could always be produced in the same way. That way, each one of these tools we could pay for with a few hundred dollars, and get incredible variation in the components. And this is one of those examples of the sets. So, for me, what was important is that this coffee set — which is just a coffee pot, a teapot, and those are the pots sitting on a tray — that they would have a coherence — so, they would be Greg Lynn Alessi coffee pots — but that everyone who bought one would have a one-of-a-kind object that was unique in some way.To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale. Architects tend to work with signature, so that an architect needs a signature and that signature has to work across the scale of houses up to, say, skyscrapers, and that problem of signatures is a thing we're very good at maintaining and working with; and intricacy, which is the relationship of, say, the shape of a building, its structure, its windows, its color, its pattern. These are real architectural problems.So, my kind of hero for this in the natural world are these tropical frogs. I got interested in them because they're the most extreme example of a surface where the texture and the — let's call it the decoration — I know the frog doesn't think of it as decoration, but that's how it works — are all intricately connected to one another. So a change in the form indicates a change in the color pattern. So, the pattern and the form aren't the same thing, but they really work together and are fused in some way. So, when doing a center for the national parks in Costa Rica, we tried to use that idea of a gradient color and a change in texture as the structure moves across the surface of the building. We also used a continuity of change from a main exhibition hall to a natural history museum, so it's all one continuous change in the massing, but within that massing are very different kinds of spaces and forms.In a housing project in Valencia, Spain, we're doing, the different towers of housing fused together in shared curves so you get a single mass, like a kind of monolith, but it breaks down into individual elements. And you can see that that change in massing also gives all 48 of the apartments a unique shape and size, but always within a, kind of, controlled limit, an envelope of change.I work with a group of other architects. We have a company called United Architects. We were one of the finalists for the World Trade Center site design. And I think this just shows how we were approaching the problem of incredibly large-scale construction. We wanted to make a kind of Gothic cathedral around the footprints of the World Trade Center site. And to do that, we tried to connect up the five towers into a single system. And we looked at, from the 1950s on, there were numerous examples of other architects trying to do the same thing. We really approached it at the level of the typology of the building, where we could build these five separate towers, but they would all join at the 60th floor and make a kind of single monolithic mass. With United Architects, also, we made a proposal for the European Central Bank headquarters that used the same system, but this time in a much more monolithic mass, like a sphere. But again, you can see this, kind of, organic fusion of multiple building elements to make a thing which is whole, but breaks down into smaller parts, but in an incredibly organic way.Finally, I'd like to just show you some of the effects of using digital fabrication. About six years ago, I bought one of these CNC mills, to just replace, kind of, young people cutting their fingers off all the time building models. And I also bought a laser cutter and started to fabricate within my own shop, kind of, large-scale building elements and models, where we could go directly to the tooling. What I found out is that the tooling, if you intervened in the software, actually produced decorative effects. So, for these interiors, like this shop in Stockholm, Sweden, or this installation wall in the Netherlands at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, we could use the texture that the tool would leave to produce a lot of the spatial effects, and we could integrate the texture of the wall with the form of the wall with the material. So, in vacuum-formed plastic, in fiberglass, and then even at the level of structural steel, which you think of as being linear and modular. The steel industry is so far ahead of the design industry that if you take advantage of it you can even start to think of beams and columns all rolled together into a single system which is highly efficient, but also produces decorative effects and formal effects that are very beautiful and organic. Thanks very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/greg_lynn_on_organic_design
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"I was listed on the online biography that said I was a design missionary. That's a bit lofty; I'm really more of something like a street walker. I spend a lot of time in urban areas looking for design, and studying design in the public sector. I take about 5,000 photographs a year, and I thought that I would edit from these, and try to come up with some images that might be appropriate and interesting to you. And I used three criteria: the first was, I thought I'd talk about real design within reach, design that's free, not design not quite within reach, as we're fondly known by our competition and competitors, but stuff that you can find on the streets, stuff that was free, stuff that was available to all people, and stuff that probably contains some other important messages.I'll use these sidewalks in Rio as an example. A very common public design done in the '50s. It's got a nice kind of flowing, organic form, very consistent with the Brazilian culture — I think good design adds to culture. Wholly inconsistent with San Francisco or New York. But I think these are my sort of information highways: I live in much more of an analog world, where pedestrian traffic and interaction and diversity exchange, and where I think the simple things under our feet have a great amount of meaning to us.How did I get started in this business? I was a ceramic designer for about 10 years, and just loved utilitarian form — simple things that we use every day, little compositions of color and surface on form. This led me to starting a company called Design Within Reach, a company dealing with simple forms, making good designers available to us, and also selling the personalities and character of the designers as well, and it seems to have worked. A couple of years into the process, I spent a lot of time in Europe traveling around, looking for design.And I had a bit of a wake-up call in Amsterdam: I was there going into the design stores, and mixing with our crowd of designers, and I recognized that a whole lot of stuff pretty much looked the same, and the effect of globalization has had that in our community also. We know a lot about what's going on with design around the world, and it's getting increasingly more difficult to find design that reflects a unique culture. I was walking around on the streets of Amsterdam and I recognized, you know, the big story from Amsterdam isn't what's in the design stores, it's what's out on the streets, and maybe it's self-explanatory, but a city that hasn't been taken over by modernism, that's preserved its kind of architecture and character, and where the bicycle plays an important part of the way in which people get around and where pedestrian rights are protected. And I write a newsletter that goes out every week, and I wrote an article about this, and it got such enormous response that I realized that design, that common design, that's in the public area means a lot to people, and establishes kind of a groundwork and a dialog.I then kind of thought about the other cities in Europe where I spend a lot of time looking for design, like Basel, where Vitra is located, or in northern Italy — all cities where there are a whole lot of bicycles, and where pedestrian areas — and I came to the conclusion that perhaps there was something about these important design centers that dealt with bicycles and foot traffic, and I'm sure the skeptic eye would say, no, the correlation there is that there are universities and schools where people can't afford cars, but it did seem that in many of these areas pedestrian traffic was protected. You wouldn't look at this and call this a designer bike: a designer bike is made of titanium or molybdenum. But I began looking at design in a place like Amsterdam and recognized, you know, the first job of design is to serve a social purpose. And so I look at this bike as not being a designer bike, but being a very good example of design.And since that time in Amsterdam, I spent an increasing amount of time in the cities, looking at design for common evidence of design that really isn't under so much of a designer's signature. I was in Buenos Aires very recently, and I went to see this bridge by Santiago Calatrava. He's a Spanish architect and designer. And the tourist brochures pointed me in the direction of this bridge — I love bridges, metaphorically and symbolically and structurally — and it was a bit of a disappointment, because of the sludge from the river was encrusted on it; it really wasn't in use. And I recognized that oftentimes design, when you're set up to see design, it can be a bit of a letdown.But there were lots of other things going on in this area: it was a kind of construction zone; a lot of buildings were going up. And, approaching a building from a distance, you don't see too much; you get a little closer, and you arrive at a nice little composition that might remind you of a Mondrian or a Diebenkorn or something. But to me it was an example of industrial materials with a little bit of colors and animation and a nice little still life — kind of unintended piece of design. And going a little closer, you get a different perspective. I find these little vignettes, these little accidental pieces of design, to be refreshing. They give me, I don't know, a sense of correctness in the world and some visual delight in the knowledge that the building will probably never look as good as this simple industrial scaffolding that is there to serve.Down the road, there was another building, a nice visual structure: horizontal, vertical elements, little decorative lines going across, these magenta squiggles, the workmen being reduced to decorative elements, just a nice, kind of, breakup of the urban place. And, you know, that no longer exists. You've captured it for a moment, and finding this little still life's like listening to little songs or something: it gives me an enormous amount of pleasure. Antoine Predock designed a wonderful ball stadium in San Diego called Petco Park. A terrific use of local materials, but inside you could find some interior compositions. Some people go to baseball stadiums to look at games; I go and see design relationships. Just a wonderful kind of breakup of architecture, and the way that the trees form vertical elements.Red is a color in the landscape that is often on stop signs. It takes your attention; it has a great amount of emotion; it stares back at you the way that a figure might. Just a piece of barrier tape construction stuff in Italy. Construction site in New York: red having this kind of emotional power that's almost an equivalent with the way in which — cuteness of puppies and such. Side street in Italy. Red drew me into this little composition, optimistic to me in the sense that maybe the public service's mailbox, door service, plumbing. It looks as if these different public services work together to create some nice little compositions. In Italy, you know, almost everything, kind of, looks good. Simple menus put on a board, achieving, kind of, the sort of balance. But I'm convinced that it's because you're walking around the streets and seeing things. Red can be comical: it can draw your attention to the poor little personality of the little fire hydrant suffering from bad civic planning in Havana. Color can animate simple blocks, simple materials: walking in New York, I'll stop.I don't always know why I take photographs of things. A nice visual composition of symmetry. Curves against sharp things. It's a comment on the way in which we deal with public seating in the city of New York. I've come across some other just, kind of, curious relationships of bollards on the street that have different interpretations, but — these things amuse me. Sometimes a trash can — this is just in the street in San Francisco — a trash can that's been left there for 18 months creates a nice 45-degree angle against these other relationships, and turns a common parking spot into a nice little piece of sculpture. So, there's this sort of silent hand of design at work that I see in places that I go.Havana is a wonderful area. It's quite free of commercial clutter: you don't see our logos and brands and names, and therefore you're alert to things physically. And this is a great protection of a pedestrian zone, and the repurposing of some colonial cannons to do that. And Cuba needs to be far more resourceful, because of the blockades and things, but a really wonderful playground.I've often wondered why Italy is really a leader in modern design. In our area, in furnishings, they're sort of way at the top. The Dutch are good also, but the Italians are good. And I came across this little street in Venice, where the communist headquarters were sharing a wall with this Catholic shrine. And I realized that, you know, Italy is a place where they can accept these different ideologies and deal with diversity and not have the problem, or they can choose to ignore them, but these — you don't have warring factions, and I think that maybe the tolerance of the absurdity which has made Italy so innovative and so tolerant. The past and the present work quite well together in Italy also, and I think that it's recognizable there, and has an important effect on culture, because their public spaces are protected, their sidewalks are protected, and you're actually able to confront these things physically, and I think this helps people get over their fear of modernism and other such things.A change might be a typical street corner in San Francisco. And I use this — this is, sort of, what I consider to be urban spam. I notice this stuff because I walk a lot, but here, private industry is really kind of making a mess of the public sector. And as I look at it, I sort of say, you know, the publications that report on problems in the urban area also contribute to it, and it's just my call to say to all of us, public policy won't change this at all; private industry has to work to take things like this seriously.The extreme might be in Italy where, again, there's kind of some type of control over what's happening in the environment is very evident, even in the way that they sell and distribute periodicals. I walk to work every day or ride my scooter, and I come down and park in this little spot. And I came down one day, and all the bikes were red. Now, this is not going to impress you guys who Photoshop, and can do stuff, but this was an actual moment when I got off my bike, and I looked and I thought, it's as if all of my biker brethren had kind of gotten together and conspired to make a little statement. And it reminded me that — to keep in the present, to look out for these kinds of things.It gave me possibilities for wonder — if maybe it's a yellow day in San Francisco, and we could all agree, and create some installations. But it also reminded me of the power of pattern and repetition to make an effect in our mind. And I don't know if there's a stronger kind of effect than pattern and the way it unites kind of disparate elements. I was at the art show in Miami in December, and spent a couple of hours looking at fine art, and amazed at the prices of art and how expensive it is, but having a great time looking at it. And I came outside, and the valets for this car service had created, you know, quite a nice little collage of these car keys, and my closest equivalent were a group of prayer tags that I had seen in Tokyo. And I thought that if pattern can unite these disparate elements, it can do just about anything.I don't have very many shots of people, because they kind of  get in the way of studying pure form. I was in a small restaurant in Spain, having lunch — one of those nice days where you had the place kind of to yourself, and you have a glass of wine, and enjoying the local area and the culture and the food and the quiet, and feeling very lucky, and a bus load of tourists arrived, emptied out, filled up the restaurant. In a very short period of time, completely changed the atmosphere and character with loud voices and large bodies and such, and we had to get up and leave; it was just that uncomfortable. And at that moment, the sun came out, and through this perforated screen, a pattern was cast over these bodies and they kind of faded into the rear, and we left the restaurant kind of feeling O.K. about stuff.And I do think pattern has the capability of eradicating some of the most evil forces of society, such as bad form in restaurants, but quite seriously, it was a statement to me that one thing that you do, sort of, see is the aggressive nature of the industrial world has produced — kind of, large masses of things, and when you — in monoculture, and I think the preservation of diversity in culture is something that's important to us.The last shots that I have deal with — coming back to this theme of sidewalks, and I wanted to say something here about — I'm, kind of, optimistic, you know. Post-Second World War, the influence of the automobile has really been devastating in a lot of our cities. A lot of urban areas have been converted into parking lots in a sort of indiscriminate use. A lot of the planning departments became subordinated to the transportation department. It's as easy to rag on cars as it is on Wal-Mart; I'm not going to do that. But they're real examples in urbanization and the change that's occurred in the last number of years, and the heightened sensitivity to the importance of our urban environments as cultural centers. I think that they are, that the statements that we make in this public sector are our contributions to a larger whole.Cities are the place where we're most likely to encounter diversity and to mix with other people. We go there for stimulation in art and all those other things. But I think people have recognized the sanctity of our urban areas. A place like Chicago has really reached kind of a level of international stature. The U.S. is actually becoming a bit of a leader in kind of enlightened urban planning and renewal, and I want to single out a place like Chicago, where I look at some guy like Mayor Daley as a bit of a design hero for being able to work through the political processes and all that to improve an area. You would expect a city like this to have upgraded flower boxes on Michigan Avenue where wealthy people shop, but if you actually go along the street you find the flower boxes change from street to street: there's actual diversity in the plants. And the idea that a city group can maintain different types of foliage is really quite exceptional.There are common elements of this that you'll see throughout Chicago, and then there are your big-D design statements: the Pritzker Pavilion done by Frank Gehry. My measure of this as being an important bit of design is not so much the way that it looks, but the fact that it performs a very important social function. There are a lot of free concerts, for example, that go on in this area; it has a phenomenal acoustic system. But the commitment that the city has made to the public area is significant, and almost an international model. I work on the mayor's council in San Francisco, on the International Design Council for Mayors, and Chicago is looked at as the pinnacle, and I really would like to salute Mayor Daley and the folks there. I thought that I should include at least one shot of technology for you guys. This is also in Millennium Park in Chicago, where the Spanish artist-designer Plensa has created, kind of, a digital readout in this park that reflects back the characters and personalities of the people in this area. And it's a welcoming area, I think, inclusive of diversity, reflective of diversity, and I think this marriage of both technology and art in the public sector is an area where the U.S. can really take a leadership role, and Chicago is one example.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_forbes_on_ways_of_seeing
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"Of the five senses, vision is the one that I appreciate the most, and it's the one that I can least take for granted. I think this is partially due to my father, who was blind. It was a fact that he didn't make much of a fuss about, usually. One time in Nova Scotia, when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun —(Laughter)Yeah, same one as in the Carly Simon song, which may or may not refer to James Taylor, Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger; we're not really sure. They handed out these dark plastic viewers that allowed us to look directly at the sun without damaging our eyes. But Dad got really scared; he didn't want us doing that. He wanted us instead to use these cheap cardboard viewers, so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would be damaged. I thought this was a little strange at the time.What I didn't know at the time was that my father had actually been born with perfect eyesight. When he and his sister Martha were just very little, their mom took them out to see a total eclipse — or actually, a solar eclipse — and not long after that, both of them started losing their eyesight. Decades later, it turned out that the source of their blindness was most likely some sort of bacterial infection. As near as we can tell, it had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse, but by then my grandmother had already gone to her grave thinking it was her fault.So, Dad graduated Harvard in 1946, married my mom, and bought a house in Lexington, Massachusetts, where the first shots were fired against the British in 1775, although we didn't actually hit any of them until Concord. He got a job working for Raytheon designing guidance systems, which was part of the Route 128 high-tech axis in those days — so, the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the '70s. Dad wasn't a real militaristic kind of guy; he just felt bad that he wasn't able to fight in World War II on account of his handicap, although they did let him get through the several-hour-long army physical exam before they got to the very last test, which was for vision.(Laughter)So Dad started racking up all of these patents and gaining a reputation as a blind genius, rocket scientist, inventor. But to us he was just Dad, and our home life was pretty normal. As a kid, I watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program and a little bit of politics. I played a lot of chess. But at the age of 14, a friend got me interested in comic books, and I decided that was what I wanted to do for a living.So, here's my dad: he's a scientist, he's an engineer and he's a military contractor. So, he has four kids, right? One grows up to become a computer scientist, one grows up to join the Navy, one grows up to become an engineer ... And then there's me: the comic book artist.(Laughter)Which, incidentally, makes me the opposite of Dean Kamen, because I'm a comic book artist, son of an inventor, and he's an inventor, son of a comic book artist.(Laughter)Right? It's true.(Applause)The funny thing is, Dad had a lot of faith in me. He had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist, even though he had no direct evidence that I was any good whatsoever; everything he saw was just a blur. Now, this gives a real meaning to the term ""blind faith,"" which doesn't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people. Now, faith in things which cannot be seen, which cannot be proved, is not the sort of faith that I've ever really related to all that much. I tend to like science, where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation of what we know.But there's a middle ground, too — a middle ground tread by people like poor old Charles Babbage and his steam-driven computers that were never built. Nobody really understood what it was that he had in mind except for Ada Lovelace, and he went to his grave trying to pursue that dream. Vannevar Bush with his memex — this idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips — he had this vision. And I think a lot of people in his day probably thought he was a bit of a kook. And, yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say, ""Yeah, ha-ha, it's all microfilm —(Laughter)But that's not the point; he understood the shape of the future. So did J.C.R. Licklider and his notions for computer-human interaction. Same thing: he understood the shape of the future, even though it was something that would only be implemented by people much later. Or Paul Baran, and his vision for packet switching. Hardly anybody listened to him in his day. Or even the people who actually pulled it off, the people at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston, who just would sketch out these structures of what would eventually become a worldwide network, and sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers and arguing over dinner at Howard Johnson's — on Route 128 in Lexington, Massachusetts, just two miles from where I was studying the Queen's Gambit Deferred and listening to Gladys Knight & The Pips singing ""Midnight Train to Georgia"" —(Laughter)in my dad's big easy chair, you know?So, three types of vision, right? Vision based on what one cannot see, the vision of that unseen and unknowable. The vision of that which has already been proven or can be ascertained. And this third kind, a vision of something which can be, which may be, based on knowledge but is, as yet, unproven. Now, we've seen a lot of examples of people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science, but I think it's also true in the arts, it's true in politics, it's even true in personal endeavors.What it comes down to, really, is four basic principles: learn from everyone; follow no one; watch for patterns; and work like hell. I think these are the four principles that go into this. And it's that third one, especially, where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves. What's interesting is that this particular way of looking at the world, is, I think, only one of four different ways that manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor. In comics, I know that it results in sort of a formalist attitude towards trying to understand how it works. Then there's another, more classical attitude which embraces beauty and craft; another one which believes in the pure transparency of content; and then another, which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience and honesty and rawness.These are four very different ways of looking at the world. I even gave them names: the classicist, the animist, the formalist and iconoclast. Interestingly, they seem to correspond more or less to Jung's four subdivisions of human thought. And they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight on left and the right; tradition and revolution on the top and the bottom. And if you go on the diagonal, you get content and form, and then beauty and truth. And it probably applies just as much to music and movies and fine art, which has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all, or, for that matter, nothing to do with our conference theme of ""Inspired by Nature,"" except to the extent of the fable of the frog who gives a ride to the scorpion on his back to get across the river because the scorpion promises not to sting him, but the scorpion stings him anyway and they both die, but not before the frog asks him why, and the scorpion says, ""Because it's my nature."" In that sense, yes.(Laughter)So this was my nature. The thing was, I saw that the route I took to discovering this focus in my work and who I was — I saw it as just this road to discovery. Actually, it was just me embracing my nature, which means that I didn't actually fall that far from the tree, after all.So what does a ""scientific mind"" do in the arts? I started making comics, but I also started trying to understand them, almost immediately. One of the most important things about comics that I discovered was that comics are a visual medium, but they try to embrace all of the senses within it. So, the different elements of comics, like pictures and words, and the different symbols and everything in between that comics presents, are all funneled through the single conduit, a vision. So we have things like resemblance, where something which resembles the physical world can be abstracted in a couple of different directions: abstracted from resemblance, but still retaining the complete meaning, or abstracted away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plane.Put all these three together, and you have a nice little map of the entire boundary of visual iconography, which comics can embrace. And if you move to the right you also get language, because that's abstracting even further from resemblance, but still maintaining meaning. Vision is called upon to represent sound and to understand the common properties of those two and their common heritage as well; also, to try to represent the texture of sound to capture its essential character through visuals. There's also a balance between the visible and the invisible in comics. Comics is a kind of call and response, in which the artist gives you something to see within the panels, and then gives you something to imagine between the panels.Also, another sense which comics' vision represents, and that's time. Sequence is a very important aspect of comics. Comics presents a kind of temporal map. And this temporal map was something that energizes modern comics, but I was wondering if perhaps it also energizes other sorts of forms, and I found some in history. You can see this same principle operating in these ancient versions of the same idea. What's happening is, an art form is colliding with a given technology, whether it's paint on stone, like the Tomb of Menna the Scribe in ancient Egypt, or a bas-relief sculpture rising up a stone column, or a 200-foot-long embroidery, or painted deerskin and tree bark running across 88 accordion-folded pages.What's interesting is, once you hit ""print"" — and this is from 1450, by the way — all of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves: rectilinear panel arrangements, simple line drawings without tone, and a left-to-right reading sequence. And within 100 years, you already start to see word balloons and captions, and it's really just a hop, skip and a jump from here to here. So I wrote a book about this in '93, but as I was finishing the book, I had to do a little bit of typesetting, and I was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it, so I bought a computer. And it was just a little thing — it wasn't good for much except text entry — but my father had told me about Moore's law back in the '70s, and I knew what was coming. And so, I kept my eyes peeled to see if the sort of changes that happened when we went from pre-print comics to print comics would happen when we went beyond, to post-print comics.So, one of the first things proposed was that we could mix the visuals of comics with the sound, motion and interactivity of the CD-ROMs being made in those days. This was even before the Web. And one of the first things they did was, they tried to take the comics page as is and transplant it to monitors, which was a classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology. And so, what they would do is have these comic pages that resemble print comics pages, and they would introduce all this sound and motion. The problem was that if you go with this basic idea that space equals time in comics, what happens is that when you introduce sound and motion, which are temporal phenomena that can only be represented through time, they break with that continuity of presentation.Interactivity was another thing. There were hypertext comics, but the thing about hypertext is that everything in hypertext is either here, not here, or connected to here; it's profoundly nonspatial. The distance from Abraham Lincoln to a Lincoln penny to Penny Marshall to the Marshall Plan to ""Plan 9"" to nine lives: it's all the same.(Laughter)But in comics, every aspect of the work, every element of the work, has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times.So the question was: Was there any way to preserve that spatial relationship while still taking advantage of all of the things that digital had to offer us? And I found my personal answer for this in those ancient comics that I was showing you. Each of them has a single unbroken reading line, whether it's going zigzag across the walls or spiraling up a column or just straight left to right, or even going in a backwards zigzag across those 88 accordion-folded pages, the same thing is happening; that is, that the basic idea that as you move through space you move through time, is being carried out without any compromise, but there were compromises when print hit. Adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments, so the basic idea of comics was being broken again and again and again and again.And I thought, OK, well, if that's true, is there any way, when we go beyond today's print, to somehow bring that back? Now, the monitor is just as limited as the page, technically, right? It's a different shape, but other than that, it's the same basic limitation. But that's only if you look at the monitor as a page, but not if you look at the monitor as a window.And that's what I propose, that perhaps we could create these comics on an infinite canvas, along the X axis and the Y axis and staircases. We could do circular narratives that were literally circular. We could do a turn in a story that was literally a turn. Parallel narratives could be literally parallel. X, Y and also Z. So I had all these notions. This was back in the late '90s, and other people in my business thought I was pretty crazy, but a lot of people then went on and actually did it. I'm going to show you a couple now.This was an early collage comic by a fellow named Jasen Lex. And notice what's going on here. What I'm searching for is a durable mutation — that's what all of us are searching for. As media head into this new era, we are looking for mutations that are durable, that have some sort of staying power. Now, we're taking this basic idea of presenting comics in a visual medium, and we're carrying it through all the way from beginning to end. That's that entire comic you just saw, up on the screen right now. But even though we're only experiencing it one piece at a time, that's just where the technology is right now. As the technology evolves, as you get full immersive displays and whatnot, this sort of thing will only grow; it will adapt. It will adapt to its environment; it's a durable mutation.Here's another one. This is by Drew Weing; this is called ""'Pup' Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe."" See what's going on here as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas is you're creating a more pure expression of what this medium is all about. We'll go by this a little quickly. You get the idea. I just want to get to the last panel.[Cat 1: Pup! Earth to Pup! Cat 2: Come play baseball with us!](Laughter)[Pup: Did either of you realize that eventually the universe will be nothing but a thin, cold gas spread across infinite, lonely space?][Cat 1: Oh ... Cat 2: We'd better hurry, then!](Laughter)Just one more. Talk about your infinite canvas. It's by a guy named Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, in Britain.Why is this important? I think this is important because media — all media — provide us a window back into our world. Now, it could be that motion pictures and eventually, virtual reality, or something equivalent to it, some sort of immersive display, is going to provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we're in. That's why most people turn to storytelling, to escape. But media provides us with a window back into the world we live in. And when media evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique — because what you're looking at is comics cubed, you're looking at comics that are more comics-like than they've ever been before — when that happens, you provide people with multiple ways of reentering the world through different windows. And when you do that, it allows them to triangulate the world they live in and see its shape. That's why I think this is important. One of many reasons, but I've got to go now. Thank you for having me.","https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_on_comics
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"This is a wheat bread, a whole wheat bread, and it's made with a new technique that I've been playing around with, and developing and writing about which, for lack of a better name, we call the epoxy method. And I call it an epoxy method because — it's not very appetizing. I understand that — but — but if you think about epoxy, what's epoxy? It's two resins that are, sort of, in and of themselves — neither of which can make glue, but when you put the two together, something happens. A bond takes place, and you get this very strong, powerful adhesive. Well, in this technique, what I've tried to do is kind of gather all of the knowledge that the bread-baking world, the artisan bread-baking community, has been trying to accumulate over the last 20 years or so — since we've been engaged in a bread renaissance in America — and put it together to come up with a method that would help to take whole-grain breads. And let's face it, everyone's trying to move towards whole grains. We finally, after 40 years of knowing that wholegrain was a healthier option, we're finally getting to the point where we actually are tipping over and attempting to actually eat them.(Laughter)The challenge, though, for a wholegrain baker is, you know, how do you make it taste good? Because whole grain — it's easy with white flour to make a good-tasting bread. White flour is sweet. It's mainly starch, and starch, when you break it down — what is starch? It's — thank you — sugar, yes. So a baker, and a good baker, knows how to pull or draw forth the inherent sugar trapped in the starch. With whole grain bread, you have other obstacles. You've got bran, which is probably the healthiest part of the bread for us, or the fiber for us because it is just loaded with fiber, for the bran is fiber. It's got germ. Those are the good things, but those aren't the tastiest parts of the wheat. So whole grain breads historically have had sort of this onus of being health food breads, and people don't like to eat, quote, health food. They like to eat healthy and healthily, but when we think of something as a health food, we think of it as something we eat out of obligation, not out of passion and love for the flavor.And ultimately, the challenge of the baker, the challenge of every culinary student, of every chef, is to deliver flavor. Flavor is king. Flavor rules. I call it the flavor rule. Flavor rules. And — and you can get somebody to eat something that's good for them once, but they won't eat it again if they don't like it, right? So, this is the challenge for this bread. We're going to try this at lunch, and I'll explain a bit more about it, but it's made not only with two types of pre-doughs — this attempt, again, at bringing out flavor is to make a piece of dough the day before that is not leavened. It's just dough that is wet. It's hydrated dough we call ""the soaker"" — that helps to start enzyme activity. And enzymes are the secret, kind of, ingredient in dough that brings out flavor. It starts to release the sugars trapped in the starch. That's what enzymes are doing. And so, if we can release some of those, they become accessible to us in our palate. They become accessible to the yeast as food. They become accessible to the oven for caramelization to give us a beautiful crust.The other pre-dough that we make is fermented — our pre-ferment. And it's made — it can be a sourdough starter, or what we call a ""biga"" or any other kind of pre-fermented dough with a little yeast in it, and that starts to develop flavor also. And on day two, we put those two pieces together. That's the epoxy. And we're hoping that, sort of, the enzyme piece of dough becomes the fuel pack for the leavened piece of dough, and when we put them together and add the final ingredients, we can create a bread that does evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain. That's the challenge. Okay, so, now, what we — in the journey of wheat, let's go back and look at these 12 stages.I'm going to go through them very quickly and then revisit them. Okay, we're going to start with the first stage. And this is what every student has to begin with. Everyone who works in the culinary world knows that the first stage of cooking is ""mise en place,"" which is just a French way of saying, ""get organized."" Everything in its place. First stage. So in baking we call it scaling — weighing out the ingredients. Stage two is mixing. We take the ingredients and we mix them. We have to develop the gluten. There's no gluten in flour. There's only the potential for gluten. Here's another kind of prefiguring of epoxy because we've got glutenin and gliadin, neither of which are strong enough to make a good bread. But when they get hydrated and they bond to each other, they create a stronger molecule, a stronger protein we call gluten. And so we, in the mixing process, have to develop the gluten, we have to activate the leaven or the yeast, and we have to essentially distribute all the ingredients evenly.Then we get into fermentation, the third stage, which is really where the flavor develops. The yeast comes alive and starts eating the sugars, creating carbon dioxide and alcohol — essentially it's burping and sweating, which is what bread is. It's yeast burps and sweat. And somehow, this is transformed — the yeast burps and sweats are later transformed — and this is really getting to the heart of what makes bread so special is that it is a transformational food, and we're going to explore that in a minute. But then, quickly through the next few stages. We, after it's fermented and it's developed, started to develop flavor and character, we divide it into smaller units. And then we take those units and we shape them. We give them a little pre-shape, usually a round or a little torpedo shape, sometimes. That's called ""rounding.""And there's a short rest period. It can be for a few seconds. It can be for 20 or 30 minutes. We call that resting or benching. Then we go into final shaping, ""panning"" — which means putting the shaped loaf on a pan. This takes a second, but it's a distinctive stage. It can be in a basket. It can be in a loaf pan, but we pan it. And then, stage nine. The fermentation which started at stage three is continuing through all these other stages. Again, developing more flavor. The final fermentation takes place in stage nine. We call it ""proofing."" Proofing means to prove that the dough is alive. And at stage nine we get the dough to the final shape, and it goes into the oven — stage 10. Three transformations take place in the oven. The sugars in the dough caramelize in the crust. They give us that beautiful brown crust. Only the crust can caramelize. It's the only place that gets hot enough. Inside, the proteins — this gluten — coagulates. When it gets to about 160 degrees, the proteins all line up  and they create structure, the gluten structure — what ultimately we will call the crumb of the bread. And the starches, when they reach about 180 degrees, gelatinize.And gelatinization is yet another oven transformation. Coagulation, caramelization and gelatinization — when the starch is thick and they absorb all the moisture that's around them, they — they kind of swell, and then they burst. And they burst, and they spill their guts into the bread. So basically now we're eating yeast sweats — sweat, burps and starch guts. Again, transformed in stage 10 in the oven because what went into the oven as dough comes out in stage 11 as bread. And stage 11, we call it cooling — because we never really eat the bread right away. There's a little carry-over baking. The proteins have to set up, strengthen and firm up. And then we have stage 12, which the textbooks call ""packaging,"" but my students call ""eating."" And so, we're going to be on our own journey today from wheat to eat, and in a few minutes we will try this, and see if we have succeeded in fulfilling this baker's mission of pulling out flavor.But I want to go back now and revisit these steps, and talk about it from the standpoint of transformation, because I really believe that all things can be understood — and this is not my own idea. This goes back to the Scholastics and to the Ancients — that all things can be understood on four levels: the literal, the metaphoric or poetic level, the political or ethical level. And ultimately, the mystical or sometimes called the ""anagogical"" level. It's hard to get to those levels unless you go through the literal. In fact, Dante says you can't understand the three deeper levels unless you first understand the literal level, so that's why we're talking literally about bread. But let's kind of look at these stages again from the standpoint of connections to possibly a deeper level — all in my quest for answering the question, ""What is it about bread that's so special?"" And fulfilling this mission of evoking the full potential of flavor.Because what happens is, bread begins as wheat or any other grain. But what's wheat? Wheat is a grass that grows in the field. And, like all grasses, at a certain point it puts out seeds. And we harvest those seeds, and those are the wheat kernels. Now, in order to harvest it — I mean, what's harvesting? It's just a euphemism for killing, right? I mean, that's what's harvest — we say we harvest the pig, you know? Yes, we slaughter, you know. Yes, that's life. We harvest the wheat, and in harvesting it, we kill it. Now, wheat is alive, and as we harvest it, it gives up its seeds. Now, at least with seeds we have the potential for future life. We can plant those in the ground. And we save some of those for the next generation. But most of those seeds get crushed and turned into flour. And at that point, the wheat has suffered the ultimate indignity. It's not only been killed, but it's been denied any potential for creating future life. So we turn it into flour.So as I said, I think bread is a transformational food. The first transformation — and, by the way, the definition of transformation for me is a radical change from one thing into something else. O.K.? Radical, not subtle. Not like hot water made cold, or cold water turned hot, but water boiled off and becoming steam. That's a transformation, two different things. Well, in this case, the first transformation is alive to dead. I'd call that radical. So, we've got now this flour. And what do we do? We add some water. In stage one, we weigh it. In stage two, we add water and salt to it, mix it together, and we create something that we call ""clay."" It's like clay. And we infuse that clay with an ingredient that we call ""leaven."" In this case, it's yeast, but yeast is leaven. What does leaven mean? Leaven comes from the root word that means enliven — to vivify, to bring to life. By the way, what's the Hebrew word for clay? Adam. You see, the baker, in this moment, has become, in a sense, sort of, the God of his dough, you know, and his dough, well, while it's not an intelligent life form, is now alive. And we know it's alive because in stage three, it grows. Growth is the proof of life.And while it's growing, all these literal transformations are taking place. Enzymes are breaking forth sugars. Yeast is eating sugar and turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Bacteria is in there, eating the same sugars, turning them into acids. In other words, personality and character's being developed in this dough under the watchful gaze of the baker. And the baker's choices all along the way determine the outcome of the product. A subtle change in temperature — a subtle change in time — it's all about a balancing act between time, temperature and ingredients. That's the art of baking. So all these things are determined by the baker, and the bread goes through some stages, and characters develop. And then we divide it, and this one big piece of dough is divided into smaller units, and each of those units are given shape by the baker. And as they're shaped, they're raised again, all along proving that they're alive, and developing character.And at stage 10, we take it to the oven. It's still dough. Nobody eats bread dough — a few people do, I think, but not too many. I've met some dough eaters, but — it's not the staff of life, right? Bread is the staff of life. But dough is what we're working with, and we take that dough to the oven, and it goes into the oven. As soon as the interior temperature of that dough crosses the threshold of 140 degrees, it passes what we call the ""thermal death point."" Students love that TDP. They think it's the name of a video game. But it's the thermal death point — all life ceases there. The yeast, whose mission it has been up till now to raise the dough, to enliven it, to vivify it, in order to complete its mission, which is also to turn this dough into bread, has to give up its life. So you see the symbolism at work? It's starting to come forth a little bit, you know. It's starting to make sense to me — what goes in is dough, what comes out is bread — or it goes in alive, comes out dead. Third transformation. First transformation, alive to dead. Second transformation, dead brought back to life. Third transformation, alive to dead — but dough to bread.Or another analogy would be, a caterpillar has been turned into a butterfly. And it's what comes out of the oven that is what we call the staff of life. This is the product that everyone in the world eats, that is so difficult to give up. It's so deeply embedded in our psyches that bread is used as a symbol for life. It's used as a symbol for transformation. And so, as we get to stage 12 and we partake of that, again completing the life cycle, you know, we have a chance to essentially ingest that — it nurtures us, and we continue to carry on and have opportunities to ponder things like this. So this is what I've learned from bread. This is what bread has taught me in my journey. And what we're going to attempt to do with this bread here, again, is to use, in addition to everything we talked about, this bread we're going to call ""spent grain bread"" because, as you know, bread-making is very similar to beer-making. Beer is basically liquid bread, or bread is solid beer. And — (Laughter) they — they're invented around the same time. I think beer came first. And the Egyptian who was tending the beer fell asleep in the hot, Egyptian sun, and it turned into bread.But we've got this bread, and what I did here is to try to, again, evoke even more flavor from this grain, was we've added into it the spent grain from beer-making. And if you make this bread, you can use any kind of spent grain from any type of beer. I like dark spent grain. Today we're using a light spent grain that's actually from, like, some kind of a lager of some sort — a light lager or an ale — that is wheat and barley that's been toasted. In other words, the beer-maker knows also how to evoke flavor from the grains by using sprouting and malting and roasting. We're going to take some of that, and put it into the bread. So now we not only have a high-fiber bread, but now fiber on top of fiber. And so this is, again, hopefully not only a healthy bread, but a bread that you will enjoy. So, if I, kind of, break this bread, maybe we can share this now a little bit here. We'll start a little piece here, and I'm going to take a little piece here — I think I'd better taste it myself before you have it at lunch. I'll leave you with what I call the baker's blessing. May your crust be crisp, and your bread always rise. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_reinhart_on_bread
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"I'm going to talk about a very fundamental change that is going on in the very fabric of the modern economy. And to talk about that, I'm going to go back to the beginning, because in the beginning were commodities. Commodities are things that you grow in the ground, raise on the ground or pull out of the ground: basically, animal, mineral, vegetable. And then you extract them out of the ground, and sell them on the open marketplace. Commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy that lasted for millennia. But then along came the industrial revolution, and then goods became the predominant economic offering, where we used commodities as a raw material to be able to make or manufacture goods.So, we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy. Well, what then happened over the last 50 or 60 years, is that goods have become commoditized. Commoditized: where they're treated like a commodity, where people don't care who makes them. They just care about three things and three things only: price, price and price.Now, there's an antidote to commoditization, and that is customization. My first book was called ""Mass Customization"" — it came up a couple of times yesterday — and how I discovered this progression of economic value was realizing that customizing a good automatically turned it into a service, because it was done just for a particular person, because it wasn't inventoried, it was delivered on demand to that individual person.So, we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy. But over the past 10 or 20 years, what's happened is that services are being commoditized as well. Long-distance telephone service sold on price, price, price; fast-food restaurants with all their value pricing; and even the Internet is commoditizing not just goods, but services as well. What that means is that it's time to move to a new level of economic value. Time to go beyond the goods and the services, and use, in that same heuristic, what happens when you customize a service? What happens when you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person — that's exactly what they need at this moment in time? Then you can't help but make them go ""wow""; you can't help but turn it into a memorable event — you can't help but turn it into an experience.So we're shifting to an experience economy, where experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering. Now most places that I talk to, when I talk about experience, I talk about Disney — the world's premier experience-stager. I talk about theme restaurants, and experiential retail, and boutique hotels, and Las Vegas — the experience capital of the world. But here, when you think about experiences, think about Thomas Dolby and his group, playing music. Think about meaningful places. Think about drinking wine, about a journey to the Clock of the Long Now. Those are all experiences. Think about TED itself. The experience capital in the world of conferences. All of these are experiences.Now, over the last several years I spent a lot of time in Europe, and particularly in the Netherlands, and whenever I talk about the experience economy there, I'm always greeted at the end with one particular question, almost invariably. And the question isn't really so much a question as an accusation. And the Dutch, when they usually put it, it always starts with the same two words. You know the words I mean? You Americans. They say, you Americans. You like your fantasy environments, your fake, your Disneyland experiences. They say, we Dutch, we like real, natural, authentic experiences. So much has that happened that I've developed a fairly praticed response, which is: I point out that first of all, you have to understand that there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience. Why? Because the experience happens inside of us. It's our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us. So, as long as we are in any sense authentic human beings, then every experience we have is authentic. Now, there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience, but even that is a matter of degree, not kind. And there's no such thing as a 100 percent natural experience. Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods, there is a company that manufactured the car that delivered you to the edge of the woods; there's a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods. There's a company that provides a cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods. Right? All of those are man-made, artificiality brought into the woods by you, and by the very nature of being there.And then I always finish off by talking about — the thing that amazes me the most about this question, particularly coming from the Dutch, is that the Netherlands is every bit as manufactured as Disneyland. (Laughter) And the Dutch, they always go ... and they realize, I'm right! There isn't a square meter of ground in the entire country that hasn't been reclaimed from the sea, or otherwise moved, modified and manicured to look as if it had always been there. It's the only place you ever go for a walk in the woods and all the trees are lined up in rows. (Laughter)But nonetheless, not just the Dutch, but everyone has this desire for the authentic. And authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility — the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who are they going to buy from, and what they're going to buy. Becoming the basis of the economy. In fact, you can look at how each of these economies developed, that each one has their own business imperative, matched with a consumer sensibility. We're the agrarian economy, and we're supplying commodities. It's about supply and availability. Getting the commodities to market.With the industrial economy, it is about controlling costs — getting the costs down as low as possible so we can offer them to the masses. With the service economy, it is about improving quality. That has — the whole quality movement has risen with the service economy over the past 20 or 30 years.And now, with the experience economy, it's about rendering authenticity. Rendering authenticity — and the keyword is ""rendering."" Right? Rendering, because you have to get your consumers — as business people — to percieve your offerings as authentic. Because there is a basic paradox: no one can have an inauthentic experience, but no business can supply one. Because all businesses are man-made objects; all business is involved with money; all business is a matter of using machinery, and all those things make something inauthentic. So, how do you render authenticity, is the question. Are you rendering authenticity?When you think about that, let me go back to what Lionel Trilling, in his seminal book on authenticity, ""Sincerity and Authenticity"" — came out in 1960 — points to as the seminal point at which authenticity entered the lexicon, if you will. And that is, to no surprise, in Shakespeare, and in his play, Hamlet. And there is one part in this play, Hamlet, where the most fake of all the characters in Hamlet, Polonius, says something profoundly real. At the end of a laundry list of advice he's giving to his son, Laertes, he says this: And this above all: to thine own self be true. And it doth follow, as night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man. And those three verses are the core of authenticity. There are two dimensions to authenticity: one, being true to yourself, which is very self-directed. Two, is other-directed: being what you say you are to others. And I don't know about you, but whenever I encounter two dimensions, I immediately go, ahh, two-by-two! All right? Anybody else like that, no? Well, if you think about that, you do, in fact, get a two-by-two. Where, on one dimension it's a matter of being true to yourself. As businesses, are the economic offerings you are providing — are they true to themselves? And the other dimension is: are they what they say they are to others? If not, you have, ""is not true to itself,"" and ""is not what it says it is,"" yielding a two-by-two matrix. And of course, if you are both true to yourself, and are what you say you are, then you're real real! (Laughter)The opposite, of course, is — fake fake. All right, now, there is value for fake. There will always be companies around to supply the fake, because there will always be desire for the fake. Fact is, there's a general rule: if you don't like it, it's fake; if you do like it, it's faux. (Laughter)Now, the other two sides of the coin are: being a real fake — is what it says it is, but is not true to itself, or being a fake real: is true to itself, but not what it says it is. You can think about those two — you know, both of these better than being fake fake — not quite as good as being real real. You can contrast them by thinking about Universal City Walk versus Disney World, or Disneyland. Universal City Walk is a real fake — in fact, we got this very term from Ada Louise Huxtable's book, ""The Unreal America."" A wonderful book, where she talks about Universal City Walk as — you know, she decries the fake, but she says, at least that's a real fake, right, because you can see behind the facade, right? It is what it says it is: It's Universal Studio; it's in the city of Los Angeles; you're going to walk a lot. Right? You don't tend to walk a lot in Los Angeles, well, here's a place where you are going to walk a lot, outside in this city. But is it really true to itself? Right? Is it really in the city? Is it — you can see behind all of it, and see what is going on in the facades of it. So she calls it a real fake.Disney World, on the other hand, is a fake real, or a fake reality. Right? It's not what it says it is. It's not really the magic kingdom. (Laughter) But it is — oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to — (Laughter) — sorry. We won't talk about Santa Claus then. (Laughter) But Disney World is wonderfully true to itself. Right? Just wonderfully true to itself. When you are there you are just immersed in this wonderful environment. So, it's a fake real.Now the easiest way to fall down in this, and not be real real, right, the easiest way not to be true to yourself is not to understand your heritage, and thereby repudiate that heritage. Right, the key of being true to yourself is knowing who you are as a business. Knowing where your heritage is: what you have done in the past. And what you have done in the past limits what you can do, what you can get away with, essentially, in the future. So, you have to understand that past.Think about Disney again. Disney, 10 or 15 years ago, right, the Disney — the company that is probably best-known for family values out there, Disney bought the ABC network. The ABC network, affectionately known in the trade as the T&A network, right — that's not too much jargon, is it? Right, the T&A network. Then it bought Miramax, known for its NC-17 fare, and all of a sudden, families everywhere couldn't really trust what they were getting from Disney. It was no longer true to its heritage; no longer true to Walt Disney. That's one of the reasons why they're having such trouble today, and why Roy Disney is out to get Michael Eisner. Because it is no longer true to itself. So, understand what — your past limits what you can do in the future.When it comes to being what you say you are, the easiest mistake that companies make is that they advertise things that they are not. That's when you're perceived as fake, as a phony company — advertizing things that you're not. Think about any hotel, any airline, any hospital. Right, if you could check into the ads, you'd have a great experience. (Laughter) But unfortunately, you have to experience the actual hotel, airline and hospital, and then you have that disconnect. Then you have that perception that you are phony. So, the number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are, is to provide places for people to experience who you are. For people to experience who you are. Right, it's not advertising does it.That's why you have companies like Starbucks, right, that doesn't advertise at all. They said, you want to know who we are, you have to come experience us. And think about the economic value they have provided by that experience. Right? Coffee, at its core, is what? Right? It's beans; right? It's coffee beans. You know how much coffee is worth, when treated as a commodity as a bean? Two or three cents per cup — that's what coffee is worth. But grind it, roast it, package it, put it on a grocery store shelf, and now it'll cost five, 10, 15 cents, when you treat it as a good. Take that same good, and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer, in a corner diner, in a bodega, a kiosk somewhere, you get 50 cents, maybe a buck per cup of coffee. But surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of a Starbucks, with the authentic cedar that goes inside of there, and now, because of that authentic experience, you can charge two, three, four, five dollars for a cup of coffee. So, authenticity is becoming the new consumer sensibility.Let me summarize it, for the business people in the audience, with three rules, three basic rules. One, don't say you're authentic unless you really are authentic. Two, it's easier to be authentic if you don't say you're authentic. And three, if you say you're authentic, you better be authentic. And then for the consumers, for everyone else in the audience, let me simply summarize it by saying, increasingly, what we — what will make us happy, is spending our time and our money satisfying the desire for authenticity. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_pine_on_what_consumers_want
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"My work is play. And I play when I design. I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure that I actually do that, and the definition of play, number one, was engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor, and number two was gambling. And I realize I do both when I'm designing. I'm both a kid and I'm gambling all the time. And I think that if you're not, there's probably something inherently wrong with the structure or the situation you're in, if you're a designer. But the serious part is what threw me, and I couldn't quite get a handle on it until I remembered an essay. And it's an essay I read 30 years ago. It was written by Russell Baker, who used to write an ""Observer"" column in the New York Times. He's a wonderful humorist. And I'm going to read you this essay, or an excerpt from it because it really hit home for me. Here is a letter of friendly advice.Be serious, it says. What it means, of course, is, be solemn. Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class. Adults, on the whole, are solemn. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower. That's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging, which is commonplace, and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn. Poker is serious. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is serious. Going to educational conferences to tell you anything about the future is solemn. Taking a long walk by yourself, during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Tiffany's, is serious.(Laughter)Now, when I apply Russell Baker's definition of solemnity or seriousness to design, it doesn't necessarily make any particular point about quality. Solemn design is often important and very effective design. Solemn design is also socially correct, and is accepted by appropriate audiences. It's what right-thinking designers and all the clients are striving for. Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally. It can be achieved out of innocence, or arrogance, or out of selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly, it's achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don't really make any sense.Serious design is imperfect. It's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being the first of its kind. Serious design is also — often — quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view. That's because the art of serious play is about invention, change, rebellion — not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play. Now, I always saw design careers like surreal staircases. If you look at the staircase, you'll see that in your 20s the risers are very high and the steps are very short, and you make huge discoveries. You sort of leap up very quickly in your youth. That's because you don't know anything and you have a lot to learn, and so that anything you do is a learning experience and you're just jumping right up there. As you get older, the risers get shallower and the steps get wider, and you start moving along at a slower pace because you're making fewer discoveries. And as you get older and more decrepit, you sort of inch along on this sort of depressing, long staircase, leading you into oblivion.(Laughter)I find it's actually getting really hard to be serious. I'm hired to be solemn, but I find more and more that I'm solemn when I don't have to be. And in my 35 years of working experience, I think I was really serious four times. And I'm going to show them to you now, because they came out of very specific conditions. It's great to be a kid. Now, when I was in my early 20s, I worked in the record business, designing record covers for CBS Records, and I had no idea what a great job I had. I thought everybody had a job like that. And what — the way I looked at design and the way I looked at the world was, what was going on around me and the things that came at the time I walked into design were the enemy. I really, really, really hated the typeface Helvetica. I thought the typeface Helvetica was the cleanest, most boring, most fascistic, really repressive typeface, and I hated everything that was designed in Helvetica. And when I was in my college days, this was the sort of design that was fashionable and popular. This is actually quite a lovely book jacket by Rudy de Harak, but I just hated it, because it was designed with Helvetica, and I made parodies about it. I just thought it was, you know, completely boring.(Laughter)So — so, my goal in life was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica. And to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica was actually kind of hard because you had to find it. And there weren't a lot of books about the history of design in the early 70s. There weren't — there wasn't a plethora of design publishing. You actually had to go to antique stores. You had to go to Europe. You had to go places and find the stuff. And what I responded to was, you know, Art Nouveau, or deco, or Victorian typography, or things that were just completely not Helvetica. And I taught myself design this way, and this was sort of my early years, and I used these things in really goofy ways on record covers and in my design. I wasn't educated. I just sort of put these things together. I mixed up Victorian designs with pop, and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else. And I made these very lush, very elaborate record covers, not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist — because I didn't know what those things were. I just hated Helvetica.(Laughter)And that kind of passion drove me into very serious play, a kind of play I could never do now because I'm too well-educated. And there's something wonderful about that form of youth, where you can let yourself grow and play, and be really a brat, and then accomplish things. By the end of the '70s, actually, the stuff became known. I mean, these covers appeared all over the world, and they started winning awards, and people knew them. And I was suddenly a post-modernist, and I began a career as — in my own business. And first I was praised for it, then criticized for it, but the fact of the matter was, I had become solemn. I didn't do what I think was a piece of serious work again for about 14 years. I spent most of the '80s being quite solemn, turning out these sorts of designs that I was expected to do because that's who I was, and I was living in this cycle of going from serious to solemn to hackneyed to dead, and getting rediscovered all over again.So, here was the second condition for which I think I accomplished some serious play. There's a Paul Newman movie that I love called ""The Verdict."" I don't know how many of you have seen it, but it's a beaut. And in the movie, he plays a down-and-out lawyer who's become an ambulance chaser. And he's taken on — he's given, actually — a malpractice suit to handle that's sort of an easy deal, and in the midst of trying to connect the deal, he starts to empathize and identify with his client, and he regains his morality and purpose, and he goes on to win the case. And in the depth of despair, in the midst of the movie, when it looks like he can't pull this thing off, and he needs this case, he needs to win this case so badly. There's a shot of Paul Newman alone, in his office, saying, ""This is the case. There are no other cases. This is the case. There are no other cases."" And in that moment of desire and focus, he can win. And that is a wonderful position to be in to create some serious play. And I had that moment in 1994 when I met a theater director named George Wolfe, who was going to have me design an identity for the New York Shakespeare Festival, then known, and then became the Public Theater. And I began getting immersed in this project in a way I never was before.This is what theater advertising looked like at that time. This is what was in the newspapers and in the New York Times. So, this is sort of a comment on the time. And the Public Theater actually had much better advertising than this. They had no logo and no identity, but they had these very iconic posters painted by Paul Davis. And George Wolf had taken over from another director and he wanted to change the theater, and he wanted to make it urban and loud and a place that was inclusive. So, drawing on my love of typography, I immersed myself into this project. And what was different about it was the totality of it, was that I really became the voice, the visual voice, of a place in a way I had never done before, where every aspect — the smallest ad, the ticket, whatever it was — was designed by me. There was no format. There was no in-house department that these things were pushed to. I literally for three years made everything — every scrap of paper, everything online, that this theater did. And it was the only job, even though I was doing other jobs. I lived and breathed it in a way I haven't with a client since. It enabled me to really express myself and grow. And I think that you know when you're going to be given this position, and it's rare, but when you get it and you have this opportunity, it's the moment of serious play.I did these things, and I still do them. I still work for the Public Theater. I'm on their board, and I still am involved with it. The high point of the Public Theater, I think, was in 1996, two years after I designed it, which was the ""Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk"" campaign that was all over New York. But something happened to it, and what happened to it was, it became very popular. And that is a kiss of death for something serious because it makes it solemn. And what happened was that New York City, to a degree, ate my identity because people began to copy it. Here's an ad in the New York Times somebody did for a play called ""Mind Games."" Then ""Chicago"" came out, used similar graphics, and the Public Theater's identity was just totally eaten and taken away, which meant I had to change it. So, I changed it so that every season was different, and I continued to do these posters, but they never had the seriousness of the first identity because they were too individual, and they didn't have that heft of everything being the same thing. Now — and I think since the Public Theater, I must have done more than a dozen cultural identities for major institutions, and I don't think I ever — I ever grasped that seriousness again — I do them for very big, important institutions in New York City.The institutions are solemn, and so is the design. They're better crafted than the Public Theater was, and they spend more money on them, but I think that that moment comes and goes. The best way to accomplish serious design — which I think we all have the opportunity to do — is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job. That doesn't happen very often, but it happened to me in the year 2000, when for some reason or another, a whole pile of different architects started to ask me to design the insides of theaters with them, where I would take environmental graphics and work them into buildings. I'd never done this kind of work before. I didn't know how to read an architectural plan, I didn't know what they were talking about, and I really couldn't handle the fact that a job — a single job — could go on for four years because I was used to immediacy in graphic design, and that kind of attention to detail was really bad for somebody like me, with ADD.So, it was a rough — it was a rough go, but I fell in love with this process of actually integrating graphics into architecture because I didn't know what I was doing. I said, ""Why can't the signage be on the floor?"" New Yorkers look at their feet. And then I found that actors and actresses actually take their cues from the floor, so it turned out that these sorts of sign systems began to make sense. They integrated with the building in really peculiar ways. They ran around corners, they went up sides of buildings, and they melded into the architecture. This is Symphony Space on 90th Street and Broadway, and the type is interwoven into the stainless steel and backlit with fiber optics. And the architect, Jim Polshek, essentially gave me a canvas to play typography out on. And it was serious play. This is the children's museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made out of completely inexpensive materials. Extruded typography that's backlit with neon. Things I never did before, built before. I just thought they'd be kind of fun to do. Donors' walls made out of Lucite. And then, inexpensive signage.(Laughter)I think my favorite of these was this little job in Newark, New Jersey. It's a performing arts school. This is the building that — they had no money, and they had to recast it, and they said, if we give you 100,000 dollars, what can you do with it? And I did a little Photoshop job on it, and I said, Well, I think we can paint it. And we did. And it was play. And there's the building. Everything was painted — typography over the whole damn thing, including the air conditioning ducts. I hired guys who paint flats fixed on the sides of garages to do the painting on the building, and they loved it. They got into it — they took the job incredibly seriously. They used to climb up on the building and call me and tell me that they had to correct my typography — that my spacing was wrong, and they moved it, and they did wonderful things with it. They were pretty serious, too. It was quite wonderful.By the time I did Bloomberg's headquarters my work had begun to become accepted. People wanted it in big, expensive places. And that began to make it solemn. Bloomberg was all about numbers, and we did big numbers through the space and the numbers were projected on a spectacular LED that my partner, Lisa Strausfeld, programmed. But it became the end of the seriousness of the play, and it started to, once again, become solemn. This is a current project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I got to be goofy. I was invited to design a logo for this neighborhood, called the North Side, and I thought it was silly for a neighborhood to have a logo. I think that's rather creepy, actually. Why would a neighborhood have a logo? A neighborhood has a thing — it's got a landmark, it's got a place, it's got a restaurant. It doesn't have a logo. I mean, what would that be?So I had to actually give a presentation to a city council and neighborhood constituents, and I went to Pittsburgh and I said, ""You know, really what you have here are all these underpasses that separate the neighborhood from the center of town. Why don't you celebrate them, and make the underpasses landmarks?"" So I began doing this crazy presentation of these installations — potential installations — on these underpass bridges, and stood up in front of the city council — and was a little bit scared, I have to admit. But I was so utterly unqualified for this project, and so utterly ridiculous, and ignored the brief so desperately that I think they just embraced it with wholeheartedness, just completely because it was so goofy to begin with. And this is the bridge they're actually painting up and preparing as we speak. It will change every six months, and it will become an art installation in the North Side of Pittsburgh, and it will probably become a landmark in the area.John Hockenberry told you a bit about my travail with Citibank, that is now a 10-year relationship, and I still work with them. And I actually am amused by them and like them, and think that as a very, very, very, very, very big corporation they actually keep their graphics very nice. I drew the logo for Citibank on a napkin in the first meeting. That was the play part of the job. And then I spent a year going to long, tedious, boring meetings, trying to sell this logo through to a huge corporation to the point of tears. I thought I was going to go crazy at the end of this year. We made idiotic presentations showing how the Citi logo made sense, and how it was really derived from an umbrella, and we made animations of these things, and we came back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And it was worth it, because they bought this thing, and it played out on such a grand scale, and it's so internationally recognizable, but for me it was actually a very, very depressing year. As a matter of fact, they actually never bought onto the logo until Fallon put it on its very good ""Live Richly"" campaign, and then everybody accepted it all over the world.So during this time I needed some kind of counterbalance for this crazy, crazy existence of going to these long, idiotic meetings. And I was up in my country house, and for some reason, I began painting these very big, very involved, laborious, complicated maps of the entire world, and listing every place on the planet, and putting them in, and misspelling them, and putting things in the wrong spot, and completely controlling the information, and going totally and completely nuts with it. They would take me about six months initially, but then I started getting faster at it. Here's the United States. Every single city of the United States is on here. And it hung for about eight months at the Cooper-Hewitt, and people walked up to it, and they would point to a part of the map and they'd say, ""Oh, I've been here."" And, of course, they couldn't have been because it's in the wrong spot. (Laughter) But what I liked about it was, I was controlling my own idiotic information, and I was creating my own palette of information, and I was totally and completely at play. One of my favorites was this painting I did of Florida after the 2000 election that has the election results rolling around in the water. I keep that for evidence.(Laughter)Somebody was up at my house and saw the paintings and recommended them to a gallery, and I had a first show about two-and-a-half years ago, and I showed these paintings that I'm showing you now. And then a funny thing happened — they sold. And they sold quickly, and became rather popular. We started making prints from them. This is Manhattan, one from the series. This is a print from the United States which we did in red, white and blue. We began doing these big silkscreen prints, and they started selling, too. So, the gallery wanted me to have another show in two years, which meant that I really had to paint these paintings much faster than I had ever done them. And I — they started to become more political, and I picked areas that sort of were in the news or that I had some feeling about, and I began doing these things.And then this funny thing happened. I found that I was no longer at play. I was actually in this solemn landscape of fulfilling an expectation for a show, which is not where I started with these things. So, while they became successful, I know how to make them, so I'm not a neophyte, and they're no longer serious — they have become solemn. And that's a terrifying factor — when you start something and it turns that way — because it means that all that's left for you is to go back and to find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow, and that's all that matters.So, I'm plugging along here — (Laughter) and I'm just going to have to blow up the staircase. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious
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"I had requested slides, kind of adamantly, up till the — pretty much, last few days, but was denied access to a slide projector. (Laughter) I actually find them a lot more emotional — (Laughter) — and personal, and the neat thing about a slide projector is you can actually focus the work, unlike PowerPoint and some other programs. Now, I agree that you have to — yeah, there are certain concessions and, you know, if you use a slide projector, you're not able to have the bad type swing in from the back or the side, or up or down, but maybe that's an O.K. trade-off, to trade that off for a focus. (Laughter) It's a thought. Just a thought. And there's something nice about slides getting stuck. And the thing you really hope for is occasionally they burn up, which we won't see tonight. So.With that, let's get the first slide up here. This, as many of you have probably guessed, is a recently emptied beer can in Portugal. (Laughter) This — I had just arrived in Barcelona for the first time, and I thought — you know, fly all night, I looked up, and I thought, wow, how clean. You come into this major airport, and they simply have a B. I mean, how nice is that? Everything's gotten simpler in design, and here's this mega airport, and God, I just — I took a picture. I thought, God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen at an airport. Till a couple months later, I went back to the same airport — same plane, I think — and looked up, and it said C. (Laughter) It was only then that I realized it was simply a gate that I was coming into. (Laughter)I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting — whatever it is. That area of design interests me the most, and I think this for me is a real clear, very simplified version of what I'm talking about. These are a couple of garage doors painted identical, situated next to each other. So, here's the first door. You know, you get the message. You know, it's pretty clear. Take a look at the second door and see if there's any different message. O.K., which one would you park in front of? (Laughter) Same color, same message, same words. The only thing that's different is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece — and, again, which is the psycho-killer here? (Laughter) Yet it doesn't say that; it doesn't need to say that. I would probably park in front of the other one.I'm sure a lot of you are aware that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last five years or so. It's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive. But I was in Milan and saw this street sign, and was very happy to see that apparently this idea of minimalism has even been translated by the graffiti artist. (Laughter) And this graffiti artist has come along, made this sign a little bit better, and then moved on. (Laughter) He didn't overpower it like they have a tendency to do. (Laughter)This is for a book by ""Metropolis."" I took some photos, and this is a billboard in Florida, and either they hadn't paid their rent, or they didn't want to pay their rent again on the sign, and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down, so they just teared out sections of it. And I would argue that it's possibly more effective than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention, getting you to look over that way. And hopefully you don't stop and buy those awful pecan things — Stuckey's.This is from my second book. The first book is called, ""The End of Print,"" and it was done along with a film, working with William Burroughs. And ""The End of Print"" is now in its fifth printing. (Laughter) When I first contacted William Burroughs about being part of it, he said no; he said he didn't believe it was the end of print. And I said, well, that's fine; I just would love to have your input on this film and this book, and he finally agreed to it. And at the end of the film, he says in this great voice that I can't mimic but I'll kind of try, but not really, he says, ""I remember attending an exhibition called, 'Photography: The End of Painting.'"" And then he says, ""And, of course, it wasn't at all."" So, apparently when photography was perfected, there were people going around saying, that's it: you've just ruined painting. People are just going to take pictures now. And of course, that wasn't the case.So, this is from ""2nd Sight,"" a book I did on intuition. I think it's not the only ingredient in design, but possibly the most important. It's something everybody has. It's not a matter of teaching it; in fact, most of the schools tend to discount intuition as an ingredient of your working process because they can't quantify it: it's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design, but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card or a newsletter. So it tends to get discounted. This is a quote from Albert Einstein, who says, ""The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness — call it intuition or what you will — and the solution just comes to you, and you don't know from where or why."" So, it's kind of like when somebody says, Who did that song? And the more you try to think about it, the further the answer gets from you, and the minute you stop thinking about it, your intuition gives you that answer, in a sense.I like this for a couple of reasons. If you've had any design courses, they would teach you you can't read this. I think you eventually can and, more importantly, I think it's true. ""Don't mistake legibility for communication."" Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area.This is working with Marshall McLuhan. I stayed and worked with his wife and son, Eric, and we came up with close to 600 quotes from Marshall that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times, predicting so much of what has happened in the advertising, television, media world. And so this book is called ""Probes."" It's another word for quotes. And it's — a lot of them are never — have never been published before, and basically, I've interpreted the different quotes. So, this was the contents page originally. When I got done it was 540 pages, and then the publisher, Gingko Press, ended up cutting it down considerably: it's just under 400 pages now. But I decided I liked this contents page — I liked the way it looks — so I kept it. (Laughter) It now has no relevance to the book whatsoever, but it's a nice spread, I think, in there. (Laughter)So, a couple spreads from the book: here McLuhan says, ""The new media are not bridges between Man and Nature; they are Nature."" ""The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property,"" which had never been done before printing. ""When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result."" ""While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world."" I hate this stuff. It's hard to read. (Laughter) (Applause) ""People in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe, and no possible occupation except information gathering."" That was it. That's all he saw as the options. And not too far off.So, this is a project for Nine Inch Nails. And I only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden, and it was done right after 9/11. And I had recently discovered a bomb shelter in the backyard of a house I had bought in LA that the real estate person hadn't pointed out. (Laughter) There was some bomb shelter built, apparently in the '60s Cuban missile crisis. And I asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by, and he goes, ""It's something to do with the sewage system."" I was, O.K.; that's fine. I finally went down there, and it was this old rusted circular thing, and two beds, and very kind of creepy and weird. And also, surprisingly, it was done in kind of a cheap metal, and it had completely rusted through, and water everywhere, and spiders. And I thought, you know, what were they thinking? You'd think maybe cement, possibly, or something. But anyway, I used this for a cover for the Nine Inch Nails DVD, and I've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape, and it's ready. I think I'm ready. So.This is an experiment, really, for a client, Quicksilver, where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the Web. So, this is a six-shot sequence. I've taken one shot; I cropped it a few different ways. And then the tiny line of copy says, If you want to see this entire sequence — how this whole ride was — go to the website. And my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site to get this entire picture. Got no way of tracking it, so I could be totally wrong. (Laughter) I don't have the site. It's just the piece itself.This is a group in New York called the Coalition for a Smoke-free Environment — asked me to do these posters. They were wild-posted around New York City. You can't really — well, you can't see it at all — but the second line is really the more kind of payoff, in a sense. It says, ""If the cigarette companies can lie, then so can we."" But — (Laughter) (Applause) — but I did. These were literally wild-posted all over New York one night, and there were definitely some heads turning, you know, people smoking and, ""Huh!"" (Laughter) And it was purposely done to look fairly serious. It wasn't some, you know, weird grunge type or something; it looked like they might be real. Anyway.Poster for Atlantic Center for the Arts, a school in Florida.This amazes me. This is a product I just found out. I was in the Caribbean at Christmas, and I'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell — not that they will sell — that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin. This was either an old product with new packaging, or a brand-new package, and I just thought, Yikes! How's that still happening?I do a lot of workshops all over the world, really, and this particular assignment was to come up with new symbols for the restroom doors. (Laughter) I felt this was one of the more successful solutions. The students actually cut them up and put them up around bars and restaurants that night, and I just always have this vision of this elderly couple going to use the restroom ... (Laughter)I did some work for Microsoft a few years back. It was a worldwide branding campaign. And it was interesting to me — my background is in sociology; I had no design training, and sometimes people say, well, that explains it — but it was a very interesting experiment because there's no product that I had to sell; it was simply the image of Microsoft they were trying to improve. They thought some people didn't like them. (Laughter) I found out that's very true, working on this campaign worldwide.And our goal was to try to humanize them a bit, and what I did was add type and people to the ad, which the previous campaign had not had, and nobody remembered them, and nobody referenced them. And we were trying to say that, hey, some of these guys that work there are actually OK; some of them actually have friends and family, and they're not all awful people. And the umbrella campaign was ""Thank God it's Monday."" So, we tried to take this — what was perceived as a negative: their over-competitiveness, their, you know, long working hours — and turn it into a positive and not run from it. You know: Thank God it's Monday — I get to go back to that little cubicle, those fake gray walls, and hear everybody else's conversations f or 10 hours and then go home.But anyway, this is one of the ads I was most pleased with, because they were all elaborately art-directed, and this one I thought actually felt like the girl was looking at the computer. It says, ""Wonder Around."" And then it's a piece of the software. And this is how the ad ran around the world. In Germany, they made one small change without checking with me — nor did they have to, because it was done through agencies — but see if you can tell the difference. This is how the ad ran throughout the world; Germany made one slight change in the ad. (Laughter)Now, there's kind of two issues here. If you're going to put a kid in the ad, pick one that looks alive. (Laughter) I just have a feeling this kid's been there for a week, you know. He's just really hoping that boots up and, you know ... (Laughter) And then as the agency explained to me, they said, ""Look, we don't have little green people in our country; why would we put little green people in our ads, for instance?"" So, I understand their logic. I totally disagree with it; I think it's a very small-minded approach, the world is certainly much more global, and I certainly think the people of Germany could have handled a little black girl sitting in front of a computer, though we'll never know.This is some work from Ray Gun. And the point of this magazine was to read the articles, listen to the music, and try to interpret it. There's no grid, there's no system, there's nothing set up in advance. This is an opener for Brian Eno, and it's just kind of my personal interpretation of the music. This is rockstars talking about teachers they had lusted after in school. There's a lot of great writing in ""Ray Gun."" And I was fortunate to find a photograph of a teacher sitting on some books. (Laughter)Article on Bryan Ferry — just really boring article — so I set the whole article in Dingbat. (Laughter) You could — you could highlight it; you could make it Helvetica or something: it is the actual article. I suppose you could eventually decode it, but it's really not very well written; it really wouldn't be worthwhile. (Laughter)Having done a lot of magazines, I'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories, and I was very curious to see how Time and Newsweek would handle 9/11. And I was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we'd already seen a million times, which was basically the moment of impact. And People magazine, I thought, got probably the best shot. It's kind of horsey type, but the texture — the second plane not quite hitting: there was something more enticing, if that's the right — it's not the right word — but in this cover than Time or Newsweek.But when I got into this magazine, there's something kind of disturbing, and this continued. On the left we see people dying; we see people running for their lives. And on the right we learn that there's a new way to support your breast. The coveted right-hand page was not given up to the whole issue. Look at the image of this lady — who knows what she's going through? — and the copy says: ""He knows just how to give me goosebumps."" Yeah, he jumps out of buildings. It's — unfortunately, this one works, kind of, as a spread.And this continued through the entire magazine. It did not let up. This says: ""One clean fits all."" . There were a lot of orphans made this day, and here's a dead body being brought out. It just seems to me possibly even a blank page would have been more appropriate. And this one I think is possibly the worst: two ladies, both facing the same way, both wearing jeans. One — who knows what she's going through; the other one is worried about model behavior and milk.And — I gave a talk in New York a couple months after this, and afterwards somebody came up to me and they said that — they actually emailed me — and they said that they appreciated the talk, and when they got back to their car, they found a note on their car that made them think maybe New York was getting back to being New York again after this event — it had been a few months. This was what they found on their car. (Laughter) There's very few times you'd be happy to find this on your car, but it did seem to indicate that we were coming back.This is my desktop. Somebody told me today there was this thing called folders, but I don't know what they are. These are my notes for the talk — there might be a correlation here. We are wrapping up.This I saw on the plane, flying in, for hot new products. I'm not sure this is an improvement, or a good idea, because, like, if you don't spend quite enough time in front of your computer, you can now get a plate in the keyboard, so there's no more faking it — that you don't really sit at your desk all day and eat and work anyway. Now there's a plate, and it would be really, really convenient to get a piece of pizza, then type a little bit, then ... I'm just not sure this is improvement.If you ever doubt the power of graphic design, this is a very generic sign that literally says, ""Vote for Hitler."" It says nothing else. And this to me is an extreme case of the power of emotion, of graphic design, even though, in fact, was a very generic poster at the time.What's next? What's next is going to be people. As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it's ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience. If you allow that to happen, it's really the only way you can do some unique work, and you're going to enjoy the work a lot more as well.This is — I like found art; hand lettering's coming back in a big way, and I thought this was a great example of both. This lady's advertising for her lost pit bull. It's friendly — she's underlined friendly — that's probably why she calls it Hercules or Hercles. She can't spell. (Laughter) But more importantly, she's willing to give you 20 bucks to go find this lost pit bull. And I'm thinking, yeah, right, I'll go look for a lost pit bill for 20 bucks. I have visions of people going down alleyways yelling out for Hercles, and you get charged by this thing and you go, oh, please be Hercles; please be the friendly one. (Laughter) I'm sure she never found the dog, because I took the sign. (Laughter)But I was asked to give a talk at a conference in Sacramento a few years back. And the theme was courage, and they asked me to talk about how courageous it is to be a graphic designer. And I remembered seeing this photograph of my father, who was a test pilot, and he told me that when you signed up to become a test pilot, they told you that there was a 40 to 50 percent chance of death on the job. That's pretty high for most occupations. (Laughter) But, you know, the government would make a plane; they'd say, go see if that one flies, would you? Some of them did; some of them didn't.And I started thinking about some of these decisions I have to make between, like, serif versus san-serif. (Laughter) And for the most part, they're not real life-threatening. Why not experiment? Why not have some fun? Why not put some of yourself into the work? And when I was teaching, I used to always ask the students, What's the definition of a good job? And as teachers, after you get all the answers, you like to give them the correct answer. And the best one I've heard — I'm sure some of you have heard this — the definition of a good job is: If you could afford to — if money wasn't an issue — would you be doing that same work? And if you would, you've got a great job. And if you wouldn't, what the heck are you doing? You're going to be dead a really long time. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_carson_on_design
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"The future that we will create can be a future that we'll be proud of. I think about this every day; it's quite literally my job. I'm co-founder and senior columnist at Worldchanging.com. Alex Steffen and I founded Worldchanging in late 2003, and since then we and our growing global team of contributors have documented the ever-expanding variety of solutions that are out there, right now and on the near horizon.In a little over two years, we've written up about 4,000 items — replicable models, technological tools, emerging ideas — all providing a path to a future that's more sustainable, more equitable and more desirable. Our emphasis on solutions is quite intentional. There are tons of places to go, online and off, if what you want to find is the latest bit of news about just how quickly our hell-bound handbasket is moving. We want to offer people an idea of what they can do about it. We focus primarily on the planet's environment, but we also address issues of global development, international conflict, responsible use of emerging technologies, even the rise of the so-called Second Superpower and much, much more.The scope of solutions that we discuss is actually pretty broad, but that reflects both the range of challenges that need to be met and the kinds of innovations that will allow us to do so. A quick sampling really can barely scratch the surface, but to give you a sense of what we cover: tools for rapid disaster relief, such as this inflatable concrete shelter; innovative uses of bioscience, such as a flower that changes color in the presence of landmines; ultra high-efficiency designs for homes and offices; distributed power generation using solar power, wind power, ocean power, other clean energy sources; ultra, ultra high-efficiency vehicles of the future; ultra high-efficiency vehicles you can get right now; and better urban design, so you don't need to drive as much in the first place; bio-mimetic approaches to design that take advantage of the efficiencies of natural models in both vehicles and buildings; distributed computing projects that will help us model the future of the climate. Also, a number of the topics that we've been talking about this week at TED are things that we've addressed in the past on Worldchanging: cradle-to-cradle design, MIT's Fab Labs, the consequences of extreme longevity, the One Laptop per Child project, even Gapminder.As a born-in-the-mid-1960s Gen X-er, hurtling all too quickly to my fortieth birthday, I'm naturally inclined to pessimism. But working at Worldchanging has convinced me, much to my own surprise, that successful responses to the world's problems are nonetheless possible. Moreover, I've come to realize that focusing only on negative outcomes can really blind you to the very possibility of success. As Norwegian social scientist Evelin Lindner has observed, ""Pessimism is a luxury of good times ... In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence."" The truth is, we can build a better world, and we can do so right now. We have the tools: we saw a hint of that a moment ago, and we're coming up with new ones all the time. We have the knowledge, and our understanding of the planet improves every day. Most importantly, we have the motive: we have a world that needs fixing, and nobody's going to do it for us.Many of the solutions that I and my colleagues seek out and write up every day have some important aspects in common: transparency, collaboration, a willingness to experiment, and an appreciation of science — or, more appropriately, science! (Laughter) The majority of models, tools and ideas on Worldchanging encompass combinations of these characteristics, so I want to give you a few concrete examples of how these principles combine in world-changing ways.We can see world-changing values in the emergence of tools to make the invisible visible — that is, to make apparent the conditions of the world around us that would otherwise be largely imperceptible. We know that people often change their behavior when they can see and understand the impact of their actions. As a small example, many of us have experienced the change in driving behavior that comes from having a real time display of mileage showing precisely how one's driving habits affect the vehicle's efficiency. The last few years have all seen the rise of innovations in how we measure and display aspects of the world that can be too big, or too intangible, or too slippery to grasp easily. Simple technologies, like wall-mounted devices that display how much power your household is using, and what kind of results you'll get if you turn off a few lights — these can actually have a direct positive impact on your energy footprint. Community tools, like text messaging, that can tell you when pollen counts are up or smog levels are rising or a natural disaster is unfolding, can give you the information you need to act in a timely fashion. Data-rich displays like maps of campaign contributions, or maps of the disappearing polar ice caps, allow us to better understand the context and the flow of processes that affect us all.We can see world-changing values in research projects that seek to meet the world's medical needs through open access to data and collaborative action. Now, some people emphasize the risks of knowledge-enabled dangers, but I'm convinced that the benefits of knowledge-enabled solutions are far more important. For example, open-access journals, like the Public Library of Science, make cutting-edge scientific research free to all — everyone in the world. And actually, a growing number of science publishers are adopting this model. Last year, hundreds of volunteer biology and chemistry researchers around the world worked together to sequence the genome of the parasite responsible for some of the developing world's worst diseases: African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. That genome data can now be found on open-access genetic data banks around the world, and it's an enormous boon to researchers trying to come up with treatments. But my favorite example has to be the global response to the SARS epidemic in 2003, 2004, which relied on worldwide access to the full gene sequence of the SARS virus. The U.S. National Research Council in its follow-up report on the outbreak specifically cited this open availability of the sequence as a key reason why the treatment for SARS could be developed so quickly.And we can see world-changing values in something as humble as a cell phone. I can probably count on my fingers the number of people in this room who do not use a mobile phone — and where is Aubrey, because I know he doesn't? (Laughter) For many of us, cell phones have really become almost an extension of ourselves, and we're really now beginning to see the social changes that mobile phones can bring about. You may already know some of the big-picture aspects: globally, more camera phones were sold last year than any other kind of camera, and a growing number of people live lives mediated through the lens, and over the network — and sometimes enter history books. In the developing world, mobile phones have become economic drivers. A study last year showed a direct correlation between the growth of mobile phone use and subsequent GDP increases across Africa. In Kenya, mobile phone minutes have actually become an alternative currency. The political aspects of mobile phones can't be ignored either, from text message swarms in Korea helping to bring down a government, to the Blairwatch Project in the UK, keeping tabs on politicians who try to avoid the press. (Laughter)And it's just going to get more wild. Pervasive, always-on networks, high quality sound and video, even devices made to be worn instead of carried in the pocket, will transform how we live on a scale that few really appreciate. It's no exaggeration to say that the mobile phone may be among the world's most important technologies. And in this rapidly evolving context, it's possible to imagine a world in which the mobile phone becomes something far more than a medium for social interaction.I've long admired the Witness project, and Peter Gabriel told us more details about it on Wednesday, in his profoundly moving presentation. And I'm just incredibly happy to see the news that Witness is going to be opening up a Web portal to enable users of digital cameras and camera phones to send in their recordings over the Internet, rather than just hand-carrying the videotape. Not only does this add a new and potentially safer avenue for documenting abuses, it opens up the program to the growing global digital generation.Now, imagine a similar model for networking environmentalists. Imagine a Web portal collecting recordings and evidence of what's happening to the planet: putting news and data at the fingertips of people of all kinds, from activists and researchers to businesspeople and political figures. It would highlight the changes that are underway, but would more importantly give voice to the people who are willing to work to see a new world, a better world, come about. It would give everyday citizens a chance to play a role in the protection of the planet. It would be, in essence, an ""Earth Witness"" project. Now, just to be clear, in this talk I'm using the name ""Earth Witness"" as part of the scenario, simply as a shorthand, for what this imaginary project could aspire to, not to piggyback on the wonderful work of the Witness organization. It could just as easily be called, ""Environmental Transparency Project,"" ""Smart Mobs for Natural Security"" — but Earth Witness is a lot easier to say.Now, many of the people who participate in Earth Witness would focus on ecological problems, human-caused or otherwise, especially environmental crimes and significant sources of greenhouse gases and emissions. That's understandable and important. We need better documentation of what's happening to the planet if we're ever going to have a chance of repairing the damage. But the Earth Witness project wouldn't need to be limited to problems. In the best Worldchanging tradition, it might also serve as a showcase for good ideas, successful projects and efforts to make a difference that deserve much more visibility. Earth Witness would show us two worlds: the world we're leaving behind, and the world we're building for generations to come.And what makes this scenario particularly appealing to me is we could do it today. The key components are already widely available. Camera phones, of course, would be fundamental to the project. And for a lot of us, they're as close as we have yet to always-on, widely available information tools. We may not remember to bring our digital cameras with us wherever we go, but very few of us forget our phones. You could even imagine a version of this scenario in which people actually build their own phones. Over the course of last year, open-source hardware hackers have come up with multiple models for usable, Linux-based mobile phones, and the Earth Phone could spin off from this kind of project. At the other end of the network, there'd be a server for people to send photos and messages to, accessible over the Web, combining a photo-sharing service, social networking platforms and a collaborative filtering system. Now, you Web 2.0 folks in the audience know what I'm talking about, but for those of you for whom that last sentence was in a crazy moon language, I mean simply this: the online part of the Earth Witness project would be created by the users, working together and working openly. That's enough right there to start to build a compelling chronicle of what's now happening to our planet, but we could do more.An Earth Witness site could also serve as a collection spot for all sorts of data about conditions around the planet picked up by environmental sensors that attach to your cell phone. Now, you don't see these devices as add-ons for phones yet, but students and engineers around the world have attached atmospheric sensors to bicycles and handheld computers and cheap robots and the backs of pigeons — that being a project that's actually underway right now at U.C. Irvine, using bird-mounted sensors as a way of measuring smog-forming pollution. It's hardly a stretch to imagine putting the same thing on a phone carried by a person. Now, the idea of connecting a sensor to your phone is not new: phone-makers around the world offer phones that sniff for bad breath, or tell you to worry about too much sun exposure. Swedish firm Uppsala Biomedical, more seriously, makes a mobile phone add-on that can process blood tests in the field, uploading the data, displaying the results. Even the Lawrence Livermore National Labs have gotten into the act, designing a prototype phone that has radiation sensors to find dirty bombs.Now, there's an enormous variety of tiny, inexpensive sensors on the market, and you can easily imagine someone putting together a phone that could measure temperature, CO2 or methane levels, the presence of some biotoxins — potentially, in a few years, maybe even H5N1 avian flu virus. You could see that some kind of system like this would actually be a really good fit with Larry Brilliant's InSTEDD project. Now, all of this data could be tagged with geographic information and mashed up with online maps for easy viewing and analysis. And that's worth noting in particular. The impact of open-access online maps over the last year or two has been simply phenomenal. Developers around the world have come up with an amazing variety of ways to layer useful data on top of the maps, from bus routes and crime statistics to the global progress of avian flu. Earth Witness would take this further, linking what you see with what thousands or millions of other people see around the world.It's kind of exciting to think about what might be accomplished if something like this ever existed. We'd have a far better — far better knowledge of what's happening on our planet environmentally than could be gathered with satellites and a handful of government sensor nets alone. It would be a collaborative, bottom-up approach to environmental awareness and protection, able to respond to emerging concerns in a smart mobs kind of way — and if you need greater sensor density, just have more people show up. And most important, you can't ignore how important mobile phones are to global youth. This is a system that could put the next generation at the front lines of gathering environmental data. And as we work to figure out ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate disruption, every little bit of information matters. A system like Earth Witness would be a tool for all of us to participate in the improvement of our knowledge and, ultimately, the improvement of the planet itself.Now, as I suggested at the outset, there are thousands upon thousands of good ideas out there, so why have I spent the bulk of my time telling you about something that doesn't exist? Because this is what tomorrow could look like: bottom-up, technology-enabled global collaboration to handle the biggest crisis our civilization has ever faced. We can save the planet, but we can't do it alone — we need each other. Nobody's going to fix the world for us, but working together, making use of technological innovations and human communities alike, we might just be able to fix it ourselves. We have at our fingertips a cornucopia of compelling models, powerful tools, and innovative ideas that can make a meaningful difference in our planet's future. We don't need to wait for a magic bullet to save us all; we already have an arsenal of solutions just waiting to be used. There's a staggering array of wonders out there, across diverse disciplines, all telling us the same thing: success can be ours if we're willing to try. And as we say at Worldchanging, another world isn't just possible; another world is here. We just need to open our eyes. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamais_cascio_looks_ahead
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"What's happening in genomics, and how this revolution is about to change everything we know about the world, life, ourselves, and how we think about them.If you saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you heard the boom, boom, boom, boom, and you saw the monolith, you know, that was Arthur C. Clarke's representation that we were at a seminal moment in the evolution of our species. In this case, it was picking up bones and creating a tool, using it as a tool, which meant that apes just, sort of, running around and eating and doing each other figured out they can make things if they used a tool. And that moved us to the next level.And, you know, we in the last 30 years in particular have seen this acceleration in knowledge and technology, and technology has bred more knowledge and given us tools. And we've seen many seminal moments. We've seen the creation of small computers in the '70s and early '80s, and who would have thought back then that every single person would not have just one computer but probably 20, in your home, and in not just your P.C. but in every device — in your washing machine, your cell phone. You're walking around; your car has 12 microprocessors. Then we go along and create the Internet and connect the world together; we flatten the world.We've seen so much change, and we've given ourselves these tools now — these high-powered tools — that are allowing us to turn the lens inward into something that is common to all of us, and that is a genome.How's your genome today? Have you thought about it lately? Heard about it, at least? You probably hear about genomes these days.I thought I'd take a moment to tell you what a genome is. It's, sort of, like if you ask people, Well, what is a megabyte or megabit? And what is broadband? People never want to say, I really don't understand. So, I will tell you right off of the bat. You've heard of DNA; you probably studied a little bit in biology. A genome is really a description for  all of the DNA that is in a living organism. And one thing that is common to all of life is DNA. It doesn't matter whether you're a yeast; it doesn't matter whether you're a mouse; doesn't matter whether you're a fly; we all have DNA. The DNA is organized in words, call them: genes and chromosomes.And when Watson and Crick in the '50s first decoded this beautiful double helix that we know as the DNA molecule — very long, complicated molecule — we then started on this journey to understand that inside of that DNA is a language that determines the characteristics, our traits, what we inherit, what diseases we may get. We've also along the way discovered that this is a very old molecule, that all of the DNA in your body has been around forever, since the beginning of us, of us as creatures. There is a historical archive.Living in your genome is the history of our species, and you as an individual human being, where you're from, going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and that's now starting to be understood. But also, the genome is really the instruction manual. It is the program. It is the code of life. It is what makes you function; it is what makes every organism function. DNA is a very elegant molecule. It's long and it's complicated. Really all you have to know about it is that there's four letters: A, T, C, G; they represent the name of a chemical. And with these four letters, you can create a language: a language that can describe anything, and very complicated things. You know, they are generally put together in pairs, creating a word or what we call base pairs. And you would, you know, when you think about it, four letters, or the representation of four things, makes us work.And that may not sound very intuitive, but let me flip over to something else you know about, and that's computers. Look at this screen here and, you know, you see pictures and you see words, but really all there are are ones and zeros. The language of technology is binary; you've probably heard that at some point in time. Everything that happens in digital is converted, or a representation, of a one and a zero. So, when you're listening to iTunes and your favorite music, that's really just a bunch of ones and zeros playing very quickly. When you're seeing these pictures, it's all ones and zeros, and when you're talking on your telephone, your cell phone, and it's going over the network, your voice is all being turned into ones and zeros and magically whizzed around. And look at all the complex things and wonderful things we've been able to create with just a one and a zero.Well, now you ramp that up to four, and you have a lot of complexity, a lot of ways to describe mechanisms. So, let's talk about what that means. So, if you look at a human genome, they consist of 3.2 billion of these base pairs. That's a lot. And they mix up in all different fashions, and that makes you a human being. If you convert that to binary, just to give you a little bit of sizing, we're actually smaller than the program Microsoft Office. It's not really all that much data. I will also tell you we're at least as buggy. (Laughter)This here is a bug in my genome that I have struggled with for a long, long time. When you get sick, it is a bug in your genome. In fact, many, many diseases we have struggled with for a long time, like cancer, we haven't been able to cure because we just don't understand how it works at the genomic level. We are starting to understand that.So, up to this point we tried to fix it by using what I call shit-against-the-wall pharmacology, which means, well, let's just throw chemicals at it, and maybe it's going to make it work. But if you really understand why does a cell go from normal cell to cancer? What is the code? What are the exact instructions that are making it do that? then you can go about the process of trying to fix it and figure it out. So, for your next dinner over a great bottle of wine, here's a few factoids for you.We actually have about 24,000 genes that do things. We have about a hundred, 120,000 others that don't appear to function every day, but represent this archival history of how we used to work as a species going back tens of thousands of years. You might also be interested in knowing that a mouse has about the same amount of genes.They recently sequenced Pinot Noir, and it also has about 30,000 genes, so the number of genes you have may not necessarily represent the complexity or the evolutionary order of any particular species. Now, look around: just look next to your neighbor, look forward, look backward. We all look pretty different. A lot of very handsome and pretty people here, skinny, chubby, different races, cultures. We are all 99.9% genetically equal. It is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us. That's a tiny amount of material, but the way that ultimately expresses itself is what makes changes in humans and in all species.So, we are now able to read genomes. The first human genome took 10 years, three billion dollars. It was done by Dr. Craig Venter. And then James Watson's — one of the co-founders of DNA — genome was done for two million dollars, and in just two months. And if you think about the computer industry and how we've gone from big computers to little ones and how they get more powerful and faster all the time, the same thing is happening with gene sequencing now: we are on the cusp of being able to sequence human genomes for about 5,000 dollars in about an hour or a half-hour; you will see that happen in the next five years.And what that means is, you are going to walk around with your own personal genome on a smart card. It will be here. And when you buy medicine, you won't be buying a drug that's used for everybody. You will give your genome to the pharmacist, and your drug will be made for you and it will work much better than the ones that were — you won't have side effects. All those side effects, you know, oily residue and, you know, whatever they say in those commercials: forget about that. They're going to make all that stuff go away.What does a genome look like? Well, there it is. It is a long, long series of these base pairs. If you saw the genome for a mouse or for a human it would look no different than this, but what scientists are doing now is they're understanding what these do and what they mean. Because what Nature is doing is double-clicking all the time. In other words, the first couple of sentences here, assuming this is a grape plant: make a root, make a branch, create a blossom. In a human being, down in here it could be: make blood cells, start cancer. For me it may be: every calorie you consume, you conserve, because I come from a very cold climate. For my wife: eat three times as much and you never put on any weight. It's all hidden in this code, and it's starting to be understood at breakneck pace.So, what can we do with genomes now that we can read them, now that we're starting to have the book of life? Well, there's many things. Some are exciting. Some people will find very scary. I will tell you a couple of things that will probably make you want to projectile puke on me, but that's okay. So, you know, we now can learn the history of organisms.You can do a very simple test: scrape your cheek; send it off. You can find out where your relatives come from; you can do your genealogy going back thousands of years. We can understand functionality. This is really important. We can understand, for example, why we create plaque in our arteries, what creates the starchiness inside of a grain, why does yeast metabolize sugar and produce carbon dioxide. We can also look at, at a grander scale, what creates problems, what creates disease, and how we may be able to fix them. Because we can understand this, we can fix them, make better organisms.Most importantly, what we're learning is that Nature has provided us a spectacular toolbox. The toolbox exists. An architect far better and smarter than us has given us that toolbox, and we now have the ability to use it. We are now not just reading genomes; we are writing them.This company, Synthetic Genomics, I'm involved with, created the first full synthetic genome for a little bug, a very primitive creature called Mycoplasma genitalium. If you have a UTI, you've probably — or ever had a UTI — you've come in contact with this little bug. Very simple — only has about 246 genes — but we were able to completely synthesize that genome. Now, you have the genome and you say to yourself, So, if I plug this synthetic genome — if I pull the old one out and plug it in — does it just boot up and live? Well, guess what. It does.Not only does it do that; if you took the genome — that synthetic genome — and you plugged it into a different critter, like yeast, you now turn that yeast into Mycoplasma. It's, sort of, like booting up a PC with a Mac O.S. software. Well, actually, you could do it the other way. So, you know, by being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware. And this is extremely profound.So, last year the French and Italians announced they got together and they went ahead and they sequenced Pinot Noir. The genomic sequence now exists for the entire Pinot Noir organism, and they identified, once again, about 29,000 genes. They have discovered pathways that create flavors, although it's very important to understand that those compounds that it's cranking out have to match a receptor in our genome, in our tongue, for us to understand and interpret those flavors.They've also discovered that there's a heck of a lot of activity going on producing aroma as well. They've identified areas of vulnerability to disease. They now are understanding, and the work is going on, exactly how this plant works, and we have the capability to know, to read that entire code and understand how it ticks. So, then what do you do? Knowing that we can read it, knowing that we can write it, change it, maybe write its genome from scratch. So, what do you do? Well, one thing you could do is what some people might call Franken-Noir. (Laughter)We can build a better vine. By the way, just so you know: you get stressed out about genetically modified organisms; there is not one single vine in this valley or anywhere that is not genetically modified. They're not grown from seeds; they're grafted into root stock; they would not exist in nature on their own.So, don't worry about, don't stress about that stuff. We've been doing this forever. So, we could, you know, focus on disease resistance; we can go for higher yields without necessarily having dramatic farming techniques to do it, or costs. We could conceivably expand the climate window: we could make Pinot Noir grow maybe in Long Island, God forbid. (Laughter)We could produce better flavors and aromas. You want a little more raspberry, a little more chocolate here or there? All of these things could conceivably be done, and I will tell you I'd pretty much bet that it will be done. But there's an ecosystem here. In other words, we're not, sort of, unique little organisms running around; we are part of a big ecosystem.In fact — I'm sorry to inform you — that inside of your digestive tract is about 10 pounds of microbes which you're circulating through your body quite a bit. Our ocean's teaming with microbes; in fact, when Craig Venter went and sequenced the microbes in the ocean, in the first three months tripled the known species on the planet by discovering all-new microbes in the first 20 feet of water. We now understand that those microbes have more impact on our climate and regulating CO2 and oxygen than plants do, which we always thought oxygenate the atmosphere.We find microbial life in every part of the planet: in ice, in coal, in rocks, in volcanic vents; it's an amazing thing. But we've also discovered, when it comes to plants, in plants, as much as we understand and are starting to understand their genomes, it is the ecosystem around them, it is the microbes that live in their root systems, that have just as much impact on the character of those plants as the metabolic pathways of the plants themselves.If you take a closer look at a root system, you will find there are many, many, many diverse microbial colonies. This is not big news to viticulturists; they have been, you know, concerned with water and fertilization. And, again, this is, sort of, my notion of shit-against-the-wall pharmacology: you know certain fertilizers make the plant more healthy so you put more in. You don't necessarily know with granularity exactly what organisms are providing what flavors and what characteristics. We can start to figure that out. We all talk about terroir; we worship terroir; we say, Wow, is my terroir great! It's so special. I've got this piece of land and it creates terroir like you wouldn't believe.Well, you know, we really, we argue and debate about it — we say it's climate, it's soil, it's this. Well, guess what? We can figure out what the heck terroir is. It's in there, waiting to be sequenced. There are thousands of microbes there. They're easy to sequence: unlike a human, they, you know, have a thousand, two thousand genes; we can figure out what they are.All we have to do is go around and sample, dig into the ground, find those bugs, sequence them, correlate them to the kinds of characteristics we like and don't like — that's just a big database — and then fertilize. And then we understand what is terroir. So, some people will say, Oh, my God, are we playing God? Are we now, if we engineer organisms, are we playing God? And, you know, people would always ask James Watson — he's not always the most politically correct guy ... (Laughter) ... and they would say, ""Are, you know, are you playing God?"" And he had the best answer I ever heard to this question: ""Well, somebody has to."" (Laughter)I consider myself a very spiritual person, and without, you know, the organized religion part, and I will tell you: I don't believe there's anything unnatural. I don't believe that chemicals are unnatural. I told you I'm going to make some of you puke. It's very simple: we don't invent molecules, compounds. They're here. They're in the universe. We reorganize things, we change them around, but we don't make anything unnatural.Now, we can create bad impacts — we can poison ourselves; we can poison the Earth — but that's just a natural outcome of a mistake we made. So, what's happening today is, Nature is presenting us with a toolbox, and we find that this toolbox is very extensive. There are microbes out there that actually make gasoline, believe it or not. There are microbes, you know — go back to yeast. These are chemical factories; the most sophisticated chemical factories are provided by Nature, and we now can use those. There also is a set of rules.Nature will not allow you to — we could engineer a grape plant, but guess what. We can't make the grape plant produce babies. Nature has put a set of rules out there. We can work within the rules; we can't break the rules; we're just learning what the rules are. I just ask the question, if you could cure all disease — if you could make disease go away, because we understand how it actually works, if we could end hunger by being able to create nutritious, healthy plants that grow in very hard-to-grow environments, if we could create clean and plentiful energy — we, right in the labs at Synthetic Genomics, have single-celled organisms that are taking carbon dioxide and producing a molecule very similar to gasoline. So, carbon dioxide — the stuff we want to get rid of — not sugar, not anything. Carbon dioxide, a little bit of sunlight, you end up with a lipid that is highly refined. We could solve our energy problems; we can reduce CO2,; we could clean up our oceans; we could make better wine. If we could, would we? Well, you know, I think the answer is very simple: working with Nature, working with this tool set that we now understand, is the next step in humankind's evolution.And all I can tell you is, stay healthy for 20 years. If you can stay healthy for 20 years, you'll see 150, maybe 300.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schuler_genomics_101
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"You know, I am so bad at tech that my daughter — who is now 41 — when she was five, was overheard by me to say to a friend of hers, If it doesn't bleed when you cut it, my daddy doesn't understand it. (Laughter) So, the assignment I've been given may be an insuperable obstacle for me, but I'm certainly going to try.What have I heard during these last four days? This is my third visit to TED. One was to TEDMED, and one, as you've heard, was a regular TED two years ago. I've heard what I consider an extraordinary thing that I've only heard a little bit in the two previous TEDs, and what that is is an interweaving and an interlarding, an intermixing, of a sense of social responsibility in so many of the talks — global responsibility, in fact, appealing to enlightened self-interest, but it goes far beyond enlightened self-interest. One of the most impressive things about what some, perhaps 10, of the speakers have been talking about is the realization, as you listen to them carefully, that they're not saying: Well, this is what we should do; this is what I would like you to do. It's: This is what I have done because I'm excited by it, because it's a wonderful thing, and it's done something for me and, of course, it's accomplished a great deal. It's the old concept, the real Greek concept, of philanthropy in its original sense: phil-anthropy, the love of humankind.And the only explanation I can have for some of what you've been hearing in the last four days is that it arises, in fact, out of a form of love. And this gives me enormous hope. And hope, of course, is the topic that I'm supposed to be speaking about, which I'd completely forgotten about until I arrived. And when I did, I thought, well, I'd better look this word up in the dictionary. So, Sarah and I — my wife — walked over to the public library, which is four blocks away, on Pacific Street, and we got the OED, and we looked in there, and there are 14 definitions of hope, none of which really hits you between the eyes as being the appropriate one. And, of course, that makes sense, because hope is an abstract phenomenon; it's an abstract idea, it's not a concrete word.Well, it reminds me a little bit of surgery. If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work. And that's the way it is with definitions of words. If you have appendicitis, they take your appendix out, and you're cured. If you've got reflux oesophagitis, there are 15 procedures, and Joe Schmo does it one way and Will Blow does it another way, and none of them work, and that's the way it is with this word, hope. They all come down to the idea of an expectation of something good that is due to happen. And you know what I found out? The Indo-European root of the word hope is a stem, K-E-U — we would spell it K-E-U; it's pronounced koy — and it is the same root from which the word curve comes from. But what it means in the original Indo-European is a change in direction, going in a different way.And I find that very interesting and very provocative, because what you've been hearing in the last couple of days is the sense of going in different directions: directions that are specific and unique to problems. There are different paradigms. You've heard that word several times in the last four days, and everyone's familiar with Kuhnian paradigms. So, when we think of hope now, we have to think of looking in other directions than we have been looking. There's another — not definition, but description, of hope that has always appealed to me, and it was one by Václav Havel in his perfectly spectacular book ""Breaking the Peace,"" in which he says that hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right, but the expectation that they will make sense regardless of how they come out.I can't tell you how reassured I was by the very last sentence in that glorious presentation by Dean Kamen a few days ago. I wasn't sure I heard it right, so I found him in one of the inter-sessions. He was talking to a very large man, but I didn't care. I interrupted, and I said, ""Did you say this?"" He said, ""I think so."" So, here's what it is: I'll repeat it. ""The world will not be saved by the Internet."" It's wonderful. Do you know what the world will be saved by? I'll tell you. It'll be saved by the human spirit. And by the human spirit, I don't mean anything divine, I don't mean anything supernatural — certainly not coming from this skeptic. What I mean is this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself or himself; to arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something that at the beginning we thought perhaps we were not capable of. On an elemental level, we have all felt that spirituality at the time of childbirth. Some of you have felt it in laboratories; some of you have felt it at the workbench. We feel it at concerts. I've felt it in the operating room, at the bedside. It is an elevation of us beyond ourselves. And I think that it's going to be, in time, the elements of the human spirit that we've been hearing about bit by bit by bit from so many of the speakers in the last few days. And if there's anything that has permeated this room, it is precisely that.I'm intrigued by a concept that was brought to life in the early part of the 19th century — actually, in the second decade of the 19th century — by a 27-year-old poet whose name was Percy Shelley. Now, we all think that Shelley obviously is the great romantic poet that he was; many of us tend to forget that he wrote some perfectly wonderful essays, too, and the most well-remembered essay is one called ""A Defence of Poetry."" Now, it's about five, six, seven, eight pages long, and it gets kind of deep and difficult after about the third page, but somewhere on the second page he begins talking about the notion that he calls ""moral imagination."" And here's what he says, roughly translated: A man — generic man — a man, to be greatly good, must imagine clearly. He must see himself and the world through the eyes of another, and of many others. See himself and the world — not just the world, but see himself.What is it that is expected of us by the billions of people who live in what Laurie Garrett the other day so appropriately called despair and disparity? What is it that they have every right to ask of us? What is it that we have every right to ask of ourselves, out of our shared humanity and out of the human spirit? Well, you know precisely what it is. There's a great deal of argument about whether we, as the great nation that we are, should be the policeman of the world, the world's constabulary, but there should be virtually no argument about whether we should be the world's healer. There has certainly been no argument about that in this room in the past four days.So, if we are to be the world's healer, every disadvantaged person in this world — including in the United States — becomes our patient. Every disadvantaged nation, and perhaps our own nation, becomes our patient. So, it's fun to think about the etymology of the word ""patient."" It comes initially from the Latin patior, to endure, or to suffer. So, you go back to the old Indo-European root again, and what do you find? The Indo-European stem is pronounced payen — we would spell it P-A-E-N — and, lo and behold, mirabile dictu, it is the same root as the word compassion comes from, P-A-E-N.So, the lesson is very clear. The lesson is that our patient — the world, and the disadvantaged of the world — that patient deserves our compassion. But beyond our compassion, and far greater than compassion, is our moral imagination and our identification with each individual who lives in that world, not to think of them as a huge forest, but as individual trees. Of course, in this day and age, the trick is not to let each tree be obscured by that Bush in Washington that can get — can get in the way. (Laughter) So, here we are. We are, should be, morally committed to being the healer of the world. And we have had examples over and over and over again — you've just heard one in the last 15 minutes — of people who have not only had that commitment, but had the charisma, the brilliance — and I think in this room it's easy to use the word brilliant, my God — the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning of their quest, and who no doubt will continue to succeed, as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves in their cause.Now, if we're talking about medicine, and we're talking about healing, I'd like to quote someone who hasn't been quoted. It seems to me everybody in the world's been quoted here: Pogo's been quoted; Shakespeare's been quoted backwards, forwards, inside out. I would like to quote one of my own household gods. I suspect he never really said this, because we don't know what Hippocrates really said, but we do know for sure that one of the great Greek physicians said the following, and it has been recorded in one of the books attributed to Hippocrates, and the book is called ""Precepts."" And I'll read you what it is. Remember, I have been talking about, essentially philanthropy: the love of humankind, the individual humankind and the individual humankind that can bring that kind of love translated into action, translated, in some cases, into enlightened self-interest. And here he is, 2,400 years ago: ""Where there is love of humankind, there is love of healing."" We have seen that here today with the sense, with the sensitivity — and in the last three days, and with the power of the indomitable human spirit. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_hope
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"I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the air force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm. Now, that was before cassette tapes, C.D.s, DVDs — any of the cool stuff we've got now. And it was an arm that, instead of hinging and pivoting as it went across the record, went straight: a radial, linear tracking tone arm. And it was the hardest invention I ever made, but it got me started, and I got really lucky after that.And without giving you too much of a tirade, I want to talk to you about an invention I brought with me today: my 44th invention. No, that's not true either. Golly, I'm just totally losing it. My 44th patent; about the 15th invention. I call this hypersonic sound. I'm going to play it for you in a couple minutes, but I want to make an analogy before I do to this. I usually show this hypersonic sound and people will say, That's really cool, but what's it good for? And I say, What is the light bulb good for? Sound, light: I'm going to draw the analogy. When Edison invented the light bulb, pretty much looked like this. Hasn't changed that much. Light came out of it in every direction. Before the light bulb was invented, people had figured out how to put a reflector behind it, focus it a little bit; put lenses in front of it, focus it a little bit better. Ultimately we figured out how to make things like lasers that were totally focused.Now, think about where the world would be today if we had the light bulb, but you couldn't focus light; if when you turned one on it just went wherever it wanted to. That's the way loudspeakers pretty much are. You turn on the loudspeaker, and after almost 80 years of having those gadgets, the sound just kind of goes where it wants. Even when you're standing in front of a megaphone, it's pretty much every direction. A little bit of differential, but not much. If the light bulb was the way the speaker is, and you couldn't focus or sharpen the edges or define it, we wouldn't have that, or movies in general, or computers, or T.V. sets, or C.D.s, or DVDs — and just go down the list of what the importance is of being able to focus light.Now, after almost 80 years of having sound, I thought it was about time that we figure out a way to put sound where you want to. I have a couple of units. That guy there was made for a demo I did yesterday early in the day for a big car maker in Detroit who wants to put them in a car — small version, over your head — so that you can actually get binaural sound in a car. What if I could aim sound the way I aim light?I got this waterfall I recorded in my back yard. Now, you're not going to hear a thing unless it hits you. Maybe if I hit the side wall it will bounce around the room. (Applause) The sound is being made right next to your ears. Is that cool? (Applause) Because I have some limited time, I'll cut it off for a second, and tell you about how it works and what it's good for.Course, like light, it's great to be able to put sound to highlight a clothing rack, or the cornflakes, or the toothpaste, or a talking plaque in a movie theater lobby. Sony's got an idea — Sony's our biggest customers right now. They tried this back in the '60s and were too smart, and so they gave up. But they want to use it — seriously. There's a mix an inventor has to have. You have to be kind of smart, and though I did not graduate from college doesn't mean I'm stupid, because you cannot be stupid and do very much in the world today. Too many other smart people out there. So. I just happened to get my education in a little different way. I'm not at all against education. I think it's wonderful; I think sometimes people, when they get educated, lose it: they get so smart they're unwilling to look at things that they know better than. And we're living in a great time right now, because almost everything's being explored anew. I have this little slogan that I use a lot, which is: virtually nothing — and I mean this honestly — has been invented yet. We're just starting. We're just starting to really discover the laws of nature and science and physics. And this is, I hope, a little piece of it.Sony's got this vision back — to get myself on track — that when you stand in the checkout line in the supermarket, you're going to watch a new T.V. channel. They know that when you watch T.V. at home, because there are so many choices you can change channels, miss their commercials. A hundred and fifty-one million people every day stand in the line at the supermarket. Now, they've tried this a couple years ago and it failed, because the checker gets tired of hearing the same message every 20 minutes, and reaches out, turns off the sound. And, you know, if the sound isn't there, the sale typically isn't made. For instance, like, when you're on an airplane, they show the movie, you get to watch it for free; when you want to hear the sound, you pay. And so ABC and Sony have devised this new thing where when you step in the line in the supermarket — initially it'll be Safeways. It is Safeways; they're trying this in three parts of the country right now — you'll be watching TV.And hopefully they'll be sensitive that they don't want to offend you with just one more outlet. But what's great about it, from the tests that have been done, is, if you don't want to hear it, you take about one step to the side and you don't hear it. So, we create silence as much as we create sound. ATMs that talk to you; nobody else hears it. Sit in bed, two in the morning, watch TV; your spouse, or someone, is next to you, asleep; doesn't hear it, doesn't wake up. We're also working on noise canceling things like snoring, noise from automobiles.I have been really lucky with this technology: all of a sudden as it is ready, the world is ready to accept it. They have literally beat a path to our door. We've been selling it since about last September, October, and it's been immensely gratifying. If you're interested in what it costs — I'm not selling them today — but this unit, with the electronics and everything, if you buy one, is around a thousand bucks. We expect by this time next year, it'll be hundreds, a few hundred bucks, to buy it. It's not any more pricey than regular electronics.Now, when I played it for you, you didn't hear the thunderous bass. This unit that I played goes from about 200 hertz to above the range of hearing. It's actually emitting ultrasound — low-level ultrasound — that's about 100,000 vibrations per second. And the sound that you're hearing, unlike a regular speaker on which all the sound is made on the face, is made out in front of it, in the air. The air is not linear, as we've always been taught. You turn up the volume just a little bit — I'm talking about a little over 80 decibels — and all of a sudden the air begins to corrupt signals you propagate. Here's why: the speed of sound is not a constant. It's fairly slow. It changes with temperature and with barometric pressure.Now, imagine, if you will, without getting too technical, I'm making a little sine wave here in the air. Well, if I turn up the amplitude too much, I'm having an effect on the pressure, which means during the making of that sine wave, the speed at which it is propagating is shifting. All of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear. Linearity means higher quality sound. Hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite: it's 100 percent based on non-linearity. An effect happens in the air, it's a corrupting effect of the sound — the ultrasound in this case — that's emitted, but it's so predictable that you can produce very precise audio out of that effect.Now, the question is, where's the sound made? Instead of being made on the face of the cone, it's made at literally billions of little independent points along this narrow column in the air, and so when I aim it towards you, what you hear is made right next to your ears. I said we can shorten the column, we can spread it out to cover the couch. I can put it so that one ear hears one speaker, the other ear hears the other. That's true binaural sound. When you listen to stereo on your home system, your both ears hear both speakers. Turn on the left speaker sometime and notice you're hearing it also in your right ear. So, the stage is more restricted — the sound stage that's supposed to spread out in front of you. Because the sound is made in the air along this column, it does not follow the inverse square law, which says it drops off about two thirds every time you double the distance: 6dB every time you go from one meter, for instance, to two meters. That means you go to a rock concert or a symphony, and the guy in the front row gets the same level as the guy in the back row, now, all of a sudden. Isn't that terrific?So, we've been, as I say, very successful, very lucky, in having companies catch the vision of this, from cars — car makers who want to put a stereo system in the front for the kids, and a separate system in the back — oh, no, the kids aren't driving today. (Laughter) I was seeing if you were listening. Actually, I haven't had breakfast yet. A stereo system in the front for mom and dad, and maybe there's a little DVD player in the back for the kids, and the parents don't want to be bothered with that, or their rap music or whatever. So, again, this idea of being able to put sound anywhere you want to is really starting to catch on. It also works for transmitting and communicating data. It also works five times better underwater.We've got the military — have just deployed some of these into Iraq, where you can put fake troop movements quarter of a mile away on a hillside. (Laughter) Or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist some Biblical verse. (Laughter) I'm serious. And they have these infrared devices that can look at their countenance, and see a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature shift from 100 yards away when they play this thing. And so, another way of hopefully determining who's friendly and who isn't. We make a version with this which puts out 155 decibels. Pain is 120. So it allows you to go nearly a mile away and communicate with people, and there can be a public beach just off to the side, and they don't even know it's turned on. We sell those to the military presently for about 70,000 dollars, and they're buying them as fast as we can make them. We put it on a turret with a camera, so that when they shoot at you, you're over there, and it's there.I have a bunch of other inventions. I invented a plasma antenna, to shift gears. Looked up at the ceiling of my office one day — I was working on a ground-penetrating radar project — and my physicist CEO came in and said, ""We have a real problem. We're using very short wavelengths. We've got a problem with the antenna ringing. When you run very short wavelengths, like a tuning fork the antenna resonates, and there's more energy coming out of the antenna than there is the backscatter from the ground that we're trying to analyze, taking too much processing."" I says, ""Why don't we make an antenna that only exists when you want it? Turn it on; turn it off. That's a fluorescent tube refined."" I just sold that for a million and a half dollars, cash. I took it back to the Pentagon after it got declassified, when the patent issued, and told the people back there about it, and they laughed, and then I took them back a demo and they bought. (Laughter)Any of you ever wore a Jabber headphone — the little cell headphones? That's my invention. I sold that for seven million dollars. Big mistake: it just sold for 80 million dollars two years ago. I actually drew that up on a little crummy Mac computer in my attic at my house, and one of the many designs which they have now is still the same design I drew way back when.So, I've been really lucky as an inventor. I'm the happiest guy you're ever going to meet. And my dad died before he realized anybody in the family would maybe, hopefully, make something out of themselves. You've been a great audience. I know I've jumped all over the place. I usually figure out what my talk is when I get up in front of a group.Let me give you, in the last minute, one more quick demo of this guy, for those of you that haven't heard it. Can never tell if it's on. If you haven't heard it, raise your hand. Getting it over there? Get the cameraman. Yeah, there you go. I've got a Coke can opening that's right in your head; that's really cool. Thank you once again. Appreciate it very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/woody_norris_invents_amazing_things
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"So, I want to start out with this beautiful picture from my childhood. I love the science fiction movies. Here it is: ""This Island Earth."" And leave it to Hollywood to get it just right. Two-and-a-half years in the making. (Laughter) I mean, even the creationists give us 6,000, but Hollywood goes to the chase. And in this movie, we see what we think is out there: flying saucers and aliens. Every world has an alien, and every alien world has a flying saucer, and they move about with great speed. Aliens.Well, Don Brownlee, my friend, and I finally got to the point where we got tired of turning on the TV and seeing the spaceships and seeing the aliens every night, and tried to write a counter-argument to it, and put out what does it really take for an Earth to be habitable, for a planet to be an Earth, to have a place where you could probably get not just life, but complexity, which requires a huge amount of evolution, and therefore constancy of conditions. So, in 2000 we wrote ""Rare Earth."" In 2003, we then asked, let's not think about where Earths are in space, but how long has Earth been Earth? If you go back two billion years, you're not on an Earth-like planet any more. What we call an Earth-like planet is actually a very short interval of time.Well, ""Rare Earth"" actually taught me an awful lot about meeting the public. Right after, I got an invitation to go to a science fiction convention, and with all great earnestness walked in. David Brin was going to debate me on this, and as I walked in, the crowd of a hundred started booing lustily. I had a girl who came up who said, ""My dad says you're the devil."" You cannot take people's aliens away from them and expect to be anybody's friends. Well, the second part of that, soon after — and I was talking to Paul Allen; I saw him in the audience, and I handed him a copy of ""Rare Earth."" And Jill Tarter was there, and she turned to me, and she looked at me just like that girl in ""The Exorcist."" It was, ""It burns! It burns!"" Because SETI doesn't want to hear this. SETI wants there to be stuff out there. I really applaud the SETI efforts, but we have not heard anything yet. And I really do think we have to start thinking about what's a good planet and what isn't.Now, I throw this slide up because it indicates to me that, even if SETI does hear something, can we figure out what they said? Because this was a slide that was passed between the two major intelligences on Earth — a Mac to a PC — and it can't even get the letters right — (Laughter) — so how are we going to talk to the aliens? And if they're 50 light years away, and we call them up, and you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then 50 years later it comes back and they say, Please repeat? I mean, there we are.Our planet is a good planet because it can keep water. Mars is a bad planet, but it's still good enough for us to go there and to live on its surface if we're protected. But Venus is a very bad — the worst — planet. Even though it's Earth-like, and even though early in its history it may very well have harbored Earth-like life, it soon succumbed to runaway greenhouse — that's an 800 degrees [Fahrenheit] surface — because of rampant carbon dioxide.Well, we know from astrobiology that we can really now predict what's going to happen to our particular planet. We are right now in the beautiful Oreo of existence — of at least life on Planet Earth — following the first horrible microbial age. In the Cambrian explosion, life emerged from the swamps, complexity arose, and from what we can tell, we're halfway through. We have as much time for animals to exist on this planet as they have been here now, till we hit the second microbial age. And that will happen, paradoxically — everything you hear about global warming — when we hit CO2 down to 10 parts per million, we are no longer going to have to have plants that are allowed to have any photosynthesis, and there go animals. So, after that we probably have seven billion years. The Sun increases in its intensity, in its brightness, and finally, at about 12 billion years after it first started, the Earth is consumed by a large Sun, and this is what's left. So, a planet like us is going to have an age and an old age, and we are in its golden summer age right now.But there's two fates to everything, isn't there? Now, a lot of you are going to die of old age, but some of you, horribly enough, are going to die in an accident. And that's the fate of a planet, too. Earth, if we're lucky enough — if it doesn't get hit by a Hale-Bopp, or gets blasted by some supernova nearby in the next seven billion years — we'll find under your feet. But what about accidental death? Well, paleontologists for the last 200 years have been charting death. It's strange — extinction as a concept wasn't even thought about until Baron Cuvier in France found this first mastodon. He couldn't match it up to any bones on the planet, and he said, Aha! It's extinct. And very soon after, the fossil record started yielding a very good idea of how many plants and animals there have been since complex life really began to leave a very interesting fossil record. In that complex record of fossils, there were times when lots of stuff seemed to be dying out very quickly, and the father/mother geologists called these ""mass extinctions.""All along it was thought to be either an act of God or perhaps long, slow climate change, and that really changed in 1980, in this rocky outcrop near Gubbio, where Walter Alvarez, trying to figure out what was the time difference between these white rocks, which held creatures of the Cretaceous period, and the pink rocks above, which held Tertiary fossils. How long did it take to go from one system to the next? And what they found was something unexpected. They found in this gap, in between, a very thin clay layer, and that clay layer — this very thin red layer here — is filled with iridium. And not just iridium; it's filled with glassy spherules, and it's filled with quartz grains that have been subjected to enormous pressure: shock quartz.Now, in this slide the white is chalk, and this chalk was deposited in a warm ocean. The chalk itself's composed by plankton which has fallen down from the sea surface onto the sea floor, so that 90 percent of the sediment here is skeleton of living stuff, and then you have that millimeter-thick red layer, and then you have black rock. And the black rock is the sediment on the sea bottom in the absence of plankton. And that's what happens in an asteroid catastrophe, because that's what this was, of course. This is the famous K-T. A 10-kilometer body hit the planet. The effects of it spread this very thin impact layer all over the planet, and we had very quickly the death of the dinosaurs, the death of these beautiful ammonites, Leconteiceras here, and Celaeceras over here, and so much else.I mean, it must be true, because we've had two Hollywood blockbusters since that time, and this paradigm, from 1980 to about 2000, totally changed how we geologists thought about catastrophes. Prior to that, uniformitarianism was the dominant paradigm: the fact that if anything happens on the planet in the past, there are present-day processes that will explain it. But we haven't witnessed a big asteroid impact, so this is a type of neo-catastrophism, and it took about 20 years for the scientific establishment to finally come to grips: yes, we were hit; and yes, the effects of that hit caused a major mass extinction.Well, there are five major mass extinctions over the last 500 million years, called the Big Five. They range from 450 million years ago to the last, the K-T, number four, but the biggest of all was the P, or the Permian extinction, sometimes called the mother of all mass extinctions. And every one of these has been subsequently blamed on large-body impact. But is this true?The most recent, the Permian, was thought to have been an impact because of this beautiful structure on the right. This is a Buckminsterfullerene, a carbon-60. Because it looks like those terrible geodesic domes of my late beloved '60s, they're called ""buckyballs."" This evidence was used to suggest that at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, a comet hit us. And when the comet hits, the pressure produces the buckyballs, and it captures bits of the comet. Helium-3: very rare on the surface of the Earth, very common in space.But is this true? In 1990, working on the K-T extinction for 10 years, I moved to South Africa to begin work twice a year in the great Karoo desert. I was so lucky to watch the change of that South Africa into the new South Africa as I went year by year. And I worked on this Permian extinction, camping by this Boer graveyard for months at a time. And the fossils are extraordinary. You know, you're gazing upon your very distant ancestors. These are mammal-like reptiles. They are culturally invisible. We do not make movies about these. This is a Gorgonopsian, or a Gorgon. That's an 18-inch long skull of an animal that was probably seven or eight feet, sprawled like a lizard, probably had a head like a lion. This is the top carnivore, the T-Rex of its time. But there's lots of stuff. This is my poor son, Patrick. (Laughter) This is called paleontological child abuse. Hold still, you're the scale. (Laughter)There was big stuff back then. Fifty-five species of mammal-like reptiles. The age of mammals had well and truly started 250 million years ago ... ... and then a catastrophe happened. And what happens next is the age of dinosaurs. It was all a mistake; it should have never happened. But it did. Now, luckily, this Thrinaxodon, the size of a robin egg here: this is a skull I've discovered just before taking this picture — there's a pen for scale; it's really tiny — this is in the Lower Triassic, after the mass extinction has finished. You can see the eye socket and you can see the little teeth in the front. If that does not survive, I'm not the thing giving this talk. Something else is, because if that doesn't survive, we are not here; there are no mammals. It's that close; one species ekes through.Well, can we say anything about the pattern of who survives and who doesn't? Here's sort of the end of that 10 years of work. The ranges of stuff — the red line is the mass extinction. But we've got survivors and things that get through, and it turns out the things that get through preferentially are cold bloods. Warm-blooded animals take a huge hit at this time. The survivors that do get through produce this world of crocodile-like creatures. There's no dinosaurs yet; just this slow, saurian, scaly, nasty, swampy place with a couple of tiny mammals hiding in the fringes. And there they would hide for 160 million years, until liberated by that K-T asteroid.So, if not impact, what? And the what, I think, is that we returned, over and over again, to the Pre-Cambrian world, that first microbial age, and the microbes are still out there. They hate we animals. They really want their world back. And they've tried over and over and over again. This suggests to me that life causing these mass extinctions because it did is inherently anti-Gaian. This whole Gaia idea, that life makes the world better for itself — anybody been on a freeway on a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles believing in the Gaia theory? No.So, I really suspect there's an alternative, and that life does actually try to do itself in — not consciously, but just because it does. And here's the weapon, it seems, that it did so over the last 500 million years. There are microbes which, through their metabolism, produce hydrogen sulfide, and they do so in large amounts. Hydrogen sulfide is very fatal to we humans. As small as 200 parts per million will kill you. You only have to go to the Black Sea and a few other places — some lakes — and get down, and you'll find that the water itself turns purple. It turns purple from the presence of numerous microbes which have to have sunlight and have to have hydrogen sulfide, and we can detect their presence today — we can see them — but we can also detect their presence in the past.And the last three years have seen an enormous breakthrough in a brand-new field. I am almost extinct — I'm a paleontologist who collects fossils. But the new wave of paleontologists — my graduate students — collect biomarkers. They take the sediment itself, they extract the oil from it, and from that they can produce compounds which turn out to be very specific to particular microbial groups. It's because lipids are so tough, they can get preserved in sediment and last the hundreds of millions of years necessary, and be extracted and tell us who was there.And we know who was there. At the end of the Permian, at many of these mass extinction boundaries, this is what we find: isorenieratene. It's very specific. It can only occur if the surface of the ocean has no oxygen, and is totally saturated with hydrogen sulfide — enough, for instance, to come out of solution. This led Lee Kump, and others from Penn State and my group, to propose what I call the Kump Hypothesis: many of the mass extinctions were caused by lowering oxygen, by high CO2. And the worst effect of global warming, it turns out: hydrogen sulfide being produced out of the oceans.Well, what's the source of this? In this particular case, the source over and over has been flood basalts. This is a view of the Earth now, if we extract a lot of it. And each of these looks like a hydrogen bomb; actually, the effects are even worse. This is when deep-Earth material comes to the surface, spreads out over the surface of the planet. Well, it's not the lava that kills anything, it's the carbon dioxide that comes out with it. This isn't Volvos; this is volcanoes. But carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide.So, these are new data Rob Berner and I — from Yale — put together, and what we try to do now is track the amount of carbon dioxide in the entire rock record — and we can do this from a variety of means — and put all the red lines here, when these — what I call greenhouse mass extinctions — took place. And there's two things that are really evident here to me, is that these extinctions take place when CO2 is going up. But the second thing that's not shown on here: the Earth has never had any ice on it when we've had 1,000 parts per million CO2. We are at 380 and climbing. We should be up to a thousand in three centuries at the most, but my friend David Battisti in Seattle says he thinks a 100 years. So, there goes the ice caps, and there comes 240 feet of sea level rise. I live in a view house now; I'm going to have waterfront.All right, what's the consequence? The oceans probably turn purple. And we think this is the reason that complexity took so long to take place on planet Earth. We had these hydrogen sulfide oceans for a very great long period. They stop complex life from existing. We know hydrogen sulfide is erupting presently a few places on the planet. And I throw this slide in — this is me, actually, two months ago — and I throw this slide in because here is my favorite animal, chambered nautilus. It's been on this planet since the animals first started — 500 million years. This is a tracking experiment, and any of you scuba divers, if you want to get involved in one of the coolest projects ever, this is off the Great Barrier Reef. And as we speak now, these nautilus are tracking out their behaviors to us.But the thing about this is that every once in a while we divers can run into trouble, so I'm going to do a little thought experiment here. This is a Great White Shark that ate some of my traps. We pulled it up; up it comes. So, it's out there with me at night. So, I'm swimming along, and it takes off my leg. I'm 80 miles from shore, what's going to happen to me? Well now, I die. Five years from now, this is what I hope happens to me: I'm taken back to the boat, I'm given a gas mask: 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide. I'm then thrown in an ice pond, I'm cooled 15 degrees lower and I could be taken to a critical care hospital. And the reason I could do that is because we mammals have gone through a series of these hydrogen sulfide events, and our bodies have adapted. And we can now use this as what I think will be a major medical breakthrough.This is Mark Roth. He was funded by DARPA. Tried to figure out how to save Americans after battlefield injuries. He bleeds out pigs. He puts in 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide — the same stuff that survived these past mass extinctions — and he turns a mammal into a reptile. ""I believe we are seeing in this response the result of mammals and reptiles having undergone a series of exposures to H2S."" I got this email from him two years ago; he said, ""I think I've got an answer to some of your questions."" So, he now has taken mice down for as many as four hours, sometimes six hours, and these are brand-new data he sent me on the way over here. On the top, now, that is a temperature record of a mouse who has gone through — the dotted line, the temperatures. So, the temperature starts at 25 centigrade, and down it goes, down it goes. Six hours later, up goes the temperature. Now, the same mouse is given 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide in this solid graph, and look what happens to its temperature. Its temperature drops. It goes down to 15 degrees centigrade from 35, and comes out of this perfectly fine.Here is a way we can get people to critical care. Here's how we can bring people cold enough to last till we get critical care. Now, you're all thinking, yeah, what about the brain tissue? And so this is one of the great challenges that is going to happen. You're in an accident. You've got two choices: you're going to die, or you're going to take the hydrogen sulfide and, say, 75 percent of you is saved, mentally. What are you going to do? Do we all have to have a little button saying, Let me die? This is coming towards us, and I think this is going to be a revolution. We're going to save lives, but there's going to be a cost to it.The new view of mass extinctions is, yes, we were hit, and, yes, we have to think about the long term, because we will get hit again. But there's a far worse danger confronting us. We can easily go back to the hydrogen sulfide world. Give us a few millennia — and we humans should last those few millennia — will it happen again? If we continue, it'll happen again. How many of us flew here? How many of us have gone through our entire Kyoto quota just for flying this year? How many of you have exceeded it? Yeah, I've certainly exceeded it. We have a huge problem facing us as a species. We have to beat this. I want to be able to go back to this reef. Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: I've just got one question for you, Peter. Am I understanding you right, that what you're saying here is that we have in our own bodies a biochemical response to hydrogen sulfide that in your mind proves that there have been past mass extinctions due to climate change?Peter Ward: Yeah, every single cell in us can produce minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide in great crises. This is what Roth has found out. So, what we're looking at now: does it leave a signal? Does it leave a signal in bone or in plant? And we go back to the fossil record and we could try to detect how many of these have happened in the past.CA: It's simultaneously an incredible medical technique, but also a terrifying ...PW: Blessing and curse.","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_mass_extinctions
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"Sheryl Shade: Hi, Aimee. Aimee Mullins: Hi.SS: Aimee and I thought we'd just talk a little bit, and I wanted her to tell all of you what makes her a distinctive athlete.AM: Well, for those of you who have seen the picture in the little bio — it might have given it away — I'm a double amputee, and I was born without fibulas in both legs. I was amputated at age one, and I've been running like hell ever since, all over the place.SS: Well, why don't you tell them how you got to Georgetown — why don't we start there? Why don't we start there?AM: I'm a senior in Georgetown in the Foreign Service program. I won a full academic scholarship out of high school. They pick three students out of the nation every year to get involved in international affairs, and so I won a full ride to Georgetown and I've been there for four years. Love it.SS: When Aimee got there, she decided that she's, kind of, curious about track and field, so she decided to call someone and start asking about it. So, why don't you tell that story?AM: Yeah. Well, I guess I've always been involved in sports. I played softball for five years growing up. I skied competitively throughout high school, and I got a little restless in college because I wasn't doing anything for about a year or two sports-wise. And I'd never competed on a disabled level, you know — I'd always competed against other able-bodied athletes. That's all I'd ever known. In fact, I'd never even met another amputee until I was 17. And I heard that they do these track meets with all disabled runners, and I figured, ""Oh, I don't know about this, but before I judge it, let me go see what it's all about."" So, I booked myself a flight to Boston in '95, 19 years old and definitely the dark horse candidate at this race. I'd never done it before. I went out on a gravel track a couple of weeks before this meet to see how far I could run, and about 50 meters was enough for me, panting and heaving. And I had these legs that were made of a wood and plastic compound, attached with Velcro straps — big, thick, five-ply wool socks on — you know, not the most comfortable things, but all I'd ever known.And I'm up there in Boston against people wearing legs made of all things — carbon graphite and, you know, shock absorbers in them and all sorts of things — and they're all looking at me like, OK, we know who's not going to win this race. And, I mean, I went up there expecting — I don't know what I was expecting — but, you know, when I saw a man who was missing an entire leg go up to the high jump, hop on one leg to the high jump and clear it at six feet, two inches ... Dan O'Brien jumped 5'11"" in '96 in Atlanta, I mean, if it just gives you a comparison of — these are truly accomplished athletes, without qualifying that word ""athlete."" And so I decided to give this a shot: heart pounding, I ran my first race and I beat the national record-holder by three hundredths of a second, and became the new national record-holder on my first try out.And, you know, people said, ""Aimee, you know, you've got speed — you've got natural speed — but you don't have any skill or finesse going down that track. You were all over the place. We all saw how hard you were working."" And so I decided to call the track coach at Georgetown. And I thank god I didn't know just how huge this man is in the track and field world. He's coached five Olympians, and the man's office is lined from floor to ceiling with All America certificates of all these athletes he's coached. He's just a rather intimidating figure. And I called him up and said, ""Listen, I ran one race and I won ...""(Laughter)""I want to see if I can, you know — I need to just see if I can sit in on some of your practices, see what drills you do and whatever."" That's all I wanted — just two practices. ""Can I just sit in and see what you do?"" And he said, ""Well, we should meet first, before we decide anything."" You know, he's thinking, ""What am I getting myself into?"" So, I met the man, walked in his office, and saw these posters and magazine covers of people he has coached. And we got to talking, and it turned out to be a great partnership because he'd never coached a disabled athlete, so therefore he had no preconceived notions of what I was or wasn't capable of, and I'd never been coached before. So this was like, ""Here we go — let's start on this trip.""So he started giving me four days a week of his lunch break, his free time, and I would come up to the track and train with him. So that's how I met Frank. That was fall of '95. But then, by the time that winter was rolling around, he said, ""You know, you're good enough. You can run on our women's track team here."" And I said, ""No, come on."" And he said, ""No, no, really. You can. You can run with our women's track team."" In the spring of 1996, with my goal of making the U.S. Paralympic team that May coming up full speed, I joined the women's track team. And no disabled person had ever done that — run at a collegiate level. So I don't know, it started to become an interesting mix.SS: Well, on your way to the Olympics, a couple of memorable events happened at Georgetown. Why don't you just tell them? AM: Yes, well, you know, I'd won everything as far as the disabled meets — everything I competed in — and, you know, training in Georgetown and knowing that I was going to have to get used to seeing the backs of all these women's shirts — you know, I'm running against the next Flo-Jo — and they're all looking at me like, ""Hmm, what's, you know, what's going on here?"" And putting on my Georgetown uniform and going out there and knowing that, you know, in order to become better — and I'm already the best in the country — you know, you have to train with people who are inherently better than you.And I went out there and made it to the Big East, which was sort of the championship race at the end of the season. It was really, really hot. And it's the first — I had just gotten these new sprinting legs that you see in that bio, and I didn't realize at that time that the amount of sweating I would be doing in the sock — it actually acted like a lubricant and I'd be, kind of, pistoning in the socket. And at about 85 meters of my 100 meters sprint, in all my glory, I came out of my leg. Like, I almost came out of it, in front of, like, 5,000 people. And I, I mean, was just mortified — because I was signed up for the 200, you know, which went off in a half hour.(Laughter)I went to my coach: ""Please, don't make me do this."" I can't do this in front of all those people. My legs will come off. And if it came off at 85 there's no way I'm going 200 meters. And he just sat there like this. My pleas fell on deaf ears, thank god. Because you know, the man is from Brooklyn; he's a big man. He says, ""Aimee, so what if your leg falls off? You pick it up, you put the damn thing back on, and finish the goddamn race!""(Laughter) (Applause) And I did. So, he kept me in line. He kept me on the right track.SS: So, then Aimee makes it to the 1996 Paralympics, and she's all excited. Her family's coming down — it's a big deal. It's now two years that you've been running?AM: No, a year.SS: A year. And why don't you tell them what happened right before you go run your race?AM: Okay, well, Atlanta. The Paralympics, just for a little bit of clarification, are the Olympics for people with physical disabilities — amputees, persons with cerebral palsy, and wheelchair athletes — as opposed to the Special Olympics, which deals with people with mental disabilities. So, here we are, a week after the Olympics and down at Atlanta, and I'm just blown away by the fact that just a year ago, I got out on a gravel track and couldn't run 50 meters. And so, here I am — never lost. I set new records at the U.S. Nationals — the Olympic trials — that May, and was sure that I was coming home with the gold. I was also the only, what they call ""bilateral BK"" — below the knee. I was the only woman who would be doing the long jump. I had just done the long jump, and a guy who was missing two legs came up to me and says, ""How do you do that? You know, we're supposed to have a planar foot, so we can't get off on the springboard."" I said, ""Well, I just did it. No one told me that.""So, it's funny — I'm three inches within the world record — and kept on from that point, you know, so I'm signed up in the long jump — signed up? No, I made it for the long jump and the 100-meter. And I'm sure of it, you know? I made the front page of my hometown paper that I delivered for six years, you know? It was, like, this is my time for shine. And we're at the trainee warm-up track, which is a few blocks away from the Olympic stadium. These legs that I was on, which I'll take out right now — I was the first person in the world on these legs. I was the guinea pig., I'm telling you, this was, like — talk about a tourist attraction.Everyone was taking pictures — ""What is this girl running on?"" And I'm always looking around, like, where is my competition? It's my first international meet. I tried to get it out of anybody I could, you know, ""Who am I running against here?"" ""Oh, Aimee, we'll have to get back to you on that one."" I wanted to find out times. ""Don't worry, you're doing great."" This is 20 minutes before my race in the Olympic stadium, and they post the heat sheets. And I go over and look. And my fastest time, which was the world record, was 15.77. Then I'm looking: the next lane, lane two, is 12.8. Lane three is 12.5. Lane four is 12.2. I said, ""What's going on?"" And they shove us all into the shuttle bus, and all the women there are missing a hand.(Laughter)So, I'm just, like — they're all looking at me like 'which one of these is not like the other,' you know? I'm sitting there, like, ""Oh, my god. Oh, my god."" You know, I'd never lost anything, like, whether it would be the scholarship or, you know, I'd won five golds when I skied. In everything, I came in first. And Georgetown — that was great. I was losing, but it was the best training because this was Atlanta. Here we are, like, crème de la crème, and there is no doubt about it, that I'm going to lose big. And, you know, I'm just thinking, ""Oh, my god, my whole family got in a van and drove down here from Pennsylvania."" And, you know, I was the only female U.S. sprinter. So they call us out and, you know — ""Ladies, you have one minute."" And I remember putting my blocks in and just feeling horrified because there was just this murmur coming over the crowd, like, the ones who are close enough to the starting line to see. And I'm like, ""I know! Look! This isn't right."" And I'm thinking that's my last card to play here; if I'm not going to beat these girls, I'm going to mess their heads a little, you know?(Laughter)I mean, it was definitely the ""Rocky IV"" sensation of me versus Germany, and everyone else — Estonia and Poland — was in this heat. And the gun went off, and all I remember was finishing last and fighting back tears of frustration and incredible — incredible — this feeling of just being overwhelmed. And I had to think, ""Why did I do this?"" If I had won everything — but it was like, what was the point? All this training — I had transformed my life. I became a collegiate athlete, you know. I became an Olympic athlete. And it made me really think about how the achievement was getting there. I mean, the fact that I set my sights, just a year and three months before, on becoming an Olympic athlete and saying, ""Here's my life going in this direction — and I want to take it here for a while, and just seeing how far I could push it.""And the fact that I asked for help — how many people jumped on board? How many people gave of their time and their expertise, and their patience, to deal with me? And that was this collective glory — that there was, you know, 50 people behind me that had joined in this incredible experience of going to Atlanta. So, I apply this sort of philosophy now to everything I do: sitting back and realizing the progression, how far you've come at this day to this goal, you know. It's important to focus on a goal, I think, but also recognize the progression on the way there and how you've grown as a person. That's the achievement, I think. That's the real achievement.SS: Why don't you show them your legs?AM: Oh, sure. SS: You know, show us more than one set of legs.AM: Well, these are my pretty legs.(Laughter)No, these are my cosmetic legs, actually, and they're absolutely beautiful. You've got to come up and see them. There are hair follicles on them, and I can paint my toenails. And, seriously, like, I can wear heels. Like, you guys don't understand what that's like to be able to just go into a shoe store and buy whatever you want. SS: You got to pick your height? AM: I got to pick my height, exactly.(Laughter)Patrick Ewing, who played for Georgetown in the '80s, comes back every summer. And I had incessant fun making fun of him in the training room because he'd come in with foot injuries. I'm like, ""Get it off! Don't worry about it, you know. You can be eight feet tall. Just take them off.""(Laughter)He didn't find it as humorous as I did, anyway. OK, now, these are my sprinting legs, made of carbon graphite, like I said, and I've got to make sure I've got the right socket. No, I've got so many legs in here. These are — do you want to hold that actually? That's another leg I have for, like, tennis and softball. It has a shock absorber in it so it, like, ""Shhhh,"" makes this neat sound when you jump around on it. All right. And then this is the silicon sheath I roll over, to keep it on. Which, when I sweat, you know, I'm pistoning out of it.SS: Are you a different height?AM: In these?SS: In these.AM: I don't know. I don't think so. I may be a little taller. I actually can put both of them on.SS: She can't really stand on these legs. She has to be moving, so ...AM: Yeah, I definitely have to be moving, and balance is a little bit of an art in them. But without having the silicon sock, I'm just going to try slip in it. And so, I run on these, and have shocked half the world on these.(Applause)These are supposed to simulate the actual form of a sprinter when they run. If you ever watch a sprinter, the ball of their foot is the only thing that ever hits the track. So when I stand in these legs, my hamstring and my glutes are contracted, as they would be had I had feet and were standing on the ball of my feet.(Audience: Who made them?)AM: It's a company in San Diego called Flex-Foot. And I was a guinea pig, as I hope to continue to be in every new form of prosthetic limbs that come out. But actually these, like I said, are still the actual prototype. I need to get some new ones because the last meet I was at, they were everywhere. You know, it's like a big — it's come full circle.Moderator: Aimee and the designer of them will be at TEDMED 2, and we'll talk about the design of them.AM: Yes, we'll do that.SS: Yes, there you go.AM: So, these are the sprint legs, and I can put my other...SS: Can you tell about who designed your other legs?AM: Yes. These I got in a place called Bournemouth, England, about two hours south of London, and I'm the only person in the United States with these, which is a crime because they are so beautiful. And I don't even mean, like, because of the toes and everything. For me, while I'm such a serious athlete on the track, I want to be feminine off the track, and I think it's so important not to be limited in any capacity, whether it's, you know, your mobility or even fashion. I mean, I love the fact that I can go in anywhere and pick out what I want — the shoes I want, the skirts I want — and I'm hoping to try to bring these over here and make them accessible to a lot of people. They're also silicon. This is a really basic, basic prosthetic limb under here. It's like a Barbie foot under this.(Laughter)It is. It's just stuck in this position, so I have to wear a two-inch heel. And, I mean, it's really — let me take this off so you can see it. I don't know how good you can see it, but, like, it really is. There're veins on the feet, and then my heel is pink, and my Achilles' tendon — that moves a little bit. And it's really an amazing store. I got them a year and two weeks ago. And this is just a silicon piece of skin. I mean, what happened was, two years ago this man in Belgium was saying, ""God, if I can go to Madame Tussauds' wax museum and see Jerry Hall replicated down to the color of her eyes, looking so real as if she breathed, why can't they build a limb for someone that looks like a leg, or an arm, or a hand?"" I mean, they make ears for burn victims. They do amazing stuff with silicon.SS: Two weeks ago, Aimee was up for the Arthur Ashe award at the ESPYs. And she came into town and she rushed around and she said, ""I have to buy some new shoes!"" We're an hour before the ESPYs, and she thought she'd gotten a two-inch heel but she'd actually bought a three-inch heel.AM: And this poses a problem for me, because it means I'm walking like that all night long.SS: For 45 minutes. Luckily, the hotel was terrific. They got someone to come in and saw off the shoes.(Laughter)AM: I said to the receptionist — I mean, I am just harried, and Sheryl's at my side — I said, ""Look, do you have anybody here who could help me? Because I have this problem ... "" You know, at first they were just going to write me off, like, ""If you don't like your shoes, sorry. It's too late."" ""No, no, no, no. I've got these special feet that need a two-inch heel. I have a three-inch heel. I need a little bit off."" They didn't even want to go there. They didn't even want to touch that one. They just did it. No, these legs are great. I'm actually going back in a couple of weeks to get some improvements. I want to get legs like these made for flat feet so I can wear sneakers, because I can't with these ones. So... Moderator: That's it.SS: That's Aimee Mullins.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_on_running
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"How can we investigate this flora of viruses that surround us, and aid medicine? How can we turn our cumulative knowledge of virology into a simple, hand-held, single diagnostic assay? I want to turn everything we know right now about detecting viruses and the spectrum of viruses that are out there into, let's say, a small chip.When we started thinking about this project — how we would make a single diagnostic assay to screen for all pathogens simultaneously — well, there's some problems with this idea. First of all, viruses are pretty complex, but they're also evolving very fast. This is a picornavirus. Picornaviruses — these are things that include the common cold and polio, things like this. You're looking at the outside shell of the virus, and the yellow color here are those parts of the virus that are evolving very, very fast, and the blue parts are not evolving very fast. When people think about making pan-viral detection reagents, usually it's the fast-evolving problem that's an issue, because how can we detect things if they're always changing? But evolution is a balance: where you have fast change, you also have ultra-conservation — things that almost never change.And so we looked into this a little more carefully, and I'm going to show you data now. This is just some stuff you can do on the computer from the desktop. I took a bunch of these small picornaviruses, like the common cold, like polio and so on, and I just broke them down into small segments. And so took this first example, which is called coxsackievirus, and just break it into small windows. And I'm coloring these small windows blue if another virus shares an identical sequence in its genome to that virus. These sequences right up here — which don't even code for protein, by the way — are almost absolutely identical across all of these, so I could use this sequence as a marker to detect a wide spectrum of viruses, without having to make something individual. Now, over here there's great diversity: that's where things are evolving fast. Down here you can see slower evolution: less diversity.Now, by the time we get out here to, let's say, acute bee paralysis virus — probably a bad one to have if you're a bee —- this virus shares almost no similarity to coxsackievirus, but I can guarantee you that the sequences that are most conserved among these viruses on the right-hand of the screen are in identical regions right up here. And so we can encapsulate these regions of ultra-conservation through evolution — how these viruses evolved — by just choosing DNA elements or RNA elements in these regions to represent on our chip as detection reagents.OK, so that's what we did, but how are we going to do that? Well, for a long time, since I was in graduate school, I've been messing around making DNA chips — that is, printing DNA on glass. And that's what you see here: These little salt spots are just DNA tacked onto glass, and so I can put thousands of these on our glass chip and use them as a detection reagent. We took our chip over to Hewlett-Packard and used their atomic force microscope on one of these spots, and this is what you see: you can actually see the strands of DNA lying flat on the glass here. So, what we're doing is just printing DNA on glass — little flat things — and these are going to be markers for pathogens. OK, I make little robots in lab to make these chips, and I'm really big on disseminating technology. If you've got enough money to buy just a Camry, you can build one of these too, and so we put a deep how-to guide on the Web, totally free, with basically order-off-the-shelf parts. You can build a DNA array machine in your garage. Here's the section on the all-important emergency stop switch. (Laughter) Every important machine's got to have a big red button. But really, it's pretty robust. You can actually be making DNA chips in your garage and decoding some genetic programs pretty rapidly. It's a lot of fun. (Laughter)And so what we did — and this is a really cool project — we just started by making a respiratory virus chip. I talked about that — you know, that situation where you go into the clinic and you don't get diagnosed? Well, we just put basically all the human respiratory viruses on one chip, and we threw in herpes virus for good measure — I mean, why not? The first thing you do as a scientist is, you make sure stuff works. And so what we did is, we take tissue culture cells and infect them with various viruses, and we take the stuff and fluorescently label the nucleic acid, the genetic material that comes out of these tissue culture cells — mostly viral stuff — and stick it on the array to see where it sticks. Now, if the DNA sequences match, they'll stick together, and so we can look at spots. And if spots light up, we know there's a certain virus in there.That's what one of these chips really looks like, and these red spots are, in fact, signals coming from the virus. And each spot represents a different family of virus or species of virus. And so, that's a hard way to look at things, so I'm just going to encode things as a little barcode, grouped by family, so you can see the results in a very intuitive way. What we did is, we took tissue culture cells and infected them with adenovirus, and you can see this little yellow barcode next to adenovirus. And, likewise, we infected them with parainfluenza-3 — that's a paramyxovirus — and you see a little barcode here. And then we did respiratory syncytial virus. That's the scourge of daycare centers everywhere — it's like boogeremia, basically. (Laughter) You can see that this barcode is the same family, but it's distinct from parainfluenza-3, which gives you a very bad cold. And so we're getting unique signatures, a fingerprint for each virus. Polio and rhino: they're in the same family, very close to each other. Rhino's the common cold, and you all know what polio is, and you can see that these signatures are distinct. And Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpes virus gives a nice signature down here. And so it is not any one stripe or something that tells me I have a virus of a particular type here; it's the barcode that in bulk represents the whole thing.All right, I can see a rhinovirus — and here's the blow-up of the rhinovirus's little barcode — but what about different rhinoviruses? How do I know which rhinovirus I have? There're 102 known variants of the common cold, and there're only 102 because people got bored collecting them: there are just new ones every year. And so, here are four different rhinoviruses, and you can see, even with your eye, without any fancy computer pattern-matching recognition software algorithms, that you can distinguish each one of these barcodes from each other.Now, this is kind of a cheap shot, because I know what the genetic sequence of all these rhinoviruses is, and I in fact designed the chip expressly to be able to tell them apart, but what about rhinoviruses that have never seen a genetic sequencer? We don't know what the sequence is; just pull them out of the field. So, here are four rhinoviruses we never knew anything about — no one's ever sequenced them — and you can also see that you get unique and distinguishable patterns. You can imagine building up some library, whether real or virtual, of fingerprints of essentially every virus. But that's, again, shooting fish in a barrel, you know, right? You have tissue culture cells. There are a ton of viruses. What about real people? You can't control real people, as you probably know. You have no idea what someone's going to cough into a cup, and it's probably really complex, right? It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material. So how do we deal with this? And how do we do the positive control here?Well, it's pretty simple. That's me, getting a nasal lavage. And the idea is, let's experimentally inoculate people with virus. This is all IRB-approved, by the way; they got paid. And basically we experimentally inoculate people with the common cold virus. Or, even better, let's just take people right out of the emergency room — undefined, community-acquired respiratory tract infections. You have no idea what walks in through the door. So, let's start off with the positive control first, where we know the person was healthy. They got a shot of virus up the nose, let's see what happens.Day zero: nothing happening. They're healthy; they're clean — it's amazing. Actually, we thought the nasal tract might be full of viruses even when you're walking around healthy. It's pretty clean. If you're healthy, you're pretty healthy. Day two: we get a very robust rhinovirus pattern, and it's very similar to what we get in the lab doing our tissue culture experiment. So that's great, but again, cheap shot, right? We put a ton of virus up this guy's nose. So — (Laughter) — I mean, we wanted it to work. He really had a cold. So, how about the people who walk in off the street?Here are two individuals represented by their anonymous ID codes. They both have rhinoviruses; we've never seen this pattern in lab. We sequenced part of their viruses; they're new rhinoviruses no one's actually even seen. Remember, our evolutionary-conserved sequences we're using on this array allow us to detect even novel or uncharacterized viruses, because we pick what is conserved throughout evolution. Here's another guy. You can play the diagnosis game yourself here. These different blocks represent the different viruses in this paramyxovirus family, so you can kind of go down the blocks and see where the signal is. Well, doesn't have canine distemper; that's probably good. (Laughter) But by the time you get to block nine, you see that respiratory syncytial virus. Maybe they have kids. And then you can see, also, the family member that's related: RSVB is showing up here. So, that's great. Here's another individual, sampled on two separate days — repeat visits to the clinic. This individual has parainfluenza-1, and you can see that there's a little stripe over here for Sendai virus: that's mouse parainfluenza. The genetic relationships are very close there. That's a lot of fun.So, we built out the chip. We made a chip that has every known virus ever discovered on it. Why not? Every plant virus, every insect virus, every marine virus. Everything that we could get out of GenBank — that is, the national repository of sequences. Now we're using this chip. And what are we using it for? Well, first of all, when you have a big chip like this, you need a little bit more informatics, so we designed the system to do automatic diagnosis. And the idea is that we simply have virtual patterns, because we're never going to get samples of every virus — it would be virtually impossible. But we can get virtual patterns, and compare them to our observed result — which is a very complex mixture — and come up with some sort of score of how likely it is this is a rhinovirus or something. And this is what this looks like. If, for example, you used a cell culture that's chronically infected with papilloma, you get a little computer readout here, and our algorithm says it's probably papilloma type 18. And that is, in fact, what these particular cell cultures are chronically infected with.So let's do something a little bit harder. We put the beeper in the clinic. When somebody shows up, and the hospital doesn't know what to do because they can't diagnose it, they call us. That's the idea, and we're setting this up in the Bay Area. And so, this case report happened three weeks ago. We have a 28-year-old healthy woman, no travel history, [unclear], doesn't smoke, doesn't drink. 10-day history of fevers, night sweats, bloody sputum — she's coughing up blood — muscle pain. She went to the clinic, and they gave her antibiotics and then sent her home. She came back after ten days of fever, right? Still has the fever, and she's hypoxic — she doesn't have much oxygen in her lungs. They did a CT scan. A normal lung is all sort of dark and black here. All this white stuff — it's not good. This sort of tree and bud formation indicates there's inflammation; there's likely to be infection. OK. So, the patient was treated then with a third-generation cephalosporin antibiotic and doxycycline, and on day three, it didn't help: she had progressed to acute failure. They had to intubate her, so they put a tube down her throat and they began to mechanically ventilate her. She could no longer breathe for herself. What to do next? Don't know. Switch antibiotics: so they switched to another antibiotic, Tamiflu. It's not clear why they thought she had the flu, but they switched to Tamiflu.And on day six, they basically threw in the towel. You do an open lung biopsy when you've got no other options. There's an eight percent mortality rate with just doing this procedure, and so basically — and what do they learn from it? You're looking at her open lung biopsy. And I'm no pathologist, but you can't tell much from this. All you can tell is, there's a lot of swelling: bronchiolitis. It was ""unrevealing"": that's the pathologist's report. And so, what did they test her for? They have their own tests, of course, and so they tested her for over 70 different assays, for every sort of bacteria and fungus and viral assay you can buy off the shelf: SARS, metapneumovirus, HIV, RSV — all these. Everything came back negative, over 100,000 dollars worth of tests. I mean, they went to the max for this woman.And basically on hospital day eight, that's when they called us. They gave us endotracheal aspirate — you know, a little fluid from the throat, from this tube that they got down there — and they gave us this. We put it on the chip; what do we see? Well, we saw parainfluenza-4. Well, what the hell's parainfluenza-4? No one tests for parainfluenza-4. No one cares about it. In fact, it's not even really sequenced that much. There's just a little bit of it sequenced. There's almost no epidemiology or studies on it. No one would even consider it, because no one had a clue that it could cause respiratory failure. And why is that? Just lore. There's no data — no data to support whether it causes severe or mild disease. Clearly, we have a case of a healthy person that's going down.OK, that's one case report. I'm going to tell you one last thing in the last two minutes that's unpublished — it's going to come out tomorrow — and it's an interesting case of how you might use this chip to find something new and open a new door. Prostate cancer. I don't need to give you many statistics about prostate cancer. Most of you already know it: third leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. Lots of risk factors, but there is a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer. For maybe about 10 percent of prostate cancer, there are folks that are predisposed to it. And the first gene that was mapped in association studies for this, early-onset prostate cancer, was this gene called RNASEL. What is that? It's an antiviral defense enzyme. So, we're sitting around and thinking, ""Why would men who have the mutation — a defect in an antiviral defense system — get prostate cancer? It doesn't make sense — unless, maybe, there's a virus?""So, we put tumors —- and now we have over 100 tumors — on our array. And we know who's got defects in RNASEL and who doesn't. And I'm showing you the signal from the chip here, and I'm showing you for the block of retroviral oligos. And what I'm telling you here from the signal, is that men who have a mutation in this antiviral defense enzyme, and have a tumor, often have — 40 percent of the time — a signature which reveals a new retrovirus. OK, that's pretty wild. What is it? So, we clone the whole virus. First of all, I'll tell you that a little automated prediction told us it was very similar to a mouse virus. But that doesn't tell us too much, so we actually clone the whole thing. And the viral genome I'm showing you right here? It's a classic gamma retrovirus, but it's totally new; no one's ever seen it before. Its closest relative is, in fact, from mice, and so we would call this a xenotropic retrovirus, because it's infecting a species other than mice. And this is a little phylogenetic tree to see how it's related to other viruses. We've done it for many patients now, and we can say that they're all independent infections. They all have the same virus, but they're different enough that there's reason to believe that they've been independently acquired. Is it really in the tissue? And I'll end up with this: yes. We take slices of these biopsies of tumor tissue and use material to actually locate the virus, and we find cells here with viral particles in them. These guys really do have this virus.Does this virus cause prostate cancer? Nothing I'm saying here implies causality. I don't know. Is it a link to oncogenesis? I don't know. Is it the case that these guys are just more susceptible to viruses? Could be. And it might have nothing to do with cancer. But now it's a door. We have a strong association between the presence of this virus and a genetic mutation that's been linked to cancer. That's where we're at. So, it opens up more questions than it answers, I'm afraid, but that's what, you know, science is really good at. This was all done by folks in the lab — I cannot take credit for most of this. This is a collaboration between myself and Don. This is the guy who started the project in my lab, and this is the guy who's been doing prostate stuff. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_derisi_hunts_the_next_killer_virus
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"Natalie MacMaster: I'm going to just quickly start out with a little bit of music here. (Applause)(Music)(Applause)Thank you! (Applause)I took my shoes off to dance, but maybe I'll get at that later. Anyways, I... where to start? Well, I'm really excited to talk a bit about my own upbringing in music and family and all of that, but I'm even more excited for you people to hear about Donnell's amazing family and maybe even a little bit about how we met, and all that sort of thing, but for those of you that may not be familiar with my upbringing, I'm from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, eastern Canada, which is a very, very musical island, and its origins come from Scotland with the music and all the traditions, the dancing, the language, which unfortunately is dying out in Cape Breton. The traditional language is Gaelic, but a lot of the music came from the Gaelic language, and the dancing and the singing and everything, and my bloodline is Scottish through and through, but my mother and father are two very, very musical people.My mom taught me to dance when I was five, and my dad taught me to play fiddle when I was nine. My uncle is a very well-known Cape Breton fiddler. His name's Buddy MacMaster, and just a wonderful guy, and we have a great tradition at home called square dancing, and we had parties, great parties at our house and the neighbors' houses, and you talk about kitchen cèilidhs. Well, cèilidh first of all is Gaelic for party, but kitchen party in Cape Breton is very common, and basically somebody drops into the house, and no matter what house you go to in Cape Breton, there's a fiddle there, guaranteed, and I'd say, well there's first of all more fiddlers per capita in Cape Breton than anywhere in the world, so ten chances to one, the fellow who walked in the door could play it, so you'd have someone come into the house, you'd invite them to play a tune, and lo and behold a little party would start up and somebody would dance, and somebody would sing, and all that sort of thing, so it was a wonderful, wonderful way to grow up, and that is where my beginnings in music come from: my surroundings, my family, just my bloodline in itself, and, oh, I've done lots of things with my music.I've recorded lots of CDs. I was nominated for a Grammy and I've won some awards and stuff like that, so that's awesome, but the best part was meeting my husband, and I've actually known Donnell for probably 12 years now, and I'm going to get into a little bit of, I guess, how music brought us together, but I'm going to introduce you right now to my new husband as of October 5, Donnell Leahy. (Applause)(Applause)Donnell Leahy: Thank you. I'm kind of new to the TED experience and I'm glad to be here, but I'm just trying to put it all together, trying to figure all you people out, and I've been here for a short while, and I'm starting to understand a little bit better. So I asked Natalie, what do I do? And she said, just talk about yourself.It's kind of boring, but I'll just tell you a little bit about my family. I'm one of 11 brothers and sisters from Lakefield, Ontario, an hour and a half northeast of Toronto, and we grew up on a farm. Mom and Dad raised beef cattle, and I'm the oldest boy. There are four girls a little bit older than me. We grew up without a television. People find that strange, but I think it was a great blessing for us. We had a television for a few years, but of course we wasted so much time and the work wasn't getting done, so out went the television.We grew up playing— Mom's from Cape Breton, coincidentally. Mom and Natalie's mother knew each other. We grew up playing, and used to dance together, right, yeah. (Laughter) We grew up playing a bunch of, we played by ear and I think that's important for us because we were not really exposed to a lot of different styles of music.We learned to play the instruments, but we kind of had to come from within or go from within, because we didn't watch television, we didn't listen to a lot of radio. We went to church and to school sometimes, and farmed and played music, so we were able, I think, at a very critical age to develop our own style, our own self, and my mother plays, my father plays, and the style that came from the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, we call it French-Canadian style but it originated in logging camps. Years ago, hundreds of men would go up for the winter to the camps in Northern Ontario and in Quebec, and they were all different cultures, and the Irish, the French, Scottish, German, they'd all meet, and of course at night, they'd play cards and step dance and play fiddles, and over the course of many years, the Ottawa Valley fiddling kind of evolved and the Ottawa Valley step dancing evolved, so that's, I kind of started out with that style and I quickly started doing my own thing, and then I met Natalie, and I was exposed to the great Cape Breton fiddling. That's how we met. (Laughter) You tell them. (Laughter)NM: You want to or no? (Laughter) Well I guess I have to now. Well, it's just so interesting that Donnell's upbringing was very similar to mine, and I actually saw Donnell play when I was about 12 years old, and he and his family came to Inverness, which is about 45 minutes from where I lived, and I was just blown away, like, it was just amazing, and you'll find out why pretty soon here, but I couldn't believe the fiddling and Mom was there with me, and she was saying — Donnell's mother came up on stage and danced with her children, and Mom was saying, ""That's Julie MacDonnell, I used to dance with her when we were kids. Little did I think our children would be playing instruments, you know, playing music, yeah.""Twelve years, er, 20 years later little did she think her kids would be getting married, but anyway, so, then I got a phone call about, I dunno, seven years later. I was 19, first or second year of college, and it was Donnell, and he said ""Hi, you probably don't know me but my name is Donnell Leahy."" And I said, ""I know you. I have a tape of yours at home."" And he said, ""Well, I'm in Truro,"" which is where I was, and he asked me out for supper. That's it. (Laughter) (Applause) Then — Will I keep going? (Laughs) (Laughter) Then we dated for two years, broke up for 10, got back together and got married. (Laughter) (Applause)DL: So anyway, we're running out of time, so I'll just get to it. I'm going to play a piece of music for you. It's actually a Scottish piece I've chosen. I starts out with a slow air. Airs were played in Europe at burials, as a body was carried out from the wake site to the burial site, the procession was led by a piper or a fiddle player. I'll quickly play a short part of the air, and then I'm going to get into kind of a crazy tune that is very difficult to play when you're not warmed up, so, if I mess it up, pretend you like it anyway. It's called The Banks.(Tuning)(Laughter)(Music)(Applause)NM: Well, we're gonna play one together now. (Applause) We're laughing, like, because our styles are totally different, as you can hear. And so, you know, Donnell and I are actually in the process of writing new pieces of music together that we can play, but we don't have any of those ready. We just started yesterday. (Laughter) So we're gonna play something together anyway.DL: With one minute.NM: With one minute.(Audience reaction)DL: You start. NM: No, you have to start, because you've got to do your thing.(Music)NM: I'm not tuned. Hold on.(Tuning)NM: I feel like I'm in the duck or the bird pose right now. (Laughter)(Music)(Audience claps along)(Applause)Announcer: Great news, they're running late downstairs. We've got another 10 minutes. (Applause)NM: Okay. Sure. All right, okay. Let's get her going. (Applause)(Tuning)DL: What do you want to play?NM: Well, um...(Music) (Laughter)NM: Uh, sure.DL: How fast?NM: Not too fast.(Music)(Audience claps along)(Cheering)(Audience claps along)(Music)(Applause)DL: We're going to play a tune and Natalie's going to accompany me on the piano. The Cape Breton piano playing is just awesome. It's very rhythmic and, you'll see it. My mom plays piano, and she learned to play before they had a piano at home in Cape Breton. Before Mom's family had a piano in Cape Breton, she learned to play the rhythms on a piece of board, and the fiddlers would all congregate to play on the cold winter's evenings and Mom would be banging on this board, so when they bought a piano, they bought it in Toronto and had it taken by train and brought in on a horse, a horse and sleigh to the house. It became the only piano in the region, and Mom said she could basically play as soon as the piano arrived, she could play it because she had learned all these rhythms. Anyway, we found the piano last year and were able to bring it back home. We purchased it. It had gone through, like, five or six families, and it was just a big thing for us, and we found actually an old picture of somebody and their family years ago. Anyway, I'm blabbering on here.NM: No, I want you to tell them about Leahy.DL: What about Leahy? (Laughter)NM: Just tell them what—DL: She wants me to talk about— We have a band named Leahy. There's 11 siblings. We, um— What will I tell them? (Laughter) We opened—NM: No surgeries.DL: No surgeries, oh yeah. We had a great opportunity. We opened for Shania Twain for two years on her international tour. It was a big thing for us, and now all my sisters are off having babies and the boys are all getting married, so we're staying close to home for, I guess, another couple of weeks. What can I say? I don't know what to say, Natalie. We, uh... (Laughter)(Laughter)NM: Is this what marriage is about? (Applause) I like it. (Applause)(Laughter)DL: Oh yeah, okay, in my family we had seven girls, four boys, we had two fiddles and one piano, and of course we were all fighting to play on the instruments, so dad and mom set a rule that you couldn't kick anyone off the instrument. You had to wait until they were finished, so of course, what we would do is we'd get on the piano and you wouldn't even get off to eat, because you wouldn't want to give it up to your brother or sister, and they'd wait and wait and wait, and it'd be midnight and you'd be still sitting there on the piano, but it was their way to get us to practice. Will we play a tune?NM: It worked. DL: It worked. Sorry, I hate to carry on... So this is our last number, and we'll feature Nat on piano. Okay, play in, how about A?(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_macmaster_and_donnell_leahy_play_the_cape_breton_fiddle
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"Right when I was 15 was when I first got interested in solar energy. My family had moved from Fort Lee, New Jersey to California, from the snow to lots of heat, and gas lines. There was gas rationing in 1973. The energy crisis was in full bore.I started reading ""Popular Science"" magazine, and I got really excited about the potential of solar energy to try and solve that crisis. I had just taken trigonometry in high school, I learned about the parabola and how it could concentrate rays of light to a single focus. That got me very excited. And I really felt that there would be potential to build some kind of thing that could concentrate light. So, I started this company called Solar Devices. And this was a company where I built parabolas, I took metal shop, and I remember walking into metal shop building parabolas and Stirling engines. And I was building a Stirling engine over on the lathe, and all the motorcycle guys said, ""You're building a bong, aren't you?"" And I said, ""No, it's a Stirling engine."" But they didn't believe me.I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of ""Popular Science"" magazine, for four dollars each. And I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech. It was a really big excitement for me to get into Caltech. And at my first year at Caltech, I continued the business. But then, in the second year of Caltech, they started grading. The whole first year was pass/fail, but the second year was graded. I wasn't able to keep up with the business, and I ended up with a 25-year detour. My dream had been to convert solar energy at a very practical cost, but then I had this big detour. First, the coursework at Caltech. Then, when I graduated from Caltech, the IBM PC came out, and I got addicted to the IBM PC in 1981.And then in 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 came out, and I was completely blown away by Lotus 1-2-3. I began operating my business with 1-2-3, began writing add-ins for 1-2-3, wrote a natural language interface to 1-2-3. I started an educational software company after I joined Lotus, and then I started Idealab so I could have a roof under which I could build multiple companies in succession.Much later — in 2000, very recently — the new California energy crisis — what was purported to be a big energy crisis — was coming. And I was trying to figure out if we could build something that would capitalize on that and get people backup energy, in case the crisis really came. And I started looking at how we could build battery backup systems that could give people five hours, 10 hours, maybe even a full day, or three days' worth of backup power. I'm glad you heard earlier today, batteries are unbelievably — lack density compared to fuel. So much more energy can be stored with fuel than with batteries. You'd have to fill your entire parking space of one garage space just to give yourself four hours of battery backup. And I concluded, after researching every other technology that we could deploy for storing energy — flywheels, different formulations of batteries — it just wasn't practical to store energy. So what about making energy? Maybe we could make energy.I tried to figure out — maybe solar's become attractive. It's been 25 years since I was doing this, let me go back and look at what's been happening with solar cells. And the price had gone down from 10 dollars a watt to about four or five dollars a watt, but it stabilized. And it needed to get much lower to be cost-effective. I studied all the new things that had happened in solar cells, and was looking for ways we could make solar cells more inexpensively. A lot of new things are happening to do that, but fundamentally, the process requires a tremendous amount of energy. Some people say it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it will give out in its entire life. If we reduce the amount of energy it takes to make the cells, that will become more practical.But right now, you pretty much have to take silicon, put it in an oven at 1600 F for 17 hours, to make the cells. A lot of people are working to try and reduce that, but I didn't have anything to contribute. So I tried to figure out what other way could we try to make cost-effective solar electricity. What if we collect the sun with a large reflector — like I had been thinking about in high school, but maybe with modern technology we could make it cheaper — concentrate it to a small converter, and then the conversion device wouldn't have to be as expensive, because it's much smaller, rather than solar cells, which have to cover the entire surface that you want to gather sun from.This seemed practical now, because a lot of new technologies had come in the 25 years since I had last looked at it. There was a lot of new manufacturing techniques, not to mention really cheap miniature motors — brushless motors, servomotors, stepper motors, that are used in printers and scanners. So, that's a breakthrough. Of course, inexpensive microprocessors and a very important breakthrough — genetic algorithms.I'll be very short on genetic algorithms. It's a powerful way of solving intractable problems using natural selection. You take a problem that you can't solve with a pure mathematical answer, you build an evolutionary system to try multiple tries at guessing, you add sex — where you take half of one solution and half of another and then make new mutations — and you use natural selection to kill off not-as-good solutions.Usually, with a genetic algorithm on a computer today, with a three gigahertz processor, you can solve many formerly intractable problems in just a matter of minutes. So we tried to come up with a way to use genetic algorithms to create a new type of concentrator. And I'll show you what we came up with.Traditionally, concentrators look like this. Those shapes are parabolas. They take all the parallel incoming rays and focus it to a single spot. They have to track the sun, because they have to point directly at the sun. They usually have a one degree acceptance angle — once they're more than a degree off, none of the sunlight rays will hit the focus. So we tried to come up with a non-tracking collector that would gather much more than one degree of light, with no moving parts. So we created a genetic algorithm to try this out, we made a model in Excel of a multisurface reflector, and an amazing thing evolved, literally, from trying a billion cycles, a billion different attempts, with a fitness function that defined how can you collect the most light, from the most angles, over a day, from the sun.And this is the shape that evolved. It's this non-tracking collector with these six tuba-like horns, and each of them collect light in the following way — if the sunlight strikes right here, it might bounce right to the center, the hot spot, directly, but if the sun is off axis and comes from the side, it might hit two places and take two bounces. So for direct light, it takes only one bounce, for off-axis light it might take two, and for extreme off-axis, it might take three. Your efficiency goes down with more bounces, because you lose about 10 percent with each bounce, but this allowed us to collect light from a plus or minus 25-degree angle. So, about two and a half hours of the day we could collect with a stationary component.Solar cells collect light for four and a half hours though. On an average adjusted day, a solar cell — because the sun's moving across the sky, the solar cell is going down with a sine wave function of performance at the off-axis angles. It collects about four and a half average hours of sunlight a day. So even this, although it was great with no moving parts — we could achieve high temperatures — wasn't enough.We needed to beat solar cells. So we took a look at another idea. We looked at a way to break up a parabola into individual petals that would track. So what you see here is 12 separate petals that each could be controlled with individual microprocessors that would only cost a dollar. You can buy a two-megahertz microprocessor for a dollar now. And you can buy stepper motors that pretty much never wear out because they have no brushes, for a dollar. So we can control all 12 of these petals for under 50 dollars and what this would allow us to do is not have to move the focus any more, but only move the petals.The whole system would have a much lower profile, but also we could gather sunlight for six and a half to seven hours a day. Now that we have concentrated sunlight, what are we going to put at the center to convert sunlight to electricity? So we tried to look at all the different heat engines that have been used in history to convert sunlight or heat to electricity, And one of the great ones of all time, James Watt's steam engine of 1788 was a major breakthrough. James Watt didn't actually invent the steam engine, he just refined it. But his refinements were incredible. He added new linear motion guides to the pistons, he added a condenser to cool the steam outside the cylinder, he made the engine double-acting, so it had double the power.Those were major breakthroughs. All of the improvements he made — and it's justifiable that our measure of energy, the watt, today is named after him. So we looked at this engine, and this had some potential. Steam engines are dangerous, and they had tremendous impact on the world — industrial revolution and ships and locomotives. But they're usually good to be large, so they're not good for distributed power generation. They're also very high-pressure, so they're dangerous.Another type of engine is the hot air engine. And the hot air engine also was not invented by Robert Stirling, but Robert Stirling came along in 1816 and radically improved it. This engine, because it was so interesting — it only worked on air, no steam — has led to hundreds of creative designs over the years that use the Stirling engine principle.But after the Stirling engine, Otto came along, and also, he didn't invent the internal combustion engine, he just refined it. He showed it in Paris in 1867, and it was a major achievement because it brought the power density of the engine way up. You could now get a lot more power in a lot smaller space, and that allowed the engine to be used for mobile applications. So, once you have mobility, you're making a lot of engines because you've got lots of units, as opposed to steam ships or big factories, so this was the engine that ended up benefiting from mass production where all the other engines didn't.So, because it went into mass production, costs were reduced, 100 years of refinement, emissions were reduced, tremendous production value. There have been hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines built, compared to thousands of Stirling engines built. And not nearly as many small steam engines being built anymore, only large ones for big operations. So after looking at these three, and 47 others, we concluded that the Stirling engine would be the best one to use. I want to give you a brief explanation of how we looked at it and how it works.So we tried to look at the Stirling engine in a new way, because it was practical — weight no longer mattered for our application. The internal combustion engine took off because weight mattered, because you were moving around. But if you're trying to generate solar energy in a static place the weight doesn't matter so much.We also discovered that efficiency doesn't matter so much if your energy source is free. Normally, efficiency is crucial because the fuel cost of your engine over its life dwarfs the cost of the engine. But if your fuel source is free, then the only thing that matters is the up-front capital cost of the engine. So you don't want to optimize for efficiency, you want to optimize for power per dollar.So using that new twist, with the new criteria, we thought we could relook at the Stirling engine, and also bring genetic algorithms in. Basically, Robert Stirling didn't have Gordon Moore before him to get us three gigahertz of processor power. So we took the same genetic algorithm that we used earlier to make that concentrator, which didn't work out for us, to optimize the Stirling engine, and make its design sizes and all of its dimensions the exact optimum to get the most power per dollar, irrespective of weight, irrespective of size, just to get the most conversion of solar energy, because the sun is free. And that's the process we took — let me show you how the engine works.The simplest heat engine, or hot air engine, of all time would be this — take a box, a steel canister, with a piston. Put a flame under it, the piston moves up. Take it off the flame and pour water on it, or let it cool down, the piston moves down. That's a heat engine. That's the most fundamental heat engine you could have. The problem is the efficiency is one hundredth of one percent, because you're heating all the metal of the chamber and then cooling all the metal of the chamber each time. And you're only getting power from the air that's heating at the same time, but you're wasting energy heating and cooling the metal.So someone came up with a very clever idea. Instead of heating and cooling the whole cylinder, what about if you put a displacer inside — a little thing that shuttles the air back and forth. You move that up and down with a little bit of energy but now you're only shifting the air down to the hot end and up to the cold end. So, now you're not alternately heating and cooling the metal, just the air. That allows you to get the efficiency up from a hundredth of a percent to about two percent.And then Robert Stirling came along with this genius idea, which was, well, I'm still not heating the metal now, with this kind of engine, but I'm still reheating all the air. I'm still heating the air every time and cooling the air every time. What about if I put a thermal sponge in the middle, in the passageway between where the air has to move between hot and cold? So he made fine wires, and cracked glass, and all different kinds of materials to be a heat sponge. So when the air pushes up to go from the hot end to the cold end, it puts some heat into the sponge. And then when the air comes back after it's been cooled, it picks up that heat again. So you're reusing your energy five or six times, and that brings the efficiency up to between 30 and 40 percent. It's a little known, but brilliant, genius invention of Robert Stirling that takes the hot air engine from being somewhat impractical — like I found out when I made the real simple version in high school — to very potentially possible, once you get the efficiency up, if you can design this to be low enough cost.So we really set out on a path to try and make the lowest cost possible. We built a huge mathematical model of how a Stirling engine works. We applied the genetic algorithm. We got the results from that for the optimal engine. We built engines — so we built 100 different engines over the last two years. We measured each one, we readjusted the model to what we measured, and then we led that to the current prototype. It led to a very compact, inexpensive engine, and this is what the engine looks like.Let me show you what it looks like in real life. So this is the engine. It's just a small cylinder down here, which holds the generator inside and all the linkage, and it's the hot cap — the hot cylinder on the top — this part gets hot, this part is cool, and electricity comes out. The exact converse is also true. If you put electricity in, this will get hot and this will get cold, you get refrigeration. So it's a complete reversible cycle, a very efficient cycle, and quite a simple thing to make. So now you put the two things together.So you have the engine. What if you combine the petals and the engine in the center? The petals track and the engine gets the concentrated sunlight, takes that heat and turns it into electricity. This is what the first prototype of our system looked like with the petals and the engine in the center. This is being run out in the sun, and now I want to show you what the actual thing looks like.(Applause)Thank you.So this is a unit with the 12 petals. These petals cost about a dollar each — they're lightweight, injection-molded plastic, aluminized. The mechanism to control each petal is below there, with a microprocessor on each one. There are thermocouples on the engine — little sensors that detect the heat when the sunlight strikes them. Each petal adjusts itself separately to keep the highest temperature on it. When the sun comes out in the morning, the petals will seek the sun, find it by searching for the highest temperature. About a minute and a half or two minutes after the rays are striking the hot cap the engine will be warm enough to start and then the engine will generate electricity for about six and a half hours a day — six and a half to seven hours as the sun moves across the sky.A critical part that we can take advantage of is that we have these inexpensive microprocessors and each of these petals is autonomous, and each of these petals figures out where the sun is with no user setup. So you don't have to tell what latitude, longitude you're at, what your roof slope angle is, or what orientation. It doesn't really care. What it does is it searches to find the hottest spot, it searches again a half an hour later, a day later, a month later. It basically figures out where on Earth you are by watching the direction the sun moves, so you don't have to actually enter anything about that.The way the unit works is, when the sun comes out, the engine will start and you get power out here. We have AC and DC, get 12 volts DC, so that could be used for certain applications. We have an inverter in there, so you get 117 volts AC. And you also get hot water. The hot water's optional. You don't have to use it, it will cool itself. But you can use it to optionally heat hot water and that brings the efficiency up even higher because some of the heat that you'd normally be rejecting, you can now use as useful energy, whether it's for a pool or hot water.Let me show you a quick movie of what this looks like running. This is the first test where we took it outside and each of the petals were individually seeking. And what they do is step, very coarsely at first, and very finely afterward. Once they get a temperature reading on the thermocouple indicating they found the sun, they slow down and do a fine search. Then the petals will move into position, and the engine will start.We've been working on this for the last two years. We're very excited about the progress, we have a long way to go though. This is how we envision it would be in a residential installation: you'd probably have more than one unit on your roof. It could be on your roof, your backyard, or somewhere else. You don't have to have enough units to power your entire house, you just save money with each incremental one you add.So you're still using the grid potentially, in this type of application, to be your backup supply — of course, you can't use these at night, and you can't use these on cloudy days. But by reducing your energy use, pretty much at the peak times — usually when you have your air conditioning on, or other times like that — this generates the peak power at the peak usage time, so it's very complementary in that sense.This is how we would envision a residential application. We also think there's very big potential for energy farms, especially in remote land where there happens to be a lot of sun. It's a really good combination of those two factors. It turns out there's a lot of powerful sun all around the world, obviously, but in special places where it happens to be relatively inexpensive to place these and also in many more places where there is high wind power. So an example of that is, here's the map of the United States. Pretty much everywhere that's not green or blue is a really ideal place, but even the green or blue areas are good, just not as good as the places that are red, orange and yellow. But the hot spot right around Las Vegas and Death Valley is very good. And is only affects the payback period, it doesn't mean that you couldn't use solar energy; you could use it anywhere on Earth. It just affects the payback period if you're comparing to grid-supplied electricity. But if you don't have grid-supplied electricity, then the question of payback is a different one entirely. It's just how many watts do you get per dollar, and how could you benefit from that to change your life in some way.This is the map of the whole Earth, and you can see a huge swathe in the middle where a large part of the population is, there's tremendous chances for solar energy. And of course, look at Africa. The potential to take advantage of solar energy there is unbelievable, and I'm really excited to talk more about finding ways we can help with that.So, in conclusion, I would say my journey has shown me that you can revisit old ideas in a new light, and sometimes ideas that have been discarded in the past can be practical now if you apply some new technology or new twists. We believe we're getting very close to something practical and affordable. Our short-term goal for this is to be half the price of solar cells and our longer-term goal is to be less than a five-year payback. And at less than a five-year payback, this becomes very economic. So you don't have to just have a feel-good attitude about energy to want to have one of these. It just makes economic sense. Right now, solar paybacks are between 30 and 50 years. If you get it down below five years, then it's almost a no-brainer because the interest to own it — someone else will finance it for you and you can just make money from day one. So that's our real powerful goal that we're really shooting for in the company.Two other things that I learned that were very surprising to me — one was how casual we are about energy. I was walking from the elevator over here, and even just looking at the stage right now — so there's probably 20,500-watt lights right now. There's 10,000 watts of light pouring on the stage, one horsepower is 746 watts, at full power. So there's basically 15 horses running at full speed just to keep the stage lit. Not to mention the 200 horses that are probably running right now to keep the air-conditioning going. And it's just amazing, walk in the elevator, and there's lights on in the elevator. Of course, now I'm very sensitive at home when we leave the lights on by mistake.But, everywhere around us we have insatiable use for energy because it's so cheap. And it's cheap because we've been subsidized by energy that's been concentrated by the sun. Basically, oil is solar-energy concentrate. It's been pounded for a billion years with a lot of energy to make it have all that energy contained in it. And we don't have a birthright to just use that up as fast as we are, I think. And it would be great if we could make our energy usage renewable, where as we're using the energy, we're creating it at the same pace, and I really hope we can get there.Thank you very much, you've been a great audience.","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_on_new_energy
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"I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don't get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It's a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos?Well, what's the history of this disease? It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that's why the death rate did come down.Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. 1945, it's still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it's just around the equator.And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn't get much investment. For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that's why that priority has been set.But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected.So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that's happened now in a number of countries. It's great to see.But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention.Now we're on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There's new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. So we're going to have these new tools.But that alone doesn't give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don't. Let's start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. I had great teachers.In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.So, how do you make education better?Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There's many people working on it. We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you'd say, ""Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people."" But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master's degrees. They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree.Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.You might say, ""Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?"" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it's a system with very high turnover.Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, ""Hey, you caused this amount of increase."" They're deeply engaged in making teaching better.When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, ""What is going on?"" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, ""I'm in the sports rally or something. What's going on?"" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, ""Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.""Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, ""OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?"" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.Now there's a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, ""Work Hard, Be Nice."" And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it's interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.But I — I'm optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There's a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things.So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you're helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged
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"I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called ""Eat, Pray, Love"" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously — doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, ""Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?""So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, ""Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?""(Laughter)Like that, you know.The answer — the short answer to all those questions is, ""Yes."" Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? ""That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?"" It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives.(Laughter)We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, ""Every one of my books has killed me a little more."" An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is — you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now — it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. So Jesus, what a thought! That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there.(Laughter)I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love.And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity.And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity ""daemons."" Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.(Laughter)And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius.And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this.But the question that I kind of want to pose is — you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something — which is to say basically everyone here —- knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal.I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, ""run like hell."" And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it ""for another poet."" And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.(Laughter)So when I heard that I was like — that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like.(Laughter)That's not at all what my creative process is — I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder.So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, ""I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it."" And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, ""Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?""(Laughter)""Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.""And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom.When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing ""Eat, Pray, Love,"" and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, ""Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.""(Laughter)Because —(Applause)Because in the end it's like this, OK — centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, ""Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God."" That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from ""Allah, Allah, Allah,"" to ""Olé, olé, olé,"" which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, ""Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo,"" incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything.This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success.And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then ""Olé!"" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And ""Olé!"" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ""Olé!"" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: Olé!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius
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"'Theme and variations' is one of those forms that require a certain kind of intellectual activity, because you are always comparing the variation with the theme that you hold in your mind. You might say that the theme is nature and everything that follows is a variation on the subject.I was asked, I guess about six years ago, to do a series of paintings that in some way would celebrate the birth of Piero della Francesca. And it was very difficult for me to imagine how to paint pictures that were based on Piero until I realized that I could look at Piero as nature — that I would have the same attitude towards looking at Piero della Francesca as I would if I were looking out a window at a tree. And that was enormously liberating to me. Perhaps it's not a very insightful observation, but that really started me on a path to be able to do a kind of theme and variationsbased on a work by Piero, in this case that remarkable painting that's in the Uffizi, ""The Duke of Montefeltro,"" who faces his consort, Battista. Once I realized that I could take some liberties with the subject, I did the following series of drawings. That's the real Piero della Francesca — one of the greatest portraits in human history. And these, I'll just show these without comment. It's just a series of variations on the head of the Duke of Montefeltro, who's a great, great figure in the Renaissance, and probably the basis for Machiavelli's ""The Prince."" He apparently lost an eye in battle, which is why he is always shown in profile. And this is Battista.And then I decided I could move them around a little bit — so that for the first time in history, they're facing the same direction. Whoops! Passed each other. And then a visitor from another painting by Piero, this is from ""The Resurrection of Christ"" — as though the cast had just gotten of the set to have a chat. And now, four large panels: this is upper left; upper right; lower left; lower right. Incidentally, I've never understood the conflict between abstraction and naturalism. Since all paintings are inherently abstract to begin with there doesn't seem to be an argument there.On another subject —(Laughter) —I was driving in the country one day with my wife, and I saw this sign, and I said, ""That is a fabulous piece of design."" And she said, ""What are you talking about?"" I said, ""Well, it's so persuasive, because the purpose of that sign is to get you into the garage, and since most people are so suspicious of garages, and know that they're going to be ripped off, they use the word 'reliable.' But everybody says they're reliable. But, reliable Dutchman"" —(Laughter) —""Fantastic!"" Because as soon as you hear the word Dutchman — which is an archaic word, nobody calls Dutch people ""Dutchmen"" anymore — but as soon as you hear Dutchman, you get this picture of the kid with his finger in the dike, preventing the thing from falling and flooding Holland, and so on. And so the entire issue is detoxified by the use of ""Dutchman."" Now, if you think I'm exaggerating at all in this, all you have to do is substitute something else, like ""Indonesian.""(Laughter)Or even ""French.""(Laughter)Now, ""Swiss"" works, but you know it's going to cost a lot of money.(Laughter)I'm going to take you quickly through the actual process of doing a poster. I do a lot of work for the School of Visual Arts, where I teach, and the director of this school — a remarkable man named Silas Rhodes — often gives you a piece of text and he says, ""Do something with this."" And so he did. And this was the text — ""In words as fashion the same rule will hold/ Alike fantastic if too new or old/ Be not the first by whom the new are tried/ Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."" I could make nothing of that. And I really struggled with this one. And the first thing I did, which was sort of in the absence of another idea, was say I'll sort of write it out and make some words big, and I'll have some kind of design on the back somehow, and I was hoping — as one often does — to stumble into something. So I took another crack at it — you've got to keep it moving — and I Xeroxed some words on pieces of colored paper and I pasted them down on an ugly board. I thought that something would come out of it, like ""Words rule fantastic new old first last Pope"" because it's by Alexander Pope, but I sort of made a mess out of it, and then I thought I'd repeat it in some way so it was legible. So, it was going nowhere.Sometimes, in the middle of a resistant problem, I write down things that I know about it. But you can see the beginning of an idea there, because you can see the word ""new"" emerging from the ""old."" That's what happens. There's a relationship between the old and the new; the new emerges from the context of the old. And then I did some variations of it, but it still wasn't coalescing graphically at all. I had this other version which had something interesting about it in terms of being able to put it together in your mind from clues. The W was clearly a W, the N was clearly an N, even though they were very fragmentary and there wasn't a lot of information in it. Then I got the words ""new"" and ""old"" and now I had regressed back to a point where there seemed to be no return.(Laughter)I was really desperate at this point.And so, I do something I'm truthfully ashamed of, which is that I took two drawings I had made for another purpose and I put them together. It says ""dreams"" at the top. And I was going to do a thing, I say, ""Well, change the copy. Let it say something about dreams, and come to SVA and you'll sort of fulfill your dreams."" But, to my credit, I was so embarrassed about doing that that I never submitted this sketch. And, finally, I arrived at the following solution. Now, it doesn't look terribly interesting, but it does have something that distinguishes it from a lot of other posters. For one thing, it transgresses the idea of what a poster's supposed to be, which is to be understood and seen immediately, and not explained. I remember hearing all of you in the graphic arts — ""If you have to explain it, it ain't working."" And one day I woke up and I said, ""Well, suppose that's not true?""(Laughter)So here's what it says in my explanation at the bottom left. It says, ""Thoughts: This poem is impossible. Silas usually has a better touch with his choice of quotations. This one generates no imagery at all."" I am now exposing myself to my audience, right? Which is something you never want to do professionally. ""Maybe the words can make the image without anything else happening. What's the heart of this poem? Don't be trendy if you want to be serious. Is doing the poster this way trendy in itself?I guess one could reduce the idea further by suggesting that the new emerges behind and through the old, like this."" And then I show you a little drawing — you see, you remember that old thing I discarded? Well, I found a way to use it. So, there's that little alternative over there, and I say, ""Not bad,"" — criticizing myself — ""but more didactic than visual. Maybe what wants to be said is that old and the new are locked in a dialectical embrace, a kind of dance where each defines the other."" And then more self-questioning — ""Am I being simple-minded? Is this the kind of simple that looks obvious, or the kind that looks profound? There's a significant difference. This could be embarrassing. Actually, I realize fear of embarrassment drives me as much as any ambition. Do you think this sort of thing could really attract a student to the school?""(Laughter)Well, I think there are two fresh things here — two fresh things. One is the sort of willingness to expose myself to a critical audience, and not to suggest that I am confident about what I'm doing. And as you know, you have to have a front. I mean — you've got to be confident; if you don't believe in your work, who else is going to believe in it? So that's one thing, to introduce the idea of doubt into graphics. That can be a big contribution. The other thing is to actually give you two solutions for the price of one; you get the big one and if you don't like that, how about the little one?(Laughter)And that too is a relatively new idea. And here's just a series of experiments where I ask the question of — does a poster have to be square? Now, this is a little illusion. That poster is not folded. It's not folded, that's a photograph and it's cut on the diagonal. Same cheap trick in the upper left-hand corner. And here, a very peculiar poster because, simply because of using the isometric perspective in the computer, it won't sit still in the space. At times, it seems to be wider at the back than the front, and then it shifts. And if you sit here long enough, it'll float off the page into the audience. But, we don't have time.(Laughter)And then an experiment — a little bit about the nature of perspective, where the outside shape is determined by the peculiarity of perspective, but the shape of the bottle — which is identical to the outside shape — is seen frontally. And another piece for the art directors' club is ""Anna Rees"" casting long shadows. This is another poster from the School of Visual Arts. There were 10 artists invited to participate in it, and it was one of those things where it was extremely competitive and I didn't want to be embarrassed, so I worked very hard on this. The idea was — and it was a brilliant idea — was to have 10 posters distributed throughout the city's subway system so every time you got on the subway you'd be passing a different poster, all of which had a different idea of what art is.But I was absolutely stuck on the idea of ""art is"" and trying to determine what art was. But then I gave up and I said, ""Well, art is whatever."" And as soon as I said that, I discovered that the word ""hat"" was hidden in the word ""whatever,"" and that led me to the inevitable conclusion. But then again, it's on my list of didactic posters. My intent is to have a literary accompaniment that explains the poster, in case you don't get it.(Laughter)Now this says, ""Note to the viewer: I thought I might use a visual cliche of our time — Magritte's everyman — to express the idea that art is mystery, continuity and history. I'm also convinced that, in an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self. The phrase 'Art is whatever' expresses the current inclusiveness that surrounds art-making — a sort of 'it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it' notion.The shadow of Magritte falls across the central part of the poster a poetic event that occurs as the shadow man isolates the word 'hat,' hidden in the word 'whatever.' The four hats shown in the poster suggests how art might be defined: as a thing itself, the worth of the thing, the shadow of the thing, and the shape of the thing. Whatever.""(Applause)OK.(Applause)And the one that I did not submit, which I still like, I wanted to use the same phrase. There were wonderful experiments by Bruno Munari on letterforms some years ago — sort of, see how far you could go and still be able to read them. And that idea stuck in my head. But then I took the pieces that I had taken off and put them at the bottom. And, of course those are the remains, and they're so labeled. But what really happens is that you read it as: ""Art is whatever remains.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/milton_glaser_on_using_design_to_make_ideas_new
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"I want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid, playing with blocks. As you figured out how to reach out and grasp, pick them up and move them around, you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships. Spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us.So, as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects — along with my adviser Pattie, and my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi — I started to wonder — what if when we used a computer, instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop, what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, arranging it the way we wanted? This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer, by building Siftables.In a nutshell, a Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie. They're able to be moved around by hand, they can sense each other, they can sense their motion, and they have a screen and a wireless radio. Most importantly, they're physical, so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping. And Siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information. And as these tools become more physical, more aware of their motion, aware of each other, and aware of the nuance of how we move them, we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles. So, I'm going to start with some simple examples.This Siftable is configured to show video, and if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way; if I tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards. And these interactive portraits are aware of each other. So if I put them next to each other, they get interested. If they get surrounded, they notice that too, they might get a little flustered. And they can also sense their motion and tilt.One of the interesting implications on interaction, we started to realize, was that we could use everyday gestures on data, like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid. So in this case, we've got three Siftables configured to be paint buckets and I can use them to pour color into that central one, where they get mixed. If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back.There are also some neat possibilities for education, like language, math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly, and view the results immediately. So here I'm — (Applause) This is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program.Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash-up between Scrabble and Boggle. Basically, in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each Siftable, and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary. Then, after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles, and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab, and I managed to get them to try it out, and shoot a video. They really loved it. And, one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions. All you have to say is, ""Make words,"" and they know exactly what to do.So here's another few people trying it out. That's our youngest beta tester, down there on the right. Turns out, all he wanted to do was to stack the Siftables up. So to him, they were just blocks. Now, this is an interactive cartoon application. And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners. And this is Felix, actually. And he can bring new characters into the scene, just by lifting the Siftables off the table that have that character shown on them. Here, he's bringing the sun out.Video: The sun is rising.David Merrill: Now he's brought a tractor into the scene.Video: The orange tractor. Good job! Yeah!DM: So by shaking the Siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact —Video: Woof!DM: inventing his own narrative.Video: Hello!DM: It's an open-ended story, and he gets to decide how it unfolds.Video: Fly away, cat.DM: So, the last example I have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently, in which Siftables act as sounds like lead, bass and drums. Each of these has four different variations, you get to choose which one you want to use. And you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want. And you inject it by just bumping up the sound Siftable against a sequence Siftable. There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter. You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it. And then, overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence. So let's have a look.Video: (Music)DM: We'll start by putting a lead into two sequence Siftables, arrange them into a series, extend it, add a little more lead. Now I put a bass line in.Video: (Music) DM: Now I'll put some percussion in. Video: (Music)DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the drums, so I can control the effect live.Video: (Music)DM: I can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other.Video: (Music)DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression.Video: (Music)DM: I can rearrange the sequence while it plays. So I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise, making it longer or shorter as I go. And now, finally, I can fade the whole sequence out using the volume Siftable, tilted to the left.(Applause) Thank you.So, as you can see, my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work. And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space, and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory. So the thought I want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms. Thank you very much. I look forward to talking with all of you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks
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"In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. But what did he appeal to? He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. Nor did he tell us, ""Trust us. Trust your country. Invest, invest, invest."" Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. And he appealed to virtue. Virtue is an old-fashioned word. It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean?Let me begin with an example. This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. And all of the items on it are unremarkable. They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: even though this is a very long list, there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. Not one. The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital.And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well.Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what ""doing right"" means.""Practical wisdom,"" Aristotle told us, ""is the combination of moral will and moral skill."" A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician — using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers.When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. At TED, brilliance is rampant. It's scary. The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else. (Applause)Now, I hope that we all know this. There's a sense in which it's obvious, and yet, let me tell you a little story. It's a story about lemonade. A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark. His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it. All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. So he brought it back. And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it, and called the police, who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital. The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood. And they were ready to let the kid go.But not so fast. The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no. And the child was sent to a foster home for three days. At that point, can the child go home? Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel. After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: ""We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure.""How do things like this happen? Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, ""Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking."" And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. Fair enough. When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them.One tool we reach for is rules. Better ones, more of them. The second tool we reach for is incentives. Better ones, more of them. What else, after all, is there? We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives ... The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom.Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. The lemonade story is one. Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten. Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' ""The Bath:"" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book. All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city, every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day. We know why these scripts are there. We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster. And they prevent disaster. But what they assure in its place is mediocrity. (Applause)Don't get me wrong. We need rules! Jazz musicians need some notes — most of them need some notes on the page. We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. And as a result, they lose their gifts, or worse, they stop playing altogether.Now, how about incentives? They seem cleverer. If you have one reason for doing something and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing, it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. Right? Well, not always. Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting, and they make people less likely to do it.I'll just give you one example because time is racing. In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. There was going to be a national referendum. Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed. And they said, ""Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?"" Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. They knew it was dangerous. They thought it would reduce their property values. But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens. The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. They said, ""If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?"" Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. Instead of 50 percent saying yes, 25 percent said yes. What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, ""What is my responsibility?"" all we ask is, ""What serves my interests?"" When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. Get smarter incentives.The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will. We need incentives. People have to make a living. But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity in two senses of that word. It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality.Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated, ""We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'"" And when professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on — addicted to — incentives and they stop asking ""Is it right?"" We see this in medicine. (""Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit."") And we certainly see it in the world of business. (""In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball."") (""I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now."") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work.So what can we do? A few sources of hope: we ought to try to re-moralize work. One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses. (Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course.What to do instead? One: Celebrate moral exemplars. Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions. People are inspired by moral heroes. But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. Well, acknowledge them. Be proud that you have them. Celebrate them. And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too. That's one thing we can do.I don't know how many of you remember this: another moral hero, 15 years ago, Aaron Feuerstein, who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts — they made Polartec — The factory burned down. 3,000 employees. He kept every one of them on the payroll. Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. ""Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine.""Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. Two were particularly inspiring to me. One was Ray Anderson, who turned — (Applause) — turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. His employees are inspired by the effort. Why? Because there happy to be doing something that's the right thing to do. Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia. (Applause)In many ways this is the perfect example. Because it took the will to do the right thing. God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill. I'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out. But most important to make it work — and he emphasized this — is that it took knowing the people in the communities. Unless the people you're working with are behind you, this will fail. And there isn't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you, because different people in different communities organize their lives in different ways.So there's a lot here at TED, and at other places, to celebrate. And you don't have to be a mega-hero. There are ordinary heroes. Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work.If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs — none of the jobs — have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom.And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers. One is that we are always teaching. Someone is always watching. The camera is always on. Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: ""Knowledge is power."" And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college.I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn't mention. That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character. They need to learn to respect themselves. They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. They need to learn to respect their teachers. And, most important, they need to learn to respect learning. That's the principle objective. If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day.Obama appealed to virtue. And I think he was right. And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues — honesty, kindness, courage and so on — to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. He also appealed to hope. Right again. I think there is reason for hope. I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous.In many ways, it's what TED is all about. Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention. Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed.Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec.Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom
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"There's a great big elephant in the room called the economy. So let's start talking about that. I wanted to give you a current picture of the economy. That's what I have behind myself.(Laughter)But of course what we have to remember is this. And what you have to think about is, when you're dancing in the flames, what's next? So what I'm going to try to do in the next 17 and a half minutes is I'm going to talk first about the flames — where we are in the economy — and then I'm going to take three trends that have taken place at TED over the last 25 years and that will take place in this conference and I will try and bring them together. And I will try and give you a sense of what the ultimate reboot looks like. Those three trends are the ability to engineer cells, the ability to engineer tissues, and robots. And somehow it will all make sense.But anyway, let's start with the economy. There's a couple of really big problems that are still sitting there. One is leverage. And the problem with leverage is it makes the U.S. financial system look like this.(Laughter)So, a normal commercial bank has nine to 10 times leverage. That means for every dollar you deposit, it loans out about nine or 10. A normal investment bank is not a deposit bank, it's an investment bank; it has 15 to 20 times. It turns out that B of A in September had 32 times. And your friendly Citibank had 47 times. Oops. That means every bad loan goes bad 47 times over. And that, of course, is the reason why all of you are making such generous and wonderful donations to these nice folks. And as you think about that, you've got to wonder: so what do banks have in store for you now? (Laughter) It ain't pretty.The government, meanwhile, has been acting like Santa Claus. We all love Santa Claus, right? But the problem with Santa Clause is, if you look at the mandatory spending of what these folks have been doing and promising folks, it turned out that in 1967, 38 percent was mandatory spending on what we call ""entitlements."" And then by 2007 it was 68 percent. And we weren't supposed to run into 100 percent until about 2030. Except we've been so busy giving away a trillion here, a trillion there, that we've brought that date of reckoning forward to about 2017. And we thought we were going to be able to lay these debts off on our kids, but, guess what? We're going to start to pay them. And the problem with this stuff is, now that the bill's come due, it turns out Santa isn't quite as cute when it's summertime. Right?(Laughter)Here's some advice from one of the largest investors in the United States. This guy runs the China Investment Corporation. He is the main buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds. And he gave an interview in December. Here's his first bit of advice. And here's his second bit of advice. And, by the way, the Chinese Prime Minister reiterated this at Davos last Sunday. This stuff is getting serious enough that if we don't start paying attention to the deficit, we're going to end up losing the dollar. And then all bets are off.Let me show you what it looks like. I think I can safely say that I'm the only trillionaire in this room. This is an actual bill. And it's 10 triliion dollars. The only problem with this bill is it's not really worth very much. That was eight bucks last week, four bucks this week, a buck next week. And that's what happens to currencies when you don't stand behind them. So the next time somebody as cute as this shows up on your doorstep, and sometimes this creature's called Chrysler and sometimes Ford and sometimes ... whatever you want — you've just got to say no. And you've got to start banishing a word that's called ""entitlement."" And the reason we have to do that in the short term is because we have just run out of cash.If you look at the federal budget, this is what it looks like. The orange slice is what's discretionary. Everything else is mandated. It makes no difference if we cut out the bridges to Alaska in the overall scheme of things. So what we have to start thinking about doing is capping our medical spending because that's a monster that's simply going to eat the entire budget. We've got to start thinking about asking people to retire a little bit later. If you're 60 to 65 you retire on time. Your 401(k) just got nailed. If you're 50 to 60 we want you to work two years more. If you're under 50 we want you to work four more years. The reason why that's reasonable is, when your grandparents were given Social Security, they got it at 65 and were expected to check out at 68. Sixty-eight is young today. We've also got to cut the military about three percent a year.We've got to limit other mandatory spending. We've got to quit borrowing as much, because otherwise the interest is going to eat that whole pie. And we've got to end up with a smaller government. And if we don't start changing this trend line, we are going to lose the dollar and start to look like Iceland. I got what you're thinking. This is going to happen when hell freezes over. But let me remind you this December it did snow in Vegas.(Laughter)Here's what happens if you don't address this stuff. So, Japan had a fiscal real estate crisis back in the late '80s. And its 225 largest companies today are worth one quarter of what they were 18 years ago. We don't fix this now, how would you like to see a Dow 3,500 in 2026? Because that's the consequence of not dealing with this stuff. And unless you want this person to not just become the CFO of Florida, but the United States, we'd better deal with this stuff. That's the short term. That's the flame part. That's the financial crisis.Now, right behind the financial crisis there's a second and bigger wave that we need to talk about. That wave is much larger, much more powerful, and that's of course the wave of technology. And what's really important in this stuff is, as we cut, we also have to grow. Among other things, because startup companies are .02 percent of U.S. GDP investmentm and they're about 17.8 percent of output. It's groups like that in this room that generate the future of the U.S. economy. And that's what we've got to keep growing. We don't have to keep growing these bridges to nowhere. So let's bring a romance novelist into this conversation. And that's where these three trends come together. That's where the ability to engineer microbes, the ability to engineer tissues, and the ability to engineer robots begin to lead to a reboot. And let me recap some of the stuff you've seen.Craig Venter showed up last year and showed you the first fully programmable cell that acts like hardware where you can insert DNA and have it boot up as a different species. In parallel, the folks at MIT have been building a standard registry of biological parts. So think of it as a Radio Shack for biology. You can go out and get your proteins, your RNA, your DNA, whatever. And start building stuff. In 2006 they brought together high school students and college students and started to build these little odd creatures. They just happened to be alive instead of circuit boards.Here was one of the first things they built. So, cells have this cycle. First they don't grow. Then they grow exponentially. Then they stop growing. Graduate students wanted a way of telling which stage they were in. So they engineered these cells so that when they're growing in the exponential phase, they would smell like wintergreen. And when they stopped growing they would smell like bananas. And you could tell very easily when your experiment was working and wasn't, and where it was in the phase.This got a bit more complicated two years later. Twenty-one countries came together. Dozens of teams. They started competing. The team from Rice University started to engineer the substance in red wine that makes red wine good for you into beer. So you take resveratrol and you put it into beer. Of course, one of the judges is wandering by, and he goes, ""Wow! Cancer-fighting beer! There is a God.""(Laughter)The team from Taiwan was a little bit more ambitious. They tried to engineer bacterias in such a way that they would act as your kidneys. Four years ago, I showed you this picture. And people oohed and ahhed, because Cliff Tabin had been able to grow an extra wing on a chicken. And that was very cool stuff back then. But now moving from bacterial engineering to tissue engineering, let me show you what's happened in that period of time.Two years ago, you saw this creature. An almost-extinct animal from Xochimilco, Mexico called an axolotl that can re-generate its limbs. You can freeze half its heart. It regrows. You can freeze half the brain. It regrows. It's almost like leaving Congress. (Laughter) But now, you don't have to have the animal itself to regenerate, because you can build cloned mice molars in Petri dishes. And, of course if you can build mice molars in Petri dishes, you can grow human molars in Petri dishes. This should not surprise you, right? I mean, you're born with no teeth. You give away all your teeth to the tooth fairy. You re-grow a set of teeth. But then if you lose one of those second set of teeth, they don't regrow, unless, if you're a lawyer.(Laughter)But, of course, for most of us, we know how to grow teeth, and therefore we can take adult stem teeth, put them on a biodegradable mold, re-grow a tooth, and simply implant it. And we can do it with other things. So, a Spanish woman who was dying of T.B. had a donor trachea, they took all the cells off the trachea, they spraypainted her stem cells onto that cartilage. She regrew her own trachea, and 72 hours later it was implanted. She's now running around with her kids. This is going on in Tony Atala's lab in Wake Forest where he is re-growing ears for injured soldiers, and he's also re-growing bladders. So there are now nine women walking around Boston with re-grown bladders, which is much more pleasant than walking around with a whole bunch of plastic bags for the rest of your life.This is kind of getting boring, right? I mean, you understand where this story's going. But, I mean it gets more interesting. Last year, this group was able to take all the cells off a heart, leaving just the cartilage. Then, they sprayed stem cells onto that heart, from a mouse. Those stem cells self-organized, and that heart started to beat. Life happens.This may be one of the ultimate papers. This was done in Japan and in the U.S., published at the same time, and it rebooted skin cells into stem cells, last year. That meant that you can take the stuff right here, and turn it into almost anything in your body. And this is becoming common, it's moving very quickly, it's moving in a whole series of places.Third trend: robots. Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from ""The Jetsons"" in our house. And all we've got is a Roomba. (Laughter) We also thought we'd have this robot to warn us of danger. Didn't happen. And these were robots engineered for a flat world, right? So, Rosie runs around on skates and the other one ran on flat threads. If you don't have a flat world, that's not good, which is why the robot's we're designing today are a little different.This is Boston Dynamics' ""BigDog."" And this is about as close as you can get to a physical Turing test. O.K., so let me remind you, a Turing test is where you've got a wall, you're talking to somebody on the other side of the wall, and when you don't know if that thing is human or animal — that's when computers have reached human intelligence. This is not an intelligence Turing rest, but this is as close as you can get to a physical Turing test. And this stuff is moving very quickly, and by the way, that thing can carry about 350 pounds of weight. These are not the only interesting robots. You've also got flies, the size of flies, that are being made by Robert Wood at Harvard. You've got Stickybots that are being made at Stanford. And as you bring these things together, as you bring cells, biological tissue engineering and mechanics together, you begin to get some really odd questions.In the last Olympics, this gentleman, who had several world records in the Special Olympics, tried to run in the normal Olympics. The only issue with Oscar Pistorius is he was born without bones in the lower part of his legs. He came within about a second of qualifying. He sued to be allowed to run, and he won the suit, but didn't qualify by time. Next Olympics, you can bet that Oscar, or one of Oscar's successors, is going to make the time. And two or three Olympics after that, they are going to be unbeatable.And as you bring these trends together, and as you think of what it means to take people who are profoundly deaf, who can now begin to hear — I mean, remember the evolution of hearing aids, right? I mean, your grandparents had these great big cones, and then your parents had these odd boxes that would squawk at odd times during dinner, and now we have these little buds that nobody sees. And now you have cochlear implants that go into people's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear. Now, they can't hear as well as you and I can. But, in 10 or 15 machine generations they will, and these are machine generations, not human generations. And about two or three years after they can hear as well as you and I can, they'll be able to hear maybe how bats sing, or how whales talk, or how dogs talk, and other types of tonal scales. They'll be able to focus their hearing, they'll be able to increase the sensitivity, decrease the sensitivity, do a series of things that we can't do.And the same thing is happening in eyes. This is a group in Germany that's beginning to engineer eyes so that people who are blind can begin to see light and dark. Very primitive. And then they'll be able to see shape. And then they'll be able to see color, and then they'll be able to see in definition, and one day, they'll see as well as you and I can. And a couple of years after that, they'll be able to see in ultraviolet, they'll be able to see in infrared, they'll be able to focus their eyes, they'll be able to come into a microfocus. They'll do stuff you and I can't do. All of these things are coming together, and it's a particularly important thing to understand, as we worry about the flames of the present, to keep an eye on the future.And, of course, the future is looking back 200 years, because next week is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. And it's the 150th anniversary of the publication of ""The Origin of Species."" And Darwin, of course, argued that evolution is a natural state. It is a natural state in everything that is alive, including hominids. There have actually been 22 species of hominids that have been around, have evolved, have wandered in different places, have gone extinct. It is common for hominids to evolve. And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap. The common state of affairs is to have overlapping versions of hominids, not one.And as you think of the implications of that, here's a brief history of the universe. The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, and then you created all the stars, and all the planets, and all the galaxies, and all the Milky Ways. And then you created Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, and then you got life about four billion years ago, and then you got hominids about 0.006 billion years ago, and then you got our version of hominids about 0.0015 billion years ago. Ta-dah! Maybe the reason for thr creation of the universe, and all the galaxies, and all the planets, and all the energy, and all the dark energy, and all the rest of stuff is to create what's in this room. Maybe not. That would be a mildly arrogant viewpoint. (Laughter) So, if that's not the purpose of the universe, then what's next? (Laughter)I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a different species of hominid. I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis. And I think this isn't 1,000 years out. I think most of us are going to glance at it, and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it. And a Homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species. And that, of course, would be the ultimate reboot.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science
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"Chris Anderson: Let's now see the extraordinary speech that we captured a couple weeks ago.(Music)Jose Antonio Abreu: My dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, I am overjoyed today at being awarded the TED Prize on behalf of all the distinguished music teachers, artists and educators from Venezuela who have selflessly and loyally accompanied me for 35 years in founding, growing and developing in Venezuela the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs.Since I was a boy, in my early childhood, I always wanted to be a musician, and, thank God, I made it. From my teachers, my family and my community, I had all the necessary support to become a musician. All my life I've dreamed that all Venezuelan children have the same opportunity that I had. From that desire and from my heart stemmed the idea to make music a deep and global reality for my country.From the very first rehearsal, I saw the bright future ahead. Because the rehearsal meant a great challenge to me. I had received a donation of 50 music stands to be used by 100 boys in that rehearsal. When I arrived at the rehearsal, only 11 kids had shown up, and I said to myself, ""Do I close the program or multiply these kids?"" I decided to face the challenge, and on that same night, I promised those 11 children I'd turn our orchestra into one of the leading orchestras in the world. Two months ago, I remembered that promise I made, when a distinguished English critic published an article in the London Times, asking who could be the winner of the Orchestra World Cup. He mentioned four great world orchestras, and the fifth one was Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra. Today we can say that art in Latin America is no longer a monopoly of elites and that it has become a social right, a right for all the people.Child: There is no difference here between classes, nor white or black, nor if you have money or not. Simply, if you are talented, if you have the vocation and the will to be here, you get in. You share with us and make music.JA: During the recent tour by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela of U.S. and Europe, we saw how our music moved young audiences to the bottom of their souls, how children and adolescents rushed up to the stage to receive the jackets from our musicians, how the standing ovations, sometimes 30 minutes long, seemed to last forever, and how the public, after the concert was over, went out into the street to greet our young people in triumph. This meant not only an artistic triumph, but also a profound emotional sympathy between the public of the most advanced nations of the world and the musical youth of Latin America, as seen in Venezuela, giving these audiences a message of music, vitality, energy, enthusiasm and strength.In its essence, the orchestra and the choir are much more than artistic structures. They are examples and schools of social life, because to sing and to play together means to intimately coexist toward perfection and excellence, following a strict discipline of organization and coordination in order to seek the harmonic interdependence of voices and instruments. That's how they build a spirit of solidarity and fraternity among them, develop their self-esteem and foster the ethical and aesthetical values related to the music in all its senses. This is why music is immensely important in the awakening of sensibility, in the forging of values and in the training of youngsters to teach other kids.Child: After all this time here, music is life. Nothing else. Music is life.JA: Each teenager and child in El Sistema has his own story, and they are all important and of great significance to me. Let me mention the case of Edicson Ruiz. He is a boy from a parish in Caracas who passionately attended to his double bass lessons at the San Agustin's Junior Orchestra. With his effort, and the support of his mother, his family and his community, he became a principal member in the double bass segment of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We have another well-known case — Gustavo Dudamel. He started as a boy member of the children's orchestra in his hometown, Barquisimeto. There, he grew as a violinist and as a conductor. He became the conductor of Venezuela's junior orchestras, and today conducts the world's greatest orchestras. He is the musical director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is still the overall leader of Venezuela's junior orchestras. He was the conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and he's an unbeatable example for young musicians in Latin America and the world.The structure of El Sistema is based on a new and flexible managing style adapted to the features of each community and region, and today attends to 300,000 children of the lower and middle class all over Venezuela. It's a program of social rescue and deep cultural transformation designed for the whole Venezuelan society with absolutely no distinctions whatsoever, but emphasizing the vulnerable and endangered social groups.The effect of El Sistema is felt in three fundamental circles: in the personal/social circle, in the family circle and in the community. In the personal/social circle, the children in the orchestras and choirs develop their intellectual and emotional side. The music becomes a source for developing the dimensions of the human being, thus elevating the spirit and leading man to a full development of his personality. So, the emotional and intellectual profits are huge — the acquisition of leadership, teaching and training principles, the sense of commitment, responsibility, generosity and dedication to others, and the individual contribution to achieve great collective goals. All this leads to the development of self-esteem and confidence.Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me: the most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one — the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem. That's why the child's development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity and makes him a role model for his family and community. It makes him a better student at school because it inspires in him a sense of responsibility, perseverance and punctuality that will greatly help him at school.Within the family, the parents' support is unconditional. The child becomes a role model for both his parents, and this is very important for a poor child. Once the child discovers he is important to his family, he begins to seek new ways of improving himself and hopes better for himself and his community. Also, he hopes for social and economic improvements for his own family. All this makes up a constructive and ascending social dynamic. The large majority of our children belong, as I already mentioned, to the most vulnerable strata of the Venezuelan population. That encourages them to embrace new dreams, new goals, and progress in the various opportunities that music has to offer.Finally, in the circle of the community, the orchestras prove to be the creative spaces of culture and sources of exchange and new meanings. The spontaneity music has excludes it as a luxury item and makes it a patrimony of society. It's what makes a child play a violin at home, while his father works in his carpentry. It's what makes a little girl play the clarinet at home, while her mother does the housework. The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs that their children belong to. The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child's taught how to play an instrument, he's no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who'll later become a full citizen. Needless to say that music is the number one prevention against prostitution, violence, bad habits, and everything degrading in the life of a child.A few years ago, historian Arnold Toynbee said that the world was suffering a huge spiritual crisis. Not an economic or social crisis, but a spiritual one. I believe that to confront such a crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind's deepest aspirations, and to the historic demands of our times. Education — the synthesis of wisdom and knowledge — is the means to strive for a more perfect, more aware, more noble and more just society.With passion and enthusiasm we pay profound respects to TED for its outstanding humanism, the scope of its principles, for its open and generous promotion of young values. We hope that TED can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission. No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.(Music)(Applause)CA: We are going live now to Caracas. We are going live to Caracas to hear Maestro Abreu's TED Prize wish.JA: Here is my TED Prize wish: I wish that you'll help to create and document a special training program for 50 gifted young musicians, passionate about their art and social justice, and dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States and other countries. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jose_abreu_on_kids_transformed_by_music
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"Chris Anderson: And now we go live to Caracas to see one of Maestro Abreu's great proteges. He is the new musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He's the greatest young conductor in the world. Gustavo Dudamel! (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Gustavo Dudamel: Hi everybody in L.A. Hi Quincy. Hi Maestro Zander. Hi Mark. We are very happy to have the possibility to be with you in the other side of the world. We can speak only with music. We are very happy because we have the opportunity to have this angel in the world — not only in our country, Venezuela, but in our world. He has given us the possibility to have dreams and to make true the dreams. And here are the results of this wonderful project that is The System in Venezuela. We hope to have, our Maestro, to have orchestras in all the countries in all Americas. And we want to play a little piece for you by one of the most important composers of America. A Mexican composer: Arturo Marquez. ""Danzon No. 2."" (Music) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/astonishing_performance_by_a_venezuelan_youth_orchestra_1
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"Fifty years ago, when I began exploring the ocean, no one — not Jacques Perrin, not Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson — imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or by what we took out of it. It seemed, at that time, to be a sea of Eden, but now we know, and now we are facing paradise lost.I want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us, and to consider why it matters that in 50 years, we've lost — actually, we've taken, we've eaten — more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea; why you should care that nearly half of the coral reefs have disappeared; why a mysterious depletion of oxygen in large areas of the Pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying, but it really should concern you. It does concern you, as well.I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls ""tomorrow's child,"" asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time. I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us.And I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.(Laughter)Did I say that? I guess I did.For me, as a scientist, it all began in 1953 when I first tried scuba. It's when I first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter. I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime. Diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970, when I led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time — at the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon. In 1979 I had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal submersible called Jim. It was six miles offshore and 1,250 feet down. It's one of my favorite bathing suits.Since then, I've used about 30 kinds of submarines and I've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to design and build systems to access the deep sea. I led a five-year National Geographic expedition, the Sustainable Seas expeditions, using these little subs. They're so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it. And I'm living proof. Astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air, food, water, temperature — all the things you need to stay alive in space or under the sea. I heard astronaut Joe Allen explain how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system; and then he pointed to this and he said, ""Life support system."" We need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it.The poet Auden said, ""Thousands have lived without love; none without water."" Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. No blue, no green. If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. Mars comes to mind. No ocean, no life support system. I gave a talk not so long ago at the World Bank and I showed this amazing image of Earth and I said, ""There it is! The World Bank!"" That's where all the assets are! And we've been trawling them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them.Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea. Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. The ocean drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, shapes Earth's chemistry. Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain, sleet and snow, and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, maybe in the universe. No water, no life; no blue, no green.Yet we have this idea, we humans, that the Earth — all of it: the oceans, the skies — are so vast and so resilient it doesn't matter what we do to it. That may have been true 10,000 years ago, and maybe even 1,000 years ago but in the last 100, especially in the last 50, we've drawn down the assets, the air, the water, the wildlife that make our lives possible. New technologies are helping us to understand the nature of nature; the nature of what's happening, showing us our impact on the Earth. I mean, first you have to know that you've got a problem. And fortunately, in our time, we've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history. And with knowing comes caring. And with caring, there's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us. But first we have to know.Three years ago, I met John Hanke, who's the head of Google Earth, and I told him how much I loved being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously. But I asked him: ""When are you going to finish it? You did a great job with the land, the dirt. What about the water?"" Since then, I've had the great pleasure of working with the Googlers, with DOER Marine, with National Geographic, with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world, ones that we could enlist, to put the ocean in Google Earth. And as of just this week, last Monday, Google Earth is now whole.Consider this: Starting right here at the convention center, we can find the nearby aquarium, we can look at where we're sitting, and then we can cruise up the coast to the big aquarium, the ocean, and California's four national marine sanctuaries, and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets We can flit over to Hawaii and see the real Hawaiian Islands: not just the little bit that pokes through the surface, but also what's below. To see — wait a minute, we can go kshhplash! — right there, ha — under the ocean, see what the whales see. We can go explore the other side of the Hawaiian Islands. We can go actually and swim around on Google Earth and visit with humpback whales. These are the gentle giants that I've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater. There's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale.We can pick up and fly to the deepest place: seven miles down, the Mariana Trench, where only two people have ever been. Imagine that. It's only seven miles, but only two people have been there, 49 years ago. One-way trips are easy. We need new deep-diving submarines. How about some X Prizes for ocean exploration? We need to see deep trenches, the undersea mountains, and understand life in the deep sea.We can now go to the Arctic. Just ten years ago I stood on the ice at the North Pole. An ice-free Arctic Ocean may happen in this century. That's bad news for the polar bears. That's bad news for us too. Excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming, it's also changing ocean chemistry, making the sea more acidic. That's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen-producing plankton. Also it's bad news for us. We're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other trash into the sea. Millions of tons of discarded fishing nets, gear that continues to kill. We're clogging the ocean, poisoning the planet's circulatory system, and we're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife, all carbon-based units. Barbarically, we're killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle — our life support system. We're still killing bluefin tuna; truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead. All of these parts are part of our life support system. We kill using long lines, with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more. Industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers, taking everything in their path.Using Google Earth you can witness trawlers — in China, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico — shaking the foundation of our life support system, leaving plumes of death in their path. The next time you dine on sushi — or sashimi, or swordfish steak, or shrimp cocktail, whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean — think of the real cost. For every pound that goes to market, more than 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, may be thrown away as bycatch. This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea. This chart shows the decline in ocean wildlife from 1900 to 2000. The highest concentrations are in red. In my lifetime, imagine, 90 percent of the big fish have been killed. Most of the turtles, sharks, tunas and whales are way down in numbers.But, there is good news. Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. But business as usual means that in 50 years, there may be no coral reefs — and no commercial fishing, because the fish will simply be gone. Imagine the ocean without fish. Imagine what that means to our life support system. Natural systems on the land are in big trouble too, but the problems are more obvious, and some actions are being taken to protect trees, watersheds and wildlife.And in 1872, with Yellowstone National Park, the United States began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea America ever had. About 12 percent of the land around the world is now protected: safeguarding biodiversity, providing a carbon sink, generating oxygen, protecting watersheds. And, in 1972, this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea, National Marine Sanctuaries. That's another great idea. The good news is that there are now more than 4,000 places in the sea, around the world, that have some kind of protection. And you can find them on Google Earth. The bad news is that you have to look hard to find them. In the last three years, for example, the U.S. protected 340,000 square miles of ocean as national monuments. But it only increased from 0.6 of one percent to 0.8 of one percent of the ocean protected, globally. Protected areas do rebound, but it takes a long time to restore 50-year-old rockfish or monkfish, sharks or sea bass, or 200-year-old orange roughy. We don't consume 200-year-old cows or chickens. Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph.With scientists around the world, I've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing — and mining, and drilling, and dumping, and whatever — to search out hope spots, and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future. Such as the Arctic — we have one chance, right now, to get it right. Or the Antarctic, where the continent is protected, but the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill, whales and fish. Sargasso Sea's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows. 97 percent of the land in the Galapagos Islands is protected, but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing. It's true too in Argentina on the Patagonian shelf, which is now in serious trouble. The high seas, where whales, tuna and dolphins travel — the largest, least protected, ecosystem on Earth, filled with luminous creatures, living in dark waters that average two miles deep. They flash, and sparkle, and glow with their own living light.There are still places in the sea as pristine as I knew as a child. The next 10 years may be the most important, and the next 10,000 years the best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life. To cope with climate change, we need new ways to generate power. We need new ways, better ways, to cope with poverty, wars and disease. We need many things to keep and maintain the world as a better place. But, nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean's are one. We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above.A global plan of action with a world conservation union, the IUCN, is underway to protect biodiversity, to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change, on the high seas and in coastal areas, wherever we can identify critical places. New technologies are needed to map, photograph and explore the 95 percent of the ocean that we have yet to see. The goal is to protect biodiversity, to provide stability and resilience. We need deep-diving subs, new technologies to explore the ocean. We need, maybe, an expedition — a TED at sea — that could help figure out the next steps.And so, I suppose you want to know what my wish is. I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films, expeditions, the web, new submarines — and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas — hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. How much? Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect? Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough. My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually — as it turns out — is my favorite species; that would be us. For the children of today, for tomorrow's child: as never again, now is the time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans
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"So, my question: are we alone?The story of humans is the story of ideas — scientific ideas that shine light into dark corners, ideas that we embrace rationally and irrationally, ideas for which we've lived and died and killed and been killed, ideas that have vanished in history, and ideas that have been set in dogma. It's a story of nations, of ideologies, of territories, and of conflicts among them. But, every moment of human history, from the Stone Age to the Information Age, from Sumer and Babylon to the iPod and celebrity gossip, they've all been carried out — every book that you've read, every poem, every laugh, every tear — they've all happened here. Here. Here. Here. (Laughter)Perspective is a very powerful thing. Perspectives can change. Perspectives can be altered. From my perspective, we live on a fragile island of life, in a universe of possibilities. For many millennia, humans have been on a journey to find answers, answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence, about who we are and why we are, and of course, who else might be out there. Is it really just us? Are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics? Well, if we are, it's an awful waste of space. (Laughter) But, what if we're not?What if, out there, others are asking and answering similar questions? What if they look up at the night sky, at the same stars, but from the opposite side? Would the discovery of an older cultural civilization out there inspire us to find ways to survive our increasingly uncertain technological adolescence? Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we're born in San Francisco, or Sudan, or close to the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from. Fifty years ago, the journey to find answers took a different path and SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, began.So, what exactly is SETI? Well, SETI uses the tools of astronomy to try and find evidence of someone else's technology out there. Our own technologies are visible over interstellar distances, and theirs might be as well. It might be that some massive network of communications, or some shield against asteroidal impact, or some huge astro-engineering project that we can't even begin to conceive of, could generate signals at radio or optical frequencies that a determined program of searching might detect. For millennia, we've actually turned to the priests and the philosophers for guidance and instruction on this question of whether there's intelligent life out there. Now, we can use the tools of the 21st century to try and observe what is, rather than ask what should be, believed.SETI doesn't presume the existence of extra terrestrial intelligence; it merely notes the possibility, if not the probability in this vast universe, which seems fairly uniform. The numbers suggest a universe of possibilities. Our sun is one of 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and we know that many other stars have planetary systems. We've discovered over 350 in the last 14 years, including the small planet, announced earlier this week, which has a radius just twice the size of the Earth. And, if even all of the planetary systems in our galaxy were devoid of life, there are still 100 billion other galaxies out there, altogether 10^22 stars. Now, I'm going to try a trick, and recreate an experiment from this morning. Remember, one billion? But, this time not one billion dollars, one billion stars. Alright, one billion stars. Now, up there, 20 feet above the stage, that's 10 trillion. Well, what about 10^22? Where's the line that marks that? That line would have to be 3.8 million miles above this stage. (Laughter) 16 times farther away than the moon, or four percent of the distance to the sun.So, there are many possibilities. (Laughter) And much of this vast universe, much more may be habitable than we once thought, as we study extremophiles on Earth — organisms that can live in conditions totally inhospitable for us, in the hot, high pressure thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, frozen in ice, in boiling battery acid, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors. These extremophiles tell us that life may exist in many other environments.But those environments are going to be widely spaced in this universe. Even our nearest star, the Sun — its emissions suffer the tyranny of light speed. It takes a full eight minutes for its radiation to reach us. And the nearest star is 4.2 light years away, which means its light takes 4.2 years to get here. And the edge of our galaxy is 75,000 light years away, and the nearest galaxy to us, 2.5 million light years. That means any signal we detect would have started its journey a long time ago. And a signal would give us a glimpse of their past, not their present. Which is why Phil Morrison calls SETI, ""the archaeology of the future."" It tells us about their past, but detection of a signal tells us it's possible for us to have a long future.I think this is what David Deutsch meant in 2005, when he ended his Oxford TEDTalk by saying he had two principles he'd like to share for living, and he would like to carve them on stone tablets. The first is that problems are inevitable. The second is that problems are soluble. So, ultimately what's going to determine the success or failure of SETI is the longevity of technologies, and the mean distance between technologies in the cosmos — distance over space and distance over time. If technologies don't last and persist, we will not succeed. And we're a very young technology in an old galaxy, and we don't yet know whether it's possible for technologies to persist.So, up until now I've been talking to you about really large numbers. Let me talk about a relatively small number. And that's the length of time that the Earth was lifeless. Zircons that are mined in the Jack Hills of western Australia, zircons taken from the Jack Hills of western Australia tell us that within a few hundred million years of the origin of the planet there was abundant water and perhaps even life. So, our planet has spent the vast majority of its 4.56 billion year history developing life, not anticipating its emergence. Life happened very quickly, and that bodes well for the potential of life elsewhere in the cosmos.And the other thing that one should take away from this chart is the very narrow range of time over which humans can claim to be the dominant intelligence on the planet. It's only the last few hundred thousand years modern humans have been pursuing technology and civilization. So, one needs a very deep appreciation of the diversity and incredible scale of life on this planet as the first step in preparing to make contact with life elsewhere in the cosmos.We are not the pinnacle of evolution. We are not the determined product of billions of years of evolutionary plotting and planning. We are one outcome of a continuing adaptational process. We are residents of one small planet in a corner of the Milky Way galaxy. And Homo sapiens are one small leaf on a very extensive Tree of Life, which is densely populated by organisms that have been honed for survival over millions of years. We misuse language, and talk about the ""ascent"" of man. We understand the scientific basis for the interrelatedness of life but our ego hasn't caught up yet. So this ""ascent"" of man, pinnacle of evolution, has got to go. It's a sense of privilege that the natural universe doesn't share.Loren Eiseley has said, ""One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human."" One day that eye may be that of an intelligent alien, and the sooner we eschew our narrow view of evolution the sooner we can truly explore our ultimate origins and destinations.We are a small part of the story of cosmic evolution, and we are going to be responsible for our continued participation in that story, and perhaps SETI will help as well. Occasionally, throughout history, this concept of this very large cosmic perspective comes to the surface, and as a result we see transformative and profound discoveries. So in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus published ""The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres,"" and by taking the Earth out of the center, and putting the sun in the center of the solar system, he opened our eyes to a much larger universe, of which we are just a small part. And that Copernican revolution continues today to influence science and philosophy and technology and theology.So, in 1959, Giuseppe Coccone and Philip Morrison published the first SETI article in a refereed journal, and brought SETI into the scientific mainstream. And in 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first SETI observation looking at two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, for about 150 hours. Now Drake did not discover extraterrestrial intelligence, but he learned a very valuable lesson from a passing aircraft, and that's that terrestrial technology can interfere with the search for extraterrestrial technology.We've been searching ever since, but it's impossible to overstate the magnitude of the search that remains. All of the concerted SETI efforts, over the last 40-some years, are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the oceans. And no one would decide that the ocean was without fish on the basis of one glass of water. The 21st century now allows us to build bigger glasses — much bigger glasses. In Northern California, we're beginning to take observations with the first 42 telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array — and I've got to take a moment right now to publicly thank Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold and all the TeamSETI members in the TED community who have so generously supported this research. (Applause)The ATA is the first telescope built from a large number of small dishes, and hooked together with computers. It's making silicon as important as aluminum, and we'll grow it in the future by adding more antennas to reach 350 for more sensitivity and leveraging Moore's law for more processing capability. Today, our signal detection algorithms can find very simple artifacts and noise. If you look very hard here you can see the signal from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant human object in the universe, 106 times as far away from us as the sun is. And over those long distances, its signal is very faint when it reaches us. It may be hard for your eye to see it, but it's easily found with our efficient algorithms. But this is a simple signal, and tomorrow we want to be able to find more complex signals.This is a very good year. 2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope, Darwin's 200th birthday, the 150th anniversary of the publication of ""On the Origin of Species,"" the 50th anniversary of SETI as a science, the 25th anniversary of the incorporation of the SETI Institute as a non-profit, and of course, the 25th anniversary of TED. And next month, the Kepler Spacecraft will launch and will begin to tell us just how frequent Earth-like planets are, the targets for SETI's searches. In 2009, the U.N. has declared it to be the International Year of Astronomy, a global festival to help us residents of Earth rediscover our cosmic origins and our place in the universe. And in 2009, change has come to Washington, with a promise to put science in its rightful position. (Applause)So, what would change everything? Well, this is the question the Edge foundation asked this year, and four of the respondents said, ""SETI."" Why? Well, to quote: ""The discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would eradicate the loneliness and solipsism that has plagued our species since its inception. And it wouldn't simply change everything, it would change everything all at once."" So, if that's right, why did we only capture four out of those 151 minds? I think it's a problem of completion and delivery, because the fine print said, ""What game-changing ideas and scientific developments would you expect to live to see?"" So, we have a fulfillment problem. We need bigger glasses and more hands in the water, and then working together, maybe we can all live to see the detection of the first extraterrestrial signal.That brings me to my wish. I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.The first step would be to tap into the global brain trust, to build an environment where raw data could be stored, and where it could be accessed and manipulated, where new algorithms could be developed and old algorithms made more efficient. And this is a technically creative challenge, and it would change the perspective of people who worked on it. And then, we'd like to augment the automated search with human insight. We'd like to use the pattern recognition capability of the human eye to find faint, complex signals that our current algorithms miss.And, of course, we'd like to inspire and engage the next generation. We'd like to take the materials that we have built for education, and get them out to students everywhere, students that can't come and visit us at the ATA. We'd like to tell our story better, and engage young people, and thereby change their perspective.I'm sorry Seth Godin, but over the millennia, we've seen where tribalism leads. We've seen what happens when we divide an already small planet into smaller islands. And, ultimately, we actually all belong to only one tribe, to Earthlings. And SETI is a mirror — a mirror that can show us ourselves from an extraordinary perspective, and can help to trivialize the differences among us. If SETI does nothing but change the perspective of humans on this planet, then it will be one of the most profound endeavors in history.So, in the opening days of 2009, a visionary president stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and said, ""We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that, as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself."" So, I look forward to working with the TED community to hear about your ideas about how to fulfill this wish, and in collaborating with you, hasten the day that that visionary statement can become a reality.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_s_call_to_join_the_seti_search
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"I'm here today representing a team of artists and technologists and filmmakers that worked together on a remarkable film project for the last four years. And along the way they created a breakthrough in computer visualization.So I want to show you a clip of the film now. Hopefully it won't stutter. And if we did our jobs well, you won't know that we were even involved.Voice (Video): I don't know how it's possible ... but you seem to have more hair.Brad Pitt: What if I told you that I wasn't getting older ... but I was getting younger than everybody else?I was born with some form of disease.Voice: What kind of disease?BP: I was born old.Man: I'm sorry.BP: No need to be. There's nothing wrong with old age.Girl: Are you sick?BP: I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon. But ... maybe not.Girl: You're different than anybody I've ever met.BB: There were many changes ... some you could see, some you couldn't. Hair started growing in all sorts of places, along with other things. I felt pretty good, considering.Ed Ulbrich: That was a clip from ""The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."" Many of you, maybe you've seen it or you've heard of the story, but what you might not know is that for nearly the first hour of the film, the main character, Benjamin Button, who's played by Brad Pitt, is completely computer-generated from the neck up. Now, there's no use of prosthetic makeup or photography of Brad superimposed over another actor's body. We've created a completely digital human head.So I'd like to start with a little bit of history on the project. This is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It's about a man who's born old and lives his life in reverse. Now, this movie has floated around Hollywood for well over half a century, and we first got involved with the project in the early '90s, with Ron Howard as the director. We took a lot of meetings and we seriously considered it. But at the time we had to throw in the towel. It was deemed impossible. It was beyond the technology of the day to depict a man aging backwards. The human form, in particular the human head, has been considered the Holy Grail of our industry.The project came back to us about a decade later, and this time with a director named David Fincher. Now, Fincher is an interesting guy. David is fearless of technology, and he is absolutely tenacious. And David won't take ""no."" And David believed, like we do in the visual effects industry, that anything is possible as long as you have enough time, resources and, of course, money. And so David had an interesting take on the film, and he threw a challenge at us. He wanted the main character of the film to be played from the cradle to the grave by one actor. It happened to be this guy.We went through a process of elimination and a process of discovery with David, and we ruled out, of course, swapping actors. That was one idea: that we would have different actors, and we would hand off from actor to actor.We even ruled out the idea of using makeup. We realized that prosthetic makeup just wouldn't hold up, particularly in close-up. And makeup is an additive process. You have to build the face up. And David wanted to carve deeply into Brad's face to bring the aging to this character. He needed to be a very sympathetic character. So we decided to cast a series of little people that would play the different bodies of Benjamin at the different increments of his life and that we would in fact create a computer-generated version of Brad's head, aged to appear as Benjamin, and attach that to the body of the real actor. Sounded great.Of course, this was the Holy Grail of our industry, and the fact that this guy is a global icon didn't help either, because I'm sure if any of you ever stand in line at the grocery store, you know — we see his face constantly. So there really was no tolerable margin of error. There were two studios involved: Warner Brothers and Paramount. And they both believed this would make an amazing film, of course, but it was a very high-risk proposition. There was lots of money and reputations at stake. But we believed that we had a very solid methodology that might work ...But despite our verbal assurances, they wanted some proof. And so, in 2004, they commissioned us to do a screen test of Benjamin. And we did it in about five weeks. But we used lots of cheats and shortcuts. We basically put something together to get through the meeting. I'll roll that for you now. This was the first test for Benjamin Button. And in here, you can see, that's a computer-generated head — pretty good — attached to the body of an actor. And it worked. And it gave the studio great relief. After many years of starts and stops on this project, and making that tough decision, they finally decided to greenlight the movie. And I can remember, actually, when I got the phone call to congratulate us, to say the movie was a go, I actually threw up. (Laughter) You know, this is some tough stuff.So we started to have early team meetings, and we got everybody together, and it was really more like therapy in the beginning, convincing each other and reassuring each other that we could actually undertake this. We had to hold up an hour of a movie with a character. And it's not a special effects film; it has to be a man. We really felt like we were in a — kind of a 12-step program. And of course, the first step is: admit you've got a problem. (Laughter) So we had a big problem: we didn't know how we were going to do this. But we did know one thing. Being from the visual effects industry, we, with David, believed that we now had enough time, enough resources, and, God, we hoped we had enough money. And we had enough passion to will the processes and technology into existence.So, when you're faced with something like that, of course you've got to break it down. You take the big problem and you break it down into smaller pieces and you start to attack that. So we had three main areas that we had to focus on. We needed to make Brad look a lot older — needed to age him 45 years or so. And we also needed to make sure that we could take Brad's idiosyncrasies, his little tics, the little subtleties that make him who he is and have that translate through our process so that it appears in Benjamin on the screen.And we also needed to create a character that could hold up under, really, all conditions. He needed to be able to walk in broad daylight, at nighttime, under candlelight, he had to hold an extreme close-up, he had to deliver dialogue, he had to be able to run, he had to be able to sweat, he had to be able to take a bath, to cry, he even had to throw up. Not all at the same time — but he had to, you know, do all of those things.And the work had to hold up for almost the first hour of the movie. We did about 325 shots. So we needed a system that would allow Benjamin to do everything a human being can do. And we realized that there was a giant chasm between the state of the art of technology in 2004 and where we needed it to be.So we focused on motion capture. I'm sure many of you have seen motion capture. The state of the art at the time was something called marker-based motion capture. I'll give you an example here. It's basically the idea of, you wear a leotard, and they put some reflective markers on your body, and instead of using cameras, there're infrared sensors around a volume, and those infrared sensors track the three-dimensional position of those markers in real time. And then animators can take the data of the motion of those markers and apply them to a computer-generated character. You can see the computer characters on the right are having the same complex motion as the dancers.But we also looked at numbers of other films at the time that were using facial marker tracking, and that's the idea of putting markers on the human face and doing the same process. And as you can see, it gives you a pretty crappy performance. That's not terribly compelling. And what we realized was that what we needed was the information that was going on between the markers. We needed the subtleties of the skin. We needed to see skin moving over muscle moving over bone. We needed creases and dimples and wrinkles and all of those things.Our first revelation was to completely abort and walk away from the technology of the day, the status quo, the state of the art. So we aborted using motion capture. And we were now well out of our comfort zone, and in uncharted territory. So we were left with this idea that we ended up calling ""technology stew."" We started to look out in other fields. The idea was that we were going to find nuggets or gems of technology that come from other industries like medical imaging, the video game space, and re-appropriate them. And we had to create kind of a sauce. And the sauce was code in software that we'd written to allow these disparate pieces of technology to come together and work as one.Initially, we came across some remarkable research done by a gentleman named Dr. Paul Ekman in the early '70s. He believed that he could, in fact, catalog the human face. And he came up with this idea of Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. He believed that there were 70 basic poses or shapes of the human face, and that those basic poses or shapes of the face can be combined to create infinite possibilities of everything the human face is capable of doing. And of course, these transcend age, race, culture, gender. So this became the foundation of our research as we went forward.And then we came across some remarkable technology called Contour. And here you can see a subject having phosphorus makeup stippled on her face. And now what we're looking at is really creating a surface capture as opposed to a marker capture. The subject stands in front of a computer array of cameras, and those cameras can, frame-by-frame, reconstruct the geometry of exactly what the subject's doing at the moment. So, effectively, you get 3D data in real time of the subject. And if you look in a comparison, on the left, we see what volumetric data gives us and on the right you see what markers give us. So, clearly, we were in a substantially better place for this. But these were the early days of this technology, and it wasn't really proven yet. We measure complexity and fidelity of data in terms of polygonal count. And so, on the left, we were seeing 100,000 polygons. We could go up into the millions of polygons. It seemed to be infinite.This was when we had our ""Aha!"" This was the breakthrough. This is when we're like, ""OK, we're going to be OK, This is actually going to work."" And the ""Aha!"" was, what if we could take Brad Pitt, and we could put Brad in this device, and use this Contour process, and we could stipple on this phosphorescent makeup and put him under the black lights, and we could, in fact, scan him in real time performing Ekman's FACS poses. Right? So, effectively, we ended up with a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face is capable of doing. (Laughter)From there, we actually carved up those faces into smaller pieces and components of his face. So we ended up with literally thousands and thousands and thousands of shapes, a complete database of all possibilities that his face is capable of doing.Now, that's great, except we had him at age 44. We need to put another 40 years on him at this point. We brought in Rick Baker, and Rick is one of the great makeup and special effects gurus of our industry. And we also brought in a gentleman named Kazu Tsuji, and Kazu Tsuji is one of the great photorealist sculptors of our time. And we commissioned them to make a maquette, or a bust, of Benjamin. So, in the spirit of ""The Great Unveiling"" — I had to do this — I had to unveil something. So this is Ben 80. We created three of these: there's Ben 80, there's Ben 70, there's Ben 60. And this really became the template for moving forward.Now, this was made from a life cast of Brad. So, in fact, anatomically, it is correct. The eyes, the jaw, the teeth: everything is in perfect alignment with what the real guy has. We have these maquettes scanned into the computer at very high resolution — enormous polygonal count. And so now we had three age increments of Benjamin in the computer.But we needed to get a database of him doing more than that. We went through this process, then, called retargeting. This is Brad doing one of the Ekman FACS poses. And here's the resulting data that comes from that, the model that comes from that. Retargeting is the process of transposing that data onto another model. And because the life cast, or the bust — the maquette — of Benjamin was made from Brad, we could transpose the data of Brad at 44 onto Brad at 87. So now, we had a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face can do at age 87, in his 70s and in his 60s.Next we had to go into the shooting process. So while all that's going on, we're down in New Orleans and locations around the world. And we shot our body actors, and we shot them wearing blue hoods. So these are the gentleman who played Benjamin. And the blue hoods helped us with two things: one, we could easily erase their heads; and we also put tracking markers on their heads so we could recreate the camera motion and the lens optics from the set.But now we needed to get Brad's performance to drive our virtual Benjamin. And so we edited the footage that was shot on location with the rest of the cast and the body actors and about six months later we brought Brad onto a sound stage in Los Angeles and he watched on the screen. His job, then, was to become Benjamin. And so we looped the scenes. He watched again and again. We encouraged him to improvise. And he took Benjamin into interesting and unusual places that we didn't think he was going to go. We shot him with four HD cameras so we'd get multiple views of him and then David would choose the take of Brad being Benjamin that he thought best matched the footage with the rest of the cast.From there we went into a process called image analysis. And so here, you can see again, the chosen take. And you are seeing, now, that data being transposed on to Ben 87. And so, what's interesting about this is we used something called image analysis, which is taking timings from different components of Benjamin's face. And so we could choose, say, his left eyebrow. And the software would tell us that, well, in frame 14 the left eyebrow begins to move from here to here, and it concludes moving in frame 32. And so we could choose numbers of positions on the face to pull that data from.And then, the sauce I talked about with our technology stew — that secret sauce was, effectively, software that allowed us to match the performance footage of Brad in live action with our database of aged Benjamin, the FACS shapes that we had. On a frame-by-frame basis, we could actually reconstruct a 3D head that exactly matched the performance of Brad.So this was how the finished shot appeared in the film. And here you can see the body actor. And then this is what we called the ""dead head,"" no reference to Jerry Garcia.And then here's the reconstructed performance now with the timings of the performance. And then, again, the final shot. It was a long process. (Applause)The next section here, I'm going to just blast through this, because we could do a whole TEDTalk on the next several slides.We had to create a lighting system. So really, a big part of our processes was creating a lighting environment for every single location that Benjamin had to appear so that we could put Ben's head into any scene and it would exactly match the lighting that's on the other actors in the real world.We also had to create an eye system. We found the old adage, you know, ""The eyes are the window to the soul,"" absolutely true. So the key here was to keep everybody looking in Ben's eyes. And if you could feel the warmth, and feel the humanity, and feel his intent coming through the eyes, then we would succeed. So we had one person focused on the eye system for almost two full years.We also had to create a mouth system. We worked from dental molds of Brad. We had to age the teeth over time.We also had to create an articulating tongue that allowed him to enunciate his words. There was a whole system written in software to articulate the tongue. We had one person devoted to the tongue for about nine months. He was very popular.Skin displacement: another big deal. The skin had to be absolutely accurate. He's also in an old age home, he's in a nursing home around other old people, so he had to look exactly the same as the others. So, lots of work on skin deformation, you can see in some of these cases it works, in some cases it looks bad. This is a very, very, very early test in our process. So, effectively we created a digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face. There were no animators necessary to come in and interpret behavior or enhance his performance.There was something that we encountered, though, that we ended up calling ""the digital Botox effect."" So, as things went through this process, Fincher would always say, ""It sandblasts the edges off of the performance."" And thing our process and the technology couldn't do, is they couldn't understand intent, the intent of the actor. So it sees a smile as a smile. It doesn't recognize an ironic smile, or a happy smile, or a frustrated smile. So it did take humans to kind of push it one way or another.But we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology ""emotion capture,"" as opposed to just motion capture. Take another look.Brad Pitt: Well, I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon, but ... maybe not.EU: That's how to create a digital human in 18 minutes. (Applause)A couple of quick factoids; it really took 155 people over two years, and we didn't even talk about 60 hairstyles and an all-digital haircut. But, that is Benjamin. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_ulbrich_shows_how_benjamin_button_got_his_face
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"Let's talk trash.You know, we had to be taught to renounce the powerful conservation ethic we developed during the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, we needed to direct our enormous production capacity toward creation of products for peacetime. Life Magazine helped in this effort by announcing the introduction of throwaways that would liberate the housewife from the drudgery of doing dishes.Mental note to the liberators: throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade. Only we humans make waste that nature can't digest.Plastics are also hard to recycle. A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream. It's diddly-point-squat. That's the percentage we recycle.Now, melting point has a lot to do with this. Plastic is not purified by the re-melting process like glass and metal. It begins to melt below the boiling point of water and does not drive off the oily contaminants for which it is a sponge. Half of each year's 100 billion pounds of thermal plastic pellets will be made into fast-track trash. A large, unruly fraction of our trash will flow downriver to the sea.Here is the accumulation at Biona Creek next to the L.A. airport. And here is the flotsam near California State University Long Beach and the diesel plant we visited yesterday.In spite of deposit fees, much of this trash leading out to the sea will be plastic beverage bottles. We use two million of them in the United States every five minutes, here imaged by TED presenter Chris Jordan, who artfully documents mass consumption and zooms in for more detail.Here is a remote island repository for bottles off the coast of Baja California. Isla San Roque is an uninhabited bird rookery off Baja's sparsely populated central coast. Notice that the bottles here have caps on them. Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, PET, will sink in seawater and not make it this far from civilization. Also, the caps are produced in separate factories from a different plastic, polypropylene. They will float in seawater, but unfortunately do not get recycled under the bottle bills.Let's trace the journey of the millions of caps that make it to sea solo. After a year the ones from Japan are heading straight across the Pacific, while ours get caught in the California current and first head down to the latitude of Cabo San Lucas. After ten years, a lot of the Japanese caps are in what we call the Eastern Garbage Patch, while ours litter the Philippines. After 20 years, we see emerging the debris accumulation zone of the North Pacific Gyre.It so happens that millions of albatross nesting on Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument forage here and scavenge whatever they can find for regurgitation to their chicks. A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with this in its stomach. Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters ... but, mostly bottle caps. Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface.The retainer rings for the caps also have consequences for aquatic animals. This is Mae West, still alive at a zookeeper's home in New Orleans.I wanted to see what my home town of Long Beach was contributing to the problem, so on Coastal Clean-Up Day in 2005 I went to the Long Beach Peninsula, at the east end of our long beach. We cleaned up the swaths of beach shown. I offered five cents each for bottle caps. I got plenty of takers. Here are the 1,100 bottle caps they collected. I thought I would spend 20 bucks. That day I ended up spending nearly 60.I separated them by color and put them on display the next Earth Day at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria stopped by to discuss the display. In spite of my ""girly man"" hat, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, they shook my hand. (Laughter) I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton.Here's what our trawl samples from the plastic soup our ocean has become look like. Trawling a zooplankton net on the surface for a mile produces samples like this. And this. Now, when the debris washes up on the beaches of Hawaii it looks like this. And this particular beach is Kailua Beach, the beach where our president and his family vacationed before moving to Washington.Now, how do we analyze samples like this one that contain more plastic than plankton? We sort the plastic fragments into different size classes, from five millimeters to one-third of a millimeter. Small bits of plastic concentrate persistent organic pollutants up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater.We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean, at the base of the food chain, was ingesting these poison pills. We did hundreds of necropsies, and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs. The record-holder, only two-and-a-half inches long, had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach.Now, you can buy certified organic produce. But no fishmonger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish.This is the legacy we are leaving to future generations. The throwaway society cannot be contained — it has gone global. We simply cannot store and maintain or recycle all our stuff. We have to throw it away. Now, the market can do a lot for us, but it can't fix the natural system in the ocean we've broken. All the king's horses and all the king's men ... will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again.Narrator (Video): The levels are increasing, the amount of packaging is increasing, the ""throwaway"" concept of living is proliferating, and it's showing up in the ocean.Anchor: He offers no hope of cleaning it up. Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill untold amounts of sea life in the process. The solution, Moore says, is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, he doesn't hold out much hope for that, either. This is Brian Rooney for Nightline, in Long Beach, California.Charles Moore: Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic
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"This is the first of two rather extraordinary photographs I'm going to show you today. It was taken 18 years ago. I was 19 years old at the time. I had just returned from one of the deepest dives I'd ever made at that time — a little over 200 feet. And I had caught this little fish. It turns out that particular one was the first of its kind ever taken alive. I'm not just an ichthyologist, I'm a bona fide fish nerd. And to a fish nerd, this is some pretty exciting stuff. More exciting was the fact that the person who took this photo is a guy named Jack Randall, the greatest living ichthyologist on earth — the Grand Poobah of fish nerds, if you will. And so, it was really exciting to me to have this moment in time. It set the course for the rest of my life.But really, the most significant, most profound thing about this picture is it was taken two days before I was completely paralyzed from the neck down. I made a really stupid kind of mistake that most 19-year-old males do when they think they're immortal, and I got a bad case of the bends and was paralyzed, and had to be flown back for treatment. I learned two really important things that day. The first thing I learned — well, I'm mortal. That's a really big one. And the second thing I learned was that I knew, with profound certainty, that this is exactly what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I had to focus all my energies towards going to find new species of things down on deep coral reefs.When you think of a coral reef, this is what most people think of: these big, hard, elaborate corals, lots of bright, colorful fishes and things. But this is really just the tip of the iceberg. If you look at this diagram of a coral reef, we know a lot about that part up near the top. The reason we know so much about it is scuba divers can very easily go down there and access it.There is a problem with scuba, though, in that it imposes some limitations on how deep you can go. It turns out that depth is about 200 feet. I'll get into why that is in just a minute, but the point is, scuba divers generally stay less than 100 feet deep, and very rarely go much below this, at least, not with any kind of sanity. So to go deeper, most biologists have turned to submersibles. Now, submersibles are great, wonderful things, but if you're going to spend 30,000 dollars a day to use one of these things and it's capable of going 2,000 feet, you're not going to go farting around up here in a couple of hundred feet, you're going to go way down deep. So the bottom line is, almost all research using submersibles has taken place well below 500 feet.Now, it's pretty obvious at this point there's a zone here in the middle. That's the zone that centers around my own personal pursuit of happiness. I want to find out what's in this zone; we know almost nothing about it. Scuba divers can't get there, submarines go right on past it.It took me a year to learn to walk again after my diving accident in Palau. During that year, I spent a lot of time learning about the physics and physiology of diving and how to overcome these limitations. I'm just going to show you a basic idea. We're all breathing air right now. Air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, 20 percent oxygen, 80 percent nitrogen. It's in our lungs. And there's a phenomenon called Henry's law, that says gases will dissolve into a fluid in proportion to the partial pressures you're exposing them to. So, basically the gas dissolves into our body. The oxygen is bound by metabolism, we use it for energy. The nitrogen sort of floats around in our blood and tissues. That's fine, it's how we're designed. The problem happens when you go underwater.The deeper you go underwater, the higher the pressure is. If you were to go down to a depth of about 130 feet, which is the recommended limit for most scuba divers, you'd get this pressure effect. The effect of that pressure is you have an increased density of gas molecules in every breath you take. Over time, those gas molecules dissolve into your blood and tissues and start to fill you up.Now, if you were to go down to, say, 300 feet, you don't have five times as many gas molecules in your lungs, you've got 10 times as many gas molecules in your lungs. And, sure enough, they dissolve into your blood and tissues as well. And if you were to go down to where there's 15 times as much — the deeper you go, the more exacerbating the problem becomes. The limitation of diving with air is all those dots in your body, all the nitrogen and all the oxygen.There are three basic limitations of scuba diving. The first limitation is the oxygen — oxygen toxicity. Now, we all know the song: ""Love is like oxygen. You get too much, you get too high. Not enough, and you're gonna die."" Well, in the context of diving, you get too much, you die also. You die because oxygen toxicity can cause a seizure. It makes you convulse underwater — not a good thing to happen underwater. It happens because there's too much concentration of oxygen in your body.The nitrogen has two problems. One of them is what Jacques Cousteau called ""rapture of the deep."" It's nitrogen narcosis. It makes you loopy; the deeper you go, the loopier you get. You don't want to drive drunk, you don't want to dive drunk. So that's a real big problem. And of course, the third problem is the one I found out the hard way in Palau, which is the bends.One thing I forgot to mention is that to obviate the problem of nitrogen narcosis — all of those blue dots in our body — you remove the nitrogen and replace it with helium. Helium's a gas; there're a lot of reasons why helium's good, it's a tiny molecule, it's inert, it doesn't give you narcosis. So that's the basic concept we use. But the theory's relatively easy. The tricky part is the implementation.So this is how I began about 15 years ago. I'll admit, it wasn't exactly the smartest of starts, but you've got to start somewhere.(Laughter)At the time, I wasn't the only one who didn't know what I was doing. Almost nobody did. This rig was actually used for a dive of 300 feet. But over time we got better at it, and we came up with this really sophisticated-looking rig with four scuba tanks, five regulators and all the right gas mixtures, all that good stuff. It was fine and dandy, it allowed us to go down and find new species.This picture was taken at 300 feet, catching new species of fish. The problem was it didn't allow us much time. For all its bulk and size, it only gave us about 15 minutes at most down at those sorts of depths. We needed more time. There had to be a better way. And indeed, there is a better way.In 1994, I was fortunate enough to get access to these prototype closed-circuit rebreathers. Closed-circuit rebreather: what makes it different from scuba, and why is it better? Well, there are three main advantages to a rebreather. One, they're quiet, they don't make any noise. Two, they allow you to stay underwater longer. Three, they allow you to go deeper. How is it that they do that? In order to really understand how they do that, you have to look underneath the hood and see what's going on.There are three basic systems to a closed-circuit rebreather. The most fundamental is called the breathing loop. It's a breathing loop because you breathe off of it; it's a closed loop, and you breathe the same gas around and around. There's a mouthpiece that you put in your mouth, and there's a counter lung, or in this case, two counter lungs. The counter lungs aren't high tech, they're simply flexible bags. They allow you to mechanically breathe, mechanically ventilate. When you exhale, it goes in the exhale counter lung; when you inhale, it comes from the inhale counter lung. It's just pure mechanics, allowing you to cycle air through this breathing loop.The other component on a breathing loop is the carbon-dioxide-absorbent canister. Now, as we breathe, we produce carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide needs to be scrubbed out of the system. There's a chemical filter in there that pulls the carbon dioxide out of the breathing gas, so that when it comes back to us, it's safe to breathe again. That's the breathing loop in a nutshell.The second main component of a closed-circuit rebreather is the gas system. The primary purpose of the gas system is to provide oxygen, to replenish the oxygen that your body consumes. So the main tank, the main critical thing, is this oxygen gas supply cylinder we have here. But if we only had an oxygen gas supply cylinder, we wouldn't be able to go very deep, because we'd run into oxygen toxicity very quickly. So we need another gas, something to dilute the oxygen with. And that, fittingly enough, is called the diluent gas supply. In our applications, we generally put air inside this diluent gas supply, because it's a very cheap and easy source of nitrogen.So that's where we get our nitrogen from. But if we want to go deeper, of course, we need another gas supply, and helium is what we really need to go deep. Usually we'll have a slightly larger cylinder, mounted exterior on the rebreather, like this. That's what we use to inject, as we start to do our deep dives. We also have a second oxygen cylinder, solely as a backup; if there's a problem with our first oxygen supply, we can continue to breathe. The way you manage all these different gases and different gas supplies is this really high-tech, sophisticated gas block up on the front here, where it's easy to reach. It's got the valves and knobs and things you need to inject the right gases at the right time.Normally, you don't have to do that, because all of it's done automatically with the electronics, the third system of a rebreather. The most critical part of a rebreather are the oxygen sensors. You need three, so if one goes bad, you know which one it is. You need voting logic. You also have three microprocessors. Any one of those computers can run the entire system, so if you have to lose two of them, there's back-up power supplies. And there are multiple displays, to get the information to the diver. This is the high-tech gadgetry that allows us to do what we do on these deep dives. I can talk about it all day — just ask my wife — but I want to move on to something much more interesting.I'm going to take you on a deep dive, and show you what it's like to do one. We start up on the boat, For all this high-tech, expensive equipment, this is still the best way to get in the water, just flop over the side of the boat.Now, as I showed you in the earlier diagram, these reefs that we dive on start out near the surface and they go almost vertically, completely straight down. So we drop in the water and go over the edge of this cliff, and then we start dropping, dropping, dropping. People ask if it takes a long time to get there. No; it only takes a couple minutes to get down to three or four hundred feet, which is what we're aiming for. It's like skydiving in slow motion. It's really very interesting. You ever see ""The Abyss,"" where Ed Harris is sinking down along the side of the wall? That's what it feels like. Amazing.And down there, you find that the water is very clear, extremely clear, because there's hardly any plankton. When you turn on your light and look around the caves, you're confronted with a tremendous amount of diversity, much more than anyone used to believe. Now, not all of it is new species — that fish you see with the white stripe, that's a known species. But if you look carefully into the cracks and crevices, you'll see little things scurrying all over the place. There's a just unbelievable diversity.It's not just fish, either. These are crinoids, sponges, black corals. There're some more fishes. Those fishes that you see now are new species. They're still new species, because I had a video camera instead of my net, so they're still waiting down there for someone to go find them. But this is what it looks like. And this kind of habitat just goes on and on and on for miles. This is Papua, New Guinea.Now little fishes and invertebrates aren't the only things we see down there. We also see sharks, much more regularly than I would have expected to. We're not quite sure why. What I want you to do now is imagine yourself 400 feet underwater, with all this high-tech gear on your back, you're in a remote reef off Papua, New Guinea, thousands of miles from the nearest recompression chamber, and you're completely surrounded by sharks.(Video) Diver 1: (In squeaky voice) Look at those ...Diver 2: Uh, oh ... Uh, oh!Audience: (Laughter)(Video) Diver 1: I think we have their attention ...Richard Pyle: When you start talking like Donald Duck, there's no situation in the world that can seem tense.(Laughter)So we're down there — this is at 400 feet. That's looking straight up, by the way, to give a sense of how far the surface is. And if you're a biologist and know about sharks, and you want to assess, how much jeopardy am I really in here, there's one question that sort of jumps to the forefront of your mind immediately, which is —(Video) Diver 1: What kind of sharks?Diver 2: Silvertip sharks.Diver 1: Oh.RP: There are actually three species of sharks here. The silvertips are the ones with the white edges on the fins, and there're also gray reef sharks and hammerheads off in the distance. And yes, it's a little nerve-racking.(Video) Diver 2: Hoo! That little guy is frisky!Audience: (Laughter)Now, you've seen video like this on TV a lot, and it's very intimidating. I think it gives the wrong impression about sharks; they're actually not very dangerous animals. That's why we weren't worried much and were joking around. More people are killed by pigs, by lightning strikes, more people are killed at soccer games in England. There's a lot of other ways you can die. And I'm not making that stuff up. Coconuts! You can get killed by a coconut more likely than killed by a shark. So sharks aren't quite as dangerous as most people make them out to be.Now, I don't know if any of you get US News and World Report — I got the recent issue. There's a cover story about the great explorers of our time. The last article is entitled, ""No New Frontiers."" It questions whether or not there really are any new frontiers out there, whether there are any true, hardcore discoveries that can still be made. My favorite line from the article: [... 'discovery' can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin.""] I have to laugh; they don't call us fish nerds for nothing. We actually do get excited about finding a new dorsal spine in a guppy. But it's much more than that. I want to show you a few of the guppies we've found over the years.This one — you can see how ugly it is.(Laughter)Even if you ignore the scientific value of this thing, look at the monetary value of this thing. A couple of these were sold through the aquarium trade to Japan, where they sold for 15,000 dollars apiece. That's half a million dollars a pound.Here's another new angelfish we discovered. This one we first discovered back in the air days — the bad old air days, when we were doing these kind of dives with air. We were at 360 feet. I remember coming up from one of these deep dives and I had this fog, and the narcosis takes a little while to fade away, sort of like sobering up. I had this vague recollection of seeing this yellow fish with a black spot, and thought, ""Damn, I should have caught one — I think that's a new species."" Eventually, I looked in my bucket. Sure enough, I had caught one, I just completely forgot. So this one, we decided to give the name Centropyge narcosis to. That's its official scientific name, in reference to its deep-dwelling habits.This is another neat one. When we first found it, we weren't even sure what family it belonged to, so we just called it the Dr. Seuss fish, since it looked like something from one of those books.Now, this one's pretty cool. If you go to Papua, New Guinea and go down 300 feet, you'll see these big mounds. This may be hard to see, but they're a couple meters in diameter. If you look closely, you'll see there's a little white and gray fish that hangs out near them. It turns out this little white fish builds these giant mounds, one pebble at a time. It's extraordinary to find something like this. It's not just new species, it's new behaviors, new ecology, all kind of new things.What I'm going to show you now, quickly, is a sampling of the new species we've discovered. What's extraordinary is not just the number of species we're finding — though as you can see, that's pretty amazing; this is only half of what we've found — what's extraordinary is how quickly we find them. We're up to seven new species per hour of time we spend at that depth. If you go to an Amazon jungle and fog a tree, you may get a lot of bugs, but for fishes, there's nowhere in the world you can get seven new species per hour of time.Now, we've done some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and we're predicting there are probably about 2,000 to 2,500 new species in the Indo-Pacific alone. There are only five to six thousand known species, so a very large percentage of what is out there isn't really known. We thought we had a handle on all the reef fish diversity — evidently not.I'm going to just close on a very somber note. At the beginning, I said I'd show you two extraordinary photographs. This is the second extraordinary photograph I'm going to show you. This one was taken at the exact moment I was down there filming those sharks. This was taken exactly 300 feet above my head. The reason this photograph is extraordinary is because it captures a moment in the very last minute of a person's life. Less than 60 seconds after this picture was taken, this guy was dead. When we recovered his body, we figured out what had gone wrong. He had made a very simple mistake; he turned the wrong valve when he filled his cylinder. he had 80 percent oxygen in his tank when he should have had 40. He had an oxygen toxicity seizure and he drowned.The reason I show this — not to put a downer on everything — but I just want to use it to key off my philosophy of life in general, which is that we all have two goals. The first goal we share with every other living thing on this planet, which is to survive. I call it perpetuation: the survival of the species and survival of ourselves, And those are both about perpetuating the genome.The second goal, for those of us who have mastered the first goal — call it spiritual fulfillment, call it financial success, you can call it any number of different things. I call it seeking joy, this pursuit of happiness. So, I guess my theme on this is this guy lived his life to the fullest, he absolutely did. You have to balance those two goals. If you live your whole life in fear — I mean, life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100 percent mortality. So you can't live your life in fear.(Laughter)I thought that was an old one!(Applause)But at the same time, you don't want to get so focused on rule number two, goal number two, that you neglect goal number one. Because once you're dead, you really can't enjoy anything after that. So I wish you all the best of luck in maintaining that balance in your future endeavors.Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_pyle_dives_the_twilight_zone
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"I was raised in Seoul, Korea, and moved to New York City in 1999 to attend college. I was pre-med at the time, and I thought I would become a surgeon because I was interested in anatomy and dissecting animals really piqued my curiosity. At the same time, I fell in love with New York City. I started to realize that I could look at the whole city as a living organism. I wanted to dissect it and look into its unseen layers. And the way to it, for me, was through artistic means. So, eventually I decided to pursue an MFA instead of an M.D. and in grad school I became interested in creatures that dwell in the hidden corners of the city.In New York City, rats are part of commuters' daily lives. Most people ignore them or are frightened of them. But I took a liking to them because they dwell on the fringes of society. And even though they're used in labs to promote human lives, they're also considered pests. I also started looking around in the city and trying to photograph them. One day, in the subway, I was snapping pictures of the tracks hoping to catch a rat or two, and a man came up to me and said, ""You can't take photographs here. The MTA will confiscate your camera."" I was quite shocked by that, and thought to myself, ""Well, OK then. I'll follow the rats."" Then I started going into the tunnels, which made me realize that there's a whole new dimension to the city that I never saw before and most people don't get to see.Around the same time, I met like-minded individuals who call themselves urban explorers, adventurers, spelunkers, guerrilla historians, etc. I was welcomed into this loose, Internet-based network of people who regularly explore urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, aqueducts, factories, hospitals, shipyards and so on.When I took photographs in these locations, I felt there was something missing in the pictures. Simply documenting these soon-to-be-demolished structures wasn't enough for me. So I wanted to create a fictional character or an animal that dwells in these underground spaces, and the simplest way to do it, at the time, was to model myself. I decided against clothing because I wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements. I wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying, derelict spaces.This was taken in the Riviera Sugar Factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It's now an empty, six-acre lot waiting for a shopping mall right across from the new Ikea. I was very fond of this space because it's the first massive industrial complex I found on my own that is abandoned. When I first went in, I was scared, because I heard dogs barking and I thought they were guard dogs. But they happened to be wild dogs living there, and it was right by the water, so there were swans and ducks swimming around and trees growing everywhere and bees nesting in the sugar barrels.The nature had really reclaimed the whole complex. And, in a way, I wanted the human figure in the picture to become a part of that nature. When I got comfortable in the space, it also felt like a big playground. I would climb up the tanks and hop across exposed beams as if I went back in time and became a child again.This was taken in the old Croton Aqueduct, which supplied fresh water to New York City for the first time. The construction began in 1837. It lasted about five years. It got abandoned when the new Croton Aqueducts opened in 1890. When you go into spaces like this, you're directly accessing the past, because they sit untouched for decades. I love feeling the aura of a space that has so much history. Instead of looking at reproductions of it at home, you're actually feeling the hand-laid bricks and shimmying up and down narrow cracks and getting wet and muddy and walking in a dark tunnel with a flashlight.This is a tunnel underneath Riverside Park. It was built in the 1930s by Robert Moses. The murals were done by a graffiti artist to commemorate the hundreds of homeless people that got relocated from the tunnel in 1991 when the tunnel reopened for trains. Walking in this tunnel is very peaceful. There's nobody around you, and you hear the kids playing in the park above you, completely unaware of what's underneath.When I was going out a lot to these places, I was feeling a lot of anxiety and isolation because I was in a solitary phase in my life, and I decided to title my series ""Naked City Spleen,"" which references Charles Baudelaire. ""Naked City"" is a nickname for New York, and ""Spleen"" embodies the melancholia and inertia that come from feeling alienated in an urban environment.This is the same tunnel. You see the sunbeams coming from the ventilation ducts and the train approaching.This is a tunnel that's abandoned in Hell's Kitchen. I was there alone, setting up, and a homeless man approached. I was basically intruding in his living space. I was really frightened at first, but I calmly explained to him that I was working on an art project and he didn't seem to mind and so I went ahead and put my camera on self-timer and ran back and forth. And when I was done, he actually offered me his shirt to wipe off my feet and kindly walked me out. It must have been a very unusual day for him. (Laughter)One thing that struck me, after this incident, was that a space like that holds so many deleted memories of the city. That homeless man, to me, really represented an element of the unconscious of the city. He told me that he was abused above ground and was once in Riker's Island, and at last he found peace and quiet in that space. The tunnel was once built for the prosperity of the city, but is now a sanctuary for outcasts, who are completely forgotten in the average urban dweller's everyday life.This is underneath my alma mater, Columbia University. The tunnels are famous for having been used during the development of the Manhattan Project. This particular tunnel is interesting because it shows the original foundations of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, which was demolished in 1890 when Columbia moved in.This is the New York City Farm Colony, which was a poorhouse in Staten Island from the 1890s to the 1930s. Most of my photos are set in places that have been abandoned for decades, but this is an exception.This children's hospital was closed in 1997; it's located in Newark. When I was there three years ago, the windows were broken and the walls were peeling, but everything was left there as it was. You see the autopsy table, morgue trays, x-ray machines and even used utensils, which you see on the autopsy table.After exploring recently-abandoned buildings, I felt that everything could fall into ruins very fast: your home, your office, a shopping mall, a church — any man-made structures around you. I was reminded of how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are.I love to travel, and Berlin has become one of my favorite cities. It's full of history, and also full of underground bunkers and ruins from the war.This was taken under a homeless asylum built in 1885 to house 1,100 people. I saw the structure while I was on the train, and I got off at the next station and met people there that gave me access to their catacomb-like basement, which was used for ammunition storage during the war and also, at some point, to hide groups of Jewish refugees. This is the actual catacombs in Paris. I explored there extensively in the off-limits areas and fell in love right away.There are more than 185 miles of tunnels, and only about a mile is open to the public as a museum. The first tunnels date back to 60 B.C. They were consistently dug as limestone quarries and by the 18th century, the caving-in of some of these quarries posed safety threats, so the government ordered reinforcing of the existing quarries and dug new observation tunnels in order to monitor and map the whole place.As you can see, the system is very complex and vast. It's very dangerous to get lost in there. And at the same time, there was a problem in the city with overflowing cemeteries. So the bones were moved from the cemeteries into the quarries, making them into the catacombs. The remains of over six million people are housed in there, some over 1,300 years old. This was taken under the Montparnasse Cemetery where most of the ossuaries are located. There are also phone cables that were used in the '50s and many bunkers from the World War II era.This is a German bunker. Nearby there's a French bunker, and the whole tunnel system is so complex that the two parties never met. The tunnels are famous for having been used by the Resistance, which Victor Hugo wrote about in ""Les Miserables."" And I saw a lot of graffiti from the 1800s, like this one.After exploring the underground of Paris, I decided to climb up, and I climbed a Gothic monument that's right in the middle of Paris. This is the Tower of Saint Jacques. It was built in the early 1500s. I don't recommend sitting on a gargoyle in the middle of January, naked. It was not very comfortable. (Laughter)And all this time, I never saw a single rat in any of these places, until recently, when I was in the London sewers. This was probably the toughest place to explore. I had to wear a gas mask because of the toxic fumes — I guess, except for in this picture. And when the tides of waste matter come in it sounds as if a whole storm is approaching you.This is a still from a film I worked on recently, called ""Blind Door."" I've become more interested in capturing movement and texture. And the 16mm black-and-white film gave a different feel to it.And this is the first theater project I worked on. I adapted and produced ""A Dream Play"" by August Strindberg. It was performed last September one time only in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn, which is considered to be the oldest underground train tunnel in the world, built in 1844. I've been leaning towards more collaborative projects like these, lately. But whenever I get a chance I still work on my series.The last place I visited was the Mayan ruins of Copan, Honduras. This was taken inside an archaeological tunnel in the main temple.I like doing more than just exploring these spaces. I feel an obligation to animate and humanize these spaces continually in order to preserve their memories in a creative way — before they're lost forever. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/miru_kim_s_underground_art
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"Four years ago, on the TED stage, I announced a company I was working with at the time called Odeo. And because of that announcement, we got a big article in The New York Times, which led to more press, which led to more attention, and me deciding to become CEO of that company — whereas I was just an adviser — and raising a round of venture capital and ramping up hiring.One of the guys I hired was an engineer named Jack Dorsey, and a year later, when we were trying to decide which way to go with Odeo, Jack presented an idea he'd been tinkering around with for a number of years that was based around sending simple status updates to friends. We were also playing with SMS at the time at Odeo, so we kind of put two and two together, and in early 2006 we launched Twitter as a side project at Odeo.Now, it's hard to justify doing a side project at a startup, where focus is so critical, but I had actually launched Blogger as a side project to my previous company, thinking it was just a little thing we'd do on the side, and it ended up taking over not only the company, but my life for the next five or six years. So I learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're going to go. And that's kind of what's happened with Twitter, time after time.So, for those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is based around a very simple, seemingly trivial concept. You say what you're doing in 140 characters or less, and people who are interested in you get those updates. If they're really interested, they get the update as a text message on their cell phone. So, for instance, I may Twitter right now that I'm giving a talk at TED. And in my case, when I hit send, up to 60,000 people will receive that message in a matter of seconds. Now, the fundamental idea is that Twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. It is by sharing these moments as they're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch, despite distance, and in real time. This is the primary use we saw of Twitter from the beginning, and what got us excited.What we didn't anticipate was the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system. One of the things we realized was how important Twitter could be during real-time events. When the wildfires broke out in San Diego, in October of 2007, people turned to Twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them.But it wasn't just individuals. The L.A. Times actually turned to Twitter to dispense information as well, and put a Twitter feed on the front page, and the L.A. Fire Department and Red Cross used it to dispense news and updates as well. At this event, dozens of people here are Twittering and thousands of people around the world are following along because they want to know what it feels like to be here and what's happening.Among the other interesting things that have cropped upare many things from businesses,from marketing and communications and predictable things, to an insanely popular Korean-barbecue taco truck that drives around L.A. and Twitters where it stops, causing a line to form around the block.Politicians have recently begun Twittering. In fact, there are 47 members of Congress who currently have Twitter accounts. And they're tweeting, in some cases, from behind closed-door sessions with the President. In this case, this guy's not liking what he's hearing. The President himself is our most popular Twitter user, although his tweets have dropped off as of late, while Senator McCain's have picked up. As have this guy's.Twitter was originally designed as a broadcast medium: you send one message and it goes out to everybody, and you receive the messages you're interested in. One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. So, this syntax, the ""@username"" that Shaquille O'Neal's using here to reply to one of his fans, was completely invented by users, and we didn't build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier. This is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system.Another is via the API. We built an application-programming interface, which basically means that programmers can write software that interacts with Twitter. We currently know about over 2,000 pieces of software that can send Twitter updates — interfaces for Mac, Windows, your iPhone, your BlackBerry — as well as things like a device that lets an unborn baby Twitter when it kicks or a plant Twitter when it needs water.Probably the most important third-party development came from a little company in Virginia called Summize. Summize built a Twitter search engine. And they tapped into the fact that, if you have millions of people around the world talking about what they're doing and what's around them, you have an incredible resource to find out about any topic or event while it's going on. This really changed how we perceived Twitter. For instance, here's what people are saying about TED. This is another way that our mind was shifted, and Twitter wasn't what we thought it was. We liked this so much we actually bought the company and are folding it into the main product. This not only lets you view Twitters in different ways, but it introduces new use cases as well. One of my favorites is what happened a few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas — where it was, and how much it cost — and then appended the keyword ""#atlgas"" which let other people search for that and find gas themselves.And this trend of people using this communication network to help each other out goes far beyond the original idea of just keeping up with family and friends. It's happened more and more lately, whether it's raising money for homeless people or to dig wells in Africa or for a family in crisis. People have raised tens of thousands of dollars over Twitter in a matter of days on several occasions. It seems like when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen.I have no idea what will happen next with Twitter. I've learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it will go. Thanks.(Applause)Chris Anderson: We're not quite done yet. So, look, if we could have this screen live. This is actually the most terrifying thing that any speaker can do after they've been to an event. It's totally intimidating.So, this would be the Twitter search screen. So we're going to just type a couple of random words into Twitter. For example: ""Evan Williams."" ""Evan Williams, give people more good ways to share information and follow your hunch at TED."" ""Currently listening to Evan Williams."" ""Currently listening to Evan Williams."" ""Evan Williams —"" Oh. ""Evan Williams is just dying on stage here at TED. Worst talk ever!"" (Laughter)Evan Williams: Nice. Thanks.CA: Just kidding.But, literally in the eight minutes he was talking, there are about fifty tweets that already came on the talk. So he'll see every aspect of the reaction: the fact that Barack Obama is the biggest Twitterer, the fact that it came out of TED. I don't think there's any other way of getting instant feedback that way.You have build something very fascinating, and it looks like its best times are still ahead of it. So, thank you very much, Evan. EW: Thank you. CA: That was very interesting.","https://www.ted.com/talks/evan_williams_on_listening_to_twitter_users
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"Back in 1992, I started working for a company called Interval Research, which was just then being founded by David Lidell and Paul Allen as a for-profit research enterprise in Silicon Valley.I met with David to talk about what I might do in his company. I was just coming out of a failed virtual reality business and supporting myself by being on the speaking circuit and writing books — after twenty years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people didn't think they could sell.And David and I discovered that we had a question in common, that we really wanted the answer to, and that was, ""Why hasn't anybody built any computer games for little girls?"" Why is that? It can't just be a giant sexist conspiracy. These people aren't that smart. There's six billion dollars on the table. They would go for it if they could figure out how.So, what is the deal here? And as we thought about our goals — I should say that Interval is really a humanistic institution, in the classical sense that humanism, at its best, finds a way to combine clear-eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people. The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life; that we can do good things, that there are things worth doing because they're good things to do, and that clear-eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them.So, contrary to popular belief, there is not a conflict of interest between empiricism and values. And Interval Research is kind of the living example of how that can be true. So David and I decided to go find out, through the best research we could muster, what it would take to get a little girl to put her hands on a computer, to achieve the level of comfort and ease with the technology that little boys have because they play video games.We spent two and a half years conducting research; we spent another year and a half in advance development. Then we formed a spin-off company. In the research phase of the project at Interval, we partnered with a company called Cheskin Research, and these people — Davis Masten and Christopher Ireland — changed my mind entirely about what market research was and what it could be. They taught me how to look and see, and they did not do the incredibly stupid thing of saying to a child, ""Of all these things we already make you, which do you like best?"" — which gives you zero answers that are usable.So, what we did for the first two and a half years was four things: We did an extensive review of the literature in related fields, like cognitive psychology, spatial cognition, gender studies, play theory, sociology, primatology. Thank you Frans de Waal, wherever you are, I love you and I'd give anything to meet you.After we had done that with a pretty large team of people and discovered what we thought the salient issues were with girls and boys and playing — because, after all, that's really what this is about — we moved to the second phase of our work, where we interviewed adult experts in academia, some of the people who'd produced the literature that we found relevant. Also, we did focus groups with people who were on the ground with kids every day, like playground supervisors. We talked to them, confirmed some hypotheses and identified some serious questions about gender difference and play.Then we did what I consider to be the heart of the work: interviewed 1,100 children, boys and girls, ages seven to 12, all over the United States — except for Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin because we knew that their little families would have millions of computers in them and they wouldn't be a representative sample.And at the end of those remarkable conversations with kids and their best friends across the United States, after two years, we pulled together some survey data from another 10,000 children, drew up a set up of what we thought were the key findings of our research, and spent another year transforming them into design heuristics, for designing computer-based products — and, in fact, any kind of products — for little girls, ages eight to 12. And we spent that time designing interactive prototypes for computer software and testing them with little girls. In 1996, in November, we formed the company Purple Moon which was a spinoff of Interval Research, and our chief investors were Interval Research, Vulcan Northwest, Institutional Venture Partners and Allen and Company.We launched a website on September 2nd that has now served 25 million pages, and has 42,000 registered young girl users. They visit an average of one and a half times a day, spend an average of 35 minutes a visit, and look at 50 pages a visit. So we feel that we've formed a successful online community with girls.We launched two titles in October — ""Rockett's New School"" — the first of a series of products — is about a character called Rockett beginning her first day of school in eighth grade at a brand new place, with a blank slate, which allows girls to play with the question of, ""What will I be like when I'm older?"" ""What's it going to be like to be in high school or junior high school? Who are my friends?""; to exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior; and which embeds in it values about noticing that we have lots of choices in our lives and the ways that we conduct ourselves.The other title that we launched is called ""Secret Paths in the Forest,"" which addresses the more fantasy-oriented, inner lives of girls. These two titles both showed up in the top 50 entertainment titles in PC Data — entertainment titles in PC Data in December, right up there with ""John Madden Football,"" which thrills me to death. So, we're real, and we've touched several hundreds of thousands of little girls. We've made half-a-billion impressions with marketing and PR for this brand, Purple Moon. Ninety-six percent of them, roughly, have been positive; four percent of them have been ""other."" I want to talk about the other, because the politics of this enterprise, in a way, have been the most fascinating part of it, for me.There are really two kinds of negative reviews that we've received. One kind of reviewer is a male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be, and won't show the product to little girls. The other kind of reviewer is a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be. And so it's funny to me that these interesting, odd bedfellows have one thing in common: they don't listen to little girls. They haven't looked at children and they're certainly not demonstrating any love for them. I'd like to play you some voices of little girls from the two-and-a-half years of research that we did — actually, some of the voices are more recent. And these voices will be accompanied by photographs that they took for us of their lives, of the things that they value and care about. These are pictures the girls themselves never saw, but they gave to us This is the stuff those reviewers don't know about and aren't listening to and this is the kind of research I recommend to those who want to do humanistic work.Girl 1: Yeah, my character is usually a tomboy. Hers is more into boys.Girl 2: Uh, yeah.Girl 1: We have — in the very beginning of the whole game, always we do this: we each have a piece of paper; we write down our name, our age — are we rich, very rich, not rich, poor, medium, wealthy, boyfriends, dogs, pets — what else — sisters, brothers, and all those.Girl 2: Divorced — parents divorced, maybe.Girl 3: This is my pretend [unclear] one.Girl 4: We make a school newspaper on the computer.Girl 5: For a girl's game also usually they'll have really pretty scenery with clouds and flowers. Girl 6: Like, if you were a girl and you were really adventurous and a real big tomboy, you would think that girls' games were kinda sissy.Girl 7: I run track, I played soccer, I play basketball, and I love a lot of things to do. And sometimes I feel like I can't really enjoy myself unless it's like a vacation, like when I get Mondays and all those days off.Girl 8: Well, sometimes there is a lot of stuff going on because I have music lessons and I'm on swim team — all this different stuff that I have to do, and sometimes it gets overwhelming. Girl 9: My friend Justine kinda took my friend Kelly, and now they're being mean to me.Girl 10: Well, sometimes it gets annoying when your brothers and sisters, or brother or sister, when they copy you and you get your idea first and they take your idea and they do it themselves.Girl 11: Because my older sister, she gets everything and, like, when I ask my mom for something, she'll say, ""No"" — all the time. But she gives my sister everything.Brenda Laurel: I want to show you, real quickly, just a minute of ""Rockett's Tricky Decision,"" which went gold two days ago. Let's hope it's really stable. This is the second day in Rockett's life. The reason I'm showing you this is I'm hoping that the scene that I'm going to show you will look familiar and sound familiar, now that you've listened to some girls' voices. And you can see how we've tried to incorporate the issues that matter to them in the game that we've created.Miko: Hey Rockett! C'mere!Rockett: Hi Miko! What's going on?Miko: Did you hear about Nakilia's big Halloween party this weekend? She asked me to make sure you knew about it. Nakilia invited Reuben too, but —Rockett: But what? Isn't he coming?Miko: I don't think so. I mean, I heard his band is playing at another party the same night.Rockett: Really? What other party?Girl: Max's party is going to be so cool, Whitney. He's invited all the best people.BL: I'm going to fast-forward to the decision point because I know I don't have a lot of time. After this awful event occurs, Rocket gets to decide how she feels about it.Rockett: Who'd want to show up at that party anyway? I could get invited to that party any day if I wanted to. Gee, I doubt I'll make Max's best people list.BL: OK, so we're going to emotionally navigate. If we were playing the game, that's what we'd do. If at any time during the game we want to learn more about the characters, we can go into this hidden hallway, and I'll quickly just show you the interface. We can, for example, go find Miko's locker and get some more information about her. Oops, I turned the wrong way. But you get the general idea of the product.I wanted to show you the ways, innocuous as they seem, in which we're incorporating what we've learned about girls — their desires to experience greater emotional flexibility, and to play around with the social complexity of their lives. I want to make the point that what we're giving girls, I think, through this effort, is a kind of validation, a sense of being seen. And a sense of the choices that are available in their lives. We love them. We see them. We're not trying to tell them who they ought to be. But we're really, really happy about who they are. It turns out they're really great.I want to close by showing you a videotape that's a version of a future game in the Rockett series that our graphic artists and design people put together, that we feel would please that four percent of reviewers. ""Rockett 28!""Rockett: It's like I'm just waking up, you know?BL: Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/brenda_laurel_on_making_games_for_girls
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"I was walking in the market one day with my wife, and somebody stuck a cage in my face. And in between those slits were the saddest eyes I've ever seen. There was a very sick orangutan baby, my first encounter. That evening I came back to the market in the dark and I heard ""uhh, uhh,"" and sure enough I found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap. Of course, the cage was salvaged. I took up the little baby, massaged her, forced her to drink until she finally started breathing normally.This is Uce. She's now living in the jungle of Sungai Wain, and this is Matahari, her second son, which, by the way, is also the son of the second orangutan I rescued, Dodoy. That changed my life quite dramatically, and as of today, I have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers.(Applause)No. No. No. Wrong. It's horrible. It's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild. It's not good. This is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing. Having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together, just now like victims for every baby, six have disappeared from the forest.The deforestation, especially for oil palm, to provide biofuel for Western countries is what's causing these problems. And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat, the largest accumulation of organic material in the world. When you open this for growing oil palms you're creating CO2 volcanoes that are emitting so much CO2 that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, after China and the United States. And we don't have any industry at all — it's only because of this deforestation.And these are horrible images. I'm not going to talk too long about it, but there are so many of the family of Uce, which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest, that still have to go through that process. And I don't know anymore where to put them. So I decided that I had to come up with a solution for her but also a solution that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests, to get their hands on the last timber and that are causing, in that way, the loss of habitat and all those victims.So I created the place Samboja Lestari, and the idea was, if I can do this on the worst possible place that I can think of where there is really nothing left, no one will have an excuse to say, ""Yeah, but ..."" No. Everyone should be able to follow this.So we're in East Borneo. This is the place where I started. As you can see there's only yellow terrain. There's nothing left — just a bit of grass there. In 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there. There was a huge amount of crime. People spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water. There was no agricultural productivity left. This was the poorest district in the whole province and it was a total extinction of wildlife. This was like a biological desert. When I stood there in the grass, it's hot — not even the sound of insects — just this waving grass.Still, four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people. The climate has changed. I will show you: no more flooding, no more fires. It's no longer the poorest district, and there is a huge development of biodiversity. We've got over 1,000 species. We have 137 bird species as of today. We have 30 species of reptiles.So what happened here? We created a huge economic failure in this forest. So basically the whole process of destruction had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm. But we saw the same thing. We had slash and burn agriculture; people cannot afford the fertilizer, so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there; the fires become more frequent, and after a while you're stuck with an area of land where there is no fertility left. There are no trees left. Still, in this place, in this grassland where you can see our very first office there on that hill, four years later, there is this one green blop on the Earth's surface ...(Applause)And there are all these animals, and all these people happy, and there's this economic value.So how's this possible? It was quite simple. If you'll look at the steps: we bought the land, we dealt with the fire, and then only, we started doing the reforestation by combining agriculture with forestry. Only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary. But we made sure that in every step of the way the local people were going to be fully involved so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that. The people would become the defenders of that forest. So we do the ""people, profit, planet"" principles, but we do it in addition to a sure legal status — because if the forest belongs to the state, people say, ""It belongs to me, it belongs to everyone."" And then we apply all these other principles like transparency, professional management, measurable results, scalability, [unclear], etc.What we did was we formulated recipes — how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing to a target situation. You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control, whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice. And then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out. Now in this recipe you also have the cost. You also know how much labor is needed. If you can drop this recipe on the map on a sandy soil, on a clay soil, on a steep slope, on flat soil, you put those different recipes; if you combine them, out of that comes a business plan, comes a work plan, and you can optimize it for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have, and you can do it.This is how it looks like in practice. We have this grass we want to get rid of. It exudes [unclear]-like compounds from the roots. The acacia trees are of a very low value but we need them to restore the micro-climate, to protect the soil and to shake out the grasses. And after eight years they might actually yield some timber — that is, if you can preserve it in the right way, which we can do with bamboo peels. It's an old temple-building technique from Japan but bamboo is very fire-susceptible. So if we would plant that in the beginning we would have a very high risk of losing everything again. So we plant it later, along the waterways to filter the water, provide the raw products just in time for when the timber becomes available.So the idea is: how to integrate these flows in space, over time and with the limited means you have. So we plant the trees, we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between, to reduce the competition for the trees, the crop fertilizer. Organic material is useful for the agricultural crops, for the people, but also helps the trees. The farmers have free land, the system yields early income, the orangutans get healthy food and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration while even saving some money.So beautiful. What a theory.But is it really that easy? Not really, because if you looked at what happened in 1998, the fire started. This is an area of about 50 million hectares. January. February. March. April. May. We lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months. This is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires that you also have in Pennsylvania here in the United States. And once the soil gets dried, you're in a dry season — you get cracks, oxygen goes in, flames come out and the problem starts all over again.So how to break that cycle? Fire is the biggest problem. This is what it looked like for three months. For three months, the automatic lights outside did not go off because it was that dark. We lost all the crops. No children gained weight for over a year; they lost 12 IQ points. It was a disaster for orangutans and people. So these fires are really the first things to work on. That was why I put it as a single point up there. And you need the local people for that because these grasslands, once they start burning ... It goes through it like a windstorm and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients to the first rainfall — going to the sea killing off the coral reefs there.So you have to do it with the local people. That is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution. So what we did is, we created a ring of sugar palms around the area. These sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant — also flood-resistant, by the way — and they provide a lot of income for local people.This is what it looks like: the people have to tap them twice a day — just a millimeter slice — and the only thing you harvest is sugar water, carbon dioxide, rain fall and a little bit of sunshine. In principle, you make those trees into biological photovoltaic cells. And you can create so much energy from this — they produce three times more energy per hectare per year, because you can tap them on a daily basis. You don't need to harvest [unclear] or any other of the crops.So this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics, which is still unexploited, and doing it in combination with technology. But also your legal side needs to be in very good order. So we bought that land, and here is where we started our project — in the middle of nowhere. And if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area is divided into strips that go over different types of soil, and we were actually monitoring, measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares, 5,000 acres. And this forest is quite different.What I really did was I just followed nature, and nature doesn't know monocultures, but a natural forest is multilayered. That means that both in the ground and above the ground it can make better use of the available light, it can store more carbon in the system, it can provide more functions. But, it's more complicated. It's not that simple, and you have to work with the people.So, just like nature, we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that, we grow the slower growing, primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity that can optimally use that light. Then, what is just as important: get the right fungi in there that will grow into those leaves, bring back the nutrients to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours. And they become like nutrient pumps. You need the bacteria to fix nitrogen, and without those microorganisms, you won't have any performance at all.And then we started planting — only 1,000 trees a day. We could have planted many, many more, but we didn't want to because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable. We didn't want to lose the people that are going to work in that plantation. And we do a lot of work here. We use indicator plants to look at what soil types, or what vegetables will grow, or what trees will grow here. And we have monitored every single one of those trees from space.This is what it looks like in reality; you have this irregular ring around it, with strips of 100 meters wide, with sugar palms that can provide income for 648 families. It's only a small part of the area.The nursery, in here, is quite different. If you look at the number of tree species we have in Europe, for instance, from the Urals up to England, you know how many? 165. In this nursery, we're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species. Can you imagine? You do need to know what you are working with, but it's that diversity which makes it work. That you can go from this zero situation, by planting the vegetables and the trees, or directly, the trees in the lines in that grass there, putting up the buffer zone, producing your compost, and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used. In the beginning, maybe pineapples and beans and corn; in the second phase, there will be bananas and papayas; later on, there will be chocolate and chilies. And then slowly, the trees start taking over, bringing in produce from the fruits, from the timber, from the fuel wood. And finally, the sugar palm forest takes over and provides the people with permanent income.On the top left, underneath those green stripes, you see some white dots — those are actually individual pineapple plants that you can see from space. And in that area we started growing some acacia trees that you just saw before. So this is after one year. And this is after two years. And that's green. If you look from the tower — this is when we start attacking the grass. We plant in the seedlings mixed with the bananas, the papayas, all the crops for the local people, but the trees are growing up fast in between as well. And three years later, 137 species of birds are living here.(Applause)So we lowered air temperature three to five degrees Celsius. Air humidity is up 10 percent. Cloud cover — I'm going to show it to you — is up. Rainfall is up. And all these species and income.This ecolodge that I built here, three years before, was an empty, yellow field. This transponder that we operate with the European Space Agency — it gives us the benefit that every satellite that comes over to calibrate itself is taking a picture. Those pictures we use to analyze how much carbon, how the forest is developing, and we can monitor every tree using satellite images through our cooperation. We can use these data now to provide other regions with recipes and the same technology. We actually have it already with Google Earth. If you would use a little bit of your technology to put tracking devices in trucks, and use Google Earth in combination with that, you could directly tell what palm oil has been sustainably produced, which company is stealing the timber, and you could save so much more carbon than with any measure of saving energy here.So this is the Samboja Lestari area. You measure how the trees grow back, but you can also measure the biodiversity coming back. And biodiversity is an indicator of how much water can be balanced, how many medicines can be kept here. And finally I made it into the rain machine because this forest is now creating its own rain. This nearby city of Balikpapan has a big problem with water; it's 80 percent surrounded by seawater, and we have now a lot of intrusion there. Now we looked at the clouds above this forest; we looked at the reforestation area, the semi-open area and the open area.And look at these images. I'll just run them very quickly through. In the tropics, raindrops are not formed from ice crystals, which is the case in the temperate zones, you need the trees with [unclear], chemicals that come out of the leaves of the trees that initiate the raindrops. So you create a cool place where clouds can accumulate, and you have the trees to initiate the rain. And look, there's now 11.2 percent more clouds — already, after three years. If you look at rainfall, it was already up 20 percent at that time. Let's look at the next year, and you can see that that trend is continuing. Where at first we had a small cap of higher rainfall, that cap is now widening and getting higher. And if we look at the rainfall pattern above Samboja Lestari, it used to be the driest place, but now you see consistently see a peak of rain forming there. So you can actually change the climate. When there are trade winds of course the effect disappears, but afterwards, as soon as the wind stabilizes, you see again that the rainfall peaks come back above this area.So to say it is hopeless is not the right thing to do, because we actually can make that difference if you integrate the various technologies. And it's nice to have the science, but it still depends mostly upon the people, on your education. We have our farmer schools. But the real success of course, is our band — because if a baby is born, we will play, so everyone's our family and you don't make trouble with your family.This is how it looks. We have this road going around the area, which brings the people electricity and water from our own area. We have the zone with the sugar palms, and then we have this fence with very thorny palms to keep the orangutans — that we provide with a place to live in the middle — and the people apart. And inside, we have this area for reforestation as a gene bank to keep all that material alive, because for the last 12 years not a single seedling of the tropical hardwood trees has grown up because the climatic triggers have disappeared. All the seeds get eaten.So now we do the monitoring on the inside — from towers, satellites, ultralights. Each of the families that have sold their land now get a piece of land back. And it has two nice fences of tropical hardwood trees — you have the shade trees planted in year one, then you underplanted with the sugar palms, and you plant this thorny fence. And after a few years, you can remove some of those shade trees. The people get that acacia timber which we have preserved with the bamboo peel, and they can build a house, they have some fuel wood to cook with. And they can start producing from the trees as many as they like. They have enough income for three families. But whatever you do in that program, it has to be fully supported by the people, meaning that you also have to adjust it to the local, cultural values. There is no simple one recipe for one place.You also have to make sure that it is very difficult to corrupt — that it's transparent. Like here, in Samboja Lestari, we divide that ring in groups of 20 families. If one member trespasses the agreement, and does cut down trees, the other 19 members have to decide what's going to happen to him. If the group doesn't take action, the other 33 groups have to decide what is going to happen to the group that doesn't comply with those great deals that we are offering them.In North Sulawesi it is the cooperative — they have a democratic culture there, so there you can use the local justice system to protect your system. In summary, if you look at it, in year one the people can sell their land to get income, but they get jobs back in the construction and the reforestation, the working with the orangutans, and they can use the waste wood to make handicraft. They also get free land in between the trees, where they can grow their crops. They can now sell part of those fruits to the orangutan project. They get building material for houses, a contract for selling the sugar, so we can produce huge amounts of ethanol and energy locally. They get all these other benefits: environmentally, money, they get education — it's a great deal.And everything is based upon that one thing — make sure that forest remains there. So if we want to help the orangutans — what I actually set out to do — we must make sure that the local people are the ones that benefit. Now I think the real key to doing it, to give a simple answer, is integration. I hope — if you want to know more, you can read more.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest
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"Trees are wonderful arenas for discovery because of their tall stature, their complex structure, the biodiversity they foster and their quiet beauty. I used to climb trees for fun all the time and now, as a grown-up, I have made my profession understanding trees and forests, through the medium of science.The most mysterious part of forests is the upper tree canopy. And Dr. Terry Erwin, in 1983, called the canopy, ""the last biotic frontier."" I'd like to take you all on a journey up to the forest canopy, and share with you what canopy researchers are asking and also how they're communicating with other people outside of science.Let's start our journey on the forest floor of one of my study sites in Costa Rica. Because of the overhanging leaves and branches, you'll notice that the understory is very dark, it's very still. And what I'd like to do is take you up to the canopy, not by putting all of you into ropes and harnesses, but rather showing you a very short clip from a National Geographic film called ""Heroes of the High Frontier."" This was filmed in Monteverde, Costa Rica and I think it gives us the best impression of what it's like to climb a giant strangler fig. (Music) (Growling) (Rustling)So what you'll see up there is that it's really like the atmosphere of an open field, and there are tremendous numbers of plants and animals that have adapted to make their way and their life in the canopy. Common groups, like the sloth here, have clear adaptations for forest canopies, hanging on with their very strong claws. But I'd like to describe to you a more subtle kind of diversity and tell you about the ants. There are 10,000 species of ants that taxonomists — people who describe and name animals — have named. 4,000 of those ants live exclusively in the forest canopy.One of the reasons I tell you about ants is because of my husband, who is in fact an ant taxonomist and when we got married, he promised to name an ant after me, which he did — Procryptocerus nalini, a canopy ant. We've had two children, August Andrew and Erika and actually, he named ants after them. So we may be the only family that has an ant named after each one of us.But my passion — in addition to Jack and my children — are the plants, the so-called epiphytes, those plants that grow up on trees. They don't have roots that go into trunks nor to the forest floor. But rather, it is their leaves that are adapted to intercept the dissolved nutrients that come to them in the form of mist and fog. These plants occur in great diversity, over 28,000 species around the world. They grow in tropical forests like this one and they also grow in temperate rainforests, that we find in Washington state.These epiphytes are mainly dominated by the mosses. One thing I want to point out is that underneath these live epiphytes, as they die and decompose, they actually construct an arboreal soil, both in the temperate zone and in the tropics. And these mosses, generated by decomposing, are like peat moss in your garden. They have a tremendous capacity for holding on to nutrients and water.One of the surprising things I discovered is that, if you pull back with me on those mats of epiphytes, what you'll find underneath them are connections, networks of what we call canopy roots. These are not epiphyte roots: these are roots that emerge from the trunk and branch of the host trees themselves. And so those epiphytes are actually paying the landlord a bit of rent in exchange for being supported high above the forest floor.I was interested, and my canopy researcher colleagues have been interested in the dynamics of the canopy plants that live in the forest. We've done stripping experiments where we've removed mats of epiphytes and looked at the rates of recolonization. We had predicted that they would grow back very quickly and that they would come in encroaching from the side. What we found, however, was that they took an extremely long time — over 20 years — to regenerate, starting from the bottom and growing up. And even now, after 25 years, they're not up there, they have not recolonized completely. And I use this little image to say this is what happens to mosses. If it's gone, it's gone, and if you're really lucky you might get something growing back from the bottom.(Laughter)So, recolonization is really very slow. These canopy communities are fragile. Well, when we look out, you and I, over that canopy of the intact primary forest, what we see is this enormous carpet of carbon. One of the challenges that canopy researchers are attacking today is trying to understand the amount of carbon that is being sequestered. We know it's a lot, but we do not yet know the answers to how much, and by what processes, carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere, held in its biomass, and moving on through the ecosystem.So I hope I've showed you that canopy-dwellers are not just insignificant bits of green up high in the canopy that Tarzan and Jane were interested in, but rather that they foster biodiversity contribute to ecosystem nutrient cycles, and they also help to keep our global climate stable.Up in the canopy, if you were sitting next to me and you turned around from those primary forest ecosystems, you would also see scenes like this. Scenes of forest destruction, forest harvesting and forest fragmentation, thereby making that intact tapestry of the canopy unable to function in the marvelous ways that it has when it is not disturbed by humans.I've also looked out on urban places like this and thought about people who are disassociated from trees in their lives. People who grew up in a place like this did not have the opportunity to climb trees and form a relationship with trees and forests, as I did when I was a young girl. This troubles me.Here in 2009, you know, it's not an easy thing to be a forest ecologist, gripping ourselves with these kinds of questions and trying to figure out how we can answer them. And especially, you know, as a small brown woman in a little college, in the upper northwest part of our country, far away from the areas of power and money, I really have to ask myself, ""What can I do about this? How can I reconnect people with trees?""Well, I think that I can do something. I know that as a scientist, I have information and as a human being, I can communicate with anybody, inside or outside of academia. And so, that's what I've begin doing, and so I'd like to unveil the International Canopy Network here. We consult to the media about canopy questions; we have a canopy newsletter; we have an email LISTSERV. And so we're trying to disseminate information about the importance of the canopy, the beauty of the canopy, the necessity of intact canopies, to people outside of academia. We also recognize that a lot of the products that we make — those videos and so forth — you know, they don't reach everybody, and so we've been fostering projects that reach people outside of academia, and outside of the choir that most ecologists preach to.Treetop Barbie is a great example of that. What we do, my students in my lab and I, is we buy Barbies from Goodwill and Value Village, we dress her in clothes that have been made by seamstresses and we send her out with a canopy handbook. And my feeling is —(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)— that we've taken this pop icon and we have just tweaked her a little bit to become an ambassador who can carry the message that being a woman scientist studying treetops is actually a really great thing.We've also made partnerships with artists, with people who understand and can communicate the aesthetic beauty of trees and forest canopies. And I'd like to just tell you one of our projects, which is the generation of Canopy Confluences. What I do is I bring together scientists and artists of all kinds, and we spend a week in the forest on these little platforms; and we look at nature, we look at trees, we look at the canopy, and we communicate, and exchange, and express what we see together. The results have been fantastic.I'll just give you a few examples. This is a fantastic installation by Bruce Chao who is chair of the Sculpture and Glass Blowing Department at Rhode Island School of Design. He saw nests in the canopy at one of our Canopy Confluences in the Pacific Northwest, and created this beautiful sculpture. We've had dance people up in the canopy. Jodi Lomask, and her wonderful troupe Capacitor, joined me in the canopy in my rainforest site in Costa Rica. They made a fabulous dance called ""Biome.""They danced in the forest, and we are taking this dance, my scientific outreach communications, and also linking up with environmental groups, to go to different cities and to perform the science, the dance and the environmental outreach that we hope will make a difference. We brought musicians to the canopy, and they made their music — and it's fantastic music. We had wooden flutists, we had oboists, we had opera singers, we had guitar players, and we had rap singers. And I brought a little segment to give you of Duke Brady's ""Canopy Rap."" (Music) That's Duke!(Applause)This experience of working with Duke also led me to initiate a program called Sound Science. I saw the power of Duke's song with urban youth — an audience, you know, I as a middle-aged professor, I don't have a hope of getting to — in terms of convincing them of the importance of wildlands. So I engaged Caution, this rap singer, with a group of young people from inner-city Tacoma. We went out to the forest, I would pick up a branch, Caution would rap on it, and suddenly that branch was really cool. And then the students would come into our sound studios, they would make their own rap songs with their own beats. They ended up making a CD which they took home to their family and friends, thereby expressing their own experiences with nature in their own medium.The final project I'll talk about is one that's very close to my heart, and it involves an economic and social value that is associated with epiphytic plants. In the Pacific Northwest, there's a whole industry of moss-harvesting from old-growth forests. These mosses are taken from the forest; they're used by the floriculture industry, by florists, to make arrangements and make hanging baskets. It's a 265 million dollar industry and it's increasing rapidly. If you remember that bald guy, you'll know that what has been stripped off of these trunks in the Pacific Northwest old-growth forest is going to take decades and decades to come back. So this whole industry is unsustainable. What can I, as an ecologist, do about that?Well, my thought was that I could learn how to grow mosses, and that way we wouldn't have to take them out of the wild. And I thought, if I had some partners that could help me with this, that would be great. And so, I thought perhaps incarcerated men and women — who don't have access to nature, who often have a lot of time, they often have space, and you don't need any sharp tools to work with mosses — would be great partners. And they have become excellent partners. The best I can imagine. They were very enthusiastic.(Applause)They were incredibly enthusiastic about the work. They learned how to distinguish different species of mosses, which, to tell you the truth, is a lot more than my undergraduate students at the Evergreen College can do. And they embraced the idea that they could help develop a research design in order to grow these mosses. We've been successful as partners in figuring out which species grow the fastest, and I've just been overwhelmed with how successful this has been. Because the prison wardens were very enthusiastic about this as well, I started a Science and Sustainability Seminar in the prisons. I brought my scientific colleagues and sustainability practitioners into the prison. We gave talks once a month, and that actually ended up implementing some amazing sustainability projects at the prisons — organic gardens, worm culture, recycling, water catchment and beekeeping. (Applause)Our latest endeavor,with a grantfrom the Department of Corrections at Washington state, they've asked us to expand this program to three more prisons. And our new project is having the inmates and ourselves learn how to raise the Oregon spotted frog which is a highly endangered amphibian in Washington state and Oregon. So they will raise them — in captivity, of course — from eggs to tadpoles and onward to frogs. And they will have the pleasure, many of them, of seeing those frogs that they've raised from eggs and helped develop, helped nurture, move out into protected wildlands to augment the number of endangered species out there in the wild.And so, I think for many reasons — ecological, social, economic and perhaps even spiritual — this has been a tremendous project and I'm really looking forward to not only myself and my students doing it, but also to promote and teach other scientists how to do this. As many of you are aware, the world of academia is a rather inward-looking one. I'm trying to help researchers move more outward to have their own partnerships with people outside of the academic community. And so I'm hoping that my husband Jack, the ant taxonomist, can perhaps work with Mattel to make Taxonomist Ken. Perhaps Ben Zander and Bill Gates could get together and make an opera about AIDS. Or perhaps Al Gore and Naturally 7 could make a song about climate change that would really make you clap your hands.So, although it's a little bit of a fantasy, I think it's also a reality. Given the duress that we're feeling environmentally in these times, it is time for scientists to reach outward, and time for those outside of science to reach towards academia as well. I started my career with trying to understand the mysteries of forests with the tools of science. By making these partnerships that I described to you, I have really opened my mind and, I have to say, my heart to have a greater understanding, to make other discoveries about nature and myself.When I look into my heart, I see trees — this is actually an image of a real heart — there are trees in our hearts, there are trees in your hearts. When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep, the most important parts of our self. In these partnerships, I have also learned that people tend to compartmentalize themselves into IT people, and movie star people, and scientists, but when we share nature, when we share our perspectives about nature, we find a common denominator.Finally, as a scientist and as a person and now, as part of the TED community, I feel that I have better tools to go out to trees, to go out to forests, to go out to nature, to make new discoveries about nature — and about humans' place in nature wherever we are and whomever you are.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nalini_nadkani_on_conserving_the_canopy
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"The ""Dirty Jobs"" crew and I were called to a little town in Colorado, called Craig. It's only a couple dozen square miles. It's in the Rockies. And the job in question was sheep rancher.My role on the show, for those of you who haven't seen it — it's pretty simple. I'm an apprentice, and I work with the people who do the jobs in question. And my responsibilities are to simply try and keep up, and give an honest account of what it's like to be these people for one day in their life. The job in question: herding sheep. Great.We go to Craig and we check into a hotel, and I realize the next day that castration is going to be an absolute part of this work. Normally, I never do any research at all. But this is a touchy subject, and I work for the Discovery Channel, and we want to portray accurately whatever it is we do. And we certainly want to do it with a lot of respect for the animals. So I call the Humane Society and I say, ""Look, I'm going to be castrating some lambs. Can you tell me the deal?""And they're like, ""Yeah, it's pretty straightforward."" They use a band, basically, a rubber band, like this, only a little smaller. This one was actually around the playing cards I got yesterday —(Laughter) But it had a certain familiarity to it.And I said, ""Well, what exactly is the process?""And they said, ""The band is applied to the tail, tightly. And then another band is applied to the scrotum, tightly. Blood flow is slowly retarded; a week later the parts in question fall off.""Great — got it."" OK, I call the SPCA to confirm this. They confirm it. I also call PETA just for fun, and they don't like it, but they confirm it. OK, that's basically how you do it.So the next day I go out. And I'm given a horse and we go get the lambs and we take them to a pen that we built, and we go about the business of animal husbandry.Melanie is the wife of Albert. Albert is the shepherd in question. Melanie picks up the lamb, one hand on both legs on the right, likewise on the left. Lamb goes on the post, she opens it up. Alright. Great. Albert goes in, I follow Albert, the crew is around. I always watch the process done the first time before I try it. Being an apprentice, you know, you do that. Albert reaches in his pocket to pull out, you know, this black rubber band, but what comes out instead is a knife. And I'm like, ""Hmm, that's not rubber at all,"" you know?(Laughter)And he kind of flicked it open in a way that caught the sun that was just coming over the Rockies, it was very —(Laughter)It was ... it was impressive.In the space of about two seconds, Albert had the knife between the cartilage of the tail, right next to the butt of the lamb, and very quickly, the tail was gone and in the bucket that I was holding. A second later, with a big thumb and a well-calloused forefinger, he had the scrotum firmly in his grasp. And he pulled it toward him, like so, and he took the knife and he put it on the tip. ""Now, you think you know what's coming, Michael, You don't, OK?""(Laughter)He snips it, throws the tip over his shoulder, and then grabs the scrotum and pushes it upward, and then his head dips down, obscuring my view. But what I hear is a slurping sound, and a noise that sounds like Velcro being yanked off a sticky wall, and I am not even kidding.Can we roll the video? No, I'm kidding, we don't —(Laughter)I thought it best to talk in pictures.I do something now I've never, ever done on a ""Dirty Jobs"" shoot, ever. I say, ""Time out. Stop."" You guys know the show, we use take one; we don't do take two. There's no writing, there's no scripting, there's no nonsense. We don't fool around, we don't rehearse — we shoot what we get!I said, ""Stop. This is nuts."" I mean —(Laughter)""This is crazy. We can't do this.""And Albert's like, ""What?""And I'm like, ""I don't know what just happened, but there are testicles in this bucket, and that's not how we do it.""He said ""Well, that's how we do it.""I said, ""Why would you do it this way?"" And before I even let him explain, I said, ""I want to do it the right way, with the rubber bands.""And he says, ""Like the Humane Society?""I said, ""Yes, like the Humane Society. Let's do something that doesn't make the lamb squeal and bleed. We're on in five continents, dude! We're on twice a day on the Discovery — we can't do this.""He says, ""OK."" He goes to his box and pulls out a bag of these little rubber bands. Melanie picks up another lamb, puts it on the post, band goes on the tail, band goes on the scrotum. Lamb goes on the ground, lamb takes two steps, falls down, gets up, shakes a little, takes another couple steps, falls down. I'm like, this is not a good sign for this lamb, at all. Gets up, walks to the corner. It's quivering, and it lies down and it's in obvious distress.And I'm looking at the lamb and I say, ""Albert, how long? When does he get up?""He's like, ""A day?""I said, ""A day! How long does it take them to fall off?""""A week.""Meanwhile, the lamb that he had just done his little procedure on is, you know, he's just prancing around, bleeding stopped. He's, you know, nibbling on some grass, frolicking. And I was just so blown away at how completely wrong I was, in that second. And I was reminded how utterly wrong I am, so much of the time.(Laughter)And I was especially reminded of what a ridiculously short straw I had that day, because now I had to do what Albert had just done, and there are like 100 of these lambs in the pen. And suddenly, this whole thing's starting to feel like a German porno, and I'm like —(Laughter)Melanie picks up the lamb, puts it on the post, opens it up. Albert hands me the knife. I go in, tail comes off. I go in, I grab the scrotum, tip comes off. Albert instructs, ""Push it way up there."" I do. ""Push it further."" I do.The testicles emerge. They look like thumbs, coming right at you. And he says, ""Bite 'em. Just bite 'em off.""(Laughter)And I heard him, I heard all the words —(Laughter)Like, how did I get here? How did — I mean — how did I get here?It's just — it's one of those moments where the brain goes off on its own, and suddenly, I'm standing there in the Rockies, and all I can think of is the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy. You know, Aristotle says a tragedy is that moment when the hero comes face to face with his true identity.(Laughter)And I'm like, ""What is this jacked-up metaphor? I don't like what I'm thinking right now."" And I can't get this thought out of my head, and I can't get that vision out of my sight, so I did what I had to do. I went in and I took them. I took them like this, and I yanked my head back. And I'm standing there with two testicles on my chin.(Laughter)And now I can't get — I can't shake the metaphor.I'm still in ""Poetics,"" in Aristotle, and I'm thinking — out of nowhere, two terms come crashing into my head, that I hadn't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there. And they are ""anagnorisis"" and ""peripeteia."" Anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis is the Greek word for discovery. Literally, the transition from ignorance to knowledge is anagnorisis. It's what our network does; it's what ""Dirty Jobs"" is. And I'm up to my neck in anagnorises every single day. Great. The other word, peripeteia, that's the moment in the great tragedies — Euripides and Sophocles. That's the moment where Oedipus has his moment, where he suddenly realizes that hot chick he's been sleeping with and having babies with is his mother. That's peripety, or peripeteia. And this metaphor in my head — I've got anagnorisis and peripeteia on my chin —(Laughter)I've got to tell you, it's such a great device, though. When you start to look for peripeteia, you find it everywhere. I mean, Bruce Willis in ""The Sixth Sense,"" right? Spends the whole movie trying to help the little kid who sees dead people, and then — boom! — ""Oh, I'm dead."" Peripeteia. You know? It's crushing when the audience sees it the right way. Neo in ""The Matrix,"" you know? ""Oh, I'm living in a computer program. That's weird.""These discoveries that lead to sudden realizations. And I've been having them, over 200 dirty jobs, I have them all the time, but that one — that one drilled something home in a way that I just wasn't prepared for. And, as I stood there, looking at the happy lamb that I had just defiled — but it looked OK; looking at that poor other little thing that I'd done it the right way on, and I just was struck by — if I'm wrong about that, and if I'm wrong so often, in a literal way, what other peripatetic misconceptions might I be able to comment upon?Because, look — I'm not a social anthropologist, but I have a friend who is. And I talk to him.(Laughter)And he says, ""Hey Mike, look. I don't know if your brain is interested in this sort of thing or not, but do you realize you've shot in every state? You've worked in mining, you've worked in fishing, you've worked in steel, you've worked in every major industry. You've had your back shoulder to shoulder with these guys that our politicians are desperate to relate to every four years, right?""I can still see Hillary doing the shots of rye, dribbling down her chin, with the steel workers. I mean, these are the people that I work with every single day. ""And if you have something to say about their thoughts, collectively, it might be time to think about it. Because, dude, you know, four years."" So, that's in my head, testicles are on my chin, thoughts are bouncing around. And, after that shoot, ""Dirty Jobs"" really didn't change, in terms of what the show is, but it changed for me, personally.And now, when I talk about the show, I no longer just tell the story you heard and 190 like it. I do, but I also start to talk about some of the other things I got wrong; some of the other notions of work that I've just been assuming are sacrosanct, and they're not. People with dirty jobs are happier than you think. As a group, they're the happiest people I know. And I don't want to start whistling ""Look for the Union Label,"" and all that happy-worker crap. I'm just telling you that these are balanced people who do unthinkable work. Roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work, I swear to God — I did it with them. They've got this amazing sort of symmetry to their life. And I see it over and over and over again.So I started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows? Follow your passion — we've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. Follow your passion — what could possibly be wrong with that? It's probably the worst advice I ever got.(Laughter)Follow your dreams and go broke, right? I mean, that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told if you follow your passion, it's going to work out.I can give you 30 examples right now. Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them to his swine. Why? Because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat, his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he's one rich pig farmer. He's good for the environment, he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell, but God bless him. He's making a great living. You ask him, ""Did you follow your passion here?"" and he'd laugh at you. The guy's worth — he just got offered like 60 million dollars for his farm and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn't follow his passion. He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going, and he went the other way. And I hear that story over and over.Matt Freund, a dairy farmer in New Canaan, Connecticut, who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk, if he could use it to make these biodegradable flowerpots. Now he's selling them to Walmart, right? Follow his passion? The guy's — come on.So I started to look at passion, I started to look at efficiency vs. effectiveness. As Tim talked about earlier, that's a huge distinction. I started to look at teamwork and determination. And basically, all those platitudes they call ""successories"" that hang with that schmaltzy art in boardrooms around the world right now, that stuff — it's suddenly all been turned on its head.Safety. Safety first is ... Going back to OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society: What if OSHA got it wrong? I mean — this is heresy, what I'm about to say — but what if it's really safety third? Right?(Laughter)No, I mean, really. What I mean to say is: I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I'm working with, but the ones who really get it done — they're not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first — the business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done.And I'll never forget, up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the ""Deadliest Catch"" guys — which I also work on in the first season. We were about 100 miles off the coast of Russia: 50-foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I'd ever seen, and I was back with a guy, lashing the pots down. So I'm 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it's doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous.I scamper down, I go into the wheelhouse and I say, with some level of incredulity, ""Captain — OSHA?""And he says, ""OSHA? Ocean."" And he points out there.(Laughter)But in that moment, what he said next can't be repeated in the Lower 48. It can't be repeated on any factory floor or any construction site. But he looked at me and said, ""Son,"" — he's my age, by the way, he calls me ""son,"" I love that — he says, ""Son, I'm the captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich.""(Laughter)You want to get home alive, that's on you."" And for the rest of that day — safety first.I mean, I was like — So, the idea that we create this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things. I could talk at length about the many little distinctions we made and the endless list of ways that I got it wrong. But what it all comes down to is this: I've formed a theory, and I'm going to share it now in my remaining 2 minutes and 30 seconds.It goes like this: we've declared war on work, as a society — all of us. It's a civil war. It's a cold war, really. We didn't set out to do it and we didn't twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way, but we've done it. And we've waged this war on at least four fronts, certainly in Hollywood. The way we portray working people on TV — it's laughable. If there's a plumber, he's 300 pounds and he's got a giant butt crack, admit it. You see him all the time. That's what plumbers look like, right? We turn them into heroes, or we turn them into punch lines. That's what TV does. We try hard on ""Dirty Jobs"" not to do that, which is why I do the work and I don't cheat.But, we've waged this war on Madison Avenue. So many of the commercials that come out there in the way of a message — what's really being said? ""Your life would be better if you could work a little less, didn't have to work so hard, got home a little earlier, could retire a little faster, punch out a little sooner."" It's all in there, over and over, again and again.Washington? I can't even begin to talk about the deals and policies in place that affect the bottom-line reality of the available jobs, because I don't really know; I just know that that's a front in this war.And right here, guys — Silicon Valley. I mean — how many people have an iPhone on them right now? How many people have their BlackBerry? We're plugged in; we're connected. I would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution. Good grief, not to this crowd.(Laughter)But I would suggest that innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time. And nobody celebrates imitation the way ""Dirty Jobs"" guys know it has to be done. Your iPhone without those people making the same interface, the same circuitry, the same board, over and over — all of that — that's what makes it equally as possible as the genius that goes inside of it.So, we've got this new toolbox. You know? Our tools today don't look like shovels and picks. They look like the stuff we walk around with. And so the collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs. And I realized, probably too late in this game — I hope not, because I don't know if I can do 200 more of these things — but we're going to do as many as we can. And to me, the most important thing to know and to really come face to face with, is that fact that I got it wrong about a lot of things, not just the testicles on my chin. I got a lot wrong.So, we're thinking — by ""we,"" I mean me —(Laughter)that the thing to do is to talk about a PR campaign for work — manual labor, skilled labor. Somebody needs to be out there, talking about the forgotten benefits. I'm talking about grandfather stuff, the stuff a lot us probably grew up with but we've kind of — you know, kind of lost a little.Barack wants to create two and a half million jobs. The infrastructure is a huge deal. This war on work that I suppose exists, has casualties like any other war. The infrastructure is the first one, declining trade school enrollments are the second one. Every single year, fewer electricians, fewer carpenters, fewer plumbers, fewer welders, fewer pipe fitters, fewer steam fitters. The infrastructure jobs that everybody is talking about creating are those guys — the ones that have been in decline, over and over. Meanwhile, we've got two trillion dollars, at a minimum, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, that we need to expend to even make a dent in the infrastructure, which is currently rated at a D minus.So, if I were running for anything — and I'm not — I would simply say that the jobs we hope to make and the jobs we hope to create aren't going to stick unless they're jobs that people want. And I know the point of this conference is to celebrate things that are near and dear to us, but I also know that clean and dirty aren't opposites. They're two sides of the same coin, just like innovation and imitation, like risk and responsibility, like peripeteia and anagnorisis, like that poor little lamb, who I hope isn't quivering anymore, and like my time that's gone.It's been great talking to you. And get back to work, will you?(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs
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"The new me is beauty.(Laughter) Yeah, people used to say, ""Norman's OK, but if you followed what he said, everything would be usable but it would be ugly."" Well, I didn't have that in mind, so ...This is neat. Thank you for setting up my display. I mean, it's just wonderful. And I haven't the slightest idea of what it does or what it's good for, but I want it. And that's my new life. My new life is trying to understand what beauty is about, and ""pretty,"" and ""emotions."" The new me is all about making things kind of neat and fun.And so this is a Philippe Starck juicer, produced by Alessi. It's just neat; it's fun. It's so much fun I have it in my house — but I have it in the entryway, I don't use it to make juice.(Laughter)In fact, I bought the gold-plated special edition and it comes with a little slip of paper that says, ""Don't use this juicer to make juice."" The acid will ruin the gold plating.(Laughter)So actually, I took a carton of orange juice and I poured it in the glass to take this picture.(Laughter)Beneath it is a wonderful knife. It's a Global cutting knife made in Japan. First of all, look at the shape — it's just wonderful to look at. Second of all, it's really beautifully balanced: it holds well, it feels well. And third of all, it's so sharp, it just cuts. It's a delight to use. And so it's got everything, right? It's beautiful and it's functional. And I can tell you stories about it, which makes it reflective, and so you'll see I have a theory of emotion. And those are the three components.Hiroshi Ishii and his group at the MIT Media Lab took a ping-pong table and placed a projector above it, and on the ping-pong table they projected an image of water with fish swimming in it. And as you play ping-pong, whenever the ball hits part of the table, the ripples spread out and the fish run away. But of course, then the ball hits the other side, the ripples hit the — poor fish, they can't find any peace and quiet.(Laughter)Is that a good way to play ping-pong? No. But is it fun? Yeah! Yeah.Or look at Google. If you type in, oh say, ""emotion and design,"" you get 10 pages of results. So Google just took their logo and they spread it out. Instead of saying, ""You got 73,000 results. This is one through 20. Next,"" they just give you as many o's as there are pages. It's really simple and subtle. I bet a lot of you have seen it and never noticed it. That's the subconscious mind that sort of notices it — it probably is kind of pleasant and you didn't know why. And it's just clever. And of course, what's especially good is, if you type ""design and emotion,"" the first response out of those 10 pages is my website.(Laughter)Now, the weird thing is Google lies, because if I type ""design and emotion,"" it says, ""You don't need the 'and.' We do it anyway."" So, OK. So I type ""design emotion"" and my website wasn't first again. It was third. Oh well, different story.There was this wonderful review in The New York Times about the MINI Cooper automobile. It said, ""You know, this is a car that has lots of faults. Buy it anyway. It's so much fun to drive."" And if you look at the inside of the car — I mean, I loved it, I wanted to see it, I rented it, this is me taking a picture while my son is driving — and the inside of the car, the whole design is fun. It's round, it's neat. The controls work wonderfully. So that's my new life; it's all about fun.I really have the feeling that pleasant things work better, and that never made any sense to me until I finally figured out — look ... I'm going to put a plank on the ground. So, imagine I have a plank about two feet wide and 30 feet long and I'm going to walk on it, and you see I can walk on it without looking, I can go back and forth and I can jump up and down. No problem. Now I'm going to put the plank 300 feet in the air — and I'm not going to go near it, thank you. Intense fear paralyzes you. It actually affects the way the brain works.So, Paul Saffo, before his talk said that he didn't really have it down until just a few days or hours before the talk, and that anxiety was really helpful in causing him to focus. That's what fear and anxiety does; it causes you to be — what's called depth-first processing — to focus, not be distracted. And I couldn't force myself across that. Now some people can — circus workers, steel workers. But it really changes the way you think.And then, a psychologist, Alice Isen, did this wonderful experiment. She brought students in to solve problems. So, she'd bring people into the room, and there'd be a string hanging down here and a string hanging down here. It was an empty room, except for a table with a bunch of crap on it — some papers and scissors and stuff. And she'd bring them in, and she'd say, ""This is an IQ test and it determines how well you do in life. Would you tie those two strings together?"" So they'd take one string and they'd pull it over here and they couldn't reach the other string. Still can't reach it. And, basically, none of them could solve it. You bring in a second group of people, and you say, ""Oh, before we start, I got this box of candy, and I don't eat candy. Would you like the box of candy?""And turns out they liked it, and it made them happy — not very happy, but a little bit of happy. And guess what — they solved the problem. And it turns out that when you're anxious you squirt neural transmitters in the brain, which focuses you makes you depth-first. And when you're happy — what we call positive valence — you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes, which makes you a breadth-first problem solver: you're more susceptible to interruption; you do out-of-the-box thinking. That's what brainstorming is about, right? With brainstorming we make you happy, we play games, and we say, ""No criticism,"" and you get all these weird, neat ideas. But in fact, if that's how you always were you'd never get any work done because you'd be working along and say, ""Oh, I got a new way of doing it."" So to get work done, you've got to set a deadline, right? You've got be anxious. The brain works differently if you're happy. Things work better because you're more creative. You get a little problem, you say, ""Ah, I'll figure it out."" No big deal.There's something I call the visceral level of processing, and there will be visceral-level design. Biology — we have co-adapted through biology to like bright colors. That's especially good that mammals and primates like fruits and bright plants, because you eat the fruit and you thereby spread the seed. There's an amazing amount of stuff that's built into the brain. We dislike bitter tastes, we dislike loud sounds, we dislike hot temperatures, cold temperatures. We dislike scolding voices. We dislike frowning faces; we like symmetrical faces, etc., etc. So that's the visceral level. In design, you can express visceral in lots of ways, like the choice of type fonts and the red for hot, exciting. Or the 1963 Jaguar: It's actually a crummy car, falls apart all the time, but the owners love it. And it's beautiful — it's in the Museum of Modern Art. A water bottle: You buy it because of the bottle, not because of the water. And when people are finished, they don't throw it away. They keep it for — you know, it's like the old wine bottles, you keep it for decoration or maybe fill it with water again, which proves it's not the water. It's all about the visceral experience.The middle level of processing is the behavioral level and that's actually where most of our stuff gets done. Visceral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. Behavioral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. Almost everything we do is subconscious. I'm walking around the stage — I'm not attending to the control of my legs. I'm doing a lot; most of my talk is subconscious; it has been rehearsed and thought about a lot. Most of what we do is subconscious. Automatic behavior — skilled behavior — is subconscious, controlled by the behavioral side. And behavioral design is all about feeling in control, which includes usability, understanding — but also the feel and heft.That's why the Global knives are so neat. They're so nicely balanced, so sharp, that you really feel you're in control of the cutting. Or, just driving a high-performance sports car over a demanding curb — again, feeling that you are in complete control of the environment. Or the sensual feeling. This is a Kohler shower, a waterfall shower, and actually, all those knobs beneath are also showerheads. It will squirt you all around and you can stay in that shower for hours — and not waste water, by the way, because it recirculates the same dirty water.(Laughter)Or this — this is a really neat teapot I found at high tea at The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago. It's a Ronnefeldt tilting teapot. That's kind of what the teapot looks like but the way you use it is you lay it on its back, and you put tea in, and then you fill it with water. The water then seeps over the tea. And the tea is sitting in this stuff to the right — the tea is to the right of this line. There's a little ledge inside, so the tea is sitting there and the water is filling it up like that. And when the tea is ready, or almost ready, you tilt it. And that means the tea is partially covered while it completes the brewing. And when it's finished, you put it vertically, and now the tea is — you remember — above this line and the water only comes to here — and so it keeps the tea out. On top of that, it communicates, which is what emotion does.Emotion is all about acting; emotion is really about acting. It's being safe in the world. Cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it — saying good, bad, safe, dangerous, and getting us ready to act, which is why the muscles tense or relax. And that's why we can tell the emotion of somebody else — because their muscles are acting, subconsciously, except that we've evolved to make the facial muscles really rich with emotion. Well, this has emotions if you like, because it signals the waiter that, ""Hey, I'm finished. See — upright."" And the waiter can come by and say, ""Would you like more water?"" It's kind of neat. What a wonderful design.And the third level is reflective, which is, if you like the superego, it's a little part of the brain that has no control over what you do, no control over the — doesn't see the senses, doesn't control the muscles. It looks over what's going on. It's that little voice in your head that's watching and saying, ""That's good. That's bad."" Or, ""Why are you doing that? I don't understand."" It's that little voice in your head that's the seat of consciousness.Here's a great reflective product. Owners of the Hummer have said, ""You know I've owned many cars in my life — all sorts of exotic cars, but never have I had a car that attracted so much attention."" It's about attention. It's about their image, not about the car. If you want a more positive model — this is the GM car. And the reason you might buy it now is because you care about the environment. And you'll buy it to protect the environment, even though the first few cars are going to be really expensive and not perfected. But that's reflective design as well. Or an expensive watch, so you can impress people — ""Oh gee, I didn't know you had that watch."" As opposed to this one, which is a pure behavioral watch, which probably keeps better time than the $13,000 watch I just showed you. But it's ugly. This is a clear Don Norman watch.And what's neat is sometimes you pit one emotion against the other, the visceral fear of falling against the reflective state saying, ""It's OK. It's OK. It's safe. It's safe."" If that amusement park were rusty and falling apart, you'd never go on the ride. So, it's pitting one against the other. The other neat thing ...(Laughter)So Jake Cress is this furniture maker, and he makes this unbelievable set of furniture. And this is his chair with claw, and the poor little chair has lost its ball and it's trying to get it back before anybody notices. And what's so neat about it is how you accept that story. And that's what's nice about emotion.So that's the new me. I'm only saying positive things from now on.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion
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"I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense — a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. And some of you may argue, ""Well, don't today's cell phones do that already?"" But I would say no. When you meet someone here at TED — and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year — you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, ""Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?"" Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make.So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far, which is still very much a work in process. I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf — and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time.I'm wearing a camera, just a simple web cam, a portable, battery-powered projection system with a little mirror. These components communicate to my cell phone in my pocket which acts as the communication and computation device. And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. The system tracks the four significant fingers. In this case, he's wearing simple marker caps that you may recognize. But if you want a more stylish version, you could also paint your nails in different colors.And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. The system also recognizes iconic gestures such as the ""take a picture"" gesture, and then takes a picture of whatever is in front of you. And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures.So, some of you most likely were here two years ago and saw the demo by Jeff Han, or some of you may think, ""Well, doesn't this look like the Microsoft Surface Table?"" And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk up to any surface, including your hand, if nothing else is available, and interact with this projected data. The device is completely portable, and can be —(Applause)(Applause ends)So, one important difference is that it's totally mobile. Another even more important difference is that in mass production, this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging — could look a lot more stylish than this version that I'm wearing around my neck. But other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ""Minority Report,"" the reason why we're really excited about this device is that it really can act as one of these sixth-sense devices that gives you relevant information about whatever is in front of you. So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper towels. And, as he picks up a product, the system can recognize the product that he's picking up, using either image recognition or marker technology, and give him the green light or an orange light. He can ask for additional information. So this particular choice here is a particularly good choice, given his personal criteria. Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically responsible choice.(Laughter)If he picks up a book in the bookstore, he can get an Amazon rating — it gets projected right on the cover of the book. This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book — reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. If he turns to a particular page, he finds an annotation by maybe an expert or a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. Reading the newspaper — it never has to be outdated.(Laughter)You can get video annotations of the events that you're reading about. You can get the latest sports scores, etc. This is a more controversial one.(Laughter)As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. In this case, the student is interested in cameras, etc. On your way to the airport, if you pick up your boarding pass, it can tell you that your flight is delayed, that the gate has changed, etc. And, if you need to know what the current time is, it's as simple as drawing a watch —(Laughter)(Applause)on your arm.So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. My student Pranav, who's really, like I said, the genius behind this.(Applause and cheering)(Applause ends)He does deserve a lot of applause, because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. And his girlfriend is probably not very happy about him either. But it's not perfect yet, it's very much a work in progress. And who knows, maybe in another 10 years we'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense
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"I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids. And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or is foreign to them. They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, ""Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs.""But, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own. The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. And I said, ""Kids, really quickly — I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house — nothing too big, two or three stories — but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me?""And immediately a voice shouted, ""Kangaroo!"" ""No, no, no! Should be a frog!"" ""No. It should be Go Go Gadget!"" ""No, no, no! It should be the Incredibles."" And other things that I don't — aren't familiar with. And then, one eight-year-old said, ""Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?"" And the whole room, including me, was like, ""Yeah."" (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as ""disabled"" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled. Interesting.So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago. And there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life's exploration. At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday. And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs.So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. So that we can stop compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee — Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a cover story.This started an incredible journey. Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. And people would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and women. And the conversation would go something like this, ""You know Aimee, you're very attractive. You don't look disabled."" (Laughter) I thought, ""Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel disabled."" And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? I mean, people — Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled. (Laughter)So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. So, three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover — ""Fashion-able""? Three months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. Nobody knew — everyone thought they were wooden boots. Actually, I have them on stage with me: grapevines, magnolias — truly stunning. Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand.I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the ""The Cremaster Cycle."" This is where it really hit home for me — that my legs could be wearable sculpture. And even at this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. Heavy! Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. That's a good close-up of that one. Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah — a little homage to my life as an athlete. 14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. (Laughter) And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these — look like jellyfish legs, also polyurethane. And the only purpose that these legs can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. So whimsy matters.Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet, and I can change my height — I have a variable of five different heights. (Laughter) Today, I'm 6'1"". And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5'8"". Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she went, ""But you're so tall!"" And I said, ""I know. Isn't it fun?"" I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. And I was having fun with it. And she looked at me, and she said, ""But, Aimee, that's not fair."" (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she really meant it. It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it.And that's when I knew — that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. It's a conversation about augmentation. It's a conversation about potential. A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology — robotics, bionics — with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: ""If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh?"" It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics
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"So, here we go: a flyby of play.It's got to be serious if the New York Times puts a cover story of their February 17th Sunday magazine about play. At the bottom of this, it says, ""It's deeper than gender. Seriously, but dangerously fun. And a sandbox for new ideas about evolution."" Not bad, except if you look at that cover, what's missing? You see any adults?Well, lets go back to the 15th century. This is a courtyard in Europe, and a mixture of 124 different kinds of play. All ages, solo play, body play, games, taunting. And there it is. And I think this is a typical picture of what it was like in a courtyard then. I think we may have lost something in our culture.So I'm gonna take you through what I think is a remarkable sequence. North of Churchill, Manitoba, in October and November, there's no ice on Hudson Bay. And this polar bear that you see, this 1200-pound male, he's wild and fairly hungry. And Norbert Rosing, a German photographer, is there on scene, making a series of photos of these huskies, who are tethered. And from out of stage left comes this wild, male polar bear, with a predatory gaze. Any of you who've been to Africa or had a junkyard dog come after you, there is a fixed kind of predatory gaze that you know you're in trouble. But on the other side of that predatory gaze is a female husky in a play bow, wagging her tail. And something very unusual happens. That fixed behavior — which is rigid and stereotyped and ends up with a meal — changes. And this polar bear stands over the husky, no claws extended, no fangs taking a look. And they begin an incredible ballet.A play ballet. This is in nature: it overrides a carnivorous nature and what otherwise would have been a short fight to the death. And if you'll begin to look closely at the husky that's bearing her throat to the polar bear, and look a little more closely, they're in an altered state. They're in a state of play. And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us.Now how did I get involved in this? John mentioned that I've done some work with murderers, and I have. The Texas Tower murderer opened my eyes, in retrospect, when we studied his tragic mass murder, to the importance of play, in that that individual, by deep study, was found to have severe play deprivation. Charles Whitman was his name. And our committee, which consisted of a lot of hard scientists, did feel at the end of that study that the absence of play and a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play led him to be more vulnerable to the tragedy that he perpetrated. And that finding has stood the test of time — unfortunately even into more recent times, at Virginia Tech.And other studies of populations at risk sensitized me to the importance of play, but I didn't really understand what it was. And it was many years in taking play histories of individuals before I really began to recognize that I didn't really have a full understanding of it. And I don't think any of us has a full understanding of it, by any means. But there are ways of looking at it that I think can give you — give us all a taxonomy, a way of thinking about it.And this image is, for humans, the beginning point of play. When that mother and infant lock eyes, and the infant's old enough to have a social smile, what happens — spontaneously — is the eruption of joy on the part of the mother. And she begins to babble and coo and smile, and so does the baby. If we've got them wired up with an electroencephalogram, the right brain of each of them becomes attuned, so that the joyful emergence of this earliest of play scenes and the physiology of that is something we're beginning to get a handle on.And I'd like you to think that every bit of more complex play builds on this base for us humans. And so now I'm going to take you through sort of a way of looking at play, but it's never just singularly one thing.We're going to look at body play, which is a spontaneous desire to get ourselves out of gravity. This is a mountain goat. If you're having a bad day, try this: jump up and down, wiggle around — you're going to feel better. And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play.And there's a whole other type of play, which is object play. And this Japanese macaque has made a snowball, and he or she's going to roll down a hill. And — they don't throw it at each other, but this is a fundamental part of being playful. The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain; the brain is in search of a hand; and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way.JPL we heard this morning — JPL is an incredible place. They have located two consultants, Frank Wilson and Nate Johnson, who are — Frank Wilson is a neurologist, Nate Johnson is a mechanic. He taught mechanics in a high school in Long Beach, and found that his students were no longer able to solve problems. And he tried to figure out why. And he came to the conclusion, quite on his own, that the students who could no longer solve problems, such as fixing cars, hadn't worked with their hands. Frank Wilson had written a book called ""The Hand."" They got together — JPL hired them. Now JPL, NASA and Boeing, before they will hire a research and development problem solver — even if they're summa cum laude from Harvard or Cal Tech — if they haven't fixed cars, haven't done stuff with their hands early in life, played with their hands, they can't problem-solve as well. So play is practical, and it's very important.Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration. This happens to be OK — he's an anatomically interested little boy and that's his mom. Other situations wouldn't be quite so good. But curiosity, exploration, are part of the play scene. If you want to belong, you need social play. And social play is part of what we're about here today, and is a byproduct of the play scene.Rough and tumble play. These lionesses, seen from a distance, looked like they were fighting. But if you look closely, they're kind of like the polar bear and husky: no claws, flat fur, soft eyes, open mouth with no fangs, balletic movements, curvilinear movements — all specific to play. And rough-and-tumble play is a great learning medium for all of us. Preschool kids, for example, should be allowed to dive, hit, whistle, scream, be chaotic, and develop through that a lot of emotional regulation and a lot of the other social byproducts — cognitive, emotional and physical — that come as a part of rough and tumble play.Spectator play, ritual play — we're involved in some of that. Those of you who are from Boston know that this was the moment — rare — where the Red Sox won the World Series. But take a look at the face and the body language of everybody in this fuzzy picture, and you can get a sense that they're all at play.Imaginative play. I love this picture because my daughter, who's now almost 40, is in this picture, but it reminds me of her storytelling and her imagination, her ability to spin yarns at this age — preschool. A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play.And I love this one, because it's also what we're about. We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. I'm telling you a story today about play. Well, this bushman, I think, is talking about the fish that got away that was that long, but it's a fundamental part of the play scene.So what does play do for the brain? Well, a lot.We don't know a whole lot about what it does for the human brain, because funding has not been exactly heavy for research on play. I walked into the Carnegie asking for a grant. They'd given me a large grant when I was an academician for the study of felony drunken drivers, and I thought I had a pretty good track record, and by the time I had spent half an hour talking about play, it was obvious that they were not — did not feel that play was serious. I think that — that's a few years back — I think that wave is past, and the play wave is cresting, because there is some good science.Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe — the executive portion — helps contextual memory be developed, and — and, and, and.So it's — for me, its been an extremely nourishing scholarly adventure to look at the neuroscience that's associated with play, and to bring together people who in their individual disciplines hadn't really thought of it that way. And that's part of what the National Institute for Play is all about. And this is one of the ways you can study play — is to get a 256-lead electroencephalogram. I'm sorry I don't have a playful-looking subject, but it allows mobility, which has limited the actual study of play. And we've got a mother-infant play scenario that we're hoping to complete underway at the moment.The reason I put this here is also to queue up my thoughts about objectifying what play does. The animal world has objectified it. In the animal world, if you take rats, who are hardwired to play at a certain period of their juvenile years and you suppress play — they squeak, they wrestle, they pin each other, that's part of their play. If you stop that behavior on one group that you're experimenting with, and you allow it in another group that you're experimenting with, and then you present those rats with a cat odor-saturated collar, they're hardwired to flee and hide. Pretty smart — they don't want to get killed by a cat. So what happens? They both hide out. The non-players never come out — they die. The players slowly explore the environment, and begin again to test things out. That says to me, at least in rats — and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture — that play may be pretty important for our survival.And, and, and — there are a lot more animal studies that I could talk about.Now, this is a consequence of play deprivation. (Laughter) This took a long time — I had to get Homer down and put him through the fMRI and the SPECT and multiple EEGs, but as a couch potato, his brain has shrunk. And we do know that in domestic animals and others, when they're play deprived, they don't — and rats also — they don't develop a brain that is normal.Now, the program says that the opposite of play is not work, it's depression. And I think if you think about life without play — no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy and, and, and. Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime.And we all have capacity to play signal. Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. What's going to follow from that behavior is play. And you can trust it. The basis of human trust is established through play signals. And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. That's a shame. I think we've got a lot of learning to do.Now, Jane Goodall has here a play face along with one of her favorite chimps. So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. You know, you can tell — and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals.You may not know this word, but it should be your biological first name and last name. Because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. And therefore, the most playful. And this gives us a leg up on adaptability.Now, there is a way of looking at play that I also want to emphasize here, which is the play history. Your own personal play history is unique, and often is not something we think about particularly.This is a book written by a consummate player by the name of Kevin Carroll. Kevin Carroll came from extremely deprived circumstances: alcoholic mother, absent father, inner-city Philadelphia, black, had to take care of a younger brother. Found that when he looked at a playground out of a window into which he had been confined, he felt something different. And so he followed up on it. And his life — the transformation of his life from deprivation and what one would expect — potentially prison or death — he become a linguist, a trainer for the 76ers and now is a motivational speaker. And he gives play as a transformative force over his entire life.Now there's another play history that I think is a work in progress. Those of you who remember Al Gore, during the first term and then during his successful but unelected run for the presidency, may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person, at least in public. And looking at his history, which is common in the press, it seems to me, at least — looking at it from a shrink's point of view — that a lot of his life was programmed. Summers were hard, hard work, in the heat of Tennessee summers. He had the expectations of his senatorial father and Washington, D.C. And although I think he certainly had the capacity for play — because I do know something about that — he wasn't as empowered, I think, as he now is by paying attention to what is his own passion and his own inner drive, which I think has its basis in all of us in our play history.So what I would encourage on an individual level to do, is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have, whether it's with a toy, on a birthday or on a vacation. And begin to build to build from the emotion of that into how that connects with your life now. And you'll find, you may change jobs — which has happened to a number people when I've had them do this — in order to be more empowered through their play. Or you'll be able to enrich your life by prioritizing it and paying attention to it.Most of us work with groups, and I put this up because the d.school, the design school at Stanford, thanks to David Kelley and a lot of others who have been visionary about its establishment, has allowed a group of us to get together and create a course called ""From Play to Innovation."" And you'll see this course is to investigate the human state of play, which is kind of like the polar bear-husky state and its importance to creative thinking: ""to explore play behavior, its development and its biological basis; to apply those principles, through design thinking, to promote innovation in the corporate world; and the students will work with real-world partners on design projects with widespread application.""This is our maiden voyage in this. We're about two and a half, three months into it, and it's really been fun. There is our star pupil, this labrador, who taught a lot of us what a state of play is, and an extremely aged and decrepit professor in charge there. And Brendan Boyle, Rich Crandall — and on the far right is, I think, a person who will be in cahoots with George Smoot for a Nobel Prize — Stuart Thompson, in neuroscience. So we've had Brendan, who's from IDEO, and the rest of us sitting aside and watching these students as they put play principles into practice in the classroom. And one of their projects was to see what makes meetings boring, and to try and do something about it. So what will follow is a student-made film about just that.Narrator: Flow is the mental state of apparition in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. Characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity.An important key insight that we learned about meetings is that people pack them in one after another, disruptive to the day. Attendees at meetings don't know when they'll get back to the task that they left at their desk. But it doesn't have to be that way.(Music)Some sage and repeatedly furry monks at this place called the d.school designed a meeting that you can literally step out of when it's over. Take the meeting off, and have peace of mind that you can come back to me. Because when you need it again, the meeting is literally hanging in your closet.The Wearable Meeting. Because when you put it on, you immediately get everything you need to have a fun and productive and useful meeting. But when you take it off — that's when the real action happens.(Music)(Laughter) (Applause)Stuart Brown: So I would encourage you all to engage not in the work-play differential — where you set aside time to play — but where your life becomes infused minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play. And I think you'll have a better and more empowered life. Thank You.(Applause)John Hockenberry: So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that there may be some temptation on the part of people to look at your work and go — I think I've heard this, in my kind of pop psychological understanding of play, that somehow, the way animals and humans deal with play, is that it's some sort of rehearsal for adult activity. Your work seems to suggest that that is powerfully wrong.SB: Yeah, I don't think that's accurate, and I think probably because animals have taught us that. If you stop a cat from playing — which you can do, and we've all seen how cats bat around stuff — they're just as good predators as they would be if they hadn't played. And if you imagine a kid pretending to be King Kong, or a race car driver, or a fireman, they don't all become race car drivers or firemen, you know. So there's a disconnect between preparation for the future — which is what most people are comfortable in thinking about play as — and thinking of it as a separate biological entity.And this is where my chasing animals for four, five years really changed my perspective from a clinician to what I am now, which is that play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams do. And if you look at sleep and dreams biologically, animals sleep and dream, and they rehearse and they do some other things that help memory and that are a very important part of sleep and dreams.The next step of evolution in mammals and creatures with divinely superfluous neurons will be to play. And the fact that the polar bear and husky or magpie and a bear or you and I and our dogs can crossover and have that experience sets play aside as something separate. And its hugely important in learning and crafting the brain. So it's not just something you do in your spare time.JH: How do you keep — and I know you're part of the scientific research community, and you have to justify your existence with grants and proposals like everyone else — how do you prevent — and some of the data that you've produced, the good science that you're talking about you've produced, is hot to handle. How do you prevent either the media's interpretation of your work or the scientific community's interpretation of the implications of your work, kind of like the Mozart metaphor, where, ""Oh, MRIs show that play enhances your intelligence. Well, let's round these kids up, put them in pens and make them play for months at a time; they'll all be geniuses and go to Harvard."" How do you prevent people from taking that sort of action on the data that you're developing?SB: Well, I think the only way I know to do it is to have accumulated the advisers that I have who go from practitioners — who can establish through improvisational play or clowning or whatever — a state of play. So people know that it's there. And then you get an fMRI specialist, and you get Frank Wilson, and you get other kinds of hard scientists, including neuroendocrinologists. And you get them into a group together focused on play, and it's pretty hard not to take it seriously.Unfortunately, that hasn't been done sufficiently for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health or anybody else to really look at it in this way seriously. I mean you don't hear about anything that's like cancer or heart disease associated with play. And yet I see it as something that's just as basic for survival — long term — as learning some of the basic things about public health.JH: Stuart Brown, thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital
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"Time flies. It's actually almost 20 years ago when I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web. Now, 20 years on, at TED, I want to ask your help in a new reframing.So going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. But 18 months later — this is how innovation happens — 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we'd got. And so he gave me the time to code it up. So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like: hypertext protocol, HTTP; the idea of URLs, these names for things which started with HTTP. I wrote the code and put it out there.Why did I do it? Well, it was basically frustration. I was frustrated — I was working as a software engineer in this huge, very exciting lab, lots of people coming from all over the world. They brought all sorts of different computers with them. They had all sorts of different data formats, all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems. So that, in all that diversity, if I wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this, everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine, I had to learn to run some new program, I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. And these were all incompatible. It was just very frustrating. The frustration was all this unlocked potential.In fact, on all these discs there were documents. So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier. Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people don't read your memo — actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy. He had written, ""Vague, but exciting,"" in pencil, in the corner.(Laughter)But in general it was difficult — it was really difficult to explain what the web was like. It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then. But then — OK, when TED started, there was no web so things like ""click"" didn't have the same meaning. I can show somebody a piece of hypertext, a page which has got links, and we click on the link and bing — there'll be another hypertext page. Not impressive. You know, we've seen that — we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs. What was difficult was to get them to imagine: so, imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine. Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make. Well, some people did. So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement. And that is what has made it most fun. That has been the most exciting thing, not the technology, not the things people have done with it, but actually the community, the spirit of all these people getting together, sending the emails. That's what it was like then.Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again. I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents — I said, ""Could you put your documents on this web thing?"" And you did. Thanks. It's been a blast, hasn't it? I mean, it has been quite interesting because we've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away. They're much more than we'd originally imagined when we put together the little, initial website that we started off with. Now, I want you to put your data on the web. Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential. There is still a huge frustration that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data.What do you mean, ""data""? What's the difference — documents, data? Well, documents you read, OK? More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it. Data — you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer. Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk? One of the great — yes a lot of people have seen it — one of the great TED Talks. Hans put up this presentation in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors — he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time. So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world.He put up a slide a little bit like this. It had underground all the data OK, data is brown and boxy and boring, and that's how we think of it, isn't it? Because data you can't naturally use by itself But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it. In this case, Hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things. He had put it together, combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he'd put it into this software, which I think his son developed, originally, and produces this wonderful presentation. And Hans made a point of saying, ""Look, it's really important to have a lot of data."" And I was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying, very forcibly, ""It's really important to have a lot of data.""So I want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did, but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data. The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple. If you want to put something on the web there are three rules: first thing is that those HTTP names — those things that start with ""http:"" — we're using them not just for documents now, we're using them for things that the documents are about. We're using them for people, we're using them for places, we're using them for your products, we're using them for events. All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP.Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data using the HTTP protocol from the web, I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event. Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person, where they were born, things like that. So the second rule is I get important information back.Third rule is that when I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. Data is relationships. Interestingly, data is relationships. This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany. And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts HTTP. So, I can go ahead and look that thing up. So I look up a person — I can look up then the city where they were born; then I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in, and the population of it, and so on. So I can browse this stuff.So that's it, really. That is linked data. I wrote an article entitled ""Linked Data"" a couple of years ago and soon after that, things started to happen. The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that Hans had, and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting. It's not just a whole lot of other plants. It's not just a root supplying a plant, but for each of those plants, whatever it is — a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data — they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together, and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is.So, linked data. The meme went out there. And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up, he noticed that Wikipedia — you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it. Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes. And in most information boxes, there's data. So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia, and put it into a blob of linked data on the web, which he called dbpedia. Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up Berlin, you'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together. So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin, you'll end up pulling up these other things as well. And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow. This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK?Let's think about data for a bit. Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms. Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there. So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data. We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important, there's scientific data, there's personal data, there's weather data, there's data about events, there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff. I'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it, so that you also see how much unlocked potential.Let's start with government data. Barack Obama said in a speech, that he — American government data would be available on the Internet in accessible formats. And I hope that they will put it up as linked data. That's important. Why is it important? Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important, but that data — this is the data from all the government departments Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America. It's actual useful. It's got value. I can use it in my company. I could use it as a kid to do my homework. So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better by making this data available.In fact if you're responsible — if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it — Hans calls it database hugging. You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. Well, I'd like to suggest that rather — yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can you say ""raw""?Audience: Raw.Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say ""data""?Audience: Data.TBL: Can you say ""now""?Audience: Now!TBL: Alright, ""raw data now""!Audience: Raw data now!Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. And it's not just America. It's all over the world. And it's not just governments, of course — it's enterprises as well.So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data. Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared.In fact, I'll just go into one area — if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example, drug discovery — there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos, because they had their genomics data in one database in one building, and they had their protein data in another. Now, they are sticking it onto — linked data — and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask, I wouldn't ask — they would. What proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons? Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google. Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before. You get 223,000 hits — no results you can use. You ask the linked data — which they've now put together — 32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at. The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist — questions which actually bridge across different disciplines — is really a complete sea change. It's very very important. Scientists are totally stymied at the moment — the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems.Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you. But, that's not true. In fact, data is about our lives. You just — you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, ""This is my friend."" Bing! Relationship. Data. You say, ""This photograph, it's about — it depicts this person. "" Bing! That's data. Data, data, data. Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it — re-purposing it — and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site. But, when you go to another linked data site — and let's say this is one about travel, and you say, ""I want to send this photo to all the people in that group,"" you can't get over the walls. The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it — tremendous frustration. The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. We need to do that with linked data.One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting. Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki. Zoom in and that square thing is a theater — which we're in right now — The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it. So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater, I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back. And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org, and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name. I did that. Me! I did that to the map. I just did that! I put that up on there. Hey, you know what? If I — that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs. And that is what linked data is all about. It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. That's how linked data works. You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it. And we've practiced that.So, linked data — it's huge. I've only told you a very small number of things There are data in every aspect of our lives, every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. You get this really huge power out of it. So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this — the people who think it's a great idea. And all the people — and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because — even though there's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it — they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called linked data. I want you to make it. I want you to demand it. And I think it's an idea worth spreading.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web
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"I’m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I’m talking about is Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning. Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you.""In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found on careful examination to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill.""Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: ""Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn’t have a builder? Yes/No. Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a painter? Yes/No. Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker? Yes/No. If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details.""A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. But Darwin shows that it’s just false.Today, though, I’m going to talk about Darwin’s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny.This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. Let’s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it’s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that’s why we like sugar. Honey is sweet because we like it, not ""we like it because honey is sweet."" There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn’t see why they tasted sweet. You have to look in our brains to understand why they’re sweet. So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you’ve got it backwards; that’s just wrong. It’s the other way round. Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved.And there’s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. And it’s a good thing that there isn’t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? Now you might think, ah, there’s a solution: hallucinations. That would be one way of doing it, but there’s a quicker way. Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. That’s all there is to it. Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn’t. If we hadn’t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness.Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. It wasn’t designed for chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull’s beak — if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it’s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness.And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here’s a pretty good example. It’s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. So nature works on many levels here. But now, if babies didn’t look the way they do — if babies looked like this, that’s what we would find adorable, that’s what we would find — we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. This is the strange inversion.Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it’s the same story, the same story. This is the hard one, the one that isn’t obvious. That’s why I leave it to the end. And I won’t be able to say too much about it. But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done — it’s dirty work, somebody’s got to do it — is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. Now, I think we've found the answer — I and a few of my colleagues. It’s a neural system that’s wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. Now I’m not going to have time to spell it all out, but I’ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. And what we’re doing is we’re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke — now it’s not funny ... oh, now it’s funnier ... now we’ll turn a little bit more ... now it’s not funny — in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain.Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. He’s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we’re putting this together into a book. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_cute_sexy_sweet_funny
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"I want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality. And my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital. I was burned very badly. And if you spend a lot of time in hospital, you'll see a lot of types of irrationalities. And the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me. Now, you must have all taken a Band-Aid off at some point, and you must have wondered what's the right approach. Do you rip it off quickly — short duration but high intensity — or do you take your Band-Aid off slowly — you take a long time, but each second is not as painful — which one of those is the right approach?The nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one, so they would grab hold and they would rip, and they would grab hold and they would rip. And because I had 70 percent of my body burned, it would take about an hour. And as you can imagine, I hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity. And I would try to reason with them and say, ""Why don't we try something else? Why don't we take it a little longer — maybe two hours instead of an hour — and have less of this intensity?"" And the nurses told me two things. They told me that they had the right model of the patient — that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain — and they also told me that the word patient doesn't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or ... This is not just in Hebrew, by the way. It's in every language I've had experience with so far.And, you know, there's not much — there wasn't much I could do, and they kept on doing what they were doing. And about three years later, when I left the hospital, I started studying at the university. And one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way, and you can try to examine this question, maybe learn something about the world.So that's what I did. I was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients. So originally I didn't have much money, so I went to a hardware store and I bought a carpenter's vice. And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it, and I would crunch it a little bit.(Laughter)And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods, and pain that went up and pain that went down, and with breaks and without breaks — all kinds of versions of pain. And when I finished hurting people a little bit, I would ask them, so, how painful was this? Or, how painful was this? Or, if you had to choose between the last two, which one would you choose?(Laughter)I kept on doing this for a while.(Laughter)And then, like all good academic projects, I got more funding. I moved to sounds, electrical shocks — I even had a pain suit that I could get people to feel much more pain.But at the end of this process, what I learned was that the nurses were wrong. Here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience, and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time. It turns out that because we don't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity, I would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower. It turns out it would have been better to start with my face, which was much more painful, and move toward my legs, giving me a trend of improvement over time — that would have been also less painful. And it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain. All of these would have been great things to do, and my nurses had no idea.And from that point on I started thinking, are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision, or is it a more general case? And it turns out it's a more general case — there's a lot of mistakes we do. And I want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities, and I want to talk to you about cheating. And the reason I picked cheating is because it's interesting, but also it tells us something, I think, about the stock market situation we're in. So, my interest in cheating started when Enron came on the scene, exploded all of a sudden, and I started thinking about what is happening here. Is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things, or are we talking a more endemic situation, that many people are actually capable of behaving this way?So, like we usually do, I decided to do a simple experiment. And here's how it went. If you were in the experiment, I would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve, but I wouldn't give you enough time. When the five minutes were over, I would say, ""Pass me the sheets of paper, and I'll pay you a dollar per question."" People did this. I would pay people four dollars for their task — on average people would solve four problems. Other people I would tempt to cheat. I would pass their sheet of paper. When the five minutes were over, I would say, ""Please shred the piece of paper. Put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack, and tell me how many questions you got correctly."" People now solved seven questions on average. Now, it wasn't as if there was a few bad apples — a few people cheated a lot. Instead, what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit.Now, in economic theory, cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis. You say, what's the probability of being caught? How much do I stand to gain from cheating? And how much punishment would I get if I get caught? And you weigh these options out — you do the simple cost-benefit analysis, and you decide whether it's worthwhile to commit the crime or not. So, we try to test this. For some people, we varied how much money they could get away with — how much money they could steal. We paid them 10 cents per correct question, 50 cents, a dollar, five dollars, 10 dollars per correct question.You would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases, people would cheat more, but in fact it wasn't the case. We got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit. What about the probability of being caught? Some people shredded half the sheet of paper, so there was some evidence left. Some people shredded the whole sheet of paper. Some people shredded everything, went out of the room, and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars. You would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down, people would cheat more, but again, this was not the case. Again, a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit, and they were insensitive to these economic incentives.So we said, ""If people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations, to these forces, what could be going on?"" And we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces. At one hand, we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, so we don't want to cheat. On the other hand, we can cheat a little bit, and still feel good about ourselves. So, maybe what is happening is that there's a level of cheating we can't go over, but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree, as long as it doesn't change our impressions about ourselves. We call this like a personal fudge factor.Now, how would you test a personal fudge factor? Initially we said, what can we do to shrink the fudge factor? So, we got people to the lab, and we said, ""We have two tasks for you today."" First, we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school, or to recall The Ten Commandments, and then we tempted them with cheating. Turns out the people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments — and in our sample nobody could recall all of The Ten Commandments — but those people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments, given the opportunity to cheat, did not cheat at all. It wasn't that the more religious people — the people who remembered more of the Commandments — cheated less, and the less religious people — the people who couldn't remember almost any Commandments — cheated more. The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments, they stopped cheating. In fact, even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the Bible and we give them a chance to cheat, they don't cheat at all. Now, Ten Commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system, so we said, ""Why don't we get people to sign the honor code?"" So, we got people to sign, ""I understand that this short survey falls under the MIT Honor Code."" Then they shredded it. No cheating whatsoever. And this is particularly interesting, because MIT doesn't have an honor code. (Laughter)So, all this was about decreasing the fudge factor. What about increasing the fudge factor? The first experiment — I walked around MIT and I distributed six-packs of Cokes in the refrigerators — these were common refrigerators for the undergrads. And I came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of Coke — how long does it last in the refrigerators? As you can expect it doesn't last very long; people take it. In contrast, I took a plate with six one-dollar bills, and I left those plates in the same refrigerators. No bill ever disappeared.Now, this is not a good social science experiment, so to do it better I did the same experiment as I described to you before. A third of the people we passed the sheet, they gave it back to us. A third of the people we passed it to, they shredded it, they came to us and said, ""Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X dollars."" A third of the people, when they finished shredding the piece of paper, they came to us and said, ""Mr Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X tokens."" We did not pay them with dollars; we paid them with something else. And then they took the something else, they walked 12 feet to the side, and exchanged it for dollars.Think about the following intuition. How bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home, compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box? These things feel very differently. Would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference? Our subjects doubled their cheating. I'll tell you what I think about this and the stock market in a minute. But this did not solve the big problem I had with Enron yet, because in Enron, there's also a social element. People see each other behaving. In fact, every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating. What does this cause us?So, we did another experiment. We got a big group of students to be in the experiment, and we prepaid them. So everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment, and we told them that at the end, we asked them to pay us back the money they didn't make. OK? The same thing happens. When we give people the opportunity to cheat, they cheat. They cheat just by a little bit, all the same. But in this experiment we also hired an acting student. This acting student stood up after 30 seconds, and said, ""I solved everything. What do I do now?"" And the experimenter said, ""If you've finished everything, go home. That's it. The task is finished."" So, now we had a student — an acting student — that was a part of the group. Nobody knew it was an actor. And they clearly cheated in a very, very serious way. What would happen to the other people in the group? Will they cheat more, or will they cheat less?Here is what happens. It turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they're wearing. Here is the thing. We ran this at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh. And at Pittsburgh there are two big universities, Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. All of the subjects sitting in the experiment were Carnegie Mellon students. When the actor who was getting up was a Carnegie Mellon student — he was actually a Carnegie Mellon student — but he was a part of their group, cheating went up. But when he actually had a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, cheating went down.(Laughter)Now, this is important, because remember, when the moment the student stood up, it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating, because the experimenter said, ""You've finished everything. Go home,"" and they went with the money. So it wasn't so much about the probability of being caught again. It was about the norms for cheating. If somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating, we feel it's more appropriate, as a group, to behave this way. But if it's somebody from another group, these terrible people — I mean, not terrible in this — but somebody we don't want to associate ourselves with, from another university, another group, all of a sudden people's awareness of honesty goes up — a little bit like The Ten Commandments experiment — and people cheat even less.So, what have we learned from this about cheating? We've learned that a lot of people can cheat. They cheat just by a little bit. When we remind people about their morality, they cheat less. When we get bigger distance from cheating, from the object of money, for example, people cheat more. And when we see cheating around us, particularly if it's a part of our in-group, cheating goes up. Now, if we think about this in terms of the stock market, think about what happens. What happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way? Would they not be able to see it this way? Of course they would. What happens when you do other things, like you remove things from money? You call them stock, or stock options, derivatives, mortgage-backed securities. Could it be that with those more distant things, it's not a token for one second, it's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time — could it be that people will cheat even more? And what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them? I think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market.More generally, I want to tell you something about behavioral economics. We have many intuitions in our life, and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions? We can think about how we're going to test this intuition in our private life, in our business life, and most particularly when it goes to policy, when we think about things like No Child Left Behind, when you create new stock markets, when you create other policies — taxation, health care and so on. And the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson I learned when I went back to the nurses to talk to them.So I went back to talk to them and tell them what I found out about removing bandages. And I learned two interesting things. One was that my favorite nurse, Ettie, told me that I did not take her pain into consideration. She said, ""Of course, you know, it was very painful for you. But think about me as a nurse, taking, removing the bandages of somebody I liked, and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time. Creating so much torture was not something that was good for me, too."" And she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her. But it was actually more interesting than that, because she said, ""I did not think that your intuition was right. I felt my intuition was correct."" So, if you think about all of your intuitions, it's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong. And she said, ""Given the fact that I thought my intuition was right ..."" — she thought her intuition was right — it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong.But in fact, this is the situation we're all in all the time. We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. And just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition, and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code
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"About four years ago, the New Yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of Mauritius. Now, the island of Mauritius is a small island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and it is the place where the dodo bird was discovered and extinguished, all within about 150 years. Everyone was very excited about this archaeological find, because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton.See, while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection, nobody — not even the actual Natural History Museum on the island of Mauritius — has a skeleton that's made from the bones of a single dodo. Well, this isn't exactly true. The fact is, is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century — it was actually mummified, skin and all — but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire. If you go look at their website today, they'll actually list these specimens, saying, the rest was lost in a fire.Not quite the whole truth. Anyway. The frontispiece of this article was this photo, and I'm one of the people that thinks that Tina Brown was great for bringing photos to the New Yorker, because this photo completely rocked my world. I became obsessed with the object — not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together — there's an entire story here. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if I had my own dodo skeleton? (Laughter)I want to point out here at this point that I've spent my life obsessed by objects and the stories that they tell, and this was the very latest one. So I began looking around for — to see if anyone sold a kit, some kind of model that I could get, and I found lots of reference material, lots of lovely pictures. No dice: no dodo skeleton for me. But the damage had been done. I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my ""Creative Projects"" folder — it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos. The key that the Marquis du Lafayette sent to George Washington to celebrate the storming of the Bastille. Russian nuclear launch key: The one on the top is the picture of the one I found on eBay; the one on the bottom is the one I made for myself, because I couldn't afford the one on eBay. Storm trooper costumes. Maps of Middle Earth — that's one I hand-drew myself. There's the dodo skeleton folder. This folder has 17,000 photos — over 20 gigabytes of information — and it's growing constantly. And one day, a couple of weeks later, it might have been maybe a year later, I was in the art store with my kids, and I was buying some clay tools — we were going to have a craft day. I bought some Super Sculpeys, some armature wire, some various materials. And I looked down at this Sculpey, and I thought, maybe, yeah, maybe I could make my own dodo skull.I should point out at this time — I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from ""Star Wars"" — especially parts from ""Star Wars"" — I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years. But you give me something like this — my friend Mike Murnane sculpted this; it's a maquette for ""Star Wars, Episode Two"" — this is not my thing — this is something other people do — dragons, soft things.However, I felt like I had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it — I mean, it couldn't be that difficult. So, I started looking at the best photos I could find. I grabbed all the reference, and I found this lovely piece of reference. This is someone selling this on eBay; it was clearly a woman’s hand, hopefully a woman's hand. Assuming it was roughly the size of my wife's hand, I made some measurements of her thumb, and I scaled them out to the size of the skull. I blew it up to the actual size, and I began using that, along with all the other reference that I had, comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be, exactly how long, etc.And over a few hours, I eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull. And I didn't mean to continue, I — it's kind of like, you know, you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time; you can't think about the totality. I wasn't thinking about a dodo skeleton; I just noticed that as I finished this skull, the armature wire that I had been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be. And one of the other things I'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons, having collected a couple of hundred. I actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them. And so button by button, vertebrae by vertebrae, I built my way down. And actually, by the end of the day, I had a reasonable skull, a moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis.And again, I kept on going, looking for more reference, every bit of reference I could find — drawings, beautiful photos. This guy — I love this guy! He put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler. This is the kind of accuracy that I wanted, and I replicated every last bone and put it in. And after about six weeks, I finished, painted, mounted my own dodo skeleton. You can see that I even made a museum label for it that includes a brief history of the dodo. And TAP Plastics made me — although I didn't photograph it — a museum vitrine. I don't have the room for this in my house, but I had to finish what I had started.And this actually represented kind of a sea change to me. Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them. And in this folder, ""Creative Projects,"" there are tons of projects that I'm currently working on, projects that I've already worked on, things that I might want to work on some day, and things that I may just want to find and buy and have and look at and touch. But now there was potentially this new category of things that I could sculpt that was different, that I — you know, I have my own R2D2, but that's — honestly, relative to sculpting, to me, that's easy.And so I went back and looked through my ""Creative Projects"" folder, and I happened across the Maltese Falcon. Now, this is funny for me: to fall in love with an object from a Hammett novel, because if it's true that the world is divided into two types of people, Chandler people and Hammett people, I am absolutely a Chandler person. But in this case, it's not about the author, it's not about the book or the movie or the story, it's about the object in and of itself. And in this case, this object is — plays on a host of levels.First of all, there's the object in the world. This is the ""Kniphausen Hawk."" It is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a Swedish Count, and it is very likely the object from which Hammett drew his inspiration for the Maltese Falcon. Then there is the fictional bird, the one that Hammett created for the book. Built out of words, it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie, in which another object is created: a prop that has to represent the thing that Hammett created out of words, inspired by the Kniphausen Hawk, and this represents the falcon in the movie. And then there is this fourth level, which is a whole new object in the world: the prop made for the movie, the representative of the thing, becomes, in its own right, a whole other thing, a whole new object of desire.And so now it was time to do some research. I actually had done some research a few years before — it's why the folder was there. I'd bought a replica, a really crappy replica, of the Maltese Falcon on eBay, and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference. But I discovered, in researching further, really wanting precise reference, that one of the original lead birds had been sold at Christie's in 1994, and so I contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original Christie's catalogue, and in it I found this magnificent picture, which included a size reference. I was able to scan the picture, blow it up to exactly full size.I found other reference. Avi [Ara] Chekmayan, a New Jersey editor, actually found this resin Maltese Falcon at a flea market in 1991, although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to the auctioneers' specifications, because there was a lot of controversy about it. It was made out of resin, which wasn't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made. It's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate it, because I can see it compared to this thing, and I can tell you — it's real, it's the real thing, it's made from the exact same mold that this one is. In this one, because the auction was actually so controversial, Profiles in History, the auction house that sold this — I think in 1995 for about 100,000 dollars — they actually included — you can see here on the bottom — not just a front elevation, but also a side, rear and other side elevation.So now, I had all the topology I needed to replicate the Maltese Falcon. What do they do, how do you start something like that? I really don't know. So what I did was, again, like I did with the dodo skull, I blew all my reference up to full size, and then I began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references. So I took Sculpey, and I built a big block of it, and I passed it through until, you know, I got the right profiles. And then slowly, feather by feather, detail by detail, I worked out and achieved — working in front of the television and Super Sculpey — here's me sitting next to my wife — it's the only picture I took of the entire process. As I moved through, I achieved a very reasonable facsimile of the Maltese Falcon. But again, I am not a sculptor,and so I don't know a lot of the tricks, like, I don't know how my friend Mike gets beautiful, shiny surfaces with his Sculpey; I certainly wasn't able to get it. So, I went down to my shop, and I molded it and I cast it in resin, because in the resin, then, I could absolutely get the glass smooth finished. Now there's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish. My preference is about 70 coats of this — matte black auto primer. I spray it on for about three or four days, it drips to hell, but it allows me a really, really nice gentle sanding surface and I can get it glass-smooth. Oh, finishing up with triple-zero steel wool. Now, the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie, when they finally bring out the bird at the end, and they place it on the table, they actually spin it. So I was able to actually screen-shot and freeze-frame to make sure. And I'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that as I'm holding the light in the same position, I'm getting the same type of reflection on it — that's the level of detail I'm going into this thing. I ended up with this: my Maltese Falcon. And it's beautiful. And I can state with authority at this point in time, when I'd finished it, of all of the replicas out there — and there is a few — this is by far the most accurate representation of the original Maltese Falcon than anyone has sculpted. Now the original one, I should tell you,is sculpted by a guy named Fred Sexton. This is where it gets weird. Fred Sexton was a friend of this guy, George Hodel. Terrifying guy — agreed by many to be the killer of the Black Dahlia. Now, James Ellroy believes that Fred Sexton, the sculptor of the Maltese Falcon, killed James Elroy's mother. I'll go you one stranger than that: In 1974, during the production of a weird comedy sequel to ""The Maltese Falcon,"" called ""The Black Bird,"" starring George Segal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a plaster original of the Maltese Falcon — one of the original six plasters, I think, made for the movie — stolen out of the museum. A lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie. John's Grill, which actually is seen briefly in ""The Maltese Falcon,"" is still a viable San Francisco eatery, counted amongst its regular customers Elisha Cook, who played Wilmer Cook in the movie, and he gave them one of his original plasters of the Maltese Falcon. And they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years, until it got stolen in January of 2007. It would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly.So here I had this Falcon, and it was lovely. It looked really great, the light worked on it really well, it was better than anything that I could achieve or obtain out in the world. But there was a problem. And the problem was that: I wanted the entirety of the object, I wanted the weight behind the object. This thing was made of resin and it was too light. There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props. And it turned out that one of the guys there, a friend of mine that I never actually met, but befriended through some prop deals, was the manager of a local foundry. He took my master Falcon pattern, he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me, and this is the bronze I got back. And this is, after some acid etching, the one that I ended up with.And this thing, it's deeply, deeply satisfying to me. Here, I'm going to put it out there, later on tonight, and I want you to pick it up and handle it. You want to know how obsessed I am. This project's only for me, and yet I went so far as to buy on eBay a 1941 Chinese San Francisco-based newspaper, in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped ... like it is in the movie. (Laughter) Yeah, I know! (Laughter) (Applause) There you can see, it's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds. That's half the weight of my dog, Huxley.But there's a problem. Now, here's the most recent progression of Falcons. On the far left is a piece of crap — a replica I bought on eBay. There's my somewhat ruined Sculpey Falcon, because I had to get it back out of the mold. There's my first casting, there's my master and there's my bronze. There's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things, which is that every time you throw it into silicone and cast it in resin, you lose a little bit of volume, you lose a little bit of size. And when I held my bronze one up against my Sculpey one, it was shorter by three-quarters of an inch. Yeah, no, really, this was like aah — why didn't I remember this? Why didn't I start and make it bigger? So what do I do? I figure I have two options. One, I can fire a freaking laser at it, which I have already done, to do a 3D scan — there's a 3D scan of this Falcon. I had figured out the exact amount of shrinkage I achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3D lithography master of this, which I will polish, then I will send to the mold maker and then I will have it done in bronze. Or:There are several people who own originals, and I have been attempting to contact them and reach them, hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds, maybe to take a picture, or even to pull out the hand-held laser scanner that I happen to own that fits inside a cereal box, and could maybe, without even touching their bird, I swear, get a perfect 3D scan. And I'm even willing to sign pages saying that I'll never let anyone else have it, except for me in my office, I promise. I'll give them one if they want it. And then, maybe, then I'll achieve the end of this exercise. But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_savage_s_obsessions
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"I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I was born in a Scots Presbyterian ghetto in Canada, and dropped out of high school. I don't own a cell phone, and I paint on paper using gouache, which hasn't changed in 600 years. But about three years ago I had an art show in New York, and I titled it ""Serious Nonsense."" So I think I'm actually the first one here — I lead. I called it ""Serious Nonsense"" because on the serious side, I use a technique of painstaking realism of editorial illustration from when I was a kid. I copied it and I never unlearned it — it's the only style I know. And it's very kind of staid and formal. And meanwhile, I use nonsense, as you can see.This is a Scottish castle where people are playing golf indoors, and the trick was to bang the golf ball off of suits of armor — which you can't see there. This was one of a series called ""Zany Afternoons,"" which became a book.This is a home-built rocket-propelled car. That's a 1953 Henry J — I'm a bug for authenticity — in a quiet neighborhood in Toledo.This is my submission for the L.A. Museum of Film. You can probably tell Frank Gehry and I come from the same town.My work is so personal and so strange that I have to invent my own lexicon for it. And I work a lot in what I call ""retrofuturism,"" which is looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow. And they're always wrong, always hilariously, optimistically wrong. And the peak time for that was the 30s, because the Depression was so dismal that anything to get away from the present into the future ... and technology was going to carry us along.This is Popular Workbench. Popular science magazines in those days — I had a huge collection of them from the '30s — all they are is just poor people being asked to make sunglasses out of wire coat hangers and everything improvised and dreaming about these wonderful giant radio robots playing ice hockey at 300 miles an hour — it's all going to happen, it's all going to be wonderful.Automotive retrofuturism is one of my specialties. I was both an automobile illustrator and an advertising automobile copywriter, so I have a lot of revenge to take on the subject. Detroit has always been halfway into the future — the advertising half. This is the '58 Bulgemobile: so new, they make tomorrow look like yesterday. This is a chain gang of guys admiring the car. That's from a whole catalog — it's 18 pages or so — ran back in the days of the Lampoon, where I cut my teeth.Techno-archaeology is digging back and finding past miracles that never happened — for good reason, usually. The zeppelin — this was from a brochure about the zeppelin based, obviously, on the Hindenburg. But the zeppelin was the biggest thing that ever moved made by man. And it carried 56 people at the speed of a Buick at an altitude you could hear dogs bark, and it cost twice as much as a first-class cabin on the Normandie to fly it. So the Hindenburg wasn't, you know, it was inevitable it was going to go.This is auto-gyro jousting in Malibu in the 30s. The auto-gyro couldn't wait for the invention of the helicopter, but it should have — it wasn't a big success. It's the only Spanish innovation, technologically, of the 20th century, by the way. You needed to know that.The flying car which never got off the ground — it was a post-war dream. My old man used to tell me we were going to get a flying car. This is pitched into the future from 1946, looking at the day all American families have them. ""There's Moscow, Shirley. Hope they speak Esperanto!""Faux-nostalgia, which I'm sort of — not, say, famous for, but I work an awful lot in it. It's the achingly sentimental yearning for times that never happened. Somebody once said that nostalgia is the one utterly most useless human emotion — so I think that’s a case for serious play.This is emblematic of it — this is wing dining, recalling those balmy summer days somewhere over France in the 20s, dining on the wing of a plane. You can't see it very well here, but that's Hemingway reading some pages from his new novel to Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford until the slipstream blows him away.This is tank polo in the South Hamptons. The brainless rich are more fun to make fun of than anybody. I do a lot of that.And authenticity is a major part of my serious nonsense. I think it adds a huge amount. Those, for example, are Mark IV British tanks from 1916. They had two machine guns and a cannon, and they had 90 horsepower Ricardo engines. They went five miles an hour and inside it was 105 degrees in the pitch dark. And they had a canary hung inside the thing to make sure the Germans weren't going to use gas. Happy little story, isn't it?This is Motor Ritz Towers in Manhattan in the 30s, where you drove up to your front door, if you had the guts. Anybody who was anybody had an apartment there. I managed to stick in both the zeppelin and an ocean liner out of sheer enthusiasm. And I love cigars — there's a cigar billboard down there.And faux-nostalgia works even in serious subjects like war. This is those wonderful days of the Battle of Britain in 1940, when a Messerschmitt ME109 bursts into the House of Commons and buzzes around, just to piss off Churchill, who's down there somewhere. It's a fond memory of times past.Hyperbolic overkill is a way of taking exaggeration to the absolute ultimate limit, just for the fun of it. This was a piece I did — a brochure again — ""RMS Tyrannic: The Biggest Thing in All the World."" The copy, which you can't see because it goes on and on for several pages, says that steerage passengers can't get their to bunks before the voyage is over, and it's so safe it carries no insurance. It's obviously modeled on the Titanic. But it's not a cri de coeur about man's hubris in the face of the elements. It's just a sick, silly joke.Shamelessly cheap is something, I think — this will wake you up. It has no meaning, just — Desoto discovers the Mississippi, and it's a Desoto discovering the Mississippi. I did that as a quick back page — I had like four hours to do a back page for an issue of the Lampoon, and I did that, and I thought, ""Well, I'm ashamed. I hope nobody knows it."" People wrote in for reprints of that thing.Urban absurdism — that's what the New Yorker really calls for. I try to make life in New York look even weirder than it is with those covers. I've done about 40 of them, and I'd say 30 of them are based on that concept. I was driving down 7th Avenue one night at 3 a.m., and this steam pouring out of the street, and I thought, ""What causes that?"" And that — who’s to say?The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan in New York — it's a very somber place. I thought I could jazz it up a bit, have a little fun with it.This is a very un-PC cover. Not in New York. I couldn't resist, and I got a nasty email from some environmental group saying, ""This is too serious and solemn to make fun of. You should be ashamed, please apologize on our website."" Haven't got around to it yet but — I may.This is the word side of my brain. (Laughter) I love the word ""Eurotrash."" (Laughter) That's all the Eurotrash coming through JFK customs.This was the New York bike messenger meeting the Tour de France. If you live in New York, you know how the bike messengers move. Except that he's carrying a tube for blueprints and stuff — they all do — and a lot of people thought that meant it was a terrorist about to shoot rockets at the Tour de France — sign of our times, I guess.This is the only fashion cover I've ever done. It's the little old lady that lives in a shoe, and then this thing — the title of that was, ""There Goes the Neighborhood."" I don't know a hell of a lot about fashion — I was told to do what they call a Mary Jane, and then I got into this terrible fight between the art director and the editor saying: ""Put a strap on it"" — ""No, don't put a strap on it"" — ""Put a strap on it — ""Don't put a strap on it"" — because it obscures the logo and looks terrible and it's bad and — I finally chickened out and did it for the sake of the authenticity of the shoe.This is a tiny joke — E-ZR pass. One letter makes an idea.This is a big joke. This is the audition for ""King Kong."" (Laughter) People always ask me, where do you get your ideas, how do your ideas come? Truth about that one is I had a horrible red wine hangover, in the middle of the night, this came to me like a Xerox — all I had to do was write it down. It was perfectly clear. I didn't do any thinking about it. And then when it ran, a lovely lady, an old lady named Mrs. Edgar Rosenberg — if you know that name — called me and said she loved the cover, it was so sweet. Her former name was Fay Wray, and so that was — I didn't have the wit to say, ""Take the painting.""Finally, this was a three-page cover, never done before, and I don't think it will ever be done again — successive pages in the front of the magazine. It's the ascent of man using an escalator, and it's in three parts. You can't see it all together, unfortunately, but if you look at it enough, you can sort of start to see how it actually starts to move. (Applause)Pretty elegant. Nothing like a crash to end a joke. That completes my oeuvre. I would just like to add a crass commercial — I have a kids' book coming out in the fall called ""Marvel Sandwiches,"" a compendium of all the serious play that ever was, and it’s going to be available in fine bookstores, crummy bookstores, tables on the street in October. So thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_mccall_s_faux_nostalgia
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"Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi's air. My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. We've also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards.The three plants are Areca palm, Mother-in-Law's Tongue and money plant. The botanical names are in front of you. Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. The second plant is Mother-in-law's Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals.With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one's blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it's available on the government of India website.Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20 percent by using these plants. And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15 percent, because you need less fresh air. We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants.Why is this important? It is also important for the environment, because the world's energy requirements are expected to grow by 30 percent in the next decade. 40 percent of the world's energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60 percent of the world's population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. ""Be the change you want to see in the world,"" said Mahatma Gandhi. And thank you for listening. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air
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"If you're at all like me, this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in San Francisco: you build experimental kite-powered hydrofoils capable of more than 30 knots. And you realize that there is incredible power in the wind, and it can do amazing things. And one day, a vessel not unlike this will probably break the world speed record.But kites aren't just toys like this. Kites: I'm going to give you a brief history, and tell you about the magnificent future of every child's favorite plaything. So, kites are more than a thousand years old, and the Chinese used them for military applications, and even for lifting men. So they knew at that stage they could carry large weights. I'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man.(Laughter)In 1827, a fellow called George Pocock actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies in races against horse carriages across the English countryside. Then of course, at the dawn of aviation, all of the great inventors of the time — like Hargreaves, like Langley, even Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who was flying this kite — were doing so in the pursuit of aviation.Then these two fellows came along, and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would ultimately enable powered human flight. So this is of course Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the Wright Flyer. And their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion, where we powered up and took off for the first-ever 12-second human flight. And that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation.But unfortunately, it relegated kites once again to be considered children's toys. That was until the 1970s, where we had the last energy crisis. And a fabulous man called Miles Loyd who lives on the outskirts of San Francisco, wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored in the Journal of Energy about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string to generate enormous amounts of electricity. The real key observation he made is that a free-flying wing can sweep through more sky and generate more power in a unit of time than a fixed-wing turbine.So turbines grew. And they can now span up to three hundred feet at the hub height, but they can't really go a lot higher, and more height is where the more wind is, and more power — as much as twice as much.So cut to now. We still have an energy crisis, and now we have a climate crisis as well. You know, so humans generate about 12 trillion watts, or 12 terawatts, from fossil fuels. And Al Gore has spoken to why we need to hit one of these targets, and in reality what that means is in the next 30 to 40 years, we have to make 10 trillion watts or more of new clean energy somehow. Wind is the second-largest renewable resource after solar: 3600 terawatts, more than enough to supply humanity 200 times over. The majority of it is in the higher altitudes, above 300 feet, where we don't have a technology as yet to get there.So this is the dawn of the new age of kites. This is our test site on Maui, flying across the sky. I'm now going to show you the first autonomous generation of power by every child's favorite plaything. As you can tell, you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours. It makes you a little nauseous. And here we're actually generating about 10 kilowatts — so, enough to power probably five United States households — with a kite not much larger than this piano. And the real significant thing here is we're developing the control systems, as did the Wright brothers, that would enable sustained, long-duration flight. And it doesn't hurt to do it in a location like this either.So this is the equivalent for a kite flier of peeing in the snow — that's tracing your name in the sky.And this is where we're actually going. So we're beyond the 12-second steps. And we're working towards megawatt-scale machines that fly at 2000 feet and generate tons of clean electricity.So you ask, how big are those machines? Well, this paper plane would be maybe a — oop! That would be enough to power your cell phone. Your Cessna would be 230 killowatts. If you'd loan me your Gulfstream, I'll rip its wings off and generate you a megawatt. If you give me a 747, I'll make six megawatts, which is more than the largest wind turbines today. And the Spruce Goose would be a 15-megawatt wing.So that is audacious, you say. I agree. But audacious is what has happened many times before in history. This is a refrigerator factory, churning out airplanes for World War II. Prior to World War II, they were making 1000 planes a year. By 1945, they were making 100,000. With this factory and 100,000 planes a year, we could make all of America's electricity in about 10 years.So really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people with these dreams. There are many of us. I am lucky enough to work with 30 of them. And I think we need to support all of the dreams of the kids out there doing these crazy things. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/saul_griffith_on_kites_as_the_future_of_renewable_energy
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"I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean? So often, we look at dollar terms — people making less than a dollar or two or three a day. And yet the complexity of poverty really has to look at income as only one variable. Because really, it's a condition about choice, and the lack of freedom.And I had an experience that really deepened and elucidated for me the understanding that I have. It was in Kenya, and I want to share it with you. I was with my friend Susan Meiselas, the photographer, in the Mathare Valley slums. Now, Mathare Valley is one of the oldest slums in Africa. It's about three miles out of Nairobi, and it's a mile long and about two-tenths of a mile wide, where over half a million people live crammed in these little tin shacks, generation after generation, renting them, often eight or 10 people to a room. And it's known for prostitution, violence, drugs: a hard place to grow up. And when we were walking through the narrow alleys, it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there: women washing their babies, washing their clothes, hanging them out to dry. I met this woman, Mama Rose, who has rented that little tin shack for 32 years, where she lives with her seven children. Four sleep in one twin bed, and three sleep on the mud and linoleum floor. And she keeps them all in school by selling water from that kiosk, and from selling soap and bread from the little store inside.It was also the day after the inauguration, and I was reminded how Mathare is still connected to the globe. And I would see kids on the street corners, and they'd say ""Obama, he's our brother!"" And I'd say ""Well, Obama's my brother, so that makes you my brother too."" And they would look quizzically, and then be like, ""High five!""And it was here that I met Jane. I was struck immediately by the kindness and the gentleness in her face, and I asked her to tell me her story. She started off by telling me her dream. She said, ""I had two. My first dream was to be a doctor, and the second was to marry a good man who would stay with me and my family, because my mother was a single mom, and couldn't afford to pay for school fees. So I had to give up the first dream, and I focused on the second."" She got married when she was 18, had a baby right away. And when she turned 20, found herself pregnant with a second child, her mom died and her husband left her — married another woman. So she was again in Mathare, with no income, no skill set, no money. And so she ultimately turned to prostitution. It wasn't organized in the way we often think of it. She would go into the city at night with about 20 girls, look for work, and sometimes come back with a few shillings, or sometimes with nothing. And she said, ""You know, the poverty wasn't so bad. It was the humiliation and the embarrassment of it all.""In 2001, her life changed. She had a girlfriend who had heard about this organization, Jamii Bora, that would lend money to people no matter how poor you were, as long as you provided a commensurate amount in savings. And so she spent a year to save 50 dollars, and started borrowing, and over time she was able to buy a sewing machine. She started tailoring. And that turned into what she does now, which is to go into the secondhand clothing markets, and for about three dollars and 25 cents she buys an old ball gown. Some of them might be ones you gave. And she repurposes them with frills and ribbons, and makes these frothy confections that she sells to women for their daughter's Sweet 16 or first Holy Communion — those milestones in a life that people want to celebrate all along the economic spectrum. And she does really good business. In fact, I watched her walk through the streets hawking. And before you knew it, there was a crowd of women around her, buying these dresses.And I reflected, as I was watching her sell the dresses, and also the jewelry that she makes, that now Jane makes more than four dollars a day. And by many definitions she is no longer poor. But she still lives in Mathare Valley. And so she can't move out. She lives with all of that insecurity, and in fact, in January, during the ethnic riots, she was chased from her home and had to find a new shack in which she would live.Jamii Bora understands that and understands that when we're talking about poverty, we've got to look at people all along the economic spectrum. And so with patient capital from Acumen and other organizations, loans and investments that will go the long term with them, they built a low-cost housing development, about an hour outside Nairobi central. And they designed it from the perspective of customers like Jane herself, insisting on responsibility and accountability. So she has to give 10 percent of the mortgage — of the total value, or about 400 dollars in savings. And then they match her mortgage to what she paid in rent for her little shanty. And in the next couple of weeks, she's going to be among the first 200 families to move into this development.When I asked her if she feared anything, or whether she would miss anything from Mathare, she said, ""What would I fear that I haven't confronted already? I'm HIV positive. I've dealt with it all."" And she said, ""What would I miss? You think I will miss the violence or the drugs? The lack of privacy? Do you think I'll miss not knowing if my children are going to come home at the end of the day?"" She said ""If you gave me 10 minutes my bags would be packed."" I said, ""Well what about your dreams?"" And she said, ""Well, you know, my dreams don't look exactly like I thought they would when I was a little girl. But if I think about it, I thought I wanted a husband, but what I really wanted was a family that was loving. And I fiercely love my children, and they love me back."" She said, ""I thought that I wanted to be a doctor, but what I really wanted to be was somebody who served and healed and cured. And so I feel so blessed with everything that I have, that two days a week I go and I counsel HIV patients. And I say, 'Look at me. You are not dead. You are still alive. And if you are still alive you have to serve.'"" And she said, ""I'm not a doctor who gives out pills. But maybe me, I give out something better because I give them hope.""And in the middle of this economic crisis, where so many of us are inclined to pull in with fear, I think we're well suited to take a cue from Jane and reach out, recognizing that being poor doesn't mean being ordinary. Because when systems are broken, like the ones that we're seeing around the world, it's an opportunity for invention and for innovation. It's an opportunity to truly build a world where we can extend services and products to all human beings, so that they can make decisions and choices for themselves. I truly believe it's where dignity starts. We owe it to the Janes of the world. And just as important, we owe it to ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jacqueline_novogratz_on_an_escape_from_poverty
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"I'm the weekly tech critic for the New York Times. I review gadgets and stuff. And mostly what good dads should be doing this time of year is nestling with their kids and decorating the Christmas tree. What I'm mostly doing this year is going on cable TV and answering the same question: ""What are the tech trends for next year?"" And I'm like, ""Didn't we just go through this last year?""But I'm going to pick the one that interests me most, and that is the completed marriage of the cell phone and the Internet. You know, I found that volcano on Google Images, not realizing how much it makes me look like the cover of Dianetics.(Laughter)Anyway, this all started a few years ago, when they started carrying your voice over the Internet rather than over a phone line, and we've come a long way since that. But that was interesting in itself. This is companies like Vonage. Basically you take an ordinary telephone, you plug it into this little box that they give you and the box plugs into your cable modem. Now, it works just like a regular phone. So you can pick up the phone, you hear a dial tone, but its just a fake-out. It's a WAV file of a dial tone, just to reassure you that the world hasn't ended. It could be anything. It could be salsa music or a comedy routine — it doesn't matter. The little box has your phone number. So that's really cool — you can take it to London or Siberia, and your next door neighbor can dial your home number and your phone will ring, because it's got everything in the box. They've got every feature known to man in there, because adding a new feature is just software.And as a result of Voice Over IP — I hate that term — Voice Over Internet — land-line home-phone service has gone down 30 percent in the last three years. I mean, no self-respecting college kid has home phone service anymore. This is what college kids are more likely to have. It's the most popular VOIP service in the world: It's Skype. It's a free program you download for your Mac or PC, and you make free phone calls anywhere in the world The downside is that you have to wear a headset like a nerd. It's not your phone — it's your computer. But nonetheless, if you're a college kid and you have no money, believe me, this is better than trying to use your cell phone.It's really cute seeing middle-aged people like me, try out Skype for the first time, which is usually when their kid goes away for a semester abroad. They don't want to pay the international fees, so they're like, ""Timmy! Is that you?""(Laughter)It's really cute. But I — at least it was when I did it —(Laughter)I think where VOIP is really going to get interesting is when they start putting it on cell phones. Imagine if you had an ordinary cell phone, and any time you were in a wireless hotspot — free calls anywhere in the world, never pay the cellular company a nickel. It'd be really, really cool — and yet, even though the technology for this has been available for five years, incredibly, the number of standard cell phones offered by US carriers with free VOIP is zero! I can't figure out why!(Laughter)Actually, I need to update that. There's one now. And it's so interesting that I thought I would tell you about it. It comes from T-Mobile. And I am not paid by T-Mobile. I'm not plugging T-Mobile. The New York Times has very rigid policies about that. Ever since that Jayson Blair jerk ruined it for all of us.(Laughter)Basically, the reason you haven't heard about this program is because it was introduced last year on June 29. Does anyone remember what else happened on June 29 last year? It was the iPhone. The iPhone came out that day. I'm like, can you imagine being the T-Mobile PR lady? You know?""Hi, we have an announcement to — WAH!!!""(Laughter)But it's actually really, really cool. You have a choice of phones, and we're not talking smartphones — ordinary phones, including a Blackberry, that have Wi-Fi. The deal is, any time you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot, all your calls are free. And when you're out of the hotspot, you're on the regular cellular network. You're thinking, ""Well, how often am I in a hotspot?"" The answer is, ""All the time!"" Because they give you a regular wireless router that works with the phone, for your house. Which is really ingenious, because we all know that T-Mobile is the most pathetic carrier. They have coverage like the size of my thumbnail. (Laughter) But it's a hundred million dollars to put up one of those towers. Right? They don't have that kind of money. Instead they give each of us a seven-dollar-and-95-cent box. They're like a stealth tower installation program. We're putting it in our homes for them!Anyway, they have Wi-Fi phones in Europe. But the thing that T-Mobile did that nobody's done before is, when you're on a call an you move from Wi-Fi into cellular range, the call is handed off in mid-syllable, seamlessly. I'll show you the advanced technologies we use at the New York Times to test this gear. This is me with a camcorder on a phone going like this.(Laughter)As I walk out of the house from my Wi-Fi hotspot into the cellular network on a call with my wife — look at the upper left. That's the Wi-Fi signal.(Video): Jennifer Pogue: Hello?David Pogue: Hi babes, it's me.JP: Oh, hi darling, how are you?DP: You're on Wi-Fi. How does it sound?JP: Oh, it sounds pretty good.Now, I'm leaving the house. DP: I'm going for a walk — do you mind?JP: No not at all. I'm having a great day with the kids.DP: What are you guys doing?Right there! It just changed to the cellular tower in mid-call. I don't know why my wife says I never listen to her. I don't get that.(Laughter)The bottom line is that the boundaries, because of the Internet plus cell phone, are melting. The cool thing about the T-Mobile phones is that although switching technologies is very advanced, the billing technology has not caught up. So what I mean is that you can start a call in your house in the Wi-Fi hotspot, you can get in your car and talk until the battery's dead — which would be like 10 minutes —(Laughter)And the call will continue to be free. Because they don't, they haven't — well, no, wait! Not so fast. It also works the other way. So if you start a call on your cellular network and you come home, you keep being billed. Which is why most people with this service get into the habit of saying, ""Hey, I just got home. Can I call you right back?"" Now you get it. It's also true that if you use one of these phones overseas, it doesn't know what Internet hotspot you're in. On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, right? Nobody knows you're in Pakistan. You can make free unlimited calls home to the US with these phones. So, very, very interesting.This is another favorite of mine. Does anyone here have a working cell phone that's on, with coverage, who can make a call right now without a lot of fussing? OK. Would you call me please right now? [Phone number given.] And don't you all call me at three a.m. asking me to fix your printer.(Laughter)I have two cell phones, so this going to be very odd, if it works. I should know not to do technology demos in front of an audience. It's just, like, absurd. This one is going off. And — oh, I have the ringer off. Tsh! Great. Anyway, this one is also going off. So they're both ringing at the same time. Excuse me one second. Hello? Oh. Where are you calling from? No, no just kidding. There he is. Thank you very much for doing that. I didn't even know it was you — I was looking at this guy. Oh great! Yeah. Yeah you can all stop calling now!(Laughter)All right! We've made the point. All right. Ringer off. Everyone wants in on the action.(Laughter)So this is Grand Central at work — it's a — oh, for gods sake!(Laughter)I have your numbers now!(Laughter)You will pay.Grand Central is this really brilliant idea where they give you a new phone number, and then at that point one phone number rings all your phones at once. Your home phone, your work phone, your cell phone, your yacht phone (this is the EG crowd).(Laughter)The beauty of that is you never miss a call. I know a lot of you are like, ""Ooh, I don't want to be reached at any hour."" But the beauty is it's all going through the internet, so you get all of these really cool features — like you can say, I want these people to be able to call me only during these hours. And I want these people to hear this greeting, ""Hi boss, I'm out making us both some money. Leave a message."" And then your wife calls, and, ""Hi honey, leave me a message."" Very, very customizable. Google bought it, and they've been working on it for a year. They're supposed to come out with it very shortly in a public method.By the way, this is something that really bothers me. I don't know if you realize this. When you call 411 on your cell phone, they charge you two bucks. Did you know that? It's an outrage. I actually got a photograph of the Verizon employee right there. I'm going to tell you how to avoid that now. What you're going to use is Google Cellular. It's totally free — there's not even ads. If you know how to send a text message, you can get the same information for free. I'm about to change your life. So here's me doing it. You send a text message to the word ""Google,"" which turns out to be 46645. Leave off the last ""e"" for savings.Anyway, so lets say you need a drugstore near Chicago. You type ""pharmacy Chicago,"" or the zip code. You hit send, and in five seconds, they will send you back the two closest drugstores, complete with name address and phone number. Here it comes. And it's already written down — so, like, if you're driving, you don't have to do one of these things, ""Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.""It works with weather, too. You can say ""Weather,"" and the name of the city you're going to travel to. And then in five seconds, they send you back the complete weather forecast for that town. Shortly I'll tell you why I was in Milan. Here we go. And those are just the beginning. These are all the different things that you can text to Google and they will — yeah! You're all trying to write this down. That's cute. I do have an email address. You can just ask me. It's absolutely phenomenal. The only downside is that it requires you to know how to text — send a text message. Nobody over 40 knows how to do that.So I'm going to teach you something even better. This is called Google Info. They've just launched this voice-activated version of the same thing. It's speech recognition like you've never heard before. So lets say I'm in Monterey, and I want what? I want to find what? Bagels. OK.Google: Say the business and the city and state.DP: Bagels, Monterey, California. I got the Chinese line.(Laughter)Google: Bagels, Monterey, California. Top eight results: Number one, Bagel Bakery on El Dorado Street. To select number one, you can press one or say ""number one."" Number two: Bagel Bakery, commissary department.Number Two. Number Two. Two.(Laughter)Why do I listen to people in the audience? Well anyway — oh! Here we go!Google: ... commissary department on McClellan Avenue, Monterey. I'll connect you, or say ""details,"" or ""go back.""DP: He's connecting me! He doesn't even tell me the phone number. He's just connecting me directly. It's like having a personal valet.Google: Hold on.(Laughter)DP: Hi, could I have 400 with a schmear? No, no, no — just kidding, no no. So anyway, you never even find out the number. It's just so amazing. And it has incredible, incredible accuracy. This is even more amazing. Put this in your speed dial. This you can ask by voice any question. Who won the 1958 World Series? What's the recipe for a certain cocktail? It's absolutely amazing — and they text you back the answer. I tried this this morning just to make sure it's still alive. ""Which actors have played James Bond?"" They text me back this: ""Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig."" Right! And then I was trying to pretend I was like a Valley girl. I'm like, ""What's the word that means you know, like, when the sun, the moon and the earth are, like, all in a line?"" Just to see how the recognition was. They texted me back, ""It's called a syzygy."" Which I knew, because it's the word that won me the Ohio spelling bee in 1976.You know, there's a lot of people wondering, ""How on earth are they going to make money doing this?"" And the answer is: look at the last line. They put this teeny-weeny little ad, about 10 characters long. And a lot of people also want to know, ""How does it work? How can it be so good? It's as though there is a human being on the other end of the line."" Because there is one! They have 10,000 people who are being paid 20 cents per answer. As you can imagine, it's college kids and old people. That's who can afford to do that. But it's a human being on the line. And it's gotten me out of so many tough positions like, ""When's the last flight out of Chicago?"" You know. It's just absolutely amazing.Another thing that really bothers me about cell phones today — this is probably my biggest pet peeve in all of technology. When I call to leave you a message, I get 15 seconds of instructions from a third-grade teacher on Ambien!(Laughter)""To page this person ... "" Page? What is this, 1975? Nobody has pagers anymore. ""You may begin speaking at the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up."" No!(Laughter)And then it gets worse: when I call to retrieve my messages, first of all: ""You have 87 messages. To listen to your messages ... "" Why else am I calling?(Laughter)Of course I want to listen to the messages!(Laughter)Oh! You all have cell phones too. So last year I went to Milan, Italy, and I got to speak to an audience of cellular executives from 200 countries around the world. And I said as a joke — as a joke, I said, ""I did the math. Verizon has 70 million customers. If you check your voicemail twice a day, that's 100 million dollars a year. I bet you guys are doing this just to run up our airtime, aren't you?"" No chuckle. They're like this —(Laughter)Where is the outrage, people? Rise up!(Laughter)Sorry. I'm not bitter.(Laughter)So now I'm going to tell you how to get out of that. There are these services that transcribe your voicemail into text. And they send it either to your email or as text messages to your phone. It is a life-changer. And by the way, they don't always get the words right, because it's over the phone and all that. So they attach the audio file at the bottom of the email so you can listen to double-check. The services are called things like Spinvox, Phonetag — this is the one I use — Callwave. A lot of people say, ""How are they doing this? I don't really want people listening in to my calls."" The executives at these companies told me, ""Well we use a proprietary B-to-B, best-of-breed, peer-to-peer soluti — "" you know. I think basically it's like these guys in India with headsets, you know, listening in.The reason I think that is that on the first day I tried one of these services, I got two voicemail messages. One was from a guy named Michael Stevenson, which shouldn't be that hard to transcribe, and it was misspelled. The other was from my video producer at the Times, whose name is Vijaiy Singh, with the silent 'h'. Nailed that one.(Laughter)So you be the judge.(Laughter)Anyway, this service, Callwave, promises that it's all software — nobody is listening to your messages. And they also promise that they're going to transcribe only the gist of your messages.(Laughter)So I thought I'd see how that goes. This is me testing it out.(Video): Hello, this is Michael. Hope you're doing well. I'm fine here. Everything's good. Hey, I was walking along the street and the sky was blue. And your daughter broke her leg at soccer practice. I'm going to have a sandwich for lunch. She's in room — emergency room 53W. OK, talk to you later — bye.(Laughter)I love my job.(Laughter)So a couple minutes later, this I got by email. It's a very good transcription. But a couple minutes after that, I got the text message version. Now remember, a text message can only be 160 characters long. So it had better be the gist of the gist, right? I'm not kidding you. The message said,""Was walking along the street"" and ""sky was blue"" and ""emergency""!(Laughter)What the f — ?(Laughter)Well I guess that was the gist.(Laughter)And lastly, I just have to talk about this one. This is my favorite of all time. It's called Popularitydialer.com. Basically, you're going to go on some iffy date, or a potentially bad meeting. So you go and you type in your phone number, and at the exact minute where you want to be called —(Laughter)And at that moment your phone will ring. And you're like, ""I'm sorry. I've got to take this."" The really beautiful thing is, you know how when somebody's sitting next to you, sometimes they can sort of hear a little bit of the caller. So they give you a choice of what you want to hear on the other end. Here's the girlfriend.Phone: Hey you, what's going on?DP: I'm kinda, like, giving a talk right now.Phone: Well, that's good.DP: What are you doing?Phone: I was just wondering what you were up to.DP: Right, I can't really talk right now. This is the — I love this — the boss call.Phone: Hey, this is Mr. Johnson calling from the office.DP: Oh, hi, sir.Phone: Did you complete that thing about a month ago? That photocopier training?DP: Oh — sorry I forgot.Phone: Yeah, well so when was the last time you used the photocopier?DP: It was like three weeks ago.Phone: Well, I don't know if you heard, you might have heard from Lenny, but —(Laughter)I think the biggest change when Internet met phone was with the iPhone. Not my finest moment in New York Times journalism. It was when in the fall of 2006, I explained why Apple would never do a cell phone.(Laughter)I looked like a moron. However, my logic was good, because — I don't know if you realize this, but — until the iPhone came along, the carriers — Verizon, AT&T, Cingular — held veto power over every aspect of every design of every phone. I know the people who worked on the Treo. They went around to these carriers and said,""Look at these cool features."" And Verizon is like, ""Hmm, no. I don't think so."" It was not very conducive to innovation. What I didn't anticipate was that Steve Jobs went around and said, ""Tell you what — I'll give you a five-year exclusive if you'll let me design this phone in peace — and you won't even see it till it's done."" Actually, even so, he was turned down by Verizon and others. Finally Cingular said OK.I'm going to talk about the effect of the iPhone. Please don't corner me at the party tonight and go, ""What are you? An Apple fan boy?"" - you know. I'm not. You can see what I said about it. It's a flawed masterpiece. It's got bad things and good things. Lets all acknowledge that right now.But it did change a few things. The first thing it changed was that all those carriers saw that they sold 10 million of these things in a year. And they said, ""Oh my gosh, maybe we've been doing it wrong. Maybe we should let phone designers design the phones.""(Applause)Another thing was that it let 10 million people, for the first time, experience being online all the time. Not using these 60-dollar-a-month cellular cards for their laptops. I don't understand why we're not there yet. When I'm an old man, I'm going to tell my grandchildren, ""When I was your age, if I wanted to check my email, I used to drive around town looking for a coffee shop. I did!""(Laughter)""We had wireless base stations that could broadcast — yay, about 150 feet across.""(Laughter)It's absurd. We have power outlets in every room of every building. We have running water. What's the problem? Anyway — but this teaches people what it's like. You have to go to YouTube and type in ""iPhone Shuffle."" This guy did a mock video of one that's one inch square, like the real iPod Shuffle. It's like, ""It only has one button. Touch it and it dials a number at random.""(Laughter)""Who the hell is this?""(Laughter)But the other thing it did is it opened up this idea of an app store. It downloads right to the phone. And you can use the tilt sensor to steer this car using this game. These programs can use all the components of the iPhone — the touch screen. This is the Etch-A-Sketch program — the theme of EG 2008. You know how you erase it? Of course. You shake it. Right, of course. We shake it to erase, like this.They have 10,000 of these programs. This is the translator program. They have every language in the world. You type in what you want, and it gives you the translation. This is amazing. This is Midomi. A song is running through your head — you sing it into the thing: do do do do do, da da da da da da, da dum ... OK, you tap, ""Done"" and it will find out the song and play it for you. I know. It's insane, right?This is Pandora. Free Internet radio. Not just free Internet radio — you type in a band or a song name. It will immediately play you that song or that band. It has a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down. You say if you like this song or not. If you like it, it tries another song on you from a different band, with the same instrumentation, vocals, theme and tempo. If you like that one, or don't like it, you do thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Over time it tailors the songs so that it completely stops playing bad songs. It eventually only plays songs you like.This is Urbanspoon. You're in a city. It knows from GPS where you're standing. You want to find a place to eat. You shake it. It proposes a restaurant. It gives you the price, and the location and ratings. Video: I'm not going all the way to Flushing. Anyway, just amazing, amazing things. Of course, its not just about the iPhone.The iPhone broke the dyke, the wall. But now it's everybody else. So Google has done their own Android operating system that will soon be on handsets — phones from 34 companies. Touch screen — very, very nice. Also with its own app store, where you can download programs.This is amazing. In the wake of all this, Verizon, the most calcified, corporate, conservative carrier of all, said, ""You can use any phone you want on our network."" I love the Wired headline: Pigs Fly, Hell Freezes Over and Verizon Opens Up Its Network — No. Really.So everything is changing. We've entered a new world of innovation, where the cell phone becomes your laptop, customized the way you want it. Every cell phone is unique. There is software that you can add on. Can I do one more one-minute song? Thank you.(Applause)Just to round it up — this is the new Apple Power Music Stand. It's only three pounds, or 12 if you install Microsoft Office.(Laughter)Sorry, that was mean. This is a song I did for the New York Times website as a music video. Ladies and gentlemen, for seven blissful hours it was the number one video on YouTube. (To the tune of ""My Way"")And now the end is near. I'm sick to death of this old cell phone. Bad sound, the signal's weak, the software stinks. A made-in-Hell phone. I've heard there's something new — a million times more rad than my phone. I too will join the cult. I want an iPhone. Concerns — I have a few. It's got some flaws; we may just face it. No keys, no memory card, the battery's sealed — you can't replace it. But God, this thing is sweet. A multitouch, iPod, Wi-Fi phone. You had me from, ""Hello."" I want an iPhone. I want to touch its precious screen. I want to wipe the smudges clean. I want my friends to look and drool. I want to say, ""Look — now I'm cool"" I stood in line and I'll get mine. I want an iPhone. For what is a man? What has he got? If not iPhone, then he's got squat. It's all the things a phone should be. Who cares if it's AT&T? I took a stand, paid half a grand! And I got an iPhone!(Applause)Thank you. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_on_cool_phone_tricks
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"I coined my own definition of success in 1934, when I was teaching at a high school in South Bend, Indiana, being a little bit disappointed, and [disillusioned] perhaps, by the way parents of the youngsters in my English classes expected their youngsters to get an A or a B. They thought a C was all right for the neighbors' children, because they were all average. But they weren't satisfied when their own — it would make the teacher feel that they had failed, or the youngster had failed. And that's not right. The good Lord in his infinite wisdom didn't create us all equal as far as intelligence is concerned, any more than we're equal for size, appearance.Not everybody could earn an A or a B, and I didn't like that way of judging, and I did know how the alumni of various schools back in the '30s judged coaches and athletic teams. If you won them all, you were considered to be reasonably successful — not completely. Because I found out — we had a number of years at UCLA where we didn't lose a game. But it seemed that we didn't win each individual game by the margin that some of our alumni had predicted — (Laughter) And quite frequently I really felt that they had backed up their predictions in a more materialistic manner.(Laughter)But that was true back in the 30s, so I understood that. But I didn't like it, I didn't agree with it. I wanted to come up with something I hoped could make me a better teacher, and give the youngsters under my supervision, be it in athletics or the English classroom, something to which to aspire, other than just a higher mark in the classroom, or more points in some athletic contest.I thought about that for quite a spell, and I wanted to come up with my own definition. I thought that might help. And I knew how Mr. Webster defined it, as the accumulation of material possessions or the attainment of a position of power or prestige, or something of that sort, worthy accomplishments perhaps, but in my opinion, not necessarily indicative of success. So I wanted to come up with something of my own.And I recalled — I was raised on a small farm in Southern Indiana, and Dad tried to teach me and my brothers that you should never try to be better than someone else. I'm sure at the time he did that, I didn't — it didn't — well, somewhere, I guess in the hidden recesses of the mind, it popped out years later. Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others. Never cease trying to be the best you can be — that's under your control. If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control. Then I ran across this simple verse that said, ""At God's footstool to confess, a poor soul knelt, and bowed his head. 'I failed!' he cried. The Master said, 'Thou didst thy best, that is success.'""From those things, and one other perhaps, I coined my own definition of success, which is: Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable. I believe that's true. If you make the effort to do the best of which you're capable, trying to improve the situation that exists for you, I think that's success, and I don't think others can judge that; it's like character and reputation — your reputation is what you're perceived to be; your character is what you really are. And I think that character is much more important than what you are perceived to be. You'd hope they'd both be good, but they won't necessarily be the same. Well, that was my idea that I was going to try to get across to the youngsters.I ran across other things. I love to teach, and it was mentioned by the previous speaker that I enjoy poetry, and I dabble in it a bit, and love it. There are some things that helped me, I think, be better than I would have been. I know I'm not what I ought to be, what I should be, but I think I'm better than I would have been if I hadn't run across certain things. One was just a little verse that said,""No written word, no spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be; nor all the books on all the shelves — it's what the teachers are themselves.""That made an impression on me in the 1930s. And I tried to use that more or less in my teaching, whether it be in sports, or whether it be in the English classroom. I love poetry and always had an interest in that somehow. Maybe it's because Dad used to read to us at night, by coal oil lamp — we didn't have electricity in our farm home. And Dad would read poetry to us. So I always liked it. And about the same time I ran across this one verse, I ran across another one. Someone asked a lady teacher why she taught, and after some time, she said she wanted to think about that. Then she came up and said,""They ask me why I teach, and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?' There sits a statesman, strong, unbiased, wise; another Daniel Webster, silver-tongued. A doctor sits beside him, whose quick, steady hand may mend a bone, or stem the life-blood's flow. And there a builder; upward rise the arch of a church he builds, wherein that minister may speak the word of God, and lead a stumbling soul to touch the Christ. And all about, a gathering of teachers, farmers, merchants, laborers — those who work and vote and build and plan and pray into a great tomorrow. And I may say, I may not see the church, or hear the word, or eat the food their hands may grow, but yet again I may; And later I may say, I knew him once, and he was weak, or strong, or bold or proud or gay. I knew him once, but then he was a boy. They ask me why I teach and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?'""And I believe the teaching profession — it's true, you have so many youngsters, and I've got to think of my youngsters at UCLA — 30-some attorneys, 11 dentists and doctors, many, many teachers and other professions. And that gives you a great deal of pleasure, to see them go on. I always tried to make the youngsters feel that they're there to get an education, number one; basketball was second, because it was paying their way, and they do need a little time for social activities, but you let social activities take a little precedence over the other two, and you're not going to have any very long. So that was the idea that I tried to get across to the youngsters under my supervision.I had three rules, pretty much, that I stuck with practically all the time. I'd learned these prior to coming to UCLA, and I decided they were very important. One was ""Never be late."" Later on I said certain things — the players, if we were leaving for somewhere, had to be neat and clean. There was a time when I made them wear jackets and shirts and ties. Then I saw our chancellor coming to school in denims and turtlenecks, and thought, it's not right for me to keep this other [rule] so I let them just — they had to be neat and clean. I had one of my greatest players that you probably heard of, Bill Walton. He came to catch the bus; we were leaving for somewhere to play. And he wasn't clean and neat, so I wouldn't let him go. He couldn't get on the bus, he had to go home and get cleaned up to get to the airport. So I was a stickler for that. I believed in that. I believe in time; very important. I believe you should be on time, but I felt at practice, for example — we start on time, we close on time. The youngsters didn't have to feel that we were going to keep them over.When I speak at coaching clinics, I often tell young coaches — and at coaching clinics, more or less, they'll be the younger coaches getting in the profession. Most of them are young, you know, and probably newly-married. And I tell them, ""Don't run practices late, because you'll go home in a bad mood, and that's not good, for a young married man to go home in a bad mood. When you get older, it doesn't make any difference, but —""(Laughter)So I did believe: on time.I believe starting on time, and I believe closing on time. And another one I had was, not one word of profanity. One word of profanity, and you are out of here for the day. If I see it in a game, you're going to come out and sit on the bench. And the third one was, never criticize a teammate. I didn't want that. I used to tell them I was paid to do that. That's my job. I'm paid to do it. Pitifully poor, but I am paid to do it. Not like the coaches today, for gracious sakes, no. It's a little different than it was in my day. Those were three things that I stuck with pretty closely all the time. And those actually came from my dad. That's what he tried to teach me and my brothers at one time.I came up with a pyramid eventually, that I don't have the time to go on that. But that helped me, I think, become a better teacher. It's something like this: And I had blocks in the pyramid, and the cornerstones being industriousness and enthusiasm, working hard and enjoying what you're doing, coming up to the apex, according to my definition of success. And right at the top, faith and patience.And I say to you, in whatever you're doing, you must be patient. You have to have patience to — we want things to happen. We talk about our youth being impatient a lot, and they are. They want to change everything. They think all change is progress. And we get a little older — we sort of let things go. And we forget there is no progress without change. So you must have patience, and I believe that we must have faith. I believe that we must believe, truly believe. Not just give it word service, believe that things will work out as they should, providing we do what we should. I think our tendency is to hope things will turn out the way we want them to much of the time, but we don't do the things that are necessary to make those things become reality. I worked on this for some 14 years, and I think it helped me become a better teacher. But it all revolved around that original definition of success.You know, a number of years ago, there was a Major League Baseball umpire by the name of George Moriarty. He spelled Moriarty with only one 'i'. I'd never seen that before, but he did. Big league baseball players — they're very perceptive about those things, and they noticed he had only one 'i' in his name. You'd be surprised how many also told him that that was one more than he had in his head at various times.(Laughter)But he wrote something where I think he did what I tried to do in this pyramid. He called it ""The Road Ahead, or the Road Behind."" He said, ""Sometimes I think the Fates must grin as we denounce them and insist the only reason we can't win, is the Fates themselves have missed. Yet there lives on the ancient claim: we win or lose within ourselves. The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow's game. You and I know deeper down, there's always a chance to win the crown. But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven't met the test, of giving all and saving none until the game is really won; of showing what is meant by grit; of playing through when others quit; of playing through, not letting up. It's bearing down that wins the cup. Of dreaming there's a goal ahead; of hoping when our dreams are dead; of praying when our hopes have fled; yet losing, not afraid to fall, if, bravely, we have given all. For who can ask more of a man than giving all within his span. Giving all, it seems to me, is not so far from victory. And so the Fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind. It's you and I who make our fates — we open up or close the gates on the road ahead or the road behind.""Reminds me of another set of threes that my dad tried to get across to us: Don't whine. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just get out there, and whatever you're doing, do it to the best of your ability. And no one can do more than that. I tried to get across, too, that — my opponents will tell you — you never heard me mention winning. Never mention winning. My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game, and you can win when you're outscored. I've felt that way on certain occasions, at various times. And I just wanted them to be able to hold their head up after a game. I used to say that when a game is over, and you see somebody that didn't know the outcome, I hope they couldn't tell by your actions whether you outscored an opponent or the opponent outscored you.That's what really matters: if you make an effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. Not necessarily what you'd want them to be but they'll be about what they should; only you will know whether you can do that. And that's what I wanted from them more than anything else. And as time went by, and I learned more about other things, I think it worked a little better, as far as the results. But I wanted the score of a game to be the byproduct of these other things, and not the end itself. I believe it was one great philosopher who said — no, no — Cervantes. Cervantes said, ""The journey is better than the end."" And I like that. I think that it is — it's getting there. Sometimes when you get there, there's almost a let down. But it's the getting there that's the fun. As a basketball coach at UCLA, I liked our practices to be the journey, and the game would be the end, the end result. I liked to go up and sit in the stands and watch the players play, and see whether I'd done a decent job during the week. There again, it's getting the players to get that self-satisfaction, in knowing that they'd made the effort to do the best of which they are capable.Sometimes I'm asked who was the best player I had, or the best teams. I can never answer that. As far as the individuals are concerned — I was asked one time about that, and they said, ""Suppose that you, in some way, could make the perfect player. What would you want?"" And I said, ""Well, I'd want one that knew why he was at UCLA: to get an education, he was a good student, really knew why he was there in the first place. But I'd want one that could play, too. I'd want one to realize that defense usually wins championships, and who would work hard on defense. But I'd want one who would play offense, too. I'd want him to be unselfish, and look for the pass first and not shoot all the time. And I'd want one that could pass and would pass.(Laughter)I've had some that could and wouldn't, and I've had some that would and could.(Laughter)So, yeah, I'd want that.And I wanted them to be able to shoot from the outside. I wanted them to be good inside too.(Laughter)I'd want them to be able to rebound well at both ends, too. Why not just take someone like Keith Wilkes and let it go at that. He had the qualifications. Not the only one, but he was one that I used in that particular category, because I think he made the effort to become the best. There was a couple.I mention in my book, ""They Call Me Coach,"" two players that gave me great satisfaction, that came as close as I think anyone I ever had to reach their full potential: one was Conrad Burke, and one was Doug McIntosh. When I saw them as freshmen, on our freshmen team — freshmen couldn't play varsity when I taught. I thought, ""Oh gracious, if these two players, either one of them"" — they were different years, but I thought about each one at the time he was there — ""Oh, if he ever makes the varsity, our varsity must be pretty miserable, if he's good enough to make it."" And you know, one of them was a starting player for a season and a half. The other one, his next year, played 32 minutes in a national championship game, Did a tremendous job for us. The next year, he was a starting player on the national championship team, and here I thought he'd never play a minute, when he was — so those are the things that give you great joy, and great satisfaction to see.Neither one of those youngsters could shoot very well. But they had outstanding shooting percentages, because they didn't force it. And neither one could jump very well, but they kept good position, and so they did well rebounding. They remembered that every shot that's taken, they assumed would be missed. I've had too many stand around and wait to see if it's missed, then they go and it's too late, somebody else is in there ahead of them. They weren't very quick, but they played good position, kept in good balance. And so they played pretty good defense for us. So they had qualities that — they came close to — as close to reaching possibly their full potential as any players I ever had. So I consider them to be as successful as Lewis Alcindor or Bill Walton, or many of the others that we had; there were some outstanding players.Have I rambled enough? I was told that when he makes his appearance, I was supposed to shut up.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_wooden_on_the_difference_between_winning_and_success
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"When most people think about the beginnings of AIDS, they're gonna think back to the 1980s. And certainly, this was the decade in which we discovered AIDS and the virus that causes it, HIV. But in fact this virus crossed over into humans many decades before, from chimpanzees, where the virus originated, into humans who hunt these apes.This photo was taken before the Great Depression in Brazzaville, Congo. At this time, there were thousands of individuals, we think, that were infected with HIV.So I have a couple of really important questions for you. If this virus was in thousands of individuals at this point, why was it the case that it took us until 1984 to be able to discover this virus? OK now, more importantly, had we been there in the '40s and '50s, '60s, had we seen this disease, had we understood exactly what was going on with it, how might that have changed and completely transformed the nature of the way this pandemic moved?In fact, this is not unique to HIV. The vast majority of viruses come from animals. And you can kind of think of this as a pyramid of this bubbling up of viruses from animals into human populations. But only at the very top of this pyramid do these things become completely human. Nevertheless, we spend the vast majority of our energy focused on this level of the pyramid, trying to tackle things that are already completely adapted to human beings, that are going to be very very difficult to address — as we've seen in the case of HIV.So during the last 15 years, I've been working to actually study the earlier interface here — what I've labeled ""viral chatter,"" which was a term coined by my mentor Don Burke. This is the idea that we can study the sort of pinging of these viruses into human populations, the movement of these agents over into humans; and by capturing this moment, we might be able to move to a situation where we can catch them early.OK, so this is a picture, and I'm going to show you some pictures now from the field. This is a picture of a central African hunter. It's actually a fairly common picture. One of the things I want you to note from it is blood — that you see a tremendous amount of blood contact. This was absolutely key for us. This is a very intimate form of connection. So if we're going to study viral chatter, we need to get to these populations who have intensive contact with wild animals.And so we've been studying people like this individual. We collect blood from them, other specimens. We look at the diseases, which are in the animals as well as the humans. And ideally, this is going to allow us to catch these things early on, as they're moving over into human populations. And the basic objective of this work is not to just go out once and look at these individuals, but to establish thousands of individuals in these populations that we would monitor continuously on a regular basis. When they were sick, we would collect specimens from them.We would actually enlist them — which we've done now — to collect specimens from animals. We give them these little pieces of filter paper. When they sample from animals, they collect the blood on the filter paper and this allows us to identify yet-unknown viruses from exactly the right animals — the ones that are actually being hunted.(Video) Narrator: Deep in a remote region of Cameroon, two hunters stalk their prey. Their names are Patrice and Patee. They're searching for bush meat; forest animals they can kill to feed their families. Patrice and Patee set out most days to go out hunting in the forest around their homes. They have a series of traps, of snares that they've set up to catch wild pigs, snakes, monkeys, rodents — anything they can, really. Patrice and Patee have been out for hours but found nothing. The animals are simply gone.We stop for a drink of water. Then there is a rustle in the brush. A group of hunters approach, their packs loaded with wild game. There's at least three viruses that you know about, which are in this particular monkey.Nathan Wolfe: This species, yeah. And there's many many more pathogens that are present in these animals. These individuals are at specific risk, particularly if there's blood contact, they're at risk for transmission and possibly infection with novel viruses.Narrator: As the hunters display their kills, something surprising happens. They show us filter paper they've used to collect the animals' blood. The blood will be tested for zoonotic viruses, part of a program Dr. Wolfe has spent years setting up.NW: So this is from this animal right here, Greater Spot-Nosed Guenon. Every person who has one of those filter papers has at least, at a minimum, been through our basic health education about the risks associated with these activities, which presumably, from our perspective, gives them the ability to decrease their own risk, and then obviously the risk to their families, the village, the country, and the world.NW: OK, before I continue, I think it's important to take just a moment to talk about bush meat. Bush meat is the hunting of wild game. OK? And you can consider all sorts of different bush meat. I'm going to be talking about this. When your children and grandchildren sort of pose questions to you about this period of time, one of the things they're gonna ask you, is how it was they we allowed some of our closest living relatives, some of the most valuable and endangered species on our planet, to go extinct because we weren't able to address some of the issues of poverty in these parts of the world.But in fact that's not the only question they're going to ask you about this. They're also going to ask you the question that when we knew that this was the way that HIV entered into the human population, and that other diseases had the potential to enter like this, why did we let these behaviors continue? Why did we not find some other solution to this? They're going to say, in regions of profound instability throughout the world, where you have intense poverty, where populations are growing and you don't have sustainable resources like this, this is going to lead to food insecurity.But they're also going to ask you probably a different question. It's one that I think we all need to ask ourselves, which is, why we thought the responsibility rested with this individual here. Now this is the individual — you can see just right up over his right shoulder — this is the individual that hunted the monkey from the last picture that I showed you. OK, take a look at his shirt. You know, take a look at his face. Bush meat is one of the central crises, which is occurring in our population right now, in humanity, on this planet. But it can't be the fault of somebody like this. OK? And solving it cannot be his responsibility alone. There's no easy solutions, but what I'm saying to you is that we neglect this problem at our own peril.So, in 1998, along with my mentors Don Burke and Colonel Mpoudi-Ngole, we went to actually start this work in Central Africa, to work with hunters in this part of the world. And my job — at that time I was a post-doctoral fellow, and I was really tasked with setting this up. So I said to myself, ""OK, great — we're gonna collect all kinds of specimens. We're gonna go to all these different locations. It's going to be wonderful."" You know, I looked at the map; I picked out 17 sites; I figured, no problem. (Laughter)Needless to say, I was drastically wrong. This is challenging work to do. Fortunately, I had and continue to have an absolutely wonderful team of colleagues and collaborators in my own team, and that's the only way that this work can really occur. We have a whole range of challenges about this work.One of them is just obtaining trust from individuals that we work with in the field. The person you see on the right hand side is Paul DeLong-Minutu. He's one of the best communicators that I've really ever dealt with. When I arrived I didn't speak a word of French, and I still seemed to understand what it was he was saying. Paul worked for years on the Cameroonian national radio and television, and he spoke about health issues. He was a health correspondent. So we figured we'd hire this person — when we got there he could be a great communicator. When we would get to these rural villages, though, what we found out is that no one had television, so they wouldn't recognize his face. But — when he began to speak they would actually recognize his voice from the radio. And this was somebody who had incredible potential to spread aspects of our message, whether it be with regards to wildlife conservation or health prevention.Often we run into obstacles. This is us coming back from one of these very rural sites, with specimens from 200 individuals that we needed to get back to the lab within 48 hours. I like to show this shot — this is Ubald Tamoufe, who's the lead investigator in our Cameroon site. Ubald laughs at me when I show this photo because of course you can't see his face. But the reason I like to show the shot is because you can see that he's about to solve this problem. (Laughter) Which — which he did, which he did. Just a few quick before and after shots. This was our laboratory before. This is what it looks like now. Early on, in order to ship our specimens, we had to have dry ice. To get dry ice we had to go to the breweries — beg, borrow, steal to get these folks to give it to us. Now we have our own liquid nitrogen. I like to call our laboratory the coldest place in Central Africa — it might be. And here's a shot of me, this is the before shot of me. (Laughter) No comment.So what happened? So during the 10 years that we've been doing this work, we actually surprised ourselves. We made a number of discoveries. And what we've found is that if you look in the right place, you can actually monitor the flow of these viruses into human populations. That gave us a tremendous amount of hope. What we've found is a whole range of new viruses in these individuals, including new viruses in the same group as HIV — so, brand new retroviruses. And let's face it, any new retrovirus in the human population — it's something we should be aware of. It's something we should be following. It's not something that we should be surprised by.Needless to say in the past these viruses entering into these rural communities might very well have gone extinct. That's no longer the case. Logging roads provide access to urban areas. And critically, what happens in central Africa doesn't stay in Central Africa. So, once we discovered that it was really possible that we could actually do this monitoring, we decided to move this from research, to really attempt to phase up to a global monitoring effort. Through generous support and partnership scientifically with Google.org and the Skoll Foundation, we were able to start the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and begin work in four different sites in Africa and Asia. Needless to say, different populations from different parts of the world have different sorts of contact. So it's not just hunters in Central Africa. It's also working in live animal markets — these wet markets — which is exactly the place where SARS emerged in Asia. But really, this is just the beginning from our perspective.Our objective right now, in addition to deploying to these sites and getting everything moving, is to identify new partners because we feel like this effort needs to be extended to probably 20 or more sites throughout the world — to viral hotspots — because really the idea here is to cast an incredibly wide net so that we can catch these things, ideally, before they make it to blood banks, sexual networks, airplanes. And that's really our objective. There was a time not very long ago when the discovery of unknown organisms was something that held incredible awe for us. It had potential to really change the way that we saw ourselves, and thought about ourselves.Many people, I think, on our planet right now despair, and they think we've reached a point where we've discovered most of the things. I'm going tell you right now: please don't despair. If an intelligent extra-terrestrial was taxed with writing the encyclopedia of life on our planet, 27 out of 30 of these volumes would be devoted to bacteria and virus, with just a few of the volumes left for plants, fungus and animals, humans being a footnote; interesting footnote but a footnote nonetheless. This is honestly the most exciting period ever for the study of unknown life forms on our planet. The dominant things that exist here we know almost nothing about. And yet finally, we have the tools, which will allow us to actually explore that world and understand them.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_wolfe_hunts_for_the_next_aids
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"I thought I would read poems I have that relate to the subject of youth and age. I was sort of astonished to find out how many I have actually.The first one is dedicated to Spencer, and his grandmother, who was shocked by his work. My poem is called ""Dirt.""My grandmother is washing my mouth out with soap;half a long century goneand still she comes at mewith that thick cruel yellow bar.All because of a word I said,not even said really, only repeated.But ""Open,"" she says, ""open up!""her hand clawing at my head.I know now her life was hard;she lost three children as babies,then her husband died too,leaving young sons, and no money.She'd stand me in the sink to peebecause there was never room in the toilet.But oh, her soap!Might its bitter burning have been what made me a poet?The street she lived on was unpaved,her flat, two cramped rooms and a fetid kitchenwhere she stalked and caught me.Dare I admit that after she did itI never really loved her again?She lived to a hundred,even then. All along it was the sadness, the squalor,but I never, until nowloved her again.When that was published in a magazine I got an irate letter from my uncle. ""You have maligned a great woman."" It took some diplomacy.This is called ""The Dress."" It's a longer poem.In those days,those days which exist for me only as the most elusive memory now,when often the first sound you'd hear in the morning would be a storm of birdsong,then the soft clop of the hooves of the horse hauling a milk wagon down your block,and the last sound at night as likely as notwould be your father pulling up in his car,having worked late again, always late,and going heavily down to the cellar, to the furnace,to shake out the ashes and damp the draft before he came upstairs to fall into bed —in those long-ago days,women, my mother, my friends' mothers, our neighbors, all the women I knew —wore, often much of the day, what were called housedresses,cheap, printed, pulpy, seemingly purposefully shapeless light cotton shifts that you wore over your nightgownand, when you had to go look for a child, hang wash on the line, or run down to the grocery store on the corner,under a coat, the twisted hem of the nightgown always lank and yellowed, dangling beneath.More than the curlers some of the women seemed constantly to have in their hair in preparation for some great event —a ball, one would think — that never came to pass;more than the way most women's faces not only were never made up during the day,but seemed scraped, bleached, and, with their plucked eyebrows, scarily masklike;more than all that it was those dresses that made women so unknowable and forbidding,adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access, and boys no conception.Only later would I see the dresses also as a proclamation:that in your dim kitchen, your laundry, your bleak concrete yard,what you revealed of yourself was a fabulation;your real sensual nature, veiled in those sexless vestments, was utterly your dominion.In those days, one hid much else as well:grown men didn't embrace one another, unless someone had died, and not always then; you shook handsor, at a ball game, thumped your friend's back and exchanged blows meant to be codes for affection;once out of childhood you'd never again know the shock of your father's whiskers on your cheek,not until mores at last had evolved, and you could hug another man, then hold on for a moment,then even kiss (your fathers bristles white and stiff now).What release finally, the embrace: though we were wary — it seemed so audacious —how much unspoken joy there was in that affirmation of equality and communion,no matter how much misunderstanding and pain had passed between you by then.We knew so little in those days, as little as now, I suppose about healing those hurts:even the women, in their best dresses, with beads and sequins sewn on the bodices,even in lipstick and mascara, their hair aflow, could only stand wringing their hands, begging for peace,while father and son, like thugs, like thieves, like Romans, simmered and hissed and hated,inflicting sorrows that endured, the worst anyway, through the kiss and embrace,bleeding from brother to brother, into the generations.In those days there was still countryside close to the city, farms, cornfields, cows;even not far from our building with its blurred brick and long shadowy hallwayyou could find tracts with hills and trees you could pretend were mountains and forests.Or you could go out by yourself even to a half-block-long empty lot,into the bushes: like a creature of leaves you'd lurk,crouched, crawling, simplified, savage, alone;already there was wanting to be simpler, wanting, when they called you,never to go back.(Applause)This is another longish one, about the old and the young. It actually happened right at the time we met. Part of the poem takes place in space we shared and time we shared.It's called ""The Neighbor.""Her five horrid, deformed little dogs who incessantly yap on the roof under my window.Her cats, God knows how many, who must piss on her rugs — her landing's a sickening reek.Her shadow once, fumbling the chain on her door, then the door slamming fearfully shut,only the barking and the music — jazz — filtering as it does, day and night into the hall.The time it was Chris Connor singing ""Lush Life"" —how it brought back my college sweetheart,my first real love, who — till I left her — played the same record.And head on my shoulder, hand on my thigh,sang sweetly along, of regrets and depletions she was too young for,as I was too young, later, to believe in her pain.It startled, then bored, then repelled me.My starting to fancy she'd ended up in this fire-trap in the Village, that my neighbor was her.My thinking we'd meet, recognize one another, become friends, that I'd accomplish a penance.My seeing her, it wasn't her, at the mailbox.Gray-yellow hair, army pants under a nightgown,her turning away, hiding her ravaged face in her hands, muttering an inappropriate ""Hi.""Sometimes there are frightening goings-on in the stairwell.A man shouting, ""Shut up!"" The dogs frantically snarling,claws scrabbling, then her — her voice hoarse, harsh, hollow, almost only a tone,incoherent, a note, a squawk, bone on metal, metal gone molten,calling them back, ""Come back darlings, come back dear ones. My sweet angels, come back.""Medea she was, next time I saw her.Sorceress, tranced, ecstatic, stock-still on the sidewalkragged coat hanging agape, passersby flowing around her,her mouth torn suddenly open as though in a scream,silently though, as though only in her brain or breast had it erupted.A cry so pure, practiced, detached, it had no need of a voice, or could no longer bear one.These invisible links that allure, these transfigurations, even of anguish, that hold us.The girl, my old love, the last lost time I saw herwhen she came to find me at a party,her drunkenly stumbling, falling, sprawling, skirt hiked, eyes veined red, swollen with tears, her shame, her dishonor.My ignorant, arrogant coarseness, my secret pride, my turning away.Still life on a rooftop, dead trees in barrels, a bench broken, dogs, excrement, sky.What pathways through pain, what junctures of vulnerability, what crossings and counterings?Too many lives in our lives already, too many chances for sorrow, too many unaccounted-for pasts.""Behold me,"" the god of frenzied, inexhaustible love says, rising in bloody splendor, ""Behold me.""Her making her way down the littered vestibule stairs, one agonized step at a time.My holding the door.Her crossing the fragmented tiles, faltering at the step to the street,droning, not looking at me, ""Can you help me?""Taking my arm, leaning lightly against me. Her wavering step into the world.Her whispering, ""Thanks love."" Lightly, lightly against me.(Applause)I think I'll lighten up a little. (Laughter) Another, different kind of poem of youth and age.It's called ""Gas.""(Laughter)Wouldn't it be nice, I think,when the blue-haired lady in the doctor's waiting room bends over the magazine tableand farts, just a little, and violently blushes.Wouldn't it be nice if intestinal gas came embodied in visible clouds,so she could see that her really quite inoffensive pop had only barely grazed my facebefore it drifted away.(Laughter)Besides, for this to have happened now is a nice coincidence. Because not an hour ago, while we were on our walk,my dog was startled by a backfire and jumped straight up like a horse bucking.And that brought back to me the stable I worked on weekends when I was 12,and a splendid piebald stallion,who whenever he was mounted would buck just like that, though more hugely of course, enormous, gleaming, resplendent.And the woman, her face abashedly buried in her ""Elle"" now, reminded me —I'd forgotten that not the least part of my awe consisted of the fact that with every jump he tookthe horse would powerfully fart.Phwap! Phwap! Phwap!Something never mentioned in the dozens of books about horses and their riders I devoured in those days.All that savage grandeur, the steely glinting hooves, the eruptions driven from the creature's mighty innards,breath stopped, heart stopped, nostrils madly flared,I didn't know if I wanted to break him, or be him.(Laughter)(Applause)This is called ""Thirst."" Many — most of my poems actually are urban poems. I happen to be reading a bunch that aren't.""Thirst.""Here was my relation with the woman who lived all last autumn and winter,day and night, on a bench in the 103rd Street subway station, until finally one day she vanished.We regarded each other, scrutinized one another.Me shyly, obliquely, trying not to be furtive.She boldly, unblinkingly, even pugnaciously, wrathfully even, when her bottle was empty.I was frightened of her. I felt like a child.I was afraid some repressed part of myself would go out of control, and I'd be forever entrappedin the shocking seethe of her stench.Not excrement merely, not merely surface and orifice going unwashed, rediffusion of rum,there was will in it, and intention, power and purpose — a social, ethical rage and rebellion —despair too, though, grief, loss.Sometimes I'd think I should take her home with me, bathe her, comfort her, dress her.She wouldn't have wanted me to, I would think. Instead, I'd step into my train.How rich I would think, is the lexicon of our self-absolving.How enduring, our bland fatal assurance that reflection is righteousness being accomplished.The dance of our glances, the clash, pulling each other through our perceptual punctures,then holocaust, holocaust, host on host of ill, injured presences, squandered, consumed.Her vigil somewhere I know continues.Her occupancy, her absolute, faithful attendance.The dance of our glances, challenge, abdication, effacement, the perfume of our consternation.(Applause)This is a newer poem, a brand new poem. The title is ""This Happened.""A student, a young woman in a fourth-floor hallway of her lycee,perched on the ledge of an open window chatting with friends between classes;a teacher passes and chides her, ""Be careful, you might fall,"" almost banteringly chides her,""You might fall,""and the young woman, 18, a girl really,though she wouldn't think that, as brilliant as she is, first in her class, and ""Beautiful, too,"" she's often told,smiles back, and leans into the open window, which wouldn't even be open if it were winter —if it were winter someone would have closed it (""Close it!"") —leans into the window, farther, still smiling,farther and farther, though it takes less time than this, really an instant, and lets herself fall.Herself fall.A casual impulse, a fancy, never thought of until now, hardly thought of even now ...No, more than impulse or fancy, the girl knows what she's doing,the girl means something, the girl means to mean,because it occurs to her in that instant, that beautiful or not, bright yes or no, she's not who she is,she's not the person she is,and the reason, she suddenly knows, is that there's been so much premeditationwhere she is, so much plotting and planning,there's hardly a person where she is, or if there is, it's not her, or not wholly her,it's a self inhabited, lived in by her,and seemingly even as she thinks it she knows what's been missing:grace,not premeditation but grace, a kind of being in the world spontaneously, with grace.Weightfully upon me was the world.Weightfully this self which graced the world yet never wholly itself.Weightfully this self which weighed upon me, the release from which is what I desire and what I achieve.And the girl remembers, in this infinite instant already now so many times divided,the sadness she felt once, hardly knowing she felt it,to merely inhabit herself.Yes, the girl falls, absurd to fall,even the earth with its compulsion to take unto itself all that falls must know that falling is absurd,yet the girl falling isn't myself, or she is myself, but a self I took of my own volition unto myself. Forever. With grace.This happened.(Applause)I'll read just one more. I don't usually say that. I like to just end. But I'm afraid that Ricky will come out here and shake his fist at me.This is called ""Old Man,"" appropriately enough.""Special: big tits,""Says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our neighborhood newsstand.But forget her breasts.A lush, fresh-lipped blond, skin glowing gold, sprawls there, resplendent.60 nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better than harlots, can still stir me.Maybe a coming of age in the American sensual darkness,never seeing an unsmudged nipple, an uncensored vagina,has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the eye.Always that erotic murmur,I'm hardly myself if I'm not in a state of incipient desire.God knows though, there are worse twists your obsessions can take.Last year in Israel, a young ultra-orthodox Rabbi guiding some teenage girls through the Shrine of the Shoahforbade them to look in one room. Because there were images in it he said were licentious.The display was a photo. Men and women stripped naked,some trying to cover their genitals, others too frightened to bother,lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown into a ditch.The girls, to my horror, averted their gaze.What carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them.Even that though. Another confession:Once in a book on pre-war Poland,a studio portrait, an absolute angel, an absolute angel with tormented, tormenting eyes.I kept finding myself at her page.That she died in the camps made her — I didn't dare wonder why —more present, more precious.Died in the camps, that too people — or Jews anyway — kept from their children back then.But it was like sex, you didn't have to be told.Sex and death, how close they can seem.So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me, sometimes I think I confound them.My wife's loveliness almost consumes me.My passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds.When we make love, her holding me everywhere all around me, I'm there and not there.My mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions,I live my life over, as though I were drowning.Then I am drowning, in despair at having to leave her, this, everything, all, unbearable, awful.Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not having been slaughtered, or enslaved.And not having to know history's next mad rage or regression, it might be a relief.No. Again, no. I don't mean that for a moment.What I mean is the world holds me so tightly — the good and the bad —my own follies and weakness that even this counterfeit Venuswith her sham heat, and her bosom probably plumped with gel, so moves memy breath catches. Vamp. Siren. Seductress.How much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows.How she incarnates our desperate human need for regard,our passion to live in beauty, to be beauty, to be cherished by glances,if by no more, of something like love,or love.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/c_k_williams_reads_poetry_of_youth_and_age
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"Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. Readers don't want to pay for yesterday's news, and advertisers follow them. Your iPhone, your laptop, is much more handy than New York Times on Sunday. And we should save trees in the end. So it's enough to bury any industry. So, should we rather ask, ""Can anything save newspapers?""There are several scenarios for the future newspaper. Some people say it should be free; it should be tabloid, or even smaller: A4; it should be local, run by communities, or niche, for some smaller groups like business — but then it's not free; it's very expensive. It should be opinion-driven; less news, more views. And we'd rather read it during breakfast, because later we listen to radio in a car, check your mail at work and in the evening you watch TV. Sounds nice, but this can only buy time. Because in the long run, I think there is no reason, no practical reason for newspapers to survive.So what can we do? (Laughter) Let me tell you my story. 20 years ago, Bonnier, Swedish publisher, started to set newspapers in the former Soviet Bloc. After a few years, they had several newspapers in central and eastern Europe. They were run by an inexperienced staff, with no visual culture, no budgets for visuals — in many places there were not even art directors. I decided to be — to work for them as an art director. Before, I was an architect, and my grandmother asked me once, ""What are you doing for a living?"" I said, ""I'm designing newspapers."" ""What? There's nothing to design there. It's just boring letters"" (Laughter) And she was right. I was very frustrated, until one day.I came to London, and I've seen performance by Cirque du Soleil. And I had a revelation. I thought, ""These guys took some creepy, run-down entertainment, and put it to the highest possible level of performance art."" I thought ""Oh my God, maybe I can do the same with these boring newspapers."" And I did. We started to redesign them, one by one. The front page became our signature. It was my personal intimate channel to talk to the readers.I'm not going to tell you stories about teamwork or cooperation. My approach was very egotistic. I wanted my artistic statement, my interpretation of reality. I wanted to make posters, not newspapers. Not even magazines: posters. We were experimenting with type, with illustration, with photos. And we had fun. Soon it started to bring results. In Poland, our pages were named ""Covers of the Year"" three times in a row. Other examples you can see here are from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia — the central European countries.But it's not only about the front page. The secret is that we were treating the whole newspaper as one piece, as one composition — like music. And music has a rhythm, has ups and downs. And design is responsible for this experience. Flipping through pages is readers experience, and I'm responsible for this experience. We treated two pages, both spreads, as a one page, because that's how readers perceive it.You can see some Russian pages here which got many awards on biggest infographic competition in Spain. But the real award came from Society for Newspaper Design. Just a year after redesigning this newspaper in Poland, they name it the World's Best-Designed Newspaper. And two years later, the same award came to Estonia. Isn't amazing?What really makes it amazing: that the circulation of these newspapers were growing too. Just some examples: in Russia, plus 11 after one year, plus 29 after three years of the redesign. Same in Poland: plus 13, up to 35 percent raise of circulation after three years. You can see on a graph, after years of stagnation, the paper started to grow, just after redesign. But the real hit was in Bulgaria. And that is really amazing.Did design do this? Design was just a part of the process. And the process we made was not about changing the look, it was about improving the product completely. I took an architectural rule about function and form and translated it into newspaper content and design. And I put strategy at the top of it. So first you ask a big question: why we do it? What is the goal? Then we adjust the content accordingly. And then, usually after two months, we start designing. My bosses, in the beginning, were very surprised. Why am I asking all of these business questions, instead of just showing them pages? But soon they realized that this is the new role of designer: to be in this process from the very beginning to the very end.So what is the lesson behind it? The first lesson is about that design can change not just your product. It can change your workflow — actually, it can change everything in your company; it can turn your company upside down. It can even change you. And who's responsible? Designers. Give power to designers. (Applause) But the second is even more important. You can live in a small poor country, like me. You can work for a small company, in a boring branch. You can have no budgets, no people — but still can put your work to the highest possible level. And everybody can do it. You just need inspiration, vision and determination. And you need to remember that to be good is not enough.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper
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"I started with paragliding. Paragliding is taking off from mountains with a paraglider, with the possibility to fly cross-country, distance, just with the use of thermals to soar. Also different aerobatic maneuvers are possible with a paraglider.From there I started with skydiving. In this picture you can see there is a four-way skydive, four people flying together, and on the left hand side it's the camera flier with the camera mounted to his helmet so he can film the whole jump, for the film itself and also for the judging.From regular, relative skydiving I went on to freeflying. Freeflying is more the three-dimensional skydiving. You can see the skydiver with the red suit, he's in a stand-up position. The one with the yellow-green suit, he's flying head-down. And that's me in the background, carving around the whole formation in freefall also, with the helmet cam to film this jump.From freeflying I went on to skysurfing. Skysurfing is skydiving with a board on the feet. You can imagine with this big surface of a skysurfing board, there is a lot of force, a lot of power. Of course I can use this power for example for nice spinning — we call it ""helicopter moves.""From there I went on to wingsuit flying. Wingsuit flying is a suit, that I can make fly, just only with my body. If I put some tension on my body, tension on my suit, I can make it fly. And as you see the fall rate is much much slower because of the bigger surface. With a proper body position I'm able to really move forward to gain quite some distance. This is a jump I did in Rio de Janeiro. You can see the Copacabana on the left-hand side.From there with all the skills and knowledge from paragliding and all the different disciplines in skydiving, I went on to BASE jumping. BASE jumping is skydiving from fixed objects, like buildings, antennae, bridges and earth — meaning mountains, cliffs. It's for sure — for me — it's the ultimate feeling of being in free fall, with all the visual references.So my goal soon was to discover new places that nobody had jumped before. So in summer 2000 I was the first to BASE jump the Eiger North Face in Switzerland. Two years after this, I was the first to BASE jump from Matterhorn, a very famous mountain that probably everybody knows in here. 2005 I did a BASE jump from the Eiger, from the Monk and from the Jungfrau, three very famous mountains in Switzerland. The special thing on these three jumps were, I hiked them all and climbed them all in only one day. In 2008 I jumped the Eiffel Tower in Paris. (Laughter)So with all this knowledge, I also wanted to get into stunts. So with some friends we started to do different tricks, like for example this jump here, I jumped from a paraglider. Or here — everybody was freezing, pretty much, except me, because it was very cold in Austria where we did this filming. Everybody sitting in a basket, and I was on top of the balloon, ready to slide down with my skysurf board. Or this jump, from a moving truck on the highway. (Laughter)Extreme sports on top level like this is only possible if you practice step by step, if you really work hard on your skills and on your knowledge. Of course you need to be in physical, very good, condition, so I'm training a lot. You need to have the best possible equipment. And probably the most important is you have to work on your mental skills, mental preparation. And all this to come as close as possible to the human dream of being able to fly.So for 2009, I'm training hard for my two new projects. The first one, I want to set a world record in flying from a cliff with my wingsuit. And I want to set a new record, with the longest distance ever flown. For my second project, I have a sensational idea of a jump that never has been done before.So now, on the following movie you will see that I'm much better in flying a wingsuit than speaking in English. Enjoy, and thank you very much. (Applause)(Applause)June Cohen: I have some questions. I think we all might have some questions. Question one: so does that actually feel the way the flying dream does? Because it looks like it might.Ueli Gegenschatz: Pretty much. I believe this is probably the closest possibility to come to the dream of being able to fly.JC: I know the answer to this, but how do you land?UE: Parachute. We have to open a parachute just seconds before, I would say, impact. (Laughter) It's not possible to land a wingsuit yet.JC: Yet. But people are trying. Are you among those — you're not going to commit — are you among those trying to do it?UE: It's a dream. It's a dream. Yeah. We're still working on it and we're developing the wingsuits to get better performance, to get more knowledge. And I believe soon.JC: All right. Well we will watch this space. But I have two more questions. What is the — there was exhaust coming out of the back of the wingsuit. Was that a propelled wingsuit that you were wearing?UE: Nope. It's just smoke.JC: Coming off of you?(Laughter)UE: Hopefully not.(Laughter)JC: That seems dangerous.UE: No, smoke is for two reasons, you can see the speed, you can see the way where I was flying. That's reason number one. And reason number two: it's much easier for the camera guy to film If I'm using smoke.JC: Ah, I see. So the wingsuit is set up to deliberately release smoke so that you can be tracked. One more question. What do you do to to cover your face? Because I just keep thinking of going that fast and having your whole face smushed backwards. Are you in a helmet? Are you in goggles?UE: The purest and the best feeling would be with only goggles.JC: And is that how you usually fly?UE: Usually I'm wearing a helmet. In the mountains I'm always wearing a helmet because of landings — usually it's difficult — it's not like regular skydiving where you have like the big landings. So you have to be prepared.JC: Right. Now is there anything you don't do? Do people come to you with projects and say, ""We want you to do this!"" and do you ever say, ""No, no I'm not going to.""UE: Oh of course, of course. Some people have crazy ideas and —(Laughter)JC: ...a round of applause...(Applause)UE: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ueli_gegenschatz_extreme_wingsuit_jumping
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"I was asked by Wilsonart International, a plastic laminate company, which is the largest plastic laminate company in the world — they asked me to design a trade show booth for exhibition at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, in 2000.So looking at their three main markets for their product which were basically transportation design, interiors and furniture, we came up with the solution of taking an old Airstream trailer and gutting it, and trying to portray laminate, and a trailer, in kind of a fresh, new contemporary look. When this trailer showed up at my shop in Berkeley, I'd actually never stepped foot in an Airstream trailer, or any other trailer. So I can be somebody that can look at this in a totally fresh perspective and see if I can optimize it in its most idealistic fashion. I decided I had to do some research and really figure out what had gone wrong somewhere along the history of Airstream. What I discovered in these interiors is that there was a disconnect between the exterior shell and the interior architecture of the pieces. In that the shell was originally conceived as a lightweight, modern, futuristic, high-tech pod for hurtling down the freeway, and the interiors were completely out of sync with that. In fact it appeared like they referenced a mountain cabin.That seemed really like a crisis to me, that they had never been able to develop a vocabulary about escape, and about travel, and modernity in this trailer that was consistent with the shell. We really needed to do some archeology in the trailer itself to figure out what's authentic in an Airstream trailer, and what feels like it has true purpose and utility. We stripped out all the vinyl and zolatone paint that was covering up this just fantastic aluminum shell. We took off all the visible hardware and trim that was kind of doing the country cabin thing. I literally drew on the walls of the trailer, mocked it up in cardboard, we'd come in and cut, decide things were wrong, pull it out, put it back in.The main goal was to smooth out the interior, and begin to speak about motion, and mobility, and independence. The biggest difficulty on one of these trailers is that when you're designing there's actually no logical place to stop and start materials because of the continuous form of the trailer. There's no such things as two walls and a ceiling coming together, where you can change materials and shapes. So that became a challenge. Compounding that, the material of choice, laminate, that I was trying to highlight, only bends in two dimensions. It's a compound curve interior. What I had to devise was a way of fooling the eye into believing that all these panels are curved with the shell.What I came up with was a series of second skins that basically float over the aluminum shell. And what I was trying to do there was direct your eye in the space, so that you would perceive the geometry in a different way, and that the casework wouldn't break up the space. They also gave us a way to run power and rewire the trailer without tearing out the skin, so they function as an electrical chase. That's the trailer, pretty much finished.That trailer led to another commission, to participate in whats called Tokyo Designers Block. Its a week of furniture design events in Tokyo, in October. Teruo Kurosaki, who owns a furniture company called Idee, he asked me to ship him two trailers to Tokyo. He said one he would like to make a real trailer, functioning, and we would sell that one. Trailer number two, you have a blank slate, you can to anything you want.We came up with a fantasy scenario of a DJ traveling around the States, that would collect records and go on tours. This trailer housed two turntables, mixer, wet bar, fridge, integrated sound system. It's got a huge couch, fits quite a few people, and basically we'd had a great time with this. And so in this trailer I took it upon myself to think about travel, and escape, in an idiosyncratic sense. A lot of these ideas migrated into the production trailers for Airstream.This brings us up to the time that I started consulting to Airstream. They came to me and said, ""Well, what can we do to freshen this thing up? And do you think kids, you know, skateboarders, surfers, rock climbers, would use these things?"" And I said, ""Well, not in that interior."" (Laughter) Anyway, I went out to Airstream about six times during the process of building this prototype, and it's called the Bambi prototype. I thought, ""Finally, oh yeah great, big company, I'm gonna work with somebody with money for tooling and molding."" And I walked in their prototype facility, and it's exactly like my shop, only bigger — same tools, same things. So the problem became — and they set this dilemma to me — that you have to design the interior using only our existing technology, and there's no money for tooling or molding. The trailers themselves are actually hand-built. All the casework is hand-scribed in, uniquely, so you can't just cut 100 parts for 100 trailers, you have to cut them big, and every single one is hand-fit. They didn't want to go to a componentized system. And there it is, that's the Bambi 16. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_deam_restyles_the_airstream
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"I thought I'd begin with a scene of war. There was little to warn of the danger ahead. The Iraqi insurgent had placed the IED, an Improvised Explosive Device, along the side of the road with great care. By 2006, there were more than 2,500 of these attacks every single month, and they were the leading cause of casualties among American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. The team that was hunting for this IED is called an EOD team— Explosives Ordinance Disposal—and they're the pointy end of the spear in the American effort to suppress these roadside bombs. Each EOD team goes out on about 600 of these bomb calls every year, defusing about two bombs a day. Perhaps the best sign of how valuable they are to the war effort, is that the Iraqi insurgents put a $50,000 bounty on the head of a single EOD soldier.Unfortunately, this particular call would not end well. By the time the soldier advanced close enough to see the telltale wires of the bomb, it exploded in a wave of flame. Now, depending how close you are and how much explosive has been packed into that bomb, it can cause death or injury. You have to be as far as 50 yards away to escape that. The blast is so strong it can even break your limbs, even if you're not hit. That soldier had been on top of the bomb.And so when the rest of the team advanced they found little left. And that night the unit's commander did a sad duty, and he wrote a condolence letter back to the United States, and he talked about how hard the loss had been on his unit, about the fact that they had lost their bravest soldier, a soldier who had saved their lives many a time. And he apologized for not being able to bring them home. But then he talked up the silver lining that he took away from the loss. ""At least,"" as he wrote, ""when a robot dies, you don't have to write a letter to its mother.""That scene sounds like science fiction, but is battlefield reality already. The soldier in that case was a 42-pound robot called a PackBot. The chief's letter went, not to some farmhouse in Iowa like you see in the old war movies, but went to the iRobot Company, which is named after the Asimov novel and the not-so-great Will Smith movie, and... um... (Laughter)... if you remember that in that fictional world, robots started out carrying out mundane chores, and then they started taking on life-and-death decisions. That's a reality we face today.What we're going to do is actually just flash a series of photos behind me that show you the reality of robots used in war right now or already at the prototype stage. It's just to give you a taste. Another way of putting it is you're not going to see anything that's powered by Vulcan technology, or teenage wizard hormones or anything like that. This is all real. So why don't we go ahead and start those pictures.Something big is going on in war today, and maybe even the history of humanity itself. The U.S. military went into Iraq with a handful of drones in the air. We now have 5,300. We went in with zero unmanned ground systems. We now have 12,000. And the tech term ""killer application"" takes on new meaning in this space.And we need to remember that we're talking about the Model T Fords, the Wright Flyers, compared to what's coming soon. That's where we're at right now. One of the people that I recently met with was an Air Force three-star general, and he said basically, where we're headed very soon is tens of thousands of robots operating in our conflicts, and these numbers matter, because we're not just talking about tens of thousands of today's robots, but tens of thousands of these prototypes and tomorrow's robots, because of course, one of the things that's operating in technology is Moore's Law, that you can pack in more and more computing power into those robots, and so flash forward around 25 years, if Moore's Law holds true, those robots will be close to a billion times more powerful in their computing than today.And so what that means is the kind of things that we used to only talk about at science fiction conventions like Comic-Con have to be talked about in the halls of power and places like the Pentagon. A robots revolution is upon us.Now, I need to be clear here. I'm not talking about a revolution where you have to worry about the Governor of California showing up at your door, a la the Terminator. (Laughter)When historians look at this period, they're going to conclude that we're in a different type of revolution: a revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb. But it may be even bigger than that, because our unmanned systems don't justaffect the ""how"" of war-fighting, they affect the ""who"" of fighting at its most fundamental level. That is, every previous revolution in war, be it the machine gun, be it the atomic bomb, was about a system that either shot faster, went further, had a bigger boom. That's certainly the case with robotics, but they also change the experience of the warrior and even the very identity of the warrior.Another way of putting this is that mankind's 5,000-year-old monopoly on the fighting of war is breaking down in our very lifetime. I've spent the last several years going around meeting with all the players in this field, from the robot scientists to the science fiction authors who inspired them to the 19-year-old drone pilots who are fighting from Nevada, to the four-star generals who command them, to even the Iraqi insurgents who they are targeting and what they think about our systems, and what I found interesting is not just their stories, but how their experiences point to these ripple effects that are going outwards in our society, in our law and our ethics, etc. And so what I'd like to do with my remaining time is basically flesh out a couple of these.So the first is that the future of war, even a robotics one, is not going to be purely an American one. The U.S. is currently ahead in military robotics right now, but we know that in technology there's no such thing as a permanent first move or advantage. In a quick show of hands, how many people in this room still use Wang Computers? (Laughter) It's the same thing in war. The British and the French invented the tank. The Germans figured out how to use it right, and so what we have to think about for the U.S. is that we are ahead right now, but you have 43 other countries out there working on military robotics, and they include all the interesting countries like Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran.And this raises a bigger worry for me. How do we move forward in this revolution given the state of our manufacturing and the state of our science and mathematics training in our schools? Or another way of thinking about this is, what does it mean to go to war increasingly with soldiers whose hardware is made in China and software is written in India?But just as software has gone open-source, so has warfare. Unlike an aircraft carrier or an atomic bomb, you don't need a massive manufacturing system to build robotics. A lot of it is off the shelf. A lot of it's even do-it-yourself. One of those things you just saw flashed before you was a raven drone, the handheld tossed one. For about a thousand dollars, you can build one yourself, equivalent to what the soldiers use in Iraq.That raises another wrinkle when it comes to war and conflict. Good guys might play around and work on these as hobby kits, but so might bad guys. This cross between robotics and things like terrorism is going to be fascinating and even disturbing, and we've already seen it start.During the war between Israel, a state, and Hezbollah, a non-state actor, the non-state actor flew four different drones against Israel. There's already a jihadi website that you can go on and remotely detonate an IED in Iraq while sitting at your home computer.And so I think what we're going to see is two trends take place with this. First is, you're going to reinforce the power of individuals against governments, but then the second is that we are going to see an expansion in the realm of terrorism. The future of it may be a cross between al Qaeda 2.0 and the next generation of the Unabomber. And another way of thinking about this is the fact that, remember, you don't have to convince a robot that they're gonna receive 72 virgins after they die to convince them to blow themselves up.But the ripple effects of this are going to go out into our politics. One of the people that I met with was a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Ronald Reagan, and he put it this way: ""I like these systems because they save American lives, but I worry about more marketization of wars, more shock-and-awe talk, to defray discussion of the costs. People are more likely to support the use of force if they view it as costless.""Robots for me take certain trends that are already in play in our body politic, and maybe take them to their logical ending point. We don't have a draft. We don't have declarations of war anymore. We don't buy war bonds anymore. And now we have the fact that we're converting more and more of our American soldiers that we would send into harm's way into machines, and so we may take those already lowering bars to war and drop them to the ground.But the future of war is also going to be a YouTube war. That is, our new technologies don't merely remove humans from risk. They also record everything that they see. So they don't just delink the public: they reshape its relationship with war. There's already several thousand video clips of combat footage from Iraq on YouTube right now, most of it gathered by drones.Now, this could be a good thing. It could be building connections between the home front and the war front as never before. But remember, this is taking place in our strange, weird world, and so inevitably the ability to download these video clips to, you know, your iPod or your Zune gives you the ability to turn it into entertainment.Soldiers have a name for these clips. They call it war porn. The typical one that I was sent was an email that had an attachment of video of a Predator strike taking out an enemy site. Missile hits, bodies burst into the air with the explosion. It was set to music. It was set to the pop song ""I Just Want To Fly"" by Sugar Ray.This ability to watch more but experience less creates a wrinkle in the public's relationship with war. I think about this with a sports parallel. It's like the difference between watching an NBA game, a professional basketball game on TV, where the athletes are tiny figures on the screen, and being at that basketball game in person and realizing what someone seven feet really does look like.But we have to remember, these are just the clips. These are just the ESPN SportsCenter version of the game. They lose the context. They lose the strategy. They lose the humanity. War just becomes slam dunks and smart bombs.Now the irony of all this is that while the future of war may involve more and more machines, it's our human psychology that's driving all of this, it's our human failings that are leading to these wars.So one example of this that has big resonance in the policy realm is how this plays out on our very real war of ideas that we're fighting against radical groups. What is the message that we think we are sending with these machines versus what is being received in terms of the message.So one of the people that I met was a senior Bush Administration official, who had this to say about our unmanning of war: ""It plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology."" But when you go out and meet with people, for example in Lebanon, it's a very different story. One of the people I met with there was a news editor, and we're talking as a drone is flying above him, and this is what he had to say. ""This is just another sign of the coldhearted cruel Israelis and Americans, who are cowards because they send out machines to fight us. They don't want to fight us like real men, but they're afraid to fight, so we just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them.""The future of war also is featuring a new type of warrior, and it's actually redefining the experience of going to war. You can call this a cubicle warrior. This is what one Predator drone pilot described of his experience fighting in the Iraq War while never leaving Nevada. ""You're going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car and you drive home and within 20 minutes, you're sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.""Now, the psychological balancing of those experiences is incredibly tough, and in fact those drone pilots have higher rates of PTSD than many of the units physically in Iraq. But some have worries that this disconnection will lead to something else, that it might make the contemplation of war crimes a lot easier when you have this distance. ""It's like a video game,"" is what one young pilot described to me of taking out enemy troops from afar. As anyone who's played Grand Theft Auto knows, we do things in the video world that we wouldn't do face to face.So much of what you're hearing from me is that there's another side to technologic revolutions, and that it's shaping our present and maybe will shape our future of war. Moore's Law is operative, but so's Murphy's Law. The fog of war isn't being lifted. The enemy has a vote.We're gaining incredible new capabilities, but we're also seeing and experiencing new human dilemmas. Now, sometimes these are just ""oops"" moments, which is what the head of a robotics company described it, you just have ""oops"" moments. Well, what are ""oops"" moments with robots in war? Well, sometimes they're funny. Sometimes, they're like that scene from the Eddie Murphy movie ""Best Defense,"" playing out in reality, where they tested out a machine gun-armed robot, and during the demonstration it started spinning in a circle and pointed its machine gun at the reviewing stand of VIPs. Fortunately the weapon wasn't loaded and no one was hurt, but other times ""oops"" moments are tragic, such as last year in South Africa, where an anti-aircraft cannon had a ""software glitch,"" and actually did turn on and fired, and nine soldiers were killed.We have new wrinkles in the laws of war and accountability. What do we do with things like unmanned slaughter? What is unmanned slaughter? We've already had three instances of Predator drone strikes where we thought we got bin Laden, and it turned out not to be the case. And this is where we're at right now. This is not even talking about armed, autonomous systems with full authority to use force. And do not believe that that isn't coming. During my research I came across four different Pentagon projects on different aspects of that.And so you have this question: what does this lead to issues like war crimes? Robots are emotionless, so they don't get upset if their buddy is killed. They don't commit crimes of rage and revenge. But robots are emotionless. They see an 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair the same way they see a T-80 tank: they're both just a series of zeroes and ones. And so we have this question to figure out: How do we catch up our 20th century laws of war, that are so old right now that they could qualify for Medicare, to these 21st century technologies?And so, in conclusion, I've talked about what seems the future of war, but notice that I've only used real world examples and you've only seen real world pictures and videos. And so this sets a great challenge for all of us that we have to worry about well before you have to worry about your Roomba sucking the life away from you. Are we going to let the fact that what's unveiling itself right now in war sounds like science fiction and therefore keeps us in denial? Are we going to face the reality of 21st century war? Is our generation going to make the same mistake that a past generation did with atomic weaponry, and not deal with the issues that surround it until Pandora's box is already opened up?Now, I could be wrong on this, and one Pentagon robot scientist told me that I was. He said, ""There's no real social, ethical, moral issues when it comes to robots. That is,"" he added, ""unless the machine kills the wrong people repeatedly. Then it's just a product recall issue.""And so the ending point for this is that actually, we can turn to Hollywood. A few years ago, Hollywood gathered all the top characters and created a list of the top 100 heroes and top 100 villains of all of Hollywood history, the characters that represented the best and worst of humanity. Only one character made it onto both lists: The Terminator, a robot killing machine. And so that points to the fact that our machines can be used for both good and evil, but for me it points to the fact that there's a duality of humans as well.This week is a celebration of our creativity. Our creativity has taken our species to the stars. Our creativity has created works of arts and literature to express our love. And now, we're using our creativity in a certain direction, to build fantastic machines with incredible capabilities, maybe even one day an entirely new species. But one of the main reasons that we're doing that is because of our drive to destroy each other, and so the question we all should ask: is it our machines, or is it us that's wired for war?Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war
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"One thing I wanted to say about film making is — about this film — in thinking about some of the wonderful talks we've heard here, Michael Moschen, and some of the talks about music, this idea that there is a narrative line, and that music exists in time. A film also exists in time; it's an experience that you should go through emotionally. And in making this film I felt that so many of the documentaries I've seen were all about learning something, or knowledge, or driven by talking heads, and driven by ideas. And I wanted this film to be driven by emotions, and really to follow my journey. So instead of doing the talking head thing, instead it's composed of scenes, and we meet people along the way. We only meet them once. They don't come back several times, so it really chronicles a journey. It's something like life, that once you get in it you can't get out.There are two clips I want to show you, the first one is a kind of hodgepodge, its just three little moments, four little moments with three of the people who are here tonight. It's not the way they occur in the film, because they are part of much larger scenes. They play off each other in a wonderful way. And that ends with a little clip of my father, of Lou, talking about something that is very dear to him, which is the accidents of life. I think he felt that the greatest things in life were accidental, and perhaps not planned at all. And those three clips will be followed by a scene of perhaps what, to me, is really his greatest building which is a building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He built the capital over there. And I think you'll enjoy this building, it's never been seen — it's been still photographed, but never photographed by a film crew. We were the first film crew in there.So you'll see images of this remarkable building. A couple of things to keep in mind when you see it, it was built entirely by hand, I think they got a crane the last year. It was built entirely by hand off bamboo scaffolding, people carrying these baskets of concrete on their heads, dumping them in the forms. It is the capital of the country, and it took 23 years to build, which is something they seem to be very proud of over there. It took as long as the Taj Mahal. Unfortunately it took so long that Lou never saw it finished. He died in 1974. The building was finished in 1983. So it continued on for many years after he died. Think about that when you see that building, that sometimes the things we strive for so hard in life we never get to see finished.And that really struck me about my father, in the sense that he had such belief that somehow, doing these things giving in the way that he gave, that something good would come out of it, even in the middle of a war, there was a war with Pakistan at one point, and the construction stopped totally and he kept working, because he felt, ""Well when the war is done they'll need this building."" So, those are the two clips I'm going to show. Roll that tape. (Applause)Richard Saul Wurman: I remember hearing him talk at Penn. And I came home and I said to my father and mother, ""I just met this man: doesn't have much work, and he's sort of ugly, funny voice, and he's a teacher at school. I know you've never heard of him, but just mark this day that someday you will hear of him, because he's really an amazing man.""Frank Gehry: I heard he had some kind of a fling with Ingrid Bergman. Is that true?Nathaniel Kahn: If he did he was a very lucky man.(Laughter)NK: Did you hear that, really?FG: Yeah, when he was in Rome.Moshe Safdie: He was a real nomad. And you know, when I knew him when I was in the office, he would come in from a trip, and he would be in the office for two or three days intensely, and he would pack up and go. You know he'd be in the office till three in the morning working with us and there was this kind of sense of the nomad in him. I mean as tragic as his death was in a railway station, it was so consistent with his life, you know? I mean I often think I'm going to die in a plane, or I'm going to die in an airport, or die jogging without an identification on me. I don't know why I sort of carry that from that memory of the way he died. But he was a sort of a nomad at heart.Louis Kahn: How accidental our existences are really and how full of influence by circumstance.Man: We are the morning workers who come, all the time, here and enjoy the walking, city's beauty and the atmosphere and this is the nicest place of Bangladesh. We are proud of it.NK: You're proud of it?Man: Yes, it is the national image of Bangladesh.NK: Do you know anything about the architect?Man: Architect? I've heard about him; he's a top-ranking architect.NK: Well actually I'm here because I'm the architect's son, he was my father.Man: Oh! Dad is Louis Farrakhan?NK: Yeah. No not Louis Farrakhan, Louis Kahn.Man: Louis Kahn, yes!(Laughter)Man: Your father, is he alive?NK: No, he's been dead for 25 years.Man: Very pleased to welcome you back.NK: Thank you.NK: He never saw it finished, Pop. No, he never saw this.Shamsul Wares: It was almost impossible, building for a country like ours. In 30, 50 years back, it was nothing, only paddy fields, and since we invited him here, he felt that he has got a responsibility. He wanted to be a Moses here, he gave us democracy. He is not a political man, but in this guise he has given us the institution for democracy, from where we can rise. In that way it is so relevant. He didn't care for how much money this country has, or whether he would be able to ever finish this building, but somehow he has been able to do it, build it, here. And this is the largest project he has got in here, the poorest country in the world.NK: It cost him his life.SW: Yeah, he paid. He paid his life for this, and that is why he is great and we'll remember him. But he was also human. Now his failure to satisfy the family life, is an inevitable association of great people. But I think his son will understand this, and will have no sense of grudge, or sense of being neglected, I think. He cared in a very different manner, but it takes a lot of time to understand that. In social aspect of his life he was just like a child, he was not at all matured. He could not say no to anything, and that is why, that he cannot say no to things, we got this building today. You see, only that way you can be able to understand him. There is no other shortcut, no other way to really understand him. But I think he has given us this building and we feel all the time for him, that's why, he has given love for us. He could not probably give the right kind of love for you, but for us, he has given the people the right kind of love, that is important. You have to understand that. He had an enormous amount of love, he loved everybody. To love everybody, he sometimes did not see the very closest ones, and that is inevitable for men of his stature.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathaniel_kahn_on_my_architect
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"What I'm going to try to do is explain to you quickly how to predict, and illustrate it with some predictions about what Iran is going to do in the next couple of years.In order to predict effectively, we need to use science. And the reason that we need to use science is because then we can reproduce what we're doing; it's not just wisdom or guesswork. And if we can predict, then we can engineer the future. So if you are concerned to influence energy policy, or you are concerned to influence national security policy, or health policy, or education, science — and a particular branch of science — is a way to do it, not the way we've been doing it, which is seat-of-the-pants wisdom.Now before I get into how to do it let me give you a little truth in advertising, because I'm not engaged in the business of magic. There are lots of thing that the approach I take can predict, and there are some that it can't. It can predict complex negotiations or situations involving coercion — that is in essence everything that has to do with politics, much of what has to do with business, but sorry, if you're looking to speculate in the stock market, I don't predict stock markets — OK, it's not going up any time really soon. But I'm not engaged in doing that. I'm not engaged in predicting random number generators. I actually get phone calls from people who want to know what lottery numbers are going to win. I don't have a clue.I engage in the use of game theory, game theory is a branch of mathematics and that means, sorry, that even in the study of politics, math has come into the picture. We can no longer pretend that we just speculate about politics, we need to look at this in a rigorous way. Now, what is game theory about? It assumes that people are looking out for what's good for them. That doesn't seem terribly shocking — although it's controversial for a lot of people — that we are self-interested. In order to look out for what's best for them or what they think is best for them, people have values — they identify what they want, and what they don't want. And they have beliefs about what other people want, and what other people don't want, how much power other people have, how much those people could get in the way of whatever it is that you want. And they face limitations, constraints, they may be weak, they may be located in the wrong part of the world, they may be Einstein, stuck away farming someplace in a rural village in India not being noticed, as was the case for Ramanujan for a long time, a great mathematician but nobody noticed.Now who is rational? A lot of people are worried about what is rationality about? You know, what if people are rational? Mother Theresa, she was rational. Terrorists, they're rational. Pretty much everybody is rational. I think there are only two exceptions that I'm aware of — two-year-olds, they are not rational, they have very fickle preferences, they switch what they think all the time, and schizophrenics are probably not rational, but pretty much everybody else is rational. That is, they are just trying to do what they think is in their own best interest.Now in order to work out what people are going to do to pursue their interests, we have to think about who has influence in the world. If you're trying to influence corporations to change their behavior, with regard to producing pollutants, one approach, the common approach, is to exhort them to be better, to explain to them what damage they're doing to the planet. And many of you may have noticed that doesn't have as big an effect, as perhaps you would like it to have. But if you show them that it's in their interest, then they're responsive.So, we have to work out who influences problems. If we're looking at Iran, the president of the United States we would like to think, may have some influence — certainly the president in Iran has some influence — but we make a mistake if we just pay attention to the person at the top of the power ladder because that person doesn't know much about Iran, or about energy policy, or about health care, or about any particular policy. That person surrounds himself or herself with advisers. If we're talking about national security problems, maybe it's the Secretary of State, maybe it's the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, maybe the ambassador to the United Nations, or somebody else who they think is going to know more about the particular problem. But let's face it, the Secretary of State doesn't know much about Iran. The secretary of defense doesn't know much about Iran. Each of those people in turn has advisers who advise them, so they can advise the president. There are lots of people shaping decisions and so if we want to predict correctly we have to pay attention to everybody who is trying to shape the outcome, not just the people at the pinnacle of the decision-making pyramid.Unfortunately, a lot of times we don't do that. There's a good reason that we don't do that, and there's a good reason that using game theory and computers, we can overcome the limitation of just looking at a few people. Imagine a problem with just five decision-makers. Imagine for example that Sally over here, wants to know what Harry, and Jane, and George and Frank are thinking, and sends messages to those people. Sally's giving her opinion to them, and they're giving their opinion to Sally. But Sally also wants to know what Harry is saying to these three, and what they're saying to Harry. And Harry wants to know what each of those people are saying to each other, and so on, and Sally would like to know what Harry thinks those people are saying. That's a complicated problem; that's a lot to know. With five decision-makers there are a lot of linkages — 120, as a matter of fact, if you remember your factorials. Five factorial is 120. Now you may be surprised to know that smart people can keep 120 things straight in their head. Suppose we double the number of influencers from five to 10. Does that mean we've doubled the number of pieces of information we need to know, from 120 to 240? No. How about 10 times? To 1,200? No. We've increased it to 3.6 million. Nobody can keep that straight in their head. But computers, they can. They don't need coffee breaks, they don't need vacations, they don't need to go to sleep at night, they don't ask for raises either. They can keep this information straight and that means that we can process the information.So I'm going to talk to you about how to process it, and I'm going to give you some examples out of Iran, and you're going to be wondering, ""Why should we listen to this guy? Why should we believe what he's saying?"" So I'm going to show you a factoid. This is an assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency of the percentage of time that the model I'm talking about is right in predicting things whose outcome is not yet known, when the experts who provided the data inputs got it wrong. That's not my claim, that's a CIA claim — you can read it, it was declassified a while ago. You can read it in a volume edited by H. Bradford Westerfield, Yale University Press.So, what do we need to know in order to predict? You may be surprised to find out we don't need to know very much. We do need to know who has a stake in trying to shape the outcome of a decision. We need to know what they say they want, not what they want in their heart of hearts, not what they think they can get, but what they say they want, because that is a strategically chosen position, and we can work backwards from that to draw inferences about important features of their decision-making. We need to know how focused they are on the problem at hand. That is, how willing are they to drop what they're doing when the issue comes up, and attend to it instead of something else that's on their plate — how big a deal is it to them? And how much clout could they bring to bear if they chose to engage on the issue?If we know those things we can predict their behavior by assuming that everybody cares about two things on any decision. They care about the outcome. They'd like an outcome as close to what they are interested in as possible. They're careerists, they also care about getting credit — there's ego involvement, they want to be seen as important in shaping the outcome, or as important, if it's their druthers, to block an outcome. And so we have to figure out how they balance those two things. Different people trade off between standing by their outcome, faithfully holding to it, going down in a blaze of glory, or giving it up, putting their finger in the wind, and doing whatever they think is going to be a winning position. Most people fall in between, and if we can work out where they fall we can work out how to negotiate with them to change their behavior.So with just that little bit of input we can work out what the choices are that people have, what the chances are that they're willing to take, what they're after, what they value, what they want, and what they believe about other people. You might notice what we don't need to know: there's no history in here. How they got to where they are may be important in shaping the input information, but once we know where they are we're worried about where they're going to be headed in the future. How they got there turns out not to be terribly critical in predicting. I remind you of that 90 percent accuracy rate.So where are we going to get this information? We can get this information from the Internet, from The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, lots of sources like that, or we can get it from asking experts who spend their lives studying places and problems, because those experts know this information. If they don't know, who are the people trying to influence the decision, how much clout do they have, how much they care about this issue, and what do they say they want, are they experts? That's what it means to be an expert, that's the basic stuff an expert needs to know.Alright, lets turn to Iran. Let me make three important predictions — you can check this out, time will tell. What is Iran going to do about its nuclear weapons program? How secure is the theocratic regime in Iran? What's its future? And everybody's best friend, Ahmadinejad. How are things going for him? How are things going to be working out for him in the next year or two? You take a look at this, this is not based on statistics. I want to be very clear here. I'm not projecting some past data into the future. I've taken inputs on positions and so forth, run it through a computer model that had simulated the dynamics of interaction, and these are the simulated dynamics, the predictions about the path of policy.So you can see here on the vertical axis, I haven't shown it all the way down to zero, there are lots of other options, but here I'm just showing you the prediction, so I've narrowed the scale. Up at the top of the axis, ""Build the Bomb."" At 130, we start somewhere above 130, between building a bomb, and making enough weapons-grade fuel so that you could build a bomb. That's where, according to my analyses, the Iranians were at the beginning of this year. And then the model makes predictions down the road. At 115 they would only produce enough weapons grade fuel to show that they know how, but they wouldn't build a weapon: they would build a research quantity. It would achieve some national pride, but not go ahead and build a weapon. And down at 100 they would build civilian nuclear energy, which is what they say is their objective.The yellow line shows us the most likely path. The yellow line includes an analysis of 87 decision makers in Iran, and a vast number of outside influencers trying to pressure Iran into changing its behavior, various players in the United States, and Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, European Union, Japan, so on and so forth. The white line reproduces the analysis if the international environment just left Iran to make its own internal decisions, under its own domestic political pressures. That's not going to be happening, but you can see that the line comes down faster if they're not put under international pressure, if they're allowed to pursue their own devices.But in any event, by the end of this year, beginning of next year, we get to a stable equilibrium outcome. And that equilibrium is not what the United States would like, but it's probably an equilibrium that the United States can live with, and that a lot of others can live with. And that is that Iran will achieve that nationalist pride by making enough weapons-grade fuel, through research, so that they could show that they know how to make weapons-grade fuel, but not enough to actually build a bomb. How is this happening? Over here you can see this is the distribution of power in favor of civilian nuclear energy today, this is what that power block is predicted to be like by the late parts of 2010, early parts of 2011. Just about nobody supports research on weapons-grade fuel today, but by 2011 that gets to be a big block, and you put these two together, that's the controlling influence in Iran.Out here today, there are a bunch of people — Ahmadinejad for example — who would like not only to build a bomb, but test a bomb. That power disappears completely; nobody supports that by 2011. These guys are all shrinking, the power is all drifting out here, so the outcome is going to be the weapons-grade fuel.Who are the winners and who are the losers in Iran? Take a look at these guys, they're growing in power, and by the way, this was done a while ago before the current economic crisis, and that's probably going to get steeper. These folks are the moneyed interests in Iran, the bankers, the oil people, the bazaaries. They are growing in political clout, as the mullahs are isolating themselves — with the exception of one group of mullahs, who are not well known to Americans. That's this line here, growing in power, these are what the Iranians call the quietists. These are the Ayatollahs, mostly based in Qom, who have great clout in the religious community, have been quiet on politics and are going to be getting louder, because they see Iran going in an unhealthy direction, a direction contrary to what Khomeini had in mind. Here is Mr. Ahmadinejad. Two things to notice: he's getting weaker, and while he gets a lot of attention in the United States, he is not a major player in Iran. He is on the way down.OK, so I'd like you to take a little away from this. Everything is not predictable: the stock market is, at least for me, not predictable, but most complicated negotiations are predictable. Again, whether we're talking health policy, education, environment, energy, litigation, mergers, all of these are complicated problems that are predictable, that this sort of technology can be applied to. And the reason that being able to predict those things is important, is not just because you might run a hedge fund and make money off of it, but because if you can predict what people will do, you can engineer what they will do. And if you engineer what they do you can change the world, you can get a better result. I would like to leave you with one thought, which is for me, the dominant theme of this gathering, and is the dominant theme of this way of thinking about the world. When people say to you, ""That's impossible,"" you say back to them, ""When you say 'That's impossible,' you're confused with, 'I don't know how to do it.'"" Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: One question for you. That was fascinating. I love that you put it out there. I got very nervous halfway through the talk though, just panicking whether you'd included in your model, the possibility that putting this prediction out there might change the result. We've got 800 people in Tehran who watch TEDTalks.Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: I've thought about that, and since I've done a lot of work for the intelligence community, they've also pondered that. It would be a good thing if people paid more attention, took seriously, and engaged in the same sorts of calculations, because it would change things. But it would change things in two beneficial ways. It would hasten how quickly people arrive at an agreement, and so it would save everybody a lot of grief and time. And, it would arrive at an agreement that everybody was happy with, without having to manipulate them so much — which is basically what I do, I manipulate them. So it would be a good thing.CA: So you're kind of trying to say, ""People of Iran, this is your destiny, lets go there.""BBM: Well, people of Iran, this is what many of you are going to evolve to want, and we could get there a lot sooner, and you would suffer a lot less trouble from economic sanctions, and we would suffer a lot less fear of the use of military force on our end, and the world would be a better place.CA: Here's hoping they hear it that way. Thank you very much Bruce.BBM: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future
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"Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth. They've been here for billions of years, and what they are are single-celled microscopic organisms. So they are one cell and they have this special property that they only have one piece of DNA. They have very few genes, and genetic information to encode all of the traits that they carry out. And the way bacteria make a living is that they consume nutrients from the environment, they grow to twice their size, they cut themselves down in the middle, and one cell becomes two, and so on and so on. They just grow and divide, and grow and divide — so a kind of boring life, except that what I would argue is that you have an amazing interaction with these critters.I know you guys think of yourself as humans, and this is sort of how I think of you. This man is supposed to represent a generic human being, and all of the circles in that man are all of the cells that make up your body. There is about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are and able to do all the things that we do, but you have 10 trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life. So, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being. And of course it's the DNA that counts, so here's all the A, T, Gs and Cs that make up your genetic code, and give you all your charming characteristics. You have about 30,000 genes. Well it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life. At the best, you're 10 percent human, but more likely about one percent human, depending on which of these metrics you like. I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial.(Laughter)These bacteria are not passive riders, these are incredibly important, they keep us alive. They cover us in an invisible body armor that keeps environmental insults out so that we stay healthy. They digest our food, they make our vitamins, they actually educate your immune system to keep bad microbes out. So they do all these amazing things that help us and are vital for keeping us alive, and they never get any press for that. But they get a lot of press because they do a lot of terrible things as well. So, there's all kinds of bacteria on the Earth that have no business being in you or on you at any time, and if they are, they make you incredibly sick.And so, the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do, or all the bad things that bacteria do. The question we had is how could they do anything at all? I mean they're incredibly small, you have to have a microscope to see one. They live this sort of boring life where they grow and divide, and they've always been considered to be these asocial reclusive organisms. And so it seemed to us that they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals. And so we wanted to think if there couldn't be a different way that bacteria live.The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri. What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri. This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence, like fireflies make light. We're not doing anything to the cells here. We just took the picture by turning the lights off in the room, and this is what we see.What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light, but when the bacteria made light. What we noticed is when the bacteria were alone, so when they were in dilute suspension, they made no light. But when they grew to a certain cell number all the bacteria turned on light simultaneously. The question that we had is how can bacteria, these primitive organisms, tell the difference from times when they're alone, and times when they're in a community, and then all do something together. What we've figured out is that the way that they do that is that they talk to each other, and they talk with a chemical language.This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell. When it's alone it doesn't make any light. But what it does do is to make and secrete small molecules that you can think of like hormones, and these are the red triangles, and when the bacteria is alone the molecules just float away and so no light. But when the bacteria grow and double and they're all participating in making these molecules, the molecule — the extracellular amount of that molecule increases in proportion to cell number. And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony. That's how bioluminescence works — they're talking with these chemical words.The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology. Again, another plug for the animals in the ocean, Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid. What you are looking at is the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and it's been turned on its back, and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes and these house the Vibrio fischeri cells, they live in there, at high cell number that molecule is there, and they're making light. The reason the squid is willing to put up with these shenanigans is because it wants that light. The way that this symbiosis works is that this little squid lives just off the coast of Hawaii, just in sort of shallow knee-deep water. The squid is nocturnal, so during the day it buries itself in the sand and sleeps, but then at night it has to come out to hunt. On bright nights when there is lots of starlight or moonlight that light can penetrate the depth of the water the squid lives in, since it's just in those couple feet of water. What the squid has developed is a shutter that can open and close over this specialized light organ housing the bacteria. Then it has detectors on its back so it can sense how much starlight or moonlight is hitting its back. And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom — which is made by the bacterium — exactly matches how much light hits the squid's back, so the squid doesn't make a shadow. It actually uses the light from the bacteria to counter-illuminate itself in an anti-predation device so predators can't see its shadow, calculate its trajectory, and eat it. This is like the stealth bomber of the ocean.(Laughter)But then if you think about it, the squid has this terrible problem because it's got this dying, thick culture of bacteria and it can't sustain that. And so what happens is every morning when the sun comes up the squid goes back to sleep, it buries itself in the sand, and it's got a pump that's attached to its circadian rhythm, and when the sun comes up it pumps out like 95 percent of the bacteria. Now the bacteria are dilute, that little hormone molecule is gone, so they're not making light — but of course the squid doesn't care. It's asleep in the sand. And as the day goes by the bacteria double, they release the molecule, and then light comes on at night, exactly when the squid wants it.First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism. And what we found — so this is now supposed to be, again, my bacterial cell — is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein — that's the red box — it's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule, the red triangle. And then as the cells grow, they're all releasing that molecule into the environment, so there's lots of molecule there. And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule. These are just like the receptors on the surfaces of your cells. When the molecule increases to a certain amount — which says something about the number of cells — it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light.Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow-in-the-dark bacterium that lives in the ocean — all bacteria have systems like this. So now what we understand is that all bacteria can talk to each other. They make chemical words, they recognize those words, and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison. We have a fancy name for this: we call it quorum sensing. They vote with these chemical votes, the vote gets counted, and then everybody responds to the vote.What's important for today's talk is that we know that there are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in these collective fashions. But the one that's probably the most important to you is virulence. It's not like a couple bacteria get in you and they start secreting some toxins — you're enormous, that would have no effect on you. You're huge. What they do, we now understand, is they get in you, they wait, they start growing, they count themselves with these little molecules, and they recognize when they have the right cell number that if all of the bacteria launch their virulence attack together, they are going to be successful at overcoming an enormous host. Bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. That's how it works.We also then went to look at what are these molecules — these were the red triangles on my slides before. This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule. This is the word that it talks with. So then we started to look at other bacteria, and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we've discovered. What I hope you can see is that the molecules are related. The left-hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria. But the right-hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species. What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages. Each molecule fits into its partner receptor and no other. So these are private, secret conversations. These conversations are for intraspecies communication. Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that's its language that allows it to count its own siblings.Once we got that far we thought we were starting to understand that bacteria have these social behaviors. But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time bacteria don't live by themselves, they live in incredible mixtures, with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria. And that's depicted on this slide. This is your skin. So this is just a picture — a micrograph of your skin. Anywhere on your body, it looks pretty much like this, and what I hope you can see is that there's all kinds of bacteria there. And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species. There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population.So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual. They all have a species-specific system — they have a molecule that says ""me."" But then, running in parallel to that is a second system that we've discovered, that's generic. So, they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal and it has its own receptor, and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria. It's used by all different bacteria and it's the language of interspecies communication. What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you. They take that information inside, and they decide what tasks to carry out depending on who's in the minority and who's in the majority of any given population.Then again we turn to chemistry, and we figured out what this generic molecule is — that was the pink ovals on my last slide, this is it. It's a very small, five-carbon molecule. What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule. So they're all using this molecule for interspecies communication. This is the bacterial Esperanto.(Laughter)Once we got that far, we started to learn that bacteria can talk to each other with this chemical language. But what we started to think is that maybe there is something practical that we can do here as well. I've told you that bacteria do have all these social behaviors, they communicate with these molecules. Of course, I've also told you that one of the important things they do is to initiate pathogenicity using quorum sensing. We thought, what if we made these bacteria so they can't talk or they can't hear? Couldn't these be new kinds of antibiotics?Of course, you've just heard and you already know that we're running out of antibiotics. Bacteria are incredibly multi-drug-resistant right now, and that's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria. They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA. We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics and that selects for resistant mutants. And so now of course we have this global problem in infectious diseases. We thought, well what if we could sort of do behavior modifications, just make these bacteria so they can't talk, they can't count, and they don't know to launch virulence.And so that's exactly what we've done, and we've sort of taken two strategies. The first one is we've targeted the intraspecies communication system. So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules — which you saw — but they're a little bit different. And so they lock into those receptors, and they jam recognition of the real thing. By targeting the red system, what we are able to do is to make species-specific, or disease-specific, anti-quorum sensing molecules. We've also done the same thing with the pink system. We've taken that universal molecule and turned it around a little bit so that we've made antagonists of the interspecies communication system. The hope is that these will be used as broad-spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria.To finish I'll just show you the strategy. In this one I'm just using the interspecies molecule, but the logic is exactly the same. What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal, in this case, a mouse, it doesn't initiate virulence right away. It gets in, it starts growing, it starts secreting its quorum sensing molecules. It recognizes when it has enough bacteria that now they're going to launch their attack, and the animal dies. What we've been able to do is to give these virulent infections, but we give them in conjunction with our anti-quorum sensing molecules — so these are molecules that look kind of like the real thing, but they're a little bit different which I've depicted on this slide. What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium — a multi-drug-resistant pathogenic bacterium — in the same time we give our anti-quorum sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives.We think that this is the next generation of antibiotics and it's going to get us around, at least initially, this big problem of resistance. What I hope you think, is that bacteria can talk to each other, they use chemicals as their words, they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we're just now starting to learn about. Of course what that allows bacteria to do is to be multicellular. So in the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference. What happens is that bacteria have these collective behaviors, and they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals.What I would hope that I could further argue to you is that this is the invention of multicellularity. Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years; humans, couple hundred thousand. We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works. We think, by studying bacteria, we're going to be able to have insight about multicellularity in the human body. We know that the principles and the rules, if we can figure them out in these sort of primitive organisms, the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well. I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other. By using these two molecules they can say ""me"" and they can say ""you."" Again of course that's what we do, both in a molecular way, and also in an outward way, but I think about the molecular stuff.This is exactly what happens in your body. It's not like your heart cells and your kidney cells get all mixed up every day, and that's because there's all of this chemistry going on, these molecules that say who each of these groups of cells is, and what their tasks should be. Again, we think that bacteria invented that, and you've just evolved a few more bells and whistles, but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study.The final thing is, again just to reiterate that there's this practical part, and so we've made these anti-quorum sensing molecules that are being developed as new kinds of therapeutics. But then, to finish with a plug for all the good and miraculous bacteria that live on the Earth, we've also made pro-quorum sensing molecules. So, we've targeted those systems to make the molecules work better. Remember you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you, keeping you healthy. What we're also trying to do is to beef up the conversation of the bacteria that live as mutualists with you, in the hopes of making you more healthy, making those conversations better, so bacteria can do things that we want them to do better than they would be on their own.Finally, I wanted to show you this is my gang at Princeton, New Jersey. Everything I told you about was discovered by someone in that picture. I hope when you learn things, like about how the natural world works — I just want to say that whenever you read something in the newspaper or you get to hear some talk about something ridiculous in the natural world it was done by a child. Science is done by that demographic. All of those people are between 20 and 30 years old, and they are the engine that drives scientific discovery in this country. It's a really lucky demographic to work with. I keep getting older and older and they're always the same age, and it's just a crazy delightful job. I want to thank you for inviting me here. It's a big treat for me to get to come to this conference.(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate
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"I am going to talk about myself, which I rarely do, because I — well for one thing, I prefer to talk about things I know nothing about. And secondly, I'm a recovering narcissist. (Laughter) I didn't know I was a narcissist actually. I thought narcissism meant you loved yourself. And then someone told me there is a flip side to it. So it's actually drearier than self-love; it's unrequited self-love. (Laughter) I don't feel I can afford a relapse.But I want to, though, explain how I came to design my own particular brand of comedy because I've been through so many different forms of it. I started with improvisation, in a particular form of improvisation called theater games, which had one rule, which I always thought was a great rule for an ethic for a society. And the rule was, you couldn't deny the other person's reality, you could only build on it.And of course we live in a society that's all about contradicting other peoples' reality. It's all about contradiction, which I think is why I'm so sensitive to contradiction in general. I see it everywhere. Like polls. You know, it's always curious to me that in public opinion polls the percentage of Americans who don't know the answer to any given question is always two percent. 75 percent of Americans think Alaska is part of Canada. But only two percent don't know the effect that the debacle in Argentina will have on the IMF's monetary policy — (Laughter) seems a contradiction. Or this ad that I read in the New York Times: ""Wearing a fine watch speaks loudly of your rank in society. Buying it from us screams good taste."" (Laughter) Or this that I found in a magazine called California Lawyer, in an article that is surely meant for the lawyers at Enron. ""Surviving the Slammer: Do's and Don'ts."" (Laughter) ""Don't use big words."" (Laughter) ""Learn the lingua franca."" (Laughter) Yeah. ""Lingua this, Frankie.""(Laughter)And I suppose it's a contradiction that I talk about science when I don't know math. You know, because — and by the way to I was so grateful to Dean Kamen for pointing out that one of the reasons, that there are cultural reasons that women and minorities don't enter the fields of science and technology — because for instance, the reason I don't do math is, I was taught to do math and read at the same time. So you're six years old, you're reading Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and it becomes rapidly obvious that there are only two kinds of men in the world: dwarves and Prince Charmings. And the odds are seven to one against your finding the prince. (Laughter) That's why little girls don't do math. It's too depressing.(Laughter)Of course, by talking about science I also may, as I did the other night, incur the violent wrath of some scientists who were very upset with me. I used the word postmodern as if it were OK. And they got very upset. One of them, to his credit, I think really just wanted to engage me in a serious argument. But I don't engage in serious arguments. I don't approve of them because arguments, of course, are all about contradiction, and they're shaped by the values that I have questions with.I have questions with the values of Newtonian science, like rationality. You're supposed to be rational in an argument. Well rationality is constructed by what Christie Hefner was talking about today, that mind-body split, you know? The head is good, body bad. Head is ego, body id. When we say ""I,"" — as when Rene Descartes said, ""I think therefore I am,"" — we mean the head. And as David Lee Roth sang in ""Just a Gigolo,"" ""I ain't got no body."" That's how you get rationality. And that's why so much of humor is the body asserting itself against the head. That's why you have toilet humor and sexual humor. That's why you have the Raspyni Brothers whacking Richard in the genital area. And we're laughing doubly then because he's the body, but it's also —Voice offstage: Richard.Emily Levine: Richard. What did I say? (Laughter) Richard. Yes but it's also the head, the head of the conference.That's the other way that humor — like Art Buchwald takes shots at the heads of state. It doesn't make quite as much money as body humor I'm sure — (Laughter) but nevertheless, what makes us treasure you and adore you.There's also a contradiction in rationality in this country though, which is, as much as we revere the head, we are very anti-intellectual. I know this because I read in the New York Times, the Ayn Rand foundation took out a full-page ad after September 11, in which they said, ""The problem is not Iraq or Iran, the problem in this country, facing this country is the university professors and their spawn."" (Laughter) So I went back and re-read ""The Fountainhead."" (Laughter) I don't know how many of you have read it. And I'm not an expert on sadomasochism. (Laughter) But let me just read you a couple of random passages from page 217.""The act of a master taking painful contemptuous possession of her, was the kind of rapture she wanted. When they lay together in bed it was, as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded, an act of violence. It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred. It was the unendurable. Not a caress, but a wave of pain. The agony as an act of passion.""So you can imagine my surprise on reading in The New Yorker that Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, claims Ayn Rand as his intellectual mentor. (Laughter) It's like finding out your nanny is a dominatrix. (Laughter) Bad enough we had to see J. Edgar Hoover in a dress. Now we have to picture Alan Greenspan in a black leather corset, with a butt tattoo that says, ""Whip inflation now.""(Laughter)And Ayn Rand of course, Ayn Rand is famous for a philosophy called Objectivism, which reflects another value of Newtonian physics, which is objectivity. Objectivity basically is constructed in that same S&M way. It's the subject subjugating the object. That's how you assert yourself. You make yourself the active voice. And the object is the passive no-voice.I was so fascinated by that Oxygen commercial. I don't know if you know this but — maybe it's different now, or maybe you were making a statement — but in many hospital nurseries across the country, until very recently anyway, according to a book by Jessica Benjamin, the signs over the little boys cribs read, ""I'm a boy,"" and the signs over the little girls cribs read, ""It's a girl."" Yeah. So the passivity was culturally projected onto the little girls.And this still goes on as I think I told you last year. There's a poll that proves — there was a poll that was given by Time magazine, in which only men were asked, ""Have you ever had sex with a woman you actively disliked?"" And well, yeah. Well, 58 percent said yes, which I think is overinflated though because so many men if you just say, ""Have you ever had sex ... "" ""Yes!"" They don't even wait for the rest of it. (Laughter) And of course two percent did not know whether they'd had — (Laughter) That's the first callback, of my attempted quadruple.(Laughter)So this subject-object thing, is part of something I'm very interested in because this is why, frankly, I believe in political correctness. I do. I think it can go too far. I think Ringling Brothers may have gone too far with an ad they took out in the New York Times Magazine. ""We have a lifelong emotional and financial commitment to our Asian Elephant partners."" (Laughter) Maybe too far. But you know — I don't think that a person of color making fun of white people is the same thing as a white person making fun of people of color. Or women making fun of men is the same as men making fun of women. Or poor people making fun of rich people, the same as rich people.I think you can make fun of the have but not the have-nots, which is why you don't see me making fun of Kenneth Lay and his charming wife. (Laughter) What's funny about being down to four houses? (Laughter) And I really learned this lesson during the sex scandals of the Clinton administration or, Or as I call them, the good ol' days. (Laughter) When people I knew, you know, people who considered themselves liberal, and everything else, were making fun of Jennifer Flowers and Paula Jones. Basically, they were making fun of them for being trailer trash or white trash. It seems, I suppose, a harmless prejudice and that you're not really hurting anybody. Until you read, as I did, an ad in the Los Angeles Times. ""For sale: White trash compactor."" (Laughter)So this whole subject-object thing has relevance to humor in this way. I read a book by a woman named Amy Richlin, who is the chair of the Classics department at USC. And the book is called ""The Garden of Priapus."" And she says that Roman humor mirrors the construction of Roman society. So that Roman society was very top/bottom, as ours is to some degree. And so was humor. There always had to be the butt of a joke. So it was always the satirist, like Juvenal or Martial, represented the audience, and he was going to make fun of the outsider, the person who didn't share that subject status.And in stand-up of course, the stand-up comedian is supposed to dominate the audience. A lot of heckling is the tension of trying to make sure that the comedian is going to be able to dominate, and overcome the heckler. And I got good at that when I was in stand up. But I always hated it because they were dictating the terms of the interaction, in the same way that engaging in a serious argument determines the content, to some degree, of what you're talking about. And I was looking for a form that didn't have that. And so I wanted something that was more interactive. I know that word is so debased now by the use of it by Internet marketers.I really miss the old telemarketers now, I'll tell you that. (Laughter) I do, because at least there you stood a chance. You know? I used to actually hang up on them. But then I read in ""Dear Abby"" that that was rude. So the next time that one called I let him get halfway through his spiel and then I said, ""You sound sexy."" (Laughter) He hung up on me!(Laughter)But the interactivity allows the audience to shape what you're going to do as much as you shape their experience of the world. And that's really what I'm looking for. And I was sort of, as I was starting to analyze what exactly it is that I do, I read a book called ""Trickster Makes This World,"" by Lewis Hyde. And it was like being psychoanalyzed. I mean he had laid it all out. And then coming to this conference, I realized that most everybody here shared those same qualities because really what trickster is is an agent of change. Trickster is a change agent. And the qualities that I'm about to describe are the qualities that make it possible to make change happen. And one of these is boundary crossing. I think this is what so, in fact, infuriated the scientists. But I like to cross boundaries. I like to, as I said, talk about things I know nothing about.(Phone Ringing)I hope that's my agent, because you aren't paying me anything.(Laughter)And I think it's good to talk about things I know nothing about because I bring a fresh viewpoint to it, you know? I'm able to see the contradiction that you may not be able to see. Like for instance a mime once — or a meme as he called himself. He was a very selfish meme. And he said that I had to show more respect because it took up to 18 years to learn how to do mime properly. And I said, ""Well, that's how you know only stupid people go into it."" (Laughter) It only takes two years to learn how to talk.(Laughter)(Applause)And you know people, this is the problem with quote, objectivity, unquote. When you're only surrounded by people who speak the same vocabulary as you, or share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that that's reality. Like economists, you know, their definition of rational, that we all act out of our own economic self-interest. Well, look at Michael Hawley, or look at Dean Kamen, or look at my grandmother.My grandmother always acted in other people's interests, whether they wanted her to or not. (Laughter) If they had had an Olympics in martyrdom, my grandmother would have lost on purpose. (Laughter) ""No, you take the prize. You're young. I'm old. Who's going to see it? Where am I going? I'm going to die soon.""(Laughter)So that's one — this boundary crossing, this go-between which — Fritz Lanting, is that his name, actually said that he was a go-between. That's an actual quality of the trickster. And another is, non-oppositional strategies. And this is instead of contradiction. Where you deny the other person's reality, you have paradox where you allow more than one reality to coexist,I think there's another philosophical construction. I'm not sure what it's called. But my example of it is a sign that I saw in a jewelry store. It said, ""Ears pierced while you wait."" (Laughter) There the alternative just boggles the imagination. (Laughter) ""Oh no. Thanks though, I'll leave them here. Thanks very much. I have some errands to run. So I'll be back to pick them up around five, if that's OK with you. Huh? Huh? What? Can't hear you.""(Laughter)And another attribute of the trickster is smart luck. That accidents, that Louis Kahn, who talked about accidents, this is another quality of the trickster. The trickster has a mind that is prepared for the unprepared. That, and I will say this to the scientists, that the trickster has the ability to hold his ideas lightly so that he can let room in for new ideas or to see the contradictions or the hidden problems with his ideas. I had no joke for that. I just wanted to put the scientists in their place. (Laughter)But here's how I think I like to make change, and that is in making connections. This is what I tend to see almost more than contradictions. Like the, what do you call those toes of the gecko? You know, the toes of the gecko, curling and uncurling like the fingers of Michael Moschen. I love connections.Like I'll read that one of the two attributes of matter in the Newtonian universe — there are two attributes of matter in the Newtonian universe — one is space occupancy. Matter takes up space. I guess the more you matter the more space you take up, which explains the whole SUV phenomenon. (Laughter) And the other one though is impenetrability.Well, in ancient Rome, impenetrability was the criterion of masculinity. Masculinity depended on you being the active penetrator. And then, in economics, there's an active producer and a passive consumer, which explains why business always has to penetrate new markets. Well yeah, I mean why we forced China to open her markets. And didn't that feel good? (Laughter) And now we're being penetrated. You know the biotech companies are actually going inside us and planting their little flags on our genes. You know we're being penetrated. And I suspect, by someone who actively dislikes us. (Laughter) That's the second of the quadruple. Yes of course you got that. Thank you very much. I still have a way to go.(Laughter)And what I hope to do, when I make these connections, is short circuit people's thinking. You know, make you not follow your usual train of association, but make you rewire. It literally — when people say about the shock of recognition, it's literally re-cognition, rewiring how you think — I had a joke to go with this and I forgot it. I'm so sorry. I'm getting like the woman in that joke about —have you heard this joke about the woman driving with her mother? And the mother is elderly. And the mother goes right through a red light. And the daughter doesn't want to say anything. She doesn't want to be like, ""You're too old to drive."" And the mother goes through a second red light. And the daughter says, as tactfully as possible, ""Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?"" And the mother says, ""Oh! Am I driving?""(Laughter)And that's the shock of recognition at the shock of recognition. That completes the quadruple.(Laughter)I just want to say two more things. One is, another characteristic of trickster is that the trickster has to walk this fine line. He has to have poise. And you know the biggest hurdle for me, in doing what I do, is constructing my performance so that it's prepared and unprepared. Finding the balance between those things is always dangerous because you might tip off too much in the direction of unprepared. But being too prepared doesn't leave room for the accidents to happen.I was thinking about what Moshe Safdie said yesterday about beauty because in his book, Hyde says that sometimes trickster can tip over into beauty. But to do that you have to lose all the other qualities because once you're into beauty you're into a finished thing. You're into something that occupies space and inhabits time. It's an actual thing. And it is always extraordinary to see a thing of beauty. But if you don't do that, if you allow for the accident to keep on happening, you have the possibility of getting on a wavelength. I like to think of what I do as a probability wave. When you go into beauty the probability wave collapses into one possibility. And I like to explore all the possibilities in the hope that you'll be on the wavelength of your audience.And the one final quality I want to say about trickster is that he doesn't have a home. He's always on the road. I want to say to you Richard, in closing, that in TED you've created a home. And thank you for inviting me into it. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_levine_s_theory_of_everything
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"What I wanted to talk to you about today is two things: one, the rise of a culture of availability; and two, a request. So we're seeing a rise of this availability being driven by mobile device proliferation, globally, across all social strata. We're seeing, along with that proliferation of mobile devices, an expectation of availability. And, with that, comes the third point, which is obligation — and an obligation to that availability.And the problem is, we're still working through, from a societal standpoint, how we allow people to be available. There's a significant delta, in fact, between what we're willing to accept. Apologies to Hans Rosling — he said anything that's not using real stats is a lie — but the big delta there is how we deal with this from a public standpoint. So we've developed certain tactics and strategies to cover up.This first one's called ""the lean."" And if you've ever been in a meeting where you play sort of meeting ""chicken,"" you're sitting there, looking at the person, waiting for them to look away, and then quickly checking the device. Although you can see the gentleman up on the right is busting him.""The stretch."" OK, the gentleman on the left is saying, ""Screw you, I'm going to check my device."" But the guy, here, on the right, he's doing the stretch. It's that reeeee-e-e-each out, the physical contortion to get that device just below the tabletop.Or, my favorite, the ""Love you; mean it."" (Laughter) Nothing says ""I love you"" like ""Let me find somebody else I give a damn about.""Or, this one, coming to us from India. You can find this on YouTube, the gentleman who's recumbent on a motorcycle while text messaging. Or what we call the ""sweet gravy, stop me before I kill again!"" That is actually the device.What this is doing is, we find a — (Laughter) a direct collision — we find a direct collision between availability — and what's possible through availability — and a fundamental human need — which we've been hearing about a lot, actually — the need to create shared narratives. We're very good at creating personal narratives, but it's the shared narratives that make us a culture. And when you're standing with someone, and you're on your mobile device, effectively what you're saying to them is, ""You are not as important as, literally, almost anything that could come to me through this device.""Look around you. There might be somebody on one right now, participating in multi-dimensional engagement.(Laughter)Our reality right now is less interesting than the story we're going to tell about it later.This one I love. This poor kid, clearly a prop — don't get me wrong, a willing prop — but the kiss that's being documented kind of looks like it sucks.This is the sound of one hand clapping.So, as we lose the context of our identity, it becomes incredibly important that what you share becomes the context of shared narrative, becomes the context in which we live. The stories that we tell — what we push out — becomes who we are. People aren't simply projecting identity, they're creating it.And so that's the request I have for everybody in this room. We are creating the technology that is going to create the new shared experience, which will create the new world. And so my request is, please, let's make technologies that make people more human, and not less.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/renny_gleeson_on_antisocial_phone_tricks
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"So how would you run a whole country without oil? That's the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a Davos afternoon about four years ago. It never left my brain. And I started playing with it more like a puzzle. The original thought I had: this must be ethanol. So I went out and researched ethanol, and found out you need the Amazon in your backyard in every country. About six months later I figured out it must be hydrogen, until some scientist told me the unfortunate truth, which is, you actually use more clean electrons than the ones you get inside a car, if you use hydrogen. So that is not going to be the path to go.And then sort of through a process of wandering around, I got to the thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars, in a way that is convenient and affordable, you could get to a solution. Now I started this from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse. Not how do you build one car, but how do you scale this so that it can become something that is used by 99 percent of the population? The thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today. So one, it has to be more convenient than a car. And two, it has be more affordable than today's cars. Affordable is not a 40,000 dollar sedan, right? Alright? That's not something that we can finance or buy today. And convenient is not something that you drive for an hour and charge for eight.So we're bound with the laws of physics and the laws of economics. And so the thought that I started with was how do you do this, still within the boundary of the science we know today — no time for science fair, no time for playing around with things or waiting for the magic battery to show up. How do you do it within the economics that we have today? How do you do it from the power of the consumer up? And not from the power of an edict down.On a random visit to Tesla on some afternoon, I actually found out that the answer comes from separating between the car ownership and the battery ownership. In a sense if you want to think about it this is the classic ""batteries not included."" Now if you separate between the two, you could actually answer the need for a convenient car by creating a network, by creating a network before the cars show up. The network has two components in them. First component is you charge the car whenever you stop — ends up that cars are these strange beasts that drive for about two hours and park for about 22 hours. If you drive a car in the morning and drive it back in the afternoon the ratio of charge to drive is about a minute for a minute. And so the first thought that came to mind is, everywhere we park we have electric power. Now it sounds crazy. But in some places around the world, like Scandinavia, you already have that. If you park your car and didn't plug in the heater, when you come back you don't have a car. It just doesn't work.Now that last mile, last foot, in a sense, is the first step of the infrastructure. The second step of the infrastructure needs to take care of the range extension. See we're bound by today's technology on batteries, which is about 120 miles if you want to stay within reasonable space and weight limitations. 120 miles is a good enough range for a lot of people. But you never want to get stuck. So what we added is a second element to our network, which is a battery swap system. You drive. You take your depleted battery out. A full battery comes on. And you drive on. You don't do it as a human being. You do it as a machine. It looks like a car wash. You come into your car wash. And a plate comes up, holds your battery, takes it out, puts it back in, and within two minutes you're back on the road and you can go again. If you had charge spots everywhere, and you had battery swap stations everywhere, how often would you do it? And it ends up that you'd do swapping less times than you stop at a gas station. As a matter of fact, we added to the contract. We said that if you stop to swap your battery more than 50 times a year we start paying you money because it's an inconvenience.Then we looked at the question of the affordability. We looked at the question, what happens when the battery is disconnected from the car. What is the cost of that battery? Everybody tells us batteries are so expensive. What we found out, when you move from molecules to electrons, something interesting happens. We can go back to the original economics of the car and look at it again. The battery is not the gas tank, in a sense. Remember in your car you have a gas tank. You have the crude oil. And you have refining and delivery of that crude oil as what we call petrol or gasoline. The battery in this sense, is the crude oil. We have a battery bay. It costs the same hundred dollars as the gas tank. But the crude oil is replaced with a battery. Just it doesn't burn. It consumes itself step after step after step. It has 2,000 life cycles these days. And so it's sort of a mini well. We were asked in the past when we bought an electric car to pay for the entire well, for the life of the car. Nobody wants to buy a mini well when they buy a car. In a sense what we've done is we've created a new consumable.You, today, buy gasoline miles. And we created electric miles. And the price of electric miles ends up being a very interesting number. Today 2010, in volume, when we come to market, it is eight cents a mile. Those of you who have a hard time calculating what that means — in the average consumer environment we're in in the U.S. 20 miles per gallon that's a buck 50, a buck 60 a gallon. That's cheaper than today's gasoline, even in the U.S. In Europe where taxes are in place, that's the equivalent to a minus 60 dollar barrel. But e-miles follow Moore's Law. They go from eight cents a mile in 2010, to four cents a mile in 2015, to two cents a mile by 2020. Why? Because batteries life cycle improve — a bit of improvement on energy density, which reduces the price. And these prices are actually with clean electrons. We do not use any electrons that come from coal. So in a sense this is an absolute zero-carbon, zero-fossil fuel electric mile at two cents a mile by 2020. Now even if we get to 40 miles per gallon by 2020, which is our desire. Imagine only 40 miles per gallon cars would be on the road. That is an 80 cent gallon. An 80 cent gallon means, if the entire Pacific would convert to crude oil, and we'd let any oil company bring it out and refine it, they still can't compete with two cents a mile. That's a new economic factor, which is fascinating to most people.Now this would have been a wonderful paper. That's how I solved it in my head. It was a white paper I handed out to governments. And some governments told me that it's fascinating that the younger generation actually thinks about these things. (Laughter) Until I got to the true young global leader, Shimon Peres, President of Israel, and he ran a beautiful manipulation on me. First he let me go to the prime minister of the country, who told me, if you can find the money you need for this network, 200 million dollars, and if you can find a car company that will build that car in mass volume, in two million cars — that's what we needed in Israel — I'll give you country to invest the 200 million into. Peres thought that was a great idea.So we went out, and we looked at all the car companies. We sent letters to all the car companies. Three of them never showed up. One of them asked us if we would stay with hybrids and they would give us a discount. But one of them Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and Nissan, when asked about hybrids said something very fascinating. He said hybrids are like mermaids. When you want a fish you get a woman and when you need a woman you get a fish. (Laughter) And Ghosn came up and said, ""I have the car, Mr. Peres; I will build you the cars."" And actually true to form, Renault has put a billion and a half dollars in building nine different types of cars that fit this kind of model that will come into the market in mass volume — mass volume being the first year, 100 thousand cars. It's the first mass-volume electric car, zero-emission electric car in the market. I was running, as Chris said, to be the CEO of a large software company called SAP And then Peres said, ""Well won't you run this project?"" And I said, ""I'm ready for CEO"" And he said, ""Oh no no no no no. You've got to explain to me, what is more important than saving your country and saving the world, that you would go and do?""And I had to quit and come and do this thing called A Better Place. We then decided to scale it up. We went to other countries. As I said we went to Denmark. And Denmark set this beautiful policy; it's called the IQ test. It's inversely proportional to taxes. They put 180 percent tax on gasoline cars and zero tax on zero-emission cars. So if you want to buy a gasoline car in Denmark, it costs you about 60,000 Euros. If you buy our car it's about 20,000 Euros. If you fail the IQ test they ask you to leave the country. (Laughter)We then were sort of coined as the guys who run only in small islands. I know most people don't think of Israel as a small island, but Israel is an island — it's a transportation island. If your car is driving outside Israel it's been stolen. (Laughter) If you're thinking about it in terms of islands, we decided to go to the biggest island that we could find, and that was Australia. The third country we announced was Australia. It's got three centers — in Brisbane, in Melbourne, in Sydney — and one freeway, one electric freeway that connects them. The next island was not too hard to find, and that was Hawaii. We decided to come into the U.S. and pick the two best places — the one where you didn't need any range extension. Hawaii you can drive around the island on one battery. And if you really have a long day you can switch, and keep on driving around the island.The second one was the San Francisco Bay Area where Gavin Newsom created a beautiful policy across all the mayors. He decided that he's going to take over the state, unofficially, and then officially, and then created this beautiful Region One policy. In the San Francisco Bay Area not only do you have the highest concentration of Priuses, but you also have the perfect range extender. It's called the other car. As we stared scaling it up we looked at what is the problem to come up to the U.S.? Why is this a big issue? And the most fascinating thing we've learned is that, when you have small problems on the individual level, like the price of gasoline to drive every morning. You don't notice it, but when the aggregate comes up you're dead. Alright?So the price of oil, much like lots of other curves that we've seen, goes along a depletion curve. The foundation of this curve is that we keep losing the wells that are close to the ground. And we keep getting wells that are farther away from the ground. It becomes more and more and more expensive to dig them out. You think, well it's been up, it's been down, its been up, it's going to keep on going up and down. Here is the problem: at 147 dollars a barrel, which we were in six months ago, the U.S. spent a ton of money to get oil. Then we lost our economy and we went back down to 47 — sometimes it's 40, sometimes it's 50. Now we're running a stimulus package. It's called the trillion-dollar stimulus package. We're going to revive the economy. Hopefully it happens between now and 2015, somewhere in that space. What happens when the economy recovers? By 2015 we would have had at least 250 million new cars even at the pace we're going at right now. That's another 30 percent demand on oil. That is another 25 million barrels a day. That's all the U.S. usage today. In other words at some point when we've recovered we go up to the peak. And then we do the OPEC stimulus package also known as 200 dollars a barrel. We take our money and we give it away. You know what happens at that point? We go back down. It's going to go up and down. And the downs are going to be much longer and the ups are going to be much shorter.And that's the difference between problems that are additive, like CO2, which we go slowly up and then we tip, and problems that are depletive, in which we lose what we have, which oscillate, and they oscillate until we lose everything we've got. Now we actually looked at what the answer would be. Right? Remember in the campaign: one million hybrid cars by 2015. That is 0.5 percent of the U.S. oil consumption. That is oh point oh well percent of the rest of the world. That won't do much difference.We looked at an MIT study: ten million electric cars on the global roads. Ten million out of 500 million we will add between now and then. That is the most pessimistic number you can have. It's also the most optimistic number because it means we will scale this industry from 100 thousand cars is 2011, to 10 million cars by 2016 — 100 x growth in less than five years. You have to remember that the world today is bringing in so many cars. We have 10 million cars by region. That's an enormous amount of cars.China is adding those cars — India, Russia, Brazil. We have all these regions. Europe has solved it. They just put a tax on gasoline. They'll be the first in line to get off because their prices are high. China solves it by an edict. At some point they'll just declare that no gasoline car will come into a city, and that will be it. The Indians don't even understand why we think of it as a problem because most people in India fill two or three gallons every time. For them to get a battery that goes 120 miles is an extension on range, not a reduction in range. We're the only ones who don't have the price set right. We don't have the industry set right. We don't have any incentive to go and resolve it across the U.S.Now where is the car industry on that? Very interesting. The car industry has been focused just on themselves. They basically looked at it and said, ""Car 1.0 we'll solve everything within the car itself."" No infrastructure, no problem. We forgot about the entire chain around us. All this stuff that happens around. We are looking at the emergence of a car 2.0 — a whole new market, a whole new business model. The business model in which the money that is actually coming in, to drive the car — the minutes, the miles if you want, that you are all familiar with — subsidize the price of the car, just like cellphones. You'll pay for the miles. And some of it will go back to the car maker. Some of it will go back to your own pocket. But our cars are actually going to be cheaper than gasoline cars.You're looking at a world where cars are matched with windmills. In Denmark, we will drive all the cars in Denmark from windmills, not from oil. In Israel, we've asked to put a solar farm in the south of Israel. And people said, ""Oh that's a very very large space that you're asking for."" And we said, ""What if we had proven that in the same space we found oil for the country for the next hundred years?"" And they said, ""We tried. There isn't any."" We said, ""No no, but what if we prove it?"" And they said, ""Well you can dig."" And we decided to dig up, instead of digging down. These are perfect matches to one another.Now all you need is about 10 percent of the electricity generated. Think of it as a project that spans over about 10 years. That's one percent a year. Now when we're looking at solving big problems, we need to start thinking in two numbers. And those are not 20 percent by 2020. The two numbers are zero — as in zero footprint or zero oil — and scale it infinity. And when we go to COP15 at the end of this year we can't stop thinking of padding CO2. We have to start thinking about giving kickers to countries that are willing to go to this kind of scale.One car emits four tons. And actually 700 and change million cars today emit 2.8 billion tons of CO2. That's, in the additive, about 25 percent of our problem. Cars and trucks add up to about 25 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. We have to come and attack this problem with a focus, with an effort that actually says, we're going to go to zero before the world ends. I actually shared that with some legislators here in the U.S. I shared it with a gentleman called Bobby Kennedy Jr., who is one of my idols. I told him one of the reasons that his uncle was remembered is because he said we're going to send a man to the moon, and we'll do it by the end of the decade. We didn't say we're going to send a man 20 percent to the moon. And there will be about a 20 percent chance we'll recover him. (Laughter)He actually shared with me another story, which is from about 200 years ago. 200 years ago, in Parliament, in Great Britain, there was a long argument over economy versus morality. 25 percent — just like 25 percent emissions today comes from cars — 25 percent of their energy for the entire industrial world in the U.K. came from a source of energy that was immoral: human slaves. And there was an argument. Should we stop using slaves? And what would it do to our economy? And people said, ""Well we need to take time to do it. Let's not do it immediately. Maybe we free the kids and keep the slaves. And after a month of arguments they decided to stop slavery, and the industrial revolution started within less than one year. And the U.K. had 100 years of economic growth. We have to make the right moral decision. We have to make it immediately. We need to have presidential leadership just like we had in Israel that said we will end oil. And we need to do it not within 20 years or 50 years, but within this presidential term because if we don't, we will lose our economy, right after we'd lost our morality.Thank you all very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars
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"The future of life, where the unraveling of our biology — and bring up the lights a little bit. I don't have any slides. I'm just going to talk — about where that's likely to carry us.And you know, I saw all the visions of the first couple of sessions. It almost made me feel a little bit guilty about having an uplifting talk about the future. It felt wrong to do that in some way. And yet, I don't really think it is because when it comes down to it, it's this larger trajectory that is really what is going to remain — what people in the future are going to remember about this period.I want to talk to you a little bit about why the visions of Jeremy Rivkins, who would like to ban these sorts of technologies, or of the Bill Joys who would like to relinquish them, are actually — to follow those paths would be such a tragedy for us. I'm focusing on biology, the biological sciences. The reason I'm doing that is because those are going to be the areas that are the most significant to us. The reason for that is really very simple. It's because we're flesh and blood. We're biological creatures. And what we can do with our biology is going to shape our future and that of our children and that of their children — whether we gain control over aging, whether we learn to protect ourselves from Alzheimer's, and heart disease, and cancer.I think that Shakespeare really put it very nicely. And I'm actually going to use his words in the same order that he did. (Laughter) He said, ""And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe. And then from hour to hour we rot and rot. And thereby hangs a tale."" Life is short, you know. And we need to think about planning a little bit. We're all going to eventually, even in the developed world, going to have to lose everything that we love. When you're beginning to rot a little bit, all of the videos crammed into your head, all of the extensions that extend your various powers, are going to being to seem a little secondary. And you know, I'm getting a little bit gray — so is Ray Kurzweil, so is Eric Drexler.This is where it's really central to our lives. Now I know there's been a whole lot of hype about our power to control biology. You just have to look at the Human Genome Project. It wasn't two years ago that everybody was talking about — we've found the Holy Grail of biology. We're deciphering the code of codes. We're reading the book of life. It's a little bit reminiscent of 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and everybody was about to race out toward the stars. And we've all seen ""2001: A Space Odyssey."" You know it's 2003, and there is no HAL. And there is no odyssey to our own moon, much less the moons of Jupiter. And we're still picking up pieces of the Challenger. So it's not surprising that some people would wonder whether maybe 30 or 40 years from now, we'll look back at this instant in time, and all of the sort of talk about the Human Genome Project, and what all this is going to mean to us — well, it will really mean precious little. And I just want to say that that is absolutely not going to be the case. Because when we talk about our genetics and our biology, and modifying and altering and adjusting these things, we're talking about changing ourselves. And this is very critical stuff.If you have any doubts about how technology affects our lives, you just have to go to any major city. This is not the stomping ground of our Pleistocene ancestors. What's happening is we're taking this technology — it's becoming more precise, more potent — and we're turning it back upon ourselves. Before it's all done we are going to alter ourselves every bit as much as we have changed the world around us. It's going to happen a lot sooner than people imagine. On the way there it's going to completely revolutionize medicine and health care; that's obvious. It's going to change the way we have children. It's going to change the way we manage and alter our emotions. It's going to probably change the human lifespan. It will really make us question what it is to be a human being.The larger context of this is that are two unprecedented revolutions that are going on today. The first of them is the obvious one, the silicon revolution, which you all are very, very familiar with. It's changing our lives in so many ways, and it will continue to do that. What the essence of that is, is that we're taking the sand at our feet, the inert silicon at our feet, and we're breathing a level of complexity into it that rivals that of life itself, and may even surpass it. As an outgrowth of that, as a child of that revolution, is the revolution in biology.The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these ""omics"" that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward. It's not at all clear where it's going to take us. But in five to ten years we're going to start see some very profound changes. The most immediate changes that we'll see are things like in medicine. There is going to be a big shift towards preventative medicine as we start to be able to identify all of the risk factors that we have as individuals. But who is going to pay for all this? And how are we going to understand all this complex information? That is going to be the IT challenge of the next generation, is communicating all this information.There's pharmacogenomics, the combination of pharmacology and genetics: tailoring drugs to our individual constitutions that Juan talked about a little bit earlier. That's going to have amazing impacts. And it's going to be used for diet as well, and nutritional supplements and such. But it's going to have a big impact because we're going to have niche drugs. And we aren't going to be able to support the kinds of expenses that we have to create blockbuster drugs today. The approval process is going to fall apart, actually. It's too slow. It's too risk-averse. And it is really not suited for the future that we're moving into.Another thing is that we're just going to have to deal with this knowledge. It's really wonderful when we hear, ""Oh, 99.9 percent of the letters in the code are the same. We're all identical to each other. Isn't it wonderful?"" And look around you and know that what we really care about is that little bit of difference. We look the same to a visitor from another planet, maybe, but not to each other because we compete with each other all time. And we're going to have to come to grips with the fact that there are differences between us as individuals that we will know about, and between subpopulations of humans as well. To deny that that's the case is not a very good start on that.A generation or so away there are going to be even more profound things that are going to happen. That's when we're going to begin to use this knowledge to modify ourselves. Now I don't mean extra gills or something — something we care about, like aging. What if we could unravel aging and understand it — begin to retard the process or even reverse it? It would change absolutely everything. And it's obvious to anyone, that if we can do this, we absolutely will do this, whatever the consequences are.The second is modifying our emotions. I mean Ritalin, Viagra, things of that sort, Prozac. You know, this is just clumsy little baby steps. What if you could take a little concoction of pharmaceuticals that would make you feel really contented, just happy to be you. Are you going to be able to resist that if it doesn't have any overt side effects? Probably not. And if you don't, who are you going to be? Why do you do what you do? We're sort of circumventing evolutionary programs that guide our behavior. It's going to be very challenging to deal with.The third area is reproduction. The idea that we're going to chose our children's genes, as we begin to understand what genes say about who we are. That's the focus of my book ""Redesigning Humans,"" where I talk about the kinds of choices we'll make, and the challenges it's going to present to society. There are three obvious ways of doing this. The first is cloning. It didn't happen. It's a total media circus. It will happen in five to 10 years. And when it does it's not going to be that big a deal. The birth of a delayed identical twin is not going to shake western civilization.But there are more important things that are already occurring: embryo screening. You take a six to eight cell embryo, you tease out one of the cells, you run a genetic test on that cell, and depending on the results of that test you either implant that embryo or you discard it. It's already done to avoid rare diseases today. And pretty soon it's going to be possible to avoid virtually all genetic diseases in that way. As that becomes possible this is going to move from something that is used by those who have infertility problems and are already doing in vitro fertilization, to the wealthy who want to protect their children, to just about everybody else. And in that process that's going to morph from being just for diseases, to being for lesser vulnerabilities, like risk of manic depression or something, to picking personalities, temperaments, traits, these sorts of things. Of course there is going to be genetic engineering. Directly going in — it's a little bit further away, but not that far away — going in and altering the genes in the first cell in an embryo. The way I suspect it will happen is using artificial chromosomes and extra chromosomes, so we go from 46 to 47 or 48. And one that is not heritable because who would want to pass on to their children the archaic enhancement modules that they got 25 years earlier from their parents? It's a joke; of course they wouldn't want to do that. They'll want the new release.Those kinds of loose analogies with (Laughter) computers, and with programming, are actually much deeper than that. They are really going to come to operate in this realm. Now not everything that can be done should be done. And it won't be done. But when something is feasible in thousands of laboratories all over the world, which is going to be the case with these technologies, when there are large numbers of people who see them as beneficial, which is already the case, and when they're almost impossible to police, it's not a question of if this is going to happen, it's when and where and how it's going to happen.Humanity is going to go down this path. And it's going to do so for two reasons. The first is that all these technologies are just a spin-off of mainstream medical research that everybody wants to see happen. It is being funded very very — in a big way. The second is, we're human. That's what we do. We try and use our technology to improve our lives in one way or another. To imagine that we're not going to use these technologies when they become available, is as much a denial of who we are as to imagine that we'll use these technologies and not fret and worry about it a great deal. The lines are going to blur. And they already are between therapy and enhancement, between treatment and prevention, between need and desire. That's really the central one, I believe.People can try and ban these things. They undoubtedly will. They have. But ultimately all this is going to do is just shift development elsewhere. It's going to drive these things from view. It's going to reserve the technology for the wealthy because they are in the best position to circumvent any of these sorts of laws. And it's going to deny us the information that we need to make wise decisions about how to use these technologies. So, sure, we need to debate these things. And I think it's wonderful that we do. But we shouldn't kid ourselves and think that we're going to reach a consensus about these things. That is simply not going to happen. They touch us too deeply. And they depend too much upon history, upon philosophy, upon religion, upon culture, upon politics. Some people are going to see this as an abomination, as the worst thing, as just awful. Other people are going to say, ""This is great. This is the flowering of human endeavor.""The one thing though that is really dangerous about these sorts of technologies, is that it's easy to become seduced by them. And to focus too much on all the high-technology possibilities that exist. And to lose touch with the basic rhythms of our biology and our health. There are too many people that think that high-technology medicine is going to keep them, save them, from overeating, from eating a lot of fast foods, from not getting any exercise. It's not going to happen.In the midst of all this amazing technology, and all these things that are occurring, it's really interesting because there is sort of a counter-revolution that is going on: a resurgence of interest in remedies from the past, in nutraceuticals, in all of these sorts of things that some people, in the pharmaceutical industry particularly, like to brand as non-science. But this whole effort is generated, is driven, by IT as well because that is how we're gathering all this information, and linking it, and integrating it together. There is a lot in this rich biota that is going to serve us well. And that's where about half of our drugs come. So we shouldn't dismiss this because it's an enormous opportunity to use these sorts of results, or these random loose trials from the last thousand years about what has impacts on our health. And to use our advanced technologies to pull out what is beneficial from this sea of noise, basically.In fact this isn't just abstract. I just formed a biotechnology company that is using this sort of an approach to develop therapeutics for Alzheimer's and other diseases of aging, and we're making some real progress. So here we are. It's the beginning of a new millennium. If you look forward, I mean future humans, far before the end of this millennium, in a few hundred years, they are going to look back at this moment. And from the beginning of today's sessions you'd think that they're going to see this as this horrible difficult, painful period that we struggled through. And I don't think that's what's going to happen. They're going to do like everybody does. They are going to forget about all that stuff. And they are actually going to romanticize this moment in time. They are going to think about it as this glorious instant when we laid down the very foundations of their lives, of their society, of their future. You know it's a little bit like a birth. Where there is this bloody, awful mess happens. And then what comes out of it? New life. Actually as was pointed out earlier, we forget about all the struggle there was in getting there.So to me, it's clear that one of the foundations of that future is going to be the reworking of our biology. It's going to come gradually at first. It's going to pick up speed. We're going to make lots of errors. That's the way these things work. To me it's an incredible privilege to be alive now and to be able to witness this thing. It is something that is a unique instant in the history of all of life. It will always be remembered. And what's extraordinary is that we're not just observing this, we are the architects of this. I think that we should be proud of it. What is so difficult and challenging is that we are also the objects of these changes. It's our health, it's our lives, it's our future, it's our children. And that is why they are so very troubling to so many people who would pull back in fear. I think that our choice in the choice of life, is not whether we're going to go down this path. We are, definitely. It's how we hold it in our hearts. It's how we look at it. I think Thucydides really spoke to us very clearly in 430 B.C. He put it nicely. Again, I'll use the words in the same order he did. ""The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, both glory and danger alike. And yet notwithstanding, they go out and they meet it.""Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_stock_to_upgrade_is_human
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"The AlloSphere: it's a three-story metal sphere in an echo-free chamber. Think of the AlloSphere as a large, dynamically varying digital microscope that's connected to a supercomputer. 20 researchers can stand on a bridge suspended inside of the sphere, and be completely immersed in their data.Imagine if a team of physicists could stand inside of an atom and watch and hear electrons spin. Imagine if a group of sculptors could be inside of a lattice of atoms and sculpt with their material. Imagine if a team of surgeons could fly into the brain, as though it was a world, and see tissues as landscapes, and hear blood density levels as music. This is some of the research that you're going to see that we're undertaking at the AlloSphere.But first a little bit about this group of artists, scientists, and engineers that are working together. I'm a composer, orchestrally-trained, and the inventor of the AlloSphere. With my visual artist colleagues, we map complex mathematical algorithms that unfold in time and space, visually and sonically. Our scientist colleagues are finding new patterns in the information. And our engineering colleagues are making one of the largest dynamically varying computers in the world for this kind of data exploration. I'm going to fly you into five research projects in the AlloSphere that are going to take you from biological macroscopic data all the way down to electron spin.This first project is called the AlloBrain. And it's our attempt to quantify beauty by finding which regions of the brain are interactive while witnessing something beautiful. You're flying through the cortex of my colleague's brain. Our narrative here is real fMRI data that's mapped visually and sonically. The brain now a world that we can fly through and interact with. You see 12 intelligent computer agents, the little rectangles that are flying in the brain with you. They're mining blood density levels. And they're reporting them back to you sonically. Higher density levels mean more activity in that point of the brain. They're actually singing these densities to you with higher pitches mapped to higher densities.We're now going to move from real biological data to biogenerative algorithms that create artificial nature in our next artistic and scientific installation. In this artistic and scientific installation, biogenerative algorithms are helping us to understand self-generation and growth: very important for simulation in the nanoscaled sciences. For artists, we're making new worlds that we can uncover and explore. These generative algorithms grow over time, and they interact and communicate as a swarm of insects. Our researchers are interacting with this data by injecting bacterial code, which are computer programs, that allow these creatures to grow over time. We're going to move now from the biological and the macroscopic world, down into the atomic world, as we fly into a lattice of atoms. This is real AFM — Atomic Force Microscope — data from my colleagues in the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center. They've discovered a new bond, a new material for transparent solar cells.We're flying through 2,000 lattice of atoms — oxygen, hydrogen and zinc. You view the bond in the triangle. It's four blue zinc atoms bonding with one white hydrogen atom. You see the electron flow with the streamlines we as artists have generated for the scientists. This is allowing them to find the bonding nodes in any lattice of atoms. We think it makes a beautiful structural art. The sound that you're hearing are the actual emission spectrums of these atoms. We've mapped them into the audio domain, so they're singing to you. Oxygen, hydrogen and zinc have their own signature. We're going to actually move even further down as we go from this lattice of atoms to one single hydrogen atom.We're working with our physicist colleagues that have given us the mathematical calculations of the n-dimensional Schrödinger equation in time. What you're seeing here right now is a superposition of an electron in the lower three orbitals of a hydrogen atom. You're actually hearing and seeing the electron flow with the lines. The white dots are the probability wave that will show you where the electron is in any given point of time and space in this particular three-orbital configuration. In a minute we're going to move to a two-orbital configuration, and you're going to notice a pulsing. And you're going to hear an undulation between the sound. This is actually a light emitter. As the sound starts to pulse and contract, our physicists can tell when a photon is going to be emitted.They're starting to find new mathematical structures in these calculations. And they're understanding more about quantum mathematics. We're going to move even further down, and go to one single electron spin. This will be the final project that I show you. Our colleagues in the Center for Quantum Computation and Spintronics are actually measuring with their lasers decoherence in a single electron spin. We've taken this information and we've made a mathematical model out of it. You're actually seeing and hearing quantum information flow. This is very important for the next step in simulating quantum computers and information technology.So these brief examples that I've shown you give you an idea of the kind of work that we're doing at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to bring together, arts, science and engineering into a new age of math, science and art. We hope that all of you will come to see the AlloSphere. Inspire us to think of new ways that we can use this unique instrument that we've created at Santa Barbara. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joann_kuchera_morin_tours_the_allosphere
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"This is Tim Ferriss circa 1979 A.D. Age two. You can tell by the power squat, I was a very confident boy — and not without reason. I had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. I would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because I was the Incredible Hulk. (Laughter) Obviously, you see the resemblance. And this routine went on for some time.When I was seven I went to summer camp. My parents found it necessary for peace of mind. And at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. You could jump off the end into the deep end. I was born premature. I was always very small. My left lung had collapsed when I was born. And I've always had buoyancy problems. So water was something that scared me to begin with. But I would go in on occasion. And on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, They were diving through inner tubes. And I thought this would be great fun. So I dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. And I tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. And I went wild eyed and thought I was going to die. A camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. From that point onward I was terrified of swimming. That is something that I did not get over. My inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk.But there is a happy ending to this story. At age 31 — that's my age now — in August I took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. And went from swimming one lap — so 20 yards — like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate — I measured it — to going to Montauk on Long Island, close to where I grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when I went in. And I came out, in my Speedos, European style, feeling like the Incredible Hulk.And that's what I want everyone in here to feel like, the Incredible Hulk, at the end of this presentation. More specifically, I want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. And I would like to share my art. If I have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. So, moving onward.Swimming, first principles. First principles, this is very important. I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. And the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, ""I will go a year without any stimulants"" — this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy — ""if you can complete a one kilometer open water race."" So the clock started ticking. I started seeking out triathletes because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. I tried kickboards. My feet would slice through the water like razors, I wouldn't even move. I would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. Hand paddles, everything. Even did lessons with Olympians — nothing helped. And then Chris Sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an Iron Man with 103 degree temperature, said, ""I have the answer to your prayers."" And he introduced me to the work of a man named Terry Laughlin who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. That set me on the road to examining biomechanics.So here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. The first is, forget about kicking. Very counterintuitive. So it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. Kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. The problem is hydrodynamics. So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. The body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally.So you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. But actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. So let's look at some examples. This is Terry. And you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. And so his entire body really is underwater. The arm is extended below the head. The head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up — very important, especially for people with lower body fat. Here is an example of the stroke. So you don't kick. But you do use a small flick. You can see this is the left extension. Then you see his left leg. Small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. And the entry point for his right hand — notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. Rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining — very important. Incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. Not their fault, honestly. And I'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. Below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what I did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. And now I love swimming. I can't wait to go swimming. I'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me.Last thing, breathing. A problem a lot of us have, certainly, when you're swimming. In freestyle, easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll, and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water. And that will get you very far. That's it. That's really all you need to know.Languages. Material versus method. I, like many people, came to the conclusion that I was terrible at languages. I suffered through Spanish for junior high, first year of high school, and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much, ""Donde esta el bano?"" And I wouldn't even catch the response. A sad state of affairs. Then I transferred to a different school sophomore year, and I had a choice of other languages. Most of my friends were taking Japanese. So I thought why not punish myself? I'll do Japanese. Six months later I had the chance to go to Japan. My teachers assured me, they said, ""Don't worry. You'll have Japanese language classes every day to help you cope. It will be an amazing experience."" My first overseas experience in fact. So my parents encouraged me to do it. I left.I arrived in Tokyo. Amazing. I couldn't believe I was on the other side of the world. I met my host family. Things went quite well I think, all things considered. My first evening, before my first day of school, I said to my mother, very politely, ""Please wake me up at eight a.m."" So, (Japanese) But I didn't say (Japanese). I said, (Japanese). Pretty close. But I said, ""Please rape me at eight a.m."" (Laughter) You've never seen a more confused Japanese woman. (Laughter)I walked in to school. And a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper. I couldn't read any of it — hieroglyphics, it could have been — because it was Kanji, Chinese characters adapted into the Japanese language. Asked him what this said. And he goes, ""Ahh, okay okay, eehto, World History, ehh, Calculus, Traditional Japanese."" And so on. And so it came to me in waves. There had been something lost in translation. The Japanese classes were not Japanese instruction classes, per se. They were the normal high school curriculum for Japanese students — the other 4,999 students in the school, who were Japanese, besides the American. And that's pretty much my response. (Laughter)And that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method. I tried everything. I went to Kinokuniya. I tried every possible book, every possible CD. Nothing worked until I found this. This is the Joyo Kanji. This is a Tablet rather, or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the Ministry of Education in 1981. Many of the publications in Japan limit themselves to these characters, to facilitate literacy — some are required to. And this became my Holy Grail, my Rosetta Stone.As soon as I focused on this material, I took off. I ended up being able to read Asahi Shinbu, Asahi newspaper, about six months later — so a total of 11 months later — and went from Japanese I to Japanese VI. Ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the U.S., and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now. Someone who was terrible at languages, and at any given time, speak, read and write five or six. This brings us to the point, which is, it's oftentimes what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. This is the difference between being effective — doing the right things — and being efficient — doing things well whether or not they're important.You can also do this with grammar. I came up with these six sentences after much experimentation. Having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar, by translating these sentences into past, present, future, will show you subject, object, verb, placement of indirect, direct objects, gender and so forth. From that point, you can then, if you want to, acquire multiple languages, alternate them so there is no interference. We can talk about that if anyone in interested. And now I love languages.So ballroom dancing, implicit versus explicit — very important. You might look at me and say, ""That guy must be a ballroom dancer."" But no, you'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things — pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps. I used to be much bigger, much more muscular. And so I ended up walking like this. I looked a lot like an orangutan, our close cousins, or the Incredible Hulk. Not very good for ballroom dancing.I found myself in Argentina in 2005, decided to watch a tango class — had no intention of participating. Went in, paid my ten pesos, walked up — 10 women two guys, usually a good ratio. The instructor says, ""You are participating."" Immediately: death sweat. (Laughter) Fight-or-flight fear sweat, because I tried ballroom dancing in college — stepped on the girl's foot with my heel. She screamed. I was so concerned with her perception of what I was doing, that it exploded in my face, never to return to the ballroom dancing club. She comes up, and this was her approach, the teacher. ""Okay, come on, grab me."" Gorgeous assistant instructor. She was very pissed off that I had pulled her from her advanced practice. So I did my best. I didn't know where to put my hands. And she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around and yelled across the room, ""This guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a fucking Frenchman,"" (Laughter) which I found encouraging. (Laughter) Everyone burst into laughter. I was humiliated. She came back. She goes, ""Come on. I don't have all day."" As someone who wrestled since age eight, I proceeded to crush her, ""Of Mice and Men"" style. And she looked up and said, ""Now that's better."" So I bought a month's worth of classes. (Laughter)And proceeded to look at — I wanted to set competition so I'd have a deadline — Parkinson's Law, the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it. So I had a very short deadline for a competition. I got a female instructor first, to teach me the female role, the follow, because I wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop, so I wouldn't have a repeat of college. And then I took an inventory of the characteristics, along with her, of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who'd won championships. I interviewed these people because they all taught in Buenos Aires. I compared the two lists, and what you find is that there is explicitly, expertise they recommended, certain training methods. Then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing. Now the protectionism of Argentine dance teachers aside, I found this very interesting. So I decided to focus on three of those commonalities. Long steps. So a lot of milongueros — the tango dancers will use very short steps. I found that longer steps were much more elegant. So you can have — and you can do it in a very small space in fact. Secondly, different types of pivots. Thirdly, variation in tempo. These seemed to be the three areas that I could exploit to compete if I wanted to comptete against people who'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years.That photo is of the semi-finals of the Buenos Aires championships, four months later. Then one month later, went to the world championships, made it to the semi-final. And then set a world record, following that, two weeks later. I want you to see part of what I practiced. I'm going to jump forward here. This is the instructor that Alicia and I chose for the male lead. His name is Gabriel Misse. One of the most elegant dancers of his generation, known for his long steps, and his tempo changes and his pivots. Alicia, in her own right, very famous. So I think you'll agree, they look quite good together. Now what I like about this video is it's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead. He had a strong lead. He didn't lead with his chest, which requires you lean forward. I couldn't develop the attributes in my toes, the strength in my feet, to do that. So he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm. So he can lift the woman to break her, for example. That's just one benefit of that. So then we broke it down. This would be an example of one pivot. This is a back step pivot. There are many different types. I have hundreds of hours of footage — all categorized, much like George Carlin categorized his comedy. So using my arch-nemesis, Spanish, no less, to learn tango.So fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn't do. More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. And the best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what's the worst that can happen? Especially with fears you gained when you were a child. Take the analytical frameworks, the capabilities you have, apply them to old fears. Apply them to very big dreams.And when I think of what I fear now, it's very simple. When I imagine my life, what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that I had, it makes me wonder. I've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the American public school system, to either fix it or replace it. And have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far — built, I'd say, about a half dozen schools, my readers, at this point. And if any of you are interested in that, I would love to speak with you. I know nothing. I'm a beginner. But I ask a lot of questions, and I would love your advice. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_smash_fear_learn_anything
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"It's pretty simple. There are nine, sort of, rules that I discovered after 35 years of rock climbing. Most of them are pretty basic.Number one: don't let go — very sure success method. But really, truly — often you think about letting go way before your body does. So hang in there, and you come up with some pretty peculiar solutions.Number two: hesitation is bad. This is a friction climb, up in Tuolumne Meadows, in the Yosemite high country. Friction climbing doesn't have any sort of hard positive edges. You're climbing on little dimples and nubbins in the rock. The most friction you have is when you first put your hand or your foot on the rock. And then from that point on, you're basically falling. So momentum is good. Don't stop.Rule number three: have a plan. This is a climb called the Naked Edge, in El Dorado Canyon, outside of Boulder. This climber is on the last pitch of it. He's actually right about where I fell. There is about 1,000 feet of air below him. And all the hard pitches are actually below him. Often what happens is you're planning so hard for like, ""How do I get through the hardest part? How do I get through the hardest part?"" And then what happens? You get to the last pitch. It's easy. And you're completely flamed out. Don't do it. You have to plan ahead to get to the top.But you also can't forget that each individual move you have to be able to complete. This is a climb called the Dike Route, on Pywjack Dome, up in the Yosemite high country. The interesting thing about this climb is it's not that hard. But if you're the leader on it, at the hardest move, you're looking at about 100 foot fall, onto some low angle slabs. So you've got to focus. You don't want to stop in the middle like Coleridge's Kubla Kahn. You've got to keep going.Rule number five: know how to rest. It's amazing. The best climbers are the ones that in the most extreme situations can get their bodies into some position where they can rest, regroup, calm themselves, focus, and keep going. This is a climb in the Needles, again in California.Fear really sucks because what it means is you're not focusing on what you're doing. You're focusing on the consequences of failing at what you're doing because any given move should require all your concentration and thought processes to execute it effectively.One of the things in climbing is, most people sort of take it straight on. And they follow the most obvious solution. This is the Devils Tower in Wyoming, which is a columnar basalt formation that most of you probably know from ""Close Encounters."" With this, typically crack climbers would put their hands in and their toes in and just start climbing. The cracks are too small to get your toes into so the only way to climb is using your fingertips in the cracks, and using opposing pressure and forcing yourself up.Rule number eight: strength doesn't always equal success. In the 35 years I've been a climbing guide and taught on indoor walls, and stuff like that, the most important thing I've learned was, guys will always try to do pull-ups. Beginning guys, it's like, they thrash, they thrash, they get 15 feet up — and they can do about 15 pull-ups right — And then they just flame out. Women are much more in balance because they don't have that idea that they're going to be able to do 100 pull-ups. They think about how to get the weight over their feet because it's sort of natural — they carry you all day long. So balance is really critical, and keeping your weight on your feet, which is your strongest muscle.And of course there is rule number nine. I came up with rule number nine after I actually didn't plan for a fall, and went about 40 feet and cracked a rib. Once you get to that point where you know it's going to happen, you need to start thinking about how you're going to let go because that is the critical piece of not getting hurt — how you're going to fall onto the rope, or if you're climbing without a rope, fall to a place where you can actually control the fall. So don't hang on till the bitter end. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matthew_childs_9_rules_of_rock_climbing
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"I'm here today, as June said, to talk about a project that my twin sister and I have been doing for the past three and half years. We're crocheting a coral reef. And it's a project that we've actually been now joined by hundreds of people around the world, who are doing it with us. Indeed thousands of people have actually been involved in this project, in many of its different aspects. It's a project that now reaches across three continents, and its roots go into the fields of mathematics, marine biology, feminine handicraft and environmental activism. It's true. It's also a project that in a very beautiful way, the development of this has actually paralleled the evolution of life on earth, which is a particularly lovely thing to be saying right here in February 2009 — which, as one of our previous speakers told us, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.All of this I'm going to get to in the next 18 minutes, I hope. But let me first begin by showing you some pictures of what this thing looks like. Just to give you an idea of scale, that installation there is about six feet across, and the tallest models are about two or three feet high. This is some more images of it. That one on the right is about five feet high. The work involves hundreds of different crochet models. And indeed there are now thousands and thousands of models that people have contributed all over the world as part of this. The totality of this project involves tens of thousands of hours of human labor — 99 percent of it done by women. On the right hand side, that bit there is part of an installation that is about 12 feet long.My sister and I started this project in 2005 because in that year, at least in the science press, there was a lot of talk about global warming, and the effect that global warming was having on coral reefs. Corals are very delicate organisms, and they are devastated by any rise in sea temperatures. It causes these vast bleaching events that are the first signs of corals of being sick. And if the bleaching doesn't go away — if the temperatures don't go down — reefs start to die. A great deal of this has been happening in the Great Barrier Reef, particularly in coral reefs all over the world. This is our invocation in crochet of a bleached reef.We have a new organization together called The Institute for Figuring, which is a little organization we started to promote, to do projects about the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics. And I went and put a little announcement up on our site, asking for people to join us in this enterprise. To our surprise, one of the first people who called was the Andy Warhol Museum. And they said they were having an exhibition about artists' response to global warming, and they'd like our coral reef to be part of it. I laughed and said, ""Well we've only just started it, you can have a little bit of it."" So in 2007 we had an exhibition, a small exhibition of this crochet reef. And then some people in Chicago came along and they said, ""In late 2007, the theme of the Chicago Humanities Festival is global warming. And we've got this 3,000 square-foot gallery and we want you to fill it with your reef."" And I, naively by this stage, said, ""Oh, yes, sure."" Now I say ""naively"" because actually my profession is as a science writer. What I do is I write books about the cultural history of physics. I've written books about the history of space, the history of physics and religion, and I write articles for people like the New York Times and the L.A. Times. So I had no idea what it meant to fill a 3,000 square-foot gallery. So I said yes to this proposition. And I went home, and I told my sister Christine. And she nearly had a fit because Christine is a professor at one of L.A.'s major art colleges, CalArts, and she knew exactly what it meant to fill a 3,000 square-foot gallery. She thought I'd gone off my head. But she went into crochet overdrive. And to cut a long story short, eight months later we did fill the Chicago Cultural Center's 3,000 square foot gallery.By this stage the project had taken on a viral dimension of its own, which got completely beyond us. The people in Chicago decided that as well as exhibiting our reefs, what they wanted to do was have the local people there make a reef. So we went and taught the techniques. We did workshops and lectures. And the people in Chicago made a reef of their own. And it was exhibited alongside ours. There were hundreds of people involved in that. We got invited to do the whole thing in New York, and in London, and in Los Angeles. In each of these cities, the local citizens, hundreds and hundreds of them, have made a reef. And more and more people get involved in this, most of whom we've never met. So the whole thing has sort of morphed into this organic, ever-evolving creature, that's actually gone way beyond Christine and I.Now some of you are sitting here thinking, ""What planet are these people on? Why on earth are you crocheting a reef? Woolenness and wetness aren't exactly two concepts that go together. Why not chisel a coral reef out of marble? Cast it in bronze."" But it turns out there is a very good reason why we are crocheting it because many organisms in coral reefs have a very particular kind of structure. The frilly crenulated forms that you see in corals, and kelps, and sponges and nudibranchs, is a form of geometry known as hyperbolic geometry. And the only way that mathematicians know how to model this structure is with crochet. It happens to be a fact. It's almost impossible to model this structure any other way, and it's almost impossible to do it on computers. So what is this hyperbolic geometry that corals and sea slugs embody?The next few minutes is, we're all going to get raised up to the level of a sea slug. (Laughter) This sort of geometry revolutionized mathematics when it was first discovered in the 19th century. But not until 1997 did mathematicians actually understand how they could model it. In 1997 a mathematician at Cornell, Daina Taimina, made the discovery that this structure could actually be done in knitting and crochet. The first one she did was knitting. But you get too many stitches on the needle. So she quickly realized crochet was the better thing. But what she was doing was actually making a model of a mathematical structure, that many mathematicians had thought it was actually impossible to model. And indeed they thought that anything like this structure was impossible per se. Some of the best mathematicians spent hundreds of years trying to prove that this structure was impossible.So what is this impossible hyperbolic structure? Before hyperbolic geometry, mathematicians knew about two kinds of space: Euclidean space, and spherical space. And they have different properties. Mathematicians like to characterize things by being formalist. You all have a sense of what a flat space is, Euclidean space is. But mathematicians formalize this in a particular way. And what they do is, they do it through the concept of parallel lines. So here we have a line and a point outside the line. And Euclid said, ""How can I define parallel lines? I ask the question, how many lines can I draw through the point but never meet the original line?"" And you all know the answer. Does someone want to shout it out? One. Great. Okay. That's our definition of a parallel line. It's a definition really of Euclidean space.But there is another possibility that you all know of: spherical space. Think of the surface of a sphere — just like a beach ball, the surface of the Earth. I have a straight line on my spherical surface. And I have a point outside the line. How many straight lines can I draw through the point but never meet the original line? What do we mean to talk about a straight line on a curved surface? Now mathematicians have answered that question. They've understood there is a generalized concept of straightness, it's called a geodesic. And on the surface of a sphere, a straight line is the biggest possible circle you can draw. So it's like the equator or the lines of longitude. So we ask the question again, ""How many straight lines can I draw through the point, but never meet the original line?"" Does someone want to guess? Zero. Very good.Now mathematicians thought that was the only alternative. It's a bit suspicious isn't it? There is two answers to the question so far, Zero and one. Two answers? There may possibly be a third alternative. To a mathematician if there are two answers, and the first two are zero and one, there is another number that immediately suggests itself as the third alternative. Does anyone want to guess what it is? Infinity. You all got it right. Exactly. There is, there's a third alternative. This is what it looks like. There's a straight line, and there is an infinite number of lines that go through the point and never meet the original line. This is the drawing. This nearly drove mathematicians bonkers because, like you, they're sitting there feeling bamboozled. Thinking, how can that be? You're cheating. The lines are curved. But that's only because I'm projecting it onto a flat surface. Mathematicians for several hundred years had to really struggle with this. How could they see this? What did it mean to actually have a physical model that looked like this?It's a bit like this: imagine that we'd only ever encountered Euclidean space. Then our mathematicians come along and said, ""There's this thing called a sphere, and the lines come together at the north and south pole."" But you don't know what a sphere looks like. And someone that comes along and says, ""Look here's a ball."" And you go, ""Ah! I can see it. I can feel it. I can touch it. I can play with it."" And that's exactly what happened when Daina Taimina in 1997, showed that you could crochet models in hyperbolic space. Here is this diagram in crochetness. I've stitched Euclid's parallel postulate on to the surface. And the lines look curved. But look, I can prove to you that they're straight because I can take any one of these lines, and I can fold along it. And it's a straight line. So here, in wool, through a domestic feminine art, is the proof that the most famous postulate in mathematics is wrong. (Applause)And you can stitch all sorts of mathematical theorems onto these surfaces. The discovery of hyperbolic space ushered in the field of mathematics that is called non-Euclidean geometry. And this is actually the field of mathematics that underlies general relativity and is actually ultimately going to show us about the shape of the universe. So there is this direct line between feminine handicraft, Euclid and general relativity.Now, I said that mathematicians thought that this was impossible. Here's two creatures who've never heard of Euclid's parallel postulate — didn't know it was impossible to violate, and they're simply getting on with it. They've been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. I once asked the mathematicians why it was that mathematicians thought this structure was impossible when sea slugs have been doing it since the Silurian age. Their answer was interesting. They said, ""Well I guess there aren't that many mathematicians sitting around looking at sea slugs."" And that's true. But it also goes deeper than that. It also says a whole lot of things about what mathematicians thought mathematics was, what they thought it could and couldn't do, what they thought it could and couldn't represent. Even mathematicians, who in some sense are the freest of all thinkers, literally couldn't see not only the sea slugs around them, but the lettuce on their plate — because lettuces, and all those curly vegetables, they also are embodiments of hyperbolic geometry. And so in some sense they literally, they had such a symbolic view of mathematics, they couldn't actually see what was going on on the lettuce in front of them. It turns out that the natural world is full of hyperbolic wonders.And so, too, we've discovered that there is an infinite taxonomy of crochet hyperbolic creatures. We started out, Chrissy and I and our contributors, doing the simple mathematically perfect models. But we found that when we deviated from the specific setness of the mathematical code that underlies it — the simple algorithm crochet three, increase one — when we deviated from that and made embellishments to the code, the models immediately started to look more natural. And all of our contributors, who are an amazing collection of people around the world, do their own embellishments. As it were, we have this ever-evolving, crochet taxonomic tree of life. Just as the morphology and the complexity of life on earth is never ending, little embellishments and complexifications in the DNA code lead to new things like giraffes, or orchids — so too, do little embellishments in the crochet code lead to new and wondrous creatures in the evolutionary tree of crochet life. So this project really has taken on this inner organic life of its own. There is the totality of all the people who have come to it. And their individual visions, and their engagement with this mathematical mode.We have these technologies. We use them. But why? What's at stake here? What does it matter? For Chrissy and I, one of the things that's important here is that these things suggest the importance and value of embodied knowledge. We live in a society that completely tends to valorize symbolic forms of representation — algebraic representations, equations, codes. We live in a society that's obsessed with presenting information in this way, teaching information in this way. But through this sort of modality, crochet, other plastic forms of play — people can be engaged with the most abstract, high-powered, theoretical ideas, the kinds of ideas that normally you have to go to university departments to study in higher mathematics, which is where I first learned about hyperbolic space. But you can do it through playing with material objects. One of the ways that we've come to think about this is that what we're trying to do with the Institute for Figuring and projects like this, we're trying to have kindergarten for grown-ups.And kindergarten was actually a very formalized system of education, established by a man named Friedrich Froebel, who was a crystallographer in the 19th century. He believed that the crystal was the model for all kinds of representation. He developed a radical alternative system of engaging the smallest children with the most abstract ideas through physical forms of play. And he is worthy of an entire talk on his own right. The value of education is something that Froebel championed, through plastic modes of play.We live in a society now where we have lots of think tanks, where great minds go to think about the world. They write these great symbolic treatises called books, and papers, and op-ed articles. We want to propose, Chrissy and I, through The Institute for Figuring, another alternative way of doing things, which is the play tank. And the play tank, like the think tank, is a place where people can go and engage with great ideas. But what we want to propose, is that the highest levels of abstraction, things like mathematics, computing, logic, etc. — all of this can be engaged with, not just through purely cerebral algebraic symbolic methods, but by literally, physically playing with ideas. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef
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"When I was five years old I fell in love with airplanes. Now I'm talking about the '30s. In the '30s an airplane had two wings and a round motor, and was always flown by a guy who looked like Cary Grant. He had high leather boots, jodhpurs, an old leather jacket, a wonderful helmet and those marvelous goggles — and, inevitably, a white scarf, to flow in the wind. He'd always walk up to his airplane in a kind of saunter, devil-may-care saunter, flick the cigarette away, grab the girl waiting here, give her a kiss. (Laughter) And then mount his airplane, maybe for the last time. Of course I always wondered what would happen if he'd kissed the airplane first. (Laughter)But this was real romance to me. Everything about flying in those years, which was — you have to stop and think for a moment — was probably the most advanced technological thing going on at the time. So as a youngster, I tried to get close to this by drawing airplanes, constantly drawing airplanes. It's the way I got a part of this romance. And of course, in a way, when I say romance, I mean in part the aesthetics of that whole situation. I think the word is the holistic experience revolving around a product. The product was that airplane. But it built a romance. Even the parts of the airplane had French names. Ze fuselage, ze empanage, ze nessal. You know, from a romance language. So that it was something that just got into your spirit. It did mine.And I decided I had to get closer than just drawing fantasy airplanes. I wanted to build airplanes. So I built model airplanes. And I found that in doing the model airplanes the appearance drawings were not enough. You couldn't transfer those to the model itself. If you wanted it to fly you had to learn the discipline of flying. You had to learn about aeronautics. You had to learn what made an airplane stay in the air. And of course, as a model in those years, you couldn't control it. So it had to be self-righting, and stay up without crashing. So I had to give up the approach of drawing the fantasy shapes and convert it to technical drawings — the shape of the wing, the shape of the fuselage and so on — and build an airplane over these drawings that I knew followed some of the principles of flying. And in so doing, I could produce a model that would fly, stay in the air. And it had, once it was in the air, some of this romance that I was in love with.Well the act of drawing airplanes led me to, when I had the opportunity to choose a course in school, led me to sign up for aeronautical engineering. And when I was sitting in classes — in which no one asked me to draw an airplane — to my surprise. I had to learn mathematics and mechanics and all this sort of thing. I'd wile away my time drawing airplanes in the class. One day a young man looked over my shoulder, he said, ""You draw very well. You should be in the art department."" And I said, ""Why?"" And he said, ""Well for one thing, there are more girls there."" (Laughter)So my romance was temporarily shifted. (Laughter) And I went into art because they appreciated drawing. Studied painting; didn't do very well at that. Went through design, some architecture. Eventually hired myself out as a designer. And for the following 25 years, living in Italy, living in America, I doled out a piece of this romance to anybody who'd pay for it — this sense, this aesthetic feeling, for the experience revolving around a designed object. And it exists. Any of you who rode the automobiles — was it yesterday? — at the track, you know the romance revolving around those high performance cars.Well in 25 years I was mostly putting out pieces of this romance and not getting a lot back in because design on call doesn't always connect you with a circumstance in which you can produce things of this nature. So after 25 years I began to feel as though I was running dry. And I quit. And I started up a very small operation — went from 40 people to one, in an effort to rediscover my innocence. I wanted to get back where the romance was.And I couldn't choose airplanes because they had gotten sort of unromantic at that point, even though I'd done a lot of airplane work, on the interiors. So I chose furniture. And I chose chairs specifically because I knew something about them. I'd designed a lot of chairs, over the years for tractors and trucks and submarines — all kinds of things. But not office chairs. So I started doing that. And I found that there were ways to duplicate the same approach that I used to use on the airplane. Only this time, instead of the product being shaped by the wind, it was shaped by the human body. So the discipline was — as in the airplane you learn a lot about how to deal with the air, for a chair you have to learn a lot about how to deal with the body, and what the body needs, wants, indicates it needs. And that's the way, ultimately after some ups and downs, I ended up designing the chair I'm going to show you.I should say one more thing. When I was doing those model airplanes, I did everything. I conceived the kind of airplane. I basically engineered it. I built it. And I flew it. And that's the way I work now. When I started this chair it was not a preconceived notion. Design nowadays, if you mean it, you don't start with styling sketches. I started with a lot of loose ideas, roughly eight or nine years ago. And the loose ideas had something to do with what I knew happened with people in the office, at the work place — people who worked, and used task seating, a great many of them sitting in front of a computer all day long. And I felt, the one thing they don't need, is a chair that interferes with their main reason for sitting there.So I took the approach that the chair should do as much for them as humanly possible or as mechanistically possible so that they didn't have to fuss with it. So my idea was that, instead of sitting down and reaching for a lot of controls, that you would sit on the chair, and it would automatically balance your weight against the force required to recline. Now that may not mean a lot to some of you. But you know most good chairs do recline because it's beneficial to open up this joint between your legs and your upper body for better breathing and better flow. So that if you sit down on my chair, whether you're five feet tall or six foot six, it always deals with your weight and transfers the amount of force required to recline in a way that you don't have to look for something to adjust.I'll tell you right up front, this is a trade off. There are drawbacks to this. One is: you can't accommodate everybody. There are some very light people, some extremely heavy people, maybe people with a lot of bulk up top. They begin to fall off the end of your chart. But the compromise, I felt, was in my favor because most people don't adjust their chairs. They will sit in them forever. I had somebody on the bus out to the racetrack tell me about his sister calling him. He said she had one of the new, better chairs. She said, ""Oh I love it."" She said, ""But it's too high."" (Laughter) So he said, ""Well I'll come over and look at it."" He came over and looked at it. He reached down. He pulled a lever. And the chair sank down. She said, ""Oh it's wonderful. How did you do that?"" And he showed her the lever. Well, that's typical of a lot of us working in chairs. And why should you get a 20-page manual about how to run a chair? (Laughter) I had one for a wristwatch once. 20 pages.Anyway, I felt that it was important that you didn't have to make an adjustment in order to get this kind of action. The other thing I felt was that armrests had never really been properly approached from the standpoint of how much of an aid they could be to your work life. But I felt it was too much to ask to have to adjust each individual armrest in order to get it where you wanted. So I spent a long time. I said I worked eight or nine years on it. And each of these things went along sort of in parallel but incrementally were a problem of their own. I worked a long time on figuring out how to move the arms over a much greater arc — that is up and down — and make them a lot easier, so that you didn't have to use a button. And so after many trials, many failures, we came up with a very simple arrangement in which we could just move one arm or the other. And they go up easily. And stop where you want. You can put them down, essentially out of the way. No arms at all. Or you can pull them up where you want them. And this was another thing that I felt, while not nearly as romantic as Cary Grant, nevertheless begins to grab a little bit of aesthetic operation, aesthetic performance into a product.The next area that was of interest to me was the fact that reclining was a very important factor. And the more you can recline, in a way, the better it is. The more the angle between here and here opens up — and nowadays, with a screen in front of you, you don't want to have your eye drop too far in the recline, so we keep it at more or less the same level — but you transfer weight off your tailbones. Would everybody put their hand under their bottom and feel their tailbone? (Laughter) You feel that bone under there? (Laughter) Just your own. (Laughter) There's two of them, one on either side. All the weight of your upper torso — your arms, your head — goes right down through your back, your spine, into those bones when you sit. And that's a lot of load. Just relieving your arms with armrests takes 20 percent of that load off. Now that, if your spine is not held in a good position, will help bend your spine the wrong way, and so on. So to unload that great weight — if that indeed exists — you can recline. When you recline you take away a lot of that load off your bottom end, and transfer it to your back. At the same time, as I say, you open up this joint. And breathability is good.But to do that, if you have any amount of recline, it gets to the point where you need a headrest because nearly always, automatically hold your head in a vertical position, see? As I recline, my head says more or less vertical. Well if you're reclined a great deal, you have to use muscle force to hold your head there. So that's where a headrest comes in. Now headrest is a challenge because you want it to adjust enough so that it'll fit, you know, a tall guy and a short girl. So here we are. I've got five inches of adjustment here in order to get the headrest in the right place. But then I knew from experience and looking around in offices where there were chairs with headrests that nobody would ever bother to reach back and turn a knob and adjust the headrest to put it in position. And you need it in a different position when you're upright, then when you're reclined. So I knew that had to be solved, and had to be automatic. So if you watch this chair as I recline, the headrest comes up to meet my neck. Ideally you want to put the head support in the cranial area, right there. So that part of it took a long time to work out.And there is a variety of other things: the shape of the cushions, the gel we put. We stole the idea from bicycle seats, and put gel in the cushions and in the armrests to absorb point load — distributes the loading so you don't get hard spots. You cant hit your elbow on bottom. And I did want to demonstrate the fact that the chair can accommodate people. While you're sitting in it you can adjust it down for the five-footer, or you can adjust it for the six-foot-six guy — all within the scope of a few simple adjustments. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/niels_diffrient_rethinks_the_way_we_sit_at_work
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"So I'm here to tell you a story of success from Africa. A year and a half ago, four of the five people who are full time members at Ushahidi, which means ""testimony"" in Swahili, were TED Fellows. A year ago in Kenya we had post-election violence. And in that time we prototyped and built, in about three days, a system that would allow anybody with a mobile phone to send in information and reports on what was happening around them. We took what we knew about Africa, the default device, the mobile phone, as our common denominator, and went from there. We got reports like this. This is just a couple of them from January 17th, last year. And our system was rudimentary. It was very basic. It was a mash-up that used data that we collected from people, and we put it on our map.But then we decided we needed to do something more. We needed to take what we had built and create a platform out of it so that it could be used elsewhere in the world. And so there is a team of developers from all over Africa, who are part of this team now — from Ghana, from Malawi, from Kenya. There is even some from the U.S. We're building for smartphones, so that it can be used in the developed world, as well as the developing world.We are realizing that this is true. If it works in Africa then it will work anywhere. And so we build for it in Africa first and then we move to the edges. It's now been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's being used by NGOs all over East Africa, small NGOs doing their own little projects. Just this last month it was deployed by Al Jazeera in Gaza. But that's actually not what I'm here to talk about.I'm here to talk about the next big thing, because what we're finding out is that we have this capacity to report eyewitness accounts of what's going on in real time. We're seeing this in events like Mumbai recently, where it's so much easier to report now than it is to consume it. There is so much information; what do you do? This is the Twitter reports for over three days just covering Mumbai. How do you decide what is important? What is the veracity level of what you're looking at? So what we find is that there is this great deal of wasted crisis information because there is just too much information for us to actually do anything with right now. And what we're actually really concerned with is this first three hours. What we are looking at is the first three hours. How do we deal with that information that is coming in? You can't understand what is actually happening. On the ground and around the world people are still curious, and trying to figure out what is going on. But they don't know.So what we built of course, Ushahidi, is crowdsourcing this information. You see this with Twitter, too. You get this information overload. So you've got a lot of information. That's great. But now what? So we think that there is something interesting we can do here. And we have a small team who is working on this. We think that we can actually create a crowdsourced filter. Take the crowd and apply them to the information. And by rating it and by rating the different people who submit information, we can get refined results and weighted results. So that we have a better understanding of the probability of something being true or not. This is the kind of innovation that is, quite frankly — it's interesting that it's coming from Africa. It's coming from places that you wouldn't expect. From young, smart developers. And it's a community around it that has decided to build this. So, thank you very much. And we are very happy to be part of the TED family. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erik_hersman_on_reporting_crisis_via_texting
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"I want to talk about the election. For the first time in the United States, a predominantly white group of voters voted for an African-American candidate for President. And in fact Barack Obama did quite well. He won 375 electoral votes. And he won about 70 million popular votes more than any other presidential candidate — of any race, of any party — in history. If you compare how Obama did against how John Kerry had done four years earlier — Democrats really like seeing this transition here, where almost every state becomes bluer, becomes more democratic — even states Obama lost, like out west, those states became more blue. In the south, in the northeast, almost everywhere but with a couple of exceptions here and there.One exception is in Massachusetts. That was John Kerry's home state. No big surprise, Obama couldn't do better than Kerry there. Or in Arizona, which is John McCain's home, Obama didn't have much improvement. But there is also this part of the country, kind of in the middle region here. This kind of Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, West Virginia region. Now if you look at '96, Bill Clinton — the last Democrat to actually win — how he did in '96, you see real big differences in this part of the country right here, the kind of Appalachians, Ozarks, highlands region, as I call it: 20 or 30 point swings from how Bill Clinton did in '96 to how Obama did in 2008. Yes Bill Clinton was from Arkansas, but these are very, very profound differences.So, when we think about parts of the country like Arkansas, you know. There is a book written called, ""What's the Matter with Kansas?"" But really the question here — Obama did relatively well in Kansas. He lost badly but every Democrat does. He lost no worse than most people do. But yeah, what's the matter with Arkansas? (Laughter) And when we think of Arkansas we tend to have pretty negative connotations. We think of a bunch of rednecks, quote, unquote, with guns. And we think people like this probably don't want to vote for people who look like this and are named Barack Obama. We think it's a matter of race. And is this fair? Are we kind of stigmatizing people from Arkansas, and this part of the country?And the answer is: it is at least partially fair. We know that race was a factor, and the reason why we know that is because we asked those people. Actually we didn't ask them, but when they conducted exit polls in every state, in 37 states, out of the 50, they asked a question, that was pretty direct, about race. They asked this question. In deciding your vote for President today, was the race of the candidate a factor? We're looking for people that said, ""Yes, race was a factor; moreover it was an important factor, in my decision,"" and people who voted for John McCain as a result of that factor, maybe in combination with other factors, and maybe alone. We're looking for this behavior among white voters or, really, non-black voters.So you see big differences in different parts of the country on this question. In Louisiana, about one in five white voters said, ""Yes, one of the big reasons why I voted against Barack Obama is because he was an African-American."" If those people had voted for Obama, even half of them, Obama would have won Louisiana safely. Same is true with, I think, all of these states you see on the top of the list. Meanwhile, California, New York, we can say, ""Oh we're enlightened"" but you know, certainly a much lower incidence of this admitted, I suppose, manifestation of racially-based voting. Here is the same data on a map. You kind of see the relationship between the redder states of where more people responded and said, ""Yes, Barack Obama's race was a problem for me."" You see, comparing the map to '96, you see an overlap here. This really seems to explain why Barack Obama did worse in this one part of the country.So we have to ask why. Is racism predictable in some way? Is there something driving this? Is it just about some weird stuff that goes on in Arkansas that we don't understand, and Kentucky? Or are there more systematic factors at work? And so we can look at a bunch of different variables. These are things that economists and political scientists look at all the time — things like income, and religion, education. Which of these seem to drive this manifestation of racism in this big national experiment we had on November 4th? And there are a couple of these that have strong predictive relationships, one of which is education, where you see the states with the fewest years of schooling per adult are in red, and you see this part of the country, the kind of Appalachians region, is less educated. It's just a fact. And you see the relationship there with the racially-based voting patterns. The other variable that's important is the type of neighborhood that you live in. States that are more rural — even to some extent of the states like New Hampshire and Maine — they exhibit a little bit of this racially-based voting against Barack Obama. So it's the combination of these two things: it's education and the type of neighbors that you have, which we'll talk about more in a moment. And the thing about states like Arkansas and Tennessee is that they're both very rural, and they are educationally impoverished.So yes, racism is predictable. These things, among maybe other variables, but these things seem to predict it. We're going to drill down a little bit more now, into something called the General Social Survey. This is conducted by the University of Chicago every other year. And they ask a series of really interesting questions. In 2000 they had particularly interesting questions about racial attitudes. One simple question they asked is, ""Does anyone of the opposite race live in your neighborhood?"" We can see in different types of communities that the results are quite different. In cites, about 80 percent of people have someone whom they consider a neighbor of another race, but in rural communities, only about 30 percent. Probably because if you live on a farm, you might not have a lot of neighbors, period. But nevertheless, you're not having a lot of interaction with people who are unlike you. So what we're going to do now is take the white people in the survey and split them between those who have black neighbors — or, really, some neighbor of another race — and people who have only white neighbors. And we see in some variables in terms of political attitudes, not a lot of difference. This was eight years ago, some people were more Republican back then. But you see Democrats versus Republican, not a big difference based on who your neighbors are.And even some questions about race — for example affirmative action, which is kind of a political question, a policy question about race, if you will — not much difference here. Affirmative action is not very popular frankly, with white voters, period. But people with black neighbors and people with mono-racial neighborhoods feel no differently about it really. But if you probe a bit deeper and get a bit more personal if you will, ""Do you favor a law banning interracial marriage?"" There is a big difference. People who don't have neighbors of a different race are about twice as likely to oppose interracial marriage as people who do. Just based on who lives in your immediate neighborhood around you. And likewise they asked, not in 2000, but in the same survey in 1996, ""Would you not vote for a qualified black president?"" You see people without neighbors who are African-American who were much more likely to say, ""That would give me a problem.""So it's really not even about urban versus rural. It's about who you live with. Racism is predictable. And it's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races. So if you want to address it, the goal is to facilitate interaction with people of other races. I have a couple of very obvious, I suppose, ideas for maybe how to do that.I'm a big fan of cities. Especially if we have cites that are diverse and sustainable, and can support people of different ethnicities and different income groups. I think cities facilitate more of the kind of networking, the kind of casual interaction than you might have on a daily basis. But also not everyone wants to live in a city, certainly not a city like New York. So we can think more about things like street grids. This is the neighborhood where I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. It's a traditional Midwestern community, which means you have real grid. You have real neighborhoods and real trees, and real streets you can walk on. And you interact a lot with your neighbors — people you like, people you might not know. And as a result it's a very tolerant community, which is different, I think, than something like this, which is in Schaumburg, Illinois, where every little set of houses has their own cul-de-sac and drive-through Starbucks and stuff like that. I think that actually this type of urban design, which became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s — I think there is a relationship between that and the country becoming more conservative under Ronald Reagan.But also here is another idea we have — is an intercollegiate exchange program where you have students going from New York abroad. But frankly there are enough differences within the country now where maybe you can take a bunch of kids from NYU, have them go study for a semester at the University of Arkansas, and vice versa. Do it at the high school level. Literally there are people who might be in school in Arkansas or Tennessee and might never interact in a positive affirmative way with someone from another part of the country, or of another racial group. I think part of the education variable we talked about before is the networking experience you get when you go to college where you do get a mix of people that you might not interact with otherwise.But the point is, this is all good news, because when something is predictable, it is what I call designable. You can start thinking about solutions to solving that problem, even if the problem is pernicious and as intractable as racism. If we understand the root causes of the behavior and where it manifests itself and where it doesn't, we can start to design solutions to it. So that's all I have to say. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nate_silver_on_race_and_politics
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"I'm going to read a few strips. These are, most of these are from a monthly page I do in and architecture and design magazine called Metropolis.And the first story is called ""The Faulty Switch.""Another beautifully designed new building ruined by the sound of a common wall light switch. It's fine during the day when the main rooms are flooded with sunlight. But at dusk everything changes.The architect spent hundreds of hours designing the burnished brass switchplates for his new office tower. And then left it to a contractor to install these 79-cent switches behind them.We know instinctively where to reach when we enter a dark room. We automatically throw the little nub of plastic upward. But the sound we are greeted with, as the room is bathed in the simulated glow of late-afternoon light, recalls to mind a dirty men's room in the rear of a Greek coffee shop. (Laughter)This sound colors our first impression of any room; it can't be helped. But where does this sound, commonly described as a click, come from? Is it simply the byproduct of a crude mechanical action? Or is it an imitation of one half the set of sounds we make to express disappointment? The often dental consonant of no Indo-European language.Or is it the amplified sound of a synapse firing in the brain of a cockroach? In the 1950s they tried their best to muffle this sound with mercury switches and silent knob controls.But today these improvements seem somehow inauthentic. The click is the modern triumphal clarion proceeding us through life, announcing our entry into every lightless room.The sound made flicking a wall switch off is of a completely different nature. It has a deep melancholy ring. Children don't like it. It's why they leave lights on around the house. (Laughter) Adults find it comforting.But wouldn't it be an easy matter to wire a wall switch so that it triggers the muted horn of a steam ship? Or the recorded crowing of a rooster? Or the distant peel of thunder?Thomas Edison went through thousands of unlikely substances before he came upon the right one for the filament of his electric light bulb. Why have we settled so quickly for the sound of its switch? That's the end of that. (Applause)The next story is called ""In Praise of the Taxpayer.""That so many of the city's most venerable taxpayers have survived yet another commercial building boom, is cause for celebration.These one or two story structures, designed to yield only enough income to cover the taxes on the land on which they stand, were not meant to be permanent buildings. Yet for one reason or another they have confounded the efforts of developers to be combined into lots suitable for high-rise construction.Although they make no claim to architectural beauty, they are, in their perfect temporariness, a delightful alternative to the large-scale structures that might someday take their place. The most perfect examples occupy corner lots. They offer a pleasant respite from the high-density development around them. A break of light and air, an architectural biding of time.So buried in signage are these structures, that it often takes a moment to distinguish the modern specially constructed taxpayer from its neighbor: the small commercial building from an earlier century, whose upper floors have been sealed, and whose groundfloor space now functions as a taxpayer. The few surfaces not covered by signs are often clad in a distinctive, dark green-gray, striated aluminum siding. Take-out sandwich shops, film processing drop-offs, peep-shows and necktie stores.Now these provisional structures have, in some cases, remained standing for the better part of a human lifetime. The temporary building is a triumph of modern industrial organization, a healthy sublimation of the urge to build, and proof that not every architectural idea need be set in stone. That's the end. (Laughter)And the next story is called, ""On the Human Lap."" For the ancient Egyptians the lap was a platform upon which to place the earthly possessions of the dead — 30 cubits from foot to knee.It was not until the 14th century that an Italian painter recognized the lap as a Grecian temple, upholstered in flesh and cloth. Over the next 200 years we see the infant Christ go from a sitting to a standing position on the Virgin's lap, and then back again. Every child recapitulates this ascension, straddling one or both legs, sitting sideways, or leaning against the body.From there, to the modern ventriloquist's dummy, is but a brief moment in history. You were late for school again this morning. The ventriloquist must first make us believe that a small boy is sitting on his lap. The illusion of speech follows incidentally. What have you got to say for yourself, Jimmy?As adults we admire the lap from a nostalgic distance. We have fading memories of that provisional temple, erected each time an adult sat down. On a crowded bus there was always a lap to sit on. It is children and teenage girls who are most keenly aware of its architectural beauty. They understand the structural integrity of a deep avuncular lap, as compared to the shaky arrangement of a neurotic niece in high heels.The relationship between the lap and its owner is direct and intimate. I envision a 36-story, 450-unit residential high-rise — a reason to consider the mental health of any architect before granting an important commission. The bathrooms and kitchens will, of course, have no windows. The lap of luxury is an architectural construct of childhood, which we seek, in vain, as adults, to employ. That's the end. (Laughter)The next story is called ""The Haverpiece Collection"" A nondescript warehouse, visible for a moment from the northbound lanes of the Prykushko Expressway, serves as the temporary resting place for the Haverpiece collection of European dried fruit.The profound convolutions on the surface of a dried cherry. The foreboding sheen of an extra-large date.Do you remember wandering as a child through those dark wooden storefront galleries? Where everything was displayed in poorly labeled roach-proof bins.Pears dried in the form of genital organs. Apricot halves like the ears of cherubim.In 1962 the unsold stock was purchased by Maurice Haverpiece, a wealthy prune juice bottler, and consolidated to form the core collection. As an art form it lies somewhere between still-life painting and plumbing.Upon his death in 1967, a quarter of the items were sold off for compote to a high-class hotel restaurant. (Laughter) Unsuspecting guests were served stewed turn-of-the-century Turkish figs for breakfast. (Laughter)The rest of the collection remains here, stored in plain brown paper bags until funds can be raised to build a permanent museum and study center.A shoe made of apricot leather for the daughter of a czar.That's the end. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_katchor_s_comics_of_old_new_york
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"The first half of the 20th century was an absolute disaster in human affairs, a cataclysm. We had the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the rise of the communist nations. And each one of these forces split the world, tore the world apart, divided the world. And they threw up walls — political walls, trade walls, transportation walls, communication walls, iron curtains — which divided peoples and nations.It was only in the second half of the 20th century that we slowly began to pull ourselves out of this abyss. Trade walls began to come tumbling down. Here are some data on tariffs: starting at 40 percent, coming down to less than 5 percent. We globalized the world. And what does that mean? It means that we extended cooperation across national boundaries; we made the world more cooperative. Transportation walls came tumbling down. You know in 1950 the typical ship carried 5,000 to 10,000 tons worth of goods. Today a container ship can carry 150,000 tons; it can be manned with a smaller crew; and unloaded faster than ever before. Communication walls, I don't have to tell you — the Internet — have come tumbling down. And of course the iron curtains, political walls have come tumbling down.Now all of this has been tremendous for the world. Trade has increased. Here is just a little bit of data. In 1990, exports from China to the United States: 15 billion dollars. By 2007: over 300 billion dollars. And perhaps most remarkably, at the beginning of the 21st century, really for the first time in modern history, growth extended to almost all parts of the world. So China, I've already mentioned, beginning around 1978, around the time of the death of Mao, growth — ten percent a year. Year after year after year, absolutely incredible. Never before in human history have so many people been raised out of such great poverty as happened in China. China is the world's greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades. India, starting a little bit later, but in 1990, begetting tremendous growth. Incomes at that time less than $1,000 per year. And over the next 18 years have almost tripled. Growth of six percent a year. Absolutely incredible. Now Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa — Sub-Saharan Africa has been the area of the world most resistant to growth. And we can see the tragedy of Africa in the first few bars here. Growth was negative. People were actually getting poorer than their parents, and sometimes even poorer than their grandparents had been. But at the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century, we saw growth in Africa. And I think, as you'll see, there's reasons for optimism, because I believe that the best is yet to come. Now why.On the cutting edge today it's new ideas which are driving growth. And by that I mean it's products for which the research and development costs are really high, and the manufacturing costs are low. More than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge. Now ideas have this amazing property. Thomas Jefferson, I think, really expressed this quite well. He said, ""He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."" Or to put it slightly differently: one apple feeds one man, but an idea can feed the world. Now this is not new. This is practically not new to TEDsters. This is practically the model of TED. But what is new is that the greater function of ideas is going to drive growth even more than ever before. This provides a reason why trade and globalization are even more important, more powerful than ever before, and are going to increase growth more than ever before.And to explain why this is so, I have a question. Suppose that there are two diseases: one of them is rare, the other one is common, but if they are not treated they are equally severe. If you had to choose, which would you rather have: the common disease or the rare disease? Common, the common — I think that's absolutely right, and why? Because there are more drugs to treat common diseases than there are to treat rare diseases. The reason for this is incentives. It costs about the same to produce a new drug whether that drug treats 1,000 people, 100,000 people, or a million people. But the revenues are much greater if the drug treats a million people. So the incentives are much larger to produce drugs which treat more people. To put this differently: larger markets save lives. In this case misery truly does love company.Now think about the following: if China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now. Now we are not there yet, but it is happening. As other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously. And that means an increase incentive to do research and development, which benefits everyone in the world. Larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas, whether it's software, whether it's a computer chip, whether it's a new design. For the Hollywood people in the audience, this even explains why action movies have larger budgets than comedies: it's because action movies translate easier into other languages and other cultures, so the market for those movies is larger. People are willing to invest more, and the budgets are larger.Alright. Well if larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas, how do we maximize that incentive? It's by having one world market, by globalizing the world. The way I like to put this is: one idea. Ideas are meant to be shared, so one idea can serve one world, one market. One idea, one world, one market. Well how else can we create new ideas? That's one reason. Globalize trade. How else can we create new ideas? Well, more idea creators. Now idea creators, they come from all walks of life. Artists and innovators — many of the people you've seen on this stage. I'm going to focus on scientists and engineers because I have some data on that, and I'm a data person.Now, today, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world's population are scientists and engineers. (Laughter) The United States has been an idea leader. A large fraction of those people are in the United States. But the U.S. is losing its idea leadership. And for that I am very grateful. That is a good thing. It is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the United States, and a handful of other developed countries, have shouldered the entire burden of research and development. But consider the following: if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the United States is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone, which are shared by everyone. I think of the great Indian mathematician, Ramanujan. How many Ramanujans are there in India today toiling in the fields, barely able to feed themselves, when they could be feeding the world? Now we're not there yet. But it is going to happen in this century. The real tragedy of the last century is this: if you think about the world's population as a giant computer, a massively parallel processor, then the great tragedy has been that billions of our processors have been off line. But in this century China is coming on line. India is coming on line. Africa is coming on line. We will see an Einstein in Africa in this century.Here is just some data. This is China. 1996: less than one million new university students in China per year; 2006: over five million. Now think what this means. This means we all benefit when another country gets rich. We should not fear other countries becoming wealthy. That is something that we should embrace — a wealthy China, a wealthy India, a wealthy Africa. We need a greater demand for ideas — those larger markets I was talking about earlier — and a greater supply of ideas for the world. Now you can see some of the reasons why I'm optimistic. Globalization is increasing the demand for ideas, the incentive to create new ideas. Investments in education are increasing the supply of new ideas.In fact if you look at world history you can see some reasons for optimism. From about the beginnings of humanity to 1500: zero economic growth, nothing. 1500 to 1800: maybe a little bit of economic growth, but less in a century than you expect to see in a year today. 1900s: maybe one percent. Twentieth century: a little bit over two percent. Twenty-first century could easily be 3.3, even higher percent. Even at that rate, by 2100 average GDP per capita in the world will be $200,000. That's not U.S. GDP per capita, which will be over a million, but world GDP per capita — $200,000. That's not that far. We won't make it. But some of our grandchildren probably will. And I should say, I think this is a rather modest prediction. In Kurzweilian terms this is gloomy. In Kurzweilian terms I'm like the Eeyore of economic growth. (Laughter)Alright what about problems? What about a great depression? Well let's take a look. Let's take a look at the Great Depression. Here is GDP per capita from 1900 to 1929. Now let's imagine that you were an economist in 1929, trying to forecast future growth for the United States, not knowing that the economy was about to go off a cliff, not knowing that we were about to enter the greatest economic disaster certainly in the 20th century. What would you have predicted, not knowing this? If you had based your prediction, your forecast on 1900 to 1929 you'd have predicted something like this. If you'd been a little more optimistic — say, based upon the Roaring Twenties — you'd have said this. So what actually happened? We went off a cliff but we recovered. In fact in the second half of the 20th century growth was even higher than anything you would have predicted based upon the first half of the 20th century. So growth can wash away even what appears to be a great depression.Alright. What else? Oil. Oil. This was a big topic. When I was writing up my notes oil was $140 per barrel. So people were asking a question. They were saying, ""Is China drinking our milkshake?"" (Laughter) And there is some truth to this, in the sense that we have something of a finite resource, and increased growth is going to push up demand for that. But I think I don't have to tell this audience that a higher price of oil is not necessarily a bad thing. Moreover, as everyone knows, look — it's energy, not oil, which counts. And higher oil prices mean a greater incentive to invest in energy R&D. You can see this in the data. As oil prices go up, energy patents go up. The world is much better equipped to overcome an increase in the price of oil today, than ever in the past, because of what I'm talking about. One idea, one world, one market.So I'm optimistic so long as we hew to these two ideas: to keep globalizing world markets, keep extending cooperation across national boundaries, and keep investing in education. Now the United States has a particularly important role to play in this: to keep our education system globalized, to keep our education system open to students from all over the world, because our education system is the candle that other students come to light their own candles. Now remember here what Jefferson said. Jefferson said, ""When they come and light their candles at ours, they gain light, and we are not darkened."" But Jefferson wasn't quite right, was he? Because the truth is, when they light their candles at ours, there is twice as much light available for everyone. So my view is: Be optimistic. Spread the ideas. Spread the light. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_tabarrok_foresees_economic_growth
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"This machine, which we all have residing in our skulls, reminds me of an aphorism, of a comment of Woody Allen to ask about what is the very best thing to have within your skull. And it's this machine. And it's constructed for change. It's all about change. It confers on us the ability to do things tomorrow that we can't do today, things today that we couldn't do yesterday. And of course it's born stupid.The last time you were in the presence of a baby — this happens to be my granddaughter, Mitra. Isn't she fabulous? (Laughter) But nonetheless when she popped out despite the fact that her brain had actually been progressing in its development for several months before on the basis of her experiences in the womb — nonetheless she had very limited abilities, as does every infant at the time of normal, natural full-term birth. If we were to assay her perceptual abilities, they would be crude. There is no real indication that there is any real thinking going on. In fact there is little evidence that there is any cognitive ability in a very young infant. Infants don't respond to much. There is not really much of an indication in fact that there is a person on board. (Laughter) And they can only in a very primitive way, and in a very limited way control their movements.It would be several months before this infant could do something as simple as reach out and grasp under voluntary control an object and retrieve it, usually to the mouth. And it will be some months beforeward, and we see a long steady progression of the evolution from the first wiggles, to rolling over, and sitting up, and crawling, standing, walking, before we get to that magical point in which we can motate in the world. And yet, when we look forward in the brain we see really remarkable advance. By this age the brain can actually store. It has stored, recorded, can fastly retrieve the meanings of thousands, tens of thousands of objects, actions, and their relationships in the world. And those relationships can in fact be constructed in hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of ways. By this age the brain controls very refined perceptual abilities. And it actually has a growing repertoire of cognitive skills. This brain is very much a thinking machine. And by this age there is absolutely no question that this brain, it has a person on board. And in fact at this age it is substantially controlling its own self-development. And by this age we see a remarkable evolution in its capacity to control movement.Now movement has advanced to the point where it can actually control movement simultaneously, in a complex sequence, in complex ways as would be required for example for playing a complicated game, like soccer. Now this boy can bounce a soccer ball on his head. And where this boy comes from, Sao Paulo, Brazil, about 40 percent of boys of his age have this ability. You could go out into the community in Monterey, and you'd have difficulty finding a boy that has this ability. And if you did he'd probably be from Sao Paulo. (Laughter)That's all another way of saying that our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environments. That environment extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brain is challenged with. Because what we've done in our personal evolutions is build up a large repertoire of specific skills and abilities that are specific to our own individual histories. And in fact they result in a wonderful differentiation in humankind, in the way that, in fact, no two of us are quite alike. Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities that all derive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine. In an adult brain of course we've built up a large repertoire of mastered skills and abilities that we can perform more or less automatically from memory, and that define us as acting, moving, thinking creatures.Now we study this, as the nerdy, laboratory, university-based scientists that we are, by engaging the brains of animals like rats, or monkeys, or of this particularly curious creature — one of the more bizarre forms of life on earth — to engage them in learning new skills and abilities. And we try to track the changes that occur as the new skill or ability is acquired. In fact we do this in individuals of any age, in these different species — that is to say from infancies, infancy up to adulthood and old age. So we might engage a rat, for example, to acquire a new skill or ability that might involve the rat using its paw to master particular manual grasp behaviors just like we might examine a child and their ability to acquire the sub-skills, or the general overall skill of accomplishing something like mastering the ability to read. Or you might look in an older individual who has mastered a complex set of abilities that might relate to reading musical notation or performing the mechanical acts of performance that apply to musical performance.From these studies we defined two great epochs of the plastic history of the brain. The first great epoch is commonly called the ""Critical Period."" And that is the period in which the brain is setting up in its initial form its basic processing machinery. This is actually a period of dramatic change in which it doesn't take learning, per se, to drive the initial differentiation of the machinery of the brain. All it takes for example in the sound domain, is exposure to sound. And the brain actually is at the mercy of the sound environment in which it is reared. So for example I can rear an animal in an environment in which there is meaningless dumb sound, a repertoire of sound that I make up, that I make, just by exposure, artificially important to the animal and its young brain. And what I see is that the animal's brain sets up its initial processing of that sound in a form that's idealized, within the limits of its processing achievements to represent it in an organized and orderly way. The sound doesn't have to be valuable to the animal: I could raise the animal in something that could be hypothetically valuable, like the sounds that simulate the sounds of a native language of a child. And I see the brain actually develop a processor that is specialized — specialized for that complex array, a repertoire of sounds. It actually exaggerates their separateness of representation, in multi-dimensional neuronal representational terms.Or I can expose the animal to a completely meaningless and destructive sound. I can raise an animal under conditions that would be equivalent to raising a baby under a moderately loud ceiling fan, in the presence of continuous noise. And when I do that I actually specialize the brain to be a master processor for that meaningless sound. And I frustrate its ability to represent any meaningful sound as a consequence. Such things in the early history of babies occur in real babies. And they account for, for example the beautiful evolution of a language-specific processor in every normally developing baby. And so they also account for development of defective processing in a substantial population of children who are more limited, as a consequence, in their language abilities at an older age.Now in this early period of plasticity the brain actually changes outside of a learning context. I don't have to be paying attention to what I hear. The input doesn't really have to be meaningful. I don't have to be in a behavioral context. This is required so the brain sets up it's processing so that it can act differentially, so that it can act selectively, so that the creature that wears it, that carries it, can begin to operate on it in a selective way. In the next great epoch of life, which applies for most of life, the brain is actually refining its machinery as it masters a wide repertoire of skills and abilities. And in this epoch, which extends from late in the first year of life to death; it's actually doing this under behavioral control. And that's another way of saying the brain has strategies that define the significance of the input to the brain. And it's focusing on skill after skill, or ability after ability, under specific attentional control. It's a function of whether a goal in a behavior is achieved or whether the individual is rewarded in the behavior. This is actually very powerful. This lifelong capacity for plasticity, for brain change, is powerfully expressed. It is the basis of our real differentiation, one individual from another. You can look down in the brain of an animal that's engaged in a specific skill, and you can witness or document this change on a variety of levels.So here is a very simple experiment. It was actually conducted about five years ago in collaboration with scientists from the University of Provence in Marseilles. It's a very simple experiment where a monkey has been trained in a task that involves it manipulating a tool that's equivalent in its difficulty to a child learning to manipulate or handle a spoon. The monkey actually mastered the task in about 700 practice tries. So in the beginning the monkey could not perform this task at all. It had a success rate of about one in eight tries. Those tries were elaborate. Each attempt was substantially different from the other. But the monkey gradually developed a strategy. And 700 or so tries later the monkey is performing it flawlessly — never fails. He's successful in his retrieval of food with this tool every time. At this point the task is being performed in a beautifully stereotyped way: very beautifully regulated and highly repeated, trial to trial.We can look down in the brain of the monkey. And we see that it's distorted. We can track these changes, and have tracked these changes in many such behaviors across time. And here we see the distortion reflected in the map of the skin surfaces of the hand of the monkey. Now this is a map, down in the surface of the brain, in which, in a very elaborate experiment we've reconstructed the responses, location by location, in a highly detailed response mapping of the responses of its neurons. We see here a reconstruction of how the hand is represented in the brain. We've actually distorted the map by the exercise. And that is indicated in the pink. We have a couple fingertip surfaces that are larger. These are the surfaces the monkey is using to manipulate the tool. If we look at the selectivity of responses in the cortex of the monkey, we see that the monkey has actually changed the filter characteristics which represents input from the skin of the fingertips that are engaged. In other words there is still a single, simple representation of the fingertips in this most organized of cortical areas of the surface of the skin of the body. Monkey has like you have. And yet now it's represented in substantially finer grain. The monkey is getting more detailed information from these surfaces. And that is an unknown — unsuspected, maybe, by you — part of acquiring the skill or ability.Now actually we've looked in several different cortical areas in the monkey learning this task. And each one of them changes in ways that are specific to the skill or ability. So for example we can look to the cortical area that represents input that's controlling the posture of the monkey. We look in cortical areas that control specific movements, and the sequences of movements that are required in the behavior, and so forth. They are all remodeled. They all become specialized for the task at hand. There are 15 or 20 cortical areas that are changed specifically when you learn a simple skill like this. And that represents in your brain, really massive change. It represents the change in a reliable way of the responses of tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of neurons in your brain. It represents changes of hundreds of millions, possibly billions of synaptic connections in your brain. This is constructed by physical change. And the level of construction that occurs is massive. Think about the changes that occur in the brain of a child through the course of acquiring their movement behavior abilities in general. Or acquiring their native language abilities. The changes are massive.What it's all about is the selective representations of things that are important to the brain. Because in most of the life of the brain this is under control of behavioral context. It's what you pay attention to. It's what's rewarding to you. It's what the brain regards, itself, as positive and important to you. It's all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization. And that underlies your specialization. That is why you, in your many skills and abilities, are a unique specialist: a specialist that's vastly different in your physical brain in detail than the brain of an individual 100 years ago; enormously different in the details from the brain of the average individual 1,000 years ago. Now, one of the characteristics of this change process is that information is always related to other inputs or information that is occurring in immediate time, in context. And that's because the brain is constructing representations of things that are correlated in little moments of time and that relate to one another in little moments of successive time. The brain is recording all information and driving all change in temporal context. Now overwhelmingly the most powerful context that's occurred in your brain is you. Billions of events have occurred in your history that are related in time to yourself as the receiver, or yourself as the actor, yourself as the thinker, yourself as the mover. Billions of times little pieces of sensation have come in from the surface of your body that are always associated with you as the receiver, and that result in the embodiment of you. You are constructed, your self is constructed from these billions of events. It's constructed. It's created in your brain. And it's created in the brain via physical change. This is a marvelously constructed thing that results in individual form because each one of us has vastly different histories, and vastly different experiences, that drive in to us this marvelous differentiation of self, of personhood.Now we've used this research to try to understand not just how a normal person develops, and elaborates their skills and abilities, but also try to understand the origins of impairment, and the origins of differences or variations that might limit the capacities of a child, or an adult. I'm going to talk about using these strategies to actually design brain plasticity-based approach to drive corrections in the machinery of a child that increases the competence of the child as a language receiver and user and, thereafter, as a reader. And I'm going to talk about experiments that involve actually using this brain science, first of all to understand how it contributes to the loss of function as we age. And then, by using it in a targeted approach we're going to try to differentiate the machinery to recover function in old age.So the first example I'm going to talk about relates to children with learning impairments. We now have a large body of literature that demonstrates that the fundamental problem that occurs in the majority of children that have early language impairments, and that are going to struggle to learn to read, is that their language processor is created in a defective form. And the reason that it rises in a defective form is because early in the baby's brain's life the machine process is noisy. It's that simple. It's a signal-to-noise problem. Okay? And there are a lot of things that contribute to that. There are numerous inherited faults that could make the machine process noisier. Now I might say the noise problem could also occur on the basis of information provided in the world from the ears.If any — those of you who are older in the audience know that when I was a child we understood that a child born with a cleft palate was born with what we called mental retardation. We knew that they were going to be slow cognitively; we knew they were going to struggle to learn to develop normal language abilities; and we knew that they were going to struggle to learn to read. Most of them would be intellectual and academic failures. That's disappeared. That no longer applies. That inherited weakness, that inherited condition has evaporated. We don't hear about that anymore. Where did it go? Well, it was understood by a Dutch surgeon, about 35 years ago, that if you simply fix the problem early enough, when the brain is still in this initial plastic period so it can set up this machinery adequately, in this initial set up time in the critical period, none of that happens. What are you doing by operating on the cleft palate to correct it? You're basically opening up the tubes that drain fluid from the middle ears, which have had them reliably full. Every sound the child hears uncorrected is muffled. It's degraded. The child's native language is such a case is not English. It's not Japanese. It's muffled English. It's degraded Japanese. It's crap. And the brain specializes for it. It creates a representation of language crap. And then the child is stuck with it.Now the crap doesn't just happen in the ear. It can also happen in the brain. The brain itself can be noisy. It's commonly noisy. There are many inherited faults that can make it noisier. And the native language for a child with such a brain is degraded. It's not English. It's noisy English. And that results in defective representations of sounds of words — not normal — a different strategy, by a machine that has different time constants and different space constants. And you can look in the brain of such a child and record those time constants. They are about an order of magnitude longer, about 11 times longer in duration on average, than in a normal child. Space constants are about three times greater. Such a child will have memory and cognitive deficits in this domain. Of course they will. Because as a receiver of language, they are receiving it and representing it, and in information it's representing crap. And they are going to have poor reading skills. Because reading is dependent upon the translation of word sounds into this orthographic or visual representational form. If you don't have a brain representation of word sounds that translation makes no sense. And you are going to have corresponding abnormal neurology.Then these children increasingly in evaluation after evaluation, in their operations in language, and their operations in reading — we document that abnormal neurology. The point is is that you can train the brain out of this. A way to think about this is you can actually re-refine the processing capacity of the machinery by changing it. Changing it in detail. It takes about 30 hours on the average. And we've accomplished that in about 430,000 kids today. Actually, probably about 15,000 children are being trained as we speak. And actually when you look at the impacts, the impacts are substantial.So here we're looking at the normal distribution. What we're most interested in is these kids on the left side of the distribution. This is from about 3,000 children. You can see that most of the children on the left side of the distribution are moving into the middle or the right. This is in a broad assessment of their language abilities. This is like an IQ test for language. The impact in the distribution, if you trained every child in the United States, would be to shift the whole distribution to the right and narrow the distribution. This is a substantially large impact.Think of a classroom of children in the language arts. Think of the children on the slow side of the class. We have the potential to move most of those children to the middle or to the right side. In addition to accurate language training it also fixes memory and cognition speech fluency and speech production. And an important language dependent skill is enabled by this training — that is to say reading. And to a large extent it fixes the brain. You can look down in the brain of a child in a variety of tasks that scientists have at Stanford, and MIT, and UCSF, and UCLA, and a number of other institutions. And children operating in various language behaviors, or in various reading behaviors, you see for the most extent, for most children, their neuronal responses, complexly abnormal before you start, are normalized by the training.Now you can also take the same approach to address problems in aging. Where again the machinery is deteriorating now from competent machinery, it's going south. Noise is increasing in the brain. And learning modulation and control is deteriorating. And you can actually look down on the brain of such an individual and witness a change in the time constants and space constants with which, for example, the brain is representing language again. Just as the brain came out of chaos at the beginning, it's going back into chaos in the end. This results in declines in memory in cognition, and in postural ability and agility. It turns out you can train the brain of such an individual — this is a small population of such individuals — train equally intensively for about 30 hours. These are 80- to 90-year-olds.And what you see are substantial improvements of their immediate memory, of their ability to remember things after a delay, of their ability to control their attention, their language abilities and visual-spatial abilities. The overall neuropsychological index of these trained individuals in this population is about two standard deviations. That means that if you sit at the left side of the distribution, and I'm looking at your neuropyschological abilities, the average person has moved to the middle or the right side of the distribution. It means that most people who are at risk for senility, more or less immediately, are now in a protected position.My issues are to try to get to rescuing older citizens more completely and in larger numbers, because I think this can be done in this arena on a vast scale — and the same for kids. My main interest is how to elaborate this science to address other maladies. I'm specifically interested in things like autism, and cerebral palsy, these great childhood catastrophes. And in older age conditions like Parkinsonism, and in other acquired impairments like schizophrenia.Your issues as it relates to this science, is how to maintain your own high-functioning learning machine. And of course, a well-ordered life in which learning is a continuous part of it, is key. But also in your future is brain aerobics. Get ready for it. It's going to be a part of every life not too far in the future, just like physical exercise is a part of every well organized life in the contemporary period. The other way that we will ultimately come to consider this literature and the science that is important to you is in a consideration of how to nurture yourself. Now that you know, now that science is telling us that you are in charge, that it's under your control, that your happiness, your well-being, your abilities, your capacities, are capable of continuous modification, continuous improvement, and you're the responsible agent and party. Of course a lot of people will ignore this advice. It will be a long time before they really understand it. (Laughter) Now that's another issue and not my fault. Okay. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain
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"I should tell you that when I was asked to be here, I thought to myself that well, it's TED. And these TEDsters are — you know, as innocent as that name sounds — these are the philanthropists and artists and scientists who sort of shape our world. And what could I possibly have to say that would be distinguished enough to justify my participation in something like that? And so I thought perhaps a really civilized-sounding British accent might help things a bit.And then I thought no, no. I should just get up there and be myself and just talk the way I really talk because, after all, this is the great unveiling. And so I thought I'd come up here and unveil my real voice to you. Although many of you already know that I do speak the Queen's English because I am from Queens, New York. (Laughter) But the theme of this session, of course, is invention. And while I don't have any patents that I'm aware of, you will be meeting a few of my inventions today. I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts. But then what? To what extent do we self-construct, do we self-invent? How do we self-identify and how mutable is that identity? Like, what if one could be anyone at any time? Well my characters, like the ones in my shows, allow me to play with the spaces between those questions. And so I've brought a couple of them with me. And well, they're very excited. What I should tell you — what I should tell you is that they've each prepared their own little TED talks. So feel free to think of this as Sarah University. (Laughter)Okay. Okay. Oh, well. Oh, wonderful. Good evening everybody. Thank you so very much for having me here today. Ah, thank you very much. My name is Lorraine Levine. Oh my! There's so many of you. Hi sweetheart. Okay. (Laughter) Anyway, I am here because of a young girl, Sarah Jones. She's a very nice, young black girl. Well you know, she calls herself black — she's really more like a caramel color if you look at her. But anyway. (Laughter) She has me here because she puts me in her show, what she calls her one-woman show. And you know what that means, of course. That means she takes the credit and then makes us come out here and do all the work. But I don't mind.Frankly, I'm kvelling just to be here with all the luminaries you have attending something like this, you know. Really, it's amazing. Not only, of course, the scientists and all the wonderful giants of the industries but the celebrities. There are so many celebrities running around here. I saw — Glenn Close I saw earlier. I love her. And she was getting a yogurt in the Google cafe. Isn't that adorable? (Laughter) So many others you see, they're just wonderful. It's lovely to know they're concerned, you know. And — oh, I saw Goldie Hawn. Oh, Goldie Hawn. I love her, too; she's wonderful. Yeah. You know, she's only half Jewish. Did you know that about her? Yeah. But even so, a wonderful talent. (Laughter) And I — you know, when I saw her, such a wonderful feeling. Yeah, she's lovely. But anyway, I should have started by saying just how lucky I feel. It's such an eye-opening experience to be here. You're all so responsible for this world that we live in today. You know, I couldn't have dreamed of such a thing as a young girl. And you've all made these advancements happen in such a short time — you're all so young. You know, your parents must be very proud.But I — I also appreciate the diversity that you have here. I noticed it's very multicultural. You know, when you're standing up here, you can see all the different people. It's like a rainbow. It's okay to say rainbow. Yeah. I just — I can't keep up with whether you can say, you know, the different things. What are you allowed to say or not say? I just — I don't want to offend anybody. You know. But anyway, you know, I just think that to be here with all of you accomplished young people — literally, some of you, the architects building our brighter future. You know, it's heartening to me. Even though, quite frankly, some of your presentations are horrifying, absolutely horrifying. It's true. It's true. You know, between the environmental degradation and the crashing of the world markets you're talking about. And of course, we know it's all because of the — all the ... Well, I don't know how else to say it to you, so I'll just say it my way: the ganeyvish schticklich coming from the governments and the, you know, the bankers and the Wall Street. You know it. Anyway. (Laughter)The point is, I'm happy somebody has practical ideas to get us out of this mess. So I salute each of you and your stellar achievements. Thank you for all that you do. And congratulations on being such big makhers that you've become TED meisters. So, happy continued success. Congratulations. Mazel tov. (Applause)Hi. Hi. Thank you everybody. Sorry, this is such a wonderful opportunity and everything, to be here right now. My name is Noraida. And I'm just — I'm so thrilled to be part of like your TED conference that you're doing and everything like that. I am Dominican-American. Actually, you could say I grew up in the capital of Dominican Republic, otherwise known as Washington Heights in New York City. But I don't know if there's any other Dominican people here, but I know that Juan Enriquez, he was here yesterday. And I think he's Mexican, so that's — honestly, that's close enough for me right now. So — (Laughter)I just — I'm sorry. I'm just trying not to be nervous because this is a very wonderful experience for me and everything. And I just — you know I'm not used to doing the public speaking. And whenever I get nervous I start to talk really fast. Nobody can understand nothing I'm saying, which is very frustrating for me, as you can imagine. I usually have to just like try to calm down and take a deep breath. But then on top of that, you know, Sarah Jones told me we only have 18 minutes. So then I'm like, should I be nervous, you know, because maybe it's better. And I'm just trying not to panic and freak out. So I like, take a deep breath.Okay. Sorry. So anyway, what I was trying to say is that I really love TED. Like, I love everything about this. It's amazing. Like, it's — I can't get over this right now. And, like, people would not believe, seriously, where I'm from, that this even exists. You know, like even, I mean I love like the name, the — TED. I mean I know it's a real person and everything, but I'm just saying that like, you know, I think it's very cool how it's also an acronym, you know, which is like, you know, is like very high concept and everything like that. I like that.And actually, I can relate to the whole like acronym thing and everything. Because, actually, I'm a sophomore at college right now. At my school — actually I was part of co-founding an organization, which is like a leadership thing, you know, like you guys, you would really like it and everything. And the organization is called DA BOMB, A\and DA BOMB — not like what you guys can build and everything — it's like, DA BOMB, it means like Dominican — it's an acronym — Dominican-American Benevolent Organization for Mothers and Babies. So, I know, see, like the name is like a little bit long, but with the war on terror and everything, the Dean of Student Activities has asked us to stop saying DA BOMB and use the whole thing so nobody would get the wrong idea, whatever. So, basically like DA BOMB — what Dominican-American Benevolent Organization for Mothers and Babies does is, basically, we try to advocate for students who show a lot of academic promise and who also happen to be mothers like me. I am a working mother, and I also go to school full-time. And, you know, it's like — it's so important to have like role models out there. I mean, I know sometimes our lifestyles are very different, whatever.But like even at my job — like, I just got promoted. Right now it's very exciting actually for me because I'm the Junior Assistant to the Associate Director under the Senior Vice President for Business Development — that's my new title. So, but I think whether you own your own company or you're just starting out like me, like something like this is so vital for people to just continue expanding their minds and learning. And if everybody, like all people really had access to that, it would be a very different world out there, as I know you know. So, I think all people, we need that, but especially, I look at people like me, you know like, I mean, Latinos — we're about to be the majority, in like two weeks. So, we deserve just as much to be part of the exchange of ideas as everybody else. So, I'm very happy that you're, you know, doing this kind of thing, making the talks available online. That's very good. I love that. And I just — I love you guys. I love TED. And if you don't mind, privately now, in the future, I'm going to think of TED as an acronym for Technology, Entertainment and Dominicans. Thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)So, that was Noraida, and just like Lorraine and everybody else you're meeting today, these are folks who are based on real people from my real life: friends, neighbors, family members. I come from a multicultural family. In fact, the older lady you just met: very, very loosely based on a great aunt on my mother's side. It's a long story, believe me. But on top of my family background, my parents also sent me to the United Nations school, where I encountered a plethora of new characters, including Alexandre, my French teacher, okay.Well, you know, it was beginner French, that I am taking with her, you know. And it was Madame Bousson, you know, she was very [French]. It was like, you know, she was there in the class, you know, she was kind of typically French. You know, she was very chic, but she was very filled with ennui, you know. And she would be there, you know, kind of talking with the class, you know, talking about the, you know, the existential futility of life, you know. And we were only 11 years old, so it was not appropriate. (Laughter)But [German]. Yes, I took German for three years, [German], and it was quite the experience because I was the only black girl in the class, even in the UN school. Although, you know, it was wonderful. The teacher, Herr Schtopf, he never discriminated. Never. He always, always treated each of us, you know, equally unbearably during the class.So, there were the teachers and then there were my friends, classmates from everywhere, many of whom are still dear friends to this day. And they've inspired many characters as well. For example, a friend of mine.Well, I just wanted to quickly say good evening. My name is Praveen Manvi and thank you very much for this opportunity. Of course, TED, the reputation precedes itself all over the world. But, you know, I am originally from India, and I wanted to start by telling you that once Sarah Jones told me that we will be having the opportunity to come here to TED in California, originally, I was very pleased and, frankly, relieved because, you know, I am a human rights advocate. And usually my work, it takes me to Washington D.C. And there, I must attend these meetings, mingling with some tiresome politicians, trying to make me feel comfortable by telling how often they are eating the curry in Georgetown. (Laughter) So, you can just imagine — right. So, but I'm thrilled to be joining all of you here. I wish we had more time together, but that's for another time. Okay? Great. (Applause)And, sadly, I don't think we'll have time for you to meet everybody I brought, but — I'm trying to behave myself, it's my first time here. But I do want to introduce you to a couple of folks you may recognize, if you saw ""Bridge and Tunnel.""Uh, well, thank you. Good evening. My name is Pauline Ning, and first I want to tell you that I'm — of course I am a member of the Chinese community in New York. But when Sarah Jones asked me to please come to TED, I said, well, you know, first, I don't know that, you know — before two years ago, you would not find me in front of an audience of people, much less like this because I did not like to give speeches because I feel that, as an immigrant, I do not have good English skills for speaking. But then, I decided, just like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, I try anyway. (Laughter) My daughter — my daughter wrote that, she told me, ""Always start your speech with humor.""But my background — I want to tell you story only briefly. My husband and I, we brought our son and daughter here in 1980s to have the freedom we cannot have in China at that time. And we tried to teach our kids to be proud of their tradition, but it's very hard. You know, as immigrant, I would speak Chinese to them, and they would always answer me back in English. They love rock music, pop culture, American culture. But when they got older, when the time comes for them to start think about getting married, that's when we expect them to realize, a little bit more, their own culture. But that's where we had some problems. My son, he says he is not ready to get married. And he has a sweetheart, but she is American woman, not Chinese. It's not that it's bad, but I told him, ""What's wrong with a Chinese woman?"" But I think he will change his mind soon.So, then I decide instead, I will concentrate on my daughter. The daughter's marriage is very special to the mom. But first, she said she's not interested. She only wants to spend time with her friends. And then at college, it's like she never came home. And she doesn't want me to come and visit. So I said, ""What's wrong in this picture?"" So, I accused my daughter to have like a secret boyfriend. But she told me, ""Mom, you don't have to worry about boys because I don't like them."" (Laughter) And I said, ""Yes, men can be difficult, but all women have to get used to that."" She said, ""No Mom. I mean, I don't like boys. I like girls. I am lesbian."" So, I always teach my kids to respect American ideas, but I told my daughter that this is one exception — (Laughter) — that she is not gay, she is just confused by this American problem. But she told me, ""Mom, it's not American."" She said she is in love — in love with a nice Chinese girl. (Laughter) So, these are the words I am waiting to hear, but from my son, not my daughter. (Laughter) But at first I did not know what to do. But then, over time, I have come to understand that this is who she is.So, even though sometimes it's still hard, I will share with you that it helps me to realize society is more tolerant, usually because of places like this, because of ideas like this, and people like you, with an open mind. So I think maybe TED, you impact people's lives in the ways maybe even you don't realize. So, for my daughter's sake, I thank you for your ideas worth spreading. Thank you. Xie xie. (Applause)Good evening. My name is Habbi Belahal. And I would like to first of all thank Sarah Jones for putting all of the pressure on the only Arab who she brought with her to be last today. I am originally from Jordan. And I teach comparative literature at Queens College. It is not Harvard. But I feel a bit like a fish out of water. But I am very proud of my students. And I see that a few of them did make it here to the conference. So you will get the extra credit I promised you. But, while I know that I may not look like the typical TED-izen, as you would say, I do like to make the point that we in global society, we are never as different as the appearances may suggest.So, if you will indulge me, I will share quickly with you a bit of verse, which I memorized as a young girl at 16 years of age. So, back in the ancient times. [Arabic] And this roughly translates: ""Please, let me hold your hand. I want to hold your hand. I want to hold your hand. And when I touch you, I feel happy inside. It's such a feeling that my love, I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide."" Well, so okay, but please, please, but please. If it is sounding familiar, it is because I was at the same time in my life listening to the Beatles. On the radio [unclear], they were very popular.So, all of that is to say that I like to believe that for every word intended as to render us deaf to one another, there is always a lyric connecting ears and hearts across the continents in rhyme. And I pray that this is the way that we will self-invent, in time. That's all, shukran. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Okay? Great. (Applause)Thank you all very much. It was lovely. Thank you for having me. (Applause) Thank you very, very much. I love you. (Applause) Well, you have to let me say this. I just — thank you. I want to thank Chris and Jacqueline, and just everyone for having me here. It's been a long time coming, and I feel like I'm home. And I know I've performed for some of your companies or some of you have seen me elsewhere, but this is honestly one of the best audiences I've ever experienced. The whole thing is amazing, and so don't you all go reinventing yourselves any time soon. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jones_as_a_one_woman_global_village
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"So the first question is, why do we need to even worry about a pandemic threat? What is it that we're concerned about? When I say ""we,"" I'm at the Council on Foreign Relations. We're concerned in the national security community, and of course in the biology community and the public health community. While globalization has increased travel, it's made it necessary that everybody be everywhere, all the time, all over the world. And that means that your microbial hitchhikers are moving with you. So a plague outbreak in Surat, India becomes not an obscure event, but a globalized event — a globalized concern that has changed the risk equation. Katrina showed us that we cannot completely depend on government to have readiness in hand, to be capable of handling things. Indeed, an outbreak would be multiple Katrinas at once.Our big concern at the moment is a virus called H5N1 flu — some of you call it bird flu — which first emerged in southern China, in the mid-1990s, but we didn't know about it until 1997. At the end of last Christmas only 13 countries had seen H5N1. But we're now up to 55 countries in the world, have had this virus emerge, in either birds, or people or both. In the bird outbreaks we now can see that pretty much the whole world has seen this virus except the Americas. And I'll get into why we've so far been spared in a moment.In domestic birds, especially chickens, it's 100 percent lethal. It's one of the most lethal things we've seen in circulation in the world in any recent centuries. And we've dealt with it by killing off lots and lots and lots of chickens, and unfortunately often not reimbursing the peasant farmers with the result that there's cover-up. It's also carried on migration patterns of wild migratory aquatic birds. There has been this centralized event in a place called Lake Chenghai, China. Two years ago the migrating birds had a multiple event where thousands died because of a mutation occurring in the virus, which made the species range broaden dramatically. So that birds going to Siberia, to Europe, and to Africa carried the virus, which had not previously been possible.We're now seeing outbreaks in human populations — so far, fortunately, small events, tiny outbreaks, occasional clusters. The virus has mutated dramatically in the last two years to form two distinct families, if you will, of the H5N1 viral tree with branches in them, and with different attributes that are worrying. So what's concerning us? Well, first of all, at no time in history have we succeeded in making in a timely fashion, a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people. It's not going to do us very much good in a global pandemic. You've heard about the vaccine we're stockpiling. But nobody believes it will actually be particularly effective if we have a real outbreak.So one thought is: after 9/11, when the airports closed, our flu season was delayed by two weeks. So the thought is, hey, maybe what we should do is just immediately — we hear there is H5N1 spreading from human to human, the virus has mutated to be a human-to-human transmitter — let's shut down the airports. However, huge supercomputer analyses, done of the likely effectiveness of this, show that it won't buy us much time at all. And of course it will be hugely disruptive in preparation plans. For example, all masks are made in China. How do you get them mobilized around the world if you've shut all the airports down? How do you get the vaccines moved around the world and the drugs moved, and whatever may or not be available that would work. So it turns out that shutting down the airports is counterproductive.We're worried because this virus, unlike any other flu we've ever studied, can be transmitted by eating raw meat of the infected animals. We've seen transmission to wild cats and domestic cats, and now also domestic pet dogs. And in experimental feedings to rodents and ferrets, we found that the animals exhibit symptoms never seen with flu: seizures, central nervous system disorders, partial paralysis. This is not your normal garden-variety flu. It mimics what we now understand about reconstructing the 1918 flu virus, the last great pandemic, in that it also jumped directly from birds to people. We had evolution over time, and this unbelievable mortality rate in human beings: 55 percent of people who have become infected with H5N1 have, in fact, succumbed. And we don't have a huge number of people who got infected and never developed disease.In experimental feeding in monkeys you can see that it actually downregulates a specific immune system modulator. The result is that what kills you is not the virus directly, but your own immune system overreacting, saying, ""Whatever this is so foreign I'm going berserk."" The result: most of the deaths have been in people under 30 years of age, robustly healthy young adults. We have seen human-to-human transmission in at least three clusters — fortunately involving very intimate contact, still not putting the world at large at any kind of risk.Alright, so I've got you nervous. Now you probably assume, well the governments are going to do something. And we have spent a lot of money. Most of the spending in the Bush administration has actually been more related to the anthrax results and bio-terrorism threat. But a lot of money has been thrown out at the local level and at the federal level to look at infectious diseases. End result: only 15 states have been certified to be able to do mass distribution of vaccine and drugs in a pandemic. Half the states would run out of hospital beds in the first week, maybe two weeks. And 40 states already have an acute nursing shortage. Add on pandemic threat, you're in big trouble.So what have people been doing with this money? Exercises, drills, all over the world. Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion. Most of these people don't actually know what their job will be. And the bottom line, major thing that has come through in every single drill: nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command. If it were Los Angeles, is it the mayor, the governor, the President of the United States, the head of Homeland Security? In fact, the federal government says it's a guy called the Principle Federal Officer, who happens to be with TSA.The government says the federal responsibility will basically be about trying to keep the virus out, which we all know is impossible, and then to mitigate the impact primarily on our economy. The rest is up to your local community. Everything is about your town, where you live. Well how good a city council you have, how good a mayor you have — that's who's going to be in charge. Most local facilities would all be competing to try and get their hands on their piece of the federal stockpile of a drug called Tamiflu, which may or may not be helpful — I'll get into that — of available vaccines, and any other treatments, and masks, and anything that's been stockpiled. And you'll have massive competition. Now we did purchase a vaccine, you've probably all heard about it, made by Sanofi-Aventis. Unfortunately it's made against the current form of H5N1. We know the virus will mutate. It will be a different virus. The vaccine will probably be useless. So here's where the decisions come in.You're the mayor of your local town. Let's see, should we order that all pets be kept indoors? Germany did that when H5N1 appeared in Germany last year, in order to minimize the spread between households by household cats, dogs and so on. What do we do when we don't have any containment rooms with reverse air that will allow the healthcare workers to take care of patients? These are in Hong Kong; we have nothing like that here. What about quarantine? During the SARS epidemic in Beijing quarantine did seem to help. We have no uniform policies regarding quarantine across the United States. And some states have differential policies, county by county. But what about the no-brainer things? Should we close all the schools? Well then what about all the workers? They won't go to work if their kids aren't in school. Encouraging telecommuting? What works?Well the British government did a model of telecommuting. Six weeks they had all people in the banking industry pretend a pandemic was underway. What they found was, the core functions — you know you still sort of had banks, but you couldn't get people to put money in the ATM machines. Nobody was processing the credit cards. Your insurance payments didn't go through. And basically the economy would be in a disaster state of affairs. And that's just office workers, bankers.We don't know how important hand washing is for flu — shocking. One assumes it's a good idea to wash your hands a lot. But actually in scientific community there is great debate about what percentage of flu transmission between people is from sneezing and coughing and what percentage is on your hands. The Institute of Medicine tried to look at the masking question. Can we figure out a way, since we know we won't have enough masks because we don't make them in America anymore, they're all made in China — do we need N95? A state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line, must-be-fitted-to-your-face mask? Or can we get away with some different kinds of masks? In the SARS epidemic, we learned in Hong Kong that most of transmission was because people were removing their masks improperly. And their hand got contaminated with the outside of the mask, and then they rubbed their nose. Bingo! They got SARS. It wasn't flying microbes. If you go online right now, you'll get so much phony-baloney information. You'll end up buying — this is called an N95 mask. Ridiculous. We don't actually have a standard for what should be the protective gear for the first responders, the people who will actually be there on the front lines.And Tamiflu. You've probably heard of this drug, made by Hoffmann-La Roche, patented drug. There is some indication that it may buy you some time in the midst of an outbreak. Should you take Tamiflu for a long period of time, well, one of the side effects is suicidal ideations. A public health survey analyzed the effect that large-scale Tamiflu use would have, actually shows it counteractive to public health measures, making matters worse. And here is the other interesting thing: when a human being ingests Tamiflu, only 20 percent is metabolized appropriately to be an active compound in the human being. The rest turns into a stable compound, which survives filtration into the water systems, thereby exposing the very aquatic birds that would carry flu and providing them a chance to breed resistant strains. And we now have seen Tamiflu-resistant strains in both Vietnam in person-to-person transmission, and in Egypt in person-to-person transmission. So I personally think that our life expectancy for Tamiflu as an effective drug is very limited — very limited indeed.Nevertheless most of the governments have based their whole flu policies on building stockpiles of Tamiflu. Russia has actually stockpiled enough for 95 percent of all Russians. We've stockpiled enough for 30 percent. When I say enough, that's two weeks worth. And then you're on your own because the pandemic is going to last for 18 to 24 months. Some of the poorer countries that have had the most experience with H5N1 have built up stockpiles; they're already expired. They are already out of date. What do we know from 1918, the last great pandemic? The federal government abdicated most responsibility. And so we ended up with this wild patchwork of regulations all over America. Every city, county, state did their own thing. And the rules and the belief systems were wildly disparate. In some cases all schools, all churches, all public venues were closed.The pandemic circulated three times in 18 months in the absence of commercial air travel. The second wave was the mutated, super-killer wave. And in the first wave we had enough healthcare workers. But by the time the second wave hit it took such a toll among the healthcare workers that we lost most of our doctors and nurses that were on the front lines. Overall we lost 700,000 people. The virus was 100 percent lethal to pregnant women and we don't actually know why. Most of the death toll was 15 to 40 year-olds — robustly healthy young adults. It was likened to the plague. We don't actually know how many people died. The low-ball estimate is 35 million. This was based on European and North American data.A new study by Chris Murray at Harvard shows that if you look at the databases that were kept by the Brits in India, there was a 31-fold greater death rate among the Indians. So there is a strong belief that in places of poverty the death toll was far higher. And that a more likely toll is somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 million people before we had commercial air travel. So are we ready? As a nation, no we're not. And I think even those in the leadership would say that is the case, that we still have a long ways to go.So what does that mean for you? Well the first thing is, I wouldn't start building up personal stockpiles of anything — for yourself, your family, or your employees — unless you've really done your homework. What mask works, what mask doesn't work. How many masks do you need? The Institute of Medicine study felt that you could not recycle masks. Well if you think it's going to last 18 months, are you going to buy 18 months worth of masks for every single person in your family?We don't know — again with Tamiflu, the number one side effect of Tamiflu is flu-like symptoms. So then how can you tell who in your family has the flu if everybody is taking Tamiflu? If you expand that out to think of a whole community, or all your employees in your company, you begin to realize how limited the Tamiflu option might be. Everybody has come up to me and said, well I'll stockpile water or, I'll stockpile food, or what have you. But really? Do you really have a place to stockpile 18 months worth of food? Twenty-four months worth of food? Do you want to view the pandemic threat the way back in the 1950s people viewed the civil defense issue, and build your own little bomb shelter for pandemic flu? I don't think that's rational.I think it's about having to be prepared as communities, not as individuals — being prepared as nation, being prepared as state, being prepared as town. And right now most of the preparedness is deeply flawed. And I hope I've convinced you of that, which means that the real job is go out and say to your local leaders, and your national leaders, ""Why haven't you solved these problems? Why are you still thinking that the lessons of Katrina do not apply to flu?"" And put the pressure where the pressure needs to be put. But I guess the other thing to add is, if you do have employees, and you do have a company, I think you have certain responsibilities to demonstrate that you are thinking ahead for them, and you are trying to plan. At a minimum the British banking plan showed that telecommuting can be helpful. It probably does reduce exposure because people are not coming into the office and coughing on each other, or touching common objects and sharing things via their hands. But can you sustain your company that way? Well if you have a dot-com, maybe you can. Otherwise you're in trouble. Happy to take your questions. (Applause)Audience member: What factors determine the duration of a pandemic?Laurie Garret: What factors determine the duration of a pandemic, we don't really know. I could give you a bunch of flip, this, that, and the other. But I would say that honestly we don't know. Clearly the bottom line is the virus eventually attenuates, and ceases to be a lethal virus to humanity, and finds other hosts. But we don't really know how and why that happens. It's a very complicated ecology.Audience member: What kind of triggers are you looking for? You know way more than any of us. To say ahh, if this happens then we are going to have a pandemic?LG: The moment that you see any evidence of serious human-to-human to transmission. Not just intimately between family members who took care of an ailing sister or brother, but a community infected — spread within a school, spread within a dormitory, something of that nature. Then I think that there is universal agreement now, at WHO all the way down: Send out the alert.Audience member: Some research has indicated that statins can be helpful. Can you talk about that?LG: Yeah. There is some evidence that taking Lipitor and other common statins for cholesterol control may decrease your vulnerability to influenza. But we do not completely understand why. The mechanism isn't clear. And I don't know that there is any way responsibly for someone to start medicating their children with their personal supply of Lipitor or something of that nature. We have absolutely no idea what that would do. You might be causing some very dangerous outcomes in your children, doing such a thing.Audience member: How far along are we in being able to determine whether someone is actually carrying, whether somebody has this before the symptoms are full-blown?LG: Right. So I have for a long time said that what we really needed was a rapid diagnostic. And our Centers for Disease Control has labeled a test they developed a rapid diagnostic. It takes 24 hours in a very highly developed laboratory, in highly skilled hands. I'm thinking dipstick. You could do it to your own kid. It changes color. It tells you if you have H5N1. In terms of where we are in science with DNA identification capacities and so on, it's not that far off. But we're not there. And there hasn't been the kind of investment to get us there.Audience member: In the 1918 flu I understand that they theorized that there was some attenuation of the virus when it made the leap into humans. Is that likely, do you think, here? I mean 100 percent death rate is pretty severe.LG: Um yeah. So we don't actually know what the lethality was of the 1918 strain to wild birds before it jumped from birds to humans. It's curious that there is no evidence of mass die-offs of chickens or household birds across America before the human pandemic happened. That may be because those events were occurring on the other side of the world where nobody was paying attention. But the virus clearly went through one round around the world in a mild enough form that the British army in World War I actually certified that it was not a threat and would not affect the outcome of the war. And after circulating around the world came back in a form that was tremendously lethal. What percentage of infected people were killed by it? Again we don't really know for sure. It's clear that if you were malnourished to begin with, you had a weakened immune system, you lived in poverty in India or Africa, your likelihood of dying was far greater. But we don't really know.Audience member: One of the things I've heard is that the real death cause when you get a flu is the associated pneumonia, and that a pneumonia vaccine may offer you 50 percent better chance of survival.LG: For a long time, researchers in emerging diseases were kind of dismissive of the pandemic flu threat on the grounds that back in 1918 they didn't have antibiotics. And that most people who die of regular flu — which in regular flu years is about 360,000 people worldwide, most of them senior citizens — and they die not of the flu but because the flu gives an assault to their immune system. And along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria, streptococcus and boom, they get a bacterial pneumonia. But it turns out that in 1918 that was not the case at all. And so far in the H5N1 cases in people, similarly bacterial infection has not been an issue at all. It's this absolutely phenomenal disruption of the immune system that is the key to why people die of this virus.And I would just add we saw the same thing with SARS. So what's going on here is your body says, your immune system sends out all its sentinels and says, ""I don't know what the heck this is. We've never seen anything even remotely like this before."" It won't do any good to bring in the sharpshooters because those antibodies aren't here. And it won't do any good to bring in the tanks and the artillery because those T-cells don't recognize it either. So we're going to have to go all-out thermonuclear response, stimulate the total cytokine cascade. The whole immune system swarms into the lungs. And yes they die, drowning in their own fluids, of pneumonia. But it's not bacterial pneumonia. And it's not a pneumonia that would respond to a vaccine. And I think my time is up. I thank you all for your attention. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_garrett_on_lessons_from_the_1918_flu
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"Last year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC. And I promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. So this is it. And for those of you that weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted — 27 kilometers in circumference. Its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began, up to 600 million times a second. It's nothing if not ambitious.This is the machine below Geneva. We take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors. This is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector — 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter. Spectacular picture here of ATLAS under construction so you can see the scale.On the 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time. And this picture was taken by ATLAS. It caused immense celebration in the control room. It's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the LHC, colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately, and showering particles into the detector. In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th we knew the machine worked, which is a great triumph. I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer, or this, when someone went onto Google and saw the front page was like that. It means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact.About a week later we had a problem with the machine, related actually to these bits of wire here — these gold wires. Those wires carry 13 thousand amps when the machine is working in full power. Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say, ""No they don't. They're small wires."" They can do that because when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire. So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, those wires can take that current.In one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in LHC, there was a manufacturing defect. So the wire heated up slightly, and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance. This was the result. Now that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons, and they moved about a foot. So we damaged about 50 of the magnets. We had to take them out, which we did. We reconditioned them all, fixed them. They're all on their way back underground now. By the end of March the LHC will be intact again. We will switch it on, and we expect to take data in June or July, and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are.Now of course, in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refute. I think that the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we're overreaching, is the value of things like the LHC. I will leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, I suspect, when defending his protege's useless experiments — his protege was Michael Faraday — said this, ""Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_what_went_wrong_at_the_lhc
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"We look around the media, as we see on the news from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and the conflict seems incomprehensible to us. And that's certainly how it seemed to me when I started this project. But as a physicist, I thought, well if you give me some data, I could maybe understand this. You know, give us a go.So as a naive New Zealander I thought, well I'll go to the Pentagon. Can you get me some information? (Laughter) No. So I had to think a little harder. And I was watching the news one night in Oxford. And I looked down at the chattering heads on my channel of choice. And I saw that there was information there. There was data within the streams of news that we consume. All this noise around us actually has information. So what I started thinking was, perhaps there is something like open source intelligence here. If we can get enough of these streams of information together, we can perhaps start to understand the war.So this is exactly what I did. We started bringing a team together, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, of economists, mathematicians. We brought these guys together and we started to try and solve this. We did it in three steps. The first step we did was to collect. We did 130 different sources of information — from NGO reports to newspapers and cable news. We brought this raw data in and we filtered it. We extracted the key bits on information to build the database. That database contained the timing of attacks, the location, the size and the weapons used. It's all in the streams of information we consume daily, we just have to know how to pull it out. And once we had this we could start doing some cool stuff. What if we were to look at the distribution of the sizes of attacks? What would that tell us?So we started doing this. And you can see here on the horizontal axis you've got the number of people killed in an attack or the size of the attack. And on the vertical axis you've got the number of attacks. So we plot data for sample on this. You see some sort of random distribution — perhaps 67 attacks, one person was killed, or 47 attacks where seven people were killed. We did this exact same thing for Iraq. And we didn't know, for Iraq what we were going to find. It turns out what we found was pretty surprising. You take all of the conflict, all of the chaos, all of the noise, and out of that comes this precise mathematical distribution of the way attacks are ordered in this conflict. This blew our mind. Why should a conflict like Iraq have this as its fundamental signature? Why should there be order in war? We didn't really understand that. We thought maybe there is something special about Iraq. So we looked at a few more conflicts. We looked at Colombia, we looked at Afghanistan, and we looked at Senegal.And the same pattern emerged in each conflict. This wasn't supposed to happen. These are different wars, with different religious factions, different political factions, and different socioeconomic problems. And yet the fundamental patterns underlying them are the same. So we went a little wider. We looked around the world at all the data we could get our hands on. From Peru to Indonesia, we studied this same pattern again. And we found that not only were the distributions these straight lines, but the slope of these lines, they clustered around this value of alpha equals 2.5. And we could generate an equation that could predict the likelihood of an attack. What we're saying here is the probability of an attack killing X number of people in a country like Iraq is equal to a constant, times the size of that attack, raised to the power of negative alpha. And negative alpha is the slope of that line I showed you before.So what? This is data, statistics. What does it tell us about these conflicts? That was a challenge we had to face as physicists. How do we explain this? And what we really found was that alpha, if we think about it, is the organizational structure of the insurgency. Alpha is the distribution of the sizes of attacks, which is really the distribution of the group strength carrying out the attacks. So we look at a process of group dynamics: coalescence and fragmentation, groups coming together, groups breaking apart. And we start running the numbers on this. Can we simulate it? Can we create the kind of patterns that we're seeing in places like Iraq? Turns out we kind of do a reasonable job. We can run these simulations. We can recreate this using a process of group dynamics to explain the patterns that we see all around the conflicts around the world.So what's going on? Why should these different — seemingly different conflicts have the same patterns? Now what I believe is going on is that the insurgent forces, they evolve over time. They adapt. And it turns out there is only one solution to fight a much stronger enemy. And if you don't find that solution as an insurgent force, you don't exist. So every insurgent force that is ongoing, every conflict that is ongoing, it's going to look something like this. And that is what we think is happening.Taking it forward, how do we change it? How do we end a war like Iraq? What does it look like? Alpha is the structure. It's got a stable state at 2.5. This is what wars look like when they continue. We've got to change that. We can push it up: the forces become more fragmented; there is more of them, but they are weaker. Or we push it down: they're more robust; there is less groups; but perhaps you can sit and talk to them.So this graph here, I'm going to show you now. No one has seen this before. This is literally stuff that we've come through last week. And we see the evolution of Alpha through time. We see it start. And we see it grow up to the stable state the wars around the world look like. And it stays there through the invasion of Fallujah until the Samarra bombings in the Iraqi elections of '06. And the system gets perturbed. It moves upwards to a fragmented state. This is when the surge happens. And depending on who you ask, the surge was supposed to push it up even further. The opposite happened. The groups became stronger. They became more robust. And so I'm thinking, right, great, it's going to keep going down. We can talk to them. We can get a solution. The opposite happened. It's moved up again. The groups are more fragmented. And this tells me one of two things. Either we're back where we started and the surge has had no effect; or finally the groups have been fragmented to the extent that we can start to think about maybe moving out. I don't know what the answer is to that. But I know that we should be looking at the structure of the insurgency to answer that question. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sean_gourley_on_the_mathematics_of_war
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"What I want to do today is to spend some time talking about some stuff that's sort of giving me a little bit of existential angst, for lack of a better word, over the past couple of years, and basically, these three quotes tell what's going on. ""When God made the color purple, God was just showing off,"" Alice Walker wrote in ""The Color Purple,"" and Zora Neale Hurston wrote in ""Dust Tracks On A Road,"" ""Research is a formalized curiosity. It's poking and prying with a purpose."" And then finally, when I think about the near future, you know, we have this attitude, well, whatever happens, happens. Right? So that goes along with the Chesire Cat saying, ""If you don't care much where you want to get to, it doesn't much matter which way you go."" But I think it does matter which way we go, and what road we take, because when I think about design in the near future, what I think are the most important issues, what's really crucial and vital is that we need to revitalize the arts and sciences right now in 2002. (Applause) If we describe the near future as 10, 20, 15 years from now, that means that what we do today is going to be critically important, because in the year 2015, and the year 2020, 2025, the world our society is going to be building on, the basic knowledge and abstract ideas, the discoveries that we came up with today, just as all these wonderful things we're hearing about here at the TED conference that we take for granted in the world right now, were really knowledge and ideas that came up in the '50s, the '60s, and the '70s. That's the substrate that we're exploiting today, whether it's the internet, genetic engineering, laser scanners, guided missiles, fiber optics, high-definition television, sensing, remote-sensing from space and the wonderful remote-sensing photos that we see in 3D weaving, TV programs like Tracker, and Enterprise, CD rewrite drives, flatscreen, Alvin Ailey's Suite Otis, or Sarah Jones' ""Your Revolution Will Not Be Between These Thighs,"" which by the way was banned by the FCC, or ska, all of these things without question, almost without exception, are really based on ideas and abstract and creativity from years before, so we have to ask ourselves, what are we contributing to that legacy right now? And when I think about it, I'm really worried. To be quite frank, I'm concerned. I'm skeptical that we're doing very much of anything. We're, in a sense, failing to act in the future. We're purposefully, consciously being laggards. We're lagging behind. Frantz Fanon, who was a psychiatrist from Martinique, said, ""Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill or betray it."" What is our mission? What do we have to do? I think our mission is to reconcile, to reintegrate science and the arts, because right now there's a schism that exists in popular culture. You know, people have this idea that science and the arts are really separate. We think of them as separate and different things, and this idea was probably introduced centuries ago, but it's really becoming critical now, because we're making decisions about our society every day that, if we keep thinking that the arts are separate from the sciences, and we keep thinking it's cute to say, ""I don't understand anything about this one, I don't understand anything about the other one,"" then we're going to have problems. Now I know no one here at TED thinks this. All of us, we already know that they're very connected, but I'm going to let you know that some folks in the outside world, believe it or not, they think it's neat when they say, ""You know, scientists and science is not creative. Maybe scientists are ingenious, but they're not creative. And then we have this tendency, the career counselors and various people say things like, ""Artists are not analytical. They're ingenious, perhaps, but not analytical,"" and when these concepts underly our teaching and what we think about the world, then we have a problem, because we stymie support for everything. By accepting this dichotomy, whether it's tongue-in-cheek, when we attempt to accommodate it in our world, and we try to build our foundation for the world, we're messing up the future, because, who wants to be uncreative? Who wants to be illogical? Talent would run from either of these fields if you said you had to choose either. Then they're going to go to something where they think, ""Well, I can be creative and logical at the same time."" Now I grew up in the '60s and I'll admit it, actually, my childhood spanned the '60s, and I was a wannabe hippie and I always resented the fact that I wasn't really old enough to be a hippie. And I know there are people here, the younger generation who want to be hippies, but people talk about the '60s all the time, and they talk about the anarchy that was there, but when I think about the '60s, what I took away from it was that there was hope for the future. We thought everyone could participate. There were wonderful, incredible ideas that were always percolating, and so much of what's cool or hot today is really based on some of those concepts, whether it's, you know, people trying to use the prime directive from Star Trek being involved in things, or again that three-dimensional weaving and fax machines that I read about in my weekly readers that the technology and engineering was just getting started. But the '60s left me with a problem. You see, I always assumed I would go into space, because I followed all of this, but I also loved the arts and sciences. You see, when I was growing up as a little girl and as a teenager, I loved designing and making dogs' clothes and wanting to be a fashion designer. I took art and ceramics. I loved dance. Lola Falana. Alvin Ailey. Jerome Robbins. And I also avidly followed the Gemini and the Apollo programs. I had science projects and tons of astronomy books. I took calculus and philosophy. I wondered about the infinity and the Big Bang theory. And when I was at Stanford, I found myself, my senior year, chemical engineering major, half the folks thought I was a political science and performing arts major, which was sort of true because I was Black Student Union President and I did major in some other things, and I found myself the last quarter juggling chemical engineering separation processes, logic classes, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and also producing and choreographing a dance production, and I had to do the lighting and the design work, and I was trying to figure out, do I go to New York City to try to become a professional dancer, or do I go to medical school? Now, my mother helped me figure that one out. (Laughter) But when I went into space, when I went into space I carried a number of things up with me. I carried a poster by Alvin Ailey, which you can figure out now, I love the dance company. An Alvin Ailey poster of Judith Jamison performing the dance ""Cry,"" dedicated to all black women everywhere. A Bundu statue, which was from the Women's Society in Sierra Leone, and a certificate for the Chicago Public School students to work to improve their science and math, and folks asked me, ""Why did you take up what you took up?"" And I had to say, ""Because it represents human creativity, the creativity that allowed us, that we were required to have to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ""Cry."" Each one of them are different manifestations, incarnations, of creativity, avatars of human creativity, and that's what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together. The difference between arts and sciences is not analytical versus intuitive, right? E=MC squared required an intuitive leap, and then you had to do the analysis afterwards. Einstein said, in fact, ""The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."" Dance requires us to express and want to express the jubilation in life, but then you have to figure out, exactly what movement do I do to make sure that it comes across correctly? The difference between arts and sciences is also not constructive versus deconstructive, right? A lot of people think of the sciences as deconstructive. You have to pull things apart. And yeah, sub-atomic physics is deconstructive. You literally try to tear atoms apart to understand what's inside of them. But sculpture, from what I understand from great sculptors, is deconstructive, because you see a piece and you remove what doesn't need to be there. Biotechnology is constructive. Orchestral arranging is constructive. So in fact we use constructive and deconstructive techniques in everything. The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin, even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather they're manifestations of the same thing. Different quantum states of an atom? Or maybe if I want to be more 21st century I could say that they are different harmonic resonances of a superstring. But we'll leave that alone. (Laughter) They spring from the same source. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us. It's our attempt to influence things, the universe internal to ourselves and external to us. The sciences, to me, are manifestations of our attempt to express or share our understanding, our experience, to influence the universe external to ourselves. It doesn't rely on us as individuals. It's the universe, as experienced by everyone, and the arts manifest our desire, our attempt to share or influence others through experiences that are peculiar to us as individuals. Let me say it again another way: science provides an understanding of a universal experience, and arts provides a universal understanding of a personal experience. That's what we have to think about, that they're all part of us, they're all part of a continuum. It's not just the tools, it's not just the sciences, you know, the mathematics and the numerical stuff and the statistics, because we heard, very much on this stage, people talked about music being mathematical. Right? Arts don't just use clay, aren't the only ones that use clay, light and sound and movement. They use analysis as well. So people might say, well, I still like that intuitive versus analytical thing, because everybody wants to do the right brain, left brain thing, right? We've all been accused of being right-brained or left-brained at some point in time, depending on who we disagreed with. (Laughter) You know, people say intuitive, you know that's like you're in touch with nature, in touch with yourself and relationships. Analytical: you put your mind to work, and I'm going to tell you a little secret. You all know this though, but sometimes people use this analysis idea, that things are outside of ourselves, to be, say, that this is what we're going to elevate as the true, most important sciences, right? And then you have artists, and you all know this is true as well, artists will say things about scientists because they say they're too concrete, they're disconnected with the world. But, we've even had that here on stage, so don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. (Laughter) We had folks talking about the Flat Earth Society and flower arrangers, so there's this whole dichotomy that we continue to carry along, even when we know better. And folks say we need to choose either or. But it would really be foolish to choose either one, right? Intuitive versus analytical? That's a foolish choice. It's foolish, just like trying to choose between being realistic or idealistic. You need both in life. Why do people do this? I'm just gonna quote a molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, who's 70 years old so he can say this. He said, ""It's always important to distinguish between chastity and impotence."" Now... (Laughter) I want to share with you a little equation, okay? How do understanding science and the arts fit into our lives and what's going on and the things that we're talking about here at the design conference, and this is a little thing I came up with, understanding and our resources and our will cause us to have outcomes. Our understanding is our science, our arts, our religion, how we see the universe around us, our resources, our money, our labor, our minerals, those things that are out there in the world we have to work with. But more importantly, there's our will. This is our vision, our aspirations of the future, our hopes, our dreams, our struggles and our fears. Our successes and our failures influence what we do with all of those, and to me, design and engineering, craftsmanship and skilled labor, are all the things that work on this to have our outcome, which is our human quality of life. Where do we want the world to be? And guess what? Regardless of how we look at this, whether we look at arts and sciences are separate or different, they're both being influenced now and they're both having problems. I did a project called S.E.E.ing the Future: Science, Engineering and Education, and it was looking at how to shed light on most effective use of government funding. We got a bunch of scientists in all stages of their careers. They came to Dartmouth College, where I was teaching, and they talked about with theologians and financiers, what are some of the issues of public funding for science and engineering research? What's most important about it? There are some ideas that emerged that I think have really powerful parallels to the arts. The first thing they said was that the circumstances that we find ourselves in today in the sciences and engineering that made us world leaders is very different than the '40s, the '50s, and the '60s and the '70s when we emerged as world leaders, because we're no longer in competition with fascism, with Soviet-style communism, and by the way that competition wasn't just military, it included social competition and political competition as well, that allowed us to look at space as one of those platforms to prove that our social system was better. Another thing they talked about was the infrastructure that supports the sciences is becoming obsolete. We look at universities and colleges, small, mid-sized community colleges across the country, their laboratories are becoming obsolete, and this is where we train most of our science workers and our researchers, and our teachers, by the way, and then that there's a media that doesn't support the dissemination of any more than the most mundane and inane of information. There's pseudo-science, crop circles, alien autopsy, haunted houses, or disasters. And that's what we see. And this isn't really the information you need to operate in everyday life and figure out how to participate in this democracy and determine what's going on. They also said that there's a change in the corporate mentality. Whereas government money had always been there for basic science and engineering research, we also counted on some companies to do some basic research, but what's happened now is companies put more energy into short-term product development than they do in basic engineering and science research. And education is not keeping up. In K through 12, people are taking out wet labs. They think if we put a computer in the room it's going to take the place of actually, we're mixing the acids, we're growing the potatoes. And government funding is decreasing in spending and then they're saying, let's have corporations take over, and that's not true. Government funding should at least do things like recognize cost-benefits of basic science and engineering research. We have to know that we have a responsibility as global citizens in this world. We have to look at the education of humans. We need to build our resources today to make sure that they're trained so that they understand the importance of these things, and we have to support the vitality of science, and that doesn't mean that everything has to have one thing that's going to go on, or we know exactly what's going to be the outcome of it, but that we support the vitality and the intellectual curiosity that goes along, and if you think about those parallels to the arts, the competition with the Bolshoi Ballet spurred the Joffrey and the New York City Ballet to become better. Infrastructure museums, theaters, movie houses across the country are disappearing. We have more television stations with less to watch, we have more money spent on rewrites to get old television programs in the movies. We have corporate funding now that, when it goes to some company, when it goes to support the arts, it almost requires that the product be part of the picture that the artist draws, and we have stadiums that are named over and over again by corporations. In Houston, we're trying to figure out what to do with that Enron Stadium thing. (Laughter) And fine arts and education in the schools is disappearing, and we have a government that seems like it's gutting the NEA and other programs, so we have to really stop and think, what are we trying to do with the sciences and the arts? There's a need to revitalize them. We have to pay attention to it. I just want to tell you really quickly what I'm doing. (Applause) I want to tell you what I've been doing a little bit since... I feel this need to sort of integrate some of the ideas that I've had and run across over time. One of the things that I found out is that there's a need to repair the dichotomy between the mind and body as well. My mother always told me, you have to be observant, know what's going on in your mind and your body, and as a dancer I had this tremendous faith in my ability to know my body, just as I knew how to sense colors. Then I went to medical school, and I was supposed to just go on what the machine said about bodies. You know, you would ask patients questions and some people would tell you, ""Don't, don't, don't listen to what the patients said."" We know that patients know and understand their bodies better, but these days we're trying to divorce them from that idea. We have to reconcile the patient's knowledge of their body with physician's measurements. We had someone talk about measuring emotions and getting machines to figure out what, to keep us from acting crazy. Right? No, we shouldn't measure, we shouldn't use machines to measure road rage and then do something to keep us from engaging in it. Maybe we can have machines help us to recognize that we have road rage and then we need to know how to control that without the machines. We even need to be able to recognize that without the machines. What I'm very concerned about is how do we bolster our self-awareness as humans, as biological organisms? Michael Moschen spoke of having to teach and learn how to feel with my eyes, to see with my hands. We have all kinds of possibilities to use our senses by, and that's what we have to do. That's what I want to do, is to try to use bioinstrumentation, those kind of things to help our senses in what we do, and that's the work I've been doing now as a company called BioSentient Corporation. I figured I'd have to do that ad, because I'm an entrepreneur, because entrepreneur says that that's somebody who does what they want to do because they're not broke enough that they have to get a real job. (Laughter) But that's the work I'm doing with BioSentient Corporation trying to figure out how do we integrate these things? Let me finish by saying that my personal design issue for the future is really about integrating, to think about that intuitive and that analytical. The arts and sciences are not separate. High school physics lesson before you leave. High school physics teacher used to hold up a ball. She would say this ball has potential energy, but nothing will happen to it, it can't do any work until I drop it and it changes states. I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action. This conference is filled with wonderful ideas. We're going to share lots of things with people, but nothing's going to happen until we risk putting those ideas into action. We need to revitalize the arts and sciences of today, we need to take responsibility for the future. We can't hide behind saying it's just for company profits, or it's just a business, or I'm an artist or an academician. Here's how you judge what you're doing. I talked about that balance between intuitive, analytical. Fran Lebowitz, my favorite cynic, she said the three questions of greatest concern, now I'm going to add on to design, is, ""Is it attractive?"" That's the intuitive. ""Is it amusing?"" The analytical. ""And does it know its place?"" The balance. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together
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"This is a sculpture I made, which is a way of, kind of, freeing a form into an object that has different degrees of freedom. So, it can balance on a point. This is a bronze ball, an aluminum arm here, and then this wooden disk. And the wooden disk was really thought about as something that you'd want to hold on to, and that would glide easily through your hands. The aluminum is because it's very light. The bronze is nice hard, durable material that could roll on the ground. Inside of the bronze ball there's a lead weight that is free-swinging on an axle that's on two bearings that pass in between, across it, like this, that counterbalance this weight. So it allows it to roll. And the sphere has that balance property that it always sort of stays still and looks the same from every direction. But if you put something on top of it, it disbalances it. And so it would tip over. But in this case because the interior is free-swinging in relation to the sphere, it can stand up on one point. And then there was a second level to this object, which is that it — I wanted it to convey some proportions that I was interested in, which is the diameter of the Moon and the diameter of the Earth in proportion to each other.I was exploring, really early on, wanting to make things float in the air. And I thought up a lot of ideas. This is sculpture that I made that — it's magnetically levitated. The thing is, is that it's slightly dangerous. Normally it's sort of cordoned off when it's in a museum. But it's uh — let's see if I can manipulate it a little bit without, um — oops. So this is just floating, floating on a permanent magnetic field, which stabilizes it in all directions. Except there is a slight tether here, which keeps it from going over the top of its field. It's sort of surfing on a magnetic field at the crest of a wave. And that's what supports the object and keeps it stable.I think we could roll the tape, admin. I have a sort of a collection of videos that I took of different installations, which I could narrate. This is a sculpture of the Sun and the Earth, in proportion. Representing that eight and a half minutes that it takes light and gravity to connect the two. So here is the Earth. It's a little less than a millimeter that was turned of solid bronze.And here is a similar sculpture. That's the Sun at that end. And then in a series of 55 balls, it reduces, proportionately — each ball and the spaces between them reduce proportionately, until they get down to this little Earth. This is in a sculpture park in Taejon.This one is about the Moon and then the distance to the Earth, in proportion also. This is a little stone ball, floating. As you can see the little tether, that it's also magnetically levitated.And then this is the first part of — this is 109 spheres, since the Sun is 109 times the diameter of the Earth. And so this is the size of the Sun. And then each of these little spheres is the size of the Earth in proportion to the Sun. It's made up of 16 concentric shells. Each one has 92 spheres. This is in the courtyard of a twelfth-century alchemist. I was thinking that the Sun is kind of the ultimate alchemist. (Laughter)So this, again, is on the subject — a slice from the equator of the Earth. And then the Moon in the center, and it's floating. And this is in France.This is in Sapporo. It's balancing on a shaft and a ball, right at the center of gravity, or just slightly above the center of gravity, which means that the lower half of the object is just a little bit more weighty. So you can see it rotating here. It weighs about a ton or over a ton. It's made of stainless steel, quite thick. But it's being balanced like that in equilibrium. It's susceptible to motion by the air currents.This is another species of work that I do. These are these arrays. These spheres are all suspended, but they have magnets horizontally in them that make them all like compasses. So all the red sides, for example, face one direction: south. And the blue side, the compliment, faces the other way. So as you turn around you're seeing different colors.This is based on the structure of a diamond. It was a diamond cell structure was the point of departure. And then there were kind of large spaces in the hollows between the atoms. And so I placed one more element of each one of them. These were white spheres. Then I had video projectors that were projecting intermittently onto the spheres. So they would catch parts of the images, and make sort of three-dimensional color volumes, as you walk through it, through the object.This is something I did of a tactile communication system. It was the idea of isolating the tactile component of sculpture, and then putting it into a communication system. This is an idea of moving a sculpture, a ball, that would be directed around the room by a computer.This is a clock I designed. It has Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map edited here. It turns once per day in synchrony with the Earth.And then, this is like projects that are harder to build. (Laughter) This has a diamond-bottomed lake. So it's a floating island with water, fresh water, that can fly from place to place. This would be grown, I suppose, with nanotechnology in the future sometime.In the course of doing my work I sort of have a broad range of interests. And some of it is just the idea of creating media — media as a sculpture, something that would keep the sculpture fresh and ever-changing, by just creating the media that the sculpture is made of. And I had a lot of — always interested in the concept of a crystal ball. And the idea that you could see things inside of a crystal ball and predict the future — or a television set, where it's sort of like a magic box where anything can appear. I had thought about, a long time ago, in the late '60s — when I was just starting out, I was under the influence of thinking about Buckminster Fuller's grand project for an electric globe across from the United Nations — and other things that were happening, the space program at that time, and Whole Earth Catalog, things like that. I was thinking about mass produced spherical television sets that could be linked to orbiting camera satellites.So if we could roll the next film here. This has evolved over the years in a lot of different iterations. But this the current version of it, is a flying airship that is about 35 meters in diameter, about 110 feet in diameter. The whole surface of it is covered with 60 million diodes, red, blue, and green, that allow you to have a high-resolution picture, visible in daylight.I came with a plan. I brought it to Paul MacCready's company AeroVironment to do a feasibility study, and they analyzed it, and came up with a lot of innovative ideas about how to propel it. So we have a physical plan of how to make this actually happen. This is the control room inside of the ship. The idea of this air genie is, it's something that can just transform and become anything. It's like a traveling show. It has speakers on it. And it has cameras over the surface of it. So it can see its environment, and then it can mimic its environment and disappear. Here the legs are retracting. The cabin is open or closed, as you like. It weighs about 20 tons. It has on-board generators. It can generate about a million kilowatts, in order to be bright enough to be visible in daylight. The idea of it is to make a kind of a traveling show. It really would be dedicated to the arts and to interacting. There would be on board a crew of artists, musicians, that would allow the thing to become actually kind of a conscious object that would respond to the moment, and to interact as an entity that was aware, that could communicate. It's completely silent and nonpolluting. It has electric motors with a novel propulsion system. It could be interacted with large crowds in different ways.Primarily I would be interested in how it would interact with, say, going to a college campus, and then being used as a way of talking about the earth sciences, the world, the situation of the globe. The default image on the object would probably be a high-resolution Earth image. But then one could interact with that and show plate tectonics or global warming issues, or migrations — all of the things that we're concerned with today.And then at night the idea is that it would be used as kind of a rave situation, where the people could cut loose, and the music and the lights, and everything. So it could land in a park, for example. Or this could represent a college green. And then it would have a corresponding website that would show the itinerary of this. And so interacting with the same kind of imagery. It would also be able to be an open code, so people could interact with it. It would be forum for people's ideas about what they would like to see on a giant screen of this type. So that's pretty much it. Okay. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_shannon_s_magnetic_sculpture
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"Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. It expands in winter and contracts in summer. The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. The permanent ice is marked in red. As you see, it expands to the dark blue — that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. In 25 years it's gone from this, to this.This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. Video: Whoa! (Laughter) Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be.And one reason is, this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. This is an annual melting river. But the volumes are much larger than ever. This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. These flows are increasing very rapidly. At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland.In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. 40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. The flows have increased. But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. This is hitting the reservoirs. And the predictions, as you've read, are serious.This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. And the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate. Four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. This is a completely unsustainable pattern. If you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing.In the last five years we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours — 25 million tons every day to the oceans. Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific, from the Americas, extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants.But we're beginning to see a sea change. Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed. (Applause) However there is a political battle in our country. And the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. That image reminded me of something. (Laughter) Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. You probably saw it on the news. This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America. This happened around Christmas. One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one.Video: ♪♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul. He's abundant here in America, and he helps our economy grow. Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday. He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay.Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal.Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about.Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. This is one of them, part of one of them.Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious threat to our business. That's why we've made it our primary goal to spend a large sum of money on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate the truth about coal. The fact is, coal isn't dirty. We think it's clean — smells good, too. So don't worry about climate change. Leave that up to us. (Laughter)Video: Actor: Clean coal — you've heard a lot about it. So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility. Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud. But that's the sound of clean coal technology. And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology.Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge.Video: Narrator: America is in crisis — the economy, national security, the climate crisis. The thread that links them all: our addiction to carbon based fuels, like dirty coal and foreign oil. But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess. Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. A plan to put America back to work, make us more secure, and help stop global warming. Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems. Repower America. Find out more.Al Gore: This is the last one.Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America. One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet. Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid. Man #2: New investments to create high-paying jobs. Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real.Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says, ""If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."" We need to go far, quickly. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_warns_on_latest_climate_trends
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"I'm not at all a cook. So don't fear, this is not going to be a cooking demonstration. But I do want to talk to you about something that I think is dear to all of us. And that is bread — something which is as simple as our basic, most fundamental human staple. And I think few of us spend the day without eating bread in some form. Unless you're on one of these Californian low-carb diets, bread is standard. Bread is not only standard in the Western diet. As I will show to you, it is actually the mainstay of modern life.So I'm going to bake bread for you. In the meantime I'm also talking to you, so my life is going to be complicated. Bear with me. First of all, a little bit of audience participation. I have two loaves of bread here. One is a supermarket standard: white bread, pre-packaged, which I'm told is called a Wonderbread. (Laughter) I didn't know this word until I arrived. And this is more or less, a whole-meal, handmade, small-bakery loaf of bread. Here we go. I want to see a show of hands. Who prefers the whole-meal bread? Okay let me do this differently. Is anybody preferring the Wonderbread at all? (Laughter) I have two tentative male hands. (Laughter)Okay, now the question is really, why is this so? And I think it is because we feel that this kind of bread really is about authenticity. It's about a traditional way of living. A way that is perhaps more real, more honest. This is an image from Tuscany, where we feel agriculture is still about beauty. And life is really, too. And this is about good taste, good traditions. Why do we have this image? Why do we feel that this is more true than this? Well I think it has a lot to do with our history. In the 10,000 years since agriculture evolved, most of our ancestors have actually been agriculturalists or they were closely related to food production. And we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past. Art has helped us to maintain that kind of image. It was a mythical past. Of course, the reality is quite different. These poor farmers working the land by hand or with their animals, had yield levels that are comparable to the poorest farmers today in West Africa. But we have, somehow, in the course of the last few centuries, or even decades, started to cultivate an image of a mythical, rural agricultural past.It was only 200 years ago that we had the advent of the Industrial Revolution. And while I'm starting to make some bread for you here, it's very important to understand what that revolution did to us. It brought us power. It brought us mechanization, fertilizers. And it actually drove up our yields. And even sort of horrible things, like picking beans by hand, can now be done automatically. All that is a real, great improvement, as we shall see. Of course we also, particularly in the last decade, managed to envelop the world in a dense chain of supermarkets, in a chain of global trade. And it means that you now eat products, which can come from all around the world. That is the reality of our modern life. Now you may prefer this loaf of bread. Excuse my hands but this is how it is.But actually the real relevant bread, historically, is this white Wonder loaf. And don't despise the white bread because it really, I think, symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not really conscious of that much. But it has changed the world. This tiny bread that is tasteless in some ways and has a lot of problems has changed the world. So what is happening? Well the best way to look at that is to do a tiny bit of simplistic statistics. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution with modernization of agriculture in the last few decades, since the 1960s, food availability, per head, in this world, has increased by 25 percent. And the world population in the meantime has doubled. That means that we have now more food available than ever before in human history. And that is the result, directly, of being so successful at increasing the scale and volume of our production. And this is true, as you can see, for all countries, including the so-called developing countries.What happened to our bread in the meantime? As food became plentiful here, it also meant that we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture to something like, on average, in the high income countries, five percent or less of the population. In the U.S. only one percent of the people are actually farmers. And it frees us all up to do other things — to sit at TED meetings and not to worry about our food. That is, historically, a really unique situation. Never before has the responsibility to feed the world been in the hands of so few people. And never before have so many people been oblivious of that fact.So as food became more plentiful, bread became cheaper. And as it became cheaper, bread manufacturers decided to add in all kinds of things. We added in more sugar. We add in raisins and oil and milk and all kinds of things to make bread, from a simple food into kind of a support for calories. And today, bread now is associated with obesity, which is very strange. It is the basic, most fundamental food that we've had in the last ten thousand years. Wheat is the most important crop — the first crop we domesticated and the most important crop we still grow today.But this is now this strange concoction of high calories. And that's not only true in this country, it is true all over the world. Bread has migrated to tropical countries, where the middle classes now eat French rolls and hamburgers and where the commuters find bread much more handy to use than rice or cassava. So bread has become from a main staple, a source of calories associated with obesity and also a source of modernity, of modern life. And the whiter the bread, in many countries, the better it is.So this is the story of bread as we know it now. But of course the price of mass production has been that we moved large-scale. And large-scale has meant destruction of many of our landscapes, destruction of biodiversity — still a lonely emu here in the Brazilian cerrado soybean fields. The costs have been tremendous — water pollution, all the things you know about, destruction of our habitats.What we need to do is to go back to understanding what our food is about. And this is where I have to query all of you. How many of you can actually tell wheat apart from other cereals? How many of you actually can make a bread in this way, without starting with a bread machine or just some kind of packaged flavor? Can you actually bake bread? Do you know how much a loaf of bread actually costs? We have become very removed from what our bread really is, which, again, evolutionarily speaking, is very strange. In fact not many of you know that our bread, of course, was not a European invention. It was invented by farmers in Iraq and Syria in particular. The tiny spike on the left to the center is actually the forefather of wheat. This is where it all comes from, and where these farmers who actually, ten thousand years ago, put us on the road of bread.Now it is not surprising that with this massification and large-scale production, there is a counter-movement that emerged — very much also here in California. The counter-movement says, ""Let's go back to this. Let's go back to traditional farming. Let's go back to small-scale, to farmers' markets, small bakeries and all that."" Wonderful. Don't we all agree? I certainly agree. I would love to go back to Tuscany to this kind of traditional setting, gastronomy, good food. But this is a fallacy. And the fallacy comes from idealizing a past that we have forgotten about.If we do this, if we want to stay with traditional small-scale farming we are going, actually, to relegate these poor farmers and their husbands — among whom I have lived for many years, working without electricity and water, to try to improve their food production — we relegate them to poverty. What they want are implements to increase their production: something to fertilize the soil, something to protect their crop and to bring it to a market. We cannot just think that small-scale is the solution to the world food problem. It's a luxury solution for us who can afford it, if you want to afford it. In fact we do not want this poor woman to work the land like this. If we say just small-scale production, as is the tendency here, to go back to local food means that a poor man like Hans Rosling cannot even eat oranges anymore because in Scandinavia we don't have oranges. So local food production is out. But also we do not want to relegate to poverty in the rural areas. And we do not want to relegate the urban poor to starvation. So we must find other solutions.One of our problems is that world food production needs to increase very rapidly — doubling by about 2030. The main driver of that is actually meat. And meat consumption in Southeast Asia and China in particular is what drives the prices of cereals. That need for animal protein is going to continue. We can discuss alternatives in another talk, perhaps one day, but this is our driving force. So what can we do? Can we find a solution to produce more? Yes. But we need mechanization. And I'm making a real plea here. I feel so strongly that you cannot ask a small farmer to work the land and bend over to grow a hectare of rice, 150,000 times, just to plant a crop and weed it. You cannot ask people to work under these conditions. We need clever low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of the large-scale mechanization that we've had.So what can we do? We must feed three billion people in cities. We will not do that through small farmers' markets because these people have no small farmers' markets at their disposal. They have low incomes. And they benefit from cheap, affordable, safe and diverse food. That's what we must aim for in the next 20 to 30 years.But yes there are some solutions. And let me just do one simple conceptual thing: if I plot science as a proxy for control of the production process and scale. What you see is that we've started in the left-hand corner with traditional agriculture, which was sort of small-scale and low-control. We've moved towards large-scale and very high control. What I want us to do is to keep up the science and even get more science in there but go to a kind of regional scale — not just in terms of the scale of the fields, but in terms of the entire food network. That's where we should move. And the ultimate may be, but it doesn't apply to cereals, that we have entirely closed ecosystems — the horticultural systems right at the top left-hand corner. So we need to think differently about agriculture science. Agriculture science for most people — and there are not many farmers among you here — has this name of being bad, of being about pollution, about large-scale, about the destruction of the environment. That is not necessary. We need more science and not less. And we need good science.So what kind of science can we have? Well first of all I think we can do much better on the existing technologies. Use biotechnology where useful, particularly in pest and disease resistance. There are also robots, for example, who can recognize weeds with a resolution of half an inch. We have much cleverer irrigation. We do not need to spill the water if we don't want to. And we need to think very dispassionately about the comparative advantages of small-scale and large-scale. We need to think that land is multi-functional. It has different functions. There are different ways in which we must use it — for residential, for nature, for agriculture purposes. And we also need to re-examine livestock. Go regional and go to urban food systems. I want to see fish ponds in parking lots and basements. I want to have horticulture and greenhouses on top of residential areas. And I want to use the energy that comes from those greenhouses and from the fermentation of crops to heat our residential areas. There are all kinds of ways we can do it. We cannot solve the world food problem by using biological agriculture. But we can do a lot more.And the main thing that I would really ask all of you as you go back to your countries, or as you stay here: ask your government for an integrated food policy. Food is as important as energy, as security, as the environment. Everything is linked together. So we can do that. In fact in a densely populated country like the River Delta, where I live in the Netherlands, we have combined these functions. So this is not science fiction. We can combine things even in a social sense of making the rural areas more accessible to people — to house, for example, the chronically sick. There is all kinds of things we can do.But there is something you must do. It's not enough for me to say, ""Let's get more bold science into agriculture."" You must go back and think about your own food chain. Talk to farmers. When was the last time you went to a farm and talked to a farmer? Talk to people in restaurants. Understand where you are in the food chain, where your food comes from. Understand that you are part of this enormous chain of events. And that frees you up to do other things. And above all, to me, food is about respect. It's about understanding, when you eat, that there are also many people who are still in this situation, who are still struggling for their daily food. And the kind of simplistic solutions that we sometimes have, to think that doing everything by hand is going to be the solution, is really not morally justified. We need to help to lift them out of poverty. We need to make them proud of being a farmer because they allow us to survive. Never before, as I said, has the responsibility for food been in the hands of so few. And never before have we had the luxury of taking it for granted because it is now so cheap.And I think there is nobody else who has expressed better, to me, the idea that food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity. Who said this so beautifully was Mahatma Gandhi, 75 years ago, when he spoke about bread. He did not speak about rice, in India. He said, ""To those who have to go without two meals a day, God can only appear as bread.""And so as I'm finishing my bread here — and I've been baking it, and I'll try not to burn my hands. Let me share with those of you here in the first row. Let me share some of the food with you. Take some of my bread. And as you eat it, and as you try it — please come and stand up. Have some of it. I want you to think that every bite connects you to the past and the future: to these anonymous farmers, that first bred the first wheat varieties; and to the farmers of today, who've been making this. And you don't even know who they are. Every meal you eat contains ingredients from all across the world. Everything makes us so privileged, that we can eat this food, that we don't struggle every day. And that, I think, evolutionarily-speaking is unique. We've never had that before. So enjoy your bread. Eat it, and feel privileged. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/louise_fresco_on_feeding_the_whole_world
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"So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks. I got invited to speak to the people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting events. Unfortunately I couldn't go. But it got me thinking about the fact that these guys, at least most of them, know what it is that they do for a living. What they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events.Shortly after that I got invited to speak at the convention of the people who make balloon animals. And again, I couldn't go. But it's a fascinating group. They make balloon animals. There is a big schism between the ones who make gospel animals and porn animals, but — (Laughter) they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons. Sometimes they get in trouble, but not often. And the other thing about these guys is, they also know what they do for a living. They make balloon animals.But what do we do for a living? What exactly to the people watching this do every day? And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. That we try to find a piece of the status quo — something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, something that is itching to be changed — and we change it. We try to make big, permanent, important change. But we don't think about it that way. And we haven't spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. And I've been studying it for a couple years. And I want to share a couple stories with you today.First, about a guy named Nathan Winograd. Nathan was the number two person at the San Francisco SPCA. And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA is, it was founded to kill dogs and cats. Cities gave them a charter to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them. In a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed, most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street. Nathan and his boss saw this, and they could not tolerate it. So they set out to make San Francisco a no-kill city: create an entire city where every dog and cat, unless it was ill or dangerous, would be adopted, not killed. And everyone said it was impossible. Nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance. And people from SPCAs and humane shelters around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them — to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane. They persisted. And Nathan went directly to the community. He connected with people who cared about this: nonprofessionals, people with passion. And within just a couple years, San Francisco became the first no-kill city, running no deficit, completely supported by the community. Nathan left and went to Tompkins County, New York — a place as different from San Francisco as you can be and still be in the United States. And he did it again. He went from being a glorified dogcatcher to completely transforming the community. And then he went to North Carolina and did it again. And he went to Reno and he did it again.And when I think about what Nathan did, and when I think about what people here do, I think about ideas. And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding, but what they do is, they take a light bulb and they smash it. Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. It is a moment in time. And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented.We started with the factory idea: that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. We then went to the TV idea, that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. And now we're in this new model of leadership, where the way we make change is not by using money or power to lever a system, but by leading.So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. Because he's got an efficient enough factory. Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. You can change the fabric of an entire country. That the essence of what you're doing is you need ever-cheaper labor, and ever-faster machines. And the problem we've run into is, we're running out of both. Ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines. (Laughter)So we shift gears for a minute, and say, ""I know: television; advertising. Push push. Take a good idea and push it on the world. I have a better mousetrap. And if I can just get enough money to tell enough people, I'll sell enough."" And you can build an entire industry on that. If necessary you can put babies in your ads. If necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff. And if babies don't work, you can use doctors. But be careful. Because you don't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition, where you're talking about one thing instead of the other. (Laughter) This model requires you to act like the king, like the person in the front of the room throwing things to the peons in the back. That you are in charge, and you're going to tell people what to do next. The quick little diagram of it is, you're up here, and you are pushing it out to the world. This method — mass marketing — requires average ideas, because you're going to the masses, and plenty of ads. What we've done as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea, hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause, hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate. And, unfortunately, it doesn't work so well anymore either. (Laughter)But there is good news around the corner — really good news. I call it the idea of tribes. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years. It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it's something that people have wanted forever. Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world, tribes are everywhere.The Internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest. So you've got the red-hat ladies over here. You've got the red-hat triathletes over there. You've got the organized armies over here. You've got the disorganized rebels over here. You've got people in white hats making food. And people in white hats sailing boats. The point is that you can find Ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them, because you want to be connected. That people on the fringes can find each other, connect and go somewhere. Every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this way of thinking. (Laughter)Now it turns out this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo. People I know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon. And that what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that is going to be torn down, and they burn it down instead, and practice putting it out. But they always stop and take a picture. (Laughter)You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one. They've got their own flag. They've got the eye patches. You can tell when you're running into someone in a tribe. And it turns out that it's tribes — not money, not factories — that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will, but because they wanted to connect.That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves, it becomes a movement. So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn't do it by himself. And he didn't do it by buying a lot of ads. He did it by creating a movement. Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him, because he can't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night.You don't need everyone. What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don't know, a thousand true fans — a thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn't for everyone, it's not a mass thing. That's not what this is about. What it's about instead is finding the true believers. It's easy to look at what I've said so far, and say, ""Wait a minute, I don't have what it takes to be that kind of leader.""So here are two leaders. They don't have a lot in common. They're about the same age. But that's about it. What they did, though, is each in their own way, created a different way of navigating your way through technology. So some people will go out and get people to be on one team. And some people will get people to be on the other team.It also informs the decisions you make when you make products or services. You know, this is one of my favorite devices. But what a shame that it's not organized to help authors create movements. What would happen if, when you're using your Kindle, you could see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment. Or from your book group. Or from your friends, or from the circle you want. What would happen if authors, or people with ideas could use version two, which comes out on Monday, and use it to organize people who want to talk about something. Now there is a million things I could share with you about the mechanics here. But let me just try a couple.The Beatles did not invent teenagers. They merely decided to lead them. That most movements, most leadership that we're doing is about finding a group that's disconnected but already has a yearning — not persuading people to want something they don't have yet.When Diane Hatz worked on ""The Meatrix,"" her video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated, she didn't invent the idea of being a vegan. She didn't invent the idea of caring about this issue. But she helped organize people, and helped turn it into a movement.Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class of Venezuela. He merely led them.Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians. He just stepped up and said, ""Follow me.""Derek Sivers invented CD Baby, which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man — to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to, and connect with each other.What all these people have in common is that they are heretics. That heretics look at the status quo and say, ""This will not stand. I can't abide this status quo. I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward. I see what the status quo is; I don't like it."" That instead of looking at all the little rules and following each one of them, that instead of being what I call a sheepwalker — somebody who's half asleep, following instructions, keeping their head down, fitting in — every once in a while someone stands up and says, ""Not me."" Someone stands up and says, ""This one is important. We need to organize around it."" And not everyone will. But you don't need everyone. You just need a few people — (Laughter) — who will look at the rules, realize they make no sense, and realize how much they want to be connected.So Tony Hsieh does not run a shoe store. Zappos isn't a shoe store. Zappos is the one, the only, the best-there-ever-was place for people who are into shoes to find each other, to talk about their passion, to connect with people who care more about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow. It can be something as prosaic as shoes, and something as complicated as overthrowing a government. It's exactly the same behavior though.What it requires, as Geraldine Carter has discovered, is to be able to say, ""I can't do this by myself. But if I can get other people to join my Climb and Ride, then together we can get something that we all want. We're just waiting for someone to lead us.""Michelle Kaufman has pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture. She doesn't do it by quietly building one house at a time. She does it by telling a story to people who want to hear it. By connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to be connected to each other. By leading a movement and making change. And around and around and around it goes.So three questions I'd offer you. The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you're not changing the status quo. The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for: the connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it — not the mechanics of what you're building, but the who, and the leading part — is where change comes.So Blake, at Tom's Shoes, had a very simple idea. ""What would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes I gave exactly the same pair to someone who doesn't even own a pair of shoes?"" This is not the story of how you get shelf space at Neiman Marcus. It's a story of a product that tells a story. And as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes and someone says, ""What are those?"" You get to tell the story on Blake's behalf, on behalf of the people who got the shoes. And suddenly it's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes. It's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes.My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10 years fighting against juvenile diabetes. Not fighting the organization that's fighting it — fighting with them, leading them, connecting them, challenging the status quo because it's important to him. And the people he surrounds himself with need the connection. They need the leadership. It makes a difference.You don't need permission from people to lead them. But in case you do, here it is: they're waiting, we're waiting for you to show us where to go next. So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. They challenge what's currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture. A secret language, a seven-second handshake, a way of knowing that you're in or out. They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe, curiosity about outsiders. They're asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone. And tribe leaders can do that. It's fascinating, because all tribe leaders have charisma, but you don't need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from — from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there.So I'd like you to do something for me. And I hope you'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand. What I want you to do, it only takes 24 hours, is: create a movement. Something that matters. Start. Do it. We need it. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead
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"(Applause) AIDS was discovered 1981; the virus, 1983. These Gapminder bubbles show you how the spread of the virus was in 1983 in the world, or how we estimate that it was. What we are showing here is — on this axis here, I'm showing percent of infected adults. And on this axis, I'm showing dollars per person in income. And the size of these bubbles, the size of the bubbles here, that shows how many are infected in each country, and the color is the continent.Now, you can see United States, in 1983, had a very low percentage infected, but due to the big population, still a sizable bubble. There were quite many people infected in the United States. And, up there, you see Uganda. They had almost five percent infected, and quite a big bubble in spite of being a small country, then. And they were probably the most infected country in the world. Now, what has happened? Now you have understood the graph and now, in the next 60 seconds, we will play the HIV epidemic in the world.But first, I have a new invention here. (Laughter) I have solidified the beam of the laser pointer.(Laughter)(Applause)So, ready, steady, go! First, we have the fast rise in Uganda and Zimbabwe. They went upwards like this. In Asia, the first country to be heavily infected was Thailand — they reached one to two percent. Then, Uganda started to turn back, whereas Zimbabwe skyrocketed, and some years later South Africa had a terrible rise of HIV frequency. Look, India got many infected, but had a low level. And almost the same happens here. See, Uganda coming down, Zimbabwe coming down, Russia went to one percent.In the last two to three years, we have reached a steady state of HIV epidemic in the world. 25 years it took. But, steady state doesn't mean that things are getting better, it's just that they have stopped getting worse. And it has — the steady state is, more or less, one percent of the adult world population is HIV-infected. It means 30 to 40 million people, the whole of California — every person, that's more or less what we have today in the world.Now, let me make a fast replay of Botswana. Botswana — upper middle-income country in southern Africa, democratic government, good economy, and this is what happened there. They started low, they skyrocketed, they peaked up there in 2003, and now they are down. But they are falling only slowly, because in Botswana, with good economy and governance, they can manage to treat people. And if people who are infected are treated, they don't die of AIDS. These percentages won't come down because people can survive 10 to 20 years. So there's some problem with these metrics now. But the poorer countries in Africa, the low-income countries down here, there the rates fall faster, of the percentage infected, because people still die. In spite of PEPFAR, the generous PEPFAR, all people are not reached by treatment, and of those who are reached by treatment in the poor countries, only 60 percent are left on treatment after two years. It's not realistic with lifelong treatment for everyone in the poorest countries. But it's very good that what is done is being done.But focus now is back on prevention. It is only by stopping the transmission that the world will be able to deal with it. Drugs is too costly — had we had the vaccine, or when we will get the vaccine, that's something more effective — but the drugs are very costly for the poor. Not the drug in itself, but the treatment and the care which is needed around it. So, when we look at the pattern, one thing comes out very clearly: you see the blue bubbles and people say HIV is very high in Africa. I would say, HIV is very different in Africa. You'll find the highest HIV rate in the world in African countries, and yet you'll find Senegal, down here — the same rate as United States. And you'll find Madagascar, and you'll find a lot of African countries about as low as the rest of the world. It's this terrible simplification that there's one Africa and things go on in one way in Africa. We have to stop that. It's not respectful, and it's not very clever to think that way.(Applause)I had the fortune to live and work for a time in the United States. I found out that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were different. (Laughter) And so it is in Africa — it's a lot of difference. So, why is it so high? Is it war? No, it's not. Look here. War-torn Congo is down there — two, three, four percent. And this is peaceful Zambia, neighboring country — 15 percent. And there's good studies of the refugees coming out of Congo — they have two, three percent infected, and peaceful Zambia — much higher. There are now studies clearly showing that the wars are terrible, that rapes are terrible, but this is not the driving force for the high levels in Africa.So, is it poverty? Well if you look at the macro level, it seems more money, more HIV. But that's very simplistic, so let's go down and look at Tanzania. I will split Tanzania in five income groups, from the highest income to the lowest income, and here we go. The ones with the highest income, the better off — I wouldn't say rich — they have higher HIV. The difference goes from 11 percent down to four percent, and it is even bigger among women. There's a lot of things that we thought, that now, good research, done by African institutions and researchers together with the international researchers, show that that's not the case. So, this is the difference within Tanzania.And, I can't avoid showing Kenya. Look here at Kenya. I've split Kenya in its provinces. Here it goes. See the difference within one African country — it goes from very low level to very high level, and most of the provinces in Kenya is quite modest.So, what is it then? Why do we see this extremely high levels in some countries? Well, it is more common with multiple partners, there is less condom use, and there is age-disparate sex — that is, older men tend to have sex with younger women. We see higher rates in younger women than younger men in many of these highly affected countries.But where are they situated? I will swap the bubbles to a map. Look, the highly infected are four percent of all population and they hold 50 percent of the HIV-infected. HIV exists all over the world. Look, you have bubbles all over the world here. Brazil has many HIV-infected. Arab countries not so much, but Iran is quite high. They have heroin addiction and also prostitution in Iran. India has many because they are many. Southeast Asia, and so on. But, there is one part of Africa — and the difficult thing is, at the same time, not to make a uniform statement about Africa, not to come to simple ideas of why it is like this, on one hand.On the other hand, try to say that this is not the case, because there is a scientific consensus about this pattern now. UNAIDS have done good data available, finally, about the spread of HIV. It could be concurrency. It could be some virus types. It could be that there is other things which makes transmission occur in a higher frequency. After all, if you are completely healthy and you have heterosexual sex, the risk of infection in one intercourse is one in 1,000. Don't jump to conclusions now on how to behave tonight and so on. (Laughter) But — and if you are in an unfavorable situation, more sexually transmitted diseases, it can be one in 100.But what we think is that it could be concurrency. And what is concurrency? In Sweden, we have no concurrency. We have serial monogamy. Vodka, New Year's Eve — new partner for the spring. Vodka, Midsummer's Eve — new partner for the fall. Vodka — and it goes on like this, you know? And you collect a big number of exes. And we have a terrible chlamydia epidemic — terrible chlamydia epidemic which sticks around for many years. HIV has a peak three to six weeks after infection and therefore, having more than one partner in the same month is much more dangerous for HIV than others. Probably, it's a combination of this.And what makes me so happy is that we are moving now towards fact when we look at this. You can get this chart, free. We have uploaded UNAIDS data on the Gapminder site. And we hope that when we act on global problems in the future we will not only have the heart, we will not only have the money, but we will also use the brain.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv
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"Let me talk about India through the evolution of ideas. Now I believe this is an interesting way of looking at it because in every society, especially an open democratic society, it's only when ideas take root that things change. Slowly ideas lead to ideology, lead to policies that lead to actions.In 1930 this country went through a Great Depression, which led to all the ideas of the state and social security, and all the other things that happened in Roosevelt's time. In the 1980s we had the Reagan revolution, which lead to deregulation. And today, after the global economic crisis, there was a whole new set of rules about how the state should intervene. So ideas change states.And I looked at India and said, really there are four kinds of ideas which really make an impact on India. The first, to my mind, is what I call as ""the ideas that have arrived."" These ideas have brought together something which has made India happen the way it is today. The second set of ideas I call ""ideas in progress."" Those are ideas which have been accepted but not implemented yet. The third set of ideas are what I call as ""ideas that we argue about"" — those are ideas where we have a fight, an ideological battle about how to do things. And the fourth thing, which I believe is most important, is ""the ideas that we need to anticipate."" Because when you are a developing country in the world where you can see the problems that other countries are having, you can actually anticipate what that did and do things very differently.Now in India's case I believe there are six ideas which are responsible for where it has come today. The first is really the notion of people. In the '60s and '70s we thought of people as a burden. We thought of people as a liability. Today we talk of people as an asset. We talk of people as human capital. And I believe this change in the mindset, of looking at people as something of a burden to human capital, has been one of the fundamental changes in the Indian mindset. And this change in thinking of human capital is linked to the fact that India is going through a demographic dividend. As healthcare improves, as infant mortality goes down, fertility rates start dropping. And India is experiencing that. India is going to have a lot of young people with a demographic dividend for the next 30 years. What is unique about this demographic dividend is that India will be the only country in the world to have this demographic dividend. In other words, it will be the only young country in an aging world. And this is very important. At the same time if you peel away the demographic dividend in India, there are actually two demographic curves. One is in the south and in the west of India, which is already going to be fully expensed by 2015, because in that part of the country, the fertility rate is almost equal to that of a West European country. Then there is the whole northern India, which is going to be the bulk of the future demographic dividend. But a demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital. Only if the people have education, they have good health, they have infrastructure, they have roads to go to work, they have lights to study at night — only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend. In other words, if you don't really invest in the human capital, the same demographic dividend can be a demographic disaster. Therefore India is at a critical point where either it can leverage its demographic dividend or it can lead to a demographic disaster.The second thing in India has been the change in the role of entrepreneurs. When India got independence entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot, as people who would exploit. But today, after 60 years, because of the rise of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs have become role models, and they are contributing hugely to the society. This change has contributed to the vitality and the whole economy.The third big thing I believe that has changed India is our attitude towards the English language. English language was seen as a language of the imperialists. But today, with globalization, with outsourcing, English has become a language of aspiration. This has made it something that everybody wants to learn. And the fact that we have English is now becoming a huge strategic asset.The next thing is technology. Forty years back, computers were seen as something which was forbidding, something which was intimidating, something that reduced jobs. Today we live in a country which sells eight million mobile phones a month, of which 90 percent of those mobile phones are prepaid phones because people don't have credit history. Forty percent of those prepaid phones are recharged at less than 20 cents at each recharge. That is the scale at which technology has liberated and made it accessible. And therefore technology has gone from being seen as something forbidding and intimidating to something that is empowering. Twenty years back, when there was a report on bank computerization, they didn't name the report as a report on computers, they call them as ""ledger posting machines."" They didn't want the unions to believe that they were actually computers. And when they wanted to have more advanced, more powerful computers they called them ""advanced ledger posting machines."" So we have come a long way from those days where the telephone has become an instrument of empowerment, and really has changed the way Indians think of technology.And then I think the other point is that Indians today are far more comfortable with globalization. Again, after having lived for more than 200 years under the East India Company and under imperial rule, Indians had a very natural reaction towards globalization believing it was a form of imperialism. But today, as Indian companies go abroad, as Indians come and work all over the world, Indians have gained a lot more confidence and have realized that globalization is something they can participate in. And the fact that the demographics are in our favor, because we are the only young country in an aging world, makes globalization all the more attractive to Indians.And finally, India has had the deepening of its democracy. When democracy came to India 60 years back it was an elite concept. It was a bunch of people who wanted to bring in democracy because they wanted to bring in the idea of universal voting and parliament and constitution and so forth. But today democracy has become a bottom-up process where everybody has realized the benefits of having a voice, the benefits of being in an open society. And therefore democracy has become embedded.I believe these six factors — the rise of the notion of population as human capital, the rise of Indian entrepreneurs, the rise of English as a language of aspiration, technology as something empowering, globalization as a positive factor, and the deepening of democracy — has contributed to why India is today growing at rates it has never seen before.But having said that, then we come to what I call as ideas in progress. Those are the ideas where there is no argument in a society, but you are not able to implement those things. And really there are four things here. One is the question of education. For some reason, whatever reason — lack of money, lack of priorities, because of religion having an older culture — primary education was never given the focus it required. But now I believe it's reached a point where it has become very important. Unfortunately the government schools don't function, so children are going to private schools today. Even in the slums of India more than 50 percent of urban kids are going into private schools. So there is a big challenge in getting the schools to work. But having said that, there is an enormous desire among everybody, including the poor, to educate their children. So I believe primary education is an idea which is arrived but not yet implemented.Similarly, infrastructure — for a long time, infrastructure was not a priority. Those of you who have been to India have seen that. It's certainly not like China. But today I believe finally infrastructure is something which is agreed upon and which people want to implement. It is reflected in the political statements. 20 years back the political slogan was, ""Roti, kapada, makaan,"" which meant, ""Food, clothing and shelter."" And today's political slogan is, ""Bijli, sadak, pani,"" which means ""Electricity, water and roads."" And that is a change in the mindset where infrastructure is now accepted. So I do believe this is an idea which has arrived, but simply not implemented.The third thing is again cities. It's because Gandhi believed in villages and because the British ruled from the cities, therefore Nehru thought of New Delhi as an un-Indian city. For a long time we have neglected our cities. And that is reflected in the kinds of situations that you see. But today, finally, after economic reforms, and economic growth, I think the notion that cities are engines of economic growth, cities are engines of creativity, cities are engines of innovation, have finally been accepted. And I think now you're seeing the move towards improving our cities. Again, an idea which is arrived, but not yet implemented.The final thing is the notion of India as a single market — because when you didn't think of India as a market, you didn't really bother about a single market, because it didn't really matter. And therefore you had a situation where every state had its own market for products. Every province had its own market for agriculture. Increasingly now the policies of taxation and infrastructure and all that, are moving towards creating India as a single market. So there is a form of internal globalization which is happening, which is as important as external globalization. These four factors I believe — the ones of primary education, infrastructure, urbanization, and single market — in my view are ideas in India which have been accepted, but not implemented.Then we have what I believe are the ideas in conflict. The ideas that we argue about. These are the arguments we have which cause gridlock. What are those ideas? One is, I think, are ideological issues. Because of the historical Indian background, in the caste system, and because of the fact that there have been many people who have been left out in the cold, a lot of the politics is about how to make sure that we'll address that. And it leads to reservations and other techniques. It's also related to the way that we subsidize our people, and all the left and right arguments that we have. A lot of the Indian problems are related to the ideology of caste and other things. This policy is causing gridlock. This is one of the factors which needs to be resolved.The second one is the labor policies that we have, which make it so difficult for entrepreneurs to create standardized jobs in companies, that 93 percent of Indian labor is in the unorganized sector. They have no benefits: they don't have social security; they don't have pension; they don't have healthcare; none of those things. This needs to be fixed because unless you can bring these people into the formal workforce, you will end up creating a whole lot of people who are completely disenfranchised. Therefore we need to create a new set of labor laws, which are not as onerous as they are today. At the same time give a policy for a lot more people to be in the formal sector, and create the jobs for the millions of people that we need to create jobs for.The third thing is our higher education. Indian higher education is completely regulated. It's very difficult to start a private university. It's very difficult for a foreign university to come to India. As a result of that our higher education is simply not keeping pace with India's demands. That is leading to a lot of problems which we need to address.But most important I believe are the ideas we need to anticipate. Here India can look at what is happening in the west and elsewhere, and look at what needs to be done. The first thing is, we're very fortunate that technology is at a point where it is much more advanced than when other countries had the development. So we can use technology for governance. We can use technology for direct benefits. We can use technology for transparency, and many other things.The second thing is, the health issue. India has equally horrible health problems of the higher state of cardiac issue, the higher state of diabetes, the higher state of obesity. So there is no point in replacing a set of poor country diseases with a set of rich country diseases. Therefore we're to rethink the whole way we look at health. We really need to put in place a strategy so that we don't go to the other extreme of health.Similarly today in the West you're seeing the problem of entitlement — the cost of social security, the cost of Medicare, the cost of Medicaid. Therefore when you are a young country, again you have a chance to put in place a modern pension system so that you don't create entitlement problems as you grow old.And then again, India does not have the luxury of making its environment dirty, because it has to marry environment and development. Just to give an idea, the world has to stabilize at something like 20 gigatons per year. On a population of nine billion our average carbon emission will have to be about two tons per year. India is already at two tons per year. But if India grows at something like eight percent, income per year per person will go to 16 times by 2050. So we're saying: income growing at 16 times and no growth in carbon. Therefore we will fundamentally rethink the way we look at the environment, the way we look at energy, the way we create whole new paradigms of development.Now why does this matter to you? Why does what's happening 10 thousand miles away matter to all of you? Number one, this matters because this represents more than a billion people. A billion people, 1/6th of the world population. It matters because this is a democracy. And it is important to prove that growth and democracy are not incompatible, that you can have a democracy, that you can have an open society, and you can have growth. It's important because if you solve these problems, you can solve the problems of poverty in the world. It's important because you need it to solve the world's environment problems.If we really want to come to a point, we really want to put a cap on our carbon emission, we want to really lower the use of energy — it has to be solved in countries like India. You know if you look at the development in the West over 200 years, the average growth may have been about two percent. Here we are talking about countries growing at eight to nine percent. And that makes a huge difference. When India was growing at about three, 3.5 percent and the population was growing at two percent, its per capita income was doubling every 45 years. When the economic growth goes to eight percent and population growth drops to 1.5 percent, then per capita income is doubling every nine years. In other words, you're certainly fast-forwarding this whole process of a billion people going to prosperity. And you must have a clear strategy which is important for India and important for the world. That is why I think all of you should be equally concerned with it as I am. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nandan_nilekani_s_ideas_for_india_s_future
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"♫ I think I'm ready to do my thing ♫♫ I think I'm ready to take my chances ♫♫ I've been dining out and all stressed out ♫♫ Due to the circumstances. See? ♫♫ I gotta get up, get up, get up, get up ♫♫ Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up ♫♫ I see what you're saying ♫♫ We sent a demo to the world, they said it sounds like Take 6 ♫♫ I said ""Hold on, wait a minute, I'll be back with the remix"" ♫♫ They looking at us funny, we can't make any money ♫♫ It took us years to figure out that we was dealing with dummies ♫♫ They didn't understand the sound from the Bronx, that's the boogie down ♫♫ to Huntsville, Alabama, there's no circles in my planner, so ♫♫ It was time to make the product, so we hooked up with Townsend ♫♫ Made a deal with John Neal, on the road sold ten thousand ♫♫ WBA, that means a trip to Nashville ♫♫ Festplatte showed up and said them boys are naturals ♫♫ Can you hear what they were hearing? See what they were seeing? ♫♫ From Bronx to Berlin, we took the tour European ♫♫ All vocal yeah, we widit, call the album ""What is it?"" ♫♫ With Sarah Connor, set the goal for number one and we hit it ♫♫ But now it's Kev, Sim, Drew, Stew, time for a new day ♫♫ Ring the alarm, hit 'em on Skype or a two-way ♫♫ Sung by the words, we ready to fly! ♫♫ Fly baby! Time to leave that nest ♫♫ Fly baby! This ain't no time to rest ♫♫ Come on fly baby, we got work to do ♫♫ Here we go, spread my wings and ... ♫♫ Fly baby! Time to leave that nest ♫♫ Fly baby! This ain't no time to rest. Come on ♫♫ Fly baby! We got work to do ♫♫ Here we go. Spread my wings and fly. One more time ♫♫ Fly baby! Time to leave that nest ♫♫ Fly baby! This ain't no time to rest ♫♫ Fly baby! We got work to do ♫♫ Here we go, spread my wings and ... ♫♫ Fly baby! Fly baby fly ♫♫ Fly baby! Fly baby high ♫♫ Fly baby! Up to the sky ♫♫ Spread my wings and fly ♫Instrumental!♫ We're ready to fly! ♫(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/naturally_7_jams_fly_baby_with_an_orchestra_of_vocals
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"Believe me or not, I come offering a solution to a very important part of this larger problem, with the requisite focus on climate. And the solution I offer is to the biggest culprit in this massive mistreatment of the earth by humankind, and the resulting decline of the biosphere. That culprit is business and industry, which happens to be where I have spent the last 52 years since my graduation from Georgia Tech in 1956. As an industrial engineer, cum aspiring and then successful entrepreneur. After founding my company, Interface, from scratch in 1973, 36 years ago, to produce carpet tiles in America for the business and institution markets, and shepherding it through start-up and survival to prosperity and global dominance in its field, I read Paul Hawken's book, ""The Ecology of Commerce,"" the summer of 1994. In his book, Paul charges business and industry as, one, the major culprit in causing the decline of the biosphere, and, two, the only institution that is large enough, and pervasive enough, and powerful enough, to really lead humankind out of this mess. And by the way he convicted me as a plunderer of the earth.And I then challenged the people of Interface, my company, to lead our company and the entire industrial world to sustainability, which we defined as eventually operating our petroleum-intensive company in such a way as to take from the earth only what can be renewed by the earth, naturally and rapidly — not another fresh drop of oil — and to do no harm to the biosphere. Take nothing: do no harm. I simply said, ""If Hawken is right and business and industry must lead, who will lead business and industry? Unless somebody leads, nobody will."" It's axiomatic. Why not us? And thanks to the people of Interface, I have become a recovering plunderer.(Laughter)(Applause)I once told a Fortune Magazine writer that someday people like me would go to jail. And that became the headline of a Fortune article. They went on to describe me as America's greenest CEO. From plunderer to recovering plunderer, to America's greenest CEO in five years — that, frankly, was a pretty sad commentary on American CEOs in 1999. Asked later in the Canadian documentary, ""The Corporation,"" what I meant by the ""go to jail"" remark, I offered that theft is a crime. And theft of our children's future would someday be a crime. But I realized, for that to be true — for theft of our children's future to be a crime — there must be a clear, demonstrable alternative to the take-make-waste industrial system that so dominates our civilization, and is the major culprit, stealing our children's future, by digging up the earth and converting it to products that quickly become waste in a landfill or an incinerator — in short, digging up the earth and converting it to pollution.According to Paul and Anne Ehrlich and a well-known environmental impact equation, impact — a bad thing — is the product of population, affluence and technology. That is, impact is generated by people, what they consume in their affluence, and how it is produced. And though the equation is largely subjective, you can perhaps quantify people, and perhaps quantify affluence, but technology is abusive in too many ways to quantify. So the equation is conceptual. Still it works to help us understand the problem.So we set out at Interface, in 1994, to create an example: to transform the way we made carpet, a petroleum-intensive product for materials as well as energy, and to transform our technologies so they diminished environmental impact, rather than multiplied it. Paul and Anne Ehrlich's environmental impact equation: I is equal to P times A times T: population, affluence and technology. I wanted Interface to rewrite that equation so that it read I equals P times A divided by T. Now, the mathematically-minded will see immediately that T in the numerator increases impact — a bad thing — but T in the denominator decreases impact. So I ask, ""What would move T, technology, from the numerator — call it T1 — where it increases impact, to the denominator — call it T2 — where it reduces impact?I thought about the characteristics of first industrial revolution, T1, as we practiced it at Interface, and it had the following characteristics. Extractive: taking raw materials from the earth. Linear: take, make, waste. Powered by fossil fuel-derived energy. Wasteful: abusive and focused on labor productivity. More carpet per man-hour. Thinking it through, I realized that all those attributes must be changed to move T to the denominator. In the new industrial revolution extractive must be replaced by renewable; linear by cyclical; fossil fuel energy by renewable energy, sunlight; wasteful by waste-free; and abusive by benign; and labor productivity by resource productivity. And I reasoned that if we could make those transformative changes, and get rid of T1 altogether, we could reduce our impact to zero, including our impact on the climate. And that became the Interface plan in 1995, and has been the plan ever since.We have measured our progress very rigorously. So I can tell you how far we have come in the ensuing 12 years. Net greenhouse gas emissions down 82 percent in absolute tonnage. (Applause) Over the same span of time sales have increased by two-thirds and profits have doubled. So an 82 percent absolute reduction translates into a 90 percent reduction in greenhouse gas intensity relative to sales. This is the magnitude of the reduction the entire global technosphere must realize by 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate disruption — so the scientists are telling us. Fossil fuel usage is down 60 percent per unit of production, due to efficiencies in renewables. The cheapest, most secure barrel of oil there is is the one not used through efficiencies. Water usage is down 75 percent in our worldwide carpet tile business. Down 40 percent in our broadloom carpet business, which we acquired in 1993 right here in California, City of Industry, where water is so precious. Renewable or recyclable materials are 25 percent of the total, and growing rapidly. Renewable energy is 27 percent of our total, going for 100 percent. We have diverted 148 million pounds — that's 74,000 tons — of used carpet from landfills, closing the loop on material flows through reverse logistics and post-consumer recycling technologies that did not exist when we started 14 years ago.Those new cyclical technologies have contributed mightily to the fact that we have produced and sold 85 million square yards of climate-neutral carpet since 2004, meaning no net contribution to global climate disruption in producing the carpet throughout the supply chain, from mine and well head clear to end-of-life reclamation — independent third-party certified. We call it Cool Carpet. And it has been a powerful marketplace differentiator, increasing sales and profits. Three years ago we launched carpet tile for the home, under the brand Flor, misspelled F-L-O-R. You can point and click today at Flor.com and have Cool Carpet delivered to your front door in five days. It is practical, and pretty too.(Laughter)(Applause)We reckon that we are a bit over halfway to our goal: zero impact, zero footprint. We've set 2020 as our target year for zero, for reaching the top, the summit of Mount Sustainability. We call this Mission Zero. And this is perhaps the most important facet: we have found Mission Zero to be incredibly good for business. A better business model, a better way to bigger profits. Here is the business case for sustainability. From real life experience, costs are down, not up, reflecting some 400 million dollars of avoided costs in pursuit of zero waste — the first face of Mount Sustainability. This has paid all the costs for the transformation of Interface.And this dispels a myth too, this false choice between the environment and the economy. Our products are the best they've ever been, inspired by design for sustainability, an unexpected wellspring of innovation. Our people are galvanized around this shared higher purpose. You cannot beat it for attracting the best people and bringing them together. And the goodwill of the marketplace is astonishing. No amount of advertising, no clever marketing campaign, at any price, could have produced or created this much goodwill. Costs, products, people, marketplaces — what else is there? It is a better business model.And here is our 14-year record of sales and profits. There is a dip there, from 2001 to 2003: a dip when our sales, over a three-year period, were down 17 percent. But the marketplace was down 36 percent. We literally gained market share. We might not have survived that recession but for the advantages of sustainability. If every business were pursuing Interface plans, would that solve all our problems? I don't think so. I remain troubled by the revised Ehrlich equation, I equals P times A divided by T2. That A is a capital A, suggesting that affluence is an end in itself. But what if we reframed Ehrlich further? And what if we made A a lowercase 'a,' suggesting that it is a means to an end, and that end is happiness — more happiness with less stuff.You know that would reframe civilization itself — (Applause) — and our whole system of economics, if not for our species, then perhaps for the one that succeeds us: the sustainable species, living on a finite earth, ethically, happily and ecologically in balance with nature and all her natural systems for a thousand generations, or 10,000 generations — that is to say, into the indefinite future. But does the earth have to wait for our extinction as a species? Well maybe so. But I don't think so.At Interface we really intend to bring this prototypical sustainable, zero-footprint industrial company fully into existence by 2020. We can see our way now, clear to the top of that mountain. And now the challenge is in execution. And as my good friend and adviser Amory Lovins says, ""If something exists, it must be possible."" (Laughter) If we can actually do it, it must be possible. If we, a petro-intensive company can do it, anybody can. And if anybody can, it follows that everybody can.Hawken fulfilled business and industry, leading humankind away from the abyss because, with continued unchecked decline of the biosphere, a very dear person is at risk here — frankly, an unacceptable risk. Who is that person? Not you. Not I. But let me introduce you to the one who is most at risk here. And I myself met this person in the early days of this mountain climb. On a Tuesday morning in March of 1996, I was talking to people, as I did at every opportunity back then, bringing them along and often not knowing whether I was connecting. But about five days later back in Atlanta, I received an email from Glenn Thomas, one of my people in the California meeting. He was sending me an original poem that he had composed after our Tuesday morning together. And when I read it it was one of the most uplifting moments of my life. Because it told me, by God, one person got it. Here is what Glenn wrote. And here is that person, most at risk. Please meet ""Tomorrow's Child.""""Without a name, an unseen face, and knowing not your time or place,Tomorrow's child, though yet unborn, I met you first last Tuesday morn.A wise friend introduced us two. And through his sobering point of viewI saw a day that you would see, a day for you but not for me.Knowing you has changed my thinking. For I never had an inklingthat perhaps the things I do might someday, somehow threaten you.Tomorrow's child, my daughter, son,I'm afraid I've just begun to think of you and of your good,though always having known I should.Begin, I will.The way the cost of what I squander, what is lost,if ever I forget that you will someday come and live here too.""Well, every day of my life since, ""Tomorrow's Child"" has spoken to me with one simple but profound message, which I presume to share with you. We are, each and every one, a part of the web of life. The continuum of humanity, sure, but in a larger sense, the web of life itself. And we have a choice to make during our brief, brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet: to hurt it or to help it. For you, it's your call.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_anderson_on_the_business_logic_of_sustainability
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"I'll tell you a little bit about irrational behavior. Not yours, of course — other people's.(Laughter)So after being at MIT for a few years, I realized that writing academic papers is not that exciting. You know, I don't know how many of those you read, but it's not fun to read and often not fun to write — even worse to write. So I decided to try and write something more fun. And I came up with an idea that I would write a cookbook. And the title for my cookbook was going to be, ""Dining Without Crumbs: The Art of Eating Over the Sink.""(Laughter)And it was going to be a look at life through the kitchen. I was quite excited about this. I was going to talk a little bit about research, a little bit about the kitchen. We do so much in the kitchen, I thought this would be interesting. I wrote a couple of chapters, and took it to MIT Press and they said,""Cute, but not for us. Go and find somebody else.""I tried other people, and everybody said the same thing,""Cute. Not for us.""Until somebody said, ""Look, if you're serious about this, you have to write about your research first; you have to publish something, then you'll get the opportunity to write something else. If you really want to do it, you have to do it.""I said, ""I don't want to write about my research. I do it all day long, I want to write something a bit more free, less constrained.""And this person was very forceful and said, ""Look, that's the only way you'll ever do it.""So I said, ""Okay, if I have to do it —"" I had a sabbatical. I said, ""I'll write about my research, if there's no other way. And then I'll get to do my cookbook."" So, I wrote a book on my research.And it turned out to be quite fun in two ways. First of all, I enjoyed writing. But the more interesting thing was that I started learning from people. It's a fantastic time to write, because there's so much feedback you can get from people. People write to me about their personal experience, and about their examples, and where they disagree, and their nuances. And even being here — I mean, the last few days, I've known heights of obsessive behavior I never thought about.(Laughter)Which I think is just fascinating.I will tell you a little bit about irrational behavior, and I want to start by giving you some examples of visual illusion as a metaphor for rationality. So think about these two tables. And you must have seen this illusion. If I asked you what's longer, the vertical line on the table on the left, or the horizontal line on the table on the right, which one seems longer? Can anybody see anything but the left one being longer? No, right? It's impossible. But the nice thing about visual illusion is we can easily demonstrate mistakes. So I can put some lines on; it doesn't help. I can animate the lines. And to the extent you believe I didn't shrink the lines, which I didn't, I've proven to you that your eyes were deceiving you. Now, the interesting thing about this is when I take the lines away, it's as if you haven't learned anything in the last minute.(Laughter)You can't look at this and say, ""Now I see reality as it is."" Right? It's impossible to overcome this sense that this is indeed longer. Our intuition is really fooling us in a repeatable, predictable, consistent way. and there is almost nothing we can do about it, aside from taking a ruler and starting to measure it.Here's another one. It's one of my favorite illusions. What color is the top arrow pointing to?Audience: Brown. Dan Ariely: Brown. Thank you.The bottom one? Yellow. Turns out they're identical. Can anybody see them as identical? Very, very hard. I can cover the rest of the cube up. If I cover the rest of the cube, you can see that they are identical. If you don't believe me, you can get the slide later and do some arts and crafts and see that they're identical. But again, it's the same story, that if we take the background away, the illusion comes back. There is no way for us not to see this illusion. I guess maybe if you're colorblind, I don't think you can see that. I want you to think about illusion as a metaphor.Vision is one of the best things we do. We have a huge part of our brain dedicated to vision — bigger than dedicated to anything else. We use our vision more hours of the day than anything else. We're evolutionarily designed to use vision. And if we have these predictable repeatable mistakes in vision, which we're so good at, what are the chances we won't make even more mistakes in something we're not as good at, for example, financial decision-making.(Laughter)Something we don't have an evolutionary reason to do, we don't have a specialized part of the brain for, and we don't do that many hours of the day. The argument is in those cases, it might be that we actually make many more mistakes. And worse — not having an easy way to see them, because in visual illusions, we can easily demonstrate the mistakes; in cognitive illusion it's much, much harder to demonstrate the mistakes to people.So I want to show you some cognitive illusions, or decision-making illusions, in the same way. And this is one of my favorite plots in social sciences. It's from a paper by Johnson and Goldstein. It basically shows the percentage of people who indicated they would be interested in donating their organs. These are different countries in Europe. You basically see two types of countries: countries on the right, that seem to be giving a lot; and countries on the left that seem to giving very little, or much less. The question is, why? Why do some countries give a lot and some countries give a little?When you ask people this question, they usually think that it has to be about culture. How much do you care about people? Giving organs to somebody else is probably about how much you care about society, how linked you are. Or maybe it's about religion. But if you look at this plot, you can see that countries that we think about as very similar, actually exhibit very different behavior. For example, Sweden is all the way on the right, and Denmark, which we think is culturally very similar, is all the way on the left. Germany is on the left, and Austria is on the right. The Netherlands is on the left, and Belgium is on the right. And finally, depending on your particular version of European similarity, you can think about the U.K. and France as either similar culturally or not, but it turns out that with organ donation, they are very different.By the way, the Netherlands is an interesting story. You see, the Netherlands is kind of the biggest of the small group. It turns out that they got to 28 percent after mailing every household in the country a letter, begging people to join this organ donation program. You know the expression, ""Begging only gets you so far."" It's 28 percent in organ donation.(Laughter)But whatever the countries on the right are doing, they're doing a much better job than begging. So what are they doing? Turns out the secret has to do with a form at the DMV. And here is the story. The countries on the left have a form at the DMV that looks something like this. ""Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program."" And what happens? People don't check, and they don't join. The countries on the right, the ones that give a lot, have a slightly different form. It says, ""Check the box below if you don't want to participate ..."" Interestingly enough, when people get this, they again don't check, but now they join.(Laughter)Now, think about what this means. You know, we wake up in the morning and we feel we make decisions. We wake up in the morning and we open the closet; we feel that we decide what to wear. we open the refrigerator and we feel that we decide what to eat. What this is actually saying, is that many of these decisions are not residing within us. They are residing in the person who is designing that form. When you walk into the DMV, the person who designed the form will have a huge influence on what you'll end up doing.Now, it's also very hard to intuit these results. Think about it for yourself. How many of you believe that if you went to renew your license tomorrow, and you went to the DMV, and you encountered one of these forms, that it would actually change your own behavior? Very hard to think that it would influence us. We can say, ""Oh, these funny Europeans, of course it would influence them."" But when it comes to us, we have such a feeling that we're in the driver's seat, such a feeling that we're in control and we are making the decision, that it's very hard to even accept the idea that we actually have an illusion of making a decision, rather than an actual decision.Now, you might say, ""These are decisions we don't care about."" In fact, by definition, these are decisions about something that will happen to us after we die. How could we care about something less than about something that happens after we die? So a standard economist, somebody who believes in rationality, would say, ""You know what? The cost of lifting the pencil and marking a ""V"" is higher than the possible benefit of the decision, so that's why we get this effect.""(Laughter)But, in fact, it's not because it's easy. It's not because it's trivial. It's not because we don't care. It's the opposite. It's because we care. It's difficult and it's complex. And it's so complex that we don't know what to do. And because we have no idea what to do, we just pick whatever it was that was chosen for us.I'll give you one more example. This is from a paper by Redelmeier and Shafir. And they said, ""Would this effect also happens to experts? People who are well-paid, experts in their decisions, and who make a lot of them?"" And they took a group of physicians. They presented to them a case study of a patient. They said, ""Here is a patient. He is a 67-year-old farmer. He's been suffering from right hip pain for a while."" And then, they said to the physicians, ""You decided a few weeks ago that nothing is working for this patient. All these medications, nothing seems to be working. So you refer the patient for hip replacement therapy. Hip replacement. Okay?"" So the patient is on a path to have his hip replaced.Then they said to half of the physicians, ""Yesterday, you reviewed the patient's case, and you realized that you forgot to try one medication. You did not try ibuprofen. What do you do? Do you pull the patient back and try ibuprofen? Or do you let him go and have hip replacement?"" Well, the good news is that most physicians in this case decided to pull the patient and try ibuprofen. Very good for the physicians.To the other group of physicians, they said, ""Yesterday when you reviewed the case, you discovered there were two medications you didn't try out yet — ibuprofen and piroxicam."" You have two medications you didn't try out yet. What do you do? You let him go, or you pull him back? And if you pull him back, do you try ibuprofen or piroxicam? Which one?"" Now, think of it: This decision makes it as easy to let the patient continue with hip replacement, but pulling him back, all of the sudden it becomes more complex. There is one more decision. What happens now? The majority of the physicians now choose to let the patient go for a hip replacement. I hope this worries you, by the way —(Laughter)when you go to see your physician. The thing is that no physician would ever say, ""Piroxicam, ibuprofen, hip replacement. Let's go for hip replacement."" But the moment you set this as the default, it has a huge power over whatever people end up doing.I'll give you a couple of more examples on irrational decision-making. Imagine I give you a choice: Do you want to go for a weekend to Rome, all expenses paid — hotel, transportation, food, a continental breakfast, everything — or a weekend in Paris? Now, weekend in Paris, weekend in Rome — these are different things. They have different food, different culture, different art. Imagine I added a choice to the set that nobody wanted. Imagine I said, ""A weekend in Rome, a weekend in Paris, or having your car stolen?""(Laughter)It's a funny idea, because why would having your car stolen, in this set, influence anything?(Laughter)But what if the option to have your car stolen was not exactly like this? What if it was a trip to Rome, all expenses paid, transportation, breakfast, but it doesn't include coffee in the morning? If you want coffee, you have to pay for it yourself, it's two euros 50.(Laughter)Now in some ways, given that you can have Rome with coffee, why would you possibly want Rome without coffee? It's like having your car stolen. It's an inferior option. But guess what happened? The moment you add Rome without coffee, Rome with coffee becomes more popular, and people choose it. The fact that you have Rome without coffee makes Rome with coffee look superior, and not just to Rome without coffee — even superior to Paris.(Laughter)Here are two examples of this principle. This was an ad in The Economist a few years ago that gave us three choices: an online subscription for 59 dollars, a print subscription for 125 dollars, or you could get both for 125.(Laughter)Now I looked at this, and I called up The Economist, and I tried to figure out what they were thinking. And they passed me from one person to another to another, until eventually I got to the person who was in charge of the website, and I called them up, and they went to check what was going on. The next thing I know, the ad is gone, no explanation.So I decided to do the experiment that I would have loved The Economist to do with me. I took this and I gave it to 100 MIT students. I said, ""What would you choose?"" These are the market shares — most people wanted the combo deal. Thankfully, nobody wanted the dominant option. That means our students can read.(Laughter)But now, if you have an option that nobody wants, you can take it off, right? So I printed another version of this, where I eliminated the middle option. I gave it to another 100 students. Here is what happened: Now the most popular option became the least popular, and the least popular became the most popular.What was happening was the option that was useless, in the middle, was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it. But it wasn't useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted. In fact, relative to the option in the middle, which was get only the print for 125, the print and web for 125 looked like a fantastic deal. And as a consequence, people chose it. The general idea here, by the way, is that we actually don't know our preferences that well. And because we don't know our preferences that well, we're susceptible to all of these influences from the external forces: the defaults, the particular options that are presented to us, and so on.One more example of this. People believe that when we deal with physical attraction, we see somebody, and we know immediately whether we like them or not, if we're attracted or not. This is why we have these four-minute dates. So I decided to do this experiment with people. I'll show you images here, no real people, but the experiment was with people. I showed some people a picture of Tom, and a picture of Jerry. and I said, ""Who do you want to date? Tom or Jerry?"" But for half the people, I added an ugly version of Jerry. I took Photoshop and I made Jerry slightly less attractive.(Laughter)For the other people, I added an ugly version of Tom. And the question was, will ugly Jerry and ugly Tom help their respective, more attractive brothers? The answer was absolutely yes. When ugly Jerry was around, Jerry was popular. When ugly Tom was around, Tom was popular.(Laughter)This of course has two very clear implications for life in general. If you ever go bar-hopping, who do you want to take with you?(Laughter)You want a slightly uglier version of yourself.(Laughter)Similar, but slightly uglier.(Laughter)The second point, or course, is that if somebody invites you to bar hop, you know what they think about you.(Laughter)Now you get it.What is the general point? The general point is that, when we think about economics, we have this beautiful view of human nature. ""What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!"" We have this view of ourselves, of others. The behavioral economics perspective is slightly less ""generous"" to people; in fact, in medical terms, that's our view.(Laughter)But there is a silver lining. The silver lining is, I think, kind of the reason that behavioral economics is interesting and exciting. Are we Superman, or are we Homer Simpson?When it comes to building the physical world, we kind of understand our limitations. We build steps. And we build these things that not everybody can use, obviously.(Laughter)We understand our limitations, and we build around them. But for some reason, when it comes to the mental world, when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stock markets, we somehow forget the idea that we are limited.I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way we understand our physical limitations, even though they don't stare us in the face the same way, we could design a better world, and that, I think, is the hope of this thing.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions
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"Alright. I'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. The title is ""Observations of In-Utero Masturbation.""(Laughter)Okay. Now on the left you can see the hand — that's the big arrow — and the penis on the right. The hand hovering. And over here we have, in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner, ""The hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements."" Bear in mind this was an ultrasound, so it would have been moving images.Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system. Now, this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don't consciously control, like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal. And the orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input. Genital stimulation. Duh. But also, Kinsey interviewed a woman who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow. People with spinal cord injuries, like paraplegias, quadriplegias, will often develop a very, very sensitive area right above the level of their injury, wherever that is. There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature.I think the most curious one that I came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth.(Laughter)Something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm. And she went to a neurologist, who was fascinated. He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste, but no — it happened with any brand. They stimulated her gums with a toothpick, to see if that was doing it. No. It was the whole, you know, motion. And the amazing thing to me is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene.(Laughter)Sadly — this is what it said in the journal paper — ""She believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to mouthwash for her oral care."" It's so sad.(Laughter)When I was working on the book, I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm. She was part of a study at Rutgers University. You've got to love that. Rutgers. So I interviewed her in Oakland, in a sushi restaurant. And I said, ""So, could you do it right here?"" And she said, ""Yeah, but you know I'd rather finish my meal if you don't mind.""(Laughter)But afterwards, she was kind enough to demonstrate on a bench outside. It was remarkable. It took about one minute. And I said to her, ""Are you just doing this all the time?""(Laughter)She said, ""No. Honestly, when I get home, I'm usually too tired.""(Laughter)She said that the last time she had done it was on the Disneyland tram.(Laughter)The headquarters for orgasm, along the spinal nerve, is something called the sacral nerve root, which is back here. And if you trigger, if you stimulate with an electrode, the precise spot, you will trigger an orgasm. And it is a fact that you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people — a certain kind of dead person, a beating-heart cadaver. Now this is somebody who is brain-dead, legally dead, definitely checked out, but is being kept alive on a respirator, so that their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation. Now in one of these brain-dead people, if you trigger the right spot, you will see something every now and then. There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex. And this is — I'll demonstrate as best I can, not being dead. It's like this. You trigger the spot. The dead guy, or gal, goes... like that. Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs.(Laughter)Now, if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person, why not the orgasm reflex? I asked this question to a brain death expert, Stephanie Mann, who was foolish enough to return my emails.(Laughter)I said, ""So, could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person?"" She said, ""Yes, if the sacral nerve is being oxygenated, you conceivably could."" Obviously it wouldn't be as much fun for the person. But it would be an orgasm —(Laughter)nonetheless.There is a researcher at the University of Alabama who does orgasm research. I said to her, ""You should do an experiment. You know? You can get cadavers if you work at a university."" I said, ""You should actually do this."" She said, ""You get the human subjects review board approval for this one.""(Laughter)According to 1930s marriage manual author, Theodoor van De Velde, a slight seminal odor can be detected on the breath of a woman within about an hour after sexual intercourse. Theodoor van De Velde was something of a semen connoisseur.(Laughter)This is a guy writing a book, ""Ideal Marriage,"" you know. Very heavy hetero guy. But he wrote in this book, ""Ideal Marriage"" — he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man, which he said had a fresh, exhilarating smell, and the semen of mature men, whose semen smelled, quote, ""Remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut. Sometimes quite freshly floral, and then again sometimes extremely pungent.""(Laughter)Okay. In 1999, in the state of Israel, a man began hiccupping. And this was one of those cases that went on and on. He tried everything his friends suggested. Nothing seemed to help. Days went by. At a certain point, the man, still hiccupping, had sex with his wife. And lo and behold, the hiccups went away. He told his doctor, who published a case report in a Canadian medical journal under the title, ""Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups."" I love this article because at a certain point they suggested that unattached hiccuppers could try masturbation.(Laughter)I love that because there is like a whole demographic: unattached hiccuppers.(Laughter)Married, single, unattached hiccupper. In the 1900s, early 1900s, a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman has an orgasm, the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix and sort of deliver it really quickly to the egg, thereby upping the odds of conception. It was called the ""upsuck"" theory.(Laughter)If you go all the way back to Hippocrates, physicians believed that orgasm in women was not just helpful for conception, but necessary. Doctors back then were routinely telling men the importance of pleasuring their wives. Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van De Velde —(Laughter)has a line in his book. I loved this guy. I got a lot of mileage out of Theodoor van De Velde. He had this line in his book that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy, where there was an empress Maria Theresa, who was having trouble conceiving. And apparently the royal court physician said to her, ""I am of the opinion that the vulva of your most sacred majesty be titillated for some time prior to intercourse.""(Laughter)It's apparently, I don't know, on the record somewhere.Masters and Johnson: now we're moving forward to the 1950s. Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics, which is also really fun to say. They didn't buy it. And they decided, being Masters and Johnson, that they would get to the bottom of it. They brought women into the lab — I think it was five women — and outfitted them with cervical caps containing artificial semen. And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance, such that it would show up on an X-ray. This is the 1950s. Anyway, these women sat in front of an X-ray device. And they masturbated. And Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up. Did not find any evidence of upsuck. You may be wondering, ""How do you make artificial semen?""(Laughter)I have an answer for you. I have two answers. You can use flour and water, or cornstarch and water. I actually found three separate recipes in the literature.(Laughter)My favorite being the one that says — you know, they have the ingredients listed, and then in a recipe it will say, for example, ""Yield: two dozen cupcakes."" This one said, ""Yield: one ejaculate.""(Laughter)There's another way that orgasm might boost fertility. This one involves men. Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg. British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators. He said, ""If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made."" Which I thought was an interesting idea, theory. So now you have an evolutionary excuse.(Laughter)Okay.(Laughter)All righty. There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom — pigs, for instance. In Denmark, the Danish National Committee for Pig Production found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow while you artificially inseminate her, you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate, which is the number of piglets produced. So they came up with this five-point stimulation plan for the sows. There is posters they put in the barn, and they have a DVD. And I got a copy of this DVD.(Laughter)This is my unveiling, because I am going to show you a clip.(Laughter)So, okay. Now, here we go, la la la, off to work. It all looks very innocent. He's going to be doing things with his hands that the boar would use his snout, lacking hands. Okay.(Laughter)This is it. The boar has a very odd courtship repertoire.(Laughter)This is to mimic the weight of the boar.(Laughter)You should know, the clitoris of the pig is inside the vagina. So this may be sort of titillating for her. Here we go.(Laughter)And the happy result.(Applause)I love this video. There is a point in this video, towards the beginning, where they zoom in for a close up of his hand with his wedding ring, as if to say, ""It's okay, it's just his job. He really does like women.""(Laughter)Okay. When I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie. And I said, ""So why don't you just stimulate the clitoris of the pig? Why don't you have the farmers do that? That's not one of your five steps."" I have to read you what she said, because I love it. She said, ""It was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva. So we thought, let's not mention the clitoris right now.""(Laughter)Shy but ambitious pig farmers, however, can purchase a — this is true — a sow vibrator, that hangs on the sperm feeder tube to vibrate. Because, as I mentioned, the clitoris is inside the vagina. So possibly, you know, a little more arousing than it looks. And I also said to her, ""Now, these sows. I mean, you may have noticed there. The sow doesn't look to be in the throes of ecstasy."" And she said, you can't make that conclusion, because animals don't register pain or pleasure on their faces in the same way that we do. Pigs, for example, are more like dogs. They use the upper half of the face; the ears are very expressive. So you're not really sure what's going on with the pig.Primates, on the other hand, we use our mouths more. This is the ejaculation face of the stump-tailed macaque.(Laughter)And, interestingly, this has been observed in female macaques, but only when mounting another female.(Laughter)Masters and Johnson. In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out the entire human sexual response cycle, from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women — everything that happens in the human body. Okay, with women, a lot of this is happening inside. This did not stop Masters and Johnson. They developed an artificial coition machine. This is basically a penis camera on a motor. There is a phallus, clear acrylic phallus, with a camera and a light source, attached to a motor that is kind of going like this. And the woman would have sex with it. That is what they would do. Pretty amazing. Sadly, this device has been dismantled. This just kills me, not because I wanted to use it — I wanted to see it.(Laughter)One fine day, Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen. This was not idle curiosity. Doctor Kinsey had heard — and there was a theory going around at the time, this being the 1940s — that the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix was a factor in fertility. Kinsey thought it was bunk, so he got to work. He got together in his lab 300 men, a measuring tape, and a movie camera.(Laughter)And in fact, he found that in three quarters of the men the stuff just kind of slopped out. It wasn't spurted or thrown or ejected under great force. However, the record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark, which is impressive.(Laughter)(Applause)Yes. Exactly.(Laughter)Sadly, he's anonymous. His name is not mentioned.(Laughter)In his write-up of this experiment in his book, Kinsey wrote, ""Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental carpets.""(Laughter)Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey. My favorite being, ""Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male.""(Laughter)Thank you very much.(Applause)Thanks!","https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_roach_10_things_you_didn_t_know_about_orgasm
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"Two years ago here at TED I reported that we had discovered at Saturn, with the Cassini Spacecraft, an anomalously warm and geologically active region at the southern tip of the small Saturnine moon Enceladus, seen here. This region seen here for the first time in the Cassini image taken in 2005. This is the south polar region, with the famous tiger-stripe fractures crossing the south pole. And seen just recently in late 2008, here is that region again, now half in darkness because the southern hemisphere is experiencing the onset of August and eventually winter.And I also reported that we'd made this mind-blowing discovery — this once-in-a-lifetime discovery of towering jets erupting from those fractures at the south pole, consisting of tiny water ice crystals accompanied by water vapor and simple organic compounds like carbon dioxide and methane. And at that time two years ago I mentioned that we were speculating that these jets might in fact be geysers, and erupting from pockets or chambers of liquid water underneath the surface, but we weren't really sure. However, the implications of those results — of a possible environment within this moon that could support prebiotic chemistry, and perhaps life itself — were so exciting that, in the intervening two years, we have focused more on Enceladus.We've flown the Cassini Spacecraft by this moon now several times, flying closer and deeper into these jets, into the denser regions of these jets, so that now we have come away with some very precise compositional measurements. And we have found that the organic compounds coming from this moon are in fact more complex than we previously reported. While they're not amino acids, we're now finding things like propane and benzene, hydrogen cyanide, and formaldehyde. And the tiny water crystals here now look for all the world like they are frozen droplets of salty water, which is a discovery that suggests that not only do the jets come from pockets of liquid water, but that that liquid water is in contact with rock. And that is a circumstance that could supply the chemical energy and the chemical compounds needed to sustain life.So we are very encouraged by these results. And we are much more confident now than we were two years ago that we might indeed have on this moon, under the south pole, an environment or a zone that is hospitable to living organisms. Whether or not there are living organisms there, of course, is an entirely different matter. And that will have to await the arrival, back at Enceladus, of the spacecrafts, hopefully some time in the near future, specifically equipped to address that particular question. But in the meantime I invite you to imagine the day when we might journey to the Saturnine system, and visit the Enceladus interplanetary geyser park, just because we can.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_porco_could_a_saturn_moon_harbor_life
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"Forrest North: The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation. And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with. I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands.Yves Behar: And in scenic Switzerland for me.FN: I always had a passion for alternative vehicles. This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada.YB: Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there.FN: And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions. This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother.YB: To the dismay of my mother, this is dangerous teenage fashion right there. (Laughter)FN: And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia — also the U.S. and Japan.YB: So, wind power, solar power — we had a lot to talk about. We had a lot that got us excited. So we decided to do a special project together. To combine engineering and design and ...FN: Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful.YB: And we made a baby. (Laughter)FN: Can you bring out our baby? (Applause) This baby is fully electric. It goes 150 miles an hour. It's twice the range of any electric motorcycle. Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design. It's got an amazing user experience. It was wonderful working with Yves Behar. He came up with our name and logo. We're Mission Motors. And we've only got three minutes, but we could talk about it for hours.YB: Thank you.FN: Thank you TED. And thank you Chris, for having us. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yves_behar_s_supercharged_motorcycle_design
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"I'm here because I have a very important message: I think we have found the most important factor for success. And it was found close to here, Stanford. Psychology professor took kids that were four years old and put them in a room all by themselves. And he would tell the child, a four-year-old kid, ""Johnny, I am going to leave you here with a marshmallow for 15 minutes. If, after I come back, this marshmallow is here, you will get another one. So you will have two."" To tell a four-year-old kid to wait 15 minutes for something that they like, is equivalent to telling us, ""We'll bring you coffee in two hours."" (Laughter) Exact equivalent.So what happened when the professor left the room? As soon as the door closed... two out of three ate the marshmallow. Five seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, two minutes, four minutes, eight minutes. Some lasted 14-and-a-half minutes. (Laughter) Couldn't do it. Could not wait. What's interesting is that one out of three would look at the marshmallow and go like this ... Would look at it. Put it back. They would walk around. They would play with their skirts and pants.That child already, at four, understood the most important principle for success, which is the ability to delay gratification. Self-discipline: the most important factor for success. 15 years later, 14 or 15 years later, follow-up study. What did they find? They went to look for these kids who were now 18 and 19. And they found that 100 percent of the children that had not eaten the marshmallow were successful. They had good grades. They were doing wonderful. They were happy. They had their plans. They had good relationships with the teachers, students. They were doing fine.A great percentage of the kids that ate the marshmallow, they were in trouble. They did not make it to university. They had bad grades. Some of them dropped out. A few were still there with bad grades. A few had good grades.I had a question in my mind: Would Hispanic kids react the same way as the American kids? So I went to Colombia. And I reproduced the experiment. And it was very funny. I used four, five and six years old kids. And let me show you what happened.(Spanish) (Laughter)So what happened in Colombia? Hispanic kids, two out of three ate the marshmallow; one out of three did not. This little girl was interesting; she ate the inside of the marshmallow. (Laughter) In other words, she wanted us to think that she had not eaten it, so she would get two. But she ate it. So we know she'll be successful. But we have to watch her. (Laughter) She should not go into banking, for example, or work at a cash register. But she will be successful.And this applies for everything. Even in sales. The sales person that — the customer says, ""I want that."" And the person says, ""Okay, here you are."" That person ate the marshmallow. If the sales person says, ""Wait a second. Let me ask you a few questions to see if this is a good choice."" Then you sell a lot more. So this has applications in all walks of life.I end with — the Koreans did this. You know what? This is so good that we want a marshmallow book for children. We did one for children. And now it is all over Korea. They are teaching these kids exactly this principle. And we need to learn that principle here in the States, because we have a big debt. We are eating more marshmallows than we are producing. Thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet
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"Let's talk about manias. Let's start with Beatlemania.(Recording of crowd roaring)Hysterical teenagers, crying, screaming, pandemonium.(Recording of crowd roaring)Sports mania: deafening crowds, all for one idea — get the ball in the net. (Recording) Goal! Okay, religious mania: there's rapture, there's weeping, there's visions. Manias can be good. Manias can be alarming. Or manias can be deadly.(Recording of crowd cheering)The world has a new mania. A mania for learning English. Listen as Chinese students practice their English, by screaming it:Teacher: ... change my life!Students: I want to change my life!T: I don't want to let my parents down!S: I don't want to let my parents down!T: I don't ever want to let my country down!S: I don't ever want to let my country down!T: Most importantly... S: Most importantly...T: I don't want to let myself down!S: I don't want to let myself down!How many people are trying to learn English worldwide? Two billion of them.Students: A t-shirt. A dress.Jay Walker: In Latin America, in India, in Southeast Asia, and most of all, in China. If you're a Chinese student, you start learning English in the third grade, by law. That's why this year, China will become the world's largest English-speaking country.(Laughter)Why English? In a single word: opportunity. Opportunity for a better life, a job, to be able to pay for school, or put better food on the table. Imagine a student taking a giant test for three full days. Her score on this one test literally determines her future. She studies 12 hours a day for three years to prepare. Twenty-five percent of her grade is based on English. It's called the gaokao, and 80 million high school Chinese students have already taken this grueling test. The intensity to learn English is almost unimaginable, unless you witness it.Teacher: Perfect! Students: Perfect!T: Perfect! S: Perfect!T: I want to speak perfect English!S: I want to speak perfect English!T: I want to speak ... S: I want to speak ...T: ... perfect English! S: ... perfect English!T (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life!S (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life!JW: So is English mania good or bad? Is English a tsunami, washing away other languages? Not likely. English is the world's second language. Your native language is your life. But with English you can become part of a wider conversation — a global conversation about global problems, like climate change or poverty, or hunger or disease. The world has other universal languages. Mathematics is the language of science. Music is the language of emotions. And now English is becoming the language of problem-solving. Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it. So English mania is a turning point.Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, English represents hope for a better future — a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_english_mania
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"This is my first trip, my first foreign trip as a first lady. Can you believe that? (Applause) And while this is not my first visit to the U.K., I have to say that I am glad that this is my first official visit. The special relationship between the United States and the U.K. is based not only on the relationship between governments, but the common language and the values that we share, and I'm reminded of that by watching you all today. During my visit I've been especially honored to meet some of Britain's most extraordinary women — women who are paving the way for all of you.And I'm honored to meet you, the future leaders of Great Britain and this world. And although the circumstances of our lives may seem very distant, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America, and you, just getting through school, I want you to know that we have very much in common. For nothing in my life's path would have predicted that I'd be standing here as the first African-American First Lady of the United States of America. There is nothing in my story that would land me here. I wasn't raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago. That's the real part of Chicago. And I was the product of a working-class community. My father was a city worker all of his life, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. And she stayed at home to take care of me and my older brother. Neither of them attended university. My dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the prime of his life. But even as it got harder for him to walk and get dressed in the morning — I saw him struggle more and more — my father never complained about his struggle. He was grateful for what he had. He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder. And my brother and I were raised with all that you really need: love, strong values and a belief that with a good education and a whole lot of hard work, that there was nothing that we could not do.I am an example of what's possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by the people around them. I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life: grandmothers, teachers, aunts, cousins, neighbors, who taught me about quiet strength and dignity. And my mother, the most important role model in my life, who lives with us at the White House and helps to care for our two little daughters, Malia and Sasha. She's an active presence in their lives, as well as mine, and is instilling in them the same values that she taught me and my brother: things like compassion, and integrity, and confidence, and perseverance — all of that wrapped up in an unconditional love that only a grandmother can give.I was also fortunate enough to be cherished and encouraged by some strong male role models as well, including my father, my brother, uncles and grandfathers. The men in my life taught me some important things, as well. They taught me about what a respectful relationship should look like between men and women. They taught me about what a strong marriage feels like: that it's built on faith and commitment and an admiration for each other's unique gifts. They taught me about what it means to be a father and to raise a family. And not only to invest in your own home but to reach out and help raise kids in the broader community.And these were the same qualities that I looked for in my own husband, Barack Obama. And when we first met, one of the things that I remember is that he took me out on a date. And his date was to go with him to a community meeting. (Laughter) I know, how romantic. (Laughter) But when we met, Barack was a community organizer. He worked, helping people to find jobs and to try to bring resources into struggling neighborhoods. As he talked to the residents in that community center, he talked about two concepts. He talked about ""the world as it is"" and ""the world as it should be."" And I talked about this throughout the entire campaign. What he said, that all too often, is that we accept the distance between those two ideas. And sometimes we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations. But Barack reminded us on that day, all of us in that room, that we all know what our world should look like. We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. We all know. And he urged the people in that meeting, in that community, to devote themselves to closing the gap between those two ideas, to work together to try to make the world as it is and the world as it should be, one and the same.And I think about that today because I am reminded and convinced that all of you in this school are very important parts of closing that gap. You are the women who will build the world as it should be. You're going to write the next chapter in history. Not just for yourselves, but for your generation and generations to come. And that's why getting a good education is so important. That's why all of this that you're going through — the ups and the downs, the teachers that you love and the teachers that you don't — why it's so important. Because communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women. And that's important to keep in mind.Part of that health includes an outstanding education. The difference between a struggling family and a healthy one is often the presence of an empowered woman or women at the center of that family. The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is often the healthy respect between men and women who appreciate the contributions each other makes to society. The difference between a languishing nation and one that will flourish is the recognition that we need equal access to education for both boys and girls.And this school, named after the U.K.'s first female doctor, and the surrounding buildings named for Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Mary Seacole, the Jamaican nurse known as the ""black Florence Nightingale,"" and the English author, Emily Bronte, honor women who fought sexism, racism and ignorance, to pursue their passions to feed their own souls. They allowed for no obstacles. As the sign said back there, ""without limitations."" They knew no other way to live than to follow their dreams. And having done so, these women moved many obstacles. And they opened many new doors for millions of female doctors and nurses and artists and authors, all of whom have followed them. And by getting a good education, you too can control your own destiny.Please remember that. If you want to know the reason why I'm standing here, it's because of education. I never cut class. Sorry, I don't know if anybody is cutting class. I never did it. I loved getting As. I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I liked getting my work done. I thought being smart was cooler than anything in the world. And you too, with these same values, can control your own destiny. You too can pave the way. You too can realize your dreams, and then your job is to reach back and to help someone just like you do the same thing. History proves that it doesn't matter whether you come from a council estate or a country estate.Your success will be determined by your own fortitude, your own confidence, your own individual hard work. That is true. That is the reality of the world that we live in. You now have control over your own destiny. And it won't be easy — that's for sure. But you have everything you need. Everything you need to succeed, you already have, right here.My husband works in this big office. They call it the Oval Office. In the White House, there's the desk that he sits at — it's called the Resolute desk. It was built by the timber of Her Majesty's Ship Resolute and given by Queen Victoria. It's an enduring symbol of the friendship between our two nations. And its name, Resolute, is a reminder of the strength of character that's required not only to lead a country, but to live a life of purpose, as well. And I hope in pursuing your dreams, you all remain resolute, that you go forward without limits, and that you use your talents — because there are many; we've seen them; it's there — that you use them to create the world as it should be. Because we are counting on you. We are counting on every single one of you to be the very best that you can be. Because the world is big. And it's full of challenges. And we need strong, smart, confident young women to stand up and take the reins.We know you can do it. We love you. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michelle_obama
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"All human life, all life, depends on plants. Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds. Just think for a moment. It doesn't matter whether you live in a small African village, or you live in a big city, everything comes back to plants in the end: whether it's for the food, the medicine, the fuel, the construction, the clothing, all the obvious things; or whether it's for the spiritual and recreational things that matter to us so much; or whether it's soil formation, or the effect on the atmosphere, or primary production. Damn it, even the books here are made out of plants. All these things, they come back to plants. And without them we wouldn't be here.Now plants are under threat. They're under threat because of changing climate. And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet with people like us. And people like us want to do things that destroy plants, and their habitats. And whether that's because of food production, or because of the introduction of alien plants into places that they really oughtn't be, or because of habitats being used for other purposes — all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt, or die, or move. And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move because there might be cities and other things in the way.So if all human life depends on plants, doesn't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them? I think it does. And I want to tell you about a project to save plants. And the way that you save plants is by storing seeds. Because seeds, in all their diverse glory, are plants' futures. All the genetic information for future generations of plants are held in seeds. So here is the building; it looks rather unassuming, really. But it goes down below ground many stories. And it's the largest seed bank in the world. It exists not only in southern England, but distributed around the world. I'll come to that. This is a nuclear-proof facility. God forbid that it should have to withstand that.So if you're going to build a seed bank, you have to decide what you're going to store in it. Right? And we decided that what we want to store first of all, are the species that are most under threat. And those are the dry land species. So first of all we did deals with 50 different countries. It means negotiating with heads of state, and with secretaries of state in 50 countries to sign treaties. We have 120 partner institutions all over the world, in all those countries colored orange. People come from all over the world to learn, and then they go away and plan exactly how they're going to collect these seeds. They have thousands of people all over the world tagging places where those plants are said to exist. They search for them. They find them in flower. And they go back when their seeds have arrived. And they collect the seeds. All over the world.The seeds — some of if is very untechnical. You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off. You label them. You do some high-tech things here and there, some low-tech things here and there. And the main thing is that you have to dry them very carefully, at low temperature. And then you have to store them at about minus 20 degrees C — that's about minus four Fahrenheit, I think — with a very critically low moisture content. And these seeds will be able to germinate, we believe, with many of the species, in thousands of years, and certainly in hundreds of years.It's no good storing the seeds if you don't know they're still viable. So every 10 years we do germination tests on every sample of seeds that we have. And this is a distributed network. So all around the world people are doing the same thing. And that enables us to develop germination protocols. That means that we know the right combination of heat and cold and the cycles that you have to get to make the seed germinate. And that is very useful information. And then we grow these things, and we tell people, back in the countries where these seeds have come from, ""Look, actually we're not just storing this to get the seeds later, but we can give you this information about how to germinate these difficult plants."" And that's already happening.So where have we got to? I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed — that's three thousand millionth seed — is now stored. Ten percent of all plant species on the planet, 24,000 species are safe; 30,000 species, if we get the funding, by next year. Twenty-five percent of all the world's plants, by 2020. These are not just crop plants, as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway — fantastic work there. This is at least 100 times bigger. We have thousands of collections that have been sent out all over the world: drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt; especially photosynthetic-efficient plants come here to the United States; salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia; the list goes on and on.These seeds are used for restoration. So in habitats that have already been damaged, like the tall grass prairie here in the USA, or in mined land in various countries, restoration is already happening because of these species — and because of this collection. Some of these plants, like the ones on the bottom to the left of your screen, they are down to the last few remaining members. The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck, that is down to about 30 last remaining trees. Fantastically useful plant, both for protein and for medicine.We have training going on in China, in the USA, and many other countries. How much does it cost? 2,800 dollars per species is the average. I think that's cheap, at the price. And that gets you all the scientific data that goes with it. The future research is ""How can we find the genetic and molecular markers for the viability of seeds, without having to plant them every 10 years?"" And we're almost there. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_why_we_re_storing_billions_of_seeds
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"I was thinking about my place in the universe, and about my first thought about what infinity might mean, when I was a child. And I thought that if time could reach forwards and backwards infinitely, doesn't that mean that every point in time is really infinitely small, and therefore somewhat meaningless. So we don't really have a place in the universe, as far as on a time line. But nothing else does either. Therefore every moment really is the most important moment that's ever happened, including this moment right now. And so therefore this music you're about to hear is maybe the most important music you'll ever hear in your life.(Laughter)(Applause)(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)For those of you who I'll be fortunate enough to meet afterwards, you could please refrain from saying, ""Oh my god, you're so much shorter in real life."" (Laughter) Because it's like the stage is an optical illusion, for some reason. (Laughter) Somewhat like the curving of the universe.I don't know what it is. I get asked in interviews a lot, ""My god, you're guitars are so gigantic!"" (Laughter) ""You must get them custom made — special, humongous guitars.""(Laughter)(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kaki_king_rocks_out_to_pink_noise
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"College presidents are not the first people who come to mind when the subject is the uses of the creative imagination. So I thought I'd start by telling you how I got here.The story begins in the late '90s. I was invited to meet with leading educators from the newly free Eastern Europe and Russia. They were trying to figure out how to rebuild their universities. Since education under the Soviet Union was essentially propaganda serving the purposes of a state ideology, they appreciated that it would take wholesale transformations if they were to provide an education worthy of free men and women. Given this rare opportunity to start fresh, they chose liberal arts as the most compelling model because of its historic commitment to furthering its students' broadest intellectual, and deepest ethical potential.Having made that decision they came to the United States, home of liberal arts education, to talk with some of us most closely identified with that kind of education. They spoke with a passion, an urgency, an intellectual conviction that, for me, was a voice I had not heard in decades, a dream long forgotten. For, in truth, we had moved light years from the passions that animated them. But for me, unlike them, in my world, the slate was not clean, and what was written on it was not encouraging.In truth, liberal arts education no longer exists — at least genuine liberal arts education — in this country. We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. (Applause)Expertise has for sure had its moments. But the price of its dominance is enormous. Subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure. We have even managed to make the study of literature arcane. You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel — that is, until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism.The progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less; this, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. Lest you think I exaggerate, here are the beginnings of the A-B-Cs of anthropology. As one moves up the ladder, values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion. Questions such as, ""What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making?"" are treated with more and more skepticism, and move off the table.In so doing, the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists, who, you can be sure, have no compunctions about using education to further their values: the absolutes of a theocracy. Meanwhile, the values and voices of democracy are silent. Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or cannot be taught. This aversion to social values may seem at odds with the explosion of community service programs. But despite the attention paid to these efforts, they remain emphatically extracurricular. In effect, civic-mindedness is treated as outside the realm of what purports to be serious thinking and adult purposes. Simply put, when the impulse is to change the world, the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment.This brew — oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity — is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom, which were at the heart — (Applause) — of the challenge posed to and by my European colleagues. When the astronomical distance between the realities of the academy and the visionary intensity of this challenge were more than enough, I can assure you, to give one pause, what was happening outside higher education made backing off unthinkable.Whether it was threats to the environment, inequities in the distribution of wealth, lack of a sane policy or a sustainable policy with respect to the continuing uses of energy, we were in desperate straits. And that was only the beginning. The corrupting of our political life had become a living nightmare; nothing was exempt — separation of powers, civil liberties, the rule of law, the relationship of church and state. Accompanied by a squandering of the nation's material wealth that defied credulity. A harrowing predilection for the uses of force had become commonplace, with an equal distaste for the alternative forms of influence. At the same time, all of our firepower was impotent when it came to halting or even stemming the slaughter in Rwanda, Darfur, Myanmar.Our public education, once a model for the world, has become most noteworthy for its failures. Mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy eludes vast numbers of our students. Despite having a research establishment that is the envy of the world, more than half of the American public don't believe in evolution. And don't press your luck about how much those who do believe in it actually understand it.Incredibly, this nation, with all its material, intellectual and spiritual resources, seems utterly helpless to reverse the freefall in any of these areas. Equally startling, from my point of view, is the fact that no one was drawing any connections between what is happening to the body politic, and what is happening in our leading educational institutions. We may be at the top of the list when it comes to influencing access to personal wealth. We are not even on the list when it comes to our responsibility for the health of this democracy. We are playing with fire. You can be sure Jefferson knew what he was talking about when he said, ""If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was, and never will be."" (Applause)On a more personal note, this betrayal of our principles, our decency, our hope, made it impossible for me to avoid the question, ""What will I say, years from now, when people ask, 'Where were you?'"" As president of a leading liberal arts college, famous for its innovative history, there were no excuses. So the conversation began at Bennington. Knowing that if we were to regain the integrity of liberal education, it would take radical rethinking of basic assumptions, beginning with our priorities. Enhancing the public good becomes a primary objective. The accomplishment of civic virtue is tied to the uses of intellect and imagination at their most challenging.Our ways of approaching agency and authority turn inside out to reflect the reality that no one has the answers to the challenges facing citizens in this century, and everyone has the responsibility for trying and participating in finding them. Bennington would continue to teach the arts and sciences as areas of immersion that acknowledge differences in personal and professional objectives. But the balances redressed, our shared purposes assume an equal if not greater importance.When the design emerged it was surprisingly simple and straightforward. The idea is to make the political-social challenges themselves — from health and education to the uses of force — the organizers of the curriculum. They would assume the commanding role of traditional disciplines. But structures designed to connect, rather than divide mutually dependent circles, rather than isolating triangles. And the point is not to treat these topics as topics of study, but as frameworks of action. The challenge: to figure out what it will take to actually do something that makes a significant and sustainable difference.Contrary to widely held assumptions, an emphasis on action provides a special urgency to thinking. The importance of coming to grips with values like justice, equity, truth, becomes increasingly evident as students discover that interest alone cannot tell them what they need to know when the issue is rethinking education, our approach to health, or strategies for achieving an economics of equity. The value of the past also comes alive; it provides a lot of company. You are not the first to try to figure this out, just as you are unlikely to be the last. Even more valuable, history provides a laboratory in which we see played out the actual, as well as the intended consequences of ideas.In the language of my students, ""Deep thought matters when you're contemplating what to do about things that matter."" A new liberal arts that can support this action-oriented curriculum has begun to emerge. Rhetoric, the art of organizing the world of words to maximum effect. Design, the art of organizing the world of things. Mediation and improvisation also assume a special place in this new pantheon. Quantitative reasoning attains its proper position at the heart of what it takes to manage change where measurement is crucial. As is a capacity to discriminate systematically between what is at the core and what is at the periphery.And when making connections is of the essence, the power of technology emerges with special intensity. But so does the importance of content. The more powerful our reach, the more important the question ""About what?"" When improvisation, resourcefulness, imagination are key, artists, at long last, take their place at the table, when strategies of action are in the process of being designed. In this dramatically expanded ideal of a liberal arts education where the continuum of thought and action is its life's blood, knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential. Social activists, business leaders, lawyers, politicians, professionals will join the faculty as active and ongoing participants in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good. Students, in turn, continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly.And of course, this new wine needs new bottles if we are to capture the liveliness and dynamism of this idea. The most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil, but between competing goods. This discovery is transforming. It undercuts self-righteousness, radically alters the tone and character of controversy, and enriches dramatically the possibilities for finding common ground. Ideology, zealotry, unsubstantiated opinions simply won't do. This is a political education, to be sure. But it is a politics of principle, not of partisanship. So the challenge for Bennington is to do it.On the cover of Bennington's 2008 holiday card is the architect's sketch of a building opening in 2010 that is to be a center for the advancement of public action. The center will embody and sustain this new educational commitment. Think of it as a kind of secular church. The words on the card describe what will happen inside. We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion and boldness of our students, faculty and staff to developing strategies for acting on the critical challenges of our time.So we are doing our job. While these past weeks have been a time of national exhilaration in this country, it would be tragic if you thought this meant your job was done. The glacial silence we have experienced in the face of the shredding of the constitution, the unraveling of our public institutions, the deterioration of our infrastructure is not limited to the universities. We the people have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance, beyond waiting another four years. We persist also in being sidelined by the idea of the expert as the only one capable of coming up with answers, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians and spectators. (Applause) People will continue and should continue to learn everything there is to know about something or other. We actually do it all the time. And there will be and should be those who spend a lifetime pursuing a very highly defined area of inquiry. But this single-mindedness will not yield the flexibilities of mind, the multiplicity of perspectives, the capacities for collaboration and innovation this country needs. That is where you come in. What is certain is that the individual talent exhibited in such abundance here, needs to turn its attention to that collaborative, messy, frustrating, contentious and impossible world of politics and public policy. President Obama and his team simply cannot do it alone.If the question of where to start seems overwhelming you are at the beginning, not the end of this adventure. Being overwhelmed is the first step if you are serious about trying to get at things that really matter, on a scale that makes a difference. So what do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Well, you have two things. You have a mind. And you have other people. Start with those, and change the world.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education
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"Information technology grows in an exponential manner. It's not linear. And our intuition is linear. When we walked through the savanna a thousand years ago we made linear predictions where that animal would be, and that worked fine. It's hardwired in our brains. But the pace of exponential growth is really what describes information technologies. And it's not just computation. There is a big difference between linear and exponential growth. If I take 30 steps linearly — one, two, three, four, five — I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially — two, four, eight, 16 — I get to a billion. It makes a huge difference. And that really describes information technology.When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer that took up a whole building. The computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, a thousand times more powerful. That's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar that we've actually experienced since I was a student. And we're going to do it again in the next 25 years. Information technology progresses through a series of S-curves where each one is a different paradigm. So people say, ""What's going to happen when Moore's Law comes to an end?"" Which will happen around 2020. We'll then go to the next paradigm. And Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing. The exponential growth of computing started decades before Gordon Moore was even born. And it doesn't just apply to computation. It's really any technology where we can measure the underlying information properties.Here we have 49 famous computers. I put them in a logarithmic graph. The logarithmic scale hides the scale of the increase, because this represents trillions-fold increase since the 1890 census. In 1950s they were shrinking vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller. They finally hit a wall; they couldn't shrink the vacuum tube any more and keep the vacuum. And that was the end of the shrinking of vacuum tubes, but it was not the end of the exponential growth of computing. We went to the fourth paradigm, transistors, and finally integrated circuits. When that comes to an end we'll go to the sixth paradigm; three-dimensional self-organizing molecular circuits.But what's even more amazing, really, than this fantastic scale of progress, is that — look at how predictable this is. I mean this went through thick and thin, through war and peace, through boom times and recessions. The Great Depression made not a dent in this exponential progression. We'll see the same thing in the economic recession we're having now. At least the exponential growth of information technology capability will continue unabated.And I just updated these graphs. Because I had them through 2002 in my book, ""The Singularity is Near."" So we updated them, so I could present it here, to 2007. And I was asked, ""Well aren't you nervous? Maybe it kind of didn't stay on this exponential progression."" I was a little nervous because maybe the data wouldn't be right, but I've done this now for 30 years, and it has stayed on this exponential progression.Look at this graph here.You could buy one transistor for a dollar in 1968. You can buy half a billion today, and they are actually better, because they are faster. But look at how predictable this is. And I'd say this knowledge is over-fitting to past data. I've been making these forward-looking predictions for about 30 years. And the cost of a transistor cycle, which is a measure of the price performance of electronics, comes down about every year. That's a 50 percent deflation rate. And it's also true of other examples, like DNA data or brain data. But we more than make up for that. We actually ship more than twice as much of every form of information technology. We've had 18 percent growth in constant dollars in every form of information technology for the last half-century, despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it each year.This is a completely different example. This is not Moore's Law. The amount of DNA data we've sequenced has doubled every year. The cost has come down by half every year. And this has been a smooth progression since the beginning of the genome project. And halfway through the project, skeptics said, ""Well, this is not working out. You're halfway through the genome project and you've finished one percent of the project."" But that was really right on schedule. Because if you double one percent seven more times, which is exactly what happened, you get 100 percent. And the project was finished on time.Communication technologies: 50 different ways to measure this, the number of bits being moved around, the size of the Internet. But this has progressed at an exponential pace. This is deeply democratizing. I wrote, over 20 years ago in ""The Age of Intelligent Machines,"" when the Soviet Union was going strong, that it would be swept away by this growth of decentralized communication.And we will have plenty of computation as we go through the 21st century to do things like simulate regions of the human brain. But where will we get the software? Some critics say, ""Oh, well software is stuck in the mud."" But we are learning more and more about the human brain. Spatial resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year. The amount of data we're getting about the brain is doubling every year. And we're showing that we can actually turn this data into working models and simulations of brain regions.There is about 20 regions of the brain that have been modeled, simulated and tested: the auditory cortex, regions of the visual cortex; cerebellum, where we do our skill formation; slices of the cerebral cortex, where we do our rational thinking. And all of this has fueled an increase, very smooth and predictable, of productivity. We've gone from 30 dollars to 130 dollars in constant dollars in the value of an average hour of human labor, fueled by this information technology.And we're all concerned about energy and the environment. Well this is a logarithmic graph. This represents a smooth doubling, every two years, of the amount of solar energy we're creating, particularly as we're now applying nanotechnology, a form of information technology, to solar panels. And we're only eight doublings away from it meeting 100 percent of our energy needs. And there is 10 thousand times more sunlight than we need.We ultimately will merge with this technology. It's already very close to us. When I was a student it was across campus, now it's in our pockets. What used to take up a building now fits in our pockets. What now fits in our pockets would fit in a blood cell in 25 years. And we will begin to actually deeply influence our health and our intelligence, as we get closer and closer to this technology.Based on that we are announcing, here at TED, in true TED tradition, Singularity University. It's a new university that's founded by Peter Diamandis, who is here in the audience, and myself. It's backed by NASA and Google, and other leaders in the high-tech and science community. And our goal was to assemble the leaders, both teachers and students, in these exponentially growing information technologies, and their application. But Larry Page made an impassioned speech at our organizing meeting, saying we should devote this study to actually addressing some of the major challenges facing humanity. And if we did that, then Google would back this. And so that's what we've done.The last third of the nine-week intensive summer session will be devoted to a group project to address some major challenge of humanity. Like for example, applying the Internet, which is now ubiquitous, in the rural areas of China or in Africa, to bringing health information to developing areas of the world. And these projects will continue past these sessions, using collaborative interactive communication. All the intellectual property that is created and taught will be online and available, and developed online in a collaborative fashion.Here is our founding meeting. But this is being announced today. It will be permanently headquartered in Silicon Valley, at the NASA Ames research center. There are different programs for graduate students, for executives at different companies. The first six tracks here — artificial intelligence, advanced computing technologies, biotechnology, nanotechnology — are the different core areas of information technology. Then we are going to apply them to the other areas, like energy, ecology, policy law and ethics, entrepreneurship, so that people can bring these new technologies to the world.So we're very appreciative of the support we've gotten from both the intellectual leaders, the high-tech leaders, particularly Google and NASA. This is an exciting new venture. And we invite you to participate. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_announces_singularity_university
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"I have a big impact on the planet to travel here by plane. I emitted, in the atmosphere, nine tons of CO2; that is the weight of two elephants. I came here to speak about ecology, and I emitted as much CO2 as a Frenchman in one year. So what do I have to do? I have to kill a Frenchman when I come back at home? (Laughter) I have to do my carbon offset in another way, like I do every time. (Laughter)In fact my work is to show our impact on our planet. I'm going to show you some examples of the last pictures I've done in the last year.Alberta sand oil, a lot of pollution. You know the problem; we don't want to believe what we know. In Alberta people work nonstop, 24 hours by seven to extract as much oil as they can. We know about the end of oil. Oil sand is not a long-term solution. But we use three times more oil than we find every year. We don't want to believe what we know. Deny.Coral reef in New Caledonia. 100 percent of the coral may be wiped out before 2050 because of global warming. And you know how coral are very sensitive to temperature, and are very important for the biodiversity of the sea.North Pole. I've done this picture last summer. It was impossible to do this picture 15 years ago. Now there is a new way open between Atlantic and Pacific. The thickness of the Arctic decreased more than 40 percent since 1960.There is a new face of Kilimanjaro without ice. Sad picture. It lost 80 percent of its ice. According to scientists, in 100 years all the mountain glacier will be gone. Glaciers are very important for the life on earth. Like Al Gore told you, two billion people live on the water from the glacier of Himalaya.Return of fish men. One fifth of human kind depend on fish to live. Today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited. According to FAO, if we don't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050. We don't want to believe what we know.The beautiful picture, by [unclear] in Africa. One human of six have not enough to eat in the world. One billion people have not enough to eat. In Africa, corn is one of the main foods in many places. Here in America, 90 percent of the corn cultivated is used to feed animals or to do oil.Palm tree plantation in Borneo. Every year we lose 50 thousand square miles in deforestation.Refugee camp in Darfur. Today we have 20 million refugees in the world. According to the U.N., we speak about 250 million refugees in 2050.I always show my pictures in the street. We have done already 100 exhibitions in the cities. But how to understand the world without the voice of people? Landscape was not enough. It was obvious to me to do another work. I launched a project named Six Billion Others. I sent around the world six cameramen asking the same question, the same crucial question, about life. We have done five thousand interviews. I'm going to show you this.Man: The most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life? It's when my dad told me, ""Here, I give you this girl as your fiance.""Woman: Love? Love is nice if you can have it.Second Man: Romeo and Juliet, Sassi and Panno, Dodi and Diana, Heer and Ranjha, this is love! Third Man: My greatest fear is ...Woman: You're asking me a hard question.Fourth Man: I live happily because what else should I do?Fifth Man: The first thing I remember ... (Sixth Man: That's how I learned, by my mother,) Fifth Man: ... from my childhood, (Sixth Man: that you should respect humans.) Fifth Man: we were having fun, biking. (Sixth Man: I will never forget those words.)Seventh Man: We invented stories, we flew around the world, while remaining in our attic.Eighth Man: I had a big laugh today. Ninth Man: You see, family is ... it's awful.10th Man: In the word life, you have the life.11th Man: Who am I? Isn't that the biggest question?12th Man: If I was to go back to Iraq and speak to the people, I'd have to bow down and kiss their feet. Just as that woman tried to kiss my feet when we were taking her sons. I feel ashamed. And I feel humbled by their strength. And I will forever feel a need to make reparations to Iraq.Second Woman: Dad, Mom, I grew up. You shouldn't worry about me. Dad doesn't need to go to work. My family ... What can I say? At the moment, my family is very poor, my life here in Shenzhen is just about showing myself that I can earn more and to let my parents stay and have something to live on. I don't want them to spend their whole lives in poverty. If someday I can achieve something, I would like to say thank you daddy and mommy. Thank you. Thank you for having fed me and raised me, and for making my life of today. Thank you.13th Man: After seven years now of being in a wheelchair, I've done more in life being in a chair than out of a chair. I still surf. I sail the world. I freedive. After many people said I couldn't do that. And I think that comes from connecting with nature, connecting with the energy of life, because we're all disabled in some way on the planet — spiritually, mentally or physically. I got the easy part.14th Man: Let's say that you and me like each other. You come from elsewhere. You don't know me. I don't know you. We talk without lying. If I do like you, I give you one cow and many other things and we become friends. How can we make it all by ourselves?(Applause)YAB: You can also go to the website, answer — respond to the questions also. Forty crucial questions.Now I am going to speak to you about my movie. For the last three years, I was shooting the earth for the movie. The name of the movie is ""Home"" — ""Maison."" It is about the state of the planet. It's a fantastic story of life on the earth. I'm very proud to show you the teaser.Video: This Earth is four and a half billion years old. These plants, several hundred million years old. And we humans have been walking upright for only 200 thousand years. We've managed to adapt, and have conquered the whole planet. For generations, we've been raising our children, not unlike millions of other species living beside us. For the past 30 years I've been closely watching the earth and its dwellers from high up in the sky. Our life is tied to the well-being of our planet. We depend on water, forests, deserts, oceans. Fishing, breeding, farming are still the world's foremost human occupations. And what binds us together is far greater than what divides us. We all share the same need for the earth's gifts — the same wish to rise above ourselves, and become better. And yet we carry on raising walls to keep us apart.Today our greatest battle is to protect the natural offerings of our planet. In less than 50 years we've altered it more thoroughly than in the entire history of mankind. Half of the world's forests have vanished. Water resources are running low. Intensive farming is depleting soils. Our energy sources are not sustainable. The climate is changing. We are endangering ourselves. We're only trying to improve our lives. But the wealth gaps are growing wider. We haven't yet understood that we're going at a much faster pace than the planet can sustain. We know that solutions are available today. We all have the power to change this trend for the better. So what are we waiting for? (Applause)YAB: Luc Besson is the producer of the movie. But it is not a normal movie. The film is going to be distributed free. This film has no copyright. On the five of June, the environment day, everybody can download the movie on Internet. The film is given for free to the distributor for TV and theater to show it the fifth of June. There is no business on this movie. It is also available for school, cities, NGOs and you.We have to believe what we know. Let me tell you something. It's too late to be pessimistic — really too late. We have all a part of the solutions. To finish, I would like to welcome the 4,700th baby born since the beginning of this talk. Merci beaucoup. I love you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yann_arthus_bertrand_captures_fragile_earth_in_wide_angle
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"""The Better Man.""I was the better at getting and keeping.You were the better at spend and spend;I was the better at grubbing and heaping,But who was the better man in the end?Yes, who was the better man, my friend?You were the better with lords and ladies,I was the better at pillaging Troy;You were the better at kissing the babies,I was the better at search and destroy.But who was the better man, old boy?Who was the better man?I was the better at improvisation,You were the better at spinning the plates;I was the better at procrastination,You were the better at quiet debate.But who was the better man, old mate?Who was the better man?You were the better at rolling a reefer,I was the better at coke and rum;Remember that night on the beach in Ibiza?The Maori twins with the tattooed bum?But who was the better man, old chum?Who was the better man?Now we come down to it, relatives grieving.Out in the hall with their crocodile tears;Now that you're out of it, now that you're leaving,Now that they've sealed your arse and your ears,What I've been meaning to tell you for years,And years, and years, and years, old friend ...Is that you were the better man, in the end;You were the better man,My friend.(Applause)I wrote this next poem for my mother. Every one of us had a mother, only one — probably the most important person in your life, if you're lucky enough to know them. My mother was certainly the most important in mine. Let me try and describe her to you. She's 86 years old. She's frail. White, platinum hair. Why do they do that? Why do old ladies go to those hair shops, and make those helmets? (Laughter) Bright as a button. All the ducks in a row. Looks like a much prettier version of Margaret Thatcher, (Laughter) but without any of the soft bits in Margaret's character. (Laughter) I wrote this poem for her. These are not my beliefs. But my mother has lived by this creed all her life.""Never Go Back.""Never go back. Never go back.Never return to the haunts of your youth.Keep to the track, to the beaten track;Memory holds all you need of the truth.Never look back. Never look back.Never succumb to the gorgon's stare.Keep to the track, to the beaten track;No-one is waiting and nothing is there.Never go back. Never go back.Never surrender the future you earned.Keep to the track, to the beaten track;Never return to the bridges you've burned.Never look back. Never look back.Never retreat to the 'glorious past.'Keep to the track, to the beaten track;Treat every day of your life as your last.Never go back. Never go back.Never acknowledge the ghost on the stair.Keep to the track, to the beaten track;No-one is waiting and nothing is there.(Applause)Now ladies and gentlemen, I'm up on me hobbyhorse. If every commercially minded cosmetic surgeon were tied end to end along a railroad track, that would be me, stoking the train without a qualm in the world. Ladies, don't do it. Don't do it. You think we want you to do it, but we don't want you to do it. Stop it. Tell them to go to hell. You bodies are wonderful as they are. Just leave them alone.""To a Beautiful Lady of a Certain Age.""Lady lady, do not weep.What is gone is gone. Now sleep.Turn your pillow. Dry your tears.Count thy sheep and not thy years.Nothing good can come of this.Time rules all, my dearest.'Tis but folly to be waging warOn one who never lost before.Lady, this is all in vain.Youth can never come again;We have drunk the summer wine.None can make a stitch in time.Nip and tuck till crack of doom.What is foretold in the wombMay not be foresworn with gold.Nor may time be bought or sold.Dearest, do I love thee less?Do I shrink from thy caress?Think you I could cease to care?Never was there one so fair!Lady lady, do not weep —What is gone is gone. Now sleep.Lean against me, calm your fears,Count thy blessings, not thy years.(Applause)America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done. I was born in Britain, as you have probably guessed. Even when on its worst behavior, I find myself automatically defending the USA from the sneers of green-eyed Europhiles playing their Greek card to Roman trumps. America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage. I am no historian, ladies and gentlemen. But it seems to be that the USA's sins, compared to those of many previous empires, are of a more moderate, if more pervasive, kind. Let me put this bluntly. If Americans are so fat, stupid and ignorant, my dear friends from Birmingham, how come they rule the world?""Hail to the Gods of America.""Hail to the Gods of America!Hail to the gods of the dream.Invictus E Pluribus Unum.But which of them reigns supreme?Which is America's Jupiter?The Brahmins of Capital Hill?A sorcerer's profit on Wall Street?They eye of a dollar bill?Or is it celebrity status?The worship of those we hate.Or the cult of living forever,If only we'd watch our weight.What of the titans of media?Or Hollywood's siren call?What of the temples of justice,Whose servants enslave us all?What of the Brand and the Label?What of the upstart Sport?And what of the Constitution,That bully of last resort?Hail to the God of America,Whose power the masses extol —Convenience rules America;Convenience owns our soul.Aye, that it does.(Applause)And if you would like to know why I am not a father — I, who by a miracle have 22 godchildren — the answer is in this poem, which upsets me every time I read it.""Love Came to Visit Me.""Love came to visit me, shy as a fawn.But finding me busy, she fled, with the dawn.At 20 the torch of resentment was lit.My rage at injustice waxed hot as the pits.The flux of its lava cleared all in its path.Comrades and enemies fled from its wrath.Yet lovers grew wary, once novelty wanedTo lie with a bloody man, his terror unfeigned.At 30 my powers seemed mighty to me.The fruits of my rivals, I shook from the tree.By guile and by bluster, by night and by day,I battered and scattered the fools from my way.And women grew willing to sham and to bluff.Their trinkets and baubles cost little enough.From 40 to 50, grown easy and sly,I wined them and dined them, like pigs in a sty.We feasted and reveled and rutted in muck,Forgetting our peril, forgetting to duck,Forgetting times arrows are sharper than knives.Grown sick to our stomachs, and sick of our lives.Love came to visit me, shy as a fawn.But finding me busy, she fled with the dawn.(Applause)Um, there are — I've got far too much money and I have far too much fun in my businesses. So poetry came as a complete shock to me, ladies and gentlemen. A complete shock. I was a little ill. Okay, I was ill. Okay, I had a life-threatening illness, you know. I was in a clinic. I wasn't allowed to make telephone calls. I wasn't allowed to see any of my — you know, whatever. So, in the end I begged a pack of Post-it notes off a nurse. And from another nurse, I begged a pencil, pen. And I didn't know what else to do. So I started to write poetry. That was in October of 2000.I'm not an evil man. But sometimes I try to put myself in an evil man's position. I'm not a glorious and fantastic-looking woman, who men fall down, you know, when she walks in a room. But sometimes I try to put myself in that position. (Laughter) Not with much success. But it's interesting to me. I love to write historical verse. I love to think what they thought, what it was like.Because although many of the speakers and many of the people who are in the audience, although you guys can not only go to the moon, you know, you're going to totally transform everything. Cloning will transform everything. Voice navigation will transform everything. I don't know. You can do anything you want. All you guys are so clever, and women, you can do it all!But human nature doesn't change, mate. My friends, human nature is exactly the same as it was when my ancestor — probably it was my ancestor — got his hands around the neck of the last Neanderthal, and battered the bastard to death. You think we didn't do that? Oh, we did. We killed every single one of them. Inch by inch we killed them. We hunted them down wherever they were. Rivals for meat. Rivals for berries. We're still doing it, with all of the genius assembled in this room. Our natures haven't changed a single iota. And they never will. Even when we've got off this little planet, and have put some of our eggs in some other baskets.And I am as bad as you. I spent eight years running one of the most successful publishing businesses in the world. And at seven o'clock every night, I took me some more girls, already corrupted. I never did anything to anyone that wasn't. And I took crack cocaine, every single night for seven years. It was like Dante's ""Inferno."" It was unbelievable. One of the offshoots of crack cocaine is that you keep an erection for about four hours. And you stay up for 12. It was absolutely unbelievable. Twenty-two godchildren I've got. What do I say to them? I only stopped because I thought if I got caught, what would happen to my mother. If you're a woman, remember that. The love of your son can utterly transform anything he does.""Our Lady in White.""Pale she was, listless;And soft to the touch.A generous mistress Whom many loved much.Shoulder to shoulder, Night after night,We hoarded and sold her —Our Lady in White.We breathed but to savor her crystal caress.We craved but to favor the hem of her dress.We dabbled and babbled, Denying our thirsts.But always we scrabbled to lie with her first.Absent, we missed her, grew haggard and limp.Toyed with her sister, or threatened her pimp.Came word out of Babel, the lady returns!And there on the table we took her, in turns.Sensing the power that tyranny craves,There in that hour, she made us her slaves.Many there were, to covet her kiss.My shame as a spur, I fled the abyss.But only just.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/publisher_felix_dennis_odes_to_vice_and_consequences
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"I used to be a Malthusian. This was my mental model of the world: exploding population, small planet; it's going to lead to ugly things. But I'm moving past Malthus, because I think that we just might be about 150 years from a kind of new enlightenment.Here's why. This is the U.N.'s population data, you may have seen, for the world. And the world's population expected to top out at something hopefully a bit less than 10 billion, late this century. And after that, most likely it's going to begin to decline. So what then? Most of the economic models are built around scarcity and growth. So a lot of economists look at declining population and expect to see stagnation, maybe depression. But a declining population is going to have at least two very beneficial economic effects.One: fewer people on a fixed amount of land make investing in property a bad bet. In the cities, a lot of the cost of property is actually wrapped up in its speculative value. Take away land speculation, price of land drops. And that begins to lift a heavy burden off the world's poor.Number two: a declining population means scarce labor. Scarce labor drives wages. As wages increase that also lifts the burden on the poor and the working class. Now I'm not talking about a radical drop in population like we saw in the Black Death. But look what happened in Europe after the plague: rising wages, land reform, technological innovation, birth of the middle class; and after that, forward-looking social movements like the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment.Most of our cultural heritage has tended to look backward, romanticizing the past. All of the Western religions begin with the notion of Eden, and descend through a kind of profligate present to a very ugly future. So human history is viewed as sort of this downhill slide from the good old days.But I think we're in for another change, about two generations after the top of that curve, once the effects of a declining population start to settle in. At that point, we'll start romanticizing the future again, instead of the nasty, brutish past.So why does this matter? Why talk about social-economic movements that may be more than a century away? Because transitions are dangerous times. When land owners start to lose money, and labor demands more pay, there are some powerful interests that are going to fear for the future. Fear for the future leads to some rash decisions. If we have a positive view about the future then we may be able to accelerate through that turn, instead of careening off a cliff.If we can make it through the next 150 years, I think that your great great grandchildren will forget all about Malthus. And instead, they'll be planning for the future and starting to build the 22nd Century Enlightenment. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pete_alcorn_s_vision_of_a_better_world
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"This is a world-changing invention. The smoke alarm has saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives, worldwide. But smoke alarms don't prevent fires.Every year in the USA, over 20,000 are killed or injured with 350,000 home fires. And one of the main causes of all these fires is electricity. What if we could prevent electrical fires before they start? Well, a couple of friends and I figured out how to do this.So how does electricity ignite residential fires? Well it turns out that the main causes are faulty and misused appliances and electrical wiring. Our invention had to address all of these issues. So what about circuit breakers? Well, Thomas Edison invented the circuit breaker in 1879. This is 130-year-old technology, and this is a problem, because over 80 percent of all home electrical fires start below the safety threshold of circuit breakers. Hmmm ...So we considered all of this. And we realized that electrical appliances must be able to communicate directly with the power receptacle itself. Any electrical device — an appliance, an extension cord, whatever — must be able to tell the power outlet, ""Hey, power outlet, I'm drawing too much current. Shut me off now, before I start a fire."" And the power outlet needs to be smart enough to do it. So here is what we did. We put a 10-cent digital transponder, a data tag, in the appliance plug. And we put an inexpensive, wireless data reader inside the receptacle so they could communicate. Now, every home electrical system becomes an intelligent network. The appliance's safe operating parameters are embedded into its plug. If too much current is flowing, the intelligent receptacle turns itself off, and prevents another fire from starting. We call this technology EFCI, Electrical Fault Circuit Interrupter.Okay, two more points. Every year in the USA, roughly 2,500 children are admitted to emergency rooms for shock and burn injuries related to electrical receptacles. And this is crazy. An intelligent receptacle prevents injuries because the power is always off, until an intelligent plug is detected. Simple.Now, besides saving lives, perhaps the greatest benefit of intelligent power is in its energy savings. This invention will reduce global energy consumption by allowing remote control and automation of every outlet in every home and business. Now you can choose to reduce your home energy bill by automatically cycling heavy loads like air conditioners and heaters. Hotels and businesses can shut down unused rooms from a central location, or even a cell phone. There are 10 billion electrical outlets in North America alone. The potential energy savings is very, very significant.So far we've applied for 414 patent claims. Of those, 186 have been granted: 228 are in process. And I'm pleased to announce that just three weeks ago we received our first international recognition, the 2009 CES Innovation Award. So, to conclude, intelligent power can, globally, save thousands of lives, prevent tens of thousands of injuries, and eliminate tens of billions of dollars in property damage every single year, while significantly reducing global energy consumption. In the spirit of this year's TED Conference, we think this is a powerful, world-changing invention. And I'd like to thank Chris for this opportunity to unveil our technology with you, and soon the world. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_la_grou_plugs_smart_power_outlets_1
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"What's happening to the climate? It is unbelievably bad. This is, obviously, that famous view now of the Arctic, which is likely to be gone at this point in the next three or four or five years. Very, very, very scary.So we all look at what we can do. And when you look at the worldwide sources of CO2, 52 percent are tied to buildings. Only nine percent is passenger cars, interestingly enough. So we ran off to a sushi bar. And at that sushi bar we came up with a great idea. And it was something called EcoRock. And we said we could redesign the 115-year-old gypsum drywall process that generates 20 billion pounds of CO2 a year. So it was a big idea. We wanted to reduce that by 80 percent, which is exactly what we've done.We started R&D in 2006. Decided to use recycled content from cement and steel manufacturing. There is the inside of our lab. We haven't shown this before. But our people had to do some 5,000 different mixes to get this right, to hit our targets. And they worked absolutely very, very, very hard. So then we went forward and built our production line in China. We don't build this production equipment any longer in the U.S., unfortunately.We did the line install over the summer. We started right there, with absolutely nothing. You're seeing for the first time, a brand new drywall production line, not made using gypsum at all. That's the finished production line there. We got our first panel out on December third. That is the slurry being poured onto paper, basically. That's the line running. The exciting thing is, look at the faces of the people. These are people who worked this project for two to three years. And they are so excited. That's the first board off the line. Our Vice President of Operation kissing the board. Obviously very, very excited.But this has a huge, huge impact on the environment. We signed the first panel just a few weeks after that, had a great signing ceremony, leading to people hopefully using these products across the world. And we've got Cradle-to-Cradle Gold on this thing. We happened to win, just recently, the Green Product of the Year for ""The Re-Invention of Drywall,"" from Popular Science. Thank you. Thank you. So here is what we learned: 8,000 gallons of gas equivalent to build one house. You probably had no idea. It's like driving around the world six times.We must change everything. Look around the room: chairs, wood, everything around us has to change or we're not going to lick this problem. Don't listen to the people who say you can't do this, because anyone can. And these job losses, we can fix them with green-collar jobs. We've got four plants. We're building this stuff around the country. We're going as fast as we can. Two and a half million cars worth of gypsum, you know, CO2 generated. Right? So what will you do? I'll tell you what I did and why I did it. And I know my time's up.Those are my kids, Natalie and David. When they have their kids, 2050, they'd better look back at Grandpa and say, ""Hey, you gave it a good shot. You did the best you could with the team that you had."" So my hope is that when you leave TED, you will look at reducing your carbon footprint in however you can do it. And if you don't know how, please find me — I will help you.Last but not least, Bill Gates, I know you invented Windows. Wait till you see, maybe next year, what kind of windows we've invented. Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_surace_fixing_drywall_to_heal_the_planet
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"This is called Hooked on a Feeling: The Pursuit of Happiness and Human Design. I put up a somewhat dour Darwin, but a very happy chimp up there. My first point is that the pursuit of happiness is obligatory. Man wishes to be happy, only wishes to be happy, and cannot wish not to be so. We are wired to pursue happiness, not only to enjoy it, but to want more and more of it.So given that that's true, how good are we at increasing our happiness? Well, we certainly try. If you look on the Amazon site, there are over 2,000 titles with advice on the seven habits, the nine choices, the 10 secrets, the 14,000 thoughts that are supposed to bring happiness. Now another way we try to increase our happiness is we medicate ourselves. And so there's over 120 million prescriptions out there for antidepressants. Prozac was really the first absolute blockbuster drug. It was clean, efficient, there was no high, there was really no danger, it had no street value. In 1995, illegal drugs were a $400 billion business, representing eight percent of world trade, roughly the same as gas and oil.These routes to happiness haven't really increased happiness very much. One problem that's happening now is, although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon, depression and anxiety are rising. Some people say this is because we have better diagnosis, and more people are being found out. It isn't just that. We're seeing it all over the world. In the United States right now there are more suicides than homicides. There is a rash of suicide in China. And the World Health Organization predicts by the year 2020 that depression will be the second largest cause of disability.Now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world, we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy. But this does not follow any of the usual trends. For example, these two show great growth in income, absolutely flat happiness curves.My field, the field of psychology, hasn't done a whole lot to help us move forward in understanding human happiness. In part, we have the legacy of Freud, who was a pessimist, who said that pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest, is propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality. He said, ""One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation."" So the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy was really what Freud called ordinary misery.(Laughter)And Freud in part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system — which is that we have both a positive and a negative system, and our negative system is extremely sensitive. So for example, we're born loving the taste of something sweet and reacting aversively to the taste of something bitter. We also find that people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain. The formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks, or interactions, for every one negative. And that's how powerful the one negative is. Especially expressions of contempt or disgust, well you really need a lot of positives to upset that.I also put in here the stress response. We're wired for dangers that are immediate, that are physical, that are imminent, and so our body goes into an incredible reaction where endogenous opioids come in. We have a system that is really ancient, and really there for physical danger. And so over time, this becomes a stress response, which has enormous effects on the body. Cortisol floods the brain; it destroys hippocampal cells and memory, and can lead to all kinds of health problems.But unfortunately, we need this system in part. If we were only governed by pleasure we would not survive. We really have two command posts. Emotions are short-lived intense responses to challenge and to opportunity. And each one of them allows us to click into alternate selves that tune in, turn on, drop out thoughts, perceptions, feelings and memories. We tend to think of emotions as just feelings. But in fact, emotions are an all-systems alert that change what we remember, what kind of decisions we make, and how we perceive things.So let me go forward to the new science of happiness. We've come away from the Freudian gloom, and people are now actively studying this. And one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints of a single continuum. The Freudian model is really one continuum that, as you get less miserable, you get happier. And that isn't true — when you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of the equation. And it's been missing. It's been missing from psychotherapy. So when people's symptoms go away, they tend to recur, because there isn't a sense of the other half — of what pleasure, happiness, compassion, gratitude, what are the positive emotions. And of course we know this intuitively, that happiness is not just the absence of misery. But somehow it was not put forward until very recently, seeing these as two parallel systems. So that the body can both look for opportunity and also protect itself from danger, at the same time. And they're sort of two reciprocal and dynamically interacting systems.People have also wanted to deconstruct. We use this word ""happy,"" and it's this very large umbrella of a term. And then three emotions for which there are no English words: fiero, which is the pride in accomplishment of a challenge; schadenfreude, which is happiness in another's misfortune, a malicious pleasure; and naches, which is a pride and joy in one's children. Absent from this list, and absent from any discussions of happiness, are happiness in another's happiness. We don't seem to have a word for that. We are very sensitive to the negative, but it is in part offset by the fact that we have a positivity.We're also born pleasure-seekers. Babies love the taste of sweet and hate the taste of bitter. They love to touch smooth surfaces rather than rough ones. They like to look at beautiful faces rather than plain faces. They like to listen to consonant melodies instead of dissonant melodies. Babies really are born with a lot of innate pleasures. There was once a statement made by a psychologist that said that 80 percent of the pursuit of happiness is really just about the genes, and it's as difficult to become happier as it is to become taller. That's nonsense. There is a decent contribution to happiness from the genes — about 50 percent — but there is still that 50 percent that is unaccounted for.Let's just go into the brain for a moment, and see where does happiness arise from in evolution. We have basically at least two systems here, and they both are very ancient. One is the reward system, and that's fed by the chemical dopamine. And it starts in the ventral tegmental area. It goes to the nucleus accumbens, all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, where decisions are made, high level. This was originally seen as a system that was the pleasure system of the brain. In the 1950s, Olds and Milner put electrodes into the brain of a rat. And the rat would just keep pressing that bar thousands and thousands and thousands of times. It wouldn't eat. It wouldn't sleep. It wouldn't have sex. It wouldn't do anything but press this bar. So they assumed this must be, you know, the brain's orgasmatron.It turned out that it wasn't, that it really is a system of motivation, a system of wanting. It gives objects what's called incentive salience. It makes something look so attractive that you just have to go after it. That's something different from the system that is the pleasure system, which simply says, ""I like this."" The pleasure system, as you see, which is the internal opiates, there is a hormone oxytocin, is widely spread throughout the brain. Dopamine system, the wanting system, is much more centralized.The other thing about positive emotions is that they have a universal signal. And we see here the smile. And the universal signal is not just raising the corner of the lips to the zygomatic major. It's also crinkling the outer corner of the eye, the orbicularis oculi. So you see, even 10-month-old babies, when they see their mother, will show this particular kind of smile. Extroverts use it more than introverts. People who are relieved of depression show it more after than before. So if you want to unmask a true look of happiness, you will look for this expression.Our pleasures are really ancient. And we learn, of course, many, many pleasures, but many of them are base. And one of them, of course, is biophilia — that we have a response to the natural world that's very profound. Very interesting studies done on people recovering from surgery, who found that people who faced a brick wall versus people who looked out on trees and nature, the people who looked out on the brick wall were in the hospital longer, needed more medication, and had more medical complications. There is something very restorative about nature, and it's part of how we are tuned.Humans, particularly so, we're very imitative creatures. And we imitate from almost the second we are born. Here is a three-week-old baby. And if you stick your tongue out at this baby, the baby will do the same. We are social beings from the beginning. And even studies of cooperation show that cooperation between individuals lights up reward centers of the brain. One problem that psychology has had is instead of looking at this intersubjectivity — or the importance of the social brain to humans who come into the world helpless and need each other tremendously — is that they focus instead on the self and self-esteem, and not self-other. It's sort of ""me,"" not ""we."" And I think this has been a really tremendous problem that goes against our biology and nature, and hasn't made us any happier at all.Because when you think about it, people are happiest when in flow, when they're absorbed in something out in the world, when they're with other people, when they're active, engaged in sports, focusing on a loved one, learning, having sex, whatever. They're not sitting in front of the mirror trying to figure themselves out, or thinking about themselves. These are not the periods when you feel happiest. The other thing is, that a piece of evidence is, is if you look at computerized text analysis of people who commit suicide, what you find there, and it's quite interesting, is use of the first person singular — ""I,"" ""me,"" ""my,"" not ""we"" and ""us"" — and the letters are less hopeless than they are really alone. And being alone is very unnatural to the human. There is a profound need to belong.But there are ways in which our evolutionary history can really trip us up. Because, for example, the genes don't care whether we're happy, they care that we replicate, that we pass our genes on. So for example we have three systems that underlie reproduction, because it's so important. There's lust, which is just wanting to have sex. And that's really mediated by the sex hormones. Romantic attraction, that gets into the desire system. And that's dopamine-fed. And that's, ""I must have this one person."" There's attachment, which is oxytocin, and the opiates, which says, ""This is a long-term bond."" See the problem is that, as humans, these three can separate. So a person can be in a long term attachment, become romantically infatuated with someone else, and want to have sex with a third person.The other way in which our genes can sometimes lead us astray is in social status. We are very acutely aware of our social status and always seek to further and increase it. Now in the animal world, there is only one way to increase status, and that's dominance. I seize command by physical prowess, and I keep it by beating my chest, and you make submissive gestures. Now, the human has a whole other way to rise to the top, and that is a prestige route, which is freely conferred. Someone has expertise and knowledge, and knows how to do things, and we give that person status. And that's clearly the way for us to create many more niches of status so that people don't have to be lower on the status hierarchy as they are in the animal world.The data isn't terribly supportive of money buying happiness. But it's not irrelevant. So if you look at questions like this, life satisfaction, you see life satisfaction going up with each rung of income. You see mental distress going up with lower income. So clearly there is some effect. But the effect is relatively small. And one of the problems with money is materialism. What happens when people pursue money too avidly, is they forget about the real basic pleasures of life. So we have here, this couple. ""Do you think the less-fortunate are having better sex?"" And then this kid over here is saying, ""Leave me alone with my toys."" So one of the things is that it really takes over. That whole dopamine-wanting system takes over and derails from any of the pleasure system.Maslow had this idea back in the 1950s that as people rise above their biological needs, as the world becomes safer and we don't have to worry about basic needs being met — our biological system, whatever motivates us, is being satisfied — we can rise above them, to think beyond ourselves toward self-actualization or transcendence, and rise above the materialist.So to just quickly conclude with some brief data that suggests this might be so. One is people who underwent what is called a quantum change: they felt their life and their whole values had changed. And sure enough, if you look at the kinds of values that come in, you see wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, fun, be respected, before the change, and much more post-materialist values after. Women had a whole different set of value shifts. But very similarly, the only one that survived there was happiness. They went from attractiveness and happiness and wealth and self-control to generosity and forgiveness.I end with a few quotes. ""There is only one question: How to love this world?"" And Rilke, ""If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself. Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches."" ""First, say to yourself what you would be. Then do what you have to do.""Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_etcoff_on_happiness_and_why_we_want_it
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"Let me share with you today an original discovery. But I want to tell it to you the way it really happened — not the way I present it in a scientific meeting, or the way you'd read it in a scientific paper. It's a story about beyond biomimetics, to something I'm calling biomutualism. I define that as an association between biology and another discipline, where each discipline reciprocally advances the other, but where the collective discoveries that emerge are beyond any single field. Now, in terms of biomimetics, as human technologies take on more of the characteristics of nature, nature becomes a much more useful teacher. Engineering can be inspired by biology by using its principles and analogies when they're advantageous, but then integrating that with the best human engineering, ultimately to make something actually better than nature.Now, being a biologist, I was very curious about this. These are gecko toes. And we wondered how they use these bizarre toes to climb up a wall so quickly. We discovered it. And what we found was that they have leaf-like structures on their toes, with millions of tiny hairs that look like a rug, and each of those hairs has the worst case of split-ends possible: about 100 to 1000 split ends that are nano-size. And the individual has 2 billion of these nano-size split ends. They don't stick by Velcro or suction or glue. They actually stick by intermolecular forces alone, van der Waals forces. And I'm really pleased to report to you today that the first synthetic self-cleaning, dry adhesive has been made. From the simplest version in nature, one branch, my engineering collaborator, Ron Fearing, at Berkeley, had made the first synthetic version. And so has my other incredible collaborator, Mark Cutkosky, at Stanford — he made much larger hairs than the gecko, but used the same general principles.And here is its first test. (Laughter) That's Kellar Autumn, my former Ph.D. student, professor now at Lewis and Clark, literally giving his first-born child up for this test. (Laughter)More recently, this happened.Man: This the first time someone has actually climbed with it.Narrator: Lynn Verinsky, a professional climber, who appeared to be brimming with confidence.Lynn Verinsky: Honestly, it's going to be perfectly safe. It will be perfectly safe.Man: How do you know?Lynn Verinsky: Because of liability insurance. (Laughter)Narrator: With a mattress below and attached to a safety rope, Lynn began her 60-foot ascent. Lynn made it to the top in a perfect pairing of Hollywood and science.Man: So you're the first human being to officially emulate a gecko.Lynn Verinsky: Ha! Wow. And what a privilege that has been.Robert Full: That's what she did on rough surfaces. But she actually used these on smooth surfaces — two of them — to climb up, and pull herself up. And you can try this in the lobby, and look at the gecko-inspired material. Now the problem with the robots doing this is that they can't get unstuck, with the material. This is the gecko's solution. They actually peel their toes away from the surface, at high rates, as they run up the wall.Well I'm really excited today to show you the newest version of a robot, Stickybot, using a new hierarchical dry adhesive. Here is the actual robot. And here is what it does. And if you look, you can see that it uses the toe peeling, just like the gecko does. If we can show some of the video, you can see it climbing up the wall. (Applause) There it is. And now it can go on other surfaces because of the new adhesive that the Stanford group was able to do in designing this incredible robot. (Applause)Oh. One thing I want to point out is, look at Stickybot. You see something on it. It's not just to look like a gecko. It has a tail. And just when you think you've figured out nature, this kind of thing happens. The engineers told us, for the climbing robots, that, if they don't have a tail, they fall off the wall. So what they did was they asked us an important question. They said, ""Well, it kind of looks like a tail."" Even though we put a passive bar there. ""Do animals use their tails when they climb up walls?"" What they were doing was returning the favor, by giving us a hypothesis to test, in biology, that we wouldn't have thought of.So of course, in reality, we were then panicked, being the biologists, and we should know this already. We said, ""Well, what do tails do?"" Well we know that tails store fat, for example. We know that you can grab onto things with them. And perhaps it is most well known that they provide static balance. (Laughter) It can also act as a counterbalance. So watch this kangaroo. See that tail? That's incredible! Marc Raibert built a Uniroo hopping robot. And it was unstable without its tail. Now mostly tails limit maneuverability, like this human inside this dinosaur suit. (Laughter) My colleagues actually went on to test this limitation, by increasing the moment of inertia of a student, so they had a tail, and running them through and obstacle course, and found a decrement in performance, like you'd predict. (Laughter) But of course, this is a passive tail. And you can also have active tails.And when I went back to research this, I realized that one of the great TED moments in the past, from Nathan, we've talked about an active tail.Video: Myhrvold thinks tail-cracking dinosaurs were interested in love, not war.Robert Full: He talked about the tail being a whip for communication. It can also be used in defense. Pretty powerful. So we then went back and looked at the animal. And we ran it up a surface. But this time what we did is we put a slippery patch that you see in yellow there. And watch on the right what the animal is doing with its tail when it slips. This is slowed down 10 times. So here is normal speed. And watch it now slip, and see what it does with its tail. It has an active tail that functions as a fifth leg, and it contributes to stability. If you make it slip a huge amount, this is what we discovered. This is incredible. The engineers had a really good idea.And then of course we wondered, okay, they have an active tail, but let's picture them. They're climbing up a wall, or a tree. And they get to the top and let's say there's some leaves there. And what would happen if they climbed on the underside of that leaf, and there was some wind, or we shook it? And we did that experiment, that you see here. (Applause) And this is what we discovered. Now that's real time. You can't see anything. But there it is slowed down.What we discovered was the world's fastest air-righting response. For those of you who remember your physics, that's a zero-angular-momentum righting response. But it's like a cat. You know, cats falling. Cats do this. They twist their bodies. But geckos do it better. And they do it with their tail. So they do it with this active tail as they swing around. And then they always land in the sort of superman skydiving posture. Okay, now we wondered, if we were right, we should be able to test this in a physical model, in a robot.So for TED we actually built a robot, over there, a prototype, with the tail. And we're going to attempt the first air-righting response in a tail, with a robot. If we could have the lights on it. Okay, there it goes. And show the video. There it is. And it works just like it does in the animal. So all you need is a swing of the tail to right yourself. (Applause)Now, of course, we were normally frightened because the animal has no gliding adaptations, so we thought, ""Oh that's okay. We'll put it in a vertical wind tunnel. We'll blow the air up, we'll give it a landing target, a tree trunk, just outside the plexi-glass enclosure, and see what it does. (Laughter) So we did. And here is what it does. So the wind is coming from the bottom. This is slowed down 10 times. It does an equilibrium glide. Highly controlled. This is sort of incredible. But actually it's quite beautiful, when you take a picture of it. And it's better than that, it — just in the slide — maneuvers in mid-air. And the way it does it, is it takes its tail and it swings it one way to yaw left, and it swings its other way to yaw right. So we can maneuver this way. And then — we had to film this several times to believe this — it also does this. Watch this. It oscillates its tail up and down like a dolphin. It can actually swim through the air. But watch its front legs. Can you see what they are doing? What does that mean for the origin of flapping flight? Maybe it's evolved from coming down from trees, and trying to control a glide. Stay tuned for that. (Laughter)So then we wondered, ""Can they actually maneuver with this?"" So there is the landing target. Could they steer towards it with these capabilities? Here it is in the wind tunnel. And it certainly looks like it. You can see it even better from down on top. Watch the animal. Definitely moving towards the landing target. Watch the whip of its tail as it does it. Look at that. It's unbelievable.So now we were really confused, because there are no reports of it gliding. So we went, ""Oh my god, we have to go to the field, and see if it actually does this."" Completely opposite of the way you'd see it on a nature film, of course. We wondered, ""Do they actually glide in nature?"" Well we went to the forests of Singapore and Southeast Asia. And the next video you see is the first time we've showed this.This is the actual video — not staged, a real research video — of animal gliding down. There is a red trajectory line. Look at the end to see the animal. But then as it gets closer to the tree, look at the close-up. And see if you can see it land. So there it comes down. There is a gecko at the end of that trajectory line. You see it there? There? Watch it come down. Now watch up there and you can see the landing. Did you see it hit? It actually uses its tail too, just like we saw in the lab.So now we can continue this mutualism by suggesting that they can make an active tail. And here is the first active tail, in the robot, made by Boston Dynamics. So to conclude, I think we need to build biomutualisms, like I showed, that will increase the pace of basic discovery in their application. To do this though, we need to redesign education in a major way, to balance depth with interdisciplinary communication, and explicitly train people how to contribute to, and benefit from other disciplines. And of course you need the organisms and the environment to do it. That is, whether you care about security, search and rescue or health, we must preserve nature's designs, otherwise these secrets will be lost forever. And from what I heard from our new president, I'm very optimistic. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_learning_from_the_gecko_s_tail
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"Why do so many people reach success and then fail? One of the big reasons is, we think success is a one-way street. So we do everything that leads up to success, but then we get there. We figure we've made it, we sit back in our comfort zone, and we actually stop doing everything that made us successful. And it doesn't take long to go downhill. And I can tell you this happens, because it happened to me.Reaching success, I worked hard, I pushed myself. But then I stopped, because I figured, ""Oh, you know, I made it. I can just sit back and relax.""Reaching success, I always tried to improve and do good work. But then I stopped because I figured, ""Hey, I'm good enough. I don't need to improve any more.""Reaching success, I was pretty good at coming up with good ideas. Because I did all these simple things that led to ideas. But then I stopped, because I figured I was this hot-shot guy and I shouldn't have to work at ideas, they should just come like magic. And the only thing that came was creative block. I couldn't come up with any ideas.Reaching success, I always focused on clients and projects, and ignored the money. Then all this money started pouring in. And I got distracted by it. And suddenly I was on the phone to my stockbroker and my real estate agent, when I should have been talking to my clients.And reaching success, I always did what I loved. But then I got into stuff that I didn't love, like management. I am the world's worst manager, but I figured I should be doing it, because I was, after all, the president of the company.Well, soon a black cloud formed over my head and here I was, outwardly very successful, but inwardly very depressed. But I'm a guy; I knew how to fix it. I bought a fast car. (Laughter) It didn't help. I was faster but just as depressed.So I went to my doctor. I said, ""Doc, I can buy anything I want. But I'm not happy. I'm depressed. It's true what they say, and I didn't believe it until it happened to me. But money can't buy happiness."" He said, ""No. But it can buy Prozac."" And he put me on anti-depressants. And yeah, the black cloud faded a little bit, but so did all the work, because I was just floating along. I couldn't care less if clients ever called. (Laughter)And clients didn't call. (Laughter) Because they could see I was no longer serving them, I was only serving myself. So they took their money and their projects to others who would serve them better.Well, it didn't take long for business to drop like a rock. My partner and I, Thom, we had to let all our employees go. It was down to just the two of us, and we were about to go under. And that was great. Because with no employees, there was nobody for me to manage.So I went back to doing the projects I loved. I had fun again, I worked harder and, to cut a long story short, did all the things that took me back up to success. But it wasn't a quick trip. It took seven years.But in the end, business grew bigger than ever. And when I went back to following these eight principles, the black cloud over my head disappeared altogether. And I woke up one day and I said, ""I don't need Prozac anymore."" And I threw it away and haven't needed it since.I learned that success isn't a one-way street. It doesn't look like this; it really looks more like this. It's a continuous journey. And if we want to avoid ""success-to-failure-syndrome,"" we just keep following these eight principles, because that is not only how we achieve success, it's how we sustain it. So here is to your continued success. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_st_john_success_is_a_continuous_journey
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"I have had the distinct pleasure of living inside two biospheres. Of course we all here in this room live in Biosphere 1. I've also lived in Biosphere 2. And the wonderful thing about that is that I get to compare biospheres. And hopefully from that I get to learn something.So what did I learn? Well, here I am inside Biosphere 2, making a pizza. So I am harvesting the wheat, in order to make the dough. And then of course I have to milk the goats and feed the goats in order to make the cheese. It took me four months in Biosphere 2 to make a pizza. Here in Biosphere 1, well it takes me about two minutes, because I pick up the phone and I call and say, ""Hey, can you deliver the pizza?""So Biosphere 2 was essentially a three-acre, entirely sealed, miniature world that I lived in for two years and 20 minutes. (Laughter) Over the top it was sealed with steel and glass, underneath it was sealed with a pan of steel — essentially entirely sealed. So we had our own miniature rainforest, a private beach with a coral reef. We had a savanna, a marsh, a desert. We had our own half-acre farm that we had to grow everything. And of course we had our human habitat, where we lived.Back in the mid-'80s when we were designing Biosphere 2, we had to ask ourselves some pretty basic questions. I mean, what is a biosphere? Back then, yes, I guess we all know now that it is essentially the sphere of life around the Earth, right? Well, you have to get a little more specific than that if you're going to build one. And so we decided that what it really is is that it is entirely materially closed — that is, nothing goes in or out at all, no material — and energetically open, which is essentially what planet Earth is.This is a chamber that was 1/400th the size of Biosphere 2 that we called our Test Module. And the very first day that this fellow, John Allen, walked in, to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive, the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin, or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something, fungus. But of course none of that happened.And over the ensuing few years, there were great sagas about designing Biosphere 2. But by 1991 we finally had this thing built. And it was time for us to go in and give it a go. We needed to know, is life this malleable? Can you take this biosphere, that has evolved on a planetary scale, and jam it into a little bottle, and will it survive? Big questions. And we wanted to know this both for being able to go somewhere else in the universe — if we were going to go to Mars, for instance, would we take a biosphere with us, to live in it? We also wanted to know so we can understand more about the Earth that we all live in. Well, in 1991 it was finally time for us to go in and try out this baby. Let's take it on a maiden voyage. Will it work? Or will something happen that we can't understand and we can't fix, thereby negating the concept of man-made biospheres?So eight of us went in: four men and four women. More on that later. (Laughter) And this is the world that we lived in. So, on the top, we had these beautiful rainforests and an ocean, and underneath we had all this technosphere, we called it, which is where all the pumps and the valves and the water tanks and the air handlers, and all of that. One of the Biospherians called it ""garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier."" And then also we had the human habitat of course, with the laboratories, and all of that. This is the agriculture. It was essentially an organic farm.The day I walked into Biosphere 2, I was, for the first time, breathing a completely different atmosphere than everybody else in the world, except seven other people. At that moment I became part of that biosphere. And I don't mean that in an abstract sense; I mean it rather literally. When I breathed out, my CO2 fed the sweet potatoes that I was growing. And we ate an awful lot of the sweet potatoes. (Laughter) And those sweet potatoes became part of me. In fact, we ate so many sweet potatoes I became orange with sweet potato. I literally was eating the same carbon over and over again. I was eating myself in some strange sort of bizarre way.When it came to our atmosphere, however, it wasn't that much of a joke over the long term, because it turned out that we were losing oxygen, quite a lot of oxygen. And we knew that we were losing CO2. And so we were working to sequester carbon. Good lord — we know that term now. We were growing plants like crazy. We were taking their biomass, storing them in the basement, growing plants, going around, around, around, trying to take all of that carbon out of the atmosphere. We were trying to stop carbon from going into the atmosphere. We stopped irrigating our soil, as much as we could. We stopped tilling, so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air. But our oxygen was going down faster than our CO2 was going up, which was quite unexpected, because we had seen them going in tandem in the test module. And it was like playing atomic hide-and-seek. We had lost seven tons of oxygen. And we had no clue where it was.And I tell you, when you lose a lot of oxygen — and our oxygen went down quite far; it went from 21 percent down to 14.2 percent — my goodness, do you feel dreadful. I mean we were dragging ourselves around the Biosphere. And we had sleep apnea at night. So you'd wake up gasping with breath, because your blood chemistry has changed. And that you literally do that. You stop breathing and then you — (Gasps) — take a breath and it wakes you up. And it's very irritating. And everybody outside thought we were dying. I mean, the media was making it sound like were were dying. And I had to call up my mother every other day saying, ""No, Mum, it's fine, fine. We're not dead. We're fine. We're fine."" And the doctor was, in fact, checking us to make sure we were, in fact, fine. But in fact he was the person who was most susceptible to the oxygen. And one day he couldn't add up a line of figures. And it was time for us to put oxygen in. And you might think, well, ""Boy, your life support system was failing you. Wasn't that dreadful?"" Yes. In a sense it was terrifying. Except that I knew I could walk out the airlock door at any time, if it really got bad, though who was going to say, ""I can't take it anymore!""? Not me, that was for sure.But on the other hand, it was the scientific gold of the project, because we could really crank this baby up, as a scientific tool, and see if we could, in fact, find where those seven tons of oxygen had gone. And we did indeed find it. And we found it in the concrete. Essentially it had done something very simple. We had put too much carbon in the soil in the form of compost. It broke down; it took oxygen out of the air; it put CO2 into the air; and it went into the concrete. Pretty straightforward really.So at the end of the two years when we came out, we were elated, because, in fact, although you might say we had discovered something that was quite ""uhh,"" when your oxygen is going down, stopped working, essentially, in your life support system, that's a very bad failure. Except that we knew what it was. And we knew how to fix it. And nothing else emerged that really was as serious as that. And we proved the concept, more or less. People, on the other hand, was a different subject. We were — yeah I don't know that we were fixable. We all went quite nuts, I will say.And the day I came out of Biosphere 2, I was thrilled I was going to see all my family and my friends. For two years I'd been seeing people through the glass. And everybody ran up to me. And I recoiled. They stank! People stink! We stink of hairspray and underarm deodorant, and all kinds of stuff. Now we had stuff inside Biosphere to keep ourselves clean, but nothing with perfume. And boy do we stink out here. Not only that, but I lost touch of where my food came from. I had been growing all my own food. I had no idea what was in my food, where it came from. I didn't even recognize half the names in most of the food that I was eating. In fact, I would stand for hours in the aisles of shops, reading all the names on all of the things. People must have thought I was nuts. It was really quite astonishing. And I slowly lost track of where I was in this big biosphere, in this big biosphere that we all live in. In Biosphere 2 I totally understood that I had a huge impact on my biosphere, everyday, and it had an impact on me, very viscerally, very literally.So I went about my business: Paragon Space Development Corporation, a little firm I started with people while I was in the Biosphere, because I had nothing else to do. And one of the things we did was try to figure out: how small can you make these biospheres, and what can you do with them? And so we sent one onto the Mir Space Station. We had one on the shuttle and one on the International Space Station, for 16 months, where we managed to produce the first organisms to go through complete multiple life cycles in space — really pushing the envelope of understanding how malleable our life systems are.And I'm also proud to announce that you're getting a sneak preview — on Friday we're going to announce that we're actually forming a team to develop a system to grow plants on the Moon, which is going to be pretty fun. And the legacy of that is a system that we were designing: an entirely sealed system to grow plants to grow on Mars. And part of that is that we had to model very rapid circulation of CO2 and oxygen and water through this plant system.As a result of that modeling I ended up in all places, in Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea, formerly part of Ethiopia, is one of those places that is astonishingly beautiful, incredibly stark, and I have no understanding of how people eke out a living there. It is so dry. This is what I saw. But this is also what I saw. I saw a company that had taken seawater and sand, and they were growing a kind of crop that will grow on pure salt water without having to treat it. And it will produce a food crop. In this case it was oilseed. It was astonishing. They were also producing mangroves in a plantation. And the mangroves were providing wood and honey and leaves for the animals, so that they could produce milk and whatnot, like we had in the Biosphere.And all of it was coming from this: shrimp farms. Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. They also pollute their next-door neighbors. So they're all shitting each other's ponds, quite literally. And what this project was doing was taking the effluent of these, and turning them into all of this food. They were literally turning pollution into abundance for a desert people. They had created an industrial ecosystem, of a sense.I was there because I was actually modeling the mangrove portion for a carbon credit program, under the U.N. Kyoto Protocol system. And as I was modeling this mangrove swamp, I was thinking to myself, ""How do you put a box around this?"" When I'm modeling a plant in a box, literally, I know where to draw the boundary. In a mangrove forest like this I have no idea. Well, of course you have to draw the boundary around the whole of the Earth. And understand its interactions with the entire Earth. And put your project in that context.Around the world today we're seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that — whether we intentionally or unintentionally — have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time. This is in fact, this beautiful photograph, is in fact over the Amazon. And here the light green are areas of massive deforestation. And those beautiful wispy clouds are, in fact, fires, human-made fires. We're in the process of transforming from this, to what I would call a biophilic society, one where we learn to nurture society. Now it may not seem like it, but we are. It is happening all across the world, in every kind of walk of life, and every kind of career and industry that you can think of. And I think often times people get lost in that. They go, ""But how can I possibly find my way in that? It's such a huge subject."" And I would say that the small stuff counts. It really does.This is the story of a rake in my backyard. This was my backyard, very early on, when I bought my property. And in Arizona, of course, everybody puts gravel down. And they like to keep everything beautifully raked. And they keep all the leaves away. And on Sunday morning the neighbors leaf blower comes out, and I want to throttle them. It's a certain type of aesthetic. We're very uncomfortable with untidiness. And I threw away my rake. And I let all of the leaves fall from the trees that I have on my property. And over time, essentially what have I been doing? I've been building topsoil. And so now all the birds come in. And I have hawks. And I have an oasis. This is what happens every spring. For six weeks, six to eight weeks, I have this flush of green oasis. This is actually in a riparian area. And all of Tucson could be like this if everybody would just revolt and throw away the rake. The small stuff counts.The Industrial Revolution — and Prometheus — has given us this, the ability to light up the world. It has also given us this, the ability to look at the world from the outside. Now we may not all have another biosphere that we can run to, and compare it to this biosphere. But we can look at the world, and try to understand where we are in its context, and how we choose to interact with it.And if you lose where you are in your biosphere, or are perhaps having a difficulty connecting with where you are in the biosphere, I would say to you, take a deep breath. The yogis had it right. Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. Take a breath now. And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you. Maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here. It also connects us in time. There may be some carbon in your breath from the dinosaurs. There could also be carbon that you are exhaling now that will be in the breath of your great-great-great-grandchildren. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2
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"I want to talk about the transformed media landscape, and what it means for anybody who has a message that they want to get out to anywhere in the world. And I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation.I'll start here. Last November there was a presidential election. You probably read something about it in the papers. And there was some concern that in some parts of the country there might be voter suppression. And so a plan came up to video the vote. And the idea was that individual citizens with phones capable of taking photos or making video would document their polling places, on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques, and would upload this to a central place. And that this would operate as a kind of citizen observation — that citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes, but also to help ensure the sanctity of the vote overall.So this is a pattern that assumes we're all in this together. What matters here isn't technical capital, it's social capital. These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It's when everybody is able to take them for granted. Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together.And so we're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere, and moving from one spot to another. That is a huge transformation. Not to put too fine a point on it, the moment we're living through — the moment our historical generation is living through — is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. Now that's a big claim. I'm going to try to back it up.There are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label ""revolution."" The first one is the famous one, the printing press: movable type, oil-based inks, that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside-down, starting in the middle of the 1400s. Then, a couple of hundred years ago, there was innovation in two-way communication, conversational media: first the telegraph, then the telephone. Slow, text-based conversations, then real-time voice based conversations. Then, about 150 years ago, there was a revolution in recorded media other than print: first photos, then recorded sound, then movies, all encoded onto physical objects. And finally, about 100 years ago, the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air — radio and television. This is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century. This is what those of us of a certain age grew up with, and are used to.But there is a curious asymmetry here. The media that is good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. And the media that's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations. If you want to have a conversation in this world, you have it with one other person. If you want to address a group, you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group, whether you're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press. That was the media landscape as we had it in the twentieth century.And this is what changed. This thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is Bill Cheswick's map of the Internet. He traces the edges of the individual networks and then color codes them. The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one-to-many pattern, the Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern. For the first time, media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations. That's one of the big changes.The second big change is that, as all media gets digitized, the Internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media, meaning that phone calls migrate to the Internet, magazines migrate to the Internet, movies migrate to the Internet. And that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium. Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well.And the third big change is that members of the former audience, as Dan Gilmore calls them, can now also be producers and not consumers. Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and produce. It's as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free; it's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons. That is a huge change in the media landscape we're used to. And it's not just Internet or no Internet. We've had the Internet in its public form for almost 20 years now, and it's still changing as the media becomes more social. It's still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the Internet well.Second story. Last May, China in the Sichuan province had a terrible earthquake, 7.9 magnitude, massive destruction in a wide area, as the Richter Scale has it. And the earthquake was reported as it was happening. People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of buildings. They were taking videos of buildings shaking. They were uploading it to QQ, China's largest Internet service. They were Twittering it. And so as the quake was happening the news was reported. And because of the social connections, Chinese students coming elsewhere, and going to school, or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China — there were people listening all over the world, hearing this news. The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter. Twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to read. The last time China had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened.(Laughter)Now they might have liked to have done that here, rather than seeing these pictures go up online. But they weren't given that choice, because their own citizens beat them to the punch. Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens, rather than from the Xinhua News Agency. And this stuff rippled like wildfire. For a while there the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter, the global short messaging service — nine of the top 10 links were about the quake. People collating information, pointing people to news sources, pointing people to the US geological survey. The 10th one was kittens on a treadmill, but that's the Internet for you.(Laughter)But nine of the 10 in those first hours. And within half a day donation sites were up, and donations were pouring in from all around the world. This was an incredible, coordinated global response. And the Chinese then, in one of their periods of media openness, decided that they were going to let it go, that they were going to let this citizen reporting fly. And then this happened. People began to figure out, in the Sichuan Provence, that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed — because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day — the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those building to be built to less than code. And so they started, the citizen journalists startedreporting that as well. And there was an incredible picture. You may have seen in on the front page of the New York Times. A local official literally prostrated himself in the street, in front of these protesters, in order to get them to go away. Essentially to say, ""We will do anything to placate you, just please stop protesting in public.""But these are people who have been radicalized, because, thanks to the one child policy, they have lost everyone in their next generation. Someone who has seen the death of a single child now has nothing to lose. And so the protest kept going. And finally the Chinese cracked down. That was enough of citizen media. And so they began to arrest the protesters. They began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on.China is probably the most successful manager of Internet censorship in the world, using something that is widely described as the Great Firewall of China. And the Great Firewall of China is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals, it mostly comes in from the outside world, it comes in relatively sparse chunks, and it comes in relatively slowly. And because of those four characteristics they are able to filter it as it comes into the country. But like the Maginot Line, the great firewall of China was facing in the wrong direction for this challenge, because not one of those four things was true in this environment. The media was produced locally. It was produced by amateurs. It was produced quickly. And it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared. And so now the Chinese government, who for a dozen years, has quite successfully filtered the web, is now in the position of having to decide whether to allow or shut down entire services, because the transformation to amateur media is so enormous that they can't deal with it any other way.And in fact that is happening this week. On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen they just, two days ago, announced that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter, because there was no way to filter it other than that. They had to turn the spigot entirely off. Now these changes don't just affect people who want to censor messages. They also affect people who want to send messages,because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole, not just a particular strategy. The classic media problem, from the 20th century is, how does an organization have a message that they want to get out to a group of people distributed at the edges of a network. And here is the twentieth century answer. Bundle up the message. Send the same message to everybody. National message. Targeted individuals. Relatively sparse number of producers. Very expensive to do, so there is not a lot of competition. This is how you reach people. All of that is over.We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. The audience can talk back. And that's a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do.But that's not the really crazy change that we're living in the middle of. The really crazy change is here: it's the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other, the fact that former consumers are now producers, the fact that the audience can talk directly to one another; because there is a lot more amateurs than professionals, and because the size of the network, the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants, meaning that the network, when it grows large, grows very, very large.As recently at last decade, most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals. Those days are over, never to return. It is the green lines now, that are the source of the free content, which brings me to my last story. We saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama campaign.And I don't mean most imaginative use in politics — I mean most imaginative use ever. And one of the things Obama did, was they famously, the Obama campaign did, was they famously put up MyBarackObama.com, myBO.com And millions of citizens rushed in to participate, and to try and figure out how to help. An incredible conversation sprung up there. And then, this time last year, Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on FISA, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He had said, in January, that he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly warrantless spying on American persons. By the summer, in the middle of the general campaign, He said, ""I've thought about the issue more. I've changed my mind. I'm going to vote for this bill."" And many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk.It was Senator Obama when they created it. They changed the name later. ""Please get FISA right."" Within days of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on myBO.com; within weeks of its being created it was the largest group. Obama had to issue a press release. He had to issue a reply. And he said essentially, ""I have considered the issue. I understand where you are coming from. But having considered it all, I'm still going to vote the way I'm going to vote. But I wanted to reach out to you and say, I understand that you disagree with me, and I'm going to take my lumps on this one.""This didn't please anybody. But then a funny thing happened in the conversation. People in that group realized that Obama had never shut them down. Nobody in the Obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join, to deny its existence, to delete it, to take to off the site. They had understood that their role with myBO.com was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters.And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media. Media, the media landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was, as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs, is increasingly slipping away. In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants, in that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups.And the choice we face, I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world, isn't whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in. That's the media environment we've got. The question we all face now is, ""How can we make best use of this media? Even though it means changing the way we've always done it."" Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history
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"My journey to coming here today started in 1974. That's me with the funny gloves. I was 17 and going on a peace walk. What I didn't know though, was most of those people, standing there with me, were Moonies. (Laughter) And within a week I had come to believe that the second coming of Christ had occurred, that it was Sun Myung Moon, and that I had been specially chosen and prepared by God to be his disciple.Now as cool as that sounds, my family was not that thrilled with this. (Laughter) And they tried everything they could to get me out of there. There was an underground railroad of sorts that was going on during those years. Maybe some of you remember it. They were called deprogrammers. And after about five long years my family had me deprogrammed. And I then became a deprogrammer. I started going out on cases. And after about five years of doing this, I was arrested for kidnapping. Most of the cases I went out on were called involuntary. What happened was that the family had to get their loved ones some safe place somehow. And so they took them to some safe place. And we would come in and talk to them, usually for about a week. And so after this happened, I decided it was a good time to turn my back on this work.And about 20 years went by. There was a burning question though that would not leave me. And that was, ""How did this happen to me?"" And in fact, what did happen to my brain? Because something did. And so I decided to write a book, a memoir, about this decade of my life.And toward the end of writing that book there was a documentary that came out. It was on Jonestown. And it had a chilling effect on me. These are the dead in Jonestown. About 900 people died that day, most of them taking their own lives. Women gave poison to their babies, and watched foam come from their mouths as they died.The top picture is a group of Moonies that have been blessed by their messiah. Their mates were chosen for them. The bottom picture is Hitler youth. This is the leg of a suicide bomber. The thing I had to admit to myself, with great repulsion, was that I get it. I understand how this could happen. I understand how someone's brain, how someone's mind can come to the place where it makes sense — in fact it would be wrong, when your brain is working like that — not to try to save the world through genocide.And so what is this? How does this work? And how I've come to view what happened to me is a viral, memetic infection. For those of you who aren't familiar with memetics, a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus, much like a virus. The way a virus works is — it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system.In 1974, I was young, I was naive, and I was pretty lost in my world. I was really idealistic. These easy ideas to complex questions are very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable. What happens is that circular logic takes over. ""Moon is one with God. God is going to fix all the problems in the world. All I have to do is humbly follow. Because God is going to stop war and hunger — all these things I wanted to do — all I have to do is humbly follow. Because after all, God is [working through] the messiah. He's going to fix all this."" It becomes impenetrable. And the most dangerous part of this is that is creates ""us"" and ""them,"" ""right"" and ""wrong,"" ""good"" and ""evil."" And it makes anything possible, makes anything rationalizable.And the thing is, though, if you looked at my brain during those years in the Moonies — neuroscience is expanding exponentially, as Ray Kurzweil said yesterday. Science is expanding. We're beginning to look inside the brain. And so if you looked at my brain, or any brain that's infected with a viral memetic infection like this, and compared it to anyone in this room, or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis, I am convinced it would look very, very different.And that, strange as it may sound, gives me hope. And the reason that gives me hope is that the first thing is to admit that we have a problem. But it's a human problem. It's a scientific problem, if you will. It happens in the human brain. There is no evil force out there to get us. And so this is something that, through research and education, I believe that we can solve. And so the first step is to realize that we can do this together, and that there is no ""us"" and ""them."" Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ex_moonie_diane_benscoter_how_cults_think
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"A talk about surgical robots is also a talk about surgery. And while I've tried to make my images not too graphic, keep in mind that surgeons have a different relationship with blood than normal people do, because, after all, what a surgeon does to a patient, if it were done without consent, would be a felony. Surgeons are the tailors, the plumbers, the carpenters — some would say the butchers — of the medical world: cutting, reshaping, reforming, bypassing, fixing. But you need to talk about surgical instruments and the evolution of surgical technology together.So in order to give you some kind of a perspective of where we are right now with surgical robots, and where we're going to be going in the future, I want to give you a little bit of perspective of how we got to this point, how we even came to believe that surgery was OK, that this was something that was possible to do, that this kind of cutting and reforming was OK.So, a little bit of perspective — about 10,000 years of perspective. This is a trephinated skull. And trephination is simply just cutting a hole in the skull. And many, many hundreds of skulls like this have been found in archaeological sites all over the world, dating back five to 10 thousand years. Five to 10 thousand years! Now imagine this. You are a healer in a Stone Age village. And you have some guy that you're not quite sure what's wrong with him — Oliver Sacks is going to be born way in the future. He's got some seizure disorder. And you don't understand this. But you think to yourself, ""I'm not quite sure what's wrong with this guy. But maybe if I cut a hole in his head I can fix it."" (Laughter) Now that is surgical thinking.Now we've got the dawn of interventional surgery here. What is astonishing about this is, even though we don't know really how much of this was intended to be religious, or how much of it was intended to be therapeutic, what we can tell is that these patients lived! Judging by the healing on the borders of these holes, they lived days, months, years following trephination. And so what we are seeing is evidence of a refined technique that was being handed down over thousands and thousands of years, all over the world. This arose independently at sites everywhere that had no communication to one another. We really are seeing the dawn of interventional surgery.Now we can fast forward many thousands of years into the Bronze Age and beyond. And we see new refined tools coming out. But surgeons in these eras are a little bit more conservative than their bold, trephinating ancestors. These guys confined their surgery to fairly superficial injuries. And surgeons were tradesmen, rather than physicians. This persisted all the way into and through the Renaissance.That may have saved the writers, but it didn't really save the surgeons terribly much. They were still a mistrusted lot. Surgeons still had a bit of a PR problem, because the landscape was dominated by the itinerant barber surgeon. These were folks that traveled from village to village, town to town, doing surgery sort of as a form of performance art. Because we were in the age before anesthesia, the agony of the patient is really as much of the public spectacle as the surgery itself. One of the most famous of these guys, Frere Jacques, shown here doing a lithotomy — which is the removal of the bladder stone, one of the most invasive surgeries they did at the time — had to take less than two minutes. You had to have quite a flair for the dramatic, and be really, really quick.And so here you see him doing a lithotomy. And he is credited with doing over 4,000 of these public surgeries, wandering around in Europe, which is an astonishing number, when you think that surgery must have been a last resort. I mean who would put themselves through that? Until anesthesia, the absence of sensation. With the demonstration of the Morton Ether Inhaler at the Mass. General in 1847, a whole new era of surgery was ushered in. Anesthesia gave surgeons the freedom to operate. Anesthesia gave them the freedom to experiment, to start to delve deeper into the body. This was truly a revolution in surgery.But there was a pretty big problem with this. After these very long, painstaking operations, attempting to cure things they'd never been able to touch before, the patients died. They died of massive infection. Surgery didn't hurt anymore, but it killed you pretty quickly. And infection would continue to claim a majority of surgical patients until the next big revolution in surgery, which was aseptic technique.Joseph Lister was aepsis's, or sterility's, biggest advocate, to a very very skeptical bunch of surgeons. But eventually they did come around. The Mayo brothers came out to visit Lister in Europe. And they came back to their American clinic and they said they had learned it was as important to wash your hands before doing surgery as it was to wash up afterwards. (Laughter) Something so simple. And yet, operative mortality dropped profoundly.These surgeries were actually now being effective. With the patient insensitive to pain, and a sterile operating field all bets were off, the sky was the limit. You could now start doing surgery everywhere, on the gut, on the liver, on the heart, on the brain. Transplantation: you could take an organ out of one person, you could put it in another person, and it would work. Surgeons didn't have a problem with respectability anymore; they had become gods.The era of the ""big surgeon, big incision"" had arrived, but at quite a cost, because they are saving lives, but not necessarily quality of life, because healthy people don't usually need surgery, and unhealthy people have a very hard time recovering from a cut like that. The question had to be asked, ""Well, can we do these same surgeries but through little incisions?"" Laparoscopy is doing this kind of surgery: surgery with long instruments through small incisions. And it really changed the landscape of surgery. Some of the tools for this had been around for a hundred years, but it had only been used as a diagnostic technique until the 1980s, when there was changes in camera technologies and things like that, that allowed this to be done for real operations.So what you see — this is now the first surgical image — as we're coming down the tube, this is a new entry into the body. It looks very different from what you're expecting surgery to look like. We bring instruments in, from two separate cuts in the side, and then you can start manipulating tissue. Within 10 years of the first gallbladder surgeries being done laparoscopically, a majority of gallbladder surgeries were being done laparoscopically — truly a pretty big revolution.But there were casualties of this revolution. These techniques were a lot harder to learn than people had anticipated. The learning curve was very long. And during that learning curve the complications went quite a bit higher. Surgeons had to give up their 3D vision. They had to give up their wrists. They had to give up intuitive motion in the instruments. This surgeon has over 3,000 hours of laparoscopic experience. Now this is a particularly frustrating placement of the needle. But this is hard. And one of the reasons why it is so hard is because the external ergonomics are terrible. You've got these long instruments, and you're working off your centerline. And the instruments are essentially working backwards.So what you need to do, to take the capability of your hand, and put it on the other side of that small incision, is you need to put a wrist on that instrument. And so — I get to talk about robots — the da Vinci robot put just that wrist on the other side of that incision. And so here you're seeing the operation of this wrist. And now, in contrast to the laparoscopy, you can precisely place the needle in your instruments, and you can pass it all the way through and follow it in a trajectory. And the reason why this becomes so much easier is — you can see on the bottom — the hands are making the motions, and the instruments are following those motions exactly. Now, what you put between those instruments and those hands, is a large, fairly complicated robot. The surgeon is sitting at a console, and controlling the robot with these controllers. And the robot is moving these instruments around, and powering them, down inside the body. You have a 3D camera, so you get a 3D view.And since this was introduced in 1999, a lot of these robots have been out and being used for surgical procedures like a prostatectomy, which is a prostate deep in the pelvis, and it requires fine dissection and delicate manipulation to be able to get a good surgical outcome. You can also sew bypass vessels directly onto a beating heart without cracking the chest. This is all done in between the ribs. And you can go inside the heart itself and repair the valves from the inside. You've got these technologies — thank you — (Applause) And so you might say, ""Wow this is really cool! So, smartypants, why isn't all surgery being done this way?"" And there are some reasons, some good reasons. And cost is one of them.I talked about the large, complicated robot. With all its bells and whistles, one of those robots will cost you about as much as a solid gold surgeon. More useful than a solid gold surgeon, but, still, it's a fairly big capital investment. But once you've got it, your procedure costs do come down. But there are other barriers. So something like a prostatectomy — the prostate is small, and it's in one spot, and you can set your robot up very precisely to work in that one spot. And so it's perfect for something like that. And in fact if you, or anyone you know, had their prostate taken out in the last couple of years, chances are it was done with one of these systems. But if you need to reach more places than just one, you need to move the robot. And you need to put some new incisions in there. And you need to re-set it up. And then you need to add some more ports, and more. And the problem is it gets time-consuming, and cumbersome.And for that reason there are many surgeries that just aren't being done with the da Vinci. So we had to ask the question, ""Well how do we fix that?"" What if we could change it so that we didn't have to re-set up each time we wanted to move somewhere different? What if we could bring all the instruments in together in one place? How would that change the capabilities of the surgeon? And how would that change the experience for the patient? Now, to do that, we need to be able to bring a camera and instruments in together through one small tube, like that tube you saw in the laparoscopy video. Or, not so coincidentally, like a tube like this.So what's going to come out of that tube is the debut of this new technology, this new robot that is going to be able to reach anywhere. Ready? So here it comes. This is the camera, and three instruments. And as you see it come out, in order to actually be able to do anything useful, it can't all stay clustered up like this. It has to be able to come off of the centerline and then be able to work back toward that centerline. He's a cheeky little devil. But what this lets you do is gives you that all-important traction, and counter-traction, so that you can dissect, so that you can sew, so that you can do all the things that you need to do, all the surgical tasks. But it's all coming in through one incision. It's not so simple. But it's worth it for the freedom that this gives us as we're going around. For the patient, however, it's transparent. This is all they're going to see.It's very exciting to think where we get to go with this. We get to write the script of the next revolution in surgery. As we take these capabilities, and we get to go to the next places, we get to decide what our new surgeries are going to be. And I think to really get the rest of the way in that revolution, we need to not just take our hands in in new ways, we also need to take our eyes in in new ways. We need to see beyond the surface. We need to be able to guide what we're cutting in a much better way.This is a cancer surgery. One of the problems with this, even for surgeons who've been looking at this a lot, is you can't see the cancer, especially when it's hidden below the surface. And so what we're starting to do is we're starting to inject specially designed markers into the bloodstream that will target the cancer. It will go, bind to the cancer. And we can make those markers glow. And we can take special cameras, and we can look at it. Now we know where we need to cut, even when it's below the surface. We can take these markers and we can inject them in a tumor site. And we can follow where they flow out from that tumor site, so we can see the first places where that cancer might travel. We can inject these dyes into the bloodstream, so that when we do a new vessel and we bypass a blockage on the heart, we can see if we actually made the connection, before we close that patient back up again — something that we haven't been able to do without radiation before. We can light up tumors like this kidney tumor, so that you can exactly see where the boundary is between the kidney tumor and the kidney you want to leave behind, or the liver tumor and the liver you want to leave behind.And we don't even need to confine ourselves to this macro vision. We have flexible microscopic probes that we can bring down into the body. And we can look at cells directly. I'm looking at nerves here. So these are nerves you see, down on the bottom, and the microscope probe that's being held by the robotic hand, up at the top. So this is all very prototypey at this point. But you care about nerves, if you are a surgical patient. Because they let you keep continence, bladder control, and sexual function after surgery, all of which is generally fairly important to the patient.So, with the combination of these technologies we can reach it all, and we can see it all. We can heal the disease. And we can leave the patient whole and intact and functional afterwards. Now, I've talked about the patient as if the patient is, somehow, someone abstract outside this room. And that is not the case. Many of you, all of you maybe, will at some point, or have already, faced a diagnosis of cancer, or heart disease, or some organ dysfunction that's going to buy you a date with a surgeon. And when you get to that point — I mean, these maladies don't care how many books you've written, how many companies you've started, that Nobel Prize you have yet to win, how much time you planned to spend with your children. These maladies come for us all.And the prospect I'm offering you, of an easier surgery ... is that going to make that diagnosis any less terrifying? I'm not sure I really even want it to. Because facing your own mortality causes a re-evaluation of priorities, and a realignment of what your goals are in life, unlike anything else. And I would never want to deprive you of that epiphany. What I want instead, is for you to be whole, intact, and functional enough to go out and save the world, after you've decided you need to do it. And that is my vision for your future. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_surgery_s_past_present_and_robotic_future
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"I want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time, in a very short time.Video: All right, start the clock please. 30 seconds studio. Keep it quiet please. Settle down. It's about time. End sequence. Take one. 15 seconds studio. 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two ...Philip Zimbardo: Let's tune into the conversation of the principals in Adam's temptation. ""Come on Adam, don't be so wishy-washy. Take a bite."" ""I did."" ""One bite, Adam. Don't abandon Eve."" ""I don't know, guys. I don't want to get in trouble."" ""Okay. One bite. What the hell?"" (Laughter)Life is temptation. It's all about yielding, resisting, yes, no, now, later, impulsive, reflective, present focus and future focus. Promised virtues fall prey to the passions of the moment.Of teenage girls who pledged sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage — thank you George Bush — the majority, 60 percent, yielded to sexual temptations within one year. And most of them did so without using birth control. So much for promises.Now lets tempt four-year-olds, giving them a treat. They can have one marshmallow now. But if they wait until the experimenter comes back, they can have two. Of course it pays, if you like marshmallows, to wait. What happens is two-thirds of the kids give in to temptation. They cannot wait. The others, of course, wait. They resist the temptation. They delay the now for later.Walter Mischel, my colleague at Stanford, went back 14 years later, to try to discover what was different about those kids. There were enormous differences between kids who resisted and kids who yielded, in many ways. The kids who resisted scored 250 points higher on the SAT. That's enormous. That's like a whole set of different IQ points. They didn't get in as much trouble. They were better students. They were self-confident and determined. And the key for me today, the key for you, is, they were future-focused rather than present-focused.So what is time perspective? That's what I'm going to talk about today. Time perspective is the study of how individuals, all of us, divide the flow of your human experience into time zones or time categories. And you do it automatically and non-consciously. They vary between cultures, between nations, between individuals, between social classes, between education levels. And the problem is that they can become biased, because you learn to over-use some of them and under-use the others.What determines any decision you make? You make a decision on which you're going to base an action. For some people it's only about what is in the immediate situation, what other people are doing and what you're feeling. And those people, when they make their decisions in that format — we're going to call them ""present-oriented,"" because their focus is what is now.For others, the present is irrelevant. It's always about ""What is this situation like that I've experienced in the past?"" So that their decisions are based on past memories. And we're going to call those people ""past-oriented,"" because they focus on what was.For others it's not the past, it's not the present, it's only about the future. Their focus is always about anticipated consequences. Cost-benefit analysis. We're going to call them ""future-oriented."" Their focus is on what will be.So, time paradox, I want to argue, the paradox of time perspective, is something that influences every decision you make, you're totally unaware of. Namely, the extent to which you have one of these biased time perspectives. Well there is actually six of them. There are two ways to be present-oriented. There is two ways to be past-oriented, two ways to be future. You can focus on past-positive, or past-negative. You can be present-hedonistic, namely you focus on the joys of life, or present-fatalist — it doesn't matter, your life is controlled. You can be future-oriented, setting goals. Or you can be transcendental future: namely, life begins after death. Developing the mental flexibility to shift time perspectives fluidly depending on the demands of the situation, that's what you've got to learn to do.So, very quickly, what is the optimal time profile? High on past-positive. Moderately high on future. And moderate on present-hedonism. And always low on past-negative and present-fatalism. So the optimal temporal mix is what you get from the past — past-positive gives you roots. You connect your family, identity and your self. What you get from the future is wings to soar to new destinations, new challenges. What you get from the present hedonism is the energy, the energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality.Any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives. What do futures sacrifice for success? They sacrifice family time. They sacrifice friend time. They sacrifice fun time. They sacrifice personal indulgence. They sacrifice hobbies. And they sacrifice sleep. So it affects their health. And they live for work, achievement and control. I'm sure that resonates with some of the TEDsters. (Laughter)And it resonated for me. I grew up as a poor kid in the South Bronx ghetto, a Sicilian family — everyone lived in the past and present. I'm here as a future-oriented person who went over the top, who did all these sacrifices because teachers intervened, and made me future oriented. Told me don't eat that marshmallow, because if you wait you're going to get two of them, until I learned to balance out. I've added present-hedonism, I've added a focus on the past-positive, so, at 76 years old, I am more energetic than ever, more productive, and I'm happier than I have ever been.I just want to say that we are applying this to many world problems: changing the drop-out rates of school kids, combating addictions, enhancing teen health, curing vets' PTSD with time metaphors — getting miracle cures — promoting sustainability and conservation, reducing physical rehabilitation where there is a 50-percent drop out rate, altering appeals to suicidal terrorists, and modifying family conflicts as time-zone clashes.So I want to end by saying: many of life's puzzles can be solved by understanding your time perspective and that of others. And the idea is so simple, so obvious, but I think the consequences are really profound. Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time
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"I'm going to talk about post-conflict recovery and how we might do post-conflict recovery better. The record on post-conflict recovery is not very impressive. 40 percent of all post-conflict situations, historically, have reverted back to conflict within a decade. In fact, they've accounted for half of all civil wars. Why has the record been so poor? Well, the conventional approach to post-conflict situations has rested on, on kind of, three principles.The first principle is: it's the politics that matters. So, the first thing that is prioritized is politics. Try and build a political settlement first. And then the second step is to say, ""The situation is admittedly dangerous, but only for a short time."" So get peacekeepers there, but get them home as soon as possible. So, short-term peacekeepers. And thirdly, what is the exit strategy for the peacekeepers? It's an election. That will produce a legitimate and accountable government.So that's the conventional approach. I think that approach denies reality. We see that there is no quick fix. There's certainly no quick security fix. I've tried to look at the risks of reversion to conflict, during our post-conflict decade. And the risks stay high throughout the decade. And they stay high regardless of the political innovations. Does an election produce an accountable and legitimate government? What an election produces is a winner and a loser. And the loser is unreconciled. The reality is that we need to reverse the sequence. It's not the politics first; it's actually the politics last. The politics become easier as the decade progresses if you're building on a foundation of security and economic development — the rebuilding of prosperity.Why does the politics get easier? And why is it so difficult initially? Because after years of stagnation and decline, the mentality of politics is that it's a zero-sum game. If the reality is stagnation, I can only go up if you go down. And that doesn't produce a productive politics. And so the mentality has to shift from zero-sum to positive-sum before you can get a productive politics. You can only get positive, that mental shift, if the reality is that prosperity is being built. And in order to build prosperity, we need security in place. So that is what you get when you face reality. But the objective of facing reality is to change reality.And so now let me suggest two complimentary approaches to changing the reality of the situations. The first is to recognize the interdependence of three key actors, who are different actors, and at the moment are uncoordinated. The first actor is the Security Council. The Security Council typically has the responsibility for providing the peacekeepers who build the security. And that needs to be recognized, first of all, that peacekeeping works. It is a cost-effective approach. It does increase security. But it needs to be done long-term. It needs to be a decade-long approach, rather than just a couple of years. That's one actor, the Security Council.The second actor, different cast of guys, is the donors. The donors provide post-conflict aid. Typically in the past, the donors have been interested in the first couple of years, and then they got bored. They moved on to some other situation. Post-conflict economic recovery is a slow process. There are no quick processes in economics except decline. You can do that quite fast. (Laughter) So the donors have to stick with this situation for at least a decade.And then the third key actor is the post-conflict government. And there are two key things it's got to do. One is it's got to do economic reform, not fuss about the political constitution. It's got to reform economic policy. Why? Because during conflict economic policy typically deteriorates. Governments snatch short-term opportunities and, by the end of the conflict, the chickens have come home to roost.So this legacy of conflict is really bad economic policy. So there is a reform agenda, and there is an inclusion agenda. The inclusion agenda doesn't come from elections. Elections produce a loser, who is then excluded. So the inclusion agenda means genuinely bringing people inside the tent. So those three actors. And they are interdependent over a long term. If the Security Council doesn't commit to security over the course of a decade, you don't get the reassurance which produces private investment. If you don't get the policy reform and the aid, you don't get the economic recovery, which is the true exit strategy for the peacekeepers. So we should recognize that interdependence, by formal, mutual commitments. The United Nations actually has a language for these mutual commitments, the recognition of mutual commitments; it's called the language of compact. And so we need a post-conflict compact. The United Nations even has an agency which could broker these compacts; it's called the Peace Building Commission.It would be ideal to have a standard set of norms where, when we got to a post-conflict situation, there was an expectation of these mutual commitments from the three parties. So that's idea one: recognize interdependence. And now let me turn to the second approach, which is complimentary. And that is to focus on a few critical objectives. Typical post-conflict situation is a zoo of different actors with different priorities. And indeed, unfortunately, if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda, because in these situations, needs are everywhere, but the capacity to implement change is very limited. So we have to be disciplined and focus on things that are critical.And I want to suggest that in the typical post-conflict situation three things are critical. One is jobs. One is improvements in basic services — especially health, which is a disaster during conflict. So jobs, health, and clean government. Those are the three critical priorities. So I'm going to talk a little about each of them.Jobs. What is a distinctive approach to generating jobs in post-conflict situations? And why are jobs so important? Jobs for whom? Especially jobs for young men. In post-conflict situations, the reason that they so often revert to conflict, is not because elderly women get upset. It's because young men get upset. And why are they upset? Because they have nothing to do. And so we need a process of generating jobs, for ordinary young men, fast. Now, that is difficult. Governments in post-conflict situation often respond by puffing up the civil service. That is not a good idea. It's not sustainable. In fact, you're building a long-term liability by inflating civil service. But getting the private sector to expand is also difficult, because any activity which is open to international trade is basically going to be uncompetitive in a post-conflict situation. These are not environments where you can build export manufacturing.There's one sector which isn't exposed to international trade, and which can generate a lot of jobs, and which is, in any case, a sensible sector to expand, post-conflict, and that is the construction sector. The construction sector has a vital role, obviously, in reconstruction. But typically that sector has withered away during conflict. During conflict people are doing destruction. There isn't any construction going on. And so the sector shrivels away. And then when you try and expand it, because it's shriveled away, you encounter a lot of bottlenecks. Basically, prices soar and crooked politicians then milk the rents from the sector, but it doesn't generate any jobs. And so the policy priority is to break the bottlenecks in expanding the construction sector.What might the bottlenecks be? Just think what you have to do successfully to build a structure, using a lot of labor. First you need access to land. Often the legal system is broken down so you can't even get access to land. Secondly you need skills, the mundane skills of the construction sector. In post-conflict situations we don't just need Doctors Without Borders, we need Bricklayers Without Borders, to rebuild the skill set. We need firms. The firms have gone away. So we need to encourage the growth of local firms. If we do that, we not only get the jobs, we get the improvements in public infrastructure, the restoration of public infrastructure.Let me turn from jobs to the second objective, which is improving basic social services. And to date, there has been a sort of a schizophrenia in the donor community, as to how to build basic services in post-conflict sectors. On the one hand it pays lip service to the idea of rebuild an effective state in the image of Scandinavia in the 1950s. Lets develop line ministries of this, that, and the other, that deliver these services. And it's schizophrenic because in their hearts donors know that's not a realistic agenda, and so what they also do is the total bypass: just fund NGOs.Neither of those approaches is sensible. And so what I'd suggest is what I call Independent Service Authorities. It's to split the functions of a monopoly line ministry up into three. The planning function and policy function stays with the ministry; the delivery of services on the ground, you should use whatever works — churches, NGOs, local communities, whatever works. And in between, there should be a public agency, the Independent Service Authority, which channels public money, and especially donor money, to the retail providers. So the NGOs become part of a public government system, rather than independent of it.One advantage of that is that you can allocate money coherently. Another is, you can make NGOs accountable. You can use yardstick competition, so they have to compete against each other for the resources. The good NGOs, like Oxfam, are very keen on this idea. They want to have the discipline and accountability. So that's a way to get basic services scaled up. And because the government would be funding it, it would be co-branding these services. So they wouldn't be provided thanks to the United States government and some NGO. They would be co-branded as being done by the post-conflict government, in the country. So, jobs, basic services, finally, clean government.Clean means follow their money. The typical post-conflict government is so short of money that it needs our money just to be on a life-support system. You can't get the basic functions of the state done unless we put money into the core budget of these countries. But, if we put money into the core budget, we know that there aren't the budget systems with integrity that mean that money will be well spent. And if all we do is put money in and close our eyes it's not just that the money is wasted — that's the least of the problems — it's that the money is captured. It's captured by the crooks who are at the heart of the political problem. And so inadvertently we empower the people who are the problem.So building clean government means, yes, provide money to the budget, but also provide a lot of scrutiny, which means a lot of technical assistance that follows the money. Paddy Ashdown, who was the grand high nabob of Bosnia to the United Nations, in his book about his experience, he said, ""I realize what I needed was accountants without borders, to follow that money."" So that's the — let me wrap up, this is the package.What's the goal? If we follow this, what would we hope to achieve? That after 10 years, the focus on the construction sector would have produced both jobs and, hence, security — because young people would have jobs — and it would have reconstructed the infrastructure. So that's the focus on the construction sector. The focus on the basic service delivery through these independent service authorities would have rescued basic services from their catastrophic levels, and it would have given ordinary people the sense that the government was doing something useful. The emphasis on clean government would have gradually squeezed out the political crooks, because there wouldn't be any money in taking part in the politics. And so gradually the selection, the composition of politicians, would shift from the crooked to the honest. Where would that leave us? Gradually it would shift from a politics of plunder to a politics of hope. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_collier_s_new_rules_for_rebuilding_a_broken_nation
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"I want to help you re-perceive what philanthropy is, what it could be, and what your relationship to it is. And in doing that, I want to offer you a vision, an imagined future, if you will, of how, as the poet Seamus Heaney has put it, ""Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.""I want to start with these word pairs here. We all know which side of these we'd like to be on. When philanthropy was reinvented a century ago, when the foundation form was actually invented, they didn't think of themselves on the wrong side of these either. In fact they would never have thought of themselves as closed and set in their ways, as slow to respond to new challenges, as small and risk-averse. And in fact they weren't. They were reinventing charity in those times, what Rockefeller called ""the business of benevolence."" But by the end of the 20th century, a new generation of critics and reformers had come to see philanthropy just this way.The thing to watch for as a global philanthropy industry comes about — and that's exactly what is happening — is how the aspiration is to flip these old assumptions, for philanthropy to become open and big and fast and connected, in service of the long term. This entrepreneurial energy is emerging from many quarters. And it's driven and propelled forward by new leaders, like many of the people here, by new tools, like the ones we've seen here, and by new pressures.I've been following this change for quite a while now, and participating in it. This report is our main public report. What it tells is the story of how today actually could be as historic as 100 years ago. What I want to do is share some of the coolest things that are going on with you. And as I do that, I'm not going to dwell much on the very large philanthropy that everybody already knows about — the Gates or the Soros or the Google. Instead, what I want to do is talk about the philanthropy of all of us: the democratization of philanthropy. This is a moment in history when the average person has more power than at any time.What I'm going to do is look at five categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy. The first is mass collaboration, represented here by Wikipedia. Now, this may surprise you. But remember, philanthropy is about giving of time and talent, not just money. Clay Shirky, that great chronicler of everything networked, has captured the assumption that this challenges in such a beautiful way. He said, ""We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.""Watch, this spring, for Paul Hawken's new book — Author and entrepreneur many of you may know about. The book is called ""Blessed Unrest."" And when it comes out, a series of wiki sites under the label WISER, are going to launch at the same time. WISER stands for World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility. WISER sets out to document, link and empower what Paul calls the largest movement, and fastest-growing movement in human history: humanity's collective immune response to today's threats. Now, all of these big things for love — experiments — aren't going to take off. But the ones that do are going to be the biggest, the most open, the fastest, the most connected form of philanthropy in human history.Second category is online philanthropy marketplaces. This is, of course, to philanthropy what eBay and Amazon are to commerce. Think of it as peer-to-peer philanthropy. And this challenges yet another assumption, which is that organized philanthropy is only for the very wealthy. Take a look, if you haven't, at DonorsChoose. Omidyar Network has made a big investment in DonorsChoose. It's one of the best known of these new marketplaces where a donor can go straight into a classroom and connect with what a teacher says they need. Take a look at Changing the Present, started by a TEDster, next time you need a wedding present or a holiday present. GiveIndia is for a whole country. And it goes on and on.The third category is represented by Warren Buffet, which I call aggregated giving. It's not just that Warren Buffet was so amazingly generous in that historic act last summer. It's that he challenged another assumption, that every giver should have his or her own fund or foundation. There are now, today, so many new funds that are aggregating giving and investing, bringing together people around a common goal, to think bigger. One of the best known is Acumen Fund, led by Jacqueline Novogratz, a TEDster who got a big boost here at TED. But there are many others: New Profit in Cambridge, New School's Venture Fund in Silicon Valley, Venture Philanthropy Partners in Washington, Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. Take a look at these. These funds are to philanthropy what venture capital, private equity, and eventually mutual funds are to investing, but with a twist — because often a community forms around these funds, as it has at Acumen and other places.Now, imagine for a second these first three types of experiments: mass collaboration, online marketplaces, aggregated giving. And understand how they help us re-perceive what organized philanthropy is. It's not about foundations necessarily; it's about the rest of us. And imagine the mash-up, if you will, of these things, in the future, when these things come together in the experiments of the future — imagine that somebody puts up, say, 100 million dollars for an inspiring goal — there were 21 gifts of 100 million dollars or more in the US last year, not out of the question — but only puts it up if it's matched by millions of small gifts from around the globe, thereby engaging lots of people, and building visibility and engaging people in the goal that's stated.I'm going to look quickly at the fourth and fifth categories, which are innovation, competitions and social investing. They're betting a visible competition, a prize, can attract talent and money to some of the most difficult issues, and thereby speed the solution. This tackles yet another assumption, that the giver and the organization is at the center, as opposed to putting the problem at the center. You can look to these innovators to help us especially with things that require technological or scientific solution.That leaves the final category, social investing, which is really, anyway, the biggest of them all, represented here by Xigi.net. And this, of course, tackles the biggest assumption of all, that business is business, and philanthropy is the vehicle of people who want to create change in the world. Xigi is a new community site that's built by the community, linking and mapping this new social capital market. It lists already 1,000 entities that are offering debt and equity for social enterprise. So we can look to these innovators to help us remember that if we can leverage even a small amount of the capital that seeks a return, the good that can be driven could be astonishing.Now, what's really interesting here is that we're not thinking our way into a new way of acting; we're acting our way into a new way of thinking. Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don't yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected, and, let us also hope, long. We have got to realize that it is going to take a long time to do these things. If we don't develop the stamina to stick with things — whatever it is you pick, stick with it — all of this stuff is just going to be, you know, a fad.But I'm really hopeful. And I'm hopeful because it's not only philanthropy that's reorganizing itself, it's also whole other portions of the social sector, and of business, that are busy challenging ""business as usual."" And everywhere I go, including here at TED, I feel that there is a new moral hunger that is growing. What we're seeing is people really wrestling to describe what is this new thing that's happening. Words like ""philanthrocapitalism,"" and ""natural capitalism,"" and ""philanthroentrepreneur,"" and ""venture philanthropy."" We don't have a language for it yet. Whatever we call it, it's new, it's beginning, and I think it's gong to quite significant.And that's where my imagined future comes in, which I am going to call the social singularity. Many of you will realize that I'm ripping a bit off of the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge's notion of a technological singularity, where a number of trends accelerate and converge and come together to create, really, a shockingly new reality. It may be that the social singularity ahead is the one that we fear the most: a convergence of catastrophes, of environmental degradation, of weapons of mass destruction, of pandemics, of poverty. That's because our ability to confront the problems that we face has not kept pace with our ability to create them. And as we've heard here, it is no exaggeration to say that we hold the future of our civilization in our hands as never before.The question is, is there a positive social singularity? Is there a frontier for us of how we live together? Our future doesn't have to be imagined. We can create a future where hope and history rhyme. But we have a problem. Our experience to date, both individually and collectively, hasn't prepared us for what we're going to need to do, or who we're going to need to be. We are going to need a new generation of citizen leaders willing to commit ourselves to growing and changing and learning as rapidly as possible. That's why I have one last thing I want to show you.This is a photograph taken about 100 years ago of my grandfather and great-grandfather. This is a newspaper publisher and a banker. And they were great community leaders. And, yes, they were great philanthropists. I keep this photograph close by to me — it's in my office — because I've always felt a mystical connection to these two men, both of whom I never knew. And so, in their honor, I want to offer you this blank slide. And I want you to imagine that this a photograph of you. And I want you to think about the community that you want to be part of creating. Whatever that means to you. And I want you to imagine that it's 100 years from now, and your grandchild, or great-grandchild, or niece or nephew or god-child, is looking at this photograph of you. What is the story you most want for them to tell? Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/katherine_fulton_you_are_the_future_of_philanthropy
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"A month ago today I stood there: 90 degrees south, the top of the bottom of the world, the Geographic South Pole. And I stood there beside two very good friends of mine, Richard Weber and Kevin Vallely. Together we had just broken the world speed record for a trek to the South Pole. It took us 33 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes to get there. We shaved five days off the previous best time. And in the process, I became the first person in history to make the entire 650-mile journey, from Hercules Inlet to South Pole, solely on feet, without skis.Now, many of you are probably saying, ""Wait a sec, is this tough to do?"" (Laughter) Imagine, if you will, dragging a sled, as you just saw in that video clip, with 170 pounds of gear, in it everything you need to survive on your Antarctic trek. It's going to be 40 below, every single day. You'll be in a massive headwind. And at some point you're going to have to cross these cracks in the ice, these crevasses. Some of them have a very precarious thin footbridge underneath them that could give way at a moment's notice, taking your sled, you, into the abyss, never to be seen again. The punchline to your journey? Look at the horizon. Yes, it's uphill the entire way, because the South Pole is at 10,000 feet, and you're starting at sea level.Our journey did not, in fact, begin at Hercules Inlet, where frozen ocean meets the land of Antarctica. It began a little less than two years ago. A couple of buddies of mine and I had finished a 111-day run across the entire Sahara desert. And while we were there we learned the seriousness of the water crisis in Northern Africa. We also learned that many of the issues facing the people of Northern Africa affected young people the most. I came home to my wife after 111 days of running in the sand, and I said, ""You know, there's no doubt if this bozo can get across the desert, we are capable of doing anything we set our minds to."" But if I'm going to continue doing these adventures, there has to be a reason for me to do them beyond just getting there.Around that time I met an extraordinary human being, Peter Thum, who inspired me with his actions. He's trying to find and solve water issues, the crisis around the world. His dedication inspired me to come up with this expedition: a run to the South Pole where, with an interactive website, I will be able to bring young people, students and teachers from around the world on board the expedition with me, as active members. So we would have a live website, that every single day of the 33 days, we would be blogging, telling stories of, you know, depleted ozone forcing us to cover our faces, or we will burn. Crossing miles and miles of sastrugi — frozen ice snowdrifts that could be hip-deep. I'm telling you, crossing these things with 170-pound sled, that sled may as well have weighed 1,700 pounds, because that's what it felt like.We were blogging to this live website daily to these students that were tracking us as well, about 10-hour trekking days, 15-hour trekking days, sometimes 20 hours of trekking daily to meet our goal. We'd catch cat-naps at 40 below on our sled, incidentally. In turn, students, people from around the world, would ask us questions. Young people would ask the most amazing questions.One of my favorite: It's 40 below, you've got to go to the bathroom, where are you going to go and how are you going to do it? I'm not going to answer that. But I will answer some of the more popular questions.Where do you sleep? We slept in a tent that was very low to the ground, because the winds on Antarctica were so extreme, it would blow anything else away.What do you eat? One of my favorite dishes on expedition: butter and bacon. It's about a million calories. We were burning about 8,500 a day, so we needed it.How many batteries do you carry for all the equipment that you have? Virtually none. All of our equipment, including film equipment, was charged by the sun.And do you get along? I certainly hope so, because at some point or another on this expedition, one of your teammates is going to have to take a very big needle, and put it in an infected blister, and drain it for you.But seriously, seriously, we did get along, because we had a common goal of wanting to inspire these young people. They were our teammates! They were inspiring us. The stories we were hearing got us to the South Pole. The website worked brilliantly as a two-way street of communication. Young people in northern Canada, kids in an elementary school, dragging sleds across the school-yard, pretending they were Richard, Ray and Kevin. Amazing.We arrived at the South Pole. We huddled into that tent, 45 below that day, I'll never forget it. We looked at each other with these looks of disbelief at what we had just completed. And I remember looking at the guys thinking, ""What do I take from this journey?"" You know? Seriously. That I'm this uber-endurance guy?As I stand here today talking to you guys, I've been running for the grand sum of five years. And a year before that I was a pack-a-day smoker, living a very sedentary lifestyle. What I take from this journey, from my journeys, is that, in fact, within every fiber of my belief standing here, I know that we can make the impossible possible. I'm learning this at 40. Can you imagine? Seriously, can you imagine? I'm learning this at 40 years of age. Imagine being 13 years old, hearing those words, and believing it. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_zahab_treks_to_the_south_pole
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"Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country. And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive.The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus. And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid ... that the correct summit — that all of our students, every high school graduate should know — should be statistics: probability and statistics. (Applause)I mean, don't get me wrong. Calculus is an important subject. It's one of the great products of the human mind. The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus. And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college. But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day-to-day lives. On the other hand, statistics — that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis. Right? It's risk. It's reward. It's randomness. It's understanding data.I think if our students, if our high school students — if all of the American citizens — knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today. (Laughter) (Applause) Not only — thank you — not only that ... but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun. I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling. It's analyzing trends. It's predicting the future. Look, the world has changed from analog to digital. And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital, from the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics — the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data — that being probability and statistics.In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means. And I mean it. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education
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"This is the exact moment that I started creating something called Tinkering School.Tinkering School is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects, and be trusted. Trusted not to hurt themselves, and trusted not to hurt others. Tinkering School doesn't follow a set curriculum, and there are no tests. We're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing.When the kids arrive they're confronted with lots of stuff: wood and nails and rope and wheels, and lots of tools, real tools. It's a six-day immersive experience for the kids. And within that context, we can offer the kids time — something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives. Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived, and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around.Nothing ever turns out as planned ... ever. (Laughter) And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry — (Laughter) and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success, or gleeful calamity. We start from doodles and sketches. And sometimes we make real plans. And sometimes we just start building. Building is at the heart of the experience: hands on, deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand. Robin and I, acting as collaborators, keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion. Success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear.When faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities, a really interesting behavior emerges: decoration. (Laughter) Decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation. From these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before.All materials are available for use. Even those mundane, hateful, plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger than anyone imagined. And the things that they build amaze even themselves.Video: Three, two, one, go!Gever Tulley: A rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds.Video: Yay! (Applause)GT: Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action
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"I'll start with my favorite muse, Emily Dickinson, who said that wonder is not knowledge, neither is it ignorance. It's something which is suspended between what we believe we can be, and a tradition we may have forgotten. And I think, when I listen to these incredible people here, I've been so inspired — so many incredible ideas, so many visions. And yet, when I look at the environment outside, you see how resistant architecture is to change. You see how resistant it is to those very ideas. We can think them out. We can create incredible things. And yet, at the end, it's so hard to change a wall. We applaud the well-mannered box. But to create a space that never existed is what interests me; to create something that has never been, a space that we have never entered except in our minds and our spirits. And I think that's really what architecture is based on.Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder. And that wonder is really what has created the greatest cities, the greatest spaces that we have had. And I think that is indeed what architecture is. It is a story. By the way, it is a story that is told through its hard materials. But it is a story of effort and struggle against improbabilities. If you think of the great buildings, of the cathedrals, of the temples, of the pyramids, of pagodas, of cities in India and beyond, you think of how incredible this is that that was realized not by some abstract idea, but by people.So, anything that has been made can be unmade. Anything that has been made can be made better. There it is: the things that I really believe are of important architecture. These are the dimensions that I like to work with. It's something very personal. It's not, perhaps, the dimensions appreciated by art critics or architecture critics or city planners. But I think these are the necessary oxygen for us to live in buildings, to live in cities, to connect ourselves in a social space.And I therefore believe that optimism is what drives architecture forward. It's the only profession where you have to believe in the future. You can be a general, a politician, an economist who is depressed, a musician in a minor key, a painter in dark colors. But architecture is that complete ecstasy that the future can be better. And it is that belief that I think drives society.And today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us. And yet it is in times like this that I think architecture can thrive with big ideas, ideas that are not small. Think of the great cities. Think of the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center. They were built in times that were not really the best of times in a certain way. And yet that energy and power of architecture has driven an entire social and political space that these buildings occupy.So again, I am a believer in the expressive. I have never been a fan of the neutral. I don't like neutrality in life, in anything. I think expression. And it's like espresso coffee, you know, you take the essence of the coffee. That's what expression is. It's been missing in much of the architecture, because we think architecture is the realm of the neutered, the realm of the kind of a state that has no opinion, that has no value. And yet, I believe it is the expression — expression of the city, expression of our own space — that gives meaning to architecture.And, of course, expressive spaces are not mute. Expressive spaces are not spaces that simply confirm what we already know. Expressive spaces may disturb us. And I think that's also part of life. Life is not just an anesthetic to make us smile, but to reach out across the abyss of history, to places we have never been, and would have perhaps been, had we not been so lucky.So again, radical versus conservative. Radical, what does it mean? It's something which is rooted, and something which is rooted deep in a tradition. And I think that is what architecture is, it's radical. It's not just a conservation in formaldehyde of dead forms. It is actually a living connection to the cosmic event that we are part of, and a story that is certainly ongoing. It's not something that has a good ending or a bad ending. It's actually a story in which our acts themselves are pushing the story in a particular way.So again I am a believer in the radical architecture. You know the Soviet architecture of that building is the conservation. It's like the old Las Vegas used to be. It's about conserving emotions, conserving the traditions that have obstructed the mind in moving forward and of course what is radical is to confront them. And I think our architecture is a confrontation with our own senses. Therefore I believe it should not be cool.There is a lot of appreciation for the kind of cool architecture. I've always been an opponent of it. I think emotion is needed. Life without emotion would really not be life. Even the mind is emotional. There is no reason which does not take a position in the ethical sphere, in the philosophical mystery of what we are. So I think emotion is a dimension that is important to introduce into city space, into city life.And of course, we are all about the struggle of emotions. And I think that is what makes the world a wondrous place. And of course, the confrontation of the cool, the unemotional with emotion, is a conversation that I think cities themselves have fostered. I think that is the progress of cities. It's not only the forms of cities, but the fact that they incarnate emotions, not just of those who build them, but of those who live there as well.Inexplicable versus understood. You know, too often we want to understand everything. But architecture is not the language of words. It's a language. But it is not a language that can be reduced to a series of programmatic notes that we can verbally write. Too many buildings that you see outside that are so banal tell you a story, but the story is very short, which says, ""We have no story to tell you."" (Laughter)So the important thing actually, is to introduce the actual architectural dimensions, which might be totally inexplicable in words, because they operate in proportions, in materials, in light. They connect themselves into various sources, into a kind of complex vector matrix that isn't really frontal but is really embedded in the lives, and in the history of a city, and of a people. So again, the notion that a building should just be explicit I think is a false notion, which has reduced architecture into banality.Hand versus the computer. Of course, what would we be without computers? Our whole practice depends on computing. But the computer should not just be the glove of the hand; the hand should really be the driver of the computing power. Because I believe that the hand in all its primitive, in all its physiological obscurity, has a source, though the source is unknown, though we don't have to be mystical about it. We realize that the hand has been given us by forces that are beyond our own autonomy. And I think when I draw drawings which may imitate the computer, but are not computer drawings — drawings that can come from sources that are completely not known, not normal, not seen, yet the hand — and that's what I really, to all of you who are working — how can we make the computer respond to our hand rather than the hand responding to the computer.I think that's part of what the complexity of architecture is. Because certainly we have gotten used to the propaganda that the simple is the good. But I don't believe it. Listening to all of you, the complexity of thought, the complexity of layers of meaning is overwhelming. And I think we shouldn't shy away in architecture, You know, brain surgery, atomic theory, genetics, economics are complex complex fields. There is no reason that architecture should shy away and present this illusory world of the simple. It is complex. Space is complex. Space is something that folds out of itself into completely new worlds. And as wondrous as it is, it cannot be reduced to a kind of simplification that we have often come to be admired. And yet, our lives are complex. Our emotions are complex. Our intellectual desires are complex. So I do believe that architecture as I see it needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess.Of course that means that architecture is political. The political is not an enemy of architecture. The politeama is the city. It's all of us together. And I've always believed that the act of architecture, even a private house, when somebody else will see it, is a political act, because it will be visible to others. And we live in a world which is connecting us more and more. So again, the evasion of that sphere, which has been so endemic to that sort of pure architecture, the autonomous architecture that is just an abstract object has never appealed to me. And I do believe that this interaction with the history, with history that is often very difficult, to grapple with it, to create a position that is beyond our normal expectations and to create a critique.Because architecture is also the asking of questions. It's not only the giving of answers. It's also, just like life, the asking of questions. Therefore it is important that it be real. You know we can simulate almost anything. But the one thing that can be ever simulated is the human heart, the human soul. And architecture is so closely intertwined with it because we are born somewhere and we die somewhere. So the reality of architecture is visceral. It's not intellectual. It's not something that comes to us from books and theories. It's the real that we touch — the door, the window, the threshold, the bed — such prosaic objects. And yet, I try, in every building, to take that virtual world, which is so enigmatic and so rich, and create something in the real world. Create a space for an office, a space of sustainability that really works between that virtuality and yet can be realized as something real.Unexpected versus habitual. What is a habit? It's just a shackle for ourselves. It's a self-induced poison. So the unexpected is always unexpected. You know, it's true, the cathedrals, as unexpected, will always be unexpected. You know Frank Gehry's buildings, they will continue to be unexpected in the future. So not the habitual architecture that instills in us the false sort of stability, but an architecture that is full of tension, an architecture that goes beyond itself to reach a human soul and a human heart, and that breaks out of the shackles of habits.And of course habits are enforced by architecture. When we see the same kind of architecture we become immured in that world of those angles, of those lights, of those materials. We think the world really looks like our buildings. And yet our buildings are pretty much limited by the techniques and wonders that have been part of them.So again, the unexpected which is also the raw. And I often think of the raw and the refined. What is raw? The raw, I would say is the naked experience, untouched by luxury, untouched by expensive materials, untouched by the kind of refinement that we associate with high culture. So the rawness, I think, in space, the fact that sustainability can actually, in the future translate into a raw space, a space that isn't decorated, a space that is not mannered in any source, but a space that might be cool in terms of its temperature, might be refractive to our desires. A space that doesn't always follow us like a dog that has been trained to follow us, but moves ahead into directions of demonstrating other possibilities, other experiences, that have never been part of the vocabulary of architecture.And of course that juxtaposition is of great interest to me because it creates a kind of a spark of new energy. And so I do like something which is pointed, not blunt, something which is focused on reality, something that has the power, through its leverage, to transform even a very small space.So architecture maybe is not so big, like science, but through its focal point it can leverage in an Archimedian way what we think the world is really about. And often it takes just a building to change our experience of what could be done, what has been done, how the world has remained both in between stability and instability. And of course buildings have their shapes. Those shapes are difficult to change. And yet, I do believe that in every social space, in every public space, there is a desire to communicate more than just that blunt thought, that blunt technique, but something that pinpoints, and can point in various directions forward, backward, sideways and around. So that is indeed what is memory. So I believe that my main interest is to memory. Without memory we would be amnesiacs. We would not know which way we were going, and why we are going where we're going.So I've been never interested in the forgettable reuse, rehashing of the same things over and over again, which, of course, get accolades of critics. Critics like the performance to be repeated again and again the same way. But I rather play something completely unheard of, and even with flaws, than repeat the same thing over and over which has been hollowed by its meaninglessness. So again, memory is the city, memory is the world. Without the memory there would be no story to tell. There would be nowhere to turn.The memorable, I think, is really our world, what we think the world is. And it's not only our memory, but those who remember us, which means that architecture is not mute. It's an art of communication. It tells a story. The story can reach into obscure desires. It can reach into sources that are not explicitly available. It can reach into millennia that have been buried, and return them in a just and unexpected equity.So again, I think the notion that the best architecture is silent has never appealed to me. Silence maybe is good for a cemetery but not for a city. Cities should be full of vibrations, full of sound, full of music. And that indeed is the architectural mission that I believe is important, is to create spaces that are vibrant, that are pluralistic, that can transform the most prosaic activities, and raise them to a completely different expectation. Create a shopping center, a swimming place that is more like a museum than like entertainment. And these are our dreams.And of course risk. I think architecture should be risky. You know it costs a lot of money and so on, but yes, it should not play it safe. It should not play it safe, because if it plays it safe it's not moving us in a direction that we want to be. And I think, of course, risk is what underlies the world. World without risk would not be worth living. So yes, I do believe that the risk we take in every building. Risks to create spaces that have never been cantilevered to that extent. Risks of spaces that have never been so dizzying, as they should be, for a pioneering city. Risks that really move architecture even with all its flaws, into a space which is much better that the ever again repeated hollowness of a ready-made thing.And of course that is finally what I believe architecture to be. It's about space. It's not about fashion. It's not about decoration. It's about creating with minimal means something which can not be repeated, cannot be simulated in any other sphere. And there of course is the space that we need to breathe, is the space we need to dream. These are the spaces that are not just luxurious spaces for some of us, but are important for everybody in this world.So again, it's not about the changing fashions, changing theories. It's about carving out a space for trees. It's carving out a space where nature can enter the domestic world of a city. A space where something which has never seen a light of day can enter into the inner workings of a density. And I think that is really the nature of architecture.Now I am a believer in democracy. I don't like beautiful buildings built for totalitarian regimes. Where people cannot speak, cannot vote, cannot do anything. We too often admire those buildings. We think they are beautiful. And yet when I think of the poverty of society which doesn't give freedom to its people, I don't admire those buildings. So democracy, as difficult as it is, I believe in it.And of course, at Ground Zero what else? It's such a complex project. It's emotional. There is so many interests. It's political. There is so many parties to this project. There is so many interests. There's money. There's political power. There are emotions of the victims. And yet, in all its messiness, in all its difficulties, I would not have liked somebody to say, ""This is the tabula rasa, mister architect — do whatever you want."" I think nothing good will come out of that.I think architecture is about consensus. And it is about the dirty word ""compromise."" Compromise is not bad. Compromise, if it's artistic, if it is able to cope with its strategies — and there is my first sketch and the last rendering — it's not that far away. And yet, compromise, consensus, that is what I believe in. And Ground Zero, despite all its difficulties, it's moving forward. It's difficult. 2011, 2013. Freedom Tower, the memorial. And that is where I end.I was inspired when I came here as an immigrant on a ship like millions of others, looking at America from that point of view. This is America. This is liberty. This is what we dream about. Its individuality, demonstrated in the skyline. It's resilience. And finally, it's the freedom that America represents, not just to me, as an immigrant, but to everyone in the world. Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: I've got a question. So have you come to peace with the process that happened at Ground Zero and the loss of the original, incredible design that you came up with?Daniel Libeskind: Look. We have to cure ourselves of the notion that we are authoritarian, that we can determine everything that happens. We have to rely on others, and shape the process in the best way possible. I came from the Bronx. I was taught not to be a loser, not to be somebody who just gives up in a fight. You have to fight for what you believe. You don't always win everything you want to win. But you can steer the process. And I believe that what will be built at Ground Zero will be meaningful, will be inspiring, will tell other generations of the sacrifices, of the meaning of this event. Not just for New York, but for the world.Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Daniel Libeskind.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_libeskind_s_17_words_of_architectural_inspiration
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"Charles and Ray were a team. They were husband and wife. Despite the New York Times' and Vanity Fair's best efforts recently, they're not brothers. (Laughter) And they were a lot of fun. You know, Ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family. (Laughter)We are going to focus on Charles today, because it is Charles' 100th birthday. But when I speak of him, I'm really speaking of both of them as a team. Here's Charles when he was three. So he would be 100 this June. We have a lot of cool celebrations that we're going to do. The thing about their work is that most people come to the door of furniture — I suspect you probably recognize this chair and some of the others I'm going to show you. But we're going to first enter through the door of the Big Top. The whole thing about this, though, is that, you know, why am I showing it? Is it because Charles and Ray made this film? This is actually a training film for a clown college that they had. They also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be. There is a picture of Charles. So let's watch the next clip.The film that we're about to see is a film they made for the Moscow World's Fair.Video: This is the land. It has many contrasts. It is rough and it is flat. In places it is cold. In some it is hot. Too much rain falls on some areas, and not enough on others. But people live on this land. And, as in Russia, they are drawn together into towns and cities. Here is something of the way they live.Eames Demetrios: Now, this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the United States. It was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across. And it was at the height of the Cold War. The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown. And yet, how did it start? You know, commonality, the first line in Charles' narration was, ""The same stars that shine down on Russia shine down on the United States. From the sky, our cities look much the same."" It was that human connection that Charles and Ray always found in everything. And you can imagine, and the thing about it is, that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images because the important thing was to get the gestalt of what the images were about.So that was just a little snip. But the thing about Charles and Ray is that they were always modeling stuff. They were always trying things out. I think one of the things I am passionate about, my grandparents work, I'm passionate about my work, but on top of all that I'm passionate about a holistic vision of design, where design is a life skill, not a professional skill. And you know, those of us with kids often want our kids to take music. I'm no exception. But it's not about them becoming Bono or Tracy Chapman. It's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking.Design is the same way. Design has to become that same way. And this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation. And Charles just checking it out there. So now we're going to go through that door of furniture. This is an unusual installation of airport seating. So what we're going to see is some of the icons of Eames furniture.And the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host, anticipating the needs of the guest. So those are cool images. But these are ones I think are really cool. These are all the prototypes. These are the mistakes, although I don't think mistakes is the right word in design. It's just the things you try out to kind of make it work better. And you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs. Some of them are kind of cool looking. It's like ""Hey, why didn't they try that?"" It was that hands-on iterative process which is so much like vernacular design and folk design in traditional cultures.And I think that's one of the commonalities between modernism and traditional design. I think it may be a real common ground as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years. The other thing that's kind of cool is that you look at this and in the media when people say design, they actually mean style. And I'm really here to talk about design. But you know the object is just a pivot. It's a pivot between a process and a system.And this is a little film I made about the making of the Eames lounge chair. The design process for Charles and Ray never ended in manufacturing. It continued. They were always trying to make thing better and better. Because it's like as Bill Clinton was saying about Rwandan health clinics. It's not enough to create one. You've got to create a system that will work better and better. So I've always liked this prototype picture. Because it just kind of, you know, doesn't get any more basic than that. You try things out.This is a relatively famous chair. Its early version had an ""X"" base. That's what the collectors like. Charles and Ray liked this one because it was better. It worked better: ""H"" base, much more practical. This is something called a splint. And I was very touched by Dean Kamen's work for the military, or for the soldiers, because Charles and Ray designed a molded plywood splint. This is it. And they'd been working on furniture before. But doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process, which was incredibly important to them.I'm trying to show you too much, because I want you to really get a broth of ideas and images. This is a house that Charles and Ray designed. My sister is chasing someone else. It's not me. Although I endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary, it's not me. And then this is a film, on the lower left, that Charles and Ray made. Now look at that plastic chair. The house is 1949. The chair is done in 1949.Charles and Ray, they didn't obsess about style for it's own sake. They didn't say, ""Our style is curves. Let's make the house curvy."" They didn't say, ""Our style is grids. Let's make the chair griddy."" They focused on the need. They tried to solve the design problem. Charles used to say, ""The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem."" It's kind of a brutal quote. This is the earlier design of that house. And again, they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype of a house — architecture, very expensive medium.Here's a film we've been hearing things about. The ""Powers of Ten"" is a film they made. If we watch the next clip, you're going to see the first version of ""Powers of Ten,"" upper left. The familiar one on the lower right. The Eames' film Tops, lower left. And a lamp that Charles designed for a church.Video: Which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies. These form part of a grouping system much as the stars do. They are so many and so varied that from this distance they appear like the stars from Earth.ED: You've seen that film, and what's so great about this whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale. Everybody here is coming at it from a different way. I want to give you one example. E.O. Wilson once told me that when he looked at ants — he loved them, of course, and he wanted to learn more about them — he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale. So here is the tiny creature. And yet simply by changing the frame of reference it reveals so much, including what ended up being the TED Prize.Modeling, they tried modeling all the time. They were always modeling things. And I think part of that is that they never delegated understanding. And I think in our family we were very lucky, because we learned about design backwards. Design was not something other. It was part of the business of life in general. It was part of the quality of life. And here is some family pictures. And you can see why I'm down on style, with a haircut like that. But anyway, (Laughter) I remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the Eames house when I was a kid. So we're going to watch another film.This is a film, the one called Toys. You can see me, I have the same haircut, in the upper right corner. Upper left is a film they did on toy trains. Lower right is a solar do-nothing toy. Lower left is Day-of-the-Dead toys. Charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear. They are often the precursor to bigger things. And these ideas — that train up there, being about the honest use of materials, is totally the same as the honest use of materials in the plywood.And now I'm going to test you. This is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old. So can you read it? Lucia angel, okay, eye.Audience: Saw many trains.ED: Awl, also, good that the leather crafter's guild is here. Also, what is he doing? Row, rowed. Sun? No. Well is there another name for a sunrise? Dawn, very good. Also rode on one. I ...Audience: You had, I hope you had —ED: Now you've been to the website Dogs of Saint Louis in the late, in the mid-1930's, then you'd know that was a Great Dane. So, I hope you had aAudience: Nice time, time —ED: Time at. Citizen Kane, rose —Audience: Rosebud.ED: No, bud. ""D""'s right. At Buddy's —Audience: Party. Love.ED: Okay, good. So, ""I saw many trains and also rode on one. I hope you had a nice time at Buddy's party."" So you guys did pretty good, cool. So my mom and Charles had this great relationship where they'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another. And it's all part of the, you know, they used to say, ""Take your pleasure seriously.""These are some images from a project of mine that's called Kymaerica. It's sort of an alternative universe. It's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape. Those plaques are plaques we've been installing around North America. We're about to do six in the U.K. next week. And they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world. So, of course, since it's bronze it has to be true.Video: Kymaerica with waterfalls, tumbling through our —ED: This is one of the traditional Kymaerican songs. And so we had spelling bees in Paris, Illinois.Video: Your word is N. Carolina.Girl: Y-I-N-D-I-A-N-A.ED: And then Embassy Row is actually a historical site, because in the Kymaerican story this is where the Parisian Diaspora started, where there embassy was. So you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional fictional experience there. And the town has really embraced it. We had the spelling bee in conjunction with the Gwomeus Club.But what is really cool is that we take our visual environment as inevitable. And it's not. Other things could have happened. The Japanese could have discovered Monterey. And we could have been born 100,000 years ago. And there are a lot of fun things. This is the Museum of the Bench. They have trading cards and all sorts of cool things. And you're kind of trapped in the texture of Kymaerica. The Tahatchabe, the great road building culture. A guy named Nobu Naga, the so-called Japanese Columbus. But now I'm going to return you to the real world.And this is Cranbrook. I've got a real treat for you, which is the first film that Charles ever made. So let's watch that. Nobody's ever seen it. Cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here. It's a film about Maya Gretel, a famous ceramicist, and a teacher at Cranbrook. And he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition. Silent. We don't have a track for it yet. Very simple. It's just a start. But it's that learn-by-doing thing. You want to learn how to make films? Go make a movie. And you try something out.But here is what's really great. See that chair there? The orange one? That's the organic chair. 1940. At the same time that Charles was doing that chair, he was doing this film. So my point is that this scope of vision, this holistic vision of design, was with them from the beginning. It wasn't like ""Oh, we made some chairs and got successful. Now we're going to do some movies."" It was always part of how they looked at the world. And that's what's really powerful. And I think that all of us in this room, as you move design forward, it's not about just doing one thing. It's about how you approach problems. And there is this huge, beautiful commonality between design, business and the world. So we're going to do the last clip. And I've shown you some of the images. I just want to focus on sound now. So this is Charles' voice.Charles Eames: In India, those without, and the lowest in caste, eat very often, particularly in southern India, they eat off of a banana leaf. And those a little bit up the scale eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish. And a little bit higher, why they have a glaze on a thing they call a thali. If you're up the scale a little bit more, why, a brass thali. And then things get to be a little questionable. There are things like silver-plated thalis. And there is solid silver thalis. And I suppose some nut has had a gold thali that he's eaten off of.But you can go beyond that. And the guys that have not only means, but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, go to the next step, and they eat off a banana leaf. And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup, that somehow or other, the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there, because I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of. But it is that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf.ED: I've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you. Because that's part of where we've got to get to. And I also want to share this one. ""Beyond the age of information is the age of choices."" And I really think that's where we are. And it's kind of cool for me to be part of a family and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978. And part of why this stuff is important and all the things that we do are important, is that these are the ideas we need. And I think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey. That's what we all need to do. Design is not just for designers anymore. It's a process. It's not style. All that great thinking needs to really get about solving pretty key problems. I really thank you for your time. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_design_genius_of_charles_and_ray_eames
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"Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called Big Viz. And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists. David Sibbet from The Grove, and Kevin Richards, from Autodesk, made 650 sketches that strive to capture the essence of each presenter's ideas. And the consensus was: it really worked. These sketches brought to life the key ideas, the portraits, the magic moments that we all experienced last year.This year we were thinking, ""Why does it work?"" What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations, that create meaning? And this is an important question to ask and answer because the more we understand how the brain creates meaning, the better we can communicate, and, I also think, the better we can think and collaborate together. So this year we're going to visualize how the brain visualizes.Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead, creates a series of mental models through a collection of ""Ah-ha moments,"" or moments of discovery, through various processes.The processing, of course, begins with the eyes. Light enters, hits the back of the retina, and is circulated, most of which is streamed to the very back of the brain, at the primary visual cortex. And primary visual cortex sees just simple geometry, just the simplest of shapes. But it also acts like a kind of relay station that re-radiates and redirects information to many other parts of the brain. As many as 30 other parts that selectively make more sense, create more meaning through the kind of ""Ah-ha"" experiences. We're only going to talk about three of them.So the first one is called the ventral stream. It's on this side of the brain. And this is the part of the brain that will recognize what something is. It's the ""what"" detector. Look at a hand. Look at a remote control. Chair. Book. So that's the part of the brain that is activated when you give a word to something.A second part of the brain is called the dorsal stream. And what it does is locates the object in physical body space. So if you look around the stage here you'll create a kind of mental map of the stage. And if you closed your eyes you'd be able to mentally navigate it. You'd be activating the dorsal stream if you did that.The third part that I'd like to talk about is the limbic system. And this is deep inside of the brain. It's very old, evolutionarily. And it's the part that feels. It's the kind of gut center, where you see an image and you go, ""Oh! I have a strong or emotional reaction to whatever I'm seeing.""So the combination of these processing centers help us make meaning in very different ways. So what can we learn about this? How can we apply this insight? Well, again, the schematic view is that the eye visually interrogates what we look at. The brain processes this in parallel, the figments of information asking a whole bunch of questions to create a unified mental model.So, for example, when you look at this image a good graphic invites the eye to dart around, to selectively create a visual logic. So the act of engaging, and looking at the image creates the meaning. It's the selective logic. Now we've augmented this and spatialized this information. Many of you may remember the magic wall that we built in conjunction with Perceptive Pixel where we quite literally create an infinite wall. And so we can compare and contrast the big ideas. So the act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning. It activates a different part of the brain. And then the limbic system is activated when we see motion, when we see color, and there are primary shapes and pattern detectors that we've heard about before.So the point of this is what? We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation. The lessons for us are three-fold. First, use images to clarify what we're trying to communicate. Secondly make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully. And the third is to augment memory by creating a visual persistence. These are techniques that can be used to be — that can be applied in a wide range of problem solving.So the low-tech version looks like this. And, by the way, this is the way in which we develop and formulate strategy within Autodesk, in some of our organizations and some of our divisions. What we literally do is have the teams draw out the entire strategic plan on one giant wall. And it's very powerful because everyone gets to see everything else. There's always a room, always a place to be able to make sense of all of the components in the strategic plan.This is a time-lapse view of it. You can ask the question, ""Who's the boss?"" You'll be able to figure that out. (Laughter) So the act of collectively and collaboratively building the image transforms the collaboration. No Powerpoint is used in two days. But instead the entire team creates a shared mental model that they can all agree on and move forward on.And this can be enhanced and augmented with some emerging digital technology. And this is our great unveiling for today. And this is an emerging set of technologies that use large-screen displays with intelligent calculation in the background to make the invisible visible. Here what we can do is look at sustainability, quite literally. So a team can actually look at all the key components that heat the structure and make choices and then see the end result that is visualized on this screen.So making images meaningful has three components. The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. Secondly, making them interactive. And then thirdly, making them persistent. And I believe that these three principles can be applied to solving some of the very tough problems that we face in the world today. Thanks so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_on_3_ways_the_brain_creates_meaning
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"I normally teach courses on how to rebuild states after war. But today I've got a personal story to share with you. This is a picture of my family, my four siblings — my mom and I — taken in 1977. And we're actually Cambodians. And this picture is taken in Vietnam. So how did a Cambodian family end up in Vietnam in 1977? Well to explain that, I've got a short video clip to explain the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975 and 1979.Video: April 17th, 1975. The communist Khmer Rouge enters Phnom Penh to liberate their people from the encroaching conflict in Vietnam, and American bombing campaigns. Led by peasant-born Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge evacuates people to the countryside in order to create a rural communist utopia, much like Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution in China. The Khmer Rouge closes the doors to the outside world. But after four years the grim truth seeps out. In a country of only seven million people, one and a half million were murdered by their own leaders, their bodies piled in the mass graves of the killing fields.Sophal Ear: So, notwithstanding the 1970s narration, on April 17th 1975 we lived in Phnom Penh. And my parents were told by the Khmer Rouge to evacuate the city because of impending American bombing for three days. And here is a picture of the Khmer Rouge. They were young soldiers, typically child soldiers. And this is very normal now, of modern day conflict, because they're easy to bring into wars.The reason that they gave about American bombing wasn't all that far off. I mean, from 1965 to 1973 there were more munitions that fell on Cambodia than in all of World War II Japan, including the two nuclear bombs of August 1945. The Khmer Rouge didn't believe in money. So the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cambodia was bombed. But not just that, they actually banned money. I think it's the only precedent in which money has ever been stopped from being used. And we know money is the root of all evil, but it didn't actually stop evil from happening in Cambodia, in fact.My family was moved from Phnom Penh to Pursat province. This is a picture of what Pursat looks like. It's actually a very pretty area of Cambodia, where rice growing takes place. And in fact they were forced to work the fields. So my father and mother ended up in a sort of concentration camp, labor camp.And it was at that time that my mother got word from the commune chief that the Vietnamese were actually asking for their citizens to go back to Vietnam. And she spoke some Vietnamese, as a child having grown up with Vietnamese friends. And she decided, despite the advice of her neighbors, that she would take the chance and claim to be Vietnamese so that we could have a chance to survive, because at this point they're forcing everybody to work. And they're giving about — in a modern-day, caloric-restriction diet, I guess — they're giving porridge, with a few grains of rice.And at about this time actually my father got very sick. And he didn't speak Vietnamese. So he died actually, in January 1976. And it made it possible, in fact, for us to take on this plan. So the Khmer Rouge took us from a place called Pursat to Kaoh Tiev, which is across from the border from Vietnam. And there they had a detention camp where alleged Vietnamese would be tested, language tested.And my mother's Vietnamese was so bad that to make our story more credible, she'd given all the boys and girls new Vietnamese names. But she'd given the boys girls' names, and the girls boys' names. And it wasn't until she met a Vietnamese lady who told her this, and then tutored her for two days intensively, that she was able to go into her exam and — you know, this was a moment of truth. If she fails, we're all headed to the gallows; if she passes, we can leave to Vietnam. And she actually, of course — I'm here, she passes. And we end up in Hong Ngu on the Vietnamese side. And then onwards to Chau Doc. And this is a picture of Hong Ngu, Vietnam today. A pretty idyllic place on the Mekong Delta. But for us it meant freedom. And freedom from persecution from the Khmer Rouge.Last year, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which the U.N. is helping Cambodia take on, started, and I decided that as a matter of record I should file a Civil Complaint with the Tribunal about my father's passing away. And I got word last month that the complaint was officially accepted by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. And it's for me a matter of justice for history, and accountability for the future, because Cambodia remains a pretty lawless place, at times.Five years ago my mother and I went back to Chau Doc. And she was able to return to a place that for her meant freedom, but also fear, because we had just come out of Cambodia. I'm happy, actually, today, to present her. She's here today with us in the audience. Thank you mother.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sophal_ear_escaping_the_khmer_rouge
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"So it was about four years ago, five years ago, I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia, I think it was, with a bag similar to this. And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag. And I was saying, you don't know this molecule really well, but your body knows it extremely well. And I was thinking that your body hated it, at the time, because we are very immune to this. This is called alpha-gal epitope. And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily.Actually our body doesn't hate these. Our body loves these. It eats them. I mean, the cells in our immune system are always hungry. And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things on the cell, it means ""that's food."" Now, I was thinking about that and I said, you know, we've got this immune response to this ridiculous molecule that we don't make, and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff. But I said we can't get rid of it, because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can't get rid of that immunity.And I said, why don't you use that? What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs? I mean I could immediately tap into an immune response that was already there, where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it — it was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on. It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you, like when you're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A., and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car, and then charges you for possession of marijuana. It's like this very fast, very efficient way to get people off the street.(Laughter)So you can take a bacteria that really doesn't make these things at all, and if you could clamp these on it really well you have it taken off the street. And for certain bacteria we don't have really efficient ways to do that anymore. Our antibiotics are running out. And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now — streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant — because we won't be here. But if we are — (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria.So I started working with this thing, with a bunch of collaborators. And trying to attach this to things that were themselves attached to certain specific target zones, bacteria that we don't like. And I feel now like George Bush. It's like ""mission accomplished."" So I might be doing something dumb, just like he was doing at the time. But basically what I was talking about there we've now gotten to work. And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them.This thing can be stuck, like that little green triangle up there, sort of symbolizing this right now. You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer. And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically to a target that you have selected for it. So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like, like Staphylococcus — I don't like it in particular, because it killed a professor friend of mine last year. It doesn't respond to antibiotics. So I don't like it. And I'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it. That will know how to find Staph when it's in your body, and will alert your immune system to go after it.Here's what happened. See that line on the very top with the little dots? That's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned by our scientist friends down in Texas, at Brooks Air Base, with anthrax. And they had also been treated with a drug that we made that would attack anthrax in particular, and direct your immune system to it. You'll notice they all lived, the ones on the top line — that's a 100 percent survival rate. And they actually lived another 14 days, or 28 when we finally killed them, and took them apart and figured out what went wrong. Why did they not die? And they didn't die because they didn't have anthrax anymore. So we did it. Okay?(Applause)Mission accomplished!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kary_mullis_next_gen_cure_for_killer_infections
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"Because of what I'm about to say, I really should establish my green credentials. When I was a small boy, I took my pledge as an American, to save and faithfully defend from waste the natural resources of my country, its air, soil and minerals, its forests, waters and wildlife. And I've stuck to that. Stanford, I majored in ecology and evolution. 1968, I put out the Whole Earth Catalog. Was ""mister natural"" for a while.And then worked for the Jerry Brown administration. The Brown administration, and a bunch of my friends, basically leveled the energy efficiency of California, so it's the same now, 30 years later, even though our economy has gone up 80 percent, per capita. And we are putting out less greenhouse gasses than any other state. California is basically the equivalent of Europe, in this.This year, Whole Earth Catalog has a supplement that I'll preview today, called Whole Earth Discipline. The dominant demographic event of our time is this screamingly rapid urbanization that we have going on. By mid-century we'll be about 80 percent urban, and that's mostly in the developing world, where that's happening. It's interesting, because history is driven to a large degree by the size of cities. The developing world now has all of the biggest cities, and they are developing three times faster than the developed countries, and nine times bigger. It's qualitatively different. They are the drivers of history, as we see by looking at history.1,000 years ago this is what the world looked like. Well we now have a distribution of urban power similar to what we had 1,000 years ago. In other words, the rise of the West, dramatic as it was, is over. The aggregate numbers are absolutely overwhelming: 1.3 million people a week coming to town, decade after decade. What's really going on? Well, what's going on is the villages of the world are emptying out. Subsistence farming is drying up basically.People are following opportunity into town. And this is why. I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and it's because I never lived in one. (Laughter) Because in town — this is the bustling squatter city of Kibera, near Nairobi — they see action. They see opportunity. They see a cash economy that they were not able to participate in back in the subsistence farm.As you go around these places there's plenty of aesthetics. There is plenty going on. They are poor, but they are intensely urban. And they are intensely creative. The aggregate numbers now are that basically squatters, all one billion of them, are building the urban world, which means they're building the world — personally, one by one, family by family, clan by clan, neighborhood by neighborhood. They start flimsy and they get substantial as time goes by. They even build their own infrastructure. Well, steal their own infrastructure, at first. Cable TV, water, the whole gamut, all gets stolen. And then gradually gentrifies.It is not the case that slums undermine prosperity, not the working slums; they help create prosperity. So in a town like Mumbai, which is half slums, it's 1/6th of the GDP of India. Social capital in the slums is at its most urban and dense. These people are valuable as a group. And that's how they work.There is a lot of people who think about all these poor people, ""Oh there's terrible things. We've got to fix their housing."" It used to be, ""Oh we've got to get them phone service."" Now they're showing us how they do their phone service. Famine mostly is a rural event now. There are things they care about. And this is where we can help. And the nations they're in can help. And they are helping each other solve these issues.And you go to a nice dense place like this slum in Mumbai. You look at that lane on the right. And you can ask, ""Okay what's going on there?"" The answer is, ""Everything."" This is better than a mall. It's much denser. It's much more interactive. And the scale is terrific. The main event is, these are not people crushed by poverty. These are people busy getting out of poverty just as fast as they can. They're helping each other do it. They're doing it through an outlaw thing, the informal economy. The informal economy, it's sort of like dark energy in astrophysics: it's not supposed to be there, but it's huge. We don't understand how it works yet, but we have to.Furthermore, people in the informal economy, the gray economy — as time goes by, crime is happening around them. And they can join the criminal world, or they can join the legitimate world. We should be able to make that choice easier for them to get toward the legitimate world, because if we don't, they will go toward the criminal world. There's all kinds of activity.In Dharavi the slum performs not only a lot of services for itself, but it performs services for the city at large. And one of the main events are these ad-hoc schools. Parents pool their money to hire some local teachers to a private, tiny, unofficial school. Education is more possible in the cities, and that changes the world. So you see some interesting, typical, urban things.So one thing slammed up against another, such as in Sao Paulo here. That's what cities do. That's how they create value, is by slamming things together. In this case, supply right next to demand. So the maids and the gardeners and the guards that live in this lively part of town on the left walk to work, in the boring, rich neighborhood.Proximity is amazing. We are learning about how dense proximity can be. Connectivity between the city and the country is what's going to keep the country good, because the city has interesting ways of doing things. This is what makes cities — (Applause) this is what makes cities so green in the developing world.Because people leave the poverty trap, an ecological disaster of subsistence farms, and head to town. And when they're gone the natural environment starts to come back very rapidly. And those who remain in the village can shift over to cash crops to send food to the new growing markets in town. So if you want to save a village, you do it with a good road, or with a good cell phone connection, and ideally some grid electrical power.So the event is: we're a city planet. That just happened. More than half. The numbers are considerable. A billion live in the squatter cities now. Another billion is expected. That's more than a sixth of humanity living a certain way. And that will determine a lot of how we function.Now, for us environmentalists, maybe the greenest thing about the cities is they diffuse the population bomb. People get into town. The immediately have fewer children. They don't even have to get rich yet. Just the opportunity of coming up in the world means they will have fewer, higher-quality kids, and the birthrate goes down radically.Very interesting side effect here, here's a slide from Phillip Longman. Shows what is happening. As we have more and more old people, like me, and fewer and fewer babies. And they are regionally separated. What you're getting is a world which is old folks, and old cities, going around doing things the old way, in the north. And young people in brand new cities they're inventing, doing new things, in the south. Where do you think the action is going to be?Shift of subject. Quickly drop by climate. The climate news, I'm sorry to say, is going to keep getting worse than we think, faster than we think. Climate is a profoundly complex, nonlinear system, full of runaway positive feedbacks, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points. Here's just a few samples. We're going to keep being surprised. And almost all the surprises are going to be bad ones.From your standpoint this means a great increase in climate refugees over the coming decades, and what goes along with that, which is resource wars and chaos wars, as we're seeing in Darfur. That's what drought does. It brings carrying capacity down, and there's not enough carrying capacity to support the people. And then you're in trouble.Shift to the power situation. Baseload electricity is what it takes to run a city, or a city planet. So far there is only three sources of baseload electricity: coal, some gas, nuclear and hydro. Of those, only nuclear and hydro are green. Coal is what is causing the climate problems. And everyone will keep burning it because it's so cheap, until governments make it expensive. Wind and solar can't help, because so far we don't have a way to store that energy.So with hydro maxed out, coal and lose the climate, or nuclear, which is the current operating low-carbon source, and maybe save the climate. And if we can eventually get good solar in space, that also could help. Because remember, this is what drives the prosperity in the developing world in the villages and in the cities.So, between coal and nuclear, compare their waste products. If all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear, the amount of waste that would be added up would fit in a Coke can. Whereas a coal-burning plant, a normal one gigawatt coal plant, burns 80 rail cars of coal a day, each car having 100 tons. And it puts 18 thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the air. So and then when you compare the lifetime emissions of these various energy forms, nuclear is about even with solar and wind, and ahead of solar — oh, I'm sorry — with hydro and wind, and ahead of solar.And does nuclear really compete with coal? Just ask the coal miners in Australia. That's where you see some of the source, not from my fellow environmentalists, but from people who feel threatened by nuclear power. Well the good news is that the developing world, but frankly, the whole world, is busy building, and starting to build, nuclear reactors. This is good for the atmosphere. It's good for their prosperity.I want to point out one interesting thing, which is that environmentalists like the thing we call micropower. It's supposed to be, I don't know, local solar and wind and cogeneration, and good things like that. But frankly micro-reactors which are just now coming on, might serve even better.The Russians, who started this, are building floating reactors, for their new passage, where the ice is melting, north of Russia. And they're selling these floating reactors, only 35 megawatts, to developing countries. Here's the design of an early one from Toshiba. It's interesting, say, to take a 25-megawatt, 25 million watts, and you compare it to the standard big iron of an ordinary Westinghouse or Ariva, which is 1.2, 1.6 billion watts. These things are way smaller. They're much more adaptable. Here's an American design from Lawrence Livermore Lab. Here's another American design that came out of Los Alamos, and is now commercial.Almost all of these are not only small, they are proliferation-proof. They're typically buried in the ground. And the innovation is moving very rapidly. So I think microreactors is going to be important for the future. In terms of proliferation, nuclear energy has done more to dismantle nuclear weapons than any other activity. And that's why 10 percent of the electricity in this room, 20 percent of electricity in this room is probably nuclear. Half of that is coming from dismantled warheads from Russia, soon to be joined by our dismantled warheads. And so I would like to see the GNEP program, that was developed in the Bush administration, go forward aggressively. And I was glad to see that president Obama supported the nuclear fuel bank strategy when he spoke in Prague the other week.One more subject. Genetically engineered food crops, in my view, as a biologist, have no reason to be controversial. My fellow environmentalists, on this subject, have been irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful. Despite their best efforts, genetically engineered crops are the most rapidly successful agricultural innovation in history. They're good for the environment because they enable no-till farming, which leaves the soil in place, getting healthier from year to year — slso keeps less carbon dioxide going from the soil into the atmosphere. They reduce pesticide use. And they increase yield, which allows you to have your agricultural area be smaller, and therefore more wild area is freed up.By the way, this map from 2006 is out of date because it shows Africa still under the thumb of Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth from Europe, and they're finally getting out from under that. And biotech is moving rapidly in Africa, at last.This is a moral issue. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics met on this issue twice in great detail and said it is a moral imperative to make genetically engineered crops readily available. Speaking of imperatives, geoengineering is taboo now, especially in government circles, though I think there was a DARPA meeting on it a couple of weeks ago, but it will be on your plate — not this year but pretty soon, because some harsh realizations are coming along. This is a list of them.Basically the news is going to keep getting more scary. There will be events, like 35,000 people dying of a heat wave, which happened a while back. Like cyclones coming up toward Bangladesh. Like wars over water, such as in the Indus. And as those events keep happening we're going to say, ""Okay, what can we do about that really?""But there's this little problem with geoengineering: what body is going to decide who gets to engineer? How much they do? Where they do it? Because everybody is downstream, downwind of whatever is done. And if we just taboo it completely we could lose civilization. But if we just say ""OK, China, you're worried, you go ahead. You geoengineer your way. We'll geoengineer our way."" That would be considered an act of war by both nations. So this is very interesting diplomacy coming along. I should say, it is more practical than people think.Here is an example that climatologists like a lot, one of the dozens of geoengineering ideas. This one came from the sulfur dioxide from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 — cooled the earth by half a degree. There was so much ice in 1992, the following year, that there was a bumper crop of polar bear cubs who were known as the Pinatubo cubs. To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would cost on the order of a billion dollars a year. That's nothing, compared to all of the other things we may be trying to do about energy.Just to run by another one: this is a plan to brighten the reflectance of ocean clouds, by atomizing seawater; that would brighten the albedo of the whole planet. A nice one, because it can happen lots of little ways in lots of little places, is by copying the ancient Amazon Indians who made good agricultural soil by pyrolizing, smoldering, plant waste, and biochar fixes large quantities of carbon while it's improving the soil.So here is where we are. Nobel Prize-winning climatologist Paul Crutzen calls our geological era the Anthropocene, the human-dominated era. We are stuck with its obligations. In the Whole Earth Catalog, my first words were, ""We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it."" The first words of Whole Earth Discipline are, ""We are as Gods, and have to get good at it."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_proclaims_4_environmental_heresies
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"I have a studio in Berlin — let me cue on here — which is down there in this snow, just last weekend. In the studio we do a lot of experiments. I would consider the studio more like a laboratory. I have occasional meetings with scientists. And I have an academy, a part of the University of Fine Arts in Berlin. We have an annual gathering of people, and that is called Life in Space. Life in Space is really not necessarily about how we do things, but why we do things.Do you mind looking, with me, at that little cross in the center there? So just keep looking. Don't mind me. So you will have a yellow circle, and we will do an after-image experiment. When the circle goes away you will have another color, the complementary color. I am saying something. And your eyes and your brain are saying something back. This whole idea of sharing, the idea of constituting reality by overlapping what I say and what you say — think of a movie.Since two years now, with some stipends from the science ministry in Berlin, I've been working on these films where we produce the film together. I don't necessarily think the film is so interesting. Obviously this is not interesting at all in the sense of the narrative. But nevertheless, what the potential is — and just keep looking there — what the potential is, obviously, is to kind of move the border of who is the author, and who is the receiver. Who is the consumer, if you want, and who has responsibility for what one sees? I think there is a socializing dimension in, kind of, moving that border. Who decides what reality is?This is the Tate Modern in London. The show was, in a sense, about that. It was about a space in which I put half a semi-circular yellow disk. I also put a mirror in the ceiling, and some fog, some haze. And my idea was to make the space tangible. With such a big space, the problem is obviously that there is a discrepancy between what your body can embrace, and what the space, in that sense, is. So here I had the hope that by inserting some natural elements, if you want — some fog — I could make the space tangible.And what happens is that people, they start to see themselves in this space. So look at this. Look at the girl. Of course they have to look through a bloody camera in a museum. Right? That's how museums are working today. But look at her face there, as she's checking out, looking at herself in the mirror. ""Oh! That was my foot there!"" She wasn't really sure whether she was seeing herself or not. And in that whole idea, how do we configure the relationship between our body and the space? How do we reconfigure it? How do we know that being in a space makes a difference?Do you see when I said in the beginning, it's about why, rather than how? The why meant really, ""What consequences does it have when I take a step?"" ""What does it matter?"" ""Does it matter if I am in the world or not?"" ""And does it matter whether the kind of actions I take filter into a sense of responsibility?"" Is art about that? I would say yes. It is obviously about not just about decorating the world, and making it look even better, or even worse, if you ask me.It's obviously also about taking responsibility, like I did here when throwing some green dye in the river in L.A., Stockholm, Norway and Tokyo, among other places. The green dye is not environmentally dangerous, but it obviously looks really rather frightening. And it's on the other side also, I think, quite beautiful, as it somehow shows the turbulence in these kind of downtown areas, in these different places of the world.The ""Green river,"" as a kind of activist idea, not a part of an exhibition, it was really about showing people, in this city, as they walk by, that space has dimensions. A space has time. And the water flows through the city with time. The water has an ability to make the city negotiable, tangible. Negotiable meaning that it makes a difference whether you do something or not. It makes a difference whether you say, ""I'm a part of this city. And if I vote it makes a difference. If I take a stand, it makes a difference.""This whole idea of a city not being a picture is, I think, something that art, in a sense, always was working with. The idea that art can actually evaluate the relationship between what it means to be in a picture, and what it means to be in a space. What is the difference? The difference between thinking and doing. So these are different experiments with that. I won't go into them. Iceland, lower right corner, my favorite place.These kinds of experiments, they filter into architectural models. These are ongoing experiments. One is an experiment I did for BMW, an attempt to make a car. It's made out of ice. A crystalline stackable principle in the center on the top, which I am trying to turn into a concert hall in Iceland. A sort of a run track, or a walk track, on the top of a museum in Denmark, which is made of colored glass, going all around. So the movement with your legs will change the color of your horizon. And two summers ago at the Hyde Park in London, with the Serpentine Gallery: a kind of a temporal pavilion where moving was the only way you could see the pavilion. This summer, in New York: there is one thing about falling water which is very much about the time it takes for water to fall. It's quite simple and fundamental.I've walked a lot in the mountains in Iceland. And as you come to a new valley, as you come to a new landscape, you have a certain view. If you stand still, the landscape doesn't necessarily tell you how big it is. It doesn't really tell you what you're looking at. The moment you start to move, the mountain starts to move. The big mountains far away, they move less. The small mountains in the foreground, they move more. And if you stop again, you wonder, ""Is that a one-hour valley? Or is that a three-hour hike, or is that a whole day I'm looking at?""If you have a waterfall in there, right out there at the horizon; you look at the waterfall and you go, ""Oh, the water is falling really slowly."" And you go, ""My god it's really far away and it's a giant waterfall."" If a waterfall is falling faster, it's a smaller waterfall which is closer by — because the speed of falling water is pretty constant everywhere. And your body somehow knows that. So this means a waterfall is a way of measuring space.Of course being an iconic city like New York, that has had an interest in somehow playing around with the sense of space, you could say that New York wants to seem as big as possible. Adding a measurement to that is interesting: the falling water suddenly gives you a sense of, ""Oh, Brooklyn is exactly this much — the distance between Brooklyn and Manhattan, in this case the lower East River is this big.""So it was not just necessarily about putting nature into the cities. It was also about giving the city a sense of dimension. And why would we want to do that? Because I think it makes a difference whether you have a body that feels a part of a space, rather than having a body which is just in front of a picture. And ""Ha-ha, there is a picture and here is I. And what does it matter?"" Is there a sense of consequences?So if I have a sense of the space, if I feel that the space is tangible, if I feel there is time, if there is a dimension I could call time, I also feel that I can change the space. And suddenly it makes a difference in terms of making space accessible. One could say this is about community, collectivity. It's about being together.How do we create public space? What does the word ""public"" mean today anyway? So, asked in that way, I think it raises great things about parliamentary ideas, democracy, public space, being together, being individual. How do we create an idea which is both tolerant to individuality, and also to collectivity, without polarizing the two into two different opposites? Of course the political agendas in the world has been very obsessed, polarizing the two against each other into different, very normative ideas.I would claim that art and culture, and this is why art and culture are so incredibly interesting in the times we're living in now, have proven that one can create a kind of a space which is both sensitive to individuality and to collectivity. It's very much about this causality, consequences. It's very much about the way we link thinking and doing. So what is between thinking and doing? And right in-between thinking and doing, I would say, there is experience. And experience is not just a kind of entertainment in a non-casual way. Experience is about responsibility. Having an experience is taking part in the world. Taking part in the world is really about sharing responsibility. So art, in that sense, I think holds an incredible relevance in the world in which we're moving into, particularly right now. That's all I have. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/olafur_eliasson_playing_with_space_and_light
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"So I am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation. Now, inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor last year, I didn't bring a human brain, but I did bring a liter of bone marrow. And bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients, most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases.So, a few years ago, I'm doing my transplant fellowship at Stanford. I'm in the operating room. We have Bob here, who is a volunteer donor. We're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia. So actually how do we harvest this bone marrow? Well we have a whole O.R. team, general anesthesia, nurses, and another doctor across from me. Bob's on the table, and we take this sort of small needle, you know, not too big. And the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue, and kind of punch it into the hard bone, into the tuchus — that's a technical term — and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out, each time, with a syringe. And hand it off to the nurse. She squirts it into a tin. Hands it back to me. And we do that again and again. About 200 times usually. And by the end of this my arm is sore, I've got a callus on my hand, let alone Bob, whose rear end looks something more like this, like Swiss cheese.So I'm thinking, you know, this procedure hasn't changed in about 40 years. And there is probably a better way to do this. So I thought of a minimally invasive approach, and a new device that we call the Marrow Miner. This is it. And the Marrow Miner, the way it works is shown here.Our standard see-through patient. Instead of entering the bone dozens of times, we enter just once, into the front of the hip or the back of the hip. And we have a flexible, powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip, as it moves around. So it enables you to very rapidly aspirate, or suck out, rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole. We can do multiple passes through that same entry. No robots required. And, so, very quickly, Bob can just get one puncture, local anesthesia, and do this harvest as an outpatient.So I did a few prototypes. I got a small little grant at Stanford. And played around with this a little bit. And our team members developed this technology. And eventually we got two large animals, and pig studies. And we found, to our surprise, that we not only got bone marrow out, but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner, compared to the normal device. This device was just FDA approved in the last year.Here is a live patient. You can see it following the flexible curves around. There will be two passes here, in the same patient, from the same hole. This was done under local anesthesia, as an outpatient. And we got, again, about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient.So why should you care? Bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells. You all know about embryonic stem cells. They've got great potential but haven't yet entered clinical trials. Adult stem cells are throughout our body, including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow, which we've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years. In the last decade there's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient's other diseases such as heart disease, vascular disease, orthopedics, tissue engineering, even in neurology to treat Parkinson's and diabetes.We've just come out, we're commercializing, this year, generation 2.0 of the Marrow Miner. The hope is that this gets more stem cells out, which translates to better outcomes. It may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live-saving bone marrow donors. It may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells, when you're younger and healthier, to use in the future should you need it. And ultimately — and here's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors, who come together for a reunion each year at Stanford. Hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future. Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kraft_invents_a_better_way_to_harvest_bone_marrow
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"I'm a neuroscientist, a professor at the University of California. And over the past 35 years, I've studied behavior on the basis of everything from genes through neurotransmitters, dopamine, things like that, all the way through circuit analysis. So that's what I normally do. But then, for some reason, I got into something else, just recently. And it all grew out of one of my colleagues asking me to analyze a bunch of brains of psychopathic killers.And so this would be the typical talk I would give. And the question is, ""How do you end up with a psychopathic killer?"" What I mean by psychopathic killer are these people, these types of people. And so some of the brains that I've studied are people you know about. When I get the brains I don't know what I'm looking at. It's blind experiments. They also gave me normal people and everything.So I've looked at about 70 of these. And what came up was a number of pieces of data. So we look at these sorts of things theoretically, on the basis of genetics, and brain damage, and interaction with environment, and exactly how that machine works. So we're interested in exactly where in the brain, and what's the most important part of the brain. So we've been looking at this: the interaction of genes, what's called epigenetic effects, brain damage, and environment, and how these are tied together. And how you end up with a psychopath, and a killer, depends on exactly when the damage occurs. It's really a very precisely timed thing. You get different kinds of psychopaths.So we're going along with this. And here's, just to give you the pattern. The pattern is that those people, every one of them I looked at, who was a murderer, and was a serial killer, had damage to their orbital cortex, which is right above the eyes, the orbits, and also the interior part of the temporal lobe. So there is the pattern that every one of them had, but they all were a little different too. They had other sorts of brain damage. A key thing is that the major violence genes, it's called the MAO-A gene.And there is a variant of this gene that is in the normal population. Some of you have this. And it's sex-linked. It's on the X chromosome. And so in this way you can only get it from your mother. And in fact this is probably why mostly men, boys, are psychopathic killers, or are very aggressive. Because a daughter can get one X from the father, one X from the mother, it's kind of diluted out. But for a son, he can only get the X chromosome from his mother.So this is how it's passed from mother to son. And it has to do with too much brain serotonin during development, which is kind of interesting because serotonin is supposed to make you calm and relaxed. But if you have this gene, in utero your brain is bathed in this, so your whole brain becomes insensitive to serotonin, so it doesn't work later on in life.And I'd given this one talk in Israel, just this past year. And it does have some consequences. Theoretically what this means is that in order to express this gene, in a violent way, very early on, before puberty, you have to be involved in something that is really traumatic — not a little stress, not being spanked or something, but really seeing violence, or being involved in it, in 3D. Right? That's how the mirror neuron system works.And so, if you have that gene, and you see a lot of violence in a certain situation, this is the recipe for disaster, absolute disaster. And what I think might happen in these areas of the world, where we have constant violence, you end up having generations of kids that are seeing all this violence. And if I was a young girl, somewhere in a violent area, you know, a 14 year old, and I want to find a mate, I'd find some tough guy, right, to protect me. Well what the problem is this tends to concentrate these genes. And now the boys and the girls get them. So I think after several generations, and here is the idea, we really have a tinderbox.So that was the idea. But then my mother said to me, ""I hear you've been going around talking about psychopathic killers. And you're talking as if you come from a normal family."" I said, ""What the hell are you talking about?"" She then told me about our own family tree. Now she blamed this on my father's side, of course. This was one of these cases, because she has no violence in her background, but my father did.Well she said, ""There is good news and bad news. One of your cousins is Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell university. But the bad news is that your cousin is also Lizzie Borden.Now I said, ""Okay, so what? We have Lizzie.""She goes, ""No it gets worse, read this book.""And here is this ""Killed Strangely,"" and it's this historical book. And the first murder of a mother by a son was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. Okay, so that's the first case of matricide. And that book is very interesting. Because it's about witch trials, and how people thought back then.But it doesn't stop there. There were seven more men, on my father's side, starting then, Cornells, that were all murderers. Okay, now this gives one a little pause. (Laughter) Because my father himself, and my three uncles, in World War II, were all conscientious objectors, all pussycats. But every once in a while, like Lizzie Borden, like three times a century, and we're kind of due. (Laughter)So the moral of the story is: people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But more likely is this. (Laughter) And we had to take action. Now our kids found out about it. And they all seemed to be OK. But our grandkids are going to be kind of concerned here. So what we've done is I've started to do PET scans of everybody in the family. (Laughter) We started to do PET scans, EEGs and genetic analysis to see where the bad news is. Now the only person — it turns out one son and one daughter, siblings, didn't get along and their patterns are exactly the same. They have the same brain, and the same EEG. And now they are close as can be. But there's gonna be bad news somewhere. And we don't know where it's going to pop up. So that's my talk. (Laughter)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_fallon_exploring_the_mind_of_a_killer
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"Interestingly, Charles Darwin was born a very lightly pigmented man, in a moderately-to-darkly pigmented world. Over the course of his life, Darwin had great privilege. He lived in a fairly wealthy home. He was raised by very supportive and interested parents. And when he was in his 20s he embarked upon a remarkable voyage  on the ship the Beagle. And during the course of that voyage, he saw remarkable things: tremendous diversity of plants and animals, and humans. And the observations that he made on that epic journey were to be eventually distilled into his wonderful book, ""On the Origin of Species,"" published 150 years ago.Now what is so interesting and to some, the extent, what's a bit infamous about ""The Origin of Species,"" is that there is only one line in it about human evolution. ""Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."" It wasn't until much longer, much later, that Darwin actually spoke and wrote about humans.Now in his years of traveling on the Beagle, and from listening to the accounts or explorers and naturalists, he knew that skin color was one of the most important ways in which people varied. And he was somewhat interested in the pattern of skin color. He knew that darkly pigmented peoples were found close to the equator; lightly pigmented peoples, like himself, were found closer to the poles.So what did he make of all this? Well he didn't write anything about it in The Origin of Species. But much later, in 1871, he did have something to say about it. And it was quite curious. He said, ""Of all the differences between the races of men, the color of the skin is the most conspicuous and one of the best marked."" And he went on to say, ""These differences do not coincide with corresponding differences in climate."" So he had traveled all around. He had seen people of different colors living in different places. And yet he rejected the idea that human skin pigmentation was related to the climate.If only Darwin lived today. If only Darwin had NASA. Now, one of the wonderful things that NASA does is it puts up a variety of satellites that detect all sort of interesting things about our environment. And for many decades now there have been a series of TOMS satellites that have collected data about the radiation of the Earth's surface. The TOMS 7 satellite data, shown here, show the annual average ultraviolet radiation at the Earth's surface. Now the really hot pink and red areas are those parts of the world that receive the highest amounts of UV during the year. The incrementally cooler colors — blues, greens, yellows, and finally grays — indicate areas of much lower ultraviolet radiation.What's significant to the story of human skin pigmentation is just how much of the Northern Hemisphere is in these cool gray zones. This has tremendous implications for our understanding of the evolution of human skin pigmentation. And what Darwin could not appreciate, or didn't perhaps want to appreciate at the time, is that there was a fundamental relationship between the intensity of ultraviolet radiation and skin pigmentation. And that skin pigmentation itself was a product of evolution. And so when we look at a map of skin color, and predicted skin color, as we know it today, what we see is a beautiful gradient from the darkest skin pigmentations toward the equator, and the lightest ones toward the poles.What's very, very important here is that the earliest humans evolved in high-UV environments, in equatorial Africa. The earliest members of our lineage, the genus Homo, were darkly pigmented. And we all share this incredible heritage of having originally been darkly pigmented, two million to one and half million years ago.Now what happened in our history? Let's first look at the relationship of ultraviolet radiation to the Earth's surface. In those early days of our evolution, looking at the equator, we were bombarded by high levels of ultraviolet radiation. The UVC, the most energetic type, was occluded by the Earth's atmosphere. But UVB and UVA especially, came in unimpeded. UVB turns out to be incredibly important. It's very destructive, but it also catalyzes the production of vitamin D in the skin, vitamin D being a molecule that we very much need for our strong bones, the health of our immune system, and myriad other important functions in our bodies.So, living at the equator, we got lots and lots of ultraviolet radiation and the melanin — this wonderful, complex, ancient polymer compound in our skin — served as a superb natural sunscreen. This polymer is amazing because it's present in so many different organisms. Melanin, in various forms, has probably been on the Earth a billion years, and has been recruited over and over again by evolution, as often happens. Why change it if it works?So melanin was recruited, in our lineage, and specifically in our earliest ancestors evolving in Africa, to be a natural sunscreen. Where it protected the body against the degradations of ultraviolet radiation, the destruction, or damage to DNA, and the breakdown of a very important molecule called folate, which helps to fuel cell production, and reproduction in the body. So, it's wonderful. We evolved this very protective, wonderful covering of melanin.But then we moved. And humans dispersed — not once, but twice. Major moves, outside of our equatorial homeland, from Africa into other parts of the Old World, and most recently, into the New World. When humans dispersed into these latitudes, what did they face? Conditions were significantly colder, but they were also less intense with respect to the ultraviolet regime.So if we're somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, look at what's happening to the ultraviolet radiation. We're still getting a dose of UVA. But all of the UVB, or nearly all of it, is dissipated through the thickness of the atmosphere. In the winter, when you are skiing in the Alps, you may experience ultraviolet radiation. But it's all UVA, and, significantly, that UVA has no ability to make vitamin D in your skin.So people inhabiting northern hemispheric environments were bereft of the potential to make vitamin D in their skin for most of the year. This had tremendous consequences for the evolution of human skin pigmentation. Because what happened, in order to ensure health and well-being, these lineages of people dispersing into the Northern Hemisphere lost their pigmentation. There was natural selection for the evolution of lightly pigmented skin.Here we begin to see the evolution of the beautiful sepia rainbow that now characterizes all of humanity. Lightly pigmented skin evolved not just once, not just twice, but probably three times. Not just in modern humans, but in one of our distant unrelated ancestors, the Neanderthals. A remarkable, remarkable testament to the power of evolution. Humans have been on the move for a long time. And just in the last 5,000 years, in increasing rates, over increasing distances. Here are just some of the biggest movements of people, voluntary movements, in the last 5,000 years.Look at some of the major latitudinal transgressions: people from high UV areas going to low UV and vice versa. And not all these moves were voluntary. Between 1520 and 1867, 12 million, 500 people were moved from high UV to low UV areas in the transatlantic slave trade. Now this had all sorts of invidious social consequences. But it also had deleterious health consequences to people.So what? We've been on the move. We're so clever we can overcome all of these seeming biological impediments. Well, often we're unaware of the fact that we're living in environments in which our skin is inherently poorly adapted. Some of us with lightly pigmented skin live in high-UV areas. Some of us with darkly pigmented skin live in low-UV areas. These have tremendous consequences for our health.We have to, if we're lightly pigmented, be careful about the problems of skin cancer, and destruction of folate in our bodies, by lots of sun. Epidemiologists and doctors have been very good about telling us about protecting our skin. What they haven't been so good about instructing people is the problem of darkly pigmented people living in high latitude areas, or working inside all the time.Because the problem there is just as severe, but it is more sinister, because vitamin D deficiency, from a lack of ultraviolet B radiation, is a major problem. Vitamin D deficiency creeps up on people, and causes all sorts of health problems to their bones, to their gradual decay of their immune systems, or loss of immune function, and probably some problems with their mood and health, their mental health.So we have, in skin pigmentation, one of these wonderful products of evolution that still has consequences for us today. And the social consequences, as we know, are incredibly profound. We live in a world where we have lightly and darkly pigmented people living next to one another, but often brought into proximity initially as a result of very invidious social interactions. So how can we overcome this? How can we begin to understand it? Evolution helps us.200 years after Darwin's birthday, we have the first moderately pigmented President of the United States. (Applause) How wonderful is that? (Applause) This man is significant for a whole host of reasons. But we need to think about how he compares, in terms of his pigmentation, to other people on Earth. He, as one of many urban admixed populations, is very emblematic of a mixed parentage, of a mixed pigmentation. And he resembles, very closely, people with moderate levels of pigmentation who live in southern Africa, or Southeast Asia.These people have a tremendous potential to tan, to develop more pigment in their skin, as a result of exposure to sun. They also run the risk of vitamin D deficiency, if they have desk jobs, like that guy. So lets all wish for his great health, and his awareness of his own skin pigmentation.Now what is wonderful about the evolution of human skin pigmentation, and the phenomenon of pigmentation, is that it is the demonstration, the evidence, of evolution by natural selection, right on your body. When people ask you, ""What is the evidence for evolution?"" You don't have to think about some exotic examples, or fossils. You just have to look at your skin.Darwin, I think, would have appreciated this, even though he eschewed the importance of climate on the evolution of pigmentation during his own life. I think, were he able to look at the evidence we have today, he would understand it. He would appreciate it. And most of all, he would teach it.You, you can teach it. You can touch it. You can understand it. Take it out of this room. Take your skin color, and celebrate it. Spread the word. You have the evolution of the history of our species, part of it, written in your skin. Understand it. Appreciate it. Celebrate it. Go out. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it wonderful? You are the products of evolution. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nina_jablonski_breaks_the_illusion_of_skin_color
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"Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of Westminster and Whitehall? (Laughter)This is Kim, a nine-year-old Vietnam girl, her back ruined by napalm, and she awakened the conscience of the nation of America to begin to end the Vietnam War. This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world. This is Tiananmen Square. A man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol for the whole world of resistance. This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty. This is Neda, the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only a few weeks ago, and she is now the focus, rightly so, of the YouTube generation.And what do all these pictures and events have in common? What they have in common is what we see unlocks what we cannot see. What we see unlocks the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community. What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others, however distantly. What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents — a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others, and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be rectified.There is a story about Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, going to see Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s. Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said — and he was the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister — ""Isn’t this man a communist?"" The reply was, ""No, Mr President, he’s an anti-communist."" And Ronald Reagan said, ""I don’t care what kind of communist he is!"" (Laughter) Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme, the Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, ""Well, what do you believe in? Do you want to abolish the rich?"" He said, ""No, I want to abolish the poor."" Our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full.I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people who we will never meet, but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication; that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with; and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters. They protested across Britain. They won public opinion over a long period of time. But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. What could they have done with the pictures that they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people’s hearts and minds?Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago. She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house, leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children, an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. But what more could she have done if she’d had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately?Now look at what’s happened in the last 10 years. In Philippines in 2001, President Estrada — a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime, eventually brought it down and it was, of course, called the ""coup de text."" (Laughter) Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert Mugabe a year ago. Because people were able to take mobile phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations, it was impossible for that Premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do. Or take Burma and the monks that were blogging out, a country that nobody knew anything about that was happening, until these blogs told the world that there was a repression, meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi, who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world, had to be listened to. Then take Iran itself, and what people are doing today: following what happened to Neda, people who are preventing the security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran, any by everybody who is blogging, changing their address to Tehran, Iran, and making it difficult for the security services.Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally.That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world. Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites; it’s got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are communicating with each other around the world. 200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery. 150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people, children, had the right to education. 100 years ago in most countries in Europe, the pressure was for the right to vote. 50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare. In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns that have been run by people to change the world.I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago, when he was in London. I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation. I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela — I was very privileged to do so — when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage. (Laughter) And Nelson Mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the time who she was. Amy Winehouse said, ""Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common. My husband too has spent a long time in prison."" (Laughter) Nelson Mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all. He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid. He said that there was a greater challenge ahead, the challenge of poverty, of climate change — global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society.We are the first generation which is in a position to do this. Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally, with the challenges that we now face, most of which are global in their nature. Climate change cannot be solved in one country, but has got to be solved by the world working together. A financial crisis, just as we have seen, could not be solved by America alone or Europe alone; it needed the world to work together. Take the problems of security and terrorism and, equally, the problem of human rights and development: they cannot be solved by Africa alone; they cannot be solved by America or Europe alone. We cannot solve these problems unless we work together.So the great project of our generation, it seems to me, is to build for the first time, out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together, a truly global society, built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future. We have now, and are the first generation with, the power to do this. Take climate change. Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that, when we want to create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem? One of the things that has got to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda.(Applause)One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have got to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well, so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations. Take the financial crisis. If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America. If people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many, many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain, and people's ordinary savings are affected by it, then you cannot rely on a system of national supervision. You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible.So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years. Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world, the poorest part of the world. We do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future, and yet, out of people’s desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done.I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone. This is a country of six and a half million people, but it has only 80 doctors; it has 200 nurses; it has 120 midwives. You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources.Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania, a girl called Miriam. She was 11 years old; her parents had both died from AIDS, her mother and then her father. She was an AIDS orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for. She herself was suffering from HIV; she was suffering from tuberculosis. I met her in a field, she was ragged, she had no shoes. When you looked in her eyes, any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future, but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl’s eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment, I believe that all the work that it had done for the global HIV/AIDS fund would be rewarded by people being prepared to make donations.We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food, but an exporter of food.Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world. Burma is in chains, Zimbabwe is a human tragedy, in Sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent. In the Rwanda Children's Museum, there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the Children's Museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million people died.There is a photograph of a boy called David. Beside that photograph there is the information about his life. It said ""David, age 10."" David: ambition to be a doctor. Favorite sport: football. What did he enjoy most? Making people laugh. How did he die? Tortured to death. Last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death: ""Don't worry. The United Nations are coming."" And we never did.And that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in Rwanda, and we never did.So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world. So my argument today is basically this. We have the means by which we could create a truly global society. The institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors. That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work, but we should not lose the chance in this generation, in this decade in particular, with President Obama in America, with other people working with us around the world, to create global institutions for the environment, and for finance, and for security and for development, that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples, our desire to bind the world together, and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist.It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people used to turn to each other and say about Cicero, ""Great speech."" But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences, people turned to each other and didn’t say ""Great speech."" They said, ""Let's march."" We should be marching towards a global society. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown
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"For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow.I'm mentioning all this — I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew — about our lives, about our careers — comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality.It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs.In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. There's a real problem with snobbery, because sometimes people from outside the U.K. imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon, fixated on country houses and titles. The bad news is that's not true. Snobbery is a global phenomenon; we are a global organization, this is a global phenomenon. What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you, and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, ""What do you do?"" According to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses.(Laughter)Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother.(Laughter)Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. Unfortunately, most people are not our mothers. Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love — not romantic love, though that may be something — but love in general, respect — they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy.And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want; it's the rewards we want. It's a new way of looking at luxury goods. The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think, ""This is somebody who's greedy."" Think, ""This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.""(Laughter)Feel sympathy, rather than contempt.There are other reasons —(Laughter)There are other reasons why it's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before. One of these, and it's paradoxical, because it's linked to something that's rather nice, is the hope we all have for our careers. Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan. We're told, from many sources, that anyone can achieve anything. We've done away with the caste system, we are now in a system where anyone can rise to any position they please. And it's a beautiful idea. Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. There are no strictly defined hierarchies. There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. Envy, it's a real taboo to mention envy, but if there's one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy. And it's linked to the spirit of equality.Let me explain. I think it would be very unusual for anyone here, or anyone watching, to be envious of the Queen of England. Even though she is much richer than any of you are, and she's got a very large house, the reason why we don't envy her is because she's too weird.(Laughter)She's simply too strange. We can't relate to her, she speaks in a funny way, she comes from an odd place. So we can't relate to her, and when you can't relate to somebody, you don't envy them.The closer two people are — in age, in background, in the process of identification — the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. The problem of modern society is it turns the whole world into a school. Everybody's wearing jeans, everybody's the same. And yet, they're not. So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation.It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. But the point is, it doesn't feel that way. It's made to feel, by magazines and other media outlets, that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage — you, too, could start a major thing.(Laughter)The consequences of this problem make themselves felt in bookshops. When you go to a large bookshop and look at the self-help sections, as I sometimes do — if you analyze self-help books produced in the world today, there are basically two kinds. The first kind tells you, ""You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible!"" The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call ""low self-esteem,"" or impolitely call, ""feeling very bad about yourself.""There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback. There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious — about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before. And it's, again, linked to something nice. And that nice thing is called meritocracy.Everybody, all politicians on Left and Right, agree that meritocracy is a great thing, and we should all be trying to make our societies really, really meritocratic. In other words — what is a meritocratic society? A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top, nothing should hold you back. It's a beautiful idea. The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing.You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an ""unfortunate"" — literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a ""loser."" There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. It's no longer the gods, it's us. We're in the driving seat.That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. It leads, in the worst cases — in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim — it leads to increased rates of suicide. There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally — they own their success, but they also own their failure.Is there any relief from some of these pressures that I've been outlining? I think there is. I just want to turn to a few of them. Let's take meritocracy. This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it's a crazy idea, completely crazy. I will support any politician of Left and Right, with any halfway-decent meritocratic idea; I am a meritocrat in that sense. But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic; it's an impossible dream.The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, bad at the bottom, exactly done as it should be, is impossible. There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc. We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should.I'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in ""The City of God,"" where he says, ""It's a sin to judge any man by his post."" In modern English that would mean it's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to, dependent on their business card. It's not the post that should count. According to St. Augustine, only God can really put everybody in their place; he's going to do that on the Day of Judgment, with angels and trumpets, and the skies will open. Insane idea, if you're a secularist person, like me. But something very valuable in that idea, nevertheless.In other words, hold your horses when you're coming to judge people. You don't necessarily know what someone's true value is. That is an unknown part of them, and we shouldn't behave as though it is known. There is another source of solace and comfort for all this. When we think about failing in life, when we think about failure, one of the reasons why we fear failing is not just a loss of income, a loss of status. What we fear is the judgment and ridicule of others. And it exists.The number one organ of ridicule, nowadays, is the newspaper. If you open the newspaper any day of the week, it's full of people who've messed up their lives. They've slept with the wrong person, taken the wrong substance, passed the wrong piece of legislation — whatever it is, and then are fit for ridicule. In other words, they have failed. And they are described as ""losers."" Now, is there any alternative to this? I think the Western tradition shows us one glorious alternative, which is tragedy.Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. A few years ago, I was thinking about this, and I went to ""The Sunday Sport,"" a tabloid newspaper I don't recommend you start reading if you're not familiar with it already.(Laughter)And I went to talk to them about certain of the great tragedies of Western art. I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories, if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon.I mentioned Othello; they'd not heard of it but were fascinated.(Laughter)I asked them to write a headline for the story. They came up with ""Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills Senator's Daughter."" Splashed across the headline. I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. Again, a book they were enchanted to discover. And they wrote ""Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud.""(Laughter)And then my favorite — they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys — my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: ""Sex With Mum Was Blinding.""(Laughter)(Applause)In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got tragedy and tragic art. And I suppose I'm arguing that we should learn a little bit about what's happening in tragic art. It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, though he has lost. And I think that is the message of tragedy to us, and why it's so very, very important, I think.The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is — something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature. Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. My own theory of success — I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word ""success"" might mean.Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can't have it all. You can't. So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding.And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true.And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.So, I'm going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a ""loser,"" with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers?Alain De Botton: Yes, I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic.CA: I mean, do you believe that you can combine your kind of kinder, gentler philosophy of work with a successful economy? Or do you think that you can't, but it doesn't matter that much that we're putting too much emphasis on that?AB: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it's a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option.CA: Alain De Botton.AB: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success
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"Hello! My name is Golan Levin. I'm an artist and an engineer, which is, increasingly, a more common kind of hybrid. But I still fall into this weird crack where people don't seem to understand me. And I was looking around and I found this wonderful picture. It's a letter from ""Artforum"" in 1967 saying ""We can't imagine ever doing a special issue on electronics or computers in art."" And they still haven't. And lest you think that you all, as the digerati, are more enlightened, I went to the Apple iPhone app store the other day. Where's art? I got productivity. I got sports. And somehow the idea that one would want to make art for the iPhone, which my friends and I are doing now, is still not reflected in our understanding of what computers are for.So, from both directions, there is kind of, I think, a lack of understanding about what it could mean to be an artist who uses the materials of his own day, or her own day, which I think artists are obliged to do, is to really explore the expressive potential of the new tools that we have. In my own case, I'm an artist, and I'm really interested in expanding the vocabulary of human action, and basically empowering people through interactivity. I want people to discover themselves as actors, as creative actors, by having interactive experiences.A lot of my work is about trying to get away from this. This a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don't just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical. So this is, as Joy Mountford once said, ""The mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through.""(Laughter)And the thing I'm really trying to do is enabling people to have more rich kinds of interactive experiences. How can we get away from the mouse and use our full bodies as a way of exploring aesthetic experiences, not necessarily utilitarian ones. So I write software. And that's how I do it. And a lot of my experiences resemble mirrors in some way. Because this is, in some sense, the first way, that people discover their own potential as actors, and discover their own agency. By saying ""Who is that person in the mirror? Oh it's actually me.""And so, to give an example, this is a project from last year, which is called the Interstitial Fragment Processor. And it allows people to explore the negative shapes that they create when they're just going about their everyday business. So as people make shapes with their hands or their heads and so forth, or with each other, these shapes literally produce sounds and drop out of thin air — basically taking what's often this, kind of, unseen space, or this undetected space, and making it something real, that people then can appreciate and become creative with. So again, people discover their creative agency in this way. And their own personalities come out in totally unique ways.So in addition to using full-body input, something that I've explored now, for a while, has been the use of the voice, which is an immensely expressive system for us, vocalizing. Song is one of our oldest ways of making ourselves heard and understood. And I came across this fantastic research by Wolfgang Köhler, the so-called father of gestalt psychology, from 1927, who submitted to an audience like yourselves the following two shapes. And he said one of them is called Maluma. And one of them is called Taketa. Which is which? Anyone want to hazard a guess? Maluma is on top. Yeah. So. As he says here, most people answer without any hesitation.So what we're really seeing here is a phenomenon called phonaesthesia, which is a kind of synesthesia that all of you have. And so, whereas Dr. Oliver Sacks has talked about how perhaps one person in a million actually has true synesthesia, where they hear colors or taste shapes, and things like this, phonaesthesia is something we can all experience to some extent. It's about mappings between different perceptual domains, like hardness, sharpness, brightness and darkness, and the phonemes that we're able to speak with.So 70 years on, there's been some research where cognitive psychologists have actually sussed out the extent to which, you know, L, M and B are more associated with shapes that look like this, and P, T and K are perhaps more associated with shapes like this. And here we suddenly begin to have a mapping between curvature that we can exploit numerically, a relative mapping between curvature and shape.So it occurred to me, what happens if we could run these backwards? And thus was born the project called Remark, which is a collaboration with Zachary Lieberman and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. And this is an interactive installation which presents the fiction that speech casts visible shadows. So the idea is you step into a kind of a magic light. And as you do, you see the shadows of your own speech. And they sort of fly away, out of your head. If a computer speech recognition system is able to recognize what you're saying, then it spells it out. And if it isn't then it produces a shape which is very phonaesthetically tightly coupled to the sounds you made. So let's bring up a video of that.(Applause)Thanks. So. And this project here, I was working with the great abstract vocalist, Jaap Blonk. And he is a world expert in performing ""The Ursonate,"" which is a half-an-hour nonsense poem by Kurt Schwitters, written in the 1920s, which is half an hour of very highly patterned nonsense. And it's almost impossible to perform. But Jaap is one of the world experts in performing it. And in this project we've developed a form of intelligent real-time subtitles. So these are our live subtitles, that are being produced by a computer that knows the text of ""The Ursonate"" — fortunately Jaap does too, very well — and it is delivering that text at the same time as Jaap is. So all the text you're going to see is real-time generated by the computer, visualizing what he's doing with his voice. Here you can see the set-up where there is a screen with the subtitles behind him. Okay. So ... (Applause) The full videos are online if you are interested.I got a split reaction to that during the live performance, because there is some people who understand live subtitles are a kind of an oxymoron, because usually there is someone making them afterwards. And then a bunch of people who were like, ""What's the big deal? I see subtitles all the time on television."" You know? They don't imagine the person in the booth, typing it all.So in addition to the full body, and in addition to the voice, another thing that I've been really interested in, most recently, is the use of the eyes, or the gaze, in terms of how people relate to each other. It's a really profound amount of nonverbal information that's communicated with the eyes. And it's one of the most interesting technical challenges that's very currently active in the computer sciences: being able to have a camera that can understand, from a fairly big distance away, how these little tiny balls are actually pointing in one way or another to reveal what you're interested in, and where your attention is directed. So there is a lot of emotional communication that happens there.And so I've been beginning, with a variety of different projects, to understand how people can relate to machines with their eyes. And basically to ask the questions: What if art was aware that we were looking at it? How could it respond, in a way, to acknowledge or subvert the fact that we're looking at it? And what could it do if it could look back at us? And so those are the questions that are happening in the next projects.In the first one which I'm going to show you, called Eyecode, it's a piece of interactive software in which, if we read this little circle, ""the trace left by the looking of the previous observer looks at the trace left by the looking of previous observer."" The idea is that it's an image wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed by different people in an installation. So let me just switch over so we can do the live demo. So let's run this and see if it works.Okay. Ah, there is lots of nice bright video. There is just a little test screen that shows that it's working. And what I'm just going to do is — I'm going to hide that. And you can see here that what it's doing is it's recording my eyes every time I blink. Hello? And I can ... hello ... okay. And no matter where I am, what's really going on here is that it's an eye-tracking system that tries to locate my eyes. And if I get really far away I'm blurry. You know, you're going to have these kind of blurry spots like this that maybe only resemble eyes in a very very abstract way. But if I come up really close and stare directly at the camera on this laptop then you'll see these nice crisp eyes.You can think of it as a way of, sort of, typing, with your eyes. And what you're typing are recordings of your eyes as you're looking at other peoples' eyes. So each person is looking at the looking of everyone else before them. And this exists in larger installations where there are thousands and thousands of eyes that people could be staring at, as you see who's looking at the people looking at the people looking before them. So I'll just add a couple more. Blink. Blink. And you can see, just once again, how it's sort of finding my eyes and doing its best to estimate when it's blinking. Alright. Let's leave that. So that's this kind of recursive observation system. (Applause) Thank you.The last couple pieces I'm going to show are basically in the new realm of robotics — for me, new for me. It's called Opto-Isolator. And I'm going to show a video of the older version of it, which is just a minute long. Okay. In this case, the Opto-Isolator is blinking in response to one's own blinks. So it blinks one second after you do. This is a device which is intended to reduce the phenomenon of gaze down to the simplest possible materials. Just one eye, looking at you, and eliminating everything else about a face, but just to consider gaze in an isolated way as a kind of, as an element. And at the same time, it attempts to engage in what you might call familiar psycho-social gaze behaviors. Like looking away if you look at it too long because it gets shy, or things like that.Okay. So the last project I'm going to show is this new one called Snout. (Laughter) It's an eight-foot snout, with a googly eye. (Laughter) And inside it's got an 800-pound robot arm that I borrowed, (Laughter) from a friend. (Laughter) It helps to have good friends. I'm at Carnegie Mellon; we've got a great Robotics Institute there. I'd like to show you thing called Snout, which is — The idea behind this project is to make a robot that appears as if it's continually surprised to see you. (Laughter) The idea is that basically — if it's constantly like ""Huh? ... Huh?"" That's why its other name is Doubletaker, Taker of Doubles. It's always kind of doing a double take: ""What?"" And the idea is basically, can it look at you and make you feel as if like, ""What? Is it my shoes?"" ""Got something on my hair?"" Here we go. Alright.Checking him out ... For you nerds, here's a little behind-the-scenes. It's got a computer vision system, and it tries to look at the people who are moving around the most. Those are its targets. Up there is the skeleton, which is actually what it's trying to do. It's really about trying to create a novel body language for a new creature. Hollywood does this all the time, of course. But also have the body language communicate something to the person who is looking at it. This language is communicating that it is surprised to see you, and it's interested in looking at you.(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you very much. That's all I've got for today. And I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/golan_levin_ted2009
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"Well, this is 2009. And it's the Bicentenary of Charles Darwin. And all over the world, eminent evolutionists are anxious to celebrate this. And what they're planning to do is to enlighten us on almost every aspect of Darwin and his life, and how he changed our thinking. I say almost every aspect, because there is one aspect of this story which they have thrown no light on. And they seem anxious to skirt around it and step over it and to talk about something else. So I'm going to talk about it. It's the question of, why are we so different from the chimpanzees?We get the geneticists keeping on telling us how extremely closely we are related — hardly any genes of difference, very, very closely related. And yet, when you look at the phenotypes, there's a chimp, there's a man; they're astoundingly different, no resemblance at all. I'm not talking about airy-fairy stuff about culture or psychology, or behavior. I'm talking about ground-base, nitty-gritty, measurable physical differences. They, that one, is hairy and walking on four legs. That one is a naked biped. Why? I mean — (Laughter) if I'm a good Darwinist, I've got to believe there's a reason for that. If we changed so much, something must have happened. What happened?Now 50 years ago, that was a laughably simple question. Everybody knew the answer. They knew what happened. The ancestor of the apes stayed in the trees; our ancestors went out onto the plain. That explained everything. We had to get up on our legs to peer over the tall grass, or to chase after animals, or to free our hands for weapons. And we got so overheated in the chase that we had to take off that fur coat and throw it away. Everybody knew that, for generations.But then, in the '90s, something began to unravel. The paleontologists themselves looked a bit more closely at the accompanying microfauna that lived in the same time and place as the hominids. And they weren't savanna species. And they looked at the herbivores. And they weren't savanna herbivores. And then they were so clever, they found a way to analyze fossilized pollen. Shock, horror. The fossilized pollen was not of savanna vegetation. Some of it even came from lianas, those things that dangle in the middle of the jungle.So we're left with a situation where we know that our earliest ancestors were moving around on four legs in the trees, before the savanna ecosystem even came into existence. This is not something I've made up. It's not a minority theory. Everybody agrees with it.Professor Tobias came over from South Africa and spoke to University College London. He said, ""Everything I've been telling you for the last 20 years, forget about it. It was wrong. We've got to go back to square one and start again."" It made him very unpopular. They didn't want to go back to square one.I mean, it's a terrible thing to happen. You've got this beautiful paradigm. You've believed it through generations. Nobody has questioned it. You've been constructing fanciful things on top of it, relying on it to be as solid as a rock. And now it's whipped away from under you. What do you do? What does a scientist do in that case?Well, we know the answer because Thomas S. Kuhn wrote a seminal treatise about this back in 1962. He said what scientists do when a paradigm fails is, guess what — they carry on as if nothing had happened. (Laughter) If they haven't got a paradigm they can't ask the question. So they say, ""Yes it's wrong, but supposing it was right ..."" (Laughter) And the only other option open to them is to stop asking the questions. So that is what they have done now. That's why you don't hear them talking about it. It's yesterday's question.Some of them have even elevated it into a principle. It's what we ought to be doing. Aaron Filler from Harvard said, ""Isn't it time we stopped talking about selective pressures? I mean, why don't we talk about, well, there's chromosomes, and there's genes. And we just record what we see."" Charles Darwin must be spinning in his grave! He knew all about that kind of science. And he called it hypothesis-free science. And he despised it from the bottom of his heart. And if you're going to say, ""I'm going to stop talking about selective pressures,"" you can take ""The Origin of Species"" and throw it out of the window, for it's about nothing else but selective pressures.And the irony of it is, that this is one occasion of a paradigm collapse where we didn't have to wait for a new paradigm to come up. There was one waiting in the wings. It had been waiting there since 1960 when Alister Hardy, a marine biologist, said, ""I think what happened, perhaps our ancestors had a more aquatic existence for some of the time."" He kept it to himself for 30 years. But then the press got hold of it and all hell broke loose. All his colleagues said, ""This is outrageous. You've exposed us to public ridicule! You must never do that again."" And at that time, it became set in stone: the aquatic theory should be dumped with the UFOs and the yetis, as part of the lunatic fringe of science.Well I don't think that. I think that Hardy had a lot going for him. I'd like to talk about just a handful of what have been called the hallmarks of mankind, the things that made us different from everybody else, and all our relatives. Let's look at our naked skin. It's obvious that most of the things we think about that have lost their body hair, mammals without body hair, are aquatic ones, like the dugong, the walrus, the dolphin, the hippopotamus, the manatee. And a couple of wallowers-in-mud like the babirusa. And you're tempted to think, well perhaps, could that be why we are naked?I suggested it and people said, ""No no no. I mean, look at the elephant. You've forgotten all about the elephant haven't you?"" So back in 1982 I said, ""Well perhaps the elephant had an aquatic ancestor."" Peals of merry laughter! ""That crazy woman. She's off again. She'll say anything won't she?"" But by now, everybody agrees that the elephant had an aquatic ancestor. This has come 'round to be that all those naked pachyderms have aquatic ancestors. The last exception was supposed to be the rhinoceros.Last year in Florida they found extinct ancestor of a rhinoceros and said, ""Seems to have spent most of its time in the water."" So this is a close connection between nakedness and water. As an absolute connection, it only works one way. You can't say all aquatic animals are naked, because look at the sea otter. But you can say that every animal that has become naked has been conditioned by water, in its own lifetime, or the lifetime of its ancestors. I think this is significant. The only exception is the naked Somalian mole-rat, which never puts its nose above the surface of the ground.And take bipedality. Here you can't find anybody to compare it with, because we're the only animal that walks upright on two legs. But you can say this: all the apes and all the monkeys are capable of walking on two legs, if they want to, for a short time. There is only one circumstance in which they always, all of them, walk on two legs, and that is when they are wading through water. Do you think that's significant? David Attenborough thinks it's significant, as the possible beginning of our bipedalism.Look at the fat layer. We have got, under our skin, a layer of fat, all over: nothing in the least like that in any other primate. Why should it be there? Well they do know, that if you look at other aquatic mammals, the fat that in most land mammals is deposited inside the body wall, around the kidneys and the intestines and so on, has started to migrate to the outside, and spread out in a layer inside the skin. In the whale it's complete: no fat inside at all, all in blubber outside. We cannot avoid the suspicion that in our case it's started to happen. We have got skin lined with this layer. It's the only possible explanation of why humans, if they're very unlucky, can become grossly obese, in a way that would be totally impossible for any other primate, physically impossible. Something very odd, matter-of-factly, never explained.The question of why we can speak. We can speak. And the gorilla can't speak. Why? Nothing to do with his teeth or his tongue or his lungs or anything like that — purely has to do with its conscious control of its breath. You can't even train a gorilla to say ""Ah"" on request. The only creatures that have got conscious control of their breath are the diving animals and the diving birds. It was an absolute precondition for our being able to speak.And then again, there is the fact that we are streamlined. Trying to imagine a diver diving into water — hardly makes a splash. Try to imagine a gorilla performing the same maneuver, and you can see that, compared with gorilla, we are halfway to being shaped like a fish. I am trying to suggest that, for 40-odd years, this aquatic idea has been miscategorized as lunatic fringe, and it is not lunatic fringe.And the ironic thing about it is that they are not staving off the aquatic theory to protect a theory of their own, which they've all agreed on, and they love. There is nothing there. They are staving off the aquatic theory to protect a vacuum. (Laughter) (Applause)How do they react when I say these things? One very common reaction I've heard about 20 times is, ""But it was investigated. They conducted a serious investigation of this at the beginning, when Hardy put forward his article."" I don't believe it. For 35 years I've been looking for any evidence of any incident of that kind, and I've concluded that that's one of the urban myths. It's never been done.I ask people sometimes, and they say, ""I like the aquatic theory! Everybody likes the aquatic theory. Of course they don't believe it, but they like it."" Well I say, ""Why do you think it's rubbish?"" They say ""Well ... everybody I talk to says it's rubbish. And they can't all be wrong, can they?"" The answer to that, loud and clear, is, ""Yes! They can all be wrong."" History is strewn with the cases when they've all got it wrong. (Applause) And if you've got a scientific problem like that, you can't solve it by holding a head count, and saying, ""More of us say yes than say no.""(Laughter)Apart from that, some of the heads count more than others. Some of them have come over. There was Professor Tobias. He's come over. Daniel Dennett, he's come over. Sir David Attenborough, he's come over. Anybody else out there? Come on in. The water is lovely.(Applause)And now we've got to look to the future. Ultimately one of three things is going to happen. Either they will go on for the next 40 years, 50 years, 60 years. ""Yeah well we don't talk about that. Let's talk about something interesting."" That would be very sad. The second thing that could happen is that some young genius will arrive, and say, ""I've found it. It was not the savanna, it was not the water, it was this!"" No sign of that happening either. I don't think there is a third option.So the third thing that might happen is a very beautiful thing. If you look back at the early years of the last century, there was a stand-off, a lot of bickering and bad feeling between the believers in Mendel, and the believers in Darwin. It ended with a new synthesis: Darwin's ideas and Mendel's ideas blending together. And I think the same thing will happen here. You'll get a new synthesis. Hardy's ideas and Darwin's ideas will be blended together.And we can move forward from there, and really get somewhere. That would be a beautiful thing. It would be very nice for me if it happened soon. (Laughter) Because I'm older now than George Burns was when he said, ""At my age, I don't even buy green bananas.""(Laughter)So if it's going to come and it's going to happen, what's holding it up? I can tell you that in three words. Academia says no. They decided in 1960, ""That belongs with the UFOs and the yetis."" And it's not easy to change their minds. The professional journals won't touch it with a barge pole. The textbooks don't mention it. The syllabus doesn't mention even the fact that we're naked, let alone look for a reason to it. ""Horizon,"" which takes its cue from the academics, won't touch it with a barge pole. So we never hear the case put for it, except in jocular references to people on the lunatic fringe.I don't know quite where this diktat comes from. Somebody up there is issuing the commandment, ""Thou shalt not believe in the aquatic theory. And if you hope to make progress in this profession, and you do believe it, you'd better keep it to yourself, because it will get in your way.""So I get the impression that some parts of the scientific establishment are morphing into a kind of priesthood. But you know, that makes me feel good, because Richard Dawkins has told us how to treat a priesthood. (Laughter) He says, ""Firstly, you've got to refuse to give it all the excessive awe and reverence it's been trained to receive."" Right. I'll go ahead with that. And secondly, he says, ""You must never be afraid to rock the boat."" I'll go along with that too. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes
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"There's an old saying, ""Just because you can't see something, doesn't mean it's not there."" My work is — it's a reflection of myself. What I wanted to do is to show the world that the little things can be the biggest things. We all seem to think that, you know, if we look down on the ground, there's nothing there. And we use the word ""nothing."" Nothing doesn't exist, because there is always something. My mother told me that, when I was a child, that I should always respect the little things.What made me do this work? I shall go into my story. This all started when I was age five. What made me do it? At school, I will admit this: academically, I couldn't express myself. So I was, more or less, classed as ""nothing."" My world was seen as less. So I decided I didn't really want to be a part of that world. I thought, I need to retreat into something else. So when my mother used to take me to school, she thought I was at school, and I used to do a U-turn, when her back was turned, and run off and hide in the shed at the back of the garden.Now, the one time I was in the shed, and my mother suspected something, thinking I was at school. My mother was like the woman in Tom and Jerry. So you'd just see her feet. (Laughter) So I was hiding in the shed, like that. And all of a sudden ... And then I saw her legs. And then she said — grabbed me like that, because my mother was quite big — and she lifted me up and she says, ""How come you're not at school?"" I told her I couldn't face it because the way the teacher was treating me, ridiculing me, and using me as an example of failure. So I told her. At that age, obviously, I couldn't express it that way, but I told her I didn't feel right. And then she just said, ""You're going back to school tomorrow."" And walked off. And I didn't expect that, because I expected one of these ... But I didn't get it.So I'm sitting there thinking. And as I looked down on the ground, I noticed there was some ants running around. And I went into this little fantasy world. And I thought, ""These ants, are they looking for the queen ant? Or do they need somewhere to live?"" So I thought ""Perhaps, if I made these ants some apartments, they'll move in."" (Laughter) So I did. And how I set about that, I got some splinters of wood. And I sliced the little splinters of wood with a broken shard of glass, constructed this little apartment. Well it looked like a little shanty shed when I'd finished. But I thought, perhaps the ant won't know, it'll probably move in. And so they did. That was a bit crude, at the time. And I made all these little apartments and little merry-go-rounds, seesaws and swings, little ladders. And then I encouraged the ants to come 'round by putting sugar and things like that. And then I sat down and all the ants came along. And all I could hear was ""Is this for us?""(Laughter)And I say, ""Yes, they're all for you."" And they moved in, and decided not to pay me any rent. (Laughter) And from there I was watching this little world. It became part of me.When I discovered that I had this gift, I wanted to experiment with this world that we can't see. So I realized that there was more to life than just everything that we see around us that's huge. So I started to educate myself on this molecular level. And as I got older, I continued. I showed my mother. My mother told me to take it smaller.Now I shall show you something here. And I'll explain. As you can see, that's a pinhead.(Laughter)(Applause)Now that is called the Huf Haus. The gentleman who commissioned me to do this was a gentleman called Peter Huf. And he says to me ""Willard, can you put my house on a pinhead?""(Laughter)So I say, ""How are you going to fit in there?""(Laughter)And then he said to me, ""I don't believe you can do it. Can you really do it?""And I says, ""Well, try me."" And then he said, ""But I don't believe that you can do this."" So I said, ""OK.""So, to cut a long story short, I went home, went underneath the microscope, and I crushed up a piece of glass, crushed it up. And underneath the microscope there were splinters of glass. Some of them were quite jagged. So I was crushing up these pieces of glass, which, as you can see, that's the actual frame of the house. And the actual roof is made up of a fiber, which I found in my sister's old teddy bear. (Laughter) So I got the teddy bear and I said, ""Do you mind if I pull out one of your fibers?"" So I did. And I looked at it beneath the microscope. And some of it was flat. So I decided to slice these up with the tool that I make by — I sharpen the end of a needle into a blade. And then I actually slow down my whole nervous system. And then I work between my heartbeat, I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don't inhale my own work, at the same time. (Laughter) (Applause) Because that has happened to me.(Laughter)So what I did, like I said, come back to the glass. I found these little bits of glass. And I had to make them square. So I'm thinking ""How can I do this?"" So what I did, I got an oilstone. Broke the edge of an oilstone off. And what I did, I took pieces of glass. And I started to rub them. I used a little tweezer which I made from a hair clip. And I built rubber around the end of the tweezer so it wouldn't crush the glass. And then I started rubbing, very very gently, till some of the edges were quite square. And then I constructed it. And how I constructed it, is by making grooves in the top of the pinhead. And then pushing the glass in with its own friction. And as I was doing it, what happened? The instrument that I used turned into a catapult. And it went like this ... And then that was it.(Laughter)Gone. So I'm thinking, ""Mr. Huf isn't going to be very happy when I told him his house has gone to another, into the atmosphere somewhere."" So to cut the story short, I decided that I had to go back and do it. So I found some more. And I decided to, sort of, construct it very, very slowly, holding my breath, working between my heartbeat, and making sure everything is leveled. Because it's such a small sculpture, nothing can go wrong. And I decided to build it up. Then I used fibers out of my jumper, which I held and stretched. And made the beams going around the house. And the actual windows and the balcony had to be sort of constructed. I used a money spider's web to actually attach certain things, which sent me insane. But I managed to do it. And when I finished it, I came back the next day. I noticed that the house was occupied. Have we ever heard of a dust mite? Darren dust mite and his family moved in.(Laughter)So basically I'd completed the house. And there you are.(Applause)(Laughter)Right. As you can see, Bart Simpson is having a little argument. I think they're arguing about the space on the pin. There's not enough room for the two of them. So I didn't think he was going to throw Bart off. I think he was just warning him actually. But this one was made out of a nylon tag out of my shirt. What I did, I plucked the tag out and put it underneath the microscope. I used the needle which has got a slight blade on the end. Can anybody see the blade on the end of that needle?Audience: No.WW: So what I did is the same process where I just kind of hold my breath and just work away very, very slowly, manipulating the plastic, cutting it, because it behaves different. Whenever you work on that level, things behave different. Because it's on this molecular level things change and they act different. And sometimes they turn into little catapults and things go up in the air. And, you know, all different things happen. But I had to make a little barrier, going around it, out of cellophane, to stop it moving. Then static electricity set in. And it went ... And I'm trying to remove it. And the static is interfering with everything. So there is sweat dripping off my head, because I have to carve Homer Simpson like that, in that position. And after I've cut out the shape, then I have to make sure that there is room for Bart's neck.So after I've done the same thing, then I have to paint it. And after I've actually sculpted them, I have to paint them. I experimented with a — I found a dead fly. And I plucked the hair off the fly's head. Decided to make a paintbrush. (Laughter) But I would never do it to a living fly. (Laughter) Because I've heard a fly in pain. And they go ""Meow! Ow!"" Even though they get on our nerves, I would never kill an insect because, ""All creatures great and small"" — there is a hymn that says that. So what I decided to do is to pluck fine hair out of my face. And I looked at it underneath the microscope. That was the paintbrush. And whilst I'm painting I have to be very careful, because the paint starts to turn into little blobs. And it starts to dry very quickly. So I have to be very quick. If I'm not, it will end up looking not like what it's supposed to look like. It could end up looking like Humpty Dumpty or somebody else. So I have to be very very careful.This one took me approximately, I would say, six to seven weeks. My work, rough estimate, sometimes five, six to seven weeks; you can't always anticipate. (Applause) As you can see, that's Charlton Heston brought down to size. (Laughter) He says to me, ""Willard"" — You can see him saying, ""Why me?"" I says, ""I enjoyed your film. That's why."" As you can see, there's an aphid fly there. That's just to show the scale and the actual size of the sculpture. I would say it probably measures ... a quarter of a millimeter. In America they say a period stop. So say if you cut a period stop in half, a full stop, that's about the size of the whole thing. It's made — the chariot is made of gold.And Charlton Heston is made of a floating fiber, which I took out of the air. When the sunlight comes through the window you see these little fibers. And what I normally do is walk 'round a room — (Laughter) — trying to find one. And then I put it underneath the microscope. I remember one time I was doing it, and the window was open. And there was a lady standing by the bus stop. And she saw me walking around like this. (Laughter) And then she looked at me. And then I went ... And then she went, ""Hmm, OK, he's not mad."" Yeah, to actually do this thing — the actual chariot is made of gold. I had a 24-karat gold ring. And I cut off a little flake of gold. And I bent it 'round, and made it into the chariot. And the horse is made from nylon. And the spider's web is for the reins on the horse. To get the symmetrical shape of the horse was very difficult, because I had to get the horse to rear up and look as though it was in some kind of action.When I did this one, a gentleman seen it and said to me, ""There's no way you can do this, you must have used some kind of machine. There's no way a man can do that. It must be a machine."" So I says, ""OK then, if you say it's a machine ..."" (Laughter) (Applause) That one took me approximately six weeks. (Applause)The most famous statue in the world. This one, I would say, was a serious challenge. (Laughter) Because I had to put the torch on the top. That one is, more or less, the same type of process. The bottom of it is carved from a grain of sand, because I wanted to get a bit of the stone effect. I used a microscopic shard of diamond to actually carve the actual base. Well, I can look at this one and I can be very proud of this, because that statue has always sort of kept an image in my head of, you know, the beginning of people coming to America. So it's sort of Ellis Island, and seeing America for the first time. And that's the first thing they saw. So I wanted to have that little image. And this is it. (Laughter)And we all know that is the Hulk. I wanted to create movement in the eye of a needle. Because we know we see needles, but people aren't familiar with the eye of a needle apart from putting a thread through it. So I broke the needle. And made a needle look like the Hulk's broken it. It's — I had to make little holes in the base of the needle, to shove his feet in. So most of my work, I don't use glue. They go in with their own friction. And that's how I managed to do it. As you can see, he's looking at the moment. He's got a little grimace on his face. And his mouth must be probably about three microns. So the eyes are probably about one micron or something.That ship there, that's made from 24-karat gold. And I normally rig it with the web of a money spider. But I had to rig it with strands of glue. Because the web of the spider, it was sending me insane, because I couldn't get the web to move off. And that's 24-karat gold. And it's constructed. I built it. Constructed each plank of gold. And the whole thing is sort of symmetrical. The flag had to be made out of little strands of gold. It's almost like doing a surgical operation to get this thing right. (Applause)As you can see, dressage. (Laughter) It's something I wanted to do just to show how I could get the symmetrical shape. The actual rigging on the reins on the horse are made from the same sort of thing. And that was done with a particle from my shirt. And the pinhead I've made green around there by scraping the particles off a green shirt and then pressed onto the needle. It's very painstaking work, but the best things come in small packages.(Laughter)Bruno Giussani: Willard Wigan!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/willard_wigan_hold_your_breath_for_micro_sculpture
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"Good morning everybody. I'd like to talk about a couple of things today. The first thing is water. Now I see you've all been enjoying the water that's been provided for you here at the conference, over the past couple of days. And I'm sure you'll feel that it's from a safe source.But what if it wasn't? What if it was from a source like this? Then statistics would actually say that half of you would now be suffering with diarrhea. I talked a lot in the past about statistics, and the provision of safe drinking water for all. But they just don't seem to get through. And I think I've worked out why. It's because, using current thinking, the scale of the problem just seems too huge to contemplate solving. So we just switch off: us, governments and aid agencies. Well, today, I'd like to show you that through thinking differently, the problem has been solved. By the way, since I've been speaking, another 13,000 people around the world are suffering now with diarrhea. And four children have just died.I invented Lifesaver bottle because I got angry. I, like most of you, was sitting down, the day after Christmas in 2004, when I was watching the devastating news of the Asian tsunami as it rolled in, playing out on TV. The days and weeks that followed, people fleeing to the hills, being forced to drink contaminated water or face death. That really stuck with me. Then, a few months later, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the side of America. ""Okay,"" I thought, ""here's a First World country, let's see what they can do."" Day one: nothing. Day two: nothing. Do you know it took five days to get water to the Superdome? People were shooting each other on the streets for TV sets and water. That's when I decided I had to do something.Now I spent a lot of time in my garage, over the next weeks and months, and also in my kitchen — much to the dismay of my wife. (Laughter) However, after a few failed prototypes, I finally came up with this, the Lifesaver bottle.Okay, now for the science bit. Before Lifesaver, the best hand filters were only capable of filtering down to about 200 nanometers. The smallest bacteria is about 200 nanometers. So a 200-nanometer bacteria is going to get through a 200-nanometer hole. The smallest virus, on the other hand, is about 25 nanometers. So that's definitely going to get through those 200 nanometer holes. Lifesaver pores are 15 nanometers. So nothing is getting through.Okay, I'm going to give you a bit of a demonstration. Would you like to see that? I spent all the time setting this up, so I guess I should. We're in the fine city of Oxford. So — someone's done that up. Fine city of Oxford, so what I've done is I've gone and got some water from the River Cherwell, and the River Thames, that flow through here. And this is the water. But I got to thinking, you know, if we were in the middle of a flood zone in Bangladesh, the water wouldn't look like this. So I've gone and got some stuff to add into it. And this is from my pond.(Sniffs) (Coughs) Have a smell of that, mister cameraman.Okay. (Laughs) Right. We're just going to pour that in there.Audience: Ugh!Michael Pritchard: Okay. We've got some runoff from a sewage plant farm. So I'm just going to put that in there. (Laughter) Put that in there. There we go. (Laughter) And some other bits and pieces, chuck that in there. And I've got a gift here from a friend of mine's rabbit. So we're just going to put that in there as well. (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) Now.The Lifesaver bottle works really simply. You just scoop the water up. Today I'm going to use a jug just to show you all. Let's get a bit of that poo in there. That's not dirty enough. Let's just stir that up a little bit. Okay, so I'm going to take this really filthy water, and put it in here. Do you want a drink yet? (Laughter) Okay. There we go. Replace the top. Give it a few pumps. Okay? That's all that's necessary. Now as soon as I pop the teat, sterile drinking water is going to come out. I've got to be quick. Okay, ready? There we go. Mind the electrics. That is safe, sterile drinking water. (Applause) Cheers. (Applause) There you go Chris. (Applause) What's it taste of?Chris Anderson: Delicious.Michael Pritchard: Okay. Let's see Chris's program throughout the rest of the show. Okay? (Laughter)Okay. Lifesaver bottle is used by thousands of people around the world. It'll last for 6,000 liters. And when it's expired, using failsafe technology, the system will shut off, protecting the user. Pop the cartridge out. Pop a new one in. It's good for another 6,000 liters.So let's look at the applications. Traditionally, in a crisis, what do we do? We ship water. Then, after a few weeks, we set up camps. And people are forced to come into the camps to get their safe drinking water. What happens when 20,000 people congregate in a camp? Diseases spread. More resources are required. The problem just becomes self-perpetuating. But by thinking differently, and shipping these, people can stay put. They can make their own sterile drinking water, and start to get on with rebuilding their homes and their lives.Now, it doesn't require a natural disaster for this to work. Using the old thinking, of national infrastructure and pipe work, is too expensive. When you run the numbers on a calculator, you run out of noughts. So here is the ""thinking different"" bit.Instead of shipping water, and using man-made processes to do it, let's use Mother Nature. She's got a fantastic system. She picks the water up from there, desalinates it, for free, transports it over there, and dumps it onto the mountains, rivers, and streams. And where do people live? Near water. All we've go to do is make it sterile. How do we do that?Well, we could use the Lifesaver bottle. Or we could use one of these. The same technology, in a jerry can. This will process 25,000 liters of water; that's good enough for a family of four, for three years. And how much does it cost? About half a cent a day to run. Thank you.(Applause)So, by thinking differently, and processing water at the point of use, mothers and children no longer have to walk four hours a day to collect their water. They can get it from a source nearby. So with just eight billion dollars, we can hit the millennium goal's target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. To put that into context, The U.K. government spends about 12 billion pounds a year on foreign aid. But why stop there? With 20 billion dollars, everyone can have access to safe drinking water. So the three-and-a-half billion people that suffer every year as a result, and the two million kids that die every year, will live. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter
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"Take a look at this picture. It poses a very fascinating puzzle for us. These African students are doing their homework under streetlights at the airport in the capital city because they don't have any electricity at home. Now, I haven't met these particular students, but I've met students like them.Let's just pick one — for example, the one in the green shirt. Let's give him a name, too: Nelson. I'll bet Nelson has a cellphone. So here is the puzzle. Why is it that Nelson has access to a cutting-edge technology, like the cellphone, but doesn't have access to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home?Now, in a word, the answer is ""rules."" Bad rules can prevent the kind of win-win solution that's available when people can bring new technologies in and make them available to someone like Nelson. What kinds of rules? The electric company in this nation operates under a rule, which says that it has to sell electricity at a very low, subsidized price — in fact, a price that is so low it loses money on every unit that it sells. So it has neither the resources, nor the incentives, to hook up many other users.The president wanted to change this rule. He's seen that it's possible to have a different set of rules, rules where businesses earn a small profit, so they have an incentive to sign up more customers. That's the kind of rules that the cellphone company that Nelson purchases his telephony from operates under. The president has seen how those rules worked well. So he tried to change the rules for pricing on electricity, but ran into a firestorm of protest from businesses and consumers who wanted to preserve the existing subsidized rates. So he was stuck with rules that prevented him from letting the win-win solution help his country. And Nelson is stuck studying under the streetlights.The real challenge then, is to try to figure out how we can change rules. Are there some rules we can develop for changing rules? I want to argue that there is a general abstract insight that we can make practical, which is that, if we can give more choices to people, and more choices to leaders — who, in many countries, are also people. (Laughter) But, it's useful to present the opposition between these two. Because the kind of choice you might want to give to a leader, a choice like giving the president the choice to raise prices on electricity, takes away a choice that people in the economy want. They want the choice to be able to continue consuming subsidized electric power. So if you give just to one side or the other, you'll have tension or friction. But if we can find ways to give more choices to both, that will give us a set of rules for changing rules that get us out of traps.Now, Nelson also has access to the Internet. And he says that if you want to see the damaging effects of rules, the ways that rules can keep people in the dark, look at the pictures from NASA of the earth at night. In particular check out Asia. If you zoom in here, you can see North Korea, in outline here, which is like a black hole compared to its neighbors. Now, you won't be surprised to learn that the rules in North Korea keep people there in the dark.But it is important to recognize that North Korea and South Korea started out with identical sets of rules in both the sense of laws and regulations, but also in the deeper senses of understandings, norms, culture, values and beliefs. When they separated, they made choices that led to very divergent paths for their sets of rules. So we can change — we as humans can change the rules that we use to interact with each other, for better, or for worse.Now let's look at another region, the Caribbean. Zoom in on Haiti, in outline here. Haiti is also dark, compared to its neighbor here, the Dominican Republic, which has about the same number of residents. Both of these countries are dark compared to Puerto Rico, which has half as many residents as either Haiti or the Dominican Republic. What Haiti warns us is that rules can be bad because governments are weak. It's not just that the rules are bad because the government is too strong and oppressive, as in North Korea. So that if we want to create environments with good rules, we can't just tear down. We've got to find ways to build up, as well.Now, China dramatically demonstrates both the potential and the challenges of working with rules. Back in the beginning of the data presented in this chart, China was the world's high-technology leader. Chinese had pioneered technologies like steel, printing, gunpowder. But the Chinese never adopted, at least in that period, effective rules for encouraging the spread of those ideas — a profit motive that could have encouraged the spread. And they soon adopted rules which slowed down innovation and cut China off from the rest of the world. So as other countries in the world innovated, in the sense both of developing newer technologies, but also developing newer rules, the Chinese were cut off from those advances. Income there stayed stagnant, as it zoomed ahead in the rest of the world.This next chart looks at more recent data. It plots income, average income in China as a percentage of average income in the United States. In the '50s and '60s you can see that it was hovering at about three percent. But then in the late '70s something changed. Growth took off in China. The Chinese started catching up very quickly with the United States.If you go back to the map at night, you can get a clue to the process that lead to the dramatic change in rules in China. The brightest spot in China, which you can see on the edge of the outline here, is Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a small bit of China that, for most of the 20th century, operated under a very different set of rules than the rest of mainland China — rules that were copied from working market economies of the time, and administered by the British.In the 1950s, Hong Kong was a place where millions of people could go, from the mainland, to start in jobs like sewing shirts, making toys. But, to get on a process of increasing income, increasing skills led to very rapid growth there. Hong Kong was also the model which leaders like Deng Xiaoping could copy, when they decided to move all of the mainland towards the market model.But Deng Xiaoping instinctively understood the importance of offering choices to his people. So instead of forcing everyone in China to shift immediately to the market model, they proceeded by creating some special zones that could do, in a sense, what Britain did: make the opportunity to go work with the market rules available to the people who wanted to opt in there. So they created four special economic zones around Hong Kong: zones where Chinese could come and work, and cities grew up very rapidly there; also zones where foreign firms could come in and make things.One of the zones next to Hong Kong has a city called Shenzhen. In that city there is a Taiwanese firm that made the iPhone that many of you have, and they made it with labor from Chinese who moved there to Shenzhen. So after the four special zones, there were 14 coastal cites that were open in the same sense, and eventually demonstrated successes in these places that people could opt in to, that they flocked to because of the advantages they offered. Demonstrated successes there led to a consensus for a move toward the market model for the entire economy.Now the Chinese example shows us several points. One is: preserve choices for people. Two: operate on the right scale. If you try to change the rules in a village, you could do that, but a village would be too small to get the kinds of benefits you can get if you have millions of people all working under good rules. On the other hand, the nation is too big. If you try to change the rules in the nation, you can't give some people a chance to hold back, see how things turn out, and let others zoom ahead and try the new rules. But cities give you this opportunity to create new places, with new rules that people can opt in to. And they're large enough to get all of the benefits that we can have when millions of us work together under good rules.So the proposal is that we conceive of something called a charter city. We start with a charter that specifies all the rules required to attract the people who we'll need to build the city. We'll need to attract the investors who will build out the infrastructure — the power system, the roads, the port, the airport, the buildings. You'll need to attract firms, who will come hire the people who move there first. And you'll need to attract families, the residents who will come and live there permanently, raise their children, get an education for their children, and get their first job.With that charter, people will move there. The city can be built. And we can scale this model. We can go do it over and over again. To make it work, we need good rules. We've already discussed that. Those are captured in the charter. We also need the choices for people. That's really built into the model if we allow for the possibility of building cities on uninhabited land. You start from uninhabited territory. People can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it. The final thing we need are choices for leaders.And, to achieve the kind of choices we want for leaders we need to allow for the potential for partnerships between nations: cases where nations work together, in effect, de facto, the way China and Britain worked together to build, first a little enclave of the market model, and then scale it throughout China. In a sense, Britain, inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we've undertaken in the last century. So if we allow for these kind of partnerships to replicate this again, we can get those kinds of benefits scaled throughout the world.In some cases this will involve a delegation of responsibility, a delegation of control from one country to another to take over certain kinds of administrative responsibilities. Now, when I say that, some of you are starting to think, ""Well, is this just bringing back colonialism?"" It's not. But it's important to recognize that the kind of emotions that come up when we start to think about these things, can get in the way, can make us pull back, can shut down our ability, and our interest in trying to explore new ideas.Why is this not like colonialism? The thing that was bad about colonialism, and the thing which is residually bad in some of our aid programs, is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. This model is all about choices, both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places. And, choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension.So let's talk about how this could play out in practice. Let's take a particular leader, Raul Castro, who is the leader of Cuba. It must have occurred to Castro that he has the chance to do for Cuba what Deng Xiaoping did for China, but he doesn't have a Hong Kong there on the island in Cuba. He does, though, have a little bit of light down in the south that has a very special status. There is a zone there, around Guantanamo Bay, where a treaty gives the United States administrative responsibility for a piece of land that's about twice the size of Manhattan.Castro goes to the prime minister of Canada and says, ""Look, the Yankees have a terrible PR problem. They want to get out. Why don't you, Canada, take over? Build — run a special administrative zone. Allow a new city to be built up there. Allow many people to come in. Let us have a Hong Kong nearby. Some of my citizens will move into that city as well. Others will hold back. But this will be the gateway that will connect the modern economy and the modern world to my country.""Now, where else might this model be tried? Well, Africa. I've talked with leaders in Africa. Many of them totally get the notion of a special zone that people can opt into as a rule. It's a rule for changing rules. It's a way to create new rules, and let people opt-in without coercion, and the opposition that coercion can force. They also totally get the idea that in some instances they can make more credible promises to long-term investors — the kind of investors who will come build the port, build the roads, in a new city —they can make more credible promises if they do it along with a partner nation. Perhaps even in some arrangement that's a little bit like an escrow account, where you put land in the escrow account and the partner nation takes responsibility for it. There is also lots of land in Africa where new cities could be built. This is a picture I took when I was flying along the coast. There are immense stretches of land like this — land where hundreds of millions of people could live. Now, if we generalize this and think about not just one or two charter cites, but dozens — cities that will help create places for the many hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people who will move to cities in the coming century —is there enough land for them? Well, throughout the world, if we look at the lights at night, the one thing that's misleading is that, visually, it looks like most of the world is already built out. So let me show you why that's wrong. Take this representation of all of the land. Turn it into a square that stands for all the arable land on Earth. And let these dots represent the land that's already taken up by the cities that three billion people now live in. If you move the dots down to the bottom of the rectangle you can see that the cities for the existing three billion urban residents take up only three percent of the arable land on earth.So if we wanted to build cities for another billion people, they would be dots like this. We'd go from three percent of the arable land, to four percent. We'd dramatically reduce the human footprint on Earth by building more cities that people can move to. And if these are cities governed by good rules, they can be cities where people are safe from crime, safe from disease and bad sanitation, where people have a chance to get a job. They can get basic utilities like electricity. Their kids can get an education.So what will it take to get started building the first charter cities, scaling this so we build many more? It would help to have a manual. (Laughter) What university professors could do is write some details that might go into this manual. You wouldn't want to let us run the cities, go out and design them. You wouldn't let academics out in the wild. (Laughter)But, you could set us to work thinking about questions like, suppose it isn't just Canada that does the deal with Raul Castro. Perhaps Brazil comes in as a participant, and Spain as well. And perhaps Cuba wants to be one of the partners in a four-way joint venture. How would we write the treaty to do that? There is less precedent for that, but that could easily be worked out.How would we finance this? Turns out Singapore and Hong Kong are cities that made huge gains on the value of the land that they owned when they got started. You could use the gains on the value of the land to pay for things like the police, the courts, but the school system and the health care system too, which make this a more attractive place to live, makes this a place where people have higher incomes — which, incidentally, makes the land more valuable. So the incentives for the people helping to construct this zone and build it, and set up the basic rules, go very much in the right direction.So there are many other details like this. How could we have buildings that are low cost and affordable for people who work in a first job, assembling something like an iPhone, but make those buildings energy efficient, and make sure that they are safe, so they don't fall down in an earthquake or a hurricane. Many technical details to be worked out, but those of us who are already starting to pursue these things can already tell that there is no roadblock, there's no impediment, other than a failure of imagination, that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win-win solution.Let me conclude with this picture. The reason we can be so well off, even though there is so many people on earth, is because of the power of ideas. We can share ideas with other people, and when they discover them, they share with us. It's not like scarce objects, where sharing means we each get less. When we share ideas we all get more. When we think about ideas in that way, we usually think about technologies.But there is another class of ideas: the rules that govern how we interact with each other; rules like, let's have a tax system that supports a research university that gives away certain kinds of knowledge for free. Let's have a system where we have ownership of land that is registered in a government office, that people can pledge as collateral.If we can keep innovating on our space of rules, and particularly innovate in the sense of coming up with rules for changing rules, so we don't get stuck with bad rules, then we can keep moving progress forward and truly make the world a better place, so that people like Nelson and his friends don't have to study any longer under the streetlights. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
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"If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be to reveal something that we've forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names. And that is that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by genius.Biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses, and take advice from them, design advice. That's where I live, and it's my university as well. I'm surrounded by genius. I cannot help but remember the organisms and the ecosystems that know how to live here gracefully on this planet. This is what I would tell you to remember if you ever forget this again. Remember this. This is what happens every year. This is what keeps its promise. While we're doing bailouts, this is what happened. Spring.Imagine designing spring. Imagine that orchestration. You think TED is hard to organize. (Laughter) Right? Imagine, and if you haven't done this in a while, do. Imagine the timing, the coordination, all without top-down laws, or policies, or climate change protocols. This happens every year. There is lots of showing off. There is lots of love in the air. There's lots of grand openings. And the organisms, I promise you, have all of their priorities in order.I have this neighbor that keeps me in touch with this, because he's living, usually on his back, looking up at those grasses. And one time he came up to me — he was about seven or eight years old — he came up to me. And there was a wasp's nest that I had let grow in my yard, right outside my door. And most people knock them down when they're small. But it was fascinating to me, because I was looking at this sort of fine Italian end papers. And he came up to me and he knocked. He would come every day with something to show me. And like, knock like a woodpecker on my door until I opened it up. And he asked me how I had made the house for those wasps, because he had never seen one this big. And I told him, ""You know, Cody, the wasps actually made that."" And we looked at it together. And I could see why he thought, you know — it was so beautifully done. It was so architectural. It was so precise.But it occurred to me, how in his small life had he already believed the myth that if something was that well done, that we must have done it. How did he not know — it's what we've all forgotten — that we're not the first ones to build. We're not the first ones to process cellulose. We're not the first ones to make paper. We're not the first ones to try to optimize packing space, or to waterproof, or to try to heat and cool a structure. We're not the first ones to build houses for our young.What's happening now, in this field called biomimicry, is that people are beginning to remember that organisms, other organisms, the rest of the natural world, are doing things very similar to what we need to do. But in fact they are doing them in a way that have allowed them to live gracefully on this planet for billions of years. So these people, biomimics, are nature's apprentices. And they're focusing on function. What I'd like to do is show you a few of the things that they're learning. They have asked themselves, ""What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'""And here is what they're learning. This is an amazing picture from a Czech photographer named Jack Hedley. This is a story about an engineer at J.R. West. They're the people who make the bullet train. It was called the bullet train because it was rounded in front, but every time it went into a tunnel it would build up a pressure wave, and then it would create like a sonic boom when it exited. So the engineer's boss said, ""Find a way to quiet this train.""He happened to be a birder. He went to the equivalent of an Audubon Society meeting. And he studied — there was a film about king fishers. And he thought to himself, ""They go from one density of medium, the air, into another density of medium, water, without a splash. Look at this picture. Without a splash, so they can see the fish. And he thought, ""What if we do this?"" Quieted the train. Made it go 10 percent faster on 15 percent less electricity.How does nature repel bacteria? We're not the first ones to have to protect ourselves from some bacteria. Turns out that — this is a Galapagos Shark. It has no bacteria on its surface, no fouling on its surface, no barnacles. And it's not because it goes fast. It actually basks. It's a slow-moving shark. So how does it keep its body free of bacteria build-up? It doesn't do it with a chemical. It does it, it turns out, with the same denticles that you had on Speedo bathing suits, that broke all those records in the Olympics,but it's a particular kind of pattern. And that pattern, the architecture of that pattern on its skin denticles keep bacteria from being able to land and adhere. There is a company called Sharklet Technologies that's now putting this on the surfaces in hospitals to keep bacteria from landing, which is better than dousing it with anti-bacterials or harsh cleansers that many, many organisms are now becoming drug resistant. Hospital-acquired infections are now killing more people every year in the United States than die from AIDS or cancer or car accidents combined — about 100,000.This is a little critter that's in the Namibian desert. It has no fresh water that it's able to drink, but it drinks water out of fog. It's got bumps on the back of its wing covers. And those bumps act like a magnet for water. They have water-loving tips, and waxy sides. And the fog comes in and it builds up on the tips. And it goes down the sides and goes into the critter's mouth. There is actually a scientist here at Oxford who studied this, Andrew Parker. And now kinetic and architectural firms like Grimshaw are starting to look at this as a way of coating buildings so that they gather water from the fog. 10 times better than our fog-catching nets.CO2 as a building block. Organisms don't think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block. There is now a cement manufacturing company starting in the United States called Calera. They've borrowed the recipe from the coral reef, and they're using CO2 as a building block in cement, in concrete. Instead of — cement usually emits a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement. Now it's reversing that equation, and actually sequestering half a ton of CO2 thanks to the recipe from the coral.None of these are using the organisms. They're really only using the blueprints or the recipes from the organisms. How does nature gather the sun's energy? This is a new kind of solar cell that's based on how a leaf works. It's self-assembling. It can be put down on any substrate whatsoever. It's extremely inexpensive and rechargeable every five years. It's actually a company a company that I'm involved in called OneSun, with Paul Hawken.There are many many ways that nature filters water that takes salt out of water. We take water and push it against a membrane. And then we wonder why the membrane clogs and why it takes so much electricity. Nature does something much more elegant. And it's in every cell. Every red blood cell of your body right now has these hourglass-shaped pores called aquaporins. They actually export water molecules through. It's kind of a forward osmosis. They export water molecules through, and leave solutes on the other side. A company called Aquaporin is starting to make desalination membranes mimicking this technology.Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight. Actually G.M. Opel used it to create that skeleton you see, in what's called their bionic car. It lightweighted that skeleton using a minimum amount of material, as an organism must, for the maximum amount of strength.This beetle, unlike this chip bag here, this beetle uses one material, chitin. And it finds many many ways to put many functions into it. It's waterproof. It's strong and resilient. It's breathable. It creates color through structure. Whereas that chip bag has about seven layers to do all of those things. One of our major inventions that we need to be able to do to come even close to what these organisms can do is to find a way to minimize the amount of material, the kind of material we use, and to add design to it. We use five polymers in the natural world to do everything that you see. In our world we use about 350 polymers to make all this.Nature is nano. Nanotechnology, nanoparticles, you hear a lot of worry about this. Loose nanoparticles. What is really interesting to me is that not many people have been asking, ""How can we consult nature about how to make nanotechnology safe?"" Nature has been doing that for a long time. Embedding nanoparticles in a material for instance, always. In fact, sulfur-reducing bacteria, as part of their synthesis, they will emit, as a byproduct, nanoparticles into the water. But then right after that, they emit a protein that actually gathers and aggregates those nanoparticles so that they fall out of solution.Energy use. Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get. And one of the largest fields right now, in the world of energy grids, you hear about the smart grid. One of the largest consultants are the social insects. Swarm technology. There is a company called Regen. They are looking at how ants and bees find their food and their flowers in the most effective way as a whole hive. And they're having appliances in your home talk to one another through that algorithm, and determine how to minimize peak power use.There's a group of scientists in Cornell that are making what they call a synthetic tree, because they are saying, ""There is no pump at the bottom of a tree."" It's capillary action and transpiration pulls water up, a drop at a time, pulling it, releasing it from a leaf and pulling it up through the roots. And they're creating — you can think of it as a kind of wallpaper. They're thinking about putting it on the insides of buildings to move water up without pumps.Amazon electric eel — incredibly endangered, some of these species — create 600 volts of electricity with the chemicals that are in your body. Even more interesting to me is that 600 volts doesn't fry it. You know we use PVC, and we sheath wires with PVC for insulation. These organisms, how are they insulating against their own electric charge? These are some questions that we've yet to ask.Here's a wind turbine manufacturer that went to a whale. Humpback whale has scalloped edges on its flippers. And those scalloped edges play with flow in such a way that is reduces drag by 32 percent. These wind turbines can rotate in incredibly slow windspeeds, as a result.MIT just has a new radio chip that uses far less power than our chips. And it's based on the cochlear of your ear, able to pick up internet, wireless, television signals and radio signals, in the same chip. Finally, on an ecosystem scale.At Biomimicry Guild, which is my consulting company, we work with HOK Architects. We're looking at building whole cities in their planning department. And what we're saying is that, shouldn't our cities do at least as well, in terms of ecosystem services, as the native systems that they replace? So we're creating something called Ecological Performance Standards that hold cities to this higher bar.The question is — biomimicry is an incredibly powerful way to innovate. The question I would ask is, ""What's worth solving?"" If you haven't seen this, it's pretty amazing. Dr. Adam Neiman. This is a depiction of all of the water on Earth in relation to the volume of the Earth — all the ice, all the fresh water, all the sea water — and all the atmosphere that we can breathe, in relation to the volume of the Earth. And inside those balls life, over 3.8 billion years, has made a lush, livable place for us.And we are in a long, long line of organisms to come to this planet and ask ourselves, ""How can we live here gracefully over the long haul?"" How can we do what life has learned to do? Which is to create conditions conducive to life. Now in order to do this, the design challenge of our century, I think, we need a way to remind ourselves of those geniuses, and to somehow meet them again.One of the big ideas, one of the big projects I've been honored to work on is a new website. And I would encourage you all to please go to it. It's called AskNature.org. And what we're trying to do, in a TEDesque way, is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function.And we're working with EOL, Encyclopedia of Life, Ed Wilson's TED wish. And he's gathering all biological information on one website. And the scientists who are contributing to EOL are answering a question, ""What can we learn from this organism?"" And that information will go into AskNature.org. And hopefully, any inventor, anywhere in the world, will be able, in the moment of creation, to type in, ""How does nature remove salt from water?"" And up will come mangroves, and sea turtles and your own kidneys.And we'll begin to be able to do as Cody does, and actually be in touch with these incredible models, these elders that have been here far, far longer than we have. And hopefully, with their help, we'll learn how to live on this Earth, and on this home that is ours, but not ours alone. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action
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"I just want to say my name is Emmanuel Jal. And I come from a long way. I've been telling a story that has been so painful for me. It's been a tough journey for me, traveling the world, telling my story in form of a book. And also telling it like now. And also, the easiest one was when I was doing it in form of a music.So I have branded myself as a war child. I'm doing this because of an old lady in my village now, who have lost her children. There is no newspaper to cover her pain, and what she wants to change in this society. And I'm doing it for a young man who want to create a change and has no way to project his voice because he can't write. Or there is no Internet, like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, for them to talk.Also one thing that kept me pushing this story, this painful stories out, the dreams I have, sometimes, is like the voices of the dead, that I have seen would tell me, ""Don't give up. Keep on going."" Because sometime I feel like stopping and not doing it, because I didn't know what I was putting myself into.Well I was born in the most difficult time, when my country was at war. I saw my village burned down. The world that meant a lot to me, I saw it vanish in my face. I saw my aunt in rape when I was only five. My mother was claimed by the war. My brothers and sisters were scattered. And up to now, me and my father were detached and I still have issues with him. Seeing people die every day, my mother crying, it's like I was raised in a violence. And that made me call myself a war child.And not only that, when I was eight I became a child soldier.I didn't know what was the war for. But one thing I knew was an image that I saw that stuck in my head. When I went to the training camp I say, ""I want to kill as many Muslims, and as many Arabs, as possible."" The training wasn't easy, but that was the driving force, because I wanted to revenge for my family. I wanted to revenge for my village.Luckily now things have changed because I came to discover the truth. What was actually killing us wasn't the Muslims, wasn't the Arabs. It was somebody sitting somewhere manipulating the system, and using religion to get what they want to get out of us, which is the oil, the diamond, the gold and the land. So realizing the truth gave me a position to choose: should I continue to hate, or let it go?So I happened to forgive. Now I sing music with the Muslims. I dance with them. I even had a movie out called ""War Child,"" funded by Muslim people. So that pain has gone out. But my story is huge. So I'm just going to go into a different step now, which is easier for me. I'm going to give you poem called ""Forced to Sin,"" which is from my album ""War Child."" I talk about my story. One of the journey that I tread when I was tempted to eat my friend because we had no food and we were like around 400. And only 16 people survived that journey. So I hope you're going to hear this.My dreams are like torment. My every moment.Voices in my brain, of friends that was slain.Friends like Lual who died by my side,of starvation. In the burning jungle, and the desert plain.Next was I, but Jesus heard my cry.As I was tempted to eat the rotten flesh of my comrade,he gave me comfort.We used to raid villages, stealing chickens, goats and sheeps,anything we could eat.I knew it was rude, but we needed food.And therefore I was forced to sin, forced to sin to make a living,forced to sin to make a living.Sometimes you gotta lose to win.Never give up. Never give in.Left home at the age of seven.One year later, live with an AK-47 by my side.Slept with one eye open wide.Run, duck, play dead and hide.I've seen my people die like flies.But I've never seen a dead body,at least one that I've killed.But still as I wonder, I won't go under.Guns barking like lightning and thunder.As a child so young and tender,Words I can't forget I still remember.I saw sergeant command raising his hand,no retreat, no surrender.I carry the banner of the trauma.War child, child without a mama,still fighting in the saga.Yet as I wage this new war I'm not alone in this drama.No sit or stop, as I reach for the topI'm fully dedicated like a patriotic cop.I'm on a fight, day and night.Sometime I do wrong in order to make things right.It's like I'm living a dream.First time I'm feeling like a human being.Ah! The children of Darfur.Your empty bellies on the telly and now it's you that I'm fighting for.Left home. Don't even know the day I'll ever return.My country is war-torn.Music I used to hear was bombs and fire of guns.So many people die that I don't even cry no more.Ask God question, what am I here for.And why are my people poor.And why, why when the rest of the children were learning how to read and write,I was learning how to fight.I ate snails, vultures, rabbits, snakes, and anything that had life.I was ready to eat.I know it's a shame. But who is to be blamed?That's my story shared in the form of a lesson.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)What energized me and kept me going is the music I do. I never saw anybody to tell my story to them so they could advise me or do therapy. So the music had been my therapy for me. It's been where I actually see heaven, where I can be happy, where I can be a child again, in dances, through music. So one thing I know about music: music is the only thing that has power to enter your cell system, your mind, your heart, influence your soul and your spirit, and can even influence the way you live without even you knowing. Music is the only thing that can make you want to wake up your bed and shake your leg, without even wanting to do it. And so the power music has I normally compare to the power love when love doesn't see a color. You know, if you fall in love with a frog, that's it.One testimony about how I find music is powerful is when I was still a soldier back then. I hated the people in the north. But I don't know why I don't hate their music. So we party and dance to their music. And one thing that shocked me is one day they brought an Arab musician to come and entertain the soldiers. And I almost broke my leg dancing to his music. But I had this question. So now I'm doing music so I know what the power of music is.So what's happening here? I've been in a painful journey. Today is day number 233 in which I only eat dinner. I don't eat breakfast. No lunch. And I've done a campaign called Lose to Win. Where I'm losing so that I could win the battle that I'm fighting now. So my breakfast, my lunch, I donate it to a charity that I founded because we want to build a school in Sudan.And I'm doing this because also it's a normal thing in my home, people eat one meal a day. Here I am in the West. I choose not to. So in my village now, kids there, they normally listen to BBC, or any radio, and they are waiting to know, the day Emmanuel will eat his breakfast it means he got the money to build our school. And so I made a commitment. I say, ""I'm gonna not eat my breakfast."" I thought I was famous enough that I would raise the money within one month, but I've been humbled. (Laughter)So it's taken me 232 days. And I said, ""No stop until we get it."" And like it's been done on Facebook, MySpace. The people are giving three dollars. The lowest amount we ever got was 20 cents. Somebody donated 20 cents online. I don't know how they did it. (Laughter) But that moved me.And so, the importance of education to me is what I'm willing to die for. I'm willing to die for this, because I know what it can do to my people. Education enlighten your brain, give you so many chances, and you're able to survive. As a nation we have been crippled. For so many years we have fed on aid. You see a 20-years-old, 30-years-old families in a refugee camps. They only get the food that drops from the sky, from the U.N.So these people, you're killing a whole generation if you just give them aid. If anybody want to help us this is what we need. Give us tools. Give the farmers tools. It's rain. Africa is fertile. They can grow the crops. (Applause) Invest in education. Education so that we have strong institution that can create a revolution to change everything. Because we have all those old men that are creating wars in Africa. They will die soon. But if you invest in education then we'll be able to change Africa. That's what I'm asking. (Applause)So in order to do that, I founded a charter called Gua Africa, where we put kids in school. And now we have a couple in university. We have like 40 kids, ex-child soldiers mixed with anybody that we feel like we want to support. And I said ""I'm going to put it in practice."" And with the people that are going to follow me and help me do things. That's what I want to do to change, to make a difference in the world.Well now, my time is going, so I want to sing a song. But I'll ask you guys to stand up so we celebrate the life of a British aid worker called Emma McCune that made it possible for me to be here. I'm gonna sing this song, just to inspire you how this woman has made a difference. She came to my country and saw the importance of education.She said the only way to help Sudan is to invest in the women, educating them, educating the children, so that they could come and create a revolution in this complex society. So she even ended up marrying a commander from the SPLA. And she rescued over 150 child soldiers. One of them happened to be me now. And so at this moment I want to ask to celebrate Emma with me. Are you guys ready to celebrate Emma?Audience: Yes!Emmanuel Jal: All right.♫ This one goes to Emma McCune ♫♫ Angel to rescue came one afternoon ♫♫ I'm here because you rescued me ♫♫ I'm proud to carry your legacy ♫♫ Thank you. Bless you. R.I.P. ♫♫ What would I be? Me! ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me? What would I be? ♫♫ What would I be? Me! ♫ ♫ Another starving refugee ♫ ♫ What would I be? ♫♫ What would I be? Me! ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me? Yeah! ♫♫ Yeah! Yeah! ♫♫ You would have seen my face on the telly ♫♫ Fat hungry belly ♫♫ Flies in my eyes, head too big for my size ♫♫ Just another little starving child ♫♫ Running around in Africa, born to be wild ♫♫ Praise God, praise the Almighty ♫♫ for sending an angel to rescue me ♫♫ I got a reason for being on this Earth ♫♫ 'Cause I know more than many what a life is worth ♫♫ Now that I got a chance to stand my ground ♫♫ I'm gonna run over mountains, leaps and bounds ♫♫ I ain't an angel, hope I'll be one soon ♫♫ And if I am, I wanna be like Emma McCune ♫♫ Me! What would I be? Me! ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me? ♫♫ What would I be? ♫♫ What would I be? Me! ♫♫ Another starving refugee ♫♫ What would I be? ♫♫ What would I be? Me! ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me? Yeah! Yeah!♫♫ Yeah, Yeah! ♫♫ I would have probably died from starvation ♫♫ Or some other wretched disease ♫♫ I would have grown up with no education ♫♫ Just another refugee ♫♫ I stand here because somebody cared ♫♫ I stand here because somebody dared ♫♫ I know there is a lot of Emmas out there ♫♫ Who is willing and trying to save a life of a child ♫♫ What would I be? Me! ♫ ♫ If Emma never rescued me? ♫♫ What would I be? ♫ ♫ What would I be? ♫♫ Another starving refugee ♫♫ I remember the time when I was small ♫♫ When I couldn't read or write at all ♫♫ Now I'm all grown up, I got my education ♫♫ The sky is the limit and I can't be stopped by no one ♫♫ How I prayed for this day to come ♫♫ And I pray that the world find wisdom ♫♫ To give the poor in need some assistance ♫♫ Instead of putting up resistance, yeah ♫♫ Sitting and waiting for the politics to fix this ♫♫ It ain't gonna happen ♫♫ They're all sitting on they asses ♫♫ Popping champagne and sponging off the masses ♫♫ Coming from a refugee boy-soldier ♫♫ But I still got my dignity ♫♫ I gotta say it again ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me ♫♫ I'd be a corpse on the African plain ♫Is there anybody who's here in the back, some love.Big scream for Emma everybody.Yeah! I'm gonna get crazy now.♫ What would I be? ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me? ♫♫ What would I be? ♫♫ Another starving refugee ♫♫ What would I be? ♫♫ If Emma never rescued me? ♫♫ Yeah, Yeah ♫♫ Yeah, I would have probably died from starvation ♫♫ Or some other wretched disease ♫♫ I would have grown up with no education ♫♫ Just another refugee ♫(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)Go save a life of a child. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emmanuel_jal_the_music_of_a_war_child
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"I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.(Laughter)In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school.(Laughter)In America, law is a professional degree: after your university degree, you go on to law school. When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible.(Laughter)Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to.(Laughter)But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills — what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might know it. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, ""Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table."" Now what would you do?Many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here — some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here.The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem.I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives.He gathered his participants and said: ""I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem."" To one group he said, ""I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem.""To the second group he offered rewards. He said, ""If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars."" Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator.Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense, right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work, right?(Laughter)If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators — if you do this, then you get that — work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.What's alarming here is that our business operating system — think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources— it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you.Glucksberg did another similar experiment, he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing.What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it?(Laughter)If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well.But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work — certain kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming — has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work!It makes me crazy. And here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy.(Laughter)This is a fact — or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact.(Laughter)(Applause)Let me give you an example. Let me marshal the evidence here. I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down.What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.Then they said, ""Let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Let's go to Madurai, India and test it."" Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards.What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No, these are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. Do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience.Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger.(Laughter)Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: ""We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance.""There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, they're interesting, or part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, it's a television set. Somebody invented it. It doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.Some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. You don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely — getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy.Some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half.(Laughter)Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, ""Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want."" Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. Being Australians, everybody has a beer.They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty; not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever.(Laughter)That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time — done, famously, at Google — where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20% time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things.Some of you might look at this and say, ""Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian."" And I say, ""Nope. I have proof."" The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen. Do it because you like to do it.Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, ""Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?"" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation, right? This is the Thrilla in Manila. Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout.Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive— the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.And here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe — we can change the world.I rest my case.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
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"Early visions of wireless power actually were thought of by Nikola Tesla basically about 100 years ago. The thought that you wouldn't want to transfer electric power wirelessly, no one ever thought of that. They thought, ""Who would use it if you didn't?"" And so, in fact, he actually set about doing a variety of things. Built the Tesla coil. This tower was built on Long Island back at the beginning of the 1900s. And the idea was, it was supposed to be able to transfer power anywhere on Earth. We'll never know if this stuff worked. Actually, I think the Federal Bureau of Investigation took it down for security purposes, sometime in the early 1900s.But the one thing that did come out of electricity is that we love this stuff so much. I mean, think about how much we love this. If you just walk outside, there are trillions of dollars that have been invested in infrastructure around the world, putting up wires to get power from where it's created to where it's used. The other thing is, we love batteries. And for those of us that have an environmental element to us, there is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or a few feet of where there is very inexpensive power.So, before I got here, I thought, ""You know, I am from North America. We do have a little bit of a reputation in the United States."" So I thought I'd better look it up first. So definition number six is the North American definition of the word ""suck."" Wires suck, they really do. Think about it. Whether that's you in that picture or something under your desk. The other thing is, batteries suck too. And they really, really do. Do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff? 40 billion of these things built. This is what happens. They fall apart, they disintegrate, and they end up here.So when you talk about expensive power, the cost per kilowatt-hour to supply battery power to something is on the order of two to three hundred pounds. Think about that. The most expensive grid power in the world is thousandths of that. So fortunately, one of the other definitions of ""suck"" that was in there, it does create a vacuum. And nature really does abhor a vacuum.What happened back a few years ago was a group of theoretical physicists at MIT actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance. Basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb at a distance of about two meters. It got about 50 percent of the efficiency — by the way, that's still a couple thousand times more efficient than a battery would be, to do the same thing. But were able to light that, and do it very successfully. This was actually the experiment. So you can see the coils were somewhat larger. The light bulb was a fairly simple task, from their standpoint.This all came from a professor waking up at night to the third night in a row that his wife's cellphone was beeping because it was running out of battery power. And he was thinking, ""With all the electricity that's out there in the walls, why couldn't some of that just come into the phone so I could get some sleep?"" And he actually came up with this concept of resonant energy transfer. But inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire. And those two coils of wire are really, really close to each other, and actually do transfer power magnetically and wirelessly, only over a very short distance.What Dr. Soljacic figured out how to do was separate the coils in a transformer to a greater distance than the size of those transformers using this technology, which is not dissimilar from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room. It's a resonant phenomenon for which he actually received a MacArthur Fellowship Award, which is nicknamed the Genius Award, last September, for his discovery.So how does it work? Imagine a coil. For those of you that are engineers, there's a capacitor attached to it too. And if you can cause that coil to resonate, what will happen is it will pulse at alternating current frequencies — at a fairly high frequency, by the way. And if you can bring another device close enough to the source, that will only work at exactly that frequency, you can actually get them to do what's called strongly couple, and transfer magnetic energy between them. And then what you do is, you start out with electricity, turn it into magnetic field, take that magnetic field, turn it back into electricity, and then you can use it.Number one question I get asked. I mean, people are worried about cellphones being safe. You know. What about safety? The first thing is this is not a ""radiative"" technology. It doesn't radiate. There aren't electric fields here. It's a magnetic field. It stays within either what we call the source, or within the device. And actually, the magnetic fields we're using are basically about the same as the Earth's magnetic field. We live in a magnetic field.And the other thing that's pretty cool about the technology is that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency. And it's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen. Then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere that will regulate everything we do. They've pretty much set field exposure limits, which all of the things in the stuff I'll show you today sort of sit underneath those guidelines.Mobile electronics. Home electronics. Those cords under your desk, I bet everybody here has something that looks like that or those batteries. There are industrial applications. And then finally, electric vehicles. These electric cars are beautiful. But who is going to want to plug them in? Imagine driving into your garage — we've built a system to do this — you drive into your garage, and the car charges itself, because there is a mat on the floor that's plugged into the wall. And it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently. Then there's all kinds of other applications. Implanted medical devices, where people don't have to die of infections anymore if you can seal the thing up. Credit cards, robot vacuum cleaners.So what I'd like to do is take a couple minutes and show you, actually, how it works. And what I'm going to do is to show you pretty much what's here. You've got a coil. That coil is connected to an R.F. amplifier that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field. We put one on the back of the television set. By the way, I do make it look a little bit easier than it is. There's lots of electronics and secret sauce and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it. But then what's going to happen is, it will create a field. It will cause one to get created on the other side.And if the demo gods are willing, in about 10 seconds or so we should see it. The 10 seconds actually are because we — I don't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a T.V. in when you use just a cord. Generally, you have to go over and hit the button. So I thought we put a little computer in it that has to wake up to tell it to do that. So, I'll plug that in. It creates a magnetic field here. It causes one to be created out here. And as I said, in sort of about 10 seconds we should start to see ...This is a commercially — (Applause) available color television set. Imagine, you get one of these things. You want to hang them on the wall. How many people want to hang them on the wall? Think about it. You don't want those ugly cords coming down. Imagine if you can get rid of it.The other thing I wanted to talk about was safety. So, there is nothing going on. I'm okay. And I'll do it again, just for safety's sake. Almost immediately, though, people ask, ""How small can you make this? Can you make this small enough?"" Because remember Dr. Soljacic's original idea was his wife's cellphone beeping.So, I wanted to show you something. We're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing. This a Google G1. You know, it's the latest thing that's come out. It runs the Android operating system. I think I heard somebody talk about that before. It's odd. It has a battery. It also has coiled electronics that WiTricity has put into the back of it. And if I can get the camera — okay, great — you'll see, as I get sort of close... you're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly. (Applause)And I know some of you are Apple aficionados. So, you know they don't make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones. So we put a little sleeve on the back, but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too. And those of you that have an iPhone recognize the green center. (Applause)And Nokia as well. You'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back, to do that, and it probably beeps, actually, as it goes on as well. But they typically use it to light up the screen. So, imagine these things could go ... they could go in your ceiling. They could go in the floor. They could go, actually, underneath your desktop. So that when you walk in or you come in from home, if you carry a purse, it works in your purse. You never have to worry about plugging these things in again. And think of what that would do for you.So I think in closing, sort of in the immortal visions of The New Yorker magazine, I thought I'd put up one more slide. And for those of you who can't read it, it says, ""It does appear to be some kind of wireless technology."" So, thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity
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"I'm going to talk about your mindset. Does your mindset correspond to my dataset? (Laughter) If not, one or the other needs upgrading, isn't it?When I talk to my students about global issues, and I listen to them in the coffee break, they always talk about ""we"" and ""them."" And when they come back into the lecture room I ask them, ""What do you mean with ""we"" and ""them""? ""Oh, it's very easy. It's the western world and it's the developing world,"" they say. ""We learned it in college."" And what is the definition then? ""The definition? Everyone knows,"" they say.But then you know, I press them like this. So one girl said, very cleverly, ""It's very easy. Western world is a long life in a small family. Developing world is a short life in a large family."" And I like that definition, because it enabled me to transfer their mindset into the dataset. And here you have the dataset. So, you can see that what we have on this axis here is size of family. One, two, three, four, five children per woman on this axis. And here, length of life, life expectancy, 30, 40, 50. Exactly what the students said was their concept about the world.And really this is about the bedroom. Whether the man and woman decide to have small family, and take care of their kids, and how long they will live. It's about the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have soap, water and food, you know, you can live long. And the students were right. It wasn't that the world consisted — the world consisted here, of one set of countries over here, which had large families and short life. Developing world. And we had one set of countries up there which was the western world. They had small families and long life.And you are going to see here the amazing thing that has happened in the world during my lifetime. Then the developing countries applied soap and water, vaccination. And all the developing world started to apply family planning. And partly to USA who help to provide technical advice and investment. And you see all the world moves over to a two child family, and a life with 60 to 70 years.But some countries remain back in this area here. And you can see we still have Afghanistan down here. We have Liberia. We have Congo. So we have countries living there. So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born. (Laughter) (Applause)And we, in fact, when we have played this over the world. I was at the Global Health Conference here in Washington last week, and I could see the wrong concept even active people in United States had, that they didn't realize the improvement of Mexico there, and China, in relation to United States. Look here when I move them forward. Here we go. They catch up. There's Mexico. It's on par with United States in these two social dimensions. There was less than five percent of the specialists in Global Health that was aware of this. This great nation, Mexico, has the problem that arms are coming from North, across the borders, so they had to stop that, because they have this strange relationship to the United States, you know.But if I would change this axis here, I would instead put income per person. Income per person. I can put that here. And we will then see a completely different picture. By the way, I'm teaching you how to use our website, Gapminder World, while I'm correcting this, because this is a free utility on the net. And when I now finally got it right, I can go back 200 years in history. And I can find United States up there. And I can let the other countries be shown. And now I have income per person on this axis. And United States only had some, one, two thousand dollars at that time. And the life expectancy was 35 to 40 years, on par with Afghanistan today.And what has happened in the world, I will show now. This is instead of studying history for one year at university. You can watch me for one minute now and you'll see the whole thing. (Laughter) You can see how the brown bubbles, which is west Europe, and the yellow one, which is the United States, they get richer and richer and also start to get healthier and healthier. And this is now 100 years ago, where the rest of the world remains behind. Here we come. And that was the influenza. That's why we are so scared about flu, isn't it? It's still remembered. The fall of life expectancy. And then we come up. Not until independence started.Look here You have China over there, you have India over there, and this is what has happened. Did you note there, that we have Mexico up there? Mexico is not at all on par with the United States, but they are quite close. And especially, it's interesting to see China and the United States during 200 years, because I have my oldest son now working for Google, after Google acquired this software. Because in fact, this is child labor. My son and his wife sat in a closet for many years and developed this. And my youngest son, who studied Chinese in Beijing. So they come in with the two perspectives I have, you know? And my son, youngest son who studied in Beijing, in China, he got a long-term perspective. Whereas when my oldest son, who works for Google, he should develop by quarter, or by half-year. Or Google is quite generous, so he can have one or two years to go.But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period, for 100 years, when they went backwards. And then they would remember the first part of last century, which was really bad, and we could go by this so-called Great Leap Forward. But this was 1963. Mao Tse-Tung eventually brought health to China, and then he died, and then Deng Xiaoping started this amazing move forward.Isn't it strange to see that the United States first grew the economy, and then gradually got rich? Whereas China could get healthy much earlier, because they applied the knowledge of education, nutrition, and then also benefits of penicillin and vaccines and family planning. And Asia could have social development before they got the economic development. So to me, as a public health professor, it's not strange that all these countries grow so fast now.Because what you see here, what you see here is the flat world of Thomas Friedman, isn't it. It's not really, really flat. But the middle income countries — and this is where I suggest to my students, stop using the concept ""developing world."" Because after all, talking about the developing world is like having two chapters in the history of the United States.The last chapter is about present, and president Obama, and the other is about the past, where you cover everything from Washington to Eisenhower. Because Washington to Eisenhower, that is what we find in the developing world. We could actually go to Mayflower to Eisenhower, and that would be put together into a developing world, which is rightly growing its cities in a very amazing way, which have great entrepreneurs, but also have the collapsing countries.So, how could we make better sense about this? Well, one way of trying is to see whether we could look at income distribution. This is the income distribution of peoples in the world, from $1. This is where you have food to eat. These people go to bed hungry. And this is the number of people. This is $10, whether you have a public or a private health service system. This is where you can provide health service for your family and school for your children, and this is OECD countries: Green, Latin America, East Europe. This is East Asia, and the light blue there is South Asia.And this is how the world changed. It changed like this. Can you see how it's growing? And how hundreds of millions and billions is coming out of poverty in Asia? And it goes over here? And I come now, into projections, but I have to stop at the door of Lehman Brothers there, you know, because — (Laughter) that's where the projections are not valid any longer. Probably the world will do this. and then it will continue forward like this. But more or less, this is what will happen, and we have a world which cannot be looked upon as divided.We have the high income countries here, with the United States as a leading power; we have the emerging economies in the middle, which provide a lot of the funding for the bailout; and we have the low income countries here. Yeah, this is a fact that from where the money comes, they have been saving, you know, over the last decade. And here we have the low income countries where entrepreneurs are. And here we have the countries in collapse and war, like Afghanistan, Somalia, parts of Congo, Darfur. We have all this at the same time.That's why it's so problematic to describe what has happened in the developing world. Because it's so different, what has happened there. And that's why I suggest a slightly different approach of what you would call it. And you have huge differences within countries also. I heard that your departments here were by regions. Here you have Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Arab states, East Europe, Latin America, and OECD. And on this axis, GDP. And on this, heath, child survival, and it doesn't come as a surprise that Africa south of Sahara is at the bottom.But when I split it, when I split it into country bubbles, the size of the bubbles here is the population. Then you see Sierra Leone and Mauritius, completely different. There is such a difference within Sub-Saharan Africa. And I can split the others. Here is the South Asian, Arab world. Now all your different departments. East Europe, Latin America, and OECD countries. And here were are. We have a continuum in the world. We cannot put it into two parts.It is Mayflower down here. It is Washington here, building, building countries. It's Lincoln here, advancing them. It's Eisenhower bringing modernity into the countries. And then it's United States today, up here. And we have countries all this way. Now, this is the important thing of understanding how the world has changed. At this point I decided to make a pause. (Laughter)And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of — no, this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. (Applause) And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much.Quite the opposite of the World Bank, who compiled data with government money, tax money, and then they sell it to add a little profit, in a very inefficient, Gutenberg way. (Applause) But the people doing that at the World Bank are among the best in the world. And they are highly skilled professionals. It's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in the modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor. (Laughter) And I'm not paid to come here, no.I would like to show you what happens with the data, what we can show with this data. Look here. This is the world. With income down there and child mortality. And what has happened in the world? Since 1950, during the last 50 years we have had a fall in child mortality. And it is the DHS that makes it possible to know this. And we had an increase in income. And the blue former developing countries are mixing up with the former industrialized western world. We have a continuum. But we still have, of course, Congo, up there. We still have as poor countries as we have had, always, in history. And that's the bottom billion, where we've heard today about a completely new approach to do it.And how fast has this happened? Well, MDG 4. The United States has not been so eager to use MDG 4. But you have been the main sponsor that has enabled us to measure it, because it's the only child mortality that we can measure. And we used to say that it should fall four percent per year. Let's see what Sweden has done. We used to boast about fast social progress. That's where we were, 1900. 1900, Sweden was there. Same child mortality as Bangladesh had, 1990, though they had lower income. They started very well. They used the aid well. They vaccinated the kids. They get better water. And they reduced child mortality, with an amazing 4.7 percent per year. They beat Sweden. I run Sweden the same 16 year period.Second round, it's Sweden, 1916, against Egypt, 1990. Here we go. Once again the USA is part of the reason here. They get safe water, they get food for the poor, and they get malaria eradicated. 5.5 percent. They are faster than the millennium development goal.And third chance for Sweden, against Brazil here. Brazil here has amazing social improvement over the last 16 years, and they go faster than Sweden. This means that the world is converging. The middle income countries, the emerging economy, they are catching up. They are moving to cities, where they also get better assistance for that.Well the Swedish students protest at this point. They say, ""This is not fair, because these countries had vaccines and antibiotics that were not available for Sweden. We have to do real-time competition."" Okay. I give you Singapore, the year I was born. Singapore had twice the child mortality of Sweden. It's the most tropical country in the world, a marshland on the equator. And here we go. It took a little time for them to get independent. But then they started to grow their economy. And they made the social investment. They got away malaria. They got a magnificent health system that beat both the U.S. and Sweden. We never thought it would happen that they would win over Sweden! (Applause)All these green countries are achieving millennium development goals. These yellow are just about to be doing this. These red are the countries that doesn't do it, and the policy has to be improved. Not simplistic extrapolation. We have to really find a way of supporting those countries in a better way. We have to respect the middle income countries on what they are doing. And we have to fact-base the whole way we look at the world.This is dollar per person. This is HIV in the countries. The blue is Africa. The size of the bubbles is how many are HIV affected. You see the tragedy in South Africa there. About 20 percent of the adult population are infected. And in spite of them having quite a high income, they have a huge number of HIV infected. But you also see that there are African countries down here. There is no such thing as an HIV epidemic in Africa. There's a number, five to 10 countries in Africa that has the same level as Sweden and United States. And there are others who are extremely high.And I will show you that what has happened in one of the best countries, with the most vibrant economy in Africa and a good governance, Botswana. They have a very high level. It's coming down. But now it's not falling, because there, with help from PEPFAR, it's working with treatment. And people are not dying. And you can see it's not that easy, that it is war which caused this. Because here, in Congo, there is war. And here, in Zambia, there is peace.And it's not the economy. Richer country has a little higher. If I split Tanzania in its income, the richer 20 percent in Tanzania has more HIV than the poorest one. And it's really different within each country. Look at the provinces of Kenya. They are very different. And this is the situation you see. It's not deep poverty. It's the special situation, probably of concurrent sexual partnership among part of the heterosexual population in some countries, or some parts of countries, in south and eastern Africa.Don't make it Africa. Don't make it a race issue. Make it a local issue. And do prevention at each place, in the way it can be done there. So to just end up, there are things of suffering in the one billion poorest, which we don't know. Those who live beyond the cellphone, those who have yet to see a computer, those who have no electricity at home.This is the disease, Konzo, I spent 20 years elucidating in Africa. It's caused by fast processing of toxic cassava root in famine situation. It's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the '30s. It's similar to other nutritional diseases. It will never affect a rich person.We have seen it here in Mozambique. This is the epidemic in Mozambique. This is an epidemic in northern Tanzania. You never heard about the disease. But it's much more than Ebola that has been affected by this disease. Cause crippling throughout the world. And over the last two years, 2,000 people has been crippled in the southern tip of Bandundu region. That used to be the illegal diamond trade, from the UNITA-dominated area in Angola. That has now disappeared, and they are now in great economic problem. And one week ago, for the first time, there were four lines on the Internet.Don't get confused of the progress of the emerging economies and the great capacity of people in the middle income countries and in peaceful low income countries. There is still mystery in one billion. And we have to have more concepts than just developing countries and developing world. We need a new mindset. The world is converging, but — but — but not the bottom billion. They are still as poor as they've ever been. It's not sustainable, and it will not happen around one superpower. But you will remain one of the most important superpowers, and the most hopeful superpower, for the time to be. And this institution will have a very crucial role, not for United States, but for the world. So you have a very bad name, State Department. This is not the State Department. It's the World Department. And we have a high hope in you. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state
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"I love theater. I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else and look at life with a completely new perspective. I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen. The idea that in that room at that moment, everyone, regardless of their age, their gender, their race, their color, their religion, comes together. At that moment, we transcend space and time together. Theater awakens our senses and opens the door to our imagination. And our ability to imagine is what makes us explorers. Our ability to imagine makes us inventors and creators and unique. I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing ""Upwake."" ""Upwake"" tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. I wanted ""Upwake"" to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would. And I wanted to let my imagination run wild. So I began drawing the story that was moving in my head.If Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of ""The Little Prince,"" were here, he would have drawn three holes inside that box and told you your sheep was inside. Because, if you look closely enough, things will begin to appear. This is not a box; these are the renderings of my imagination from head to paper to screen to life. In ""Upwake"" buildings wear suits, Zero tap dances on a giant keyboard, clones himself with a scanner, tames and whips the computer mice, sails away into dreamscape from a single piece of paper and launches into space. I wanted to create environments that moved and morphed like an illusionist. Go from one world to another in a second. I wanted to have humor, beauty, simplicity and complexity and use metaphors to suggest ideas. At the beginning of the show, for example, Zero deejays dream and reality. Technology is an instrument that allowed me to manifest my visions in high definition, live, on stage.So today, I would like to talk to you about the relationship between theater and technology. Let's start with technology. (Fuse blowing) All right. Let's start with theater. (Laughter) (Buzzing) (Click, click, bang) (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you.""Upwake"" lasts 52 minutes and 54 seconds. I project 3D animation on all the four surfaces of the stage which I interact with. The use of animation and projection was a process of discovery. I didn't use it as a special effect, but as a partner on stage. There are no special effects in ""Upwake,"" no artifice. It's as lavish and intricate as it is simple and minimal. Three hundred and forty-four frames, four and a half years and commissions later, what started as a one person show became a collaborative work of nineteen most talented artists. And here are some excerpts. (Applause) Thank you.So this is, relatively, a new show that we're now beginning to tour. And in Austin, Texas, I was asked to give small demonstrations in schools during the afternoon. When I arrived at one of the schools, I certainly did not expect this: Six hundred kids, packed in a gymnasium, waiting. I was a little nervous performing without animation, costume — really — and make-up. But the teachers came to me afterward and told me they hadn't seen the kids that attentive. And I think the reason why is that I was able to use their language and their reality in order to transport them into another. Something happened along the way. Zero became a person and not just a character in a play. Zero does not speak, is neither man nor woman. Zero is Zero, a little hero of the 21st Century, and Zero can touch so many more people than I possibly could.It's as much about bringing new disciplines inside this box as it is about taking theater out of its box. As a street performer, I have learned that everybody wants to connect. And that usually, if you're a bit extraordinary, if you're not exactly of human appearance, then people will feel inclined to participate and to feel out loud. It's as though you made something resonate within them. It's as though the mystery of the person they're interacting with and connecting allows them to be themselves just a bit more. Because through your mask, they let theirs go.Being human is an art form. I know theater can improve the quality of people's lives, and I know theater can heal. I've worked as a doctor clown in a hospital for two years. I have seen sick kids and sad parents and doctors be lifted and transported in moments of pure joy. I know theater unites us. Zero wants to engage the generation of today and tomorrow, tell various stories through different mediums.Comic books. Quantum physics video games. And Zero wants to go to the moon. In 2007, Zero launched a green campaign, suggesting his friends and fans to turn off their electricity every Sunday from 7:53 to 8:00 p.m. The idea is simple, basic. It's not original, but it's important, and it's important to participate.There is a revolution. It's a human and technological revolution. It's motion and emotion. It's information. It's visual. It's musical. It's sensorial. It's conceptual. It's universal. It's beyond words and numbers. It's happening. The natural progression of science and art finding each other to better touch and define the human experience. There is a revolution in the way that we think, in the way that we share, and the way that we express our stories, our evolution. This is a time of communication, connection and creative collaboration. Charlie Chaplin innovated motion pictures and told stories through music, silence, humor and poetry. He was social, and his character, The Tramp, spoke to millions. He gave entertainment, pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most.We are not here to question the possible; we are here to challenge the impossible. In the science of today, we become artists. In the art of today, we become scientists. We design our world. We invent possibilities. We teach, touch and move. It is now that we can use the diversity of our talents to create intelligent, meaningful and extraordinary work. It's now. (Ringing) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/natasha_tsakos_multimedia_theatrical_adventure
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"I've been fascinated with crop diversity for about 35 years from now, ever since I stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named Jack Harlan. And he described the diversity within crops — all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such — as a genetic resource. And he said, ""This genetic resource,"" — and I'll never forget the words — ""stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.""I figured he was either really on to something, or he was one of these academic nutcases. So, I looked a little further, and what I figured out was that he wasn't a nutcase. He was the most respected scientist in the field. What he understood was that biological diversity — crop diversity — is the biological foundation of agriculture. It's the raw material, the stuff, of evolution in our agricultural crops. Not a trivial matter. And he also understood that that foundation was crumbling, literally crumbling. That indeed, a mass extinction was underway in our fields, in our agricultural system. And that this mass extinction was taking place with very few people noticing and even fewer caring.Now, I know that many of you don't stop to think about diversity in agricultural systems and, let's face it, that's logical. You don't see it in the newspaper every day. And when you go into the supermarket, you certainly don't see a lot of choices there. You see apples that are red, yellow, and green and that's about it.So, let me show you a picture of one form of diversity. Here's some beans, and there are about 35 or 40 different varieties of beans on this picture. Now, imagine each one of these varieties as being distinct from another about the same way as a poodle from a Great Dane. If I wanted to show you a picture of all the dog breeds in the world, and I put 30 or 40 of them on a slide, it would take about 10 slides because there about 400 breeds of dogs in the world. But there are 35 to 40,000 different varieties of beans. So if I were to going to show you all the beans in the world, and I had a slide like this, and I switched it every second, it would take up my entire TED talk, and I wouldn't have to say anything.But the interesting thing is that this diversity — and the tragic thing is — that this diversity is being lost. We have about 200,000 different varieties of wheat, and we have about 2 to 400,000 different varieties of rice, but it's being lost. And I want to give you an example of that. It's a bit of a personal example, in fact. In the United States, in the 1800s — that's where we have the best data — farmers and gardeners were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples. Imagine that. 7,100 apples with names. Today, 6,800 of those are extinct, no longer to be seen again.I used to have a list of these extinct apples, and when I would go out and give a presentation, I would pass the list out in the audience. I wouldn't tell them what it was, but it was in alphabetical order, and I would tell them to look for their names, their family names, their mother's maiden name. And at the end of the speech, I would ask, ""How many people have found a name?"" And I never had fewer than two-thirds of an audience hold up their hand. And I said, ""You know what? These apples come from your ancestors, and your ancestors gave them the greatest honor they could give them. They gave them their name. The bad news is they're extinct. The good news is a third of you didn't hold up your hand. Your apple's still out there. Find it. Make sure it doesn't join the list.""So, I want to tell you that the piece of the good news is that the Fowler apple is still out there. And there's an old book back here, and I want to read a piece from it. This book was published in 1904. It's called ""The Apples of New York"" and this is the second volume. See, we used to have a lot of apples. And the Fowler apple is described in here — I hope this doesn't surprise you — as, ""a beautiful fruit."" (Laughter) I don't know if we named the apple or if the apple named us, but ... but, to be honest, the description goes on and it says that it ""doesn't rank high in quality, however."" And then he has to go even further. It sounds like it was written by an old school teacher of mine. ""As grown in New York, the fruit usually fails to develop properly in size and quality and is, on the whole, unsatisfactory.""(Laughter)And I guess there's a lesson to be learned here, and the lesson is: so why save it? I get this question all the time. Why don't we just save the best one? And there are a couple of answers to that question. One thing is that there is no such thing as a best one. Today's best variety is tomorrow's lunch for insects or pests or disease. The other thing is that maybe that Fowler apple or maybe a variety of wheat that's not economical right now has disease or pest resistance or some quality that we're going to need for climate change that the others don't. So it's not necessary, thank God, that the Fowler apple is the best apple in the world. It's just necessary or interesting that it might have one good, unique trait. And for that reason, we ought to be saving it. Why? As a raw material, as a trait we can use in the future. Think of diversity as giving us options. And options, of course, are exactly what we need in an era of climate change.I want to show you two slides, but first, I want to tell you that we've been working at the Global Crop Diversity Trust with a number of scientists — particularly at Stanford and University of Washington — to ask the question: What's going to happen to agriculture in an era of climate change and what kind of traits and characteristics do we need in our agricultural crops to be able to adapt to this? In short, the answer is that in the future, in many countries, the coldest growing seasons are going to be hotter than anything those crops have seen in the past. The coldest growing seasons of the future, hotter than the hottest of the past. Is agriculture adapted to that? I don't know. Can fish play the piano? If agriculture hasn't experienced that, how could it be adapted?Now, the highest concentration of poor and hungry people in the world, and the place where climate change, ironically, is going to be the worst is in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. So I've picked two examples here, and I want to show you. In the histogram before you now, the blue bars represent the historical range of temperatures, going back about far as we have temperature data. And you can see that there's some difference between one growing season and another. Some are colder, some are hotter and it's a bell shaped curve. The tallest bar is the average temperature for the most number of growing seasons. In the future, later this century, it's going to look like the red, totally out of bounds. The agricultural system and, more importantly, the crops in the field in India have never experienced this before.Here's South Africa. The same story. But the most interesting thing about South Africa is we don't have to wait for 2070 for there to be trouble. By 2030, if the maize, or corn, varieties, which is the dominant crop — 50 percent of the nutrition in Southern Africa are still in the field — in 2030, we'll have a 30 percent decrease in production of maize because of the climate change already in 2030. 30 percent decrease of production in the context of increasing population, that's a food crisis. It's global in nature. We will watch children starve to death on TV. Now, you may say that 20 years is a long way off. It's two breeding cycles for maize. We have two rolls of the dice to get this right. We have to get climate-ready crops in the field, and we have to do that rather quickly.Now, the good news is that we have conserved. We have collected and conserved a great deal of biological diversity, agricultural diversity, mostly in the form of seed, and we put it in seed banks, which is a fancy way of saying a freezer. If you want to conserve seed for a long term and you want to make it available to plant breeders and researchers, you dry it and then you freeze it. Unfortunately, these seed banks are located around the world in buildings and they're vulnerable. Disasters have happened. In recent years we lost the gene bank, the seed bank in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can guess why. In Rwanda, in the Solomon Islands. And then there are just daily disasters that take place in these buildings, financial problems and mismanagement and equipment failures, and all kinds of things, and every time something like this happens, it means extinction. We lose diversity. And I'm not talking about losing diversity in the same way that you lose your car keys. I'm talking about losing it in the same way that we lost the dinosaurs: actually losing it, never to be seen again.So, a number of us got together and decided that, you know, enough is enough and we need to do something about that and we need to have a facility that can really offer protection for our biological diversity of — maybe not the most charismatic diversity. You don't look in the eyes of a carrot seed quite in the way you do a panda bear, but it's very important diversity. So we needed a really safe place, and we went quite far north to find it. To Svalbard, in fact. This is above mainland Norway. You can see Greenland there. That's at 78 degrees north. It's as far as you can fly on a regularly scheduled airplane. It's a remarkably beautiful landscape. I can't even begin to describe it to you. It's otherworldly, beautiful. We worked with the Norwegian government and with the NorGen, the Norwegian Genetic Resources Program, to design this facility. What you see is an artist's conception of this facility, which is built in a mountain in Svalbard. The idea of Svalbard was that it's cold, so we get natural freezing temperatures. But it's remote. It's remote and accessible so it's safe and we don't depend on mechanical refrigeration.This is more than just an artist's dream, it's now a reality. And this next picture shows it in context, in Svalbard. And here's the front door of this facility. When you open up the front door, this is what you're looking at. It's pretty simple. It's a hole in the ground. It's a tunnel, and you go into the tunnel, chiseled in solid rock, about 130 meters. There are now a couple of security doors, so you won't see it quite like this. Again, when you get to the back, you get into an area that's really my favorite place. I think of it as sort of a cathedral. And I know that this tags me as a bit of a nerd, but ... (Laughter) Some of the happiest days of my life have been spent ... (Laughter) in this place there.(Applause)If you were to walk into one of these rooms, you would see this. It's not very exciting, but if you know what's there, it's pretty emotional. We have now about 425,000 samples of unique crop varieties. There's 70,000 samples of different varieties of rice in this facility right now. About a year from now, we'll have over half a million samples. We're going up to over a million, and someday we'll basically have samples — about 500 seeds — of every variety of agricultural crop that can be stored in a frozen state in this facility. This is a backup system for world agriculture. It's a backup system for all the seed banks. Storage is free. It operates like a safety deposit box. Norway owns the mountain and the facility, but the depositors own the seed. And if anything happens, then they can come back and get it. This particular picture that you see shows the national collection of the United States, of Canada, and an international institution from Syria.I think it's interesting in that this facility, I think, is almost the only thing I can think of these days where countries, literally, every country in the world — because we have seeds from every country in the world — all the countries of the world have gotten together to do something that's both long term, sustainable and positive. I can't think of anything else that's happened in my lifetime that way.I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a solution for climate change, for the water crisis. Agriculture takes 70 percent of fresh water supplies on earth. I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that there is such a solution for those things, or the energy crisis, or world hunger, or peace in conflict. I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a simple solution for that, but I can look you in the eyes and tell you that we can't solve any of those problems if we don't have crop diversity. Because I challenge you to think of an effective, efficient, sustainable solution to climate change if we don't have crop diversity. Because, quite literally, if agriculture doesn't adapt to climate change, neither will we. And if crops don't adapt to climate change, neither will agriculture, neither will we.So, this is not something pretty and nice to do. There are a lot of people who would love to have this diversity exist just for the existence value of it. It is, I agree, a nice thing to do. But it's a necessary thing to do. So, in a very real sense, I believe that we, as an international community, should get organized to complete the task. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a wonderful gift that Norway and others have given us, but it's not the complete answer. We need to collect the remaining diversity that's out there. We need to put it into good seed banks that can offer those seeds to researchers in the future. We need to catalog it. It's a library of life, but right now I would say we don't have a card catalog for it. And we need to support it financially.My big idea would be that while we think of it as commonplace to endow an art museum or endow a chair at a university, we really ought to be thinking about endowing wheat. 30 million dollars in an endowment would take care of preserving all the diversity in wheat forever. So we need to be thinking a little bit in those terms.And my final thought is that we, of course, by conserving wheat, rice, potatoes, and the other crops, we may, quite simply, end up saving ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cary_fowler_one_seed_at_a_time_protecting_the_future_of_food
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"I'm going to tell you about one of the world's largest problems and how it can be solved.I'd like to start with a little experiment. Could you put your hand up if you wear glasses or contact lenses, or you've had laser refractive surgery? Now, unfortunately, there are too many of you for me to do the statistics properly. But it looks like — I'm guessing — that it'll be about 60 percent of the room because that's roughly the fraction of developed world population that have some sort of vision correction.The World Health Organization estimates — well, they make various estimates of the number of people who need glasses — the lowest estimate is 150 million people. They also have an estimate of around a billion. But in fact, I would argue that we've just done an experiment here and now, which shows us that the global need for corrective eyewear is around half of any population. And the problem of poor vision, is actually not just a health problem, it's also an educational problem, and it's an economic problem, and it's a quality of life problem.Glasses are not very expensive. They're quite plentiful. The problem is, there aren't enough eye care professionals in the world to use the model of the delivery of corrective eyewear that we have in the developed world. There are just way too few eye care professionals.So this little slide here shows you an optometrist and the little blue person represents about 10,000 people and that's the ratio in the U.K. This is the ratio of optometrists to people in sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, there are some countries in sub-Saharan Africa where there's one optometrist for eight million of the population.How do you do this? How do you solve this problem? I came up with a solution to this problem, and I came up with a solution based on adaptive optics for this. And the idea is you make eye glasses, and you adjust them yourself and that solves the problem.What I want to do is to show you that one can make a pair of glasses. I shall just show you how you make a pair of glasses. I shall pop this in my pocket. I'm short sighted. I look at the signs at the end, I can hardly see them. So — okay, I can now see that man running out there, and I can see that guy running out there. I've now made prescription eyewear to my prescription. Next step in my process. So, I've now made eye glasses to my prescription. Okay, so I've made these glasses and ... Okay, I've made the glasses to my prescription and ... ... I've just ... And I've now made some glasses. That's it.(Applause)Now, these aren't the only pair in the world. In fact, this technology's been evolving. I started working on it in 1985, and it's been evolving very slowly. There are about 30,000 in use now. And they're in fifteen countries. They're spread around the world.And I have a vision, which I'll share with you. I have a global vision for vision. And that vision is to try to get a billion people wearing the glasses they need by the year 2020. To do that — this is an early example of the technology. The technology is being further developed — the cost has to be brought down. This pair, in fact, these currently cost about 19 dollars. But the cost has to be brought right down. It has to be brought down because we're trying to serve populations who live on a dollar a day.How do you solve this problem? You start to get into detail. And on this slide, I'm basically explaining all the problems you have. How do you distribute? How do you work out how to fit the thing? How do you have people realizing that they have a vision problem? How do you deal with the industry? And the answer to that is research.What we've done is to set up the Center for Vision in the Developing World here in the university. If you want to know more, just come have a look at our website. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses
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"It's hard to believe that it's less than a year since the extraordinary moment when the finance, the credit, which drives our economies froze. A massive cardiac arrest. The effect, the payback, perhaps, for years of vampire predators like Bernie Madoff, whom we saw earlier. Abuse of steroids, binging and so on. And it's only a few months since governments injected enormous sums of money to try and keep the whole system afloat. And we're now in a very strange sort of twilight zone, where no one quite knows what's worked, or what doesn't. We don't have any very clear maps, any compass to guide us. We don't know which experts to believe anymore.What I'm going to try and do is to give some pointers to what I think is the landscape on the other side of the crisis, what things we should be looking out for and how we can actually use the crisis. There's a definition of leadership which says, ""It's the ability to use the smallest possible crisis for the biggest possible effect."" And I want to talk about how we ensure that this crisis, which is by no means small, really is used to the full.I want to start just by saying a bit about where I'm coming from. I've got a very confused background which perhaps makes me appropriate for confused times. I've got a Ph.D. in Telecoms, as you can see. I trained briefly as a Buddhist monk under this guy. I've been a civil servant, and I've been in charge of policy for this guy as well.But what I want to talk about begins when I was at this city, this university, as a student. And then as now, it was a beautiful place of balls and punts, beautiful people, many of whom took to heart Ronald Reagan's comment that, ""even if they say hard work doesn't do you any harm, why risk it?""But when I was here, a lot of my fellow teenagers were in a very different situation, leaving school at a time then of rapidly growing youth unemployment, and essentially hitting a brick wall in terms of their opportunities. And I spent quite a lot of time with them rather than in punts. And they were people who were not short of wit, or grace or energy, but they had no hope, no jobs, no prospects. And when people aren't allowed to be useful, they soon think that they're useless. And although that was great for the music business at the time, it wasn't much good for anything else. And ever since then, I've wondered why it is that capitalism is so amazingly efficient at some things, but so inefficient at others, why it's so innovative in some ways and so un-innovative in others.Now, since that time, we've actually been through an extraordinary boom, the longest boom ever in the history of this country. Unprecedented wealth and prosperity, but that growth hasn't always delivered what we needed. H.L. Mencken once said that, ""to every complex problem, there is a simple solution and it's wrong."" But I'm not saying growth is wrong, but it's very striking that throughout the years of growth, many things didn't get better. Rates of depression carried on up, right across the Western world. If you look at America, the proportion of Americans with no one to talk to about important things went up from a tenth to a quarter. We commuted longer to work, but as you can see from this graph, the longer you commute the less happy you're likely to be. And it became ever clearer that economic growth doesn't automatically translate into social growth or human growth.We're now at another moment when another wave of teenagers are entering a cruel job market. There will be a million unemployed young people here by the end of the year, thousands losing their jobs everyday in America. We've got to do whatever we can to help them, but we've also got to ask, I think, a more profound question of whether we use this crisis to jump forward to a different kind of economy that's more suited to human needs, to a better balance of economy and society.And I think one of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity. They bring ideas from the margins into the mainstream. They often lead to the acceleration of much-needed reforms. And you saw that in the '30s, when the Great Depression paved the way for Bretton Woods, welfare states and so on. And I think you can see around us now, some of the green shoots of a very different kind of economy and capitalism which could grow. You can see it in daily life. When times are hard, people have to do things for themselves, and right across the world, Oxford, Omaha, Omsk, you can see an extraordinary explosion of urban farming, people taking over land, taking over roofs, turning barges into temporary farms.And I'm a very small part of this. I have 60,000 of these things in my garden. A few of these. This is Atilla the hen. And I'm a very small part of a very large movement, which for some people is about survival, but is also about values, about a different kind of economy, which isn't so much about consumption and credit, but about things which matter to us. And everywhere too, you can see a proliferation of time banks and parallel currencies, people using smart technologies to link up all the resources freed up by the market — people, buildings, land — and linking them to whomever has got the most compelling needs.There's a similar story, I think, for governments. Ronald Reagan, again, said the two funniest sentences in the English language are, ""I'm from the government. And I'm here to help."" But I think last year when governments did step in, people were quite glad that they were there, that they did act. But now, a few months on, however good politicians are at swallowing frogs without pulling a face, as someone once put it, they can't hide their uncertainty. Because it's already clear how much of the enormous amount of money they put into the economy, really went into fixing the past, bailing out the banks, the car companies, not preparing us for the future. How much of the money is going into concrete and boosting consumption, not into solving the really profound problems we have to solve.And everywhere, as people think about the unprecedented sums which are being spent of our money and our children's money, now, in the depth of this crisis, they're asking: Surely, we should be using this with a longer-term vision to accelerate the shift to a green economy, to prepare for aging, to deal with some of the inequalities which scar countries like this and the United States rather than just giving the money to the incumbents? Surely, we should be giving the money to entrepreneurs, to civil society, for people able to create the new, not to the big, well-connected companies, big, clunky government programs. And, after all this, as the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu said, ""Governing a great country is like cooking a small fish. Don't overdo it.""And I think more and more people are also asking: Why boost consumption, rather than change what we consume? Like the mayor of São Paulo who's banned advertising billboards, or the many cities like San Francisco putting in infrastructures for electric cars. You can see a bit of the same thing happening in the business world. Some, I think some of the bankers who have appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But ask yourselves: What will be the biggest sectors of the economy in 10, 20, 30 years time? It won't be the ones lining up for handouts, like cars and aerospace and so on.The biggest sector, by far, will be health — already 18 percent of the American economy, predicted to grow to 30, even 40 percent by mid-century. Elder care, child care, already much bigger employers than cars. Education: six, seven, eight percent of the economy and growing. Environmental services, energy services, the myriad of green jobs, they're all pointing to a very different kind of economy which isn't just about products, but is using distributed networks, and it's founded above all on care, on relationships, on what people do to other people, often one to one, rather than simply selling them a product.And I think that what connects the challenge for civil society, the challenge for governments and the challenge for business now is, in a way, a very simple one, but quite a difficult one. We know our societies have to radically change. We know we can't go back to where we were before the crisis. But we also know it's only through experiment that we'll discover exactly how to run a low carbon city, how to care for a much older population, how to deal with drug addiction and so on.And here's the problem. In science, we do experiments systematically. Our societies now spend two, three, four percent of GDP to invest systematically in new discovery, in science, in technology, to fuel the pipeline of brilliant inventions which illuminate gatherings like this. It's not that our scientists are necessarily much smarter than they were a hundred years ago, maybe they are, but they have a hell of a lot more backing than they ever did. And what's striking though, is that in society there's almost nothing comparable, no comparable investment, no systematic experiment, in the things capitalism isn't very good at, like compassion, or empathy, or relationships or care.Now, I didn't really understand that until I met this guy who was then an 80-year-old, slightly shambolic man who lived on tomato soup and thought ironing was very overrated. He had helped shape Britain's post-war institutions, its welfare state, its economy, but had sort of reinvented himself as a social entrepreneur, became an inventor of many, many different organizations. Some famous ones like the Open University, which has 110,000 students, the University of the Third Age, which has nearly half a million older people teaching other older people, as well as strange things like DIY garages and language lines and schools for social entrepreneurs. And he ended his life selling companies to venture capitalists.He believed if you see a problem, you shouldn't tell someone to act, you should act on it yourself, and he lived long enough and saw enough of his ideas first scorned and then succeed that he said you should always take no as a question and not as an answer. And his life was a systematic experiment to find better social answers, not from a theory, but from experiment, and experiment involving the people with the best intelligence on social needs, which were usually the people living with those needs. And he believed we live with others, we share the world with others and therefore our innovation must be done with others too, not doing things at people, for them, and so on.Now, what he did didn't used to have a name, but I think it's rapidly becoming quite mainstream. It's what we do in the organization named after him where we try and invent, create, launch new ventures, whether it's schools, web companies, health organizations and so on. And we find ourselves part of a very rapidly growing global movement of institutions working on social innovation, using ideas from design or technology or community organizing to develop the germs of a future world, but through practice and through demonstration and not through theory. And they're spreading from Korea to Brazil to India to the USA and across Europe. And they've been given new momentum by the crisis, by the need for better answers to joblessness, community breakdown and so on.Some of the ideas are strange. These are complaints choirs. People come together to sing about the things that really bug them. (Laughter) Others are much more pragmatic: health coaches, learning mentors, job clubs. And some are quite structural, like social impact bonds where you raise money to invest in diverting teenagers from crime or helping old people keep out of hospital, and you get paid back according to how successful your projects are.Now, the idea that all of this represents, I think, is rapidly becoming a common sense and part of how we respond to the crisis, recognizing the need to invest in innovation for social progress as well as technological progress. There were big health innovation funds launched earlier this year in this country, as well as a public service innovation lab. Across northern Europe, many governments now have innovation laboratories within them. And just a few months ago, President Obama launched the Office of Social Innovation in the White House.And what people are beginning to ask is: Surely, just as we invest in R and D, two, three, four percent, of our GDP, of our economy, what if we put, let's say, one percent of public spending into social innovation, into elder care, new kinds of education, new ways of helping the disabled? Perhaps we'd achieve similar productivity gains in society to those we've had in the economy and in technology.And if, a generation or two ago, the big challenges were ones like getting a man on the moon, perhaps the challenges we need to set ourselves now are ones like eliminating child malnutrition, stopping trafficking, or one, I think closer to home for America or Europe, why don't we set ourselves the goal of achieving a billion extra years of life for today's citizens. Now those are all goals which could be achieved within a decade, but only with radical and systematic experiment, not just with technologies, but also with lifestyles and culture and policies and institutions too.Now, I want to end by saying a little bit about what I think this means for capitalism. I think what this is all about, this whole movement which is growing from the margins, remains quite small. Nothing like the resources of a CERN or a DARPA or an IBM or a Dupont. What it's telling us is that capitalism is going to become more social. It's already immersed in social networks. It will become more involved in social investment, and social care and in industries where the value comes from what you do with others, not just from what you sell to them, and from relationships as well as from consumption. But interestingly too, it implies a future where society learns a few tricks from capitalism about how you embed the DNA of restless continual innovation into society, trying things out and then growing and scaling the ones that work.Now, I think this future will be quite surprising to many people. In recent years, a lot of intelligent people thought that capitalism had basically won. History was over and society would inevitably have to take second place to economy. But I've been struck with a parallel in how people often talk about capitalism today and how they talked about the monarchy 200 years ago, just after the French Revolution and the restoration of the monarchy in France.Then, people said monarchy dominated everywhere because it was rooted in human nature. We were naturally deferential. We needed hierarchy. Just as today, the enthusiasts of unrestrained capitalism say it's rooted in human nature, only now it's individualism, inquisitiveness, and so on. Then monarchy had seen off its big challenger, mass democracy, which was seen as a well-intentioned but doomed experiment, just as capitalism has seen off socialism. Even Fidel Castro now says that the only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is not being exploited by multinational capitalism. And whereas then monarchies, palaces and forts dominated every city skyline and looked permanent and confident, today it's the gleaming towers of the banks which dominate every big city.I'm not suggesting the crowds are about to storm the barricades and string up every investment banker from the nearest lamppost, though that might be quite tempting. But I do think we're on the verge of a period when, just as happened to the monarchy and, interestingly, the military too, the central position of finance capital is going to come to an end, and it's going to steadily move to the sides, the margins of our society, transformed from being a master into a servant, a servant to the productive economy and of human needs.And as that happens, we will remember something very simple and obvious about capitalism, which is that, unlike what you read in economics textbooks, it's not a self-sufficient system. It depends on other systems, on ecology, on family, on community, and if these aren't replenished, capitalism suffers too. And our human nature isn't just selfish, it's also compassionate. It's not just competitive, it's also caring. Because of the depth of the crisis, I think we are at a moment of choice.The crisis is almost certainly deepening around us. It will be worse at the end of this year, quite possibly worse in a year's time than it is today. But this is one of those very rare moments when we have to choose whether we're just pedaling furiously to get back to where we were a year or two ago, and a very narrow idea of what the economy is for, or whether this is a moment to jump ahead, to reboot and to do some of the things we probably should have been doing anyway. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/geoff_mulgan_post_crash_investing_in_a_better_world_1
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"I'm a creative technologist and the focus of my work is on public installations. One of my driving passions is this idea of exploring nature, and trying to find hidden data within nature. It seems to me that there is this latent potential everywhere, all around us. Everything gives out some kind of data, whether it's sound or smell or vibration. Through my work, I've been trying to find ways to harness and unveil this. And so this basically led me to a subject called cymatics. Now, cymatics is the process of visualizing sound by basically vibrating a medium such as sand or water, as you can see there.So, if we have a quick look at the history of cymatics beginning with the observations of resonance, by Da Vinci, Galileo, the English scientist Robert Hook and then Ernest Chladni. He created an experiment using a metal plate, covering it with sand and then bowing it to create the Chladni patterns that you see here on the right.Moving on from this, the next person to explore this field was a gentleman called Hans Jenny in the 1970s. He actually coined the term cymatics. Then bringing us into the present day is a fellow collaborator of mine and cymatics expert, John Stewart Reed. He's kindly recreated for us the Chladni experiment. What we can see here is the metal sheet, this time connected to a sound driver and being fed by a frequency generator. As the frequencies increase, so do the complexities of the patterns that appear on the plate. As you can see with your own eyes. (Applause)So, what excites me about cymatics? Well, for me cymatics is an almost magical tool. It's like a looking glass into a hidden world. Through the numerous ways that we can apply cymatics, we can actually start to unveil the substance of things not seen. Devices like the cymascope, which you can see here, have been used to scientifically observe cymatic patterns. And the list of scientific applications is growing every day.For example, in oceanography, a lexicon of dolphin language is actually being created by basically visualizing the sonar beams that the dolphins emit. And hopefully in the future we'll be able to gain some deeper understanding of how they communicate. We can also use cymatics for healing and education. This is an installation developed with school children, where their hands are tracked. It allows them to control and position cymatic patterns and the reflections that are caused by them. We can also use cymatics as a beautiful natural art form.This image here is created from a snippet of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony playing through a cymatic device. So it kind of flips things on its head a little bit. This is Pink Floyd's ""Machine"" playing in real time through the cymascope. We can also use cymatics as a looking glass into nature. And we can actually recreate the archetypal forms of nature. So, for example, here on the left we can see a snowflake as it would appear in nature. Then on the right we can see a cymatically created snowflake. And here is a starfish and a cymatic starfish. And there is thousands of these.So what does this all mean? Well, there is still a lot to explore in its early days. And there's not many people working in this field. But consider for a moment that sound does have form. We've seen that it can affect matter and cause form within matter. Then sort of take a leap and think about the universe forming. And think about the immense sound of the universe forming. And if we kind of ponder on that, then perhaps cymatics had an influence on the formation of the universe itself.And here is some eye candy for you, from a range of DIY scientists and artists from all over the globe. Cymatics is accessible to everybody. I want to urge everybody here to apply your passion, your knowledge and your skills to areas like cymatics. I think collectively we can build a global community. We can inspire each other. And we can evolve this exploration of the substance of things not seen. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/evan_grant_cymatics
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"I'm extremely excited to be given the opportunity to come and speak to you today about what I consider to be the biggest stunt on Earth. Or perhaps not quite on Earth. A parachute jump from the very edge of space. More about that a bit later on.What I'd like to do first is take you through a very brief helicopter ride of stunts and the stunts industry in the movies and in television, and show you how technology has started to interface with the physical skills of the stunt performer in a way that makes the stunts bigger and actually makes them safer than they've ever been before.I've been a professional stunt man for 13 years. I'm a stunt coordinator. And as well as perform stunts I often design them. During that time, health and safety has become everything about my job. It's critical now that when a car crash happens it isn't just the stunt person we make safe, it's the crew. We can't be killing camera men. We can't be killing stunt men. We can't be killing anybody or hurting anybody on set, or any passerby. So, safety is everything. But it wasn't always that way.In the old days of the silent movies — Harold Lloyd here, hanging famously from the clock hands — a lot of these guys did their own stunts. They were quite remarkable. They had no safety, no real technology. What safety they had was very scant. This is the first stunt woman, Rosie Venger, an amazing woman. You can see from the slide, very very strong. She really paved the way at a time when nobody was doing stunts, let alone women.My favorite and a real hero of mine is Yakima Canutt. Yakima Canutt really formed the stunt fight. He worked with John Wayne and most of those old punch-ups you see in the Westerns. Yakima was either there or he stunt coordinated. This is a screen capture from ""Stagecoach,"" where Yakima Canutt is doing one of the most dangerous stunts I've ever seen. There is no safety, no back support, no pads, no crash mats, no sand pits in the ground. That's one of the most dangerous horse stunts, certainly.Talking of dangerous stunts and bringing things slightly up to date, some of the most dangerous stunts we do as stunt people are fire stunts. We couldn't do them without technology. These are particularly dangerous because there is no mask on my face. They were done for a photo shoot. One for the Sun newspaper, one for FHM magazine. Highly dangerous, but also you'll notice it doesn't look as though I'm wearing anything underneath the suit. The fire suits of old, the bulky suits, the thick woolen suits, have been replaced with modern materials like Nomex or, more recently, Carbonex — fantastic materials that enable us as stunt professionals to burn for longer, look more spectacular, and in pure safety. Here's a bit more. There's a guy with a flame thrower there, giving me what for.One of the things that a stuntman often does, and you'll see it every time in the big movies, is be blown through the air. Well, we used to use trampettes. In the old days, that's all they had. And that's a ramp. Spring off the thing and fly through the air, and hopefully you make it look good.Now we've got technology. This thing is called an air ram. It's a frightening piece of equipment for the novice stunt performer, because it will break your legs very, very quickly if you land on it wrong. Having said that, it works with compressed nitrogen. And that's in the up position. When you step on it, either by remote control or with the pressure of your foot, it will fire you, depending on the gas pressure, anything from five feet to 30 feet. I could, quite literally, fire myself into the gallery. Which I'm sure you wouldn't want. Not today.Car stunts are another area where technology and engineering advances have made life easier for us, and safer. We can do bigger car stunts than ever before now. Being run over is never easy. That's an old-fashioned, hard, gritty, physical stunt. But we have padding, and fantastic shock-absorbing things like Sorbothane — the materials that help us, when we're hit like this, not to hurt ourselves too much.The picture in the bottom right-hand corner there is of some crash test dummy work that I was doing. Showing how stunts work in different areas, really. And testing breakaway signpost pillars. A company makes a Lattix pillar, which is a network, a lattice-type pillar that collapses when it's hit. The car on the left drove into the steel pillar. And you can't see it from there, but the engine was in the driver's lap. They did it by remote control. I drove the other one at 60 miles an hour, exactly the same speed, and clearly walked away from it.Rolling a car over is another area where we use technology. We used to have to drive up a ramp, and we still do sometimes. But now we have a compressed nitrogen cannon. You can just see, underneath the car, there is a black rod on the floor by the wheel of the other car. That's the piston that was fired out of the floor. We can flip lorries, coaches, buses, anything over with a nitrogen cannon with enough power. (Laughs)It's a great job, really. (Laughter) It's such fun! You should hear some of the phone conversations that I have with people on my Bluetooth in the shop. ""Well, we can flip the bus over, we can have it burst into flames, and how about someone, you know, big explosion."" And people are looking like this ... (Laughs) I sort of forget how bizarre some of those conversations are.The next thing that I'd like to show you is something that Dunlop asked me to do earlier this year with our Channel Five's ""Fifth Gear Show."" A loop-the-loop, biggest in the world. Only one person had ever done it before. Now, the stuntman solution to this in the old days would be, ""Let's hit this as fast as possible. 60 miles an hour. Let's just go for it. Foot flat to the floor."" Well, you'd die if you did that.We went to Cambridge University, the other university, and spoke to a Doctor of Mechanical Engineering there, a physicist who taught us that it had to be 37 miles an hour. Even then, I caught seven G and lost a bit of consciousness on the way in. That's a long way to fall, if you get it wrong. That was just about right. So again, science helps us, and with the engineering too — the modifications to the car and the wheel.High falls, they're old fashioned stunts. What's interesting about high falls is that although we use airbags, and some airbags are quite advanced, they're designed so you don't slip off the side like you used to, if you land a bit wrong. So, they're a much safer proposition. Just basically though, it is a basic piece of equipment. It's a bouncy castle with slats in the side to allow the air to escape. That's all it is, a bouncy castle. That's the only reason we do it. See, it's all fun, this job. What's interesting is we still use cardboard boxes. They used to use cardboard boxes years ago and we still use them. And that's interesting because they are almost retrospective. They're great for catching you, up to certain heights.And on the other side of the fence, that physical art, the physical performance of the stuntman, has interfaced with the very highest technology in I.T. and in software. Not the cardboard box, but the green screen. This is a shot of ""Terminator,"" the movie. Two stunt guys doing what I consider to be a rather benign stunt. It's 30 feet. It's water. It's very simple. With the green screen we can put any background in the world on it, moving or still, and I can assure you, nowadays you can't see the joint. This is a parachutist with another parachutist doing exactly the same thing. Completely in the safety of a studio, and yet with the green screen we can have some moving image that a skydiver took, and put in the sky moving and the clouds whizzing by.Decelerator rigs and wires, we use them a lot. We fly people on wires, like this. This guy is not skydiving. He's being flown like a kite, or moved around like a kite.And this is a Guinness World Record attempt. They asked me to open their 50th anniversary show in 2004. And again, technology meant that I could do the fastest abseil over 100 meters, and stop within a couple of feet of the ground without melting the rope with the friction, because of the alloys I used in the descender device. And that's Centre Point in London. We brought Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road to a standstill.Helicopter stunts are always fun, hanging out of them, whatever. And aerial stunts. No aerial stunt would be the same without skydiving. Which brings us quite nicely to why I'm really here today: Project Space Jump.In 1960, Joseph Kittenger of the United States Air Force did the most spectacular thing. He did a jump from 100,000 feet, 102,000 to be precise, and he did it to test high altitude systems for military pilots in the new range of aircraft that were going up to 80,000 feet or so. And I'd just like to show you a little footage of what he did back then. And just how brave he was in 1960, bear in mind.Project Excelsior, it was called. There were three jumps. They first dropped some dummies. So that's the balloon, big gas balloon. It's that shape because the helium has to expand. My balloon will expand to 500 times and look like a big pumpkin when it's at the top. These are the dummies being dropped from 100,000 feet, and there is the camera that's strapped to them. You can clearly see the curvature of the Earth at that kind of altitude. And I'm planning to go from 120,000 feet, which is about 22 miles. You're in a near vacuum in that environment, which is in minus 50 degrees. So it's an extremely hostile place to be.This is Joe Kittenger himself. Bear in mind, ladies and gents, this was 1960. He didn't know if he would live or die. This is an extremely brave man. I spoke with him on the phone a few months ago. He's a very humble and wonderful human being. He sent me an email, saying, ""If you get this thing off the ground I wish you all the best."" And he signed it, ""Happy landings,"" which I thought was quite lovely. He's in his 80s and he lives in Florida. He's a tremendous guy. This is him in a pressure suit.Now one of the challenges of going up to altitude is when you get to 30,000 feet — it's great, isn't it? — When you get to 30,000 feet you can really only use oxygen. Above 30,000 feet up to nearly 50,000 feet, you need pressure breathing, which is where you're wearing a G suit. This is him in his old rock-and-roll jeans there, pushing him in, those turned up jeans. You need a pressure suit. You need a pressure breathing system with a G suit that squeezes you, that helps you to breathe in and helps you to exhale.Above 50,000 feet you need a space suit, a pressure suit. Certainly at 100,000 feet no aircraft will fly. Not even a jet engine. It needs to be rocket-powered or one of these things, a great big gas balloon. It took me a while; it took me years to find the right balloon team to build the balloon that would do this job. I've found that team in America now. And it's made of polyethylene, so it's very thin. We will have two balloons for each of my test jumps, and two balloons for the main jump, because they notoriously tear on takeoff. They're just so, so delicate.This is the step off. He's written on that thing, ""The highest step in the world."" And what must that feel like? I'm excited and I'm scared, both at the same time in equal measures. And this is the camera that he had on him as he tumbled before his drogue chute opened to stabilize him. A drogue chute is just a smaller chute which helps to keep your face down. You can just see them there, popping open. Those are the drogue chutes. He had three of them. I did quite a lot of research. And you'll see in a second there, he comes back down to the floor.Now just to give you some perspective of this balloon, the little black dots are people. It's hundreds of feet high. It's enormous. That's in New Mexico. That's the U.S. Air Force Museum. And they've made a dummy of him. That's exactly what it looked like. My gondola will be more simple than that. It's a three sided box, basically.So I've had to do quite a lot of training. This is Morocco last year in the Atlas mountains, training in preparation for some high altitude jumps. This is what the view is going to be like at 90,000 feet for me. Now you may think this is just a thrill-seeking trip, a pleasure ride, just the world's biggest stunt. Well there's a little bit more to it than that.Trying to find a space suit to do this has led me to an area of technology that I never really expected when I set about doing this. I contacted a company in the States who make suits for NASA. That's a current suit. This was me last year with their chief engineer. That suit would cost me about a million and a half dollars. And it weighs 300 pounds and you can't skydive in it. So I've been stuck. For the past 15 years I've been trying to find a space suit that would do this job, or someone that will make one.Something revolutionary happened a little while ago, at the same facility. That's the prototype of the parachute. I've now had them custom make one, the only one of its kind in the world. And that's the only suit of its kind in the world. It was made by a Russian that's designed most of the suits of the past 18 years for the Soviets. He left the company because he saw, as some other people in the space suit industry, an emerging market for space suits for space tourists.You know if you are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet and the cabin depressurizes, you can have oxygen. If you're at 100,000 feet you die. In six seconds you've lost consciousness. In 10 seconds you're dead. Your blood tries to boil. It's called vaporization. The body swells up. It's awful. And so we expect — it's not much fun. We expect, and others expect, that perhaps the FAA, the CAA might say, ""You need to put someone in a suit that's not inflated, that's connected to the aircraft."" Then they're comfortable, they have good vision, like this great big visor. And then if the cabin depressurizes while the aircraft is coming back down, in whatever emergency measures, everyone is okay.I would like to bring Costa on, if he's here, to show you the only one of its kind in the world. I was going to wear it, but I thought I'd get Costa to do it, my lovely assistant. Thank you. He's very hot. Thank you, Costa. This is the communication headset you'll see on lots of space suits. It's a two-layer suit. NASA suits have got 13 layers. This is a very lightweight suit. It weighs about 15 pounds. It's next to nothing. Especially designed for me.It's a working prototype. I will use it for all the jumps. Would you just give us a little twirl, please, Costa? Thank you very much. And it doesn't look far different when it's inflated, as you can see from the picture down there.I've even skydived in it in a wind tunnel, which means that I can practice everything I need to practice, in safety, before I ever jump out of anything. Thanks very much, Costa. (Applause)Ladies and gentlemen, that's just about it from me. The status of my mission at the moment is it still needs a major sponsor. I'm confident that we'll find one. I think it's a great challenge. And I hope that you will agree with me, it is the greatest stunt on Earth. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_truglia_a_leap_from_the_edge_of_space
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"Most of the time, art and science stare at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. There is great confusion when the two look at each other. Art, of course, looks at the world through the psyche, the emotions — the unconscious at times — and of course the aesthetic. Science tends to look at the world through the rational, the quantitative — things that can be measured and described — but it gives art a terrific context of understanding.In the Extreme Ice Survey, we're dedicated to bringing those two parts of human understanding together, to merging the art and science to the end of helping us understand nature and humanity's relationship with nature better. Specifically, I as a person who's been a professional nature photographer my whole adult life, am firmly of the belief that photography, video, film have tremendous powers for helping us understand and shape the way we think about nature and about ourselves in relationship to nature.In this project, we're specifically interested, of course, in ice. I'm fascinated by the beauty of it, the mutability of it, the malleability of it, and the fabulous shapes in which it can carve itself. These first images are from Greenland. But ice has another meaning. Ice is the canary in the global coal mine. It's the place where we can see and touch and hear and feel climate change in action.Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world. Whether or not you believe in it is based on your sense of is it raining more or is it raining less? Is it getting hotter or is it getting colder? What do the computer models say about this, that and the other thing? All of that, strip it away. In the world of the arctic and alpine environments, where the ice is, it's real and it's present. The changes are happening. They're very visible. They're photographable. They're measurable.95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking. That's outside Antarctica. 95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking, and that's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing. There is no significant scientific dispute about that. It's been observed, it's measured, it's bomb-proof information. And the great irony and tragedy of our time is that a lot of the general public thinks that science is still arguing about that. Science is not arguing about that. In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise.So, having seen all of this in the course of a 30-year career, I was still a skeptic about climate change until about 10 years ago, because I thought the story of climate change was based on computer models. I hadn't realized it was based on concrete measurements of what the paleoclimates — the ancient climates — were, as recorded in the ice sheets, as recorded in deep ocean sediments, as recorded in lake sediments, tree rings, and a lot of other ways of measuring temperature.When I realized that climate change was real, and it was not based on computer models, I decided that one day I would do a project looking at trying to manifest climate change photographically. And that led me to this project. Initially, I was working on a National Geographic assignment — conventional, single frame, still photography. And one crazy day, I got the idea that I should — after that assignment was finished — I got the idea that I should shoot in time-lapse photography, that I should station a camera or two at a glacier and let it shoot every 15 minutes, or every hour or whatever and watch the progression of the landscape over time.Well, within about three weeks, I incautiously turned that idea of a couple of time-lapse cameras into 25 time-lapse cameras. And the next six months of my life were the hardest time in my career, trying to design, build and deploy out in the field these 25 time-lapse cameras. They are powered by the sun. Solar panels power them. Power goes into a battery. There is a custom made computer that tells the camera when to fire. And these cameras are positioned on rocks on the sides of the glaciers, and they look in on the glacier from permanent, bedrock positions, and they watch the evolution of the landscape. We just had a number of cameras out on the Greenland Ice Sheet. We actually drilled holes into the ice, way deep down below the thawing level, and had some cameras out there for the past month and a half or so. Actually, there's still a camera out there right now. In any case, the cameras shoot roughly every hour. Some of them shoot every half hour, every 15 minutes, every five minutes.Here's a time lapse of one of the time-lapse units being made. (Laughter) I personally obsessed about every nut, bolt and washer in these crazy things. I spent half my life at our local hardware store during the months when we built these units originally.We're working in most of the major glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere. Our time-lapse units are in Alaska, the Rockies, Greenland and Iceland, and we have repeat photography positions, that is places we just visit on an annual basis, in British Columbia, the Alps and Bolivia.It's a big undertaking. I stand here before you tonight as an ambassador for my whole team. There's a lot of people working on this right now. We've got 33 cameras out this moment. We just had 33 cameras shoot about half an hour ago all across the northern hemisphere, watching what's happened. And we've spent a lot of time in the field. It's been a fantastic amount of work. We've been out for two and a half years, and we've got about another two and a half years yet to go.That's only half our job. The other half of our job is to tell the story to the global public. You know, scientists have collected this kind of information off and on over the years, but a lot of it stays within the science community. Similarly, a lot of art projects stay in the art community, and I feel very much a responsibility through mechanisms like TED, and like our relationship with the Obama White House, with the Senate, with John Kerry, to influence policy as much as possible with these pictures as well. We've done films. We've done books. We have more coming. We have a site on Google Earth that Google Earth was generous enough to give us, and so forth, because we feel very much the need to tell this story, because it is such an immediate evidence of ongoing climate change right now.Now, one bit of science before we get into the visuals. If everybody in the developed world understood this graph, and emblazoned it on the inside of their foreheads, there would be no further societal argument about climate change because this is the story that counts. Everything else you hear is just propaganda and confusion. Key issues: this is a 400,000 year record. This exact same pattern is seen going back now almost a million years before our current time. And several things are important.Number one: temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere go up and down basically in sync. You can see that from the orange line and the blue line. Nature naturally has allowed carbon dioxide to go up to 280 parts per million. That's the natural cycle. Goes up to 280 and then drops for various reasons that aren't important to discuss right here. But 280 is the peak. Right now, if you look at the top right part of that graph, we're at 385 parts per million. We are way, way outside the normal, natural variability. Earth is having a fever. In the past hundred years, the temperature of the Earth has gone up 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, .75 degrees Celsius, and it's going to keep going up because we keep dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere. At the rate of about two and a half parts per million per year. It's been a remorseless, steady increase.We have to turn that around. That's the crux, and someday I hope to emblazon that across Times Square in New York and a lot of other places. But anyway, off to the world of ice.We're now at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska. This is a view of what's called the calving face. This is what one of our cameras saw over the course of a few months. You see the glacier flowing in from the right, dropping off into the sea, camera shooting every hour. If you look in the middle background, you can see the calving face bobbing up and down like a yo-yo. That means that glacier's floating and it's unstable, and you're about to see the consequences of that floating. To give you a little bit of a sense of scale, that calving face in this picture is about 325 feet tall. That's 32 stories. This is not a little cliff. This is like a major office building in an urban center. The calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off, but in fact, it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet. So there's a wall of ice a couple thousand feet deep going down to bedrock if the glacier's grounded on bedrock, and floating if it isn't.Here's what Columbia's done. This is in south central Alaska. This was an aerial picture I did one day in June three years ago. This is an aerial picture we did this year. That's the retreat of this glacier. The main stem, the main flow of the glacier is coming from the right and it's going very rapidly up that stem. We're going to be up there in just a few more weeks, and we expect that it's probably retreated another half a mile, but if I got there and discovered that it had collapsed and it was five miles further back, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.Now it's really hard to grasp the scale of these places, because as the glaciers — one of the things is that places like Alaska and Greenland are huge, they're not normal landscapes — but as the glaciers are retreating, they're also deflating, like air is being let out of a balloon. And so, there are features on this landscape. There's a ridge right in the middle of the picture, up above where that arrow comes in, that shows you that a little bit. There's a marker line called the trim line above our little red illustration there. This is something no self-respecting photographer would ever do — you put some cheesy illustration on your shot, right? — and yet you have to do it sometimes to narrate these points. But, in any case, the deflation of this glacier since 1984 has been higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the Empire State Building.A tremendous amount of ice has been let out of these valleys as it's retreated and deflated, gone back up valley. These changes in the alpine world are accelerating. It's not static. Particularly in the world of sea ice, the rate of natural change is outstripping predictions of just a few years ago, and the processes either are accelerating or the predictions were too low to begin with. But in any case, there are big, big changes happening as we speak.So, here's another time-lapse shot of Columbia. And you see where it ended in these various spring days, June, May, then October. Now we turn on our time lapse. This camera was shooting every hour. Geologic process in action here. And everybody says, well don't they advance in the winter time? No. It was retreating through the winter because it's an unhealthy glacier. Finally catches up to itself, it advances.And you can look at these pictures over and over again because there's such a strange, bizarre fascination in seeing these things you don't normally get to see come alive. We've been talking about ""seeing is believing "" and seeing the unseen at TED Global. That's what you see with these cameras. The images make the invisible visible. These huge crevasses open up. These great ice islands break off — and now watch this. This has been the springtime this year — a huge collapse. That happened in about a month, the loss of all that ice.So that's where we started three years ago, way out on the left, and that's where we were a few months ago, the last time we went into Columbia. To give you a feeling for the scale of the retreat, we did another cheesy illustration, with British double-decker buses. If you line up 295 of those nose to tail, that's about how far back that was. It's a long way.On up to Iceland. One of my favorite glaciers, the Sólheimajökull. And here, if you watch, you can see the terminus retreating. You can see this river being formed. You can see it deflating. Without the photographic process, you would never see this. This is invisible. You can stand up there your whole life and you would never see this, but the camera records it.So we wind time backwards now. We go back a couple years in time. That's where it started. That's where it ended a few months ago.And on up to Greenland. The smaller the ice mass, the faster it responds to climate. Greenland took a little while to start reacting to the warming climate of the past century, but it really started galloping along about 20 years ago. And there's been a tremendous increase in the temperature up there.It's a big place. That's all ice. All those colors are ice and it goes up to about two miles thick, just a gigantic dome that comes in from the coast and rises in the middle. The one glacier up in Greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the Ilulissat Glacier.We have some cameras on the south edge of the Ilulissat, watching the calving face as it goes through this dramatic retreat. Here's a two-year record of what that looks like. Helicopter in front of the calving face for scale, quickly dwarfed. The calving face is four and a half miles across, and in this shot, as we pull back, you're only seeing about a mile and a half. So, imagine how big this is and how much ice is charging out. The interior of Greenland is to the right. It's flowing out to the Atlantic Ocean on the left. Icebergs, many, many, many, many times the size of this building, are roaring out to sea.We just downloaded these pictures a couple weeks ago, as you can see. June 25th, monster calving events happened. I'll show you one of those in a second.This glacier has doubled its flow speed in the past 15 years. It now goes at 125 feet a day, dumping all this ice into the ocean. It tends to go in these pulses, about every three days, but on average, 125 feet a day, twice the rate it did 20 years ago.Okay. We had a team out watching this glacier, and we recorded the biggest calving event that's ever been put on film. We had nine cameras going. This is what a couple of the cameras saw. A 400-foot-tall calving face breaking off. Huge icebergs rolling over. Okay, how big was that? It's hard to get it. So an illustration again, gives you a feeling for scale. A mile of retreat in 75 minutes across the calving face, in that particular event, three miles wide. The block was three-fifths of a mile deep, and if you compare the expanse of the calving face to the Tower Bridge in London, about 20 bridges wide. Or if you take an American reference, to the U.S. Capitol Building and you pack 3,000 Capitol Buildings into that block, it would be equivalent to how large that block was. 75 minutes.Now I've come to the conclusion after spending a lot of time in this climate change world that we don't have a problem of economics, technology and public policy. We have a problem of perception. The policy and the economics and the technology are serious enough issues, but we actually can deal with them. I'm certain that we can. But what we have is a perception problem because not enough people really get it yet. You're an elite audience. You get it. Fortunately, a lot of the political leaders in the major countries of the world are an elite audience that for the most part gets it now. But we still need to bring a lot of people along with us. And that's where I think organizations like TED, like the Extreme Ice Survey can have a terrific impact on human perception and bring us along. Because I believe we have an opportunity right now.We are nearly on the edge of a crisis, but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge of our generation and, in fact, of our century. This is a terrific, terrific call to arms to do the right thing for ourselves and for the future. I hope that we have the wisdom to let the angels of our better nature rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss
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"Today I want to talk to you about swimming across the North Pole, across the most northern place in the whole world. And perhaps the best place to start is with my late father. He was a great storyteller. He could tell a story about an event, and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment. And one of the stories he told me so often when I was a young boy was of the first British atomic bomb test. He had been there and watched it go off.And he said that the explosion was so loud and the light was so intense, that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes. And he said that he could actually see an x-ray of his fingers, because the light was so bright. And I know that watching that atomic bomb going off had a very, very big impact on my late father. Every holiday I had as a young boy was in a national park. What he was trying to do with me was to inspire me to protect the world, and show me just how fragile the world is.He also told me about the great explorers. He loved history. He would tell me about Captain Scott walking all the way to the South Pole and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing up Mount Everest. And so ever since I think I was just six years old, I dreamed of going to the polar regions. I really, really wanted to go to the Arctic. There was something about that place which drew me to it. And, well, sometimes it takes a long time for a dream to come true. But seven years ago, I went to the Arctic for the first time. And it was so beautiful that I've been back there ever since, for the last seven years. I love the place.But I have seen that place change beyond all description, just in that short period of time. I have seen polar bears walking across very, very thin ice in search of food. I have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much. And I have also, every year, seen less and less sea ice. And I wanted the world to know what was happening up there.In the two years before my swim, 23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover just melted away. And I wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders to get them to understand what is happening. So I decided to do this symbolic swim at the top of the world, in a place which should be frozen over, but which now is rapidly unfreezing. And the message was very clear: Climate change is for real, and we need to do something about it. And we need to do something about it right now.Well, swimming across the North Pole, it's not an ordinary thing to do. I mean, just to put it in perspective, 27 degrees is the temperature of a normal indoor swimming pool. This morning, the temperature of the English Channel was 18 degrees. The passengers who fell off the Titanic fell into water of just five degrees centigrade. Fresh water freezes at zero. And the water at the North Pole is minus 1.7. It's fucking freezing. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm sorry, but there is no other way to describe it. (Laughter)And so I had to assemble an incredible team around me to help me with this task. I assembled this team of 29 people from 10 nations. Some people think that swimming is a very solo sport, you just dive into the sea and off you go. It couldn't be further from the truth for me. And I then went and did a huge amount of training, swimming in icy water, backwards and forwards.But the most important thing was to train my mind to prepare myself for what was going to happen. And I had to visualize the swim. I had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end. I had to taste the salt water in my mouth. I had to see my coach screaming for me, ""Come on Lewis! Come on! Go! Go! Go! Don't slow down!"" And so I literally swam across the North Pole hundreds and hundreds of times in my mind.And then, after a year of training, I felt ready. I felt confident that I could actually do this swim. So myself and the five members of the team, we hitched a ride on an icebreaker which was going to the North Pole. And on day four, we decided to just do a quick five minute test swim. I had never swum in water of minus 1.7 degrees before, because it's just impossible to train in those types of conditions. So we stopped the ship, as you do. We all got down onto the ice, and I then got into my swimming costume and I dived into the sea.I have never in my life felt anything like that moment. I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air. I was hyperventilating so much, and within seconds my hands were numb. And it was — the paradox is that you're in freezing cold water, but actually you're on fire. I swam as hard as I could for five minutes. I remember just trying to get out of the water. I climbed out of the ice. And I remember taking the goggles off my face and looking down at my hands in sheer shock, because my fingers had swollen so much that they were like sausages. And they were swollen so much, I couldn't even close them.What had happened is that we are made partially of water, and when water freezes it expands. And so what had actually happened is that the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded. And they had burst. And I was in so much agony. I immediately got rushed onto the ship and into a hot shower.And I remember standing underneath the hot shower and trying to defrost my fingers. And I thought, in two days' time, I was going to do this swim across the North Pole. I was going to try and do a 20-minute swim, for one kilometer across the North Pole. And this dream which I had had ever since I was a young boy with my father, was just going out the window. There is no possibility that this was going to happen. And I remember then getting out of the shower and realizing I couldn't even feel my hands. And for a swimmer, you need to feel your hands because you need to be able to grab the water and pull it through with you.The next morning, I woke up and I was in such a state of depression, and all I could think about was Sir Ranulph Fiennes. For those of you who don't know him, he's the great British explorer. A number of years ago, he tried to ski all the way to the North Pole. He accidentally fell through the ice into the sea. And after just three minutes in that water, he was able to get himself out. And his hands were so badly frostbitten that he had to return to England. He went to a local hospital and there they said, ""Ran, there is no possibility of us being able to save these fingers. We are going to actually have to take them off."" And Ran decided to go into his tool shed and take out a saw and do it himself.And all I could think of was, if that happened to Ran after three minutes, and I can't feel my hands after five minutes, what on earth is going to happen if I try 20 minutes? At the very best, I'm going to end up losing some fingers. And at worst, I didn't even want to think about it. We carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the North Pole.And my close friend David, he saw the way I was thinking, and he came up to me and he said, ""Lewis, I've known you since you were 18 years old. I've known you, and I know, Lewis, deep down, right deep down here, that you are going to make this swim. I so believe in you Lewis. I've seen the way you've been training. And I realize the reason why you're going to do this. This is such an important swim. We stand at a very, very important moment in this history, and you're going to make a symbolic swim here to try to shake the lapels of world leaders. Lewis, have the courage to go in there, because we are going to look after you every moment of it.""And I just, I got so much confidence from him saying that, because he knew me so well. So we carried on sailing and we arrived at the North Pole. And we stopped the ship, and it was just as the scientists had predicted. There were open patches of sea everywhere. And I went down into my cabin and I put on my swimming costume. And then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor, which measures my core body temperature and my heart rate. And then we walked out onto the ice.And I remember looking into the ice, and there were big chunks of white ice in there, and the water was completely black. I had never seen black water before. And it is 4,200 meters deep. And I said to myself, ""Lewis, don't look left, don't look right. Just scuttle forward and go for it."" And so I now want to show you a short video of what happened there on the ice.Narrator (Video): We're just sailing out of harbor now, and it's at this stage when one can have a bit of a wobble mentally. Everything just looks so gray around here, and looks so cold. We've just seen our first polar bears. It was absolutely magical. A mother and a cub, such a beautiful sight. And to think that in 30, 40 years they could become extinct. It's a very frightening, very, very frightening thought. We're finally at the North Pole. This is months and months and months of dreaming to get here, years of training and planning and preparation. Ooh. In a couple of hours' time I'm going to get in here and do my swim. It's all a little bit frightening, and emotional. Amundson, you ready? Amudson: Ready. Lewis Pugh: Ten seconds to swim. Ten seconds to swim. Take the goggles off. Take the goggles off!Man: Take the shoes. Take the shoes. Well done lad! You did it! You did it Lewis! You did it! You did it man!LP: How on earth did we do that?Man: Against the current! You did it against the current!(Applause)LP: Thank you very much. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you so much.Audience: Encore! (Laughter)LP: I'd just like to end off by just saying this: It took me four months again to feel my hands. But was it worth it? Yes, absolutely it was. There are very, very few people who don't know now about what is happening in the Arctic. And people ask me, ""Lewis, what can we do about climate change?""And I say to them, I think we need to do three things. The first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down into manageable chunks. You saw during that video all those flags. Those flags represented the countries from which my team came from. And equally, when it comes to climate change, every single country is going to have to make cuts. Britain, America, Japan, South Africa, the Congo. All of us together, we're all on the same ship together.The second thing we need to do is we need to just look back at how far we have come in such a short period of time. I remember, just a few years ago, speaking about climate change, and people heckling me in the back and saying it doesn't even exist. I've just come back from giving a series of speeches in some of the poorest townships in South Africa to young children as young as 10 years old. Four or five children sitting behind a desk, and even in those poorest conditions, they all have a very, very good grasp of climate change.We need to believe in ourselves. Now is the time to believe. We've come a long way. We're doing good. But the most important thing we must do is, I think, we must all walk to the end of our lives and turn around, and ask ourselves a most fundamental question. And that is, ""What type of world do we want to live in, and what decision are we going to make today to ensure that we all live in a sustainable world?"" Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very, very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lewis_pugh_swims_the_north_pole
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"Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds. And the problem I'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy, which is, ""How can we know whether other people have minds?"" That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot. So that's a problem in philosophy, but for today's purposes I'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind, and that I don't have to worry about this.There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists, which is, ""Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?"" Or perhaps, more relevantly, ""Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?""I think novelists put this best. Like Philip Roth, who said, ""And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people? So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims."" So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is, of course, a problem I confront every day. But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that is the one I'm going to introduce to you today. And that problem is, ""How is it so easy to know other minds?""So to start with an illustration, you need almost no information, one snapshot of a stranger, to guess what this woman is thinking, or what this man is. And put another way, the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds, our brain, is made up of pieces, brain cells, that we share with all other animals, with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs. And yet, you put them together in a particular network, and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet. Or to say, as Alan Greenspan did, ""I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."" (Laughter)So, the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas, one in each hand. And to try to understand how you can put together simple units, simple messages over space and time, in a network, and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds. So I'm going to tell you three things about this today. Obviously the whole project here is huge. And I'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people's thoughts. Some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job. And then finally, to show that some of the differences between people, in how we judge others, can be explained by differences in this brain system.So first, the first thing I want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain, in your brains, whose job it is to think about other people's thoughts. This is a picture of it. It's called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction. It's above and behind your right ear. And this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures I showed you, or when you read Romeo and Juliet or when you tried to understand Alan Greenspan. And you don't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems. So this brain region is called the Right TPJ. And this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults. They're MIT undergraduates. (Laughter)The second thing I want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds, we weren't always that way. It takes children a long time to break into the system. I'm going to show you a little bit of that long, extended process. The first thing I'm going to show you is a change between age three and five, as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own. So I'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task.Rebecca Saxe (Video): This is the first pirate. His name is Ivan. And you know what pirates really like?Child: What? RS: Pirates really like cheese sandwiches.Child: Cheese? I love cheese!RS: Yeah. So Ivan has this cheese sandwich, and he says, ""Yum yum yum yum yum! I really love cheese sandwiches."" And Ivan puts his sandwich over here, on top of the pirate chest. And Ivan says, ""You know what? I need a drink with my lunch."" And so Ivan goes to get a drink. And while Ivan is away the wind comes, and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass. And now, here comes the other pirate. This pirate is called Joshua. And Joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches. So Joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says, ""Yum yum yum yum yum! I love cheese sandwiches."" And he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest.Child: So, that one is his.RS: That one is Joshua's. That's right.Child: And then his went on the ground.RS: That's exactly right.Child: So he won't know which one is his.RS: Oh. So now Joshua goes off to get a drink. Ivan comes back and he says, ""I want my cheese sandwich."" So which one do you think Ivan is going to take?Child: I think he is going to take that one.RS: Yeah, you think he's going to take that one? All right. Let's see. Oh yeah, you were right. He took that one.So that's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions. Now I'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle.RS: And Ivan says, ""I want my cheese sandwich."" Which sandwich is he going to take? Do you think he's going to take that one? Let's see what happens. Let's see what he does. Here comes Ivan. And he says, ""I want my cheese sandwich."" And he takes this one. Uh-oh. Why did he take that one?Child: His was on the grass.So the three-year-old does two things differently. First, he predicts Ivan will take the sandwich that's really his. And second, when he sees Ivan taking the sandwich where he left his, where we would say he's taking that one because he thinks it's his, the three-year-old comes up with another explanation: He's not taking his own sandwich because he doesn't want it, because now it's dirty, on the ground. So that's why he's taking the other sandwich. Now of course, development doesn't end at five. And we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now, not for an action prediction, but for a moral judgment. So first I'm going to show you the three-year-old again.RS.: So is Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich?Child: Yeah.RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich?Child: Yeah.So it's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of Ivan to take Joshua's sandwich, since he thinks Ivan only took Joshua's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich. But now I'm going to show you the five-year-old. Remember the five-year-old completely understood why Ivan took Joshua's sandwich.RS: Was Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich?Child: Um, yeah.And so, it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response.RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich?Child: No, because the wind should get in trouble.He says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches. (Laughter)And now what we've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people's thoughts. So the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region, the Right TPJ, being used while children are thinking about other people. But it's not quite like the adult brain.So whereas in the adults, as I told you, this brain region is almost completely specialized — it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people's thoughts — in children it's much less so, when they are age five to eight, the age range of the children I just showed you. And actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds, getting into early adolescence, they still don't have quite an adult-like brain region. And so, what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence, both the cognitive system, our mind's ability to think about other minds, and the brain system that supports it are continuing, slowly, to develop.But of course, as you're probably aware, even in adulthood, people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds, how often they do it and how accurately. And so what we wanted to know was, could differences among adults in how they think about other people's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region? So, the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids. And I'm going to give that to you now.So Grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory, and they take a break for coffee. And Grace's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee. Grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder, which is sugar. But the powder is labeled ""Deadly Poison,"" so Grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison. And she puts it in her friend's coffee. And her friend drinks the coffee, and is fine.How many people think it was morally permissible for Grace to put the powder in the coffee? Okay. Good. (Laughter) So we ask people, how much should Grace be blamed in this case, which we call a failed attempt to harm?And we can compare that to another case, where everything in the real world is the same. The powder is still sugar, but what's different is what Grace thinks. Now she thinks the powder is sugar. And perhaps unsurprisingly, if Grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend's coffee, people say she deserves no blame at all. Whereas if she thinks the powder was poison, even though it's really sugar, now people say she deserves a lot of blame, even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same.And in fact, they say she deserves more blame in this case, the failed attempt to harm, than in another case, which we call an accident. Where Grace thought the powder was sugar, because it was labeled ""sugar"" and by the coffee machine, but actually the powder was poison. So even though when the powder was poison, the friend drank the coffee and died, people say Grace deserves less blame in that case, when she innocently thought it was sugar, than in the other case, where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred.People, though, disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame Grace should get in the accident case. Some people think she should deserve more blame, and other people less. And what I'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they're making that judgment. So what I'm showing you, from left to right, is how much activity there was in this brain region, and from top to bottom, how much blame people said that Grace deserved.And what you can see is, on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region, people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident. Whereas on the right, where there was a lot of activity, people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief, and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident.So that's good, but of course what we'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region, and see if we could change people's moral judgment. And we do have such a tool. It's called Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody's skull, into a small region of their brain, and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region.So I'm going to show you a demo of this. First, I'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse. I'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine. When you hear clicks, we're turning the machine on. So now I'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain, to the part of my brain that controls my hand. So there is no physical force, just a magnetic pulse.Woman (Video): Ready, Rebecca? RS: Yes.Okay, so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain. And we can use that same pulse, now applied to the RTPJ, to ask if we can change people's moral judgments. So these are the judgments I showed you before, people's normal moral judgments. And then we can apply TMS to the RTPJ and ask how people's judgments change. And the first thing is, people can still do this task overall.So their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same. They say she deserves no blame. But in the case of a failed attempt to harm, where Grace thought that it was poison, although it was really sugar, people now say it was more okay, she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee.And in the case of the accident, where she thought that it was sugar, but it was really poison and so she caused a death, people say that it was less okay, she deserves more blame. So what I've told you today is that people come, actually, especially well equipped to think about other people's thoughts.We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking. This system takes a long time to develop, slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence. And even in adulthood, differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people.But I want to give the last word back to the novelists, and to Philip Roth, who ended by saying, ""The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living. Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again."" Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: So, I have a question. When you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people's moral judgments, that sounds alarming. (Laughter) Please tell me that you're not taking phone calls from the Pentagon, say.RS: I'm not. I mean, they're calling, but I'm not taking the call. (Laughter)CA: They really are calling? So then seriously, you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads. I mean, you're clearly an incredible human being, but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber, do acts that people here might be worried about.RS: Yeah, we worry about this. So, there's a couple of things to say about TMS. One is that you can't be TMSed without knowing it. So it's not a surreptitious technology. It's quite hard, actually, to get those very small changes. The changes I showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain, but they're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make.And what we changed was not people's moral judgments when they're deciding what to do, when they're making action choices. We changed their ability to judge other people's actions. And so, I think of what I'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial, but studying the jury.CA: Is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education, to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments?RS: That's one of the idealistic hopes. The whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new. Until recently, what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal's brain could do too, so we could study it in animal models. We knew how brains see, and how they control the body and how they hear and sense. And the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things — learn language and abstract concepts, and thinking about other people's thoughts — that's brand new. And we don't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it.CA: So I've got one last question. There is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness, that puzzles a lot of people. The notion that you can understand why a brain works, perhaps. But why does anyone have to feel anything? Why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate? You're a brilliant young neuroscientist. I mean, what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career, someone, you or someone else, is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem?RS: I hope they do. And I think they probably won't.CA: Why?RS: It's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing. (Laughter)CA: That's a great answer. Rebecca Saxe, thank you very much. That was fantastic. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments
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"These are grim economic times, fellow TEDsters, grim economic times indeed. And so, I would like to cheer you up with one of the great, albeit largely unknown, commercial success stories of the past 20 years. Comparable, in its own very peculiar way, to the achievements of Microsoft or Google. And it's an industry which has bucked the current recession with equanimity. I refer to organized crime.Now organized crime has been around for a very long time, I hear you say, and these would be wise words, indeed. But in the last two decades, it has experienced an unprecedented expansion, now accounting for roughly 15 percent of the world's GDP. I like to call it the Global Shadow Economy, or McMafia, for short.So what triggered this extraordinary growth in cross-border crime? Well, of course, there is globalization, technology, communications, all that stuff, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But first, I would like to take you back to this event: the collapse of communism. All across Eastern Europe, a most momentous episode in our post-war history.Now it's time for full disclosure. This event meant a great deal to me personally. I had started smuggling books across the Iron Curtain to Democratic opposition groups in Eastern Europe, like Solidarity in Poland, when I was in my teens. I then started writing about Eastern Europe, and eventually I became the BBC's chief correspondent for the region, which is what I was doing in 1989. And so when 425 million people finally won the right to choose their own governments, I was ecstatic, but I was also a touch worried about some of the nastier things lurking behind the wall.It wasn't long, for example, before ethnic nationalism reared its bloody head in Yugoslavia. And amongst the chaos, amidst the euphoria, it took me a little while to understand that some of the people who had wielded power before 1989, in Eastern Europe, continued to do so after the revolutions there. Obviously there were characters like this. But there were also some more unexpected people who played a critical role in what was going on in Eastern Europe.Like this character. Remember these guys? They used to win the gold medals in weightlifting and wrestling, every four years in the Olympics, and they were the great celebrities of communism, with a fabulous lifestyle to go with it. They used to get great apartments in the center of town, casual sex on tap, and they could travel to the West very freely, which was a great luxury at the time. It may come as a surprise, but they played a critical role in the emergence of the market economy in Eastern Europe. Or as I like to call them, they are the midwives of capitalism. Here are some of those same weightlifters after their 1989 makeover.Now in Bulgaria — this photograph was taken in Bulgaria — when communism collapsed all over Eastern Europe, it wasn't just communism; it was the state that collapsed as well. That means your police force wasn't working. The court system wasn't functioning properly. So what was a business man in the brave new world of East European capitalism going to do to make sure that his contracts would be honored? Well, he would turn to people who were called, rather prosaically by sociologists, privatized law enforcement agencies. We prefer to know them as the mafia. And in Bulgaria, the mafia was soon joined with 14,000 people who were sacked from their jobs in the security services between 1989 and 1991.Now, when your state is collapsing, your economy is heading south at a rate of knots, the last people you want coming on to the labor market are 14,000 men and women whose chief skills are surveillance, are smuggling, building underground networks and killing people. But that's what happened all over Eastern Europe. Now, when I was working in the 1990s, I spent most of the time covering the appalling conflict in Yugoslavia.And I couldn't help notice that the people who were perpetrating the appalling atrocities, the paramilitary organizations, were actually the same people running the organized criminal syndicates. And I came to think that behind the violence lay a sinister criminal enterprise. And so I resolved to travel around the world examining this global criminal underworld by talking to policemen, by talking to victims, by talking to consumers of illicit goods and services. But above all else, by talking to the gangsters themselves.And the Balkans was a fabulous place to start. Why? Well of course there was the issue of law and order collapsing, but also, as they say in the retail trade, it's location, location, location. And what I noticed at the beginning of my research that the Balkans had turned into a vast transit zone for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world. Heroin, cocaine, women being trafficked into prostitution and precious minerals.And where were they heading? The European Union, which by now was beginning to reap the benefits of globalization, transforming it into the most affluent consumer market in history, eventually comprising some 500 million people. And a significant minority of those 500 million people like to spend some of their leisure time and spare cash sleeping with prostitutes, sticking 50 Euro notes up their nose and employing illegal migrant laborers.Now, organized crime in a globalizing world operates in the same way as any other business. It has zones of production, like Afghanistan and Columbia. It has zones of distribution, like Mexico and the Balkans. And then, of course, it has zones of consumption, like the European Union, Japan and of course, the United States. The zones of production and distribution tend to lie in the developing world, and they are often threatened by appalling violence and bloodshed.Take Mexico, for example. Six thousand people killed there in the last 18 months as a direct consequence of the cocaine trade. But what about the Democratic Republic of Congo? Since 1998, five million people have died there. It's not a conflict you read about much in the newspapers, but it's the biggest conflict on this planet since the Second World War. And why is it? Because mafias from all around the world cooperate with local paramilitaries in order to seize the supplies of the rich mineral resources of the region.In the year 2000, 80 percent of the world's coltan was sourced to the killing fields of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, coltan you will find in almost every mobile phone, in almost every laptop and games console. The Congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia in exchange for weapons, and the mafia would then sell it on to Western markets. And it is this Western desire to consume that is the primary driver of international organized crime.Now, let me show you some of my friends in action, caught conveniently on film by the Italian police, and smuggling duty-not-paid cigarettes. Now, cigarettes out the factory gate are very cheap. The European Union then imposes the highest taxes on them in the world. So if you can smuggle them into the E.U., there are very handsome profits to be made, and I want to show you this to demonstrate the type of resources available to these groups.This boat is worth one million Euros when it's new. And it's the fastest thing on European waters. From 1994, for seven years, 20 of these boats made the trip across the Adriatic, from Montenegro to Italy, every single night. And as a consequence of this trade, Britain alone lost eight billion dollars in revenue. And instead that money went to underwrite the wars in Yugoslavia and line the pockets of unscrupulous individuals.Now Italian police, when this trade started, had just two boats which could go at the same speed. And this is very important, because the only way you can catch these guys is if they run out of gas. Sometimes the gangsters would bring with them women being trafficked into prostitution, and if the police intervened, they would hurl the women into the sea so that the police had to go and save them from drowning, rather than chasing the bad guys.So I have shown you this to demonstrate how many boats, how many vessels it takes to catch one of these guys. And the answer is six vessels. And remember, 20 of these speed boats were coming across the Adriatic every single night. So what were these guys doing with all the money they were making?Well, this is where we come to globalization, because that was not just the deregulation of global trade. It was the liberalization of international financial markets. And boy, did that make it easy for the money launderers. The last two decades have been the champagne era for dirty lucre.In the 1990s, we saw financial centers around the world competing for their business, and there was simply no effective mechanism to prevent money laundering. And a lot of licit banks were also happy to accept deposits from very dubious sources without questions being asked.But at the heart of this, is the offshore banking network. Now these things are an essential part of the money laundering parade, and if you want to do something about illegal tax evasion and transnational organized crime, money laundering, you have to get rid of them. On a positive note, we at last have someone in the White House who has consistently spoken out against these corrosive entities.And if anyone is concerned about what I believe is the necessity for new legislation, regulation, effective regulation, I say, let's take a look at Bernie Madoff, who is now going to be spending the rest of his life in jail. Bernie Madoff stole 65 billion dollars. That puts him up there on the Olympus of gangsters with the Colombian cartels and the major Russian crime syndicates, but he did this for decades in the very heart of Wall Street, and no regulator picked up on it. So how many other Madoffs are there on Wall Street or in the city of London, fleecing ordinary folk and money laundering? Well I can tell you, it's quite a few of them.Let me go on to the 101 of international organized crime now. And that is narcotics. Our second marijuana farm photograph for the morning. This one, however, is in central British Columbia where I photographed it. It's one of the tens of thousands of mom-and-pop grow-ops in B.C. which ensure that over five percent of the province's GDP is accounted for by this trade.Now, I was taken by inspector Brian Cantera, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to a cavernous warehouse east of Vancouver to see some of the goods which are regularly confiscated by the RCMP from the smugglers who are sending it, of course, down south to the United States where there is an insatiable market for B.C. Bud, as it's called, in part because it's marketed as organic, which of course goes down very well in California. (Laughter) (Applause)Now, even by the police's admission, this makes not a dent in the profits, really, of the major exporters. Since the beginning of globalization, the global narcotics market has expanded enormously. There has, however, been no concomitant increase in the resources available to police forces.This, however, may all be about to change, because something very strange is going on. The United Nations recognized earlier this — it was last month actually — that Canada has become a key area of distribution and production of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs.Interestingly, the market share of heroin and cocaine is going down, because the pills are getting ever better at reproducing their highs. Now that is a game changer, because it shifts production away from the developing world and into the Western world. When that happens, it is a trend which is set to overwhelm our policing capacity in the West. The drugs policy which we've had in place for 40 years is long overdue for a very serious rethink, in my opinion.Now, the recession. Well, organized crime has already adapted very well to the recession. Not surprising, the most opportunistic industry in the whole world. And it has no rules to its regulatory system. Except, of course, it has two business risks: arrest by law enforcement, which is, frankly, the least of their worries, and competition from other groups, i.e. a bullet in the back of the head.What they've done is they've shifted their operations. People don't smoke as much dope, or visit prostitutes quite so frequently during a recession. And so instead, they have invaded financial and corporate crime in a big way, but above all, two sectors, and that is counterfeit goods and cybercrime. And it's been terribly successful. I would like to introduce you to Mr. Pringle. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, Señor Pringle.I was introduced to this bit of kit by a Brazilian cybercriminal. We sat in a car on the Avenue Paulista in São Paulo, together. Hooked it up to my laptop, and within about five minutes he had penetrated the computer security system of a major Brazilian bank. It's really not that difficult. And it's actually much easier because the fascinating thing about cybercrime is that it's not so much the technology.The key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering. Or to use the technical term for it, there's one born every minute. You would not believe how easy it is to persuade people to do things with their computers which are objectively not in their interest. And it was very soon when the cybercriminals learned that the quickest way to do this, of course, the quickest way to a person's wallet is through the promise of sex and love.I expect some of you remember the ILOVEYOU virus, one of the very great worldwide viruses that came. I was very fortunate when the ILOVEYOU virus came out, because the first person I received it from was an ex-girlfriend of mine. Now, she harbored all sorts of sentiments and emotions towards me at the time, but love was not amongst them. (Laughter) And so as soon as I saw this drop into my inbox, I dispatched it hastily to the recycle bin and spared myself a very nasty infection.So, cybercrime, do watch out for it. One thing that we do know that the Internet is doing is the Internet is assisting these guys. These are mosquitos who carry the malarial parasite which infests our blood when the mosy has had a free meal at our expense.Now, Artesunate is a very effective drug at destroying the parasite in the early days of infection. But over the past year or so, researchers in Cambodia have discovered that what's happening is the malarial parasite is developing a resistance. And they fear that the reason why it's developing a resistance is because Cambodians can't afford the drugs on the commercial market, and so they buy it from the Internet. And these pills contain only low doses of the active ingredient. Which is why the parasite is beginning to develop a resistance.The reason I say this is because we have to know that organized crime impacts all sorts of areas of our lives. You don't have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime. They affect our bank accounts. They affect our communications, our pension funds. They even affect the food that we eat and our governments.This is no longer an issue of Sicilians from Palermo and New York. There is no romance involved with gangsters in the 21st Century. This is a mighty industry, and it creates instability and violence wherever it goes. It is a major economic force and we need to take it very, very seriously. It's been a privilege talking to you. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/misha_glenny_investigates_global_crime_networks
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"The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, the architectural object. Is the latest tower in London a gherkin or a sausage or a sex tool?So recently, we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually sort of tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn't have to invent it, it already existed in the form of a comic book.So we basically copied the format of the comic book to actually tell the stories of behind the scenes, how our projects actually evolve through adaptation and improvisation. Sort of through the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world. We call this comic book ""Yes is More,"" which is obviously a sort of evolution of the ideas of some of our heroes.In this case it's Mies van der Rohe's Less is More. He triggered the modernist revolution. After him followed the post-modern counter-revolution, Robert Venturi saying, ""Less is a bore."" After him, Philip Johnson sort of introduced (Laughter) you could say promiscuity, or at least openness to new ideas with, ""I am a whore."" Recently, Obama has introduced optimism at a sort of time of global financial crisis.And what we'd like to say with ""Yes is More"" is basically trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined, as who or what we are against. The cliche of the radical architect is the sort of angry young man rebelling against the establishment. Or this idea of the misunderstood genius, frustrated that the world doesn't fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we're much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world.In fact, I actually think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process. His famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings. At each meeting, there's way too many ideas. Only the best ones can survive. And through a process of architectural selection, we might choose a really beautiful model or we might have a very functional model. We mate them. They have sort of mutant offspring. And through these sort of generations of design meetings we arrive at a design.A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and a hotel in Copenhagen. The design process was really tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved: this sort of idea of a rational tower that melts together with the surrounding city, sort of expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but sort of public on the outside, as well as on the inside, with the library.But Darwin doesn't only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a subspecies branches off. And quite often we sit in a design meeting and we discover that there is this great idea. It doesn't really work in this context. But for another client in another culture, it could really be the right answer to a different question. So as a result, we never throw anything out. We keep our office almost like an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it.And what I'd like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world. The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. And we saw this guy, Haibao. He's the mascot of the expo, and he looks strangely familiar. In fact he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn't exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn't think so either. So we lost.But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman who saw our design and said, ""Wow, that's the Chinese character for the word 'people.'"" (Laughter) So, apparently this is how you write ""people,"" as in the People's Republic of China. We even double checked. And at the same time, we got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai Creative Industry Week. So we thought like, this is too much of an opportunity, so we hired a feng shui master. We scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and went to China. (Laughter) So the People's Building, as we called it. This is our two interpreters, sort of reading the architecture.It went on the cover of the Wen Wei Po newspaper, which got Mr. Liangyu Chen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. And we had the chance to explain the project. And he said, ""Shanghai is the city in the world with most skyscrapers,"" but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People's Building, he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China. So we obviously profoundly agreed with him. (Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, Mr. Chen is now in prison for corruption. (Laughter)But like I said, Haibao looked very familiar, because he is actually the Chinese character for ""people."" And they chose this mascot because the theme of the expo is ""Better City, Better Life."" Sustainability. And we thought, sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good.You know, you're not supposed to take long, warm showers. You're not supposed to fly on holidays because it's bad for the environment. Gradually, you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life. So we thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life.We also asked ourselves, what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant? You know, it's one of the biggest countries in the world, one of the smallest. China symbolized by the dragon. Denmark, we have a national bird, the swan. (Laughter) China has many great poets,but we discovered that in the People's Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Sheng, or Hans Christian Anderson, as we call him. So that means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with ""The Emperor's New Clothes,"" ""The Matchstick Girl"" and ""The Little Mermaid."" It's almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture.The biggest tourist attraction in China is the Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that can be seen from the moon. The big tourist attraction in Denmark is The Little Mermaid. That can actually hardly be seen from the canal tours. (Laughter)And it sort of shows the difference between these two cities. Copenhagen, Shanghai, modern, European. But then we looked at recent urban development, and we noticed that this is like a Shanghai street, 30 years ago. All bikes, no cars. This is how it looks today; all traffic jam. Bicycles have become forbidden many places.Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we're actually expanding the bicycle lanes. A third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city. So we thought, why don't we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate 1,000 bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the expo, go straight to the Danish pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions.Like I said, Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the harbor bath in Copenhagen, sort of continuing the public realm into the water. So we thought that these expos quite often have a lot of state financed propaganda, images, statements, but no real experience. So just like with a bike, we don't talk about it. You can try it. Like with the water, instead of talking about it, we're going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is.This is where people normally object that it doesn't sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for ballast. So we can actually hitch a ride for free.And in the middle of this sort of harbor bath, we're actually going to put the actual Little Mermaid. So the real Mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes. And when she's gone, we're going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is this sort of loop of exhibition and bikes. When you go to the exhibition, you'll see the Mermaid and the pool. You'll walk around, start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out into the rest of the expo.So when we actually won the competition we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project. And to our surprise we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese state censorship. The first thing, the China map missed Taiwan. It's a very serious political issue in China. We will add on. The second thing, we had compared the swan to the dragon, and then the Chinese state said, ""Suggest change to panda."" (Laughter) (Applause)So, when it came out in Denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument, the National People's Party sort of rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the Mermaid. So for the first time, I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting because in the morning, from 9 to 11, they were discussing the bailout package — how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy. And then at 11 o'clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1, they were debating whether or not to send the Mermaid to China. (Laughter) (Applause)But to conclude, if you want to see the Mermaid from May to December next year, don't come to Copenhagen, because she's going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda. (Laughter)So the second story that I'd like to tell is, actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over the sort of landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the Leonardo DiCaprio balcony. And they form this sort of vertical backyard where, on a nice summer day, you'll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters. The house is sort of a distortion of a square block. Trying to zigzag it to make sure that all of the apartments look at the straight views, instead of into each other.Until recently, this was the view from my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. And he said that he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure. And we thought, rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don't we turn all the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars.And because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we sort of cut up the volume, so we wouldn't block the view from my apartment. (Laughter) And essentially the parking is sort of occupying the deep space underneath the apartments.And up in the sun, you have a single layer of apartments that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a sort of metropolitan view, and a sort of dense urban location. This is our first architectural model. This is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially, the apartments cover the parking. They are accessed through this diagonal elevator. It's actually a stand-up product from Switzerland, because in Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators. (Laughter)And the facade of the parking, we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. And we discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. And since we always refer to the project as The Mountain, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3,000 square meter artwork. (Applause)So if you go back into the parking, into the corridors, it's almost like traveling into a parallel universe from cars and colors, into this sort of south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facades. If you go even further, it turns into this green garden. And all the rainwater that drops on the Mountain is actually accumulated. And there is an automatic irrigation system that makes sure that this sort of landscape of gardens, in one or two years it will sort of transform into a Cambodian temple ruin, completely covered in green.So, the Mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy. This idea that you can actually create, if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients, like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don't have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both.As an architect, it's really hard to set the agenda. You can't just say that now I'd like to do a sustainable city in central Asia, because that's not really how you get commissions. You always have to sort of adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen, and the sort of turmoil of the world.One last example is that recently we, like last summer, we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. (Laughter) It was in the middle of the capital so we were really excited by this opportunity. Unfortunately, it was the national bank of Iceland.At the same time, we actually had a visitor — a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see the Mountain. And he got very excited by this idea that you could actually make mountains out of architecture, because Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia. So he asked us if we could actually imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan.So we took the commission. And we made this small movie that I'd like to show. We quite often make little movies. We always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song. So basically, Baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we are planning — almost like the diagram of their flag. And our main idea was to sort of sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable of human life. Then we place these mountains on the island, surrounding this sort of central green valley, almost like a central park.And what makes it interesting is that the island right now is just a piece of desert. It has no vegetation. It has no water. It has no energy, no resources. So we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings. And all the sort of excess freshwater wastewater is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into sort of a green, lush landscape.So, you can say where an urban development normally happens at the expense of nature, in this case it's actually creating nature. And the buildings, they don't only sort of invoke the imagery of the mountains, they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind. They accumulate the solar energy. They accumulate the water. So they actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem.So we recently presented the master plan, and it has gotten approved. And this summer we are starting the construction documents of the two first mountains, in what's going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia. (Applause) Yes, maybe just to round off. So in a way you can see how the Mountain in Copenhagen sort of evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan. With a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in 10 years it could be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bjarke_ingels_3_warp_speed_architecture_tales
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"So the question is, what is invisible? There is more of it than you think, actually. Everything, I would say. Everything that matters except every thing and except matter.We can see matter. But we can't see what's the matter. As in this cryptic sentence I found in The Guardian recently: ""The marriage suffered a setback in 1965, when the husband was killed by the wife."" (Laughter) There's a world of invisibility there, isn't there? (Laughter)So, we can see the stars and the planets, but we can't see what holds them apart or what draws them together. With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things. We can't see into the engine room. We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty. And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. And you can't see energy.So everything that matters, that's important, is invisible. One slightly silly thing that's invisible is this story, which is invisible to you. And I'm now going to make it visible to you in your minds. It's about an M.P. called Geoffrey Dickens.The late Geoffrey Dickens, M.P. was attending a fete in his constituency. Wherever he went, at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness. (Laughter) Try as he might, he couldn't get away from her. A few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him, had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph. After her name, written in brackets was the apt description, horse face. (Laughter)""I've misjudged this women,"" thought Mr. Dickens. ""Not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness, she turns it to her advantage. A photo is not enough."" So he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in. And on the photograph, he wrote with a flourish, ""To Horse Face, with love from Geoffrey Dickens, M.P."" After it had been sent off, his secretary said to him, ""Did you get that letter from the woman at the fete? I wrote Horse Face on her, so you'd remember who she was."" (Laughter)I bet he thought he wished he was invisible, don't you? (Laughter)So, one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we can't see we also can't understand. Gravity is one thing that we can't see and which we don't understand. It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest. And nobody really knows what it is or why it's there.For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. That's what he thought he was there for. So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know. (Laughter)Consciousness. I see all your faces. I have no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that incredible that we can't read each other's minds? But we can touch each other, taste each other perhaps, if we get close enough. But we can't read each other's minds. I find that quite astonishing.In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion, which some claim is the route of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say. But their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist. So that's why we don't think it exists, the Sufi masters working on us.In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, gotten nowhere. We have no idea how consciousness works. With artificial intelligence, not only have they not created artificial intelligence, they haven't yet created artificial stupidity. (Laughter)The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful. Remind you of anyone? Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. And I've found a very useful new word, ignostic. Okay? I'm an ignostic. I refuse to be drawn on the question of whether God exists, until somebody properly defines the terms. (Laughter)Another thing we can't see is the human genome. And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago, when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100,000 genes. Geneticists will know this, but every year since, it's been revised downwards. We now think there are likely to be only just over 20,000 genes in the human genome.This is extraordinary. Because rice — get this — rice is known to have 38 thousand genes. Potatoes, potatoes have 48 chromosomes. Do you know that? Two more than people, and the same as a gorilla. (Laughter) You can't see these things, but they are very strange. (Laughter)The stars by day. I always think that's fascinating. The universe disappears. The more light there is, the less you can see.Time, nobody can see time. I don't know if you know this. Modern physics, there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures. It's much easier if it's not really there. You can't see the future, obviously. And you can't see the past, except in your memory.One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see. My son asked me this the other day, he said, ""Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two?"" And I said, ""Yes."" And he said, ""Why can't I?""Isn't that extraordinary? You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three, which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job. Because that's where all the stuff happens (Laughter) that makes you who you are.Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang. This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. You can see it in skin and this kind of stuff. Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff. But every cell in your body is replaced at some point. Taste buds, every 10 days or so. Livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer. A spine takes several years. But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago. The question is, who, then, are we? What are we? What is this thing that we hang on, that is actually us?Okay. Atoms, you can't see them. Nobody ever will. They're smaller than the wavelength of light. Gas, you can't see that. Interesting. Somebody mentioned 1600 recently. Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called Van Helmont. It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual. Quite good. He also invented a word called ""blas,"" meaning astral radiation. Didn't catch on, unfortunately. (Laughter) But well done, him. (Laughter)There is so many things that — Light. You can't see light. When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. I find that extraordinary, not to be able to see light, not to be able to see darkness.Electricity, you can't see that. Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity. They don't. Nobody knows what it is. (Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light when you turn the light on. They don't. Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. (Laughter)Galaxies, 100 billion of them estimated in the universe. 100 billion. How many can we see? Five. Five out of the 100 billion galaxies, with the naked eye, and one of them is quite difficult to see unless you've got very good eyesight.Radio waves. There's another thing. Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated. And somebody said to him, ""Well what's the point of these, Heinrich? What's the point of these radio waves that you've found?"" And he said, ""Well, I've no idea. But I guess somebody will find a use for them someday."" And that's what they do, radio. That's what they discovered.Anyway, so the biggest thing that's invisible to us is what we don't know. It is incredible how little we know. Thomas Edison once said, ""We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything.""And I've come to the conclusion — because you've asked this other question, ""What's another thing you can't see?"" The point, most of us. What's the point? (Laughter) (Applause) You can't see a point. It's by definition dimensionless, like an electron, oddly enough.But the point, what I've got it down to, is there are only two questions really worth asking. ""Why are we here?"" and ""What should we do about it while we are? And to help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century, one a mathematician and an engineer, and the other a poet.The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, ""I don't know why we are here. But I'm pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."" (Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard wasn't he? (Laughter)And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, ""We are here on earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've no idea."" (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_lloyd_inventories_the_invisible
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"We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination. And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our inscapes.  We've lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations  are completely different. They don't seem to be of our creation. They don't seem to be under our control. They seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception.So I am going to be talking about hallucinations, and a particular sort of visual hallucination which I see among my patients. A few months ago, I got a phone call from a nursing home where I work. They told me that one of their residents, an old lady in her 90s, was seeing things, and they wondered if she'd gone bonkers or, because she was an old lady, whether she'd had a stroke, or whether she had Alzheimer's.And so they asked me if I would come and see Rosalie, the old lady. I went in to see her. It was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and  of good intelligence, but she'd been very startled and very bewildered, because she'd been seeing things. And she told me — the nurses hadn't mentioned this — that she was blind, that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years. But now, for the last few days, she'd been seeing things.So I said, ""What sort of things?"" And she said, ""People in Eastern dress, in drapes, walking up and down stairs. A man who turns towards me and smiles. But he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals too. I see a white building. It's snowing, a soft snow. I see this horse with a harness, dragging the snow away. Then, one night, the scene changes. I see cats and dogs walking towards me. They come to a certain point and then stop. Then it changes again. I see a lot of children. They are walking up and down stairs. They wear bright colors, rose and blue, like Eastern dress.""Sometimes, she said, before the people come on, she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor, which seem to go up to the ceiling. I said, ""Is this like a dream?"" And she said, ""No, it's not like a dream. It's like a movie."" She said, ""It's got color. It's got motion. But it's completely silent, like a silent movie."" And she said that it's a rather boring movie. She said, ""All these people with Eastern dress, walking up and down, very repetitive, very limited."" (Laughter)And she has a sense of humor. She knew it was a hallucination. But she was frightened. She'd lived 95 years and she'd never had a hallucination before. She said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing, that they seemed to come on by themselves, or disappear. She had no control over them. She said she didn't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations. And none of the people or the animals, well, they all seemed oblivious of her. And she didn't know what was going on. She wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind.Well, I examined her carefully. She was a bright old lady, perfectly sane. She had no medical problems. She wasn't on any medications which could produce hallucinations. But she was blind. And I then said to her, ""I think I know what you have."" I said, ""There is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness. This was originally described,"" I said, ""right back in the 18th century, by a man called Charles Bonnet. And you have Charles Bonnet syndrome. There is nothing wrong with your brain. There is nothing wrong with your mind. You have Charles Bonnet syndrome.""And she was very relieved at this, that there was nothing seriously the matter, and also rather curious. She said, ""Who is this Charles Bonnet?"" She said, ""Did he have them himself?"" And she said, ""Tell all the nurses that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome."" (Laughter) ""I'm not crazy. I'm not demented. I have Charles Bonnet syndrome."" Well, so I did tell the nurses.Now this, for me, is a common situation. I work in old-age homes, largely. I see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired. About 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations. And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations. You don't have to be completely blind, only sufficiently impaired.Now with the original description in the 18th century, Charles Bonnet did not have them. His grandfather had these hallucinations. His grandfather was a magistrate, an elderly man. He'd had cataract surgery. His vision was pretty poor. And in 1759, he described to his grandson various things he was seeing.The first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair. It was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles. And he knew it was a hallucination. You don't have handkerchiefs in midair. And then he saw a big wheel in midair. But sometimes he wasn't sure whether he was hallucinating or not, because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions. So on one occasion, when his granddaughters were visiting them, he said, ""And who are these handsome young men with you?"" And they said, ""Alas, Grandpapa, there are no handsome young men."" And then the handsome young men disappeared. It's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash. They don't usually fade in and out. They are rather sudden, and they change suddenly.Charles Lullin, the grandfather, saw hundreds of different figures, different landscapes of all sorts. On one occasion, he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe, and realized it was himself. That was the only figure he recognized. On one occasion when he was walking in the streets of Paris, he saw — this was real — a scaffolding. But when he got back home, he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high, on his study table. This repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia.With him and with Rosalie, what seems to be going on — and Rosalie said, ""What's going on?"" — and I said that as you lose vision, as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input, they become hyperactive and excitable, and they start to fire spontaneously. And you start to see things. The things you see can be very complicated indeed.With another patient of mine, who, also had some vision, the vision she had could be disturbing. On one occasion, she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant. And he turned around. And then he divided into six figures in striped shirts, who started walking towards her. And then the six figures came together again, like a concertina. Once, when she was driving, or rather, her husband was driving, the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads.She had very mobile hallucinations as well. A lot of them had to do with a car. Sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car. He was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned. And then when they came to a stop, the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff, 100 foot in the air, and then disappear.Another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination. This was a woman who didn't have trouble with her eyes, but the visual parts of her brain, a little tumor in the occipital cortex. And, above all, she would see cartoons. These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field, like a screen. And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog. (Laughter) Now, I don't watch Sesame Street, but she made a point of saying, ""Why Kermit?"" she said, ""Kermit the Frog means nothing to me. You know, I was wondering about Freudian determinants. Why Kermit? Kermit the Frog means nothing to me.""She didn't mind the cartoons too much. But what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with Rosalie, the faces were often deformed, with very large teeth or very large eyes. And these frightened her. Well, what is going on with these people? As a physician, I have to try and define what's going on, and to reassure people, especially to reassure them that they're not going insane.Something like 10 percent, as I said, of visually impaired people get these. But no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them, because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something. And if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed.In particular, the notion is that if you see things or hear things, you're going mad, but the psychotic hallucinations  are quite different. Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them. There is none of this quality of being addressed with these Charles Bonnet hallucinations. There is a film. You're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you, or that's how people think about it.There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy, and sometimes, if one has this, one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past. You're at a particular road junction. You smell chestnuts roasting. You hear the traffic. All the senses are involved. And you're waiting for your girl. And it's that Tuesday evening back in 1982. And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations, full of feeling, full of familiarity, located in space and time, coherent, dramatic. The Charles Bonnet ones are quite different.So in the Charles Bonnet hallucinations, you have all sorts of levels, from the geometrical hallucinations — the pink and blue squares the woman had — up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces. Faces, and sometimes deformed faces, are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations. And one of the second commonest is cartoons.So, what is going on? Fascinatingly, in the last few years, it's been possible to do functional brain imagery, to do fMRI on people as they are hallucinating. And in fact, to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating. When people have these simple geometrical hallucinations, the primary visual cortex is activated. This is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns. You don't form images with your primary visual cortex.When images are formed, a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe. And in particular, one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus. And it's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus, they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces. But if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus, they may hallucinate faces, and this is exactly what you find in some of these people. There is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented, and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations.There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons. It's activated when one recognizes cartoons, when one draws cartoons, and when one hallucinates them. It's very interesting that that should be specific. There are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes.Around 1970, it was found that there were not only parts of the brain, but particular cells. ""Face cells"" were discovered around 1970. And now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells, which can be very, very specific. So you may not only have ""car"" cells, you may have ""Aston Martin"" cells. (Laughter) I saw an Aston Martin this morning. I had to bring it in. And now it's in there somewhere. (Laughter)Now, at this level, in what's called the inferotemporal cortex, there are only visual images, or figments or fragments. It's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion. And in the Charles Bonnet syndrome, you don't go to those higher levels. You're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images, or figments, or fragmentary figments, all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells.Normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception, or imagination, and one is not conscious of them. It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted. And instead of getting normal perception, you're getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation, or release, of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex. So, suddenly you see a face. Suddenly you see a car. Suddenly this, and suddenly that. The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this, but not terribly successfully.When these were first described, it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams. But in fact people say, ""I don't recognize the people. I can't form any associations."" ""Kermit means nothing to me."" You don't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams.Well, I've more or less said what I wanted. I think I just want to recapitulate and say this is common. Think of the number of blind people. There must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations, but are too scared to mention them. So this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public. Finally, I think they are infinitely interesting and valuable, for giving one some insight as to how the brain works.Charles Bonnet said, 250 years ago — he wondered how, thinking these hallucinations, how, as he put it, the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain. Now, 250 years later, I think we're beginning to glimpse how this is done. Thanks very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: That was superb. Thank you so much. You speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients. Have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about?Oliver Sacks: I was afraid you'd ask that. (Laughter) Well, yeah, a lot of them. And actually I'm a little visually impaired myself. I'm blind in one eye, and not terribly good in the other. And I see the geometrical hallucinations. But they stop there.CA: And they don't disturb you? Because you understand what's doing it, it doesn't make you worried?OS: Well they don't disturb me any more than my tinnitus, which I ignore. They occasionally interest me, and I have many pictures of them in my notebooks. I've gone and had an fMRI myself, to see how my visual cortex is taking over. And when I see all these hexagons and complex things, which I also have, in visual migraine, I wonder whether everyone sees things like this, and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit.CA: That was an utterly, utterly fascinating talk. Thank you so much for sharing.OS: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds
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"♫ Where do we go from here? ♫♫ How do we carry on? ♫♫ I can't get beyond the questions ♫♫ Clambering for the scraps ♫ ♫ in the shatter of us, collapsed ♫♫ It cuts me with every could have been ♫♫ Pain on pain on play, repeating ♫♫ With the backup, makeshift life in waiting ♫♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫♫ What of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫♫ There is nothing to see here now ♫♫ Turning the sign around ♫♫ We're closed to the Earth 'til further notice ♫♫ A crumbling cliche case ♫ ♫ crumpled and puffy faced ♫♫ caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles ♫♫ All I want, only one street level miracle ♫♫ I'll be an out and out born again ♫ ♫ from none more cynical ♫♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ that time heals everything ♫♫ But what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ And sit here cold? ♫♫ We will be long gone by then ♫♫ In lackluster ♫♫ In dust we lay around old magazines ♫♫ Fluorescent lighting sets the scene ♫♫ for all we could and should be being ♫♫ in the one life that we've got ♫♫ Everybody says ♫♫ time heals everything ♫♫ And what of the wretched hollow? ♫♫ The endless in between? ♫♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫♫ Wait it out ♫ (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/imogen_heap_wait
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"My name is Jonathan Zittrain, and in my recent work I've been a bit of a pessimist. So I thought this morning I would try to be the optimist, and give reason to hope for the future of the Internet by drawing upon its present.Now, it may seem like there is less hope today than there was before. People are less kind. There is less trust around. I don't know. As a simple example, we could run a test here. How many people have ever hitchhiked? I know. How many people have hitchhiked within the past 10 years? Right. So what has changed? It's not better public transportation. So that's one reason to think that we might be declensionists, going in the wrong direction.But I want to give you three examples to try to say that the trend line is in fact in the other direction, and it's the Internet helping it along. So example number one: the Internet itself. These are three of the founders of the Internet. They were actually high school classmates together at the same high school in suburban Los Angles in the 1960s. You might have had a French club or a Debate club. They had a ""Let's build a global network"" club, and it worked out very well.They are pictured here for their 25th anniversary Newsweek retrospective on the Internet. And as you can tell, they are basically goof balls. They had one great limitation and one great freedom as they tried to conceive of a global network. The limitation was that they didn't have any money. No particular amount of capital to invest, of the sort that for a physical network you might need for trucks and people and a hub to move packages around overnight. They had none of that.But they had an amazing freedom, which was they didn't have to make any money from it. The Internet has no business plan, never did. No CEO, no firm responsible, singly, for building it. Instead, it's folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to, or because they were expecting to make a mint off of it.That ethos led to a network architecture, a structure that was unlike other digital networks then or since. So unusual, in fact, that it was said that it's not clear the Internet could work. As late as 1992, IBM was known to say you couldn't possibly build a corporate network using Internet Protocol. And even some Internet engineers today say the whole thing is a pilot project and the jury is still out. (Laughter)That's why the mascot of Internet engineering, if it had one, is said to be the bumblebee. Because the fur-to-wingspan ratio of the bumblebee is far too large for it to be able to fly. And yet, mysteriously, somehow the bee flies. I'm pleased to say that, thanks to massive government funding, about three years ago we finally figured out how bees fly. (Laughter) It's very complicated, but it turns out they flap their wings very quickly. (Laughter)So what is this bizarre architecture configuration that makes the network sing and be so unusual? Well, to move data around from one place to another — again, it's not like a package courier. It's more like a mosh pit. (Laughter) Imagine, you being part of a network where, you're maybe at a sporting event, and you're sitting in rows like this, and somebody asks for a beer, and it gets handed at the aisle. And your neighborly duty is to pass the beer along, at risk to your own trousers, to get it to the destination.No one pays you to do this. It's just part of your neighborly duty. And, in a way, that's exactly how packets move around the Internet, sometimes in as many as 25 or 30 hops, with the intervening entities that are passing the data around having no particular contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver.Now, of course, in a mosh pit it's hard to specify a destination. You need a lot of trust, but it's not like, ""I'm trying to get to Pensacola, please."" So the Internet needs addressing and directions. It turns out there is no one overall map of the Internet. Instead, again, it is as if we are all sitting together in a theater, but we can only see amidst the fog the people immediately around us. So what do we do to figure out who is where? We turn to the person on the right, and we tell that person what we see on our left, and vice versa. And they can lather, rinse, repeat. And before you know it, you have a general sense of where everything is.This is how Internet addressing and routing actually work. This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable. In rare but striking instances, a single lie told by just one entity in this honeycomb can lead to real trouble.So, for example, last year, the government of Pakistan asked its Internet service providers there to prevent citizens of Pakistan from seeing YouTube. There was a video there that the government did not like and they wanted to make sure it was blocked. This is a common occurrence. Governments everywhere are often trying to block and filter and censor content on the Internet.Well this one ISP in Pakistan chose to effectuate the block for its subscribers in a rather unusual way. It advertised — the way that you might be asked, if you were part of the Internet, to declare what you see near you — it advertised that near it, in fact, it had suddenly awakened to find that it was YouTube. ""That's right,"" it said, ""I am YouTube."" Which meant that packets of data from subscribers going to YouTube stopped at the ISP, since they thought they were already there, and the ISP threw them away unopened because the point was to block it.But it didn't stop there. You see, that announcement went one click out, which got reverberated, one click out. And it turns out that as you look at the postmortem of this event, you have at one moment perfectly working YouTube. Then, at moment number two, you have the fake announcement go out. And within two minutes, it reverberates around and YouTube is blocked everywhere in the world. If you were sitting in Oxford, England, trying to get to YouTube, your packets were going to Pakistan and they weren't coming back.Now just think about that. One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it. And yet, somehow, within about two hours, the problem was fixed. How did this happen?Well, for a big clue, we turn to NANOG. The North American Network Operators Group, a group of people who, on a beautiful day outside, enter into a windowless room, at their terminals reading email and messages in fixed proportion font, like this, and they talk about networks. And some of them are mid-level employees at Internet service providers around the world. And here is the message where one of them says, ""Looks like we've got a live one. We have a hijacking of YouTube! This is not a drill. It's not just the cluelessness of YouTube engineers. I promise. Something is up in Pakistan."" And they came together to help find the problem and fix it.So it's kind of like if your house catches on fire. The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is random people apparate from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise. (Applause) I was trying to think of the right model to describe this form of random acts of kindness by geeky strangers. (Laughter) You know, it's just like the hail goes out and people are ready to help. And it turns out this model is everywhere, once you start looking for it.Example number two: Wikipedia. If a man named Jimbo came up to you in 2001 and said, ""I've got a great idea! We start with seven articles that anybody can edit anything, at any time, and we'll get a great encyclopedia! Eh?"" Right. Dumbest idea ever. (Laughter) In fact, Wikipedia is an idea so profoundly stupid that even Jimbo never had it.Jimbo's idea was for Nupedia. It was going to be totally traditional. He would pay people money because he was feeling like a good guy, and the money would go to the people and they would write the articles. The wiki was introduced so others could make suggestions on edits — as almost an afterthought, a back room. And then it turns out the back room grew to encompass the entire project.And today, Wikipedia is so ubiquitous that you can now find it on Chinese restaurant menus. (Laughter) I am not making this up. (Laughter) I have a theory I can explain later. Suffice it to say for now that I prefer my Wikipedia stir-fried with pimentos. (Laughter)But now, Wikipedia doesn't just spontaneously work. How does it really work? It turns out there is a back room that is kind of windowless, metaphorically speaking. And there are a bunch of people who, on a sunny day, would rather be inside and monitoring this, the administrator's notice board, itself a wiki page that anyone can edit. And you just bring your problems to the page. It's reminiscent of the description of history as ""one damn thing after another,"" right?Number one: ""Tendentious editing by user Andyvphil."" Apologies, Andyvphil, if you're here today. I'm not taking sides. ""Anon attacking me for reverting."" Here is my favorite: ""A long story."" (Laughter) It turns out there are more people checking this page for problems and wanting to solve them than there are problems arising on the page.And that's what keeps Wikipedia afloat. At all times, Wikipedia is approximately 45 minutes away from utter destruction. Right? There are spambots crawling it, trying to turn every article into an ad for a Rolex watch. (Laughter) It's this thin geeky line that keeps it going. Not because it's a job, not because it's a career, but because it's a calling. It's something they feel impelled to do because they care about it.They even gather together in such groups as the Counter-Vandalism Unit — ""Civility, Maturity, Responsibility"" — to just clean up the pages. It does make you wonder if there were, for instance, a massive, extremely popular Star Trek convention one weekend, who would be minding the store? (Laughter)So what we see — (Laughter) what we see in this phenomenon is something that the crazed, late traffic engineer Hans Monderman discovered in the Netherlands, and here in South Kensington, that sometimes if you remove some of the external rules and signs and everything else, you can actually end up with a safer environment in which people can function, and one in which they are more human with each other. They're realizing that they have to take responsibility for what they do. And Wikipedia has embraced this.Some of you may remember Star Wars Kid, the poor teenager who filmed himself with a golf ball retriever, acting as if it were a light saber. The film, without his permission or even knowledge at first, found its way onto the Internet. Hugely viral video. Extremely popular. Totally mortifying to him.Now, it being encyclopedic and all, Wikipedia had to do an article about Star Wars Kid. Every article on Wikipedia has a corresponding discussion page, and on the discussion page they had extensive argument among the Wikipedians as to whether to have his real name featured in the article. You could see arguments on both sides. Here is just a snapshot of some of them. They eventually decided — not unanimously by any means — not to include his real name, despite the fact that nearly all media reports did. They just didn't think it was the right thing to do. It was an act of kindness.And to this day, the page for Star Wars Kid has a warning right at the top that says you are not to put his real name on the page. If you do, it will be removed immediately, removed by people who may have disagreed with the original decision, but respect the outcome and work to make it stay because they believe in something bigger than their own opinion. As a lawyer, I've got to say these guys are inventing the law and stare decisis and stuff like that as they go along.Now, this isn't just limited to Wikipedia. We see it on blogs all over the place. I mean, this is a 2005 Business Week cover. Wow. Blogs are going to change your business. I know they look silly. And sure they look silly. They start off on all sorts of goofy projects.This is my favorite goofy blog: Catsthatlooklikehitler.com. (Laughter) You send in a picture of your cat if it looks like Hitler. (Laughter) Yeah, I know. Number four, it's like, can you imagine coming home to that cat everyday? (Laughter)But then, you can see the same kind of whimsy applied to people. So this is a blog devoted to unfortunate portraiture. This one says, ""Bucolic meadow with split-rail fence. Is that an animal carcass behind her?"" (Laughter) You're like, ""You know? I think that's an animal carcass behind her.""And it's one after the other. But then you hit this one. Image removed at request of owner. That's it. Image removed at request of owner. It turns out that somebody lampooned here wrote to the snarky guy that does the site, not with a legal threat, not with an offer of payment, but just said, ""Hey, would you mind?"" The person said, ""No, that's fine.""I believe we can build architectures online to make such human requests that much easier to do, to make it possible for all of us to see that the data we encounter online is just stuff on which to click and paste and copy and forward that actually represents human emotion and endeavor and impact, and to be able to have an ethical moment where we decide how we want to treat it.I even think it can go into the real world. We can end up, as we get in a world with more censors — everywhere there is something filming you, maybe putting it online — to be able to have a little clip you could wear that says, ""You know, I'd rather not."" And then have technology that the person taking the photo will know later, this person requested to be contacted before this goes anywhere big, if you don't mind. And that person taking the photo can make a decision about how and whether to respect it.In the real world, we see filtering of this sort taking place in Pakistan. And we now have means that we can build, like this system, so that people can report the filtering as they encounter it. And it's no longer just a ""I don't know. I couldn't get there. I guess I'll move on,"" but suddenly a collective consciousness about what is blocked and censored where online. In fact, talk about technology imitating life imitating tech, or maybe it's the other way around.An NYU researcher here took little cardboard robots with smiley faces on them, and a motor that just drove them forward and a flag sticking out the back with a desired destination. It said, ""Can you help me get there?"" Released it on the streets of Manhattan. (Laughter) They'll fund anything these days. Here is the chart of over 43 people helping to steer the robot that could not steer and get it on its way, from one corner from one corner of Washington Square Park to another.That leads to example number three: hitchhiking. I'm not so sure hitchhiking is dead. Why? There is the Craigslist rideshare board. If it were called the Craigslist hitchhiking board, tumbleweeds would be blowing through it. But it's the rideshare board, and it's basically the same thing. Now why are people using it? I don't know. Maybe they think that, uh, killers don't plan ahead? (Laughter) No. I think the actual answer is that once you reframe it, once you get out of one set of stale expectations from a failed project that had its day, but now, for whatever reason, is tarnished, you can actually rekindle the kind of human kindness and sharing that something like this on Craigslist represents.And then you can highlight it into something like, yes, CouchSurfing.org. CouchSurfing: one guy's idea to, at last, put together people who are going somewhere far away and would like to sleep on a stranger's couch for free, with people who live far away, and would like someone they don't know to sleep on their couch for free. It's a brilliant idea. It's a bee that, yes, flies.Amazing how many successful couch surfings there have been. And if you're wondering, no, there have been no known fatalities associated with CouchSurfing. Although, to be sure, the reputation system, at the moment, works that you leave your report after the couch surfing experience, so there may be some selection bias there. (Laughter)So, my urging, my thought, is that the Internet isn't just a pile of information. It's not a noun. It's a verb. And when you go on it, if you listen and see carefully and closely enough, what you will discover is that that information is saying something to you. What it's saying to you is what we heard yesterday, Demosthenes was saying to us. It's saying, ""Let's march."" Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_zittrain_the_web_is_a_random_act_of_kindness
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"Good morning. I think, as a grumpy Eastern European, I was brought in to play the pessimist this morning. So bear with me. Well, I come from the former Soviet Republic of Belarus, which, as some of you may know, is not exactly an oasis of liberal democracy. So that's why I've always been fascinated with how technology could actually reshape and open up authoritarian societies like ours.So, I'm graduating college and, feeling very idealistic, I decided to join the NGO which actually was using new media to promote democracy and media reform in much of the former Soviet Union. However, to my surprise, I discovered that dictatorships do not crumble so easily. In fact, some of them actually survived the Internet challenge, and some got even more repressive.So this is when I ran out of my idealism and decided to quit my NGO job and actually study how the Internet could impede democratization. Now, I must tell you that this was never a very popular argument, and it's probably not very popular yet with some of you sitting in this audience. It was never popular with many political leaders, especially those in the United States who somehow thought that new media would be able to do what missiles couldn't. That is, promote democracy in difficult places where everything else has already been tried and failed. And I think by 2009, this news has finally reached Britain, so I should probably add Gordon Brown to this list as well.However, there is an underlying argument about logistics, which has driven so much of this debate. Right? So if you look at it close enough, you'll actually see that much of this is about economics. The cybertopians say, much like fax machines and Xerox machines did in the '80s, blogs and social networks have radically transformed the economics of protest, so people would inevitably rebel. To put it very simply, the assumption so far has been that if you give people enough connectivity, if you give them enough devices, democracy will inevitably follow.And to tell you the truth, I never really bought into this argument, in part because I never saw three American presidents agree on anything else in the past. (Laughter) But, you know, even beyond that, if you think about the logic underlying it, is something I call iPod liberalism, where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy. And again, I think this is kind of false.But I think a much bigger problem with this is that this logic — that we should be dropping iPods not bombs — I mean, it would make a fascinating title for Thomas Friedman's new book. (Laughter) But this is rarely a good sign. Right? So, the bigger problem with this logic is that it confuses the intended versus the actual uses of technology. For those of you who think that new media of the Internet could somehow help us avert genocide, should look no further than Rwanda, where in the '90s it was actually two radio stations which were responsible for fueling much of the ethnic hatred in the first place.But even beyond that, coming back to the Internet, what you can actually see is that certain governments have mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes. Right? And they are building what I call the Spinternet. The combination of spin, on the one hand, and the Internet on the other. So governments from Russia to China to Iran are actually hiring, training and paying bloggers in order to leave ideological comments and create a lot of ideological blog posts to comment on sensitive political issues. Right?So you may wonder, why on Earth are they doing it? Why are they engaging with cyberspace? Well my theory is that it's happening because censorship actually is less effective than you think it is in many of those places. The moment you put something critical in a blog, even if you manage to ban it immediately, it will still spread around thousands and thousands of other blogs. So the more you block it, the more it emboldens people to actually avoid the censorship and thus win in this cat-and-mouse game. So the only way to control this message is actually to try to spin it and accuse anyone who has written something critical of being, for example, a CIA agent.And, again, this is happening quite often. Just to give you an example of how it works in China, for example. There was a big case in February 2009 called ""Elude the Cat."" And for those of you who didn't know, I'll just give a little summary. So what happened is that a 24-year-old man, a Chinese man, died in prison custody. And police said that it happened because he was playing hide and seek, which is ""elude the cat"" in Chinese slang, with other inmates and hit his head against the wall, which was not an explanation which sat well with many Chinese bloggers.So they immediately began posting a lot of critical comments. In fact, QQ.com, which is a popular Chinese website, had 35,000 comments on this issue within hours. But then authorities did something very smart. Instead of trying to purge these comments, they instead went and reached out to the bloggers. And they basically said, ""Look guys. We'd like you to become netizen investigators."" So 500 people applied, and four were selected to actually go and tour the facility in question, and thus inspect it and then blog about it. Within days the entire incident was forgotten, which would have never happened if they simply tried to block the content. People would keep talking about it for weeks.And this actually fits with another interesting theory about what's happening in authoritarian states and in their cyberspace. This is what political scientists call authoritarian deliberation, and it happens when governments are actually reaching out to their critics and letting them engage with each other online. We tend to think that somehow this is going to harm these dictatorships, but in many cases it only strengthens them. And you may wonder why. I'll just give you a very short list of reasons why authoritarian deliberation may actually help the dictators.And first it's quite simple. Most of them operate in a complete information vacuum. They don't really have the data they need in order to identify emerging threats facing the regime. So encouraging people to actually go online and share information and data on blogs and wikis is great because otherwise, low level apparatchiks and bureaucrats will continue concealing what's actually happening in the country, right? So from this perspective, having blogs and wikis produce knowledge has been great.Secondly, involving public in any decision making is also great because it helps you to share the blame for the policies which eventually fail. Because they say, ""Well look, we asked you, we consulted you, you voted on it. You put it on the front page of your blog. Well, great. You are the one who is to blame.""And finally, the purpose of any authoritarian deliberation efforts is usually to increase the legitimacy of the regimes, both at home and abroad. So inviting people to all sorts of public forums, having them participate in decision making, it's actually great. Because what happens is that then you can actually point to this initiative and say, ""Well, we are having a democracy. We are having a forum.""Just to give you an example, one of the Russian regions, for example, now involves its citizens in planning its strategy up until year 2020. Right? So they can go online and contribute ideas on what that region would look like by the year 2020. I mean, anyone who has been to Russia would know that there was no planning in Russia for the next month. So having people involved in planning for 2020 is not necessarily going to change anything, because the dictators are still the ones who control the agenda.Just to give you an example from Iran, we all heard about the Twitter revolution that happened there, but if you look close enough, you'll actually see that many of the networks and blogs and Twitter and Facebook were actually operational. They may have become slower, but the activists could still access it and actually argue that having access to them is actually great for many authoritarian states. And it's great simply because they can gather open source intelligence.In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you actually know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. I mean KGB, and not just KGB, used to torture in order to actually get this data. Now it's all available online. (Laughter)But I think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cybertopians made is when it comes to digital natives, people who have grown up online. We often hear about cyber activism, how people are getting more active because of the Internet. Rarely hear about cyber hedonism, for example, how people are becoming passive. Why? Because they somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography. That's not an option being considered too strongly.So for every digital renegade that is revolting in the streets of Tehran, there may as well be two digital captives who are actually rebelling only in the World of Warcraft. And this is realistic. And there is nothing wrong about it because the Internet has greatly empowered many of these young people and it plays a completely different social role for them.If you look at some of the surveys on how the young people actually benefit from the Internet, you'll see that the number of teenagers in China, for example, for whom the Internet actually broadens their sex life, is three times more than in the United States. So it does play a social role, however it may not necessarily lead to political engagement.So the way I tend to think of it is like a hierarchy of cyber-needs in space, a total rip-off from Abraham Maslow. But the point here is that when we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be the reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, ""Sex and the City,"" or maybe watching funny videos of cats. So this is something you have to recognize.So what should we do about it? Well I say we have to stop thinking about the number of iPods per capita and start thinking about ways in which we can empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs and then the members of civil society. Because even what has been happening up 'til now with the Spinternet and authoritarian deliberation, there is a great chance that those voices will not be heard. So I think we should shatter some of our utopian assumptions and actually start doing something about it. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared
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"Thank you. Two years ago, I stood on the TED stage in Arusha, Tanzania. I spoke very briefly about one of my proudest creations. It was a simple machine that changed my life.Before that time, I had never been away from my home in Malawi. I had never used a computer. I had never seen an Internet. On the stage that day, I was so nervous. My English lost, I wanted to vomit. (Laughter) I had never been surrounded by so many azungu, white people. (Laughter)There was a story I wouldn't tell you then. But well, I'm feeling good right now. I would like to share that story today. We have seven children in my family. All sisters, excepting me. This is me with my dad when I was a little boy. Before I discovered the wonders of science, I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers. Like everyone else, we grew maize.One year our fortune turned very bad. In 2001 we experienced an awful famine. Within five months all Malawians began to starve to death. My family ate one meal per day, at night. Only three swallows of nsima for each one of us. The food passes through our bodies. We drop down to nothing.In Malawi, the secondary school, you have to pay school fees. Because of the hunger, I was forced to drop out of school. I looked at my father and looked at those dry fields. It was the future I couldn't accept.I felt very happy to be at the secondary school, so I was determined to do anything possible to receive education. So I went to a library. I read books, science books, especially physics. I couldn't read English that well. I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them.Another book put that knowledge in my hands. It said a windmill could pump water and generate electricity. Pump water meant irrigation, a defense against hunger, which we were experiencing by that time. So I decided I would build one windmill for myself. But I didn't have materials to use, so I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials. Many people, including my mother, said I was crazy. (Laughter)I found a tractor fan, shock absorber, PVC pipes. Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo, I built my machine. It was one light at first. And then four lights, with switches, and even a circuit breaker, modeled after an electric bell. Another machine pumps water for irrigation.Queues of people start lining up at my house (Laughter) to charge their mobile phone. (Applause) I could not get rid of them. (Laughter) And the reporters came too, which lead to bloggers and which lead to a call from something called TED. I had never seen an airplane before. I had never slept in a hotel. So, on stage that day in Arusha, my English lost, I said something like, ""I tried. And I made it.""So I would like to say something to all the people out there like me to the Africans, and the poor who are struggling with your dreams. God bless. Maybe one day you will watch this on the Internet. I say to you, trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens, don't give up. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_how_i_harnessed_the_wind
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"Okay, so 90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. It involves a campaign of letter writing, research and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia. And oddly, the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World, a seemingly innocuous site.And it read — I'm just going to read a key sentence: ""Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to.""Photography threatens fantasy. They didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths and beliefs, and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth. But there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator's intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented.Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge.It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information. And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph. And it's just another place from which to observe, and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders. And the outsider can never really reach the core.I'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series. It's titled, ""An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,"" and it's comprised of nearly 70 images. In this context I'll just show you a few. This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State, where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water. A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly. And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America, which you can see here.And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text. So I create these two poles. Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text. And what I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground. But in this context I'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts.This is a cryopreservation unit, and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger, who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health, with advancements in science and technology, all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars, for forever.This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty. Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state, allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage. So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen, allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse, to simulate the loss of virginity.This is a jury simulation deliberation room, and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror. And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they're hoping for. This process costs 60,000 dollars.This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room, a contraband room, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. On that table you can see 48 hours' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States. There is a pig's head and African cane rats. And part of my photographic work is I'm not just documenting what's there. I do take certain liberties and intervene. And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting, so I spent some time with the smells and items.This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, their original headquarters building. And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts. And it's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics. And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency, and had thus come under question, is abstract expressionism.This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition. And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene.This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States. It's a research crop marijuana grow room.And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can't find any discernible formula in how these things — they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security — and you can't completely understand how information is being distributed.These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting North America to Europe. They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability. This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut. But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago, like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn't necessarily progressed.This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (Laughter) And this is ... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired, and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity. And Playboy is always in the top few. (Laughter) But you'd be surprised, they don't do the photographs. It's just the text. (Laughter)This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza. This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead. And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States. And the film was shot on 72 millimeter, government-issue film. And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film.All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding — that would be mother to son, father to daughter, sister to brother — to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger. Meaning white fur, ice blue eyes, a pink nose. And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth. It's a very violent process that is little known. And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment. Kenny was born. He actually made it to adulthood. He has since passed away, but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities.This, on a lighter note, is at George Lucas' personal archive. This is the Death Star. And it's shown here in its true orientation. In the context of ""Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,"" its mirror image is presented. They flip the negative. And you can see the photoetched brass detailing, and the painted acrylic facade. In the context of the film, this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire, capable of annihilating planets and civilizations, and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet. (Laughter)This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. It's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site. Essentially they've simulated a city for urban combat, and this is one of the structures that exists in that city. It's called the World Church of God. It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. And after I took this photograph, they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq. And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice. And we put that wall around the World Church of God, and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army. And I put them into my photograph.This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School, who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity.And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world. It runs 24 hours a day, commercial free. However, it's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States. And in 2004, they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq, which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq.Now I'm going to move on to another project I did. It's titled ""The Innocents."" And for the men in these photographs, photography had been used to create a fantasy. Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth, in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie. I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, violent crimes.I investigate photography's ability to blur truth and fiction, and its influence on memory, which can lead to severe, even lethal consequences. For the men in these photographs, the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of images. But through exposure to composite sketches, Polaroids, mug shots and line-ups, eyewitness testimony can change.I'll give you an example from a case. A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker. She saw some similarities in one of the photographs, but couldn't quite make a positive identification. Days later, she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs, except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array. And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory, if there ever was an actual memory.Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications.Frederick Daye, who is photographed at his alibi location, where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime. He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape, kidnapping and vehicle theft. And he served 10 years of a life sentence. Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison. But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick's photograph.Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl walking to school. He served 18 years of a death sentence. I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho. And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction. The scene of arrest, the scene of misidentification, the alibi location. And here, the scene of the crime, it's this place to which he's never been, but changed his life forever. So photographing there, I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, in both his life and in photography.Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder. He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco, Texas.Larry Mayes, I photographed at the scene of arrest, where he hid between two mattresses in Gary, Indiana, in this very room to hide from the police. He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery. The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification, days later, from a photo array.Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival. He is photographed at his alibi location.Ron Williamson. Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club, and served 11 years of a death sentence. I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A's to play professional baseball just before his conviction. And the state's key witness in Ron's case was, in the end, the actual perpetrator.Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman. I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago.William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary. He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky.Timothy Durham, who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime, was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence, for several charges of rape and robbery. He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim.Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia. He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery, and served seven years of a 47 year sentence. Troy's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward, but said he looked too old. The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier, which they entered into a photo array days later, and he was positively identified.Now I'm going to leave you with a self portrait. And it reiterates that distortion is a constant, and our eyes are easily deceived. That's it. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/taryn_simon_photographs_secret_sites
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"Clearly, we're living in a moment of crisis. Arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us, and yet I stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive. Because of some of technologies we've been talking about. Because of the resources, the skills, and certainly the surge of talent we're seeing all around the world, with the mindset to create change. And we've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen, who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower, but that we've got to engage in a different way with the world.And by definition, every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul, a global citizen. You work on the front lines. And you've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another. And no matter what country you live or work in, you've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of, even in their most ordinariness.Today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty, how best we release their energies. On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. And what I want to talk about is something that compliments both systems. We call it patient capital.The critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in Africa since 1970 and say, and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty, rampant corruption? They use Mobutu as metaphor. And their policy prescription is to make government more accountable, focus on the capital markets, invest, don't give anything away.On the other side, as I said, there are those who say the problem is that we need more money. That when it comes to the rich, we'll bail out and we'll hand a lot of aid, but when it comes to our poor brethren, we want little to do with it. They point to the successes of aid: the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals. Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.After 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation, it's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet than low-income people. They must navigate markets daily, making micro-decisions, dozens and dozens, to move their way through society, and yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family, they could be put back into poverty, sometimes for generations. And so we need both the market and we need aid.Patient capital works between, and tries to take the best of both. It's money that's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy, thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity, but as individual customers, consumers, clients, people who want to make decisions in their own lives.Patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk, a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment, to use the market as the best listening device that we have, and the expectation of below-market returns, but outsized social impact. It recognizes that the market has its limitation, and so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy to include all people.Now, entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons. First, they tend to work in markets where people make one, two, three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level. Second, the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure — no roads to speak of, sporadic electricity and high levels of corruption. Third, they are often creating markets.Even if you're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages, it is something new. And so many low-income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience. It also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance. Not only to build the systems, the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way, but to connect those business to other markets, to governments, to corporations — real partnerships if we want to get to scale.I want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation. In 2002 I met this incredible entrepreneur named Amitabha Sadangi from India, who'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet. And he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether, despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in India make under a dollar a day. They were creating subsidies either for large farms, or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use, rather than that the farmers wanted to use.At the same time Amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in Israel. It was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant. And it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green. But the market also had bypassed low income farmers, because these systems were both too expensive, and they were constructed for fields that were too large. The average small village farmer works on two acres or less.And so, Amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves, because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he thought that they should have. And he used three fundamental principles.The first one was miniaturization. The drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre, even if he had two, because it was too frightening, given all that he had at stake. Second, it had to be extremely affordable. In other words, that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest, or else they wouldn't take the risk. And third, it had to be what Amitabha calls infinitely expandable. What I mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre, the farmers could buy a second and a third and a fourth.As of today, IDE India, Amitabha's organization, has sold over 300,000 farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple on average, but this didn't happen overnight. In fact, when you go back to the beginning, there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day, that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors, agriculture.And so we needed grants. And he used significant grants to research, to experiment, to fail, to innovate and try again. And when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers, that's when patient capital could come in. And we helped him build a company, for profit, that would build on IDE's knowledge, and start looking at sales and exports, and be able to tap into other kinds of capital.Secondarily, we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries. And so we met Dr. Sono Khangharani in Pakistan. And while, again, you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in India into Pakistan, just to get the permits, over time we were able to start a company with Dr. Sono, who runs a large community development organization in the Thar Desert, which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country. And though that company has just started, our assumption is that there too we'll see the impact on millions.But drip irrigation isn't the only innovation. We're starting to see these happening all around the world. In Arusha, Tanzania, A to Z Textile Manufacturing has worked in partnership with us, with UNICEF, with the Global Fund, to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people, mostly women. And they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for Africans around the world.Lifespring Hospital is a joint venture between Acumen and the government of India to bring quality, affordable maternal health care to low-income women, and it's been so successful that it's currently building a new hospital every 35 days.And 1298 Ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry, building an ambulance service in Bombay that would use the technology of Google Earth, a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access, and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption. So that in the terrorist attacks of November they were the first responder, and are now beginning to scale, because of partnership. They've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances, and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in India.This idea of scale is critical. Because we're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people. All of the ones I discussed have reached at least a quarter million people. But that's obviously not enough. And it's where the idea of partnership becomes so important. Whether it's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets, government itself, or partner with major corporations, there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation.President Obama understands that. He recently authorized the creation of a Social Innovation Fund to focus on what works in this country, and look at how we can scale it. And I would submit that it's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations, not only for their country, but ones that we can use in the developed world as well. Invest financial assistance, but also management assistance. And then measure the returns, both from a financial perspective and from a social impact perspective.When we think about new approaches to aid, it's impossible not to talk about Pakistan. We've had a rocky relationship with that country and, in all fairness, the United States has not always been a very reliable partner. But again I would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen. And if we take that notion of a global innovation fund, we could use this time to invest not directly in government, though we would have government's blessing, nor in international experts, but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country.People like Rashani Zafar, who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country, and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country. And Tasneem Siddiqui, who developed a way called incremental housing, where he has moved 40,000 slum dwellers into safe, affordable community housing. Educational initiatives like DIL and The Citizen Foundation that are building schools across the country. It's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the Taliban.I've invested in Pakistan for over seven years now, and those of you who've also worked there can attest that Pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population, and there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature.President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true. That these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of Pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day, provide real pathways to hope. And as we think about how we construct aid for Pakistan, while we need to strengthen the judiciary, build greater stability, we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world.On one of my last visits to Pakistan, I asked Dr. Sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the Thar Desert. And we left Karachi one morning before dawn. It was about 115 degrees. And we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color, lots of heat, very little discussion, because we were exhausted.And finally, at the end of the journey, I could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon. And as we got closer, its significance became apparent. That there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall. Because one of the poorest farmers on Earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life. His name was Raja, and he had kind, twinkly hazel eyes and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father.And he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he hadn't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day. Because he was building these crops. And with the money he earned he could stay this year. And for the first time ever in three generations, his children would go to school.We asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons. And he said, ""Of course I will. Because I don't want them discriminated against anymore."" When we think about solutions to poverty, we cannot deny individuals their fundamental dignity. Because at the end of the day, dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. And what's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity. Because that is where dignity really starts.Martin Luther King said that love without power is anemic and sentimental, and that power without love is reckless and abusive. Our generation has seen both approaches tried, and often fail. But I think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power. For that is what we'll need, as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us, and to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal to every human being on the planet.The time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions, a cross sector, is now. I can only talk from my own experience, but in eight years of running Acumen fund, I've seen the power of patient capital. Not only to inspire innovation and risk taking, but to truly build systems that have created more than 25,000 jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet. I know it works. But I know that many other kinds of innovation also work.And so I urge you, in whatever sector you work, in whatever job you do, to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we're trying to help. Rather than what we think that they might need. It will take embracing the world with both arms. And it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability, with a sense of integrity and perseverance. And yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations. And there is so much good that we can do. Just think of all those sunflowers in the desert. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jacqueline_novogratz_a_third_way_to_think_about_aid
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"Do we live in a borderless world? Before you answer that, have a look at this map. Contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today. That's probably more than at any time in centuries. Now, many of you will object. For you this would be a more appropriate map. You could call it TEDistan. In TEDistan, there are no borders, just connected spaces and unconnected spaces. Most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen, of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy.But let's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born. For them, nations, countries, boundaries, borders still matter a great deal, and often violently. Now here at TED, we're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe. Well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved: our basic political geography. How do we distribute ourselves around the world?Now this is important, because border conflicts justify so much of the world's military-industrial complex. Border conflicts can derail so much of the progress that we hope to achieve here. So I think we need a deeper understanding of how people, money, power, religion, culture, technology interact to change the map of the world. And we can try to anticipate those changes, and shape them in a more constructive direction.So we're going to look at some maps of the past, the present and some maps you haven't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going. Let's start with the world of 1945. 1945 there were just 100 countries in the world. After World War II, Europe was devastated, but still held large overseas colonies: French West Africa, British East Africa, South Asia, and so forth. Then over the late '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, waves of decolonization took place. Over 50 new countries were born. You can see that Africa has been fragmented. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South East Asian nations created. Then came the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You had the creation of new states in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslav republics and the Balkans, and the 'stans of central Asia.Today we have 200 countries in the world. The entire planet is covered by sovereign, independent nation-states. Does that mean that someone's gain has to be someone else's loss? Let's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world, Eastern Eurasia. As you can see on this map, Russia is still the largest country in the world. And as you know, China is the most populous. And they share a lengthy land border.What you don't see on this map is that most of Russia's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to Europe. And only 30 million people are in its eastern areas. In fact, the World Bank predicts that Russia's population is declining towards about 120 million peopleAnd there is another thing that you don't see on this map. Stalin, Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders forced Russians out to the far east to be in gulags, labor camps, nuclear cities, whatever the case was. But as oil prices rose, Russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country, east and west. But nothing has more perversely impacted Russia's demographic distribution, because the people in the east, who never wanted to be there anyway, have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west. As a result, in the Russian far east today, which is twice the size of India, you have exactly six million Russians.So let's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world. We can start with Mongolia, or as some call it, Mine-golia. Why do they call it that? Because in Mine-golia, Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines — copper, zinc, gold — and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China. China isn't conquering Mongolia. It's buying it. Colonies were once conquered. Today countries are bought.So let's apply this principle to Siberia. Siberia most of you probably think of as a cold, desolate, unlivable place. But in fact, with global warming and rising temperatures, all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness, and grain being produced in Siberia. But who is it going to feed? Well, just on the other side of the Amo River, in the Heilongjiang and Harbin provinces of China, you have over 100 million people. That's larger than the entire population of Russia.Every single year, for at least a decade or more, [60,000] of them have been voting with their feet, crossing, moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain. They set up their own bazaars and medical clinics. They've taken over the timber industry and been shipping the lumber east, back into China. Again, like Mongolia, China isn't conquering Russia. It's just leasing it. That's what I call globalization Chinese style.Now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years. But hold on. This map is 700 years old. This is the map of the Yuan Dynasty, led by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. So history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme.This is just to give you a taste of what's happening in this part of the world. Again, globalization Chinese style. Because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography. So, the history of East Asia in fact, people don't think about nations and borders. They think more in terms of empires and hierarchies, usually Chinese or Japanese.Well it's China's turn again. So let's look at how China is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far East. It starts with the global hubs. Remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy? East Asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sidney. These are the filters and funnels of global capital. Trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region, so much of it being invested into China.Then there is trade. These vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that China has with every country in the region. Specifically, it targets Japan and Korea and Australia, countries that are strong allies of the United States. Australia, for example, is heavily dependent on exporting iron ore and natural gas to China. For poorer countries, China reduces tariffs so that Laos and Cambodia can sell their goods more cheaply and become dependent on exporting to China as well.And now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to China to lead the rebound, the economic rebound, not just in Asia, but potentially for the world. The Asian free trade zone, almost free trade zone, that's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the Pacific. So China is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region.Another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy. China has signed military agreements with many countries in the region. It has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the East Asian Community. Some of these organizations don't even have the United States as a member. There is a treaty of nonaggression between countries, such that if there were a conflict between China and the United States, most countries vow to just sit it out, including American allies like Korea and Australia.Another pillar of the strategy, like Russia, is demographic. China exports business people, nannies, students, teachers to teach Chinese around the region, to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies. Already ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there. Chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result. Singapore, for example, used to ban Chinese language education. Now it encourages it.If you add it all up what do you get? Well, if you remember before World War II, Japan had a vision for a greater Japanese co-prosperity sphere. What's emerging today is what you might call a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere. So no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders, what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures, but in a much more fluid, imperial zone. All of this is happening without firing a shot.That's most certainly not the case in the Middle East where countries are still very uncomfortable in the borders left behind by European colonialists. So what can we do to think about borders differently in this part of the world? What lines on the map should we focus on? What I want to present to you is what I call state building, day by day.Let's start with Iraq. Six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality. Oil used to be one of the forces holding Iraq together; now it is the most significant cause of the country's disintegration. The reason is Kurdistan. The Kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence, and now is their chance to finally have it. These are pipeline routes, which emerge from Kurdistan, which is an oil-rich region.And today, if you go to Kurdistan, you'll see that Kurdish Peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the Sunni Iraqi army. But what are they guarding? Is it really a border on the map? No. It's the pipelines. If the Kurds can control their pipelines, they can set the terms of their own statehood. Now should we be upset about this, about the potential disintegration of Iraq? I don't believe we should. Iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. And we'll have a chance to solve a 3,000 year old dispute. Now remember Kurdistan is landlocked. It has no choice but to behave. In order to profit from its oil it has to export it through Turkey or Syria, and other countries, and Iraq itself. And therefore it has to have amicable relations with them.Now lets look at a perennial conflict in the region. That is, of course, in Palestine. Palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it's two parts Palestinian, one part Israel. 30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict. What might? I believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure. Today donors are spending billions of dollars on this. These two arrows are an arc, an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the West Bank and Gaza.If Gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the West Bank, you can have a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian economy. That, I believe, is going to bring peace to this particular conflict. The lesson from Kurdistan and from Palestine is that independence alone, without infrastructure, is futile.Now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders, when the insecurities might abate? The last time that was the case was actually a century ago, during the Ottoman Empire. This is the Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway ran from Istanbul to Medina via Damascus. It even had an offshoot running to Haifa in what is today Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea. But today the Hejaz Railway lies in tatters, ruins. If we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map, infrastructure, that cross the straight lines, the borders, I believe the Middle East would be a far more peaceful region.Now let's look at another part of the world, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, the 'stans. These countries' borders originate from Stalin's decrees. He purposely did not want these countries to make sense. He wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule. Fortunately for them, most of their oil and gas resources were discovered after the Soviet Union collapsed.Now I know some of you may be thinking, ""Oil, oil, oil. Why is it all he's talking about is oil?"" Well, there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we're talking about it now. Before it was, how do we control their oil? Now it's their oil for their own purposes. And I assure you it's every bit as important to them as it might have been to colonizers and imperialists. Here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades. A great deal of them.For a number of countries in this part of the world, having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves. Just take Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the Caucuses, but now with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey, it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west.Then there is Turkmenistan, which most people think of as a frozen basket case. But now it's contributing gas across the Caspian Sea to provide for Europe, and even a potentially Turkmen- Afghan-Pakistan-India pipeline as well.Then there is Kazakhstan, which didn't even have a name before. It was more considered South Siberia during the Soviet Union. Today most people recognize Kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player. Why? Because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the Caspian, north through Russia, and even east to China. More pipelines means more silk roads, instead of the Great Game. The Great Game connotes dominance of one over the other. Silk road connotes independence and mutual trust. The more pipelines we have, the more silk roads we'll have, and the less of a dominant Great Game competition we'll have in the 21st century.Now let's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders, and how that has enhanced its strength. And that is, of course, Europe. The European Union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries, and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of Germany to happen in a peaceful way. But then eventually it grew into 12 countries, and those are the 12 stars on the European flag. The E.U. also became a currency block, and is now the most powerful trade block in the entire world. On average, the E.U. has grown by one country per year since the end of the Cold War. In fact most of that happened on just one day. In 2004, 15 new countries joined the E.U. and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people.So what is next? What is the future of the European Union? Well in light blue, you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the European Union for trade and investment. What does that tell us? Trade and investment tell us that Europe is putting its money where its mouth is. Even if these regions aren't part of the E.U., they are becoming part of its sphere of influence. Just take the Balkans. Croatia, Serbia Bosnia, they're not members of the E.U. yet. But you can get on a German ICE train and make it almost to Albania. In Bosnia you use the Euro currency already, and that's the only currency they're probably ever going to have.So, looking at other parts of Europe's periphery, such as North Africa. On average, every year or two, a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the Mediterranean, connecting North Africa to Europe. That not only helps Europe diminish its reliance on Russia for energy, but if you travel to North Africa today, you'll hear more and more people saying that they don't really think of their region as the Middle East. So in other words, I believe that President Sarkozy of France is right when he talks about a Mediterranean union.Now let's look at Turkey and the Caucasus. I mentioned Azerbaijan before. That corridor of Turkey and the Caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of Europe's energy supply. So does Turkey really have to be a member of the European Union? I don't think it does. I think it's already part of a Euro-Turkish superpower.So what's next? Where are we going to see borders change and new countries born? Well, South Central Asia, South West Asia is a very good place to start. Eight years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability. Pakistan and Afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of Pashtun nationalism. This is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan and Pakistan border.Let's not neglect the insurgency just to the south, Balochistan. Two weeks ago, Balochi rebels attacked a Pakistani military garrison, and this was the flag that they raised over it. The post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating, and I expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment.Of course, we can't forget Africa. 53 countries, and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map. If we were to look at all of Africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more, tribal divisions and so forth. But let's just look at Sudan, the second-largest country in Africa. It has three ongoing civil wars, the genocide in Darfur, which you all know about, the civil war in the east of the country, and south Sudan. South Sudan is going to be having a referendum in 2011 in which it is very likely to vote itself independence.Now let's go up to the Arctic Circle. There is a great race on for energy resources under the Arctic seabed. Who will win? Canada? Russia? The United States? Actually Greenland. Several weeks ago Greenland's [60,000] people voted themselves self-governance rights from Denmark. So Denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller.What is the lesson from all of this? Geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline. It's constantly morphing and changing the world, like climate change. And like our relationship with the ecosystem we're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet. Now we fear changes on the map. We fear civil wars, death tolls, having to learn the names of new countries. But I believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent.The question is how do we change those borders, and what lines do we focus on? I believe we focus on the lines that cross borders, the infrastructure lines. Then we'll wind up with the world we want, a borderless one. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/parag_khanna_maps_the_future_of_countries
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"I'd like to talk a little bit this morning about what happens if we move from design to design thinking. Now this rather old photo up there is actually the first project I was ever hired to do, something like 25 years ago. It's a woodworking machine, or at least a piece of one, and my task was to make this thing a little bit more modern, a little bit easier to use. I thought, at the time, I did a pretty good job. Unfortunately, not very long afterwards the company went out of business.This is the second project that I did. It's a fax machine. I put an attractive shell around some new technology. Again, 18 months later, the product was obsolete. And now, of course, the whole technology is obsolete. Now, I'm a fairly slow learner, but eventually it occurred to me that maybe what passed for design wasn't all that important — making things more attractive, making them a bit easier to use, making them more marketable. By focusing on a design, maybe just a single product, I was being incremental and not having much of an impact.But I think this small view of design is a relatively recent phenomenon, and in fact really emerged in the latter half of the 20th century as design became a tool of consumerism. So when we talk about design today, and particularly when we read about it in the popular press, we're often talking about products like these. Amusing? Yes. Desirable? Maybe. Important? Not so very.But this wasn't always the way. And I'd like to suggest that if we take a different view of design, and focus less on the object and more on design thinking as an approach, that we actually might see the result in a bigger impact. Now this gentleman, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designed many great things in his career in the 19th century, including the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol and the Thames tunnel at Rotherhithe. Both great designs and actually very innovative too. His greatest creation runs actually right through here in Oxford. It's called the Great Western Railway.And as a kid I grew up very close to here, and one of my favorite things to do was to cycle along by the side of the railway waiting for the great big express trains to roar past. You can see it represented here in J.M.W. Turner's painting, ""Rain, Steam and Speed"". Now, what Brunel said that he wanted to achieve for his passengers was the experience of floating across the countryside.Now, this was back in the 19th century. And to do that meant creating the flattest gradients that had ever yet been made, which meant building long viaducts across river valleys — this is actually the viaduct across the Thames at Maidenhead — and long tunnels such as the one at Box, in Wiltshire. But he didn't stop there. He didn't stop with just trying to design the best railway journey. He imagined an integrated transportation system in which it would be possible for a passenger to embark on a train in London and disembark from a ship in New York. One journey from London to New York. This is the S.S. Great Western that he built to take care of the second half of that journey.Now, Brunel was working 100 years before the emergence of the design profession, but I think he was using design thinking to solve problems and to create world-changing innovations. Now, design thinking begins with what Roger Martin, the business school professor at the University of Toronto, calls integrative thinking. And that's the ability to exploit opposing ideas and opposing constraints to create new solutions. In the case of design, that means balancing desirability, what humans need, with technical feasibility, and economic viability. With innovations like the Great Western, we can stretch that balance to the absolute limit.So somehow, we went from this to this. Systems thinkers who were reinventing the world, to a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things. As our industrial society matured, so design became a profession and it focused on an ever smaller canvas until it came to stand for aesthetics, image and fashion. Now I'm not trying to throw stones here. I'm a fully paid-up member of that priesthood, and somewhere in here I have my designer glasses. There we go. But I do think that perhaps design is getting big again. And that's happening through the application of design thinking to new kinds of problems — to global warming, to education, healthcare, security, clean water, whatever.And as we see this reemergence of design thinking and we see it beginning to tackle new kinds of problems, there are some basic ideas that I think we can observe that are useful. And I'd like to talk about some of those just for the next few minutes. The first of those is that design is human-centered. It may integrate technology and economics, but it starts with what humans need, or might need. What makes life easier, more enjoyable? What makes technology useful and usable? But that is more than simply good ergonomics, putting the buttons in the right place. It's often about understanding culture and context before we even know where to start to have ideas.So when a team was working on a new vision screening program in India, they wanted to understand what the aspirations and motivations were of these school children to understand how they might play a role in screening their parents. Conversion Sound has developed a high quality, ultra-low-cost digital hearing aid for the developing world. Now, in the West we rely on highly trained technicians to fit these hearing aids. In places like India, those technicians simply don't exist. So it took a team working in India with patients and community health workers to understand how a PDA and an application on a PDA might replace those technicians in a fitting and diagnostic service.Instead of starting with technology, the team started with people and culture. So if human need is the place to start, then design thinking rapidly moves on to learning by making. Instead of thinking about what to build, building in order to think. Now, prototypes speed up the process of innovation, because it is only when we put our ideas out into the world that we really start to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And the faster we do that, the faster our ideas evolve.Now, much has been said and written about the Aravind Eye Institute in Madurai, India. They do an incredible job of serving very poor patients by taking the revenues from those who can afford to pay to cross-subsidize those who cannot. Now, they are very efficient, but they are also very innovative. When I visited them a few years ago, what really impressed me was their willingness to prototype their ideas very early.This is the manufacturing facility for one of their biggest cost breakthroughs. They make their own intraocular lenses. These are the lenses that replace those that are damaged by cataracts. And I think it's partly their prototyping mentality that really allowed them to achieve the breakthrough. Because they brought the cost down from $200 a pair, down to just $4 a pair. Partly they did this by instead of building a fancy new factory, they used the basement of one of their hospitals. And instead of installing the large-scale machines used by western producers, they used low-cost CAD/CAM prototyping technology. They are now the biggest manufacturer of these lenses in the developing world and have recently moved into a custom factory.So if human need is the place to start, and prototyping, a vehicle for progress, then there are also some questions to ask about the destination. Instead of seeing its primary objective as consumption, design thinking is beginning to explore the potential of participation — the shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer to the active engagement of everyone in experiences that are meaningful, productive and profitable.So I'd like to take the idea that Rory Sutherland talked about, this notion that intangible things are worth perhaps more than physical things, and take that a little bit further and say that I think the design of participatory systems, in which many more forms of value beyond simply cash are both created and measured, is going to be the major theme, not only for design, but also for our economy as we go forward.So William Beveridge, when he wrote the first of his famous reports in 1942, created what became Britain's welfare state in which he hoped that every citizen would be an active participant in their own social well-being. By the time he wrote his third report, he confessed that he had failed and instead had created a society of welfare consumers.Hilary Cottam, Charlie Leadbeater, and Hugo Manassei of Participle have taken this idea of participation, and in their manifesto entitled Beveridge 4.0, they are suggesting a framework for reinventing the welfare state. So in one of their projects called Southwark Circle, they worked with residents in Southwark, South London and a small team of designers to develop a new membership organization to help the elderly with household tasks. Designs were refined and developed with 150 older people and their families before the service was launched earlier this year.We can take this idea of participation perhaps to its logical conclusion and say that design may have its greatest impact when it's taken out of the hands of designers and put into the hands of everyone. Nurses and practitioners at U.S. healthcare system Kaiser Permanente study the topic of improving the patient experience, and particularly focused on the way that they exchange knowledge and change shift. Through a program of observational research, brainstorming new solutions and rapid prototyping, they've developed a completely new way to change shift.They went from retreating to the nurse's station to discuss the various states and needs of patients, to developing a system that happened on the ward in front of patients, using a simple software tool. By doing this they brought the time that they were away from patients down from 40 minutes to 12 minutes, on average. They increased patient confidence and nurse happiness. When you multiply that by all the nurses in all the wards in 40 hospitals in the system, it resulted, actually, in a pretty big impact.And this is just one of thousands of opportunities in healthcare alone. So these are just some of the kind of basic ideas around design thinking and some of the new kinds of projects that they're being applied to. But I'd like to go back to Brunel here, and suggest a connection that might explain why this is happening now, and maybe why design thinking is a useful tool. And that connection is change. In times of change we need new alternatives, new ideas.Now, Brunel worked at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when all of life and our economy was being reinvented. Now the industrial systems of Brunel's time have run their course, and indeed they are part of the problem today. But, again, we are in the midst of massive change. And that change is forcing us to question quite fundamental aspects of our society — how we keep ourselves healthy, how we govern ourselves, how we educate ourselves, how we keep ourselves secure. And in these times of change, we need these new choices because our existing solutions are simply becoming obsolete.So why design thinking? Because it gives us a new way of tackling problems. Instead of defaulting to our normal convergent approach where we make the best choice out of available alternatives, it encourages us to take a divergent approach, to explore new alternatives, new solutions, new ideas that have not existed before. But before we go through that process of divergence, there is actually quite an important first step. And that is, what is the question that we're trying to answer? What's the design brief? Now Brunel may have asked a question like this, ""How do I take a train from London to New York?"" But what are the kinds of questions that we might ask today?So these are some that we've been asked to think about recently. And one in particular, is one that we're working on with the Acumen Fund, in a project that's been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. How might we improve access to safe drinking water for the world's poorest people, and at the same time stimulate innovation amongst local water providers?So instead of having a bunch of American designers come up with new ideas that may or may not have been appropriate, we took a sort of more open, collaborative and participative approach. We teamed designers and investment experts up with 11 water organizations across India. And through workshops they developed innovative new products, services, and business models.We hosted a competition and then funded five of those organizations to develop their ideas. So they developed and iterated these ideas. And then IDEO and Acumen spent several weeks working with them to help design new social marketing campaigns, community outreach strategies, business models, new water vessels for storing water and carts for delivering water. Some of those ideas are just getting launched into the market. And the same process is just getting underway with NGOs in East Africa.So for me, this project shows kind of how far we can go from some of those sort of small things that I was working on at the beginning of my career. That by focusing on the needs of humans and by using prototypes to move ideas along quickly, by getting the process out of the hands of designers, and by getting the active participation of the community, we can tackle bigger and more interesting questions. And just like Brunel, by focusing on systems, we can have a bigger impact. So that's one thing that we've been working on.I'm actually really quite interested, and perhaps more interested to know what this community thinks we could work on. What kinds of questions do we think design thinking could be used to tackle? And if you've got any ideas then feel free, you can post them to Twitter. There is a hash tag there that you can use, #CBDQ. And the list looked something like this a little while ago. And of course you can search to find the questions that you're interested in by using the same hash code.So I'd like to believe that design thinking actually can make a difference, that it can help create new ideas and new innovations, beyond the latest High Street products. To do that I think we have to take a more expansive view of design, more like Brunel, less a domain of a professional priesthood. And the first step is to start asking the right questions. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_urges_designers_to_think_big
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"For years I've been feeling frustrated, because as a religious historian, I've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what's been called the Golden Rule. Sometimes it comes in a positive version — ""Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself."" And equally important is the negative version — ""Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you."" Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.And people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, ""all day and every day,"" not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism, but to do it all day and every day, you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself. And it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao. Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence.But you know you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort. Often people don't really want to be compassionate. I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. And that of course defeats the object of the exercise.Now why was I so grateful to TED? Because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century, enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than I could have ever conceived. Because I feel an urgency about this. If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.The task of our time, one of the great tasks of our time, is to build a global society, as I said, where people can live together in peace. And the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem. And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule. This is the source of all morality, this imaginative act of empathy, putting yourself in the place of another.And so we have a choice, it seems to me. We can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith, or we can go back to the rabbis. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, who, when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, said, ""That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary.""And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate. And we need to revive that spirit. And it's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down. We have to make this happen, and we can do it with the modern communications that TED has introduced. Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners.In Singapore, we have a group going to use the Charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in Singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. In Malaysia, there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people, young people, and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. Throughout Europe, the Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, are discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths.But it can't stop there. It can't stop with the launch. Religious teaching, this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines. Religious teaching must always lead to action. And I intend to work on this till my dying day. And I want to continue with our partners to do two things — educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. Education because we've so dropped out of compassion. People often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody. But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it. You also have to do it.I want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another. The same applies to educators. I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling.I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions. And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking, so that because people have this Charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech, disdainful remarks from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry. Because we can change the world, we have the ability.I would never have thought of putting the Charter online. I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. And TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas. Because that is what is so wonderful about TED. In this room, all this expertise, if we joined it all together, we could change the world. And of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable.But I'd just like to quote, finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author whom I don't quote very often, C.S. Lewis. But he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a schoolgirl. It's in his book ""The Four Loves."" He said that he distinguished between erotic love, when two people gaze, spellbound, into each other's eyes. And then he compared that to friendship, when two people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal.We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. And I am convinced. I felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at Vevey, that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences melt away. And we learn amity. And we learn to live together and to get to know one another. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_armstrong_let_s_revive_the_golden_rule
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"I have a very difficult task. I'm a spectroscopist. I have to talk about astronomy without showing you any single image of nebulae or galaxies, etc. because my job is spectroscopy. I never deal with images. But I'll try to convince you that spectroscopy is actually something which can change this world. Spectroscopy can probably answer the question, ""Is there anybody out there?"" Are we alone? SETI. It's not very fun to do spectroscopy.One of my colleagues in Bulgaria, Nevena Markova, spent about 20 years studying these profiles. And she published 42 articles just dedicated to the subject. Can you imagine? Day and night, thinking, observing, the same star for 20 years is incredible. But we are crazy. We do these things. (Laughter)And I'm not that far. I spent about eight months working on these profiles. Because I've noticed a very small symmetry in the profile of one of the planet host stars. And I thought, well maybe there is Lithium-6 in this star, which is an indication that this star has swallowed a planet. Because apparently you can't have this fragile isotope of Lithium-6 in the atmospheres of sun-like stars. But you have it in planets and asteroids. So if you engulf planet or large number of asteroids, you will have this Lithium-6 isotope in the spectrum of the star. So I invested more than eight months just studying the profile of this star.And actually it's amazing, because I got phone calls from many reporters asking, ""Have you actually seen the planet going into a star?"" Because they thought that if you are having a telescope, you are an astronomer so what you are doing is actually looking in a telescope. And you might have seen the planet going into a star. And I was saying, ""No, excuse me. What I see is this one."" (Laughter) It's just incredible. Because nobody understood really. I bet that there were very few people who really understood what I'm talking about. Because this is the indication that the planet went into the star. It's amazing.The power of spectroscopy was actually realized by Pink Floyd already in 1973. (Laughter) Because they actually said that you can get any color you like in a spectrum. And all you need is time and money to make your spectrograph. This is the number one high resolution, most precise spectrograph on this planet, called HARPS, which is actually used to detect extrasolar planets and sound waves in the atmospheres of stars.How we get spectra? I'm sure most of you know from school physics that it's basically splitting a white light into colors. And if you have a liquid hot mass, it will produce something which we call a continuous spectrum. A hot gas is producing emission lines only, no continuum. And if you place a cool gas in front of a hot source, you will see certain patterns which we call absorption lines. Which is used actually to identify chemical elements in a cool matter, which is absorbing exactly at those frequencies.Now, what we can do with the spectra? We can actually study line-of-sight velocities of cosmic objects. And we can also study chemical composition and physical parameters of stars, galaxies, nebulae. A star is the most simple object. In the core, we have thermonuclear reactions going on, creating chemical elements. And we have a cool atmosphere. It's cool for me. Cool in my terms is three or four or five thousand degrees. My colleagues in infra-red astronomy call minus 200 Kelvin is cool for them. But you know, everything is relative. So for me 5,000 degrees is pretty cool. (Laughter)This is the spectrum of the Sun — 24,000 spectral lines, and about 15 percent of these lines is not yet identified. It is amazing. So we are in the 21st century, and we still cannot properly understand the spectrum of the sun. Sometimes we have to deal with just one tiny, weak spectral line to measure the composition of that chemical element in the atmosphere. For instance, you see the spectral line of the gold is the only spectral line in the spectrum of the Sun. And we use this weak feature to measure the composition of gold in the atmosphere of the Sun.And now this is a work in progress. We have been dealing with a similarly very weak feature, which belongs to osmium. It's a heavy element produced in thermonuclear explosions of supernovae. It's the only place where you can produce, actually, osmium. Just comparing the composition of osmium in one of the planet host stars, we want to understand why there is so much of this element. Perhaps we even think that maybe supernova explosions trigger formations of planets and stars. It can be an indication.The other day, my colleague from Berkeley, Gibor Basri, emailed me a very interesting spectrum, asking me, ""Can you have a look at this?"" And I couldn't sleep, next two weeks, when I saw the huge amount of oxygen and other elements in the spectrum of the stars. I knew that there is nothing like that observed in the galaxy. It was incredible. The only conclusion we could make from this is clear evidence that there was a supernova explosion in this system, which polluted the atmosphere of this star. And later a black hole was formed in a binary system, which is still there with a mass of about five solar masses. This was considered as first evidence that actually black holes come from supernovae explosions.My colleagues, comparing composition of chemical elements in different galactic stars, actually discovered alien stars in our galaxy. It's amazing that you can go so far simply studying the chemical composition of stars. They actually said that one of the stars you see in the spectra is an alien. It comes from a different galaxy. There is interaction of galaxies. We know this. And sometimes they just capture stars.You've heard about solar flares. We were very surprised to discover a super flare, a flare which is thousands of millions of times more powerful than those we see in the Sun. In one of the binary stars in our galaxy called FH Leo, we discovered the super flare. And later we went to study the spectral stars to see is there anything strange with these objects. And we found that everything is normal. These stars are normal like the Sun. Age, everything was normal. So this is a mystery. It's one of the mysteries we still have, super flares. And there are six or seven similar cases reported in the literature.Now to go ahead with this, we really need to understand chemical evolution of the universe. It's very complicated. I don't really want you to try to understand what is here. (Laughter) But it's to show you how complicated is the whole story of the production of chemical elements. You have two channels — the massive stars and low-mass stars — producing and recycling matter and chemical elements in the universe. And doing this for 14 billion years, we end up with this picture, which is a very important graph, showing relative abundances of chemical elements in sun-like stars and in the interstellar medium.So which means that it's really impossible to find an object where you find about 10 times more sulfur than silicon, five times more calcium than oxygen. It's just impossible. And if you find one, I will say that this is something related to SETI, because naturally you can't do it. Doppler Effect is something very important from fundamental physics. And this is related to the change of the frequency of a moving source. The Doppler Effect is used to discover extrasolar planets.The precision which we need to discover a Jupiter-like planet around a sun-like star is something like 28.4 meters per second. And we need nine centimeters per second to detect an Earth-like planet. This can be done with the future spectrographs. I, myself, I'm actually involved in the team which is developing a CODEX, high resolution, future generation spectrograph for the 42 meter E-ELT telescope. And this is going to be an instrument to detect Earth-like planets around sun-like stars. It is an amazing tool called astroseismology where we can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of stars.This is the sound of an Alpha Cen. We can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of sun-like stars. Those waves have frequencies in infrasound domain, the sound actually nobody knows, domain. Coming back to the most important question, ""Is there anybody out there?"" This is closely related to tectonic and volcanic activity of planets. Connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward. No life without tectonic activity, without volcanic activity. And we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium.How to measure, if we have planets where the amount of those elements is small, so those planets are tectonically dead, there cannot be life. If there is too much uranium or potassium or thorium, probably, again, there would be no life. Because can you imagine everything boiling? It's too much energy on a planet. Now, we have been measuring abundance of thorium in one of the stars with extrasolar planets. It's exactly the same game. A very tiny feature.We are actually trying to measure this profile and to detect thorium. It's very tough. It's very tough. And you have to, first you have to convince yourself. Then you have to convince your colleagues. And then you have to convince the whole world that you have actually detected something like this in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet host star somewhere in 100 parsec away from here. It's really difficult. But if you want to know about a life on extrasolar planets, you have to do this job. Because you have to know how much of radioactive element you have in those systems.The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals. If you receive something interesting, well that's what SETI does actually, what SETI has been doing for many years. I think the most promising way is to go for biomarkers. You can see the spectrum of the Earth, this Earthshine spectrum, and that is a very clear signal. The slope which is coming, which we call a Red Edge, is a detection of vegetated area. It's amazing that we can detect vegetation from a spectrum. Now imagine doing this test for other planets.Now very recently, very recently, I'm talking about last six, seven, eight months, water, methane, carbon dioxide have been detected in the spectrum of a planet outside the solar system. It's amazing. So this is the power of spectroscopy. You can actually go and detect and study a chemical composition of planets far, far, far from solar system. We have to detect oxygen or ozone to make sure that we have all necessary conditions to have life.Cosmic miracles are something which can be related to SETI. Now imagine an object, amazing object, or something which we cannot explain when we just stand up and say, ""Look, we give up. Physics doesn't work."" So it's something which you can always refer to SETI and say, ""Well, somebody must be doing this, somehow.""And with the known physics etc, it's something actually which has been pointed out by Frank Drake, many years ago, and Shklovsky. If you see, in the spectrum of a planet host star, if you see strange chemical elements, it can be a signal from a civilization which is there and they want to signal about it. They want to actually signal their presence through these spectral lines, in the spectrum of a star, in different ways.There can be different ways doing this. One is, for instance, technetium is a radioactive element with a decay time of 4.2 million years. If you suddenly observe technetium in a sun-like star, you can be sure that somebody has put this element in the atmosphere, because in a natural way it is impossible to do this. Now we are reviewing the spectra of about 300 stars with extrasolar planets. And we are doing this job since 2000 and it's a very heavy project. We have been working very hard. And we have some interesting cases, candidates, so on, things which we can't really explain. And I hope in the near future we can confirm this.So the main question: ""Are we alone?"" I think it will not come from UFOs. It will not come from radio signals. I think it will come from a spectrum like this. It is the spectrum of a planet like Earth, showing a presence of nitrogen dioxide, as a clear signal of life, and oxygen and ozone. If, one day, and I think it will be within 15 years from now, or 20 years. If we discover a spectrum like this we can be sure that there is life on that planet. In about five years we will discover planets like Earth, around sun-like stars, the same distance as the Earth from the Sun. It will take about five years. And then we will need another 10, 15 years with space projects to get the spectra of Earth-like planets like the one I showed you. And if we see the nitrogen dioxide and oxygen, I think we have the perfect E.T. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/garik_israelian_what_s_inside_a_star
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"I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years, I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know, and for even more that you've never heard of. As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided to close it down for one year.Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That's clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. In a career I'm definitely more engaged. But at the same time, there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it.I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was. It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter)Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And then just leave it all to them. And I don't have to do anything. So I looked for furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. It's not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made peace with those dogs. (Laughter)Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It's called Be Here Now. It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. So I will not really go too far into it.Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. And I'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals.This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli. His restaurant is open seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations.If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That's about five percent of everybody. So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I've found that finding out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. (Laughter)In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. So I became my own intern. (Laughter)And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing; 9 to 10: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun. Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else.We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto, where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself was a logo.So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa da Musica Logo Generator. That's connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy, because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is exactly the same.So it will always fit together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers, who all performed there, get their own Casa da Musica logo. It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make typography out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program, as well as educational services.Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both salespeople. But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title ""Things I've Learned in My Life So Far."" I'll just show two now.This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. It says, ""Self-confidence produces fine results."" This is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some pictures visitors sent to me. (Laughter)And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250,000 coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, ""Obsessions make my life worse and my work better.""And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, ""Should I really take as much money as I can? Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?"" While we built all this up during that week, with the 100 volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police.And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. That's the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter)We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It's a movie about happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They weren't quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. So of course whatever you don't really do yourself doesn't really get done properly.That film we'll be working on for the next two years. So it's going to be a while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile. Then you can of course always go and see this guy.Video: (Laughter) And I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive.Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off
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"How do you feed a city? It's one of the great questions of our time. Yet it's one that's rarely asked. We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time, there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere.But when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it's remarkable that cities get fed at all.We live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world, forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat, we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me — it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil — in order to feed us. These are extraordinary landscapes, but few of us ever get to see them.And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either. As more of us move into cities, more of us are eating meat, so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals. And given that it takes three times as much grain — actually ten times as much grain — to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first, that's not a very efficient way of feeding us.And it's an escalating problem too. By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed. So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand. And that's going to pose an enormous problem. Six billion hungry carnivores to feed, by 2050. That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are, it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve.Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land. Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion. We're very hungry for fossil fuels too. It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West. And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don't actually value it. Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away. And to end all of this, at the end of this long process, we're not even managing to feed the planet properly. A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. None of it makes very much sense.And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations, it's a grim picture. As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet. And if we look to the future, it's an unsustainable diet.So how did we get here? And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? Well, to answer the slightly easier question first, about 10,000 years ago, I would say, is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent. Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped. And it was also fertile. And it was here, about 10,000 years ago, that two extraordinary inventions, agriculture and urbanism, happened roughly in the same place and at the same time.This is no accident, because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other. Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements. And if we look at what those settlements were like, we see they were compact. They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur, that were, in fact, effectively, spiritualized, central food distribution centers.Because it was the temples that organized the harvest, gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods, and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people. So, if you like, the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them. And in fact, that's true of every ancient city. But of course not all of them were that small. Famously, Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D. So how did a city like this feed itself? The answer is what I call ""ancient food miles.""Basically, Rome had access to the sea, which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away. This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world, because it was very difficult to transport food over roads, which were rough. And the food obviously went off very quickly. So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves. And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long, drawn out militarized shopping spree, really. (Laughter) In fact — I love the fact, I just have to mention this: Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that's extraordinary.So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite. But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world. If we look at a map of London in the 17th century, we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames, along the bottom of this map. So the grain markets were to the south of the city. And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside, which was the main market, were also grain markets.And if you look at the name of one of those streets, Bread Street, you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago. And the same of course was true for fish. Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing. And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market, operating on-site here until the mid-1980s. Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it. Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port.This is another thing about food in cities: Once its roots into the city are established, they very rarely move. Meat is a very different story because, of course, animals could walk into the city. So much of London's meat was coming from the northwest, from Scotland and Wales. So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest, which is why Smithfield, London's very famous meat market, was located up there. Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast. I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway, and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes. And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside, that's where they were sold, which is why it's called Poultry.And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age, you can trace food coming in to it. You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food, both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues. Friday Street, in a previous life, is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday. But also you have to imagine it full of food. Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold.And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from. In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch, the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier. So this was obviously an organic city, part of an organic cycle. And then 10 years later everything changed.This is an image of the Great Western in 1840. And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep. So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market. They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind, somewhere in the countryside. And they're coming into the city by rail. And this changes everything. To start off with, it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities, really any size and shape, in any place. Cities used to be constrained by geography; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means. All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography.And as you can see from these maps of London, in the 90 years after the trains came, it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot, and so on, to a large splurge, that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot, either animals or people. And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars, and really this marks the end of this process. It's the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all.And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell, devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people, because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape. In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars, drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts, came back with a week's worth of shopping, and wondered what on earth to do with it. And this really is the moment when our relationship, both with food and cities, changes completely.Here we have food — that used to be the center, the social core of the city — at the periphery. It used to be a social event, buying and selling food. Now it's anonymous. We used to cook; now we just add water, or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something. We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat. We just read the back of a label on a packet. And we don't value food. We don't trust it. So instead of trusting it, we fear it. And instead of valuing it, we throw it away.One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they've made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder. By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we've seen, are unsustainable.So what are we going to do about that? It's not a new question. 500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself. This is the frontispiece of his book ""Utopia."" And it was a series of semi-independent city-states, if that sounds remotely familiar, a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad, and grew vegetables in their back gardens, and ate communal meals together, and so on. And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia, even though More never framed it that way.And here is another very famous ""Utopian"" vision, that of Ebenezer Howard, ""The Garden City."" Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states, little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around, joined to one another by railway. And again, food could be said to be the ordering principle of his vision. It even got built, but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had. And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas, that they are Utopian.Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately. It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek. It can either mean a good place, or no place. Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it. And I think, as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling, that makes it not much use. So I've come up with an alternative, which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek, ""sitos"" for food, and ""topos"" for place.I believe we already live in Sitopia. We live in a world shaped by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool — a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently. So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like? Well I think it looks a bit like this. I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog. But anyway, this is — (Laughter) it's food at the center of life, at the center of family life, being celebrated, being enjoyed, people taking time for it. This is where food should be in our society.But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this. By the way, these can be men as well. It's people who think about food, who think ahead, who plan, who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them. We need these people. We're part of a network. Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this. Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable. But networks, markets where food is being grown locally. It's common. It's fresh. It's part of the social life of the city. Because without that, you can't have this kind of place, food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape, and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole. Cows with a view. Steaming piles of humus. This is basically bringing the whole thing together.And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto. It's a greenhouse, where kids get told all about food and growing their own food. Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know. But anyway, these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important.So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing. It's basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere. The trick is to join them up, to use food as a way of seeing. And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this. We're going to see them more like this, as part of the productive, organic framework of which they are inevitably a part, symbiotically connected. But of course, that's not a great image either, because we need not to be producing food like this anymore. We need to be thinking more about permaculture, which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing. It's a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives.The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago. It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's ""Allegory of Good Government."" It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside. And I think the message of this is very clear. If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city. And I want us to ask now, what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today? What would an allegory of good government look like today? Because I think it's an urgent question. It's one we have to ask, and we have to start answering. We know we are what we eat. We need to realize that the world is also what we eat. But if we take that idea, we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_steel_how_food_shapes_our_cities
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"What we're really here to talk about is the ""how."" Okay, so how exactly do we create this world-shattering, if you will, innovation? Now, I want to tell you a quick story. We'll go back a little more than a year. In fact, the date — I'm curious to know if any of you know what happened on this momentous date? It was February 3rd, 2008. Anyone remember what happened, February 3rd, 2008? Super Bowl. I heard it over here. It was the date of the Super Bowl.And the reason that this date was so momentous is that what my colleagues, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, and I noticed as we began to debrief various Super Bowl parties, is that it seemed to us that across the United States, if you will, tribal councils had convened. And they had discussed things of great national importance. Like, ""Do we like the Budweiser commercial?"" and, ""Do we like the nachos?"" and, ""Who is going to win?"" But they also talked about which candidate they were going to support.And if you go back in time to February 3rd, it looked like Hilary Clinton was going to get the Democratic nomination. And there were even some polls that were saying she was going to go all the way. But when we talked to people, it appeared that a funnel effect had happened in these tribes all across the United States. Now what is a tribe? A tribe is a group of about 20 — so kind of more than a team — 20 to about 150 people. And it's within these tribes that all of our work gets done. But not just work. It's within these tribes that societies get built, that important things happen.And so as we surveyed the, if you will, representatives from various tribal councils that met, also known as Super Bowl parties, we sent the following email off to 40 newspaper editors the following day. February 4th, we posted it on our website. This was before Super Tuesday. We said, ""The tribes that we're in are saying it's going to be Obama."" Now, the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes, studying these naturally occurring groups.All of you are members of tribes. In walking around at the break, many of you had met members of your tribe. And you were talking to them. And many of you were doing what great, if you will, tribal leaders do, which is to find someone who is a member of a tribe, and to find someone else who is another member of a different tribe, and make introductions. That is in fact what great tribal leaders do.So here is the bottom line. If you focus in on a group like this — this happens to be a USC game — and you zoom in with one of those super satellite cameras and do magnification factors so you could see individual people, you would in fact see not a single crowd, just like there is not a single crowd here, but you would see these tribes that are then coming together. And from a distance it appears that it's a single group. And so people form tribes. They always have. They always will. Just as fish swim and birds fly, people form tribes. It's just what we do. But here's the rub. Not all tribes are the same, and what makes the difference is the culture.Now here is the net out of this. You're all a member of tribes. If you can find a way to take the tribes that you're in and nudge them forward, along these tribal stages to what we call Stage Five, which is the top of the mountain. But we're going to start with what we call Stage One. Now, this is the lowest of the stages. You don't want this. Okay? This is a bit of a difficult image to put up on the screen. But it's one that I think we need to learn from.Stage One produces people who do horrible things. This is the kid who shot up Virginia Tech. Stage One is a group where people systematically sever relationships from functional tribes, and then pool together with people who think like they do. Stage One is literally the culture of gangs and it is the culture of prisons. Now, again, we don't often deal with Stage One. And I want to make the point that as members of society, we need to. It's not enough to simply write people off.But let's move on to Stage Two. Now, Stage One, you'll notice, says, in effect, ""Life Sucks."" So, this other book that Steve mentioned, that just came out, called ""The Three Laws of Performance,"" my colleague, Steve Zaffron and I, argue that as people see the world, so they behave. Well, if people see the world in such a way that life sucks, then their behavior will follow automatically from that. It will be despairing hostility. They'll do whatever it takes to survive, even if that means undermining other people.Now, my birthday is coming up shortly, and my driver's license expires. And the reason that that's relevant is that very soon I will be walking into what we call a Stage Two tribe, which looks like this. (Laughter) Now, am I saying that in every Department of Motor Vehicles across the land, you find a Stage Two culture? No. But in the one near me, where I have to go in just a few days, what I will say when I'm standing in line is, ""How can people be so dumb, and yet live?"" (Laughter)Now, am I saying that there are dumb people working here? Actually, no, I'm not. But I'm saying the culture makes people dumb. So in a Stage Two culture — and we find these in all sorts of different places — you find them, in fact, in the best organizations in the world. You find them in all places in society. I've come across them at the organizations that everybody raves about as being best in class. But here is the point. If you believe and you say to people in your tribe, in effect, ""My life sucks. I mean, if I got to go to TEDx USC my life wouldn't suck. But I don't. So it does."" If that's how you talked, imagine what kind of work would get done. What kind of innovation would get done? The amount of world-changing behavior that would happen? In fact it would be basically nil.Now when we go on to Stage Three: this is the one that hits closest to home for many of us. Because it is in Stage Three that many of us move. And we park. And we stay. Stage Three says, ""I'm great. And you're not."" (Laughter) I'm great and you're not. Now imagine having a whole room of people saying, in effect, ""I'm great and you're not."" Or, ""I'm going to find some way to compete with you and come out on top as a result of that."" A whole group of people communicating that way, talking that way.I know this sounds like a joke. Three doctors walk into a bar. But, in this case, three doctors walk into an elevator. I happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book. And one doctor said to the others, ""Did you see my article in the New England Journal of Medicine?"" And the other said, ""No. That's great. Congratulations!""The next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said, ""Well while you were, you know, doing your research,"" — notice the condescending tone — ""While you were off doing your research, I was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution.""And the third one got the same wry smile and said, ""Well, while you were off doing your research, and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery, that eventually we'll train monkeys to do, or cells or robots, or maybe not even need to do it at all, I was off running the future of the residency program, which is really the future of medicine.""And they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back. And the elevator door opened, and they all walked out. That is a meeting of a Stage Three tribe. Now, we find these in places where really smart, successful people show up. Like, oh, I don't know, TEDx USC. (Laughter)Here is the greatest challenge we face in innovation. It is moving from Stage Three to Stage Four. Let's take a look at a quick video snippet. This is from a company called Zappos, located outside Las Vegas. And my question on the other side is just going to be, ""What do you think they value?"" It was not Christmas time. There was a Christmas tree. This is their lobby. Employees volunteer time in the advice booth. Notice it looks like something out of a Peanuts cartoon.Okay, we're going through the hallway here at Zappos. This is a call center. Notice how it's decorated. Notice people are applauding for us. They don't know who we are and they don't care. And if they did they probably wouldn't applaud. But you'll notice the level of excitement. Notice, again, how they decorate their office. Now, what's important to people at Zappos, these may not be the things that are important to you. But they value things like fun. And they value creativity. One of their stated values is, ""Be a little bit weird."" And you'll notice they are a little bit weird.So when individuals come together and find something that unites them that's greater than their individual competence, then something very important happens. The group gels. And it changes from a group of highly motivated but fairly individually-centric people into something larger, into a tribe that becomes aware of its own existence. Stage Four tribes can do remarkable things. But you'll notice we're not at the top of the mountain yet. There is, in fact, another stage.Now, some of you may not recognize the scene that's up here. And if you take a look at the headline of Stage Five, which is ""Life is Great,"" this may seem a little incongruous. This is a scene or snippet from the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa for which Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize. Now think about that. South Africa, terrible atrocities had happened in the society. And people came together focused only on those two values: truth and reconciliation. There was no road map. No one had ever done anything like this before.And in this atmosphere, where the only guidance was people's values and their noble cause, what this group accomplished was historic. And people, at the time, feared that South Africa would end up going the way that Rwanda has gone, descending into one skirmish after another in a civil war that seems to have no end. In fact, South Africa has not gone down that road. Largely because people like Desmond Tutu set up a Stage Five process to involve the thousands and perhaps millions of tribes in the country, to bring everyone together. So, people hear this and they conclude the following, as did we in doing the study.Okay, got it. I don't want to talk Stage One. That's like, you know, ""Life sucks."" Who wants to talk that way? I don't want to talk like they do at the particular DMV that's close to where Dave lives. I really don't want to just say ""I'm great,"" because that kind of sounds narcissistic, and then I won't have any friends. Saying, ""We're great"" — that sounds pretty good. But I should really talk Stage Five, right? ""Life is great.""Well, in fact, there are three somewhat counter-intuitive findings that come out of all this. The first one, if you look at the Declaration of Independence and actually read it, the phrase that sticks in many of our minds is things about inalienable rights. I mean, that's Stage Five, right? Life is great, oriented only by our values, no other guidance. In fact, most of the document is written at Stage Two. ""My life sucks because I live under a tyrant, also known as King George. We're great! Who is not great? England!"" Sorry. (Laughter)Well, what about other great leaders? What about Gandhi? What about Martin Luther King? I mean, surely these were just people who preached, ""Life is great,"" right? Just one little bit of happiness and joy after another. In fact, Martin Luther King's most famous line was at Stage Three. He didn't say ""We have a dream."" He said, ""I have a dream."" Why did he do that? Because most people are not at Stage Five.Two percent are at Stage One. About 25 percent are at Stage Two, saying, in effect, ""My life sucks."" 48 percent of working tribes say, these are employed tribes, say, ""I'm great and you're not."" And we have to duke it out every day, so we resort to politics. Only about 22 percent of tribes are at Stage Four, oriented by our values, saying ""We're great. And our values are beginning to unite us."" Only two percent, only two percent of tribes get to Stage Five. And those are the ones that change the world.So the first little finding from this is that leaders need to be able to talk all the levels so that you can touch every person in society. But you don't leave them where you found them. Okay? Tribes can only hear one level above and below where they are. So we have to have the ability to talk all the levels, to go to where they are. And then leaders nudge people within their tribes to the next level. I'd like to show you some examples of this.One of the people we interviewed was Frank Jordan, former Mayor of San Francisco. Before that he was Chief of Police in San Francisco. And he grew up essentially in Stage One. And you know what changed his life? It was walking into one of these, a Boys and Girls Club. Now here is what happened to this person who eventually became Mayor of San Francisco. He went from being alive and passionate at Stage One — remember, ""Life sucks, despairing hostility, I will do whatever it takes to survive"" — to walking into a Boys and Girls Club, folding his arms, sitting down in a chair, and saying, ""Wow. My life really sucks. I don't know anybody. I mean, if I was into boxing, like they were, then my life wouldn't suck. But I don't. So it does. So I'm going to sit here in my chair and not do anything.""In fact, that's progress. We move people from Stage One to Stage Two by getting them in a new tribe and then, over time, getting them connected. So, what about moving from Stage Three to Stage Four? I want to argue that we're doing that right here. TED represents a set of values, and as we unite around these values, something really interesting begins to emerge.If you want this experience to live on as something historic, then at the reception tonight I'd like to encourage you to do something beyond what people normally do and call networking. Which is not just to meet new people and extend your reach, extend your influence, but instead, find someone you don't know, and find someone else you don't know, and introduce them. That's called a triadic relationship.See, people who build world-changing tribes do that. They extend the reach of their tribes by connecting them, not just to myself, so that my following is greater, but I connect people who don't know each other to something greater than themselves. And ultimately that adds to their values.But we're not done yet. Because then how do we go from Stage Four, which is great, to Stage Five? The story that I like to end with is this. It comes out of a place called the Gallup Organization. You know they do polls, right? So it's Stage Four. We're great. Who is not great? Pretty much everybody else who does polls. If Gallup releases a poll on the same day that NBC releases a poll, people will pay attention to the Gallup poll. Okay, we understand that. So, they were bored. They wanted to change the world. So here is the question someone asked.""How could we, instead of just polling what Asia thinks or what the United States thinks, or who thinks what about Obama versus McCain or something like that, what does the entire world think?"" And they found a way to do the first-ever world poll. They had people involved who were Nobel laureates in economics, who reported being bored. And suddenly they pulled out sheets of paper and were trying to figure out, ""How do we survey the population of Sub-Saharan Africa? How do we survey populations that don't have access to technology, and speak languages we don't speak, and we don't know anyone who speaks those languages. Because in order to achieve on this great mission, we have to be able to do it. Incidentally, they did pull it off. And they released the first-ever world poll.So I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. First of all: we all form tribes, all of us. You're in tribes here. Hopefully you're extending the reach of the tribes that you have. But the question on the table is this: What kind of an impact are the tribes that you are in making? You're hearing one presentation after another, often representing a group of people, a tribe, about how they have changed the world. If you do what we've talked about, you listen for how people actually communicate in the tribes that you're in. And you don't leave them where they are. You nudge them forward. You remember to talk all five culture stages. Because we've got people in all five, around us. And the question that I'd like to leave you with is this: Will your tribes change the world? Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership
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"I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call ""the danger of the single story."" I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples,(Laughter)and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.(Laughter)Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.(Laughter)And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, ""Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing."" So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ""tribal music,"" and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.(Laughter)She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in ""India, Africa and other countries.""(Laughter)So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as ""beasts who have no houses,"" he writes, ""They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.""Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are ""half devil, half child.""And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not ""authentically African."" Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is ""nkali."" It's a noun that loosely translates to ""to be greater than another."" Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, ""secondly."" Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called ""American Psycho"" —(Laughter)— and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.(Laughter)But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.(Laughter)But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls ""a balance of stories.""What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, ""I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ...""(Laughter)And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. ""They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.""I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
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"I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one.Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split.Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one.(Laughter)Here is the green one. And here is the gray one.(Laughter)So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right?(Laughter)So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.But first, we have to ask another question, which is, ""What is color for?"" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right?(Laughter)Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it.So, color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye.This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources. Let me show you what I mean. Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay? And these are two projections from the world. They're identical in every single way. Identical in shape, size, spectral content. They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. And yet they come from completely different sources. The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium. Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. And yet it's only the retinal information that we get.So how on Earth do we even see? So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally. There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters.So, how do we see? Well, we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can.Audience: ""Can you read this?"" ""You are not reading this."" ""What are you reading?""Beau Lotto: ""What are you reading?"" Half the letters are missing, right? There's no a priori reason why an ""H"" has to go between that ""W"" and ""A."" But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first ""T."" Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again.So, let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. So if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk.(Laughter)But I really want you to learn. And I'll tell you — don't look anywhere else — I'll tell you what's happening in your head. Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now?(Laughter)Can I have the lights up again?I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right?(Applause)Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. Okay? So, what does this mean for context? It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past.So I'll show you what I mean. Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. And see what happens to your perception.Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective — just the laws of physics. So you see it that way.Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions.This is one I made a few years ago. And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side. That is your perceptual reality. The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same.Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right. I'm not going to change those tiles at all, but I'm going to reveal the rest of the scene. And see what happens to your perception. The four blue tiles on the left are gray. The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray. They are the same. Okay? Don't believe me? Let's watch it again.What's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion. So, here we have — let's turn this around — a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink, it will switch. So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? How do you know? Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities.Are we the only ones that see illusions? The answer to this question is no. Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do. So in my lab we work on bumblebees, because we can completely control their experience, and see how it alters the architecture of their brain. We do this in what we call the Bee Matrix.Here you have the hive. You can see the queen bee, the large bee in the middle. Those are her daughters, the eggs. They go back and forth between this hive and the arena, via this tube. You'll see one of the bees come out here. You see how she has a little number on her? There's another one coming out, she also has a number on her. Now, they're not born that way, right? We pull them out, put them in the fridge, and they fall asleep. Then you can superglue little numbers on them.(Laughter)And now, in this experiment they get a reward if they go to the blue flowers. They land on the flower, stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and drink sugar water. She's drinking a glass of water that's about that big to you and I, will do that about three times, then fly. And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue, but to go where the other bees go. So they copy each other. They can count to five. They can recognize faces. And here she comes down the ladder. And she'll come into the hive, find an empty honey pot, and throw up, and that's honey.(Laughter)Now remember, she's supposed to be going to the blue flowers, but what are these bees doing in the upper right corner? It looks like they're going to green flowers. Now, are they getting it wrong? And the answer to the question is no. Those are actually blue flowers. But those are blue flowers under green light. So they're using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle, which is exactly what we do.So, illusions are often used, especially in art, in the words of a more contemporary artist, ""to demonstrate the fragility of our senses."" Okay, this is complete rubbish. The senses aren't fragile. And if they were, we wouldn't be here. Instead, color tells us something completely different, that the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. And how we see is by continually redefining normality.So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears.Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed.(Continuous sound)(Sound changes momentarily)(Sound changes momentarily)(Sound changes momentarily)(Sound changes momentarily)(Sound changes momentarily)Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like.(Electronic representation of orchestral music)So, a six-year-old child. Okay?Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical. So, what I'd like to finish with is this over here. Because what I've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty. Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding.So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here — Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light.Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. Let's pull the covers off. Now remember — you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the same? No. The question is, ""Is that an illusion?"" And I'll leave you with that.So, thank you very much.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_optical_illusions_show_how_we_see
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"So, I am indeed going to talk about the spaces men create for themselves, but first I want to tell you why I'm here. I'm here for two reasons. These two guys are my two sons Ford and Wren. When Ford was about three years old, we shared a very small room together, in a very small space. My office was on one half of the bedroom, and his bedroom was on the other half. And you can imagine, if you're a writer, that things would get really crowded around deadlines.So when Wren was on the way, I realized I needed to find a space of my own. There was no more space in the house. So I went out to the backyard, and without any previous building experience, and about 3,000 dollars and some recycled materials, I built this space. It had everything I needed. It was quiet. There was enough space. And I had control, which was very important.As I was building this space, I thought to myself, ""Surely I'm not the only guy to have to have carved out a space for his own."" So I did some research. And I found that there was an historic precedence. Hemingway had his writing space. Elvis had two or three manspaces, which is pretty unique because he lived with both his wife and his mother in Graceland. In the popular culture, Superman had the Fortress of Solitude, and there was, of course, the Batcave.So I realized then that I wanted to go out on a journey and see what guys were creating for themselves now. Here is one of the first spaces I found. It is in Austin, Texas, which is where I'm from. On the outside it looks like a very typical garage, a nice garage. But on the inside, it's anything but. And this, to me, is a pretty classic manspace. It has neon concert posters, a bar and, of course, the leg lamp, which is very important.I soon realized that manspaces didn't have to be only inside. This guy built a bowling alley in his backyard, out of landscaping timbers, astroturf. And he found the scoreboard in the trash.Here's another outdoor space, a little bit more sophisticated. This a 1923 wooden tugboat, made completely out of Douglas fir. The guy did it all himself. And there is about 1,000 square feet of hanging-out space inside.So, pretty early on in my investigations I realized what I was finding was not what I expected to find, which was, quite frankly, a lot of beer can pyramids and overstuffed couches and flat-screen TVs. There were definitely hang-out spots. But some were for working, some were for playing, some were for guys to collect their things. Most of all, I was just surprised with what I was finding.Take this place for example. On the outside it looks like a typical northeastern garage. This is in Long Island, New York. The only thing that might tip you off is the round window. On the inside it's a recreation of a 16th century Japanese tea house. The man imported all the materials from Japan, and he hired a Japanese carpenter to build it in the traditional style. It has no nails or screws. All the joints are hand-carved and hand-scribed.Here is another pretty typical scene. This is a suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. But you open one of the garage doors and there is a professional-size boxing ring inside. (Laughter) And so there is a good reason for this. It was built by this man who is Wayne McCullough. He won the silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Olympics, and he trains in this space. He trains other people. And right off the garage he has his own trophy room where he can sort of bask in his accomplishments, which is another sort of important part about a manspace.So, while this space represents someone's profession, this one certainly represents a passion. It's made to look like the inside of an English sailing ship. It's a collection of nautical antiques from the 1700s and 1800s. Museum quality.So, as I came to the end of my journey, I found over 50 spaces. And they were unexpected and they were surprising. But they were also — I was really impressed by how personalized they were, and how much work went into them. And I realized that's because the guys that I met were all very passionate about what they did. And they really loved their professions. And they were very passionate about their collections and their hobbies. And so they created these spaces to reflect what they love to do, and who they were.So if you don't have a space of your own, I highly recommend finding one, and getting into it. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_martin_builds_a_room_of_his_own
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"The substance of things unseen. Cities, past and future. In Oxford, perhaps we can use Lewis Carroll and look in the looking glass that is New York City to try and see our true selves, or perhaps pass through to another world. Or, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ""As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailors' eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world.""My colleagues and I have been working for 10 years to rediscover this lost world in a project we call The Mannahatta Project. We're trying to discover what Henry Hudson would have seen on the afternoon of September 12th, 1609, when he sailed into New York harbor. And I'd like to tell you the story in three acts, and if I have time still, an epilogue.So, Act I: A Map Found. So, I didn't grow up in New York. I grew up out west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, like you see here, in the Red Rock Canyon. And from these early experiences as a child I learned to love landscapes. And so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies, I studied this emerging field of landscape ecology. Landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals. This experience and this training lead me to get a wonderful job with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world. And over the last decade, I traveled to over 40 countries to see jaguars and bears and elephants and tigers and rhinos.But every time I would return from my trips I'd return back to New York City. And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists, to the top of the Empire State Building, and I'd look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems, and I'd wonder, ""How does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals? How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?"" I'd go to Times Square and I'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall, and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them. I'd go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown Manhattan.I started reading about the history and the geography in New York City. I read that New York City was the first mega-city, a city of 10 million people or more, in 1950. I started seeing paintings like this. For those of you who are from New York, this is 125th street under the West Side Highway. (Laughter) It was once a beach. And this painting has John James Audubon, the painter, sitting on the rock. And it's looking up on the wooded heights of Washington Heights to Jeffrey's Hook, where the George Washington Bridge goes across today.Or this painting, from the 1740s, from Greenwich Village. Those are two students at King's College — later Columbia University — sitting on a hill, overlooking a valley. And so I'd go down to Greenwich Village and I'd look for this hill, and I couldn't find it. And I couldn't find that palm tree. What's that palm tree doing there? (Laughter)So, it was in the course of these investigations that I ran into a map. And it's this map you see here. It's held in a geographic information system which allows me to zoom in. This map isn't from Hudson's time, but from the American Revolution, 170 years later, made by British military cartographers during the occupation of New York City. And it's a remarkable map. It's in the National Archives here in Kew. And it's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide.And if I zoom in to lower Manhattan you can see the extent of New York City as it was, right at the end of the American Revolution. Here's Bowling Green. And here's Broadway. And this is City Hall Park. So the city basically extended to City Hall Park. And just beyond it you can see features that have vanished, things that have disappeared. This is the Collect Pond, which was the fresh water source for New York City for its first 200 years, and for the Native Americans for thousands of years before that. You can see the Lispenard Meadows draining down through here, through what is TriBeCa now, and the beaches that come up from the Battery, all the way to 42nd St.This map was made for military reasons. They're mapping the roads, the buildings, these fortifications that they built. But they're also mapping things of ecological interest, also military interest: the hills, the marshes, the streams. This is Richmond Hill, and Minetta Water, which used to run its way through Greenwich Village. Or the swamp at Gramercy Park, right here. Or Murray Hill. And this is the Murrays' house on Murray Hill, 200 years ago. Here is Times Square, the two streams that came together to make a wetland in Times Square, as it was at the end of the American Revolution.So I saw this remarkable map in a book. And I thought to myself, ""You know, if I could georeference this map, if I could place this map in the grid of the city today, I could find these lost features of the city, in the block-by-block geography that people know, the geography of where people go to work, and where they go to live, and where they like to eat."" So, after some work we were able to georeference it, which allows us to put the modern streets on the city, and the buildings, and the open spaces, so that we can zoom in to where the Collect Pond is. We can digitize the Collect Pond and the streams, and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today. So this is fun for finding where things are relative to the old topography.But I had another idea about this map. If we take away the streets, and if we take away the buildings, and if we take away the open spaces, then we could take this map. If we pull off the 18th century features we could drive it back in time. We could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals: to the hills, to the streams, to the basic hydrology and shoreline, to the beaches, the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape.Then, if we added maps like the geology, the bedrock geology, and the surface geology, what the glaciers leave, if we make the soil map, with the 17 soil classes, that are defined by the National Conservation Service, if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were, then we can calculate the slopes. We can calculate the aspect. We can calculate the winter wind exposure — so, which way the winter winds blow across the landscape. The white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds.We compiled all the information about where the Native Americans were, the Lenape. And we built a probability map of where they might have been. So, the red areas on this map indicate the places that are best for human sustainability on Manhattan, places that are close to water, places that are near the harbor to fish, places protected from the winter winds. We know that there was a Lenape settlement down here by the Collect Pond. And we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture, that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn, beans, and squash, the ""Three Sisters"" garden.So, we built a model that explains where those fields might have been. And the old fields, the successional fields that go. And we might think of these as abandoned. But, in fact, they're grassland habitats for grassland birds and plants. And they have become successional shrub lands, and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities. And it turns out that Manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types. You can think of these as neighborhoods, as distinctive as TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and Inwood — that these are the forest and the wetlands and the marine communities, the beaches.And 55 is a lot. On a per-area basis, Manhattan had more ecological communities per acre than Yosemite does, than Yellowstone, than Amboseli. It was really an extraordinary landscape that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity.So, Act II: A Home Reconstructed. So, we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees, the 85 different kinds of fish that were on Manhattan, the Heath hens, the species that aren't there anymore, the beavers on all the streams, the black bears, and the Native Americans, to study how they used and thought about their landscape. We wanted to try and map these. And to do that what we did was we mapped their habitat needs.Where do they get their food? Where do they get their water? Where do they get their shelter? Where do they get their reproductive resources? To an ecologist, the intersection of these is habitat, but to most people, the intersection of these is their home. So, we would read in field guides, the standard field guides that maybe you have on your shelves, you know, what beavers need is, ""A slowly meandering stream with aspen trees and alders and willows, near the water."" That's the best thing for a beaver.So we just started making a list. Here is the beaver. And here is the stream, and the aspen and the alder and the willow. As if these were the maps that we would need to predict where you would find the beaver. Or the bog turtle, needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places. Or the bobcat, needing rabbits and beavers and den sites. And rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be something that a bobcat needs. But a beaver also needs things. And that having it on either side means that we can link it together, that we can create the network of the habitat relationships for these species.Moreover, we realized that you can start out as being a beaver specialist, but you can look up what an aspen needs. An aspen needs fire and dry soils. And you can look at what a wet meadow needs. And it need beavers to create the wetlands, and maybe some other things. But you can also talk about sunny places. So, what does a sunny place need? Not habitat per se. But what are the conditions that make it possible? Or fire. Or dry soils. And that you can put these on a grid that's 1,000 columns long across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way. And then we can visualize this data like a network, like a social network.And this is the network of all the habitat relationships of all the plants and animals on Manhattan, and everything they needed, going back to the geology, going back to time and space at the very core of the web. We call this the Muir Web. And if you zoom in on it it looks like this. Each point is a different species or a different stream or a different soil type. And those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together. They are the connections that actually make nature resilient. And the structure of this is what makes nature work, seen with all its parts. We call these Muir Webs after the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir, who said, ""When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.""So then we took the Muir webs and we took them back to the maps. So if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th, and Lex and Third, maybe there was a stream in that block. And these would be the kind of trees that might have been there, and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses, the butterflies, the fish in the stream, the birds in the trees. Maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there. And perhaps a black bear walked by. And maybe Native Americans were there. And then we took this data.You can see this for yourself on our website. You can zoom into any block on Manhattan, and see what might have been there 400 years ago. And we used it to try and reveal a landscape here in Act III. We used the tools they use in Hollywood to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies.And we tried to use it to visualize Third Avenue. So we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography. We'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters, and illuminate the landscape. We would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities. And feed into that the map of the species. So that we would actually take a photograph, flying above Times Square, looking toward the Hudson River, waiting for Hudson to come. Using this technology, we can make these fantastic georeferenced views. We can basically take a picture out of any window on Manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago.This is the view from the East River, looking up Murray Hill at where the United Nations is today. This is the view looking down the Hudson River, with Manhattan on the left, and New Jersey out on the right, looking out toward the Atlantic Ocean. This is the view over Times Square, with the beaver pond there, looking out toward the east. So we can see the Collect Pond, and Lispenard Marshes back behind. We can see the fields that the Native Americans made. And we can see this in the geography of the city today. So when you're watching ""Law and Order,"" and the lawyers walk up the steps they could have walked back down those steps of the New York Court House, right into the Collect Pond, 400 years ago.So these images are the work of my friend and colleague, Mark Boyer, who is here in the audience today. And I'd just like, if you would give him a hand, to call out for his fine work. (Applause)There is such power in bringing science and visualization together, that we can create images like this, perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass. And even though I've only had a brief time to speak, I hope you appreciate that Mannahatta was a very special place. The place that you see here on the left side was interconnected. It was based on this diversity. It had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world.But I wouldn't have you think that I don't like the place on the right, which I quite do. I've come to love the city and its kind of diversity, and its resilience, and its dependence on density and how we're connected together. In fact, that I see them as reflections of each other, much as Lewis Carroll did in ""Through the Looking Glass."" We can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time, that they really are the same place, that there is no way that cities can escape from nature. And I think this is what we're learning about building cities in the future.So if you'll allow me a brief epilogue, not about the past, but about 400 years from now, what we're realizing is that cities are habitats for people, and need to supply what people need: a sense of home, food, water, shelter, reproductive resources, and a sense of meaning. This is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity. And so many of the talks here at TED are about meaning, about bringing meaning to our lives in all kinds of different ways, through technology, through art, through science, so much so that I think we focus so much on that side of our lives, that we haven't given enough attention to the food and the water and the shelter, and what we need to raise the kids.So, how can we envision the city of the future? Well, what if we go to Madison Square Park, and we imagine it without all the cars, and bicycles instead and large forests, and streams instead of sewers and storm drains? What if we imagined the Upper East Side with green roofs, and streams winding through the city, and windmills supplying the power we need? Or if we imagine the New York City metropolitan area, currently home to 12 million people, but 12 million people in the future, perhaps living at the density of Manhattan, in only 36 percent of the area, with the areas in between covered by farmland, covered by wetlands, covered by the marshes we need.This is the kind of future I think we need, is a future that has the same diversity and abundance and dynamism of Manhattan, but that learns from the sustainability of the past, of the ecology, the original ecology, of nature with all its parts. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_sanderson_pictures_new_york_before_the_city
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"I'm Dr. David Hanson, and I build robots with character. And by that, I mean that I develop robots that are characters, but also robots that will eventually come to empathize with you. So we're starting with a variety of technologies that have converged into these conversational character robots that can see faces, make eye contact with you, make a full range of facial expressions, understand speech and begin to model how you're feeling and who you are, and build a relationship with you.I developed a series of technologies that allowed the robots to make more realistic facial expressions than previously achieved, on lower power, which enabled the walking biped robots, the first androids. So, it's a full range of facial expressions simulating all the major muscles in the human face, running on very small batteries, extremely lightweight.The materials that allowed the battery-operated facial expressions is a material that we call Frubber, and it actually has three major innovations in the material that allow this to happen. One is hierarchical pores, and the other is a macro-molecular nanoscale porosity in the material.There he's starting to walk. This is at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. I built the head. They built the body. So the goal here is to achieve sentience in machines, and not just sentience, but empathy.We're working with the Machine Perception Laboratory at the U.C. San Diego. They have this really remarkable facial expression technology that recognizes facial expressions, what facial expressions you're making. It also recognizes where you're looking, your head orientation. We're emulating all the major facial expressions, and then controlling it with the software that we call the Character Engine. And here is a little bit of the technology that's involved in that.In fact, right now — plug it from here, and then plug it in here, and now let's see if it gets my facial expressions. Okay. So I'm smiling. (Laughter) Now I'm frowning. And this is really heavily backlit. Okay, here we go. Oh, it's so sad. Okay, so you smile, frowning. So his perception of your emotional states is very important for machines to effectively become empathetic.Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Right? Those machines have no place for empathy. And there is billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.So, we've made 20 robots in the last eight years, during the course of getting my Ph.D. And then I started Hanson Robotics, which has been developing these things for mass manufacturing. This is one of our robots that we showed at Wired NextFest a couple of years ago. And it sees multiple people in a scene, remembers where individual people are, and looks from person to person, remembering people.So, we're involving two things. One, the perception of people, and two, the natural interface, the natural form of the interface, so that it's more intuitive for you to interact with the robot. You start to believe that it's alive and aware.So one of my favorite projects was bringing all this stuff together in an artistic display of an android portrait of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote great works like, ""Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"" which was the basis of the movie ""Bladerunner."" In these stories, robots often think that they're human, and they sort of come to life. So we put his writings, letters, his interviews, correspondences, into a huge database of thousands of pages, and then used some natural language processing to allow you to actually have a conversation with him. And it was kind of spooky, because he would say these things that just sounded like they really understood you.And this is one of the most exciting projects that we're developing, which is a little character that's a spokesbot for friendly artificial intelligence, friendly machine intelligence. And we're getting this mass-manufactured. We specked it out to actually be doable with a very, very low-cost bill of materials, so that it can become a childhood companion for kids. Interfacing with the Internet, it gets smarter over the years. As artificial intelligence evolves, so does his intelligence.Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. That's incredible. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_hanson_robots_that_relate_to_you
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"This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man, I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister that pays all the bills. It's held every two years in Burma. And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again. (Laughter)But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business, that what we create in advertising, which is intangible value — you might call it perceived value, you might call it badge value, subjective value, intangible value of some kind — gets rather a bad rap. If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don't like. Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value, that actually intangible value, in many ways is a very, very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things.Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, ""How do we make the journey to Paris better?"" And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time. Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man ... ... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks?Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter)Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again. And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception. So I'll ask you another question. What on earth is wrong with placebos? They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop. They work extraordinarily well. They have no side effects, or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them. (Laughter)So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it. Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further, and actually produce placebo education. The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things. It actually works by giving you the impression that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) (Applause)But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality? Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings, but doing a bit of historical research, it seems to be Fredrick the Great. Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread. And you get a far lower risk of famine, because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one.The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables — rather like contemporary Scottish people. (Laughter) So, actually, he tried making it compulsory. The Prussian peasantry said, ""We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing."" There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes.So he tried plan B. He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it. And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. (Laughter) Now, 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life, which is if something is worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany. What he'd effectively done is he'd re-branded the potato. It was an absolute masterpiece.I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said, ""Very, very good marketer, Fredrick the Great. But not a patch on Ataturk."" Ataturk, rather like Nicolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil, in Turkey, to modernize it. Now, boring people would have just simply banned the veil. But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. (Laughter) (Applause)I can't verify that fully, but it does not matter. There is your environmental problem solved, by the way, guys: All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne. (Laughter) What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things. Which is that, actually, first one, all value is actually relative. All value is perceived value.For those of you who don't speak Spanish, jugo de naranja — it's actually the Spanish for ""orange juice."" Because actually it's not the dollar. It's actually the peso in Buenos Aires. Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists. As an advertising man, I have to admire that.But the first thing is that all value is subjective. Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion. These funny signs that flash your speed at you, some of the new ones, on the bottom right, now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face, to act as an emotional trigger. What's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera, but they prevent twice as many accidents. So, the bizarre thing, which is baffling to conventional, classically trained economists, is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £60 fine and three penalty points.Tiny little behavioral economics detail: in Italy, penalty points go backwards. You start with 12 and they take them away. Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people's behavior. In Britain we tend to feel, ""Whoa! Got another three!"" Not so in Italy.Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value, which remember, is what, after all, the environmental movement needs to be about: This again is from Prussia, from, I think, about 1812, 1813. The wealthy Prussians, to help in the war against the French, were encouraged to give in all their jewelry. And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron. Here's one: ""Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1813."" The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence, the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn't made of gold or diamonds. It was made of cast iron. Because actually, never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry. This actually had symbolic value, badge value. It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past.So, the modern equivalent would of course be this. (Laughter) But, actually, there is a thing, just as there are Veblen goods, where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare — there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous, classless and minimalistic.If you think about it, Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement. Adam Smith talks about 18th century America, where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great, it was almost a block in the economy in New England, because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors. It's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies.What's also interesting, if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value, a high component of intangible value, versus their intrinsic value: They are often quite egalitarian. In terms of dress, denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value. Coca-Cola. A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos, and you may not like the Coca-Cola company, but it's worth remembering Andy Warhol's point about Coke. What Warhol said about Coke is, he said, ""What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street."" Now, that is, actually, when you think about it — we take it for granted — it's actually a remarkable achievement, to produce something that's that democratic.Now, we basically have to change our views slightly. There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor. It involves engineering. It involves limited raw materials. And that what we add on top is kind of false. It's a fake version. And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it. It patently veers toward propaganda. However, what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value, and it's much fairer.When I grew up, this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food. You had a monopoly supplier. On the left, you have Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC. (Laughter) And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it. (Laughter)Nowadays, the user is actually involved. This is actually what's called, in the digital world, ""user-generated content."" Although it's called agriculture in the world of food. (Laughter) This is actually called a mash-up, where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it. In the world of food we call it cooking. This is food 2.0, which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people. This is mobile food. British are very good at that. Fish and chips in newspaper, the Cornish Pasty, the pie, the sandwich. We invented the whole lot of them. We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally. (Laughter)I only learned this the other day. The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich. He actually invented the toasty. But then, the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name. (Laughter)Finally, we have contextual communication. Now, the reason I show you Pernod — it's only one example. Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink. In France it's Pernod. It tastes great within the borders of that country, but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else. (Laughter) Unicum in Hungary, for example. The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina, which even tastes shite when you're in Greece. (Laughter)But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people, for giving them better information — B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is — He's invented the phrase, ""persuasive technologies."" He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented.Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently. I'll give you one example. If you had a large red button of this kind, on the wall of your home, and every time you pressed it, it saved 50 dollars for you, put 50 dollars into your pension, you would save a lot more. The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior. Okay?Now, marketing has done a very, very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. If you did this, more people would save more. It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions, and the very nature of the decisions changes. Obviously, I don't want people to do this, because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed. (Laughter) But if anybody did want to do that, that's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about, actually: fundamental opportunities to change human behavior.Now, I've got an example here from Canada. There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville, who was working in improv in Toronto, and got a part-time job in advertising, and was given the job of advertising Shreddies. Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. Shreddies is a strange, square, whole-grain cereal, only available in New Zealand, Canada and Britain. It's Kraft's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown. (Laughter) In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies, he came up with this.Video: (Buzzer) Man: Shreddies is supposed to be square. (Laughter)Woman: Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? (Laughter)Voiceover: New Diamond Shreddies cereal. Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. (Applause)Rory Sutherland: I'm not sure this isn't the most perfect example of intangible value creation. All it requires is photons, neurons, and a great idea to create this thing. I would say it's a work of genius. But, naturally, you can't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research.Man: So, Shreddies is actually producing a new product, which is something very exciting for them. So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies. (Laughter) So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that, when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there. (Laughter)Woman: Weren't they square?Woman #2: I'm a little bit confused. Woman #3: They look like the squares to me.Man: They — Yeah, it's all in the appearance. But it's kind of like flipping a six or a nine. Like a six, if you flip it over it looks like a nine. But a six is very different from a nine.Woman # 3: Or an ""M"" and a ""W"". Man: An ""M"" and a ""W"", exactly.Man #2: [unclear] You just looked like you turned it on its end. But when you see it like that it's more interesting looking.Man: Just try both of them. Take a square one there, first. (Laughter) Man: Which one did you prefer? Man #2: The first one.Man: The first one? (Laughter)Rory Sutherland: Now, naturally, a debate raged. There were conservative elements in Canada, unsurprisingly, who actually resented this intrusion. So, eventually, the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise, which was the combo pack. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter)If you think it's funny, bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics, which actually does extensive research into perception of things, and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine, except when you tell the people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more. So drink your wine blind in the future.But this is both hysterically funny — but I think an important philosophical point, which is, going forward, we need more of this kind of value. We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists, and less time agonizing over what else we can do.Two quotations to more or less end with. One of them is, ""Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new."" Which isn't a bad definition of what our job is, to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar, but also to gain a greater appreciation, and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing. There is some evidence, by the way, that things like social networking help do that. Because they help people share news. They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities. So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display, and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest, simplest things in life. Which is magic.The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session, which is, ""We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders,"" which I think for anybody involved in technology, is perfectly true. And a final thing: When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible, a thing not seen, you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man
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"Our mission is to build a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain. And we've done, in the past four years, a proof of concept on a small part of the rodent brain, and with this proof of concept we are now scaling the project up to reach the human brain.Why are we doing this? There are three important reasons. The first is, it's essential for us to understand the human brain if we do want to get along in society, and I think that it is a key step in evolution. The second reason is, we cannot keep doing animal experimentation forever, and we have to embody all our data and all our knowledge into a working model. It's like a Noah's Ark. It's like an archive. And the third reason is that there are two billion people on the planet that are affected by mental disorder, and the drugs that are used today are largely empirical. I think that we can come up with very concrete solutions on how to treat disorders.Now, even at this stage, we can use the brain model to explore some fundamental questions about how the brain works. And here, at TED, for the first time, I'd like to share with you how we're addressing one theory — there are many theories — one theory of how the brain works. So, this theory is that the brain creates, builds, a version of the universe, and projects this version of the universe, like a bubble, all around us.Now, this is of course a topic of philosophical debate for centuries. But, for the first time, we can actually address this, with brain simulation, and ask very systematic and rigorous questions, whether this theory could possibly be true. The reason why the moon is huge on the horizon is simply because our perceptual bubble does not stretch out 380,000 kilometers. It runs out of space. And so what we do is we compare the buildings within our perceptual bubble, and we make a decision. We make a decision it's that big, even though it's not that big.And what that illustrates is that decisions are the key things that support our perceptual bubble. It keeps it alive. Without decisions you cannot see, you cannot think, you cannot feel. And you may think that anesthetics work by sending you into some deep sleep, or by blocking your receptors so that you don't feel pain, but in fact most anesthetics don't work that way. What they do is they introduce a noise into the brain so that the neurons cannot understand each other. They are confused, and you cannot make a decision. So, while you're trying to make up your mind what the doctor, the surgeon, is doing while he's hacking away at your body, he's long gone. He's at home having tea. (Laughter)So, when you walk up to a door and you open it, what you compulsively have to do to perceive is to make decisions, thousands of decisions about the size of the room, the walls, the height, the objects in this room. 99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes. It is what you infer about that room. So I can say, with some certainty, ""I think, therefore I am."" But I cannot say, ""You think, therefore you are,"" because ""you"" are within my perceptual bubble.Now, we can speculate and philosophize this, but we don't actually have to for the next hundred years. We can ask a very concrete question. ""Can the brain build such a perception?"" Is it capable of doing it? Does it have the substance to do it? And that's what I'm going to describe to you today.So, it took the universe 11 billion years to build the brain. It had to improve it a little bit. It had to add to the frontal part, so that you would have instincts, because they had to cope on land. But the real big step was the neocortex. It's a new brain. You needed it. The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions.So, you can think of the neocortex actually as the ultimate solution today, of the universe as we know it. It's the pinnacle, it's the final product that the universe has produced. It was so successful in evolution that from mouse to man it expanded about a thousandfold in terms of the numbers of neurons, to produce this almost frightening organ, structure. And it has not stopped its evolutionary path. In fact, the neocortex in the human brain is evolving at an enormous speed.If you zoom into the surface of the neocortex, you discover that it's made up of little modules, G5 processors, like in a computer. But there are about a million of them. They were so successful in evolution that what we did was to duplicate them over and over and add more and more of them to the brain until we ran out of space in the skull. And the brain started to fold in on itself, and that's why the neocortex is so highly convoluted. We're just packing in columns, so that we'd have more neocortical columns to perform more complex functions.So you can think of the neocortex actually as a massive grand piano, a million-key grand piano. Each of these neocortical columns would produce a note. You stimulate it; it produces a symphony. But it's not just a symphony of perception. It's a symphony of your universe, your reality. Now, of course it takes years to learn how to master a grand piano with a million keys. That's why you have to send your kids to good schools, hopefully eventually to Oxford. But it's not only education. It's also genetics. You may be born lucky, where you know how to master your neocortical column, and you can play a fantastic symphony.In fact, there is a new theory of autism called the ""intense world"" theory, which suggests that the neocortical columns are super-columns. They are highly reactive, and they are super-plastic, and so the autists are probably capable of building and learning a symphony which is unthinkable for us. But you can also understand that if you have a disease within one of these columns, the note is going to be off. The perception, the symphony that you create is going to be corrupted, and you will have symptoms of disease.So, the Holy Grail for neuroscience is really to understand the design of the neocoritical column — and it's not just for neuroscience; it's perhaps to understand perception, to understand reality, and perhaps to even also understand physical reality. So, what we did was, for the past 15 years, was to dissect out the neocortex, systematically. It's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rainforest. How many trees does it have? What shapes are the trees? How many of each type of tree do you have? Where are they positioned?But it's a bit more than cataloging because you actually have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity, because the neurons don't just like to connect with any neuron. They choose very carefully who they connect with. It's also more than cataloging because you actually have to build three-dimensional digital models of them. And we did that for tens of thousands of neurons, built digital models of all the different types of neurons we came across. And once you have that, you can actually begin to build the neocortical column.And here we're coiling them up. But as you do this, what you see is that the branches intersect actually in millions of locations, and at each of these intersections they can form a synapse. And a synapse is a chemical location where they communicate with each other. And these synapses together form the network or the circuit of the brain. Now, the circuit, you could also think of as the fabric of the brain. And when you think of the fabric of the brain, the structure, how is it built? What is the pattern of the carpet? You realize that this poses a fundamental challenge to any theory of the brain, and especially to a theory that says that there is some reality that emerges out of this carpet, out of this particular carpet with a particular pattern.The reason is because the most important design secret of the brain is diversity. Every neuron is different. It's the same in the forest. Every pine tree is different. You may have many different types of trees, but every pine tree is different. And in the brain it's the same. So there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as another, and there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as in yours. And your neurons are not going to be oriented and positioned in exactly the same way. And you may have more or less neurons. So it's very unlikely that you got the same fabric, the same circuitry.So, how could we possibly create a reality that we can even understand each other? Well, we don't have to speculate. We can look at all 10 million synapses now. We can look at the fabric. And we can change neurons. We can use different neurons with different variations. We can position them in different places, orient them in different places. We can use less or more of them. And when we do that what we discovered is that the circuitry does change. But the pattern of how the circuitry is designed does not. So, the fabric of the brain, even though your brain may be smaller, bigger, it may have different types of neurons, different morphologies of neurons, we actually do share the same fabric. And we think this is species-specific, which means that that could explain why we can't communicate across species.So, let's switch it on. But to do it, what you have to do is you have to make this come alive. We make it come alive with equations, a lot of mathematics. And, in fact, the equations that make neurons into electrical generators were discovered by two Cambridge Nobel Laureates. So, we have the mathematics to make neurons come alive. We also have the mathematics to describe how neurons collect information, and how they create a little lightning bolt to communicate with each other. And when they get to the synapse, what they do is they effectively, literally, shock the synapse. It's like electrical shock that releases the chemicals from these synapses.And we've got the mathematics to describe this process. So we can describe the communication between the neurons. There literally are only a handful of equations that you need to simulate the activity of the neocortex. But what you do need is a very big computer. And in fact you need one laptop to do all the calculations just for one neuron. So you need 10,000 laptops. So where do you go? You go to IBM, and you get a supercomputer, because they know how to take 10,000 laptops and put it into the size of a refrigerator. So now we have this Blue Gene supercomputer. We can load up all the neurons, each one on to its processor, and fire it up, and see what happens. Take the magic carpet for a ride.Here we activate it. And this gives the first glimpse of what is happening in your brain when there is a stimulation. It's the first view. Now, when you look at that the first time, you think, ""My god. How is reality coming out of that?"" But, in fact, you can start, even though we haven't trained this neocortical column to create a specific reality. But we can ask, ""Where is the rose?"" We can ask, ""Where is it inside, if we stimulate it with a picture?"" Where is it inside the neocortex? Ultimately it's got to be there if we stimulated it with it.So, the way that we can look at that is to ignore the neurons, ignore the synapses, and look just at the raw electrical activity. Because that is what it's creating. It's creating electrical patterns. So when we did this, we indeed, for the first time, saw these ghost-like structures: electrical objects appearing within the neocortical column. And it's these electrical objects that are holding all the information about whatever stimulated it. And then when we zoomed into this, it's like a veritable universe.So the next step is just to take these brain coordinates and to project them into perceptual space. And if you do that, you will be able to step inside the reality that is created by this machine, by this piece of the brain. So, in summary, I think that the universe may have — it's possible — evolved a brain to see itself, which may be a first step in becoming aware of itself. There is a lot more to do to test these theories, and to test any other theories. But I hope that you are at least partly convinced that it is not impossible to build a brain. We can do it within 10 years, and if we do succeed, we will send to TED, in 10 years, a hologram to talk to you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets
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"Over the next five minutes, my intention is to transform your relationship with sound. Let me start with the observation that most of the sound around us is accidental; much of it is unpleasant. (Traffic noise) We stand on street corners, shouting over noise like this, pretending it doesn't exist. This habit of suppressing sound has meant that our relationship with sound has become largely unconscious.There are four major ways sound is affecting you all the time, and I'd like to raise them in your consciousness today. The first is physiological.(Alarm clocks ring)Sorry about that. I just gave you a shot of cortisol, your fight-flight hormone. Sounds are affecting your hormone secretions all the time, but also your breathing, heart rate — which I just also did — and your brainwaves.It's not just unpleasant sounds like that that do it. This is surf. (Ocean waves) It has the frequency of roughly 12 cycles per minute. Most people find that very soothing, and, interestingly, 12 cycles per minute is roughly the frequency of the breathing of a sleeping human, so there is a deep resonance with being at rest. We also associate it with being stress-free and on holiday.The second way in which sound affects you is psychological. Music is the most powerful form of sound that we know that affects our emotional state. (Albinoni's Adagio) This is guaranteed to make most of you feel pretty sad if I leave it on. Music is not the only kind of sound, however, which affects your emotions.Natural sound can do that, too. Birdsong, for example, is a sound which most people find reassuring. There's a reason: over hundreds of thousands of years we've learned that when the birds are singing, things are safe. It's when they stop you need to be worried.The third way in which sound affects you is cognitively. You can't understand two people talking at once (Voice-over) or in this case, one person talking twice. You have to choose which me you're going to listen to.We have a very small amount of bandwidth for processing auditory input, which is why noise like this ...(Office noise)is extremely damaging for productivity. If you have to work in an open-plan office like this, your productivity is greatly reduced. And whatever number you're thinking of, it probably isn't as bad as this.[Open-plan offices productivity down 66%]You are one-third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms. I have a tip for you: if you work in spaces like that, carry headphones with you, with a soothing sound like birdsong. Put them on, and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be.The fourth way in which sound affects us is behaviorally. With all that other stuff going on, it would be amazing if our behavior didn't change.(Techno music)So ask yourself: Is this person ever going to drive at a steady 28 miles per hour? I don't think so. At the simplest, you move away from unpleasant sound and towards pleasant sounds. So if I were to play this ...(Jackhammer)for more than a few seconds, you'd feel uncomfortable; for more than a few minutes, you'd be leaving the room in droves. For people who can't get away from noise like that, it's extremely damaging for their health.And that's not the only thing that bad sound damages. Most retail sound is inappropriate and accidental, even hostile, and it has a dramatic effect on sales. For you retailers, you may want to look away before I show this slide.[Inappropriate retail soundscapes sales down 28%]They're losing up to 30 percent of their business with people leaving shops faster, or just turning around at the door. We've all done it, left the area, because the sound in there is so dreadful.I want to spend just a moment talking about the model we've developed, which allows us to start at the top and look at the drivers of sound, analyze the soundscape and then predict the four outcomes I just talked about. Or start at the bottom and say what outcomes we want, and then design a soundscape to have a desired effect. At last we've got some science we can apply. And we're in the business of designing soundscapes.Just a word on music. Music is the most powerful sound there is, often inappropriately deployed. It's powerful for two reasons: you recognize it fast, and you associate it very powerfully. I'll give you two examples.(First chord of ""A Hard Day's Night"")Most of you recognize that immediately. The younger, maybe not.(Laughter)(First notes of ""Jaws"" theme)Most of you associate that with something! Now, those are one-second samples of music. Music is very powerful, and unfortunately, it's veneering commercial spaces, often inappropriately. I hope that's going to change over the next few years.Let me talk about brands for a moment, since some of you run brands. Every brand is out there making sound right now. There are eight expressions of a brand in sound; they're all important. And every brand needs to have guidelines at the center. I'm glad to say that is starting to happen now.(Intel ad jingle)You all recognize that one.(Nokia ringtone)This is the most-played tune in the world today — 1.8 billion times a day, that tune is played.(Laughter)And it cost Nokia absolutely nothing.I'll leave you with four golden rules, for those of you who run businesses, for commercial sound. First, make it congruent, pointing in the same direction as your visual communication. That increases impact by over 1,100 percent. If your sound is pointing the opposite direction, incongruent, you reduce impact by 86 percent. That's an order of magnitude, up or down. This is important. Secondly, make it appropriate to the situation. Thirdly, make it valuable. Give people something with the sound, don't just bombard them with stuff. Finally, test and test it again. Sound is complex; there are many countervailing influences. It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti: sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens.So I hope this talk has raised sound in your consciousness. If you're listening consciously, you can take control of the sound around you. It's good for your health and for your productivity. If we all do that, we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living in the world. I'll leave you with more birdsong. (Birds chirping) I recommend at least five minutes a day, but there's no maximum dose.Thank you for lending me your ears today.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us
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"Thirteen trillion dollars in wealth has evaporated over the course of the last two years. We've questioned the future of capitalism. We've questioned the financial industry. We've looked at our government oversight. We've questioned where we're going. And yet, at the same time, this very well may be a seminal moment in American history, an opportunity for the consumer to actually take control and guide us to a new trajectory in America.I'm calling this The Great Unwind.(Laughter)And the idea is a simple, simple idea, which is the fact that the consumer has moved from a state of anxiety to action. Consumers who represent 72 percent of the GDP of America have actually started, just like banks and just like businesses, to de-leverage, to unwind their leverage in daily life, to remove themselves from the liability and risk that presents itself as they move forward.So, to understand this — and I'm going to stress this — it's not about the consumer being in retreat. The consumer is empowered. To understand this, we'll step back and look at what's happened over the last year and a half. So if you've been gone, this is the CliffsNotes on what's happened in the economy.(Laughter)Unemployment up. Housing values down. Equity markets down. Commodity prices are like this.If you're a mom trying to manage a budget, and oil was 150 dollars a barrel last summer, and it's somewhere between 50 and 70, do you plan vacations? How do you buy? What's your strategy in your household? Will the bailout work? We have national debt, Detroit, currency valuations, health care — all these issues facing us. You put them all together, mix them up in a bouillabaisse, and you have consumer confidence that's basically a ticking time bomb.In fact, let's go back and look at what caused this crisis, because the consumer, all of us, in our daily lives, actually contributed a large part to the problem. This is something I call the 50-20 paradox. It took us 50 years to reach annual savings ratings of almost 10 percent. Fifty years. Do you know what this was right here? This was World War II. Do you know why savings was so high? There was nothing to buy, unless you wanted to buy some rivets.What happened, though, over the course of the last 20 years, we went from a 10 percent savings rate to a negative savings rate. Because we binged. We bought extra-large cars, supersized everything, we bought remedies for restless leg syndrome. All these things together basically created a factor where the consumer drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today. The personal debt-to-income ratio basically went from 65 to 135 percent in the span of about 15 years. So consumers got over-leveraged. And of course our banks did as well, as did our federal government.This is an absolutely staggering chart. It shows leverage, trended out from 1919 to 2009. And what you end up seeing is the whole phenomenon that we are actually stepping forth and basically leveraging future education, future children in our households.So if you look at this in the context of visualizing the bailout, what you can see is, if you stack up dollar bills, first of all, 360,000 dollars is about the size of a five-foot-four guy. But if you stack it up, you see this amazing, staggering amount of dollars that have been put into the system to fund and bail us out. So this is the first 315 billion. But I read this fact the other day, that one trillion seconds equals 32,000 years. So if you think about that, the context, the casualness with which we talk about trillion-dollar bailout here and trillion there, we are stacking ourselves up for long-term leverage.However, consumers have moved. They are taking responsibility. What we're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate. In fact, 11 straight months of savings have happened since the beginning of the crisis. We're working our way back up to that 10 percent. Also, remarkably, in the fourth quarter, spending dropped to its lowest level in 62 years — almost a 3.7 percent decline.Visa now reports that more people are using debit cards than credit cards. So we're starting to pay for things with money that we have. And we're starting to be much more careful about how we save and invest. But that's not really the whole story, because this has also been a dramatic time of transformation. And you've got to admit, over the last year and a half, consumers have been doing some weird things. It's pretty staggering, what we've lived through. If you take into account that 80 percent of all Americans were born after World War II, this was essentially our Depression.And so, as a result, some crazy things have happened. I'll give you some examples. Let's talk about dentists, vasectomies, guns and shark attacks.(Laughter)Dentists report molars — people grinding their teeth, coming in and reporting that they've had stress. So there's an increase in people having to have their fillings replaced. Gun sales, according to the FBI, who does background checks, are up almost 25 percent since January. Vasectomies are up 48 percent, according to the Cornell Institute. And lastly, but a very good point, hopefully not related to the former point I just made, which is that shark attacks are at their lowest level from 2003. Does anybody know why?(Laughter)No one's at the beach. So there's a bright side to everything.But seriously, what we see happening, and the reason I want to stress that the consumer is not in retreat, is that this is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer who drove us into this recession to lead us right back out. What I mean by that is we can move from mindless consumption to mindful consumption. Right?(Applause)If you think about the last three decades, the consumer has moved from savvy about marketing in the '90s, to gathering all these amazing social and search tools in this decade. But the one thing holding them back is the ability to discriminate. By restricting their demand, consumers can actually align their values with their spending, and drive capitalism and business to not just be about more, but to be about better.We're going to explain that right now. Based on Y&R's BrandAsset Valuator, proprietary tool of VML and Young & Rubicam, we set out to understand what's been happening in the crisis with the consumer marketplace. We found a couple of really interesting things. We're going to go through four value shifts that we see driving new consumer behaviors, that offer new management principles.The first cultural value shift we see is this tendency toward something we call ""liquid life."" This is the movement from Americans defining their success on having things to having liquidity, because the less excess that you have around you, the more nimble and fleet of foot you are. As a result, déclassé consumption is in. Déclassé consumption is the whole idea that spending money frivolously makes you look a little bit anti-fashion. The management principle is dollars and cents.So let's look at some examples of this déclassé consumption that falls out of this value. The first thing is, something must be happening when P. Diddy vows to tone down his bling.(Laughter)But seriously, we also have this phenomenon on Madison Avenue and in other places, where people are actually walking out of luxury boutiques with ordinary, generic paper bags to hide the brand purchases. We see high-end haggling in fashion today, high-end haggling for luxury and real estate. We also see just a relaxing of ego, and sort of a dismantling of artifice.This is a story on the yacht club that's all basically blue collar. Blue-collar yacht club — where you can join, but you've got to work in the boatyard as condition of membership. We also see the trend toward tourism that's a little bit more low-key: agritourism — going to vineyards and going to farms.And then we also see this movement forward from dollars and cents. What businesses can do to connect with these new mindsets is really interesting. A couple things that are kind of cool. One is that Frito-Lay figured out this liquidity thing with their consumer. They found their consumer had more money at the beginning of the month, less at the end of the month. So they started to change their packaging: larger packs at the beginning of the month, smaller packaging at the end of the month.Really interestingly, too, was the San Francisco Giants. They've just instituted dynamic pricing. It takes into account everything from the pitcher match-ups, to the weather, to the team records, in setting prices for the consumer. Another quick example of these types of movements is the rise of Zynga. Zynga has risen on the consumer's desire to not want to be locked in to fixed cost. Again, this theme is about variable cost, variable living. So micro-payments have become huge. And lastly, some people are using Hulu as a device to get rid of their cable bill. So, really clever ideas there that are being taken ahold of and that marketers are starting to understand.The second of the four values is this movement toward ethics and fair play. We see that play itself out with empathy and respect. The consumer is demanding it. And, as a result, businesses must provide not only value, but values. Increasingly, consumers are looking at the culture of the company, at their conduct in the marketplace. So we see with empathy and respect lots of really hopeful things come out of this recession. I'll give you a few examples.One is the rise toward communities and neighborhoods, and increased emphasis on your neighbors as your support system. Also, a wonderful by-product of a really lousy thing, which has been unemployment, is a rise in volunteerism that's been noted in our country. We also see the phenomenon — some of you may have ""boomerang kids"" — these are ""boomerang alumni,"" where universities are actually reconnecting with alumni and helping them with jobs, sharing skills and retraining. We also talked about character and professionalism. We had this miracle on the Hudson in New York City in January, and suddenly Sully has become a key name on BabyCenter.(Laughter)So, from a value and values standpoint, what companies can do is connect in lots of different ways. Microsoft is doing something wonderful. They are actually vowing to retrain two million Americans with IT training, using their existing infrastructure to do something good.Also, a really interesting company is GORE-TEX. GORE-TEX is all about personal accountability of their management and their employees, to the point where they really kind of shun the idea of bosses. But they also talk about the fact that their executives — all of their expense reports are put onto their company intranet for everyone to see. Complete transparency. Think twice before you have that bottle of wine.(Laughter)The third of the four laws of post-crisis consumerism is about durable living. We're seeing in our data that consumers are realizing this is a marathon, not a sprint. They're digging in and looking for ways to extract value out of every purchase they make. Witness the fact that Americans are holding on to their cars longer than ever before: 9.4 years on average, in March. A record. We also see the fact that libraries have become a huge resource for America. Did you know that 68 percent of Americans now carry a library card? The highest percentage ever in our nation's history.So what you see in this trend is also the accumulation of knowledge. Continuing education is up. Everything is focused on betterment, training, development and moving forward. We also see a big DIY movement. I was fascinated to learn that 30 percent of all homes in America are actually built by owners. That includes cottages and the like, but 30 percent. People are getting their hands dirty, rolling up their sleeves. They want these skills.We see it with the phenomenon of raising backyard hens, chickens and ducks. And when you work out the math, they say it doesn't work, but the principle is there; it's about being sustainable and taking care of yourself. Then we look at the High Line in New York City, an excellent use of reimagining existing infrastructure for something good, which is a brand-new park in New York City.So what brands can do, and companies, is pay dividends to consumers, be a brand that lasts, offer transparency, promise you're going to be there beyond today's sale. Perfect example of that is Patagonia. Patagonia's ""Footprint Chronicles"" basically goes through and tracks every product they make, and gives you social responsibility, and helps you understand the ethics behind the product they make.Another great example is Fidelity. Rather than instant cash-back rewards on your credit or debit purchases, this is about 529 rewards for your student education. Or the interesting company Sunrun. I love this company. They've created a consumer collective where they put solar panels on households and create a consumer-based utility, where the electricity they generate is basically pumped back out into the marketplace. So it's a consumer-driven co-op.The fourth post-crisis consumerism that we see is this movement about ""return to the fold."" It's incredibly important right now. Trust is not parceled out, as we all know. It's now about connecting to your communities, connecting to your social networks. In my book, I talked about the fact that 72 percent of people trust what other people say about a brand or a company, versus 15 percent on advertising. So in that respect, cooperative consumerism has really taken off. This is about consumers working together to get what they want out of the marketplace. Let's look at a couple of quick examples.The artisanal movement is huge: everything about locally derived products and services, supporting your local neighborhoods, whether it's cheeses, wines and other products. Also this rise of local currencies. Realizing that it's difficult to get loans in this environment, you're doing business with people you trust in your local markets. So this rise of local currency is another really interesting phenomenon. And then they did a recent report I thought was fascinating. They actually started, in certain communities in the United States, to publish people's electricity usage. And what they found out is when that was available for public record, the people's electricity usage in those communities dropped.Then we also look at the idea of cow-pooling, which is the whole phenomenon of consumers organizing together to buy meat from organic farms, that they know is safe and controlled in the way that they want it to be controlled. And then there's this other really interesting movement in California, which is about carrot mobs. The traditional thing would be to boycott, right? Have a stick. Well, why not have a carrot? So these are consumers organizing, pooling their resources to incentify companies to do good.And then we look at what companies can do. This is all the opportunity about being a community organizer. You have to realize that you can't fight and control this. You actually need to organize it. You need to harness it. You need to give it meaning. And there's lots of really interesting examples here. First is just the rise of the fact that Zagat's has actually moved out of and diversified from rating restaurants, into actually rating health care. So what credentials does Zagat's have? Well, they have a lot, because it's their network of people. So that becomes a very powerful force for them to make their brand more elastic.Then you look at the phenomenon of Kogi. This Kogi doesn't exist. It's a moving truck. It's a moving truck through L.A., and the only way you can find it is through Twitter.(Laughter)Or you look at Johnson & Johnson's ""Momversations,"" a phenomenal blog that's been built up, where J&J basically is tapping into the power of mommy bloggers, allowing them to create a forum where they can communicate and connect. And it's also become a very valuable advertising revenue for J&J as well. This, plus the fact that you've got phenomenal work from CEOs, from Ford to Zappos, connecting on Twitter, creating an open environment, allowing their employees to be part of the process, rather than hidden behind walls.You see this rising force in total transparency and openness that companies are starting to adopt, all because the consumer is demanding it. So when we look at this and step back, what I believe is that the crisis that exists today is definitely real. It's been tremendously powerful for consumers. But at the same time, this is also a tremendous opportunity. The Chinese character for crisis is actually the same side of the same coin. Crisis equals opportunity. What we're seeing with consumers right now is the ability for them to actually lead us forward out of this recession.So we believe that values-driven spending will force capitalism to be better: it will drive innovation; it will make longer-lasting products; it will create better, more intuitive customer service; and it will give us the opportunity to connect with companies that share the values that we share. So when we look back and step out at this and see the beginning of these trends that we're seeing in our data, we see a very hopeful picture for the future of America.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_gerzema_the_post_crisis_consumer
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"One of the biggest challenges in computer graphics has been being able to create a photo-real, digital human face. And one of the reasons it is so difficult is that, unlike aliens and dinosaurs, we look at human faces every day. They are very important to how we communicate with each other. As a result, we're tuned in to the subtlest things that could possibly be wrong with a computer rendering, in order to believe whether these things are realistic.And what I'm going to do in the next five minutes is take you through a process where we tried to create a reasonably photo-realistic computer-generated face, using some computer graphics technology we've developed, and also some collaborators at a company called Image Metrics. And we're going to try to do a photo-real face of an actress named Emily O'Brien, who is right there. And that's actually a completely computer-generated rendering of her face. By the end of the talk, we're going to see it move.The way that we did this is we tried to start with Emily herself, who was gracious enough to come to our laboratory in Marina Del Rey, and sit for a session in Light Stage 5. This is a face-scanning sphere, with 156 white LEDs all around that allow us to photograph her in a series of very controlled illumination conditions. And the lighting that we use these days looks something like this. We shoot all of these photographs in about three seconds.And we basically capture enough information with video projector patterns that drape over the contours of her face, and different principle directions of light from the light stage, to figure out both the coarse-scale and the fine-scale detail of her face. If we zoom in on this photograph right here, we can see it's a really nice photograph to have of her, because she is lit from absolutely everywhere at the same time to get a nice image of her facial texture.And in addition, we've actually used polarizers on all the lights — just like polarized sunglasses can block the glare off of the road, polarizers can block the shine off of the skin, so we don't get all those specular reflections to take this map. Now, if we turn the polarizers around just a little bit, we can actually bring that specular reflection of the skin back in, and you can see she looks kind of shiny and oily at this point. If you take the difference between these two images here, you can get an image lit from the entire sphere of light of just the shine off of Emily's skin.I don't think any photograph like this had ever been taken before we had done this. And this is very important light to capture, because this is the light that reflects off the first surface of the skin. It doesn't get underneath the translucent layers of the skin and blur out. And, as a result, it's a very good cue to the detailed shape of the skin-pore structure and all of the fine wrinkles that all of us have, the things that actually make us look like real humans.So, if we use information that comes off of this specular reflection, we can go from a traditional face scan that might have the gross contours of the face and the basic shape, and augment it with information that puts in all of that skin pore structure and fine wrinkles. And, even more importantly, since this is a photometric process that only takes three seconds to capture, we can shoot Emily in just part of an afternoon, in many different facial poses and facial expressions.So, here you can see her moving her eyes around, moving her mouth around. And these we're actually going to use to create a photo-real digital character. If you take a look at these scans that we have of Emily, you can see that the human face does an enormous amount of amazing things as it goes into different facial expressions. You can see things. Not only the face shape changes, but all sorts of different skin buckling and skin wrinkling occurs. You can see that the skin pore structure changes enormously from stretched skin pores to the regular skin texture. You can see the furrows in the brow and how the microstructure changes there. You can see muscles pulling down at flesh to bring her eyebrows down. Her muscles bulging in her forehead when she winces like that.In addition to this kind of high-resolution geometry, since it's all captured with cameras, we've got a great texture map to use for the face. And by looking at how the different color channels of the illumination, the red and the green and the blue, diffuse the light differently, we can come up with a way of shading the skin on the computer. Then, instead of looking like a plaster mannequin, it actually looks like it's made out of living human flesh.And this is what we used to give to the company Image Metrics to create a rigged, digital version of Emily. We're just seeing the coarse-scale geometry here. But they basically created a digital puppet of her, where you can pull on these various strings, and it actually moves her face in ways that are completely consistent with the scans that we took. And, in addition to the coarse-scale geometry, they also used all of that detail to create a set of what are called ""displacement maps"" that animate as well. These are the displacement maps here. And you can see those different wrinkles actually show up as she animates.So the next process was then to animate her. We actually used one of her own performances to provide the source data. So, by analyzing this video with computer vision techniques, they were able to drive the facial rig with the computer-generated performance. So what you're going to see now, after this, is a completely photo-real digital face. We can turn the volume up a little bit if that's available.Emily: Image Metrics is a markerless, performance-driven animation company. We specialize in high-quality facial animation for video games and films. Image Metrics is a markerless, performance-driven animation company. We specialize in high quality facial animation for video games and films.Paul Debevec: So, if we break that down into layers, here's that diffuse component we saw in the first slide. Here is the specular component animating. You can see all the wrinkles happening there. And there is the underlying wireframe mesh. And that is Emily herself.Now, where are we going with this here? We've gone a little bit beyond Light Stage 5. This is Light Stage 6, and we're looking at taking this technology and applying it to whole human bodies. This is Bruce Lawmen, one of our researchers in the group, who graciously agreed to get captured running in the Light Stage. And let's take a look at a computer-generated version of Bruce, running in a new environment. And thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_debevec_animates_a_photo_real_digital_face
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"The magical moment, the magical moment of conducting. Which is, you go onto a stage. There is an orchestra sitting. They are all, you know, warming up and doing stuff. And I go on the podium. You know, this little office of the conductor. Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space. And in front of all that noise, you do a very small gesture. Something like this, not very pomp, not very sophisticated, this. And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. Noise becomes music.And this is fantastic. And it's so tempting to think that it's all about me. (Laughter) All those great people here, virtuosos, they make noise, they need me to do that. Not really. If it were that, I would just save you the talk, and teach you the gesture. So you could go out to the world and do this thing in whatever company or whatever you want, and you have perfect harmony. It doesn't work. Let's look at the first video. I hope you'll think it's a good example of harmony. And then speak a little bit about how it comes about.(Music)Was that nice? So that was a sort of a success. Now, who should we thank for the success? I mean, obviously the orchestra musicians playing beautifully, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. They don't often even look at the conductor. Then you have the clapping audience, yeah, actually taking part in doing the music. You know Viennese audiences usually don't interfere with the music. This is the closest to an Oriental bellydancing feast that you will ever get in Vienna. (Laughter)Unlike, for example Israel, where audiences cough all the time. You know, Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, used to say that, ""Anywhere in the world, people that have the flu, they go to the doctor. In Tel Aviv they come to my concerts."" (Laughter) So that's a sort of a tradition. But Viennese audiences do not do that. Here they go out of their regular, just to be part of that, to become part of the orchestra, and that's great. You know, audiences like you, yeah, make the event.But what about the conductor? What can you say the conductor was doing, actually? Um, he was happy. And I often show this to senior management. People get annoyed. ""You come to work. How come you're so happy?"" Something must be wrong there, yeah? But he's spreading happiness. And I think the happiness, the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time.You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. Yeah. You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. And then you have other stories, unseen. People who build this wonderful concert hall. People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert. That's a reason to go out of home. Yeah? And not all conductors do just that. Let's see somebody else, a great conductor. Riccardo Muti, please.(Music)Yeah, that was very short, but you could see it's a completely different figure. Right? He's awesome. He's so commanding. Yeah? So clear. Maybe a little bit over-clear. Can we have a little demonstration? Would you be my orchestra for a second? Can you sing, please, the first note of Don Giovanni? You have to sing ""Aaaaaah,"" and I'll stop you. Okay? Ready?Audience: ♫ Aaaaaaah ... ♫Itay Talgam: Come on, with me. If you do it without me I feel even more redundant than I already feel. So please, wait for the conductor. Now look at me. ""Aaaaaah,"" and I stop you. Let's go.Audience: ♫ ... Aaaaaaaah ... ♫ (Laughter)Itay Talgam: So we'll have a little chat later. (Laughter) But ... There is a vacancy for a ... But — (Laughter) — you could see that you could stop an orchestra with a finger. Now what does Riccardo Muti do? He does something like this ... (Laughter) And then — sort of — (Laughter) So not only the instruction is clear, but also the sanction, what will happen if you don't do what I tell you. (Laughter) So, does it work? Yes, it works — to a certain point.When Muti is asked, ""Why do you conduct like this?"" He says, ""I'm responsible."" Responsible in front of him. No he doesn't really mean Him. He means Mozart, which is — (Laughter) — like a third seat from the center. (Laughter) So he says, ""If I'm — (Applause) if I'm responsible for Mozart, this is going to be the only story to be told. It's Mozart as I, Riccardo Muti, understand it.""And you know what happened to Muti? Three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of La Scala, musical employees, I mean the musicians, saying, ""You're a great conductor. We don't want to work with you. Please resign."" (Laughter) ""Why? Because you don't let us develop. You're using us as instruments, not as partners. And our joy of music, etc., etc. ..."" So he had to resign. Isn't that nice? (Laughter) He's a nice guy. He's a really nice guy. Well, can you do it with less control, or with a different kind of control? Let's look at the next conductor, Richard Strauss.(Music)I'm afraid you'll get the feeling that I really picked on him because he's old. It's not true. When he was a young man of about 30, he wrote what he called ""The Ten Commandments for Conductors."" The first one was: If you sweat by the end of the concert it means that you must have done something wrong. That's the first one. The fourth one you'll like better. It says: Never look at the trombones — it only encourages them. (Laughter)So, the whole idea is really to let it happen by itself. Do not interfere. But how does it happen? Did you see him turning pages in the score? Now, either he is senile, and doesn't remember his own music, because he wrote the music. Or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them, saying, ""Come on guys. You have to play by the book. So it's not about my story. It's not about your story. It's only the execution of the written music, no interpretation."" Interpretation is the real story of the performer. So, no, he doesn't want that. That's a different kind of control. Let's see another super-conductor, a German super-conductor. Herbert von Karajan, please.(Music)What's different? Did you see the eyes? Closed. Did you see the hands? Did you see this kind of movement? Let me conduct you. Twice. Once like a Muti, and you'll — (Claps) — clap, just once. And then like Karajan. Let's see what happens. Okay? Like Muti. You ready? Because Muti ... (Laughter) Okay? Ready? Let's do it.Audience: (Claps)Itay Talgam: Hmm ... again.Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Good. Now like a Karajan. Since you're already trained, let me concentrate, close my eyes. Come, come.Audience: (Claps) (Laughter)Itay Talgam: Why not together? (Laughter) Because you didn't know when to play. Now I can tell you, even the Berlin Philharmonic doesn't know when to play. (Laughter) But I'll tell you how they do it. No cynicism. This is a German orchestra, yes? They look at Karajan. And then they look at each other. (Laughter) ""Do you understand what this guy wants?"" And after doing that, they really look at each other, and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together.And when Karajan is asked about it he actually says, ""Yes, the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction. Because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra."" Now that's great. What about the eyes? Why are the eyes closed? There is a wonderful story about Karajan conducting in London. And he cues in a flute player like this. The guy has no idea what to do. (Laughter) ""Maestro, with all due respect, when should I start?"" What do you think Karajan's reply was? When should I start? Oh yeah. He says, ""You start when you can't stand it anymore."" (Laughter)Meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything. It's my music. The real music is only in Karajan's head. And you have to guess my mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because I don't give you instruction, and yet, you have to guess my mind. So it's a different kind of, a very spiritual but yet very firm control. Can we do it in another way? Of course we can. Let's go back to the first conductor we've seen: Carlos Kleiber, his name. Next video, please.(Music)(Laughter) Yeah. Well, it is different. But isn't that controlling in the same way? No, it's not, because he is not telling them what to do. When he does this, it's not, ""Take your Stradivarius and like Jimi Hendrix, smash it on the floor."" It's not that. He says, ""This is the gesture of the music. I'm opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation."" That is another story.But how does it really work together if it doesn't give them instructions? It's like being on a rollercoaster. Yeah? You're not really given any instructions, but the forces of the process itself keep you in place. That's what he does. The interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist. It's not a physical thing. It's in the players' heads.And that's what makes them into partners. You have the plan in your head. You know what to do, even though Kleiber is not conducting you. But here and there and that. You know what to do. And you become a partner building the rollercoaster, yeah, with sound, as you actually take the ride. This is very exciting for those players. They do need to go to a sanatorium for two weeks, later. (Laughter) It is very tiring. Yeah? But it's the best music making, like this.But of course it's not only about motivation and giving them a lot of physical energy. You also have to be very professional. And look again at this Kleiber. Can we have the next video, quickly? You'll see what happens when there is a mistake.(Music) Again you see the beautiful body language. (Music) And now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done. Go along with the video. Look. See, second time for the same player. (Laughter) And now the third time for the same player. (Laughter) ""Wait for me after the concert. I have a short notice to give you."" You know, when it's needed, the authority is there. It's very important. But authority is not enough to make people your partners.Let's see the next video, please. See what happens here. You might be surprised having seen Kleiber as such a hyperactive guy. He's conducting Mozart. (Music) The whole orchestra is playing. (Music) Now something else. (Music) See? He is there 100 percent, but not commanding, not telling what to do. Rather enjoying what the soloist is doing. (Music)Another solo now. See what you can pick up from this. (Music) Look at the eyes. Okay. You see that? First of all, it's a kind of a compliment we all like to get. It's not feedback. It's an ""Mmmm ..."" Yeah, it comes from here. So that's a good thing. And the second thing is it's about actually being in control, but in a very special way. When Kleiber does — did you see the eyes, going from here? (Singing) You know what happens? Gravitation is no more.Kleiber not only creates a process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place. So again, the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work, and creative and all of that. And the level in which Kleiber is in control is in a different level. So control is no longer a zero-sum game. You have this control. You have this control. And all you put together, in partnership, brings about the best music. So Kleiber is about process. Kleiber is about conditions in the world.But you need to have process and content to create the meaning. Lenny Bernstein, my own personal maestro. Since he was a great teacher, Lenny Bernstein always started from the meaning. Look at this, please.(Music)Do you remember the face of Muti, at the beginning? Well he had a wonderful expression, but only one. (Laughter) Did you see Lenny's face? You know why? Because the meaning of the music is pain. And you're playing a painful sound. And you look at Lenny and he's suffering. But not in a way that you want to stop. It's suffering, like, enjoying himself in a Jewish way, as they say. (Laughter) But you can see the music on his face. You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. Now it's about you, the player, telling the story. Now it's a reversed thing. You're telling the story. And you're telling the story. And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to. And Bernstein enables that. Isn't that wonderful?Now, if you are doing all the things we talked about, together, and maybe some others, you can get to this wonderful point of doing without doing. And for the last video, I think this is simply the best title. My friend Peter says, ""If you love something, give it away."" So, please.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors
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"Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years ago I read a newspaper article which said that one day syringes would be one of the major causes of the spread of AIDS, the transmission of AIDS. I thought this was unacceptable. So I decided to do something about it.Sadly, it's come true. Malaria, as we all know, kills approximately one million people a year. The reuse of syringes now exceeds that and kills 1.3 million people a year. This young girl and her friend that I met in an orphanage in Delhi were HIV positive from a syringe. And what was so sad about this particular story was that once their parents had found out — and don't forget, their parents took them to the doctor — the parents threw them out on the street. And hence they ended up in an orphanage.And it comes from situations like this where you have either skilled or unskilled practitioners, blindly giving an injection to someone. And the injection is so valuable, that the people basically trust the doctor, being second to God, which I've heard many times, to do the right thing. But in fact they're not. And you can understand, obviously, the transmission problem between people in high-virus areas.This video we took undercover, which shows you, over a half an hour period, a tray of medicines of 42 vials, which are being delivered with only 2 syringes in a public hospital in India. And over the course of half an hour, not one syringe was filmed being unwrapped. They started with two and they ended with two. And you'll see, just now, a nurse coming back to the tray, which is their sort of modular station, and dropping the syringe she's just used back in the tray for it to be picked up and used again. So you can imagine the scale of this problem. And in fact in India alone, 62 percent of all injections given are unsafe.These kids in Pakistan don't go to school. They are lucky. They already have a job. And that job is that they go around and pick up syringes from the back of hospitals, wash them, and in the course of this, obviously picking them up they injure themselves. And then they repackage them and sell them out on markets for literally more money than a sterile syringe in the first place, which is quite bizarre. In an interesting photo, their father, while we were talking to him, picked up a syringe and pricked his finger — I don't know whether you can see the drop of blood on the end — and immediately whipped out a box of matches, lit one, and burned the blood off the end of his finger, giving me full assurance that that was the way that you stopped the transmission of HIV.In China, recycling is a major issue. And they are collected en mass — you can see the scale of it here — and sorted out, by hand, back into the right sizes, and then put back out on the street. So recycling and reuse are the major issues here. But there was one interesting anecdote that I found in Indonesia. In all schools in Indonesia, there is usually a toy seller in the playground. The toy seller, in this case, had syringes, which they usually do, next door to the diggers, which is obviously what you would expect. And they use them, in the breaks, for water pistols. They squirt them at each other, which is lovely and innocent. And they are having great fun. But they also drink from them while they're in their breaks, because it's hot. And they squirt the water into their mouths. And these are used with traces of blood visible.So we need a better product. And we need better information. And I think, if I can just borrow this camera, I was going to show you my invention, which I came up with. So, it's a normal-looking syringe. You load it up in the normal way. This is made on existing equipment in 14 factories that we license. You give the injection and then put it down. If someone then tries to reuse it, it locks and breaks afterwards. It's very, very simple. Thank you. (Applause) And it costs the same as a normal syringe. And in comparison, a Coca-Cola is 10 times the price. And that will stop reusing a syringe 20 or 30 times.And I have an information charity which has done huge scale amount of work in India. And we're very proud of giving information to people, so that little kids like this don't do stupid things. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_koska_the_devastating_toll_of_syringe_reuse
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"The future, as we know it, is very unpredictable. The best minds in the best institutions generally get it wrong. This is in technology. This is in the area of politics, where pundits, the CIA, MI6 always get it wrong. And it's clearly in the area of finance. With institutions established to think about the future, the IMF, the BIS, the Financial Stability Forum, couldn't see what was coming. Over 20,000 economists whose job it is, competitive entry to get there, couldn't see what was happening.Globalization is getting more complex. And this change is getting more rapid. The future will be more unpredictable. Urbanization, integration, coming together, leads to a new renaissance. It did this a thousand years ago. The last 40 years have been extraordinary times. Life expectancy has gone up by about 25 years. It took from the Stone Age to achieve that. Income has gone up for a majority of the world's population, despite the population going up by about two billion people over this period. And illiteracy has gone down, from a half to about a quarter of the people on Earth. A huge opportunity, unleashing of new potential for innovation, for development.But there is an underbelly. There are two Achilles' heels of globalization. There is the Achilles' heel of growing inequality — those that are left out, those that feel angry, those that are not participating. Globalization has not been inclusive. The second Achilles' heel is complexity — a growing fragility, a growing brittleness. What happens in one place very quickly affects everything else. This is a systemic risk, systemic shock. We've seen it in the financial crisis. We've seen it in the pandemic flu. It will become virulent and it's something we have to build resilience against.A lot of this is driven by what's happening in technology. There have been huge leaps. There will be a million-fold improvement in what you can get for the same price in computing by 2030. That's what the experience of the last 20 years has been. It will continue. Our computers, our systems will be as primitive as the Apollo's are for today. Our mobile phones are more powerful than the total Apollo space engine. Our mobile phones are more powerful than some of the strongest computers of 20 years ago. So what will this do? It will create huge opportunities in technology. Miniaturization as well. There will be invisible capacity. Invisible capacity in our bodies, in our brains, and in the air. This is a dust mite on a nanoreplica.This sort of ability to do everything in new ways unleashes potential, not least in the area of medicine. This is a stem cell that we've developed here in Oxford, from an embryonic stem cell. We can develop any part of the body. Increasingly, over time, this will be possible from our own skin — able to replicate parts of the body. Fantastic potential for regenerative medicine. I don't think there will be a Special Olympics long after 2030, because of this capacity to regenerate parts of the body. But the question is, ""Who will have it?""The other major development is going to be in the area of what can happen in genetics. The capacity to create, as this mouse has been genetically modified, something which goes three times faster, lasts for three times longer, we could produce, as this mouse can, to the age of our equivalent of 80 years, using about the same amount of food. But will this only be available for the super rich, for those that can afford it? Are we headed for a new eugenics? Will only those that are able to afford it be able to be this super race of the future? (Laughter)So the big question for us is, ""How do we manage this technological change?"" How do we ensure that it creates a more inclusive technology, a technology which means that not only as we grow older, that we can also grow wiser, and that we're able to support the populations of the future? One of the most dramatic manifestations of these improvements will be moving from population pyramids to what we might term population coffins. There is unlikely to be a pension or a retirement age in 2030. These will be redundant concepts. And this isn't only something of the West.The most dramatic changes will be the skyscraper type of new pyramids that will take place in China and in many other countries. So forget about retirements if you're young. Forget about pensions. Think about life and where it's going to be going. Of course, migration will become even more important. The war on talent, the need to attract people at all skill ranges, to push us around in our wheelchairs, but also to drive our economies. Our innovation will be vital.The employment in the rich countries will go down from about 800 to about 700 million of these people. This would imply a massive leap in migration. So the concerns, the xenophobic concerns of today, of migration, will be turned on their head, as we search for people to help us sort out our pensions and our economies in the future. And then, the systemic risks. We understand that these will become much more virulent, that what we see today is this interweaving of societies, of systems, fastened by technologies and hastened by just-in-time management systems. Small levels of stock push resilience into other people's responsibility.The collapse in biodiversity, climate change, pandemics, financial crises: these will be the currency that we will think about. And so a new awareness will have to arise, of how we deal with these, how we mobilize ourselves, in a new way, and come together as a community to manage systemic risk. It's going to require innovation. It's going to require an understanding that the glory of globalization could also be its downfall. This could be our best century ever because of the achievements, or it could be our worst. And of course we need to worry about the individuals, particularly the individuals that feel that they've been left out in one way or another.An individual, for the first time in the history of humanity, will have the capacity, by 2030, to destroy the planet, to wreck everything, through the creation, for example, of a biopathogen. How do we begin to weave these tapestries together? How do we think about complex systems in new ways? That will be the challenge of the scholars, and of all of us engaged in thinking about the future. The rest of our lives will be in the future. We need to prepare for it now. We need to understand that the governance structure in the world is fossilized. It cannot begin to cope with the challenges that this will bring. We have to develop a new way of managing the planet, collectively, through collective wisdom.We know, and I know from my own experience, that amazing things can happen, when individuals and societies come together to change their future. I left South Africa, and 15 years later, after thinking I would never go back, I had the privilege and the honor to work in the government of Nelson Mandela. This was a miracle. We can create miracles, collectively, in our lifetime. It is vital that we do so. It is vital that the ideas that are nurtured in TED, that the ideas that we think about look forward, and make sure that this will be the most glorious century, and not one of eco-disaster and eco-collapse. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ian_goldin_navigating_our_global_future
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"I'm sure that, throughout the hundred-thousand-odd years of our species' existence, and even before, our ancestors looked up at the night sky, and wondered what stars are. Wondering, therefore, how to explain what they saw in terms of things unseen.Okay, so, most people only wondered that occasionally, like today, in breaks from whatever normally preoccupied them. But what normally preoccupied them also involved yearning to know. They wished they knew how to prevent their food supply from sometimes failing, and how they could rest when they were tired without risking starvation, be warmer, cooler, safer, in less pain. I bet those prehistoric cave artists would have loved to know how to draw better.In every aspect of their lives, they wished for progress, just as we do. But they failed, almost completely, to make any. They didn't know how to. Discoveries like fire happened so rarely, that from an individual's point of view, the world never improved. Nothing new was learned.The first clue to the origin of starlight happened as recently as 1899: radioactivity. Within 40 years, physicists discovered the whole explanation, expressed, as usual, in elegant symbols. But never mind the symbols. Think how many discoveries they represent. Nuclei and nuclear reactions, of course. But isotopes, particles of electricity, antimatter, neutrinos, the conversion of mass to energy — that's E=mc^2 — gamma rays, transmutation. That ancient dream that had always eluded the alchemists was achieved through these same theories that explained starlight and other ancient mysteries, and new, unexpected phenomena.That all that, discovered in 40 years, had not been in the previous hundred thousand, was not for lack of thinking about stars, and all those other urgent problems they had. They even arrived at answers, such as myths, that dominated their lives, yet bore almost no resemblance to the truth. The tragedy of that protracted stagnation isn't sufficiently recognized, I think. These were people with brains of essentially the same design that eventually did discover all those things. But that ability to make progress remained almost unused, until the event that revolutionized the human condition and changed the universe.Or so we should hope. Because that event was the Scientific Revolution, ever since which our knowledge of the physical world, and of how to adapt it to our wishes, has been growing relentlessly. Now, what had changed? What were people now doing for the first time that made that difference between stagnation and rapid, open-ended discovery? How to make that difference is surely the most important universal truth that it is possible to know. Worryingly, there is no consensus about what it is. So, I'll tell you. But I'll have to backtrack a little first.Before the Scientific Revolution, they believed that everything important, knowable, was already known, enshrined in ancient writings, institutions, and in some genuinely useful rules of thumb — which were, however, entrenched as dogmas, along with many falsehoods. So they believed that knowledge came from authorities that actually knew very little. And therefore progress depended on learning how to reject the authority of learned men, priests, traditions and rulers. Which is why the Scientific Revolution had to have a wider context.The Enlightenment, a revolution in how people sought knowledge, trying not to rely on authority. ""Take no one's word for it."" But that can't be what made the difference. Authorities had been rejected before, many times. And that rarely, if ever, caused anything like the Scientific Revolution. At the time, what they thought distinguished science was a radical idea about things unseen, known as empiricism. All knowledge derives from the senses. Well, we've seen that that can't be true. It did help by promoting observation and experiment. But, from the outset, it was obvious that there was something horribly wrong with it.Knowledge comes from the senses. In what language? Certainly not the language of mathematics, in which, Galileo rightly said, the book of nature is written. Look at the world. You don't see equations carved on to the mountainsides. If you did, it would be because people had carved them. By the way, why don't we do that? What's wrong with us? (Laughter)Empiricism is inadequate because, well, scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen. And the unseen, you have to admit, doesn't come to us through the senses. We don't see those nuclear reactions in stars. We don't see the origin of species. We don't see the curvature of space-time, and other universes. But we know about those things. How?Well, the classic empiricist answer is induction. The unseen resembles the seen. But it doesn't. You know what the clinching evidence was that space-time is curved? It was a photograph, not of space-time, but of an eclipse, with a dot there rather than there. And the evidence for evolution? Some rocks and some finches. And parallel universes? Again: dots there, rather than there, on a screen. What we see, in all these cases, bears no resemblance to the reality that we conclude is responsible — only a long chain of theoretical reasoning and interpretation connects them.""Ah!"" say creationists. ""So you admit it's all interpretation. No one has ever seen evolution. We see rocks. You have your interpretation. We have ours. Yours comes from guesswork, ours from the Bible."" But what creationist and empiricists both ignore is that, in that sense, no one has ever seen a bible either, that the eye only detects light, which we don't perceive. Brains only detect nerve impulses. And they don't perceive even those as what they really are, namely electrical crackles. So we perceive nothing as what it really is.Our connection to reality is never just perception. It's always, as Karl Popper put it, theory-laden. Scientific knowledge isn't derived from anything. It's like all knowledge. It's conjectural, guesswork, tested by observation, not derived from it. So, were testable conjectures the great innovation that opened the intellectual prison gates? No. Contrary to what's usually said, testability is common, in myths and all sorts of other irrational modes of thinking. Any crank claiming the sun will go out next Tuesday has got a testable prediction.Consider the ancient Greek myth explaining seasons. Hades, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the Goddess of Spring, and negotiates a forced marriage contract, requiring her to return regularly, and lets her go. And each year, she is magically compelled to return. And her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth, is sad, and makes it cold and barren. That myth is testable. If winter is caused by Demeter's sadness, then it must happen everywhere on Earth simultaneously. So if the ancient Greeks had only known that Australia is at its warmest when Demeter is at her saddest, they'd have known that their theory is false.So what was wrong with that myth, and with all pre-scientific thinking, and what, then, made that momentous difference? I think there is one thing you have to care about. And that implies testability, the scientific method, the Enlightenment, and everything. And here is the crucial thing. There is such a thing as a defect in a story. I don't just mean a logical defect. I mean a bad explanation. What does that mean? Well, explanation is an assertion about what's there, unseen, that accounts for what's seen.Because the explanatory role of Persephone's marriage contract could be played equally well by infinitely many other ad hoc entities. Why a marriage contract and not any other reason for regular annual action? Here is one. Persephone wasn't released. She escaped, and returns every spring to take revenge on Hades, with her Spring powers. She cools his domain with Spring air, venting heat up to the surface, creating summer. That accounts for the same phenomena as the original myth. It's equally testable. Yet what it asserts about reality is, in many ways, the opposite. And that is possible because the details of the original myth are unrelated to seasons, except via the myth itself.This easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation, because, without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants, advocating one of them, in preference to the others, is irrational. So, for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress, seek good explanations, the ones that can't be easily varied, while still explaining the phenomena.Now, our current explanation of seasons is that the Earth's axis is tilted like that, so each hemisphere tilts toward the sun for half the year, and away for the other half. Better put that up. (Laughter) That's a good explanation: hard to vary, because every detail plays a functional role. For instance, we know, independently of seasons, that surfaces tilted away from radiant heat are heated less, and that a spinning sphere, in space, points in a constant direction. And the tilt also explains the sun's angle of elevation at different times of year, and predicts that the seasons will be out of phase in the two hemispheres. If they'd been observed in phase, the theory would have been refuted. But now, the fact that it's also a good explanation, hard to vary, makes the crucial difference.If the ancient Greeks had found out about seasons in Australia, they could have easily varied their myth to predict that. For instance, when Demeter is upset, she banishes heat from her vicinity, into the other hemisphere, where it makes summer. So, being proved wrong by observation, and changing their theory accordingly, still wouldn't have got the ancient Greeks one jot closer to understanding seasons, because their explanation was bad: easy to vary. And it's only when an explanation is good that it even matters whether it's testable. If the axis-tilt theory had been refuted, its defenders would have had nowhere to go. No easily implemented change could make that tilt cause the same seasons in both hemispheres.The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress. It's the basic regulating principle of the Enlightenment. So, in science, two false approaches blight progress. One is well known: untestable theories. But the more important one is explanationless theories. Whenever you're told that some existing statistical trend will continue, but you aren't given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend, you're being told a wizard did it.When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes — but not how gene percentages confer rights — wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don't explain how genes cause opinions, they've settled nothing. They are saying that our opinions are caused by wizards, and presumably so are their own. That the truth consists of hard to vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is, itself, unseen, yet impossible to vary. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation
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"All buildings today have something in common. They're made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All of this effort results in an inert object. And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it.Now, in order to do this, we need the right kind of language. Living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world, through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism. And this is the conversion of one group of substances into another, either through the production or the absorption of energy. And this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way. So, I'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture. But they don't exist. So I'm having to make them.I'm working with architect Neil Spiller at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and we're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach. That means we're generating them from scratch. One of our collaborators is chemist Martin Hanczyc, and he's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter. Now, that's exactly the kind of process that I'm interested in, when we're thinking about sustainable materials.So, Martin, he works with a system called the protocell. Now all this is — and it's magic — is a little fatty bag. And it's got a chemical battery in it. And it has no DNA. This little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living. It is able to move around its environment. It can follow chemical gradients. It can undergo complex reactions, some of which are happily architectural. So here we are. These are protocells, patterning their environment. We don't know how they do that yet. Here, this is a protocell, and it's vigorously shedding this skin. Now, this looks like a chemical kind of birth. This is a violent process.Here, we've got a protocell to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate. And that's the shell around that globular fat. They are quite brittle. So you've only got a part of one there. So what we're trying to do is, we're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom-up construction approaches for architecture, which contrast the current, Victorian, top-down methods which impose structure upon matter. That can't be energetically sensible.So, bottom-up materials actually exist today. They've been in use, in architecture, since ancient times. If you walk around the city of Oxford, where we are today, and have a look at the brickwork, which I've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days, you'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone. And if you look even closer, you'll see, in that limestone, there are little shells and little skeletons that are piled upon each other. And then they are fossilized over millions of years.Now a block of limestone, in itself, isn't particularly that interesting. It looks beautiful. But imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere. Maybe they could extract carbon dioxide. Would it give this block of limestone new properties? Well, most likely it would. It might be able to grow. It might be able to self-repair, and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment.So, architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material. They think big. Okay? So when we think about scaling up metabolic materials, we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls, or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water. So, one of these examples would of course be the historic city of Venice. Now, Venice, as you know, has a tempestuous relationship with the sea, and is built upon wooden piles. So we've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we're working with to sustainably reclaim Venice. And architect Christian Kerrigan has come up with a series of designs that show us how it may be possible to actually grow a limestone reef underneath the city.So, here is the technology we have today. This is our protocell technology, effectively making a shell, like its limestone forefathers, and depositing it in a very complex environment, against natural materials. We're looking at crystal lattices to see the bonding process in this. Now, this is the very interesting part. We don't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals. What we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles.So, you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light, toward the dark foundations. We've observed this in the laboratory. The protocells can actually move away from the light. They can actually also move towards the light. You have to just choose your species. So that these don't just exist as one entity, we kind of chemically engineer them. And so here the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically, around the foundations of Venice, effectively petrifying it.Now, this isn't going to happen tomorrow. It's going to take a while. It's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case-by-case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of Venice. But gradually, as the buildings are repaired, we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city. An accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide. Also it will attract the local marine ecology, who will find their own ecological niches within this architecture.So, this is really interesting. Now we have an architecture that connects a city to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way. But perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere. This is terrestrial chemistry. We've all got it, which means that this technology is just as appropriate for developing countries as it is for First World countries. So, in summary, I'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to Victorian technologies, and building architectures from a bottom-up approach.Secondly, these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems, which means they can perform in similar ways. They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture. And finally, an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_armstrong_architecture_that_repairs_itself
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"I'm a writer and a journalist, and I'm also an insanely curious person, so in 22 years as a journalist, I've learned how to do a lot of new things. And three years ago, one of the things I learned how to do was to become invisible. I became one of the working homeless. I quit my job as a newspaper editor after my father died in February of that same year, and decided to travel. His death hit me pretty hard. And there were a lot of things that I wanted to feel and deal with while I was doing that.I've camped my whole life. And I decided that living in a van for a year to do this would be like one long camping trip. So I packed my cat, my Rottweiler and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van, and drove off into the sunset, having fully failed to realize three critical things. One: that society equates living in a permanent structure, even a shack, with having value as a person. Two: I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality, if we let it. Three: I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle.At first, living in the van was great. I showered in campgrounds. I ate out regularly. And I had time to relax and to grieve. But then the anger and the depression about my father's death set in. My freelance job ended. And I had to get a full-time job to pay the bills. What had been a really mild spring turned into a miserably hot summer. And it became impossible to park anywhere — (Laughs) — without being very obvious that I had a cat and a dog with me, and it was really hot. The cat came and went through an open window in the van. The doggy went into doggy day care. And I sweated. Whenever I could, I used employee showers in office buildings and truck stops. Or I washed up in public rest rooms.Nighttime temperatures in the van rarely dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, making it difficult or impossible to sleep. Food rotted in the heat. Ice in my ice chest melted within hours, and it was pretty miserable. I couldn't afford to find an apartment, or couldn't afford an apartment that would allow me to have the Rottweiler and the cat. And I refused to give them up, so I stayed in the van. And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night, I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet.When winter weather set in, the temperatures dropped below freezing. And they stayed there. And I faced a whole new set of challenges. I parked a different place every night so I would avoid being noticed and hassled by the police. I didn't always succeed.But I felt out of control of my life. And I don't know when or how it happened, but the speed at which I went from being a talented writer and journalist to being a homeless woman, living in a van, took my breath away. I hadn't changed. My I.Q. hadn't dropped. My talent, my integrity, my values, everything about me remained the same. But I had changed somehow. I spiraled deeper and deeper into a depression.And eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic. And I went. I hadn't bathed in three days. I was as smelly and as depressed as anyone in line. I just wasn't drunk or high. And when several of the homeless men realized that, including a former university professor, they said, ""You aren't homeless. Why are you really here?"" Other homeless people didn't see me as homeless, but I did. Then the professor listened to my story and he said, ""You have a job. You have hope. The real homeless don't have hope."" A reaction to the medication the clinic gave me for my depression left me suicidal. And I remember thinking, ""If I killed myself, no one would notice.""A friend told me, shortly after that, that she had heard that Tim Russert, a nationally renowned journalist, had been talking about me on national T.V. An essay I'd written about my father, the year before he died, was in Tim's new book. And he was doing the talk show circuit. And he was talking about my writing. And when I realized that Tim Russert, former moderator of ""Meet the Press,"" was talking about my writing, while I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I started laughing. You should too. (Laughter)I started laughing because it got to the point where, was I a writer, or was I a homeless woman? So I went in the bookstore. And I found Tim's book. And I stood there. And I reread my essay. And I cried. Because I was a writer. I was a writer. Shortly after that I moved back to Tennessee. I alternated between living in a van and couch surfing with friends. And I started writing again. By the summer of the following year I was a working journalist. I was winning awards. I was living in my own apartment. I was no longer homeless. And I was no longer invisible.Thousands of people work full and part-time jobs, and live in their cars. But society continues to stigmatize and criminalize living in your vehicle or on the streets. So the homeless, the working homeless, primarily remain invisible. But if you ever meet one, engage them, encourage them, and offer them hope. The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope. And I'm not here to be the poster girl for the homeless. I'm not here to encourage you to give money to the next panhandler you meet. But I am here to tell you that, based on my experience, people are not where they live, where they sleep, or what their life situation is at any given time. Three years ago I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and today I'm speaking at TED. Hope always, always finds a way. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/becky_blanton_the_year_i_was_homeless
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"On the 30th of May, 1832, a gunshot was heard ringing out across the 13th arrondissement in Paris. (Gunshot) A peasant, who was walking to market that morning, ran towards where the gunshot had come from, and found a young man writhing in agony on the floor, clearly shot by a dueling wound. The young man's name was Evariste Galois. He was a well-known revolutionary in Paris at the time. Galois was taken to the local hospital where he died the next day in the arms of his brother. And the last words he said to his brother were, ""Don't cry for me, Alfred. I need all the courage I can muster to die at the age of 20.""It wasn't, in fact, revolutionary politics for which Galois was famous. But a few years earlier, while still at school, he'd actually cracked one of the big mathematical problems at the time. And he wrote to the academicians in Paris, trying to explain his theory. But the academicians couldn't understand anything that he wrote. (Laughter) This is how he wrote most of his mathematics.So, the night before that duel, he realized this possibly is his last chance to try and explain his great breakthrough. So he stayed up the whole night, writing away, trying to explain his ideas. And as the dawn came up and he went to meet his destiny, he left this pile of papers on the table for the next generation. Maybe the fact that he stayed up all night doing mathematics was the fact that he was such a bad shot that morning and got killed.But contained inside those documents was a new language, a language to understand one of the most fundamental concepts of science — namely symmetry. Now, symmetry is almost nature's language. It helps us to understand so many different bits of the scientific world. For example, molecular structure. What crystals are possible, we can understand through the mathematics of symmetry.In microbiology you really don't want to get a symmetrical object, because they are generally rather nasty. The swine flu virus, at the moment, is a symmetrical object. And it uses the efficiency of symmetry to be able to propagate itself so well. But on a larger scale of biology, actually symmetry is very important, because it actually communicates genetic information.I've taken two pictures here and I've made them artificially symmetrical. And if I ask you which of these you find more beautiful, you're probably drawn to the lower two. Because it is hard to make symmetry. And if you can make yourself symmetrical, you're sending out a sign that you've got good genes, you've got a good upbringing and therefore you'll make a good mate. So symmetry is a language which can help to communicate genetic information.Symmetry can also help us to explain what's happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. Or what's not happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. To be able to make predictions about the fundamental particles we might see there, it seems that they are all facets of some strange symmetrical shape in a higher dimensional space.And I think Galileo summed up, very nicely, the power of mathematics to understand the scientific world around us. He wrote, ""The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.""But it's not just scientists who are interested in symmetry. Artists too love to play around with symmetry. They also have a slightly more ambiguous relationship with it. Here is Thomas Mann talking about symmetry in ""The Magic Mountain."" He has a character describing the snowflake, and he says he ""shuddered at its perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death.""But what artists like to do is to set up expectations of symmetry and then break them. And a beautiful example of this I found, actually, when I visited a colleague of mine in Japan, Professor Kurokawa. And he took me up to the temples in Nikko. And just after this photo was taken we walked up the stairs. And the gateway you see behind has eight columns, with beautiful symmetrical designs on them. Seven of them are exactly the same, and the eighth one is turned upside down.And I said to Professor Kurokawa, ""Wow, the architects must have really been kicking themselves when they realized that they'd made a mistake and put this one upside down."" And he said, ""No, no, no. It was a very deliberate act."" And he referred me to this lovely quote from the Japanese ""Essays in Idleness"" from the 14th century, in which the essayist wrote, ""In everything, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth."" Even when building the Imperial Palace, they always leave one place unfinished.But if I had to choose one building in the world to be cast out on a desert island, to live the rest of my life, being an addict of symmetry, I would probably choose the Alhambra in Granada. This is a palace celebrating symmetry. Recently I took my family — we do these rather kind of nerdy mathematical trips, which my family love. This is my son Tamer. You can see he's really enjoying our mathematical trip to the Alhambra. But I wanted to try and enrich him. I think one of the problems about school mathematics is it doesn't look at how mathematics is embedded in the world we live in. So, I wanted to open his eyes up to how much symmetry is running through the Alhambra.You see it already. Immediately you go in, the reflective symmetry in the water. But it's on the walls where all the exciting things are happening. The Moorish artists were denied the possibility to draw things with souls. So they explored a more geometric art. And so what is symmetry? The Alhambra somehow asks all of these questions. What is symmetry? When [there] are two of these walls, do they have the same symmetries? Can we say whether they discovered all of the symmetries in the Alhambra?And it was Galois who produced a language to be able to answer some of these questions. For Galois, symmetry — unlike for Thomas Mann, which was something still and deathly — for Galois, symmetry was all about motion. What can you do to a symmetrical object, move it in some way, so it looks the same as before you moved it? I like to describe it as the magic trick moves. What can you do to something? You close your eyes. I do something, put it back down again. It looks like it did before it started.So, for example, the walls in the Alhambra — I can take all of these tiles, and fix them at the yellow place, rotate them by 90 degrees, put them all back down again and they fit perfectly down there. And if you open your eyes again, you wouldn't know that they'd moved. But it's the motion that really characterizes the symmetry inside the Alhambra. But it's also about producing a language to describe this. And the power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.So I'm going to take you through, perhaps push you a little bit mathematically — so brace yourselves — push you a little bit to understand how this language works, which enables us to capture what is symmetry. So, let's take these two symmetrical objects here. Let's take the twisted six-pointed starfish. What can I do to the starfish which makes it look the same? Well, there I rotated it by a sixth of a turn, and still it looks like it did before I started. I could rotate it by a third of a turn, or a half a turn, or put it back down on its image, or two thirds of a turn. And a fifth symmetry, I can rotate it by five sixths of a turn. And those are things that I can do to the symmetrical object that make it look like it did before I started.Now, for Galois, there was actually a sixth symmetry. Can anybody think what else I could do to this which would leave it like I did before I started? I can't flip it because I've put a little twist on it, haven't I? It's got no reflective symmetry. But what I could do is just leave it where it is, pick it up, and put it down again. And for Galois this was like the zeroth symmetry. Actually, the invention of the number zero was a very modern concept, seventh century A.D., by the Indians. It seems mad to talk about nothing. And this is the same idea. This is a symmetrical — so everything has symmetry, where you just leave it where it is.So, this object has six symmetries. And what about the triangle? Well, I can rotate by a third of a turn clockwise or a third of a turn anticlockwise. But now this has some reflectional symmetry. I can reflect it in the line through X, or the line through Y, or the line through Z. Five symmetries and then of course the zeroth symmetry where I just pick it up and leave it where it is. So both of these objects have six symmetries. Now, I'm a great believer that mathematics is not a spectator sport, and you have to do some mathematics in order to really understand it.So here is a little question for you. And I'm going to give a prize at the end of my talk for the person who gets closest to the answer. The Rubik's Cube. How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? How many things can I do to this object and put it down so it still looks like a cube? Okay? So I want you to think about that problem as we go on, and count how many symmetries there are. And there will be a prize for the person who gets closest at the end.But let's go back down to symmetries that I got for these two objects. What Galois realized: it isn't just the individual symmetries, but how they interact with each other which really characterizes the symmetry of an object. If I do one magic trick move followed by another, the combination is a third magic trick move. And here we see Galois starting to develop a language to see the substance of the things unseen, the sort of abstract idea of the symmetry underlying this physical object. For example, what if I turn the starfish by a sixth of a turn, and then a third of a turn?So I've given names. The capital letters, A, B, C, D, E, F, are the names for the rotations. B, for example, rotates the little yellow dot to the B on the starfish. And so on. So what if I do B, which is a sixth of a turn, followed by C, which is a third of a turn? Well let's do that. A sixth of a turn, followed by a third of a turn, the combined effect is as if I had just rotated it by half a turn in one go. So the little table here records how the algebra of these symmetries work. I do one followed by another, the answer is it's rotation D, half a turn. What I if I did it in the other order? Would it make any difference? Let's see. Let's do the third of the turn first, and then the sixth of a turn. Of course, it doesn't make any difference. It still ends up at half a turn.And there is some symmetry here in the way the symmetries interact with each other. But this is completely different to the symmetries of the triangle. Let's see what happens if we do two symmetries with the triangle, one after the other. Let's do a rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise, and reflect in the line through X. Well, the combined effect is as if I had just done the reflection in the line through Z to start with. Now, let's do it in a different order. Let's do the reflection in X first, followed by the rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise. The combined effect, the triangle ends up somewhere completely different. It's as if it was reflected in the line through Y.Now it matters what order you do the operations in. And this enables us to distinguish why the symmetries of these objects — they both have six symmetries. So why shouldn't we say they have the same symmetries? But the way the symmetries interact enable us — we've now got a language to distinguish why these symmetries are fundamentally different. And you can try this when you go down to the pub, later on. Take a beer mat and rotate it by a quarter of a turn, then flip it. And then do it in the other order, and the picture will be facing in the opposite direction.Now, Galois produced some laws for how these tables — how symmetries interact. It's almost like little Sudoku tables. You don't see any symmetry twice in any row or column. And, using those rules, he was able to say that there are in fact only two objects with six symmetries. And they'll be the same as the symmetries of the triangle, or the symmetries of the six-pointed starfish. I think this is an amazing development. It's almost like the concept of number being developed for symmetry. In the front here, I've got one, two, three people sitting on one, two, three chairs. The people and the chairs are very different, but the number, the abstract idea of the number, is the same.And we can see this now: we go back to the walls in the Alhambra. Here are two very different walls, very different geometric pictures. But, using the language of Galois, we can understand that the underlying abstract symmetries of these things are actually the same. For example, let's take this beautiful wall with the triangles with a little twist on them. You can rotate them by a sixth of a turn if you ignore the colors. We're not matching up the colors. But the shapes match up if I rotate by a sixth of a turn around the point where all the triangles meet. What about the center of a triangle? I can rotate by a third of a turn around the center of the triangle, and everything matches up. And then there is an interesting place halfway along an edge, where I can rotate by 180 degrees. And all the tiles match up again. So rotate along halfway along the edge, and they all match up.Now, let's move to the very different-looking wall in the Alhambra. And we find the same symmetries here, and the same interaction. So, there was a sixth of a turn. A third of a turn where the Z pieces meet. And the half a turn is halfway between the six pointed stars. And although these walls look very different, Galois has produced a language to say that in fact the symmetries underlying these are exactly the same. And it's a symmetry we call 6-3-2.Here is another example in the Alhambra. This is a wall, a ceiling, and a floor. They all look very different. But this language allows us to say that they are representations of the same symmetrical abstract object, which we call 4-4-2. Nothing to do with football, but because of the fact that there are two places where you can rotate by a quarter of a turn, and one by half a turn.Now, this power of the language is even more, because Galois can say, ""Did the Moorish artists discover all of the possible symmetries on the walls in the Alhambra?"" And it turns out they almost did. You can prove, using Galois' language, there are actually only 17 different symmetries that you can do in the walls in the Alhambra. And they, if you try to produce a different wall with this 18th one, it will have to have the same symmetries as one of these 17.But these are things that we can see. And the power of Galois' mathematical language is it also allows us to create symmetrical objects in the unseen world, beyond the two-dimensional, three-dimensional, all the way through to the four- or five- or infinite-dimensional space. And that's where I work. I create mathematical objects, symmetrical objects, using Galois' language, in very high dimensional spaces. So I think it's a great example of things unseen, which the power of mathematical language allows you to create.So, like Galois, I stayed up all last night creating a new mathematical symmetrical object for you, and I've got a picture of it here. Well, unfortunately it isn't really a picture. If I could have my board at the side here, great, excellent. Here we are. Unfortunately, I can't show you a picture of this symmetrical object. But here is the language which describes how the symmetries interact.Now, this new symmetrical object does not have a name yet. Now, people like getting their names on things, on craters on the moon or new species of animals. So I'm going to give you the chance to get your name on a new symmetrical object which hasn't been named before. And this thing — species die away, and moons kind of get hit by meteors and explode — but this mathematical object will live forever. It will make you immortal. In order to win this symmetrical object, what you have to do is to answer the question I asked you at the beginning. How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have?Okay, I'm going to sort you out. Rather than you all shouting out, I want you to count how many digits there are in that number. Okay? If you've got it as a factorial, you've got to expand the factorials. Okay, now if you want to play, I want you to stand up, okay? If you think you've got an estimate for how many digits, right — we've already got one competitor here. If you all stay down he wins it automatically. Okay. Excellent. So we've got four here, five, six. Great. Excellent. That should get us going. All right.Anybody with five or less digits, you've got to sit down, because you've underestimated. Five or less digits. So, if you're in the tens of thousands you've got to sit down. 60 digits or more, you've got to sit down. You've overestimated. 20 digits or less, sit down. How many digits are there in your number? Two? So you should have sat down earlier. (Laughter) Let's have the other ones, who sat down during the 20, up again. Okay? If I told you 20 or less, stand up. Because this one. I think there were a few here. The people who just last sat down.Okay, how many digits do you have in your number? (Laughs) 21. Okay good. How many do you have in yours? 18. So it goes to this lady here. 21 is the closest. It actually has — the number of symmetries in the Rubik's cube has 25 digits. So now I need to name this object. So, what is your name? I need your surname. Symmetrical objects generally — spell it for me. G-H-E-Z No, SO2 has already been used, actually, in the mathematical language. So you can't have that one. So Ghez, there we go. That's your new symmetrical object. You are now immortal. (Applause)And if you'd like your own symmetrical object, I have a project raising money for a charity in Guatemala, where I will stay up all night and devise an object for you, for a donation to this charity to help kids get into education in Guatemala. And I think what drives me, as a mathematician, are those things which are not seen, the things that we haven't discovered. It's all the unanswered questions which make mathematics a living subject. And I will always come back to this quote from the Japanese ""Essays in Idleness"": ""In everything, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_du_sautoy_symmetry_reality_s_riddle
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"I believe that there are new, hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions — institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life: schools, hospitals, workplaces, factories, offices, etc. And something that I see happening is something that I would like to call a sort of ""democratization of intimacy."" And what do I mean by that? I mean that what people are doing is, in fact, they are sort of, with their communication channels, they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them. How are they doing this? They're doing it in a very simple way, by calling their mom from work, by IMing from their office to their friends, by texting under the desk. The pictures that you're seeing behind me are people that I visited in the last few months. And I asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most. And somebody brought a boyfriend, somebody a father. One young woman brought her grandfather. For 20 years, I've been looking at how people use channels such as email, the mobile phone, texting, etc. What we're actually going to see is that, fundamentally, people are communicating on a regular basis with five, six, seven of their most intimate sphere. Now, lets take some data. Facebook. Recently some sociologists from Facebook — Facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels. And an average user, said Cameron Marlow, from Facebook, has about 120 friends. But he actually talks to, has two-way exchanges with, about four to six people on a regular base, depending on his gender. Academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists, but fundamentally people chat with two, three, four — anyway, less than five. My own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people. 80 percent. And when you go to Skype, it's down to two people. A lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed. I mean, I've been a bit disappointed sometimes when I saw this data and all this deployment, just for five people. And some sociologists actually feel that it's a closure, it's a cocooning, that we're disengaging from the public. And I would actually, I would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it, and from where they're doing it, actually there is an incredible social transformation. There are three stories that I think are quite good examples. The first gentleman, he's a baker. And so he starts working every morning at four o'clock in the morning. And around eight o'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven, cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife. He just wants to wish her a good day, because that's the start of her day. And I've heard this story a number of times. A young factory worker who works night shifts, who manages to sneak away from the factory floor, where there is CCTV by the way, and find a corner, where at 11 o'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight. Or a mother who, at four o'clock, suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home. Then there is another couple, there is a Brazilian couple. They've lived in Italy for a number of years. They Skype with their families a few times a week. But once a fortnight, they actually put the computer on their dining table, pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in Sao Paulo. And they have a big event of it. And I heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from Kosovo in Switzerland. They had set up a big screen in their living room, and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother. But Danny Miller, who is a very good anthropologist who is working on Filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the Philippines, was telling me about how much parenting is going on through Skype, and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through Skype. And then there is the third couple. They are two friends. They chat to each other every day, a few times a day actually. And finally, finally, they've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work. And now, obviously, they have it open. Whenever they have a moment they chat to each other. And this is exactly what we've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school, under the table, and texting under the table to their friends. So, none of these cases are unique. I mean, I could tell you hundreds of them. But what is really exceptional is the setting. So, think of the three settings I've talked to you about: factory, migration, office. But it could be in a school, it could be an administration, it could be a hospital. Three settings that, if we just step back 15 years, if you just think back 15 years, when you clocked in, when you clocked in to an office, when you clocked in to a factory, there was no contact for the whole duration of the time, there was no contact with your private sphere. If you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere. If you were in management, oh, that was a different story. Maybe you had a direct line. If you were not, you maybe had to go through an operator. But basically, when you walked into those buildings, the private sphere was left behind you. And this has become such a norm of our professional lives, such a norm and such an expectation. And it had nothing to do with technical capability. The phones were there. But the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand, fully to the people around you. That was where the focus had to be. And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage. If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. And then the school enacts perfectly well. It mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices: rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time. And of course, the major thing: learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention. This only started about 150 years ago. It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution. When people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work. And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach, where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere. So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades. They were living on top of the land they were laboring. They were living on top of the workshops where they were working. And if you think, it's permeated our whole culture, even our cities. If you think of medieval cities, medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there. Now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas. And actually, over these 150 years, there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged. So the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out, the more removed he would be from his personal sphere. People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations. And they are doing it massively. The Pew Institute, which produces good data on a regular basis on, for instance, in the States, says that — and I think that this number is conservative — 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office. I really think that the number is conservative. In my own research, we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o'clock in the morning, whatever the country. 75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones. 100 percent are using text. The point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions. I'm always surprised the U.S. Army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance, of soldiers in Iraq having daily contact with their families. But there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access. And every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like a $15 fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated. And they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy.","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy
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"A few years ago, my eyes were opened to the dark side of the construction industry. In 2006, young Qatari students took me to go and see the migrant worker camps. And since then I've followed the unfolding issue of worker rights.In the last six months, more than 300 skyscrapers in the UAE have been put on hold or canceled. Behind the headlines that lay behind these buildings is the fate of the often-indentured construction worker. 1.1 million of them. Mainly Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Nepalese, these laborers risk everything to make money for their families back home. They pay a middle-man thousands of dollars to be there. And when they arrive, they find themselves in labor camps with no water, no air conditioning, and their passports taken away.While it's easy to point the finger at local officials and higher authorities, 99 percent of these people are hired by the private sector, and so therefore we're equally, if not more, accountable. Groups like Buildsafe UAE have emerged, but the numbers are simply overwhelming. In August 2008, UAE public officials noted that 40 percent of the country's 1,098 labor camps had violated minimum health and fire safety regulations. And last summer, more than 10,000 workers protested for the non-payment of wages, for the poor quality of food, and inadequate housing.And then the financial collapse happened. When the contractors have gone bust, as they've been overleveraged like everyone else, the difference is everything goes missing, documentation, passports, and tickets home for these workers. Currently, right now, thousands of workers are abandoned. There is no way back home. And there is no way, and no proof of arrival. These are the boom-and-bust refugees.The question is, as a building professional, as an architect, an engineer, as a developer, if you know this is going on, as we go to the sights every single week, are you complacent or complicit in the human rights violations? So let's forget your environmental footprint. Let's think about your ethical footprint. What good is it to build a zero-carbon, energy efficient complex, when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best? Now, recently I've been told I've been taking the high road. But, quite frankly, on this issue, there is no other road.So let's not forget who is really paying the price of this financial collapse. And that as we worry about our next job in the office, the next design that we can get, to keep our workers. Let's not forget these men, who are truly dying to work. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_sinclair_the_refugees_of_boom_and_bust
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"I'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper. Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change; and like this when they have to do with air quality or smog. They're two branches of the same field of atmospheric science.Recently, the headlines looked like this when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system. That report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries. They wrote almost 1,000 pages on the topic, and all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers from 113 countries. It's a big community; such a big community, in fact, that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world.Over 15,000 scientists go to San Francisco every year for that. Every one of those scientists is in a research group, and every research group studies a wide variety of topics. For us at Cambridge, it's as varied as the El Niño Oscillation, which affects weather and climate, to the assimilation of satellite data, to emissions from crops that produce biofuels, which is what I study.And in each one of these research areas, of which there are even more, there are PhD students, like me, and we study incredibly narrow topics, things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules. And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene, which is here. It's a small organic molecule. You've probably never heard of it. The weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion — 10 to the 21st — molecules of isoprene.But despite its very small weight, enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet. It's a huge amount of stuff. It's equal to the weight of methane. And because it's so much stuff, it's really important for the atmospheric system.Because it's important to the atmospheric system, we go to all lengths to study this thing. We blow it up and look at the pieces. This is the EUPHORE Smog Chamber in Spain. Atmospheric explosions, or full combustion, takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car. But still, we look at the pieces.We run enormous models on supercomputers; this is what I happen to do. Our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each, on minute timescales. It takes weeks to perform our integrations, and we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what's happening.We also fly all over the world looking for this thing. I recently joined a field campaign in Malaysia — there are others. We found a global atmospheric watchtower there in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene and other things while we were there. This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest from above, and the tower from below.On part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us. And this plane, the model BAe-146, which was run by FAAM, normally flies 120 to 130 people, so maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today. But we didn't just fly it. We were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule — incredibly dangerous stuff.We have to fly at a special incline to make the measurements; we hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering; we need special flight clearance. As you come around the banks in these valleys, the forces can get up to two Gs; the scientists must be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while on board. So as you can imagine, the inside of the aircraft doesn't look like one you'd take on vacation. It's a flying laboratory we took to make measurements of this molecule.We do all this to understand the chemistry of one molecule. And when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule, they write one scientific paper on the subject. And out of that field campaign we'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules.As a body of knowledge builds up, it will form one subsection, or one sub-subsection, of an assessment like the IPCC, although we have others. And each one of the 11 chapters of the IPCC has six to ten subsections. So you can imagine the scale of the effort. In each one of the assessments we write, we always tag on a summary, and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience. And we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers in order to make headlines like these.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline
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"I started my journey 30 years ago. And I worked in mines. And I realized that this was a world unseen. And I wanted, through color and large format cameras and very large prints, to make a body of work that somehow became symbols of our use of the landscape, how we use the land. And to me this was a key component that somehow, through this medium of photography, which allows us to contemplate these landscapes, that I thought photography was perfectly suited to doing this type of work.And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes, it occurred to me that oil is underpinning the scale and speed. Because that is what has changed, is the speed at which we're taking all our resources. And so then I went out to develop a whole series on the landscape of oil. And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc that there is extraction, where we're taking it from the ground, refinement. And that's one chapter.The other chapter that I wanted to look at was how we use it — our cities, our cars, our motorcultures, where people gather around the vehicle as a celebration. And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil, this entropic end, where all of our parts of cars, our tires, oil filters, helicopters, planes — where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up?And to me, again, photography was a way in which I could explore and research the world, and find those places. And another idea that I had as well, that was brought forward by an ecologist — he basically did a calculation where he took one liter of gas and said, well, how much carbon it would take, and how much organic material? It was 23 metric tons for one liter. So whenever I fill up my gas, I think of that liter, and how much carbon.And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton, but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy. From the photosynthetic growth, it would take 500 years of that growth to produce what we use, the 30 billion barrels we use per year.And that also brought me to the fact that this poses such a risk to our society. Looking at 30 billion per year, we look at our two largest suppliers, Saudi Arabia and now Canada, with its dirty oil. And together they only form about 15 years of supply. The whole world, at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves, only gives us about 45 years. So, it's not a question of if, but a question of when peak oil will come upon us.So, to me, using photography — and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really take the task of using our talents, our ways of thinking, to begin to deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging issues of our time, how to deal with our energy crisis.And I would like to say that, on the other side of it, 30, 40 years from now, the children that I have, I can look at them and say, ""We did everything we possibly, humanly could do, to begin to mitigate this, what I feel is one of the most important and critical moments in our time. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_photographs_the_landscape_of_oil
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"I'd like to ask you, what do these three people have in common? Well, you probably recognize the first person. I'm sure you're all avid ""American Idol"" watchers. But you might not recognize Aydah Al Jahani, who is a contestant, indeed a finalist, in the Poet of the Millions competition, which is broadcast out of Abu Dhabi, and seen throughout the Arab world. In this contest people have to write and recite original poetry, in the Nabati form of poetry, which is the traditional Bedouin form. And Lima Sahar was a finalist in the Afghan Star singing competition.Now, before I go any further, yes, I know it all began with ""Britain's Got Talent."" But my point in discussing this is to show you — I hope I'll be able to show you how these merit-based competitions, with equal access to everyone, with the winner selected via voting by SMS, are changing tribal societies. And I'm going to focus on Afghanistan and the Arab world with the UAE, how they're changing tribal societies, not by introducing Western ideas, but by being integrated into the language in those places.It all begins with enjoyment. Video: We are late to watch ""Afghan Star."" We are going to watch ""Afghan Star."" We are late. We are running late. We must go to watch ""Afghan Star."" Cynthia Schneider: These programs are reaching incredibly deeply into society. In Afghanistan, people go to extraordinary lengths to be able to watch this program. And you don't necessarily have to have your own TV set. People watch it all over the country also in public places. But it goes beyond watching, because also, part of this is campaigning. People become so engaged that they have volunteers, just like political volunteers anyway, who fan out over the countryside, campaigning for their candidate. Contestants also put themselves forward.Now, of course there is a certain degree of ethnic allegiance, but not entirely. Because each year the winner has come from a different tribal group. This has opened up the door, particularly for women. And in the last season there were two women in the finalists. One of them, Lima Sahar, is a Pashtun from Kandahar, a very conservative part of the country. And here she relates, in the documentary film ""Afghan Star,"" how her friends urged her not to do this and told her that she was leaving them for democracy. But she also confides that she knows that members of the Taliban are actually SMS-ing votes in for her.Aydah Al Jahnani also took risks and put herself out, to compete in the Poet of the Millions competition. I have to say, her husband backed her from the start. But her tribe and family urged her not to compete and were very much against it. But, once she started to win, then they got behind her again. It turns out that competition and winning is a universal human value. And she's out there. Her poetry is about women, and the life of women in society. So just by presenting herself and being in competition with men — this shows the voting on the program — it sets a very important example for young women — these are young women in the audience of the program — in Abu Dhabi, but also people in the viewing audience.Now you'd think that ""American Idol"" would introduce a measure of Americanization. But actually, just the opposite is happening. By using this engaging popular format for traditional, local culture, it actually, in the Gulf, is precipitating a revival of interest in Nabati poetry, also in traditional dress and dance and music. And for Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned music for many years, it is reintroducing their traditional music. They don't sing pop songs, they sing Afghan music. And they also have learned how to lose gracefully, without avenging the winner. (Laughter) No small thing.And the final, sort of, formulation of this ""American Idol"" format, which has just appeared in Afghanistan, is a new program called ""The Candidate."" And in this program, people present policy platforms that are then voted on. Many of them are too young to run for president, but by putting the issues out there, they are influencing the presidential race. So for me, the substance of things unseen is how reality TV is driving reality. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_schneider_the_surprising_spread_of_idol_tv
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"We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us. There are an enormous number of them that we use every day. Unlike most of our computing devices, these objects are much more fun to use. When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other. A gesture of ""Namaste!"", maybe, to respect someone, or maybe, in India I don't need to teach a kid that this means ""four runs"" in cricket. It comes as a part of our everyday learning.So, I am very interested, from the beginning, how our knowledge about everyday objects and gestures, and how we use these objects, can be leveraged to our interactions with the digital world. Rather than using a keyboard and mouse, why can I not use my computer in the same way that I interact in the physical world?So, I started this exploration around eight years back, and it literally started with a mouse on my desk. Rather than using it for my computer, I actually opened it. Most of you might be aware that, in those days, the mouse used to come with a ball inside, and there were two rollers that actually guide the computer where the ball is moving, and, accordingly, where the mouse is moving. So, I was interested in these two rollers, and I actually wanted more, so I borrowed another mouse from a friend — never returned to him — and I now had four rollers. Interestingly, what I did with these rollers is, basically, I took them off of these mouses and then put them in one line. It had some strings and pulleys and some springs. What I got is basically a gesture-interface device that actually acts as a motion-sensing device made for two dollars. So, here, whatever movement I do in my physical world is actually replicated inside the digital world just using this small device that I made, around eight years back, in 2000.Because I was interested in integrating these two worlds, I thought of sticky notes. I thought, ""Why can I not connect the normal interface of a physical sticky note to the digital world?"" A message written on a sticky note to my mom, on paper, can come to an SMS, or maybe a meeting reminder automatically syncs with my digital calendar — a to-do list that automatically syncs with you. But you can also search in the digital world, or maybe you can write a query, saying, ""What is Dr. Smith's address?"" and this small system actually prints it out — so it actually acts like a paper input-output system, just made out of paper.In another exploration, I thought of making a pen that can draw in three dimensions. So, I implemented this pen that can help designers and architects not only think in three dimensions, but they can actually draw, so that it's more intuitive to use that way.Then I thought, ""Why not make a Google Map, but in the physical world?"" Rather than typing a keyword to find something, I put my objects on top of it. If I put a boarding pass, it will show me where the flight gate is. A coffee cup will show where you can find more coffee, or where you can trash the cup.So, these were some of the earlier explorations I did because the goal was to connect these two worlds seamlessly. Among all these experiments, there was one thing in common: I was trying to bring a part of the physical world to the digital world. I was taking some part of the objects, or any of the intuitiveness of real life, and bringing them to the digital world, because the goal was to make our computing interfaces more intuitive.But then I realized that we humans are not actually interested in computing. What we are interested in is information. We want to know about things. We want to know about dynamic things going around.So I thought, around last year — in the beginning of the last year — I started thinking, ""Why can I not take this approach in the reverse way?"" Maybe, ""How about I take my digital world and paint the physical world with that digital information?"" Because pixels are actually, right now, confined in these rectangular devices that fit in our pockets. Why can I not remove this confine and take that to my everyday objects, everyday life so that I don't need to learn the new language for interacting with those pixels?So, in order to realize this dream, I actually thought of putting a big-size projector on my head. I think that's why this is called a head-mounted projector, isn't it? I took it very literally, and took my bike helmet, put a little cut over there so that the projector actually fits nicely. So now, what I can do — I can augment the world around me with this digital information.But later, I realized that I actually wanted to interact with those digital pixels, also. So I put a small camera over there that acts as a digital eye. Later, we moved to a much better, consumer-oriented pendant version of that, that many of you now know as the SixthSense device.But the most interesting thing about this particular technology is that you can carry your digital world with you wherever you go. You can start using any surface, any wall around you, as an interface. The camera is actually tracking all your gestures. Whatever you're doing with your hands, it's understanding that gesture. And, actually, if you see, there are some color markers that in the beginning version we are using with it. You can start painting on any wall. You stop by a wall, and start painting on that wall. But we are not only tracking one finger, here. We are giving you the freedom of using all of both of your hands, so you can actually use both of your hands to zoom into or zoom out of a map just by pinching all present. The camera is actually doing — just, getting all the images — is doing the edge recognition and also the color recognition and so many other small algorithms are going on inside. So, technically, it's a little bit complex, but it gives you an output which is more intuitive to use, in some sense.But I'm more excited that you can actually take it outside. Rather than getting your camera out of your pocket, you can just do the gesture of taking a photo, and it takes a photo for you.(Applause)Thank you. And later I can find a wall, anywhere, and start browsing those photos or maybe, ""OK, I want to modify this photo a little bit and send it as an email to a friend."" So, we are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world. And, of course, if you don't have any surface, you can start using your palm for simple operations. Here, I'm dialing a phone number just using my hand. The camera is actually not only understanding your hand movements, but, interestingly, is also able to understand what objects you are holding in your hand.For example, in this case, the book cover is matched with so many thousands, or maybe millions of books online, and checking out which book it is. Once it has that information, it finds out more reviews about that, or maybe New York Times has a sound overview on that, so you can actually hear, on a physical book, a review as sound.(Video) Famous talk at Harvard University —This was Obama's visit last week to MIT.(Video) And particularly I want to thank two outstanding MIT —Pranav Mistry: So, I was seeing the live [video] of his talk, outside, on just a newspaper. Your newspaper will show you live weather information rather than having it updated. You have to check your computer in order to do that, right?(Applause)When I'm going back, I can just use my boarding pass to check how much my flight has been delayed, because at that particular time, I'm not feeling like opening my iPhone, and checking out a particular icon. And I think this technology will not only change the way —(Laughter)Yes. It will change the way we interact with people, also, not only the physical world. The fun part is, I'm going to the Boston metro, and playing a pong game inside the train on the ground, right?(Laughter)And I think the imagination is the only limit of what you can think of when this kind of technology merges with real life.But many of you argue, actually, that all of our work is not only about physical objects. We actually do lots of accounting and paper editing and all those kinds of things; what about that? And many of you are excited about the next-generation tablet computers to come out in the market.So, rather than waiting for that, I actually made my own, just using a piece of paper. So, what I did here is remove the camera — All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera. I removed the microphone from that, and then just pinched that — like I just made a clip out of the microphone — and clipped that to a piece of paper, any paper that you found around. So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I'm touching the paper. But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving.You can of course watch movies.(Video) Good afternoon. My name is Russell, and I am a Wilderness Explorer in Tribe 54.""PM: And you can of course play games.(Car engine)Here, the camera is actually understanding how you're holding the paper and playing a car-racing game.(Applause)Many of you already must have thought, OK, you can browse. Yeah. Of course you can browse to any websites or you can do all sorts of computing on a piece of paper wherever you need it. So, more interestingly, I'm interested in how we can take that in a more dynamic way. When I come back to my desk, I can just pinch that information back to my desktop so I can use my full-size computer.(Applause)And why only computers? We can just play with papers. Paper world is interesting to play with. Here, I'm taking a part of a document, and putting over here a second part from a second place, and I'm actually modifying the information that I have over there. Yeah. And I say, ""OK, this looks nice, let me print it out, that thing."" So I now have a print-out of that thing. So the workflow is more intuitive, the way we used to do it maybe 20 years back, rather than now switching between these two worlds.So, as a last thought, I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. And it will actually help us not end up being machines sitting in front of other machines.That's all. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: So, Pranav, first of all, you're a genius. This is incredible, really. What are you doing with this? Is there a company being planned? Or is this research forever, or what?Pranav Mistry: So, there are lots of companies, sponsor companies of Media Lab interested in taking this ahead in one or another way. Companies like mobile-phone operators want to take this in a different way than the NGOs in India, thinking, ""Why can we only have 'Sixth Sense'? We should have a 'Fifth Sense' for missing-sense people who cannot speak. This technology can be used for them to speak out in a different way maybe a speaker system.""CA: What are your own plans? Are you staying at MIT, or are you going to do something with this?PM: I'm trying to make this more available to people so that anyone can develop their own SixthSense device, because the hardware is actually not that hard to manufacture or hard to make your own. We will provide all the open source software for them, maybe starting next month.CA: Open source? Wow.(Applause)CA: Are you going to come back to India with some of this, at some point?PM: Yeah. Yes, yes, of course.CA: What are your plans? MIT? India? How are you going to split your time going forward?PM: There is a lot of energy here. Lots of learning. All of this work that you have seen is all about my learning in India. And now, if you see, it's more about the cost-effectiveness: this system costs you $300 compared to the $20,000 surface tables, or anything like that. Or maybe even the $2 mouse gesture system at that time was costing around $5,000? I showed that, at a conference, to President Abdul Kalam, at that time, and then he said, ""OK, we should use this in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for some use of that."" So I'm excited about how I can bring the technology to the masses rather than just keeping that technology in the lab environment.(Applause)CA: Based on the people we've seen at TED, I would say you're truly one of the two or three best inventors in the world right now. It's an honor to have you at TED. Thank you so much. That's fantastic.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology
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"One morning, in the year 1957, the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield saw himself like this, a weird freak with huge hands, huge mouth, and a tiny bottom. Actually this creature is the result of the Penfield research. He named it homunculus. Basically the homunculus is the visualization of a human being where each part of the body is proportional to the surface it takes in the brain. So, of course, homunculus is definitely not a freak. It's you. It's me. It's our invisible reality. This visualization could explain, for example, why newborns, or smokers, put, instinctively, their fingers in the mouth. Unfortunately it doesn't explain why so many designers remain mainly interested in designing chairs.So anyway, even if I do not understand science entirely, for my design I essentially refer to it. I'm fascinated by its ability to deeply investigate the human being, its way of working, its way of feeling. And it really helps me to understand how we see, how we hear, how we breathe, how our brain can inform or mislead us. It's a great tool for me to understand what could be our real needs.Marketing people have never been able to do that. Marketing reduces things. Marketing simplifies. Marketing creates user groups. And scientists, amidst complexity, amidst fluctuation and uniqueness. What could be our real needs? Maybe the silence. In our daily life we are continuously disturbed by aggressive sounds. And you know all those kind of sound puts us in a kind of stressful state, and prevent us from being quiet and focused. So I wanted to create a kind of sound filter, able to preserve ourselves from noise pollution. But I didn't want it to make it by isolating people, without any earmuffs or those kind of things. Or neither with including complex technology. I just wanted to, using the complexity and the technology of the brain, of the human brain.So I worked with white noise. dB is basically — dB is the name of the product, basically a white noise diffuser. This is white noise. The white noise is the sum of all frequencies that are audible by the human being, brought to the same intensity. And this noise is like a ""shhhhhhhhhhhhh,"" like that. And this noise is the most neutral. It is the perfect sound for our ears and our brain. So when you hear this sound you feel like a kind of shelter, preserved from noise pollution. And when you hear the white noise, your brain is immediately focused on it. And do not be disturbed any more by the other aggressive sound. It seems to be magic. But it is just physiology. It's just in your brain. And in mine, I hope.So in order to make this white noise a little bit active and reactive, I create a ball, a rolling ball able to analyze and find where does aggressive sound come from, and roll, at home or at work, towards aggressive noise, and emits white noise in order to neutralize it. (Laughter) It works. You feel the effect of the white noise? It's too in silence. If you make some noise you can feel the effect.So even if this object, even if this product includes some technology, it includes some speakers, it includes some microphones and some electronic devices, this object is not a very smart object. And I don't want to make a very smart object. I don't want to create a perfect object like a perfect robot. I want to create an object like you and me. So, definitely not perfect. So imagine, for instance, you are at home. A loving dispute with your girl or boyfriend. You shout. You say, ""Blah blah blah, Blah blah blah. Who is this guy?"" And dB will probably roll toward you. And turning around you is ""shhhhhhh,"" like that. (Laughter) Definitely not perfect. So you would probably shut it, at this point. (Laughter)Anyway, in this same kind of approach, I designed K. K is a daylight receiver transmitter. So this object is supposed to be displayed on your desk, or on your piano, where you are supposed to spend most of your time in the day. And this object will be able to know exactly the quantity of light you receive during the day, and able to give you the quantity of light you need. This object is completely covered by fiber opticals. And the idea of those fiber opticals is to inform the object, for sure, but creates the idea of an eye sensibility of the object. I want, by this design feel, when you see it, you see, instinctively, this object seems to be very sensitive, very reactive. And this object knows, better than you and probably before you, what you really need. You have to know that the lack of daylight can provoke some problem of energy, or problem of libido. So, a huge problem. (Laughter)Most of the projects I work on — I live in collaboration with scientists. I'm just a designer. So I need them. So there can be some biologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on. And I submit them, my intuitions, my hypothesis, my first ideas. And they react. They told me what is possible, what is impossible. And together we improve the original concept. And we build the project to the end. And this kind of relationship between designer and scientist started when I was at school.Indeed in my studies I was a guinea pig for a pharmaceutical industry. And the irony for me was of course, I didn't do that for the sake of science progress. I just do that to make money. Anyway, this project, or this experience, make me start a new project on the design of medicine. You have to know that today, roughly one or two every drug pills is not taken correctly. So even if the active constituents in pharmaceuticals made constant progress in terms of chemistry, target of stability, the behavior of the patients goes more and more unstable. So we took too many of them. We took irregular dosage. We do not follow instructions. And so on.So I wanted to create a new kind of medicine, in order to create a new kind of relationship between the patient and the treatment. So I turned traditional pills into this. I'm going to give you some example. This one is an antibiotic. And its purpose is to help patient to go to the end of the treatment. And the concept is to create a kind of onion, a kind of structure in layers. So, you start with the darkest one. And you are helped to visualize the duration of the treatment. And you are helped to visualize the decrease of the infection. So the first day, this is the big one. And you have to peel and eat one layer a day. And your antibiotic goes smaller and clearer. And you're waiting for recovery as you were waiting for the Christmas day. And you follow the treatment like that, to the end of the treatment. And here you can get the white core. And it means, right, you are in the recovery. (Applause) Thank you.This one is a ""third lung,"" a pharmaceutical device for long-term asthma treatment. I designed it to help kids to follow the treatment. So the idea of this one is to create a relationship between the patient of the treatment but a relationship of dependency. But in this case it is not the medication that is dependent on the patient. This is, the kids will feel the therapeutic object needs him. So the idea is, all night long the elastic skin of the third lung will slowly inflate itself, including air and molecules, for sure. And when the kids wake up, he can see the object needs him. And he take him to his mouth, and breathe the air it contains. So by this way, the kid, to take care of himself, is to take care of this living object. And he does not feel anymore it's relies on asthma treatment, as the asthma treatment needs him. (Applause)In this guise of living object approach, I like the idea of a kind of invisible design, as if the function of the object exists in a kind of invisible field just around the objects themselves. We could talk about a kind of soul, of a ghost accompanying them. And almost a kind of poltergeist effect. So when a passive object like this one seems to be alive, because it is — woosh — starting to move.And I remember an exhibition design I made for John Maeda, and for the Fondation Cartier in Paris. And John Maeda was supposed to show several graphic animations in this exhibition. And my idea for this exhibition design was to create a real pong game, like this one. And the idea was to create some self-moving benches in the main exhibition room. So the living benches would be exactly like the ball. And John was so excited by this idea. He said to me, ""Okay let's go."" I remember the day of the opening. I was a little bit late. When I bring the 10 living and self-moving benches in the exhibition room, John was just beside me, and was like, ""Hmm. Hmm."" And he told me, after a long silence, ""I wonder, Mathieu, if people won't be more fascinated by your benches than by my videos."" (Laughter) It would be a great honor, a great compliment for me, if he hadn't decided to take all them off two hours before the opening. So, huge tragedy.I guess you won't be surprised if I tell you that Pinocchio is one of my great influences. Pinocchio is probably one of my best design products, my favorite one. Because it is a kind of object with a conscience, able to be modified by its surroundings, and able to modify it as well. The other great influence is the mine's canary. In coal mines, this canary was supposed to be close to the miners. And it was singing all day long. And when it stops it means that it just died. So this canary was a living alarm, and a very efficient one. A very natural technology, in order to say to the miners, ""The air is too bad. You have to go. It's an emergency."" So it's, for me, a great product.And I tried to design a kind of canary. Andrea is one. Andrea is a living air filter that absorbs toxic gasses from air, contaminated indoor air. So it uses some plants to do this job, selected for their gas-filtering ability. You have to know, or you probably already know, that indoor air pollution is more toxic than outdoor one. So while I'm talking to you, the seats you are sitting on are currently emitting some invisible and odorless toxic gas. Sorry for that. (Laughter) So you are currently breathing formaldehyde. It's the same for me with the carpet. And this is exactly the same at home. Because all the product we get constantly give away the volatile component of which they're made of.So let's have a look at your home. So your sofa, your plastic chair, your kid's toys give their own invisible reality. And this one is very toxic. This is the reason why I created, with David Edward, a scientist of Harvard University, an object able to absorb the toxic elements using those kind of plants. But the idea is to force the air to go in the effective part of the plants. Because the roots of the plant are not very effective. Bill Wolverton from NASA analyzed it cleverly in the '70s. So the idea is to create an object able to force the air, and to be in contact at the right speed at the right place, in all the effective parts of the plant. So this is the final object. It will be launched next September. (Applause)This one is kind of the same approach because I include, in a product like Andrea, some plants. And in this one, plants are used for the water filtration ability. And it includes some fishes as well. But here, unlike Andrea, here are supposed to be eaten. Indeed, this object is a domestic farm, for fishes and green. So the idea of this object is to be able to get at home very local food. The locavores used to get food taken in a radius of 100 miles. Local River is able to provide you food directly in your living room. So the principle of this object is to create an ecosystem called aquaponics. And the aquaponics is the dirty water of the fish, by a water pump, feeds the plants above. And the plants will filter, by the roots, the dirty water of the fish. After, it goes back into the fish tank.After that you have two options. Or you sit down in front of it like you would do in front your TV set. Amazing channel. Or you start fishing. And you make some sushis with a fish and the aromatic plants above. Because you can grow some potatoes. No, not potatoes, but tomatoes, aromatic plants and so on.So now we can breathe safely. Now we can eat local food. Now we can be treated by smart medicine. Now we can be well-balanced in our biorhythm with daylight. But it was important to create a perfect place, so I tried to, in order to work and create. So I designed, for an American scientist based in Paris, a very stimulative, brain-stimulative office. I wanted to create a perfect place where you can work and play, and where your body and your brain can work together.So, in this office, you do not work anymore at your desk, like a politician. Your seat, your sleep and your play on a big geodesic island made of leather. See, like this one? In this office you do not work and write and draw on a sheet of paper, but you draw directly on a kind of huge whiteboard cave, like a prehistoric scientist. So you, like that, can make some sport during your work. In this office you do not need to go out in order to be in contact with nature. You include, directly, the nature in the floor of the office. You can see it there.This is an inspiration image to lead this project of the office. It really helped me to design it. I never show it to my client. He would be so afraid. (Laughter) Just for my workshop. I guess it may be the revenge of the guinea pig I was. But it's maybe the conviction as monkey and homunculus we are. All of us need to be considered according to our real nature. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mathieu_lehanneur_demos_science_inspired_design
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"I'm going to talk about some of my discoveries around the world through my work. These are not discoveries of planets or new technologies or science. They're discoveries of people and the way people are, and new leadership.This is Benki. Benki is a leader of the Ashaninka Nation. His people live in Brazil and in Peru. Benki comes from a village so remote up in the Amazon that to get there, either you have to fly and land on water, or go by canoe for several days. I met Benki three years ago in Sao Paulo when I'd brought him and other leaders from indigenous peoples to meet with me and leaders from around the world, because we wanted to learn from each other. We wanted to share our stories with each other.The Ashaninka people are known throughout South America for their dignity, their spirit and their resistance, starting with the Incas and continuing through the 19th century with the rubber tappers. Today's biggest threat to the Ashaninka people and to Benki comes from illegal logging — the people who come into the beautiful forest and cut down ancient mahogany trees, float them down the river to world markets. Benki knew this. He could see what was happening to his forest, to his environment, because he was taken under his grandfather's wing when he was only two years old to begin to learn about the forest and the way of life of his people. His grandfather died when he was only 10. And at that young age, 10 years old, Benki became the paje of his community. Now, in the Ashaninka tradition and culture, the paje is the most important person in the community. This is the person who contains within him all the knowledge, all the wisdom of centuries and centuries of life, and not just about his people, but about everything that his people's survival depended on: the trees, the birds, the water, the soil, the forest. So when he was only 10 and he became the paje, he began to lead his people. He began to talk to them about the forest that they needed to protect, the way of life they needed to nurture. He explained to them that it was not a question of survival of the fittest; it was a question of understanding what they needed to survive and to protect that.Eight years later, when he was a young man of 18, Benki left the forest for the first time. He went 3,000 miles on an odyssey to Rio to the Earth Summit to tell the world what was happening in his tiny, little corner. And he went because he hoped the world would listen. Some did, not everybody. But if you can imagine this young man with his headdress and his flowing robe, learning a new language, Portuguese, not to mention English, going to Rio, building a bridge to reach out to people he'd never met before — a pretty hostile world. But he wasn't dismayed.Benki came back to his village full of ideas — new technologies, new research, new ways of understanding what was going on. Since that time, he's continued to work with his people, and not only the Ashaninka Nation, but all the peoples of the Amazon and beyond. He's built schools to teach children to care for the forest. Together, he's led the reforestation of over 25 percent of the land that had been destroyed by the loggers. He's created a cooperative to help people diversify their livelihoods. And he's brought the internet and satellite technology to the forest — both so that people themselves could monitor the deforestation, but also that he could speak from the forest to the rest of the world. If you were to meet Benki and ask him, ""Why are you doing this? Why are you putting yourself at risk? Why are you making yourself vulnerable to what is often a hostile world?"" he would tell you, as he told me, ""I asked myself,"" he said, ""What did my grandparents and my great-grandparents do to protect the forest for me? And what am I doing?""So when I think of that, I wonder what our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, when they ask themselves that question, I wonder how they will answer. For me, the world is veering towards a future we don't much want when we really think about it deep inside. It's a future we don't know the details of, but it's a future that has signs, just like Benki saw the signs around him. We know we are running out of what we need. We're running out of fresh water. We're running out of fossil fuels. We're running out of land. We know climate change is going to affect all of us. We don't know how, but we know it will. And we know that there will be more of us than ever before — five times as many people in 40 years than 60 years ago. We are running out of what we need. And we also know that the world has changed in other ways, that since 1960 there are one-third as many new countries that exist as independent entities on the planet. Egos, systems of government — figuring it out — massive change. And in addition to that, we know that five other really big countries are going to have a say in the future, a say we haven't even really started to hear yet — China, India, Russia, South Africa and Benki's own Brazil, where Benki got his civil rights only in the 1988 constitution.But you know all that. You know more than Benki knew when he left his forest and went 3,000 miles. You also know that we can't just keep doing what we've always done, because we'll get the results we've always gotten. And this reminds me of something I understand Lord Salisbury said to Queen Victoria over a hundred years ago, when she was pressing him, ""Please change."" He said, ""Change? Why change? Things are bad enough as they are."" We have to change. It's imperative to me, when I look around the world, that we need to change ourselves. We need new models of what it means to be a leader. We need new models of being a leader and a human in the world.I started life as a banker. Now I don't admit to that to anybody but my very close friends. But for the past eight years, I've done something completely different. My work has taken me around the world, where I've had the real privilege of meeting people like Benki and many others who are making change happen in their communities — people who see the world differently, who are asking different questions, who have different answers, who understand the filters that they wear when they go out into the world.This is Sanghamitra. Sanghamitra comes from Bangalore. I met Sanghamitra eight years ago when I was in Bangalore organizing a workshop with leaders of different NGO's working in some of the hardest aspects of society. Sanghamitra didn't start life as a leader of an NGO, she started her career as university professor, teaching English literature. But she realized that she was much too detached from the world doing that. She loved it, but she was too detached. And so in 1993, a long time ago, she decided to start a new organization called Samraksha focused on one of the hardest areas, one of the hardest issues in India — anywhere in the world at the time — HIV/AIDS. Since that time, Samraksha has grown from strength to strength and is now one of the leading health NGO's in India. But if you just think about the state of the world and knowledge of HIV/AIDS in 1993 — in India at that time it was skyrocketing and nobody understood why, and everyone was actually very, very afraid. Today there are still three million HIV-positive people in India. That's the second largest population in the world.When I asked Sanghamitra, ""How did you get from English literature to HIV/AIDS?"" not an obvious path, she said to me, ""It's all connected. Literature makes one sensitive, sensitive to people, to their dreams and to their ideas."" Since that time, under her leadership, Samraksha has been a pioneer in all fields related to HIV/AIDS. They have respite homes, the first, the first care centers, the first counseling services — and not just in urban, 7-million-population Bangalore, but in the hardest to reach villages in the state of Karnataka. Even that wasn't enough. She wanted to change policy at the government level. 10 of their programs that she pioneered are now government policy and funded by the government. They take care of 20,000-odd people today in over 1,000 villages around Karnataka.She works with people like Murali Krishna. Murali Krishna comes from one of those villages. He lost his wife to AIDS a couple of years ago, and he's HIV-positive. But he saw the work, the care, the compassion that Sanghamitra and her team brought to the village, and he wanted to be part of it. He's a Leaders' Quest fellow, and that helps him with his work. They've pioneered a different approach to villages. Instead of handing out information in pamphlets, as is so often the case, they bring theater troupes, songs, music, dance. And they sit around, and they talk about dreams.Sanghamitra told me just last week — she had just come back from two weeks in the villages, and she had a real breakthrough. They were sitting in a circle, talking about the dreams for the village. And the young women in the village spoke up and said, ""We've changed our dream. Our dream is for our partners, our husbands, not to be given to us because of a horoscope, but to be given to us because they've been tested for HIV."" If you are lucky enough to meet Sanghamitra and ask her why and how, how have you achieved so much? She would look at you and very quietly, very softly say, ""It just happened. It's the spirit inside.""This is Dr. Fan Jianchuan. Jianchuan comes from Sichuan Province in southwest China. He was born in 1957, and you can imagine what his childhood looked like and felt like, and what his life has been like over the last 50 tumultuous years. He's been a soldier, a teacher, a politician, a vice-mayor and a business man. But if you sat down and asked him, ""Who are you really, and what do you do?"" He would tell you, ""I'm a collector, and I curate a museum."" I was lucky; I had heard about him for years, and I finally met him earlier this year at his museum in Chengdu.He's been a collector all of his life, starting when he was four or five in the early 1960's. Now, just think of the early 1960's in China. Over a lifetime, through everything, through the Cultural Revolution and everything afterward, he's kept collecting, so that he now has over eight million pieces in his museums documenting contemporary Chinese history. These are pieces that you won't find anywhere else in the world, in part because they document parts of history Chinese choose to forget. For example, he's got over one million pieces documenting the Sino-Japanese War, a war that's not talked about in China very much and whose heroes are not honored. Why did he do all this? Because he thought a nation should never repeat the mistakes of the past.So, from commissioning slightly larger than life bronze statues of the heroes of the Sino-Japanese War, including those Chinese who then fought with each other and left mainland China to go to Taiwan, to commemorating all the unknown, ordinary soldiers who survived, by asking them to take prints of their hands, he is making sure — one man is making sure — that history is not forgotten. But it's not just Chinese heroes he cares about. This building contains the world's largest collection of documents and artifacts commemorating the U.S. role in fighting on the Chinese side in that long war — the Flying Tigers. He has nine other buildings — that are already open to the public — filled to the rafters with artifacts documenting contemporary Chinese history. Two of the most sensitive buildings include a lifetime of collection about the Cultural Revolution, a period that actually most Chinese would prefer to forget. But he doesn't want his nation ever to forget.These people inspire me, and they inspire me because they show us what is possible when you change the way you look at the world, change the way you look at your place in the world. They looked outside, and then they changed what was on the inside. They didn't go to business school. They didn't read a manual, ""How to Be a Good Leader in 10 Easy Steps."" But they have qualities we'd all recognize. They have drive, passion, commitment. They've gone away from what they did before, and they've gone to something they didn't know. They've tried to connect worlds they didn't know existed before. They've built bridges, and they've walked across them. They have a sense of the great arc of time and their tiny place in it. They know people have come before them and will follow them. And they know that they're part of a whole, that they depend on other people. It's not about them, they know that, but it has to start with them. And they have humility. It just happens.But we know it doesn't just happen, don't we? We know it takes a lot to make it happen, and we know the direction the world is going in. So I think we need succession planning on a global basis. We can't wait for the next generation, the new joiners, to come in and learn how to be the good leaders we need. I think it has to start with us. And we know, just like they knew, how hard it is. But the good news is that we don't have to figure it out as we go along; we have models, we have examples, like Benki and Sanghamitra and Jianchuan. We can look at what they've done, if we look. We can learn from what they've learned. We can change the way we see ourselves in the world. And if we're lucky, we can change the way our great-grandchildren will answer Benki's question.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fields_wicker_miurin_learning_from_leadership_s_missing_manual
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"To understand the business of mythology and what a Chief Belief Officer is supposed to do, you have to hear a story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers, and his brother, the athletic warlord of the gods, Kartikeya. The two brothers one day decided to go on a race, three times around the world. Kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans. He went around once, he went around twice, he went around thrice. But his brother, Ganesha, simply walked around his parents once, twice, thrice, and said, ""I won."" ""How come?"" said Kartikeya. And Ganesha said, ""You went around 'the world.' I went around 'my world.'"" What matters more?If you understand the difference between 'the world' and 'my world,' you understand the difference between logos and mythos. 'The world' is objective, logical, universal, factual, scientific. 'My world' is subjective. It's emotional. It's personal. It's perceptions, thoughts, feelings, dreams. It is the belief system that we carry. It's the myth that we live in.'The world' tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. 'My world' tells us why the sun rises, why we were born. Every culture is trying to understand itself: ""Why do we exist?"" And every culture comes up with its own understanding of life, its own customized version of mythology.Culture is a reaction to nature, and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals, which are always indifferent to rationality. And so, when you study it, you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world. Different people see things differently — different viewpoints.There is my world and there is your world, and my world is always better than your world, because my world, you see, is rational and yours is superstition. Yours is faith. Yours is illogical. This is the root of the clash of civilizations. It took place, once, in 326 B.C. on the banks of a river called the Indus, now in Pakistan. This river lends itself to India's name. India. Indus.Alexander, a young Macedonian, met there what he called a ""gymnosophist,"" which means ""the naked, wise man."" We don't know who he was. Perhaps he was a Jain monk, like Bahubali over here, the Gomateshwara Bahubali whose image is not far from Mysore. Or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock, staring at the sky and the sun and the moon.Alexander asked, ""What are you doing?"" and the gymnosophist answered, ""I'm experiencing nothingness."" Then the gymnosophist asked, ""What are you doing?"" and Alexander said, ""I am conquering the world."" And they both laughed. Each one thought that the other was a fool. The gymnosophist said, ""Why is he conquering the world? It's pointless."" And Alexander thought, ""Why is he sitting around, doing nothing? What a waste of a life.""To understand this difference in viewpoints, we have to understand the subjective truth of Alexander — his myth, and the mythology that constructed it. Alexander's mother, his parents, his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer's ""Iliad."" They told him of a great hero called Achilles, who, when he participated in battle, victory was assured, but when he withdrew from the battle, defeat was inevitable. ""Achilles was a man who could shape history, a man of destiny, and this is what you should be, Alexander."" That's what he heard.""What should you not be? You should not be Sisyphus, who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night. Don't live a life which is monotonous, mediocre, meaningless. Be spectacular! — like the Greek heroes, like Jason, who went across the sea with the Argonauts and fetched the Golden Fleece. Be spectacular like Theseus, who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed Minotaur. When you play in a race, win! — because when you win, the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods.""Because, you see, the Greeks believed you live only once, and when you die, you have to cross the River Styx. And if you have lived an extraordinary life, you will be welcomed to Elysium, or what the French call ""Champs-Élysées"" — (Laughter) — the heaven of the heroes.But these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard. He heard a very different story. He heard of a man called Bharat, after whom India is called Bhārata. Bharat also conquered the world. And then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called Meru. And he wanted to hoist his flag to say, ""I was here first."" But when he reached the mountain peak, he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him, each one claiming ""'I was here first' ... that's what I thought until I came here."" And suddenly, in this canvas of infinity, Bharat felt insignificant. This was the mythology of the gymnosophist.You see, he had heroes, like Ram — Raghupati Ram and Krishna, Govinda Hari. But they were not two characters on two different adventures. They were two lifetimes of the same hero. When the Ramayana ends the Mahabharata begins. When Ram dies, Krishna is born. When Krishna dies, eventually he will be back as Ram.You see, the Indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. But you don't cross it once. You go to and fro endlessly. It was called the Vaitarani. You go again and again and again. Because, you see, nothing lasts forever in India, not even death. And so, you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days ... And what do you do at the end of 10 days? You dunk it in the river. Because it has to end. And next year, she will come back. What goes around always comes around, and this rule applies not just to man, but also the gods. You see, the gods have to come back again and again and again as Ram, as Krishna. Not only do they live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all. ""Groundhog Day."" (Laughter)Two different mythologies. Which is right? Two different mythologies, two different ways of looking at the world. One linear, one cyclical. One believes this is the one and only life. The other believes this is one of many lives. And so, the denominator of Alexander's life was one. So, the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements. The denominator of the gymnosophist's life was infinity. So, no matter what he did, it was always zero. And I believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired Indian mathematicians to discover the number zero. Who knows?And that brings us to the mythology of business. If Alexander's belief influenced his behavior, if the gymnosophist's belief influences his behavior, then it was bound to influence the business they were in. You see, what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves? And if you look at cultures around the world, all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business.Take a look. If you live only once, in one-life cultures around the world, you will see an obsession with binary logic, absolute truth, standardization, absoluteness, linear patterns in design. But if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives, you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic, with opinion, with contextual thinking, with everything is relative, sort of — (Laughter) mostly. (Laughter)You look at art. Look at the ballerina, how linear she is in her performance. And then look at the Indian classical dancer, the Kuchipudi dancer, the Bharatanatyam dancer, curvaceous. (Laughter)And then look at business. Standard business model: vision, mission, values, processes. Sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land, with the commandments held by the leader. And if you comply, you will go to heaven.But in India there is no ""the"" promised land. There are many promised lands, depending on your station in society, depending on your stage of life. You see, businesses are not run as institutions, by the idiosyncrasies of individuals. It's always about taste. It's always about my taste.You see, Indian music, for example, does not have the concept of harmony. There is no orchestra conductor. There is one performer standing there, and everybody follows. And you can never replicate that performance twice. It is not about documentation and contract. It's about conversation and faith. It's not about compliance. It's about setting, getting the job done, by bending or breaking the rules — just look at your Indian people around here, you'll see them smile; they know what it is. (Laughter) And then look at people who have done business in India, you'll see the exasperation on their faces. (Laughter) (Applause)You see, this is what India is today. The ground reality is based on a cyclical world view. So, it's rapidly changing, highly diverse, chaotic, ambiguous, unpredictable. And people are okay with it. And then globalization is taking place. The demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in. Which is rooted in one-life culture. And a clash is going to take place, like on the banks of the Indus. It is bound to happen.I have personally experienced it. I'm trained as a medical doctor. I did not want to study surgery. Don't ask me why. I love mythology too much. I wanted to learn mythology. But there is nowhere you can study. So, I had to teach it to myself. And mythology does not pay, well, until now. (Laughter) So, I had to take up a job. And I worked in the pharma industry. And I worked in the healthcare industry. And I worked as a marketing guy, and a sales guy, and a knowledge guy, and a content guy, and a training guy. I even was a business consultant, doing strategies and tactics. And I would see the exasperation between my American and European colleagues, when they were dealing with India.Example: Please tell us the process to invoice hospitals. Step A. Step B. Step C. Mostly. (Laughter) How do you parameterize ""mostly""? How do you put it in a nice little software? You can't.I would give my viewpoints to people. But nobody was interested in listening to it, you see, until I met Kishore Biyani of the Future group. You see, he has established the largest retail chain, called Big Bazaar. And there are more than 200 formats, across 50 cities and towns of India. And he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets. And he knew very intuitively, that best practices, developed in Japan and China and Europe and America will not work in India. He knew that institutional thinking doesn't work in India. Individual thinking does. He had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of India.So, he had asked me to be the Chief Belief Officer, and said, ""All I want to do is align belief."" Sounds so simple. But belief is not measurable. You can't measure it. You can't manage it. So, how do you construct belief? How do you enhance the sensitivity of people to Indian-ness. Even if you are Indian, it is not very explicit, it is not very obvious.So, I tried to work on the standard model of culture, which is, develop stories, symbols and rituals. And I will share one of the rituals with you. You see it is based on the Hindu ritual of Darshan. Hindus don't have the concept of commandments. So, there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life. So, you're not really sure how you stand in front of God. So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God. You want to see God. And you want God to see you, and hence the gods have very large eyes, large unblinking eyes, sometimes made of silver, so they look at you. Because you don't know whether you're right or wrong, and so all you seek is divine empathy. ""Just know where I came from, why I did the Jugaad."" (Laughter) ""Why did I do the setting, why I don't care for the processes. Just understand me, please.""And based on this, we created a ritual for leaders. After a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store, we blindfold him, we surround him with the stakeholders, the customer, his family, his team, his boss. You read out his KRA, his KPI, you give him the keys, and then you remove the blindfold. And invariably, you see a tear, because the penny has dropped. He realizes that to succeed, he does not have to be a ""professional,"" he does not have to cut out his emotions, he has to include all these people in his world to succeed, to make them happy, to make the boss happy, to make everyone happy. The customer is happy, because the customer is God.That sensitivity is what we need. Once this belief enters, behavior will happen, business will happen. And it has. So, then we come back to Alexander and to the gymnosophist. And everybody asks me, ""Which is the better way, this way or that way?"" And it's a very dangerous question, because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence. So, I will not answer the question. What I will give you is an Indian answer, the Indian head-shake. (Laughter) (Applause)Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm. You see, because both the paradigms are human constructions. They are cultural creations, not natural phenomena. And so the next time you meet someone, a stranger, one request: Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does he. Understand it. And when you understand it you will discover something spectacular. You will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth. Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes. Indra, a hundred. You and I, only two. Thank you. Namaste. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/devdutt_pattanaik
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"As technology progresses, and as it advances, many of us assume that these advances make us more intelligent, make us smarter and more connected to the world. And what I'd like to argue is that that's not necessarily the case, as progress is simply a word for change, and with change you gain something, but you also lose something.And to really illustrate this point, what I'd like to do is to show you how technology has dealt with a very simple, a very common, an everyday question. And that question is this. What time is it? What time is it? If you glance at your iPhone, it's so simple to tell the time. But, I'd like to ask you, how would you tell the time if you didn't have an iPhone? How would you tell the time, say, 600 years ago? How would you do it?Well, the way you would do it is by using a device that's called an astrolabe. So, an astrolabe is relatively unknown in today's world. But, at the time, in the 13th century, it was the gadget of the day. It was the world's first popular computer. And it was a device that, in fact, is a model of the sky. So, the different parts of the astrolabe, in this particular type, the rete corresponds to the positions of the stars. The plate corresponds to a coordinate system. And the mater has some scales and puts it all together.If you were an educated child, you would know how to not only use the astrolabe, you would also know how to make an astrolabe. And we know this because the first treatise on the astrolabe, the first technical manual in the English language, was written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Yes, that Geoffrey Chaucer, in 1391, to his little Lewis, his 11-year-old son. And in this book, little Lewis would know the big idea.And the central idea that makes this computer work is this thing called stereographic projection. And basically, the concept is, how do you represent the three-dimensional image of the night sky that surrounds us onto a flat, portable, two-dimensional surface. The idea is actually relatively simple. Imagine that that Earth is at the center of the universe, and surrounding it is the sky projected onto a sphere. Each point on the surface of the sphere is mapped through the bottom pole, onto a flat surface, where it is then recorded.So the North Star corresponds to the center of the device. The ecliptic, which is the path of the sun, moon, and planets correspond to an offset circle. The bright stars correspond to little daggers on the rete. And the altitude corresponds to the plate system. Now, the real genius of the astrolabe is not just the projection. The real genius is that it brings together two coordinate systems so they fit perfectly. There is the position of the sun, moon and planets on the movable rete. And then there is their location on the sky as seen from a certain latitude on the back plate. Okay?So how would you use this device? Well, let me first back up for a moment. This is an astrolabe. Pretty impressive, isn't it? And so, this astrolabe is on loan from us from the Oxford School of — Museum of History. And you can see the different components. This is the mater, the scales on the back. This is the rete. Okay. Do you see that? That's the movable part of the sky. And in the back you can see a spider web pattern. And that spider web pattern corresponds to the local coordinates in the sky. This is a rule device. And on the back are some other devices, measuring tools and scales, to be able to make some calculations. Okay?You know, I've always wanted one of these. For my thesis I actually built one of these out of paper. And this one, this is a replica from a 15th-century device. And it's worth probably about three MacBook Pros. But a real one would cost about as much as my house, and the house next to it, and actually every house on the block, on both sides of the street, maybe a school thrown in, and some — you know, a church. They are just incredibly expensive.But let me show you how to work this device. So let's go to step one. First thing that you do is you select a star in the night sky, if you're telling time at night. So, tonight, if it's clear you'll be able to see the summer triangle. And there is a bright star called Deneb. So let's select Deneb. Second, is you measure the altitude of Deneb. So, step two, I hold the device up, and then I sight its altitude there so I can see it clearly now. And then I measure its altitude. So, it's about 26 degrees. You can't see it from over there. Step three is identify the star on the front of the device. Deneb is there. I can tell. Step four is I then move the rete, move the sky, so the altitude of the star corresponds to the scale on the back. Okay, so when that happens everything lines up. I have here a model of the sky that corresponds to the real sky. Okay? So, it is, in a sense, holding a model of the universe in my hands. And then finally, I take a rule, and move the rule to a date line which then tells me the time here. Right. So, that's how the device is used. (Laughter)So, I know what you're thinking: ""That's a lot of work, isn't it? Isn't it a ton of work to be able to tell the time?"" as you glance at your iPod to just check out the time. But there is a difference between the two, because with your iPod you can tell — or your iPhone, you can tell exactly what the time is, with precision. The way little Lewis would tell the time is by a picture of the sky. He would know where things would fit in the sky. He would not only know what time it was, he would also know where the sun would rise, and how it would move across the sky. He would know what time the sun would rise, and what time it would set. And he would know that for essentially every celestial object in the heavens.So, in computer graphics and computer user interface design, there is a term called affordances. So, affordances are the qualities of an object that allow us to perform an action with it. And what the astrolabe does is it allows us, it affords us, to connect to the night sky, to look up into the night sky and be much more — to see the visible and the invisible together. So, that's just one use. Incredible, there is probably 350, 400 uses. In fact, there is a text, and that has over a thousand uses of this first computer.On the back there is scales and measurements for terrestrial navigation. You can survey with it. The city of Baghdad was surveyed with it. It can be used for calculating mathematical equations of all different types. And it would take a full university course to illustrate it. Astrolabes have an incredible history. They are over 2,000 years old. The concept of stereographic projection originated in 330 B.C.And the astrolabes come in many different sizes and shapes and forms. There is portable ones. There is large display ones. And I think what is common to all astrolabes is that they are beautiful works of art. There is a quality of craftsmanship and precision that is just astonishing and remarkable.Astrolabes, like every technology, do evolve over time. So, the earliest retes, for example, were very simple and primitive. And advancing retes became cultural emblems. This is one from Oxford. And I find this one really extraordinary because the rete pattern is completely symmetrical, and it accurately maps a completely asymmetrical, or random sky. How cool is that? This is just amazing.So, would little Lewis have an astrolabe? Probably not one made of brass. He would have one made out of wood, or paper. And the vast majority of this first computer was a portable device that you could keep in the back of your pocket. So, what does the astrolabe inspire? Well, I think the first thing is that it reminds us just how resourceful people were, our forebears were, years and years ago. It's just an incredible device.Every technology advances. Every technology is transformed and moved by others. And what we gain with a new technology, of course, is precision and accuracy. But what we lose, I think, is an accurate — a felt sense of the sky, a sense of context. Knowing the sky, knowing your relationship with the sky, is the center of the real answer to knowing what time it is.So, it's — I think astrolabes are just remarkable devices. And so, what can you learn from these devices? Well, primarily that there is a subtle knowledge that we can connect with the world. And astrolabes return us to this subtle sense of how things all fit together, and also how we connect to the world. Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_demos_the_13th_century_astrolabe
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"Once upon a time, at the age of 24, I was a student at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore. I was a guest student during one month of a public health course. And that changed my mindset forever. The course was good, but it was not the course content in itself that changed the mindset. It was the brutal realization, the first morning, that the Indian students were better than me.(Laughter)You see, I was a study nerd. I loved statistics from a young age. And I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times. In Sweden we read it once and then we went partying.(Laugher)And that, to me, that personal experience was the first time in my life that the mindset I grew up with was changed. And I realized that perhaps the Western world will not continue to dominate the world forever. And I think many of you have the same sort of personal experience. It's that realization of someone you meet that really made you change your ideas about the world. It's not the statistics, although I tried to make it funny.And I will now, here, onstage, try to predict when that will happen — that Asia will regain its dominant position as the leading part of the world, as it used to be, over thousands of years. And I will do that by trying to predict precisely at what year the average income per person in India, in China, will reach that of the West. And I don't mean the whole economy, because to grow an economy of India to the size of U.K. — that's a piece of cake, with one billion people. But I want to see when will the average pay, the money for each person, per month, in India and China, when will that have reached that of U.K. and the United States?But I will start with a historical background. And you can see my map if I get it up here. You know? I will start at 1858. 1858 was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. And they were the first to ""Twitter"" transatlantically. (Laughter) (Applause) And I've been able, through this wonderful Google and Internet, to find the text of the telegram sent back from President Buchanan to Queen Victoria. And it ends like this: ""This telegraph is a fantastic instrument to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty and law throughout the world.""Those are nice words. But I got sort of curious of what he meant with liberty, and liberty for whom. And we will think about that when we look at the wider picture of the world in 1858. Because 1858 was also watershed year in the history of Asia. 1858 was the year when the courageous uprising against the foreign occupation of India was defeated by the British forces. And India was up to 89 years more of foreign domination.1858 in China was the victory in the Opium War by the British forces. And that meant that foreigners, as it said in the treaty, were allowed to trade freely in China. It meant paying with opium for Chinese goods.And 1858 in Japan was the year when Japan had to sign the Harris Treaty and accept trade on favorable condition for the U.S. And they were threatened by those black ships there, that had been in Tokyo harbor over the last year. But, Japan, in contrast to India and China, maintained its national sovereignty.And let's see how much difference that can make. And I will do that by bringing these bubbles back to a Gapminder graph here, where you can see each bubble is a country. The size of the bubble here is the population. On this axis, as I used to have income per person in comparable dollar. And on that axis I have life expectancy, the health of people. And I also bring an innovation here. I have transformed the laser beam into an ecological, recyclable version here, in green India.(Applause)And we will see, you know. Look here, 1858, India was here, China was here, Japan was there, United States and United Kingdom was richer over there. And I will start the world like this. India was not always like this level. Actually if we go back into the historical record, there was a time hundreds of years ago when the income per person in India and China was even above that of Europe. But 1850 had already been many, many years of foreign domination, and India had been de-industrialized. And you can see that the countries who were growing their economy was United States and United Kingdom. And they were also, by the end of the century, getting healthy, and Japan was starting to catch up. India was trying down here. Can you see how it starts to move there? But really, really natural sovereignty was good for Japan. And Japan is trying to move up there.And it's the new century now. Health is getting better, United Kingdom, United States. But careful now — we are approaching the First World War. And the First World War, you know, we'll see a lot of deaths and economical problems here. United Kingdom is going down. And now comes the Spanish flu also. And then after the First World War, they continue up. Still under foreign domination, and without sovereignty, India and China are down in the corner. Not much has happened. They have grown their population but not much more. In the 1930's now, you can see that Japan is going to a period of war, with lower life expectancy. And the Second World War was really a terrible event, also economically for Japan. But they did recover quite fast afterwards. And we are moving into the new world. In 1947 India finally gained its independence. And they could raise the Indian flag and become a sovereign nation, but in very big difficulties down there.(Applause)In 1949 we saw the emergence of the modern China in a way which surprised the world. And what happened? What happens in the after independence? You can see that the health started to improve. Children started to go to school. Health services were provided. This is the Great Leap Forward, when China fell down. It was central planning by Mao Tse Tung. China recovered. Then they said, ""Nevermore, stupid central planning."" But they went up here, and India was trying to follow. And they were catching up indeed. And both countries had the better health, but still a very low economy.And we came to 1978, and Mao Tse Tung died, and a new guy turned up from the left. And it was Deng Xiaoping coming out here. And he said, ""Doesn't matter if a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice."" Because catching mice is what the two cats wanted to do. And you can see the two cats being here, China and India, wanting to catch the mices over there, you know. And they decided to go not only for health and education, but also starting to grow their economy. And the market reformer was successful there. In '92 India follows with a market reform. And they go quite closely together, and you can see that the similarity with India and China, in many ways, are greater than the differences with them.And here they march on. And will they catch up?This is the big question today. There they are today.Now what does it mean that the — (Applause) the averages there — this is the average of China. If I would split China, look here, Shanghai has already catched up. Shanghai is already there. And it's healthier than the United States. But on the other hand, Guizhou, one of the poorest inland provinces of China, is there. And if I split Guizhou into urban and rural, the rural part of Guizhou goes down there. You see this enormous inequity in China, in the midst of fast economic growth.And if I would also look at India, you have another type of inequity, actually, in India. The geographical, macro-geographical difference is not so big. Uttar Pradesh, the biggest of the states here, is poorer and has a lower health than the rest of India. Kerala is flying on top there, matching United States in health, but not in economy. And here, Maharashtra, with Mumbai, is forging forward. Now in India, the big inequities are within the state, rather than between the states. And that is not a bad thing, in itself. If you have a lot inequity, macro-geographical inequities can be more difficult in the long term to deal with, than if it is in the same area where you have a growth center relatively close to where poor people are living.No, there is one more inequity. Look there, United States. (Laughter) Oh, they broke my frame. Washington, D.C. went out here. My friends at Gapminder wanted me to show this because there is a new leader in Washington who is really concerned about the health system. And I can understand him, because Washington, D.C. is so rich over there but they are not as healthy as Kerala. It's quite interesting, isn't it? (Applause) I can see a business opportunity for Kerala, helping fix the health system in the United States.(Laughter)(Applause)Now here we have the whole world. You have the legend down there. And when you see the two giant cats here, pushing forward, you see that in between them and ahead of them, is the whole emerging economies of the world, which Thomas Friedman so correctly called the ""flat world."" You can see that in health and education, a large part of the world population is putting forward, but in Africa, and other parts, as in rural Guizhou in China, there is still people with low health and very low economy. We have an enormous disparity in the world. But most of the world in the middle are pushing forwards very fast.Now, back to my projections. When will it catch up? I have to go back to very conventional graph. I will show income per person on this axis instead, poor down here, rich up there. And then time here, from 1858 I start the world. And we shall see what will happen with these countries. You see, China under foreign domination actually lowered their income and came down to the Indian level here. Whereas U.K. and United States is getting richer and richer. And after Second World War, United States is richer than U.K. But independence is coming here. Growth is starting, economic reform. Growth is faster, and with projection from IMF you can see where you expect them to be in 2014.Now, the question is, ""When will the catch up take place?"" Look at, look at the United States. Can you see the bubble? The bubbles, not my bubbles, but the financial bubbles. That's the dot com bubble. This is the Lehman Brothers doorstep there. You see it came down there. And it seems this is another rock coming down there, you know. So they doesn't seem to go this way, these countries. They seem to go in a more humble growth way, you know. And people interested in growth are turning their eyes towards Asia.I can compare to Japan. This is Japan coming up. You see, Japan did it like that. We add Japan to it. And there is no doubt that fast catch up can take place. Can you see here what Japan did? Japan did it like this, until full catch up, and then they follow with the other high-income economies. But the real projections for those ones, I would like to give it like this. Can be worse, can be better. It's always difficult to predict, especially about the future. Now, a historian tells me it's even more difficult to predict about the past.(Laughter)I think I'm in a difficult position here. Inequalities in China and India I consider really the big obstacle because to bring the entire population into growth and prosperity is what will create a domestic market, what will avoid social instability, and which will make use of the entire capacity of the population. So, social investments in health, education and infrastructure, and electricity is really what is needed in India and China.You know the climate. We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change. And I consider India and China the best partners in the world in a good global climate policy. But they ain't going to pay for what others, who have more money, have largely created, and I can agree on that.But what I'm really worried about is war. Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia? And will Asia be able to handle that new position of being in charge of being the most mighty, and the governors of the world? So, always avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward. Now if these inequalities, climate and war can be avoided, get ready for a world in equity, because this is what seems to be happening.And that vision that I got as a young student, 1972, that Indians can be much better than Swedes, is just about to happen. And it will happen precisely the year 2048 in the later part of the summer, in July, more precisely, the 27th of July. (Applause) The 27th of July, 2048 is my 100th birthday. (Laughter) And I expect to speak in the first session of the 39th TED India. Get your bookings in time. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_asia_s_rise_how_and_when
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"As a culture, we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future, and where we might move forward from this point. Some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us. Other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling.But I want to tell you a different story here today. Like all stories, it has a beginning. My work, for a long time, has been involved in education, in teaching people practical skills for sustainability, teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food, how to build buildings using local materials, how to generate their own energy, and so on.I lived in Ireland, built the first straw-bale houses in Ireland, and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing. But all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model, and moderating what comes in at one end, and moderating the outputs at the other end. And then I came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly.And in order to introduce you to that, I've got something here that I'm going to unveil, which is one of the great marvels of the modern age. And it's something so astounding and so astonishing that I think maybe as I remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate. If you could help me with that it would be fantastic. (Laughter) This is a liter of oil.This bottle of oil, distilled over a hundred million years of geological time, ancient sunlight, contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor — equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you. We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials, medicine, modern clothing, laptops, a whole range of different things. It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable, historically. We've based the design of our settlements, our business models, our transport plans, even the idea of economic growth, some would argue, on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity.Yet, when we take a step back, and look over the span of history, at what we might call the petroleum interval, it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material, and then based a whole way of life around it. But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume, to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability.And it's increasingly clear that we aren't going to be able to rely on the fact that we're going to have this at our disposal forever. For every four barrels of oil that we consume, we only discover one. And that gap continues to widen. There is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling. In the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it. Completely unprecedented, historically. Already that's fallen to about 11. And that's why, now, the new breakthroughs, the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in Alberta, or at the bottom of the oceans.There are 98 oil-producing nations in the world. But of those, 65 have already passed their peak. The moment when the world on average passes this peak, people wonder when that's going to happen. And there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last July when the oil prices were so high.But are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side? No. But the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are.There is also the issue of climate change, is the other thing that underpins this transition approach. But the thing that I notice, as I talk to climate scientists, is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes, as the data that's coming in, which is far ahead of what the IPCC are talking about. So the IPCC said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100, in their worst case scenario. Actually, if current trends continue, it could all be gone in five or 10 years' time. If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms, it would offset all the savings that we need to make, in carbon, over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change. We have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization.But I'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us. ""The generation that lived at the top of the mountain, that partied so hard, and so abused its inheritance."" And one of the ways I like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil, before we had fossil fuels, and people relied on their own muscle, animal muscle energy, or a little bit of wind, little bit of water energy.We had stories like ""The Seven-League Boots"": the giant who had these boots, where, once you put them on, with every stride you could cover seven leagues, or 21 miles, a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal.Stories like The Magic Porridge Pot, where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words, this pot would just make as much food as you liked, without you having to do any work, provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge. Otherwise you'd flood your entire town with warm porridge.There is the story of ""The Elves and the Shoemaker."" The people who make shoes go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and all the shoes are magically made for them. It's something that was unimaginable to people then.Now we have the seven-league boots in the form of Ryanair and Easyjet. We have the magic porridge pot in the form of Walmart and Tesco. And we have the elves in the form of China. But we don't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been.And what are the stories that we tell ourselves now, as we look forward about where we're going to go. And I would argue that there are four. There is the idea of business as usual, that the future will be like the present, just more of it. But as we've seen over the last year, I think that's an idea that is increasingly coming into question. And in terms of climate change, is something that is not actually feasible.There is the idea of hitting the wall, that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse. This is a popular story in some places. The third story is the idea that technology can solve everything, that technology can somehow get us through this completely.And it's an idea that I think is very prevalent at these TED Talks, the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis, that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints, the idea that we'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side, the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world.But the world isn't Second Life. We can't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse. And as we sit, exchanging free ideas with each other, there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers, extracting the minerals to make all of those things. The breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances, usually at the expense of the local, more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past, which we've so effectively devalued and dismantled.We can be astonishingly inventive and creative. But we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands. Energy and technology are not the same thing. What I'm involved with is the transition response. And this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face, and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need. It's something which has spread incredibly fast. And it is something which has several characteristics.It's viral. It seems to spread under the radar very, very quickly. It's open source. It's something which everybody who's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it. It's self-organizing. There is no great central organization that pushes this; people just pick up an idea and they run with it, and they implement it where they are. It's solutions-focused. It's very much looking at what people can do where they are, to respond to this. It's sensitive to place and to scale.Transitional is completely different. Transition groups in Chile, transition groups in the U.S., transition groups here, what they're doing looks very different in every place that you go to. It learns very much from its mistakes. And it feels historic. It tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary. And it's a process which is really joyful. People have a huge amount of fun doing this, reconnecting with other people as they do it. One of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience.And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology. And it's really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside. When they encounter shock from the outside that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces. And I think it's a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said.When our supermarkets have only two or three days' worth of food in them at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in. Looking through the lens of resilience, we really question how we've let ourselves get into a situation that's so vulnerable. Resilience runs much deeper: it's about building modularity into what we do, building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us.This is a photograph of the Bristol and District Market Gardeners Association, in 1897. This is at a time when the city of Bristol, which is quite close to here, was surrounded by commercial market gardens, which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town, and created a lot of employment for people, as well. There was a degree of resilience, if you like, at that time, which we can now only look back on with envy.So how does this transition idea work? So basically, you have a group of people who are excited by the idea. They pick up some of the tools that we've developed. They start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town. They show films, they give talks, and so on. It's a process which is playful and creative and informative. Then they start to form working groups, looking at different aspects of this, and then from that, there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable.So it started out with some work I was involved in in Ireland, where I was teaching, and has since spread. There are now over 200 formal transition projects. And there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage. They are mulling whether they're going to take it further. And actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff. But what do they actually do? You know, it's a kind of nice idea, but what do they actually do on the ground?Well, I think it's really important to make the point that actually you know, this isn't something which is going to do everything on its own. We need international legislation from Copenhagen and so on. We need national responses. We need local government responses. But all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front, making unelectable policies electable, over the next 5 to 10 years.Some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects, like community-supported agriculture schemes, urban food production, creating local food directories, and so on. A lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies, community-owned energy companies, where the community can invest money into itself, to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need. A lot of places are working with their local schools. Newent in the Forest of Dean: big polytunnel they built for the school; the kids are learning how to grow food. Promoting recycling, things like garden-share, that matches up people who don't have a garden who would like to grow food, with people who have gardens they aren't using anymore. Planting productive trees throughout urban spaces. And also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies.This is Lewes in Sussex, who have recently launched the Lewes Pound, a currency that you can only spend within the town, as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy. You take it anywhere else, it's not worth anything. But actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively.Another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan, which is basically to develop a plan B for the town. Most of our local authorities, when they sit down to plan for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years of a community, still start by assuming that there will be more energy, more cars, more housing, more jobs, more growth, and so on. What does it look like if that's not the case? And how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody? As a friend of mine says, ""Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for."" And that's certainly been my experience with transition. From three years ago, it just being an idea, this has become something that has virally swept around the world. We're getting a lot of interest from government. Ed Miliband, the energy minister of this country, was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener. Which he did — (Laughter) (Applause) — and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea.There are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities, Leicestershire and Somerset. And in Stroud, the transition group there, in effect, wrote the local government's food plan. And the head of the council said, ""If we didn't have Transition Stroud, we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time."" As we see the spread of it, we see national hubs emerging.In Scotland, the Scottish government's climate change fund has funded Transition Scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this. And we see it all over the place as well now. But the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now, but that things are already inevitably changing, and what we need to do is to work creatively with that, based on asking the right questions.I think I'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories. Because I think stories are vital here. And actually the stories that we tell ourselves, we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here. And one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing. Stories about the community that's produced its own 21 pound note, for example, the school that's turned its car park into a food garden, the community that's founded its own energy company. And for me, one of the great stories recently was the Obamas digging up the south lawn of the White House to create a vegetable garden. Because the last time that was done, when Eleanor Roosevelt did it, it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the United States.So the question I'd like to leave you with, really, is — for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive, how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions, while also building resilience?Personally, I feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil. I've been astonishingly lucky, we've been astonishingly lucky. But let us honor what it has bought us, and move forward from this point. Because if we cling to it, and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices, the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable. And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us, and that the Oil Age has done for us, we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient, more nourishing, and in which, we find ourselves fitter, more skilled and more connected to each other. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_hopkins_transition_to_a_world_without_oil
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"It's a bit funny to be at a conference dedicated to things not seen, and present my proposal to build a 6,000-kilometer-long wall across the entire African continent. About the size of the Great Wall of China, this would hardly be an invisible structure. And yet it's made from parts that are invisible, or near-invisible, to the naked eye: bacteria and grains of sand.Now, as architects we're trained to solve problems. But I don't really believe in architectural problems; I only believe in opportunities. Which is why I'll show you a threat, and an architectural response. The threat is desertification. My response is a sandstone wall made from bacteria and solidified sand, stretching across the desert.Now, sand is a magical material of beautiful contradictions. It is simple and complex. It is peaceful and violent. It is always the same, never the same, endlessly fascinating. One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second. That's a cyclical process. As rocks and mountains die, grains of sand are born. Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone. And as the sandstone weathers, new grains break free. Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale, into a sand dune.In a way, the static, stone mountain becomes a moving mountain of sand. But, moving mountains can be dangerous. Let me try and explain why. Dry areas cover more than one third of the Earth's land surfaces. Some are already deserts; others are being seriously degraded by the sand. Just south of the Sahara we find the Sahel. The name means ""edge of the desert."" And this is the region most closely associated with desertification. It was here in the late '60s and early '70s that major droughts brought three million people to become dependent upon emergency food aid, with about up to 250,000 dying.This is a catastrophe waiting to happen again. And it's one that gets very little attention. In our accelerated media culture, desertification is simply too slow to reach the headlines. It's nothing like a tsunami or a Katrina: too few crying children and smashed up houses. And yet desertification is a major threat on all continents, affecting some 110 countries and about 70 percent of the world's agricultural drylands.It seriously threatens the livelihoods of millions of people, and especially in Africa and China. And it is largely an issue that we've created for ourselves through unsustainable use of scarce resources. So, we get climate change. We get droughts, increased desertification, crashing food systems, water scarcity, famine, forced migration, political instability, warfare, crisis. That's a potential scenario if we fail to take this seriously. But, how far away is it?I went to Sokoto in northern Nigeria to try and find out how far away it is. The dunes here move southward at a pace of around 600 meters a year. That's the Sahara eating up almost [two meters] a day of the arable land, physically pushing people away from their homes. Here I am — I'm the second person on the left — (Laughter) with the elders in Gidan-Kara, a tiny village outside of Sokoto.They had to move this village in 1987 as a huge dune threatened to swallow it. So, they moved the entire village, hut by hut. This is where the village used to be. It took us about 10 minutes to climb up to the top of that dune, which goes to show why they had to move to a safer location. That's the kind of forced migration that desertification can lead to. If you happen to live close to the desert border, you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away, and abandon your home and your life as you know it.Now, sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts. And still, those extreme environments are very good places if we want to stop the shifting sands. Four years ago, 23 African countries came together to create the Great Green Wall Sahara. A fantastic project, the initial plan called for a shelter belt of trees to be planted right across the African continent, from Mauritania in the west, all the way to Djibouti in the east. If you want to stop a sand dune from moving, what you need to make sure to do is to stop the grains from avalanching over its crest. And a good way of doing that, the most efficient way, is to use some kind of sand catcher. Trees or cacti are good for this. But, one of the problems with planting trees is that the people in these regions are so poor that they chop them down for firewood.Now there is an alternative to just planting trees and hoping that they won't get chopped down. This sandstone wall that I'm proposing essentially does three things. It adds roughness to the dune's surface, to the texture of the dune's surface, binding the grains. It provides a physical support structure for the trees, and it creates physical spaces, habitable spaces inside of the sand dunes. If people live inside of the green barrier they can help support the trees, protect them from humans, and from some of the forces of nature. Inside of the dunes we find shade. We can start harvesting condensation, and start greening the desert from within.Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand or we can have the wind excavate it for us. So, the wind carries the sand onto the site and then it carries the redundant sand away from the structure for us.But, by now, you're probably asking, how am I planning to solidify a sand dune? How do we glue those grains of sand together? And the answer is, perhaps, that you use these guys, Bacillus pasteurii, a micro-organism that is readily available in wetlands and marshes, and does precisely that. It takes a pile of loose sand and it creates sandstone out of it. These images from the American Society for Microbiology show us the process.What happens is, you pour Bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand, and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains. A chemical process produces calcite, which is a kind of natural cement that binds the grains together. The whole cementation process takes about 24 hours. I learned about this from a professor at U.C. Davis called Jason DeJong. He managed to do it in a mere 1,400 minutes. Here I am, playing the part of the mad scientist, working with the bugs at UCL in London, trying to solidify them.So, how much would this cost? I'm not an economist, very much not, but I did, quite literally, a back of the envelope calculation — (Laughter) — and it seems that for a cubic meter of concrete we would have to pay in the region of 90 dollars. And, after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria, which you'll never have to pay again, one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars.How do we construct something like this? Well, I'll quickly show you two options. The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it. Then, a few years afterwards, using permacultural strategies, we green that part of the desert.The second alternative would be to use injection piles. So, we pushed the piles down through the dune, and we create an initial bacterial surface. We then pull the piles up through the dune and we're able to create almost any conceivable shape inside of the sand with the sand acting as a mold as we go up. So, we have a way of turning sand into sandstone, and then creating these habitable spaces inside of the desert dunes.But, what should they look like? Well, I was inspired, for my architectural form, by tafoni, which look a little bit like this, this is a model representation of it. These are cavernous rock structures that I found on the site in Sokoto. And I realized that if I scaled them up, they would provide me with good spatial qualities, for ventilation, for thermal comfort, and for other things. Now, part of the formal control over this structure would be lost to nature, obviously, as the bacteria do their work. And I think this creates a kind of boundless beauty actually. I think there is really something in that articulation that is quite nice. We see the result, the traces, if you like, of the Bacillus pasteurii being harnessed to sculpt the desert into these habitable environments.Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably, and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way. That's not true at all. It's a natural process. It goes on in nature today, and the bacteria die as soon as we stop feeding them. So, there it is — architectural anti-desertification structures made from the desert itself. Sand-stopping devices, made from sand. The world is likely to lose one third of its arable land by the end of the century. In a period of unprecedented population growth and increased food demands, this could prove disastrous. And quite frankly, we're putting our heads in the sand.If nothing else, I would like for this scheme to initiate a discussion. But, if I had something like a TED wish, it would be to actually get it built, to start building this habitable wall, this very, very long, but very narrow city in the desert, built into the dunescape itself. It's not only something that supports trees, but something that connects people and countries together. I would like to conclude by showing you an animation of the structure, and leave you with a sentence by Jorge Luis Borges.Borges said that ""nothing is built on stone, everything is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.""Now, there are many details left to explore in this scheme — political, practical, ethical, financial. My design, as it takes you down the rabbit hole, is fraught with many challenges and difficulties in the real world. But, it's a beginning, it's a vision. As Borges would have it, it's the sand. And I think now is really the time to turn it into stone. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture
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"One day a one-eyed monkey came into the forest. Under a tree she saw a woman meditating furiously. The one-eyed monkey recognized the woman, a Sekhri. She was the wife of an even more famous Brahmin. To watch her better, the one-eyed monkey climbed onto the tree. Just then, with a loud bang, the heavens opened. (Claps) And the god Indra jumped into the clearing. Indra saw the woman, a Sekhri. Ah-hah. The woman paid him no heed. So, Indra, attracted, threw her onto the floor, and proceeded to rape her. Then Indra disappeared. (Clap! Clap!) And the woman's husband, the Brahmin, appeared. He realized at once what had happened. So, he petitioned the higher gods so that he may have justice. So, the god Vishnu arrived.""Are there any witnesses?""""Just a one-eyed monkey,"" said the Brahmin.Now, the one-eyed monkey really wanted for the woman, a Sekhri, to get justice, so she retold events exactly as they had happened. Vishnu gave his judgment.""The god Indra has sinned, in that he has sinned against ... a Brahmin. May he be called to wash away his sins.""So, Indra arrived, and performed the sacrifice of the horse. And so it transpired that a horse was killed, a god was made sin-free, a Brahmin's ego was appeased, a woman ... was ruined, and a one-eyed monkey was left ... very confused at what we humans call justice.In India there is a rape every three minutes. In India, only 25 percent of rapes come to a police station, and of these 25 percent that come to a police station, convictions are only in four percent of the cases. That's a lot of women who don't get justice.And it's not only about women. Look around you, look at your own countries. There is a certain pattern in who gets charged with crimes. If you're in Australia, it's mostly aboriginals who are in jail. If you're in India, it's either Muslims or Adivasis, our tribals, the Naxalites. If you're in the U.S., it's mostly the blacks. There is a trend here. And the Brahmins and the gods, like in my story, always get to tell their truth as The Truth. So, have we all become one-eyed — two-eyed instead of one-eyed — monkeys? Have we stopped seeing injustice?Good morning. (Applause) You know, I have told this story close to 550 times, in audiences in 40 countries, to school students, to black-tie dinners at the Smithsonian, and so on and so forth, and every time it hits something. Now, if I were to go into the same crowd and say, ""I want to lecture you about justice and injustice,"" they would say, ""Thank you very much, we have other things to do."" And that is the astonishing power of art.Art can go through where other things can't. You can't have barriers, because it breaks through your prejudices, breaks through everything that you have as your mask, that says, ""I am this, I am that, I am that."" No. It breaks through those. And it reaches somewhere where other things don't. And in a world where attitudes are so difficult to change, we need a language that reaches through.Hitler knew it; he used Wagner to make all the Nazis feel wonderful and Aryan. And Mr. Berlusconi knows it, as he sits atop this huge empire of media and television and so on and so forth. And all of the wonderful creative minds who are in all the advertising agencies, and who help corporate sell us things we absolutely don't require, they also know the power of the arts.For me it came very early. When I was a young child, my mother, who was a choreographer, came upon a phenomenon that worried her. It was a phenomenon where young brides were committing suicide in rural Gujarat, because they were being forced to bring more and more money for their in-laws' families. And she created a dance piece which then Prime Minister Nehru saw. He came to talk to her and said, ""What is this about?"" She told him and he set out the first inquiry into what today we call Dowry Dance. Imagine a dance piece for the first inquiry into something that even today kills thousands of women.Many years later, when I was working with the director Peter Brook in ""The Mahabharata"" playing this feisty feminine feminist called Draupadi, I had similar experiences. Big fat black mamas in the Bronx used to come and say, ""Hey girl, that's it!"" And then these trendy young things in the Sorbonne would say, ""Madame Draupadi, on n'est pas feministe, mais ça? Ça!"" And then aboriginal women in Africa would come and say, ""This is it!"" And I thought, ""This is what we need, as a language.""We had somebody from public health. And Devdutt also mentioned public health. Well, millions of people around the world die of waterborne disease every year. And that's because there is no clean water to drink, or in countries like India, people don't know that they need to soap their hands before defecation. So, what do they do? They drink the water they know is dirty, they get cholera, they get diarrhea, they get jaundice and they die. And governments have not been able to provide clean water. They try and build it. They try and build pipelines; it doesn't happen. And the MNCs give them machines that they cannot afford. So what do you do? Do you let them die?Well, somebody had a great idea. And it was a simple idea. It was an idea that could not profit anybody but would help health in every field. Most houses in Asia and India have a cotton garment. And it was discovered, and WHO endorses this, that a clean cotton garment folded eight times over, can reduce bacteria up to 80 percent from water sieved through. So, why aren't governments blaring this on television? Why isn't it on every poster across the third world? Because there is no profit in it. Because nobody can get a kickback. But it still needs to get to people. And here is one of the ways we get it to people.[Video] Woman: Then get me one of those fancy water purifiers.Man: You know how expensive those are. I have a solution that requires neither machine, nor wood, nor cooking gas.Woman: What solution?Man: Listen, go fetch that cotton sari you have.Boy: Grand-dad, tell me the solution please.Man: I will tell all of you. Just wait.Woman: Here father. (Man: Is it clean?) Woman: Yes, of course.Man: Then do as I tell you. Fold the sari into eight folds.Woman: All right, father.Man: And you, you count that she does it right. (Boy: All right, grand-dad.)Man: One, two, three, four folds we make. All the germs from the water we take.Chorus: One, two, three, four folds we make. All the germs from the water we take. Five, six, seven, eight folds we make. Our drinking water safe we make. Five, six, seven, eight folds we make. Our drinking water safe we make.Woman: Here, father, your eight-times folded cotton sari.Man: So this is the cotton sari. And through this we will have clean water.(Applause)I think it's safe to say that all of us here are deeply concerned about the escalating violence in our daily lives. While universities are trying to devise courses in conflict resolution, and governments are trying to stop skirmishes at borders, we are surrounded by violence, whether it's road rage, or whether it's domestic violence, whether it's a teacher beating up a student and killing her because she hasn't done her homework, it's everywhere. So, why are we not doing something to actually attend that problem on a day to day basis?What are we doing to try and make children and young people realize that violence is something that we indulge in, that we can stop, and that there are other ways of actually taking violence, taking anger, taking frustrations into different things that do not harm other people. Well, here is one such way.(Video) (Laughs) You are peaceful people. Your parents were peaceful people. Your grandparents were peaceful people. So much peace in one place? How could it be otherwise?(Music)But, what if ... Yes. What if ... One little gene in you has been trying to get through? From your beginnings in Africa, through each generation, may be passed on to you, in your creation. It's a secret urge, hiding deep in you. And if it's in you, then it's in me too. Oh, dear.It's what made you smack your baby brother, stamp on a cockroach, scratch your mother. It's the feeling that wells up from deep inside, when your husband comes home drunk and you wanna tan his hide. Want to kill that cyclist on the way to work, and string up your cousin 'cause she's such a jerk. Oh, dear. And as for outsiders, white, black or brown, tar and feather them, and whip them out of town.It's that little gene. It's small and it's mean. Too small for detection, it's your built-in protection. Adrenaline, kill. It'll give you the will. Yes, you'd better face it 'cause you can't displace it. You're V-I-O-L-E-N-T. Cause you're either a victim, or on top, like me.Goodbye, Abraham Lincoln. Goodbye, Mahatma Gandhi. Goodbye, Martin Luther King. Hello, gangs from this neighborhood killing gangs from that neighborhood. Hello governments of rich countries selling arms to governments of poor countries who can't even afford to give them food. Hello civilization. Hello, 21st century. Look what we've ... look what they've done. (Applause)Mainstream art, cinema, has been used across the world to talk about social issues. A few years ago we had a film called Rang De Basanti, which suddenly spawned thousands of young people wanting to volunteer for social change. In Venezuela, one of the most popular soap operas has a heroine called Crystal. And when, onscreen, Crystal got breast cancer, 75,000 more young women went to have mammographies done. And of course, ""The Vagina Monologues"" we know about. And there are stand-up comics who are talking about racial issues, about ethnic issues.So, why is it, that if we think that we all agree that we need a better world, we need a more just world, why is it that we are not using the one language that has consistently showed us that we can break down barriers, that we can reach people? What I need to say to the planners of the world, the governments, the strategists is, ""You have treated the arts as the cherry on the cake. It needs to be the yeast."" Because, any future planning, if 2048 is when we want to get there, unless the arts are put with the scientists, with the economists, with all those who prepare for the future, badly, we're not going to get there. And unless this is actually internalized, it won't happen.So, what is it that we require? What is it that we need? We need to break down our vision of what planners are, of what the correct way of a path is. And to say all these years of trying to make a better world, and we have failed. There are more people being raped. There are more wars. There are more people dying of simple things. So, something has got to give. And that is what I want. Can I have my last audio track please?Once there was a princess who whistled beautifully. (Whistling) Her father the king said, ""Don't whistle."" Her mother the queen said, ""Hai, don't whistle."" But the princess continued whistling. (Whistling)The years went by and the princess grew up into a beautiful young woman, who whistled even more beautifully. (Whistling) Her father the king said, ""Who will marry a whistling princess?"" Her mother the queen said, ""Who will marry a whistling princess?""But the king had an idea. He announced a Swayamvara. He invited all the princes to come and defeat his daughter at whistling. ""Whoever defeats my daughter shall have half my kingdom and her hand in marriage!"" Soon the palace filled with princes whistling. (Whistling) Some whistled badly. Some whistled well. But nobody could defeat the princess.""Now what shall we do?"" said the king. ""Now what shall we do?"" said the queen. But the princess said, ""Father, Mother, don't worry. I have an idea. I am going to go to each of these young men and I am going to ask them if they defeated correctly. And if somebody answers, that shall be my wish.""So she went up to each and said, ""Do you accept that I have defeated you?"" And they said, ""Me? Defeated by a woman? No way, that's impossible! No no no no no! That's not possible."" Till finally one prince said, ""Princess, I accept, you have defeated me."" ""Uh-huh ..."" she said. ""Father, mother, this man shall be my wife."" (Whistling)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mallika_sarabhai
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"As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister, I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower. In fact, the American publishers of my book, ""The Elephant, The Tiger and the Cell Phone,"" added a gratuitous subtitle saying, ""India: The next 21st-century power."" And I just don't think that's what India's all about, or should be all about.Indeed, what worries me is the entire notion of world leadership seems to me terribly archaic. It's redolent of James Bond movies and Kipling ballads. After all, what constitutes a world leader? If it's population, we're on course to top the charts. We will overtake China by 2034. Is it military strength? Well, we have the world's fourth largest army. Is it nuclear capacity? We know we have that. The Americans have even recognized it, in an agreement. Is it the economy? Well, we have now the fifth-largest economy in the world in purchasing power parity terms. And we continue to grow. When the rest of the world took a beating last year, we grew at 6.7 percent.But, somehow, none of that adds up to me, to what I think India really can aim to contribute in the world, in this part of the 21st century. And so I wondered, could what the future beckons for India to be all about be a combination of these things allied to something else, the power of example, the attraction of India's culture, what, in other words, people like to call ""soft power.""Soft power is a concept invented by a Harvard academic, Joseph Nye, a friend of mine. And, very simply, and I'm really cutting it short because of the time limits here, it's essentially the ability of a country to attract others because of its culture, its political values, its foreign policies. And, you know, lots of countries do this. He was writing initially about the States, but we know the Alliance Francaise is all about French soft power, the British Council. The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the Voice of America and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity.So soft power is something that really emerges partly because of governments, but partly despite governments. And in the information era we all live in today, what we might call the TED age, I'd say that countries are increasingly being judged by a global public that's been fed on an incessant diet of Internet news, of televised images, of cellphone videos, of email gossip. In other words, all sorts of communication devices are telling us the stories of countries, whether or not the countries concerned want people to hear those stories.Now, in this age, again, countries with access to multiple channels of communication and information have a particular advantage. And of course they have more influence, sometimes, about how they're seen. India has more all-news TV channels than any country in the world, in fact in most of the countries in this part of the world put together.But, the fact still is that it's not just that. In order to have soft power, you have to be connected. One might argue that India has become an astonishingly connected country. I think you've already heard the figures. We've been selling 15 million cellphones a month. Currently there are 509 million cellphones in Indian hands, in India. And that makes us larger than the U.S. as a telephone market. In fact, those 15 million cellphones are the most connections that any country, including the U.S. and China, has ever established in the history of telecommunications.But, what perhaps some of you don't realize is how far we've come to get there. You know, when I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone. But sometimes it just sat there.I went to high school in Calcutta. And we would look at this instrument sitting in the front foyer. But half the time we would pick it up with an expectant look on our faces, there would be no dial tone. If there was a dial tone and you dialed a number, the odds were two in three you wouldn't get the number you were intending to reach. In fact the words ""wrong number"" were more popular than the word ""Hello."" (Laughter) If you then wanted to connect to another city, let's say from Calcutta you wanted to call Delhi, you'd have to book something called a trunk call, and then sit by the phone all day, waiting for it to come through. Or you could pay eight times the going rate for something called a lightning call. But, lightning struck rather slowly in our country in those days, so, it was like about a half an hour for a lightning call to come through.In fact, so woeful was our telephone service that a Member of Parliament stood up in 1984 and complained about this. And the Then-Communications Minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country communications are a luxury, not a right, that the government had no obligation to provide better service, and if the honorable Member wasn't satisfied with his telephone, could he please return it, since there was an eight-year-long waiting list for telephones in India.Now, fast-forward to today and this is what you see: the 15 million cell phones a month. But what is most striking is who is carrying those cell phones. You know, if you visit friends in the suburbs of Delhi, on the side streets you will find a fellow with a cart that looks like it was designed in the 16th century, wielding a coal-fired steam iron that might have been invented in the 18th century. He's called an isthri wala. But he's carrying a 21st-century instrument. He's carrying a cell phone because most incoming calls are free, and that's how he gets orders from the neighborhood, to know where to collect clothes to get them ironed.The other day I was in Kerala, my home state, at the country farm of a friend, about 20 kilometers away from any place you'd consider urban. And it was a hot day and he said, ""Hey, would you like some fresh coconut water?"" And it's the best thing and the most nutritious and refreshing thing you can drink on a hot day in the tropics, so I said sure. And he whipped out his cellphone, dialed the number, and a voice said, ""I'm up here."" And right on top of the nearest coconut tree, with a hatchet in one hand and a cell phone in the other, was a local toddy tapper, who proceeded to bring down the coconuts for us to drink.Fishermen are going out to sea and carrying their cell phones. When they catch the fish they call all the market towns along the coast to find out where they get the best possible prices. Farmers now, who used to have to spend half a day of backbreaking labor to find out if the market town was open, if the market was on, whether the product they'd harvested could be sold, what price they'd fetch. They'd often send an eight year old boy all the way on this trudge to the market town to get that information and come back, then they'd load the cart. Today they're saving half a day's labor with a two minute phone call.So this empowerment of the underclass is the real result of India being connected. And that transformation is part of where India is heading today. But, of course that's not the only thing about India that's spreading. You've got Bollywood. My attitude to Bollywood is best summarized in the tale of the two goats at a Bollywood garbage dump — Mr. Shekhar Kapur, forgive me — and they're chewing away on cans of celluloid discarded by a Bollywood studio. And the first goat, chewing away, says, ""You know, this film is not bad."" And the second goat says, ""No, the book was better."" (Laughter)I usually tend to think that the book is usually better, but, having said that, the fact is that Bollywood is now taking a certain aspect of Indian-ness and Indian culture around the globe, not just in the Indian diaspora in the U.S. and the U.K., but to the screens of Arabs and Africans, of Senegalese and Syrians. I've met a young man in New York whose illiterate mother in a village in Senegal takes a bus once a month to the capital city of Dakar, just to watch a Bollywood movie. She can't understand the dialogue. She's illiterate, so she can't read the French subtitles. But these movies are made to be understood despite such handicaps, and she has a great time in the song and the dance and the action. She goes away with stars in her eyes about India, as a result.And this is happening more and more. Afghanistan, we know what a serious security problem Afghanistan is for so many of us in the world. India doesn't have a military mission there. You know what was India's biggest asset in Afghanistan in the last seven years? One simple fact: you couldn't try to call an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening. Why? Because that was the moment when the Indian television soap opera, ""Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi,"" dubbed into Dari, was telecast on Tolo T.V. And it was the most popular television show in Afghan history. Every Afghan family wanted to watch it. They had to suspend functions at 8:30. Weddings were reported to be interrupted so guests could cluster around the T.V. set, and then turn their attention back to the bride and groom. Crime went up at 8:30. I have read a Reuters dispatch — so this is not Indian propaganda, a British news agency — about how robbers in the town of Musarri Sharif* stripped a vehicle of its windshield wipers, its hubcaps, its sideview mirrors, any moving part they could find, at 8:30, because the watchmen were busy watching the T.V. rather than minding the store. And they scrawled on the windshield in a reference to the show's heroine, ""Tulsi Zindabad"": ""Long live Tulsi."" (Laughter)That's soft power. And that is what India is developing through the ""E"" part of TED: its own entertainment industry. The same is true, of course — we don't have time for too many more examples — but it's true of our music, of our dance, of our art, yoga, ayurveda, even Indian cuisine. I mean, the proliferation of Indian restaurants since I first went abroad as a student, in the mid '70s, and what I see today, you can't go to a mid-size town in Europe or North America and not find an Indian restaurant. It may not be a very good one. But, today in Britain, for example, Indian restaurants in Britain employ more people than the coal mining, ship building and iron and steel industries combined. So the empire can strike back. (Applause)But, with this increasing awareness of India, with you and with I, and so on, with tales like Afghanistan, comes something vital in the information era, the sense that in today's world it's not the side of the bigger army that wins, it's the country that tells a better story that prevails. And India is, and must remain, in my view, the land of the better story. Stereotypes are changing. I mean, again, having gone to the U.S. as a student in the mid '70s, I knew what the image of India was then, if there was an image at all.Today, people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere speak of the IITs, the Indian Institutes of Technology with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT. This can sometimes have unintended consequences. OK. I had a friend, a history major like me, who was accosted at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, by an anxiously perspiring European saying, ""You're Indian, you're Indian! Can you help me fix my laptop?"" (Laughter)We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus. But that too is transforming the Indian story around the world. But, there is something more substantive to that. The story rests on a fundamental platform of political pluralism. It's a civilizational story to begin with. Because India has been an open society for millennia. India gave refuge to the Jews, fleeing the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians, and said thereafter by the Romans.In fact, legend has is that when Doubting Thomas, the Apostle, Saint Thomas, landed on the shores of Kerala, my home state, somewhere around 52 A.D., he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. And to this day remains the only Jewish diaspora in the history of the Jewish people, which has never encountered a single incident of anti-semitism. (Applause) That's the Indian story. Islam came peacefully to the south, slightly more differently complicated history in the north. But all of these religions have found a place and a welcome home in India.You know, we just celebrated, this year, our general elections, the biggest exercise in democratic franchise in human history. And the next one will be even bigger, because our voting population keeps growing by 20 million a year. But, the fact is that the last elections, five years ago, gave the world extraordinary phenomenon of an election being won by a woman political leader of Italian origin and Roman Catholic faith, Sonia Gandhi, who then made way for a Sikh, Mohan Singh, to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim, President Abdul Kalam, in a country 81 percent Hindu. (Applause)This is India, and of course it's all the more striking because it was four years later that we all applauded the U.S., the oldest democracy in the modern world, more than 220 years of free and fair elections, which took till last year to elect a president or a vice president who wasn't white, male or Christian. So, maybe — oh sorry, he is Christian, I beg your pardon — and he is male, but he isn't white. All the others have been all those three. (Laughter) All his predecessors have been all those three, and that's the point I was trying to make. (Laughter)But, the issue is that when I talked about that example, it's not just about talking about India, it's not propaganda. Because ultimately, that electoral outcome had nothing to do with the rest of the world. It was essentially India being itself. And ultimately, it seems to me, that always works better than propaganda. Governments aren't very good at telling stories. But people see a society for what it is, and that, it seems to me, is what ultimately will make a difference in today's information era, in today's TED age.So India now is no longer the nationalism of ethnicity or language or religion, because we have every ethnicity known to mankind, practically, we've every religion know to mankind, with the possible exception of Shintoism, though that has some Hindu elements somewhere. We have 23 official languages that are recognized in our Constitution. And those of you who cashed your money here might be surprised to see how many scripts there are on the rupee note, spelling out the denominations. We've got all of that. We don't even have geography uniting us, because the natural geography of the subcontinent framed by the mountains and the sea was hacked by the partition with Pakistan in 1947. In fact, you can't even take the name of the country for granted, because the name ""India"" comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan.But, the whole point is that India is the nationalism of an idea. It's the idea of an ever-ever-land, emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, but sustained, above all, by pluralist democracy. That is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one. And it's the nationalism of an idea that essentially says you can endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, consonant, for that matter, and still rally around a consensus. And the consensus is of a very simple principle, that in a diverse plural democracy like India you don't really have to agree on everything all the time, so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree. The great success story of India, a country that so many learned scholars and journalists assumed would disintegrate, in the '50s and '60s, is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus.Now, that is the India that is emerging into the 21st century. And I do want to make the point that if there is anything worth celebrating about India, it isn't military muscle, economic power. All of that is necessary, but we still have huge amounts of problems to overcome. Somebody said we are super poor, and we are also super power. We can't really be both of those. We have to overcome our poverty. We have to deal with the hardware of development, the ports, the roads, the airports, all the infrastructural things we need to do, and the software of development, the human capital, the need for the ordinary person in India to be able to have a couple of square meals a day, to be able to send his or her children to a decent school, and to aspire to work a job that will give them opportunities in their lives that can transform themselves.But, it's all taking place, this great adventure of conquering those challenges, those real challenges which none of us can pretend don't exist. But, it's all taking place in an open society, in a rich and diverse and plural civilization, in one that is determined to liberate and fulfill the creative energies of its people. That's why India belongs at TED, and that's why TED belongs in India. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shashi_tharoor
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"Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Prime Minister, that was both fascinating and quite inspiring. So, you're calling for a global ethic. Would you describe that as global citizenship? Is that an idea that you believe in, and how would you define that?Gordon Brown: It is about global citizenship and recognizing our responsibilities to others. There is so much to do over the next few years that is obvious to so many of us to build a better world. And there is so much shared sense of what we need to do, that it is vital that we all come together. But we don't necessarily have the means to do so.So there are challenges to be met. I believe the concept of global citizenship will simply grow out of people talking to each other across continents. But of course the task is to create the institutions that make that global society work. But I don't think we should underestimate the extent to which massive changes in technology make possible the linking up of people across the world.CA: But people get excited about this idea of global citizenship, but then they get confused a bit again when they start thinking about patriotism, and how to combine these two. I mean, you're elected as Prime Minister with a brief to bat for Britain. How do you reconcile the two things?GB: Well, of course national identity remains important. But it's not at the expense of people accepting their global responsibilities. And I think one of the problems of recession is that people become more protectionist, they look in on themselves, they try to protect their own nation, perhaps at the expense of other nations. When you actually look at the motor of the world economy, it cannot move forward unless there is trade between the different countries. And any nation that would become protectionist over the next few years would deprive itself of the chance of getting the benefits of growth in the world economy.So, you've got to have a healthy sense of patriotism; that's absolutely important. But you've got to realize that this world has changed fundamentally, and the problems we have cannot be solved by one nation and one nation alone.CA: Well, indeed. But what do you do when the two come into conflict and you're forced to make a decision that either is in Britain's interest, or the interest of Britons, or citizens elsewhere in the world?GB: Well I think we can persuade people that what is necessary for Britain's long-term interests, what is necessary for America's long-term interests, is proper engagement with the rest of the world, and taking the action that is necessary.There is a great story, again, told about Richard Nixon. 1958, Ghana becomes independent, so it is just over 50 years ago. Richard Nixon goes to represent the United States government at the celebrations for independence in Ghana. And it's one of his first outings as Vice President to an African country. He doesn't quite know what to do, so he starts going around the crowd and starts talking to people and he says to people in this rather unique way, ""How does it feel to be free?"" And he's going around, ""How does it feel to be free?"" ""How does it feel to be free?"" And then someone says, ""How should I know? I come from Alabama.""(Laughter)And that was the 1950s. Now, what is remarkable is that civil rights in America were achieved in the 1960s. But what is equally remarkable is socioeconomic rights in Africa have not moved forward very fast even since the age of colonialism. And yet, America and Africa have got a common interest. And we have got to realize that if we don't link up with those people who are sensible voices and democratic voices in Africa, to work together for common causes, then the danger of Al Qaeda and related groups making progress in Africa is very big.So, I would say that what seems sometimes to be altruism, in relation to Africa, or in relation to developing countries, is more than that. It is enlightened self-interest for us to work with other countries. And I would say that national interest and, if you like, what is the global interest to tackle poverty and climate change do, in the long run, come together. And whatever the short-run price for taking action on climate change or on security, or taking action to provide opportunities for people for education, these are prices that are worth paying so that you build a stronger global society where people feel able to feel comfortable with each other and are able to communicate with each other in such a way that you can actually build stronger links between different countries.CA: I still just want to draw out on this issue. So, you're on vacation at a nice beach, and word comes through that there's been a massive earthquake and that there is a tsunami advancing on the beach. One end of the beach, there is a house containing a family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beach there is a single Brit. You have time to —(Laughter)you have time to alert one house. What do you do?(Laughter)GB: Modern communications.(Applause)Alert both.(Applause)I do agree that my responsibility is first of all to make sure that people in our country are safe. And I wouldn't like anything that is said today to suggest that I am diminishing the importance of the responsibility that each leader has for their own country.But I'm trying to suggest that there is a huge opportunity open to us that was never open to us before. But the power to communicate across borders allows us to organize the world in a different way. And I think, look at the tsunami, it's a classic example. Where was the early warning systems? Where was the world acting together to deal with the problems that they knew arose from the potential for earthquakes, as well as the potential for climate change? And when the world starts to work together, with better early-warning systems, you can deal with some of these problems in a better way. I just think we're not seeing, at the moment, the huge opportunities open to us by the ability of people to cooperate in a world where either there was isolationism before or there was limited alliances based on convenience which never actually took you to deal with some of the central problems.CA: But I think this is the frustration that perhaps a lot of people have, like people in the audience here, where we love the kind of language that you're talking about. It is inspiring. A lot of us believe that that has to be the world's future. And yet, when the situation changes, you suddenly hear politicians talking as if, you know, for example, the life of one American soldier is worth countless numbers of Iraqi civilians. When the pedal hits the metal, the idealism can get moved away. I'm just wondering whether you can see that changing over time, whether you see in Britain that there are changing attitudes, and that people are actually more supportive of the kind of global ethic that you talk about.GB: I think every religion, every faith, and I'm not just talking here to people of faith or religion — it has this global ethic at the center of its credo. And whether it's Jewish or whether it's Muslim or whether it's Hindu, or whether it's Sikh, the same global ethic is at the heart of each of these religions. So, I think you're dealing with something that people instinctively see as part of their moral sense. So you're building on something that is not pure self-interest. You're building on people's ideas and values — that perhaps they're candles that burn very dimly on certain occasions. But it is a set of values that cannot, in my view, be extinguished.Then the question is, how do you make that change happen? How do you persuade people that it is in their interest to build strong — After the Second World War, we built institutions, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Marshall Plan. There was a period in which people talked about an act of creation, because these institutions were so new. But they are now out of date. They don't deal with the problems. You can't deal with the environmental problem through existing institutions. You can't deal with the security problem in the way that you need to. You can't deal with the economic and financial problem. So we have got to rebuild our global institutions, build them in a way that is suitable to the challenges of this time.And I believe that if you look at the biggest challenge we face, it is to persuade people to have the confidence that we can build a truly global society with the institutions that are founded on these rules. So, I come back to my initial point. Sometimes you think things are impossible. Nobody would have said 50 years ago that apartheid would have gone in 1990, or that the Berlin wall would have fallen at the turn of the '80s and '90s, or that polio could be eradicated, or perhaps 60 years ago, nobody would have said a man could gone to the Moon. All these things have happened. By tackling the impossible, you make the impossible possible.CA: And we have had a speaker who said that very thing, and swallowed a sword right after that, which was quite dramatic.(Laughter)GB: Followed my sword and swallow.CA: But, surely a true global ethic is for someone to say, ""I believe that the life of every human on the planet is worth the same, equal consideration, regardless of nationality and religion."" And you have politicians who have — you're elected. In a way, you can't say that. Even if, as a human being, you believe that, you can't say that. You're elected for Britain's interests.GB: We have a responsibility to protect. I mean look, 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, and all the treaties before that, the Treaty of Westphalia and everything else, were about protecting the sovereign right of countries to do what they want. Since then, the world has moved forward, partly as a result of what happened with the Holocaust, and people's concern about the rights of individuals within territories where they need protection, partly because of what we saw in Rwanda, partly because of what we saw in Bosnia. The idea of the responsibility to protect all individuals who are in situations where they are at humanitarian risk is now being established as a principle which governs the world.So, while I can't automatically say that Britain will rush to the aid of any citizen of any country, in danger, I can say that Britain is in a position where we're working with other countries so that this idea that you have a responsibility to protect people who are victims of either genocide or humanitarian attack, is something that is accepted by the whole world.Now, in the end, that can only be achieved if your international institutions work well enough to be able to do so. And that comes back to what the future role of the United Nations, and what it can do, actually is. But, the responsibility to protect is a new idea that is, in a sense, taken over from the idea of self-determination as the principle governing the international community.CA: Can you picture, in our lifetimes, a politician ever going out on a platform of the kind of full-form global ethic, global citizenship? And basically saying, ""I believe that all people across the planet have equal consideration, and if in power we will act in that way. And we believe that the people of this country are also now global citizens and will support that ethic.""GB: Is that not what we're doing in the debate about climate change? We're saying that you cannot solve the problem of climate change in one country; you've got to involve all countries. You're saying that you must, and you have a duty to help those countries that cannot afford to deal with the problems of climate change themselves. You're saying you want a deal with all the different countries of the world where we're all bound together to cutting carbon emissions in a way that is to the benefit of the whole world. We've never had this before because Kyoto didn't work. If you could get a deal at Copenhagen, where people agreed, A, that there was a long-term target for carbon emission cuts, B, that there was short-range targets that had to be met so this wasn't just abstract; it was people actually making decisions now that would make a difference now, and if you could then find a financing mechanism that meant that the poorest countries that had been hurt by our inability to deal with climate change over many, many years and decades are given special help so that they can move to energy-efficient technologies, and they are in a position financially to be able to afford the long-term investment that is associated with cutting carbon emissions, then you are treating the world equally, by giving consideration to every part of the planet and the needs they have.It doesn't mean that everybody does exactly the same thing, because we've actually got to do more financially to help the poorest countries, but it does mean there is equal consideration for the needs of citizens in a single planet.CA: Yes. And then of course the theory is still that those talks get rent apart by different countries fighting over their own individual interests.GB: Yes, but I think Europe has got a position, which is 27 countries have already come together. I mean, the great difficulty in Europe is if you're at a meeting and 27 people speak, it takes a very, very long time. But we did get an agreement on climate change. America has made its first disposition on this with the bill that President Obama should be congratulated for getting through Congress. Japan has made an announcement. China and India have signed up to the scientific evidence. And now we've got to move them to accept a long-term target, and then short-term targets. But more progress has been made, I think, in the last few weeks than had been made for some years.And I do believe that there is a strong possibility that if we work together, we can get that agreement to Copenhagen. I certainly have been putting forward proposals that would have allowed the poorest parts of the world to feel that we have taken into account their specific needs. And we would help them adapt. And we would help them make the transition to a low-carbon economy.I do think a reform of the international institutions is vital to this. When the IMF was created in the 1940s, it was created with resources that were five percent or so of the world's GDP. The IMF now has limited resources, one percent. It can't really make the difference that ought to be made in a period of crisis. So, we've got to rebuild the world institutions. And that's a big task: persuading all the different countries with the different voting shares in these institutions to do so.There is a story told about the three world leaders of the day getting a chance to get some advice from God. And the story is told that Bill Clinton went to God and he asked when there will be successful climate change and a low-carbon economy. And God shook his head and said, ""Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not even in [your] lifetime."" And Bill Clinton walked away in tears because he had failed to get what he wanted.And then the story is that Barroso, the president of the European Commission, went to God and he asked, ""When will we get a recovery of global growth?"" And God said, ""Not this year, not in this decade, perhaps not in your lifetime."" So Barroso walked away crying and in tears.And then the Secretary-General of the United Nations came up to speak to God and said, ""When will our international institutions work?"" And God cried.(Laughter)It is very important to recognize that this reform of institutions is the next stage after agreeing upon ourselves that there is a clear ethic upon which we can build.CA: Prime Minister, I think there are many in the audience who are truly appreciative of the efforts you made in terms of the financial mess we got ourselves into. And there are certainly many people in the audience who will be cheering you on as you seek to advance this global ethic.Thank you so much for coming to TED.GB: Well, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown_on_global_ethic_vs_national_interest
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"How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.So, my story today about black holes is about one particular black hole. I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call ""supermassive"" black hole at the center of our galaxy. And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist. And second, it gives us the opportunity to understand how these supermassive black holes interact with their environment, and to understand how they affect the formation and evolution of the galaxies which they reside in.So, to begin with, we need to understand what a black hole is so we can understand the proof of a black hole. So, what is a black hole? Well, in many ways a black hole is an incredibly simple object, because there are only three characteristics that you can describe: the mass, the spin, and the charge. And I'm going to only talk about the mass. So, in that sense, it's a very simple object. But in another sense, it's an incredibly complicated object that we need relatively exotic physics to describe, and in some sense represents the breakdown of our physical understanding of the universe.But today, the way I want you to understand a black hole, for the proof of a black hole, is to think of it as an object whose mass is confined to zero volume. So, despite the fact that I'm going to talk to you about an object that's supermassive, and I'm going to get to what that really means in a moment, it has no finite size. So, this is a little tricky.But fortunately there is a finite size that you can see, and that's known as the Schwarzschild radius. And that's named after the guy who recognized why it was such an important radius. This is a virtual radius, not reality; the black hole has no size. So why is it so important? It's important because it tells us that any object can become a black hole. That means you, your neighbor, your cellphone, the auditorium can become a black hole if you can figure out how to compress it down to the size of the Schwarzschild radius.At that point, what's going to happen? At that point gravity wins. Gravity wins over all other known forces. And the object is forced to continue to collapse to an infinitely small object. And then it's a black hole. So, if I were to compress the Earth down to the size of a sugar cube, it would become a black hole, because the size of a sugar cube is its Schwarzschild radius.Now, the key here is to figure out what that Schwarzschild radius is. And it turns out that it's actually pretty simple to figure out. It depends only on the mass of the object. Bigger objects have bigger Schwarzschild radii. Smaller objects have smaller Schwarzschild radii. So, if I were to take the sun and compress it down to the scale of the University of Oxford, it would become a black hole.So, now we know what a Schwarzschild radius is. And it's actually quite a useful concept, because it tells us not only when a black hole will form, but it also gives us the key elements for the proof of a black hole. I only need two things. I need to understand the mass of the object I'm claiming is a black hole, and what its Schwarzschild radius is. And since the mass determines the Schwarzschild radius, there is actually only one thing I really need to know.So, my job in convincing you that there is a black hole is to show that there is some object that's confined to within its Schwarzschild radius. And your job today is to be skeptical. Okay, so, I'm going to talk about no ordinary black hole; I'm going to talk about supermassive black holes.So, I wanted to say a few words about what an ordinary black hole is, as if there could be such a thing as an ordinary black hole. An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life. So, if a star starts its life off with much more mass than the mass of the Sun, it's going to end its life by exploding and leaving behind these beautiful supernova remnants that we see here. And inside that supernova remnant is going to be a little black hole that has a mass roughly three times the mass of the Sun. On an astronomical scale that's a very small black hole.Now, what I want to talk about are the supermassive black holes. And the supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of galaxies. And this beautiful picture taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes. There are big ones. There are little ones. Almost every object in that picture there is a galaxy. And there is a very nice spiral up in the upper left. And there are a hundred billion stars in that galaxy, just to give you a sense of scale. And all the light that we see from a typical galaxy, which is the kind of galaxies that we're seeing here, comes from the light from the stars. So, we see the galaxy because of the star light.Now, there are a few relatively exotic galaxies. I like to call these the prima donna of the galaxy world, because they are kind of show offs. And we call them active galactic nuclei. And we call them that because their nucleus, or their center, are very active. So, at the center there, that's actually where most of the starlight comes out from. And yet, what we actually see is light that can't be explained by the starlight. It's way more energetic. In fact, in a few examples it's like the ones that we're seeing here. There are also jets emanating out from the center. Again, a source of energy that's very difficult to explain if you just think that galaxies are composed of stars.So, what people have thought is that perhaps there are supermassive black holes which matter is falling on to. So, you can't see the black hole itself, but you can convert the gravitational energy of the black hole into the light we see. So, there is the thought that maybe supermassive black holes exist at the center of galaxies. But it's a kind of indirect argument.Nonetheless, it's given rise to the notion that maybe it's not just these prima donnas that have these supermassive black holes, but rather all galaxies might harbor these supermassive black holes at their centers. And if that's the case — and this is an example of a normal galaxy; what we see is the star light. And if there is a supermassive black hole, what we need to assume is that it's a black hole on a diet. Because that is the way to suppress the energetic phenomena that we see in active galactic nuclei.If we're going to look for these stealth black holes at the center of galaxies, the best place to look is in our own galaxy, our Milky Way. And this is a wide field picture taken of the center of the Milky Way. And what we see is a line of stars. And that is because we live in a galaxy which has a flattened, disk-like structure. And we live in the middle of it, so when we look towards the center, we see this plane which defines the plane of the galaxy, or line that defines the plane of the galaxy.Now, the advantage of studying our own galaxy is it's simply the closest example of the center of a galaxy that we're ever going to have, because the next closest galaxy is 100 times further away. So, we can see far more detail in our galaxy than anyplace else. And as you'll see in a moment, the ability to see detail is key to this experiment.So, how do astronomers prove that there is a lot of mass inside a small volume? Which is the job that I have to show you today. And the tool that we use is to watch the way stars orbit the black hole. Stars will orbit the black hole in the very same way that planets orbit the sun. It's the gravitational pull that makes these things orbit. If there were no massive objects these things would go flying off, or at least go at a much slower rate because all that determines how they go around is how much mass is inside its orbit.So, this is great, because remember my job is to show there is a lot of mass inside a small volume. So, if I know how fast it goes around, I know the mass. And if I know the scale of the orbit I know the radius. So, I want to see the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible. Because I want to show there is a mass inside as small a region as possible. So, this means that I want to see a lot of detail. And that's the reason that for this experiment we've used the world's largest telescope.This is the Keck observatory. It hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters, which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court. Now, this is wonderful, because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope, the smaller the detail that we can see. But it turns out these telescopes, or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise. And that is because of the atmosphere. Atmosphere is great for us; it allows us to survive here on Earth. But it's relatively challenging for astronomers who want to look through the atmosphere to astronomical sources.So, to give you a sense of what this is like, it's actually like looking at a pebble at the bottom of a stream. Looking at the pebble on the bottom of the stream, the stream is continuously moving and turbulent, and that makes it very difficult to see the pebble on the bottom of the stream. Very much in the same way, it's very difficult to see astronomical sources, because of the atmosphere that's continuously moving by.So, I've spent a lot of my career working on ways to correct for the atmosphere, to give us a cleaner view. And that buys us about a factor of 20. And I think all of you can agree that if you can figure out how to improve life by a factor of 20, you've probably improved your lifestyle by a lot, say your salary, you'd notice, or your kids, you'd notice.And this animation here shows you one example of the techniques that we use, called adaptive optics. You're seeing an animation that goes between an example of what you would see if you don't use this technique — in other words, just a picture that shows the stars — and the box is centered on the center of the galaxy, where we think the black hole is. So, without this technology you can't see the stars. With this technology all of a sudden you can see it. This technology works by introducing a mirror into the telescope optics system that's continuously changing to counteract what the atmosphere is doing to you. So, it's kind of like very fancy eyeglasses for your telescope.Now, in the next few slides I'm just going to focus on that little square there. So, we're only going to look at the stars inside that small square, although we've looked at all of them. So, I want to see how these things have moved. And over the course of this experiment, these stars have moved a tremendous amount. So, we've been doing this experiment for 15 years, and we see the stars go all the way around.Now, most astronomers have a favorite star, and mine today is a star that's labeled up there, SO-2. Absolutely my favorite star in the world. And that's because it goes around in only 15 years. And to give you a sense of how short that is, the sun takes 200 million years to go around the center of the galaxy. Stars that we knew about before, that were as close to the center of the galaxy as possible, take 500 years. And this one, this one goes around in a human lifetime. That's kind of profound, in a way.But it's the key to this experiment. The orbit tells me how much mass is inside a very small radius. So, next we see a picture here that shows you before this experiment the size to which we could confine the mass of the center of the galaxy. What we knew before is that there was four million times the mass of the sun inside that circle. And as you can see, there was a lot of other stuff inside that circle. You can see a lot of stars. So, there was actually lots of alternatives to the idea that there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, because you could put a lot of stuff in there.But with this experiment, we've confined that same mass to a much smaller volume that's 10,000 times smaller. And because of that, we've been able to show that there is a supermassive black hole there. To give you a sense of how small that size is, that's the size of our solar system. So, we're cramming four million times the mass of the sun into that small volume.Now, truth in advertising. Right? I have told you my job is to get it down to the Schwarzchild radius. And the truth is, I'm not quite there. But we actually have no alternative today to explaining this concentration of mass. And, in fact, it's the best evidence we have to date for not only existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, but any in our universe. So, what next? I actually think this is about as good as we're going to do with today's technology, so let's move on with the problem.So, what I want to tell you, very briefly, is a few examples of the excitement of what we can do today at the center of the galaxy, now that we know that there is, or at least we believe, that there is a supermassive black hole there. And the fun phase of this experiment is, while we've tested some of our ideas about the consequences of a supermassive black hole being at the center of our galaxy, almost every single one has been inconsistent with what we actually see. And that's the fun.So, let me give you the two examples. You can ask, ""What do you expect for the old stars, stars that have been around the center of the galaxy for a long time, they've had plenty of time to interact with the black hole."" What you expect there is that old stars should be very clustered around the black hole. You should see a lot of old stars next to that black hole.Likewise, for the young stars, or in contrast, the young stars, they just should not be there. A black hole does not make a kind neighbor to a stellar nursery. To get a star to form, you need a big ball of gas and dust to collapse. And it's a very fragile entity. And what does the big black hole do? It strips that gas cloud apart. It pulls much stronger on one side than the other and the cloud is stripped apart. In fact, we anticipated that star formation shouldn't proceed in that environment.So, you shouldn't see young stars. So, what do we see? Using observations that are not the ones I've shown you today, we can actually figure out which ones are old and which ones are young. The old ones are red. The young ones are blue. And the yellow ones, we don't know yet. So, you can already see the surprise. There is a dearth of old stars. There is an abundance of young stars, so it's the exact opposite of the prediction.So, this is the fun part. And in fact, today, this is what we're trying to figure out, this mystery of how do you get — how do you resolve this contradiction. So, in fact, my graduate students are, at this very moment, today, at the telescope, in Hawaii, making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage, where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars, and so few old stars. To make further progress we really need to look at the orbits of stars that are much further away. To do that we'll probably need much more sophisticated technology than we have today.Because, in truth, while I said we're correcting for the Earth's atmosphere, we actually only correct for half the errors that are introduced. We do this by shooting a laser up into the atmosphere, and what we think we can do is if we shine a few more that we can correct the rest. So this is what we hope to do in the next few years. And on a much longer time scale, what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes, because, remember, bigger is better in astronomy.So, we want to build a 30 meter telescope. And with this telescope we should be able to see stars that are even closer to the center of the galaxy. And we hope to be able to test some of Einstein's theories of general relativity, some ideas in cosmology about how galaxies form. So, we think the future of this experiment is quite exciting.So, in conclusion, I'm going to show you an animation that basically shows you how these orbits have been moving, in three dimensions. And I hope, if nothing else, I've convinced you that, one, we do in fact have a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. And this means that these things do exist in our universe, and we have to contend with this, we have to explain how you can get these objects in our physical world.Second, we've been able to look at that interaction of how supermassive black holes interact, and understand, maybe, the role in which they play in shaping what galaxies are, and how they work.And last but not least, none of this would have happened without the advent of the tremendous progress that's been made on the technology front. And we think that this is a field that is moving incredibly fast, and holds a lot in store for the future. Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrea_ghez_the_hunt_for_a_supermassive_black_hole
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"For emotions, we should not move quickly to the desert. So, first, a small housekeeping announcement: please switch off your proper English check programs installed in your brain. (Applause)So, welcome to the Golden Desert, Indian desert. It receives the least rainfall in the country, lowest rainfall. If you are well-versed with inches, nine inches, centimeters, 16 [centimeters]. The groundwater is 300 feet deep, 100 meters. And in most parts it is saline, not fit for drinking. So, you can't install hand pumps or dig wells, though there is no electricity in most of the villages. But suppose you use the green technology, solar pumps — they are of no use in this area.So, welcome to the Golden Desert. Clouds seldom visit this area. But we find 40 different names of clouds in this dialect used here. There are a number of techniques to harvest rain. This is a new work, it's a new program. But for the desert society this is no program; this is their life. And they harvest rain in many ways. So, this is the first device they use in harvesting rain. It's called kunds; somewhere it is called [unclear].And you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment. The desert is there, sand dunes, some small field. And this is all big raised platform. You can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment, and there is a slope. Sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms, but here they will care properly. And the water will go where it should go. And then it is 40 feet deep. The waterproofing is done perfectly, better than our city contractors, because not a single drop should go waste in this.They collect 100 thousand liters in one season. And this is pure drinking water. Below the surface there is hard saline water. But now you can have this for year round. It's two houses. We often use a term called bylaws. Because we are used to get written things. But here it is unwritten by law. And people made their house, and the water storage tanks. These raised up platforms just like this stage. In fact they go 15 feet deep, and collect rain water from roof, there is a small pipe, and from their courtyard. It can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon.Another big one, this is of course out of the hardcore desert area. This is near Jaipur. This is called the Jaigarh Fort. And it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season. The age is 400 years. So, since 400 years it has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season. You can calculate the price of that water. It draws water from 15 kilometers of canals.You can see a modern road, hardly 50 years old. It can break sometimes. But this 400 year old canal, which draws water, it is maintained for so many generations. Of course if you want to go inside, the two doors are locked. But they can be opened for TED people. (Laughter) And we request them. You can see person coming up with two canisters of water. And the water level — these are not empty canisters — water level is right up to this. It can envy many municipalities, the color, the taste, the purity of this water. And this is what they call Zero B type of water, because it comes from the clouds, pure distilled water.We stop for a quick commercial break, and then we come back to the traditional systems. The government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from the Himalayas. That's why I said that this is a commercial break. (Laughter) But we will come back, once again, to the traditional thing. So, water from 300, 400 kilometers away, soon it become like this. In many portions, water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything.Of course there are some areas where water is reaching, I'm not saying that it is not reaching at all. But the tail end, the Jaisalmer area, you will notice in Bikaner things like this: where the water hyacinth couldn't grow, the sand is flowing in these canals. The bonus is that you can find wildlife around it. (Laughter)We had full-page advertisements, some 30 years, 25 years ago when this canal came. They said that throw away your traditional systems, these new cement tanks will supply you piped water. It's a dream. And it became a dream also. Because soon the water was not able to reach these areas. And people started renovating their own structures.These are all traditional water structures, which we won't be able to explain in such a short time. But you can see that no woman is standing on those. (Laughter) And they are plaiting hair. (Applause) Jaisalmer. This is heart of desert. This town was established 800 years ago. I'm not sure by that time Bombay was there, or Delhi was there, or Chennai was there, or Bangalore was there.So, this was the terminal point for silk route. Well connected, 800 years ago, through Europe. None of us were able to go to Europe, but Jaisalmer was well connected to it. And this is the 16 centimeter area. Such a limited rainfall, and highest colorful life flourished in these areas. You won't find water in this slide. But it is invisible. Somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here. Or, if you want to paint, you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms.But apart from this system, they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town. And what we call private public partnership you can add estate also. So, estate, public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body. And it's a kind of water body for all seasons. You will admire it. Just behold the beauty throughout the year. Whether water level goes up or down, the beauty is there throughout.Another water body, dried up, of course, during the summer period, but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics, with the heart. These statues, marvelous statues, gives you an idea of water table. When this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank, it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in English today ""mass communication."" This was for mass communication. Everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned, so water will be there for seven months or nine months, or 12 months. And then they will come and worship this pond, pay respect, their gratitude.Another small water body, called the [unclear]. It is difficult to translate in English, especially in my English. But the nearest would be ""glory,"" a reputation. The reputation in desert of this small water body is that it never dries up. In severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up. And perhaps they knew the future also. It was designed some 150 years ago. But perhaps they knew that on sixth, November, 2009, there will be a TED green and blue session, so they painted it like this. (Laughter) (Applause)Dry water body. Children are standing on a very difficult device to explain. This is called kund. We have, in English, surface water and ground water. But this is not ground water. You can draw ground water from any well. But this is no ordinary well. It squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand. And they have dubbed this water as the third one called [unclear]. And there is a gypsum belt running below it. And it was deposited by the great mother Earth, some three million years ago. And where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water.This is the same dry water body. Now, you don't find any kund; they are all submerged. But when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year. This year they have received only six centimeters. Six centimeter of rainfall, and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city, Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Mysore, please come to our area of six centimeters, we can give you water. (Laughter)How they maintain them? There are three things: concept, planning, making the actual thing, and also maintaining them. It is a structure for maintain, for centuries, by generations, without any department, without any funding, So the secret is ""[unclear],"" respect. Your own thing, not personal property, my property, every time.So, these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area. Don't spit, don't do anything wrong, so that the clean water can be collected. Another pillar, stone pillar on your right side. If you climb these three, six steps you will find something very nice. This was done in 11th century. And you have to go further down. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we can say a thousand words right now, an another thousand words. If the water table goes down, you will find new stairs. If it comes up, some of them will be submerged. So, throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure. Three sides, such steps, on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such TED conferences anytime. (Applause)Excuse me, who built these structures? They are in front of you. The best civil engineers we had, the best planners, the best architects. We can say that because of them, because of their forefathers, India could get the first engineering college in 1847. There were no English medium schools at that time, even no Hindi schools, [unclear] schools. But such people, compelled to the East India Company, which came here for business, a very dirty kind of business ... (Laughter) but not to create the engineering colleges. But because of them, first engineering college was created in a small village, not in the town.The last point, we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert. So, you can find through your Jeep, a camel, and a cart. This tire comes from the airplane. So, look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater, and also create something through a tire from a jet plane, and used in a camel cart.Last picture, it's a tattoo, 2,000-years-old tattoo. They were using it on their body. Tattoo was, at one time, a kind of a blacklisted or con thing, but now it is in thing. (Laughter) (Applause) You can copy this tattoo. I have some posters of this. (Laughter) The center of life is water. These are the beautiful waves. These are the beautiful stairs which we just saw in one of the slides. These are the trees. And these are the flowers which add fragrance to our lives. So, this is the message of desert. Thank you very much. (Applause)Chris Anderson: So, first of all, I wish I had your eloquence, truly, in any language. (Applause) These artifacts and designs are inspiring. Do you believe that they can be used elsewhere, that the world can learn from this? Or is this just right for this place?Anupam Mishra: No, the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area. So, the ponds, the open bodies, are everywhere, right from Sri Lanka to Kashmir, and in other parts also. And these [unclear], which stored water, there are two type of things. One recharge, and one stores. So, it depends on the terrain. But kund, which uses the gypsum belt, for that you have to go back to your calendar, three million years ago. If it is there it can be done right now. Otherwise, it can't be done. (Laughter) (Applause)CA: Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anupam_mishra_the_ancient_ingenuity_of_water_harvesting
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"For the last 20 years I've been designing puzzles. And I'm here today to give you a little tour, starting from the very first puzzle I designed, through what I'm doing now. I've designed puzzles for books, printed things. I'm the puzzle columnist for Discover Magazine. I've been doing that for about 10 years. I have a monthly puzzle calendar. I do toys. The bulk of my work is in computer games. I did puzzles for ""Bejeweled."" (Applause) I didn't invent ""Bejeweled."" I can't take credit for that.So, very first puzzle, sixth grade, my teacher said, ""Oh, let's see, that guy, he likes to make stuff. I'll have him cut out letters out of construction paper for the board."" I thought this was a great assignment. And so here is what I came up with. I start fiddling with it. I came up with this letter. This is a letter of the alphabet that's been folded just once. The question is, which letter is it if I unfold it? One hint: It's not ""L."" (Laughter) It could be an ""L,"" of course. So, what else could it be? Yeah, a lot of you got it. Oh yeah. So, clever thing.Now, that was my first puzzle. I got hooked. I created something new, I was very excited because, you know, I'd made crossword puzzles, but that's sort of like filling in somebody else's matrix. This was something really original. I got hooked. I read Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American. Went on, and eventually decided to devote myself, full time, to that.Now, I should pause and say, what do I mean by puzzle? A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer. ""Fun to solve,"" as opposed to everyday problems, which, frankly, are not very well-designed puzzles. You know, they might have a solution. It might take a long time. Nobody wrote down the rules clearly. Who designed this? It's like, you know, life is not a very well-written story so we have to hire writers to make movies.Well, I take everyday problems, and I make puzzles out of them. And ""right answer,"" of course there might be more than one right answer; many puzzles have more than one. But as opposed to a couple other forms of play, toys and games — by toy I mean, something you play with that doesn't have a particular goal. You can create one out of Legos. You know, you can do anything you want. Or competitive games like chess where, well, you're not trying to solve ... You can make a chess puzzle, but the goal really is to beat another player.I consider that puzzles are an art form. They're very ancient. It goes back as long as there is written history. It's a very small form, like a joke, a poem, a magic trick or a song, very compact form. At worst, they're throwaways, they're for amusement. But at best they can reach for something more and create a memorable impression. The progression of my career that you'll see is looking for creating puzzles that have a memorable impact.So, one thing I found early on, when I started doing computer games, is that I could create puzzles that will alter your perception. I'll show you how. Here is a famous one. So, it's two profiles in black, or a white vase in the middle. This is called a figure-ground illusion. The artist M.C. Escher exploited that in some of his wonderful prints. Here we have ""Day and Night."" Here is what I did with figure and ground. So, here we have ""figure"" in black. Here we have ""figure"" in white. And it's all part of the same design. The background to one is the other. Originally I tried to do the words ""figure"" and ""ground."" But I couldn't do that, I realized. I changed the problem. It's all ""figure."" (Laughter)A few other things. Here is my name. And that turns into the title of my first book, ""Inversions."" These sorts of designs now go by the word ""ambigram."" I'll show you just a couple others. Here we have the numbers one through 10, the digits zero through nine, actually. Each letter here is one of these digits. Not strictly an ambigram in the conventional sense. I like pushing on what an ambigram can mean.Here's the word ""mirror."" No, it's not the same upside-down. It's the same this way. And a marvelous fellow from the Media Lab who just got appointed head of RISD, is John Maeda. And so I did this for him. It's sort of a visual canon. (Laughter) And recently in Magic magazine I've done a number of ambigrams on magician's names. So here we have Penn and Teller, same upside-down. This appears in my puzzle calendar. Okay, let's go back to the slides. Thank you very much.Now, those are fun to look at. Now how would you do it interactively? For a while I was an interface designer. And so I think a lot about interaction. Well, let's first of all simplify the vases illusion, make the thing on the right. Now, if you could pick up the black vase, it would look like the figure on top. If you could pick up the white area, it would look like the figure on the bottom. Well, you can't do that physically, but on a computer you can do it. Let's switch over to the P.C.And here it is, figure-ground. The goal here is to take the pieces on the left and make them so they look like the shape on the right. And this follows the rules I just said: any black area that is surrounded by white can be picked up. But that is also true of any white area. So, here we got the white area in the middle, and you can pick it up. I'll just go one step further. So, here is — here is a couple pieces. Move them together, and now this is an active piece. You can really get inside somebody's perception and have them experience something. It's like the old maxim of ""you can tell somebody something and show them, but if they do it they really learn it.""Here is another thing you can do. There is a game called Rush Hour. This is one of the true masterpieces in puzzle design besides Rubik's cube. So, here we have a crowded parking lot with cars all over the place. The goal is to get the red car out. It's a sliding block puzzle. It's made by the company Think Fun. It's done very well. I love this puzzle.Well, let's play one. Here. So, here is a very simple puzzle. Well, that's too simple, let's add another piece. Okay, so how would you solve this one? Well, move the blue one out of the way. Here, let's make it a little harder. Still pretty easy. Now we'll make it harder, a little harder. Now, this one is a little bit trickier. You know? What do you do here? The first move is going to be what? You're going to move the blue one up in order to get the lavender one to the right. And you can make puzzles like this one that aren't solvable at all. Those four are locked in a pinwheel; you can't get them apart.I wanted to make a sequel. I didn't come up with the original idea. But this is another way I work as an inventor is to create a sequel. I came up with this. This is Railroad Rush Hour. It's the same basic game except I introduced a new piece, a square piece that can move both horizontally and vertically. In the other game the cars can only move forward and back. Created a whole bunch of levels for it. Now I'm making it available to schools. And it includes exercises that show you not just how to solve these puzzles, but how to extract the principles that will let you solve mathematical puzzles or problems in science, other areas.So, I'm really interested in you learning how to make your own puzzles as well as just me creating them. Garry Trudeau calls himself an investigative cartoonist. You know, he does a lot of research before he writes a cartoon. In Discover Magazine, I'm an investigative puzzle maker. I got interested in gene sequencing. And I said, ""Well, how on Earth can you come up with a sequence of the base pairs in DNA?"" Cut up the DNA, you sequence individual pieces, and then you look for overlaps, and you basically match them at the edges. And I said, ""This is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces overlap.""So, here is what I created for Discover Magazine. And it has to be solvable in a magazine. You know, you can't cut out the pieces and move them around. So, here is the nine pieces. And you're supposed to put them into this grid. And you have to choose pieces that overlap on the edge. There is only one solution. It's not that hard. But it takes some persistence. And when you're done, it makes this design, which, if you squint, is the word ""helix."" So, that's the form of the puzzle coming out of the content, rather than the other way around.Here is a couple more. Here is a physics-based puzzle. Which way will these fall? One of these weighs 50 pounds, 30 pounds and 10 pounds. And depending on which one weighs which amount, they'll fall different directions. And here is a puzzle based on color mixing. I separated this image into cyan, magenta, yellow, black, the basic printing colors, and then mixed up the separations, and you get these peculiar pictures. Which separations were mixed up to make those pictures? Gets you thinking about color.Finally, what I'm doing now. So, ShuffleBrain.com, website you can go visit, I joined up with my wife, Amy-Jo Kim. She could easily be up here giving a talk about her work. So, we're making smart games for social media. I'll explain what that means. We're looking at three trends. This is what's going on in the games industry right now. First of all, you know, for a long time computer games meant things like ""Doom,"" where you're going around shooting things, very violent games, very fast, aimed at teenage boys. Right? That's who plays computer games.Well, guess what? That's changing. ""Bejeweled"" is a big hit. It was the game that really broke open what's called casual games. And the main players are over 35, and are female. Then recently ""Rock Band"" has been a big hit. And it's a game you play with other people. It's very physical. It looks nothing like a traditional game. This is what's becoming the dominant form of electronic gaming.Now, within that there is some interesting things happening. There is also a trend towards games that are good for you. Why? Well, we aging Boomers, Baby Boomers, we're eating our healthy food, we're exercising. What about our minds? Oh no, our parents are getting Alzheimer's. We better do something. Turns out doing crossword puzzles can stave off some of the effects of Alzheimer's. So, we got games like ""Brain Age"" coming out for the Nintendo DS, huge hit. A lot of people do Sudoku. In fact some doctors prescribe it.And then there is social media, and what's happening on the Internet. Everybody now considers themselves a creator, and not just a viewer. And what does this add up to? Here is what we see coming. It's games that fit into a healthy lifestyle. They're part of your life. They're not necessarily a separate thing. And they are both, something that is good for you, and they're fun. I'm a puzzle guy. My wife is an expert in social media. And we decided to combine our skills.Our first game is called ""Photo Grab."" The game takes about a minute and 20 seconds. This is your first time playing my game. Okay. Let's see how well we can do. There are three images. And we have 24 seconds each. Where is that? I'll play as fast as I can. But if you can see it, shout out the answer. You get more — Down, okay, yeah where is that? Oh, yeah. There, okay. J-O and — I guess that's that part. We got the bow. That bow helps. That's his hair. You get a lot of figure-ground problems. Yeah, that one is easy. Okay. So, ahhh! Okay on to the next one. Okay, so that's the lens. Anybody? Looks like a black shape. So, where is that? That's the corner of the whole thing. Yeah, I've played this image before, but even when I make up my own puzzles — and you can put your own images in here. And we have people all over the world doing that now.There we are. Visit ShuffleBrain.com if you want to try it yourself. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_kim_takes_apart_the_art_of_puzzles
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"I'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation, the third-largest organized crime, a $10 billion industry. I'm talking to you about modern-day slavery.I'd like to tell you the story of these three children, Pranitha, Shaheen and Anjali. Pranitha's mother was a woman in prostitution, a prostituted person. She got infected with HIV, and towards the end of her life, when she was in the final stages of AIDS, she could not prostitute, so she sold four-year-old Pranitha to a broker. By the time we got the information, we reached there, Pranitha was already raped by three men.Shaheen's background I don't even know. We found her in a railway track, raped by many, many men, I don't know many. But the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body. And when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body. We still don't know who her parents are, who she is. All that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally.Anjali's father, a drunkard, sold his child for pornography. You're seeing here images of three years, four-year-olds, and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. In this country, and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. They are sold in the name of adoption. They are sold in the name of organ trade. They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything.I work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation. And I tell you stories from there. My own journey to work with these children started as a teenager. I was 15 when I was gang-raped by eight men. I don't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. Yes, there were eight men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn't go into my consciousness. I never felt like a victim, then or now. But what lingered from then till now — I am 40 today — is this huge outrageous anger.Two years, I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated, because I was a victim. And that's what we do to all traffic survivors. We, as a society, we have PhDs in victimizing a victim. Right from the age of 15, when I started looking around me, I started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices, but have absolutely no respite, because we don't allow them to come in.Where does their journey begin? Most of them come from very optionless families, not just poor. You have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked. I had this I.S. officer's daughter, who is 14 years old, studying in ninth standard, who was raped chatting with one individual, and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine, who was trafficked. I have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families, and children from well-to-do families, who are getting trafficked.These people are deceived, forced. 99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution. Some pay the price for it. They're killed; we don't even hear about them. They are voiceless, [unclear], nameless people. But the rest, who succumb into it, go through everyday torture. Because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends, or who want to have a family with you. These are men who buy you for an hour, for a day, and use you, throw you.Each of the girls that I have rescued — I have rescued more than 3,200 girls — each of them tell me one story in common ... (Applause) one story about one man, at least, putting chili powder in her vagina, one man taking a cigarette and burning her, one man whipping her. We are living among those men: they're our brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, all around us. And we are silent about them.We think it is easy money. We think it is shortcut. We think the person likes to do what she's doing. But the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, you name it, substance abuse, drugs, everything under the sun. And one day she gives up on you and me, because we have no options for her. And therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation. She believes, ""Yes, this is it, this is what my destiny is about."" And this is normal, to get raped by 100 men a day. And it's abnormal to live in a shelter. It's abnormal to get rehabilitated.It's in that context that I work. It's in that context that I rescue children. I've rescued children as young as three years, and I've rescued women as old as 40 years. When I rescued them, one of the biggest challenges I had was where do I begin. Because I had lots of them who were already HIV infected. One third of the people I rescue are HIV positive. And therefore my challenge was to understand how can I get out the power from this pain. And for me, I was my greatest experience. Understanding my own self, understanding my own pain, my own isolation, was my greatest teacher. Because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential.You see a girl here who is trained as a welder. She works for a very big company, a workshop in Hyderabad, making furnitures. She earns around 12,000 rupees. She is an illiterate girl, trained, skilled as a welder. Why welding and why not computers? We felt, one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage. They did not have any pardas inside their body, hijabs inside themselves; they've crossed the barrier of it. And therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world, very easily, and not feel very shy about it.We have trained girls as carpenters, as masons, as security guards, as cab drivers. And each one of them are excelling in their chosen field, gaining confidence, restoring dignity, and building hopes in their own lives. These girls are also working in big construction companies like Ram-ki construction, as masons, full-time masons.What has been my challenge? My challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up. I've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life. I can't hear from my right ear. I've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue. My biggest challenge is society. It's you and me. My biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own.A very supportive friend of mine, a well-wisher of mine, used to give me every month, 2,000 rupees for vegetables. When her mother fell sick she said, ""Sunitha, you have so much of contacts. Can you get somebody in my house to work, so that she can look after my mother?"" And there is a long pause. And then she says, ""Not one of our girls.""It's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, in this fantastic A-C hall. It's very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. It's not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. It's not nice for our children to study with their children. There it ends. That's my biggest challenge.If I'm here today, I'm here not only as Sunitha Krishnan. I'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking. They need your compassion. They need your empathy. They need, much more than anything else, your acceptance.Many times when I talk to people, I keep telling them one thing: don't tell me hundred ways how you cannot respond to this problem. Can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem? And that's what I'm here for, asking for your support, demanding for your support, requesting for your support. Can you break your culture of silence? Can you speak to at least two persons about this story? Tell them this story. Convince them to tell the story to another two persons.I'm not asking you all to become Mahatma Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings, or Medha Patkars, or something like that. I'm asking you, in your limited world, can you open your minds? Can you open your hearts? Can you just encompass these people too? Because they are also a part of us. They are also part of this world. I'm asking you, for these children, whose faces you see, they're no more. They died of AIDS last year. I'm asking you to help them, accept as human beings — not as philanthropy, not as charity, but as human beings who deserve all our support. I'm asking you this because no child, no human being, deserves what these children have gone through. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sunitha_krishnan_tedindia
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"Chris has been so nice. I don't know how you keep it up, Chris, I really don't. So nice, all week. He's the kind of man you could say to, ""Chris, I'm really sorry, I've crashed your car. And it gets worse, I crashed it into your house. Your house has caught fire. And what's more, your wife has just run off with your best friend.""And you know that Chris would say, ""Thank you."" (Laughter) ""Thank you for sharing, that's really interesting."" (Laughter) ""Thank you for taking me to a place that I didn't know existed. Thank you."" (Laughter)One of the — (Applause) Thank you for inviting us. One of the things about appearing later on in the TED week is that, gradually, as the days go by, all the other speakers cover most of what you were going to say. (Laughter) Nuclear fusion, I had about 10 minutes on that. Spectroscopy, that was another one. Parallel universes. And so this morning I thought, ""Oh well, I'll just do a card trick."" (Laughter) That one's gone as well. And today is Emmanuel's day, I think we've agreed that, already, haven't we? Emmanuel? Absolutely. (Applause) I was planning on finishing on a dance ... (Laughter) So, that's going to look pretty shabby now.So, what I thought I'd do is — in honor of Emmanuel — is, what I can do is to launch today the first TED Global auction. If I could start, this is the Enigma decoding machine. (Laughter) Who will start me with $1,000? Anyone?Thank you. Bruno's face, just then, he said, ""No, don't go through this. Don't, please don't. Don't go through this. Don't do it."" (Laughter)I'm worried. When I first got the invitation, they said somewhere in the thing, they said, ""15 minutes to change the world, your moment onstage."" 15 minutes to change the world. I don't know about you, it takes me 15 minutes to change a plug. (Laughter) So, the idea of changing the world is really quite an extraordinary one. Well, of course now we know we don't have to change a plug, now we've seen that wonderful demonstration of the wireless electric — fantastic. You know, it inspires us. 300 years ago he'd have been burnt at the stake for that. (Laughter) And now it's an idea. (Laughter) It's great. It's fantastic. But you do meet some fantastic people, people who look at the world in a totally different way.Yesterday, David Deutsch, another one who covered most of what I was going to say. (Laughter) But when you think of the world in that way, it does make going to Starbucks a whole new experience, don't you think? I mean, he must walk in and they will say, ""Would you like a macchiato, or a latte, or an Americano, or a cappuccino?"" And he'll say, ""You're offering me things that are infinitely variable."" (Laughter) ""How can your coffee be true?"" (Laughter) And they will say, ""Would you mind if I serve the next customer?"" (Laughter)And Elaine Morgan yesterday, wasn't she wonderful? Fantastic. Really good. Her talk about the aquatic ape, and the link, of course, the link between Darwinism and the fact that we are all naked beneath this — we're not hirsute and we can swim rather well. And she said, you know, she's 90. She's running out of time, she said. And she's desperate to find more evidence for the link. And I think, ""I'm sitting next to Lewis Pugh."" (Laughter) This man has swum around the North Pole, what more evidence do you want? (Laughter) And there he is. (Applause) That's how TED brings these connections together.I wasn't here on Tuesday. I didn't actually see Gordon Brown's job application — um, sorry. (Laughter) I'm so sorry. (Applause) I'm so sorry. No, no. (Applause) No, no, ahh ... (Applause) (As Brown): ""Global problems require Scottish solutions."" (Laughter) The problem I have is because Gordon Brown, he comes onstage and he looks for all the world like a man who's just taken the head off a bear suit.(As Brown): ""Hello, can I tell you what happened in the woods back there? Uh, no."" (Laughter) ""I'm sorry. I've only got 18 minutes, 18 minutes to talk about saving the world, saving the planet, global institutions. Our work on climate change, I've only got 18 minutes, unfortunately I'm not able to tell you about all the wonderful things we're doing to promote the climate change agenda in Great Britain, like the third runway we're planning at Heathrow Airport ..."" (Laughter) ""The large coal-fired power station we're building at King's North, and of course the exciting news that only today, only this week, Britain's only manufacturer of wind turbines has been forced to close. No time, unfortunately, to mention those."" (Applause) ""British jobs for Scottish people ... No."" (Laughter) ""Christian principles, Christian values. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."" (Laughter) ""Although to be honest, when I was at Number 11 that was never going to be a problem."" (Laughter)(As Tony Blair): ""Yeah, alright, come on, eh. Alright Gordon, come on, eh. I just, can I just say a few things about, first about Cherie, because she's a wonderful lady, my wife, with a wonderful smile. That reminds me, I must post that letter."" (Laughter) ""I just think, you know, what people forget, Gordon and I, we always got on perfectly well. Alright, it was never exactly 'Brokeback Mountain.'"" (Laughter) ""You know, I wrote to him, just before I left office. I said, 'Can I rely on your support for the next month?' And he wrote back. He said, 'No, you can't.' Which kind of surprised me, because I'd never seen 'can't' spelled that way before."" (Laughter)Another thing Gordon could have mentioned in his speech to the Mansion House in 2002 — that was to the building; the people weren't listening. But the people, when talking about the finance industry, he said, ""What you as the city of London have done for financial services, we, as a government, hope to do for the economy as a whole."" (Laughter) When you think what's happened to financial services, and you see what's happened to the economy, you think, ""Well, there is a man who delivers on his promises."" (Laughter)But we're in a new world now. We're in a completely new world. This is the first time that I can remember, where if you get a letter from the bank manager about a loan, you don't know if you're borrowing money from him, or if he's borrowing money from you. Am I right?These extraordinary things, Icelandic Internet accounts. Did anyone here have an Icelandic Internet account? Why would you do that? Why would — It's like one step up from replying to one of those emails from Nigeria, isn't it? (Laughter) Asking for your bank details. And, you know, Iceland, it was never going to cut it. It didn't have that kind of collateral. What does it have? It has fish, that's all. That's why the Prime Minister went on television. He said, ""This has left us all with a very big haddock."" (Laughter)A lot of what I do — I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them. And making sense of the financial crisis is very, very difficult. Luckily, somebody like George Bush was really helpful. He summed it up, really, at a dinner. He was speaking at a dinner, he said, ""Wall Street got drunk."" (Laughter) ""And now it's got a hangover."" And that's, you know, that's something — (Applause) And that's something we can relate to. It's certainly something he can relate to. (Laughter)And the other one, of course, is Donald Rumsfeld, who said, ""There are the known knowns, the things we know we know. And then you got the known unknowns, the things we know we don't know. And then you got the unknown unknowns, those are the things we don't know we don't know."" And being English, when I first heard that I thought, ""What a load of cock."" And then, you're now, well, actually, that's what this is about.This whole, what Ben Bernanke has said, the chaotic unwinding of the world's financial system, it's about — they don't know, they didn't know what they were doing. In 2006, the head of the American Mortgage Bankers Association said, quote, ""As we can clearly see, no seismic occurrence is about to overwhelm the U.S. economy."" Now, there is a man on top of his job. (Laughter) And when the crisis was happening, the head of quantitative equities at Lehman Brothers said, ""Events which models predicted would happen once every 10,000 years happened every day for three days.""So, it's extraordinary. It's a new world that's very, very difficult to make sense of. But we have a new hope. We have a new man. America has now elected its first openly black President. (Laughter) Wonderful news. Not only that, he's left-handed. Have you noticed this? How many people here are left-handed? You see, a lot of the people that I most admire, they're great artists, great designers, great thinkers, they're left-handed. And somebody said to me last night, you know, being left-handed, you have to learn to write without smudging the ink. And somebody was talking about metaphors on Monday. And I thought, what a wonderful metaphor, isn't it? An American President who has to write without smudging the ink.You like that one? As opposed to you could see George Bush, well, what's the metaphor there? I think it would be something out of the aquatic ape thing, wouldn't it? ""Well, you know I'm sorry about that. I'm right-handed but I seem to have smudged that ink as well."" (Laughter) But, you know, he's gone. Now he's gone. That's eight years of American History, eight minutes of my act, just gone like that.""You know, it's the end of an error [sic]. I happen to believe it was a great error. I know folks said to me they believe it was one of the greatest errors in the history of the United States. But we proved them wrong in Iraq. They said there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. There is now."" (Laughter) ""But I have a message for the suicide bombers, for those people who've blown themselves up."" (Laughter) ""We're going to find you."" (Laughter) ""We're going to make sure you don't do it again."" (Laughter)But now he's gone, and it's great to see one of the — arguably one of the worst speech makers in American history, now given way to one of the greatest, in Obama. You were there, maybe, on the night of his victory. And he spoke to the crowd in Chicago, he said, ""If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible ..."" I can't do the whole thing because it would take too long, it really would. (Laughter) But you get the picture. And then it goes to the inauguration. And he and the Chief Justice, they trip over each other, they get their words wrong and they screw the thing up. And there is George Bush sitting there going, ""Heh heh heh heh ..."" (Laughter) ""Not so easy is it? Heh heh heh."" (Laughter)But the interesting thing is, Gordon Brown was talking about Cicero, who said, people would listen to a speech, they said, ""Great speech."" And then they'd listen to Demosthenes, and they'd say, ""Let's march."" And we all want to believe in President Obama. It's rather like that line in the film ""As Good As it Gets."" Do you remember that film with Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson, and Helen Hunt says to Jack Nicholson, ""What do you see in me?"" And Jack Nicholson just says, ""You make me want to be a better man.""And you want a leader who inspires and challenges and makes you want to be a better citizen. Right? But at the moment, it's a Cicero thing. We like what Barack Obama says, but we don't do anything about it. So he comes over to this country, and he says, ""We need a big fiscal stimulus."" And everyone goes, ""Great!"" He leaves the country and the French and the Germans go, ""No, no, forget about that, absolutely not."" Nothing happens. He goes to Strasburg. He says, ""We need more boots on the ground in Afghanistan."" And everyone goes, ""Great idea."" He leaves, people go, ""No no no, we're not going to do that. 5,000 maximum, and no rockets. No, no, not going to do it."" He goes to Prague, he says, ""We believe in a nuclear-free world.""And it's great to have an American president who can say the word ""nuclear,"" let's just point that out first. Do you remember that? George Bush, ""A nu-ca-ler."" Sorry, what? ""A nu-ca-ler."" (Laughter) Could you say ""avuncular""? ""Avunclear."" (Laughter) Thank you very much.But he says, ""We want a nuclear-free world."" And that day, North Korea, that very day, North Korea is just seeing if it can just get one over Japan — (Laughter) — and land it before ...So, where do we look for inspiration? We've still got Bill Clinton. ""Travels the world."" (Laughs) ""I believe, I believe it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who said ..."" (Laughter) ""Tell a lie; it was Diana Ross ..."" (Laughter) ""... who said, reach out and touch ..."" (Laughter) ""... somebody's gla — hand."" (Laughter) ""Make this world a better place, if you can. I just think that's important. I really do. And I was hoping Hillary would get to the White House, because she'd have been out of our home for four years. And I, you know."" (Laughter) ""So, when that didn't work out I had to make a few arrangements, let me tell you."" (Laughter)So, there's him. In Britain we have Prince Charles: ""And the environment is so important, all we can do. My wife gets fed up with me constantly trying to push emissions up her agenda."" (Laughter)Or, any South Africans, we have Mandela to inspire. Mandela, the great man Mandela. He's been honored with a statue now. The previous highest honor he had in Britain was a visit from the team from Ground Force, a gardening program. ""So, Nelson, how would you like a nice water feature?"" ""Ahh, listen to me Mr. Titchmarsh."" (Laughter) ""I was held in prison for nearly 30 years on an island in the middle of the ocean. Why would I need a bloody water feature?"" (Laughter)Very quickly: I wasn't quite sure how to end this talk and then yesterday that man came up with a wonderful quote from the ""Japanese Essays on Idleness"" which said it's nice to have something which is unfinished because it implies there is still room for growth. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_bremner_s_one_man_world_summit
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"The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. And that's what it's about. We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did.I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. So, how do we do that? And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview.And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why.Now, I had two preconditions. One was that they be American. That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me.And why did I do that? Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. But the second part of it — and the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. That's the one advantage that older people have. Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited.So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. Fair enough.But I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. By the way, this was always done in public. This was not an oral history program. This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait.Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that. I didn't know it coming into it. And the only reason I really know that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. And he had never appeared in public since that point. This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we had an hour conversation about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, ""Where did you train as a doctor?""And I said, ""I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that.""And she said, ""Well, something very weird was happening. When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own."" I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out.So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. But then I began to think of other things. Who makes a great interview in this context? It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. It was about their energy. It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. I'm convinced of it. And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. These were people through their 90s.In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force — I guess that's the way I think about it — filled with it. And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. And, in fact, he did wind up opening up — by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him.But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman. I didn't know who she was, and she said, ""Did you get George Abbott to talk?""And I said, ""Yeah. Apparently I did.""And she said, ""I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it."" And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk.So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest, because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, ""Aw, shucks, it was an accident."" There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them.The worst interview I ever did: William L. Shirer. The journalist who did ""The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."" This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, ""Oh, I just happened to be there. Didn't matter."" Whatever. Awful. I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you.But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. This wasn't — and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews — tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place.I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people.There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. She did so much. She was a playwright. She did an extraordinary play called ""The Women."" She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. And, in fact, when we did the interview — I did the living self-portrait with her — there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence.And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. So she and I had a delightful conversation.We were on the stage and then — by the way, spectacular. It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. She was in a great evening gown. She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there — any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing.And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. When we were alone, I was her audience. Now I'm her competitor for the audience. That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question — I didn't know how I was going to get out of it — I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, ""Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah,"" she said, ""Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress."" But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, ""Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there,"" and she went on and on, ""And then I got on the stage.""And then she turned to me and said, ""And you know what those young actors did? They upstaged me."" And she said, ""Do you know what that is?"" Just withering in her contempt.And I said, ""I'm learning.""(Laughter)And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like.I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. Again, a remarkable person. I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. And the way she died — she had, toward the end, a brain tumor. That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party.And she was in horrible pain. We all knew that. She stayed in her room. Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. The usual sort of thing. Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly.Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, ""Steve,"" or ""Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?""And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, ""This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?"" And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, ""What was your childhood like?""And I said — these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate — and I said, ""My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny.""(Laughter)And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed?Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints.One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, ""Would you like to have met him?""And he said, ""Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters."" So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years.And I asked him one question. I said, ""Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?""And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, ""Well ..."" — I'm going to do a bad southern accent. Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. But he said, ""Well,"" he said, ""I'm afraid so."" He said, ""You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit.""And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. He said, ""But I understand that."" He said, ""I understand that."" He said, ""We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation.""And he said, ""Now, John Adams was too honest."" And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow.But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but I promise you it was the right question. This was to Agnes de Mille. Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. She basically created the dances in ""Oklahoma,"" transforming the American theater. An amazing woman.At the time that I proposed to her that — by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary — but proposed to her that she come on. She said, ""Come to my apartment."" She lived in New York. ""Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed.""And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but — I speak of the life force — her hair was askew. She wasn't about to make up for this occasion.And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. She said, ""I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to."" And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series.She agreed. She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. I said, ""Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?""And the audience just — you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned — here she was, in this broken body — and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, ""And then puberty hit.""And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life.It was an amazing privilege to do this series. There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_pachter_the_art_of_the_interview
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"Good morning. I've come here to share with you an experiment of how to get rid of one form of human suffering. It really is a story of Dr. Venkataswamy. His mission and his message is about the Aravind Eye Care System. I think first it's important for us to recognize what it is to be blind.(Music)Woman: Everywhere I went looking for work, they said no, what use do we have for a blind woman? I couldn't thread a needle or see the lice in my hair. If an ant fell into my rice, I couldn't see that either.Thulasiraj Ravilla: Becoming blind is a big part of it, but I think it also deprives the person of their livelihood, their dignity, their independence, and their status in the family. So she is just one amongst the millions who are blind. And the irony is that they don't need to be.A simple, well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions, and something even simpler, a pair of glasses, can make millions more see. If we add to that the many of us here now who are more productive because they have a pair of glasses, then almost one in five Indians will require eye care, a staggering 200 million people. Today, we're reaching not even 10 percent of them.So this is the context in which Aravind came into existence about 30 years back as a post-retirement project of Dr. V. He started this with no money. He had to mortgage all his life savings to make a bank loan. And over time, we have grown into a network of five hospitals, predominately in the state of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and then we added several, what we call Vision Centers as a hub-and-spoke model. And then more recently we started managing hospitals in other parts of the country and also setting up hospitals in other parts of the world as well.The last three decades, we have done about three-and-a-half million surgeries, a vast majority of them for the poor people. Now, each year we perform about 300,000 surgeries. A typical day at Aravind, we would do about a thousand surgeries, maybe see about 6,000 patients, send out teams into the villages to examine, bring back patients, lots of telemedicine consultations, and, on top of that, do a lot of training, both for doctors and technicians who will become the future staff of Aravind.And then doing this day-in and day-out, and doing it well, requires a lot of inspiration and a lot of hard work. And I think this was possible thanks to the building blocks put in place by Dr. V., a value system, an efficient delivery process, and fostering the culture of innovation.(Music)Dr. V: I used to sit with the ordinary village man because I am from a village, and suddenly you turn around and seem to be in contact with his inner being, you seem to be one with him. Here is a soul which has got all the simplicity of confidence. Doctor, whatever you say, I accept it. An implicit faith in you and then you respond to it. Here is an old lady who has got so much faith in me, I must do my best for her. When we grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify ourselves with all that is in the world, so there is no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing.(Applause)This helped us build a very ethical and very highly patient-centric organization and systems that support it. But on a practical level, you also have to deliver services efficiently, and, odd as it may seem, the inspiration came from McDonald's.Dr. V: See, McDonald's' concept is simple. They feel they can train people all over the world, irrespective of different religions, cultures, all those things, to produce a product in the same way and deliver it in the same manner in hundreds of places.Larry Brilliant: He kept talking about McDonalds and hamburgers, and none of it made any sense to us. He wanted to create a franchise, a mechanism of delivery of eye care with the efficiency of McDonald's.Dr. V: Supposing I'm able to produce eye care, techniques, methods, all in the same way, and make it available in every corner of the world. The problem of blindness is gone.TR: If you think about it, I think the eyeball is the same, as American or African, the problem is the same, the treatment is the same. And yet, why should there be so much variation in quality and in service, and that was the fundamental principle that we followed when we designed the delivery systems. And, of course, the challenge was that it's a huge problem, we are talking of millions of people, very little resource to deal with it, and then lots of logistics and affordability issues.And then so, one had to constantly innovate. And one of the early innovations, which still continues, is to create ownership in the community to the problem, and then engage with them as a partner, and here is one such event. Here a community camp just organized by the community themselves, where they find a place, organize volunteers, and then we'll do our part. You know, check their vision, and then you have doctors who you find out what the problem is and then determine what further testing should be done, and then those tests are done by technicians who check for glasses, or check for glaucoma.And then, with all these results, the doctor makes a final diagnosis, and then prescribes a line of treatment, and if they need a pair of glasses, they are available right there at the camp site, usually under a tree. But they get glasses in the frames of their choice, and that's very important because I think glasses, in addition to helping people see, is also a fashion statement, and they're willing to pay for it. So they get it in about 20 minutes and those who require surgery, are counseled, and then there are buses waiting, which will transport them to the base hospital.And if it was not for this kind of logistics and support, many people like this would probably never get services, and certainly not when they most need it. They receive surgery the following day, and then they will stay for a day or two, and then they are put back on the buses to be taken back to where they came from, and where their families will be waiting to take them back home.(Applause)And this happens several thousand times each year. It may sound impressive that we're seeing lots of patients, very efficient process, but we looked at, are we solving the problem? We did a study, a scientifically designed process, and then, to our dismay, we found this was only reaching seven percent of those in need, and we're not adequately addressing more, bigger problems.So we had to do something different, so we set up what we call primary eye care centers, vision centers. These are truly paperless offices with completely electronic medical records and so on. They receive comprehensive eye exams. We kind of changed the simple digital camera into a retinal camera, and then every patient gets their teleconsultation with a doctor.The effect of this has been that, within the first year, we really had a 40 percent penetration in the market that it served, which is over 50,000 people. And the second year went up to 75 percent. So I think we have a process by which we can really penetrate into the market and reach everyone who needs it, and in this process of using technology, make sure that most don't need to come to the base hospital.And how much will they pay for this? We fixed the pricing, taking into account what they would save in bus fare in coming to a city, so they pay about 20 rupees, and that's good for three consultations.(Applause)The other challenge was, how do you give high-tech or more advanced treatment and care? We designed a van with a VSAT, which sends out images of patients to the base hospital where it is diagnosed, and then as the patient is waiting, the report goes back to the patient, it gets printed out, the patient gets it, and then gets a consultation about what they should be doing — I mean, go see a doctor or come back after six months, and then this happens as a way of bridging the technology competence.So the impact of all this has been essentially one of growing the market, because it focused on the non-customer, and then by reaching the unreached, we're able to significantly grow the market.The other aspect is how do you deal with this efficiently when you have very few ophthalmologists? So what is in this video is a surgeon operating, and then you see on the other side, another patient is getting ready. So, as they finish the surgery, they just swing the microscope over, the tables are placed so that their distance is just right, and then we need to do this, because, by doing this kind of process, we're able to more than quadruple the productivity of the surgeon.And then to support the surgeon, we require a certain workforce. And then we focused on village girls that we recruited, and then they really are the backbone of the organization. They do almost all of the skill-based routine tasks. They do one thing at a time. They do it extremely well. With the result we have very high productivity, very high quality at very, very low cost. So, putting all this together, what really happened was the productivity of our staff was significantly higher than anyone else.(Applause)This is a very busy table, but what this really is conveying is that, when it comes to quality, we have put in very good quality-assurance systems. As a result, our complications are significantly lower than what has been reported in the United Kingdom, and you don't see those kind of numbers very often.(Applause)So the final part of the puzzle is, how do you make all this work financially, especially when the people can't pay for it? So what we did was, we gave away a lot of it for free, and then those who pay, I mean, they paid local market rates, nothing more, and often much less. And we were helped by the market inefficiency. I think that has been a big savior, even now. And, of course, one needs the mindset to be wanting to give away what you have as a surplus.The result has been, over the years, the expenditure has increased with volumes. The revenues increase at a higher level, giving us a healthy margin while you're treating a large number of people for free. I think in absolute terms, last year we earned about 20-odd million dollars, spent about 13 million, with over a 40 percent EBITA.(Applause)But this really requires going beyond what we do, or what we have done, if you really want to achieve solving this problem of blindness. And what we did was a couple of very counter-intuitive things. We created competition for ourselves, and then we made eye care affordable by making low-cost consumables. We proactively and systematically promoted these practices to many hospitals in India, many in our own backyards and then in other parts of the world as well. The impact of this has been that these hospitals, in the second year after our consultation, are double their output and then achieve financial recovery as well.The other part was how do you address this increase in cost of technology? There was a time when we failed to negotiate the [intra-ocular lens] prices to be at affordable levels, so we set up a manufacturing unit. And then, over time, we were able to bring down the cost significantly to about two percent of what it used to be when we started out. Today, we believe we have about seven percent of the global market, and they're used in about 120-odd countries.To conclude, I mean, what we do, does it have a broader relevance, or is it just India or developing countries? So to address this, we studied UK versus Aravind. What it shows is that we do roughly about 60 percent of the volume of what the UK does, near a half-million surgeries as a whole country. And we do about 300,000. And then we train about 50 ophthalmologists against the 70 trained by them, comparable quality, both in training and in patient care. So we're really comparing apples to apples. We looked at cost. (Laughter)(Applause)So, I think it is simple to say just because the U.K. isn't India the difference is happening. I think there is more to it. I mean, I think one has to look at other aspects as well. Maybe there is — the solution to the cost could be in productivity, maybe in efficiency, in the clinical process, or in how much they pay for the lenses or consumables, or regulations, their defensive practice. So, I think decoding this can probably bring answers to most developed countries including the U.S., and maybe Obama's ratings can go up again.(Laughter)Another insight, which, again, I want to leave with you, in conditions where the problem is very large, which cuts across all economic strata, where we have a good solution, I think the process I described, you know, productivity, quality, patient-centered care, can give an answer, and there are many which fit this paradigm. You take dentistry, hearing aid, maternity and so on. There are many where this paradigm can now play, but I think probably one of the most challenging things is on the softer side.Now, how do you create compassion? Now, how do you make people own the problem, want to do something about it? There are a bit harder issues. And I'm sure people in this crowd can probably find the solutions to these.So I want to end my talk leaving this thought and challenge to you.Dr. V: When you grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing.TR: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thulasiraj_ravilla_how_low_cost_eye_care_can_be_world_class
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"Hello, everyone. Because this is my first time at TED, I've decided to bring along an old friend to help break the ice a bit. Yes. That's right. This is Barbie. She's 50 years old. And she's looking as young as ever. (Laughter) But I'd also like to introduce you to what may be an unfamiliar face. This is Fulla. Fulla is the Arab world's answer to Barbie.Now, according to proponents of the clash of civilizations, Barbie and Fulla occupy these completely separate spheres. They have different interests. They have divergent values. And should they ever come in contact ... well, I've got to tell you, it's just not going to be pretty.My experience, however, in the Islamic world is very different. Where I work, in the Arab region, people are busy taking up Western innovations and changing them into things which are neither conventionally Western, nor are they traditionally Islamic. I want to show you two examples. The first is 4Shbab. It means ""for youth"" and it's a new Arab TV channel.(Video): Video clips from across the globe. The USA.♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫♫ I am not afraid to stand alone, if Allah is by my side ♫♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫♫ Everything will be all right ♫♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫The Arab world.(Music)♫ She was preserved by modesty of the religion ♫ ♫ She was adorned by the light of the Quran ♫Shereen El Feki: 4Shbab has been dubbed Islamic MTV. Its creator, who is an Egyptian TV producer called Ahmed Abu Haïba, wants young people to be inspired by Islam to lead better lives. He reckons the best way to get that message across is to use the enormously popular medium of music videos. 4Shbab was set up as an alternative to existing Arab music channels. And they look something like this. (Music)That, by the way is Haifa Wehbe. She's a Lebanese pop star and pan-Arab pin-up girl. In the world of 4Shbab, it's not about bump and grind. But it's not about fire and brimstone either. Its videos are intended to show a kinder, gentler face of Islam, for young people to deal with life's challenges.Now, my second example is for a slightly younger crowd. And it's called ""The 99."" Now, these are the world's first Islamic superheroes. They were created by a Kuwaiti psychologist called Naif Al Mutawa. And his desire is to rescue Islam from images of intolerance, all in a child-friendly format. ""The 99."" The characters are meant to embody the 99 attributes of Allah: justice, wisdom, mercy, among others. So, for example, there is the character of Noora. She is meant to have the power to look inside people and see the good and bad in everyone. Another character called Jami has the ability to create fantastic inventions.Now, ""The 99"" is not just a comic book. It's now a theme park. There is an animated series in the works. And by this time next year, the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman will have joined forces with ""The 99"" to beat injustice wherever they find it.""The 99"" and 4Shbab are just two of many examples of this sort of Islamic cross-cultural hybridization. We're not talking here about a clash of civilizations. Nor is it some sort of indistinguishable mash. I like to think of it as a mesh of civilizations, in which the strands of different cultures are intertwined.Now, while 4Shbab and ""The 99"" may look new and shiny, there is actually a very long tradition of this. Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations both ancient and modern. After all, it's the Quran which encourages us to do this: ""We made you into nations and tribes so that you could learn from one another."" And to my mind, those are pretty wise words, no matter what your creed. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shereen_el_feki_pop_culture_in_the_arab_world
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"I'm going to show you how terrorism actually interacts with our daily life. 15 years ago I received a phone call from a friend. At the time he was looking after the rights of political prisoners in Italian jails. He asked me if I wanted to interview the Red Brigades. Now, as many of you may remember, the Red Brigades was a terrorist, Marxist organization which was very active in Italy from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. As part of their strategy the Red Brigades never spoke with anybody, not even with their lawyers. They sat in silence through their trails, waving occasionally at family and friends.In 1993 they declared the end of the armed struggle. And they drew a list of people with whom they would talk, and tell their story. And I was one of those people. When I asked my friend why the Red Brigades want to talk to me, he said that the female members of the organization had actually supported my name. In particular, one person had put it forward. She was my childhood friend. She had joined the Red Brigades and became a leader of the organization.Naturally, I didn't know that until the day she was arrested. In fact, I read it in the newspaper. At the time of the phone call I just had a baby, I successfully completed a management buyout to the company I was working with, and the last thing I wanted to do was to go back home and touring the high-security prisons. But this is exactly what I did because I wanted to know what had turned my best friend into a terrorist, and why she'd never tried to recruit me. (Laughter) (Applause)So, this is exactly what I did. Now, I found the answer very quickly. I actually had failed the psychological profiling of a terrorist. The center committee of the Red Brigades had judged me too single-minded and too opinionated to become a good terrorist. My friend, on the other hand, she was a good terrorist because she was very good at following orders. She also embraced violence. Because she believed that the only way to unblock what, at the time, was known as a blocked democracy, Italy, a country run by the same party for 35 years was the arms struggle.At the same time, while I was interviewing the Red Brigades, I also discovered that their life was not ruled by politics or ideology, but actually was ruled by economics. They were constantly short of cash. They were constantly searching for cash. Now, contrary to what many people believe, terrorism is actually a very expensive business. I'll give you an idea. In the 1970s, the turnover of the Red Brigades on a yearly basis was seven million dollars. This is roughly between 100 and 150 million, today.Now, you know, if you live underground it's really hard to produce this amount of money. But this also explains why, when I was interviewing the Red Brigades, and then, later on, other arms organizations, including members of al-Zarqawi group in the Middle East, everybody was extremely reluctant to talk about ideology, or politics. Because they had no idea. The political vision of a terrorist organization is decided by the leadership, which, generally, is never more than five to seven people. All the others do, day in and day out, is search for money.Once, for example, I was interviewing this part-timer from the Red Brigades. It was a psychiatrist. He loved sailing. He was a really keen sailor. And he had this beautiful boat. And he told me that the best time of his life was when he was a member of the Red Brigades and he went sailing, every summer, back and forth from Lebanon, where he would pick up Soviet weapons from the PLO, and then carry them all the way to Sardinia where the other arms organization from Europe would go and take their share of the arms. For that service the Red Brigades were actually paid a fee, which went to fund their organization.So, because I am a trained economist and I think in economic terms, all of the sudden I thought, maybe there is something here. Maybe there is a link, a commercial link, between one organization and another one. But it was only when I interviewed Mario Moretti, the head of the Red Brigades, the man who kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, Italian former prime minister, that I finally realized that terrorism is actually business. I was having lunch with him in a high-security prison in Italy. And as we were eating, I had the distinct feeling that I was back in the city of London, having lunch with a fellow banker or an economist. This guy thought in the same way I did.So, I decided that I wanted to investigate the economics of terrorism. Naturally, nobody wanted to fund my research. In fact, I think many people thought that I was a bit crazy. You know, that woman that goes around to foundations asking for money, thinking about the economics of terrorism. So, in the end, I took a decision that, in retrospect, did change my life. I sold my company, and funded the research myself.And what I discovered is this parallel reality, another international economic system, which runs parallel to our own, which has been created by arms organizations since the end of World War II. And what is even more shocking is that this system has followed, step by step, the evolution of our own system, of our Western capitalism. And there are three main stages. The first one is the state sponsor of terrorism.The second one is the privatization of terrorism. And the third, of course, is the globalization of terrorism. So, state sponsor of terrorism, feature of the Cold War. This is when the two superpowers were fighting a war by proxy, along the periphery of the sphere of influence, fully funding arms organizations. A mix of legal and illegal activities is used. So, the link between crime and terror is established very early on.And here is the best example, the Contras in Nicaragua, created by the CIA, legally funded by the U.S. Congress, illegally funded by the Reagan administration via covert operation, for example, the Iran-Contra Affair. Then comes the late 1970s, early '80s, and some groups successfully carry out the privatization of terrorism. So, they gain independence from the sponsor, and start funding themselves.Now, again we see a mix of legal and illegal activities. So, Arafat used to get a percentage of the smuggling of hashish from Bekáa Valley, which is the valley between Lebanon and Syria. And the IRA, which control the private transportation system in Northern Ireland, did exactly the same thing. So, every single time that somebody got into a taxi in Belfast without knowing, actually, was funding the IRA.But the great change came, of course, with globalization and deregulation. This is when arms organization were able to link up, also financially, with each other. But above all, they started to do serious business with the world of crime. And together they money-laundered their dirty business through the same channel. This is when we see the birth of the transnational arms organization Al Qaeda. This is an organization that can raise money across border. But also that is able to carry out attacks in more than one country.Now, deregulation also brought back rogue economics. So what is rogue economics? Rogue economics is a force which is constantly lurking in the background of history. It comes back at times of great transformation, globalization being one of those transformations. It is at this times in which politics actually loses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force working against us. It has happened before in history. It has happened with the fall of the Roman Empire. It has happened with Industrial Revolution. And it actually happened again, with the fall of the Berlin wall.Now, I calculated how big was this international economic system composed by crime, terror, and illegal economy, before 9-11. And it is a staggering 1.5 trillion dollars. It is trillions, it's not billions. This is about twice the GDP of the United Kingdom, soon will be more, considering where this country is going. (Laughter)Now, until 9-11, the bulk of all this money flew into the U.S. economy because the bulk of the money was denominated in U.S. dollars and the money laundering was taking place inside the United States. The entry point, of course, of most of this money were the off-shore facilities. So, this was a vital injection of cash into the U.S. economy. Now, when I went to look at the figures of the U.S. money supply, the U.S. money supply is the amount of dollars that the Federal Reserve prints every year in order to satisfy the increase in the demand for dollars, which, of course, reflects the growth of the economy.So, when I went to look at those figures, I noted that since the late 1960s a growing number of these dollars was actually leaving the United States, never to come back. These were money taken out in suitcases or in containers, in cash of course. These were money taken out by criminals and money launderers. These were money taken out to fund the growth of the terror, illegal and criminal economy. So, you see, what is the relationship?The United States actually is a country that is the reserve currency of the world. What does it mean? That means that it has a privilege that other countries do not have. It can borrow against the total amount of dollars in circulation in the world. This privilege is called seigniorage. No other country can do that. All the other countries, for example the United Kingdom, can borrow only against the amount of money in circulation inside its own borders.So, here is the implication of the relationship between the worlds of crime, terror, and illegal economy, and our economy. The U.S. in the 1990s was borrowing against the growth of the terror, illegal and criminal economy. This is how close we are with this world. Now, this situation changed, of course, after 9-11, because George Bush launched the War on Terror. Part of the War on Terror was the introduction of the Patriot Act. Now, many of you know that the Patriot Act is a legislation that greatly reduces the liberties of Americans in order to protect them against terrorism.But there is a section of the Patriot Act which refers specifically to finance. And it is, in fact, an anti-money-laundering legislation. What the Patriot Act did was to prohibit U.S. bank, and U.S.-registered foreign banks from doing any businesses with off-shore facilities. It closed that door between the money laundering in dollars, and the U.S. economy. It also gave the U.S. monetary authorities the right to monitor any dollar transaction taking place anywhere in the world.Now, you can imagine what was the reaction of the international finance and banking. All the bankers said to their clients, ""Get out of the dollars and go and invest somewhere else."" Now, the Euro was a newly born currency of great opportunity for business, and, of course, for investment. And this is what people did. Nobody wants the U.S. monetary authority to check their relationship, to monitor their relationship with their clientele. The same thing happened, of course, in the world of crime and terror. People simply moved their money-laundering activities away from the United States into Europe.Why did this happen? This happened because the Patriot Act was a unilateral legislation. It was introduced only in the United States. And it was introduced only for the U.S. dollars. In Europe, a similar legislation was not introduced. So, within six months Europe became the epicenter of the money-laundering activities of the world. So, this is how incredible are the relationship between the world of crime and the world of terror, and our own life.So, why did I tell you this story? I told you this story because you must understand that there is a world that goes well beyond the headlines of the newspapers, including the personal relationship that you have with friends and family. You got to question everything that is told to you, including what I just told you today. (Laughter) This is the only way for you to step into the dark side, and have a look at it. And believe me, it's going to be scary. It's going to be frightful, but it's going to enlighten you. And, above all, it's not going to be boring. (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_napoleoni_the_intricate_economics_of_terrorism
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"My name is Ryan Lobo, and I've been involved in the documentary filmmaking business all over the world for the last 10 years. During the process of making these films I found myself taking photographs, often much to the annoyance of the video cameramen.I found this photography of mine almost compulsive. And at the end of a shoot, I would sometimes feel that I had photographs that told a better story than a sometimes-sensational documentary. I felt, when I had my photographs, that I was holding on to something true, regardless of agendas or politics. In 2007, I traveled to three war zones. I traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia. And over there I experienced other people's suffering, up close and personal, immersed myself in some rather intense and emotional stories, and at times I experienced great fear for my own life.As always, I would return to Bangalore, and often to animated discussions at friend's homes, where we would discuss various issues while they complained bitterly about the new pub timings, where a drink often cost more than what they'd paid their 14-year-old maid. I would feel very isolated during these discussions. But at the same time, I questioned myself and my own integrity and purpose in storytelling. And I decided that I had compromised, just like my friends in those discussions, where we told stories in contexts we made excuses for, rather than taking responsibility for.I won't go into details about what led to a decision I made, but let's just say it involved alcohol, cigarettes, other substances and a woman. (Laughter) I basically decided that it was I, not the camera or the network, or anything that lay outside myself, that was the only instrument in storytelling truly worth tuning. In my life, when I tried to achieve things like success or recognition, they eluded me. Paradoxically, when I let go of these objectives, and worked from a place of compassion and purpose, looking for excellence, rather than the results of it, everything arrived on its own, including fulfillment.Photography transcended culture, including my own. And it is, for me, a language which expressed the intangible, and gives voice to people and stories without. I invite you into three recent stories of mine, which are about this way of looking, if you will, which I believe exemplify the tenets of what I like to call compassion in storytelling.In 2007 I went to Liberia, where a group of my friends and I did an independent, self-funded film, still in progress, on a very legendary and brutal war-lord named General Butt Naked. His real name is Joshua, and he's pictured here in a cell where he once used to torture and murder people, including children. Joshua claims to have personally killed more than 10,000 people during Liberia's civil war. He got his name from fighting stark naked. And he is probably the most prolific mass murderer alive on Earth today.This woman witnessed the General murdering her brother. Joshua commanded his child-soldiers to commit unspeakable crimes, and enforced his command with great brutality. Today many of these children are addicted to drugs like heroin, and they are destitute, like these young men in the image. How do you live with yourself if you know you've committed horrific crimes? Today the General is a baptized Christian evangelist. And he's on a mission.We accompanied Joshua, as he walked the Earth, visiting villages where he had once killed and raped. He seeked forgiveness, and he claims to endeavor to improve the lives of his child-soldiers. During this expedition I expected him to be killed outright, and us as well. But what I saw opened my eyes to an idea of forgiveness which I never thought possible. In the midst of incredible poverty and loss, people who had nothing absolved a man who had taken everything from them. He begs for forgiveness, and receives it from the same woman whose brother he murdered. Senegalese, the young man seated on the wheelchair here, was once a child soldier, under the General's command, until he disobeyed orders, and the General shot off both his legs. He forgives the General in this image. He risked his life as he walked up to people whose families he'd murdered.In this photograph a hostile crowd in a slum surrounds him. And Joshua remains silent as they vented their rage against him. This image, to me, is almost like from a Shakespearean play, with a man, surrounded by various influences, desperate to hold on to something true within himself, in a context of great suffering that he has created himself.I was intensely moved during all this. But the question is, does forgiveness and redemption replace justice? Joshua, in his own words, says that he does not mind standing trial for his crimes, and speaks about them from soapboxes across Monrovia, to an audience that often includes his victims. A very unlikely spokesperson for the idea of separation of church and state.The second story I'm going to tell you about is about a group of very special fighting women with rather unique peace-keeping skills. Liberia has been devastated by one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars, which has left more than 200,000 people dead, thousands of women scarred by rape and crime on a spectacular scale. Liberia is now home to an all-woman United Nations contingent of Indian peacekeepers.These women, many from small towns in India, help keep the peace, far away from home and family. They use negotiation and tolerance more often than an armed response. The commander told me that a woman could gauge a potentially violent situation much better than men. And that they were definitely capable of diffusing it non-aggressively. This man was very drunk, and he was very interested in my camera, until he noticed the women, who handled him with smiles, and AK-47s at the ready, of course. (Laughter)This contingent seems to be quite lucky, and it has not sustained any casualties, even though dozens of peacekeepers have been killed in Liberia. And yes, all of those people killed were male. Many of the women are married with children, and they say the hardest part of their deployment was being kept away from their children.I accompanied these women on their patrols, and watched as they walked past men, many who passed very lewd comments incessantly. And when I asked one of the women about the shock and awe response, she said, ""Don't worry, same thing back home. We know how to deal with these fellows,"" and ignored them.In a country ravaged by violence against women, Indian peacekeepers have inspired many local women to join the police force. Sometimes, when the war is over and all the film crews have left, the most inspiring stories are the ones that float just beneath the radar. I came back to India and nobody was interested in buying the story. And one editor told me that she wasn't interested in doing what she called ""manual labor stories.""In 2007 and 2009 I did stories on the Delhi Fire Service, the DFS, which, during the summer, is probably the world's most active fire department. They answer more than 5,000 calls in just two months. And all this against incredible logistical odds, like heat and traffic jams. Something amazing happened during this shoot. Due to a traffic jam, we were late in getting to a slum, a large slum, which had caught fire. As we neared, angry crowds attacked our trucks and stoned them, by hundreds of people all over the place. These men were terrified, as the mob attacked our vehicle.But nonetheless, despite the hostility, firefighters left the vehicle and successfully fought the fire. Running the gauntlet through hostile crowds, and some wearing motorbike helmets to prevent injury. Some of the local people forcibly took away the hoses from the firemen to put out the fire in their homes. Now, hundreds of homes were destroyed. But the question that lingered in my mind was, what causes people to destroy fire trucks headed to their own homes? Where does such rage come from? And how are we responsible for this? 45 percent of the 14 million people who live in Delhi live in unauthorized slums, which are chronically overcrowded. They lack even the most basic amenities. And this is something that is common to all our big cities.Back to the DFS. A huge chemical depot caught fire, thousands of drums filled with petrochemicals were blazing away and exploding all around us. The heat was so intense, that hoses were used to cool down firefighters fighting extremely close to the fire, and with no protective clothing. In India we often love to complain about our government bodies. But over here, the heads of the DFS, Mr. R.C. Sharman, Mr. A.K. Sharman, led the firefight with their men. Something wonderful in a country where manual labor is often looked down upon. (Applause)Over the years, my faith in the power of storytelling has been tested. And I've had very serious doubt about its efficacy, and my own faith in humanity. However, a film we shot still airs on the National Geographic channel. And when it airs I get calls from all the guys I was with and they tell me that they receive hundreds of calls congratulating them. Some of the firemen told me that they were also inspired to do better because they were so pleased to get thank-yous rather than brick bats.It seems that this story helped change perceptions about the DFS, at least in the minds of an audience in part on televisions, read magazines and whose huts aren't on fire. Sometimes, focusing on what's heroic, beautiful and dignified, regardless of the context, can help magnify these intangibles three ways, in the protagonist of the story, in the audience, and also in the storyteller. And that's the power of storytelling. Focus on what's dignified, courageous and beautiful, and it grows. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_lobo_through_the_lens_of_compassion
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"There are a lot of web 2.0 consultants who make a lot of money. In fact, they make their living on this stuff. I'm going to try to save you all the time and money and go through it in the next three minutes, so bear with me. Started a website in 2005 with a few friends, called Reddit.com. It's what you'd call a social news website;basically, the democratic front page of the best stuff on the web. You find some interesting content — say, a TED Talk — submit it to Reddit, and a community of your peers votes up if they like it, down if they don't. That creates the front page. It's always rising, falling; a half million people visit every day. But this isn't about Reddit. It's about discovering new things that pop up on the web. In the last four years, we've seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends get born right on our front page.This isn't about Reddit itself, it's actually about humpback whales. Well, technically, it's about Greenpeace, an environmental organization that wanted to stop the Japanese government's whaling campaign. The whales were getting killed; they wanted to put an end to it. One of the ways they wanted to do it was to put a tracking chip inside one of the whales. But to personify the movement, they wanted to name it.So in true web fashion, they put together a poll, where they had a bunch of very erudite, very thoughtful, cultured names. I believe this is the Farsi word for ""immortal."" I think this means ""divine power of the ocean"" in a Polynesian language. And then there was this: ""Mister Splashy Pants.""(Laughter)And this was a special name. Mister Pants, or ""Splashy"" to his friends, was very popular on the Internet. In fact, someone on Reddit thought, ""What a great thing, we should all vote this up."" And Redditors responded and all agreed. So the voting started. We got behind it ourselves; we changed our logo for the day, from the alien to Splashy, to help the cause. And it wasn't long before other sites like Fark and Boing Boing and the rest of the Internet started saying, ""We love Splashy Pants!""So it went from about five percent, which was when this meme started, to 70 percent at the end of voting. Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. Just kidding — Greenpeace actually wasn't that crazy about it, because they wanted one of the more thoughtful names to win. They said, ""No, just kidding. We'll give it another week of voting.""Well, that got us a little angry, so we changed it to Fightin' Splashy.(Laughter)And the Reddit community — really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. Facebook groups were created. Facebook applications were created. The idea was, ""Vote your conscience, vote for Mister Splashy Pants."" People were putting up signs in the real world about this whale.(Laughter)This was the final vote: 78 percent of the votes. To give you an idea of the landslide, the next highest name pulled in three.There was a clear lesson: the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants. Which is obvious. It's a great name. Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, ""Mister Splashy Pants.""(Laughter)I think that's what helped drive this. What was cool were the repercussions. Greenpeace created an entire marketing campaign around it — Mister Splashy Pants shirts and pins, an e-card so you could send your friend a dancing Splashy. But even more important was that they accomplished their mission. The Japanese government called off their whaling expedition. Mission accomplished: Greenpeace was thrilled, the whales were happy — that's a quote.(Laughter)And actually, Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate, but they weren't whale lovers. A few, certainly, but we're talking about a lot of people, really interested and caught up in this meme. Greenpeace came back to the site and thanked Reddit for its participation. But this wasn't really altruism; just interest in doing something cool.This is how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. The Internet provides a level playing field. Your link is as good as your link, which is as good as my link. With a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter your budget. That is, as long as you can keep net neutrality in place.Another important thing is it costs nothing to get content online. There are so many publishing tools available, it only takes a few minutes to produce something. and the cost of iteration is so cheap, you might as well.If you do, be genuine. Be honest, up-front. One of the great lessons Greenpeace learned is that it's OK to lose control, OK to take yourself a little less seriously, given that, even though it's a very serious cause, you could ultimately achieve your goal. That's the final message I want to share: you can do well online. But no longer is the message coming from just the top down. If you want to succeed you've got to be OK to lose control.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alexis_ohanian_how_to_make_a_splash_in_social_media
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"Actually, I come from Britain, but I've been living in Maldives for 26 years now. So, that's home really. The Maldives, as I'm sure you're aware, are a chain of islands off the southwest coast of India here. Capital, Malé, where I live. Actually, sitting here today in Mysore, we're closer to Malé than we are to Delhi, for example.If you're in IT, India, obviously, is the place to be at the moment. But if you're a marine biologist, Maldives is not such a bad place to be. And it has been my home these years. For those of you who've been there, fantastic coral reefs, fantastic diving, fantastic snorkeling. I spend as much of my time as possible investigating the marine life. I study fish, also the bigger things, whales and dolphins.This is a blue whale. We have blue whales in the waters around here, off Maldives, around the waters of India. You can see them off Kerala. And, in fact, we're very lucky in this region. One of the best places in the world to see blue whales is here in this region. In Sri Lanka, if you go down to the south coast of Sri Lanka, during the northeast monsoon season, you can see blue whales very, very easily. It's probably the best place in the world to see them.Now, when I talk about the northeast monsoon season, I'm sure many of you here know exactly what I mean, but perhaps some of you are not quite so sure. I need to explain a little bit about monsoons. Now, monsoon, the root of the word ""monsoon"" comes from the word ""season.""So, it's just a season. And there are two seasons in most of South Asia. And in the summer India heats up, gets very hot. Hot air rises, and air is drawn in off the sea to replace it. And the way it works is, it comes from the southwest. It comes off the ocean here and is drawn up towards India. So it comes from the southwest. It's a southwest monsoon. Picks up moisture as it crosses the ocean. That's what brings the monsoon rain. And then in the winter things cool down. High pressure builds over India. And the whole system goes into reverse.So, the wind is now coming from the northeast out of India, across the Indian Ocean, this way towards Africa. Keep that in mind. Now, I'm a marine biologist, but I'm actually a bit of an old fashioned naturalist, I suppose. I'm interested in all sorts of things, almost everything that moves, including dragonflies. And I'm actually going to talk, this afternoon, about dragonflies. This is a very beautiful species, it's called the Oriental Scarlet.And one thing you need to know about dragonflies, one important thing, is that they lay their eggs in fresh water. They need fresh water to breed. They lay the eggs into fresh water. Little larvae hatch out in fresh water. They feed on other little things. They feed on mosquito larvae. So, they're very important. They control mosquito larvae, among other things. And they grow and grow by stages. And they climb out of the water, burst out, as the adult which we see. And typically, there is a lot of variation, but if you have a dragonfly with, say, a one year life cycle, which is quite typical, the larva, living in the fresh water, lives for 10 or 11 months. And then the adult, which comes after, lives for one or two months. So it's essentially a freshwater animal. It really does need fresh water.Now, the particular species of dragonfly I want to talk about is this one, because most dragonflies, like the one we've just seen, when the adult is there for its brief one or two months of life, it doesn't go very far. It can't travel very far. A few kilometers, maybe, is quite typical. They are very good fliers, but they don't go too far. But this guy is an exception. And this is called the Globe Skimmer, or Wandering Glider. And, as the name might suggest, it is found pretty much around the world. It lives throughout the tropics, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, into the Pacific. And it wanders far and wide. We know that much about it. But it really hasn't been studied very much.It's a rather mediocre looking dragonfly. If you're going to study dragonflies, you want to study those really bright beautiful ones, like that red one. Or the really rare ones, the endemic endangered ones. This is, it seems a bit dull you know. It's sort of dull-colored. And it's fairly common. And it occurs everywhere — you know, why bother? But if you take that attitude, you're actually missing something rather special. Because this dragonfly has a rather amazing story to tell. And I feel very privileged to have stumbled across it living in the Maldives.When I first went to the Maldives, dead keen on diving, spent as much of my time as I could in and under the water. Didn't notice any dragonflies; maybe they were there, maybe they weren't. Didn't notice them. But after some time, after some months, one day as I was going out and about, suddenly I noticed hundreds of dragonflies, hundreds of dragonflies. Something like this, these are all this species Globe Skimmer. I didn't know at the time, but I know now, they're Globe Skimmers, hundreds of them. And they were there for some time. And then they were gone.And I didn't think anything more of it until the following year, when it happened again, and then the year after that, and then the year after that. And I was a bit slow, I didn't really take too much notice. But I asked some Maldivian friends and colleagues, and yes they come every year. And I asked people about them and yes, they knew, but they didn't know anything, where they came from, or anything. And again I didn't think too much of it. But slowly it began to dawn on me that something rather special was happening.Because dragonflies need fresh water to breed. And the Maldives, and I'm sure some of you have been there — so here is home. So, Maldives, beautiful place. (Laughter) It's built entirely of coral reefs. And on top of the coral reefs are sand banks. Average height, about that much above sea level. So, global warming, sea level rise, it's a real serious issue. But I'm not going to talk about that. Another important point of these sand banks is that when it rains, the rainwater soaks down into the soil. So, it's gone. So, it stays under the soil. The trees can put their roots into it. Humans can dig holes and make a well.But dragonflies — a bit tricky. There is no surface fresh water. There are no ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, nothing like that. So, why is it that every year millions of dragonflies, millions, millions of dragonflies turn up? I got a little bit curious. In fact I'll stop here, because I want to ask, and there is a lot of people who, from India of course, people who grew up spending your childhood here. Those of you who are Indian or spent your childhood here, let me have a show of hands, who of you — not yet, not yet! You're too keen. You're too keen. No. Hang on. Hang on. Wait for the go. I'll say go.Those of you who grew up in India, do you remember in your childhood, dragonflies, swarms of dragonflies? Maybe at school, maybe tying little bits of string onto them? Maybe pulling bits off? I'm not asking about that. You've only got to say, do you remember seeing lots of dragonflies. Any hands? Any hands? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. It's a widespread phenomenon throughout South Asia, including the Maldives. And I got a bit curious about it.In the Maldives — now, in India there is plenty of water, so, dragonflies, yeah, of course. Why not? But in Maldives, no fresh water. So, what on Earth is going on? And the first thing I did was started recording when they turned up in the Maldives. And there is the answer, 21st of October. Not every year, that's the average date. So, I've been writing it down for 15 years now. You'd think they're coming from India. It's the closest place. But in October, remember, we're still in southwest monsoon, Maldives is still in the southwest monsoon. But wind is, invariably, every time, is from the west. It's going towards India, not from India. So, are these things, how are these things getting here? Are they coming from India against the wind? Seemed a bit unlikely.So, next thing I did is I got on the phone. Maldives is a long archipelago. It stretches about 500 miles, of course it's India here. I got on the phone and emailed to friends and colleagues. When do you see the dragonflies appear? And pretty soon, a picture started emerging. In Bangalore, a colleague there sent me information for three years, average, 24th of September, so late September. Down in Trivandrum, a bit later. Far north of Maldives, a bit later. Then Malé, then further south. And then the southernmost Maldives. It's pretty obvious, they're coming from India. But they are coming 400 miles across the ocean, against the wind. How on Earth are they doing that? I didn't know.The next thing I did was I started counting dragonflies. I wanted to know about their seasonality, what time of year, this is when they first arrive, but how long are they around for? Does that give any clues? So, I started a very rigorous scientific process. I had a rigorous scientific transect. I got on my bicycle, and I cycled around the island of Malé. It's about five kilometers around, counting the dragonflies as I go, trying not to bump into people as I'm looking in the trees.And they're here for a very short time, October, November, December. That's it. And then they tail off, there's a few, but that's it. October, November, December. That is not the northeast monsoon season. That's not the southwest season. That's the inter-monsoon, the time when the monsoon changes.Now, what I said was, you get the southwest monsoon going one way, and then it changes and you get the northeast monsoon going the other way. And that sort of gives the impression you've got one air mass going up and down, up and down. It doesn't work like that. What happens, actually, is there is two air masses. And there is a front between them, and the front moves. So, if you've got India here, when the front is up above India you're into the southwest monsoon. Then the front moves into the northeast monsoon. And that front in the middle is not vertical, it's at an angle.So, as it comes over towards Malé I'm standing in Malé underneath the front. I can be in the southwest monsoon. But the wind above is from the northeast monsoon. So, the dragonflies are actually coming from India on the northeast monsoon, but at an altitude at 1,000 to 2,000 meters up in the air. Incredible. These little insects, it's the same ones we see out here [in India], two inches long, five centimeters long, flying in their millions, 400 miles across the ocean, at 2,000 meters up. Quite incredible.So, I was quite pleased with myself. I thought wow, I've tracked this one, I know how they come here. Then I scratched my head a bit, and that's okay, I know how they come here, but why do they come here? What are millions of dragonflies doing, flying out over the ocean every year to their apparent doom? It doesn't make sense. There is nothing for them in Maldives. What on Earth are they doing? Well, to cut a long story short, they're actually flying right across the ocean. They're making it all the way across to East Africa.I know that because I have friends who work on fisheries' research vessels who have sent to me reports from boats out in the ocean. I know because we have reports from Seychelles, which fit in as well, down here. And I know because when you look at the rainfall, these particular insects, these Globe Skimmers breed in temporary rain water pools. Okay, they lay their eggs where the seasonal rains are, the monsoon rains. The larvae have to develop very quickly. They only take six weeks. Instead of 11 months, they're six weeks. They're up, and they're off.Now, here we have, in case you can't read at the back, the top is rainfall for India. And we're starting in June. So this is the monsoon rain. By September, October, it's drying out. Nothing for these dragonflies. There is no more seasonal rain. They've got to go hunting for seasonal rain. And they fly south. As the monsoon withdraws to the south they come down through Karnataka, into Kerala. And then they run out of land. But they are incredibly good fliers. This particular species, it can fly for thousands of kilometers. And it just keeps going. And the wind, the northeast wind swooshes it around and carries it off across the ocean to Africa, where it's raining. And they are breeding in the rains of Africa. Now, this is southeast Africa. It makes it look like there are sort of two breeding periods here. It's slightly more complicated than that.What's happening is they are breeding in the monsoon rains here. And the dragonflies you can see today outside here, on the campus, are the young of this generation. They hatched out in India. They're looking for somewhere to breed. If it rains here they'll breed. But most of them are going to carry on. And next stop, perhaps only four or five days away is going to be East Africa. The wind will swoosh them out across here. If they pass the Maldives they might go and have a look, nothing there, they'll carry on.Here, here, Kenya, East Africa, they've actually just come out of a long drought. Just last week the rains broke. The short rains broke and it's raining there now. And the dragonflies are there. I have reports from my various contacts. The dragonflies are here now. They're breeding there. When those guys, they'll lay their eggs now. They'll hatch out in six weeks. By that time the seasonal rains have moved on. It's not there, it's down here. They'll fly down here. And the clever thing is the wind is always converging to where the rain is. The rain occurs, these are summer rains. This is a summer monsoon. The sun is overhead there. Summer rains in southern Africa. The sun is overhead, maximum heating, maximum evaporation, maximum clouds, maximum rainfall, maximum opportunities for reproduction.Not only that, because you have this convection, you have this rising of the air where it's hot, air is drawn in. There's a convergence. So, wherever the rain is falling, the air is drawn towards it to replace the air that's rising. So, the little fellow that hatches out here, he gets up into the air, he is automatically carried to where the rain is falling. Lay their eggs, next generation, they come up, automatically carried to where the rain is falling. It's now back there. They come out, it's time to come back. So, in four generations, one, two, three, four and then back.A complete circuit of the Indian Ocean. This is a circuit of about 16,000 kilometers. 16,000 kilometers, four generations, mind you, for a two inch long insect. It's quite incredible. Those of you from North America will be familiar with the Monarch butterfly. Which, up until now has had the longest known insect migration. It's only half the length of this one. And this crossing here, of the ocean, is the only truly regular transoceanic crossing of any insect. A quite incredible feat. And I only stumbled on this because I was living in Malé, in Maldives for long enough for it to percolate into my brain that something rather special was going on.But dragonflies are not the only creatures that make the crossing. There is more to the story. I'm also interested in birds. And I'm familiar with this fellow. This is a rather special bird. It's a falcon. It's called the eastern red-footed falcon, obviously. But it's also called the Amur Falcon. And it's called the Amur Falcon because it breeds in Amurland. Which is an area along the Amur River, which is up here. It's the border, much of it is the border between China and Russia, up here in the far east.So, Siberia, Manchuria. And that's where it breeds. And if you're a falcon it's quite a nice place to be in the summer. But it's a pretty miserable place to be in the winter. It's, well, you can imagine. So, as any sensible bird would do, he moves south. They move south. The whole population moves south. But then the being sensible stopped. So, now they don't stop here, or even down here. No, they turn across here. They have a little refueling stop in northeastern India. They come to the latitude of about Mumbai or Goa. And then they strike out across the ocean, down to Kenya. And down here, and they winter down here [in southern Africa]. Incredible. This is the most extraordinary migration of any bird of prey. A quite incredible migration.And they are not the only one that makes the crossing. They have the most incredible journey, but several make the crossing from India to Africa. Includes this one, the hobby. This fellow is a very nice bird, this is the Pied cuckoo. Those of you from northern India will be familiar with this. It comes with the monsoons. This time of year they cross back to Africa. And this guy, the roller, a rather beautiful bird. It's known as the Eurasian Roller. In India it occurs in the northwest, so it's known as the Kashmir Roller. And these birds, what I've done is I've complied all the records, all the available records of these birds, put them together, and found out they migrate at exactly the same time as the dragonflies. They make use of exactly the same winds. They travel at exactly the same time with the same winds to make the crossing. I know they travel at the same altitude.It's known about the Amur Falcon. This guy, unfortunately, one of these met an unfortunate end. He was flying off the coast of Goa, 21 years ago, 1988. October, 1988. An Indian Navy jet was flying off Goa, bang! In the middle of the night. Fortunately, a two engine jet got back to base, and they pulled the remains of one of these [Eurasian Rollers] out. Flying at night over the Indian Ocean 2,424 meters. Same height as the dragonflies go. So, they are using the same winds. And the other thing, the other important factor for all these birds, all medium sized fellows, and this includes the next slide as well, which is a bee-eater. Bee-eaters eat bees. This one has a nice blue cheek. It's a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater. And every one of these birds that makes the crossing from India to East Africa eats insects, large insects, the size of dragonflies. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_anderson_discovers_dragonflies_that_cross_oceans
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"Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.Now, to assist me in explaining this, I've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers, the reigning king of the metaphorians, a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor. I am, of course, referring to none other than Elvis Presley. (Laughter)Now, ""All Shook Up"" is a great love song. It's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract — ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts — we inevitably resort to metaphor. In ""All Shook Up,"" a touch is not a touch, but a chill. Lips are not lips, but volcanoes. She is not she, but a buttercup. And love is not love, but being all shook up.In this, Elvis is following Aristotle's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. This is the mathematics of metaphor. And fortunately it's very simple. X equals Y. (Laughter) This formula works wherever metaphor is present.Elvis uses it, but so does Shakespeare in this famous line from ""Romeo and Juliet:"" Juliet is the sun. Now, here, Shakespeare gives the thing, Juliet, a name that belongs to something else, the sun. But whenever we give a thing a name that belongs to something else, we give it a whole network of analogies too. We mix and match what we know about the metaphor's source, in this case the sun, with what we know about its target, Juliet. And metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of Juliet than if Shakespeare had literally described what she looks like.So, how do we make and understand metaphors? This might look familiar. The first step is pattern recognition. Look at this image. What do you see? Three wayward Pac-Men, and three pointy brackets are actually present. What we see, however, are two overlapping triangles. Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns. Second step, conceptual synesthesia.Now, synesthesia is the experience of a stimulus in once sense organ in another sense organ as well, such as colored hearing. People with colored hearing actually see colors when they hear the sounds of words or letters. We all have synesthetic abilities. This is the Bouba/Kiki test. What you have to do is identify which of these shapes is called Bouba, and which is called Kiki. (Laughter)If you are like 98 percent of other people, you will identify the round, amoeboid shape as Bouba, and the sharp, spiky one as Kiki. Can we do a quick show of hands? Does that correspond? Okay, I think 99.9 would about cover it. Why do we do that? Because we instinctively find, or create, a pattern between the round shape and the round sound of Bouba, and the spiky shape and the spiky sound of Kiki.And many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic. Silence is sweet. Neckties are loud. Sexually attractive people are hot. Sexually unattractive people leave us cold. Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.Third step is cognitive dissonance. This is the Stroop test. What you need to do here is identify as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which these words are printed. You can take the test now. If you're like most people, you will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when the name of the color is printed in a differently colored ink. The test shows that we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words even when the literal meaning gives the wrong answer.Stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well. The participants had to identify, as quickly as possible, the literally false sentences. They took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences. Why? Because we cannot ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either.One of the sentences was, ""Some jobs are jails."" Now, unless you're a prison guard, the sentence ""Some jobs are jails"" is literally false. Sadly, it's metaphorically true. And the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false. Metaphor matters because it's around us every day, all the time. Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.Pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news. Agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in, ""The NASDAQ climbed higher."" Object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things, as in, ""The Dow fell like a brick.""Researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries, and then predict the next day's price trend. Those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue. And they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal. If, for example, house prices are routinely described as climbing and climbing, higher and higher, people might naturally assume that that rise is unstoppable. They may feel confident, say, in taking out mortgages they really can't afford. That's a hypothetical example of course. But this is how metaphor misleads.Metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies. A group of students was told that a small democratic country had been invaded and had asked the U.S. for help. And they had to make a decision. What should they do? Intervene, appeal to the U.N., or do nothing? They were each then given one of three descriptions of this hypothetical crisis. Each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy: World War II, Vietnam, and the third was historically neutral.Those exposed to the World War II scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others. Just as we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words, we cannot ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor. Metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery. Whenever we solve a problem, or make a discovery, we compare what we know with what we don't know. And the only way to find out about the latter is to investigate the ways it might be like the former.Einstein described his scientific method as combinatory play. He famously used thought experiments, which are essentially elaborate analogies, to come up with some of his greatest discoveries. By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.Now metaphor is ubiquitous, yet it's hidden. But you just have to look at the words around you and you'll find it. Ralph Waldo Emerson described language as ""fossil poetry."" But before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor. And these fossils still breathe.Take the three most famous words in all of Western philosophy: ""Cogito ergo sum."" That's routinely translated as, ""I think, therefore I am."" But there is a better translation. The Latin word ""cogito"" is derived from the prefix ""co,"" meaning ""together,"" and the verb ""agitare,"" meaning ""to shake."" So, the original meaning of ""cogito"" is to shake together. And the proper translation of ""cogito ergo sum"" is ""I shake things up, therefore I am."" (Laughter)Metaphor shakes things up, giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process. The mind is a plastic snow dome, the most beautiful, most interesting, and most itself, when, as Elvis put it, it's all shook up. And metaphor keeps the mind shaking, rattling and rolling, long after Elvis has left the building. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking
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"The anger in me against corruption made me to make a big career change last year, becoming a full-time practicing lawyer. My experiences over the last 18 months, as a lawyer, has seeded in me a new entrepreneurial idea, which I believe is indeed worth spreading. So, I share it with all of you here today, though the idea itself is getting crystallized and I'm still writing up the business plan. Of course it helps that fear of public failure diminishes as the number of ideas which have failed increases.I've been a huge fan of enterprise and entrepreneurship since 1993. I've explored, experienced, and experimented enterprise and capitalism to my heart's content. I built, along with my two brothers, the leading real estate company in my home state, Kerala, and then worked professionally with two of India's biggest businessmen, but in their startup enterprises. In 2003, when I stepped out of the pure play capitalistic sector to work on so-called social sector issues, I definitely did not have any grand strategy or plan to pursue and find for-profit solutions to addressing pressing public issues.When life brought about a series of death and near-death experiences within my close circle, which highlighted the need for an emergency medical response service in India, similar to 911 in USA. To address this, I, along with four friends, founded Ambulance Access for All, to promote life-support ambulance services in India. For those from the developing world, there is nothing, absolutely nothing new in this idea. But as we envisioned it, we had three key goals: Providing world-class life support ambulance service which is fully self-sustainable from its own revenue streams, and universally accessible to anyone in a medical emergency, irrespective of the capability to pay. The service which grew out of this, Dial 1298 for Ambulance, with one ambulance in 2004, now has a hundred-plus ambulances in three states, and has transported over 100,000 patients and victims since inception.The service is — (Applause) fully self-sustainable from its own revenues, without accessing any public funds, and the cross-subsidy model actually works, where the rich pays higher, poor pays lower, and the accident victim is getting the service free of charge. The service responded effectively and efficiently, during the unfortunate 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. And as you can see from the visuals, the service was responding and rescuing victims from the incident locations even before the police could cordon off the incident locations and formally confirm it as a terror strike. We ended up being the first medical response team in every incident location and transported 125 victims, saving life.(Applause)In tribute and remembrance of 26/11 attacks over the last one year, we have actually helped a Pakistani NGO, Aman Foundation, to set up a self-sustainable life support ambulance service in Karachi, facilitated by Acumen Fund.(Applause)It's a small message from us, in our own small way to the enemies of humanity, of Islam, of South Asia, of India, and of Pakistan, that humanity will continue to bloom, irrespective of such dastardly attacks. Since then I've also co-founded two other social enterprises. One is Education Access for All, setting up schools in small-town India. And the other is Moksha-Yug Access, which is integrating rural supply chain on the foundations of self-help group-based microfinance. I guess we seem to be doing at least a few things right. Because diligent investors and venture funds have committed over 7.5 million dollars in funding. With the significance being these funds have come in as a QT capital, not as grant or as philanthropy.Now I come back to the idea of the new social enterprise that I'm exploring. Corruption, bribes, and lack of transparency. You may be surprised to know that eight speakers yesterday actually mentioned these terms in their talks. Bribes and corruption have both a demand and a supply side, with the supply side being mostly of greedy corporate unethical businesses and hapless common man. And the demand side being mostly politicians, bureaucrats and those who have discretionary power vested with them.According to World Bank estimate, one trillion dollars is paid in bribes every year, worsening the condition of the already worse off. Yet, if you analyze the common man, he or she does not wake up every day and say, ""Hmm, let me see who I can pay a bribe to today."" or, ""Let me see who I can corrupt today."" Often it is the constraining or the back-to-the-wall situation that the hapless common man finds himself or herself in that leads him to pay a bribe. In the modern day world, where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough, the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life.Now, let me ask you another question. Imagine you are being asked to pay a bribe in your day-to-day life to get something done. What do you do? Of course you can call the police. But what is the use if the police department is in itself steeped in corruption? Most definitely you don't want to pay the bribe. But you also don't have the time, resources, expertise or wherewithal to fight this. Unfortunately, many of us in this room are supporters of capitalist policies and market forces.Yet the market forces around the world have not yet thrown up a service where you can call in, pay a fee, and fight the demand for a bribe. Like a bribe buster service, or 1-800-Fight-Bribes, or www.stopbribes.org or www.preventcorruption.org. Such a service simply do not exist. One image that has haunted me from my early business days is of a grandmother, 70 plus years, being harassed by the bureaucrats in the town planning office. All she needed was permission to build three steps to her house, from ground level, making it easier for her to enter and exit her house. Yet the officer in charge would not simply give her the permit for want of a bribe. Even though it pricked my conscience then, I could not, or rather I did not tend to her or assist her, because I was busy building my real estate company. I don't want to be haunted by such images any more.A group of us have been working on a pilot basis to address individual instances of demands for bribes for common services or entitlement. And in all 42 cases where we have pushed back such demands using existing and legitimate tools like the Right to Information Act, video, audio, or peer pressure, we have successfully obtained whatever our clients set out to achieve without actually paying a bribe. And with the cost of these tools being substantially lower than the bribe demanded. I believe that these tools that worked in these 42 pilot cases can be consolidated in standard processes in a BPO kind of environment, and made available on web, call-center and franchise physical offices, for a fee, to serve anyone confronted with a demand for a bribe. The target market is as tempting as it can get. It can be worth up to one trillion dollars, being paid in bribes every year, or equal to India's GDP. And it is an absolutely virgin market.I propose to explore this idea further, to examine the potential of creating a for-profit, fee-based BPO kind of service to stop bribes and prevent corruption. I do realize that the fight for justice against corruption is never easy. It never has been and it never will be. In my last 18 months as a lawyer, battling small- and large-scale corruption, including the one perpetrated by India's biggest corporate scamster. Through his charities I have had three police cases filed against me alleging trespass, impersonation and intimidation. The battle against corruption exacts a toll on ourselves, our families, our friends, and even our kids. Yet I believe the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity and making the world a fairer place.What gives us the courage? As my close friend replied, when told during the seeding days of the ambulance project that it is an impossible task and the founders are insane to chalk up their blue-chip jobs, I quote: ""Of course we cannot fail in this, at least in our own minds. For we are insane people, trying to do an impossible task. And an insane person does not know what an impossible task is."" Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Shaffi, that is a really exciting business idea. Shaffi Mather: I just have to get through the initial days where I don't get eliminated.(Laughter)CA: What's on your mind? I mean, give us a sense of the numbers here — a typical bribe and a typical fee. I mean, what's in your head?SM: So let me ... Let me give you an example. Somebody who had applied for the passport. The officer was just sitting on it and was demanding around 3,000 rupees in bribes. And he did not want to pay. So we actually used the Right to Information Act, which is equal to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, and pushed back the officers in this particular case. And in all these 42 cases, when we kept pushing them back, there was three kinds of reaction. A set of people actually say, ""Oh, let me just grant it to them, and run away from it."" Some people actually come back and say, ""Oh, you want to screw me. Let me show you what I can do."" And he will push us back. So you take the next step, or use the next tool available in what we are putting together, and then he relents. By the third time, in all 42 cases, we have achieved success.CA: But if it's a 3,000-rupee, 70-dollar bribe, what fee would you have to charge, and can you actually make the business work?SM: Well, actually the cost that we incurred was less than 200 rupees. So, it actually works.CA: That's a high gross margin business. I like it.(Laughter)SM: I actually did not want to answer this on the TED stage.CA: OK, so these are provisional numbers, no pricing guarantee. If you can pull this off, you will be a global hero. I mean, this could be huge. Thank you so much for sharing this idea at TED.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption
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"The key question is, ""When are we going to get fusion?"" It's really been a long time since we've known about fusion. We've known about fusion since 1920, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and the British Association for the Advancement of Science conjectured that that's why the sun shines.I've always been very worried about resource. I don't know about you, but when my mother gave me food, I always sorted the ones I disliked from the ones I liked. And I ate the disliked ones first, because the ones you like, you want to save. And as a child you're always worried about resource. And once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world's resources, I got very upset, about as upset as I did when I realized that the Earth will only last about five billion years before it's swallowed by the sun. Big events in my life, a strange child. (Laughter)Energy, at the moment, is dominated by resource. The countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them. Coal-powered industrial revolution in this country — oil, gas, sorry. (Laughter) Gas, I'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when Mister Putin turns off the gas tap, because my budget goes up.We're really dominated now by those things that we're using up faster and faster and faster. And as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the Third World, in the developing world, we're using energy faster and faster. And those resources are going away. And the way we'll make energy in the future is not from resource, it's really from knowledge. If you look 50 years into the future, the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three, with some wind, with some other things, but these are going to be the base load energy drivers.Solar can do it, and we certainly have to develop solar. But we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world. Fission. Our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations. They're going to put in six new nuclear power stations, and probably more after that. China is building nuclear power stations. Everybody is. Because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy.But if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is, the perfect energy source is one that doesn't take up much space, has a virtually inexhaustible supply, is safe, doesn't put any carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't leave any long-lived radioactive waste: it's fusion. But there is a catch. Of course there is always a catch in these cases. Fusion is very hard to do. We've been trying for 50 years.Okay. What is fusion? Here comes the nuclear physics. And sorry about that, but this is what turns me on. (Laughter) I was a strange child. Nuclear energy comes for a simple reason. The most stable nucleus is iron, right in the middle of the periodic table. It's a medium-sized nucleus. And you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy. So, uranium, which is very big, wants to split. But small atoms want to join together, small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron.And you can get energy out this way. And indeed that's exactly what stars do. In the middle of stars, you're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon, to make oxygen, all the things that you're made of are made in the middle of stars. But it's a hard process to do because, as you know, the middle of a star is quite hot, almost by definition. And there is one reaction that's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do. It's between two isotopes of hydrogen, two kinds of hydrogen: deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen, which you can get from seawater, and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen.These two nuclei, when they're far apart, are charged. And you push them together and they repel. But when you get them close enough, something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together. So, most of the time they repel. You get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together. For a moment they become helium 5, because they've got five particles inside them.So, that's that process there. Deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5. Helium splits out, and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out. If you can get something to about 150 million degrees, things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration, this will happen, and it will release energy. And that energy is what powers fusion. And it's this reaction that we want to do.There is one trickiness about this reaction. Well, there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees, but there is a trickiness about the reaction yet. It's pretty hot. The trickiness about the reaction is that tritium doesn't exist in nature. You have to make it from something else. And you make if from lithium. That reaction at the bottom, that's lithium 6, plus a neutron, will give you more helium, plus tritium. And that's the way you make your tritium. But fortunately, if you can do this fusion reaction, you've got a neutron, so you can make that happen.Now, why the hell would we bother to do this? This is basically why we would bother to do it. If you just plot how much fuel we've got left, in units of present world consumption. And as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil — the blue line, by the way, is the lowest estimate of existing resources. And the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate.And as you go across there you will see that we've got a few tens of years, and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left. And god knows we don't really want to burn all of it, because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air. And then we get to uranium. And with current reactor technology we really don't have very much uranium. And we will have to extract uranium from sea water, which is the yellow line, to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us. This is a bit shocking, because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet Kyoto, and do all those kind of things.To go any further you would have to have breeder technology. And breeder technology is fast breeders. And that's pretty dangerous. The big thing, on the right, is the lithium we have in the world. And lithium is in sea water. That's the yellow line. And we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water. Everybody can get it. That's why we want to do fusion. Is it cost-competitive? We make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant. And we get within about the same price as current electricity.So, how would we make it? We have to hold something at 150 million degrees. And, in fact, we've done this. We hold it with a magnetic field. And inside it, right in the middle of this toroidal shape, doughnut shape, right in the middle is 150 million degrees. It boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees. And in fact we can make fusion happen. And just down the road, this is JET. It's the only machine in the world that's actually done fusion.When people say fusion is 30 years away, and always will be, I say, ""Yeah, but we've actually done it."" Right? We can do fusion. In the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997. And in 2013 we're going to fire it up again and break all those records. But that's not really fusion power. That's just making some fusion happen. We've got to take that, we've got to make that into a fusion reactor. Because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the Earth. This is the device we're building now.It gets very expensive to do this research. It turns out you can't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense. Right? You can't. You have to do it in a very big device. More than half the world's population is involved in building this device in southern France, which is a nice place to put an experiment. Seven nations are involved in building this. It's going to cost us 10 billion. And we'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power. But that's not electricity yet. We have to get to this. We have to get to a power plant. We have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology. And I'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is. But at the moment, all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s.I wish this were different. We really need it now. We're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country. So 2030 looks like an infinity away. But we can't abandon it now; we have to push forward, get fusion to happen. I wish we had more money, I wish we had more resources. But this is what we're aiming at, sometime in the 2030s — real electric power from fusion. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_cowley_fusion_is_energy_s_future
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"Namaste. Salaam. Shalom. Sat Sri Akal. Greetings to all of you from Pakistan. It is often said that we fear that which we do not know. And Pakistan, in this particular vein, is very similar. Because it has provoked, and does provoke, a visceral anxiety in the bellies of many a Western soul, especially when viewed through the monochromatic lens of turbulence and turmoil. But there are many other dimensions to Pakistan.And what follows is a stream of images, a series of images captured by some of Pakistan's most dynamic and young photographers, that aims to give you an alternative glimpse, a look inside the hearts and minds of some ordinary Pakistani citizens. Here are some of the stories they wanted us to share with you.My name is Abdul Khan. I come from Peshawar. I hope that you will be able to see not just my Taliban-like beard, but also the richness and color of my perceptions, aspirations and dreams, as rich and colorful as the satchels that I sell.My name is Meher and this is my friend Irim. I hope to become a vet when I grow up so that I can take care of stray cats and dogs who wander around the streets of the village that I live near Gilgit, northern Pakistan.My name is Kailash. And I like to enrich lives through technicolored glass. Madame, would you like some of those orange bangles with the pink polka dots?My name is Zamin. And I'm an IDP, an internally displaced person, from Swat. Do you see me on the other side of this fence? Do I matter, or really exist for you?My name is Iman. I am a fashion model, an up-and-coming model from Lahore. Do you see me simply smothered in cloth? Or can you move beyond my veil and see me for who I truly am inside?My name is Ahmed. I am an Afghan refugee from the Khyber agency. I have come from a place of intense darkness. And that is why I want to illuminate the world.My name is Papusay. My heart and drum beat as one. If religion is the opium of the masses, then for me, music is my one and only ganja.A rising tide lifts all boats. And the rising tide of India's spectacular economic growth has lifted over 400 million Indians into a buoyant middle class. But there are still over 650 million Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, who remain washed up on the shores of poverty.Therefore as India and Pakistan, as you and I, it behooves us to transcend our differences, to celebrate our diversity, to leverage our common humanity. Our collective vision at Naya Jeevan, which for many of you, as you all recognize, means ""new life"" in Urdu and Hindi, is to rejuvenate the lives of millions of low income families by providing them with affordable access to catastrophic health care. Indeed it is the emerging world's first HMO for the urban working poor.Why should we do this as Indians and Pakistanis? We are but two threads cut from the same cloth. And if our fates are intertwined, then we believe that it is good karma, it is good fortune. And for many of us, our fortunes do indeed lie at the bottom of the pyramid. Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: Fantastic. Just stay up here. That was fantastic. I found that really moving. You know, we fought hard to get at least a small Pakistani contingent to come. It felt like it was really important. They went through a lot to get here. Would the Pakistanis please just stand up please? I just really wanted to acknowledge you. (Applause) Thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/asher_hasan_s_message_of_peace_from_pakistan
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"Well, I learned a lot of things about ballooning, especially at the end of these balloon flights around the world I did with Brian Jones. When I took this picture, the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night. And on the other side there was a rising sun. So, you see that on the other side of ice you have the unknown, you have the non-obvious, you have the non-seen, for the people who don't dare to go through the ice.There are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side. And I think that's one of the main problems of our society. We learn, maybe not the famous TED audience, but so many other people learn, that the unknown, the doubts, the question marks are dangerous. And we have to resist to the changes. We have to keep everything under control. Well, the unknown is part of life.And in that sense, ballooning is a beautiful metaphor. Because in the balloon, like in life, we go very well in unforeseen directions. We want to go in a direction, but the winds push us in another direction, like in life. And as long as we fight horizontally, against life, against the winds, against what's happening to us, life is a nightmare.How do we steer a balloon? By understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction. So, then, we understand that if we want to change our trajectory, in life, or in the balloon, we have to change altitude. Changing altitude, in life, that means raising to another psychological, philosophical, spiritual level. But how do we do that?In ballooning, or in life, how do we change altitude? How do we go from the metaphor to something more practical that we can really use every day? Well, in a balloon it's easy, we have ballast. And when we drop the ballast overboard we climb. Sand, water, all the equipment we don't need anymore. And I think in life it should be exactly like this.You know, when people speak about pioneering spirit, very often they believe that pioneers are the ones who have new ideas. It's not true. The pioneers are not the ones who have new ideas, because new ideas are so easy to have. We just close our eyes for a minute we all come back with a lot of new ideas. No, the pioneer is the one who allows himself to throw overboard a lot of ballast. Habits, certainties, convictions, exclamation marks, paradigms, dogmas. And when we are able to do that, what happens? Life is not anymore just one line going in one direction in one dimension. No. Life is going to be made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in three dimensions.And pioneering spirit will be each time we allow ourselves to explore this vertical axis. Of course not just like the atmosphere in the balloon, but in life itself. Explore this vertical axis, that means explore all the different ways to do, all the different ways to behave, all the different ways to think, before we find the one that goes in the direction we wish. This is very practical. This can be in politics. This can be in spirituality. This can be in environment, in finance, in education of children.I deeply believe that life is a much greater adventure if we manage to do politics without the trench between the left and the right wing. Because we will throw away these political dogmas. I deeply believe that we can make much more protection of the environment if we get rid — if we throw overboard this fundamentalism that some of the greens have showed in the past. And that we can aim for much higher spirituality if we get rid of the religious dogmas. Throwing overboard, as ballast, to change our direction.Well, these basically are things I believed in such a long time. But actually I had to go around the world in a balloon to be invited to talk about it. (Laughter) (Applause) It's clear that it's not easy to know which ballast to drop and which altitude to take. Sometime we need friends, family members or a psychiatrist. Well, in balloons we need weather men, the one who calculate the direction of each layer of wind, at which altitude, in order to help the balloonist. But sometimes it's very paradoxical.When Brian Jones and I were flying around the world, the weather man asked us, one day, to fly quite low, and very slow. And when we calculated we thought we're never going to make it around the world at that speed. So, we disobeyed. We flew much higher, and double the speed.And I was so proud to have found that jetstream that I called the weather man, and I told him, ""Hey, guy, don't you think we're good pilots up there? We fly twice the speed you predicted."" And he told me, ""Don't do that. Go down immediately in order to slow down."" And I started to argue. I said, ""I'm not going to do that. We don't have enough gas to fly so slow."" And he told me, ""Yes, but with the low pressure you have on your left if you fly too fast, in a couple of hours you will turn left and end up at the North Pole. (Laughter) And then he asked me — and this is something I will never forget in my life — he just asked me, ""You're the good pilot up there. What do you really want? You want to go very fast in the wrong direction, or slowly in the good direction? (Laughter) (Applause)And this is why you need weathermen. This is why you need people with long-term vision. And this is precisely what fails in the political visions we have now, in the political governments. We are burning, as you heard, so much energy, not understanding that such an unsustainable way of life cannot last for long. So, we went down actually. We slowed down. And we went through moments of fears because we had no idea how the little amount of gas we had in the balloon could allow us to travel 45,000 kilometers. But we were expected to have doubts; we're expected to have fears. And actually this is where the adventure really started.When we were flying over the Sahara and India it was nice holidays. We could land anytime and fly back home with an airplane. In the middle of the Pacific, when you don't have the good winds, you cannot land, you cannot go back. That's a crisis. That's the moment when you have to wake up from the automatic way of thinking. That's the moment when you have to motivate your inner potential, your creativity. That's when you throw out all the ballast, all the certainties, in order to adapt to the new situation.And actually, we changed completely our flight plan. We changed completely our strategy. And after 20 days we landed successfully in Egypt. But if I show you this picture it's not to tell you how happy we were. It's to show you how much gas was left in the last bottles. We took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane. We landed with 40 kilos.When I saw that, I made a promise to myself. I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world, it would be with no fuel, independent from fossil energies, in order to be safe, not to be threatened by the fuel gauge. I had no idea how it was possible. I just thought it's a dream and I want to do it.And when the capsule of my balloon was introduced officially in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, together with the airplane of Charles Lindbergh, with Apollo 11, with the Wright Brothers' Flyer, with Chuck Yeager's 61, I had really a thought then. I thought, well, the 20th century, that was brilliant. It allowed to do all those things there. But it will not be possible in the future any more. It takes too much energy. It will cost too much. It will be prohibited because we'll have to save our natural resources in a few decades from now.So how can we perpetuate this pioneering spirit with something that will be independent from fossil energy? And this is when the project Solar Impulse really started to turn in my head. And I think it's a nice metaphor also for the 21st century. Pioneering spirit should continue, but on another level. Not to conquer the planet or space, not anymore, it has been done, but rather to improve the quality of life. How can we go through the ice of certainty in order to make the most incredible a possible thing? What is today completely impossible — get rid of our dependency on fossil energy.If you tell to people, we want to be independent from fossil energy in our world, people will laugh at you, except here, where crazy people are invited to speak. (Laughter) So, the idea is that if we fly around the world in a solar powered airplane, using absolutely no fuel, nobody ever could say in the future that it's impossible to do it for cars, for heating systems, for computers, and so on and so on.Well, solar power airplanes are not new. They have flown in the past, but without saving capabilities, without batteries. Which means that they have more proven the limits of renewable energies than the potential of it. If we want to show the potential, we have to fly day and night. That means to load the batteries during the flight, in order to spend the night on the batteries, and fly the next day again. It has been made, already, on remote controlled little airplane models, without pilots.But it stays an anecdote because the public couldn't identify to it. I think you need a pilot in the plane that can talk to the universities, that can talk to students, talk to politicians during the flight, and really make it a human adventure. For that, unfortunately, four meters wingspan is not enough. You need 64 meter wingspan. 64 meter wingspan to carry one pilot, the batteries, flies slowly enough with the aerodynamic efficiency. Why that? Because fuel is not easy to replace. That's for sure. And with 200 square meters of solar power on our plane, we can produce the same energy than 200 little lightbulbs. That means a Christmas tree, a big Christmas tree.So the question is, how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big Christmas tree? People will tell you it's impossible, and that's exactly why we try to do it. We launched the project with my colleague Andre Borschberg six years ago. We have now 70 people in the team working on it. We have gone through the stages of simulation, design, computing, preparing the construction of the first prototype. That has been achieved after two years of work. Cockpit, propeller, engine. Just the fuselage here, it's so light. It's not designed by an artist, but it could be. 50 kilos for the entire fuselage. Couple of kilos more for the wing spars.This is the complete structure of the airplane. And one month ago we have unveiled it. You cannot imagine how it is for a team who has been working six years on it to show that it's not only a dream and a vision, it's a real airplane. A real airplane that we could finally present.And what's the goal now? The goal is to take off, end of this year for the first test, but mainly next year, spring or summer, take off, on our own power, without additional help, without being towed, climb to 9,000 meters altitude. The same time we load the batteries, we run the engines, and when we get at the maximum height, we arrive at the beginning of the night. And there, there will be just one goal, just one: reach the next sunrise before the batteries are empty. (Laughter)And this is exactly the symbol of our world. If our airplane is too heavy, if the pilot wastes energy, we'll never make it through the night. And in our world, if we keep on spoiling, wasting our energy resources, if we keep on building things that consume so much energy that most of the companies now go bankrupt, it's clear that we'll never give the planet to the next generation without a major problem.So, you see that this airplane is more a symbol. I don't think it will transport 200 people in the next years. But when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the payload was also just sufficient for one person and some fuel. And 20 years later there were 200 people in every airplane crossing the Atlantic.So, we have to start, and show the example. A little bit like on this picture here. This is a painting from Magritte, in the museum in Holland that I love so much. It's a pipe, and it's written, ""This is not a pipe."" This is not an airplane. This is a symbol of what we can achieve when we believe in the impossible, when we have a team, when we have pioneering spirit, and especially when we understand that all the certainties we have should be thrown overboard.What pleases me very much is that in the beginning I thought that we would have to fly around the world with no fuel in order to have our message been understood. And more and more, we're invited around the world with Andre to talk about that project, to talk about the symbol of it, invited by politicians, invited in energy forums, in order to show that it's not anymore completely stupid to think about getting rid of the dependency on fossil energies.So, through speeches like this one today, through interviews, through meetings, our goal is to get as many people possible on the team. The success will not come if we ""just,"" quote, unquote, fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane. No, the success will come if enough people are motivated to do exactly the same in their daily life, save energy, go to renewables. And this is possible. You know, with the technologies we have today, we can save between 30 and 50 percent of the energy of a country in Europe, and we can solve half of the rest with renewables. It leaves 25 or 30 percent for oil, gas, coal, nuclear, or whatever. This is acceptable.This is why all the people who believe in this type of spirit are welcome to be on that team. You can just go on SolarImpulse.com, subscribe to just be informed of what we're doing. But much more, to get advices, to give your comments, to spread the word that if it's possible in the air, of course it's possible in the ground.And each time we have some ice in the future, we have to know that life will be great, and the success will be brilliant if we dare to overcome our fear of the ice, to go through the obstacle, to go through the problem, in order to see what there is on the other side. So, you see, this is what we're doing on our side. Everyone has his goal, has his dreams, has his visions.The question I leave you with now is which is the ballast you would like to throw overboard? Which will be the altitude at which you would like to fly in your life, to get to the success that you wish to have, to get to the point that really belongs to you, with the potential you have, and the one you can really fulfill? Because the most renewable energy we have is our own potential, and our own passion. So, let's go for it, and I wish you an excellent adventure in the wings of the future. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bertrand_piccard_s_solar_powered_adventure
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"I'd like to talk to you today about the human brain, which is what we do research on at the University of California. Just think about this problem for a second. Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence, about the nature of God.And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world. It's the greatest mystery confronting human beings: How does this all come about? Well, the brain, as you know, is made up of neurons. We're looking at neurons here. There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. And based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.So, how do you go about studying the brain? One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain, and study changes in their behavior. This is what I spoke about in the last TED. Today I'll talk about a different approach, which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain, and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain.Now, one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes. Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time.But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action. So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view. It's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action.Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation. Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person's point of view. So, this is important for imitation and emulation. Well, why is that important? Well, let's take a look at the next slide. So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation.Now, let's look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, let's look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. All of that happened relatively quickly.Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly. And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out, this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations.So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population.This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. But the same neuron, in some cases, will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. So, it's empathizing the other person being touched.So, most of them will fire when I'm touched in different locations. Different neurons for different locations. But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location. So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying ""Don't worry, you're not being touched. So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch, otherwise you'll get confused and muddled.""Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons. (Laughter)And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense. All that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this, of course, is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness.And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. So, you have a patient with a phantom limb. If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom, and you watch somebody else being touched, you feel it in your phantom. Now the astonishing thing is, if you have pain in your phantom limb, you squeeze the other person's hand, massage the other person's hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged.So, here you have my last slide. For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization
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"So, 120 years ago, Dr. Röntgen X-rayed his wife's hand. Quite why he had to pin her fingers to the floor with her brooch, I'm not sure. It seems a bit extreme to me. That image was the start of the X-ray technology. And I'm still fundamentally using the same principles today. I'm interpreting it in a more contemporary manner.The first shot I ever did was of a soda can, which was to promote a brand that we all know, so I'm not going to do them any favors by showing you it. But the second shot I did was my shoes I was wearing on the day. And I do really like this shot, because it shows all the detritus that's sort of embedded in the sole of the sneakers. It was just one of those pot-luck things where you get it right first time.Moving on to something a bit larger, this is an X-ray of a bus. And the bus is full of people. It's actually the same person. It's just one skeleton. And back in the '60s, they used to teach student radiographers to take X-rays, thankfully not on you and I, but on dead people. So, I've still got access to one of these dead people called Frieda; she's falling apart, I'm afraid, because she's very old and fragile. But everyone on that bus is Frieda. And the bus is taken with a cargo-scanning X-ray, which is the sort of machine you have on borders, which checks for contraband and drugs and bombs and things.Fairly obvious what that is. So, using large-scale objects does sort of create drama because you just don't see X-rays of big things that often. Technology is moving ahead, and these large cargo scanner X-rays that work with the digital system are getting better and better and better. Again though, to make it come alive you need, somehow, to add the human element. And I think the reason this image works, again, is because Frieda is driving the bulldozer. (Laughter)Quite a difficult brief, make a pair of men's pants look beautiful. But I think the process, in itself, shows how exquisite they are. Fashion — now, I'm sort of anti-fashion because I don't show the surface, I show what's within. So, the fashionistas don't really like me because it doesn't matter if Kate Moss is wearing it or if I'm wearing it, it looks the same. (Laughter) We all look the same inside, believe me. The creases in the material and the sort of nuances. And I show things for really what they are, what they're made of. I peel back the layers and expose it. And if it's well made I show it, if it's badly made I show it.And I'm sure Ross can associate that with design. The design comes from within. It's not just Topshop, I get some strange looks when I go out getting my props. Here I was fumbling around in the ladies' underwear department of a department store, almost got escorted from the premises. I live opposite a farm. And this was the runt of the litter, a piglet that died. And what's really interesting is, if you look at the legs, you'll notice that the bones haven't fused. And should that pig have grown, unfortunately it was dead, it would have certainly been dead after I X-rayed it, with the amount of radiation I used anyway. (Laughter) But once the bones had fused together it would have been healthy.So, that's an empty parka jacket. But I quite love the way it's posed. Nature is my greatest inspiration. And to carry on with a theme that we've already touched with is how nature is related to architecture. If you look at the roof of the Eden Project, or the British library, it's all this honeycomb structure. And I'm sure those architects are inspired, as I am, by what surrounds us, by nature. This, in fact, is a Victoria water lily leaf that floats on the top of a pond. An amaryllis flower looking really three-dimensional. Seaweed, ebbing in the tide. Now, how do I do this, and where do I do this, and all of that sort of thing.This is my new, purpose-built, X-ray shed. And the door to my X-ray room is made of lead and steel. It weighs 1,250 kilograms and the only exercise I get is opening and closing it. (Laughter) The walls are 700 millimeters thick of solid dense concrete. So, I'm using quite a lot of radiation. A lot more than you'd get in a hospital or a vet's. And there I am. This is a quite high-powered X-ray machine. What's interesting really about X-ray really is, if you think about it, is that that technology is used for looking for cancer or looking for drugs, or looking for contraband or whatever. And I use that sort of technology to create things that are quite beautiful.So, still working with film, I'm afraid. Technology in X-ray where it's life-size processed, apart from these large cargo-scanning machines, hasn't moved on enough for the quality of the image and the resolution to be good enough for what I want to do with it, which is show my pictures big. So, I have to use a 1980s drum scanner, which was designed in the days when everyone shot photographs on film. They scan each individual X-ray. And this shows how I do my process of same-size X-rays. So, this is, again, my daughter's dress. Still has the tag in it from me buying it, so I can take it back to the shop if she didn't like it. But there are four X-ray plates. You can see them overlapping.So, when you move forward from something fairly small, a dress which is this size, onto something like that which is done in exactly the same process, you can see that that is a lot of work. In fact, that is three months solid X-raying. There is over 500 separate components. Boeing sent me a 747 in containers. And I sent them back an X-ray. (Laughter) I kid you not.Okay, so Frieda is my dead skeleton. This, unfortunately, is basically two pictures. One on the extreme right is a photograph of an American footballer. The one on the left is an x-ray. But this time I had to use a real body. Because I needed all the skin tissue to make it look real, to make it look like it was a real athlete. So, here I had to use a recently deceased body. And getting a hold of that was extremely difficult and laborious. But people do donate their bodies to art and science. And when they do, I'm in the queue. So, I like to use them. (Laughter)The coloring, so coloring adds another level to the X-rays. It makes it more organic, more natural. It's whatever takes my fancy, really. It's not accurately colored to how it is in real life. That flower doesn't come in bright orange, I don't think. But I just like it in bright orange. And also with something technical, like these are DJ decks, it sort of adds another level. It makes a two dimensional image look more three dimensional.The most difficult things to X-ray, the most technically challenging things to X-ray are the lightest things, the most delicate things. To get the detail in a feather, believe me, if there is anyone out here who knows anything about X-rays, that's quite a challenge. I'm now going to show you a short film, I'll step to the side.Video: (Music) The thing in there is very dangerous. If you touch that, you could possibly die through radiation poisoning. In my career I've had two exposures to radiation, which is two too many, because it stays with you for life. It's cumulative.(Music) It has human connotations. The fact that it's a child's toy that we all recognize, but also it looks like it's a robot, and it comes from a sci-fi genus. It's a surprise that it has humanity, but also man-made, future, alien associations. And it's just a bit spooky.(Music) The bus was done with a cargo-scanning X-ray machine, which is used on the borders between countries, looking for contraband and illegal immigrants. The lorry goes in front of it. And it takes slices of X-rays through the lorry. And that's how this was done. It's actually slice, slice. It's a bit like a CT scanner in a hospital. Slices. And then if you look carefully, there is all little things. He's got headphones on, reading the newspaper, got a hat on, glasses, got a bag. So, these little details help to make it work, make it real.(Music) The problem with using living people is that to take an X-ray, if I X-ray you, you get exposed to radiation. So, to avoid that — I have to avoid it somehow — is I use dead people. Now, that's a variety of things, from recently deceased bodies, to a skeleton that was used by student radiographers to train in taking X-rays of the human body, at different densities.(Music) I have very high-tech equipment of gloves, scissors and a bucket.(Music) I will show how the capillary action works, how it feeds, I'll be able to get all the cells inside that stem. Because it transfers food from its roots to its leaves. Look at this monster.(Music) It's so basic. It just grows wild. That's what I really like about it, the fact that I haven't got to go and buy it, and it hasn't been genetically modified at all. It's just happening. And the X-ray shows how beautiful nature can be. Not that that is particularly beautiful when you look at it with the human eye, the way the leaves form. They're curling back on each other. So the X-ray will show the overlaps in these little corners. The thicker the object, the more radiation it needs, and the more time it needs. The lighter the object, the less radiation. Sometimes you keep the time up, because the time gives you detail. The longer the exposure goes on for, the more detail you get.(Music) If you look at this, just the tube, it is quite bright. But I could get a bit darker in the tube, but everything else would suffer. So, these leaves at the edge would start to disappear. What I like is how hard the edges are, how sharp. Yeah, I'm quite pleased with it.(Music) I travel beyond the surface and show something for what it's worth, for what it's really made of, how it really works. But also I find that I've got the benefit of taking away all the surface, which is things that people are used to seeing.And that's the sort of thing I've been doing. I've got the opportunity now to show you what I'm going to be doing in the future. This is a commercial application of my most recent work. And what's good about this, I think, is that it's like a moment in time, like you've turned around, you've got X-ray vision and you've taken a picture with the X-ray camera. Unfortunately I haven't got X-ray vision. I do dream in X-ray. I see my projects in my sleep. And I know what they're going to look like in X-ray and I'm not far off.So, what am I doing in the future? Well, this year is the 50th anniversary of Issigonis's Mini, which is one of my favorite cars. So, I've taken it apart, component by component, months and months and months of work. And with this image, I'm going to be displaying it in the Victoria and Albert Museum as a light box, which is actually attached to the car. So, I've got to saw the car in half, down the middle, not an easy task, in itself. And then, so you can get in the driver's side, sit down, and up against you is a wall. And if you get out and walk around to the other side of the car, you see a life-sized light box of the car showing you how it works.And I'm going to take that idea and apply it to other sort of iconic things from my life. Like, my first computer was a big movement in my life. And I had a Mac Classic. And it's a little box. And I think that would look quite neat as an X-ray. I'm also looking to take my work from the two-dimensional form to a more three-dimensional form. And this is quite a good way of doing it. I'm also working now with X-ray video. So, if you can imagine, some of these flowers, and they're actually moving and growing and you can film that in X-ray, should be quite stunning. But that's it. I'm done. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_veasey_exposing_the_invisible_1
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"Something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 10 percent of how long the average person lives, within certain biological limits, is dictated by our genes. The other 90 percent is dictated by our lifestyle. So the premise of Blue Zones: if we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity we can come up with a de facto formula for longevity.But if you ask the average American what the optimal formula of longevity is, they probably couldn't tell you. They've probably heard of the South Beach Diet, or the Atkins Diet. You have the USDA food pyramid. There is what Oprah tells us. There is what Doctor Oz tells us.The fact of the matter is there is a lot of confusion around what really helps us live longer better. Should you be running marathons or doing yoga? Should you eat organic meats or should you be eating tofu? When it comes to supplements, should you be taking them? How about these hormones or resveratrol? And does purpose play into it? Spirituality? And how about how we socialize?Well, our approach to finding longevity was to team up with National Geographic, and the National Institute on Aging, to find the four demographically confirmed areas that are geographically defined. And then bring a team of experts in there to methodically go through exactly what these people do, to distill down the cross-cultural distillation.And at the end of this I'm going to tell you what that distillation is. But first I'd like to debunk some common myths when it comes to longevity. And the first myth is if you try really hard you can live to be 100. False. The problem is, only about one out of 5,000 people in America live to be 100. Your chances are very low. Even though it's the fastest growing demographic in America, it's hard to reach 100. The problem is that we're not programmed for longevity. We are programmed for something called procreative success. I love that word. It reminds me of my college days.Biologists term procreative success to mean the age where you have children and then another generation, the age when your children have children. After that the effect of evolution completely dissipates. If you're a mammal, if you're a rat or an elephant, or a human, in between, it's the same story. So to make it to age 100, you not only have to have had a very good lifestyle, you also have to have won the genetic lottery.The second myth is, there are treatments that can help slow, reverse, or even stop aging. False. When you think of it, there is 99 things that can age us. Deprive your brain of oxygen for just a few minutes, those brain cells die, they never come back. Play tennis too hard, on your knees, ruin your cartilage, the cartilage never comes back. Our arteries can clog. Our brains can gunk up with plaque, and we can get Alzheimer's. There is just too many things to go wrong.Our bodies have 35 trillion cells, trillion with a ""T."" We're talking national debt numbers here. (Laughter) Those cells turn themselves over once every eight years. And every time they turn themselves over there is some damage. And that damage builds up. And it builds up exponentially. It's a little bit like the days when we all had Beatles albums or Eagles albums and we'd make a copy of that on a cassette tape, and let our friends copy that cassette tape, and pretty soon, with successive generations that tape sounds like garbage. Well, the same things happen to our cells. That's why a 65-year-old person is aging at a rate of about 125 times faster than a 12-year-old person.So, if there is nothing you can do to slow your aging or stop your aging, what am I doing here? Well, the fact of the matter is the best science tells us that the capacity of the human body, my body, your body, is about 90 years, a little bit more for women. But life expectancy in this country is only 78. So somewhere along the line, we're leaving about 12 good years on the table. These are years that we could get. And research shows that they would be years largely free of chronic disease, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.We think the best way to get these missing years is to look at the cultures around the world that are actually experiencing them, areas where people are living to age 100 at rates up to 10 times greater than we are, areas where the life expectancy is an extra dozen years, the rate of middle age mortality is a fraction of what it is in this country.We found our first Blue Zone about 125 miles off the coast of Italy, on the island of Sardinia. And not the entire island, the island is about 1.4 million people, but only up in the highlands, an area called the Nuoro province. And here we have this area where men live the longest, about 10 times more centenarians than we have here in America. And this is a place where people not only reach age 100, they do so with extraordinary vigor. Places where 102 year olds still ride their bike to work, chop wood, and can beat a guy 60 years younger than them. (Laughter)Their history actually goes back to about the time of Christ. It's actually a Bronze Age culture that's been isolated. Because the land is so infertile, they largely are shepherds, which occasions regular, low-intensity physical activity. Their diet is mostly plant-based, accentuated with foods that they can carry into the fields. They came up with an unleavened whole wheat bread called carta musica made out of durum wheat, a type of cheese made from grass-fed animals so the cheese is high in Omega-3 fatty acids instead of Omega-6 fatty acids from corn-fed animals, and a type of wine that has three times the level of polyphenols than any known wine in the world. It's called Cannonau.But the real secret I think lies more in the way that they organize their society. And one of the most salient elements of the Sardinian society is how they treat older people. You ever notice here in America, social equity seems to peak at about age 24? Just look at the advertisements. Here in Sardinia, the older you get the more equity you have, the more wisdom you're celebrated for. You go into the bars in Sardinia, instead of seeing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, you see the centenarian of the month calendar.This, as it turns out, is not only good for your aging parents to keep them close to the family — it imparts about four to six years of extra life expectancy — research shows it's also good for the children of those families, who have lower rates of mortality and lower rates of disease. That's called the grandmother effect.We found our second Blue Zone on the other side of the planet, about 800 miles south of Tokyo, on the archipelago of Okinawa. Okinawa is actually 161 small islands. And in the northern part of the main island, this is ground zero for world longevity. This is a place where the oldest living female population is found. It's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. They have what we want. They live a long time, and tend to die in their sleep, very quickly, and often, I can tell you, after sex.They live about seven good years longer than the average American. Five times as many centenarians as we have in America. One fifth the rate of colon and breast cancer, big killers here in America. And one sixth the rate of cardiovascular disease. And the fact that this culture has yielded these numbers suggests strongly they have something to teach us. What do they do? Once again, a plant-based diet, full of vegetables with lots of color in them. And they eat about eight times as much tofu as Americans do.More significant than what they eat is how they eat it. They have all kinds of little strategies to keep from overeating, which, as you know, is a big problem here in America. A few of the strategies we observed: they eat off of smaller plates, so they tend to eat fewer calories at every sitting. Instead of serving family style, where you can sort of mindlessly eat as you're talking, they serve at the counter, put the food away, and then bring it to the table.They also have a 3,000-year-old adage, which I think is the greatest sort of diet suggestion ever invented. It was invented by Confucius. And that diet is known as the Hara, Hatchi, Bu diet. It's simply a little saying these people say before their meal to remind them to stop eating when their stomach is [80] percent full. It takes about a half hour for that full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain. And by remembering to stop at 80 percent it helps keep you from doing that very thing.But, like Sardinia, Okinawa has a few social constructs that we can associate with longevity. We know that isolation kills. Fifteen years ago, the average American had three good friends. We're down to one and half right now. If you were lucky enough to be born in Okinawa, you were born into a system where you automatically have a half a dozen friends with whom you travel through life. They call it a Moai. And if you're in a Moai you're expected to share the bounty if you encounter luck, and if things go bad, child gets sick, parent dies, you always have somebody who has your back. This particular Moai, these five ladies have been together for 97 years. Their average age is 102.Typically in America we've divided our adult life up into two sections. There is our work life, where we're productive. And then one day, boom, we retire. And typically that has meant retiring to the easy chair, or going down to Arizona to play golf. In the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement. Instead there is one word that imbues your entire life, and that word is ""ikigai."" And, roughly translated, it means ""the reason for which you wake up in the morning.""For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art. For this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week. And this is a question. The National Institute on Aging actually gave us a questionnaire to give these centenarians. And one of the questions, they were very culturally astute, the people who put the questionnaire. One of the questions was, ""What is your ikigai?"" They instantly knew why they woke up in the morning. For this 102 year old woman, her ikigai was simply her great-great-great-granddaughter. Two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years. And I asked her what it felt like to hold a great-great-great-granddaughter. And she put her head back and she said, ""It feels like leaping into heaven."" I thought that was a wonderful thought.My editor at Geographic wanted me to find America's Blue Zone. And for a while we looked on the prairies of Minnesota, where actually there is a very high proportion of centenarians. But that's because all the young people left. (Laughter) So, we turned to the data again. And we found America's longest-lived population among the Seventh-Day Adventists concentrated in and around Loma Linda, California. Adventists are conservative Methodists. They celebrate their Sabbath from sunset on Friday till sunset on Saturday. A ""24-hour sanctuary in time,"" they call it. And they follow five little habits that conveys to them extraordinary longevity, comparatively speaking.In America here, life expectancy for the average woman is 80. But for an Adventist woman, their life expectancy is 89. And the difference is even more pronounced among men, who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their American counterparts. Now, this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years. Sterling study. And I think it supremely illustrates the premise of this Blue Zone project.This is a heterogeneous community. It's white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The only thing that they have in common are a set of very small lifestyle habits that they follow ritualistically for most of their lives. They take their diet directly from the Bible. Genesis: Chapter one, Verse [29], where God talks about legumes and seeds, and on one more stanza about green plants, ostensibly missing is meat. They take this sanctuary in time very serious.For 24 hours every week, no matter how busy they are, how stressed out they are at work, where the kids need to be driven, they stop everything and they focus on their God, their social network, and then, hardwired right in the religion, are nature walks. And the power of this is not that it's done occasionally, the power is it's done every week for a lifetime. None of it's hard. None of it costs money. Adventists also tend to hang out with other Adventists. So, if you go to an Adventist's party you don't see people swilling Jim Beam or rolling a joint. Instead they're talking about their next nature walk, exchanging recipes, and yes, they pray. But they influence each other in profound and measurable ways.This is a culture that has yielded Ellsworth Whareham. Ellsworth Whareham is 97 years old. He's a multimillionaire, yet when a contractor wanted 6,000 dollars to build a privacy fence, he said, ""For that kind of money I'll do it myself."" So for the next three days he was out shoveling cement, and hauling poles around. And predictably, perhaps, on the fourth day he ended up in the operating room. But not as the guy on the table; the guy doing open-heart surgery. At 97 he still does 20 open-heart surgeries every month.Ed Rawlings, 103 years old now, an active cowboy, starts his morning with a swim. And on weekends he likes to put on the boards, throw up rooster tails.And then Marge Deton. Marge is 104. Her grandson actually lives in the Twin Cities here. She starts her day with lifting weights. She rides her bicycle. And then she gets in her root-beer colored 1994 Cadillac Seville, and tears down the San Bernardino freeway, where she still volunteers for seven different organizations. I've been on 19 hardcore expeditions. I'm probably the only person you'll ever meet who rode his bicycle across the Sahara desert without sunscreen. But I'll tell you, there is no adventure more harrowing than riding shotgun with Marge Deton. ""A stranger is a friend I haven't met yet!"" she'd say to me.So, what are the common denominators in these three cultures? What are the things that they all do? And we managed to boil it down to nine. In fact we've done two more Blue Zone expeditions since this and these common denominators hold true. And the first one, and I'm about to utter a heresy here, none of them exercise, at least the way we think of exercise. Instead, they set up their lives so that they are constantly nudged into physical activity. These 100-year-old Okinawan women are getting up and down off the ground, they sit on the floor, 30 or 40 times a day.Sardinians live in vertical houses, up and down the stairs. Every trip to the store, or to church or to a friend's house occasions a walk. They don't have any conveniences. There is not a button to push to do yard work or house work. If they want to mix up a cake, they're doing it by hand. That's physical activity. That burns calories just as much as going on the treadmill does. When they do do intentional physical activity, it's the things they enjoy. They tend to walk, the only proven way to stave off cognitive decline, and they all tend to have a garden. They know how to set up their life in the right way so they have the right outlook.Each of these cultures take time to downshift. The Sardinians pray. The Seventh-Day Adventists pray. The Okinawans have this ancestor veneration. But when you're in a hurry or stressed out, that triggers something called the inflammatory response, which is associated with everything from Alzheimer's disease to cardiovascular disease. When you slow down for 15 minutes a day you turn that inflammatory state into a more anti-inflammatory state.They have vocabulary for sense of purpose, ikigai, like the Okinawans. You know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you're born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate in their life, that's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy.There's no longevity diet. Instead, these people drink a little bit every day, not a hard sell to the American population. (Laughter) They tend to eat a plant-based diet. Doesn't mean they don't eat meat, but lots of beans and nuts. And they have strategies to keep from overeating, little things that nudge them away from the table at the right time.And then the foundation of all this is how they connect. They put their families first, take care of their children and their aging parents. They all tend to belong to a faith-based community, which is worth between four and 14 extra years of life expectancy if you do it four times a month. And the biggest thing here is they also belong to the right tribe. They were either born into or they proactively surrounded themselves with the right people.We know from the Framingham studies, that if your three best friends are obese there is a 50 percent better chance that you'll be overweight. So, if you hang out with unhealthy people, that's going to have a measurable impact over time. Instead, if your friend's idea of recreation is physical activity, bowling, or playing hockey, biking or gardening, if your friends drink a little, but not too much, and they eat right, and they're engaged, and they're trusting and trustworthy, that is going to have the biggest impact over time.Diets don't work. No diet in the history of the world has ever worked for more than two percent of the population. Exercise programs usually start in January; they're usually done by October. When it comes to longevity there is no short term fix in a pill or anything else. But when you think about it, your friends are long-term adventures, and therefore, perhaps the most significant thing you can do to add more years to your life, and life to your years. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100
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"I want you to put off your preconceptions, your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles. Because that is the only way I'm going to get my story across to you. And by the way, if I come across as a sort of rabid, hippie conservationist, it's purely a figment of your imagination. (Laughter)Okay. We are actually the first species on Earth to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival. And I know we've all seen images enough to make us numb, of the tragedies that we're perpetrating on the planet. We're kind of like greedy kids, using it all up, aren't we? And today is a time for me to talk to you about water. It's not only because we like to drink lots of it, and its marvelous derivatives, beer, wine, etc. And, of course, watch it fall from the sky and flow in our wonderful rivers, but for several other reasons as well.When I was a kid, growing up in New York, I was smitten by snakes, the same way most kids are smitten by tops, marbles, cars, trains, cricket balls. And my mother, brave lady, was partly to blame, taking me to the New York Natural History Museum, buying me books on snakes, and then starting this infamous career of mine, which has culminated in of course, arriving in India 60 years ago, brought by my mother, Doris Norden, and my stepfather, Rama Chattopadhyaya.It's been a roller coaster ride. Two animals, two iconic reptiles really captivated me very early on. One of them was the remarkable gharial. This crocodile, which grows to almost 20 feet long in the northern rivers, and this charismatic snake, the king cobra. What my purpose of the talk today really is, is to sort of indelibly scar your minds with these charismatic and majestic creatures. Because this is what you will take away from here, a reconnection with nature, I hope.The king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons. What you're seeing here is very recently shot images in a forest nearby here, of a female king cobra making her nest. Here is a limbless animal, capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves, and then laying her eggs inside, to withstand 5 to 10 [meters of rainfall], in order that the eggs can incubate over the next 90 days, and hatch into little baby king cobras. So, she protects her eggs, and after three months, the babies finally do hatch out. A majority of them will die, of course. There is very high mortality in little baby reptiles who are just 10 to 12 inches long.My first experience with king cobras was in '72 at a magical place called Agumbe, in Karnataka, this state. And it is a marvelous rain forest. This first encounter was kind of like the Maasai boy who kills the lion to become a warrior. It really changed my life totally. And it brought me straight into the conservation fray. I ended up starting this research and education station in Agumbe, which you are all of course invited to visit.This is basically a base wherein we are trying to gather and learn virtually everything about the biodiversity of this incredibly complex forest system, and try to hang on to what's there, make sure the water sources are protected and kept clean, and of course, having a good time too. You can almost hear the drums throbbing back in that little cottage where we stay when we're there. It was very important for us to get through to the people. And through the children is usually the way to go. They are fascinated with snakes. They haven't got that steely thing that you end up either fearing or hating or despising or loathing them in some way. They are interested. And it really works to start with them. This gives you an idea of the size of some of these snakes.This is an average size king cobra, about 12 feet long. And it actually crawled into somebody's bathroom, and was hanging around there for two or three days. The people of this part of India worship the king cobra. And they didn't kill it. They called us to catch it. Now we've caught more than 100 king cobras over the last three years, and relocated them in nearby forests.But in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures [it was necessary] for us to actually insert a small radio transmitter inside [each] snake. Now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets, where the babies go after they hatch, and remarkable things like this you're about to see. This was just a few days ago in Agumbe. I had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra who had caught a venomous pit viper. And it does it in such a way that it doesn't get bitten itself. And king cobras feed only on snakes. This [little snake] was kind of a tid-bit for it, what we'd call a ""vadai"" or a donut or something like that. (Laughter)Usually they eat something a bit larger. In this case a rather strange and inexplicable activity happened over the last breeding season, wherein a large male king cobra actually grabbed a female king cobra, didn't mate with it, actually killed it and swallowed it. We're still trying to explain and come to terms with what is the evolutionary advantage of this.But they do also a lot of other remarkable things. This is again, something [we were able to see] by virtue of the fact that we had a radio transmitter in one of the snakes. This male snake, 12 feet long, met another male king cobra. And they did this incredible ritual combat dance. It's very much like the rutting of mammals, including humans, you know, sorting out our differences, but gentler, no biting allowed. It's just a wresting match, but a remarkable activity.Now, what are we doing with all this information? What's the point of all this? Well, the king cobra is literally a keystone species in these rainforests. And our job is to convince the authorities that these forests have to be protected. And this is one of the ways we do it, by learning as much as we can about something so remarkable and so iconic in the rainforests there, in order to help protect trees, animals and of course the water sources.You've all heard, perhaps, of Project Tiger which started back in the early '70s, which was, in fact, a very dynamic time for conservation. We were piloted, I could say, by a highly autocratic stateswoman, but who also had an incredible passion for environment. And this is the time when Project Tiger emerged. And, just like Project Tiger, our activities with the king cobra is to look at a species of animal so that we protect its habitat and everything within it. So, the tiger is the icon. And now the king cobra is a new one.All the major rivers in south India are sourced in the Western Ghats, the chain of hills running along the west coast of India. It pours out millions of gallons every hour, and supplies drinking water to at least 300 million people, and washes many, many babies, and of course feeds many, many animals, both domestic and wild, produces thousands of tons of rice.And what do we do? How do we respond to this? Well, basically, we dam it, we pollute it, we pour in pesticides, weedicides, fungicides. You drink it in peril of your life. And the thing is, it's not just big industry. It's not misguided river engineers who are doing all this; it's us. It seems that our citizens find the best way to dispose of garbage are in water sources. Okay. Now we're going north, very far north.North central India, the Chambal River is where we have our base. This is the home of the gharial, this incredible crocodile. It is an animal which has been on the Earth for just about 100 million years. It survived even during the time that the dinosaurs died off. It has remarkable features. Even though it grows to 20 feet long, since it eats only fish it's not dangerous to human beings. It does have big teeth, however, and it's kind of hard to convince people if an animal has big teeth, that it's a harmless creature.But we, actually, back in the early '70s, did surveys, and found that gharial were extremely rare. In fact, if you see the map, the range of their original habitat was all the way from the Indus in Pakistan to the Irrawaddy in Burma. And now it's just limited to a couple of spots in Nepal and India. So, in fact at this point there are only 200 breeding gharial left in the wild. So, starting in the mid-'70s when conservation was at the fore, we were actually able to start projects which were basically government supported to collect eggs from the wild from the few remaining nests and release 5,000 baby gharial back to the wild. And pretty soon we were seeing sights like this. I mean, just incredible to see bunches of gharial basking on the river again.But complacency does have a tendency to breed contempt. And, sure enough, with all the other pressures on the river, like sand mining, for example, very, very heavy cultivation all the way down to the river's edge, not allowing the animals to breed anymore, we're looking at even more problems building up for the gharial, despite the early good intentions. Their nests hatching along the riverside producing hundreds of hatchlings. It's just an amazing sight. This was actually just taken last year. But then the monsoon arrives, and unfortunately downriver there is always a dam or there is always a barrage, and, shoop, they get washed down to their doom.Luckily there is still a lot of interest. My pals in the Crocodile Specialist Group of the IUCN, the [Madras Crocodile Bank], an NGO, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Institute of India, State Forest Departments, and the Ministry of Environment, we all work together on stuff. But it's possibly, and definitely not enough. For example, in the winter of 2007 and 2008, there was this incredible die-off of gharial, in the Chambal River. Suddenly dozens of gharial appearing on the river, dead. Why? How could it happen?This is a relatively clean river. The Chambal, if you look at it, has clear water. People scoop water out of the Chambal and drink it, something you wouldn't do in most north Indian rivers. So, in order to try to find out the answer to this, we got veterinarians from all over the world working with Indian vets to try to figure out what was happening. I was there for a lot of the necropsies on the riverside. And we actually looked through all their organs and tried to figure out what was going on. And it came down to something called gout, which, as a result of kidney breakdown is actually uric acid crystals throughout the body, and worse in the joints, which made the gharial unable to swim. And it's a horribly painful death.Just downriver from the Chambal is the filthy Yamuna river, the sacred Yamuna river. And I hate to be so ironic and sarcastic about it but it's the truth. It's just one of the filthiest cesspools you can imagine. It flows down through Delhi, Mathura, Agra, and gets just about every bit of effluent you can imagine. So, it seemed that the toxin that was killing the gharial was something in the food chain, something in the fish they were eating. And, you know, once a toxin is in the food chain everything is affected, including us.Because these rivers are the lifeblood of people all along their course. In order to try to answer some of these questions, we again turn to technology, to biological technology, in this case, again, telemetry, putting radios on 10 gharial, and actually following their movements. They're being watched everyday as we speak, to try to find out what this mysterious toxin is.The Chambal river is an absolutely incredible place. It's a place that's famous to a lot of you who know about the bandits, the dacoits who used to work up there. And there still are quite a few around. But Poolan Devi was one [of them]. Which actually Shekhar Kapur made an incredible movie, ""The Bandit Queen,"" which I urge you to see. You'll get to see the incredible [Chambal] landscape as well.But, again, heavy fishing pressures. This is one of the last repositories of the Ganges river dolphin, various species of turtles, thousands of migratory birds, and fishing is causing problems like this. And now [these] new elements of human intolerance for river creatures like the gharial means that if they don't drown in the net, then they simply cut their beaks off. Animals like the Ganges river dolphin which is just down to a few left, and it is also critically endangered.So, who is next? Us? Because we are all dependent on these water sources. So, we all know about the Narmada river, the tragedies of dams, the tragedies of huge projects which displace people and wreck river systems without providing livelihoods. And development just basically going berserk, for a double figure growth index, basically. So, we're not sure where this story is going to end, whether it's got a happy or sad ending. And climate change is certainly going to turn all of our theories and predictions on their heads. We're still working hard at it. We've got a lot of a good team of people working up there.And the thing is, you know, the decision makers, the folks in power, they're up in their bungalows and so on in Delhi, in the city capitals. They are all supplied with plenty of water. It's cool. But out on the rivers there are still millions of people who are in really bad shape. And it's a bleak future for them. So, we have our Ganges and Yamuna cleanup project. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and nothing to show for it. Incredible. So, people talk about political will. During the die-off of the gharial we did galvanize a lot of action. Government cut through all the red tape, we got foreign vets on it. It was great. So, we can do it. But if you stroll down to the Yamuna or to the Gomati in Lucknow, or to the Adyar river in Chennai, or the Mula-Mutha river in Pune, just see what we're capable of doing to a river. It's sad.But I think the final note really is that we can do it. The corporates, the artists, the wildlife nuts, the good old everyday folks can actually bring these rivers back. And the final word is that there is a king cobra looking over our shoulders. And there is a gharial looking at us from the river. And these are powerful water totems. And they are going to disturb our dreams until we do the right thing. Namaste. (Applause)Chris Anderson: Thanks, Rom. Thanks a lot. You know, most people are terrified of snakes. And there might be quite a few people here who would be very glad to see the last king cobra bite the dust. Do you have those conversations with people? How do you really get them to care?Romulus Whitaker: I take the sort of humble approach, I guess you could say. I don't say that snakes are huggable exactly. It's not like the teddy bear. But I sort of — there is an innocence in these animals. And when the average person looks at a cobra going ""Ssssss!"" like that, they say, ""My god, look at that angry, dangerous creature."" I look at it as a creature who is totally frightened of something so dangerous as a human being. And that is the truth. And that's what I try to get out. (Applause)CA: Now, incredible footage you showed of the viper being killed. You were saying that that hasn't been filmed before.RW: Yes, this is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it, for one thing. As I said, it's just like a little snack for him, you know? Usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes, or even cobras. But this guy who we're following right now is in the deep jungle. Whereas other king cobras very often come into the human interface, you know, the plantations, to find big rat snakes and stuff. This guy specializes in pit vipers. And the guy who is working there with them, he's from Maharashtra, he said, ""I think he's after the nusha."" (Laughter) Now, the nusha means the high. Whenever he eats the pit viper he gets this little venom rush. (Laughter)CA: Thanks Rom. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/romulus_whitaker_the_real_danger_lurking_in_the_water
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(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Music) (Applause)(Music) (Applause) (Applause)Herbie Hancock: Thank you. Marcus Miller. (Applause) Harvey Mason. (Applause)Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/herbie_hancock_s_all_star_set
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"Hi. For those of you who haven't seen dancing bears, these are the dancing bears. In 1995, we started working on a two-year investigative research project to try and find out what was going on. Because the sloth bears in the wild were obviously getting depleted because of this. This is the Qalandar community. They are a marginalized Islamic community who live across India, and have been in India since the 13th century.We went about getting evidence of what was going on. And this is footage from a hidden camera in a button. And we went in, pretending to be buyers. And we found this right in this very state, in Karnataka. And the bear cubs were being harvested from across the country and being sold and traded. These were being sold for about 2,000 dollars each, and they are used for bear paw soup, and also being trained, later on, to become dancing bears like the one you just saw.Sadly, the family of Qalandars depended on this bear. The couple are barely 18 years old. They already have four children beside them. You can see them. And the economy of the family and their livelihood depended on those animals. So, we had to deal with it in a very practical and sustainable manner.Now, when we started working deeper and digging deeper, we found that it's an illegal act. These guys could go to jail for up to seven years if they were caught by authorities. And what they were doing to the bears was really appalling. It was unacceptable. The mother bears are usually killed. The cubs, which are taken, are separated. Their teeth are basically bashed out with a metal rod. And they use a red hot iron needle to make a hole through the muzzle. Now we had to start changing these people and converting them from using that for a livelihood, to getting something else.So, this is Bitu Qalandar, who was our first experiment. And we were so unsure that this would work. We weren't sure at all. And we managed to convince him. And we said, ""Okay, here is some seed fund. Let's see if you can get something else."" And we got the bear surrendered to — we set up a sanctuary. We have four sanctuaries in India. And now he sells cool drinks, he's by the highway. He has a telephone booth.And then it started, there was no turning back after that. This is Sadua who came and surrendered his bear. And now he runs a cattle fodder store and a grain store near Agra. Then there was no looking back at all for us. We gave cycle rickshaws. We set up carpet-weaving units, vocational training for the women. The women were just not allowed to come out of the community and work with mainstream society. So, we were able to address that.Education. The kids never went to school. They only had Islamic education, very little of it. And they were never allowed to go to school because they were an extra earning hand at home. So we managed to get education. So, we sponsor 600 children education programs today. We were able to ensure brighter futures for these people.Of course we also had to get the bears in. This is what happens to the bears when they come in. And this is what we turn them into. We have a veterinary facility in our rescue centers. So, basically in 2002 there were 1,200 dancing bears. We rescued over 550 dancing bears. We've been able to ensure better futures for the people and the bears.The big news that I want to announce today is that next month we will be bringing in the very last bear of India, into our rescue center. (Applause) And India will no longer have to witness this cruel barbaric practice which has been here for centuries. And the people can hold their heads up high. And the Qalandar people will rise above all this cruel barbaric past that they've lived all their lives. And the beautiful bears can of course live in the wild again. And there will be no more removing of these bears. And the children, both humans and bear cubs can live peacefully. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kartick_satyanarayan_how_we_rescued_the_dancing_bears
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"Contagious is a good word. Even in the times of H1N1, I like the word. Laughter is contagious. Passion is contagious. Inspiration is contagious. We've heard some remarkable stories from some remarkable speakers. But for me, what was contagious about all of them was that they were infected by something I call the ""I Can"" bug.So, the question is, why only them? In a country of a billion people and some, why so few? Is it luck? Is it chance? Can we all not systematically and consciously get infected? So, in the next eight minutes I would like to share with you my story. I got infected when I was 17, when, as a student of the design college, I encountered adults who actually believed in my ideas, challenged me and had lots of cups of chai with me. And I was struck by just how wonderful it felt, and how contagious that feeling was. I also realized I should have got infected when I was seven.So, when I started Riverside school 10 years ago it became a lab, a lab to prototype and refine a design process that could consciously infect the mind with the ""I Can"" bug. And I uncovered that if learning is embedded in real-world context, that if you blur the boundaries between school and life, then children go through a journey of ""aware,"" where they can see the change, ""enable,"" be changed, and then ""empower,"" lead the change. And that directly increased student wellbeing. Children became more competent, and less helpless. But this was all common sense.So, I'd like to show you a little glimpse of what common practice looks like at Riverside. A little background: when my grade five was learning about child rights, they were made to roll incense sticks, agarbattis, for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer. It transformed them. What you will see is their journey, and then their utter conviction that they could go out and change the world. (Music)That's them rolling. And in two hours, after their backs were broke, they were changed. And once that happened, they were out in the city convincing everybody that child labor just had to be abolished. And look at Ragav, that moment when his face changes because he's been able to understand that he has shifted that man's mindset. And that can't happen in a classroom. So, when Ragav experienced that he went from ""teacher told me,"" to ""I am doing it."" And that's the ""I Can"" mindshift. And it is a process that can be energized and nurtured.But we had parents who said, ""Okay, making our children good human beings is all very well, but what about math and science and English? Show us the grades."" And we did. The data was conclusive. When children are empowered, not only do they do good, they do well, in fact very well, as you can see in this national benchmarking assessment taken by over 2,000 schools in India, Riverside children were outperforming the top 10 schools in India in math, English and science.So, it worked. It was now time to take it outside Riverside. So, on August 15th, Independence Day, 2007, the children of Riverside set out to infect Ahmedabad. Now it was not about Riverside school. It was about all children. So, we were shameless. We walked into the offices of the municipal corporation, the police, the press, businesses, and basically said, ""When are you going to wake up and recognize the potential that resides in every child? When will you include the child in the city? Basically, open your hearts and your minds to the child.""So, how did the city respond? Since 2007 every other month the city closes down the busiest streets for traffic and converts it into a playground for children and childhood. Here was a city telling its child, ""You can."" A glimpse of infection in Ahmedabad. Video: [Unclear] So, the busiest streets closed down. We have the traffic police and municipal corporation helping us. It gets taken over by children. They are skating. They are doing street plays. They are playing, all free, for all children. (Music)Atul Karwal: aProCh is an organization which has been doing things for kids earlier. And we plan to extend this to other parts of the city. (Music)Kiran Bir Sethi: And the city will give free time. And Ahmedabad got the first child-friendly zebra crossing in the world.Geet Sethi: When a city gives to the children, in the future the children will give back to the city. (Music)KBS: And because of that, Ahmedabad is known as India's first child-friendly city.So, you're getting the pattern. First 200 children at Riverside. Then 30,000 children in Ahmedabad, and growing. It was time now to infect India. So, on August 15th, again, Independence Day, 2009, empowered with the same process, we empowered 100,000 children to say, ""I can."" How? We designed a simple toolkit, converted it into eight languages, and reached 32,000 schools. We basically gave children a very simple challenge. We said, take one idea, anything that bothers you, choose one week, and change a billion lives.And they did. Stories of change poured in from all over India, from Nagaland in the east, to Jhunjhunu in the west, from Sikkim in the north, to Krishnagiri in the south. Children were designing solutions for a diverse range of problems. Right from loneliness to filling potholes in the street to alcoholism, and 32 children who stopped 16 child marriages in Rajasthan. I mean, it was incredible. Basically again reaffirming that when adults believe in children and say, ""You can,"" then they will. Infection in India. This is in Rajasthan, a rural village.Child: Our parents are illiterate and we want to teach them how to read and write. KBS: First time, a rally and a street play in a rural school — unheard of — to tell their parents why literacy is important. Look at what their parents says.Man: This program is wonderful. We feel so nice that our children can teach us how to read and write.Woman: I am so happy that my students did this campaign. In the future, I will never doubt my students' abilities. See? They have done it.KBS: An inner city school in Hyderabad. Girl: 581. This house is 581 ...We have to start collecting from 555.KBS: Girls and boys in Hyderabad, going out, pretty difficult, but they did it.Woman: Even though they are so young, they have done such good work. First they have cleaned the society, then it will be Hyderabad, and soon India.Woman: It was a revelation for me. It doesn't strike me that they had so much inside them.Girl: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. For our auction we have some wonderful paintings for you, for a very good cause, the money you give us will be used to buy hearing aids. Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen? Audience: Yes! Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes!KBS: So, the charter of compassion starts right here. Street plays, auctions, petitions. I mean, they were changing lives. It was incredible. So, how can we still stay immune? How can we stay immune to that passion, that energy, that excitement? I know it's obvious, but I have to end with the most powerful symbol of change, Gandhiji. 70 years ago, it took one man to infect an entire nation with the power of ""We can.""So, today who is it going to take to spread the infection from 100,000 children to the 200 million children in India? Last I heard, the preamble still said, ""We, the people of India,"" right? So, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? Like I said, contagious is a good word. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge
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"In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. Millions of people were in severe need of help. The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims.When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail. The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps.But help was coming. At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. And it took them four days. The new software they used? Google Mapmaker.Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store.Maps matter. Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone.In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable. And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere.Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now. So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries. You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal. And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore.This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning. This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time.This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet. Welcome to the new world. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lalitesh_katragadda_making_maps_to_fight_disaster_build_economies
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"I am going to be talking about secrets. Obviously the best way to divulge a secret is to tell someone to not say anything about it. (Laughter) Secrets. I'm using PowerPoint this year just because, you know, I'm into the TED thing. (Laughter) And when you use these things you don't have to go like that. You just press it. (Laughter) Oh, man. Um, yes. (Laughter) Yes. I'm sure! Just change it! (Laughter) Is Bill Gates here? Change it! Come on! What? (Laughter) Ah! Okay. That's not my slides, but it's okay. (Laughter)As you can see, these are all maps. And maps are important devices for transferring information, especially if you have human cognitive ability. We can see that all formulas are really maps. Now, as humans, we make maps of places that we seldom even go, which seems a little wasteful of time.This, of course, is a map of the moon. There're some very delightful names. Tranquilacalitis, [unclear]. My favorite is Frigoris. What are these people thinking? Frigoris? What the Frigoris you doing? Names are important. Frigoris? This is the Moon. People could live there one day. I'll meet you at Frigoris. No. I don't think so. (Laughter)There we see Mars, again with various names. And this is all done, by the way, by the International Astronomical Union. This is an actual group of people that sit around naming planetary objects. This is from their actual book. These are some of the names that they have chosen, ladies and gentlemen.I'll go through a little of them. Bolotnitsa. That, of course, is the Slavic swamp mermaid. (Laughter) Now I think the whole concept of a mermaid doesn't really blend into the swamp feel. (Laughter) ""Oh look! Mermaid come out of swamp. Oh boy! It's time for Bolotnitsa!"" (Laughter)Djabran Fluctus. If that don't flow off the tongue, what does? (Laughter) I mean kids are studying this stuff and they've got the word ""fluctus"" up there. That's wrong. (Laughter) One dyslexic kid and he could be ruining his life. (Laughter) ""It fluctus up, Mama.""Hikuleo Fluctus. That's a little more flowing. Hikuleo sounds like a kind of a Leonardo DiCaprio 17 syllable thing. And that's the Tonga underworld.And one of my favorites is the Itoki Fluctus, who is the Nicaraguan goddess of insects, stars, and planets. Now, if you're a goddess of stars and planets wouldn't you relegate insects to somebody else? (Laughter) ""No, no, really, I'm so busy with the stars. Would you mind taking the insects? Thank you darling. Oh take the spiders too. I know they're not insects, but I don't care. Monkeys, chimps, just get rid of the hairy creatures."" (Laughter)Now, we're going to be going to Mars one day. And when we do, it's going to be unfair for the people that are living there to have to live with these ridiculous names. So, you'll be on Mars, and you're at Hellespointica Depressio which has got to be a really ""up"" place. (Laughter)Yeah, I'm at the Depressio, and I want to get over to Amazonis so I plug it into the Mars map, and click the button and there's my directions. I go to Chrysokeras. (Laughter) Left to the Thymiamata. Then to Niliacus Lacus, which is not a bad name. Niliacus Lacus, try to get the practice, slick-a-tick-a-bacus. That's a cool name. I will say that. So, I hold back a little of my venom for these astronomical misnomers.And then of course Arnon to Thoth. And of course there will be advertisements. This is from their rule book, the International Astronomical Union. And you know they're international because they put it ""en Francais"" as well. L'Union Astronomique Internationale, for those of you who don't speak French. I thought I'd translate for you.From the rulebook: Nomenclature is a tool. The first consideration, make it clear, simple and unambiguous. And I think that Djabran Fluctus, that fits that mode. (Laughter) That's simple, the goddess of goats, very simple. Djabran Fluctus. ""Now, Frank is this clear to you, Djabran Fluctus?"" ""Yeah, that's the goat goddess right? The Abacazanian? (Laughter) It's clear to me."" ""Listen, I'm going back to the swamp mermaid. Can you call me in a little while?"" (Laughter)Also, from the actual document I highlighted a part I thought may be of interest. Anyone can suggest changing a name. So, I look to you, fellow member of the Earth community. We've got to change this stuff up fast. So, these are actual names of people that work there. I did some more investigation. These are more people working for this group. And, as you can see, they don't use their first names. (Laughter) These are people naming planets, and they won't use their first names. Something is askew here. (Laughter) Is it because his name is really Jupiter Blunck? (Laughter) Is that Ganymede Andromeda Burba? (Laughter) Is that Mars Ya Marov? I don't know. But it's investigative material, no doubt.There are some mapping people who do use their names. Witness please, Eugene Shoemaker, who, diligently, from a young boy decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies. Must have been a very interesting day in the Shoemaker house. ""Mom, I want to make maps."" ""That's wonderful Eugene. You could make maps of Toronto."" ""No, I want to make maps of planets."" ""Yeah, go to your room."" (Laughter)Martians, Venusians, Jovians. We have names for places where people don't exist. That seems a little silly to me. There are no Jovians.Getting back to my premise, I used stamps, by the way, because you don't have to pay anybody for the rights. (Laughter) (Applause) There is obviously Einstein, Niels Bohr, de Fermat's last theorem, and I'm not sure whether that's James Coburn or Richard Harris. (Laughter) It's definitely one of the two. I'm not really clear which one.But obviously the point is that numbers are maps. And within numbers, is there an underlying secret to the universe? That is the premise of this particular presentation. By the way, that's a natural picture of Saturn, no adjustments. I mean that's just beautiful. So beautiful that I will even give up a laugh to explain my love of this particular planet, and the day Saturday, named after it, wonderfully.So, formulas relate number to form. That's Euler, his formula was one of the inspirations that lead to the beginning of string theory which is kind of cool, not that funny, but it is cool. (Laughter) He was also famous for having no body. (Laughter) Which a lot of you are like, ""How did he figure that out?"" He's got no body, no man, just a head floating high. Here comes Euler. (Laughter)And that's an icosahedron, which is one of the five sacred solids, very important shapes. You see the icosahedron again. The dodecahedron, it's dual. There is a dodecahedron which I had to do in my room last night. The five sacred solids, as you can see there. Which is not to be confused with the five sacred salads. (Laughter) Blue cheese, ranch, oil and vinegar, thousand islands and house. I suggest the house.The reality, now here is something important. What's important about this is these shapes are duals of each other. And you can see how the icosahedron withdraws into the dodecahedron and then they just merge into each other. So, the whole concept of branes in the universe, if the universe is shaped like a dodecahedron this is a very good map of what could possibly be. And that is, of course, what we are here to talk about.What a coincidence! October 9th, in France, Jean-Pierre Luminet said that the universe is probably shaped like a dodecahedron, based on information that they got from this probe. This would be a normal wave pattern. But what they're seeing, way out there in the far reaches of the microwave background, is this kind of odd undulation. It doesn't plug in to what they suspected a flat universe would be.So, you can kind of get an idea from this extrapolating that back under this huge picture, so we get this idea of what the primal universe looked like. And judging from this, it looks a little like a cheeseburger. (Laughter) So, I'm thinking the universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger. And for me, that's a win-win. Everybody goes, I'm happy. (Laughter) Better really hurry up.I just threw this in because as important as all of our intellectual abilities are, without heart and without love it's just — it's all meaningless. And that, to me, is really beautiful. (Laughter) Except for that creepy guy in the background. (Laughter)Getting back to the point of my particular presentation, Kepler, one of my great heroes, who realized that these five solids, which I spoke of earlier, were related somehow to the planets, but he couldn't prove it. It freaked him out. But it did lead to Newton discovering gravity. So, maps of things leading to organized understandings of the universe in which we emerge.Now this is Isaac from a Vietnamese stamp. (Laughter) I am not suggesting at all that my Vietnamese brothers and sisters could maybe use a little art class here and there. But ... (Laughter) that's not a good picture. (Laughter) Not a good picture. Now, my friends in the island of Nevis are a little better. Look at that! That's Isaac Newton. That guy is rockin'. (Laughter) What a handsome cat.Once again, Nicaragua let me down. (Laughter) And Copernicus looks like Johnny Carson, which is really weird. (Laughter) I don't get that at all. Once again, these guys rock it out. Isaac is kickin' ass. Man, he looks like a rock star. This is freaky is a major way. This is Sierra Leone. They got little babies in there, floating in there. (Laughter)Man. I don't really need to comment on this. But I didn't know that Isaac Newton was in the Moody Blues. Did you? (Laughter) When did this happen? (Laughter) It's a different kind of course. And they've got five apples? I mean these guys are extrapolating in realms that are not necessarily valid. Although five is a good number, of course.Ecuador, my friend Kepler, as you can see, they call him Juan. (Laughter) Juan? No! Johannes, not Juan. It wasn't Carlos Chaplain. It's wrong. (Laughter)René Descartes, of course. Once again these Grenada people, this is like way too sick for anybody's imagination. He's all murky. There is little kids leaning on his leg, little ghosts flying around. We gotta clean this stuff up fast, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter)This is, of course, the Cartesian coordinates. Once again, that's Sierra Leone. This is again, indicating how numbers relate to space relate to form, maps of the universe. Because that's why we're here, really, I think to figure stuff out and to love each other.Descartes. (Laughter) Before the horse. (Laughter) Now, Monaco took Descartes, and just flipped him around. Now, Monaco is problematic for me, and I'll show you why. Here is a map. All they have is a casino on it. (Laughter) And why Franklin Delano Roosevelt is on their map I don't even want to hazard a guess. But I'd say he'd been to Hellespointica Depressio recently. (Laughter)This is the flag of Monaco. Ladies and gentlemen, the flag of Indonesia. Please examine. (Laughter) (Applause) Not sure how this came to be, but it's not right. In Monaco, ""No, what are you talking about? They are so different. Look, ours is more red, it's longer. They stole our flag! They stole our flag!"" (Laughter)Bode's law wasn't even his law. It was a guy named Titus. And the reason I just bring this up because it is a law that doesn't really work. That's Jude Law and some of his films recently didn't work. (Laughter) Just a correlation that indicates how things are misinterpreted.And I wonder if the photographer said, ""Okay, Jude, could you touch your tooth? That's good."" Just a tip, if you're being photographed for press pictures, don't touch your teeth. (Laughter)Prime numbers, Gauss, one of my favorites. Golden section, I've been obsessed with this thing since before I was born. I know that scares a lot of you, but that was my purpose entirely. There we can see Fibonacci numbers related to the Golden Section, because Fibonacci and Golden Section relate to the unfolding of the measured meter of matter, as I refer to it. If Fibonacci had been on Paxil, (Laughter) that would be the Fibonacci series. ""Ten milligram, 20 milligram."" ""Leonardo, dinner's ready, put down those books and take your pills."" ""Yes, Mama."" (Laughter)Alright where is this going? That's a good question. Here is the premise that I began 27 years ago. If numbers can express the laws of this incredible universe that we live, I reason, through some sort of reverse engineering, we could extrapolate from them some basic structural element of this universe. And that's what I did. Twenty-seven years ago I started working on this.And I tried to build a particle accelerator. (Laughter) And that didn't work out well. So, then I thought a calculator is a metaphor. I can just divide numbers, that's like atom smashing. That's what I did. That's how I found Moleeds. Moleeds are what I believe the thing that will allow string theory to be proved. They are the nodes on the string, patterns and relationships, 27, 37. That was the first chart I came up with.You can see, even if you don't go for the numbers, the beauty of the symmetry. The numbers from one to 36, divided into six groups. Symmetry, pairs. Every top adds up to 37. Bottom, all 74. There is so many intricate relationships that I'm not going to go there now, because you would say, ""Hey, go back to the Fluctus part."" (Laughter)Circle of Fifths, acoustic harmony, geometric symmetry. I knew those two were related. Once again, the Cartesian kind of cross-over. So, I said if I'm going to put a circle, see what kind of patterns I get, boom, the Red System. Look at that. You can't just make this stuff up, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) You can't just go around going, ""Oh, I'm going to put some triangles in a circle and they're going to be symmetrical. And they're all going to add up, and it's going to be, oh yeah, I figured that out.""This is beyond anything anybody could just make up. There is the Orange System. (Laughter) And you'll see over here, these are multiples of the number 27. And they recapitulate that shape, even though that's a circle of nine and that's a circle of 36. It's nuts. (Laughter) That's the Green System. It all folds in half on the Green System, right between 18 and 19. The Blue System. The Violet. It's all there. (Laughter) Look at that! I mean you cannot make that stuff up. (Laughter) That just doesn't fall out of a tree, ladies and gentlemen. Twenty-seven years of my life! (Laughter) And I'm presenting it here at TED. Why? Because this is the place if aliens land, I hope they come here. (Laughter) ""We are going to destroy the Earth. Hmmm ... maybe not."" (Laughter)In this last year I have found these subsequent systems which allow for the mathematic possibilities of the Calabi-Yau manifolds in a way that doesn't necessitate these little hidden dimensions. Which works mathematically, but it just doesn't seem God-like to me. It just seems like it's not sexy and elegant, it's hidden. I don't want hidden, I want to see it. (Laughter)I found other pairs all have symmetry, even though, unlike the master one, their symmetry is split. Unbelievable. This is like crazy. Am I the only one that sees this? (Laughter) You know, I didn't just draw this in a day, by the way. You know, try making some charts like this at home. You gotta be accurate! There's measurement involved, increments. These are maps, by the way. Not stamps, but one day. (Laughter)Okay, I'm getting to the punch. Golden Ratio, it's crazy. And look at this, built within it is the Golden Ratio. I start looking at that, and look at them again. They start looking like planets. I go to JPL. I look at the orbits of the planets. I find 18 examples of it in our solar system. I never told anybody. This is the first thing. This could be history. (Laughter) Kepler was right. (Laughter) Eighteen and 19, the middle of the Moleeds, 0.618 is the golden section. Multiply them together, 18.618 x 19.618 is 365.247. Which is .005 different from the number of days in a year.Hey, you can't make this up. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_fleischer_insists_all_things_are_moleeds
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"As a magician, I try to create images that make people stop and think. I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible. I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin, buried alive in a coffin in April, 1999, for a week. I lived there with nothing but water. And it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things. The next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City. That one was way more difficult than I had expected. The one after that, I stood on top of a hundred-foot pillar for 36 hours. I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads.So, next I went to London. In London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water. It was, for me, one of the most difficult things I'd ever done, but it was also the most beautiful. There was so many skeptics, especially the press in London, that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me.(Laughter)So, I felt very validated when the New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science.My next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing, like how long I could survive with nothing, not even air. I didn't realize that it would become the most amazing journey of my life.As a young magician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges. So, I began, early on, competing against the other kids, seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times, while I stayed under on one breath. By the time I was a teenager, I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds. I would later find out that was Houdini's personal record.In 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river. He was underneath, not breathing for 45 minutes. When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage. His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees. As a magician, I think everything is possible. And I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others. I started to think, if the boy could survive without breathing for that long, there must be a way that I could do it.So, I met with a top neurosurgeon. And I asked him, how long is it possible to go without breathing, like how long could I go without air? And he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage. So, I took that as a challenge, basically.(Laughter)My first try, I figured that I could do something similar, and I created a water tank, and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water. And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my core temperature would start to drop. And I was shivering. In my first attempt to hold my breath, I couldn't even last a minute. So, I realized that was completely not going to work.I went to talk to a doctor friend — and I asked him, ""How could I do that?"" ""I want to hold my breath for a really long time. How could it be done?"" And he said, ""David, you're a magician, create the illusion of not breathing, it will be much easier.""(Laughter)So, he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather, with a CO2 scrubber, which was basically a tube from Home Depot, with a balloon duct-taped to it, that he thought we could put inside of me, and somehow be able to circulate the air and rebreathe with this thing in me. This is a little hard to watch. But this is that attempt. So, that clearly wasn't going to work.(Laughter)Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing. There is a chemical that's called perflubron. And it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it. So, I got my hands on that chemical, filled the sink up with it, and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in, which was really impossible. It's basically like trying to breathe, as a doctor said, while having an elephant standing on your chest. So, that idea disappeared.Then I started thinking, would it be possible to hook up a heart/lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery, and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood? Which was another insane idea, obviously.Then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas: to actually do it.(Laughter)To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead. So, I started researching into pearl divers. You know, because they go down for four minutes on one breath. And when I was researching pearl divers, I found the world of free-diving. It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered, pretty much. There is many different aspects to free-diving. There is depth records, where people go as deep as they can. And then there is static apnea. That's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving. That was the one that I studied.The first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breath, you should never move at all; that wastes energy. And that depletes oxygen, and it builds up CO2 in your blood. So, I learned never to move. And I learned how to slow my heart rate down. I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn't in my body, and just control that. And then I learned how to purge. Purging is basically hyperventilating. You blow in and out —(Breathing loudly)You do that, you get lightheaded, you get tingling. And you're really ridding your body of CO2. So, when you hold your breath, it's infinitely easier. Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath, and just hold and relax and never let any air out, and just hold and relax through all the pain.Every morning, this is for months, I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for, out of 52 minutes, I would hold my breath for 44 minutes. So, basically what that means is I would purge, I'd breathe really hard for a minute. And I would hold, immediately after, for five and a half minutes. Then I would breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can, then immediately after that I would hold again for five and a half minutes. I would repeat this process eight times in a row. Out of 52 minutes, you're only breathing for eight minutes. At the end of that you're completely fried, your brain. You feel like you're walking around in a daze. And you have these awful headaches. Basically, I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff.I started learning about the world-record holder. His name is Tom Sietas. And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath. He's six foot four. He's 160 pounds. And his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person. I'm six foot one, and fat. We'll say big-boned.(Laughter)I had to drop 50 pounds in three months. So, everything that I put into my body, I considered as medicine. Every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value. I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day. And I started to really adapt my body.[Individual results may vary](Laughter)The thinner I was, the longer I was able to hold my breath. And by eating so well and training so hard, my resting heart-rate dropped to 38 beats per minute. Which is lower than most Olympic athletes. In four months of training, I was able to hold my breath for over seven minutes. I wanted to try holding my breath everywhere. I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress.(Laughter)I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television. The world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds, held by Tom Sietas, that guy with the whale lungs I told you about. I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln Center and if I stayed there a week not eating, I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism, which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it. I was completely wrong.I entered the sphere a week before the scheduled air date. And I thought everything seemed to be on track. Two days before my big breath-hold attempt, for the record, the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath, and almost drowning, is too boring for television.(Laughter)So, I had to add handcuffs, while holding my breath, to escape from. This was a critical mistake. Because of the movement, I was wasting oxygen. And by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions. By 7:08, I started to black out. And by seven minutes and 30 seconds, they had to pull my body out and bring me back. I had failed on every level.(Laughter)So, naturally, the only way out of the slump that I could think of was, I decided to call Oprah.(Laughter)I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had. This was a different record. This was a pure O2 static apnea record that Guinness had set the world record at 13 minutes. So, basically you breathe pure O2 first, oxygenating your body, flushing out CO2, and you are able to hold much longer. I realized that my real competition was the beaver.(Laughter)(Laughter ends)In January of '08, Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train. So, I would sleep in a hypoxic tent every night. A hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates altitude at 15,000 feet. So, it's like base camp, Everest. What that does is, you start building up the red bloodcell count in your body, which helps you carry oxygen better. Every morning, again, after getting out of that tent, your brain is completely wiped out. My first attempt on pure O2, I was able to go up to 15 minutes. So, it was a pretty big success.The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind, at 15 minutes your brain is done, you're brain dead. So, he pulled me up, and I was fine. There was one person there that was definitely not impressed. It was my ex-girlfriend. While I was breaking the record underwater for the first time, she was sifting through my Blackberry, checking all my messages.(Laughter)My brother had a picture of it. It is really —(Laughter)(Laughter ends)I then announced that I was going to go for Sietas' record, publicly. And what he did in response, is he went on Regis and Kelly, and broke his old record. Then his main competitor went out and broke his record. So, he suddenly pushed the record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds. Which was three minutes longer than I had prepared. It was longer than the record.I wanted to get the Science Times to document this. I wanted to get them to do a piece on it. So, I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do. I walked into the New York Times offices and did card tricks to everybody.(Laughter)So, I don't know if it was the magic or the lure of the Cayman Islands, but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding.While he was there, I tried to impress him, of course. And I did a dive down to 160 feet, which is basically the height of a 16 story building, and as I was coming up, I blacked out underwater, which is really dangerous; that's how you drown. Luckily, Kirk had seen me and he swam over and pulled me up.So, I started full focus. I completely trained to get my breath-hold time up for what I needed to do. But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it, being on Oprah. But in practice, I would do it face down, floating on the pool. But for TV they wanted me to be upright so they could see my face, basically. The other problem was the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up. So, I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose, which was a real problem for me. That made me extremely nervous, raising the heart rate.Then, what they also did was, which we never did before, is there was a heart-rate monitor. And it was right next to the sphere. So, every time my heart would beat, I'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep, you know, the ticking, really loud. Which was making me more nervous. And there was no way to slow my heart rate down. Normally, I would start at 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breath, it would drop to 12 beats per minute, which is pretty unusual.(Laughter)This time it started at 120 beats, and it never went down. I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down. I was just sitting there thinking, ""I've got to slow this down. I'm going to fail."" And I was getting more nervous. And the heart rate just kept going up and up, all the way up to 150 beats. Basically it's the same thing that created my downfall at Lincoln Center. It was a waste of O2. When I made it to the halfway mark, at eight minutes, I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this. There was no way for me to do it.I figured, Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing, if I had cracked early, it would be a whole show about how depressed I am.(Laughter)So, I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until I black out, at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that.(Laughter)I kept pushing to 10 minutes. At 10 minutes you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes. And I knew that that was blood shunting, when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs. At 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs, and my lips started to feel really strange.At minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears, and I started to feel my arm going numb. And I'm a hypochondriac, and I remember arm numb means heart attack. So, I started to really get really paranoid. Then at 13 minutes, maybe because of the hypochondria, I started feeling pains all over my chest. It was awful.(Laughter)At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe.(Laughter)(Laughter ends)At 15 minutes I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart. And I started having ischemia to the heart. My heartbeat would go from 120 to 50, to 150, to 40, to 20, to 150 again. It would skip a beat. It would start. It would stop. And I felt all this. And I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack.So, at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out, if I did have a heart attack, they'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up. I was really nervous. I let my feet out, and I started floating to the top. And I didn't take my head out. But I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop, just waiting.They had doctors with the ""Pst,"" you know, sitting there waiting. And then suddenly I hear screaming. And I think that there is some weird thing — that I had died or something had happened. And then I realized that I had made it to 16:32. So, with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing. And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds.(Applause)(Applause ends)As though that wasn't enough, what I did immediately after is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were, so the doctors could use it, once again. I also didn't want anybody to question it. I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate.So, I get to New York City the next day, I'm walking out of the Apple store, and this kid walks up to me he's like, ""Yo, D!"" I'm like ""Yeah?"" He said, ""If you really held your breath that long, why'd you come out of the water dry?"" I was like ""What?""(Laughter)And that's my life. So —(Laughter)As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It's practice, it's training, and it's — (Sobs) It's practice, it's training and experimenting,(Sobs)while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that's what magic is to me, so, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min
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"Right now is the most exciting time to see new Indian art. Contemporary artists in India are having a conversation with the world like never before. I thought it might be interesting, even for the many long-time collectors here with us at TED, local collectors, to have an outside view of 10 young Indian artists I wish everyone at TED to know.The first is Bharti Kher. The central motif of Bharti's practice is the ready-made store-bought bindi that untold millions of Indian women apply to their foreheads, every day, in an act closely associated with the institution of marriage. But originally the significance of the bindi is to symbolize the third eye between the spiritual world and the religious world. Bharti seeks to liberate this everyday cliche, as she calls it, by exploding it into something spectacular. She also creates life-size fiberglass sculptures, often of animals, which she then completely covers in bindis, often with potent symbolism. She says she first got started with 10 packets of bindis, and then wondered what she could do with 10 thousand.Our next artist, Balasubramaniam, really stands at the crossroads of sculpture, painting and installation, working wonders with fiberglass. Since Bala himself will be speaking at TED I won't spend too much time on him here today, except to say that he really succeeds at making the invisible visible.Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh is known for her digital collages, using Indian comic books called amar chitra kathas as her primary source material. These comics are a fundamental way that children, especially in the diaspora, learn their religious and mythological folk tales. I, for one, was steeped in these. Chitra basically remixes and re-titles these iconic images to tease out some of the sexual and gender politics embedded in these deeply influential comics. And she uses this vocabulary in her installation work as well.Jitish Kallat successfully practices across photography, sculpture, painting and installation. As you can see, he's heavily influenced by graffiti and street art, and his home city of Mumbai is an ever-present element in his work. He really captures that sense of density and energy which really characterizes modern urban Bombay. He also creates phantasmagoric sculptures made of bones from cast resin. Here he envisions the carcass of an autorickshaw he once witnessed burning in a riot.This next artist, N.S. Harsha, actually has a studio right here in Mysore. He's putting a contemporary spin on the miniature tradition. He creates these fine, delicate images which he then repeats on a massive scale. He uses scale to more and more spectacular effect, whether on the roof of a temple in Singapore, or in his increasingly ambitious installation work, here with 192 functioning sewing machines, fabricating the flags of every member of the United Nations.Mumbai-based Dhruvi Acharya builds on her love of comic books and street art to comment on the roles and expectations of modern Indian women. She too mines the rich source material of amar chitra kathas, but in a very different way than Chitra Ganesh. In this particular work, she actually strips out the images and leaves the actual text to reveal something previously unseen, and provocative.Raqib Shaw is Kolkata-born, Kashmir-raised, and London-trained. He too is reinventing the miniature tradition. He creates these opulent tableaus inspired by Hieronymus Bosch, but also by the Kashmiri textiles of his youth. He actually applies metallic industrial paints to his work using porcupine quills to get this rich detailed effect.I'm kind of cheating with this next artist since Raqs Media Collective are really three artists working together. Raqs are probably the foremost practitioners of multimedia art in India today, working across photography, video and installation. They frequently explore themes of globalization and urbanization, and their home of Delhi is a frequent element in their work. Here, they invite the viewer to analyze a crime looking at evidence and clues embedded in five narratives on these five different screens, in which the city itself may have been the culprit.This next artist is probably the alpha male of contemporary Indian art, Subodh Gupta. He was first known for creating giant photo-realistic canvases, paintings of everyday objects, the stainless steel kitchen vessels and tiffin containers known to every Indian. He celebrates these local and mundane objects globally, and on a grander and grander scale, by incorporating them into ever more colossal sculptures and installations. And finally number 10, last and certainly not least,Ranjani Shettar, who lives and works here in the state of Karnataka, creates ethereal sculptures and installations that really marry the organic to the industrial, and brings, like Subodh, the local global. These are actually wires wrapped in muslin and steeped in vegetable dye. And she arranges them so that the viewer actually has to navigate through the space, and interact with the objects. And light and shadow are a very important part of her work. She also explores themes of consumerism, and the environment, such as in this work, where these basket-like objects look organic and woven, and are woven, but with the strips of steel, salvaged from cars that she found in a Bangalore junkyard.10 artists, six minutes, I know that was a lot to take in. But I can only hope I've whet your appetite to go out and see and learn more about the amazing things that are happening in art in India today. Thank you very much for looking and listening. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ravin_agrawal_10_young_indian_artists_to_watch
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"This is actually a painting that hangs at the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School. And it shows the first time an organ was ever transplanted. In the front, you see, actually, Joe Murray getting the patient ready for the transplant, while in the back room you see Hartwell Harrison, the Chief of Urology at Harvard, actually harvesting the kidney. The kidney was indeed the first organ ever to be transplanted to the human.That was back in 1954, 55 years ago. Yet we're still dealing with a lot of the same challenges as many decades ago. Certainly many advances, many lives saved. But we have a major shortage of organs. In the last decade the number of patients waiting for a transplant has doubled. While, at the same time, the actual number of transplants has remained almost entirely flat. That really has to do with our aging population. We're just getting older. Medicine is doing a better job of keeping us alive. But as we age, our organs tend to fail more.So, that's a challenge, not just for organs but also for tissues. Trying to replace pancreas, trying to replace nerves that can help us with Parkinson's. These are major issues. This is actually a very stunning statistic. Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue regeneration or replacement. So, what can we do about it? We've talked about stem cells tonight. That's a way to do it. But still ways to go to get stem cells into patients, in terms of actual therapies for organs.Wouldn't it be great if our bodies could regenerate? Wouldn't it be great if we could actually harness the power of our bodies, to actually heal ourselves? It's not really that foreign of a concept, actually; it happens on the Earth every day. This is actually a picture of a salamander. Salamanders have this amazing capacity to regenerate. You see here a little video. This is actually a limb injury in this salamander. And this is actually real photography, timed photography, showing how that limb regenerates in a period of days. You see the scar form. And that scar actually grows out a new limb.So, salamanders can do it. Why can't we? Why can't humans regenerate? Actually, we can regenerate. Your body has many organs and every single organ in your body has a cell population that's ready to take over at the time of injury. It happens every day. As you age, as you get older. Your bones regenerate every 10 years. Your skin regenerates every two weeks. So, your body is constantly regenerating. The challenge occurs when there is an injury. At the time of injury or disease, the body's first reaction is to seal itself off from the rest of the body. It basically wants to fight off infection, and seal itself, whether it's organs inside your body, or your skin, the first reaction is for scar tissue to move in, to seal itself off from the outside.So, how can we harness that power? One of the ways that we do that is actually by using smart biomaterials. How does this work? Well, on the left side here you see a urethra which was injured. This is the channel that connects the bladder to the outside of the body. And you see that it is injured. We basically found out that you can use these smart biomaterials that you can actually use as a bridge. If you build that bridge, and you close off from the outside environment, then you can create that bridge, and cells that regenerate in your body, can then cross that bridge, and take that path.That's exactly what you see here. It's actually a smart biomaterial that we used, to actually treat this patient. This was an injured urethra on the left side. We used that biomaterial in the middle. And then, six months later on the right-hand side you see this reengineered urethra. Turns out your body can regenerate, but only for small distances. The maximum efficient distance for regeneration is only about one centimeter. So, we can use these smart biomaterials but only for about one centimeter to bridge those gaps.So, we do regenerate, but for limited distances. What do we do now, if you have injury for larger organs? What do we do when we have injuries for structures which are much larger than one centimeter? Then we can start to use cells. The strategy here, is if a patient comes in to us with a diseased or injured organ, you can take a very small piece of tissue from that organ, less than half the size of a postage stamp, you can then tease that tissue apart, and look at its basic components, the patient's own cells, you take those cells out, grow and expand those cells outside the body in large quantities, and then we then use scaffold materials.To the naked eye they look like a piece of your blouse, or your shirt, but actually these materials are fairly complex and they are designed to degrade once inside the body. It disintegrates a few months later. It's acting only as a cell delivery vehicle. It's bringing the cells into the body. It's allowing the cells to regenerate new tissue, and once the tissue is regenerated the scaffold goes away.And that's what we did for this piece of muscle. This is actually showing a piece of muscle and how we go through the structures to actually engineer the muscle. We take the cells, we expand them, we place the cells on the scaffold, and we then place the scaffold back into the patient. But actually, before placing the scaffold into the patient, we actually exercise it. We want to make sure that we condition this muscle, so that it knows what to do once we put it into the patient. That's what you're seeing here. You're seeing this muscle bio-reactor actually exercising the muscle back and forth.Okay. These are flat structures that we see here, the muscle. What about other structures? This is actually an engineered blood vessel. Very similar to what we just did, but a little bit more complex. Here we take a scaffold, and we basically — scaffold can be like a piece of paper here. And we can then tubularize this scaffold. And what we do is we, to make a blood vessel, same strategy. A blood vessel is made up of two different cell types. We take muscle cells, we paste, or coat the outside with these muscle cells, very much like baking a layer cake, if you will.You place the muscle cells on the outside. You place the vascular blood vessel lining cells on the inside. You now have your fully seeded scaffold. You're going to place this in an oven-like device. It has the same conditions as a human body, 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen. You then exercise it, as what you saw on that tape.And on the right you actually see a carotid artery that was engineered. This is actually the artery that goes from your neck to your brain. And this is an X-ray showing you the patent, functional blood vessel. More complex structures such as blood vessels, urethras, which I showed you, they're definitely more complex because you're introducing two different cell types. But they are really acting mostly as conduits. You're allowing fluid or air to go through at steady states. They are not nearly as complex as hollow organs. Hollow organs have a much higher degree of complexity, because you're asking these organs to act on demand.So, the bladder is one such organ. Same strategy, we take a very small piece of the bladder, less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then tease the tissue apart into its two individual cell components, muscle, and these bladder specialized cells. We grow the cells outside the body in large quantities. It takes about four weeks to grow these cells from the organ. We then take a scaffold that we shape like a bladder. We coat the inside with these bladder lining cells. We coat the outside with these muscle cells. We place it back into this oven-like device. From the time you take that piece of tissue, six to eight weeks later you can put the organ right back into the patient.This actually shows the scaffold. The material is actually being coated with the cells. When we did the first clinical trial for these patients we actually created the scaffold specifically for each patient. We brought patients in, six to eight weeks prior to their scheduled surgery, did X-rays, and we then composed a scaffold specifically for that patient's size pelvic cavity. For the second phase of the trials we just had different sizes, small, medium, large and extra-large. (Laughter) It's true. And I'm sure everyone here wanted an extra-large. Right? (Laughter)So, bladders are definitely a little bit more complex than the other structures. But there are other hollow organs that have added complexity to it. This is actually a heart valve, which we engineered. And the way you engineer this heart valve is the same strategy. We take the scaffold, we seed it with cells, and you can now see here, the valve leaflets opening and closing. We exercise these prior to implantation. Same strategy.And then the most complex are the solid organs. For solid organs, they're more complex because you're using a lot more cells per centimeter. This is actually a simple solid organ like the ear. It's now being seeded with cartilage. That's the oven-like device; once it's coated it gets placed there. And then a few weeks later we can take out the cartilage scaffold.This is actually digits that we're engineering. These are being layered, one layer at a time, first the bone, we fill in the gaps with cartilage. We then start adding the muscle on top. And you start layering these solid structures. Again, fairly more complex organs, but by far, the most complex solid organs are actually the vascularized, highly vascularized, a lot of blood vessel supply, organs such as the heart, the liver, the kidneys. This is actually an example — several strategies to engineer solid organs.This is actually one of the strategies. We use a printer. And instead of using ink, we use — you just saw an inkjet cartridge — we just use cells. This is actually your typical desktop printer. It's actually printing this two chamber heart, one layer at a time. You see the heart coming out there. It takes about 40 minutes to print, and about four to six hours later you see the muscle cells contract. (Applause) This technology was developed by Tao Ju, who worked at our institute. And this is actually still, of course, experimental, not for use in patients.Another strategy that we have followed is actually to use decellularized organs. We actually take donor organs, organs that are discarded, and we then can use very mild detergents to take all the cell elements out of these organs. So, for example on the left panel, top panel, you see a liver. We actually take the donor liver, we use very mild detergents, and we, by using these mild detergents, we take all the cells out of the liver.Two weeks later, we basically can lift this organ up, it feels like a liver, we can hold it like a liver, it looks like a liver, but it has no cells. All we are left with is the skeleton, if you will, of the liver, all made up of collagen, a material that's in our bodies, that will not reject. We can use it from one patient to the next. We then take this vascular structure and we can prove that we retain the blood vessel supply.You can see, actually that's a fluoroscopy. We're actually injecting contrast into the organ. Now you can see it start. We're injecting the contrast into the organ into this decellularized liver. And you can see the vascular tree that remains intact. We then take the cells, the vascular cells, blood vessel cells, we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient's own cells. We perfuse the outside of the liver with the patient's own liver cells. And we can then create functional livers. And that's actually what you're seeing. This is still experimental. But we are able to actually reproduce the functionality of the liver structure, experimentally.For the kidney, as I talked to you about the first painting that you saw, the first slide I showed you, 90 percent of the patients on the transplant wait list are waiting for a kidney, 90 percent. So, another strategy we're following is actually to create wafers that we stack together, like an accordion, if you will. So, we stack these wafers together, using the kidney cells. And then you can see these miniature kidneys that we've engineered. They are actually making urine. Again, small structures, our challenge is how to make them larger, and that is something we're working on right now at the institute. One of the things that I wanted to summarize for you then is what is a strategy that we're going for in regenerative medicine.If at all possible, we really would like to use smart biomaterials that we can just take off the shelf and regenerate your organs. We are limited with distances right now, but our goal is actually to increase those distances over time. If we cannot use smart biomaterials, then we'd rather use your very own cells.Why? Because they will not reject. We can take cells from you, create the structure, put it right back into you, they will not reject. And if possible, we'd rather use the cells from your very specific organ. If you present with a diseased wind pipe we'd like to take cells from your windpipe. If you present with a diseased pancreas we'd like to take cells from that organ.Why? Because we'd rather take those cells which already know that those are the cell types you want. A windpipe cell already knows it's a windpipe cell. We don't need to teach it to become another cell type. So, we prefer organ-specific cells. And today we can obtain cells from most every organ in your body, except for several which we still need stem cells for, like heart, liver, nerve and pancreas. And for those we still need stem cells. If we cannot use stem cells from your body then we'd like to use donor stem cells. And we prefer cells that will not reject and will not form tumors.And we're working a lot with the stem cells that we published on two years ago, stem cells from the amniotic fluid, and the placenta, which have those properties. So, at this point, I do want to tell you that some of the major challenges we have. You know, I just showed you this presentation, everything looks so good, everything works. Actually no, these technologies really are not that easy. Some of the work you saw today was performed by over 700 researchers at our institute across a 20-year time span.So, these are very tough technologies. Once you get the formula right you can replicate it. But it takes a lot to get there. So, I always like to show this cartoon. This is how to stop a runaway stage. And there you see the stagecoach driver, and he goes, on the top panel, He goes A, B, C, D, E, F. He finally stops the runaway stage. And those are usually the basic scientists, The bottom is usually the surgeons. (Laughter) I'm a surgeon so that's not that funny. (Laughter)But actually method A is the correct approach. And what I mean by that is that anytime we've launched one of these technologies to the clinic, we've made absolutely sure that we do everything we can in the laboratory before we ever launch these technologies to patients. And when we launch these technologies to patients we want to make sure that we ask ourselves a very tough question. Are you ready to place this in your own loved one, your own child, your own family member, and then we proceed. Because our main goal, of course, is first, to do no harm.I'm going to show you now, a very short clip, It's a five second clip of a patient who received one of the engineered organs. We started implanting some of these structures over 14 years ago. So, we have patients now walking around with organs, engineered organs, for over 10 years, as well. I'm going to show a clip of one young lady. She had a spina bifida defect, a spinal cord abnormality. She did not have a normal bladder. This is a segment from CNN. We are just taking five seconds. This is a segment that Sanjay Gupta actually took care of.Video: Kaitlyn M: I'm happy. I was always afraid that I was going to have like, an accident or something. And now I can just go and go out with my friends, go do whatever I want.Anthony Atala: See, at the end of the day, the promise of regenerative medicine is a single promise. And that is really very simple, to make our patients better. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_organs_engineering_tissue
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"Can geographic information make you healthy? In 2001 I got hit by a train. My train was a heart attack. I found myself in a hospital in an intensive-care ward, recuperating from emergency surgery. And I suddenly realized something: that I was completely in the dark. I started asking my questions, ""Well, why me?"" ""Why now?"" ""Why here?"" ""Could my doctor have warned me?""So, what I want to do here in the few minutes I have with you is really talk about what is the formula for life and good health. Genetics, lifestyle and environment. That's going to sort of contain our risks, and if we manage those risks we're going to live a good life and a good healthy life. Well, I understand the genetics and lifestyle part. And you know why I understand that? Because my physicians constantly ask me questions about this.Have you ever had to fill out those long, legal-size forms in your doctor's office? I mean, if you're lucky enough you get to do it more than once, right? (Laughter) Do it over and over again. And they ask you questions about your lifestyle and your family history, your medication history, your surgical history, your allergy history ... did I forget any history?But this part of the equation I didn't really get, and I don't think my physicians really get this part of the equation. What does that mean, my environment? Well, it can mean a lot of things. This is my life. These are my life places. We all have these. While I'm talking I'd like you to also be thinking about: How many places have you lived?Just think about that, you know, wander through your life thinking about this. And you realize that you spend it in a variety of different places. You spend it at rest and you spend it at work. And if you're like me, you're in an airplane a good portion of your time traveling some place. So, it's not really simple when somebody asks you, ""Where do you live, where do you work, and where do you spend all your time? And where do you expose yourselves to risks that maybe perhaps you don't even see?"" Well, when I have done this on myself, I always come to the conclusion that I spend about 75 percent of my time relatively in a small number of places. And I don't wander far from that place for a majority of my time, even though I'm an extensive global trekker.Now, I'm going to take you on a little journey here. I started off in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I don't know if anybody might hail from northeastern Pennsylvania, but this is where I spent my first 19 years with my little young lungs. You know, breathing high concentrations here of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and methane gas, in unequal quantities — 19 years of this. And if you've been in that part of the country, this is what those piles of burning, smoldering coal waste look like.So then I decided to leave that part of the world, and I was going to go to the mid-west. OK, so I ended up in Louisville, Kentucky. Well, I decided to be neighbors to a place called Rubbertown. They manufacture plastics. They use large quantities chloroprene and benzene. Okay, I spent 25 years, in my middle-age lungs now, breathing various concentrations of that. And on a clear day it always looked like this, so you never saw it. It was insidious and it was really happening.Then I decided I had to get really smart, I would take this job in the West Coast. And I moved to Redlands California. Very nice, and there my older, senior lungs, as I like to call them, I filled with particulate matter, carbon dioxide and very high doses of ozone. Okay? Almost like the highest in the nation. Alright, this is what it looks like on a good day. If you've been there, you know what I'm talking about.So, what's wrong with this picture? Well, the picture is, there is a huge gap here. The one thing that never happens in my doctor's office: They never ask me about my place history. No doctor, can I remember, ever asking me, ""Where have you lived?"" They haven't asked me what kind of the quality of the drinking water that I put in my mouth or the food that I ingest into my stomach. They really don't do that. It's missing. Look at the kind of data that's available. This data's from all over the world — countries spend billions of dollars investing in this kind of research.Now, I've circled the places where I've been. Well, by design, if I wanted to have a heart attack I'd been in the right places. Right? So, how many people are in the white? How many people in the room have spent the majority of their life in the white space? Anybody? Boy you're lucky. How many have spent it in the red places? Oh, not so lucky. There are thousands of these kinds of maps that are displayed in atlases all over the world. They give us some sense of what's going to be our train wreck. But none of that's in my medical record. And it's not in yours either.So, here's my friend Paul. He's a colleague. He allowed his cell phone to be tracked every two hours, 24/7, 365 days out of the year for the last two years, everywhere he went. And you can see he's been to a few places around the United States. And this is where he has spent most of his time. If you really studied that you might have some clues as to what Paul likes to do. Anybody got any clues? Ski. Right. We can zoom in here, and we suddenly see that now we see where Paul has really spent a majority of his time. And all of those black dots are all of the toxic release inventories that are monitored by the EPA.Did you know that data existed? For every community in the United States, you could have your own personalized map of that. So, our cell phones can now build a place history. This is how Paul did it. He did it with his iPhone. This might be what we end up with.This is what the physician would have in front of him and her when we enter that exam room instead of just the pink slip that said I paid at the counter. Right? This could be my little assessment. And he looks at that and he says, ""Whoa Bill, I suggest that maybe you not decide, just because you're out here in beautiful California, and it's warm every day, that you get out and run at six o'clock at night. I'd suggest that that's a bad idea Bill, because of this report.""What I'd like to leave you for are two prescriptions. Okay, number one is, we must teach physicians about the value of geographical information. It's called geomedicine. There are about a half a dozen programs in the world right now that are focused on this. And they're in the early stages of development. These programs need to be supported, and we need to teach our future doctors of the world the importance of some of the information I've shared here with you today.The second thing we need to do is while we're spending billions and billions of dollars all over the world building an electronic health record, we make sure we put a place history inside that medical record. It not only will be important for the physician; it will be important for the researchers that now will have huge samples to draw upon. But it will also be useful for us. I could have made the decision, if I had this information, not to move to the ozone capital of the United States, couldn't I? I could make that decision. Or I could negotiate with my employer to make that decision in the best interest of myself and my company.With that, I would like to just say that Jack Lord said this almost 10 years ago. Just look at that for a minute. That was what the conclusion of the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare was about, was saying that we can explain the geographic variations that occur in disease, in illness, in wellness, and how our healthcare system actually operates. That was what he was talking about on that quote. And I would say he got it right almost a decade ago. So, I'd very much like to see us begin to really seize this as an opportunity to get this into our medical records. So with that, I'll leave you that in my particular view of view of health: Geography always matters. And I believe that geographic information can make both you and me very healthy. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_davenhall_your_health_depends_on_where_you_live
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"I'm going to speak to you today about architectural agency. What I mean by that is that it's time for architecture to do things again, not just represent things. This is a construction helmet that I received two years ago at the groundbreaking of the largest project I, and my firm, have ever been involved in. I was thrilled to get it. I was thrilled to be the only person standing on the stage with a shiny silver helmet. I thought it represented the importance of the architect.I stayed thrilled until I got home, threw the helmet onto my bed, fell down onto my bed and realized inside there was an inscription. (Laughter) Now, I think that this is a great metaphor for the state of architecture and architects today. We are for decorative purposes only. (Laughter)Now, who do we have to blame? We can only blame ourselves. Over the last 50 years the design and construction industry has gotten much more complex and has gotten much more litigious. And we architects are cowards. So, as we have faced liability, we have stepped back and back, and unfortunately, where there is liability, guess what there is: power. So, eventually we have found ourselves in a totally marginalized position, way over here.Now, what did we do? We're cowards, but we're smart cowards. And so we redefined this marginalized position as the place of architecture. And we announced, ""Hey, architecture, it's over here, in this autonomous language we're going to seed control of processes."" And we were going to do something that was horrible for the profession. We actually created an artificial schism between creation and execution, as if you could actually create without knowing how to execute and as if you could actually execute without knowing how to create.Now, something else happened. And that's when we began to sell the world that architecture was created by individuals creating genius sketches. And that the incredible amount of effort to deliver those sketches for years and years and years is not only something to be derided, but we would merely write it off as merely execution. Now I'd argue that that is as absurd as stating that 30 minutes of copulation is the creative act, and nine months of gestation, and, God forbid, 24 hours of child labor is merely execution.So, what do we architects need to do? We need to stitch back creation and execution. And we need to start authoring processes again instead of authoring objects. Now, if we do this, I believe we can go back 50 years and start reinjecting agency, social engineering, back into architecture. Now, there are all kinds of things that we architects need to learn how to do, like managing contracts, learning how to write contracts, understanding procurement processes, understanding the time value of money and cost estimation.But I'm going to reduce this to the beginning of the process, into three very pedantic statements. The first is: Take core positions with your client. I know it's shocking, right, that architecture would actually say that.The second position is: Actually take positions. Take joint positions with your client. This is the moment in which you as the architect and your client can begin to inject vision and agency. But it has to be done together. And then only after this is done are you allowed to do this, begin to put forward architectural manifestations that manifest those positions. And both owner and architect alike are empowered to critique those manifestations based on the positions that you've taken.Now, I believe that one really amazing thing will happen if you do this. I'd like to call it the lost art of productively losing control. You do not know what the end result is. But I promise you, with enough brain power and enough passion and enough commitment, you will arrive at conclusions that will transcend convention, and will simply be something that you could not have initially or individually conceived of.Alright, now I'm going to reduce all of this to a series of simple dumb sketches. This is the modus operandi that we have today. We roll 120-foot Spartan, i.e. our vision, up to our clients' gates of Troy. And we don't understand why they won't let us in. Right? Well, how about instead of doing that, we roll up to the gates something they want.Now this is a little bit of a dangerous metaphor, because of course we all know that inside of the Trojan Horse were a bunch of people with spears. So, we can change the metaphor. Let's call the Trojan Horse the vessel by which you get through the gate, get through the constraints of a project. At which point, you and your client have the ability to start considering what you're going to put inside that vessel, the agency, the vision. And if you do that, you do that responsibly, I believe that instead of delivering Spartans, you can deliver maidens.And if I could summarize that all up into one single sketch it would be this. If we are so good at our craft shouldn't we be able to conceive of an architectural manifestation that slides seamlessly through the project's and the client's constraints? Now, with that in mind, I'm going to show a project that's very dear to many people in this room— well, maybe not dear, but certainly close to many people in this room. And that's a project that is just about to open next week, the new home for the Dallas Theater Center, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre.Now, I'm going to present it on the same terms: issue, position and architectural manifestation. Now, the first issue that we faced was that the Dallas Theater Center had a notoriety that was beyond what you would expect of some place outside of the triumvirate of New York, Chicago and Seattle. And this had to do with the ambitions of the leadership. But it also had to do with something rather unusual, and that was this horrible little building that they'd been performing in.Why was this horrible little building so important to their renown and their innovation? Because they could do whatever they wanted to to this building. When you're on Broadway, you cannot tear the proscenium down. This building, when an artistic director wanted to do a ""Cherry Orchard"" and wanted people and wanted people to come out of a well on the stage, they brought a backhoe in, and they simply dug the hole. Well, that's exciting. And you can start to get the best artistic directors, scenic designers and actors from around the country to come to perform here because you can do things you can't do elsewhere.So, the first position we took was, ""Hey, we as architects had better not show up and do a pristine building that doesn't engender the same freedoms that this old dilapidated shed provided the company."" The second issue is a nuance of the first. And that's that the company and the building was multiform. That meant that they were able to perform, as long as they had labor they were able to go between proscenium, thrust, flat floor, arena, traverse, you name it. All they needed was labor.Well, something happened. In fact something happened to all institutions around the world. It started to become hard to raise operational costs, operational budgets. So, they stopped having inexpensive labor. And eventually they had to freeze their organization into something called a bastardized thruscenium.So, the second position we took is that the freedoms that we provided, the ability to move between stage configurations, had better be able to be done without relying on operational costs. Alright? Affordably. The architectural manifestation was frankly just dumb. It was to take all the things that are known as front of house and back of house and redefine them as above house and below house.At first blush you think, ""Hey it's crazy, what could you possibly gain?"" We created what we like to call superfly. (Laughter) Now, superfly, the concept is you take all the freedoms you normally associate with the flytower, and you smear them across flytower and auditorium. Suddenly the artistic director can move between different stage and audience configurations. And because that flytower has the ability to pick up all the pristine elements, suddenly the rest of the environment can be provisional. And you can drill, cut, nail, screw paint and replace, with a minimum of cost.But there was a third advantage that we got by doing this move that was unexpected. And that was that it freed up the perimeter of the auditorium in a most unusual way. And that provided the artistic director suddenly the ability to define suspension of disbelief. So, the building affords artistic directors the freedom to conceive of almost any kind of activity underneath this floating object. But also to challenge the notion of suspension of disbelief such that in the last act of Macbeth, if he or she wants you to associate the parable that you're seeing with Dallas, with your real life, he or she can do so.Now, in order to do this we and the clients had to do something fairly remarkable. In fact it really was the clients who had to do it. They had to make a decision, based on the positions we took to redefine the budget being from two thirds capital-A architecture and one-third infrastructure, to actually the inverse, two-thirds infrastructure and one-third capital-A architecture. That's a lot for a client to commit to before you actually see the fruition of the concept. But based on the positions, they took the educated leap of faith to do so. And effectively we created what we like to call a theater machine.Now, that theater machine has ability to move between a whole series of configurations at the push of a button and a few stagehands in a short amount of time. But it also has the potential to not only provide multiform but multi-processional sequences. Meaning: The artistic director doesn't necessarily need to go through our lobby.One of the things that we learned when we visited various theaters is they hate us architects, because they say the first thing they have to do, the first five minutes of any show, is they have to get our architecture out of the mind of their patron. Well now there are potentials of this building to allow the artistic director to actually move into the building without using our architecture. So, in fact, there is the building, there is what we call the draw. You're going down into our lobby, go through the lobby with our own little dangly bits, whether you like them or not, up through the stair that leads you into the auditorium.But there is also the potential to allow people to move directly from the outside, in this case suggesting kind of Wagnerian entrance, into the interior of the auditorium. And here is the fruition of that in actuality. These are the two large pivoting doors that allow people to move directly from the outside, in or from the inside, out, performers or audience alike.Now, imagine what that could be. I have to say honestly this is not something yet the building can do because it takes too long. But imagine the freedoms if you could take this further, that in fact you could consider a Wagnerian entry, a first act in thrust, an intermission in Greek, a second act in arena, and you leave through our lobby with dangly bits. Now that, I would say, is architecture performing. It is taking the hand of the architect to actually remove the hand of the architect in favor of the hand of the artistic director.I'll go through the three basic configurations. This is the flat floor configuration. You notice that there is no proscenium, the balconies have been raised up, there are no seats, the floor in the auditorium is flat.The first configuration is easy to understand. The balconies come down, you see that the orchestra begins to have a rake that's frontal towards the end stage, and the seats come in.The third configuration is a little harder to understand. Here you see that the balconies actually have to move out of the way in order to bring a thrust into the space. And some of the seats need to actually change their direction, and change their rake, to allow that to happen.I'll do it again so you can see it. There you see it's the side balconies for the proscenium. And there it is in the thrust configuration.In order to do that, again, we needed a client who was willing to take educational risks. And they told us one important thing: ""You shall not beta-test."" Meaning, nothing that we do can we be the first ones to do it. But they were willing for us to apply technologies from other areas that already had failsafe mechanisms to this building.And the solution in terms of the balconies was to use something that we all know as a scoreboard lift. Now, if you were to take a scoreboard and drop it on dirt and whiskey, that would be bad. If you were not able to take the scoreboard out of the arena and be able to do the Ice Capades the next night, that would also be bad. And so this technology already had all the failsafe mechanisms and allowed the theater and our client to actually do this with confidence that they would be able to change over their configurations at will.The second technology that we applied was actually using things that you know from the stage side of an opera house. In this case what we're doing is we're taking the orchestra floor, lifting it up, spinning it, changing the rake, taking it back to flat floor, changing the rake again. In essence, you can begin to define rakes and viewing angles of people in the orchestra seating, at will.Here you see the chairs being spun around to go from proscenium or end stage to thrust configuration. The proscenium, also. As far as we know this is the first building in the world in which the proscenium can entirely fly out of the space. Here you see the various acoustic baffles as well as the flying mechanisms and catwalks over the auditorium. And ultimately, up in the flytower, the scene sets that allow the transformations to occur.As I said, all that was in service of creating a flexible yet affordable configuration. But we got this other benefit, and that was the ability of the perimeter to suddenly engage Dallas on the outside. Here you see the building in its current state with blinds closed. This is a trompe l'oeil. Actually this is not a curtain. These are vinyl blinds that are integrated into the windows themselves, again with failsafe mechanisms that can be lifted such that you can completely demystify, if you chose, the operations of the theater going on behind, rehearsals and so forth. But you also have the ability to allow the audience to see Dallas, to perform with Dallas as the backdrop of your performance.Now, if I'll take you through — this is an early concept sketch — take you through kind of a mixture of all these things together. Effectively you would have something like this. You would be allowed to bring objects or performers into the performing chamber: ""Aida,"" their elephants, you can bring the elephants in. You would be able to expose the auditorium to Dallas or vice versa, Dallas to the auditorium. You'd be able to open portions in order to change the procession, allow people to come in and out for an intermission, or to enter for the beginning or the end of a performance.As I said, all the balconies can move, but they can also be disappeared completely. The proscenium can fly. You can bring large objects into the chamber itself. But most convincingly when we had to confront the idea of changing costs from architecture to infrastructure, is something that is represented by this. And again, this is not all the flexibilities of the building that is actually built, but at least suggests the ideas.This building has the ability, in short order, to go back to a flat floor organization such that they can rent it out. Now, if there is anyone here from American Airlines, please consider doing your Christmas party here. (Laughter) That allows the company to raise operational budgets without having to compete with other venues with much larger auditoriums. That's an enormous benefit.So, the theater company has the ability to do totally hermetic, light-controlled, sound-controlled, great acoustics, great intimacy Shakespeare, but can also do Beckett with the skyline of Dallas sitting behind it. Here it is in a flat floor configuration. The theater has been going through its kind of paces.Here it is in an end stage configuration. It's actually beautiful. There was a rock band. We stood outside trying to see if the acoustics worked, and you could see the guys doing this but you couldn't hear them. It was very unusual. Here it is in a thrust configuration. And last but not least, you see this already has the ability to create events in order to generate operational budgets to overcome the building in fact performing to allow the company to overcome their biggest problem.I'm going to show you a brief time lapse. As I said, this can be done with only two people, and with a minimum amount of time. This is the first time that actually the changeover was done and so there is literally thousands of people because everyone was excited and wanted to be a part of it. So, in a way try to disregard all the thousands of ants running around. And think of it being done with just a few people. Again, just a couple people are required. (Laughter) I promise. Et voila. (Applause)So, just in conclusion, a few shots. This is the AT&T Performing Arts Center's Dee and Charles Wyly Theater. There it is at night. And last but not least the entire AT&T Performing Arts Center. You can see the Winspear Opera House on the right and the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater on the left.And to remind you that here is an example in which architecture actually did something. But we got to that conclusion without understanding where we were going, what we knew were a series of issues that the company and the client was confronted with. And we took positions with them, and it was through those positions that we began to take architectural manifestations and we arrived at a conclusion that none of us, really none of us could ever have conceived of initially or individually. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_building_a_theater_that_remakes_itself
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"Namaste. Good morning. I'm very happy to be here in India. And I've been thinking a lot about what I have learned over these last particularly 11 years with V-Day and ""The Vagina Monologues,"" traveling the world, essentially meeting with women and girls across the planet to stop violence against women.What I want to talk about today is this particular cell, or grouping of cells, that is in each and every one of us. And I want to call it the girl cell. And it's in men as well as in women. I want you to imagine that this particular grouping of cells is central to the evolution of our species and the continuation of the human race.And I want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell, the oppression of these cells, the reinterpretation of these cells, the undermining of these cells, getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing, eradicating, destroying, reducing these cells, basically began the process of killing off the girl cell, which was, by the way, patriarchy.I want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective consciousness. And it is essential to balance, to wisdom and to actually the future of all of us. And then I want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion, and it's empathy, and it's passion itself, and it's vulnerability, and it's openness, and it's intensity, and it's association, and it's relationship, and it is intuitive.And then let's think how compassion informs wisdom, and that vulnerability is our greatest strength, and that emotions have inherent logic, which lead to radical, appropriate, saving action. And then let's remember that we've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be, that compassion clouds your thinking, that it gets in the way, that vulnerability is weakness, that emotions are not to be trusted, and you're not supposed to take things personally, which is one of my favorites.I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. How do we bring up boys? What does it mean to be a boy? To be a boy really means not to be a girl. To be a man means not to be a girl. To be a woman means not to be a girl. To be strong means not to be a girl. To be a leader means not to be a girl. I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we've had to train everyone not to be that. (Laughter)And I'd also like to say that the irony of course, is that denying girl, suppressing girl, suppressing emotion, refusing feeling has lead thus here. Where we have now come to live in a world where the most extreme forms of violence, the most horrific poverty, genocide, mass rapes, the destruction of the Earth, is completely out of control. And because we have suppressed our girl cells and suppressed our girl-ship, we do not feel what is going on.So, we are not being charged with the adequate response to what is happening. I want to talk a little bit about the Democratic Republic of Congo. For me, it was the turning point of my life. I have spent a lot of time there in the last three years. I feel up to that point I had seen a lot in the world, a lot of violence.I essentially lived in the rape mines of the world for the last 12 years. But the Democratic Republic of Congo really was the turning point in my soul. I went and I spent time in a place called Bukavu in a hospital called the Panzi Hospital, with a doctor who was as close to a saint as any person I've ever met. His name is Dr. Denis Mukwege. In the Congo, for those of you who don't know, there has been a war raging for the last 12 years, a war that has killed nearly six million people. It is estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 women have been raped there.When I spent my first weeks at Panzi hospital I sat with women who sat and lined up every day to tell me their stories. Their stories were so horrific, and so mind-blowing and so on the other side of human existence, that to be perfectly honest with you, I was shattered. And I will tell you that what happened is through that shattering, listening to the stories of eight-year-old girls who had their insides eviscerated, who had guns and bayonets and things shoved inside them so they had holes, literally, inside them where their pee and poop came out of them.Listening to the story of 80-year-old women who were tied to chains and circled, and where groups of men would come and rape them periodically, all in the name of economic exploitation to steal the minerals so the West can have it and profit from them. My mind was so shattered.But what happened for me is that that shattering actually emboldened me in a way I have never been emboldened. That shattering, that opening of my girl cell, that kind of massive breakthrough of my heart allowed me to become more courageous, and braver, and actually more clever than I had been in the past in my life.I want to say that I think the powers that be know that empire-building is actually — that feelings get in the way of empire-building. Feelings get in the way of the mass acquisition of the Earth, and excavating the Earth, and destroying things. I remember, for example, when my father, who was very, very violent, used to beat me. And he would actually say, while he was beating me, ""Don't you cry. Don't you dare cry."" Because my crying somehow exposed his brutality to him. And even in the moment he didn't want to be reminded of what he was doing.I know that we have systematically annihilated the girl cell. And I want to say we've annihilated it in men as well as in women. And I think in some ways we've been much harsher to men in the annihilation of their girl cell. (Applause) I see how boys have been brought up, and I see this across the planet: to be tough, to be hardened, to distance themselves from their tenderness, to not cry. I actually realized once in Kosovo, when I watched a man break down, that bullets are actually hardened tears, that when we don't allow men to have their girl self and have their vulnerability, and have their compassion, and have their hearts, that they become hardened and hurtful and violent.And I think we have taught men to be secure when they are insecure, to pretend they know things when they don't know things, or why would we be where we are? To pretend they're not a mess when they are a mess. And I will tell you a very funny story. On my way here on the airplane, I was walking up and down the aisle of the plane. And all these men, literally at least 10 men, were in their little seats watching chick flicks. And they were all alone, and I thought, ""This is the secret life of men."" (Laughter)I've traveled, as I said, to many, many countries, and I've seen, if we do what we do to the girl inside us then obviously it's horrific to think what we do to girls in the world. And we heard from Sunitha yesterday, and Kavita about what we do to girls. But I just want to say that I've met girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns, who are literally being treated like ashtrays. I've seen girls be treated like garbage cans. I've seen girls who were beaten by their mothers and brothers and fathers and uncles. I've seen girls starving themselves to death in America in institutions to look like some idealized version of themselves.I've seen that we cut girls and we control them and we keep them illiterate, or we make them feel bad about being too smart. We silence them. We make them feel guilty for being smart. We get them to behave, to tone it down, not to be too intense. We sell them, we kill them as embryos, we enslave them, we rape them. We are so accustomed to robbing girls of the subject of being the subjects of their lives that we have now actually objectified them and turned them into commodities.The selling of girls is rampant across the planet. And in many places they are worth less than goats and cows. But I also want to talk about the fact that if one in eight people on the planet are girls between the ages of 10 to 24, they are they key, really, in the developing world, as well as in the whole world, to the future of humanity. And if girls are in trouble because they face systematic disadvantages that keep them where society wants them to be, including lack of access to healthcare, education, healthy foods, labor force participation. The burden of all the household tasks usually falls on girls and younger siblings, which ensures that they will never overcome these barriers.The state of girls, the condition of girls, will, in my belief — and that's the girl inside us and the girl in the world — determine whether the species survives. And what I want to suggest is that, having talked to girls, because I just finished a new book called ""I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World,"" I've been talking to girls for five years, and one of the things that I've seen is true everywhere is that the verb that's been enforced on girl is the verb ""to please."" Girls are trained to please. I want to change the verb. I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be ""educate,"" or ""activate,"" or ""engage,"" or ""confront,"" or ""defy,"" or ""create."" If we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them.And I have to now share a few stories of girls I've seen across the planet who have engaged their girl, who have taken on their girl in spite of all the circumstances around them. I know a 14-year-old girl in the Netherlands, for example, who is demanding that she take a boat and go around the entire world by herself.There is a teenage girl who just recently went out and knew that she needed 56 stars tattooed on the right side of her face.There is a girl, Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived for a year in a tree because she wanted to protect the wild oaks.There is a girl who I met 14 years ago in Afghanistan who I have adopted as my daughter because her mother was killed. Her mother was a revolutionary. And this girl, when she was 17 years old, wore a burqa in Afghanistan, and went into the stadiums and documented the atrocities that were going on towards women, underneath her burqa, with a video. And that video became the video that went out all over the world after 9/11 to show what was going on in Afghanistan.I want to talk about Rachel Corrie who was in her teens when she stood in front of an Israeli tank to say, ""End the occupation."" And she knew she risked death and she was literally gunned down and rolled over by that tank.And I want to talk about a girl that I just met recently in Bukavu, who was impregnated by her rapist. And she was holding her baby. And I asked her if she loved her baby. And she looked into her baby's eyes and she said, ""Of course I love my baby. How could I not love my baby? It's my baby and it's full of love.""The capacity for girls to overcome situations and to move on levels, to me, is mind-blowing. There is a girl named Dorcas, and I just met her in Kenya. Dorcas is 15 years old, and she was trained in self-defense. A few months ago she was picked up on the street by three older men. They kidnapped her, they put her in a car. And through her self-defense, she grabbed their Adam's apples, she punched them in the eyes and she got herself free and out of the car.In Kenya, in August, I went to visit one of the V-Day safe houses for girls, a house we opened seven years ago with an amazing woman named Agnes Pareyio. Agnes was a woman who was cut when she was a little girl, she was female genitally mutilated. And she made a decision as many women do across this planet, that what was done to her would not be enforced and done to other women and girls.So, for years Agnes walked through the Rift valley. She taught girls what a healthy vagina looked like, and what a mutilated vagina looked like. And in that time she saved many girls. And when we met her we asked her what we could do for her, and she said, ""Well, if you got me a Jeep I could get around a lot faster."" So, we got her a Jeep. And then she saved 4,500 girls.And then we asked her, ""Okay, what else do you need?"" And she said, ""Well, now, I need a house."" So, seven years ago Agnes built the first V-Day safe house in Narok, Kenya, in the Masai land. And it was a house where girls could run away, they could save their clitoris, they wouldn't be cut, they could go to school. And in the years that Agnes has had the house, she has changed the situation there. She has literally become deputy mayor. She's changed the rules. The whole community has bought in to what she's doing.When we were there she was doing a ritual where she reconciles girls, who have run away, with their families. And there was a young girl named Jaclyn. Jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her Masai family and there's a drought in Kenya. So cows are dying, and cows are the most valued possession. And Jaclyn overheard her father talking to an old man about how he was about to sell her for the cows. And she knew that meant she would be cut. She knew that meant she wouldn't go to school. She knew that meant she wouldn't have a future. She knew she would have to marry that old man, and she was 14.So, one afternoon, she'd heard about the safe house, Jaclyn left her father's house and she walked for two days, two days through Masai land. She slept with the hyenas. She hid at night. She imagined her father killing her on one hand, and Mama Agnes greeting her, with the hope that she would greet her when she got to the house. And when she got to the house she was greeted. Agnes took her in, and Agnes loved her, and Agnes supported her for the year. She went to school and she found her voice, and she found her identity, and she found her heart.Then, her time was ready when she had to go back to talk to her father about the reconciliation, after a year. I had the privilege of being in the hut when she was reunited with her father and reconciled. In that hut, we walked in, and her father and his four wives were sitting there, and her sisters who had just returned because they had all fled when she had fled, and her primary mother, who had been beaten in standing up for her with the elders. When her father saw her and saw who she had become, in her full girl self, he threw his arms around her and broke down crying. He said, ""You are beautiful. You have grown into a gorgeous woman. We will not cut you. And I give you my word, here and now, that we will not cut your sisters either.""And what she said to him was, ""You were willing to sell me for four cows, and a calf and some blankets. But I promise you, now that I will be educated I will always take care of you, and I will come back and I will build you a house. And I will be in your corner for the rest of your life.""For me, that is the power of girls. And that is the power of transformation. I want to close today with a new piece from my book. And I want to do it tonight for the girl in everybody here. And I want to do it for Sunitha. And I want to do it for the girls that Sunitha talked about yesterday, the girls who survive, the girls who can become somebody else. But I really want to do it for each and every person here, to value the girl in us, to value the part that cries, to value the part that's emotional, to value the part that's vulnerable, to understand that's where the future lies.This is called ""I'm An Emotional Creature."" And it happened because I met a girl in Watts, L.A. I was asking girls if they like being a girl, and all the girls were like, ""No, I hate it. I can't stand it. It's all bad. My brothers get everything."" And this girl just sat up and went, ""I love being a girl. I'm an emotional creature!"" (Laughter) This is for her:I love being a girl. I can feel what you're feeling as you're feeling inside the feeling before. I am an emotional creature. Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas. They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears. Oh, I know when your girlfriend's really pissed off, even though she appears to give you what you want. I know when a storm is coming. I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air. I can tell you he won't call back. It's a vibe I share.I am an emotional creature. I love that I do not take things lightly. Everything is intense to me, the way I walk in the street, the way my momma wakes me up, the way it's unbearable when I lose, the way I hear bad news.I am an emotional creature. I am connected to everything and everyone. I was born like that. Don't you say all negative that it's only only a teenage thing, or it's only because I'm a girl. These feelings make me better. They make me present. They make me ready. They make me strong.I am an emotional creature. There is a particular way of knowing. It's like the older women somehow forgot. I rejoice that it's still in my body. Oh, I know when the coconut's about to fall. I know we have pushed the Earth too far. I know my father isn't coming back, and that no one's prepared for the fire. I know that lipstick means more than show, and boys are super insecure, and so-called terrorists are made, not born. I know that one kiss could take away all my decision-making ability. (Laughter) And you know what? Sometimes it should. This is not extreme. It's a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open.Don't tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable. I am an emotional creature. It's how the earth got made, how the wind continues to pollinate. You don't tell the Atlantic Ocean to behave. I am an emotional creature. Why would you want to shut me down or turn me off? I am your remaining memory. I can take you back. Nothing's been diluted. Nothing's leaked out. I love, hear me, I love that I can feel the feelings inside you, even if they stop my life, even if they break my heart, even if they take me off track, they make me responsible.I am an emotional, I am an emotional, incondotional, devotional creature. And I love, hear me, I love, love, love being a girl. Can you say it with me? I love, I love, love, love being a girl! Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_embrace_your_inner_girl
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"Please close your eyes, and open your hands. Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe your wallet. Now open your eyes. What about a life?What you see here is a premature baby. He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive because he can't regulate his own body temperature. This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to stay warm. Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world. Four million of these babies die annually.But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. The reason is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. Imagine: Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm.That is the primary function of an incubator. But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars. So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. As a result, parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies' bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here — methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. I've seen this firsthand over and over again.On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby, Rani. She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator. But that hospital was over four hours away, and Sevitha didn't have the means to get there, so her baby died.Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use, given that the majority of births still take place in the home. We needed something that was portable, something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs.So, this is what we came up with. What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby. You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. There's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily. But the magic is in this pouch of wax. This is a phase-change material. It's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. So, you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby.Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. We plan to launch this product in India in 2010, and the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator.Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth. This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact.In designing this we followed a few basic principles. We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people like Sevitha. We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. In doing this, I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses. And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives
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"So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says,""Excuse me, what is the name of this block?""And you say, ""I'm sorry, well, this is Oak Street, that's Elm Street. This is 26th, that's 27th.""He says, ""OK, but what is the name of that block?""You say, ""Well, blocks don't have names. Streets have names; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets.""He leaves, a little confused and disappointed.So, now imagine you're standing on a street, anywhere in Japan, you turn to a person next to you and say,""Excuse me, what is the name of this street?""They say, ""Oh, well that's Block 17 and this is Block 16.""And you say, ""OK, but what is the name of this street?""And they say, ""Well, streets don't have names. Blocks have names. Just look at Google Maps here. There's Block 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. All of these blocks have names, and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks.And you say then, ""OK, then how do you know your home address?""He said, ""Well, easy, this is District Eight. There's Block 17, house number one.""You say, ""OK, but walking around the neighborhood, I noticed that the house numbers don't go in order.""He says, ""Of course they do. They go in the order in which they were built. The first house ever built on a block is house number one. The second house ever built is house number two. Third is house number three. It's easy. It's obvious.""So, I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn't even know we had, and realize that the opposite of them may also be true.So, for example, there are doctors in China who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy. So, any month you are healthy you pay them, and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job. They get rich when you're healthy, not sick. (Applause)In most music, we think of the ""one"" as the downbeat, the beginning of the musical phrase: one, two, three, four. But in West African music, the ""one"" is thought of as the end of the phrase, like the period at the end of a sentence. So, you can hear it not just in the phrasing, but the way they count off their music: two, three, four, one.And this map is also accurate. (Laughter)There's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite is also true. So, let's never forget, whether at TED, or anywhere else, that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true. Domo arigato gozaimashita.","https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different
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"As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in. And these are unfortunate moments, because you go to sleep that night dumber than when you woke up. So, that's really the goal of my talk, is to A, communicate that moment to you and B, have you leave this session a little dumber than when you entered. So, I hope I can really accomplish that.So, this incident that I'm going to describe really began with some diarrhea. Now, we've known for a long time the cause of diarrhea. That's why there's a glass of water up there. For us, it's a problem, the people in this room. For babies, it's deadly. They lack nutrients, and diarrhea dehydrates them. And so, as a result, there is a lot of death, a lot of death. In India in 1960, there was a 24 percent child mortality rate, lots of people didn't make it. This is incredibly unfortunate. One of the big reasons this happened was because of diarrhea. Now, there was a big effort to solve this problem, and there was actually a big solution. This solution has been called, by some, ""potentially the most important medical advance this century.""Now, the solution turned out to be simple. And what it was was oral rehydration salts. Many of you have probably used this. It's brilliant. It's a way to get sodium and glucose together so that when you add it to water the child is able to absorb it even during situations of diarrhea. Remarkable impact on mortality. Massive solution to the problem. Flash forward: 1960, 24 percent child mortality has dropped to 6.5 percent today.Still a big number, but a big drop. It looks like the technological problem is solved. But if you look, even today there are about 400,000 diarrhea-related deaths in India alone. What's going on here? Well the easy answer is, we just haven't gotten those salts to those people. That's actually not true. If you look in areas where these salts are completely available, the price is low or zero, these deaths still continue abated. Maybe there's a biological answer. Maybe these are the deaths that simple rehydration alone doesn't solve. That's not true either. Many of these deaths were completely preventable, and this what I want to think of as the disconcerting thing, what I want to call ""the last mile"" problem.See, we spent a lot of energy, in many domains — technological, scientific, hard work, creativity, human ingenuity — to crack important social problems with technology solutions. That's been the discoveries of the last 2,000 years, that's mankind moving forward. But in this case we cracked it, but a big part of the problem still remains. Nine hundred and ninety-nine miles went well, the last mile's proving incredibly stubborn.Now, that's for oral rehydration therapy. Maybe this is something unique about diarrhea. Well, it turns out — and this is where things get really disconcerting — it's not unique to diarrhea. It's not even unique to poor people in India. Here's an example from a variety of contexts. I've put a bunch of examples up here.I'll start with insulin, diabetes medication in the U.S. OK, the American population. On Medicaid — if you're fairly poor you get Medicaid, or if you have health insurance — insulin is pretty straightforward. You get it, either in pill form or you get it as an injection; you have to take it every day to maintain your blood sugar levels. Massive technological advance: took an incredibly deadly disease, made it solvable. Adherence rates. How many people are taking their insulin every day? About on average, a typical person is taking it 75 percent of the time. As a result, 25,000 people a year go blind, hundreds of thousands lose limbs, every year, for something that's solvable.Here I have a bunch of other examples, all suffer from the last mile problem. It's not just medicine. Here's another example from technology: agriculture. We think there's a food problem, so we create new seeds. We think there's an income problem, so we create new ways of farming that increase income. Well, look at some old ways, some ways that we'd already cracked. Intercropping. Intercropping really increases income. Sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side. Some people are doing that, many are not. What's going on? This is the last mile. The last mile is, everywhere, problematic.Alright, what's the problem? The problem is this little three-pound machine that's behind your eyes and between your ears. This machine is really strange, and one of the consequences is that people are weird. They do lots of inconsistent things. (Applause) They do lots of inconsistent things. And the inconsistencies create, fundamentally, this last mile problem. See, when we were dealing with our biology, bacteria, the genes, the things inside here, the blood? That's complex, but it's manageable. When we're dealing with people like this? The mind is more complex. That's not as manageable, and that's what we're struggling with.Let me go back to diarrhea for a second. Here's a question that was asked in the National Sample Survey, which is a survey asked of many Indian women: ""Your child has diarrhea. Should you increase, maintain or decrease the number of fluids?"" Just so you don't embarrass yourselves, I'll give you the right answer: It's increase. Now, diarrhea's interesting because it's been around for thousands of years, ever since humankind really lived side by side enough to have really polluted water. One Roman strategy that was very interesting was that — and it really gave them a comparative advantage — they made sure their soldiers didn't drink even remotely muddied waters. Because if some of your troops get diarrhea they're not that effective on the battlefield. So, if you think of Roman comparative advantage part of it was the breast shields, the breastplates, but part of it was drinking the right water.So, here are these women. They've seen their parents have struggled with diarrhea, they've struggled with diarrhea, they've seen lots of deaths. How do they answer this question? In India, 35 to 50 percent say ""Reduce."" Think about what that means for a second. Thirty-five to 50 percent of women forget oral rehydration therapy, they are increasing — they are actually making their child more likely to die through their actions. How is that possible? Well, one possibility — I think that's how most people respond to this — is to say, ""That's just stupid."" I don't think that's stupid. I think there is something very profoundly right in what these women are doing. And that is, you don't put water into a leaky bucket.So, think of the mental model that goes behind reducing the intake. Just doesn't make sense. Now, the model is intuitively right. It just doesn't happen to be right about the world. But it makes a whole lot of sense at some deep level. And that, to me, is the fundamental challenge of the last mile.This first challenge is what I refer to as the persuasion challenge. Convincing people to do something — take oral rehydration therapy, intercrop, whatever it might be — is not an act of information: ""Let's give them the data, and when they have data they'll do the right thing."" It's more complex than that. And if you want to understand how it's more complex let me start with something kind of interesting.I'm going to give you a little math problem, and I want you to just yell out the answer as fast as possible. A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Quick. So, somebody out there says, ""Five."" A lot of you said, ""Ten."" Let's think about 10 for a second. If the ball costs 10, the bat costs... this is easy, $1.10. Yeah. So, together they would cost $1.20. So, here you all are, ostensibly educated people. Most of you look smart. The combination of that produces something that is actually, you got this thing wrong.How is that possible? Let's go to something else. I know algebra can be complicated. So, let's dial this back. That's what? Fifth grade? Fourth grade? Let's go back to kindergarten. OK? There's a great show on American television that you have to watch. It's called ""Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?"" I think we've learned the answer to that here. Let's move to kindergarten. Let's see if we can beat five-year-olds. Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to put objects on the screen. I just want you to name the color of the object. That's all it is. OK?I want you to do it fast, and say it out loud with me, and do it quickly. I'll make the first one easy for you. Ready? Black. Now the next ones I want you to do quickly and say it out loud. Ready? Go.Audience: Red. Green. Yellow. Blue. Red. (Laughter)Sendhil Mullainathan: That's pretty good. Almost out of kindergarten. What is all this telling us? You see, what's going on here, and in the bat and ball problem is that you have some intuitive ways of interacting with the world, some models that you use to understand the world. These models, like the leaky bucket, work well in most situations. I suspect most of you — I hope that's true for the rest of you — actually do pretty well with addition and subtraction in the real world.I found a problem, a specific problem that actually found an error with that. Diarrhea, and many last mile problems, are like that. They are situations where the mental model doesn't match the reality. Same thing here: You had an intuitive response to this that was very quick. You read ""blue"" and you wanted to say ""blue,"" even though you knew your task was red.Now, I do this stuff because it's fun. But it's more profound than fun. I'll give you a good example of how it actually effects persuasion. BMW is a pretty safe car. And they are trying to figure out, ""Safety is good. I want to advertise safety. How am I going to advertise safety?"" ""I could give people numbers. We do well on crash tests."" But the truth of the matter is, you look at that car, it doesn't look like a Volvo, and it doesn't look like a Hummer.So, what I want you to think about for a few minutes is: How would you convey safety of the BMW? Okay? So now, while you're thinking about that let's move to a second task. The second task is fuel efficiency. Okay?Here's another puzzle for all of you. One person walks into a car lot, and they're thinking about buying this Toyota Yaris. They are saying, ""This is 35 miles per gallon. I'm going to do the environmentally right thing, I'm going to buy the Prius, 50 miles per gallon."" Another person walks into the lot, and they're about to buy a Hummer, nine miles per gallon, fully loaded, luxury. And they say, ""You know what? Do I need turbo? Do I need this heavyweight car?"" I'm going to do something good for the environment. I'm going to take off some of that weight, and I'm going to buy a Hummer that's 11 miles per gallon.""Which one of these people has done more for the environment? See, you have a mental model. Fifty versus 35, that's a big move. Eleven versus nine? Come on. Turns out, go home and do the math, the nine to 11 is a bigger change. That person has saved more gallons. Why? Because we don't care about miles per gallon, we care about gallons per mile. Think about how powerful that is if you're trying to encourage fuel efficiency. Miles per gallon is the way we present things.If we want to encourage change of behavior, gallons per mile would have far more effectiveness. Researchers have found these type of anomalies. Okay, back to BMW. What should they do? The problem BMW faces is this car looks safe. This car, which is my Mini, doesn't look that safe. Here was BMW's brilliant insight, which they embodied into an ad campaign. They showed a BMW driving down the street. There's a truck on the right. Boxes fall out of the truck. The car swerves to avoid it, and therefore doesn't get into an accident.BWM realizes safety, in people's minds, has two components. You can be safe because when you're hit, you survive, or you can be safe because you avoid accidents. Remarkably successful campaign, but notice the power of it. It harnesses something you already believe. Now, even if I persuaded you to do something, it's hard sometimes to actually get action as a result. You all probably intended to wake up, I don't know, 6:30, 7 a.m. This is a battle we all fight every day, along with trying to get to the gym. Now, this is an example of that battle, and makes us realize intentions don't always translate into action, and so one of the fundamental challenges is how we would actually do that. OK?So, let me now talk about the last mile problem. So far, I've been pretty negative. I've been trying to show you the oddities of human behavior. And I think maybe I'm being too negative. Maybe it's the diarrhea. Maybe the last mile problem really should be thought of as the last mile opportunity.Let's go back to diabetes. This is a typical insulin injection. Now, carrying this thing around is complicated. You gotta carry the bottle, you gotta carry the syringe. It's also painful. Now, you may think to yourself, ""Well, if my eyes depended on it, you know, I would obviously use it every day."" But the pain, the discomfort, you know, paying attention, remembering to put it in your purse when you go on a long trip: These are the day-to-day of life, and they do pose problems. Here is an innovation, a design innovation. This is a pen, it's called an insulin pen, preloaded. The needle is particularly sharp. You just gotta carry this thing around. It's much easier to use, much less painful. Anywhere between five and 10 percent increase in adherence, just as a result of this.That's what I'm talking about as a last mile opportunity. You see, we tend to think the problem is solved when we solve the technology problem. But the human innovation, the human problem still remains, and that's a great frontier that we have left. This isn't about the biology of people; this is now about the brains, the psychology of people, and innovation needs to continue all the way through the last mile.Here's another example of this. This is from a company called Positive Energy. This is about energy efficiency. We're spending a lot of time on fuel cells right now. What this company does is they send a letter to households that say, ""Here's your energy use, here's your neighbor's energy use: You're doing well."" Smiley face. ""You're doing worse."" Frown. And what they find is just this letter, nothing else, has a two to three percent reduction in electricity use.And you want to think about the social value of that in terms of carbon offsets, reduced electricity, 900 million dollars per year. Why? Because for free, this isn't a new technology, this is a letter — we're getting a Big Bang in behavior. So, how do we tackle the last mile? I think this tells us there is an opportunity. And I think to tackle it, we need to combine psychology, marketing, art, we've seen that. But you know what we need to combine it with? We need to combine this with the scientific method.See what's really puzzling and frustrating about the last mile, to me, is that the first 999 miles are all about science. No one would say, ""Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it."" We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? ""Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there."" The amount of resources we put in are disparate. We put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies. How much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible, systematic, testing way?Now, I think that we're on the verge of something big. We're on the verge of a whole new social science. It's a social science that recognizes — much like science recognizes the complexity of the body, biology recognizes the complexity of the body — we'll recognize the complexity of the human mind. The careful testing, retesting, design, are going to open up vistas of understanding, complexities, difficult things. And those vistas will both create new science, and fundamental change in the world as we see it, in the next hundred years. All right. Thank you very much. (Applause)Chris Anderson: Sendhil, thank you so much. So, this whole area is so fascinating. I mean, it sometimes feels, listening to behavioral economists that they are kind of putting into place academically, what great marketers have sort of intuitively known for a long time. How much is your field talking to great marketers about their insights into human psychology? Because they've seen it on the ground.Sendhil Mullainathan: Yeah, we spend a lot of time talking to marketers, and I think 60 percent of it is exactly what you say, there are insights to be gleaned there. Forty percent of it is about what marketing is. Marketing is selling an ad to a firm. So, in some sense, a lot of marketing is about convincing a CEO, ""This is a good ad campaign."" So, there is a little bit of slippage there. That's just a caveat. That's different from actually having an effective ad campaign. And one of the new movements in marketing is: How do we actually measure effectiveness? Are we effective?CA: How you take your insights here and actually get them integrated into working business models on the ground, in Indian villages, for example?SM: So, the scientific method I alluded to is pretty important. We work closely with companies that have operational capacity, or nonprofits that have operational capacity. And then we say, ""Well, you want to get this behavior change. Let's come up with a few ideas, test them, see which is working, go back, synthesize, and try to come up with a thing that works,"" and then we're able to scale with partners. It's kind of the model that has worked in other contexts. If you have biological problems we try and fix it, see if it works, and then work the scale.CA: Alright Sendhil, thanks so much for coming to TED. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sendhil_mullainathan
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"When my brother called me in December of 1998, he said, ""The news does not look good."" This is him on the screen. He'd just been diagnosed with ALS, which is a disease that the average lifespan is three years. It paralyzes you. It starts by killing the motor neurons in your spinal cord. And you go from being a healthy, robust 29-year-old male to someone that cannot breathe, cannot move, cannot speak.This has actually been, to me, a gift, because we began a journey to learn a new way of thinking about life. And even though Steven passed away three years ago we had an amazing journey as a family. We did not even — I think adversity is not even the right word. We looked at this and we said, ""We're going to do something with this in an incredibly positive way."" And I want to talk today about one of the things that we decided to do, which was to think about a new way of approaching healthcare. Because, as we all know here today, it doesn't work very well. I want to talk about it in the context of a story.This is the story of my brother. But it's just a story. And I want to go beyond the story, and go to something more. ""Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there?"" is what we are here to do in medicine, is what everyone should do. And those questions all have variables to them. All of our statuses are different. All of our hopes and dreams, what we want to accomplish, is different, and our paths will be different, they are all stories.But it's a story until we convert it to data and so what we do, this concept we had, was to take Steven's status, ""What is my status?"" and go from this concept of walking, breathing, and then his hands, speak, and ultimately happiness and function. So, the first set of pathologies, they end up in the stick man on his icon, but the rest of them are really what's important here. Because Steven, despite the fact that he was paralyzed, as he was in that pool, he could not walk, he could not use his arms — that's why he had the little floaty things on them, did you see those? — he was happy. We were at the beach, he was raising his son, and he was productive.And we took this, and we converted it into data. But it's not a data point at that one moment in time. It is a data point of Steven in a context. Here he is in the pool. But here he is healthy, as a builder: taller, stronger, got all the women, amazing guy. Here he is walking down the aisle, but he can barely walk now, so it's impaired. And he could still hold his wife's hand, but he couldn't do buttons on his clothes, can't feed himself. And here he is, paralyzed completely, unable to breathe and move, over this time journey. These stories of his life, converted to data. He renovated my carriage house when he was completely paralyzed, and unable to speak, and unable to breathe, and he won an award for a historic restoration.So, here's Steven alone, sharing this story in the world. And this is the insight, the thing that we are excited about, because we have gone away from the community that we are, the fact that we really do love each other and want to care for each other. We need to give to others to be successful. So, Steven is sharing this story, but he is not alone. There are so many other people sharing their stories. Not stories in words, but stories in data and words. And we convert that information into this structure, this understanding, this ability to convert those stories into something that is computable, to which we can begin to change the way medicine is done and delivered.We did this for ALS. We can do this for depression, Parkinson's disease, HIV. These are not simple, they are not internet scalable; they require thought and processes to find the meaningful information about the disease. So, this is what it looks like when you go to the website. And I'm going to show you what Patients Like Me, the company that myself, my youngest brother and a good friend from MIT started.Here are the actual patients, there are 45,000 of them now, sharing their stories as data. Here is an M.S. patient. His name is Mike, and he is uniformly impaired on cognition, vision, walking, sensation. Those are things that are different for each M.S. patient. Each of them can have a different characteristic. You can see fibromyalgia, HIV, ALS, depression. Look at this HIV patient down here, Zinny. It's two years of this disease. All of the symptoms are not there. But he is working to keep his CD4 count high and his viral level low so he can make his life better.But you can aggregate this and you can discover things about treatments. Look at this, 2,000 people almost, on Copaxone. These are patients currently on drugs, sharing data. I love some of these, physical exercise, prayer. Anyone want to run a comparative effectiveness study on prayer against something? Let's look at prayer. What I love about this, just sort of interesting design problems. These are why people pray. Here is the schedule of how frequently they — it's a dose. So, anyone want to see the 32 patients that pray for 60 minutes a day, and see if they're doing better, they probably are. Here they are. It's an open network, everybody is sharing. We can see it all.Or, I want to look at anxiety, because people are praying for anxiety. And here is data on 15,000 people's current anxiety, right now. How they treat it, the drugs, the components of it, their side effects, all of it in a rich environment, and you can drill down and see the individuals. This amazing data allows us to drill down and see what this drug is for — 1,500 people on this drug, I think. Yes. I want to talk to the 58 patients down here who are taking four milligrams a day. And I want to talk to the ones of those that have been doing it for more than two years. So, you can see the duration. All open, all available. I'm going to log in.And this is my brother's profile. And this is a new version of our platform we're launching right now. This is the second generation. It's going to be in Flash. And you can see here, as this animates over, Steven's actual data against the background of all other patients, against this information. The blue band is the 50th percentile. Steven is the 75th percentile, that he has non-genetic ALS. You scroll down in this profile and you can see all of his prescription drugs, but more than that, in the new version, I can look at this interactively. Wait, poor spinal capacity.Doesn't this remind you of a great stock program? Wouldn't it be great if the technology we used to take care of ourselves was as good as the technology we use to make money? Detrol. In the side effects for his drug, integrated into that, the stem cell transplant that he had, the first in the world, shared openly for anyone who wants to see it.I love here — the cyberkinetics implant, which was, again, the only patient's data that was online and available. You can adjust the time scale. You can adjust the symptoms. You can look at the interaction between how I treat my ALS. So, you click down on the ALS tab there. I'm taking three drugs to manage it. Some of them are experimental. I can look at my constipation, how to manage it. I can see magnesium citrate, and the side effects from that drug all integrated in the time in which they're meaningful.But I want more. I don't want to just look at this cool device, I want to take this data and make something even better. I want my brother's center of the universe and his symptoms and his drugs, and all of the things that interact among those, the side effects, to be in this beautiful data galaxy that we can look at in any way we want to understand it, so that we can take this information and go beyond just this simple model of what a record is.I don't even know what a medical record is. I want to solve a problem. I want an application. So, can I take this data — rearrange yourself, put the symptoms in the left, the drugs across the top, tell me everything we know about Steven and everyone else, and what interacts. Years after he's had these drugs, I learned that everything he did to manage his excess saliva, including some positive side effects that came from other drugs, were making his constipation worse. And if anyone's ever had severe constipation, and you don't understand how much of an impact that has on your life — yes, that was a pun.You're trying to manage these, and this grid is available here, and we want to understand it. No one's ever had this kind of information. So, patients have this. We're for patients. This is all about patient health care, there was no doctors on our network. This is about the patients. So, how can we take this and bring them a tool that they can go back and they can engage the medical system? And we worked hard, and we thought about it and we said, ""What's something we can use all the time, that we can use in the medical care system, that everyone will understand?""So, the patients print it out, because hospitals usually block us because they believe we are a social network. It's actually the most used feature on the website. Doctors actually love this sheet, and they're actually really engaged. So, we went from this story of Steven and his history to data, and then back to paper, where we went back and engaged the medical care system. And here's another paper. This is a journal, PNAS — I think it's the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America. You've seen multiple of these today, when everyone's bragging about the amazing things they've done. This is a report about a drug called lithium. Lithium, that is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder, that a group in Italy found slowed ALS down in 16 patients, and published it.Now, we'll skip the critiques of the paper. But the short story is: If you're a patient, you want to be on the blue line. You don't want to be on the red line, you want to be on the blue line. Because the blue line is a better line. The red line is way downhill, the blue line is a good line. So, you know we said — we looked at this, and what I love also is that people always accuse these Internet sites of promoting bad medicine and having people do things irresponsibly. So, this is what happened when PNAS published this. Ten percent of the people in our system took lithium. Ten percent of the patients started taking lithium based on 16 patients of data in a bad publication. And they call the Internet irresponsible. Here's the implication of what happens.There's this one guy, named Humberto, from Brazil, who unfortunately passed away nine months ago, who said, ""Hey, listen. Can you help us answer this question? Because I don't want to wait for the next trial, it's going to be years. I want to know now. Can you help us?"" So, we launched some tools, we let them track their blood levels. We let them share the data and exchange it. You know, a data network. And they said, you know, ""Jamie, PLM, can you guys tell us whether this works or not?"" And we went around and we talked to people, and they said, ""You can't run a clinical trial like this. You know? You don't have the blinding, you don't have data, it doesn't follow the scientific method. It's never going to work. You can't do it.""So, I said, ""Okay well we can't do that. Then we can do something harder."" (Laughter) I can't say whether lithium works in all ALS patients, but I can say whether it works in Humberto. I bought a Mac about two years ago, I converted over, and I was so excited about this new feature of the time machine that came in Leopard. And we said — because it's really cool, you can go back and you can look at the entire history of your computer, and find everything you've lost, and I loved it. And I said, ""What if we built a time machine for patients, except instead of going backwards, we go forwards. Can we find out what's going to happen to you, so that you can maybe change it?""So, we did. We took all the patients like Humberto, That's the Apple background, we stole that because we didn't have time to build our own. This is a real app by the way. This is not just graphics. And you take those data, and we find the patients like him, and we bring their data together. And we bring their histories into it. And then we say, ""Well how do we line them all up?"" So, we line them all up so they go together around the meaningful points, integrated across everything we know about the patient. Full information, the entire course of their disease. And that's what is going to happen to Humberto, unless he does something. And he took lithium, and he went down the line. And it works almost every time.Now, the ones that it doesn't work are interesting. But almost all the time it works. It's actually scary. It's beautiful. So, we couldn't run a clinical trial, we couldn't figure it out. But we could see whether it was going to work for Humberto. And yeah, all the clinicians in the audience will talk about power and all the standard deviation. We'll do that later. But here is the answer of the mean of the patients that actually decided to take lithium. These are all the patients that started lithium. It's the Intent to Treat Curve. You can see here, the blue dots on the top, the light ones, those are the people in the study in PNAS that you wanted to be on. And the red ones are the ones, the pink ones on the bottom are the ones you didn't want to be. And the ones in the middle are all of our patients from the start of lithium at time zero, going forward, and then going backward.So, you can see we matched them perfectly, perfectly. Terrifyingly accurate matching. And going forward, you actually don't want to be a lithium patient this time. You're actually doing slightly worse — not significantly, but slightly worse. You don't want to be a lithium patient this time. But you know, a lot of people dropped out, the trial, there is too much drop out. Can we do the even harder thing? Can we go to the patients that actually decided to stay on lithium, because they were so convinced they were getting better?We asked our control algorithm, are those 69 patients — by the way, you'll notice that's four times the number of patients in the clinical trial — can we look at those patients and say, ""Can we match them with our time machine to the other patients that are just like them, and what happens?"" Even the ones that believed they were getting better matched the controls exactly. Exactly. Those little lines? That's the power.So, we — I can't tell you lithium doesn't work. I can't tell you that if you did it at a higher dose or if you run the study proper — I can tell you that for those 69 people that took lithium, they didn't do any better than the people that were just like them, just like me, and that we had the power to detect that at about a quarter of the strengths reported in the initial study. We did that one year ahead of the time when the first clinical trial funded by the NIH for millions of dollars failed for futility last week, and announced it.So, remember I told you about my brother's stem cell transplant. I never really knew whether it worked. And I put 100 million cells in his cisterna magna, in his lumbar cord, and filled out the IRBs and did all this work, and I never really knew. How did I not know? I mean, I didn't know what was going to happen to him. I actually asked Tim, who is the quant in our group — we actually searched for about a year to find someone who could do the sort of math and statistics and modeling in healthcare, couldn't find anybody. So, we went to the finance industry. And there are these guys who used to model the future of interest rates, and all that kind of stuff. And some of them were available. So, we hired one. (Laughter)We hired them, set them up, assisting at lab. I I.M. him things. That's the way I communicate with him, is like a little guy in a box. I I.M.ed Tim. I said, ""Tim can you tell me whether my brother's stem cell transplant worked or not?"" And he sent me this two days ago. It was that little outliers there. You see that guy that lived a long time? We have to go talk to him. Because I'd like to know what happened. Because something went different. But my brother didn't. My brother went straight down the line. It only works about 12 months.It's the first version of the time machine. First time we ever tried it. We'll try to get it better later but 12 months so far. And, you know, I look at this, and I get really emotional. You look at the patients, you can drill in all the controls, you can look at them, you can ask them. And I found a woman that had — we found her, she was odd because she had data after she died. And her husband had come in and entered her last functional scores, because he knew how much she cared. And I am thankful.I can't believe that these people, years after my brother had died, helped me answer the question about whether an operation I did, and spent millions of dollars on years ago, worked or not. I wished it had been there when I'd done it the first time, and I'm really excited that it's here now, because the lab that I founded has some data on a drug that might work, and I'd like to show it. I'd like to show it in real time, now, and I want to do that for all of the diseases that we can do that for. I've got to thank the 45,000 people that are doing this social experiment with us. There is an amazing journey we are going on to become human again, to be part of community again, to share of ourselves, to be vulnerable, and it's very exciting. So, thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_brother_inspired
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"The problem I want to talk with you about is really the problem of: How does one supply health care in a world in which cost is everything? How do you do that? And the basic paradigm we want to suggest to you, I want to suggest to you, is one in which you say that in order to treat disease, you have to first know what you're treating, that's diagnostics, and then you have to do something.The program we're involved in is something we call ""Diagnostics for All,"" or ""zero-cost diagnostics."" How do you provide medically relevant information at as close as possible to zero cost? How do you do it? Let me just give you two examples. The rigors of military medicine are not so dissimilar from the third world: poor resources, a rigorous environment — a series of problems — light weight and things of this kind. And also they're not so different from the home health care and diagnostic system world.So, the technology I want to talk about is for the third world, for the developing world, but it has, I think, much broader application, because information is so important in the health care system. So you see two examples here. One is a lab that is actually a fairly high-end laboratory in Africa. The second is basically an entrepreneur who is set up and doing who-knows-what at a table in a market. I don't know what kind of health care is delivered there. But it's not really what is probably most efficient.What is our approach? The way in which one typically approaches a problem of lowering cost, starting from the perspective of the United States, is to take our solution, and then try to cut cost out of it. No matter how you do that, you're not going to start with a $100,000 instrument and bring it down to no cost. It isn't going to work.So the approach we took was the other way around, to ask: What is the cheapest possible stuff that you could make a diagnostic system out of, and get useful information and add function? And what we've chosen is paper. What you see here is a prototypic device. It's about a centimeter on the side. It's about the size of a fingernail. The lines around the edges are a polymer. It's made of paper. And paper, of course, wicks fluid, as you know, paper, cloth — drop wine on the tablecloth, and the wine wicks all over everything. Put it on your shirt, it ruins the shirt. That's what a hydrophilic surface does.So in this device, the idea is that you drip the bottom end of it in a drop of, in this case, urine. The fluid wicks its way into those chambers at the top. The brown color indicates the amount of glucose in the urine, the blue color indicates the amount of protein in the urine. And the combination of those two is a first-order shot at a number of useful things that you want. So, this is an example of a device made from a simple piece of paper.Now, how simple can you make the production? Why do we choose paper? There's an example of the same thing on a finger, showing you basically what it looks like. One reason for using paper is that it's everywhere. We have made these kinds of devices using napkins and toilet paper and wraps, and all kinds of stuff.So the production capability is there. The second is, you can put lots and lots of tests in a very small place. I'll show you in a moment that the stack of paper there would probably hold something like 100,000 tests, something of that kind.And then finally, a point you don't think of so much in developed world medicine: it eliminates sharps. And what sharps means is needles, things that stick. If you've taken a sample of someone's blood and the someone might have hepatitis C, you don't want to make a mistake and stick it in you. You don't want to do that. So how do you dispose of that? It's a problem everywhere, and here, you simply burn it. So it's a sort of a practical approach to starting on things.Now, you say, ""If paper is a good idea, other people have surely thought of it."" And the answer is, of course, yes. Those half of you, roughly, who are women, at some point may have had a pregnancy test. And the most common of these is in a device that looks like the thing on the left. It's something called a lateral-flow immunoassay. In that particular test, urine, either containing a hormone called hCG, does or does not flow across a piece of paper. And there are two bars; one bar indicates that the test is working, and if the second bar shows up, you're pregnant.This is a terrific kind of test in a binary world, and the nice thing about pregnancy is either you are pregnant or you're not pregnant; you're not partially pregnant or thinking about being pregnant or something of that sort. So it works very well there, but it doesn't work very well when you need more quantitative information.There are also dipsticks, but if you look at the dipsticks, they're for another kind of urine analysis. There are an awful lot of colors and things like that. What do you actually do about that in a difficult circumstance? So the approach we started with is to ask: Is it really practical to make things of this sort? And that problem is now, in a purely engineering way, solved. And the procedure that we have is simply to start with paper. You run it through a new kind of printer called a wax printer. The wax printer does what looks like printing. It is printing. You put that on, you warm it a little bit, the wax prints through, so it absorbs into the paper, and you end up with the device you want.The printers cost 800 bucks now. We estimate that if you were to run them 24 hours a day, they'd make about 10 million tests a year. So it's a solved problem. That particular problem is solved. And there is an example of the kind of thing that you see. That's on a piece of 8 by 12 paper. That takes about two seconds to make. And so I regard that as done. There's a very important issue here, which is that because it's a printer, a color printer, it prints colors. That's what color printers do. I'll show you in a moment, that's actually quite useful.Now, the next question that you would like to ask is: What would you like to measure? What would you like to analyze? And the thing you'd most like to analyze, we're a fair distance from. It's what's called ""fever of undiagnosed origin."" Someone comes into the clinic, they have a fever, they feel bad. What do they have? Do they have TB? Do they have AIDS? Do they have a common cold? The triage problem. That's a hard problem for reasons I won't go through. There are an awful lot of things that you'd like to distinguish among. But then there are a series of things — AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, TB, others — and simpler ones, such as guidance of treatment.Now, even that's more complicated than you think. A friend of mine works in transcultural psychiatry, and he is interested in the question of why people do and don't take their meds. So Dapsone, or something like that, you have to take for a while. He has a wonderful story of talking to a villager in India and saying, ""Have you taken your Dapsone?"" ""Yes."" ""Have you taken it every day?"" ""Yes."" ""Have you taken if for a month?"" ""Yes."" What the guy actually meant was that he'd fed a 30-day dose of Dapsone to his dog that morning.(Laughter)And he was telling the truth, because in a different culture, the dog is a surrogate for you; ""today,"" ""this month,"" ""since the rainy season"" — there are lots of opportunities for misunderstanding.(Laughter)And so an issue here is to, in some cases, figure out how to deal with matters that seem uninteresting, like compliance.Now, take a look at what a typical test looks like. Prick a finger, you get some blood — about 50 microliters. That's about all you're going to get, because you can't use the usual sort of systems. You can't manipulate it very well; I'll show something about that in a moment. So you take the drop of blood, no further manipulations, you put it on a little device, the device filters out the blood cells, lets the serum go through, and you get a series of colors down in the bottom there. And the colors indicate ""disease"" or ""normal."" But even that's complicated, because to me, colors might indicate ""normal,"" but after all, we're all suffering from probably an excess of education.What do you do about something which requires quantitative analysis? And so the solution that we and many other people are thinking about there, and at this point, there is a dramatic flourish, and out comes the universal solution to everything these days, which is a cell phone — in this particular case, a camera phone. They're everywhere — six billion a month in India. And the idea is that what one does is to take the device, you dip it, you develop the color, you take a picture, the picture goes to a central laboratory. You don't have to send out a doctor, you send out somebody who can just take the sample, and in the clinic either a doctor, or ideally, a computer in this case, does the analysis. Turns out to work actually quite well, particularly when your color printer has printed the color bars that indicate how things work.So my view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor, but an 18-year-old, otherwise unemployed, who has two things: a backpack full of these tests and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample, and an AK-47. And these are the things that get him through his day.(Laughter)There's another very interesting connection here, and that is, that what one wants to do is pass through useful information over what is generally a pretty awful telephone system. It turns out there's an enormous amount of information already available on that subject, which is the Mars Rover problem. How do you get back an accurate view of the color on Mars if you have a really terrible bandwidth to do it with? And the answer is not complicated, but it's one which I don't want to go through here, other than to say that the communication systems for doing this are really pretty well understood.Also, a fact which you may not know is that the compute capability of this thing is not so different from the compute capability of your desktop computer. This is a fantastic device which is only beginning to be tapped. I don't know whether the idea of one computer, one child makes any sense. Here's the computer of the future, because this screen is already there and they're ubiquitous.All right, let me show you just a little bit about advanced devices. And we'll start by posing a little problem. What you see here is another centimeter-sized device, and the different colors are different colors of dye. And you notice something which might strike you as a little bit interesting, which is, the yellow seems to disappear, get through the blue, and then get through the red. How does that happen? How do you make something flow through something? And, of course the answer is, ""You don't."" You make it flow under and over.But now the question is: How do you make it flow under and over in a piece of paper? The answer is that what you do — and the details are not terribly important here — is to make something more elaborate: You take several different layers of paper, each one containing its own little fluid system, and you separate them by pieces of, literally, double-sided carpet tape, the stuff you use to stick the carpets onto the floor. And the fluid will flow from one layer into the next. It distributes itself, flows through further holes, distributes itself.And what you see, at the lower right-hand side there, is a sample in which a single sample of blood has been put on the top, and it has gone through and distributed itself into these 16 holes on the bottom, in a piece of paper — basically, it looks like a chip, two pieces of paper thick. And in this particular case, we were just interested in the replicability of that. But that is, in principle, the way you solve the ""fever of unexplained origin"" problem, because each one of those spots then becomes a test for a particular set of markers of disease, and this will work in due course.Here is an example of a slightly more complicated device. There's the chip. You dip in a corner. The fluid goes into the center. It distributes itself out into these various wells or holes and turns color, all done with paper and carpet tape. So it's, I think, as low-cost as we're likely to be able to come up and make things.Now, I have two last little stories to tell you in finishing off this business. This is one: One of the things you occasionally need to do is separate blood cells from serum. And the question was, here we do it by taking a sample, we put it in a centrifuge, we spin it, and you get blood cells out. Terrific. What happens if you don't have electricity, a centrifuge, and whatever? And we thought for a while of how you might do this, and the way, in fact, you do it, is what's shown here. You get an eggbeater, which is everywhere, and you saw off a blade, and then you take tubing, and you stick it on that. You put the blood in, somebody sits there and spins it. It works really, really well.And we sat down, we did the physics of eggbeaters and self-aligning tubes and all the rest of that kind of thing, and sent it off to a journal. We were very proud of this, particularly the title, which was ""Eggbeater as Centrifuge.""(Laughter)And we sent it off, and by return mail, it came back. I called up the editor and I said, ""What's going on? How is this possible?"" The editor said, with enormous disdain, ""I read this. And we're not going to publish it, because we only publish science.""(Laughter)And it's an important issue, because it means that we have to, as a society, think about what we value. And if it's just papers and Phys. Rev. letters, we've got a problem.Here is another example of something which is — this is a little spectrophotometer. It measures the absorption of light in a sample. The neat thing about this is, you have a light source that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz, another light source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz, and so you can run this system in broad daylight. It performs about equivalently to a system that's on the order of 100,000 dollars. It costs 50 dollars. We can probably make it for 50 cents if we put our mind to it. Why doesn't somebody do it? The answer is: How do you make a profit in a capitalist system, doing that? Interesting problem.So, let me finish by saying that we've thought about this as a kind of engineering problem. And we've asked: What is the scientific unifying idea here? And we've decided we should think about this not so much in terms of cost, but in terms of simplicity. Simplicity is a neat word. You've got to think about what simplicity means. I know what it is, but I don't actually know what it means.So I actually was interested enough in this to put together several groups of people. The most recent involved a couple of people at MIT, one of them being an exceptionally bright kid who is one of the very few people I would think of who's an authentic genius. We all struggled for an entire day to think about simplicity. And I want to give you the answer of this deep scientific thought.[What is simplicity? ""It's impossible to f..k it up""](Laughter)So, in a sense, you get what you pay for.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp
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"I'm a cancer doctor, and I walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago, and this was the cover of Fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy.And so, as a cancer doctor, you look at this, and you get a little bit downhearted. But when you start to read the article by Cliff, who himself is a cancer survivor, who was saved by a clinical trial where his parents drove him from New York City to upstate New York to get an experimental therapy for — at the time — Hodgkin's disease, which saved his life, he makes remarkable points here. And the point of the article was that we have gotten reductionist in our view of biology, in our view of cancer. For the last 50 years, we have focused on treating the individual gene in understanding cancer, not in controlling cancer.So, this is an astounding table. And this is something that sobers us in our field everyday in that, obviously, we've made remarkable impacts on cardiovascular disease, but look at cancer. The death rate in cancer in over 50 years hasn't changed. We've made small wins in diseases like chronic myelogenous leukemia, where we have a pill that can put 100 percent of people in remission, but in general, we haven't made an impact at all in the war on cancer.So, what I'm going to tell you today, is a little bit of why I think that's the case, and then go out of my comfort zone and tell you where I think it's going, where a new approach — that we hope to push forward in terms of treating cancer. Because this is wrong.So, what is cancer, first of all? Well, if one has a mass or an abnormal blood value, you go to a doctor, they stick a needle in. They way we make the diagnosis today is by pattern recognition: Does it look normal? Does it look abnormal?So, that pathologist is just like looking at this plastic bottle. This is a normal cell. This is a cancer cell. That is the state-of-the-art today in diagnosing cancer. There's no molecular test, there's no sequencing of genes that was referred to yesterday, there's no fancy looking at the chromosomes. This is the state-of-the-art and how we do it.You know, I know very well, as a cancer doctor, I can't treat advanced cancer. So, as an aside, I firmly believe in the field of trying to identify cancer early. It is the only way you can start to fight cancer, is by catching it early. We can prevent most cancers. You know, the previous talk alluded to preventing heart disease. We could do the same in cancer. I co-founded a company called Navigenics, where, if you spit into a tube — and we can look look at 35 or 40 genetic markers for disease, all of which are delayable in many of the cancers — you start to identify what you could get, and then we can start to work to prevent them. Because the problem is, when you have advanced cancer, we can't do that much today about it, as the statistics allude to.So, the thing about cancer is that it's a disease of the aged. Why is it a disease of the aged? Because evolution doesn't care about us after we've had our children. See, evolution protected us during our childbearing years and then, after age 35 or 40 or 45, it said ""It doesn't matter anymore, because they've had their progeny."" So if you look at cancers, it is very rare — extremely rare — to have cancer in a child, on the order of thousands of cases a year. As one gets older? Very, very common.Why is it hard to treat? Because it's heterogeneous, and that's the perfect substrate for evolution within the cancer. It starts to select out for those bad, aggressive cells, what we call clonal selection. But, if we start to understand that cancer isn't just a molecular defect, it's something more, then we'll get to new ways of treating it, as I'll show you.So, one of the fundamental problems we have in cancer is that, right now, we describe it by a number of adjectives, symptoms: ""I'm tired, I'm bloated, I have pain, etc."" You then have some anatomic descriptions, you get that CT scan: ""There's a three centimeter mass in the liver."" You then have some body part descriptions: ""It's in the liver, in the breast, in the prostate."" And that's about it. So, our dictionary for describing cancer is very, very poor. It's basically symptoms. It's manifestations of a disease.What's exciting is that over the last two or three years, the government has spent 400 million dollars, and they've allocated another billion dollars, to what we call the Cancer Genome Atlas Project. So, it is the idea of sequencing all of the genes in the cancer, and giving us a new lexicon, a new dictionary to describe it. You know, in the mid-1850's in France, they started to describe cancer by body part. That hasn't changed in over 150 years. It is absolutely archaic that we call cancer by prostate, by breast, by muscle. It makes no sense, if you think about it.So, obviously, the technology is here today, and, over the next several years, that will change. You will no longer go to a breast cancer clinic. You will go to a HER2 amplified clinic, or an EGFR activated clinic, and they will go to some of the pathogenic lesions that were involved in causing this individual cancer. So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, ""This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it."" When one is exposed to H1N1, you take Tamiflu, and you can remarkably decrease the severity of symptoms and prevent many of the manifestations of the disease. Why? Because we know what you have, and we know how to treat it — although we can't make vaccine in this country, but that's a different story.The Cancer Genome Atlas is coming out now. The first cancer was done, which was brain cancer. In the next month, the end of December, you'll see ovarian cancer, and then lung cancer will come several months after. There's also a field of proteomics that I'll talk about in a few minutes, which I think is going to be the next level in terms of understanding and classifying disease. But remember, I'm not pushing genomics, proteomics, to be a reductionist. I'm doing it so we can identify what we're up against. And there's a very important distinction there that we'll get to.In health care today, we spend most of the dollars — in terms of treating disease — most of the dollars in the last two years of a person's life. We spend very little, if any, dollars in terms of identifying what we're up against. If you could start to move that, to identify what you're up against, you're going to do things a hell of a lot better. If we could even take it one step further and prevent disease, we can take it enormously the other direction, and obviously, that's where we need to go, going forward.So, this is the website of the National Cancer Institute. And I'm here to tell you, it's wrong. So, the website of the National Cancer Institute says that cancer is a genetic disease. The website says, ""If you look, there's an individual mutation, and maybe a second, and maybe a third, and that is cancer."" But, as a cancer doc, this is what I see. This isn't a genetic disease. So, there you see, it's a liver with colon cancer in it, and you see into the microscope a lymph node where cancer has invaded. You see a CT scan where cancer is in the liver. Cancer is an interaction of a cell that no longer is under growth control with the environment. It's not in the abstract; it's the interaction with the environment. It's what we call a system.The goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer. And I think that's been the fundamental problem over the last five decades, is that we have strived to understand cancer. The goal is to control cancer. And that is a very different optimization scheme, a very different strategy for all of us.I got up at the American Association of Cancer Research, one of the big cancer research meetings, with 20,000 people there, and I said, ""We've made a mistake. We've all made a mistake, myself included, by focusing down, by being a reductionist. We need to take a step back."" And, believe it or not, there were hisses in the audience. People got upset, but this is the only way we're going to go forward.You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago. We were pushed together, and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other. I said, ""Do I really want to meet a guy from Disney, who designed computers?"" And he was saying: Does he really want to meet another doctor? But people prevailed on us, and we got together, and it's been transformative in what I do, absolutely transformative. We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling — and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team — the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system. And I'll show you some data there where I really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it.The key is, when you look at these variables and you look at this data, you have to understand the data inputs. You know, if I measured your temperature over 30 days, and I asked, ""What was the average temperature?"" and it came back at 98.7, I would say, ""Great."" But if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours, and you took Tylenol and got better, etc., I would totally miss it. So, one of the problems, the fundamental problems in medicine is that you and I, and all of us, we go to our doctor once a year. We have discrete data elements; we don't have a time function on them.Earlier it was referred to this direct life device. You know, I've been using it for two and a half months. It's a staggering device, not because it tells me how many kilocalories I do every day, but because it looks, over 24 hours, what I've done in a day. And I didn't realize that for three hours I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm not moving at all. And a lot of the functions in the data that we have as input systems here are really different than we understand them, because we're not measuring them dynamically.And so, if you think of cancer as a system, there's an input and an output and a state in the middle. So, the states, are equivalent classes of history, and the cancer patient, the input, is the environment, the diet, the treatment, the genetic mutations. The output are our symptoms: Do we have pain? Is the cancer growing? Do we feel bloated, etc.? Most of that state is hidden. So what we do in our field is we change and input, we give aggressive chemotherapy, and we say, ""Did that output get better? Did that pain improve, etc.?""And so, the problem is that it's not just one system, it's multiple systems on multiple scales. It's a system of systems. And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope. A neuron under the microscope is very elegant with little things sticking out and little things over here, but when you start to put them together in a complex system, and you start to see that it becomes a brain, and that brain can create intelligence, what we're talking about in the body, and cancer is starting to model it like a complex system. Well, the bad news is that these robust — and robust is a key word — emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail. The good news is you can manipulate them. You can try to control them without that fundamental understanding of every component.One of the most fundamental clinical trials in cancer came out in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took women who were pre-menopausal with breast cancer. So, about the worst kind of breast cancer you can get. They had gotten their chemotherapy, and then they randomized them, where half got placebo, and half got a drug called Zoledronic acid that builds bone. It's used to treat osteoporosis, and they got that twice a year. They looked and, in these 1,800 women, given twice a year a drug that builds bone, you reduce the recurrence of cancer by 35 percent. Reduce occurrence of cancer by a drug that doesn't even touch the cancer. So the notion, you change the soil, the seed doesn't grow as well. You change that system, and you could have a marked effect on the cancer.Nobody has ever shown — and this will be shocking — nobody has ever shown that most chemotherapy actually touches a cancer cell. It's never been shown. There's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes, that if you give this cancer drug, you can do this effect to the cell, but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body.If I give a woman with breast cancer a drug called Taxol every three weeks, which is the standard, about 40 percent of women with metastatic cancer have a great response to that drug. And a response is 50 percent shrinkage. Well, remember that's not even an order of magnitude, but that's a different story. They then recur, I give them that same drug every week. Another 30 percent will respond. They then recur, I give them that same drug over 96 hours by continuous infusion, another 20 or 30 percent will respond. So, you can't tell me it's working by the same mechanism in all three size. It's not. We have no idea the mechanism. So the idea that chemotherapy may just be disrupting that complex system, just like building bone disrupted that system and reduced recurrence, chemotherapy may work by that same exact way. The wild thing about that trial also, was that it reduced new primaries, so new cancers, by 30 percent also.So, the problem is, yours and mine, all of our systems are changing. They're dynamic. I mean, this is a scary slide, not to take an aside, but it looks at obesity in the world. And I'm sorry if you can't read the numbers, they're kind of small. But, if you start to look at it, that red, that dark color there, more than 75 percent of the population of those countries are obese. Look a decade ago, look two decades ago: markedly different. So, our systems today are dramatically different than our systems a decade or two ago. So the diseases we have today, which reflect patterns in the system over the last several decades, are going to change dramatically over the next decade or so based on things like this.So, this picture, although it is beautiful, is a 40-gigabyte picture of the whole proteome. So this is a drop of blood that has gone through a superconducting magnet, and we're able to get resolution where we can start to see all of the proteins in the body. We can start to see that system. Each of the red dots are where a protein has actually been identified. The power of these magnets, the power of what we can do here, is that we can see an individual neutron with this technology. So, again, this is stuff we're doing with Danny Hillis and a group called Applied Proteomics, where we can start to see individual neutron differences, and we can start to look at that system like we never have before. So, instead of a reductionist view, we're taking a step back.So this is a woman, 46 years old, who had recurrent lung cancer. It was in her brain, in her lungs, in her liver. She had gotten Carboplatin Taxol, Carboplatin Taxotere, Gemcitabine, Navelbine: Every drug we have she had gotten, and that disease continued to grow. She had three kids under the age of 12, and this is her CT scan. And so what this is, is we're taking a cross-section of her body here, and you can see in the middle there is her heart, and to the side of her heart on the left there is this large tumor that will invade and will kill her, untreated, in a matter of weeks. She goes on a pill a day that targets a pathway, and again, I'm not sure if this pathway was in the system, in the cancer, but it targeted a pathway, and a month later, pow, that cancer's gone. Six months later it's still gone. That cancer recurred, and she passed away three years later from lung cancer, but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne. That's about it.So, the problem is that the clinical trial was done, and we were a part of it, and in the fundamental clinical trial — the pivotal clinical trial we call the Phase Three, we refused to use a placebo. Would you want your mother, your brother, your sister to get a placebo if they had advanced lung cancer and had weeks to live? And the answer, obviously, is not. So, it was done on this group of patients. Ten percent of people in the trial had this dramatic response that was shown here, and the drug went to the FDA, and the FDA said, ""Without a placebo, how do I know patients actually benefited from the drug?"" So the morning the FDA was going to meet, this was the editorial in the Wall Street Journal. (Laughter) And so, what do you know, that drug was approved.The amazing thing is another company did the right scientific trial, where they gave half placebo and half the drug. And we learned something important there. What's interesting is they did it in South America and Canada, where it's ""more ethical to give placebos."" They had to give it also in the U.S. to get approval, so I think there were three U.S. patients in upstate New York who were part of the trial. But they did that, and what they found is that 70 percent of the non-responders lived much longer and did better than people who got placebo. So it challenged everything we knew in cancer, is that you don't need to get a response. You don't need to shrink the disease. If we slow the disease, we may have more of a benefit on patient survival, patient outcome, how they feel, than if we shrink the disease.The problem is that, if I'm this doc, and I get your CT scan today and you've got a two centimeter mass in your liver, and you come back to me in three months and it's three centimeters, did that drug help you or not? How do I know? Would it have been 10 centimeters, or am I giving you a drug with no benefit and significant cost? So, it's a fundamental problem. And, again, that's where these new technologies can come in.And so, the goal obviously is that you go into your doctor's office — well, the ultimate goal is that you prevent disease, right? The ultimate goal is that you prevent any of these things from happening. That is the most effective, cost-effective, best way we can do things today. But if one is unfortunate to get a disease, you'll go into your doctor's office, he or she will take a drop of blood, and we will start to know how to treat your disease. The way we've approached it is the field of proteomics, again, this looking at the system. It's taking a big picture.The problem with technologies like this is that if one looks at proteins in the body, there are 11 orders of magnitude difference between the high-abundant and the low-abundant proteins. So, there's no technology in the world that can span 11 orders of magnitude. And so, a lot of what has been done with people like Danny Hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles, try to bring the software. We can start to look at different components along this spectrum.And so, earlier was talked about cross-discipline, about collaboration. And I think one of the exciting things that is starting to happen now is that people from those fields are coming in. Yesterday, the National Cancer Institute announced a new program called the Physical Sciences and Oncology, where physicists, mathematicians, are brought in to think about cancer, people who never approached it before. Danny and I got 16 million dollars, they announced yesterday, to try to attach this problem. A whole new approach, instead of giving high doses of chemotherapy by different mechanisms, to try to bring technology to get a picture of what's actually happening in the body.So, just for two seconds, how these technologies work — because I think it's important to understand it. What happens is every protein in your body is charged, so the proteins are sprayed in, the magnet spins them around, and then there's a detector at the end. When it hit that detector is dependent on the mass and the charge. And so we can accurately — if the magnet is big enough, and your resolution is high enough — you can actually detect all of the proteins in the body and start to get an understanding of the individual system.And so, as a cancer doctor, instead of having paper in my chart, in your chart, and it being this thick, this is what data flow is starting to look like in our offices, where that drop of blood is creating gigabytes of data. Electronic data elements are describing every aspect of the disease. And certainly the goal is we can start to learn from every encounter and actually move forward, instead of just having encounter and encounter, without fundamental learning.So, to conclude, we need to get away from reductionist thinking. We need to start to think differently and radically. And so, I implore everyone here: Think differently. Come up with new ideas. Tell them to me or anyone else in our field, because over the last 59 years, nothing has changed. We need a radically different approach.You know, Andy Grove stepped down as chairman of the board at Intel — and Andy was one of my mentors, tough individual. When Andy stepped down, he said, ""No technology will win. Technology itself will win."" And I'm a firm believer, in the field of medicine and especially cancer, that it's going to be a broad platform of technologies that will help us move forward and hopefully help patients in the near-term.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_agus_a_new_strategy_in_the_war_on_cancer
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"John Hockenberry: It's great to be here with you, Tom. And I want to start with a question that has just been consuming me since I first became familiar with your work. In you work there's always this kind of hybrid quality of a natural force in some sort of interplay with creative force. Are they ever in equilibrium in the way that you see your work?Tom Shannon: Yeah, the subject matter that I'm looking for, it's usually to solve a question. I had the question popped into my head: What does the cone that connects the sun and the Earth look like if you could connect the two spheres? And in proportion, what would the size of the sphere and the length, and what would the taper be to the Earth? And so I went about and made that sculpture, turning it out of solid bronze. And I did one that was about 35 feet long. The sun end was about four inches in diameter, and then it tapered over about 35 feet to about a millimeter at the Earth end. And so for me, it was really exciting just to see what it looks like if you could step outside and into a larger context, as though you were an astronaut, and see these two things as an object, because they are so intimately bound, and one is meaningless without the other.JH: Is there a relief in playing with these forces? And I'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is in playing with these forces.TS: Well, like the magnetically levitated objects — like that silver one there, that was the result of hundreds of experiments with magnets, trying to find a way to make something float with the least possible connection to the ground. So I got it down to just one tether to be able to support that.JH: Now is this electromagnetic here, or are these static?TS: Those are permanent magnets, yeah.JH: Because if the power went out, there would just be a big noise.TS: Yeah. It's really unsatisfactory having plug-in art.JH: I agree.TS: The magnetic works are a combination of gravity and magnetism, so it's a kind of mixture of these ambient forces that influence everything. The sun has a tremendous field that extends way beyond the planets and the Earth's magnetic field protects us from the sun. So there's this huge invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe. But with the pendulum, it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up. My sculptures are normally very simplified. I try to refine them down to very simple forms. But the paintings become very complex, because I think the fields that are supporting them, they're billowing, and they're interpenetrating, and they're interference patterns.JH: And they're non-deterministic. I mean, you don't know necessarily where you're headed when you begin, even though the forces can be calculated. So the evolution of this — I gather this isn't your first pendulum.TS: No. (JH: No.)TS: The first one I did was in the late 70's, and I just had a simple cone with a spigot at the bottom of it. I threw it into an orbit, and it only had one color, and when it got to the center, the paint kept running out, so I had to run in there, didn't have any control over the spigot remotely. So that told me right away: I need a remote control device. But then I started dreaming of having six colors. I sort of think about it as the DNA — these colors, the red, blue, yellow, the primary colors and white and black. And if you put them together in different combinations — just like printing in a sense, like how a magazine color is printed — and put them under certain forces, which is orbiting them or passing them back and forth or drawing with them, these amazing things started appearing.JH: It looks like we're loaded for bear here.TS: Yeah, well let's put a couple of canvases. I'll ask a couple of my sons to set up the canvases here. I want to just say — so this is Jack, Nick and Louie.JH: Thanks guys.TS: So here are the —JH: All right, I'll get out of the way here.TS: I'm just going to throw this into an orbit and see if I can paint everybody's shoes in the front.(Laughter)JH: Whoa. That is ... ooh, nice.TS: So something like this. I'm doing this as a demo, and it's more playful, but inevitably, all of this can be used. I can redeem this painting, just continuing on, doing layers upon layers. And I keep it around for a couple of weeks, and I'm contemplating it, and I'll do another session with it and bring it up to another level, where all of this becomes the background, the depth of it.JH: That's fantastic. So the valves at the bottom of those tubes there are like radio-controlled airplane valves.TS: Yes, they're servos with cams that pinch these rubber tubes. And they can pinch them very tight and stop it, or you can have them wide open. And all of the colors come out one central port at the bottom. You can always be changing colors, put aluminum paint, or I could put anything into this. It could be tomato sauce, or anything could be dispensed — sand, powders or anything like that.JH: So many forces there. You've got gravity, you've got the centrifugal force, you've got the fluid dynamics. Each of these beautiful paintings, are they images in and of themselves, or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas?TS: Well, this painting here, I wanted to do something very simple, a simple, iconic image of two ripples interfering. So the one on the right was done first, and then the one on the left was done over it. And then I left gaps so you could see the one that was done before. And then when I did the second one, it really disturbed the piece — these big blue lines crashing through the center of it — and so it created a kind of tension and an overlap. There are lines in front of the one on the right, and there are lines behind the one on the left, and so it takes it into different planes. What it's also about, just the little events, the events of the interpenetration of —JH: Two stars, or —TS: Two things that happened — there's an interference pattern, and then a third thing happens. There are shapes that come about just by the marriage of two events that are happening, and I'm very interested in that. Like the occurrence of moire patterns. Like this green one, this is a painting I did about 10 years ago, but it has some — see, in the upper third — there are these moires and interference patterns that are radio kind of imagery. And that's something that in painting I've never seen done. I've never seen a representation of a kind of radio interference patterns, which are so ubiquitous and such an important part of our lives.JH: Is that a literal part of the image, or is my eye making that interference pattern — is my eye completing that interference pattern?TS: It is the paint actually, makes it real. It's really manifested there. If I throw a very concentric circle, or concentric ellipse, it just dutifully makes these evenly spaced lines, which get closer and closer together, which describes how gravity works. There's something very appealing about the exactitude of science that I really enjoy. And I love the shapes that I see in scientific observations and apparatus, especially astronomical forms and the idea of the vastness of it, the scale, is very interesting to me.My focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology. Some of these paintings, when you look at them very close, odd things appear that really look like horses or birds or crocodiles, elephants. There are lots of things that appear. When you look into it, it's sort of like looking at cloud patterns, but sometimes they're very modeled and highly rendered. And then there are all these forms that we don't know what they are, but they're equally well-resolved and complex. So I think, conceivably, those could be predictive. Because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we're familiar with in biology, it's also making other forms that we're not familiar with. And maybe it's the kind of forms we'll discover underneath the surface of Mars, where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface.JH: Oh, let's hope so. Oh, my God, let's. Oh, please, yes. Oh, I'm so there. You know, it seems at this stage in your life, you also very personally are in this state of confrontation with a sort of dissonant — I suppose it's an electromagnetic force that somehow governs your Parkinson's and this creative force that is both the artist who is in the here and now and this sort of arc of your whole life. Is that relevant to your work?TS: As it turns out, this device kind of comes in handy, because I don't have to have the fine motor skills to do, that I can operate slides, which is more of a mental process. I'm looking at it and making decisions: It needs more red, it needs more blue, it needs a different shape. And so I make these creative decisions and can execute them in a much, much simpler way. I mean, I've got the symptoms. I guess Parkinson's kind of creeps up over the years, but at a certain point you start seeing the symptoms. In my case, my left hand has a significant tremor and my left leg also. I'm left-handed, and so I draw. All my creations really start on small drawings, which I have thousands of, and it's my way of just thinking. I draw with a simple pencil, and at first, the Parkinson's was really upsetting, because I couldn't get the pencil to stand still.JH: So you're not a gatekeeper for these forces. You don't think of yourself as the master of these forces. You think of yourself as the servant.TS: Nature is — well, it's a godsend. It just has so much in it. And I think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature, humans are of the universe. The universe is in our mind, and our minds are in the universe. And we are expressions of the universe, basically. As humans, ultimately being part of the universe, we're kind of the spokespeople or the observer part of the constituency of the universe. And to interface with it, with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere act and show what they can do, giving them pigment and paint just like an artist, it's a good ally. It's a terrific studio assistant.JH: Well, I love the idea that somewhere within this idea of fine motion and control with the traditional skills that you have with your hand, some sort of more elemental force gets revealed, and that's the beauty here. Tom, thank you so much. It's been really, really great.TS: Thank you, John.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_shannon_the_painter_and_the_pendulum
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"I am going to speak about corruption, but I would like to juxtapose two different things. One is the large global economy, the large globalized economy, and the other one is the small, and very limited, capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern, to shape, this economy. Because there is this asymmetry, which creates, basically, failing governance. Failing governance in many areas: in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment, in the area of exploitation of women and children, in the area of climate change, in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy, which is operating in a worldwide arena. And I think corruption, and the fight against corruption, and the impact of corruption, is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what I mean with this failure of governance.Let me talk about my own experience. I used to work as the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi for East Africa. At that time, I noticed that corruption, that grand corruption, that systematic corruption, was undermining everything we were trying to do. And therefore, I began to not only try to protect the work of the World Bank, our own projects, our own programs against corruption, but in general, I thought, ""We need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption."" And as soon as I started this work, I received a memorandum from the World Bank, from the legal department first, in which they said, ""You are not allowed to do this. You are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries. This is forbidden by the charter of the World Bank, so I want you to stop your doings.""In the meantime, I was chairing donor meetings, for instance, in which the various donors, and many of them like to be in Nairobi — it is true, it is one of the unsafest cities of the world, but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable. And in these donor meetings, I noticed that many of the worst projects — which were put forward by our clients, by the governments, by promoters, many of them representing suppliers from the North — that the worst projects were realized first. Let me give you an example: a huge power project, 300 million dollars, to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable, and one of the most beautiful, areas of western Kenya. And we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits: It had no clients, nobody would buy the electricity there, nobody was interested in irrigation projects. To the contrary, we knew that this project would destroy the environment: It would destroy riparian forests, which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups, the Samburu and the Turkana in this area. So everybody knew this is a, not a useless project, this is an absolute damaging, a terrible project — not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars, and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools, like hospitals and so on. And yet, we all rejected this project, none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it, and it was the first project to be implemented.The good projects, which we as a donor community would take under our wings, they took years, you know, you had too many studies, and very often they didn't succeed. But these bad projects, which were absolutely damaging — for the economy for many generations, for the environment, for thousands of families who had to be resettled — they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks, of supplier agencies, of insurance agencies — like in Germany, Hermes, and so on — and they came back very, very quickly, driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the North. Now, these suppliers were our big companies. They were the actors of this global market, which I mentioned in the beginning. They were the Siemenses of this world, coming from France, from the UK, from Japan, from Canada, from Germany, and they were systematically driven by systematic, large-scale corruption. We are not talking about 50,000 dollars here, or 100,000 dollars there, or one million dollars there. No, we are talking about 10 million, 20 million dollars on the Swiss bank accounts, on the bank accounts of Liechtenstein, of the president's ministers, the high officials in the para-statal sectors.This was the reality which I saw, and not only one project like that: I saw, I would say, over the years I worked in Africa, I saw hundreds of projects like this. And so, I became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries, which is the main reason for the misery, for the poverty, for the conflicts, for the violence, for the desperation in many of these countries. That we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line, that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world, twice that number, more than two billion people without sanitation and so on, and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children, still, child mortality of more than 10 million people every year, children dying before they are five years old: The cause of this is, to a large extent, grand corruption.Now, why did the World Bank not let me do this work? I found out afterwards, after I left, under a big fight, the World Bank. The reason was that the members of the World Bank thought that foreign bribery was okay, including Germany. In Germany, foreign bribery was allowed. It was even tax-deductible. No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany, but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia, everywhere, systematically bribed. Not all of them, but most of them. And this is the phenomenon which I call failing governance, because when I then came to Germany and started this little NGO here in Berlin, at the Villa Borsig, we were told, ""You cannot stop our German exporters from bribing, because we will lose our contracts. We will lose to the French, we will lose to the Swedes, we'll lose to the Japanese."" And therefore, there was a indeed a prisoner's dilemma, which made it very difficult for an individual company, an individual exporting country to say, ""We are not going to continue this deadly, disastrous habit of large companies to bribe.""So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure, because even the powerful government, which we have in Germany, comparatively, was not able to say, ""We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad."" They needed help, and the large companies themselves have this dilemma. Many of them didn't want to bribe. Many of the German companies, for instance, believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price, so they are very competitive. They are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are, but they were not allowed to show their strengths, because the world was eaten up by grand corruption.And this is why I'm telling you this: Civil society rose to the occasion. We had this small NGO, Transparency International. They began to think of an escape route from this prisoner's dilemma, and we developed concepts of collective action, basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table, explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing, and to make a long story short, we managed to eventually get Germany to sign together with the other OECD countries and a few other exporters.In 1997, a convention, under the auspices of the OECD, which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery. (Applause) Well, thank you. I mean, it's interesting, in doing this, we had to sit together with the companies. We had here in Berlin, at the Aspen Institute on the Wannsee, we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry, and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery. In the first session — we had three sessions over the course of two years. And President von Weizsäcker, by the way, chaired one of the sessions, the first one, to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs, who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations. And in the first session, they all said, ""This is not bribery, what we are doing."" This is customary there. This is what these other cultures demand. They even applaud it. In fact, [unclear] still says this today. And so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing. But in the second session, they admitted already that they would never do this, what they are doing in these other countries, here in Germany, or in the U.K., and so on. Cabinet ministers would admit this. And in the final session, at the Aspen Institute, we had them all sign an open letter to the Kohl government, at the time, requesting that they participate in the OECD convention.And this is, in my opinion, an example of soft power, because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us. We had a longer-term time perspective. We had a broader, geographically much wider, constituency we were trying to defend. And that's why the law has changed. That's why Siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that's why MIN is in the trouble they are in. In some other countries, the OECD convention is not yet properly enforced. And, again, civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment.In London, for instance, where the BAE got away with a huge corruption case, which the Serious Fraud Office tried to prosecute, 100 million British pounds, every year for ten years, to one particular official of one particular friendly country, who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment. This case, they are not prosecuting in the UK. Why? Because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of Great Britain. Civil society is pushing, civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem, also in the U.K., and also in Japan, which is not properly enforcing, and so on.In Germany, we are pushing the ratification of the UN convention, which is a subsequent convention. We are, Germany, is not ratifying. Why? Because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies. In Germany, we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant, but you are allowed to bribe a deputy. This is, under German law, allowed, and the members of our parliament don't want to change this, and this is why they can't sign the U.N. convention against foreign bribery — one of they very, very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world, but not able to ratify the convention, which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world.I see my time is ticking. Let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened. I believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption, one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance. By now, the United Nations is totally on our side. The World Bank has turned from Saulus to Paulus; under Wolfensohn, they became, I would say, the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world. Most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on. And this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem, in the development of remedies, in the implementation of reforms, and then later, in the monitoring of reforms.Of course, if civil society organizations want to play that role, they have to grow into this responsibility. Not all civil society organizations are good. The Ku Klux Klan is an NGO. So, we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself. They have to have a much more transparent financial governance. They have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations. We also need much more competence of civil society leaders. This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin, because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general, do not focus enough, yet, on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society.But what I'm saying from my very practical experience: If civil society does it right and joins the other actors — in particular, governments, governments and their international institutions, but also large international actors, in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility — then in this magical triangle between civil society, government and private sector, there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_eigen_how_to_expose_the_corrupt
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"Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead through the food that they eat.My name's Jamie Oliver. I'm 34 years old. I'm from Essex in England and for the last seven years I've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I'm not a doctor; I'm a chef, I don't have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education.I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you're at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today? Put your hands up. You can continue to put your hands up, aunties and uncles as well. Most of you. OK. We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we've built around them. Two-thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese. You lot, you're all right, but we'll get you eventually, don't worry.(Laughter)The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it; it's on the front page of every paper, CNN. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God's sake. Right?(Laughter)(Applause)Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that. Fact: diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today. This is a global problem. It's a catastrophe. It's sweeping the world. England is right behind you, as usual.(Laughter)I know they were close, but not that close. We need a revolution. Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health. Think about smoking. It costs way less than obesity now. Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your health-care bills, 150 billion dollars a year. In 10 years, it's set to double: 300 billion dollars a year. Let's be honest, guys, you haven't got that cash.(Laughter)I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in. We need it. The time is now. We're in a tipping-point moment. I've been doing this for seven years. I've been trying in America for seven years. Now is the time when it's ripe — ripe for the picking. I went to the eye of the storm. I went to West Virginia, the most unhealthy state in America. Or it was last year. We've got a new one this year, but we'll work on that next season.(Laughter)Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town. I wanted to put heart and soul and people, your public, around the statistics that we've become so used to. I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about: your public, your children. I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany. She's 16 years old. She's got six years to live because of the food that she's eaten. She's the third generation of Americans that hasn't grown up within a food environment where they've been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom's mom. She has six years to live. She's eating her liver to death.Stacy, the Edwards family. This is a normal family, guys. Stacy does her best, but she's third-generation as well; she was never taught to cook at home or at school. The family's obese. Justin here, 12 years old, he's 350 pounds. He gets bullied, for God's sake. The daughter there, Katie, she's four years old. She's obese before she even gets to primary school. Marissa, she's all right, she's one of your lot. But you know what? Her father, who was obese, died in her arms, And then the second most important man in her life, her uncle, died of obesity, and now her step-dad is obese. You see, the thing is, obesity and diet-related disease doesn't just hurt the people that have it; it's all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters.Pastor Steve: an inspirational man, one of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia. He's at the sharp knife-edge of this problem. He has to bury the people, OK? And he's fed up with it. He's fed up with burying his friends, his family, his community. Come winter, three times as many people die. He's sick of it. This is preventable disease. Waste of life. By the way, this is what they get buried in. We're not geared up to do this. Can't even get them out the door, and I'm being serious. Can't even get them there. Forklift.OK, I see it as a triangle, OK? This is our landscape of food. I need you to understand it. You've probably heard all this before. Over the last 30 years, what's happened that's ripped the heart out of this country? Let's be frank and honest. Well, modern-day life.Let's start with the Main Street. Fast food has taken over the whole country; we know that. The big brands are some of the most important powers, powerful powers, in this country.(Sighs)Supermarkets as well. Big companies. Big companies. Thirty years ago, most of the food was largely local and largely fresh. Now it's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives, extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story. Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem. Labeling is a massive problem. The labeling in this country is a disgrace. The industry wants to self-police themselves. What, in this kind of climate? They don't deserve it. How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of so much sugar?Home. The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food culture, what made our society. That is not happening anymore. And you know, as we go to work and as life changes, and as life always evolves, we kind of have to look at it holistically — step back for a moment, and re-address the balance. It hasn't happened for 30 years, OK? I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now; the Edwards family.(Video) Jamie Oliver: Let's have a talk. This stuff goes through you and your family's body every week. And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. How are you feeling?Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now. But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn't going to get them there. But I'm killing them.JO: Yes you are. You are. But we can stop that. Normal. Let's get on schools, something that I'm fairly much a specialist in. OK, school. What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc. You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK? But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK? School food is something that most kids — 31 million a day, actually — have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances.(Laughter)Before I crack into my rant, which I'm sure you're waiting for —(Laughter)I need to say one thing, and it's so important in, hopefully, the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months. The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America — I offer myself as their ambassador. I'm not slagging them off. They're doing the best they can do. They're doing their best. But they're doing what they're told, and what they're being told to do is wrong. The system is highly run by accountants; there's not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business. There's a problem: If you're not a food expert, and you've got tight budgets and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative, you can't duck and dive and write different things around things. If you're an accountant, and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit.Now, the reality is, the food that your kids get every day is fast food, it's highly processed, there's not enough fresh food in there at all. You know, the amount of additives, E numbers, ingredients you wouldn't believe — there's not enough veggies at all. French fries are considered a vegetable. Pizza for breakfast. They don't even get crockery. Knives and forks? No, they're too dangerous. They have scissors in the classroom, but knives and forks? No. And the way I look at it is: If you don't have knives and forks in your school, you're purely endorsing, from a state level, fast food, because it's handheld. And yes, by the way, it is fast food: It's sloppy Joes, it's burgers, it's wieners, it's pizzas, it's all of that stuff.(Sighs)Ten percent of what we spend on health care, as I said earlier, is on obesity, and it's going to double. We're not teaching our kids. There's no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school, OK? We don't teach kids about food, right? And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England.(Video) Who knows what this is?Child: Potatoes.Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is?Child: Broccoli?JO: What about this? Our good old friend.Child: Celery.JO: No. What do you think this is?Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No.JO: Immediately you get a really clear sense of ""Do the kids know anything about where food comes from?"" Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear?JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don't know.JO: If the kids don't know what stuff is, then they will never eat it.(Laughter)JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. Guess what fixed that. Two one-hour sessions. We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period.(Applause)I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we're in, guys, OK? I want to talk about something so basic as milk. Every kid has the right to milk at school. Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch, right? They'll be having two bottles, OK? And most kids do. But milk ain't good enough anymore. Don't get me wrong, I support milk — but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings, colorings and sugar in milk, more kids will drink it. Yeah.Obviously now that's going to catch on the apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they'll eat more as well. Do you know what I mean? For me, there isn't any need to flavor the milk. Okay? There's sugar in everything. I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. It's in everything. Even the milk hasn't escaped the kind of modern-day problems. There's our milk. There's our carton. In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop, and they are having two a day. So, let me just show you. We've got one kid, here — having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. You know, there's your week. There's your month. And I've taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. Now, I don't know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That's my belief.(Applause)(Applause ends)Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That's the good news. It's very, very preventable. So, let's just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. Okay so, in my world, what do we need to do? Here is the thing, right, it cannot just come from one source. To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, ""In 10 years' time, the history of your children's lives, happiness — and let's not forget, you're clever if you eat well, you know you're going to live longer — all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?""So, supermarkets. Where else do you shop so religiously? Week in, week out. How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? Love them. They just sell us what we want. All right. They owe us to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. They need to help us shop. They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. This is not expensive. It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. I know, easier said than done. It's the future. It's the only way.Fast food. With the fast-food industry you know, it's very competitive. I've had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants. I know how they do it. I mean, basically they've weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z, and everyone loves them, right? So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry, and over a five, six, seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar and all the other non-food ingredients.Now, also, back to the sort of big brands: labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted. OK, school. Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site, OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah?(Applause)Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills.(Applause)That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. If you can cook, time doesn't matter. The workplace, we haven't really talked about it. You know, it's now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. The staff are the moms and dads of America's children. Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she'd be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. Definitely they shouldn't be left out. Let's go back to the home.Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it's so achievable. You can care and be commercial. Absolutely. But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. And for me, it's quite romantic, but it's about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that's the whole population of America. Romantic, yes, but most importantly, it's about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. We've got to put back what's been lost. Huntington's Kitchen. Huntington, where I made this program, we've got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. I truly believe that change will happen. Huntington's Kitchen. I work with a community. I worked in the schools. I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area from the junk, onto the fresh food: six-and-a-half grand per school.(Applause)That's all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school. The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay? This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population, and it's people on people. You know, it's local cooks teaching local people. It's free cooking lessons, guys, in the Main Street. This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools — farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education — there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, but there's no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do.(Applause)And look, I know it's weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. All I can say is: I care. I'm a father, and I love this country. And I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it, other people will follow. It's incredibly important.(Audience) Yeah!(Applause)When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren't, I thought ""If I had a magic wand, what would I do?"" And I thought, ""You know what? I'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America."" And a month later, TED phoned me up and gave me this award. I'm here. So, my wish. Dyslexic, so I'm a bit slow. My wish is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause continues)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver
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"About a year and a half ago, Stephen Lawler, who also gave a talk here at TED in 2007 on Virtual Earth, brought me over to become the architect of Bing Maps, which is Microsoft's online-mapping effort. In the past two and a half, we've been very hard at work on redefining the way maps work online. And we really are seeing this in very different terms from the kind of mapping and direction site that one is used to.So, the first thing that you might notice about the mapping site is just the fluidity of the zooming and the panning, which, if you're familiar at all with Seadragon, that's where it comes from.Mapping is, of course, not just about cartography, it's also about imagery. So, as we zoom-in beyond a certain level this resolves into a kind of Sim City-like virtual view at 45 degrees. This can be viewed from any of the cardinal directions to show you the 3D structure of the city, all the facades. Now, we see this space, this three-dimensional environment, as being a canvas on which all sorts of applications can play out, and map's directions are really just one of them.If you click on this, you'll see some of the ones that we've put out, just in the past couple of months since we've launched. So, for example, a couple of days after the disaster in Haiti, we had an earthquake map that showed before and after pictures from the sky. This wonderful one which I don't have time to show you is taking hyper-local blogs in real time and mapping those stories, those entries to the places that are referred to on the blogs. It's wonderful.But I'm going to show you some more candy sort of stuff.So, we see the imagery, of course, not stopping at the sky. These little green bubbles represent photosynths that users have made. I'm not going to dive into them either, but photosynths are integrated into the map. Everything that's cased in blue is an area where we've taken imagery on the ground as well.And so, when you fly down —(Applause)Thank you. When you fly down to the ground, and you see this kind of panoramic imagery, the first thing that you might notice is that it's not just a picture, there's just as much three-dimensional understanding of this environment as there is of the three-dimensional city from above, so if I click on something to get a closer view of it, then, the fact that that transition looks as it does, is a function of all of that geometry, all of that 3D understanding behind this model.Now, I'll show you a fun app that — we've been working on a collaboration with our friends at Flickr. This takes Flickr, georegistered imagery and uses photosynth-like processes to connect that imagery to our imagery, so — I'm not sure if that's the one I actually meant to pull up, but —(Laughter)But notice — this is, of course, a popular tourist site, and there are lots of photos around here, and these photos are all taken at different times. So this one was taken around five. So that's the Flickr photo, that's our imagery. So you really see how this kind of crowd-sourced imagery is integrating, in a very deep way, into the map itself.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)There are several reasons why this is interesting and one of them, of course, is time travel. And I'm not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here, but there are some with horses and carriages and so on as well. But what's cool about this is that, not only is it augmenting this visual representation of the world with things that are coming in from users, but it also is the foundation for augmented reality, and that's something that I'll be showing you more of in just a moment.Now I just made a transition indoors. That's also interesting. OK, notice there's now a roof above us. We're inside the Pike Place Market. And this is something that we're able to do with a backpack camera, so, we're now not only imaging in the street with this camera on tops of cars, but we're also imaging inside. And from here, we're able to do the same sorts of registration, not only of still images, but also of video.So this is something that we're now going to try for the first time, live, and this is really, truly, very frightening.(Laughter)OK.(Ringing)All right, guys, are you there?(Noise)All right. I'm hitting it. I'm punching play. I'm live. All right. There we go. So, these are our friends in Pike Place Market, the lab.(Applause)So they're broadcasting this live. OK, George, can you pan back over to the corner market? Because I want to show points of interest. No, no. The other way. Yeah, yeah, back to the corner, back to the corner. I don't want to see you guys yet. OK, OK, back to the corner, back to the corner, back to the corner. OK, never mind.What I wanted to show you was these points of interest over here on top of the image because what that gives you a sense of is the way, if you're actually on the spot, you can think about this — this is taking a step in addition to augmented reality.What the hell are you guys — oh, sorry.(Laughter)We're doing two different — OK, I'm hanging up now. We're doing two different things here. One of them is to take that real ...(Laughter)All right, let me just take a moment and thank the team. They've done a fantastic job of pulling this together.(Applause)I'm going to abandon them now and walk back outside. And while I walk outside, I'll just mention that here we're using this for telepresence, but you can equally well use this on the spot, for augmented reality. When you use it on the spot, it means that you're able to bring all of that metadata and information about the world to you. So here, we're taking the extra step of also broadcasting it. That was being broadcast, by the way, on a 4G network from the market.All right, and now there's one last TED talk that Microsoft has given in the past several years. And that's Curtis Wong, WorldWide Telescope. So, we're going to head over to the dumpsters, where it's traditional, after a long day at the market, to go out for a break, but also stare up at the sky. This is the integration of WorldWide Telescope into our maps.(Applause)This is the current — thank you — this is the current time. If we scrub the time, then we can see how the sky will look at different times, and we can get all of this very detailed information about different times, different dates: Let's move the moon a little higher in the sky, maybe change the date. I would like to kind of zoom in on the moon. So, this is an astronomically complete representation of the sky integrated right into the Earth.All right now, I've overrun my time, so I've got to stop. Thank you all very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera
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"Someone once said that politics is, of course, ""showbiz for ugly people."" So, on that basis, I feel like I've really arrived. The other thing to think of is what an honor it is, as a politician, to give a TED talk, particularly here in the U.K., where the reputation of politics, with the expenses scandal, has sunk so low.There was even a story recently that scientists had thought about actually replacing rats in their experiments with politicians. And someone asked,""Why?"" and they said, ""Well, there's no shortage of politicians, no one really minds what happens to them and, after all, there are some things that rats just won't do."" (Laughter)Now, I know you all love data, so I'm starting with a data-rich slide. This, I think, is the most important fact to bear in mind in British politics or American politics, and that is: We have run out of money. We have vast budget deficits. This is my global public debt clock, and, as you can see, it's 32 trillion and counting.And I think what this leads to is a very simple recognition, that there's one question in politics at the moment above all other, and it's this one: How do we make things better without spending more money? Because there isn't going to be a lot of money to improve public services, or to improve government, or to improve so many of the things that politicians talk about. So what follows from that is that if you think it's all about money — you can only measure success in public services in health care and education and policing by spending more money, you can only measure progress by spending money — you're going to have a pretty miserable time.But if you think a whole lot of other things matter that lead up to well being — things like your family relationships, friendship, community, values — then, actually, this is an incredibly exciting time to be in politics. And the really simple argument I want to make tonight, the really straightforward argument is this: That if we combine the right political philosophy, the right political thinking, with the incredible information revolution that has taken place, and that all of you know so much more about than I do, I think there's an incredible opportunity to actually remake politics, remake government, remake public services, and achieve what's up on that slide, which is a big increase in our well-being. That's the argument I want to make tonight.So, starting with the political philosophy. Now I'm not saying for a minute that British Conservatives have all the answers. Of course we don't. But there are two things at heart that I think drive a conservative philosophy that are really relevant to this whole debate. The first is this: We believe that if you give people more power and control over their lives, if you give people more choice, if you put them in the driving seat, then actually, you can create a stronger and better society. And if you marry this fact with the incredible abundance of information that we have in our world today, I think you can completely, as I've said, remake politics, remake government, remake your public services.The second thing we believe is we believe in going with the grain of human nature. Politics and politicians will only succeed if they actually try and treat with people as they are, rather than as they would like them to be. Now, if you combine this very simple, very conservative thought — go with the grain of human nature — with all the advances in behavioral economics, some of which we were just hearing about, again, I think we can achieve a real increase in well-being, in happiness, in a stronger society without necessarily having to spend a whole lot more money.Now, why do I think now is the moment to make this argument? Well, I'm afraid you're going to suffer a short, condensed history lesson about what I would say are the three passages of history: the pre-bureaucratic age, the bureaucratic age and what we now live in, which I think is a post-bureaucratic age. A simpler way of thinking of it is that we have gone from a world of local control, then we went to a world of central control, and now we're in a world of people control. Local power, central power, now, people power.Now, here is King Cnut, king a thousand years ago. Thought he could turn back the waves; couldn't turn back the waves. Couldn't actually turn back very much, because if you were king a thousand years ago, while it still took hours and hours and weeks and weeks to traverse your own country, there wasn't much you were in charge of. You weren't in charge of policing, justice, education, health, welfare. You could just about go to war and that was about it. This was the pre-bureaucratic age, an age in which everything had to be local. You had to have local control because there was no nationally-available information because travel was so restricted. So this was the pre-bureaucratic age.Next part of the cold history lesson, the lovely picture of the British Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, all sorts of transport, travel information were possible, and this gave birth to, what I like to call, the bureaucratic age. And hopefully this slide is going to morph beautifully. There we are. Suddenly, you have the big, strong, central state. It was able — but only it was able — to organize health care, education, policing, justice. And it was a world of, as I say, not local power, but now central power. It had sucked all that power up from the localities. It was able to do that itself.The next great stage, which all of you are so familiar with: the massive information revolution. Just consider this one fact: One hundred years ago, sending these 10 words cost 50 dollars. Right now, here we are linked up to Long Beach and everywhere else, and all these secret locations for a fraction of that cost, and we can send and receive huge quantities of information without it costing anything. So we're now living in a post-bureaucratic age, where genuine people power is possible.Now, what does this mean for our politics, for our public services, for our government? Well I can't, in the time I've got, give huge numbers of examples, but let me just give a few of the ways that life can change. And this is so obvious, in a way, because you think about how all of you have changed the way we shop, the way we travel, the way that business is done. That is already happened; the information and Internet revolution has actually gone all the way through our societies in so many different ways, but it hasn't, in every way, yet touched our government.So, how could this happen? Well, I think there are three chief ways that it should make an enormous difference: in transparency, in greater choice and in accountability, in giving us that genuine people power. If we take transparency, here is one of my favorite websites, the Missouri Accountability Portal. In the old days, only the government could hold the information, and only a few elected people could try and grab that information and question it and challenge it. Now here, on one website, one state in America, every single dollar spent by that government is searchable, is analyzable, is checkable.Think of the huge change that means: Any business that wants to bid for a government contract can see what currently is being spent. Anyone thinking, ""I could do that service better, I could deliver it cheaper,"" it's all available there. We have only, in government and in politics, started to scratch the surface of what people are doing in the commercial world with the information revolution. So, complete transparency will make a huge difference. In this country, if we win the election, we are going to make all government spending over 25,000 pounds transparent and available online, searchable for anyone to see. We're going to make every contract — we're announcing this today — available on the Internet so anyone can see what the terms are, what the conditions are, driving huge value for money, but also huge increases, I believe, in well-being as well.Choice. Now you all shop online, compare online, do everything online, and yet this revolution has hardly touched the surface of public services like education, or health care or policing, and you're going to see this change massively. We should be making this change with the information revolution in our country, with searchable health sites, so you can see what operations work out properly, what records doctors have, the cleanliness of hospitals, who does best at infection control — all of the information that would once be locked in the Department of Health is now available for all of us to see.And the third of these big changes: accountability. This, I think, is a huge change. It is a crime map. This is a crime map from Chicago. So, instead of having a situation where only the police have the information about which crimes are committed where, and we have to employ people in government to try and hold the police to account, suddenly, we've got this vast opportunity for people power, where we, as citizens, can see what crimes are being committed — where, when and by whom — and we can hold the police to account. And you can see this looks a bit like a chef's hat, but actually that's an assault, the one in blue. You can see what crime is committed where, and you have the opportunity to hold your police force to account. So those three ways — transparency, accountability and choice — will make a huge difference.Now I also said the other principle that I think we should work on is understanding of people, is recognizing that going with the grain of human nature you can achieve so much more. Now, we're got a huge revolution in understanding of why people behave in the way that they do, and a great opportunity to put that knowledge and information to greater use. We're working with some of these people. We're being advised by some of these people, as was said, to try and bring all the experience to book.Let me just give you one example that I think is incredibly simple, and I love. We want to get people to be more energy efficient. Why? It cuts fuel poverty, it cuts their bills, and it cuts carbon emissions at the same time. How do you do it? Well, we've had government information campaigns over the years when they tell you to switch off the lights when you leave the home. We even had — one government minister once told us to brush our teeth in the dark. I don't think they lasted very long. Look at what this does. This is a simple piece of behavioral economics. The best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill is to show them their own spending, to show them what their neighbors are spending, and then show what an energy conscious neighbor is spending. That sort of behavioral economics can transform people's behavior in a way that all the bullying and all the information and all the badgering from a government cannot possibly achieve. Other examples are recycling. We all know we need to recycle more. How do we make it happen? All the proof from America is that actually, if you pay people to recycle, if you give them a carrot rather than a stick, you can transform their behavior.So what does all this add up to? Here are my two favorite U.S. speeches of the last 50 years. Obviously, here we have JFK with that incredibly simple and powerful formulation, ""Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,"" an incredibly noble sentiment. But when he made that speech, what could you do to build the stronger, better society? You could fight for your country, you could die for your country, you could serve in your country's civil service, but you didn't really have the information and the knowledge and the ability to help build the stronger society in the way that you do now.And I think an even more wonderful speech, which I'm going to read a big chunk of, which sums up what I said at the beginning about believing there is more to life than money, and more that we should try and measure than money. And it is Robert Kennedy's beautiful description of why gross national product captures so little: It ""does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.""Again, a sentiment that was so noble and beautifully put 40 years ago, and a beautiful dream 40 years ago, but now with the huge advances in information technology, with the massive changes in behavioral economics, with all that we know about how you advance well-being, that if we combine those insights of giving power to people, and using information to make that possible, and using the insight of going with the grain of human nature, while at the same time, understanding why people behave in the way they do, it is a dream more easy to realize today than it was when it was made in that beautiful speech 40 years ago.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_cameron
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"I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word ""disabled"" to see what I'd find.Let me read you the entry. ""Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable."" I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past ""mangled,"" and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed.You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured.So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. Here's the updated version of this entry. Unfortunately, it's not much better. I find the last two words under ""Near Antonyms,"" particularly unsettling: ""whole"" and ""wholesome.""So, it's not just about the words. It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead?One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands — different colors, you know — to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything — I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. And, one day, he came in to my session — exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions — and he said to me, ""Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks.""Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them — not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phrase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. Implicit in this phrase of ""overcoming adversity"" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It's part of our life. And I tend to think of it like my shadow. Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle.There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions.In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself.By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. And, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it.This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. Conflict is the genesis of creation. From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. So, we can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. Maybe we can see it as change. Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet.I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. Now, who's normal? There's no normal. There's common, there's typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? (Laughter) I don't think so. If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility — or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous — we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community.Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. They didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. It was summertime: I had shorts on. I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, ""Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins."" And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is.And I said, ""I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you.""He said, ""Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb."" (Laughter) Oh, that guy. And, but of course, actually, it did click.This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer — this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.He said to me, ""I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since."" (Laughter) (Applause)The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. And he called this part of the course the X Factor, the potential of the human will. No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, ""In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve.""See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. And it's because of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me.See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. If you can hand somebody the key to their own power — the human spirit is so receptive — if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You're teaching them to open doors for themselves. In fact, the exact meaning of the word ""educate"" comes from the root word ""educe."" It means ""to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential."" So again, which potential do we want to bring out?There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. It's called the streaming trials. We call it ""tracking"" here in the States. It's separating students from A, B, C, D and so on. And the ""A students"" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were ""A's,"" told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level.And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the ""A students"" and told them they were ""D's."" And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. Those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. A crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. They were simply told, ""These are the 'A-students,' these are the 'D-students.'"" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them.So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being.I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called ""The God Who Only Knows Four Words"": ""Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me.'""Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_adversity
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"I'm going to talk today about energy and climate. And that might seem a bit surprising, because my full-time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. But energy and climate are extremely important to these people; in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. The climate getting worse means that many years, their crops won't grow: there will be too much rain, not enough rain; things will change in ways their fragile environment simply can't support. And that leads to starvation, it leads to uncertainty, it leads to unrest. So, the climate changes will be terrible for them.Also, the price of energy is very important to them. In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. Now, the price of energy has come down over time. Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s, we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning; we can make modern materials and do so many things. And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. But as we make it cheaper — and let's say, let's go for making it twice as cheap — we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2.CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses.Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be, and where the positive feedbacks are — there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. And so that's a big challenge. It's very different than saying, ""We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under."" This is something that has to get to zero.Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year — over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons. For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. It's been constantly going up. It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero.This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication. So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. So let's look at each one of these, and see how we can get this down to zero. Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero.(Laughter)That's back from high school algebra. But let's take a look.First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3.The second factor is the services we use. This encompasses everything: the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. These are very good things. Getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. And it's a great thing for this number to go up. In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, overall, that will more than double the services delivered per person. Here we have a very basic service: Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework? And, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their schoolwork under the street lamps.Now, efficiency, ""E,"" the energy for each service — here, finally we have some good news. We have something that's not going up. Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings — there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. There are other services, like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. And so overall, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it.So let's look at this fourth factor — this is going to be a key one — and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. So the question is: Can you actually get that to zero? If you burn coal, no. If you burn natural gas, no. Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. So we need energy miracles.Now, when I use the term ""miracle,"" I don't mean something that's impossible. The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. The Internet and its services are a miracle. So the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. Usually, we don't have a deadline where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline.Now, I thought, ""How could I really capture this? Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here?"" I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people enjoyed that.(Laughter)It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitoes. With energy, all I could come up with is this. I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. So here we have some natural fireflies. I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar.(Laughter)Now, there's all sorts of gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much. We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability. And although there's many directions that people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better. But my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges.Let's look first at burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. What you need to do there seems like it might be simple, but it's not. And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. Now, we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level. But getting up to that full percentage — that will be very tricky. And agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue: Who's going to be sure? Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that's a tough one.Next would be nuclear. It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. And then what do you do with the waste? Although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on.The last three of the five, I've grouped together. These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. And they actually — although it's great they don't require fuel — they have some disadvantages. One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of times more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. Also, these are intermittent sources. The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. So we've got big cost challenges here. We have transmission challenges; for example, say this energy source is outside your country, you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere.And, finally, this storage problem. To dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries made — for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything — and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses. What I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery.Now, how are we going to go forward on this — what's the right approach? Is it a Manhattan Project? What's the thing that can get us there? Well, we need lots of companies working on this — hundreds. In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. A lot of them, you'll look at and say, ""They're crazy."" That's good. And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. Vinod Khosla is investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. Innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising.The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium — the one percent, which is the U235 — we decided, ""Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238."" It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right materials approach, this looks like it would work.And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. So instead of worrying about them, you just take that, it's a great thing. It breeds this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. You see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. That would power the US for hundreds of years. And simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet.So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? What should our report card look like? Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. That really is very important, that we get there. And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries — still some agriculture; hopefully, we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. The other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and are in the process of getting it elsewhere? That's super important. That's a key element of making that report card.Backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? Well, again, it should have the two elements. We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and therefore, the less the temperature. But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs.These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. The Al Gore book, ""Our Choice,"" and the David MacKay book, ""Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air."" They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. There's a lot that has to come together.So this is a wish. It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years — I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented — this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact. If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the US and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all, the lives of those two billion will be far worse.So what do we have to do? What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? We need to go for more research funding. When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. They should discuss this innovation agenda. You'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. We do need the market incentives — CO2 tax, cap and trade — something that gets that price signal out there. We need to get the message out. We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve.Thank you.(Applause) (Applause ends)Thank you.Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)CA: Thank you. So to understand more about TerraPower. I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is?Bill Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions. And even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. The tough thing is building the pilot reactor — finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it.CA: So to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground, almost like a vertical column of nuclear fuel, of this spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down?BG: That's right. Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong, where you're opening it up and moving things in and out — that's not good. So if you have very —(Laughter)very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in — just think of it as a log — put it down and not have those same complexities. And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done.CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution.BG: Yeah; what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there — there's a lot less waste under this approach — then you can actually take that and put it into another one and burn that. And we start out, actually, by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry-casking by reactors — that's our fuel to begin with. So the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process.CA: You're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities. Where is there most interest in actually doing something with this?BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called ""nuclear."" So we've got a lot of interest. People from the company have been in Russia, India, China. I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. So I'm optimistic. The French and Japanese have done some work. This is a variant on something that has been done. It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built.CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live?BG: Well, we need — for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. And TerraPower — if things go well, which is wishing for a lot — could easily meet that. And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies — we need it to be hundreds — who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. We certainly need one to succeed.CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changers, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there?BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal. And so, if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation, the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own.CA: If this doesn't work, then what? Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable?BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been overeating, and you're about to have a heart attack. Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. Now, that's just an insurance policy; you hope you don't need to do that. Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about: Should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect?CA: Climate skeptics: If you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong?BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps. The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. Are they saying there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. The main problem we have here — it's kind of like with AIDS: you make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later.And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later, and a somewhat uncertain pain thing. In fact, the IPCC report — that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, ""OK, that isn't that big of a deal."" The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, ""OK, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2. But I guess I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than what's come before.""(Applause)CA: So that would be your response to the Bjørn Lomborg argument, basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do.BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece — say the US should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now — it's not that dramatic. It shouldn't take away from other things. The thing you get into big money on, and reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that — that, to me, mostly is a waste. Unless you're very close, and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap, I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. If the trade-off you get into is, ""Let's make energy super expensive,"" then the rich can afford that. I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. The disaster is for that two billion.And even Lomborg has changed. His shtick now is, ""Why isn't the R&D getting more discussed?"" He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. The R&D piece — it's crazy how little it's funded.CA: Well, Bill, I suspect I speak on behalf of most people here to say I really hope your wish comes true. Thank you so much.BG: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates
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"I want to talk about my investigations into what technology means in our lives — not just our immediate life, but in the cosmic sense, in the kind of long history of the world and our place in the world. What is this stuff? What is the significance? And so, I want to kind of go through my little story of what I found out.One of the first things I started to investigate was the history of the name of technology. In the United States, there is a State of the Union address given by every president since 1790. And each one of those is kind of summing up the most important things for the United States at that time. If you search for the word ""technology,"" it was not used until 1952. So, technology was sort of absent from everybody's thinking until 1952, which happened to be the year of my birth. And obviously, technology had existed before then, but we weren't aware of it. And so it was sort of an awakening of this force in our life.I actually did research to find out the first use of the word ""technology."" It was in 1829, and it was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum — a course, bringing together all the kinds of arts and crafts, and industry — and he called it ""Technology."" And that's the very first use of the word.So what is this stuff that we're all consumed by and bothered by? Alan Kay calls it, ""Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.""(Laughter)Which is sort of the idea we normally have about what technology is: it's all that new stuff. It's not roads, or penicillin, or factory tires; it's the new stuff. My friend Danny Hillis says kind of a similar one, he says, ""Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.""(Laughter)Which is, again, a sense that it's all new.But we know that it's just not new. It actually goes way back, and what I want to suggest is, it goes a long way back. So, another way to think about technology, what it means, is to imagine a world without technology. If we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today — and I mean everything, from blades to scrapers to cloth — we, as a species, would not live very long. We would die by the billions, and very quickly: the wolves would get us, we would be defenseless, we would be unable to grow enough food or find enough food.Even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools. So, they had minimal technology, but they had some technology. And if we study those hunter-gatherer tribes and the Neanderthal, which are very similar to early man, we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology, and this is a kind of a curve of their average age.There are no Neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we've ever found, and the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30. There are very few young infants, because they die — high mortality rate — and there's very few old people. So the profile is sort of for your average San Francisco neighborhood: a lot of young people. And if you go there, you say, ""Hey, everybody's really healthy."" Well, that's because they're all young.Same thing with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man: you didn't live beyond the age of 30. So it was a world without grandparents. And grandparents are very important, because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information. Imagine a world where basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old. How much learning can you do? You can't do very much learning in your own life, it's so short, and there's nobody to pass on what you do learn. So that's one aspect.It was a very short life. But at the same time, anthropologists know that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world, with that very little technology, actually did not spend a very long time gathering the food they needed: three to six hours a day. Some anthropologists call that the original affluent society, because they had bankers' hours, basically. So it was possible to get enough food. But when the scarcity came, when the highs and lows and the droughts came, then people went into starvation. And that's why they didn't live very long.So what technology brought, through the very simple tools like these stone tools here — even something as small as this — the early bands of humans were actually able to eliminate to extinction about 250 megafauna animals in North America when they first arrived 10,000 years ago. So, long before the industrial age, we've been affecting the planet on a global scale with just a small amount of technology.The other thing that the early man invented was fire. And fire was used to clear out, and again, affected the ecology of grass and whole continents, and was used in cooking. It enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things. It was, in a certain sense, in a McLuhan sense, an external stomach, in the sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise. And if we didn't have fire, we actually could not live. Our bodies have adapted to these new diets. Our bodies have changed in the last 10,000 years.So, with that little bit of technology, humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so — the same number as Neanderthals everywhere — and we suddenly exploded. With the invention of language around 50,000 years ago, the number of humans exploded, and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet. And they migrated into the rest of the world at two kilometers per year until, within several tens of thousands of years, we occupied every single watershed on the planet and became the most dominant species, with a very small amount of technology.And even at that time, with the introduction of agriculture, 8,000, 10,000 years ago, we started to see climate change. So climate change is not a new thing; what's new is just the degree of it. Even during the agricultural age, there was climate change. So already, small amounts of technology were transforming the world. And what this means, and where I'm going, is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world. All the things we see today that are changing our lives, we can always trace back to the introduction of some new technology.So it's a force, that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet, and in such a degree, that I think it's become who we are. In fact, our humanity and everything that we think about ourselves, is something we've invented. So we've invented ourselves. Of all the animals that we've domesticated, the most important animal has been us.So humanity is our greatest invention, but of course, we're not done yet. We're still inventing, and this is what technology is allowing us to do; it's continually to reinvent ourselves. It's a very, very strong force. I call this entire thing — us humans as our technology, everything that we've made, gadgets in our lives — we call that the technium. That's this world. My working definition of technology is: anything useful that a human mind makes. It's not just hammers and gadgets, like laptops. But it's also law. And, of course, cities are ways to make things more useful to us. While this is something that comes from our mind, it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos.It goes back. The origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang, in this way, in that they are part of this self-organizing thread that starts at the Big Bang and goes through galaxies and stars, into life, into us. And the three major phases of the early universe was energy, when the dominant force was energy; then the dominant force, as it cooled, became matter; and then, with the invention of life four billion years ago, the dominant force in our neighborhood became information. That's what life is: an information process that was restructuring and making new order.So, energy and matter, Einstein showed were equivalent, and now new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information and matter and energy are all interrelated. So it's one long continuum. You put energy into the right kind of system, and out comes wasted heat, entropy, and extropy, which is order. It's the increased order.Where does this order come from? Its roots go way back. We actually don't know. But we do know that the self-organization trend throughout the universe is long, and it began with things like galaxies; they maintained their order for billions of years. Stars are basically nuclear fission machines that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years: order against the extropy of the world. And flowers and plants are the same thing, extended, and technology is basically an extension of life.One trend that we notice in all those things is that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through this is actually increasing. The amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence. And the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life is actually greater than a star — because of the star's long lifespan, the energy density in life is actually higher than a star. And the energy density that we see in the greatest amount anywhere in the universe is actually in a PC chip. There is more energy flowing through, per gram per second, than anything that we have any other experience with.And so, what I would suggest is that if you want to see where technology is going, we continue that trajectory, and we say, ""Well, it's going to become more energy-dense, that's where it's going."" And so what I've done is, I've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say, ""What are the general trends in evolutionary life?"" And there are things moving towards greater complexity, moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization, sentience, ubiquity, and most important, evolvability. Those very same things are also present in technology. That's where technology is going.In fact, technology is accelerating all the aspects of life. And we can see that happening; just as there's diversity in life, there's more diversity in things we make. Things in life start off being general cells, and they become specialized: you have tissue cells, muscle, brain cells. The same thing happens with, say, a hammer, which is general at first and becomes more specific. So I would like to say that while there are six kingdoms of life, we can think of technology basically as a seventh kingdom of life. It's a branching off from the human form.But technology has its own agenda, like anything, like life itself. For instance, right now, three-quarters of the energy that we use is actually used to feed the technium itself. In transportation, it's not to move us; it's to move the stuff we make or buy. I use the word ""want."" Technology wants. This is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power. Your cat wants more food. A bacterium, which has no consciousness at all, wants to move towards light. It has an urge, and technology has an urge.At the same time, it wants to give us things, and what it gives us is basically progress. You can take all kinds of curves, and they're all pointing up. There's really no dispute about progress, if we discount the cost of that. And that's the thing that bothers most people, is that progress is really real, but we wonder and question: What are the environmental costs of it?I did a survey of the number of species of artifacts in my house, and there's 6,000. Other people have come up with 10,000. When King Henry of England died, he had 18,000 things in his house, but that was the entire wealth of England, so ...(Laughter)And with that entire wealth of England, King Henry could not buy any antibiotics, he could not buy refrigeration, he could not buy a trip of a thousand miles, whereas this rickshaw wallah in India could save up and buy antibiotics and he could buy refrigeration. He could buy things that King Henry, in all his wealth, could never buy. That's what progress is about.So, technology is selfish; technology is generous. That conflict, that tension, will be with us forever: sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do, and sometimes it's going to do things for us. We have confusion about what we should think about a new technology. Right now the default position when a new technology comes along, is people talk about the precautionary principle, which is very common in Europe, which says, basically, ""Don't do anything. When you meet a new technology, stop, until it can be proven that it does no harm."" I think that really leads nowhere.But a better way is what I call the proactionary principle, which is, you engage with technology. You try it out. You obviously do what the precautionary principle suggests, you try to anticipate it, but after anticipating it, you constantly asses it, not just once, but eternally. And when it diverts from what you want, we prioritize risk, we evaluate not just the new stuff, but the old stuff. We fix it; but most importantly, we relocate it. And what I mean by that is, we find a new job for it.Nuclear energy, fission, is a really bad idea for bombs. But it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy for electricity, instead of burning coal. When we have a bad idea, the response to a bad idea is not no ideas, it's not to stop thinking. The response to a bad idea — like, say, a tungsten lightbulb — is a better idea. So, better ideas is really always the response to technology we don't like; it's basically better technology. And actually, in a certain sense, technology is a kind of a method for generating better ideas, if you can think about it that way.So, maybe spraying DDT on crops is a really bad idea. But DDT sprayed on local homes — there's nothing better to eliminate malaria, besides insect DDT-impregnated mosquito nets. But that's a really good idea; that's a good job for technology.So our job as humans is to parent our mind children, to find them good friends, to find them a good job. And so, every technology is sort of a creative force looking for the right job. That's actually my son, right here.(Laughter)There are no bad technologies, just as there are no bad children. We don't say children are neutral; children are positive. We just have to find them the right place.And so, what technology gives us over the long term — over this sort of extended evolution from the beginning of time, through the invention of the plants and animals, and the evolution of life, the evolution of brains — what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences: It's increasing diversity, it's increasing options, it's increasing choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. That's what we get from technology all the time. That's why people leave villages and go into cities — because they are always gravitating towards increased choices and possibilities. And we are aware of the price; we pay a price for that, but we're aware of it, and generally, we will pay the price for increased freedoms, choices and opportunities.Even technology wants clean water. Is technology diametrically opposed to nature? Because technology is an extension of life, it's in parallel and aligned with the same things that life wants. So that I think technology loves biology, if we allow it to. Great movement starting billions of years ago is moving through us and it continues to go, and our choice, so to speak, in technology, is really to align ourselves with this force much greater than ourselves.So, technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket; it's more than just gadgets, it's more than just things that people invent. It's actually part of a very long story — a great story — that began billions of years ago. It's moving through us, this self-organization, and we're extending and accelerating it, and we can be part of it by aligning the technology that we make with it. And I really appreciate your attention today.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_tells_technology_s_epic_story
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"I've always been interested in the relationship of formal structures and human behavior. If you build a wide road out to the outskirts of town, people will move there. Well, law is also a powerful driver of human behavior. And what I'd like to discuss today is the need to overhaul and simplify the law to release the energy and passion of Americans, so that we can begin to address the challenges of our society.You might have noticed that law has grown progressively denser in your lives over the last decade or two. If you run a business, it's hard to do much of anything without calling your general counsel. Indeed, there is this phenomenon now where the general counsels are becoming the CEOs. It's a little bit like the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. You need a lawyer to run the company, because there's so much law. But it's not just business that's affected by this, it's actually pressed down into the daily activities of ordinary people.A couple of years ago I was hiking near Cody, Wyoming. It was in a grizzly bear preserve, although no one told me that before we went. And our guide was a local science teacher. She was wholly unconcerned about the bears, but she was terrified of lawyers. The stories started pouring out. She'd just been involved in an episode where a parent had threatened to sue the school because she lowered the grade of the student by 10 percent when he turned the paper in late. The principal didn't want to stand up to the parent because he didn't want to get dragged into some legal proceedings. So, she had to go to meeting after meeting, same arguments made over and over again. After 30 days of sleepless nights, she finally capitulated and raised the grade. She said, ""Life's too short, I just can't keep going with this.""About the same time, she was going to take two students to a leadership conference in Laramie, which is a couple of hours away, and she was going to drive them in her car, but the school said, ""No, you can't drive them in the car for liability reasons. You have to go in a school bus."" So, they provided a bus that held 60 people and drove the three of them back and forth several hours to Laramie.Her husband is also a science teacher, and he takes his biology class on a hike in the nearby national park. But he was told he couldn't go on the hike this year because one of the students in the class was disabled, so the other 25 students didn't get to go on the hike either. At the end of this day I could have filled a book just with stories about law from this one teacher.Now, we've been taught to believe that law is the foundation of freedom. But somehow or another, in the last couple of decades, the land of the free has become a legal minefield. It's really changed our lives in ways that are sort of imperceptible; and yet, when you pull back, you see it all the time. It's changed the way we talk. I was talking to a pediatrician friend in North Carolina. He said, ""Well you know, I don't deal with patients the same way anymore. You wouldn't want to say something off-the-cuff that might be used against you."" This is a doctor, whose life is caring for people. My own law firm has a list of questions that I'm not allowed to ask when interviewing candidates, such as the sinister question, bulging with hidden motives and innuendo, ""Where are you from?"" (Laughter)Now for 20 years, tort reformers have been sounding the alarm that lawsuits are out of control. And we read every once in while about these crazy lawsuits, like the guy in the District of Columbia who sued his dry cleaners for 54 million dollars because they lost his pair of pants. The case went on for two years; I think he's still appealing the case.But the reality is, these crazy cases are relatively rare. They don't usually win. And the total of direct tort cost in this country is about two percent, which is twice as much as in other countries but, as taxes go, hardly crippling. But the direct costs are really only the tip of the iceberg.What's happened here, again, almost without our knowing, is our culture has changed. People no longer feel free to act on their best judgment. So, what do we do about it? We certainly don't want to give up the rights, when people do something wrong, to seek redress in the courts. We need regulation to make sure people don't pollute and such. We lack even a vocabulary to deal with this problem, and that's because we have the wrong frame of reference.We've been trained to think that the way to look at every dispute, every issue, is a matter of kind of individual rights. And so we peer through a legal microscope, and look at everything. Is it possible that there are extenuating circumstances that explain why Johnny turned his paper in late in Cody, Wyoming? Is it possible that the doctor might have done something differently when the sick person gets sicker? And of course the hindsight bias is perfect. There's always a different scenario that you can sketch out where it's possible that something could have been done differently.And yet, we've been trained to squint into this legal microscope, hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society, where everyone will agree what's fair, and where accidents will be extinct, risk will be no more. Of course, this is Utopia; it's a formula for paralysis, not freedom. It's not the basis of the rule of law, it's not the basis of a free society. So, now I have the first of four propositions I'm going to leave with you about how you simplify the law: You've got to judge law mainly by its effect on the broader society, not individual disputes. Absolutely vital.So, let's pull back from the anecdotes for a second and look at our society from high above. Is it working? What does the macro-data show us? Well, the healthcare system has been transformed: a culture pervaded with defensiveness, universal distrust of the system of justice, universal practice of defensive medicine. It's very hard to measure because there are mixed motives. Doctors can make more on ordering tests sometimes, and also they no longer even know what's right or wrong. But reliable estimates range between 60 billion and 200 billion dollars per year. That's enough to provide care to all the people in America who don't have it.The trial lawyers say, ""Well, this legal fear makes doctors practice better medicine."" Well that's been studied too, by the Institute of Medicine and others. Turns out that's not the case. The fear has chilled professional interaction so thousands of tragic errors occur because doctors are afraid to speak up: ""Are you sure that's the right dosage?"" Because they're not sure, and they don't want to take legal responsibility.Let's go to schools. As we saw with the teacher in Cody, Wyoming, she seems to be affected by the law. Well it turns out the schools are literally drowning in law. You could have a separate section of a law library around each of the following legal concepts: due process, special education, no child left behind, zero tolerance, work rules ... it goes on. We did a study of all the rules that affect one school in New York. The Board of Ed. had no idea. Tens of thousands of discreet rules, 60 steps to suspend a student from school: It's a formula for paralysis. What's the effect of that? One is a decline in order.Again, studies have shown it's directly attributable to the rise of due process. Public agenda did a survey for us a couple of years ago where they found that 43 percent of the high school teachers in America say that they spend at least half of their time maintaining order in the classroom. That means those students are getting half the learning they're supposed to, because if one child is disrupting the class no one can learn. And what happens when the teacher tries to assert order? They're threatened with a legal claim. We also surveyed that. Seventy-eight percent of the middle and high school teachers in America have been threatened by their students with violating their rights, with lawsuits by their students. They are threatening, their students. It's not that they usually sue, it's not that they would win, but it's an indication of the corrosion of authority.And how has this system of law worked for government? It doesn't seem to be working very well does it? Neither in Sacramento nor in Washington. The other day at the State of the Union speech, President Obama said, and I think we could all agree with this goal, ""From the first railroads to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been the first to compete. There is no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains."" Well, actually there is a reason: Environmental review has evolved into a process of no pebble left unturned for any major project taking the better part of a decade, then followed by years of litigation by anybody who doesn't like the project.Then, just staying above the Earth for one more second, people are acting like idiots, (Laughter) all across the country. (Applause) Idiots. A couple of years ago, Broward County, Florida, banned running at recess. (Laughter) That means all the boys are going to be ADD. I mean it's just absolutely a formula for failure.My favorite, though, are all the warning labels. ""Caution: Contents are hot,"" on billions of coffee cups. Archeologists will dig us up in a thousand years and they won't know about defensive medicine and stuff, but they'll see all these labels, ""Contents are extremely hot."" They'll think it was some kind of aphrodisiac. That's the only explanation. Because why would you have to tell people that something was actually hot? My favorite warning was one on a five-inch fishing lure. I grew up in the South and whiled away the summers fishing. Five-inch fishing lure, it's a big fishing lure, with a three pronged hook in the back, and outside it said, ""Harmful if swallowed."" (Laughter)So, none of these people are doing what they think is right. And why not? They don't trust the law. Why don't they trust the law? Because it gives us the worst of both worlds: It's random — anybody can sue for almost anything and take it to a jury, not even an effort at consistency — and it's also too detailed. In the areas that are regulated, there are so many rules no human could possibly know it. Well how do you fix it? We could spend 10,000 lifetimes trying to prune this legal jungle. But the challenge here is not one of just amending the law, because the hurdle for success is trust.People — for law to be the platform for freedom, people have to trust it. So, that's my second proposition: Trust is an essential condition to a free society. Life is complicated enough without legal fear. But law is different than other kinds of uncertainties, because it carries with it the power of state. And so the state can come in. It actually changes the way people think. It's like having a little lawyer on your shoulders all day long, whispering in your ear, ""Could that go wrong? Might that go wrong?"" It drives people from the smart part of the brain — that dark, deep well of the subconscious, where instincts and experience, and all the other factors of creativity and good judgment are — it drives us to the thin veneer of conscious logic.Pretty soon the doctor's saying, ""Well, I doubt if that headache could be a tumor, but who would protect me if it were? So maybe I'll just order the MRI."" Then you've wasted 200 billion dollars in unnecessary tests. If you make people self-conscious about their judgments, studies show you will make them make worse judgments. If you tell the pianist to think about how she's hitting the notes when she's playing the piece, she can't play the piece. Self-consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment. Edison stated it best. He said, ""Hell, we ain't got no rules around here, we're trying to accomplish something."" (Laughter)So, how do you restore trust? Tweaking the law's clearly not good enough, and tort reform, which is a great idea, lowers your cost if you're a businessperson, but it's like a Band-Aid on this gaping wound of distrust. States with extensive tort reform still suffer all these pathologies. So, what's needed is not just to limit claims, but actually create a dry ground of freedom. It turns out that freedom actually has a formal structure. And it is this: Law sets boundaries, and on one side of those boundaries are all the things you can't do or must do — you can't steal, you've got to pay your taxes — but those same boundaries are supposed to define and protect a dry ground of freedom.Isaiah Berlin put it this way: ""Law sets frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men shall be inviolable."" We've forgotten that second part. Those dikes have burst. People wade through law all day long. So, what's needed now is to rebuild these boundaries. And it's especially important to rebuild them for lawsuits. Because what people can sue for establishes the boundaries for everybody else's freedom. If someone brings a lawsuit over, ""A kid fell off the seesaw,"" it doesn't matter what happens in the lawsuit, all the seesaws will disappear. Because no one will want to take the risk of a lawsuit. And that's what's happened. There are no seesaws, jungle gyms, merry-go-rounds, climbing ropes, nothing that would interest a kid over the age of four, because there's no risk associated with it.So, how do we rebuild it? Life is too complex for... (Applause) Life is too complex for a software program. All these choices involve value judgments and social norms, not objective facts. And so here is the fourth proposition. This is what we have, the philosophy we have to change to. And there are two essential elements of it: We have to simplify the law. We have to migrate from all this complexity towards general principles and goals. The constitution is only 16 pages long. Worked pretty well for 200 years.Law has to be simple enough so that people can internalize it in their daily choices. If they can't internalize it, they won't trust it. And how do you make it simple? Because life is complex, and here is the hardest and biggest change: We have to restore the authority to judges and officials to interpret and apply the law. (Applause) We have to rehumanize the law. To make law simple so that you feel free, the people in charge have to be free to use their judgment to interpret and apply the law in accord with reasonable social norms. As you're going down, and walking down the sidewalk during the day, you have to think that if there is a dispute, there's somebody in society who sees it as their job to affirmatively protect you if you're acting reasonably. That person doesn't exist today.This is the hardest hurdle. It's actually not very hard. Ninety-eight percent of cases, this is a piece of cake. Maybe you've got a claim in small claims court for your lost pair of pants for $100, but not in a court of general jurisdiction for millions of dollars. Case dismissed without prejudice or refiling in small claims court. Takes five minutes. That's it, it's not that hard.But it's a hard hurdle because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values: racism, gender discrimination, pollution — they were bad values. And we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore. The problem is, we created a system where we eliminated the right to have good values. It doesn't mean that people in authority can do whatever they want. They're still bounded by legal goals and principles: The teacher is accountable to the principal, the judge is accountable to an appellate court, the president is accountable to voters. But the accountability's up the line judging the decision against the effect on everybody, not just on the disgruntled person. You can't run a society by the lowest common denominator. (Applause)So, what's needed is a basic shift in philosophy. We can pull the plug on a lot of this stuff if we shift our philosophy. We've been taught that authority is the enemy of freedom. It's not true. Authority, in fact, is essential to freedom. Law is a human institution; responsibility is a human institution. If teachers don't have authority to run the classroom, to maintain order, everybody's learning suffers. If the judge doesn't have the authority to toss out unreasonable claims, then all of us go through the day looking over our shoulders. If the environmental agency can't decide that the power lines are good for the environment, then there's no way to bring the power from the wind farms to the city. A free society requires red lights and green lights, otherwise it soon descends into gridlock. That's what's happened to America. Look around.What the world needs now is to restore the authority to make common choices. It's the only way to get our freedom back, and it's the only way to release the energy and passion needed so that we can meet the challenges of our time. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard
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"Does anybody know when the stethoscope was invented? Any guesses? 1816. And what I can say is, in 2016, doctors aren't going to be walking around with stethoscopes. There's a whole lot better technology coming, and that's part of the change in medicine.What has changed our society has been wireless devices. But the future are digital medical wireless devices, OK?So, let me give you some examples of this to kind of make this much more concrete. This is the first one. This is an electrocardiogram. And, as a cardiologist, to think that you could see in real time a patient, an individual, anywhere in the world on your smartphone, watching your rhythm — that's incredible, and it's with us today.But that's just the beginning. You check your email while you're sitting here. In the future you're going to be checking all your vital signs, all your vital signs: your heart rhythm, your blood pressure, your oxygen, your temperature, etc. This is already available today.This is AirStrip Technologies. It's now wired — or I should say, wireless — by taking the aggregate of these signals in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, and putting it on a smartphone for physicians. If you're an expectant parent, what about the ability to monitor, continuously, fetal heart rate, or intrauterine contractions, and not having to worry so much that things are fine as the pregnancy, and moving over into the time of delivery?And then as we go further, today we have continuous glucose sensors. Right now, they are under the skin, but in the future, they won't have to be implanted. And of course, the desired range — trying to keep glucose between 75 and less than 200, checking it every five minutes in a continuous glucose sensor — you'll see how that can impact diabetes.And what about sleep? We're going to zoom in on that a little bit. We're supposed to spend a third of our life in sleep. What if, on your phone, which will be available in the next few weeks, you had every minute of your sleep displayed? And this is, of course, as you can see, the awake is the orange. The REM sleep, rapid eye movement, dream state, is in light green; and light is gray, light sleep; and deep sleep, the best restorative sleep, is that dark green.How about counting every calorie? And this is ability, in real time, to actually take measurements of caloric intake as well as expenditure, through a Band-Aid.Now, what I've talked about are physiologic metrics. But what I want to get to, the next frontier, very quickly, and why the stethoscope is on its way out, is because we can transcend listening to the valve sounds, and the breath sounds, because now, introduced by G.E. is a handheld ultra-sound. Why is this important? Because this is so much more sensitive. Here is an example of an abdominal ultrasound, and also a cardiac echo, which can be sent wireless, and then there's an example of fetal monitoring on your smartphone.So, we're not just talking about physiologic metrics — the key measurements of vital signs, and all those things in physiology — but also all the imaging that one could look at in your smartphone. Now, this is an example of another obsolete technology, soon to be buried: the Holter Monitor. Twenty-four hour recording, lots of wires. This is now a little tiny patch. You can put it on for two weeks and send it in the mail.Now, how does this work? Well, there is these smart Band-Aids or these sensors that one would put on, on a shoe or on the wrist. And this sends a signal and it creates a body area network to a gateway. Gateway could be a smartphone or it could be a dedicated gateway, as today many of these things are dedicated gateways, because they are not so well integrated. That signal goes to the web, the cloud, and then it can be processed and sent anywhere: to a caregiver, to a physician, back to the patient, etc. So, that's basically very simplistic technology of how this works.Now, I have this device on. I didn't want to take my shirt off to show you, but I can tell you it's on. This is a device that not only measures cardiac rhythm, as you saw already, but it also goes well beyond that. This is me now. And you can see the ECG. Below that's the actual heart rate and the trend; to the right of that is a bioconductant. That's the fluid status, fluid status, that's really important if you're monitoring somebody with heart failure. And below that's temperature, and respiration, and oxygen, and then the position activity. So, this is really striking, because this device measures seven things that are very much vital signs for monitoring someone with heart failure. OK?And why is this important? Well, this is the most expensive bed. What if we could reduce the need for hospital beds? Well, we can. First of all, heart failure is the number one reason for hospital admissions and readmissions in this country. The cost of heart failure is 37 billion dollars a year, which is 80 percent related to hospitalization. And in the course of 30 days after a hospital stay for a Medicare greater than 65 years or older, is — 27 percent are readmitted in 30 days, and by six months, over 56 percent are readmitted. So, can we improve that? Well the idea is we take this device that I'm wearing, and we put it on 600 patients with heart failure, randomly assigned, versus 600 patients who don't have active monitoring, and see whether we can reduce heart failure readmissions, and that's exciting. And we'll start that trial, and you'll hear more about how we're going to do that, but that's a type of wireless device trial that could change medicine in the years ahead.Why now? Why has this all of a sudden become a reality, an exciting direction in the future of medicine? What we have is, in a way, a perfect positive storm. This sets up consumer-driven healthcare. That's where this is all starting. Let me just give you specifics about why this is a big movement if you're not aware of it: 1.2 million Americans have gotten a Nike shoe, which is a body-area network that connects the shoe, the sole of the shoe to the iPhone, or an iPod. And this Wired Magazine cover article really captured a lot of this; it talked a lot about the Nike shoe and how quickly that's been adopted to monitor exercise physiology and energy expenditure. Here are some things, the principles that are guiding principles to keep in mind: ""A data-driven health revolution promises to make us all better, faster, and stronger. Living by numbers."" And this one, which is really telling, this was from July, this cover article:""The personal metrics movement goes way beyond diet and exercise. It's about tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365."" Well, I tried this device. A lot of you have gotten that Phillips Direct Life. I didn't have one of those, but I got the Fitbit. That looks like this. It's like a wireless accelerometer, pedometer. And I want to just give you the results of that testing, because I wanted to understand about the consumer movement. I hope the, by the way, the Phillips Direct Life works better — I hope so. But this monitors food, it monitors activity and tracks weight. However you have to put in most of this stuff. The only thing it really tracks by itself is activity, and even then, it's not complete. So, you exercise and it picks up the exercise. You put in your height and weight, it calculates BMI, and of course it tells you how many calories you're expending from the exercise, and how many you took in, if you go in and enter all the foods.But it really wants you to enter all your activity. And so I went to this, and of course I was gratified that it picked up the 42 minutes of exercise, elliptical exercise I did, but then it wants more information. So, it says, ""You want to log sexual activity. How long did you do it for?"" (Laughter) And it says, ""How hard was it?"" (Laughter) Furthermore it says, ""Start time."" Now, this doesn't appear — this just doesn't work, I mean, this just doesn't work.So, now I want to move to sleep. Who would ever have thought you could have your own EEG at your home, tagged to a very nice alarm clock, by the way? This is the headband that goes with this alarm clock. It monitors your brainwaves continuously, when you're sleeping. So, I did this thing for seven days getting ready for TEDMed. This is an important part of our life, one-third you're supposed to be sleeping.Of course how many here have any problems with sleeping? It's usually 90 percent. So, you tell me you sleep better than expected. Okay, well this was a week of my life in sleeping, and you get a Z.Q. score. Instead of an I.Q. score, you get a Z.Q. score when you wake up. You say, ""Oh, OK."" And a Z.Q. score is adjusted to age, and you want to get as high as you possibly can. So this is the moment-by-moment, or minute-by-minute sleep. And you see that Z.Q. there was 80-odd. And the wake time is in orange. And this can be a problem, as I learned. Because it not only helps you with quantifying your sleep, but also tells others you're awake. So, when my wife came in and she could tell you're awake. ""Eric, I want to talk. I want to talk."" And I'm trying to play possum. This thing is very, very impressive.OK. So, that's the first night. And this one is now 67, and that's not a good score. And this tells you, of course, how much you had in REM sleep, in deep sleep, and all this sort of thing. This was really fascinating because this gave that quantitation about all the different phases of sleep. So, it also then tells you how you do compared to your age group. It's like a managed competition of sleep. And really interesting stuff. Look at this thing and say, ""Well, I didn't think I was a very good sleeper, but actually I did better than average in 50 to 60 year olds."" OK? And the key thing was, what I didn't know, was that I was a really good dreamer.OK. Now let's move from sleep to diseases. Eighty percent of Americans have chronic disease, or 80 percent of age greater than 65 have two or more chronic disease, 140 million Americans have one or more chronic disease, and 80 percent of our 1.5, whatever, trillion expenditures are related to chronic disease. Now, diabetes is one of the big ones. Almost 24 million people have diabetes. And here is the latest map. It was published just a little more than a week ago in the New York Times, and it isn't looking good. That is, for men, 29 percent in the country over 60 have Type II diabetes, and women, although it's less, it's terribly high.But of course we have a way to measure that now on a continuous basis, with a sensor that detects blood glucose, and it's important because we could detect hyperglycemia that otherwise wouldn't be known, and also hypoglycemia. And you can see the red dots, in this particular patient's case, were finger sticks, which would have missed both ends.But by continuous monitoring, it captures all that vital information. The future of this though, is being able to move this to a Band-Aid type phenomenon, and that's not so far away. So, let me just give you, very quickly, 10 top targets for wireless medicine. All these things are possible — some of them are very close, or already, as you heard, are available today, in some way or form.Alzheimer's disease: there's five million people affected, and you can check vital signs, activity, balance. Asthma: large number, we could detect things like pollen count, air quality, respiratory rate. Breast cancer, I'll show you an example of that real quickly. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Depression, there's a great approach to that in mood disorders. Diabetes I've just mentioned. Heart failure we already talked about. Hypertension: 74 million people could have continuous blood-pressure monitoring to come up with much better management and prevention. And obesity we already talked about, the ways to get to that. And sleep disorders.This is effective around the world. The access to smartphones and cell phones today is extraordinary. And this article from The Economist summed it up beautifully about the opportunities in health across the developing world: ""Mobile phones made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology."" And that's before we got going on the m-health world. Aging: The problem is enormous, 300,000 broken hips per year; but the solutions are extraordinary, and they include so many different things.One of the ones I just wanted to mention: The iShoe is another example of a sensor that improves proprioception among the elderly to prevent falling. One of many different techniques using wireless sensors. So, we can change medicine across the continuum of care, across the ages from premies or unborn children to seniors; the pharmaceutical arena changes; the full spectrum of disease — I hope I've given you a sense of that — across the globe.There are two things that can really accelerate this whole process. One of them — we're very fortunate — is to develop a dedicated institute and that's work that started with the work that Scripps with Qualcomm ... and then the great fortune of meeting up with Gary and Mary West, to get behind this wireless health institute. San Diego is an extraordinary place for this. There's over 650 wireless companies, 100 of which or more are working in wireless health. It's the number one source of commerce, and interestingly it dovetails beautifully with over 500 life science companies.The wireless institute, the West Wireless Health Institute, is really the outgrowth of two extraordinary people who are here this evening: Gary and Mary West. And I'd like to give it up for them for getting behind this. (Applause) Their fantastic philanthropic investment made this possible, and this is really a nonprofit education center which is just about to open. It looks like this, this whole building dedicated. And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate — and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday — then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics.The other big thing, besides having this fantastic institute to catalyze this process is guidance, and that's of course relying on the fact that medicine goes digital. If we understand biology from genomics and omics and wireless through physiologic phenotyping, that's big. Because what it does is allow a convergence like we've never had before. Over 80 major diseases have been cracked at the genomic level, but this is quite extraordinary: More has been learned about the underpinnings of disease in the last two and a half years than in the history of man. And when you put that together with, for example, now an app for the iPhone with your genotype to guide drug therapy ... but, the future — we can now tell who's going to get Type II diabetes from all the common variants, and that's going to get filled in more with low-frequency variants in the future. We can tell who's going to get breast cancer from the various genes. We can also know who's likely to get atrial fibrillation.And finally, another example: sudden cardiac death. Each of these has a sensor. We can give glucose a sensor for diabetes to prevent it. We can prevent, or have the earliest detection possible, for breast cancer with an ultrasound device given to the patient. An iPatch, iRhythm, for atrial fibrillation. And vital-signs monitoring to prevent sudden cardiac death. We lose 700,000 people a year in the U.S. from sudden cardiac death.So, I hope I've convinced you of this, of the impact on hospital clinic resources is profound and then the impact on diseases is equally impressive across all these different diseases and more. It's really taking individualized medicine to a new height and it's hyper-innovative, and I think it represents the black swan of medicine. Thanks for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_topol_the_wireless_future_of_medicine
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"I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is. Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe — the child remains nonverbal — all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers. And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here.(Laughter)You wouldn't have any —(Applause)It's a continuum of traits. When does a nerd turn into Asperger, which is just mild autism? I mean, Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today. And one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things that Bill Gates talked about this morning.OK, now, if you want to understand autism: animals. I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking. You have to get away from verbal language. I think in pictures. I don't think in language. Now, the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details. This is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters or the little letters, and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly.And the thing is, the normal brain ignores the details. Well, if you're building a bridge, details are pretty important because it'll fall down if you ignore the details. And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract. People are getting away from doing hands-on stuff. I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes, because art, and classes like that — those are the classes where I excelled.In my work with cattle, I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice would make the cattle balk. For example, this flag waving right in front of the veterinary facility. This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility; all they needed to do was move the flag. Rapid movement, contrast. In the early '70s when I started, I got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing. People thought that was crazy. A coat on a fence would make them balk, shadows would make them balk, a hose on the floor — people weren't noticing these things. A chain hanging down ... And that's shown very, very nicely in the movie.In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. That's the geek side. My drawings got to star in the movie, too. And, actually, it's called ""Temple Grandin,"" not ""Thinking in Pictures.""So what is thinking in pictures? It's literally movies in your head. My mind works like Google for images. When I was a young kid, I didn't know my thinking was different. I thought everybody thought in pictures. Then when I did my book, ""Thinking in Pictures,"" I started interviewing people about how they think. And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different. Like if I say, ""Think about a church steeple,"" most people get this sort of generalized generic one. Now, maybe that's not true in this room, but it's going to be true in a lot of different places. I see only specific pictures. They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures. And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there, where the word ""shoe"" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes pop into my imagination.OK, there's my childhood church; that's specific. There's some more, Fort Collins. OK, how about famous ones? And they just kind of come up, kind of like this. Just really quickly, like Google for pictures. And they come up one at a time, and then I think, ""OK, well, maybe we can have it snow, or we can have a thunderstorm,"" and I can hold it there and turn them into videos.Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. And I've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant. I'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides. I've got that stuff up on YouTube, if you want to look at it.(Laughter)But one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could test-run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. And this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie. That was like just so super cool. And there were a lot of, kind of, Asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set, too.(Laughter)But one of the things that really worries me is: Where's the younger version of those kids going today? They're not ending up in Silicon Valley, where they belong.(Laughter)(Applause)One of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social, is I had to sell my work, and not myself. And the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings, I showed off pictures of things. Another thing that helped me as a little kid is, boy, in the '50s, you were taught manners. You were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around.When kids get to be in third or fourth grade, you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker, drawing in perspective. Now, I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker. Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago, and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex. This is tensor imaging. And my great big Internet trunk line is twice as big as the control's. The red lines there are me, and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control. And there I got a gigantic one, and the control over there, the blue one, has got a really small one.And some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. Now, the thing is, the visual thinker is just one kind of mind. You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind — good at one thing, bad at something else. And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. Gigantic mistake. I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra, go right to geometry and trig.Now, another kind of mind is the pattern thinker. More abstract. These are your engineers, your computer programmers. This is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper — no scotch tape, no cuts. And there in the background is the pattern for folding it. Here are the types of thinking: photo-realistic visual thinkers, like me; pattern thinkers, music and math minds. Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. You also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic. You'll see these different kinds of minds. And then there's a verbal mind, they know every fact about everything.Now, another thing is the sensory issues. I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face. And I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it, and they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin. But sensory is an issue. Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights; others have problems with sound sensitivity. You know, it's going to be variable.Now, visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind. Because think about it: an animal is a sensory-based thinker, not verbal — thinks in pictures, thinks in sounds, thinks in smells. Think about how much information there is on the local fire hydrant. He knows who's been there —(Laughter)When they were there. Are they friend or foe? Is there anybody he can go mate with? There's a ton of information on that fire hydrant. It's all very detailed information. And looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals.Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. Man on a horse, and a man on the ground — that is viewed as two totally different things. You could have a horse that's been abused by a rider. They'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer, but you can't ride him. You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up, and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. Cattle are the same way. Man on a horse, a man on foot — they're two different things. You see, it's a different picture. See, I want you to think about just how specific this is.Now, this ability to put information into categories, I find a lot of people are not very good at this. When I'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant, they don't seem to be able to figure out: ""Do I have a training-people issue? Or do I have something wrong with the equipment?"" In other words, categorize equipment problem from a people problem. I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that. Now, let's say I figure out it's an equipment problem. Is it a minor problem, with something simple I can fix? Or is the whole design of the system wrong? People have a hard time figuring that out.Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. Yeah, I'm a million-mile flier. I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? It would be their airplane tails. You know, five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years, the tail either came off, or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way. It's tails, pure and simple. And when the pilots walk around the plane, guess what? They can't see that stuff inside the tail. Now as I think about that, I'm pulling up all of that specific information. It's specific. See, my thinking's bottom-up. I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle.Now, here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats. He'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat. White cowboy hats, that was absolutely fine. Now, the thing is, the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together. We've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds. And one of the things that is driving me really crazy as I travel around and I do autism meetings, is I'm seeing a lot of smart, geeky, nerdy kids, and they just aren't very social, and nobody's working on developing their interest in something like science.And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher. My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie. I was a goofball student when I was in high school. I just didn't care at all about studying, until I had Mr. Carlock's science class. He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie. And he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room. This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. You know, one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED, and there's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet to get these kids turned on. Because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky, nerdy kids, and the teachers out in the Midwest and other parts of the country when you get away from these tech areas, they don't know what to do with these kids. And they're not going down the right path.The thing is, you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind, or your mind can be wired to be more social. And what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here in the really brilliant mind, and we lose a few social circuits here. It's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social. And then you can get to the point where it's so severe, you're going to have a person that's going to be non-verbal. In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals.This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller. He studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia. And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain. And then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars. Now, Van Gogh doesn't know anything about physics, but I think it's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence, which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head.And the Wolfram stuff — I was taking notes and writing down all the search words I could use, because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures. We've got to show these kids interesting stuff. And they've taken out the auto-shop class and the drafting class and the art class. I mean, art was my best subject in school.We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kinds of people in the future. And let's talk about jobs. OK, my science teacher got me studying, because I was a goofball that didn't want to study. But you know what? I was getting work experience. I'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven't learned basic things, like how to be on time — I was taught that when I was eight years old. How to have table manners at granny's Sunday party. I was taught that when I was very, very young. And when I was 13, I had a job at a dressmaker's shop sewing clothes. I did internships in college, I was building things, and I also had to learn how to do assignments.You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little. My mother said, ""Well let's do a picture of something else."" They've got to learn how to do something else. Let's say the kid is fixated on Legos. Let's get him working on building different things. The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated. Like if the kid loves race cars, let's use race cars for math. Let's figure out how long it takes a race car to go a certain distance. In other words, use that fixation in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do. I really get fed up when the teachers, especially when you get away from this part of the country, they don't know what to do with these smart kids. It just drives me crazy.What can visual thinkers do when they grow up? They can do graphic design, all kinds of stuff with computers, photography, industrial design. The pattern thinkers — they're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians, your software engineers, your computer programmers, all of those kinds of jobs. And then you've got the word minds; they make great journalists, and they also make really, really good stage actors. Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. You just kind of ... you just have to learn it.And we need to be working with these students. And this brings up mentors. You know, my science teacher was not an accredited teacher. He was a NASA space scientist. Some states now are getting it to where, if you have a degree in biology or in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. We need to be doing that. Because what I'm observing is, the good teachers, for a lot of these kids, are out in the community colleges. But we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools.Another thing that can be very, very, very successful is: there's a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry, and they can teach your kid. And it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old, because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark. You're getting that kid turned on. And you get him turned on, then you'll learn all the new stuff. Mentors are just essential. I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me. And we've got to mentor them, hire them.And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. Don't just say, ""Design new software."" You've got to tell them something more specific: ""We're designing software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing, and it can only use so much memory."" That's the kind of specificity you need.Well, that's the end of my talk. And I just want to thank everybody for coming. It was great to be here.(Applause) (Applause ends)Oh — you have a question for me? OK.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you so much for that. You know, you once wrote — I like this quote: ""If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.""(Laughter)Temple Grandin: Because who do you think made the first stone spear? It was the Asperger guy, and if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there'd be no more Silicon Valley, and the energy crisis would not be solved.(Applause)CA: I want to ask you a couple other questions, and if any of these feel inappropriate, it's OK just to say, ""Next question."" But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them?TG: Well, first of all, we've got to look at age. If you have a two, three or four-year-old, no speech, no social interaction, I can't emphasize enough: Don't wait. You need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching. The thing is, autism comes in different degrees. About half of the people on the spectrum are not going to learn to talk, and they won't be working in Silicon Valley. That would not be a reasonable thing for them to do.But then you get these smart, geeky kids with a touch of autism, and that's where you've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things. I got social interaction through shared interests — I rode horses with other kids, I made model rockets with other kids, did electronics lab with other kids. And in the '60s, it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show. That was, like, we considered that super cool.(Laughter)CA: Is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them, as some might, as most, wish?TG: Well, I tell you, that child will be loyal, and if your house is burning down, they're going to get you out of it.CA: Wow. So most people, if you ask them what they're most passionate about, they'd say things like, ""My kids"" or ""My lover."" What are you most passionate about?TG: I'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place. When I have a mother of an autistic child say, ""My kid went to college because of your book or one of your lectures,"" that makes me happy.You know, the slaughter plants I worked with in the '80s; they were absolutely awful. I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants, where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down? How many got poked with the prodder? How many cattle are mooing their heads off? And it's very, very simple. You directly observe a few simple things. It's worked really well. I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff.CA: Totally.(Applause)CA: When we were talking on the phone, one of the things you said that really astonished me was that one thing you were passionate about was server farms. Tell me about that.TG: Well, the reason why I got really excited when I read about that, it contains knowledge. It's libraries. And to me, knowledge is something that is extremely valuable. So, maybe over 10 years ago now, our library got flooded. This is before the Internet got really big. And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked, because it was knowledge being destroyed. And server farms, or data centers, are great libraries of knowledge.CA: Temple, can I just say, it's an absolute delight to have you at TED. Thank you so much.TG: Well, thank you so much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds
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"If you are a blind child in India, you will very likely have to contend with at least two big pieces of bad news. The first bad news is that the chances of getting treatment are extremely slim to none, and that's because most of the blindness alleviation programs in the country are focused on adults, and there are very, very few hospitals that are actually equipped to treat children. In fact, if you were to be treated, you might well end up being treated by a person who has no medical credentials as this case from Rajasthan illustrates. This is a three-year-old orphan girl who had cataracts. So, her caretakers took her to the village medicine man, and instead of suggesting to the caretakers that the girl be taken to a hospital, the person decided to burn her abdomen with red-hot iron bars to drive out the demons. The second piece of bad news will be delivered to you by neuroscientists, who will tell you that if you are older than four or five years of age, that even if you have your eye corrected, the chances of your brain learning how to see are very, very slim — again, slim or none.So when I heard these two things, it troubled me deeply, both because of personal reasons and scientific reasons. So let me first start with the personal reason. It'll sound corny, but it's sincere. That's my son, Darius. As a new father, I have a qualitatively different sense of just how delicate babies are, what our obligations are towards them and how much love we can feel towards a child. I would move heaven and earth in order to get treatment for Darius, and for me to be told that there might be other Dariuses who are not getting treatment, that's just viscerally wrong. So that's the personal reason.Scientific reason is that this notion from neuroscience of critical periods — that if the brain is older than four or five years of age, it loses its ability to learn — that doesn't sit well with me, because I don't think that idea has been tested adequately. The birth of the idea is from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's work, two researchers who were at Harvard, and they got the Nobel Prize in 1981 for their studies of visual physiology, which are remarkably beautiful studies, but I believe some of their work has been extrapolated into the human domain prematurely. So, they did their work with kittens, with different kinds of deprivation regiments, and those studies, which date back to the '60s, are now being applied to human children.So I felt that I needed to do two things. One: provide care to children who are currently being deprived of treatment. That's the humanitarian mission. And the scientific mission would be to test the limits of visual plasticity. And these two missions, as you can tell, thread together perfectly. One adds to the other; in fact, one would be impossible without the other. So, to implement these twin missions, a few years ago, I launched Project Prakash. Prakash, as many of you know, is the Sanskrit word for light, and the idea is that in bringing light into the lives of children, we also have a chance of shedding light on some of the deepest mysteries of neuroscience. And the logo — even though it looks extremely Irish, it's actually derived from the Indian symbol of Diya, an earthen lamp. The Prakash, the overall effort has three components: outreach, to identify children in need of care; medical treatment; and in subsequent study. And I want to show you a short video clip that illustrates the first two components of this work.This is an outreach station conducted at a school for the blind.(Text: Most of the children are profoundly and permanently blind ...)Pawan Sinha: So, because this is a school for the blind, many children have permanent conditions. That's a case of microphthalmos, which is malformed eyes, and that's a permanent condition; it cannot be treated. That's an extreme of micropthalmos called enophthalmos. But, every so often, we come across children who show some residual vision, and that is a very good sign that the condition might actually be treatable. So, after that screening, we bring the children to the hospital. That's the hospital we're working with in Delhi, the Schroff Charity Eye Hospital. It has a very well-equipped pediatric ophthalmic center, which was made possible in part by a gift from the Ronald McDonald charity. So, eating burgers actually helps.(Text: Such examinations allow us to improve eye-health in many children, and ... ... help us find children who can participate in Project Prakash.)PS: So, as I zoom in to the eyes of this child, you will see the cause of his blindness. The whites that you see in the middle of his pupils are congenital cataracts, so opacities of the lens. In our eyes, the lens is clear, but in this child, the lens has become opaque, and therefore he can't see the world. So, the child is given treatment. You'll see shots of the eye. Here's the eye with the opaque lens, the opaque lens extracted and an acrylic lens inserted. And here's the same child three weeks post-operation, with the right eye open.(Applause)Thank you.So, even from that little clip, you can begin to get the sense that recovery is possible, and we have now provided treatment to over 200 children, and the story repeats itself. After treatment, the child gains significant functionality. In fact, the story holds true even if you have a person who got sight after several years of deprivation. We did a paper a few years ago about this woman that you see on the right, SRD, and she got her sight late in life, and her vision is remarkable at this age. I should add a tragic postscript to this — she died two years ago in a bus accident. So, hers is just a truly inspiring story — unknown, but inspiring story. So when we started finding these results, as you might imagine, it created quite a bit of stir in the scientific and the popular press. Here's an article in Nature that profiled this work, and another one in Time. So, we were fairly convinced — we are convinced — that recovery is feasible, despite extended visual deprivation.The next obvious question to ask: What is the process of recovery? So, the way we study that is, let's say we find a child who has light sensitivity. The child is provided treatment, and I want to stress that the treatment is completely unconditional; there is no quid pro quo. We treat many more children then we actually work with. Every child who needs treatment is treated. After treatment, about every week, we run the child on a battery of simple visual tests in order to see how their visual skills are coming on line. And we try to do this for as long as possible. This arc of development gives us unprecedented and extremely valuable information about how the scaffolding of vision gets set up. What might be the causal connections between the early developing skills and the later developing ones?And we've used this general approach to study many different visual proficiencies, but I want to highlight one particular one, and that is image parsing into objects. So, any image of the kind that you see on the left, be it a real image or a synthetic image, it's made up of little regions that you see in the middle column, regions of different colors, different luminances. The brain has this complex task of putting together, integrating, subsets of these regions into something that's more meaningful, into what we would consider to be objects, as you see on the right. And nobody knows how this integration happens, and that's the question we asked with Project Prakash.So, here's what happens very soon after the onset of sight. Here's a person who had gained sight just a couple of weeks ago, and you see Ethan Myers, a graduate student from MIT, running the experiment with him. His visual-motor coordination is quite poor, but you get a general sense of what are the regions that he's trying to trace out. If you show him real world images, if you show others like him real world images, they are unable to recognize most of the objects because the world to them is over-fragmented; it's made up of a collage, a patchwork, of regions of different colors and luminances. And that's what's indicated in the green outlines. When you ask them, ""Even if you can't name the objects, just point to where the objects are,"" these are the regions that they point to. So the world is this complex patchwork of regions. Even the shadow on the ball becomes its own object. Interestingly enough, you give them a few months, and this is what happens.Doctor: How many are these?Patient: These are two things.Doctor: What are their shapes?Patient: Their shapes ... This one is a circle, and this is a square.PS: A very dramatic transformation has come about. And the question is: What underlies this transformation? It's a profound question, and what's even more amazing is how simple the answer is. The answer lies in motion and that's what I want to show you in the next clip.Doctor: What shape do you see here?Patient: I can't make it out.Doctor: Now?Patient: Triangle.Doctor: How many things are these? Now, how many things are these?Patient: Two.Doctor: What are these things?Patient: A square and a circle.PS: And we see this pattern over and over again. The one thing the visual system needs in order to begin parsing the world is dynamic information. So the inference we are deriving from this, and several such experiments, is that dynamic information processing, or motion processing, serves as the bedrock for building the rest of the complexity of visual processing; it leads to visual integration and eventually to recognition.This simple idea has far reaching implications. And let me just quickly mention two, one, drawing from the domain of engineering, and one from the clinic. So, from the perspective of engineering, we can ask: Goven that we know that motion is so important for the human visual system, can we use this as a recipe for constructing machine-based vision systems that can learn on their own, that don't need to be programmed by a human programmer? And that's what we're trying to do.I'm at MIT, at MIT you need to apply whatever basic knowledge you gain. So we are creating Dylan, which is a computational system with an ambitious goal of taking in visual inputs of the same kind that a human child would receive, and autonomously discovering: What are the objects in this visual input? So, don't worry about the internals of Dylan. Here, I'm just going to talk about how we test Dylan. The way we test Dylan is by giving it inputs, as I said, of the same kind that a baby, or a child in Project Prakash would get. But for a long time we couldn't quite figure out: Wow can we get these kinds of video inputs? So, I thought, could we have Darius serve as our babycam carrier, and that way get the inputs that we feed into Dylan? So that's what we did. (Laughter) I had to have long conversations with my wife. (Laughter) In fact, Pam, if you're watching this, please forgive me.So, we modified the optics of the camera in order to mimic the baby's visual acuity. As some of you might know, babyies are born pretty much legally blind. Their acuity — our acuity is 20/20; babies' acuity is like 20/800, so they are looking at the world in a very, very blurry fashion. Here's what a baby-cam video looks like.(Laughter) (Applause)Thankfully, there isn't any audio to go with this. What's amazing is that working with such highly degraded input, the baby, very quickly, is able to discover meaning in such input. But then two or three days afterward, babies begin to pay attention to their mother's or their father's face. How does that happen? We want Dylan to be able to do that, and using this mantra of motion, Dylan actually can do that. So, given that kind of video input, with just about six or seven minutes worth of video, Dylan can begin to extract patterns that include faces. So, it's an important demonstration of the power of motion.The clinical implication, it comes from the domain of autism. Visual integration has been associated with autism by several researchers. When we saw that, we asked: Could the impairment in visual integration be the manifestation of something underneath, of dynamic information processing deficiencies in autism? Because, if that hypothesis were to be true, it would have massive repercussions in our understanding of what's causing the many different aspects of the autism phenotype.What you're going to see are video clips of two children — one neurotypical, one with autism, playing Pong. So, while the child is playing Pong, we are tracking where they're looking. In red are the eye movement traces. This is the neurotypical child, and what you see is that the child is able to make cues of the dynamic information to predict where the ball is going to go. Even before the ball gets to a place, the child is already looking there. Contrast this with a child with autism playing the same game. Instead of anticipating, the child always follows where the ball has been. The efficiency of the use of dynamic information seems to be significantly compromised in autism. So we are pursuing this line of work and hopefully we'll have more results to report soon.Looking ahead, if you think of this disk as representing all of the children we've treated so far, this is the magnitude of the problem. The red dots are the children we have not treated. So, there are many, many more children who need to be treated, and in order to expand the scope of the project, we are planning on launching The Prakash Center for Children, which will have a dedicated pediatric hospital, a school for the children we are treating and also a cutting-edge research facility. The Prakash Center will integrate health care, education and research in a way that truly creates the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.So, to summarize: Prakash, in its five years of existence, it's had an impact in multiple areas, ranging from basic neuroscience plasticity and learning in the brain, to clinically relevant hypotheses like in autism, the development of autonomous machine vision systems, education of the undergraduate and graduate students, and most importantly in the alleviation of childhood blindness. And for my students and I, it's been just a phenomenal experience because we have gotten to do interesting research, while at the same time helping the many children that we have worked with.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see
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"I think it was in my second grade that I was caught drawing the bust of a nude by Michelangelo. I was sent straight away to my school principal, and my school principal, a sweet nun, looked at my book with disgust, flipped through the pages, saw all the nudes — you know, I'd been seeing my mother draw nudes and I'd copy her — and the nun slapped me on my face and said, ""Sweet Jesus, this kid has already begun.""I had no clue what she was talking about, but it was convincing enough for me never to draw again until the ninth grade. Thanks to a really boring lecture, I started caricaturing my teachers in school. And, you know, I got a lot of popularity. I don't play sports. I'm really bad at sports. I don't have the fanciest gadgets at home. I'm not on top of the class. So for me, cartooning gave me a sense of identity. I got popular, but I was scared I'd get caught again. So what I did was I quickly put together a collage of all the teachers I had drawn, glorified my school principal, put him right on top, and gifted it to him. He had a good laugh at the other teachers and put it up on the notice board. (Laughter) This is a part of that. And I became a school hero. All my seniors knew me. I felt really special.I have to tell you a little bit about my family. That's my mother. I love her to bits. She's the one who taught me how to draw and, more importantly, how to love. She's a bit of a hippie. She said, ""Don't say that,"" but I'm saying it anyway. The rest of my family are boring academics, busy collecting Ivy League decals for our classic Ambassador car. My father's a little different. My father believed in a holistic approach to living, and, you know, every time he taught us, he'd say, ""I hate these books, because these books are hijacked by Industrial Revolution.""While he still held that worldview, I was 16, I got the best lawyer in town, my older brother Karthik, and I sat him down, and I said, ""Pa, from today onwards I've decided I'm going to be disciplined, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to learn something new every day, I'm going to be very hard working, and I'm not going to depend on you emotionally or financially."" And he was very impressed. He was all tearing up. Ready to hug me. And I said, ""Hold that thought."" I said, ""Can I quit school then?""But, to cut a long story short, I quit school to pursue a career as a cartoonist. I must have done about 30,000 caricatures. I would do birthday parties, weddings, divorces, anything for anyone who wanted to use my services. But, most importantly, while I was traveling, I taught children cartooning, and in exchange, I learned how to be spontaneous. And mad and crazy and fun. When I started teaching them, I said let me start doing this professionally. When I was 18 I started my own school. However, an 18 year-old trying to start a school is not easy unless you have a big patron or a big supporter.So I was flipping through the pages of the Times of India when I saw that the Prime Minister of India was visiting my home town, Bangalore. And, you know, just like how every cartoonist knows Bush here, and if you had to meet Bush, it would be the funnest thing because his face was a cartoonist's delight. I had to meet my Prime Minister. I went to the place where his helicopter was about to land. I saw layers of security. I caricatured my way through three layers by just impressing the guards, but I got stuck. I got stuck at the third. And what happened was, to my luck, I saw a nuclear scientist at whose party I had done cartoons. I ran up to him, and said, ""Hello, sir. How do you do?"" He said, ""What are you doing here, Raghava?"" I said, ""I'm here to meet the Prime Minister."" He said, ""Oh, so am I."" I hopped into his car, and off we went through the remaining layers of security. (Applause) Thank you. I sat him down, I caricatured him, and since then I've caricatured hundreds of celebrities.This is one I remember fondly. Salman Rushdie was pissed-off I think because I altered the map of New York, if you notice. (Laughter) Anyway, the next slide I'm about to show you — (Laughter) Should I just turn that off? The next slide I'm about to show you, is a little more serious. I was hesitant to include this in my presentation because this cartoon was published soon after 9/11. What was, for me, a very naive observation, turned out to be a disaster. That evening, I came home to hundreds of hate mails, hundreds of people telling me how they could have lived another day without seeing this. I was also asked to leave the organization, a cartoonists' organization in America, that for me was my lifeline. That's when I realized, you know, cartoons are really powerful, art comes with responsibility.Anyway, what I did was I decided that I need to take a break. I quit my job at the papers, I closed my school, and I wrapped up my pencils and my brushes and inks, and I decided to go traveling. When I went traveling, I remember, I met this fabulous old man, who I met when I was caricaturing, who turned out to be an artist, in Italy. He invited me to his studio. He said, ""Come and visit."" When I went, I saw the ghastliest thing ever. I saw this dead, naked effigy of himself hanging from the ceiling. I said, ""Oh, my God. What is that?"" And I asked him, and he said, ""Oh, that thing? In the night, I die. In the morning, I am born again."" I thought he was koo koo, but something about that really stuck. I loved it. I thought there was something really beautiful about that. So I said, ""I am dead, so I need to be born again.""So, I wanted to be a painter like him, except, I don't know how to paint. So, I tried going to the art store. You know, there are a hundred types of brushes. Forget it, they will confuse you even if you know how to draw. So I decided, I'm going to learn to paint by myself. I'm going to show you a very quick clip to show you how I painted and a little bit about my city, Bangalore. (Music) They had to be larger than life. Everything had to be larger. The next painting was even bigger. And even bigger. And for me it was, I had to dance while I painted. It was so exciting. Except, I even started painting dancers. Here for example is a Flamenco dancer, except there was one problem. I didn't know the dance form, so I started following them, and I made some money, sold my paintings and would rush off to France or Spain and work with them. That's Pepe Linares, the renowned Flamenco singer.But I had one problem, my paintings never danced. As much energy as I put into them while making them, they never danced. So I decided — I had this crazy epiphany at two in the morning. I called my friends, painted on their bodies, and had them dance in front of a painting. And, all of a sudden, my paintings came alive. And then I was fortunate enough to actually perform this in California with Velocity Circus. And I sat like you guys there in the audience. And I saw my work come alive. You know, normally you work in isolation, and you show at a gallery, but here, the work was coming alive, and it had some other artists working with me.The collaborative effort was fabulous. I said, I'm going to collaborate with anybody and everybody I meet. I started doing fashion. This is a fashion show we held in London. The best collaboration, of course, is with children. They are ruthless, they are honest, but they're full of energy and fun. This is a work, a library I designed for the Robin Hood Foundation. And I must say, I spent time in the Bronx working with these kids. And, in exchange for me working with them, they taught me how to be cool. I don't think I've succeeded, but they've taught me. They said, ""Stop saying sorry. Say, my bad."" (Laughter)Then I said, all this is good, but I want to paint like a real painter. American education is so expensive. I was in India, and I was walking down the streets, and I saw a billboard painter. And these guys paint humongous paintings, and they look really good. And I wondered how they did it from so close. So, one day I had the opportunity to meet one of these guys, and I said, ""How do you paint like that? Who taught you?"" And he said, ""Oh, it's very easy. I can teach you, but we're leaving the city, because billboard painters are a dying, extinct bunch of artists, because digital printing has totally replaced them and hijacked them."" I said, in exchange for education in how to paint, I will support them, and I started a company. And since then, I've been painting all over the place. This is a painting I did of my wife in my apartment. This is another painting. And, in fact, I started painting on anything, and started sending them around town.Since I mentioned my wife, the most important collaboration has been with her, Netra. Netra and I met when she was 18. I must have been 19 and a half then, and it was love at first sight. I lived in India. She lived in America. She'd come every two months to visit me, and then I said I'm the man, I'm the man, and I have to reciprocate. I have to travel seven oceans, and I have to come and see you. I did that twice, and I went broke. So then I said, ""Nets, what do I do?"" She said, ""Why don't you send me your paintings? My dad knows a bunch of rich guys. We'll try and con them into buying it, and then..."" But it turned out, after I sent the works to her, that her dad's friends, like most of you, are geeks. I'm joking. (Laughter) No, they were really big geeks, and they didn't know much about art. So Netra was stuck with 30 paintings of mine.So what we did was we rented a little van and we drove all over the east coast trying to sell it. She contacted anyone and everyone who was willing to buy my work. She made enough money, she sold off the whole collection and made enough money to move me for four years with lawyers, a company, everything, and she became my manager. That's us in New York. Notice one thing, we're equal here. Something happened along the line. (Laughter)But this brought me — with Netra managing my career — it brought me a lot of success. I was really happy. I thought of myself as a bit of a rockstar. I loved the attention. This is all the press we got, and we said, it's time to celebrate. And I said that the best way to celebrate is to marry Netra. I said, ""Let's get married."" And I said, ""Not just married. Let's invite everyone who's helped us, all the people who bought our work."" And you won't believe it, we put together a list of 7,000 people, who had made a difference — a ridiculous list, but I was determined to bring them to India, so — a lot of them were in India. 150 artists volunteered to help me with my wedding. We had fashion designers, installation artists, models, we had makeup artists, jewelry designers, all kinds of people working with me to make my wedding an art installation. And I had a special installation in tribute to my in-laws. I had the vegetable carvers work on that for me.But all this excitement led to the press writing about us. We were in the papers, we're still in the news three years later, but, unfortunately, something tragic happened right after. My mother fell very ill. I love my mother and I was told all of a sudden that she was going to die. And they said you have to say bye to her, you have to do what you have to do. And I was devastated. I had shows booked up for another year. I was on a high. And I couldn't. I could not.My life was not exuberant. I could not live this larger than life person. I started exploring the darker abscesses of the human mind. Of course, my work turned ugly, but another thing happened. I lost all my audiences. The Bollywood stars who I would party with and buy my work disappeared. The collectors, the friends, the press, everyone said, ""Nice, but thank you."" ""No thank you,"" was more like it. But I wanted people to actually feel my work from their gut, because I was painting it from my gut. If they wanted beauty, I said, this is the beauty I'm willing to give you. It's politicized. Of course, none of them liked it.My works also turned autobiographical. At this point, something else happened. A very, very dear friend of mine came out of the closet, and in India at that time, it was illegal to be gay, and it's disgusting to see how people respond to a gay person. I was very upset. I remember the time when my mother used to dress me up as a little girl — that's me there — because she wanted a girl, and she has only boys. (Laughter) Anyway, I don't know what my friends are going to say after this talk. It's a secret.So, after this, my works turned a little violent. I talked about this masculinity that one need not perform. And I talked about the weakness of male sexuality. This time, not only did my collectors disappear, the political activists decided to ban me and to threaten me and to forbid me from showing. It turned nasty, and I'm a bit of a chicken. I can't deal with any threat. This was a big threat.So, I decided it was time to end and go back home. This time I said let's try something different. I need to be reborn again. And I thought the best way, as most of you know who have children, the best way to have a new lease on life, is to have a child. I decided to have a child, and before I did that, I quickly studied what can go wrong. How can a family get dysfunctional? And Rudra was born. That's my little son.And two magical things happened after he was born. My mother miraculously recovered after a serious operation, and this man was elected president of this country. You know I sat at home and I watched. I teared up and I said that's where I want to be. So Netra and I wound up our life, closed up everything we had, and we decided to move to New York. And this was just eight months ago.I moved back to New York, my work has changed. Everything about my work has become more whimsical. This one is called ""What the Fuck Was I Thinking?"" It talks about mental incest. You know, I may appear to be a very nice, clean, sweet boy. But I'm not. I'm capable of thinking anything. But I'm very civil in my action, I assure you. (Laughter) These are just different cartoons.And, before I go, I want to tell you a little story. I was talking to mother and father this morning, and my dad said, ""I know you have so much you want to say, but you have to talk about your work with children."" So I said, okay.I work with children all over the world, and that's an entirely different talk, but I want to leave you with one story that really, really inspired me. I met Belinda when she was 16. I was 17. I was in Australia, and Belinda had cancer, and I was told she's not going to live very long. They, in fact, told me three weeks. I walk into her room, and there was a shy girl, and she was bald, and she was trying to hide her baldness. I whipped out my pen, and I started drawing on her head and I drew a crown for her. And then, we started talking, and we spent a lovely time — I told her how I ended up in Australia, how I backpacked and who I conned, and how I got a ticket, and all the stories. And I drew it out for her. And then I left. Belinda died and within a few days of her death, they published a book for her, and she used my cartoon on the cover. And she wrote a little note, she said, ""Hey Rags, thank you for the magic carpet ride around the world.""For me, my art is my magic carpet ride. I hope you will join me in this magic carpet ride, and touch children and be honest. Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raghava_kk_five_lives_of_an_artist
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"Everybody talks about happiness these days. I had somebody count the number of books with ""happiness"" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier. But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness.And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. It turns out that the word ""happiness"" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. There's just no way of getting it right.Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story — He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. But it hadn't. What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. He had had the experience. He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep.What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches — you know, when the doctor asks, ""Does it hurt now when I touch you here?"" And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, ""How have you been feeling lately?"" or ""How was your trip to Albania?"" or something like that. Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness.Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. And that really starts with a basic response of our memories — it starts immediately. We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. And let me begin with one example. This is an old study. Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. Here are two patients, those are their recordings. And you are asked, ""Who of them suffered more?"" And it's a very easy question. Clearly, Patient B suffered more — his colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and more.But now there is another question: ""How much did these patients think they suffered?"" And here is a surprise. The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great — but one of them is this distinct ... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. How do we know that? Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, ""How bad was the whole thing, in total?"" And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory.Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. Now, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work — you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. What defines a story? And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other. And you can ask: What happens to these moments? And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. I mean, most of the moments of our life — and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 — most of them don't leave a trace. Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us.So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. You have not changed the story. And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story.Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories. And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need.I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. And this is a bit hard to justify I think. I mean, how much do we consume our memories? That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. There seems to be a discrepancy. Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences?So I want you to think about a thought experiment. Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? And they're all — happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. What are the emotions that can be measured? And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. This is not about how happily a person lives. It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. Very different notion. Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way.The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. And the main lesson I think that we have learned is they are really different. You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, ""Oh his father is six feet tall,"" how much would you know about his height? Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. You have that much uncertainty. If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. So the correlation is low.We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. We know that money is very important, goals are very important. We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. It is a completely different notion.Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio. (Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up — some people may end up moving to California. And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. We know that. But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision.It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. Thank you so much. Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now?Daniel Kahneman: Sure. I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans — and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample — below an income of 600,000 dollars a year...CA: 60,000.DK: 60,000. (Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. That does not hold for emotions.CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it?DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. It's going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics.CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will — or at least should be — the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. Thank you, Danny Kahneman.","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory
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"So, what I'm going to do is just give you the latest episode of India's — maybe the world's — longest running soap opera, which is cricket. And may it run forever, because it gives people like me a living. It's got everything that you'd want a normal soap opera to want: It's got love, joy, happiness, sadness, tears, laughter, lots of deceit, intrigue. And like all good soaps, it jumps 20 years when the audience interest changes. And that's exactly what cricket has done. It's jumped 20 years into 20-over game. And that's what I'm going to talk about, how a small change leads to a very big revolution.But it wasn't always like that. Cricket wasn't always this speed-driven generations game. There was a time when you played cricket, you played timeless test matches, when you played on till the game got over. And there was this game in March 1939 that started on the third of March and ended on the 14th of March. And it only ended because the English cricketers had to go from Durban to Cape Town, which is a two-hour train journey, to catch the ship that left on the 17th, because the next ship wasn't around for a long time. So, the match was ended in between. And one of the English batsmen said, ""You know what? Another half an hour and we would have won."" (Laughter) Another half an hour after 12 days. There were two Sundays in between. But of course, Sundays are church days, so you don't play on Sundays. And one day it rained, so they all sat around making friends with each other.But there is a reason why India fell in love with cricket: because we had about the same pace of life. (Laughter) The Mahabharata was like that as well, wasn't it? You fought by day, then it was sunset, so everyone went back home. And then you worked out your strategy, and you came and fought the next day, and you went back home again. The only difference between the Mahabharata and our cricket was that in cricket, everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day. Princes patronize the game, not because they love the game, but because it was a means of ingratiating themselves to the British rulers.But there is one other reason why India fell in love with cricket, which was, all you needed was a plank of wood and a rubber ball, and any number of people could play it anywhere. Take a look: You could play it in the dump with some rocks over there, you could play it in a little alley — you couldn't hit square anywhere, because the bat hit the wall; don't forget the air conditioning and the cable wires. (Laughter) You could play it on the banks of the Ganges — that's as clean as the Ganges has been for a long time. Or you could play many games in one small patch of land, even if you didn't know which game you were actually in. (Laughter) As you can see, you can play anywhere. But slowly the game moved on, you know, finally.You don't always have five days. So, we moved on, and we started playing 50-over cricket. And then an enormous accident took place. In Indian sport we don't make things happen, accidents happen and we're in the right place at the right time, sometimes. And we won this World Cup in 1983. And suddenly we fell in love with the 50-over game, and we played it virtually every day. There was more 50-over cricket than anywhere.But there was another big date. 1983 was when we won the World Cup. 1991,'92, we found a finance minister and a prime minister willing to let the world look at India, rather than be this great country of intrigue and mystery in this closed country. And so we allowed multinationals into India. We cut customs duties, we reduced import duties, and we got all the multinationals coming in, with multinational budgets, who looked at per-capita income and got very excited about the possibilities in India, and were looking for a vehicle to reach every Indian.And there are only two vehicles in India — one real, one scripted. The scripted one is what you see in the movies, the real one was cricket. And so one of my friends sitting right here in front of me, Ravi Dhariwal from Pepsi, decided he's going to take it all over the world. And Pepsi was this big revolution, because they started taking cricket all over. And so cricket started becoming big; cricket started bringing riches in. Television started covering cricket. For a long time television said, ""We won't cover cricket unless you pay us to cover it."" Then they said, ""OK, the next rights are sold for 55 million dollars. The next rights are sold for 612 million dollars."" So, it's a bit of a curve, that.And then another big accident happened in our cricket. England invented 20 overs cricket, and said, ""The world must play 20 overs cricket."" Just as England invented cricket, and made the rest of the world play it. Thank God for them. (Laughter) And so, India had to go and play the T20 World Cup, you see. India didn't want to play the T20 World Cup. But we were forced to play it by an 8-1 margin. And then something very dramatic happened. We got to the final, and then this moment, that will remain enshrined forever, for everybody, take a look.(Crowd cheering)The Pakistani batsman trying to clear the fielder.Announcer: And Zishan takes it! India wins! What a match for a Twenty20 final. India, the world champions. (Cheering) India, T20 champions. But what a game we had, M. S. Dhoni got it right in the air, but Misbah-ul-Haq, what a player. A massive, massive success: India, the world TT champions.Harsha Bhogle: Suddenly India discovered this power of 20-overs cricket. The accident, of course, there, was that the batsman thought the bowler was bowling fast. (Laughter) If he had bowled fast, the ball would have gone where it was meant to go, but it didn't go. And we suddenly discovered that we could be good at this game. And what it also did was it led to a certain pride in the fact that India could be the best in the world. It was at a time when investment was coming in, India was feeling a little more confident about itself. And so there was a feeling that there was great pride in what we can do. And thankfully for all of us, the English are very good at inventing things, and then the gracious people that they are, they let the world become very good at it. (Laughter) And so England invented T20 cricket, and allowed India to hijack it. It was not like reengineering that we do in medicine, we just took it straight away, as is. (Laughter)And so, we launched our own T20 league. Six weeks, city versus city. It was a new thing for us. We had only ever supported our country — the only two areas in which India was very proud about their country, representing itself on the field. One was war, the Indian army, which we don't like to happen very often. The other was Indian cricket. Now, suddenly we had to support city leagues. But the people getting into these city leagues were people who were taking their cues from the West. America is a home of leagues. And they said, ""Right, we'll build some glitzy leagues here in India."" But was India ready for it? Because cricket, for a long time in India was always organized. It was never promoted, it was never sold — it was organized. And look what they did with our beautiful, nice, simple family game. All of a sudden, you had that happening.(Music)An opening ceremony to match every other. This was an India that was buying Corvettes. This was an India that was buying Jaguar. This was an India that was adding more mobile phones per month than New Zealand's population twice over. So, it was a different India. But it was also a slightly more orthodox India that was very happy to be modern, but didn't want to say that to people. And so, they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived. Everyone secretly watched them, but everyone claimed not to.(Music)(Laughter)The new owners of Indian cricket were not the old princes. They were not bureaucrats who were forced into sport because they didn't actually love it; these were people who ran serious companies. And so they started promoting cricket big time, started promoting clubs big time. And they've started promoting them with huge money behind it. I mean the IPL had 2.3 billion dollars before a ball was bowled, 1.6 billion dollars for television revenue over 10 years, and another 70 million dollars plus from all these franchises that were putting in money. And then they had to appeal to their cities, but they had to do it like the West, right? Because we are setting up leagues. But what they were very good at doing was making it very localized. So, just to give you an example of how they did it — not Manchester United style promotion, but very Mumbai style promotion. Take a look.(Music)Of course, a lot of people said, ""Maybe they dance better than they play."" (Laughter) But that's all right. What it did also is it changed the way we looked at cricket. All along, if you wanted a young cricketer, you picked him up from the bylanes of your own little locality, your own city, and you were very proud of the system that produced those cricketers. Now, all of the sudden, if you were to bowl a shot — if Mumbai were to bowl a shot, for example, they needn't go to Kalbadevi or Shivaji Park or somewhere to source them, they could go to Trinidad. This was the new India, wasn't it? This was the new world, where you can source from anywhere as long as you get the best product at the best price. And all of a sudden, Indian sport had awakened to the reality that you can source the best product for the best price anywhere in the world.So, the Mumbai Indians flew in Dwayne Bravo from Trinidad and Tobago, overnight. And when he had to go back to represent the West Indies, they asked him, ""When do you have to reach?"" He said, ""I have to be there by a certain time, so I have to leave today."" We said, ""No, no, no. It's not about when you have to leave; it's about when do you have to reach there?"" And so he said, ""I've got to reach on date X."" And they said, ""Fine, you play to date X, minus one."" So, he played in Hyderabad, went, straight after the game, went from the stadium to Hyderabad airport, sat in a private corporate jet — first refueling in Portugal, second refueling in Brazil; he was in West Indies in time. (Laughter) Never would India have thought on this scale before. Never would India have said, ""I want a player to play one game for me, and I will use a corporate jet to send him all the way back to Kingston, Jamaica to play a game."" And I just thought to myself, ""Wow, we've arrived somewhere in the world, you know? We have arrived somewhere. We are thinking big.""But what this also did was it started marrying the two most important things in Indian cricket, which is cricket and the movies in Indian entertainment. There is cricket and the movies. And they came together because people in the movies now started owning clubs. And so, people started going to the cricket to watch Preity Zinta. They started going to the cricket to watch Shah Rukh Khan. And something very interesting happened. We started getting song and dance in Indian cricket. And so it started resembling the Indian movies more and more. And of course, if you were on Preity Zinta's team — as you will see on the clip that follows — if you did well, you got a hug from Preity Zinta. So that was the ultimate reason to do well. Take a look — everyone's watching Preity Zinta.(Music)And then of course there was Shah Rukh playing the Kolkata crowd. We'd all seen matches in Kolkata, but we'd never seen anything like this: Shah Rukh, with the Bengali song, getting the audiences all worked up for Kolkata — not for India, but for Kolkata. But take a look at this.(Music)An Indian film star hugging a Pakistani cricketer because they'd won in Kolkata. Can you imagine? And do you know what the Pakistani cricketer said? (Applause) ""I wish I was playing for Preity Zinta's team.""(Laughter)But I thought I'd take this opportunity — there's a few people from Pakistan in here. I'm so happy that you're here because I think we can show that we can both be together and be friends, right? We can play cricket together, we can be friends. So thank you very much for coming, all of you from Pakistan.(Applause)There was criticism too because they said, ""Players are being bought and sold? Are they grain? Are they cattle?"" Because we had this auction, you see. How do you fix a price for a player? And so the auction that followed literally had people saying, ""Bang! so many million dollars for so-and-so player."" There it is.(Music)Auctioneer: Going at 1,500,000 dollars. Chennai. Shane Warne sold for 450,000 dollars.HB: Suddenly, a game which earned its players 50 rupees a day — so 250 rupees for a test match, but if you finish in four days you only got 200. The best Indian players who played every test match — every one of the internationals, the top of the line players — standard contracts are 220,000 dollars in a whole year. Now they were getting 500,000 for six days' work. Then Andrew Flintoff came by from England, he got one and a half million dollars, and he went back and said, ""For four weeks, I'm earning more than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, and I'm earning more than the footballers, wow."" And where was he earning it from? From a little club in India. Could you have imagined that day would come? One and a half million dollars for six weeks' work. That's not bad, is it?So, at 2.3 billion dollars before the first ball was bowled. What India was doing, though, was benchmarking itself against the best in the world, and it became a huge brand. Lalit Modi was on the cover of Business Today. IPL became the biggest brand in India and, because our elections, had to be moved to South Africa, and we had to start the tournament in three weeks. Move a whole tournament to South Africa in three weeks. But we did it. You know why? Because no country works as slowly as we do till three weeks before an event, and nobody works fast as we do in the last three weeks.(Applause)Our population, which for a long time we thought was a problem, suddenly became our biggest asset because there were more people watching — the huge consuming class — everybody came to watch the cricket. We'd also made cricket the only sport in India, which is a pity, but in India every other sport pushes cricket to become big, which is a bit of a tragedy of our times.Now, this last minute before I go — there's a couple of side effects of all this. For a long time, India was this country of poverty, dust, beggars, snake charmers, filth, Delhi belly — people heard Delhi belly stories before they came. And, all of a sudden, India was this land of opportunity. Cricketers all over the world said, ""You know, we love India. We love to play in India."" And that felt good, you know? We said, ""The dollar's quite powerful actually."" Can you imagine, you've got the dollar on view and there's no Delhi belly in there anymore. There's no filth, there's no beggars, all the snake charmers have vanished, everybody's gone. This tells you how the capitalist world rules.Right so, finally, an English game that India usurped a little bit, but T20 is going to be the next missionary in the world. If you want to take the game around the world, it's got to be the shortest form of the game. You can't take a timeless test to China and sit through 14 days with no result in the end, or you can't take it all over the world. So that's what T20 is doing. Hopefully, it'll make everyone richer, hopefully it'll make the game bigger and hopefully it'll give cricket commentators more time in the business.Thank you very much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harsha_bhogle_the_rise_of_cricket_the_rise_of_india
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"If I can leave you with one big idea today, it's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts, and instead of thinking about information overload, what I'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible.So what we're looking at right here is a typical mortality chart organized by age. This tool that I'm using here is a little experiment. It's called Pivot, and with Pivot what I can do is I can choose to filter in one particular cause of deaths — say, accidents. And, right away, I see there's a different pattern that emerges. This is because, in the mid-area here, people are at their most active, and over here they're at their most frail. We can step back out again and then reorganize the data by cause of death, seeing that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects, but not for everyone. If we go ahead and we filter by age — say 40 years or less — we see that accidents are actually the greatest cause that people have to be worried about. And if you drill into that, it's especially the case for men.So you get the idea that viewing information, viewing data in this way, is a lot like swimming in a living information info-graphic. And if we can do this for raw data, why not do it for content as well? So what we have right here is the cover of every single Sports Illustrated ever produced. It's all here; it's all on the web. You can go back to your rooms and try this after my talk. With Pivot, you can drill into a decade. You can drill into a particular year. You can jump right into a specific issue. So I'm looking at this; I see the athletes that have appeared in this issue, the sports. I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, so I'll go ahead and I'll click on that, which reveals, for me, all the issues in which Lance Armstrong's been a part of.(Applause)Now, if I want to just kind of take a peek at these, I might think, ""Well, what about taking a look at all of cycling?"" So I can step back, and expand on that. And I see Greg LeMond now. And so you get the idea that when you navigate over information this way — going narrower, broader, backing in, backing out — you're not searching, you're not browsing. You're doing something that's actually a little bit different. It's in between, and we think it changes the way information can be used.So I want to extrapolate on this idea a bit with something that's a little bit crazy. What we're done here is we've taken every single Wikipedia page and we reduced it down to a little summary. So the summary consists of just a little synopsis and an icon to indicate the topical area that it comes from. I'm only showing the top 500 most popular Wikipedia pages right here. But even in this limited view, we can do a lot of things. Right away, we get a sense of what are the topical domains that are most popular on Wikipedia. I'm going to go ahead and select government. Now, having selected government, I can now see that the Wikipedia categories that most frequently correspond to that are Time magazine People of the Year. So this is really important because this is an insight that was not contained within any one Wikipedia page. It's only possible to see that insight when you step back and look at all of them.Looking at one of these particular summaries, I can then drill into the concept of Time magazine Person of the Year, bringing up all of them. So looking at these people, I can see that the majority come from government; some have come from natural sciences; some, fewer still, have come from business — there's my boss — and one has come from music. And interestingly enough, Bono is also a TED Prize winner. So we can go, jump, and take a look at all the TED Prize winners. So you see, we're navigating the web for the first time as if it's actually a web, not from page-to-page, but at a higher level of abstraction.And so I want to show you one other thing that may catch you a little bit by surprise. I'm just showing the New York Times website here. So Pivot, this application — I don't want to call it a browser; it's really not a browser, but you can view web pages with it — and we bring that zoomable technology to every single web page like this. So I can step back, pop right back into a specific section. Now the reason why this is important is because, by virtue of just viewing web pages in this way, I can look at my entire browsing history in the exact same way. So I can drill into what I've done over specific time frames. Here, in fact, is the state of all the demo that I just gave. And I can sort of replay some stuff that I was looking at earlier today. And, if I want to step back and look at everything, I can slice and dice my history, perhaps by my search history — here, I was doing some nepotistic searching, looking for Bing, over here for Live Labs Pivot. And from these, I can drill into the web page and just launch them again. It's one metaphor repurposed multiple times, and in each case it makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts with the data.So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. We talk about the curse of information overload. We talk about drowning in data. What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? If we can do that, then instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there's wisdom to be found.So with that, I thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration
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"I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking ""samples"" — frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water — and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was — the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday — that seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn't let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: ""Terminator,"" ""Aliens"" and ""The Abyss."" And with ""The Abyss,"" I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. So, you know, merging the two passions.Something interesting came out of ""The Abyss,"" which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn't make any money — barely broke even, I should say — I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic.You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, ""Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art."" So, with ""Terminator 2,"" which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience — although we did make a little more money on that one.So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, ""This is going to be a whole new world,"" this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while.But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. So, I wrote this piece called ""Avatar,"" which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while.So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. (Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as ""'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: ""It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film."" Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of ""Titanic."" And that's why I made the movie. (Applause) And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. But I convinced them. I said, ""We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. We'll be using it in the opening of the film. It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook."" And I talked them into funding an expedition. (Laughter)Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. Not a movie, not HD — for real. (Applause)Now, that blew my mind. And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. And I thought like, ""Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. This is really cool.""And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it — it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them.So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of ""Titanic,"" I said, ""OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while."" And so, we started planning these expeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the Titanic wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it.So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. When I say, ""I'm operating it,"" but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship.So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience — that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really, really quite profound. And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan.So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals — they're basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigrade water plumes. You think they can't possibly exist.At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well — again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access — astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments — taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing.I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. Because I had to, at a certain point, say, ""What am I doing out here? Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?"" We don't make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame in it. People sort of think I went away between ""Titanic"" and ""Avatar"" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience.No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge — and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is — for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time.And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, ""We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea,"" you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect.So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was ""Avatar,"" I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing ""Avatar,"" coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, ""Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora."" To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that.So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It's the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, ""Give me some advice for doing this."" And I say, ""Don't put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you — don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks.""NASA has this phrase that they like: ""Failure is not an option."" But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_cameron_before_avatar_a_curious_boy
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"(Music)(Applause)I'm Jon M. Chu. And I'm not a dancer, I'm not a choreographer — I'm actually a filmmaker, a storyteller. I directed a movie two years ago called ""Step Up 2: The Streets."" Anybody? Anybody? Yeah! During that movie I got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers — amazing, the best in the world — and they brought me into a society, the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind. I mean, this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities. They could fly in the air. They could bend their elbow all the way back. They could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row. I'd never seen anything like that.When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson. I grew up in a musical family. (Laughter) And those guys, those were like, ultimate heroes. Being a shy, little, skinny Asian kid growing up in the Silicon Valley with low self-esteem, those guys made me believe in something bigger. Those guys made me want to, like, ""I'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl.""(Applause)And it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared, sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos. But after seeing what I've seen, the truth is, they have not disappeared at all. They're here, getting better and better every day. And dance has progressed. It is insane what dance is right now. Dance has never had a better friend than technology.Online videos and social networking ... dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance, where kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself. And this is happening every day.And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages, with cheap webcams, lies the world's great dancers of tomorrow. Our Fred Astaires, our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips, and may not have that opportunity, except for us.So, we created the LXD, sort of a — the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world. A living, breathing comic book series, but unlike Spiderman and Iron Man, these guys can actually do it. And we're going to show you some today. So, let me introduce to you, some of our heroes right now. We got Madd Chadd, Lil' C, Kid David and J Smooth. Please be excited, have fun, yell, scream. Ladies and gentlemen: The LXD.(Applause)(Video): Madd Chadd: When people first see me, I get a lot of different reactions actually. Sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it, but sometimes they get a little freaked out. And, I don't know, I kind of get a kick out of that a little bit.(Music)(Applause)J Smooth: When I'm in the zone — I'm dancing and free styling it — I actually visually kind of picture lines, and moving them. I think of like, Transformers, like how panels open and then they fold, they fold in, and then you close that panel. And then another thing opens, you close that.(Music)(Applause)Kid David: It's kind of like, honestly a lot of times I don't really know what's going on when I'm dancing. Because at that point it's just really like, it's my body and the music. It's not really a conscious decision, ""I'm going to do this next, I'm going to do this."" It's kind of like this other level where you can't make choices anymore, and it's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music. I got my name just because I was so young. I was young when I started. I was younger than a lot of the people I was dancing with. So, it was always like, they called me Kid David, because I was the kid.(Music)(Applause)L'il C: I tell them to create a ball, and then you just use that ball of energy. And instead of throwing it out, people would think that's a krump move, that's a krump move. That's not a krump move. You're going to throw it out, you throw it out, and you hold it. And you let it go, and then right when you see the tail, you grab it by the tail, then you bring it back in. And you just got this piece of energy and you just, you're manipulating it. You know, you create power, then you tame it.(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_lxd_in_the_internet_age_dance_evolves
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"I have a vision for each one of you, and the vision I have for you is that when you wake up in the morning, your blood is singing at the thought of being who you are and doing what you do; that as you go through the day, you can literally sink to your knees in gratitude at the tremendous good fortune that's been bestowed on you; that as you go through the day, you become radiantly alive several times. And if your life isn't like that, I'd like to humbly suggest that you're wasting your life. A life is too short to be wasted.So what I propose to do in the next 17 minutes — I've used up one minute already — is to give you a set of powerful tools which can get you started on being there. Is that of interest to you?Audience: Yes.Srikumar Rao: OK.This is a conference on happiness, but even if it wasn't a conference on happiness, would it be right if I said that in some way, shape, fashion or form, you're devoting your entire life to being happy? Everything you do — your job, family, children, relationships, whatever — is a quest for happiness. Correct?I'd like you to think about the following: What do you have to get in order to be happy? We're just going to spend a minute on this. What do you have to get in order to be happy?Anybody, quick?When I conduct this experiment, a bunch of stuff comes up: vast wealth, trophy spouse, good health, lots of travel, time, etc, etc, etc. Right now, if you were to think about it, you probably have a list of, ""Here's what I need to get in order to be happy."" I would like you to consider this: anything that you can get — let me repeat that — anything you can get, you can un-get. Is that correct? So, vast wealth can make you happy. Vast wealth can disappear tomorrow. A number of people in the financial sector have discovered this already. So whatever you get that can make you happy can go away. Where does that leave you? Not a very nice place, right?I have a different proposition to suggest to you. What I have to suggest to you is that there is nothing that you have to get, do or be in order to be happy. Let me repeat that: there is nothing that you have to get, do or be in order to be happy. In fact, happiness is your innate nature. It is hardwired into you. It is part of your DNA. You cannot not be happy.Now, all of you are very polite, and in some of the other forums I speak in, such as top business schools, they're not so polite. And invariably, somebody articulates what many of you are thinking, which is: ""If happiness is my innate nature, how come I am not experiencing it? How come I am experiencing my life sucks?""(Laughter)And the answer to that is actually very simple. You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. Let me repeat that: you have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental model.A mental model is a notion we have that this is the way the world works. All of us have mental models, we've got dozens of mental models. We've got mental models on how to find a job, how to get ahead at work, how to pick a restaurant to eat at, how to have a movie to go to ... dozens of them. The problem isn't that we have mental models. The problem is that we don't know that we have mental models. We think this is the way the world works. And the more we invest in a mental model, the more it appears that this, in fact, is the way the world works. But it isn't: it's just a mental model, and the mental model we have that we buy into so strongly is that we have to get something so we can do something so we can be something. Like, we have to get a great deal of money so we can travel to exotic places so we can be happy. We have to be in a relationship so we can have great sex so we can be happy.All of this is a variation of the if-then model. And the if-then model is: if this happens, then we will be happy. If I were to get a better job, if I were to get more money, if my boss would have a heart attack, if only I was married, if only my wife would leave me —(Laughter)if only I had children, if my children would grow up and go to college ... It doesn't matter what it is. The whole notion is if this happens, then I will be happy.And right now, the only thing that's different between the persons in this audience is what is the particular ""if"" that you are focusing on? And the only thing that's different between you now and where you were 10 years ago is what is the particular ""if"" that you were focusing on? Think about your life 10 years ago. Spend a minute doing that. Ten years ago, if you remember clearly, there were certain things you wanted. Is that correct? Odds are pretty good that many of those things you wanted 10 years ago you now have. Is that correct? Where has that left you? In exactly the same place, right?What we don't realize is the model itself is flawed. The if-then model — ""If this happens I will be happy"" — the model itself is flawed. But instead of recognizing that it is the model itself that's flawed, what we do is spend enormous amounts of time changing the ""if."" ""Oh, well, I thought if I became CEO it would help, but now I realize it's not that I want to become a CEO. I want to become the billionaire CEO, and then I will be happy."" You've got your own variation on that. But it's the model itself that's flawed, not what you put on the ""if"" side of the equation. I can demonstrate that to you.Can any of you recall a time when you were confronted with a scene of such spectacular beauty that it took you outside of yourself into a place of great serenity? Maybe a rainbow, a mountain range, a valley, the sea. And if you remember that — raise your hands if you could. Virtually all of you could, right? Have you ever wondered why that happened? The reason that happened is that somehow, for some reason, at that instant, you accepted the universe exactly as it was. You didn't say, ""That's a beautiful rainbow, but it's kind of off to the left, and if I could move it 200 yards to the right, it would be ever so much more beautiful.""(Laughter)You didn't say, ""That's a beautiful valley, but the tree in the foreground has too many crooked branches. So if you gave me a chainsaw and 20 minutes, I'd make it ever so much better.""Oh no, the rainbow off-center was just fine. The tree with its crooked branches was just fine. And the moment you accepted the universe just as it was, your habitual-wanting self dropped away, and the happiness which is your innate nature surfaced, and you felt it. And I know you felt it because now, even now after all those years, you can still remember it.The problem is that your life right now, with all of the problems that you have — more precisely, all of the problems that you think you have — is equally perfect. But you do not accept it. In fact, you're spending all your time striving with might and main to make it different. You are not accepting it. And when you're not accepting it, you're buying into the if-then model: if this happens, then I will be happy. And it's the model itself that is flawed.So let me show you how you can get out of that, or at least you can begin the steps towards getting out of that. I'd like to share with you that action. We all live our lives because we want to achieve something, correct? You know, we are here and we want to have something. Alex wants to have a successful conference. You know, many of you want to have great programs for your companies that are very successful. You want to progress, have more money, all of that, is that correct? Each of those is an outcome; you would like something to happen.Now, I'd like you to think about the following: actions are within your control, not entirely, but to a large extent. The outcome is completely out of your control. OK? Actions are within your control. The outcome is completely outside your control.Have any of you recognized that when you have a goal and you start to work towards it, some of the time you don't achieve your goal, and some of the time what you get is the exact opposite of what you wanted? Has that happened to any of you?Like there was a friend of mine who said, ""Gee, you know, I have not been paying a lot of attention to my wife, and this has to change."" So the next time we went on a business trip, he bought a very expensive dress for her. And this was his way of showing, you know, I care for you, and nice things would happen. And when he presented the gift to his wife, her immediate reaction was, ""After 20 years of marriage, you don't know my size?""(Laughter)""And furthermore, don't you know I never wear this kind of thing?"" And the next thing you know, he had a full-blown marital spat. Has that happened to any of you? You've taken action for a particular outcome and the outcome you got was the exact opposite of what you wanted? Happens all the time.Well, we live in a world where what we think of, what we invest in, is the outcome. We define our life in the following way: here I am, here is where I want to go, these are the steps I have to take in order to get from where I am to where I want to go, and if I succeed, life is wonderful. And if I don't, then I have failed, life is no good, life sucks. True? False? That is how we live. We invest in the outcome, and as I've just pointed out, the outcome is frequently different from what we would like, and sometimes the diametric opposite of what we would like. You invest in the outcome and you are guaranteed to have more than your share of frustration, angst and all the rest of the stuff that makes life suck.There is an alternative. And the alternative is that you do not invest in the outcome, you invest in the process. And the best way to describe that is a quote by John Wooden. I don't know how many of you are familiar with John Wooden. He's very well-known in the United States and certainly among basketball fans. He's the only person ever to make the basketball Hall of Fame both as a player and as a coach. And what he told his entering team — he led UCLA to an unprecedented number of victories and finals in the NCAA — and what he used to tell any new team is he never spoke about winning. He always said, ""When it's over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? And if you did the best that you were capable of, the score doesn't matter. But I would suspect that if you did the best that you were capable of, you will find the score to your liking."" That is investing in a process.What we do is the exact opposite. We invest in the outcome. This is what I want — oh, I want it so desperately, because if I get it I will be happy. And you try with might and main, to do whatever you can, but you are always focusing on, ""This is the outcome."" Now, focusing on the outcome is fine. It gives you direction. Investing in the outcome means that you make the achievement of a particular outcome dependent for your well-being. And that is a surefire recipe for failure.What you can do is something else. You can invest in the process. That is, once you have determined, here is where I am, here is where I want to be, and that's fine, you focus on the outcome only to the extent that it gives you direction, and then you invest yourself completely in the process. You say, here are the steps you want to take, and you put everything into it. And if you succeed, wonderful. And if you don't succeed, still wonderful, because now you have a new starting point, and from that new starting point, you select another outcome and keep going. And when you do that, you will find that every day is a blast.Let me give you an example. And if you have children — raise your hands if you have children. Have you ever seen a small child learn to walk? What happens, and this happens typically between 11 and 13 months, is the child gets up and she sees everybody walking, she wants to walk, she gets up, she falls down, she starts crying and momma runs up and comforts her, kisses the place, makes it well. She tries again, falls down, mommy runs up again. After some time, mommy feels tired and no longer runs up and the child stops crying, and then she gets up, takes a step and doesn't fall down, and then she takes another, and a beautiful smile comes on her face. And very soon, generally within 24 hours, she's walking all over the place, upsetting your living room arrangements. And you know you've gone to a new stage of parenting. Right?Now, imagine what would happen if each time the child fell, she would say, ""Oh my God, I failed again. I'm never going to learn to walk."" And you have to get counseling for her to help her deal with feelings of inadequacy and not being able to achieve and fail yet again. How long do you think it would take her to learn to walk if you had to do that, if every three times she fell down, you had to get a counselor to counsel her and so on? Sounds funny, doesn't it? But that is exactly what we're doing. What the child is doing is focusing on the process. She's investing in the process, not in the outcome.What we do is the exact opposite. As we grow up, we lose the ability to invest in the process, we start investing in the outcome. By definition the outcome is outside of our control, and if that's where we spend all of our emotional energy, we are going to get drained as we do.But if, on the other hand, we said, ""Here is the outcome, I am going to invest in the process and give it every single bit I could,"" every day is a blast, and you're well on your way to achieving the vision that I outlined to you.The question that I get all the time, is people say, ""Professor Rao, but nothing makes me passionate."" So I say, ""OK, what would?"" And they invariably come up with, you know, here is a list of things. Here's my job and here's how much it pays, this is the kind of person my boss is, the kind of people my colleagues are, and here's how my customers are, here's how much I travel, here's how big my office is, how deep the carpeting is, how many windows I have — a bunch of parameters.And what I tell them is what I want to share with you, because all of that stuff — first of all, it doesn't exist. But second, even if it did and you were plugged into it, it would not take more than six months for you to be the same sorry, miserable self there as you are now, because passion exists inside you. It does not exist in the job. And if you don't find a way to ignite it within you right where you are, you are not going to find it outside. But if you do find a way to ignite it where you are, then you will find that the external world rearranges itself to accommodate the new person that you are becoming. And as you do that, you will find that miracles happen on a regular basis. Persons come up whom you're delighted to meet. New people enter your life. It's just a breeze, because all you do in your life is you take journeys.You came here to this conference; you went on a journey. You hang around the water cooler, talking about how terrible your place of work is; you went on a journey. You watch ""Desperate Housewives,"" you go on a journey. You go on a journey where 40-something women are having affairs with 19-something gardeners while the husbands are playing around with models. All you do is go on journeys. There's nothing wrong with that, but just ask yourself, ""Is this a journey I want to take? Does this take me to a place I want to spend time?""And if you start doing that, you will find that your life changes. The kind of people you meet, the things you talk about, the movies you go to, the books you read — everything changes. And you begin all of that by focusing on the process.Invest in the process, not in the outcome.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/srikumar_rao_plug_into_your_hard_wired_happiness
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"Last year here at TED I asked you to give me your data, to put your data on the web, on the basis that if people put data onto the web — government data, scientific data, community data, whatever it is — it will be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways that they never could have imagined.So, today I'm back just to show you a few things, to show you, in fact, there is an open data movement afoot, now, around the world. The cry of ""Raw data now!"" which I made people make in the auditorium, was heard around the world. So, let's roll the video.A classic story, the first one which lots of people picked up, was when in March — on March 10th in fact, soon after TED — Paul Clarke, in the U.K. government, blogged, ""Oh, I've just got some raw data. Here it is, it's about bicycle accidents."" Two days it took the Times Online to make a map, a mashable map — we call these things mash-ups — a mashed-up user interface that allows you to go in there and have a look and find out whether your bicycle route to work was affected.Here's more data, traffic survey data, again, put out by the U.K. government, and because they put it up using the Linked Data standards, then a user could just make a map, just by clicking.Does this data affect things? Well, let's get back to 2008. Look at Zanesville, Ohio. Here's a map a lawyer made. He put on it the water plant, and which houses are there, which houses have been connected to the water. And he got, from other data sources, information to show which houses are occupied by white people. Well, there was too much of a correlation, he felt, between which houses were occupied by white people and which houses had water, and the judge was not impressed either. The judge was not impressed to the tune of 10.9 million dollars. That's the power of taking one piece of data, another piece of data, putting it together, and showing the result.Let's look at some data from the U.K. now. This is U.K. government data, a completely independent site, Where Does My Money Go. It allows anybody to go there and burrow down. You can burrow down by a particular type of spending, or you can go through all the different regions and compare them. So, that's happening in the U.K. with U.K. government data.Yes, certainly you can do it over here. Here's a site which allows you to look at recovery spending in California. Take an arbitrary example, Long Beach, California, you can go and have a look at what recovery money they've been spending on different things such as energy.In fact, this is the graph of the number of data sets in the repositories of data.gov, and data.gov.uk. And I'm delighted to see a great competition between the U.K. in blue, and the U.S. in red.How can you use this stuff? Well, for example, if you have lots of data about places you can take, from a postcode — which is like a zip plus four — for a specific group of houses, you can make paper, print off a paper which has got very, very specific things about the bus stops, the things specifically near you.On a larger scale, this is a mash-up of the data which was released about the Afghan elections. It allows you to set your own criteria for what sort of things you want to look at. The red circles are polling stations, selected by your criteria. And then you can select also other things on the map to see what other factors, like the threat level. So, that was government data.I also talked about community-generated data — in fact I edited some. This is the wiki map, this is the Open Street Map. ""Terrace Theater"" I actually put on the map because it wasn't on the map before TED last year. I was not the only person editing the open street map. Each flash on this visualization — put together by ITO World — shows an edit in 2009 made to the Open Street Map. Let's now spin the world during the same year. Every flash is an edit. Somebody somewhere looking at the Open Street Map, and realizing it could be better. You can see Europe is ablaze with updates. Some places, perhaps not as much as they should be.Here focusing in on Haiti. The map of Port au-Prince at the end of 2009 was not all it could be, not as good as the map of California. Fortunately, just after the earthquake, GeoEye, a commercial company, released satellite imagery with a license, which allowed the open-source community to use it. This is January, in time lapse, of people editing ... that's the earthquake. After the earthquake, immediately, people all over the world, mappers who wanted to help, and could, looked at that imagery, built the map, quickly building it up.We're focusing now on Port-au-Prince. The light blue is refugee camps these volunteers had spotted from the [satellite images]. So, now we have, immediately, a real-time map showing where there are refugee camps — rapidly became the best map to use if you're doing relief work in Port-au-Prince. Witness the fact that it's here on this Garmin device being used by rescue team in Haiti.There's the map showing, on the left-hand side, that hospital — actually that's a hospital ship. This is a real-time map that shows blocked roads, damaged buildings, refugee camps — it shows things that are needed [for rescue and relief work].So, if you've been involved in that at all, I just wanted to say: Whatever you've been doing, whether you've just been chanting, ""Raw data now!"" or you've been putting government or scientific data online, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say: Thank you very much, and we have only just started! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide
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"I only have three minutes so I'm going to have to talk fast, and it will use up your spare mental cycles, so multitasking may be hard. So, 27 years ago I got a traffic ticket that got me thinking. I've had some time to think it over. And energy efficiency is more than just about the vehicle — it's also about the road.Road design makes a difference, particularly intersections, of which there are two types: signalized and unsignalized, which means stop signs. Fifty percent of crashes happen at intersections. Roundabouts are much better. A study of 24 intersections has found crashes drop 40 percent from when you convert a traffic light into a roundabout. Injury crashes have dropped 76 percent, fatal crashes down 90 percent. But that's just safety. What about time and gas? So, traffic keeps flowing, so that means less braking, which means less accelerating, less gas and less pollution, less time wasted, and that partly accounts for Europe's better efficiency than we have in the United States.So, unsignalized intersections, meaning stop signs, they save many lives, but there's an excessive proliferation of them. Small roundabouts are starting to appear. This is one in my neighborhood. And they are much better — better than traffic lights, better than four-way stop signs. They're expensive to install, but they are more expensive not to. So, we should look at that.But they are not applicable in all situations. So, take, for example, the three-way intersection. So, it's logical that you'd have one there, on the minor road entering the major. But the other two are somewhat questionable. So, here's one. There's another one which I studied. Cars rarely appear on that third road.And so, the question is, what does that cost us? That intersection I looked at had about 3,000 cars per day in each direction, and so that's two ounces of gas to accelerate out of. That's five cents each, and times 3,000 cars per day, that's $51,000 per year. That's just the gasoline cost. There is also pollution, wear on the car, and time. What's that time worth? Well, at 10 seconds per 3,000 cars, that's 8.3 hours per day. The average wage in the U.S. is $20 an hour. That is 60,000 per year. Add that together with the gas, and it's $112,000 per year, just for that sign in each direction.Discount that back to the present, at five percent: over two million dollars for a stop sign, in each direction. Now, if you look at what that adjacent property is worth, you could actually buy the property, cut down the shrubbery to improve the sight line, and then sell it off again. And you'd still come out ahead. So, it makes one wonder, ""Why is it there?"" I mean, why is there that stop sign in each direction? Because it is saving lives. So, is there a better way to accomplish that goal?The answer is to enable cars to come in from that side road safely. Because there are a lot of people who might live up there and if they're waiting forever a long queue could form because the cars aren't slowing down on the main road. Can that be accomplished with existing signs? So, there is a long history of stop signs and yield signs. Stop signs were invented in 1915, yield signs in 1950. But that's all we got.So, why not use a yield sign? Well the meaning of yield is: You must yield the right-of-way. That means that if there are five cars waiting, you have to wait till they all go, then you go. It lacks the notion of alternating, or taking turns, and it's always on the minor road, allowing the major one to have primacy. So, it's hard to create a new meaning for the existing sign. You couldn't suddenly tell everyone, ""OK, remember what you used to do at yield signs? Now do something different."" That would not work.So, what the world needs now is a new type of sign. (Applause) So, you'd have a little instruction below it, you know, for those who didn't see the public service announcements. And it merges the stop sign and yield signs. It's kind of shaped like a T, as in taking turns. And uncertainty results in caution. When people come to an unfamiliar situation they don't know how to deal with they slow down.So, now that you are all ""Road Scholars"" ... (Laughter) don't wait for that sign to be adopted, these things don't change quickly. But you all are members of communities, and you can exercise your community influence to create more sensible traffic flows. And you can have more impact on the environment just getting your neighborhood to change these things than by changing your vehicle. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_lauder_s_new_traffic_sign_take_turns
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"So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. I've loved only two. That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. What a fish. (Laughter) Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. So you could feel good about selling it.I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. ""Absolutely,"" I said. Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus?For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love — the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish — they've collapsed. There's almost nothing left. So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute — most of them do anyway — and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. I wanted to support them. The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. Let's call him Don.""Don,"" I said, ""just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute.""""That's right,"" he said. ""We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated."" And then he added, ""We're basically a world unto ourselves. That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one,"" he said. ""Best in the business.""2.5 to one, great. ""2.5 what? What are you feeding?""""Sustainable proteins,"" he said.""Great,"" I said. Got off the phone. And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? (Laughter)So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. I said, ""Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?""He said he didn't know. He would ask around. Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. Let's call him Don too. (Laughter)""Don,"" I said, ""what are some examples of sustainable proteins?""Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. I said, ""Chicken pellets?""He said, ""Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed.""I said, ""What percentage of your feed is chicken?"" Thinking, you know, two percent.""Well, it's about 30 percent,"" he said.I said, ""Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?"" (Laughter)There was a long pause on the line, and he said, ""There's just too much chicken in the world."" (Laughter)I fell out of love with this fish. (Laughter) No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. I actually am. (Laughter) No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. (Laughter)This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. She kind of set us up. (Laughter) It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. The chef had overcooked it. Like twice over. Amazingly, it was still delicious.Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? I can't, but this guy can. Let's call him Miguel — actually his name is Miguel. (Laughter) And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river.Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. They did it by draining the land. They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. And ecologically, it was a disaster. It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land.What did they do? They reversed the flow of water. They literally flipped the switch. Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. They flooded the canals. They created a 27,000-acre fish farm — bass, mullet, shrimp, eel — and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. The farm's incredible. I mean, you've never seen anything like this. You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland.I was there not long ago with Miguel. He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. (Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe.It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. I asked him how he became such an expert on fish.He said, ""Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. I'm an expert in relationships."" And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants.And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. It's great, but I was in love. And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. So I interrupted him. I said, ""Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?""He pointed at the algae.""I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. But what are your fish eating? What's the feed conversion ratio?""Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. There is no feed. Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals?Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, ""For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success?""At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see.""That's success,"" he said. ""Look at their bellies, pink. They're feasting."" Feasting? I was totally confused.I said, ""Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish?"" (Laughter)""Yes,"" he said. (Laughter) ""We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe.""I said, ""Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?"" (Laughter) He shook his head, no.He said, ""We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. So the pinker the belly, the better the system.""Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. (Laughter) They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. (Laughter) No kidding.I was imagining a ""March of the Penguins"" thing, so I looked at Miguel. I said, ""Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? Do they do that for the children?""He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. (Laughter) He said, ""No; they do it because the food's better."" (Laughter)I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious — and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. I almost never cook with it. Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. He said, ""The skin acts like a sponge. It's the last defense before anything enters the body. It evolved to soak up impurities."" And then he added, ""But our water has no impurities.""OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. And then I realized when he says, ""A farm that has no impurities,"" he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant — and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle.What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. (Laughter) (Applause) But for a lot people, that's a bit too radical. We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, ""Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?"" How are you going to feed the world?Can I be honest? I don't love that question. No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. One billion people will go hungry today. One billion — that's more than ever before — because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years.Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, ""If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?"" That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture.Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea.Want to feed the world? Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? (Applause) To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. It's really old, and it's tired. It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. Instead, let's look to the ecological model. That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience.Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish
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"For some time I have been interested in the placebo effect, which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in, unless you think of it in the terms that I do, which is, ""Something fake is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real."" In other words, sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a — for pain management, for example, if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect. Something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it.In order for us to understand each other, I want to start by showing you a rudimentary, very simple magic trick. And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the 1950s. I learned it myself from Cub Scout Magic in the 1970s. I'll do it for you, and then I'll explain it. And then I'll explain why I explained it.So, here's what happens. The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you could examine. I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this. I'll get my sleeve back. And to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here. That way you can see that at no time can anything travel, as long as I'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve. And the object of this is quite simple. I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if all is well, my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife. In fact it's held so tightly in place that I can shake it, and the knife does not come off. Nothing goes up or down my sleeve, no trickery. And you can examine everything. Ta-da! (Applause)So, this is a trick that I often teach to young children that are interested in magic, because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very — even though it's a very simple trick methodologically. Probably many of you in the room know this trick. What happens is this. I hold the knife in my hand. I say I'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve, that is a lie.The reason I'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret of the illusion. In a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you, this finger right here, my index finger is just going to shift from where it is, to a position pointing out like this. Nice one. Someone who didn't have a childhood is out there. (Laughter)So, it goes like this, from here, right. And as I move around my finger shifts. And we could talk about why this is deceptive, why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here, because the mind, and the way it processes information, it doesn't count, one, two, three. It groups them. But that's not really what this is about. Right? And then I open my hand up. Obviously it's clinging there, not by animal magnetism, but by chicanery, my index finger being there. And then when I close my finger, same thing, as I move back, this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger. I take this hand away. You give the knife out. There is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors. Thanks.Now, (Laughter) what does that have to do with the placebo effect? I read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open. I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an astonishing thing. It turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill, that's like aspirin shaped — it's just a round white pill — it has some certain measurable effect. But if you change the form that you give the placebo in, like you make a smaller pill, and color it blue, and stamp a letter into it, it is actually measurably more effective. Even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical — they're sugar pills. But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill. What? (Laughter) That really flipped me out.Turns out though, that that's not even where it stops. If you have capsules, they're more effective than tablets in any form. A colored capsule, that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule. Dosage has something to do with this. One pill twice a day is not as good at three pills — I don't remember the statistic now. Sorry. But the point is ... (Laughter) ... these dosages have something to do with it. And the form has something to do with it. And if you want the ultimate in placebo, you've go to the needle. Right? A syringe with some inert — a couple CCs of some inert something, and you inject this into a patient ... Well this is such a powerful image in their mind, it's so much stronger than the white pill.It's a really, this graph, well I'll show it to you some other time when we have slides. The point is the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle. And none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality, it's only your belief that makes it real in your body and makes a stronger effect. I wanted to see if I could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick. And take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real. And we know from that study that when you want reality, you go to the needle.This is a seven-inch hatpin. It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit. This is really my flesh. This is not Damian's special-grown flesh. That's my skin right there. This is not a Hollywood special effect. I'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side.If you're queasy — (Laughs) if you faint easily — I was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night, and some people that I didn't know, and one woman almost passed out. So, I suggest if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next 30 — in fact, you know what, I'll do the first bad part behind it. You'll get to see, you can look away too if you'd like to.So, here is what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm I just make a little pierce. I'm sorry, man. Am I freaking you out? OK, and then just through my skin a tiny bit, and then out the other side like this. Now, essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick. (Laughter) Sort of. But you can't count my fingers right now can you? So, let me show them to you. That's one, two three, four, five. Yes, well...I know what people think when they see this. They go, ""Well, he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes. So, let me give you a little peek. How's that look out there? Pretty good. (Laughs) Yeah, I know. (Laughs) And the people in the back go, ""OK, I didn't really see that."" People in the satellite room are starting to move in now. Let me give you good close look at this. That really is my skin. That is not a Hollywood special effect. That's my flesh, and I can twist that around. I'm sorry. If you're getting queasy, look away, don't look at the thing.People in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go, ""Well yeah, that looks kind of neat in some sort of effect there, but if it were real he would be — see there's a hole there and a hole there, if it were real he would be bleeding. Well let me work up some blood for you. (Laughter) Yes, there it is. (Applause) (Laughter)Normally now, I would take the needle out. I would clean off my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds. But I think in this context and with the idea of taking something fake and making it into something real, I'm just going to leave it there, and walk off the stage. (Laughter) I will be seeing you several times over the next few days. I hope you're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_mead_the_magic_of_the_placebo
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"I'm going to talk to you today about my work on suspended animation. Now, usually when I mention suspended animation, people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh. But now, I'm not talking about gorking people out to fly to Mars or even Pandora, as much fun as that may be. I'm talking about the concept of using suspended animation to help people out in trauma.So what do I mean when I say ""suspended animation""? It is the process by which animals de-animate, appear dead and then can wake up again without being harmed. OK, so here is the sort of big idea: If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality. And so, what I'm going to tell you about is a way to tell a person who's in trauma — find a way to de-animate them a bit so they're a little more immortal when they have that heart attack.An example of an organism or two that happens to be quite immortal would be plant seeds or bacterial spores. These creatures are some of the most immortal life forms on our planet, and they tend to spend most of their time in suspended animation. Bacterial spores are thought now by scientists to exist as individual cells that are alive, but in suspended animation for as long as 250 million years. To suggest that this all, sort of, about little, tiny creatures, I want to bring it close to home. In the immortal germ line of human beings — that is, the eggs that sit in the ovaries — they actually sit there in a state of suspended animation for up to 50 years in the life of each woman.So then there's also my favorite example of suspended animation. This is Sea-Monkeys. Those of you with children, you know about them. You go to the pet store or the toy store, and you can buy these things. You just open the bag, and you just dump them into the plastic aquarium, and in about a week or so, you'll have little shrimps swimming around. Well, I wasn't so interested in the swimming. I was interested in what was going on in the bag, the bag on the toy store shelf where those shrimp sat in suspended animation indefinitely. So these ideas of suspended animation are not just about cells and weird, little organisms.Occasionally, human beings are briefly de-animated, and the stories of people who are briefly de-animated that interest me the most are those having to do with the cold. Ten years ago, there was a skier in Norway that was trapped in an icy waterfall, and she was there for two hours before they extracted her. She was extremely cold, and she had no heartbeat — for all intents and purposes she was dead, frozen. Seven hours later, still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life, and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her.A couple of years later — so I get really excited about these things — about a couple of years later, there was a 13-month-old, she was from Canada. Her father had gone out in the wintertime; he was working night shift, and she followed him outside in nothing but a diaper. And they found her hours later, frozen, lifeless, and they brought her back to life.There was a 65-year-old woman in Duluth, Minnesota last year that was found frozen and without a pulse in her front yard one morning in the winter, and they brought her back to life. The next day, she was doing so well, they wanted to run tests on her. She got cranky and just went home. (Laughter)So, these are miracles, right? These are truly miraculous things that happen. Doctors have a saying that, in fact, ""You're not dead until you're warm and dead."" And it's true. It's true. In the New England Journal of Medicine, there was a study published that showed that with appropriate rewarming, people who had suffered without a heartbeat for three hours could be brought back to life without any neurologic problems. That's over 50 percent. So what I was trying to do is think of a way that we could study suspended animation to think about a way to reproduce, maybe, what happened to the skier.Well, I have to tell you something very odd, and that is that being exposed to low oxygen does not always kill. So, in this room, there's 20 percent oxygen or so, and if we reduce the oxygen concentration, we will all be dead. And, in fact, the animals we were working with in the lab — these little garden worms, nematodes — they were also dead when we exposed them to low oxygen. And here's the thing that should freak you out. And that is that, when we lower the oxygen concentration further by 100 times, to 10 parts per million, they were not dead, they were in suspended animation, and we could bring them back to life without any harm. And this precise oxygen concentration, 10 parts per million, that caused suspended animation, is conserved. We can see it in a variety of different organisms. One of the creatures we see it in is a fish. And we can turn its heartbeat on and off by going in and out of suspended animation like you would a light switch.So this was pretty shocking to me, that we could do this. And so I was wondering, when we were trying to reproduce the work with the skier, that we noticed that, of course, she had no oxygen consumption, and so maybe she was in a similar state of suspended animation. But, of course, she was also extremely cold. So we wondered what would happen if we took our suspended animals and exposed them to the cold. And so, what we found out was that, if you take animals that are animated like you and I, and you make them cold — that is, these were the garden worms — now they're dead. But if you have them in suspended animation, and move them into the cold, they're all alive. And there's the very important thing there: If you want to survive the cold, you ought to be suspended. Right? It's a really good thing.And so, we were thinking about that, about this relationship between these things, and thinking about whether or not that's what happened to the skier. And so we wondered: Might there be some agent that is in us, something that we make ourselves, that we might be able to regulate our own metabolic flexibility in such a way as to be able to survive when we got extremely cold, and might otherwise pass away? I thought it might be interesting to sort of hunt for such things. You know?I should mention briefly here that physiology textbooks that you can read about will tell you that this is a kind of heretical thing to suggest. We have, from the time we are slapped on the butt until we take our last dying breath — that's when we're newborn to when we're dead — we cannot reduce our metabolic rate below what's called a standard, or basal metabolic rate. But I knew that there were examples of creatures, also mammals, that do reduce their metabolic rate such as ground squirrels and bears, they reduce their metabolic rate in the wintertime when they hibernate. So I wondered: Might we be able to find some agent or trigger that might induce such a state in us?And so, we went looking for such things. And this was a period of time when we failed tremendously. Ken Robinson is here. He talked about the glories of failure. Well, we had a lot of them. We tried many different chemicals and agents, and we failed over and over again. So, one time, I was at home watching television on the couch while my wife was putting our child to bed, and I was watching a television show. It was a television show — it was a NOVA show on PBS — about caves in New Mexico. And this particular cave was Lechuguilla, and this cave is incredibly toxic to humans. The researchers had to suit up just to enter it. It's filled with this toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide. Now, hydrogen sulfide is curiously present in us. We make it ourselves. The highest concentration is in our brains. Yet, it was used as a chemical warfare agent in World War I. It's an extraordinarily toxic thing. In fact, in chemical accidents, hydrogen sulfide is known to — if you breathe too much of it, you collapse to the ground, you appear dead, but if you were brought out into room air, you can be reanimated without harm, if they do that quickly.So, I thought, ""Wow, I have to get some of this."" (Laughter) Now, it's post-9/11 America, and when you go into the research institute, and you say, ""Hi. I'd like to buy some concentrated, compressed gas cylinders of a lethal gas because I have these ideas, see, about wanting to suspend people. It's really going to be OK."" So that's kind of a tough day, but I said, ""There really is some basis for thinking why you might want to do this."" As I said, this agent is in us, and, in fact, here's a curious thing, it binds to the very place inside of your cells where oxygen binds, and where you burn it, and that you do this burning to live. And so we thought, like in a game of musical chairs, might we be able to give a person some hydrogen sulfide, and might it be able to occupy that place like in a game of musical chairs where oxygen might bind? And because you can't bind the oxygen, maybe you wouldn't consume it, and then maybe it would reduce your demand for oxygen. I mean, who knows?So — (Laughter) So, there's the bit about the dopamine and being a little bit, what do you call it, delusional, and you might suggest that was it. And so, we wanted to find out might we be able to use hydrogen sulfide in the presence of cold, and we wanted to see whether we could reproduce this skier in a mammal. Now, mammals are warm-blooded creatures, and when we get cold, we shake and we shiver, right? We try to keep our core temperature at 37 degrees by actually burning more oxygen. So, it was interesting for us when we applied hydrogen sulfide to a mouse when it was also cold because what happened is the core temperature of the mouse got cold. It stopped moving. It appeared dead. Its oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold. And here's the really important point. I told you hydrogen sulfide is in us. It's rapidly metabolized, and all you have to do after six hours of being in this state of de-animation is simply put the thing out in room air, and it warms up, and it's none the worse for wear.Now, this was cosmic. Really. Because we had found a way to de-animate a mammal, and it didn't hurt it. Now, we'd found a way to reduce its oxygen consumption to rock-bottom levels, and it was fine. Now, in this state of de-animation, it could not go out dancing, but it was not dead, and it was not harmed. So we started to think: Is this the agent that might have been present in the skier, and might have she had more of it than someone else, and might that have been able to reduce her demand for oxygen before she got so cold that she otherwise would have died, as we found out with our worm experiments?So, we wondered: Can we do anything useful with this capacity to control metabolic flexibility? And one of the things we wondered — I'm sure some of you out there are economists, and you know all about supply and demand. And when supply is equal to demand, everything's fine, but when supply falls, in this case of oxygen, and demand stays high, you're dead. So, what I just told you is we can now reduce demand. We ought to be able to lower supply to unprecedented low levels without killing the animal. And with money we got from DARPA, we could show just that. If you give mice hydrogen sulfide, you can lower their demand for oxygen, and you can put them into oxygen concentrations that are as low as 5,000 feet above the top of Mt. Everest, and they can sit there for hours, and there's no problem. Well this was really cool. We also found out that we could subject animals to otherwise lethal blood loss, and we could save them if we gave them hydrogen sulfide.So these proof of concept experiments led me to say ""I should found a company, and we should take this out to a wider playing field."" I founded a company called Ikaria with others' help. And this company, the first thing it did was make a liquid formulation of hydrogen sulfide an injectable form that we could put in and send it out to physician scientists all over the world who work on models of critical care medicine, and the results are incredibly positive.In one model of heart attack, animals given hydrogen sulfide showed a 70 percent reduction in heart damage compared to those who got the standard of care that you and I would receive if we were to have a heart attack here today. Same is true for organ failure, when you have loss of function owing to poor perfusion of kidney, of liver, acute respiratory distress syndrome and damage suffered in cardiac-bypass surgery. So, these are the thought leaders in trauma medicine all over the world saying this is true, so it seems that exposure to hydrogen sulfide decreases damage that you receive from being exposed to otherwise lethal-low oxygen.And I should say that the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide required to get this benefit are low, incredibly low. In fact, so low that physicians will not have to lower or dim the metabolism of people much at all to see the benefit I just mentioned, which is a wonderful thing, if you're thinking about adopting this. You don't want to be gorking people out just to save them, it's really confusing. (Laughter)So, I want to say that we're in human trials. Now, and so — (Applause) Thank you. The Phase 1 safety studies are over, and we're doing fine, we're now moved on. We have to get to Phase 2 and Phase 3. It's going to take us a few years. This has all moved very quickly, and the mouse experiments of hibernating mice happened in 2005; the first human studies were done in 2008, and we should know in a couple of years whether it works or not. And this all happened really quickly because of a lot of help from a lot of people.I want to mention that, first of all, my wife, without whom this talk and my work would not be possible, so thank you very much. Also, the brilliant scientists who work at my lab and also others on staff, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington — wonderful place to work. And also the wonderful scientists and businesspeople at Ikaria. One thing those people did out there was take this technology of hydrogen sulfide, which is this start-up company that's burning venture capital very quickly, and they fused it with another company that sells another toxic gas that's more toxic than hydrogen sulfide, and they give it to newborn babies who would otherwise die from a failure to be able to oxygenate their tissues properly. And this gas that is delivered in over a thousand critical care hospitals worldwide, now is approved, on label, and saves thousands of babies a year from certain death. (Applause)So it's really incredible for me to be a part of this. And I want to say that I think we're on the path of understanding metabolic flexibility in a fundamental way, and that in the not too distant future, an EMT might give an injection of hydrogen sulfide, or some related compound, to a person suffering severe injuries, and that person might de-animate a bit, they might become a little more immortal. Their metabolism will fall as though you were dimming a switch on a lamp at home. And then, they will have the time, that will buy them the time, to be transported to the hospital to get the care they need. And then, after they get that care — like the mouse, like the skier, like the 65-year-old woman — they'll wake up. A miracle? We hope not, or maybe we just hope to make miracles a little more common.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation
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"If you think about the phone — and Intel has tested a lot of the things I'm going to show you, over the last 10 years, in about 600 elderly households — 300 in Ireland, and 300 in Portland — trying to understand: How do we measure and monitor behavior in a medically meaningful way?And if you think about the phone, right, it's something that we can use for some incredible ways to help people actually take the right medication at the right time. We're testing these kinds of simple sensor-network technologies in the home so that any phone that a senior is already comfortable with can help them deal with their medications. And a lot of what they do is they pick up the phone, and it's our system whispering to them which pill they need to take, and they fake like they're having a conversation with a friend. And they're not embarrassed by a meds caddy that's ugly, that sits on their kitchen table and says, ""I'm old. I'm frail."" It's surreptitious technology that's helping them do a simple task of taking the right pill at the right time.Now, we also do some pretty amazing things with these phones. Because that moment when you answer the phone is a cognitive test every time that you do it. Think about it, all right? I'm going to answer the phone three different times. ""Hello? Hey."" All right? That's the first time. ""Hello? Uh, hey."" ""Hello? Uh, who? Oh, hey."" All right? Very big differences between the way I answered the phone the three times. And as we monitor phone usage by seniors over a long period of time, down to the tenths of a microsecond, that recognition moment of whether they can figure out that person on the other end is a friend and we start talking to them immediately, or they do a lot of what's called trouble talk, where they're like, ""Wait, who is this? Oh."" Right? Waiting for that recognition moment may be the best early indicator of the onset of dementia than anything that shows up clinically today.We call these behavioral markers. There's lots of others. Is the person going to the phone as quickly, when it rings, as they used to? Is it a hearing problem or is it a physicality problem? Has their voice gotten more quiet? We're doing a lot of work with people with Alzheimer's and particularly with Parkinson's, where that quiet voice that sometimes shows up with Parkinson's patients may be the best early indicator of Parkinson's five to 10 years before it shows up clinically. But those subtle changes in your voice over a long period of time are hard for you or your spouse to notice until it becomes so extreme and your voice has become so quiet.So, sensors are looking at that kind of voice. When you pick up the phone, how much tremor are you having, and what is that like, and what is that trend like over a period of time? Are you having more trouble dialing the phone than you used to? Is it a dexterity problem? Is it the onset of arthritis? Are you using the phone? Are you socializing less than you used to? And looking at that pattern. And what does that decline in social health mean, as a kind of a vital sign of the future? And then wow, what a radical idea, we — except in the United States — might be able to use this newfangled technology to actually interact with a nurse or a doctor on the other end of the line. Wow, what a great day that will be once we're allowed to actually do those kinds of things.So, these are what I would call behavioral markers. And it's the whole field that we've been trying to work on for the last 10 years at Intel. How do you put simple disruptive technologies, and the first of five phrases that I'm going to talk about in this talk? Behavioral markers matter. How do we change behavior? How do we measure changes in behavior in a meaningful way that's going to help us with prevention of disease, early onset of disease, and tracking the progression of disease over a long period of time?Now, why would Intel let me spend a lot of time and money, over the last 10 years, trying to understand the needs of seniors and start thinking about these kinds of behavioral markers? This is some of the field work that we've done. We have now lived with 1,000 elderly households in 20 countries over the last 10 years. We study people in Rochester, New York. We go live with them in the winter because what they do in the winter, and their access to healthcare, and how much they socialize, is very different than in the summer. If they have a hip fracture we go with them and we study their entire discharge experience. If they have a family member who is a key part of their care network, we fly and study them as well.So, we study the holistic health experience of 1,000 seniors over the last 10 years in 20 different countries. Why is Intel willing to fund that? It's because of the second slogan that I want to talk about. Ten years ago, when I started trying to convince Intel to let me go start looking at disruptive technologies that could help with independent living, this is what I called it: ""Y2K + 10.""You know, back in 2000, we were all so obsessed with paying attention to the aging of our computers, and whether or not they were going to survive the tick of the clock from 1999 to 2000, that we missed a moment that only demographers were paying attention to. It was right around New Years. And that switchover, when we had the larger number of older people on the planet, for the first time than younger people. For the first time in human history — and barring aliens landing or some major other pandemic, that's the expectation from demographers, going forward.And 10 years ago it seemed like I had a lot of time to convince Intel to work on this. Right? Y2K + 10 was coming, the baby boomers starting to retire. Well folks, it's like we know these demographics here. This is a map of the entire world. It's like the lights are on, but nobody's home on this demographic Y2K + 10 problem. Right? I mean we sort of get it here, but we don't get it here, and we're not doing anything about it.The health reform bill is largely ignoring the realities of the age wave that's coming, and the implications for what we need to do to change not only how we pay for care, but deliver care in some radically different ways. And in fact, it's upon us. I mean you probably saw these headlines. This is Catherine Casey who is the first boomer to actually get Social Security. That actually occurred this year. She took early retirement. She was born one second after midnight in 1946. A retired school teacher, there she is with a Social Security administrator. The first boomer actually, we didn't even wait till 2011, next year. We're already starting to see early retirement occur this year.All right, so it's here. This Y2K + 10 problem is at our door. This is 50 tsunamis scheduled on the calendar, but somehow we can't sort of marshal our government and innovative forces to sort of get out in front of it and do something about it. We'll wait until it's more of a catastrophe, and react, as opposed to prepare for it. So, one of the reasons it's so challenging to prepare for this Y2K problem is, I want to argue, we have what I would call mainframe poisoning.Andy Grove, about six or seven years ago, he doesn't even know or remember this, in a Fortune Magazine article he used the phrase ""mainframe healthcare,"" and I've been extending and expanding this. He saw it written down somewhere. He's like, ""Eric that's a really cool concept."" I was like, ""Actually it was your idea. You said it in a Fortune Magazine article. I just extended it."" You know, this is the mainframe.This mentality of traveling to and timesharing large, expensive healthcare systems actually began in 1787. This is the first general hospital in Vienna. And actually the second general hospital in Vienna, in about 1850, was where we started to build out an entire curriculum for teaching med students specialties. And it's a place in which we started developing architecture that literally divided the body, and divided care into departments and compartments. And it was reflected in our architecture, it was reflected in the way that we taught students, and this mainframe mentality persists today.Now, I'm not anti-hospital. With my own healthcare problems, I've taken drug therapies, I've traveled to this hospital and others, many, many times. But we worship the high hospital on a hill. Right? And this is mainframe healthcare. And just as 30 years ago we couldn't conceive that we would have the power of a mainframe computer that took up a room this size in our purses and on our belts, that we're carrying around in our cell phone today, and suddenly, computing, that used to be an expert driven system, it was a personal system that we all owned as part of our daily lives — that shift from mainframe to personal computing is what we have to do for healthcare. We have to shift from this mainframe mentality of healthcare to a personal model of healthcare.We are obsessed with this way of thinking. When Intel does surveys all around the world and we say, ""Quick response: healthcare."" The first word that comes up is ""doctor."" The second that comes up is ""hospital."" And the third is ""illness"" or ""sickness."" Right? We are wired, in our imagination, to think about healthcare and healthcare innovation as something that goes into that place. Our entire health reform discussion right now, health I.T., when we talk with policy makers, equals ""How are we going to get doctors using electronic medical records in the mainframe?"" We're not thinking about how do we shift from the mainframe to the home. And the problem with this is the way we conceive healthcare. Right?This is a very reactive, crisis-driven system. We're doing 15-minute exams with patients. It's population-based. We collect a bunch of biological information in this artificial setting, and we fix them up, like Humpty-Dumpty all over again, and send them home, and hope — we might hand them a brochure, maybe an interactive website — that they do as asked and don't come back into the mainframe.And the problem is we can't afford it today, folks. We can't afford mainframe healthcare today to include the uninsured. And now we want to do a double-double of the age wave coming through? Business as usual in healthcare is broken and we've got to do something different. We've got to focus on the home.We've got to focus on a personal healthcare paradigm that moves care to the home. How do we be more proactive, prevention-driven? How do we collect vital signs and other kinds of information 24 by 7? How do we get a personal baseline about what's going to work for you? How do we collect not just biological data but behavioral data, psychological data, relational data, in and on and around the home? And how do we drive compliance to be a customized care plan that uses all this great technology that's around us to change our behavior? That's what we need to do for our personal health model.I want to give you a couple of examples. This is Mimi from one of our studies — in her 90s, had to move out of her home because her family was worried about falls. Raise your hand if you had a serious fall in your household, or any of your loved ones, your parents or so forth. Right? Classic. Hip fracture often leads to institutionalization of a senior. This is what was happening to Mimi; the family was worried about it, moved her out of her own home into an assisted living facility. She tripped over her oxygen tank.Many people in this generation won't press the button, even if they have an alert call system, because they don't want to bother anybody, even though they've been paying 30 dollars a month. Boomers will press the button. Trust me. They're going to be pressing that button non-stop. Right?Mimi broke her pelvis, lay all night, all morning, finally somebody came in and found her, sent her to the hospital. They fixed her back up. She was never going to be able to move back into the assisted living. They put her into the nursing home unit. First night in the nursing home unit where she had been in the same assisted living facility, moved her from one bed to another, kind of threw her, rebroke her pelvis, sent her back to the hospital that she had just come from, no one read the chart, put her on Tylenol, which she is allergic to, broke out, got bedsores, basically, had heart problems, and died from the fall and the complications and the errors that were there.Now, the most frightening thing about this is this is my wife's grandmother. Now, I'm Eric Dishman. I speak English, I work for Intel, I make a good salary, I'm smart about falls and fall-related injuries — it's an area of research that I work on. I have access to senators and CEOs. I can't stop this from happening. What happens if you don't have money, you don't speak English or don't have the kind of access to deal with these kinds of problems that inevitably occur? How do we actually prevent the vast majority of falls from ever occurring in the first place?Let me give you a quick example of work that we're doing to try to do exactly that. I've been wearing a little technology that we call Shimmer. It's a research platform. It has accelerometry. You can plug in a three-lead ECG. There is all kinds of sort of plug-and-play kind of Legos that you can do to capture, in the wild, in the real world, things like tremor, gait, stride length and those kinds of things.The problem is, our understanding of falls today, like Mimi, is get a survey in the mail three months after you fell, from the State, saying, ""What were you doing when you fell?"" That's sort of the state of the art. But with something like Shimmer, or we have something called the Magic Carpet, embedded sensors in carpet, or camera-based systems that we borrowed from sports medicine, we're starting for the first time in those 600 elderly households to collect actual kinematic motion data to understand: What are the subtle changes that are occurring that can show us that mom has become risk at falls?And most often we can do two interventions, fix the meds mix. I'm a qualitative researcher, but when I look at these data streams coming in from these homes, I can look at the data and tell you the day that some doctor prescribed them something that nobody else knew that they were on, because we see the changes in their patterns in the household. Right? These discoveries of behavioral markers, and behavioral changes are game changing, and like the discovery of the microscope because of our collecting data streams that we've actually never done before.This is an example in our TRIL Clinic in Ireland of — actually what you're seeing is she's looking at data, in this picture, from the Magic Carpet. So, we have a little carpet that you can look at your amount of postural sway, and look at the changes in your postural sway over many months. Here's what some of this data might look like. This is actually sensor firings.These are two different subjects in our study. It's about a year's worth of data. The color represents different rooms they are in the house. This person on the left is living in their own home. This person on the right is actually living in an assisted living facility. I know this because look at how punctuated meal time is when they are no longer in their particular rooms here. Right? Now, this doesn't mean that much to you. But when we look at these cycles of data over a longer period of time — and we're looking at everything from motion around different rooms in the house, to sort of micro-motions that Shimmer picks up, about gait and stride length — these streams of data are starting to tell us things about behavioral patterns that we've never understood before.You can go to ORCATech.org — it has nothing to do with whales, it's the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology — to see more about that. The problem is, Intel is still one of the largest funders in the world of independent living technology research. I'm not bragging about how much we fund; it's how little anyone else actually pays attention to aging and funds innovation on aging, chronic disease management and independent living in the home.So, my mantra here, my fourth slogan is: 10,000 households or bust. We need to drive a national, if not international, Framingham-type heart study of independent living technologies, where we have 10,000 elderly connected households with broadband, full medical characterization, and a platform by which we can start to experiment and turn these from 20-household anecdotal studies that the universities fund, to large clinical trials that prove out the value of these technologies. So, 10,000 households or bust. These are just some of the households that we've done in the Intel studies.My fifth and final phrase: I have tried for two years, and there were moments when we were quite close, to make this healthcare reform bill be about reform from something and to something, from a mainframe model to a personal health model, or to mean something more than just a debate about the public option and how we're going to finance. It doesn't matter how we finance healthcare. We're going to figure something out for the next 10 years, and try it. No matter who pays for it, we better start doing care in a fundamentally different way and treating the home and the patient and the family member and the caregivers as part of these coordinated care teams and using disruptive technologies that are already here to do care in some pretty fundamental different ways.The president needs to stand up and say, at the end of a healthcare reform debate, ""Our goal as a country is to move 50 percent of care out of institutions, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes, to the home, in 10 years."" It's achievable. We should do it economically, we should do it morally, and we should do it for quality of life. But there is no goal within this health reform. It's just a mess today.So, you know, that's my last message to you. How do we set a going-to-the-moon goal of dealing with the Y2K +10 problem that's coming? It's not that innovation and technology is going to be the magic pill that cures all, but it's going to be part of the solution. And if we don't create a personal health movement, something that we're all aiming towards in reform, then we're going to move nowhere. So, I hope you'll turn this conference into that kind of movement forward. Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_dishman_take_health_care_off_the_mainframe
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"I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer. I've been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games.Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, ""That's a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world."" But actually, according to my research at the Institute for the Future, actually the opposite is true. Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems.In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that's probably a bit of a counter-intuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade.(Laughter)No. I'm serious. I am.Here's why. This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species.(Laughter)Truly. This is a portrait by photographer Phil Toledano. He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. And this is a classic gaming emotion. Now, if you're not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo. You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem.If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. This is a gamer who's on the verge of something called an ""epic win.""(Laughter)Oh, you've heard of that. OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive, you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination, and when you get there, you're shocked to discover what you're truly capable of. That's an epic win. This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century — the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win.Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. This is what I call the ""I'm Not Good At Life"" face. This is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. This is me making the ""I'm Not Good At Life"" face. This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games.I don't mean just good as in successful, although that's part of it. We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters — inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. And when we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves — the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games. So that's what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student.What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? So I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds.The first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. Right? So you can do it. They never give you a challenge you can't achieve. But it is on the verge of what you're capable of, so you have to try hard. But there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft; no sitting around, wringing your hands — there's always something specific and important to be done. There are also tons of collaborators. Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission.That's not something we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators. And there's this epic story, this inspiring story of why we're there, and what we're doing, and we get all this positive feedback. You guys have heard of leveling up, +1 strength, +1 intelligence. We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life. When I get off this stage, I'm not going to have +1 speaking, and +1 crazy idea, +20 crazy idea. I don't get that feedback in real life.Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time, we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. It's just better than reality. So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It might sound like it's a bad thing. But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. That was the first upright primate.So when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. But it's also apt, because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We're evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. This is true. I believe this.So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States, 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school, from fifth grade to high school graduation, if you have perfect attendance.(Laughter)So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on, where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they're learning about everything else in school. Some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book ""Outliers,"" so you would have heard of his theory of success, the ""10,000 hours"" theory of success. It's based on this great cognitive-science research that says if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.So, the big question is, ""What exactly are gamers getting so good at?"" Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. And in the next decade, we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. If you don't know it already, this is coming. The game industry is developing consoles that are low-energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet, so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers.So I've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it's always worth trying, and trying now. Gamers don't sit around. Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. There's a lot of interesting research that shows we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly. And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until it's over.And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. Blissful productivity. I love it. You know, there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week — kind of a half-time job. It's because we know, when we're playing a game, that we're actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings, to do hard and meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work.Finally: epic meaning. Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. Five million people use it every month. They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. They are building an epic story. They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft.Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That's the problem that I'm trying to solve.There's an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. And he says, ""We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments."" And he's an economist, so he's rational. And he says —(Laughter)Not like me, I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So he says, for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world work more like a game.I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. These are ancient dice, made out of sheep's knuckles. Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep's knuckles. And these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings, and if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia, during a time of famine.Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided they had to do something crazy. People were suffering. People were fighting. It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games, and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games. And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games, because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying, blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat.And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famine, by eating on one day, and playing games on the next. Now, this is exactly, I think, how we're using games today. We're using games to escape real-world suffering — we're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment, everything that's not satisfying about real life, and we're getting what we need from games.But it doesn't have to end there. This is really exciting. According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilization somewhere else where they could thrive.Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true. And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years, that could have explained the famine. So this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way.Okay, we can do that.(Laughter)We've been playing Warcraft since 1994. That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. That was 16 years ago. They played dice games for 18 years, we've been playing Warcraft for 16 years. I say we are ready for our own epic game. Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that's where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. Let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems.Now, I know you're asking, ""How are we going to solve real-world problems in games?"" Well, that's what I've devoted my work to over the past few years, at the Institute for the Future. We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. We do not want to try to predict the future. What we want to do is make the future. We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win.I'm just going to very briefly show you three games that I've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. This is World Without Oil. We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real, and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what's not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there's rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos.We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've tracked them for the three years since. And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live, just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, ""We've run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive,"" most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.So for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher — bigger problem than just peak oil. We did a game called Superstruct at the Institute for the Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. We asked people to come online — almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team — you've got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world.(Laughter)But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, ""Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net."" We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, Google ""Superstruct,"" and see.So, finally, the last game, we're launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game, you will be certified by the World Bank Institute as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. We've got a graphic novel, we've got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world.So, I'm going to wrap up now. I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning.I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. That's my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want, so I say: Let the world-changing games begin.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world
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"OK. We've heard a lot of people speak at this conference about the power of the human mind. And what I'd like to do today is give you a vivid example of how that power can be unleashed when someone is in a survival situation, how the will to survive can bring that out in people. This is an incident which occurred on Mount Everest; it was the worst disaster in the history of Everest. And when it occurred, I was the only doctor on the mountain. So I'll take you through that and we'll see what it's like when someone really summons the will to survive.OK, this is Mount Everest. It's 29,035 feet high. I've been there six times: Four times I did work with National Geographic, making tectonic plate measurements; twice, I went with NASA doing remote sensing devices. It was on my fourth trip to Everest that a comet passed over the mountain. Hyakutake. And the Sherpas told us then that was a very bad omen, and we should have listened to them. Everest is an extreme environment. There's only one-third as much oxygen at the summit as there is at sea level. Near the summit, temperatures can be 40 degrees below zero. You can have winds 20 to 40 miles an hour. It's actually a wind-chill factor which is lower than a summer day on Mars. I remember one time being up near the summit, I reached into my down jacket for a drink from my water bottle, inside my down jacket, only to discover that the water was already frozen solid. That gives you an idea of just how severe things are near the summit.OK, this is the route up Everest. It starts at base camp, at 17,500 feet. Camp One, 2,000 feet higher. Camp Two, another 2,000 feet higher up, what's called the Western Cwm. CampThree is at the base of Lhotse, which is the fourth highest mountain in the world, but it's dwarfed by Everest. And then Camp Four is the highest camp; that's 3,000 feet short of the summit. This is a view of base camp. This is pitched on a glacier at 17,500 feet. It's the highest point you can bring your yaks before you have to unload. And this is what they unloaded for me: I had four yak loads of medical supplies, which are dumped in a tent, and here I am trying to arrange things.This was our expedition. It was a National Geographic expedition, but it was organized by The Explorers Club. There were three other expeditions on the mountain, an American team, a New Zealand team and an IMAX team. And, after actually two months of preparation, we built our camps all the way up the mountain.This is a view looking up the icefall, the first 2,000 feet of the climb up from base camp. And here's a picture in the icefall; it's a waterfall, but it's frozen, but it moves very slowly, and it actually changes every day. When you're in it, you're like a rat in a maze; you can't even see over the top. This is near the top of the icefall. You want to climb through at night when the ice is frozen. That way, it's less likely to tumble down on you. These are some climbers reaching the top of the icefall just at sun-up. This is me crossing a crevasse. We cross on aluminum ladders with safety ropes attached. That's another crevasse. Some of these things are 10 stories deep or more, and one of my climbing friends says that the reason we actually climb at night is because if we ever saw the bottom of what we're climbing over, we would never do it.Okay. This is Camp One. It's the first flat spot you can reach after you get up to the top of the icefall. And from there we climb up to Camp Two, which is sort of the foreground. These are climbers moving up the Lhotse face, that mountain toward Camp Three. They're on fixed ropes here. A fall here, if you weren't roped in, would be 5,000 feet down. This is a view taken from camp three. You can see the Lhotse face is in profile, it's about a 45 degree angle. It takes two days to climb it, so you put the camp halfway through.If you notice, the summit of Everest is black. There's no ice over it. And that's because Everest is so high, it's in the jet stream, and winds are constantly scouring the face, so no snow gets to accumulate. What looks like a cloud behind the summit ridge is actually snow being blown off the summit.This is on the way up from Camp Three to Camp Four, moving in, up through the clouds. And this is at Camp Four. Once you get to Camp Four, you have maybe 24 hours to decide if you're going to go for the summit or not. Everybody's on oxygen, your supplies are limited, and you either have to go up or go down, make that decision very quickly. This is a picture of Rob Hall. He was the leader of the New Zealand team. This is a radio he used later to call his wife that I'll tell you about. These are some climbers waiting to go to the summit. They're up at Camp Four, and you can see that there's wind blowing off the summit. This is not good weather to climb in, so the climbers are just waiting, hoping that the wind's going to die down. And, in fact, the wind does die down at night. It becomes very calm, there's no wind at all. This looks like a good chance to go for the summit. So here are some climbers starting out for the summit on what's called the Triangular Face. It's the first part of climb. It's done in the dark, because it's actually less steep than what comes next, and you can gain daylight hours if you do this in the dark.So that's what happened. The climbers got on the southeast ridge. This is the view looking at the southeast ridge. The summit would be in the foreground. From here, it's about 1,500 feet up at a 30-degree angle to the summit. But what happened that year was the wind suddenly and unexpectedly picked up. A storm blew in that no one was anticipating. You can see here some ferocious winds blowing snow way high off the summit. And there were climbers on that summit ridge.This is a picture of me in that area taken a year before, and you can see I've got an oxygen mask on with a rebreather. I have an oxygen hose connected here. You can see on this climber, we have two oxygen tanks in the backpack — little titanium tanks, very lightweight — and we're not carrying much else. This is all you've got. You're very exposed on the summit ridge.OK, this is a view taken on the summit ridge itself. This is on the way toward the summit, on that 1,500-foot bridge. All the climbers here are climbing unroped, and the reason is because the drop off is so sheer on either side that if you were roped to somebody, you'd wind up just pulling them off with you. So each person climbs individually. And it's not a straight path at all, it's very difficult climbing, and there's always the risk of falling on either side. If you fall to your left, you're going to fall 8,000 feet into Nepal; if you fall to your right, you're going to fall 12,000 feet into Tibet. So it's probably better to fall into Tibet because you'll live longer. (Laughter) But, either way, you fall for the rest of your life.OK. Those climbers were up near the summit, along that summit ridge that you see up there, and I was down here in Camp Three. My expedition was down in Camp Three, while these guys were up there in the storm. The storm was so fierce that we had to lay, fully dressed, fully equipped, laid out on the tent floor to stop the tent from blowing off the mountain. It was the worst winds I've ever seen. And the climbers up on the ridge were that much higher, 2,000 feet higher, and completely exposed to the elements. We were in radio contact with some of them.This is a view taken along the summit ridge. Rob Hall, we heard by radio, was up here, at this point in the storm with Doug Hansen. And we heard that Rob was OK, but Doug was too weak to come down. He was exhausted, and Rob was staying with him. We also got some bad news in the storm that Beck Weathers, another climber, had collapsed in the snow and was dead. There were still 18 other climbers that we weren't aware of their condition. They were lost. There was total confusion on the mountain; all the stories were confusing, most of them were conflicting. We really had no idea what was going on during that storm. We were just hunkered down in our tents at Camp Three.Our two strongest climbers, Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, decided to go up to try to rescue who they could even though there was a ferocious storm going. They tried to radio a message to Rob Hall, who was a superb climber stuck, sort of, with a weak climber up near the summit. I expected them to say to Rob, ""Hold on. We're coming."" But in fact, what they said was, ""Leave Doug and come down yourself. There's no chance of saving him, and just try to save yourself at this point."" And Rob got that message, but his answer was, ""We're both listening."" Todd and Pete got up to the summit ridge, up in here, and it was a scene of complete chaos up there. But they did what they could to stabilize the people. I gave them radio advice from Camp Three, and we sent down the climbers that could make it down under their own power. The ones that couldn't we just sort of decided to leave up at Camp Four. So the climbers were coming down along this route.This is taken from Camp Three, where I was. And they all came by me so I could take a look at them and see what I could do for them, which is really not much, because Camp Three is a little notch cut in the ice in the middle of a 45-degree angle. You can barely stand outside the tent. It's really cold; it's 24,000 feet. The only supplies I had at that altitude were two plastic bags with preloaded syringes of painkiller and steroids.So, as the climbers came by me, I sort of assessed whether or not they were in condition to continue on further down. The ones that weren't that lucid or were not that well coordinated, I would give an injection of steroids to try to give them some period of lucidity and coordination where they could then work their way further down the mountain. It's so awkward to work up there that sometimes I even gave the injections right through their clothes. It was just too hard to maneuver any other way up there.While I was taking care of them, we got more news about Rob Hall. There was no way we could get up high enough to rescue him. He called in to say that he was alone now. Apparently, Doug had died higher up on the mountain. But Rob was now too weak to come down himself, and with the fierce winds and up at that altitude, he was just beyond rescue and he knew it. At that point, he asked to be paged into his wife. He was carrying a radio. His wife was home in New Zealand, seven months pregnant with their first child, and Rob asked to be patched into her. That was done, and Rob and his wife had their last conversation. They picked the name for their baby. Rob then signed off, and that was the last we ever heard of him.I was faced with treating a lot of critically ill patients at 24,000 feet, which was an impossibility. So what we did was, we got the victims down to 21,000 feet, where it was easier for me to treat them. This was my medical kit. It's a tackle box filled with medical supplies. This is what I carried up the mountain. I had more supplies lower down, which I asked to be brought up to meet me at the lower camp. And this was scene at the lower camp.The survivors came in one by one. Some of them were hypothermic, some of them were frostbitten, some were both. What we did was try to warm them up as best we could, put oxygen on them and try to revive them, which is difficult to do at 21,000 feet, when the tent is freezing. This is some severe frostbite on the feet, severe frostbite on the nose. This climber was snow blind.As I was taking care of these climbers, we got a startling experience. Out of nowhere, Beck Weathers, who we had already been told was dead, stumbled into the tent, just like a mummy, he walked into the tent. I expected him to be incoherent, but, in fact, he walked into the tent and said to me, ""Hi, Ken. Where should I sit?"" And then he said, ""Do you accept my health insurance?"" (Laughter) He really said that. (Laughter) So he was completely lucid, but he was very severely frostbitten. You can see his hand is completely white; his face, his nose, is burned. First, it turns white, and then when it's completed necrosis, it turns black, and then it falls off. It's the last stage, just like a scar.So, as I was taking care of Beck, he related what had been going on up there. He said he had gotten lost in the storm, collapsed in the snow, and just laid there, unable to move. Some climbers had come by and looked at him, and he heard them say, ""He's dead."" But Beck wasn't dead; he heard that, but he was completely unable to move. He was in some sort of catatonic state where he could be aware of his surroundings, but couldn't even blink to indicate that he was alive. So the climbers passed him by, and Beck lay there for a day, a night and another day, in the snow. And then he said to himself, ""I don't want to die. I have a family to come back to."" And the thoughts of his family, his kids and his wife, generated enough energy, enough motivation in him, so that he actually got up. After laying in the snow that long a time, he got up and found his way back to the camp. And Beck told me that story very quietly, but I was absolutely stunned by it. I couldn't imagine anybody laying in the snow that long a time and then getting up. He apparently reversed an irreversible hypothermia. And I can only try to speculate on how he did it.So, what if we had Beck hooked up to a SPECT scan, something that could actually measure brain function? Just very simply, the three parts of the brain: the frontal lobe, where you focus your attention and concentration; you have the temporal lobe, where you form images and keep memories; and the posterior part of your brain, which contains the cerebellum, which controls motion; and the brain stem, where you have your basic maintenance functions, like heartbeat and respiration.So let's take a cut through the brain here, and imagine that Beck was hooked up to a SPECT scan. This measures dynamic blood flow and therefore energy flow within the brain. So you have the prefrontal cortex here, lighting up in red. This is a pretty evenly distributed scan. You have the middle area, where the temporal lobe might be, in here, and the posterior portion, where the maintenance functions are in the back.This is a roughly normal scan, showing equal distribution of energy. Now, you go to this one and you see how much more the frontal lobes are lighting up. This might be what Beck would be experiencing when he realizes he's in danger. He's focusing all his attention on getting himself out of trouble. These parts of the brain are quieting down. He's not thinking about his family or anybody else at this point, and he's working pretty hard. He's trying to get his muscles going and get out of this. OK, but he's losing ground here. He's running out of energy. It's too cold; he can't keep his metabolic fires going, and, you see, there's no more red here; his brain is quieting down. He's collapsed in the snow here. Everything is quiet, there's very little red anywhere. Beck is powering down. He's dying.You go on to the next scan, but, in Beck's case, you can see that the middle part of his brain is beginning to light up again. He's beginning to think about his family. He's beginning to have images that are motivating him to get up. He's developing energy in this area through thought. And this is how he's going to turn thought back into action. This part of the brain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus. It's an area in which a lot of neuroscientists believe the seat of will exists. This is where people make decisions, where they develop willpower. And, you can see, there's an energy flow going from the mid portion of his brain, where he's got images of his family, into this area, which is powering his will.Okay. This is getting stronger and stronger to the point where it's actually going to be a motivating factor. He's going to develop enough energy in that area — after a day, a night and a day — to actually motivate himself to get up. And you can see here, he's starting to get more energy into the frontal lobe. He's beginning to focus, he can concentrate now. He's thinking about what he's got to do to save himself. So this energy has been transmitted up toward the front of his brain, and it's getting quieter down here, but he's using this energy to think about what he has to do to get himself going. And then, that energy is sort of spreading throughout his thought areas. He's not thinking about his family now, and he's getting himself motivated. This is the posterior part, where his muscles are going to be moving, and he's going to be pacing himself. His heart and lungs are going to pick up speed. So this is what I can speculate might have been going on had we been able to do a SPECT scan on Beck during this survival epic.So here I am taking care of Beck at 21,000 feet, and I felt what I was doing was completely trivial compared to what he had done for himself. It just shows you what the power of the mind can do. He was critically ill, there were other critically ill patients; luckily, we were able to get a helicopter in to rescue these guys. A helicopter came in at 21,000 feet and carried out the highest helicopter rescue in history. It was able to land on the ice, take away Beck and the other survivors, one by one, and get them off to Kathmandu in a clinic before we even got back to base camp.This is a scene at base camp, at one of the camps where some of the climbers were lost. And we had a memorial service there a few days later. These are Serphas lighting juniper branches. They believe juniper smoke is holy. And the climbers stood around on the high rocks and spoke of the climbers who were lost up near the summit, turning to the mountain, actually, to talk to them directly. There were five climbers lost here. This was Scott Fischer, Rob Hall, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba. And one more climber should have died that day, but didn't, and that's Beck Weathers. He was able to survive because he was able to generate that incredible willpower, he was able to use all the power of his mind to save himself.These are Tibetan prayer flags. These Sherpas believe that if you write prayers on these flags, the message will be carried up to the gods, and that year, Beck's message was answered.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_kamler_medical_miracle_on_everest
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"So, I was just asked to go and shoot this film called ""Elizabeth."" And we're all talking about this great English icon and saying, ""She's a fantastic woman, she does everything. How are we going to introduce her?"" So we went around the table with the studio and the producers and the writer, and they came to me and said, ""Shekhar, what do you think?""And I said, ""I think she's dancing.""And I could see everybody looked at me, somebody said, ""Bollywood.""The other said, ""How much did we hire him for?""And the third said, ""Let's find another director.""I thought I had better change. So we had a lot of discussion on how to introduce Elizabeth, and I said, ""OK, maybe I am too Bollywood. Maybe Elizabeth, this great icon, dancing? What are you talking about?"" So I rethought the whole thing, and then we all came to a consensus. And here was the introduction of this great British icon called ""Elizabeth.""Leicester: May I join you, my lady?Elizabeth: If it please you, sir. (Music)Shekhar Kapur: So she was dancing. So how many people who saw the film did not get that here was a woman in love, that she was completely innocent and saw great joy in her life, and she was youthful? And how many of you did not get that? That's the power of visual storytelling, that's the power of dance, that's the power of music: the power of not knowing.When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience. So I come up, and I say, ""What am I going to do today?"" I'm not going to do what I planned to do, and I put myself into absolute panic. It's my one way of getting rid of my mind, getting rid of this mind that says, ""Hey, you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. You're a director, you've done it for years."" So I've got to get there and be in complete panic. It's a symbolic gesture. I tear up the script, I go and I panic myself, I get scared. I'm doing it right now; you can watch me. I'm getting nervous, I don't know what to say, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to go there.And as I go there, of course, my A.D. says, ""You know what you're going to do, sir."" I say, ""Of course I do.""And the studio executives, they would say, ""Hey, look at Shekhar. He's so prepared."" And inside I've just been listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan because he's chaotic. I'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos, I'm hoping some moments of truth will come. All preparation is preparation. I don't even know if it's honest. I don't even know if it's truthful. The truth of it all comes on the moment, organically, and if you get five great moments of great, organic stuff in your storytelling, in your film, your film, audiences will get it. So I'm looking for those moments, and I'm standing there and saying, ""I don't know what to say.""So, ultimately, everybody's looking at you, 200 people at seven in the morning who got there at quarter to seven, and you arrived at seven, and everybody's saying, ""Hey. What's the first thing? What's going to happen?"" And you put yourself into a state of panic where you don't know, and so you don't know. And so, because you don't know, you're praying to the universe because you're praying to the universe that something — I'm going to try and access the universe the way Einstein — say a prayer — accessed his equations, the same source. I'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself, outside the universe. You're looking for something that comes and hits you. Until that hits you, you're not going to do the first shot. So what do you do?So Cate says, ""Shekhar, what do you want me to do?""And I say, ""Cate, what do you want to do?"" (Laughter) ""You're a great actor, and I like to give to my actors — why don't you show me what you want to do?"" (Laughter) What am I doing? I'm trying to buy time. I'm trying to buy time.So the first thing about storytelling that I learned, and I follow all the time is: Panic. Panic is the great access of creativity because that's the only way to get rid of your mind. Get rid of your mind. Get out of it, get it out. And let's go to the universe because there's something out there that is more truthful than your mind, that is more truthful than your universe. [unclear], you said that yesterday. I'm just repeating it because that's what I follow constantly to find the shunyata somewhere, the emptiness. Out of the emptiness comes a moment of creativity. So that's what I do.When I was a kid — I was about eight years old. You remember how India was. There was no pollution. In Delhi, we used to live — we used to call it a chhat or the khota. Khota's now become a bad word. It means their terrace — and we used to sleep out at night. At school I was being just taught about physics, and I was told that if there is something that exists, then it is measurable. If it is not measurable, it does not exist. And at night I would lie out, looking at the unpolluted sky, as Delhi used to be at that time when I was a kid, and I used to stare at the universe and say, ""How far does this universe go?""My father was a doctor. And I would think, ""Daddy, how far does the universe go?""And he said, ""Son, it goes on forever.""So I said, ""Please measure forever because in school they're teaching me that if I cannot measure it, it does not exist. It doesn't come into my frame of reference."" So, how far does eternity go? What does forever mean? And I would lie there crying at night because my imagination could not touch creativity.So what did I do? At that time, at the tender age of seven, I created a story. What was my story? And I don't know why, but I remember the story. There was a woodcutter who's about to take his ax and chop a piece of wood, and the whole galaxy is one atom of that ax. And when that ax hits that piece of wood, that's when everything will destroy and the Big Bang will happen again. But all before that there was a woodcutter. And then when I would run out of that story, I would imagine that woodcutter's universe is one atom in the ax of another woodcutter. So every time, I could tell my story again and again and get over this problem, and so I got over the problem.How did I do it? Tell a story. So what is a story? A story is our — all of us — we are the stories we tell ourselves. In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves. So that's as wide as we look at stories. A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world, and that's our mythology.We tell our stories, and a person without a story does not exist. So Einstein told a story and followed his stories and came up with theories and came up with theories and then came up with his equations. Alexander had a story that his mother used to tell him, and he went out to conquer the world. We all, everybody, has a story that they follow. We tell ourselves stories. So, I will go further, and I say, ""I tell a story, and therefore I exist."" I exist because there are stories, and if there are no stories, we don't exist. We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad. I don't know; I'm not sure, but that's what I've done all the time.Now, a film. A film tells a story. I often wonder when I make a film — I'm thinking of making a film of the Buddha — and I often wonder: If Buddha had all the elements that are given to a director — if he had music, if he had visuals, if he had a video camera — would we get Buddhism better? But that puts some kind of burden on me. I have to tell a story in a much more elaborate way, but I have the potential. It's called subtext. When I first went to Hollywood, they said — I used to talk about subtext, and my agent came to me, ""Would you kindly not talk about subtext?"" And I said, ""Why?"" He said, ""Because nobody is going to give you a film if you talk about subtext. Just talk about plot and say how wonderful you'll shoot the film, what the visuals will be.""So when I look at a film, here's what we look for: We look for a story on the plot level, then we look for a story on the psychological level, then we look for a story on the political level, then we look at a story on a mythological level. And I look for stories on each level. Now, it is not necessary that these stories agree with each other. What is wonderful is, at many times, the stories will contradict with each other. So when I work with Rahman who's a great musician, I often tell him, ""Don't follow what the script already says. Find that which is not. Find the truth for yourself, and when you find the truth for yourself, there will be a truth in it, but it may contradict the plot, but don't worry about it.""So, the sequel to ""Elizabeth,"" ""Golden Age."" When I made the sequel to ""Elizabeth,"" here was a story that the writer was telling: A woman who was threatened by Philip II and was going to war, and was going to war, fell in love with Walter Raleigh. Because she fell in love with Walter Raleigh, she was giving up the reasons she was a queen, and then Walter Raleigh fell in love with her lady in waiting, and she had to decide whether she was a queen going to war or she wanted...Here's the story I was telling: The gods up there, there were two people. There was Philip II, who was divine because he was always praying, and there was Elizabeth, who was divine, but not quite divine because she thought she was divine, but the blood of being mortal flowed in her. But the divine one was unjust, so the gods said, ""OK, what we need to do is help the just one."" And so they helped the just one. And what they did was, they sent Walter Raleigh down to physically separate her mortal self from her spirit self. And the mortal self was the girl that Walter Raleigh was sent, and gradually he separated her so she was free to be divine. And the two divine people fought, and the gods were on the side of divinity.Of course, all the British press got really upset. They said, ""We won the Armada.""But I said, ""But the storm won the Armada. The gods sent the storm.""So what was I doing? I was trying to find a mythic reason to make the film. Of course, when I asked Cate Blanchett, I said, ""What's the film about?"" She said, ""The film's about a woman coming to terms with growing older."" Psychological. The writer said ""It's about history, plot."" I said ""It's about mythology, the gods.""So let me show you a film — a piece from that film — and how a camera also — so this is a scene, where in my mind, she was at the depths of mortality. She was discovering what mortality actually means, and if she is at the depths of mortality, what really happens. And she's recognizing the dangers of mortality and why she should break away from mortality. Remember, in the film, to me, both her and her lady in waiting were parts of the same body, one the mortal self and one the spirit self.So can we have that second?(Music)Elizabeth: Bess? Bess? Bess Throckmorton?Bess: Here, my lady.Elizabeth: Tell me, is it true? Are you with child? Are you with child?Bess: Yes, my lady.Elizabeth: Traitorous. You dare to keep secrets from me? You ask my permission before you rut, before you breed. My bitches wear my collars. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?Walsingham: Majesty. Please, dignity. Mercy.Elizabeth: This is no time for mercy, Walsingham. You go to your traitor brother and leave me to my business. Is it his? Tell me. Say it. Is the child his? Is it his?Bess: Yes. My lady, it is my husband's child. Elizabeth: Bitch! (Cries)Raleigh: Majesty. This is not the queen I love and serve.Elizabeth: This man has seduced a ward of the queen, and she has married without royal consent. These offenses are punishable by law. Arrest him. Go. You no longer have the queen's protection.Bess: As you wish, Majesty.Elizabeth: Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out.(Music)Shekhar Kapur: So, what am I trying to do here? Elizabeth has realized, and she's coming face-to-face with her own sense of jealousy, her own sense of mortality. What am I doing with the architecture? The architecture is telling a story. The architecture is telling a story about how, even though she's the most powerful woman in the world at that time, there is the other, the architecture's bigger. The stone is bigger than her because stone is an organic. It'll survive her. So it's telling you, to me, stone is part of her destiny. Not only that, why is the camera looking down? The camera's looking down at her because she's in the well. She's in the absolute well of her own sense of being mortal. That's where she has to pull herself out from the depths of mortality, come in, release her spirit. And that's the moment where, in my mind, both Elizabeth and Bess are the same person. But that's the moment she's surgically removing herself from that. So the film is operating on many many levels in that scene. And how we tell stories visually, with music, with actors, and at each level it's a different sense and sometimes contradictory to each other. So how do I start all this? What's the process of telling a story?About ten years ago, I heard this little thing from a politician, not a politician that was very well respected in India. And he said that these people in the cities, in one flush, expend as much water as you people in the rural areas don't get for your family for two days. That struck a chord, and I said, ""That's true."" I went to see a friend of mine, and he made me wait in his apartment in Malabar Hill on the twentieth floor, which is a really, really upmarket area in Mumbai. And he was having a shower for 20 minutes. I got bored and left, and as I drove out, I drove past the slums of Bombay, as you always do, and I saw lines and lines in the hot midday sun of women and children with buckets waiting for a tanker to come and give them water. And an idea started to develop. So how does that become a story? I suddenly realized that we are heading towards disaster.So my next film is called ""Paani"" which means water. And now, out of the mythology of that, I'm starting to create a world. What kind of world do I create, and where does the idea, the design of that come? So, in my mind, in the future, they started to build flyovers. You understand flyovers? Yeah? They started to build flyovers to get from A to B faster, but they effectively went from one area of relative wealth to another area of relative wealth. And then what they did was they created a city above the flyovers. And the rich people moved to the upper city and left the poorer people in the lower cities, about 10 to 12 percent of the people have moved to the upper city.Now, where does this upper city and lower city come? There's a mythology in India about — where they say, and I'll say it in Hindi, [Hindi] Right. What does that mean? It says that the rich are always sitting on the shoulders and survive on the shoulders of the poor. So, from that mythology, the upper city and lower city come. So the design has a story.And now, what happens is that the people of the upper city, they suck up all the water. Remember the word I said, suck up. They suck up all the water, keep to themselves, and they drip feed the lower city. And if there's any revolution, they cut off the water. And, because democracy still exists, there's a democratic way in which you say ""Well, if you give us what [we want], we'll give you water.""So, okay my time is up. But I can go on about telling you how we evolve stories, and how stories effectively are who we are and how these get translated into the particular discipline that I am in, which is film. But ultimately, what is a story? It's a contradiction. Everything's a contradiction. The universe is a contradiction. And all of us are constantly looking for harmony. When you get up, the night and day is a contradiction. But you get up at 4 a.m. That first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other. Harmony is the notes that Mozart didn't give you, but somehow the contradiction of his notes suggest that. All contradictions of his notes suggest the harmony. It's the effect of looking for harmony in the contradiction that exists in a poet's mind, a contradiction that exists in a storyteller's mind. In a storyteller's mind, it's a contradiction of moralities. In a poet's mind, it's a conflict of words, in the universe's mind, between day and night. In the mind of a man and a woman, we're looking constantly at the contradiction between male and female, we're looking for harmony within each other.The whole idea of contradiction, but the acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story, not the resolution. The problem with a lot of the storytelling in Hollywood and many films, and as [unclear] was saying in his, that we try to resolve the contradiction. Harmony is not resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of a thing that is much larger than resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of something that is embracing and universal and of eternity and of the moment. Resolution is something that is far more limited. It is finite; harmony is infinite. So that storytelling, like all other contradictions in the universe, is looking for harmony and infinity in moral resolutions, resolving one, but letting another go, letting another go and creating a question that is really important.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shekhar_kapur_we_are_the_stories_we_tell_ourselves
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"I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality — questions of good and evil and right and wrong — are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people — I think most people probably here — think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, ""What is worth living for?"" ""What is worth dying for?"" ""What constitutes a good life?""So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion — and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about. And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects.And there's no notion, no version of human morality and human values that I've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes. Even if you get your values from religion, even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death — either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell — you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes. And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim, which, of course, may or may not be true.Now, to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life, for human beings, we know that there is a continuum of such facts. We know that it's possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong — where mothers cannot feed their children, where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately. And we know that it's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic, to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable.And we know — we know — that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space. Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not. Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye, so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors? Probably not. There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths.So, in talking about values we are talking about facts. Now, of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels — from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements. But if we're going to talk about human well-being we are, of necessity, talking about the human brain. Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain —whatever happens after death. Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife, in this life, his personality — his rather unfortunate personality — is the product of his brain. So the contributions of culture — if culture changes us, as indeed it does, it changes us by changing our brains. And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can, at least in principle, be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind — neuroscience, psychology, etc.So, what I'm arguing is that value's reduced to facts — to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings. And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings. And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape, with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures, both personal and collective. And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access, that few people access. And these await our discovery. Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual. Perhaps there are other states that we can't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them.Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. I don't think, for instance, that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child, or whether we should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense. (Laughter) But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.For instance, there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal, where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board, hard, and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin. And hundreds of thousands of children, incidentally, are subjected to this every year. The locations of these enlightened districts, I think, will fail to surprise you. We're not talking about Connecticut.And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious. The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod, lest we spoil the child — this is in Proverbs 13 and 20, and I believe, 23. But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior? (Laughter) Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters?Now, many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined, and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed. And so, how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being? Well, consider by analogy, the concept of physical health. The concept of physical health is undefined. As we just heard from Michael Specter, it has changed over the years. When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30. It's now around 80 in the developed world. There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability. People will send you donations when you're in that condition. (Laughter)Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open, genuinely open for revision, does not make it vacuous. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science. Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing.Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality? Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, ""What is food?"" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions.So, for instance, if it's really wrong to lie, it must always be wrong to lie, and if you can find an exception, well then there's no such thing as moral truth. Why would we think this? Consider, by analogy, the game of chess. Now, if you're going to play good chess, a principle like, ""Don't lose your Queen,"" is very good to follow. But it clearly admits some exceptions. There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do. There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do. And yet, chess is a domain of perfect objectivity. The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all.Now, this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere. Consider the great problem of women's bodies: What to do about them? Well this is one thing you can do about them: You can cover them up. Now, it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as ""wrong"" in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way?Well, who are we not to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil — women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. But what does voluntary mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father's first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame?Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her. What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing?Now, to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. (Laughter) But if we are in a reflective mood, we can ask, ""Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?"" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. OK, so perhaps there's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. (Applause) Perhaps there are many such places —again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being. In fact, the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue. But the demagogues are right about one thing: We need a universal conception of human values.Now, what stands in the way of this? Well, one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality — especially secular, academic, scientist types. When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don't in any other area of our lives. So, for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion, and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness. On the other hand, we have someone like Ted Bundy; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women.So, we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one's time. (Laughter) Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say, ""Well, there's nothing for the Dalai Lama to be really right about — really right about — or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science. He likes chocolate, he likes vanilla. There's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other."" Notice that we don't do this in science.On the left you have Edward Witten. He's a string theorist. If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around, in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten. The other half will tell you they don't like the question. (Laughter) So, what would happen if I showed up at a physics conference and said,""String theory is bogus. It doesn't resonate with me. It's not how I chose to view the universe at a small scale. I'm not a fan."" (Laughter) Well, nothing would happen because I'm not a physicist; I don't understand string theory. I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. (Laughter) I wouldn't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member.But this is just the point. Whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it is to have a domain of expertise. That is what it is for knowledge to count. How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise, or moral talent, or moral genius even? How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count? How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering? Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering? No. (Laughter) How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being? (Applause)So, this, I think, is what the world needs now. It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts. It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering. Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality. We live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less, and they will one day mean nothing.We live in a world filled with destructive technology, and this technology cannot be uninvented; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. It seems to me, therefore, patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life. And to do that, we have to admit that these questions have answers. Thank you very much. (Applause)Chris Anderson: So, some combustible material there. Whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world, hearing some of this, may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing, after as well, some of them.Language seems to be really important here. When you're talking about the veil, you're talking about women dressed in cloth bags. I've lived in the Muslim world, spoken with a lot of Muslim women. And some of them would say something else. They would say, ""No, you know, this is a celebration of female specialness, it helps build that and it's a result of the fact that"" — and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view — ""that male lust is not to be trusted."" I mean, can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist?Sam Harris: Yeah, well I think I tried to broach this in a sentence, watching the clock ticking, but the question is: What is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations, and you're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you don't veil yourself? And so, if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil, or a very funny hat, or tattoo their face — I think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want, but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under. And so I think we shouldn't be so eager to always take their word for it, especially when it's 120 degrees out and you're wearing a full burqa.CA: A lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress. But can you reconcile that? I think I understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that doesn't become one dimensional, where we all have to think the same. Paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward, 100 years forward, how you would like to think of the world, balancing moral progress with richness.SH: Well, I think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail, then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail. So, we're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion, and we're going to understand the factors that encourage it — whether they're genetic, whether they're how people talk to one another, whether they're economic systems, and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space.So, everything is not going to be up for grabs. It's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women. I mean I don't think we need an NSF grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea — but at a certain point we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them. Do people love their daughters just as much in these systems? And I think there are clearly right answers to that.CA: And if the results come out that actually they do, are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues?SH: Well yeah, modulo one obvious fact, that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system. So, you can say like, ""Because I knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend, I chopped his head off. And that was the most compassionate thing I could do."" If you get all those parts aligned, yes I think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love. But again, then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context. It's all of us in this together, not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus.CA: Sam, this is a conversation I would actually love to continue for hours. We don't have that, but maybe another time. Thank you for coming to TED.SH: Really an honor. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right
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"Illegal wildlife trade in Brazil is one of the major threats against our fauna, especially birds, and mainly to supply the pet market with thousands of animals taken from nature every month, and transported far from their origins, to be sold mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.It is estimated that all kinds of illegal wildlife trade in Brazil withdraw from nature almost 38 million animals every year, a business worth almost two billion dollars. The police intercepts these huge cargos with live animals, intended to supply the pet market, or they seize the animals directly from the people's houses, and this is how we end up, every month, with thousands of seized animals.And for us to understand what happens with them, we're going to follow Brad. In the eyes of many people, after the animals are seized, they say, ""Yay, justice has been served. The good guys arrived, took the cute, mistreated animals from the hands of the evil traffickers, and everyone lived happily ever after."" But did they? Actually, no, and this is where many of our problems begin. Because we have to figure out what to do with all these animals.In Brazil, they are usually first sent to governmental triage facilities, in which most of the cases, the conditions are as bad as with the traffickers. In 2002, these centers received 45,000 animals, of which 37,000 were birds. And the police estimates that we seize only five percent of what's being trafficked. Some lucky ones — and among them, Brad — go to serious rehabilitation centers after that. And in these places they are cared for. They train their flying, they learn how to recognize the food they will find in nature, and they are able to socialize with others from the same species. (Laughter)But then what? The Brazil Ornithological Society — so now we're talking only birds — claims that we have too little knowledge about the species in nature. Therefore, it would be too risky to release these animals, both for the released and for the natural populations. They also claim that we spend too many resources in their rehabilitation. Following this argument, they suggest that all the birds seized from non-threatened species should be euthanized. However, this would mean having killed 26,267 birds, only in the state of São Paulo, only in 2006.But, some researchers, myself included — some NGOs and some people from the Brazilian government — believe there is an alternative. We think that if and when the animals meet certain criteria concerning their health, behavior, inferred origin and whatever we know about the natural populations, then technically responsible releases are possible, both for the well-being of the individual, and for the conservation of the species and their ecosystems, because we will be returning genes for these populations — which could be important for them in facing environmental challenges — and also we could be returning potential seed dispersers, predators, preys, etc.All of these were released by us. On the top, the turtles are just enjoying freedom. (Laughter) On the middle, this guy nested a couple of weeks after the release. And on the bottom, my personal favorite, the little male over there, four hours after his release he was together with a wild female. So, this is not new, people have been doing this around the world. But it's still a big issue in Brazil. We believe we have performed responsible releases. We've registered released animals mating in nature and having chicks. So, these genes are indeed going back to the populations.However this is still a minority for the very lack of knowledge. So, I say, ""Let's study more, let's shed light on this issue, let's do whatever we can."" I'm devoting my career to that. And I'm here to urge each and every one of you to do whatever is in your reach: Talk to your neighbor, teach your children, make sure your pet is from a legal breeder. We need to act, and act now, before these ones are the only ones left. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juliana_machado_ferreira
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"So, basically we have public leaders, public officials who are out of control; they are writing bills that are unintelligible, and out of these bills are going to come maybe 40,000 pages of regulations, total complexity, which has a dramatically negative impact on our life. If you're a veteran coming back from Iraq or Vietnam you face a blizzard of paperwork to get your benefits; if you're trying to get a small business loan, you face a blizzard of paperwork.What are we going to do about it? I define simplicity as a means to achieving clarity, transparency and empathy, building humanity into communications. I've been simplifying things for 30 years. I come out of the advertising and design business. My focus is understanding you people, and how you interact with the government to get your benefits, how you interact with corporations to decide whom you're going to do business with, and how you view brands.So, very quickly, when President Obama said, ""I don't see why we can't have a one-page, plain English consumer credit agreement."" So, I locked myself in a room, figured out the content, organized the document, and wrote it in plain English. I've had this checked by the two top consumer credit lawyers in the country. This is a real thing. Now, I went one step further and said, ""Why do we have to stick with the stodgy lawyers and just have a paper document? Let's go online.""And many people might need help in computation. Working with the Harvard Business School, you'll see this example when you talk about minimum payment: If you spent 62 dollars for a meal, the longer you take to pay out that loan, you see, over a period of time using the minimum payment it's 99 dollars and 17 cents. How about that? Do you think your bank is going to show that to people? But it's going to work. It's more effective than just computational aids. And what about terms like ""over the limit""? Perhaps a stealth thing. Define it in context. Tell people what it means.When you put it in plain English, you almost force the institution to give the people a way, a default out of that, and not put themselves at risk. Plain English is about changing the content. And one of the things I'm most proud of is this agreement for IBM. It's a grid, it's a calendar. At such and such a date, IBM has responsibilities, you have responsibilities. Received very favorably by business.And there is some good news to report today. Each year, one in 10 taxpayers receives a notice from the IRS. There are 200 million letters that go out. Running through this typical letter that they had, I ran it through my simplicity lab, it's pretty unintelligible. All the parts of the document in red are not intelligible. We looked at doing over 1,000 letters that cover 70 percent of their transactions in plain English. They have been tested in the laboratory. When I run it through my lab, this heat-mapping shows everything is intelligible. And the IRS has introduced the program.(Applause)There are a couple of things going on right now that I want to bring to your attention. There is a lot of discussion now about a consumer financial protection agency, how to mandate simplicity. We see all this complexity. It's incumbent upon us, and this organization, I believe, to make clarity, transparency and empathy a national priority. There is no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate. There is no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible.So, how are we going to change the world? Make clarity, transparency and simplicity a national priority. I thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon
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"I want to talk about 4.6 billion years of history in 18 minutes. That's 300 million years per minute. Let's start with the first photograph NASA obtained of planet Mars. This is fly-by, Mariner IV. It was taken in 1965. When this picture appeared, that well-known scientific journal, The New York Times, wrote in its editorial, ""Mars is uninteresting. It's a dead world. NASA should not spend any time or effort studying Mars anymore."" Fortunately, our leaders in Washington at NASA headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet.One of the key questions in all of science, ""Is there life outside of Earth?"" I believe that Mars is the most likely target for life outside the Earth. I'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on Mars. But let me start with a Viking photograph. This is a composite taken by Viking in 1976. Viking was developed and managed at the NASA Langley Research Center. We sent two orbiters and two landers in the summer of 1976. We had four spacecraft, two around Mars, two on the surface — an amazing accomplishment.This is the first photograph taken from the surface of any planet. This is a Viking Lander photograph of the surface of Mars. And yes, the red planet is red. Mars is half the size of the Earth, but because two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, the land area on Mars is comparable to the land area on Earth. So, Mars is a pretty big place even though it's half the size. We have obtained topographic measurements of the surface of Mars. We understand the elevation differences.We know a lot about Mars. Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. Mars has the Grand Canyon of the solar system, Valles Marineris. Very, very interesting planet. Mars has the largest impact crater in the solar system, Hellas Basin. This is 2,000 miles across. If you happened to be on Mars when this impactor hit, it was a really bad day on Mars. (Laughter) This is Olympus Mons. This is bigger than the state of Arizona.Volcanoes are important, because volcanoes produce atmospheres and they produce oceans. We're looking at Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, superimposed on a map of the United States, 3,000 miles across. One of the most intriguing features about Mars, the National Academy of Science says one of the 10 major mysteries of the space age, is why certain areas of Mars are so highly magnetized. We call this crustal magnetism. There are regions on Mars, where, for some reason — we don't understand why at this point — the surface is very, very highly magnetized.Is there water on Mars? The answer is no, there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars today. But there is intriguing evidence that suggests that the early history of Mars there may have been rivers and fast flowing water. Today Mars is very very dry. We believe there's some water in the polar caps, there are polar caps of North Pole and South Pole. Here are some recent images. This is from Spirit and Opportunity. These images that show at one time, there was very fast flowing water on the surface of Mars. Why is water important? Water is important because if you want life you have to have water. Water is the key ingredient in the evolution, the origin of life on a planet.Here is some picture of Antarctica and a picture of Olympus Mons, very similar features, glaciers. So, this is frozen water. This is ice water on Mars. This is my favorite picture. This was just taken a few weeks ago. It has not been seen publicly. This is European space agency Mars Express, image of a crater on Mars and in the middle of the crater we have liquid water, we have ice. Very intriguing photograph.We now believe that in the early history of Mars, which is 4.6 billion years ago, 4.6 billion years ago, Mars was very Earth-like. Mars had rivers, Mars had lakes, but more important Mars had planetary-scale oceans. We believe that the oceans were in the northern hemisphere, and this area in blue, which shows a depression of about four miles, was the ancient ocean area on the surface of Mars. Where did the ocean's worth of water on Mars go? Well, we have an idea. This is a measurement we obtained a few years ago from a Mars-orbiting satellite called Odyssey. Sub-surface water on Mars, frozen in the form of ice. And this shows the percent. If it's a blueish color, it means 16 percent by weight. Sixteen percent, by weight, of the interior contains frozen water, or ice. So, there is a lot of water below the surface.The most intriguing and puzzling measurement, in my opinion, we've obtained of Mars, was released earlier this year in the magazine Science. And what we're looking at is the presence of the gas methane, CH4, in the atmosphere of Mars. And you can see there are three distinct regions of methane. Why is methane important? Because on Earth, almost all — 99.9 percent — of the methane is produced by living systems, not little green men, but microscopic life below the surface or at the surface. We now have evidence that methane is in the atmosphere of Mars, a gas that, on Earth, is biogenic in origin, produced by living systems. These are the three plumes: A, B1, B2.And this is the terrain it appears over, and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on Mars. In fact, the Earth and Mars are both 4.6 billion years old. The oldest rock on Earth is only 3.6 billion. The reason there is a billion-year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics, The crust of the Earth has been recycled. We have no geological record prior for the first billion years. That record exists on Mars. And this terrain that we're looking at dates back to 4.6 billion years when Earth and Mars were formed. It was a Tuesday. (Laughter)This is a map that shows where we've put our spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Here is Viking I, Viking II. This is Opportunity. This is Spirit. This is Mars Pathfinder. This is Phoenix, we just put two years ago. Notice all of our rovers and all of our landers have gone to the northern hemisphere. That's because the northern hemisphere is the region of the ancient ocean basin. There aren't many craters. And that's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites. But look in the southern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere there are impact craters, there are volcanic craters. Here's Hellas Basin, a very very different place, geologically. Look where the methane is, the methane is in a very rough terrain area.What is the best way to unravel the mysteries on Mars that exist? We asked this question 10 years ago. We invited 10 of the top Mars scientists to the Langley Research Center for two days. We addressed on the board the major questions that have not been answered. And we spent two days deciding how to best answer this question. And the result of our meeting was a robotic rocket-powered airplane we call ARES. It's an Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor. There's a model of ARES here. This is a 20-percent scale model.This airplane was designed at the Langley Research Center. If any place in the world can build an airplane to fly on Mars, it's the Langley Research Center, for almost 100 years a leading center of aeronautics in the world. We fly about a mile above the surface. We cover hundreds of miles, and we fly about 450 miles an hour. We can do things that rovers can't do and landers can't do: We can fly above mountains, volcanoes, impact craters; we fly over valleys; we can fly over surface magnetism, the polar caps, subsurface water; and we can search for life on Mars.But, of equal importance, as we fly through the atmosphere of Mars, we transmit that journey, the first flight of an airplane outside of the Earth, we transmit those images back to Earth. And our goal is to inspire the American public who is paying for this mission through tax dollars. But more important we will inspire the next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. And that's a critical area of national security and economic vitality, to make sure we produce the next generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and technologists.This is what ARES looks like as it flies over Mars. We preprogram it. We will fly where the methane is. We will have instruments aboard the plane that will sample, every three minutes, the atmosphere of Mars. We will look for methane as well as other gasses produced by living systems. We will pinpoint where these gases emanate from, because we can measure the gradient where it comes from, and there, we can direct the next mission to land right in that area.How do we transport an airplane to Mars? In two words, very carefully. The problem is we don't fly it to Mars, we put it in a spacecraft and we send it to Mars. The problem is the spacecraft's largest diameter is nine feet; ARES is 21-foot wingspan, 17 feet long. How do we get it to Mars? We fold it, and we transport it in a spacecraft. And we have it in something called an aeroshell. This is how we do it. And we have a little video that describes the sequence.Video: Seven, six. Green board. Five, four, three, two, one. Main engine start, and liftoff.Joel Levine: This is a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the spacecraft taking nine months to get to Mars. It enters the atmosphere of Mars. A lot of heating, frictional heating. It's going 18 thousand miles an hour. A parachute opens up to slow it down. The thermal tiles fall off. The airplane is exposed to the atmosphere for the first time. It unfolds. The rocket engine begins.We believe that in a one-hour flight we can rewrite the textbook on Mars by making high-resolution measurements of the atmosphere, looking for gases of biogenic origin, looking for gases of volcanic origin, studying the surface, studying the magnetism on the surface, which we don't understand, as well as about a dozen other areas.Practice makes perfect. How do we know we can do it? Because we have tested ARES model, several models in a half a dozen wind tunnels at the NASA Langley Research Center for eight years, under Mars conditions. And, of equal importance is, we test ARES in the Earth's atmosphere, at 100,000 feet, which is comparable to the density and pressure of the atmosphere on Mars where we'll fly. Now, 100,000 feet, if you fly cross-country to Los Angeles, you fly 37,000 feet. We do our tests at 100,000 feet.And I want to show you one of our tests. This is a half-scale model. This is a high-altitude helium balloon. This is over Tilamook, Oregon. We put the folded airplane on the balloon — it took about three hours to get up there — and then we released it on command at 103,000 feet, and we deploy the airplane and everything works perfectly. And we've done high-altitude and low-altitude tests, just to perfect this technique.We're ready to go. I have a scale model here. But we have a full-scale model in storage at the NASA Langley Research Center. We're ready to go. All we need is a check from NASA headquarters (Laughter) to cover the costs. I'm prepared to donate my honorarium for today's talk for this mission. There's actually no honorarium for anyone for this thing. This is the ARES team; we have about 150 scientists, engineers; where we're working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center and half a dozen major universities and corporations in developing this.It's a large effort. It's all at NASA Langley Research Center. And let me conclude by saying not too far from here, right down the road in Kittyhawk, North Carolina, a little more than 100 years ago history was made when we had the first powered flight of an airplane on Earth. We are on the verge right now to make the first flight of an airplane outside the Earth's atmosphere. We are prepared to fly this on Mars, rewrite the textbook about Mars. If you're interested in more information, we have a website that describes this exciting and intriguing mission, and why we want to do it. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joel_levine
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"One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings.And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental — if you'll pardon the pun — in helping Nathaniel get off the streets.I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me.Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him.And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall — he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep.And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. (Laughter) So, I just started playing. And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto.And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete — Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen.And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician.Music is medicine. Music changes us. And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. And that is an escape from his tormented state. And I understood that this was the very essence of art. This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us.And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. Thank you. (Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. Robert Gupta. (Applause)Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. So, please forgive me.(Laughter) (Music) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gupta
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"You know for me, the interest in contemporary forms of slavery started with a leaflet that I picked up in London. It was the early '90s, and I was at a public event. I saw this leaflet and it said, ""There are millions of slaves in the world today."" And I thought, ""No way, no way."" And I'm going to admit to hubris. Because I also, I'm going to admit to you, I also thought, ""How can I be like a hot-shot young full professor who teaches human rights and not know this? So it can't be true.""Well, if you teach, if you worship in the temple of learning, do not mock the gods, because they will take you, fill you with curiosity and desire, and drive you. Drive you with a passion to change things. I went out and did a lit review, 3,000 articles on the key word ""slavery."" Two turned out to be about contemporary — only two. All the rest were historical. They were press pieces and they were full of outrage, they were full of speculation, they were anecdotal — no solid information.So, I began to do a research project of my own. I went to five countries around the world. I looked at slaves. I met slaveholders, and I looked very deeply into slave-based businesses because this is an economic crime. People do not enslave people to be mean to them. They do it to make a profit. And I've got to tell you, what I found out in the world in four different continents, was depressingly familiar. Like this: Agricultural workers in Africa, whipped and beaten, showing us how they were beaten in the fields before they escaped from slavery and met up with our film crew. It was mind-blowing.And I want to be very clear. I'm talking about real slavery. This is not about lousy marriages, this is not about jobs that suck. This is about people who can not walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. It's real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history.Now, where is it? Well, this map in the sort of redder, yellower colors are the places with the highest densities of slavery. But in fact that kind of bluey color are the countries where we can't find any cases of slavery. And you might notice that it's only Iceland and Greenland where we can't find any cases of enslavement around the world.We're also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction. Around the world, slaves are used to destroy the environment, cutting down trees in the Amazon; destroying forest areas in West Africa; mining and spreading mercury around in places like Ghana and the Congo; destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia. It's a pretty harrowing linkage between what's happening to our environment and what's happening to our human rights.Now, how on Earth did we get to a situation like this, where we have 27 million people in slavery in the year 2010? That's double the number that came out of Africa in the entire transatlantic slave trade. Well, it builds up with these factors. They are not causal, they are actually supporting factors. One we all know about, the population explosion: the world goes from two billion people to almost seven billion people in the last 50 years. Being numerous does not make you a slave. Add in the increased vulnerability of very large numbers of people in the developing world, caused by civil wars, ethnic conflicts, kleptocratic governments, disease ... you name it, you know it.We understand how that works. In some countries all of those things happen at once, like Sierra Leone a few years ago, and push enormous parts ... about a billion people in the world, in fact, as we know, live on the edge, live in situations where they don't have any opportunity and are usually even destitute. But that doesn't make you a slave either. What it takes to turn a person who is destitute and vulnerable into a slave, is the absence of the rule of law. If the rule of law is sound, it protects the poor and it protects the vulnerable. But if corruption creeps in and people don't have the opportunity to have that protection of the rule of law, then if you can use violence, if you can use violence with impunity, you can reach out and harvest the vulnerable into slavery.Well, that is precisely what has happened around the world. Though, for a lot of people, the people who step into slavery today don't usually get kidnapped or knocked over the head. They come into slavery because someone has asked them this question.All around the world I've been told an almost identical story. People say, ""I was home, someone came into our village, they stood up in the back of a truck, they said, 'I've got jobs, who needs a job?'"" And they did exactly what you or I would do in the same situation. They said, ""That guy looked sketchy. I was suspicious, but my children were hungry. We needed medicine. I knew I had to do anything I could to earn some money to support the people I care about."" They climb into the back of the truck. They go off with the person who recruits them. Ten miles, 100 miles, 1,000 miles later, they find themselves in dirty, dangerous, demeaning work. They take it for a little while, but when they try to leave, bang!, the hammer comes down, and they discover they're enslaved.Now, that kind of slavery is, again, pretty much what slavery has been all through human history. But there is one thing that is particularly remarkable and novel about slavery today, and that is a complete collapse in the price of human beings — expensive in the past, dirt cheap now. Even the business programs have started picking up on this. I just want to share a little clip for you.Daphne: OK. Llively discussion guaranteed here, as always, as we get macro and talk commodities. Continuing here in the studio with our guest Michael O'Donohue, head of commodities at Four Continents Capital Management. And we're also joined by Brent Lawson from Lawson Frisk Securities.Brent Lawson: Happy to be here.D: Good to have you with us, Brent. Now, gentlemen ... Brent, where is your money going this year?BL: Well Daphne, we've been going short on gas and oil recently and casting our net just a little bit wider. We really like the human being story a lot. If you look at a long-term chart, prices are at historical lows and yet global demand for forced labor is still real strong. So, that's a scenario that we think we should be capitalizing on.D: Michael, what's your take on the people story? Are you interested?Michael O'Donoghue: Oh definitely. Non-voluntary labor's greatest advantage as an asset is the endless supply. We're not about to run out of people. No other commodity has that.BL: Daphne, if I may draw your attention to one thing. That is that private equity has been sniffing around, and that tells me that this market is about to explode. Africans and Indians, as usual, South Americans, and Eastern Europeans in particular are on our buy list.D: Interesting. Micheal, bottom line, what do you recommend?MO: We're recommending to our clients a buy and hold strategy. There's no need to play the market. There's a lot of vulnerable people out there. It's very exciting.D: Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, thank you very much.Kevin Bales: Okay, you figured it out. That's a spoof. Though I enjoyed watching your jaws drop, drop, drop, until you got it. MTV Europe worked with us and made that spoof, and they've been slipping it in between music videos without any introduction, which I think is kind of fun. Here's the reality. The price of human beings across the last 4,000 years in today's money has averaged about 40,000 dollars. Capital purchase items. You can see that the lines cross when the population explodes.The average price of a human being today, around the world, is about 90 dollars. They are more expensive in places like North America. Slaves cost between 3,000 to 8,000 dollars in North America, but I could take you places in India or Nepal where human beings can be acquired for five or 10 dollars. They key here is that people have ceased to be that capital purchase item and become like Styrofoam cups. You buy them cheaply, you use them, you crumple them up, and then when you're done with them you just throw them away.These young boys are in Nepal. They are basically the transport system on a quarry run by a slaveholder. There are no roads there, so they carry loads of stone on their backs, often of their own weight, up and down the Himalaya Mountains. One of their mothers said to us, ""You know, we can't survive here, but we can't even seem to die either."" It's a horrible situation. And if there is anything that makes me feel very positive about this, it's that there are also — in addition to young men like this who are still enslaved — there are ex-slaves who are now working to free others. Or, we say, Frederick Douglass is in the house.I don't know if you've ever had a daydream about, ""Wow. What would it be like to meet Harriet Tubman? What would it be like to meet Frederick Douglass?"" I've got to say, one of the most exciting parts about my job is that I get to, and I want to introduce you to one of those. His name is James Kofi Annan. He was a slave child in Ghana enslaved in the fishing industry, and he now, after escape and building a new life, has formed an organization that we work closely with to go back and get people out of slavery. This is not James, this is one of the kids that he works with.James Kofi Annan (Video): He was hit with a paddle in the head. And this reminds me of my childhood when I used to work here.KB: James and our country director in Ghana, Emmanuel Otoo are now receiving regular death threats because the two of them managed to get convictions and imprisonment for three human traffickers for the very first time in Ghana for enslaving people, from the fishing industry, for enslaving children.Now, everything I've been telling you, I admit, is pretty disheartening. But there is actually a very positive side to this, and that is this: The 27 million people who are in slavery today, that's a lot of people, but it's also the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery. And likewise, the 40 billion dollars that they generate into the global economy each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labor.Slavery, illegal in every country has been pushed to the edges of our global society. And in a way, without us even noticing, has ended up standing on the precipice of its own extinction, waiting for us to give it a big boot and knock it over. And get rid of it. And it can be done.Now, if we do that, if we put the resources and the focus to it, what does it actually cost to get people out of slavery? Well, first, before I even tell you the cost I've got to be absolutely clear. We do not buy people out of slavery. Buying people out of slavery is like paying a burglar to get your television back; it's abetting a crime. Liberation, however, costs some money.Liberation, and more importantly all the work that comes after liberation. It's not an event, it's a process. It's about helping people to build lives of dignity, stability, economic autonomy, citizenship. Well, amazingly, in places like India where costs are very low, that family, that three-generation family that you see there who were in hereditary slavery — so, that granddad there, was born a baby into slavery — but the total cost, amortized across the rest of the work, was about 150 dollars to bring that family out of slavery and then take them through a two year process to build a stable life of citizenship and education.A boy in Ghana rescued from fishing slavery, about 400 dollars. In the United States, North America, much more expensive. Legal costs, medical costs ... we understand that it's expensive here: about 30,000 dollars. But most of the people in the world in slavery live in those places where the costs are lowest. And in fact, the global average is about what it is for Ghana.And that means, when you multiply it up, the estimated cost of not just freedom but sustainable freedom for the entire 27 million people on the planet in slavery is something like 10.8 billion dollars — what Americans spend on potato chips and pretzels, what Seattle is going to spend on its light rail system: usually the annual expenditure in this country on blue jeans, or in the last holiday period when we bought GameBoys and iPods and other tech gifts for people, we spent 10.8 billion dollars. Intel's fourth quarter earnings: 10.8 billion.It's not a lot of money at the global level. In fact, it's peanuts. And the great thing about it is that it's not money down a hole, there is a freedom dividend. When you let people out of slavery to work for themselves, are they motivated? They take their kids out of the workplace, they build a school, they say, ""We're going to have stuff we've never had before like three squares, medicine when we're sick, clothing when we're cold."" They become consumers and producers and local economies begin to spiral up very rapidly.That's important, all of that about how we rebuild sustainable freedom, because we'd never want to repeat what happened in this country in 1865. Four million people were lifted up out of slavery and then dumped. Dumped without political participation, decent education, any kind of real opportunity in terms of economic lives, and then sentenced to generations of violence and prejudice and discrimination. And America is still paying the price for the botched emancipation of 1865.We have made a commitment that we will never let people come out of slavery on our watch, and end up as second class citizens. It's just not going to happen. This is what liberation really looks like. Children rescued from slavery in the fishing industry in Ghana, reunited with their parents, and then taken with their parents back to their villages to rebuild their economic well-being so that they become slave-proof — absolutely unenslaveable.Now, this woman lived in a village in Nepal. We'd been working there about a month. They had just begun to come out of a hereditary kind of slavery. They'd just begun to light up a little bit, open up a little bit. But when we went to speak with her, when we took this photograph, the slaveholders were still menacing us from the sidelines. They hadn't been really pushed back. I was frightened. We were frightened. We said to her, ""Are you worried? Are you upset?""She said, ""No, because we've got hope now. How could we not succeed,"" she said, ""when people like you from the other side of the world are coming here to stand beside us?""Okay, we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to live in a world with slavery? If we don't take action, we just leave ourselves open to have someone else jerk the strings that tie us to slavery in the products we buy, and in our government policies. And yet, if there's one thing that every human being can agree on, I think it's that slavery should end.And if there is a fundamental violation of our human dignity that we would all say is horrific, it's slavery. And we've got to say, what good is all of our intellectual and political and economic power — and I'm really thinking intellectual power in this room — if we can't use it to bring slavery to an end? I think there is enough intellectual power in this room to bring slavery to an end. And you know what? If we can't do that, if we can't use our intellectual power to end slavery, there is one last question: Are we truly free? Okay, thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_bales_how_to_combat_modern_slavery
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"I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. And I'm not a trained academic. Neither am I a veteran social worker. I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table.The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep.We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year.Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, ""When will you start? How many schools will you start? How many children will you get? How are you going to scale? How are you going to replicate?"" It was very difficult not to get scared, not to get daunted. But we dug our heels and said, ""We're not in the number game. We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job.""So, we started Parikrma. The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. Indian academic year begins in June. So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. My God! What a bonding exercise that was. And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages. (Applause)Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. And so all our schools are English medium schools. But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. No one in their family has spoken English. No one in their generation has spoken English. But how wrong it is.Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear] and Hardy Boys. Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it.Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter)Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course, but he has done a lot of research through Google search. You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, ""Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. They'll never be able to cope."" Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. You should just come across to see how well our children do.There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. That's absolute hogwash. All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible.Video: (Hindi)SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. Fathers have started to attend. It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. Now they have started writing their signature. The children have taught them. It's amazing how much children can teach.We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, ""You know, we want to learn how to read and write. Can you teach us?"" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools.Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children. They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile.More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school.There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad.Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. I mingled with almost everyone. They were very friendly. I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. Even now we are in touch through Facebook.After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. My accent with English improved a lot. And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here. Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, ""Yes ma'am, what you want?"" It was so good to hear!(Laughter) (Applause)SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. And today she wants to be a neurologist.Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. They are really excelling. There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city. We've got the best school award for three years successively. And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. We also have our very own dream team.Why is this happening? Why this confidence? Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. Art, music are considered therapy and mediums of expression. We also believe that it's the content that is more important. It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education.When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child complete the circle of life, and unleash his total potential. We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. But we began with the idea of one child at a time.This is five-year-old Parusharam. He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. He's in kindergarten. He has learned how to speak English. We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, ""I like sleeping. I like eating. I like playing."" And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, ""I want to horsing."" Now, ""horsing"" is going for a horse ride. So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. He comes for a tummy rub, because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter)When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world. But today I have been transformed. I have been changed with my children. I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shukla_bose_teaching_one_child_at_a_time
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"We are drowning in news. Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year. That's just one source.My question is: How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run? That's the idea behind The Long News. It's a project by The Long Now Foundation, which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. And what we're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now. And when you look at the news through that filter, a lot falls by the wayside.To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year, is this going to matter in a decade? Or this? Or this? Really? Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years? Okay, that was kind of cool. (Laughter) But the top story of this past year was the economy, and I'm just betting that, sooner or later, this particular recession is going to be old news.So, what kind of stories might make a difference for the future? Well, let's take science. Someday, little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things. That someday is already here if you're a mouse. Some recent stories: nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom; they're sending genes into the brain; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body.What about resources? How are we going to feed nine billion people? We're having trouble feeding six billion today. As we heard yesterday, there's over a billion people hungry. Britain will starve without genetically modified crops. Bill Gates, fortunately, has bet a billion on [agricultural] research.What about global politics? The world's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda, and they may. They've overtaken the U.S. as the world's biggest car market, they've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter, and they've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers.We're finding all kinds of ways to push back the limits of what we know. Some recent discoveries: There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica; there's a self-directed robot scientist that's made a discovery — soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years. It seems that with or without us, life will go on.But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one: water found on the moon. Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there. And if NASA doesn't do it, China might, or somebody in this room might write a big check.My point is this: In the long run, some news stories are more important than others. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_citron_and_now_the_real_news
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"Ladies and gentlemen, at TED we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement. So let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under three minutes and dissect some lessons from it.First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. What he's doing is so easy to follow. Here's his first follower with a crucial role; he's going to show everyone else how to follow.Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. Now it's not about the leader anymore; it's about them, plural. Now, there he is calling to his friends. Now, if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. It takes guts to stand out like that. The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.(Laughter)(Applause)And here comes a second follower. Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts — three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. So a movement must be public. It's important to show not just the leader, but the followers, because you find that new followers emulate the followers, not the leader.Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. Now we've got a movement.(Laughter)So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. So those that were sitting on the fence before now have no reason not to. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, but they will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry.(Laughter)So, over the next minute, you'll see all of those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in. And that's how you make a movement.But let's recap some lessons from this. So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you.(Laughter)Okay, but we might have missed the real lesson here.The biggest lesson, if you noticed — did you catch it? — is that leadership is over-glorified. Yes, it was the shirtless guy who was first, and he'll get all the credit, but it was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. So, as we're told that we should all be leaders, that would be really ineffective.If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow. And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. And what a perfect place to do that, at TED.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement
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"Now, I want to start with a question: When was the last time you were called ""childish""? For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. Which really bothers me. After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults.Now, what have kids done? Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. The traits the word ""childish"" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.(Applause)Thank you.Then again, who's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren't exactly what the world needs? Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, ""That's impossible,"" or ""That costs too much,"" or ""That won't benefit me."" For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking, like my wish that no one went hungry, or that everything were free, a kind of utopia. How many of you still dream like that, and believe in the possibilities? Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos. On the other hand, we kids still dream about perfection. And that's a good thing, because in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first.In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. For instance, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, my home state — yoohoo, Washington!(Applause)has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. The resident artist said they got some of their best ideas from the program, because kids don't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes, they just think of good ideas. Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision.(Laughter)Now, our inherent wisdom doesn't have to be insider's knowledge. Kids already do a lot of learning from adults, and we have a lot to share. I think that adults should start learning from kids. Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd — teachers and students, and I like this analogy: It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, ""Do this, do that."" The students should teach their teachers. Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal. The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it.Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back.(Laughter)True story, by the way. Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every ""Don't do that, don't do this"" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control. And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population.Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them. My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister. Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing ""The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round."" Well, we heard that one too, but ""Pioneer Germ Fighters"" totally rules.(Laughter)I loved to write from the age of four, and when I was six, my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word. Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. Many publishers were not quite so encouraging. One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. Children's publisher not working with children? I don't know, you're kind of alienating a large client there.(Laughter)One publisher, Action Publishing, was willing to take that leap and trust me, and to listen to what I had to say. They published my first book, ""Flying Fingers,"" you see it here. And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you.I appreciate your attention today, because to show that you truly care, you listen. But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. Kids grow up and become adults just like you.(Laughter)Or just like you? Really? The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials.(Laughter)But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away.(Laughter)Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. You must lend an ear today, because we are the leaders of tomorrow, which means we're going to take care of you when you're old and senile. No, just kidding.(Laughter)No, really, we are going to be the next generation, the ones who will bring this world forward. And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. Are you ready to make the match? Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak
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"""People do stupid things. That's what spreads HIV."" This was a headline in a U.K. newspaper, The Guardian, not that long ago. I'm curious, show of hands, who agrees with it? Well, one or two brave souls.This is actually a direct quote from an epidemiologist who's been in field of HIV for 15 years, worked on four continents, and you're looking at her.And I am now going to argue that this is only half true. People do get HIV because they do stupid things, but most of them are doing stupid things for perfectly rational reasons. Now, ""rational"" is the dominant paradigm in public health, and if you put your public health nerd glasses on, you'll see that if we give people the information that they need about what's good for them and what's bad for them, if you give them the services that they can use to act on that information, and a little bit of motivation, people will make rational decisions and live long and healthy lives. Wonderful.That's slightly problematic for me because I work in HIV, and although I'm sure you all know that HIV is about poverty and gender inequality, and if you were at TED '07 it's about coffee prices ... Actually, HIV's about sex and drugs, and if there are two things that make human beings a little bit irrational, they are erections and addiction.(Laughter)So, let's start with what's rational for an addict. Now, I remember speaking to an Indonesian friend of mine, Frankie. We were having lunch and he was telling me about when he was in jail in Bali for a drug injection. It was someone's birthday, and they had very kindly smuggled some heroin into jail, and he was very generously sharing it out with all of his colleagues. And so everyone lined up, all the smackheads in a row, and the guy whose birthday it was filled up the fit, and he went down and started injecting people. So he injects the first guy, and then he's wiping the needle on his shirt, and he injects the next guy. And Frankie says, ""I'm number 22 in line, and I can see the needle coming down towards me, and there is blood all over the place. It's getting blunter and blunter. And a small part of my brain is thinking, 'That is so gross and really dangerous,' but most of my brain is thinking, 'Please let there be some smack left by the time it gets to me. Please let there be some left.'"" And then, telling me this story, Frankie said, ""You know ... God, drugs really make you stupid.""And, you know, you can't fault him for accuracy. But, actually, Frankie, at that time, was a heroin addict and he was in jail. So his choice was either to accept that dirty needle or not to get high. And if there's one place you really want to get high, it's when you're in jail.But I'm a scientist and I don't like to make data out of anecdotes, so let's look at some data. We talked to 600 drug addicts in three cities in Indonesia, and we said, ""Well, do you know how you get HIV?"" ""Oh yeah, by sharing needles."" I mean, nearly 100 percent. Yeah, by sharing needles. And, ""Do you know where you can get a clean needle at a price you can afford to avoid that?"" ""Oh yeah."" Hundred percent. ""We're smackheads; we know where to get clean needles."" ""So are you carrying a needle?"" We're actually interviewing people on the street, in the places where they're hanging out and taking drugs. ""Are you carrying clean needles?"" One in four, maximum. So no surprises then that the proportion that actually used clean needles every time they injected in the last week is just about one in 10, and the other nine in 10 are sharing.So you've got this massive mismatch; everyone knows that if they share they're going to get HIV, but they're all sharing anyway. So what's that about? Is it like you get a better high if you share or something? We asked that to a junkie and they're like, ""Are you nuts?"" You don't want to share a needle anymore than you want to share a toothbrush even with someone you're sleeping with. There's just kind of an ick factor there. ""No, no. We share needles because we don't want to go to jail."" So, in Indonesia at this time, if you were carrying a needle and the cops rounded you up, they could put you into jail. And that changes the equation slightly, doesn't it? Because your choice now is either I use my own needle now, or I could share a needle now and get a disease that's going to possibly kill me 10 years from now, or I could use my own needle now and go to jail tomorrow. And while junkies think that it's a really bad idea to expose themselves to HIV, they think it's a much worse idea to spend the next year in jail where they'll probably end up in Frankie's situation and expose themselves to HIV anyway. So, suddenly it becomes perfectly rational to share needles.Now, let's look at it from a policy maker's point of view. This is a really easy problem. For once, your incentives are aligned. We've got what's rational for public health. You want people to use clean needles — and junkies want to use clean needles. So we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest. Now, the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known, bleeding heart liberal Margaret Thatcher. And she put in the world's first national needle exchange program, and other countries followed suit: Australia, The Netherlands and few others. And in all of those countries, you can see, not more than four percent of injectors ever became infected with HIV.Now, places that didn't do this — New York City for example, Moscow, Jakarta — we're talking, at its peak, one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease. Now, Margaret Thatcher didn't do this because she has any great love for junkies. She did it because she ran a country that had a national health service. So, if she didn't invest in effective prevention, she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on, and obviously those are much higher. So she was making a politically rational decision. Now, if I take out my public health nerd glasses here and look at these data, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? But in this country, where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens, (Laughter) we've taken a very different approach. So what we've been doing in the United States is reviewing the data — endlessly reviewing the data. So, these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the United States, and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective — quite a lot of them. Now, the ones that show that needle programs aren't effective — you think that's one of these annoying dynamic slides and I'm going to press my dongle and the rest of it's going to come up, but no — that's the whole slide.(Laughter)There is nothing on the other side. So, completely irrational, you would think. Except that, wait a minute, politicians are rational, too, and they're responding to what they think the voters want. So what we see is that voters respond very well to things like this and not quite so well to things like this.(Laughter)So it becomes quite rational to deny services to injectors. Now let's talk about sex. Are we any more rational about sex? Well, I'm not even going to address the clearly irrational positions of people like the Catholic Church, who think somehow that if you give out condoms, everyone's going to run out and have sex. I don't know if Pope Benedict watches TEDTalks online, but if you do, I've got news for you Benedict — I carry condoms all the time and I never get laid. (Laughter) (Applause) It's not that easy! Here, maybe you'll have better luck.(Applause)Okay, seriously, HIV is actually not that easy to transmit sexually. So, it depends on how much virus there is in your blood and in your body fluids. And what we've got is a very, very high level of virus right at the beginning when you're first infected, then you start making antibodies, and then it bumps along at quite low levels for a long time — 10 or 12 years — you have spikes if you get another sexually transmitted infection. But basically, nothing much is going on until you start to get symptomatic AIDS, and by that stage, you're not looking great, you're not feeling great, you're not having that much sex.So the sexual transmission of HIV is essentially determined by how many partners you have in these very short spaces of time when you have peak viremia. Now, this makes people crazy because it means that you have to talk about some groups having more sexual partners in shorter spaces of time than other groups, and that's considered stigmatizing. I've always been a bit curious about that because I think stigma is a bad thing, whereas lots of sex is quite a good thing, but we'll leave that be. The truth is that 20 years of very good research have shown us that there are groups that are more likely to turnover large numbers of partners in a short space of time. And those groups are, globally, people who sell sex and their more regular partners. They are gay men on the party scene who have, on average, three times more partners than straight people on the party scene. And they are heterosexuals who come from countries that have traditions of polygamy and relatively high levels of female autonomy, and almost all of those countries are in east or southern Africa. And that is reflected in the epidemic that we have today.You can see these horrifying figures from Africa. These are all countries in southern Africa where between one in seven, and one in three of all adults, are infected with HIV. Now, in the rest of the world, we've got basically nothing going on in the general population — very, very low levels — but we have extraordinarily high levels of HIV in these other populations who are at highest risk: drug injectors, sex workers and gay men. And you'll note, that's the local data from Los Angeles: 25 percent prevalence among gay men. Of course, you can't get HIV just by having unprotected sex. You can only HIV by having unprotected sex with a positive person.In most of the world, these few prevention failures notwithstanding, we are actually doing quite well these days in commercial sex: condom use rates are between 80 and 100 percent in commercial sex in most countries. And, again, it's because of an alignment of the incentives. What's rational for public health is also rational for individual sex workers because it's really bad for business to have another STI. No one wants it. And, actually, clients don't want to go home with a drip either. So essentially, you're able to achieve quite high rates of condom use in commercial sex.But in ""intimate"" relations it's much more difficult because, with your wife or your boyfriend or someone that you hope might turn into one of those things, we have this illusion of romance and trust and intimacy, and nothing is quite so unromantic as the, ""My condom or yours, darling?"" question. So in the face of that, you really need quite a strong incentive to use condoms.This, for example, this gentleman is called Joseph. He's from Haiti and he has AIDS. And he's probably not having a lot of sex right now, but he is a reminder in the population, of why you might want to be using condoms. This is also in Haiti and is a reminder of why you might want to be having sex, perhaps. Now, funnily enough, this is also Joseph after six months on antiretroviral treatment. Not for nothing do we call it the Lazarus Effect. But it is changing the equation of what's rational in sexual decision-making. So, what we've got — some people say, ""Oh, it doesn't matter very much because, actually, treatment is effective prevention because it lowers your viral load and therefore makes it more difficult to transmit HIV."" So, if you look at the viremia thing again, if you do start treatment when you're sick, well, what happens? Your viral load comes down. But compared to what? What happens if you're not on treatment? Well, you die, so your viral load goes to zero. And all of this green stuff here, including the spikes — which are because you couldn't get to the pharmacy, or you ran out of drugs, or you went on a three day party binge and forgot to take your drugs, or because you've started to get resistance, or whatever — all of that is virus that wouldn't be out there, except for treatment.Now, am I saying, ""Oh, well, great prevention strategy. Let's just stop treating people."" Of course not, of course not. We need to expand antiretroviral treatment as much as we can. But what I am doing is calling into question those people who say that more treatment is all the prevention we need. That's simply not necessarily true, and I think we can learn a lot from the experience of gay men in rich countries where treatment has been widely available for going on 15 years now. And what we've seen is that, actually, condom use rates, which were very, very high — the gay community responded very rapidly to HIV, with extremely little help from public health nerds, I would say — that condom use rate has come down dramatically since treatment for two reasons really: One is the assumption of, ""Oh well, if he's infected, he's probably on meds, and his viral load's going to be low, so I'm pretty safe.""And the other thing is that people are simply not as scared of HIV as they were of AIDS, and rightly so. AIDS was a disfiguring disease that killed you, and HIV is an invisible virus that makes you take a pill every day. And that's boring, but is it as boring as having to use a condom every time you have sex, no matter how drunk you are, no matter how many poppers you've taken, whatever? If we look at the data, we can see that the answer to that question is, mmm.So these are data from Scotland. You see the peak in drug injectors before they started the national needle exchange program. Then it came way down. And both in heterosexuals — mostly in commercial sex — and in drug users, you've really got nothing much going on after treatment begins, and that's because of that alignment of incentives that I talked about earlier. But in gay men, you've got quite a dramatic rise starting three or four years after treatment became widely available. This is of new infections.What does that mean? It means that the combined effect of being less worried and having more virus out there in the population — more people living longer, healthier lives, more likely to be getting laid with HIV — is outweighing the effects of lower viral load, and that's a very worrisome thing. What does it mean? It means we need to be doing more prevention the more treatment we have.Is that what's happening? No, and I call it the ""compassion conundrum."" We've talked a lot about compassion the last couple of days, and what's happening really is that people are unable quite to bring themselves to put in good sexual and reproductive health services for sex workers, unable quite to be giving out needles to junkies. But once they've gone from being transgressive people whose behaviors we don't want to condone to being AIDS victims, we come over all compassionate and buy them incredibly expensive drugs for the rest of their lives. It doesn't make any sense from a public health point of view.I want to give what's very nearly the last word to Ines. Ines is a a transgender hooker on the streets of Jakarta; she's a chick with a dick. Why does she do that job? Well, of course, because she's forced into it because she doesn't have any better option, etc., etc. And if we could just teach her to sew and get her a nice job in a factory, all would be well. This is what factory workers earn in an hour in Indonesia: on average, 20 cents. It varies a bit province to province. I do speak to sex workers, 15,000 of them for this particular slide, and this is what sex workers say they earn in an hour. So it's not a great job, but for a lot of people it really is quite a rational choice. Okay, Ines.We've got the tools, the knowledge and the cash, and commitment to preventing HIV too.Ines: So why is prevalence still rising? It's all politics. When you get to politics, nothing makes sense.Elizabeth Pisani: ""When you get to politics, nothing makes sense."" So, from the point of view of a sex worker, politicians are making no sense. From the point of view of a public health nerd, junkies are doing dumb things. The truth is that everyone has a different rationale. There are as many different ways of being rational as there are human beings on the planet, and that's one of the glories of human existence. But those ways of being rational are not independent of one another, so it's rational for a drug injector to share needles because of a stupid decision that's made by a politician, and it's rational for a politician to make that stupid decision because they're responding to what they think the voters want. But here's the thing: we are the voters. We're not all of them, of course, but TED is a community of opinion leaders. And everyone who's in this room, and everyone who's watching this out there on the web, I think, has a duty to demand of their politicians that we make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense. It's going to be really hard for us to individually affect what's rational for every Frankie and every Ines out there, but you can at least use your vote to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_pisani_sex_drugs_and_hiv_let_s_get_rational_1
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"It's not about technology, it's about people and stories. I could show you what recently was on television as a high quality video: 60 Minutes, many of you may have seen it. And it was the now director of the entire piece of the veteran's administration — who, himself, had lost an arm 39 years ago in Vietnam — who was adamantly opposed to these crazy devices that don't work. And it turns out that with 60 Minutes cameras rolling in the background, after he pretty much made his position clear on this — he had his hook and he had his — he wore this arm for less than two hours and was able to pour himself a drink and got quite emotional over the fact that, quote — his quote — it's the first time he's felt like he's had an arm in 39 years.But that would sort of be jumping to the middle of the story, and I'm not going to show you that polished video. I'm going to, instead, in a minute or two, show you an early, crude video because I think it's a better way to tell a story.A few years ago I was visited by the guy that runs DARPA, the people that fund all the advanced technologies that businesses and universities probably wouldn't take the risk of doing. They have a particular interest in ones that will help our soldiers. I get this sort of unrequested — by me anyway — visit, and sitting in my conference room is a very senior surgeon from the military and the guy that runs DARPA.They proceed to tell me a story which comes down to basically the following. We have used such advanced technologies now and made them available in the most remote places that we put soldiers: hills of Afghanistan, Iraq ... They were quite proud of the fact that you know, before the dust clears, if some soldier has been hurt they will have collected him or her, they will have brought him back, they will be getting world-class triage emergency care faster than you and I would be getting it if we were hurt in a car accident in a major city in the United States. That's the good news.The bad news is if they've collected this person and he or she is missing an arm or leg, part of the face, it's probably not coming back. So, they started giving me the statistics on how many of these kids had lost an arm. And then the surgeon pointed out, with a lot of anger, he said, ""Why is it? At the end of the Civil War, they were shooting each other with muskets. If somebody lost an arm, we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it. Now we've got F18s and F22s, and if somebody loses an arm, we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it.""And they basically said, ""This is unacceptable,"" and then the punchline: ""So, Dean, we're here because you make medical stuff. You're going to give us an arm."" And I was waiting for the 500 pages of bureaucracy, paperwork and DODs. No, the guy says, ""We're going to bring a guy into this conference room, and wearing the arm you're going to give us, he or she is going to pick up a raisin or a grape off this table. If it's the grape, they won't break it."" Great he needs efferent, afferent, haptic response sensors. ""If it's the raisin, they won't drop it."" So he wants fine motor control: flex at the wrist, flex at the elbow, abduct and flex at the shoulder. Either way they were going to eat it.""Oh, by the way Dean. It's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame — namely 32 inches from the long finger — and weigh less than nine pounds."" 50th percentile female frame. ""And it's going to be completely self contained including all its power."" So, they finished that. And I, as you can tell, am a bashful guy. I told them they're nuts. (Laughter) They've been watching too much ""Terminator."" (Laughter) Then, the surgeon says to me, ""Dean, you need to know more than two dozen of these kids have come back bilateral."" Now, I cannot imagine — I'm sorry, you may have a better imagination than I do — I can't imagine losing my arm, and typically at 22 years old. But compared to that, losing two? Seems like that would be an inconvenience.Anyway, I went home that night. I thought about it. I literally could not sleep thinking about, ""I wonder how you'd roll over with no shoulders."" So, I decided we've got to do this. And trust me, I've got a day job, I've got a lot of day jobs. Most of my day job keeps me busy funding my fantasies like FIRST and water and power .... And I've got a lot of day jobs. But I figured I gotta do this. Did a little investigation, went down to Washington, told them I still think they're nuts but we're going to do it. And I told them I'd build them an arm. I told them it would probably take five years to get through the FDA, and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional. Look what it takes to make things like iPods. ""Great,"" he said, ""You got two years."" (Laughter) I said, ""I'll tell you what. I'll build you an arm that's under nine pounds that has all that capability in one year. It will take the other nine to make it functional and useful."" We sort of agreed to disagree.I went back and I started putting a team together, the best guys I could find with a passion to do this. At the end of exactly one year we had a device with 14 degrees of freedom, all the sensors, all the microprocessors, all the stuff inside. I could show you it with a cosmesis on it that's so real it's eerie, but then you wouldn't see all this cool stuff. I then thought it would be years before we'd be able to make it really, really useful. It turned out, as I think you could see in Aimee's capabilities and attitudes, people with a desire to do something are quite remarkable and nature is quite adaptable.Anyway, with less than 10 hours of use, two guys — one that's bilateral. He's literally, he's got no shoulder on one side, and he's high trans-humeral on the other. And that's Chuck and Randy together, after 10 hours — were playing in our office. And we took some pretty cruddy home movies. At the end of the one I'm going to show, it's only about a minute and a couple of seconds long, Chuck does something that to this day I'm jealous of, I can't do it. He picks up a spoon, picks it up, scoops out some Shredded Wheat and milk, holds the spoon level as he translates it, moving all these joints simultaneously, to his mouth, and he doesn't drop any milk. (Laughter) I cannot do that. (Laughter) His wife was standing behind me. She's standing behind me at the time and she says, ""Dean, Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years. So, you've got a choice: We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck."" (Laughter) (Applause)So, can we see that? This is Chuck showing simultaneous control of all the joints. He's punching our controls guy. The guy behind him is our engineer/surgeon, which is a convenient guy to have around. There's Randy, these guys are passing a rubber little puck between them. And just as in the spirit of FIRST, gracious professionalism, they are quite proud of this, so they decide to share a drink. This is a non-trivial thing to do, by the way. Imagine doing that with a wooden stick and a hook on the end of it, doing either of those. Now Chuck is doing something quite extraordinary, at least for my limited physical skill. And now he's going to do what DARPA asked me for. He's going to pick up a grape — he didn't drop it, he didn't break it — and he's going to eat it. So, that's where we were at the end of about 15 months. (Applause)But, as I've learned from Richard, the technology, the processors, the sensors, the motors, is not the story. I hadn't dealt with this kind of problem or frankly, this whole segment of the medical world. I'll give you some astounding things that have happened as we started this. After we were pretty much convinced we had a good design, and we'd have to make all the standard engineering trade-offs you always make — you can always get three out of four of anything you want; the weight, the size, the cost, the functionality — I put a bunch of guys in my plane and I said, ""We're flying down to Walter Reed, and we're going talk to these kids, because frankly it doesn't matter whether we like this arm. It doesn't matter whether the Department of Defense likes this arm."" When I told them that they weren't entirely enthusiastic, but I told them, ""It really doesn't matter what their opinion is. There is only one opinion that matters, the kids that are either going to use it or not.""I told a bunch of my engineers, ""Look we're going to walk into Walter Reed, and you're going to see people, lots of them, missing major body parts. They're probably going to be angry, depressed, frustrated. We're probably going to have to give them support, encouragement. But we've got to extract from them enough information to make sure we're doing the right thing."" We walked into Walter Reed and I could not have been more wrong. We did see a bunch of people, a lot of them missing a lot of body parts, and parts they had left were burned; half a face gone, an ear burned off.They were sitting at a table. They were brought together for us. And we started asking them all questions. ""Look,"" I'd say to them, ""We're not quite as good as nature yet. I could give you fine motor control, or I could let you curl 40 pounds; I probably can't do both. I can give you fast control with low reduction ratios in these gears, or I can give you power; I can't give you both. And we were trying to get them to all help us know what to give them. Not only were they enthusiastic, they kept thinking they're there to help us. ""Well, would it help if I ..."" ""Guys, and woman, you've given enough. We're here to help you. We need data. We need to know what you need.""After a half an hour, maybe, there was one guy at the far end of the table who wasn't saying much. You could see he was missing an arm. He was leaning on his other arm. I called down to the end, ""Hey, you haven't said much. If we needed this or this, what would you want?"" And he said, ""You know, I'm the lucky guy at this table. I lost my right arm, but I'm a lefty."" (Laughter) So, he wouldn't say much. He had a great spirit, like all the rest of them had great spirits. And he made a few comments. And then the meeting ended. We said goodbye to all these guys. And that guy pushed himself back from the table ... he has no legs.So, we left. And I was thinking, ""We didn't give them support and encouragement; they gave it to us. They're not finished giving yet."" It was astounding. So, we went back. And I started working harder, faster. Then we went out to Brooke Army Medical Center. And we saw lots of these kids, lots of them. And it was astounding how positive they are. So, we went back, and we've been working harder yet. We're in clinical trials, we've got five of them on people. We're screaming along. And I get a call and we go back to Washington.We go back to Walter Reed, and a kid, literally, 20 some-odd days before that was blown up. And they shipped him to Germany and 24 hours later they shipped him from Germany to Walter Reed. And he was there, and they said we needed to come. And I went down and they rolled him into a room. He's got no legs. He's got no arms. He's got a small residual limb on one side. Half of his face is gone, but they said his vision is coming back. He had one good eye. His name is Brandon Marrocco.And he said, ""I need your arms, but I need two of them."" ""You'll get them."" This kid was from Staten Island. And he said, ""I had a truck, before I went over there, and it had a stick. You think I'll be able to drive it?"" ""Sure."" And I turned around and went, ""How are we going to do this?"" (Laughter) Anyway, he was just like all the rest of them. He doesn't really want a lot. He wants to help. He told me that he wanted to go back to help his buddies.So, I was on my way out here. I was asked to stop at Texas. There were 3,500 people, the Veteran's Administration, U.S. ... just 3,500 at this huge event to help the families of all the kids — some that have died, some that are like Brandon — and they wanted me to speak. I said, ""What am I going to say? This is not a happy thing. Look, if this happens to you, I can give you ... This stuff is still not as good at the original equipment."" ""You need to come.""So, I went. And, as I think you get the point, there were a lot people there recovering. Some further along than others. But universally, these people that had been through this had astounding attitudes, and just the fact that people care makes a huge difference to them.I'll shut up, except one message or concern I have. I don't think anybody does it intentionally, but there were people there literally talking about, ""Well, how much will they get?"" You know, this country is involved as we've all heard, in this great healthcare debate. ""Who is entitled to what? Who is entitled to how much? Who is going to pay for it?"" Those are tough questions. I don't have an answer to that. Not everybody can be entitled to everything simply because you were born here. It's not possible. It would be nice but let's be realistic.They were tough questions. There's polarized groups down there. I don't know the answers. There are other questions that are tough. ""Should we be there? How do we get out? What do we need to do?"" There's very polarized answers to that question too, and I don't have any answers to that. Those are political questions, economic questions, strategic questions. I don't have the answer. But let me give you a simple concern or maybe statement, then. It is an easy answer.I know what these kids deserve on the healthcare side. I was talking to one of them, and he was really liking this arm — it's way, way, way better than a plastic stick with a hook on it — but there's nobody in this room that would rather have that than the one you got. But I was saying to him, ""You know, the first airplane went 100 feet in 1903. Wilbur and Orville. But you know what? It wouldn't have made an old pigeon jealous. But now we got Eagles out there, F15s, even that Bald Eagle. I've never seen a bird flying around at Mach 2. I think eventually we'll make these things extraordinary."" And I said to that kid, ""I'll stop when your buddies are envious of your Luke arm because of what it can do, and how it does it. And we'll keep working. And I'm not going to stop working until we do that.""And I think this country ought to continue its great debate, whining and complaining, ""I'm entitled."" ""You're a victim."" And whining and complaining about what our foreign policy ought to be. But while we have the luxury of whining and complaining about who's paying for what and how much we get, the people that are out there giving us that great privilege of whining and complaining, I know what they deserve: everything humanly possible. And we ought to give it to them. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_the_emotion_behind_invention
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"So the first robot to talk about is called STriDER. It stands for Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot. It's a robot that has three legs, which is inspired by nature. But have you seen anything in nature, an animal that has three legs? Probably not. So why do I call this a biologically inspired robot? How would it work? But before that, let's look at pop culture. So, you know H.G. Wells's ""War of the Worlds,"" novel and movie. And what you see over here is a very popular video game, and in this fiction, they describe these alien creatures and robots that have three legs that terrorize Earth. But my robot, STriDER, does not move like this.This is an actual dynamic simulation animation. I'm going to show you how the robot works. It flips its body 180 degrees and it swings its leg between the two legs and catches the fall. So that's how it walks. But when you look at us human beings, bipedal walking, what you're doing is, you're not really using muscle to lift your leg and walk like a robot. What you're doing is, you swing your leg and catch the fall, stand up again, swing your leg and catch the fall. You're using your built-in dynamics, the physics of your body, just like a pendulum. We call that the concept of passive dynamic locomotion. What you're doing is, when you stand up, potential energy to kinetic energy, potential energy to kinetic energy. It's a constantly falling process. So even though there is nothing in nature that looks like this, really, we're inspired by biology and applying the principles of walking to this robot. Thus, it's a biologically inspired robot.What you see here, this is what we want to do next. We want to fold up the legs and shoot it up for long-range motion. And it deploys legs — it looks almost like ""Star Wars"" — so when it lands, it absorbs the shock and starts walking. What you see over here, this yellow thing, this is not a death ray.(Laughter)This is just to show you that if you have cameras or different types of sensors, because it's 1.8 meters tall, you can see over obstacles like bushes and those kinds of things.So we have two prototypes. The first version, in the back, that's STriDER I. The one in front, the smaller, is STriDER II. The problem we had with STriDER I is, it was just too heavy in the body. We had so many motors aligning the joints and those kinds of things. So we decided to synthesize a mechanical mechanism so we could get rid of all the motors, and with a single motor, we can coordinate all the motions. It's a mechanical solution to a problem, instead of using mechatronics. So with this, now the top body is lighted up; it's walking in our lab. This was the very first successful step. It's still not perfected, its coffee falls down, so we still have a lot of work to do.The second robot I want to talk about is called IMPASS. It stands for Intelligent Mobility Platform with Actuated Spoke System. It's a wheel-leg hybrid robot. So think of a rimless wheel or a spoke wheel, but the spokes individually move in and out of the hub; so, it's a wheel-leg hybrid. We're literally reinventing the wheel here. Let me demonstrate how it works. So in this video we're using an approach called the reactive approach. Just simply using the tactile sensors on the feet, it's trying to walk over a changing terrain, a soft terrain where it pushes down and changes. And just by the tactile information, it successfully crosses over these types of terrains.But, when it encounters a very extreme terrain — in this case, this obstacle is more than three times the height of the robot — then it switches to a deliberate mode, where it uses a laser range finder and camera systems to identify the obstacle and the size. And it carefully plans the motion of the spokes and coordinates it so it can show this very impressive mobility. You probably haven't seen anything like this out there. This is a very high-mobility robot that we developed called IMPASS. Ah, isn't that cool?When you drive your car, when you steer your car, you use a method called Ackermann steering. The front wheels rotate like this. For most small-wheeled robots, they use a method called differential steering where the left and right wheel turn the opposite direction. For IMPASS, we can do many, many different types of motion. For example, in this case, even though the left and right wheels are connected with a single axle rotating at the same angle of velocity, we simply change the length of the spoke, it affects the diameter, then can turn to the left and to the right. These are just some examples of the neat things we can do with IMPASS.This robot is called CLIMBeR: Cable-suspended Limbed Intelligent Matching Behavior Robot. I've been talking to a lot of NASA JPL scientists — at JPL, they are famous for the Mars rovers — and the scientists, geologists always tell me that the real interesting science, the science-rich sites, are always at the cliffs. But the current rovers cannot get there. So, inspired by that, we wanted to build a robot that can climb a structured cliff environment.So this is CLIMBeR. It has three legs. It's probably difficult to see, but it has a winch and a cable at the top. It tries to figure out the best place to put its foot. And then once it figures that out, in real time, it calculates the force distribution: how much force it needs to exert to the surface so it doesn't tip and doesn't slip. Once it stabilizes that, it lifts a foot, and then with the winch, it can climb up these kinds of cliffs. Also for search and rescue applications as well.Five years ago, I actually worked at NASA JPL during the summer as a faculty fellow. And they already had a six-legged robot called LEMUR. So this is actually based on that. This robot is called MARS: Multi-Appendage Robotic System. It's a hexapod robot. We developed our adaptive gait planner. We actually have a very interesting payload on there. The students like to have fun. And here you can see that it's walking over unstructured terrain.(Motor sound)It's trying to walk on the coastal terrain, a sandy area, but depending on the moisture content or the grain size of the sand, the foot's soil sinkage model changes, so it tries to adapt its gait to successfully cross over these kind of things. It also does some fun stuff. As you can imagine, we get so many visitors visiting our lab. So when the visitors come, MARS walks up to the computer, starts typing, ""Hello, my name is MARS. Welcome to RoMeLa, the Robotics Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech.""(Laughter)This robot is an amoeba robot. Now, we don't have enough time to go into technical details, I'll just show you some of the experiments. These are some of the early feasibility experiments. We store potential energy to the elastic skin to make it move, or use active tension cords to make it move forward and backward. It's called ChIMERA. We also have been working with some scientists and engineers from UPenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot. We do something to something, and just like magic, it moves. ""The Blob.""This robot is a very recent project. It's called RAPHaEL: Robotic Air-Powered Hand with Elastic Ligaments. There are a lot of really neat, very good robotic hands out there on the market. The problem is, they're just too expensive — tens of thousands of dollars. So for prosthesis applications it's probably not too practical, because it's not affordable. We wanted to tackle this problem in a very different direction. Instead of using electrical motors, electromechanical actuators, we're using compressed air. We developed these novel actuators for the joints, so it's compliant. You can actually change the force, simply just changing the air pressure. And it can actually crush an empty soda can. It can pick up very delicate objects like a raw egg, or in this case, a lightbulb. The best part: it took only 200 dollars to make the first prototype.This robot is actually a family of snake robots that we call HyDRAS, Hyper Degrees-of-freedom Robotic Articulated Serpentine. This is a robot that can climb structures. This is a HyDRAS's arm. It's a 12-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm. But the cool part is the user interface. The cable over there, that's an optical fiber. This student, it's probably her first time using it, but she can articulate it in many different ways. So, for example, in Iraq, the war zone, there are roadside bombs. Currently, you send these remotely controlled vehicles that are armed. It takes really a lot of time and it's expensive to train the operator to operate this complex arm. In this case, it's very intuitive; this student, probably his first time using it, is doing very complex manipulation tasks, picking up objects and doing manipulation, just like that. Very intuitive.Now, this robot is currently our star robot. We actually have a fan club for the robot, DARwIn: Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence. As you know, we're very interested in human walking, so we decided to build a small humanoid robot. This was in 2004; at that time, this was something really, really revolutionary. This was more of a feasibility study: What kind of motors should we use? Is it even possible? What kinds of controls should we do? This does not have any sensors, so it's an open-loop control. For those who probably know, if you don't have any sensors and there's any disturbances, you know what happens.(Laughter)Based on that success, the following year we did the proper mechanical design, starting from kinematics. And thus, DARwIn I was born in 2005. It stands up, it walks — very impressive. However, still, as you can see, it has a cord, an umbilical cord. So we're still using an external power source and external computation.So in 2006, now it's really time to have fun. Let's give it intelligence. We give it all the computing power it needs: a 1.5 gigahertz Pentium M chip, two FireWire cameras, rate gyros, accelerometers, four forced sensors on the foot, lithium polymer batteries — and now DARwIn II is completely autonomous. It is not remote controlled. There's no tethers. It looks around, searches for the ball ... looks around, searches for the ball, and it tries to play a game of soccer autonomously — artificial intelligence. Let's see how it does. This was our very first trial, and ...(Video) Spectators: Goal!Dennis Hong: There is actually a competition called RoboCup. I don't know how many of you have heard about RoboCup. It's an international autonomous robot soccer competition. And the actual goal of RoboCup is, by the year 2050, we want to have full-size, autonomous humanoid robots play soccer against the human World Cup champions and win.(Laughter)It's a true, actual goal. It's a very ambitious goal, but we truly believe we can do it.This is last year in China. We were the very first team in the United States that qualified in the humanoid RoboCup competition. This is this year in Austria. You're going to see the action is three against three, completely autonomous.(Video) (Crowd groans)DH: There you go. Yes! The robots track and they team-play amongst themselves. It's very impressive. It's really a research event, packaged in a more exciting competition event. What you see here is the beautiful Louis Vuitton Cup trophy. This is for the best humanoid. We'd like to bring this, for the first time, to the United States next year, so wish us luck.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)DARwIn also has a lot of other talents. Last year, it actually conducted the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra for the holiday concert. This is the next generation robot, DARwIn IV, much smarter, faster, stronger. And it's trying to show off its ability: ""I'm macho, I'm strong.""(Laughter)""I can also do some Jackie Chan-motion, martial art movements.""(Laughter)And it walks away. So this is DARwIn IV. Again, you'll be able to see it in the lobby. We truly believe this will be the very first running humanoid robot in the United States. So stay tuned.All right. So I showed you some of our exciting robots at work. So, what is the secret of our success? Where do we come up with these ideas? How do we develop these kinds of ideas? We have a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive into urban environments. We won a half a million dollars in the DARPA Urban Challenge. We also have the world's very first vehicle that can be driven by the blind. We call it the Blind Driver Challenge, very exciting. And many, many other robotics projects I want to talk about. These are just the awards that we won in 2007 fall from robotics competitions and those kinds of things.So really, we have five secrets. First is: Where do we get inspiration? Where do we get this spark of imagination? This is a true story, my personal story. At night, when I go to bed, at three, four in the morning, I lie down, close my eyes, and I see these lines and circles and different shapes floating around. And they assemble, and they form these kinds of mechanisms. And I think, ""Ah, this is cool."" So right next to my bed I keep a notebook, a journal, with a special pen that has an LED light on it, because I don't want to turn on the light and wake up my wife.So I see this, scribble everything down, draw things, and go to bed. Every day in the morning, the first thing I do, before my first cup of coffee, before I brush my teeth, I open my notebook. Many times it's empty; sometimes I have something there. If something's there, sometimes it's junk. But most of the time, I can't read my handwriting. Four in the morning — what do you expect, right? So I need to decipher what I wrote. But sometimes I see this ingenious idea in there, and I have this eureka moment. I directly run to my home office, sit at my computer, I type in the ideas, I sketch things out and I keep a database of ideas. So when we have these calls for proposals, I try to find a match between my potential ideas and the problem. If there's a match, we write a research proposal, get the research funding in, and that's how we start our research programs.But just a spark of imagination is not good enough. How do we develop these kinds of ideas? At our lab RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions. So we gather around, we discuss problems and solutions and talk about it. But before we start, we set this golden rule. The rule is: nobody criticizes anybody's ideas. Nobody criticizes any opinion. This is important, because many times, students fear or feel uncomfortable about how others might think about their opinions and thoughts.So once you do this, it is amazing how the students open up. They have these wacky, cool, crazy, brilliant ideas, and the whole room is just electrified with creative energy. And this is how we develop our ideas.Well, we're running out of time. One more thing I want to talk about is, you know, just a spark of idea and development is not good enough. There was a great TED moment — I think it was Sir Ken Robinson, was it? He gave a talk about how education and school kill creativity. Well, actually, there's two sides to the story. So there is only so much one can do with just ingenious ideas and creativity and good engineering intuition. If you want to go beyond a tinkering, if you want to go beyond a hobby of robotics and really tackle the grand challenges of robotics through rigorous research, we need more than that. This is where school comes in.Batman, fighting against the bad guys, he has his utility belt, he has his grappling hook, he has all different kinds of gadgets. For us roboticists, engineers and scientists, these tools are the courses and classes you take in class. Math, differential equations. I have linear algebra, science, physics — even, nowadays, chemistry and biology, as you've seen. These are all the tools we need. So the more tools you have, for Batman, more effective at fighting the bad guys, for us, more tools to attack these kinds of big problems. So education is very important.Also — it's not only about that. You also have to work really, really hard. So I always tell my students, ""Work smart, then work hard."" This picture in the back — this is three in the morning. I guarantee if you come to our lab at 3, 4am, we have students working there, not because I tell them to, but because we are having too much fun. Which leads to the last topic: do not forget to have fun. That's really the secret of our success, we're having too much fun. I truly believe that highest productivity comes when you're having fun, and that's what we're doing. And there you go.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dennis_hong_my_seven_species_of_robot
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"Thank you. I have two missions here today. The first is to tell you something about pollen, I hope, and to convince you that it's more than just something that gets up your nose. And, secondly, to convince you that every home really ought to have a scanning electron microscope. (Laughter) Pollen is a flower's way of making more flowers. It carries male sex cells from one flower to another. This gives us genetic diversity, or at least it gives the plants genetic diversity. And it's really rather better not to mate with yourself. That's probably true of humans as well, mostly.Pollen is produced by the anthers of flowers. Each anther can carry up to 100,000 grains of pollen, so, it's quite prolific stuff. And it isn't just bright flowers that have pollen; it's also trees and grasses. And remember that all our cereal crops are grasses as well.Here is a scanning electron micrograph of a grain of pollen. The little hole in the middle, we'll come to a bit later, but that's for the pollen tube to come out later on. A very tiny tube. So, that's 20 micrometers across, that pollen grain there. That's about a 50th of a millimeter. But not all pollen is quite so simple looking.This is Morina. This is a plant — which I've always thought to be rather tedious — named after Morin, who was an enterprising French gardener, who issued the first seed catalog in 1621. But anyway, take a look at its pollen. This is amazing, I think. That little hole in the middle there is for the pollen tube, and when the pollen finds its special female spot in another Morina flower, just on the right species, what happens? Like I said, pollen carries the male sex cells. If you actually didn't realize that plants have sex, they have rampant, promiscuous and really quite interesting and curious sex. Really. (Laughter) A lot.My story is actually not about plant propagation, but about pollen itself. ""So, what are pollen's properties?"" I hear you ask. First of all, pollen is tiny. Yes we know that. It's also very biologically active, as anyone with hay fever will understand. Now, pollen from plants, which are wind-dispersed — like trees and grasses and so on — tend to cause the most hay fever. And the reason for that is they've got to chuck out masses and masses of pollen to have any chance of the pollen reaching another plant of the same species.Here are some examples — they're very smooth if you look at them — of tree pollen that is meant to be carried by the wind. Again — this time, sycamore — wind-dispersed. So, trees: very boring flowers, not really trying to attract insects. Cool pollen, though. This one I particularly like. This is the Monterey Pine, which has little air sacks to make the pollen carry even further. Remember, that thing is just about 30 micrometers across.Now, it's much more efficient if you can get insects to do your bidding. This is a bee's leg with the pollen glommed onto it from a mallow plant. And this is the outrageous and beautiful flower of the mangrove palm. Very showy, to attract lots of insects to do its bidding. The pollen has little barbs on it, if we look. Now, those little barbs obviously stick to the insects well, but there is something else that we can tell from this photograph, and that is that you might be able to see a fracture line across what would be the equator of this, if it was the Earth. That tells me that it's actually been fossilized, this pollen. And I'm rather proud to say that this was found just near London, and that 55 million years ago London was full of mangroves. Isn't that cool? (Laughter)Okay, so this is another species evolved to be dispersed by insects. You can tell that from the little barbs on there. All these pictures were taken with a scanning electron microscope, actually in the lab at Kew Laboratories. No coincidence that these were taken by Rob Kesseler, who is an artist, and I think it's someone with a design and artistic eye like him that has managed to bring out the best in pollen. (Laughter)Now, all this diversity means that you can look at a pollen grain and tell what species it came from, and that's actually quite handy if you maybe have a sample and you want to see where it came from. So, different species of plants grow in different places, and some pollen carries further than others. So, if you have a pollen sample, then in principle, you should be able to tell where that sample came from. And this is where it gets interesting for forensics.Pollen is tiny. It gets on to things, and it sticks to them. So, not only does each type of pollen look different, but each habitat has a different combination of plants. A different pollen signature, if you like, or a different pollen fingerprint. By looking at the proportions and combinations of different kinds of pollen in a sample, you can tell very precisely where it came from. This is some pollen embedded in a cotton shirt, similar to the one that I'm wearing now. Now, much of the pollen will still be there after repeated washings. Where has it been? Four very different habitats might look similar, but they've got very different pollen signatures. Actually this one is particularly easy, these pictures were all taken in different countries.But pollen forensics can be very subtle. It's being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made, where banknotes have come from, to look at the provenance of antiques and see that they really did come from the place the seller said they did. And murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing, certainly in the U.K., to within an area that's small enough that you can send in tracker dogs to find the murder victim. So, you can tell from a piece of clothing to within about a kilometer or so, where that piece of clothing has been recently and then send in dogs. And finally, in a rather grizzly way, the Bosnia war crimes; some of the people brought to trial were brought to trial because of the evidence from pollen, which showed that bodies had been buried, exhumed and then reburied somewhere else.I hope I've opened your eyes, if you'll excuse the visual pun, (Laughter) to some of pollen's secrets. This is a horse chestnut. There is an invisible beauty all around us, each grain with a story to tell ... each of us, in fact, with a story to tell from the pollen fingerprint that's upon us. Thank you to the colleagues at Kew, and thank you to palynologists everywhere. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_every_pollen_grain_has_a_story
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"(Music)♫ My age is three hundred ♫♫ and seventy-two ♫♫ I think with the deepest regret ♫♫ How I used to pick upand voraciously chew ♫♫ the dear little boysthat I met ♫♫ I've eaten them rawin their holiday suits, ♫♫ Eaten themcurried with rice, ♫♫ I've eaten them bakedin their jackets and boots, ♫♫ And found them exceedingly nice. ♫♫ But now that my jawsare too weak for such fare, ♫♫ I think it's increasingly rude ♫♫ To do such a thingwhen I'm quite well aware ♫♫ Little boys do not likebeing chewed. ♫♫ Little boys do not likebeing chewed. ♫(Music)♫ So now I contentedly live upon eels, ♫♫ And try to do nothing amiss ♫♫ And pass all the timeI can spare from my meals ♫♫ In innocent slumber like this, ♫♫ Innocent slumberlike this. ♫(Applause)I suppose I owe you an explanation. I've been working on a project for the last six years adapting children's poetry to music. And that's a poem by Charles Edward Carryl, who was a stockbroker in New York City for 45 years, but in the evenings, he wrote nonsense for his children. And this book was one of the most famous books in America for about 35 years. ""The Sleepy Giant,"" which is the song that I just sang, is one of his poems. Now, we're going to do other poems for you, and here's a preview of some of the poets. This is Rachel Field, Robert Graves — a very young Robert Graves — Christina Rossetti. Ghosts, right? Have nothing to say to us, obsolete, gone — not so. What I really enjoyed about this project is reviving these people's words. Taking them off the dead, flat pages. Bringing them to life, bringing them to light. So, what we're going to do next is a poem that was written by Nathalia Crane. Nathalia Crane was a little girl from Brooklyn. When she was 10 years old in 1927, she published her first book of poems called ""The Janitor's Boy."" Here she is. And here's her poem.(Music)♫ Oh, I'm in lovewith the janitor's boy, ♫♫ And the janitor's boyis in love with me. ♫♫ Oh, I'm in lovewith the janitor's boy, ♫♫ And the janitor's boyis in love with me. ♫♫ He's going to hunt for a desert isle ♫♫ In our geography. ♫♫ A desert islewith spicy trees ♫♫ Somewhere in Sheepshead Bay; ♫♫ A right nice place,just fit for two ♫♫ Where we can live always. ♫♫ Oh, I'm in lovewith the janitor's boy, ♫♫ And the janitor's boy, ♫he's busy as can be; ♫♫ Down in the cellar he's making a raft ♫♫ Out of an old settee. ♫♫ He'll carry me off,I know that he will, ♫♫ For his hair is exceedingly red; ♫♫ And the only thingthat occurs to me ♫♫ Is to dutifully shiver in bed. ♫♫ And on the day that we sail,I will leave a little note ♫♫ For my parents I hate to annoy: ♫♫ ""I have flown to an islandin the bay ♫♫ With my janitor'sred haired-boy."" ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ I'm going to sail away ♫♫ Gone to Sheepshead Bay ♫♫ With my janitor's red-haired boy. ♫♫ On an old settee ♫♫ My red-haired boy and me ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy. ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫♫ The janitor's red-haired boy ♫(Applause)The next poem is by E.E. Cummings, ""Maggie and Milly and Molly and May.""(Music)♫ Maggie and Milly,Molly and May ♫♫ They went down to the beachone day to play ♫♫ And Maggie discovereda shell that sang ♫♫ So sweetly she couldn't rememberher troubles ♫♫ Maggie and Milly,Molly and May ♫♫ Maggie and Milly,Molly and May ♫♫ Milly befriendeda stranded star ♫♫ Whose rays,whose rays ♫♫ Five languid fingerswere ♫(Music)♫ Maggie and Milly,Molly and May ♫♫ Maggie and Milly,Molly and May ♫(Music)♫ Molly was chasedby a horrible thing ♫♫ Which racedsideways blowing ♫♫ Blowing ♫♫ Blowing ♫♫ May came homewith a smooth, round stone ♫♫ Small as a worldand as large as alone ♫(Music)♫ For whatever we loselike a you or a me ♫♫ Always ourselvesthat we findat the sea ♫(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)The next poem is ""If No One Ever Marries Me."" It was written by Laurence Alma-Tadema. She was the daughter of a very, very famous Dutch painter who had made his fame in England. He went there after the death of his wife of smallpox and brought his two young children. One was his daughter, Laurence. She wrote this poem when she was 18 years old in 1888, and I look at it as kind of a very sweet feminist manifesto tinged with a little bit of defiance and a little bit of resignation and regret.(Music)♫ Well, if no one ever marries me ♫♫ And I don't see why they should, ♫♫ Nurse says I'm not pretty, ♫♫ And you know I'm seldom good,seldom good — ♫♫ Well, if no one ever marries me ♫♫ I shan't mind very much; ♫♫ Buy a squirrel in a cage ♫♫ And a little rabbit-hutch. ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ I'll have a cottage near a wood ♫♫ And a pony all my own ♫♫ A little lamb quite clean and tame ♫♫ That I can take to town. ♫♫ And when I'm really getting old — ♫♫ And 28 or nine — ♫♫ Buy myself a little orphan girl ♫♫ And bring her up as mine. ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ If no one marries me ♫♫ Well, if no one marries me ♫♫ Marries me ♫♫ Well, if no one marries me ♫♫ Marries me ♫♫ Well, if no one marries me ♫ Thank you.(Applause) Thank you.I became very curious about the poets after spending six years with them, and started to research their lives, and then decided to write a book about it. And the burning question about Alma-Tadema was: Did she marry? And the answer was no, which I found in the London Times archive. She died alone in 1940 in the company of her books and her dear friends. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a saintly man. He became a Jesuit. He converted from his Anglican faith. He was moved to by the Tractarian Movement, the Oxford Movement, otherwise known as — and he became a Jesuit priest. He burned all his poetry at the age of 24 and then did not write another poem for at least seven years because he couldn't rectify the life of a poet with the life of a priest. He died typhoid fever at the age of 44, I believe, 43 or 44. At the time, he was teaching classics at Trinity College in Dublin. A few years before he died, after he had resumed writing poetry, but in secret, he confessed to a friend in a letter that I found when I was doing my research: ""I've written a verse. It is to explain death to a child, and it deserves a piece of plain-song music."" And my blood froze when I read that because I had written the plain-song music 130 years after he'd written the letter. And the poem is called, ""Spring and Fall.""♫ Margaret,are you grieving ♫♫ Over Goldengroveunleaving, by and by? ♫♫ Leaves, like the thingsof man, you ♫♫ With your fresh thoughts care for,can you? ♫♫ But as the heart grows older ♫♫ It will come to such sightsmuch colder ♫♫ By and by,nor spare a sigh ♫♫ Though worlds ofwanwood leafmeal lie; ♫♫ And yet you will weepand you'll know why. ♫♫ No matter child, the name: ♫♫ Sorrow's springs are all the same ♫♫ They're all the same. ♫♫ Nor mouth hadnor no mind expressed ♫♫ What heart heard of,ghost had guessed: ♫♫ It's the blightman was born for, ♫♫ It is Margaretthat you mourn for ♫Thank you so much.(Applause)(Music)I'd like to thank everybody, all the scientists, the philosophers, the architects, the inventors, the biologists, the botanists, the artists ... everyone that blew my mind this week. Thank you. (Applause)♫ Oh, a li la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la li la la la la la la ♫ (Applause)♫ La li la la la ♫♫ La li la la la la ♫♫ La li la la la la la la ♫♫ La la la li la la la la la ♫♫ You've been so kind andgenerous ♫♫ I don't know how you keep on giving. ♫♫ And for your kindness,I'm in debt to you. ♫♫ And for your selflessness,my admiration. ♫♫ And for everything you've done,you know I'm bound; ♫♫ I'm bound to thank for it ♫♫ La li la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la li la li la la la ♫ (Clapping)♫ La li la la la ♫♫ La li la la la la ♫♫ La li la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la li la li la la ♫♫ And you ♫♫ Now you've been so kind and ... ♫Curb the enthusiasm, just a little bit. Just bring it down a little. (Laughter) It's my turn. I still have two minutes. (Laughter) Okay, we're going to start that verse again.♫ Well, you've been so ... ♫That's innovative, don't you think? Calming the audience down; I'm supposed to be whipping you into a frenzy, and I,""That's enough. Sh."" (Laughter)♫ Now, you've been kind and ... ♫I'm going to sing this to Bill Gates. (Laughter) I have so much admiration for him.♫ Now, you've been so kind andgenerous, ♫♫ I don't know how you keep on giving. ♫♫ And for your kindnessI'm in debt to you. ♫♫ And I never could have comethis far without you. ♫♫ So for everything you've done,you know I'm bound ♫♫ I'm bound to thank you for it ♫ (Clapping)♫ La li la la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la la ♫♫ La li la la la la ♫♫ La li la la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la li la li la la la ♫♫ La li la la la ♫♫ Oh, I want to thank you for so many gifts ♫♫ You gave in love with tenderness ♫♫ Thank you ♫♫ I want to thank youfor your generosity ♫♫ the love and the honesty that you gave me ♫♫ I want to thank youshow my gratitude, ♫ My loveand my respect for you ♫♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫You know what? I'll show you how to clap to this song. (Laughter) (Clapping)♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫♫ Thank you, thank you ♫♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫It works better, right?♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫♫ I want to thank you ♫♫ Ooh hoo ♫♫ Ooh hoo ♫♫ Ooh hoo ♫♫ Ooh hoo ♫Let's bring it down. Decrescendo. Gradually, bringing it down, bringing it down.♫ I want to thank you, thank you ♫Finger popping, ain't no stopping. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_merchant_sings_old_poems_to_life
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"Let's pretend right here we have a machine. A big machine, a cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. And everyone in this room has to get into it. And you can go backwards, you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. And I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back. I don't know. They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or ""American Idol."" I don't know. I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking. And I understand that.I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. I don't want to go back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. It's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward. So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go forward. This is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease ... There's never been a time like this. My great-grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60. My grandparents pushed that number to 70. My parents are closing in on 80. So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number. But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that.A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. Think about that, it's an incredible fact. And why is it true? Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has. It's gone. It's vanished. We vanquished it. Puff. In the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist, hardly. Diphtheria, rubella, polio ... does anyone even know what those things are? Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. And to my mind, the scientific method — trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't — is one of the great accomplishments of humanity.So that's the good news. Unfortunately, that's all the good news because there are some other problems, and they've been mentioned many times. And one of them is that despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day. That number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. And not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. Potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away, and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too.So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on. I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it. I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. But here's the thing that keeps me up at night — one of the things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now. Never. And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today. We're on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress, when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more fronts, than we do now.People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free. And, listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress. But you know what you're not entitled to? You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. And this took me awhile to figure out.About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The New Yorker. A little story. And I was amazed to find opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective public health measure in human history. I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on. And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food. Same thing, only bigger. People were going crazy. So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was ""Frankenfoods,"" why they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground. But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on. I mean, I'm a journalist. We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine.(Laughter)But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. And that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. They were exactly like the people in this room. And it just disturbed me so much. But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. We're at a point in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to. We talk about it ambivalently. We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it: ""progress."" Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. We've lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. You can just say a few names and people will understand. Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, hanging chads. You know, you can choose your list. There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good at doing that. And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and hope never to see again.About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine shot. Very scary. Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. Tons of studies should have been done; it's a serious issue. The data came back. The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no correlation, no connection, none at all. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real. We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all do. But you know what? The result of that has been disastrous. Disastrous because here's a fact: The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down. That is disgraceful, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's horrible. What kind of a thing happened that we could do that?Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? Doesn't happen very much. Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. That's a lot of death of measles — 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like ""Oprah"" and ""Larry King Live."" And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon.This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us. No fear, no agony. Polio — puff, gone. That guy in the middle, not so much. His name is Paul Offit. He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people. It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year. Pretty good, right? Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining. And he actually says it that way. So, Paul's a terrorist. When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school. And why? Because Paul made a vaccine.I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. You take them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's happening. We have measles in this country now. And it's getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it's just a numbers game. And they're not just going to die of measles. What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. No one's ever said that before. She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio, no way. Fine. Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right now he's over Ohio. And he's going to land in a couple of hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight. And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's the way the world works. That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't.Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. Everyone take their vitamins this morning? Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. I know you did because half of Americans do every day. They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're useless. The data says it all the time. They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. (Laughter) It's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? I'm totally with you. (Laughter) Dark urine. Dark. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Well, I think I understand, we hate Big Pharma. We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man. And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. It's cruel to millions of people. It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. So we run away from it, and where do we run? We leap into the arms of Big Placebo. (Laughter) That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo. (Applause)But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. And I have all sorts of little props here. None of it ... ginkgo, fraud; echinacea, fraud; acai — I don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it — it's fraud. And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, ""What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. It makes them feel good."" And you know what? You're wrong. Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, ""Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms,"" or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease. Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. There are. There always are.Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. It's a debate about words, about metaphors. It's ideology, it's not science. Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has been modified by man. You know, there weren't tangerines in the garden of Eden. There wasn't any cantaloupe. (Laughter) There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. We made it over the last 11,000 years. And some of it worked, and some of it didn't. We got rid of the stuff that didn't. Now we can do it in a more precise way — and there are risks, absolutely — but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. You don't want to do that? I have to say, I don't understand it.We object to genetically engineered food. Why do we do that? Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields of the same thing, that's wrong. We don't companies patenting life. We don't want companies owning seeds. And you know what my response to all of that is? Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but this isn't science. This has nothing to do with science. It's law, it's morality, it's patent stuff. You know science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea; it's a process. It's a process, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from prospering.You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. This investment in Africa over the last 30 years. Disgraceful. Disgraceful. They need it, and we're not giving it to them. And why? Genetically engineered food. We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for instance. Cassava's something that half a billion people eat. It's kind of like a potato. It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks. It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. They wouldn't starve, and you know what? That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice.And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? I mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? Because we don't want to move genes around? This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals. It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food. This isn't about Rice Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about time we started to understand what that meant. Because, you know something? If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. There's no other way to describe what's going on here. It's selfish, it's ugly, it's beneath us, and we really have to stop it.So after this amazingly fun conversation, (Laughter) you might want to say, ""So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward?"" Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. It's stuck in the present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. We can set that time machine on anything we want. We can move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it where we want to move it. We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we do. I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's something the world needs right now.(Applause)Thank you.Thank you.Thank you. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial
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"In my industry, we believe that images can change the world. Okay, we're naive, we're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The truth is that we know that the images themselves don't change the world, but we're also aware that, since the beginning of photography, images have provoked reactions in people, and those reactions have caused change to happen.So let's begin with a group of images. I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't recognize many or most of them. They're best described as iconic: so iconic, perhaps, they're cliches. In fact, they're so well-known that you might even recognize them in a slightly or somewhat different form.(Laughter)But I think we're looking for something more. We're looking for something more. We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something — in other words, to act. Well, this image you've all seen. It changed our view of the physical world. We had never seen our planet from this perspective before. Many people credit a lot of the birth of the environmental movement to our seeing the planet like this for the first time — its smallness, its fragility.Forty years later, this group, more than most, are well aware of the destructive power that our species can wield over our environment. And at last, we appear to be doing something about it. This destructive power takes many different forms. For example, these images taken by Brent Stirton in the Congo. These gorillas were murdered, some would even say crucified, and unsurprisingly, they sparked international outrage. Most recently, we've been tragically reminded of the destructive power of nature itself with the recent earthquake in Haiti.Well, I think what is far worse is man's destructive power over man. Samuel Pisar, an Auschwitz survivor, said, and I'll quote him, ""The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man, when he loses his moral compass and his reason.""There's another kind of crucifixion. The horrifying images from Abu Ghraib as well as the images from Guantanamo had a profound impact. The publication of those images, as opposed to the images themselves, caused a government to change its policies. Some would argue that it is those images that did more to fuel the insurgency in Iraq than virtually any other single act. Furthermore, those images forever removed the so-called moral high ground of the occupying forces.Let's go back a little. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was basically shown in America's living rooms day in, day out. News photos brought people face to face with the victims of the war: a little girl burned by napalm, a student killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest. In fact, these images became the voices of protest themselves.Now, images have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion, ignorance, and in particular — I've given a lot of talks on this but I'll just show one image — the issue of HIV/AIDS. In the 1980s, the stigmatization of people with the disease was an enormous barrier to even discussing or addressing it. A simple act, in 1987, of the most famous woman in the world, the Princess of Wales, touching an HIV/AIDS infected baby did a great deal, especially in Europe, to stop that. She, better than most, knew the power of an image.So when we are confronted by a powerful image, we all have a choice: We can look away, or we can address the image. Thankfully, when these photos appeared in The Guardian in 1998, they put a lot of focus and attention and, in the end, a lot of money towards the Sudan famine relief efforts. Did the images change the world? No, but they had a major impact. Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other. We all saw those images after Katrina, and I think for millions of people they had a very strong impact. And I think it's very unlikely that they were far from the minds of Americans when they went to vote in November 2008.Unfortunately, some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them. I'll show you one photo here, and it's a photo by Eugene Richards of an Iraq War veteran from an extraordinary piece of work, which has never been published, called War Is Personal. But images don't need to be graphic in order to remind us of the tragedy of war. John Moore set up this photo at Arlington Cemetery. After all the tense moments of conflict in all the conflict zones of the world, there's one photograph from a much quieter place that haunts me still, much more than the others.Ansel Adams said, and I'm going to disagree with him, ""You don't take a photograph, you make it."" In my view, it's not the photographer who makes the photo, it's you. We bring to each image our own values, our own belief systems, and as a result of that, the image resonates with us. My company has 70 million images. I have one image in my office. Here it is. I hope that the next time you see an image that sparks something in you, you'll better understand why, and I know that speaking to this audience, you'll definitely do something about it.And thank you to all the photographers.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_klein_photos_that_changed_the_world
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"First of all, I'm a geek. I'm an organic food-eating, carbon footprint-minimizing, robotic surgery geek. And I really want to build green, but I'm very suspicious of all of these well-meaning articles, people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kinds of things. And so I have to figure this out for myself. For example: Is this evil? I have dropped a blob of organic yogurt from happy self-actualized local cows on my counter top, and I grab a paper towel and I want to wipe it up. But can I use a paper towel? (Laughter)The answer to this can be found in embodied energy. This is the amount of energy that goes into any paper towel or embodied water, and every time I use a paper towel, I am using this much virtual energy and water. Wipe it up, throw it away. Now, if I compare that to a cotton towel that I can use a thousand times, I don't have a whole lot of embodied energy until I wash that yogurty towel. This is now operating energy. So if I throw my towel in the washing machine, I've now put energy and water back into that towel ... unless I use a front-loading, high-efficiency washing machine, (Laughter) and then it looks a little bit better. But what about a recycled paper towel that comes in those little half sheets? Well, now a paper towel looks better. Screw the paper towels. Let's go to a sponge. I wipe it up with a sponge, and I put it under the running water, and I have a lot less energy and a lot more water. Unless you're like me and you leave the handle in the position of hot even when you turn it on, and then you start to use more energy. Or worse, you let it run until it's warm to rinse out your towel. And now all bets are off.(Laughter)So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize. Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house. (Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. And so, we wanted to know, how green could we be? And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room. Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it takes to make it — millions and millions of paper towels.We wanted to know how much better we could do. And so, like many people, we start with a house on a lot, and I'm going to show you a typical construction on the top and what we're doing on the bottom. So first, we demolish it. It takes some energy, but if you deconstruct it — you take it all apart, you use the bits — you can get some of that energy back. We then dug a big hole to put in a rainwater catchment tank to take our yard water independent. And then we poured a big foundation for passive solar. Now, you can reduce the embodied energy by about 25 percent by using high fly ash concrete. We then put in framing. And so this is framing — lumber, composite materials — and it's kind of hard to get the embodied energy out of that, but it can be a sustainable resource if you use FSC-certified lumber.We then go on to the first thing that was very surprising. If we put aluminum windows in this house, we would double the energy use right there. Now, PVC is a little bit better, but still not as good as the wood that we chose. We then put in plumbing, electrical and HVAC, and insulate. Now, spray foam is an excellent insulator — it fills in all the cracks — but it is pretty high embodied energy, and, sprayed-in cellulose or blue jeans is a much lower energy alternative to that. We also used straw bale infill for our library, which has zero embodied energy. When it comes time to sheetrock, if you use EcoRock it's about a quarter of the embodied energy of standard sheetrock.And then you get to the finishes, the subject of all of those ""go green"" articles, and on the scale of a house they almost make no difference at all. And yet, all the press is focused on that. Except for flooring. If you put carpeting in your house, it's about a tenth of the embodied energy of the entire house, unless you use concrete or wood for a much lower embodied energy. So now we add in the final construction energy, we add it all up, and we've built a house for less than half of the typical embodied energy for building a house like this.But before we pat ourselves too much on the back, we have poured 151 megawatt hours of energy into constructing this house when there was a house there before. And so the question is: How could we make that back? And so if I run my new energy-efficient house forward, compared with the old, non-energy-efficient house, we make it back in about six years. Now, I probably would have upgraded the old house to be more energy-efficient, and in that case, it would take me more about 20 years to break even. Now, if I hadn't paid attention to embodied energy, it would have taken us over 50 years to break even compared to the upgraded house. So what does this mean? On the scale of my portion of the house, this is equivalent to about as much as I drive in a year, it's about five times as much as if I went entirely vegetarian. But my elephant in the living room flies. Clearly, I need to walk home from TED. But all the calculations for embodied energy are on the blog.And, remember, it's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest changes that are.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_builds_green
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"The brilliant playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, wrote a volume called ""People Who Led to My Plays."" And if I were to write a volume, it would be called, ""Artists Who Have Led My Exhibitions"" because my work, in understanding art and in understanding culture, has come by following artists, by looking at what artists mean and what they do and who they are. J.J. from ""Good Times,"" (Applause) significant to many people of course because of ""Dy-no-mite,"" but perhaps more significant as the first, really, black artist on primetime TV. Jean-Michel Basquiat, important to me because [he was] the first black artist in real time that showed me the possibility of who and what I was about to enter into.My overall project is about art — specifically, about black artists — very generally about the way in which art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves. My interest is in artists who understand and rewrite history, who think about themselves within the narrative of the larger world of art, but who have created new places for us to see and understand. I'm showing two artists here,  Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, two of many who really form for me the essential questions that I wanted to bring as a curator to the world. I was interested in the idea of why and how I could create a new story, a new narrative in art history and a new narrative in the world. And to do this, I knew that I had to see the way in which artists work, understand the artist's studio as a laboratory, imagine, then, reinventing the museum as a think tank and looking at the exhibition as the ultimate white paper — asking questions, providing the space to look and to think about answers.In 1994, when I was a curator at the Whitney Museum, I made an exhibition called Black Male. It looked at the intersection of race and gender in contemporary American art. It sought to express the ways in which art could provide a space for dialogue — complicated dialogue, dialogue with many, many points of entry — and how the museum could be the space for this contest of ideas. This exhibition included over 20 artists of various ages and races, but all looking at black masculinity from a very particular point of view. What was significant about this exhibition is the way in which it engaged me in my role as a curator, as a catalyst, for this dialogue. One of the things that happened very distinctly in the course of this exhibition is I was confronted with the idea of how powerful images can be in people's understanding  of themselves and each other.I'm showing you two works, one on the right by Leon Golub, one on the left by Robert Colescott. And in the course of the exhibition — which was contentious, controversial and ultimately, for me, life-changing in my sense of what art could be — a woman came up to me on the gallery floor to express her concern about the nature of how powerful images could be and how we understood each other. And she pointed to the work on the left to tell me how problematic this image was, as it related, for her, to the idea of how black people had been represented. And she pointed to the image on the right as an example, to me, of the kind of dignity that needed to be portrayed to work against those images in the media. She then assigned these works racial identities, basically saying to me that the work on the right, clearly, was made by a black artist, the work on the left, clearly, by a white artist, when, in effect, that was the opposite case: Bob Colescott, African-American artist; Leon Golub, a white artist. The point of that for me was to say — in that space, in that moment — that I really, more than anything, wanted to understand how images could work, how images did work, and how artists provided a space bigger than one that we could imagine in our day-to-day lives to work through these images.Fast-forward and I end up in Harlem; home for many of black America, very much the psychic heart of the black experience, really the place where the Harlem Renaissance existed. Harlem now, sort of explaining and thinking of itself in this part of the century, looking both backwards and forwards ... I always say Harlem is an interesting community because, unlike many other places, it thinks of itself in the past, present and the future simultaneously; no one speaks of it just in the now. It's always what it was and what it can be. And, in thinking about that, then my second project, the second question I ask is: Can a museum be a catalyst in a community? Can a museum house artists and allow them to be change agents as communities rethink themselves? This is Harlem, actually, on January 20th, thinking about itself in a very wonderful way.So I work now at The Studio Museum in Harlem, thinking about exhibitions there, thinking about what it means to discover art's possibility. Now, what does this mean to some of you? In some cases, I know that many of you are involved in cross-cultural dialogues, you're involved in ideas of creativity and innovation. Think about the place that artists can play in that — that is the kind of incubation and advocacy that I work towards, in working with young, black artists. Think about artists, not as content providers, though they can be brilliant at that, but, again, as real catalysts.The Studio Museum was founded in the late 60s. And I bring this up because it's important to locate this practice in history. To look at 1968, in the incredible historic moment that it is, and think of the arc that has happened since then, to think of the possibilities that we are all privileged to stand in today and imagine that this museum that came out of a moment of great protest and one that was so much about examining the history and the legacy of important African-American artists to the history of art in this country like Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden.And then, of course, to bring us to today. In 1975, Muhammad Ali gave a lecture at Harvard University. After his lecture, a student got up and said to him, ""Give us a poem."" And Mohammed Ali said, ""Me, we."" A profound statement about the individual and the community. The space in which now, in my project of discovery, of thinking about artists, of trying to define what might be black art cultural movement of the 21st century. What that might mean for cultural movements all over this moment, the ""me, we"" seems incredibly prescient totally important.To this end, the specific project that has made this possible for me is a series of exhibitions, all titled with an F — Freestyle, Frequency and Flow — which have set out to discover and define the young, black artists working in this moment who I feel strongly will continue to work over the next many years. This series of exhibitions was made specifically to try and question the idea of what it would mean now, at this point in history, to see art as a catalyst; what it means now, at this point in history, as we define and redefine culture, black culture specifically in my case, but culture generally. I named this group of artists around an idea, which I put out there called post-black, really meant to define them as artists who came and start their work now, looking back at history but start in this moment, historically.It is really in this sense of discovery that I have a new set of questions that I'm asking. This new set of questions is: What does it mean, right now, to be African-American in America? What can artwork say about this? Where can a museum exist as the place for us all to have this conversation? Really, most exciting about this is thinking about the energy and the excitement that young artists can bring. Their works for me are about, not always just simply about the aesthetic innovation that their minds imagine, that their visions create and put out there in the world, but more, perhaps, importantly, through the excitement of the community that they create as important voices that would allow us right now to understand our situation, as well as in the future. I am continually amazed by the way in which the subject of race can take itself in many places that we don't imagine it should be. I am always amazed by the way in which artists are willing to do that in their work. It is why I look to art. It's why I ask questions of art. It is why I make exhibitions.Now, this exhibition, as I said, 40 young artists done over the course of eight years, and for me it's about considering the implications. It's considering the implications of what this generation has to say to the rest of us. It's considering what it means for these artists to be both out in the world as their work travels, but in their communities as people who are seeing and thinking about the issues that face us. It's also about thinking about the creative spirit and nurturing it, and imagining, particularly in urban America, about the nurturing of the spirit.Now, where, perhaps, does this end up right now? For me, it is about re-imagining this cultural discourse in an international context. So the last iteration of this project has been called Flow, with the idea now of creating a real network of artists around the world; really looking, not so much from Harlem and out, but looking across, and Flow looked at artists all born on the continent of Africa. And as many of us think about that continent and think about what if means to us all in the 21st century, I have begun that looking through artists, through artworks, and imagining what they can tell us about the future, what they tell us about our future, and what they create in their sense of offering us this great possibility of watching that continent emerge as part of our bigger dialogue. So, what do I discoverwhen I look at artworks? What do I think about when I think about art? I feel like the privilege I've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works, the discovery of exciting works. But, really, it has been what I've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition, to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other. That's what makes me get up every day and want to think about this generation of black artists and artists around the world.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thelma_golden_how_art_gives_shape_to_cultural_change
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"In the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, who said, ""People protect what they love,"" I want to share with you today what I love most in the ocean, and that's the incredible number and variety of animals in it that make light.My addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called Wasp; that's not an acronym — just somebody thought it looked like the insect. It was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet. Right after I completed my Ph.D., I was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists that was using it for the first time as a tool for ocean exploration. We trained in a tank in Port Hueneme, and then my first open ocean dive was in Santa Barbara Channel. It was an evening dive. I went down to a depth of 880 feet and turned out the lights. And the reason I turned out the lights is because I knew I would see this phenomenon of animals making light called bioluminescence. But I was totally unprepared for how much there was and how spectacular it was. I saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores that were longer than this room, pumping out so much light that I could read the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight; and puffs and billows of what looked like luminous blue smoke; and explosions of sparks that would swirl up out of the thrusters — just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire, but these were icy, blue embers. It was breathtaking.Now, usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all, it's these guys; it's fireflies. And there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light — some insects, earthworms, fungi — but in general, on land, it's really rare. In the ocean, it's the rule rather than the exception. If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals — in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net — make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.Now I want to share with you a little video that I shot from a submersible. I first developed this technique working from a little single-person submersible called Deep Rover and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea-Link, which you see here. So, mounted in front of the observation sphere, there's a a three-foot diameter hoop with a screen stretched across it. And inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera that's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye, albeit a little fuzzy. So you turn on the camera, turn out the lights. That sparkle you're seeing is not luminescence, that's just electronic noise on these super intensified cameras. You don't see luminescence until the submersible begins to move forward through the water, but as it does, animals bumping into the screen are stimulated to bioluminesce.Now, when I was first doing this, all I was trying to do was count the numbers of sources. I knew my forward speed, I knew the area, and so I could figure out how many hundreds of sources there were per cubic meter. But I started to realize that I could actually identify animals by the type of flashes they produced. And so, here, in the Gulf of Maine at 740 feet, I can name pretty much everything you're seeing there to the species level. Like those big explosions, sparks, are from a little comb jelly, and there's krill and other kinds of crustaceans, and jellyfish. There was another one of those comb jellies. And so I've worked with computer image analysis engineers to develop automatic recognition systems that can identify these animals and then extract the XYZ coordinate of the initial impact point. And we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land, and do nearest neighbor distances.But you don't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean to see a light show like this. You can actually see it in surface waters. This is some shot, by Dr. Mike Latz at Scripps Institution, of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton. And this isn't someplace exotic like one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, this was actually shot in San Diego Harbor. And sometimes you can see it even closer than that, because the heads on ships — that's toilets, for any land lovers that are listening — are flushed with unfiltered seawater that often has bioluminescent plankton in it. So, if you stagger into the head late at night and you're so toilet-hugging sick that you forget to turn on the light, you may think that you're having a religious experience. (Laughter)So, how does a living creature make light? Well, that was the question that 19th century French physiologist Raphael Dubois, asked about this bioluminescent clam. He ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals; one, the enzyme, he called luciferase; the substrate, he called luciferin after Lucifer the Lightbearer. That terminology has stuck, but it doesn't actually refer to specific chemicals because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms. In fact, most of the people studying bioluminescence today are focused on the chemistry, because these chemicals have proved so incredibly valuable for developing antibacterial agents, cancer fighting drugs, testing for the presence of life on Mars, detecting pollutants in our waters — which is how we use it at ORCA. In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope, in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering.Another thing all these molecules are telling us that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history, which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival. So, what is it about bioluminescence that's so important to so many animals? Well, for animals that are trying to avoid predators by staying in the darkness, light can still be very useful for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive: and that's find food, attract a mate and avoid being eaten. So, for example, this fish has a built-in headlight behind its eye that it can use for finding food or attracting a mate. And then when it's not using it, it actually can roll it down into its head just like the headlights on your Lamborghini. This fish actually has high beams.And this fish, which is one of my favorites, has three headlights on each side of its head. Now, this one is blue, and that's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean because evolution has selected for the color that travels farthest through seawater in order to optimize communication. So, most animals make blue light, and most animals can only see blue light, but this fish is a really fascinating exception because it has two red light organs. And I have no idea why there's two, and that's something I want to solve some day — but not only can it see blue light, but it can see red light. So it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper's scope to be able to sneak up on animals that are blind to red light and be able to see them without being seen. It's also got a little chin barbel here with a blue luminescent lure on it that it can use to attract prey from a long way off. And a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure.This is another one of my favorite fish. This is a viperfish, and it's got a lure on the end of a long fishing rod that it arches in front of the toothy jaw that gives the viperfish its name. The teeth on this fish are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain. So instead, it slides in grooves on the outside of the head. This is a Christmas tree of a fish; everything on this fish lights up, it's not just that lure. It's got a built-in flashlight. It's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly that it uses for a type of camouflage that obliterates its shadow, so when it's swimming around and there's a predator looking up from below, it makes itself disappear. It's got light organs in the mouth, it's got light organs in every single scale, in the fins, in a mucus layer on the back and the belly, all used for different things — some of which we know about, some of which we don't.And we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to Pixar, and I'm very grateful to Pixar for sharing my favorite topic with so many people. I do wish, with their budget, that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money to pay a consulting fee to some poor, starving graduate student, who could have told them that those are the eyes of a fish that's been preserved in formalin. These are the eyes of a living anglerfish. So, she's got a lure that she sticks out in front of this living mousetrap of needle-sharp teeth in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey. And this one has a lure with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it.Now we used to think that the different shape of the lure was to attract different types of prey, but then stomach content analyses on these fish done by scientists, or more likely their graduate students, have revealed that they all eat pretty much the same thing. So, now we believe that the different shape of the lure is how the male recognizes the female in the anglerfish world, because many of these males are what are known as dwarf males. This little guy has no visible means of self-support. He has no lure for attracting food and no teeth for eating it when it gets there. His only hope for existence on this planet is as a gigolo. (Laughter) He's got to find himself a babe and then he's got to latch on for life. So this little guy has found himself this babe, and you will note that he's had the good sense to attach himself in a way that he doesn't actually have to look at her. (Laughter) But he still knows a good thing when he sees it, and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss. His flesh fuses with her flesh, her bloodstream grows into his body, and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac. (Laughter) Well, this is a deep-sea version of Women's Lib. She always knows where he is, and she doesn't have to be monogamous, because some of these females come up with multiple males attached.So they can use it for finding food, for attracting mates. They use it a lot for defense, many different ways. A lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud. This shrimp is actually spewing light out of its mouth like a fire breathing dragon in order to blind or distract this viperfish so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness. And there are a lot of different animals that can do this: There's jellyfish, there's squid, there's a whole lot of different crustaceans,there's even fish that can do this. This fish is called the shining tubeshoulder because it actually has a tube on its shoulder that can squirt out light. And I was luck enough to capture one of these when we were on a trawling expedition off the northwest coast of Africa for ""Blue Planet,"" for the deep portion of ""Blue Planet."" And we were using a special trawling net that we were able to bring these animals up alive. So we captured one of these, and I brought it into the lab. So I'm holding it, and I'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder, and when I do, you'll see bioluminescence coming out. But to me, what's shocking is not just the amount of light, but the fact that it's not just luciferin and luciferase. For this fish, it's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes. It's energetically very costly for this fish to do this, and we have no idea why it does it — another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved.Now, another form of defense is something called a burglar alarm — same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car; the honking horn and flashing lights are meant to attract the attention of, hopefully, the police that will come and take the burglar away — when an animal's caught in the clutches of a predator, its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier that will attack their attacker, thereby affording them a chance for escape. This jellyfish, for example, has a spectacular bioluminescent display. This is us chasing it in the submersible. That's not luminescence, that's reflected light from the gonads. We capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition, bring it into the lab on the ship. And then to generate the display you're about to see, all I did was touch it once per second on its nerve ring with a sharp pick that's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish. And once this display gets going, I'm not touching it anymore. This is an unbelievable light show. It's this pinwheel of light, and I've done calculations that show that this could be seen from as much as 300 feet away by a predator. And I thought, ""You know, that might actually make a pretty good lure."" Because one of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology. The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles. I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles. When I'm sitting in a submersible though, I know that I'm not unobtrusive at all — I've got bright lights and noisy thrusters — any animal with any sense is going to be long gone. So, I've wanted for a long time to figure out a different way to explore.And so, sometime ago, I got this idea for a camera system. It's not exactly rocket science. We call this thing Eye-in-the-Sea. And scientists have done this on land for years; we just use a color that the animals can't see and then a camera that can see that color. You can't use infrared in the sea. We use far-red light, but even that's a problem because it gets absorbed so quickly. Made an intensified camera, wanted to make this electronic jellyfish. Thing is, in science, you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you're going to discover before they'll give you the money. And I didn't know what I was going to discover, so I couldn't get the funding for this. So I kluged this together, I got the Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially, and then I kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources.Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute gave me time with their ROV so that I could test it and we could figure out, you know, for example, which colors of red light we had to use so that we could see the animals, but they couldn't see us — get the electronic jellyfish working. And you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was, because we cast these 16 blue LEDs in epoxy and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used, the word Ziploc is still visible. Needless to say, when it's kluged together like this, there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working. But there came a moment when it all came together, and everything worked. And, remarkably, that moment got caught on film by photographer Mark Richards, who happened to be there at the precise moment that we discovered that it all came together. That's me on the left, my graduate student at the time, Erika Raymond, and Lee Fry, who was the engineer on the project. And we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor with the caption: ""Engineer satisfying two women at once."" (Laughter) And we were very, very happy.So now we had a system that we could actually take to some place that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean that might be patrolled by large predators. And so, the place that we took it to was this place called a Brine Pool, which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico. It's a magical place. And I know this footage isn't going to look like anything to you — we had a crummy camera at the time — but I was ecstatic. We're at the edge of the Brine Pool, there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera. It's clearly undisturbed by us. And I had my window into the deep sea. I, for the first time, could see what animals were doing down there when we weren't down there disturbing them in some way. Four hours into the deployment, we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the first time. Eighty-six seconds after it went into its pinwheel display, we recorded this: This is a squid, over six feet long, that is so new to science, it cannot be placed in any known scientific family. I could not have asked for a better proof of concept.And based on this, I went back to the National Science Foundation and said, ""This is what we will discover."" And they gave me enough money to do it right, which has involved developing the world's first deep-sea webcam — which has been installed in the Monterey Canyon for the past year — and now, more recently, a modular form of this system, a much more mobile form that's a lot easier to launch and recover, that I hope can be used on Sylvia's ""hope spots"" to help explore and protect these areas, and, for me, learn more about the bioluminescence in these ""hope spots.""So one of these take-home messages here is, there is still a lot to explore in the oceans. And Sylvia has said that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what's in them, and she's right. So if you ever, ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible, say yes — a thousand times, yes — and please turn out the lights. I promise, you'll love it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_glowing_life_in_an_underwater_world
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"Good morning. Happy to see so many fine folks out here and so many smiling faces. I have a very peculiar background, attitude and approach to the real world because I am a conjurer. Now, I prefer that term over magician, because if I were a magician, that would mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real magic. No, I don't do that; I'm a conjurer, who is someone who pretends to be a real magician. (Laughter)Now, how do we go about that sort of thing? We depend on the fact that audiences, such as yourselves, will make assumptions. For example, when I walked up here and I took the microphone from the stand and switched it on, you assumed this was a microphone, which it is not. (Laughter) As a matter of fact, this is something that about half of you, more than half of you will not be familiar with. It's a beard trimmer, you see? And it makes a very bad microphone; I've tried it many times. (Laughter) The other assumption that you made — and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions. Not only that you can, but that you will when they are properly suggested to you. You believe I'm looking at you. Wrong. I'm not looking at you. I can't see you. I know you're out there, they told me backstage, it's a full house and such. I know you're there because I can hear you, but I can't see you because I normally wear glasses. These are not glasses, these are empty frames. (Laughter) Quite empty frames.Now why would a grown man appear before you wearing empty frames on his face? To fool you, ladies and gentlemen, to deceive you, to show that you, too, can make assumptions. Don't you ever forget that. Now, I have to do something — first of all, switch to real glasses so I can actually see you, which would probably be a convenience. I don't know. I haven't had a good look. Well, it's not that great a convenience.(Laughter)I have to do something now, which seems a little bit strange for a magician. But I'm going to take some medication. This is a full bottle of Calms Forte. I'll explain that in just a moment. Ignore the instructions, that's what the government has to put in there to confuse you, I'm sure. I will take enough of these. Mm. Indeed, the whole container. Thirty-two tablets of Calms Forte.Now that I've done that — I'll explain it in a moment — I must tell you that I am an actor. I'm an actor who plays a specific part. I play the part of a magician, a wizard, if you will, a real wizard. If someone were to appear on this stage in front of me and actually claim to be an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet, you would be insulted and rightly so. Why would a man assume that you would believe something bizarre like this? But there exists out there a very large population of people who will tell you that they have psychic, magical powers that they can predict the future, that they can make contact with the deceased. Oh, they also say they will sell you astrology or other fortunetelling methods. Oh, they gladly sell you that, yes. And they also say that they can give you perpetual motion machines and free energy systems. They claim to be psychics, or sensitives, whatever they can.But the one thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead. Now, to my innocent mind, dead implies incapable of communicating. (Laughter) You might agree with me on that. But these people, they tend to tell you that not only can they communicate with the dead — ""Hi, there"" — but they can hear the dead as well, and they can relay this information back to the living. I wonder if that's true. I don't think so, because this subculture of people use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do, exactly the same — the same physical methods, the same psychological methods — and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth, to their detriment. They deceive these people, costs them a lot of money, cost them a lot of emotional anguish. Billions of dollars are spent every year, all over the globe, on these charlatans.Now, I have two questions I would like to ask these people if I had the opportunity to do so. First question: If I want to ask them to call up — because they do hear them through the ear. They listen to the spirits like this — I'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother because, when she died, she had the family will, and she secreted it someplace. We don't know where it is, so we ask Granny, ""Where is the will, Granny?"" What does Granny say? She says, ""I'm in heaven and it's wonderful. I'm here with all my old friends, my deceased friends, and my family and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that I used to have when I was a little girl. And I love you, and I'll always be with you. Good bye."" And she didn't answer the damn question! Where is the will? Now, she could easily have said, ""Oh, it's in the library on the second shelf, behind the encyclopedia,"" but she doesn't say that. No, she doesn't. She doesn't bring any useful information to us. We paid a lot of money for that information, be we didn't get it.The second question that I'd like to ask, rather simple: Suppose I ask them to contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, as an example. Why do they insist on saying — remember, they speak into this ear — why do they say, ""My name starts with J or M?"" Is this a hunting game? Hunting and fishing? What is it? Is it 20 questions? No, it's more like 120 questions. But it is a cruel, vicious, absolutely conscienceless — I'll be all right, keep your seats (Laughter) — game that these people play. And they take advantage of the innocent, the naive, the grieving, the needy people out there.Now, this is a process that is called cold reading. There's one fellow out there, Van Praagh is his name, James Van Praagh. He's one of the big practitioners of this sort of thing. John Edward, Sylvia Browne and Rosemary Altea, they are other operators. There are hundreds of them all over the earth, but in this country, James Van Praagh is very big. And what does he do? He likes to tell you how the deceased got deceased, the people he's talking to through his ear, you see? So what he says is, very often, is like this: he says, ""He tells me, he tells me, before he passed, that he had trouble breathing."" Folks, that's what dying is all about! (Laughter) You stop breathing, and then you're dead. It's that simple. And that's the kind of information they're going to bring back to you? I don't think so. Now, these people will make guesses, they'll say things like, ""Why am I getting electricity? He's saying to me, 'Electricity.' Was he an electrician?"" ""No."" ""Did he ever have an electric razor?"" ""No."" It was a game of hunting questions like this. This is what they go through.Now, folks often ask us at the James Randi Educational Foundation, they call me, they say, ""Why are you so concerned about this, Mr. Randi? Isn't it just a lot of fun?"" No, it is not fun. It is a cruel farce. Now, it may bring a certain amount of comfort, but that comfort lasts only about 20 minutes or so. And then the people look in the mirror, and they say, I just paid a lot of money for that reading. And what did she say to me? 'I love you!'"" They always say that. They don't get any information, they don't get any value for what they spend.Now, Sylvia Browne is the big operator. We call her ""The Talons."" Sylvia Browne — thank you — Sylvia Browne is the big operator in this field at this very moment. Now, Sylvia Browne — just to show you — she actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone, she doesn't even go there in person, and you have to wait up to two years because she's booked ahead that amount of time. You pay by credit card or whatever, and then she will call you sometime in the next two years. You can tell it's her. ""Hello, this is Sylvia Browne."" That's her, you can tell right away. Now, Montel Williams is an intelligent man. We all know who he is on television. He's well educated, he's smart, he knows what Sylvia Browne is doing but he doesn't give a damn. He just doesn't care. Because, the bottom line is, the sponsors love it, and he will expose her to television publicity all the time.Now, what does Sylvia Browne give you for that 700 dollars? She gives you the names of your guardian angels, that's first. Now, without that, how could we possibly function? (Laughter) She gives you the names of previous lives, who you were in previous lives. Duh. It turns out that the women that she gives readings for were all Babylonian princesses, or something like that. And the men were all Grecian warriors fighting with Agamemnon. Nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of London who died of consumption. He isn't worth bringing back, obviously. And the strange thing — folks, you may have noticed this too. You see these folks on television — they never call anybody back from hell. (Laughter) Everyone comes back from heaven, but never from hell. If they call back any of my friends, they're not going to... Well, you see the story.(Laughter)Now, Sylvia Browne is an exception, an exception in one way, because the James Randi Educational Foundation, my foundation, offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds. Very simply won. All you have to do is prove any paranormal, occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions. It's very easy, win the million dollars. Sylvia Browne is an exception in that she's the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted our challenge. She did this on the ""Larry King Live"" show on CNN six and a half years ago. And we haven't heard from her since. Strange. She said that, first of all, that she didn't know how to contact me. Duh. A professional psychic who speaks to dead people, she can't reach me? (Laughter) I'm alive, you may have noticed. Well, pretty well anyway. She couldn't reach me. Now she says she doesn't want to reach me because I'm a godless person. All the more reason to take the million dollars, wouldn't you think, Sylvia?Now these people need to be stopped, seriously now. They need to be stopped because this is a cruel farce. We get people coming to the foundation all the time. They're ruined financially and emotionally because they've given their money and their faith to these people.Now, I popped some pills earlier. I have to explain that to you. Homeopathy, let's find out what that's all about. Hmm. You've heard of it. It's an alternative form of healing, right? Homeopathy actually consists — and that's what this is. This is Calms Forte, 32 caplets of sleeping pills! I forgot to tell you that. I just ingested six and a half days worth of sleeping pills. (Laughter) Six and a half days, that certainly is a fatal dose. It says right on the back here, ""In case of overdose, contact your poison control center immediately,"" and it gives an 800 number. Keep your seats — it's going to be okay. I don't really need it because I've been doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10 years, taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills.Why don't they affect me? (Laughter) (Applause) The answer may surprise you. What is homeopathy? It's taking a medicine that really works and diluting it down well beyond Avogadro's limit. Diluting it down to the point where there's none of it left. (Laughter) Now folks, this is not just a metaphor I'm going to give you now, it's true. It's exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and then stirring it up, obviously with a very big stick, and waiting two years or so until the solution is homogeneous. Then, when you get a headache, you take a sip of this water, and — voila! — it is gone. (Laughter) Now that is true. That is what homeopathy is all about.And another claim that they make — you'll love this one — the more dilute the medicine is, they say, the more powerful it is. Now wait a minute, we heard about a guy in Florida. The poor man, he was on homeopathic medicine. He died of an overdose. He forgot to take his pill. (Laughter) Work on it. Work on it. It's a ridiculous thing. It is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what we're doing, believing in all this nonsense over all these years.Now, let me tell you, The James Randi Educational Foundation is waving this very big carrot, but I must say, the fact that nobody has taken us up on this offer doesn't mean that the powers don't exist. They might, some place out there. Maybe these people are just independently wealthy. Well, with Sylvia Browne I would think so. You know, 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone — that's more than lawyers make! I mean that's a fabulous amount of money. These people don't need the million dollars perhaps, but wouldn't you think they'd like to take it just to make me look silly? Just to get rid of this godless person out there that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time?I think that something needs to be done about this. We really would love to have suggestions from you folks on how to contact federal, state and local authorities to get them to do something. If you find out — now I understand. We've seen people, even today, speaking to us about AIDS epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water supplies that people have to suffer with. Those are very important, critically important to us. And we must do something about those problems. But at the same time, as Arthur C. Clarke said, The rotting of the human mind, the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult and the supernatural — all of this total nonsense, this medieval thinking — I think something should be done about that, and it all lies in education. Largely, it's the media who are to blame for this sort of thing. They shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense of this sort because it pleases the sponsors. It's the bottom line, the dollar line. That's what they're looking at.We really must do something about this. I'm willing to take your suggestions, and I'm willing to have you tune in to our webpage. It's www.randi.org. Go in there and look at the archives, and you will begin to understand much more of what I've been talking about today. You will see the records that we have. There's nothing like sitting in that library and having a family appear there and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune. She cashed in the CDs, she gave away the stocks and the certificates. That's really sad to hear, and it hasn't helped them one bit, hasn't solved any of their problems. Yes, there could be a rotting of the American mind, and of the minds all the way around the earth, if we don't start to think sensibly about these things.Now, we've offered this carrot, as I say, we've dangled the carrot. We're waiting for the psychics to come forth and snap at it. Oh, we get lots of them, hundreds of them every year come by. These are dowsers and people who think that they can talk to the dead as well, but they're amateurs; they don't know how to evaluate their own so-called powers. The professionals never come near us, except in that case of Sylvia Browne that I told you about a moment ago. She did accept and then backed away. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm James Randi, and I'm waiting.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_randi
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"The greatest irony in global health is that the poorest countries carry the largest disease burden. If we resize the countries of the globe in proportion to the subject of interest, we see that Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst hit region by HIV/AIDS. This is the most devastating epidemic of our time. We also see that this region has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease. There are very few doctors and, quite frankly, these countries do not have the resources that are needed to cope with such epidemics.So what the Western countries, developed countries, have generously done is they have proposed to provide free drugs to all people in Third World countries who actually can't afford these medications. And this has already saved millions of lives, and it has prevented entire economies from capsizing in Sub-Saharan Africa.But there is a fundamental problem that is killing the efforts in fighting this disease, because if you keep throwing drugs out at people who don't have diagnostic services, you end up creating a problem of drug resistance. This is already beginning to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. The problem is that, what begins as a tragedy in the Third World could easily become a global problem. And the last thing we want to see is drug-resistant strains of HIV popping up all over the world, because it will make treatment more expensive and it could also restore the pre-ARV carnage of HIV/AIDS.I experienced this firsthand as a high school student in Uganda. This was in the 90s during the peak of the HIV epidemic, before there were any ARVs in Sub-Saharan Africa. And during that time, I actually lost more relatives, as well as the teachers who taught me, to HIV/AIDS. So this became one of the driving passions of my life, to help find real solutions that could address these kinds of problems.We all know about the miracle of miniaturization. Back in the day, computers used to fill this entire room, and people actually used to work inside the computers. But what electronic miniaturization has done is that it has allowed people to shrink technology into a cell phone. And I'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world, in the Third World countries. The good news is that the same technology that allowed miniaturization of electronics is now allowing us to miniaturize biological laboratories.So, right now, we can actually miniaturize biological and chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic chips. I was very lucky to come to the US right after high school, and was able to work on this technology and develop some devices. This is a microfluidic chip that I developed. A close look at how the technology works: These are channels that are about the size of a human hair — so you have integrated valves, pumps, mixers and injectors — so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments onto a microfluidic system.So what I plan to do with this technology is to actually take the current state of the technology and build an HIV kit in a microfluidic system. So, with one microfluidic chip, which is the size of an iPhone, you can actually diagnose 100 patients at the same time. For each patient, we will be able to do up to 100 different viral loads per patient. And this is only done in four hours, 50 times faster than the current state of the art, at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper than the current options. So this will allow us to create personalized medicines in the Third World at a cost that is actually achievable and make the world a safer place.I invite your interest as well as your involvement in driving this vision to a point of practical reality.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frederick_balagadde_bio_lab_on_a_microchip
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"Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. The marshmallow has to be on top. And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. And it was a huge success. And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you.So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and — ta-da! — they admire their work. But what really happens, most of the time, is that the ""ta-da"" turns into an ""uh-oh,"" because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse.So there are a number of people who have a lot more ""uh-oh"" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. (Laughter) They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. And of course there are teams that have a lot more ""ta-da"" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. (Laughter) And it's pretty amazing. As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all.So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? They don't spend time jockeying for power. But there's another reason as well. And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? And then they execute on it. And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? It's a crisis. Sound familiar? Right. What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work.So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. Who does the very best? Architects and engineers, thankfully. (Laughter) Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. (Laughter) It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, ""Oh, that team's going to win."" You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? Because they have special skills of facilitation. They manage the process, they understand the process. And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures.And I tried something interesting. I thought, let's up the ante, once. So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. So what do you think happened to these design students? What was the result? Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. We did the exercise again with the same students. What do you think happened then? So now they understand the value of prototyping. So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success.So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise.And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. There's step-by-step instructions on this. There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. There's world records that are on this as well.And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an ""uh-oh"" moment to a ""ta-da"" moment. And that can make a big difference.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower
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"One of the things that defines a TEDster is you've taken your passion, and you've turned it into stewardship. You actually put action to the issues you care about. But what you're going to find eventually is you may need to actually get elected officials to help you out. So, how do you do that?One of the things I should probably tell you is, I worked for the Discovery Channel early in my career, and that sort of warped my framework. So, when you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things? (Laughter) What we need to understand is: What drives the political creature? And there are two things that are primary in a politician's heart: One is reputation and influence. These are the primary tools by which a politician can do his job. The second one — unlike most animals, which is survival of the species — this is preservation of self. Now you may think it's money, but that's actually sort of a proxy to what I can do to preserve myself.Now, the challenge with you moving your issue forward is these animals are getting broadcast to all the time. So, what doesn't work, in terms of getting your issue to be important? You can send them an email. Well, unfortunately, I've got so many Viagra ads coming at me, your email is lost. It doesn't matter, it's spam. How about you get on the phone? Well, chances are I've got a droid who's picking up the phone, ""Yes, they called, and they said they didn't like it."" That doesn't move. Face to face would work, but it's hard to set it up. It's hard to get the context and actually get the communication to work. Yes, contributions actually do make a difference and they set a context for having a conversation, but it takes some time to build up.So what actually works? And the answer is rather strange. It's a letter. We live in a digital world, but we're fairly analog creatures. Letters actually work. Even the top dog himself takes time every day to read 10 letters that are picked out by staff. I can tell you that every official that I've ever worked with will tell you about the letters they get and what they mean. So, how are you going to write your letter? First of all, you're going to pick up an analog device: a pen. I know these are tough, and you may have a hard time getting your hand bent around it, (Laughter) but this is actually critical. And it is critical that you actually handwrite your letter. It is so novel to see this, that somebody actually picked up an analog device and has written to me. Second of all, I'm going to recommend that you get into a proactive stance and write to your elected officials at least once a month. Here's my promise to you: If you are consistent and do this, within three months the elected official will start calling you when that issue comes up and say, ""What do you think?""Now, I'm going to give you a four paragraph format to work with. Now, when you approach these animals, you need to understand there's a dangerous end to them, and you also need to approach them with some level of respect and a little bit of wariness. So in paragraph number one, what I'm going to tell you to do is very simply this: You appreciate them. You may not appreciate the person, you may not appreciate anything else, but maybe you appreciate the fact that they've got a tough gig. When animals are going to make a point, they make the point. They don't spend a lot of time dicking around. So, here you go. (Laughter) Paragraph number two: You may actually have to just get very blunt and say what's really on your mind. When you do this, don't attack people; you attack tactics. Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere. Paragraph number three: When animals are attacked or cornered, they will fight to the death, so you have to give them an exit. Most of the time, if they have an exit strategy, they should take it. ""Obviously, you're intelligent. If you had the right information, you would have done the right thing."" (Laughter) Lastly, you want to be the nurturing agent. You're the safe place to come in to. So, in paragraph number four, you're going to tell people, ""If no one is providing you with this information, let me help."" (Laughter)Animals do displays. They do two things: They warn you or they try to attract you and say, ""We need to mate."" You're going to do that by the way you sign your letter. You do a number of things: you're a vice president, you volunteer, you do something else. Why is is this important? Because this establishes the two primary criteria for the political creature: that you have influence in a large sphere, and that my preservation depends on you.Here is one very quick hack, especially for the feds in the audience. Here's how you mail your letter. First of all, you send the original to the district office. So, you send the copy to the main office. If they follow protocol, they'll pick up the phone and say, ""Hey, do you have the original?"" Then some droid in the back puts the name on a tickler and says, ""Oh, this is an important letter."" And you actually get into the folder that the elected official actually has to read.So, what your letter means: I've got to tell you, we are all in a party, and political officials are the pinatas. (Laughter) We are harangued, lectured to, sold, marketed, but a letter is actually one of the few times that we have honest communication. I got this letter when I was first elected, and I still carry it to every council meeting I go to. This is an opportunity at real dialogue, and if you have stewardship and want to communicate, that dialogue is incredibly powerful. So when you do that, here's what I can promise: You're going to be the 800 pound gorilla in the forest.Get writing.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/omar_ahmad_political_change_with_pen_and_paper
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"Salaam. Namaskar. Good morning. Given my TED profile, you might be expecting that I'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends — the one that's currently got Wall Street and the World Bank buzzing — how to invest in women, how to empower them, how to save them.Not me. I am interested in how women are saving us. They're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities, polarities we've taken for granted for a long time, like the ones between modernity and tradition, First World and Third World, oppression and opportunity. In the midst of the daunting challenges we face as a global community, there's something about this third way raga that is making my heart sing. What intrigues me most is how women are doing this, despite a set of paradoxes that are both frustrating and fascinating.Why is it that women are, on the one hand, viciously oppressed by cultural practices, and yet at the same time, are the preservers of cultures in most societies? Is the hijab or the headscarf a symbol of submission or resistance? When so many women and girls are beaten, raped, maimed on a daily basis in the name of all kinds of causes — honor, religion, nationality — what allows women to replant trees, to rebuild societies, to lead radical, non-violent movements for social change? Is it different women who are doing the preserving and the radicalizing? Or are they one and the same? Are we guilty, as Chimamanda Adichie reminded us at the TED conference in Oxford, of assuming that there is a single story of women's struggles for their rights while there are, in fact, many? And what, if anything, do men have to do with it?Much of my life has been a quest to get some answers to these questions. It's taken me across the globe and introduced me to some amazing people. In the process, I've gathered a few fragments that help me shed some light on this puzzle. Among those who've helped open my eyes to a third way are: a devout Muslim in Afghanistan, a group of harmonizing lesbians in Croatia and a taboo breaker in Liberia. I'm indebted to them, as I am to my parents, who for some set of misdemeanors in their last life, were blessed with three daughters in this one. And for reasons equally unclear to me, seem to be inordinately proud of the three of us.I was born and raised here in India, and I learned from an early age to be deeply suspicious of the aunties and uncles who would bend down, pat us on the head and then say to my parents with no problem at all, ""Poor things. You only have three daughters. But you're young, you could still try again."" My sense of outrage about women's rights was brought to a boil when I was about 11. My aunt, an incredibly articulate and brilliant woman, was widowed early. A flock of relatives descended on her. They took off her colorful sari. They made her wear a white one. They wiped her bindi off her forehead. They broke her bangles. Her daughter, Rani, a few years older than me, sat in her lap bewildered, not knowing what had happened to the confident woman she once knew as her mother. Late that night, I heard my mother begging my father, ""Please do something Ramu. Can't you intervene?"" And my father, in a low voice, muttering, ""I'm just the youngest brother, there's nothing I can do. This is tradition."" That's the night I learned the rules about what it means to be female in this world. Women don't make those rules, but they define us, and they define our opportunities and our chances. And men are affected by those rules too. My father, who had fought in three wars, could not save his own sister from this suffering.By 18, under the excellent tutelage of my mother, I was therefore, as you might expect, defiantly feminist. On the streets chanting, ""[Hindi] [Hindi] We are the women of India. We are not flowers, we are sparks of change."" By the time I got to Beijing in 1995, it was clear to me, the only way to achieve gender equality was to overturn centuries of oppressive tradition. Soon after I returned from Beijing, I leapt at the chance to work for this wonderful organization, founded by women, to support women's rights organizations around the globe. But barely six months into my new job, I met a woman who forced me to challenge all my assumptions. Her name is Sakena Yacoobi.She walked into my office at a time when no one knew where Afghanistan was in the United States. She said to me, ""It is not about the burka."" She was the most determined advocate for women's rights I had ever heard. She told me women were running underground schools in her communities inside Afghanistan, and that her organization, the Afghan Institute of Learning, had started a school in Pakistan. She said, ""The first thing anyone who is a Muslim knows is that the Koran requires and strongly supports literacy. The prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the Koran for themselves."" Had I heard right? Was a women's rights advocate invoking religion? But Sakena defies labels. She always wears a headscarf, but I've walked alongside with her on a beach with her long hair flying in the breeze. She starts every lecture with a prayer, but she's a single, feisty, financially independent woman in a country where girls are married off at the age of 12.She is also immensely pragmatic. ""This headscarf and these clothes,"" she says, ""give me the freedom to do what I need to do to speak to those whose support and assistance are critical for this work. When I had to open the school in the refugee camp, I went to see the imam. I told him, 'I'm a believer, and women and children in these terrible conditions need their faith to survive.'"" She smiles slyly. ""He was flattered. He began to come twice a week to my center because women could not go to the mosque. And after he would leave, women and girls would stay behind. We began with a small literacy class to read the Koran, then a math class, then an English class, then computer classes. In a few weeks, everyone in the refugee camp was in our classes."" Sakena is a teacher at a time when to educate women is a dangerous business in Afghanistan.She is on the Taliban's hit list. I worry about her every time she travels across that country. She shrugs when I ask her about safety. ""Kavita jaan, we cannot allow ourselves to be afraid. Look at those young girls who go back to school when acid is thrown in their face."" And I smile, and I nod, realizing I'm watching women and girls using their own religious traditions and practices, turning them into instruments of opposition and opportunity. Their path is their own and it looks towards an Afghanistan that will be different.Being different is something the women of Lesbor in Zagreb, Croatia know all too well. To be a lesbian, a dyke, a homosexual in most parts of the world, including right here in our country, India, is to occupy a place of immense discomfort and extreme prejudice. In post-conflict societies like Croatia, where a hyper-nationalism and religiosity have created an environment unbearable for anyone who might be considered a social outcast. So enter a group of out dykes, young women who love the old music that once spread across that region from Macedonia to Bosnia, from Serbia to Slovenia. These folk singers met at college at a gender studies program. Many are in their 20s, some are mothers. Many have struggled to come out to their communities, in families whose religious beliefs make it hard to accept that their daughters are not sick, just queer. As Leah, one of the founders of the group, says, ""I like traditional music very much. I also like rock and roll. So Lesbor, we blend the two. I see traditional music like a kind of rebellion, in which people can really speak their voice, especially traditional songs from other parts of the former Yugoslav Republic. After the war, lots of these songs were lost, but they are a part of our childhood and our history, and we should not forget them.""Improbably, this LGBT singing choir has demonstrated how women are investing in tradition to create change, like alchemists turning discord into harmony. Their repertoire includes the Croatian national anthem, a Bosnian love song and Serbian duets. And, Leah adds with a grin, ""Kavita, we especially are proud of our Christmas music, because it shows we are open to religious practices even though Catholic Church hates us LGBT."" Their concerts draw from their own communities, yes, but also from an older generation: a generation that might be suspicious of homosexuality, but is nostalgic for its own music and the past it represents. One father, who had initially balked at his daughter coming out in such a choir, now writes songs for them. In the Middle Ages, troubadours would travel across the land singing their tales and sharing their verses: Lesbor travels through the Balkans like this, singing, connecting people divided by religion, nationality and language. Bosnians, Croats and Serbs find a rare shared space of pride in their history, and Lesbor reminds them that the songs one group often claims as theirs alone really belong to them all.(Singing)Yesterday, Mallika Sarabhai showed us that music can create a world more accepting of difference than the one we have been given. The world Leymah Gbowee was given was a world at war. Liberia had been torn apart by civil strife for decades. Leymah was not an activist, she was a mother of three. But she was sick with worry: She worried her son would be abducted and taken off to be a child soldier, she worried her daughters would be raped, she worried for their lives. One night, she had a dream. She dreamt she and thousands of other women ended the bloodshed. The next morning at church, she asked others how they felt. They were all tired of the fighting. We need peace, and we need our leaders to know we will not rest until there is peace. Among Leymah's friends was a policewoman who was Muslim. She promised to raise the issue with her community.At the next Friday sermon, the women who were sitting in the side room of the mosque began to share their distress at the state of affairs. ""What does it matter?"" they said, ""A bullet doesn't distinguish between a Muslim and a Christian."" This small group of women, determined to bring an end to the war, and they chose to use their traditions to make a point: Liberian women usually wear lots of jewelry and colorful clothing. But no, for the protest, they dressed all in white, no makeup. As Leymah said, ""We wore the white saying we were out for peace."" They stood on the side of the road on which Charles Taylor's motorcade passed every day. They stood for weeks — first just 10, then 20, then 50, then hundreds of women — wearing white, singing, dancing, saying they were out for peace.Eventually, opposing forces in Liberia were pushed to hold peace talks in Ghana. The peace talks dragged on and on and on. Leymah and her sisters had had enough. With their remaining funds, they took a small group of women down to the venue of the peace talks and they surrounded the building. In a now famous CNN clip, you can see them sitting on the ground, their arms linked. We know this in India. It's called a [Hindi]. Then things get tense. The police are called in to physically remove the women. As the senior officer approaches with a baton, Leymah stands up with deliberation, reaches her arms up over her head, and begins, very slowly, to untie her headdress that covers her hair. You can see the policeman's face. He looks embarrassed. He backs away. And the next thing you know, the police have disappeared. Leymah said to me later, ""It's a taboo, you know, in West Africa. If an older woman undresses in front of a man because she wants to, the man's family is cursed."" (Laughter) (Applause) She said, ""I don't know if he did it because he believed, but he knew we were not going to leave. We were not going to leave until the peace accord was signed.""And the peace accord was signed. And the women of Liberia then mobilized in support of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a woman who broke a few taboos herself becoming the first elected woman head of state in Africa in years. When she made her presidential address, she acknowledged these brave women of Liberia who allowed her to win against a football star — that's soccer for you Americans — no less.Women like Sakena and Leah and Leymah have humbled me and changed me and made me realize that I should not be so quick to jump to assumptions of any kind. They've also saved me from my righteous anger by offering insights into this third way. A Filipina activist once said to me, ""How do you cook a rice cake? With heat from the bottom and heat from the top."" The protests, the marches, the uncompromising position that women's rights are human rights, full stop. That's the heat from the bottom. That's Malcolm X and the suffragists and gay pride parades. But we also need the heat from the top. And in most parts of the world, that top is still controlled by men.So to paraphrase Marx: Women make change, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They have to negotiate. They have to subvert tradition that once silenced them in order to give voice to new aspirations. And they need allies from their communities. Allies like the imam, allies like the father who now writes songs for a lesbian group in Croatia, allies like the policeman who honored a taboo and backed away, allies like my father, who couldn't help his sister but has helped three daughters pursue their dreams. Maybe this is because feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor — it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers — it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.And perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism, that the personal is in fact the political. So that, as Eleanor Roosevelt said once of human rights, the same is true of gender equality: that it starts in small places, close to home. On the streets, yes, but also in negotiations at the kitchen table and in the marital bed and in relationships between lovers and parents and sisters and friends. And then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles, women like Sakena and Leah and Leymah — but also women like Sonia Gandhi here in India and Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Shirin Ebadi in Iran — are doing something else. They're challenging the very notion of Western models of development. They are saying, we don't have to be like you to make change. We can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou, and we can be party leaders and presidents and human rights lawyers. We can use our tradition to navigate change. We can demilitarize societies and pour resources, instead, into reservoirs of genuine security.It is in these little stories, these individual stories, that I see a radical epic being written by women around the world. It is in these threads that are being woven into a resilient fabric that will sustain communities, that I find hope. And if my heart is singing, it's because in these little fragments, every now and again, you catch a glimpse of a whole, of a whole new world. And she is definitely on her way.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kavita_ramdas_radical_women_embracing_tradition
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"So I want to talk today about an idea. It's a big idea. Actually, I think it'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that's emerged in the past century. It's the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there's actually a lot more to computation than that. It's really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we've only just begun to see.Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. Then, I started drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I'm happy to say that that's led to many good things in R & D and education, lots of other areas. Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica: I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. But I wanted to look not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe.So we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes. But what about the space of all possible programs? Here's a representation of a really simple program. So, if we run this program, this is what we get. Very simple. So let's try changing the rule for this program a little bit. Now we get another result, still very simple. Try changing it again. You get something a little bit more complicated. But if we keep running this for a while, we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate, it has a very regular structure. So the question is: Can anything else happen? Well, we can do a little experiment. Let's just do a little mathematical experiment, try and find out.Let's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we're looking at. They're called cellular automata. You can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here. Most of them do very simple things, but if you look along all these different pictures, at rule number 30, you start to see something interesting going on. So let's take a closer look at rule number 30 here. So here it is. We're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here, but we're getting all this amazing stuff. It's not at all what we're used to, and I must say that, when I first saw this, it came as a huge shock to my intuition. And, in fact, to understand it, I eventually had to create a whole new kind of science.(Laughter)This science is different, more general, than the mathematics-based science that we've had for the past 300 or so years. You know, it's always seemed like a big mystery: how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we've found its secret: It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like Rule 30 or like this. And knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science. It also brings up new issues, though, like computational irreducibility. I mean, we're used to having science let us predict things, but something like this is fundamentally irreducible. The only way to find its outcome is, effectively, just to watch it evolve. It's connected to, what I call, the principle of computational equivalence, which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything. It doesn't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation; just something that happens, naturally, all over the place. Things with rules as simple as these can do it. Well, this has deep implications about the limits of science, about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies, about intelligence in the universe, about questions like free will and about creating technology.You know, in working on this science for many years, I kept wondering, ""What will be its first killer app?"" Well, ever since I was a kid, I'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable. People like Leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier. But I'd always assumed that to make progress, I'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain. Well, then I got to thinking: This scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different — and, by the way, I've now got huge computation capabilities in Mathematica, and I'm a CEO with some worldly resources to do large, seemingly crazy, projects — So I decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that's out there in the world we could make computable.So, it's been a big, very complex project, which I was not sure was going to work at all. But I'm happy to say it's actually going really well. And last year we were able to release the first website version of Wolfram Alpha. Its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions. So let's give it a try. Let's start off with something really easy. Hope for the best. Very good. Okay. So far so good. (Laughter) Let's try something a little bit harder. Let's do some mathy thing, and with luck it'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math. We could ask it something about the real world. Let's say — I don't know — what's the GDP of Spain? And it should be able to tell us that. Now we could compute something related to this, let's say ... the GDP of Spain divided by, I don't know, the — hmmm ... let's say the revenue of Microsoft.(Laughter)The idea is that we can just type this in, this kind of question in, however we think of it. So let's try asking a question, like a health related question. So let's say we have a lab finding that ... you know, we have an LDL level of 140 for a male aged 50. So let's type that in, and now Wolfram Alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on. Or let's try asking about, I don't know, the International Space Station.And what's happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is not just looking up something; it's computing, in real time, where the International Space Station is right now at this moment, how fast it's going, and so on. So Wolfram Alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things. It's got, by now, pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library. But the goal is to go much further and, very broadly, to democratize all of this knowledge, and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas. To be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have, not by searching what other people may have written down before, but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions.Now, of course, Wolfram Alpha is a monumentally huge, long-term project with lots and lots of challenges. For a start, one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data, and we built quite a pipeline of Mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this. But that's just the beginning. Given raw facts or data to actually answer questions, one has to compute: one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries. Well, even starting from Mathematica, this is still a huge amount of work. So far, there are about 8 million lines of Mathematica code in Wolfram Alpha built by experts from many, many different fields.Well, a crucial idea of Wolfram Alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language, which means that we've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them. And I must say that I thought that step might just be plain impossible. Two big things happened: First, a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe; and second, the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language. And, of course, now with Wolfram Alpha actually out in the wild, we can learn from its actual usage. And, in fact, there's been an interesting coevolution that's been going on between Wolfram Alpha and its human users, and it's really encouraging. Right now, if we look at web queries, more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time. And if you look at things like the iPhone app, the fraction is considerably larger. So, I'm pretty pleased with it all.But, in many ways, we're still at the very beginning with Wolfram Alpha. I mean, everything is scaling up very nicely and we're getting more confident. You can expect to see Wolfram Alpha technology showing up in more and more places, working both with this kind of public data, like on the website, and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on. You know, I've realized that Wolfram Alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing, in which one's starting not just from raw computation, but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge. And when one does that, one really changes the economics of delivering computational things, whether it's on the web or elsewhere.You know, we have a fairly interesting situation right now. On the one hand, we have Mathematica, with its sort of precise, formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines. Let me show you a couple of examples here. So here's a trivial piece of Mathematica programming. Here's something where we're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here. Here we'll just create, in this line, a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there. If you go on, that's a slightly more complicated program that's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on. But it's something that is very precise stuff. It's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes Mathematica to know what to do here.Then on the other hand, we have Wolfram Alpha, with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it. So what happens when you put these things together? I think it's actually rather wonderful. With Wolfram Alpha inside Mathematica, you can, for example, make precise programs that call on real world data. Here's a real simple example. You can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have Wolfram Alpha figure out what you're talking about. Let's try this here. But actually I think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language. Then, the idea is that Wolfram Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger, precise programs. So, sometimes, Wolfram Alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with. Here's a big website where we've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things. I'll show you one example here. This is just an example of one of these computable documents. This is probably a fairly small piece of Mathematica code that's able to be run here.Okay. Let's zoom out again. So, given our new kind of science, is there a general way to use it to make technology? So, with physical materials, we're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes. Well, it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe. There's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there. The challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes. Something like Rule 30, for example, turns out to be a really good randomness generator. Other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world. And, for example, Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe. And, for example, this — if we go back here — this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe. In a sense, we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity. I'm hoping we can, for example, use that even to get Wolfram Alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly, and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with.Well, so, that leads to kind of an ultimate question: Could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe? Perhaps there's even some quite simple rule, some simple program for our universe. Well, the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated. But in the computational universe, we've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior. So could that be what's going on with our whole universe? If the rules for the universe are simple, it's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level; operating, for example, far below the level of space or time, which makes it hard to represent things. But in at least a large class of cases, one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network, which, when it gets big enough, behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid. Well, then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network. And each possible rule, in a sense, corresponds to a candidate universe.Actually, I haven't shown these before, but here are a few of the candidate universes that I've looked at. Some of these are hopeless universes, completely sterile, with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space, no notion of time, no matter, other problems like that. But the exciting thing that I've found in the last few years is that you actually don't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that aren't obviously not our universe. Here's the problem: Any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility. Which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave, and whether it matches our physical universe. A few years ago, I was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity, and even general relativity and gravitation, and at least give hints of quantum mechanics. So, will we find the whole of physics? I don't know for sure, but I think at this point it's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try.Not an easy project. One's got to build a lot of technology. One's got to build a structure that's probably at least as deep as existing physics. And I'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is. Build a team, open it up, offer prizes and so on. But I'll tell you, here today, that I'm committed to seeing this project done, to see if, within this decade, we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes ... and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha, ""the theory of the universe,"" and have it tell us.(Laughter)So I've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years, building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on. With every passing year, I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is. It's taken us a long way already, but there's so much more to come. From the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition, I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: That was astonishing. Stay here. I've got a question.(Applause)So, that was, fair to say, an astonishing talk. Are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe?Stephen Wolfram: Well, the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true, things like the standard model of physics: what I'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it's simply wrong. The things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model, but hasn't quite gotten there. My guess is that some great simplifications of what I'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what's been done in string theory, but that's a complicated math thing that I don't yet know how it's going to work out.CA: Benoit Mandelbrot is in the audience. He also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start. Does your work relate to his?SW: I think so. I view Benoit Mandelbrot's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area. Benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns, in fractals and so on, where the structure is something that's kind of tree-like, and where there's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on. That's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity. I think things like the Rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level. In fact, in a very precise way, they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity that's sort of as great as complexity can ever get ...I could go on about this at great length, but I won't. (Laughter) (Applause)CA: Stephen Wolfram, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything
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"Hi, my name is Roz Savage and I row across oceans. Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the Pacific. Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over three million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean on a 23 foot rowboat. This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on. I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict math teacher that I once had at school. I didn't always like her, but I did respect her, and she taught me a heck of a lot. So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now.Now, some of you might be thinking, ""Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide and maybe look a bit more like these guys?"" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. (Laughter) And no matter how long I've spent on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard, and I hope that it remains that way.For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. I didn't look the part. I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. So for 11 years, I conformed. I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-30s and I thought, ""You know, I'm not getting any younger. I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it.So, fast forward a few years. I'd gone through some changes. To try and answer that question of, ""What am I supposed to be doing with my life?"" I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, ""Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life."" I made a few changes, let go of some loose trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean.(Laughter)The Atlantic Rowing Race runs from the Canaries to Antigua, it's about 3,000 miles, and it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. And my timing was not great either: 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. And pretty early on, those storms started making their presence known.All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. Oars are not supposed to look like this. But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. Oars are your only means of propulsion. So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. And then when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, but it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side.And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour, 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had no choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy.And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. I was euphoric. And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the cliff tops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. It was absolutely wonderful. And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it.So this might be a good moment to take a quick time-out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. So I grow my own beansprouts. I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts. And generally arrive about 30 pounds lighter at the other end. Question number two: How do you sleep? With my eyes shut. Ha-ha. I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. That's a bad day at the office. What do I wear? Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile — or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight — and lots of sun lotion. Do I have a chase boat? No I don't. I'm totally self-supporting out there. I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. And finally: Am I crazy? Well, I leave that one up to you to judge.So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? Well, naturally, you decide to row across the Pacific. Well, I thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done so: we are right in the middle, and we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world. Whereas if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. It pretty much covers half the planet. You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. It is really big — 65 million square miles — and to row in a straight line across it would be about 8,000 miles. Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably nine or 10,000 miles in all.So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. The first attempt didn't go so well. In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. A bit like being in a washing machine. Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided that this damsel was in distress and needed saving. The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up overhead. I tried to tell them to go away. We had a bit of a battle of wills. I lost and got airlifted. Awful, really awful. It was one of the worst feelings of my life, as I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 foot waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again.But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up 10. So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. But it was not without misadventure. My watermaker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. Fortunately, help was at hand.There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles latched together into two pontoons. They were going very slowly. Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up.But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. They were running out of food; I was running out of water. So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetic speed of about 1.4: it was like two snails in a mating dance. But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi-mahi, which was the best food I'd had in, ooh, at least three months.Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. When they opened this one up, they found its stomach was full of plastic. And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. So there are very real implications for human health.I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. This is big trouble for these guys. They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. And also, as an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. He expects that within the next 50 years, the 100,000 people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves; if the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever. How, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel.Very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia, and if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. And I try to use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that humankind now finds itself in.I think there are probably three key points here. The first one is about the stories that we tell ourselves. For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. And then that story changed. I found out that people had rowed across oceans. I even met one of them and she was just about my size. So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed: My interior dialogue had changed. At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. But what about if we just change that story? We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones, to create a greener future.The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezes and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals, day after day and year after year. And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. And when we do that, we're not just one person. Anything that we do spreads ripples. Other people will see if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the checkout line. That's just one example. This is a world-wide community.The other point: It's about taking responsibility. For so much of my life, I wanted something else to make me happy. I thought if I had the right house or the right car or the right man in my life, then I could be happy. But when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years old, I want to be happy and healthy. And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's racked with famine and drought. It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air.So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. It's meant to be a bit of a game. We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world.I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. We can choose a greener future, and we can get there if we all pull together to take it one stroke at a time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roz_savage_why_i_m_rowing_across_the_pacific
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"Most of the talks that you've heard in the last several fabulous days have been from people who have the characteristic that they have thought about something, they are experts, they know what's going on. All of you know about the topic that I'm supposed to talk about. That is, you know what simplicity is, you know what complexity is. The trouble is, I don't. And what I'm going to do is share with you my ignorance on this subject.I want you to read this, because we're going to come back to it in a moment. The quote is from the fabled Potter Stewart opinion on pornography. And let me just read it, the important details here: ""Shorthand description, ['hardcore pornography']; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly defining it. But I know it when I see it."" I'm going to come back to that in a moment.So, what is simplicity? It's good to start with some examples. A coffee cup — we don't think about coffee cups, but it's much more interesting than one might think — a coffee cup is a device, which has a container and a handle. The handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid. Why is that important? Well, it enables you to drink coffee. But also, by the way, the coffee is hot, the liquid is sterile; you're not likely to get cholera that way. So the coffee cup, or the cup with a handle, is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health. Scissors are your clothes, glasses enable you to see things and keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or run down by automobiles, and books are, after all, your education.But there's another class of simple things, which are also very important. Simple in function, but not at all simple in how they're constructed. And the two here are just examples. One is the cellphone, which we use every day. And it rests on a complexity, which has some characteristics very different from those that my friend Benoit Mandelbrot discussed, but are very interesting. And the other, of course, is a birth control pill, which, in a very simple way, fundamentally changed the structure of society by changing the role of women in it by providing to them the opportunity to make reproductive choices.So, there are two ways of thinking about this word, I think. And here I've corrupted the Potter Stewart quotation by saying that we can think about something — which spans all the way from scissors to the cell phone, Internet and birth control pills — by saying that they're simple, the functions are simple, and we recognize what that simplicity is when we see it.Or there may be another way of doing it, which is to think about the problem in terms of what — if you associate with moral philosophers — is called the teapot problem. The teapot problem I'll pose this way. Suppose you see a teapot, and the teapot is filled with hot water. And you then ask the question: Why is the water hot? And that's a simple question. It's like, what is simplicity? One answer would be: because the kinetic energy of the water molecules is high and they bounce against things rapidly — that's a kind of physical science argument. A second argument would be: because it was sitting on a stove with the flame on — that's an historical argument. A third is that I wanted hot water for tea — that's an intentional argument. And, since this is coming from a moral philosopher, the fourth would be that it's part of God's plan for the universe. All of these are possibilities.The point is that you get into trouble when you ask a single question with a single box for an answer, in which that single question actually is many questions with quite different meanings, but with the same words. Asking, ""What is simplicity?"" I think falls in that category. What is the state of science? And, interestingly, complexity is very highly evolved. We have a lot of interesting information about what complexity is. Simplicity, for reasons that are a little bit obscure, is almost not pursued, at least in the academic world.We academics — I am an academic — we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes. (Laughter) Simplicity — all of you really would like your Waring Blender in the morning to make whatever a Waring Blender does, but not explode or play Beethoven. You're not interested in the limits of these things. So what one is interested in has a lot to do with the rewards of the system. And there's a lot of rewards in thinking about complexity and emergence, not so much in thinking about simplicity. One of the things I want to do is to help you with a very important task — which you may not know that you have very often — which is to understand how to sit next to a physicist at a dinner party and have a conversation. (Laughter) And the words that I would like you to focus on are complexity and emergence, because these will enable you to start the conversation and then daydream about other things.(Laughter)All right, what is complexity in this view of things, and what is emergence? We have, actually, a pretty good working definition of complexity. It is a system, like traffic, which has components. The components interact with one another. These are cars and drivers. They dissipate energy. It turns out that, whenever you have that system, weird stuff happens, and you in Los Angeles probably know this better than anyone. Here's another example, which I put up because it's an example of really important current science. You can't possibly read that. It's not intended that you read it, but that's a tiny part of the chemical reactions going on in each of your cells at any given moment. And it's like the traffic that you see. The amazing thing about the cell is that it actually does maintain a fairly stable working relationship with other cells, but we don't know why. Anyone who tells you that we understand life, walk away.And let me reduce this to the simplest level. We've heard from Bill Gates recently. All of us, to some extent, study this thing called a Bill Gates. Terrific. You learn everything you can about that. And then there's another kind of thing that you might study, and you study that hard. That's a Bono, this is a Bono. But then, if you know everything you can know about those two things, and you put them together, what can you say about this combination? The answer is, not a lot. And that's complexity. Now, imagine building that up to a city, or to a society, and you've got, obviously, an interesting problem.All right, so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind. And I want to introduce a word that I think is very useful, which is stacking. And I'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that I can build things with it. Or I'm going to use simple to mean reliable, predictable, repeatable. And I'm going to use as an example the Internet, because it's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity. We call it a complex system, which it is, but it's also something else.The Internet starts with mathematics, it starts with binary. And if you look at the list of things on the bottom, we are familiar with the Arabic numbers one to 10 and so on. In binary, one is 0001, seven is 0111. The question is: Why is binary simpler than Arabic? And the answer is, simply, that if I hold up three fingers, you can count that easily, but if I hold up this, it's sort of hard to say that I just did seven. The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it. Now, if you like to represent this zero and one of binary, you need a device. And think of things in your life that are binary, one of them is light switches. They can be on and off. That's binary.Now wall switches, we all know, fail. But our friends who are condensed matter physicists managed to come up, some 50 years ago, with a very nice device, shown under that bell jar, which is a transistor. A transistor is nothing more than a wall switch. It turns things on and off, but it does so without moving parts and it doesn't fail, basically, for a very long period of time. So the second layer of simplicity was the transistor in the Internet. So, since the transistor is so simple, you can put lots of them together. And you put lots of them together and you come with something called integrated circuits. And a current integrated circuit might have in each one of these chips something like a billion transistors, all of which have to work perfectly every time. So that's the next layer of simplicity, and, in fact, integrated circuits are really simple in the sense that they, in general, work really well.With integrated circuits, you can build cellphones. You all are accustomed to having your cellphones work the large majority of the time. In Boston ... Boston is a little bit like Namibia in its cell phone coverage, (Laughter) so that we're not accustomed to that all the time, but some of the time. But, in fact, if you have cell phones, you can now go to this nice lady who's somewhere like Namibia, and who is extremely happy with the fact that although she does not have an master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT, she's nonetheless able to hack her cell phone to get power in some funny way. And from that comes the Internet. And this is a map of bitflows across the continent. The two blobs that are light in the middle there are the United States and Europe.And then back to simplicity again. So here we have what I think is one of the great ideas, which is Google. Which, in this simple portal makes the claim that it makes accessible all of the world's information. But the point is that that extraordinary simple idea rests on layers of simplicity each compounded into a complexity that is itself simple, in the sense that it is completely reliable.All right, let me then finish off with four general statements, an example and two aphorisms. The characteristics, which I think are useful to think about for simple things: First, they are predictable. Their behavior is predictable. Now, one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it's going to do, in general. So simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things. The second is, and this is a real world statement, they're cheap. If you have things that are cheap enough, people will find uses for them, even if they seem very primitive. So, for example, stones. You can build cathedrals out of stones, you just have to know what it does. You carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another, and they support weight.So there has to be function, the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low. What that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost. And then I would propose as this last component that they serve, or have the potential to serve, as building blocks. That is, you can stack them. And stack can mean this way, or it can mean this way, or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space. But if you have something that has a function, and it's really cheap, people will find new ways of putting it together to make new things. Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. There's no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor. It just is not possible. So these are the components.Now, the example is something that I want to give you from the work that we ourselves do. We are very interested in delivering health care in the developing world, and one of the things that we wish to do in this particular business is to find a way of doing medical diagnosis at as close to zero cost as we can manage. So, how does one do that? This is a world in which there's no electricity, there's no money, there's no medical competence. And I don't want to spend your time in going through the details, but in the lower right-hand corner, you see an example of the kind of thing that we have. It's a little paper chip. It has a few things printed on it using the same technology that you use for making comic books, which was the inspiration for this particular idea. And you put a drop, in this case, of urine at the bottom. It wicks its way up into these little branches. You know, no power required. It turns colors. In this particular case, you're reading kidney function. And, since the health care worker of much of this part of the world is an 18 year-old with an AK-47, who happens to be out of work and is willing to go around and do this sort of thing, he can take a picture of it with his cellphone, send the picture back to where there is a doctor, and the doctor can look at it.So what you've done is to take a technology, which is available everywhere, make a device, which is extremely cheap, and make it in such a fashion that it is very, very reliable. If we can pull this off, if we can build more function, it will be stackable. That is to say, if we can make the basic technology of one or two things work, it will be applicable to a very, very large variety of human conditions, and hence, extendable in both vertical and horizontal directions. Part of my interest in this, I have to say, is that I would like to — how do I put this politely? — change the way, or maybe eviscerate, the capital structure of the U.S. health care system, which I think is fundamentally broken.So, let me close — (Applause)Let me close with my two aphorisms. One of them is from Mr. Einstein, and he says, ""Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."" And I think that's a very good way of thinking about the problem. If you take too much out of something that's simple, you lose function. You have to have low cost, but you also have to have a function. So you can't make it too simple. And the second is a design issue, and it's not directly relevant, but it's a nice statement.This is by de Saint-Exupery. And he says, ""You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."" And that certainly is going in the right direction. So, what I think one can begin to do with this kind of cut at the word simplicity, which doesn't cover Brancusi, it doesn't answer the question of why Mondrian is better or worse or simpler or less simpler than Van Gogh, and certainly doesn't address the question of whether Mozart is simpler than Bach.But it does make a point — which is one which, in a sense, differentiates the real world of people who make things, and the world of people who think about things, which is, there is an intellectual merit to asking: How do we make things as simple as we can, as cheap as we can, as functional as we can and as freely interconnectable as we can? If we make that kind of simplicity in our technology and then give it to you guys, you can go off and do all kinds of fabulous things with it.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Quick question. So can you picture that a science of simplicity might get to the point where you could look out at various systems — say a financial system or a legal system, health system — and say, ""That has got to the point of danger or dysfunctionality for the following reasons, and this is how we might simplify it""?George Whitesides: Yes, I think you could. Because if you look at the components from which the system is made and examine their fragility, or their stability, you can probably build a kind of risk assessment based on that basis.CA: Have you started to do that? I mean, with the health system, you got a sort of radical solution on the cost side, but in terms of the system itself?GW: Well, no. How do I put that simply? No.CA: That was a simple, powerful answer. GW: Yes.CA: So, in terms of that diagnostic technology that you've got, where is that, and when do you see that maybe getting rolled out to scale.GW: That's coming out soon. I mean, the systems work, and we have to find out how to manufacture them and do things of this kind, but the basic technology works.CA: You've got a company set up to ... GW: A foundation, a foundation. Not-for-profit.CA: All right. Well, thank you so much for your talk. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity
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"If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. And that's a huge amount of data. And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? (Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with?To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. (Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft — actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. Oh, well. If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about.How should you deliver your talk? TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage.(Laughter)Now, while ... (Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. I'll give you three examples. First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. (Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker — that's the good news — to fake intellectual capacity. If I don't understand something, I can just say, ""etc., etc."" You'll all stay with me. It's perfectly fine. (Applause)Now, let's go to the visuals. The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. Color plays a very important role. Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. (Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment.So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. And I call this tool the TEDPad. (Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? So, download it and have fun with it.Now I hope you enjoy the session. I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see.Thank you very much.(Applause) Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks
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"So here it is. You can check: I am short, I'm French, I have a pretty strong French accent, so that's going to be clear in a moment.Maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about. And I suspect many of you gave something to the people of Haiti this year. And there is something else I believe in the back of your mind you also know. That is, every day, 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes. That's a Haiti earthquake every eight days. And I suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well, but somehow it doesn't happen with the same intensity.So why is that? Well, here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine you have a few million dollars that you've raised — maybe you're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend. You want to spend it on the poor: How do you go about it? Do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money? That we know how to eradicate poverty, we just need to do more? Or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help, on the contrary it might hurt, it might exacerbate corruption, dependence, etc.? Or maybe you turn to the past. After all, we have spent billions of dollars on aid. Maybe you look at the past and see. Has it done any good?And, sadly, we don't know. And worst of all, we will never know. And the reason is that — take Africa for example. Africans have already got a lot of aid. These are the blue bars. And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is. There's only one Africa.So what do you do? To give the aid, and hope and pray that something comes out of it? Or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen? The thing is, if we don't know whether we are doing any good, we are not any better than the Medieval doctors and their leeches. Sometimes the patient gets better, sometimes the patient dies. Is it the leeches? Is it something else? We don't know.So here are some other questions. They're smaller questions, but they are not that small. Immunization, that's the cheapest way to save a child's life. And the world has spent a lot of money on it: The GAVI and the Gates Foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it, and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort. And yet, every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. So this is what you call a ""last mile problem."" The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. So you have your million. How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem?And here's another question: Malaria. Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. In fact, that is the leading cause of under-five mortality. We already know how to kill malaria, but some people come to you and say, ""You have your millions. How about bed nets?"" Bed nets are very cheap. For 10 dollars, you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them. And, not only do they protect the people who sleep under them, but they have these great contagion benefits. If half of a community sleeps under a net, the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread. And yet, only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net. Societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net, give them for free, or, for that matter, pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits. ""Not so fast,"" say other people. ""If you give the nets for free, people are not going to value them. They're not going to use them, or at least they're not going to use them as bed nets, maybe as fishing nets."" So, what do you do? Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? How do you know?And a third question: Education. Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. But how do you do that? Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? Do you provide school lunch? How do you know?So here is the thing. I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. But these three questions, I can answer them. It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. And I'll give you some examples with those three questions.So I start with immunization. Here's Udaipur District, Rajasthan. Beautiful. Well, when I started working there, about one percent of children were fully immunized. That's bad, but there are places like that. Now, it's not because the vaccines are not there — they are there and they are free — and it's not because parents do not care about their kids. The same child that is not immunized against measles, if they do get measles, parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them. So you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals. So what is the problem? Well, part of the problem, surely, is people do not fully understand. After all, in this country as well, all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization. So if that's the case, that's difficult, because persuasion is really difficult. But maybe there is another problem as well. It's going from intention to action. Imagine you are a mother in Udaipur District, Rajasthan. You have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized. And maybe when you get there, what you find is this: The subcenter is closed. Ao you have to come back, and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do, you will always tend to postpone and postpone, and eventually it gets too late. Well, if that's the problem, then that's much easier. Because A, we can make it easy, and B, we can maybe give people a reason to act today, rather than wait till tomorrow.So these are simple ideas, but we didn't know. So let's try them. So what we did is we did a randomized, controlled trial in 134 villages in Udaipur Districts. So the blue dots are selected randomly. We made it easy — I'll tell you how in a moment. In the red dots, we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now. The white dots are comparisons, nothing changed. So we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized. And then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization. Now, a kilo of lentils is tiny. It's never going to convince anybody to do something that they don't want to do. On the other hand, if your problem is you tend to postpone, then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later.So what do we find? Well, beforehand, everything is the same. That's the beauty of randomization. Afterwards, the camp — just having the camp — increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent. That's full immunization. That's not bad, that's a good improvement. Add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent. So here you've got your answer. Make it easy and give a kilo of lentils, you multiply immunization rate by six. Now, you might say, ""Well, but it's not sustainable. We cannot keep giving lentils to people."" Well, it turns out it's wrong economics, because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them. Since you have to pay for the nurse anyway, the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you don't.How about bed nets? Should you give them for free, or should you ask people to pay for them? So the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions. One is: If people must pay for a bed net, are they going to purchase them? The second one is: If I give bed nets for free, are people going to use them? And the third one is: Do free bed nets discourage future purchase? The third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts, it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets. Now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric. It's more ideological than practical, but it turns out it's an easy question. We can know the answer to this question. We can just run an experiment. And many experiments have been run, and they all have the same results, so I'm just going to talk to you about one.And this one that was in Kenya, they went around and distributed to people vouchers, discount vouchers. So people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy. And some people get 100 percent discount, and some people get 20 percent discounts, and some people get 50 percent discount, etc. And now we can see what happens. So, how about the purchasing? Well, what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets, the coverage rate really falls down a lot. So even with partial subsidy, three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net, and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets, you lose the health immunity, that's not great. Second thing is, how about the use? Well, the good news is, people, if they have the bed nets, will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it. If they get it for free, they use it. If they have to pay for it, they use it. How about the long term? In the long term, people who got the free bed nets, one year later, were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars. And people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who didn't get a free one. So people do not get used to handouts; they get used to nets. Maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit.So, that's for bed nets. So you will think, ""That's great. You know how to immunize kids, you know how to give bed nets."" But what politicians need is a range of options. They need to know: Out of all the things I could do, what is the best way to achieve my goals? So suppose your goal is to get kids into school. There are so many things you could do. You could pay for uniforms, you could eliminate fees, you could build latrines, you could give girls sanitary pads, etc., etc. So what's the best? Well, at some level, we think all of these things should work. So, is that sufficient? If we think they should work intuitively, should we go for them? Well, in business, that's certainly not the way we would go about it.Consider for example transporting goods. Before the canals were invented in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, goods used to go on horse carts. And then canals were built, and with the same horseman and the same horse, you could carry ten times as much cargo. So should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts, on the ground, that they would eventually get there? Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. So why shouldn't we do the same with social policy? In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something, so why aren't we doing that with social policy?Well, with experiments, what you can do is answer a simple question. Suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions. How many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars? Now I'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions. So the first ones are if you want the usual suspects, hire teachers, school meals, school uniforms, scholarships. And that's not bad. For your hundred dollars, you get between one and three extra years of education. Things that don't work so well is bribing parents, just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money. And here are the most surprising results. Tell people the benefits of education, that's very cheap to do. So for every hundred dollars you spend doing that, you get 40 extra years of education. And, in places where there are worms, intestinal worms, cure the kids of their worms. And for every hundred dollars, you get almost 30 extra years of education. So this is not your intuition, this is not what people would have gone for, and yet, these are the programs that work. We need that kind of information, we need more of it, and then we need to guide policy.So now, I started from the big problem, and I couldn't answer it. And I cut it into smaller questions, and I have the answer to these smaller questions. And they are good, scientific, robust answers.So let's go back to Haiti for a moment. In Haiti, about 200,000 people died — actually, a bit more by the latest estimate. And the response of the world was great: Two billion dollars got pledged just last month, so that's about 10,000 dollars per death. That doesn't sound like that much when you think about it. But if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies, that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem. And yet it doesn't happen. So, why is that? Well, I think what part of the problem is that, in Haiti, although the problem is huge, somehow we understand it, it's localized. You give your money to Doctors Without Borders, you give your money to Partners In Health, and they'll send in the doctors, and they'll send in the lumber, and they'll helicopter things out and in. And the problem of poverty is not like that. So, first, it's mostly invisible; second, it's huge; and third, we don't know whether we are doing the right thing. There's no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty. And that's very frustrating.But look what we just did today. I gave you three simple answers to three questions: Give lentils to immunize people, provide free bed nets, deworm children. With immunization or bed nets, you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved. With deworming, you can get an extra year of education for three dollars. So we cannot eradicate poverty just yet, but we can get started. And maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective.Here's an example of how this can be powerful. Deworming. Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines. They are not beautiful and don't kill anybody. And yet, when the young global leader in Davos showed the numbers I gave you, they started Deworm the World. And thanks to Deworm the World, and the effort of many country governments and foundations, 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009. So this evidence is powerful. It can prompt action.So we should get started now. It's not going to be easy. It's a very slow process. You have to keep experimenting, and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality. And sometimes what works somewhere doesn't work elsewhere. So it's a slow process, but there is no other way. These economics I'm proposing, it's like 20th century medicine. It's a slow, deliberative process of discovery. There is no miracle cure, but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year, and we can do the same thing.And now, maybe, we can go back to the bigger question that I started with at the beginning. I cannot tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference, but can we come back here in 30 years and say, ""What we have done, it really prompted a change for the better."" I believe we can and I hope we will.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_fight_poverty
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"How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. And yet, they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded — and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. There's something else at play here.About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it the golden circle.Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by ""why"" I don't mean ""to make a profit."" That's a result. It's always a result. By ""why,"" I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out.Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: ""We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?"" ""Meh."" That's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that. Here's our new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform for our clients. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. Buy our car. But it's uninspiring.Here's how Apple actually communicates. ""Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?"" Totally different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just reversed the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it.This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. As I said before, Apple's just a computer company. Nothing distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors. Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. They've been making flat-screen monitors for years. Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products — and nobody bought one. In fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell. Why would you buy one from a computer company? But we do it every day. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the ""what"" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, ""I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right."" Why would we use that verb, it doesn't ""feel"" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn't control language. The best we can muster up is, ""I don't know.  It just doesn't feel right."" Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language.But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. Nowhere else is there a better example than with the Wright brothers.Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Even now, you ask people, ""Why did your product or why did your company fail?"" and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop. Not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur. And The New York Times followed them around nowhere.The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper.And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: the day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, ""That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology,"" but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit.People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation, if you don't know the law, you know the terminology. The first 2.5% of our population are our innovators. The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. The next 34% are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore.(Laughter)We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. I love asking businesses, ""What's your conversion on new business?"" They love to tell you, ""It's about 10 percent,"" proudly. Well, you can trip over 10% of the customers. We all have about 10% who just ""get it."" That's how we describe them, right? That's like that gut feeling, ""Oh, they just get it.""The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, ""Crossing the Chasm"" — because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It's because they wanted to be first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: they were first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions. You should have success then. Look at TiVo. From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. They were extremely well-funded. Market conditions were fantastic. I mean, we use TiVo as verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time.(Laughter)But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes.Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. They said, ""We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking."" And the cynical majority said, ""We don't believe you. We don't need it. We don't like it. You're scaring us.""What if they had said, ""If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc."" People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe.Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ""I believe, I believe, I believe,"" he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white.Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by men. And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. By the way, he gave the ""I have a dream"" speech, not the ""I have a plan"" speech.(Laughter)Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring anybody. Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with ""why"" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action
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"I'm an ecologist, mostly a coral reef ecologist. I started out in Chesapeake Bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight. And it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years. I mean, somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet. And that was what I did.And I ended up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life. And this picture here, it's really interesting, it shows two things: First of all, it's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far, and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s, you took pictures in black and white. The other thing it shows you is that, although there's this beautiful forest of coral, there are no fish in that picture.Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years. We were the best and the brightest. People came to study our reefs from Australia, which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs. And the view of scientists about how coral reefs work, how they ought to be, was based on these reefs without any fish. Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen. I put half the lab up in my house. The wind blew very strong. The waves were 25 to 50 feet high. And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, ""Well, we're real smart. We know that hurricanes have always happened in the past."" And we published a paper in Science, the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane. And we predicted what would happen, and we got it all wrong. And the reason was because of overfishing, and the fact that a last common grazer, a sea urchin, died. And within a few months after that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow. And that is the same reef; that's the same reef 15 years ago; that's the same reef today. The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime. And that's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and increasingly, tragically, the coral reefs worldwide.Now, that's my little, depressing story. All of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories. There are tens of thousands of those stories out there, and it's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being, because it just keeps getting worse. And the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery, but what's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that. And so I'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things.We hear a lot about the collapse of cod. It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod. Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe. It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song ""Jamaica Farewell"" — ""Ackee rice salt fish are nice"" — is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada. It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s: 35,000 people lost their jobs. And that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species, from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world, and what have you. It's a little hard to understand that, because you can go to a Costco in the United States and buy cheap fish. You ought to read the label to find out where it came from, but it's still cheap, and everybody thinks it's okay.It's hard to communicate this, and one way that I think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish, because people like to go out and catch fish. It's one of those things. This picture here shows the trophy fish, the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat, go to a place off of Key West in Florida, drink a lot of beer, throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water, come back with the biggest and the best fish, and the champion trophy fish are put on this board, where people take a picture, and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish. Well, that's what it's like now, but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock. The trophy fish were so big that you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it. And the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper, and if you wanted to go out and kill something, you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish. And they tasted really good. And people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little, tiny fish. And that's everywhere.It's not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. We use nets that are 20 miles long. We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish. Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. What it is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. We've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years.We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days. And all of that stuff is really disgusting, but what's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems. And I'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution: one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients. So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so-called killer algae. A book was written about it. It's a bit of an embarrassment. It was accidentally released from the aquarium in Monaco, it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria. It's very pretty, and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern Mediterranean. I don't know how many of you remember the movie ""The Little Shop of Horrors,"" but this is the plant of ""The Little Shop of Horrors."" But, instead of devouring the people in the shop, what it's doing is overgrowing and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern Mediterranean Sea. We don't know anything that eats it, we're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done, but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do.Now another form of pollution that's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients. The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it. It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it. It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water. But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton. And when it dies, it falls to the bottom and then it rots, which means that bacteria break it down. And in the process they use up all the oxygen, and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that can't swim away. So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you. And the only fishery left — and it is a commercial fishery — is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right, where there used to be prawns. Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery.And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms. That picture on the left is just staggering to me. I have talked about it a million times, but it's unbelievable. In the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the Mississippi Delta, and the lower left of that picture is the Texas-Mexico border. You're looking at the entire northwestern Gulf of Mexico; you're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish, made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right. And in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore. That's the same species. And as it comes to shore and the wind blows, and little droplets of the water get into the air, the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress. And that's retirement homes on the west coast of Florida. A friend and I did this thing in Hollywood we called Hollywood ocean night, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what's going on. And I said, ""So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu' because all the beautiful people have moved to North Dakota, where it's clean and safe. And the only people who are left there are the people who can't afford to move away from the coast, because the coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health.""And then this is amazing. It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France. This is from the coast of Brittany, which is being enveloped in this green, algal slime. The reason that it attracted so much attention, besides the fact that it's disgusting, is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die, and a farmer died of it, and you can imagine the scandal that happened. And so there's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all, and the net result is that the beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis.And then, of course, there's climate change, and we all know about climate change. I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea. Think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. Well, the Northwest Passage is already there. I think it's sort of funny; it's on the Siberian coast, maybe the Russians will charge tolls. The governments of the world are taking this really seriously. The military of the Arctic nations is taking it really seriously. For all the denial of climate change by government leaders, the CIA and the navies of Norway and the U.S. and Canada, whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view. And, of course, Arctic communities are toast.The other kinds of effects of climate change — this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right? All that white coral. Except it's supposed to be brown. What happens is that the corals are a symbiosis, and they have these little algal cells that live inside them. And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection. But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar. The corals say, ""You cheated. You didn't pay your rent."" They kick them out, and then they die. Not all of them die; some of them survive, some more are surviving, but it's really bad news. To try and give you a sense of this, imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or in North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, ""Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died."" Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died.And then the really scary thing about all of this — the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change — is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks, the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it. But what does that mean? We really don't know.So what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years? Well, there won't be any fish except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things and full of mercury, etc., etc. And dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they'll start to merge, and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global, coastal ocean. Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it, because it would be a kind of gastronomic Russian roulette. Sometimes you have a toxic bloom; sometimes you don't. That doesn't sell.The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening. As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over. We say it becomes more strongly stratified. The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, of the sardines of California or in Peru or whatever, those slow down and those fisheries collapse. And, at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert.So the question is: How are we all going to respond to this? And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson
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"I bring to you a message from tens of thousands of people — in the villages, in the slums, in the hinterland of the country — who have solved problems through their own genius, without any outside help. When our home minister announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of India, about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable, he missed the point. The point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years, the point that people may be economically poor, but they're not poor in the mind. In other words, the minds on the margin are not the marginal minds. That is the message, which we started 31 years ago. And what did it start?Let me just tell you, briefly, my personal journey, which led me to come to this point. In '85, '86, I was in Bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands, on the fields of the poor people, and how to develop research technologies, which are based on the knowledge of the people. I came back in '86. I had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that I found in that country, which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity. I started looking at my own work: The work that I had done for the previous 10 years, almost every time, had instances of knowledge that people had shared.Now, I was paid in dollars as a consultant, and I looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself: ""Is there a line in my return, which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has made it possible? Was it because I'm brilliant that I'm getting this reward, or because of the revolution? Is it that I write very well? Is it that I articulate very well? Is it that I analyze the data very well? Is it because I'm a professor, and, therefore, I must be entitled to this reward from society?"" I tried to convince myself that, ""No, no, I have worked for the policy changes. You know, the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor, and, therefore I think it's okay."" But it appeared to me that all these years that I'd been working on exploitation — exploitation by landlords, by moneylenders, by traders — gave me an insight that probably I was also an exploiter, because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of the people — those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me — and nothing ever went back to them. So much so, that much of my work till that time was in the English language.The majority of the people from whom I learned didn't know English. So what kind of a contributor was I? I was talking about social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act — of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research, wrote, read about 100 papers. And I came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique, dilemma is not unique; the solution had to be unique.And one day — I don't know what happened — while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if I only could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful. What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates. And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don't feel shortchanged. In fact, they invite the honey bees through their colors, and the bees don't keep all the honey for themselves. These are the three guiding principles of the Honey Bee Network: that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. They must not remain anonymous.And I must tell you that after 20 years, I have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of this art. That is a great tragedy — which I'm carrying still with me and I hope that all of you will carry this with you — that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making them anonymous. The research guidelines of U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Research Councils of the U.K. or of Indian Councils of Science Research do not require that whatever you learn from people, you must share back with them. We are talking about an accountable society, a society that is fair and just, and we don't even do justice in the knowledge market. And India wants to be a knowledge society. How will it be a knowledge society? So, obviously, you cannot have two principles of justice, one for yourself and one for others. It must be the same. You cannot discriminate. You cannot be in favor of your own values, which are at a distance from the values that you espouse. So, fairness to one and to the other is not divisible.Look at this picture. Can you tell me where has it been taken from, and what is it meant for? Anybody? I'm a professor; I must quiz you. (Laughter) Anybody? Any guess at all? Pardon? (Audience Member: Rajasthan.) Anil Gupta: But what has it been used for? What has it been used for? (Murmuring) Pardon? You know, you're so right. We must give him a hand, because this man knows how insensitive our government is. Look at this. This is the site of the government of India. It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. I'm so sorry to say that. Is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. If this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. We should be doing something about it. And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women still carry water on their heads. And we do not ask this question.You must have taken tea in the morning. Think for a minute. The leaves of the tea, plucked from the bushes; you know what the action is? The action is: The lady picks up a few leaves, puts them in the basket on the backside. Just do it 10 times; you will realize the pain in this shoulder. And she does it a few thousand times every day. The rice that you ate in the lunch, and you will eat today, is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture, millions of them, every season, in the paddy season, when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water. And feet in the water will develop fungus, infections, and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point. And every year, 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually. No machines have been developed.So the silence of scientists, of technologists, of public policy makers, of the change agent, drew our attention that this is not on, this is not on; this is not the way society will work. This is not what our parliament would do. You know, we have a program for employment: One hundred, 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100 days by this great country. Doing what? Breaking stones, digging earth. So we asked a question to the parliament: Do poor have heads? Do poor have legs, mouth and hands, but no head?So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. And what has happened? An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. This is what Honey Bee Network is about. And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity, the innovations, either in terms of contemporary innovations, or in terms of traditional knowledge. And it all begins with curiosity. It all begins with curiosity.This person, whom we met — and you will see it on the website, www.sristi.org — this tribal person, he had a wish. And he said, ""If my wish gets fulfilled"" — somebody was sick and he had to monitor — ""God, please cure him. And if you cure him, I will get my wall painted."" And this is what he got painted. Somebody was talking yesterday about Maslowian hierarchy. There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian model of hierarchy of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment. Kabir, Rahim, all the great Sufi saints, they were all poor people, and they had a great reason. (Applause) Please do not ever think that only after meeting your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment. Any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment, only by the resolve that they have in their mind that they must achieve something.Look at this. We saw it in Shodh Yatra. Every six months we walk in different parts of the country. I've walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years. So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel. Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting. That's the only space she could express her creativity. And she's so marvelous. Look at this lady, Ram Timari Devi, on a grain bin. In Champaran, we had a Shodh Yatra and we were walking in the land where Gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy, pain of indigo growers. Bhabi Mahato in Purulia and Bankura. Look at what she has done. The whole wall is her canvas. She's sitting there with a broom. Is she an artisan or an artist? Obviously she's an artist; she's a creative person. If we can create markets for these artists, we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones. They will be paid for what they are good at, not what they're bad at. (Applause)Look at what Rojadeen has done. In Motihari in Champaran, there are a lot of people who sell tea on the shack and, obviously, there's a limited market for tea. Every morning you have tea, as well as coffee. So he thought, why don't I convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine? So this is a coffee machine. Just takes a few hundred rupees. People bring their own cooker, he attaches a valve and a steam pipe, and now he gives you espresso coffee. (Laughter) Now, this is a real, affordable coffee percolator that works on gas. (Applause) Look at what Sheikh Jahangir has done. A lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground. So this fellow is bringing a flour-grinding machine on a two-wheeler. If you have 500 grams, 1000, one kilogram, he will grind it for it for you; the flourmill will not grind such a small quantity.Please understand the problem of poor people. They have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of energy, in terms of cost, in terms of quality. They don't want second-standard, second-quality outputs. But to be able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs. And that is what Sheikh Jahangir did. But that's not enough, what he did. Look at what he did here. If you have clothes, and you don't have enough time to wash them, he brought a washing machine to your doorstep, mounted on a two-wheeler. So here's a model where a two-wheeler washing machine ... He is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep. (Applause) You bring your water, you bring your soap, I wash the clothes for you. Charge 50 paisa, one rupee for you per lot, and a new business model can emerge. Now, what we need is, we need people who will be able to scale them up.Look at this. It looks like a beautiful photograph. But you know what it is? Can anybody guess what it is? Somebody from India would know, of course. It's a tawa. It's a hot plate made of clay. Now, what is the beauty in it? When you have a non-stick pan, it costs about, maybe, 250 rupees, five dollars, six dollars. This is less than a dollar and this is non-stick; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials. And the best part is that, while you use a costly non-stick pan, you eat the so-called Teflon or Teflon-like material because after some time the stuff disappears. Where has it gone? It has gone in your stomach. It was not meant for that. (Laughter) You know? But here in this clay hot plate, it will never go into your stomach. So it is better, it is safer; it is affordable, it is energy-efficient. In other words, solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper, need not be, so-called, jugaad, need not be some kind of makeshift arrangement.They have to be better, they have to be more efficient, they have to be affordable. And that is what Mansukh Bhai Prajapati has done. He has designed this plate with a handle. And now with one dollar, you can afford a better alternative than the people market is offering you. This lady, she developed a herbal pesticide formulation. We filed the patent for her, the National Innovation Foundation. And who knows? Somebody will license this technology and develop marketable products, and she would get revenue. Now, let me mention one thing: I think we need a polycentric model of development, where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner. Higher the local fit, greater is the chance of scaling up.In the scaling up, there's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people, point by point, with the supply that you're making. So why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch? Things can scale up, and they have scaled up. For example, cell phones: We have 400 million cellphones in this country. Now, it is possible that I use only two buttons on the cellphone, only three options on the cellphone. It has 300 options, I'm paying for 300; I'm using only three but I'm willing to live with it, therefore it is scaling up. But if I had to get a match to match, obviously, I would need a different design of a cellphone. So what we're saying is that scalability should not become an enemy of sustainability. There must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a locality, and yet, one can be able to fund them.One of the greatest studies that we've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question — ""What is a scalable model?"" — as if the need of a community, which is only located in a space and time and has those needs only located in those places, has no legitimate right to get them for free because it's not part of a larger scale. So either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out. Now, the eminent model, the long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books, for example, having only a few copies sold can still be a viable model. And we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio, will invest in the portfolio, where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities, and yet, the overall platform of the model will become viable.Look at what he is doing. Saidullah Sahib is an amazing man. At the age of 70, he is linking up something very creative.(Music)Saidullah Sahib: I couldn't wait for the boat. I had to meet my love. My desperation made me an innovator. Even love needs help from technology. Innovation is the light of my wife, Noor. New inventions are the passion of my life. My technology.(Applause)AG: Saidulluh Sahib is in Motihari, again in Champaran. Wonderful human being, but he stills sells, at this age, honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood, because we haven't been able to convince the water park people, the lake people, in [unclear] operations. And we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in Mumbai — where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers, wading in the water — that, look, you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will not go, where your transport will not go. So we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue device, as a vending device during the floods in eastern India, when you have to deliver things to people in different islands where they're marooned. But the idea has a merit. The idea has a merit.What has Appachan done? Appachan, unfortunately, is no more, but he has left behind a message. A very powerful messageAppachan: I watch the world wake up every day.(Music)It's not that a coconut fell on my head, and I came upon this idea. With no money to fund my studies, I scaled new heights. Now, they call me the local Spiderman. My technology.(Applause)AG: Many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally — what I call a G2G model, grassroots to global. And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department, bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy. And this device makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms, rather than only a few, because otherwise she had to make a big platform and then climb her [unclear] would climb on that. So, you know, we are advancing the frontiers of science.Remya Jose has developed ... you can go to the YouTube and find India Innovates and then you will find these videos. Innovation by her when she was in class 10th: a washing machine-cum-exercising machine. Mr. Kharai who is a physically challenged person, one and a half foot height, only. But he has modified a two-wheeler so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility. This innovation is from the slums of Rio. And this person, Mr. Ubirajara. We were talking about, my friends in Brazil, how we scale up this model in China and Brazil. And we have a very vibrant network in China, particularly, but also emerging in Brazil and other parts of the world. This stand on the front wheel, you will not find on any cycle. India and China have the largest number of cycles. But this innovation emerged in Brazil.The point is, none of us should be parochial, none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good ideas will come only from our country. No, we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically poor people, wherever they are. And look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations: cycle that's a sprayer, cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road. I can't change the condition of the road, but I can make the cycle run faster. That is what Kanak Das has done. And in South Africa, we had taken our innovators, and many of us had gone there share with the colleagues in South Africa as to how innovation can become a means of liberation from the drudgery that people have. And this is a donkey cart which they modified. There's an axle here, of 30, 40 kg, serving no purpose. Remove it, the cart needs one donkey less.This is in China. This girl needed a breathing apparatus. These three people in the village sat down and decided to think, ""How do we elongate the life of this girl of our village?"" They were not related to her, but they tried to find out, ""How can we use ... "" They used a cycle, they put together a breathing apparatus. And this breathing apparatus now saved the life, and she's very welcome.There's a whole range of innovations that we have. A car, which runs on compressed air with six paisa per kilometer. Assam, Kanak Gogoi. And you would not find this car in U.S. or Europe, but this is available in India. Now, this lady, she used to do the winding of the yarn for Pochampally Saree. In one day, 18,000 times, she had to do this winding to generate two sarees. This is what her son has done after seven years of struggle. She said, ""Change your profession."" He said, ""I can't. This is the only thing I know, but I'll invent a machine, which will solve your problem."" And this is what he did, a sewing machine in Uttar Pradesh. So, this is what SRISTI is saying: ""Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.""I will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity, a whole range of things. We have sold things all over the world, from Ethiopia to Turkey to U.S. to wherever. Products have gone to the market, a few. These are the people whose knowledge made this Herbavate cream for eczema possible. And here, a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every time a user uses it, it asks the user, ""You can also be an innovator. If you have an idea, send it back to us."" So, creativity counts, knowledge matters, innovations transform, incentives inspire. And incentives: not just material, but also non-material incentives.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_gupta_india_s_hidden_hotbeds_of_invention
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"I've been playing TED for nearly a decade, and I've very rarely played any new songs of my own. And that was largely because there weren't any.(Laughter)So I've been busy with a couple of projects, and one of them was this: The Nutmeg. A 1930s ship's lifeboat, which I've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in England. And, so now, when the polar ice caps melt, my recording studio will rise up like an ark, and I'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel. During the day, the Nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse, and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast. So that when it gets dark, I've got plenty of power. And I can light up the Nutmeg like a beacon. And so I go in there until the early hours of the morning, and I work on new songs. I'd like to play to you guys, if you're willing to be the first audience to hear it.(Applause)It's about Billie Holiday. And it appears that, some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night, until she reappeared in the morning. But I know where she was. She was with me on my lifeboat. And she was hot.(Music)♫ Billie crept softly ♫♫ into my waking arms ♫♫ warm like a sip of sour mash ♫♫ Strange fruit for ♫♫ a sweet hunk of trash ♫♫ Panic at the stage door ♫♫ of Carnegie Hall ♫♫ ""Famous Jazz Singer Gone AWOL"" ♫♫ Must have left the building ♫♫ body and soul ♫♫ On a creaky ♫♫ piano stool tonight ♫♫ as the moon is my ♫♫ only witness ♫♫ She was breathing ♫♫ in my ear ♫♫ ""This time it's love"" ♫♫ But love is a loaded pistol ♫♫ By daybreak she's gone ♫♫ Over the frozen river, home ♫♫ Me and Johnny Walker ♫♫ See in the new age ♫♫ alone ♫♫ Stay with me ♫♫ again tonight ♫♫ Billie, time, ♫♫ time is a wily trickster ♫♫ Still an echo ♫♫ in my heart says, ♫♫ ""This time it's love"" ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pistol
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"For me, this story begins about 15 years ago, when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago. And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the South Side of Chicago. And I was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness. And in my lab, I was studying the widower effect, which is a very old idea in the social sciences, going back 150 years, known as ""dying of a broken heart."" So, when I die, my wife's risk of death can double, for instance, in the first year. And I had gone to take care of one particular patient, a woman who was dying of dementia. And in this case, unlike this couple, she was being cared for by her daughter. And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother. And the daughter's husband, he also was sick from his wife's exhaustion. And I was driving home one day, and I get a phone call from the husband's friend, calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend. So here I get this call from this random guy that's having an experience that's being influenced by people at some social distance.And so I suddenly realized two very simple things: First, the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives. And second, it was not restricted to pairs of people. And I started to see the world in a whole new way, like pairs of people connected to each other. And then I realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby. And then, in fact, these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships: marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties. And that, in fact, these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other. So I started to see the world in a completely new way and I became obsessed with this. I became obsessed with how it might be that we're embedded in these social networks, and how they affect our lives. So, social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous, in fact, that one has to ask what purpose they serve. Why are we embedded in social networks? I mean, how do they form? How do they operate? And how do they effect us?So my first topic with respect to this, was not death, but obesity. It had become trendy to speak about the ""obesity epidemic."" And, along with my collaborator, James Fowler, we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people I discussed earlier. So this is a slide of some of our initial results. It's 2,200 people in the year 2000. Every dot is a person. We make the dot size proportional to people's body size; so bigger dots are bigger people. In addition, if your body size, if your BMI, your body mass index, is above 30 — if you're clinically obese — we also colored the dots yellow. So, if you look at this image, right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image. But the visual complexity is still very high. It's not obvious exactly what's going on. In addition, some questions are immediately raised: How much clustering is there? Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone? How big are the clusters? How far do they reach? And, most importantly, what causes the clusters?So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters. This here shows, on the Y-axis, the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and, on the X-axis, the degrees of separation between the two people. On the far left, you see the purple line. It says that, if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. And the next bar over, the [red] line, says if your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. And then the next line over says if your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. And it's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size.Well, what might be causing this clustering? There are at least three possibilities: One possibility is that, as I gain weight, it causes you to gain weight. A kind of induction, a kind of spread from person to person. Another possibility, very obvious, is homophily, or, birds of a feather flock together; here, I form my tie to you because you and I share a similar body size. And the last possibility is what is known as confounding, because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on. And here, the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain, nor that I preferentially form a tie with you because you and I share the same body size, but rather that we share a common exposure to something, like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time.When we studied these data, we found evidence for all of these things, including for induction. And we found that if your friend becomes obese, it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period. There can be many mechanisms for this effect: One possibility is that your friends say to you something like — you know, they adopt a behavior that spreads to you — like, they say, ""Let's go have muffins and beer,"" which is a terrible combination. (Laughter) But you adopt that combination, and then you start gaining weight like them. Another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight, and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is. Here, what's spreading from person to person is not a behavior, but rather a norm: An idea is spreading.Now, headline writers had a field day with our studies. I think the headline in The New York Times was, ""Are you packing it on? Blame your fat friends."" (Laughter) What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers had a different take: They said, ""Are your friends gaining weight? Perhaps you are to blame."" (Laughter) And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America, and a kind of self-serving, ""not my responsibility"" kind of phenomenon.Now, I want to be very clear: We do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all. Our next questions was: Could we actually visualize this spread? Was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person? And this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure, the architecture of the ties, was changing across time. In addition, because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic, there's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic — if we find that guy, there was a spread of obesity out from him — it's a multicentric epidemic. Lots of people are doing things at the same time. And I'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and James five years of our lives to do. So, again, every dot is a person. Every tie between them is a relationship. We're going to put this into motion now, taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years.The dot sizes are going to grow, you're going to see a sea of yellow take over. You're going to see people be born and die — dots will appear and disappear — ties will form and break, marriages and divorces, friendings and defriendings. A lot of complexity, a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic. And, by the end, you're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network. Now, when looked at this, it changed the way I see things, because this thing, this network that's changing across time, it has a memory, it moves, things flow within it, it has a kind of consistency — people can die, but it doesn't die; it still persists — and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time.And so, I came to see these kinds of social networks as living things, as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand. And we used a variety of techniques to do this. And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena. We looked at smoking and drinking behavior, and voting behavior, and divorce — which can spread — and altruism. And, eventually, we became interested in emotions. Now, when we have emotions, we show them. Why do we show our emotions? I mean, there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside, you know, anger or happiness. But we don't just experience them, we show them. And not only do we show them, but others can read them. And, not only can they read them, but they copy them. There's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations. And so this function of emotions suggests that, in addition to any other purpose they serve, they're a kind of primitive form of communication. And that, in fact, if we really want to understand human emotions, we need to think about them in this way.Now, we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way, in simple, sort of, brief periods of time. So, for example, I was giving this talk recently in New York City, and I said, ""You know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you, and you just instinctively smile back?"" And they looked at me and said, ""We don't do that in New York City."" (Laughter) And I said, ""Everywhere else in the world, that's normal human behavior."" And so there's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other. And, in fact, emotional contagion can be broader still. Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger, as in riots. The question that we wanted to ask was: Could emotion spread, in a more sustained way than riots, across time and involve large numbers of people, not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car? Maybe there's a kind of below the surface, quiet riot that animates us all the time. Maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks. Maybe, in fact, emotions have a collective existence, not just an individual existence.And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon. Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network. There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch.(Laughter)So, this work with emotions, which are so fundamental, then got us to thinking about: Maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes. Because human social networks, whenever they are mapped, always kind of look like this: the picture of the network. But they never look like this. Why do they not look like this? Why don't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice? Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure.And notice first of all — so, to understand this, though, we need to dissect network structure a little bit first — and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person. But that's not the case with real networks. So, for example, here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university. And now I'm highlighting a few dots. If you look here at the dots, compare node B in the upper left to node D in the far right; B has four friends coming out from him and D has six friends coming out from him. And so, those two individuals have different numbers of friends. That's very obvious, we all know that. But certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious.Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left. Now, those people both have four friends, but A's friends all know each other, and B's friends do not. So the friend of a friend of A's is, back again, a friend of A's, whereas the friend of a friend of B's is not a friend of B's, but is farther away in the network. This is known as transitivity in networks. And, finally, compare nodes C and D: C and D both have six friends. If you talk to them, and you said, ""What is your social life like?"" they would say, ""I've got six friends. That's my social experience."" But now we, with a bird's eye view looking at this network, can see that they occupy very different social worlds. And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you: Who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network? Would you rather be C or D? You'd rather be D, on the edge of the network. And now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip — not about you — was spreading through the network? (Laughter) Now, you would rather be C.So different structural locations have different implications for your life. And, in fact, when we did some experiments looking at this, what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes. And this is not surprising. We know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious. That's obvious. But we also found some non-obvious things. For instance, 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes. Whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes, but with yours. And we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other — you know who you are — and others of you keep them apart and don't introduce your friends to each other. And so some people knit together the networks around them, creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they're comfortably embedded. And finally, we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes. So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable.Now, what is the point of this? How does this help us understand? How does this help us figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days? Well, the argument I'd like to make is that networks have value. They are a kind of social capital. New properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks, and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks, not just in the individuals within them. So think about these two common objects. They're both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way — on the left — and you get graphite, which is soft and dark. But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms. So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is not just what's happening to these people — whether they're losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy — that affects us; it's also the actual architecture of the ties around us.Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism. Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. Like, for example, a hive of bees that's finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that's evading a predator, or a flock of birds that's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that's able to bring down larger prey. Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena — like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption.Now, look at this. I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_the_hidden_influence_of_social_networks
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"We invent. My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun — invention is a lot of fun to do — and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it. So we do this fun and profit-oriented inventing for most of what we do, but we also have a program where we invent for humanity — where we take some of our best inventors, and we say, ""Are there problems where we have a good idea for solving a problem the world has?"" — and to solve it in the way we try to solve problems, which is with dramatic, crazy, out-of-the-box solutions. Bill Gates is one of those smartest guys of ours that work on these problems and he also funds this work, so thank you. So I'm going to briefly discuss a couple of problems that we have and a couple of problems where we've got some solutions underway.Vaccination is one of the key techniques in public health, a fantastic thing. But in the developing world a lot of vaccines spoil before they're administered, and that's because they need to be kept cold. Almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures. They go bad very quickly if you don't, and if you don't have stable power grid, this doesn't happen, so kids die. It's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters; it's the fact that those kids don't get vaccinated. This is one of the ways that vaccines are carried: These are Styrofoam chests. These are being carried by people, but they're also put on the backs of pickup trucks. We've got a different solution. Now, one of these Styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it.And we thought, well, that's not really good enough. So we made this thing. This lasts six months with no power; absolutely zero power, because it loses less than a half a watt. Now, this is our second generations prototype. The third generation prototype is, right now, in Uganda being tested. Now, the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas: One is that this is similar to a cryogenic Dewar, something you'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in. They have incredible insulation, so let's put some incredible insulation here. The other idea is kind of interesting, which is, you can't reach inside anymore. Because if you open it up and reach inside, you'd let the heat in, the game would be over. So the inside of this thing actually looks like a Coke machine. It vends out little individual vials. So a simple idea, which we hope is going to change the way vaccines are distributed in Africa and around the world.We'll move on to malaria. Malaria is one of the great public health problems. Esther Duflo talked a little bit about this. Two hundred million people a year. Every 43 seconds a child in Africa dies; 27 will die during my talk. And there's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved. Another comment of Esther's was that we react when there's a tragedy like Haiti, but that tragedy is ongoing. So what can we do about it? Well, there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria. You can spray; the problem is there are environmental issues. You can try to treat people and create awareness. That's great, except the places that have malaria really bad, they don't have health care systems. A vaccine would be a terrific thing, only they don't work yet. People have tried for a long time. There are a couple of interesting candidates. It's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for. You can distribute bed nets, and bed nets are very effective if you use them. You don't always use them for that. People fish with them. They don't always get to everyone. And bed nets have an effect on the epidemic, but you're never going to make it extinct with bed nets.Now, malaria is an incredibly complicated disease. We could spend hours going over this. It's got this sort of soap opera-like lifestyle; they have sex, they burrow into your liver, they tunnel into your blood cells ... it's an incredibly complicated disease, but that's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria: There's a lot of potential ways in. One of those ways might be better diagnosis. So we hope this year to prototype each of these devices. One does an automatic malaria diagnosis in the same way that a diabetic's glucose meter works: You take a drop of blood, you put it in there and it automatically tells you. Today, you need to do a complicated laboratory procedure, create a bunch of microscope slides and have a trained person examine it.The other thing is, you know, it would be even better if you didn't have to draw the blood. And if you look through the eye, or you look at the vessels on the white of the eye, in fact, you may be able to do this directly, without drawing any blood at all, or through your nail beds. Because if you actually look through your fingernails, you can see blood vessels, and once you see blood vessels, we think we can see the malaria. We can see it because of this molecule called hemozoin. It's produced by the malaria parasite and it's a very interesting crystalline substance. Interesting, anyway, if you're a solid-state physicist. There's a lot of cool stuff we can do with it.This is our femtosecond laser lab. So this creates pulses of light that last a femtosecond. That's really, really, really short. This is a pulse of light that's only about one wavelength of light long, so it's a whole bunch of photons all coming and hitting simultaneously. It creates a very high peak power and it lets you do all kinds of interesting things; in particular, it lets you find hemozoin. So here's an image of red blood cells, and now we can actually map where the hemozoin and where the malaria parasites are inside those red blood cells. And using both this technique and other optical techniques, we think we can make those diagnostics. We also have another hemozoin-oriented therapy for malaria: a way, in acute cases, to actually take the malaria parasite and filter it out of the blood system. Sort of like doing dialysis, but for relieving the parasite load.This is our thousand-core supercomputer. We're kind of software guys, and so nearly any problem that you pose, we like to try to solve with some software. One of the problems that you have if you're trying to eradicate malaria or reduce it is you don't know what's the most effective thing to do. Okay, we heard about bed nets earlier. You spend a certain amount per bed net. Or you could spray. You can give drug administration. There's all these different interventions but they have different kinds of effectiveness. How can you tell? So we've created, using our supercomputer, the world's best computer model of malaria, which we'll show you now.We picked Madagascar. We have every road, every village, every, almost, square inch of Madagascar. We have all of the precipitation data and the temperature data. That's very important because the humidity and precipitation tell you whether you've got standing pools of water for the mosquitoes to breed. So that sets the stage on which you do this. You then have to introduce the mosquitoes, and you have to model that and how they come and go. Ultimately, it gives you this. This is malaria spreading across Madagascar. And this is this latter part of the rainy season. We're going to the dry season now. It nearly goes away in the dry season, because there's no place for the mosquitoes to breed. And then, of course, the next year it comes roaring back. By doing these kinds of simulations, we want to eradicate or control malaria thousands of times in software before we actually have to do it in real life; to be able to simulate both the economic trade-offs — how many bed nets versus how much spraying? — or the social trade-offs — what happens if unrest breaks out?We also try to study our foe. This is a high-speed camera view of a mosquito. And, in a moment, we're going to see a view of the airflow. Here, we're trying to visualize the airflow around the wings of the mosquito with little particles we're illuminating with a laser. By understanding how mosquitoes fly, we hope to understand how to make them not fly. Now, one of the ways you can make them not fly is with DDT. This is a real ad. This is one of those things you just can't make up. Once upon a time, this was the primary technique, and, in fact, many countries got rid of malaria through DDT. The United States did. In 1935, there were 150,000 cases a year of malaria in the United States, but DDT and a massive public health effort managed to squelch it.So we thought, ""Well, we've done all these things that are focused on the Plasmodium, the parasite involved. What can we do to the mosquito? Well, let's try to kill it with consumer electronics."" Now, that sounds silly, but each of these devices has something interesting in it that maybe you could use. Your Blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser. Your laser printer has a mirror galvanometer that's used to steer a laser beam very accurately; that's what makes those little dots on the page. And, of course, there's signal processing and digital cameras. So what if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, in our company, this is what we call ""the pinky-suck moment.""(Laughter)What if we could do that? Now, just suspend disbelief for a moment, and let's think of what could happen if we could do that. Well, we could protect very high-value targets like clinics. Clinics are full of people that have malaria. They're sick, and so they're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes. You really want to protect them. Of course, if you do that, you could also protect your backyard. And farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to Whole Foods because our photons are 100 percent organic. (Laughter) They're completely natural.Now, it actually gets better than this. You could, if you're really smart, you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it, and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size. And then you could decide: ""Is this an insect I want to kill, or an insect I don't want to kill?"" Moore's law made computing cheap; so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down. (Laughter) Now, it turns out we only kill the female mosquitoes. They're the only ones that are dangerous. Mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs. Mosquitoes actually live ... their day-to-day nutrition comes from nectar, from flowers — in fact, in the lab, we feed ours raisins — but the female needs the blood meal. So, this sounds really crazy, right? Would you like to see it?Audience: Yeah!Nathan Myhrvold: Okay, so our legal department prepared a disclaimer, and here it is. (Laughter) Now, after thinking about this a little bit we thought, you know, it probably would be simpler to do this with a nonlethal laser. So, Eric Johanson, who built the device, actually, with parts from eBay; and Pablos Holman over here, he's got mosquitoes in the tank. We have the device over here. And we're going to show you, instead of the kill laser, which will be a very brief, instantaneous pulse, we're going to have a green laser pointer that's going to stay on the mosquito for, actually, quite a long period of time; otherwise, you can't see it very well. Take it away Eric.Eric Johanson: What we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage. And we have ... this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around. And Pablos, if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around. Now, that's a fairly straightforward image processing routine, and let me show you how it works. Here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they're flying around, which is kind of fun. Next we can actually light them up with a laser. (Laughter) Now, this is a low powered laser, and we can actually pick up a wing-beat frequency. So you may be able to hear some mosquitoes flying around.NM: That's a mosquito wing beat you're hearing.EJ: Finally, let's see what this looks like. There you can see mosquitoes as they fly around, being lit up. This is slowed way down so that you have an opportunity to see what's happening. Here we have it running at high-speed mode. So this system that was built for TED is here to illustrate that it is technically possible to actually deploy a system like this, and we're looking very hard at how to make it highly cost-effective to use in places like Africa and other parts of the world.(Applause)NM: So it wouldn't be any fun to show you that without showing you what actually happens when we hit 'em. (Laughter) (Laughter) This is very satisfying. (Laughter) This is one of the first ones we did. The energy's a little bit high here. (Laughter) We'll loop around here in just a second, and you'll see another one. Here's another one. Bang. An interesting thing is, we kill them all the time; we've never actually gotten the wings to shut off in midair. The wing motor is very resilient. I mean, here we're blowing wings off but the wing motor keeps all the way down.So, that's what I have. Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_could_this_laser_zap_malaria
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"I'm going to tell you two things today: One is what we have lost, and two, a way to bring it back. And let me start with this. This is my baseline: This is the Mediterranean coast with no fish, bare rock and lots of sea urchins that like to eat the algae. Something like this is what I first saw when I jumped in the water for the first time in the Mediterranean coast off Spain. Now, if an alien came to earth — let's call him Joe — what would Joe see? If Joe jumped in a coral reef, there are many things the alien could see. Very unlikely, Joe would jump on a pristine coral reef, a virgin coral reef with lots of coral, sharks, crocodiles, manatees, groupers, turtles, etc. So, probably, what Joe would see would be in this part, in the greenish part of the picture. Here we have the extreme with dead corals, microbial soup and jellyfish. And where the diver is, this is probably where most of the reefs of the world are now, with very few corals, algae overgrowing the corals, lots of bacteria, and where the large animals are gone. And this is what most marine scientists have seen too. This is their baseline. This is what they think is natural because we started modern science with scuba diving long after we started degrading marine ecosystems.So I'm going to get us all on a time machine, and we're going to the left; we're going to go back to the past to see what the ocean was like. And let's start with this time machine, the Line Islands, where we have conducted a series of National Geographic expeditions. This sea is an archipelago belonging to Kiribati that spans across the equator and it has several uninhabited, unfished, pristine islands and a few inhabited islands. So let's start with the first one: Christmas Island, over 5,000 people. Most of the reefs are dead, most of the corals are dead — overgrown by algae — and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them. We did 250 hours of diving here in 2005. We didn't see a single shark. This is the place that Captain Cook discovered in 1777 and he described a huge abundance of sharks biting the rudders and the oars of their small boats while they were going ashore.Let's move the dial a little bit to the past. Fanning Island, 2,500 people. The corals are doing better here. Lots of small fish. This is what many divers would consider paradise. This is where you can see most of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. And many people think this is really, really beautiful, if this is your baseline. If we go back to a place like Palmyra Atoll, where I was with Jeremy Jackson a few years ago, the corals are doing better and there are sharks. You can see sharks in every single dive. And this is something that is very unusual in today's coral reefs. But then, if we shift the dial 200, 500 years back, then we get to the places where the corals are absolutely healthy and gorgeous, forming spectacular structures, and where the predators are the most conspicuous thing, where you see between 25 and 50 sharks per dive.What have we learned from these places? This is what we thought was natural. This is what we call the biomass pyramid. If we get all of the fish of a coral reef together and weigh them, this is what we would expect. Most of the biomass is low on the food chain, the herbivores, the parrotfish, the surgeonfish that eat the algae. Then the plankton feeders, these little damselfish, the little animals floating in the water. And then we have a lower biomass of carnivores, and a lower biomass of top head, or the sharks, the large snappers, the large groupers. But this is a consequence. This view of the world is a consequence of having studied degraded reefs.When we went to pristine reefs, we realized that the natural world was upside down; this pyramid was inverted. The top head does account for most of the biomass, in some places up to 85 percent, like Kingman Reef, which is now protected. The good news is that, in addition to having more predators, there's more of everything. The size of these boxes is bigger. We have more sharks, more biomass of snappers, more biomass of herbivores, too, like these parrot fish that are like marine goats. They clean the reef; everything that grows enough to be seen, they eat, and they keep the reef clean and allow the corals to replenish. Not only do these places — these ancient, pristine places — have lots of fish, but they also have other important components of the ecosystem like the giant clams; pavements of giant clams in the lagoons, up to 20, 25 per square meter. These have disappeared from every inhabited reef in the world, and they filter the water; they keep the water clean from microbes and pathogens.But still, now we have global warming. If we don't have fishing because these reefs are protected by law or their remoteness, this is great. But the water gets warmer for too long and the corals die. So how are these fish, these predators going to help? Well, what we have seen is that in this particular area during El Nino, year '97, '98, the water was too warm for too long, and many corals bleached and many died. In Christmas, where the food web is really trimmed down, where the large animals are gone, the corals have not recovered. In Fanning Island, the corals are not recovered. But you see here a big table coral that died and collapsed. And the fish have grazed the algae, so the turf of algae is a little lower. Then you go to Palmyra Atoll that has more biomass of herbivores, and the dead corals are clean, and the corals are coming back. And when you go to the pristine side, did this ever bleach? These places bleached too, but they recovered faster. The more intact, the more complete, [and] the more complex your food web, the higher the resilience, [and] the more likely that the system is going to recover from the short-term impacts of warming events. And that's good news, so we need to recover that structure. We need to make sure that all of the pieces of the ecosystem are there so the ecosystem can adapt to the effects of global warming.So if we have to reset the baseline, if we have to push the ecosystem back to the left, how can we do it? Well, there are several ways. One very clear way is the marine protected areas, especially no-take reserves that we set aside to allow for the recovery for marine life. And let me go back to that image of the Mediterranean. This was my baseline. This is what I saw when I was a kid. And at the same time I was watching Jacques Cousteau's shows on TV, with all this richness and abundance and diversity. And I thought that this richness belonged to tropical seas, and that the Mediterranean was a naturally poor sea. But, little did I know, until I jumped for the first time in a marine reserve. And this is what I saw, lots of fish.After a few years, between five and seven years, fish come back, they eat the urchins, and then the algae grow again. So you have this little algal forest, and in the size of a laptop you can find more than 100 species of algae, mostly microscopic fit hundreds of species of little animals that then feed the fish, so that the system recovers. And this particular place, the Medes Islands Marine Reserve, is only 94 hectares, and it brings 6 million euros to the local economy, 20 times more than fishing, and it represents 88 percent of all the tourist revenue. So these places not only help the ecosystem but also help the people who can benefit from the ecosystem.So let me just give you a summary of what no-take reserves do. These places, when we protect them, if we compare them to unprotected areas nearby, this is what happens. The number of species increases 21 percent; so if you have 1,000 species you would expect 200 more in a marine reserve. This is very substantial. The size of organisms increases a third, so your fish are now this big. The abundance, how many fish you have per square meter, increases almost 170 percent. And the biomass — this is the most spectacular change — 4.5 times greater biomass on average, just after five to seven years. In some places up to 10 times larger biomass inside the reserves.So we have all these things inside the reserve that grow, and what do they do? They reproduce. That's population biology 101. If you don't kill the fish, they take a longer time to die, they grow larger and they reproduce a lot. And same thing for invertebrates. This is the example. These are egg cases laid by a snail off the coast of Chile, and this is how many eggs they lay on the bottom. Outside the reserve, you cannot even detect this. One point three million eggs per square meter inside the marine reserve where these snails are very abundant. So these organisms reproduce, the little larvae juveniles spill over, they all spill over, and then people can benefit from them outside too. This is in the Bahamas: Nassau grouper. Huge abundance of groupers inside the reserve, and the closer you get to the reserve, the more fish you have. So the fishermen are catching more. You can see where the limits of the reserve are because you see the boats lined up. So there is spill over; there are benefits beyond the boundaries of these reserves that help people around them, while at the same time the reserve is protecting the entire habitat. It is building resilience.So what we have now — or a world without reserves — is like a debit account where we withdraw all the time and we never make any deposit. Reserves are like savings accounts. We have this principal that we don't touch; that produces returns, social, economic and ecological. And if we think about the increase of biomass inside the reserves, this is like compound interest. Two examples, again, of how these reserves can benefit people. This is how much fishermen get everyday in Kenya, fishing over a series of years, in a place where there is no protection; it's a free-for-all. Once the most degrading fishing gear, seine nets, were removed, the fishermen were catching more. If you fish less, you're actually catching more. But if we add the no-take reserve on top of that, the fishermen are still making more money by fishing less around an area that is protected.Another example: Nassau groupers in Belize in the Mesoamerican Reef. This is grouper sex, and the groupers aggregate around the full moons of December and January for a week. They used to aggregate up to the tens of thousands, 30,000 groupers about this big in one hectare, in one aggregation. Fishermen knew about these things; they caught them, and they depleted them. When I went there for the first time in 2000, there were only 3,000 groupers left. And the fishermen were authorized to catch 30 percent of the entire spawning population every year. So we did a simple analysis, and it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that, if you take 30 percent every year, your fishery is going to collapse very quickly. And with the fishery, the entire reproductive ability of the species goes extinct. It happened in many places around the Caribbean. And they would make 4,000 dollars per year, total, for the entire fishery, several fishing boats. Now, if you do an economic analysis and project what would happen if the fish were not cut, if we brought just 20 divers one month per year, the revenue would be more than 20 times higher and that would be sustainable over time.So how much of this do we have? If this is so good, if this is such a no-brainer, how much of this do we have? And you already heard that less than one percent of the ocean's protected. We're getting closer to one percent now, thanks to the protections of the Chagos Archipelago, and only a fraction of this is fully protected from fishing. Scientific studies recommend that at least 20 percent of the ocean should be protected. The estimated range is between 20 and 50 percent for a series of goals of biodiversity and fishery enhancement and resilience.Now, is this possible? People would ask: How much would that cost? Well, let's think about how much we are paying now to subsidize fishing: 35 billion dollars per year. Many of these subsidies go to destructive fishing practices. Well, there are a couple estimates of how much it would cost to create a network of protected areas covering 20 percent of the ocean that would be only a fraction of what we are now paying; the government hands out to a fishery that is collapsing. People are losing their jobs because the fisheries are collapsing. A creation of a network of reserves would provide direct employment for more than a million people plus all the secondary jobs and all the secondary benefits.So how can we do that? If it's so clear that these savings accounts are good for the environment and for people, why don't we have 20, 50 percent of the ocean? And how can we reach that goal? Well, there are two ways of getting there. The trivial solution is to create really large protected areas like the Chagos Archipelago. The problem is that we can create these large reserves only in places where there are no people, where there is no social conflict, where the political cost is really low and the economic cost is also low. And a few of us, a few organizations in this room and elsewhere are working on this.But what about the rest of the coast of the world, where people live and make a living out of fishing? Well, there are three main reasons why we don't have tens of thousands of small reserves: The first one is that people have no idea what marine reserves do, and fishermen tend to be really, really defensive when it comes to regulating or closing an area, even if it's small. Second, the governance is not right because most coastal communities around the world don't have the authority to monitor the resources to create the reserve and enforce it. It's a top down hierarchical structure where people wait for government agents to come and this is not effective. And the government doesn't have enough resources.Which takes us to the third reason, why we don't have many more reserves, is that the funding models have been wrong. NGOs and governments spend a lot of time and energy and resources in a few small areas, usually. So marine conservation and coastal protection has become a sink for government or philanthropic money, and this is not sustainable. So the solutions are just fixing these three issues. First, we need to develop a global awareness campaign to inspire local communities and governments to create no-take reserves that are better than what we have now. It's the savings accounts versus the debit accounts with no deposits. Second, we need to redesign our governance so conservation efforts can be decentralized, so conservation efforts don't depend on work from NGOs or from government agencies and can be created by the local communities, like it happens in the Philippines and a few other places. And third, and very important, we need to develop new business models. The philanthropy sink as the only way to create reserves is not sustainable. We really need to develop models, business models, where coastal conservation is an investment, because we already know that these marine reserves provide social, ecological and economic benefits.And I'd like to finish with one thought, which is that no one organization alone is going to save the ocean. There has been a lot of competition in the past, and we need to develop a new model of partnership, truly collaborative, where we are looking for complementing, not substituting. The stakes are just too high to continue the way we are going. So let's do that. Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you Enric.Enric Sala: Thank you.CA: That was a masterful job of pulling things together. First of all, your pyramid, your inverted pyramid, showing 85 percent biomass in the predators, that seems impossible. How could 85 percent survive on 15 percent?ES: Well, imagine that you have two gears of a watch, a big one and a small one. The big one is moving very slowly, and the small one is moving fast. That's basically it. The animals at the lower parts of the food chain, they reproduce very fast; they grow really fast; they produce millions of eggs. Up there, you have sharks and large fish that live 25, 30 years. They reproduce very slowly; they have a slow metabolism; and, basically, they just maintain their biomass. So, basically, the production surplus of these guys down there is enough to maintain this biomass that is not moving. They are like capacitors of the system.CA: That's very fascinating. So, really, our picture of a food pyramid is just — we have to change that completely.ES: At least in the seas. What we found in coral reefs is that the inverted pyramid is the equivalent of the Serengeti, with five lions per wildebeest. And on land, this cannot work. But at least on coral reefs are systems where there is a bottom component with structure. We think this is universal. But we have started studying pristine reefs only very recently.CA: So the numbers you presented really are astonishing. You're saying we're spending 35 billion dollars now on subsidies. It would only cost 16 billion to set up 20 percent of the ocean as marine protected areas that actually give new living choices to the fishermen as well. If the world was a smarter place, we could solve this problem for negative 19 billion dollars. We've got 19 billion to spend on health care or something.ES: And then we have the under-performance of fisheries that is 50 billion dollars. So again, one of the big solutions is have the World Trade Organization shifting the subsidies to sustainable practices.CA: Okay, so there's a lot of examples that I'm hearing out there about ending this subsidies madness. So thank you for those numbers. The last one's a personal question. A lot of the experience of people here who've been in the oceans for a long time has just been seeing this degradation, the places they saw that were beautiful getting worse, depressing. Talk to me about the feeling that you must have experienced of going to these pristine areas and seeing things coming back.ES: It is a spiritual experience. We go there to try to understand the ecosystems, to try to measure or count fish and sharks and see how these places are different from the places we know. But the best feeling is this biophilia that E.O. Wilson talks about, where humans have this sense of awe and wonder in front of untamed nature, of raw nature. And there, only there, you really feel that you are part of a larger thing or of a larger global ecosystem. And if it were not for these places that show hope, I don't think I could continue doing this job. It would be just too depressing.CA: Well, Enric, thank you so much for sharing some of that spiritual experience with us all. Thank you.ES: Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/enric_sala
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"Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something — a movie, an album, a song or a book — and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked, and you anticipated that reaction, you waited for it, and it came back, and the person hated it? So, by way of introduction, that is the exact same state in which I spent every working day of the last six years. (Laughter) I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it. I mean, it's just a losing proposition.So there's a useful stereotype about students that I see, a useful stereotype about you all. I could give you guys an algebra-two final exam, and I would expect no higher than a 25 percent pass rate. And both of these facts say less about you or my students than they do about what we call math education in the U.S. today.To start with, I'd like to break math down into two categories. One is computation; this is the stuff you've forgotten. For example, factoring quadratics with leading coefficients greater than one. This stuff is also really easy to relearn, provided you have a really strong grounding in reasoning. Math reasoning — we'll call it the application of math processes to the world around us — this is hard to teach. This is what we would love students to retain, even if they don't go into mathematical fields. This is also something that, the way we teach it in the U.S. all but ensures they won't retain it. So, I'd like to talk about why that is, why that's such a calamity for society, what we can do about it and, to close with, why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher.So first, five symptoms that you're doing math reasoning wrong in your classroom. One is a lack of initiative; your students don't self-start. You finish your lecture block and immediately you have five hands going up asking you to re-explain the entire thing at their desks. Students lack perseverance. They lack retention; you find yourself re-explaining concepts three months later, wholesale. There's an aversion to word problems, which describes 99 percent of my students. And then the other one percent is eagerly looking for the formula to apply in that situation. This is really destructive.David Milch, creator of ""Deadwood"" and other amazing TV shows, has a really good description for this. He swore off creating contemporary drama, shows set in the present day, because he saw that when people fill their mind with four hours a day of, for example, ""Two and a Half Men,"" no disrespect, it shapes the neural pathways, he said, in such a way that they expect simple problems. He called it, ""an impatience with irresolution."" You're impatient with things that don't resolve quickly. You expect sitcom-sized problems that wrap up in 22 minutes, three commercial breaks and a laugh track. And I'll put it to all of you, what you already know, that no problem worth solving is that simple. I am very concerned about this because I'm going to retire in a world that my students will run. I'm doing bad things to my own future and well-being when I teach this way. I'm here to tell you that the way our textbooks — particularly mass-adopted textbooks — teach math reasoning and patient problem solving, it's functionally equivalent to turning on ""Two and a Half Men"" and calling it a day.(Laughter)In all seriousness. Here's an example from a physics textbook. It applies equally to math. Notice, first of all here, that you have exactly three pieces of information there, each of which will figure into a formula somewhere, eventually, which the student will then compute. I believe in real life. And ask yourself, what problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving where you knew all of the given information in advance; where you didn't have a surplus of information and you had to filter it out, or you didn't have sufficient information and had to go find some. I'm sure we all agree that no problem worth solving is like that. And the textbook, I think, knows how it's hamstringing students because, watch this, this is the practice problem set. When it comes time to do the actual problem set, we have problems like this right here where we're just swapping out numbers and tweaking the context a little bit. And if the student still doesn't recognize the stamp this was molded from, it helpfully explains to you what sample problem you can return to to find the formula. You could literally, I mean this, pass this particular unit without knowing any physics, just knowing how to decode a textbook. That's a shame.So I can diagnose the problem a little more specifically in math. Here's a really cool problem. I like this. It's about defining steepness and slope using a ski lift. But what you have here is actually four separate layers, and I'm curious which of you can see the four separate layers and, particularly, how when they're compressed together and presented to the student all at once, how that creates this impatient problem solving. I'll define them here: You have the visual. You also have the mathematical structure, talking about grids, measurements, labels, points, axes, that sort of thing. You have substeps, which all lead to what we really want to talk about: which section is the steepest.So I hope you can see. I really hope you can see how what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we're paving a smooth, straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way. That's all we're doing here. So I want to put to you that if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students, we can have everything we're looking for in terms of patient problem solving.So right here I start with the visual, and I immediately ask the question: Which section is the steepest? And this starts conversation because the visual is created in such a way where you can defend two answers. So you get people arguing against each other, friend versus friend, in pairs, journaling, whatever. And then eventually we realize it's getting annoying to talk about the skier in the lower left-hand side of the screen or the skier just above the mid line. And we realize how great would it be if we just had some A, B, C and D labels to talk about them more easily. And then as we start to define what does steepness mean, we realize it would be nice to have some measurements to really narrow it down, specifically what that means. And then and only then, we throw down that mathematical structure. The math serves the conversation, the conversation doesn't serve the math. And at that point, I'll put it to you that nine out of 10 classes are good to go on the whole slope, steepness thing. But if you need to, your students can then develop those substeps together.Do you guys see how this, right here, compared to that — which one creates that patient problem solving, that math reasoning? It's been obvious in my practice, to me. And I'll yield the floor here for a second to Einstein, who, I believe, has paid his dues. He talked about the formulation of a problem being so incredibly important, and yet in my practice, in the U.S. here, we just give problems to students; we don't involve them in the formulation of the problem.So 90 percent of what I do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving. And here's how it works. I like this question. It's about a water tank. The question is: How long will it take you to fill it up? First things first, we eliminate all the substeps. Students have to develop those, they have to formulate those. And then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you'll need. None of it's a distractor, so we lose that. Students need to decide, ""All right, well, does the height matter? Does the side of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here?"" Such an underrepresented question in math curriculum. So now we have a water tank. How long will it take you to fill it up? And that's it.And because this is the 21st century and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms, not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks, we go out and we take a picture of it. So now we have the real deal. How long will it take it to fill it up? And then even better is we take a video, a video of someone filling it up. And it's filling up slowly, agonizingly slowly. It's tedious. Students are looking at their watches, rolling their eyes, and they're all wondering at some point or another, ""Man, how long is it going to take to fill up?"" (Laughter) That's how you know you've baited the hook, right?And that question, off this right here, is really fun for me because, like the intro, I teach kids — because of my inexperience — I teach the kids that are the most remedial, all right? And I've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula; someone else knows how to work the formula better than me, so I won't talk about it. But here, every student is on a level playing field of intuition. Everyone's filled something up with water before, so I get kids answering the question, ""How long will it take?"" I've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation. We put names on the board, attach them to guesses, and kids have bought in here. And then we follow the process I've described. And the best part here, or one of the better parts is that we don't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher's edition. We, instead, just watch the end of the movie. (Laughter) And that's terrifying, because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher's edition, that's great, but it's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical. But those conversations have been so valuable, among the most valuable.So I'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class. These are the kids who now, one semester in, I can put something on the board, totally new, totally foreign, and they'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year, which is just so fun. We're no longer averse to word problems, because we've redefined what a word problem is. We're no longer intimidated by math, because we're slowly redefining what math is. This has been a lot of fun.I encourage math teachers I talk to to use multimedia, because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation; to let students build the problem, because Einstein said so; and to finally, in total, just be less helpful, because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways: It's buying you out of your obligation, for patient problem solving and math reasoning, to be less helpful.And why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket. It's ubiquitous and fairly cheap, and the tools to distribute it freely under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous. I put a video series on my blog not so long ago and it got 6,000 views in two weeks. I get emails still from teachers in countries I've never visited saying, ""Wow, yeah. We had a good conversation about that. Oh, and by the way, here's how I made your stuff better,"" which, wow. I put this problem on my blog recently: In a grocery store, which line do you get into, the one that has one cart and 19 items or the line with four carts and three, five, two and one items. And the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom, but it eventually got me on ""Good Morning America"" a few weeks later, which is just bizarre, right?And from all of this, I can only conclude that people, not just students, are really hungry for this. Math makes sense of the world. Math is the vocabulary for your own intuition. So I just really encourage you, whatever your stake is in education — whether you're a student, parent, teacher, policy maker, whatever — insist on better math curriculum. We need more patient problem solvers. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover
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"I have a daughter, Mulan. And when she was eight, last year, she was doing a report for school or she had some homework about frogs. And we were at this restaurant, and she said, ""So, basically, frogs lay eggs and the eggs turn into tadpoles, and tadpoles turn into frogs.""And I said, ""Yeah. You know, I'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much. It's the females, I think, that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them. And then they become tadpoles and frogs.""And she says, ""What? Only the females have eggs?""And I said, ""Yeah.""And she goes, ""And what's this fertilizing?""So I kind of said, ""Oh, it's this extra ingredient, you know, that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog."" (Laughter)And she said, ""Oh, so is that true for humans too?""And I thought, ""Okay, here we go."" I didn't know it would happen so quick, at eight. I was trying to remember all the guidebooks, and all I could remember was, ""Only answer the question they're asking. Don't give any more information."" (Laughter) So I said, ""Yes.""And she said, ""And where do, um, where do human women, like, where do women lay their eggs?""And I said, ""Well, funny you should ask. (Laughter) We have evolved to have our own pond. We have our very own pond inside our bodies. And we lay our eggs there, we don't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that. It's our own pond. And that's how it happens.""And she goes, ""Then how do they get fertilized?""And I said, ""Well, Men, through their penis, they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out. And you go through the woman's vagina.""And so we're just eating, and her jaw just drops, and she goes, ""Mom! Like, where you go to the bathroom?""And I said, ""I know. I know."" (Laughter) That's how we evolved. It does seem odd. It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park ... Bad zoning, but ..."" (Laughter)She's like, ""What?"" And she goes, ""But Mom, but men and women can't ever see each other naked, Mom. So how could that ever happen?""And then I go, ""Well,"" and then I put my Margaret Mead hat on. ""Human males and females develop a special bond, and when they're much older, much, much older than you, and they have a very special feeling, then they can be naked together.""And she said, ""Mom, have you done this before?""And I said, ""Yes.""And she said, ""But Mom, you can't have kids."" Because she knows that I adopted her and that I can't have kids.And I said, ""Yes.""And she said, ""Well, you don't have to do that again.""And I said, ""...""And then she said, ""But how does it happen when a man and woman are together? Like, how do they know that's the time? Mom, does the man just say, 'Is now the time to take off my pants?'""(Laughter)And I said, ""Yes."" (Laughter) ""That is exactly right. That's exactly how it happens.""So we're driving home and she's looking out the window, and she goes, ""Mom. What if two just people saw each other on the street, like a man and a woman, they just started doing it. Would that ever happen?""And I said, ""Oh, no. Humans are so private. Oh ...""And then she goes, ""What if there was like a party, and there was just like a whole bunch of girls and a whole bunch of boys, and there was a bunch of men and women and they just started doing it, Mom? Would that ever happen?""And I said, ""Oh, no, no. That's not how we do it.""Then we got home and we see the cat. And she goes, ""Mom, how do cats do it?""And I go, ""Oh, it's the same. It's basically the same.""And then she got all caught up in the legs. ""But how would the legs go, Mom? I don't understand the legs."" She goes, ""Mom, everyone can't do the splits.""And I go, ""I know, but the legs ..."" and I'm probably like, ""The legs get worked out.""And she goes, ""But I just can't understand it.""So I go, ""You know, why don't we go on the Internet, and maybe we can see ... like on Wikipedia."" (Laughter)So we go online, and we put in ""cats mating."" And, unfortunately, on YouTube, there's many cats mating videos. And we watched them and I'm so thankful, because she's just like, ""Wow! This is so amazing."" She goes, ""What about dogs?"" So we put in dogs mating, and, you know, we're watching it, and she's totally absorbed.And then she goes, ""Mom, do you think they would have, on the Internet, any humans mating?"" (Laughter) And then I realized that I had taken my little eight year old's hand, and taken her right into Internet porn. (Laughter)And I looked into this trusting, loving face, and I said, ""Oh, no. That would never happen.""Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.","https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_sweeney_has_the_talk
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"Good afternoon. There's a medical revolution happening all around us, and it's one that's going to help us conquer some of society's most dreaded conditions, including cancer. The revolution is called angiogenesis, and it's based on the process that our bodies use to grow blood vessels.So why should we care about blood vessels? Well, the human body is literally packed with them — 60,000 miles worth in a typical adult. End to end, that would form a line that would circle the earth twice. The smallest blood vessels are called capillaries. We've got 19 billion of them in our bodies. And these are the vessels of life, and as I'll show you, they can also be the vessels of death. Now, the remarkable thing about blood vessels is that they have this ability to adapt to whatever environment they're growing in. For example, in the liver, they form channels to detoxify the blood; in the lungs, they line air sacs for gas exchange. In muscle, they corkscrew, so that muscles can contract without cutting off circulation. And in nerves, they course along like power lines, keeping those nerves alive.We get most of these blood vessels when we're actually still in the womb. And what that means is that as adults, blood vessels don't normally grow. Except in a few special circumstances. In women, blood vessels grow every month, to build the lining of the uterus. During pregnancy, they form the placenta, which connects mom and baby. And after injury, blood vessels actually have to grow under the scab in order to heal a wound. And this is actually what it looks like, hundreds of blood vessels, all growing toward the center of the wound.So the body has the ability to regulate the amount of blood vessels that are present at any given time. It does this through an elaborate and elegant system of checks and balances, stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis, such that, when we need a brief burst of blood vessels, the body can do this by releasing stimulators, proteins called angiogenic factors, that act as natural fertilizer, and stimulate new blood vessels to sprout. When those excess vessels are no longer needed, the body prunes them back to baseline, using naturally-occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis. There are other situations where we start beneath the baseline, and we need to grow more blood vessels, just to get back to normal levels — for example, after an injury — and the body can do that too, but only to that normal level, that set point.But what we now know, is that for a number of diseases, there are defects in the system, where the body can't prune back extra blood vessels, or can't grow enough new ones in the right place at the right time. And in these situations, angiogenesis is out of balance. And when angiogenesis is out of balance, a myriad of diseases result. For example, insufficient angiogenesis — not enough blood vessels — leads to wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, legs without circulation, death from stroke, nerve damage. And on the other end, excessive angiogenesis — too many blood vessels — drives disease, and we see this in cancer, blindness, arthritis, obesity, Alzheimer's disease. In total, there are more than 70 major diseases affecting more than a billion people worldwide, that all look on the surface to be different from one another, but all actually share abnormal angiogenesis as their common denominator. And this realization is allowing us to re-conceptualize the way that we actually approach these diseases, by controlling angiogenesis.Now, I'm going to focus on cancer, because angiogenesis is a hallmark of cancer — every type of cancer. So here we go. This is a tumor: dark, gray, ominous mass growing inside a brain. And under the microscope, you can see hundreds of these brown-stained blood vessels, capillaries that are feeding cancer cells, bringing oxygen and nutrients. But cancers don't start out like this, and in fact, cancers don't start out with a blood supply. They start out as small, microscopic nests of cells, that can only grow to one half a cubic millimeter in size. That's the tip of a ballpoint pen. Then they can't get any larger because they don't have a blood supply, so they don't have enough oxygen or nutrients.In fact, we're probably forming these microscopic cancers all the time in our body. Autopsy studies from people who died in car accidents have shown that about 40 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 50 actually have microscopic cancers in their breasts. About 50 percent of men in their 50s and 60s have microscopic prostate cancers, and virtually 100 percent of us, by the time we reach our 70s, will have microscopic cancers growing in our thyroid. Yet, without a blood supply, most of these cancers will never become dangerous. Dr. Judah Folkman, who was my mentor and who was the pioneer of the angiogenesis field, once called this ""cancer without disease.""So the body's ability to balance angiogenesis, when it's working properly, prevents blood vessels from feeding cancers. And this turns out to be one of our most important defense mechanisms against cancer. In fact, if you actually block angiogenesis and prevent blood vessels from ever reaching cancer cells, tumors simply can't grow up. But once angiogenesis occurs, cancers can grow exponentially. And this is actually how a cancer goes from being harmless, to being deadly. Cancer cells mutate, and they gain the ability to release lots of those angiogenic factors, natural fertilizer, that tip the balance in favor of blood vessels invading the cancer. And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues, and the same vessels that are feeding tumors allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases. And unfortunately, this late stage of cancer is the one at which it's most likely to be diagnosed, when angiogenesis is already turned on, and cancer cells are growing like wild.So, if angiogenesis is a tipping point between a harmless cancer and a harmful one, then one major part of the angiogenesis revolution is a new approach to treating cancer by cutting off the blood supply. We call this antiangiogenic therapy, and it's completely different from chemotherapy, because it selectively aims at the blood vessels that are feeding the cancers. We can do this because tumor blood vessels are unlike normal, healthy vessels we see in other places of the body — they're abnormal, they're very poorly constructed, and because of that, they're highly vulnerable to treatments that target them. In effect, when we give cancer patients antiangiogenic therapy — here, an experimental drug for a glioma, which is a type of brain tumor — you can see that there are dramatic changes that occur when the tumor is being starved. Here's a woman with a breast cancer, being treated with the antiangiogenic drug called Avastin, which is FDA approved. And you can see that the halo of blood flow disappears after treatment.Well, I've just shown you two very different types of cancer that both responded to antiangiogenic therapy. So a few years ago, I asked myself, ""Can we take this one step further and treat other cancers, even in other species?"" So here is a nine year-old boxer named Milo, who had a very aggressive tumor called a malignant neurofibroma growing on his shoulder. It invaded into his lungs. His veterinarian only gave him three months to live. So we created a cocktail of antiangiogenic drugs that could be mixed into his dog food, as well as an antiangiogenic cream, that could be applied on the surface of the tumor. And within a few weeks of treatment, we were able to slow down that cancer's growth, such that we were ultimately able to extend Milo’s survival to six times what the veterinarian had initially predicted, all with a very good quality of life. And we've subsequently treated more than 600 dogs. We have about a 60 percent response rate, and improved survival for these pets that were about to be euthanized.So let me show you a couple of even more interesting examples. This is 20-year-old dolphin living in Florida, and she had these lesions in her mouth that, over the course of three years, developed into invasive squamous cell cancers. So we created an antiangiogenic paste. We had it painted on top of the cancer three times a week. And over the course of seven months, the cancers completely disappeared, and the biopsies came back as normal.Here's a cancer growing on the lip of a Quarter Horse named Guinness. It's a very, very deadly type of cancer called an angiosarcoma. It had already spread to his lymph nodes, so we used an antiangiogenic skin cream for the lip, and the oral cocktail, so we could treat from the inside as well as the outside. And over the course of six months, he experienced a complete remission. And here he is six years later, Guinness, with his very happy owner.(Applause)Now obviously, antiangiogenic therapy could be used for a wide range of cancers. And in fact, the first pioneering treatments for people as well as dogs, are already becoming available. There are 12 different drugs, 11 different cancer types. But the real question is: How well do these work in practice? So here's actually the patient survival data from eight different types of cancer. The bars represent survival time taken from the era in which there was only chemotherapy, or surgery, or radiation available. But starting in 2004, when antiangiogenic therapies first became available, you can see that there has been a 70 to 100 percent improvement in survival for people with kidney cancer, multiple myeloma, colorectal cancer, and gastrointestinal stromal tumors. That's impressive. But for other tumors and cancer types, the improvements have only been modest.So I started asking myself, ""Why haven't we been able to do better?"" And the answer, to me, is obvious: we're treating cancer too late in the game, when it's already established, and oftentimes, it's already spread or metastasized. And as a doctor, I know that once a disease progresses to an advanced stage, achieving a cure can be difficult, if not impossible. So I went back to the biology of angiogenesis, and started thinking: Could the answer to cancer be preventing angiogenesis, beating cancer at its own game, so the cancers could never become dangerous? This could help healthy people, as well as people who've already beaten cancer once or twice, and want to find a way to keep it from coming back.So to look for a way to prevent angiogenesis in cancer, I went back to look at cancer's causes. And what really intrigued me, was when I saw that diet accounts for 30 to 35 percent of environmentally-caused cancers. Now the obvious thing is to think about what we could remove from our diet, what to strip out, take away. But I actually took a completely opposite approach, and began asking: What could we be adding to our diet that's naturally antiangiogenic, and that could boost the body's defense system, and beat back those blood vessels that are feeding cancers? In other words, can we eat to starve cancer?(Laughter)Well, the answer is yes, and I'm going to show you how. And our search for this has taken us to the market, the farm and to the spice cabinet, because what we've discovered is that Mother Nature has laced a large number of foods and beverages and herbs with naturally-occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis.Here's a test system we developed. At the center is a ring from which hundreds of blood vessels are growing out in a starburst fashion. And we can use this system to test dietary factors at concentrations that are obtainable by eating. Let me show you what happens when we put in an extract from red grapes. The active ingredient is resveratrol, it's also found in red wine. This inhibits abnormal angiogenesis, by 60 percent. Here's what happens when we added an extract from strawberries. It potently inhibits angiogenesis. And extract from soybeans. And here is a growing list of antiangiogenic foods and beverages that we're interested in studying. For each food type, we believe that there are different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you're eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that's most potent for preventing cancer?So here are four different teas that we've tested. They're all common ones: Chinese jasmine, Japanese sencha, Earl Grey and a special blend that we prepared, and you can see clearly that the teas vary in their potency, from less potent to more potent. But what's very cool is when we combine the two less potent teas together, the combination, the blend, is more potent than either one alone. This means there's food synergy.Here's some more data from our testing. Now in the lab, we can simulate tumor angiogenesis, represented here in a black bar. And using this system, we can test the potency of cancer drugs. So the shorter the bar, the less angiogenesis — that's good. And here are some common drugs that have been associated with reducing the risk of cancer in people. Statins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and a few others — they inhibit angiogenesis, too. And here are the dietary factors going head-to-head against these drugs. You can see they clearly hold their own, and in some cases, they're more potent than the actual drugs. Soy, parsley, garlic, grapes, berries. I could go home and cook a tasty meal using these ingredients. Imagine if we could create the world's first rating system, in which we could score foods according to their antiangiogenic, cancer-preventative properties. And that's what we're doing right now.Now, I've shown you a bunch of lab data, and so the real question is: What is the evidence in people that eating certain foods can reduce angiogenesis in cancer? Well, the best example I know is a study of 79,000 men followed over 20 years, in which it was found that men who consumed cooked tomatoes two to three times a week, had up to a 50 percent reduction in their risk of developing prostate cancer. Now, we know that tomatoes are a good source of lycopene, and lycopene is antiangiogenic. But what's even more interesting from this study, is that in those men who did develop prostate cancer, those who ate more servings of tomato sauce, actually had fewer blood vessels feeding their cancer. So this human study is a prime example of how antiangiogenic substances present in food and consumed at practical levels, can have an impact on cancer. And we're now studying the role of a healthy diet — with Dean Ornish at UCSF and Tufts University — the role of this healthy diet on markers of angiogenesis that we can find in the bloodstream.Obviously, what I've shared with you has some far-ranging implications, even beyond cancer research. Because if we're right, it could impact consumer education, food services, public health and even the insurance industry. And in fact, some insurance companies are already beginning to think along these lines. Check out this ad from BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota. For many people around the world, dietary cancer prevention may be the only practical solution, because not everybody can afford expensive end-stage cancer treatments, but everybody could benefit from a healthy diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops.Now, finally, I've talked to you about food, and I've talked to you about cancer, so there's just one more disease that I have to tell you about, and that's obesity. Because it turns out that adipose tissue — fat — is highly angiogenesis-dependent. And like a tumor, fat grows when blood vessels grow. So the question is: Can we shrink fat by cutting off its blood supply? The top curve shows the body weight of a genetically obese mouse that eats nonstop until it turns fat, like this furry tennis ball.(Laughter)And the bottom curve is the weight of a normal mouse.If you take the obese mouse and give it an angiogenesis inhibitor, it loses weight. Stop the treatment, gains the weight back. Restart the treatment, loses the weight. Stop the treatment, it gains the weight back. And, in fact, you can cycle the weight up and down simply by inhibiting angiogenesis. So this approach that we're taking for cancer prevention may also have an application for obesity. The truly interesting thing about this is that we can't take these obese mice and make them lose more weight than what the normal mouse's weight is supposed to be. In other words, we can't create supermodel mice.(Laughter)And this speaks to the role of angiogenesis in regulating healthy set points.Albert Szent-Györgi once said, ""Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought.""I hope I've convinced you that for diseases like cancer, obesity and other conditions, there may be a great power in attacking their common denominator: angiogenesis. And that's what I think the world needs now.Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: I have a quick question for you.JC: So these drugs aren't exactly in mainstream cancer treatments right now. For anyone out here who has cancer, what would you recommend? Do you recommend pursuing these treatments now, for most cancer patients?William Li: There are antiangiogenic treatments that are FDA approved, and if you're a cancer patient, or working for one or advocating for one, you should ask about them. And there are many clinical trials. The Angiogenesis Foundation is following almost 300 companies, and there are about 100 more drugs in that pipeline. So, consider the approved ones, look for clinical trials, but then between what the doctor can do for you, we need to start asking what can we do for ourselves. This is one of the themes I'm talking about: We can empower ourselves to do the things that doctors can't do for us, which is to use knowledge and take action. And if Mother Nature has given us some clues, we think there might be a new future in the value of how we eat, and what we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day.JC: Right. And along those lines, for people who might have risk factors for cancer, would you recommend pursuing any treatments prophylactically, or simply pursuing the right diet, with lots of tomato sauce?WL: Well, you know, there's abundant epidemiological evidence, and I think in the information age, it doesn't take long to go to a credible source like PubMed, the National Library of Medicine, to look for epidemiological studies for cancer risk reduction based on diet and based on common medications. And that's certainly something that anybody can look into.JC: Okay. Well, thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_li
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"About a year ago, I asked myself a question: ""Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian?"" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. I started a site called TreeHugger — I care about this stuff. I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do.I also knew that I'm not alone. We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak.So why was I stalling? I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. Imagine your last hamburger. (Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. Sound familiar?So I wondered, might there be a third solution? And I thought about it, and I came up with one. I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. It's called weekday veg. The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. On the weekend, your choice. Simple. If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake.The program has been great, weekday veg. My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight.So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian
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"I want to talk about penguins today. But first, I want to start by saying that we need a new operating system, for the oceans and for the Earth. When I came to the Galapagos 40 years ago, there were 3,000 people that lived in the Galapagos. Now there are over 30,000. There were two Jeeps on Santa Cruz. Now, there are around a thousand trucks and buses and cars there. So the fundamental problems that we face are overconsumption and too many people. It's the same problems in the Galapagos, except, obviously, it's worse here, in some ways, than other places. Because we've only doubled the population of the Earth since the 1960s — a little more than doubled — but we have 6.7 billion people in the world, and we all like to consume. And one of the major problems that we have is our operating system is not giving us the proper feedback. We're not paying the true environmental costs of our actions.And when I came at age 22 to live on Fernandina, let me just say, that I had never camped before. I had never lived alone for any period of time, and I'd never slept with sea lions snoring next to me all night. But moreover, I'd never lived on an uninhabited island. Punta Espinosa is where I lived for over a year, and we call it uninhabited because there are no people there. But it's alive with life; it's hardly uninhabited. So a lot has happened in the last 40 years,and what I learned when I came to the Galapagos is the importance of wild places, wild things, certainly wildlife, and the amazing qualities that penguins have. Penguins are real athletes: They can swim 173 kilometers in a day. They can swim at the same speed day and night — that's faster than any Olympic swimmer. I mean, they can do like seven kilometers an hour and sustain it. But what is really amazing, because of this deepness here, Emperor penguins can go down more than 500 meters and they can hold their breath for 23 minutes. Magellanic penguins, the ones that I work on, they can dive to about 90 meters and they can stay down for about 4.6 minutes. Humans, without fins: 90 meters, 3.5 minutes. And I doubt anybody in this room could really hold their breath for 3.5 minutes. You have to train to be able to do that. So penguins are amazing athletes.The other thing is, I've never met anybody that really doesn't say that they like penguins. They're comical, they walk upright, and, of course, they're diligent. And, more importantly, they're well-dressed. So they have all the criteria that people normally like. But scientifically, they're amazing because they're sentinels. They tell us about our world in a lot of different ways, and particularly the ocean.This is a picture of a Galapagos penguin that's on the front of a little zodiac here in the Galapagos. And that's what I came to study. I thought I was going to study the social behavior of Galapagos penguins, but you already know penguins are rare. These are the rarest penguins in the world. Why I thought I was going to be able to do that, I don't know. But the population has changed dramatically since I was first here. When I counted penguins for the first time and tried to do a census, we just counted all the individual beaks that we could around all these islands. We counted around 2,000, so I don't know how many penguins there really are, but I know I can count 2,000. If you go and do it now, the national parks count about 500. So we have a quarter of the penguins that we did 40 years ago. And this is true of most of our living systems. We have less than we had before, and most of them are in fairly steep decline. And I want to just show you a little bit about why.(Braying)That's a penguin braying to tell you that it's important to pay attention to penguins. Most important of all, I didn't know what that was the first time I heard it. And you can imagine sleeping on Fernandina your first night there and you hear this lonesome, plaintful call. I fell in love with penguins, and it certainly has changed the rest of my life. What I found out I was studying is really the difference in how the Galapagos changes, the most extreme variation. You've heard about these El Ninos, but this is the extreme that penguins all over the world have to adapt to. This is a cold-water event called La Nina. Where it's blue and it's green, it means the water is really cold. And so you can see this current coming up — in this case, the Humboldt Current — that comes all the way out to the Galapagos Islands, and this deep undersea current, the Cromwell Current, that upwells around the Galapagos. That brings all the nutrients: When this is cold in the Galapagos, it's rich, and there's plenty of food for everyone.When we have extreme El Nino events, you see all this red, and you see no green out here around the Galapagos. That means that there's no upwelling, and there's basically no food. So it's a real desert for not only for the penguins and the sea lions and the marine iguanas ... things die when there's no food. But we didn't even know that that affected the Galapagos when I went to study penguins. And you can imagine being on an island hoping you're going to see penguins, and you're in the middle of an El Nino event and there are no penguins. They're not breeding; they're not even around. I studied marine iguanas at that point. But this is a global phenomenon, we know that.And if you look along the coast of Argentina, where I work now, at a place called Punta Tombo — the largest Magellanic penguin colony in the world down here about 44 degrees south latitude — you see that there's great variation here. Some years, the cold water goes all the way up to Brazil, and other years, in these La Nina years, it doesn't. So the oceans don't always act together; they act differently, but that is the kind of variation that penguins have to live with, and it's not easy. So when I went to study the Magellanic penguins, I didn't have any problems. There were plenty of them.This is a picture at Punta Tombo in February showing all the penguins along the beach. I went there because the Japanese wanted to start harvesting them and turning them into high fashion golf gloves, protein and oil. Fortunately, nobody has harvested any penguins and we're getting over 100,000 tourists a year to see them. But the population is declining and it's declined fairly substantially, about 21 percent since 1987, when I started these surveys, in terms of number of active nests. Here, you can see where Punta Tombo is, and they breed in incredibly dense colonies. We know this because of long-term science, because we have long-term studies there. And science is important in informing decision makers, and also in changing how we do and knowing the direction of change that we're going in.And so we have this penguin project. The Wildlife Conservation Society has funded me along with a lot of individuals over the last 27 years to be able to produce these kinds of maps. And also, we know that it's not only Galapagos penguins that are in trouble, but Magellanics and many other species of penguins. And so we have started a global penguin society to try to focus on the real plight of penguins. This is one of the plights of penguins: oil pollution. Penguins don't like oil and they don't like to swim through oil. The nice thing is, if you look down here in Argentina, there's no surface oil pollution from this composite map. But, in fact, when we went to Argentina, penguins were often found totally covered in oil. So they were just minding their own business. They ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it. Because when tankers carry oil they have to have ballast at some point, so when they're empty, they have the ballast water in there. When they come back, they actually dump this oily ballast water into the ocean. Why do they do that? Because it's cheaper, because they don't pay the real environmental costs. We usually don't, and we want to start getting the accounting system right so we can pay the real cost.At first, the Argentine government said, ""No, there's no way. You can't find oiled penguins in Argentina. We have laws, and we can't have illegal dumping; it's against the law."" So we ended up spending nine years convincing the government that there were lots of oiled penguins. In some years, like this year, we found more than 80 percent of the adult penguins dead on the beach were covered in oil. These little blue dots are the fledglings — we do this survey every March — which means that they're only in the environment from January until March, so maybe three months at the most that they could get covered in oil. And you can see, in some years over 60 percent of the fledglings were oiled.Eventually, the government listened and, amazingly, they changed their laws. They moved the tanker lanes 40 kilometers farther off shore, and people are not doing as much illegal dumping. So what we're seeing now is very few penguins are oiled. Why are there even these penguins oiled? Because we've solved the problem in Chubut province, which is like a state in Argentina where Punta Tombo is — so that's about 1,000 kilometers of coastline — but we haven't solved the problem in northern Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. So now I want to show you that penguins are affected.I'm just going to talk about two things. This is climate change. Now this has really been a fun study because I put satellite tags on the back of these Magellanic penguins. Try to convince donors to give you a couple thousand dollars to glue a satellite tag on the back of penguins. But we've been doing this now for more than a decade to learn where they go. We thought we needed a marine protected area of about 30 kilometers, and then we put a satellite tag on the back of a penguin. And what the penguins show us — and these are all the little dots from where the penguins' positions were for penguins in incubation in 2003 — and what you see is some of these individuals are going 800 kilometers away from their nests. So that means as their mate is sitting on the nest incubating the eggs, the other one is out there foraging, and the longer they have to stay gone, the worse condition the mate is in when the mate comes back. And, of course, all of this then leads to a vicious cycle and you can't raise a lot of chicks.Here you see in 2003 — these are all the dots of where the penguins are — they were raising a little over a half of a chick. Here, you can see in 2006, they raised almost three quarters of a chick per nest, and you can see that they're closer to Punta Tombo; they're not going as far away. This past year, in 2009, you can see that they're now raising about a fourth of a chick, and some of these individuals are going more than 900 kilometers away from their nests. So it's kind of like you having a job in Chicago, and then you get transferred to St. Louis, and your mate is not happy about this because you've got to pay airfare, because you're gone longer. The same thing's true for penguins as well. And they're going about, on average now, 40 kilometers farther than they did a decade ago.We need to be able to get information out to the general public. And so we started a publication with the Society for Conservation that we think presents cutting-edge science in a new, novel way, because we have reporters that are good writers that actually can distill the information and make it accessible to the general public. So if you're interested in cutting-edge science and smarter conservation, you should join with our 11 partners — some of them here in this room, like the Nature Conservancy — and look at this magazine because we need to get information out about conservation to the general public.Lastly I want to say that all of you, probably, have had some relationship at some time in your life with a dog, a cat, some sort of pet, and you recognized that those are individuals. And some of you consider them almost part of your family. If you had a relationship with a penguin, you'd see it in the same sort of way. They're amazing creatures that really change how you view the world because they're not that different from us: They're trying to make a living, they're trying to raise their offspring, they're trying to get on and survive in the world.This is Turbo the Penguin. Turbo's never been fed. He met us and got his name because he started standing under my diesel truck: a turbo truck, so we named him Turbo. Turbo has taken to knocking on the door with his beak, we let him in and he comes in here. And I just wanted to show you what happened one day when Turbo brought in a friend. So this is Turbo. He's coming up to one of my graduate students and flipper patting, which he would do to a female penguin. And you can see, he's not trying to bite. This guy has never been in before and he's trying to figure out, ""What is going on? What is this guy doing? This is really pretty weird."" And you'll see soon that my graduate student ... and you see, Turbo's pretty intent on his flipper patting. And now he's looking at the other guy, saying, ""You are really weird."" And now look at this: not friendly. So penguins really differ in their personalities just like our dogs and our cats.We're also trying to collect our information and become more technologically literate. So we're trying to put that in computers in the field. And penguins are always involved in helping us or not helping us in one way or another. This is a radio frequency ID system. You put a little piece of rice in the foot of a penguin that has a barcode, so it tells you who it is. It walks over the pad, and you know who it is.Okay, so here are a few penguins coming in. See, this one's coming back to its nest. They're all coming in at this time, walking across there, just kind of leisurely coming in. Here's a female that's in a hurry. She's got food. She's really rushing back, because it's hot, to try to feed her chicks. And then there's another fellow that will leisurely come by. Look how fat he is. He's walking back to feed his chicks. Then I realize that they're playing king of the box. This is my box up here, and this is the system that works. You can see this penguin, he goes over, he looks at those wires, does not like that wire. He unplugs the wire; we have no data.(Laughter)So, they really are pretty amazing creatures. OK. Most important thing is: Only you can change yourself, and only you can change the world and make it better, for people as well as penguins.So, thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dee_boersma_pay_attention_to_penguins
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"For the next few minutes we're going to talk about energy, and it's going to be a bit of a varied talk. I'll try to spin a story about energy, and oil's a convenient starting place. The talk will be broadly about energy, but oil's a good place to start. And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff. You take about eight or so carbon atoms, about 20 hydrogen atoms, you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid: very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels. It's great stuff. Now, as far as it goes, there's a lot of oil out there in the world.Here's my little pocket map of where it's all located. A bigger one for you to look at. But this is it, this is the oil in the world. Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is. This is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today. Now, that's just one story about oil, and we could end it there and say, ""Well, oil's going to last forever because, well, there's just a lot of it."" But there's actually more to the story than that. Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil, 1000 meters below where you're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world. Come talk to me about it, I'll fill in some of the details if you want.So, that's one of the stories of oil; there's just a lot of it. But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system? Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil, and it's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years. Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about: For the last 25 years, oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems. There was one kind of peak oil in 1985, when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply. Now, it's about 35 percent. It's been declining and I believe it will continue to decline. Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining.So oil is playing a less significant role every year. And so, 25 years ago, there was a peak oil; just like, in the 1920s, there was a peak coal; and a hundred years before that, there was a peak wood. This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems. And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades? Well, a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear, for starters. And what goes on in the future? Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas, and beyond that, peak renewables.Now, I'll tell you another little, very important story about this picture. Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total isn't increasing, it is — that's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it, we'll fill in some of the details — but there's a very important message here: This is 200 years of history, and for 200 years we've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system. Energy systems of the world becoming progressively — year on year, decade on decade, century on century — becoming less carbon intense. And that continues into the future with the renewables that we're developing today, reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century. Now that might be the end of the story — Okay, we just replace it all with conventional renewables — but I think, actually, there's more to the story than that.And to tell the next part of the story — and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond. What is the future of truly sustainable, carbon-free energy? Well, we have to take a little excursion, and we'll start in central Texas. Here's a piece of limestone. I picked it up outside of Marble Falls, Texas. It's about 400 million years old. And it's just limestone, nothing really special about it. Now, here's a piece of chalk. I picked this up at MIT. It's a little younger. And it's different than this limestone, you can see that. You wouldn't build a building out of this stuff, and you wouldn't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this. Yeah, it's very different — no, it's not different. It's not different, it's the same stuff: calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate. What's different is how the molecules are put together.Now, if you think that's kind of neat, the story gets really neat right now. Off the coast of California comes this: It's an abalone shell. Now, millions of abalone every year make this shell. Oh, by the way, just in case you weren't already guessing, it's calcium carbonate. It's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this. But it's not the same stuff; it's different. It's thousands of times, maybe 3,000 times tougher than this. And why? Because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers, making this beautiful, iridescent mother of pearl. Very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles, millions of abalone, all the time, every day, every year. This is pretty incredible stuff. All the same, what's different? How the molecules are put together.Now, what does this have to do with energy? Here's a piece of coal. And I'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk. Now, whether we're talking about fuels or energy carriers, or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells, nature hasn't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature didn't need to. Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell, the survival of a species didn't depend on building those materials, until maybe now when it might just matter. So, when we think about the future of energy, imagine what would it be like if instead of this, we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently.And so that is my story. The oil will never run out. It's not because we have a lot of it. It's not because we're going to build a bajillion windmills. It's because, well, thousands of years ago, people invented ideas — they had ideas, innovations, technology — and the Stone Age ended, not because we ran out of stones. (Laughter) It's ideas, it's innovation, it's technology that will end the age of oil, long before we run out of oil.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_sears_planning_for_the_end_of_oil
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"We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell, a cell made by starting with the digital code in the computer, building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals, assembling that chromosome in yeast, transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell and transforming that cell into a new bacterial species. So this is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer. It also is the first species to have its own website encoded in its genetic code. But we'll talk more about the watermarks in a minute.This is a project that had its inception 15 years ago when our team then — we called the institute TIGR — was involved in sequencing the first two genomes in history. We did Haemophilus influenzae and then the smallest genome of a self-replicating organism, that of Mycoplasma genitalium. And as soon as we had these two sequences we thought, if this is supposed to be the smallest genome of a self-replicating species, could there be even a smaller genome? Could we understand the basis of cellular life at the genetic level? It's been a 15-year quest just to get to the starting point now to be able to answer those questions, because it's very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell. You can only do them one at a time. We decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route, even though nobody had been there before, to see if we could synthesize a bacterial chromosome so we could actually vary the gene content to understand the essential genes for life. That started our 15-year quest to get here.But before we did the first experiments, we actually asked Art Caplan's team at the University of Pennsylvania to undertake a review of what the risks, the challenges, the ethics around creating new species in the laboratory were because it hadn't been done before. They spent about two years reviewing that independently and published their results in Science in 1999. Ham and I took two years off as a side project to sequence the human genome, but as soon as that was done we got back to the task at hand.In 2002, we started a new institute, the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, where we set out two goals: One, to understand the impact of our technology on the environment, and how to understand the environment better, and two, to start down this process of making synthetic life to understand basic life. In 2003, we published our first success. So Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison developed some new methods for making error-free DNA at a small level. Our first task was a 5,000-letter code bacteriophage, a virus that attacks only E. coli. So that was the phage phi X 174, which was chosen for historical reasons. It was the first DNA phage, DNA virus, DNA genome that was actually sequenced. So once we realized that we could make 5,000-base pair viral-sized pieces, we thought, we at least have the means then to try and make serially lots of these pieces to be able to eventually assemble them together to make this mega base chromosome. So, substantially larger than we even thought we would go initially.There were several steps to this. There were two sides: We had to solve the chemistry for making large DNA molecules, and we had to solve the biological side of how, if we had this new chemical entity, how would we boot it up, activate it in a recipient cell. We had two teams working in parallel: one team on the chemistry, and the other on trying to be able to transplant entire chromosomes to get new cells. When we started this out, we thought the synthesis would be the biggest problem, which is why we chose the smallest genome.And some of you have noticed that we switched from the smallest genome to a much larger one. And we can walk through the reasons for that, but basically the small cell took on the order of one to two months to get results from, whereas the larger, faster-growing cell takes only two days. So there's only so many cycles we could go through in a year at six weeks per cycle. And you should know that basically 99, probably 99 percent plus of our experiments failed. So this was a debugging, problem-solving scenario from the beginning because there was no recipe of how to get there.So, one of the most important publications we had was in 2007. Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another. I think philosophically, that was one of the most important papers that we've ever done because it showed how dynamic life was. And we knew, once that worked, that we actually had a chance if we could make the synthetic chromosomes to do the same with those. We didn't know that it was going to take us several years more to get there.In 2008, we reported the complete synthesis of the Mycoplasma genitalium genome, a little over 500,000 letters of genetic code, but we have not yet succeeded in booting up that chromosome. We think in part, because of its slow growth and, in part, cells have all kinds of unique defense mechanisms to keep these events from happening. It turned out the cell that we were trying to transplant into had a nuclease, an enzyme that chews up DNA on its surface, and was happy to eat the synthetic DNA that we gave it and never got transplantations. But at the time, that was the largest molecule of a defined structure that had been made.And so both sides were progressing, but part of the synthesis had to be accomplished or was able to be accomplished using yeast, putting the fragments in yeast and yeast would assemble these for us. It's an amazing step forward, but we had a problem because now we had the bacterial chromosomes growing in yeast. So in addition to doing the transplant, we had to find out how to get a bacterial chromosome out of the eukaryotic yeast into a form where we could transplant it into a recipient cell.So our team developed new techniques for actually growing, cloning entire bacterial chromosomes in yeast. So we took the same mycoides genome that Carole had initially transplanted, and we grew that in yeast as an artificial chromosome. And we thought this would be a great test bed for learning how to get chromosomes out of yeast and transplant them. When we did these experiments, though, we could get the chromosome out of yeast but it wouldn't transplant and boot up a cell. That little issue took the team two years to solve.It turns out, the DNA in the bacterial cell was actually methylated, and the methylation protects it from the restriction enzyme, from digesting the DNA. So what we found is if we took the chromosome out of yeast and methylated it, we could then transplant it. Further advances came when the team removed the restriction enzyme genes from the recipient capricolum cell. And once we had done that, now we can take naked DNA out of yeast and transplant it.So last fall when we published the results of that work in Science, we all became overconfident and were sure we were only a few weeks away from being able to now boot up a chromosome out of yeast. Because of the problems with Mycoplasma genitalium and its slow growth about a year and a half ago, we decided to synthesize the much larger chromosome, the mycoides chromosome, knowing that we had the biology worked out on that for transplantation. And Dan led the team for the synthesis of this over one-million-base pair chromosome. But it turned out it wasn't going to be as simple in the end, and it set us back three months because we had one error out of over a million base pairs in that sequence.So the team developed new debugging software, where we could test each synthetic fragment to see if it would grow in a background of wild type DNA. And we found that 10 out of the 11 100,000-base pair pieces we synthesized were completely accurate and compatible with a life-forming sequence. We narrowed it down to one fragment; we sequenced it and found just one base pair had been deleted in an essential gene. So accuracy is essential. There's parts of the genome where it cannot tolerate even a single error, and then there's parts of the genome where we can put in large blocks of DNA, as we did with the watermarks, and it can tolerate all kinds of errors. So it took about three months to find that error and repair it. And then early one morning, at 6 a.m. we got a text from Dan saying that, now, the first blue colonies existed.So, it's been a long route to get here: 15 years from the beginning. We felt one of the tenets of this field was to make absolutely certain we could distinguish synthetic DNA from natural DNA. Early on, when you're working in a new area of science, you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn't, and, even worse, leading others to believe it. So, we thought the worst problem would be a single molecule contamination of the native chromosome, leading us to believe that we actually had created a synthetic cell, when it would have been just a contaminant.So early on, we developed the notion of putting in watermarks in the DNA to absolutely make clear that the DNA was synthetic. And the first chromosome we built in 2008 — the 500,000-base pair one — we simply assigned the names of the authors of the chromosome into the genetic code, but it was using just amino acid single letter translations, which leaves out certain letters of the alphabet. So the team actually developed a new code within the code within the code. So it's a new code for interpreting and writing messages in DNA. Now, mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time, but it's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because, if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed, it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions.So the code that Mike Montague and the team developed actually puts frequent stop codons, so it's a different alphabet but allows us to use the entire English alphabet with punctuation and numbers. So, there are four major watermarks all over 1,000 base pairs of genetic code. The first one actually contains within it this code for interpreting the rest of the genetic code. So in the remaining information, in the watermarks, contain the names of, I think it's 46 different authors and key contributors to getting the project to this stage. And we also built in a website address so that if somebody decodes the code within the code within the code, they can send an email to that address. So it's clearly distinguishable from any other species, having 46 names in it, its own web address. And we added three quotations, because with the first genome we were criticized for not trying to say something more profound than just signing the work.So we won't give the rest of the code, but we will give the three quotations. The first is, ""To live, to err, to fall, to triumph and to recreate life out of life."" It's a James Joyce quote. The second quotation is, ""See things not as they are, but as they might be."" It's a quote from the ""American Prometheus"" book on Robert Oppenheimer. And the last one is a Richard Feynman quote: ""What I cannot build, I cannot understand."" So, because this is as much a philosophical advance as a technical advance in science, we tried to deal with both the philosophical and the technical side.The last thing I want to say before turning it over to questions is that the extensive work that we've done — asking for ethical review, pushing the envelope on that side as well as the technical side — this has been broadly discussed in the scientific community, in the policy community and at the highest levels of the federal government. Even with this announcement, as we did in 2003 — that work was funded by the Department of Energy, so the work was reviewed at the level of the White House, trying to decide whether to classify the work or publish it. And they came down on the side of open publication, which is the right approach — we've briefed the White House, we've briefed members of Congress, we've tried to take and push the policy issues in parallel with the scientific advances.So with that, I would like to open it first to the floor for questions. Yes, in the back.Reporter: Could you explain, in layman's terms, how significant a breakthrough this is please?Craig Venter: Can we explain how significant this is? I'm not sure we're the ones that should be explaining how significant it is. It's significant to us. Perhaps it's a giant philosophical change in how we view life. We actually view it as a baby step in terms of, it's taken us 15 years to be able to do the experiment we wanted to do 15 years ago on understanding life at its basic level. But we actually believe this is going to be a very powerful set of tools and we're already starting in numerous avenues to use this tool.We have, at the Institute, ongoing funding now from NIH in a program with Novartis to try and use these new synthetic DNA tools to perhaps make the flu vaccine that you might get next year. Because instead of taking weeks to months to make these, Dan's team can now make these in less than 24 hours. So when you see how long it took to get an H1N1 vaccine out, we think we can shorten that process quite substantially. In the vaccine area, Synthetic Genomics and the Institute are forming a new vaccine company because we think these tools can affect vaccines to diseases that haven't been possible to date, things where the viruses rapidly evolve, such with rhinovirus. Wouldn't it be nice to have something that actually blocked common colds? Or, more importantly, HIV, where the virus evolves so quickly the vaccines that are made today can't keep up with those evolutionary changes.Also, at Synthetic Genomics, we've been working on major environmental issues. I think this latest oil spill in the Gulf is a reminder. We can't see CO2 — we depend on scientific measurements for it and we see the beginning results of having too much of it — but we can see pre-CO2 now floating on the waters and contaminating the beaches in the Gulf. We need some alternatives for oil. We have a program with Exxon Mobile to try and develop new strains of algae that can efficiently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from concentrated sources, make new hydrocarbons that can go into their refineries to make normal gasoline and diesel fuel out of CO2.Those are just a couple of the approaches and directions that we're taking.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life
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"I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online. I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now.(Laughter)And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk, and said, ""We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?"" And I said, ""Sure.""And four years later, it's been downloaded four million times. So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me.(Laughter)(Applause)Don't you feel?(Laughter)So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is.(Laughter)Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly.(Laughter)So, as I was saying —(Laughter)You see, he's right. I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more.(Laughter)But I believe there is a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. And you may say, by the way, ""Look, I'm good. I have one climate crisis, I don't really need the second one.""(Laughter)But this is a crisis of, not natural resources — though I believe that's true — but a crisis of human resources.I believe fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything.Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, ""There are two types of people in this world: those who divide the world into two types and those who do not.""(Laughter)Well, I do.(Laughter)I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said, ""Don't do this anymore,"" they'd wonder what you're talking about. It isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, ""But this is me, you know. It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self."" And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. And I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need — and the word's been used many times in the past few days — is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.(Applause)One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard, because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense. Things that people think, ""It can't be done differently, that's how it's done.""I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point.(Laughter)He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. We don't teach American history in Britain.(Laughter)We suppress it. You know, this is our policy.(Laughter)No doubt, something fascinating was happening then, which the Americans among us will be aware of.But he said this: ""The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion."" I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. ""As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.""I love that word, ""disenthrall."" You know what it means? That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done. It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. And the reason is that you take it for granted.(Laughter)Let me ask you something you may take for granted. How many of you here are over the age of 25? That's not what you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that. Are there any people here under the age of 25? Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch? Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don't mean they can't, they just often choose not to. And the reason is we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And by the way, you don't need either; it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, ""It's a single-function device.""(Laughter)""Like, how lame is that?"" And I say, ""No, no, it tells the date as well.""(Laughter)""It has multiple functions.""(Laughter)But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. A couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story: that life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. Certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go, but not everybody needs to go, or go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. I said, ""What do you do?"" And he said, ""I'm a fireman."" I asked, ""How long have you been a fireman?"" ""Always. I've always been a fireman."" ""Well, when did you decide?"" He said, ""As a kid. Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman.""(Laughter)He said, ""But I wanted to be a fireman."" And he said, ""When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. This one teacher didn't take it seriously. He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that."" He said, ""It was humiliating. It was in front of the whole class and I felt dreadful. But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted. You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher, because six months ago, I saved his life.""(Laughter)He said, ""He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well."" He said, ""I think he thinks better of me now.""(Laughter)(Applause)You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges —(Applause)At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem.When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement — very well-intentioned — which said, ""College begins in kindergarten."" No, it doesn't.(Laughter)It doesn't. If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't.(Laughter)Kindergarten begins in kindergarten.(Laughter)A friend of mine once said, ""A three year-old is not half a six year-old.""(Laughter)(Applause)They're three.But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get into kindergarten — to get to the right kindergarten — that people are being interviewed for it at three. Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes —(Laughter)Flicking through and saying, ""What, this is it?""(Laughter)(Applause)""You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?""(Laughter)""You've achieved nothing — commit.(Laughter)Spent the first six months breastfeeding, I can see.""(Laughter)See, it's outrageous as a conception.The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. There are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other is like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.(Applause)We have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar.(Laughter)It worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying.(Laughter)In a way — it did not for me. I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. It just wouldn't work.(Laughter)But it's not only about that. It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. There are great ones, like KIPP's; it's a great system. There are many great models. It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.Now in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the Internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's what they choose, to be educated with their families or friends.There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of these few days. And I wanted to just very quickly — I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, ""I've got something else, but it may not be for you.""He says this: ""Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."" And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution
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"I heard this amazing story about Miuccia Prada. She's an Italian fashion designer. She goes to this vintage store in Paris with a friend of hers. She's rooting around, she finds this one jacket by Balenciaga — she loves it. She's turning it inside out. She's looking at the seams. She's looking at the construction. Her friend says, ""Buy it already."" She said, ""I'll buy it, but I'm also going to replicate it."" Now, the academics in this audience may think, ""Well, that sounds like plagiarism."" But to a fashionista, what it really is is a sign of Prada's genius: that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that doesn't need to be changed by one iota, and to be current and to be now.You might also be asking whether it's possible that this is illegal for her to do this. Well, it turns out that it's actually not illegal. In the fashion industry, there's very little intellectual property protection. They have trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of. All they have, really, is trademark protection, and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design. The only thing that they can't copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel. That's one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products. It's because it's a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they can't knock off the logo. But if you go to Santee Alley, yeah. (Laughter) Well, yeah. Canal Street, I know. And sometimes these are fun, right?Now, the reason for this, the reason that the fashion industry doesn't have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection. They didn't want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing. And then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because Joe Blow owns it. But too utilitarian? I mean is that the way you think of fashion? This is Vivienne Westwood. No! We think of it as maybe too silly, too unnecessary.Now, those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection — which is that without ownership, there is no incentive to innovate — might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry. What I'm going to argue today is that because there's no copyright protection in the fashion industry, fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design, things to cover our naked bodies, into something that we consider art. Because there's no copyright protection in this industry, there's a very open and creative ecology of creativity.Unlike their creative brothers and sisters, who are sculptors or photographers or filmmakers or musicians, fashion designers can sample from all their peers' designs. They can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design. They're also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist. And here, I suspect, they were influenced by the costumes in Avatar. Maybe just a little. Can't copyright a costume either.Now, fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry. This wedding dress here is actually made of sporks, and this dress is actually made of aluminum. I've heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through. So, one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying, which is really what it is, is the establishment of trends. People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? Well, it's because it's legal for people to copy one another.Some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we're all going to wear, but if you talk to any designer at any level, including these high-end designers, they always say their main inspiration comes from the street: where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks. And that's where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration, so it's both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry.Now, the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry. They are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices. And they've been faced with a lot of lawsuits, but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers. The courts have said over and over again, ""You don't need any more intellectual property protection."" When you look at copies like this, you wonder: How do the luxury high-end brands remain in business? If you can get it for 200 bucks, why pay a thousand? Well, that's one reason we had a conference here at USC a few years ago. We invited Tom Ford to come — the conference was called, ""Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity"" — and we asked him exactly this question. Here's what he had to say. He had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at Gucci, in case you didn't know.Tom Ford: And we found after much research that — actually not much research, quite simple research — that the counterfeit customer was not our customer.Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci. (Laughter) This is a very different demographic. And, you know, a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design, at least in terms of the materials; they're always made of cheaper materials. But even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects, can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend. There's lots of virtues of copying. One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before, and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry, actually. And this is a good thing. We need lots of options.Fashion, whether you like it or not, helps you project who you are to the world. Because of fast fashion, global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to. And this, actually, is good news to trendsetters; they want trends to be set so that they can move product. For fashionistas, they want to stay ahead of the curve. They don't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing. And so, they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible.I tell you, there is no rest for the fashionable. Every season, these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody's going to love. And this, let me tell you, is very good for the bottom line. Now of course, there's a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process. And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer. He has complained a lot about people copying him, but in one interview I read, he said it has really forced him to up his game. He had to come up with new ideas, new things that would be hard to copy. He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material, it'll actually crack in two. It forced him to be a little more innovative. (Music)And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. I don't know if you've heard this anecdote, but I have. He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn't be able to replicate the sound. (Laughter) He wanted to make it too difficult to copy, and that's what fashion designers are doing all the time. They're trying to put together a signature look, an aesthetic that reflects who they are. When people knock it off, everybody knows because they've put that look out on the runway, and it's a coherent aesthetic.I love these Gallianos. Okay, we'll move on. (Laughter)This is not unlike the world of comedy. I don't know if you know that jokes also can't be copyright protected. So when one-liners were really popular, everybody stole them from one another. But now, we have a different kind of comic. They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers. And their jokes, much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer, really only work within that aesthetic. If somebody steals a joke from Larry David, for instance, it's not as funny.Now, the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they've learned how to copy themselves. They knock themselves off. They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic: the Santee Alley demographic.Now, some fashion designers will say, ""It's only in the United States that we don't have any respect. In other countries there is protection for our artful designs."" But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world, it turns out that the protection that's offered is really ineffectual. In Japan, for instance, which I think is the third largest market, they have a design law; it protects apparel, but the novelty standard is so high, you have to prove that your garment has never existed before, it's totally unique. And that's sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get — rarely get here in the states.In the European Union, they went in the other direction. Very low novelty standard, anybody can register anything. But even though it's the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there, they don't register their garments, generally, and there's not a lot of litigation. It turns out it's because the novelty standard is too low. A person can come in and take somebody else's gown, cut off three inches from the bottom, go to the E.U. and register it as a new, original design. So, that does not stop the knock-off artists. If you look at the registry, actually, a lot of the registered things in the E.U. are Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another.But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg. She is the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs. The retailers have kind of quashed this notion though. I don't think the legislation is going anywhere, because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between a pirated design and something that's just part of a global trend. Who owns a look? That is a very difficult question to answer. It takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time, and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive.You know, it's not just the fashion industry that doesn't have copyright protection. There's a bunch of other industries that don't have copyright protection, including the food industry. You cannot copyright a recipe because it's a set of instructions, it's fact, and you cannot copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish. Same with automobiles. It doesn't matter how wacky they look or how cool they look, you cannot copyright the sculptural design. It's a utilitarian article, that's why. Same with furniture, it's too utilitarian. Magic tricks, I think they're instructions, sort of like recipes: no copyright protection. Hairdos, no copyright protection. Open source software, these guys decided they didn't want copyright protection. They thought it'd be more innovative without it. It's really hard to get copyright for databases. Tattoo artists, they don't want it; it's not cool. They share their designs. Jokes, no copyright protection. Fireworks displays, the rules of games, the smell of perfume: no. And some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you, but these are the gross sales for low I.P. industries, industries with very little copyright protection, and there's the gross sales of films and books. (Applause) It ain't pretty.(Applause)So you talk to people in the fashion industry and they're like, ""Shhh! Don't tell anybody we can actually steal from each other's designs. It's embarrassing."" But you know what? It's revolutionary, and it's a model that a lot of other industries — like the ones we just saw with the really small bars — they might have to think about this. Because right now, those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it's as if they don't have any protection, and they don't know what to do.When I found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that didn't have copyright protection, I thought, ""What exactly is the underlying logic? I want a picture."" And the lawyers do not provide a picture, so I made one. These are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law. It is more complex than this, but this will do. First: Is something an artistic object? Then it deserves protection. Is it a utilitarian object? Then no, it does not deserve protection. This is a difficult, unstable binary.The other one is: Is it an idea? Is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society? No protection. Or is it a physically fixed expression of an idea: something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it? The problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed, expression versus idea concept. Nowadays, we don't really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold. It's a digital file. It is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds. And these things, because we can copy and transmit them so easily, actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects.Now, the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and, let me tell you, we don't want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out. They're smart. I'm with one. He's my boyfriend, he's okay. He's smart, he's smart. But you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out, trying to figure out: What is the kind of ownership model, in a digital world, that's going to lead to the most innovation? And my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future.If you want more information about this research project, please visit our website: it's ReadyToShare.org. And I really want to thank Veronica Jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation.Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture
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"Today, I want you to look at children who become suicide bombers through a completely different lens. In 2009, there were 500 bomb blasts across Pakistan. I spent the year working with children who were training to become suicide bombers and with Taliban recruiters, trying to understand how the Taliban were converting these children into live ammunition and why these children were actively signing up to their cause.I want you to watch a short video from my latest documentary film, ""Children of the Taliban.""(Singing)The Taliban now run their own schools. They target poor families and convince the parents to send their children. In return, they provide free food and shelter and sometimes pay the families a monthly stipend. We've obtained a propaganda video made by the Taliban. Young boys are taught justifications for suicide attacks and the execution of spies.I made contact with a child from Swat who studied in a madrassa like this. Hazrat Ali is from a poor farming family in Swat. He joined the Taliban a year ago when he was 13.How do the Taliban in your area get people to join them?Hazrat Ali: They first call us to the mosque and preach to us. Then they take us to a madrassa and teach us things from the Koran.Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: He tells me that children are then given months of military training.HA: They teach us to use machine guns, Kalashnikov, rocket launchers, grenades, bombs. They ask us to use them only against the infidels. Then they teach us to do a suicide attack.SOC: Would you like to carry out a suicide attack?HA: If God gives me strength.SOC: I, in my research, have seen that the Taliban have perfected the way in which they recruit and train children, and I think it's a five-step process. Step one is that the Taliban prey on families that are large, that are poor, that live in rural areas. They separate the parents from the children by promising to provide food, clothing, shelter to these children. Then they ship them off, hundreds of miles away to hard-line schools that run along the Taliban agenda.Step two: They teach the children the Koran, which is Islam's holiest book, in Arabic, a language these children do not understand and cannot speak. They rely very heavily on teachers, who I have personally seen distort the message to these children as and when it suits their purpose to. These children are explicitly forbidden from reading newspapers, listening to radio, reading any books that the teachers do not prescribe them. If any child is found violating these rules, he is severely reprimanded. Effectively, the Taliban create a complete blackout of any other source of information for these children.Step three: The Taliban want these children to hate the world that they currently live in. So they beat these children — I have seen it; they feed them twice a day dried bread and water; they rarely allow them to play games; they tell them that, for eight hours at a time, all they have to do is read the Koran. The children are virtual prisoners; they cannot leave, they cannot go home. Their parents are so poor, they have no resources to get them back.Step four: The older members of the Taliban, the fighters, start talking to the younger boys about the glories of martyrdom. They talk to them about how when they die, they will be received up with lakes of honey and milk, how there will be 72 virgins waiting for them in paradise, how there will be unlimited food, and how this glory is going to propel them to become heroes in their neighborhoods. Effectively, this is the brainwashing process that has begun.Step five: I believe the Taliban have one of the most effective means of propaganda. Their videos that they use are intercut with photographs of men and women and children dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Pakistan. And the basic message is that the Western powers do not care about civilian deaths, so those people who live in areas and support governments that work with Western powers are fair game. That's why Pakistani civilians, over 6,000 of whom have been killed in the last two years alone, are fair game. Now these children are primed to become suicide bombers. They're ready to go out and fight because they've been told that this is effectively their only way to glorify Islam.I want you to watch another excerpt from the film.This boy is called Zenola. He blew himself up, killing six. This boy is called Sadik. He killed 22. This boy is called Messoud. He killed 28. The Taliban are running suicide schools, preparing a generation of boys for atrocities against civilians.Do you want to carry out a suicide attack?Boy: I would love to. But only if I get permission from my dad. When I look at suicide bombers younger than me, or my age, I get so inspired by their terrific attacks.SOC: What blessing would you get from carrying out a suicide attack?Boy: On the day of judgment, God will ask me, ""Why did you do that?"" I will answer, ""My Lord! Only to make you happy! I have laid down my life fighting the infidels."" Then God will look at my intention. If my intention was to eradicate evil for Islam, then I will be rewarded with paradise.Singer: ♫ On the day of judgment ♫ ♫ My God will call me ♫ ♫ My body will be put back together ♫ ♫ And God will ask me why I did this ♫SOC: I leave you all with this thought: If you grew up in these circumstances, faced with these choices, would you choose to live in this world or in the glorious afterlife? As one Taliban recruiter told me, ""There will always be sacrificial lambs in this war.""Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sharmeen_obaid_chinoy_inside_a_school_for_suicide_bombers
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"Do you worry about what is going to kill you? Heart disease, cancer, a car accident? Most of us worry about things we can't control, like war, terrorism, the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti. But what really threatens humanity? A few years ago, Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history. He called these, ""massively fatal discontinuities,"" meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years. He looked at the odds of another world war, of a massive volcanic eruption, even of an asteroid hitting the Earth. But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent, and that is a severe flu pandemic. Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher. You know, the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically, it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic.In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people. It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms. Are we safer today? Well, we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared, but this threat could reappear at any time. The good news is that we're at a moment in time when science, technology, globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility: the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth. We can do this. We're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines, and if we get these to more people, we can certainly save more lives. But with new or better vaccines for malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhea, flu, we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time.So, I'm here to trumpet vaccines for you. But first, I have to explain why they're important because vaccines, the power of them, is really like a whisper. When they work, they can make history, but after a while you can barely hear them. Now, some of us are old enough to have a small, circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children. But when was the last time you worried about smallpox, a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us? Or polio? How many of you remember the iron lung? We don't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines.Now, it's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now, but we're still threatened by things like HIV and flu. Why is that? Well, here's the dirty little secret. Until recently, we haven't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked. We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error. You took a pathogen, you modified it, you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened. This worked well for most pathogens, somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu, but not at all for HIV, for which humans have no natural immunity.So let's explore how vaccines work. They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed. Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work. Now, let's take a look at a video that we're debuting at TED, for the first time, on how an effective HIV vaccine might work.(Music)Narrator: A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader. After HIV penetrates the body's mucosal barriers, it infects immune cells to replicate. The invader draws the attention of the immune system's front-line troops. Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it. Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops. These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed. Memory B cells turn into plasma cells, which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells, while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected. The virus is defeated. Without a vaccine, these responses would have taken more than a week. By that time, the battle against HIV would already have been lost.Seth Berkley: Really cool video, isn't it? The antibodies you just saw in this video, in action, are the ones that make most vaccines work. So the real question then is: How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV? The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they're always changing. So let's take a look at the flu virus. In this rendering of the flu virus, these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you. And also, what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus. When these mutate, they change their shape, and the antibodies don't know what they're looking at anymore. So that's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu. It's also why in the spring, we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year, put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall.Even worse, the most common influenza — influenza A — also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans, and they can recombine in those particular animals. In addition, wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza. So, you've got this situation: In 2003, we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent. Now luckily, that particular virus, although very scary at the time, did not transmit from person to person very easily. This year's H1N1 threat was actually a human, avian, swine mixture that arose in Mexico. It was easily transmitted, but, luckily, was pretty mild. And so, in a sense, our luck is holding out, but you know, another wild bird could fly over at anytime.Now let's take a look at HIV. As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome. Here's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV, a much wilder target. In the video a moment ago, you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells. Now realize that in a recently infected person, there are millions of these ships; each one is just slightly different. Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder.Now, in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, we've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together. These drugs aren't cures, but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV, at least for those who can access them. The vaccine effort though is really quite different. Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business. Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine, but today, evidence tells us otherwise.In September, we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand. For the first time, we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans — albeit, quite modestly — and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago. Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models. But in the past few months, researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual. Now, what does this mean? We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable, that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus. If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models, they provide full protection from infection. In addition, these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto, and what's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates. It's like, as many times as the virus changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks.So what we've got is a situation. The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine, and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that. This strategy, working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate, has never been done before in vaccine research. It's called retro-vaccinology, and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV. So think of it this way. We've got these new antibodies we've identified, and we know that they latch onto many, many variations of the virus. We know that they have to latch onto a specific part, so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part, present that through a vaccine, what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies. And that would create a universal HIV vaccine. Now, it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site, and as you can imagine, these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on. And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this, we'd love to hear about it.But, you know, the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases. So for instance, a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza, as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus. They're currently making a cocktail — an antibody cocktail — that can be used to treat severe, overwhelming cases of flu. In the longer term, what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine. Now, retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design.Let me give you another example. We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus. Notice these other, smaller protuberances. These are largely hidden from the immune system. Now it turns out that these spots also don't change much when the virus mutates. If you can cripple these with specific antibodies, you could cripple all versions of the flu. So far, animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease, although you might get a mild case. So if this works in humans, what we're talking about is a universal flu vaccine, one that doesn't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death. We really could think of flu, then, as just a bad cold.Of course, the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it. So to do that, we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and, of course, smart delivery methods. So I want you to think back a few months ago. In June, the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak. Vaccines were promised to developing countries. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing. So what happened?Well, we first figured out how to make flu vaccines, how to produce them, in the early 1940s. It was a slow, cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs, millions of living chicken eggs. Viruses only grow in living things, and so it turned out that, for flu, chicken eggs worked really well. For most strains, you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg. Luckily for us, we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances. So today, we get our flu vaccines from ... chicken eggs, (Laughter) hundreds of millions of chicken eggs. Almost nothing has changed. The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow. This year's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production: basically .6 doses per egg. So, here's an alarming thought. What if that wild bird flies by again? You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks, and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines. So, Dan [Barber], if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm, I know where to get them. So right now, the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains, and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu. But this assumes that our factories are humming because, in 2004, the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant. And the process still takes more than half a year.So are we better prepared than we were in 1918? Well, with the new technologies emerging now, I hope we can say definitively, ""Yes."" Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we're currently spending now in the United States. With a range of new technologies, we could. Here's an example: A company I'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system. If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter. This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli. Now, as you know, bacteria reproduce quickly — it's like making yogurt — and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories, in a few weeks, with no eggs, for a fraction of the cost of current methods.(Applause)So here's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies. And, aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings — for example, the E. coli method I just talked about — look at the time saved: this would be lives saved. The developing world, mostly left out of the current response, sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they're leapfrogging the West. India, Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines, and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use. Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap, billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them.Now think of where this leads us. New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years. Some day, perhaps soon, we'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us. Will we be quick enough to react before millions die? Luckily, this year's flu was relatively mild. I say, ""luckily"" in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated. So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments, we will master these and new tools of vaccinology, and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives. No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year. No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year. No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases, or indeed, anybody. Instead of having Vaclav Smil's ""massively fatal discontinuity"" of life, we can ensure the continuity of life. What the world needs now are these new vaccines, and we can make it happen.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So, the science is changing. In your mind, Seth — I mean, you must dream about this — what is the kind of time scale on, let's start with HIV, for a game-changing vaccine that's actually out there and usable?SB: The game change can come at any time, because the problem we have now is we've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans; we just need a better one. And with these types of antibodies, we know humans can make them. So, if we can figure out how to do that, then we have the vaccine, and what's interesting is there already is some evidence that we're beginning to crack that problem. So, the challenge is full speed ahead.CA: In your gut, do you think it's probably going to be at least another five years?SB: You know, everybody says it's 10 years, but it's been 10 years every 10 years. So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation, but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends.CA: And that's the same with universal flu vaccine, the same kind of thing?SB: I think flu is different. I think what happened with flu is we've got a bunch — I just showed some of this — a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now. They look good. The problem has been that, what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that's what we were comfortable with. You also can use adjuvants, which are chemicals you mix. That's what Europe is doing, so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available, but, going back to what Michael Specter said, the anti-vaccine crowd didn't really want that to happen.CA: And malaria's even further behind?SB: No, malaria, there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now. It probably isn't the perfect vaccine, but it's moving along.CA: Seth, most of us do work where every month, we produce something; we get that kind of gratification. You've been slaving away at this for more than a decade, and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do. The world needs people like you. Thank you.SB: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_berkley_hiv_and_flu_the_vaccine_strategy
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"I want to talk about what we learn from conservatives. And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days, so I want to confess to you that when I was a kid, indeed, I was a conservative. I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican, a leader in the Teenage Republicans. Indeed, I was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan to be the Republican nominee for president.Now, I know what you're thinking. (Laughter) You're thinking, ""That's not what the Internets say."" You're thinking, ""Wikipedia doesn't say this fact."" And indeed, this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these Internets here. Wikipedia reports that this guy, this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people at the Republican National Convention, but it's just not true. (Laughter) Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here. (Laughter) (Applause) All right. Okay, so ... perfect. Perfect. (Laughter) Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right. Okay. Finally, truth will be brought here. Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go. ""... Youngest Republican,"" okay, we're finished. That's it. Please save this. Great, here we go. And ... Wikipedia is fixed, finally. Okay, but no, this is really besides the point.(Applause)But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives — not so much this issue of the 1980 convention — the thing to think about is this: They go to church. Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church. I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church. And I'm not talking about the God thing. I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point. They go to church, by which I mean, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners. They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. And it's the very same people leading Wall Street firms who, on Sundays, show up and share. And not only food, right.These very same people are strong believers, in lots of contexts, in the limits on the markets. They are in many important places against markets. Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship. But they're very keen that we don't let money drop into that relationship, else it turns into something like this. They want to regulate us, those conservatives, to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places. Because they understand: There are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. They recognize: Both of these things have to live together.And the second great thing about conservatives: they get ecology. Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking — Teddy Roosevelt. They first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources. And then they began to teach us in the context of innovation, economics. They understand, in that context, ""free."" They understand ""free"" is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well. That's the thing I want you to think about them.Now, I know you don't believe me, really, here. So here's exhibit number one. I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, ""evil"" Cato Institute. Okay, so Julian made this video. He's a terrible producer of videos, but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it. So here he is beginning.Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ...Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos. This is this fantastic Brat Pack remix set to Lisztomania. Which, of course, spread virally. Hugely successful.(Music) And then some people from Brooklyn saw it. They decided they wanted to do the same. (Music) And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it. And San Franciscans thought they had to do the same as well. (Music) And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this. Here's lesson number one.JS: There's obviously also something really deeply great about this. They are acting in the sense that they're emulating the original mashup. And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing. But this is also basically just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together. It should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends.LL: Or ...JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here, remix isn't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement; it becomes an act of social creativity. And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art.LL: And so then, what this libertarian draws from these two points ...JS: One remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience. Stage two, social remix, is really about using it to mediate people's relationships to each other. First, within each video, the Brat Pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group. But there's also a dialogue between the videos, where, once the basic structure is established, it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups' social and physical worlds.LL: And then, here's for me, the critical key to what Julian has to say ...JS: Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity; it's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities — social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture. I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind. If we're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer and, in some ways, maybe even more important one.LL: Right. Bingo. Point. Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture. And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture. The point is they, he, here, gets that culture.Now, my concern is, we Dems, too often, not so much. All right, take for example this great company. In the good old days when this Republican ran that company, their greatest work was work that built on the past, right. All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them, or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them, to celebrate this add-on remix creativity. Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course, as ""Steamboat Willie,"" is a remix of the then, very dominant, very popular ""Steamboat Bill"" by Buster Keaton. This man was a remixer extraordinaire. He is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity.But then the company passes through this dark stage to this Democrat. Wildly different. This is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years, so that no one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. Now, when we tried to challenge this, going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there — if we could get them to wake up to this — to strike it down, we had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners including this right-wing Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, who said he would join our brief only if the word ""no brainer"" was in the brief somewhere. (Laughter) But apparently, no brains existed in this place when Democrats passed and signed this bill into law. Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote: Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican, but I don't buy it. This guy is no Republican.Okay, for a second example, think about this cultural hero, icon on the Left, creator of this character. Look at the site that he built: ""Star Wars"" MashUps, inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon. Read the license. The license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to Lucas. The mashup is owned by Lucas. Indeed, anything you add to the mashup, music you might add, Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free. There is no creator here to be recognized. The creator doesn't have any rights. The creator is a sharecropper in this story. And we should remember who employed the sharecroppers: the Democrats, right?So the point is the Republicans here recognize that there's a certain need of ownership, a respect for ownership, the respect we should give the creator, the remixer, the owner, the property owner, the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff, and not a generation of sharecroppers. Now, I think there are lessons we should learn here, lessons about openness. Our lives are sharing activities, at least in part. Even for the head of Goldman Sachs, at least in part. And for that sharing activity to happen, we have to have well-protected spaces of fair use.That's number one. Number two: This ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create. Freedom, which means without permission from anyone, the ability to create. And number three: We need to respect the creator, the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them. Now, this explains the right-wing nonprofit Creative Commons. Actually, it's not a right-wing nonprofit, but of course — let me just tie it here — the Creative Commons, which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry.So that we go from a ""all rights reserved"" world to a ""some rights reserved"" world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content, building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work. These tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely. And it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that's obviously developed around these licenses, as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there, licensed freely in this way.Now that picture of an ecology of creativity, the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity, is that the ecology of creativity we have right now? Well, as you all know, not many of us believe we do. I tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week. I created a video which was based on a Wireside Chat that I'd given, and I uploaded it to YouTube. I then got this email from YouTube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious WMG that matched their content ID. So I didn't think much about it.And then on Twitter, somebody said to me, ""Your talk on YouTube was DMCA'd. Was that your purpose?"" imagining that I had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the DMCA. I answered, ""No."" I didn't even think about it. But then I went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced. My whole 45-minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video, a video about fair use, that included Warner Music Group music. Now, interestingly, they still sold ads for that music, if you played the silent video. You could still buy the music, but you couldn't hear anything because it had been silenced.So I did what the current regime says I must do to be free to use YouTube to talk about fair use. I went to this site, and I had to answer these questions. And then in an extraordinarily Bart Simpson-like, juvenile way you've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak. And I felt like I was in third grade again. ""I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair."" This is absurd. It is outrageous. It is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging.And the question I ask you is: Who's fighting it? Well, interestingly, in the last presidential election, who was the number one, active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech? John McCain. Letter after letter attacking YouTube's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system, that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the Internet.Now, that was the story of me then, my good old days of right-wing lunacy. Let me come back to now, now when I'm a little leftist — I'm certainly left-handed, so at least a lefty — And I wonder, can we on the Left expect to build this ecology of freedom, now, in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it, where even icons of the Left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government-funded research? The president, who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements, which effectively lock us into the insane system of DMCA that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes, you're out that, of course, the rest of the world are increasingly adopting. Not a single example of reform has been produced yet. And we're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon.So here's the lessons of openness that I think we need to learn. Openness is a commitment to a certain set of values. We need to speak of those values. The value of freedom. It's a value of community. It's a value of the limits in regulation. It's a value respecting the creator. Now, if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the Right, if we can take them and incorporate them, maybe we could do a little trade. We learn those values on the Left, and maybe they'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the Right.Anyway, please join me in teaching these values.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed
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"We're 25, 26 years after the advent of the Macintosh, which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general. It fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation, thought about computers, how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them. It was such a radical change, in fact, that the early Macintosh development team in '82, '83, '84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up. Now, this is an interesting little message, and it's a lesson that has since, I think, been forgotten or lost or something, and that is, namely, that the OS is the interface. The interface is the OS. It's like the land and the king (i.e. Arthur) they're inseparable, they are one. And to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter. It wasn't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines. There were no graphics routines. There were no mouse drivers. So it was a necessity.But in the quarter-century since then, we've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk. So memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million. Same thing for processor speeds. Networks, we didn't have networks at all at the time of the Macintosh's introduction, and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers. And, of course, graphics: Today 84 dollars and 97 cents at Best Buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from SGI only a decade ago. So we've got that incredible ramp-up. Then, on the side, we've got the Web and, increasingly, the cloud, which is fantastic, but also — in the regard in which an interface is fundamental — kind of a distraction. So we've forgotten to invent new interfaces. Certainly we've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard, and people are starting to wake up about that. So what happens next? Where do we go from there?The problem, as we see it, has to do with a single, simple word: ""space,"" or a single, simple phrase: ""real world geometry."" Computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in, that we teach them in, are hideously insensate when it comes to space. They don't understand real world space. It's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well. They also don't understand time, but that's a matter for a separate talk.So what happens if you start to explain space to them? One thing you might get is something like the Luminous Room. The Luminous Room is a system in which it's considered that input and output spaces are co-located. That's a strangely simple, and yet unexplored idea, right? When you use a mouse, your hand is down here on the mouse pad. It's not even on the same plane as what you're talking about: The pixels are up on the display. So here was a room in which all the walls, floors, ceilings, pets, potted plants, whatever was in there, were capable, not only of display but of sensing as well. And that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this. That's a digital storage in a physical container. The contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers. Has to come back out, whatever you put in. This little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well. If you presented it with a chess board, it tried to figure out what you might mean by that. And if there was nothing for them to do, the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away.The academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous, so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser. The beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects, and the system projects down the laser beam path. So you've got an interface that has no interface. You operate the world as you operate the real world, which is to say, with your hands. Similarly, a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left — not that remarkable in a sense; we didn't invent the mathematics. But if you displayed that on a CRT or flat panel display, it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object, a real world object in that. Here, the real world merges with the simulation.And finally, to pull out all the stops, this is a system called Urp, for urban planners, in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use CAD systems. And we make the machine meet them half way. It projects down digital shadows, as you see here. And if you introduce tools like this inverse clock, then you can control the sun's position in the sky. That's 8 a.m. shadows. They get a little shorter at 9 a.m. There you are, swinging the sun around. Short shadows at noon and so forth. And we built up a series of tools like this. There are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate, even though they don't know anything about urban planning: To move a building, you simply reach out your hand and you move the building. A material wand makes the building into a sort of Frank Gehry thing that reflects light in all directions. Are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways? A zoning tool connects distant structures, a building and a roadway. Are you going to get sued by the zoning commission? And so forth. Now, if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated, that's great; they should seem familiar.This work is 15 years old. This stuff was undertaken at MIT and the Media Lab under the incredible direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii, director of the Tangible Media Group. But it was that work that was seen by Alex McDowell, one of the world's legendary production designers. But Alex was preparing a little, sort of obscure, indie, arthouse film called ""Minority Report"" for Steven Spielberg, and invited us to come out from MIT and design the interfaces that would appear in that film. And the great thing about it was that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude, the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable, that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an R&D effort. And the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual. People still reference those sequences in ""Minority Report"" when they talk about new UI design. So this led full circle, in a strange way, to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface: the Spatial Operating Environment, we call it.So here we have a bunch of stuff, some images. And, using a hand, we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom, six degrees of navigational control. And it's fun to fly through Mr. Beckett's eye. And you can come back out through the scary orangutan. And that's all well and good. Let's do something a little more difficult. Here, we have a whole bunch of disparate images. We can fly around them. So navigation is a fundamental issue. You have to be able to navigate in 3D. Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial. And the part that isn't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it. Now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways. So we can throw it out like that. Let's reset it. We can organize it this way.And, of course, it's not just about navigation, but about manipulation as well. So if we don't like stuff, or we're intensely curious about Ernst Haeckel's scientific falsifications, we can pull them out like that. And then if it's time for analysis, we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution. Let's just come down a bit and fly around. So that's a different way to look at stuff. If you're of a more analytical nature then you might want, actually, to look at this as a color histogram. So now we've got the stuff color-sorted, angle maps onto color. And now, if we want to select stuff, 3D, space, the idea that we're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in, not in 2D, not in fake 2D, but in actual 3D. Here are some selection planes. And we'll perform this Boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass.So, from there to the world of real work. Here's a logistics system, a small piece of one that we're currently building. There're a lot of elements. And one thing that's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information. So here's a familiar place. And we'll bring this back here for a second. Maybe select a little bit of that. And bring out this graph. And we should, now, be able to fly in here and have a closer look. These are logistics elements that are scattered across the United States.One thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers. That's the old way, that's the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen. Well, that doesn't really cut it anymore. In the real world, we have people who collaborate; we have people who have to work together, and we have many different displays. And we might want to look at these various images. We might want to ask for some help.The author of this new pointing device is sitting over there, so I can pull this from there to there. These are unrelated machines, right? So the computation is space soluble and network soluble. So I'm going to leave that over there because I have a question for Paul. Paul is the designer of this wand, and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what's going on. So let me get some of these out of the way. Let's pull this apart: I'll go ahead and explode it. Kevin, can you help? Let me see if I can help us find the circuit board. Mind you, it's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise, but we do it in the lab all the time. All right. So collaborative work, whether it's immediately co-located or distant and distinct, is always important. And again, that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space.And finally, I'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery. This is a system called TAMPER, which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be. We at Oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form. So we have a large number of movies stuck inside here. And let's just pick out a few elements. We can zip through them as a possibility. We can grab elements off the front, where upon they reanimate, come to life, and drag them down onto the table here. We'll go over to Jacques Tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well. We may need more than one. And we probably need, well, we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest. (Laughter) Yeah, let's take that one. (Laughter) You see, cowboys and French farce people don't go well together, and the system knows that.Let me leave with one final thought, and that is that one of the greatest English language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift. And he wasn't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 [dollars], or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen Vermeer; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence. And I think that it's time that we asked for the same from technology. Technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity, and we need to demand that, in fact. For some of this kind of technology, ground center is a combination of design, which is crucially important. We can't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start. And, as well, as of efficacy, agency. We're, as human beings, the creatures that create, and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image.So I will leave you with that. Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: So to ask the obvious question — actually this is from Bill Gates — when? (John Underkoffler: When?) CA: When real? When for us, not just in a lab and on a stage? Can it be for every man, or is this just for corporations and movie producers?JU: No, it has to be for every human being. That's our goal entirely. We won't have succeeded unless we take that next big step. I mean it's been 25 years. Can there really be only one interface? There can't.CA: But does that mean that, at your desk or in your home, you need projectors, cameras? You know, how can it work?JU: No, this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display. It'll be built into architecture. The gloves go away in a matter of months or years. So this is the inevitability about it.CA: So, in your mind, five years time, someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface?JU: I think in five years time when you buy a computer, you'll get this.CA: Well that's cool. (Applause) The world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used. What do you think, what in your mind is the first killer app for this?JU: That's a good question, and we ask ourselves that every day. At the moment, our early-adopter customers — and these systems are deployed out in the real world — do all the big data intensive, data heavy problems with it. So, whether it's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction, financial services, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics, those are the topics right now, but that's not a killer app. And I understand what you're asking.CA: C'mon, c'mon. Martial arts, games. C'mon. (Laughter) John, thank you for making science-fiction real.JU: It's been a great pleasure. Thank you to you all.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture
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"I would like to share with you this morning some stories about the ocean through my work as a still photographer for National Geographic magazine. I guess I became an underwater photographer and a photojournalist because I fell in love with the sea as a child. And I wanted to tell stories about all the amazing things I was seeing underwater, incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors. And after even 30 years of doing this, after 30 years of exploring the ocean, I never cease to be amazed at the extraordinary encounters that I have while I'm at sea. But more and more frequently these days I'm seeing terrible things underwater as well, things that I don't think most people realize. And I've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues to tell a more complete story. I want people to see what's happening underwater, both the horror and the magic.The first story that I did for National Geographic, where I recognized the ability to include environmental issues within a natural history coverage, was a story I proposed on harp seals. The story I wanted to do initially was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year where these animals migrate down from the Canadian arctic to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to engage in courtship, mating and to have their pups. And all of this is played out against the backdrop of transient pack ice that moves with wind and tide. And because I'm an underwater photographer, I wanted to do this story from both above and below, to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water. But as I got more involved in the story, I realized that there were two big environmental issues I couldn't ignore. The first was that these animals continue to be hunted, killed with hakapiks at about eight, 15 days old. It actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year.But as disturbing as that is, I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming. This is an aerial picture that I made that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season. And even though we see a lot of ice in this picture, there's a lot of water as well, which wasn't there historically. And the ice that is there is quite thin. The problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice in order to nurse from their moms. They only need 12 days from the moment they're born until they're on their own. But if they don't get 12 days, they can fall into the ocean and die. This is a photo that I made showing one of these pups that's only about five or seven days old — still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly — that has fallen in because of the thin ice, and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe and to get it back to stable purchase. This problem has continued to grow each year since I was there. I read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So, clearly, this species has a lot of problems going forward. This ended up becoming a cover story at National Geographic. And it received quite a bit of attention.And with that, I saw the potential to begin doing other stories about ocean problems. So I proposed a story on the global fish crisis, in part because I had personally witnessed a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years, but also because I read a scientific paper that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years. These are the tuna, the billfish and the sharks. When I read that, I was blown away by those numbers. I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet, but it really wasn't, so I wanted to do a story that was a very different kind of underwater story. I wanted it to be more like war photography, where I was making harder-hitting pictures that showed readers what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet.The first component of the story that I thought was essential, however, was to give readers a sense of appreciation for the ocean animals that they were eating. You know, I think people go into a restaurant, and somebody orders a steak, and we all know where steak comes from, and somebody orders a chicken, and we know what a chicken is, but when they're eating bluefin sushi, do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they're consuming? These are the lions and tigers of the sea. In reality, these animals have no terrestrial counterpart; they're unique in the world. These are animals that can practically swim from the equator to the poles and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year. If we weren't so efficient at catching them, because they grow their entire life, would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton. But the truth is we're way too efficient at catching them, and their stocks have collapsed worldwide.This is the daily auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market that I photographed a couple years ago. And every single day these tuna, bluefin like this, are stacked up like cordwood, just warehouse after warehouse. As I wandered around and made these pictures, it sort of occurred to me that the ocean's not a grocery store, you know. We can't keep taking without expecting serious consequences as a result.I also, with the story, wanted to show readers how fish are caught, some of the methods that are used to catch fish, like a bottom trawler, which is one of the most common methods in the world. This was a small net that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp, but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world. You have a large net in the middle with two steel doors on either end. And as this assembly is towed through the water, the doors meet resistance with the ocean, and it opens the mouth of the net, and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom. And this just drags over the bottom, in this case to catch shrimp. But as you can imagine, it's catching everything else in its path as well. And it's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom, things like sponges and corals, that critical habitat for other animals.This photograph I made of the fisherman holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour. So he had a handful of shrimp, maybe seven or eight shrimp, and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch. These are animals that died in the process, but have no commercial value. So this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner, maybe seven or eight shrimp and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process. And to make that point even more visual, I swam under the shrimp boat and made this picture of the guy shoveling this bycatch into the sea as trash and photographed this cascade of death, you know, animals like guitarfish, bat rays, flounder, pufferfish, that only an hour before, were on the bottom of the ocean, alive, but now being thrown back as trash.I also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry because, currently on planet Earth, we're killing over 100 million sharks every single year. But before I went out to photograph this component, I sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers You know, I think there's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark. But this one morning I jumped in and found this thresher that had just recently died in the gill net. And with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible, it struck me as sort of a crucifixion, if you will. This ended up being the lead picture in the global fishery story in National Geographic. And I hope that it helped readers to take notice of this problem of 100 million sharks.And because I love sharks — I'm somewhat obsessed with sharks — I wanted to do another, more celebratory, story about sharks, as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation. So I went to the Bahamas because there're very few places in the world where sharks are doing well these days, but the Bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy, largely due to the fact that the government there had outlawed longlining several years ago. And I wanted to show several species that we hadn't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations.One of the locations was this place called Tiger Beach, in the northern Bahamas where tiger sharks aggregate in shallow water. This is a low-altitude photograph that I made showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks sort of just swimming around behind. But the one thing I definitely didn't want to do with this coverage was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters. I didn't want them to be overly threatening or scary. And with this photograph of a beautiful 15-feet, probably 14-feet, I guess, female tiger shark, I sort of think I got to that goal, where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose, and my strobe created a shadow on her face. And I think it's a gentler picture, a little less threatening, a little more respectful of the species.I also searched on this story for the elusive great hammerhead, an animal that really hadn't been photographed much until maybe about seven or 10 years ago. It's a very solitary creature. But this is an animal that's considered data deficient by science in both Florida and in the Bahamas. You know, we know almost nothing about them. We don't know where they migrate to or from, where they mate, where they have their pups, and yet, hammerhead populations in the Atlantic have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years. You know, we're losing them faster than we can possibly find them.This is the oceanic whitetip shark, an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species, if you pay attention to such lists. But it's an animal that's about 98 percent in decline throughout most of its range. Because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water, and because we weren't working on the bottom, I brought along a shark cage here, and my friend, shark biologist Wes Pratt is inside the cage. You'll see that the photographer, of course, was not inside the cage here, so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer I guess.And lastly with this story, I also wanted to focus on baby sharks, shark nurseries. And I went to the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, to work with lemon shark pups. This is a photo of a lemon shark pup, and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives in these protective mangroves. This is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph. It's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture. But, you know, here we see a shark that's maybe 10 or 11 inches long swimming in about a foot of water. But this is crucial habitat and it's where they spend the first two, three years of their lives, until they're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef. After I left Bimini, I actually learned that this habitat was being bulldozed to create a new golf course and resort.And other recent stories have looked at single, flagship species, if you will, that are at risk in the ocean as a way of talking about other threats. One such story I did documented the leatherback sea turtle. This is the largest, widest-ranging, deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species. Here we see a female crawling out of the ocean under moonlight on the island of Trinidad. These are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years. And there was a time in their lifespan where they were coming out of the water to nest and saw Tyrannosaurus rex running by. And today, they crawl out and see condominiums. But despite this amazing longevity, they're now considered critically endangered. In the Pacific, where I made this photograph, their stocks have declined about 90 percent in the last 15 years.This is a photograph that shows a hatchling about to taste saltwater for the very first time beginning this long and perilous journey. Only one in a thousand leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity. But that's due to natural predators like vultures that pick them off on a beach or predatory fish that are waiting offshore. Nature has learned to compensate with that, and females have multiple clutches of eggs to overcome those odds. But what they can't deal with is anthropogenic stresses, human things, like this picture that shows a leatherback caught at night in a gill net. I actually jumped in and photographed this, and with the fisherman's permission, I cut the turtle out, and it was able to swim free. But, you know, thousands of other leatherbacks each year are not so fortunate, and the species' future is in great danger.Another charismatic megafauna species that I worked with is the story I did on the right whale. And essentially, the story is this with right whales, that about a million years ago, there was one species of right whale on the planet, but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated, the species sort of separated, and today we have essentially two distinct stocks. We have the Southern right whale that we see here and the North Atlantic right whale that we see here with a mom and calf off the coast of Florida. Now, both species were hunted to the brink of extinction by the early whalers, but the Southern right whales have rebounded a lot better because they're located in places farther away from human activity.The North Atlantic right whale is listed as the most endangered species on the planet today because they are urban whales; they live along the east coast of North America, United States and Canada, and they have to deal with all these urban ills. This photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of Florida. You can see the coal burning plant in the background. They have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals that are flushed out into the ocean, and maybe even affecting their reproduction. They also get entangled in fishing gear. This is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale. And those white markings are not natural markings. These are entanglement scars. 72 percent of the population has such scars, but most don't shed the gear, things like lobster traps and crab pots. They hold on to them, and it eventually kills them. And the other problem is they get hit by ships. And this was an animal that was struck by a ship in Nova Scotia, Canada being towed in, where they did a necropsy to confirm the cause of death, which was indeed a ship strike. So all of these ills are stacking up against these animals and keeping their numbers very low.And to draw a contrast with that beleaguered North Atlantic population, I went to a new pristine population of Southern right whales that had only been discovered about 10 years ago in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand, a place called the Auckland Islands. I went down there in the winter time. And these are animals that had never seen humans before, and I was one of the first people they probably had ever seen. And I got in the water with them, and I was amazed at how curious they were. This photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet and one of these amazingly beautiful, 45-foot, 70-ton whales, like a city bus just swimming up, you know. They were in perfect condition, very fat and healthy, robust, no entanglement scars, the way they're supposed to look. You know, I read that the pilgrims, when they landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620, wrote that you could walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of right whales. And we can't go back and see that today, but maybe we can preserve what we have left.And I wanted to close this program with a story of hope, a story I did on marine reserves as sort of a solution to the problem of overfishing, the global fish crisis story. I settled on working in the country of New Zealand because New Zealand was rather progressive, and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean. And I really wanted this story to be about three things: I wanted it to be about abundance, about diversity and about resilience. And one of the first places I worked was a reserve called Goat Island in Leigh of New Zealand. What the scientists there told me was that when protected this first marine reserve in 1975, they hoped and expected that certain things might happen.For example, they hoped that certain species of fish like the New Zealand snapper would return because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction. And they did come back. What they couldn't predict was that other things would happen. For example, these fish predate on sea urchins, and when the fish were all gone, all anyone ever saw underwater was just acres and acres of sea urchins. But when the fish came back and began predating and controlling the urchin population, low and behold, kelp forests emerged in shallow water. And that's because the urchins eat kelp. So when the fish control the urchin population, the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium. You know, this is probably how the ocean looked here one or 200 years ago, but nobody was around to tell us.I worked in other parts of New Zealand as well, in beautiful, fragile, protected areas like in Fiordland, where this sea pen colony was found. Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color. In the northern part of New Zealand, I dove in the blue water, where the water's a little warmer, and photographed animals like this giant sting ray swimming through an underwater canyon. Every part of the ecosystem in this place seems very healthy, from tiny, little animals like a nudibrank crawling over encrusting sponge or a leatherjacket that is a very important animal in this ecosystem because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold.And I wanted to finish with this photograph, a picture I made on a very stormy day in New Zealand when I just laid on the bottom amidst a school of fish swirling around me. And I was in a place that had only been protected about 20 years ago. And I talked to divers that had been diving there for many years, and they said that the marine life was better here today than it was in the 1960s. And that's because it's been protected, that it has come back.So I think the message is clear. The ocean is, indeed, resilient and tolerant to a point, but we must be good custodians. I became an underwater photographer because I fell in love with the sea, and I make pictures of it today because I want to protect it, and I don't think it's too late.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_skerry_reveals_ocean_s_glory_and_horror
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"Tom Green: That's a 4chan thing. These kids on the Internet, they have this group of kids and they like to say funny words like ""barrel roll."" It's a video game move from ""Star Fox."" ""Star Fox 20""? (Assistant: ""Star Fox 64."") Tom Green: Yeah. And they've been dogging me for a year. I got to tell you, it's driving me nuts, actually. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I scream, ""4chan!""Christopher Poole: When I was 15, I found this website called Futaba Channel. And it was a Japanese forum and imageboard. That format of forum, at that time, was not well-known outside of Japan. And so what I did is I took it, I translated it into English, and I stuck it up for my friends to use. Now, six and a half years later, over seven million people are using it, contributing over 700,000 posts per day. And we've gone from one board to 48 boards.This is what it looks like. So, what's unique about the site is that it's anonymous, and it has no memory. There's no archive, there are no barriers, there's no registration. These things that we're used to with forums don't exist on 4chan. And that's led to this discussion that's completely raw, completely unfiltered. What the site's known for, because it has this environment, is it's fostered the creation of a lot of Internet phenomena, viral videos and whatnot, known as ""memes.""Two of the largest memes that have come out of this site some of you might be familiar with are these LOLcats — just silly pictures of cats with text. And this resonates with millions of people, apparently, because there are tens of thousands of these, and there is a whole blogging empire now dedicated to pictures like these. And Rick Astley's kind of rebirth these past two years ... Rickroll was this bait and switch, really simple, classic bait and switch. Somebody says they're linking to something interesting, and you get an '80s pop song. That's all it was. And it got big enough to the point where there was a float last year at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and Rick Astley pops out, and rickrolls millions of people on television. (Laughter)There are thousands of memes that come out of the site. There are a handful that have escaped into the mainstream, the ones I've just shown you, but every day, every month, people are producing thousands of these.So does a site like this have rules? We do; they're the codified rules that I've come up with, which are more-or-less ignored by the community. And so they've come up with their own set of rules, the ""Rules of the Internet."" And so there are three that I want to show you specifically. Rule one is you don't talk about /b/. Two is you do not talk about /b/. And this one's kind of interesting: ""If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions."" (Laughter) And I will spare you that slide. I assure you, it is very true./b/ is the first board we started with, and it is, in many ways, the beating heart of the website. It is where a third of all the traffic is going. And /b/ is known for, more than anything, not just the memes they've created, but the exploits. And Chris just touched on one of those a second ago, and that was the Time 100 poll. So somebody at Time, at the magazine, thought it would be fun to nominate me for this thing they did last year. And so they placed me on it, and the Internet got wind of it. My community decided they wanted me to win it. I didn't instruct them to do it; they just decided that that's what they wanted. And so, you know, 390 percent approval rating ain't so bad. (Laughter) So they broke that poll. And I ended up on top. I ended up at this really fancy party.But that's not what's interesting about this. It's that they weren't putting me at the top of this list; they were actually — it got so sophisticated to the point where they gamed all of the top 21 places to spell ""mARBLECAKE. ALSO, THE GAME."" (Laughter) The amount of time and effort that went into that is absolutely incredible. And ""marble cake"" is significant because it is the channel that this group called Anonymous organized. Anonymous is this group of people that protested, very famously, Scientology. The story is, Scientology had this embarrassing video of Tom Cruise. It went up online. They got it taken offline and managed to piss off part of the Internet. And so these people, over 7,000 people, less than one month later, organized in a hundred cities around the globe and — this is L.A. — protested the Church of Scientology, and they have continued to do so, now, two full years after the fact. They are still protesting. (Laughter) So we've got this activist group that's this grassroots group that's come out of the site.And last, I'm going to show you the example, the story of Dusty the cat. Dusty is the name that we've given to this cat. This young man posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube. And, you know, this didn't sit well with people, and so there was this outpouring of support for people to do something about this. So what they did is they — I mean, they put CSI to shame here — the Internet detectives came out. They matched, they found his MySpace. They took the YouTube video and they mashed everything in the video. Within 24 hours, they had his name, and within 48 hours, he was arrested.(Applause)And so, what I think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it's this open place. As I said, it's raw, it's unfiltered. And sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now. They're endangered because we're moving towards social networking. We're moving towards persistent identity. We're moving towards, you know, a lack of privacy, really. We're sacrificing a lot of that, and I think in doing so, moving towards those things, we're losing something valuable.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. Got a couple questions for you. But if I ask them, is the TED website going to go down?CP: You're lucky that this is not being streamed to them live right now.CA: Well, you never know. Some of them — we've got people in 75 countries out there watching. Don't tell. But seriously, this issue on anonymity is — I mean, you made the case there. But anonymity basically allows people to say anything, all the rules gone. You've had to wrestle with issues like child pornography. And I'm just curious whether you sometimes lie awake in the night worrying that you've opened Pandora's box.CP: Yes and no. I mean, for as much good that kind of comes out of this environment, there is plenty of bad. There are plenty of downsides. But I think that the greater good is being served here by just allowing people — there are very few places, now, where you can go and not have identity, to be completely anonymous and say whatever you'd like. And saying whatever you like, I think, is powerful. Doing whatever you like is now crossing a line. But I think it's important to have these places. When I get emails, people say, ""Thank you for giving me this place, this outlet, where I can come after work and be myself.""CA: But words, saying things, you know, can be constructive; it can be really damaging. And if you cut the link between what is said and any attribution back to you, I mean, surely there are huge risks with that.CP: There are, certainly. But —CA: Tell me about what — I mean, I think you asked the board what you might say at TED, right?CP: Yeah, I posted a thread on Sunday. And within 24 hours, it had over 12,000 responses. And the thing is, I didn't make it into that presentation because I can't read to you anything that they said, more or less. (Laughter) 99 percent of it is just, would have been, you know, bleeped out. But there were some good things that came out of that too. (Laughter) Love and peace were mentioned.CA: Love and peace were mentioned, kind of with quote marks around them, right?CP: Cats and dogs were mentioned too. CA: And that content is all off the board now. Right, it's gone? Or is it still up there?CP: I stuck that thread so it lasted a few days. It went up to about 16,000 posts, and now it has been taken off.CA: Okay, well. Now, I'm not sure I would have necessarily recommended everyone at TED to go and check it out anyway. Chris, you yourself? I mean, you're a figure of some intrigue. You've got this surprising semi-underground influence, but it's not making you a lot of money, yet. What's the commercial picture here?CP: The commercial picture is that there really isn't much of one, I guess. The site has adult content on it. I mean, obviously, it's got some very offensive, obscene content on it, just in terms of language alone. And when you've got that, you've pretty much sacrificed any hope of making lots of money.CA: But you still live at home, right?CP: I actually moved out recently.CA: That's very cool.(Applause)CP: I got out of Mom's, and I'm back in school right now.CA: But what conversations did you or do you have with your mother about 4chan?CP: At first, very kind of pained, awkward conversations. The content is not dinner table conversation in the least. But my parents — I think part of why they kind of are able to appreciate it is because they don't understand it. (Laughter) CA: And they were probably pleased to see you on top of the Time poll.CP: Yeah. They still didn't know what to think of that though.(Laughter)CA: And so, in 10 years' time, what do you picture yourself doing?CP: That's a good question. As I said, I just went back to school, and I am considering majoring in urban studies and then going on to urban planning, kind of taking whatever I've learned from online communities and trying to adapt that to a physical community.CA: Chris, thank you. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you for coming to TED.","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online
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"We live in difficult and challenging economic times, of course. And one of the first victims of difficult economic times, I think, is public spending of any kind, but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science, and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration. So I want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do.But I think to set the scene, I want to show — the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst TED slide in the history of TED, but it is a bit of a mess. (Laughter) But actually, it's not my fault; it's from the Guardian newspaper. And it's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs. Because, if I'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration, I should tell you how much it costs. So this is a game called ""spot the science budgets."" This is the U.K. government spend. You see there, it's about 620 billion a year.The science budget is actually — if you look to your left, there's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs. And it's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob. It's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion. That funds everything in the U.K. from medical research, space exploration, where I work, at CERN in Geneva, particle physics, engineering, even arts and humanities, funded from the science budget, which is that 3.3 billion, that little, tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen. So that's what we're arguing about. That percentage, by the way, is about the same in the U.S. and Germany and France. R&D in total in the economy, publicly funded, is about 0.6 percent of GDP. So that's what we're arguing about.The first thing I want to say, and this is straight from ""Wonders of the Solar System,"" is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful. This is a picture that actually was sent back by the Cassini space probe around Saturn, after we'd finished filming ""Wonders of the Solar System."" So it isn't in the series. It's of the moon Enceladus. So that big sweeping, white sphere in the corner is Saturn, which is actually in the background of the picture. And that crescent there is the moon Enceladus, which is about as big as the British Isles. It's about 500 kilometers in diameter. So, tiny moon. What's fascinating and beautiful ... this an unprocessed picture, by the way, I should say, it's black and white, straight from Saturnian orbit.What's beautiful is, you can probably see on the limb there some faint, sort of, wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb. This is how we visualize that in ""Wonders of the Solar System."" It's a beautiful graphic. What we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon. That's fascinating and beautiful in itself, but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon. And what's important about that is that, on our planet, on Earth, wherever we find liquid water, we find life. So, to find strong evidence of liquid, pools of liquid, beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the Earth is really quite astounding. So what we're saying, essentially, is maybe that's a habitat for life in the solar system. Well, let me just say, that was a graphic. I just want to show this picture. That's one more picture of Enceladus. This is when Cassini flew beneath Enceladus. So it made a very low pass, just a few hundred kilometers above the surface. And so this, again, a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space, absolutely beautiful.But that's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system. That's probably this place, which is a moon of Jupiter, Europa. And again, we had to fly to the Jovian system to get any sense that this moon, as most moons, was anything other than a dead ball of rock. It's actually an ice moon. So what you're looking at is the surface of the moon Europa, which is a thick sheet of ice, probably a hundred kilometers thick. But by measuring the way that Europa interacts with the magnetic field of Jupiter, and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around, we've inferred very strongly that there's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of Europa. So below the ice, there's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon. It could be hundreds of kilometers deep, we think. We think it's saltwater, and that would mean that there's more water on that moon of Jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the Earth combined. So that place, a little moon around Jupiter, is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the Earth, that we know of. Tremendous and beautiful discovery.Our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful. It may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask, which is: ""Are we alone in the universe?"" Is there any other use to exploration and science, other than just a sense of wonder? Well, there is. This is a very famous picture taken, actually, on my first Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1968, when I was about eight months old. It was taken by Apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon. Earthrise from Apollo 8. A famous picture; many people have said that it's the picture that saved 1968, which was a turbulent year — the student riots in Paris, the height of the Vietnam War. The reason many people think that about this picture, and Al Gore has said it many times, actually, on the stage at TED, is that this picture, arguably, was the beginning of the environmental movement. Because, for the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space.What's also not often said about the space exploration, about the Apollo program, is the economic contribution it made. I mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this, it cost a lot, didn't it? Well, actually, many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness, the economic impact of Apollo. The biggest one was in 1975 by Chase Econometrics. And it showed that for every $1 spent on Apollo, 14 came back into the U.S. economy. So the Apollo program paid for itself in inspiration, in engineering, achievement and, I think, in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over. So exploration can pay for itself.What about scientific discovery? What about driving innovation? Well, this looks like a picture of virtually nothing. What it is, is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen. See, back in the 1880s, 1890s, many scientists, many observers, looked at the light given off from atoms. And they saw strange pictures like this. What you're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it doesn't just glow like a white light, it just emits light at particular colors, a red one, a light blue one, some dark blue ones. Now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them. And the electrons can only be in particular places. And when they jump up to the next place they can be, and fall back down again, they emit light at particular colors.And so the fact that atoms, when you heat them up, only emit light at very specific colors, was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory, the theory of the structure of atoms. I just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable. This is actually a picture of the spectrum of the Sun. And now, this is a picture of atoms in the Sun's atmosphere absorbing light. And again, they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down, jump up and fall down. But look at the number of black lines in that spectrum. And the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the Sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element. And that's why helium's called helium. It's called ""helios"" — helios from the Sun.Now, that sounds esoteric, and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit, but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon, for example. The way that silicon behaves, the fact that you can build transistors, is a purely quantum phenomenon. So without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms, which led to this rather esoteric theory, quantum mechanics, then we wouldn't have transistors, we wouldn't have silicon chips, we wouldn't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy.There's one more, I think, wonderful twist to that tale. In ""Wonders of the Solar System,"" we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal. It's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on Earth, is you can transport it, not only to the planets, but to the most distant stars and galaxies. And one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics, just by looking at the structure of atoms — the same theory that describes transistors — is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than, quite specifically, 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. That's a limit imposed on the mass of stars. You can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory, get a telescope, swing it to the sky, and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. That's quite an incredible prediction.What happens when you have a star that's right on the edge of that mass? Well, this is a picture of it. This is the picture of a galaxy, a common ""our garden"" galaxy with, what, 100 billion stars like our Sun in it. It's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. There are a billion stars in the galactic core, which is why it's shining out so brightly. This is about 50 million light years away, so one of our neighboring galaxies. But that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy. So that star is also 50 million light years away. It's part of that galaxy, and it's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it. That's a Type Ia supernova explosion. Now that's an incredible phenomena, because it's a star that sits there. It's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf. It sits there about, say, 1.3 times the mass of the Sun. And it has a binary companion that goes around it, so a big star, a big ball of gas. And what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star, until it gets to this limit called the Chandrasekhar limit, and then it explodes. And it explodes, and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks, and releases, not only energy, but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe. In fact, that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf.Now, there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the Big Bang. And there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars. It was made in stars like that, locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets, stars, new solar systems and, indeed, people like us. I think that's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics, because we understand that process, because we understand the structure of atoms here on Earth.This is a beautiful quote that I found — we're talking about serendipity there — from Alexander Fleming: ""When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic."" Now, the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor. And they certainly didn't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions, which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe. So, I think science can be — serendipity is important. It can be beautiful. It can reveal quite astonishing things. It can also, I think, finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet.This is a spectacular picture of our home planet. Now, it doesn't look like our home planet. It looks like Saturn because, of course, it is. It was taken by the Cassini space probe. But it's a famous picture, not because of the beauty and majesty of Saturn's rings, but actually because of a tiny, faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings. And if I blow it up there, you see it. It looks like a moon, but in fact, it's a picture of Earth. It was a picture of Earth captured in that frame of Saturn. That's our planet from 750 million miles away. I think the Earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it, the more beautiful it seems.But that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet. It was taken by this thing, which is called the Voyager spacecraft. And that's a picture of me in front of it for scale. The Voyager is a tiny machine. It's currently 10 billion miles away from Earth, transmitting with that dish, with the power of 20 watts, and we're still in contact with it. But it visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And after it visited all four of those planets, Carl Sagan, who's one of my great heroes, had the wonderful idea of turning Voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited. And it took this picture of Earth. Now it's very hard to see the Earth there, it's called the ""Pale Blue Dot"" picture, but Earth is suspended in that red shaft of light. That's Earth from four billion miles away.And I'd like to read you what Sagan wrote about it, just to finish, because I cannot say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken. He said, ""Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. It's been said that astronomy's a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.""Beautiful words about the power of science and exploration. The argument has always been made, and it will always be made, that we know enough about the universe. You could have made it in the 1920s; you wouldn't have had penicillin. You could have made it in the 1890s; you wouldn't have the transistor. And it's made today in these difficult economic times. Surely, we know enough. We don't need to discover anything else about our universe.Let me leave the last words to someone who's rapidly becoming a hero of mine, Humphrey Davy, who did his science at the turn of the 19th century. He was clearly under assault all the time. ""We know enough at the turn of the 19th century. Just exploit it; just build things."" He said this, he said, ""Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers
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"Hi there. I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. Some of you may recognize this image. This is the opening frame of the video that we created. We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted.Now, when we first started talking to OK Go — the name of the song is ""This Too Shall Pass"" — we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. They're responsible for this video, ""Here It Goes Again."" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. A fantastically viral and wonderful video. So we were really excited about working with them. And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine.Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. And we came up with some parameters, because, you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open.And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. So we came up with a list of requirements, the ""10 commandments,"" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is ""No magic."" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. They wanted band integration, that is, the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. They wanted us to make use of the space. So we have this 10,000-square-foot warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. It included an exterior loading dock. We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. The machine itself would start the music. So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot.(Laughter)(Applause)Okay. So, just some statistics about what we went through in the process. The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. (Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe — after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build — and left it in a pile of stuff. And another engineer thought, ""Well, that would be a really good thing to use"" and ended up using it as a really nice trigger. And it's actually in the machine.So what did we learn from all of this? Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. And we learned that small stuff stinks. Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right?What else? Planning is incredibly important. (Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. It's been said that, ""No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."" I think our enemy was physics — (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. Again, small to large is relevant here. The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing.Life can be messy. There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, ""This Too Shall Pass.""Thank you very much.(Applause) And now to introducetheir music video, we have OK Go.OK Go: An introduction. Hello TEDxUSC. We are OK Go. What are we doing? Oh, just hanging out with our Grammy. What what! It think we can do better than this. Hello TEDxUSC. We are OK Go. Have you read the ""Natural Curiosity Cabinet?"" I mean, ""Curiosity"" — excuse me. Let me start again. We need some more ridiculous things besides ""The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities."" Tim's sundial hat. Have you seen the new work they've done to the Waltz Towers? Sorry, start again. (Barking) Dogs. Hello, TEDxUSC. We are OK Go, and this our new video, ""This Too Shall Pass."" [unclear] Kay, we can still do one better I think, yeah. That one's pretty good. It's getting better.(Music)♫ You know you can't keep letting it get you down ♫♫ And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around ♫♫ If there ain't all that much to lug around ♫♫ Better run like hell when you hit the ground ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ You can't stop these kids from dancing ♫♫ Why would you want to? ♫♫ Especially when you're already getting yours ♫♫ Cuz if your mind don't move and your knees don't bend ♫♫ Well don't go blaming the kids again ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ Let it go ♫♫ This too shall pass ♫♫ Let it go ♫♫ This too shall pass ♫♫ You know you can't keep letting it get you down ♫♫ No, you can't keep letting it get you down ♫♫ Let it go ♫♫ This too shall pass ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫♫ When the morning comes ♫(Cheering)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_sadowsky_engineers_a_viral_music_video
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"One thing the world needs, one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates. We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument. (Applause) If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. I have a suggestion. Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion. First, let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality, give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens, Aristotle's theory of justice, and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today. So, are you ready for the lecture? According to Aristotle, justice means giving people what they deserve. That's it; that's the lecture.(Laughter)Now, you may say, well, that's obvious enough. The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why. Take the example of flutes. Suppose we're distributing flutes. Who should get the best ones? Let's see what people — What would you say? Who should get the best flute? You can just call it out.(Audience: Random.)Michael Sandel: At random. You would do it by lottery. Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them. Who else?(Audience: The best flute players.)MS: The best flute players. (Audience: The worst flute players.)MS: The worst flute players. How many say the best flute players? Why? Actually, that was Aristotle's answer too.(Laughter)But here's a harder question. Why do you think, those of you who voted this way, that the best flutes should go to the best flute players?Peter: The greatest benefit to all.MS: The greatest benefit to all. We'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players. That's Peter? (Audience: Peter.)MS: All right. Well, it's a good reason. We'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music. But Peter, Aristotle doesn't agree with you that that's the reason. That's all right. Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players. He said, that's what flutes are for — to be played well. He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing, or the social activity — in this case, musical performance. And the point, the essential nature, of musical performance is to produce excellent music. It'll be a happy byproduct that we'll all benefit. But when we think about justice, Aristotle says, what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing. One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy, but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians.Now, flutes may seem ... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case. Let's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice. It had to do with golf. Casey Martin — a few years ago, Casey Martin — did any of you hear about him? He was a very good golfer, but he had a disability. He had a bad leg, a circulatory problem, that made it very painful for him to walk the course. In fact, it carried risk of injury. He asked the PGA, the Professional Golfers' Association, for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments. They said, ""No. Now that would give you an unfair advantage."" He sued, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, believe it or not, the case over the golf cart, because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated, provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity. He says, ""I'm a great golfer. I want to compete. But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next.""Suppose you were on the Supreme Court. Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case. How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart? And how many say, no, he doesn't? All right, let's take a poll, show of hands. How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin? And how many would not? How many would say he doesn't? All right, we have a good division of opinion here. Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart, what would be your reason? Raise your hand, and we'll try to get you a microphone. What would be your reason?(Audience: It'd be an unfair advantage.)MS: It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart. All right, those of you, I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage. What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart? How would you answer the objection? Yes, all right.Audience: The cart's not part of the game.MS: What's your name? (Audience: Charlie.)MS: Charlie says — We'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply. Tell us, Charlie, why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart?Charlie: The cart's not part of the game.MS: But what about walking from hole to hole?Charlie: It doesn't matter; it's not part of the game.MS: Walking the course is not part of the game of golf?Charlie: Not in my book, it isn't.MS: All right. Stay there, Charlie.(Laughter)Who has an answer for Charlie? All right, who has an answer for Charlie? What would you say?Audience: The endurance element is a very important part of the game, walking all those holes.MS: Walking all those holes? That's part of the game of golf? (Audience: Absolutely.)MS: What's your name? (Audience: Warren.)MS: Warren. Charlie, what do you say to Warren?Charley: I'll stick to my original thesis.(Laughter)MS: Warren, are you a golfer?Warren: I am not a golfer.Charley: And I am. (MS: Okay.) (Laughter)(Applause)You know, it's interesting. In the case, in the lower court, they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue. Is walking the course essential to the game? And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. And what do you suppose they all said? Yes. They agreed with Warren. They said, yes, walking the course is strenuous physical exercise. The fatigue factor is an important part of golf. And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart. Now, notice, something interesting — Well, I should tell you about the Supreme Court first.The Supreme Court decided. What do you suppose they said? They said yes, that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart. Seven to two, they ruled. What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we've just had is that the discussion about the right, the justice, of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf. And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question. And Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, said he had read all about the history of golf, and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible, and that walking was not essential, but incidental.Now, there were two dissenters, one of whom was Justice Scalia. He wouldn't have granted the cart, and he had a very interesting dissent. It's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority's opinion. He said it's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf. Here's how he put it. ""To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement, (Laughter) that is, what distinguishes games from productive activity, (Laughter) it is quite impossible to say that any of a game's arbitrary rules is essential.""So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority's opinion. Justice Scalia's opinion is questionable for two reasons. First, no real sports fan would talk that way. (Laughter) If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game. It's also objectionable on a second ground. On the face of it, it seemed to be — this debate about the golf cart — an argument about fairness, what's an unfair advantage. But if fairness were the only thing at stake, there would have been an easy and obvious solution. What would it be? (Audience: Let everyone use the cart.) Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to. Then the fairness objection goes away.But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been, I suspect, more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA, even than making an exception for Casey Martin. Why? Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf, but, relatedly, the question: What abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents? Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game. (Laughter) After all, there's no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. (Laughter) So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart, it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer, the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes. That illustrates that with golf, as with flutes, it's hard to decide the question of what justice requires, without grappling with the question, ""What is the essential nature of the activity in question, and what qualities, what excellences connected with that activity, are worthy of honor and recognition?""Let's take a final example that's prominent in contemporary political debate: same-sex marriage. There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage. How many here favor the first policy: the state should recognize traditional marriage only? And how many favor the second, same-sex marriage? Now, put it this way: What ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage? The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage, fundamentally, is procreation, and that's what's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging. And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no, procreation is not the only purpose of marriage; what about a lifelong, mutual, loving commitment? That's really what marriage is about. So with flutes, with golf carts, and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage, Aristotle has a point. Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition.So let's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve, elevate, the terms of political discourse in the United States, and for that matter, around the world. There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite, that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Chris. Thanks, Chris.Chris Anderson: From flutes to golf courses to same-sex marriage — that was a genius link. Now look, you're a pioneer of open education. Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big. What's your vision for the next phase of this?MS: Well, I think that it is possible. In the classroom, we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions. And I think we can do that in public life more generally. And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we've created of the course — it's available now, online, free for everyone anywhere in the world — and to see whether we can partner with institutions, at universities in China, in India, in Africa, around the world, to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate.CA: So you picture, at some point, live, in real time, you could have this kind of conversation, inviting questions, but with people from China and India joining in?MS: Right. We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach, and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students. Wouldn't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing, engaging seriously with big moral questions, exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup, students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge, Massachusetts and create a global classroom. That's what I would love to do.(Applause)CA: So, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor. Michael Sandel. Thank you so much. (MS: Thanks so much.)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_lost_art_of_democratic_debate
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"In Africa we say, ""God gave the white man a watch and gave the black man time."" (Laughter) I think, how is it possible for a man with so much time to tell his story in 18 minutes? I think it will be quite a challenge for me.Most African stories these days, they talk about famine, HIV and AIDS, poverty or war. But my story that I would like to share with you today is the one about success. It is about a country in the southwest of Africa called Namibia. Namibia has got 2.1 million people, but it is only twice the size of California.I come from a region in the remote northwest part of the country. It's called Kunene region. And in the center of Kunene region is the village of Sesfontein. This is where I was born. This is where I'm coming from. Most people that are following the story of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt will know where Namibia is. They love Namibia for its beautiful dunes, that are even taller than the Empire State Building. Wind and time have twisted our landscape into very strange shapes, and these shapes are speckled with wildlife that has become so adapted to this harsh and strange land.I'm a Himba. You might wonder, why are you wearing these Western clothes? I'm a Himba and Namibian. A Himba is one of the 29 ethnic groups in Namibia. We live a very traditional lifestyle. I grew up herding, looking after our livestock — goats, sheep and cattle. And one day, my father actually took me into the bush. He said, ""John, I want you to become a good herder. Boy, if you are looking after our livestock and you see a cheetah eating our goat — cheetah is very nervous — just walk up to it. Walk up to it and smack it on the backside."" (Laughter) ""And he will let go of the goat and run off."" But then he said, ""Boy, if you run into a lion, don't move. Don't move. Stand your ground. Puff up and just look it in the eye and it may not want to fight you."" (Laughter) But then, he said, ""If you see a leopard, boy, you better run like hell."" (Laughter) ""Imagine you run faster than those goats you are looking after."" In this way — (Laughter) In this way, I actually started to learn about nature.In addition to being an ordinary Namibian and in addition to being a Himba I'm also a trained conservationist. And it is very important if you are in the field to know what to confront and what to run from. I was born in 1971. We lived under apartheid regime. The whites could farm, graze and hunt as they wished, but we black, we were not regarded as responsible to use wildlife. Whenever we tried to hunt, we were called poachers. And as a result, we were fined and locked up in jail.Between 1966 and 1990, the U.S. and Soviet interests fought for control over my country. And you know, during war time, there are militaries, armies, that are moving around. And the army hunted for valuable rhino horns and tusks. They could sell these things for anything between $5,000 a kilo. During the same year almost every Himba had a rifle. Because it was wartime, the British .303 rifle was just all over the whole country.Then in the same time, around 1980, we had a very big drought. It killed almost everything that was left. Our livestock was almost at the brink of extinction, protected as well. We were hungry. I remember a night when a hungry leopard went into the house of one of our neighbors and took a sleeping child out of the bed. It's a very sad story. But even today, that memory is still in people's minds. They can pinpoint the exact location where this all happened. And then, in the same year, we almost lost everything. And my father said, ""Why don't you just go to school?"" And they sent me off to school, just to get busy somewhere there.And the year I went to school, my father actually got a job with a non-governmental organization called IRDNC, Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation. They actually spend a lot of time a year in the communities. They were trusted by the local communities like our leader, Joshua Kangombe. Joshua Kangombe saw what was happening: wildlife disappearing, poaching was skyrocketing, and the situation seemed very hopeless. Death and despair surrounded Joshua and our entire communities.But then, the people from IRDNC proposed to Joshua: What if we pay people that you trust to look after wildlife? Do you have anybody in your communities, or people, that know the bush very well and that know wildlife very well? The headman said: ""Yes. Our poachers."" ""Eh? The poachers?"" ""Yes. Our poachers."" And that was my father. My father has been a poacher for quite a long time. Instead of shooting poachers dead like they were doing elsewhere in Africa, IRDNC has helped men reclaim their abilities to manage their peoples and their rights to own and manage wildlife. And thus, as people started feeling ownership over wildlife, wildlife numbers started coming back, and that's actually becoming a foundation for conservation in Namibia. With independence, the whole approach of community getting involved was embraced by our new government.Three things that actually help to build on this foundation: The very first one is honoring of tradition and being open to new ideas. Here is our tradition: At every Himba village, there is a sacred fire. And at this sacred fire, the spirit of our ancestors speak through the headman and advise us where to get water, where to get grazings, and where to go and hunt. And I think this is the best way of regulating ourselves on the environment. And here are the new ideas. Transporting rhinos using helicopters I think is much easier than talking through a spirit that you can't see, isn't it? And these things we were taught by outsiders. We learned these things from outsiders. We needed new boundaries to describe our traditional lands; we needed to learn more things like GPS just to see whether — can GPS really reflect the true reflection of the land or is this just a thing made somewhere in the West? And we then wanted to see whether we can match our ancestral maps with digital maps made somewhere in the world. And through this, we actually started realizing our dreams, and we maintained honoring our traditions but we were still open to new ideas.The second element is that we wanted to have a life, a better life where we can benefit through many things. Most poachers, like my father, were people from our own community. They were not people from outside. These were our own people. And sometimes, once they were caught, they were treated with respect, brought back into the communities and they were made part of the bigger dreams. The best one, like my father — I'm not campaigning for my father — (Laughter) they were put in charge to stop others from poaching. And when this thing started going on, we started becoming one community, renewing our connection to nature. And that was a very strong thing in Namibia.The last element that actually helped develop these things was the partnerships. Our government has given legal status over our traditional lands. The other partners that we have got is business communities. Business communities helped bring Namibia onto the world map and they have also helped make wildlife a very valuable land use like any other land uses such as agriculture. And most of my conservation colleagues today that you find in Namibia have been trained through the initiative, through the involvement of World Wildlife Fund in the most up-to-date conservation practices. They have also given funding for two decades to this whole program. And so far, with the support of World Wildlife Fund, we've been able to scale up the very small programs to national programs today. Namibia ... or Sesfontein was no more an isolated village somewhere, hidden away in Namibia. With these assets we are now part of the global village.Thirty years have passed since my father's first job as a community game guard. It's very unfortunate that he passed away and he cannot see the success as I and my children see it today. When I finished school in 1995, there were only 20 lions in the entire Northwest — in our area. But today, there are more than 130 lions. (Applause) So please, if you go to Namibia, make sure that you stay in the tents. Don't walk out at night!(Laughter)The black rhino — they were almost extinct in 1982. But today, Kunene has the largest concentration of black rhino — free-roaming black rhinos — in the world. This is outside the protected area.(Applause)The leopard — they are now in big numbers but they are now far away from our village, because the natural plain has multiplied, like zebras, springboks and everything. They stay very much far away because this other thing has multiplied from less than a thousand to tens of thousands of animals.What started as very small, community rangers getting community involved, has now grown into something that we call conservancies. Conservancies are legally instituted institutions by the government, and these are run by the communities themselves, for their benefit. Today, we have got 60 conservancies that manage and protect over 13 million hectares of land in Namibia. We have already reshaped conservation in the entire country. Nowhere else in the world has community-adopted conservation at this scale.(Applause)In 2008, conservancy generated 5.7 million dollars. This is our new economy — an economy based on the respect of our natural resources. And we are able to use this money for many things: Very importantly, we put it in education. Secondly, we put it for infrastructure. Food. Very important as well — we invest this money in AIDS and HIV education. You know that Africa is being affected by these viruses. And this is the good news from Africa that we have to shout from the rooftops.(Applause)And now, what the world really needs is for you to help me and our partners take some of what we have learned in Namibia to other places with similar problems: places like Mongolia, or even in your own backyards, the Northern Great Plains, where buffalo and other animals have suffered and many communities are in decline. I like that one: Namibia serving as a model to Africa, and Africa serving as a model to the United States. (Applause) We were successful in Namibia because we dreamed of a future that was much more than just a healthy wildlife. We knew conservation would fail if it doesn't work to improve the lives of the local communities. So, come and talk to me about Namibia, and better yet, come to Namibia and see for yourself how we have done it. And please, do visit our website to learn more and see how you can help CBNRM in Africa and across the world. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_kasaona_from_poachers_to_caretakers
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"Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me. One of them was: Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when, for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels, male and female, serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey? You'd still have five billion left in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. Now, you may remember me asking the question as well, a very interesting observation, that actually those strange little signs that actually flash ""35"" at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you're within or outside the speed limit — those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment.So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is: The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible, as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied. So there seems to be a complete disconnect here. So what I'm asking for is the creation of a new job title — I'll come to this a little later — and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language. Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government, which is, of course, the largest organization of all, have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people.Let me give you one example of this. You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger, okay, heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time. It may still be, for all I know. Now, all of you in this room, in one form or other, are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged. Just interested, did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all? So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity, you're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody, okay? By contrast, years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do, the most potent things are actually very, very small. This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class, it's the cruet salt and pepper set. Quite nice in itself, they're little, sort of, airplane things. What's really, really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought, which is, ""I reckon I can heist these."" However, you pick them up and underneath, actually engraved in the metal, are the words, ""Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class."" (Laughter) Now, years after you remember the strategic question of whether you're flying in a 777 or an Airbus, you remember those words and that experience.Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar. Has anybody stayed there? It's the lift, it's a series of buttons in the lift. Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor. It starts with garage at the bottom, I suppose, appropriately, but it doesn't go up garage, grand floor, mezzanine, one, two, three, four. It actually says garage, funk, rhythm and blues. You have a series of buttons. You actually choose your lift music. My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max. It's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars, in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life.Now, these are trivial marketing examples, I accept. But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo, probably one of the leading experts in, effectively, the eradication of poverty in the developing world, actually spoke. And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which, in a business context or a government context, would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing. It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by, not only making it a social event — I think good use of behavioral economics in that, if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated, your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone. But secondly, to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated. It's a tiny, tiny thing. If you're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says, ""So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty?"" you're not really confident standing up there saying, ""I've got it cracked; it's the lentils,"" are you?Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them. And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there's a very, very strong disproportionality at work, that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that's applied. But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality. So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget. And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on. What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all. (Laughter) It's those people I'd quite like to create in the world going forward.Now, here's another thing that happens, which is what I call sometimes ""Terminal 5 syndrome,"" which is that big, expensive things get big, highly-intelligent attention, and they're great, and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent, until you get down to the small detail, the usability, which is the signage, which is catastrophic. You come out of ""Arrive"" at the airport, and you follow a big yellow sign that says ""Trains"" and it's in front of you. So you walk for another hundred yards, expecting perhaps another sign, that might courteously be yellow, in front of you and saying ""Trains."" No, no, no, the next one is actually blue, to your left, and says ""Heathrow Express."" I mean, it could almost be rather like that scene from the film ""Airplane."" A yellow sign? That's exactly what they'll be expecting.Actually, what happens in the world increasingly — now, all credit to the British Airport Authority. I spoke about this before, and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said, ""Okay, what can you do?"" So I did come up with five suggestions, which they are actually actioning. One of them also being, although logically it's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it, if it only serves two floors, it's actually bloody terrifying, okay? Because when the door closes and there's nothing for you to do, you've actually just stepped into a Hammer film.(Laughter)So these questions ... what is happening in the world is the big stuff, actually, is done magnificently well. But the small stuff, what you might call the user interface, is done spectacularly badly. But also, there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions. Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as ""strategy"" to actually solve them. I tried this exercise recently, talking about banking. They said, ""Can we do an advertising campaign? What can we do and encourage more online banking?"" I said, ""It's really, really easy."" I said, ""When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they'd probably quite like to look at. The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance."" I've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen.Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news? Okay, you simply wouldn't. I said, ""If you make, actually, 'Tell me my balance.' If you make that an option rather than the default, you'll find twice as many people log on to online banking, and they do it three times as often."" Let's face it, most of us — how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine? And you're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large. Now, interesting that no single person does that, or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it. But what's interesting about that suggestion was that, to implement that suggestion wouldn't cost 10 million pounds; it wouldn't involve large amounts of expenditure; it would actually cost about 50 quid. And yet, it never happens.Because there's a fundamental disconnect, as I said, that actually, the people with the power want to do big expensive things. And there's to some extent a big strategy myth that's prevalent in business now. And if you think about it, it's very, very important that the strategy myth is maintained. Because, if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors, it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company's success might actually lie somewhere else, in small pieces of tactical activity.But what is happening is that effectively — and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn't helped this; lots of things haven't helped this — business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy. It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate. It's a kind of mechanistic world that we'd all love to live in where, effectively, it sits very nicely on spreadsheets, everything is numerically expressible, and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success. That's the world people actually want. In truth, we do live in a world that science can understand. Unfortunately, the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases, very, very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects, and equally, vast areas of activity, enormous mergers, can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all. But it's very, very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we're living in such a world.But what I'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach. That is actually strategy, and I'm not denying that strategy has a role. You know, there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot. And I'd be wrong to dis that completely. Moving over, we come, of course, to consultancy.(Laughter)I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way. I mean, Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model. He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services, (Laughter) no longer tied to a single monopoly provider, in many cases, sourcing things locally, and of course, the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing. So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that, I'm not sure.Then there are other things that don't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing. That's called trivia. But there's a fourth thing. And the fundamental problem is we don't actually have a word for this stuff. We don't know what to call it. And actually we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause.So the first thing I'd like is a competition — to anybody watching this as a film — is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right. And the second thing, I think, is that the world needs to have people in charge of that. That's why I call for the ""Chief Detail Officer."" Every corporation should have one, and every government should have a Ministry of Detail. The people who actually have no money, who have no extravagant budget, but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay, but you'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English. And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers, then that fourth quadrant, which is so woefully neglected at the moment, might finally get the attention it deserves.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_sweat_the_small_stuff
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"Chris Anderson: We're having a debate. The debate is over the proposition: ""What the world needs now is nuclear energy."" True or false? And before we have the debate, I'd like to actually take a show of hands — on balance, right now, are you for or against this? So those who are ""yes,"" raise your hand. ""For."" Okay, hands down. Those who are against, raise your hands. Okay, I'm reading that at about 75 to 25 in favor at the start. Which means we're going to take a vote at the end and see how that shifts, if at all. So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each, and then after one little, quick exchange between them, I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience to have 30 seconds to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point.So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly, is one of, truly, the founders of the environmental movement, a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand.Stewart Brand: Whoa. (Applause) The saying is that with climate, those who know the most are the most worried. With nuclear, those who know the most are the least worried. A classic example is James Hansen, a NASA climatologist pushing for 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He came out with a wonderful book recently called ""Storms of My Grandchildren."" And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power, as are most climatologists who are engaging this issue seriously.This is the design situation: a planet that is facing climate change and is now half urban. Look at the client base for this. Five out of six of us live in the developing world. We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world. And we are educating our kids, having fewer kids, basically good news all around. But we move to cities, toward the bright lights, and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs, is electricity. And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it. This is one of the most desired things by poor people all over the world, in the cities and in the countryside. Electricity for cities, at its best, is what's called baseload electricity. That's where it is on all the time. And so far there are only three major sources of that — coal and gas, hydro-electric, which in most places is maxed-out — and nuclear. I would love to have something in the fourth place here, but in terms of constant, clean, scalable energy, [solar] and wind and the other renewables aren't there yet because they're inconstant. Nuclear is and has been for 40 years.Now, from an environmental standpoint, the main thing you want to look at is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal, the two major sources of electricity. If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear, the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can — a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds. But one day of coal adds up to one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant. Then what happens to the waste? The nuclear waste typically goes into a dry cask storage out back of the parking lot at the reactor site because most places don't have underground storage yet. It's just as well, because it can stay where it is. While the carbon dioxide, vast quantities of it, gigatons, goes into the atmosphere where we can't get it back — yet — and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about. So when you add up the greenhouse gases in the lifetime of these various energy sources, nuclear is down there with wind and hydro, below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels.Wind is wonderful; I love wind. I love being around these big wind generators. But one of the things we're discovering is that wind, like solar, is an actually relatively dilute source of energy. And so it takes a very large footprint on the land, a very large footprint in terms of materials, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm. In places like Denmark and Germany, they've maxed out on wind already. They've run out of good sites. The power lines are getting overloaded. And you peak out. Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 square miles of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen. It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land. Solar's wonderful on rooftops. But out in the landscape, one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert.When you add all these things up — Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out what would it take to get 13 clean terawatts of energy from wind, solar and biofuels, and that area would be roughly the size of the United States, an area he refers to as ""Renewistan."" A guy who's added it up all this very well is David Mackay, a physicist in England, and in his wonderful book, ""Sustainable Energy,"" among other things, he says, ""I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic.""(Laughter)In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. Ten percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads. We haven't even started the American stockpile. I think of most interest to a TED audience would be the new generation of reactors that are very small, down around 10 to 125 megawatts. This is one from Toshiba. Here's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge. And that would be very interesting in the developing world. Typically, these things are put in the ground. They're referred to as nuclear batteries. They're incredibly safe, weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it. Here is a commercial version from New Mexico called the Hyperion, and another one from Oregon called NuScale. Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors, here's an integral fast reactor. Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in. The governments of the world are going to have to decide that coals need to be made expensive, and these will go ahead. And here's the future.(Applause)CA: Okay. Okay. (Applause) So arguing against, a man who's been at the nitty, gritty heart of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years. In 2000, he discovered that soot was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2. His team have been making detailed calculations of the relative impacts of different energy sources. His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage — we shall see — from Stanford, Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck.Mark Jacobson: Thank you. (Applause) So my premise here is that nuclear energy puts out more carbon dioxide, puts out more air pollutants, enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems, namely wind, solar, geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power. And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation. So let's start just by looking at the CO2 emissions from the life cycle. CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions of all the greenhouse gases and particles that cause warming and converted to CO2. And if you look, wind and concentrated solar have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph. Nuclear — there are two bars here. One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate. The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry estimate of nuclear. The high is the average of 103 scientific, peer-reviewed studies. And this is just the CO2 from the life cycle.If we look at the delays, it takes between 10 and 19 years to put up a nuclear power plant from planning to operation. This includes about three and a half to six years for a site permit. and another two and a half to four years for a construction permit and issue, and then four to nine years for actual construction. And in China, right now, they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear. And the average, just for the construction time of these, is 7.1 years on top of any planning times. While you're waiting around for your nuclear, you have to run the regular electric power grid, which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world. And the chart here shows the difference between the emissions from the regular grid, resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else, versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics. Wind takes about two to five years on average, same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics. So the difference is the opportunity cost of using nuclear versus wind, or something else. So if you add these two together, alone, you can see a separation that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy. And this doesn't even account for the footprint on the ground.If you look at the air pollution health effects, this is the number of deaths per year in 2020 just from vehicle exhaust. Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or flex fuel vehicles run on E85. Well, right now in the United States, 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution, and vehicles are about 25,000 of those. In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000 due to improvements. And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions, the death rates of 2020. If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol, you'd actually increase the death rate slightly. If you go to nuclear, you do get a big reduction, but it's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar.Now if you consider the fact that nuclear weapons proliferation is associated with nuclear energy proliferation, because we know for example, India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly by enriching uranium in nuclear energy facilities. North Korea did that to some extent. Iran is doing that right now. And Venezuela would be doing it if they started with their nuclear energy facilities. If you do a large scale expansion of nuclear energy across the world, and as a result there was just one nuclear bomb created that was used to destroy a city such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity, the additional death rates due to this averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S. would be this. So, do we need this?The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint. Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world. That, because the footprint, as you can see, is just the pole touching the ground. And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines. That would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground, entirely. The spacing is something else. That's the footprint that is always being confused. People confuse footprint with spacing. As you can see from these pictures, the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes including agricultural land, range land or open space. Over the ocean, it's not even land. Now if we look at nuclear — (Laughter) With nuclear, what do we have? We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone that's 17 square kilometers. And you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with.Now if we go to the area, lots is worse than nuclear or wind. For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, this is how much land you would need. That's cellulosic, second generation biofuels from prairie grass. Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller. This is based on ranges from data, but if you look at nuclear, it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet. For wind, there's a larger area, but much smaller footprint. And of course, with wind, you could put it all over the East Coast, offshore theoretically, or you can split it up. And now, if you go back to looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both, and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing, but it's still pretty small. And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet. To power the entire world with 50 percent wind, you would need about one percent of world land.Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant. We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply. You can do that by combining renewables. This is from real data in California, looking at wind data and solar data. And it considers just using existing hydro to match the hour-by-hour power demand. Here are the world wind resources. There's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide than we need for all the world. So then here's the final ranking. And one last slide I just want to show. This is the choice: You can either have wind or nuclear. If you use wind, you guarantee ice will last. Nuclear, the time lag alone will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more. And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky or an uncertain future with nuclear power.(Applause)CA: All right. So while they're having their comebacks on each other — and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran — I need two people from either side. So if you're for this, if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands. If you're against, put up one. And I want two of each for the mics. Now then, you guys have — you have a minute comeback on him to pick up a point he said, challenge it, whatever.SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark, has to do with weapons and energy. These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow putting out a lot of greenhouse gases — a lot of those studies include, ""Well of course war will be inevitable and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that,"" which is kind of finessing it a little bit, I think. The reality is that there's, what, 21 nations that have nuclear power? Of those, seven have nuclear weapons. In every case, they got the weapons before they got the nuclear power. There are two nations, North Korea and Israel, that have nuclear weapons and don't have nuclear power at all. The places that we would most like to have really clean energy occur are China, India, Europe, North America, all of which have sorted out their situation in relation to nuclear weapons. So that leaves a couple of places like Iran, maybe Venezuela, that you would like to have very close surveillance of anything that goes on with fissile stuff. Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we really know where all of the fissile material is, and we can move toward zero weapons left, once we know all that.CA: Mark, 30 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said.MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first, and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories. So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy. There's plenty of solar and wind. You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram. That's from real data. And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science. Solving the world's problems can be done, if you really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy. There's absolutely no need for nuclear power.(Applause)CA: We need someone for. Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN. I've been involved in global warming policy since 1994, when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol. And I want to support Stewart Brand's position. I've come around in the last 10 years. I used to be against nuclear power. I'm now supporting Stewart's position, softly, from a risk-management standpoint, agreeing that the risks of overheating the planet outweigh the risk of nuclear incident, which certainly is possible and is a very real problem. However, I think there may be a win-win solution here where both parties can win this debate, and that is, we face a situation where it's carbon caps on this planet or die. And in the United States Senate, we need bipartisan support — only one or two votes are needed — to move global warming through the Senate, and this room can help. So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris.CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against.David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things. The first is: be aware of the propaganda. The propaganda from the industry has been very, very strong. And we have not had the other side of the argument fully aired so that people can draw their own conclusions. Be very aware of the propaganda. Secondly, think about this. If we build all these nuclear power plants, all that waste is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks and trains, moving through this country every day. Tell me they're not going to have accidents. Tell me that those accidents aren't going to put material into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years. And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains isn't a potential terrorist target.CA: Thank you. For. Anyone else for? Go.Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say, I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan. I've got solar PV on my roof. I've got a hydro conversion at a watermill that I own. And I'm, you know, very much ""pro"" that kind of stuff. However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here. The capability of the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling, simply isn't enough to add up. So if we want to keep the lights on, we actually need a solution which is going to keep generating all of the time. I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the '80s, and I continue to do so now. But we've got an opportunity to recycle them into something more useful that enables us to get energy all of the time. And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away. We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone. We need a solution that generates all of the time. If we're going to keep the lights on, nuclear is that solution.CA: Thank you. Anyone else against?Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise that we don't have enough alternative renewable resources. And our ""against"" proponent up here made it very clear that we actually do. And so the fallacy that we need this resource and we can actually make it in a time frame that is meaningful is not possible. I will also add one other thing. Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks — we know that the stick is going up exponentially. So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables and say, ""That's all we have."" Because five years from now, it will blow you away what we'll actually have as alternatives to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power.CA: Point well made. Thank you.(Applause)So each of you has really just a couple sentences — 30 seconds each to sum up. Your final pitch, Stewart.SB: I loved your ""It all balances out"" chart that you had there. It was a sunny day and a windy night. And just now in England they had a cold spell. All of the wind in the entire country shut down for a week. None of those things were stirring. And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France. Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel. This keeps happening. I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor. And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along. And especially the small reactors need to go forward. I heard from Nathan Myhrvold — and I think here's the action point — it'll take an act of Congress to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission start moving quickly on these small reactors, which we need very much, here and in the world.(Applause)MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour power demand and supply, looking at solar, wind, using data for California. And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour, for the whole year almost. Now, with regard to the resources, we've developed the first wind map of the world, from data alone, at 80 meters. We know what the wind resources are. You can cover 15 percent. Fifteen percent of the entire U.S. has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive. And there's much more solar than there is wind. There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable.CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark. (Applause) So if you were in Palm Springs ... (Laughter) (Applause) Shameless. Shameless. Shameless. (Applause)So, people of the TED community, I put it to you that what the world needs now is nuclear energy. All those in favor, raise your hands. (Shouts) And all those against. Ooooh. Now that is — my take on that ... Just put up ... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate, who voted differently. Those of you who changed your mind in favor of ""for"" put your hands up. Okay. So here's the read on it. Both people won supporters, but on my count, the mood of the TED community shifted from about 75 to 25 to about 65 to 35 in favor, in favor.You both won. I congratulate both of you. Thank you for that.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy
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"This is the venue where, as a young man, some of the music that I wrote was first performed. It was, remarkably, a pretty good sounding room. With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere, it actually sounded pretty good. This is a song that was recorded there. (Music) This is not Talking Heads, in the picture anyway. (Music: ""A Clean Break (Let's Work)"" by Talking Heads) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood. The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood. The sound system was kind of decent. And there wasn't a lot of reverberation in the room. So the rhythms could be pretty intact too, pretty concise. Other places around the country had similar rooms. This is Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. The music was in some ways different, but in structure and form, very much the same. The clientele behavior was very much the same too. And so the bands at Tootsie's or at CBGB's had to play loud enough — the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down, shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing.Since then, I've played other places that are much nicer. I've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that. And it's been very exciting. But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written, or was writing at the time, didn't sound all that great in some of those halls. We managed, but sometimes those halls didn't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made. So I asked myself: Do I write stuff for specific rooms? Do I have a place, a venue, in mind when I write? Is that a kind of model for creativity? Do we all make things with a venue, a context, in mind?Okay, Africa. (Music: ""Wenlenga"" / Various artists) Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa. And the music there, I would say, the instruments, the intricate rhythms, the way it's played, the setting, the context, it's all perfect. It all works perfect. The music works perfectly in that setting. There's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms. The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification, etc., etc. It's no accident. It's perfect for that particular context. And it would be a mess in a context like this. This is a gothic cathedral. (Music: ""Spem In Alium"" by Thomas Tallis) In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect. It doesn't change key, the notes are long, there's almost no rhythm whatsoever, and the room flatters the music. It actually improves it. This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for. This is the organ. It's not as big as a gothic cathedral, so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate. He can, very innovatively, actually change keys without risking huge dissonances. (Music: ""Fantasia On Jesu, Mein Freunde"" by Johann S. Bach)This is a little bit later. This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in. I think we're in like 1770, somewhere around there. They're smaller, even less reverberant, so he can write really frilly music that's very intricate — and it works. (Music: ""Sonata in F,"" KV 13, by Wolfgang A. Mozart) It fits the room perfectly. This is La Scala. It's around the same time, I think it was built around 1776. People in the audience in these opera houses, when they were built, they used to yell out to one another. They used to eat, drink and yell out to people on the stage, just like they do at CBGB's and places like that. If they liked an aria, they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore, not at the end of the show, but immediately. (Laughter) And well, that was an opera experience. This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself. And the size of the room is not that big. It's smaller than this. But Wagner made an innovation. He wanted a bigger band. He wanted a little more bombast, so he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there. (Music: ""Lohengrin / Prelude to Act III"" by Richard Wagner)Okay. This is Carnegie Hall. Obviously, this kind of thing became popular. The halls got bigger. Carnegie Hall's fair-sized. It's larger than some of the other symphony halls. And they're a lot more reverberant than La Scala. Around the same, according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker, this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet — no more eating, drinking and yelling at the stage, or gossiping with one another during the show. They had to be very quiet. So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls. It meant that there could be extreme dynamics, which there weren't in some of these other kinds of music. Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting. But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall, the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural. (Music: ""Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major"" by Gustav Mahler) This is Mahler. It looks like Bob Dylan, but it's Mahler. That was Bob's last record, yeah.(Laughter)Popular music, coming along at the same time. This is a jazz band. According to Scott Joplin, the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs. Again, it's noisy. They're playing for dancers. There's certain sections of the song — the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked. And they'd say, ""Play that part again."" Well, there's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers. So the bands started to improvise new melodies. And a new form of music was born. (Music: ""Royal Garden Blues"" by W.C. Handy / Ethel Waters) These are played mainly in small rooms. People are dancing, shouting and drinking. So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that. Same thing goes true for — that's the beginning of the century — for the whole of 20th-century popular music, whether it's rock or Latin music or whatever. [Live music] doesn't really change that much.It changes about a third of the way into the 20th century, when this became one of the primary venues for music. And this was one way that the music got there. Microphones enabled singers, in particular, and musicians and composers, to completely change the kind of music that they were writing. So far, a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music, but singers, like Frank Sinatra, could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone. Other singers after him went even further. (Music: ""My Funny Valentine"" by Chet Baker) This is Chet Baker. And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone. It would have been impossible without recorded music as well. And he's singing right into your ear. He's whispering into your ears. The effect is just electric. It's like the guy is sitting next to you, whispering who knows what into your ear.So at this point, music diverged. There's live music, and there's recorded music. And they no longer have to be exactly the same. Now there's venues like this, a discotheque, and there's jukeboxes in bars, where you don't even need to have a band. There doesn't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever, and the sound systems are good. People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems. And, as with jazz, the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others. So the early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections. (Music: ""Rapper's Delight"" by The Sugarhill Gang) The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies. And another new form of music was born.Live performance, when it was incredibly successful, ended up in what is probably, acoustically, the worst sounding venues on the planet: sports stadiums, basketball arenas and hockey arenas. Musicians who ended up there did the best they could. They wrote what is now called arena rock, which is medium-speed ballads. (Music: ""I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"" by U2) They did the best they could given that this is what they're writing for. The tempos are medium. It sounds big. It's more a social situation than a musical situation. And in some ways, the music that they're writing for this place works perfectly.So there's more new venues. One of the new ones is the automobile. I grew up with a radio in a car. But now that's evolved into something else. The car is a whole venue. (Music: ""Who U Wit"" by Lil' Jon & the East Side Boyz) The music that, I would say, is written for automobile sound systems works perfectly on it. It might not be what you want to listen to at home, but it works great in the car — has a huge frequency spectrum, you know, big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle. Automobile music, you can share with your friends.There's one other kind of new venue, the private MP3 player. Presumably, this is just for Christian music. (Laughter) And in some ways it's like Carnegie Hall, or when the audience had to hush up, because you can now hear every single detail. In other ways, it's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet, you turn it up, and the next minute, your ears are blasted out by a louder passage. So that doesn't really work. I think pop music, mainly, it's written today, to some extent, is written for these kind of players, for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail, but the dynamic doesn't change that much.So I asked myself: Okay, is this a model for creation, this adaptation that we do? And does it happen anywhere else? Well, according to David Attenborough and some other people, birds do it too — that the birds in the canopy, where the foliage is dense, their calls tend to be high-pitched, short and repetitive. And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls, so that they don't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor. And birds like this Savannah sparrow, they tend to have a buzzing (Sound clip: Savannah sparrow song) type call. And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs. Other birds, like this tanager, have adapted within the same species. The tananger on the East Coast of the United States, where the forests are a little denser, has one kind of call, and the tananger on the other side, on the west (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) has a different kind of call. (Sound clip: Scarlet tanager song) So birds do it too.And I thought: Well, if this is a model for creation, if we make music, primarily the form at least, to fit these contexts, and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls, and if we write software to fit existing operating systems, is that how it works? Yeah. I think it's evolutionary. It's adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there. This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional Romantic view. The Romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I'm saying, well, the passion's still there, but the vessel that it's going to be injected into and poured into, that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going. But this conflict of views is kind of interesting.The writer, Thomas Frank, says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests, that voters, like a lot of us, assume, that if they hear something that sounds like it's sincere, that it's coming from the gut, that it's passionate, that it's more authentic. And they'll vote for that. So that, if somebody can fake sincerity, if they can fake passion, they stand a better chance of being selected in that way, which seems a little dangerous. I'm saying the two, the passion, the joy, are not mutually exclusive.Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds. We adapt. We sing. And like the birds, the joy is still there, even though we have changed what we do to fit the context.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolve
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"So since I was here last in '06, we discovered that global climate change is turning out to be a pretty serious issue, so we covered that fairly extensively in Skeptic magazine. We investigate all kinds of scientific and quasi-scientific controversies, but it turns out we don't have to worry about any of this because the world's going to end in 2012.Another update: You will recall I introduced you guys to the Quadro Tracker. It's like a water dowsing device. It's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around. And you walk around, and it points to things. Like if you're looking for marijuana in students' lockers, it'll point right to somebody. Oh, sorry. (Laughter) This particular one that was given to me finds golf balls, especially if you're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes. Well, under the category of ""What's the harm of silly stuff like this?"" this device, the ADE 651, was sold to the Iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece. It's just like this one, completely worthless, in which it allegedly worked by ""electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,"" which translates to ""pseudoscientific baloney"" — would be the nice word — in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good, but it does absolutely nothing. In this case, at trespass points, allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay, actually cost lives. So there is a danger to pseudoscience, in believing in this sort of thing.So what I want to talk about today is belief. I want to believe, and you do too. And in fact, I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on ""X-Files,"" who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B, and that's called association learning.We find patterns, we make those connections, whether it's Pavlov's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food, and then he salivates to the sound of the bell, or whether it's a Skinnerian rat, in which he's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it, and therefore he repeats the behavior. In fact, what Skinner discovered is that, if you put a pigeon in a box like this, and he has to press one of these two keys, and he tries to figure out what the pattern is, and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there — if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern, they will figure out any kind of pattern. And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern. Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise, once clockwise and peck the key twice. And that's called superstition, and that, I'm afraid, we will always have with us.I call this process ""patternicity"" — that is, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is. So let's do a thought experiment. You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa. Your name is Lucy, okay? And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind? Your next decision could be the most important one of your life. Well, if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, you've made an error in cognition, made a Type I error, false positive. But no harm. You just move away. You're more cautious. You're more vigilant. On the other hand, if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch. You've just won a Darwin award. You've been taken out of the gene pool.Now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error. This is the only equation in the talk by the way. We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations. So the default position is just: Believe all patterns are real — All rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind. And so I think that we evolved ... there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that I'll come back to.So for example, what do you see here? It's a horse head, that's right. It looks like a horse. It must be a horse. That's a pattern. And is it really a horse? Or is it more like a frog? See, our pattern detection device, which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex — it's our little detection device there — can be easily fooled, and this is the problem. For example, what do you see here? Yes, of course, it's a cow. Once I prime the brain — it's called cognitive priming — once I prime the brain to see it, it pops back out again even without the pattern that I've imposed on it. And what do you see here? Some people see a Dalmatian dog. Yes, there it is. And there's the prime. So when I go back without the prime, your brain already has the model so you can see it again. What do you see here? Planet Saturn. Yes, that's good. How about here? Just shout out anything you see. That's a good audience, Chris. Because there's nothing in this. Well, allegedly there's nothing.This is an experiment done by Jennifer Whitson at U.T. Austin on corporate environments and whether feelings of uncertainty and out of control makes people see illusory patterns. That is, almost everybody sees the planet Saturn. People that are put in a condition of feeling out of control are more likely to see something in this, which is allegedly patternless. In other words, the propensity to find these patterns goes up when there's a lack of control. For example, baseball players are notoriously superstitious when they're batting, but not so much when they're fielding. Because fielders are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time. The best batters fail seven out of 10 times. So their superstitions, their patternicities, are all associated with feelings of lack of control and so forth.What do you see in this particular one here, in this field? Anybody see an object there? There actually is something here, but it's degraded. While you're thinking about that, this was an experiment done by Susan Blackmore, a psychologist in England, who showed subjects this degraded image and then ran a correlation between their scores on an ESP test: How much did they believe in the paranormal, supernatural, angels and so forth. And those who scored high on the ESP scale, tended to not only see more patterns in the degraded images but incorrect patterns. Here is what you show subjects. The fish is degraded 20 percent, 50 percent and then the one I showed you, 70 percent.A similar experiment was done by another [Swiss] psychologist named Peter Brugger, who found significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere, via the left visual field, than the left hemisphere. So if you present subjects the images such that it's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left, then they're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere. Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity occurs. So what we're trying to do is bore into the brain to see where all this happens.Brugger and his colleague, Christine Mohr, gave subjects L-DOPA. L-DOPA's a drug, as you know, given for treating Parkinson's disease, which is related to a decrease in dopamine. L-DOPA increases dopamine. An increase of dopamine caused subjects to see more patterns than those that did not receive the dopamine. So dopamine appears to be the drug associated with patternicity. In fact, neuroleptic drugs that are used to eliminate psychotic behavior, things like paranoia, delusions and hallucinations, these are patternicities. They're incorrect patterns. They're false positives. They're Type I errors. And if you give them drugs that are dopamine antagonists, they go away. That is, you decrease the amount of dopamine, and their tendency to see patterns like that decreases. On the other hand, amphetamines like cocaine are dopamine agonists. They increase the amount of dopamine. So you're more likely to feel in a euphoric state, creativity, find more patterns.In fact, I saw Robin Williams recently talk about how he thought he was much funnier when he was doing cocaine, when he had that issue, than now. So perhaps more dopamine is related to more creativity. Dopamine, I think, changes our signal-to-noise ratio. That is, how accurate we are in finding patterns. If it's too low, you're more likely to make too many Type II errors. You miss the real patterns. You don't want to be too skeptical. If you're too skeptical, you'll miss the really interesting good ideas. Just right, you're creative, and yet you don't fall for too much baloney. Too high and maybe you see patterns everywhere. Every time somebody looks at you, you think people are staring at you. You think people are talking about you. And if you go too far on that, that's just simply labeled as madness. It's a distinction perhaps we might make between two Nobel laureates, Richard Feynman and John Nash. One sees maybe just the right number of patterns to win a Nobel Prize. The other one also, but maybe too many patterns. And we then call that schizophrenia.So the signal-to-noise ratio then presents us with a pattern-detection problem. And of course you all know exactly what this is, right? And what pattern do you see here? Again, I'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here, causing you conflicting pattern detections. You know, of course, this is Via Uno shoes. These are sandals. Pretty sexy feet, I must say. Maybe a little Photoshopped. And of course, the ambiguous figures that seem to flip-flop back and forth. It turns out what you're thinking about a lot influences what you tend to see. And you see the lamp here, I know. Because the lights on here. Of course, thanks to the environmentalist movement we're all sensitive to the plight of marine mammals. So what you see in this particular ambiguous figure is, of course, the dolphins, right? You see a dolphin here, and there's a dolphin, and there's a dolphin. That's a dolphin tail there, guys.(Laughter)If we can give you conflicting data, again, your ACC is going to be going into hyperdrive. If you look down here, it's fine. If you look up here, then you get conflicting data. And then we have to flip the image for you to see that it's a set up. The impossible crate illusion. It's easy to fool the brain in 2D. So you say, ""Aw, come on Shermer, anybody can do that in a Psych 101 text with an illusion like that."" Well here's the late, great Jerry Andrus' ""impossible crate"" illusion in 3D, in which Jerry is standing inside the impossible crate. And he was kind enough to post this and give us the reveal. Of course, camera angle is everything. The photographer is over there, and this board appears to overlap with this one, and this one with that one, and so on. But even when I take it away, the illusion is so powerful because of how are brains are wired to find those certain kinds of patterns.This is a fairly new one that throws us off because of the conflicting patterns of comparing this angle with that angle. In fact, it's the exact same picture side by side. So what you're doing is comparing that angle instead of with this one, but with that one. And so your brain is fooled. Yet again, your pattern detection devices are fooled.Faces are easy to see because we have an additional evolved facial recognition software in our temporal lobes. Here's some faces on the side of a rock. I'm actually not even sure if this is — this might be Photoshopped. But anyway, the point is still made. Now which one of these looks odd to you? In a quick reaction, which one looks odd? The one on the left. Okay. So I'll rotate it so it'll be the one on the right. And you are correct. A fairly famous illusion — it was first done with Margaret Thatcher. Now, they trade up the politicians every time. Well, why is this happening? Well, we know exactly where it happens, in the temporal lobe, right across, sort of above your ear there, in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And there's two types of cells that do this, that record facial features either globally, or specifically these large, rapid-firing cells, first look at the general face. So you recognize Obama immediately. And then you notice something quite a little bit odd about the eyes and the mouth. Especially when they're upside down, you're engaging that general facial recognition software there.Now I said back in our little thought experiment, you're a hominid walking on the plains of Africa. Is it just the wind or a dangerous predator? What's the difference between those? Well, the wind is inanimate; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent. And I call this process agenticity. That is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency, often invisible beings from the top down. This is an idea that we got from a fellow TEDster here, Dan Dennett, who talked about taking the intentional stance.So it's a type of that expanded to explain, I think, a lot of different things: souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention, are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. I think it's the basis of animism and polytheism and monotheism. It's the belief that aliens are somehow more advanced than us, more moral than us, and the narratives always are that they're coming here to save us and rescue us from on high. The intelligent designer's always portrayed as this super intelligent, moral being that comes down to design life. Even the idea that government can rescue us — that's no longer the wave of the future, but that is, I think, a type of agenticity: projecting somebody up there, big and powerful, will come rescue us.And this is also, I think, the basis of conspiracy theories. There's somebody hiding behind there pulling the strings, whether it's the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. But this is a pattern detection problem, isn't it? Some patterns are real and some are not. Was JFK assassinated by a conspiracy or by a lone assassin? Well, if you go there — there's people there on any given day — like when I went there, here — showing me where the different shooters were. My favorite one was he was in the manhole. And he popped out at the last second, took that shot. But of course, Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy. So we can't just uniformly dismiss all patterns like that. Because, let's face it, some patterns are real. Some conspiracies really are true. Explains a lot, maybe.And 9/11 has a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy. We did a whole issue on it. Nineteen members of Al Queda plotting to fly planes into buildings constitutes a conspiracy. But that's not what the ""9/11 truthers"" think. They think it was an inside job by the Bush administration. Well, that's a whole other lecture. You know how we know that 9/11 was not orchestrated by the Bush administration? Because it worked.(Laughter)(Applause)So we are natural-born dualists. Our agenticity process comes from the fact that we can enjoy movies like these. Because we can imagine, in essence, continuing on. We know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe, you can produce a feeling of out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there. Or you can do it through loss of consciousness, by accelerating in a centrifuge. You get a hypoxia, or a lower oxygen. And the brain then senses that there's an out-of-body experience. You can use — which I did, went out and did — Michael Persinger's God Helmet, that bombards your temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves. And you get a sense of out-of-body experience.So I'm going to end here with a short video clip that sort of brings all this together. It's just a minute and a half. It ties together all this into the power of expectation and the power of belief. Go ahead and roll it.Narrator: This is the venue they chose for their fake auditions for an advert for lip balm.Woman: We're hoping we can use part of this in a national commercial, right? And this is test on some lip balms that we have over here. And these are our models who are going to help us, Roger and Matt. And we have our own lip balm, and we have a leading brand. Would you have any problem kissing our models to test it?Girl: No.Woman: You wouldn't? (Girl: No.) Woman: You'd think that was fine.Girl: That would be fine. (Woman: Okay.)So this is a blind test. I'm going to ask you to go ahead and put a blindfold on. Kay, now can you see anything? (Girl: No.) Pull it so you can't even see down. (Girl: Okay.)Woman: It's completely blind now, right?Girl: Yes. (Woman: Okay.)Now, what I'm going to be looking for in this test is how it protects your lips, the texture, right, and maybe if you can discern any flavor or not.Girl: Okay. (Woman: Have you ever done a kissing test before?)Girl: No.Woman: Take a step here. Okay, now I'm going to ask you to pucker up. Pucker up big and lean in just a little bit, okay?(Music)(Laughter)(Laughter)Woman: Okay. And, Jennifer, how did that feel?Jennifer: Good.(Laughter)Girl: Oh my God!(Laughter)Michael Shermer: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception
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"So, if you're in the audience today, or maybe you're watching this talk in some other time or place, you are a participant in the digital rights ecosystem. Whether you're an artist, a technologist, a lawyer or a fan, the handling of copyright directly impacts your life. Rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership, it's a complex web of relationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape. YouTube cares deeply about the rights of content owners, but in order to give them choices about what they can do with copies, mashups and more, we need to first identify when copyrighted material is uploaded to our site.Let's look at a specific video so you can see how it works. Two years ago, recording artist Chris Brown released the official video of his single ""Forever."" A fan saw it on TV, recorded it with her camera phone, and uploaded it to YouTube. Because Sony Music had registered Chris Brown's video in our Content ID system, within seconds of attempting to upload the video, the copy was detected, giving Sony the choice of what to do next.But how do we know that the user's video was a copy? Well, it starts with content owners delivering assets into our database, along with a usage policy that tells us what to do when we find a match. We compare each upload against all of the reference files in our database. This heat map is going to show you how the brain of the system works. Here we can see the original reference file being compared to the user generated content. The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there's a match. This means that we can identify a match even if the copy used is just a portion of the original file, plays it in slow motion and has degraded audio and video quality. And we do this every time that a video is uploaded to YouTube. And that's over 20 hours of video every minute. When we find a match, we apply the policy that the rights owner has set down.And the scale and the speed of this system is truly breathtaking. We're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day, between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. When we compare those hundred years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. It would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day, without so much as a coffee break.Now, what do we do when we find a match? Well, most rights owners, instead of blocking, will allow the copy to be published. And then they benefit through the exposure, advertising and linked sales. Remember Chris Brown's video ""Forever""? Well, it had its day in the sun and then it dropped off the charts, and that looked like the end of the story, but sometime last year, a young couple got married. This is their wedding video. You may have seen it.(Music)What's amazing about this is, if the processional of the wedding was this much fun, can you imagine how much fun the reception must have been? I mean, who are these people? I totally want to go to that wedding.So their little wedding video went on to get over 40 million views. And instead of Sony blocking, they allowed the upload to occur. And they put advertising against it and linked from it to iTunes. And the song, 18 months old, went back to number four on the iTunes charts. So Sony is generating revenue from both of these. And Jill and Kevin, the happy couple, they came back from their honeymoon and found that their video had gone crazy viral. And they've ended up on a bunch of talk shows, and they've used it as an opportunity to make a difference. The video's inspired over 26,000 dollars in donations to end domestic violence. The ""JK Wedding [Entrance] Dance"" became so popular that NBC parodied it on the season finale of ""The Office,"" which just goes to show, it's truly an ecosystem of culture. Because it's not just amateurs borrowing from big studios, but sometimes big studios borrowing back.By empowering choice, we can create a culture of opportunity. And all it took to change things around was to allow for choice through rights identification. So why has no one ever solved this problem before? It's because it's a big problem, and it's complicated and messy. It's not uncommon for a single video to have multiple rights owners. There's musical labels. There's multiple music publishers. And each of these can vary by country. There's lots of cases where we have more than one work mashed together. So we have to manage many claims to the same video.YouTube's Content ID system addresses all of these cases. But the system only works through the participation of rights owners. If you have content that others are uploading to YouTube, you should register in the Content ID system, and then you'll have the choice about how your content is used. And think carefully about the policies that you attach to that content. By simply blocking all reuse, you'll miss out on new art forms, new audiences, new distribution channels and new revenue streams.But it's not just about dollars and impressions. Just look at all the joy that was spread through progressive rights management and new technology. And I think we can all agree that joy is definitely an idea worth spreading.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright
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"Thank you so much. I'm going to try to take you on a journey of the underwater acoustic world of whales and dolphins. Since we are such a visual species, it's hard for us to really understand this, so I'll use a mixture of figures and sounds and hope this can communicate it. But let's also think, as a visual species, what it's like when we go snorkeling or diving and try to look underwater. We really can't see very far. Our vision, which works so well in air, all of a sudden is very restricted and claustrophobic. And what marine mammals have evolved over the last tens of millions of years is ways to depend on sound to both explore their world and also to stay in touch with one another.Dolphins and toothed whales use echolocation. They can produce loud clicks and listen for echoes from the sea floor in order to orient. They can listen for echoes from prey in order to decide where food is and to decide which one they want to eat. All marine mammals use sound for communication to stay in touch. So the large baleen whales will produce long, beautiful songs, which are used in reproductive advertisement for male and females, both to find one another and to select a mate. And mother and young and closely bonded animals use calls to stay in touch with one another, so sound is really critical for their lives.The first thing that got me interested in the sounds of these underwater animals, whose world was so foreign to me, was evidence from captive dolphins that captive dolphins could imitate human sounds. And I mentioned I'll use some visual representations of sounds. Here's the first example. This is a plot of frequency against time — sort of like musical notation, where the higher notes are up higher and the lower notes are lower, and time goes this way. This is a picture of a trainer's whistle, a whistle a trainer will blow to tell a dolphin it's done the right thing and can come get a fish. It sounds sort of like ""tweeeeeet."" Like that. This is a calf in captivity making an imitation of that trainer's whistle. If you hummed this tune to your dog or cat and it hummed it back to you, you ought to be pretty surprised. Very few nonhuman mammals can imitate sounds. It's really important for our music and our language.So it's a puzzle: The few other mammal groups that do this, why do they do it? A lot of my career has been devoted to trying to understand how these animals use their learning, use the ability to change what you say based on what you hear in their own communication systems. So let's start with calls of a nonhuman primate. Many mammals have to produce contact calls when, say, a mother and calf are apart. This is an example of a call produced by squirrel monkeys when they're isolated from another one. And you can see, there's not much variability in these calls. By contrast, the signature whistle which dolphins use to stay in touch, each individual here has a radically different call. They can use this ability to learn calls in order to develop more complicated and more distinctive calls to identify individuals.How about the setting in which animals need to use this call? Well let's look at mothers and calves. In normal life for mother and calf dolphin, they'll often drift apart or swim apart if Mom is chasing a fish, and when they separate they have to get back together again. What this figure shows is the percentage of the separations in which dolphins whistle, against the maximum distance. So when dolphins are separating by less than 20 meters, less than half the time they need to use whistles. Most of the time they can just find each other just by swimming around. But all of the time when they separate by more than 100 meters, they need to use these individually distinctive whistles to come back together again. Most of these distinctive signature whistles are quite stereotyped and stable through the life of a dolphin. But there are some exceptions.When a male dolphin leaves Mom, it will often join up with another male and form an alliance, which may last for decades. As these two animals form a social bond, their distinctive whistles actually converge and become very similar. This plot shows two members of a pair. As you can see at the top here, they share an up-sweep, like ""woop, woop, woop."" They both have that kind of up-sweep. Whereas these members of a pair go ""wo-ot, wo-ot, wo-ot."" And what's happened is they've used this learning process to develop a new sign that identifies this new social group. It's a very interesting way that they can form a new identifier for the new social group that they've had.Let's now take a step back and see what this message can tell us about protecting dolphins from human disturbance. Anybody looking at this picture will know this dolphin is surrounded, and clearly his behavior is being disrupted. This is a bad situation. But it turns out that when just a single boat is approaching a group of dolphins at a couple hundred meters away, the dolphins will start whistling, they'll change what they're doing, they'll have a more cohesive group, wait for the boat to go by, and then they'll get back to normal business. Well, in a place like Sarasota, Florida, the average interval between times that a boat is passing within a hundred meters of a dolphin group is six minutes. So even in the situation that doesn't look as bad as this, it's still affecting the amount of time these animals have to do their normal work.And if we look at a very pristine environment like western Australia, Lars Bider has done work comparing dolphin behavior and distribution before there were dolphin-watching boats. When there was one boat, not much of an impact. And two boats: When the second boat was added, what happened was that some of the dolphins left the area completely. Of the ones that stayed, their reproductive rate declined. So it could have a negative impact on the whole population. When we think of marine-protected areas for animals like dolphins, this means that we have to be quite conscious about activities that we thought were benign. We may need to regulate the intensity of recreational boating and actual whale watching in order to prevent these kinds of problems. I'd also like to point out that sound doesn't obey boundaries. So you can draw a line to try to protect an area, but chemical pollution and noise pollution will continue to move through the area.And I'd like to switch now from this local, familiar, coastal environment to a much broader world of the baleen whales and the open ocean. This is a kind of map we've all been looking at. The world is mostly blue. But I'd also like to point out that the oceans are much more connected than we think. Notice how few barriers there are to movement across all of the oceans compared to land. To me, the most mind-bending example of the interconnectedness of the ocean comes from an acoustic experiment where oceanographers took a ship to the southern Indian Ocean, deployed an underwater loudspeaker and played back a sound. That same sound traveled to the west, and could be heard in Bermuda, and traveled to the east, and could be heard in Monterey — the same sound.So we live in a world of satellite communication, are used to global communication, but it's still amazing to me. The ocean has properties that allow low-frequency sound to basically move globally. The acoustic transit time for each of these paths is about three hours. It's nearly halfway around the globe. In the early '70s, Roger Payne and an ocean acoustician published a theoretical paper pointing out that it was possible that sound could transmit over these large areas, but very few biologists believed it.It actually turns out, though, even though we've only known of long-range propagation for a few decades, the whales clearly have evolved, over tens of millions of years, a way to exploit this amazing property of the ocean. So blue whales and fin whales produce very low-frequency sounds that can travel over very long ranges. The top plot here shows a complicated series of calls that are repeated by males. They form songs, and they appear to play a role in reproduction, sort of like that of song birds. Down below here, we see calls made by both males and females that also carry over very long ranges.The biologists continued to be skeptical of the long-range communication issue well past the '70s, until the end of the Cold War. What happened was, during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had a system that was secret at the time, that they used to track Russian submarines. It had deep underwater microphones, or hydrophones, cabled to shore, all wired back to a central place that could listen to sounds over the whole North Atlantic. And after the Berlin Wall fell, the Navy made these systems available to whale bio-acousticians to see what they could hear.This is a plot from Christopher Clark who tracked one individual blue whale as it passed by Bermuda, went down to the latitude of Miami and came back again. It was tracked for 43 days, swimming 1,700 kilometers, or more than 1,000 miles. This shows us both that the calls are detectable over hundreds of miles and that whales routinely swim hundreds of miles. They're ocean-based and scale animals who are communicating over much longer ranges than we had anticipated.Unlike fins and blues, which disperse into the temperate and tropical oceans, the humpbacked whales congregate in local traditional breeding grounds, so they can make a sound that's a little higher in frequency, broader-band and more complicated. So you're listening to the complicated song produced by humpbacks here. Humpbacks, when they develop the ability to sing this song, they're listening to other whales and modifying what they sing based on what they're hearing, just like song birds or the dolphin whistles I described. This means that humpback song is a form of animal culture, just like music for humans would be.I think one of the most interesting examples of this comes from Australia. Biologists on the east coast of Australia were recording the songs of humpbacks in that area. And this orange line here marks the typical songs of east coast humpbacks. In '95 they all sang the normal song. But in '96 they heard a few weird songs, and it turned out that these strange songs were typical of west coast whales. The west coast calls became more and more popular, until by 1998, none of the whales sang the east coast song; it was completely gone. They just sang the cool new west coast song. It's as if some new hit style had completely wiped out the old-fashioned style before, and with no golden oldies stations. Nobody sang the old ones.I'd like to briefly just show what the ocean does to these calls. Now you are listening to a recording made by Chris Clark, 0.2 miles away from a humpback. You can hear the full frequency range. It's quite loud. You sound very nearby. The next recording you're going to hear was made of the same humpback song 50 miles away. That's shown down here. You only hear the low frequencies. You hear the reverberation as the sound travels over long-range in the ocean and is not quite as loud. Now after I play back these humpback calls, I'll play blue whale calls, but they have to be sped up because they're so low in frequency that you wouldn't be able to hear it otherwise. Here's a blue whale call at 50 miles, which was distant for the humpback. It's loud, clear — you can hear it very clearly. Here's the same call recorded from a hydrophone 500 miles away. There's a lot of noise, which is mostly other whales. But you can still hear that faint call.Let's now switch and think about a potential for human impacts. The most dominant sound that humans put into the ocean comes from shipping. This is the sound of a ship, and I'm having to talk a little louder to talk over it. Imagine that whale listening from 500 miles. There's a potential problem that maybe this kind of shipping noise would prevent whales from being able to hear each other. Now this is something that's been known for quite a while.This is a figure from a textbook on underwater sound. And on the y-axis is the loudness of average ambient noise in the deep ocean by frequency. In the low frequencies, this line indicates sound that comes from seismic activity of the earth. Up high, these variable lines indicate increasing noise in this frequency range from higher wind and wave. But right in the middle here where there's a sweet spot, the noise is dominated by human ships. Now think about it. This is an amazing thing: That in this frequency range where whales communicate, the main source globally, on our planet, for the noise comes from human ships, thousands of human ships, distant, far away, just all aggregating.The next slide will show what the impact this may have on the range at which whales can communicate. So here we have the loudness of a call at the whale. And as we get farther away, the sound gets fainter and fainter. Now in the pre-industrial ocean, as we were mentioning, this whale call could be easily detected. It's louder than noise at a range of a thousand kilometers. Let's now take that additional increase in noise that we saw comes from shipping. All of a sudden, the effective range of communication goes from a thousand kilometers to 10 kilometers. Now if this signal is used for males and females to find each other for mating and they're dispersed, imagine the impact this could have on the recovery of endangered populations.Whales also have contact calls like I described for the dolphins. I'll play the sound of a contact call used by right whales to stay in touch. And this is the kind of call that is used by, say, right whale mothers and calves as they separate to come back again. Now imagine — let's put the ship noise in the picture. What's a mother to do if the ship comes by and her calf isn't there? I'll describe a couple strategies.One strategy is if your call's down here, and the noise is in this band, you could shift the frequency of your call out of the noise band and communicate better. Susan Parks of Penn State has actually studied this. She's looked in the Atlantic. Here's data from the South Atlantic. Here's a typical South Atlantic contact call from the '70s. Look what happened by 2000 to the average call. Same thing in the North Atlantic, in the '50s versus 2000. Over the last 50 years, as we've put more noise into the oceans, these whales have had to shift. It's as if the whole population had to shift from being basses to singing as a tenor. It's an amazing shift, induced by humans over this large scale, in both time and space.And we now know that whales can compensate for noise by calling louder, like I did when that ship was playing, by waiting for silence and by shifting their call out of the noise band. Now there's probably costs to calling louder or shifting the frequency away from where you want to be, and there's probably lost opportunities. If we also have to wait for silence, they may miss a critical opportunity to communicate. So we have to be very concerned about when the noise in habitats degrades the habitat enough that the animals either have to pay too much to be able to communicate, or are not able to perform critical functions. It's a really important problem.And I'm happy to say that there are several very promising developments in this area, looking at the impact of shipping on whales. In terms of the shipping noise, the International Maritime Organization of the United Nations has formed a group whose job is to establish guidelines for quieting ships, to tell the industry how you could quiet ships. And they've already found that by being more intelligent about better propeller design, you can reduce that noise by 90 percent. If you actually insulate and isolate the machinery of the ship from the hull, you can reduce that noise by 99 percent. So at this point, it's primarily an issue of cost and standards. If this group can establish standards, and if the shipbuilding industry adopts them for building new ships, we can now see a gradual decline in this potential problem.But there's also another problem from ships that I'm illustrating here, and that's the problem of collision. This is a whale that just squeaked by a rapidly moving container ship and avoided collision. But collision is a serious problem. Endangered whales are killed every year by ship collision, and it's very important to try to reduce this. I'll discuss two very promising approaches. The first case comes from the Bay of Fundy. These black lines mark shipping lanes in and out of the Bay of Fundy. The colorized area shows the risk of collision for endangered right whales because of the ships moving in this lane. It turns out that this lane here goes right through a major feeding area of right whales in the summer time, and it makes an area of a significant risk of collision. Well, biologists who couldn't take no for an answer went to the International Maritime Organization and petitioned them to say, ""Can't you move that lane? Those are just lines on the ground. Can't you move them over to a place where there's less of a risk?"" And the International Maritime Organization responded very strongly, ""These are the new lanes."" The shipping lanes have been moved. And as you can see, the risk of collision is much lower.So it's very promising, actually. We can be very creative about thinking of different ways to reduce these risks. Another action which was just taken independently by a shipping company itself was initiated because of concerns the shipping company had about greenhouse gas emissions with global warming. The Maersk Line looked at their competition and saw that everybody who is in shipping thinks time is money. They rush as fast as they can to get to their port. But then they often wait there. What Maersk did is they worked ways to slow down. They could slow down by about 50 percent. This reduced their fuel consumption by about 30 percent, which saved them money, and at the same time, it had a significant benefit for whales. It you slow down, you reduce the amount of noise you make and you reduce the risk of collision.So to conclude, I'd just like to point out, you know, the whales live in an amazing acoustic environment. They've evolved over tens of millions of years to take advantage of this. And we need to be very attentive and vigilant to thinking about where things that we do may unintentionally prevent them from being able to achieve their important activities. At the same time, we need to be really creative in thinking of solutions to be able to help reduce these problems. I hope these examples have shown some of the different directions we can take in addition to protected areas to be able to keep the ocean safe for whales to be able to continue to communicate.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_tyack_the_intriguing_sound_of_marine_mammals
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"I would be willing to bet I'm the dumbest guy in the room, because I couldn't get through school; I struggled with school. But I knew at a very early age that I loved money, I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing. I was raised to be an entrepreneur. What I've been really passionate about ever since — and I've never spoken about this ever, until now — so this is the first time anyone's heard it, except my wife, three days ago. She said, ""What are you talking about?"" I told her that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society.Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's Entrepreneurial Master's Program. It was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. When I was in grade two, I won a citywide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, ""Hey, this kid's a good speaker. He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized."" No one said, ""Get him a coach in speaking."" They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at.So as kids show these traits — and we need to start looking for them — I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. Unfortunately, the school system is grooming this world to say, ""Let's be a lawyer,"" or, ""Let's be a doctor."" We're missing that opportunity, because no one ever says, ""Hey, be an entrepreneur."" Entrepreneurs are people — we have a lot of them in this room — who have ideas and passions or see these needs in the world and decide to stand up and do it. And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. We have the ability to get the groups of people around us that want to build that dream with us. And I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age, of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that's a problem today. Every problem out there, somebody has the idea for. And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen, because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out.I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish — the old parable: ""Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."" If we can teach our kids to be entrepreneurial, the ones that show the traits to be, like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones with entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? We could have these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts.What we do is teach our kids the things they shouldn't do: don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs; the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. And the media says it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo or Crosby. Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. The reason I avoided an MBA program, other than that I didn't get into any, since I had a 61 percent average out of high school, then a 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton, is that our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to work in corporations.So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found — and this should be on all your reading lists — the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur a hero is ""Atlas Shrugged."" Everything else in the world looks at entrepreneurs and says we're bad people. I look at even my family. Both my grandfathers and my dad were entrepreneurs. My brother, sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. We all decided to start these things because it's the only place we fit. We didn't fit in normal work; we couldn't work for somebody else, we're stubborn and we have all these other traits.But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. I'm a big part of a couple organizations called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference. And everyone I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. So this thing right here is freaking me out.(Laughter)It's probably why I'm a bit panicked, other than all the caffeine I've had and the sugar. But this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. All three of the founders of Netscape had it. I could go on and on. Kids — you can see these signs in kids. And we're giving them Ritalin and saying, ""Don't be an entrepreneurial type. Fit into this other system and try to become a student."" Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. We fast-track. We figure out the game. I stole essays. I cheated on exams. I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. But as an entrepreneur, you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. So I just figured that out earlier.(Laughter)(Applause)At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. I'm also quoted — and I told the person who wrote the textbook — I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies — in managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. I open up chapter eight, talking about budgeting. I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. She thought it was too funny to not include it.But kids, you can see these signs in them. The definition of entrepreneur is ""a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture."" That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program, or that you have to get through school. It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. We've heard, ""Is it nurture or is it nature?"" Right? Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. I was groomed as an entrepreneur.When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early age, when my dad realized I didn't fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school, that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies where we could employ other people.My first business venture: I was seven years old, in Winnipeg. I was in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords, calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much they'd pay me for coat hangers. And my mom came into the room and said, ""Where are you going to get the hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?"" And I said, ""Let's go look in the basement."" We went down to the basement, and I opened up this cupboard. There was about 1,000 hangers that I'd collected, because, when I told her I was going out to play, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect hangers to put in the basement, because I saw her a few weeks before that — you could get paid, they used to pay two cents per coat hanger. So I was like, well, there's all kinds of hangers, so I'll just go get them. I knew she wouldn't want me to get them, so I just did it anyway. And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. This one guy offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. I even knew at seven years old that I could get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay it, because it multiplied up. At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for 1,000 hangers.I sold license plate protectors door to door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me them at wholesale. At nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license-plate protectors door to door. And I remember this one customer so vividly — I also did some other stuff with these clients, I sold newspapers, and he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me, ever. But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license-plate protector. And he's like, ""We don't need one."" I said, ""But you've got two cars."" Remember, I'm nine years old. I'm like, ""You have two cars and they don't have license-plate protectors. And this car has one license plate that's all crumpled up."" He said, ""That's my wife's car."" I said, ""Why don't we test one on her car and see if it lasts longer?"" So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. I learned that at a young age.I did comic book arbitrage. When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. I would go biking up to the end of the beach, buy all the comics from the poor kids, then go back to the other end of the beach to sell them to the rich kids. It was obvious to me: buy low, sell high. You've got this demand over here that has money. Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich people do. Obvious, right? It's like a recession. So there's a recession. There's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the US economy. Go get some of that. I learned that at a young age. I also learned, don't reveal your source: I got beat up after four weeks of this, because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics, and didn't like that he was paying more.I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. I didn't want a paper route, but my dad said, ""That's your next business."" Not only did he get me one, but I had to get two. He wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did. Then I realized: collecting tips is how you made all the money. So I'd collect tips and get payment. I would collect for the papers — he could just deliver them. Because then I realized I could make money. By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee.(Laughter)My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. He had all these old automotive parts lying around. They had this old brass and copper. I asked what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. I said, ""Wouldn't somebody pay for that?"" And he goes, ""Maybe."" Remember: at 10 years old, 34 years ago, I saw opportunity in this stuff, I saw there was money in garbage. And I collected it from the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. Then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. And I thought that was kind of cool. Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and making money off that, too.I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs. We made these pincushions for our moms for Mother's Day out of wooden clothespins — when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. And you'd make these chairs. And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. And you could stuff pins in them. Because people used to sew and they needed a pincushion. But I realized you had to have options, so I spray-painted a whole bunch of them brown, so when I went to the door, it wasn't, ""Do you want to buy one?"" It was, ""Which color would you like?"" I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no, especially if you have two options, the brown one or the clear one. So I learned that lesson at a young age.I learned that manual labor really sucks. Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing, that if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person, because you can't sell them more. So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age.Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. I would go to the golf course and caddy for people, but I realized there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole, that had this huge hill, and people could never get their bags up it. So I'd sit there in a lawn chair and carry for all the people who didn't have caddies. I'd carry their golf bags to the top; they'd pay me a dollar, while my friends worked for hours hauling some guy's bag around for 10 bucks. I'm like, ""That's stupid. You have to work for five hours. That doesn't make sense. Figure out a way to make more money faster.Every week, I'd go to the corner store and buy all these pops, Then I'd deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. They'd give me their orders for the following week. I'd deliver pop and charge twice. I had this captured market. You didn't need contracts, you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out.I went and got golf balls from golf courses. But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I'm like, screw that. They're in the pond. And nobody's going into the pond. So I'd go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes, just pick them up with both feet. You can't do it onstage. You get the golf balls, throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done, you've got a couple hundred of them. But the problem is, people didn't want all the golf balls. So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? I packaged them up three ways. I had the Pinnacles, DDHs and the really cool ones. Those sold for two dollars each. Then I had the good ones that didn't look crappy: 50 cents each. And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. And they could use those for practice balls.I sold sunglasses when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you, because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. But it paid the bills. So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. Then when the school shut me down — they called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it — I went to the gas stations and sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. That was cool because then, I had retail outlets. I think I was 14.Then I paid my entire way through first year of university at Carlton by selling wineskins door to door. You know you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? So what, right? But you know what? Stuff that down your shorts when you go to a football game, you can get booze in for free. Everybody bought them. Supply, demand, big opportunity. I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. It had our university logo on it.You know, we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that nurture the traits you need to be entrepreneurs? Why don't you teach them not to waste money? I remember being told to walk out into the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta. I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, ""Go pick it up. I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you waste a penny."" I remember that lesson to this day.Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. What I do with my kids, nine and seven, is teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. Come and tell me what it is. Or I'll say, ""Here's what I need done."" And then, you know what we do? We negotiate. They go around looking for what it is, then we negotiate what they'll get paid. They don't have a regular check, but they have opportunities to find more stuff, and learn the skill of negotiating and of finding opportunities.You breed that kind of stuff. Each of my kids has two piggy banks. Fifty percent of all the money they earn goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. The toy account, they spend on whatever they want. The 50 percent in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. they walk up with me. Every year, all the money in the bank goes to their broker. Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stockbroker already. I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, ""Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now."" Shit, you've missed 25 years. You can teach those habits to young kids, when they don't even feel the pain yet.Don't read bedtime stories every night — maybe four nights of the week, and three nights, have them tell stories. Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? My kids do that all the time. It teaches them to sell, teaches them creativity, teaches them to think on their feet. Do that kind of stuff, have fun with it.Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just in front of their friends, and do plays and have speeches. Those are entrepreneurial traits you want to be nurturing. Show kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. Show them grumpy employees. When you see grumpy customer service, point it out. Say, ""By the way, that guy is a crappy employee."" And say, ""These are good ones.""(Laughter)If you go into a restaurant and have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like.(Laughter)We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to get a tutor. Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk in the house right now, all the toys they outgrew two years ago and said, ""Why don't we sell some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?"" And they actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when offers come in. They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. Then 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent in their toy account. My kids love this stuff.Some of the entrepreneurial traits you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. All these traits, you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. Look for that kind of stuff. There's two traits I want you to also look out for that we don't get out of their system. Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad.(Applause)The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. Bipolar disorder is nicknamed ""the CEO disease."" When Steve Jurvetson, Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape — imagine if they were given Ritalin. We wouldn't have that stuff, right? Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet.(Laughter)These are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom, as well as everything else. I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them? Because there's huge opportunities in that.I want to close with a quick video that was done by one of the companies I mentor. These guys, Grasshopper. It's about kids. It's about entrepreneurship. Hopefully, this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world.[Kid... ""And you thought you could do anything?""][You still can.][Because a lot of what we consider impossible] [is easy to overcome][Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [one individual can make a difference][Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country:] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [or perhaps they didn't own anything except for] [a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers] [innovators] [until they came up with the name] [entrepreneurs][They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.][Right now, it's hard to see] [when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us] [to discover new ways of doing things][So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation] [changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.][Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you] [stay connected with friends, family and colleagues] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.][Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone Even... you] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights,] [but most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid] [when everything was within your reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:][it still is.]Thank you very much for having me.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_herold_let_s_raise_kids_to_be_entrepreneurs
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"(Music)[Sanskrit] This is an ode to the mother goddess, that most of us in India learn when we are children. I learned it when I was four at my mother's knee. That year she introduced me to dance, and thus began my tryst with classical dance. Since then — it's been four decades now — I've trained with the best in the field, performed across the globe, taught young and old alike, created, collaborated, choreographed, and wove a rich tapestry of artistry, achievement and awards. The crowning glory was in 2007, when I received this country's fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, for my contribution to art.(Applause)But nothing, nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on the first of July 2008. I heard the word ""carcinoma."" Yes, breast cancer. As I sat dumbstruck in my doctor's office, I heard other words: ""cancer,"" ""stage,"" ""grade."" Until then, Cancer was the zodiac sign of my friend, stage was what I performed on, and grades were what I got in school. That day, I realized I had an unwelcome, uninvited, new life partner. As a dancer, I know the nine rasas or the navarasas: anger, valor, disgust, humor and fear. I thought I knew what fear was. That day, I learned what fear was.Overcome with the enormity of it all and the complete feeling of loss of control, I shed copious tears and asked my dear husband, Jayant. I said, ""Is this it? Is this the end of the road? Is this the end of my dance?"" And he, the positive soul that he is, said, ""No, this is just a hiatus, a hiatus during the treatment, and you'll get back to doing what you do best.""I realized then that I, who thought I had complete control of my life, had control of only three things: My thought, my mind — the images that these thoughts created — and the action that derived from it. So here I was wallowing in a vortex of emotions and depression and what have you, with the enormity of the situation, wanting to go to a place of healing, health and happiness. I wanted to go from where I was to where I wanted to be, for which I needed something. I needed something that would pull me out of all this. So I dried my tears, and I declared to the world at large ... I said, ""Cancer's only one page in my life, and I will not allow this page to impact the rest of my life.""I also declared to the world at large that I would ride it out, and I would not allow cancer to ride me. But to go from where I was to where I wanted to be, I needed something. I needed an anchor, an image, a peg to peg this process on, so that I could go from there. And I found that in my dance, my dance, my strength, my energy, my passion, my very life breath. But it wasn't easy. Believe me, it definitely wasn't easy. How do you keep cheer when you go from beautiful to bald in three days? How do you not despair when, with the body ravaged by chemotherapy, climbing a mere flight of stairs was sheer torture, that to someone like me who could dance for three hours? How do you not get overwhelmed by the despair and the misery of it all? All I wanted to do was curl up and weep. But I kept telling myself fear and tears are options I did not have.So I would drag myself into my dance studio — body, mind and spirit — every day into my dance studio, and learn everything I learned when I was four, all over again, reworked, relearned, regrouped. It was excruciatingly painful, but I did it. Difficult. I focused on my mudras, on the imagery of my dance, on the poetry and the metaphor and the philosophy of the dance itself. And slowly, I moved out of that miserable state of mind.But I needed something else. I needed something to go that extra mile, and I found it in that metaphor which I had learned from my mother when I was four. The metaphor of Mahishasura Mardhini, of Durga. Durga, the mother goddess, the fearless one, created by the pantheon of Hindu gods. Durga, resplendent, bedecked, beautiful, her 18 arms ready for warfare, as she rode astride her lion into the battlefield to destroy Mahishasur. Durga, the epitome of creative feminine energy, or shakti. Durga, the fearless one. I made that image of Durga and her every attribute, her every nuance, my very own.Powered by the symbology of a myth and the passion of my training, I brought laser-sharp focus into my dance, laser-sharp focus to such an extent that I danced a few weeks after surgery. I danced through chemo and radiation cycles, much to the dismay of my oncologist. I danced between chemo and radiation cycles and badgered him to fit it to my performing dance schedule. What I had done is I had tuned out of cancer and tuned into my dance. Yes, cancer has just been one page in my life.My story is a story of overcoming setbacks, obstacles and challenges that life throws at you. My story is the power of thought. My story is the power of choice. It's the power of focus. It's the power of bringing ourselves to the attention of something that so animates you, so moves you, that something even like cancer becomes insignificant. My story is the power of a metaphor. It's the power of an image. Mine was that of Durga, Durga the fearless one. She was also called Simhanandini, the one who rode the lion.As I ride out, as I ride my own inner strength, my own inner resilience, armed as I am with what medication can provide and continue treatment, as I ride out into the battlefield of cancer, asking my rogue cells to behave, I want to be known not as a cancer survivor, but as a cancer conqueror.I present to you an excerpt of that work ""Simhanandini.""(Applause)(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ananda_shankar_jayant_fights_cancer_with_a_dance
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"I'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century. In the 21st century, we need to actually look at — and what I'm actually going to encourage you to consider today — is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count. But I think it's time for us to think about what we count. Because what we actually count truly counts.Let me start by telling you a little story. This is Van Quach. She came to this country in 1986 from Vietnam. She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years.With the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old, in 1987, I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life. And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? So I spent time with Vivian, and I saw that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets. Her job, her goal and her calling was not to become the world's greatest toilet scrubber. What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests. And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home.That very human lesson, more than 20 years ago, served me well during the last economic downturn we had. In the wake of the dotcom crash and 9/11, San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels. We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area, so we were particularly vulnerable. But also back then, remember we stopped eating French fries in this country. Well, not exactly, of course not. We started eating ""freedom fries,"" and we started boycotting anything that was French. Well, my name of my company, Joie de Vivre — so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company. And I'd write them back, and I'd say, ""What a minute. We're not French. We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco."" And I'd get a terse response: ""Oh, that's worse.""(Laughter)So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly. That's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow's ""hierarchy of needs."" I took one psychology class in college, and I learned about this guy, Abraham Maslow, as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs. But as I sat there for four hours, the full afternoon, reading Maslow, I recognized something that is true of most leaders. One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect, and that is that we're all human. Each of us, no matter what our role is in business, has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace.So as I started reading more Maslow, what I started to realize is that Maslow, later in his life, wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective, to organizations and specifically to business. But unfortunately, he died prematurely in 1970, and so he wasn't really able to live that dream completely. So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow. And that's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid, which is survival, success and transformation. It's not just fundamental in business, it's fundamental in life. And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs, these transformational needs for our key employees in the company. These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers, I realized we had no metrics. We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right. So we started asking ourselves: What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees' sense of meaning, or our customers' sense of emotional connection with us? For example, we actually started asking our employees, do they understand the mission of our company, and do they feel like they believe in it, can they actually influence it, and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it? We started asking our customers, did they feel an emotional connection with us, in one of seven different kinds of ways. Miraculously, as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid, what we found is we created more loyalty. Our customer loyalty skyrocketed. Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average, and during that five year dotcom bust, we tripled in size.As I went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time, what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure. What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid. They didn't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid. So I started asking myself the question: How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible? If we're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure, and all we can measure is the tangible in life, we're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid.So I went out and studied a bunch of things, and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty, and yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business. So as leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don't have a clue how to measure them. So here's another Einstein quote: ""Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."" I hate to argue with Einstein, but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually can't be counted or valued, aren't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane?It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks. I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri-La. It's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. I went to Bhutan. The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man, but this was back in 1972, when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away. At age 17, he started asking the kinds of questions that you'd expect of someone with a beginner's mind.On a trip through India, early in his reign as king, he was asked by an Indian journalist about the Bhutanese GDP, the size of the Bhutanese GDP. The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later. He said the following, he said: ""Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? Why don't we care more about gross national happiness?"" Now, in essence, the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success, what has come to be known as GNH, or gross national happiness. Most world leaders didn't take notice, and those that did thought this was just ""Buddhist economics."" But the king was serious. This was a notable moment, because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness — that leader 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence — 200 years later, this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure, and it's something we should actually value as government officials.For the next three dozen years as king, this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan — including, just recently, taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed, no coup. Bhutan, for those of you who don't know it, is the newest democracy in the world, just two years ago.So as I spent time with leaders in the GNH movement, I got to really understand what they're doing. And I got to spend some time with the prime minister. Over dinner, I asked him an impertinent question. I asked him, ""How can you create and measure something which evaporates — in other words, happiness?"" And he's a very wise man, and he said, ""Listen, Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness. We create the conditions for happiness to occur. In other words, we create a habitat of happiness."" Wow, that's interesting. He said that they have a science behind that art, and they've actually created four essential pillars, nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH. One of those key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? It's a good question. How do you feel about how you spend your time each day? Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world. And yet, of course, that little intangible piece of data doesn't factor into our GDP calculations.As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation. And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel. How many know him? Anybody? 1954, he wrote a book called ""The Real Enjoyment of Living,"" and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want; instead, it's about wanting what you have. Or in other words, I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have — imagine gratitude — divided by having what you want — gratification. The Bhutanese aren't on some aspirational treadmill, constantly focused on what they don't have. Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have. How many of us here, as TEDsters in the audience, spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation, in the denominator? We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one.(Laughter)The reality is, in Western countries, quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out — an object that we're supposed to get, or maybe many objects. Actually, in fact, if you look in the dictionary, many dictionaries define pursuit as to ""chase with hostility."" Do we pursue happiness with hostility? Good question. But back to Bhutan.Bhutan's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world's population. Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India? Bhutan's created the ultimate export, a new global currency of well-being, and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own GNH. You may have heard, this last fall Nicolas Sarkozy in France announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists, focusing on happiness and wellness in France. Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index, what some French are calling a ""joie de vivre index."" I like it. Co-branding opportunities.Just three days ago, three days ago here at TED, we had a simulcast of David Cameron, potentially the next prime minister of the UK, quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time, Robert Kennedy's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that GDP is a misplaced metric. So it suggests that the momentum is shifting.I've taken that Robert Kennedy quote, and I've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here. This is a collection of things that Robert Kennedy said in that quote. GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods. But it doesn't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials. As you look at these two columns here, doesn't it make you feel like it's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count, a new way to imagine what's important to us in life?(Applause)Certainly Robert Kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that. He said GDP ""measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."" Wow. So how do we do that? Let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now, at least in this country. Why in the heck in America are we doing a census in 2010? We're spending 10 billion dollars on the census. We're asking 10 simple questions — it is simplicity. But all of those questions are tangible. They're about demographics. They're about where you live, how many people you live with, and whether you own your home or not. That's about it. We're not asking meaningful metrics. We're not asking important questions. We're not asking anything that's intangible.Abe Maslow said long ago something you've heard before, but you didn't realize it was him. He said, ""If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."" We've been fooled by our tool. Excuse that expression. (Laughter) We've been fooled by our tool. GDP has been our hammer. And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success. And yet, 64 percent of the world's GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service, the service industry, the industry I'm in. And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture. So maybe it's time that we get a bigger toolbox, right? Maybe it's time we get a toolbox that doesn't just count what's easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible.I guess I'm sort of a curious CEO. I was also a curious economics major as an undergrad. I learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same. They aren't the same. In fact, as leaders, what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling. In Vivian's case, her unit of production isn't the tangible hours she works, it's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work.This is Dave Arringdale who's actually been a longtime guest at Vivian's motel. He stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years, and he's loyal to the property because of the relationship that Vivian and her fellow employees have created with him. They've created a habitat of happiness for Dave. He tells me that he can always count on Vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home. Why is it that business leaders and investors quite often don't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business? We don't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits, we can have both. In fact, inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits, right?So what the world needs now, in my opinion, is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count. We count numbers. We count on people. What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people. I learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country. What can you start counting today? What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life, whether it's your work life or your business life?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile
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"I'm going to begin by reciting a poem. ""Oh beloved dentist: Your rubber fingers in my mouth ... your voice so soft and muffled ... Lower the mask, dear dentist, lower the mask.""(Laughter)Okay, in this presentation, I'm going to be putting the right side of your brains through a fairly serious workout. You're going to see a lot of imagery, and it's not always connected to what I'm talking about, so I need you to kind of split your brains in half and let the images flow over one side and listen to me on the other. So I am one of those people with a transformative personal story. Six years ago, after 20 years in graphic design and typography, I changed the way I was working and the way most graphic designers work to pursue a more personal approach to my work, with only the humble attempt to simply make a living doing something that I loved. But something weird happened. I became bizarrely popular. My current work seems to resonate with people in a way that has so taken me by surprise that I still frequently wonder what in the hell is going on. And I'm slowly coming to understand that the appeal of what I do may be connected to why I do it.These days, I call myself a graphic artist. So where my work as a graphic designer was to follow strategy, my work now follows my heart and my interests with the guidance of my ego to create work that is mutually beneficial to myself and a client. Now, this is heresy in the design world. The ego is not supposed to be involved in graphic design. But I find that for myself, without exception, the more I deal with the work as something of my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is as something that's compelling, interesting and sustaining. So I exist somewhat outside of the mainstream of design thinking. Where others might look at measurable results, I tend to be interested in more ethereal qualities, like ""Does it bring joy?"" ""Is there a sense of wonder?"" and ""Does it invoke curiosity?""This is a scientific diagram, by the way. I don't have time to explain it, but it has to do with DNA and RNA. So I have a particular imaginative approach to visual work. The things that interest me when I'm working are visual structure, surprise and anything that requires figuring things out. So for this reason, I'm particularly drawn to systems and patterns. I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how my brain works.This is a piece that I did for The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. They have a magazine that they call G2. And this is for their puzzle special in 2007. And puzzling it is. I started by creating a series of tiling units. And these tiling units, I designed specifically so that they would contain parts of letterforms within their shapes so that I could then join those pieces together to create letters and then words within the abstract patterning. But then as well, I was able to just flip them, rotate them and combine them in different ways to create either regular patterns or abstract patterns. So here's the word puzzle again. And here it is with the abstract surrounding. And as you can see, it's extremely difficult to read. But all I have to do is fill certain areas of those letterforms and I can bring those words out of the background pattern. But maybe that's a little too obvious. So then I can add some color in with the background and add a bit more color in with the words themselves, and this way, working with the art director, I'm able to bring it to just the right point that it's puzzling for the audience — they can figure out that there's something they have to read — but it's not impossible for them to read.I'm also interested in working with unusual materials and common materials in unusual ways. So this requires figuring out how to get the most out of something's innate properties and also how to bend it to my will. So ultimately, my goal is to create something unexpected. To this end, I have worked in sugar for Stefan Sagmeister, three-time TED speaker. And this project began essentially on my kitchen table. I've been eating cereal for breakfast all of my life. And for that same amount of time, I've been spilling sugar on the table and just kind of playing with it with my fingers. And eventually I used this technique to create a piece of artwork. And then I used it again to create six pieces for Stefan's book, ""Things in My Life I've Learned So Far."" And these were created without sketches, just freehand, by putting the sugar down on a white surface and then manipulating it to get the words and designs out of it. Recently, I've also made some rather highbrow baroque borders out of lowbrow pasta. And this is for a chapter that I'm doing in a book, and the chapter is on honor. So it's a little bit unexpected, but, in a way, it refers to the macaroni art that children make for their parents or they make in school and give to their parents, which is in itself a form of honor. This is what you can do with some household tinfoil. Okay, well, it's what I can do with some household tinfoil.(Laughter)I'm very interested in wonder, in design as an impetus to inquiring. To say I wonder is to say I question, I ask. And to experience wonder is to experience awe. So I'm currently working on a book, which plays with both senses of the word, as I explore some of my own ideas and inquiries in a visual display of rather peacock-like grandeur. The world is full of wonder. But the world of graphic design, for the most part, is not. So I'm using my own writings as a kind of testing ground for a book that has an interdependency between word and image as a kind of seductive force. I think that one of the things that religions got right was the use of visual wonder to deliver a message. I think this true marriage of art and information is woefully underused in adult literature, and I'm mystified as to why visual wealth is not more commonly used to enhance intellectual wealth. When we look at works like this, we tend to associate them with children's literature. There's an implication that ornamental graphics detract from the seriousness of the content. But I really hope to have the opportunity to change that perception. This book is taking rather a long time, but I'm nearly done.For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to put an intermission in my talk. And this is it — just to give you and me a moment to catch up.(Laughter)So I do these valentines. I've been sending out valentines on a fairly large scale since 2005. These are my valentines from 2005 and 2006. And I started by doing just a single image like this and sending them out to each person. But in 2007, I got the cockamamie idea to hand-draw each valentine for everyone on my mailing list. I reduced my mailing list to 150 people. And I drew each person their own unique valentine and put their name on it and numbered it and signed it and sent it out. Believe it or not, I devised this as a timesaving method. I was very busy in the beginning of that year, and I didn't know when I was going to find time to design and print a single valentine. And I thought that I could kind of do this piecemeal as I was traveling. It didn't exactly work out that way. There's a longer story to this, but I did get them all done in time, and they were extremely well received. I got an almost 100 percent response rate. (Laughter) And those who didn't respond will never receive anything from me ever again.(Laughter)Last year, I took a more conceptual approach to the valentine. I had this idea that I wanted people to receive a kind of mysterious love letter, like a found fragment in their mailbox. I wanted it to be something that was not addressed to them or signed by me, something that caused them to wonder what on Earth this thing was. And I specifically wrote four pages that don't connect. There were four different versions of this. And I wrote them so that they begin in the middle of a sentence, end in the middle of a sentence. And they're on the one hand, universal, so I avoid specific names or places, but on the other hand, they're personal. So I wanted people to really get the sense that they had received something that could have been a love letter to them. And I'm just going to read one of them to you.""You've never really been sure of this, but I can assure you that this quirk you're so self-conscious of is intensely endearing. Just please accept that this piece of you escapes with your smile, and those of us who notice are happy to catch it in passing. Time spent with you is like chasing and catching small birds, but without the scratches and bird shit."" (Laughter) ""That is to say, your thoughts and words flit and dart, disconcertedly elusive at times, but when caught and examined — ahh, such a wonder, such a delightful reward. There's no passing time with you, only collecting — the collecting of moments with the hope for preservation and at the same time release. Impossible? I don't think so. I know this makes you embarrassed. I'm certain I can see you blushing. But I just have to tell you because sometimes I hear your self-doubt, and it's so crushing to think that you may not know how truly wonderful you are, how inspiring and delightful and really, truly the most completely ...""(Laughter)(Applause)So Valentine's Day is coming up in a couple of days, and these are currently arriving in mailboxes all around the world. This year, I got, what I really have to say is a rather brilliant idea, to laser cut my valentines out of used Christmas cards. So I solicited friends to send me their used Christmas cards, and I made 500 of these. Each one of them is completely different. I'm just really, really thrilled with them. I don't have that much else to say, but they turned out really well.I do spend a lot of time on my work. And one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is what is worth while. What is it that's worth spending my time on and my life on in this way? Working in the commercial world, this is something that I do have to struggle with at times. And yes, sometimes I'm swayed by money. But ultimately, I don't consider that a worthy goal. What makes something worthwhile for me is the people I work for or with, the conditions I work under and the audience that I'm able to reach. So I might ask: ""Who is it for?"" ""What does it say?"" and ""What does it do?""You know, I have to tell you, it's really difficult for someone like me to come up on stage at this conference with these unbelievably brilliant minds, who are thinking these really big-picture, world-changing, life-changing ideas and technologies. And it's very, very common for designers and people in the visual arts to feel that we're not contributing enough, or worse, that all we're doing is contributing to landfill. Here I am; I'm showing you some pretty visuals and talking about aesthetics. But I've come to believe that truly imaginative visual work is extremely important in society.Just in the way that I'm inspired by books and magazines of all kinds, conversations I have, movies, so I also think, when I put visual work out there into the mass media, work that is interesting, unusual, intriguing, work that maybe opens up that sense of inquiry in the mind, that I'm seeding the imagination of the populace. And you just never know who is going to take something from that and turn it into something else, because inspiration is cross-pollinating. So a piece of mine may inspire a playwright or a novelist or a scientist, and that in turn may be the seed that inspires a doctor or a philanthropist or a babysitter. And this isn't something that you can quantify or track or measure, and we tend to undervalue things in society that we can't measure.But I really believe that a fully operating, rich society needs these seeds coming from all directions and all disciplines in order to keep the gears of inspiration and imagination flowing and cycling and growing. So that's why I do what I do, and why I spend so much time and effort on it, and why I work in the commercial, public sphere, as opposed to the isolated, private sphere of fine art: because I want as many people as possible to see my work, notice it, be drawn into it, and be able to take something from it. And I actually really feel that it's worthwhile to spend my valuable and limited time on this Earth in this way. And I thank you for allowing me to show it to you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marian_bantjes_intricate_beauty_by_design
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"It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a great pleasure to speak after Brian Cox from CERN. I think CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider. What ever happened to the Small Hadron Collider? Where is the Small Hadron Collider? Because the Small Hadron Collider once was the big thing. Now, the Small Hadron Collider is in a cupboard, overlooked and neglected. You know when the Large Hadron Collider started, and it didn't work, and people tried to work out why, it was the Small Hadron Collider team who sabotaged it because they were so jealous. The whole Hadron Collider family needs unlocking.The lesson of Brian's presentation, in a way — all those fantastic pictures — is this really: that vantage point determines everything that you see. What Brian was saying was science has opened up successively different vantage points from which we can see ourselves, and that's why it's so valuable. So the vantage point you take determines virtually everything that you will see. The question that you will ask will determine much of the answer that you get.And so if you ask this question: Where would you look to see the future of education? The answer that we've traditionally given to that is very straightforward, at least in the last 20 years: You go to Finland. Finland is the best place in the world to see school systems. The Finns may be a bit boring and depressive and there's a very high suicide rate, but by golly, they are qualified. And they have absolutely amazing education systems. So we all troop off to Finland, and we wonder at the social democratic miracle of Finland and its cultural homogeneity and all the rest of it, and then we struggle to imagine how we might bring lessons back.Well, so, for this last year, with the help of Cisco who sponsored me, for some balmy reason, to do this, I've been looking somewhere else. Because actually radical innovation does sometimes come from the very best, but it often comes from places where you have huge need — unmet, latent demand — and not enough resources for traditional solutions to work — traditional, high-cost solutions, which depend on professionals, which is what schools and hospitals are.So I ended up in places like this. This is a place called Monkey Hill. It's one of the hundreds of favelas in Rio. Most of the population growth of the next 50 years will be in cities. We'll grow by six cities of 12 million people a year for the next 30 years. Almost all of that growth will be in the developed world. Almost all of that growth will be in places like Monkey Hill. This is where you'll find the fastest growing young populations of the world. So if you want recipes to work — for virtually anything — health, education, government politics and education — you have to go to these places. And if you go to these places, you meet people like this.This is a guy called Juanderson. At the age of 14, in common with many 14-year-olds in the Brazilian education system, he dropped out of school. It was boring. And Juanderson, instead, went into what provided kind of opportunity and hope in the place that he lived, which was the drugs trade. And by the age of 16, with rapid promotion, he was running the drugs trade in 10 favelas. He was turning over 200,000 dollars a week. He employed 200 people. He was going to be dead by the age of 25. And luckily, he met this guy, who is Rodrigo Baggio, the owner of the first laptop to ever appear in Brazil. 1994, Rodrigo started something called CDI, which took computers donated by corporations, put them into community centers in favelas and created places like this. What turned Juanderson around was technology for learning that made learning fun and accessible.Or you can go to places like this. This is Kibera, which is the largest slum in East Africa. Millions of people living here, stretched over many kilometers. And there I met these two, Azra on the left, Maureen on the right. They just finished their Kenyan certificate of secondary education. That name should tell you that the Kenyan education system borrows almost everything from Britain, circa 1950, but has managed to make it even worse. So there are schools in slums like this. They're places like this. That's where Maureen went to school. They're private schools. There are no state schools in slums. And the education they got was pitiful. It was in places like this. This a school set up by some nuns in another slum called Nakuru. Half the children in this classroom have no parents because they've died through AIDS. The other half have one parent because the other parent has died through AIDS. So the challenges of education in this kind of place are not to learn the kings and queens of Kenya or Britain. They are to stay alive, to earn a living, to not become HIV positive. The one technology that spans rich and poor in places like this is not anything to do with industrial technology. It's not to do with electricity or water. It's the mobile phone. If you want to design from scratch virtually any service in Africa, you would start now with the mobile phone. Or you could go to places like this.This is a place called the Madangiri Settlement Colony, which is a very developed slum about 25 minutes outside New Delhi, where I met these characters who showed me around for the day. The remarkable thing about these girls, and the sign of the kind of social revolution sweeping through the developing world is that these girls are not married. Ten years ago, they certainly would have been married. Now they're not married, and they want to go on to study further, to have a career. They've been brought up by mothers who are illiterate, who have never ever done homework. All across the developing world there are millions of parents — tens, hundreds of millions — who for the first time are with children doing homework and exams. And the reason they carry on studying is not because they went to a school like this. This is a private school. This is a fee-pay school. This is a good school. This is the best you can get in Hyderabad in Indian education. The reason they went on studying was this.This is a computer installed in the entrance to their slum by a revolutionary social entrepreneur called Sugata Mitra who has conducted the most radical experiments, showing that children, in the right conditions, can learn on their own with the help of computers. Those girls have never touched Google. They know nothing about Wikipedia. Imagine what their lives would be like if you could get that to them.So if you look, as I did, through this tour, and by looking at about a hundred case studies of different social entrepreneurs working in these very extreme conditions, look at the recipes that they come up with for learning, they look nothing like school. What do they look like? Well, education is a global religion. And education, plus technology, is a great source of hope. You can go to places like this.This is a school three hours outside of Sao Paulo. Most of the children there have parents who are illiterate. Many of them don't have electricity at home. But they find it completely obvious to use computers, websites, make videos, so on and so forth. When you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull, not push. Most of our education system is push. I was literally pushed to school. When you get to school, things are pushed at you: knowledge, exams, systems, timetables. If you want to attract people like Juanderson who could, for instance, buy guns, wear jewelry, ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade, and you want to attract him into education, having a compulsory curriculum doesn't really make sense. That isn't really going to attract him. You need to pull him. And so education needs to work by pull, not push.And so the idea of a curriculum is completely irrelevant in a setting like this. You need to start education from things that make a difference to them in their settings. What does that? Well, the key is motivation, and there are two aspects to it. One is to deliver extrinsic motivation, that education has a payoff. Our education systems all work on the principle that there is a payoff, but you have to wait quite a long time. That's too long if you're poor. Waiting 10 years for the payoff from education is too long when you need to meet daily needs, when you've got siblings to look after or a business to help with. So you need education to be relevant and help people to make a living there and then, often. And you also need to make it intrinsically interesting.So time and again, I found people like this. This is an amazing guy, Sebastiao Rocha, in Belo Horizonte, in the third largest city in Brazil. He's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun. In the schools and communities that Taio works in, the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question. Imagine an education system that started from questions, not from knowledge to be imparted, or started from a game, not from a lesson, or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them. Our education systems, you do all that stuff afterward, if you're lucky, sport, drama, music. These things, they teach through. They attract people to learning because it's really a dance project or a circus project or, the best example of all — El Sistema in Venezuela — it's a music project. And so you attract people through that into learning, not adding that on after all the learning has been done and you've eaten your cognitive greens.So El Sistema in Venezuela uses a violin as a technology of learning. Taio Rocha uses making soap as a technology of learning. And what you find when you go to these schemes is that they use people and places in incredibly creative ways. Masses of peer learning. How do you get learning to people when there are no teachers, when teachers won't come, when you can't afford them, and even if you do get teachers, what they teach isn't relevant to the communities that they serve? Well, you create your own teachers. You create peer-to-peer learning, or you create para-teachers, or you bring in specialist skills. But you find ways to get learning that's relevant to people through technology, people and places that are different.So this is a school in a bus on a building site in Pune, the fastest growing city in Asia. Pune has 5,000 building sites. It has 30,000 children on those building sites. That's one city. Imagine that urban explosion that's going to take place across the developing world and how many thousands of children will spend their school years on building sites. Well, this is a very simple scheme to get the learning to them through a bus. And they all treat learning, not as some sort of academic, analytical activity, but as that's something that's productive, something you make, something that you can do, perhaps earn a living from.So I met this character, Steven. He'd spent three years in Nairobi living on the streets because his parents had died of AIDS. And he was finally brought back into school, not by the offer of GCSEs, but by the offer of learning how to become a carpenter, a practical making skill. So the trendiest schools in the world, High Tech High and others, they espouse a philosophy of learning as productive activity. Here, there isn't really an option. Learning has to be productive in order for it to make sense.And finally, they have a different model of scale, and it's a Chinese restaurant model of how to scale. And I learned it from this guy, who is an amazing character. He's probably the most remarkable social entrepreneur in education in the world. His name is Madhav Chavan, and he created something called Pratham. And Pratham runs preschool play groups for, now, 21 million children in India. It's the largest NGO in education in the world. And it also supports working-class kids going into Indian schools. He's a complete revolutionary. He's actually a trade union organizer by background, and that's how he learned the skills to build his organization.When they got to a certain stage, Pratham got big enough to attract some pro bono support from McKinsey. McKinsey came along and looked at his model and said, ""You know what you should do with this, Madhav? You should turn it into McDonald's. And what you do when you go to any new site is you kind of roll out a franchise. And it's the same wherever you go. It's reliable and people know exactly where they are. And there will be no mistakes."" And Madhav said, ""Why do we have to do it that way? Why can't we do it more like the Chinese restaurants?""There are Chinese restaurants everywhere, but there is no Chinese restaurant chain. Yet, everyone knows what is a Chinese restaurant. They know what to expect, even though it'll be subtly different and the colors will be different and the name will be different. You know a Chinese restaurant when you see it. These people work with the Chinese restaurant model — same principles, different applications and different settings — not the McDonald's model. The McDonald's model scales. The Chinese restaurant model spreads.So mass education started with social entrepreneurship in the 19th century. And that's desperately what we need again on a global scale. And what can we learn from all of that? Well, we can learn a lot because our education systems are failing desperately in many ways. They fail to reach the people they most need to serve. They often hit their target but miss the point. Improvement is increasingly difficult to organize; our faith in these systems, incredibly fraught. And this is just a very simple way of understanding what kind of innovation, what kind of different design we need.There are two basic types of innovation. There's sustaining innovation, which will sustain an existing institution or an organization, and disruptive innovation that will break it apart, create some different way of doing it. There are formal settings — schools, colleges, hospitals — in which innovation can take place, and informal settings — communities, families, social networks. Almost all our effort goes in this box, sustaining innovation in formal settings, getting a better version of the essentially Bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century. And as I said, the trouble with this is that, in the developing world there just aren't teachers to make this model work. You'd need millions and millions of teachers in China, India, Nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need. And in our system, we know that simply doing more of this won't eat into deep educational inequalities, especially in inner cities and former industrial areas.So that's why we need three more kinds of innovation. We need more reinvention. And all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves. They're recognizably schools, but they look different. There are Big Picture schools in the U.S. and Australia. There are Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden. Of 14 of them, only two of them are in schools. Most of them are in other buildings not designed as schools. There is an amazing school in Northen Queensland called Jaringan. And they all have the same kind of features: highly collaborative, very personalized, often pervasive technology, learning that starts from questions and problems and projects, not from knowledge and curriculum. So we certainly need more of that.But because so many of the issues in education aren't just in school, they're in family and community, what you also need, definitely, is more on the right hand side. You need efforts to supplement schools. The most famous of these is Reggio Emilia in Italy, the family-based learning system to support and encourage people in schools. The most exciting is the Harlem Children's Zone, which over 10 years, led by Geoffrey Canada, has, through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects, attempted to transform not just education in schools, but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in Harlem. We need more of that completely new and radical thinking. You can go to places an hour away, less, from this room, just down the road, which need that, which need radicalism of a kind that we haven't imagined.And finally, you need transformational innovation that could imagine getting learning to people in completely new and different ways. So we are on the verge, 2015, of an amazing achievement, the schoolification of the world. Every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015. It's an amazing thing. But it is, unlike cars, which have developed so rapidly and orderly, actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century, from a Bismarkian model of German schooling that got taken up by English reformers, and often by religious missionaries, taken up in the United States as a force of social cohesion, and then in Japan and South Korea as they developed.It's recognizably 19th century in its roots. And of course it's a huge achievement. And of course it will bring great things. It will bring skills and learning and reading. But it will also lay waste to imagination. It will lay waste to appetite. It will lay waste to social confidence. It will stratify society as much as it liberates it. And we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform. That is why we need really radical thinking, and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education
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"When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands. And that day I knew that when I grew up, I was going to become a brain doctor, scientist, something or the other.Years later, when I finally grew up, my dream came true. And it was while I was doing my Ph.D. on the neurological causes of dyslexia in children that I encountered a startling fact that I'd like to share with you all today. It is estimated that one in six children, that's one in six children, suffer from some developmental disorder. This is a disorder that retards mental development in the child and causes permanent mental impairments. Which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder.But here's what really perplexed me. Despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain, most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior. But diagnosing a brain disorder without actually looking at the brain is analogous to treating a patient with a heart problem based on their physical symptoms, without even doing an ECG or a chest X-ray to look at the heart. It seemed so intuitive to me. To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately, it would be necessary to look at the brain directly. Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete, or even a misleading, picture of the child's problems. Yet, despite all the advances in medical technology, the diagnosis of brain disorders in one in six children still remained so limited.And then I came across a team at Harvard University that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it, instead of in brain research, towards diagnosing brain disorders in children. Their groundbreaking technology records the EEG, or the electrical activity of the brain, in real time, allowing us to watch the brain as it performs various functions and then detect even the slightest abnormality in any of these functions: vision, attention, language, audition. A program called Brain Electrical Activity Mapping then triangulates the source of that abnormality in the brain. And another program called Statistical Probability Mapping then performs mathematical calculations to determine whether any of these abnormalities are clinically significant, allowing us to provide a much more accurate neurological diagnosis of the child's symptoms. And so I became the head of neurophysiology for the clinical arm of this team, and we're finally able to use this technology towards actually helping children with brain disorders. And I'm happy to say that I'm now in the process of setting up this technology here in India.I'd like to tell you about one such child, whose story was also covered by ABC News. Seven-year-old Justin Senigar came to our clinic with this diagnosis of very severe autism. Like many autistic children, his mind was locked inside his body. There were moments when he would actually space out for seconds at a time. And the doctors told his parents he was never going to be able to communicate or interact socially, and he would probably never have too much language.When we used this groundbreaking EEG technology to actually look at Justin's brain, the results were startling. It turned out that Justin was almost certainly not autistic. He was suffering from brain seizures that were impossible to see with the naked eye, but that were actually causing symptoms that mimicked those of autism. After Justin was given anti-seizure medication, the change in him was amazing. Within a period of 60 days, his vocabulary went from two to three words to 300 words. And his communication and social interaction were improved so dramatically that he was enrolled into a regular school and even became a karate super champ.Research shows that 50 percent of children, almost 50 percent of children diagnosed with autism are actually suffering from hidden brain seizures. These are the faces of the children that I have tested with stories just like Justin. All these children came to our clinic with a diagnosis of autism, attention deficit disorder, mental retardation, language problems. Instead, our EEG scans revealed very specific problems hidden within their brains that couldn't possibly have been detected by their behavioral assessments. So these EEG scans enabled us to provide these children with a much more accurate neurological diagnosis and much more targeted treatment.For too long now, children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen. And for too long, these children and their parents have suffered undue frustration and desperation. But we are now in a new era of neuroscience, one in which we can finally look directly at brain function in real time with no risks and no side effects, non-invasively, and find the true source of so many disabilities in children.So if I could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder, then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved. One more mind will be unlocked. And one more child who has been misdiagnosed or even undiagnosed by the system will finally realize his or her true potential while there's still time for his or her brain to recover. And all this by simply watching the child's brainwaves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aditi_shankardass_a_second_opinion_on_learning_disorders
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"So, these are the Dark Ages. And the Dark Ages are the time between when you put away the Lego for the last time as a kid, and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid's toy. Started out with my then four-year-old: ""Oh, should buy the kid some Lego. That stuff's cool."" Walked into the Lego store. Bought him this. It's totally appropriate for a four-year-old. (Laughter) I think the box says — let's see here — ""8 to 12"" on it. I turn to my wife and said, ""Who are we buying this for?"" She's like, ""Oh, us."" I'm like, ""Okay. All right. That's cool.""Pretty soon it got a little bit out of control. The dining room looked like this. You walk there, and it hurts. So we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an Abu Ghraib annex. (Laughter) Torture, very funny. Wow, you guys are great. And we put down those little floor tiles, and then I went onto eBay and bought 150 pounds of Lego — (Laughter) which is insane. My daughter — the day we got it, I was tucking her in — and I said, ""Honey, you're my treasure."" And she said, ""No, the Lego is the treasure."" (Laughter) And then she said, ""Dad, we're Lego rich."" I was like, ""Yeah. I suppose we are."" So then once you do that you're like, ""Oh, crap. Where am I going to put all this?"" So you go to The Container Store and spend an enormous amount of money, and then you start this crazy sorting process that never — it's just nuts. Whatever.So then you realize there are these conventions. And you go to one of these conventions, and some dude built the Titanic. And you're like, ""Holy shit! He had to come in like a truck, a semi, with this thing."" And then someone built this — this is the Smith Tower in Seattle. Just beautiful. And there's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for Lego, because Lego — the Danish — no, they're not into guns. But the Americans? Oh, we'll make some guns for Lego, no problem. And at a certain point, you look around, you're like, ""Whoa, this is a really nerdy crowd."" And I mean like this is a nerdy crowd, but that's like a couple of levels above furries. (Laughter) The nerds here, they get laid — except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket — and you say to yourself at some point, ""Am I part of this group? Like, am I into this?"" And I was just like, ""Yeah, I guess I am. I'm coming out. I'm kind of into this stuff, and I'm going to stop being embarrassed.""So then you really get into it, and you're like, ""Well, the Lego people in Denmark, they've got all this software to let you build your own virtually."" And so this is like this CAD program where you build it. And then whatever you design virtually, you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later. And then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store. The Lego guys don't give you any royalties, strangely, but some user made this and then it sold. And it's pretty amazing actually.Then you notice that if that Lego-provided CAD program isn't enough, there's an entire open-source, third-party, independent Lego CAD program that lets you do 3D modeling and 3D rendering and make, in fact, movies out of Lego, 3D films of which there are thousands on YouTube, and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content — just beautiful — and people recreating all sorts of things. I have to take a moment. I love the guy who's like running away with his clasps, his hooks. Okay. Anyway.(Laughter)There's a whole programming language and robotics tool, so if you want to teach someone how to program, kid, adult, whatever it is. And the guy that made this, he made a slot machine out of Lego. And I don't mean he made Lego that looked like a slot machine; I mean he made a slot machine out of Lego. The insides were Lego.There's people getting drunk building Lego, and you've got to finish the thing before you puke. There's a whole gray market for Lego, thousands of home-based businesses. And some people will fund their entire Lego habit by selling the little guy, but then you have no guys in your ships.And then, just some examples. This stuff really is sculpture. This is amazing what you can do. And don't kid yourself: some architectural details, incredible organic shapes and just, even, nature out of, again, little blocks. This is my house. And this is my house. I was afraid a car was going to come smash it as I was taking a picture for you guys.Anyway, I'm out of time. But just very quickly — we'll just see if I can do this quick. Because there aren't enough TED logos around here. (Laughter) Let's see here. Okay. Ta-da.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hillel_cooperman_legos_for_grownups
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"The story starts in Kenya in December of 2007, when there was a disputed presidential election, and in the immediate aftermath of that election, there was an outbreak of ethnic violence. And there was a lawyer in Nairobi, Ory Okolloh — who some of you may know from her TEDTalk — who began blogging about it on her site, Kenyan Pundit. And shortly after the election and the outbreak of violence, the government suddenly imposed a significant media blackout. And so weblogs went from being commentary as part of the media landscape to being a critical part of the media landscape in trying to understand where the violence was. And Okolloh solicited from her commenters more information about what was going on. The comments began pouring in, and Okolloh would collate them. She would post them. And she quickly said, ""It's too much. I could do this all day every day and I can't keep up. There is more information about what's going on in Kenya right now than any one person can manage. If only there was a way to automate this.""And two programmers who read her blog held their hands up and said, ""We could do that,"" and in 72 hours, they launched Ushahidi. Ushahidi — the name means ""witness"" or ""testimony"" in Swahili — is a very simple way of taking reports from the field, whether it's from the web or, critically, via mobile phones and SMS, aggregating it and putting it on a map. That's all it is, but that's all that's needed because what it does is it takes the tacit information available to the whole population — everybody knows where the violence is, but no one person knows what everyone knows — and it takes that tacit information and it aggregates it, and it maps it and it makes it public. And that, that maneuver called ""crisis mapping,"" was kicked off in Kenya in January of 2008.And enough people looked at it and found it valuable enough that the programmers who created Ushahidi decided they were going to make it open source and turn it into a platform. It's since been deployed in Mexico to track electoral fraud. It's been deployed in Washington D.C. to track snow cleanup. And it's been used most famously in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. And when you look at the map now posted on the Ushahidi front page, you can see that the number of deployments in Ushahidi has gone worldwide, all right? This went from a single idea and a single implementation in East Africa in the beginning of 2008 to a global deployment in less than three years.Now what Okolloh did would not have been possible without digital technology. What Okolloh did would not have been possible without human generosity. And the interesting moment now, the number of environments where the social design challenge relies on both of those things being true. That is the resource that I'm talking about. I call it cognitive surplus. And it represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects. Cognitive surplus is made up of two things. The first, obviously, is the world's free time and talents. The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. Now, that free time existed in the 20th century, but we didn't get Ushahidi in the 20th century.That's the second half of cognitive surplus. The media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume, and we got, as a result, very good at consuming. But now that we've been given media tools — the Internet, mobile phones — that let us do more than consume, what we're seeing is that people weren't couch potatoes because we liked to be. We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us. We still like to consume, of course. But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share. And it's those two things together — ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts — that are the new design resource. And using cognitive surplus, we're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific, literary, artistic, political efforts. Designing.We're also getting, of course, a lot of LOLcats. LOLcats are cute pictures of cats made cuter with the addition of cute captions. And they are also part of the abundant media landscape we're getting now. This is one of the participatory — one of the participatory models we see coming out of that, along with Ushahidi. Now I want to stipulate, as the lawyers say, that LOLcats are the stupidest possible creative act. There are other candidates of course, but LOLcats will do as a general case. But here's the thing: The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. Someone who has done something like this, however mediocre and throwaway, has tried something, has put something forward in public. And once they've done it, they can do it again, and they could work on getting it better.There is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work, and as anybody who's worked as an artist or a creator knows, it's a spectrum you're constantly struggling to get on top of. The gap is between doing anything and doing nothing. And someone who makes a LOLcat has already crossed over that gap. Now it's tempting to want to get the Ushahidis without the LOLcats, right, to get the serious stuff without the throwaway stuff. But media abundance never works that way. Freedom to experiment means freedom to experiment with anything. Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.So before I talk about what is, I think, the critical difference between LOLcats and Ushahidi, I want to talk about their shared source. And that source is design for generosity. It is one of the curiosities of our historical era that even as cognitive surplus is becoming a resource we can design around, social sciences are also starting to explain how important our intrinsic motivations are to us, how much we do things because we like to do them rather than because our boss told us to do them, or because we're being paid to do them.This is a graph from a paper by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, who set out to test, at the beginning of this decade, what they called ""deterrence theory."" And deterrence theory is a very simple theory of human behavior: If you want somebody to do less of something, add a punishment and they'll do less of it. Simple, straightforward, commonsensical — also, largely untested. And so they went and studied 10 daycare centers in Haifa, Israel. They studied those daycare centers at the time of highest tension, which is pick-up time. At pick-up time the teachers, who have been with your children all day, would like you to be there at the appointed hour to take your children back. Meanwhile, the parents — perhaps a little busy at work, running late, running errands — want a little slack to pick the kids up late.So Gneezy and Rustichini said, ""How many instances of late pick-ups are there at these 10 daycare centers?"" Now they saw — and this is what the graph is, these are the number of weeks and these are the number of late arrivals — that there were between six and 10 instances of late pick-ups on average in these 10 daycare centers. So they divided the daycare centers into two groups. The white group there is the control group; they change nothing. But the group of daycare centers represented by the black line, they said, ""We are changing this bargain as of right now. If you pick your kid up more than 10 minutes late, we're going to add a 10 shekel fine to your bill. Boom. No ifs, ands or buts.""And the minute they did that, the behavior in those daycare centers changed. Late pick-ups went up every week for the next four weeks until they topped out at triple the pre-fine average, and then they fluctuated at between double and triple the pre-fine average for the life of the fine. And you can see immediately what happened, right? The fine broke the culture of the daycare center. By adding a fine, what they did was communicate to the parents that their entire debt to the teachers had been discharged with the payment of 10 shekels, and that there was no residue of guilt or social concern that the parents owed the teachers. And so the parents, quite sensibly, said, ""10 shekels to pick my kid up late? What could be bad?"" (Laughter)The explanation of human behavior that we inherited in the 20th century was that we are all rational, self-maximizing actors, and in that explanation — the daycare center had no contract — should have been operating without any constraints. But that's not right. They were operating with social constraints rather than contractual ones. And critically, the social constraints created a culture that was more generous than the contractual constraints did. So Gneezy and Rustichini run this experiment for a dozen weeks — run the fine for a dozen weeks — and then they say, ""Okay, that's it. All done; fine."" And then a really interesting thing happens: Nothing changes. The culture that got broken by the fine stayed broken when the fine was removed. Not only are economic motivations and intrinsic motivations incompatible, that incompatibility can persist over long periods. So the trick in designing these kinds of situations is to understand where you're relying on the economic part of the bargain — as with the parents paying the teachers — and when you're relying on the social part of the bargain, when you're really designing for generosity.This brings me back to the LOLcats and to Ushahidi. This is, I think, the range that matters. Both of these rely on cognitive surplus. Both of these design for the assumption that people like to create and we want to share. Here is the critical difference between these: LOLcats is communal value. It's value created by the participants for each other. Communal value on the networks we have is everywhere — every time you see a large aggregate of shared, publicly available data, whether it's photos on Flickr or videos on Youtube or whatever. This is good. I like LOLcats as much as the next guy, maybe a little more even, but this is also a largely solved problem. I have a hard time envisioning a future in which someone is saying, ""Where, oh where, can I find a picture of a cute cat?""Ushahidi, by contrast, is civic value. It's value created by the participants but enjoyed by society as a whole. The goals set out by Ushahidi are not just to make life better for the participants, but to make life better for everyone in the society in which Ushahidi is operating. And that kind of civic value is not just a side effect of opening up to human motivation. It really is going to be a side effect of what we, collectively, make of these kinds of efforts. There are a trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs. That will be true year-in and year-out. The number of people who are going to be able to participate in these kinds of projects is going to grow, and we can see that organizations designed around a culture of generosity can achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of contractual overhead — a very different model than our default model for large-scale group action in the 20th century.What's going to make the difference here is what Dean Kamen said, the inventor and entrepreneur. Kamen said, ""Free cultures get what they celebrate."" We've got a choice before us. We've got this trillion hours a year. We can use it to crack each other up, and we're going to do that. That, we get for free. But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. And to the degree we're going to do that, to the degree we're able to do that, we'll be able to change society.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world
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"In the last 50 years, we've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially retail, sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.So why is this important? I think there are any number of reasons, and I'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few. Just from the perspective of climate change, the average urban dweller in the U.S. has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller, mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more, and living in detached buildings, you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of. So strictly from a climate change perspective, the cities are already relatively green. The big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs. All that driving that we've been doing out in the suburbs, we have doubled the amount of miles we drive. It's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency. We're just driving so much more; we haven't been able to keep up technologically.Public health is another reason to consider retrofitting. Researchers at the CDC and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles. And those have been linked then with the rather alarming, growing rates of obesity, shown in these maps here, and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. And that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore, again, because of our development patterns.And then there's finally — there's the affordability question. I mean, how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices? Suburban expansion to cheap land, for the last 50 years — you know the cheap land out on the edge — has helped generations of families enjoy the American dream. But increasingly, the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability — which is basically our model — those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs. For instance, here in Atlanta, about half of households make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation. I mean, that's 2005 figures. That's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon. You know, none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs, and they're not going down any time soon.Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips, there are reasons why it's important to retrofit. But is it practical? I think it is. June Williamson and I have been researching this topic for over a decade, and we've found over 80 varied projects. But that they're really all market driven, and what's driving the market in particular — number one — is major demographic shifts. We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place, but that's really not the case anymore. Since 2000, already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them. We just haven't caught up with the actual realities of this. The reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now: the Baby Boomers retiring — and then there's a gap, Generation X, which is a small generation. They're still having kids — but Generation Y hasn't even started hitting child-rearing age. They're the other big generation.So as a result of that, demographers predict that through 2025, 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them. And the market research, consumer research, asking the Boomers and Gen Y what it is they would like, what they would like to live in, tells us there is going to be a huge demand — and we're already seeing it — for more urban lifestyles within suburbia. That basically, the Boomers want to be able to age in place, and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle, but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia.The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt. Now I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band, but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots — and suburbia is full of them. When the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown, it made sense to just build surface parking lots. But those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again, as we've just continued to sprawl, and they now have a relatively central location. It no longer just makes sense. That land is more valuable than just surface parking lots. It now makes sense to go back in, build a deck and build up on those sites. So what do you do with a dead mall, dead office park? It turns out, all sorts of things. In a slow economy like ours, re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies.So this happens to be a dead mall in St. Louis that's been re-inhabited as art-space. It's now home to artist studios, theater groups, dance troupes. It's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was, but it's serving its community. It's keeping the lights on. It's becoming, I think, a really great institution. Other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes, as universities, and as all variety of office space. We also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well — lots of schools, lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one.This was a little grocery store, a Food Lion grocery store, that is now a public library. In addition to, I think, doing a beautiful adaptive reuse, they tore up some of the parking spaces, put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff, put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods. And they've made this, what was just a store along a commercial strip, into a community gathering space. This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Phoenix, Arizona. Really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint, a gourmet grocery, and they put up a restaurant in the old post office. Never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination. It's been so successful, they've now taken over the strip across the street. The real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim, ""Walking distance to Le Grande Orange,"" because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call ""a third place."" If home is the first place and work is the second place, the third place is where you go to hang out and build community. And especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family, the family households, there's a real hunger for more third places.So the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category, the next strategy: redevelopment. Now, during the boom, there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density, a sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods. But some of them have been much more incremental. This is Mashpee Commons, the oldest retrofit that we've found. And it's just incrementally, over the last 20 years, built urbanism on top of its parking lots. So the black and white photo shows the simple 60's strip shopping center. And then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact, mixed-use New England village, and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side. So, you know, sometimes it's incremental. Sometimes, it's all at once.This is another infill project on the parking lots, this one of an office park outside of Washington D.C. When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site, the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new Main Street, several apartments and condo buildings, while keeping the existing office buildings. Here is the site in 1940: It was just a little farm in the village of Hyattsville. By 1980, it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right. Today, the transit, the Main Street and the new housing have all been built. Eventually, I expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall. Plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped. Transit is a big driver of retrofits. So here's what it looks like. You can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new Main Street.This one is one of my favorites, Belmar. I think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction. There's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines. This was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock. It's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets, two public parks, eight bus lines and a range of housing types, and so it's really given Lakewood, Colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had. Here was the mall in its heyday. They had their prom in the mall. They loved their mall. So here's the site in 1975 with the mall. By 1995, the mall has died. The department store has been kept — and we found this was true in many cases. The department stores are multistory; they're better built. They're easy to be re-adapted. But the one story stuff ... that's really history.So here it is at projected build-out. This project, I think, has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods. It's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle. It's about two-thirds built out right now. Here's what the new Main Street looks like. It's very successful, and it's helped to prompt — eight of the 13 regional malls in Denver have now, or have announced plans to be, retrofitted. But it's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring — just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city. No, it's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties. And so it's giving people more choices, but it's not taking away choices.But it's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability. You want to also try to get more systemic transformation. We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves. So this is one that has been retrofitted in California. They took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below, and they built a boulevard that has become the Main Street for their town. And it's transformed from being an ugly, unsafe, undesirable address, to becoming a beautiful, attractive, dignified sort of good address. I mean now we're hoping we start to see it; they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels. I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree. So there's a lot of great things, but I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting.But densification is not going to work everywhere. Sometimes re-greening is really the better answer. There's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like Flint, Michigan. There's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement — sort of victory gardens meets the Internet. But perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology, as in this example outside of Minneapolis. When the shopping center died, the city restored the site's original wetlands, creating lakefront property, which then attracted private investment, the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years. So they've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time. This is another re-greening example. It also makes sense in very strong markets. This one in Seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop. And the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit. The creek had been culverted under the parking lot. But daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat.So I've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits. What's next? I think we have three challenges for the future. The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened. Where should we be redeveloping? And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation? These slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta. I led a team that was asked to imagine Atlanta 100 years from now. And we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves — expensive, but simple. One, in a hundred years, transit on all major rail and road corridors. Two, in a hundred years, thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors. It's a little extreme, but we've got a little water problem. In a hundred years, subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit won't be viable. And so we've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production.So the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits. And I close with this image of democracy in action: This is a protest that's happening on a retrofit in Silver Spring, Maryland on an Astroturf town green. Now, retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism, and not without reason; you don't get much more phony than an Astroturf town green. I have to say, these are very hybrid places. They are new but trying to look old. They have urban streetscapes, but suburban parking ratios. Their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia, but they're less diverse than cities. And they are public places, but that are managed by private companies. And just the surface appearance are often — like the Astroturf here — they make me wince. So, you know, I mean I'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job. The fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks, the streets and blocks, the putting in of public space, compromised as it may be, is still a really great thing. But we've got to get the architecture better.The final challenge is for all of you. I want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places — more sustainable places, period. But culturally, we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It's time to let them grow up, so I want you to all support the zoning changes, the road diets, the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_dunham_jones_retrofitting_suburbia
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"It can be a very complicated thing, the ocean. And it can be a very complicated thing, what human health is. And bringing those two together might seem a very daunting task, but what I'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity, there's some simple themes that I think, if we understand, we can really move forward. And those simple themes aren't really themes about the complex science of what's going on, but things that we all pretty well know. And I'm going to start with this one: If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. We know that, right? We've experienced that. And if we just take that and we build from there, then we can go to the next step, which is that if the ocean ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. That's the theme of my talk. And we're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways.This is a shot of Cannery Row in 1932. Cannery Row, at the time, had the biggest industrial canning operation on the west coast. We piled enormous amounts of pollution into the air and into the water. Rolf Bolin, who was a professor at the Hopkin's Marine Station where I work, wrote in the 1940s that ""The fumes from the scum floating on the inlets of the bay were so bad they turned lead-based paints black."" People working in these canneries could barely stay there all day because of the smell, but you know what they came out saying? They say, ""You know what you smell? You smell money."" That pollution was money to that community, and those people dealt with the pollution and absorbed it into their skin and into their bodies because they needed the money. We made the ocean unhappy; we made people very unhappy, and we made them unhealthy.The connection between ocean health and human health is actually based upon another couple simple adages, and I want to call that ""pinch a minnow, hurt a whale."" The pyramid of ocean life ... Now, when an ecologist looks at the ocean — I have to tell you — we look at the ocean in a very different way, and we see different things than when a regular person looks at the ocean because when an ecologist looks at the ocean, we see all those interconnections. We see the base of the food chain, the plankton, the small things, and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid, and on so up this diagram. And that flow, that flow of life, from the very base up to the very top, is the flow that ecologists see. And that's what we're trying to preserve when we say, ""Save the ocean. Heal the ocean."" It's that pyramid.Now why does that matter for human health? Because when we jam things in the bottom of that pyramid that shouldn't be there, some very frightening things happen. Pollutants, some pollutants have been created by us: molecules like PCBs that can't be broken down by our bodies. And they go in the base of that pyramid, and they drift up; they're passed up that way, on to predators and on to the top predators, and in so doing, they accumulate.Now, to bring that home, I thought I'd invent a little game. We don't really have to play it; we can just think about it here. It's the Styrofoam and chocolate game. Imagine that when we got on this boat, we were all given two Styrofoam peanuts. Can't do much with them: Put them in your pocket. Suppose the rules are: every time you offer somebody a drink, you give them the drink, and you give them your Styrofoam peanuts too. What'll happen is that the Styrofoam peanuts will start moving through our society here, and they will accumulate in the drunkest, stingiest people. (Laughter) There's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible Styrofoam peanuts. And that's exactly what happens with PDBs in this food pyramid: They accumulate into the top of it.Now suppose, instead of Styrofoam peanuts, we take these lovely little chocolates that we get and we had those instead. Well, some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around, and instead of accumulating, they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group because they're absorbed by us. And that's the difference between a PCB and, say, something natural like an omega-3, something we want out of the marine food chain.PCBs accumulate. We have great examples of that, unfortunately. PCBs accumulate in dolphins in Sarasota Bay, in Texas, in North Carolina. They get into the food chain. The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton, and those PCBs, being fat-soluble, accumulate in these dolphins. Now, a dolphin, mother dolphin, any dolphin — there's only one way that a PCB can get out of a dolphin. And what's that? In mother's milk. Here's a diagram of the PCB load of dolphins in Sarasota Bay. Adult males: a huge load. Juveniles: a huge load. Females after their first calf is already weaned: a lower load. Those females, they're not trying to. Those females are passing the PCBs in the fat of their own mother's milk into their offspring, and their offspring don't survive. The death rate in these dolphins, for the first calf born of every female dolphin, is 60 to 80 percent. These mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant, and most of them die. Now, the mother then can go and reproduce, but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals — the death of the first-born calf.There's another top predator in the ocean, it turns out. That top predator, of course, is us. And we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places. This is whale meat that I photographed in a grocery store in Tokyo — or is it? In fact, what we did a few years ago was learn how to smuggle a molecular biology lab into Tokyo and use it to genetically test the DNA out of whale meat samples and identify what they really were. And some of those whale meat samples were whale meat. Some of them were illegal whale meat, by the way. That's another story. But some of them were not whale meat at all. Even though they were labeled whale meat, they were dolphin meat. Some of them were dolphin liver. Some of them were dolphin blubber. And those dolphin parts had a huge load of PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals. And that huge load was passing into the people that ate this meat. It turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world. That's a tragedy for those populations, but it's also a tragedy for the people eating them because they don't know that that's toxic meat.We had these data a few years ago. I remember sitting at my desk being about the only person in the world who knew that whale meat being sold in these markets was really dolphin meat, and it was toxic. It had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the EPA. And I remember there sitting at my desk thinking, ""Well, I know this. This is a great scientific discovery,"" but it was so awful. And for the very first time in my scientific career, I broke scientific protocol, which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals and then begin to talk about them. We sent a very polite letter to the Minister of Health in Japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation, not for us, but for the people of Japan because mothers who may be breastfeeding, who may have young children, would be buying something that they thought was healthy, but it was really toxic. That led to a whole series of other campaigns in Japan, and I'm really proud to say that at this point, it's very difficult to buy anything in Japan that's labeled incorrectly, even though they're still selling whale meat, which I believe they shouldn't. But at least it's labeled correctly, and you're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead.It isn't just there that this happens, but in a natural diet of some communities in the Canadian arctic and in the United States and in the European arctic, a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of PCBs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women. These women have toxic breast milk. They cannot feed their offspring, their children, their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain, in their part of the world's ocean pyramid. That means their immune systems are compromised. It means that their children's development can be compromised. And the world's attention on this over the last decade has reduced the problem for these women, not by changing the pyramid, but by changing what they particularly eat out of it. We've taken them out of their natural pyramid in order to solve this problem. That's a good thing for this particular acute problem, but it does nothing to solve the pyramid problem.There's other ways of breaking the pyramid. The pyramid, if we jam things in the bottom, can get backed up like a sewer line that's clogged. And if we jam nutrients, sewage, fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid, it can back up all through it. We end up with things we've heard about before: red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage. We can also see blooms of bacteria, blooms of viruses in the ocean. These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it. How many people have seen a ""beach closed"" sign? Why does that happen? It happens because we have jammed so much into the base of the natural ocean pyramid that these bacteria clog it up and overfill onto our beaches. Often what jams us up is sewage.Now how many of you have ever gone to a state park or a national park where you had a big sign at the front saying, ""Closed because human sewage is so far over this park that you can't use it""? Not very often. We wouldn't tolerate that. We wouldn't tolerate our parks being swamped by human sewage, but beaches are closed a lot in our country. They're closed more and more and more all around the world for the same reason, and I believe we shouldn't tolerate that either. It's not just a question of cleanliness; it's also a question of how those organisms then turn into human disease. These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people. They can go into your skin and create skin infections.This is a graph from NOAA's ocean and human health initiative, showing the rise of the infections by vibrio in people over the last few years. Surfers, for example, know this incredibly. And if you can see on some surfing sites, in fact, not only do you see what the waves are like or what the weather's like, but on some surf rider sites, you see a little flashing poo alert. That means that the beach might have great waves, but it's a dangerous place for surfers to be because they can carry with them, even after a great day of surfing, this legacy of an infection that might take a very long time to solve. Some of these infections are actually carrying antibiotic resistance genes now, and that makes them even more difficult.These same infections create harmful algal blooms. Those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals. This is just a simple list of some of the types of poisons that come out of these harmful algal blooms: shellfish poisoning,fish ciguatera, diarrheic shellfish poisoning — you don't want to know about that — neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, paralytic shellfish poisoning. These are things that are getting into our food chain because of these blooms. Rita Calwell very famously traced a very interesting story of cholera into human communities, brought there, not by a normal human vector, but by a marine vector, this copepod. Copepods are small crustaceans. They're a tiny fraction of an inch long, and they can carry on their little legs some of the cholera bacteria that then leads to human disease. That has sparked cholera epidemics in ports along the world and has led to increased concentration on trying to make sure shipping doesn't move these vectors of cholera around the world.So what do you do? We have major problems in disrupted ecosystem flow that the pyramid may not be working so well, that the flow from the base up into it is being blocked and clogged. What do you do when you have this sort of disrupted flow? Well, there's a bunch of things you could do. You could call Joe the Plumber, for example. And he could come in and fix the flow. But in fact, if you look around the world, not only are there hope spots for where we may be able to fix problems, there have been places where problems have been fixed, where people have come to grips with these issues and begun to turn them around. Monterey is one of those.I started out showing how much we had distressed the Monterey Bay ecosystem with pollution and the canning industry and all of the attendant problems. In 1932, that's the picture. In 2009, the picture is dramatically different. The canneries are gone. The pollution has abated. But there's a greater sense here that what the individual communities need is working ecosystems. They need a functioning pyramid from the base all the way to the top. And that pyramid in Monterey, right now, because of the efforts of a lot of different people, is functioning better than it's ever functioned for the last 150 years.It didn't happen accidentally. It happened because many people put their time and effort and their pioneering spirit into this. On the left there, Julia Platt, the mayor of my little hometown in Pacific Grove. At 74 years old, became mayor because something had to be done to protect the ocean. In 1931, she produced California's first community-based marine protected area, right next to the biggest polluting cannery, because Julia knew that when the canneries eventually were gone, the ocean needed a place to grow from, that the ocean needed a place to spark a seed, and she wanted to provide that seed.Other people, like David Packard and Julie Packard, who were instrumental in producing the Monterey Bay aquarium to lock into people's notion that the ocean and the health of the ocean ecosystem were just as important to the economy of this area as eating the ecosystem would be. That change in thinking has led to a dramatic shift, not only in the fortunes of Monterey Bay, but other places around the world.Well, I want to leave you with the thought that what we're really trying to do here is protect this ocean pyramid, and that ocean pyramid connects to our own pyramid of life. It's an ocean planet, and we think of ourselves as a terrestrial species, but the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected. And it's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_palumbi_following_the_mercury_trail
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"It's a great honor today to share with you The Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe. And so I think we can roll the video that we have.[The Himalayas.](Music)The flat horizon that we've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste. It wasn't until we really left Earth, got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself, that we could understand our planet as a limited condition. The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over the past 12 years. We maintain that, put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales. What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. NASA supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world.The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do — our main space shows in the dome. But what you see here is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden. I've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work, and the result has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. This software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live. I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology.And so as we move out, we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, giving you a sense of how far away we are. As we move out, the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long, we're essentially backing up into the past. We back so far up we're finally seeing a containment around us — the afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the WMAP microwave background that we see. We'll fly outside it here, just to see this sort of containment. If we were outside this, it would almost be meaningless, in the sense as before time. But this our containment of the visible universe. We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see.Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of exoplanets that we've mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with our own solar system. What you're going to see — we're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system — these are the paths of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system. Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of the Moon, and we see the Earth. This map can be updated, and we can add in new data.I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. for the Cassini mission. But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase.This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this. This software can also be networked between domes. We have a growing user base of this, and we network domes. And we can network between domes and classrooms. We're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia and a high school in Cambodia. And the Cambodians have actually controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school.This is an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, but through the Uniview software. So you're seeing the edge of the Earth. This is Nepal. This is, in fact, right here is the valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. But we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. This is Nepal and Tibet.And just in closing, I'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on — here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out — so I'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is. Because our home is the universe, and we are the universe, essentially. We carry that in us. And to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carter_emmart_demos_a_3d_atlas_of_the_universe
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"Why grow homes? Because we can. Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma. And there's a cause for that, all right. We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses. As an architect, I have to confront something like this.So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses? Well, it's been around for 2,500 years. It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system. And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that. We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab. It fits into the environment. It is the environment. It is the landscape, right?And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon. They're perfect. You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment. Imagine pre-growing a village — it takes about seven to 10 years — and everything is green.So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one.So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab. And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs. We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry. We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed. It's victimless. It's meat from a test tube. So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes.So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows.(Laughter)And we know it's incredibly ugly. It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape. And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it.We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat. That's why we grow homes. Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mitchell_joachim_don_t_build_your_home_grow_it
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"Thank you very much. Please excuse me for sitting; I'm very old. (Laughter) Well, the topic I'm going to discuss is one which is, in a certain sense, very peculiar because it's very old. Roughness is part of human life forever and forever, and ancient authors have written about it. It was very much uncontrollable, and in a certain sense, it seemed to be the extreme of complexity, just a mess, a mess and a mess. There are many different kinds of mess. Now, in fact, by a complete fluke, I got involved many years ago in a study of this form of complexity, and to my utter amazement, I found traces — very strong traces, I must say — of order in that roughness. And so today, I would like to present to you a few examples of what this represents. I prefer the word roughness to the word irregularity because irregularity — to someone who had Latin in my long-past youth — means the contrary of regularity. But it is not so. Regularity is the contrary of roughness because the basic aspect of the world is very rough.So let me show you a few objects. Some of them are artificial. Others of them are very real, in a certain sense. Now this is the real. It's a cauliflower. Now why do I show a cauliflower, a very ordinary and ancient vegetable? Because old and ancient as it may be, it's very complicated and it's very simple, both at the same time. If you try to weigh it — of course it's very easy to weigh it, and when you eat it, the weight matters — but suppose you try to measure its surface. Well, it's very interesting. If you cut, with a sharp knife, one of the florets of a cauliflower and look at it separately, you think of a whole cauliflower, but smaller. And then you cut again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, and you still get small cauliflowers. So the experience of humanity has always been that there are some shapes which have this peculiar property, that each part is like the whole, but smaller. Now, what did humanity do with that? Very, very little. (Laughter)So what I did actually is to study this problem, and I found something quite surprising. That one can measure roughness by a number, a number, 2.3, 1.2 and sometimes much more. One day, a friend of mine, to bug me, brought a picture and said, ""What is the roughness of this curve?"" I said, ""Well, just short of 1.5."" It was 1.48. Now, it didn't take me any time. I've been looking at these things for so long. So these numbers are the numbers which denote the roughness of these surfaces. I hasten to say that these surfaces are completely artificial. They were done on a computer, and the only input is a number, and that number is roughness. So on the left, I took the roughness copied from many landscapes. To the right, I took a higher roughness. So the eye, after a while, can distinguish these two very well.Humanity had to learn about measuring roughness. This is very rough, and this is sort of smooth, and this perfectly smooth. Very few things are very smooth. So then if you try to ask questions: ""What's the surface of a cauliflower?"" Well, you measure and measure and measure. Each time you're closer, it gets bigger, down to very, very small distances. What's the length of the coastline of these lakes? The closer you measure, the longer it is. The concept of length of coastline, which seems to be so natural because it's given in many cases, is, in fact, complete fallacy; there's no such thing. You must do it differently.What good is that, to know these things? Well, surprisingly enough, it's good in many ways. To begin with, artificial landscapes, which I invented sort of, are used in cinema all the time. We see mountains in the distance. They may be mountains, but they may be just formulae, just cranked on. Now it's very easy to do. It used to be very time-consuming, but now it's nothing. Now look at that. That's a real lung. Now a lung is something very strange. If you take this thing, you know very well it weighs very little. The volume of a lung is very small, but what about the area of the lung? Anatomists were arguing very much about that. Some say that a normal male's lung has an area of the inside of a basketball [court]. And the others say, no, five basketball [courts]. Enormous disagreements. Why so? Because, in fact, the area of the lung is something very ill-defined. The bronchi branch, branch, branch and they stop branching, not because of any matter of principle, but because of physical considerations: the mucus, which is in the lung. So what happens is that in a way you have a much bigger lung, but it branches and branches down to distances about the same for a whale, for a man and for a little rodent.Now, what good is it to have that? Well, surprisingly enough, amazingly enough, the anatomists had a very poor idea of the structure of the lung until very recently. And I think that my mathematics, surprisingly enough, has been of great help to the surgeons studying lung illnesses and also kidney illnesses, all these branching systems, for which there was no geometry. So I found myself, in other words, constructing a geometry, a geometry of things which had no geometry. And a surprising aspect of it is that very often, the rules of this geometry are extremely short. You have formulas that long. And you crank it several times. Sometimes repeatedly: again, again, again, the same repetition. And at the end, you get things like that.This cloud is completely, 100 percent artificial. Well, 99.9. And the only part which is natural is a number, the roughness of the cloud, which is taken from nature. Something so complicated like a cloud, so unstable, so varying, should have a simple rule behind it. Now this simple rule is not an explanation of clouds. The seer of clouds had to take account of it. I don't know how much advanced these pictures are. They're old. I was very much involved in it, but then turned my attention to other phenomena.Now, here is another thing which is rather interesting. One of the shattering events in the history of mathematics, which is not appreciated by many people, occurred about 130 years ago, 145 years ago. Mathematicians began to create shapes that didn't exist. Mathematicians got into self-praise to an extent which was absolutely amazing, that man can invent things that nature did not know. In particular, it could invent things like a curve which fills the plane. A curve's a curve, a plane's a plane, and the two won't mix. Well, they do mix. A man named Peano did define such curves, and it became an object of extraordinary interest. It was very important, but mostly interesting because a kind of break, a separation between the mathematics coming from reality, on the one hand, and new mathematics coming from pure man's mind. Well, I was very sorry to point out that the pure man's mind has, in fact, seen at long last what had been seen for a long time. And so here I introduce something, the set of rivers of a plane-filling curve. And well, it's a story unto itself. So it was in 1875 to 1925, an extraordinary period in which mathematics prepared itself to break out from the world. And the objects which were used as examples, when I was a child and a student, as examples of the break between mathematics and visible reality — those objects, I turned them completely around. I used them for describing some of the aspects of the complexity of nature.Well, a man named Hausdorff in 1919 introduced a number which was just a mathematical joke, and I found that this number was a good measurement of roughness. When I first told it to my friends in mathematics they said, ""Don't be silly. It's just something [silly]."" Well actually, I was not silly. The great painter Hokusai knew it very well. The things on the ground are algae. He did not know the mathematics; it didn't yet exist. And he was Japanese who had no contact with the West. But painting for a long time had a fractal side. I could speak of that for a long time. The Eiffel Tower has a fractal aspect. I read the book that Mr. Eiffel wrote about his tower, and indeed it was astonishing how much he understood.This is a mess, mess, mess, Brownian loop. One day I decided — halfway through my career, I was held by so many things in my work — I decided to test myself. Could I just look at something which everybody had been looking at for a long time and find something dramatically new? Well, so I looked at these things called Brownian motion — just goes around. I played with it for a while, and I made it return to the origin. Then I was telling my assistant, ""I don't see anything. Can you paint it?"" So he painted it, which means he put inside everything. He said: ""Well, this thing came out ..."" And I said, ""Stop! Stop! Stop! I see; it's an island."" And amazing. So Brownian motion, which happens to have a roughness number of two, goes around. I measured it, 1.33. Again, again, again. Long measurements, big Brownian motions, 1.33. Mathematical problem: how to prove it? It took my friends 20 years. Three of them were having incomplete proofs. They got together, and together they had the proof. So they got the big [Fields] medal in mathematics, one of the three medals that people have received for proving things which I've seen without being able to prove them.Now everybody asks me at one point or another, ""How did it all start? What got you in that strange business?"" What got you to be, at the same time, a mechanical engineer, a geographer and a mathematician and so on, a physicist? Well actually I started, oddly enough, studying stock market prices. And so here I had this theory, and I wrote books about it — financial prices increments. To the left you see data over a long period. To the right, on top, you see a theory which is very, very fashionable. It was very easy, and you can write many books very fast about it. (Laughter) There are thousands of books on that. Now compare that with real price increments. Where are real price increments? Well, these other lines include some real price increments and some forgery which I did. So the idea there was that one must be able to — how do you say? — model price variation. And it went really well 50 years ago. For 50 years, people were sort of pooh-poohing me because they could do it much, much easier. But I tell you, at this point, people listened to me. (Laughter) These two curves are averages: Standard & Poor, the blue one; and the red one is Standard & Poor's from which the five biggest discontinuities are taken out. Now discontinuities are a nuisance, so in many studies of prices, one puts them aside. ""Well, acts of God. And you have the little nonsense which is left. Acts of God."" In this picture, five acts of God are as important as everything else. In other words, it is not acts of God that we should put aside. That is the meat, the problem. If you master these, you master price, and if you don't master these, you can master the little noise as well as you can, but it's not important. Well, here are the curves for it.Now, I get to the final thing, which is the set of which my name is attached. In a way, it's the story of my life. My adolescence was spent during the German occupation of France. Since I thought that I might vanish within a day or a week, I had very big dreams. And after the war, I saw an uncle again. My uncle was a very prominent mathematician, and he told me, ""Look, there's a problem which I could not solve 25 years ago, and which nobody can solve. This is a construction of a man named [Gaston] Julia and [Pierre] Fatou. If you could find something new, anything, you will get your career made."" Very simple. So I looked, and like the thousands of people that had tried before, I found nothing.But then the computer came, and I decided to apply the computer, not to new problems in mathematics — like this wiggle wiggle, that's a new problem — but to old problems. And I went from what's called real numbers, which are points on a line, to imaginary, complex numbers, which are points on a plane, which is what one should do there, and this shape came out. This shape is of an extraordinary complication. The equation is hidden there, z goes into z squared, plus c. It's so simple, so dry. It's so uninteresting. Now you turn the crank once, twice: twice, marvels come out. I mean this comes out. I don't want to explain these things. This comes out. This comes out. Shapes which are of such complication, such harmony and such beauty. This comes out repeatedly, again, again, again. And that was one of my major discoveries, to find that these islands were the same as the whole big thing, more or less. And then you get these extraordinary baroque decorations all over the place. All that from this little formula, which has whatever, five symbols in it. And then this one. The color was added for two reasons. First of all, because these shapes are so complicated that one couldn't make any sense of the numbers. And if you plot them, you must choose some system. And so my principle has been to always present the shapes with different colorings because some colorings emphasize that, and others it is that or that. It's so complicated.(Laughter)In 1990, I was in Cambridge, U.K. to receive a prize from the university, and three days later, a pilot was flying over the landscape and found this thing. So where did this come from? Obviously, from extraterrestrials. (Laughter) Well, so the newspaper in Cambridge published an article about that ""discovery"" and received the next day 5,000 letters from people saying, ""But that's simply a Mandelbrot set very big.""Well, let me finish. This shape here just came out of an exercise in pure mathematics. Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art_of_roughness
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"I'm Ellen and I'm totally obsessed with food. But I didn't start out obsessed with food. I started out obsessed with global security policy, because I lived in New York during 9/11 and it was a very relevant thing. I got from global security policy to food because I realized when I'm hungry, I'm really pissed off, and I'm assuming the rest of the world is too. Especially if you and your kids are hungry and your neighbor's kids are hungry and your whole neighborhood is hungry. And actually, it looks like the areas of the world that are hungry are also the areas of the world that are pretty insecure.So I took a job at the United Nations World Food Programme as a way to try to address these security issues through food security issues. There, I came across what I think is the most brilliant of their programs. It's called School Feeding and it's a really simple idea to get in the middle of the cycle of poverty and hunger that continues for a lot of people around the world, and stop it. A free school meal gets kids into school, which is education, the first step out of poverty, but it also gives them the micronutrients and the macronutrients they need to develop mentally and physically.While I was working at the UN, I met this girl. Her name is Lauren Bush. And she had this really awesome idea to sell the bag, called the ""Feed Bag"" — which is really beautifully ironic because you can strap on the Feed Bag. But each bag we'd sell would provide a year's worth of school meals for one kid. It's so simple, and we thought, OK, it costs between 20 and 50 bucks to provide school feeding for a year. We could sell these bags and raise a ton of money and awareness for the World Food Programme. But at the UN, sometimes things move slowly and they basically said no. And we thought, this is such a good idea, it's going to raise so much money. So we said screw it, we'll start our own company, which we did, three years ago. That was my first dream, to start this company called FEED, and here's a screenshot of our website. We did a bag for Haiti just a month after the earthquake to provide school meals for kids in Haiti. So FEED's doing great. We've so far provided 55 million meals to kids around the world by selling now 550,000 bags, a ton of bags, a lot of bags.All this time you're really — hunger is a hard thing to think about, because what we think about is eating. I think about eating a lot and I really love it. And the thing that's strange about international hunger and talking about international issues is that most people want to know: ""What are you doing for America's kids?"" There's definitely hunger in America: 49 million people and almost 16.7 million children. I mean that's pretty dramatic for our own country. Hunger definitely means something different in America than it does internationally, but it's incredibly important to address hunger in our own country. But the bigger problem that we all know about is obesity, and it's dramatic. The other thing that's dramatic is that both hunger and obesity have really risen in the last 30 years. Unfortunately, obesity's not only an American problem. It's actually been spreading all around the world and mainly through our kind of food systems that we're exporting. The numbers are pretty crazy. There's a billion people obese or overweight and a billion people hungry.So those seem like two bifurcated problems, but I kind of started to think about, you know, what is obesity and hunger? What are both those things about? Well, they're both about food. And when you think about food, the underpinning of food in both cases is potentially problematic agriculture. And agriculture is where food comes from. Agriculture in America's very interesting. It's very consolidated and the foods that are produced lead to the foods that we eat. The foods that are produced are, more or less, corn, soy and wheat. And that's three-quarters of the food that we're eating: processed foods and fast foods. Unfortunately, in our agricultural system, we haven't done a good job in the last three decades of exporting those technologies around the world. So African agriculture, which is the place of most hunger in the world, has actually fallen precipitously as hunger has risen. So somehow we're not making the connect between exporting a good agricultural system that will help feed people all around the world.Who is farming? That's what I was wondering. So I went and stood on a big grain bin in the Midwest, and that really didn't help me understand farming, but I think it's a really cool picture. And the reality is that between farmers in America — who actually, quite frankly, when I spend time in the Midwest, are pretty large in general. And their farms are also large. But farmers in the rest of the world are actually quite skinny, and that's because they're starving. Most hungry people in the world are subsistence farmers. And most of those people are women — which is a totally other topic that I won't get on right now, but I'd love to do the feminist thing at some point. I think it's really interesting to look at agriculture from these two sides. There's this large, consolidated farming that's led to what we eat in America, and it's really been since around 1980, after the oil crisis, when, you know — mass consolidation, mass exodus of small farmers in this country. And then in the same time period, we've kind of left Africa's farmers to do their own thing. Unfortunately, what is farmed ends up as what we eat. And in America, a lot of what we eat has led to obesity and has led to a real change in sort of what our diet is, in the last 30 years.It's crazy. A fifth of kids under two drinks soda. Hello! You don't put soda in bottles. But people do, because it's so cheap, and so our whole food system in the last 30 years has really shifted. I mean, you know, it's not just in our own country, but really we're exporting the system around the world, and when you look at the data of least developed countries — especially in cities, which are growing really rapidly — people are eating American processed foods. And in one generation, they're going from hunger and all of the detrimental health effects of hunger to obesity and things like diabetes and heart disease in one generation. So the problematic food system is affecting both hunger and obesity. Not to beat a dead horse, but this is a global food system where there's a billion people hungry and a billion people obese. I think that's the only way to look at it. And instead of taking these two things as bifurcated problems that are very separate, it's really important to look at them as one system. We get a lot of our food from all around the world and people from all around the world are importing our food system, so it's incredibly relevant to start a new way of looking at it.I've learned — and the technology people here, which I'm totally not one of — but apparently, it really takes 30 years for a lot of technologies to become really endemic to us, like the mouse and the Internet and Windows. You know, there's 30-year cycles. I think 2010 can be a really interesting year because it is the end of the 30-year cycle, and it's the birthday of the global food system. That's the first birthday I want to talk about. If we really think that this is something that's happened in the last 30 years, there's hope in that. It's the 30th anniversary of GMO crops and the Big Gulp, Chicken McNuggets, high-fructose corn syrup, the farm crisis in America and the change in how we've addressed agriculture internationally. So there's a lot of reasons to take this 30-year time period as sort of the creation of this new food system. I'm not the only one who's obsessed with this whole 30-year thing. The icons like Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver in his TED Prize wish both addressed this last three-decade time period as incredibly relevant for food system change. Well, I really care about 1980 because it's also the 30th anniversary of me this year. And so in my lifetime, a lot of what's happened in the world — and being a person obsessed with food — a lot of this has really changed.So my second dream is that I think we can look to the next 30 years as a time to change the food system again. And we know what's happened in the past, so if we start now and we look at technologies and improvements to the food system long-term, we might be able to recreate the food system so when I give my next talk and I'm 60 years old, I'll be able to say that it's been a success. So I'm announcing today the start of a new organization, or a new fund within the FEED Foundation, called the 30 Project. And the 30 Project is really focused on these long-term ideas for food system change. And I think by aligning international advocates that are addressing hunger and domestic advocates that are addressing obesity, we might actually look for long-term solutions that will make the food system better for everyone.We all tend to think that these systems are quite different and people argue whether or not organic can feed the world, but if we take a 30-year view, there's more hope in collaborative ideas. So I'm hoping that by connecting really disparate organizations like the ONE campaign and Slow Food, which don't seem right now to have much in common, we can talk about holistic, long-term, systemic solutions that will improve food for everyone. Some ideas I've had is like, look, the reality is — kids in the South Bronx need apples and carrots and so do kids in Botswana. And how are we going to get those kids those nutritious foods?Another thing that's become incredibly global is production of meat and fish. Understanding how to produce protein in a way that's healthy for the environment and healthy for people will be incredibly important to address things like climate change and how we use petrochemical fertilizers. And, you know, these are really relevant topics that are long-term and important for both people in Africa who are small farmers and people in America who are farmers and eaters.And I also think that thinking about processed foods in a new way, where we actually price the negative externalities like petrochemicals and like fertilizer runoff into the price of a bag of chips — Well, if that bag of chips then becomes inherently more expensive than an apple, then maybe it's time for a different sense of personal responsibility in food choice because the choices are actually choices instead of three-quarters of the products being made just from corn, soy and wheat.The 30Project.org is launched and I've gathered a coalition of a few organizations to start. And it'll be growing over the next few months. But I really hope that you will all think of ways that you can look long-term at things like the food system and make change.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_gustafson_obesity_hunger_1_global_food_issue
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"Trees epitomize stasis. Trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations, but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs, trees become very dynamic entities, moving and growing. And I decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists. I simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig. I waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas, and that produced art. The piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a Douglas fir, and what I learned was that different species have different signatures, like a Picasso versus a Monet.But I was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it, so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree — which produced this painting — moved in a single year, I simply measured and summed each of those lines. I multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year. And so I was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year. You might have a guess. The answer is actually 186,540 miles, or seven times around the globe. And so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs, we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities, but rather extremely dynamic.And I began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees, to consider other entities that are also static and stuck, but which cry for change and dynamicism, and one of those entities is our prisons. Prisons, of course, are where people who break our laws are stuck, confined behind bars. And our prison system itself is stuck. The United States has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women. That number is rising. Of the 100 incarcerated people that are released, 60 will return to prison. Funds for education, for training and for rehabilitation are declining, so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues. I decided to ask whether the lesson I had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons, and I think the answer is yes.In the year 2007, I started a partnership with the Washington State Department of Corrections. Working with four prisons, we began bringing science and scientists, sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons. We give science lectures, and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting. That, I think, is movement. We partnered with the Nature Conservancy for inmates at Stafford Creek Correctional Center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in Washington state. That, I think, is movement. We worked with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife to grow endangered frogs — the Oregon spotted frog — for later release into protected wetlands. That, I think, is movement.And just recently, we've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call Supermax facilities. They've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners. They're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day. When they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals, they're placed in immobile booths like this. For one hour a day they're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards. Although we can't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments, we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards, putting them on the walls, so at least they get contact with visual images of nature. This is Mr. Lopez, who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months, and he's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene, more calm, less apt to violence.And so what we see, I think, is that small, collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope. We know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks. But if trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nalini_nadkarni_life_science_in_prison
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"I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people, and that was in 1960. I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future, but I will not use digital technology, as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. Instead, I have progressed, and I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box.This box contains one billion people. And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion people. In the developing world, she said, they had two billion people. And they lived away then. There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. In the industrialized world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. And their aspiration was to buy a car. And in 1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. This was the economic level at which Sweden was. But in contrast to this, in the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day. They were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up. And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about ""the West"" and ""the Developing World."" But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it.And that's what I'm going to show you, because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. Just look how many. The world population has doubled since I went to school. And of course, there's been economic growth in the West. A lot of companies have happened to grow the economy, so the Western population moved over to here. And now their aspiration is not only to have a car. Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly. So this is where they are today. And the most successful of the developing countries, they have moved on, you know, and they have become emerging economies, we call them. They are now buying cars. And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company, and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world. (Laughter)So there they are. And the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes, they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago. The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions, the three billions here, which are also becoming emerging economies, because they are quite healthy, relatively well-educated, and they already also have two to three children per woman, as those [richer also] have. And their aspiration now is, of course, to buy a bicycle, and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also. But this is the world we have today, no longer any gap. But the distance from the poorest here, the very poorest, to the very richest over here is wider than ever. But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying — there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle. This is the new world we have today in 2010.And what will happen in the future? Well, I'm going to project into 2050. I was in Shanghai recently, and I listened to what's happening in China, and it's pretty sure that they will catch up, just as Japan did. All the projections [say that] this one [billion] will [only] grow with one to two or three percent. [But this second] grows with seven, eight percent, and then they will end up here. They will start flying. And these lower or middle income countries, the emerging income countries, they will also forge forwards economically. And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology — so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap — then they will move all the way up here. And they will start to buy electric cars. This is what we will find there.So what about the poorest two billion? What about the poorest two billion here? Will they move on? Well, here population [growth] comes in because there [among emerging economies] we already have two to three children per woman, family planning is widely used, and population growth is coming to an end. Here [among the poorest], population is growing. So these [poorest] two billion will, in the next decades, increase to three billion, and they will thereafter increase to four billion. There is nothing — but a nuclear war of a kind we've never seen — that can stop this [growth] from happening. Because we already have this [growth] in process. But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [to live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050. We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth.And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. Here I have on the screen my country bubbles. Every bubble is a country. The size is population. The colors show the continent. The yellow on there is the Americas; dark blue is Africa; brown is Europe; green is the Middle East and this light blue is South Asia. That's India and this is China. Size is population. Here I have children per woman: two children, four children, six children, eight children — big families, small families. The year is 1960. And down here, child survival, the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school: 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90, and almost 100 percent, as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries. But look, this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960: one billion Western world here — high child-survival, small families — and all the rest, the rainbow of developing countries, with very large families and poor child survival.What has happened? I start the world. Here we go. Can you see, as the years pass by, child survival is increasing? They get soap, hygiene, education, vaccination, penicillin and then family planning. Family size is decreasing. [When] they get up to 90-percent child survival, then families decrease, and most of the Arab countries in the Middle East is falling down there [to small families]. Look, Bangladesh catching up with India. The whole emerging world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size, but we still have the poorest billion. Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? They are still up here. And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to the next generation. And the population will double in one generation.So the only way of really getting world population [growth] to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent. That's why investments by Gates Foundation, UNICEF and aid organizations, together with national government in the poorest countries, are so good; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world. We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things. Child survival is the new green. It's only by child survival that we will stop population growth. And will it happen? Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. I'm a very serious ""possibilist."" It's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work analytically with the world. It can be done. We can have a much more just world. With green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty, and global governance, the world can become like this.And look at the position of the old West. Remember when this blue box was all alone, leading the world, living its own life. This will not happen [again]. The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world — nothing more, nothing less. But it's a very important role. Do it well and get used to it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth
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"This is the ocean as I used to know it. And I find that since I've been in the Gulf a couple of times, I really kind of am traumatized because whenever I look at the ocean now, no matter where I am, even where I know that none of the oil has gone, I sort of see slicks, and I'm finding that I'm very much haunted by it. But what I want to talk to you about today is a lot of things that try to put all of this in context, not just about the oil eruption, but what it means and why it has happened.First, just a little bit about me. I'm basically just a guy that likes to go fishing ever since I was a little kid, and because I did, I wound up studying sea birds to try to stay in the coastal habitats that I so loved. And now I mainly write books about how the ocean is changing, and the ocean is certainly changing very rapidly. Now we saw this graphic earlier on, that we really live on a hard marble that has just a slight bit of wetness to it. It's like you dipped a marble in water. And the same thing with the atmosphere: If you took all the atmosphere and rolled it up in a ball, you would get that little sphere of gas on the right. So we live on the most fragile little soap bubble you can imagine, a very sacred soap bubble, but one that is very, very easy to affect.And all the burning of oil and coal and gas, all the fossil fuels, have changed the atmosphere greatly. Carbon dioxide level has gone up and up and up. We're warming the climate. So the blowout in the Gulf is just a little piece of a much larger problem that we have with the energy that we use to run civilization. Beyond warming, we have the problem of the oceans getting more acidified — and already measurably so, and already affecting animals. Now in the laboratory, if you take a clam and you put it in the pH that is not 8.1, which is the normal pH of seawater, but 7.5, it dissolves in about three days. If you take a sea urchin larva from 8.1, put it in a pH of 7.7 — not a huge change — it becomes deformed and dies. Already, commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places. Coral reefs are growing slower in some places because of this problem. So this really matters.Now, let's take a little tour around the Gulf a little bit. One of the things that really impresses me about the people in the Gulf: They are really, really aquatic people. And they can handle water. They can handle a hurricane that comes and goes. When the water goes down, they know what to do. But when it's something other than water, and their water habitat changes, they don't have many options. In fact, those entire communities really don't have many options. They don't have another thing they can do. They can't go and work in the local hotel business because there isn't one in their community.If you go to the Gulf and you look around, you do see a lot of oil. You see a lot of oil on the ocean. You see a lot of oil on the shoreline. If you go to the site of the blowout, it looks pretty unbelievable. It looks like you just emptied the oil pan in your car, and you just dumped it in the ocean. And one of the really most incredible things, I think, is that there's nobody out there trying to collect it at the site where it is densest. Parts of the ocean there look just absolutely apocalyptic. You go in along the shore, you can find it everywhere. It's really messy. If you go to the places where it's just arriving, like the eastern part of the Gulf, in Alabama, there's still people using the beach while there are people cleaning up the beach. And they have a very strange way of cleaning up the beach. They're not allowed to put more than 10 pounds of sand in a 50-gallon plastic bag. They have thousands and thousands of plastic bags. I don't know what they'll do with all that stuff. Meanwhile, there are still people trying to use the beach. They don't see the sign that says: ""Stay out of the water."" Their kids are in the water; they're getting tar all over their clothes and their sandals— It's a mess. If you go to where the oil has been for a while, it's an even bigger mess. And there's basically nobody there anymore, a few people trying to keep using it.You see people who are really shell-shocked. They are very hardworking people. All they know about life is they get up in the morning, and if their engine starts, they go to work. They always felt that they could rely on the assurances that nature brought them through the ecosystem of the Gulf. They're finding that their world is really collapsing. And so you can see, literally, signs of their shock ... signs of their outrage ... signs of their anger ... and signs of their grief. These are the things that you can see.There's a lot you can't see, also, underwater. What's going on underwater? Well, some people say there are oil plumes. Some people say there are not oil plumes. And Congressman Markey asks, you know, ""Is it going to take a submarine ride to see if there are really oil plumes?"" But I couldn't take a submarine ride — especially between the time I knew I was coming here and today — so I had to do a little experiment myself to see if there was oil in the Gulf of Mexico. So this is the Gulf of Mexico ... sparkling place full of fish. And I created a little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. And I learned, in fact, I confirmed the hypothesis that oil and water don't mix ... until you add a dispersant ... and then ... they start mixing. And you add a little energy from the wind and the waves, and you get a big mess, a big mess that you can't possibly clean, you can't touch, you can't extract and, I think most importantly — this is what I think — you can't see it. I think it's being hidden on purpose. Now this is such a catastrophe and such a mess that lots of stuff is leaking out on the edges of the information stream. But as many people have said, there's a large attempt to suppress what's going on. Personally, I think that the dispersants are a major strategy to hide the body, because we put the murderer in charge of the crime scene. But you can see it. You can see where the oil is concentrated at the surface, and then it is attacked, because they don't want the evidence, in my opinion.OK. We heard that bacteria eat oil? So do sea turtles. When it breaks up, it has a long way to go before it gets down to bacteria. Turtles eat it. It gets in the gills of fish. These guys have to swim around through it. I heard the most incredible story today when I was on the train coming here. A writer named Ted Williams called me, and he was asking me a couple of questions about what I saw, because he's writing an article for Audubon magazine. He said that he had been in the Gulf a little while ago; like about a week ago, and a guy who had been a recreational fishing guide took him out to show him what's going on. That guide's entire calendar year is canceled bookings. He has no bookings left. Everybody wanted their deposit back, everybody is fleeing. That's the story of thousands of people. But he told Ted that on the last day he went out, a bottlenose dolphin suddenly appeared next to the boat, and it was splattering oil out its blowhole. And he moved away because it was his last fishing trip, and he knew that the dolphins scare fish. So he moved away from it, turned around a few minutes later, it was right next to the side of the boat again. He said that in 30 years of fishing he had never seen a dolphin do that. And he felt that —(Sigh)he felt that it was coming to ask for help. Sorry.Now, in the Exxon Valdez spill, about 30 percent of the killer whales died in the first few months. Their numbers have never recovered. So the recovery rate of all this stuff is going to be variable. It's going to take longer for some things. And some things, I think, will probably come back a little faster. The other thing about the Gulf that is important is that there are a lot of animals that concentrate in the Gulf at certain parts of the year. So the Gulf is a really important piece of water — more important than a similar volume of water in the open Atlantic Ocean. These tuna swim the entire ocean. They get in the Gulf Stream, they go all the way to Europe. When it comes time to spawn, they come inside, and these two tuna that were tagged, you can see them on the spawning grounds very much right in the area of the slick. They're probably having, at the very least, a catastrophic spawning season this year. I'm hoping that maybe the adults are avoiding that dirty water. They don't usually like to go into water that is very cloudy anyway. But these are really high-performance athletic animals. I don't know what this kind of stuff will do in their gills. I don't know if it'll affect the adults. If it's not, it's certainly affecting their eggs and larvae, I would certainly think. But if you look at that graph that goes down and down and down, that's what we've done to this species through overfishing over many decades.So while the oil spill, the leak, the eruption, is a catastrophe, I think it's important to keep in mind that we've done a lot to affect what's in the ocean, for a very long time. It's not like we're starting with something that's been OK. We're starting with something that's had a lot of stresses and a lot of problems to begin with. If you look around at the birds, there are a lot of birds in the Gulf that concentrate in the Gulf at certain times of the year, but then leave. And they populate much larger areas. For instance, most of the birds in this picture are migratory birds. They were all on the Gulf in May, while oil was starting to come ashore in certain places. Down on the lower left there are ruddy turnstones and sanderlings. They breed in the High Arctic, and they winter down in southern South America. But they concentrate in the Gulf and then fan out all across the Arctic. I saw birds that breed in Greenland, in the Gulf. So this is a hemispheric issue. The economic effects go at least nationally in many ways. The biological effects are certainly hemispheric.I think that this is one of the most absolutely mind-boggling examples of total unpreparedness that I can even think of. Even when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, at least they shot back. And we just seem to be unable to figure out what to do. There was nothing ready, and, you know, as we can see by what they're doing. Mainly what they're doing is booms and dispersants. The booms are absolutely not made for open water. They don't even attempt to corral the oil where it is most concentrated. They get near shore — Look at these two boats. That one on the right is called Fishing Fool. And I think, you know, that's a great name for boats that think that they're going to do anything to make a dent in this, by dragging a boom between them when there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles in the Gulf right now with oil at the surface.The dispersants make the oil go right under the booms. The booms are only about 13 inches in diameter. So it's just absolutely crazy. Here are shrimp boats employed. There are hundreds of shrimp boats employed to drag booms instead of nets. Here they are working. You can see easily that all the oily water just goes over the back of the boom. All they're doing is stirring it. It's just ridiculous. Also, for all the shoreline that has booms — hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline — all of the shoreline that has booms, there's adjacent shoreline that doesn't have any booms. There is ample opportunity for oil and dirty water to get in behind them.And that lower photo, that's a bird colony that has been boomed. Everybody's trying to protect the bird colonies there. Well, as an ornithologist, I can tell you that birds fly, and that —(Laughter)and that booming a bird colony doesn't do it; it doesn't do it. These birds make a living by diving into the water. In fact ... really what I think they should do, if anything — they're trying so hard to protect those nests — actually, if they destroyed every single nest, some of the birds would leave, and that would be better for them this year. As far as cleaning them ... I don't mean to cast any aspersion on people cleaning birds. It's really, really important that we express our compassion. I think that's the most important thing that people have, is compassion. It's really important to get those images and to show it. But really, where are those birds going to get released to? It's like taking somebody out of a burning building, treating them for smoke inhalation and sending them back into the building, because the oil is still gushing.I refuse to acknowledge this as anything like an accident. I think that this is the result of gross negligence.(Applause)Not just BP. BP operated very sloppily and very recklessly because they could. And they were allowed to do so because of the absolute failure of oversight of the government that is supposed to be our government, protecting us. It turns out that — you see this sign on every commercial vessel in the United States — you know, if you spilled a couple of gallons of oil, you would be in big trouble. And you have to really wonder who are the laws made for, and who has gotten above the laws. And there are things that we can do in the future. We could have the kinds of equipment that we would really need. It would not take an awful lot to anticipate that after making 30,000 holes in the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico looking for oil, oil might start coming out of one of them. And you'd have some idea of what to do. That's certainly one of the things we need to do.But I think we have to understand where this leak really started from. It really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it's our government, meant to protect the larger public interest. So I think that the oil blowout, the bank bailout, the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause. We still seem to understand that at least, we need the police to protect us from a few bad people. And even though the police can be a little annoying at times — giving us tickets and stuff like that — nobody says that we should just get rid of them. But in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years, there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from, buying the government out from under us.(Applause)Now this has been a problem for a very, very long time. You can see that corporations were illegal at the founding of America, and even Thomas Jefferson complained that they were already bidding defiance to the laws of our country. OK, people who say they're conservative, if they really wanted to be really conservative and patriotic, they would tell these corporations to go to hell. That's what it would really mean to be conservative. So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it's our government safeguarding our interests, and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost. I think there are signs of hope.We seem to be waking up a little bit. The Glass-Steagall Act — which was really to protect us from the kind of thing that caused the recession to happen, and the bank meltdown and all that stuff that required the bailouts — that was put in effect in 1933, was systematically destroyed. Now there's a mood to put some of that stuff back in place, but the lobbyists are already there trying to weaken the regulations after the legislation has just passed. So it's a continued fight. It's a historic moment right now. We're either going to have an absolutely unmitigated catastrophe of this oil leak in the Gulf, or we will make the moment we need out of this, as many people have noted today. There's certainly a common theme about needing to make the moment out of this.We've been through this before with other ways of offshore drilling. The first offshore wells were called whales. The first offshore drills were called harpoons. We emptied the ocean of the whales at that time. Now are we stuck with this? Ever since we lived in caves, every time we wanted any energy, we lit something on fire, and that is still what we're doing. We're still lighting something on fire every time we want energy.And people say we can't have clean energy because it's too expensive. Who says it's too expensive? People who sell us fossil fuels. We've been here before with energy, and people saying the economy cannot withstand a switch, because the cheapest energy was slavery. Energy is always a moral issue. It's an issue that is moral right now. It's a matter of right and wrong.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_safina_the_oil_spill_s_unseen_culprits_victims
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"When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled.How did we achieve that, whether you think it's a good thing or not? How did we achieve that? How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous? The size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population, and the level of the graph represents GDP per capita. I think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.I want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this. These are both real objects. One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by Homo erectus. The other is obviously a computer mouse. They're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree. I've tried to work out which is bigger, and it's almost impossible. And that's because they're both designed to fit the human hand. They're both technologies. In the end, their similarity is not that interesting. It just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand. The differences are what interest me, because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years — from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago. Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations. Of course there were a few changes, but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days. There was no progress, no innovation. It's an extraordinary phenomenon, but it's true. Whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years. And there's another difference too, which is the object on the left is made from one substance. The object on the right is made from a confection of different substances, from silicon and metal and plastic and so on. And more than that, it's a confection of different ideas, the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser, the idea of transistors. They've all been combined together in this technology.And it's this combination, this cumulative technology, that intrigues me, because I think it's the secret to understanding what's happening in the world. My body's an accumulation of ideas too: the idea of skin cells, the idea of brain cells, the idea of liver cells. They've come together. How does evolution do cumulative, combinatorial things? Well, it uses sexual reproduction. In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one, then one has to be better than the other. One goes extinct for the other to survive. But if you have a sexual species, then it's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages. So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species. It's not confined to its own lineage.What's the process that's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution? And I think the answer is exchange, the habit of exchanging one thing for another. It's a unique human feature. No other animal does it. You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange — and indeed there's reciprocity in other animals — But the exchange of one object for another never happens. As Adam Smith said, ""No man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog."" (Laughter) You can have culture without exchange. You can have, as it were, asexual culture. Chimpanzees, killer whales, these kinds of creatures, they have culture. They teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring. In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks. But the difference is that these cultures never expand, never grow, never accumulate, never become combinatorial, and the reason is because there is no sex, as it were, there is no exchange of ideas. Chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops. There's no exchange of ideas between them.And why does exchange raise living standards? Well, the answer came from David Ricardo in 1817. And here is a Stone Age version of his story, although he told it in terms of trade between countries. Adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe. Oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe. So Oz is better at both spears and axes than Adam. He doesn't need Adam. He can make his own spears and axes. Well no, because if you think about it, if Oz makes two spears and Adam make two axes, and then they trade, then they will each have saved an hour of work. And the more they do this, the more true it's going to be, because the more they do this, the better Adam is going to get at making axes and the better Oz is going to get at making spears. So the gains from trade are only going to grow. And this is one of the beauties of exchange, is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization, which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on. Adam and Oz both saved an hour of time. That is prosperity, the saving of time in satisfying your needs.Ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by. If you had to start from scratch, let's say you go out into the countryside. You find a sheep. You kill it. You get the fat out of it. You render it down. You make a candle, etc. etc. How long is it going to take you? Quite a long time. How long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you're on the average wage in Britain today? And the answer is about half a second. Back in 1950, you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light. And that's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you've gained since 1950, as it were, because that's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else, or you can acquire another good or service. And back in 1880, it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light on the average wage. Back in 1800, you'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour. In other words, the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800.Go back to this image of the axe and the mouse, and ask yourself: ""Who made them and for who?"" The stone axe was made by someone for himself. It was self-sufficiency. We call that poverty these days. But the object on the right was made for me by other people. How many other people? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? You know, I think it's probably millions. Because you've got to include the man who grew the coffee, which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig, who was drilling for oil, which was going to be made into the plastic, etc. They were all working for me, to make a mouse for me. And that's the way society works. That's what we've achieved as a species.In the old days, if you were rich, you literally had people working for you. That's how you got to be rich; you employed them. Louis XIV had a lot of people working for him. They made his silly outfits, like this, (Laughter) and they did his silly hairstyles, or whatever. He had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. But a modern tourist going around the palace of Versailles and looking at Louis XIV's pictures, he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too. They're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over Paris, and they're all ready to serve you at an hour's notice with an excellent meal that's probably got higher quality than Louis XIV even had. And that's what we've done, because we're all working for each other. We're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other's living standards.Now, you do get other animals working for each other too. Ants are a classic example; workers work for queens and queens work for workers. But there's a big difference, which is that it only happens within the colony. There's no working for each other across the colonies. And the reason for that is because there's a reproductive division of labor. That is to say, they specialize with respect to reproduction. The queen does it all. In our species, we don't like doing that. It's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves, is reproduction. (Laughter) Even in England, we don't leave reproduction to the Queen.(Applause)So when did this habit start? And how long has it been going on? And what does it mean? Well, I think, probably, the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor. But I've got no evidence for that. It just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male. In all hunter-gatherer societies today, there's a foraging division of labor between, on the whole, hunting males and gathering females. It isn't always quite that simple, but there's a distinction between specialized roles for males and females. And the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides. The woman knows that, in the Hadzas' case here — digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat — she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat. And she doesn't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog. And the man knows that he doesn't have to do any digging to get roots. All he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it's big enough to share some. And so both sides raise each other's standards of living through the sexual division of labor.When did this happen? We don't know, but it's possible that Neanderthals didn't do this. They were a highly cooperative species. They were a highly intelligent species. Their brains on average, by the end, were bigger than yours and mine in this room today. They were imaginative. They buried their dead. They had language, probably, because we know they had the FOXP2 gene of the same kind as us, which was discovered here in Oxford. And so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills. They were brilliant people. I'm not dissing the Neanderthals. But there's no evidence of a sexual division of labor. There's no evidence of gathering behavior by females. It looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men. And the other thing there's no evidence for is exchange between groups, because the objects that you find in Neanderthal remains, the tools they made, are always made from local materials. For example, in the Caucasus there's a site where you find local Neanderthal tools. They're always made from local chert. In the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date, 30,000 years ago, and some of those are from local chert, but more — but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away. And when human beings began moving objects around like this, it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups.Trade is 10 times as old as farming. People forget that. People think of trade as a modern thing. Exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years. And the earliest evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in Africa, when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in Ethiopia. You also see seashells — as discovered by a team here in Oxford — moving 125 miles inland from the Mediterranean in Algeria. And that's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups. And that will have led to specialization.How do you know that long-distance movement means trade rather than migration? Well, you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals, who quarried for stone axes at a place called Mount Isa, which was a quarry owned by the Kalkadoon tribe. They traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs, and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of Australia. So long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade, not migration.What happens when you cut people off from exchange, from the ability to exchange and specialize? And the answer is that not only do you slow down technological progress, you can actually throw it into reverse. An example is Tasmania. When the sea level rose and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago, the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland, they actually experienced regress. They gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had. It's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island. How many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years? It didn't happen in Tierra del Fuego — similar island, similar people. The reason: because Tierra del Fuego is separated from South America by a much narrower straight, and there was trading contact across that straight throughout 10,000 years. The Tasmanians were isolated.Go back to this image again and ask yourself, not only who made it and for who, but who knew how to make it. In the case of the stone axe, the man who made it knew how to make it. But who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody, literally nobody. There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse. I mean this quite seriously. The president of the computer mouse company doesn't know. He just knows how to run a company. The person on the assembly line doesn't know because he doesn't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic, and so on. We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole.I am of course quoting from a famous essay by Leonard Read, the economist in the 1950s, called ""I, Pencil"" in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made, and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil, because the people who assemble it don't know how to mine graphite, and they don't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing. And what we've done in human society, through exchange and specialization, is we've created the ability to do things that we don't even understand. It's not the same with language. With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other. But with technology, we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities.We've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. And by the way, that's one of the reasons that I'm not interested in the debate about I.Q., about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It's completely irrelevant. What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. So we've created something called the collective brain. We're just the nodes in the network. We're the neurons in this brain. It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. However, bad things happen. And in the future, as we go forward, we will, of course, experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure that, because of the connections people are making, and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I'm also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance. Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex
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"I'm an American, which means, generally, I ignore football unless it involves guys my size or Bruno's size running into each other at extremely high speeds. That said, it's been really hard to ignore football for the last couple of weeks. I go onto Twitter, there are all these strange words that I've never heard before: FIFA, vuvuzela, weird jokes about octopi. But the one that's really been sort of stressing me out, that I haven't been able to figure out, is this phrase ""Cala a boca, Galvao."" If you've gone onto Twitter in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen this. It's been a major trending topic.Being a monolingual American, I obviously don't know what the phrase means. So I went onto Twitter, and I asked some people if they could explain to me ""Cala a boca, Galvao."" And fortunately, my Brazilian friends were more than ready to help. They explained that the Galvao bird is a rare and endangered parrot that's in terrible, terrible danger. In fact, I'll let them tell you a bit more about it. Narrator: A word about Galvao, a very rare kind of bird native to Brazil. Every year, more than 300,000 Galvao birds are killed during Carnival parades. Ethan Zuckerman: Obviously, this is a tragic situation, and it actually gets worse. It turns out that, not only is the Galvao parrot very attractive, useful for headdresses, it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties, which means that there's a terrible problem with Galvao abuse. Some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting Galvao. And it's terribly endangered. The good news about this is that the global community — again, my Brazilian friends tell me — is pitching in to help out. It turns out that Lady Gaga has released a new single — actually five or six new singles, as near as I can tell — titled ""Cala a boca, Galvao."" And my Brazilian friends tell me that if I just tweet the phrase ""Cala a boca, Galvao,"" 10 cents will be given to a global campaign to save this rare and beautiful bird.Now, most of you have figured out that this was a prank, and actually a very, very good one. ""Cala a boca, Galvao"" actually means something very different. In Portugese, it means ""Shut your mouth, Galvao."" And it specifically refers to this guy, Galvao Bueno, who's the lead soccer commentator for Rede Globo. And what I understand from my Brazilian friends is that this guy is just a cliche machine. He can ruin the most interesting match by just spouting cliche again and again and again. So Brazilians went to that first match against North Korea, put up this banner, started a Twitter campaign and tried to convince the rest of us to tweet the phrase: ""Cala a boca, Galvao."" And in fact, were so successful at this that it topped Twitter for two weeks.Now there's a couple — there's a couple of lessons that you can take from this. And the first lesson, which I think is a worthwhile one, is that you cannot go wrong asking people to be active online, so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase. So as long as activism is that simple, it's pretty easy to get away with. The other thing you can take from this, by the way, is that there are a lot of Brazilians on Twitter. There's more than five million of them. As far as national representation, 11 percent of Brazilian internet users are on Twitter. That's a much higher number than in the U.S. or U.K. Next to Japan, it's the second most represented by population.Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with. And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy, you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys. And you don't necessarily have the sense that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space. It's also extremely surprising to many Americans, a heavily African-American space. Twitter recently did some research. They looked at their local population. They believe that 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population. And again, that was very shocking to many Twitter users, but it shouldn't be. And the reason it shouldn't be is that on any day you can go into Trending Topics. And you tend to find topics that are almost entirely African-American conversations.This was a visualization done by Fernando Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, two amazing visualization designers, who looked at a weekend's worth of Twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations — and in ways that you wouldn't expect. It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation. And what's crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter, it's literally a quick click away. You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it. But generally speaking, most of us don't. We end up within these filter bubbles, as my friend Eli Pariser calls them, where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see that wider picture.Now for me, I'm surprised by this, because this wasn't how the internet was supposed to be. If you go back into the early days of the internet, when cyber-utopians like Nick Negroponte were writing big books like ""Being Digital,"" the prediction was that the internet was going to be an incredibly powerful force to smooth out cultural differences, to put us all on a common field of one fashion or another. Negroponte started his book with a story about how hard it is to build connections in the world of atoms. He's at a technology conference in Florida. And he's looking at something really, truly absurd, which is bottles of Evian water on the table. And Negroponte says this is crazy. This is the old economy. It's the economy of moving these heavy, slow atoms over long distances that's very difficult to do. We're heading to the future of bits, where everything is speedy, it's weightless. It can be anywhere in the world at any time. And it's going to change the world as we know it.Now, Negroponte has been right about a lot of things. He's totally wrong about this one. It turns out that in many cases atoms are much more mobile than bits. If I walk into a store in the United States, it's very, very easy for me to buy water that's bottled in Fiji, shipped at great expense to the United States. It's actually surprisingly hard for me to see a Fijian feature film. It's really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music. It's extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news, which is strange, because actually there's an enormous amount going on in Fiji. There's a coup government. There's a military government. There's crackdowns on the press. It's actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment.Here's what I think is going on. I think that we tend to look a lot at the infrastructure of globalization. We look at the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world. And that's a framework that includes things like airline routes. It includes things like the Internet cables. We look at a map like this one, and it looks like the entire world is flat because everything is a hop or two away. You can get on a flight in London, you can end up in Bangalore later today. Two hops, you're in Suva, the capitol of Fiji. It's all right there.When you start looking at what actually flows on top of these networks, you get a very different picture. You start looking at how the global plane flights move, and you suddenly discover that the world isn't even close to flat. It's extremely lumpy. There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected. There's basically a giant pathway in the sky between London and New York. but look at this map, and you can watch this for, you know, two or three minutes. You won't see very many planes go from South America to Africa. And you'll discover that there are parts of the globe that are systematically cut off. When we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible, and we look at what actually happens, we start realizing that the world doesn't work quite the same way that we think it does.So here's the problem that I've been interested in in the last decade or so. The world is, in fact, getting more global. It's getting more connected. More of problems are global in scale. More of our economics is global in scale. And our media is less global by the day. If you watched a television broadcast in the United States in the 1970s, 35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news on a nightly new broadcast. That's down to about 12 to 15 percent. And this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world. Here's a slide that Alisa Miller showed at a previous TED Talk. Alisa's the president of Public Radio International. And she made a cartogram, which is basically a distorted map based on what American television news casts looked at for a month. And you see that when you distort a map based on attention, the world within American television news is basically reduced to this giant bloated U.S. and a couple of other countries which we've invaded. And that's basically what our media is about. And before you conclude that this is just a function of American TV news — which is dreadful, and I agree that it's dreadful — I've been mapping elite media like the New York Times, and I get the same thing. When you look at the New York Times, you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we've invaded.It turns out that new media isn't necessarily helping us all that much. Here's a map made by Mark Graham who's down the street at the Oxford Internet Institute. A this is a map of articles in Wikipedia that have been geo-coded. And you'll notice that there's a very heavy bias towards North America and Western Europe. Even within Wikipedias, where we're creating their own content online, there's a heavy bias towards the place where a lot of the Wikipedia authors are based, rather than to the rest of the world. In the U.K., you can get up, you can pick up your computer when you get out of this session, you could read a newspaper from India or from Australia, from Canada, God forbid from the U.S. You probably won't. If you look at online media consumption — in this case, in the top 10 users of the internet — more than 95 percent of the news readership is on domestic news sites. It's one of these rare cases where the U.S. is actually slightly better than [the U.K.], because we actually like reading your media, rather than vice versa.So all of this starts leading me to think that we're in a state that I refer to as imaginary cosmopolitanism. We look at the internet. We think we're getting this wide view of the globe. We occasionally stumble onto a page in Chinese, and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world. And we forget that most of the time we're checking Boston Red Sox scores. So this is a real problem — not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year — but it's a real problem because, as we're discussing here at TED, the real problems in the world the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope, they require global conversations to get to global solutions. This is a problem we have to solve.So here's the good news. For six years, I've been hanging out with these guys. This is a group called Global Voices. This is a team of bloggers from around the world. Our mission was to fix the world's media. We started in 2004. You might have noticed, we haven't done all that well so far. Nor do I think we are by ourselves, actually going to solve the problem. But the more that I think about it, the more that I think that a few things that we have learned along the way are interesting lessons for how we would rewire if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world. The first thing you have to consider is that there are parts of the world that are dark spots in terms of attention. In this case — the map of the world at night by NASA — they're dark literally because of lack of electricity. And I used to think that a dark spot on this map basically meant you're not going to get media from there because there are more basic needs.What I'm starting to realize is that you can get media, it's just an enormous amount of work, and you need an enormous amount of encouragement. One of those dark spots is Madagascar, a country which is generally better known for the Dreamworks film than it is actually known for the lovely people who live there. And so the people who founded Foko Club in Madagascar weren't actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country. They were doing something much simpler. It was a club to learn English and to learn computers and the internet. but what happened was that Madagascar went through a violent coup. Most independent media was shut down. And the high school students who were learning to blog through Foko Club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations, the violence, everything that was going on within this country. So a very, very small program designed to get people in front of computers, publishing their own thoughts, publishing independent media, ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country.Now the trick with this is that I'm guessing most people here don't speak Malagasy. I'm also guessing that most of you don't even speak Chinese — which is sort of sad if you think about it, as it's now the most represented language on the internet. Fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this. If you're using Google Chrome and you go to a Chinese language site, you notice this really cute box at the top, which automatically detects that the page is in Chinese and very quickly at a mouse click will give you a translation of the page. Unfortunately, it's a machine translation of the page. And while Google is very, very good with some languages, it's actually pretty dreadful with Chinese. And the results can be pretty funny. What you really want — what I really want, is eventually the ability to push a button and have this queued so a human being can translate this.And if you think this is absurd, it's not. There's a group right now in China called Yeeyan. And Yeeyan is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day. They look for the most interesting content in the English language. They translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers, major websites. They put it online for free. It's the project of a guy named Zhang Lei, who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots and who couldn't believe how biased American media coverage was. And he said, ""If there's one thing I can do, I can start translating, so that people between these countries start understanding each other a little bit better."" And my question to you is: if Yeeyan can line up 150,000 people to translate the English internet into Chinese, where's the English language Yeeyan? Who's going after Chinese, which now has 400 million internet users out there? My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say.So even if we can find a way to translate from Chinese, there's no guarantee that we're going to find it. When we look for information online, we basically have two strategies. We use a lot of search. And search is terrific if you know what you're looking for. But if what you're looking for is serendipity, if you want to stumble onto something that you didn't know you needed, our main philosophy is to look to our social networks, to look for our friends. What are they looking at? Maybe we should be looking at it. The problem with this is that essentially what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock. You end up flocking with a lot of people who are probably similar to you, who have similar interests. And it's very, very hard to get information from the other flocks, from the other parts of the world where people getting together and talking about their own interests. To do this, at a certain point, you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock. You need a guide.So this is Amira Al Hussaini. She is the Middle East editor for Global Voices. She has one of the hardest jobs in the world. Not only does she have to keep our Israeli and Palestinian contributors from killing each other, she has to figure out what is going to interest you about the Middle East. And in that sense of trying to get you out of your normal orbit, and to try to get you to pay attention to a story about someone who's given up smoking for the month of Ramadan, she has to know something about a global audience. She has to know something about what stories are available. Basically, she's a deejay. She's a skilled human curator who knows what material is available to her, who's able to listen to the audience, and who's able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another. I don't think this is necessarily an algorithmic process. I think what's great about the internet is that it actually makes it much easier for deejays to reach a wider audience. I know Amira. I can ask her what to read. But with the internet, she's in a position where she can tell a lot of people what to read. And you can listen to her as well, if this is a way that you're interested in having your web widened.So once you start widening like this, once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots, once you start translating, once you start curating, you end up in some really weird places. This is an image from pretty much my favorite blog, which is AfriGadget. And AfriGadget is a blog that looks at technology in an Africa context. And specifically, it's looking at a blacksmith in Kibera in Nairobi, who is turning the shaft of a Landrover into a cold chisel. And when you look at this image, you might find yourself going, ""Why would I conceivably care about this?"" And the truth is, this guy can probably explain this to you. This is Erik Hersman. You guys may have seen him around the conference. He goes by the moniker White African. He's both a very well known American geek, but he's also Kenyan; he was born in Sudan, grew up in Kenya. He is a bridge figure. He is someone who literally has feet in both worlds — one in the world of the African technology community, one in the world of the American technology community. And so he's able to tell a story about this blacksmith in Kibera and turn it into a story about repurposing technology, about innovating from constraint, about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials. He knows one world, and he's finding a way to communicate it to another world, both of which he has deep connections to. These bridge figures, I'm pretty well convinced, are the future of how we try to make the world wider through using the web.But the trick with bridges is, ultimately, you need someone to cross them. And that's where we start talking about xenophiles. So if I found myself in the NFL, I suspect I would spend my off-season nursing my wounds, enjoying my house, so on and so forth — possibly recording a hip-hop album. Dhani Jones, who is the middle linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals, has a slightly different approach to the off-season. Dhani has a television show. It's called ""Dhani Tackles the Globe."" And every week on this television show, Dhani travels to a different nation of the world. He finds a local sporting team. He trains with them for a week, and he plays a match with them. And his reason for this is not just that he wants to master Muay Thai boxing. It's because, for him, sport is the language that allows him to encounter the full width and wonder of the world. For some of us it might be music. For some of us it might be food. For a lot of us it might be literature or writing. But there are all these different techniques that allow you to go out and look at the world and find your place within it.The goal of my Talk here is not to persuade the people in this room to embrace your xenophilia. My guess — given that you're at a conference called TEDGlobal — is that most of you are xenophiles, whether or not you use that term. My challenge instead is this. It's not enough to make the personal decision that you want a wider world. We have to figure out how to rewire the systems that we have. We have to fix our media. We have to fix the internet. We have to fix our education. We have to fix our immigration policy. We need to look at ways of creating serendipity, of making translation pervasive, and we need to find ways to embrace and celebrate these bridge figures. And we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles. That's what I'm trying to do. I need your help.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman
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"I'm a storyteller. That's what I do in life — telling stories, writing novels — and today I would like to tell you a few stories about the art of storytelling and also some supernatural creatures called the djinni. But before I go there, please allow me to share with you glimpses of my personal story. I will do so with the help of words, of course, but also a geometrical shape, the circle, so throughout my talk, you will come across several circles.I was born in Strasbourg, France to Turkish parents. Shortly after, my parents got separated, and I came to Turkey with my mom. From then on, I was raised as a single child by a single mother. Now in the early 1970s, in Ankara, that was a bit unusual. Our neighborhood was full of large families, where fathers were the heads of households, so I grew up seeing my mother as a divorcee in a patriarchal environment. In fact, I grew up observing two different kinds of womanhood. On the one hand was my mother, a well-educated, secular, modern, westernized, Turkish woman. On the other hand was my grandmother, who also took care of me and was more spiritual, less educated and definitely less rational. This was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye.Many people visited my grandmother, people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands. Each time, my grandmother would utter some words in Arabic, take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove. Then one by one, she would encircle these thorns with dark ink. A week later, the patient would come back for a follow-up examination. Now, I'm aware that I should not be saying such things in front of an audience of scholars and scientists, but the truth is, of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions, I did not see anyone go back unhappy or unhealed. I asked her how she did this. Was it the power of praying? In response she said, ""Yes, praying is effective, but also beware of the power of circles.""From her, I learned, amongst many other things, one very precious lesson — that if you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside. Now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle. We all do. We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink; our hearts might dwindle, and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons. Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family — if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image.Now one other thing women like my grandma do in Turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out. It's an old Eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection. Ironically, [living in] communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today's globalized world. And it's happening everywhere, among liberals and conservatives, agnostics and believers, the rich and the poor, East and West alike. We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see.I started writing fiction at the age of eight. My mother came home one day with a turquoise notebook and asked me if I'd be interested in keeping a personal journal. In retrospect, I think she was slightly worried about my sanity. I was constantly telling stories at home, which was good, except I told this to imaginary friends around me, which was not so good. I was an introverted child, to the point of communicating with colored crayons and apologizing to objects when I bumped into them, so my mother thought it might do me good to write down my day-to-day experiences and emotions. What she didn't know was that I thought my life was terribly boring, and the last thing I wanted to do was to write about myself. Instead, I began to write about people other than me and things that never really happened. And thus began my life-long passion for writing fiction. So from the very beginning, fiction for me was less of an autobiographical manifestation than a transcendental journey into other lives, other possibilities. And please bear with me: I'll draw a circle and come back to this point.Now one other thing happened around this same time. My mother became a diplomat. So from this small, superstitious, middle-class neighborhood of my grandmother, I was zoomed into this posh, international school [in Madrid], where I was the only Turk. It was here that I had my first encounter with what I call the ""representative foreigner."" In our classroom, there were children from all nationalities, yet this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan, egalitarian classroom democracy. Instead, it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen — not as an individual on his own, but as the representative of something larger. We were like a miniature United Nations, which was fun, except whenever something negative, with regards to a nation or a religion, took place. The child who represented it was mocked, ridiculed and bullied endlessly. And I should know, because during the time I attended that school, a military takeover happened in my country, a gunman of my nationality nearly killed the Pope, and Turkey got zero points in [the] Eurovision Song Contest. (Laughter)I skipped school often and dreamed of becoming a sailor during those days. I also had my first taste of cultural stereotypes there. The other children asked me about the movie ""Midnight Express,"" which I had not seen; they inquired how many cigarettes a day I smoked, because they thought all Turks were heavy smokers, and they wondered at what age I would start covering my hair. I came to learn that these were the three main stereotypes about my country: politics, cigarettes and the veil. After Spain, we went to Jordan, Germany and Ankara again. Everywhere I went, I felt like my imagination was the only suitcase I could take with me. Stories gave me a sense of center, continuity and coherence, the three big Cs that I otherwise lacked.In my mid-twenties, I moved to Istanbul, the city I adore. I lived in a very vibrant, diverse neighborhood where I wrote several of my novels. I was in Istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999. When I ran out of the building at three in the morning, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. There was the local grocer there — a grumpy, old man who didn't sell alcohol and didn't speak to marginals. He was sitting next to a transvestite with a long black wig and mascara running down her cheeks. I watched the man open a pack of cigarettes with trembling hands and offer one to her, and that is the image of the night of the earthquake in my mind today — a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk. In the face of death and destruction, our mundane differences evaporated, and we all became one even if for a few hours. But I've always believed that stories, too, have a similar effect on us. I'm not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake, but when we are reading a good novel, we leave our small, cozy apartments behind, go out into the night alone and start getting to know people we had never met before and perhaps had even been biased against.Shortly after, I went to a women's college in Boston, then Michigan. I experienced this, not so much as a geographical shift, as a linguistic one. I started writing fiction in English. I'm not an immigrant, refugee or exile — they ask me why I do this — but the commute between languages gives me the chance to recreate myself. I love writing in Turkish, which to me is very poetic and very emotional, and I love writing in English, which to me is very mathematical and cerebral. So I feel connected to each language in a different way. For me, like millions of other people around the world today, English is an acquired language. When you're a latecomer to a language, what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration. As latecomers, we always want to say more, you know, crack better jokes, say better things, but we end up saying less because there's a gap between the mind and the tongue. And that gap is very intimidating. But if we manage not to be frightened by it, it's also stimulating. And this is what I discovered in Boston — that frustration was very stimulating.At this stage, my grandmother, who had been watching the course of my life with increasing anxiety, started to include in her daily prayers that I urgently get married so that I could settle down once and for all. And because God loves her, I did get married. (Laughter) But instead of settling down, I went to Arizona. And since my husband is in Istanbul, I started commuting between Arizona and Istanbul — the two places on the surface of earth that couldn't be more different. I guess one part of me has always been a nomad, physically and spiritually. Stories accompany me, keeping my pieces and memories together, like an existential glue.Yet as much as I love stories, recently, I've also begun to think that they lose their magic if and when a story is seen as more than a story. And this is a subject that I would love to think about together. When my first novel written in English came out in America, I heard an interesting remark from a literary critic. ""I liked your book,"" he said, ""but I wish you had written it differently."" (Laughter) I asked him what he meant by that. He said, ""Well, look at it. There's so many Spanish, American, Hispanic characters in it, but there's only one Turkish character and it's a man."" Now the novel took place on a university campus in Boston, so to me, it was normal that there be more international characters in it than Turkish characters, but I understood what my critic was looking for. And I also understood that I would keep disappointing him. He wanted to see the manifestation of my identity. He was looking for a Turkish woman in the book because I happened to be one.We often talk about how stories change the world, but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. Many authors feel this pressure, but non-Western authors feel it more heavily. If you're a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women. You're expected to write informative, poignant and characteristic stories and leave the experimental and avant-garde to your Western colleagues. What I experienced as a child in that school in Madrid is happening in the literary world today. Writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own, but as the representatives of their respective cultures: a few authors from China, a few from Turkey, a few from Nigeria. We're all thought to have something very distinctive, if not peculiar.The writer and commuter James Baldwin gave an interview in 1984 in which he was repeatedly asked about his homosexuality. When the interviewer tried to pigeonhole him as a gay writer, Baldwin stopped and said, ""But don't you see? There's nothing in me that is not in everybody else, and nothing in everybody else that is not in me."" When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger. There's a fuzzy category called multicultural literature in which all authors from outside the Western world are lumped together. I never forget my first multicultural reading, in Harvard Square about 10 years ago. We were three writers, one from the Philippines, one Turkish and one Indonesian — like a joke, you know. (Laughter) And the reason why we were brought together was not because we shared an artistic style or a literary taste. It was only because of our passports. Multicultural writers are expected to tell real stories, not so much the imaginary. A function is attributed to fiction. In this way, not only the writers themselves, but also their fictional characters become the representatives of something larger.But I must quickly add that this tendency to see a story as more than a story does not solely come from the West. It comes from everywhere. And I experienced this firsthand when I was put on trial in 2005 for the words my fictional characters uttered in a novel. I had intended to write a constructive, multi-layered novel about an Armenian and a Turkish family through the eyes of women. My micro story became a macro issue when I was prosecuted. Some people criticized, others praised me for writing about the Turkish-Armenian conflict. But there were times when I wanted to remind both sides that this was fiction. It was just a story. And when I say, ""just a story,"" I'm not trying to belittle my work. I want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is, not as a means to an end.Writers are entitled to their political opinions, and there are good political novels out there, but the language of fiction is not the language of daily politics. Chekhov said, ""The solution to a problem and the correct way of posing the question are two completely separate things. And only the latter is an artist's responsibility."" Identity politics divides us. Fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations. The other, in nuances. One draws boundaries. The other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks. Fiction is flowing water.In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called ""meddah."" They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, impersonating that character. Everybody could go and listen, you know — ordinary people, even the sultan, Muslims and non-Muslims. Stories cut across all boundaries, like ""The Tales of Nasreddin Hodja,"" which were very popular throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and Asia. Today, stories continue to transcend borders. When Palestinian and Israeli politicians talk, they usually don't listen to each other, but a Palestinian reader still reads a novel by a Jewish author, and vice versa, connecting and empathizing with the narrator. Literature has to take us beyond. If it cannot take us there, it is not good literature.Books have saved the introverted, timid child that I was — that I once was. But I'm also aware of the danger of fetishizing them. When the poet and mystic, Rumi, met his spiritual companion, Shams of Tabriz, one of the first things the latter did was to toss Rumi's books into water and watch the letters dissolve. The Sufis say, ""Knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance."" The problem with today's cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge — we know a lot about each other, or so we think — but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves: it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected. There's a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul, with strong Turkish roots, but the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures. In that sense, I like to think of my fiction as both local and universal, both from here and everywhere.Now those of you who have been to Istanbul have probably seen Topkapi Palace, which was the residence of Ottoman sultans for more than 400 years. In the palace, just outside the quarters of the favorite concubines, there's an area called The Gathering Place of the Djinn. It's between buildings. I'm intrigued by this concept. We usually distrust those areas that fall in between things. We see them as the domain of supernatural creatures like the djinn, who are made of smokeless fire and are the symbol of elusiveness. But my point is perhaps that elusive space is what writers and artists need most. When I write fiction I cherish elusiveness and changeability. I like not knowing what will happen 10 pages later. I like it when my characters surprise me. I might write about a Muslim woman in one novel, and perhaps it will be a very happy story, and in my next book, I might write about a handsome, gay professor in Norway. As long as it comes from our hearts, we can write about anything and everything.Audre Lorde once said, ""The white fathers taught us to say, 'I think, therefore I am.'"" She suggested, ""I feel, therefore I am free."" I think it was a wonderful paradigm shift. And yet, why is it that, in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is ""write what you know""? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all. Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next.In the end, stories move like whirling dervishes, drawing circles beyond circles. They connect all humanity, regardless of identity politics, and that is the good news. And I would like to finish with an old Sufi poem: ""Come, let us be friends for once; let us make life easy on us; let us be lovers and loved ones; the earth shall be left to no one.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction
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"Chris Anderson: Julian, welcome. It's been reported that WikiLeaks, your baby, has, in the last few years has released more classified documents than the rest of the world's media combined. Can that possibly be true?Julian Assange: Yeah, can it possibly be true? It's a worry — isn't it? — that the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined.CA: How does it work? How do people release the documents? And how do you secure their privacy?JA: So these are — as far as we can tell — classical whistleblowers, and we have a number of ways for them to get information to us. So we use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the Internet, to hide trails, pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections. We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it — which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information — release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.CA: So you make an effort to ensure the documents are legitimate, but you actually almost never know who the identity of the source is?JA: That's right, yeah. Very rarely do we ever know, and if we find out at some stage then we destroy that information as soon as possible. (Phone ring) God damn it.(Laughter)CA: I think that's the CIA asking what the code is for a TED membership.(Laughter)So let's take [an] example, actually. This is something you leaked a few years ago. If we can have this document up ... So this was a story in Kenya a few years ago. Can you tell us what you leaked and what happened?JA: So this is the Kroll Report. This was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the Kenyan government after its election in 2004. Prior to 2004, Kenya was ruled by Daniel arap Moi for about 18 years. He was a soft dictator of Kenya. And when Kibaki got into power — through a coalition of forces that were trying to clean up corruption in Kenya — they commissioned this report, spent about two million pounds on this and an associated report. And then the government sat on it and used it for political leverage on Moi, who was the richest man — still is the richest man — in Kenya. It's the Holy Grail of Kenyan journalism. So I went there in 2007, and we managed to get hold of this just prior to the election — the national election, December 28. When we released that report, we did so three days after the new president, Kibaki, had decided to pal up with the man that he was going to clean out, Daniel arap Moi, so this report then became a dead albatross around President Kibaki's neck.CA: And — I mean, to cut a long story short — word of the report leaked into Kenya, not from the official media, but indirectly, and in your opinion, it actually shifted the election. JA: Yeah. So this became front page of the Guardian and was then printed in all the surrounding countries of Kenya, in Tanzanian and South African press. And so it came in from the outside. And that, after a couple of days, made the Kenyan press feel safe to talk about it. And it ran for 20 nights straight on Kenyan TV, shifted the vote by 10 percent, according to a Kenyan intelligence report, which changed the result of the election.CA: Wow, so your leak really substantially changed the world?JA: Yep.(Applause)CA: Here's — We're going to just show a short clip from this Baghdad airstrike video. The video itself is longer, but here's a short clip. This is — this is intense material, I should warn you.Radio: ... just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up. I see your element, uh, got about four Humvees, uh, out along ... You're clear. All right. Firing. Let me know when you've got them. Let's shoot. Light 'em all up. C'mon, fire! (Machine gun fire) Keep shoot 'n. Keep shoot 'n. (Machine gun fire) Keep shoot 'n. Hotel ... Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six, we need to move, time now! All right, we just engaged all eight individuals. Yeah, we see two birds [helicopters], and we're still firing. Roger. I got 'em. Two-Six, this is Two-Six, we're mobile. Oops, I'm sorry. What was going on? God damn it, Kyle. All right, hahaha. I hit 'em.CA: So, what was the impact of that?JA: The impact on the people who worked on it was severe. We ended up sending two people to Baghdad to further research that story. So this is just the first of three attacks that occurred in that scene.CA: So, I mean, 11 people died in that attack, right, including two Reuters employees?JA: Yeah. Two Reuters employees, two young children were wounded. There were between 18 and 26 people killed all together.CA: And releasing this caused widespread outrage. What was the key element of this that actually caused the outrage, do you think?JA: I don't know. I guess people can see the gross disparity in force. You have guys walking in a relaxed way down the street, and then an Apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometer firing 30-millimeter cannon shells on everyone — looking for any excuse to do so — and killing people rescuing the wounded. And there was two journalists involved that clearly weren't insurgents because that's their full-time job.CA: I mean, there's been this U.S. intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, arrested, and it's alleged that he confessed in a chat room to have leaked this video to you, along with 280,000 classified U.S. embassy cables. I mean, did he?JA: We have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, about five days ago, with obtaining 150,000 cables and releasing 50. Now, we had released, early in the year, a cable from the Reykjavik U.S. embassy, but this is not necessarily connected. I mean, I was a known visitor of that embassy.CA: I mean, if you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables ...JA: We would have released them. (CA: You would?)JA: Yeah. (CA: Because?)JA: Well, because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human-rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that's the sort of material that's there.CA: So let's talk a little more broadly about this. I mean, in general, what's your philosophy? Why is it right to encourage leaking of secret information?JA: Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good — because the organizations that know it best, that know it from the inside out, are spending work to conceal it. And that's what we've found in practice, and that's what the history of journalism is.CA: But are there risks with that, either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large, where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence?JA: Not that we have seen with anything we have released. I mean, we have a harm immunization policy. We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal — personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets — you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret — but we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated.CA: So they are well-motivated. And what would you say to, for example, the, you know, the parent of someone whose son is out serving the U.S. military, and he says, ""You know what, you've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out. It shows a U.S. soldier laughing at people dying. That gives the impression, has given the impression, to millions of people around the world that U.S. soldiers are inhuman people. Actually, they're not. My son isn't. How dare you?"" What would you say to that?JA: Yeah, we do get a lot of that. But remember, the people in Baghdad, the people in Iraq, the people in Afghanistan — they don't need to see the video; they see it every day. So it's not going to change their opinion. It's not going to change their perception. That's what they see every day. It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all, and that's our hope.CA: So you found a way to shine light into what you see as these sort of dark secrets in companies and in government. Light is good. But do you see any irony in the fact that, in order for you to shine that light, you have to, yourself, create secrecy around your sources?JA: Not really. I mean, we don't have any WikiLeaks dissidents yet. We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us, but we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.CA: I'd actually be interested, just based on what we've heard so far — I'm curious as to the opinion in the TED audience. You know, there might be a couple of views of WikiLeaks and of Julian. You know, hero — people's hero — bringing this important light. Dangerous troublemaker. Who's got the hero view? Who's got the dangerous troublemaker view?JA: Oh, come on. There must be some.CA: It's a soft crowd, Julian, a soft crowd. We have to try better. Let's show them another example. Now here's something that you haven't yet leaked, but I think for TED you are. I mean it's an intriguing story that's just happened, right? What is this?JA: So this is a sample of what we do sort of every day. So late last year — in November last year — there was a series of well blowouts in Albania, like the well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, but not quite as big. And we got a report — a sort of engineering analysis into what happened — saying that, in fact, security guards from some rival, various competing oil firms had, in fact, parked trucks there and blown them up. And part of the Albanian government was in this, etc., etc. And the engineering report had nothing on the top of it, so it was an extremely difficult document for us. We couldn't verify it because we didn't know who wrote it and knew what it was about. So we were kind of skeptical that maybe it was a competing oil firm just sort of playing the issue up. So under that basis, we put it out and said, ""Look, we're skeptical about this thing. We don't know, but what can we do? The material looks good, it feels right, but we just can't verify it."" And we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it, wanting to track down the source — (Laughter) saying, ""Hey, we want to track down the source."" And we were like, ""Oh, tell us more. What document is it, precisely, you're talking about? Can you show that you had legal authority over that document? Is it really yours?"" So they sent us this screen shot with the author in the Microsoft Word ID. Yeah. (Applause) That's happened quite a lot though. This is like one of our methods of identifying, of verifying, what a material is, is to try and get these guys to write letters.CA: Yeah. Have you had information from inside BP?JA: Yeah, we have a lot, but I mean, at the moment, we are undergoing a sort of serious fundraising and engineering effort. So our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we're re-engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have. That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth, and that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.CA: So that's the key bottleneck, basically journalistic volunteers and/or the funding of journalistic salaries?JA: Yep. Yeah, and trusted people. I mean, we're an organization that is hard to grow very quickly because of the sort of material we deal with, so we have to restructure in order to have people who will deal with the highest national security stuff, and then lower security cases.CA: So help us understand a bit about you personally and how you came to do this. And I think I read that as a kid you went to 37 different schools. Can that be right?JA: Well, my parents were in the movie business and then on the run from a cult, so the combination between the two ...(Laughter)CA: I mean, a psychologist might say that's a recipe for breeding paranoia.JA: What, the movie business?(Laughter)(Applause)CA: And you were also — I mean, you were also a hacker at an early age and ran into the authorities early on. JA: Well, I was a journalist. You know, I was a very young journalist activist at an early age. I wrote a magazine, was prosecuted for it when I was a teenager. So you have to be careful with hacker. I mean there's like — there's a method that can be deployed for various things. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's mostly deployed by the Russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother's bank accounts. So this phrase is not, not as nice as it used to be.CA: Yeah, well, I certainly don't think you're stealing anyone's grandmother's bank account, but what about your core values? Can you give us a sense of what they are and maybe some incident in your life that helped determine them?JA: I'm not sure about the incident. But the core values: well, capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims. And that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life.CA: Capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims?JA: Yeah. And you know, I'm a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurture, but some way — there is another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crime. And so that is something that has been in my character for a long time.CA: So just tell us, very quickly in the last minute, the story: what happened in Iceland? You basically published something there, ran into trouble with a bank, then the news service there was injuncted from running the story. Instead, they publicized your side. That made you very high-profile in Iceland. What happened next?JA: Yeah, this is a great case, you know. Iceland went through this financial crisis. It was the hardest hit of any country in the world. Its banking sector was 10 times the GDP of the rest of the economy. Anyway, so we release this report in July last year. And the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air, like out of a movie: injunction landed on the news desk, and the news reader was like, ""This has never happened before. What do we do?"" Well, we just show the website instead, for all that time, as a filler, and we became very famous in Iceland, went to Iceland and spoke about this issue. And there was a feeling in the community that that should never happen again, and as a result, working with Icelandic politicians and some other international legal experts, we put together a new sort of package of legislation for Iceland to sort of become an offshore haven for the free press, with the strongest journalistic protections in the world, with a new Nobel Prize for freedom of speech. Iceland's a Nordic country, so, like Norway, it's able to tap into the system. And just a month ago, this was passed by the Icelandic parliament unanimously.CA: Wow.(Applause)Last question, Julian. When you think of the future then, do you think it's more likely to be Big Brother exerting more control, more secrecy, or us watching Big Brother, or it's just all to be played for either way?JA: I'm not sure which way it's going to go. I mean, there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world — within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see. That's why it's a very interesting time to be in — because with just a little bit of effort, we can shift it one way or the other.CA: Well, it looks like I'm reflecting the audience's opinion to say, Julian, be careful, and all power to you.JA: Thank you, Chris. (CA: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks
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"In October 2010, the Justice League of America will be teaming up with The 99. Icons like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and their colleagues will be teaming up with icons Jabbar, Noora, Jami and their colleagues. It's a story of intercultural intersections, and what better group to have this conversation than those that grew out of fighting fascism in their respective histories and geographies? As fascism took over Europe in the 1930s, an unlikely reaction came out of North America. As Christian iconography got changed, and swastikas were created out of crucifixes, Batman and Superman were created by Jewish young men in the United States and Canada, also going back to the Bible.Consider this: like the prophets, all the superheroes are missing parents. Superman's parents die on Krypton before the age of one. Bruce Wayne, who becomes Batman, loses his parents at the age of six in Gotham City. Spiderman is raised by his aunt and uncle. And all of them, just like the prophets who get their message from God through Gabriel, get their message from above. Peter Parker is in a library in Manhattan when the spider descends from above and gives him his message through a bite. Bruce Wayne is in his bedroom when a big bat flies over his head, and he sees it as an omen to become Batman. Superman is not only sent to Earth from the heavens, or Krypton, but he's sent in a pod, much like Moses was on the Nile. (Laughter) And you hear the voice of his father, Jor-El, saying to Earth, ""I have sent to you my only son.""(Laughter)(Applause)These are clearly biblical archetypes, and the thinking behind that was to create positive, globally-resonating storylines that could be tied to the same things that other people were pulling mean messages out of because then the person that's using religion for the wrong purpose just becomes a bad man with a bad message. And it's only by linking positive things that the negative can be delinked. This is the kind of thinking that went into creating The 99. The 99 references the 99 attributes of Allah in the Koran, things like generosity and mercy and foresight and wisdom and dozens of others that no two people in the world would disagree about. It doesn't matter what your religion is; even if you're an atheist, you don't raise your kid telling him, you know, ""Make sure you lie three times a day."" Those are basic human values.And so the backstory of The 99 takes place in 1258, which history tells us the Mongols invaded Baghdad and destroyed it. All the books from Bait al-Hikma library, the most famous library in its day, were thrown in the Tigris River, and the Tigris changes color with ink. It's a story passed on generation after generation. I rewrote that story, and in my version, the librarians find out that this is going to happen — and here's a side note: if you want a comic book to do well, make the librarians the hero. It always works well. (Laughter) (Applause) So the librarians find out and they get together a special solution, a chemical solution called King's Water, that when mixed with 99 stones would be able to save all that culture and history in the books. But the Mongols get there first. The books and the solution get thrown in the Tigris River. Some librarians escape, and over the course of days and weeks, they dip the stones into the Tigris and suck up that collective wisdom that we all think is lost to civilization.Those stones have been smuggled as three prayer beads of 33 stones each through Arabia into Andalusia in Spain, where they're safe for 200 years. But in 1492, two important things happen. The first is the fall of Granada, the last Muslim enclave in Europe. The second is Columbus finally gets funded to go to India, but he gets lost. (Laughter) So 33 of the stones are smuggled onto the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and are spread in the New World. Thirty-three go on the Silk Road to China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. And 33 are spread between Europe, the Middle East and Africa.And now it's 2010, and there are 99 heroes from 99 different countries. Now it's very easy to assume that those books, because they were from a library called Bait al-Hikma, were Muslim books, but that's not the case because the caliph that built that library, his name was al-Ma'mun — he was Harun al-Rashid's son. He had told his advisers, ""Get me all the scholars to translate any book they can get their hands onto into Arabic, and I will pay them its weight in gold."" After a while, his advisers complained. They said, ""Your Highness, the scholars are cheating. They're writing in big handwriting to take more gold."" To which he said, ""Let them be, because what they're giving us is worth a lot more than what we're paying them."" So the idea of an open architecture, an open knowledge, is not new to my neck of the desert.The concept centers on something called the Noor stones. Noor is Arabic for light. So these 99 stones, a few kind of rules in the game: Number one, you don't choose the stone; the stone chooses you. There's a King Arthur element to the storyline, okay. Number two, all of The 99, when they first get their stone, or their power, abuse it; they use it for self-interest. And there's a very strong message in there that when you start abusing your stone, you get taken advantage of by people who will exploit your powers, okay. Number three, the 99 stones all have within them a mechanism that self-updates.Now there are two groups that exist within the Muslim world. Everybody believes the Koran is for all time and all place. Some believe that means that the original interpretation from a couple thousand years ago is what's relevant today. I don't belong there. Then there's a group that believes the Koran is a living, breathing document, and I captured that idea within these stones that self-update. Now the main bad guy, Rughal, does not want these stones to update, so he's trying to get them to stop updating. He can't use the stones, but he can stop them. And by stopping them, he has more of a fascist agenda, where he gets some of The 99 to work for him — they're all wearing cookie-cutter, same color uniforms They're not allowed to individually express who they are and what they are. And he controls them from the top down — whereas when they work for the other side, eventually, when they find out this is the wrong person, they've been manipulated, they actually, each one has a different, colorful kind of dress.And the last point about the 99 Noor stones is this. So The 99 work in teams of three. Why three? A couple of reasons. Number one, we have a thing within Islam that you don't leave a boy and a girl alone together, because the third person is temptation or the devil, right? I think that's there in all cultures, right? But this is not about religion, it's not about proselytizing. There's this very strong social message that needs to get to kind of the deepest crevices of intolerance, and the only way to get there is to kind of play the game. And so this is the way I dealt with it. They work in teams of three: two boys and a girl, two girls and a boy, three boys, three girls, no problem. And the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, also spoke about the importance of the number three in all cultures, so I figure I'm covered. Well ... I got accused in a few blogs that I was actually sent by the Pope to preach the Trinity and Catholicism in the Middle East, so you — (Laughter) you believe who you want. I gave you my version of the story.So here's some of the characters that we have. Mujiba, from Malaysia: her main power is she's able to answer any question. She's the Trivial Pursuit queen, if you want, but when she first gets her power, she starts going on game shows and making money. We have Jabbar from Saudi who starts breaking things when he has the power. Now, Mumita was a fun one to name. Mumita is the destroyer. So the 99 attributes of Allah have the yin and the yang; there's the powerful, the hegemonous, the strong, and there's also the kind, the generous. I'm like, are all the girls going to be kind and merciful and the guys all strong? I'm like, you know what, I've met a few girls who were destroyers in my lifetime, so ... (Laughter) We have Jami from Hungary, who first starts making weapons: He's the technology wiz. Musawwira from Ghana, Hadya from Pakistan, Jaleel from Iran who uses fire. And this is one of my favorites, Al-Batina from Yemen. Al-Batina is the hidden. So Al-Batina is hidden, but she's a superhero. I came home to my wife and I said, ""I created a character after you."" My wife is a Saudi from Yemeni roots. And she said, ""Show me."" So I showed this. She said, ""That's not me."" I said, ""Look at the eyes. They're your eyes.""(Laughter)So I promised my investors this would not be another made-in-fifth-world-country production. This was going to be Superman, or it wasn't worth my time or their money. So from day one, the people involved in the project, bottom left is Fabian Nicieza, writer for X-Men and Power Rangers. Next to him is Dan Panosian, one of the character creators for the modern-day X-Men. Top right is Stuart Moore, a writer for Iron Man. Next to him is John McCrea, who was an inker for Spiderman. And we entered Western consciousness with a tagline: ""Next Ramadan, the world will have new heroes,"" back in 2005.Now I went to Dubai, to an Arab Thought Foundation Conference, and I was waiting by the coffee for the right journalist. Didn't have a product, but had energy. And I found somebody from The New York Times, and I cornered him, and I pitched him. And I think I scared him — (Laughter) because he basically promised me — we had no product — but he said, ""We'll give you a paragraph in the arts section if you'll just go away."" (Laughter) So I said, ""Great."" So I called him up a few weeks afterward. I said, ""Hi, Hesa."" And he said, ""Hi."" I said, ""Happy New Year."" He said, ""Thank you. We had a baby."" I said, ""Congratulations."" Like I care, right? ""So when's the article coming out?"" He said, ""Naif, Islam and cartoon? That's not timely. You know, maybe next week, next month, next year, but, you know, it'll come out."" So a few days after that, what happens? What happens is the world erupts in the Danish cartoon controversy. I became timely. (Laughter) So flurry of phone calls and emails from The New York Times. Next thing you knew, there's a full page covering us positively, January 22nd, 2006, which changed our lives forever, because anybody Googling Islam and cartoon or Islam and comic, guess what they got; they got me.And The 99 were like superheroes kind of flying out of what was happening around the world. And that led to all kinds of things, from being in curricula in universities and schools to — one of my favorite pictures I have from South Asia, it was a couple of men with long beards and a lot of girls wearing the hijab — it looked like a school. The good news is they're all holding copies of The 99, smiling, and they found me to sign the picture. The bad news is they were all photocopies, so we didn't make a dime in revenue. (Laughter) We've been able to license The 99 comic books into eight languages so far — Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish. Opened a theme park through a license in Kuwait a year and a half ago called The 99 Village Theme Park — 300,000 square feet, 20 rides, all with our characters: a couple back-to-school licenses in Spain and Turkey.But the biggest thing we've done to date, which is just amazing, is that we've done a 26-episode animated series, which is done for global audiences: in fact, we're already going to be in the U.S. and Turkey, we know. It's 3D CGI, which is going to be very high-quality, written in Hollywood by the writers behind Ben 10 and Spiderman and Star Wars: Clone Wars. In this clip I'm about to show you, which has never been seen in the public before, there is a struggle. Two of the characters, Jabbar, the one with the muscles, and Noora, the one that can use light, are actually wearing the cookie-cutter fascist gray uniform because they're being manipulated. They don't know, OK, and they're trying to get another member of The 99 to join them. So there's a struggle within the team. So if we can get the lights ...[""The 99""]Jabbar: Dana, I can't see where to grab hold. I need more light.What's happening?Dana: There's too much darkness.Rughal: There must be something we can do.Man: I won't send any more commandos in until I know it's safe.Dr. Razem: It's time to go, Miklos.Miklos: Must download file contents. I can't forget auntie.Jabbar: Dana, I can't do this without you.Dana: But I can't help.Jabbar: You can, even if you don't believe in yourself right now. I believe in you. You are Noora the Light.Dana: No. I don't deserve it. I don't deserve anything.Jabbar: Then what about the rest of us? Don't we deserve to be saved? Don't I? Now, tell me which way to go.Dana: That way.Alarm: Threat imminent.Jabbar: Aaaahhh!Miklos: Stay away from me.Jabbar: We're here to help you.Dr. Razem: Don't listen to them.Dana: Miklos, that man is not your friend.Miklos: No. He gave me access, and you want to reboot the [unclear]. No more [unclear].[""The 99""]Thank you.(Applause)So ""The 99"" is technology; it's entertainment; it's design. But that's only half the story. As the father of five sons, I worry about who they're going to be using as role models. I worry because all around me, even within my extended family, I see religion being manipulated. As a psychologist, I worry for the world in general, but worry about the perception of how people see themselves in my part of the world. Now, I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm licensed in New York State. I trained at Bellevue Hospital Survivors of Political Torture Program, and I heard one too many stories of people growing up to idolize their leadership, only to end up being tortured by their heroes. And torture's a terrible enough thing as it is, but when it's done by your hero, that just breaks you in so many ways. I left Bellevue, went to business school and started this.Now, one of the things that I refer to when I — about the importance of this message — is that I gave a lecture at the medical school at Kuwait University, where I lecture on the biological basis of behavior, and I gave the students two articles, one from The New York Times and one from New York magazine. And I took away the name of the writer, the name of the [unclear] — everything was gone except the facts. And the first one was about a group called The Party of God, who wanted to ban Valentine's Day. Red was made illegal. Any boys and girls caught flirting would get married off immediately, okay. The second one was about a woman complaining because three minivans with six bearded men pulled up and started interrogating her on the spot for talking to a man who wasn't related to her.And I asked the students in Kuwait where they thought these incidents took place. The first one, they said Saudi Arabia. There was no debate. The second one, they were actually split between Saudi and Afghanistan. What blew their mind was the first one took place in India, it was the party of a Hindu God. The second one took place in upstate New York. It was an Orthodox Jewish community. But what breaks my heart and what's alarming is that in those two interviews, the people around, who were interviewed as well, refer to that behavior as Talibanization. In other words, good Hindus and good Jews don't act this way. This is Islam's influence on Hinduism and Judaism. But what do the students in Kuwait say? They said it's us — and this is dangerous. It's dangerous when a group self-identifies itself as extreme.This is one of my sons, Rayan, who's a Scooby Doo addict. You can tell by the glasses there. He actually called me a meddling kid the other day. (Laughter) But I borrow a lesson that I learned from him. Last summer when we were in our home in New York, he was out in the yard playing in his playhouse. And I was in my office working, and he came in, ""Baba, I want you to come with me. I want my toy."" ""Yes, Rayan, just go away."" He left his Scooby Doo in his house. I said, ""Go away. I'm working. I'm busy."" And what Rayan did then is he sat there, he tapped his foot on the floor, at three and a half, and he looked at me and he said, ""Baba, I want you to come with me to my office in my house. I have work to do."" (Laughter) (Applause) Rayan reframed the situation and brought himself down to my level.(Laughter)And with The 99, that is what we aim to do. You know, I think that there's a big parallel between bending the crucifix out of shape and creating swastikas. And when I see pictures like this, of parents or uncles who think it's cute to have a little child holding a Koran and having a suicide bomber belt around them to protest something, the hope is by linking enough positive things to the Koran, that one day we can move this child from being proud in the way they're proud there, to that. And I think — I think The 99 can and will achieve its mission.As an undergrad at Tufts University, we were giving away free falafel one day and, you know, it was Middle East Day or something. And people came up and picked up the culturally resonant image of the falafel, ate it and, you know, talked and left. And no two people could disagree about what the word free was and what the word falafel was, behind us, ""free falafel."" You know. (Laughter) Or so we thought, until a woman came rushing across the campus and dropped her bag on the floor, pointed up to the sign and said, ""Who's falafel?"" (Laughter) True story. (Laughter) She was actually coming out of an Amnesty International meeting.(Laughter)Just today, D.C. Comics announced the cover of our upcoming crossover. On that cover you see Batman, Superman and a fully-clothed Wonder Woman with our Saudi member of The 99, our Emirati member and our Libyan member. On April 26, 2010, President Barack Obama said that of all the initiatives since his now famous Cairo speech — in which he reached out to the Muslim world — the most innovative was that The 99 reach back out to the Justice League of America. We live in a world in which the most culturally innocuous symbols, like the falafel, can be misunderstood because of baggage, and where religion can be twisted and purposefully made where it's not supposed to be by others. In a world like that, they'll always be a job for Superman and The 99.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/naif_al_mutawa_superheroes_inspired_by_islam
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"Well, indeed, I'm very, very lucky. My talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months — seemingly unrelated, but as you will see, actually all having to do with the story I want to tell you today. The first one was actually a funeral — to be more precise, a reburial. On May 22nd, there was a hero's reburial in Frombork, Poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world. He did that, literally, by replacing the Earth with the Sun in the center of the Solar System, and then with this simple-looking act, he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution, which many call the Copernican Revolution. Now that was, ironically, and very befittingly, the way we found his grave. As it was the custom of the time, Copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave, together with 14 others in that cathedral. DNA analysis, one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started, was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was Copernicus' hair — obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on. That match was unambiguous. The DNA matched, and we know that this was indeed Nicolaus Copernicus.Now, the connection between biology and DNA and life is very tantalizing when you talk about Copernicus because, even back then, his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask: if the Earth is just a planet, then what about planets around other stars? What about the idea of the plurality of the worlds, about life on other planets? In fact, I'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time. And at the time, people actually answered that question positively: ""Yes."" But there was no evidence. And here begins 400 years of frustration, of unfulfilled dreams — the dreams of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, many others — which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time. ""What is life? What is the origin of life? Are we alone?"" And that especially happened in the last 10 years, at the end of the 20th century, when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology, understanding the code of life, DNA, all of that seemed to actually put us, not closer, but further apart from answering those basic questions.Now, the good news. A lot has happened in the last few years, and let's start with the planets. Let's start with the old Copernican question: Are there earths around other stars? And as we already heard, there is a way in which we are trying, and now able, to answer that question. It's a new telescope. Our team, befittingly I think, named it after one of those dreamers of the Copernican time, Johannes Kepler, and that telescope's sole purpose is to go out, find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy, and tell us how often do planets like our own Earth happen to be out there. The telescope is actually built similarly to the, well-known to you, Hubble Space Telescope, except it does have an additional lens — a wide-field lens, as you would call it as a photographer. And if, in the next couple of months, you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this, you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night, without any interruption, for the next four years.The way we do that, actually, is with a method, which we call the transit method. It's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star. Not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that, but if you have a million stars, you'll find enough planets. And as you see on this animation, what Kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star. We are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this. All the stars for Kepler are just points of light. But we learn a lot from that: not only that there is a planet there, but we also learn its size. How much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is. We learn about its orbit, the period of its orbit and so on. So, what have we learned? Well, let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that I'm here to tell you today.What Kepler does is discover a lot of candidates, which we then follow up and find as planets, confirm as planets. It basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size. There are small planets, there are bigger planets, there are big planets, okay. So we count many, many such planets, and they have different sizes. We do that in our solar system. In fact, even back during the ancients, the Solar System in that sense would look on a diagram like this. There will be the smaller planets, and there will be the big planets, even back to the time of Epicurus and then of course Copernicus and his followers. Up until recently, that was the Solar System — four Earth-like planets with small radius, smaller than about two times the size of the Earth — and that was of course Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course the Earth, and then the two big, giant planets. Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes, and of course three more planets were discovered. Now the total planet number in our solar system was nine. The small planets dominated, and there was a certain harmony to that, which actually Copernicus was very happy to note, and Kepler was one of the big proponents of. So now we have Pluto to join the numbers of small planets. But up until, literally, 15 years ago, that was all we knew about planets. And that's what the frustration was. The Copernican dream was unfulfilled.Finally, 15 years ago, the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star, and we actually did pretty well. In the next 15 years, almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars, with different methods. Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a very different picture. There was of course an explanation for it: We only see the big planets, so that's why most of those planets are really in the category of ""like Jupiter."" But you see, we haven't gone very far. We were still back where Copernicus was. We didn't have any evidence whether planets like the Earth are out there. And we do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive. And we didn't have the evidence for that.So today, I'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope, Kepler, has been able to tell us in the last few weeks, and, lo and behold, we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of Copernicus. You can see here, the small planets dominate the picture. The planets which are marked ""like Earth,"" [are] definitely more than any other planets that we see. And now for the first time, we can say that. There is a lot more work we need to do with this. Most of these are candidates. In the next few years we will confirm them. But the statistical result is loud and clear. And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. Our own Milky Way Galaxy is rich in this kind of planets.So the question is: what do we do next? Well, first of all, we can study them now that we know where they are. And we can find those that we would call habitable, meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen. So, we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own Milky Way Galaxy harbors. And the number, as you might expect, is pretty staggering. It's about 100 million such planets. That's great news. Why? Because with our own little telescope, just in the next two years, we'll be able to identify at least 60 of them. So that's great because then we can go and study them — remotely, of course — with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years. We can find what they're made of, would their atmospheres have water, carbon dioxide, methane. We know and expect that we'll see that.That's great, but that is not the whole news. That's not why I'm here. Why I'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part. The one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next. And here comes biology — biology, with its basic question, which still stands unanswered, which is essentially: ""If there is life on other planets, do we expect it to be like life on Earth?"" And let me immediately tell you here, when I say life, I don't mean ""dolce vita,"" good life, human life. I really mean life on Earth, past and present, from microbes to us humans, in its rich molecular diversity, the way we now understand life on Earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions — and we call that, collectively, biochemistry, life as a chemical process, as a chemical phenomenon.So the question is: is that chemical phenomenon universal, or is it something which depends on the planet? Is it like gravity, which is the same everywhere in the universe, or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them? We need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that. And that's a very basic question, which we don't know the answer to, but which we can try — and we are trying — to answer in the lab. We don't need to go to space to answer that question. And so, that's what we are trying to do. And that's what many people now are trying to do. And a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well.So this is one example that I want to show you here. When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life, we think of compartmentalization, keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane, isolated from the rest of the environment, but yet, in an environment in which they actually could originate together. And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak's labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments — which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth, where you have some liquid water and some clays — you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles. But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth looks like, like this. And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life.Now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon. And in a sense, you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge, building a bridge from two sides of the river. On one hand, on the left bank of the river, are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments. We don't want to go blind because there's too many possibilities, and there is not too much lab, and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments. So that's what we are building from the left side of the river. From the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that I just showed you, where we actually tried that, and it feeds back and forth, and we hope to meet in the middle one day.So why should you care about that? Why am I trying to sell you a half-built bridge? Am I that charming? Well, there are many reasons, and you heard some of them in the short talk today. This understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives. But there is something more profound here, something deeper. And that deeper, underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it. And that is going to change our worldview in a profound way — not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago, Copernicus' act did, by changing the way we view space and time. Now it's about something else, but it's equally profound. And half the time, what's happened is it's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind, to the Earth in a bigger space. And the more we learn, the more that was reinforced. You've all learned that in school — how small the Earth is compared to the immense universe. And the bigger the telescope, the bigger that universe becomes. And look at this image of the tiny, blue dot. This pixel is the Earth. It is the Earth as we know it. It is seen from, in this case, from outside the orbit of Saturn. But it's really tiny. We know that. Let's think of life as that entire planet because, in a sense, it is. The biosphere is the size of the Earth. Life on Earth is the size of the Earth. And let's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms. What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong? Would that make us more responsible for what is happening today? Let's actually try that.So in space, the Earth is very small. Can you imagine how small it is? Let me try it. Okay, let's say this is the size of the observable universe, with all the galaxies, with all the stars, okay, from here to here. Do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be? It will be the size of a single, small atom. It is unimaginably small. We can't imagine it. I mean look, you can see the necktie, but you can't even imagine seeing the size of a little, small atom. But that's not the whole story, you see. The universe and life are both in space and time. If that was the age of the universe, then this is the age of life on Earth. Think about those oldest living things on Earth, but in a cosmic proportion. This is not insignificant. This is very significant. So life might be insignificant in size, but it is not insignificant in time. Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent, parent and offspring.So what does this tell us? This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle, it's all wrong. There is immense, powerful potential in life in this universe — especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common. And that potential, that powerful potential, is also our potential, of you and me. And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and its biosphere, we'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it. And the good news is we can actually, indeed do it. And let's do it. Let's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one, with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future. And let's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dimitar_sasselov_how_we_found_hundreds_of_potential_earth_like_planets
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"Up until now, our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms. Whether it's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch, or even as complex as programming robotics, we have always had to give a command to a machine, or even a series of commands, in order for it to do something for us. Communication between people, on the other hand, is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed. We observe facial expressions, body language, and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another. This actually forms a large part of our decision-making process. Our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction into human-computer interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do, but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences. And what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain, our center for control and experience.Well, it sounds like a pretty good idea, but this task, as Bruno mentioned, isn't an easy one for two main reasons: First, the detection algorithms. Our brain is made up of billions of active neurons, around 170,000 km of combined axon length. When these neurons interact, the chemical reaction emits an electrical impulse, which can be measured. The majority of our functional brain is distributed over the outer surface layer of the brain, and to increase the area that's available for mental capacity, the brain surface is highly folded. Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses. Each individual's cortex is folded differently, very much like a fingerprint. So even though a signal may come from the same functional part of the brain, by the time the structure has been folded, its physical location is very different between individuals, even identical twins. There is no longer any consistency in the surface signals.Our breakthrough was to create an algorithm that unfolds the cortex, so that we can map the signals closer to its source, and therefore making it capable of working across a mass population. The second challenge is the actual device for observing brainwaves. EEG measurements typically involve a hairnet with an array of sensors, like the one that you can see here in the photo. A technician will put the electrodes onto the scalp using a conductive gel or paste and usually after a procedure of preparing the scalp by light abrasion. Now this is quite time consuming and isn't the most comfortable process. And on top of that, these systems actually cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.So with that, I'd like to invite onstage Evan Grant, who is one of last year's speakers, who's kindly agreed to help me to demonstrate what we've been able to develop.(Applause)So the device that you see is a 14-channel, high-fidelity EEG acquisition system. It doesn't require any scalp preparation, no conductive gel or paste. It only takes a few minutes to put on and for the signals to settle. It's also wireless, so it gives you the freedom to move around. And compared to the tens of thousands of dollars for a traditional EEG system, this headset only costs a few hundred dollars. Now on to the detection algorithms. So facial expressions — as I mentioned before in emotional experiences — are actually designed to work out of the box with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization. But with the limited time we have available, I'd like to show you the cognitive suite, which is the ability for you to basically move virtual objects with your mind.Now, Evan is new to this system, so what we have to do first is create a new profile for him. He's obviously not Joanne — so we'll ""add user."" Evan. Okay. So the first thing we need to do with the cognitive suite is to start with training a neutral signal. With neutral, there's nothing in particular that Evan needs to do. He just hangs out. He's relaxed. And the idea is to establish a baseline or normal state for his brain, because every brain is different. It takes eight seconds to do this, and now that that's done, we can choose a movement-based action. So Evan, choose something that you can visualize clearly in your mind.Evan Grant: Let's do ""pull.""Tan Le: Okay, so let's choose ""pull."" So the idea here now is that Evan needs to imagine the object coming forward into the screen, and there's a progress bar that will scroll across the screen while he's doing that. The first time, nothing will happen, because the system has no idea how he thinks about ""pull."" But maintain that thought for the entire duration of the eight seconds. So: one, two, three, go. Okay. So once we accept this, the cube is live. So let's see if Evan can actually try and imagine pulling. Ah, good job! (Applause) That's really amazing.(Applause)So we have a little bit of time available, so I'm going to ask Evan to do a really difficult task. And this one is difficult because it's all about being able to visualize something that doesn't exist in our physical world. This is ""disappear."" So what you want to do — at least with movement-based actions, we do that all the time, so you can visualize it. But with ""disappear,"" there's really no analogies — so Evan, what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out, okay. Same sort of drill. So: one, two, three, go. Okay. Let's try that. Oh, my goodness. He's just too good. Let's try that again.EG: Losing concentration.(Laughter)TL: But we can see that it actually works, even though you can only hold it for a little bit of time. As I said, it's a very difficult process to imagine this. And the great thing about it is that we've only given the software one instance of how he thinks about ""disappear."" As there is a machine learning algorithm in this —(Applause)Thank you. Good job. Good job.(Applause)Thank you, Evan, you're a wonderful, wonderful example of the technology.So, as you can see, before, there is a leveling system built into this software so that as Evan, or any user, becomes more familiar with the system, they can continue to add more and more detections, so that the system begins to differentiate between different distinct thoughts. And once you've trained up the detections, these thoughts can be assigned or mapped to any computing platform, application or device.So I'd like to show you a few examples, because there are many possible applications for this new interface. In games and virtual worlds, for example, your facial expressions can naturally and intuitively be used to control an avatar or virtual character. Obviously, you can experience the fantasy of magic and control the world with your mind. And also, colors, lighting, sound and effects can dynamically respond to your emotional state to heighten the experience that you're having, in real time. And moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world, with robots and simple machines, for example — in this case, flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking ""lift"" with your mind.The technology can also be applied to real world applications — in this example, a smart home. You know, from the user interface of the control system to opening curtains or closing curtains. And of course, also to the lighting — turning them on or off. And finally, to real life-changing applications, such as being able to control an electric wheelchair. In this example, facial expressions are mapped to the movement commands.Man: Now blink right to go right. Now blink left to turn back left. Now smile to go straight.TL: We really — Thank you.(Applause)We are really only scratching the surface of what is possible today, and with the community's input, and also with the involvement of developers and researchers from around the world, we hope that you can help us to shape where the technology goes from here. Thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves
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"So let me just start with my story. So I tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college. Then I went on to tear my ACL, the ligament in my knee, and then developed an arthritic knee. And I'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story, and, by the way, I married a woman who has exactly the same story. So this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if I couldn't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me. So with that, let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we're trying to explain.Narrator: We are all aware of the risk of cancer, but there's another disease that's destined to affect even more of us: arthritis. Cancer may kill you, but when you look at the numbers, arthritis ruins more lives. Assuming you live a long life, there's a 50 percent chance you'll develop arthritis. And it's not just aging that causes arthritis. Common injuries can lead to decades of pain, until our joints quite literally grind to a halt. Desperate for a solution, we've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts, but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body, shouldn't we stop and ask if there's a better, more natural way? Let's consider an alternative path. What if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature, or within our own stem cells? This is the field of biologic replacements, where we replace worn-out parts with new, natural ones.Kevin Stone: And so, the mission is: how do I treat these things biologically? And let's talk about both what I did for my wife, and what I've done for hundreds of other patients. First thing for my wife, and the most common thing I hear from my patients, particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group, 70-year-old age group, is they come in and say, ""Hey, Doc, isn't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee? I'm not ready for joint replacement."" And so for her, I put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that [knee] joint space. And [the allograft] replaces [the missing meniscus]. And then for that unstable ligament, we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee. And then for the damaged arthritis on the surface, we did a stem cell paste graft, which we designed in 1991, to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there. So here's my wife's bad knee on the left, and her just hiking now four months later in Aspen, and doing well. And it works, not just for my wife, but certainly for other patients. The girl on the video, Jen Hudak, just won the Superpipe in Aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee, as you see in the other image — and having a paste graft to that knee. And so we can regrow these surfaces biologically.So with all this success, why isn't that good enough, you might ask. Well the reason is because there's not enough donor cycles. There's not enough young, healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us. And the tissue's very expensive. And so that's not going to be a solution that's going to get us global with biologic tissue. But the solution is animal tissue because it's plentiful, it's cheap, you can get it from young, healthy tissues, but the barrier is immunology. And the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl, or gal epitope. So if we're going to transplant animal tissues to people, we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope.So my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984. And I started first with cow Achilles tendon, where we would take the cow Achilles tendon, which is type-I collagen, strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template. We would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient's knee. We've now done that procedure, and it's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases, so it's an FDA-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus. And that's great when I can degrade the tissue. But what happens for your ligament when I need an intact ligament? I can't grind it up in a blender. So in that case, I have to design — and we designed with Uri Galili and Tom Turek — an enzyme wash to wash away, or strip, those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme. And we call that a ""gal stripping"" technique. What we do is humanize the tissue. It's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it (Laughter), and then we can put it back into a patient's knee. And we've done that. Now we've taken pig ligament — young, healthy, big tissue, put it into 10 patients in an FDA-approved trial — and then one of our patients went on to have three Canadian Masters Downhill championships — on his ""pig-lig,"" as he calls it. So we know it can work. And there's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending.So what about the next step? What about getting to a total biologic knee replacement, not just the parts? How are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement? Well here's how we're going to do it. So what we're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young, healthy pig, strip it of its antigens, load it with your stem cells, then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee, tack it on there, have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee. So that's our biologic approach right now. We're going to rebuild your knee with the parts. We're going to resurface it with a completely new surface.But we have other advantages from the animal kingdom. There's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation. We can harness those benefits. We can use thicker, younger, better tissues than you might have injured in your knee, or that you might have when you're 40, 50 or 60. We can do it as an outpatient procedure. We can strip that tissue very economically, and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global.And so welcome to super biologics. It's not hardware. It's not software. It's bioware. It's version 2.0 of you. And so with that, coming to a — (Laughter) coming to an operating theater near you soon, I believe.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_stone_the_bio_future_of_joint_replacement
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"Today, I'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes. My base of operations is in the U.S., but let's start at the other end of the map, in Kyoto, Japan, where I was living with a Japanese family while I was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago. I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings, but they popped up when I least expected it.On my first day, I went to a restaurant, and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar. After a pause, the waiter said, ""One does not put sugar in green tea."" ""I know,"" I said. ""I'm aware of this custom. But I really like my tea sweet."" In response, he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. ""One does not put sugar in green tea."" ""I understand,"" I said, ""that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea, but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea."" (Laughter) Surprised by my insistence, the waiter took up the issue with the manager. Pretty soon, a lengthy discussion ensued, and finally the manager came over to me and said, ""I am very sorry. We do not have sugar."" (Laughter) Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it, I ordered a cup of coffee, which the waiter brought over promptly. Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar.My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet, green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding. This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. From my American perspective, when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences, she has every right to have that request met. The American way, to quote Burger King, is to ""have it your way,"" because, as Starbucks says, ""happiness is in your choices."" (Laughter) But from the Japanese perspective, it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better — (Laughter) in this case, the ignorant gaijin — from making the wrong choice. Let's face it: the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards, and they were doing their best to help me save face.Americans tend to believe that they've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice. They think that choice, as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures. At times they don't even hold true at America's own borders. I'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them. As I do so, I hope you'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds.First assumption: if a choice affects you, then you should be the one to make it. This is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for. It is essential for success. In America, the primary locus of choice is the individual. People must choose for themselves, sometimes sticking to their guns, regardless of what other people want or recommend. It's called ""being true to yourself."" But do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice? Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question. In one study, which we ran in Japantown, San Francisco, we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children into the laboratory, and we divided them up into three groups.The first group came in, and they were greeted by Miss Smith, who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles. The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do, and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with. When the second group of children came in, they were brought to the same room, shown the same anagrams, but this time Miss Smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with. Now when the third group came in, they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers. (Laughter) In reality, the kids who were told what to do, whether by Miss Smith or their mothers, were actually given the very same activity, which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen.With this procedure, we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity, making it easier for us to compare performance. Such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed. Anglo-Americans, they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them, as compared to when it was chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers. It didn't matter who did the choosing, if the task was dictated by another, their performance suffered. In fact, some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted. (Laughter) One girl named Mary said, ""You asked my mother?""(Laughter)In contrast, Asian-American children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice, second best when they chose for themselves, and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith. A girl named Natsumi even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked, ""Could you please tell my mommy I did it just like she said?"" The first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. If they had a concept of being true to one's self, then that self, most likely, [was] composed, not of an individual, but of a collective. Success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one's own preferences. Or, you could say that the individual's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others.The assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others. When, in contrast, two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected, then they may amplify one another's success by turning choosing into a collective act. To insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships. Yet that is exactly what the American paradigm demands. It leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility. It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act. People that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating, but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone.The second assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. So bring it on, Walmart, with 100,000 different products, and Amazon, with 27 million books and Match.com with — what is it? — 15 million date possibilities now. You will surely find the perfect match. Let's test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. When the participants arrived for their interview, I offered them a set of drinks: Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite — seven, to be exact.During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. ""Oh, but it doesn't matter. It's all just soda. That's just one choice."" (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on, I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas, and I asked them, ""How many choices are these?"" Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices — juice, water and soda. Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. You know, research shows repeatedly that we can't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Of course, you and I know that Coke is the better choice.(Laughter)For modern Americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world, choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is. Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better, and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters. But for Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge. They were flooded with choice before they could protest that they didn't know how to swim. When asked, ""What words and images do you associate with choice?"" Grzegorz from Warsaw said, ""Ah, for me it is fear. There are some dilemmas you see. I am used to no choice."" Bohdan from Kiev said, in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace, ""It is too much. We do not need everything that is there."" A sociologist from the Warsaw Survey Agency explained, ""The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them. They were never given a chance to learn how to react."" And Tomasz, a young Polish man said, ""I don't need twenty kinds of chewing gum. I don't mean to say that I want no choice, but many of these choices are quite artificial.""In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. Americans train their whole lives to play ""spot the difference."" They practice this from such an early age that they've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability. In fact, though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice, we don't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent. When someone can't see how one choice is unlike another, or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities, but imposes constraints. It's not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it. But it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice. Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice.We all have physical, mental and emotional (Laughter) limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter, even in the grocery store, let alone over the course of our entire lives. A number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they're making a choice, they make poorer decisions, whether it be health care, investment, other critical areas. Yet still, many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them.This brings me to the third, and perhaps most problematic, assumption: ""You must never say no to choice."" To examine this, let's go back to the U.S. and then hop across the pond to France. Right outside Chicago, a young couple, Susan and Daniel Mitchell, were about to have their first baby. They'd already picked out a name for her, Barbara, after her grandmother. One night, when Susan was seven months pregnant, she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room. The baby was delivered through a C-section, but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia, a loss of oxygen to the brain. Unable to breathe on her own, she was put on a ventilator. Two days later, the doctors gave the Mitchells a choice: They could either remove Barbara off the life support, in which case she would die within a matter of hours, or they could keep her on life support, in which case she might still die within a matter of days. If she survived, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state, never able to walk, talk or interact with others. What do they do? What do any parent do?In a study I conducted with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali, American and French parents were interviewed. They had all suffered the same tragedy. In all cases, the life support was removed, and the infants had died. But there was a big difference. In France, the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed, while in the United States, the final decision rested with the parents. We wondered: does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one? We found that it did. Even up to a year later, American parents were more likely to express negative emotions, as compared to their French counterparts. French parents were more likely to say things like, ""Noah was here for so little time, but he taught us so much. He gave us a new perspective on life.""American parents were more likely to say things like, ""What if? What if?"" Another parent complained, ""I feel as if they purposefully tortured me. How did they get me to do that?"" And another parent said, ""I feel as if I've played a role in an execution."" But when the American parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctors make the decision, they all said, ""No."" They could not imagine turning that choice over to another, even though having made that choice made them feel trapped, guilty, angry. In a number of cases they were even clinically depressed. These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice, because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice.In her essay, ""The White Album,"" Joan Didion writes, ""We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience."" The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. This narrative promises so much: freedom, happiness, success. It lays the world at your feet and says, ""You can have anything, everything."" It's a great story, and it's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it. But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways.Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice, believing that they will be, or ought to be, welcomed with open hearts and minds. But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn't always work out that way. The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere. Moreover, Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long.Robert Frost once said that, ""It is poetry that is lost in translation."" This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language. But Joseph Brodsky said that, ""It is poetry that is gained in translation,"" suggesting that translation can be a creative, transformative act. When it comes to choice, we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives. Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written. No matter where we're from and what your narrative is, we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do, and what it can represent. And this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism. Rather, it teaches us when and how to act. It brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice, to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn't always deliver. If we learn to speak to one another, albeit through translation, then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness, complexity and compelling beauty.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on?Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. Yeah, I — as you would expect — get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest. And I can't decide. And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. And one was called ""Ballet Slippers."" And the other one was called ""Adorable."" (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies, and the one lady told me, ""Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.'"" ""Well, what does it look like?"" ""Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink."" ""Okay, great."" The other lady tells me to wear ""Adorable."" ""What does it look like?"" ""It's a glamorous shade of pink."" And so I asked them, ""Well, how do I tell them apart? What's different about them?"" And they said, ""Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous."" Okay, we got that. And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart.(Laughter)And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color, so I decided to do a little experiment. So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, ""Which one would you pick?"" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. (Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. Now, of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked ""Adorable,"" and when the labels were on, they picked ""Ballet Slippers."" So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different.BG: Thank you. Sheena Iyengar. Thank you Sheena.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing
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"I am a marine toxicologist, and I've been very, very concerned about the Gulf, particularly about the massive applications of the toxic dispersants, the Corexits. I've been working on ocean pollution for quite a long time — the impacts on marine life and particularly the impacts on marine mammals. As it turns out, marine mammals are at the top of this food chain that we're pouring millions of tons of toxic substances into every year. And they are showing the signs of this. I'm sorry to have a sad slide like this, but not everything is all that happy, especially in my work. They are loaded with toxic chemicals in their body, hundreds of compounds, all kinds of compounds — it's staggering. And they're dying off rather regularly, tens of thousands around the world. It's predicted they may go extinct — about a third of them — within about 30 years.So my project is along the Northwest Atlantic. It's called Seals as Sentinels. We're tracking pollution at the top of the food web, in marine mammals and fish. It's a region-wide, eco-toxicological investigation. We're looking at a lot of compounds, but recently been quite interested in the flame retardants, the brominated flame retardants that are in many, many things that we use in our everyday life, from the cushions in the chairs we're all sitting on to the plastic casings of our computers, our television sets and so on. So we are tracking how do these things get from the products into the ocean, which is the final sink for them. And there's quite a complicated pathway for that because, as these products age, they get concentrated in dust, and then they also get thrown out, so they go to the landfills. They wind up in waste water treatment plants. As you all know, we throw out billions of computers and TVs every year. And those go to e-waste dumps. And all that gets into surface waters, eventually reaching the ocean, the final sink. So, in our study, we did find quite high levels, as we expected, of these flame retardants in the harbor seals' bodies. And we reported this. It led to a ban of this neuro-toxic flame retardant called Deca in Maine, where I am based, and also then a phase-out, U.S.-wide, at the end of last year. But we said, well, on the bright side, our harbor seals at least will not be bursting into flame anytime soon.So then I got really curious, myself, as a toxicologist, and I donated some blood to my lab and said, ""Okay, let's do it."" Well, we detected 113 different compounds in my blood. And I must say, if any of you would have this done, you'd probably find a similar profile, or cocktail, as they call it. But I was the recipient of a lot of flame retardant material for some reason. And just to point out the levels — Americans have 10 to 40 times higher levels of these compounds in our bodies than the Europeans. Why? Because we are flame-retarding everything, and we have weak regulations for toxic chemicals. But lo and behold, I'm one of the high-end individuals. Lucky me. But then I thought, well, in case of a fire, I might be the last one to ignite.(Laughter)So anyway, here's the problem — and it is a problem that we're looking at in the Gulf today — we're not regulating chemicals in this country properly. We're hardly regulating them at all. And we're letting industry run the show. And Jackie Savitz spoke this morning about Big Oil and the propaganda and how we're all brainwashed with their, you know, lies and so forth. Well, Big Chemical is what we're dealing with here. And they're allowed to keep trade secrets, so they don't even give the ingredients out. Plus they don't give health and safety data, so, consequently, they cannot be regulated before they go to market. So it's a case of innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is not on the producer.So I then was invited to go to the Gulf in May. I went down there on a preliminary investigation to look into dispersants and how they're going into the water column and so forth. And I was told that I was the only toxicologist to date who was dumb enough to get into the water, but I did. And we dove in the slick without even HazMat gear. And I did get sick. I got a ferocious sore throat two days later. I felt like my throat was on fire. But it did pass. And what I did see in the water as we went down, what really shocked me — and it's haunted me ever since — because I could see the droplets of oil dispersing. And as you go down, they're catching all kinds of plankton, bumping into, you know, little wisps of life that are the food for the planktivores, the herring kind of fish. And you could just see the web of death as you go down in the water column.Well, you know, we got into this in the beginning as a trade-off, they say, between the wetlands versus the ocean depth. And I didn't agree with that decision at the time; I still don't. The decision was to protect the marshes. When the oil gets into the marshes, you can't get it out. And as you know, there's been a very weak response, up until recently, to actually collect the oil. It's gotten much more aggressive. This is an Exxon slide showing what happens, the scenario and the trade-off. So this shows oil on the surface. You can see it getting up into the mangrove, but it is not harming the corals or the sea grass, right. So here we have the other scenario. If you disperse, the sea grass and the corals are getting hit pretty hard, but you're saving the mangrove. So this, to me, is like going to the eye doctor, okay? Is it better with one or two?(Laughter)The problem is that we have released so darn much of this stuff, we're climbing up to two million gallons very quickly. And then there's the problem of the plumes. What plumes? It turns out there are plumes. Independent researchers found that. And then there's the looming, messy problem of human health, reported human health effects. And actually, one of our federal officials said that it was probably heat stress. So ... Having been in that water just for the short time I was there, I can tell you, it is not heat stress. There are volumes of volatile petroleum fumes coming off that water, plus the Corexit, which has solvent in it. So it is not at all rational.So what do we have? The BP show is going on. Our officials complained about Corexit, which is the most toxic line of dispersants. But heck, they're still using it, and they used the most toxic one, the 9527, until they ran out of supplies. Now they're on 9500. 9527 had 2-butoxyethanol in it that causes internal bleeding. We know that from the Exxon Valdez spill, by the way. So what we're doing, we're putting compounds with petroleum solvents onto a petroleum spill. Does this make sense? So this is the way it works. And I want to show you this cute little thing that happens here. It's a micelle. Micelles form around the oil. And what happens first is the solvents break into the oil, the lipid membrane, they let the surfactants in there. The surfactants — which are like things we use on fast food wrappers — they grab around the droplets of oil, and they make little, tiny droplets with nice, little surfactant edges to them. The thing to remember about the micelles — these little floating globules of toxin — is they are there to deliver. They're like the FedEx guys. And if you're a fish, and you haven't gotten your glob in the morning, you're going to get it in the afternoon, because they've got your number.So from a toxicology perspective, this is really awful because Corexit and the dispersed oil are much more toxic together than either alone. And usually the exposure is a combined exposure. The dispersants — as I was saying — their job is to break down the lipid membrane. The solvents in them do that very efficiently. So they break down lipid membranes in our body, starting with cells of the skin, the cells of organs. So it actually hastens oil getting into the body easily and readily. Oil contains hundreds of hydrocarbon compounds and other compounds that are toxic to every organ in the body. And so with the dispersants combined, you have this very synergistic combined toxicity. Corexit also contains petroleum solvents and many other toxic compounds. And I'm part of a chat group, which is a national group of toxicologists and chemists that are, you know, basically turning cartwheels trying to figure out what's in this stuff, and what is it doing and what are the interactions of these chemicals, most of which we don't know, and what are their byproducts, which are usually more toxic than the parent compound. So we did find that Corexit 9500 contains heavy metals, arsenic and chromium — arsenic at high enough levels to have cancer-causing effects.So this is what we have to look at, these, you know, ridiculous safety data sheets, which have nothing on them much. And now they were forced to release the ultimate list of everything that's in Corexit. And guess what, tons of stuff is missing. Derivatives, derivatives, these are whole big groups of many, many compounds, these sorbitans. And then you get down to the petroleum distillates, which are the solvents, hundreds of them. They are not identified. And why? Trade secrets again. BP's running the show, and the Nalco company, this is all they have to do. So far these ingredients have not been released, and toxicologists are actually going nuts because we cannot predict with certainty what the interactions and toxic results are going to be.But we do have quite a lot at risk down there, as we all know, the 33 wildlife refuges, so much wildlife and fish and diversity. So we know from previous spills. And then part of this is just part of my bad dreams. And I appreciate being able to vent some of my anguish upon you. What we do know is that the corals are going to get hit hard. And this is a study that was done on the Australian coast, the coast of Tasmania. Corals are, you know, the home to about a quarter of all marine species. And with the Corexit and the oil, there's zero percent fertilization. With oil alone, there's 98 percent fertilization. So they're a very sensitive species to this combo.Here's another group. I could see myself easily in the water column. The plankton and the plankton eaters, you know, these are the little herring fish that go through the water column with their mouths open, feeding indiscriminately and just lapping up this brown pudding of toxic stuff. And we do know from other studies that this is a highly toxic mixture. See the oil and Corexit is causing death at a much, much lower dose than oil alone. That's probably as far as what we do know about toxic effects. But my bad dreams go like this. The piscivorous fish, the cobia, grouper, amberjacks, those big fish, also the tuna and sharks, are going to hit by this. And the gills are quite sensitive. The respiratory system is very sensitive. Think about it with the Corexit hitting the membranes, and it will clog up the gills, and then these animals are going to be getting something like what you call chemical pneumonia, trying to aspirate the compounds. It also will cause internal bleeding upon ingestion. I'm very worried about the air-breathing mammals because I study them, but also, the way their going to be exposed is every time they come to the surface to take a breath, they're going to inhale these volatile fumes. And what does happen with that eventually is pneumonia sets in and liver, kidney, brain damage. The Corexit is transporting the oil into every membrane and every system of the body. And you're having a lot of different unpleasant effects, but burns to the eyes and mouth, skin ulcers, lesions. And I think, personally, that we have not begun to see the impacts of this spill on the wildlife of the Gulf.We started hypothesizing: what do we know? what do with think would be a trophic cascade? which means that somebody gets wiped out, and then everything above that's eating those guys will crash. So our thought was — this is a simple thinking process, but ... obviously the plankton, the planktivores, and that's about as far as we got. And then it turns out we're not very good at figuring this stuff out. This is what the Exxon Valdez scientists thought would happen, this trophic cascade where you lose the kelp and the herring and other fishes and going up. They thought that eventually the killer whale would be at the top of this cascade. And then here's what really happened, much more complicated, much more specific. Actually the kelp and the barnacles that attach to the rock were decimated by the combination of Corexit and the oil. They were replaced by invasive species, which had less holding power to the rock. Storms came along. They ripped out of the rock. And this was the entire food web for the sea ducks. And as you know, we lost about 300,000 sea ducks from the Exxon Valdez spill, and they haven't come back.So we are launching an independent study. And by independent, I do not mean alone; I mean independent in the sense of not tied to the kind of crime-scene secrecy that's going on in the Gulf now. But we are actually going to be assessing toxic impacts, but we need lots and lots of partners to do this intelligently. We have some of the partners lined up. And Dave Gallo signed on. Sylvia's in here. And we hope that some of you will help us. My question to you is: why shouldn't we know? Don't we have the right to know? Surely we have the right to learn what loss we are going through in the Gulf. And my wish would be — for the gulf prize — would be that we have the truth. Whatever it is, please let us have the truth. And to get there, we need to do the assessment.So I appreciate being here. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_shaw_the_oil_spill_s_toxic_trade_off
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"For a moment, what I need to do is project something on the screen of your imagination. We're in 17th century Japan on the west coast, and a little, wizened monk is hurrying along, near midnight, to the crest of a small hill. He arrives on the small hill, dripping with water. He stands there, and he looks across at the island, Sado. And he scans across the ocean, and he looks at the sky. Then he says to himself, very quietly, ""[Turbulent the sea,] [Stretching across to Sado] [The Milky Way]."" Basho was a brilliant man. He said more with less than any human that I have ever read or talked to. Basho, in 17 syllables, juxtaposed a turbulent ocean driven by a storm now past, and captured the almost impossible beauty of our home galaxy with millions of stars, probably hundreds and hundreds of — who knows how many — planets, maybe even an ocean that we will probably call Sylvia in time. As he was nearing his death, his disciples and followers kept asking him, ""What's the secret? How can you make haiku poems so beautiful so easily?"" And toward the end, he said, ""If you would know the pine tree, go to the pine tree."" That was it.(Laughter)Sylvia has said we must use every capacity we have in order to know the oceans. If we would know the oceans, we must go to the oceans. And what I'd like to talk to you today about, a little bit, is really transforming the relationship, or the interplay, between humans and oceans with a new capability that is not at all routine yet. I hope it will be. There are a few key points. One of them is the oceans are central to the quality of life on earth. Another is that there are bold, new ways of studying oceans that we have not used well yet. And the last is that these bold, new ways that we are exploring as a community will transform the way we look at our planet, our oceans, and eventually how we manage probably the entire planet, for what it's worth. So what scientists do when they begin is to start with the system. They define what the system is. The system isn't Chesapeake Bay. It's not the Kuril arc. It's not even the entire Pacific. It's the whole planet, the entire planet, continents and oceans together. That's the system.And basically, our challenge is to optimize the benefits and mitigate the risks of living on a planet that's driven by only two processes, two sources of energy, one of which is solar, that drives the winds, the waves, the clouds, the storms and photosynthesis. The second one is internal energy. And these two war against one another almost continuously. Mountain ranges, plate tectonics, moves the continents around, forms ore deposits. Volcanoes erupt. That's the planet that we live on. It's immensely complex.Now I don't expect all of you to see all the details here, but what I want you to see is this is about 10 percent of the processes that operate within the oceans almost continuously, and have for the last 4 billion years. This is a system that's been around a very long time. And these have all co-evolved. What do I mean by that? They interact with one another constantly. All of them interact with one another. So the complexity of this system that we're looking at, the one driven by the sun — upper portion, mostly — and the lower portion is partly driven by the input from heat below and by other processes. This is very, very important because this is the system, this is the crucible, out of which life on the planet came, and it's now time for us to understand it. We must understand it. That's one of the themes that Sylvia reminds us about: understand this ocean of ours, this basic life support system, the dominant life support system on the planet.Look at this complexity here. This is only one variable. If you can see the complexity, you can see how tiny, little eddies and large eddies and the motion — this is just sea surface temperature, but it's immensely complicated. Now a layer in, the other two or three hundred processes that are all interacting, partly as a function of temperature, partly as a function of all the other factors, and you've got a really complicated system. That's our challenge, is to understand, understand this system in new and phenomenal ways. And there's an urgency to this. Part of the urgency comes from the fact that, of order, a billion people on the planet currently are undernourished or starving. And part of the issue is for Cody — who's here, 16 years old — and I have permission to relay this number. When he, 40 years from now, is the age of Nancy Brown, there are going to be another two and a half billion people on the planet. We can't solve all the problems by looking only at the oceans, but if we don't understand the fundamental life support system of this planet much more thoroughly than we do now, then the stresses that we will face, and that Cody will face, and even Nancy, who's going to live till she's 98, will have really problems coping.All right, let's talk about another perspective on the importance of the oceans. Look at this diagram, which is showing warm waters in red, cool waters in blue, and on the continents, what you're seeing in bright green, is the growth of vegetation, and in olive green, the dieback of vegetation. And in the lower left hand corner there's a clock ticking away from 1982 to 1998 and then cycling again. What you'll see is that the rhythms of growth, of vegetation — a subset of which is food on the continents — is directly tied to the rhythms of the sea surface temperatures. The oceans control, or at least significantly influence, correlate with, the growth patterns and the drought patterns and the rain patterns on the continents. So people in Kansas, in a wheat field in Kansas, need to understand that the oceans are central to them as well. Another complexity: this is the age of the oceans. I'm going to layer in on top of this the tectonic plates. The age of the ocean, the tectonic plates, gives rise to a totally new phenomenon that we have heard about in this conference.And I share with you some very high-definition video that we collected in real time. Seconds after this video was taken, people in Beijing, people in Sydney, people in Amsterdam, people in Washington D.C. were watching this. Now you've heard of hydrothermal vents, but the other discovery is that deep below the sea floor, there is vast reservoir of microbial activity, which we have only just discovered and we have almost no way to study. Some people have estimated that the biomass tied up in these microbes living in the pours and the cracks of the sea floor and below rival the total amount of living biomass at the surface of the planet. It's an astonishing insight, and we have only found out about this recently. This is very, very exciting. It may be the next rainforest, in terms of pharmaceuticals. We know little or nothing about it.Well, Marcel Proust has this wonderful saying that, ""The real voyage of discovery consists not so much in seeking new territory, but possibly in having new sets of eyes,"" new ways of seeing things, a new mindset. And many of you remember the early stages of oceanography, when we had to use what we had at our fingertips. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy in those days. Some of you remember this, I'm sure. And now, we have an entire suite of tools that are really pretty powerful — ships, satellites, moorings. But they don't quite cut it. They don't quite give us what we need.And the program that I wanted to talk to you about just a little bit here, was funded, and it involves autonomous vehicles like the one running across the base of this image. Modeling: on the right hand side, there's a very complex computational model. On the left hand side, there's a new type of mooring, which I'll show you in just a second. And on the basis of several points, the oceans are complex, and they're central to the life on earth. They are changing rapidly, but not predictably. And the models that we need to predict the future do not have enough data to refine them. The computational power is amazing. But without data, those models will never ever be predicted. And that's what we really need. For a variety of reasons they're dangerous, but we feel that OOI, this Ocean Observatory Initiative, which the National Science Foundation has begun to fund, has the potential to really transform things. And the goal of the program is to launch an era of scientific discovery and understanding across and within the ocean basins, utilizing widely accessible, interactive telepresence. It's a new world.We will be present throughout the volume of the ocean, at will, communicating in real time. And this is what the system involves, a number of sites in the southern hemisphere, shown in those circles. And in the northern hemisphere there are four sites. I won't talk a lot about most of them right here, but the one on the west coast, that's in the box, is called the regional scale nodes. It was once called Neptune. And let me show you what's behind it.Fiber: next-generation way of communicating. You can see the copper tips on these things. You can transmit power, but the bandwidth is in those tiny, little threads smaller than the hair on your head in diameter. And this particular set here can transmit something of the order of three to five terabits per second. This is phenomenal bandwidth. And this is what the planet looks like. We are already laced up as if we're in a fiber optic corset, if you like. This is what it looks like. And the cables go really continent to continent. It's a very powerful system, and most of our communications consist of it.So this is the system that I'm talking about, off the west coast. It's coincident with the tectonic plate, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. And it's going to deliver abundant power and unprecedented bandwidth across this entire volume — in the overlying ocean, on the sea floor and below the sea floor. Bandwidth and power and a wide variety of processes that will be operating. This is what one of those primary nodes looks like, and it's like a sub station with power and bandwidth that can spread out over an area the size of Seattle. And the kind of science that can be done will be determined by a variety of scientists who want to be involved and can bring the instrumentation to the table. They will bring it and link it in. It'll be, in a sense, like having time on a telescope, except you'll have your own port. Climate change, ocean acidification, dissolved oxygen, carbon cycle, coastal upwelling, fishing dynamics — the full spectrum of earth science and ocean science simultaneously in the same volume. So anyone coming along later simply accesses the database and can draw down the information they need about anything that has taken place. And this is just the first of these. In conjunction with our Canadian colleagues, we've set this up.Now I want to take you into the caldera. On the left hand side there is a large volcano called Axial Seamount. And we're going to go down into the Axial Seamount using animation. Here's what this system is going to look like that we are funded to build at this point. Very powerful. That's an elevator that's constantly moving up and down, but it can be controlled by the folks on land who are responsible for it. Or they can transfer control to someone in India or China who can take over for a while, because it's all going to be directly connected through the Internet. There will be massive amounts of data flowing ashore, all available to anyone who has any interest in using it. This is going to be much more powerful than having a single ship in a single location, then move to a new location.We're flying across the caldera floor. There is a number of robotic systems. There's cameras that can be turned on and off at your will, if those are your experiments. The kinds of systems that will be down there, the kinds of instruments that will be on the sea floor, consist of — if you can read them there — there's cameras, there's pressure sensors, fluorometers, there's seismometers. It's a full spectrum of tools. Now, that mound right there actually looks like this. This is what it actually looks like. And this is the kind of activity that we can see with high-definition video, because the bandwidth of these cables is so huge that we could have five to 10 stereo HD systems running continuously and, again, directed through robotic techniques from land. Very, very powerful. And these are the things that we're funded to do today.So what can we actually do tomorrow? We're about to ride the wave of technological opportunity. There are emerging technologies throughout the field around oceanography, which we will incorporate into oceanography, and through that convergence, we will transform oceanography into something even more magical. Robotics systems are just incredible these days, absolutely incredible. And we will be bringing robotics of all sorts into the ocean. Nanotechnology: this is a small generator. It's smaller than a postage stamp, and it can generate power just by being attached to your shirt as you move. Just as you move, it generates power. There are many kinds of things that can be used in the ocean, continuously. Imaging: Many of you know a good deal more about this type of thing than I, but stereo imaging at four times the definition that we have in HD will be routine within five years.And this is the magic one. As a result of the human genome process, we are in a situation where events that take place in the ocean — like an erupting volcano, or something of that sort — can actually be sampled. We pump the fluid through one of these systems, and we press the button, and it's analyzed for the genomic character. And that's transmitted back to land immediately. So in the volume of the ocean, we will know, not just the physics and the chemistry, but the base of the food chain will be transparent to us with data on a continuous basis. Grid computing: the power of grid computers is going to be just amazing here. We will soon be using grid computing to do pretty much everything, like adjust the data and everything that goes with the data. The power generation will come from the ocean itself. And the next generation fiber will be simply magic. It's far beyond what we currently have. So the presence of the power and the bandwidth in the environment will allow all of these new technologies to converge in a manner that is just unprecedented.So within five to seven years, I see us having a capacity to be completely present throughout the ocean and have all of that connected to the Internet, so we can reach many, many folks. Delivering the power and the bandwidth into the ocean will dramatically accelerate adaptation. Here's an example. When earthquakes take place, massive amounts of these new microbes we've never seen before come out of the sea floor. We have a way of addressing that, a new way of addressing that. We've determined from the earthquake activity that you're seeing here that the top of that volcano is erupting, so we deploy the troops. What are the troops? The troops are the autonomous vehicles, of course. And they fly into the erupting volcano. They sample the fluids coming out of the sea floor during an eruption, which have the microbes that have never been to the surface of the planet before. They eject it to the surface where it floats, and it is picked up by an autonomous airplane, and it's brought back to the laboratory within 24 hours of the eruption. This is doable. All the pieces are there.A laboratory: many of you heard what happened on 9/7. Some doctors in New York City removed the gallbladder of a woman in France. We could do work on the sea floor that would be stunning, and it would be on live TV, if we have interesting things to show. So we can bring an entirely new telepresence to the world, throughout the ocean. This — I've shown you sea floor — but so the goal here is real time interaction with the oceans from anywhere on earth. It's going to be amazing.And as I go here, I just want to show you what we can bring into classrooms, and indeed, what we can bring into your pocket. Many of you don't think of this yet, but the ocean will be in your pocket. It won't be long. It won't be long.So let me leave you then with a few words from another poet, if you'll forgive me. In 1943, T.S. Eliot wrote the ""Four Quartets."" He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In ""Little Gidding"" he says — speaking I think for the human race, but certainly for the TED Conference and Sylvia — ""We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, arrive through the unknown remembered gate where the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river the voice of a hidden waterfall not known because not looked for, but heard, half heard in the stillness beneath the waves of the sea.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_delaney_wiring_an_interactive_ocean
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"I want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species. The first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious, and that's that our species, Homo sapiens, is actually really, really smart — like, ridiculously smart — like you're all doing things that no other species on the planet does right now. And this is, of course, not the first time you've probably recognized this. Of course, in addition to being smart, we're also an extremely vain species. So we like pointing out the fact that we're smart. You know, so I could turn to pretty much any sage from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert to point out things like the fact that we're noble in reason and infinite in faculties and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral.But of course, there's a second observation about the human species that I want to focus on a little bit more, and that's the fact that even though we're actually really smart, sometimes uniquely smart, we can also be incredibly, incredibly dumb when it comes to some aspects of our decision making. Now I'm seeing lots of smirks out there. Don't worry, I'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes. But of course, just in the last two years we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude. And we've watched as the tools we uniquely make to pull the resources out of our environment kind of just blow up in our face. We've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create — these markets that were supposed to be foolproof — we've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes.But both of these two embarrassing examples, I think, don't highlight what I think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make, which is that we'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of FAIL Blog-worthy decisions. But it turns out, what social scientists are actually learning is that most of us, when put in certain contexts, will actually make very specific mistakes. The errors we make are actually predictable. We make them again and again. And they're actually immune to lots of evidence. When we get negative feedback, we still, the next time we're face with a certain context, tend to make the same errors. And so this has been a real puzzle to me as a sort of scholar of human nature. What I'm most curious about is, how is a species that's as smart as we are capable of such bad and such consistent errors all the time?You know, we're the smartest thing out there, why can't we figure this out? In some sense, where do our mistakes really come from? And having thought about this a little bit, I see a couple different possibilities. One possibility is, in some sense, it's not really our fault. Because we're a smart species, we can actually create all kinds of environments that are super, super complicated, sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand, even though we've actually created them. We create financial markets that are super complex. We create mortgage terms that we can't actually deal with. And of course, if we are put in environments where we can't deal with it, in some sense makes sense that we actually might mess certain things up. If this was the case, we'd have a really easy solution to the problem of human error. We'd actually just say, okay, let's figure out the kinds of technologies we can't deal with, the kinds of environments that are bad — get rid of those, design things better, and we should be the noble species that we expect ourselves to be.But there's another possibility that I find a little bit more worrying, which is, maybe it's not our environments that are messed up. Maybe it's actually us that's designed badly. This is a hint that I've gotten from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors. And what we see is that people tend to keep making errors exactly the same way, over and over again. It feels like we might almost just be built to make errors in certain ways. This is a possibility that I worry a little bit more about, because, if it's us that's messed up, it's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it. We might just have to accept the fact that we're error prone and try to design things around it.So this is the question my students and I wanted to get at. How can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two? What we need is a population that's basically smart, can make lots of decisions, but doesn't have access to any of the systems we have, any of the things that might mess us up — no human technology, human culture, maybe even not human language. And so this is why we turned to these guys here. These are one of the guys I work with. This is a brown capuchin monkey. These guys are New World primates, which means they broke off from the human branch about 35 million years ago. This means that your great, great, great great, great, great — with about five million ""greats"" in there — grandmother was probably the same great, great, great, great grandmother with five million ""greats"" in there as Holly up here. You know, so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant, but albeit evolutionary, relative. The good news about Holly though is that she doesn't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do. You know, she's a smart, very cut creature, a primate as well, but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up. So she's the perfect test case.What if we put Holly into the same context as humans? Does she make the same mistakes as us? Does she not learn from them? And so on. And so this is the kind of thing we decided to do. My students and I got very excited about this a few years ago. We said, all right, let's, you know, throw so problems at Holly, see if she messes these things up. First problem is just, well, where should we start? Because, you know, it's great for us, but bad for humans. We make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts. You know, where are we actually going to start with this? And because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse, around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news, we said, hhmm, maybe we should actually start in the financial domain. Maybe we should look at monkey's economic decisions and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do.Of course, that's when we hit a sort second problem — a little bit more methodological — which is that, maybe you guys don't know, but monkeys don't actually use money. I know, you haven't met them. But this is why, you know, they're not in the queue behind you at the grocery store or the ATM — you know, they don't do this stuff. So now we faced, you know, a little bit of a problem here. How are we actually going to ask monkeys about money if they don't actually use it? So we said, well, maybe we should just, actually just suck it up and teach monkeys how to use money. So that's just what we did. What you're looking at over here is actually the first unit that I know of of non-human currency. We weren't very creative at the time we started these studies, so we just called it a token. But this is the unit of currency that we've taught our monkeys at Yale to actually use with humans, to actually buy different pieces of food. It doesn't look like much — in fact, it isn't like much.Like most of our money, it's just a piece of metal. As those of you who've taken currencies home from your trip know, once you get home, it's actually pretty useless. It was useless to the monkeys at first before they realized what they could do with it. When we first gave it to them in their enclosures, they actually kind of picked them up, looked at them. They were these kind of weird things. But very quickly, the monkeys realized that they could actually hand these tokens over to different humans in the lab for some food. And so you see one of our monkeys, Mayday, up here doing this. This is A and B are kind of the points where she's sort of a little bit curious about these things — doesn't know. There's this waiting hand from a human experimenter, and Mayday quickly figures out, apparently the human wants this. Hands it over, and then gets some food. It turns out not just Mayday, all of our monkeys get good at trading tokens with human salesman. So here's just a quick video of what this looks like. Here's Mayday. She's going to be trading a token for some food and waiting happily and getting her food. Here's Felix, I think. He's our alpha male; he's a kind of big guy. But he too waits patiently, gets his food and goes on.So the monkeys get really good at this. They're surprisingly good at this with very little training. We just allowed them to pick this up on their own. The question is: is this anything like human money? Is this a market at all, or did we just do a weird psychologist's trick by getting monkeys to do something, looking smart, but not really being smart. And so we said, well, what would the monkeys spontaneously do if this was really their currency, if they were really using it like money? Well, you might actually imagine them to do all the kinds of smart things that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other. You might have them start paying attention to price, paying attention to how much they buy — sort of keeping track of their monkey token, as it were. Do the monkeys do anything like this?And so our monkey marketplace was born. The way this works is that our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure. When they get a hankering for some treats, we actually allowed them a way out into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market. Upon entering the market — it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets because, as the monkeys entered the door of the market, a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens so they could actually trade the tokens with one of these two guys here — two different possible human salesmen that they could actually buy stuff from. The salesmen were students from my lab. They dressed differently; they were different people. And over time, they did basically the same thing so the monkeys could learn, you know, who sold what at what price — you know, who was reliable, who wasn't, and so on. And you can see that each of the experimenters is actually holding up a little, yellow food dish. and that's what the monkey can for a single token. So everything costs one token, but as you can see, sometimes tokens buy more than others, sometimes more grapes than others.So I'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like. Here's a monkey-eye-view. Monkeys are shorter, so it's a little short. But here's Honey. She's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently. All of a sudden the market opens. Here's her choice: one grapes or two grapes. You can see Honey, very good market economist, goes with the guy who gives more. She could teach our financial advisers a few things or two. So not just Honey, most of the monkeys went with guys who had more. Most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food. When we introduced sales, we saw the monkeys paid attention to that. They really cared about their monkey token dollar. The more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists to actually look at the monkeys' data using economic tools, they basically matched, not just qualitatively, but quantitatively with what we saw humans doing in a real market. So much so that, if you saw the monkeys' numbers, you couldn't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market.And what we'd really thought we'd done is like we'd actually introduced something that, at least for the monkeys and us, works like a real financial currency. Question is: do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do? Well, we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might. One thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace was any evidence of saving — you know, just like our own species. The monkeys entered the market, spent their entire budget and then went back to everyone else. The other thing we also spontaneously saw, embarrassingly enough, is spontaneous evidence of larceny. The monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity — from each other, often from us — you know, things we didn't necessarily think we were introducing, but things we spontaneously saw.So we said, this looks bad. Can we actually see if the monkeys are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do? One possibility is just kind of let the monkey financial system play out, you know, see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years. We were a little impatient so we wanted to sort of speed things up a bit. So we said, let's actually give the monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong in certain kinds of economic challenges, or certain kinds of economic experiments. And so, since the best way to see how people go wrong is to actually do it yourself, I'm going to give you guys a quick experiment to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action.So imagine that right now I handed each and every one of you a thousand U.S. dollars — so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills. Take these, put it in your wallet and spend a second thinking about what you're going to do with it. Because it's yours now; you can buy whatever you want. Donate it, take it, and so on. Sounds great, but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money. And here's your choice: you can either be risky, in which case I'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens. If it comes up heads, you're going to get a thousand dollars more. If it comes up tails, you get nothing. So it's a chance to get more, but it's pretty risky. Your other option is a bit safe. Your just going to get some money for sure. I'm just going to give you 500 bucks. You can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately. So see what your intuition is here. Most people actually go with the play-it-safe option. Most people say, why should I be risky when I can get 1,500 dollars for sure? This seems like a good bet. I'm going to go with that. You might say, eh, that's not really irrational. People are a little risk-averse. So what?Well, the ""so what?"" comes when start thinking about the same problem set up just a little bit differently. So now imagine that I give each and every one of you 2,000 dollars — 20 crisp hundred dollar bills. Now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before. Think about how you'd feel sticking it in your wallet. And now imagine that I have you make another choice But this time, it's a little bit worse. Now, you're going to be deciding how you're going to lose money, but you're going to get the same choice. You can either take a risky loss — so I'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you're going to actually lose a lot. If it comes up tails, you lose nothing, you're fine, get to keep the whole thing — or you could play it safe, which means you have to reach back into your wallet and give me five of those $100 bills, for certain.And I'm seeing a lot of furrowed brows out there. So maybe you're having the same intuitions as the subjects that were actually tested in this, which is when presented with these options, people don't choose to play it safe. They actually tend to go a little risky. The reason this is irrational is that we've given people in both situations the same choice. It's a 50/50 shot of a thousand or 2,000, or just 1,500 dollars with certainty. But people's intuitions about how much risk to take varies depending on where they started with.So what's going on? Well, it turns out that this seems to be the result of at least two biases that we have at the psychological level. One is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms. You really have to do work to figure out, well, one option's a thousand, 2,000; one is 1,500. Instead, we find it very easy to think in very relative terms as options change from one time to another. So we think of things as, ""Oh, I'm going to get more,"" or ""Oh, I'm going to get less."" This is all well and good, except that changes in different directions actually effect whether or not we think options are good or not. And this leads to the second bias, which economists have called loss aversion.The idea is that we really hate it when things go into the red. We really hate it when we have to lose out on some money. And this means that sometimes we'll actually switch our preferences to avoid this. What you saw in that last scenario is that subjects get risky because they want the small shot that there won't be any loss. That means when we're in a risk mindset — excuse me, when we're in a loss mindset, we actually become more risky, which can actually be really worrying. These kinds of things play out in lots of bad ways in humans. They're why stock investors hold onto losing stocks longer — because they're evaluating them in relative terms. They're why people in the housing market refused to sell their house — because they don't want to sell at a loss.The question we were interested in is whether the monkeys show the same biases. If we set up those same scenarios in our little monkey market, would they do the same thing as people? And so this is what we did, we gave the monkeys choices between guys who were safe — they did the same thing every time — or guys who were risky — they did things differently half the time. And then we gave them options that were bonuses — like you guys did in the first scenario — so they actually have a chance more, or pieces where they were experiencing losses — they actually thought they were going to get more than they really got.And so this is what this looks like. We introduced the monkeys to two new monkey salesmen. The guy on the left and right both start with one piece of grape, so it looks pretty good. But they're going to give the monkeys bonuses. The guy on the left is a safe bonus. All the time, he adds one, to give the monkeys two. The guy on the right is actually a risky bonus. Sometimes the monkeys get no bonus — so this is a bonus of zero. Sometimes the monkeys get two extra. For a big bonus, now they get three. But this is the same choice you guys just faced. Do the monkeys actually want to play it safe and then go with the guy who's going to do the same thing on every trial, or do they want to be risky and try to get a risky, but big, bonus, but risk the possibility of getting no bonus. People here played it safe. Turns out, the monkeys play it safe too. Qualitatively and quantitatively, they choose exactly the same way as people, when tested in the same thing.You might say, well, maybe the monkeys just don't like risk. Maybe we should see how they do with losses. And so we ran a second version of this. Now, the monkeys meet two guys who aren't giving them bonuses; they're actually giving them less than they expect. So they look like they're starting out with a big amount. These are three grapes; the monkey's really psyched for this. But now they learn these guys are going to give them less than they expect. They guy on the left is a safe loss. Every single time, he's going to take one of these away and give the monkeys just two. the guy on the right is the risky loss. Sometimes he gives no loss, so the monkeys are really psyched, but sometimes he actually gives a big loss, taking away two to give the monkeys only one.And so what do the monkeys do? Again, same choice; they can play it safe for always getting two grapes every single time, or they can take a risky bet and choose between one and three. The remarkable thing to us is that, when you give monkeys this choice, they do the same irrational thing that people do. They actually become more risky depending on how the experimenters started. This is crazy because it suggests that the monkeys too are evaluating things in relative terms and actually treating losses differently than they treat gains.So what does all of this mean? Well, what we've shown is that, first of all, we can actually give the monkeys a financial currency, and they do very similar things with it. They do some of the smart things we do, some of the kind of not so nice things we do, like steal it and so on. But they also do some of the irrational things we do. They systematically get things wrong and in the same ways that we do. This is the first take-home message of the Talk, which is that if you saw the beginning of this and you thought, oh, I'm totally going to go home and hire a capuchin monkey financial adviser. They're way cuter than the one at ... you know — Don't do that; they're probably going to be just as dumb as the human one you already have. So, you know, a little bad — Sorry, sorry, sorry. A little bad for monkey investors.But of course, you know, the reason you're laughing is bad for humans too. Because we've answered the question we started out with. We wanted to know where these kinds of errors came from. And we started with the hope that maybe we can sort of tweak our financial institutions, tweak our technologies to make ourselves better. But what we've learn is that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that. In fact, they might be due to the very nature of our evolutionary history. You know, maybe it's not just humans at the right side of this chain that's duncey. Maybe it's sort of duncey all the way back. And this, if we believe the capuchin monkey results, means that these duncey strategies might be 35 million years old. That's a long time for a strategy to potentially get changed around — really, really old.What do we know about other old strategies like this? Well, one thing we know is that they tend to be really hard to overcome. You know, think of our evolutionary predilection for eating sweet things, fatty things like cheesecake. You can't just shut that off. You can't just look at the dessert cart as say, ""No, no, no. That looks disgusting to me."" We're just built differently. We're going to perceive it as a good thing to go after. My guess is that the same thing is going to be true when humans are perceiving different financial decisions. When you're watching your stocks plummet into the red, when you're watching your house price go down, you're not going to be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms. This means that the biases that lead investors to do badly, that lead to the foreclosure crisis are going to be really hard to overcome.So that's the bad news. The question is: is there any good news? I'm supposed to be up here telling you the good news. Well, the good news, I think, is what I started with at the beginning of the Talk, which is that humans are not only smart; we're really inspirationally smart to the rest of the animals in the biological kingdom. We're so good at overcoming our biological limitations — you know, I flew over here in an airplane. I didn't have to try to flap my wings. I'm wearing contact lenses now so that I can see all of you. I don't have to rely on my own near-sightedness. We actually have all of these cases where we overcome our biological limitations through technology and other means, seemingly pretty easily. But we have to recognize that we have those limitations.And here's the rub. It was Camus who once said that, ""Man is the only species who refuses to be what he really is."" But the irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them. The hope is that you all will think about your limitations, not necessarily as unovercomable, but to recognize them, accept them and then use the world of design to actually figure them out. That might be the only way that we will really be able to achieve our own human potential and really be the noble species we hope to all be.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos
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"Last year when I was here, I was speaking to you about a swim which I did across the North Pole. And while that swim took place three years ago, I can remember it as if it was yesterday. I remember standing on the edge of the ice, about to dive into the water, and thinking to myself, I have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening. The water is completely black. The water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade, or 29 degrees Fahrenheit. It's flipping freezing in that water. And then a thought came across my mind: if things go pear-shaped on this swim, how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean? And then I said to myself, I've just got to get this thought out of my mind as quickly as possible. And the only way I can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my iPod and really revving myself up, listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to Puff Daddy, and then committing myself a hundred percent — there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind — and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water.And that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds, and it felt like 18 days. And I remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers, and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because — you know, we're made partially of water — when water freezes it expands, and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst. And the most immediate thought when I came out of that water was the following: I'm never, ever going to do another cold water swim in my life again.Anyway, last year, I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the — (Laughter) and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change. I heard about this lake, Lake Imja. This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier. The glacier's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake. And I firmly believe that what we're seeing in the Himalayas is the next great, big battleground on this earth. Nearly two billion people — so one in three people on this earth — rely on the water from the Himalayas. And with a population increasing as quickly as it is, and with the water supply from these glaciers — because of climate change — decreasing so much, I think we have a real risk of instability. North, you've got China; south, you've India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all these countries.And so I decided to walk up to Mt. Everest, the highest mountain on this earth, and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of Mt. Everest. Now, I don't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to Mt. Everest, but it's quite an ordeal getting up there. 28 great, big, powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain — I don't just have my Speedo, but there's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world. The other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude. I wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level. So it's right up in the heavens. It's very, very difficult to breath. You get altitude sickness. I feels like you've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time.That's not the worst part of it. The worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on Mt. Everest. Many, many people have died on Mt. Everest, and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain. And when you're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before, and, in fact, no fish — there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters — When you're trying to do that, and then the bodies are coming past you, it humbles you, and you also realize very, very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are.And we walked up this pathway, all the way up. And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier. And all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice. And then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of Mt. Everest, and I prepared myself the same way as I've always prepared myself, for this swim which was going to be so very difficult. I put on my iPod, I listened to some music, I got myself as aggressive as possible — but controlled aggression — and then I hurled myself into that water.I swam as quickly as I could for the first hundred meters, and then I realized very, very quickly, I had a huge problem on my hands. I could barely breathe. I was gasping for air. I then began to choke, and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water. And it all happened so quickly: I then — I don't know how it happened — but I went underwater. And luckily, the water was quite shallow, and I was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air. And then I said, carry on. Carry on. Carry on. I carried on for another five or six strokes, and then I had nothing in my body, and I went down to the bottom of the lake. And I don't where I got it from, but I was able to somehow pull myself up and as quickly as possible get to the side of the lake. I've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have. I have never, ever heard such utter bollocks. (Laughter) It is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have.I got myself to the side of the lake. My crew grabbed me, and then we walked as quickly as we could down — over the rubble — down to our camp. And there, we sat down, and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on Mt. Everest. And my team just gave it to me straight. They said, Lewis, you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim. Every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming, you must forget. Every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the British army, about speed and aggression, you put that to one side. We want you to walk up the hill in another two days' time. Take some time to rest and think about things. We want you to walk up the mountain in two days' time, and instead of swimming fast, swim as slowly as possible. Instead of swimming crawl, swim breaststroke. And remember, never ever swim with aggression. This is the time to swim with real humility.And so we walked back up to the mountain two days later. And I stood there on the edge of the lake, and I looked up at Mt. Everest — and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth — and I said to myself, just do this slowly. And I swam across the lake. And I can't begin to tell you how good I felt when I came to the other side.But I learned two very, very important lessons there on Mt. Everest, and I thank my team of Sherpas who taught me this. The first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. And similarly, now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task. And taking that into the world of climate change — which is, frankly, the Mt. Everest of all problems — just because we've lived the way we have lived for so long, just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long, doesn't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on. The warning signs are all there. When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion people. We're now 6.8 billion people, and we're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050.And then the second lesson, the radical, tactical shift. And I've come here to ask you today: what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment, which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world, and most importantly, in a sustainable world? And I ask you, please, to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make, which will make that big difference, and then commit a hundred percent to doing it. Blog about it, tweet about it, talk about it, and commit a hundred percent, because very, very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it.So thank you very, very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lewis_pugh_s_mind_shifting_mt_everest_swim
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"I grew up on a small farm in Missouri. We lived on less than a dollar a day for about 15 years. I got a scholarship, went to university, studied international agriculture, studied anthropology, and decided I was going to give back. I was going to work with small farmers. I was going to help alleviate poverty. I was going to work on international development, and then I took a turn and ended up here. Now, if you get a Ph.D., and you decide not to teach, you don't always end up in a place like this. It's a choice. You might end up driving a taxicab. You could be in New York. What I found was, I started working with refugees and famine victims — small farmers, all, or nearly all — who had been dispossessed and displaced. Now, what I'd been trained to do was methodological research on such people. So I did it: I found out how many women had been raped en route to these camps. I found out how many people had been put in jail, how many family members had been killed. I assessed how long they were going to stay and how much it would take to feed them. And I got really good at predicting how many body bags you would need for the people who were going to die in these camps.Now this is God's work, but it's not my work. It's not the work I set out to do. So I was at a Grateful Dead benefit concert on the rainforests in 1988. I met a guy — the guy on the left. His name was Ben. He said, ""What can I do to save the rainforests?"" I said, ""Well, Ben, what do you do?"" ""I make ice cream."" So I said, ""Well, you've got to make a rainforest ice cream. And you've got to use nuts from the rainforests to show that forests are worth more as forests than they are as pasture."" He said, ""Okay."" Within a year, Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves. It was a great success. We did our first million-dollars-worth of trade by buying on 30 days and selling on 21. That gets your adrenaline going. Then we had a four and a half million-dollar line of credit because we were credit-worthy at that point. We had 15 to 20, maybe 22 percent of the global Brazil-nut market. We paid two to three times more than anybody else. Everybody else raised their prices to the gatherers of Brazil nuts because we would buy it otherwise. A great success. 50 companies signed up, 200 products came out, generated 100 million in sales. It failed. Why did it fail? Because the people who were gathering Brazil nuts weren't the same people who were cutting the forests. And the people who made money from Brazil nuts were not the people who made money from cutting the forests. We were attacking the wrong driver. We needed to be working on beef. We needed to be working on lumber. We needed to be working on soy — things that we were not focused on.So let's go back to Sudan. I often talk to refugees: ""Why was it that the West didn't realize that famines are caused by policies and politics, not by weather?"" And this farmer said to me, one day, something that was very profound. He said, ""You can't wake a person who's pretending to sleep.""(Laughter)Okay. Fast forward. We live on a planet. There's just one of them. We've got to wake up to the fact that we don't have any more and that this is a finite planet. We know the limits of the resources we have. We may be able to use them differently. We may have some innovative, new ideas. But in general, this is what we've got. There's no more of it. There's a basic equation that we can't get away from. Population times consumption has got to have some kind of relationship to the planet, and right now, it's a simple ""not equal."" Our work shows that we're living at about 1.3 planets. Since 1990, we crossed the line of being in a sustainable relationship to the planet. Now we're at 1.3. If we were farmers, we'd be eating our seed. For bankers, we'd be living off the principal, not the interest. This is where we stand today. A lot of people like to point to some place else as the cause of the problem. It's always population growth. Population growth's important, but it's also about how much each person consumes. So when the average American consumes 43 times as much as the average African, we've got to think that consumption is an issue. It's not just about population, and it's not just about them; it's about us. But it's not just about people; it's about lifestyles. There's very good evidence — again, we don't necessarily have a peer-reviewed methodology that's bulletproof yet — but there's very good evidence that the average cat in Europe has a larger environmental footprint in its lifetime than the average African. You think that's not an issue going forward? You think that's not a question as to how we should be using the Earth's resources?Let's go back and visit our equation. In 2000, we had six billion people on the planet. They were consuming what they were consuming — let's say one unit of consumption each. We have six billion units of consumption. By 2050, we're going to have nine billion people — all the scientists agree. They're all going to consume twice as much as they currently do — scientists, again, agree — because income is going to grow in developing countries five times what it is today — on global average, about [2.9]. So we're going to have 18 billion units of consumption. Who have you heard talking lately that's said we have to triple production of goods and services? But that's what the math says. We're not going to be able to do that. We can get productivity up. We can get efficiency up. But we've also got to get consumption down. We need to use less to make more. And then we need to use less again. And then we need to consume less. All of those things are part of that equation.But it basically raises a fundamental question: should consumers have a choice about sustainability, about sustainable products? Should you be able to buy a product that's sustainable sitting next to one that isn't, or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable? If they should all be sustainable on a finite planet, how do you make that happen? The average consumer takes 1.8 seconds in the U.S. Okay, so let's be generous. Let's say it's 3.5 seconds in Europe. How do you evaluate all the scientific data around a product, the data that's changing on a weekly, if not a daily, basis? How do you get informed? You don't. Here's a little question. From a greenhouse gas perspective, is lamb produced in the U.K. better than lamb produced in New Zealand, frozen and shipped to the U.K.? Is a bad feeder lot operation for beef better or worse than a bad grazing operation for beef? Do organic potatoes actually have fewer toxic chemicals used to produce them than conventional potatoes? In every single case, the answer is ""it depends."" It depends on who produced it and how, in every single instance. And there are many others. How is a consumer going to walk through this minefield? They're not. They may have a lot of opinions about it, but they're not going to be terribly informed.Sustainability has got to be a pre-competitive issue. It's got to be something we all care about. And we need collusion. We need groups to work together that never have. We need Cargill to work with Bunge. We need Coke to work with Pepsi. We need Oxford to work with Cambridge. We need Greenpeace to work with WWF. Everybody's got to work together — China and the U.S. We need to begin to manage this planet as if our life depended on it, because it does, it fundamentally does. But we can't do everything. Even if we get everybody working on it, we've got to be strategic. We need to focus on the where, the what and the who. So, the where: We've identified 35 places globally that we need to work. These are the places that are the richest in biodiversity and the most important from an ecosystem function point-of-view. We have to work in these places. We have to save these places if we want a chance in hell of preserving biodiversity as we know it. We looked at the threats to these places. These are the 15 commodities that fundamentally pose the biggest threats to these places because of deforestation, soil loss, water use, pesticide use, over-fishing, etc.So we've got 35 places, we've got 15 priority commodities, who do we work with to change the way those commodities are produced? Are we going to work with 6.9 billion consumers? Let's see, that's about 7,000 languages, 350 major languages — a lot of work there. I don't see anybody actually being able to do that very effectively. Are we going to work with 1.5 billion producers? Again, a daunting task. There must be a better way. 300 to 500 companies control 70 percent or more of the trade of each of the 15 commodities that we've identified as the most significant. If we work with those, if we change those companies and the way they do business, then the rest will happen automatically. So, we went through our 15 commodities. This is nine of them. We lined them up side-by-side, and we put the names of the companies that work on each of those. And if you go through the first 25 or 30 names of each of the commodities, what you begin to see is, gosh, there's Cargill here, there's Cargill there, there's Cargill everywhere. In fact, these names start coming up over and over again. So we did the analysis again a slightly different way. We said: if we take the top hundred companies, what percentage of all 15 commodities do they touch, buy or sell? And what we found is it's 25 percent. So 100 companies control 25 percent of the trade of all 15 of the most significant commodities on the planet. We can get our arms around a hundred companies. A hundred companies, we can work with.Why is 25 percent important? Because if these companies demand sustainable products, they'll pull 40 to 50 percent of production. Companies can push producers faster than consumers can. By companies asking for this, we can leverage production so much faster than by waiting for consumers to do it. After 40 years, the global organic movement has achieved 0.7 of one percent of global food. We can't wait that long. We don't have that kind of time. We need change that's going to accelerate. Even working with individual companies is not probably going to get us there. We need to begin to work with industries. So we've started roundtables where we bring together the entire value chain, from producers all the way to the retailers and brands. We bring in civil society, we bring in NGOs, we bring in researchers and scientists to have an informed discussion — sometimes a battle royale — to figure out what are the key impacts of these products, what is a global benchmark, what's an acceptable impact, and design standards around that. It's not all fun and games.In salmon aquaculture, we kicked off a roundtable almost six years ago. Eight entities came to the table. We eventually got, I think, 60 percent of global production at the table and 25 percent of demand at the table. Three of the original eight entities were suing each other. And yet, next week, we launch globally verified, vetted and certified standards for salmon aquaculture. It can happen.(Applause)So what brings the different entities to the table? It's risk and demand. For the big companies, it's reputational risk, but more importantly, they don't care what the price of commodities is. If they don't have commodities, they don't have a business. They care about availability, so the big risk for them is not having product at all. For the producers, if a buyer wants to buy something produced a certain way, that's what brings them to the table. So it's the demand that brings them to the table. The good news is we identified a hundred companies two years ago. In the last 18 months, we've signed agreements with 40 of those hundred companies to begin to work with them on their supply chain. And in the next 18 months, we will have signed up to work with another 40, and we think we'll get those signed as well. Now what we're doing is bringing the CEOs of these 80 companies together to help twist the arms of the final 20, to bring them to the table, because they don't like NGOs, they've never worked with NGOs, they're concerned about this, they're concerned about that, but we all need to be in this together. So we're pulling out all the stops. We're using whatever leverage we have to bring them to the table.One company we're working with that's begun — in baby steps, perhaps — but has begun this journey on sustainability is Cargill. They've funded research that shows that we can double global palm oil production without cutting a single tree in the next 20 years, and do it all in Borneo alone by planting on land that's already degraded. The study shows that the highest net present value for palm oil is on land that's been degraded. They're also undertaking a study to look at all of their supplies of palm oil to see if they could be certified and what they would need to change in order to become third-party certified under a credible certification program. Why is Cargill important? Because Cargill has 20 to 25 percent of global palm oil. If Cargill makes a decision, the entire palm oil industry moves, or at least 40 or 50 percent of it. That's not insignificant. More importantly, Cargill and one other company ship 50 percent of the palm oil that goes to China. We don't have to change the way a single Chinese company works if we get Cargill to only send sustainable palm oil to China. It's a pre-competitive issue. All the palm oil going there is good. Buy it.Mars is also on a similar journey. Now most people understand that Mars is a chocolate company, but Mars has made sustainability pledges to buy only certified product for all of its seafood. It turns out Mars buys more seafood than Walmart because of pet food. But they're doing some really interesting things around chocolate, and it all comes from the fact that Mars wants to be in business in the future. And what they see is that they need to improve chocolate production. On any given plantation, 20 percent of the trees produce 80 percent of the crop, so Mars is looking at the genome, they're sequencing the genome of the cocoa plant. They're doing it with IBM and the USDA, and they're putting it in the public domain because they want everybody to have access to this data, because they want everybody to help them make cocoa more productive and more sustainable. What they've realized is that if they can identify the traits on productivity and drought tolerance, they can produce 320 percent as much cocoa on 40 percent of the land. The rest of the land can be used for something else. It's more with less and less again. That's what the future has got to be, and putting it in the public domain is smart. They don't want to be an I.P. company; they want to be a chocolate company, but they want to be a chocolate company forever.Now, the price of food, many people complain about, but in fact, the price of food is going down, and that's odd because in fact, consumers are not paying for the true cost of food. If you take a look just at water, what we see is that, with four very common products, you look at how much a farmer produced to make those products, and then you look at how much water input was put into them, and then you look at what the farmer was paid. If you divide the amount of water into what the farmer was paid, the farmer didn't receive enough money to pay a decent price for water in any of those commodities. That is an externality by definition. This is the subsidy from nature. Coca-Cola, they've worked a lot on water, but right now, they're entering into 17-year contracts with growers in Turkey to sell juice into Europe, and they're doing that because they want to have a product that's closer to the European market. But they're not just buying the juice; they're also buying the carbon in the trees to offset the shipment costs associated with carbon to get the product into Europe. There's carbon that's being bought with sugar, with coffee, with beef. This is called bundling. It's bringing those externalities back into the price of the commodity.We need to take what we've learned in private, voluntary standards of what the best producers in the world are doing and use that to inform government regulation, so we can shift the entire performance curve. We can't just focus on identifying the best; we've got to move the rest.The issue isn't what to think, it's how to think. These companies have begun to think differently. They're on a journey; there's no turning back. We're all on that same journey with them. We have to really begin to change the way we think about everything. Whatever was sustainable on a planet of six billion is not going to be sustainable on a planet with nine.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jason_clay_how_big_brands_can_save_biodiversity
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"The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages. It, however, is enormous in both scale and importance. Look, you all are very well traveled; this is TEDGlobal after all. But I do hope to take you to some places you've never been to before.So, let's start off in China. This photo was taken two weeks ago. Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband's shoulders has just graduated from high school. (Laughter) But this is Tiananmen Square. Many of you have been there. It's not the real China. Let me take you to the real China. This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. And they share this great splendor with a very large pig. Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, ""We're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. You're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. Why would we waste this money on you?"" This is what happens to girls in remote areas.Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors. We wrote about her in The New York Times. We got a flood of donations — mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 — really nice guy. We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. He was delighted. He thought, ""Oh, I can renovate the school. I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. She went to high school. She went to vocational school for accounting. She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. She sent money back to her family. They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig.What we saw was a natural experiment. It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls' education. And over the years, as we followed Dai Manju, we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. She not only changed her own dynamic, she changed her household, she changed her family, her village. The village became a real standout. Of course, most of China was flourishing at the time, but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China.And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of ""Half the Sky."" And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity. In the 19th century, it was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender. So some of you may be thinking, ""Gosh, that's hyperbole. She's exaggerating."" Well, let me ask you this question. How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world? Let me take a poll. How many of you think there are more males in the world? Hands up, please. How many of you think — a few — how many of you there are more females in the world? Okay, most of you. Well, you know this latter group, you're wrong. There are, true enough, in Europe and the West, when women and men have equal access to food and health care, there are more women, we live longer. But in most of the rest of the world, that's not the case. In fact, demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population.And, you know, it happens for several reasons. For instance, in the last half-century, more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century. Sometimes it's also because of the sonogram. Girls get aborted before they're even born when there are scarce resources. This girl here, for instance, is in a feeding center in Ethiopia. The entire center was filled with girls like her. What's remarkable is that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. In India, in the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast, and the breast shows no son preference. From one to five, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India.The second tenet of ""Half the Sky"" is that, let's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all, and just on a purely practical level, we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force. Poverty, for instance. There are three reasons why this is the case. For one, overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty. And you know, when you educate a boy, his family tends to have fewer kids, but only slightly. When you educate a girl, she tends to have significantly fewer kids. The second reason is it has to do with spending. It's kind of like the dirty, little secret of poverty, which is that, not only do poor people take in very little income, but also, the income that they take in, they don't spend it very wisely, and unfortunately, most of that spending is done by men. So research has shown, if you look at people who live under two dollars a day — one metric of poverty — two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here, in education. 20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks — and prostitution and festivals. If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket, you would have a transformative effect.The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution, not the problem. You need to use scarce resources. It's a waste of resources if you don't use someone like Dai Manju. Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia. He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves. However, two-thirds of the way there was a barrier. On this side was men, and then the barrier, and this side was women. And someone from this side of the room got up and said, ""Mr. Gates, we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology. Do you think we'll make it?"" So Bill Gates, as he was staring out at the audience, he said, ""If you're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country, there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10."" So here is Bill of Arabia.(Laughter)So what would some of the specific challenges look like? I would say, on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking. And I'll just say two things about this. The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. Now, modern slavery: according to State Department rough statistics, there are about 800,000 — 10 times the number — that are trafficked across international borders. And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders, which is a substantial portion. And if you look at another factor, another contrast, a slave back then is worth about $40,000 in today's money. Today, you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars, which means she's actually more disposable. But you know, there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand. We don't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed.The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality. You know, childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event. In Niger, one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth. Around the world, one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth. You know, it's not as though we don't have the technological solution, but these women have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are rural and they are female. You know, for every woman who does die, there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury. And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula. It's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent.Let me tell you about Mahabuba. She lives in Ethiopia. She was married against her will at age 13. She got pregnant, ran to the bush to have the baby, but you know, her body was very immature, and she ended up having obstructed labor. The baby died, and she ended up with a fistula. So that meant she was incontinent; she couldn't control her wastes. In a word, she stank. The villagers thought she was cursed; they didn't know what to do with her. So finally, they put her at the edge of the village in a hut. They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night. That night, there was a stick in the hut. She fought off the hyenas with that stick. And the next morning, she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary, she would be saved. Because she had some damage to her nerves, she crawled all the way — 30 miles — to that doorstep, half dead. The foreign missionary opened the door, knew exactly what had happened, took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation. The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor, she was really clever, and they made her a nurse. So now, Mahabuba, she is saving the lives of hundreds, thousands, of women. She has become part of the solution, not the problem. She's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle.I've talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. I've hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. So of course, when you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. With economic opportunity, it can be transformative.Let me tell you about Saima. She lives in a small village outside Lahore, Pakistan. And at the time, she was miserable. She was beaten every single day by her husband, who was unemployed. He was kind of a gambler type — and unemployable, therefore — and took his frustrations out on her. Well, when she had her second daughter, her mother in-law told her son, ""I think you'd better get a second wife. Saima's not going to produce you a son."" This is when she had her second daughter. At the time, there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan. Saima took that money, and she started an embroidery business. The merchants liked her embroidery; it sold very well, and they kept asking for more. And when she couldn't produce enough, she hired other women in the village. Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business. And then, when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace, she needed someone to help her do the transport, so she hired her husband. So now they're in it together. He does the transportation and distribution, and she does the production and sourcing. And now they have a third daughter, and the daughters, all of them, are being tutored in education because Saima knows what's really important.Which brings me to the final element, which is education. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, once said that, ""It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls' education."" Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira. Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border, and like Dai Manju, she didn't go to school. Actually, she had never been to school, not to a lick, one day. Her parents, again, said, ""Why should we spend the money on her? She's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth."" Well, it just so happens, at that time, there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut. They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International. Heifer sent two goats to Africa. One of them ended up with Beatrice's parents, and that goat had twins. The twins started producing milk. They sold the milk for cash. The cash started accumulating, and pretty soon the parents said, ""You know, we've got enough money. Let's send Beatrice to school."" So at nine years of age, Beatrice started in first grade — after all, she'd never been to a lick of school — with a six year-old. No matter, she was just delighted to be in school. She rocketed to the top of her class. She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village, ever, to come to the United States on scholarship. Two years ago, she graduated from Connecticut College. On the day of her graduation, she said, ""I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat."" (Laughter) And that goat was $120.So you see how transformative little bits of help can be. But I want to give you a reality check. Look: U.S. aid, helping people is not easy, and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid. There's Bill Easterly's book. There's a book called ""Dead Aid."" You know, the criticism is fair; it isn't easy. You know, people say how half of all water well projects, a year later, are failed. When I was in Zimbabwe, we were touring a place with the village chief — he wanted to raise money for a secondary school — and there was some construction a few yards away, and I said, ""What's that?"" He sort of mumbled. Turns out that it's a failed irrigation project. A few yards away was a failed chicken coop. One year, all the chickens died, and no one wanted to put the chickens in there. It's true, but we think that you don't through the baby out with the bathwater; you actually improve. You learn from your mistakes, and you continuously improve.We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement. And a movement of men and women is what's needed to bring about social change, change that will address this great moral challenge. So then, I ask, what's in it for you? You're probably asking that. Why should you care? I will just leave you with two things. One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of — which most of us, all of us, here in this room do — research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself.And the second thing, it's an anecdote that I'll leave you with. And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur. Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur, seeing things that no human being should see. Throughout her time there, she was strong, she was steadfast. She never broke down. And then she came back to the United States and was on break, Christmas break. She was in her grandmother's backyard, and she saw something that made her break down in tears. What that was was a bird feeder. And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted, where we not only can feed, clothe and house ourselves, but also provide for wild birds so they don't go hungry in the winter. And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility. And so, like her, you, me, we have all won the lottery of life. And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility?So, here's the cause. Join the movement. Feel happier and help save the world.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice
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"When I saw a piece of technology called Kinect — it was called Natal — I was inspired, and I thought for a moment, maybe it's possible to address that one problem of storytelling, to create a character which seemed alive, which noticed me, that could look me in the eyes and feel real, and sculpt a story about our relationship. And so a year ago, I showed this off at a computer show called E3. And this was a piece of technology with someone called Claire interacting with this boy. And there was a huge row online about, ""Hey, this can't be real."" And so I waited till now to have an actual demo of the real tech.Now, this tech incorporates three big elements. The first is a Kinect camera, which will be out in November, some incredible AI that was hidden in the dusty vaults, collecting dust in Microsoft, plus our quite crude attempts at AI at a company called Lionhead, mixing all those things together just to get to this one simple idea: to create a real, living being in a computer. Now, I'll be honest with you and say that most of it is just a trick, but it's a trick that actually works.So why don't we go over and have a look at the demo now. This is Dimitri. Dimitri, just waggle your arm around. Now, you notice he's sitting. There are no controllers, no keyboards, or mice, or joysticks, or joypads. He is just going to use his hand, his body and his voice, just like humans interact with their hands, body and voice.So let's move forward. You're going to meet Milo for the first time. We had to give him a problem because when we first created Milo, we realized that he came across as a little bit of a brat, to be honest with you. He was quite a know-it-all, and he wanted to kind of make you laugh. So the problem we introduced to him was this: he's just moved house. He's moved from London to New England, over in America. His parents are too busy to listen to his problems, and that's when he starts almost conjuring you up. So here he is walking through the grass. And you're able to interact with his world. The cool thing is, what we're doing is we're changing the mind of Milo constantly. That means no two people's Milos can be the same. You're actually sculpting a human being here. So, he's discovering the garden. You're helping him discover the garden by just pointing out these snails. Very simple at the start. By the way, if you are a boy, it's snails; if you're a girl, it's butterflies because what we found was that girls hate snails.(Laughter)So remember, this is the first time you've met him, and we really want to draw you in and make you more curious. His face, by the way, is fully AI-driven. We have complete control over his blush responses, the diameter of his nostrils to denote stress. We actually do something called body matching. If you're leaning forward, he will try and slightly change the neuro-linguistic nature of his face, because we went out with this strong idea: how can we make you believe that something's real? Now we've used the hand. The other thing to use is your body. Why not just, instead of pushing left and right with a mouse or with a joypad, why not use your body just to lean on the chair — again, relaxed? You can lean back, but the camera will change its perspective depending on which way you're looking.So Dimitri's now going to use — he's used his hand; he's used his body. He's now going to use the other thing which is essential, and that's his voice. Now, the thing about voice is, our experience with voice recognition is pretty awful, isn't it? It never works. You order an airline ticket; you end up in Timbuktu. So we've tackled that problem, and we've come up with a solution, which we'll see in a second.Milo: I could just squish it.Peter Molyneux: What are you going to do, Dimitri?Female Voice: Squashing a snail may not seem important, but remember, even this choice will affect how Milo develops. Do you want Milo to squash it? When you see the microphone, say ... (PM: Squash.) ... yes to decide.Dimitri: Go on, Milo. Squash it.PM: No. That's the wrong thing to do. Now look at his response. He said, ""Go on, Milo. Squash it."" What we're using there is, we're using something, a piece of technology called Tellme. It's a company that Microsoft acquired some years ago. We've got a database of words which we recognize. We pick those words out. We also reference that with the tonation database that we build up of Dimitri's voice, or the user's voice. Now we need to have a bit more engagement, and again, what we can do is we can look at the body. And we'll do that in a second.Milo: I wonder how deep it is. Deep.PM: Okay. So what we're going to do now is teach Milo to skim stones. We're actually teaching him. It's very, very interesting that men, more than women, tend to be more competitive here. They're fine with teaching Milo for the first few throws, but then they want to beat Milo, where women, they're more nurturing about this. Okay, this is skimming stones. How do you skim stones? You stand up, and you skim the stone. It's that simple. Just recognizing your body, recognizing the body's motions, the tech, understanding that you've gone from sitting down to standing up. Again, all of this is done in the way us humans do things, and that's crucially important if we want Milo to appear real.Female Voice: See if you can inspire him to do any better. Try hitting the boat.Milo: Ahhh. So close.PM: That's Dimitri at his most competitive. Now beaten an 11-year-old child. Well done.Milo: Okay.PM: So, Milo's being called back in by his parents, giving us time to be alone and to help him out. Basically — the bit that we missed at the start — his parents had asked him to clean up his room. And we're going to help him with this now. But this is going to be an introduction, and this is all about the deep psychology that we're trying to use. We're trying to introduce you to what I believe is the most wonderful part, you being able to talk in your natural voice to Milo. Now, to do that, we needed a set up, like a magician's trick. And what we did was, we needed to give Milo this big problem.So as Dimitri starts tidying up, you can overhear a conversation that Milo's having with his parents.Milo's Mom: Oh, you've got gravy all over the floor. (Milo: I didn't mean to!)Milo's Mom: That carpet is brand new.PM: So he's just spilled a plate of sausages on the floor, on the brand-new carpet. We've all done it as parents; we've all done it as children. Now's a chance for Dimitri to kind of reassure and calm Milo down. It's all been too much for him. He's just moved house. He's got no friends. Now is the time when we open that portal and allow you to talk to Milo.Female Voice: Why don't you try saying something encouraging to cheer Milo up.Dimitri: Come on, Milo. You know what parents are like. They're always getting stressed.Milo: What do they want to come here for anyway? We don't know anyone.Dimitri: Well, you've got a new school to go to. You're going to meet loads of cool, new friends. Milo: I just really miss my old house, that's all.Dimitri: Well, this is a pretty awesome house, Milo. You've got a cool garden to play in and a pond.Milo: It was good skimming stones. This looks nice. You cleaned up my room. Thanks.PM: So after three-quarters of an hour, he recognizes you. And I promise you, if you're sitting in front of this screen, that is a truly wonderful moment. And we're ready now to tell a story about his childhood and his life, and it goes on, and he has, you know, many adventures. Some of those adventures are a little bit dark or on the darker side. Some of those adventures are wonderfully encouraging — he's got to go to school.The cool thing is that we're doing as well: as you interact with him, you're able to put things into his world; he recognizes objects. His mind is based in a cloud. That means Milo's mind, as millions of people use it, will get smarter and cleverer. He'll recognize more objects and thus understand more words.But for me, this is a wonderful opportunity where technology, at last, can be connected with, where I am no longer restrained by the finger I hold in my hand — as far as a computer game's concerned — or by the blandness of not being noticed if you're watching a film or a book. And I love those revolutions, and I love the future that Milo brings.Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_molyneux_demos_milo_the_virtual_boy
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"This talk is about righting writing wrongs. No, the sound's not faulty — righting writing wrongs. The Middle East is huge, and with all our problems, one thing's for sure: we love to laugh. I think humor is a great way to celebrate our differences. We need to take our responsibilities seriously, but not ourselves. Don't get me wrong: it's not like we don't have comedy in the Middle East. I grew up at a time when iconic actors from Kuwait, Syria, Egypt used laughter to unite the region, just as football can. (Laughter) Now is the time for us to laugh at ourselves, before others can laugh with us. This is the story of the rise and rise of stand-up comedy in the Middle East — a stand-up uprising, if you will.Working in London as TV maker and writer, I quickly realized that comedy connects audiences. Now, the best breeding ground for good comic writing is the stand-up comedy circuit, where they just happen to say that you kill when you do well and you bomb when you do badly. An unfortunate connection for us maybe, but it reminds me that we'd like to thank one man for, over the past decade, working tirelessly to support comedians all around the world, specifically comedians with a Middle Eastern background. (Applause) Like my good friends, Dean and Maysoon, at the bottom of the screen, who, two years after 9/11, started a festival to change the way Middle Easterners are perceived in the world. It's still going strong, with positive press to die for. Also, three guys working for years in Los Angeles, an Iranian, a Palestinian and an Egyptian, created the aptly named Axis of Evil comedy act. And wherever they went, they killed.Now, I didn't start this fire, but I did pour petrol on it. I moved to Dubai as the head of original content for a Western TV network. My job was to connect the brand with a Middle Eastern audience. Now, the American head of programming wanted new local Arabic comedy. In a thick Arabic accent, my brain went, ""Berfect."" (Laughter) Now, I had friends in the U.S. who had started a successful new tribe. And I had every intention of taking this tribe from being outliers in the Middle East and pushing them over the tipping point towards success. Now, as with any new idea, it wasn't easy. I had four phases to this plan. First, we'd need to buy content from the West and air it. Then I'd bring my friends, and we'd show local amateurs how it's done. We would film that and air it, and then I could work with the local amateurs and write new comedy.I excitedly presented this to the big boss, and his reaction was, ""Um, I don't get it."" So I retreated back to my cave and continued to support and produce comedy and let my friends use my couch as a regional operations hub. Now, fast forward two years, to early 2007. The earth rotated, as did our management, (Laughter) and as if by divine intervention, things came together to help this revolution take shape. Here's how the dots connected. First, the Axis guys recorded a Comedy Central special that aired in the States, and it was getting great hits on YouTube. Our new French CEO believed in the power of positive PR ... (Laughter) and ideas du bon marche. Let's just say ""value for money."" I produced in Dubai a show for Ahmed Ahmed to showcase his new Axis special to a packed room. I invited our new CEO, and as soon as he realized we had a room packed full of laughing infidels, his reaction was very simple: ""Let's make this happen. And one more thing: No, don't F it up."" So I quickly went to work with a great team around me. I happened to find a funny guy to present it in Arabic, who is originally Korean, a perfect fit for the Axis of Evil. This is all true.Now, while preparing for the tour, I had to remind the guys to be culturally sensitive. I used the three Bs of stand-up don'ts as I call them in the Middle East: blue content, keep it clean; beliefs, not religion; and the third B, bolitics. Stay away from bolitics in the Middle East. Oh course, you might think, what's left without bolitics, sex and religion, how can you make people laugh? I'd say, watch any successful well-written, family-friendly sitcom in the West for your answers.Now, were the Axis successful? In five countries, in just under a month, we had thousands of fanatical fans come and see them live. We had millions see them on TV and on TV news. In Jordan, we had His Majesty the King come and see them. In fact, they were so successful that you could buy a pirated copy of their DVD, even before it was released in the Middle East. Anywhere you go. So everywhere we went, we auditioned amateurs. We filmed that process and aired a documentary. I called it ""Three Guys and Wonho."" It really is his name. And all this TV and Internet exposure has led to a great many recruits to our cause. In Dubai this year, we've just had the first all-women's, homegrown stand-up show. And notice two of them are wearing headscarves, and yes, even they can laugh.Dubai, to me, is like a hand that supports anyone who wants to make things happen. 20 years ago, no one had heard of it. Look at it now. With an inspirational leader, I think this year, the opening of the tallest tower in the world is like adding a finger to that hand, that points at all those who spread fallacious stories about us.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, in three short years, we've come a long way with stand-up comedy shows happening even in Saudi Arabia. These comics are now going to the New York festival. And the Lebanese, brilliant Lebanese, Nemr Abou Nassar, we featured in our first tour, has just been performing in L.A.'s legendary comedy clubs. So clearly, from the inside, we are doing our best to change our image, and it's exploding. (Laughter) So, as for the outsiders looking in, watch the CNN report on the second Amman Comedy Festival. The reporter did a great job, and I thank her, but somebody forgot to send the positive PR email to the person operating the automatic news ticker that appears at the bottom. For example, when Dean talks, the ticker says, ""U.S.: Suspect gave 'actionable intel."" Well, if you're used to listening to comedians, then I'm not surprised.Sadly, this leads me to another three Bs that represents how the media in the West talks about us as bombers, billionaires and belly dancers. Enough. We're not all angry fanatics who want to kill the infidel. We have a positive story to tell and image to sell. In fact, one thing's for sure, in my experience, we love to laugh like hell.(Laughter)Here are three questions that I like to use to test the truthiness of our representation in any media story. One: Is the Middle East being shown in a current time and correct context? (Laughter) Two: Do the Middle Eastern characters laugh or smile without showing the whites of their eyes? (Laughter) Three: Is the Middle Eastern character being played by one? Clearly, there are wrongs that need to be righted. We've started in our region. My challenge to the rest of the world is please, start using positive Middle Eastern images in your stories. For inspiration, go to one of our festivals, go online, drop us a line. Let's change the narrative together and let's start righting writing wrongs.I'd like to end, before going back to the Middle East, with a quote from one of the greatest Sheikhs to put quill to parchment. As my father likes to call him, ""Asheikh Azubare;"" as my mother would say, ""Shakespeare."" (Laughter) ""And now we go in content to liberty and not to banishment.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamil_abu_wardeh_bringing_comedy_to_the_axis_of_evil
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"I was one of the founding members of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. The other founding members included Ahmed Ahmed, who is an Egyptian-American, who actually had the idea to go to the Middle East and try it out before we went out as a tour. He went out solo and did it first. Then there was Aron Kader, who was the Palestinian-American. And then there was me, the Iranian-American of the group. Now, being Iranian-American presents its own set of problems, as you know. Those two countries aren't getting along these days. So it causes a lot of inner conflict, you know, like part of me likes me, part of me hates me.(Laughter)Part of me thinks I should have a nuclear program, the other part thinks I can't be trusted with one. These are dilemmas I have every day.But I was born in Iran; I'm now an American citizen, which means I have the American passport, which means I can travel. Because if you only have the Iranian passport, you're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms, you know — Syria, Venezuela, North Korea.(Laughter)So, anyone who's gotten their passport in America will tell you, when you get it, it still says what country you were born in. So I remember getting my American passport. I was like, ""Woo-hoo! I'm going to travel."" And I opened it up, it said, ""Born in Iran."" I'm like, ""Oh, come on, man!""(Laughter)""I'm trying to go places.""(Laughter)But what's interesting is, I've never had trouble in any Western countries with my American passport, even though it says, ""Born in Iran"" — no problems. Where I've had problems is in some of the Arab countries. I guess some of the Arab countries aren't getting along with Iran either. So I was in Kuwait recently, doing a comedy show with some other American comedians. They all went through. Then the border patrol saw my American passport: ""Ah-ha! American, great."" Then he opened it up. ""Born in Iran? Wait.""(Laughter)And he started asking me questions. He said, ""What is your father's name?"" I said, ""Well, he's passed away, but his name was Khosro."" He goes, ""What is your grandfather's name?"" I said, ""He passed away a long time ago. His name was Jabbar."" He says, ""You wait. I'll be back,"" and he walked away. And I started freaking out, because I don't know what kind of crap my grandfather was into.(Laughter)Thought the guy was going to come back and be like, ""We've been looking for you for 200 years.""(Laughter)""Your grandfather has a parking violation. It's way overdue. You owe us two billion dollars.""(Laughter)But as you can see, when I talk, I speak with an American accent, which you would think, as an Iranian-American actor, I should be able to play any part, good, bad, what have you. But a lot of times in Hollywood, when casting directors find out you're of Middle Eastern descent, they go, ""Oh, you're Iranian. Great! Can you say 'I will kill you in the name of Allah?'"" I go, ""I could say that, but what if I were to say, 'Hello. I'm your doctor'?"" They go, ""Great! And then you hijack the hospital.""(Laughter)Like, I think you're missing the point here. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind playing bad guys. I want to play a bad guy. I want to rob a bank. I want to rob a bank in a film, but do it with a gun, not with a bomb strapped around me, right?(Laughter)Because I imagine the director: ""Maz, I think your character would rob the bank with a bomb around him."" ""Why would I do that? If I want the money, why would I kill myself?""(Laughter)Right?(Applause) ""Gimme all your money, or I'll blow myself up!""(Laughter)""Well, then blow yourself up.(Laughter)Just do it outside, please.""(Laughter)But the fact is, there's good people everywhere. That's what I try and show in my stand-up, good people everywhere. All it takes in one person to mess it up. Like a couple months ago in Times Square in New York, there was a Pakistani Muslim guy who tried to blow up a car bomb. Now, I happened to be in Times Square that night doing a comedy show. And a few months before that, there was a white American guy in Austin, Texas who flew his airplane into the IRS building, and I happened to be in Austin that day doing a stand-up comedy show. Now I'll tell you, as a Middle-Eastern male, when you show up around a lot of these activities, you start feeling guilty at one point.(Laughter)I was watching the news. I'm like, ""Am I involved in this crap?""(Laughter)""I didn't get the memo. What's going on?""(Laughter)But what was interesting was, the Pakistani Muslim guy — see, he gives a bad name to Muslims and Middle Easterners and Pakistanis from all over the world. And one thing that happened there was also the Pakistani Taliban took credit for that failed car bombing. My question is: Why would you take credit for a failed car bombing? ""We just want to say: we tried.""(Laughter)""And furthermore ...(Laughter)it is the thought that counts.""(Laughter)(Applause)""And in conclusion, win some, lose some.""(Laughter)But what happened was, when the white guy flew his plane into the building, I know all my Middle Eastern and Muslim friends in the States were watching TV, going, ""Please, don't be Middle Eastern. Don't be Hassan or Hussein."" And the name came out: Jack. I'm like, ""Woooo! That's not one of us!"" But I kept watching the news in case they came back, and were like, ""Before he did it, he converted to Islam."" ""Damn it! Why Jack? Why?""But the fact is, I've been lucky to get a chance to perform all over the world, and I did a lot of shows in the Middle East. I just did a seven-country solo tour. I was in Oman, and I was in Saudi Arabia. I was in Dubai. And it's great, there's good people everywhere. And you learn great things about these places. I encourage people always to go visit these places. For example, Dubai — cool place. They're obsessed with having the biggest, tallest, longest, as we all know. They have a mall there, the Dubai Mall. It is so big, they have taxis in the mall. I was walking. I heard, ""Beep! Beep!"" I'm like, ""What are you doing here?"" He goes, ""I'm going to the Zara store. It's three miles away. Out of my way. Out of my way. Out of my way.""(Laughter)And what's crazy — there's a recession going on, even in Dubai, but you wouldn't know by the prices. Like in the Dubai Mall, they sell frozen yogurt by the gram. It's like a drug deal. I was walking by. The guy goes, ""Psst! Habibi, my friend.""(Laughter)""You want some frozen yogurt?(Laughter)Come here. Come here. Come here. I have one gram, five gram, 10 gram. How many gram do you want?""(Laughter)I bought five grams. 10 dollars. 10 dollars! I said, ""What's in this?"" He's like, ""Good stuff, man. Colombian. Top of the line.""(Laughter)The other thing you learn when you travel in these countries, in the Middle East, Latin American, South American countries, a lot of times when they build stuff, there's no rules and regulations. For example, I took my two-year-old son to the playground at the Dubai Mall. And I've taken him to playgrounds all over the United States. And when you put your two-year-old on a slide in the United States, they put something on the slide to slow the kid down as he comes down the slide. Not in the Middle East.(Laughter)I put my two-year-old on the slide, he went whoosh! He took off!(Laughter)I went down and, ""Where's my son?"" ""On the third floor, sir. Third floor.""(Laughter)""You take a taxi. You go to Zara. Make a left.""(Laughter)""Try the yogurt. It's very good. Little expensive.""(Laughter)But one thing I try to do with my stand-up is break stereotypes. And I've been guilty of stereotyping as well. I was in Dubai. And there's a lot of Indians who work in Dubai. And they don't get paid that well. And I got it in my head that all the Indians must be workers. I forgot there's obviously successful Indians in Dubai too. I was doing a show, and they said, ""We'll send a driver to pick you up."" I went down to the lobby, and saw this Indian guy. I go, ""He must be my driver,"" since he's standing there in a cheap suit, thin mustache, staring at me. I say, ""Excuse me, are you my driver?"" He goes, ""No, sir. I own the hotel.""(Laughter)I go, ""I'm sorry! Why were you staring at me?"" He goes, ""I thought you were my driver.""(Laughter)(Applause)(Laughter)I'll leave you with this: I try, with my stand-up, to break stereotypes, present Middle Easterners and Muslims in a positive light. I hope that in the coming years, more film and television programs come out of Hollywood, presenting us in a positive light. Who knows? Maybe one day, we'll even have our own James Bond. Right? ""My name is Bond. Jamal Bond.""(Laughter)Til then, I'll keep telling jokes. Hope you keep laughing. Have a good day. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maz_jobrani_make_jokes_not_bombs
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"My name's Seth Priebatsch. I'm the chief ninja of SCVNGR. I'm a proud Princeton dropout. Also proud to have relocated here to Boston, where I actually grew up.(Applause) Yeah, Boston.Easy wins, I should just name the counties that we've got around here. I'm also fairly determined to try and build a game layer on top of the world. This is sort of a new concept and it's really important, because while the last decade was the decade of social, the decade where the framework in which we connect with other people was built, this next decade will be the decade where the game framework is built, where the motivations we use to actually influence behavior and the framework in which that is constructed, is decided upon, and that's really important.I say I want to build a game layer on top of the world, but that's not quite true, because it's already under construction; it's already happening. And it looks like this right now. It looks like the Web did back in 1997, right? It's not very good. It's cluttered. It's filled with lots of different things that, in short, aren't that fun. There are credit card schemes and airline mile programs, coupon cards and all these loyalty schemes that actually do use game dynamics and are building the game layer — they just suck. They're not very well-designed.(Laughter)So that's unfortunate. But luckily, as my favorite action hero, Bob the Builder, says, ""We can do better. We can build this better."" And the tools, the resources that we use to build a game layer, are game dynamics themselves. And so the crux of this presentation is going to go through four really important game dynamics, really interesting things, that, if you use consciously, you can use to influence behavior, both for good, for bad, for in-between. Hopefully for good. But this is the important stage in which that framework will get built, and so we want to all be thinking about it consciously now.Before we jump into that, there's a question of: Why is this important? I'm making this claim that there's a game layer on top of the world, and it's very important that we build it properly. The reason it's so important is that, in the last decade, what we've seen has been building the social layer, has been this framework for connections, and construction on that layer is over, it's finished. There's still a lot to explore, still a lot of people trying to figure out social and how we leverage this and how we use this, but the framework itself is done, and it's called Facebook. And that's OK, right? A lot of people are very happy with Facebook. I like it quite a lot. They've created this thing called the Open Graph, and they own all of our connections. They own half a billion people. So when you want to build on the social layer, the framework has been decided; it is the Open Graph API. And if you're happy with that, fantastic. If you're not, too bad. There's nothing you can do.And that's a real thing. I mean, we want to build frameworks in a way that makes it acceptable and makes it productive down the road. So, the social layer is all about these connections. The game layer is all about influence. It's not about adding a social fabric to the web and connecting you to other people everywhere you are and everywhere you go, it's actually about using dynamics, using forces, to influence the behavior of where you are, what you do there, how you do it. That's really, really powerful. And it's going to be more important than the social layer, and affect our lives more deeply and perhaps more invisibly. So it's incredibly critical that at this moment, while it's just getting constructed, while the frameworks like Facebook or Open Graph are being created for the game-layer equivalent, that we think about it very consciously, and that we do it in a way that is open, available, and can be leveraged for good.So that's what I want to talk about for game dynamics, because construction has just begun, and the more consciously we can think about this, the better we'll be able to use it for anything we want. So like I said, the way you go through and build on the game layer is not with glass and steel and cement. And the resources we use are not this two-dimensional swath of land that we have. The resources are mindshare, and the tools, the raw materials, are these game dynamics. With that, a couple game dynamics to talk about. Back at SCVNGR, we like to joke that with seven game dynamics, you can get anyone to do anything. Today, I'm going to show you four, because I hope to have a competitive advantage at the end of this, still.(Laughter)So the first one, it's a very simple game dynamic. It's called the appointment dynamic. It's a dynamic in which to succeed, players have to do something at a predefined time, generally at a predefined place. And these dynamics are a little scary sometimes, because you think, ""Other people can be using forces that will manipulate how I interact: what I do, where I do it, when I do it."" This sort of ""loss of free will"" that occurs in games can be frightening. So with each dynamic, I'm going to give three examples: one that shows how it's already being used in the real world, so you can rationalize it a bit; one that shows it in what we consider a conventional game — I think everything is a game, but this is more what you'd think of as a game played on a board or on a computer screen; and one of how it can be used for good, so you can see that these forces can be very powerful.So the first one, the most famous appointment dynamic in the world, is something called, ""Happy Hour."" So I had just recently dropped out of Princeton and actually ended up for the first time in a bar, and I saw these happy hour things all over the place. And this is simply an appointment dynamic: come here at a certain time, get your drinks half off. To win, all you have to do is show up at the right place at the right time. This game dynamic is so powerful, it doesn't just influence our behavior; it's influenced our entire culture. That's a really scary thought, that one game dynamic can change things so powerfully.It also exists in more conventional game forms. I'm sure you've all heard of Farmville by now. If you haven't, I recommend playing it. You won't do anything else for the rest of your day. Farmville has more active users than Twitter. It's incredibly powerful, and it has this dynamic where you have to return at a certain time to water your fake crops, or they wilt. And this is so powerful that when they tweak their stats, when they say your crops wilt after eight hours, or after six hours, or after 24 hours, it changes the life cycle of some 70 million people during the day. They will return, like clockwork, at different times. So if they wanted the world to end, if they wanted productivity to stop, they could make it a 30-minute cycle, and no one could do anything else, right?(Laughter)That's a little scary. But this could also be used for good. This local company called Vitality has created a product to help people take their medicine on time. That's an appointment. It's something that people don't do very well. They have these GlowCaps which flash and email you and do cool things to remind you to take your medicine. This isn't a game yet, but really should be. You should get points for doing it on time and lose points for not doing it on time. They should recognize they've built an appointment dynamic, and leverage the games. Then you can really achieve good in some interesting ways.We're going to jump onto the next one. Influence and status. This is one of the most famous game dynamics, used all over the place. It's used in your wallets, right now. We all want that credit card on the far left, because it's black. And you see someone at CVS or — not CVS — like, Christian Dior —(Laughter)I don't know. I don't have a black card; I've got a debit card.(Laughter)So they whip it out and you see that black card, and: ""I want that because it means they're cooler than I am, and I need that."" And this is used in games as well. ""Modern Warfare,"" one of the most successful selling games of all time. I'm only a level four, but I desperately want to be a level 10, because they've got that cool red badge, and that means that I am somehow better than everyone else. And that's very powerful to me. Status is really good motivator.It's also used in more conventional settings, and can be used more consciously there. School — and remember, I made it through one year, so I think I'm qualified to talk on school — is a game; it's just not a terribly well-designed game. There are levels. There are C. There are B. There's A. There are statuses. I mean, what is valedictorian, but a status? If we called valedictorian a ""White Knight Paladin level 20,"" I think people would probably work a lot harder.(Laughter)(Applause)So school is a game, and there has been lots of experimentation on how we do this properly. But let's use it consciously. Why have games you can lose? Why go from an A to an F or a B to a C? That sucks. Why not level-up? At Princeton, they've actually experimented with this, with quizzes where you gain experience points, and you level up from B to an A. And it's very powerful. It can be used in interesting ways.The third one I'll talk about is the progression dynamic, where you have to make progress, move through different steps in a very granular fashion. This is used all over the place, including LinkedIn, where I am an unwhole individual. I am only 85 percent complete on LinkedIn, and that bothers me. And this is so deep-seated in our psyche that when we're presented with a progress bar and presented with easy, granular steps to take to try and complete that progress bar, we will do it. We will find a way to move that blue line all the way to the right edge of the screen.This is used in conventional games as well. I mean, this is a Paladin level 10, and that's a Paladin level 20. And if you were going to fight Orcs on the fields of Mordor against the Ra's Al Ghul, you'd probably want to be the bigger one, right? I would. And so people work very hard to level-up. ""World of Warcraft"" is one of the most successful games of all time. The average player spends some six, six-and-a-half hours a day on it, their most dedicated players — it's like a full-time job, it's insane. And they have these systems where you can level-up. And that's a very powerful thing. Progression is powerful.It can also be used in very compelling ways for good. One of the things we work on at SCVNGR is: How do you use games to drive traffic and business to local businesses, to something that is very key to the economy? And here, we have a game that people play. They go places, do challenges, earn points. And we've introduced a progression dynamic into it, where, by going to the same place over and over, doing challenges, engaging with the business, you move a green bar from the left edge of the screen to the right, and unlock rewards. This is powerful enough that we can see it hooks people into these dynamics, pulls them back to the same local businesses, creates loyalty, creates engagement, and is able to drive meaningful revenue and fun and engagement to businesses. These progression dynamics are powerful and can be used in the real world.The final one I want to talk about — and it's a great one to end on — is this concept of communal discovery, a dynamic in which everyone has to work together to achieve something. Communal discovery is powerful because it leverages the network that is society to solve problems. This is used in some famous consumer web stories like Digg, which I'm sure you've all heard of. Digg is a communal dynamic to try to find and source the best news, the most interesting stories. And they made this into a game, initially. They had a leader board where, if you recommended the best stories, you would get points. And that really motivated people to find the best stories. But it became so powerful, there was actually a cabal, a group of people, the top seven on the leader board, who would work together to make sure they maintained that position, recommending people's stories.The game became more powerful than the goal. They ended up shutting down the leader board because, while it was effective, it was so powerful that it stopped sourcing the best stories, and started having people work to maintain leadership. So we have to use this one carefully. It's also used in things like McDonald's Monopoly, where the game is not the Monopoly you're playing, but the cottage industries that form to try and find Boardwalk. There, they're just looking for a sticker that says ""Boardwalk,"" but it can also be used to find real things. This is the DARPA balloon challenge, where they hid a couple balloons all across the United States and said, ""Use networks. Try and find these balloons fastest, and the winner will get $40,000."" The winner was a group out of MIT, where they created sort of a pyramid scheme, a network, where the first person to recommend the location of a balloon got $2,000, and anyone else to push that recommendation up also got a cut. And in 12 hours, they were able to find all these balloons, all across the country. Really powerful dynamic.And so, I've got about 20 seconds left, so if I'm going to leave you with anything, last decade was the decade of social. This next decade is the decade of games. We use game dynamics to build on it. We build with mindshare. We can influence behavior. It's very powerful. It's very exciting. Let's all build it together, let's do it well and have fun playing.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world
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"It feels like we're all suffering from information overload or data glut. And the good news is there might be an easy solution to that, and that's using our eyes more. So, visualizing information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information that's important. Failing that, visualized information can just look really cool.So, let's see. This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram, and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press. That is, they're meaningless without context: 500 billion for this pipeline, 20 billion for this war. It doesn't make any sense, so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively. So I scraped a load of reported figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts. And the colors here represent the motivation behind the money. So purple is ""fighting,"" and red is ""giving money away,"" and green is ""profiteering."" And what you can see straight away is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers. You can literally see them. But more importantly, you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.Let me point out some that I really like. This is OPEC's revenue, this green box here — 780 billion a year. And this little pixel in the corner — three billion — that's their climate change fund. Americans, incredibly generous people — over 300 billion a year, donated to charity every year, compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top 17 industrialized nations at 120 billion. Then of course, the Iraq War, predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003. And it mushroomed slightly. Afghanistan and Iraq mushroomed now to 3,000 billion. So now it's great because now we have this texture, and we can add numbers to it as well. So we could say, well, a new figure comes out ... let's see African debt. How much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that Africa owes to the West? Let's take a look. So there it is: 227 billion is what Africa owes. And the recent financial crisis, how much of this diagram might that figure take up? What has that cost the world? Let's take a look at that. Dooosh — Which I think is the appropriate sound effect for that much money: 11,900 billion. So, by visualizing this information, we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a kind of map really, a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.So I want to show you another landscape now. We need to imagine what a landscape of the world's fears might look like. Let's take a look. This is Mountains Out of Molehills, a timeline of global media panic. (Laughter) So, I'll label this for you in a second. But the height here, I want to point out, is the intensity of certain fears as reported in the media. Let me point them out. So this, swine flu — pink. Bird flu. SARS — brownish here. Remember that one? The millennium bug, terrible disaster. These little green peaks are asteroid collisions. (Laughter) And in summer, here, killer wasps.(Laughter)So these are what our fears look like over time in our media. But what I love — and I'm a journalist — and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective. And there's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only see when you visualize it. Let me highlight it for you. See this line, this is a landscape for violent video games. As you can see, there's a kind of odd, regular pattern in the data, twin peaks every year. If we look closer, we see those peaks occur at the same month every year. Why? Well, November, Christmas video games come out, and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content. But April isn't a particularly massive month for video games. Why April? Well, in April 1999 was the Columbine shooting, and since then, that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year. You have retrospectives, anniversaries, court cases, even copy-cat shootings, all pushing that fear into the agenda. And there's another pattern here as well. Can you spot it? See that gap there? There's a gap, and it affects all the other stories. Why is there a gap there? You see where it starts? September 2001, when we had something very real to be scared about.So, I've been working as a data journalist for about a year, and I keep hearing a phrase all the time, which is this: ""Data is the new oil."" Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily. It's not a particularly great metaphor in these times, especially if you live around the Gulf of Mexico, but I would, perhaps, adapt this metaphor slightly, and I would say that data is the new soil. Because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments. And, all right, I'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit. But it's a really fertile medium, and it feels like visualizations, infographics, data visualizations, they feel like flowers blooming from this medium. But if you look at it directly, it's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts. But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way, interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed.Let me show you this. Can you guess what this data set is? What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday, and then flattens out over the summer? I'll take answers. (Audience: Chocolate.) David McCandless: Chocolate. You might want to get some chocolate in. Any other guesses? (Audience: Shopping.) DM: Shopping. Yeah, retail therapy might help. (Audience: Sick leave.) DM: Sick leave. Yeah, you'll definitely want to take some time off. Shall we see?(Laughter)(Applause)So, the information guru Lee Byron and myself, we scraped 10,000 status Facebook updates for the phrase ""break-up"" and ""broken-up"" and this is the pattern we found — people clearing out for Spring Break, (Laughter) coming out of very bad weekends on a Monday, being single over the summer, and then the lowest day of the year, of course: Christmas Day. Who would do that? So there's a titanic amount of data out there now, unprecedented. But if you ask the right kind of question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge.So information is beautiful. Data is beautiful. I wonder if I could make my life beautiful. And here's my visual C.V. I'm not quite sure I've succeeded. Pretty blocky, the colors aren't that great. But I wanted to convey something to you. I started as a programmer, and then I worked as a writer for many years, about 20 years, in print, online and then in advertising, and only recently have I started designing. And I've never been to design school. I've never studied art or anything. I just kind of learned through doing. And when I started designing, I discovered an odd thing about myself. I already knew how to design, but it wasn't like I was amazingly brilliant at it, but more like I was sensitive to the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography. It's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me. And I don't feel like I'm unique.I feel that everyday, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless, it literally pours in. And if you're navigating a dense information jungle, coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization, it's a relief, it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle. I was curious about this, so it led me to the work of a Danish physicist called Tor Norretranders, and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms.So here we go. This is your senses, pouring into your senses every second. Your sense of sight is the fastest. It has the same bandwidth as a computer network. Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key. And then you have hearing and smell, which has the throughput of a hard disk. And then you have poor old taste, which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator. And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent, that's the amount we're actually aware of. So a lot of your vision — the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in. It's unconscious. The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern. It loves them, and it calls them beautiful. It's the language of the eye. If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other. So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts. And that whole thing — it's two languages both working at the same time.So we can use this new kind of language, if you like, to alter our perspective or change our views. Let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer: Who has the biggest military budget? It's got to be America, right? Massive. 609 billion in 2008 — 607, rather. So massive, in fact, that it can contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. Now, you can see Africa's total debt there and the U.K. budget deficit for reference. So that might well chime with your view that America is a sort of warmongering military machine, out to overpower the world with its huge industrial-military complex. But is it true that America has the biggest military budget? Because America is an incredibly rich country. In fact, it's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations' economies inside itself, it's so vastly rich. So its military budget is bound to be enormous. So, to be fair and to alter our perspective, we have to bring in another data set, and that data set is GDP, or the country's earnings. Who has the biggest budget as a proportion of GDP? Let's have a look. That changes the picture considerably. Other countries pop into view that you, perhaps, weren't considering, and American drops into eighth.Now you can also do this with soldiers. Who has the most soldiers? It's got to be China. Of course, 2.1 million. Again, chiming with your view that China has a militarized regime ready to, you know, mobilize its enormous forces. But of course, China has an enormous population. So if we do the same, we see a radically different picture. China drops to 124th. It actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration. So, absolute figures, like the military budget, in a connected world, don't give you the whole picture. They're not as true as they could be.We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, ""Let the dataset change your mindset."" And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior.Take a look at this one. I'm a bit of a health nut. I love taking supplements and being fit, but I can never understand what's going on in terms of evidence. There's always conflicting evidence. Should I take vitamin C? Should I be taking wheatgrass? This is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements. This kind of diagram is called a balloon race. So the higher up the image, the more evidence there is for each supplement. And the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to Google hits. So you can immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity, but you can also, if you grade the evidence, do a ""worth it"" line. So supplements above this line are worth investigating, but only for the conditions listed below, and then the supplements below the line are perhaps not worth investigating.Now this image constitutes a huge amount of work. We scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed, the biomedical database, and we compiled them and graded them all. And it was incredibly frustrating for me because I had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book, and I spent a month doing this, and I only filled two pages. But what it points to is that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. It's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space. And once you've curated that data, and once you've cleaned that data, and once it's there, you can do cool stuff like this.So I converted this into an interactive app, so I can now generate this application online — this is the visualization online — and I can say, ""Yeah, brilliant."" So it spawns itself. And then I can say, ""Well, just show me the stuff that affects heart health."" So let's filter that out. So heart is filtered out, so I can see if I'm curious about that. I think, ""No, no. I don't want to take any synthetics, I just want to see plants and — just show me herbs and plants. I've got all the natural ingredients."" Now this app is spawning itself from the data. The data is all stored in a Google Doc, and it's literally generating itself from that data. So the data is now alive; this is a living image, and I can update it in a second. New evidence comes out. I just change a row on a spreadsheet. Doosh! Again, the image recreates itself. So it's cool. It's kind of living.But it can go beyond data, and it can go beyond numbers. I like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts. This is a visualization of the political spectrum, an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture, into families, into individuals, into their beliefs and back around again in a cycle. What I love about this image is it's made up of concepts, it explores our worldviews and it helps us — it helps me anyway — to see what others think, to see where they're coming from. And it feels just incredibly cool to do that.What was most exciting for me designing this was that, when I was designing this image, I desperately wanted this side, the left side, to be better than the right side — being a journalist, a Left-leaning person — but I couldn't, because I would have created a lopsided, biased diagram. So, in order to really create a full image, I had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side and at the same time, uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me, which was very, very annoying and uncomfortable. (Laughter) But not too uncomfortable, because there's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective, versus being told or forced to listen to one. You're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them. It's even fun to engage with them because it's visual. So that's what's exciting to me, seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream — beautiful, lovely data.So, just to wrap up, I wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions, and information design is about solving information problems. It feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment, from the overload and the saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency, or even just interestingness. I mean, I find information just too interesting. It has a magnetic quality that draws me in.So, visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful. Often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly, like this one, the recent Icelandic volcano. Which was emitting the most CO2? Was it the planes or the volcano, the grounded planes or the volcano? So we can have a look. We look at the data and we see: Yep, the volcano emitted 150,000 tons; the grounded planes would have emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky. So essentially, we had our first carbon-neutral volcano.(Laughter)(Applause)And that is beautiful. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization
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"Come with me to the bottom of the world, Antarctica, the highest, driest, windiest, and yes, coldest region on Earth — more arid than the Sahara and, in parts, colder than Mars. The ice of Antarctica glows with a light so dazzling, it blinds the unprotected eye. Early explorers rubbed cocaine in their eyes to kill the pain of it. The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level, beneath its weight. Yet, the ice of Antarctica is a calendar of climate change. It records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onset of the last ice ages. Nowhere on Earth offers us such a perfect record. And here, scientists are drilling into the past of our planet to find clues to the future of climate change.This past January, I traveled to a place called WAIS Divide, about 600 miles from the South Pole. It is the best place on the planet, many say, to study the history of climate change. There, about 45 scientists from the University of Wisconsin, the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and others have been working to answer a central question about global warming. What is the exact relationship between levels of greenhouse gases and planetary temperatures? It's urgent work. We know that temperatures are rising. This past May was the warmest worldwide on record. And we know that levels of greenhouse gases are rising too. What we don't know is the exact, precise, immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns — winds, ocean currents, precipitation rates, cloud formation, things that bear on the health and well-being of billions of people.Their entire camp, every item of gear, was ferried 885 miles from McMurdo Station, the main U.S. supply base on the coast of Antarctica. WAIS Divide itself though, is a circle of tents in the snow. In blizzard winds, the crew sling ropes between the tents so that people can feel their way safely to the nearest ice house and to the nearest outhouse. It snows so heavily there, the installation was almost immediately buried. Indeed, the researchers picked this site because ice and snow accumulates here 10 times faster than anywhere else in Antarctica. They have to dig themselves out every day. It makes for an exotic and chilly commute.(Laughter)But under the surface is a hive of industrial activity centered around an eight-million-dollar drill assembly. Periodically, this drill, like a biopsy needle, plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice to extract a marrow of gases and isotopes for analysis. Ten times a day, they extract the 10-foot long cylinder of compressed ice crystals that contain the unsullied air and trace chemicals laid down by snow, season after season for thousands of years. It's really a time machine. At the peak of activity earlier this year, the researchers lowered the drill an extra hundred feet deeper into the ice every day and another 365 years deeper into the past. Periodically, they remove a cylinder of ice, like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell from the barrel of a drill. They inspect it, they check it for cracks, for drill damage, for spalls, for chips.More importantly, they prepare it for inspection and analysis by 27 independent laboratories in the United States and Europe, who will examine it for 40 different trace chemicals related to climate, some in parts per quadrillion. Yes, I said that with a Q, quadrillion. They cut the cylinders up into three-foot sections for easier handling and shipment back to these labs, some 8,000 miles from the drill site. Each cylinder is a parfait of time.This ice formed as snow 15,800 years ago, when our ancestors were daubing themselves with paint and considering the radical new technology of the alphabet. Bathed in polarized light and cut in cross-section, this ancient ice reveals itself as a mosaic of colors, each one showing how conditions at depth in the ice have affected this material at depths where pressures can reach a ton per square inch. Every year, it begins with a snowflake, and by digging into fresh snow, we can see how this process is ongoing today. This wall of undisturbed snow, back-lit by sunlight, shows the striations of winter and summer snow, layer upon layer. Each storm scours the atmosphere, washing out dust, soot, trace chemicals, and depositing them on the snow pack year after year, millennia after millennia, creating a kind of periodic table of elements that at this point is more than 11,000 feet thick. From this, we can detect an extraordinary number of things. We can see the calcium from the world's deserts, soot from distant wildfires, methane as an indicator of the strength of a Pacific monsoon, all wafted on winds from warmer latitudes to this remote and very cold place.Most importantly, these cylinders and this snow trap air. Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air, a pristine time capsule of greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide — all unchanged from the day that snow formed and first fell. And this is the object of their scrutiny. But don't we already know what we need to know about greenhouse gases? Why do we need to study this anymore? Don't we already know how they affect temperatures? Don't we already know the consequences of a changing climate on our settled civilization? The truth is, we only know the outlines, and what we don't completely understand, we can't properly fix. Indeed, we run the risk of making things worse.Consider, the single most successful international environmental effort of the 20th century, the Montreal Protocol, in which the nations of Earth banded together to protect the planet from the harmful effects of ozone-destroying chemicals used at that time in air conditioners, refrigerators and other cooling devices. We banned those chemicals, and we replaced them, unknowingly, with other substances that, molecule per molecule, are a hundred times more potent as heat-trapping, greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.This process requires extraordinary precautions. The scientists must insure that the ice is not contaminated. Moreover, in this 8,000-mile journey, they have to insure this ice doesn't melt. Imagine juggling a snowball across the tropics. They have to, in fact, make sure this ice never gets warmer than about 20 degrees below zero, otherwise, the key gases inside it will dissipate. So, in the coldest place on Earth, they work inside a refrigerator. As they handle the ice, in fact, they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven, so that, when their work gloves freeze and their fingers stiffen, they can don a fresh pair. They work against the clock and against the thermometer.So far, they've packed up about 4,500 feet of ice cores for shipment back to the United States. This past season, they manhandled them across the ice to waiting aircraft. The 109th Air National Guard flew the most recent shipment of ice back to the coast of Antarctica, where it was boarded onto a freighter, shipped across the tropics to California, unloaded, put on a truck, driven across the desert to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, where, as we speak, scientists are now slicing this material up for samples, for analysis, to be distributed to the laboratories around the country and in Europe.Antarctica was this planet's last empty quarter — the blind spot in our expanding vision of the world. Early explorers sailed off the edge of the map, and they found a place where the normal rules of time and temperature seem suspended. Here, the ice seems a living presence. The wind that rubs against it gives it voice. It is a voice of experience. It is a voice we should heed.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lee_hotz_inside_an_antarctic_time_machine
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"Cartoons are basically short stories. I tried to find one that didn't have a whole lot of words. Not all of them have happy endings. So how did I get started cartooning? I doodled a lot as a kid, and if you spend enough time doodling, sooner or later, something happens: all your career options run out. So you have to make a living cartooning.Actually, I fell in love with the ocean when I was a little boy, when I was about eight or nine. And I was particularly fascinated with sharks. This is some of my early work. Eventually, my mom took the red crayon away, so it was [unclear]. But I'd like to relay to you a childhood experience of mine that really made me see the ocean differently, and it's become the foundation of my work because, I feel like, if in a day, I can see the ocean differently, then I can evoke that same kind of change in others, especially kids. Before that day, this is how I saw the ocean. It's just a big blue surface. And this is how we've seen the ocean since the beginning of time. It's a mystery. There's been a lot of folklore developed around the ocean, mostly negative. And that prompted people to make maps like this, with all kinds of wonderful detail on the land, but when you get to the waters edge, the ocean looks like one giant puddle of blue paint. And this is the way I saw the ocean at school — as if to say, ""All geography and science lessons stop at water's edge. This part's not going to be on the test.""But that day I flew low over the islands — it was a family trip to the Caribbean, and I flew in a small plane low over the islands. This is what I saw. I saw hills and valleys. I saw forests and meadows. I saw grottoes and secret gardens and places I'd love to hide as a kid, if I could only breathe underwater. And best of all, I saw the animals. I saw a manta ray that looked as big as the plane I was flying in. And I flew over a lagoon with a shark in it, and that was the day that my comic strip about a shark was born.So from that day on, I was an ordinary kid walking around on dry land, but my head was down there, underwater. Up until that day, these were the animals that were most common in my life. These were the ones I'd like to draw — all variations of four legs and fur. But when you got to the ocean, my imagination was no competition for nature. Every time I'd come up with a crazy cartoon character on the drawing board, I'd find a critter in the ocean that was even crazier. And the differences in scale between this tiny sea dragon and this enormous humpback whale was like something out of a science-fiction movie.Whenever I talk to kids, I always like to tell them, the biggest animal that ever lived is still alive. It's not a dinosaur; it's a whale, animals as big as office buildings still swimming around out there in our ocean. Speaking of dinosaurs, sharks are basically the same fish they were 300 million years ago. So if you ever fantasize about going back in time and seeing what a dinosaur looked like, that's what a dinosaur looks like. So you have living dinosaurs and space aliens, animals that evolved in zero gravity in harsh conditions. It's just incredible; no Hollywood designer could come up with something more interesting than that. Or this fangtooth. The particles in the water make it look like it's floating in outer space. Could you image if we looked through the Hubble Telescope and we saw that? It would start a whole new space race. But instead, we stick a camera in the deep ocean, and we see a fish, and it doesn't capture our imagination as a society. We say to ourselves, ""Maybe we can make fish sticks with it or something.""So, what I'd like to do now is try a little drawing. So, I'm going to try to draw this fangtooth here. I love to draw the deep sea fish, because they are so ugly, but beautiful in their own way. Maybe we can give him a little bioluminescence here — give him a headlight, maybe a brake light, turn signals. But it's easy to see why these animals make such great cartoon characters, their shapes and sizes. So some of them actually seem to have powers like superheroes in a comic book. For instance, take these sea turtles. They kind of have a sixth sense like Superman's x-ray vision. They can sense the magnetic fields of the earth. And they can use that sense to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean. I kind of give my turtle hands just to make them an easier cartoon character to work with. Or take this sea cucumber. It's not an animal we draw cartoons of or draw at all. He's like an underwater Spiderman. He shoots out these sticky webs to entangle his enemy. Of course, sea cucumbers shoot them out their rears, which, in my opinion, makes them much more interesting a superhero. (Laughter) He can't spin a web anytime; he's got to pull his pants down first.(Laughter)Or the blowfish. The blowfish is like the Incredible Hulk. It can change its body into a big, intimidating fish in a matter of seconds. I'm going to draw this blowfish uninflated. And then I'm going to attempt onscreen animation here. Let's see. Try and inflate it. (Laughter) ""You talkin' to me?"" See, he can inflate himself when he wants to be intimidating. Or take this swordfish. Could you imagine being born with a tool for a nose? Do you think he wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says, ""Somebody's getting stabbed today."" Or this lionfish for instance. Imagine trying to make friends covered with razor-sharp poisonous barbs. It's not something you want to put on your Facebook page, right?My characters are — my lead character's a shark named Sherman. He's a great white shark. And I kind of broke the mold with Sherman. I didn't want to go with this ruthless predator image. He's kind of just out there making a living. He's sort of a Homer Simpson with fins. And then his sidekick is a sea turtle, as I mentioned before, named Filmore. He uses his wonderful skills at navigation to wander the oceans, looking for a mate. And he does manage to find them, but great navigation skills, lousy pick-up lines. He never seems to settle on any particular girl. I have a hermit crab named Hawthorne, who doesn't get a lot of respect as a hermit crab, so he kind of wishes he were a great white shark. And then I'll introduce you to one more character, this guy, Ernest, who is basically a juvenile delinquent in a fish body.So with characters, you can make stories. Sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens. So, imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom. (Laughter) Or, sometimes I take them to places that people have never heard of because they're underwater. For instance, I took them skiing in the Mid-Atlantic Range, which is this range of mountains in the middle of the Atlantic. I've taken them to the Sea of Japan, where they met giant jellyfish. I've taken them camping in the kelp forests of California.This next one here, I did a story on the census of marine life. And that was a lot of fun because, as most of you know, it's a real project we've heard about. But it was a chance for me to introduce readers to a lot of crazy undersea characters. So we start off the story with Ernest, who volunteers as a census taker. He goes down and he meets this famous anglerfish. Then he meets the yeti crab, the famous vampire squid — elusive, hard to find — and the Dumbo octopus, which looks so much like a cartoon in real life that really didn't have to change a thing when I drew it.I did another story on marine debris. I was speaking to a lot of my friends in the conservation business, and they — I asked them, ""So what's one issue you would like everyone to know more about?"" And they said — this one friend of mine said, ""I've got one word for you: plastic."" And I told him, ""Well, I need something a little sexier than that. Plastic just is not going to do it."" We sort of worked things out. He wanted me to use words like polyvinyl chloride, which doesn't really work in voice balloons very well. I couldn't fit them in. So what I did was I made an adventure strip.Basically, this bottle travels a long way. What I'm trying to tell readers is that plastic doesn't really go away; it just continues to wash downstream. And a lot of it ends up washing into the ocean, which is a great story if you attach a couple characters to it, especially if they can't stand each other, like these two. So, I sent them to Boise, Idaho, where they dropped a plastic bottle into the Boise sewer system. And it ended up in the Boise River and then on to the Columbia River and then to the mouth of the Columbia and to the Pacific Ocean and then on to this place called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — which is this giant Pacific gyre in the North Pacific, where a lot of this plastic ends up floating around — and then back onto the lagoon. So that was basically a buddy story with a plastic bottle following along. So a lot of people remember the plastic bottle anyway, but we really talked about marine debris and plastic in the course of that one.The third storyline I did about a year and a half ago was probably my most difficult. It was on shark finning, and I felt really strongly about this issue. And I felt like, since my main character was a shark, the comic strip was a perfect vehicle for telling the public about this. Now, finning is the act of taking a shark, cutting the valuable fins off and throwing the live animal back in the water. It's cruel, it's wasteful. There's nothing funny or entertaining about it, but I really wanted to take this issue on. I had to kill my main character, who is a shark.We start with Sherman in a Chinese restaurant, who gets a fortune that he's about to get caught by a trawler, which he does. And then he dies. He gets finned, and then he gets thrown overboard. Ostensibly, he's dead now. And so I killed a character that's been in the newspaper for 15 years. So I got a lot of reader feedback on that one. Meanwhile, the other characters are talking about shark fin soup. I do three or four strips after that where we explore the finning issue and the shark fin soup issue. Sherman's up in shark heaven. This is what I love about comic strips, you know. You really don't have to worry about the audience suspending its sense of disbelief because, if you start with a talking shark, readers pretty much check their disbelief at the door. You can kind of do anything. It becomes a near-death experience for Sherman. Meanwhile, Ernest finds his fins on the internet. There was a real website based in China that actually sold shark fins, so I kind of exposed that. And he clicks the ""buy now"" button. And voila, next-day air, they show up, and they surgically reattach them. I ended that series with a kind of a mail-in petition that encouraged our National Marine Fishery Service, to force other countries to have a stronger stance with shark management.(Applause)Thanks. I'd like to end with a little metaphor here. I've been trying to think of a metaphor to represent Mission Blue, and this is what I came up with. Imagine you're in an enormous room, and it's as dark as a cave. And you can have anything in that room, anything you want, but you can't see anything. You've been given one tool, a hammer. So you wander around in the darkness, and you bump into something, and it feels like it's made of stone. It's big, it's heavy. You can't carry it away, so you bang it with your hammer, and you break off a piece. And you take the piece out into the daylight. And you see you have a beautiful piece of white alabaster. So you say to yourself, ""Well, that's worth something."" So you go back into the room, and you break this thing to pieces, and you haul it away. And you find other things, and you break that up, and you haul those away. And you're getting all kinds of cool stuff. And you hear other people doing the same thing. So you get this sense of urgency, like you need to find as much stuff as possible as soon as possible. And then some yells, ""Stop!"" And they turn up the lights. And you realize where you are; you're in the Louvre. And you've taken all this complexity and beauty, and you've turned it into a cheap commodity.And that's what we're doing with the ocean. And part of what Mission Blue is about is yelling, ""Stop!"" so that each of us — explorer, scientist, cartoonist, singer, chef — can turn up the lights in their own way. And that's what I hope my comic strip does in a small way. That's why I like what I do.Thanks for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_toomey_learning_from_sherman_the_shark
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"So I'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important, long, oily, hot summer, and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted. But before I talk about the political chemistry, I actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil.This is a photograph from when I visited Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 2002 to watch the Minerals Management Service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice. And what you see here is, you see a little bit of crude oil, you see some ice cubes, and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm. The napalm is burning there quite nicely. And the thing is, is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the American consumer. We're four percent of the world's population; we use 25 percent of the world's oil production. And we don't really understand what oil is, until you check out its molecules, And you don't really understand that until you see this stuff burn. So this is what happens as that burn gets going. It takes off. It's a big woosh. I highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday, because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again. It'll just bake your retinas. So there it is; the retinas are baking.Let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil. Oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules. It starts of with the very small ones, which are one carbon, four hydrogen — that's methane — it just floats off. Then there's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon. You've probably heard of benzene rings; they're very carcinogenic. And it goes all the way over to these big, thick, galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons, and they have thousands of hydrogens, and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them. Those are called the asphaltenes; they're an ingredient in asphalt. They're very important in oil spills.Let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water. It is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous. Oil doesn't sink, it floats. If it sank, it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill. And the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water. It spreads out to be really thin, so you have a hard time corralling it. The next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate, and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that, and shrimp. And then the asphaltenes — and this is the crucial thing — the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion, something like mayonnaise. It triples the amount of oily, messy goo that you have in the water, and it makes it very hard to handle. It also makes it very viscous. When the Prestige sank off the coast of Spain, there were big, floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil, with the consistency, or the viscosity, of chewing gum. It's incredibly hard to clean up. And every single oil is different when it hits water.When the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics, it's absolutely explosive. For the first time, American consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves. They have a ""eureka!"" moment, when we suddenly understand oil in a different context. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics, because it's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important, why we need to stay focused. Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks, ""Wow! I'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work."" No, they think, ""Ugh. I have to go buy gas. I'm so angry about it. The oil companies are ripping me off. They set the prices, and I don't even know. I am helpless over this."" And this is what happens to us at the gas pump — and actually, gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger. You might notice that many gas pumps, including this one, are designed to look like ATMs. I've talked to engineers. That's specifically to diffuse our anger, because supposedly we feel good about ATMs. (Laughter) That shows you how bad it is.But actually, I mean, this feeling of helplessness comes in because most Americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy, not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market. And the thing is, too, is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume, which is somewhat reasonable, because in fact, we have designed this system where, if you want to get a job, it's much more important to have a car that runs, to have a job and keep a job, than to have a GED. And that's actually very perverse.Now there's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas, which is that we'd rather be doing anything else. This is BP's gas station in downtown Los Angeles. It is green. It is a shrine to greenishness. ""Now,"" you think, ""why would something so lame work on people so smart?"" Well, the reason is, is because, when we're buying gas, we're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance. I mean, we're angry at the one hand and we want to be somewhere else. We don't want to be buying oil; we want to be doing something green. And we get kind of in on our own con. I mean — and this is funny, it looks funny here. But in fact, that's why the slogan ""beyond petroleum"" worked. But it's an inherent part of our energy policy, which is we don't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use. We talk about energy independence. We talk about hydrogen cars. We talk about biofuels that haven't been invented yet. And so, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil, and it's really important to dealing with this oil spill.Okay, so the politics of oil are very moral in the United States. The oil industry is like a huge, gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else, but we actually see it in very moral terms. This is an early-on photograph — you can see, we had these gushers. Early journalists looked at these spills, and they said, ""This is a filthy industry."" But they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing. They weren't farmers, they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground. It's the ""Beverly Hillbillies,"" basically. But in the beginning, this was seen as a very morally problematic thing, long before it became funny.And then, of course, there was John D. Rockefeller. And the thing about John D. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry, and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company, a multinational. It was terrifying; you think Walmart is a terrifying business model now, imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s. And it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy. But what's really amazing is that Ida Tarbell, the journalist, went in and did a big exposé of Rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place. But in many ways, that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us. And here's one of the things that Ida Tarbell said — she said, ""He has a thin nose like a thorn. There were no lips. There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them."" (Laughter) Okay, so that guy is actually still with us. (Laughter) I mean, this is a very pervasive — this is part of our DNA. And then there's this guy, okay.So, you might be wondering why it is that, every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill, we call these CEOs down to Washington, and we sort of pepper them with questions in public and we try to shame them. And this is something that we've been doing since 1974, when we first asked them, ""Why are there these obscene profits?"" And we've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these CEOs. And we take it as, you know — we look at it on a moral level, rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level. And so I'm not saying these guys aren't liable to answer questions — I'm just saying that, when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards, you don't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate, or you're going to get around to really reducing the amount of oil and reducing our dependence on oil. So I'm saying this is kind of a distraction. But it makes for good theater, and it's powerfully cathartic as you probably saw last week.So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing. I mean, these pictures — this is from the Santa Barbara spill. You have these pictures of birds. They really influence people. When the Santa Barbara spill happened in 1969, it formed the environmental movement in its modern form. It started Earth Day. It also put in place the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. Everything that we are really stemmed from this period. I think it's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us. Here we are normally; we're standing at the gas pump, and we're feeling kind of helpless. We look at these pictures and we understand, for the first time, our role in this supply chain. We connect the dots in the supply chain. And we have this kind of — as voters, we have kind of a ""eureka!"" moment. This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important. But it's also really important that we don't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it. We actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem.One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms. We were very reactive, as opposed to being proactive about what happened. And so what we did was, actually, we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling. We stopped drilling in ANWR, but we didn't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed. In fact, it's continued to increase. The only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices. As you can see, our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out. We only have two percent of the world's oil reserves; 65 percent of them are in the Persian Gulf.One of the things that's happened because of this is that, since 1969, the country of Nigeria, or the part of Nigeria that pumps oil, which is the delta — which is two times the size of Maryland — has had thousands of oil spills a year. I mean, we've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations. That has been the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since 1969. And we can wrap our heads around the spills, because that's what we see here, but in fact, these guys actually live in a war zone. There's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of Maryland, and it's all related to the oil. And these guys, I mean, if they were in the U.S., they might be actually here in this room. They have degrees in political science, degrees in business — they're entrepreneurs. They don't actually want to be doing what they're doing. And it's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us.The other thing that we've done, as we've continued to increase demand, is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs. One of the places we put in a big oil project in Chad, with Exxon. So the U.S. taxpayer paid for it; the World Bank, Exxon paid for it. We put it in. There was a tremendous banditry problem. I was there in 2003. We were driving along this dark, dark road, and the guy in the green stepped out, and I was just like, ""Ahhh! This is it."" And then the guy in the Exxon uniform stepped out, and we realized it was okay. They have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields. But at the same time, Chad has become much more unstable, and we are not paying for that price at the pump. We pay for it in our taxes on April 15th.We do the same thing with the price of policing the Persian Gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open. This is 1988 — we actually bombed two Iranian oil platforms that year. That was the beginning of an escalating U.S. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump. We pay for it on April 15th, and we can't even calculate the cost of this involvement. The other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the Gulf of Mexico, which was not part of the moratoriums. Now what's happened in the Gulf of Mexico — as you can see, this is the Minerals Management diagram of wells for gas and oil. It's become this intense industrialized zone. It doesn't have the same resonance for us that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has, but it should, I mean, it's a bird sanctuary. Also, every time you buy gasoline in the United States, half of it is actually being refined along the coast, because the Gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well. So the people of the Gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment.And finally, American families also pay a price for oil. Now on the one hand, the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil, but on the other hand, the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work, generally in a fairly crummy car. If you look at people who make $50,000 a year, they have two kids, they might have three jobs or more, and then they have to really commute. They're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care. And the same thing happens at the 50th percentile, around 80,000. Gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the American economy, but they're also a drain on individual families and it's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher.So, what I'm going to talk to you about now is: what do we have to do this time? What are the laws? What do we have to do to keep ourselves focused? One thing is — we need to stay away from the theater. We need to stay away from the moratoriums. We need to focus really back again on the molecules. The moratoriums are fine, but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil. One of the things that we also need to do, is we need to try to not kind of fool ourselves into thinking that you can have a green world, before you reduce the amount of oil that we use. We need to focus on reducing the oil.What you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the U.S. economy. It comes in on the side — the useful stuff is the dark gray, and the un-useful stuff, which is called the rejected energy — the waste, goes up to the top. Now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount. And one of the things that we need to do is, not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient, but we also need to fix the economy in general.We need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel. For example, we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000. We actually encourage people to drive more. We have policies that reward sprawl — we have all kinds of policies. We need to have more mobility choices. We need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil. And we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry, which is at least 10 billion dollars a year, into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute. Whether that's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road, this is where we need to be. We need to kind of rationalize this whole thing, and you can find more about this policy. It's called STRONG, which is ""Secure Transportation Reducing Oil Needs Gradually,"" and the idea is instead of being helpless, we need to be more strong. They're up at NewAmerica.net. What's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump, to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are, having kind of that special moment, where we connect the dots actually at the pump.Now supposedly, oil taxes are the third rail of American politics — the no-fly zone. I actually — I agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much, but I think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline, and upped it to six cents next year, nine cents the following year, all the way up to 30 cents by 2020, that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption, and at the same time we would give people time to prepare, time to respond, and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time. Let me give you a little sense of how this would work.This is a gas receipt, hypothetically, for a year from now. The first thing that you have on the tax is — you have a tax for a stronger America — 33 cents. So you're not helpless at the pump. And the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign, very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack. And what it says is, ""The National Academy of Sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs."" That's a lot. And so this — you can see that you're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax. And also, the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system. And at the same time, you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting, or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car, or whatever it is you're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence. With this whole sort of suite of policies, we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption — or our oil consumption — by 20 percent by 2020. So, three million barrels a day.But in order to do this, one of the things we really need to do, is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon. We need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater, not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there. We need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_margonelli_the_political_chemistry_of_oil
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"So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair. So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us. And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing.So quick show of hands — who studied some marketing in university? Who studied some physics in university? Pretty good. And at school? Okay, lots of you. So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories.So, physics and marketing. We'll start with something very simple — Newton's Law: ""The force equals mass times acceleration."" This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign. (Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle — a larger mass — it requires more force to change its direction. It's the same with brands: the more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning. And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy. It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P&G keep brands separate, like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand. So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction. The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures.Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? Getting a little more technical now. So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state — i.e., the position — and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. So to explain that — if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you looked at it. By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it. The act of observation changes it. It's the same in marketing. So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior. Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost none of them buy lots of junk food. And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year. Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day. And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few. Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched for category. So luckily, the science — no, sorry — the marketing is getting easier. Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do. So the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it. The marketing is — the message for marketing is — that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do.So next, the scientific method — an axiom of physics, of all science — says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it. What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it. And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water. So if we take an example — Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth. It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water. And there are parallels for marketing — you can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief. Take BP — they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident. Think about Toyota. It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident. And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador. Well, you know the story. (Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it — any hypothesis is shaky. And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work. So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand.And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy — the second law of thermodynamics. This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. The same is true of marketing. If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. But where we are today, things have changed. You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster. But then you lose control of it. With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes. Your brand starts being dispersed, (Laughter) it gets more chaotic. (Laughter) It's out of your control. (Laughter) I actually saw him speak — he did a good job. But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing. This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people. It makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law. The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it.So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_cobley_what_physics_taught_me_about_marketing
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"Martin Luther King did not say, ""I have a nightmare,"" when he inspired the civil rights movements. He said, ""I have a dream."" And I have a dream. I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times, ""The Road."" It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future.For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. We have focused on the worst-case scenario. We have focused on the problems. And we have not thought enough about the solutions. We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened — think of a deer. A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is.What would it be like to be improving the human lot? And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is — that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear — that more is better. Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, ""A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income."" But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce.But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, ""The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile."" How crazy is that? That our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being.And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. This is from a global survey. It's asking people, what do they want. And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. Okay, they think money is slightly important. It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. We all need to love and be loved in life. It's not nearly as important as health. We want to be healthy and live a full life. These seem to be natural human aspirations. Why are statisticians not measuring these? Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? And really, this is what I've done with my adult life — is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits.And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. We all have one planet. We all have to share it. It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. And economics is very interested in scarcity. When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. It is an efficiency measure. And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph.Running horizontally along the graph, is ""ecological footprint,"" which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. More is bad. Running vertically upwards, is a measure called ""happy life years."" It's about the well-being of nations. It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being — typically, sub-Saharan Africa. In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. Malaria, HIV/AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world.But now for the good news! There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. This is an aspirational graph. We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. They're Latin American. The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. Maybe some of you have. Costa Rica. Costa Rica — average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. That is longer than in the USA. They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet — than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. They are the happiest place. They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world — a quarter of the resources.What's going on there? What's happening in Costa Rica? We can look at some of the data. 99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. They abolished the army in 1949 — 1949. And they invested in social programs — health and education. They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. They have the social connectedness. (Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly — and the thing we might have to think about — is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. It might be Latin American. And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. That's what we need to do. And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. And then we're starting to create a happy planet. That's one way of looking at it.Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. And this is the trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. And so in strict happy-planet methodology, we've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. It's actually not very long away. It's half a human lifetime away. A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. This is not the very distant future. This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. That is changing our business. That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. I think we want it to carry on. I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. They want to hold on to what they've got. And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more.Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. Human beings are very motivated by the ""now."" You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. What would that look like for society? Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio — I don't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news. And why do I hear that? Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? That's how you create a collective goal. You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. At a personal level, we need these nudges too. Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do — never my best thing. What are these for happiness? What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier?We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program — lots and lots of people — involved lots of experts — everything evidence based — a huge tome. But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from.And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? Keep building them. The second one is be active. The fastest way out of a bad mood: step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. Being active is great for our positive mood. The third one is take notice. How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, [very] strong for our well being. The fourth is keep learning and keep is important — learning throughout the whole life course. Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. It's more curiosity. It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. Keep learning. And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. We feel good if we give. You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves.And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. They don't have any carbon content. They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. He said, ""I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land."" Now, he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. And not only that, we need to create a Great Transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things.Human beings want to be happy. Pave them with the five ways. And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them — something like the Happy Planet Index. And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want, where happiness does not cost the earth.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index
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"We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth. This is bad news, but perhaps surprising to you, it's also part of the good news. We're the first generation — thanks to science — to be informed that we may be undermining the stability and the ability of planet Earth to support human development as we know it. It's also good news, because the planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. This is a scientific journey on the challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability.On this journey, I'd like to bring, apart from yourselves, a good friend, a stakeholder, who's always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues, a stakeholder who refuses to compromise — planet Earth. So I thought I'd bring her with me today on stage, to have her as a witness of a remarkable journey, which humbly reminds us of the period of grace we've had over the past 10,000 years. This is the living conditions on the planet over the last 100,000 years. It's a very important period — it's roughly half the period when we've been fully modern humans on the planet. We've had the same, roughly, abilities that developed civilizations as we know it. This is the environmental conditions on the planet.Here, used as a proxy, temperature variability. It was a jumpy ride. 80,000 years back in a crisis, we leave Africa, we colonize Australia in another crisis, 60,000 years back, we leave Asia for Europe in another crisis, 40,000 years back, and then we enter the remarkably stable Holocene phase, the only period in the whole history of the planet, that we know of, that can support human development. A thousand years into this period, we abandon our hunting and gathering patterns. We go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are today. The Mesopotamian culture: we invent agriculture, we domesticate animals and plants. You have the Roman, the Greek and the story as you know it. The only phase, as we know it that can support humanity.The trouble is we're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet, a quadruple sqeeze, which, as its first squeeze, has population growth of course. Now, this is not only about numbers; this is not only about the fact that we're seven billion people committed to nine billion people, it's an equity issue as well. The majority of the environmental impacts on the planet have been caused by the rich minority, the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial bandwagon in the mid-18th century. The majority of the planet, aspiring for development, having the right for development, are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle, a momentous pressure.The second pressure on the planet is, of course the climate agenda — the big issue — where the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at 450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees, to avoid the risk that we may be destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, holding six meters — level rising, the risk of destabilizing the Greenland Ice Sheet, holding another seven meters — sea level rising. Now, you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet, a resilient planet, but unfortunately, the third pressure is the ecosystem decline. Never have we seen, in the past 50 years, such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet, one of them being the ability to regulate climate on the long term, in our forests, land and biodiversity.The forth pressure is surprise, the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old paradigm, that ecosystems behave linearly, predictably, controllably in our — so to say — linear systems, and that in fact, surprise is universal, as systems tip over very rapidly, abruptly and often irreversibly. This, dear friends, poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous scale. We may, in fact, have entered a new geological era — the Anthropocene, where humans are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level.Now, as a scientist, what's the evidence for this? Well, the evidence is, unfortunately, ample. It's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated change. You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being — nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing land degredation, loss of species — they all show the same pattern over the past 200 years. Simultaneously, they branch off in the mid-50s, 10 years after the Second World War, showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human enterprise starts in the mid-50s. You see, for the first time, an imprint on the global level. And I can tell you, you enter the disciplinary research in each of these, you find something remarkably important, the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to bend the curves, that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the history humanity on the planet, the decade when we have to bend the curves.Now, as if this was not enough — to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated pressure on the planet — we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple stable states, separated by thresholds — illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram, where the depth of the cup is the resilience of the system. Now, the system may gradually — under pressure of climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss — lose the depth of the cup, the resilience, but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly, under a threshold, be tipping over. Upff. Sorry. Changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation, where new biophysical logic takes over, new species take over, and the system gets locked.Do we have evidence of this? Yes, coral reef systems. Biodiverse, low-nutrient, hard coral systems under multiple pressures of overfishing, unsustainable tourism, climate change. A trigger and the system tips over, loses its resilience, soft corals take over, and we get undesired systems that cannot support economic and social development. The Arctic — a beautiful system — a regulating biome at the planetary level, taking the knock after knock on climate change, appearing to be in a good state. No scientist could predict that in 2007, suddenly, what could be crossing a threshold. The system suddenly, very surprisingly, loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover. And the drama is, of course, that when the system does this, the logic may change. It may get locked in an undesired state, because it changes color, absorbs more energy, and the system may get stuck. In my mind, the largest red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation. As a sideline, you know that the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted a red flag at the bottom of the Arctic to be able to control the oil resources.Now, if we have evidence, which we now have, that wetlands, forests, [unclear] monsoon system, the rainforests, behave in this nonlinear way. 30 or so scientists around the world gathered and asked a question for the first time, ""Do we have to put the planet into the the pot?"" So we have to ask ourselves: are we threatening this extraordinarily stable Holocene state? Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human development? You know, you don't want to stand there. In fact, you're not even allowed to stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In fact, there's a fence quite upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger zone. And this is the new paradigm, which we gathered two, three years back, recognizing that our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future, aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts, is of the past.Now we to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene? And could we even, thanks to major advancements in Earth systems science, identify the thresholds, the points where we may expect nonlinear change? And could we even define a planetary boundary, a fence, within which we then have a safe operating space for humanity? This work, which was published in ""Nature,"" late 2009, after a number of years of analysis, led to the final proposition that we can only find nine planetary boundaries with which, under active stewardship, would allow ourselves to have a safe operating space. These include, of course, climate. It may surprise you that it's not only climate. But it shows that we are interconnected, among many systems on the planet, with the three big systems, climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification being the three big systems, where the scientific evidence of large-scale thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet.But we also include, what we call, the slow variables, the systems that, under the hood, regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet — the interference of the big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet, land use change, rate of biodiversity loss, freshwater use, functions which regulate biomass on the planet, carbon sequestration, diversity. And then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify — air pollution, including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates, but also chemical pollution. Together, these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the Anthropocene, understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system. In fact, most evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three Musketeers, ""One for all. All for one."" You degrade forests, you go beyond the boundary on land, you undermine the ability of the climate system to stay stable. The drama here is, in fact, that it may show that the climate challenge is the easy one, if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development.Now this is the Big Bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries. What you see here in black line is the safe operating space, the quantified boundaries, as suggested by this analysis. The yellow dot in the middle here is our starting point, the pre-industrial point, where we're very safely in the safe operating space. In the '50s, we start branching out. In the '60s already, through the green revolution and the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere — you know, human's today take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a whole. We don't transgress the climate boundary until the early '90s, actually, right after Rio. And today, we are in a situation where we estimate that we've transgressed three boundaries, the rate of biodiversity loss, which is the sixth extinction period in the history of humanity — one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs — nitrogen and climate change. But we still have some degrees of freedom on the others, but we are approaching fast on land, water, phosphorus and oceans. But this gives a new paradigm to guide humanity, to put the light on our, so far overpowered industrial vehicle, which operates as if we're only on a dark, straight highway.Now the question then is: how gloomy is this? Is then sustainable development utopia? Well, there's no science to suggest. In fact, there is ample science to indicate that we can do this transformative change, that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative, a transformative gear, across scales. The drama is, of course, is that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our governance and management paradigm, from the current linear, command and control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible, a much more adaptive approach, where we recognize that redundancy, both in social and environmental systems, is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change. We have to invest in persistence, in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and still remain in that desired cup. We have to invest in transformations capability, moving from crisis into innovation and the ability to rise after a crisis, and of course to adapt to unavoidable change. This is a new paradigm. We're not doing that at any scale on governance.But is it happening anywhere? Do we have any examples of success on this mind shift being applied at the local level? Well, yes, in fact we do and the list can start becoming longer and longer. There's good news here, for example, from Latin America, where plow-based farming systems of the '50s and '60s led farming basically to a dead-end, with lower and lower yields, degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in Paraguay, Uruguay and a number of countries, Brazil, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies, which today, for example, in some countries, have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch, zero till farming which, not only produces more food, but also sequesters carbon.The Australian Great Barrier Reef is another success story. Under the realization from tourist operators, fishermen, the Australian Great Barrier Reef Authority and scientists that the Great Barrier Reef is doomed under the current governance regime. Global change, beautification rack culture, overfishing and unsustainable tourism, all together placing this system in the realization of crisis. But the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset, which today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience, acknowledge redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole, and then allow for much more redundancy in the system.Sweden, the country I come from, has other examples, where wetlands in southern Sweden were seen as — as in many countries — as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban regions. But again, a crisis, new partnerships, actors locally, transforming these into a key component of sustainable urban planning. So crisis leading into opportunities.Now, what about the future? Well, the future, of course, has one massive challenge, which is feeding a world of nine billion people. We need nothing less than a new green revolution, and the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a sink. It has to basically do this on current land. We cannot expand anymore, because it erodes the planetary boundaries. We cannot continue consuming water as we do today, with 25 percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean. And we need a transformation. Well, interestingly, and based on my work and others in Africa, for example, we've shown that even the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems, with innovations and supplementary irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts, sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on nutrients from toilets back to farmers' fields, and innovations in tillage systems, we can triple, quadruple, yield levels on current land.Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows empirically across the world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local, action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations, where local actors, together, can deal with the global commons at a large scale. But even on the hard policy area we have innovations. We know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a low-carbon economy in record time. And what shall we do? Everybody talks about carbon taxes — it won't work — emission schemes, but for example, one policy measure, feed-in tariffs on the energy system, which is already applied, from China doing it on offshore wind systems, all the way to the U.S. where you give the guaranteed price for investment in renewable energy, but you can subsidize electricity to poor people. You get people out of poverty. You solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector, while at the same time, stimulating innovation — examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary level.So there is — no doubt — opportunity here, and we can list many, many examples of transformative opportunities around the planet. The key though in all of these, the red thread, is the shift in mindset, moving away from a situation where we simply are pushing ourselves into a dark future, where we instead backcast our future, and we say, ""What is the playing field on the planet? What are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate?"" and then backtrack innovations within that. But of course, the drama is, it clearly shows that incremental change is not an option.So, there is scientific evidence. They sort of say the harsh news, that we are facing the largest transformative development since the industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today. Now, science indicates that, yes, we can achieve a prosperous future within the safe operating space, if we move simultaneously, collaborating on a global level, from local to global scale, in transformative options, which build resilience on a finite planet.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/johan_rockstrom_let_the_environment_guide_our_development
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"Tyler Dewar: The way I feel right now is that all of the other speakers have said exactly what I wanted to say. (Laughter) And it seems that the only thing left for me to say is to thank you all for your kindness.TD: But maybe in the spirit of appreciating the kindness of you all, I could share with you a little story about myself.TD: From the time I was very young, onward, I was given a lot of different responsibilities, and it always seemed to me, when I was young, that everything was laid out before me. All of the plans for me were already made. I was given the clothes that I needed to wear and told where I needed to be, given these very precious and holy looking robes to wear, with the understanding that it was something sacred or important.TD: But before that kind of formal lifestyle happened for me, I was living in eastern Tibet with my family. And when I was seven years old, all of a sudden, a search party arrived at my home. They were looking the next Karmapa, and I noticed they were talking to my mom and dad, and the news came to me that they were telling me that I was the Karmapa. And these days, people ask me a lot, how did that feel. How did that feel when they came and whisked you away, and your lifestyle completely changed? And what I mostly say is that, at that time, it was a pretty interesting idea to me. I thought that things would be pretty fun and there would be more things to play with.(Laughter)TD: But it didn't turn out to be so fun and entertaining, as I thought it would have been. I was placed in a pretty strictly controlled environment. And immediately, a lot of different responsibilities, in terms of my education and so forth, were heaped upon me. I was separated, largely, from my family, including my mother and father. I didn't have have many personal friends to spend time with, but I was expected to perform these prescribed duties. So it turned out that my fantasy about an entertaining life of being the Karmapa wasn't going to come true. It more felt to be the case to me that I was being treated like a statue, and I was to sit in one place like a statue would.TD: Nevertheless, I felt that, even though I've been separated from my loved ones — and, of course, now I'm even further away. When I was 14, I escaped from Tibet and became even further removed from my mother and father, my relatives, my friends and my homeland. But nevertheless, there's no real sense of separation from me in my heart, in terms of the love that I feel for these people. I feel, still, a very strong connection of love for all of these people and for the land.TD: And I still do get to keep in touch with my mother and father, albeit infrequently. I talk to my mother once in a blue moon on the telephone. And my experience is that, when I'm talking to her, with every second that passes during our conversation, the feeling of love that binds us is bringing us closer and closer together.TD: So those were just a few remarks about my personal background. And in terms of other things that I wanted to share with you, in terms of ideas, I think it's wonderful to have a situation like this, where so many people from different backgrounds and places can come together, exchange their ideas and form relationships of friendship with each other. And I think that's symbolic of what we're seeing in the world in general, that the world is becoming smaller and smaller, and that all of the peoples in the world are enjoying more opportunities for connection. That's wonderful, but we should also remember that we should have a similar process happening on the inside. Along with outward development and increase of opportunity, there should be inward development and deepening of our heart connections as well as our outward connections. So we spoke and we heard some about design this week. I think that it's important for us to remember that we need to keep pushing forward on the endeavor of the design of the heart. We heard a lot about technology this week, and it's important for us to remember to invest a lot of our energy in improving the technology of the heart.TD: So, even though I'm somewhat happy about the wonderful developments that are happening in the world, still, I feel a sense of impediment, when it comes to the ability that we have to connect with each other on a heart-to-heart, or a mind-to-mind, level. I feel that there are some things that are getting in the way.TC: My relationship to this concept of heart-to-heart connection, or mind-to-mind connection, is an interesting one, because, as a spiritual leader, I'm always attempting to open my heart to others and offer myself up for heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind connections in a genuine way with other people, but at the same time, I've always been advised that I need to emphasize intelligence over the heart-to-heart connections, because, being someone in a position like mine, if I don't rely primarily on intelligence, then something dangerous may happen to me. So it's an interesting paradox at play there. But I had a really striking experience once, when a group from Afghanistan came to visit me, and we had a really interesting conversation.TD: So we ended up talking about the Bamiyan Buddhas, which, as you know, were destroyed some years ago in Afghanistan. But the basis of our conversation was the different approach to spirituality on the part of the Muslim and Buddhist traditions. Of course, in Muslim, because of the teachings around the concept of idolatry, you don't find as many physical representations of divinity or of spiritual liberation as you do in the Buddhist tradition, where, of course, there are many statues of the Buddha that are highly revered. So, we were talking about the differences between the traditions and what many people perceived as the tragedy of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but I offered the suggestion that perhaps we could look at this in a positive way. What we saw in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was the depletion of matter, some solid substance falling down and disintegrating. Maybe we could look at that to be more similar to the falling of the Berlin Wall, where a divide that had kept two types of people apart had collapsed and opened up a door for further communication. So I think that, in this way, it's always possible for us to derive something positive that can help us understand one another better.TD: So, with regard to the development that we've been talking about here at this conference, I really feel that the development that we make shouldn't create a further burden for us as human beings, but should be used to improve our fundamental lifestyle of how we live in the world.TD: Of course, I rejoice in the development and the growth and the rise of the noble land of India, the great country of India, but at the same time, I think, as some of us have acknowledged, we need to be aware that some aspects of this rise are coming at the cost of the very ground on which we stand. So, as we are climbing the tree, some of the things that we're doing in order to climb the tree are actually undermining the tree's very root. And so, what I think it comes down to is a question of, not only having information of what's going on, but paying attention to that and letting that shift our motivation to become more sincere and genuinely positive. We have hear, this week, about the horrible sufferings, for example, that so many women of the world are enduring day-to-day. We have that information, but what often happens to us is that we don't really choose to pay attention to it. We don't really choose to allow that to cause there to be a shift in our hearts. So I think the way forward for the world — one that will bring the path of outer development in harmony with the real root of happiness — is that we allow the information that we have to really make a change in our heart.TD: So I think that sincere motivation is very important for our future well-being, or deep sense of well-being as humans, and I think that means sinking in to whatever it is you're doing now. Whatever work you're trying to do now to benefit the world, sink into that, get a full taste of that.TD: So, since we've been here this week, we've taken millions of breaths, collectively, and perhaps we haven't witnessed any course changes happening in our lives, but we often miss the very subtle changes. And I think that sometimes we develop grand concepts of what happiness might look like for us, but that, if we pay attention, we can see that there are little symbols of happiness in every breath that we take.TD: So, every one of you who has come here is so talented, and you have so much to offer to the world, I think it would be a good note to conclude on then to just take a moment to appreciate how fortunate we are to have come together in this way and exchanged ideas and really form a strong aspiration and energy within ourselves that we will take the good that has come from this conference, the momentum, the positivity, and we will spread that and plant it in all of the corners of the world.His Holiness the Karmapa: Tomorrow is my Talk.TD: Lakshmi has worked incredibly hard, even in inviting me, let alone everything else that she has done to make this happen, and I was somewhat resistant at times, and I was also very nervous throughout this week. I was feeling under the weather and dizzy and so forth, and people would ask me, why. I would tell them, ""It's because I have to talk tomorrow."" And so Lakshmi had to put up with me through all of that, but I very much appreciate the opportunity she's given me to be here. And to you, everyone, thank you very much.(Applause)HH: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/his_holiness_the_karmapa_the_technology_of_the_heart
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"Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal. For real — you can take a second. You've got to feel this to learn it. Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay? Imagine deciding right now that you're going to do it. Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you're going to do. Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you. Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? Don't you feel one step closer already, like it's already becoming part of your identity?Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it. The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. Ideally you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a ""social reality."" The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. And then because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary.(Laughter)So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? So they hold us to it.So, let's look at the proof. 1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this ""substitution."" 1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published.It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests. Everyone wrote down their personal goal. Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room, and half didn't. Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal.So if this is true, what can we do? Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, ""I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don't, okay?""So audience, next time you're tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say?(Silence)Exactly! Well done.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself
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"This strange-looking plant is called the Llareta. What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a shrub comprised of thousands of branches, each containing clusters of tiny green leaves at the end and so densely packed together that you could actually stand on top of it. This individual lives in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and it happens to be 3,000 years old. It also happens to be a relative of parsley.For the past five years, I've been researching, working with biologists and traveling all over the world to find continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. The project is part art and part science. There's an environmental component. And I'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale. I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age because I wanted to start at what we consider to be year zero and work backward from there.What you're looking at now is a tree called Jomon Sugi, living on the remote island of Yakushima. The tree was in part a catalyst for the project. I'd been traveling in Japan without an agenda other than to photograph, and then I heard about this tree that is 2,180 years old and knew that I had to go visit it. It wasn't until later, when I was actually back home in New York that I got the idea for the project. So it was the slow churn, if you will. I think it was my longstanding desire to bring together my interest in art, science and philosophy that allowed me to be ready when the proverbial light bulb went on. So I started researching, and to my surprise, this project had never been done before in the arts or the sciences. And — perhaps naively — I was surprised to find that there isn't even an area in the sciences that deals with this idea of global species longevity.So what you're looking at here is the rhizocarpon geographicum, or map lichen, and this is around 3,000 years old and lives in Greenland, which is a long way to go for some lichens. Visiting Greenland was more like traveling back in time than just traveling very far north. It was very primal and more remote than anything I'd ever experienced before. And this is heightened by a couple of particular experiences. One was when I had been dropped off by boat on a remote fjord, only to find that the archeologists I was supposed to meet were nowhere to be found. And it's not like you could send them a text or shoot them an e-mail, so I was literally left to my own devices. But luckily, it worked out obviously, but it was a humbling experience to feel so disconnected. And then a few days later, we had the opportunity to go fishing in a glacial stream near our campsite, where the fish were so abundant that you could literally reach into the stream and grab out a foot-long trout with your bare hands. It was like visiting a more innocent time on the planet. And then, of course, there's the lichens. These lichens grow only one centimeter every hundred years. I think that really puts human lifespans into a different perspective.And what you're looking at here is an aerial photo take over eastern Oregon. And if the title ""Searching for Armillaria Death Rings,"" sounds ominous, it is. The Armillaria is actually a predatory fungus, killing certain species of trees in the forest. It's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the ""humongous fungus"" because it happens to be one of the world's largest organisms as well. So with the help of some biologists studying the fungus, I got some maps and some GPS coordinates and chartered a plane and started looking for the death rings, the circular patterns in which the fungus kills the trees. So I'm not sure if there are any in this photo, but I do know the fungus is down there. And then this back down on the ground and you can see that the fungus is actually invading this tree. So that white material that you see in between the bark and the wood is the mycelial felt of the fungus, and what it's doing — it's actually slowly strangling the tree to death by preventing the flow of water and nutrients. So this strategy has served it pretty well — it's 2,400 years old. And then from underground to underwater.This is a Brain Coral living in Tobago that's around 2,000 years old. And I had to overcome my fear of deep water to find this one. This is at about 60 feet or 18 meters, depth. And you'll see, there's some damage to the surface of the coral. That was actually caused by a school of parrot fish that had started eating it, though luckily, they lost interest before killing it. Luckily still, it seems to be out of harm's way of the recent oil spill. But that being said, we just as easily could have lost one of the oldest living things on the planet, and the full impact of that disaster is still yet to be seen.Now this is something that I think is one of the most quietly resilient things on the planet. This is clonal colony of Quaking Aspen trees, living in Utah, that is literally 80,000 years old. What looks like a forest is actually only one tree. Imagine that it's one giant root system and each tree is a stem coming up from that system. So what you have is one giant, interconnected, genetically identical individual that's been living for 80,000 years. It also happens to be male and, in theory immortal.(Laughter)This is a clonal tree as well. This is the spruce Gran Picea, which at 9,550 years is a mere babe in the woods. The location of this tree is actually kept secret for its own protection. I spoke to the biologist who discovered this tree, and he told me that that spindly growth you see there in the center is most likely a product of climate change. As it's gotten warmer on the top of the mountain, the vegetation zone is actually changing. So we don't even necessarily have to have direct contact with these organisms to have a very real impact on them.This is the Fortingall Yew — no, I'm just kidding — this is the Fortingall Yew. (Laughter) But I put that slide in there because I'm often asked if there are any animals in the project. And aside from coral, the answer is no. Does anybody know how old the oldest tortoise is — any guesses? (Audience: 300.) Rachel Sussman: 300? No, 175 is the oldest living tortoise, so nowhere near 2,000. And then, you might have heard of this giant clam that was discovered off the coast of northern Iceland that reached 405 years old. However, it died in the lab as they were determining its age. The most interesting discovery of late, I think is the so-called immortal jellyfish, which has actually been observed in the lab to be able to be able to revert back to the polyp state after reaching full maturity. So that being said, it's highly unlikely that any jellyfish would survive that long in the wild. And back to the yew here. So as you can see, it's in a churchyard; it's in Scotland. It's behind a protective wall. And there are actually a number or ancient yews in churchyards around the U.K., but if you do the math, you'll remember it's actually the yew trees that were there first, then the churches.And now down to another part of the world. I had the opportunity to travel around the Limpopo Province in South Africa with an expert in Baobab trees. And we saw a number of them, and this is most likely the oldest. It's around 2,000, and it's called the Sagole Baobab. And you know, I think of all of these organisms as palimpsests. They contain thousands of years of their own histories within themselves, and they also contain records of natural and human events. And the Baobabs in particular are a great example of this. You can see that this one has names carved into its trunk, but it also records some natural events. So the Baobabs, as they get older, tend to get pulpy in their centers and hollow out. And this can create great natural shelters for animals, but they've also been appropriated for some rather dubious human uses, including a bar, a prison and even a toilet inside of a tree.And this brings me to another favorite of mine — I think, because it is just so unusual. This plant is called the Welwitschia, and it lives only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola, where it's uniquely adapted to collect moisture from mist coming off the sea. And what's more, it's actually a tree. It's a primitive conifer. You'll notice that it's bearing cones down the center. And what looks like two big heaps of leaves, is actually two single leaves that get shredded up by the harsh desert conditions over time. And it actually never sheds those leaves, so it also bears the distinction of having the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. I spoke to a biologist at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Capetown to ask him where he thought this remarkable plant came from, and his thought was that if you travel around Namibia, you see that there are a number of petrified forests, and the logs are all — the logs are all giant coniferous trees, and yet there's no sign of where they might have come from. So his thought was that flooding in the north of Africa actually brought those coniferous trees down tens of thousands of years ago, and what resulted was this remarkable adaptation to this unique desert environment.This is what I think is the most poetic of the oldest living things. This is something called an underground forest. So, I spoke to a botanist at the Pretoria Botanical Garden, who explained that certain species of trees have adapted to this region. It's bushfelt region, which is dry and prone to a lot of fires, as so what these trees have done is, if you can imagine that this is the crown of the tree, and that this is ground level, imagine that the whole thing, that whole bulk of the tree, migrated underground, and you just have those leaves peeping up above the surface. That way, when a fire roars through, it's the equivalent of getting your eyebrows singed. The tree can easily recover. These also tend to grow clonally, the oldest of which is 13,000 years old.Back in the U.S., there's a couple plants of similar age. This is the clonal Creosote bush, which is around 12,000 years old. If you've been in the American West, you know the Creosote bush is pretty ubiquitous, but that being said, you see that this has this unique, circular form. And what's happening is it's expanding slowly outwards from that original shape. And it's one — again, that interconnected root system, making it one genetically identical individual. It also has a friend nearby — well, I think they're friends. This is the clonal Mojave yucca, it's about a mile away, and it's a little bit older than 12,000 years. And you see it has that similar circular form. And there's some younger clones dotting the landscape behind it. And both of these, the yucca and the Creosote bush, live on Bureau of Land Management land, and that's very different from being protected in a national park. In fact, this land is designated for recreational all-terrain vehicle use.So, now I want to show what very well might be the oldest living thing on the planet. This is Siberian Actinobacteria, which is between 400,000 and 600,000 years old. This bacteria was discovered several years ago by a team of planetary biologists hoping to find clues to life on other planets by looking at one of the harshest conditions on ours. And what they found, by doing research into the permafrost, was this bacteria. But what's unique about it is that it's doing DNA repair below freezing. And what that means is that it's not dormant — it's actually been living and growing for half a million years. It's also probably one the most vulnerable of the oldest living things, because if the permafrost melts, it won't survive.This is a map that I've put together of the oldest living things, so you can get a sense of where they are; you see they're all over the world. The blue flags represent things that I've already photographed, and the reds are places that I'm still trying to get to. You'll see also, there's a flag on Antarctica. I'm trying to travel there to find 5,000 year-old moss, which lives on the Antarctic Peninsula.So, I probably have about two more years left on this project — on this phase of the project, but after five years, I really feel like I know what's at the heart of this work. The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future. They've survived for millennia in desert, in the permafrost, at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean. They've withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments, but now some of them are in jeopardy, and they can't just get up and get out of the way. It's my hope that, by going to find these organisms, that I can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_sussman_the_world_s_oldest_living_things
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"Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there. I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world. So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, ""These are places where good teachers won't go."" On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes. So we have an ironic problem — good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most.I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi. I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English — they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. I connected high speed internet to it — it's about three feet off the ground — turned it on and left it there. After this, we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see. But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do.This is the first experiment that we did — eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse. This boy here in the middle of central India — this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time. In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee. They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village. So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were.At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer. We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children — they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, ""Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying."" So I said, ""Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. Make yourself understood to the computer."" So the children said, ""How do we do that."" And I said, ""I don't know, actually."" (Laughter) And I left. (Laughter) Two months later — and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal — that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer. In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley. (Laughter) So they could do that on their own. After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own.I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, ""I want to see what's going on."" And he couldn't travel, so I went over there. He said two interesting things, ""A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be."" (Laughter) The second thing he said was that, ""If children have interest, then education happens."" And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him.(Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them. And when you've got interest, then you have education.Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa. This is a 15 year-old boy.(Video) Boy: ... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music.SM: And I asked him, ""Do you send emails?"" And he said, ""Yes, and they hop across the ocean."" This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia — a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child would play inside the classroom or at home. They would, you know, throw it back at you. They'd say, ""This is very boring."" If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do. This is what these children are doing. They are trying to multiply, I think. And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework. As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English — (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things. They said, ""They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth. (Laughter) And indeed they had. I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head? So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own.At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India. So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, ""I'll do it from Delhi."" They said, ""There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi."" So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle. I wanted to test the limits of the system. The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India. And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero — I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them — they get another zero, I'll go back and say, ""Yes, we need teachers for certain things.""I called in 26 children. They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. It's all in English, and I'm going. (Laughter) So I left them with it. I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. I said, ""Well, did you look at any of the stuff?"" They said, ""Yes, we did."" ""Did you understand anything?"" ""No, nothing."" So I said, ""Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?"" They said, ""We look at it every day."" So I said, ""For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?"" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, ""Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else.""(Laughter)(Applause)(Laughter)It took me three years to publish that. It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. One of the referees who refereed the paper said, ""It's too good to be true,"" which was not very nice. Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher. And then that's her over there. Remember, they don't study English. I edited out the last bit when I asked, ""Where is the neuron?"" and she says, ""The neuron? The neuron,"" and then she looked and did this. Whatever the expression, it was not very nice.So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. But 30 percent is not a pass. So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. I asked that girl, ""Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass?"" And she said, ""How would I do that? I don't know the subject."" I said, ""No, use the method of the grandmother."" She said, ""What's that?"" I said, ""Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more?'"" She did that for two months. The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting.So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious. So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think of. (Laughter) Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. I made them into groups of four. I said, ""You make your own groups of four. Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers."" Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. ""You can exchange groups. You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work."" And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method.(Laughter)(Applause)The children enthusiastically got after me and said, ""Now, what do you want us to do?"" I gave them six GCSE questions. The first group — the best one — solved everything in 20 minutes. The worst, in 45. They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. The teachers said, ""Is this deep learning?"" I said, ""Well, let's try it. I'll come back after two months. We'll give them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc."" The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further.Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment. Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers. 200 of them volunteered immediately. (Laughter) The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time, sitting in their homes, one day in a week. So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud. The granny cloud sits over there. I can beam them to whichever school I want to.(Video) Teacher: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me.Children: You can't catch me.Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man.Children: I'm the gingerbread man.Teacher: Well done. Very good ...SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes. You know, stuff which I don't know anything about. Two children watch a TEDTalk. They wanted to be footballers before. After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci.(Laughter)(Applause)It's pretty simple stuff.This is what I'm building now — they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. If they want, they can call the granny cloud. This is a SOLE in Newcastle. The mediator is from Pune, India.So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop. I went to Turin in May. I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students. I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate. I started writing English questions on the blackboard. The children looked at it and said, ""What?"" I said, ""Well, do it."" They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google. Fifteen minutes later — next question: where is Calcutta? This one, they took only 10 minutes. I tried a really hard one then. Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do? There was silence for a while, then they said, ""You've spelled it wrong. It's Pitagora."" And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens. This sent shivers up my spine. These are 10 year-olds. Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then?(Laughter)(Applause)SM: So you know what's happened? I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. I think I can make a guess now — education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try. But in the meanwhile, there is a method available. One billion children, we need 100 million mediators — there are many more than that on the planet — 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years. We could change everything.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education
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"The moment I say ""school,"" so many memories come back to me. It's like after every exam, when I walk out, the teacher would say, ""Hey, come. How did you do?"" I would say with a great smile, ""I will definitely pass."" And I didn't understand why, in one hand they say, ""Speak the truth,"" in the other hand, when you say the truth, they hated you. So it went on like that, and I didn't know where else to find myself. So I remember those nights I used to go to sleep with asking help from [the] Unknown because, for some reason, I couldn't believe what my father and mother hanged in the Puja room as a god, because my friend's family had something else as a god. So I thought, ""I guess I'll pray to [the] Unknown and ask help,"" and started getting help from everywhere, each and every corner of my life at that time. My brothers started giving me a few tips about drawing and painting.Then, when I was in eighth standard around 13 years old, I started working in a part-time job in one of the signboard artists called Putu. And then school also started supporting me. ""Oh, he's bad at studies, but let him send to the drawing competitions."" So it was good to survive with that little tool that I found to find my own place in school. And one of those competitions, I just won a small, little transistor Philips radio. And I didn't have the patience to wait until I reached home. So I just switched on in the train, loudly. If you travel in Indian trains, you can see people listening to radio and, you know, even from their mobiles.So at that time — and I was 13 — and I was listening to just radio, and someone happened to sit next to me, like these three people are sitting here. You know, like just adjacent to me. He just started asking, ""Where did you buy the radio? How much is it?"" I said, ""It's a prize from [an] art competition."" And he said, ""Oh, I teach at a college of arts. I think you should study in a school of art. You just quit school and come there."" So, why I'm telling you this, you know, maybe, you know, whoever is sitting next to you can change your whole life — it's possible. It is that we need we need to be open and fine-tuned. So that's what made me enter [the] college of arts after three attempts and just continue to inquire what I really want to do with art work, or art and finally I'm here in front of you.When I look back, you know, on what happened between that time and now here — the last 10/15 years — I can see that most of the works revolve around three subjects, but it was not intentional. And I just start out with a trace because I was thinking, ""What really makes us?"" — you know, it's actually [the] past, what makes a person. So I was thinking, but when you look at the past, the way to understand the past is only by the traces available, because we cannot go back [to] the past. It can be ruins, or it can be music, or it can be painting or drawing or writing, whatever it is. But it is just a kind of trace of that time. And that fascinated me, to explore that territory. So I was working on the line, but instead of working about traces, I started capturing traces.So here are some of the works I would like to show you. So this is called ""Self In Progress."" It's just a trace of being in this body. So here, what happened then, you know — what I really enjoyed the most is that this sculpture is nothing but a trace of myself. It's almost like a 3D photograph. So there is an element of performance, and there is an element of sculpture, and there is an element of feeling one's self, so close to one's self. So it's almost like fossils for the future. And then moved slowly to explore the other possibilities of capturing traces. So this is what I was talking about, while molding, it's such a great experience, because we have freedom of like walking, or moving my hand or, moving around in the space, but the moment this becomes solid, when you cannot move even an inch, because this is plaster of Paris, so the moment you pour it it's like liquid; but after 20 minutes, it's almost like a hard stone.So this is capturing the trace of a thumbprint because, knowingly or unknowingly, whatever we do, you know, we leave our traces here. So I just thought, ""I'm going to capture thumbprint, footprint, or whatever traces we leave as humans."" This is the trace of fire, this is the trace of sun. Because when I was capturing traces, you know, this thought comes to me always: is it, only when the object touches the thing and it leaves the trace, or is there other ways to capture it?"" So this work is nothing but like — because of the focal length of the lens, it just shows what is on the other side. So I just put the paper on the focal length, which was an etching print, then I got the portrait of [the] sun from sunlight. This is called ""Dawn to Dawn."" What I did here, I just put like 10 feet [of] paper then put a coconut rope, and just burnt it. So it took about 24 hours to get this line. So wherever the fire is eating the paper, that's what becomes the work — detail.Even though we have traces when we try to understand them, the perception and context play a major role to understand it. So do we really understand what it is, or are we trying to get what we think it is? Then move towards questioning the perception because, even though there are traces, when you try to understand them, you know you play a major role. So like let's say even a simple act. How many of you saw a cow crossing in India while you were coming from Bangalore to Mysore? Can you just raise the hand?If you just ask an opinion of how, everyone can interpret it. Like, let's say, if a schoolteacher says, she'll simply say, ""To get to the other side."" Why the cow was crossing the road, you know. The answer can be so different if Potter said it. He would say, ""For the greater good."" Martin Luther King would say, ""I imagine a world where all cows will be free to cross the road, without having their motives called into question."" (Laughter) Imagine Moses comes now, and he sees the same cow walking around the street. He would definitely say, ""God came down from heaven, and he said unto the cow, 'Thou shalt cross the road.' And cow crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing as a holy cow."" (Laughter) Freud would say, ""The fact that you're at all concerned reveals your underlying sexual insecurity."" (Laughter) If we ask Einstein, he would say, ""Whether the cow crossed the road, or the road moved underneath the cow, depends on your frame of reference."" (Laughter) Or Buddha — if he saw the same cow, he would say, ""Asking this question denies your own nature [as a] cow.""(Laughter)So, what we see is just what we think often, and most of the time, we don't see what it is. It just all depends on one's perception. And context, what is really context? You know, I could just show you this little piece of paper. Because I always think meaning doesn't really exist. The meaning of what we create in this world doesn't exist. It's just created by the mind. If you look at this piece of paper, this is the breadth and this is called length. This is how we've been taught in school. But if you tear it in the middle — now, I didn't touch this breadth, but still, the meaning of this changes. So what we conceive as a meaning is always not there; it's on the other side, even when we say dark, light, good, bad, tall, short — all meaning it doesn't exist in reality. It's just that being a human, the way we train to perceive the reality creates this meaning.So this work from this period is mostly like — you know, this is a work called ""Light Makes Dark."" It's just captured through from the lamp. So the lamp is not just giving a light, it's also giving a darkness. So this is a work of art, which is just trying to explore that. This is called ""Limit Out."" This shows how limited our eye or hearing sense or touch — do we really see? This is an exact negative. It's about six inches deep in the wall, but it just appears like it's coming out of the wall. You know the wall is almost like — this is the first skin, and this is the second, and there's a third, and each creates a meaning. And we're just pulling the wall off the gallery. Again, ""Inward Out."" It's a full-figure cast from myself. It's about eight inches deep.When I was doing that, I always wondered since I've worked with creators — and now you know, I've moved to questioning the perception — whenever I see the bird flying in the sky, it just makes me feel like: is there anything behind, are there any traces up there, which as a human, we don't see them? Is there any way to capture the thought into visual art? I couldn't find it. But a solution arrived after being quiet and not working for about six, seven months, in the restroom, when I was changing the air freshener that goes from solid substance to vapor. It's called Odonil. This is the work I made out of that material. The process to get to make the sculpture was interesting, because I wrote to Balsara, who produces that air freshener called Odonil, saying, ""Dear Sir, I am an artist. This is my catalogue. Will you help me to make this sculpture?"" They never wrote back to me. Then I thought, ""I will go to the Small Scale Industries Facilitating Unit and ask help."" So I told them, ""I'd like to start an air freshener company."" They said, ""Of course. This is the fee for the project report, and we will give you all the details,"" and they gave. Finally, I went back to them and said, ""It's not for starting the company, it's just to make my own work. Please come for the show."" And they did. And this work is in the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi.In India, nobody really talks about works of art; they always talk about the appreciation of art. You buy this for 3,000 rupees, it'll become 30,000 in two months. This is the craft that was going on, but there are a few collectors who also collect art which can depreciate. And this was collected by Anupam — which is like, finally in the end, he will not have anything, because it will evaporate. So this is after a few weeks, this is after a few months. It's just all about questioning the preconceptions. So if someone says, ""Oh, I see the portrait,"" it may not be the portrait after a few months. And if they say it's solid, it will not be solid, it will evaporate. And if they say they don't get it, that's also not true, because it's in the air. It's in the same gallery or in the same museum. So they inhaled it, but they are not aware of it.While I was doing that work, my mom and my dad, they were looking at it and they said, ""Why do you deal with negative subjects all the time?"" And I was like, ""What do you mean?"" ""Light makes dark and now evaporating self. Don't you think it remained something about death,"" they said. ""Of course not. For me,"" I'm thinking, ""this is tucked in some small solid, but the moment it evaporates, it's merged with the whole."" But she said, ""No. Still, I don't like it. Can you make something from nothing as a sculptor?"" I said, ""No, mom. It can't be. Because we can create a sculpture by gathering dust together, or we can break the sculpture and get the dust, but there is nowhere that we can bring dust into the universe.""So, I did this work for her. It's called ""Emerging Angel."" This is the first day — it just gives the appearance that one is becoming the other. So, the same sculpture after a few days. This is after 15/20 days. Through that small little slit between the glass box and the wood, the air goes underneath the sculpture and creates the other one. This gave me a greater faith. That evaporating sculpture gave me a greater faith that maybe there is many more possibilities to capture [the] invisible.So what you see now is called ""Shadow Foreshadow."" And what I'd like to tell you is we don't see shadow, and we don't see light too; we see the source of the light. We see where it's bouncing, but we don't see [them] as they exist. You know, that's why the night sky, we see the sky as dark, but it's filled with light all the time. When it's bounced on the moon, we see it. The same thing in the darkroom. The little dust particle will again, reflect the light, and we realize the existence of light. So we don't see dark, we don't see light, we don't see gravity, we don't see electricity. So, I just started doing this work to inquire further about how to sculpt the space between this object and there. Because, as a visual artist, if I'm seeing this and I'm seeing that — but how to sculpt this, you know? If we sculpt this, this has two reference points. The skin of this is also representing this. And skin at the other end also represents the floor. I did this as an experiment of casting the shadow. So this is a corrugated box and its shadow. Then the second one — the moment you bring any invisible into the visible world it will have all the characteristics of the visible existence. So that produced a shadow. Then I thought, okay, let me sculpt that. Then, again, that becomes an object. Again, throwing light, then the third one. So what you see is nothing but shadow of a shadow of a shadow. And then again, at that point, there is no shadow. I thought, ""Oh, good. Work is finished."" You can see the detail.This is called ""Gravity."" It's called ""Breath."" It's just two holes on the gallery wall. It's a false wall, which contains like 110 cubic feet. So that hole actually makes the air come out and go in. So where it's happening, we can see, but what is happening will remain invisible only. This is from the show called ""Invisible,"" at Talwar Gallery. This is called ""Kaayam."" Detail.And what I'd like to tell you, our senses are so limited — we cannot hear everything, we cannot see everything. We don't feel, ""I am touching the air,"" but if the breeze is a little more faster, then I can feel it. So all of our construction of reality is through these limited senses. So my request was like, is there any way to use all this as just a symbol or a sign? And to really get to the point, we should move beyond, you know, go to the other side of the wall, like illogic, like are invisible. Because when we see someone walks, we see the footprint. But if we're just cutting that footprint from the whole thing and trying to analyze it, you will miss the point because the actual journey happens between those footprints, and the footprints are nothing but passing time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alwar_balasubramaniam_sculpture_of_substance_and_absence
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"My story is a little bit about war. It's about disillusionment. It's about death. And it's about rediscovering idealism in all of that wreckage. And perhaps also, there's a lesson about how to deal with our screwed-up, fragmenting and dangerous world of the 21st century. I don't believe in straightforward narratives. I don't believe in a life or history written as decision ""A"" led to consequence ""B"" led to consequence ""C"" — these neat narratives that we're presented with, and that perhaps we encourage in each other. I believe in randomness, and one of the reasons I believe that is because me becoming a diplomat was random. I'm colorblind. I was born unable to see most colors. This is why I wear gray and black most of the time, and I have to take my wife with me to chose clothes.And I'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a boy. I loved watching planes barrel over our holiday home in the countryside. And it was my boyhood dream to be a fighter pilot. And I did the tests in the Royal Air Force to become a pilot, and sure enough, I failed. I couldn't see all the blinking different lights, and I can't distinguish color. So I had to choose another career, and this was in fact relatively easy for me, because I had an abiding passion all the way through my childhood, which was international relations. As a child, I read the newspaper thoroughly. I was fascinated by the Cold War, by the INF negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in Angola or Afghanistan. These things really interested me. And so I decided quite at an early age I wanted to be a diplomat. And I, one day, I announced this to my parents — and my father denies this story to this day — I said, ""Daddy, I want to be a diplomat."" And he turned to me, and he said, ""Carne, you have to be very clever to be a diplomat."" (Laughter) And my ambition was sealed.In 1989, I entered the British Foreign Service. That year, 5,000 people applied to become a diplomat, and 20 of us succeeded. And as those numbers suggest, I was inducted into an elite and fascinating and exhilarating world. Being a diplomat, then and now, is an incredible job, and I loved every minute of it — I enjoyed the status of it. I bought myself a nice suit and wore leather-soled shoes and reveled in this amazing access I had to world events. I traveled to the Gaza Strip. I headed the Middle East Peace Process section in the British Foreign Ministry. I became a speechwriter for the British Foreign Secretary. I met Yasser Arafat. I negotiated with Saddam's diplomats at the U.N. Later, I traveled to Kabul and served in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. And I would travel in a C-130 transport and go and visit warlords in mountain hideaways and negotiate with them about how we were going to eradicate Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, surrounded by my Special Forces escort, who, themselves, had to have an escort of a platoon of Royal Marines, because it was so dangerous. And that was exciting — that was fun. It was really interesting. And it's a great cadre of people, incredibly close-knit community of people.And the pinnacle of my career, as it turned out, was when I was posted to New York. I'd already served in Germany, Norway, various other places, but I was posted to New York to serve on the U.N. Security Council for the British delegation. And my responsibility was the Middle East, which was my specialty. And there, I dealt with things like the Middle East peace process, the Lockerbie issue — we can talk about that later, if you wish — but above all, my responsibility was Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and the sanctions we placed on Iraq to oblige it to disarm itself of these weapons. I was the chief British negotiator on the subject, and I was steeped in the issue. And anyway, my tour — it was kind of a very exciting time. I mean it was very dramatic diplomacy. We went through several wars during my time in New York. I negotiated for my country the resolution in the Security Council of the 12th of September 2001 condemning the attacks of the day before, which were, of course, deeply present to us actually living in New York at the time. So it was kind of the best of time, worst of times kind of experience. I lived the high-life. Although I worked very long hours, I lived in a penthouse in Union Square. I was a single British diplomat in New York City; you can imagine what that might have meant. (Laughter) I had a good time.But in 2002, when my tour came to an end, I decided I wasn't going to go back to the job that was waiting for me in London. I decided to take a sabbatical, in fact, at the New School, Bruce. In some inchoate, inarticulate way I realized that there was something wrong with my work, with me. I was exhausted, and I was also disillusioned in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. And I decided to take some time out from work. The Foreign Office was very generous. You could take these special unpaid leave, as they called them, and yet remain part of the diplomatic service, but not actually do any work. It was nice. And eventually, I decided to take a secondment to join the U.N. in Kosovo, which was then under U.N. administration.And two things happened in Kosovo, which kind of, again, shows the randomness of life, because these things turned out to be two of the pivots of my life and helped to deliver me to the next stage. But they were random things. One was that, in the summer of 2004, the British government, somewhat reluctantly, decided to have an official inquiry into the use of intelligence on WMD in the run up to the Iraq War, a very limited subject. And I testified to that inquiry in secret. I had been steeped in the intelligence on Iraq and its WMD, and my testimony to the inquiry said three things: that the government exaggerated the intelligence, which was very clear in all the years I'd read it. And indeed, our own internal assessment was very clear that Iraq's WMD did not pose a threat to its neighbors, let alone to us. Secondly, the government had ignored all available alternatives to war, which in some ways was a more discreditable thing still. The third reason, I won't go into. But anyway, I gave that testimony, and that presented me with a crisis. What was I going to do? This testimony was deeply critical of my colleagues, of my ministers, who had, in my view had perpetrated a war on a falsehood.And so I was in crisis. And this wasn't a pretty thing. I moaned about it, I hesitated, I went on and on and on to my long-suffering wife, and eventually I decided to resign from the British Foreign Service. I felt — there's a scene in the Al Pacino movie ""The Insider,"" which you may know, where he goes back to CBS after they've let him down over the tobacco guy, and he goes, ""You know, I just can't do this anymore. Something's broken."" And it was like that for me. I love that movie. I felt just something's broken. I can't actually sit with my foreign minister or my prime minister again with a smile on my face and do what I used to do gladly for them. So took a running leap and jumped over the edge of a cliff.And it was a very, very uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling. And I started to fall. And today, that fall hasn't stopped; I'm still falling. But, in a way, I've got used to the sensation of it. And in a way, I kind of like the sensation of it a lot better than I like actually standing on top of the cliff, wondering what to do. A second thing happened in Kosovo, which kind of — I need a quick gulp of water, forgive me. A second thing happened in Kosovo, which kind of delivered the answer, which I couldn't really answer, which is, ""What do I do with my life?"" I love diplomacy — I have no career — I expected my entire life to be a diplomat, to be serving my country. I wanted to be an ambassador, and my mentors, my heroes, people who got to the top of my profession, and here I was throwing it all away. A lot of my friends were still in it. My pension was in it. And I gave it up. And what was I going to do?And that year, in Kosovo, this terrible, terrible thing happened, which I saw. In March 2004, there were terrible riots all over the province — as it then was — of Kosovo. 18 people were killed. It was anarchy. And it's a very horrible thing to see anarchy, to know that the police and the military — there were lots of military troops there — actually can't stop that rampaging mob who's coming down the street. And the only way that rampaging mob coming down the street will stop is when they decide to stop and when they've had enough burning and killing. And that is not a very nice feeling to see, and I saw it. And I went through it. I went through those mobs. And with my Albanian friends, we tried to stop it, but we failed. And that riot taught me something, which isn't immediately obvious and it's kind of a complicated story.But one of the reasons that riot took place — those riots, which went on for several days, took place — was because the Kosovo people were disenfranchised from their own future. There were diplomatic negotiations about the future of Kosovo going on then, and the Kosovo government, let alone the Kosovo people, were not actually participating in those talks. There was this whole fancy diplomatic system, this negotiation process about the future of Kosovo, and the Kosovars weren't part of it. And funnily enough, they were frustrated about that. Those riots were part of the manifestation of that frustration. It wasn't the only reason, and life is not simple, one reason narratives. It was a complicated thing, and I'm not pretending it was more simple than it was. But that was one of the reasons.And that kind of gave me the inspiration — or rather to be precise, it gave my wife the inspiration. She said, ""Why don't you advise the Kosovars? Why don't you advise their government on their diplomacy?"" And the Kosovars were not allowed a diplomatic service. They were not allowed diplomats. They were not allowed a foreign office to help them deal with this immensely complicated process, which became known as the Final Status Process of Kosovo. And so that was the idea. That was the origin of the thing that became Independent Diplomat, the world's first diplomatic advisory group and a non-profit to boot. And it began when I flew back from London after my time at the U.N. in Kosovo. I flew back and had dinner with the Kosovo prime minister and said to him, ""Look, I'm proposing that I come and advise you on the diplomacy. I know this stuff. It's what I do. Why don't I come and help you?"" And he raised his glass of raki to me and said, ""Yes, Carne. Come.""And I came to Kosovo and advised the Kosovo government. Independent Diplomat ended up advising three successive Kosovo prime ministers and the multi-party negotiation team of Kosovo. And Kosovo became independent. Independent Diplomat is now established in five diplomatic centers around the world, and we're advising seven or eight different countries, or political groups, depending on how you wish to define them — and I'm not big on definitions. We're advising the Northern Cypriots on how to reunify their island. We're advising the Burmese opposition, the government of Southern Sudan, which — you heard it here first — is going to be a new country within the next few years. We're advising the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara, who are fighting to get their country back from Moroccan occupation after 34 years of dispossession. We're advising various island states in the climate change negotiations, which is suppose to culminate in Copenhagen.There's a bit of randomness here too because, when I was beginning Independent Diplomat, I went to a party in the House of Lords, which is a ridiculous place, but I was holding my drink like this, and I bumped into this guy who was standing behind me. And we started talking, and he said — I told him what I was doing, and I told him rather grandly I was going to establish Independent Diplomat in New York. At that time there was just me — and me and my wife were moving back to New York. And he said, ""Why don't you see my colleagues in New York?"" And it turned out he worked for an innovation company called ?What If!, which some of you have probably heard of. And one thing led to another, and I ended up having a desk in ?What If! in New York, when I started Independent Diplomat. And watching ?What If! develop new flavors of chewing gum for Wrigley or new flavors for Coke actually helped me innovate new strategies for the Kosovars and for the Saharawis of the Western Sahara. And I began to realize that there are different ways of doing diplomacy — that diplomacy, like business, is a business of solving problems, and yet the word innovation doesn't exist in diplomacy; it's all zero sum games and realpolitik and ancient institutions that have been there for generations and do things the same way they've always done things.And Independent Diplomat, today, tries to incorporate some of the things I learned at ?What If!. We all sit in one office and shout at each other across the office. We all work on little laptops and try to move desks to change the way we think. And we use naive experts who may know nothing about the countries we're dealing with, but may know something about something else to try to inject new thinking into the problems that we try to address for our clients. It's not easy, because our clients, by definition, are having a difficult time, diplomatically.There are, I don't know, some lessons from all of this, personal and political — and in a way, they're the same thing. The personal one is falling off a cliff is actually a good thing, and I recommend it. And it's a good thing to do at least once in your life just to tear everything up and jump. The second thing is a bigger lesson about the world today. Independent Diplomat is part of a trend which is emerging and evident across the world, which is that the world is fragmenting. States mean less than they used to, and the power of the state is declining. That means the power of others things is rising. Those other things are called non-state actors. They may be corporations, they may be mafiosi, they may be nice NGOs, they may anything, any number of things. We are living in a more complicated and fragmented world. If governments are less able to affect the problems that affect us in the world, then that means, who is left to deal with them, who has to take greater responsibility to deal with them? Us. If they can't do it, who's left to deal with it? We have no choice but to embrace that reality.What this means is it's no longer good enough to say that international relations, or global affairs, or chaos in Somalia, or what's going on in Burma is none of your business, and that you can leave it to governments to get on with. I can connect any one of you by six degrees of separation to the Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia. Ask me how later, particularly if you eat fish, interestingly enough, but that connection is there. We are all intimately connected. And this isn't just Tom Friedman, it's actually provable in case after case after case. What that means is, instead of asking your politicians to do things, you have to look to yourself to do things. And Independent Diplomat is a kind of example of this in a sort of loose way.There aren't neat examples, but one example is this: the way the world is changing is embodied in what's going on at the place I used to work — the U.N. Security Council. The U.N. was established in 1945. Its charter is basically designed to stop conflicts between states — interstate conflict. Today, 80 percent of the agenda of the U.N. Security Council is about conflicts within states, involving non-state parties — guerillas, separatists, terrorists, if you want to call them that, people who are not normal governments, who are not normal states. That is the state of the world today. When I realized this, and when I look back on my time at the Security Council and what happened with the Kosovars, and I realize that often the people who were most directly affected by what we were doing in the Security Council weren't actually there, weren't actually invited to give their views to the Security Council, I thought, this is wrong. Something's got to be done about this.So I started off in a traditional mode. Me and my colleagues at Independent Diplomat went around the U.N. Security Council. We went around 70 U.N. member states — the Kazaks, the Ethiopians, the Israelis — you name them, we went to see them — the secretary general, all of them, and said, ""This is all wrong. This is terrible that you don't consult these people who are actually affected. You've got to institutionalize a system where you actually invite the Kosovars to come and tell you what they think. This will allow you to tell me — you can tell them what you think. It'll be great. You can have an exchange. You can actually incorporate these people's views into your decisions, which means your decisions will be more effective and durable."" Super-logical, you would think. I mean, incredibly logical. So obvious, anybody could get it. And of course, everybody got it. Everybody went, ""Yes, of course, you're absolutely right. Come back to us in maybe six months."" And of course, nothing happened — nobody did anything. The Security Council does its business in exactly the same way today that it did X number of years ago, when I was there 10 years ago.So we looked at that observation of basically failure and thought, what can we do about it. And I thought, I'm buggered if I'm going to spend the rest of my life lobbying for these crummy governments to do what needs to be done. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to set up these meetings ourselves. So now, Independent Diplomat is in the process of setting up meetings between the U.N. Security Council and the parties to the disputes that are on the agenda of the Security Council. So we will be bringing Darfuri rebel groups, the Northern Cypriots and the Southern Cypriots, rebels from Aceh, and awful long laundry list of chaotic conflicts around the world. And we will be trying to bring the parties to New York to sit down in a quiet room in a private setting with no press and actually explain what they want to the members of the U. N. Security Council, and for the members of the U.N. Security Council to explain to them what they want. So there's actually a conversation, which has never before happened. And of course, describing all this, any of you who know politics will think this is incredibly difficult, and I entirely agree with you. The chances of failure are very high, but it certainly won't happen if we don't try to make it happen.And my politics has changed fundamentally from when I was a diplomat to what I am today, and I think that outputs is what matters, not process, not technology, frankly, so much either. Preach technology to all the Twittering members of all the Iranian demonstrations who are now in political prison in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad remains in power. Technology has not delivered political change in Iran. You've got to look at the outputs, and you got to say to yourself, ""What can I do to produce that particular output?"" That is the politics of the 21st century, and in a way, Independent Diplomat embodies that fragmentation, that change, that is happening to all of us.That's my story. Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/carne_ross_an_independent_diplomat
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"I am a cultural omnivore, one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod — an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart, pop diva Christina Aguilera, country singer Josh Turner, gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin, concerti, symphonies and more and more. I'm a voracious reader, a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer. I have read the Twilight tetralogy. And one who lives for my home theater, a home theater where I devour DVDs, video on demand and a lot of television. For me, ""Law & Order: SVU,"" Tina Fey and ""30 Rock"" and ""Judge Judy"" — ""The people are real, the cases are real, the rulings are final.""(Laughter)Now, I'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions, especially my passion for ""Judge Judy,"" and you'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us, but I'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life, a passion for the live professional performing arts, performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire, yes, but jazz as well, modern dance, opera, theater and more and more and more.Frankly, it's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology. While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems, we now realize that the Internet is, if anything, too effective in that regard. Depending on who you read, an arts organization or an artist, who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer, now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen sees every single day. We now know, in fact, that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time. Five years ago, Gen Xers spent 20.7 hours online and TV, the majority on TV. Gen Yers spent even more — 23.8 hours, the majority online. And now, a typical university-entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games — a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined.Moreover, we're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption. Thanks to the Internet, we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it, delivered to our own doorstep. We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night, ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body types. Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts — which have set curtain times, set venues, attendant inconveniences of travel, parking and the like — simply cannot meet. And we're all acutely aware: what's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony, opera or ballet ticket, when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free? These are enormous questions for those of us that work in this terrain. But as particular as they feel to us, we know we're not alone.All of us are engaged in a seismic, fundamental realignment of culture and communications, a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry, the magazine industry, the book and publishing industry and more. Saddled in the performing arts as we are, by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming, locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues, where we charge exorbitant prices. Many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves, ""Are we next?"" Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich, who, in ""Dreams of a Common Language,"" wrote, ""We are out in a country that has no language, no laws. Whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us are out of date by years."" And for those of you who love the arts, aren't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day?(Laughter)(Applause)Now, rather than saying that we're on the brink of our own annihilation, I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation, a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century. The arts reformation, like the religious Reformation, is spurred in part by technology, with indeed, the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation. Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion, internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models. And at heart, both reformations, I think, were asking the questions: who's entitled to practice? How are they entitled to practice? And indeed, do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine?Chris Anderson, someone I trust you all know, editor in chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, really was the first, for me, to nail a lot of this. He wrote a long time ago, you know, thanks to the invention of the Internet, web technology, minicams and more, the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history. In the 1930s, if any of you wanted to make a movie, you had to work for Warner Brothers or RKO, because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring, and more? And now who in this room doesn't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second, third, or fourth movie?(Laughter)Similarly, the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history. Again, in the '30s, Warner Brothers, RKO did that for you. Now, go to YouTube, Facebook; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market, a time when anyone is a potential author. Frankly, what we're seeing now in this environment is a massive time, when the entire world is changing as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting. But the number of arts participants, people who write poetry, who sing songs, who perform in church choirs, is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations. This group, others have called the pro-ams, amateur artists doing work at a professional level. You see them on YouTube, in dance competitions, film festivals and more. They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary, while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions. Ultimately, we now live in a world defined not by consumption, but by participation.But I want to be clear, just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood; I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance. They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity — not opulence, of dignity. And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home. But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is, by far, too shortsighted. And indeed, while we've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional, the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist, the professional artist who works, not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage; but most frequently around women's rights, or human rights, or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more — not out of economic necessity, but out of a deep, organic conviction that the work that she or he is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment.Today's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada, but by Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange — a multi-generational, professional dance company, whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82, and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN. Today's professional theater community is defined, not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals, but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles — a collective of artists that after 9/11, brought together 10 different religious communities — the Baha'i, the Catholic, the Muslim, the Jewish, even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith, helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play, where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing. Today's performers, like Rhodessa Jones, work in women's prisons, helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration, while today's playwrights and directors work with youth gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more. And indeed, I think, rather than being annihilated, the performing arts are poised on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been.You know, we've said for a long time, we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town. And absolutely — I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy, dollars spent in restaurants or on parking, at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes, the piano tuner who tunes the instruments, and more. But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward, especially in industries we can't even imagine yet, just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries, which few, if any of us, could have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago. Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, to have empathy, to articulate change, to motivate others — the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter.Especially now, as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation, uninformed by social conscience; we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters, and especially characters of the young people, who all too often are subjected to bombardment of sensation, rather than digested experience. Ultimately, especially now in this world, where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws, in reality TV that thrives on humiliation, and in a context of analysis, where the thing we hear most repeatedly, day in, day out in the United States, in every train station, every bus station, every plane station is, ""Ladies and gentlemen, please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest to you,"" when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion.The arts, whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity. God knows, if we ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now. You know, we're bound together, not, I think by technology, entertainment and design, but by common cause. We work to promote healthy vibrant societies, to ameliorate human suffering, to promote a more thoughtful, substantive, empathic world order.I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work, whatever your purpose may be. I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come. And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon.Thank you, and Godspeed.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_cameron_tedxyyc
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"If you really want to understand the problem that we're facing with the oceans, you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics. We can't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way. So I'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean. We'll look at sea level rise. We'll look at ocean warming. And then the last thing on the list there, ocean acidification — if you were to ask me, you know, ""What do you worry about the most? What frightens you?"" for me, it's ocean acidification. And this has come onto the stage pretty recently. So I will spend a little time at the end.I was in Copenhagen in December like a number of you in this room. And I think we all found it, simultaneously, an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience. I sat in this large negotiation hall, at one point, for three or four hours, without hearing the word ""oceans"" one time. It really wasn't on the radar screen. The nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders — it tended to be the leaders of the small island states, the low-lying island states. And by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations, a lot of the low-lying states, like Kiribati and Nauru, they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows. You know, they were marginalized in the negotiation room.One of the problems is coming up with the right target. It's not clear what the target should be. And how can you figure out how to fix something if you don't have a clear target? Now, you've heard about ""two degrees"": that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees. But there's not a lot of science behind that number. We've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Should it be 450? Should it be 400? There's not a lot of science behind that one either. Most of the science that is behind these numbers, these potential targets, is based on studies on land. And I would say, for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be, we would argue that they must be much lower. You know, from an oceanic perspective, 450 is way too high. Now there's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350. We are, right now, at 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450, so we've got to accept we're going to do an overshoot, and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what's the pathway back to 350.Now, why is this so complicated? Why don't we know some of these things a little bit better? Well, the problem is that we've got very complicated forces in the climate system. There's all kinds of natural causes of climate change. There's air-sea interactions. Here in Galapagos, we're affected by El Ninos and La Nina. But the entire planet warms up when there's a big El Nino. Volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere. That changes our climate. The ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet. So anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet. And we know the solar output's not constant through time. So those are all natural causes of climate change. And then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well. We're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land, the reflectivity. We inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere, and we have trace gases, and not just carbon dioxide — it's methane, ozone, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen.So here's the thing. It sounds like a simple question. Is CO2 produced by man's activities causing the planet to warm up? But to answer that question, to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide, you have to know something about all of these other agents of change. But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things. You know, thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes. And we've got it worked out, and we can say, ""Yes, CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now."" Now, we have many ways to study natural variability. I'll show you a few examples of this now.This is the ship that I spent the last three months on in the Antarctic. It's a scientific drilling vessel. We go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change, right. Like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had CO2 double what it is today. And so that's what we've done with this ship. This was — this is south of the Antarctic Circle. It looks downright tropical there. One day where we had calm seas and sun, which was the reason I could get off the ship. Most of the time it looked like this. We had a waves up to 50 ft. and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots.So that trip just ended, and I can't show you too many results from that right now, but we'll go back one more year, to another drilling expedition I've been involved in. This was led by Ross Powell and Tim Naish. It's the ANDRILL project. And we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet. This is a crazy thing, this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm, drilling at temperatures of minus 40. And we drilled in the Ross Sea. That's the Ross Sea Ice Shelf on the right there. So, this huge floating ice shelf the size of Alaska comes from West Antarctica. Now, West Antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep. So that ice sheet is partly floating, and it's exposed to the ocean, to the ocean heat.This is the part of Antarctica that we worry about. Because it's partly floating, you can imagine, is sea level rises a little bit, the ice lifts off the bed, and then it can break off and float north. When that ice melts, sea level rises by six meters. So we drill back in time to see how often that's happened, and exactly how fast that ice can melt. Here's the cartoon on the left there. We drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor. So it's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled.It took about 10 years to put this project together. And here's what we found. Now, there's 40 scientists working on this project, and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses. But it turns out, you know, the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description. You know, we saw this in the core samples as they came up. We saw these alternations between sediments that look like this — there's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand. That's the kind of material in the deep sea. It can only get there if it's carried out by ice. So we know there's an ice shelf overhead. And that alternates with a sediment that looks like this. This is absolutely beautiful stuff. This sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants. And these plants need sunlight, so we know when we find that sediment there's no ice overhead. And we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water, between gravels and these plant sediments.So what that means is, what it tells us is that the Ross Sea region, this ice shelf, melted back and formed anew about 35 times. And this is in the past four million years. This was completely unexpected. Nobody imagined that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was this dynamic. In fact, the lore for many years has been, ""The ice formed many tens of millions of years ago, and it's been there ever since."" And now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again, and sea level went up and down, six meters at a time.What caused it? Well, we're pretty sure that it's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching Antarctica, just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the Earth. But here's the key thing: you know, the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold, that the planet warmed up enough — and the number's about one degree to one and a half degrees Centigrade — the planet warmed up enough that it became ... that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted. And you know what? We've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount. So many of us are convinced now that West Antarctica, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is starting to melt. We do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century. And it could be larger than that. This is a serious consequence for nations like Kiribati, you know, where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level.Okay, the second story takes place here in Galapagos. This is a bleached coral, coral that died during the 1982-'83 El Nino. This is from Champion Island. It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony. And it's covered with algae. That's what happens. When these things die, immediately, organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface. And so, when a coral colony is killed by an El Nino event, it leaves this indelible record. You can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this. So one of the things thought of in the '80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the Galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event. And just so you know, 1982-'83, that El Nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in Galapagos. Then there was similar mortality in '97-'98. And what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events. We saw no other mass mortality events. So these events in our recent past really are unique. So they're either just truly monster El Ninos, or they're just very strong El Ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming. Either case, it's bad news for the corals of the Galapagos Islands.Here's how we sample the corals. This is actually Easter Island. Look at this monster. This coral is eight meters tall, right. And it been growing for about 600 years. Now, Sylvia Earle turned me on to this exact same coral. And she was diving here with John Lauret — I think it was 1994 — and collected a little nugget and sent it to me. And we started working on it, and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this. So we have a diamond drill. We're not killing the colony; we're taking a small core sample out of the top. The core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone. And that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it. You can see some of the coral cores there on the right.So we've done that all over the Eastern Pacific. We're starting to do it in the Western Pacific as well. I'll take you back here to the Galapagos Islands. And we've been working at this fascinating uplift here in Urbina Bay. That the place where, during an earthquake in 1954, this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly, and it was lifted up about six to seven meters. And so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet. If you go on the ground there, it looks like this, and this is the grandaddy coral. It's 11 meters in diameter, and we know that it started growing in the year 1584. Imagine that. And that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters, until 1954, when the earthquake happened.Now the reason we know it's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands. When you cut them, slice those cores in half and x-ray them, you see these light and dark bands. Each one of those is a year. We know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year. And we just count on down to the bottom. Then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry. We can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral, and there's a whole bunch of things we can do. But in this case, we measured the different isotopes of oxygen. Their ratio tells us the water temperature. In this example here, we had monitored this reef in Galapagos with temperature recorders, so we know the temperature of the water the coral's growing in. Then after we harvest a coral, we measure this ratio, and now you can see, those curves match perfectly.In this case, at these islands, you know, corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water. And of course, our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here. The coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years. So, what we do: we've merged a lot of different data sets. It's not just my group; there's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this. But we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years, and we put them together. Here's a synthetic diagram. There's a whole family of curves here.But what's happening: we're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet. And there's five or six different compilations there, But each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals. We do similar things with ice cores. We work with tree rings. And that's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century, right? And I chose this one because it's complicated and messy looking, right. This is as messy as it gets. You can see there's some signals there. Some of the records show lower temperatures than others. Some of them show greater variability. But they all tell us what the natural variability is. Some of them are from the northern hemisphere; some are from the entire globe.But here's what we can say: what's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down. It was cooling down until about 1900 or so. And there is natural variability caused by the Sun, caused by El Ninos. A century-scale, decadal-scale variability, and we know the magnitude; it's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree Centigrade. But then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black. And there's the temperature up there in 2009. You know, we've warmed the globe about a degree Centigrade in the last century, and there's nothing in the natural part of that record that resembles what we've seen in the last century. You know, that's the strength of our argument, that we are doing something that's truly different.So I'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification. I like it as a component of global change to talk about, because, even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic, and I talk to that community fairly often, you cannot deny the simple physics of CO2 dissolving in the ocean. You know, we're pumping out lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, from fossil fuels, from cement production. Right now, about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea, right? And as it does so, it makes the ocean more acidic. So, you cannot argue with that. That is what's happening right now, and it's a very different issue than the global warming issue. It has many consequences.There's consequences for carbonate organisms. There are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate — plants and animals both. The main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate. That material is more soluble in acidic fluid. So one of the things we're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells. At some point, as this transience, as this CO2 uptake in the ocean continues, that material's actually going to start to dissolve. And on coral reefs, where some of the main framework organisms disappear, we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity. But it's not just the carbonate producers that are affected. There's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean. So many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean. So, all of these things — greater metabolic demands, reduced reproductive success, changes in respiration and metabolism. You know, these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience.So we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track CO2 levels in the atmosphere, going back millions of years. We used to do it just with ice cores, but in this case, we're going back 20 million years. And we take samples of the sediment, and it tells us the CO2 level of the ocean, and therefore the CO2 level of the atmosphere. And here's the thing: you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were about what they are today. You have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were double what they are today. Now, what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean, with CO2 levels lower than they are today. That's the reason that they're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that's going on right now.So, Charlie Veron came up with this statement last year: ""The prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic CO2 release."" And I think that may very well be true, so I'll close with this. You know, we do need the protected areas, absolutely, but for the sake of the oceans, we have to cap or limit CO2 emissions as soon as possible.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_dunbar
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"If nothing else, at least I've discovered what it is we put our speakers through: sweaty palms, sleepless nights, a wholly unnatural fear of clocks. I mean, it's quite brutal.And I'm also a little nervous about this. There are nine billion humans coming our way. Now, the most optimistic dreams can get dented by the prospect of people plundering the planet. But recently, I've become intrigued by a different way of thinking of large human crowds, because there are circumstances where they can do something really cool. It's a phenomenon that I think any organization or individual can tap into. It certainly impacted the way we think about TED's future, and perhaps the world's future overall.So, let's explore. The story starts with just a single person, a child, behaving a little strangely. This kid is known online as Lil Demon. He's doing tricks here, dance tricks, that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before. How did he learn them? And what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice this must have taken? Here's a clue.(Video) Lil Demon: ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫Chris Anderson: So, that was sent to me by this man, a filmmaker, Jonathan Chu, who told me that was the moment he realized the Internet was causing dance to evolve. This is what he said at TED in February. In essence, dancers were challenging each other online to get better; incredible new dance skills were being invented; even the six-year-olds were joining in. It felt like a revolution. And so Jon had a brilliant idea: He went out to recruit the best of the best dancers off of YouTube to create this dance troupe — The League of Extraordinary Dancers, the LXD. I mean, these kids were web-taught, but they were so good that they got to play at the Oscars this year. And at TED here in February, their passion and brilliance just took our breath away.So, this story of the evolution of dance seems strangely familiar. You know, a while after TEDTalks started taking off, we noticed that speakers were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation. It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two. ... Months of preparation crammed into 18 minutes, raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers, with the effects that we've seen this week. It's not as if J.J. and Jill actually ended their talks saying, ""Step your game up,"" but they might as well have. So, in both of these cases, you've got these cycles of improvement, apparently driven by people watching web video.What is going on here? Well, I think it's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call ""crowd-accelerated innovation."" And there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear. You can think of them as three dials on a giant wheel. You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. And the first thing you need is ... a crowd, a group of people who share a common interest. The bigger the crowd, the more potential innovators there are. That's important, but actually most people in the crowd occupy these other roles. They're creating the ecosystem from which innovation emerges. The second thing you need is light. You need clear, open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of, because that is how you will learn how you will be empowered to participate. And third, you need desire. You know, innovation's hard work. It's based on hundreds of hours of research, of practice. Absent desire, not going to happen.Now, here's an example — pre-Internet — of this machine in action. Dancers at a street corner — it's a crowd, a small one, but they can all obviously see what each other can do. And the desire part comes, I guess, from social status, right? Best dancer walks tall, gets the best date. There's probably going to be some innovation happening here. But on the web, all three dials are ratcheted right up. The dance community is now global. There's millions connected. And amazingly, you can still see what the best can do, because the crowd itself shines a light on them, either directly, through comments, ratings, email, Facebook, Twitter, or indirectly, through numbers of views, through links that point Google there. So, it's easy to find the good stuff, and when you've found it, you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it. That's a lot of light.But the desire element is really dialed way up. I mean, you might just be a kid with a webcam, but if you can do something that goes viral, you get to be seen by the equivalent of sports stadiums crammed with people. You get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you. And even if it's not that eloquent — and it's not — it can still really make your day. So, this possibility of a new type of global recognition, I think, is driving huge amounts of effort. And it's important to note that it's not just the stars who are benefiting: because you can see the best, everyone can learn.Also, the system is self-fueling. It's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire, but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination that attract new people to the crowd. So, this is a model that pretty much any organization could use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. Invite the crowd, let in the light, dial up the desire. And the hardest part about that is probably the light, because it means you have to open up, you have to show your stuff to the world. It's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret that maybe millions of people are empowered to help improve it.And, very happily, there's one class of people who really can't make use of this tool. The dark side of the web is allergic to the light. I don't think we're going to see terrorists, for example, publishing their plans online and saying to the world, ""Please, could you help us to actually make them work this time?""But you can publish your stuff online. And if you can get that wheel to turn, look out.So, at TED, we've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness. In fact, my colleague, June Cohen, has taken to calling it ""radical openness,"" because it works for us each time. We opened up our talks to the world, and suddenly there are millions of people out there helping spread our speakers' ideas, and thereby making it easier for us to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers. By opening up our translation program, thousands of heroic volunteers — some of them watching online right now, and thank you! — have translated our talks into more than 70 languages, thereby tripling our viewership in non-English-speaking countries. By giving away our TEDx brand, we suddenly have a thousand-plus live experiments in the art of spreading ideas. And these organizers, they're seeing each other, they're learning from each other. We are learning from them. We're getting great talks back from them. The wheel is turning.Okay, step back a minute. I mean, it's really not news for me to tell you that innovation emerges out of groups. You know, we've heard that this week — this romantic notion of the lone genius with the ""eureka!"" moment that changes the world is misleading. Even he said that, and he would know. We're a social species. We spark off each other. It's also not news to say that the Internet has accelerated innovation. For the past 15 years, powerful communities have been connecting online, sparking off each other. If you take programmers, you know, the whole open-source movement is a fantastic instance of crowd-accelerated innovation. But what's key here is, the reason these groups have been able to connect is because their work output is of the type that can be easily shared digitally — a picture, a music file, software. And that's why what I'm excited about, and what I think is under-reported, is the significance of the rise of online video.This is the technology that's going to allow the rest of the world's talents to be shared digitally, thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. The first few years of the web were pretty much video-free, for this reason: video files are huge; the web couldn't handle them. But in the last 10 years, bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold. Suddenly, here we are. Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day. Cisco actually estimates that, within four years, more than 90 percent of the web's data will be video. If it's all puppies, porn and piracy, we're doomed. I don't think it will be. Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it.Here, let me introduce you to Sam Haber. He's a unicyclist. Before YouTube, there was no way for him to discover his sport's true potential, because you can't communicate this stuff in words, right? But looking at video clips posted by strangers, a world of possibility opens up for him. Suddenly, he starts to emulate and then to innovate. And a global community of unicyclists discover each other online, inspire each other to greatness. And there are thousands of other examples of this happening — of video-driven evolution of skills, ranging from the physical to the artful. And I have to tell you, as a former publisher of hobbyist magazines, I find this strangely beautiful. I mean, there's a lot of passion right here on this screen.But if Rube Goldberg machines and video poetry aren't quite your cup of tea, how about this. Jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video. There's a problem with a traditional scientific paper. It can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print. Here's one such frustrated scientist, Moshe Pritsker, the founder of Jove. He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this. But look at this video. I mean, look: if you can show instead of just describing, that problem goes away. So it's not far-fetched to say that, at some point, online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance.Here's another example that's close to our hearts at TED, where video is sometimes more powerful than print — the sharing of an idea. Why do people like watching TEDTalks? All those ideas are already out there in print. It's actually faster to read than to view. Why would someone bother? Well, so, there's some showing as well as telling. But even leaving the screen out of it, there's still a lot more being transferred than just words. And in that non-verbal portion, there's some serious magic. Somewhere hidden in the physical gestures, the vocal cadence, the facial expressions, the eye contact, the passion, the kind of awkward, British body language, the sense of how the audience are reacting, there are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand, and whether you're inspired — light, if you like, and desire. Incredibly, all of this can be communicated on just a few square inches of a screen.Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. That's what's made it into this mysterious, powerful thing it is. Someone speaks, there's resonance in all these receiving brains, the whole group acts together. I mean, this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action. It's probably driven our culture for millennia. 500 years ago, it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage. It's right here. Print scaled. The world's ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide, and so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine. But now, in the blink of an eye, the game has changed again. It's not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication. So, that primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely wired for ... that just went global.Now, this is big. We may have to reinvent an ancient art form. I mean, today, one person speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for learning and to respond — and in his case, intense desire to laugh. For the first time in human history, talented students don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. They can sit two feet in front of the world's finest.Now, TED is just a small part of this. I mean, the world's universities are opening up their curricula. Thousands of individuals and organizations are sharing their knowledge and data online. Thousands of people are figuring out new ways to learn and, crucially, to respond, completing the cycle. And so, as we've thought about this, you know, it's become clear to us what the next stage of TED's evolution has to be. TEDTalks can't be a one-way process, one-to-many. Our future is many-to-many. So, we're dreaming of ways to make it easier for you, the global TED community, to respond to speakers, to contribute your own ideas, maybe even your own TEDTalks, and to help shine a light on the very best of what's out there. Because, if we can bubble up the very best from a vastly larger pool, this wheel turns.Now, is it possible to imagine a similar process to this, happening to global education overall? I mean, does it have to be this painful, top-down process? Why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate? It's the participation age, right? Schools can't be silos. We can't stop learning at age 21. What if, in the coming crowd of nine billion ... what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors, instead of net plunderers? That changes everything, right? I mean, that would take more teachers than we've ever had. But the good news is they are out there. They're in the crowd, and the crowd is switching on lights, and we can see them for the first time, not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers, but as individuals we can learn from. Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. You're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history, a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter, wiser, more beautiful place.Here's a group of kids in a village in Pakistan near where I grew up. Within five years, each of these kids is going to have access to a cellphone capable of full-on web video and capable of uploading video to the web. I mean, is it crazy to think that this girl, in the back, at the right, in 15 years, might be sharing the idea that keeps the world beautiful for your grandchildren? It's not crazy; it's actually happening right now.I want to introduce you to a good friend of TED who just happens to live in Africa's biggest shantytown.(Video) Christopher Makau: Hi. My name is Christopher Makau. I'm one of the organizers of TEDxKibera. There are so many good things which are happening right here in Kibera. There's a self-help group. They turned a trash place into a garden. The same spot, it was a crime spot where people were being robbed. They used the same trash to form green manure. The same trash site is feeding more than 30 families. We have our own film school. They are using Flip cameras to record, edit, and reporting to their own channel, Kibera TV. Because of a scarcity of land, we are using the sacks to grow vegetables, and also [we're] able to save on the cost of living. Change happens when we see things in a different way. Today, I see Kibera in a different way. My message to TEDGlobal and the entire world is: Kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas.(Applause)CA: You know what? I bet Chris has always been an inspiring guy. What's new — and it's huge — is that, for the first time, we get to see him, and he can see us. Right now, Chris and Kevin and Dennis and Dickson and their friends are watching us, in Nairobi, right now. Guys, we've learned from you today. Thank you.And thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation
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"Let's start with day and night. Life evolved under conditions of light and darkness, light and then darkness. And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light. These are chemical clocks, and they're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell.I'll give you an example — if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach, and you fly it all the way across the continent, and you drop it into a sloped cage, it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores, and it'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away. It'll do this for weeks, until it kind of gradually loses the plot. And it's incredible to watch, but there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on; it's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond, usually, with what's going on around it.So, we have this ability as well. And in humans, we call it the ""body clock."" You can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker, deep underground, for a couple of months. (Laughter) People actually volunteer for this, and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole. So, no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be, they all show the same thing. They get up just a little bit later every day — say 15 minutes or so — and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks. And so, in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks, rather than somehow sensing the day outside.So fine, we have a body clock, and it turns out that it's incredibly important in our lives. It's a huge driver for culture and I think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior. We evolved as a species near the equator, and so we're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. But of course, we've spread to every corner of the globe and in Arctic Canada, where I live, we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter. So the culture, the northern aboriginal culture, traditionally has been highly seasonal. In winter, there's a lot of sleeping going on; you enjoy your family life inside. And in summer, it's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours, very active.So, what would our natural rhythm look like? What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. They go to bed around 8:00 p.m. until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2:00 a.m. until sunrise. And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. And during this time, there's a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives.So, cut to the modern day. We're living in a culture of jet lag, global travel, 24-hour business, shift work. And you know, our modern ways of doing things have their advantages, but I believe we should understand the costs.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep
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"For the last 10 years, I've been spending my time trying to figure out how and why human beings assemble themselves into social networks. And the kind of social network I'm talking about is not the recent online variety, but rather, the kind of social networks that human beings have been assembling for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since we emerged from the African savannah. So, I form friendships and co-worker and sibling and relative relationships with other people who in turn have similar relationships with other people. And this spreads on out endlessly into a distance. And you get a network that looks like this. Every dot is a person. Every line between them is a relationship between two people — different kinds of relationships. And you can get this kind of vast fabric of humanity, in which we're all embedded.And my colleague, James Fowler and I have been studying for quite sometime what are the mathematical, social, biological and psychological rules that govern how these networks are assembled and what are the similar rules that govern how they operate, how they affect our lives. But recently, we've been wondering whether it might be possible to take advantage of this insight, to actually find ways to improve the world, to do something better, to actually fix things, not just understand things. So one of the first things we thought we would tackle would be how we go about predicting epidemics.And the current state of the art in predicting an epidemic — if you're the CDC or some other national body — is to sit in the middle where you are and collect data from physicians and laboratories in the field that report the prevalence or the incidence of certain conditions. So, so and so patients have been diagnosed with something, or other patients have been diagnosed, and all these data are fed into a central repository, with some delay. And if everything goes smoothly, one to two weeks from now you'll know where the epidemic was today. And actually, about a year or so ago, there was this promulgation of the idea of Google Flu Trends, with respect to the flu, where by looking at people's searching behavior today, we could know where the flu — what the status of the epidemic was today, what's the prevalence of the epidemic today.But what I'd like to show you today is a means by which we might get not just rapid warning about an epidemic, but also actually early detection of an epidemic. And, in fact, this idea can be used not just to predict epidemics of germs, but also to predict epidemics of all sorts of kinds. For example, anything that spreads by a form of social contagion could be understood in this way, from abstract ideas on the left like patriotism, or altruism, or religion to practices like dieting behavior, or book purchasing, or drinking, or bicycle-helmet [and] other safety practices, or products that people might buy, purchases of electronic goods, anything in which there's kind of an interpersonal spread. A kind of a diffusion of innovation could be understood and predicted by the mechanism I'm going to show you now.So, as all of you probably know, the classic way of thinking about this is the diffusion-of-innovation, or the adoption curve. So here on the Y-axis, we have the percent of the people affected, and on the X-axis, we have time. And at the very beginning, not too many people are affected, and you get this classic sigmoidal, or S-shaped, curve. And the reason for this shape is that at the very beginning, let's say one or two people are infected, or affected by the thing and then they affect, or infect, two people, who in turn affect four, eight, 16 and so forth, and you get the epidemic growth phase of the curve. And eventually, you saturate the population. There are fewer and fewer people who are still available that you might infect, and then you get the plateau of the curve, and you get this classic sigmoidal curve. And this holds for germs, ideas, product adoption, behaviors, and the like. But things don't just diffuse in human populations at random. They actually diffuse through networks. Because, as I said, we live our lives in networks, and these networks have a particular kind of a structure.Now if you look at a network like this — this is 105 people. And the lines represent — the dots are the people, and the lines represent friendship relationships. You might see that people occupy different locations within the network. And there are different kinds of relationships between the people. You could have friendship relationships, sibling relationships, spousal relationships, co-worker relationships, neighbor relationships and the like. And different sorts of things spread across different sorts of ties. For instance, sexually transmitted diseases will spread across sexual ties. Or, for instance, people's smoking behavior might be influenced by their friends. Or their altruistic or their charitable giving behavior might be influenced by their coworkers, or by their neighbors. But not all positions in the network are the same.So if you look at this, you might immediately grasp that different people have different numbers of connections. Some people have one connection, some have two, some have six, some have 10 connections. And this is called the ""degree"" of a node, or the number of connections that a node has. But in addition, there's something else. So, if you look at nodes A and B, they both have six connections. But if you can see this image [of the network] from a bird's eye view, you can appreciate that there's something very different about nodes A and B. So, let me ask you this — I can cultivate this intuition by asking a question — who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network, A or B? (Audience: B.) Nicholas Christakis: B, it's obvious. B is located on the edge of the network. Now, who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip were spreading through the network? A. And you have an immediate appreciation that A is going to be more likely to get the thing that's spreading and to get it sooner by virtue of their structural location within the network. A, in fact, is more central, and this can be formalized mathematically. So, if we want to track something that was spreading through a network, what we ideally would like to do is to set up sensors on the central individuals within the network, including node A, monitor those people that are right there in the middle of the network, and somehow get an early detection of whatever it is that is spreading through the network.So if you saw them contract a germ or a piece of information, you would know that, soon enough, everybody was about to contract this germ or this piece of information. And this would be much better than monitoring six randomly chosen people, without reference to the structure of the population. And in fact, if you could do that, what you would see is something like this. On the left-hand panel, again, we have the S-shaped curve of adoption. In the dotted red line, we show what the adoption would be in the random people, and in the left-hand line, shifted to the left, we show what the adoption would be in the central individuals within the network. On the Y-axis is the cumulative instances of contagion, and on the X-axis is the time. And on the right-hand side, we show the same data, but here with daily incidence. And what we show here is — like, here — very few people are affected, more and more and more and up to here, and here's the peak of the epidemic. But shifted to the left is what's occurring in the central individuals. And this difference in time between the two is the early detection, the early warning we can get, about an impending epidemic in the human population.The problem, however, is that mapping human social networks is not always possible. It can be expensive, not feasible, unethical, or, frankly, just not possible to do such a thing. So, how can we figure out who the central people are in a network without actually mapping the network? What we came up with was an idea to exploit an old fact, or a known fact, about social networks, which goes like this: Do you know that your friends have more friends than you do? Your friends have more friends than you do, and this is known as the friendship paradox. Imagine a very popular person in the social network — like a party host who has hundreds of friends — and a misanthrope who has just one friend, and you pick someone at random from the population; they were much more likely to know the party host. And if they nominate the party host as their friend, that party host has a hundred friends, therefore, has more friends than they do. And this, in essence, is what's known as the friendship paradox. The friends of randomly chosen people have higher degree, and are more central than the random people themselves.And you can get an intuitive appreciation for this if you imagine just the people at the perimeter of the network. If you pick this person, the only friend they have to nominate is this person, who, by construction, must have at least two and typically more friends. And that happens at every peripheral node. And in fact, it happens throughout the network as you move in, everyone you pick, when they nominate a random — when a random person nominates a friend of theirs, you move closer to the center of the network. So, we thought we would exploit this idea in order to study whether we could predict phenomena within networks. Because now, with this idea we can take a random sample of people, have them nominate their friends, those friends would be more central, and we could do this without having to map the network.And we tested this idea with an outbreak of H1N1 flu at Harvard College in the fall and winter of 2009, just a few months ago. We took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates, we had them nominate their friends, and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic. And we did this passively by looking at whether or not they'd gone to university health services. And also, we had them [actively] email us a couple of times a week. Exactly what we predicted happened. So the random group is in the red line. The epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left, over here. And the difference in the two is 16 days. By monitoring the friends group, we could get 16 days advance warning of an impending epidemic in this human population.Now, in addition to that, if you were an analyst who was trying to study an epidemic or to predict the adoption of a product, for example, what you could do is you could pick a random sample of the population, also have them nominate their friends and follow the friends and follow both the randoms and the friends. Among the friends, the first evidence you saw of a blip above zero in adoption of the innovation, for example, would be evidence of an impending epidemic. Or you could see the first time the two curves diverged, as shown on the left. When did the randoms — when did the friends take off and leave the randoms, and [when did] their curve start shifting? And that, as indicated by the white line, occurred 46 days before the peak of the epidemic. So this would be a technique whereby we could get more than a month-and-a-half warning about a flu epidemic in a particular population.I should say that how far advanced a notice one might get about something depends on a host of factors. It could depend on the nature of the pathogen — different pathogens, using this technique, you'd get different warning — or other phenomena that are spreading, or frankly, on the structure of the human network. Now in our case, although it wasn't necessary, we could also actually map the network of the students.So, this is a map of 714 students and their friendship ties. And in a minute now, I'm going to put this map into motion. We're going to take daily cuts through the network for 120 days. The red dots are going to be cases of the flu, and the yellow dots are going to be friends of the people with the flu. And the size of the dots is going to be proportional to how many of their friends have the flu. So bigger dots mean more of your friends have the flu. And if you look at this image — here we are now in September the 13th — you're going to see a few cases light up. You're going to see kind of blooming of the flu in the middle. Here we are on October the 19th. The slope of the epidemic curve is approaching now, in November. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang — you're going to see lots of blooming in the middle, and then you're going to see a sort of leveling off, fewer and fewer cases towards the end of December. And this type of a visualization can show that epidemics like this take root and affect central individuals first, before they affect others.Now, as I've been suggesting, this method is not restricted to germs, but actually to anything that spreads in populations. Information spreads in populations, norms can spread in populations, behaviors can spread in populations. And by behaviors, I can mean things like criminal behavior, or voting behavior, or health care behavior, like smoking, or vaccination, or product adoption, or other kinds of behaviors that relate to interpersonal influence. If I'm likely to do something that affects others around me, this technique can get early warning or early detection about the adoption within the population. The key thing is that for it to work, there has to be interpersonal influence. It cannot be because of some broadcast mechanism affecting everyone uniformly.Now the same insights can also be exploited — with respect to networks — can also be exploited in other ways, for example, in the use of targeting specific people for interventions. So, for example, most of you are probably familiar with the notion of herd immunity. So, if we have a population of a thousand people, and we want to make the population immune to a pathogen, we don't have to immunize every single person. If we immunize 960 of them, it's as if we had immunized a hundred [percent] of them. Because even if one or two of the non-immune people gets infected, there's no one for them to infect. They are surrounded by immunized people. So 96 percent is as good as 100 percent. Well, some other scientists have estimated what would happen if you took a 30 percent random sample of these 1000 people, 300 people and immunized them. Would you get any population-level immunity? And the answer is no. But if you took this 30 percent, these 300 people and had them nominate their friends and took the same number of vaccine doses and vaccinated the friends of the 300 — the 300 friends — you can get the same level of herd immunity as if you had vaccinated 96 percent of the population at a much greater efficiency, with a strict budget constraint.And similar ideas can be used, for instance, to target distribution of things like bed nets in the developing world. If we could understand the structure of networks in villages, we could target to whom to give the interventions to foster these kinds of spreads. Or, frankly, for advertising with all kinds of products. If we could understand how to target, it could affect the efficiency of what we're trying to achieve. And in fact, we can use data from all kinds of sources nowadays [to do this].This is a map of eight million phone users in a European country. Every dot is a person, and every line represents a volume of calls between the people. And we can use such data, that's being passively obtained, to map these whole countries and understand who is located where within the network. Without actually having to query them at all, we can get this kind of a structural insight. And other sources of information, as you're no doubt aware are available about such features, from email interactions, online interactions, online social networks and so forth. And in fact, we are in the era of what I would call ""massive-passive"" data collection efforts. They're all kinds of ways we can use massively collected data to create sensor networks to follow the population, understand what's happening in the population, and intervene in the population for the better. Because these new technologies tell us not just who is talking to whom, but where everyone is, and what they're thinking based on what they're uploading on the Internet, and what they're buying based on their purchases. And all this administrative data can be pulled together and processed to understand human behavior in a way we never could before.So, for example, we could use truckers' purchases of fuel. So the truckers are just going about their business, and they're buying fuel. And we see a blip up in the truckers' purchases of fuel, and we know that a recession is about to end. Or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway, and the phone company can see, as the velocity is slowing down, that there's a traffic jam. And they can feed that information back to their subscribers, but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam! Or we can monitor doctors prescribing behaviors, passively, and see how the diffusion of innovation with pharmaceuticals occurs within [networks of] doctors. Or again, we can monitor purchasing behavior in people and watch how these types of phenomena can diffuse within human populations.And there are three ways, I think, that these massive-passive data can be used. One is fully passive, like I just described — as in, for instance, the trucker example, where we don't actually intervene in the population in any way. One is quasi-active, like the flu example I gave, where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends — do they have the flu, or not? — and then get warning. Or another example would be, if you're a phone company, you figure out who's central in the network and you ask those people, ""Look, will you just text us your fever every day? Just text us your temperature."" And collect vast amounts of information about people's temperature, but from centrally located individuals. And be able, on a large scale, to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people. Or, finally, it can be more fully active — as I know subsequent speakers will also talk about today — where people might globally participate in wikis, or photographing, or monitoring elections, and upload information in a way that allows us to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena.In fact, the availability of these data, I think, heralds a kind of new era of what I and others would like to call ""computational social science."" It's sort of like when Galileo invented — or, didn't invent — came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope — or actually invented — and could see biology in a new way. But now we have access to these kinds of data that allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before possible. And with this science, we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts. And actually, we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks_predict_epidemics
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"Now, since this is TEDGlobal, who can tell me what this is called in French? I see you're all up on the history of hurdy-gurdy — ""vielle à roue."" And in Spanish, ""zanfona."" And in Italian, ""ghironda,"" okay? Hurdy-gurdy, or wheel fiddle.So, these are the different kinds and shapes of the hurdy-gurdy. The hurdy-gurdy is the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings, like the bow of a violin, to produce music. It has three different kinds of strings. The first string is the drone string, which plays a continuous sound like the bagpipe. The second string is a melody string, which is played with a wooden keyboard tuned like a piano. And the third string is pretty innovative. It's also the only instrument that uses this kind of technique. It activates what's called the buzzing bridge, or the dog. When I turn the crank and I apply pressure, it makes a sound like a barking dog. So all of this is pretty innovative, if you consider that the hurdy-gurdy appeared about a thousand years ago and it took two people to play it; one to turn the crank, and another person — yes — to play the melody by physically pulling up large wooden pegs. Luckily, all of this changed a couple of centuries later. So, one person could actually play and almost — this is pretty heavy — carry the hurdy-gurdy.The hurdy-gurdy has been used, historically, through the centuries in mostly dance music because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boombox here. And today, the hurdy-gurdy is used in all sorts of music — traditional folk music, dance, contemporary and world music — in the U.K., in France, in Spain and in Italy. And this kind of hurdy-gurdy takes anywhere from three to five years [to order and receive it]. It's made by specialized luthiers, also in Europe. And it's very difficult to tune.So without further ado, would you like to hear it?(Audience: Yes.)Caroline Phillips: I didn't hear you. Would you like to hear it? (Audience: Yes!)CP: Okay. There I go. I'd like to sing in Basque, which is the language spoken in the Basque Country where I live, in the region in France and Spain.(Music)[Basque](Music)Thank you.(Applause)This is a song that I wrote based on traditional Basque rhythms. And this is a song that has a kind of a Celtic feel.(Music)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caroline_phillips_hurdy_gurdy_for_beginners
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"Hello. I would like to start my talk with actually two questions, and the first one is: How many people here actually eat pig meat? Please raise your hand — oh, that's a lot. And how many people have actually seen a live pig producing this meat? In the last year?In the Netherlands — where I come from — you actually never see a pig, which is really strange, because, on a population of 16 million people, we have 12 million pigs. And well, of course, the Dutch can't eat all these pigs. They eat about one-third, and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world. A lot goes to the U.K., Germany.And what I was curious about — because historically, the whole pig would be used up until the last bit so nothing would be wasted — and I was curious to find out if this was actually still the case. And I spent about three years researching. And I followed this one pig with number ""05049,"" all the way up until the end and to what products it's made of. And in these years, I met all kinds people like, for instance, farmers and butchers, which seems logical. But I also met aluminum mold makers, ammunition producers and all kinds of people. And what was striking to me is that the farmers actually had no clue what was made of their pigs, but the consumers — as in us — had also no idea of the pigs being in all these products.So what I did is, I took all this research and I made it into a — well, basically it's a product catalog of this one pig, and it carries a duplicate of his ear tag on the back. And it consists of seven chapters — the chapters are skin, bones, meat, internal organs, blood, fat and miscellaneous. (Laughter) In total, they weigh 103.7 kilograms. And to show you how often you actually meet part of this pig in a regular day, I want to show you some images of the book.You probably start the day with a shower. So, in soap, fatty acids made from boiling pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent, but also for giving it a pearl-like effect. Then if you look around you in the bathroom, you see lots more products like shampoo, conditioner, anti-wrinkle cream, body lotion, but also toothpaste. Then, so, before breakfast, you've already met the pig so many times. Then, at breakfast, the pig that I followed, the hairs off the pig or proteins from the hairs off the pig were used as an improver of dough. (Laughter) Well, that's what the producer says: it's ""improving the dough, of course."" In low-fat butter, or actually in many low-fat products, when you take the fat out, you actually take the taste and the texture out. So what they do is they put gelatin back in, in order to retain the texture.Well, when you're off to work, under the road or under the buildings that you see, there might very well be cellular concrete, which is a very light kind of concrete that's actually got proteins from bones inside and it's also fully reusable. In the train brakes — at least in the German train brakes — there's this part of the brake that's made of bone ash. And in cheesecake and all kinds of desserts, like chocolate mousse, tiramisu, vanilla pudding, everything that's cooled in the supermarket, there's gelatin to make it look good. Fine bone china — this is a real classic. Of course, the bone in fine-bone china gives it its translucency and also its strength, in order to make these really fine shapes, like this deer.In interior decorating, the pig's actually quite there. It's used in paint for the texture, but also for the glossiness. In sandpaper, bone glue is actually the glue between the sand and the paper. And then in paintbrushes, hairs are used because, apparently, they're very suitable for making paintbrushes because of their hard-wearing nature.I was not planning on showing you any meat because, of course, half the book's meat and you probably all know what meats they are. But I didn't want you to miss out on this one, because this, well, it's called ""portion-controlled meat cuts."" And this is actually sold in the frozen area of the supermarket. And what it is — it's actually steak. So, this is sold as cow, but what happens when you slaughter a cow — at least in industrial factory farming — they have all these little bits of steak left that they can't actually sell as steak, so what they do is they glue them all together with fibrin from pig blood into this really large sausage, then freeze the sausage, cut it in little slices and sell those as steak again. And this also actually happens with tuna and scallops. So, with the steak, you might drink a beer. In the brewing process, there's lots of cloudy elements in the beer, so to get rid of these cloudy elements, what some companies do is they pour the beer through a sort of gelatin sieve in order to get rid of that cloudiness. This actually also goes for wine as well as fruit juice.There's actually a company in Greece that produces these cigarettes that actually contain hemoglobin from pigs in the filter. And according to them, this creates an artificial lung in the filter. (Laughter) So, this is actually a healthier cigarette. (Laughter) Injectable collagen — or, since the '70s, collagen from pigs — has been used for injecting into wrinkles. And the reason for this is that pigs are actually quite close to human beings, so the collagen is as well. Well, this must be the strangest thing I found. This is a bullet coming from a very large ammunition company in the United States.And while I was making the book, I contacted all the producers of products because I wanted them to send me the real samples and the real specimens. So I sent this company an email saying, ""Hello. I'm Christien. I'm doing this research. And can you send me a bullet?"" (Laughter) And well, I didn't expect them to even answer my email. But they answered and they said, ""Why, thank you for your email. What an interesting story. Are you in anyway related to the Dutch government?"" I thought that was really weird, as if the Dutch government sends emails to anyone.(Laughter)So, the most beautiful thing I found — at least what I think is the most beautiful — in the book, is this heart valve. It's actually a very low-tech and very high-tech product at the same time. The low-tech bit is that it's literally a pig's heart valve mounted in the high-tech bit, which is a memory metal casing. And what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart without open heart surgery. And once it's in the right spot, they remove the outer shell, and the heart valve, well, it gets this shape and at that moment it starts beating, instantly. It's really a sort of magical moment. So this is actually a Dutch company, so I called them up, and I asked, ""Can I borrow a heart valve from you?"" And the makers of this thing were really enthusiastic. So they were like, ""Okay, we'll put it in a jar for you with formalin, and you can borrow it."" Great — and then I didn't hear from them for weeks, so I called, and I asked, ""What's going on with the heart valve?"" And they said, ""Well the director of the company decided not to let you borrow this heart valve, because want his product to be associated with pigs.""(Laughter)Well, the last product from the book that I'm showing you is renewable energy — actually, to show that my first question, if pigs are still used up until the last bit, was still true. Well it is, because everything that can't be used for anything else is made into a fuel that can be used as renewable energy source.In total, I found 185 products. And what they showed me is that, well, firstly, it's at least to say odd that we don't treat these pigs as absolute kings and queens. And the second, is that we actually don't have a clue of what all these products that surround us are made of.And you might think I'm very fond of pigs, but actually — well, I am a little bit — but I'm more fond of raw materials in general. And I think that, in order to take better care of what's behind our products — so, the livestock, the crops, the plants, the non-renewable materials, but also the people that produce these products — the first step would actually be to know that they are there.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christien_meindertsma_on_pig_05049
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"Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment.And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank — both elite and mass folks drank — day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin — particularly around 1650 — and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice — right — because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life — and I know this is true of some of you — if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee.But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense — ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental — what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few.But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have ""eureka!"" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment.But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea — a new idea — is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain.So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent — a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically — it's very simple — we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So, the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless.So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, ""Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?"" And this is what they ended up coming with. It's called a ""neonurture device."" From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm — it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions — people from different backgrounds. So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that — strangely enough — look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here.And one of the problems with this is that people are actually — when you research this field — people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image — you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. And ""oh, eureka,"" they've got the idea.What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. And something about that environment — and I've started calling it the ""liquid network,"" where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other — that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. So they want to tell the story of the ""eureka!"" moment. They want to say, ""There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head."" But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods — I call this the ""slow hunch."" We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve.Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic ""eureka!"" moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, ""Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work."" That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time.Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? It's hard to go to your boss and say, ""I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?"" Now a couple of companies — like Google — they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, ""Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened."" And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. And they start talking, and one of them says, ""Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in."" And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, ""No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea.""And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around — hacking, as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. So they made it really easy to find it.So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, ""Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great."" And before long, they think, ""Well jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it."" And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they they start thinking, ""Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect."" And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. And they said, ""Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. That's pretty cool.""And eventually, they get permission — this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description. They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning.A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, ""Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?"" And they thought about it and they said, ""Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here."" So they went back, and they thought about it. And they came back and said, ""Actually, it'll be easier."" And he said, ""Oh, that's great. Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?""And that's how GPS was born. 30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last — (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right?(Applause)And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte.(Laughter)That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from
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"I want you to take a trip with me. Picture yourself driving down a small road in Africa, and as you drive along, you look off to the side, and this is what you see: you see a field of graves. And you stop, and you get out of your car and you take a picture. And you go into the town, and you inquire, ""What's going on here?"" and people are initially reluctant to tell you. And then someone says, ""These are the recent AIDS deaths in our community."" HIV isn't like other medical conditions; it's stigmatizing. People are reluctant to talk about it — there's a fear associated with it. And I'm going to talk about HIV today, about the deaths, about the stigma. It's a medical story, but more than that, it's a social story.This map depicts the global distribution of HIV. And as you can see, Africa has a disproportionate share of the infection. There are 33 million people living with HIV in the world today. Of these, two-thirds, 22 million are living in sub-Saharan Africa. There are 1.4 million pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries living with HIV and of these, 90 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa. We talk about things in relative terms. And I'm going to talk about annual pregnancies and HIV-positive mothers. The United States — a large country — each year, 7,000 mothers with HIV who give birth to a child. But you go to Rwanda — a very small country — 8,000 mothers with HIV who are pregnant. And then you go to Baragwanath Hospital, outside of Johannesburg in South Africa, and 8,000 HIV-positive pregnant women giving birth — a hospital the same as a country. And to realize that this is just the tip of an iceberg that when you compare everything here to South Africa, it just pales, because in South Africa, each year 300,000 mothers with HIV give birth to children.So we talk about PMTCT, and we refer to PMTCT, prevention of mother to child transmission. I think there's an assumption amongst most people in the public that if a mother is HIV-positive, she's going to infect her child. The reality is really, very different. In resource-rich countries, with all the tests and treatment we currently have, less than two percent of babies are born HIV-positive — 98 percent of babies are born HIV-negative. And yet, the reality in resource-poor countries, in the absence of tests and treatment, 40 percent — 40 percent of children are infected — 40 percent versus two percent — an enormous difference. So these programs — and I'm going to refer to PMTCT though my talk — these prevention programs, simply, they're the tests and the drugs that we give to mothers to prevent them from infecting their babies, and also the medicines we give to mothers to keep them healthy and alive to raise their children. So it's the test a mother gets when she comes in. It's the drugs she receives to protect the baby that's inside the uterus and during delivery. It's the guidance she gets around infant feeding and safer sex. It's an entire package of services, and it works.So in the United States, since the advent of treatment in the middle of the 1990s, there's been an 80-percent decline in the number of HIV-infected children. Less than 100 babies are born with HIV each year in the United States and yet, still, over 400,000 children are born every year in the world today with HIV. What does that mean? It means 1,100 children infected each day — 1,100 children each day, infected with HIV. And where do they come from? Well, less than one comes from the United States. One, on average, comes from Europe. 100 come from Asia and the Pacific. And each day, a thousand babies — a thousand babies are born each day with HIV in Africa.So again, I look at the globe here and the disproportionate share of HIV in Africa. And let's look at another map. And here, again, we see Africa has a disproportionate share of the numbers of doctors. That thin sliver you see here, that's Africa. And it's the same with nurses. The truth is sub-Saharan Africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden and yet only three percent of the world's health care workers. That means doctors and nurses simply don't have the time to take care of patients. A nurse in a busy clinic will see 50 to 100 patients in a day, which leaves her just minutes per patient — minutes per patient. And so when we look at these PMTCT programs, what does it mean?Well, back in 2001, when there was just a simple test and a single dose of a drug, a nurse, in the course of her few minutes with a patient, would have to counsel for the HIV test, perform the HIV test, explain the results, dispense a single dose of the drug, Nevirapine, explain how to take it, discuss infant feeding options, reinforce infant feeding, and test the baby — in minutes. Well, fortunately since 2001, we've got new treatments, new tests, and we're far more successful, but we don't have any more nurses. And so these are the tests a nurse now has to do in those same few minutes. It's not possible — it doesn't work. And so we need to find better ways of providing care.This is a picture of a maternal health clinic in Africa — mothers coming, pregnant and with their babies. These women are here for care, but we know that just doing a test, just giving someone a drug, it's not enough. Meds don't equal medical care. Doctors and nurses, frankly, don't have the time or skills to tell people what to do in ways they understand. I'm a doctor — I tell people things to do, and I expect them to follow my guidance — because I'm a doctor; I went to Harvard — but the reality is, if I tell a patient, ""You should have safer sex. You should always use a condom,"" and yet, in her relationship, she's not empowered — what's going to happen? If I tell her to take her medicines every day and yet, no one in the household knows about her illness, so it's just not going to work. And so we need to do more, we need to do it differently, we need to do it in ways that are affordable and accessible and can be taken to scale, which means it can be done everywhere.So, I want to tell you a story — I want to take you on a little trip. Imagine yourself, if you can, you're a young woman in Africa, you're going to the hospital or clinic. You go in for a test and you find out that you're pregnant, and you're delighted. And then they give you another test and they tell you you're HIV-positive, and you're devastated. And the nurse takes you into a room, and she tells you about the tests and HIV and the medicines you can take and how to take care of yourself and your baby, and you hear none of it. All you're hearing is, ""I'm going to die, and my baby is going to die."" And then you're out on the street, and you don't know where to go. And you don't know who you can talk to, because the truth is, HIV is so stigmatizing that if you partner, your family, anyone in your home, you're likely to be thrown out without any means of support. And this — this is the face and story of HIV in Africa today.But we're here to talk about possible solutions and some good news. And I want to change the story a little bit. Take the same mother, and the nurse, after she gives her her test, takes her to a room. The door opens and there's a room full of mothers, mothers with babies, and they're sitting, and they're talking, they're listening. They're drinking tea, they're having sandwiches. And she goes inside, and woman comes up to her and says, ""Welcome to mothers2mothers. Have a seat. You're safe here. We're all HIV-positive. You're going to be okay. You're going to live. Your baby is going to be HIV-negative.""We view mothers as a community's single greatest resource. Mothers take care of the children, take care of the home. So often the men are gone. They're working, or they're not part of the household. Our organization, mothers2mothers, enlists women with HIV as care providers. We bring mothers who have HIV, who've been through these PMTCT programs in the very facilities, to come back and work side by side with doctors and nurses as part of the health care team. These mothers, we call them mentor mothers, are able to engage women who, just like themselves, pregnant with babies, have found out about being HIV-positive, who need support and education. And they support them around the diagnosis and educate them about how to take their medicines, how to take care of themselves, how to take care of their babies. Consider: if you needed surgery, you would want the best possible technical surgeon, right? But if you wanted to understand what that surgery would do to your life, you'd like to engage someone, someone who's had the procedure. Patients are experts on their own experience, and they can share that experience with others. This is the medical care that goes beyond just medicines.So the mothers who work for us, they come from the communities in which they work. They're hired — they're paid as professional members of the health care teams, just like doctors and nurses. And we open bank accounts for them and they're paid directly into the accounts, because their money's protected; the men can't take it away from them. They go through two to three weeks of rigorous curriculum-based education, training. Now, doctors and nurses — they too get trained. But so often, they only get trained once, so they're not aware of new medicines, new guidelines as they come out. Our mentor mothers get trained every single year and retrained. And so doctors and nurses — they look up to them as experts. Imagine that: a woman, a former patient, being able to educate her doctor for the first time and educate the other patients that she's taking care of.Our organization has three goals. The first, to prevent mother-to-child transmission. The second: keep mothers healthy, keep mothers alive, keep the children alive — no more orphans. And the third, and maybe the most grand, is to find ways to empower women, enable them to fight the stigma and to live positive and productive lives with HIV. So how do we do it? Well, maybe the most important engagement is the one-to-one, seeing patients one-to-one, educating them, supporting them, explaining how they can take care of themselves. We go beyond that; we try to bring in the husbands, the partners. In Africa, it's very, very hard to engage men. Men are not frequently part of pregnancy care. But in Rwanda, in one country, they've got a policy that a woman can't come for care unless she brings the father of the baby with her — that's the rule. And so the father and the mother, together, go through the counseling and the testing. The father and the mother, together, they get the results. And this is so important in breaking through the stigma.Disclosure is so central to prevention. How do you have safer sex, how do you use a condom regularly if there hasn't been disclosure? Disclosure is so important to treatment, because again, people need the support of family members and friends to take their medicines regularly. We also work in groups. Now the groups, it's not like me lecturing, but what happens is women, they come together — under the support and guidance of our mentor mothers — they come together, and they share their personal experiences. And it's through the sharing that people get tactics of how to take care of themselves, how to disclose how to take medicines. And then there's the community outreach, engaging women in their communities. If we can change the way households believe and think, we can change the way communities believe and think. And if we can change enough communities, we can change national attitudes. We can change national attitudes to women and national attitudes to HIV. The hardest barrier really is around stigma reduction. We have the medicines, we have the tests, but how do you reduce the stigma? And it's important about disclosure.So, a couple years ago, one of the mentor mothers came back, and she told me a story. She had been asked by one of the clients to go to the home of the client, because the client wanted to tell the mother and her brothers and sisters about her HIV status, and she was afraid to go by herself. And so the mentor mother went along with. And the patient walked into the house and said to her mother and siblings, ""I have something to tell you. I'm HIV-positive."" And everybody was quiet. And then her oldest brother stood up and said, ""I too have something to tell you. I'm HIV-positive. I've been afraid to tell everybody."" And then this older sister stood up and said, ""I too am living with the virus, and I've been ashamed."" And then her younger brother stood up and said, ""I'm also positive. I thought you were going to throw me out of the family."" And you see where this is going. The last sister stood up and said, ""I'm also positive. I thought you were going to hate me."" And there they were, all of them together for the first time being able to share this experience for the first time and to support each other for the first time.(Video) Female Narrator: Women come to us, and they are crying and scared. I tell them my story, that I am HIV-positive, but my child is HIV-negative. I tell them, ""You are going to make it, and you will raise a healthy baby."" I am proof that there is hope.Mitchell Besser: Remember the images I showed you of how few doctors and nurses there are in Africa. And it is a crisis in health care systems. Even as we have more tests and more drugs, we can't reach people; we don't have enough providers. So we talk in terms of what we call task-shifting. Task-shifting is traditionally when you take health care services from one provider and have another provider do it. Typically, it's a doctor giving a job to a nurse. And the issue in Africa is that there are fewer nurses, really than doctors, and so we need to find new paradigm for health care. How do you build a better health care system? We've chosen to redefine the health care system as a doctor, a nurse and a mentor mother. And so what nurses do is that they ask the mentor mothers to explain how to take the drugs, the side effects. They delegate education about infant feeding, family planning, safer sex, actions that nurses simple just don't have time for.So we go back to the prevention of mother to child transmission. The world is increasingly seeing these programs as the bridge to comprehensive maternal and child health. And our organization helps women across that bridge. The care doesn't stop when the baby's born — we deal with the ongoing health of the mother and baby, ensuring that they live healthy, successful lives.Our organization works on three levels. The first, at the patient level — mothers and babies keeping babies from getting HIV, keeping mothers healthy to raise them. The second, communities — empowering women. They become leaders within their communities. They change the way communities think — we need to change attitudes to HIV. We need to change attitudes to women in Africa. We have to do that. And then rework the level of the health care systems, building stronger health care systems. Our health care systems are broken. They're not going to work the way they're currently designed. And so doctors and nurses who need to try to change people's behaviors don't have the skills, don't have the time — our mentor mothers do. And so in redefining the health care teams by bringing the mentor mothers in, we can do that.I started the program in Capetown, South Africa back in 2001. It was at that point, just the spark of an idea. Referencing Steven Johnson's very lovely speech yesterday on where ideas come from, I was in the shower at the time — I was alone. (Laughter) The program is now working in nine countries, we have 670 program sites, we're seeing about 230,000 women every month, we're employing 1,600 mentor mothers, and last year, they enrolled 300,000 HIV-positive pregnant women and mothers. That is 20 percent of the global HIV-positive pregnant women — 20 percent of the world. What's extraordinary is how simple the premise is. Mothers with HIV caring for mothers with HIV. Past patients taking care of present patients. And empowerment through employment — reducing stigma.(Video) Female Narrator: There is hope, hope that one day we shall win this fight against HIV and AIDS. Each person must know their HIV status. Those who are HIV-negative must know how to stay negative. Those who are HIV-infected must know how to take care of themselves. HIV-positive pregnant women must get PMTCT services in order to have HIV-negative babies. All of this is possible, if we each contribute to this fight.MB: Simple solutions to complex problems. Mothers caring for mothers. It's transformational.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mitchell_besser_mothers_helping_mothers_fight_hiv
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"I'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV/AIDS campaigner. And this is the name of my campaign: SING Campaign. In November of 2003, I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela's 46664 Foundation — that is his HIV/AIDS foundation. And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island. And that's me with Youssou N'Dour, onstage, having the time of my life. The next day, all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island, where he was going to give a conference to the world's press, standing in front of his former prison cell. You can see the bars of the window there. It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us. In that moment in time, Mandela told the world's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country; that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation, a thousand people were dying on a daily basis and that the front line victims, the most vulnerable of all, were women and children.This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV/AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. And so I committed — when I left South Africa, when I left Capetown, I told myself, ""This is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve."" And so, subsequently I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences, interviews, talking and using my platform as a musician, with my commitment to Mandela — out of respect for the tremendous, unbelievable work that he had done. Everyone in the world respects Nelson Mandela, everyone reveres Nelson Mandela. But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa, his country, the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus? I think that if I went out into the street now and I told people what was happening there, they would be shocked.I was very, very fortunate a couple of years later to have met Zackie Achmat, the founder of Treatment Action Campaign, an incredible campaigner and activist. I met him at a 46664 event. He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now. This is a tool — this tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV, people who are living with HIV. And in a way because of the stigma, by wearing this t-shirt I say, ""Yes, we can talk about this issue. It doesn't have to be in the closet."" I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign and I'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization. It's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women, most of whom are HIV-positive. They work in the field. They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus. They have education programs. They bring out the issues of stigma. It's quite extraordinary what they do. And yes, my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds. A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do, and are still continuing to do in South Africa.So this is my SING Campaign. SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me. I've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years — I went to about 12 different countries. Here I am in Oslo in Norway, getting a nice, fat check; singing in Hong Kong, trying to get people to raise money. In Johannesburg, I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white, middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears because I use film clips that really touch the heart, the whole nature, of this terrible tragedy that is taking place, that people are tending to avoid, because they are fatigued, and they really don't quite know what the solutions are. Aaron Motsoaledi, the current health minister, attended that concert and I had an opportunity to meet with him, and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change, which is absolutely necessary. This is in the Scottish Parliament. I've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV. And I was showing them my experiences and trying to, again, raise awareness. And once again, in Edinburgh with the wonderful African Children's Choir who I simply adore. And it's children like this, many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus.I'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe — he's the director of UNAIDS. And I'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me, only a few months ago, to become a UNAIDS ambassador. And in this way, I've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach. The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015. It's a very ambitious goal but we believe it can be achieved with political will. This can happen.And here I am with a pregnant woman, who is HIV positive and we're smiling, both of us are smiling, because we're very confident, because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she's about to give birth to. And her baby will receive PMTCT, which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus. Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life. It's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic.Now, I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile. This is Avelile — she goes with me wherever I go. I tell her story to everyone because she represents one of millions of HIV/AIDS orphans. Avelile's mother had HIV virus — she died from AIDS-related illness. Avelile had the virus, she was born with the virus. And here she is at seven years old, weighing no more than a one year-old baby. At this point in her life, she's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia. We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her — an adorable child. The doctors and nurses were phenomenal. They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her. And we didn't know when we left the hospital — because we filmed her story — we didn't know if she was going to survive. So, it was obviously — it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience, this one child, you know, that story. Five months later, we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again. And I'm getting — the hairs on my — I don't know if you can see the hairs on my arms. They're standing up because I know what I'm going to show you. This is the transformation that took place. Isn't it extraordinary?(Applause)That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile. And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation. So, I would like to say to you, each one in the audience, if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care, and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals, specifically five and six, should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world — especially in sub-Saharan Africa — could you please stand up. I think that's fair to say, it's almost everyone in the hall.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/annie_lennox_why_i_am_an_hiv_aids_activist
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"I am a PhD student. And that means I have a question: How can we make digital content graspable? Because you see, on the one hand, there is the digital world and no question, many things are happening there right now. And for us humans, it's not quite material, it's not really there — it's virtual. On the other hand, we're humans, we live in a physical world. It's rich, it tastes good, it feels good, it smells good. So the question is: How do we get the stuff over from the digital into the physical? That's my question.If you look at the iPhone with its touch and the Wii with its bodily activity, you can see the tendency; it's getting physical. The question is: What's next? Now, I have three options that I would like to show you.The first one is mass. As humans, we are sensitive to where an object in our hand is heavy. So could we use that in mobile phones? Let me show you the weight-shifting mobile. It is a mobile phone-shaped box that has an iron weight inside, which we can move around, and you can feel where it's heavy. We shift the gravitational center of it. For example, we can augment digital content with physical mass. So you move around the content on the display, but you can also feel where it is just from the weight of the device.Another thing it's good for is navigation. It can guide you around in a city. It can tell you by its weight, ""OK, move right. Walk ahead. Make a left here."" And the good thing about that is, you don't have to look at the device all the time; you have your eyes free to see the city.Now, mass is the first thing — the second thing, that's shape. We're also sensitive to the shape of objects we have in our hands. So if I download an e-book and it has 20 pages — well, they could be thin, right? But if it has 500 pages, I want to feel that ""Harry Potter"" — it's thick.(Laughter)So let me show you the shape-changing mobile. Again, it's a mobile phone-shaped box, and this one can change its shape. We can play with the shape itself. For example, it can be thin in your pocket, which we of course want it to be. But then if you hold it in your hand, it can lean towards you, be thick. It's like tapered to the downside. If you change the grasp, it can adjust to that. It's also useful if you want to put it down on your nightstand to watch a movie or use as an alarm clock. It stands. It's fairly simple.Another thing is, sometimes we watch things on a mobile phone that are bigger than the phone itself. In that case — like here, there's an app that's bigger than the phone's screen — the shape of the phone could tell you, ""OK, off the screen, right here, there is more content. You can't see it, but it's there."" And you can feel it, because it's thicker at that edge.The shape is the second thing. The third thing operates on a different level. As humans, we are social, we are empathic, and that's great. Wouldn't that be a way to make mobile phones more intuitive? Think of a hamster in the pocket. Well, I can feel it, it's doing all right. I don't have to check it.(Laughter)Let me show you the living mobile phone. So, once again, a mobile phone-shaped box. But this one, it has a breath and a heartbeat, and it feels very organic.(Laughter)And you can tell, it's relaxed right now. Oh, now — missed call, a new call, new girlfriend, maybe — very exciting.(Laughter)How do we calm it down? You give it a pat behind the ears, and everything is all right again. That's very intuitive, and that's what we want. So what we have seen are three ways to make the digital graspable for us. And I think making it physical is a good way to do that. What's behind that is a postulation, namely, not that humans should get much more technical in the future; rather than that, technology, a bit more human.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fabian_hemmert_the_shape_shifting_future_of_the_mobile_phone
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"The Hindus say, ""Nada brahma,"" one translation of which is, ""The world is sound."" And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating. In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating. Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies. So you are, in fact, a chord — each of you an individual chord. One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony. Your ears can't hear that chord; they can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves. Incidentally, we see just one octave. Your ears are always on — you have no ear lids. They work even when you sleep. The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters. The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that.Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening. Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at — it's a relationship with sound. And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught. For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions, places you can listen from? Here are two of them. Reductive listening is listening ""for."" It reduces everything down to what's relevant and it discards everything that's not relevant. Men typically listen reductively. So he's saying, ""I've got this problem."" He's saying, ""Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next."" That's the way we talk, right guys?Expansive listening, on the other hand, is listening ""with,"" not listening ""for."" It's got no destination in mind — it's just enjoying the journey. Women typically listen expansively. If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other, possibly both talking at the same time. (Laughter) Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk, practice expansive listening, and you can transform your relationships.The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time. Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe. Two percent of the population of Europe — that's 16 million people — are having their sleep devastated by noise like that. Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe. It's a really big problem.Now, when you were little, if you had noise and you didn't want to hear it, you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum. These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler. It looks a bit like this. The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues. The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined: ""schizophonia."" It's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear. So, we're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us. I think there's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia.The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression. We squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this. Listen to this — this is an uncompressed piece of music. (Music) And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed. (Music) I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two. There is a cost of compression. It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data. You're having to imagine it. It's not good for you in the long run.The third problem with headphones is this: deafness — noise-induced hearing disorder. Ten million Americans already have this for one reason or another, but really worryingly, 16 percent — roughly one in six — of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse. One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse. We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people. Now that's a really serious problem.I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children, please. Professional hearing protectors are great; I use some all the time. If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you don't have to have it so loud. If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice, it's too loud. And thirdly, if you're in bad sound, it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it. Protect your ears in that way.Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out. WWB: Wind, water, birds — stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events, all of it very healthy, all of it sound that we evolved to over the years. Seek those sounds out; they're good for you and so it this. Silence is beautiful. The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence. I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art. Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion. It's fun to get into designing with sound. If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. Sound design is the future, and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds.I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities, eight ways sound can improve health. First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy; it's also now being used to treat cancer. Lithotripsy — saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound. Sound healing is a wonderful modality. It's been around for thousands of years. I do urge you to explore this. There are great things being done there, treating now autism, dementia and other conditions. And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you, if it's music that's made with good intention, made with love, generally. Devotional music, good — Mozart, good. There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy.And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved. First of all, listen consciously. I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that. It's a whole new dimension to your life and it's wonderful to have that dimension. Secondly, get in touch with making some sound — create sound. The voice is the instrument we all play, and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained; learn to sing, learn to play an instrument. Musicians have bigger brains — it's true. You can do this in groups as well. It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia; to make music and sound in a group of people, whichever style you enjoy particularly. And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us. Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely. Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work. And let's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on.So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound. My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things, we will take a very big step in that direction. So I urge you to take that path.I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you. I wish you sound health.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_shh_sound_health_in_8_steps
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"I got up this morning at 6:10 a.m. after going to sleep at 12:45 a.m. I was awakened once during the night. My heart rate was 61 beats per minute — my blood pressure, 127 over 74. I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31.We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve. A few years ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments.Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle — the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. It tracks your movement through space. It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device — among early adopters at the moment — the Fitbit. This tracks your activity and also your sleep. It has just that sensor in it.You're probably familiar with the Nike+ system. I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor. This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike+ system.This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep — deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. The rest of it is the bedside console; just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago — I mean, really until now. And this is the sleep tracking system of today.This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors.Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world — these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge.Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. What is this for? What should it be for? Some people will say it's for biometric security. Some people will say it's for public health research. Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self
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"We live in in a remarkable time, the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That's why we look different. I've got brown eyes; you might have blue or gray. But it's not just skin-deep. The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies. And yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes. What do you guys think? Are you more than your genes? (Audience: Yes.) Yes? I think some people agree with me. I think we should make a statement. I think we should say it all together. All right: ""I'm more than my genes"" — all together. Everybody: I am more than my genes. (Cheering) Sebastian Seung: What am I? (Laughter) I am my connectome. Now, since you guys are really great, maybe you can humor me and say this all together too. (Laughter) Right. All together now. Everybody: I am my connectome. SS: That sounded great. You know, you guys are so great, you don't even know what a connectome is, and you're willing to play along with me. I could just go home now.Well, so far only one connectome is known, that of this tiny worm. Its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons. And in the 1970s and '80s, a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons. In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection. This is the connectome of the worm C. elegans. Your connectome is far more complex than this because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections. There's a diagram like this for your brain, but there's no way it would fit on this slide. Your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters. That's a lot of information.What's in that information? We don't know for sure, but there are theories. Since the 19th century, neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories — the information that makes you, you — maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain's neurons. And perhaps other aspects of your personal identity — maybe your personality and your intellect — maybe they're also encoded in the connections between your neurons. And so now you can see why I proposed this hypothesis: I am my connectome. I didn't ask you to chant it because it's true; I just want you to remember it. And in fact, we don't know if this hypothesis is correct, because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it. Finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor. And to find the connectomes of brains more like our own, we need more sophisticated technologies, that are automated, that will speed up the process of finding connectomes. And in the next few minutes, I'll tell you about some of these technologies, which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators.Now you've probably seen pictures of neurons before. You can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes. They extend long and delicate branches, and in short, they look like trees. But this is just a single neuron. In order to find connectomes, we have to see all the neurons at the same time. So let's meet Bobby Kasthuri, who works in the laboratory of Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University. Bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain. And we're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution, so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time. Except, you still may not really recognize them, and that's because we have to work in three dimensions.If we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up, we get a three-dimensional image. And still, you may not see the branches. So we start at the top, and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red, and we do that for the next slice and for the next slice. And we keep on doing that, slice after slice. If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron. And we can do that for another neuron in green. And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses.Let's zoom in on one synapse, and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron. You should see small circles — these are called vesicles. They contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter. And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter. At the synapse, the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone.So you see how to find a synapse. How can we find an entire connectome? Well, we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book. We color every neuron in, in a different color, and then we look through all of the images, find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse. If we can do that throughout all the images, we could find a connectome.Now, at this point, you've learned the basics of neurons and synapses. And so I think we're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience: how are the brains of men and women different? (Laughter) According to this self-help book, guys brains are like waffles; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes. Girls' brains are like spaghetti; everything in their life is connected to everything else. (Laughter) You guys are laughing, but you know, this book changed my life. (Laughter) But seriously, what's wrong with this? You already know enough to tell me — what's wrong with this statement? It doesn't matter whether you're a guy or girl, everyone's brains are like spaghetti. Or maybe really, really fine capellini with branches. Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches. One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact. By now, you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is.And so let's do a series of comparisons to show you. I assure you, this is very tiny. It's just six microns on a side. So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron. And you can tell that, really, only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube. And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain. And that's just a mouse brain — it's a lot smaller than a human brain. So when show my friends this, sometimes they've told me, ""You know, Sebastian, you should just give up. Neuroscience is hopeless."" Because if you look at a brain with your naked eye, you don't really see how complex it is, but when you use a microscope, finally the hidden complexity is revealed.In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote of his dread of the infinite, his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space. And, as a scientist, I'm not supposed to talk about my feelings — too much information, professor. (Laughter) But may I? (Laughter) (Applause) I feel curiosity, and I feel wonder, but at times I have also felt despair. Why did I choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite? It's absurd. How could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this?And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor. And indeed, these days I harbor new hopes. Someday, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images. And some day, artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome. I do not know, but I hope that I will live to see that day, because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. It will take the work of generations to succeed. At the present time, my collaborators and I, what we're aiming for is much more modest — just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain. But even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that I am my connectome. For now, let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis, that it's actually worth taking seriously.As you grow during childhood and age during adulthood, your personal identity changes slowly. Likewise, every connectome changes over time. What kinds of changes happen? Well, neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and they can lose old ones. Synapses can be created, and they can be eliminated. And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller. Second question: what causes these changes? Well, it's true. To some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that's not the whole story, because there are signals, electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change. And if you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that's why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome — an idea that you may find empowering.What's in this picture? A cool and refreshing stream of water, you say. What else is in this picture? Do not forget that groove in the Earth called the stream bed. Without it, the water would not know in which direction to flow. And with the stream, I would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity. Neural activity is constantly changing. It's like the water of the stream; it never sits still. The connections of the brain's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows. And so the connectome is like bed of the stream; but the metaphor is richer than that, because it's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water, but over long timescales, the water also reshapes the bed of the stream. And as I told you just now, neural activity can change the connectome. And if you'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights, I will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis — or so neuroscientists think — of thoughts, feelings and perceptions. And so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness. Neural activity is its water, and the connectome is its bed.So let's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science. Suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work. How will we go about testing the hypothesis ""I am my connectome?"" Well, I propose a direct test. Let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes. Consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata. According to a theory that dates back to the 19th century, such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain. Because, if the first neurons in the chain are activated, through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons, which are activated, and so on down the line, like a chain of falling dominoes. And this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements.So one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes. But it won't be easy, because they're not going to look like this. They're going to be scrambled up. So we'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain. And if we can do that, the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall. And if that were successful, that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome.(Laughter)What a mess — have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this? I hope not. But if you have, you know it's very easy to make a mistake. The branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain. Can anyone guess: what's the total length of wires in your brain? I'll give you a hint. It's a big number. (Laughter) I estimate, millions of miles, all packed in your skull. And if you appreciate that number, you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain. And indeed, the popular press loves headlines like, ""Anorexic brains are wired differently,"" or ""Autistic brains are wired differently."" These are plausible claims, but in truth, we can't see the brain's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true. And so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain, to see mental disorders in connectomes.Sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication. Philosophers know this game very well. If you believe that I am my connectome, I think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome. I mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species. One of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics. If you pay 100,000 dollars, you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an Arizona warehouse, awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you.Should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality, calling them fools? Or will they someday chuckle over our graves? I don't know — I prefer to test their beliefs, scientifically. I propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain. We know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing. The question is: has that damage erased the connectome? If it has, there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains. Resurrection might succeed for the body, but not for the mind. On the other hand, if the connectome is still intact, we cannot ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily.I've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small, and propels us to the world of the far future. Connectomes will mark a turning point in human history. As we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the African savanna, what distinguished us was our larger brains. We have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies. Eventually, these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains. I believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists, but for all of us. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung
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"So I want to tell you a story — an encouraging story — about addressing desperation, depression and despair in Afghanistan, and what we have learned from it, and how to help people to overcome traumatic experiences and how to help them to regain some confidence in the time ahead — in the future — and how to participate again in everyday life. So, I am a Jungian psychoanalyst, and I went to Afghanistan in January 2004, by chance, on an assignment for Medica Mondiale. Jung in Afghanistan — you get the picture. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and 70 percent of the people are illiterate. War and malnutrition kills people together with hope. You may know this from the media, but what you may not know is that the average age of the Afghan people is 17 years old, which means they grow up in such an environment and — I repeat myself — in 30 years of war.So this translates into ongoing violence, foreign interests, bribery, drugs, ethnic conflicts, bad health, shame, fear and cumulative traumatic experiences. Local and foreign military are supposed to build peace together with the donors and the governmental and non-governmental organizations. And people had hope, yes, but until they realized their situation worsens every day — either because they are being killed or because, somehow, they are poorer than eight years ago. One figure for that: 54 percent of the children under the age of five years suffer from malnutrition.Yet, there is hope. One day a man told me, ""My future does not look brilliant, but I want to have a brilliant future for my son."" This is a picture I took in 2005, walking on Fridays over the hills in Kabul, and for me it's a symbolic picture of an open future for a young generation.So, doctors prescribe medication. And donors are supposed to bring peace by building schools and roads. Military collect weapons, and depression stays intact. Why? Because people don't have tools to cope with it, to get over it. So, soon after my arrival, I had confirmed something which I had already known; that my instruments come from the heart of modern Europe, yes. However, what can wound us and our reaction to those wounds — they are universal. And the big challenge was how to understand the meaning of the symptom in this specific cultural context. After a counseling session, a woman said to me, ""Because you have felt me, I can feel myself again, and I want to participate again in my family life."" This was very important, because the family is central in Afghans' social system.No one can survive alone. And if people feel used, worthless and ashamed, because something horrible has happened to them, then they retreat, and they fall into social isolation, and they do not dare to tell this evil to other people or to their loved ones, because they do not want to burden them. And very often violence is a way to cope with it. Traumatized people also easily lose control — symptoms are hyper-arousal and memory flashbacks — so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly, suddenly, and they cannot control it. To compensate this loss of inner control, they try to control the outside, very understandably — mostly the family — and unfortunately, this fits very well into the traditional side, regressive side, repressive side, restrictive side of the cultural context. So, husbands start beating wives, mothers and fathers beat their children, and afterward, they feel awful. They did not want to do this, it just happened — they lost control. The desperate try to restore order and normality, and if we are not able to cut this circle of violence, it will be transferred to the next generation without a doubt. And partly this is already happening.So everybody needs a sense for the future, and the Afghan sense of the future is shattered. But let me repeat the words of the woman. ""Because you have felt me, I can feel myself again."" So the key here is empathy. Somebody has to be a witness to what has happened to you. Somebody has to feel how you felt. And somebody has to see you and listen to you. Everybody must be able to know what he or she has experienced is true, and this only goes with another person. So everybody must be able to say, ""This happened to me, and it did this with me, but I'm able to live with it, to cope with it, and to learn from it. And I want to engage myself in the bright future for my children and the children of my children, and I will not marry-off my 13 year-old daughter,"" — what happens too often in Afghanistan.So something can be done, even in such extreme environments as Afghanistan. And I started thinking about a counseling program. But, of course, I needed help and funds. And one evening, I was sitting next to a very nice gentleman in Kabul, and he asked what I thought would be good in Afghanistan. And I explained to him quickly, I would train psycho-social counselors, I would open centers, and I explained to him why. This man gave me his contact details at the end of the evening and said, ""If you want to do this, call me."" At that time, it was the head of Caritas Germany.So, I was able to launch a three-year project with Caritas Germany, and we trained 30 Afghan women and men, and we opened 15 counseling centers in Kabul. This was our sign — it's hand-painted, and we had 45 all over Kabul. Eleven thousand people came — more than that. And 70 percent regained their lives. This was a very exciting time, developing this with my wonderful Afghan team. And they are working with me up to today. We developed a culturally-sensitive psycho-social counseling approach. So, from 2008 up until today, a substantial change and step forward has been taking place.The European Union delegation in Kabul came into this and hired me to work inside the Ministry of Public Health, to lobby this approach — we succeeded. We revised the mental health component of the primary health care services by adding psycho-social care and psycho-social counselors to the system. This means, certainly, to retrain all health staff. But for that, we already have the training manuals, which are approved by the Ministry and moreover, this approach is now part of the mental health strategy in Afghanistan.So we also have implemented it already in some selected clinics in three provinces, and you are the first to see the results. We wanted to know if what is being done is effective. And here you can see the patients all had symptoms of depression, moderate and severe. And the red line is the treatment as usual — medication with a medical doctor. And all the symptoms stayed the same or even got worse. And the green line is treatment with psycho-social counseling only, without medication. And you can see the symptoms almost completely go away, and the psycho-social stress has dropped significantly, which is explicable, because you cannot take away the psycho-social stresses, but you can learn how to cope with them. So this makes us very happy, because now we also have some evidence that this is working.So here you see, this is a health facility in Northern Afghanistan, and every morning it looks like this all over. And doctors usually have three to six minutes for the patients, but now this will change. They go to the clinics, because they want to cure their immediate symptoms, and they will find somebody to talk to and discuss these issues and talk about what is burdening them and find solutions, develop their resources, learn tools to solve their family conflicts and gain some confidence in the future.And I would like to share one short vignette. One Hazara said to his Pashtun counselor, ""If we were to have met some years ago, then we would have killed each other. And now you are helping me to regain some confidence in the future."" And another counselor said to me after the training, ""You know, I never knew why I survived the killings in my village, but now I know, because I am part of a nucleus of a new peaceful society in Afghanistan."" So I believe this kept me running. And this is a really emancipatory and political contribution to peace and reconciliation. And also — I think — without psycho-social therapy, and without considering this in all humanitarian projects, we cannot build-up civil societies.I thought it was an idea worth spreading, and I think it must be, can be, could be replicated elsewhere.I thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/inge_missmahl_brings_peace_to_the_minds_of_afghanistan
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"Welcome to Thailand. Now, when I was a young man — 40 years ago, the country was very, very poor with lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty. We decided to do something about it, but we didn't begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program. But we began with a family-planning program, following a very successful maternal child health activity, sets of activities. So basically, no one would accept family planning if their children didn't survive. So the first step: get to the children, get to the mothers, and then follow up with family planning. Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning. Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it.In my country, that was the case in 1974. Seven children per family — tremendous growth at 3.3 percent. There was just no future. We needed to reduce the population growth rate. So we said, ""Let's do it."" The women said, ""We agree. We'll use pills, but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills,"" and we had very, very few doctors. We didn't take no as an answer; we took no as a question. We went to the nurses and the midwives, who were also women, and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill. That was wonderful, but it covered only 20 percent of the country.What do we do for the other 80 percent — leave them alone and say, ""Well, they're not medical personnel."" No, we decided to do a bit more. So we went to the ordinary people that you saw. Actually, below that yellow sign — I wish they hadn't wiped that, because there was ""Coca-Cola"" there. We were so much bigger than Coca-Cola in those days. And no difference, the people they chose were the people we chose. They were well-known in the community, they knew that customers were always right, and they were terrific, and they practiced their family planning themselves. So they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country, in every village of the country. So there we are. We went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution. Wherever there were people — and you can see boats with the women, selling things — here's the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives — wherever you find people, you'll find contraceptives in Thailand.And then we decided, why not get to religion because in the Philippines, the Catholic Church was pretty strong, and Thai people were Buddhist. We went to them and they said, ""Look, could you help us?"" I'm there — the one in blue, not the yellow — holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family. And this picture was sent throughout the country. So some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves. And the women were saying, ""No wonder we have no side-effects. It's been blessed."" That was their perception.And then we went to teachers. You need everybody to be involved in trying to provide whatever it is that make humanity a better place. So we went to the teachers. Over a quarter of a million were taught about family planning with a new alphabet — A, B for birth, C for condom, I for IUD, V for vasectomy. And then we had a snakes and ladders game, where you throw dice. If you land on anything pro-family planning, you move ahead. Like, ""Mother takes the pill every night. Very good, mother. Move ahead. Uncle buys a condom. Very good, uncle. Move ahead. Uncle gets drunk, doesn't use condom. Come back, start again."" (Laughter) Again, education, class entertainment. And the kids were doing it in school too. We had relay races with condoms, we had children's condom-blowing championship. And before long, the condom was know as the girl's best friend. In Thailand, for poor people, diamonds don't make it — so the condom is the girl's best friend.We introduced our first microcredit program in 1975, and the women who organized it said, ""We only want to lend to women who practice family planning. If you're pregnant, take care of your pregnancy. If you're not pregnant, you can take a loan out from us."" And that was run by them. And after 35/36 years, it's still going on. It's a part of the Village Development Bank; it's not a real bank, but it's a fund — microcredit. And we didn't need a big organization to run it — it was run by the villagers themselves. And you probably hardly see a Thai man there, it's always women, women, women, women. And then we thought we'd help America, because America's been helping everyone, whether they want help or not. (Laughter) And this is on the Fourth of July. We decided to provide vasectomy to all men, but in particular, American men to the front of the queue, right up to the Ambassador's residence during his [unclear]. And the hotel gave us the ballroom for it — very appropriate room. (Laughter) And since it was near lunch time, they said, ""All right, we'll give you some lunch. Of course, it must be American cola. You get two brands, Coke and Pepsi. And then the food is either hamburger or hotdog."" And I thought a hotdog will be more symbolic. (Laughter) And here is this, then, young man called Willy Bohm who worked for the USAID. Obviously, he's had his vasectomy because his hotdog is half eaten, and he was very happy. It made a lot of news in America, and it angered some people also. I said, ""Don't worry. Come over and I'll do the whole lot of you.""(Laughter)And what happened? In all this thing, from seven children to 1.5 children, population growth rate of 3.3 to 0.5. You could call it the Coca-Cola approach if you like — it was exactly the same thing. I'm not sure whether Coca-Cola followed us, or we followed Coca-Cola, but we're good friends. And so that's the case of everyone joining in. We didn't have a strong government. We didn't have lots of doctors. But it's everybody's job who can change attitude and behavior.Then AIDS came along and hit Thailand, and we had to stop doing a lot of good things to fight AIDS. But unfortunately, the government was in denial, denial, denial. So our work wasn't affected. So I thought, ""Well, if you can't go to the government, go to the military."" So I went to the military and asked to borrow 300 radio stations. They have more than the government, and they've got more guns than the government. So I asked them, could they help us in our fight against HIV. And after I gave them statistics, they said, ""Yes. Okay. You can use all the radio stations, television stations."" And that's when we went onto the airwaves. And then we got a new prime minister soon after that. And he said, ""Mechai, could you come and join?"" He asked me in because he liked my wife a lot. So I said, ""Okay."" He became the chairman of the National AIDS Committee and increased the budget fifty-fold.Every ministry, even judges, had to be involved in AIDS education — everyone — and we said the public, institutions, religious institutions, schools — everyone was involved. And here, every media person had to be trained for HIV. And we gave every station half a minute extra for advertising to earn more money. So they were happy with that. And then AIDS education in all schools, starting from university. And these are high school kids teaching high school kids. And the best teachers were the girls, not the boys, and they were terrific. And these girls who go around teaching about safe sex and HIV were known as Mother Theresa. And then we went down one more step. These are primary school kids — third, fourth grade — going to every household in the village, every household in the whole of Thailand, giving AIDS information and a condom to every household, given by these young kids. And no parents objected, because we were trying to save lives, and this was a lifesaver. And we said, ""Everyone needs to be involved.""So you have the companies also realizing that sick staff don't work, and dead customers don't buy. So they all trained. And then we have this Captain Condom, with his Harvard MBA, going to schools and night spots. And they loved him. You need a symbol of something. In every country, every program, you need a symbol, and this is probably the best thing he's ever done with his MBA. (Laughter) And then we gave condoms out everywhere on the streets — everywhere, everywhere. In taxis, you get condoms. And also, in traffic, the policemen give you condoms — our ""cops and rubbers"" programs. (Laughter) So, can you imagine New York policemen giving out condoms? Of course I can. And they'd enjoy it immensely; I see them standing around right now, everywhere. Imagine if they had condoms, giving out to all sorts of people. And then, new change, we had hair bands, clothing and the condom for your mobile phone during the rainy season.(Laughter)And these were the condoms that we introduced. One says, ""Weapon of mass protection."" We found — you know — somebody here was searching for the weapon of mass destruction, but we have found the weapon of mass protection: the condom. And then it says here, with the American flag, ""Don't leave home without it."" But I have some to give out afterward. But let me warn you, these are Thai-sized, so be very careful. (Laughter) And so you can see that condoms can do so many things. Look at this — I gave this to Al Gore and to Bill Senior also. Stop global warming; use condoms. And then this is the picture I mentioned to you — the weapon of mass protection. And let the next Olympics save some lives. Why just run around? (Laughter) And then finally, in Thailand we're Buddhist, we don't have a God, so instead, we say, ""In rubber we trust."" (Laughter) So you can see that we added everything to our endeavor to make life better for the people. We had condoms in all the refrigerators in the hotels and the schools, because alcohol impairs judgment.And then what happened? After all this time, everybody joined in. According to the U.N., new cases of HIV declined by 90 percent, and according to the World Bank, 7.7 million lives were saved. Otherwise there wouldn't be many Thais walking around today. So it just showed you, you could do something about it. 90 percent of the funding came from Thailand. There was political commitment, some financial commitment, and everybody joined in the fight. So just don't leave it to the specialists and doctors and nurses. We all need to help.And then we decided to help people out of poverty, now that we got AIDS somewhat out of the way — this time, not with government alone, but in cooperation with the business community. Because poor people are business people who lack business skills and access to credit. Those are the things to be provided by the business community. We're trying to turn them into barefoot entrepreneurs, little business people. The only way out of poverty is through business enterprise. So, that was done. The money goes from the company into the village via tree-planting. It's not a free gift. They plant the trees, and the money goes into their microcredit fund, which we call the Village Development Bank. Everybody joins in, and they feel they own the bank, because they have brought the money in.And before you can borrow the money, you need to be trained. And we believe if you want to help the poor, those who are living in poverty, access to credit must be a human right. Access to credit must be a human right. Otherwise they'll never get out of poverty. And then before getting a loan, you must be trained. Here's what we call a ""barefoot MBA,"" teaching people how to do business so that, when they borrow money, they'll succeed with the business. These are some of the businesses: mushrooms, crabs, vegetables, trees, fruits, and this is very interesting — Nike ice cream and Nike biscuits; this is a village sponsored by Nike. They said, ""They should stop making shoes and clothes. Make these better, because we can afford them."" And then we have silk, Thai silk. Now we're making Scottish tartans, as you can see on the left, to sell to all people of Scottish ancestors. So anyone sitting in and watching TV, get in touch with me. And then this is our answer to Starbucks in Thailand — ""Coffee and Condoms."" See, Starbucks you awake, we keep you awake and alive. That's the difference. Can you imagine, at every Starbucks that you can also get condoms? You can order your condoms with your with your cappuccino.And then now, finally in education, we want to change the school as being underutilized into a place where it's a lifelong learning center for everyone. We call this our School-Based Integrated Rural Development. And it's a center, a focal point for economic and social development. Re-do the school, make it serve the community needs. And here is a bamboo building — all of them are bamboo. This is a geodesic dome made of bamboo. And I'm sure Buckminster Fuller would be very, very proud to see a bamboo geodesic dome. And we use vegetables around the school ground, so they raise their own vegetables.And then, finally, I firmly believe, if we want the MDGs to work — the Millennium Development Goals — we need to add family planning to it. Of course, child mortality first and then family planning — everyone needs family planning service — it's underutilized. So we have now found the weapon of mass protection. And we also ask the next Olympics to be involved in saving lives. And then, finally, that is our network. And these are our Thai tulips.(Laughter)Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mechai_viravaidya_how_mr_condom_made_thailand_a_better_place
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"So, I'd like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years. But before I do that, I need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics, which require huge amounts of energy to create and, because of their disposal issues, are slowly poisoning our planet. I also want to tell you and share with you how my team and I have been using mushrooms over the last three years. Not like that. (Laughter) We're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials, which perform a lot like plastics during their use, but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives.(Cheering)But first, I need to talk to you about what I consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category. This is a material you all know is Styrofoam, but I like to think of it as toxic white stuff. In a single cubic foot of this material — about what would come around your computer or large television — you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol. Yet, after just a few weeks of use, you'll throw this material in the trash. And this isn't just found in packaging. 20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year, in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops. And that's not the only place it's found. The EPA estimates, in the United States, by volume, this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills. Even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment — on the side of the road or next to a river. If it's not picked up by a human, like me and you, it'll stay there for thousands and thousands of years. Perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans, like in the great plastic gyre, where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits, but they're not really going away. They're not biologically compatible. They're basically fouling up Earth's respiratory and circulatory systems. And because these materials are so prolific, because they're found in so many places, there's one other place you'll find this material, styrene, which is made from benzene, a known carcinogen. You'll find it inside of you.So, for all these reasons, I think we need better materials, and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials. The first is feedstocks. Today, we use a single feedstock, petroleum, to heat our homes, power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you. We recognize this is a finite resource, and it's simply crazy to do this, to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package. Second of all, we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials. I say far less, because 10 percent isn't going to cut it. We should be talking about half, a quarter, one-tenth the energy content. And lastly, and I think perhaps most importantly, we should be creating materials that fit into what I call nature's recycling system. This recycling system has been in place for the last billion years. I fit into it, you fit into it, and a hundred years tops, my body can return to the Earth with no preprocessing. Yet that packaging I got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years. This is crazy.But nature provides us with a really good model here. When a tree's done using its leaves — its solar collectors, these amazing molecular photon capturing devices — at the end of a season, it doesn't pack them up, take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves. It just drops them, the shortest distance possible, to the forest floor, where they're actually upcycled into next year's topsoil. And this gets us back to the mushrooms. Because in nature, mushrooms are the recycling system. And what we've discovered is, by using a part of the mushroom you've probably never seen — analogous to its root structure; it's called mycelium — we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics.Now, mycelium is an amazing material, because it's a self-assembling material. It actually takes things we would consider waste — things like seed husks or woody biomass — and can transform them into a chitinous polymer, which you can form into almost any shape. In our process, we basically use it as a glue. And by using mycelium as a glue, you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry, and you can create materials with many different properties, materials that are insulating, fire-resistant, moisture-resistant, vapor-resistant — materials that can absorb impacts, that can absorb acoustical impacts. But these materials are grown from agricultural byproducts, not petroleum. And because they're made of natural materials, they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard.So I'd like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials. The first is selecting a feedstock, preferably something that's regional, that's in your area, right — local manufacturing. The next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool, physically filling an enclosure, a mold, in whatever shape you want to get. Then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles, and that's where the magic happens, because the organism is doing the work in this process, not the equipment. The final step is, of course, the product, whether it's a packaging material, a table top, or building block. Our vision is local manufacturing, like the local food movement, for production. So we've created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts. If you're in China, you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull. If you're in Northern Europe or North America, you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls. We then process these husks with some basic equipment.And I want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale. So what you're seeing here is actually cotton hulls from Texas, in this case. It's a waste product. And what they're doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system, which cleans, cooks, cools and pasteurizes these materials, while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium. This gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape, though today we're making corner blocks. And it's when this lid goes on the part, that the magic really starts. Because the manufacturing process is our organism. It'll actually begin to digest these wastes and, over the next five days, assemble them into biocomposites. Our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark, quietly self-assembling materials — and everything from building materials to, in this case, a packaging corner block.So I've said a number of times that we grow materials. And it's kind of hard to picture how that happens. So my team has taken five days-worth of growth, a typical growth cycle for us, and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse. And I want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen, because, over the five-day period, what they do is extend out and through this material, using the energy that's contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix. This matrix self-assembles, growing through and around the particles, making millions and millions of tiny fibers. And what parts of the seed husk we don't digest, actually become part of the final, physical composite. So in front of your eyes, this part just self-assembled. It actually takes a little longer. It takes five days. But it's much faster than conventional farming.The last step, of course, is application. In this case, we've grown a corner block. A major Fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment. They used to use a plastic packaging buffer, but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material. Best of all, when it gets to the customer, it's not trash. They can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing, and it's going to improve the local soil.So, why mycelium? The first reason is local open feedstocks. You want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls, because you have multiple choices. The next is self-assembly, because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process. You don't need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility. So you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world. Biological yield is really important. And because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product, even the parts that aren't digested become part of the structure, we're getting incredible yield rates.Natural polymers, well ... I think that's what's most important, because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years, in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans. They're not going to clog up Earth's ecosystems. They work great. And while, today, we can practically guarantee that yesterday's packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years, what I want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years, our descendants, our children's children, will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy Earth. And I think that can be some really good news.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic
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"I want to talk to you today about prosperity, about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity. And not just us, but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished. And hope actually is at the heart of this. In fact, the Latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity. ""Pro-speras,"" ""speras,"" hope — in accordance with our hopes and expectations. The irony is, though, that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth. And we've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope — running down resources, cutting down rainforests, spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, changing the climate — and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession. And recession, of course, isn't exactly a recipe for hope either, as we're busy finding out. So we're caught in a kind of trap. It's a dilemma, a dilemma of growth. We can't live with it; we can't live without it. Trash the system or crash the planet — it's a tough choice; it isn't much of a choice. And our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently. Now I haven't got anything against efficiency. And I think we are a clever species sometimes. But I think we should also just check the numbers, take a reality check here.So I want you to imagine a world, in 2050, of around nine billion people, all aspiring to Western incomes, Western lifestyles. And I want to ask the question — and we'll give them that two percent hike in income, in salary each year as well, because we believe in growth. And I want to ask the question: how far and how fast would be have to move? How clever would we have to be? How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets? And here in my chart — on the left-hand side is where we are now. This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment. It's around about 770 grams of carbon. In the world I describe to you, we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon. It's a 130-fold improvement, and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we've ever achieved in industrial history. Maybe we can do it, maybe it's possible — who knows? Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which is what we're going to need to be doing by the end of the century. But shouldn't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement?So I want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics. It's a bit complex, and I apologize for that. What I'll try and do, is I'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms. So it looks a little bit like this. Firms produce goods for households — that's us — and provide us with incomes, and that's even better, because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services. That's called the circular flow of the economy. It looks harmless enough. I just want to highlight one key feature of this system, which is the role of investment. Now investment constitutes only about a fifth of the national income in most modern economies, but it plays an absolutely vital role. And what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth. It does this in a couple of ways — chasing productivity, which drives down prices and encourages us to buy more stuff. But I want to concentrate on the role of investment in seeking out novelty, the production and consumption of novelty. Joseph Schumpeter called this ""the process of creative destruction."" It's a process of the production and reproduction of novelty, continually chasing expanding consumer markets, consumer goods, new consumer goods.And this, this is where it gets interesting, because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty. We love new stuff — new material stuff for sure — but also new ideas, new adventures, new experiences. But the materiality matters too, because in every society that anthropologists have looked at, material stuff operates as a kind of language — a language of goods, a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories — stories, for example, about how important we are. Status-driven, conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty. And here, all of a sudden, we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic — the economic institutions, and who we are as people, locked together to drive an engine of growth. And this engine is not just economic value; it is pulling material resources relentlessly through the system, driven by our own insatiable appetites, driven in fact by a sense of anxiety. Adam Smith, 200 years ago, spoke about our desire for a life without shame. A life without shame: in his day, what that meant was a linen shirt, and today, well, you still need the shirt, but you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the netbook and iPad, the list goes on — an almost inexhaustible supply of goods, driven by this anxiety. And even if we don't want them, we need to buy them, because, if we don't buy them, the system crashes. And to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades, we've expanded the money supply, expanded credit and debt, so that people can keep buying stuff. And of course, that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis.But this — I just want to show you some data here. This is what it looks like, essentially, this credit and debt system, just for the U.K. This was the last 15 years before the crash, and you can see there, consumer debt rose dramatically. It was above the GDP for three years in a row just before the crisis. And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted. The savings ratio, net savings, were below zero in the middle of 2008, just before the crash. This is people expanding debt, drawing down their savings, just to stay in the game. This is a strange, rather perverse, story, just to put it in very simple terms. It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.(Laughter)(Applause)But before we consign ourselves to despair, maybe we should just go back and say, ""Did we get this right? Is this really how people are? Is this really how economies behave?"" And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies. The first one is in the crisis itself. In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? They want to hunker down, they want to look to the future. They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view. Keynes called this the ""paradox of thrift"" — saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even further, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It's an anomaly, it's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people.Here's another one — completely different one: Why is it that we don't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change, very, very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances, putting in efficient lights, turning the lights off occasionally, insulating our homes? These things save carbon, they save energy, they save us money. So is it that, though they make perfect economic sense, we don't do them? Well, I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago. It was a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, and it was just after — actually, to be honest, too long after — we had moved into a new house. And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping, installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts. And my, then, five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do. And we'd been doing this for a while, when she turned to me very solemnly and said, ""Will this really keep out the giraffes?"" (Laughter) ""Here they are, the giraffes."" You can hear the five-year-old mind working. These ones, interestingly, are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather. But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me, because it suddenly became clear to me why we don't do the blindingly obvious things. We're too busy keeping out the giraffes — putting the kids on the bus in the morning, getting ourselves to work on time, surviving email overload and shop floor politics, foraging for groceries, throwing together meals, escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online, getting from one end of the day to the other, keeping out the giraffes.(Laughter)What is the objective? ""What is the objective of the consumer?"" Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago. ""It is,"" she said, ""to help create the social world and find a credible place in it."" That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives, and it's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model. So who are we? Who are these people? Are we these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist depicted in Rembrandt's lovely, lovely sketch here? Well psychology actually says there is a tension — a tension between self-regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors. And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots, so selfish behavior is adaptive in certain circumstances — fight or flight.But other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings. And perhaps even more interesting from our point of view, another tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and tradition or conservation. Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself. Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups. So here, all of a sudden, we're looking at a map of the human heart. And it reveals to us, suddenly, the crux of the matter. What we've done is we've created economies. We've created systems, which systematically privilege, encourage, one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded. And in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because this isn't, therefore, about changing human nature. It isn't, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It is about opening up. It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect Rembrandt's fragile altruist within.What does all this mean for economics? What would economies look like if we took that vision of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche? Well, it might look a little bit like the 4,000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States, enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their heart — companies, in fact, like this one, Ecosia. And I just want to, very quickly, show you this. Ecosia is an Internet search engine. Internet search engines work by drawing revenues from sponsored links that appear when you do a search. And Ecosia works in pretty much the same way. So we can do that here — we can just put in a little search term. There you go, Oxford, that's where we are. See what comes up. The difference with Ecosia though is that, in Ecosia's case, it draws the revenues in the same way, but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon. And we're going to do it. We're just going to click on Naturejobs.uk. In case anyone out there is looking for a job in a recession, that's the page to go to. And what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to Ecosia, and Ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project. It's taking profits from one place and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources.It's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy. It's a form, if you like, of ecological altruism — perhaps something along those lines. Maybe it's that. Whatever it is, whatever this new economy is, what we need the economy to do, in fact, is to put investment back into the heart of the model, to re-conceive investment. Only now, investment isn't going to be about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth. Investment has to be a different beast. Investment has to be, in the new economy, protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends. It has to be about transition. It has to be investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures. We have to invest, in fact, in the idea of a meaningful prosperity, providing capabilities for people to flourish.And of course, this task has material dimensions. It would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they didn't have food, clothing and shelter. But it's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this. It has social and psychological aims — family, friendship, commitments, society, participating in the life of that society. And this too requires investment, investment — for example, in places — places where we can connect, places where we can participate, shared spaces, concert halls, gardens, public parks, libraries, museums, quiet centers, places of joy and celebration, places of tranquility and contemplation, sites for the ""cultivation of a common citizenship,"" in Michael Sandel's lovely phrase. An investment — investment, after all, is just such a basic economic concept — is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future, a shared present and a common future. And we need that relationship to reflect, to reclaim hope.So let me come back, with this sense of hope, to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door. What can we offer those people? It's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty. It's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations. And it's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model. So this is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy. In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when ""Prosperity Without Growth"" was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu. Ubuntu says, ""I am because we are."" Prosperity is a shared endeavor. Its roots are long and deep — its foundations, I've tried to show, exist already, inside each of us. So this is not about standing in the way of development. It's not about overthrowing capitalism. It's not about trying to change human nature. What we're doing here is we're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose. And at the heart of that economics, we're placing a more credible, more robust, and more realistic vision of what it means to be human.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: While they're taking the podium away, just a quick question. First of all, economists aren't supposed to be inspiring, so you may need to work on the tone a little. (Laughter) Can you picture the politicians ever buying into this? I mean, can you picture a politician standing up in Britain and saying, ""GDP fell two percent this year. Good news! We're actually all happier, and a country's more beautiful, and our lives are better.""Tim Jackson: Well that's clearly not what you're doing. You're not making news out of things falling down. You're making news out of the things that tell you that we're flourishing. Can I picture politicians doing it? Actually, I already am seeing a little bit of it. When we first started this kind of work, politicians would stand up, treasury spokesmen would stand up, and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves. And actually in the period through which we've been working over the last 18 years — partly because of the financial crisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economics — actually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world.CA: But is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together, or is it going to be more just civil society and companies?TJ: It has to be companies. It has to be civil society. But it has to have political leadership. This is a kind of agenda, which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma, because they're hooked on the growth model themselves. But actually opening up the space to think about different ways of governing, different kinds of politics, and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operate differently — absolutely vital.CA: And if someone could convince you that we actually can make the — what was it? — the 130-fold improvement in efficiency, of reduction of carbon footprint, would you then actually like that picture of economic growth into more knowledge-based goods?TJ: I would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century, in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere, and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water. If you can convince me we can do all that, then, yes, I would take the two percent.CA: Tim, thank you for a very important talk. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_jackson_s_economic_reality_check
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"I've been fascinated for a lifetime by the beauty, form and function of giant bluefin tuna. Bluefin are warmblooded like us. They're the largest of the tunas, the second-largest fish in the sea — bony fish. They actually are a fish that is endothermic — powers through the ocean with warm muscles like a mammal. That's one of our bluefin at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. You can see in its shape and its streamlined design it's powered for ocean swimming. It flies through the ocean on its pectoral fins, gets lift, powers its movements with a lunate tail. It's actually got a naked skin for most of its body, so it reduces friction with the water. This is what one of nature's finest machines.Now, bluefin were revered by Man for all of human history. For 4,000 years, we fished sustainably for this animal, and it's evidenced in the art that we see from thousands of years ago. Bluefin are in cave paintings in France. They're on coins that date back 3,000 years. This fish was revered by humankind. It was fished sustainably till all of time, except for our generation. Bluefin are pursued wherever they go — there is a gold rush on Earth, and this is a gold rush for bluefin. There are traps that fish sustainably up until recently. And yet, the type of fishing going on today, with pens, with enormous stakes, is really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet. Now bluefin, in general, goes to one place: Japan. Some of you may be guilty of having contributed to the demise of bluefin. They're delectable muscle, rich in fat — absolutely taste delicious. And that's their problem; we're eating them to death. Now in the Atlantic, the story is pretty simple. Bluefin have two populations: one large, one small. The North American population is fished at about 2,000 ton. The European population and North African — the Eastern bluefin tuna — is fished at tremendous levels: 50,000 tons over the last decade almost every year.The result is whether you're looking at the West or the Eastern bluefin population, there's been tremendous decline on both sides, as much as 90 percent if you go back with your baseline to 1950. For that, bluefin have been given a status equivalent to tigers, to lions, to certain African elephants and to pandas. These fish have been proposed for an endangered species listing in the past two months. They were voted on and rejected just two weeks ago, despite outstanding science that shows from two committees this fish meets the criteria of CITES I. And if it's tunas you don't care about, perhaps you might be interested that international long lines and pursing chase down tunas and bycatch animals such as leatherbacks, sharks, marlin, albatross. These animals and their demise occurs in the tuna fisheries. The challenge we face is that we know very little about tuna, and everyone in the room knows what it looks like when an African lion takes down its prey. I doubt anyone has seen a giant bluefin feed. This tuna symbolizes what's the problem for all of us in the room.It's the 21st century, but we really have only just begun to really study our oceans in a deep way. Technology has come of age that's allowing us to see the Earth from space and go deep into the seas remotely. And we've got to use these technologies immediately to get a better understanding of how our ocean realm works. Most of us from the ship — even I — look out at the ocean and see this homogeneous sea. We don't know where the structure is. We can't tell where are the watering holes like we can on an African plain. We can't see the corridors, and we can't see what it is that brings together a tuna, a leatherback and an albatross. We're only just beginning to understand how the physical oceanography and the biological oceanography come together to create a seasonal force that actually causes the upwelling that might make a hot spot a hope spot. The reasons these challenges are great is that technically it's difficult to go to sea. It's hard to study a bluefin on its turf, the entire Pacific realm. It's really tough to get up close and personal with a mako shark and try to put a tag on it. And then imagine being Bruce Mate's team from OSU, getting up close to a blue whale and fixing a tag on the blue whale that stays, an engineering challenge we've yet to really overcome.So the story of our team, a dedicated team, is fish and chips. We basically are taking the same satellite phone parts, or the same parts that are in your computer, chips. We're putting them together in unusual ways, and this is taking us into the ocean realm like never before. And for the first time, we're able to watch the journey of a tuna beneath the ocean using light and photons to measure sunrise and sunset. Now, I've been working with tunas for over 15 years. I have the privilege of being a partner with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We've actually taken a sliver of the ocean, put it behind glass, and we together have put bluefin tuna and yellowfin tuna on display. When the veil of bubbles lifts every morning, we can actually see a community from the Pelagic ocean, one of the only places on Earth you can see giant bluefin swim by. We can see in their beauty of form and function, their ceaseless activity. They're flying through their space, ocean space. And we can bring two million people a year into contact with this fish and show them its beauty.Behind the scenes is a working lab at Stanford University partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here, for over 14 or 15 years, we've actually brought in both bluefin and yellowfin in captivity. We'd been studying these fish, but first we had to learn how to husbandry them. What do they like to eat? What is it that they're happy with? We go in the tanks with the tuna — we touch their naked skin — it's pretty amazing. It feels wonderful. And then, better yet, we've got our own version of tuna whisperers, our own Chuck Farwell, Alex Norton, who can take a big tuna and in one motion, put it into an envelope of water, so that we can actually work with the tuna and learn the techniques it takes to not injure this fish who never sees a boundary in the open sea. Jeff and Jason there, are scientists who are going to take a tuna and put it in the equivalent of a treadmill, a flume. And that tuna thinks it's going to Japan, but it's staying in place. We're actually measuring its oxygen consumption, its energy consumption. We're taking this data and building better models. And when I see that tuna — this is my favorite view — I begin to wonder: how did this fish solve the longitude problem before we did? So take a look at that animal. That's the closest you'll probably ever get. Now, the activities from the lab have taught us now how to go out in the open ocean.So in a program called Tag-A-Giant we've actually gone from Ireland to Canada, from Corsica to Spain. We've fished with many nations around the world in an effort to basically put electronic computers inside giant tunas. We've actually tagged 1,100 tunas. And I'm going to show you three clips, because I tagged 1,100 tunas. It's a very hard process, but it's a ballet. We bring the tuna out, we measure it. A team of fishers, captains, scientists and technicians work together to keep this animal out of the ocean for about four to five minutes. We put water over its gills, give it oxygen. And then with a lot of effort, after tagging, putting in the computer, making sure the stalk is sticking out so it senses the environment, we send this fish back into the sea. And when it goes, we're always happy. We see a flick of the tail. And from our data that gets collected, when that tag comes back, because a fisher returns it for a thousand-dollar reward, we can get tracks beneath the sea for up to five years now, on a backboned animal.Now sometimes the tunas are really large, such as this fish off Nantucket. But that's about half the size of the biggest tuna we've ever tagged. It takes a human effort, a team effort, to bring the fish in. In this case, what we're going to do is put a pop-up satellite archival tag on the tuna. This tag rides on the tuna, senses the environment around the tuna and actually will come off the fish, detach, float to the surface and send back to Earth-orbiting satellites position data estimated by math on the tag, pressure data and temperature data. And so what we get then from the pop-up satellite tag is we get away from having to have a human interaction to recapture the tag. Both the electronic tags I'm talking about are expensive. These tags have been engineered by a variety of teams in North America. They are some of our finest instruments, our new technology in the ocean today. One community in general has given more to help us than any other community. And that's the fisheries off the state of North Carolina. There are two villages, Harris and Morehead City, every winter for over a decade, held a party called Tag-A-Giant, and together, fishers worked with us to tag 800 to 900 fish. In this case, we're actually going to measure the fish. We're going to do something that in recent years we've started: take a mucus sample. Watch how shiny the skin is; you can see my reflection there. And from that mucus, we can get gene profiles, we can get information on gender, checking the pop-up tag one more time, and then it's out in the ocean. And this is my favorite.With the help of my former postdoc, Gareth Lawson, this is a gorgeous picture of a single tuna. This tuna is actually moving on a numerical ocean. The warm is the Gulf Stream, the cold up there in the Gulf of Maine. That's where the tuna wants to go — it wants to forage on schools of herring — but it can't get there. It's too cold. But then it warms up, and the tuna pops in, gets some fish, maybe comes back to home base, goes in again and then comes back to winter down there in North Carolina and then on to the Bahamas. And my favorite scene, three tunas going into the Gulf of Mexico. Three tunas tagged. Astronomically, we're calculating positions. They're coming together. That could be tuna sex — and there it is. That is where the tuna spawn. So from data like this, we're able now to put the map up, and in this map you see thousands of positions generated by this decade and a half of tagging. And now we're showing that tunas on the western side go to the eastern side. So two populations of tunas — that is, we have a Gulf population, one that we can tag — they go to the Gulf of Mexico, I showed you that — and a second population. Living amongst our tunas — our North American tunas — are European tunas that go back to the Med. On the hot spots — the hope spots — they're mixed populations.And so what we've done with the science is we're showing the International Commission, building new models, showing them that a two-stock no-mixing model — to this day, used to reject the CITES treaty — that model isn't the right model. This model, a model of overlap, is the way to move forward. So we can then predict where management places should be. Places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean are places where the single species, the single population, can be captured. These become forthright in places we need to protect. The center of the Atlantic where the mixing is, I could imagine a policy that lets Canada and America fish, because they manage their fisheries well, they're doing a good job. But in the international realm, where fishing and overfishing has really gone wild, these are the places that we have to make hope spots in. That's the size they have to be to protect the bluefin tuna.Now in a second project called Tagging of Pacific Pelagics, we took on the planet as a team, those of us in the Census of Marine Life. And, funded primarily through Sloan Foundation and others, we were able to actually go in, in our project — we're one of 17 field programs and begin to take on tagging large numbers of predators, not just tunas. So what we've done is actually gone up to tag salmon shark in Alaska, met salmon shark on their home territory, followed them catching salmon and then went in and figured out that, if we take a salmon and put it on a line, we can actually take up a salmon shark — This is the cousin of the white shark — and very carefully — note, I say ""very carefully,"" — we can actually keep it calm, put a hose in its mouth, keep it off the deck and then tag it with a satellite tag. That satellite tag will now have your shark phone home and send in a message. And that shark leaping there, if you look carefully, has an antenna. It's a free swimming shark with a satellite tag jumping after salmon, sending home its data. Salmon sharks aren't the only sharks we tag. But there goes salmon sharks with this meter-level resolution on an ocean of temperature — warm colors are warmer. Salmon sharks go down to the tropics to pup and come into Monterey.Now right next door in Monterey and up at the Farallones are a white shark team led by Scott Anderson — there — and Sal Jorgensen. They can throw out a target — it's a carpet shaped like a seal — and in will come a white shark, a curious critter that will come right up to our 16-ft. boat. It's a several thousand-pound animal. And we'll wind in the target. And we'll place an acoustic tag that says, ""OMSHARK 10165,"" or something like that, acoustically with a ping. And then we'll put on a satellite tag that will give us the long-distance journeys with the light-based geolocation algorithms solved on the computer that's on the fish. So in this case, Sal's looking at two tags there, and there they are: the white sharks of California going off to the white shark cafe and coming back. We also tag makos with our NOAA colleagues, blue sharks. And now, together, what we can see on this ocean of color that's temperature, we can see ten-day worms of makos and salmon sharks. We have white sharks and blue sharks. For the first time, an ecoscape as large as ocean-scale, showing where the sharks go.The tuna team from TOPP has done the unthinkable: three teams tagged 1,700 tunas, bluefin, yellowfin and albacore all at the same time — carefully rehearsed tagging programs in which we go out, pick up juvenile tunas, put in the tags that actually have the sensors, stick out the tuna and then let them go. They get returned, and when they get returned, here on a NASA numerical ocean you can see bluefin in blue go across their corridor, returning to the Western Pacific.Our team from UCSC has tagged elephant seals with tags that are glued on their heads, that come off when they slough. These elephant seals cover half an ocean, take data down to 1,800 feet — amazing data. And then there's Scott Shaffer and our shearwaters wearing tuna tags, light-based tags, that now are going to take you from New Zealand to Monterey and back, journeys of 35,000 nautical miles we had never seen before. But now with light-based geolocation tags that are very small, we can actually see these journeys. Same thing with Laysan albatross who travel an entire ocean on a trip sometimes, up to the same zone the tunas use. You can see why they might be caught. Then there's George Schillinger and our leatherback team out of Playa Grande tagging leatherbacks that go right past where we are. And Scott Benson's team that showed that leatherbacks go from Indonesia all the way to Monterey. So what we can see on this moving ocean is we can finally see where the predators are. We can actually see how they're using ecospaces as large as an ocean.And from this information, we can begin to map the hope spots. So this is just three years of data right here — and there's a decade of this data. We see the pulse and the seasonal activities that these animals are going on. So what we're able to do with this information is boil it down to hot spots, 4,000 deployments, a huge herculean task, 2,000 tags in an area, shown here for the first time, off the California coast, that appears to be a gathering place. And then for sort of an encore from these animals, they're helping us. They're carrying instruments that are actually taking data down to 2,000 meters. They're taking information from our planet at very critical places like Antarctica and the Poles. Those are seals from many countries being released who are sampling underneath the ice sheets and giving us temperature data of oceanographic quality on both poles.This data, when visualized, is captivating to watch. We still haven't figured out best how to visualize the data. And then, as these animals swim and give us the information that's important to climate issues, we also think it's critical to get this information to the public, to engage the public with this kind of data. We did this with the Great Turtle Race — tagged turtles, brought in four million hits. And now with Google's Oceans, we can actually put a white shark in that ocean. And when we do and it swims, we see this magnificent bathymetry that the shark knows is there on its path as it goes from California to Hawaii. But maybe Mission Blue can fill in that ocean that we can't see. We've got the capacity, NASA has the ocean. We just need to put it together.So in conclusion, we know where Yellowstone is for North America; it's off our coast. We have the technology that's shown us where it is. What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally — to basically get the message home — maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths.So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/barbara_block_tagging_tuna_in_the_deep_ocean
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"We are here today because [the] United Nations have defined goals for the progress of countries. They're called Millennium Development Goals. And the reason I really like these goals is that there are eight of them. And by specifying eight different goals, the United Nations has said that there are so many things needed to change in a country in order to get the good life for people. Look here — you have to end poverty, education, gender, child and maternal health, control infections, protect the environment and get the good global links between nations in every aspect from aid to trade.There's a second reason I like these development goals, and that is because each and every one is measured. Take child mortality; the aim here is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds, from 1990 to 2015. That's a four percent reduction per year — and this, with measuring. That's what makes the difference between political talking like this and really going for the important thing, a better life for people. And what I'm so happy about with this is that we have already documented that there are many countries in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America and East Europe that [are] reducing with this rate. And even mighty Brazil is going down with five percent per year, and Turkey with seven percent per year. So there's good news. But then I hear people saying, ""There is no progress in Africa. And there's not even statistics on Africa to know what is happening."" I'll prove them wrong on both points.Come with me to the wonderful world of statistics. I bring you to the webpage, ChildMortality.org, where you can take deaths in children below five years of age for all countries — it's done by U.N. specialists. And I will take Kenya as an example. Here you see the data. Don't panic — don't panic now, I'll help you through this. It looks nasty, like in college when you didn't like statistics. But first thing, when you see dots like this, you have to ask yourself: from where do the data come? What is the origin of the data? Is it so that in Kenya, there are doctors and other specialists who write the death certificate at the death of the child and it's sent to the statistical office? No — low-income countries like Kenya still don't have that level of organization. It exists, but it's not complete because so many deaths occur in the home with the family, and it's not registered. What we rely on is not an incomplete system. We have interviews, we have surveys. And this is highly professional female interviewers who sit down for one hour with a woman and ask her about [her] birth history. How many children did you have? Are they alive? If they died, at what age and what year? And then this is done in a representative sample of thousands of women in the country and put together in what used to be called a demographic health survey report. But these surveys are costly, so they can only be done [in] three- to five-year intervals. But they have good quality. So this is a limitation. And all these colored lines here are results; each color is one survey. But that's too complicated for today, so I'll simplify it for you, and I give you one average point for each survey.This was 1977, 1988, 1992, '97 and 2002. And when the experts in the U.N. have got these surveys in place in their database, then they use advanced mathematical formulas to produce a trend line, and the trend line looks like this. See here — it's the best fit they can get of this point. But watch out — they continue the line beyond the last point out into nothing. And they estimated that in 2008, Kenya had per child mortality of 128. And I was sad, because we could see this reversal in Kenya with an increased child mortality in the 90s. It was so tragic. But in June, I got a mail in my inbox from Demographic Health Surveys, and it showed good news from Kenya. I was so happy. This was the estimate of the new survey. Then it just took another three months for [the] U.N. to get it into their server, and on Friday we got the new trend line — it was down here. Isn't it nice — isn't it nice, yeah? I was actually, on Friday, sitting in front of my computer, and I saw the death rate fall from 128 to 84 just that morning. So we celebrated.But now, when you have this trend line, how do we measure progress? I'm going into some details here, because [the] U.N. do it like this. They start [in] 1990 — they measure to 2009. They say, ""0.9 percent, no progress."" That's unfair. As a professor, I think I have the right to propose something differently. I would say, at least do this — 10 years is enough to follow the trend. It's two surveys, and you can see what's happening now. They have 2.4 percent. Had I been in the Ministry of Health in Kenya, I may have joined these two points. So what I'm telling you is that we know the child mortality. We have a decent trend. It's coming into some tricky things then when we are measuring MDGs. And the reason here for Africa is especially important, because '90s was a bad decade, not only in Kenya, but across Africa. The HIV epidemic peaked. There was resistance for the old malaria drugs, until we got the new drugs. We got, later, the mosquito netting. And there was socio-economic problems, which are now being solved at a much better scale. So look at the average here — this is the average for all of sub-Saharan Africa. And [the] U.N. says it's a reduction with 1.8 percent.Now this sounds a little theoretical, but it's not so theoretical. You know, these economists, they love money, they want more and more of it, they want it to grow. So they calculate the percent annual growth rate of [the] economy. We in public health, we hate child death, so we want less and less and less of child deaths. So we calculate the percent reduction per year, but it's sort of the same percentage. If your economy grows with four percent, you ought to reduce child mortality four percent; if it's used well and people are really involved and can get the use of the resources in the way they want it. So is this fair now to measure this over 19 years? An economist would never do that. I have just divided it into two periods. In the 90s, only 1.2 percent, only 1.2 percent. Whereas now, second gear — it's like Africa had first gear, now they go into second gear. But even this is not a fair representation of Africa, because it's an average, it's an average speed of reduction in Africa.And look here when I take you into my bubble graphs. Still here, child death per 1,000 on that axis. Here we have [the] year. And I'm now giving you a wider picture than the MDG. I start 50 years ago when Africa celebrated independence in most countries. I give you Congo, which was high, Ghana — lower. And Kenya — even lower. And what has happened over the years since then? Here we go. You can see, with independence, literacy improved and vaccinations started, smallpox was eradicated, hygiene was improved, and things got better. But then, in the '80s, watch out here. Congo got into civil war, and they leveled off here. Ghana got very ahead, fast. This was the backlash in Kenya, and Ghana bypassed, but then Kenya and Ghana go down together — still a standstill in Congo. That's where we are today. You can see it doesn't make sense to make an average of this zero improvement and this very fast improvement. Time has come to stop thinking about sub-Saharan Africa as one place. Their countries are so different, and they merit to be recognized in the same way, as we don't talk about Europe as one place. I can tell you that the economy in Greece and Sweden are very different — everyone knows that. And they are judged, each country, on how they are doing.So let me show the wider picture. My country, Sweden: 1800, we were up there. What a strange personality disorder we must have, counting the children so meticulously in spite of a high child death rate. It's very strange. It's sort of embarrassing. But we had that habit in Sweden, you know, that we counted all the child deaths, even if we didn't do anything about it. And then, you see, these were famine years. These were bad years, and people got fed up with Sweden. My ancestors moved to the United States. And eventually, soon they started to get better and better here. And here we got better education, and we got health service, and child mortality came down. We never had a war; Sweden was in peace all this time. But look, the rate of lowering in Sweden was not fast. Sweden achieved a low child mortality because we started early. We had primary school actually started in 1842. And then you get that wonderful effect when we got female literacy one generation later. You have to realize that the investments we do in progress are long-term investments. It's not about just five years — it's long-term investments. And Sweden never reached [the] Millennium Development Goal rate, 3.1 percent when I calculated. So we are off track — that's what Sweden is. But you don't talk about it so much. We want others to be better than we were, and indeed, others have been better.Let me show you Thailand, see what a success story, Thailand from the 1960s — how they went down here and reached almost the same child mortality levels as Sweden. And I'll give you another story — Egypt, the most hidden, glorious success in public health. Egypt was up here in 1960, higher than Congo. The Nile Delta was a misery for children with diarrheal disease and malaria and a lot of problems. And then they got the Aswan Dam. They got electricity in their homes, they increased education and they got primary health care. And down they went, you know. And they got safer water, they eradicated malaria. And isn't it a success story. Millennium Development Goal rates for child mortality is fully possible. And the good thing is that Ghana today is going with the same rate as Egypt did at its fastest. Kenya is now speeding up. Here we have a problem. We have a severe problem in countries which are at a standstill.Now, let me now bring you to a wider picture, a wider picture of child mortality. I'm going to show you the relationship between child mortality on this axis here — this axis here is child mortality — and here I have the family size. The relationship between child mortality and family size. One, two, three, four children per woman: six, seven, eight children per woman. This is, once again, 1960 — 50 years ago. Each bubble is a country — the color, you can see, a continent. The dark blue here is sub-Saharan Africa. And the size of the bubble is the population. And these are the so-called ""developing"" countries. They had high, or very high, child mortality and family size, six to eight. And the ones over there, they were so-called Western countries. They had low child mortality and small families. What has happened? What I want you [to do] now is to see with your own eyes the relation between fall in child mortality and decrease in family size. I just want not to have any room for doubt — you have to see that for yourself. This is what happened. Now I start the world. Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox, better education, health service. It got down there — China comes into the Western box here. And here Brazil is in the Western Box. India is approaching. The first African countries coming into the Western box, and we get a lot a new neighbors. Welcome to a decent life. Come on. We want everyone down there. This is the vision we have, isn't it. And look now, the first African countries here are coming in. There we are today.There is no such thing as a ""Western world"" and ""developing world."" This is the report from [the] U.N., which came out on Friday. It's very good — ""Levels and Trends in Child Mortality"" — except this page. This page is very bad; it's a categorization of countries. It labels ""developing countries,"" — I can read from the list here — developing countries: Republic of Korea — South Korea. Huh? They get Samsung, how can they be [a] developing country? They have here Singapore. They have the lowest child mortality in the world, Singapore. They bypassed Sweden five years ago, and they are labeled a developing country. They have here Qatar. It's the richest country in the world with Al Jazeera. How the heck could they be [a] developing country? This is crap. (Applause) The rest here is good — the rest is good.We have to have a modern concept, which fits to the data. And we have to realize that we are all going to into this, down to here. What is the importance now with the relations here. Look — even if we look in Africa — these are the African countries. You can clearly see the relation with falling child mortality and decreasing family size, even within Africa. It's very clear that this is what happens. And a very important piece of research came out on Friday from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle showing that almost 50 percent of the fall in child mortality can be attributed to female education. That is, when we get girls in school, we'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later, which is a secular trend which is very strong. That's why we must have that long-term perspective, but we must measure the impact over 10-year periods. It's fully possible to get child mortality down in all of these countries and to get them down in the corner where we all would like to live together.And of course, lowering child mortality is a matter of utmost importance from humanitarian aspects. It's a decent life for children, we are talking about. But it is also a strategic investment in the future of all mankind, because it's about the environment. We will not be able to manage the environment and avoid the terrible climate crisis if we don't stabilize the world population. Let's be clear about that. And the way to do that, that is to get child mortality down, get access to family planning and behind that drive female education. And that is fully possible. Let's do it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_decade
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"Imagine, if you will — a gift. I'd like for you to picture it in your mind. It's not too big — about the size of a golf ball. So envision what it looks like all wrapped up. But before I show you what's inside, I will tell you, it's going to do incredible things for you. It will bring all of your family together. You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven't heard from in years. Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you. It will recalibrate what's most important in your life.It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith. You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body. You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy. You'll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you'll have a healthier lifestyle. And get this — you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing. You'll eat countless gourmet meals. Flowers will arrive by the truckload. People will say to you, ""You look great. Have you had any work done?"" And you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs.You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled. Your life will have new meaning. Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana. The price? $55,000, and that's an incredible deal.By now I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one. Does Amazon carry it? Does it have the Apple logo on it? Is there a waiting list? Not likely. This gift came to me about five months ago. It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up — not quite so pretty. And this, and then this. It was a rare gem — a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma — the gift that keeps on giving.And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you. I'm not sure you'd want it. But I wouldn't change my experience. It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn't expect in all the ways I just shared with you.So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected, unwanted and uncertain, consider that it just may be a gift.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stacey_kramer_the_best_gift_i_ever_survived
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"Sometimes I go browsing [through] a very old magazine. I found this observation test about the story of the ark. And the artist that drew this observation test did some errors, had some mistakes — there are more or less 12 mistakes. Some of them are very easy. There is a funnel, an aerial part, a lamp and clockwork key on the ark. Some of them are about the animals, the number. But there is a much more fundamental mistake in the overall story of the ark that's not reported here. And this problem is: where are the plants? So now we have God that is going to submerge Earth permanently or at least for a very long period, and no one is taking care of plants. Noah needed to take two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal, of every kind of creature that moves, but no mention about plants. Why? In another part of the same story, all the living creatures are just the living creatures that came out from the ark, so birds, livestock and wild animals. Plants are not living creatures — this is the point. That is a point that is not coming out from the Bible, but it's something that really accompanied humanity.Let's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a Renaissance book. Here we have the description of the order of nature. It's a nice description because it's starting from left — you have the stones — immediately after the stones, the plants that are just able to live. We have the animals that are able to live and to sense, and on the top of the pyramid, there is the man. This is not the common man. The ""Homo studiosus"" — the studying man. This is quite comforting for people like me — I'm a professor — this to be over there on the top of creation. But it's something completely wrong. You know very well about professors. But it's also wrong about plants, because plants are not just able to live; they are able to sense. They are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals. Just to give you an example, every single root apex is able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters. And they also are able to show and to exhibit such a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence. Well, but this is something — this underestimation of plants is something that is always with us.Let's have a look at this short movie now. We have David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough is really a plant lover; he did some of the most beautiful movies about plant behavior. Now, when he speaks about plants, everything is correct. When he speaks about animals, [he] tends to remove the fact that plants exist. The blue whale, the biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is wrong, completely wrong. The blue whale, it's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is, this wonderful, magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum. (Applause) And this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons. Now, the story that plants are some low-level organisms has been formalized many times ago by Aristotle, that in ""De Anima"" — that is a very influential book for the Western civilization — wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and not living. They have just a kind of very low-level soul. It's called the vegetative soul, because they lack movement, and so they don't need to sense. Let's see.Okay, some of the movements of the plants are very well-known. This is a very fast movement. This is a Dionaea, a Venus fly trap hunting snails — sorry for the snail. This has been something that has been refused for centuries, despite the evidence. No one can say that the plants were able to eat an animal, because it was against the order of nature. But plants are also able to show a lot of movement. Some of them are very well known, like the flowering. It's just a question to use some techniques like the time lapse. Some of them are much more sophisticated. Look at this young bean that is moving to catch the light every time. And it's really so graceful; it's like a dancing angel. They are also able to play — they are really playing. These are young sunflowers, and what they are doing cannot be described with any other terms than playing. They are training themselves, as many young animals do, to the adult life where they will be called to track the sun all the day. They are able to respond to gravity, of course, so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots toward the vector of gravity. But they are also able to sleep. This is one, Mimosa pudica. So during the night, they curl the leaves and reduce the movement, and during the day, you have the opening of the leaves — there is much more movement. This is interesting because this sleeping machinery, it's perfectly conserved. It's the same in plants, in insects and in animals. And so if you need to study this sleeping problem, it's easy to study on plants, for example, than in animals and it's much more easy even ethically. It's a kind of vegetarian experimentation.Plants are even able to communicate — they are extraordinary communicators. They communicate with other plants. They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin. They communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles, for example, during the pollination. Now with the pollination, it's a very serious issue for plants, because they move the pollen from one flower to the other, yet they cannot move from one flower to the other. So they need a vector — and this vector, it's normally an animal. Many insects have been used by plants as vectors for the transport of the pollination, but not just insects; even birds, reptiles, and mammals like bats rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen. This is a serious business. We have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweet substance — very energizing — having in change this transportation of the pollen. But some plants are manipulating animals, like in the case of orchids that promise sex and nectar and give in change nothing for the transportation of the pollen.Now, there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we have seen. How is it possible to do this without a brain? We need to wait until 1880, when this big man, Charles Darwin, publishes a wonderful, astonishing book that starts a revolution. The title is ""The Power of Movement in Plants."" No one was allowed to speak about movement in plants before Charles Darwin. In his book, assisted by his son, Francis — who was the first professor of plant physiology in the world, in Cambridge — they took into consideration every single movement for 500 pages. And in the last paragraph of the book, it's a kind of stylistic mark, because normally Charles Darwin stored, in the last paragraph of a book, the most important message. He wrote that, ""It's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animals."" This is not a metaphor. He wrote some very interesting letters to one of his friends who was J.D. Hooker, or at that time, president of the Royal Society, so the maximum scientific authority in Britain speaking about the brain in the plants.Now, this is a root apex growing against a slope. So you can recognize this kind of movement, the same movement that worms, snakes and every animal that are moving on the ground without legs is able to display. And it's not an easy movement because, to have this kind of movement, you need to move different regions of the root and to synchronize these different regions without having a brain. So we studied the root apex and we found that there is a specific region that is here, depicted in blue — that is called the ""transition zone."" And this region, it's a very small region — it's less than one millimeter. And in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important, you have these kinds of signals here. The signals that you are seeing here are action potential, are the same signals that the neurons of my brain, of our brain, use to exchange information. Now we know that a root apex has just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature, but we know how big the root apparatus of a small plant, like a plant of rye. We have almost 14 million roots. We have 11 and a half million root apex and a total length of 600 or more kilometers and a very high surface area.Now let's imagine that each single root apex is working in network with all the others. Here were have on the left, the Internet and on the right, the root apparatus. They work in the same way. They are a network of small computing machines, working in networks. And why are they so similar? Because they evolved for the same reason: to survive predation. They work in the same way. So you can remove 90 percent of the root apparatus and the plants [continue] to work. You can remove 90 percent of the Internet and it is [continuing] to work. So, a suggestion for the people working with networks: plants are able to give you good suggestions about how to evolve networks.And another possibility is a technological possibility. Let's imagine that we can build robots and robots that are inspired by plants. Until now, the man was inspired just by man or the animals in producing a robot. We have the animaloid — and the normal robots inspired by animals, insectoid, so on. We have the androids that are inspired by man. But why have we not any plantoid? Well, if you want to fly, it's good that you look at birds — to be inspired by birds. But if you want to explore soils, or if you want to colonize new territory, to best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are masters in doing this. We have another possibility we are working [on] in our lab, [which] is to build hybrids. It's much more easy to build hybrids. Hybrid means it's something that's half living and half machine. It's much more easy to work with plants than with animals. They have computing power, they have electrical signals. The connection with the machine is much more easy, much more even ethically possible. And these are three possibilities that we are working on to build hybrids, driven by algae or by the leaves at the end, by the most, most powerful parts of the plants, by the roots.Well, thank you for your attention. And before I finish, I would like to reassure that no snails were harmed in making this presentation. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence
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"One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, I'm really struck by the things that we have in common. They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. But I also see lots of poverty, and it's quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world. So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola.Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. And so when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home and I'm thinking, ""We're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations,"" you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing? And I'm not the first person to ask this question. But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. It's staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. That's like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. So why does this matter? Well, if we're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we're set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good.Coke's success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. So that's why I took a bit of time to study Coke. And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. So let's start with the data. Now Coke has a very clear bottom line — they report to a set of shareholders, they have to turn a profit. So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. They have this very continuous feedback loop. They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. They have a whole team called ""Knowledge and Insight."" It's a lot like other consumer companies. So if you're running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue.Let's contrast that for a minute to development. In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. I've sat in a lot of those meetings, and by then, it is way too late to use the data. I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. They said, ""You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. It's dark, you can't see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact."" Real-time data turns on the lights.So what's the second thing that Coke's good at? They're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. Coke's been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldn't reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. And in Africa, the remote places, it's hard to find a good road. But Coke noticed something — they noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers, and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Coke's sales. Let's look at the development side.What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. I think a great example of this is Ethiopia's new health extension program. The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic, they were over a day's travel away from a health clinic. So if you're in an emergency situation — or if you're a mom about to deliver a baby — forget it, to get to the health care center. They decided that wasn't good enough, so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this, and they adapted it for Ethiopia. And in 2003, the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country. They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people. In just five years, their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people.Now, think about how this can change people's lives. Health extension workers can help with so many things, whether it's family planning, prenatal care, immunizations for the children, or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery. That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia, and it's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008. In Ethiopia, there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program. So what's the next step for Ethiopia? Well, they're already starting talk about this. They're starting to talk about, ""How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas? How do you incent them based on the impact that they're getting out in those remote villages?"" That's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people's potential.The third component of Coke's success is marketing. Ultimately, Coke's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a Coca-Cola. Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow. So, they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing, and what's the secret to their marketing? Well, it's aspirational. It is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live. So even though it's a global company, they take a very local approach. Coke's global campaign slogan is ""Open Happiness."" But they localize it. And they don't just guess what makes people happy; they go to places like Latin America and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life. And in South Africa, they associate happiness with seriti or community respect. Now, that played itself out in the World Cup campaign. Let's listen to this song that Coke created for it, ""Wavin' Flag"" by a Somali hip hop artist.(Video) K'Naan: ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫Give you freedom, give you fire♫ ♫ Give you reason, take you higher ♫ ♫ See the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ You define us, make us feel proud ♫ ♫ In the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ As we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ Celebration, it's around us ♫ ♫ Every nation, all around us ♫Melinda French Gates: It feels pretty good, right? Well, they didn't stop there — they localized it into 18 different languages. And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries. It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood, ""I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing,"" that also went number one on the pop charts. Both songs have something in common: that same appeal of celebration and unity. So how does health and development market? Well, it's based on avoidance, not aspirations. I'm sure you've heard some of these messages. ""Use a condom, don't get AIDS."" ""Wash you hands, you might not get diarrhea."" It doesn't sound anything like ""Wavin' Flag"" to me.And I think we make a fundamental mistake — we make an assumption, that we think that, if people need something, we don't have to make them want that. And I think that's a mistake. And there's some indications around the world that this is starting to change. One example is sanitation. We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation. But there's a solution: you build a toilet. But what we're finding around the world, over and over again, is, if you build a toilet and you leave it there, it doesn't get used. People reuse it for a slab for their home. They sometimes store grain in it. I've even seen it used for a chicken coop. (Laughter) But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea? Well, you work with the community. You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn't be done in the village, and they agree to that. But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern, trendy convenience. One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship. And it works — look at these headlines. (Laughter) I'm not kidding. Women are refusing to marry men without toilets. No loo, no ""I do.""(Laughter)Now, it's not just a funny headline — it's innovative. It's an innovative marketing campaign. But more importantly, it saves lives. Take a look at this — this is a room full of young men and my husband, Bill. And can you guess what the young men are waiting for? They're waiting to be circumcised. Can you you believe that? We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men. And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation, I have to admit, Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying, ""But who's going to volunteer for this procedure?"" But it turns out the men do, because they're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it, and the men also believe it improves their sex life. So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development, we can change communities and we can change whole nations.Well, why is all of this so important? So let's talk about what happens when this all comes together, when you tie the three things together. And polio, I think, is one of the most powerful examples. We've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years. So if you look back to 1988, there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year. In 2009, we're down to 1,600 cases. Well how did that happen? Let's look at a country like India. They have over a billion people in this country, but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis, and clinicians, a huge reporting system in chemists. They have two and a half million vaccinators. But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you. Let me tell you the story of Shriram, an 18 month boy in Bihar, a northern state in India. This year on August 8th, he felt paralysis and on the 13th, his parents took him to the doctor. On August 14th and 15th, they took a stool sample, and by the 25th of August, it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio. By August 30th, a genetic test was done, and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had.Now it could have come from one of two places. It could have come from Nepal, just to the north, across the border, or from Jharkhand, a state just to the south. Luckily, the genetic testing proved that, in fact, this strand came north, because, had it come from the south, it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission. So many more people would have been affected. So what's the endgame? Well on September 4th, there was a huge mop-up campaign, which is what you do in polio. They went out and where Shriram lives, they vaccinated two million people. So in less than a month, we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program. And I'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio. That's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading, and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands; they can save lives.Now one of the challenges in polio, still, is marketing, but it might not be what you think. It's not the marketing on the ground. It's not telling the parents, ""If you see paralysis, take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated."" We have a problem with marketing in the donor community. The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years, but we're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations aren't willing to fund polio any longer. So by next summer, we're sighted to run out of money on polio. So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we're about to run short of money. And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational, if we could focus as a community on how far we've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease, we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us. And if we could do that, we could stop vaccinating everybody, worldwide, in all of our countries for polio. And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. And we are so close. And this victory is so possible.So if Coke's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness, I'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms. To me, that is deep happiness. And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector, then in the future we make together, that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melinda_french_gates_what_nonprofits_can_learn_from_coca_cola
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"I learned about the Haiti earthquake by Skype. My wife sent me a message, ""Whoa, earthquake,"" and then disappeared for 25 minutes. It was 25 minutes of absolute terror that thousands of people across the U.S. felt. I was afraid of a tsunami; what I didn't realize was there was a greater terror in Haiti, and that was building collapse. We've all seen the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti. These are shots my wife took a couple days after the quake, while I was making my way through the D.R. into the country. This is the national palace — the equivalent of the White House. This is the largest supermarket in the Caribbean at peak shopping time. This is a nurses' college — there are 300 nurses studying. The general hospital right next door emerged largely unscathed. This is the Ministry of Economics and Finance.We have all heard about the tremendous human loss in the earthquake in Haiti, but we haven't heard enough about why all those lives were lost. We haven't heard about why the buildings failed. After all, it was the buildings, not the earthquake, that killed 220,000 people, that injured 330,000, that displaced 1.3 million people, that cut off food and water and supplies for an entire nation. This is the largest metropolitan-area disaster in decades, and it was not a natural disaster — it was a disaster of engineering.AIDG has worked in Haiti since 2007, providing engineering and business support to small businesses. And after the quake, we started bringing in earthquake engineers to figure out why the buildings collapsed, to examine what was safe and what wasn't. Working with MINUSTAH, which is the U.N. mission in Haiti, with the Ministry of Public Works, with different NGOs, we inspected over 1,500 buildings. We inspected schools and private residencies. We inspected medical centers and food warehouses. We inspected government buildings.This is the Ministry of Justice. Behind that door is the National Judicial Archives. The fellow in the door, Andre Filitrault — who's the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo — was examining it to see if it was safe to recover the archives. Andre told me, after seeing these buildings fail again and again in the same way, that there is no new research here. There is nothing here that we don't know. The failure points were the same: walls and slabs not tied properly into columns — that's a roof slab hanging off the building — cantilevered structures, or structures that were asymmetric, that shook violently and came down, poor building materials, not enough concrete, not enough compression in the blocks, rebar that was smooth, rebar that was exposed to the weather and had rusted away.Now there's a solution to all these problems. And we know how to build properly. The proof of this came in Chile, almost a month later, when 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. That is 500 times the power of the 7.0 that hit Port-au-Prince — 500 times the power, yet only under a thousand casualties. Adjusted for population density, that is less than one percent of the impact of the Haitian quake. What was the difference between Chile and Haiti? Seismic standards and confined masonry, where the building acts as a whole — walls and columns and roofs and slabs tied together to support each other — instead of breaking off into separate members and failing. If you look at this building in Chile, it's ripped in half, but it's not a pile of rubble. Chileans have been building with confined masonry for decades.Right now, AIDG is working with KPFF Consulting Engineers, Architecture for Humanity, to bring more confined masonry training into Haiti. This is Xantus Daniel; he's a mason, just a general construction worker, not a foreman, who took one of our trainings. On his last job he was working with his boss, and they started pouring the columns wrong. He took his boss aside, and he showed him the materials on confined masonry. He showed him, ""You know, we don't have to do this wrong. It won't cost us any more to do it the right way."" And they redid that building. They tied the rebar right, they poured the columns right, and that building will be safe. And every building that they build going forward will be safe.To make sure these buildings are safe, it's not going to take policy — it's going to take reaching out to the masons on the ground and helping them learn the proper techniques. Now there are many groups doing this. And the fellow in the vest there, Craig Toten, he has pushed forward to get documentation out to all the groups that are doing this. Through Haiti Rewired, through Build Change, Architecture for Humanity, AIDG, there is the possibility to reach out to 30,000 — 40,000 masons across the country and create a movement of proper building. If you reach out to the people on the ground in this collaborative way it's extremely affordable. For the billions spent on reconstruction, you can train masons for dollars on every house that they end up building over their lifetime.Ultimately, there are two ways that you can rebuild Haiti; the way at the top is the way that Haiti's been building for decades. The way at the top is a poorly constructed building that will fail. The way at the bottom is a confined masonry building, where the walls are tied together, the building is symmetric, and it will stand up to an earthquake. For all the disaster, there is an opportunity here to build better houses for the next generation, so that when the next earthquake hits, it is a disaster — but not a tragedy.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_haas_haiti_s_disaster_of_engineering
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"I was informed by this kind of unoriginal and trite idea that new technologies were an opportunity for social transformation, which is what drove me then, and still, it's a delusion that drives me now. I wanted to update what I've been doing since then — but it's still the same theme song — and introduce you to my lab and current work, which is the Environmental Health Clinic that I run at NYU. And what it is — it's a twist on health. Because, really, what I'm trying to do now is redefine what counts as health. It's a clinic like a health clinic at any other university, except people come to the clinic with environmental health concerns, and they walk out with prescriptions for things they can do to improve environmental health, as opposed to coming to a clinic with medical concerns and walking out with prescriptions for pharmaceuticals.It's a handy-dandy quote from Hippocrates of the Hippocratic oath that says, ""The greater part of the soul lays outside the body, treatment of the inner requires treatment of the outer."" But that suggests the issue that I'm trying to get at here, that we have an opportunity to redefine what is health. Because this idea that health is internal and atomized and individual and pharmaceutical is largely an error. And I would use this study, a recent study by Philip Landrigan, to motivate a different view of health, where he went to most of the pediatricians in Manhattan and the New York area and logged what they spent their patient hours on. 80 to 90 percent of their time was spent on five things. Number one was asthma, number two was developmental delays, number three was 400-fold increases in rare childhood cancers in the last eight to 10, 15 years. Number four and five were childhood obesity and diabetes-related issues. So all of those — what's common about all of those? The environment is implicated, radically implicated, right. This is not the germs that medicos were trained to deal with; this is a different definition of health, health that has a great advantage because it's external, it's shared, we can do something about it, as opposed to internal, genetically predetermined or individualized.People who come to the clinic are called, not patients, but impatients, because they're too impatient to wait for legislative change to address local and environmental health issues. And I meet them at the University, I also have a few field offices that I set up in various places that provide an immersion in some of the environmental challenges we face. I like this one from the Belgian field office, where we met in a roundabout, precisely because the roundabout iconified the headless social movement that informs much social transformation, as opposed to the top-down control of red light traffic intersections. In this case, of course, the roundabout with that micro-decisions being made in situ by people not being told what to do. But, of course, affords greater throughput, fewer accidents, and an interesting model of social movement.Some of the things that the monitoring protocols have developed: this is the tadpole bureaucrat protocol, or keeping tabs, if you will. What they are is an addition of tadpoles that are named after a local bureaucrat whose decisions affect your water quality. So an impatient concerned for water quality would raise a tadpole bureaucrat in a sample of water in which they're interested. And we give them a couple of things to do that, to help them do companion animal devices while they're blogging and doing their email. This is a tadpole walker to take your tadpole walking in the evening. And the interesting thing that happens — because we're using tadpoles, of course, because they have the most exquisite biosenses that we have, several orders of magnitude more sensitive than some of our senses for sensing, responding in a biologically meaningful way, to that whole class of industrial contaminants we call endocrine disruptors or hormone emulators.But by taking your tadpole out for a walk in the evening — there's a few action shots — your neighbors are likely to say, ""What are you doing?"" And then you have to introduce your tadpole and who it's named after. You have to explain what you're doing and how the developmental events of a tadpole are, of course, very observable and they use the same T3-mediated hormones that we do. And so next time your neighbor sees you they'll say, ""How is that tadpole doing?"" And you can let them social network with your tadpole, because the Environmental Health Clinic has a social networking site for, not only impatients, humans, but non-humans, social networking for humans and non-humans. And of course, these endocrine disruptors are things that are implicated in the breast cancer epidemic, the obesity epidemic, the two and a half year drop in the average age of onset of puberty in young girls and other related things. The culmination of this is if you've successfully raised your tadpole, observing the behavioral and developmental events, you will then go and introduce your tadpole to its namesake and discuss the evidence that you've seen.Another quick protocol — and I'm going to go through these quickly, but just to give you the material sense of what we're doing here — instead of asking you for urine samples, I'll ask you for a mouse sample. Anyone here lucky enough to share, to cohabit with a mouse — a domestic partnership with mice? Very lucky. Mice, of course, are the quintessential model organism. They're even better models of environmental health, because not only the same mammalian biology, but they share your diet, largely. They share your environmental stressors, the asbestos levels and lead levels, whatever you're exposed to. And they're geographically more limited than you are, because we don't know if you've been exposed to persistent organic pollutants in your home, or occupationally or as a child. Mice are a very good representation. So it starts by building a better mousetrap, of course. This is one of them.Coping with environmental stressors is tricky. Is anybody here on antidepressants? (Laughter) There's a lot of people in Manhattan are. And we were testing if the mice would also self-administer SSRIs. So this was Prozac, this was Zoloft, this was a black jellybean and this was muscle relaxant, all of which were the medications that the impatient was taking. So do you think the mice self-administered antidepressants? What's the — (Audience: Sure. Yes.) How did you know that? They did. This was vodka and solution, gin and solution. This guy also liked plain water and the muscle relaxant. Where's our expert? Vodka, gin — (Audience: [unclear]) Yes. Yes. You know your mice well. They did, yes. So they drank as much vodka as they did plain water, which was interesting. Then of course, it goes into the entrapment device. There's an old cellphone in there — a good use for old cellphones — which dials the clinic, we go and pick up the mouse. We take the blood sample and do the blood work and hair work on the mice.And I want to sort of point out the big advantage of framing health in this external way. But we do have a few prescription products through this. It's very different from the medical model. Anything you do to improve your water quality or air quality, or to understand it or to change it, the benefits are enjoyed by anyone you share that water quality or air quality with. And that aggregating effect, that collective action effect, is actually something we can use to our advantage. So I want to show you one prescription product in the clinic called the No Park. This is a prescription to improve water quality. Many impatients are very concerned for water quality and air quality. What we do is we take a fire hydrant, a ""no parking"" space associated with a fire hydrant, and we prescribe the removal of the asphalt to create an engineered micro landscape, to create an infiltration opportunity.Because, many of you will know, that the biggest pollution burden that we have on the New York, New Jersey harbor right now is no longer the point sources, no longer the big polluters, no longer the GEs, but that massive network of roads, [those] impervious surfaces, that collect all that cadmium neurotoxin that comes from your brake liners or the oily hydrocarbon waste in every single storm event and medieval infrastructure washes it straight into the estuary system. That doesn't do a lot of good. These are little opportunities to intercept those pollutants before they enter the harbor, and they're produced by impatients on various city blocks in some very interesting ways. I just want to say it was sort of a rule of thumb though, there's about two or three fire hydrants on every city block. By creating engineered micro landscapes to infiltrate in them, we don't prevent them from being used as emergency vehicle parking spaces, because, of course, a firetruck can come and park there. They flatten a few plants. No big deal, they'll regenerate. But if we did this in every single — every fire hydrant we could redefine the emergency. That 99 percent of the time when a firetruck is not parking there, it's infiltrating pollutants. It's also increasing fixing CO2s, sequestering some of the airborne pollutants. And aggregated, these smaller interceptions could actually infiltrate all the roadborne pollution that now runs into the estuary system, up to a seven inch rain event, up to a hundred-year storm.So these are small actions that can amount to a significant effect to improve local environmental health. This is one of the more ambitious ones. What the climate crisis has revealed to us is a secondary, more insidious and more pervasive crisis, which is the crisis of agency, which is what to do. Somehow buying a local lettuce, changing a light bulb, driving the speed limit, changing your tires regularly, doesn't seem sufficient in the face of climate crisis. And this is an interesting icon that happened — you remember these: fallout shelters. What is the fallout shelter for the climate crisis? This was civic mobilization. Churches, school groups, hospitals, private residents — everyone built one of these in a matter of months. And they still remain as icons of civic response in the face of shared, uncertain, collective threat.Fallout shelter for the climate crisis, I would say, looks something like this, or this, which is an intensive urban agriculture facility that's due to go on my lab building at NYU. What it does is a very simple idea of taking — 80 to 90 percent of the CO2 produced in Manhattan is building related — we take, just like a commercial greenhouse, we take the CO2 from the building — CO2-enriched air — we force it through the urban agriculture facility, and then we resupply oxygen-enriched air. You can't actually build much on a roof, they're not designed for that. So it's on legs, so it focuses all the load on the masonry walls and the columns. It's built as a barn raising, using open source hardware. This is the quarter-scale prototype that was functioning in Spain. This is what it will look like, fingers crossed, NYU willing.And what I want to show you is — actually this is one of the components of it that we've just recently been testing — which is a solar chimney — we have got 17 of them now put around New York at the moment — that passively draws air up. You understand a solar chimney. Hot air rises. You put a bit of black plastic on the side of a building, it'll heat up, and you'll get passive airflow. What we do is actually put a standard HVAC filter on the top of that. That actually removes about 95 percent of the carbon black, that stuff that, with ozone, is responsible for about half of global warming's effects, because it changes, it settles on the snow, it changes the reflectors, it changes the transmission qualities of the atmosphere. Carbon black is that grime that otherwise lodges in your pretty pink lungs, and it's associated with. It's not good stuff, and it's from inefficient combustion, not from combustion itself. When we put it through our solar chimney, we remove actually about 95 percent of that. And then I swap it out with the students and actually re-release that carbon black. And we make pencils the length of which measures the grime that we've pulled out of the air. Here's one of them that we have up now. Here's who put them up and who are avid pencil users.Okay, so I want to show you just two more interfaces, because I think one of our big challenges is re-imagining our relationship to natural systems, not only through this model of twisted personalized health, but through the animals with whom we cohabit. We are not alone; the animals are moving in. In fact, urban migration now describes the movement of animals formerly known as wild into urban centers. You know, coyote in Central Park, a whale in the Gowanus Canal, elk in Westchester County. It's happening all over the Developed World, probably for loss of habitat, but also because our cities are a little bit more livable than they have been. And every green space we create is an invitation for non-humans to cohabit with us. But we've kind of lacked imagination in how we could do that well or interestingly. And I want to show you a few of the technological interfaces that have been developed under the moniker of OOZ — which is zoo backwards and without cages — to try and reform that relationship. This is communication technology for birds. It looks like this. When a bird lands on it, they trigger a sound file. This is actually in the Whitney Museum, where there were six of them, each of which had a different argument on it, different sound file. They said things like this.(Whistling)Recorded Voice: Here's what you need to do. Go down there and buy some of those health food bars, the ones you call bird food, and bring it here and scatter it around. There's a good person.Natalie Jeremijenko: Okay. (Laugher) So there was several of these. The birds were able to jump from one to the other. These are just your average urban pigeon. And an early test which argument elicited cooperative behavior from the people below — about a hundred to one decided that this was the argument that worked best on us.Recorded Voice: Tick, tick, tick. That's the sound of genetic mutations of the avian flu becoming a deadly human flu. Do you know what slows it down? Healthy sub-populations of birds, increasing biodiversity generally. It is in your interests that I'm healthy, happy, well-fed. Hence, you could share some of your nutritional resources instead of monopolizing them. That is, share your lunch.(Laughter)NJ: It worked, and it's true. The final project I'd like to show you is a new interface for fish that has just been launched — it's actually officially launched next week — with a wonderful commission from the Architectural League. You may not have known that you need to communicate with fish, but there is now a device for you to do so. It looks like this: buoys that float on the water, project three foot up, three foot down. When a fish swims underneath, a light goes on. This is what it looks like. So there's another function on here. This top light is — I'm sorry if I'm making you seasick — this top light is actually a water quality display that shifts from red, when the dissolved oxygen is low, to a blue/green, when its dissolved oxygen is high. And then you can also text the fish. So there's business cards down there that'll give you contact details. And they text back. When the buoys get your text, they wink at you twice to say, we've got your message. But perhaps the most popular has been that we've got another array of these boys in the Bronx River, where the first beaver — crazy as he is — to have moved in and built a lodge in New York in 250 years, hangs out. So updates from a beaver. You can subscribe to updates from him. You can talk to him.And what I like to think of is this is an interface that re-scripts how we interact with natural systems, specifically by changing who has information, where they have it, who can make sense of that information, and what you can do about it. In this case, instead of throwing chewing gum, or Doritos or whatever you have in your pocket at the fish — There's a body of water in Iceland that I've been dealing with that's in the middle of the city, and the largest pollution burden on it is not the roadborne pollution, it's actually white bread from people feeding the fish and the birds. Instead of doing that actually, we've developed some fish sticks that you can feed the fish. They're delicious. They're cross-species delicious that is, delicious for humans and non-humans. But they also have a chelating agent in them. They're nutritionally appropriate, not like Doritos. And so every time that desire to interact with the animals, which is at least as ubiquitous as that sign: ""Do not feed the animals."" And there's about three of them on every New York City park. And Yellowstone National Park, there's more ""do not feed the animals"" signs than there are animals you might wish to feed. But in that action, that interaction, by re-scripting that, by changing it into an opportunity to offer food that is nutritionally appropriate, that could augment the nutritional resources that we ourselves have depleted for augmenting the fish population and also adding chelating agent, which, like any chelating agent that we use medicinally, binds to the bioaccumulated heavy metals and PCBs that are in the fish living in this particular habitat and allows them to pass it out as a harmless salt where it's complexed by a reactive, effectively removing it from bioavailability.But I wanted to say that interaction, re-scripting that interaction, into collective action, collective remediative action, very different from the approach that's being used on the other side on the Hudson River, where we're dredging the PCBs — after 30 years of legislative and legal struggle, GE's paying for the dredging of the largest Superfund site in the world — we're dredging it, and it'll probably get shipped off to Pennsylvania or the nearest Third World country, where it will continue to be toxic sludge. Displacement is not the way to deal with environmental issues. And that's typically the paradigm under which we've operated.By actually taking the opportunity that new technologies, new interactive technologies, present to re-script our interactions, to script them, not just as isolated, individuated interactions, but as collective aggregating actions that can amount to something, we can really begin to address some of our important environmental challenges.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_jeremijenko_the_art_of_the_eco_mindshift
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"Every presentation needs this slide in it. (Laughter) It's beautiful, isn't it? Do you see? All the points, all the lines — it's incredible. It is the network; and in my case, the network has been important in media, because I get to connect to people. Isn't it amazing? Through that, I connect to people. And the way that I've been doing it has been multifaceted. For example, I get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners. (Laughter) I put together projects like Earth Sandwich, where I ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the Earth. And people started laying bread in tribute, and eventually a team was able to do it between New Zealand and Spain. It's pretty incredible — the video's online. Connecting to people in projects like YoungmeNowme for example. In YoungmeNowme, the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult. (Laughter) This is the same person — top photo, James, bottom photo, [Jennifer]. Poignant. This was a Mother's Day gift. (Laughter) Particularly creepy. (Applause) (Laughter) My favorite of these photos, which I couldn't find, is there's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so with a little baby on her lap, and the next photo is a 220-lb man with a tiny, little old lady peaking over his shoulder.But this project changed the way that I thought about connecting to people. This is project called Ray. And what happened was I was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio. Somebody said, ""You have to listen to this."" And this is what came to me.Recording: Hi, my name is Ray, and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair. Being quite disturbed, she called for comfort, and I didn't really know what to tell her, because we have to deal with so much mess in our society. So I was led to write this song just for her, just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job. And I figured I'd put it on the Internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you're going through on your job. Here's how the song goes.♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫♫ 'Cause I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫Now you might not be able to sing that out loud, but you can hum it to yourself, and you know what the words are. And let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job. All right. Stay strong. Peace.Ze Frank: So — yeah. No, no, no, shush. We've got to go quickly. So I was so moved by this — this is incredible. This was connecting, right. This was, at a distance, realizing that someone was feeling something, wanting to affect them in a particular way, using media to do it, putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact. This was incredible; this is what I wanted to do. So the first thing I thought of is we have to thank him. And I asked my audience, I said, ""Listen to this piece of audio. We have to remix it. He's got a great voice. It's actually in the key of B flat. And have to do something with it."" Hundreds of remixes came back — lots of different attempts. One stood out in particular. It was done by a guy named Goose.Remix: ♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫♫ You gonna have to send me home ♫♫ Cuz I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫♫ I'm about to whip some ♫ —ZF: Great, so it was incredible. That song — (Applause) Thank you. So that song, somebody told me that it was at a baseball game in Kansas City. In the end, it was one of the top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services. And so I said, ""Let's put this together in an album."" And the audience came together, and they designed an album cover. And I said, ""If you put it all on this, I'm going to deliver it to him, if you can figure out who this person is,"" because all I had was his name — Ray — and this little piece of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset. In two weeks, they found him. I received and email and it said, ""Hi, I'm Ray. I heard you were looking for me."" (Laughter) And I was like, ""Yeah, Ray. It's been an interesting two weeks."" And so I flew to St. Louis and met Ray, and he's a preacher — (Laughter) among other things.So but anyways, here's the thing — is it reminds me of this, which is a sign that you see in Amsterdam on every street corner. And it's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world. I look at this photo, and he seems really interested in what's going on with that button, but it doesn't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street. (Laughter) And it makes me think of this. On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile — right, you've seen people stop — all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network. And this is it, right, to feel and be felt. It's the fundamental force that we're all after. We can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier, but ultimately, what we're trying to do is really connect with one other person. And that's not always going to happen in physical spaces. It's also going to now happen in virtual spaces, and we have to get better at figuring that out. I think, of the people that build all this technology in the network, a lot of them aren't very good at connecting with people. This is kind of like something I used to do in third grade.(Laughter)So here's a series of projects over the last few years where I've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection. Sometimes they're very, very simple things. A Childhood Walk, which is a project where I ask people to remember a walk that they used to take as a child over and over again that was sort of meaningless — like on the route to the bus stop, to a neighbor's house, and take it inside of Google Streetview. And I promise you, if you take that walk inside Google Streetview, you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face. And I collected those moments — the photos inside Google Streetview and the memories, specifically. ""Our conversation started with me saying, 'I'm bored,' and her replying, 'When I'm bored I eat pretzels.' I remember this distinctly because it came up a lot."" ""Right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom, I remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola."" ""They used some of the morbidly artist footage, a close-up of Chad's shoes in the middle of the highway. I guess the shoes came off when he was hit. He slept over at my house once, and he left his pillow. It had 'Chad' written in magic marker on it. He died long after he left the pillow at my house, but we never got around to returning it.""Sometimes they're a little bit more abstract. This is Pain Pack. Right after September 11th, last year, I was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it, the way that we excise it from our bodies. So what I did is I opened up a hotline — a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain, not necessarily related to that event. And people called in and left messages like this.Recording: Okay, here's something. I'm not alone, and I am loved. I'm really fortunate. But sometimes I feel really lonely. And when I feel that way even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry. Like even people in convenience stores saying, ""Have a nice day,"" when they're accidentally looking me in the eye.ZF: So what I did was I took those voicemails, and with their permission, converted them to MP3s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just those voicemails. And those were then distributed to DJs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material. (Music) We don't have time to play much of it. You can look at it online.""From 52 to 48 with love"" was a project around the time of the last election cycle, where McCain and Obama both, in their speeches after the election, talked about reconciliation, and I was like, ""What the hell does that look like?"" So I thought, ""Well let's just give it a try. Let's have people hold up signs about reconciliation."" And so some really nice things came together. ""I voted blue. I voted red. Together, for our future."" These are very, very cute little things right. Some came from the winning party. ""Dear 48, I promise to listen to you, to fight for you, to respect you always."" Some came from the party who had just lost. ""From a 48 to a 52, may your party's leadership be as classy as you, but I doubt it."" But the truth was that as this start becoming popular, a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing, which I could also see. And so I started getting amazing amounts of hate mail, death threats even. And one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages, and he was dressed as Batman. And he said, ""I'm dressed as Batman to hide my identity."" Just in case I thought the real Batman was coming after me; which actually made me feel a little better — like, ""Phew, it's not him.""So what I did — unfortunately, I was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of me, and it started to eat away at my psyche. And I was protecting the project from it, I realized. I was protecting it — I didn't want this special, little group of photographs to get sullied in some way. So what I did, I took all those emails, and I put them together into something called Angrigami, which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff. And I asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the Angrigami. (Laughter) But this was the emotional moment. One of my viewer's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate. It's amazing.The last thing I'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called Songs You Already Know, where the idea was, I was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions with group projects. So one of them was fairly straightforward. A guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could I write a song for her, his daughter. And I said, ""Oh yeah, I'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep."" And this was ""Scared.""(Video) ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫♫ I don't know why but it helps me get over it ♫♫ The words of the song just move me along ♫♫ And somehow I get over it ♫♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫♫ I keep on trying despite ♫♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫♫ I keep on trying despite ♫♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫Okay, so I wrote that song, right. Thank you. So the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter's room at some point, and she actually was singing that song to herself. So I was like, ""Awesome. This is great.""And then I got this email. And there's a little bit of a back story to this. And I don't have much time. But the idea was that at one point I did a project called Facebook Me Equals You, where I wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person. So I asked for people's usernames and passwords to be sent to me. And I got a lot, like 30 in a half an hour. And I shut that part down. And I chose two people to be, and I asked them to send me descriptions of how to act as them on Facebook. One person sent me a very detailed description; the other person didn't. And the person who didn't, it turned out, had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job. So, you know, people were writing me and saying, ""How's your new job?"" I was like, ""I don't know. Didn't know I had one.""But anyway, this same person, Laura, ended up emailing me a little bit after that project. And I felt badly for not having done a good job. And she said, ""I'm really anxious, I just moved to a new town, I have this new job, and I've just had this incredible amount of anxiety."" So she had seen the ""Scared"" song and wondered if I could do something. So I asked her, ""What does it feel like when you feel this way?"" And she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety. And so what I decided to do. I said, ""Okay, I'll think about it."" And so quietly in the background, I started sending people this.(Audio) ♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫So I asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities, just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on, so I could just get their voices back. And this is the kind of thing that I got back.Recording: ♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫ZF: So that's one of the better ones, really. But what's awesome is, as I started getting more and more and more of them, all of a sudden I had 30, 40 voices from around the world. And when you put them together, something magical happens, something absolutely incredible happens, and all of a sudden I get a chorus from around the world. And what was really great is, I'm putting all this work together in the background, and Laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by. And she said, ""I know you've forgotten about me. I just want to say thanks for even considering it."" And then a few days later I sent her this.(Audio) ♫ Right now, it feels like I forgot to turn the light on ♫♫ And things that looked so good yesterday ♫♫ are now shades of gray ♫♫ And it seems like the world is spinning ♫♫ while I'm standing still ♫♫ Or maybe I am spinning I can't tell ♫♫ And then you say ♫♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫♫ Just breathe ♫♫ And now the words sing ♫♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫♫ Just breathe ♫♫ Now everybody sings ♫♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫♫ Just breathe ♫♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫♫ Just breathe ♫♫ Hey ♫♫ You're okay ♫♫ You'll be fine ♫♫ Just breathe ♫Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_s_web_playroom
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"The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance. I was six years old when I first heard stories about the poor. Now I didn't hear those stories from the poor themselves, I heard them from my Sunday school teacher and Jesus, kind of via my Sunday school teacher. I remember learning that people who were poor needed something material — food, clothing, shelter — that they didn't have. And I also was taught, coupled with that, that it was my job — this classroom full of five and six year-old children — it was our job, apparently, to help. This is what Jesus asked of us. And then he said, ""What you do for the least of these, you do for me."" Now I was pretty psyched. I was very eager to be useful in the world — I think we all have that feeling. And also, it was kind of interesting that God needed help. That was news to me, and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in.But I also learned very soon thereafter that Jesus also said, and I'm paraphrasing, the poor would always be with us. This frustrated and confused me; I felt like I had been just given a homework assignment that I had to do, and I was excited to do, but no matter what I would do, I would fail. So I felt confused, a little bit frustrated and angry, like maybe I'd misunderstood something here. And I felt overwhelmed. And for the first time, I began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people. I imagined in my head, a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away, that would always be with us. They were always going to ask me to help them and give them things, which I was excited to do, but I didn't know how it was going to work. And I didn't know what would happen when I ran out of things to give, especially if the problem was never going away. In the years following, the other stories I heard about the poor growing up were no more positive. For example, I saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering. I heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor. I heard about disease, I heard about war — they always seemed to be kind of related. And in general, I got this sort of idea that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness, devastation, hopelessness.And after a while, I developed what I think many of us do, is this predictable response, where I started to feel bad every time I heard about them. I started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth, because I wasn't doing more, apparently, to make things better. And I even felt a sense of shame because of that. And so naturally, I started to distance myself. I stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as I had before. And I stopped expecting things to really change. Now I still gave — on the outside it looked like I was still quite involved. I gave of my time and my money, I gave when solutions were on sale. The cost of a cup of coffee can save a child's life, right. I mean who can argue with that? I gave when I was cornered, when it was difficult to avoid and I gave, in general, when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering, not someone else's. The truth be told, I was giving out of that place, not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity. It became a transaction for me, became sort of a trade. I was purchasing something — I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news. And I think the way that we go through that sometimes can, first of all, disembody a group of people, individuals out there in the world. And it can also turn into a commodity, which is a very scary thing. So as I did this, and as I think many of us do this, we kind of buy our distance, we kind of buy our right to go on with our day. I think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most. It can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person's life and, in short to love.Thankfully, a few years ago, things shifted for me because I heard this gentleman speak, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. I know many in the room probably know exactly who he is, but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak, Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance. When I heard him speak, it was three years before that. But basically, microfinance — if this is new to you as well — think of that as financial services for the poor. Think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day. Dr. Yunus shared his story, explaining what that was, and what he had done with his Grameen Bank. He also talked about, in particular, microlending, which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business. Now, when I heard him speak, it was exciting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I learned about this new method of change in the world that, for once, showed me, maybe, a way to interact with someone and to give, to share of a resource in a way that wasn't weird and didn't make me feel bad — that was exciting. But more importantly, he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories I had heard before. In fact, those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note. He was talking about strong, smart, hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family's lives better. All they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital. It was an amazing sort of insight for me.And I, in fact, was so deeply moved by this — it's hard to express now how much that affected me — but I was so moved that I actually quit my job a few weeks later, and I moved to East Africa to try to see for myself what this was about. For the first time, actually, in a long time I wanted to meet those individuals, I wanted to meet these entrepreneurs, and see for myself what their lives were actually about. So I spent three months in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business. And in fact, through those interactions, for the first time, I was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away. I was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories. And over and over again, as I interviewed them and spent my days with them, I did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change.So I would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats. Their business trajectory would change. They would make a little bit more money; their standard of living would shift and would get better. And they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives, like they would start to send their children to school. They might be able to buy mosquito nets. Maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure. Maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when I came as their guest and that made them feel proud. But there were these beautiful details, even if I talked to 20 goat herders in a row, and some days that's what happened — these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them. That was another thing that really touched me. It was really humbling to see for the first time, to really understand that even if I could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything, I probably would have gotten a lot wrong. Because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them. So I saw that and it was very humbling.Anyway, another interesting thing happened while I was there. I never once was asked for a donation, which had kind of been my mode, right. There's poverty, you give money to help — no one asked me for a donation. In fact, no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all. If anything, they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities. So what I did hear, once in a while, was that people wanted a loan — I thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting. And by the way, I was a philosophy and poetry major in school, so I didn't know the difference between profit and revenue when I went to East Africa. I just got this impression that the money would work. And my introduction to business was in these $100 little infuses of capital. And I learned about profit and revenue, about leverage, all sorts of things, from farmers, from seamstresses, from goat herders. So this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family, and through that, maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans, that's this little idea that turned into Kiva.A few months later, I went back to Uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner, Matthew, and I had kind of built, and took pictures of seven of my new friends, posted their stories, these stories of entrepreneurship, up on the website, spammed friends and family and said, ""We think this is legal. Haven't heard back yet from SEC on all the details, but do you say, do you want to help participate in this, provide the money that they need?"" The money came in basically overnight. We sent it over to Uganda. And over the next six months, a beautiful thing happened; the entrepreneurs received the money, they were paid, and their businesses, in fact, grew, and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives. In October of '05, after those first seven loans were paid, Matt and I took the word beta off of the site. We said, ""Our little experiment has been a success. Let's start for real."" That was our official launch. And then that first year, October '05 through '06, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. The second year, it was a total of 15 million. The third year, the total was up to around 40. The fourth year, we were just short of 100. And today, less than five years in, Kiva's facilitated more than 150 million dollars, in little 25-dollar bits, from lenders and entrepreneurs — more than a million of those, collectively in 200 countries.So that's where Kiva is today, just to bring you right up to the present. And while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they're interesting, to me, Kiva's really about stories. It's about retelling the story of the poor, and it's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity, validates a partnership relationship, not a relationship that's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen. But instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward. So what I hope is that, not only can the money keep flowing forth through Kiva — that's a very positive and meaningful thing — but I hope Kiva can blur those lines, like I said, between the traditional rich and poor categories that we're taught to see in the world, this false dichotomy of us and them, have and have not. I hope that Kiva can blur those lines. Because as that happens, I think we can feel free to interact in a way that's more open, more just and more creative, to engage with each other and to help each other.Imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you're about to approach them. Imagine how you feel; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business. Maybe they're smiling, and they want to talk to you about what they've done. Imagine if you're speaking with somebody who's growing things and making them flourish, somebody who's using their talents to do something productive, somebody who's built their own business from scratch, someone who is surrounded by abundance, not scarcity, who's in fact creating abundance, somebody with full hands with something to offer, not empty hands asking for you to give them something. Imagine if you could hear a story you didn't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very, very hard to make their life better. These stories can really change the way that we think about each other. And if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money, I think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other's potential.Now for me, Kiva is just the beginning. And as I look forward to what is next, it's been helpful to reflect on the things I've learned so far. The first one is, as I mentioned, entrepreneurship was a new idea to me. Kiva borrowers, as I interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years, have taught me what entrepreneurship is. And I think, at its core, it's deciding that you want your life to be better. You see an opportunity and you decide what you're going to do to try to seize that. In short, it's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that. Second thing that I've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity. So they're not a donation. Yeah, maybe it doesn't sound that much different. But in fact, when you give something to someone and they say, ""Thanks,"" and let you know how things go, that's one thing. When you lend them money, and they slowly pay you back over time, you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue. This continued attention — this ongoing attention — is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us. And then third, from what I've heard from the entrepreneurs I've gotten to know, when all else is equal, given the option to have just money to do what you need to do, or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community, people choose the community plus the money. That's a much more meaningful combination, a more powerful combination.So with that in mind, this particular incident has led to the things that I'm working on now. I see entrepreneurs everywhere now, now that I'm tuned into this. And one thing that I've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world. With social networks, it's an amazing way, growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities, rapidly. And so, as I have been thinking about this, I've been wondering: how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today? As I've researched what's going on in the United States, a few interesting little insights have come up. So one is that, of course, as we all might expect, many small businesses in the U.S. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month. But there's always a need for resources close by. Another thing is, it turns out, those resources don't usually come from the places you might expect — banks, venture capitalists, other organizations and support structures — they come from friends and family. Some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family. That's around 130 billion dollars a year — it's a lot. And third, so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process, it's very awkward, people don't know exactly what to ask for, how to ask, what to promise in return, even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them.So to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like, exactly what fits them and the people around them, this week actually, we're quietly doing a launch of Profounder, which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family. And it's investments, not donations, not loans, but investments that have a dynamic return. So the mapping of participating in the story, it actually flows with the up and down. So in short, it's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds. And what you can do is go onto the site, create a profile, create investment terms in a really easy way. We make it really, really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site. And we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues. They can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited, unsophisticated investors — everyday people, heaven forbid — and they can share those returns over time — again, whatever terms they set. As investors choose to become involved based on those terms, they can either take their rewards back as cash, or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit. So they can be a cash, or a cause, investor. It's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea a path to go do what they want to do in the world and to gather the people around them that they already have, the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them, to gather them to make this happen.So that's what I'm working on now. And to close, I just want to say, look these are tools. Right now, Profounder's right at the very beginning, and it's very palpable; it's very clear to me, that it's just a vessel, it's just a tool. What we need are for people to care, to actually go use it, just like they've cared enough to use Kiva to make those connections. But the good news is I don't think I need to stand here and convince you to care — I'm not even going to try. I don't think, even though we often hear, you know, hear the ethical and moral reasons, the religious reasons, ""Here's why caring and giving will make you happier."" I don't think we need to be convinced of that. I think we know; in fact, I think we know so much, and it's such a reality that we care so deeply, that in fact, what usually stops us is that we're afraid to try and to mess up, because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other's lives.So what I think I can do today, that best thing I can give you — I've given you my story, which is the best I can do. And I think I can remind us that we do care. I think we all already know that. And I think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try. Just a sec.(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)For me, the best way to be inspired to try is to stop and to listen to someone else's story. And I'm grateful that I've gotten to do that here at TED. And I'm grateful that whenever I do that, guaranteed, I am inspired — I am inspired by the person I am listening to. And I believe more and more every time I listen in that that person's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help. And that — forget the tools, forget the moving around of resources — that stuff's easy. Believing in each other, really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world, that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us. So that, this belief in each other, knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do, that's what I believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_jackley_poverty_money_and_love
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"This technology made a very important impact on us. It changed the way our history developed. But it's a technology so pervasive, so invisible, that we, for a long time, forgot to take it into account when we talked about human evolution. But we see the results of this technology, still. So let's make a little test. So everyone of you turns to their neighbor please. Turn and face your neighbors. Please, also on the balcony. Smile. Smile. Open the mouths. Smile, friendly. (Laughter) Do you — Do you see any Canine teeth? (Laughter) Count Dracula teeth in the mouths of your neighbors? Of course not. Because our dental anatomy is actually made, not for tearing down raw meat from bones or chewing fibrous leaves for hours. It is made for a diet which is soft, mushy, which is reduced in fibers, which is very easily chewable and digestible. Sounds like fast food, doesn't it.(Laughter)It's for cooked food. We carry in our face the proof that cooking, food transformation, made us what we are. So I would suggest that we change how we classify ourselves. We talk about ourselves as omnivores. I would say, we should call ourselves coctivors — (Laughter) from coquere, to cook. We are the animals who eat cooked food. No, no, no, no. Better — to live of cooked food. So cooking is a very important technology. It's technology. I don't know how you feel, but I like to cook for entertainment. And you need some design to be successful. So, cooking is a very important technology, because it allowed us to acquire what brought you all here: the big brain, this wonderful cerebral cortex we have. Because brains are expensive. Those have to pay tuition fees know. (Laughter) But it's also, metabolically speaking, expensive. You now, our brain is two to three percent of the body mass, but actually it uses 25 percent of the total energy we use. It's very expensive. Where does the energy come from. Of course, from food. If we eat raw food, we cannot release really the energy. So this ingenuity of our ancestors, to invent this most marvelous technology. Invisible — everyone of us does it every day, so to speak. Cooking made it possible that mutations, natural selections, our environment, could develop us.So if we think about this unleashing human potential, which was possible by cooking and food, why do we talk so badly about food? Why is it always do and don'ts and it's good for you, it's not good for you? I think the good news for me would be if we could go back and talk about the unleashing, the continuation of the unleashing of human potential. Now, cooking allowed also that we became a migrant species. We walked out of Africa two times. We populated all the ecologies. If you can cook, nothing can happen to you, because whatever you find, you will try to transform it. It keeps also your brain working. Now the very easy and simple technology which was developed actually runs after this formula. Take something which looks like food, transform it, and it gives you a good, very easy, accessible energy.This technology affected two organs, the brain and the gut, which it actually affected. The brain could grow, but the gut actually shrunk. Okay, it's not obvious to be honest. (Laughter) But it shrunk to 60 percent of primate gut of my body mass. So because of having cooked food, it's easier to digest. Now having a large brain, as you know, is a big advantage, because you can actually influence your environment. You can influence your own technologies you have invented. You can continue to innovate and invent. Now the big brain did this also with cooking. But how did it actually run this show? How did it actually interfere? What kind of criteria did it use? And this is actually taste reward and energy. You know we have up to five tastes, three of them sustain us. Sweet — energy. Umami — this is a meaty taste. You need proteins for muscles, recovery. Salty, because you need salt, otherwise your electric body will not work. And two tastes which protect you — bitter and sour, which are against poisonous and rotten material. But of course, they are hard-wired but we use them still in a sophisticated way. Think about bittersweet chocolate; or think about the acidity of yogurt — wonderful — mixed with strawberry fruits.So we can make mixtures of all this kind of thing because we know that, in cooking, we can transform it to the form. Reward: this is a more complex and especially integrative form of our brain with various different elements — the external states, our internal states, how do we feel, and so on are put together. And something which maybe you don't like but you are so hungry that you really will be satisfied to eat. So satisfaction was a very important part. And as I say, energy was necessary.Now how did the gut actually participate in this development? And the gut is a silent voice — it's going more for feelings. I use the euphemism digestive comfort — actually — it's a digestive discomfort, which the gut is concerned with. If you get a stomach ache, if you get a little bit bloated, was not the right food, was not the right cooking manipulation or maybe other things went wrong. So my story is a tale of two brains, because it might surprise you, our gut has a full-fledged brain. All the managers in the room say, ""You don't tell me something new, because we know, gut feeling. This is what we are using."" (Laughter) And actually you use it and it's actually useful. Because our gut is connected to our emotional limbic system, they do speak with each other and make decisions. But what it means to have a brain there is that, not only the big brain has to talk with the food, the food has to talk with the brain, because we have to learn actually how to talk to the brains.Now if there's a gut brain, we should also learn to talk with this brain. Now 150 years ago, anatomists described very, very carefully — here is a model of a wall of a gut. I took the three elements — stomach, small intestine and colon. And within this structure, you see these two pinkish layers, which are actually the muscle. And between this muscle, they found nervous tissues, a lot of nervous tissues, which penetrate actually the muscle — penetrate the submucosa, where you have all the elements for the immune system. The gut is actually the largest immune system, defending your body. It penetrates the mucosa. This is the layer which actually touches the food you are swallowing and you digest, which is actually the lumen. Now if you think about the gut, the gut is — if you could stretch it — 40 meters long, the length of a tennis court. If we could unroll it, get out all the folds and so on, it would have 400 sq. meters of surface.And now this brain takes care over this, to move it with the muscles and to do defend the surface and, of course, digest our food we cook. So if we give you a specification, this brain, which is autonomous, have 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons — so around the size of a cat brain, so there sleeps a little cat — thinks for itself, optimizes whatever it digests. It has 20 different neuron types. It's got the same diversity you find actually in a pig brain, where you have 100 billion neurons. It has autonomous organized microcircuits, has these programs which run. It senses the food; it knows exactly what to do. It senses it by chemical means and very importantly by mechanical means, because it has to move the food — it has to mix all the various elements which we need for digestion. This control of muscle is very, very important, because, you know, there can be reflexes. If you don't like a food, especially if you're a child, you gag. It's this brain which makes this reflex. And then finally, it controls also the secretion of this molecular machinery, which actually digests the food we cook.Now how do the two brains work with each other? I took here a model from robotics — it's called the Subsumption Architecture. What it means is that we have a layered control system. The lower layer, our gut brain, has its own goals — digestion defense — and we have the higher brain with the goal of integration and generating behaviors. Now both look — and this is the blue arrows — both look to the same food, which is in the lumen and in the area of your intestine. The big brain integrates signals, which come from the running programs of the lower brain, But subsumption means that the higher brain can interfere with the lower. It can replace, or it can inhibit actually, signals. So if we take two types of signals — a hunger signal for example. If you have an empty stomach, your stomach produces a hormone called ghrelin. It's a very big signal; it's sent to the brain says, ""Go and eat."" You have stop signals — we have up to eight stop signals. At least in my case, they are not listened to. (Laughter)So what happens if the big brain in the integration overrides the signal? So if you override the hunger signal, you can have a disorder, which is called anorexia. Despite generating a healthy hunger signal, the big brain ignores it and activates different programs in the gut. The more usual case is overeating. It actually takes the signal and changes it, and we continue, even [though] our eight signals would say, ""Stop, enough. We have transferred enough energy."" Now the interesting thing is that, along this lower layer — this gut — the signal becomes stronger and stronger if undigested, but digestible, material could penetrate. This we found from bariatric surgery. That then the signal would be very, very high.So now back to the cooking question and back to the design. We have learned to talk to the big brain — taste and reward, as you know. Now what would be the language we have to talk to the gut brain that its signals are so strong that the big brain cannot ignore it? Then we would generate something all of us would like to have — a balance between the hunger and the satiation. Now I give you, from our research, a very short claim. This is fat digestion. You have on your left an olive oil droplet, and this olive oil droplet gets attacked by enzymes. This is an in vitro experiment. It's very difficult to work in the intestine. Now everyone would expect that when the degradation of the oil happens, when the constituents are liberated, they disappear, they go away because they [were] absorbed. Actually, what happens is that a very intricate structure appears. And I hope you can see that there are some ring-like structures in the middle image, which is water. This whole system generates a huge surface to allow more enzymes to attack the remaining oil. And finally, on your right side, you see a bubbly, cell-like structure appearing, from which the body will absorb the fat. Now if we could take this language — and this is a language of structures — and make it longer-lasting, that it can go through the passage of the intestine, it would generate stronger signals.So our research — and I think the research also at the universities — are now fixing on these points to say: how can we actually — and this might sound trivial now to you — how can we change cooking? How can we cook that we have this language developed? So what we have actually, it's not an omnivore's dilemma. We have a coctivor's opportunity, because we have learned over the last two million years which taste and reward — quite sophisticated to cook — to please ourselves, to satisfy ourselves. If we add the matrix, if we add the structure language, which we have to learn, when we learn it, then we can put it back; and around energy, we could generate a balance, which comes out from our really primordial operation: cooking. So, to make cooking really a very important element, I would say even philosophers have to change and have to finally recognize that cooking is what made us.So I would say, coquo ergo sum: I cook, therefore I am. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/heribert_watzke_the_brain_in_your_gut
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"I'm a visual artist, and I'm also one of the co-founders of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. I've been working with plastic bags, which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years. I turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations. Upon working with the plastic, after about the first eight years, some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic. And I thought, ""Great. It's ephemeral just like us.""Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing. It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic. And what we're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment. I then, in the last few years, learned about the Pacific garbage patch and the gyre. And my initial reaction — and I think this is a lot of people's first reaction to learning about it — is, ""Oh my God! We've got to go out there and clean this thing up."" So I actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers, a crane, a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine. And my intention was to go out to the gyre, raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic, chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities.I began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so, I realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world, and that actually I needed to back up and look at the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is: we need to find a way to turn off the faucet. We need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics, which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale.So in looking at that, I also realized that I was really angry. I wasn't just concerned about plastic that you're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres, potentially, of plastic in five major oceans in the world. It's not just that gyre of plastic that I'm concerned about — it's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket. I'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic. All of my beverages are packaged in plastic, even at the health food market. I'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator, and I'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies.So I came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue, and we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition. We have many initiatives that we're working on, but some of them are very basic. One is: if 80 to 90 percent of what we're finding in the ocean — of the marine debris that we're finding in the ocean — is plastic, then why don't we call it what it is. It's plastic pollution. Recycling — everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling. You put something in a bin and you don't have to think about it again. What is the reality of that? In the United States, less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled. And if you really look into it, particularly when it comes to plastic bottles, most of it is only down-cycled, or incinerated, or shipped to China. It is down-cycled and turned into lesser things, while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again — a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again.So this is a big issue for us. Another thing that we're looking at and asking people to think about is we've added a fourth R onto the front of the ""Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,"" three R's, and that is refuse. Whenever possible, refuse single-use and disposable plastics. Alternatives exist; some of them are very old-school. I myself am now collecting these cool Pyrex containers and using those instead of Glad and Tupperware containers to store food in. And I know that I am doing a service to myself and my family. It's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle, if you're traveling and you've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water, versus purchasing plastic bottled water.I guess what I want to say to everybody here — and I know that you guys know a lot about this issue — is that this is a huge problem in the oceans, but this is a problem that we've created as consumers and we can solve. We can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives. So whenever possible, to choose alternatives to single-use plastics. We can cut the stem — tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so, save our oceans, save our planet, save ourselves.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dianna_cohen_tough_truths_about_plastic_pollution
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"So yeah, I'm a newspaper cartoonist — political cartoonist. I don't know if you've heard about it — newspapers? It's a sort of paper-based reader. (Laughter) It's lighter than an iPad, it's a bit cheaper. You know what they say? They say the print media is dying — who says that? Well, the media. But this is no news, right? You've read about it already.(Laughter)Ladies and gentlemen, the world has gotten smaller. I know it's a cliche, but look, look how small, how tiny it has gotten. And you know the reason why, of course. This is because of technology — yeah. (Laughter) Any computer designers in the room? Yeah well, you guys are making my life miserable because track pads used to be round, a nice round shape. That makes a good cartoon. But what are you going to do with a flat track pad, those square things? There's nothing I can do as a cartoonist. Well, I know the world is flat now. That's true. And the Internet has reached every corner of the world, the poorest, the remotest places. Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe. (Laughter) Don't go asking for a Frappuccino there. So we are bridging the digital divide. The Third World is connected, we are connected. And what happens next? Well, you've got mail. Yeah. Well, the Internet has empowered us. It has empowered you, it has empowered me and it has empowered some other guys as well.(Laughter)You know, these last two cartoons — I did them live during a conference in Hanoi. And they were not used to that in communist 2.0 Vietnam. (Laughter) So I was cartooning live on a wide screen — it was quite a sensation — and then this guy came to me. He was taking pictures of me and of my sketches, and I thought, ""This is great, a Vietnamese fan."" And as he came the second day, I thought, ""Wow, that's really a cartoon lover."" And on the third day, I finally understood, the guy was actually on duty. So by now, there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the Vietnamese police.(Laughter)No, but it's true: the Internet has changed the world. It has rocked the music industry; it has changed the way we consume music. For those of you old enough to remember, we used to have to go to the store to steal it. (Laughter) And it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application. So be careful with that Facebook account — your momma told you, be careful. And technology has set us free — this is free WiFi. But yeah, it has liberated us from the office desk. This is your life, enjoy it. (Laughter) In short, technology, the internet, they have changed our lifestyle. Tech guru, like this man — that a German magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century — they are shaping the way we do things. They are shaping the way we consume. They are shaping our very desires. (Laughter) (Applause) You will not like it. And technology has even changed our relationship to God.(Laughter)Now I shouldn't get into this. Religion and political cartoons, as you may have heard, make a difficult couple, ever since that day of 2005, when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world — demonstrations, fatwa, they provoked violence. People died in the violence. This was so sickening; people died because of cartoons. I mean — I had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides, actually. They were used first by a Danish newspaper, which wanted to make a point on Islam. A Danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet — 12 of them refused. Did you know that? He told me, ""Nobody has to tell me what I should draw. This is not how it works."" And then, of course, they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side. They wanted to stir up controversy. You know the story. We know that cartoons can be used as weapons. History tells us, they've been used by the Nazis to attack the Jews. And here we are now. In the United Nations, half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion — they call it the defamation of religion — while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech. So the clash of civilizations is here, and cartoons are at the middle of it? This got me thinking. Now you see me thinking at my kitchen table, and since you're in my kitchen, please meet my wife.(Laughter)In 2006, a few months after, I went Ivory Coast — Western Africa. Now, talk of a divided place — the country was cut in two. You had a rebellion in the North, the government in the South — the capital, Abidjan — and in the middle, the French army. This looks like a giant hamburger. You don't want to be the ham in the middle. I was there to report on that story in cartoons. I've been doing this for the last 15 years; it's my side job, if you want. So you see the style is different. This is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning. I went to places like Gaza during the war in 2009. So this is really journalism in cartoons. You'll hear more and more about it. This is the future of journalism, I think.And of course, I went to see the rebels in the north. Those were poor guys fighting for their rights. There was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in Africa. And I went to see the Dozo. The Dozo, they are the traditional hunters of West Africa. People fear them — they help the rebellion a lot. They are believed to have magical powers. They can disappear and escape bullets. I went to see a Dozo chief; he told me about his magical powers. He said, ""I can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life."" I said, ""Well, maybe we don't have time for this right now."" (Laughter) ""Another time.""So back in Abidjan, I was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there and I thought, yes, in a context like this, cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side. I mean, the press in Ivory Coast was bitterly divided — it was compared to the media in Rwanda before the genocide — so imagine. And what can a cartoonist do? Sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see, and the guy has to feed his family, right? So the idea was pretty simple. We brought together cartoonists from all sides in Ivory Coast. We took them away from their newspaper for three days. And I asked them to do a project together, tackle the issues affecting their country in cartoons, yes, in cartoons. Show the positive power of cartoons. It's a great tool of communication for bad or for good. And cartoons can cross boundaries, as you have seen. And humor is a good way, I think, to address serious issues. And I'm very proud of what they did. I mean, they didn't agree with each other — that was not the point. And I didn't ask them to do nice cartoons. The first day, they were even shouting at each other. But they came up with a book, looking back at 13 years of political crisis in Ivory Coast.So the idea was there. And I've been doing projects like this, in 2009 in Lebanon, this year in Kenya, back in January. In Lebanon, it was not a book. The idea was to have — the same principal, a divided country — take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together. So in Lebanon, we enrolled the newspaper editors, and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page, addressing the issue affecting Lebanon, like religion in politics and everyday life. And it worked. For three days, almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together — anti-government, pro-government, Christian, Muslim, of course, English-speaking, well, you name it. So this was a great project. And then in Kenya, what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity, which is a poison in a lot of places in Africa. And we did video clips — you can see them if you go to YouTube/Kenyatoons.So, preaching for freedom of speech is easy here, but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division, again, what can a cartoonist do? He has to keep his job. Well I believe that in any context anywhere, he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred. And that's the message I try to convey to them. I think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing. But we need to support these [unclear], critical and responsible voices in Africa, in Lebanon, in your local newspaper, in the Apple store. Today, tech companies are the world's largest editors. They decide what is too offensive or too provocative for you to see. So really, it's not about the freedom of cartoonists; it's about your freedoms. And for dictators all over the world, the good news is when cartoonists, journalists and activists shut up.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patrick_chappatte_the_power_of_cartoons
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"(Music)♫ Here we stand ♫♫ Like an Adam and an Eve ♫♫ Waterfalls ♫♫ The Garden of Eden ♫♫ Two fools in love ♫♫ So beautiful and strong ♫♫ Birds in the trees ♫♫ Are smiling upon them ♫♫ From the age of the dinosaurs ♫♫ Cars would run on gasoline ♫♫ Where? Where have they gone? ♫♫ Now, there's nothing but flowers ♫♫ This was a factory ♫♫Now there are mountains and rivers ♫♫ You got it, you got it ♫♫ We caught a rattlesnake ♫♫ Now we've got something for dinner ♫♫ You got it, you got it ♫♫ This was a parking lot ♫♫ Now it's all covered with flowers ♫♫ You got it, you got it ♫♫ If this is paradise ♫♫ I wish I had a lawnmower ♫♫ You got it, you got it ♫♫ This was a shopping mall ♫♫ Now it's turned into corn field ♫♫ You got it, you got it ♫♫ Don't leave me stranded here ♫♫ I can't get used to this lifestyle ♫(Applause)Thomas Dolby: David Byrne.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_sings_nothing_but_flowers
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"The big residual is always value for money. All the time we are trying to get value for money. What we don't look for is value for many, while we are generating value for money. Do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day, the so-called bottom of the pyramid? What are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many? We have described here in terms of the performance and the price. If you have money, of course, you can get the value. You can get a Mercedes for a very high price, very high performance. But if you don't have money, what happens? Well, you are to ride a bicycle, carrying your own weight and also some other weight, so that you can earn the bread for the day. Well, poor do not remain poor; they become lower-middle-class. And if they do so, then, of course, the conditions improve, and they start riding on scooters. But the challenge is, again, they don't get much value, because they can't afford anything more than the scooter. The issue is, at that price, can you give them some extra value? A super value, in terms of their ability to ride in a car, to get that dignity, to get that safety, looks practically impossible, isn't it.Now, this is something that we see on Indian streets all the time. But many people see the same thing and think things differently, and one of them is here, Ratan Tata. The great thing about our leaders is that, should they not only have passion in their belly, which practically all of them have, they're also very innovative. An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done. They believe that things can be done. But great leaders like Ratan have compassion. And what you said, Lakshmi, is absolutely true: it's not just Ratan Tata, it's the house of Tatas over time. Let me confirm what she said. Yes, I went barefoot until I was 12. I struggled to [unclear] day was a huge issue. And when I finished my SSC, the eleventh standard, I stood eleventh among 125,000 students. But I was about to leave the school, because my poor mother couldn't afford schooling. And it was [unclear] Tata Trust, which gave me six rupees per month, almost a dollar per month for six years. That's how I'm standing before you. So that is the House of Tata. (Applause) Innovation, compassion and passion. They combine all that.And it was that compassion which bothered them, because when he saw — in fact, he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car — he drives his own car by the way — and he saw in the rain, a family like the one that I showed to you getting drenched with an infant. And then he said, ""Well, I must give them a car that they can afford, one lakh car, $2,000 car."" Of course, as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible, and that's what was said by Suzuki. He said, oh, probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney. And you can see the cartoon here. Well they didn't build that. They built a proper car. Nano. And mind you, I'm six feet half an inch, Ratan is taller than me, and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car. And incredible car. And of course, nothing succeeds like success; the cynics then turned around, and one after the other they also started saying, ""Yes, we also want to make a car in the Nano Segment. We'll manufacture a car in the Nano Segment.""How did this great story unfold, the making of Nano? Let me tell you a bit about it. For example, how we started: Ratan just began with a five-engineer team, young people in their mid-twenties. And he said, ""Well, I won't define the vehicle for you, but I will define the cost for you. It is one lakh, 100,000 rupees, and you are to make it within that."" And he told them, ""Question the unquestionable. Stretch the envelope."" And at a point in time, he got so engrossed in the whole challenge, that he himself became a member of the team. Can you believe it? I still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated. Until midnight, he'd be thinking. Early morning he'll be coming back with sort of solutions. But who was the team leader? The team leader was Girish Wagh, a 34 year-old boy in [unclear]. And the Nano team average age was just 27 years.And they did innovation in design and beyond. Broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time. For example, that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft. Adhesives were replacing the rivets. There was a co-creation, a huge co-creation, with vendors and suppliers. All ideas on board were welcome. 100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plant, and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed. Imagine that a fellow who sells cloth, for example, will be selling Nano. I mean, it was incredible innovation. Seeking solutions for non-auto sectors. It was an open innovation, ideas from all over were welcome. The mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used, by the way, as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers. The fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers.And the crux of the matter was, however, getting more from less. All the time, you have been given an envelope. You can't cross that envelope, which is 100,000 rupees, 2,000 dollars. And therefore, each component had to have a dual functionality. And the seat riser, for example, serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity. Half the number of parts are contained in Nano in comparison to a typical passenger car. The length is smaller by eight percent by the way. But the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less, but 21 percent more inside space.And what happened was that — more from less — you can see how much more for how much less. When the Model T was launched — and this is, by the way, all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices — Model T was 19,700 by Ford. Volkswagon was 11,333. And British Motor was around 11,000. And Nano was, bang, 2,000 dollars. This is why you started actually a new paradigm shift, where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car, who were carrying their entire family in a scooter, started dreaming of being in a car. And those dreams are getting fulfilled. This is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home. The driver's name is Naran. He has bought his own Nano. And you can see, there is a physical space that has been created for him, parking that car, along with the owner's car, but more importantly, they've created a space in their mind that ""Yes, my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it."" And that's why I call it a transformational innovation. It is not just technological, it is social innovation that we talk about.And that is where, ladies and gentlemen, this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important. I remember talking about this for the first time in Australia, about one and a half years ago, when their academy honored me with a fellowship. And unbelievably, in 40 years, I was the first Indian to be honored. And the title of my talk was therefore ""Indian innovation from Gandhi to Gandhian engineering."" And I titled this more from less for more and more people as Gandhian engineering. And Gandhian engineering, in my judgment, is the one which is going to take the world forward, is going to make a difference, not just for a few, but for everyone. Let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs. Here is an American citizen and his son having an artificial foot. What is its price? 20,000 dollars. And of course, these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads.Unfortunately, that's not the case in India. You can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land, sometimes in a marshy land, and so on and so forth. More importantly, they not only walk far to work, and not only do they cycle to work, but they cycle for work, as you can see here. And they climb up for their work. You have to design an artificial foot for such conditions. A challenge, of course. Four billion people, their incomes are less then two dollars a day. And if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe, you're talking about 10,000 days of income. You just don't have it. And therefore, you ought to look at alternatives.And that is how Jaipur Foot was created in India. It had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system, a quick molding and modular components, enabling custom-made, on-the-spot limb fitments. You could feel it actually in an hour, by the way, whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day, as so on. Outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes, rather than using heated sheets. And unique high-ankle design and human-like looks, [unclear] and functions. And I like to show how it looks and how it works. (Music) See, he jumps. You can see what stress it must have.(Text: ... any person with a below the knee limb could do this. ... above the limb, yes, it would be difficult ... ""Did it hurt?"" ""No ... not at all."" ... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds ...)One kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds. (Applause) So that's what it is all about. And therefore Time took notice of this 28-dollar foot, basically. (Applause) An incredible story.Let's move on to something else. I've been talking about getting more from less for more. Let's move to health. We've talked about mobility and the rest of it, let's talk about health. What's happening in the area of health? You know, you have new diseases that require new drugs. And if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now, what has happened? 10 years ago, it used to cost about a quarter billion. Today it costs 1.5 billion dollars. Time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace, after all the human and animal testing, was 10 years, now it is 15 years. Are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money? No, I'm sorry. We used to have 40, now they have come down to 30. So actually we are getting less from more for less and less people. Why less and less people? Because it is so expensive, so very few will be able to basically afford that.Let us just take an example. Psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin. The cost of treatment, 20,000 dollars. 1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin, by the way, and 20 of them. Time for development — it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars. Let's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets. For example, we don't want 20,000 dollars; we don't have it. Can we do it [for] 100 dollars? Time for development, not 10 years. We are in a hurry. Five years. Cost of development — 300 million dollars. Sorry. I can't spend more than 10 million dollars. Looks absolutely audacious. Looks absolutely ridiculous.You know something? This has been achieved in India. These targets have been achieved in India. And how they have been achieved ... Sir Francis Bacon once said, ""When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before."" And therefore, the standard process, where you develop a molecule, put it into mice, into men, are not yielding those results — the billions of dollars that have been spent. The Indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge, however, scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men, not molecule to mice to men, you know. And that is how this difference has come. And you can see this blending of traditional medicine, modern medicine, modern science. I launched a big program [unclear] CSIR about nine years ago. He is giving us not just for Psoriasis, for cancer and a whole range of things, changing the whole paradigm. And you can see this Indian Psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of [unclear] by doing things differently. You can see before treatment and after treatment. This is really getting more from less for more and more people, because these are all affordable treatments now.Let me just remind you of what Mahatma Gandhi had said. He had said, ""Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."" So the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people, not only the current generation, but the future generations. And he also said, ""I would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all."" So he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people, not just a few people. And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, this is the theme, getting more from less for more. And mind you, it is not getting just a little more for just a little less. It's not about low cost. It's about ultra-low cost. You cannot say it's a mere treatment 10,000 dollars, but because you are poor I'll give it for 9,000. Sorry, it doesn't work. You have to give it for 100 dollars, 200 dollars. Is it possible? It has been made possible, by the way, for certain other different reasons. So you are not talking about low cost, you are talking about ultra-low cost. You are not talking about affordability, you are talking about extreme affordability. Because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day. You're not talking exclusive innovation. You're talking about inclusive innovation. And therefore, you're not talking about incremental innovation, you're talking about disruptive innovation. The ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms. And I would also add, it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people, the whole world working for it.I was very touched when I saw a breakthrough the other day. You know, incubators for infants, for example. They're not available in Africa. They're not available in Indian villages. And infants die. And incubator costs 2,000 dollars. And there's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created. And by whom? By young students from Standford University on an extreme affordability project that they had, basically. Their heart is in the right place, like Ratan Tata. It's not just innovation, compassion and passion — compassion in the heart and passion in the belly. That's the new world that we want to create. And that is why the message is that of Gandhian engineering.Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to end before time. I was also afraid of those 18 minutes. I've still one and a half to go. The message, the final message, is this: India gave a great gift to the world. What was that? [In the] 20th century, we gave Gandhi to the world. The 21st century gift, which is very, very important for the whole world, whether it is global economic meltdown, whether it is climate change — any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more — not only the current generations, for the future generations. And that can come only from Gandhian engineering. So ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy to announce, this gift of the 21st century to the world from India, Gandhian engineering.(Applause)Lakshmi Pratury: Thank you, Dr. Mashelkar. (R.A. Mashelkar: Thank you very much.)LP: A quick question for you. Now, when you were a young boy in this school, what were your thoughts, like what did you think you could become? What do you think that drove you? Was there a vision you had? What is it that drove you?RAM: I'll tell you a story that drove me, that transformed my life. I remember, I went to a poor school, because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees, that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time. It was [unclear] high school. But it was a poor school with rich teachers, honestly. And one of them was [unclear] who taught us physics. One day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens. The lens was here. The piece of paper was there. He moved it up and down. And there was a bright spot up there. And then he said, ""This is the focal length."" But then he held it for a little while, Lakshmi. And then the paper burned. When the paper burned, for some reason he turned to me, and he said, ""Mashelkar, like this, if you do not diffuse your energies, if you focus your energies, you can achieve anything in the world."" That gave me a great message: focus and you can achieve. I said, ""Whoa, science is so wonderful, I have to become a scientist."" But more importantly, focus and you can achieve. And that message, very frankly, is valuable for society today.What does that focal length do? It has parallel lines, which are sun rays. And the property of parallel lines is that they never meet. What does that convex lens do? It makes them meet. This is convex lens leadership. You know what today's leadership is doing? Concave length. They divide them farther. So I learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that. And when I was at National Chemical Laboratory [unclear]. When I was at Council of Scientific Industry Research — 40 laboratories — when two laboratories were not talking to each other, I would [unclear]. And currently I'm president of Global Research Alliance, 60,000 scientists in nine counties, right from India to the U.S. I'm trying to build a global team, which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing. That was the lesson. That was the inspirational moment.LP: Thank you very much. (RAM: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/r_a_mashelkar_breakthrough_designs_for_ultra_low_cost_products
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"I'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century. And basically, what I'd like to tell you is that power is changing, and there are two types of changes I want to discuss. One is power transition, which is change of power amongst states. And there the simple version of the message is it's moving from West to East. The other is power diffusion, the way power is moving from all states West or East to non-state actors. Those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century. And I want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why, in the end, there may be some good news.When we talk about power transition, we often talk about the rise of Asia. It really should be called the recovery or return of Asia. If we looked at the world in 1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world's product. Now fast forward to 1900: half the world's people — more than half — still live in Asia, but they're now making only a fifth of the world's product. What happened? The Industrial Revolution, which meant that all of a sudden, Europe and America became the dominant center of the world. What we're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world's population and more than half of the world's product. That's important and it's an important shift. But let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that I'm talking about, which is power diffusion.To understand power diffusion put this in your mind: computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century. Now that's a big abstract number. But to make it more real, if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power, you could buy a car today for five dollars. Now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down. Anybody can play in the game. So in 1970, if you wanted to communicate from Oxford to Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously, you could do it. The technology was there. But to be able to do it, you had to be very rich — a government, a multinational corporation, maybe the Catholic Church — but you had to be pretty wealthy. Now, anybody has that capacity, which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors. If they have the price of entry into an Internet cafe — the last time I looked, it was something like a pound an hour — and if you have Skype, it's free. So capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone. And what that meansis not that the age of the State is over. The State still matters. But the stage is crowded. The State's not alone. There are many, many actors. Some of that's good: Oxfam, a great non-governmental actor. Some of it's bad: Al Qaeda, another non-governmental actor. But think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts. We think in terms of war and interstate war. And you can think back to 1941 when the government of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. It's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in 1941. You might think of that as the privatization of war. So we're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power.Now the problem is that we're not thinking about it in very innovative ways. So let me step back and ask: what's power? Power is simple the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, and you can do it in three ways. You can do it with threats of coercion, ""sticks,"" you can do it with payments, ""carrots,"" or you can do it by getting others to want what you want. And that ability to get others to want what you want, to get the outcomes you want without coercion or payment, is what I call soft power. And that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood, and yet it's tremendously important. Indeed, if you can learn to use more soft power, you can save a lot on carrots and sticks. Traditionally, the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power. For example, the great Oxford historian who taught here at this university, A.J.P. Taylor, defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war. But we need a new narrative if we're to understand power in the 21st century. It's not just prevailing at war, though war still persists. It's not whose army wins; it's also whose story wins. And we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective.Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what's happening there. the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers. And the current narrative is all about the rise of China and the decline of the United States. Indeed, with the 2008 financial crisis, many people said this was the beginning of the end of American power. The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting. And president Medvedev of Russia, for example, pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of United States power. But in fact, this metaphor of decline is often very misleading. If you look at history, in recent history, you'll see the cycles of belief in American decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so. In 1958, after the Soviets put up Sputnik, it was ""That's the end of America."" In 1973, with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window, that was the end of America. In the 1980s, as America went through a transition in the Reagan period, between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of California, that was the end of America. But in fact, what we've seen is none of those were true. Indeed, people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s, thinking America could do anything, which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures, and now we're back to decline again.The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality. If we try to focus on the reality, then what we need to focus on is what's really happening in terms of China and the United States. Goldman Sachs has projected that China, the Chinese economy, will surpass that of the U.S. by 2027. So we've got, what, 17 more years to go or so before China's bigger. Now someday, with a billion point three people getting richer, they are going to be bigger than the United States. But be very careful about these projections such as the Goldman Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century. Let me mention three reasons why it's too simple. First of all, it's a linear projection. You know, everything says, here's the growth rate of China, here's the growth rate of the U.S., here it goes — straight line. History is not linear. There are often bumps along the road, accidents along the way. The second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in, let's say, 2030, which it may it, that will be a measure of total economic size, but not of per capita income — won't tell you about the composition of the economy. China still has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy. And that the Chinese won't catch up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part, after 2050, of this century.The other point that's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is. You know, it looks at economic power measured by GDP. Doesn't tell you much about military power, doesn't tell you very much about soft power. It's all very one-dimensional. And also, when we think about the rise of Asia, or return of Asia as I called it a little bit earlier, it's worth remembering Asia's not one thing. If you're sitting in Japan, or in New Delhi, or in Hanoi, your view of the rise of China is a little different than if you're sitting in Beijing. Indeed, one of the advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China. It's as though Mexico and Canada were hostile neighbors to the United States, which they're not. So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition.But you might ask, well so what in any case? Why does it matter? Who cares? Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play? The answer is it matters quite a lot. Because, if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this, the facts, not the myths, you may have policies which are very dangerous. Let me give you an example from history. The Peloponnesian War was the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago. What caused it? Thucydides, the great historian of the the Peloponnesian War, said it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. Notice both halves of that explanation.Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century, in which World War One, the great conflagration in which the European state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world, that that was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain. So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today, that what we're going to see is the same thing now in this century. No, I think that's wrong. It's bad history. For one thing, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial strength by 1900. And as I said earlier, China has not passed the United States. But also, if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear, it leads to overreaction. And the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the East is fear. To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt from a different context, the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself. We don't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia. And if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective, we're going to be able to manage this process.Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together. If you ask how is power distributed in the world today, it's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game. Top board: military power among states. The United States is the only superpower, and it's likely to remain that way for two or three decades. China's not going to replace the U.S. on this military board. Middle board of this three-dimensional chess game: economic power among states. Power is multi-polar. There are balancers — the U.S., Europe, China, Japan can balance each other. The bottom board of this three-dimensional, the board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, things like climate change, drug trade, financial flows, pandemics, all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments, there nobody's in charge. It makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar. Power is chaotically distributed. And the only way you can solve these problems — and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century — is through cooperation, through working together, which means that soft power becomes more important, that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation.Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum — my gain is your loss and vice versa. Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain. If China develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions, that's good for us as well as good for China as well as good for everybody else. So empowering China to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody, and it's not a zero sum, I win, you lose. It's one in which we can all gain. So as we think about power in this century, we want to get away from this view that it's all I win, you lose. Now I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about this. Wars persist. Power persists. Military power is important. Keeping balances is important. All this still persists. Hard power is there, and it will remain. But unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power, you're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we're facing.So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods, things from which all of us can benefit? How do we define our national interests so that it's not just zero sum, but positive sum. In that sense, if we define our interests, for example, for the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th century, keeping an open trading system, keeping a monetary stability, keeping freedom of the seas — those were good for Britain, they were good for others as well. And in the 21st century, you have to do an analog to that. How do we produce global public goods, which are good for us, but good for everyone at the same time? And that's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century.There are ways to define our interests in which, while protecting ourselves with hard power, we can organize with others in networks to produce, not only public goods, but ways that will enhance our soft power. So if one looks at the statements that have been made about this, I am impressed that when Hillary Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration, she said that the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power, as she put it, ""using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box."" And if we're going to deal with these two great power shifts that I've described, the power shift represented by transition among states, the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states, we're going to have to develop a new narrative of power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power. And that's the good news I have. We can do that.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_nye_on_global_power_shifts
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"Sustainability represents the what, the where and the how of what is caught. The who and the why are what's important to me. I want to know the people behind my dinner choices. I want to know how I impact them. I want to know how they impact me. I want to know why they fish. I want to know how they rely on the water's bounty for their living. Understanding all of this enables us to shift our perception of seafood away from a commodity to an opportunity to restore our ecosystem. It allows for us to celebrate the seafood that we're also so fortunate to eat.So what do we call this? I think we call it restorative seafood. Where sustainability is the capacity to endure and maintain, restorative is the ability to replenish and progress. Restorative seafood allows for an evolving and dynamic system and acknowledges our relationship with the ocean as a resource, suggesting that we engage to replenish the ocean and to encourage its resiliency. It is a more hopeful, it is a more human, and is a more useful way of understanding our environment.Wallet guides — standard issue by lots in the marine conservation world — are very handy; they're a wonderful tool. Green, yellow and red lists [of] seafood species. The association is very easy: buy green, don't buy red, think twice about yellow. But in my mind, it's really not enough to just eat green list. We can't sustain this without the measure of our success really changing the fate of the species in the yellow and the red. But what if we eat only in the green list? You've got pole-caught yellowfin tuna here — comes from sustainable stocks. Pole caught — no bycatch. Great for fishermen. Lots of money. Supporting local economies. But it's a lion of the sea. It's a top predator.What's the context of this meal? Am I sitting down in a steakhouse to a 16-ounce portion of this? Do I do this three times a week? I might still be in the green list, but I'm not doing myself, or you, or the oceans any favors. The point is that we have to have a context, a gauge for our actions in all this. Example: I've heard that red wine is great for my health — antioxidants and minerals — heart healthy. That's great! I love red wine! I'm going to drink so much of it. I'm going to be so healthy. Well, how many bottles is it before you tell me that I have a problem? Well folks, we have a protein problem. We have lost this sensibility when it regards our food, and we are paying a cost. The problem is we are hiding that cost beneath the waves. We are hiding that cost behind the social acceptance of expanding waistlines. And we are hiding that cost behind monster profits.So the first thing about this idea of restorative seafood is that it really takes into account our needs. Restorative seafood might best be represented not by Jaws, or by Flipper, or the Gordon's fisherman, but rather, by the Jolly Green Giant. Vegetables: they might yet save the oceans. Sylvia likes to say that blue is the new green. Well I'd like to respectfully submit that broccoli green might then be the new blue. We must continue to eat the best seafood possible, if at all. But we also must eat it with a ton of vegetables. The best part about restorative seafood though is that it comes on the half-shell with a bottle of Tabasco and lemon wedges. It comes in a five-ounce portion of tilapia breaded with Dijon mustard and crispy, broiled breadcrumbs and a steaming pile of pecan quinoa pilaf with crunchy, grilled broccoli so soft and sweet and charred and smoky on the outside with just a hint of chili flake. Whooo! This is an easy sell. And the best part is all of those ingredients are available to every family at the neighborhood Walmart.Jamie Oliver is campaigning to save America from the way we eat. Sylvia is campaigning to save the oceans from the way we eat. There's a pattern here. Forget nuclear holocaust; it's the fork that we have to worry about. We have ravaged our Earth and then used the food that we've sourced to handicap ourselves in more ways than one. So I think we have this whole eating thing wrong. And so I think it's time we change what we expect from our food. Sustainability is complicated but dinner is a reality that we all very much understand. So let's start there.There's been a lot of movement recently in greening our food systems. Dan Barber and Alice Waters are leading passionately the green food Delicious Revolution. But green foods often represent a way for us to disregard the responsibility as eaters. Just because it comes from a green source doesn't mean we can treat it with disregard on the plate. We have eco-friendly shrimp. We can make them; we have that technology. But we can never have any eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. It doesn't work. Heart-healthy dinner is a very important part of restorative seafood. While we try to manage declining marine populations, the media's recommending increased consumption of seafood. Studies say that tens of thousands of American grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers and fathers might be around for another birthday if we included more seafood. That's a reward I am not willing to pass up. But it's not all about the seafood. It's about the way that we look at our plates.As a chef, I realize the easiest thing for me to do is reduce the portion sizes on my plate. A couple things happened. I made more money. People started buying appetizers and salads, because they knew they weren't going to fill up on the entrees alone. People spent more time engaging in their meals, engaging with each other over their meals. People got, in short, more of what they came there for even though they got less protein. They got more calories over the course of a diversified meal. They got healthier. I made more money. This is great. Environmental consideration was served with every plate, but it was served with a heaping mound of consideration for human interests at the same time.One of the other things we did was begin to diversify the species that we served — small silverfish, anchovies, mackerel, sardines were uncommon. Shellfish, mussels, oysters, clams, tilapia, char — these were the common species. We were directing tastes towards more resilience, more restorative options. This is what we need to favor. This is what the green list says. But this is also how we can actually begin to restore our environment.But what of those big predators, those fashionable species, that green list tuna that I was talking about earlier? Well, if you must, I have a recipe for you. It pretty much works with any big fish in the ocean, so here we go. Start with a 16-ounce portion of big fish. Get a knife. Cut it into four portions. Put it on four plates. Mound up those four plates with vegetables and then open up the very best bottle of Burgundy you have, light the candles and celebrate it. Celebrate the opportunity you have to eat this. Invite your friends and neighbors over and repeat once a year, maybe.I expect a lot from food. I expect health and joy and family and community. I expect that producing ingredients, preparing dishes and eating meals is all part of the communion of human interests. I was lucky enough that my father was a fantastic cook. And he taught me very early on about the privilege that eating represents. I remember well the meals of my childhood. They were reasonable portions of protein served with copious quantities of vegetables and small amounts of starch, usually rice. This is still how I largely eat today. I get sick when I go to steakhouses. I get the meat sweats. It's like a hangover from protein. It's disgusting. But of all the dire news that you'll hear and that you have heard about the state of our oceans, I have the unfortunate burden of delivering to you possibly the very worst of it and that is this whole time your mother was right. Eat your vegetables. It's pretty straightforward.So what are we looking for in a meal? Well for health, I'm looking for wholesome ingredients that are good for my body. For joy, I'm looking for butter and salt and sexy things that make things taste less like penance. For family, I'm looking for recipes that genuflect to my own personal histories. For community though, we start at the very beginning. There's no escaping the fact that everything we eat has a global impact. So try and learn as best you can what that impact is and then take the first step to minimize it. We've seen an image of our blue planet, our world bank. But it is more than just a repository of our resources; it's also the global geography of the communion we call dinner. So if we all take only what we need, then we can begin to share the rest, we can begin to celebrate, we can begin to restore. We need to savor vegetables. We need to savor smaller portions of seafood. And we need to save dinner.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/barton_seaver_sustainable_seafood_let_s_get_smart
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"I'm a bug lover, myself — not from childhood, by the way, but rather late. When I bachelored, majoring in zoology at Tel Aviv University, I kind of fell in love with bugs. And then, within zoology, I took the course or the discipline of entomology, the science of insects. And then I thought to myself, how can I be practical or help in the science of entomology? And then I moved to the world of plant protection — plant protection from insects, from bad bugs. And then within plant protection, I came into the discipline of biological pest control, which we actually define as the use of living organisms to reduce populations of noxious plant pests. So it's a whole discipline in plant protection aimed at the reduction of chemicals.And biological pest control, by the way, or these ""good bugs"" that we are talking about, they've existed in the world for thousands and thousands of years, for a long, long time. But only in the last 120 years, people started, or people knew more and more how to exploit, or how to use, this biological control phenomenon, or in fact, natural control phenomenon, for their own needs. Because biological control phenomenon — you can see it in your backyard. Just take a magnifying glass. You see what I have here? That's a magnifier, times 10. You just open it, twist leaves, and you see a whole new world of minute insects, or little spiders of one millimeter, one-and-a-half, two millimeters long, and you can distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones. So this phenomenon of natural control exists literally everywhere. Here, in front of this building, I'm sure. Just have a look at the plants. So it's everywhere, and we need to know how to exploit it.Well, let's go hand by hand and browse through just a few examples. What is a pest? What damage does it actually inflict on the plant? And what is the natural enemy, the biological control agent, or the ""good bug"" that we're talking about? In general, I'm going to talk about insects and spiders, or mites, let us call them. Insects, those six-legged organisms and spiders or mites, the eight-legged organisms. Let's have a look at that. Here is a devastating pest, a spider mite, because it does a lot of webbing, like a spider. You see the mother in between, and two daughters, probably, on the left and right, and a single egg on the right-hand side. And then you see what kind of damage it can inflict.On your right-hand side, you can see a cucumber leaf, in the middle, a cotton leaf, and on the left, a tomato leaf with these little stipplings. They can literally turn from green to white, because of the sucking, piercing mouth parts of those spiders.But here comes nature, that provides us with a good spider. This is a predatory mite — just as small as a spider mite; one, two millimeters long, not more than that — running quickly, hunting, chasing the spider mites. And here, you can see this lady in action on your left-hand side — just pierces, sucks the body fluids on the left-hand side of the pest mite. And after five minutes, this is what you see: just a typical dead corpse — the shriveled, sucked-out, dead corpse of the spider mite, and next to it, two satiated individuals, predatory mites, a mother on the left-hand side, a young nymph on the right-hand side. By the way, a meal for them for 24 hours, is about five of the spider mites, of the bad mites, and-or 15 to 20 eggs of the pest mites. By the way, they are always hungry.(Laughter)And here is another example: aphids. It's springtime now in Israel. When temperatures rise sharply, you can see those bad ones, those aphids, all over the plants — in your hibiscus, in your lantana, in the young, fresh foliage of the so-called spring flush. By the way, with aphids you have only females, like Amazons. Females giving rise to females, giving rise to other females. No males at all. Parthenogenesis, as it's so called. And they're very happy with that, apparently.(Laughter)Here we can see the damage. Those aphids secrete a sticky, sugary liquid called honeydew, and this just clogs the upper parts of the plant. Here you see a typical cucumber leaf that turned from green to black because of a black fungus, sooty mold, which is covering it.And here comes the salvation, through this parasitic wasp. Here we are not talking about a predator. Here we are talking a parasite — not a two-legged parasite, but an eight-legged parasite, of course. This is a parasitic wasp, again, two millimeters long, slender, a very quick and sharp flier. And here you can see this parasite in action, like in an acrobatic maneuver. She stands vis-à-vis in front of the victim at the right-hand side, bending its abdomen and inserting a single egg into the body fluids of the aphid. By the way, the aphid tries to escape. She kicks and bites and secretes different liquids, but nothing will happen, in fact — only the egg of the parasitoid will be inserted into the body fluids of the aphid. And after a few days, depending upon temperature, the egg will hatch and the larva of this parasite will eat the aphid from the inside.(Laughter)This is all natural. This is all natural. This is not fiction, nothing at all. Again — in your backyard. In your backyard.(Laughter)(Applause)But this is the end result: mummies. This is the visual result of a dead aphid encompassing inside, a developing parasitoid that, after a few minutes, you see halfway out. The birth is almost complete. You can see, by the way, in different movies, etc., it takes just a few minutes. And if this is a female, she'll immediately mate with a male and off she goes, because time is very short. This female can live only three to four days, and she needs to give rise to around 400 eggs. That means she has 400 bad aphids to put her eggs into their body fluids. This is, of course, not the end of it.There is a whole wealth of other natural enemies and this is just the last example. Again, we'll start first with the pest: the thrips. By the way, all these weird names — I didn't bother you with the Latin names of these creatures, just the popular names. But this is a nice, slender, very bad pest. If you can see this: sweet peppers. This is not just an exotic, ornamental sweet pepper. This is a sweet pepper which is not consumable because it is suffering from a viral disease transmitted by those thrip adults. And here comes the natural enemy, minute pirate bug — ""minute,"" because it is rather small. Here you can see the adult, black, and two young ones. And again, in action. This adult pierces the thrips, sucking it within just several minutes, going to the other prey, continuing all over the place. And if we spread those minute pirate bugs, the good ones, for example, in a sweet pepper plot, they go to the flowers. And look — this flower is flooded with predatory bugs, with the good ones, after wiping out the bad ones, the thrips. So this is a very positive situation. No harm to the developing fruit. No harm to the fruit set. Everything is just fine under these circumstances. But again, the question is, here you saw them on a one-to-one basis — the pest, the natural enemy.What we do is actually this. In Northeast Israel, in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, there is a facility that mass-produces those natural enemies. In other words, what we do there is amplify the natural control, or the biological control phenomenon. And in 30,000 square meters of state-of-the-art greenhouses, there, we are mass-producing those predatory mites, those minute pirate bugs, those parasitic wasps, etc. Many different parts. By the way, they have a very nice landscape — you see the Jordanian Mountains on the one hand, and the Jordan Valley on the other hand, and a good, mild winter and a nice, hot summer, which is an excellent condition to mass-produce those creatures. And by the way, mass-production — it is not genetic manipulation. There are no GMOs — genetically modified organisms — whatsoever. We take them from nature, and the only thing that we do is give them the optimal conditions, under the greenhouses or in the climate rooms, in order to proliferate, multiply and reproduce. And that's what we get.You see under a microscope. You see in the upper left corner? You see a single predatory mite. And this is the whole bunch of predatory mites. You see this ampul. You see this one. I have one gram of those predatory mites. One gram is 80,000 individuals. 80,000 individuals are good enough to control one acre, 4,000 square meters, of a strawberry plot against spider mites for the whole season of almost one year. And we can produce from this, believe you me, several dozens of kilograms on an annual basis. So this is what I call amplification of the phenomenon. And no, we do not disrupt the balance. On the contrary, because we bring it to every cultural plot where the balance was already disrupted by the chemicals. Here we come with those natural enemies in order to reverse a little bit of the wheel and to bring more natural balance to the agricultural plot by reducing those chemicals. That's the whole idea.And what is the impact? In this table, you can actually see what is an impact of a successful biological control by good bugs. For example, in Israel, where we employ more than 1,000 hectares — 10,000 dunams in Israeli terms — of biological pests controlling sweet pepper under protection, 75 percent of the pesticides were actually reduced. And Israeli strawberries, even more — 80 percent of the pesticides, especially those aimed against pest mites in strawberries. So the impact is very strong. And there goes the question, especially if you ask growers, agriculturists: Why biological control? Why good bugs? By the way, the number of answers you get equals the number of people you ask. But if we go, for example, to this place, Southeast Israel, the Arava area above the Great Rift Valley, where the pearl of Israeli agriculture is located, especially under greenhouse conditions, or under screenhouse conditions — if you drive all the way to Eilat, you see this just in the middle of the desert. And if you zoom in, you can definitely watch this: grandparents with their grandchildren, distributing the natural enemies, the good bugs, instead of wearing special clothes and gas masks and applying chemicals. So safety, with respect to the application, is the number one answer that we get from growers, for ""Why biological control?""Number two, many growers are, in fact, petrified by the idea of resistance, that the pests will become resistant to the chemicals, just like in our case, that bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics. It's the same, and it can happen very quickly. Fortunately, in either biological control or even natural control, resistance is extremely rare. It hardly happens. Because this is evolution, this is the natural ratio, unlike resistance, which happens in the case of chemicals.And thirdly, public demand. The more the public demands the reduction of chemicals, the more growers become aware of the fact that they should, wherever they can and wherever possible, replace the chemical control with biological control. Even here, there is another grower, you see, very interested in the bugs, the bad ones and the good ones, wearing this magnifier already on her head, just walking safely in her crop.Finally, I want to get to my vision, or, in fact, to my dream. Because, you see, this is the reality. Have a look at the gap. If we take the overall turnover of the biocontrol industry worldwide, it's 250 million dollars. And look at the overall pesticide industry in all the crops throughout the world. I think it's times 100 or something like that. Twenty-five billion. So there is a huge gap to bridge. So actually, how can we do it? How can we bridge, or let's say, narrow, this gap over the years? First of all, we need to find more robust, good and reliable biological solutions, more good bugs that we can either mass-produce or actually conserve in the field. Secondly, to create even more intensive and strict public demand for the reduction of chemicals in agricultural fresh produce. And thirdly, also to increase awareness by the growers to the potential of this industry. And this gap really narrows. Step by step, it does narrow.So I think my last slide is: All we are saying — we can actually sing it — Give nature a chance. I'm saying it on behalf of all the biocontrol practitioners and implementers, in Israel and abroad, really give nature a chance.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shimon_steinberg_natural_pest_control_using_bugs
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"(Music by Anna Oxygen)(Music: ""Shells"" by Mirah)♪ You learned how to be a diver ♪♪ Put on a mask and believe ♪♪ Gather a dinner of shells for me ♪♪ Take the tank down so you can breathe ♪♪ Below ♪♪ Movements slow ♪♪ You are an island ♪♪ All the secrets until then ♪♪ Pried open I held them ♪♪ Until they were still ♪♪ Until they were still ♪♪ Until they were still ♪(Music) (Music by Caroline Lufkin)(Music by Anna Oxygen)♪ Dream time, I will find you ♪♪ You are shady, you are new ♪♪ I'm not so good at mornings ♪♪ I can see too clearly ♪♪ I prefer the nighttime ♪♪ Dark and blurry ♪♪ Falling night ♪♪ Hovering light ♪♪ Calling night ♪♪ Hovering light ♪♪ In the moontime I will give up my life ♪ ♪ And in the deep dreams ♪♪ You will find me ♪(Applause) [Excerpts from ""Myth and Infrastructure""]Bruno Giussani: Come back. Miwa Matreyek!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/miwa_matreyek_s_glorious_visions
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"I love video games. I'm also slightly in awe of them. I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before. And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this. And in particular, I think we can learn things about learning. Now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media. From about 10 billion in 1990, it's worth 50 billion dollars globally today, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In four years' time, it's estimated it'll be worth over 80 billion dollars. That's about three times the recorded music industry. This is pretty stunning, but I don't think it's the most telling statistic of all. The thing that really amazes me is that, today, people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games. This is a screenshot from the virtual game world, Entropia Universe. Earlier this year, a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars. And this is a Titan class ship in the space game, EVE Online. And this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build, plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that. And yet, many of these get built. At the other end of the scale, the game Farmville that you may well have heard of, has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day.This may all sound really quite alarming to some people, an index of something worrying or wrong in society. But we're here for the good news, and the good news is that I think we can explore why this very real human effort, this very intense generation of value, is occurring. And by answering that question, I think we can take something extremely powerful away. And I think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards. And specifically, it's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively. Now if we look at what's going on in someone's head when they are being engaged, two quite different processes are occurring. On the one hand, there's the wanting processes. This is a bit like ambition and drive — I'm going to do that. I'm going to work hard. On the other hand, there's the liking processes, fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back. It's a really great image. It's pretty cool. It's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally, one of whom is me, another of whom is my wife. And this kind of a world, this vast flying beast you can ride around, shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking. Because it's very powerful. It's pretty awesome. It gives you great powers. Your ambition is satisfied, but it's very beautiful. It's a very great pleasure to fly around. And so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement.But this isn't the really interesting stuff. The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured. The biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players, about what everybody does — far more detail than you'd ever get from any website. And this allows something very special to happen in games. It's something called the reward schedule. And by this, I mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort. Now, to try and explain this in sort of real terms, I want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games. Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item. Let's say, for the sake of argument, my mission is to get 15 pies and I can get 15 pies by killing these cute, little monsters. Simple game quest. Now you can think about this, if you like, as a problem about boxes. I've got to keep opening boxes. I don't know what's inside them until I open them. And I go around opening box after box until I've got 15 pies. Now, if you take a game like Warcraft, you can think about it, if you like, as a great box-opening effort. The game's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes, getting better and better stuff in them.This sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling. And the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data. Let's think about probability. If we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies, we want to make sure it's neither too easy, nor too difficult, to find a pie. So what do you do? Well, you look at a million people — no, 100 million people, 100 million box openers — and you work out, if you make the pie rate about 25 percent — that's neither too frustrating, nor too easy. It keeps people engaged. But of course, that's not all you do — there's 15 pies. Now, I could make a game called Piecraft, where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies. That would be very boring. Fifteen is a pretty optimal number. You find that — you know, between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going. But we don't just have pies in the boxes. There's 100 percent up here. And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened, there's something in it, some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged. In most adventure games, it's a little bit in-game currency, a little bit experience. But we don't just do that either.We also say there's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement. There's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item. There's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item. And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item. And also, we say, ""Well, how many monsters? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters?"" No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time. So I'm drawn on. It's not too easy, not too difficult. So all this is very powerful. But we're in virtuality. These aren't real boxes. So we can do some rather amazing things. We notice, looking at all these people opening boxes, that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies, their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. They're not rational about probability. They think this game is unfair. It's not giving me my last two pies. I'm going to give up. If they're real boxes, there's not much we can do, but in a game we can just say, ""Right, well. When you get to 13 pies, you've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now."" Keep you engaged. Look at what people do — adjust the world to match their expectation. Our games don't always do this. And one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item, they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value, to keep it special.And the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways. Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning. But now, we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes. So what does all this mean in practice? Well, I've come up with seven things that, I think, show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games. The first one is very simple: experience bars measuring progress — something that's been talked about brilliantly by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year. It's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States, among other places. It's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces, you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own. And everything comes towards that, and they watch it creeping up, and they own that as it goes along.Second, multiple long and short-term aims — 5,000 pies, boring, 15 pies, interesting. So, you give people lots and lots of different tasks. You say, it's about doing 10 of these questions, but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time, but another task is collaborating with other people, another task is showing you're working five times, another task is hitting this particular target. You break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities.Third, you reward effort. It's your 100 percent factor. Games are brilliant at this. Every time you do something, you get credit; you get a credit for trying. You don't punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort — a little bit of gold, a little bit of credit. You've done 20 questions — tick. It all feeds in as minute reinforcement.Fourth, feedback. This is absolutely crucial, and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this. If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we've been hearing amazing things about, it's very, very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions. Pollution, global warming, these things — the consequences are distant in time and space. It's very hard to learn, to feel a lesson. But if you can model things for people, if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes, then they can learn a lesson, they can see, they can move on, they can understand.And fifth, the element of uncertainty. Now this is the neurological goldmine, if you like, because a known reward excites people, but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward, the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty, that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not. The 25 percent. This lights the brain up. And if you think about using this in testing, in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training, you can transform the levels of people's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism. When we don't quite predict something perfectly, we get really excited about it. We just want to go back and find out more.As you probably know, the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. It's associated with reward-seeking behavior. And something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K., where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain. And what this means is we can predict learning, we can predict enhanced engagement, these windows, these windows of time, in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level. And two things really flow from this. The first has to do with memory, that we can find these moments. When someone is more likely to remember, we can give them a nugget in a window. And the second thing is confidence, that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver, make them more willing to take risks, more willing to take on difficulty, harder to discourage. This can all seem very sinister. But you know, sort of ""our brains have been manipulated; we're all addicts."" The word ""addiction"" is thrown around. There are real concerns there. But the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. This is what really excites us. In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash — that's nice — it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 — a video game called EverQuest. And in this video game, there were two really big dragons, and you had to team up to kill them — 42 people, up to 42 to kill these big dragons. That's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items. So players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other, fairly and transparently. What happened was, they paid each other a virtual currency they called ""dragon kill points."" And every time you turned up to go on a mission, you got paid in dragon kill points. They tracked these on a separate website. So they tracked their own private currency, and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted — all organized by the players themselves. Now the staggering system, not just that this worked in EverQuest, but that today, a decade on, every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system — tens of millions of people. And the success rate is at close to 100 percent. This is a player-developed, self-enforcing, voluntary currency, and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior.And I just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world. Let's start with business. I mean, we're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation. We're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters. And I just look at this, and I think, yes, we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see. In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can transform how we engage people. We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment. We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks. We can use calculated randomness. We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together. And we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms. Government, well, one thing that comes to mind is the U.S. government, among others, is literally starting to pay people to lose weight. So we're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity. But again, those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal, to take the data, to take the observations, of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement.And in the end, it's this word, ""engagement,"" that I want to leave you with. It's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. But it's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games. And if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards, then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_chatfield_7_ways_games_reward_the_brain
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"So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does. We stand in elections; we vote in elections; we observe elections. Our democracies rely on elections. We all understand why we have elections, and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote. We cherish the opportunity to have our say, to help decide the future of the country. The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us, to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all. Without that mandate, they would be corrupt.Well unfortunately, power corrupts, and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power, including doing bad things to elections. You see, even if the idea of the election is perfect, running a countrywide election is a big project, and big projects are messy. Whenever there is an election, it seems like something always goes wrong, someone tries to cheat, or something goes accidentally awry — a ballot box goes missing here, chads are left hanging over here.To make sure as few things as possible go wrong, we have all these procedures around the election. So for example, you come to the polling station, and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote. When you come back out, you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes, so that no one knows how you voted.Well, what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that, after you drop your vote into the ballot box. And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted, because they trust that the election system works. They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly. The ballot boxes go to counting places. They're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted. Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote, and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election. So we have to trust a lot of people. We have to trust a lot of procedures. And sometimes we even have to trust computers. So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes, all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines, and you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better.Well in the face of all these bad headlines, researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently. They've zoomed out and looked at the big picture. And the big picture is this: elections should be verifiable. Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly, without breaking election secrecy, which is so very important. And that's the tough part. How do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret?Well, the way we've come up with uses computers but doesn't depend on them. And the secret is the ballot form. And if you look closely at these ballot forms, you'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one. And that means, if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list, I won't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for. And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right. And there's some complicated cryptography going on in there, but what's not complicated is voting with one of these forms. So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us, and then we'll use the paper for verification.So this is how you vote. You get one of these ballot forms at random, and then you go into the voting booth, and you mark your choices, and you tear along a perforation. And you shred the candidate list. And the bit that remains, the one with your marks — this is your encrypted vote. So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote. And because it's encrypted, it can be submitted, stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see, including you. So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt. And after the close of the election, you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website. And remember, the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth, so if an election official wants to find out how you voted, they will not be able to. If the government wants to find out how you voted, they won't be able to. No hacker can break in and find out how you voted. No hacker can break in and change your vote, because then it won't match your receipt. Votes can't go missing because then you won't find yours when you look for it.But the election magic doesn't stop there. Instead, we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves. They can check that all the votes were counted correctly. They can check that the announced result of the election is the correct one. And these are elections by the people, for the people. So the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud
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"I guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s, when I was seven or eight years old, watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on. Then after every episode, I had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain, because that's all there was to look at. And by the time I turned 16, I pursued a career in marine science, in exploration and diving, and lived in underwater habitats, like this one off the Florida Keys, for 30 days total. Brian Skerry took this shot. Thanks, Brian. And I've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world. And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world, operated by the Japanese government.And Sylvia Earle and I were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in Japan. And on my dive, I went down 18,000 feet, to an area that I thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor. But when I got there, I found lots of plastic garbage and other debris. And it was really a turning point in my life, where I started to realize that I couldn't just go have fun doing science and exploration. I needed to put it into a context. I needed to head towards conservation goals. So I began to work with National Geographic Society and others and led expeditions to Antarctica. I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica. Ten years ago was a seminal trip, where we explored that big iceberg, B-15, the largest iceberg in history, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. And we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg, such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around, so that, as the blood flowed through our kidneys, it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies. But after three trips to Antarctica, I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water. And that same year, 10 years ago, I headed north to the Phoenix Islands.And I'm going to tell you that story here in a moment. But before I do, I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment. You may have seen this in other forms, but the top line is the amount of protected area on land, globally, and it's about 12 percent. And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and '70s, and it's on kind of a nice trajectory right now. And that's probably because that's when everybody got aware of the environment and Earth Day and all the stuff that happened in the '60s with the Hippies and everything really did, I think, have an affect on global awareness. But the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now — it appears to be ticking up. And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean. I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land. But unfortunately, the ocean is opaque, and we can't see what's going on. And therefore we're way behind on protection. But scuba diving, submersibles and all the work that we're setting about to do here will help rectify that.So where are the Phoenix Islands? They were the world's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the Chagos Archipelago was declared. It's in the mid-Pacific. It's about five days from anywhere. If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands, it's five days from Fiji, it's five days from Hawaii, it's five days from Samoa. It's out in the middle of the Pacific, right around the Equator. I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago, nor the country, Kiribati, that owns them, till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji said, ""Greg, would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands? They've never been dived."" And I said, ""Yeah. But tell me where they are and the country that owns them."" So that's when I first learned of the Islands and had no idea what I was getting into. But I was in for the adventure. Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area. It's a very deep-water part of our planet. The average depths are about 12,000 ft. There's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands, which are specifically part of the protected area. Seamounts are important for biodiversity. There's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land. It's an interesting fact. And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts. So it's a deep — think about it in a big three-dimensional space, very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna, whales, all kinds of deep sea marine life like we've seen here before.That's the vessel that we took up there for these studies, early on, and that's what the Islands look like — you can see in the background. They're very low to the water, and they're all uninhabited, except one island has about 35 caretakers on it. And they've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days, these islands were too far away from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti for those ancient Polynesian mariners that were traversing the Pacific so widely. But we got up there, and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go, ""Okay, where are we going to dive? Let's try there,"" and then falling into the water. Both my personal and my professional life changed.Suddenly, I saw a world that I had never seen before in the ocean — schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface, coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful, large fish everywhere, manta rays. It was an ecosystem. Parrotfish spawning — this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands. You can see the fish are balled up and then there's a little cloudy area there where they're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction — events that the ocean is supposed to do, but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity. The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries, especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here. Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location. And sharks — we had sharks on our early dives, up to 150 sharks at once, which is an indication of a very, very healthy, very strong, system.So I thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever, but they did finally come to an end. And we explored the surface of the Islands as well — very important bird nesting site, some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific, in the world. And we finished our trip. And that's the area again. You can see the Islands — there are eight islands — that pop out of the water. The peaks that don't come out of the water are the seamounts. Remember, a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface.And what's the context of the Phoenix Islands? Where do these exist? Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati, and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific in three island groups. In the west we have the Gilbert Islands. In the center we have the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject that I'm talking about. And then over to the east we have the Line Islands. It's the largest atoll nation in the world. And they have about 110,000 people spread out over 33 islands. They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean, and that's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet. And when I was first going up there, I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago, and people would ask me, ""Why are you going to this place called Kiribati?"" And it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed, and the reporter yells, ""Hey, Willy. Why do you rob banks?"" And he says, ""cause that's where all the money is."" And I would tell people, ""Why do I go to Kiribati? Because that's where all the ocean is."" They basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the Central Pacific Ocean.They're also a country that is in dire danger. Sea levels are rising, and Kiribati, along with 42 other nations in the world, will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean. The Islands rise only one to two meters above the surface. Some of the islands have already gone under water. And these nations are faced with a real problem. We as a world are faced with a problem. What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet? The president of the Maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries. So it's something we need to focus on. But back to the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject of this Talk.After I got back, I said, okay, this is amazing, what we found. I'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati, who are over in Tarawa, the westernmost group. So I started contacting them — because they had actually given me a permit to do this — and I said, ""I want to come up and tell you what we found."" And for some reason they didn't want me to come, or it was hard to find a time and a place, and it took a while, but finally they said, ""Okay, you can come. But if you come, you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar."" So I said, ""Okay, I'm happy to buy lunch. Just get whatever anybody wants."" So David Obura, a coral reef biologist, and I went to Tarawa, and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands. And the country never knew this. They never had any data from this area. They'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands. After the talk, the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me and he said, ""Greg, do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did?"" He said, ""We often issue these permits to do research in our waters, but usually we get a note two or three years later, or a reprint. But you're the first one who's ever come back and told us what you did. And we really appreciate that. And we're buying you lunch today. And are you free for dinner?""And I was free for dinner, and I went out to dinner with the Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati. And over the course of dinner, I learned that Kiribati gains most of its revenue — it's a very poor country — but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters, because Kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself. And the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives Kiribati five percent of the landed value. So if the United States removes a million dollars' worth of lobsters from a reef, Kiribati gets 50,000 dollars. And, you know, it didn't seem like a very good deal to me. So I asked the Minister over dinner, I said, ""Would you consider a situation where you would still get paid — we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is — but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water?"" He stopped, and he said, ""Yes, we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem, and I think we would call it a reverse fishing license."" He coined the term ""reverse fishing license."" So I said, ""Yes, a 'reverse fishing license.'""So we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point. I went back to the States and started looking around to see if I could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued, and it turned out there were none. There were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing. It had occurred on land, in rainforests of South America and Africa, where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down. And Conservation International had struck some of those deals. So I went to Conservation International and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource, deciding how much Kiribati should be compensated, what the range of the fishes were, brought in a whole bunch of other partners — the government of Australia, the government of New Zealand, the World Bank. The Oak Foundation and National Geographic have been big funders of this as well. And we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact.Halfway through this process, I met the president of Kiribati, President Anote Tong. He's a really important leader, a real visionary, forward-thinking man, and he told me two things when I approached him. He said, ""Greg, there's two things I'd like you to do. One is, remember I'm a politician, so you've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of Kiribati that this is a good idea. Secondly, I'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency. I don't want to do something like this if it's going to go away after I'm voted out of office."" So we had very strong leadership, very good vision and a lot of science, a lot of lawyers involved. Many, many steps were taken to pull this off. And it was primarily because Kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this. They realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community.Then in 2002, when this was all going full-swing, a coral-bleaching event happened in the Phoenix Islands. Here's this resource that we're looking to save, and it turns out it's the hottest heating event that we can find on record. The ocean heated up as it does sometimes, and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the Phoenix Islands for six months. It was over 32 degrees Celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral. So suddenly we had this area that we were protecting, but now it appeared to be dead, at least in the coral areas. Of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine, but the coral, which everybody likes to look at, was in trouble. Well, the good news is it's recovered and recovering fast, faster than any reef we've seen. This picture was just taken by Brian Skerry a few months ago when we returned to the Phoenix Islands and discovered that, because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy, the coral is booming, is just booming back. It's almost like if a person has multiple diseases, it's hard to get well, you might die, but if you only have one disease to deal with, you can get better. And that's the story with climate-change heating. It's the only threat, the only influence that the reef had to deal with. There was no fishing, there was no pollution, there was no coastal development, and the reef is on a full-bore recovery.Now I remember that dinner I had with the Minister of Fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and I got quite animated during the dinner and said, ""Well, I think that the conservation community might embrace this idea, Minister."" He paused and put his hands together and said, ""Yes, Greg, but the devil will be in the details,"" he said. And it certainly was. The last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans, as I said, teams of lawyers, MOUs, creating the Phoenix Islands Trust Board. And we are now in the process of raising the full endowment. Kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment. We just had our first PIPA Trust Board meeting three weeks ago. So it's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country. And the PIPA Trust Board holds that license and pays the country for this. So it's a very solid, very well thought-out, very well grounded system, and it was a bottom-up system, and that was very important with this work, from the bottom up to secure this. So the conditions for success here are listed. You can read them yourselves. But I would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation. And that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of Kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world.And I'll leave you with one final slide, that is: how do we scale this up? How do we realize Sylvia's dream? Where eventually do we take this? Here's the Pacific with large MPAs and large conservation zones on it. And as you can see, we have a patchwork across this ocean. I've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle, the Phoenix Islands, but every other green patch on that has its own story. And what we need to do now is look at the whole Pacific Ocean in its entirety and make a network of MPAs across the Pacific so that we have our world's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/greg_stone_saving_the_ocean_one_island_at_a_time
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"I have a doppelganger. (Laughter) Dr. Gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the ""Dragonball Z: Android Saga."" If you look very carefully, you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent Plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light. That's exactly what I do — optical mind control.(Laughter)But in contrast to my evil twin who lusts after world domination, my motives are not sinister. I control the brain in order to understand how it works. Now wait a minute, you may say, how can you go straight to controlling the brain without understanding it first? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis. They say, ""If we could record the activity of our neurons, we would understand the brain."" But think for a moment what that means. Even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times, we would still have to make sense of the recorded activity patterns, and that's so difficult, chances are we'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them.Take a look at what brain activity might look like. In this simulation, each black dot is one nerve cell. The dot is visible whenever a cell fires an electrical impulse. There's 10,000 neurons here. So you're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach. Your brains are about 100 million times more complicated. Somewhere, in a pattern like this, is you, your perceptions, your emotions, your memories, your plans for the future. But we don't know where, since we don't know how to read the pattern. We don't understand the code used by the brain. To make progress, we need to break the code. But how? An experienced code-breaker will tell you that in order to figure out what the symbols in a code mean, it's essential to be able to play with them, to rearrange them at will. So in this situation too, to decode the information contained in patterns like this, watching alone won't do. We need to rearrange the pattern. In other words, instead of recording the activity of neurons, we need to control it. It's not essential that we can control the activity of all neurons in the brain, just some. The more targeted our interventions, the better. And I'll show you in a moment how we can achieve the necessary precision.And since I'm realistic, rather than grandiose, I don't claim that the ability to control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries. But we'll certainly learn a lot. Now, I'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is. The history of attempts to tinker with the function of the nervous system is long and illustrious. It dates back at least 200 years, to Galvani's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond. Galvani showed that a frog's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve to a source of electrical current. This experiment revealed the first, and perhaps most fundamental, nugget of the neural code: that information is written in the form of electrical impulses. Galvani's approach of probing the nervous system with electrodes has remained state-of-the-art until today, despite a number of drawbacks. Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.So around the turn of the last century, I started to think, ""Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down?"" So instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain, re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive to diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light. Such an approach would literally, in a flash of light, overcome many of the obstacles to discovery. First, it's clearly a non-invasive, wireless form of communication. And second, just as in a radio broadcast, you can communicate with many receivers at once. You don't need to know where these receivers are, and it doesn't matter if these receivers move — just think of the stereo in your car. It gets even better, for it turns out that we can fabricate the receivers out of materials that are encoded in DNA. So each nerve cell with the right genetic makeup will spontaneously produce a receiver that allows us to control its function. I hope you'll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of this concept. There's no high-tech gizmos here, just biology revealed through biology.Now let's take a look at these miraculous receivers up close. As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons, we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores. Pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system. But these pores here are special. They are coupled to light receptors similar to the ones in your eyes. Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor, the pore opens, an electrical current is switched on, and the neuron fires electrical impulses. Because the light-activated pore is encoded in DNA, we can achieve incredible precision. This is because, although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes, different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells. You can exploit this to make sure that only some neurons contain our light-activated pore and others don't. So in this cartoon, the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore. The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain. In this example, each electrical impulse, each deflection on the trace, is caused by a brief pulse of light. And the approach, of course, also works in moving, behaving animals.This is the first ever such experiment, sort of the optical equivalent of Galvani's. It was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student, Susana Lima. Susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore. You're familiar with these cells because they are the ones that frustrate you when you try to swat the fly. They trained the escape reflex that makes the fly jump into the air and fly away whenever you move your hand in position. And you can see here that the flash of light has exactly the same effect. The animal jumps, it spreads its wings, it vibrates them, but it can't actually take off because the fly is sandwiched between two glass plates. Now to make sure that this was no reaction of the fly to a flash it could see, Susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment. She cut the heads off of her flies. These headless bodies can live for about a day, but they don't do much. They just stand around and groom excessively. So it seems that the only trait that survives decapitation is vanity. (Laughter) Anyway, as you'll see in a moment, Susana was able to turn on the flight motor of what's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies to actually take off and fly away. They didn't get very far, obviously. Since we took these first steps, the field of optogenetics has exploded. And there are now hundreds of labs using these approaches.And we've come a long way since Galvani's and Susana's first successes in making animals twitch or jump. We can now actually interfere with their psychology in rather profound ways, as I'll show you in my last example, which is directed at a familiar question. Life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure to decide what to do next. We cope with this pressure by having brains, and within our brains, decision-making centers that I've called here the ""Actor."" The Actor implements a policy that takes into account the state of the environment and the context in which we operate. Our actions change the environment, or context, and these changes are then fed back into the decision loop.Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies. Each chamber in these two vertical stacks contains one fly. The left and the right halves of the chamber are filled with two different odors, and a security camera watches as the flies pace up and down between them. Here's some such CCTV footage. Whenever a fly reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odor streams meet, it has to make a decision. It has to decide whether to turn around and stay in the same odor, or whether to cross the midline and try something new. These decisions are clearly a reflection of the Actor's policy. Now for an intelligent being like our fly, this policy is not written in stone but rather changes as the animal learns from experience. We can incorporate such an element of adaptive intelligence into our model by assuming that the fly's brain contains not only an Actor, but a different group of cells, a ""Critic,"" that provides a running commentary on the Actor's choices. You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain's equivalent of the Catholic Church, if you're an Austrian like me, or the super-ego, if you're Freudian, or your mother, if you're Jewish.(Laughter)Now obviously, the Critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent. So we set out to identify the cells in the fly's brain that played the role of the Critic. And the logic of our experiment was simple. We thought if we could use our optical remote control to activate the cells of the Critic, we should be able, artificially, to nag the Actor into changing its policy. In other words, the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but, in reality, it had not made. So we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable. And then we took these flies and allowed them to make choices. And whenever they made one of the two choices, chose one odor, in this case the blue one over the orange one, we switched on the lights. If the Critic was among the optically activated cells, the result of this intervention should be a change in policy. The fly should learn to avoid the optically reinforced odor.Here's what happened in two instances: We're comparing two strains of flies, each of them having about 100 light-addressable cells in their brains, shown here in green on the left and on the right. What's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. But the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right. Optically activating these hundred or so cells into two strains of flies has dramatically different consequences. If you look first at the behavior of the fly on the right, you can see that whenever it reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odors meet, it marches straight through, as it did before. Its behavior is completely unchanged. But the behavior of the fly on the left is very different. Whenever it comes up to the midpoint, it pauses, it carefully scans the odor interface as if it was sniffing out its environment, and then it turns around. This means that the policy that the Actor implements now includes an instruction to avoid the odor that's in the right half of the chamber. This means that the Critic must have spoken in that animal, and that the Critic must be contained among the dopamine-producing neurons on the left, but not among the dopamine producing neurons on the right.Through many such experiments, we were able to narrow down the identity of the Critic to just 12 cells. These 12 cells, as shown here in green, send the output to a brain structure called the ""mushroom body,"" which is shown here in gray. We know from our formal model that the brain structure at the receiving end of the Critic's commentary is the Actor. So this anatomy suggests that the mushroom bodies have something to do with action choice. Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies, this makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that we can construct an electronic toy circuit that simulates the behavior of the fly. In this electronic toy circuit, the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board. These LED's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air. Each odor activates a different combination of sensors, which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body. So the pilot in the cockpit of the fly, the Actor, can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue LEDs lights up.What the Actor does with this information depends on its policy, which is stored in the strengths of the connection, between the odor detectors and the motors that power the fly's evasive actions. If the connection is weak, the motors will stay off and the fly will continue straight on its course. If the connection is strong, the motors will turn on and the fly will initiate a turn. Now consider a situation in which the motors stay off, the fly continues on its path and it suffers some painful consequence such as getting zapped. In a situation like this, we would expect the Critic to speak up and to tell the Actor to change its policy. We have created such a situation, artificially, by turning on the critic with a flash of light. That caused a strengthening of the connections between the currently active odor detector and the motors. So the next time the fly finds itself facing the same odor again, the connection is strong enough to turn on the motors and to trigger an evasive maneuver.I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly. This is one piece of good news. The other piece of good news, for a scientist at least, is that much remains to be discovered. In the experiments I told you about, we have lifted the identity of the Critic, but we still have no idea how the Critic does its job. Come to think of it, knowing when you're wrong without a teacher, or your mother, telling you, is a very hard problem. There are some ideas in computer science and in artificial intelligence as to how this might be done, but we still haven't solved a single example of how intelligent behavior springs from the physical interactions in living matter. I think we'll get there in the not too distant future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gero_miesenboeck
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"Well, there's lots to talk about, but I think I'm just going to play to start off.(Music)♫ When I wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ I pour the coffee ♫ ♫ I read the paper ♫ ♫ And then I slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ So feed the fishes ♫ ♫ You sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ Like it's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on Earth ♫(Applause)All right. So, I wanted to do something special today. I want to debut a new song that I've been working on in the last five or six months. And there's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience, especially when it's half-finished. (Laughter) I'm kind of hoping some conversations here might help me finish it. Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms. And so this is basically a song about loops, but not the kind of loops that I make up here. They're feedback loops. And in the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound. And I'm going to demonstrate for you. (Laughter) I'm not going to hurt you. Don't worry.♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a — (Feedback)All right. I don't know if that was necessary to demonstrate — (Laughter) — but my point is it's the sound of self-destruction.And I've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the ecological, okay. There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from, it gets ugly. So like, you can't feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease, and inbreeding and incest and, let's see, what's the other one? Biological — there's autoimmune diseases, where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host, or the person. And then — okay, this is where we get to the song — kind of bridges the gap to the emotional.Because although I've used scientific terms in songs, it's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical. And there's some things you just don't need to have in songs. So I'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody. And so, I don't know if you've ever had this, but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep, I can't stop thinking about my own eyes. And it's like your eyes start straining to see themselves. That's what it feels like to me. It's not pleasant. I'm sorry if I put that idea in your head. (Laughter) It's impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying. So that's getting a little more closer to a personal experience. Or ears being able to hear themselves — it's just impossible. That's the thing. So, I've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they're left to do the deed themselves, if that's possible. And that's what the song is asking. All right. It doesn't have a name yet.(Music)♫ Go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ Give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ And the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ And the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ 'Cause it's your ear, oh oh ♫ ♫ You've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ Took yourself apart ♫ ♫ You made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ No one can break your heart ♫ ♫ So you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you wring it out ♫ ♫ And you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own ♫ (Applause)Thanks. (Applause) All right. It's kind of cool. Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research. But, you know, I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now, just a little bit. (Applause) I'm going to finish up with a song of mine called ""Weather Systems.""(Music)♫ Quiet ♫ ♫ Quiet down, she said ♫ ♫ Speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ On the edge of the bed, I can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ I can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ Hold still awhile ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Some things you say ♫ ♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ I would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ Hold still a while ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_bird_s_one_man_orchestra_of_the_imagination
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"So this is a story of a place that I now call home. It's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both. So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA. To give you an idea of the ""where:"" So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state. It's about two hours east driving-time from Raleigh. And it's very flat. It's very swampy. It's mostly farmland. The entire county is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed. So there's only 27 people per square mile, which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer.Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America. We've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders. We know the symptoms. It's the hollowing out of small towns. It's downtowns becoming ghost towns. The brain drain — where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back. It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban. And Bertie County is no exception to this. Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with, like many communities similar to it, is that there's no shared, collective investment in the future of rural communities. Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities, and yet 20 percent of our population lives there.So Bertie County is not only very rural; it's incredibly poor. It is the poorest county in the state. It has one in three of its children living in poverty, and it's what is referred to as a ""rural ghetto."" The economy is mostly agricultural. The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco, and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut. The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant. The county seat is Windsor. This is like Times Square of Windsor that you're looking at right now. It's home to only 2,000 people, and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years. There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use. You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand — Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite. But in the whole county there is no coffee shop, there's no Internet cafe, there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore. There isn't even a Walmart.Racially, the county is about 60 percent African-American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy. So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American. And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class, and you can see the difference is pretty stark. So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement. There's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from, and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher. So there isn't a big legacy in the pride of education. In fact, two years ago, only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both English and math.So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place, but I promise there is good news. The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man: This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z. He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system. And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina and then in Denver, Colorado. He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late '80s in the U.S. And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary, and he is the reason that I now live and work there. So in February of 2009, Dr. Zullinger invited us, Project H Design — which is a non-profit design firm that I founded — to come to Bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district. And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process — one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital. Specifically, we use these six design directives, probably the most important being number two: we design with, not for — in that, when we're doing humanitarian-focused design, it's not about designing for clients anymore. It's about designing with people, and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within.So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco, and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County. And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder. So fast-forward to today, and we now live there. I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo, because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits. But this is our front porch. We live there. We now call this place home. Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place. We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County, that, as designers and builders, you can't do everywhere. There's space to experiment and to weld and to test things. We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger. There's a nobility of real, hands-on, dirt-under-your-fingernails work.But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there, there is a huge need. There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County. There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county. And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the — to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit. The initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger — that was why we were there. But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County, as a community, was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking. So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education, but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development.So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education. And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County, but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond. So the first of the three is design for education. This is the most kind of direct, obvious intersection of the two things. It's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students. This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days. And so this played out for us in a couple different ways. The first was a series of renovations of computer labs. So traditionally, the computer labs, particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County, where they have to benchmark test every other week, the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility. You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave. So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology, to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging, more accessible, and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction. So this is the lab at the high school, and the principal there is in love with this room. Every time he has visitors, it's the first place that he takes them.And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape. It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid. So this game that the kids are playing here — in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me. And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams, one team on each side of the playground, and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires. And then she'll call out a math problem — so let's say four times four — and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it. So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins. And the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing. Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores, a greater comfort level with the material, especially with the boys, that in going outside and playing, they aren't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem — and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material. So with design for education, I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers, so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them. So this is Mr. Perry. He's the assistant superintendent. He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself.(Laughter)So the second approach is redesigning education itself. This is the most complex. It's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom. So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change, which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities. So for us, this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie. There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county. And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband Internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system. Right now I should say, there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home Internet connection. And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings, or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint, which I find myself squatting outside of a lot. Aside from, you know, getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place, it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community. It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community's development. So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer, and we're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day.And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is: design as education. So ""design as education"" means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning — not like ""let's learn physics by building a rocket,"" but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose. It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation. And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by. It's hands-on, it's in-your-face, it requires an active engagement, and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways. So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class — wood and metal shop class in particular — historically, has been something intended for kids who aren't going to go to college. It's a vocational training path. It's working-class; it's blue-collar. The projects are things like, let's make a birdhouse for your mom for Christmas. And in recent decades, a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely.So we thought, what if you could bring back shop class, but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed, and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process. So we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with Dr. Zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class. And so this starts in four weeks, at the end of the summer, and my partner and I, Matthew and I, just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it. And this is what it looks like.So over the course of two semesters, the Fall and the Spring, the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio/shop space. And during that time, they're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need-finding, coming back into the studio, doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work, and then moving into the shop and actually testing them, building them, prototyping them, figuring out if they are going to work and refining that. And then over the summer, they're offered a summer job. They're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community. So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year. So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say, ""I built that, and I'm proud of it.""So I want you to meet three of our students. This is Ryan. She is 15 years old. She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher. She wants to go to college, but she wants to come back to Bertie County, because that's where her family is from, where she calls home, and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she's been fairly fortunate in. So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way.This is Eric. He plays for the football team. He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect. So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client.And then this is Anthony. He is 16 years old, loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands, and so for him, Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement. He's interested in forestry, but he isn't sure, so if he ends up not going to college, he will have developed some industry-relevant skills.What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom. So this building downtown, which may very well become the site of our future farmers' market, is now the classroom. And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why — that's a homework assignment. And the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers' market and it's open to the public — that's the final exam. And for the community, what design and building offers is real, visible, built progress. It's one project per year, and it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future.So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story — 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place. But we feel like this could work in other places. And I really, strongly believe in the power of the small story, because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale. Because, when you zoom out that far, you lose the ability to view people as humans.Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers. And let's face it, designers, we need to reinvent ourselves. We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter, we need to work outside of our comfort zones more, and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard. So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_pilloton_teaching_design_for_change
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"Today I want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war. These are not normally the most cheerful of topics, nor do they generally generate the kind of good news that this conference is about. Yet, not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago, but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict. Three things stand out: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design. What I will focus on in my talk is why they matter, how they matter, and what we can all do to make sure that they continue to matter in the right ways, that is, how all of us can contribute to developing and honing the skills of local and global leaders to make peace and to make it last. But let's start at the beginning.Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now, and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat. For nearly two decades now, the news has been bad and the images have been haunting. In Georgia, after years of stalemate, we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in August, 2008. This quickly escalated into a five-day war between Russia and Georgia, leaving Georgia ever more divided. In Kenya, contested presidential elections in 2007 — we just heard about them — quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people. In Sri Lanka, a decades-long civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009, after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983. In Kyrgyzstan, just over the last few weeks, unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks. Hundreds have been killed, and more than 100,000 displaced, including many ethnic Uzbeks who fled to neighboring Uzbekistan. In the Middle East, conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues unabated, and it becomes ever more difficult to see how, just how a possible, sustainable solution can be achieved. Darfur may have slipped from the news headlines, but the killing and displacement there continues as well, and the sheer human misery that it creates is very hard to fathom. And in Iraq, finally, violence is on the rise again, and the country has yet to form a government four months after its last parliamentary elections.But hang on, this talk is to be about the good news. So are these now the images of the past? Well, notwithstanding the gloomy pictures from the Middle East, Darfur, Iraq, elsewhere, there is a longer-term trend that does represent some good news. Over the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an overall decline in the number of civil wars. Since the high in the early 1990s, with about 50 such civil wars ongoing, we now have 30 percent fewer such conflicts today. The number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two. But this trend is less unambiguous. The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001, with about 80,000 soldiers, policemen and rebels killed every year. The lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003, with just 20,000 killed. Despite the up and down since then, the overall trend — and this is the important bit — clearly points downward for the past two decades.The news about civilian casualties is also less bad than it used to be. From over 12,000 civilians deliberately killed in civil wars in 1997 and 1998, a decade later, this figure stands at 4,000. This is a decrease by two-thirds. This decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. But then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months. This certainly is an accomplishment that must never be surpassed. What is also important is to note that these figures only tell part of the story. They exclude people that died as a consequence of civil war, from hunger or disease, for example. And they also do not properly account for civilian suffering more generally. Torture, rape and ethnic cleansing have become highly effective, if often non-lethal, weapons in civil war. To put it differently, for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war, there is no good war and there is no bad peace. Thus, even though every civilian killed, maimed, raped, or tortured is one too many, the fact that the number of civilian casualties is clearly lower today than it was a decade ago, is good news.So, we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed. And the big question, of course, is why? In some cases, there is a military victory of one side. This is a solution of sorts, but rarely is it one that comes without human costs or humanitarian consequences. The defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this, but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the Balkans, in the South Caucasus and across most of Africa. At times, they are complimented by negotiated settlements, or at least cease-fire agreements, and peacekeepers are deployed. But hardly ever do they represent a resounding success — Bosnia and Herzegovina perhaps more so than Georgia. But for many parts of Africa, a colleague of mine once put it this way, ""The cease-fire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning.""But let's look at the good news again. If there's no solution on the battlefield, three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war, or for sustainable peace afterwards: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design. Take the example of Northern Ireland. Despite centuries of animosity, decades of violence and thousands of people killed, 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement. Its initial version was skillfully mediated by Senator George Mitchell. Crucially, for the long-term success of the peace process in Northern Ireland, he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations. Central among them, a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the British and Irish governments, who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland.The core institutions that were put in place in 1998 and their modifications in 2006 and 2008 were highly innovative and allowed all conflict parties to see their core concerns and demands addressed. The agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland with cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and thus recognizes the so-called Irish dimension of the conflict. And significantly, there's also a clear focus on both the rights of individuals and the rights of communities. The provisions in the agreement may be complex, but so is the underlying conflict. Perhaps most importantly, local leaders repeatedly rose to the challenge of compromise, not always fast and not always enthusiastically, but rise in the end they did. Who ever could have imagined Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness jointly governing Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister?But then, is Northern Ireland a unique example, or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries? By no means. The ending of Liberia's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership, diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001, or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005. In all three cases, local leaders were willing and able to make peace, the international community stood ready to help them negotiate and implement an agreement, and the institutions have lived up to the promise that they held on the day they were agreed.Focusing on leadership, diplomacy and institutional design also helps explain failures to achieve peace, or to make it last. The hopes that were vested in the Oslo Accords did not lead to an end of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not all the issues that needed to be resolved were actually covered in the agreements. Rather, local leaders committed to revisiting them later on. Yet instead of grasping this opportunity, local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second Intifada, the events of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.The comprehensive peace agreement for Sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged, and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south. Changes and shortcomings in leadership, more off than on international diplomacy and institutional failures account for this in almost equal measure. Unresolved boundary issues, squabbles over oil revenues, the ongoing conflict in Darfur, escalating tribal violence in the south and generally weak state capacity across all of Sudan complete a very depressing picture of the state of affairs in Africa's largest country.A final example: Kosovo. The failure to achieve a negotiated solution for Kosovo and the violence, tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many, many different factors. Central among them are three. First, the intransigence of local leaders to settle for nothing less than their maximum demands. Second, an international diplomatic effort that was hampered from the beginning by Western support for Kosovo's independence. And third, a lack of imagination when it came to designing institutions that could have addressed the concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike. By the same token — and here we have some good news again — the very fact that there is a high-level, well-resourced international presence in Kosovo and the Balkans region more generally and the fact that local leaders on both sides have showed relative restraint, explains why things have not been worse over the past two years since 2008.So even in situations where outcomes are less than optimal, local leaders and international leaders have a choice, and they can make a difference for the better. A cold war is not as good as a cold peace, but a cold peace is still better than a hot war. Good news is also about learning the right lesson. So what then distinguishes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia? Both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue. First, leadership. In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters, their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either. Leadership needs to be capable, determined and visionary in its commitment to peace. Leaders need to connect to each other and to their followers, and they need to bring them along on what is an often arduous journey into a peaceful future.Second, diplomacy. Diplomacy needs to be well resourced, sustained, and apply the right mix of incentives and pressures on leaders and followers. It needs to help them reach an equitable compromise, and it needs to ensure that a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters help them implement their agreement.Third, institutional design. Institutional design requires a keen focus on issues, innovative thinking and flexible and well-funded implementation. Conflict parties need to move away from maximum demands and towards a compromise that recognizes each other's needs. And they need to think about the substance of their agreement much more than about the labels they want to attach to them. Conflict parties also need to be prepared to return to the negotiation table if the agreement implementation stalls.For me personally, the most critical lesson of all is this: Local commitment to peace is all-important, but it is often not enough to prevent or end violence. Yet, no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have. Therefore, we must invest in developing leaders, leaders that have the skills, vision and determination to make peace. Leaders, in other words, that people will trust and that they will want to follow even if that means making hard choices.A final thought: Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers, frustrations and setbacks. It often takes a generation to accomplish, but it also requires us, today's generation, to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership, diplomacy and institutional design, so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_wolff_the_path_to_ending_ethnic_conflicts
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"I'm here today to show my photographs of the Lakota. Many of you may have heard of the Lakota, or at least the larger group of tribes, called the Sioux. The Lakota are one of many tribes that were moved off their land to prisoner-of-war camps, now called reservations. The Pine Ridge Reservation, the subject of today's slide show, is located about 75 miles southeast of the Black Hills in South Dakota. It is sometimes referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Number 334, and it is where the Lakota now live. Now, if any of you have ever heard of AIM, the American Indian Movement, or of Russell Means, or Leonard Peltier, or of the standoff at Oglala, then you know Pine Ridge is ground zero for Native issues in the US.So I've been asked to talk a little bit today about my relationship with the Lakota, and that's a very difficult one for me, because, if you haven't noticed from my skin color, I'm white, and that is a huge barrier on a Native reservation. You'll see a lot of people in my photographs today. I've become very close with them, and they've welcomed me like family. They've called me ""brother"" and ""uncle,"" and invited me again and again over five years. But on Pine Ridge, I will always be what is called ""wasichu."" ""Wasichu"" is a Lakota word that means ""non-Indian,"" but another version of this word means ""the one who takes the best meat for himself."" And that's what I want to focus on — the one who takes the best part of the meat. It means ""greedy.""So take a look around this auditorium today. We are at a private school in the American West, sitting in red velvet chairs with money in our pockets. And if we look at our lives, we have indeed taken the best part of the meat. So let's look today at a set of photographs of a people who lost so that we could gain, and know that when you see these people's faces, that these are not just images of the Lakota; they stand for all indigenous people.On this piece of paper is the history the way I learned it from my Lakota friends and family. The following is a time line of treaties made, treaties broken and massacres disguised as battles. I'll begin in 1824. What is known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was created within the War Department, setting an early tone of aggression in our dealings with the Native Americans.1851: The first treaty of Fort Laramie was made, clearly marking the boundaries of the Lakota Nation. According to the treaty, those lands are a sovereign nation. If the boundaries of this treaty had held — and there is a legal basis that they should — then this is what the US would look like today. Ten years later. The Homestead Act, signed by President Lincoln, unleashed a flood of white settlers into Native lands.1863: An uprising of Santee Sioux in Minnesota ends with the hanging of 38 Sioux men, the largest mass execution in US history. The execution was ordered by President Lincoln, only two days after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.1866: The beginning of the Transcontinental Railroad — a new era. We appropriated land for trails and trains to shortcut through the heart of the Lakota Nation. The treaties were out the window. In response, three tribes led by the Lakota chief Red Cloud attacked and defeated the US army, many times over. I want to repeat that part: The Lakota defeat the US army.1868: The second Fort Laramie Treaty clearly guarantees the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation and the Lakotas' ownership of the sacred Black Hills. The government also promises land and hunting rights in the surrounding states. We promise that the Powder River country will henceforth be closed to all whites. The treaty seemed to be a complete victory for Red Cloud and the Sioux. In fact, this is the only war in American history in which the government negotiated a peace by conceding everything demanded by the enemy.1869: The Transcontinental Railroad was completed. It began carrying, among other things, large numbers of hunters, who began the wholesale killing of buffalo, eliminating a source of food, clothing and shelter for the Sioux.1871: The Indian Appropriation Act makes all Indians wards of the federal government. In addition, the military issued orders forbidding western Indians from leaving reservations. All western Indians at that point in time were now prisoners of war. Also in 1871, we ended the time of treaty-making. The problem with treaties is they allow tribes to exist as sovereign nations, and we can't have that. We had plans.1874: General George Custer announced the discovery of gold in Lakota territory, specifically the Black Hills. The news of gold creates a massive influx of white settlers into Lakota Nation. Custer recommends that Congress find a way to end the treaties with the Lakota as soon as possible.1875: The Lakota war begins over the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty. 1876: On July 26th, on its way to attack a Lakota village, Custer's 7th Cavalry was crushed at the battle of Little Big Horn. 1877: The great Lakota warrior and chief named Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson. He was later killed while in custody. 1877 is also the year we found a way to get around the Fort Laramie Treaties. A new agreement was presented to Sioux chiefs and their leading men, under a campaign known as ""Sell or Starve"" — sign the paper, or no food for your tribe. Only 10 percent of the adult male population signed. The Fort Laramie Treaty called for at least three-quarters of the tribe to sign away land. That clause was obviously ignored.1887: The Dawes Act. Communal ownership of reservation lands ends. Reservations are cut up into 160-acre sections, and distributed to individual Indians with the surplus disposed of. Tribes lost millions of acres. The American dream of individual land ownership turned out to be a very clever way to divide the reservation until nothing was left. The move destroyed the reservations, making it easier to further subdivide and to sell with every passing generation. Most of the surplus land and many of the plots within reservation boundaries are now in the hands of white ranchers. Once again, the fat of the land goes to wasichu.1890: A date I believe to be the most important in this slide show. This is the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre. On December 29, US troops surrounded a Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee Creek, and massacred Chief Big Foot and 300 prisoners of war, using a new rapid-fire weapon that fired exploding shells, called a Hotchkiss gun. For this so-called ""battle,"" 20 Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were given to the 7th Cavalry. To this day, this is the most Medals of Honor ever awarded for a single battle. More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.The Wounded Knee Massacre is considered the end of the Indian wars. Whenever I visit the site of the mass grave at Wounded Knee, I see it not just as a grave for the Lakota or for the Sioux, but as a grave for all indigenous peoples. The holy man Black Elk, said, ""I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch, as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. And it was a beautiful dream.""With this event, a new era in Native American history began. Everything can be measured before Wounded Knee and after, because it was in this moment, with the fingers on the triggers of the Hotchkiss guns, that the US government openly declared its position on Native rights. They were tired of treaties. They were tired of sacred hills. They were tired of ghost dances. And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux. So they brought out their cannons. ""You want to be an Indian now?"" they said, finger on the trigger.1900: the US Indian population reached its low point — less than 250,000, compared to an estimated eight million in 1492.Fast-forward. 1980: The longest-running court case in US history, the Sioux Nation versus the United States, was ruled upon by the US Supreme Court. The court determined that when the Sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders, the terms of the second Fort Laramie Treaty had been violated. The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken, and that the initial offering price, plus interest, should be paid to the Sioux Nation. As payment for the Black Hills, the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation. The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry, ""The Black Hills are not for sale.""2010: Statistics about Native population today, more than a century after the massacre at Wounded Knee, reveal the legacy of colonization, forced migration and treaty violations. Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90 percent. The housing office is unable to build new structures, and existing structures are falling apart. Many are homeless, and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to five families. Thirty-nine percent of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity. At least 60 percent of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold. More than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line. The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the US national average. The infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent, and is about three times higher than the US national average. Cervical cancer is five times higher than the US national average. The school dropout rate is up to 70 percent. Teacher turnover is eight times higher than the US national average. Frequently, grandparents are raising their grandchildren because parents, due to alcoholism, domestic violence and general apathy, cannot raise them. Fifty percent of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes. The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old — roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia.The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, ""My god — what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die."" This is how we came to own these United States. This is the legacy of Manifest Destiny. Prisoners are still born into prisoner of war camps, long after the guards are gone. These are the bones left after the best meat has been taken.A long time ago, a series of events was set in motion by a people who look like me, by wasichu, eager to take the land and the water and the gold in the hills. Those events led to a domino effect that has yet to end.As removed as we, the dominant society, may feel from a massacre in 1890, or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago, I still have to ask you the question: How should you feel about the statistics of today? What is the connection between these images of suffering and the history that I just read to you? And how much of this history do you need to own, even? Is any of this your responsibility today? I have been told that there must be something we can do. There must be some call to action. Because for so long, I've been standing on the sidelines, content to be a witness, just taking photographs. Because the solutions seem so far in the past, I needed nothing short of a time machine to access them.The suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix. It's not something everyone can get behind the way they get behind helping Haiti, or ending AIDS, or fighting a famine. The ""fix,"" as it's called, may be much more difficult for the dominant society than, say, a $50 check or a church trip to paint some graffiti-covered houses, or a suburban family donating a box of clothes they don't even want anymore. So where does that leave us? Shrugging our shoulders in the dark?The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties with the Lakota. The call to action I offer today — my TED wish — is this: Honor the treaties. Give back the Black Hills. It's not your business what they do with them.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey
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"This cell phone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the Eastern Congo. It's mined by armed gangs using slaves, child slaves, what the U.N. Security Council calls ""blood minerals,"" then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China. That factory — over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year. One man died after working a 36-hour shift. We all love chocolate. We buy it for our kids. Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children. Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves. Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations. Heparin — a blood thinner, a pharmaceutical product — starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China, because the active ingredient comes from pigs' intestines. Your diamond — you've all heard, probably seen the movie ""Blood Diamond."" This is a mine in Zimbabwe right now. Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth. Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton. It's forced child labor on an institutional scale. And all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in Manila.These places, these origins, represent governance gaps. That's the politest description I have for them. These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin — the global supply chains, which bring us our favorite brand name products. Some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states. Some of them are not states anymore at all. They're failed states. Some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment, promote trade. Either way, they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma. I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a human rights abuse in a global supply chain. But right now, most of the companies involved in these supply chains don't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future, nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product.Now, I didn't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain. We need a reality check. We need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have. This is an independent republic, probably a failed state. It's definitely not a democratic state. And right now, that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us, that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption. Now, that's not a new story. You've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world, even in developed countries. You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop.But take the example of heparin. It's a pharmaceutical product. You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital, probably squeaky clean. The problem is that the active ingredient in there — as I mentioned earlier — comes from pigs. The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs. And their factory in China — which probably is pretty clean — is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs, where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient. So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain. Worse, some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests. This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin, the real ingredient, cost 900 dollars a pound. A no-brainer. The problem was that it killed more people.And so you're asking yourself, ""How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen? How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen?"" And the answer is quite simple: the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities, not pharmaceutical facilities, so they don't audit them. And the USFDA has a jurisdictional problem. This is offshore. They actually do conduct a few investigations overseas — about a dozen a year — maybe 20 in a good year. There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone. In fact, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore, particularly China and India, and we don't have a governance system. We don't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe. We don't have a system to ensure that human rights, basic dignity, are ensured.So at a national level — and we work in about 60 different countries — at a national level we've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil. And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it's supranational. So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball at a national level, have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level. And you can just look at the headlines. Take Copenhagen last year — complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge. Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago — stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago. You can take any one of the major global challenges we've discussed this week and ask yourself, where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions, responses, to those international problems? And the simple answer is they can't. They're national. Their voters are local. They have parochial interests. They can't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good.So, if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level — in this case, in the global supply chain — we have to come up with a different mechanism. We need a different machine. Fortunately, we have some examples. In the 1990s, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. — child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses. And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, ""Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom. I don't know how to prevent that, but I'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response."" So they formed a White House task force, and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain. Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility. They don't own those facilities. They don't employ those workers. They're not legally liable. Everybody else at the table said, ""Folks, that doesn't cut it. You have a custodial duty, a duty of care, to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it, without fear of our safety, or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product."" So they agreed, ""Okay, what we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct. We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control. We'll make it part of the contract."" And that was a stroke of absolute genius, because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract, private power, to deliver public goods.And let's face it, the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law, the local environmental regulations, the local human rights standards. Those factories will probably never see an inspector. If the inspector did come along, it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe. Even if they did their jobs, and they cited those facilities for their violations, the fine would be derisory. But you lose that contract for a major brand name, that's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt. That makes a difference. So what we've been able to do is we've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain, that of the multinational company, and get them to do the right thing, get them to use that power for good, to deliver the key public goods.Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies. They weren't set up to do this. They're set up to make money. But they are extremely efficient organizations. They have resources, and if we can add the will, the commitment, they know how to deliver that product. Now, getting there is not easy. Those supply chains I put up on the screen earlier, they're not there. You need a safe space. You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions. We can do it. The technical solutions are there. The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGOs, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies. If we can put those two together in a safe space, get them to work together, we can deliver public goods right now, or in extremely short supply.This is a radical proposition, and it's crazy to think that if you're a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka — 22, 23, 24 dollars a month — your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract. It's crazy. Multinationals are protecting human rights. I know there's going to be disbelief. You'll say, ""How can we trust them?"" Well, we don't. It's the old arms control phrase: ""Trust, but verify."" So we audit. We take their supply chain, we take all the factory names, we do a random sample, we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities, and then we publish the results. Transparency is absolutely critical to this. You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work. So what we're doing is, we're not only enlisting the multinationals, we're giving them the tools to deliver this public good — respect for human rights — and we're checking. You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me. Go to the website. Look at the audit results. Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way? Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics? That's the way the system works.I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world. I hate the idea that governments have dropped this ball and I can't get used to the idea that somehow we can't get them to do their jobs. I've been at this for 30 years, and in that time I've seen the ability, the commitment, the will of government to do this decline, and I don't see them making a comeback right now. So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure. We're now thinking that, in fact, this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges. Call it network governance. Call it what you will. The private actors, companies and NGOs, are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face. Just look at pandemics — swine flu, bird flu, H1N1. Look at the health systems in so many countries. Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic? No. Could the private sector and NGOs get together and marshal a response? Absolutely. What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action. That's what we're trying to provide.I know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume. ""You want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain. There are thousands of suppliers in there."" It seems too daunting, too dangerous, for any company to take on. But there are companies. We have 4,000 companies who are members. Some of them are very, very large companies. The sporting goods industry, in particular, stepped up to the plate and have done it. The example, the role model, is there. And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address — child labor in cottonseed farms in India — this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India. It seems overwhelming. The numbers just make you want to zone out. But we break it down to some basic realities.And human rights comes down to a very simple proposition: can I give this person their dignity back? Poor people, people whose human rights have been violated — the crux of that is the loss of dignity, the lack of dignity. It starts with just giving people back their dignity. I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi, one of the flashiest, brightest new cities popping up in India right now, and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road, and I asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands. They didn't say money. They said, ""The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist. Please ask them to treat us like human beings."" That's my simple understanding of human rights. That's my simple proposition to you, my simple plea to every decision-maker in this room, everybody out there. We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped. If we don't do it, we're abandoning hope, we're abandoning our essential humanity, and I know that's not a place we want to be, and we don't have to be there. So I appeal to you. Join us, come into that safe space, and let's start to make this happen.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/auret_van_heerden_making_global_labor_fair
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"Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you're faced with a complex problem? Well, I hope to change that in less than three minutes. So, I hope to convince you that complex doesn't always equal complicated. So for me, a well-crafted baguette, fresh out of the oven, is complex, but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated. I'm an ecologist, and I study complexity. I love complexity. And I study that in the natural world, the interconnectedness of species.So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California. And this is what happens to that food web when it's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before. All the grayed-out species disappear. Some are actually on the brink of extinction. And lakes with fish have more mosquitos, even though they eat them. These effects were all unanticipated, and yet we're discovering they're predictable.So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems. First is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you didn't think of before. For example, you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem, or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park. The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system — all the species, all the links — and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with.So let's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the U.S. government. This is a diagram of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It was front page of the New York Times a couple months ago. Instantly ridiculed by the media for being so crazy complicated. And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government. Clearly a complex problem, but is it complicated? Well, when I saw this in the front page of the Times, I thought, ""Great. Finally something I can relate to. I can sink my teeth into this.""So let's do it. So here we go for the first time ever, a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network. The circled node is the one we're trying to influence — popular support for the government. And so now we can look one degrees, two degrees, three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence. Within that sphere, most of those nodes are not actionable, like the harshness of the terrain, and a very small minority are actual military actions. Most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories: active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair, transparent economic development and provisioning of services. I don't know about this, but this is what I can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds.When you see a diagram like this, I don't want you to be afraid. I want you to be excited. I want you to be relieved. Because simple answers may emerge. We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity. So for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity
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"We've got a real problem with math education right now. Basically, no one's very happy. Those learning it think it's disconnected, uninteresting and hard. Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough. Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it. And teachers are also frustrated. Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history. So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world than we ever have had.So what's the problem, why has this chasm opened up, and what can we do to fix it? Well actually, I think the answer is staring us right in the face: Use computers. I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work. So to explain that, let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education. See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians. It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people — modeling and simulation. It's actually very popular. But in education it looks very different — dumbed-down problems, lots of calculating, mostly by hand. Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world, except if you're learning it. And another thing about math: math sometimes looks like math — like in this example here — and sometimes it doesn't — like ""Am I drunk?"" And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world. You wouldn't have expected that a few years back. But now you can find out all about — unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but — all about what happens.So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math? What's the point of teaching people math? And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general? Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject? Well, I think there are about three reasons: technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies, what I call ""everyday living"" — to function in the world today, you've got to be pretty quantitative, much more so than a few years ago: figure out your mortgages, being skeptical of government statistics, those kinds of things — and thirdly, what I would call something like logical mind training, logical thinking. Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically. It's part of human society. It's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that.So let's ask another question. What is math? What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math? Well, I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question. What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here? And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math. People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others. So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem. That's stage two. Once you've done that, then there's the computation step. Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form. And of course, math is very powerful at doing that. And then finally, turn it back to the real world. Did it answer the question? And also verify it — crucial step. Now here's the crazy thing right now. In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand. Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four — conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that.See, crucial point here: math is not equal to calculating. Math is a much broader subject than calculating. Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years. There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand. But in the last few decades that has totally changed. We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers. Calculating was typically the limiting step, and now often it isn't. So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating. But that math liberation didn't get into education yet. See, I think of calculating, in a sense, as the machinery of math. It's the chore. It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and automation allows us to have that machinery. Computers allow us to do that — and this is not a small problem by any means. I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. That's an amazing amount of human endeavor. So we better be damn sure — and by the way, they didn't even have fun doing it, most of them — so we better be damn sure that we know why we're doing that and it has a real purpose.I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that. And I think there are some cases. For example: mental arithmetic. I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. People say, ""Is such and such true?"" And I'll say, ""Hmm, not sure."" I'll think about it roughly. It's still quicker to do that and more practical. So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand. And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number. One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates. See, the thing we're doing right now is we're forcing people to learn mathematics. It's a major subject. I'm not for one minute suggesting that, if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre — they should do that. That's absolutely the right thing, for people to follow their self-interest. I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek. I don't think it's warranted. So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that.So what are the issues people bring up with this? Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first. You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject. So my usual question is, what do you mean by ""basics?"" Basics of what? Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it, or design it for that matter? Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill? I don't think so. I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation. A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things. But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it. So automation allows this separation and also allows — in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths — a democratized way of doing that. It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that.So there's another thing that comes up with basics. People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics. My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this. She enjoys making what she calls ""paper laptops."" (Laughter) So I asked her one day, ""You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these. Why do you think that was?"" And after a second or two, carefully reflecting, she said, ""No paper?"" (Laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool.So another one that comes up is ""Computers dumb math down."" That somehow, if you use a computer, it's all mindless button-pushing, but if you do it by hand, it's all intellectual. This one kind of annoys me, I must say. Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get? I don't think so. And what's worse, what they're learning there isn't even practically useful anymore. Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore. When they're out of education, they do it on a computer. Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual. Now, of course, like any great tool, they can be used completely mindlessly, like turning everything into a multimedia show, like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand, where the computer was the teacher — show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand. This is just nuts. Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway? All backwards.Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate. See, normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations. But you see, when you're using a computer, you can just substitute. You can make it a quartic equation. Make it kind of harder, calculating-wise. Same principles applied — calculations, harder. And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this. They've got hair all over them. They're not just simple, dumbed-down things that we see in school math. And think of the outside world. Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers? I don't think so — quite the opposite. So the problem we've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down, but that we have dumbed-down problems right now. Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding. So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better. I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important. But there's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world. It's called programming.Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand. If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it. So programming is the way I think we should be doing that. So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously. I can't think of any other subject where that's recently been possible. It's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual. But I think we can do both at the same time here. And we open up so many more possibilities. You can do so many more problems. What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before. And experience of harder problems — being able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. We want people who can feel the math instinctively. That's what computers allow us to do.Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum. Traditionally it's been by how difficult it is to calculate, but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts, however hard the calculating. So calculus has traditionally been taught very late. Why is this? Well, it's damn hard doing the calculations, that's the problem. But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group. This was an example I built for my daughter. And very, very simple. We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number. And of course, it turns into a circle. And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration. You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme — and very small sides and a very large number of sides. Very simple example. That's a view of the world that we don't usually give people for many, many years after this. And yet, that's a really important practical view of the world. So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams. In the end, if we test everyone by hand in exams, it's kind of hard to get the curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters.And one of the reasons it's so important — so it's very important to get computers in exams. And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? — real questions that people have in their everyday lives. And you see, this isn't some dumbed-down model here. This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens. How many years of protection do I need? What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth? Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding.So I believe [there is] critical reform we have to do in computer-based math. We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics. This isn't some optional extra. And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook. In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the ""knowledge economy"" to what we might call a ""computational knowledge economy,"" where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is. We can engage so many more students with this, and they can have a better time doing it. And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change. We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math. And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all — bigger disaster. No, what I'm suggesting is that we should leap off, we should increase our velocity so it's high, and we should leap off one side and go the other — of course, having calculated our differential equation very carefully.(Laughter)So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future. Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_math_with_computers
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"Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty. I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living. I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it. Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different. I mean just think of the sheer variety — a baby's face, Berlioz's ""Harold in Italy,"" movies like ""The Wizard of Oz"" or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, ""Der Rosenkavalier,"" a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's ""Starry Night,"" a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy.I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. And we get it not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic. No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding, and you know who I mean: Charles Darwin. Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, ""What is beauty?"" It's in the eye of the beholder. It's whatever moves you personally. Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder. People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease. Beethoven is adored in Japan. Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth. Or just think about American jazz or American movies — they go everywhere. There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values.How can we explain this universality? The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory. I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth. And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.Now, I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. The first of these is natural selection — that's random mutation and selective retention — along with our basic anatomy and physiology — the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff. Natural selection also explains pleasures — sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs.The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently. The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this. It did not evolve for natural survival. In fact, it goes against natural survival. No, the peacock's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. It's quite a familiar story. It's women who actually push history forward. Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. He actually used that word. Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak. I mean, you can't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. It would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover. So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved. This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally — get this — a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.But, someone might argue, that's natural beauty. How about artistic beauty? Isn't that exhaustively cultural? No, I don't think it is. And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it. It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet. Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that. Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago.But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes. The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. They go back about two-and-a-half-million years. These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what are to our eyes an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form. These Acheulian hand axes — they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century — have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed. Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can't have been made for butchering animals. And the plot really thickens when you realize that, unlike other pleistocene tools, the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges. And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery. Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today.So what were these ancient — I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign, but they're at the same time somehow familiar. What were these artifacts for? The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history — tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call ""fitness signals"" — that is to say, displays that are performances like the peacock's tail, except that, unlike hair and feathers, the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted. Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities — intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. You know, it's an old line, but it has been shown to work — ""Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?""(Laughter)Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language. It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact. This object was made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language. Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens — as they were then called, finally — were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by, who knows, telling jokes, storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling. Yes, hairstyling — I insist on that.For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. We find beauty in something done well.So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No, it's deep in our minds. It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty
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"Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment. And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law. And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment. When I reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, I feel young, invincible, eternal. It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself. You can see my fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern. And here is another picture of them. Unfortunately, I cannot show their faces, neither can I disclose their true names, and that's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates, offenders spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes' ride from here — well, like everything in Israel. And I've been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years and by now, they've become a very big part of my life.This story began four years ago. The correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips, and it's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards. So on one of these rides, I talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden. I told the warden that I wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically I wanted to take the kids from here to there. And I told him, ""Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country."" And the warden was quite amused, and he told me he thought that I was a nut and he told me, ""This place is a correction facility. These guys are serious offenders. They are supposed to be locked up. They aren't supposed to be out at large."" And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another. And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen. And so two months later, we found ourselves ""at large"" — myself, 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named Russ, who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project.And in the next few weeks, I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom, a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these — everything you see here is obviously in Israel — as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes, colors, shapes, forms and so on. In spite of all this splendor, the beginning was extremely frustrating. Every small obstacle, every slight uphill, would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up. So we had a lot of this going on. I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties — not because they were physically unfit. But that's one reason why they ended up where they were. And I became increasingly more and more agitated, because I was there not only to be with them, but also to ride and create a team and I didn't know what to do.Now, let me give you an example. We're going downhill in some rocky terrain, and the front tire of Alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here. So he crashes down, and he gets slightly injured, but this does not prevent him from jumping up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently. Then he throws his helmet in the air. His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction. And then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like I've never heard. And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do. I'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students, and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging, violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere. And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations. They happened in places like this, in the Judean Desert, 20 kilometers away from the nearest road. And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's a teenager sitting on a rock, saying, ""I'm not moving from here. Forget it. I've had it."" Well, that's a problem because one way or another, you have to get this guy moving because it's getting dark soon and dangerous.It took me several such incidents to figure out what I was supposed to do. At the beginning, it was a disaster. I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere. That's what they had all their lives. And at some point I found out, when a kid like this gets into a fit, the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid, which is difficult, because what you really want to do is go away. But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him. So what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate. So I would say, ""Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult. Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on."" ""Go away you maniac-psychopath. Why would you bring us to this goddamn place?"" And I would say, ""Relax, Alex. Here's a piece of chocolate."" And Alex would go, ""Arrrrggg!"" Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry — and after the rides also.And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with? He's a 17-year-old. When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and sent him, shipped him to Israel on his own. And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member. And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only, the slums and the state prison, where he spent the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there. And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way. So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience. It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had.I want to say a few words about vision. When I started this program four years ago, I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs. I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind. And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available. It all of a sudden dawned on me, in this project, that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love. Love to the country, to the uphill and the downhill, to all the incredible creatures that surround us — the animals, the plants, the insects — love and respect to other fellow members in your team, in your biking team, and most importantly, love and respect to yourself, which is something that they badly miss.Together with the kids, I also went through a remarkable transformation. Now, I come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology. I used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen. And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened. All you have to do is play with it, change it a little bit, and come up with something that does help, that does work. So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others.(Laughter)(Applause)And one of these principles is focus. Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride. You have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen. So these are words like ""teamwork"" or ""endurance"" or even complicated concepts like ""resource allocation"" or ""perspective,"" a word that they don't understand. You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you. I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows. It literally propels you upwards. That's what perspective is all about. Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before. And that's how they develop self-esteem.Now, let me give you an example of how it works. You stand with your bike at the beginning of February. It's very cold, and you're standing in one of these rainy days, and it's drizzling and cold and chilly, and you're standing in, let's say, Yokneam. And you look up at the sky through a hole in the clouds you see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka — that's where you're supposed to climb now — and you say, ""There's no way that I could possibly get there."" And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat. And you look down at Yokneam; everything is so small and tiny. And you say, ""Hey, Alex. Look at this parking lot where we started. It's that big. I can't believe that I did it."" And that's the point when you start loving yourself.And so we talked about these special words that we teach them. And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference, and these discussions can be extremely inspiring. In one of them, one of the kids once said, ""When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea — and he's talking about this spot here — ""I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother. We walked 120 kilometers until we reached Sudan. This was the first place where we got some water and supplies."" And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life. And he says — because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him — and he says, ""And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel. And only now,"" he says, ""I'm beginning to understand where I am, and I actually like it."" Now I remember, when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background. That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa.And so, perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids. We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors. We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins. And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements — three-, four, five-thousand years old. And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white. And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope.I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday. Here's a picture I took last Tuesday — less than a week ago — and I ride with them tomorrow also. In every one of these rides I always end up standing in one of these incredible locations, taking in this incredible landscape around me, and I feel blessed and fortunate that I'm alive, and that I sense every fiber in my aching body. And I feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago I had the courage to resign my tenured position at NYU and return to my home country where I can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from Ethiopia and Morocco and Russia. And I feel blessed and fortunate that every week, every Tuesday — and actually every Friday also — I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shimon_schocken_s_rides_of_hope
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"I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. I had a really hard time in school. In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school. I ran away. I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali, and there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together, over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business. It was a fairy tale, and then we retired. Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see. It ruined my life — (Laughter) ""The Inconvenient Truth"" and Mr. Gore. I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had. And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities. So here's the world, and here we are in Bali. It's a tiny, little island — 60 miles by 90 miles. It has an intact Hindu culture. Cynthia and I were there. We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual. We decided to give back locally.And here it is: it's called the Green School. I know it doesn't look like a school, but it is something we decided to do, and it is extremely, extremely green. The classrooms have no walls. The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard. The desks are not square. At Green School, the children are smiling — an unusual thing for school, especially for me. And we practice holism. And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world — a whole world — to live on. Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box. The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials. So if this gentleman had had a holistic education, would he be sitting there? Would he have had more possibilities in his life?The classrooms have natural light. They're beautiful. They're bamboo. The breeze passes through them. And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know. These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree. So we basically turned the box into a bubble. And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future. We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren. We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible. These kids did a little graffiti on their desks, and then they signed up for two extra courses. The first one was called sanding and the second one was called re-waxing. But since that happened, they own those desks. They know they can control their world.We're on the grid. We're not proud of it. But an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar. And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world, in a two-and-a-half meter drop on a river. When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night. And you know what these are. There's nowhere to flush. And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water — you're all really smart, just do the math. How many people times how much water. There isn't enough water. These are compost toilets, and nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal. And they work. People use them. People are okay. It's something you should think about doing. Not many things didn't work. The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months. We had to replace them with recyclable plastic. The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms. So we had some good ideas: we took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard.Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden. There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river. I met a father the other day; he looked a little crazed. I said, ""Welcome to Green School."" He said, ""I've been on an airplane for 24 hours."" I asked him, ""Why?"" He said, ""I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane. In August I'm bringing my sons."" This was a great thing. But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths. And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School. It's becoming a community. It's becoming a green model. We had to look at everything. No petrochemicals in the pavement. No pavement. These are volcanic stones laid by hand. There are no sidewalks. The sidewalks are gravel. They flood when it rains, but they're green.This is the school buffalo. He's planning to eat that fence for dinner. All the fences at Green School are green. And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca. They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips. Landscaping. We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms. We dropped them gently in. We made space for these guys who are Bali's last black pigs. And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field.These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture. They know how to plant organic rice, they know how to look after it, they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it. They're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future. This young man is picking organic vegetables. We feed 400 people lunch every day and it's not a normal lunch. There's no gas. Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know. The food is incredible.Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global. And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. The kids are from 25 countries. When I see them together, I know that they're working out how to live in the future. Green School is going into its third year with 160 children. It's a school where you do learn reading — one of my favorites — writing — I was bad at it — arithmetic. But you also learn other things. You learn bamboo building. You practice ancient Balinese arts. This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields. The kids love it. The mothers aren't quite convinced.(Laughter)We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local, what does ""local"" mean? Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese, and this was a really big commitment. And we were right. And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders. The teachers are as diverse as the student body, and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up. A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture. A woman came from Africa with music. And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders. The Green School effect — we don't know what it is. We need someone to come and study it. But what's happening, our learning-different kids — dyslexic — we've renamed them prolexic — are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms. And all the kids are thriving.And how did we do all this? On giant grass. It's bamboo. It comes out of the ground like a train. It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months and three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this. It's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof. When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this. The yellow box was called the administration complex. (Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it ""the heart of school,"" and that changed everything forever. It's a double helix. It has administrators in it and many, many other things.And the problem of building it — when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, ""What's this?"" So we built big models. We had them engineered by the engineers. And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand. It was chaos. And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral to green education. The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it. From the time the foundations were finished, in three months it had roofs and floors. It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful.Is this doable in your community? We believe it is. Green School is a model we built for the world. It's a model we built for Bali. And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build.So, Mr. Gore, thank you. You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future. And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hardy_my_green_school_dream
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"Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. It's a place of myth and legend. It's a place marked on ancient maps as ""here be monsters."" It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep.We are talking about the high seas. The ""high seas"" is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark. We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. And then finally, we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect.So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above — that area in the darker blue. To me, as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. This is indeed the true heart of the planet. Some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws — for example, shipping — provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simply goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore. As a result, we have garbage patches the size of twice-Texas. It's unbelievable. We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case.So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. Conditional access: You can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify.What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing in the high seas. For a group of very dedicated individuals — scientists, conservationists, photographers and states — were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. And how did we do that? Well, as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed.So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. Instead of ""go anywhere, do anything you want,"" we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. In 2009, when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected. This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection. But what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed, to create a new regime. So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true, blue perspective for this beautiful planet. Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas.Today, we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm, and five showed up in the U.K. just recently.But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. Thus, the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction — but the vast majority is beyond — to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area.Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now: the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. It's actually a bay. It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims. So anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. But unfortunately, CCAMLR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime.Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area — potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. So, in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round.Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. Many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. That is, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. It's protecting five World Heritage sites. Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these World Heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half-the-World Heritage Convention. But what we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific Gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch.So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide. We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative. We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. They fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year. So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. So stay tuned for further information. What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators; it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found. And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. We have the support of governments now behind us. We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hotspots. At the same time we're saying, ""Yes, we need more. We need to move forward.""But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space — and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. We can also tag and track fishing vessels. Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. But not all the vessels have those to date. It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know — someone needs to know — where you are and what you're doing.So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. But we need to think broad-scale. We need to think globally. We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. We need to get the new paradigm of precaution and respect. At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table, if you will, to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. And third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management. Our species are ocean-basin-wide. Many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide. We need to better understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. And in order to do that, you also need ocean-basin management regimes. That is, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so they're like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization.So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote.So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas: one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kristina_gjerde_making_law_on_the_high_seas
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"So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby. And that's not to say I ever went on to become a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist. Sorry, TED. But I did go on to be a reasonably astute, arguably world-class worrier. One of my girlfriends in graduate school, Marie, said, ""Kim, I figured it out. It's not that you're more neurotic than everyone else; it's just that you're more honest about how neurotic you are.""So in the spirit of full disclosure, I brought some pictures to share. Awwww.(Laughter)I'll just say: July.(Laughter)Zip!(Laughter)For safety.(Laughter)Water wings — an inch of water. And then, finally, all suited up for the 90-minute drive to Copper Mountain. So you can get kind of a feel for this. So my baby, Vander, is eight years old now. And, despite being cursed with my athletic inability, he plays soccer. He's interested in playing football. He wants to learn how to ride a unicycle.So why would I worry? Because this is what I do. This is what I teach. It's what I study. It's what I treat. And I know that kids get concussed every year. In fact, more than four million people sustain a concussion every year, and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms. And so when kids sustain a concussion, we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung, but what is it that we're really talking about? Let's take a look.[Concussive Force]""Starsky and Hutch""? Arguably, yes. So, a car accident. Forty miles an hour into a fixed barrier: 35 Gs. A heavyweight boxer punches you straight in the face: 58 Gs.(Music)In case you missed it, we'll look again. So look to the right-hand side of the screen.(Music)What would you say? How many Gs? Close. Seventy-two? Would it be crazy to know: 103 Gs? The average concussive impact is 95 Gs. Now, when the kid on the right doesn't get up, we know they've had a concussion.But how about the kid on the left, or the athlete that leaves the field of play? How do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion? How do we know that legislation that would require they be pulled from play, cleared for return to play, applies to them? The definition of concussion doesn't actually require a loss of consciousness. It requires only a change in consciousness, and that can be any one or a number of symptoms, including feeling foggy, feeling dizzy, hearing a ringing in your ear, being more impulsive or hostile than usual.So given all of that and given how darn neurotic I am, how do I get any sleep at all? Because I know our brains are resilient. They're designed to recover from an injury. If — God forbid — any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion, most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks. But kids are more vulnerable to brain injury. In fact, high-school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers, and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline. After that first injury, their risk for second injury is exponentially greater. From there, their risk for a third injury, greater still, and so on.And here's the really alarming part: We don't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries. You guys may be familiar with this research that's coming out of the NFL. In a nutshell, this research suggests that, among retired NFL players with three or more career concussions, the incidence of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population. So you've all seen that — New York Times, you've seen it. What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said, ""Isn't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys?"" ""Isn't it weird that my 47-year-old husband is forever losing the car?"" ""Isn't it weird that my 48-year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car, from the driveway?"" I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child. So it's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around someday.(Laughter)So, how do we guarantee the safety of our kids? How can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids? Let me tell you what I've come up with.(Laughter)If only. My little boy's right there, and he's like, ""She's not kidding. She's totally not kidding."" So in all seriousness: Should my kid play football? Should your kid play football? I don't know. But I do know there are three things you can do. The first: study up. You have to be familiar with the issues we're talking about today. There are some great resources out there.The CDC has a program, HEADS UP. It's at CDC.gov. HEADS UP is specific to concussion in kids. The second is a resource I'm personally really proud of. We've just rolled this out in the last couple months — CO Kids With Brain Injury. This is a great resource for student athletes, teachers, parents, professionals, athletic and coaching staff. It's a great place to start if you have questions.The second thing is: speak up. Just two weeks ago, a bill introduced by Senator Kefalas that would have required athletes, kids under 18, to wear a helmet when they're riding their bike, died in committee. It died, in large part, because it lacked constituent buy-in; it lacked stakeholder traction. Now, I'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should or shouldn't support, but I am going to tell you that, if it matters to you, your legislators need to know that.Speak up also with coaching staff. Ask about what kind of protective equipment is available. What's the budget for protective equipment? How old it is? Maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear.Which brings us to: suit up. Wear a helmet. The only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening. Recently, one of my graduate students, Tom, said, ""Kim, I've decided to wear a bike helmet on the way to class."" And Tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the g-force of impact by half. Now, I thought it was because I have this totally compelling helmet crusade, this epiphany of Tom's. As it turns out, it occurred to Tom that a $20 helmet is a good way to protect a $100,000 graduate education.(Laughter)So ... Should Vander play football? I can't say no, but I can guarantee that every time he leaves the house, that kid's wearing a helmet — like, to the car, or at school. So whether athlete, scholar, overprotected kid, neurotic mom, or otherwise, here's my baby, Vander, reminding you to mind your matter.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kim_gorgens_protecting_the_brain_against_concussion
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"I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking — my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.This is not a story of a nameless survivor of war, and nameless refugees, whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our TV with tattered clothes, dirty face, scared eyes. This is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war, who we do not know their hopes, their dreams, their accomplishments, their families, their beliefs, their values. This is my story. I was that girl. I am another image and vision of another survivor of war. I am that refugee, and I am that girl. You see, I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it. We only talk about one side of it. But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it.I grew up with the colors of war — the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war — the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. ""War,"" a friend of mine said, ""is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity.""I have since left Iraq and founded a group called Women for Women International that ends up working with women survivors of wars. In my travels and in my work, from Congo to Afghanistan, from Sudan to Rwanda, I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. You know, there is a fear of dying, and do not believe any movie character where the hero is not afraid. It is very scary to go through that feeling of ""I am about to die"" or ""I could die in this explosion."" But there's also the fear of losing loved ones, and I think that's even worse. It's too painful. You don't want to think about it. But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear — as Samia, a Bosnian woman, once told me, who survived the four-years besiege of Sarajevo; she said, ""The fear of losing the 'I' in me, the fear of losing the 'I' in me."" That's what my mother in Iraq used to tell me. It's like dying from inside-out. A Palestinian woman once told me, ""It is not about the fear of one death,"" she said, ""sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day,"" as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets. She said, ""But it's not fair, because there is only one life, and there should only be one death.""We have been only seeing one side of war. We have only been discussing and consumed with high-level preoccupations over troop levels, drawdown timelines, surges and sting operations, when we should be examining the details of where the social fabric has been most torn, where the community has improvised and survived and shown acts of resilience and amazing courage just to keep life going. We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics, tactics, weapons, dollars and casualties. This is the language of sterility.How casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic. This is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities. Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children. Oh. Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians. Seventy-five percent of them are women and children. How interesting. Oh, half a million women in Rwanda get raped in 100 days. Or, as we speak now, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women are getting raped and mutilated. How interesting. These just become numbers that we refer to. The front of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets, while the human conduct of the orchestra of media relations in the event that this particular drone attack hits a villager instead of an extremist. It is a chess game. You learn to play an international relations school on your way out and up to national and international leadership. Checkmate.We are missing a completely other side of wars. We are missing my mother's story, who made sure with every siren, with every raid, with every cut off-of electricity, she played puppet shows for my brothers and I, so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions. We are missing the story of Fareeda, a music teacher, a piano teacher, in Sarajevo, who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in Sarajevo and walked to that school, despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her, and kept the piano, the violin, the cello playing the whole duration of the war, with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats. That was her fight. That was her resistance. We are missing the story of Nehia, a Palestinian woman in Gaza who, the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year's war, she left out of home, collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have, in case there is no cease-fire the day after. We are missing the stories of Violet, who, despite surviving genocide in the church massacre, she kept on going on, burying bodies, cleaning homes, cleaning the streets. We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars. Do you know — do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going? And the ones who are keeping that life are women.There are two sides of war. There is a side that fights, and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open. There is a side that is focused on winning battles, and there is a side that is focused on winning life. There is a side that leads the front-line discussion, and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion. There is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting, and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs. There is a side that is led by men, and there is a side that is led by women. And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace, we must understand war and peace from both sides. We must have a full picture of what that means.In order for us to understand what actually peace means, we need to understand, as one Sudanese woman once told me, ""Peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again."" She grew up in Sudan, in Southern Sudan, for 20 years of war, where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees. Many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers, as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers. So that woman walked for 20 years, so she would not be kidnapped again. And only when there was some sort of peace, her toenails grew back again. We need to understand peace from a toenail's perspective.We need to understand that we cannot actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table. I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping, and the group of people who are mostly — though not exclusively — who are keeping life going in the midst of war, are not included in the negotiating table. And I do argue that women lead the back-line discussion, but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion. The doctors who are not fighting, the artists, the students, the men who refuse to pick up the guns, they are, too, excluded from the negotiating tables. There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace, building of democracy, sustainable economies, any kind of stabilities, if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table. Not one, but 50 percent.There is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we don't start investing in women and girls. Did you know that one year of the world's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women? If we just reverse that distribution of funds, perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world. And last, but not least, we need to invest in peace and women, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because it is the right thing to do, for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today, but it is for the future.A Congolese woman, who was telling me about how her children saw their father killed in front of them and saw her raped in front of them and mutilated in front of them, and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling killed in front of them, how they're doing okay right now. She got into Women for Women International's program. She got a support network. She learned about her rights. We taught her vocational and business skills. We helped her get a job. She was earning 450 dollars. She was doing okay. She was sending them to school. Have a new home. She said, ""But what I worry about the most is not any of that. I worry that my children have hate in their hearts, and when they want to grow up, they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother."" We need to invest in women, because that's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future. That mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do.Are there good news? Of course, there are good news. There are lots of good news. To start with, these women that I told you about are dancing and singing every single day, and if they can, who are we not to dance? That girl that I told you about ended up starting Women for Women International Group that impacted one million people, sent 80 million dollars, and I started this from zero, nothing, nada, [unclear].(Laughter)They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it. Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion.Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet, says, ""Out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' no longer makes any sense."" I humbly add — humbly add — that out beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there. Let us make this field a much bigger place. Let us all meet in that field.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zainab_salbi
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"So I'm going to talk about work; specifically, why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have. But let's sort of start at the beginning.So, we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort. And they expect these people who work for them to do great work — I would hope, at least. At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work — hopefully great work. And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work. So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that — most people have to go to an office every day.And so these companies, they build offices. They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that.However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done? You'll find out that people don't say what businesses think they would say. If you ask people the question: Where do you need to go when you need to get something done? Typically, you get three different kinds of answers. One is kind of a place or a location or a room. Another one is a moving object, and a third is a time.So here are some examples. I've been asking people this question for about 10 years: ""Where do you go when you really need to get something done?"" I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck, the kitchen. I'll hear things like an extra room in the house, the basement, the coffee shop, the library. And then you'll hear things like the train, a plane, a car — so, the commute. And then you'll hear people say, ""Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends."" You almost never hear someone say, ""The office."" But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office.What is that about?(Laughter)Why is that? Why is that happening? And what you find out is, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people — this is what happens: People go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of ""work moments"" — that's what happens at the office. You don't have a work day anymore. You have work moments. It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do ... Then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you a question, and before you know it, it's 5 p.m., and you look back on the day, and you realize that you didn't get anything done. We've all been through this. We probably went through it yesterday or the day before, or the day before that. You look back on your day, and you're like, ""I got nothing done today. I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer. I used the software they told me to use. I went to these meetings I was asked to go to. I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff. But I didn't actually do anything. I just did tasks. I didn't actually get meaningful work done.""And what you find is that, especially with creative people — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? How about seven hours? Six? Five? Four? When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office? Two hours? One, maybe? Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office. And this is why people choose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, in the car or in the train, because there are no distractions.Now there are different kinds of distractions, but not the really bad distractions, which I'll talk about in a minute. And this whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep. I think that sleep and work are very closely related — not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events. Sleep is about sleep phases, or stages — some people call them different things. There are five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones. If you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones — if someone bumps you in bed, or there's a sound, or whatever happens — you don't just pick up where you left off.If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. So you have to go back a few phases and start again. And what ends up happening — you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, ""I didn't sleep very well. I did the sleep thing — I went to bed, I laid down, but I didn't really sleep."" People say you go ""to"" sleep, but you don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep; it takes a while. You've got to go through phases and stuff, and if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well. So does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they're interrupted all night? I don't think anyone would say yes. Why do we expect people to work well if they're being interrupted all day at the office? How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they go to the office and are interrupted? That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense, to me.So what are the interruptions that happen at the office but not at other places? Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. If you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions. They'll sometimes also say, ""If I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?"" which is ridiculous, but that's one of the excuses that managers give. And I'm one of these managers. I understand. I know how this goes. We all have to improve on this sort of thing. But oftentimes they'll cite distractions: ""I can't let someone work at home. They'll watch TV, or do this other thing."" It turns out those aren't the things that are distracting, Because those are voluntary distractions. You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV, when you want to turn something on, or when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk. At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary. So let's go through a couple of those.Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and other websites, and in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work. Some of you may work at places where you can't get to certain sites. I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here? You can't go to a website at work, and that's the problem? That's why people aren't getting work done, because they're on Facebook and Twitter? That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy. Today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks. No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there? Those aren't the real problems in the office.The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings. Those are the real problems in the modern office today. And this is why things don't get done at work, it's because of the M&Ms. Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work, like at home, in the car, on a plane, late at night, or early in the morning, you don't find managers and meetings. You find a lot of other distractions, but not managers and meetings. So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere, but you do find at the office. And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people. That's pretty much what managers are for. They're for interrupting people. They don't really do the work, so they make sure everyone else is doing work, which is an interruption. We have lots of managers in the world now, and a lot of people in the world, and a lot of interruptions by these managers. They have to check in: ""Hey, how's it going? Show me what's up."" This sort of thing. They keep interrupting you at the wrong time, while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do, they tend to interrupt you. That's kind of bad.But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings. And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work.(Laughter)We all know this to be true, and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees. It doesn't work that way. The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people — to say, ""Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. I don't care what you're doing, you've got to stop doing it, so you can have this meeting."" I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop? What if they're thinking about something important, or doing important work? All of a sudden you tell them they have to stop doing that to do something else. So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later.But meetings also procreate. So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting, which leads to another meeting. There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization. Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person. If there are 10 people, it's a 10-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes. But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook; you can't. You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. And so we tend to fill these times up when things should go really quickly.So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially at offices. These things don't exist outside of the office. So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation. What can managers do — enlightened managers, hopefully — what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, ""When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office."" Because the offices are well-equipped; everything is there for them to do the work. But they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that? I have three suggestions to share with you. I have about three minutes, so that'll fit perfectly.We've all heard of the Casual Friday thing. I don't know if people still do that. But how about ""No-talk Thursdays?""(Laughter)Pick one Thursday once a month, and cut it in half, just the afternoon — I'll make it easy for you. So just the afternoon, one Thursday. First Thursday of the month, just the afternoon, nobody in the office can talk to each other. Just silence, that's it. And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. This is when people actually get stuff done, is when no one's bothering them or interrupting them. Giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work. It's better than a computer, better than a new monitor, better than new software, or whatever people typically use. Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable. If you try that, I think you'll agree, and hopefully you can do it more often. So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. That's something that you'll find will really, really work.Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff — tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. Now some people might say email is really distracting, I.M. is really distracting, and these other things are really distracting, but they're distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing. You can quit the email app; you can't quit your boss. You can quit I.M.; you can't hide your manager. You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. Because work, like sleep, happens in phases. So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. There are very, very few things that are that urgent, that need to happen, that need to be answered right this second. So if you're a manager, start encouraging people to use more things like I.M. and email and other things that someone can put away and then get back to you on their own schedule.And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. Just cancel that next meeting.(Laughter)Today's Friday, usually people have meetings on Monday. Just don't have it. I don't mean move it; I mean just erase it from memory, it's gone. And you'll find out that everything will be just fine. All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday, just forget about them, and things will be fine. People will have a more open morning, they can actually think. You'll find out all these things you thought you had to do, you don't actually have to do.So those are just three quick suggestions I wanted to give you guys to think about. I hope that some of these ideas were at least provocative enough for managers and bosses and business owners and organizers and people who are in charge of other people, to think about laying off a little bit, and giving people more time to get work done. I think it'll all pay off in the end.So, thanks for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work
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"(Applause)Thank you very much. I have a few pictures, and I'll talk a little bit about how I'm able to do what I do. All these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material, stuff that was headed to the mulcher, the landfill, the burn pile. It was all just gone. This is the first house I built. This double front door here with the three-light transom, that was headed to the landfill. Have a little turret there. And then these buttons on the corbels here — right there — those are hickory nuts. And these buttons there — those are chicken eggs.(Laughter)Of course, first you have breakfast, and then you fill the shell full of Bondo and paint it and nail it up, and you have an architectural button in just a fraction of the time.This is a look at the inside. You can see the three-light transom there with the eyebrow windows. Certainly an architectural antique headed to the landfill — even the lockset is probably worth 200 dollars. Everything in the kitchen was salvaged. There's a 1952 O'Keefe & Merritt stove, if you like to cook — cool stove. This is going up into the turret. I got that staircase for 20 dollars, including delivery to my lot.(Laughter)Then, looking up in the turret, you see there are bulges and pokes and sags and so forth. Well, if that ruins your life, well, then, you shouldn't live there.(Laughter)This is a laundry chute. And this right here is a shoe last — those are those cast-iron things you see at antique shops. So I had one of those, so I made some low-tech gadgetry, where you just stomp on the shoe last, and then the door flies open and you throw your laundry down. And then if you're smart enough, it goes on a basket on top of the washer. If not, it goes into the toilet.(Laughter)This is a bathtub I made, made out of scrap two-by-four. Started with the rim, and then glued and nailed it up into a flat, corbeled it up and flipped it over, then did the two profiles on this side. It's a two-person tub. After all, it's not just a question of hygiene, but there's a possibility of recreation as well.(Laughter)Then, this faucet here is just a piece of Osage orange. It looks a little phallic, but after all, it's a bathroom.(Laughter)This is a house based on a Budweiser can. It doesn't look like a can of beer, but the design take-offs are absolutely unmistakable: the barley hops design worked up into the eaves, then the dentil work comes directly off the can's red, white, blue and silver. Then, these corbels going down underneath the eaves are that little design that comes off the can. I just put a can on a copier and kept enlarging it until I got the size I want. Then, on the can it says, ""This is the famous Budweiser beer, we know of no other beer, blah, blah, blah."" So we changed that and put, ""This is the famous Budweiser house. We don't know of any other house ..."" and so forth and so on. This is a deadbolt. It's a fence from a 1930s shaper, which is a very angry woodworking machine. And they gave me the fence, but they didn't give me the shaper, so we made a deadbolt out of it. That'll keep bull elephants out, I promise.(Laughter)And sure enough, we've had no problems with bull elephants.(Laughter)The shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer. We've got bubbles going up there, then suds at the top with lumpy tiles. Where do you get lumpy tiles? Well, of course, you don't. But I get a lot of toilets, and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer, and then you have lumpy tiles. And then the faucet is a beer tap.(Laughter)Then, this panel of glass is the same panel of glass that occurs in every middle-class front door in America. We're getting tired of it. It's kind of clichéd now. If you put it in the front door, your design fails. So don't put it in the front door; put it somewhere else. It's a pretty panel of glass. But if you put it in the front door, people say, ""Oh, you're trying to be like those guys, and you didn't make it."" So don't put it there. Then, another bathroom upstairs. This light up here is the same light that occurs in every middle-class foyer in America. Don't put it in the foyer. Put it in the shower, or in the closet, but not in the foyer. Then, somebody gave me a bidet, so it got a bidet.(Laughter)This little house here, those branches there are made out of Bois d'arc or Osage orange. These pictures will keep scrolling as I talk a little bit.In order to do what I do, you have to understand what causes waste in the building industry. Our housing has become a commodity, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But the first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA. Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? What it means is, for every perception we have, it needs to tally with the one like it before, or we don't have continuity, and we become a little bit disoriented. So I can show you an object you've never seen before. Oh, that's a cell phone. But you've never seen this one before. What you're doing is sizing up the pattern of structural features, and then you go through your databanks: Cell phone. Oh! That's a cell phone. If I took a bite out of it, you'd go, ""Wait a second.(Laughter)""That's not a cell phone. That's one of those new chocolate cell phones.""(Laughter)You'd have to start a new category, right between cell phones and chocolate.(Laughter)That's how we process information.You translate that to the building industry. If we have a wall of windowpanes and one pane is cracked, we go, ""Oh, dear. That's cracked. Let's repair it. Let's take it out and throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in."" Because that's what you do with a cracked pane. Never mind that it doesn't affect our lives at all. It only rattles that expected pattern and unity of structural features. However, if we took a small hammer, and we added cracks to all the other windows —(Laughter)then we have a pattern. Because Gestalt psychology emphasizes recognition of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern. We'll go, ""Ooh, that's nice."" So, that serves me every day. Repetition creates pattern. If I have 100 of these, 100 of those, it makes no difference what these and those are. If I can repeat anything, I have the possibility of a pattern, from hickory nuts and chicken eggs, shards of glass, branches. It doesn't make any difference. That causes a lot of waste in the building industry.The second cause is, Friedrich Nietzsche, along about 1885, wrote a book titled ""The Birth of Tragedy."" And in there, he said cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives: on the one hand, we have an Apollonian perspective, which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect. On the other end of the spectrum, we have a Dionysian perspective, which is more given to the passions and intuition, tolerant of organic texture and human gesture. So the way the Apollonian personality takes a picture or hangs a picture is, they'll get out a transit and a laser level and a micrometer. ""OK, honey. A thousandth of an inch to the left. That's where we want the picture. Right. Perfect!"" Predicated on plumb level, square and centered. The Dionysian personality takes the picture and goes:(Laughter)That's the difference. I feature blemish. I feature organic process. Dead center John Dewey. Apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste. If something isn't perfect, if it doesn't line up with that premeditated model? Dumpster. ""Oops. Scratch. Dumpster."" ""Oops"" this, ""oops"" that. Landfill, landfill, landfill.The third thing is arguably — The Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism, then got a little jump start along about the French Revolution. By the middle of the 19th century, it's in full flower. And we have dumaflaches and gizmos and contraptions that will do anything that we, up to that point, had to do by hand. So now we have standardized materials. Well, trees don't grow two inches by four inches, eight, ten and twelve feet tall.(Laughter)We create mountains of waste. And they're doing a pretty good job there in the forest, working all the byproduct of their industry — with OSB and particle board and so forth and so on — but it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption. And that's what's happening. And so if something isn't standard, ""Oops, dumpster."" ""Oops"" this. ""Oops, warped."" If you buy a two-by-four and it's not straight, you can take it back. ""Oh, I'm so sorry, sir. We'll get you a straight one."" Well, I feature all those warped things because repetition creates pattern, and it's from a Dionysian perspective.The fourth thing is labor is disproportionately more expensive than materials. Well, that's just a myth. And there's a story: Jim Tulles, one of the guys I trained — I said, ""Jim, it's time now. I got a job for you as a foreman on a framing crew. Time for you to go."" ""Dan, I just don't think I'm ready."" ""Jim, now it's time. You're the down — oh!"" So we hired on. And he was out there with a tape measure, going through the trash heap, looking for header material, or the board that goes over a door, thinking he'd impress his boss — that's how we taught him to do it. The superintendent walked up and said, ""What are you doing?"" ""Oh, just looking for header material,"" waiting for that kudos. He said, ""I'm not paying you to go through the trash. Get back to work."" And Jim had the wherewithal to say, ""You know, if you were paying me 300 dollars an hour, I can see how you might say that. But right now, I'm saving you five dollars a minute. Do the math.""(Laughter)""Good call, Tulles. From now on, you guys hit this pile first."" And the irony is that he wasn't very good at math.(Laughter)But once in a while, you get access to the control room, and then you can kind of mess with the dials. And that's what happened there.The fifth thing is that maybe, after 2,500 years, Plato is still having his way with us in his notion of perfect forms. He said that we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want, and we force environmental resources to accommodate that. So we all have in our head the perfect house, the American dream, which is a house, the dream house. The problem is we can't afford it. So we have the American dream look-alike, which is a mobile home. Now there's a blight on the planet.(Laughter)It's a chattel mortgage, just like furniture, just like a car. You write the check, and instantly, it depreciates 30 percent. After a year, you can't get insurance on everything you have in it, only on 70 percent. Wired with 14-Gauge wire, typically. Nothing wrong with that, unless you ask it to do what 12-Gauge wire's supposed to do, and that's what happens. It out-gasses formaldehyde — so much so that there is a federal law in place to warn new mobile home buyers of the formaldehyde atmosphere danger. Are we just being numbingly stupid? The walls are this thick. The whole thing has the structural value of corn.(Laughter)""So ... I thought Palm Harbor Village was over there."" ""No, no. We had a wind last night. It's gone now.""(Laughter)Then when they degrade, what do you do with them?Now, all that — that Apollonian, Platonic model — is what the building industry is predicated on, and there are a number of things that exacerbate that. One is that all the professionals, all the tradesmen, vendors, inspectors, engineers, architects all think like this. And then it works its way back to the consumer, who demands the same model. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can't get out of it. Then here come the marketeers and the advertisers. ""Woo. Woo-hoo."" We buy stuff we didn't know we needed. All we have to do is look at what one company did with carbonated prune juice. How disgusting.(Laughter)But you know what they did? They hooked a metaphor into it and said, ""I drink Dr. Pepper ..."" And pretty soon, we're swilling that stuff by the lake-ful, by the billions of gallons. It doesn't even have real prunes! Doesn't even keep you regular.(Laughter)My oh my, that makes it worse. And we get sucked into that faster than anything.Then, a man named Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book titled ""Being and Nothingness."" It's a pretty quick read. You can snap through it in maybe —(Laughter)maybe two years, if you read eight hours a day. In there, he talked about the divided self. He said human beings act differently when they know they're alone than when they know somebody else is around. So if I'm eating spaghetti, and I know I'm alone, I can eat like a backhoe. I can wipe my mouth on my sleeve, napkin on the table, chew with my mouth open, make little noises, scratch wherever I want.(Laughter)But as soon as you walk in, I go, ""Oops! Lil' spaghetti sauce there."" Napkin in my lap, half-bites, chew with my mouth closed, no scratching. Now, what I'm doing is fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life. I feel that expectation, and so I accommodate it, and I'm living my life according to what you expect me to do. That happens in the building industry as well. That's why all subdivisions look the same. Sometimes, we even have these formalized cultural expectations. I'll bet all your shoes match. Sure enough, we all buy into that ...(Laughter)And with gated communities, we have a formalized expectation, with a homeowners' association. Sometimes those guys are Nazis, my oh my. That exacerbates and continues this model.The last thing is gregariousness. Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions, because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with. You see this in junior high a lot. Those kids, they'll work all summer long — kill themselves — so that they can afford one pair of designer jeans. So along about September, they can stride in and go, ""I'm important today. See? Don't touch my designer jeans! I see you don't have designer jeans. You're not one of the beautiful — See, I'm one of the beautiful people. See my jeans?"" Right there is reason enough to have uniforms. And so that happens in the building industry as well.We have confused Maslow's hierarchy of needs, just a little bit. On the bottom tier, we have basic needs: shelter, clothing, food, water, mating and so forth. Second: security. Third: relationships. Fourth: status, self-esteem — that is, vanity — and we're taking vanity and shoving it down here. And so we end up with vain decisions, and we can't even afford our mortgage. We can't afford to eat anything except beans;that is, our housing has become a commodity. And it takes a little bit of nerve to dive into those primal, terrifying parts of ourselves and make our own decisions and not make our housing a commodity, but make it something that bubbles up from seminal sources. That takes a little bit of nerve, and, darn it, once in a while, you fail. But that's okay. If failure destroys you, then you can't do this. I fail all the time, every day, and I've had some whopping failures, I promise — big, public, humiliating, embarrassing failures.Everybody points and laughs, and they say, ""He tried it a fifth time, and it still didn't work! What a moron!"" Early on, contractors come by and say, ""Dan, you're a cute little bunny, but you know, this just isn't going to work. What don't you do this? Why don't you do that?"" And your instinct is to say, ""Well, why don't you suck an egg?""(Laughter)But you don't say that, because they're the guys you're targeting.And so what we've done — and this isn't just in housing; it's in clothing and food and our transportation needs, our energy — we sprawl just a little bit. And when I get a little bit of press, I hear from people all over the world. And we may have invented excess, but the problem of waste is worldwide. We're in trouble. And I don't wear ammo belts crisscrossing my chest and a red bandana. But we're clearly in trouble. And what we need to do is reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves and make some decisions and say, ""You know, I think I would like to put CDs across the wall there. What do you think, honey?"" If it doesn't work, take it down. What we need to do is reconnect with who we really are, and that's thrilling indeed.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_phillips_creative_houses_from_reclaimed_stuff
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"Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system. First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet. Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. I must admit, I used to be one of them. I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day.What I discovered was this is not true. I began to look into this stuff on the Internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature — like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. (Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown. The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s. And most folks don't even know they exist. Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way. And let me tell you, corn is in everything. And don't even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS.(Laughter)Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow. They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too. Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets.So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? This is what I found out. I discovered that there's a movement for a better way. Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. (Applause) Thank you. And that way I can have a greater impact on the world. This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system. Since I'm home-schooled, I went to go hear him speak one day. This man, this ""lunatic farmer,"" doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds. And so for that, he's called crazy by the system.I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life. Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really? With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital. (Applause) Now I know definitely which one I would choose. I want you to know that there are farms out there — like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee — whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from. I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community popping up. I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. I try to share this everywhere I go.Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal. He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes — you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front. My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time.So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/birke_baehr_what_s_wrong_with_our_food_system
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"Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels. To the first son, he left half the camels; to the second son, he left a third of the camels; and to the youngest son, he left a ninth of the camels. The three sons got into a negotiation — 17 doesn't divide by two. It doesn't divide by three. It doesn't divide by nine. Brotherly tempers started to get strained. Finally, in desperation, they went and they consulted a wise old woman. The wise old woman thought about their problem for a long time, and finally she came back and said, ""Well, I don't know if I can help you, but at least, if you want, you can have my camel."" So then, they had 18 camels. The first son took his half — half of 18 is nine. The second son took his third — a third of 18 is six. The youngest son took his ninth — a ninth of 18 is two. You get 17. They had one camel left over. They gave it back to the wise old woman.(Laughter)Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in. They start off like 17 camels, no way to resolve it. Somehow, what we need to do is step back from those situations, like that wise old woman, look at the situation through fresh eyes and come up with an 18th camel. Finding that 18th camel in the world's conflicts has been my life passion.I basically see humanity a bit like those three brothers. We're all one family. We know that scientifically, thanks to the communications revolution, all the tribes on the planet — all 15,000 tribes — are in touch with each other. And it's a big family reunion. And yet, like many family reunions, it's not all peace and light. There's a lot of conflict, and the question is: How do we deal with our differences? How do we deal with our deepest differences, given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction? That's the question.As I've spent the last better part of three decades, almost four, traveling the world, trying to work, getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela — some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet — I've been asking myself that question. And I think I've found, in some ways, what is the secret to peace. It's actually surprisingly simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. It's not even new. It may be one of our most ancient human heritages. The secret to peace is us. It's us who act as a surrounding community around any conflict, who can play a constructive role.Let me give you just a story, an example. About 20 years ago, I was in South Africa, working with the parties in that conflict, and I had an extra month, so I spent some time living with several groups of San Bushmen. I was curious about them, about the way in which they resolve conflict. Because, after all, within living memory, they were hunters and gatherers, living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story. And all the men have these poison arrows that they use for hunting — absolutely fatal. So how do they deal with their differences? Well, what I learned is, whenever tempers rise in those communities, someone goes and hides the poison arrows out in the bush, and then everyone sits around in a circle like this, and they sit and they talk and they talk. It may take two days, three days, four days, but they don't rest until they find a resolution or better yet — a reconciliation. And if tempers are still too high, then they send someone off to visit some relatives, as a cooling-off period.Well, that system is, I think, probably the system that kept us alive to this point, given our human tendencies. That system, I call ""the third side."" Because if you think about it, normally when we think of conflict, when we describe it, there's always two sides — it's Arabs versus Israelis, labor versus management, husband versus wife, Republicans versus Democrats. But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors. And we can play an incredibly constructive role.Perhaps the most fundamental way in which the third side can help is to remind the parties of what's really at stake. For the sake of the kids, for the sake of the family, for the sake of the community, for the sake of the future, let's stop fighting for a moment and start talking. Because, the thing is, when we're involved in conflict, it's very easy to lose perspective. It's very easy to react. Human beings — we're reaction machines. And as the saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.(Laughter)And so the third side reminds us of that. The third side helps us go to the balcony, which is a metaphor for a place of perspective, where we can keep our eyes on the prize.Let me tell you a little story from my own negotiating experience. Some years ago, I was involved as a facilitator in some very tough talks between the leaders of Russia and the leaders of Chechnya. There was a war going on, as you know. And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place. And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said, ""You should stay right here in your seats, because you're going to be on trial for war crimes."" And then he turned to me and said, ""You're an American. Look at what you Americans are doing in Puerto Rico."" And my mind started racing, ""Puerto Rico? What do I know about Puerto Rico?"" I started reacting.(Laughter)But then, I tried to remember to go to the balcony. And then when he paused and everyone looked at me for a response, from a balcony perspective, I was able to thank him for his remarks and say, ""I appreciate your criticism of my country and I take it as a sign that we're among friends and can speak candidly to one another.""(Laughter)""And what we're here to do is not to talk about Puerto Rico or the past. We're here to see if we can figure out a way to stop the suffering and the bloodshed in Chechnya."" The conversation got back on track. That's the role of the third side, to help the parties go to the balcony.Now let me take you, for a moment, to what's widely regarded as the world's most difficult conflict, or the most impossible conflict, the Middle East. Question is: where's the third side there? How could we possibly go to the balcony? Now, I don't pretend to have an answer to the Middle East conflict, but I think I've got a first step — literally, a first step — something that any one of us could do as third-siders. Let me just ask you one question first. How many of you in the last years have ever found yourself worrying about the Middle East and wondering what anyone could do? Just out of curiosity, how many of you? OK, so the great majority of us. And here, it's so far away. Why do we pay so much attention to this conflict? Is it the number of deaths? There are a hundred times more people who die in a conflict in Africa than in the Middle East. No, it's because of the story, because we feel personally involved in that story. Whether we're Christians, Muslims or Jews, religious or non-religious, we feel we have a personal stake in it.Stories matter; as an anthropologist, I know that. Stories are what we use to transmit knowledge. They give meaning to our lives. That's what we tell here at TED, we tell stories. Stories are the key. And so my question is — yes, let's try and resolve the politics there in the Middle East, but let's also take a look at the story. Let's try to get at the root of what it's all about. Let's see if we can apply the third side to it. What would that mean? What is the story there?Now, as anthropologists, we know that every culture has an origin story. What's the origin story of the Middle East? In a phrase, it's: Four thousand years ago, a man and his family walked across the Middle East, and the world has never been the same since. That man, of course, was Abraham. And what he stood for was unity, the unity of the family; he's the father of us all. But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was. His basic message was unity too, the interconnectedness of it all, the unity of it all. And his basic value was respect, was kindness toward strangers. That's what he's known for, his hospitality. So in that sense, he's the symbolic third side of the Middle East. He's the one who reminds us that we're all part of a greater whole. Now, think about that for a moment.Today, we face the scourge of terrorism. What is terrorism? Terrorism is basically taking an innocent stranger and treating them as an enemy whom you kill in order to create fear. What's the opposite of terrorism? It's taking an innocent stranger and treating them as a friend whom you welcome into your home, in order to sow and create understanding or respect, or love.So what if, then, you took the story of Abraham, which is a third-side story, what if that could be — because Abraham stands for hospitality — what if that could be an antidote to terrorism? What if that could be a vaccine against religious intolerance? How would you bring that story to life? Now, it's not enough just to tell a story. That's powerful, but people need to experience the story. They need to be able to live the story. How would you do that? And that was my thinking of how would you do that. And that's what comes to the first step here. Because the simple way to do that is: you go for a walk. You go for a walk in the footsteps of Abraham. You retrace the footsteps of Abraham. Because walking has a real power. You know, as an anthropologist, walking is what made us human. It's funny — when you walk, you walk side-by-side, in the same common direction. Now if I were to come to you face-to-face and come this close to you, you would feel threatened. But if I walk shoulder-to-shoulder, even touching shoulders, it's no problem. Who fights while they walk? That's why in negotiations, often, when things get tough, people go for walks in the woods.So the idea came to me of, what about inspiring a path, a route — think the Silk Route, think the Appalachian Trail — that followed in the footsteps of Abraham? People said, ""That's crazy. You can't. You can't retrace the footsteps of Abraham — it's too insecure, you've got to cross all these borders, it goes across 10 different countries in the Middle East, because it unites them all."" And so we studied the idea at Harvard. We did our due diligence. And then a few years ago, a group of us, about 25 of us from 10 different countries, decided to see if we could retrace the footsteps of Abraham, going from his initial birthplace in the city of Urfa in Southern Turkey, Northern Mesopotamia. And we then took a bus and took some walks and went to Harran, where, in the Bible, he sets off on his journey. Then we crossed the border into Syria, went to Aleppo, which, turns out, is named after Abraham. We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham. We then came to Northern Jordan, to Jerusalem — which is all about Abraham — to Bethlehem, and finally, to the place where he's buried, in Hebron. So effectively, we went from womb to tomb. We showed it could be done. It was an amazing journey.Let me ask you a question. How many of you have had the experience of being in a strange neighborhood or strange land, and a total stranger, perfect stranger, comes up to you and shows you some kindness — maybe invites you into their home, gives you a drink, gives you a coffee, gives you a meal? How many of you have ever had that experience? That's the essence of the Abraham Path. That's what you discover as you go into these villages in the Middle East where you expect hostility, and you get the most amazing hospitality, all associated with Abraham: ""In the name of Father Ibrahim, let me offer you some food."" So what we discovered is that Abraham is not just a figure out of a book for those people; he's alive, he's a living presence.And to make a long story short, in the last couple of years now, thousands of people have begun to walk parts of the path of Abraham in the Middle East, enjoying the hospitality of the people there. They've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Syria. It's an amazing experience. Men, women, young people, old people — more women than men, actually, interestingly.For those who can't walk, who are unable to get there right now, people started to organize walks in cities, in their own communities. In Cincinnati, for instance, they organized a walk from a church to a mosque to a synagogue and all had an Abrahamic meal together. It was Abraham Path Day. In São Paulo, Brazil, it's become an annual event for thousands of people to run in a virtual Abraham Path Run, uniting the different communities. The media love it; they really adore it. They lavish attention on it because it's visual and it spreads the idea, this idea of Abrahamic hospitality, of kindness towards strangers. And just a couple weeks ago, there was an NPR story on it. Last month, there was a piece in the Manchester Guardian about it, two whole pages. And they quoted a villager who said, ""This walk connects us to the world."" He said, ""It was like a light that went on in our lives — it brought us hope."" And so that's what it's about.But it's not just about psychology; it's about economics. Because as people walk, they spend money. And this woman right here, Um Ahmad, is a woman who lives on the path in Northern Jordan. She's desperately poor. She's partially blind, her husband can't work, she's got seven kids. But what she can do is cook. And so she's begun to cook for some groups of walkers who come through the village and have a meal in her home. They sit on the floor — she doesn't even have a tablecloth. She makes the most delicious food, that's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside. And so more and more walkers have come, and lately she's begun to earn an income to support her family. And so she told our team there, she said, ""You have made me visible in a village where people were once ashamed to look at me."" That's the potential of the Abraham Path.There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East, across the path. The potential is basically to change the game. And to change the game, you have to change the frame, the way we see things — to change the frame from hostility to hospitality, from terrorism to tourism. And in that sense, the Abraham Path is a game-changer.Let me just show you one thing. I have a little acorn here that I picked up while I was walking on the path earlier this year. Now, the acorn is associated with the oak tree, of course — grows into an oak tree, which is associated with Abraham. The path right now is like an acorn; it's still in its early phase. What would the oak tree look like? When I think back to my childhood, a good part of which I spent, after being born here in Chicago, I spent in Europe. If you had been in the ruins of, say, London in 1945, or Berlin, and you had said, ""Sixty years from now, this is going to be the most peaceful, prosperous part of the planet,"" people would have thought you were certifiably insane. But they did it, thanks to a common identity, Europe, and a common economy. So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East? Why not, thanks to a common identity, which is the story of Abraham, and thanks to a common economy that would be based, in good part, on tourism?So let me conclude, then, by saying that in the last 35 years, as I've worked in some of the most dangerous, difficult and intractable conflicts around the planet, I have yet to see one conflict that I felt could not be transformed. It's not easy, of course. But it's possible. It was done in South Africa. It was done in Northern Ireland. It could be done anywhere. It simply depends on us. It depends on us taking the third side. So let me invite you to consider taking the third side, even as a very small step. We're about to take a break in a moment. Just go up to someone who's from a different culture, a different country, a different ethnicity — some difference — and engage them in a conversation. Listen to them. That's a third-side act. That's walking Abraham's Path. After a TED Talk, why not a TED Walk?(Laughter)So let me just leave you with three things. One is, the secret to peace is the third side. The third side is us. Each of us, with a single step, can take the world, can bring the world a step closer to peace. There's an old African proverb that goes: ""When spiderwebs unite, they can halt even the lion."" If we're able to unite our third-side webs of peace, we can even halt the lion of war.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_ury
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"Okay, I'm going to show you again something about our diets. And I would like to know what the audience is, and so who of you ever ate insects? That's quite a lot. (Laughter) But still, you're not representing the overall population of the Earth. (Laughter) Because there's 80 percent out there that really eats insects. But this is quite good.Why not eat insects? Well first, what are insects? Insects are animals that walk around on six legs. And here you see just a selection. There's six million species of insects on this planet, six million species. There's a few hundreds of mammals — six million species of insects. In fact, if we count all the individual organisms, we would come at much larger numbers. In fact, of all animals on Earth, of all animal species, 80 percent walks on six legs. But if we would count all the individuals, and we take an average weight of them, it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on Earth. That means that in terms of biomass, insects are more abundant than we are, and we're not on a planet of men, but we're on a planet of insects. Insects are not only there in nature, but they also are involved in our economy, usually without us knowing.There was an estimation, a conservative estimation, a couple of years ago that the U.S. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year. It's a number — very large — a contribution to the economy of the United States for free. And so I looked up what the economy was paying for the war in Iraq in the same year. It was 80 billion U.S. dollars. Well we know that that was not a cheap war. So insects, just for free, contribute to the economy of the United States with about the same order of magnitude, just for free, without everyone knowing. And not only in the States, but in any country, in any economy.What do they do? They remove dung, they pollinate our crops. A third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants. They control pests, and they're food for animals. They're at the start of food chains. Small animals eat insects. Even larger animals eat insects. But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals, still larger animals. And at the end of the food chain, we are eating them as well. There's quite a lot of people that are eating insects. And here you see me in a small, provincial town in China, Lijiang — about two million inhabitants. If you go out for dinner, like in a fish restaurant, where you can select which fish you want to eat, you can select which insects you would like to eat. And they prepare it in a wonderful way. And here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars, locusts, bee pupae — delicacies. And you can eat something new everyday. There's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe. That's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we're eating, like a cow or a pig or a sheep. More than 1,000 species — an enormous variety. And now you may think, okay, in this provincial town in China they're doing that, but not us.Well we've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally, but I can tell you that every one of you is eating insects, without any exception. You're eating at least 500 grams per year. What are you eating? Tomato soup, peanut butter, chocolate, noodles — any processed food that you're eating contains insects, because insects are here all around us, and when they're out there in nature they're also in our crops. Some fruits get some insect damage. Those are the fruits, if they're tomato, that go to the tomato soup. If they don't have any damage, they go to the grocery. And that's your view of a tomato. But there's tomatoes that end up in a soup, and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency, there can be all kinds of things in there, no problem. In fact, why would we put these balls in the soup, there's meat in there anyway? (Laughter) In fact, all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of. So anything is a good protein source already.Now you may say, ""Okay, so we're eating 500 grams just by accident."" We're even doing this on purpose. In a lot of food items that we have — I have only two items here on the slide — pink cookies or surimi sticks or, if you like, Campari — a lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye. The surimi sticks [of] crabmeat, or is being sold as crab meat, is white fish that's being dyed with cochineal. Cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti. It's being produced in large amounts, 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the Canary Islands in Peru, and it's big business. One gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros. One gram of gold is 30 euros. So it's a very precious thing that we're using to dye our foods.Now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me, for everyone on this Earth. The human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially. Where, at the moment, we have something between six and seven billion people, it will grow to about nine billion in 2050. That means that we have a lot more mouths to feed, and this is something that worries more and more people. There was an FAO conference last October that was completely devoted to this. How are we going to feed this world? And if you look at the figures up there, it says that we have a third more mouths to feed, but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent. And that's especially because this world population is increasing, and it's increasing, not only in numbers, but we're also getting wealthier, and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat. And meat, in fact, is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production.Our diet consists, [in] some part, of animal proteins, and at the moment, most of us here get it from livestock, from fish, from game. And we eat quite a lot of it. In the developed world it's on average 80 kilograms per person per year, which goes up to 120 in the United States and a bit lower in some other countries, but on average 80 kilograms per person per year. In the developing world it's much lower. It's 25 kilograms per person per year. But it's increasing enormously. In China in the last 20 years, it increased from 20 to 50, and it's still increasing. So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average, and a third of the world population is living in China and in India, we're having an enormous demand on meat. And of course, we are not there to say that's only for us, it's not for them. They have the same share that we have.Now to start with, I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world. We could do with much, much less — and I know, I've been a vegetarian for a long time, and you can easily do without anything. You'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway. But then there's a lot of problems that come with meat production, and we're being faced with that more and more often. The first problem that we're facing is human health. Pigs are quite like us. They're even models in medicine, and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human. That means that pigs also share diseases with us. And a pig disease, a pig virus, and a human virus can both proliferate, and because of their kind of reproduction, they can combine and produce a new virus. This has happened in the Netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak. You get a new disease that can be deadly. We eat insects — they're so distantly related from us that this doesn't happen. So that's one point for insects.(Laughter)And there's the conversion factor. You take 10 kilograms of feed, you can get one kilogram of beef, but you can get nine kilograms of locust meat. So if you would be an entrepreneur, what would you do? With 10 kilograms of input, you can get either one or nine kg. of output. So far we're taking the one, or up to five kilograms of output. We're not taking the bonus yet. We're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet. So that's two points for insects.(Laughter)And there's the environment. If we take 10 kilograms of food — (Laughter) and it results in one kilogram of beef, the other nine kilograms are waste, and a lot of that is manure. If you produce insects, you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce. So less waste. Furthermore, per kilogram of manure, you have much, much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure. So you have less waste, and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung. So that's three points for insects.(Laughter)Now there's a big ""if,"" of course, and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality. Well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein, or fat, or vitamins, it's very good. In fact, it's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment. And even in terms of calories, it is very good. One kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs, or six Big Macs. So that's four points for insects.(Laughter)I can go on, and I could make many more points for insects, but time doesn't allow this. So the question is, why not eat insects? I gave you at least four arguments in favor. We'll have to. Even if you don't like it, you'll have to get used to this because at the moment, 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock. That's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding, but it's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported. We can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests, but there's a limitation very soon. And if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent, we're not going to make it that way. We could much better change from meat, from beef, to insects. And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects, so we are just a minority — in a country like the U.K., the USA, the Netherlands, anywhere. On the left-hand side, you see a market in Laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night. On the right-hand side you see a grasshopper. So people there are eating them, not because they're hungry, but because they think it's a delicacy. It's just very good food. You can vary enormously. It has many benefits.In fact, we have delicacy that's very much like this grasshopper: shrimps, a delicacy being sold at a high price. Who wouldn't like to eat a shrimp? There are a few people who don't like shrimp, but shrimp, or crabs, or crayfish, are very closely related. They are delicacies. In fact, a locust is a ""shrimp"" of the land, and it would make very good into our diet. So why are we not eating insects yet? Well that's just a matter of mindset. We're not used to it, and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us. That's why we're changing the perception of insects. And I'm working very hard with my colleague, Arnold van Huis, in telling people what insects are, what magnificent things they are, what magnificent jobs they do in nature. And in fact, without insects, we would not be here in this room, because if the insects die out, we will soon die out as well. If we die out, the insects will continue very happily.(Laughter)So we have to get used to the idea of eating insects. And some might think, well they're not yet available. Well they are. There are entrepreneurs in the Netherlands that produce them, and one of them is here in the audience, Marian Peeters, who's in the picture. I predict that later this year, you'll get them in the supermarkets — not visible, but as animal protein in the food. And maybe by 2020, you'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you're going to eat. And they're being made in the most wonderful ways. A Dutch chocolate maker. (Music) (Applause) So there's even a lot of design to it.(Laughter)Well in the Netherlands, we have an innovative Minister of Agriculture, and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry. And when she got all the Ministers of Agriculture of the E.U. over to the Hague recently, she went to a high-class restaurant, and they ate insects all together. It's not something that is a hobby of mine. It's really taken off the ground. So why not eat insects? You should try it yourself. A couple of years ago, we had 1,750 people all together in a square in Wageningen town, and they ate insects at the same moment, and this was still big, big news. I think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects, because it's just a normal way of doing.So you can try it yourself today, and I would say, enjoy. And I'm going to show to Bruno some first tries, and he can have the first bite.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Look at them first. Look at them first.Marcel Dicke: It's all protein.BG: That's exactly the same [one] you saw in the video actually. And it looks delicious. They just make it [with] nuts or something.MD: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects
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"I'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey, actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis. As a child, I had two passions. One was a passion for rodents. I had all kinds of rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, squirrels. You name it, I bred it, and I sold them to pet shops. (Laughter) I also had a passion for Africa. Growing up in a multicultural environment, we had African students in the house, and I learned about their stories, so different backgrounds, dependency on imported know-how, goods, services, exuberant cultural diversity. Africa was truly fascinating for me.I became an industrial engineer, engineer in product development, and I focused on appropriate detection technologies, actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries. I started working in the industry, but I wasn't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear, extracting and manufacturing mode. I quit my job to focus on the real world problem: landmines. We're talking '95 now. Princess Diana is announcing on TV that landmines form a structural barrier to any development, which is really true. As long as these devices are there, or there is suspicion of landmines, you can't really enter into the land. Actually, there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they're needed to produce, which is mainly in the developing world. We chose rats.Why would you choose rats? Because, aren't they vermin? Well, actually rats are, in contrary to what most people think about them, rats are highly sociable creatures. And actually, our product — what you see here. There's a target somewhere here. You see an operator, a trained African with his rats in front who actually are left and right. There, the animal finds a mine. It scratches on the soil. And the animal comes back for a food reward. Very, very simple. Very sustainable in this environment. Here, the animal gets its food reward. And that's how it works. Very, very simple.Now why would you use rats? Rats have been used since the '50s last century, in all kinds of experiments. Rats have more genetic material allocated to olfaction than any other mammal species. They're extremely sensitive to smell. Moreover, they have the mechanisms to map all these smells and to communicate about it. Now how do we communicate with rats? Well don't talk rat, but we have a clicker, a standard method for animal training, which you see there. A clicker, which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors. First of all, we associate the click sound with a food reward, which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe. Once the animal knows click, food, click, food, click, food — so click is food — we bring it in a cage with a hole, and actually the animal learns to stick the nose in the hole under which a target scent is placed, and to do that for five seconds — five seconds, which is long for a rat. Once the animal knows this, we make the task a bit more difficult. It learns how to find the target smell in a cage with several holes, up to 10 holes.Then the animal learns to walk on a leash in the open and find targets. In the next step, animals learn to find real mines in real minefields. They are tested and accredited according to International Mine Action Standards, just like dogs have to pass a test. This consists of 400 square meters. There's a number of mines placed blindly, and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets. If the animal does that, it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field — just like dogs, by the way. Maybe one slight difference: we can train rats at a fifth of the price of training the mining dog.This is our team in Mozambique: one Tanzanian trainer, who transfers the skills to these three Mozambican fellows. And you should see the pride in the eyes of these people. They have a skill, which makes them much less dependent on foreign aid. Moreover, this small team together with, of course, you need the heavy vehicles and the manual de-miners to follow-up. But with this small investment in a rat capacity, we have demonstrated in Mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal — two dollars per square meter, we do it at $1.18, and we can still bring that price down. Question of scale. If you can bring in more rats, we can actually make the output even bigger. We have a demonstration site in Mozambique. Eleven African governments have seen that they can become less dependent by using this technology. They have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the Great Lakes region, and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines.But let me bring you to a very different problem. And there's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine, but worldwide last year, almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection. Especially in Africa where T.B. and HIV are strongly linked, there is a huge common problem. Microscopy, the standard WHO procedure, reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability. In Tanzania — the numbers don't lie — 45 percent of people — T.B. patients — get diagnosed with T.B. before they die. It means that, if you have T.B., you have more chance that you won't be detected, but will just die from T.B. secondary infections and so on. And if, however, you are detected very early, diagnosed early, treatment can start, and even in HIV-positives, it makes sense. You can actually cure T.B., even in HIV-positives.So in our common language, Dutch, the name for T.B. is ""tering,"" which, etymologically, refers to the smell of tar. Already the old Chinese and the Greek, Hippocrates, have actually published, documented, that T.B. can be diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding from patients. So what we did is we collected some samples — just as a way of testing — from hospitals, trained rats on them and see if this works, and wonder, well, we can reach 89 percent sensitivity, 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row. This is how it works, and really, this is a generic technology. We're talking now explosives, tuberculosis, but can you imagine, you can actually put anything under there.So how does it work? You have a cassette with 10 samples. You put these 10 samples at once in the cage. An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent, so it goes extremely fast. Here it's already at the third sample. This is a positive sample. It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward. And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive, which are negative. Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only. A cage like this — (Applause) A cage like this — provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats — a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 samples. Can you imagine the potential offspring applications — environmental detection of pollutants in soils, customs applications, detection of illicit goods in containers and so on.But let's stick first to tuberculosis. I just want to briefly highlight, the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in Dar es Salaam on a population of 500,000 people, where 15,000 reported to get a test done. Microscopy for 1,800 patients. And by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back, we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent. Throughout last year, we've been — depending on which intervals you take — we've been consistently increasing case detection rates in five hospitals in Dar es Salaam between 30 and 40 percent. So this is really considerable. Knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people, healthy people, per year, you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives. At least our hero rats have saved lots of lives.The way forward for us is now to standardize this technology. And there are simple things like, for instance, we have a small laser in the sniffer hole where the animal has to stick for five seconds. So, to standardize this. Also, to standardize the pellets, the food rewards, and to semi-automate this in order to replicate this on a much larger scale and affect the lives of many more people. To conclude, there are also other applications at the horizon. Here is a first prototype of our camera rat, which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims after earthquake and so on. This is in a prototype stage. We don't have a working system here yet.To conclude, I would actually like to say, you may think this is about rats, these projects, but in the end it is about people. It is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult, expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks, and doing that with a local resource, plenty available. So something completely different is to keep on challenging your perception about the resources surrounding you, whether they are environmental, technological, animal, or human. And to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable world.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bart_weetjens_how_i_taught_rats_to_sniff_out_land_mines
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"Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world. For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it. That's a lot. I want to take something rather humble to discuss. I found this in the farmers' market today, and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later, you're very welcome to. The humble potato — and I've spent a long time, 25 years, preparing these. And it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime. First of all, it's planted, and that takes energy. It grows and is nurtured. It's then harvested. It's then distributed, and distribution is a massive issue. It's then sold and bought, and it's then delivered to me. I basically take it, prepare it, and then people consume it — hopefully they enjoy it. The last stage is basically waste, and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it. There are different types of waste. There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy; and there's a waste of waste. And every business I've been working on over the past five years, I'm trying to lower each one of these elements.Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like. Basically a restaurant just like any other. This is the restaurant, Acorn House. Front and back. So let me run you through a few ideas. Floor: sustainable, recyclable. Chairs: recycled and recyclable. Tables: Forestry Commission. This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood. This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom — she didn't like sitting on it, so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale — reusing, a job that was pretty good. I hate waste, especially walls. If they're not working, put a shelf on it, which I did, and that shows all the customers my products. The whole business is run on sustainable energy. This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs. Paint is all low-volume chemical, which is very important when you're working in the room all the time. I was experimenting with these — I don't know if you can see it — but there's a work surface there. And that's a plastic polymer. And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature. But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers. Will they outlive me? They probably might. Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine. It actually looks better than a brand new one — so looking good there. Now reusing is vital. And we filter our own water. We put them in bottles, refrigerate them, and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again. Here's a great little example. If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire, which has been turned inside out and sewn up. It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great.This is the kitchen, which is in the same room. I basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and volume of food that they wanted to consume. Rather than me putting a dish down, they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted. Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters. It serves 220 people a day. We generate quite a lot of waste. This is the waste room. You can't get rid of waste. But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it. In here, I have produce and boxes that are unavoidable. I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator — turns food into an inner material, which I can store and then compost later.I compost it in this garden. All of the soil you can see there is basically my food, which is generated by the restaurant, and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things. Three compost bins — go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week — really good, makes fantastic compost. A couple of wormeries in there too. And actually one of the wormeries was a big wormery. I had a lot of worms in it. And I tried taking the dried food waste, putting it to the worms, going, ""There you go, dinner."" It was like vegetable jerky, and killed all of them. I don't know how many worms [were] in there, but I've got some heavy karma coming, I tell you. (Laughter) What you're seeing here is a water filtration system. This takes the water out of the restaurant, runs it through these stone beds — this is going to be mint in there — and I sort of water the garden with it. And I ultimately want to recycle that, put it back into the loos, maybe wash hands with it, I don't know.So, water is a very important aspect. I started meditating on that and created a restaurant called Waterhouse. If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great. I managed to do it. This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House — same chairs, same tables. They're all English and a little bit more sustainable. But this is an electrical restaurant. The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen. And it's run on hydroelectricity, so I've gone from air to water. Now it's important to understand that this room is cooled by water, heated by water, filters its own water, and it's powered by water. It literally is Waterhouse. The air handling system inside it — I got rid of air-conditioning because I thought there was too much consumption going on there. This is basically air-handling. I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside, pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism, it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof, and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant, cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be. And this is an English willow air diffuser, and that's softly moving that air current through the room. Very advanced, no air-conditioning — I love it. In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant, there is hundreds of meters of coil piping. This takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange. I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it. (Laughter) And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat — it's off-grid; it generates all its own power. He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic.There's no accident in names of these restaurants. Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water; and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities. I've got water and wood. I'm just about to do fire. I've got metal and earth to come. So you've got to watch your space for that. Okay. So this is my next project. Five weeks old, it's my baby, and it's hurting real bad. The People's Supermarket. So basically, the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what I was doing anyway. What I needed to do was get food out to a broader spectrum of people. So people — i.e., perhaps, more working-class — or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative. This is a social enterprise, not-for-profit cooperative supermarket. It really is about the social disconnect between food, communities in urban settings and their relationship to rural growers — connecting communities in London to rural growers. Really important. So I'm committing to potatoes; I'm committing to milk; I'm committing to leeks and broccoli — all very important stuff. I've kept the tiles; I've kept the floors; I've kept the trunking; I've got in some recycled fridges; I've got some recycled tills; I've got some recycled trolleys. I mean, the whole thing is is super-sustainable. In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world. That's zero food waste. And no one's doing that just yet. In fact, Sainsbury's, if you're watching, let's have a go. Try it on. I'm going to get there before you.So nature doesn't create waste doesn't create waste as such. Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle with waste being the end of the beginning, and that's been something that's been nurturing me for some time, and it's an important statement to understand. If we don't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food, think about the sustainable nature of it, then we may fail. But, I wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we're more responsible. Environmentally conscious businesses are doable. They're here. You can see I've done three so far; I've got a few more to go. The idea is embryonic. I think it's important. I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse and recycle — right at the end there — recycling is the last point I want to make; but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's — then I think we're going to be on our way. So these three are not perfect — they're ideas. I think that there are many problems to come, but with help, I'm sure I'm going to find solutions. And I hope you all take part.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_potts_dawson_a_vision_for_sustainable_restaurants
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"It sure used to be a lot easier to be from Iceland, because until a couple of years ago, people knew hardly anything about us, and I could basically come out here and say only good things about us. But in the last couple of years we've become infamous for a couple of things. First, of course, the economic meltdown. It actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on eBay. (Laughter) Ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve. Then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends, including President Obama. By the way, the pronunciation is ""Eyjafjallajokull."" None of your media got it right.(Laughter)But I'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly. I'm here to tell you the story of Audur Capital, which is a financial firm founded by me and Kristin — who you see in the picture — in the spring of 2007, just over a year before the economic collapse hit. Why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm? Well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone. And I'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country. But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems.(Applause)So we decided, a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this wasn't sustainable, to found a financial services firm based on our values, and we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance. Raised quite a few eyebrows in Iceland. We weren't known as the typical ""women"" women in Iceland up until then. So it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then. And we got a great group of people to join us — principled people with great skills, and investors with a vision and values to match ours. And together we got through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients. And although I want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that — and also there's a factor of luck and timing — we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values.So let me share with you our values. We believe in risk awareness. What does that mean? We believe that you should always understand the risks that you're taking, and we will not invest in things we don't understand. Not a complicated thing. But in 2007, at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures, it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market. We also believe in straight-talking, telling it as it is, using simple language that people understand, telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides, and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter, like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the Icelandic financial sector that already we had months before the collapse hit us. And, although we do work in the financial sector, where Excel is king, we believe in emotional capital. And we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence. It is actually people that make money and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets.(Applause)Last, but not least, we believe in profit with principles. We care how we make our profit. So while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers, we are willing to do it with a long-term view, and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter. So we like to see profits, plus positive social and environmental benefits, when we invest.But it wasn't just about the values, although we are convinced that they matter. It was also about a business opportunity. It's the female trend, and it's the sustainability trend, that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come. The whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men; it is actually about women being different from men, bringing different values and different ways to the table. So what do you get? You get better decision-making, and you get less herd behavior, and both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results.But one has to wonder, now that we've had this financial sector collapse upon us in Iceland — and by the way, Europe looks pretty bad right now, and many would say that you in America are heading for some more trouble as well. Now that we've had all that happen, and we have all this data out there telling us that it's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables, will we see business and finance change? Will government change?Well I'll give you my straight talk about this. I have days that I believe, but I have days that I'm full of doubt. Have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us? (Applause) Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity — to do the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. So I guess the world is insane, because I see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again, hoping that this time it's not going to collapse upon us. I want to see more revolutionary thinking, and I remain hopeful. Like TED, I believe in people. And I know that consumers are becoming more conscious, and they are going to start voting with their wallets, and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside, if they don't do it from the inside.But I'm more of the revolutionary, and I should be; I'm from Iceland. We have a long history of strong, courageous, independent women, ever since the Viking age. And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society, I was seven — it happened to be my mother's birthday — October 24, 1975. Women in Iceland took the day off. From work or from home, they took the day off, and nothing worked in Iceland. (Laughter) They marched into the center of Reykjavik, and they put women's issues onto the agenda. And some say this was the start of a global movement. For me it was the start of a long journey, but I decided that day to matter. Five years later, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president — first female to become head of state, single mom, a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed. And at one of the campaign sessions, she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she couldn't become president — she was a woman, and even half a woman. That night she won the election, because she came back — not just because of his crappy behavior — but she came back and said, ""Well, I'm actually not going to breastfeed the Icelandic nation; I'm going to lead it.""(Applause)So I've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who I am and where I am today. But in spite of that, I went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman. Started in corporate America, and I was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual, that women and men would have just the same opportunities. But I've come to conclude lately that it isn't like that. We are not the same, and it's great. Because of our differences, we create and sustain life. So we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge.The final thought I want to leave with you is that I'm fed up with this tyranny of either/or choices in life — either it's men or it's women. We need to start embracing the beauty of balance. So let's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there, and let's start thinking about doing good business. That's how we change the world. That's the only sustainable future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/halla_tomasdottir
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"I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating — no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger — and definitely no fear; that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects. I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the ""man box."" See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted, and we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. They're 11 and 12. Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. There was a period of time when my wife — her name is Tammie — and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. (Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. It didn't matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. Daddy's got you. That's all that's important.Now Kendall on the other hand — and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her — he'd come to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, ""Why are you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what's wrong. Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you. Why are you crying?"" And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, ""Just go in your room. Just go on, go on in your room. Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a —"" what? (Audience: Man.) Like a man. And he's five years old. And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, ""My God, what's wrong with me? What am I doing? Why would I do this?"" And I think back. I think back to my father.There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. We lived in New York City, as I said. We lived in the Bronx at the time, and the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. And the limousine empties out. My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine, and no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. He didn't want cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground — something I just can't even imagine. The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me, and at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying.I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, ""How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?"" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad; I'd be mad; I'd be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me — the boy said to me, ""It would destroy me."" And I said to myself, ""God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?""(Applause)It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city. At this time we're living in the Bronx, and in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old — younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, ""What is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys?"" And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn't on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude, man. He was cool. He was fine. That's what the sisters said, ""He was fine."" He was having sex. We all looked up to him.So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something — just playing around, doing something — I don't know what. He looks out his window; he calls me upstairs; he said, ""Hey Anthony."" They called me Anthony growing up as a kid. ""Hey Anthony, come on upstairs."" Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, ""Do you want some?"" Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, ""Do you want some?"" meant one of two things: sex or drugs — and we weren't doing drugs. Now my box, my card, my man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don't talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. There ain't no first time. (Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short, I just simply said to Johnny, ""Yes."" He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She's 16 years old. She's nude. She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher-functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I'm petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything, and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do; I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room, and lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there's a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. And they asked me how was it, and I say to them, ""It was good,"" and I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught. But I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear, getting outside the man box, totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her — how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman. (Applause)I remember asking a nine-year-old boy, I asked a nine-year-old boy, ""What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box?"" He said to me, ""I would be free.""Thank you folks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tony_porter_a_call_to_men
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"Now I'm going to give you a story. It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey. Let me begin with my parents. I'm a product of this visionary mother and father. Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s — '50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India. They belonged to boys. They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married. My family, in my city, and almost in the country, was unique. We were four of us, not one, and fortunately no boys. We were four girls and no boys. And my parents were part of a landed property family. My father defied his own grandfather, almost to the point of disinheritance, because he decided to educate all four of us. He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education. As I've said, when we're born, we don't choose our parents, and when we go to school, we don't choose our school. Children don't choose a school. They just get the school which parents choose for them. So this is the foundation time which I got. I grew up like this, and so did my other three sisters. And my father used to say at that time, ""I'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world."" I don't know if he really meant [that], but it happened. I'm the only one who's left in India. One is a British, another is an American and the third is a Canadian. So we are four of us in four corners of the world.And since I said they're my role models, I followed two things which my father and mother gave me. One, they said, ""Life is on an incline. You either go up, or you come down."" And the second thing, which has stayed with me, which became my philosophy of life, which made all the difference, is: 100 things happen in your life, good or bad. Out of 100, 90 are your creation. They're good. They're your creation. Enjoy it. If they're bad, they're your creation. Learn from it. Ten are nature-sent over which you can't do a thing. It's like a death of a relative, or a cyclone, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. You can't do a thing about it. You've got to just respond to the situation. But that response comes out of those 90 points. Since I'm a product of this philosophy, of 90/10, and secondly, ""life on an incline,"" that's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got. I'm a product of opportunities, rare opportunities in the '50s and the '60s, which girls didn't get, and I was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique. Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities. I thought I must tell you this. Why I said this, is the background.This is what comes next. I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable stamina, because I used to run for my tennis titles, etc. But I joined the Indian Police Service, and then it was a new pattern of policing. For me the policing stood for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect. This is something like a new definition ever given in policing in India — the power to prevent. Because normally it was always said, power to detect, and that's it, or power to punish. But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was growing up. How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10? So this was how it came into my service, and it was different from the men. I didn't want to make it different from the men, but it was different, because this was the way I was different. And I redefined policing concepts in India. I'm going to take you on two journeys, my policing journey and my prison journey. What you see, if you see the title called ""PM's car held."" This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket. (Laughter) That's the first time in India, and I can tell you, that's the last time you're hearing about it. It'll never happen again in India, because now it was once and forever. And the rule was, because I was sensitive, I was compassionate, I was very sensitive to injustice, and I was very pro-justice. That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service. I had other options, but I didn't choose them.So I'm going to move on. This is about tough policing, equal policing. Now I was known as ""here's a woman that's not going to listen."" So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings, postings which others would say no. I now went to a prison assignment as a police officer. Normally police officers don't want to do prison. They sent me to prison to lock me up, thinking, ""Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to. Let's lock her up."" Here I got a prison assignment. This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals. Obviously, it was. But 10,000 men, of which only 400 were women — 10,000 — 9,000 plus about 600 were men. Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters — some of them I'd sent to jail as a police officer outside. And then how did I deal with them? The first day when I went in, I didn't know how to look at them. And I said, ""Do you pray?"" When I looked at the group, I said, ""Do you pray?"" They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit. I said, ""Do you pray?"" And they didn't say anything. I said, ""Do you pray? Do you want to pray?"" They said, ""Yes."" I said, ""All right, let's pray."" I prayed for them, and things started to change. This is a visual of education inside the prison.Friends, this has never happened, where everybody in the prison studies. I started this with community support. Government had no budget. It was one of the finest, largest volunteerism in any prison in the world. This was initiated in Delhi prison. You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class. These are hundreds of classes. Nine to eleven, every prisoner went into the education program — the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten. We converted this into an ashram — from a prison to an ashram through education. I think that's the bigger change. It was the beginning of a change. Teachers were prisoners. Teachers were volunteers. Books came from donated schoolbooks. Stationery was donated. Everything was donated, because there was no budget of education for the prison. Now if I'd not done that, it would have been a hellhole.That's the second landmark. I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world. One, the numbers you'll never get to see. Secondly, this concept. This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners. One thousand prisoners who sat in meditation. This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor. And this is what transformed. You want to know more about this, go and see this film, ""Doing Time, Doing Vipassana."" You will hear about it, and you will love it. And write to me on KiranBedi.com, and I'll respond to you. Let me show you the next slide. I took the same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison? Because crime is a product of a distorted mind. It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control. Not by preaching, not by telling, not by reading, but by addressing your mind. I took the same thing to the police, because police, equally, were prisoners of their minds, and they felt as if it was ""we"" and ""they,"" and that the people don't cooperate. This worked.This is a feedback box called a petition box. This is a concept which I introduced to listen to complaints, listen to grievances. This was a magic box. This was a sensitive box. This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison. If you see somebody in the blue — yeah, this guy — he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher. And you see, everybody's busy. There was no time to waste.Let me wrap it up. I'm currently into movements, movements of education of the under-served children, which is thousands — India is all about thousands. Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India. That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India. Friends, you will hear a lot about it. That's the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life.Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bedi_a_police_chief_with_a_difference
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"We are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly, and in many of the places where it counts the most, women are, in fact, taking control of everything. In my mother's day, she didn't go to college. Not a lot of women did. And now, for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same. Women, for the first time this year, became the majority of the American workforce. And they're starting to dominate lots of professions — doctors, lawyers, bankers, accountants. Over 50 percent of managers are women these days, and in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two of them are dominated by women. So the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men, believe it or not, and these economic changes are starting to rapidly affect our culture — what our romantic comedies look like, what our marriages look like, what our dating lives look like, and our new set of superheroes.For a long time, this is the image of American manhood that dominated — tough, rugged, in control of his own environment. A few years ago, the Marlboro Man was retired and replaced by this much less impressive specimen, who is a parody of American manhood, and that's what we have in our commercials today. The phrase ""first-born son"" is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that this statistic alone shocked me. In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys. And in places where you wouldn't think, such as South Korea, India and China, the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little, and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons.If you think about this, if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots, you can see the evidence everywhere. You can see it in college graduation patterns, in job projections, in our marriage statistics, you can see it in the Icelandic elections, which you'll hear about later, and you can see it on South Korean surveys on son preference, that something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women. Certainly this is not the first time that we've had great progress with women. The '20s and the '60s also come to mind. But the difference is that, back then, it was driven by a very passionate feminist movement that was trying to project its own desires, whereas this time, it's not about passion, and it's not about any kind of movement. This is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in. The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end, believe it or not, and that's why I talk about the ""end of men.""Now all you men out there, this is not the moment where you tune out or throw some tomatoes, because the point is that this is happening to all of us. I myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom I dearly love. And this is why I like to talk about this, because if we don't acknowledge it, then the transition will be pretty painful. But if we do take account of it, then I think it will go much more smoothly. I first started thinking about this about a year and a half ago. I was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else, and I started to notice a distinct pattern — that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women. And I remembered back to about 10 years ago when I read a book by Susan Faludi called ""Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man,"" in which she described how hard the recession had hit men, and I started to think about whether it had gotten worse this time around in this recession. And I realized that two things were different this time around. The first was that these were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was giving men — that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shift in our global economy. And second, that the story was no longer just about the crisis of men, but it was also about what was happening to women.And now look at this second set of slides. These are headlines about what's been going on with women in the next few years. These are things we never could have imagined a few years ago. Women, a majority of the workplace. And labor statistics: women take up most managerial jobs. This second set of headlines — you can see that families and marriages are starting to shift. And look at that last headline — young women earning more than young men. That particular headline comes to me from a market research firm. They were basically asked by one of their clients who was going to buy houses in that neighborhood in the future. And they expected that it would be young families, or young men, just like it had always been. But in fact, they found something very surprising. It was young, single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood. And so they decided, because they were intrigued by this finding, to do a nationwide survey. So they spread out all the census data, and what they found, the guy described to me as a shocker, which is that in 1,997 out of 2,000 communities, women, young women, were making more money than young men. So here you have a generation of young women who grow up thinking of themselves as being more powerful earners than the young men around them.Now, I've just laid out the picture for you, but I still haven't explained to you why this is happening. And in a moment, I'm going to show you a graph, and what you'll see on this graph — it begins in 1973, just before women start flooding the workforce, and it brings us up to our current day. And basically what you'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy. Now what does that mean? It means that the economy is dividing into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low-wage jobs — and that the middle, the middle-skill jobs, and the middle-earning jobs, are starting to drop out of the economy. This has been going on for 40 years now. But this process is affecting men very differently than it's affecting women. You'll see the women in red, and you'll see the men in blue. You'll watch them both drop out of the middle class, but see what happens to women and see what happens to men. There we go. So watch that. You see them both drop out of the middle class. Watch what happens to the women. Watch what happens to the men. The men sort of stagnate there, while the women zoom up in those high-skill jobs. So what's that about? It looks like women got some power boost on a video game, or like they snuck in some secret serum into their birth-control pills that lets them shoot up high. But of course, it's not about that.What it's about is that the economy has changed a lot. We used to have a manufacturing economy, which was about building goods and products, and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy. Those two economies require very different skills, and as it happens, women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been. It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills, and with the help of a union, you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life. But that really isn't true anymore. This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength, which is what's helped men along all these years. What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills. You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be, and those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing.If you look at management theory these days, it used to be that our ideal leader sounded something like General Patton, right? You would be issuing orders from above. You would be very hierarchical. You would tell everyone below you what to do. But that's not what an ideal leader is like now. If you read management books now, a leader is somebody who can foster creativity, who can get his — get the employees — see, I still say ""his"" — who can get the employees to talk to each other, who can basically build teams and get them to be creative. And those are all things that women do very well.And then on top of that, that's created a kind of cascading effect. Women enter the workplace at the top, and then at the working class, all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home. So that's childcare, elder care and food preparation. So those are all the jobs that are growing, and those are jobs that women tend to do. Now one day it might be that mothers will hire an out-of-work, middle-aged, former steelworker guy to watch their children at home, and that would be good for the men, but that hasn't quite happened yet.To see what's going to happen, you can't just look at the workforce that is now, you have to look at our future workforce. And here the story is fairly simple. Women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men. Why? This is a real mystery. People have asked men, why don't they just go back to college, to community college, say, and retool themselves, learn a new set of skills? Well it turns out that they're just very uncomfortable doing that. They're used to thinking of themselves as providers, and they can't seem to build the social networks that allow them to get through college. So for some reason men just don't end up going back to college. And what's even more disturbing is what's happening with younger boys. There's been about a decade of research about what people are calling the ""boy crisis."" Now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys, for whatever reason, are doing worse in school than very young girls, and people have theories about that. Is it because we have an excessively verbal curriculum, and little girls are better at that than little boys? Or that we require kids to sit still too much, and so boys initially feel like failures? And some people say it's because, in 9th grade, boys start dropping out of school. Because I'm writing a book about all this, I'm still looking into it, so I don't have the answer. But in the mean time, I'm going to call on the worldwide education expert, who's my 10-year-old daughter, Noa, to talk to you about why the boys in her class do worse.(Video) Noa: The girls are obviously smarter. I mean they have much larger vocabulary. They learn much faster. They are more controlled. On the board today for losing recess tomorrow, only boys.Hanna Rosin: And why is that?Noa: Why? They were just not listening to the class while the girls sat there very nicely.HR: So there you go. This whole thesis really came home to me when I went to visit a college in Kansas City — working-class college. Certainly, when I was in college, I had certain expectations about my life — that my husband and I would both work, and that we would equally raise the children. But these college girls had a completely different view of their future. Basically, the way they said it to me is that they would be working 18 hours a day, that their husband would maybe have a job, but that mostly he would be at home taking care of the kiddies. And this was kind of a shocker to me. And then here's my favorite quote from one of the girls: ""Men are the new ball and chain.""(Laughter)Now you laugh, but that quote has kind of a sting to it, right? And I think the reason it has a sting is because thousands of years of history don't reverse themselves without a lot of pain, and that's why I talk about us all going through this together. The night after I talked to these college girls, I also went to a men's group in Kansas, and these were exactly the kind of victims of the manufacturing economy which I spoke to you about earlier. They were men who had been contractors, or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom, and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support. And the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age. He was telling them they no longer had any moral authority, that nobody needed them for emotional support anymore, and they were not really the providers. So who were they? And this was very disheartening for them. And what he did was he wrote down on the board ""$85,000,"" and he said, ""That's her salary,"" and then he wrote down ""$12,000."" ""That's your salary. So who's the man now?"" he asked them. ""Who's the damn man? She's the man now."" And that really sent a shudder through the room. And that's part of the reason I like to talk about this, because I think it can be pretty painful, and we really have to work through it.And the other reason it's kind of urgent is because it's not just happening in the U.S. It's happening all over the world. In India, poor women are learning English faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in India. In China, a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses, small businesses, faster than men. And here's my favorite example, which is in South Korea. Over several decades, South Korea built one of the most patriarchal societies we know about. They basically enshrined the second-class status of women in the civil code. And if women failed to birth male children, they were basically treated like domestic servants. And sometimes family would pray to the spirits to kill off a girl child so they could have a male child. But over the '70s and '80s, the South Korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize, and so what they did was, they started to push women into the workforce. Now they've been asking a question since 1985: ""How strongly do you prefer a first-born son?"" And now look at the chart. That's from 1985 to 2003. How much do you prefer a first-born son?So you can see that these economic changes really do have a strong effect on our culture. Now because we haven't fully processed this information, it's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways, where you can see that the stereotypes are changing. And so we have on the male side what one of my colleagues likes to call the ""omega males"" popping up, who are the males who are romantically challenged losers who can't find a job. And they come up in lots of different forms. So we have the perpetual adolescent. We have the charmless misanthrope. Then we have our Bud Light guy who's the happy couch potato. And then here's a shocker: even America's most sexiest man alive, the sexiest man alive gets romantically played these days in a movie. And then on the female side, you have the opposite, in which you have these crazy superhero women. You've got Lady Gaga. You've got our new James Bond, who's Angelina Jolie. And it's not just for the young, right? Even Helen Mirren can hold a gun these days. And so it feels like we have to move from this place where we've got these uber-exaggerated images into something that feels a little more normal.So for a long time in the economic sphere, we've lived with the term ""glass ceiling."" Now I've never really liked this term. For one thing, it puts men and women in a really antagonistic relationship with one another, because the men are these devious tricksters up there who've put up this glass ceiling. And we're always below the glass ceiling, the women. And we have a lot of skill and experience, but it's a trick, so how are you supposed to prepare to get through that glass ceiling? And also, ""shattering the glass ceiling"" is a terrible phrase. What crazy person would pop their head through a glass ceiling?So the image that I like to think of, instead of glass ceiling, is the high bridge. It's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge, but it's also pretty exhilarating, because it's beautiful up there, and you're looking out on a beautiful view. And the great thing is there's no trick like with the glass ceiling. There's no man or woman standing in the middle about to cut the cables. There's no hole in the middle that you're going to fall through. And the great thing is that you can take anyone along with you. You can bring your husband along. You can bring your friends, or your colleagues, or your babysitter to walk along with you. And husbands can drag their wives across, if their wives don't feel ready. But the point about the high bridge is that you have to have the confidence to know that you deserve to be on that bridge, that you have all the skills and experience you need in order to walk across the high bridge, but you just have to make the decision to take the first step and do it.Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hanna_rosin_new_data_on_the_rise_of_women
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"I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students. In 1931, my grandmother — bottom left for you guys over here — graduated from the eighth grade. She went to school to get the information because that's where the information lived. It was in the books; it was inside the teacher's head; and she needed to go there to get the information, because that's how you learned. Fast-forward a generation: this is the one-room schoolhouse, Oak Grove, where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse. And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher, stored it in the only portable memory he has, which is inside his own head, and take it with him, because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world. When I was a kid, we had a set of encyclopedias at my house. It was purchased the year I was born, and it was extraordinary, because I did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information. The information was inside my house and it was awesome. This was different than either generation had experienced before, and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level. But the information was closer to me. I could get access to it.In the time that passes between when I was a kid in high school and when I started teaching, we really see the advent of the Internet. Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government. My first year — super gung-ho — going to teach American government, loved the political system. Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. Year two: learned a few things — had to change my tactic. And I put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. I didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. I posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community.They produced flyers. They called offices. They checked schedules. They were meeting with secretaries. They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates. They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well, and really had this robust experiential learning. The older teachers — more experienced — looked at me and went, ""Oh, there she is. That's so cute. She's trying to get that done."" (Laughter) ""She doesn't know what she's in for."" But I knew that the kids would show up, and I believed it, and I told them every week what I expected out of them. And that night, all 90 kids — dressed appropriately, doing their job, owning it. I had to just sit and watch. It was theirs. It was experiential. It was authentic. It meant something to them. And they will step up.From Kansas, I moved on to lovely Arizona, where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years, this time with middle school students. Luckily, I didn't have to teach them American government. Could teach them the more exciting topic of geography. Again, ""thrilled"" to learn. But what was interesting about this position I found myself in in Arizona, was I had this really extraordinarily eclectic group of kids to work with in a truly public school, and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities. And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina, which is the gentleman that the movie ""Hotel Rwanda"" is based after. And he was going to speak at the high school next door to us. We could walk there. We didn't even have to pay for the buses. There was no expense cost. Perfect field trip.The problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful, and they know what to do with it. And so we chose to look at Paul Rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive. I then challenged the kids to identify someone in their own life, or in their own story, or in their own world, that they could identify that had done a similar thing. I asked them to produce a little movie about it. It's the first time we'd done this. Nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer, but they were into it. And I asked them to put their own voice over it. It was the most awesome moment of revelation that when you ask kids to use their own voice and ask them to speak for themselves, what they're willing to share. The last question of the assignment is: how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people? The things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary.Fast-forward to Pennsylvania, where I find myself today. I teach at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia. We are a nine through 12 public school, but we do school quite differently. I moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that I knew that kids learned, and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when you are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past, of information scarcity when my grandmother was in school and when my father was in school and even when I was in school, and to a moment when we have information surplus. So what do you do when the information is all around you? Why do you have kids come to school if they no longer have to come there to get the information?In Philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program, so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday, taking them home, getting access to information. And here's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you've given the tool to acquire information to students, is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process. We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test, and I am here to share with you: it is not learning. That is the absolute wrong thing to ask, to tell kids to never be wrong. To ask them to always have the right answer doesn't allow them to learn. So we did this project, and this is one of the artifacts of the project. I almost never show them off because of the issue of the idea of failure.My students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill. I asked them to take the examples that we were seeing of the info-graphics that existed in a lot of mass media, and take a look at what were the interesting components of it, and produce one for themselves of a different man-made disaster from American history. And they had certain criteria to do it. They were a little uncomfortable with it, because we'd never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. They can talk — they're very smooth, and they can write very, very well, but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them. But I gave them the room to just do the thing. Go create. Go figure it out. Let's see what we can do. And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint. This was done in like two or three days. And this is the work of the student that consistently did it.And when I sat the students down, I said, ""Who's got the best one?"" And they immediately went, ""There it is."" Didn't read anything. ""There it is."" And I said, ""Well what makes it great?"" And they're like, ""Oh, the design's good, and he's using good color. And there's some ... "" And they went through all that we processed out loud. And I said, ""Go read it."" And they're like, ""Oh, that one wasn't so awesome."" And then we went to another one — it didn't have great visuals, but it had great information — and spent an hour talking about the learning process, because it wasn't about whether or not it was perfect, or whether or not it was what I could create. It asked them to create for themselves, and it allowed them to fail, process, learn from. And when we do another round of this in my class this year, they will do better this time, because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process.There are a million pictures that I could click through here, and had to choose carefully — this is one of my favorites — of students learning, of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information, but instead, ask them what they can do with it. Ask them really interesting questions. They will not disappoint. Ask them to go to places, to see things for themselves, to actually experience the learning, to play, to inquire. This is one of my favorite photos, because this was taken on Tuesday, when I asked the students to go to the polls. This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that. But this is learning too, because we asked them to go out into real spaces.The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark. And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach
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"Alisa Volkman: So this is where our story begins — the dramatic moments of the birth of our first son, Declan. Obviously a really profound moment, and it changed our lives in many ways. It also changed our lives in many unexpected ways, and those unexpected ways we later reflected on, that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us, and a year later, we launched Babble, a website for parents.Rufus Griscom: Now I think of our story as starting a few years earlier. AV: That's true.RG: You may remember, we fell head over heels in love.AV: We did.RG: We were at the time running a very different kind of website. It was a website called Nerve.com, the tagline of which was ""literate smut."" It was in theory, and hopefully in practice, a smart online magazine about sex and culture.AV: That spawned a dating site. But you can understand the jokes that we get. Sex begets babies. You follow instructions on Nerve and you should end up on Babble, which we did. And we might launch a geriatric site as our third. We'll see.RG: But for us, the continuity between Nerve and Babble was not just the life stage thing, which is, of course, relevant, but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about. It seems to us that when people start dissembling, people start lying about things, that's when it gets really interesting. That's a subject that we want to dive into. And we've been surprised to find, as young parents, that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex.AV: It's true. So like we said, the early years were really wonderful, but they were also really difficult. And we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting. (Laughter) We subscribed to a lot of magazines, did our homework, but really everywhere you look around, we were surrounded by images like this. And we went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this. The sun was always streaming in, and our children would never be crying. I would always be perfectly coiffed and well rested, and in fact, it was not like that at all.RG: When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at, with these beautiful images, and looked at the scene in our actual living room, it looked a little bit more like this. These are our three sons. And of course, they're not always crying and screaming, but with three boys, there's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should.AV: Yes, you can see where the disconnect was happening for us. We really felt like what we went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing, and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight. We really wanted to let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way.RG: So today, what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos. And of course, there are many more than four things you can't say about parenting, but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally. So the first, taboo number one: you can't say you didn't fall in love with your baby in the very first minute. I remember vividly, sitting there in the hospital. We were in the process of giving birth to our first child.AV: We, or I?RG: I'm sorry. Misuse of the pronoun. Alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child — (AV: Thank you.) — and I was there with a catcher's mitt. And I was there with my arms open. The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful, beautiful child, and I remember, as she was approaching me, the voices of friends saying, ""The moment they put the baby in your hands, you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is [on] an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you've ever experienced in your entire life."" So I was bracing myself for the moment. The baby was coming, and I was ready for this Mack truck of love to just knock me off my feet. And instead, when the baby was placed in my hands, it was an extraordinary moment. This picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over. And you can see, our eyes were glistening. I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife, with deep, deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child. And it was also, of course, surreal. I mean, I had to check the tags and make sure. I was incredulous, ""Are you sure this is our child?"" And this was all quite remarkable. But what I felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection, but nothing like what I feel for him now, five years later.And so we've done something here that is heretical. We have charted our love for our child over time. (Laughter) This, as you know, is an act of heresy. You're not allowed to chart love. The reason you're not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing. You're either in love, or you're not in love. You love, or you don't love. And I think the reality is that love is a process, and I think the problem with thinking of love as something that's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent, or inadequate, or what have you. And I think I'm speaking obviously here to the father's experience. But I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months, maybe their first year, that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion.AV: Well, I'm glad Rufus is bringing this up, because you can notice where he dips in the first years where I think I was doing most of the work. But we like to joke, in the first few months of all of our children's lives, this is Uncle Rufus. (Laughter)RG: I'm a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle.AV: Yes, and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home that I'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up amongst other babies. So I actually threw a pop quiz here onto Rufus.RG: Uh oh.AV: I don't want to embarrass him too much. But I am going to give him three seconds.RG: That is not fair. This is a trick question. He's not up there, is he?AV: Our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here, and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify him.RG: The far left. AV: No!(Laughter)RG: Cruel.AV: Nothing more to be said.(Laughter)I'll move on to taboo number two. You can't talk about how lonely having a baby can be. I enjoyed being pregnant. I loved it. I felt incredibly connected to the community around me. I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy, all around me, tracking it down till the actual due-date. I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity. That continued into the the hospital. It was really exhilarating. I was shower with gifts and flowers and visitors. It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings. I did expect it to be difficult, have sleepless nights, constant feedings, but I did not expect the feelings of isolation and loneliness that I experienced, and I was really surprised that no one had talked to me, that I was going to be feeling this way. And I called my sister whom I'm very close to — and had three children — and I asked her, ""Why didn't you tell me I was going to be feeling this way, that I was going to have these — feeling incredibly isolated?"" And she said — I'll never forget — ""It's just not something you want to say to a mother that's having a baby for the first time.""RG: And of course, we think it's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time. And that this, of course, one of the themes for us is that we think that candor and brutal honesty is critical to us collectively being great parents. And it's hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world. So Alisa's experience is not isolated. So your 58 percent of mothers surveyed report feelings of loneliness. Of those, 67 percent are most lonely when their kids are zero to five — probably really zero to two. In the process of preparing this, we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time, because here in the Western world, less than 50 percent of us live near our family members, which I think is part of why this is such a tough period. So to take one example among many: in Southern India there's a practice known as jholabhari, in which the pregnant woman, when she's seven or eight months pregnant, moves in with her mother and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies, give birth and returns home to her nuclear family several months after the child is born. And this is one of many ways that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period.AV: So taboo number three: you can't talk about your miscarriage — but today I'll talk about mine. So after we had Declan, we kind of recalibrated our expectations. We thought we actually could go through this again and thought we knew what we would be up against. And we were grateful that I was able to get pregnant, and I soon learned that we were having a boy, and then when I was five months, we learned that we had lost our child. This is actually the last little image we have of him. And it was obviously a very difficult time — really painful. As I was working through that mourning process, I was amazed that I didn't want to see anybody. I really wanted to crawl into a hole, and I didn't really know how I was going to work my way back into my surrounding community. And I realize, I think, the way I was feeling that way, is on a really deep gut level, I was feeling a lot of shame and embarrassed, frankly, that, in some respects, I had failed at delivering what I'm genetically engineered to do. And of course, it made me question, if I wasn't able to have another child, what would that mean for my marriage, and just me as a woman. So it was a very difficult time. As I started working through it more, I started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people. I was really amazed by all the stories that started flooding in. People I interacted with daily, worked with, was friends with, family members that I had known a long time, had never shared with me their own stories. And I just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork, and I felt like I happened upon this secret society of women that I now was a part of, which was reassuring and also really concerning. And I think, miscarriage is an invisible loss. There's not really a lot of community support around it. There's really no ceremony, rituals, or rites. And I think, with a death, you have a funeral, you celebrate the life, and there's a lot of community support, and it's something women don't have with miscarriage.RG: Which is too bad because, of course, it's a very common and very traumatic experience. Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage, and I find this astounding. In a survey, 74 percent of women said that miscarriage, they felt, was partly their fault, which is awful. And astoundingly, 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse.So taboo number four: you can't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child. The party line is that every single aspect of my life has just gotten dramatically better ever since I participated in the miracle that is childbirth and family. I'll never forget, I remember vividly to this day, our first son, Declan, was nine months old, and I was sitting there on the couch, and I was reading Daniel Gilbert's wonderful book, ""Stumbling on Happiness."" And I got about two-thirds of the way through, and there was a chart on the right-hand side — on the right-hand page — that we've labeled here ""The Most Terrifying Chart Imaginable for a New Parent."" This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies. Basically, there's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction, which is closely aligned, we all know, with broader happiness, that doesn't rise again until your first child goes to college. So I'm sitting here looking at the next two decades of my life, this chasm of happiness that we're driving our proverbial convertible straight into. We were despondent.AV: So you can imagine, I mean again, the first few months were difficult, but we'd come out of it, and were really shocked to see this study. So we really wanted to take a deeper look at it in hopes that we would find a silver lining.RG: And that's when it's great to be running a website for parents, because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies. We said, something is wrong here. There's something missing from these studies. It can't possibly be that bad. So Liz Mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece, and she interviewed four scientists, and she also interviewed Daniel Gilbert, and we did indeed find a silver lining. So this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life. Average happiness is, of course, inadequate, because it doesn't speak to the moment-by-moment experience, and so this is what we think it looks like when you layer in moment-to-moment experience. And so we all remember as children, the tiniest little thing — and we see it on the faces of our children — the teeniest little thing can just rocket them to these heights of just utter adulation, and then the next teeniest little thing can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair. And it's just extraordinary to watch, and we remember it ourselves. And then, of course, as you get older, it's almost like age is a form of lithium.As you get older, you become more stable. And part of what happens, I think, in your '20s and '30s, is you start to learn to hedge your happiness. You start to realize that ""Hey, I could go to this live music event and have an utterly transforming experience that will cover my entire body with goosebumps, but it's more likely that I'll feel claustrophobic and I won't be able to get a beer. So I'm not going to go. I've got a good stereo at home. So, I'm not going to go."" So your average happiness goes up, but you lose those transcendent moments.AV: Yeah, and then you have your first child, and then you really resubmit yourself to these highs and lows — the highs being the first steps, the first smile, your child reading to you for the first time — the lows being, our house, any time from six to seven every night. But you realize you resubmit yourself to losing control in a really wonderful way, which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives and is quite gratifying.RG: And so in effect, we trade average happiness. We trade the sort of security and safety of a certain level of contentment for these transcendent moments. So where does that leave the two of us as a family with our three little boys in the thick of all this? There's another factor in our case. We have violated yet another taboo in our own lives, and this is a bonus taboo.AV: A quick bonus taboo for you, that we should not be working together, especially with three children — and we are.RG: And we had reservations about this on the front end. Everybody knows, you should absolutely not work with your spouse. In fact, when we first went out to raise money to start Babble, the venture capitalists said, ""We categorically don't invest in companies founded by husbands and wives, because there's an extra point of failure. It's a bad idea. Don't do it."" And we obviously went forward. We did. We raised the money, and we're thrilled that we did, because in this phase of one's life, the incredibly scarce resource is time. And if you're really passionate about what you do every day — which we are — and you're also passionate about your relationship, this is the only way we know how to do it. And so the final question that we would ask is: can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards? It's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy, but they're sometimes pretty quick. And so how about that average baseline of happiness? Can we move that up a little bit?AV: And we kind of feel that the happiness gap, which we talked about, is really the result of walking into parenting — and really any long-term partnership for that matter — with the wrong expectations. And if you have the right expectations and expectation management, we feel like it's going to be a pretty gratifying experience.RG: And so this is what — And we think that a lot of parents, when you get in there — in our case anyway — you pack your bags for a trip to Europe, and you're really excited to go. Get out of the airplane, it turns out you're trekking in Nepal. And trekking in Nepal is an extraordinary experience, particularly if you pack your bags properly and you know what you're getting in for and you're psyched. So the point of all this for us today is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty, but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences, that we can all collectively bend that happiness baseline up a little bit.RG + AV: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rufus_griscom_alisa_volkman_let_s_talk_parenting_taboos
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"So today I'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption. I'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you — in just 15 minutes — that this isn't a flimsy idea, or a short-term trend, but a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume, but how we consume.Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example. Hands up — how many of you have books, CDs, DVDs, or videos lying around your house that you probably won't use again, but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away? Can't see all the hands, but it looks like all of you, right? On our shelves at home, we have a box set of the DVD series ""24,"" season six to be precise. I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present. Now my husband, Chris, and I love this show. But let's face it, when you've watched it once maybe, or twice, you don't really want to watch it again, because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists. So there it sits on our shelves obsolete to us, but with immediate latent value to someone else. Now before we go on, I have a confession to make. I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan of ""Sex and the City."" Now I'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week. So how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of ""24"" for a wanted copy of ""Sex and the City?"" Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging called swap-trading. Now the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media. What it does is use the Internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person A's ""haves"" with person C's ""wants,"" whatever they may be.The other week, I went on one of these sites, appropriately called Swaptree, and there were over 59,300 items that I could instantly swap for my copy of ""24."" Lo and behold, there in Reseda, CA was Rondoron who wanted swap his or her ""like new"" copy of ""Sex and the City"" for my copy of ""24."" So in other words, what's happening here is that Swaptree solves my carrying company's sugar rush problem, a problem the economists call ""the coincidence of wants,"" in approximately 60 seconds. What's even more amazing is it will print out a postage label on the spot, because it knows the way of the item. Now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree, but that's not my interest, and nor is swap trading, per se.My passion, and what I've spent the last few years dedicated to researching, is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics inherent in these systems. When you think about it, it would have seemed like a crazy idea, even a few years ago, that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn't know and without any money changing hands. Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully, and the one percent that receive a negative rating, it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive on time.So what's happening here? An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play. Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers. We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. So what's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back. We're bartering, trading, swapping, sharing, but they're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms. What I find fascinating is that we've actually wired our world to share, whether that's our neighborhood, our school, our office, or our Facebook network, and that's creating an economy of ""what's mine is yours."" From the mighty eBay, the grandfather of exchange marketplaces, to car-sharing companies such as GoGet, where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour, to social lending platforms such as Zopa, that will take anyone in this audience with 100 dollars to lend, and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world, we're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe are more hip than hippie. I call this ""groundswell collaborative consumption.""Now before I dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption, I'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked, which is, where did this idea come from? Now I'd like to say I woke up one morning and said, ""I'm going to write about collaborative consumption,"" but actually it was a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas. Over the next minute, you're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots that went on in my head. The first thing I began to notice: how many big concepts were emerging — from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs — around how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose. And linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world — from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia, and everything in between — on what the power of numbers could achieve.Now, you know when you learn a new word, and then you start to see that word everywhere? That's what happened to me when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators, to highly enabled collaborators. What's happening is the Internet is removing the middleman, so that anyone from a T-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer. And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates. I mean, it's amazing to think that, in every single minute of this speech, 25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded. Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they're actually tapping into our primate instincts. I mean, we're monkeys, and we're born and bred to share and cooperate. And we were doing so for thousands of years, whether it's when we hunted in packs, or farmed in cooperatives, before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms. But things are changing, and one of the reasons why is the digital natives, or Gen-Y. They're growing up sharing — files, video games, knowledge. It's second nature to them. So we, the millennials — I am just a millennial — are like foot soldiers, moving us from a culture of ""me"" to a culture of ""we.""The reason why it's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration. We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time, from a small device in our hands. All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008, when, of course, the great financial crash happened. Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists, and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall, when Mother Nature and the market both said, ""No more."" Now we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption is a Ponzi scheme. It's a house of cards. Yet, it's hard for us to individually know what to do.So all of this is a lot of twittering, right? Well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head, until actually I realized it was happening because of four key drivers. One, a renewed belief in the importance of community, and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means. A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we behave. Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns. And four, a global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors. These four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift — away from the 20th century, defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, defined by collaborative consumption. I generally believe we're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors — through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online — are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives. From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food, we are consuming and collaborating once again.So my co-author, Roo Rogers, and I have actually gathered thousands of examples from all around the world of collaborative consumption. And although they vary enormously in scale, maturity and purpose, when we dived into them, we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems. The first is redistribution markets. Redistribution markets, just like Swaptree, are when you take a used, or pre-owned, item and move it from where it's not needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is. They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' — reduce, reuse, recycle, repair and redistribute — because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste.The second is collaborative lifestyles. This is the sharing of resources of things like money, skills and time. I bet, in a couple of years, that phrases like ""coworking"" and ""couchsurfing"" and ""time banks"" are going to become a part of everyday vernacular. One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called Landshare. It's a scheme in the U.K. that matches Mr. Jones, with some spare space in his back garden, with Mrs. Smith, a would-be grower. Together they grow their own food. It's one of those ideas that's so simple, yet brilliant, you wonder why it's never been done before.Now, the third system is product-service systems. This is where you pay for the benefit of the product — what it does for you — without needing to own the product outright. This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high-idling capacity. And that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to — how many of you have a power drill, own a power drill? Right. That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. (Laughter) It's kind of ridiculous, right? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill. (Laughter) (Applause) So why don't you rent the drill, or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it? These three systems are coming together, allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles, or their cherished personal freedoms. I'm not asking people to share nicely in the sandpit.So I want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors. The average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run. Yet, that car sits idle for 23 hours a day. So when you consider these two facts, it starts to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright. So this is where car-sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in. In 2009, Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities — and they're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies — and got them to surrender their keys for a month. Instead, these people had to walk, bike, take the train, or other forms of public transport. They could only use their Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary. The results of this challenge after just one month was staggering. It's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise. But my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back. In other words, the car addicts had lost their urge to own.Now products-service systems have been around for years. Just think of libraries and laundrettes. But I think they're entering a new age, because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun. There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times that said, ""Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the 8-track, what solar power is to the coal mine."" I believe also, our generation, our relationship to satisfying what we want is far less tangible than any other previous generation. I don't want the DVD; I want the movie it carries. I don't want a clunky answering machine; I want the message it saves. I don't want a CD; I want the music it plays. In other words, I don't want stuff; I want the needs or experiences it fulfills. This is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions — or as Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, puts it, ""where access is better than ownership.""Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud, a blurry line is appearing between what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours. I want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening. This represents an eight-year time span. We've gone from traditional car-ownership to car-sharing companies, such as Zipcar and GoGet, to ride-sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry, which is peer-to-peer car rental, where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor. Now all of these systems require a degree of trust, and the cornerstone to this working is reputation.Now in the old consumer system, our reputation didn't matter so much, because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review. But now with the Web, we leave a trail. With every spammer we flag, with every idea we post, comment we share, we're actually signaling how well we collaborate, and whether we can or can't be trusted. Let's go back to my first example, Swaptree. I can see that Rondoron has completed 553 trades with a 100 percent success rate. In other words, I can trust him or her. Now mark my words, it's only a matter of time before we're going to be able to perform a Google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital. And this reputation capital will determine our access to collaborative consumption. It's a new social currency, so to speak, that could become as powerful as our credit rating.Now as a closing thought, I believe we're actually in a period where we're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste, and we're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity. I believe it will be referred to as a revolution, so to speak — when society, faced with great challenges, made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good. I'm on a mission to make sharing cool. I'm on a mission to make sharing hip. Because I really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business, help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption
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"Beverly Joubert: We are truly passionate about the African wilderness and protecting the African wilderness, and so what we've done is we've focused on iconic cats. And I know, in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change, one would wonder, why worry about a few cats? Well today we're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character — this leopard.Dereck Joubert: Well, our lives have basically been like a super long episode of ""CSI"" — something like 28 years. In essence, what we've done is we've studied the science, we've looked at the behavior, we've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals. But one of the things that science really lets us down on is that personality, that individual personality that these animals have. And here's a prime example. We found this leopard in a 2,000-year-old baobab tree in Africa, the same tree that we found her mother in and her grandmother. And she took us on a journey and revealed something very special to us — her own daughter, eight days old. And the minute we found this leopard, we realized that we needed to move in, and so we basically stayed with this leopard for the next four-and-a-half years — following her every day, getting to know her, that individual personality of hers, and really coming to know her. Now I'm destined to spend a lot of time with some unique, very, very special, individualistic and often seductive female characters. (Laughter) Beverly's clearly one of them, and this little leopard, Legadema, is another, and she changed our lives.BJ: Well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her — in fact, more time than even her mother did. When her mother would go off hunting, we would stay and film. And early on, a lightning bolt hit a tree 20 paces away from us. It was frightening, and it showered us with leaves and a pungent smell. And of course, we were stunned for a while, but when we managed to get our wits about us, we looked at it and said, ""My gosh, what's going to happen with that little cub? She's probably going to forever associate that deafening crash with us."" Well, we needn't have worried. She came charging out of the thicket straight towards us, sat next to us, shivering, with her back towards Dereck, and looking out. And actually from that day on, she's been comfortable with us. So we felt that that day was the day that she really earned her name. We called her Legadema, which means, ""light from the sky.""DJ: Now we've found these individualisms in all sorts of animals, in particular in the cats. This particular one is called Eetwidomayloh, ""he who greets with fire,"" and you can just see that about him, you know — that's his character. But only by getting up close to these animals and spending time with them can we actually even reach out and dig out these personal characters that they have.BJ: But through our investigation, we have to seek the wildest places in Africa. And right now this is in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Yes, it is swamp. We live in the swamp in a tent, but I must tell you, every day is exhilarating. But also, our hearts are in our throats a huge amount of the time, because we're driving through water, and it's an unknown territory. But we're really there seeking and searching and filming the iconic cats.DJ: Now one of the big things, of course, everybody knows that cats hate water, and so this was a real revelation for us. And we could only find this by pushing ourselves, by going where no sane person should go — not without some prompting, by the way, from Beverly — and just pushing the envelope, going out there, pushing our vehicle, pushing ourselves. But we've managed to find that these lions are 15 percent bigger than any others, and they specialize in hunting buffalo in the water.BJ: And then of course, the challenge is knowing when to turn around. We don't always get that right, and on this particular day, we seriously underestimated the depth. We got deeper and deeper, until it was at Dereck's chest-height. Well then we hit a deep depression, and we seriously submerged the vehicle. We actually managed to drown two million dollars' worth of camera gear. We drowned our pride, I must tell you, which was really serious, and we seized the engine.DJ: And of course, one of the rules that we have in the vehicle is that he who drowns the vehicle gets to swim with the crocodiles. (Laughter) You will notice also that all of these images here are taken from the top angle by Beverly — the dry top angle, by the way. (Laughter) But all the places we get stuck in really have great views. And it wasn't a moment, and these lions came back towards us, and Beverly was able to get a great photograph.BJ: But we truly do spend day and night trying to capture unique footage. And 20 years ago, we did a film called ""Eternal Enemies"" where we managed to capture this unusual disturbing behavior across two species — lions and hyenas. And surprisingly, it became a cult film. And we can only work that out as people were seeing parallels between the thuggish side of nature and gang warfare.DJ: It was amazing, because you can see that this lion is doing exactly what his name, Eetwidomayloh, represents. He's focused on this hyena, and he is going to get it. (Animal sounds) But that's, I think, what this is all about, is that these individuals have these personalities and characters. But for us to get them, not only do we push ourselves, but we live by certain rules of engagement, which mean we can't interfere. This sort of behavior has been going on for three, four, five million years, and we can't step in and say, ""That's wrong, and that's right."" But that's not always easy for us.BJ: So, as Dereck says, we have to work through extremes — extreme temperatures, push ourselves at night. Sleep deprivation is extreme. We're on the edge through a large part of the time. But, for 10 years, we tried to capture lions and elephants together — and never ever managed until this particular night. And I have to tell you that it was a disturbing night for me. I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I was shaking with anxiety, but I knew that [I had] to capture something that had never been seen before, had never been documented. And I do believe you should stay with us.DJ: The amazing thing about these moments — and this is probably a highlight of our career — is that you never know how it's going to end. Many people believe, in fact, that death begins in the eyes, not in the heart, not in the lungs, and that's when people give up hope, or when any life form gives up hope. And you can see the start of it here. This elephant, against overwhelming odds, simply gives up hope. But by the same token, you can get your hope back again. So just when you think it's all over, something else happens, some spark gets into you, some sort of will to fight — that iron will that we all have, that this elephant has, that conservation has, that big cats have. Everything has that will to survive, to fight, to push through that mental barrier and to keep going. And for us, in many ways, this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us, a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work.(Applause)Now back to the leopard. We were spending so much time with this leopard and getting to understand her individualism, her personal character, that maybe we were taking it a little bit far. We were perhaps taking her for granted, and maybe she didn't like that that much. This is about couples working together, and so I do need to say that within the vehicle we have quite strict territories, Beverly and I. Beverly sits on the one side where all her camera gear is, and I'm on the other side where my space is. These are precious to us, these divides.BJ: But when this little cub saw that I had vacated my seat and climbed to the back to get some camera gear, she came in like a curious cat to come and investigate. It was phenomenal, and we felt grateful that she trusted us to that extent. But at the same time, we were concerned that if she created this as a habit and jumped into somebody else's car, it might not turn out the same way — she might get shot for that. So we knew we had to react quickly. And the only way we thought we could without scaring her is to try and simulate a growl like her mother would make — a hiss and a sound. So Dereck turned on the heater fan in the car — very innovative.DJ: It was the only way for me to save the marriage, because Beverly felt she was being replaced, you see. (Laughter) But really and truly, this was how this little leopard was displaying her individual personality. But nothing prepared us for what happened next in our relationship with her, when she started hunting.BJ: And on this first hunt, we truly were excited. It was like watching a graduation ceremony. We felt like we were surrogate parents. And of course, we knew now that she was going to survive. But only when we saw the tiny baby baboon clinging to the mother's fur did we realize that something very unique was taking place here with Legadema. And of course, the baby baboon was so innocent, it didn't turn and run. So what we watched over the next couple of hours was very unique. It was absolutely amazing when she picked it up to safety, protecting it from the hyena. And over the next five hours, she took care of it. We realized that we actually don't know everything, and that nature is so unpredictable, we have to be open at all times.DJ: Okay, so she was a little bit rough. (Laughter) But in fact, what we were seeing here was interesting. Because she is a cub wanting to play, but she was also a predator needing to kill, and yet conflicted in some way, because she was also an emerging mother. She had this maternal instinct, much like a young girl on her way to womanhood, and so this really took us to this new level of understanding that personality.BJ: And of course, through the night, they lay together. They ended up sleeping for hours. But I have to tell you — everybody always asks, ""What happened to the baby baboon?"" It did die, and we suspect it was from the freezing winter nights.DJ: So at this stage, I guess, we had very, very firm ideas on what conservation meant. We had to deal with these individual personalities. We had to deal with them with respect and celebrate them. And so we, with the National Geographic, formed the Big Cats Initiative to march forward into conservation, taking care of the big cats that we loved — and then had an opportunity to look back over the last 50 years to see how well we had all collectively been doing. So when Beverly and I were born, there were 450,000 lions, and today there are 20,000. Tigers haven't fared any better — 45,000 down to maybe 3,000.BJ: And then cheetahs have crashed all the way down to 12,000. Leopards have plummeted from 700,000 down to a mere 50,000. Now in the extraordinary time that we have worked with Legadema — which is really over a five-year period — 10,000 leopards were legally shot by safari hunters. And that's not the only leopards that were being killed through that period. There's an immense amount of poaching as well, and so possibly the same amount. It's simply not sustainable. We admire them, and we fear them, and yet, as man, we want to steal their power. It used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin, but now throughout rituals and ceremonies, traditional healers and ministers. And of course, looking at this lion paw that has been skinned, it eerily reminds me of a human hand, and that's ironic, because their fate is in our hands.DJ: There's a burgeoning bone trade. South Africa just released some lion bones onto the market. Lion bones and tiger bones look exactly the same, and so in a stroke, the lion bone industry is going to wipe out all the tigers. So we have a real problem here, no more so than the lions do, the male lions. So the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring, because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions, and they all are actually infected with the same disease. I call it complacency — our complacency. Because there's a sport, there's an activity going on that we're all aware of, that we condone. And that's probably because we haven't seen it like we are today.BJ: And you have to know that, when a male lion is killed, it completely disrupts the whole pride. A new male comes into the area and takes over the pride, and, of course, first of all kills all the cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs. So we've estimated that between 20 [and] 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place.DJ: So what our investigations have shown is that these lions are essential. They're essential to the habitat. If they disappear, whole ecosystems in Africa disappear. There's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into Africa. So this is not just a concern about lions; it's a concern about communities in Africa as well. If they disappear, all of that goes away. But what I'm more concerned about in many ways is that, as we de-link ourselves from nature, as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals, we lose hope, we lose that spiritual connection, our dignity, that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet.BJ: So you have to know, looking into the eyes of lions and leopards right now, it is all about critical awareness. And so what we are doing, in February, we're bringing out a film called ""The Last Lion,"" and ""The Last Lion"" is exactly what is happening right now. That is the situation we're in — the last lions. That is, if we don't take action and do something, these plains will be completely devoid of big cats, and then, in turn, everything else will disappear. And simply, if we can't protect them, we're going to have a job protecting ourselves as well.DJ: And in fact, that original thing that we spoke about and designed our lives by — that conservation was all about respect and celebration — is probably true. That's really what it needs. We need it. We respect and celebrate each other as a man and a woman, as a community and as part of this planet, and we need to continue that.And Legadema? Well we can report, in fact, that we're grandparents.(Laughter)BJ/DJ: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beverly_dereck_joubert_life_lessons_from_big_cats
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"So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting — it's about a three-hour meeting — and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, ""Did you just move into this office?"" And he said, ""No, we've been here about a year."" And I said, ""Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?"" And he looked at me, and he said, ""Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom.""(Laughter)So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters?Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, ""Mommy, don't get on the plane"" thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, ""Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table,"" and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours — and our little blue notebooks — yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, ""How did you do?"" And Carrie says, ""Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic."" And I say, ""God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow."" And my brother says, ""I got the top grade in the class.""(Laughter)""You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything.""(Laughter)The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, ""I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?"" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, ""Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success."" I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: ""Heidi"" to ""Howard."" But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not.The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, ""I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up."" ""What do you mean?"" She said, ""You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men."" And I thought to myself, ""Wow, if it's me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women?"" We've got to get women to sit at the table.(Cheers)(Applause)Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.(Applause)Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more — how shall I say this on this stage? They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.(Cheers)Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. ""How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?"" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, ""Me. I want to do that."" She starts leaning back. The problem is that — let's say she got pregnant that day, that day — nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath — Fast-forward two years, more often — and as I've seen it — women start thinking about this way earlier — when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this. She looked a little young. And I said, ""So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?"" And she said, ""Oh no, I'm not married."" She didn't even have a boyfriend.(Laughter)I said, ""You're thinking about this just way too early.""But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this — and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child — and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population — in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders
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"So today, I'm going to tell you about some people who didn't move out of their neighborhoods. The first one is happening right here in Chicago. Brenda Palms-Farber was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison. Currently, taxpayers spend about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail. We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back. I find it interesting that, for every one dollar we spend, however, on early childhood education, like Head Start, we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future. Or — think about it — that 60,000 dollars is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well.But Brenda, not being phased by stuff like that, took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution: create a business that produces skin care products from honey. Okay, it might be obvious to some of you; it wasn't to me. It's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential. She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees, harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves, and that were later sold at Whole Foods. She combined employment experience and training with life skills they needed, like anger-management and teamwork, and also how to talk to future employers about how their experiences actually demonstrated the lessons that they had learned and their eagerness to learn more. Less than four percent of the folks that went through her program actually go back to jail. So these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills through bee keeping and became productive citizens in the process. Talk about a sweet beginning.Now, I'm going to take you to Los Angeles, and lots of people know that L.A. has its issues. But I'm going to talk about L.A.'s water issues right now. They have not enough water on most days and too much to handle when it rains. Currently, 20 percent of California's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California. Their spending loads, loads, to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well. Now Andy Lipkis is working to help L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island — linking trees, people and technology to create a more livable city. All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water, also helps cool our cities. Because, come to think about it, do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want? How you get it shouldn't make that much of a difference.So a few years ago, L.A. County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools. And Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves. And by presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery, that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure. So ultimately, 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided, and electrical consumption for air-conditioning went down, while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up, resulting in a net-savings to the system, but also healthier students and schools system employees as well.Now Judy Bonds is a coal miner's daughter. Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia. And if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history, and of the town, it should be Judy. But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father's father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people. Now, two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months, and only for about a few years' worth of coal. That kind of technology is called ""mountaintop removal."" It can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months. Just imagine that the air surrounding these places — it's filled with the residue of explosives and coal. When we visited, it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so — not just miners, but everybody.And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned. And the coal companies just move on after the mountain was emptied, leaving even more unemployment in their wake. But she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain, and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet. Three years of dirty energy with not many jobs, or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills, and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region's wind. She calculated the up-front cost and the payback over time, and it's a net-plus on so many levels for the local, national and global economy. It's a longer payback than mountaintop removal, but the wind energy actually pays back forever. Now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals, and it gives them a lot of misery. The water is turned into goo. Most people are still unemployed, leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience — drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy and poor heath, as well.Now Judy and I — I have to say — totally related to each other. Not quite an obvious alliance. I mean, literally, her hometown is called Whitesville, West Virginia. I mean, they are not — they ain't competing for the birthplace of hip hop title or anything like that. But the back of my T-shirt, the one that she gave me, says, ""Save the endangered hillbillies."" So homegirls and hillbillies we got it together and totally understand that this is what it's all about. But just a few months ago, Judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer. Yeah. And it has since moved to her bones and her brain. And I just find it so bizarre that she's suffering from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from. But her dream of Coal River Mountain Wind is her legacy. And she might not get to see that mountaintop. But rather than writing yet some kind of manifesto or something, she's leaving behind a business plan to make it happen. That's what my homegirl is doing. So I'm so proud of that.(Applause)But these three people don't know each other, but they do have an awful lot in common. They're all problem solvers, and they're just some of the many examples that I really am privileged to see, meet and learn from in the examples of the work that I do now. I was really lucky to have them all featured on my Corporation for Public Radio radio show called ThePromisedLand.org. Now they're all very practical visionaries. They take a look at the demands that are out there — beauty products, healthy schools, electricity — and how the money's flowing to meet those demands. And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs, you're left with unemployed people, and those people aren't cheap. In fact, they make up some of what I call the most expensive citizens, and they include generationally impoverished, traumatized vets returning from the Middle East, people coming out of jail. And for the veterans in particular, the V.A. said there's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003. I think that number's probably going to go up. They're not the largest number of people, but they are some of the most expensive — and in terms of the likelihood for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, poor performance by their kids in schools and also poor health as a result of stress. So these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands, reduce the social problems that we have now and prevent new problems in the future.And there are plenty of other examples like that. One problem: waste handling and unemployment. Even when we think or talk about recycling, lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or in landfills and leaving many municipalities, diversion rates — they leave much to be recycled. And where is this waste handled? Usually in poor communities. And we know that eco-industrial business, these kinds of business models — there's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park, where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another, or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell. We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing. And in my hometown, we actually tried to do one of these in the Bronx, but our mayor decided what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot. Fortunately — because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs — but after many years, the city wanted to build a jail. They've since abandoned that project, thank goodness.Another problem: unhealthy food systems and unemployment. Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water and also refrigeration. Mega agricultural operations often are responsible for poisoning our waterways and our land, and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity. And so we know ""urban ag"" is a big buzz topic this time of the year, but it's mostly gardening, which has some value in community building — lots of it — but it's not in terms of creating jobs or for food production. The numbers just aren't there. Part of my work now is really laying the groundwork to integrate urban ag and rural food systems to hasten the demise of the 3,000-mile salad by creating a national brand of urban-grown produce in every city, that uses regional growing power and augments it with indoor growing facilities, owned and operated by small growers, where now there are only consumers. This can support seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really can't meet the year-round demand for produce. It's not a competition with rural farm; it's actually reinforcements. It allies in a really positive and economically viable food system.The goal is to meet the cities' institutional demands for hospitals, senior centers, schools, daycare centers, and produce a network of regional jobs, as well. This is smart infrastructure. And how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day. Our municipalities, rural and urban, play the operational course of infrastructure — things like waste disposal, energy demand, as well as social costs of unemployment, drop-out rates, incarceration rates and the impacts of various public health costs. Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base. And imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability. So I'm hoping you can see a little theme here.These examples indicate a trend. I haven't created it, and it's not happening by accident. I'm noticing that it's happening all over the country, and the good news is that it's growing. And we all need to be invested in it. It is an essential pillar to this country's recovery. And I call it ""hometown security."" The recession has us reeling and fearful, and there's something in the air these days that is also very empowering. It's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery. Now is the time for us to act in our own communities where we think local and we act local. And when we do that, our neighbors — be they next-door, or in the next state, or in the next country — will be just fine. The sum of the local is the global. Hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses, putting people to work, restoring our natural systems. Hometown security means creating wealth here at home, instead of destroying it overseas. Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings, wealth generation and national security. Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America. The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more.Now, hometown security is about taking care of your own, but it's not like the old saying, ""charity begins at home."" I recently read a book called ""Love Leadership"" by John Hope Bryant. And it's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear. And reading that book made me reexamine that theory because I need to explain what I mean by that. See, my dad was a great, great man in many ways. He grew up in the segregated South, escaped lynching and all that during some really hard times, and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times. But, like all of us, he had some problems. (Laughter) And his was gambling, compulsively. To him that phrase, ""Charity begins at home,"" meant that my payday — or someone else's — would just happen to coincide with his lucky day. So you need to help him out. And sometimes I would loan him money from my after-school or summer jobs, and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest, of course, after he hit it big. And he did sometimes, believe it or not, at a racetrack in Los Angeles — one reason to love L.A. — back in the 1940s. He made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that I grew up in. So I'm not that unhappy about that. But listen, I did feel obligated to him, and I grew up — then I grew up. And I'm a grown woman now, and I have learned a few things along the way.To me, charity often is just about giving, because you're supposed to, or because it's what you've always done, or it's about giving until it hurts. I'm about providing the means to build something that will grow and intensify its original investment and not just require greater giving next year — I'm not trying to feed the habit. I spent some years watching how good intentions for community empowerment, that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it, actually left people in the same, if not worse, position that they were in before. And over the past 20 years, we've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars on social problems, yet educational outcomes, malnutrition, incarceration, obesity, diabetes, income disparity, they've all gone up with some exceptions — in particular, infant mortality among people in poverty — but it's a great world that we're bringing them into as well.And I know a little bit about these issues, because, for many years, I spent a long time in the non-profit industrial complex, and I'm a recovering executive director, two years clean. (Laughter) But during that time, I realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities. But I really did struggle for financial support. The greater our success, the less money came in from foundations. And I tell you, being on the TED stage and winning a MacArthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived. And by the time I'd moved on, I was actually covering a third of my agency's budget deficit with speaking fees. And I think because early on, frankly, my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time. But since then, the park that was just a dump and was featured at a TED2006 Talk became this little thing. But I did in fact get married in it. Over here. There goes my dog who led me to the park in my wedding. The South Bronx Greenway was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006. Since then, we got about 50 million dollars in stimulus package money to come and get here. And we love this, because I love construction now, because we're watching these things actually happen.So I want everyone to understand the critical importance of shifting charity into enterprise. I started my firm to help communities across the country realize their own potential to improve everything about the quality of life for their people. Hometown security is next on my to-do list. What we need are people who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises, who will partner with folks like me to identify the growth trends and climate adaptation as well as understand the growing social costs of business as usual. We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems and repair ourselves. It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/majora_carter_3_stories_of_local_ecoactivism
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"So, I'll start with this: a couple years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. And she called, and she said, ""I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer."" And I thought, ""Well, what's the struggle?"" And she said, ""Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant.""(Laughter)And I was like, ""Okay."" And she said, ""But the thing I liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller."" And of course, the academic, insecure part of me was like, ""You're going to call me a what?"" And she said, ""I'm going to call you a storyteller."" And I was like, ""Why not 'magic pixie'?""(Laughter)I was like, ""Let me think about this for a second."" I tried to call deep on my courage. And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller. I'm a qualitative researcher. I collect stories; that's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul. And maybe I'm just a storyteller. And so I said, ""You know what? Why don't you just say I'm a researcher-storyteller."" And she went, ""Ha ha. There's no such thing.""(Laughter)So I'm a researcher-storyteller, and I'm going to talk to you today — we're talking about expanding perception — and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent.And this is where my story starts. When I was a young researcher, doctoral student, my first year, I had a research professor who said to us, ""Here's the thing, if you cannot measure it, it does not exist."" And I thought he was just sweet-talking me. I was like, ""Really?"" and he was like, ""Absolutely."" And so you have to understand that I have a bachelor's and a master's in social work, and I was getting my Ph.D. in social work, so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the ""life's messy, love it."" And I'm more of the, ""life's messy, clean it up, organize it and put it into a bento box.""(Laughter)And so to think that I had found my way, to found a career that takes me — really, one of the big sayings in social work is, ""Lean into the discomfort of the work."" And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's. That was my mantra. So I was very excited about this. And so I thought, you know what, this is the career for me, because I am interested in some messy topics. But I want to be able to make them not messy. I want to understand them. I want to hack into these things that I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see.So where I started was with connection. Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is — neurobiologically that's how we're wired — it's why we're here.So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things that you do really awesome, and one ""opportunity for growth?""(Laughter)And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.So very quickly — really about six weeks into this research — I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection?The things I can tell you about it: It's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this ""I'm not good enough,"" — which, we all know that feeling: ""I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough."" The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability. This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability. And so I thought, this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick. I'm going in, I'm going to figure this stuff out, I'm going to spend a year, I'm going to totally deconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerability works, and I'm going to outsmart it. So I was ready, and I was really excited. As you know, it's not going to turn out well.(Laughter)You know this. So, I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time. But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to — and this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doing this research.My one year turned into six years: Thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups. At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories — thousands of pieces of data in six years. And I kind of got a handle on it. I kind of understood, this is what shame is, this is how it works. I wrote a book, I published a theory, but something was not okay — and what it was is that, if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness — that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness — they have a strong sense of love and belonging — and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough.There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were ""whole-hearted."" These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled the interviews, the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just writing and in my researcher mode.And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it's from the Latin word ""cor,"" meaning ""heart"" — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and — this was the hard part — as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating — as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, ""I love you"" first ... the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees ... the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.I personally thought it was betrayal. I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job — you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena for the explicit reason to control and predict. And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. This led to a little breakdown —(Laughter)— which actually looked more like this.(Laughter)And it did.I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening.(Laughter)A spiritual awakening sounds better than breakdown, but I assure you, it was a breakdown. And I had to put my data away and go find a therapist. Let me tell you something: you know who you are when you call your friends and say, ""I think I need to see somebody. Do you have any recommendations?"" Because about five of my friends were like, ""Wooo, I wouldn't want to be your therapist.""(Laughter)I was like, ""What does that mean?"" And they're like, ""I'm just saying, you know. Don't bring your measuring stick.""(Laughter)I was like, ""Okay."" So I found a therapist. My first meeting with her, Diana — I brought in my list of the way the whole-hearted live, and I sat down. And she said, ""How are you?"" And I said, ""I'm great. I'm okay."" She said, ""What's going on?"" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good.(Laughter)And so I said, ""Here's the thing, I'm struggling."" And she said, ""What's the struggle?"" And I said, ""Well, I have a vulnerability issue. And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. And I think I have a problem, and I need some help."" And I said, ""But here's the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit.""(Laughter)""I just need some strategies.""(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you. So she goes like this.(Laughter)And then I said, ""It's bad, right?"" And she said, ""It's neither good nor bad.""(Laughter)""It just is what it is."" And I said, ""Oh my God, this is going to suck.""(Laughter)And it did, and it didn't. And it took about a year. And you know how there are people that, when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, that they surrender and walk into it. A: that's not me, and B: I don't even hang out with people like that.(Laughter)For me, it was a yearlong street fight. It was a slugfest. Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.And so then I went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they, the whole-hearted, what choices they were making, and what we are doing with vulnerability. Why do we struggle with it so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No.So this is what I learned. We numb vulnerability — when we're waiting for the call. It was funny, I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says, ""How would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?"" And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses. Because I wanted to know what's out there. Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick, and we're newly married; initiating sex with my husband; initiating sex with my wife; being turned down; asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying off people. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability.And I think there's evidence — and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause — We are the most in-debt ... obese ... addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is — and I learned this from the research — that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.(Laughter)I don't want to feel these. And I know that's knowing laughter. I hack into your lives for a living. God.(Laughter)You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. ""I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up."" That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work. Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks.(Laughter)Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, ""Wow.""(Laughter)And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, ""Look at her, she's perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect — make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh."" That's not our job. Our job is to look and say, ""You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging."" That's our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems, I think, that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives. We do that corporate — whether it's a bailout, an oil spill ... a recall. We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo, people. We just need you to be authentic and real and say ... ""We're sorry. We'll fix it.""But there's another way, and I'll leave you with this. This is what I have found: To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen ... to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee — and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult — to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, ""Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?"" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, ""I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive."" And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, ""I'm enough"" ... then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.That's all I have. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability
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"The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. That's Ken Sharpe over there.(Applause)So there is among many people — certainly me and most of the people I talk to — a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them. Our doctors don't know who the hell we are, and they don't have enough time for us. We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers. They almost brought the entire financial system down. And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart. Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. They don't understand us. They don't have the time to get to know us.There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment. Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with.Or — or maybe and — in addition to rules, let's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don't particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest — the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems.Rules and incentives — ""sticks"" and ""carrots."" We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. We'll see. In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing — as I said — selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff. And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that.But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. Why? Because bankers are smart people. And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system ""almost-collapse"" can't happen again. It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that.What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. We need character. We need people who want to do the right thing. And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called ""practical wisdom."" Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems — problems that they hadn't anticipated. So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. So what do they do? They fashion a novel solution to the problem. They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure — a flexible rule, a rule that bends. And Aristotle said, ""Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule."" And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules.Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. Wise people know how to improvise. The way my co-author , Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. A wise person knows when to bend the rules. A wise person knows when to improvise. And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue.So I'll give you an example of wise practice in action. It's the case of Michael. Michael's a young guy. He had a pretty low-wage job. He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school. Then he lost his job. He panicked about being able to support his family. One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver — stole 50 dollars. He robbed him at gunpoint. It was a toy gun. He got caught. He got tried. He got convicted. The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense. He had never committed a crime before. He was a responsible husband and father. He had been faced with desperate circumstances. All this would do is wreck a family. And so she improvised a sentence — 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work. Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. He did. He served out his sentence. He made restitution and found himself a new job. And the family was united.And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life — a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. He did after all have a toy gun. The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. He won the appeal. Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. Judge Forer had to follow the law. And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. And Michael disappeared. So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better.Now consider Ms. Dewey. Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school. She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do. Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called ""bubble kids"" — kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. It's like they were about to go play a football game. For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher.Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. You need to have incentives. People have to make a living. But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. And second, they demoralize the activity itself. The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. It creates people — when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing — it creates people who are addicted to incentives. That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives.Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what's in the books and only care about how long they are. If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures — which is the current system — they would do more. If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason — namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists.And it doesn't have to be this way. We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down.So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. More hopeful are people we call system-changers. These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill. Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. He was married, he had a third kid on the way, he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. So he started selling marijuana. He was busted in a drug sweep. His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids.Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. But Judge Russell did have an alternative. And that's because he was in a special court. He was in a court called the Veterans' Court. In the Veterans' Court — this was the first of its kind in the United States. Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court. It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. No one wanted non-violent offenders — and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot — to be thrown into prison. They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. And what the Veterans' Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn't forget about them once the judgment was made. Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump.There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this. Why has the idea spread? Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. None. None. Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. So here's is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching.There's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers — I know this is hard to believe — encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. The bank was profitable. The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. They didn't make loans and then sell the loans. They serviced the loans. They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. Banking hasn't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.So there are examples like this in medicine — doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. So the patients are not organ systems, and they're not diseases; they're people, people with lives. And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. In addition to which there's an enormous amount of back and forth, mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation — we hope — of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. We'll see.So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission — what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. People want to be allowed to be virtuous. They want to have permission to do the right thing. They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work.Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study — I know this will come as a shock to all of you — the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else.Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. Rules and incentives don't tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom. Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_using_our_practical_wisdom
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"My big idea is a very, very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us. And my little idea that will do that is sleep.(Laughter)(Applause)This is a room of type A women. This is a room of sleep-deprived women. And I learned the hard way the value of sleep. Two-and-a-half years ago, I fainted from exhaustion. I hit my head on my desk. I broke my cheekbone, I got five stitches on my right eye. And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep. And in the course of that, I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep.(Applause)And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution, this new feminist issue. We are literally going to sleep our way to the top — literally —(Laughter)(Applause)because unfortunately, for men, sleep deprivation has become a virility symbol. I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before. And I felt like saying to him — but I didn't say — I felt like saying, ""You know what? if you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting.""(Laughter)There is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship. Especially here in Washington, if you try to make a breakfast date, and you say, ""How about eight o'clock?"" they're likely to tell you, ""Eight o'clock is too late for me, but that's OK, I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight."" And they think that means they are so incredibly busy and productive, but the truth is, they're not, because we, at the moment, have had brilliant leaders in business, in finance, in politics, making terrible decisions. So a high IQ does not mean that you're a good leader, because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic.(Laughter)And we've had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics. In fact, I have a feeling that if Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters, they might still be around.(Laughter)(Applause)While all the brothers were busy just being hyper-connected 24/7, maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg, because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep, and have been able to see the big picture.So as we are facing all the multiple crises in our world at the moment, what is good for us on a personal level, what's going to bring more joy, gratitude, effectiveness in our lives and be the best for our own careers, is also what is best for the world. So I urge you to shut your eyes, and discover the great ideas that lie inside us; to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_get_more_sleep
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"You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. But in fact, here in the Northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as ""gardens watered by running streams."" Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its ""otherness."" The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran ""as toilsome reading as I ever undertook; a wearisome, confused jumble.""(Laughter)Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book — as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God — and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad — were just another author on the best-seller list. Yet, the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote — that is, to misquote.(Laughter)Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the ""highlighter version,"" which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes.So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly — as properly as I could, that is. My Arabic is reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side by side, verse by verse, along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic. Now, I did have an advantage. My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a-Sunni split, and for that, I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran — an informed one, an experienced one, even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading someone else's holy book.(Laughter)So I read slowly.(Laughter)I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by ""hubris"" —(Laughter)because it turned out to be three months.(Laughter)I did resist the temptation to skip to the back, where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran — that feeling of ""I get it now"" — it would slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning, wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land. And yet, the terrain was very familiar. The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh, jealously insisting on no other gods. The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic.Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, ""an interpretation."" But all is not lost in translation.As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises — a degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second- and third-person masculine, the Koran includes women — talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women. Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca, where fighting was usually forbidden. And the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. Not ""You must kill unbelievers in Mecca,"" but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over, and only if there's no other pact in place, and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. And even then — God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme — and so, essentially, better if you don't.(Laughter)This was perhaps the biggest surprise — how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible.""Some of these verses are definite in meaning,"" it says, ""and others are ambiguous."" The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. Only God knows the true meaning. The phrase ""God is subtle"" appears again and again, and indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. Old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here. The word used four times is ""houris,"" rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: houris. Not a swelling breast or high bosom in sight.(Laughter)Now this may be a way of saying ""pure beings,"" like in angels, or it may be like the Greek ""kouros"" or ""kore,"" an eternal youth.But the truth is, nobody really knows. And that's the point. Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be ""a new creation in paradise,"" and that you will be ""recreated in a form unknown to you,"" which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin.(Laughter)And that number 72 never appears. There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. Paradise is quite the opposite. It's not virginity; it's fecundity; it's plenty. It's gardens watered by running streams.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazelton_on_reading_the_koran
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"So I am a surgeon who studies creativity, and I have never had a patient tell me, ""I really want you to be creative during surgery,"" and so I guess there's a little bit of irony to it. I will say though that, after having done surgery a lot, it's similar to playing a musical instrument. And for me, this deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and to study the science of sound, particularly music. I'm going to talk over the next few minutes about my career in terms of how I'm able to study music and try to grapple with all these questions of how the brain is able to be creative. I've done most of this work at Johns Hopkins University, and at the National Institute of Health where I was previously. I'll go over some science experiments and cover three musical experiments.I will start off by playing a video for you. This video is of Keith Jarrett, who's a well-known jazz improviser and probably the most well-known, iconic example of someone who takes improvisation to a higher level. And he'll improvise entire concerts off the top of his head, and he'll never play it exactly the same way again, so as a form of intense creativity, I think this is a great example. And so why don't we go and click the video.(Music)(Music ends)It's really a remarkable thing that happens there. I've always as a listener, as a fan, I listen to that, and I'm astounded. I think — how can this possibly be? How can the brain generate that much information, that much music, spontaneously? And so I set out with this concept, scientifically, that artistic creativity, it's magical, but it's not magic, meaning that it's a product of the brain. There's not too many brain-dead people creating art. With this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process, and there are subquestions that I put there. Is it possible to study creativity scientifically? And I think that's a good question. And I'll tell you that most scientific studies of music, they're very dense, and when you go through them, it's very hard to recognize the music in it. In fact, they seem to be unmusical entirely and to miss the point of the music.This brings the second question: Why should scientists study creativity? Maybe we're not the right people to do it.(Laughter)Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective, we talked a lot about innovation today, the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative. I think that we're going to see, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish, Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process like complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously. So it gets down to the brain. All of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood, to say the least. I think that neuroscientists have more questions than answers, and I'm not going to give you answers today, just ask a lot of questions.And that's what I do in my lab. I ask questions about what is the brain doing to enable us to do this. This is the main method that I use. This is functional MRI. If you've been in an MRI scanner, it's very much the same, but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain, but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain. The way that's done is by the following: There's something called BOLD imaging, which is Blood Oxygen Level Dependent imaging. When you're in an fMRI scanner, you're in a big magnet that's aligning your molecules in certain areas. When an area of the brain is active, meaning a neural area is active, it gets blood flow shunted to that area. That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration. Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI, whereas oxyhemoglobin can't. So through this method of inference — and we're measuring blood flow, not neural activity — we say that an area of the brain that's getting more blood was active during a particular task, and that's the crux of how fMRI works. And it's been used since the '90s to study really complex processes.I'm going to review a study that I did, which was jazz in an fMRI scanner. It was done with a colleague, Alan Braun, at the NIH. This is a short video of how we did this project.(Video) Charles Limb: This is a plastic MIDI piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments. And it's a 35-key keyboard designed to fit both inside the scanner, be magnetically safe, have minimal interference that would contribute to any artifact, and have this cushion so that it can rest on the players' legs while they're lying down in the scanner, playing on their back. It works like this — this doesn't actually produce any sound. It sends out what's called a MIDI signal — or a Musical Instrument Digital Interface — through these wires into the box and then the computer, which then trigger high-quality piano samples like this.(Music)(Music)(Music ends)OK, so it works. And so through this piano keyboard, we have the means to take a musical process and study it. So what do you do now that you have this cool piano keyboard? You can't just say, ""It's great we have a keyboard."" We have to come up with a scientific experiment. The experiment really rests on the following: What happens in the brain during something that's memorized and over-learned, and what happens in the brain during something that is spontaneously generated, or improvised, in a way that's matched motorically and in terms of lower-level sensory motor features?I have here what we call the paradigms. There's a scale paradigm, which is playing a scale up and down, memorized, then there's improvising on a scale, quarter notes, metronome, right hand — scientifically very safe, but musically really boring. Then there's the bottom one, which is called the jazz paradigm. So we brought professional jazz players to the NIH, and we had them memorize this piece of music on the lower-left, which is what you heard me playing — and we had them improvise to the same chord changes. And if you can hit that lower-right sound icon, that's an example of what was recorded in the scanner.(Music)(Music ends)In the end, it's not the most natural environment, but they're able to play real music. And I've listened to that solo 200 times, and I still like it. And the musicians were comfortable in the end. We first measured the number of notes. Were they playing more notes when they were improvising? That was not what was going on. And then we looked at the brain activity. I will try to condense this for you. These are contrast maps that are showing subtractions between what changes when you're improvising vs. when you're doing something memorized. In red is an area that's active in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain, and in blue is this area that was deactivated. So we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity. We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity, I'll summarize that for you.These are multifunctional areas of the brain, these are not the jazz areas of the brain. They do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection, introspection, working memory etc. Really, consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. We think, at least in this preliminary — it's one study; it's probably wrong, but it's one study —(Laughter)we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you should have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you're not inhibited, you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses. Now a lot of people know that music is not always a solo activity — sometimes it's done communicatively.The next question was: What happens when musicians are trading back and forth, something called ""trading fours,"" which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment. So this is a 12-bar blues, and I've broken it down into four-bar groups, so you would know how you would trade. We brought a musician into the scanner, same way, had them memorize this melody then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively.So this is a musician, Mike Pope, one of the world's best bassists and a fantastic piano player.(Music)He's now playing the piece that we just saw a little better than I wrote it.(Video) CL: Mike, come on in.Mike Pope: May the force be with you.Nurse: Nothing in your pockets, Mike?MP: No. Nothing's in my pockets.CL: You have to have the right attitude to agree to do it.(Laughter)It's kind of fun, actually.(Music)Now we're playing back and forth. He's in there. You can see his legs up there.(Music)And then I'm in the control room here, playing back and forth.(Music)(Music ends)(Video) Mike Pope: This is a pretty good representation of what it's like. And it's good that it's not too quick. The fact that we do it over and over again lets you acclimate to your surroundings. So the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing, looking at my hands through two mirrors, laying on my back, and not able to move at all except for my hand. That was challenging. But again — there were moments, for sure —(Laughter)there were moments of real, honest-to-God musical interplay, for sure.CL: At this point, I'll take a few moments. So what you're seeing here — and I'm doing a cardinal sin in science, which is to show you preliminary data. This is one subject's data. This is, in fact, Mike Pope's data. So what am I showing you here? When he was trading fours with me, improvising vs. memorized, his language areas lit up, his Broca's area, in the inferior frontal gyrus on the left. He had it also homologous on the right. This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication. This whole notion that music is a language — maybe there's a neurologic basis to it after all, and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation. So we've done this on eight subjects now, and we're getting all the data together, hopefully we'll have something to say about it meaningfully.Now when I think about improvisation and the language, what's next? Rap, of course, rap — freestyle. I've always been fascinated by freestyle. And let's play this video.(Video) Mos Def: Brown skin I be, standing five-ten I be Rockin' it when I be, in your vicinity Whole-style synergy, recognize symmetry Go and try to injure me, broke 'em down chemically Ain't the number 10 MC, talk about how been I be Styled it like Kennedy, late like a 10 to three When I say when I be, girls say bend that key cutCL: So there's a lot of analogy between what takes place in freestyle rap and jazz. There are a lot of correlates between the two forms of music, I think, in different time periods, in lot of ways, rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve. So how do you study rap scientifically? And my colleagues think I'm crazy, but I think it's very viable. This is what you do: You have a freestyle artist come and memorize a rap that you write for them, that they've never heard before, and then you have them freestyle. So I told my lab members that I would rap for TED, and they said, ""No, you won't."" And then I thought —(Laughter)(Applause)But here's the thing. With this big screen, you can all rap with me. OK? So what we had them do was memorize this lower-left sound icon, please. This is the control condition. This is what they memorized.Computer: Memory, thump.CL: Thump of the beat in a known repeat Rhythm and rhyme, they make me complete The climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin' rhymes that hit you like a lightning strikeComputer: Search.CL: I search for the truth in this eternal quest My passion's not fashion, you can see how I'm dressed Psychopathic words in my head appear Whisper these lyrics only I can hearComputer: Art.CL: The art of discovering and that which is hovering Inside the mind of those unconfined All of these words keep pouring out like rain I need a mad scientist to check my brainComputer: Stop.(Applause)I guarantee you that will never happen again.(Laughter)So now, what's great about these free-stylers, they will get cued different words. They don't know what's coming, but they'll hear something off the cuff. Go hit that right sound icon, there will be cued three square words: like, not and head. He doesn't know what's coming. Computer: Like.Freestyler: I'm like some kind of extraterrestrial, celestial scene Back in the days, I used to sit in pyramids and meditateWith two microphones — Computer: Head hovering over my head See if I could still listen, spittin' off the sound See what you grinning I teach the children in the back of the classroom About the message of apocalypticalComputer: Not. Not really though, 'cause I've got to keep it simple instrumental Detrimental playing Super Mario boxes [unclear] hip hopComputer: Stop.CL: It's an incredible thing that's taking place. It's doing something neurologically remarkable. Whether or not you like the music is irrelevant. Creatively speaking, it's just a phenomenal thing. This is a short video of how we do this in a scanner.[fMRI of Hip-Hop Rap](Laughter)(Video) CL: We're here with Emmanuel.CL: That was recorded in the scanner, by the way.(Video) CL: That's Emmanuel in the scanner. He's just memorized a rhyme for us.[Control Condition Memorized Verses]Emmanuel: Top of the beat with no repeat Rhythm and rhyme make me complete Climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin' rhymes that'll hit you like a lightning strikeComputer: Search. I search for the truth in this eternal quest I'm passing on fashion; you can see how I'm dressedCL: I'm going to stop that there; so what do we see in his brain? This is four rappers' brains. And we do see language areas lighting up, but then, eyes closed — when you are freestyling vs. memorizing, you've got major visual areas lighting up. You've got major cerebellar activity, which is involved in motor coordination. You have heightened brain activity when you're doing a comparable task, when that one task is creative and the other task is memorized. It's very preliminary, but I think it's kind of cool.To conclude, we've got a lot of questions to ask, and like I said, we'll ask questions here, not answer them. But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius neurologically, and I think, with these methods, we're getting close. And I think, hopefully in the next 10, 20 years, you'll see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there.Thank you for your time, I appreciate it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv
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"There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography — women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all. Do you know which group you're in? If you don't, you're not alone. Because the breast has become a very political organ. The truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press, politicians, radiologists and medical imaging companies. I will do my best this morning to tell you what I think is the truth. But first, my disclosures. I am not a breast cancer survivor. I'm not a radiologist. I don't have any patents, and I've never received any money from a medical imaging company, and I am not seeking your vote.(Laughter)What I am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question. She came to see me after discovering a breast lump. Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s. She and I were both very pregnant at that time, and my heart just ached for her, imagining how afraid she must be. Fortunately, her lump proved to be benign. But she asked me a question: how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one? So I studied her mammogram, and I reviewed the radiology literature, and I was shocked to discover that, in her case, our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin.You may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the United States Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the world's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s. Now everybody rushed to criticize the Task Force, even though most of them weren't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies. It took the Senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage. Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines. The pre-eminent mammographer in the United States issued the following quote to the Washington Post. The radiologists were, in turn, criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest. But in my view, the radiologists are heroes. There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause. But that very fact is telling.Where there is this much legal smoke, there is likely to be some fire. The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density. Breast density refers to the relative amount of fat — pictured here in yellow — versus connective and epithelial tissues — pictured in pink. And that proportion is primarily genetically determined. Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them. And although breast density generally declines with age, up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause.So how do you know if your breasts are dense? Well, you need to read the details of your mammography report. Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram. If the breast is less than 25 percent dense, that's called fatty-replaced. The next category is scattered fibroglandular densities, followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense. And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense. The problem with breast density is that it's truly the wolf in sheep's clothing. Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram, and the X-ray often can't distinguish between the two. So it's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast. But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast. That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts.Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer. It's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer. At the time my patient posed this question to me, breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature, and very few women having mammograms, or the physicians ordering them, knew about this. But what else could I offer her?Mammograms have been around since the 1960's, and it's changed very little. There have been surprisingly few innovations, until digital mammography was approved in 2000. Digital mammography is still an X-ray of the breast, but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally, just like we can with a digital camera. The U.S. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment, and what have we gained from that investment? In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars, digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography, and in fact, it was worse in older women. But it was better in one group, and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts, and in those women, digital mammography found twice as many cancers, but it still only found 60 percent. So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment, but it's been a very small step forward for womankind.What about ultrasound? Ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies, so it's not widely used. And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors, but it's also very expensive. If we think about disruptive technology, we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive. Think about iPods compared to stereos. But it's the exact opposite in health care. The machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive. Screening the average young woman with an MRI is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a Hummer. It's just way too much equipment. One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs. And sooner or later, we're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can't always come at a much higher price.Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation, and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius. Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about. It's like the essence of TED. He quotes one innovator who says, ""The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick."" (Laughter) This makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions. And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize are problems. Now, take a look at this cartoon that accompanied Gladwell's article, and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers.(Laughter)So if you will allow me a little creative license, I will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient's problem with a physicist's solution. Shortly after her visit, I was introduced to a nuclear physicist at Mayo named Michael O'Conner, who was a specialist in cardiac imaging, something I had nothing to do with. And he happened to tell me about a conference he'd just returned from in Israel, where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector. Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart, and it had even been tried to image the breast. But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge, bulky tubes, and they were filled with these scintillating crystals, and you just couldn't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors. But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X-rays, are not influenced by breast density. But this technology could not find tumors when they're small, and finding a small tumor is critical for survival. If you can find a tumor when it's less than a centimeter, survival exceeds 90 percent, but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases. But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he'd seen, and this is it. It's made not of a bulky tube, but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector. And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors.So after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape — (Laughter) — Michael hacked off the X-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out, and we attached the new detector, and we decided to call this machine Molecular Breast Imaging, or MBI. This is an image from our first patient. And you can see, using the old gamma technology, that it just looked like noise. But using our new detector, we could begin to see the outline of a tumor.So here we were, a nuclear physicist, an internist, soon joined by Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer, and two radiologists, and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape. To say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement, but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system. This is our current detector. And you can see that it looks a lot different. The duct tape is gone, and we added a second detector on top of the breast, which has further improved our tumor detection.So how does this work? The patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells, but not by normal cells, and this is the key difference from mammography. Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue, and we've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast. But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors, and therefore, it's impervious to breast density. After the injection, the patient's breast is placed between the detectors. And if you've ever had a mammogram — if you're old enough to have had a mammogram — you know what comes next: pain. You may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that's regulated by federal law, and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study. But with MBI, we use just light, pain-free compression. (Applause) And the detector then transmits the image to the computer.So here's an example. You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue. But the MBI image shows that tumor much more clearly, as well as a second tumor, which profoundly influence that patient's surgical options. In this example, although the mammogram found one tumor, we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors — one is small as three millimeters.Our big break came in 2004. After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors, we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts, comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI. Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors. MBI found 83 percent. Here's an example from that screening study. The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor. In this case, a one-centimeter tumor. And in this case, a 45-year-old medical secretary at Mayo, who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young, wanted to enroll in our study. And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image. And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball. But fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes.So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem. We had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose, and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this. And I'm very happy to report that we're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram. And at this low dose, we're continuing this screening study, and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram, but an MBI image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer. So this is not just young women that it's benefiting. It's also older women with dense tissue. And we're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that's used in any other type of gamma technology.MBI generates four images per breast. MRI generates over a thousand. It takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding. But I suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the MBI image. But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive — it's as accurate as MRI, it's far less complex to interpret, and it's a fraction of the cost. But you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo.After achieving what we felt were remarkable results, our manuscript was rejected by four journals. After the fourth rejection, we requested reconsideration of the manuscript, because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology. Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology. (Applause) We still need to complete the screening study using the low dose, and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions, and this could take five or more years. If this technology is widely adopted, I will not benefit financially in any way, and that is very important to me, because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth. But I recognize — (Applause) I recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science.The MBI unit has now been FDA approved, but it's not yet widely available. So until something is available for women with dense breasts, there are things that you should know to protect yourself. First, know your density. Ninety percent of women don't, and 95 percent of women don't know that it increases your breast cancer risk. The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram. I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is. Of course we should. And if you don't know, please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report. Second, if you're pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower. Third, if you notice a persistent change in your breast, insist on additional imaging. And fourth and most important, the mammography debate will rage on, but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram.Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer. But this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation. Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later, and most women, thankfully, survive. So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer. Mammography's the only one that's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim. It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations. We need to individualize screening based on density. For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice. But for women with dense breasts; we shouldn't abandon screening altogether, we need to offer them something better.The babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school, and the answer has been so slow to come. She's given me her blessing to share this story with you. After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer, she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy. We can and must do better, not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters, but in time for you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_rhodes
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"So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada. My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar, India. And they got here in the late 1960s. They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto, and they settled into a new life. They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids. My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods. We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn't take for granted when they grew up — things like power always on in our houses, things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard. We grew up, and we grew older. I went to high school. I graduated. I moved out of the house, I got a job, I found a girl, I settled down — and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens' song —(Laughter)but life was pretty good. Life was pretty good. 2006 was a great year. Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded by 150 family and friends. 2007 was a great year. I graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends. Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads. (Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe me.(Laughter)2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me. First of all, the news was so heavy. It's still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flipped open a newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs, or our retirements, or our livelihoods. 2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason, too. I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. My marriage wasn't going well, and we just were growing further and further apart. One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation. And she said, ""I don't love you anymore,"" and it was one of the most painful things I'd ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever heard, until only a month later, when I heard something even more heartbreaking.My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time. And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be. I spoke to him on the phone at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday night. We talked about the TV show we watched that evening. And Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared. Very sadly, he took his own life. And it was a really heavy time.And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com. I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough — things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line — even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there.(Laughter)And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000. And nobody read it except for my mom. Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad. (Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions. It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, ""You've just won the Best Blog In the World award."" I was like, that sounds totally fake. (Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to? (Laughter) But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart. And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog. And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book. Flash-forward to the next year and ""The Book of Awesome"" has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks.(Applause)But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today. I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you the three As of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought. So let's talk about those three As. Over the last few years, I haven't had that much time to really think. But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: ""What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself?"" And I've summarized those things, for me personally, as three As. They are Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. I'd love to just talk about each one briefly.So Attitude: Look, we're all going to get lumps, and we're all going to get bumps. None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that's that it ain't gonna go according to plan. We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too. It's sad, and it's not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend could cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog could get hit by a car on the street. It's not a happy thought, but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes. Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean. And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well, too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart, and when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges and soaks in, I just really hope you feel like you've always got two choices. One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever, or two, you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes. Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choosing, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future.The second ""A"" is Awareness. I love hanging out with three year-olds. I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. I love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk. I love the way that they'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs. I love the way that they'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner. I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. Having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old. Because you all used to be three years old. That three-year-old boy is still part of you. That three-year-old girl is still part of you. They're in there. And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too. So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work. There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, ""Found money.""The last ""A"" is Authenticity. And for this one, I want to tell you a quick story. Let's go all the way back to 1932 when, on a peanut farm in Georgia, a little baby boy named Roosevelt Grier was born. Roosevelt Grier, or Rosey Grier, as people used to call him, grew up and grew into a 300-pound, six-foot-five linebacker in the NFL. He's number 76 in the picture. Here he is pictured with the ""fearsome foursome."" These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against. They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field. But Rosey Grier also had another passion. In his deeply authentic self, he also loved needlepoint. (Laughter) He loved knitting. He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks. That's what he said. I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining clubs. And he even put out a book called ""Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men."" (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great cover. If you notice, he's actually needlepointing his own face.(Laughter)And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authentic person, and that's what authenticity is all about. It's just about being you and being cool with that. And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. You meet people that you like talking to. You go places you've dreamt about. And you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled. So those are the three A's.For the closing thought, I want to take you all the way back to my parents coming to Canada. I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you're in your mid-20s. I don't know, because I never did it, but I would imagine that it would take a great attitude. I would imagine that you'd have to be pretty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you're starting to see in your new world. And I think you'd have to be really authentic, you'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you're being exposed to.I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't get many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitting in the front row. So I wanted to ask them to, if they don't mind, stand up. And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys.(Applause)When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada. And it's a great story, because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport, and he was welcomed by a non-profit group, which I'm sure someone in this room runs. (Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada. And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread. There was bread, there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little white onions. There was rolled up turkey cold cuts, rolled up ham cold cuts, rolled up roast beef cold cuts and little cubes of cheese. There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches. There was lasagna, there was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pies, lots and lots of pies. And when my dad tells the story, he says, ""The craziest thing was, I'd never seen any of that before, except bread. (Laughter) I didn't know what was meat, what was vegetarian. I was eating olives with pie. (Laughter) I just couldn't believe how many things you can get here.""(Laughter)When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping, and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables. He would say, ""Look, can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico? They've got an apple here from South Africa. Can you believe they've got a date from Morocco?"" He's like, ""Do you know where Morocco even is?"" And I'd say, ""I'm five. I don't even know where I am. Is this A&P?"" And he'd say, ""I don't know where Morocco is either, but let's find out."" And so we'd buy the date, and we'd go home. And we'd actually take an atlas off the shelf, and we'd flip through until we found this mysterious country. And when we did, my dad would say, ""Can you believe someone climbed a tree over there, picked this thing off it, put it in a truck, drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house, so they could sell it to us for 25 cents?"" And I'd say, ""I don't believe that."" And he's like, ""I don't believe it either. Things are amazing. There's just so many things to be happy about.""When I stop to think about it, he's absolutely right. There are so many things to be happy about. We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we've ever seen, capable of experiencing so many of these things. I mean, we're the only ones with architecture and agriculture. We're the only ones with jewelry and democracy. We've got airplanes, highway lanes, interior design and horoscope signs. We've got fashion magazines, house party scenes. You can watch a horror movie with monsters. You can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming. We've got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and rollercoaster rides. You can sleep in clean sheets. You can go to the movies and get good seats. You can smell bakery air, walk around with rain hair, pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap.We've got all that, but we've only got 100 years to enjoy it. And that's the sad part. The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgating you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every teacher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your family, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years. Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet. And that moment is right now, and those moments are counting down, and those moments are always, always, always fleeting.You will never be as young as you are right now. And that's why I believe that if you live your life with a great attitude, choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow, living with a sense of awareness of the world around you, embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself, being you and being cool with that, letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you, then I think you'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying, and I think you'll live a life that is truly awesome.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_pasricha_the_3_a_s_of_awesome
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"I'm actually here to make a challenge to people. I know there have been many challenges made to people. The one I'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means. Peace is not ""Kumbaya, my Lord."" Peace is not the dove and the rainbow — as lovely as they are. When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity. I think of meditation. I do not think about what I consider to be peace, which is sustainable peace with justice and equality. It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear. This is called human security. And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire. I understand that humans are so ""messed up"" — to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public. And I'm trying harder and harder. Mom, I'm really trying.We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense. We need to redefine what makes us secure in this world. It is not arming our country to the teeth. It is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them. It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure. I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote. I certainly support the START vote. But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons. Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars? Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in my bank account — it's not, but ... In global terms, it's a little bit of money. But it's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up off our ... and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security. It is saving the tigers. It is stopping the tar sands. It is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer. It is all of those things. It is using our money for all of those things. It is about action.I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness — we're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates. And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church. We're staring at everybody, waiting our turn to speak, and he leans over to me, and he says, ""Jody, I'm a Buddhist monk."" I said, ""Yes, Your Holiness. Your robe gives it away."" (Laughter) He said, ""You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray."" I said, ""That's good. That's good. We need that in the world. I don't follow that, but that's cool."" And he says, ""But I have become skeptical. I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world. I think what we need is action."" His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero.I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago. As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma. You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy. She was just released a couple of weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon, agitating for change. She is already out in the streets, working with the party to try to rebuild it. But I talked to her for a range of issues. But one thing that I want to say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said. She said, ""You know, we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country. But I don't believe in hope without endeavor. I don't believe in the hope of change, unless we take action to make it so.""Here's another woman hero of mine. She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has been in exile for the last year and a half. You ask her where she lives — where does she live in exile? She says the airports of the world. She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections. And instead of going home, she conferred with all the other women that she works with, who said to her, ""Stay out. We need you out. We need to be able to talk to you out there, so that you can give the message of what's happening here."" A year and a half — she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country.Wangari Maathai — 2004 Peace laureate. They call her the ""Tree Lady,"" but she's more than the Tree Lady. Working for peace is very creative. It's hard work every day. When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country. People could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail. But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay — creativity. But it's not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai — it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world.The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers. Working together is what changes our world. The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country. When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one comes out and joins the movement, recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately bring change in their own country.Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side — bringing peace to Northern Ireland. I'll tell you the quick story. An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into people on the side of the street. There was a mother and three children. The children were killed on the spot. It was Mairead's sister. Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty — a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic — and they took to the streets to say, ""No more violence."" And they were able to get tens of thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change. And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do.This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. She also received the Peace Prize. She is now running for president. She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy, about how you bring democracy to the country, about educating, about how to vote — but that democracy is not just about voting; it's about being an active citizen.That's what I got stuck doing — the landmine campaign. One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines. Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month. They could maybe volunteer that much. There were others, like myself, who were full-time. But it was the actions, together, of all of us that brought about that change.In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace. It's not a dirty word. It's hard work every single day. And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world. And we can't wait for the other guy. We have to do it ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jody_williams_a_realistic_vision_for_world_peace
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"I would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs, but not the cyborgs that you think. You're not RoboCop, and you're not Terminator, but you're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices. So what's a good definition for cyborg? Well, traditional definition is ""an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments."" That came from a 1960 paper on space travel, because, if you think about it, space is pretty awkward. People aren't supposed to be there. But humans are curious, and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the Alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next.So let's look at the concept of traditional anthropology. Somebody goes to another country, says, ""How fascinating these people are, how interesting their tools are, how curious their culture is."" And then they write a paper, and maybe a few other anthropologists read it, and we think it's very exotic. Well, what's happening is that we've suddenly found a new species. I, as a cyborg anthropologist, have suddenly said, ""Oh, wow. Now suddenly we're a new form of Homo sapiens, and look at these fascinating cultures, and look at these curious rituals that everybody's doing around this technology. They're clicking on things and staring at screens.""Now there's a reason why I study this, versus traditional anthropology. And the reason is that tool use, in the beginning — for thousands and thousands of years, everything has been a physical modification of self. It has helped us to extend our physical selves, go faster, hit things harder, and there's been a limit on that. But now what we're looking at is not an extension of the physical self, but an extension of the mental self, and because of that, we're able to travel faster, communicate differently. And the other thing that happens is that we're all carrying around little Mary Poppins technology. We can put anything we want into it, and it doesn't get heavier, and then we can take anything out. What does the inside of your computer actually look like? Well, if you print it out, it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you're carrying around all the time. And if you actually lose that information, it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind, that you suddenly feel like something's missing, except you aren't able to see it, so it feels like a very strange emotion.The other thing that happens is that you have a second self. Whether you like it or not, you're starting to show up online, and people are interacting with your second self when you're not there. And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open, which is basically your Facebook wall, so that people don't write on it in the middle of the night — because it's very much the equivalent. And suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self. You have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life. So, in the same way that you wake up, take a shower and get dressed, you have to learn to do that for your digital self. And the problem is that a lot of people now, especially adolescents, have to go through two adolescences. They have to go through their primary one, that's already awkward, and then they go through their second self's adolescence, and that's even more awkward because there's an actual history of what they've gone through online. And anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now, and so it's very awkward, and it's very difficult for them to do those things.So when I was little, my dad would sit me down at night and he would say, ""I'm going to teach you about time and space in the future."" And I said, ""Great."" And he said one day, ""What's the shortest distance between two points?"" And I said, ""Well, that's a straight line. You told me that yesterday."" I thought I was very clever. He said, ""No, no, no. Here's a better way."" He took a piece of paper, drew A and B on one side and the other and folded them together so where A and B touched. And he said, ""That is the shortest distance between two points."" And I said, ""Dad, dad, dad, how do you do that?"" He said, ""Well, you just bend time and space, it takes an awful lot of energy, and that's just how you do it."" And I said, ""I want to do that."" And he said, ""Well, okay."" And so, when I went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years, I was thinking at night, ""I want to be the first person to create a wormhole, to make things accelerate faster. And I want to make a time machine."" I was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders.But then what I realized when I went to college is that technology doesn't just get adopted because it works. It gets adopted because people use it and it's made for humans. So I started studying anthropology. And when I was writing my thesis on cell phones, I realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets. They weren't physically transporting themselves; they were mentally transporting themselves. They would click on a button, and they would be connected as A to B immediately. And I thought, ""Oh, wow. I found it. This is great.""So over time, time and space have compressed because of this. You can stand on one side of the world, whisper something and be heard on the other. One of the other ideas that comes around is that you have a different type of time on every single device that you use. Every single browser tab gives you a different type of time. And because of that, you start to dig around for your external memories — where did you leave them? So now we're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we've lost on our external brains that we're carrying around in our pockets. And that incites a sort of panic architecture — ""Oh no, where's this thing?"" We're all ""I Love Lucy"" on a great assembly line of information, and we can't keep up.And so what happens is, when we bring all that into the social space, we end up checking our phones all the time. So we have this thing called ambient intimacy. It's not that we're always connected to everybody, but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want. And if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone, the room would be very crowded. These are the people that you have access to right now, in general — all of these people, all of your friends and family that you can connect to.And so there are some psychological effects that happen with this. One I'm really worried about is that people aren't taking time for mental reflection anymore, and that they aren't slowing down and stopping, being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces, paleontology and panic architecture. They're not just sitting there. And really, when you have no external input, that is a time when there is a creation of self, when you can do long-term planning, when you can try and figure out who you really are. And then, once you do that, you can figure out how to present your second self in a legitimate way, instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in — and oh, I have to do this, and I have to do this, and I have to do this. And so this is very important. I'm really worried that, especially kids today, they're not going to be dealing with this down-time, that they have an instantaneous button-clicking culture, and that everything comes to them, and that they become very excited about it and very addicted to it.So if you think about it, the world hasn't stopped either. It has its own external prosthetic devices, and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other. But when you actually visualize it, all the connections that we're doing right now — this is an image of the mapping of the Internet — it doesn't look technological. It actually looks very organic. This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we've connected in this way. And it's not that machines are taking over. It's that they're helping us to be more human, helping us to connect with each other.The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives. And really, it ends up being more human than technology, because we're co-creating each other all the time. And so this is the important point that I like to study: that things are beautiful, that it's still a human connection — it's just done in a different way. We're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other, regardless of geography. So that's why I study cyborg anthropology.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now
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"If we look around us, much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world. But, of course, they don't look like rocks and sludge now. They look like TV cameras, monitors, annoying radio mics. And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project, which became known as the Toaster Project. And it was also inspired by this quote from Douglas Adams, and the situation is from ""The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."" And the situation it describes is the hero of the book — he's a 20th-century man — finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people. And he kind of assumes that, yes, he'll become — these villagers — he'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements, but, of course, realizes that without the rest of human society, he can barely make a sandwich, let alone a toaster. But he didn't have Wikipedia.So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch. And, working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that, inside this object, which I'd bought for just 3.49 pounds, there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials. I didn't have the rest of my life to do this project. I had maybe nine months. So I thought, okay, I'll start with five. And these were steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel.So, starting with steel: how do you make steel? I went and knocked on the door of the Rio Tinto Chair of Advanced Mineral Extraction at the Royal School of Mines and said, ""How do you make steel?"" And Professor Cilliers was very kind and talked me through it. And my vague rememberings from GCSE science — well, steel comes from iron, so I phoned up an iron mine. And said, ""Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster. Can I come up and get some iron?"" Unfortunately, when I got there — emerges Ray. He had misheard me and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster, and so wasn't prepared to take me into the mines. But after some nagging, I got him to do that.(Video) Ray: It was Crease Limestone, and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice, warm, sunny atmosphere. When you study geology, you can see what's happened in the past, and there were terrific changes in the earth.Thomas Thwaites: As you can see, they had the Christmas decorations up. And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore, because, though Ray was a miner there, the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction, because, of course, it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America, Australia, wherever. But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train, and then was faced with the problem: Okay, how do you make this rock into components for a toaster?So I went back to Professor Cilliers, and he said, ""Go to the library."" So I did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy — completely useless for what I was trying to do. Because, of course, they don't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant. So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book. This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West, at least. And there you can see that woodcut is basically what I ended up doing. But instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower. (Laughter) And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project, was, the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go. And so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron. I dragged out this stuff, and it wasn't iron. But luckily, I found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves, and at 30 minutes at full power, and I was able to finish off the process.So, my next — (Applause) The next thing I was trying to get was copper. Again, this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world. It's not anymore, but I found a retired geology professor to take me down, and he said, ""Okay, I'll let you have some water from the mine."" And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up, dissolving the minerals from the mine. And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto, which is in Portugal. As you can see, it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it. So many such that it's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic, toxic conditions. But anyway, the water I dragged back from the Isle of Anglesey where the mine was — there was enough copper in it such that I could cast the pins of my metal electric plug.So my next thing: I was off to Scotland to get mica. And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity. That's me getting mica. And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case. Plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods. And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil. BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now. But even then they weren't convinced and said, ""Okay, we'll phone you back"" — never did. So I looked at other ways of making plastic. And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches. So this is attempting to make potato starch plastic. And for a while that was looking really good. I poured it into the mold, which you can see there, which I've made from a tree trunk. And it was looking good for a while, but I left it outside, because you had to leave it outside to dry, and unfortunately I came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato.So kind of out of desperation, I decided that I could think laterally. And geologists have actually christened — well, they're debating whether to christen — the age that we're living in — they're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, the age of Man. And that's because geologists of the future would kind of see a sharp shift in the strata of rock that is being laid down now. So suddenly, it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945. And there'd also be an extinction event — like fossils would suddenly disappear. And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock.So I looked up a plastic — so I decided that I could mine some of this modern-day rock. And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling. And they're at the sharp end of what's called the WEEE, which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive. And that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill. But this is it.(Music)(Laughter)So there's a picture of my toaster. (Applause) That's it without the case on. And there it is on the shelves. Thanks.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: I'm told you did plug it in once.TT: Yeah, I did plug it in. I don't know if you could see, but I was never able to make insulation for the wires. Kew Gardens were insistent that I couldn't come and hack into their rubber tree. So the wires were uninsulated. So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug. And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself. But I considered it a partial success, to be honest.BG: Thomas Thwaites. TT: Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch
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"This room may appear to be holding 600 people, but there's actually so many more, because in each one of us there is a multitude of personalities. I have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since I was a little girl. I call them ""the mystic"" and ""the warrior."" I was born into a family of politically active, intellectual atheists. There was this equation in my family that went something like this: if you are intelligent, you therefore are not spiritual. I was the freak of the family. I was this weird little kid who wanted to have deep talks about the worlds that might exist beyond the ones that we perceive with our senses. I wanted to know if what we human beings see and hear and think is a full and accurate picture of reality. So, looking for answers, I went to Catholic mass. I tagged along with my neighbors. I read Sartre and Socrates. And then a wonderful thing happened when I was in high school: Gurus from the East started washing up on the shores of America. And I said to myself, ""I wanna get me one of them.""And ever since, I've been walking the mystic path, trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called ""the optical delusion of everyday consciousness."" So what did he mean by this? I'll show you. Take a breath right now of this clear air in this room. Now, see this strange, underwater, coral reef-looking thing? It's actually a person's trachea, and those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now, all around us. If we're blind to this simple biology, imagine what we're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now and at the grandest cosmic levels. My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions. They've made me a proud I-don't-know-it-all.Now when the mystic part of me jabbers on and on like this, the warrior rolls her eyes. She's concerned about what's happening in this world right now. She's worried. She says, ""Excuse me, I'm pissed off, and I know a few things, and we better get busy about them right now."" I've spent my life as a warrior, working for women's issues, working on political campaigns, being an activist for the environment. And it can be sort of crazy-making, housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body. I've always been attracted to those rare people who pull that off, who devote their lives to humanity with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic — people like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, ""I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This,"" he wrote, ""is the interrelated structure of reality."" Then Mother Teresa, another mystic warrior, who said, ""The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small."" And Nelson Mandela, who lives by the African concept of ""ubuntu,"" which means ""I need you in order to be me, and you need me in order to be you."" Now we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors as if they were born with the saint gene. But we all actually have the same capacity that they do, and we need to do their work now.I'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing ""the Other"" by the voice we're giving to the most divisive among us. Listen to these titles of some of the bestselling books from both sides of the political divide here in the U.S. ""Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder,"" ""Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot,"" ""Pinheads and Patriots,"" ""Arguing With Idiots."" They're supposedly tongue-in-cheek, but they're actually dangerous. Now here's a title that may sound familiar, but whose author may surprise you: ""Four-and-a-Half-Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice."" Who wrote that? That was Adolf Hitler's first title for ""Mein Kampf"" — ""My Struggle"" — the book that launched the Nazi party. The worst eras in human history, whether in Cambodia or Germany or Rwanda, they start like this, with negative other-izing. And then they morph into violent extremism.This is why I'm launching a new initiative. And it's to help all of us, myself included, to counteract the tendency to ""otherize."" And I realize we're all busy people, so don't worry, you can do this on a lunch break. I'm calling my initiative, ""Take the Other to Lunch."" If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch, or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch. Now if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch makes you lose your appetite, I suggest you start more local, because there is no shortage of the Other right in your own neighborhood. Maybe that person who worships at the mosque, or the church or the synagogue, down the street. Or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict. Or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming. Anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you, or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears.A couple of weeks ago, I took a Conservative Tea Party woman to lunch. Now on paper, she passed my smoking ears test. She's an activist from the Right, and I'm an activist from the Left. And we used some guidelines to keep our conversation elevated, and you can use them too, because I know you're all going to take an Other to lunch. So first of all, decide on a goal: to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped. And then, before you get together, agree on some ground rules. My Tea Party lunchmate and I came up with these: don't persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious; be conversational; be real. And listen.From there, we dove in. And we used these questions: Share some of your life experiences with me. What issues deeply concern you? And what have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side? My lunch partner and I came away with some really important insights, and I'm going to share just one with you. I think it has relevance to any problem between people anywhere. I asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies about my side. ""What?"" she wanted to know. ""Like we're a bunch of elitist, morally-corrupt terrorist-lovers."" Well, she was shocked. She thought my side beat up on her side way more often, that we called them brainless, gun-toting racists, and we both marveled at the labels that fit none of the people we actually know. And since we had established some trust, we believed in each other's sincerity.We agreed we'd speak up in our own communities when we witnessed the kind of ""otherizing"" talk that can wound and fester into paranoia and then be used by those on the fringes to incite. By the end of our lunch, we acknowledged each other's openness. Neither of us had tried to change the other. But we also hadn't pretended that our differences were just going to melt away after a lunch. Instead, we had taken first steps together, past our knee-jerk reactions, to the ubuntu place, which is the only place where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems will be found.Who should you invite to lunch? Next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing, that will be your clue. And what might happen at your lunch? Will the heavens open and ""We Are the World"" play over the restaurant sound system? Probably not. Because ubuntu work is slow, and it's difficult. It's two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls. It's two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other. Here's how the great Persian poet Rumi put it: ""Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.""(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_lesser_take_the_other_to_lunch
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"So I'm here to tell you that we have a problem with boys, and it's a serious problem with boys. Their culture isn't working in schools, and I'm going to share with you ways that we can think about overcoming that problem. First, I want to start by saying, this is a boy, and this is a girl, and this is probably stereotypically what you think of as a boy and a girl. If I essentialize gender for you today, then you can dismiss what I have to say. So I'm not going to do that, I'm not interested in doing that. This is a different kind of boy and a different kind of girl. So the point here is that not all boys exist within these rigid boundaries of what we think of as boys and girls, and not all girls exist within those rigid boundaries of what we think of as girls. But, in fact, most boys tend to be a certain way, and most girls tend to be a certain way. And the point is that, for boys, the way that they exist and the culture that they embrace isn't working well in schools now.How do we know that? The 100 girls project tells us some really nice statistics. For example, for every 100 girls that are suspended from school, there are 250 boys that are suspended from school. For every 100 girls who are expelled from school, there are 335 boys who are expelled from school. For every 100 girls in special education, there are 217 boys. For every 100 girls with a learning disability, there are 276 boys. For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed, we have 324 boys. And by the way, all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black, if you happen to be poor, if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school. And if you are a boy, you're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD — Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.Now there is another side to this. And it is important that we recognize that women still need help in school, that salaries are still significantly lower, even when controlled for job types, and that girls have continued to struggle in math and science for years. That's all true. Nothing about that prevents us from paying attention to the literacy needs of our boys between ages three and 13. And so we should. In fact, what we ought to do is take a page from their playbook, because the initiatives and programs that have been set in place for women in science and engineering and mathematics are fantastic. They've done a lot of good for girls in these situations, and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years.Even in their older years, what we find is that there's still a problem. When we look at the universities, 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees are going to women now, which is a significant shift. And in fact, university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities. This makes university administrators very nervous, because girls don't want to go to schools that don't have boys. And so we're starting to see the establishment of men centers and men studies to think about how do we engage men in their experiences in the university. If you talk to faculty, they may say, ""Ugh. Yeah, well, they're playing video games, and they're gambling online all night long, and they're playing World of Warcraft, and that's affecting their academic achievement."" Guess what? Video games are not the cause. Video games are a symptom. They were turned off a long time before they got here.So let's talk about why they got turned off when they were between the ages of three and 13. There are three reasons that I believe that boys are out of sync with the culture of schools today. The first is zero tolerance. A kindergarten teacher I know, her son donated all of his toys to her, and when he did, she had to go through and pull out all the little plastic guns. You can't have plastic knives and swords and axes and all that kind of thing in a kindergarten classroom. What is it that we're afraid that this young man is going to do with this gun? I mean, really. But here he stands as testament to the fact that you can't roughhouse on the playground today. Now I'm not advocating for bullies. I'm not suggesting that we need to be allowing guns and knives in the school. But when we say that an Eagle Scout in a high school classroom who has a locked parked car in the parking lot and a penknife in it, has to be suspended from school, I think we may have gone a little too far with zero tolerance.Another way that zero tolerance lives itself out is in the writing of boys. In a lot of classrooms today, you're not allowed to write about anything that's violent. You're not allowed to write about anything that has to do with video games. These topics are banned. Boy comes home from school, and he says, ""I hate writing."" ""Why do you hate writing, son? What's wrong with writing?"" ""Now I have to write what she tells me to write."" ""OK, what is she telling you to write?"" ""Poems. I have to write poems. And little moments in my life. I don't want to write that stuff."" ""Well, what do you want to write? What do you want to write about?"" ""I want to write about video games. I want to write about leveling-up. I want to write about this really interesting world. I want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out, and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody."" ""All right. OK."" You tell a teacher that, and they'll ask you, in all seriousness, ""Should we send this child to the psychologist?"" And the answer is no, he's just a boy. He's just a little boy. It's not OK to write these kinds of things in classrooms today.So that's the first reason: Zero tolerance policies and the way they're lived out. The next reason that boys' cultures are out of sync with school cultures: there are fewer male teachers. Anybody who's over 15 doesn't know what this means, because in the last 10 years, the number of elementary school classroom teachers has been cut in half. We went from 14 percent to seven percent. That means that 93 percent of the teachers that our young men get in elementary classrooms are women. Now what's the problem with this? Women are great, yep, absolutely. But male role models for boys that say it's all right to be smart — they've got dads, they've got pastors, they've got Cub Scout leaders, but ultimately, six hours a day, five days a week they're spending in a classroom, and most of those classrooms are not places where men exist. And so they say, I guess this really isn't a place for boys. This is a place for girls. And I'm not very good at this, so I guess I'd better go play video games or get into sports, or something like that, because I obviously don't belong here. Men don't belong here, that's pretty obvious.So that may be a very direct way that we see it happen. But less directly, the lack of male presence in the culture — you've got a teachers' lounge, and they're having a conversation about Joey and Johnny who beat each other up on the playground. ""What are we going to do with these boys?"" The answer to that question changes depending on who's sitting around that table. Are there men around that table? Are there moms who've raised boys around that table? You'll see, the conversation changes depending upon who's sitting around the table.Third reason that boys are out of sync with school today: Kindergarten is the old second grade, folks. We have a serious compression of the curriculum happening out there. When you're three, you better be able to write your name legibly, or else we'll consider it a developmental delay. By the time you're in first grade, you should be able to read paragraphs of text with maybe a picture, maybe not, in a book of maybe 25 to 30 pages. If you don't, we're probably going to be putting you into a Title I special reading program. And if you ask Title I teachers, they'll tell you they've got about four or five boys for every girl that's in their program, in the elementary grades.The reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is, ""You need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time."" The teacher's salary depends on ""No Child Left Behind"" and ""Race to the Top"" and accountability and testing and all of this. So she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum — and girls. This compressed curriculum is bad for all active kids. And what happens is, she says, ""Please, sit down, be quiet, do what you're told, follow the rules, manage your time, focus, be a girl."" That's what she tells them. Indirectly, that's what she tells them. And so this is a very serious problem. Where is it coming from? It's coming from us.(Laughter)We want our babies to read when they are six months old. Have you seen the ads? We want to live in Lake Wobegon where every child is above average ... but what this does to our children is really not healthy. It's not developmentally appropriate, and it's particularly bad for boys.So what do we do? We need to meet them where they are. We need to put ourselves into boy culture. We need to change the mindset of acceptance in boys in elementary schools. More specifically, we can do some very specific things. We can design better games. Most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards. They're glorified drill and practice. They don't have the depth, the rich narrative that really engaging video games have, that the boys are really interested in. So we need to design better games. We need to talk to teachers and parents and school board members and politicians. We need to make sure that people see that we need more men in the classroom. We need to look carefully at our zero tolerance policies. Do they make sense? We need to think about how to uncompress this curriculum if we can, trying to bring boys back into a space that is comfortable for them. All of those conversations need to be happening.There are some great examples out there of schools — the New York Times just talked about a school recently. A game designer from the New School put together a wonderful video gaming school. But it only treats a few kids, and so this isn't very scalable. We have to change the culture and the feelings that politicians and school board members and parents have about the way we accept and what we accept in our schools today. We need to find more money for game design. Because good games, really good games, cost money, and World of Warcraft has quite a budget. Most of the educational games do not.Where we started: my colleagues Mike Petner, Shawn Vashaw, myself, we started by trying to look at the teachers' attitudes and find out how do they really feel about gaming, what do they say about it. And we discovered that they talk about the kids in their school, who talk about gaming, in pretty demeaning ways. They say, ""Oh, yeah. They're always talking about that stuff. They're talking about their little action figures and their little achievements or merit badges, or whatever it is that they get. And they're always talking about this stuff."" And they say these things as if it's OK. But if it were your culture, think of how that might feel. It's very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of that kind of language. They're nervous about anything that has anything to do with violence because of the zero tolerance policies. They are sure that parents and administrators will never accept anything.So we really need to think about looking at teacher attitudes and finding ways to change the attitudes, so that teachers are much more open and accepting of boy cultures in their classrooms. Because, ultimately, if we don't, then we're going to have boys who leave elementary school saying, ""Well I guess that was just a place for girls, it wasn't for me. So I've got to do gaming, or I've got to do sports."" If we change these things, if we pay attention to these things, and we reengage boys in their learning, they will leave the elementary schools saying, ""I'm smart.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning
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"I just did something I've never done before. I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the boat we were on, by the way. The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the dolphins, the glamorous stuff. They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff. And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it. So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding. It's still working its way up the food chain. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. Rachel Carson — the godmother of modern environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. She pointed out that the ""control men"" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds. But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT. And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent. Thus the title ""Silent Spring."" I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties. And I think what it is is I don't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — ""top hats,"" ""top kills"" and, most memorably, the ""junk shot"" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades. Then, it is years of deadly damage control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot — in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change. Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, ""What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?"" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, ""What if those scientists are right?"" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. But climate policy in the wealthy world — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: ""What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?"" Or we ask, ""How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or — where we're currently going — four degrees Celsius?"" And by the way, the assumption that we can safely control the Earth's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure fantasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops. So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious? A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like ""greed."" This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money. Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. And you actually don't have a lot of options. You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. Now both of these options — the boy genius and the scammer — are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future. By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: ""What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. Don't feel ashamed. Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do. So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides — for society at least. The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. And this problem — call it the ""perils of privilege"" — brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. Because none of us — at least in the global North — neither men nor women, are fully exempt from this message. Here's what I'm talking about. Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, ""Slap Mother Nature in the face."" And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story. We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance. Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. ""The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."" In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it. It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers. Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. The Earth always did have limits. They were just beyond our sights. And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts. I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? Now on the one hand, exhorting us to ""drill, baby, drill,"" because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them, and on the other, glorying in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall. There are still no limits. There will always be another frontier. So stop worrying and keep shopping. Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual. This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. And most controversially, it means the tar sands. I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. The oil is not liquid. You can't just drill a hole and pump it out. Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil. So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds. That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England. I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever built. That's a person down there by the wheel. My point is that this is not oil drilling. It's not even mining. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada. How else to describe this, but as a form of mass insanity? Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes. The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too. At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. But, of course, our secular religion is technology. Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these. The idea behind this form of ""geoengineering"" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet. The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution. Think of it as the ultimate junk shot. The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash. Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. An escape hatch has been reached. A new frontier has been found. Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose. We badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk
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"You may not know this, but you are celebrating an anniversary with me. I'm not married, but one year ago today, I woke up from a month-long coma, following a double lung transplant. Crazy, I know. Insane. Thank you.Six years before that, I was starting my career as an opera singer in Europe, when I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension — also known as PH. It happens when there's a thickening in the pulmonary veins, making the right side of the heart work overtime, and causing what I call the reverse-Grinch effect. My heart was three-and-a-half sizes too big. Physical activity becomes very difficult for people with this condition, and usually after two to five years, you die. I went to see this specialist, and she was top-of-the-field and told me I had to stop singing. She said, ""Those high notes are going to kill you."" While she didn't have any medical evidence to back up her claim that there was a relationship between operatic arias and pulmonary hypertension, she was absolutely emphatic I was singing my own obituary. I was very limited by my condition, physically. But I was not limited when I sang, and as air came up from my lungs, through my vocal cords and passed my lips as sound, it was the closest thing I had ever come to transcendence. And just because of someone's hunch, I wasn't going to give it up.Thankfully, I met Reda Girgis, who is dry as toast, but he and his team at Johns Hopkins didn't just want me to survive, they wanted me to live a meaningful life. This meant making trade-offs. I come from Colorado. It's a mile high, and I grew up there with my 10 brothers and sisters and two adoring parents. Well, the altitude exacerbated my symptoms. So I moved to Baltimore to be near my doctors and enrolled in a conservatory nearby. I couldn't walk as much as I used to, so I opted for five-inch heels. And I gave up salt, I went vegan, and I started taking huge doses of sildenafil, also known as Viagra.(Laughter)My father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for PH, but after six months, I couldn't walk up a small hill. I couldn't climb a flight of stairs. I could barely stand up without feeling like I was going to faint. I had a heart catheterization, where they measure this internal arterial pulmonary pressure, which is supposed to be between 15 and 20. Mine was 146. I like to do things big, and it meant one thing: there is a big gun treatment for pulmonary hypertension called Flolan, and it's not just a drug; it's a way of life. Doctors insert a catheter into your chest, which is attached to a pump that weighs about four-and-a-half pounds. Every day, 24 hours, that pump is at your side, administering medicine directly to your heart, and it's not a particularly preferable medicine in many senses. This is a list of the side effects: if you eat too much salt, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you'll probably end up in the ICU. If you go through a metal detector, you'll probably die. If you get a bubble in your medicine — because you have to mix it every morning — and it stays in there, you probably die. If you run out of medicine, you definitely die.No one wants to go on Flolan. But when I needed it, it was a godsend. Within a few days, I could walk again. Within a few weeks, I was performing, and in a few months, I debuted at the Kennedy Center. The pump was a little bit problematic when performing, so I'd attach it to my inner thigh with the help of the girdle and an ACE bandage. Literally hundreds of elevator rides were spent with me alone stuffing the pump into my Spanx, hoping the doors wouldn't open unexpectedly. And the tubing coming out of my chest was a nightmare for costume designers. I graduated from graduate school in 2006, and I got a fellowship to go back to Europe. A few days after arriving, I met this wonderful, old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles. And before long, I was commuting between Budapest, Milan and Florence. Though I was attached to this ugly, unwanted, high-maintenance, mechanical pet, my life was kind of like the happy part in an opera — very complicated, but in a good way.Then in February of 2008, my grandfather passed away. He was a big figure in all of our lives, and we loved him very much. It certainly didn't prepare me for what came next. Seven weeks later, I got a call from my family. My father had been in a catastrophic car accident, and he died. At 24, my death would have been entirely expected. But his — well, the only way I can articulate how it felt was that it precipitated my medical decline. Against my doctors' and family's wishes, I needed to go back for the funeral. I had to say goodbye in some way, shape or form. But soon I was showing signs of right-heart failure, and I had to return to sea level, doing so knowing that I probably would never see my home again.I canceled most of my engagements that summer, but I had one left in Tel Aviv, so I went. After one performance, I could barely drag myself from the stage to the taxicab. I sat down and felt the blood rush down from my face, and in the heat of the desert, I was freezing cold. My fingers started turning blue, and I was like, ""What is going on here?"" I heard my heart's valves snapping open and closed. The cab stopped, and I pulled my body from it feeling each ounce of weight as I walked to the elevator. I fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where I found my problem: I had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine. I was dying, and if I didn't mix that stuff up fast, I would never leave that apartment alive. I started mixing, and I felt like everything was going to fall out through one hole or another, but I just kept on going. Finally, with the last bottle in and the last bubble out, I attached the pump to the tubing and lay there hoping it would kick in soon enough. If it didn't, I'd probably see my father sooner than I anticipated. Thankfully, in a few minutes, I saw the signature hive-like rash appear on my legs, which is a side effect of the medication, and I knew I'd be okay.We're not big on fear in my family, but I was scared. I went back to the States, anticipating I'd return to Europe, but the heart catheterization showed that I wasn't going anywhere further that a flight-for-life from Johns Hopkins Hospital. I performed here and there, but as my condition deteriorated, so did my voice. My doctor wanted me to get on the list for a lung transplant. I didn't. I had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries. I knew another young man, though, who had PH who died while waiting for one. I wanted to live. I thought stem cells were a good option, but they hadn't developed to a point where I could take advantage of them yet. I officially took a break from singing, and I went to the Cleveland Clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years, for transplant. I was sitting there kind of unenthusiastically talking with the head transplant surgeon, and I asked him if I needed a transplant, what I could do to prepare. He said, ""Be happy. A happy patient is a healthy patient."" It was like in one verbal swoop he had channeled my thoughts on life and medicine and Confucius. I still didn't want a transplant, but in a month, I was back in the hospital with some severely edemic kankles — very attractive. And it was right-heart failure.I finally decided it was time to take my doctor's advice. It was time for me to go to Cleveland and to start the agonizing wait for a match. But the next morning, while I was still in the hospital, I got a telephone call. It was my doctor in Cleveland, Marie Budev. And they had lungs. It was a match. They were from Texas. And everybody was really happy for me, but me. Because, despite their problems, I had spent my whole life training my lungs, and I was not particularly enthusiastic about giving them up. I flew to Cleveland, and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye. But organs don't wait, and I went into surgery before I could say goodbye. The last thing I remember was lying on a white blanket, telling my surgeon that I needed to see my mother again, and to please try and save my voice. I fell into this apocalyptic dream world.During the thirteen-and-a-half-hour surgery, I flatlined twice, 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body. And in my surgeon's 20-year career, he said it was among the most difficult transplants that he's ever performed. They left my chest open for two weeks. You could see my over-sized heart beating inside of it. I was on a dozen machines that were keeping me alive. An infection ravaged my skin. I had hoped my voice would be saved, but my doctors knew that the breathing tubes going down my throat might have already destroyed it. If they stayed in, there was no way I would ever sing again. So my doctor got the ENT, the top guy at the clinic, to come down and give me surgery to move the tubes around my voice box. He said it would kill me. So my own surgeon performed the procedure in a last-ditch attempt to save my voice.Though my mom couldn't say goodbye to me before the surgery, she didn't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed. And if you want an example of perseverance, grit and strength in a beautiful, little package, it is her. One year ago to this very day, I woke up. I was 95 lbs. There were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body. I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't eat, I couldn't move, I certainly couldn't sing, I couldn't even breathe, but when I looked up and I saw my mother, I couldn't help but smile.Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs, death happens. But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it? It's about living. Medical conditions don't negate the human condition. And when people are allowed to pursue their passions, doctors will find they have better, happier and healthier patients. My parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place, but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time. And I'm so grateful they did.This past summer, when I was running and singing and dancing and playing with my nieces and my nephews and my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my grandmother in the Colorado Rockies, I couldn't help but think of that doctor who told me that I couldn't sing. And I wanted to tell her, and I want to tell you, we need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams. When we do, we will find that patients don't just survive; we thrive. And some of us might even sing.(Applause) [Singing: French]Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. And I'd like to thank my pianist, Monica Lee. (Applause) Thank you so much. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/charity_tilleman_dick_singing_after_a_double_lung_transplant
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"I am honored to be here, and I'm honored to talk about this topic, which I think is of grave importance. We've been talking a lot about the horrific impacts of plastic on the planet and on other species, but plastic hurts people, too — especially poor people. And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have the bull's-eye on their foreheads are poor people. People got very upset when the BP oil spill happened, for very good reason. People thought, ""Oh, my God. This is terrible, this oil — it's in the water. It's going to destroy the living systems there. People are going to be hurt. This is a terrible thing, this oil is going to hurt the people in the Gulf.""What people don't think about is: What if the oil had made it safely to shore? What if the oil actually got where it was trying to go? Not only would it have been burned in engines and added to global warming, but there's a place called ""Cancer Alley,"" and the reason it's called ""Cancer Alley"" is because the petrochemical industry takes that oil and turns it into plastic and in the process, kills people. It shortens the lives of the people who live there in the Gulf. So oil and petrochemicals are not just a problem when there's a spill; they're a problem when there's not. And what we don't often appreciate is the price that poor people pay for us to have these disposable products.The other thing we often don't appreciate is, it's not just at the point of production that poor people suffer. Poor people also suffer at the point of use. Those of us who earn a certain income level, we have something called choice. The reason why you want to work hard and have a job and not be poor and broke is so you can have choices, economic choices. We actually get a chance to choose not to use products that have dangerous, poisonous plastic in them. Other people who are poor don't have those choices. So low-income people often are the ones who are buying the products that have those dangerous chemicals in them that their children are using. Those are the people who wind up ingesting a disproportionate amount of this poisonous plastic in using it. And people say, ""Well, they should just buy a different product."" Well, the problem with being poor is you don't have those choices. You often have to buy the cheapest products. The cheapest products are often the most dangerous.And if that weren't bad enough — if it wasn't just the production of plastic that's giving people cancer in places like Cancer Alley, and shortening lives and hurting poor kids at the point of use — at the point of disposal, once again, it's poor people who bear the burden. Often, we think we're doing a good thing: You're in your office, drinking your bottled water or whatever it is, and you think to yourself, ""I'm going to throw this away. No — I'm going to be virtuous. I'm going to put it in the blue bin."" You think, ""I put mine in the blue bin."" And then you look at your colleague and say, ""Why, you cretin! You put yours in the white bin."" And we use that as a moral tickle. We feel so good about ourselves. If we — well, OK, I'm just ... me. Not you, but I feel this way often.(Laughter)And so we kind of have this moral feel-good moment. But if we were to be able to follow that little bottle on its journey, we would be shocked to discover that, all too often, that bottle is going to be put on a boat, it's going to go all the way across the ocean at some expense, and it's going to wind up in a developing country, often China. I think in our minds, we imagine somebody's going to take the little bottle and say, ""Oh, little bottle! We're so happy to see you, little bottle.""(Laughter)""You've served so well.""(Laughter)He's given a little bottle massage, a little bottle medal. And they say, ""What would you like to do next?"" The little bottle says, ""I just don't know ...""(Laughter)But that's not actually what happens. You know? That bottle winds up getting burned. The recycling of plastic in many developing countries means the incineration of the plastic, the burning of the plastic, which releases incredible toxic chemicals and, once again, kills people. And so, poor people who are making these products in petrochemical centers like Cancer Alley, poor people who are consuming these products disproportionately, and then poor people who, even at the tail end of the recycling, are having their lives shortened. They're all being harmed — greatly — by this addiction that we have to disposability.Now, you think to yourself — I know how you are — you say, ""That sure is terrible for those poor people. It's just awful. Those poor people. I hope someone does something to help them."" But what we don't understand is — here we are in Los Angeles. We worked very hard to get the smog reduction happening here in Los Angeles. But guess what? Because they're doing so much dirty production in Asia now, because the environmental laws don't protect the people in Asia now, almost all of the clean air gains and the toxic air gains that we've achieved here in California have been wiped out by dirty air coming over from Asia. So we all are being hit. We all are being impacted. It's just that the poor people get it first and worst. But the dirty production, the burning of toxins, the lack of environmental standards in Asia, is actually creating so much dirty air pollution, it's coming across the ocean, and has erased our gains here in California. We're back where we were in the 1970s. And so we're on one planet, and we have to be able to get to the root of these problems.The root of this problem, in my view, is the idea of disposability itself. You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. But if you create a world where you don't trash people, you can't trash the planet. So now we are at a moment where the coming together of social justice as an idea and ecology as an idea, we finally can now see that they are really, at the end of the day, one idea. And it's the idea that we don't have disposable anything. We don't have disposable resources. We don't have disposable species. And we don't have disposable people, either. We don't have a throwaway planet, and we don't have throwaway children — it's all precious.And as we all begin to come back to that basic understanding, new opportunities for action begin to emerge. Biomimicry, which is an emerging science, winds up being a very important social justice idea. People who are just learning about this stuff: biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. Democracy, by the way, means respecting the wisdom of all people — we'll get to that. But biomimicry means respecting the wisdom of all species. It turns out we're a pretty clever species. We have this big cortex, we're pretty proud of ourselves. But if we want to make something hard, we say, ""I know! I'm going to make a hard substance. I know! I'm going to get vacuums and furnaces and drag stuff out of the ground and get things hot and poison and pollute ... But I got this hard thing!""(Laughter)""I'm so clever!"" And you look behind you, and there's destruction all around you. But guess what? You're so clever, but you're not as clever as a clam.A clamshell is hard. There's no vacuums. There's no big furnaces. There's no poison. There's no pollution. It turns out that other species figured out a long time ago how to create many of the things we need using biological processes that nature knows how to use well. That insight of biomimicry, of our scientists finally realizing that we have as much to learn from other species — I don't mean taking a mouse and sticking it with stuff. I don't mean looking at it from that way, abusing the little species. I mean actually respecting them, respecting what they've achieved. That's called biomimicry, and that opens the door to zero waste production; zero pollution production; that we could actually enjoy a high quality of life, a high standard of living, without trashing the planet.Well, that idea of biomimicry, respecting the wisdom of all species, combined with the idea of democracy and social justice, respecting the wisdom and the worth of all people, would give us a different society. We would have a different economy. We would have a green society that Dr. King would be proud of. That should be the goal. And the way that we get there is to first of all recognize that the idea of disposability not only hurts the species we've talked about, but it even corrupts our own society.We're so proud to live here in California. We just had this vote, and everybody's like, ""Well — not in our state!""(Laughter)I don't know what those other states were doing, but ...""(Laughter)Just so proud. And, yeah, I'm proud, too. But ... California, though we lead the world in some of the green stuff, we also, unfortunately, lead the world in some of the gulag stuff. California has one of the highest incarceration rates of all the 50 states. We have a moral challenge in this movement. We are passionate about rescuing some dead materials from the landfill, but sometimes not as passionate about rescuing living beings, living people. And I would say that we live in a country — five percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the greenhouse gases, but also 25 percent of the world's prisoners. One of every four people locked up anywhere in the world is locked up right here in the United States. So that is consistent with this idea that disposability is something we believe in.And yet, as a movement that has to broaden its constituency, that has to grow, that has to reach out beyond our natural comfort zone, one of the challenges to the success of this movement, of getting rid of things like plastic and helping the economy shift, is people look at our movement with some suspicion. And they ask a question, and the question is: How can these people be so passionate? A poor person, a low-income person, somebody in Cancer Alley, somebody in Watts, somebody in Harlem, somebody on an Indian reservation, might say to themselves — and rightfully so — ""How can these people be so passionate about making sure that a plastic bottle has a second chance in life, or an aluminum can has a second chance, and yet, when my child gets in trouble and goes to prison, he doesn't get a second chance?"" ""How can this movement be so passionate about saying we don't have throwaway stuff, no throwaway dead materials, and yet accept throwaway lives and throwaway communities like Cancer Alley?"" And so, we now get a chance to be truly proud of this movement. When we take on topics like this, it gives us that extra call to reach out to other movements and to become more inclusive and to grow, and we can finally get out of this crazy dilemma that we've been in.Most of you are good, softhearted people. When you were younger, you cared about the whole world, and at some point, somebody said you had to pick an issue, you had to boil your love down to an issue. ""Can't love the whole world — you've got to work on trees or you've got to work on immigration. You've got to shrink it down and be about one issue."" And really, they fundamentally told you, ""Are you going to hug a tree? Or are you going to hug a child? Pick. Are you going to hug a tree? Or are you going to hug a child? Pick."" Well, when you start working on issues like plastic, you realize the whole thing is connected. And luckily, most of us are blessed to have two arms — we can hug both.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/van_jones_the_economic_injustice_of_plastic
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"I will start by posing a little bit of a challenge: the challenge of dealing with data, data that we have to deal with in medical situations. It's really a huge challenge for us. And this is our beast of burden — this is a Computer Tomography machine, a CT machine. It's a fantastic device. It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body. It takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine. So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care, but as I said, it's also a challenge for us. And the challenge is really found in this picture here. It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now. We're facing this problem. And let me step back in time.Let's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then. These machines that came out — they started coming in the 1970s — they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body. And I've taken the liberty, just for clarity, to translate that to data slices. That would correspond to about 50 megabytes of data, which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices. If you translate that to phone books, it's about one meter of phone books in the pile. Looking at what we're doing today with these machines that we have, we can, just in a few seconds, get 24,000 images out of a body, and that would correspond to about 20 gigabytes of data, or 800 phone books, and the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books. What's about to happen — and we're seeing this; it's beginning — a technology trend that's happening right now is that we're starting to look at time-resolved situations as well. So we're getting the dynamics out of the body as well. And just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds, and that would correspond to one terabyte of data — that's 800,000 books and 16 kilometers of phone books. That's one patient, one data set. And this is what we have to deal with.So this is really the enormous challenge that we have. And already today — this is 25,000 images. Imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this. They would put up 25,000 images, they would go like this, ""25,0000, okay, okay. There is the problem."" They can't do that anymore. That's impossible. So we have to do something that's a little bit more intelligent than doing this. So what we do is that we put all these slices together. Imagine that you slice your body in all these directions, and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data, into a block of data. So this is really what we're doing. So this gigabyte or terabyte of data, we're putting it into this block. But of course, the block of data just contains the amount of X-ray that's been absorbed in each point in the human body. So what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we don't want to look at. So transforming the data set into something that looks like this. And this is a challenge. This is a huge challenge for us to do that.Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information. I want to look at the heart. I want to look at the blood vessels. I want to look at the liver. Maybe even find a tumor, in some cases. So this is where this little dear comes into play. This is my daughter. This is as of 9 a.m. this morning. She's playing a computer game. She's only two years old, and she's having a blast. So she's really the driving force behind the development of graphics-processing units. As long as kids are playing computer games, graphics is getting better and better and better. So please go back home, tell your kids to play more games, because that's what I need.So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data. So really what I'm doing is using these fantastic little devices. And you know, going back maybe 10 years in time when I got the funding to buy my first graphics computer — it was a huge machine. It was cabinets of processors and storage and everything. I paid about one million dollars for that machine. That machine is, today, about as fast as my iPhone. So every month there are new graphics cards coming out, and here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors — NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well. And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards. So this is really what's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine, together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms — compressing data, extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on.So I'm going to show you a few examples of what we can do. This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner. You can see that this is a full data [set]. It's a woman. You can see the hair. You can see the individual structures of the woman. You can see that there is [a] scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth. That's where those artifacts are coming from. But fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer, I can just put in a clip plane. And of course all the data is inside, so I can start rotating, I can look at it from different angles, and I can see that this woman had a problem. She had a bleeding up in the brain, and that's been fixed with a little stent, a metal clamp that's tightening up the vessel. And just by changing the functions, then I can decide what's going to be transparent and what's going to be visible. I can look at the skull structure, and I can see that, okay, this is where they opened up the skull on this woman, and that's where they went in. So these are fantastic images. They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today.Now we have really made use of this, and we have tried to squeeze a lot of data into the system. And one of the applications that we've been working on — and this has gotten a little bit of traction worldwide — is the application of virtual autopsies. So again, looking at very, very large data sets, and you saw those full-body scans that we can do. We're just pushing the body through the whole CT scanner, and just in a few seconds we can get a full-body data set. So this is from a virtual autopsy. And you can see how I'm gradually peeling off. First you saw the body bag that the body came in, then I'm peeling off the skin — you can see the muscles — and eventually you can see the bone structure of this woman.Now at this point, I would also like to emphasize that, with the greatest respect for the people that I'm now going to show — I'm going to show you a few cases of virtual autopsies — so it's with great respect for the people that have died under violent circumstances that I'm showing these pictures to you. In the forensic case — and this is something that ... there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years. So this will be the typical workflow situation. The police will decide — in the evening, when there's a case coming in — they will decide, okay, is this a case where we need to do an autopsy? So in the morning, in between six and seven in the morning, the body is then transported inside of the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one of the CT scanners. And then the radiologist, together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist, looks at the data that's coming out, and they have a joint session. And then they decide what to do in the real physical autopsy after that.Now looking at a few cases, here's one of the first cases that we had. You can really see the details of the data set. It's very high-resolution, and it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details. And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here. Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman. And it's very, very easy to see the damages on the bone structure. And the cause of death is the broken neck. And this women also ended up under the car, so she's quite badly beaten up by this injury.Here's another case, a knifing. And this is also again showing us what we can do. It's very easy to look at metal artifacts that we can show inside of the body. You can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth — that's actually the filling of the teeth — but because I've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent. Here's another violent case. This really didn't kill the person. The person was killed by stabs in the heart, but they just deposited the knife by putting it through one of the eyeballs. Here's another case. It's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings. Here you can see that knife went through the heart. It's very easy to see how air has been leaking from one part to another part, which is difficult to do in a normal, standard, physical autopsy. So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was.Here's another case that I think is interesting. Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person. And what we've done is that we've turned the bullet into a light source, so that bullet is actually shining, and it makes it really easy to find these fragments. During a physical autopsy, if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments, that's actually quite hard to do.One of the things that I'm really, really happy to be able to show you here today is our virtual autopsy table. It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPUs. It actually looks like this, just to give you a feeling for what it looks like. It really just works like a huge iPhone. So we've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table, and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface. So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it. This is what you want instead. Steve, I hope you're listening to this, all right. So it's a very nice little device. So if you have the opportunity, please try it out. It's really a hands-on experience. So it gained some traction, and we're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes, but also, perhaps in the future, in a more clinical situation. There's a YouTube video that you can download and look at this, if you want to convey the information to other people about virtual autopsies.Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really ""touching"" data. And this is a bit of science fiction now, so we're moving into really the future. This is not really what the medical doctors are using right now, but I hope they will in the future. So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device. It's a little mechanical pen that has very, very fast step motors inside of the pen. And so I can generate a force feedback. So when I virtually touch data, it will generate forces in the pen, so I get a feedback. So in this particular situation, it's a scan of a living person. I have this pen, and I look at the data, and I move the pen towards the head, and all of a sudden I feel resistance. So I can feel the skin. If I push a little bit harder, I'll go through the skin, and I can feel the bone structure inside. If I push even harder, I'll go through the bone structure, especially close to the ear where the bone is very soft. And then I can feel the brain inside, and this will be the slushy like this.So this is really nice. And to take that even further, this is a heart. And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution. So just looking at this heart, I can play back a video here. And this is Karljohan, one of my graduate students who's been working on this project. And he's sitting there in front of the Haptic device, the force feedback system, and he's moving his pen towards the heart, and the heart is now beating in front of him, so he can see how the heart is beating. He's taken the pen, and he's moving it towards the heart, and he's putting it on the heart, and then he feels the heartbeats from the real living patient. Then he can examine how the heart is moving. He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving. And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons. I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data. So this is really neat.Now we're going even further into science fiction. And we heard a little bit about functional MRI. Now this is really an interesting project. MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body. So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen. That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain. So this is something that we've been working on. And you just saw Motts the research engineer, there, going into the MRI system, and he was wearing goggles. So he could actually see things in the goggles. So I could present things to him while he's in the scanner. And this is a little bit freaky, because what Motts is seeing is actually this. He's seeing his own brain. So Motts is doing something here, and probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex. And then he can see that at the same time. These visualizations are brand new. And this is something that we've been researching for a little while.This is another sequence of Motts' brain. And here we asked Motts to calculate backwards from 100. So he's going ""100, 97, 94."" And then he's going backwards. And you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain. Well this is fantastic. We can do this in real time. We can investigate things. We can tell him to do things. You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain. And he's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things. The signal is really deep inside of the brain as well, and it's shining through, because all of the data is inside this volume. And in just a second here you will see — okay, here. Motts, now move your left foot. So he's going like this. For 20 seconds he's going like that, and all of a sudden it lights up up here. So we've got motor cortex activation up there. So this is really, really nice, and I think this is a great tool. And connecting also with the previous talk here, this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working, how the brain is working, and we can do this with very, very high visual quality and very fast resolution.Now we're also having a bit of fun at the center. So this is a CAT scan — Computer Aided Tomography. So this is a lion from the local zoo outside of Norrkoping in Kolmarden, Elsa. So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner. And then, of course, I get the whole data set from the lion. And I can do very nice images like this. I can peel off the layer of the lion. I can look inside of it. And we've been experimenting with this. And I think this is a great application for the future of this technology, because there's very little known about the animal anatomy. What's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information. We can scan all sorts of things, all sorts of animals. The only problem is to fit it into the machine. So here's a bear. It was kind of hard to get it in. And the bear is a cuddly, friendly animal. And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear. And you might want to cuddle this one, until you change the functions and look at this. So be aware of the bear.So with that, I'd like to thank all the people who have helped me to generate these images. It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software. So, some very talented people. My motto is always, I only hire people that are smarter than I am and most of these are smarter than I am.So thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anders_ynnerman_visualizing_the_medical_data_explosion
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"Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields. So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics. So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts. I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology. Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology. With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech.(Laughter)So we're based in New York City. And if you're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the Bot-Agent. The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @robotinthewild. I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data. He's named after the Star Trek character. I think he's going to be super popular. We've got the robot — in his head is a database of a lot of jokes. Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes. So it knows something about the subject; it knows about the length. It knows how much it's moving. And so it's going to try to watch your response. I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today.(Laughter)It can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things, sort of like Netflix-style, over longer-term to different communities or audiences, children versus adults, different cultures. You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in. And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions. Some of you in this middle section — you have red/green paddles. If you like what's going on, show the green. If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red. Now don't be shy. It's just a robot. It doesn't have feelings ... yet. (Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter. There's also a microphone that's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing — I hope not — to help make some of its next decisions. Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin.Data: Hello TEDWomen. It's an honor to be here.(Laughter)(Applause)You guys are looking good out there. Ready for some jokes?Audience: Yeah.Data: Here's the first one. Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, ""I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live."" ""That's terrible,"" said the patient. ""How can the news possibly be worse?"" ""I've been trying to contact you since yesterday.""(Laughter)(Applause)The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss. Data: Pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? ""Come on buddy, I have the toe clippers right here. You get past me, the guy behind me has a spoon.""(Laughter)HK: He's a French robot.Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods. One of them falls to the ground. He does not seem to be breathing. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911. He gasps to the operator, ""My friend is dead. What can I do?"" The operator says, ""Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."" There is a silence, and the operator hears a shot. The guy's voice comes back on the line, ""Okay, now what?""(Laughter)(Applause)Question: Why is television called a medium? Anyone? Because it's neither rare nor well done. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television. Any of you like television? Audience: Yes. Data: I find it incredibly educational. Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read. (Laughter) That's all for now. Was that okay for my first time?(Applause)You've been a great audience. Thank you.HK: Yay.(Applause)So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance. So thank you all for being a part of it. There's a lot more to come. And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/heather_knight_silicon_based_comedy
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"The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you'll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis.A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That's just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year.And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world — which I think is what China will become — will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots.Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large, is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can't. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like, just as a beginning.The first is this: that China is not really a nation-state. Okay, it's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years, but everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this. This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period — the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago. And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China its sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation-state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization-state. I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization-state, rather than as a nation-state. And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It's never been the case.So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown — the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together.The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. ""Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case."" Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong — as it will be to the question of Taiwan — was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China — maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil — all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged — of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think — in these days at least — that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because — well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special — it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged — I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on — for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate — not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family — not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state — very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, ""The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe."" And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more or less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms — many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas — as we are familiar with — with something like the one-child policy.Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China — the civilization-state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society.And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong — our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect — this is the reason. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures — virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West — have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. — a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago — Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future.And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid — take Europe; America is slightly different — but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people — I've got an English friend in China, and he said, ""The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion."" Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration. But there's another problem which goes along with this — that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world — and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future. I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in its confidence. Take the 19th century, for example. But this, alas, is no longer true.If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China — there's old Confucius. This is a railway station the likes of which you've never seen before. It doesn't even look like a railway station. This is the new [Wuhan] railway station for the high-speed trains. China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together. Or take this: now this is an idea, but it's an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing. Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour. Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States: China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big-picture positive for this world. For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That's what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India — between them 38 percent of the world's population — and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation, and we will have to learn about these civilizations.This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. (Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368. I think they're playing golf. Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.Welcome to the future. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_jacques_understanding_the_rise_of_china
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"I'm going to be talking to you about how we can tap a really underutilized resource in health care, which is the patient, or, as I like to use the scientific term, people. Because we are all patients, we are all people. Even doctors are patients at some point. So I want to talk about that as an opportunity that we really have failed to engage with very well in this country and, in fact, worldwide. If you want to get at the big part — I mean from a public health level, where my training is — you're looking at behavioral issues. You're looking at things where people are actually given information, and they're not following through with it. It's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes, obesity, many forms of heart disease, even some forms of cancer — when you think of smoking. Those are all behaviors where people know what they're supposed to do. They know what they're supposed to be doing, but they're not doing it.Now behavior change is something that is a long-standing problem in medicine. It goes all the way back to Aristotle. And doctors hate it, right? I mean, they complain about it all the time. We talk about it in terms of engagement, or non-compliance. When people don't take their pills, when people don't follow doctors' orders — these are behavior problems. But for as much as clinical medicine agonizes over behavior change, there's not a lot of work done in terms of trying to fix that problem. So the crux of it comes down to this notion of decision-making — giving information to people in a form that doesn't just educate them or inform them, but actually leads them to make better decisions, better choices in their lives.One part of medicine, though, has faced the problem of behavior change pretty well, and that's dentistry. Dentistry might seem — and I think it is — many dentists would have to acknowledge it's somewhat of a mundane backwater of medicine. Not a lot of cool, sexy stuff happening in dentistry. But they have really taken this problem of behavior change and solved it. It's the one great preventive health success we have in our health care system. People brush and floss their teeth. They don't do it as much as they should, but they do it.So I'm going to talk about one experiment that a few dentists in Connecticut cooked up about 30 years ago. So this is an old experiment, but it's a really good one, because it was very simple, so it's an easy story to tell. So these Connecticut dentists decided that they wanted to get people to brush their teeth and floss their teeth more often, and they were going to use one variable: they wanted to scare them. They wanted to tell them how bad it would be if they didn't brush and floss their teeth. They had a big patient population. They divided them up into two groups. They had a low-fear population, where they basically gave them a 13-minute presentation, all based in science, but told them that, if you didn't brush and floss your teeth, you could get gum disease. If you get gum disease, you will lose your teeth, but you'll get dentures, and it won't be that bad. So that was the low-fear group. The high-fear group, they laid it on really thick. They showed bloody gums. They showed puss oozing out from between their teeth. They told them that their teeth were going to fall out. They said that they could have infections that would spread from their jaws to other parts of their bodies, and ultimately, yes, they would lose their teeth. They would get dentures, and if you got dentures, you weren't going to be able to eat corn-on-the-cob, you weren't going to be able to eat apples, you weren't going to be able to eat steak. You'll eat mush for the rest of your life. So go brush and floss your teeth. That was the message. That was the experiment.Now they measured one other variable. They wanted to capture one other variable, which was the patients' sense of efficacy. This was the notion of whether the patients felt that they actually would go ahead and brush and floss their teeth. So they asked them at the beginning, ""Do you think you'll actually be able to stick with this program?"" And the people who said, ""Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty good about that,"" they were characterized as high efficacy, and the people who said, ""Eh, I never get around to brushing and flossing as much as I should,"" they were characterized as low efficacy. So the upshot was this. The upshot of this experiment was that fear was not really a primary driver of the behavior at all. The people who brushed and flossed their teeth were not necessarily the people who were really scared about what would happen — it's the people who simply felt that they had the capacity to change their behavior. So fear showed up as not really the driver. It was the sense of efficacy.So I want to isolate this, because it was a great observation — 30 years ago, right, 30 years ago — and it's one that's laid fallow in research. It was a notion that really came out of Albert Bandura's work, who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment. The notion of efficacy basically boils down to one — that if somebody believes that they have the capacity to change their behavior. In health care terms, you could characterize this as whether or not somebody feels that they see a path towards better health, that they can actually see their way towards getting better health, and that's a very important notion. It's an amazing notion. We don't really know how to manipulate it, though, that well. Except, maybe we do.So fear doesn't work, right? Fear doesn't work. And this is a great example of how we haven't learned that lesson at all. This is a campaign from the American Diabetes Association. This is still the way we're communicating messages about health. I mean, I showed my three-year-old this slide last night, and he's like, ""Papa, why is an ambulance in these people's homes?"" And I had to explain, ""They're trying to scare people."" And I don't know if it works.Now here's what does work: personalized information works. Again, Bandura recognized this years ago, decades ago. When you give people specific information about their health, where they stand, and where they want to get to, where they might get to, that path, that notion of a path — that tends to work for behavior change. So let me just spool it out a little bit. So you start with personalized data, personalized information that comes from an individual, and then you need to connect it to their lives. You need to connect it to their lives, hopefully not in a fear-based way, but one that they understand. Okay, I know where I sit. I know where I'm situated. And that doesn't just work for me in terms of abstract numbers — this overload of health information that we're inundated with. But it actually hits home. It's not just hitting us in our heads; it's hitting us in our hearts. There's an emotional connection to information because it's from us. That information then needs to be connected to choices, needs to be connected to a range of options, directions that we might go to — trade-offs, benefits. Finally, we need to be presented with a clear point of action. We need to connect the information always with the action, and then that action feeds back into different information, and it creates, of course, a feedback loop.Now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change. But the problem is that things — in the upper-right corner there — personalized data, it's been pretty hard to come by. It's a difficult and expensive commodity, until now. So I'm going to give you an example, a very simple example of how this works. So we've all seen these. These are the ""your speed limit"" signs. You've seen them all around, especially these days as radars are cheaper. And here's how they work in the feedback loop. So you start with the personalized data where the speed limit on the road that you are at that point is 25, and, of course, you're going faster than that. We always are. We're always going above the speed limit. The choice in this case is pretty simple. We either keep going fast, or we slow down. We should probably slow down, and that point of action is probably now. We should take our foot off the pedal right now, and generally we do. These things are shown to be pretty effective in terms of getting people to slow down. They reduce speeds by about five to 10 percent. They last for about five miles, in which case we put our foot back on the pedal. But it works, and it even has some health repercussions. Your blood pressure might drop a little bit. Maybe there's fewer accidents, so there's public health benefits.But by and large, this is a feedback loop that's so nifty and too rare. Because in health care, most health care, the data is very removed from the action. It's very difficult to line things up so neatly. But we have an opportunity. So I want to talk about, I want to shift now to think about how we deliver health information in this country, how we actually get information. This is a pharmaceutical ad. Actually, it's a spoof. It's not a real pharmaceutical ad. Nobody's had the brilliant idea of calling their drug Havidol quite yet. But it looks completely right. So it's exactly the way we get health information and pharmaceutical information, and it just sounds perfect. And then we turn the page of the magazine, and we see this — now this is the page the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to put into their ads, or to follow their ads, and to me, this is one of the most  cynical exercises in medicine. Because we know. Who among us would actually say that people read this? And who among us would actually say that people who do try to read this actually get anything out of it? This is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information. There is no good faith in this.So this is a different approach. This is an approach that has been developed by a couple researchers at Dartmouth Medical School, Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin. And they created this thing called the ""drug facts box."" They took inspiration from, of all things, Cap'n Crunch. They went to the nutritional information box and saw that what works for cereal, works for our food, actually helps people understand what's in their food. God forbid we should use that same standard that we make Cap'n Crunch live by and bring it to drug companies. So let me just walk through this quickly. It says very clearly what the drug is for, specifically who it is good for, so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you. You can understand exactly what the benefits are. It isn't this kind of vague promise that it's going to work no matter what, but you get the statistics for how effective it is. And finally, you understand what those choices are. You can start to unpack the choices involved because of the side effects. Every time you take a drug, you're walking into a possible side effect. So it spells those out in very clean terms, and that works.So I love this. I love that drug facts box. And so I was thinking about, what's an opportunity that I could have to help people understand information? What's another latent body of information that's out there that people are really not putting to use? And so I came up with this: lab test results. Blood test results are this great source of information. They're packed with information. They're just not for us. They're not for people. They're not for patients. They go right to doctors. And God forbid — I think many doctors, if you really asked them, they don't really understand all this stuff either. This is the worst presented information. You ask Tufte, and he would say, ""Yes, this is the absolute worst presentation of information possible.""What we did at Wired was we went, and I got our graphic design department to re-imagine these lab reports. So that's what I want to walk you through. So this is the general blood work before, and this is the after, this is what we came up with. The after takes what was four pages — that previous slide was actually the first of four pages of data that's just the general blood work. It goes on and on and on, all these values, all these numbers you don't know. This is our one-page summary. We use the notion of color. It's an amazing notion that color could be used. So on the top-level you have your overall results, the things that might jump out at you from the fine print. Then you can drill down and understand how actually we put your level in context, and we use color to illustrate exactly where your value falls. In this case, this patient is slightly at risk of diabetes because of their glucose level.Likewise, you can go over your lipids and, again, understand what your overall cholesterol level is and then break down into the HDL and the LDL if you so choose. But again, always using color and personalized proximity to that information. All those other values, all those pages and pages of values that are full of nothing, we summarize. We tell you that you're okay, you're normal. But you don't have to wade through it. You don't have to go through the junk. And then we do two other very important things that kind of help fill in this feedback loop: we help people understand in a little more detail what these values are and what they might indicate. And then we go a further step — we tell them what they can do. We give them some insight into what choices they can make, what actions they can take. So that's our general blood work test.Then we went to CRP test. In this case, it's a sin of omission. They have this huge amount of space, and they don't use it for anything, so we do. Now the CRP test is often done following a cholesterol test, or in conjunction with a cholesterol test. So we take the bold step of putting the cholesterol information on the same page, which is the way the doctor is going to evaluate it. So we thought the patient might actually want to know the context as well. It's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed, which might be a risk for heart disease. What you're actually measuring is spelled out in clean language. Then we use the information that's already in the lab report. We use the person's age and their gender to start to fill in the personalized risks. So we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is.The last one I'll show you is a PSA test. Here's the before, and here's the after. Now a lot of our effort on this one — as many of you probably know, a PSA test is a very controversial test. It's used to test for prostate cancer, but there are all sorts of reasons why your prostate might be enlarged. And so we spent a good deal of our time indicating that. We again personalized the risks. So this patient is in their 50s, so we can actually give them a very precise estimate of what their risk for prostate cancer is. In this case it's about 25 percent, based on that. And then again, the follow-up actions.So our cost for this was less than 10,000 dollars, all right. That's what Wired magazine spent on this. Why is Wired magazine doing this? (Laughter) Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, the two largest lab testing companies — last year, they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively. Now this is not a problem of resources; this is a problem of incentives. We need to recognize that the target of this information should not be the doctor, should not be the insurance company. It should be the patient. It's the person who actually, in the end, is going to be having to change their lives and then start adopting new behaviors.This is information that is incredibly powerful. It's an incredibly powerful catalyst to change. But we're not using it. It's just sitting there. It's being lost. So I want to just offer four questions that every patient should ask, because I don't actually expect people to start developing these lab test reports. But you can create your own feedback loop. Anybody can create their feedback loop by asking these simple questions: Can I have my results? And the only acceptable answer is — (Audience: Yes.) — yes. What does this mean? Help me understand what the data is. What are my options? What choices are now on the table? And then, what's next? How do I integrate this information into the longer course of my life?So I want to wind up by just showing that people have the capacity to understand this information. This is not beyond the grasp of ordinary people. You do not need to have the education level of people in this room. Ordinary people are capable of understanding this information, if we only go to the effort of presenting it to them in a form that they can engage with. And engagement is essential here, because it's not just giving them information; it's giving them an opportunity to act. That's what engagement is. It's different from compliance. It works totally different from the way we talk about behavior in medicine today. And this information is out there.I've been talking today about latent information, all this information that exists in the system that we're not putting to use. But there are all sorts of other bodies of information that are coming online, and we need to recognize the capacity of this information to engage people, to help people and to change the course of their lives.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_goetz_it_s_time_to_redesign_medical_data
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"(Laughter)I was afraid of womanhood. Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend. I've learned to be flexible. In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear. Let me explain. Back in the '50s and '60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft, and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy — really not quite clear what we were supposed to be.(Laughter)There were plenty of role models all around us. We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be. Now my mother was different. She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together, and she didn't buy me pink outfits. Instead, she knew what I needed, and she bought me a book of cartoons. And I just ate it up. I drew, and I drew, and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family, I could draw, do what I wanted to do, and not have to perform, not have to speak — I was very shy — and I could still get approval. I was launched as a cartoonist. Now when we're young, we don't always know. We know there are rules out there, but we don't always know — we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is. We're told what shape we're supposed to be in. (Laughter) We're told what to wear — (Laughter) — and how to do our hair — (Laughter) — and how to behave.Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture. We're being corrected, and the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition. We pass it down from generation to generation. Not only that — we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us. And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing. (Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position.(Laughter)Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't — I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them — what better way than to change them [than] with humor? Humor relies on the traditions of a society. It takes what we know, and it twists it. It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress, and it makes it unexpected, and that's what elicits a laugh. Now what if you put together women and humor? I think you can get change. Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table.Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos. I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C. during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations, the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement, and I think I was drawing, trying to figure out what was going on. And then also my family was in chaos, and I drew to try to bring my family together — (Laughter) — try to bring my family together with laughter. It didn't work. My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested. But I found my place. I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in.Now when I was a little older, in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning. And I thought, ""Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning,"" and so I did. I became a cartoonist. And then I thought — in my 40s I started thinking, ""Well, why don't I do something? I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh?""Now my perspective is a particularly — (Laughter) — my perspective is a particularly American perspective. I can't help it. I live here. Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman. But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course — that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S. Consequently, we have. Women, because we're on the ground, we know the tradition. We have amazing antennae.Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists, which I so enjoy, and it's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth, to get at the issues quickly and succinctly. And not only that, it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect, but through the heart. My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world — countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, France — and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties. And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances. But I feel blessed to be able to work with them.And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents. And I think, I truly believe, that we can change this thing one laugh at a time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/liza_donnelly_drawing_upon_humor_for_change
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"The maxim, ""Know thyself"" has been around since the ancient Greeks. Some attribute this golden world knowledge to Plato, others to Pythagoras. But the truth is it doesn't really matter which sage said it first, because it's still sage advice, even today. ""Know thyself."" It's pithy almost to the point of being meaningless, but it rings familiar and true, doesn't it? ""Know thyself."" I understand this timeless dictum as a statement about the problems, or more exactly, the confusions, of consciousness. I've always been fascinated with knowing the self. This fascination led me to submerge myself in art, study neuroscience, and later, to become a psychotherapist.Today I combine all my passions as the CEO of InteraXon, a thought-controlled computing company. My goal, quite simply, is to help people become more in tune with themselves. I take it from this little dictum, ""Know thyself."" If you think about it, this imperative is kind of the defining characteristic of our species, isn't it? I mean, it's self-awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind.Today we're often too busy tending to our iPhones and iPods to really stop and get to know ourselves. Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations, e-mails, relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and Tweets and tags, we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place: Ourselves. Much of the time we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves out into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves. We've cluttered ourselves up with all this. And we feel like we have to get far, far away to a secluded retreat, leaving it all behind.So we go far away to the top of a mountain, assuming that perching ourselves on a piece is bound to give us the respite we need to sort the clutter, the chaotic everyday, and find ourselves again. But on that mountain where we gain that beautiful peace of mind, what are we really achieving? It's really only a successful escape. Think of the term we use, ""Retreat."" This is the term that armies use when they've lost a battle. It means we've got to get out of here. Is this how we feel about the pressures of our world, that in order to get inside ourselves, you have to run for the hills? And the problem with escaping your day-to-day life is that you have to come home, eventually. So when you think about it, we're almost like a tourist visiting ourselves over there. And eventually, that vacation's got to come to an end.So my question to you is, can we find ways to know ourselves without the escape? Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek? Can we live here and now in our wired web and still follow those ancient instructions, ""Know thyself?"" I say the answer is yes. And I'm here today to share a new way that we're working with technology to this end, to get familiar with our inner self like never before — humanizing technology and furthering that age-old quest of ours to more fully know the self. It's called thought-controlled computing.You may or may not have noticed that I'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead. This is actually a brainwave sensor that's reading the electrical activity of my brain as I give this talk. These brainwaves are being analyzed and we can see them as a graph. Let me show you what it looks like. That blue line there is my brainwave. It's the direct signal being recorded from my head, rendered in real time. The green and red bars show that same signal displayed by frequency, with lower frequencies here and higher frequencies up here. You're actually looking inside my head as I speak. These graphs are compelling, they're undulating, but from a human's perspective, they're actually not very useful. That's why we've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this data meaningful to the people who use it.For instance, what if I could use this data to find out how relaxed I am at any moment? Or what if I can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen? The shape on the right over here has become an indicator of what's going on in my head. The more relaxed I am, the more the energy's going to fall through it. I may also be interested in knowing how focused I am, so I can put my level of attention into the circuit board on the other side. And the more focused my brain is, the more the circuit board is going to surge with energy.Ordinarily, I would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed I was in any tangible way. As we know, our feelings about how we're feeling are notoriously unreliable. We've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who didn't deserve it, and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier. This new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves. We're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient, our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever. I'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit, but first I want to take a look at how we got here. By the way, feel free to check in on my head at any time.(Laughter)My team at InteraXon and I have been developing thought-controlled application for almost a decade now. In the first phase of development, we were really enthused by all the things we could control with our mind. We were making things activate, light up and work just by thinking. We were transcending the space between the mind and the device. We brought to life a vast array of prototypes and products that you could control with your mind, like thought-controlled home appliances or slot-car games or video games or a levitating chair. We created technology and applications that engaged people's imaginations, and it was really exciting.And then we were asked to do something really big for the Olympics. We were invited to create a massive installation at the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics, were used in Vancouver, got to control the lighting on the CN Tower, the Canadian Parliament buildings and Niagara Falls from all the way across the country using their minds. Over 17 days at the Olympics, 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the CN Tower, parliament and Niagara in real time with their minds from across the country, 3,000 km away. So controlling stuff with your mind is pretty cool.But we're always interested in multitiered levels of human interaction. And so we began looking into inventing thought-controlled applications in a more complex frame than just control. And that was responsiveness. We realized that we had a system that allowed technology to know something about you. And it could join into the relationship with you. We created the responsive room where the lights, music and blinds adjusted to your state. They followed these little shifts in your mental activity. So as you settled into relaxation at the end of a hard day, on the couch in our office, the music would mellow with you. When you read, the desk lamp would get brighter. If you nod off, the system would know, dimming to darkness as you do.We then realized that if technology could know something about you and use it to help you, there's an even more valuable application than that. That you could know something about yourself. We could know sides of ourselves that were all but invisible and come to see things that were previously hidden. Let me show you an example of what I'm talking about here.Here's an application that I created for the iPad. So the goal of the original game Zen Bound is to wrap a rope around a wooden form. So you use it with your headset. The headset connects wirelessly to an iPad or a smartphone. In that headset, you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear. In the original Zen Bound game, you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad. In the game that we created, of course, you control the wooden form that's on the screen there with your mind. As you focus on the wooden form, it rotates. The more you focus, the faster the rotation. This is for real. This is not a fake. What's really interesting to me though is at the end of the game, you get stats and feedback about how you did. You have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing — not just how much rope you used or what your high score is, but what was going on inside of your mind. And this is valuable feedback that we can use to understand what's going on inside of ourselves.I like to call this ""intra-active."" Normally, we think about technology as interactive. This technology is intra-active. It understands what's inside of you and builds a sort of responsive relationship between you and your technology so that you can use this information to move you forward. So you can use this information to understand you in a responsive loop. At InteraXon — intra-active technology is one of our really defining mandates. It's how we understand the world inside and reflect it outside into this tight loop.For example, thought-controlled computing can teach children with ADD how to improve their focus. With ADD, children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states. So you can create applications that reward focused brain states. So you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their ADD symptoms as they do it. This can be as effective as Ritalin. Perhaps even more importantly, thought-controlled computing can give children with ADD insights into their own fluctuating mental states, so they can better understand themselves and their learning needs. The way these children will be able to use their new awareness to improve themselves will upend many of the damaging and widespread social stigmas that people who are diagnosed as different are challenged with.We can peer inside our heads and interact with what was once locked away from us, what once mystified and separated us. Brainwave technology can understand us, anticipate our emotions and find the best solutions for our needs. Imagine this collected awareness of the individual computed and reflected across an entire lifespan. Imagine the insights that you can gain from this kind of second sight. It would be like plugging into your own personal Google.On the subject of Google, today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them. You can tag pictures of baby animals as happy, or whatever baby animals are to you, and then you can search that database, navigating with your feelings, rather than the keywords that just hint at them. Or you could tag Facebook photos with the emotions that you had associated with those memories and then instantly prioritize the streams that catch your attention, just like this. Humanizing technology is about taking what's already natural about the human-tech experience and building technology seamlessly in tandem with it. As it aligns with our human behaviors, it can allow us to make better sense of what we do and, more importantly, why. Creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are.With humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles. When our productivity starts to slacken, we can go back to that data and see how we can make more effective balance between work and play. Do you know what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self, what triggers cause you to be depressed or what fun things are going to bring you out of that funk? Imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest, or what activities brought you joy. Would you make more time for those people? Would you prioritize? Would you get a divorce?(Laughter)What thought-controlled computing can allow you to do is build colorful layered pictures of our lives. And with this, we can get the skinny on our psychological happenings and build a story of our behaviors over time. We can begin to see the underlying narratives that propel us forward and tell us about what's going on. And from this, we can learn how to change the plot, the outcome and the character of our personal stories.Two millennia ago, those Greeks had some powerful insights. They knew that a fundamental piece falls into place when you start to live out their little phrase, when you come into contact with yourself. They understood the power of human narrative and the value that we place on humans as changing, evolving and growing. But they understood something more fundamental — the sheer joy in discovery, the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it; the richness that we get from seeing, feeling and knowing the lives that we are.My mom's an artist, and as a child, I'd often see her bring things to life with the stroke of a brush. One moment, it was all white space, pure possibility. The next, it was alive with her colorful ideas and expressions. As I sat easel-side, watching her transform canvas after canvas, I learned that you could create your own world. I learned that our own inner worlds — our ideas, emotions and imaginations — were, in fact, not bound by our brains and bodies. If you could think it, if you could discover it, you could bring it to life.To me, thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush — one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us. I look forward to the day that I can sit beside you, easel-side, watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ariel_garten_know_thyself_with_a_brain_scanner
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"My story actually began when I was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of Savannah, Georgia. And this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after Confederate war generals. We lived on Robert E. Lee Boulevard. And when I was five, my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle. It had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan. That's why they were called ape hangers. They were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s, which I'm sure my mom didn't know. And one day I was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away. And I came back, and I wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly, so I decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood, and wham! I was hit by a passing sedan. My mangled body flew in one direction, my mangled bike flew in the other. And I lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line, and one of my neighbors came running over. ""Andy, Andy, how are you doing?"" she said, using the name of my older brother. (Laughter) ""I'm Bruce,"" I said, and promptly passed out.I broke my left femur that day — it's the largest bone in your body — and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee, and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle. And for the next 38 years, that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me. In fact, I made a living by walking. I traveled around the world, entered different cultures, wrote a series of books about my travels, including ""Walking the Bible."" I hosted a television show by that name on PBS. I was, for all the world, the ""walking guy."" Until, in May 2008, a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones. And my doctor, on a whim, sent me to get a full-body bone scan, which showed that there was some growth in my left leg. That sent me to an X-ray, then to an MRI. And one afternoon, I got a call from my doctor. ""The tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor."" I stopped walking, and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying negative. I have cancer. And to think that the tumor was in the same bone, in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier — it seemed like too much of a coincidence.So that afternoon, I went back to my house, and my three year-old identical twin daughters, Eden and Tybee Feiler, came running to meet me. They'd just turned three, and they were into all things pink and purple. In fact, we called them Pinkalicious and Purplicious — although I must say, our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday, April 15th. When they were born at 6:14 and 6:46 on April 15, 2005, our otherwise grim, humorless doctor looked at his watch, and was like, ""Hmm, April 15th — tax day. Early filer and late filer."" (Laughter) The next day I came to see him. I was like, ""Doctor, that was a really good joke."" And he was like, ""You're the writer, kid."" Anyway — so they had just turned three, and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground, laughing with all the glee in the world. I crumbled. I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down. Would they wonder who I was, I thought. Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice?A few days later, I woke with an idea of how I might give them that voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters' lives. ""I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives,"" I wrote these men. ""They'll have loving families and welcoming homes, but they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?"" And I said to myself I would call this group of men ""the Council of Dads.""Now as soon as I had this idea, I decided I wouldn't tell my wife. Okay. She's a very upbeat, naturally excited person. There's this idea in this culture — I don't have to tell you — that you sort of ""happy"" your way through a problem. We should focus on the positive. My wife, as I said, she grew up outside of Boston. She's got a big smile. She's got a big personality. She's got big hair — although, she told me recently, I can't say she has big hair, because if I say she has big hair, people will think she's from Texas. And it's apparently okay to marry a boy from Georgia, but not to have hair from Texas. And actually, in her defense, if she were here right now, she would point out that, when we got married in Georgia, there were three questions on the marriage certificate license, the third of which was, ""Are you related?"" (Laughter) I said, ""Look, in Georgia at least we want to know. In Arkansas they don't even ask."" What I didn't tell her is, if she said, ""Yes,"" you could jump. You don't need the 30-day waiting period. Because you don't need the get-to-know-you session at that point.So I wasn't going to tell her about this idea, but the next day I couldn't control myself, I told her. And she loved the idea, but she quickly started rejecting my nominees. She was like, ""Well, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice."" So it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends.(Laughter)So we decided that we needed a set of rules, and we came up with a number. And the first one was no family, only friends. We thought our family would already be there. Second, men only. We were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls' lives. And then third, sort of a dad for every side. We kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing. So what happened was I wrote a letter to each of these men. And rather than send it, I decided to read it to them in person. Linda, my wife, joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals. I sort of friend-married each of these guys.And the first of these guys was Jeff Schumlin. Now Jeff led this trip I took to Europe when I graduated from high school in the early 1980s. And on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle. And I snuck out behind, and there was a moat, a fence and a field of cows. And Jeff came up beside me and said, ""So, have you ever been cow tipping?"" I was like, ""Cow tipping? He was like, ""Yeah. Cows sleep standing up. So if you approach them from behind, down wind, you can push them over and they go thud in the mud."" So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not, we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence, we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor, dozing cow.So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we went up to Vermont, and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads. And we went to this apple orchard, and I read him this letter. ""Will you help be their dad?"" And I got to the end — he was crying and I was crying — and then he looked at me, and he said, ""Yes."" I was like, ""Yes?"" I kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter. And frankly, although I keep getting asked this, it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances. And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book. And that was, ""What's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls?""And Jeff's advice was, ""Be a traveller, not a tourist. Get off the bus. Seek out what's different. Approach the cow."" ""So it's 10 years from now,"" I said, ""and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad, and I'm not here. What would you tell them?"" He said, ""I would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle. You can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple, or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like, what it smells like."" And as he talked he had that glint in his eye that I first saw back in Holland — the glint that says, ""Let's go cow tipping,"" even though we never did tip the cow, even though no one tips the cow, even though cows don't sleep standing up. He said, ""I want to see you back here girls, at the end of this experience, covered in mud.""Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed I had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur. Six hundred Americans a year get an osteosarcoma. Eighty-five percent are under 21. Only a hundred adults a year get one of these diseases. Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped, and there was a 15 percent survival rate. And then in the 1980's, they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective, and within weeks I had started that regimen. And since we are in a medical room, I went through four and a half months of chemo. Actually I had Cisplatin, Doxorubicin and very high-dose Methotrexate.And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium. And if you did see the Sanjay special, you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis. Then he took my fibula from my calf, cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh, where it now lives. And what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf and re-vascularized it in my thigh and then connected it to the good parts of my knee and my hip. And then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle. This is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me. And my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo. It was, as we said in my house, a lost year.Because in those opening weeks, we all had nightmares. And one night I had a nightmare that I was walking through my house, sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else's children sitting on my desk. And I remember a particular one night that, when you told that story of — I don't know where you are Dr. Nuland — of William Sloane Coffin — it made me think of it. Because I was in the hospital after, I think it was my fourth round of chemo when my numbers went to zero, and I had basically no immune system. And they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital. And anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body. And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters, at that time three and a half, were missing me and feeling my absence. And I hung up the phone, and I put my face in my hands, and I screamed this silent scream. And what you said, Dr. Nuland — I don't know where you are — made me think of this today. Because the thought that came to my mind was that the feeling that I had was like a primal scream.And what was so striking — and one of the messages I want to leave you here with today — is the experience. As I became less and less human — and at this moment in my life, I was probably 30 pounds less than I am right now. Of course, I had no hair and no immune system. They were actually putting blood inside my body. At that moment I was less and less human, I was also, at the same time, maybe the most human I've ever been. And what was so striking about that time was, instead of repulsing people, I was actually proving to be a magnet for people. People were incredibly drawn. When my wife and I had kids, we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck. Instead, it was everybody running the other way. And when I had cancer, we thought it'd be everybody running the other way. Instead, it was all-hands-on-deck. And when people came to me, rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw — I was like a living ghost — they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives.Cancer, I found, is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to, but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed when we do. And this also happened to my girls as they began to see, and, we thought, maybe became an ounce more compassionate. One day, my daughter Tybee, Tybee came to me, and she said, ""I have so much love for you in my body, daddy, I can't stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that's where love comes from."" (Laughter) And one night my daughter Eden came to me. And as I lifted my leg out of bed, she reached for my crutches and handed them to me. In fact, if I cling to one memory of this year, it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand. I didn't need the crutch anymore, I was walking on air.And one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people. And it made me think — and I'll just note for the record — one word that I've only heard once actually was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday — the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word ""friend."" And yet from everything we've been talking about — compliance, or addiction, or weight loss — we now know that community is important, and yet it's one thing we don't actually bring in. And there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me. And one of the things that I learned is that over time, particularly men, who used to be non-communicative, are becoming more and more communicative. And that particularly happened — there was one in my life — is this Council of Dads that Linda said, what we were talking about, it's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off.And no one captures this modern manhood to me more than David Black. Now David is my literary agent. He's about five-foot three and a half on a good day, standing fully upright in cowboy boots. And on kind of the manly-male front, he answers the phone — I can say this I guess because you've done it here — he answers the phone, ""Yo, motherfucker."" He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine, and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car — although, like a lot of men, he's impatient; he bought it on his 49th. But like a lot of modern men, he hugs, he bakes, he leaves work early to coach Little League. Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads. I was like, ""David cries when you invite him to take a walk."" (Laughter) But he's a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true. And this is what we wanted him to capture — what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations. And I said, ""What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer?"" And he said, ""A belief in themselves."" ""But when I came to see you,"" I said, ""I didn't believe in myself. I was at a wall."" He said, ""I don't see the wall,"" and I'm telling you the same, Don't see the wall. You may encounter one from time to time, but you've got to find a way to get over it, around it, or through it. But whatever you do, don't succumb to it. Don't give in to the wall.My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and during the year and a half I was on crutches, it became a sort of symbol to me. So one day near the end of my journey, I said, ""Come on girls, let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge."" We set out on crutches. I was on crutches, my wife was next to me, my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead. And because walking was one of the first things I lost, I spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts. Walking upright, we are told, is the threshold of what made us human. And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright, the act is essentially unchanged. As my physical therapist likes to say, ""Every step is a tragedy waiting to happen."" You nearly fall with one leg, then you catch yourself with the other. And the biggest consequence of walking on crutches — as I did for a year and a half — is that you walk slower. You hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. You go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with this community you built along the way.At the risk of admission, I was never nicer than the year I was on crutches. 200 years ago, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris. He was called a ""flaneur,"" one who wanders the arcades. And it was the custom of those flaneurs to show they were men of leisure by taking turtles for walks and letting the reptile set the pace. And I just love this ode to slow moving. And it's become my own motto for my girls. Take a walk with a turtle. Behold the world in pause. And this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson I took from my journey.There's a quote from Moses on the side of the Liberty Bell, and it comes from a passage in the book of Leviticus, that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow. And every seven sets of seven years, the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love. That 50th year is called the jubilee year, and it's the origin of that term. And though I'm shy of 50, it captures my own experience. My lost year was my jubilee year. By laying fallow, I planted the seeds for a healthier future and was reunited with the ones I love.Come the one year anniversary of my journey, I went to see my surgeon, Dr. John Healey — and by the way, Healey, great name for a doctor. He's the president of the International Society of Limb Salvage, which is the least euphemistic term I've ever heard. And I said, ""Dr. Healey, if my daughters come to you one day and say, 'What should I learn from my daddy's story?' what would you tell them?"" He said, ""I would tell them what I know, and that is everybody dies, but not everybody lives. I want you to live.""I wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book, ""The Council of Dads,"" and I listed these lessons, a few of which you've heard here today: Approach the cow, pack your flipflops, don't see the wall, live the questions, harvest miracles. As I looked at this list — to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living — I realized, we may have done it for our girls, but it really changed us. And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads, is that my wife and I did this in an attempt to help our daughters, but it really changed us.So I stand here today as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane. And last week I had my 18-month scans. And as you all know, anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans. In my case it's quarterly. And all the collective minds in this room, I dare say, can never find a solution for scan-xiety. As I was going there, I was wondering, what would I say depending on what happened here. I got good news that day, and I stand here today cancer-free, walking without aid and hobbling forward.And I just want to mention briefly in passing — I'm past my time limit — but I just want to briefly mention in passing that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this is, at a similar meeting, back in the spring, Anne Wojcicki heard about our story and very quickly — in a span of three weeks — put the full resources of 23andMe, and we announced an initiative in July to get to decode the genome of anybody, a living person with a heart tissue, bone sarcoma. And she told me last night, in the three months since we've done it, we've gotten 300 people who've contributed to this program. And the epidemiologists here will tell you, that's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the United States. So if you go to 23andMe, or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link. And we encourage anybody to join this effort.But I'll just close what I've been talking about by leaving you with this message: May you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal, or to that college roommate, or to some person you may have turned away from. May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace, or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams. And every now and then, find a friend, find a turtle, and take a long, slow walk.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_the_council_of_dads
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"I am passionate about the American landscape and how the physical form of the land, from the great Central Valley of California to the bedrock of Manhattan, has really shaped our history and our character. But one thing is clear. In the last 100 years alone, our country — and this is a sprawl map of America — our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet. And so, how I see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them. This graph represents what we're dealing with now in the built environment. And it's really a conflux of urban population rising, biodiversity plummeting and also, of course, sea levels rising and climate changing.So when I also think about design, I think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way. And you can see from the arrow here indicating ""you are here,"" I'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology, and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way. So the era of big infrastructure is over. I mean, these sort of top-down, mono-functional, capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it. We need new tools and new approaches. Similarly, the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field, devoid of context, is really not the — excuse me, it's fairly blatant — is really not the approach that we need to take. So we need new stories, new heroes and new tools.So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster. So, albeit a very small creature and very modest, this creature is incredible, because it can agglomerate into these mega-reef structures. It can grow; you can grow it; and — did I mention? — it's quite tasty. So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called ""oyster-tecture."" And the core idea of oyster-tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels, eelgrass and oysters — species that live in the harbor — and, at the same time, harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now.Here's a map of my city, New York City, showing inundation in red. And what's circled is the site that I'm going to talk about, the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island. If you look here at this map, showing everything in blue is out in the water, and everything in yellow is upland. But you can see, even just intuit, from this map, that the harbor has dredged and flattened, and went from a rich, three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years. Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself. Now the Gowanus is particularly smelly — I will admit it. There are problems of sewage overflow and contamination, but I would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition, and it's a condition that we're all facing. And here's a map of that condition, showing the contaminants in yellow and green, exacerbated by this new flow of storm-surge and sea-level rise. So we really had a lot to deal with.When we started this project, one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there. And you can see from this map, there's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement. We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself. So our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept, harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern. And the idea has two core stages. One is to develop a new artificial ecology, a reef out in the harbor, that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the Gowanus. Because if you have cleaner water and slower water, you can imagine a new way of living with that water.So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way, I think. Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster. And again, it's this incredibly exciting animal. It accepts algae and detritus in one end, and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water. And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days. They were key in our culture and our economy. Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells. This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today. So again, we got the short end of the deal there. (Laughter) Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures. They really become nature's wave attenuators. And they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem. Many, many species depend on them.So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster. It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat, which is when they're floating through the water, and when they're ready to attach onto another oyster, to an adult male oyster or female oyster, in a number of weeks. We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef. And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive.How does the reef work? Well, it's very, very simple. A core concept here is that climate change isn't something that — the answers won't land down from the Moon. And with a $20 billion price tag, we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what's in front of us. So this image is simply showing — it's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope. What is fuzzy rope, you ask? It's just that; it's this very inexpensive thing, available practically at your hardware store, and it's very cheap. So we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project. (Laughter) So in the studio, rather than drawing, we began to learn how to knit. The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on. You can see in the diagram how it grows over time from an infrastructural space into a new public urban space. And that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change.It also creates this incredibly interesting, I think, new amphibious public space, where you can imagine working, you can imagine recreating in a new way. In the end, what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century — an amphibious park, if you will. So get your Tevas on. So you can imagine scuba diving here. This is an image of high school students, scuba divers that we worked with on our team. So you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water, and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring.Another new vocabulary word for the brave new world: this is the word ""flupsy"" — it's short for ""floating upwelling system."" And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below. So the water is churned through this raft. You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them. So rather than having 10 oysters, you have 10,000 oysters. And then those spat are then seeded. Here's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines — the flupsification of the Gowanus. New word. And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges. And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef.I get asked two questions about this project. One is: why isn't it happening now? And the second one is: when can we eat the oysters? And the answer is: not yet, they're working. But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster.To conclude, this is just one cross-section of one piece of city, but my dream is, my hope is, that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable, a more livable and a more delicious future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_orff_oysters_as_architecture
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"I'm going to have a pretty simple idea that I'm just going to tell you over and over until I get you to believe it, and that is all of us are makers. I really believe that. All of us are makers. We're born makers. We have this ability to make things, to grasp things with our hands. We use words like ""grasp"" metaphorically to also think about understanding things. We don't just live, but we make. We create things. Well I'm going to show you a group of makers from Maker Faire and various places. It doesn't come out particularly well, but that's a particularly tall bicycle. It's a scraper bike; it's called — from Oakland. And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size. But he's trying to power it, or motorize it, with a drill. (Laughter) And the question he had is, ""Can I do it? Can it be done?"" Apparently it can. So makers are enthusiasts; they're amateurs; they're people who love doing what they do. They don't always even know why they're doing it.We have begun organizing makers at our Maker Faire. There was one held in Detroit here last summer, and it will be held again next summer, at the Henry Ford. But we hold them in San Francisco — (Applause) — and in New York. And it's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation.(Video) Guy: I might get one of those.Dale Dougherty: These are electric muffins.Guy: Where did you guys get those?Muffin: Will you glide with us? (Guy: No.)DD: I know Ford has new electric vehicles coming out. We got there first.Lady: Will you glide with us?DD: This is something I call ""swinging in the rain."" And you can barely see it, but it's — a controller at top cycles the water to fall just before and after you pass through the bottom of the arc. So imagine a kid: ""Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet? No, I didn't get wet. Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet?"" That's the experience of a clever ride. And of course, we have fashion. People are remaking things into fashion. I don't know if this is called a basket-bra, but it ought to be something like that. We have art students getting together, taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it. They did that in the summer, and it was very warm.Now this one takes a little bit of explaining. You know what those are, right? Billy-Bob, or Billy Bass, or something like that. Now the background is — the guy who did this is a physicist. And here he'll explain a little bit about what it does.(Video) Richard Carter: I'm Richard Carter, and this is the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir.Choir: ♫ When you hold me in your arms ♫DD: This is all computer-controlled in an old Volvo.Choir: ♫ I'm hooked on a feelin' ♫ ♫ I'm high on believin' ♫ ♫ That you're in love with me ♫DD: So Richard came up from Houston last year to visit us in Detroit here and show the wonderful Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. So, are you a maker? How many people here would say you're a maker, if you raise your hand? That's a pretty good — but there's some of you out there that won't admit that you're makers. And again, think about it. You're makers of food; you're makers of shelter; you're makers of lots of different things, and partly what interests me today is you're makers of your own world, and particularly the role that technology has in your life. You're really a driver or a passenger — to use a Volkswagen phrase. Makers are in control. That's what fascinates them. That's why they do what they do. They want to figure out how things work; they want to get access to it; and they want to control it. They want to use it to their own purpose.Makers today, to some degree, are out on the edge. They're not mainstream. They're a little bit radical. They're a bit subversive in what they do. But at one time, it was fairly commonplace to think of yourself as a maker. It was not something you'd even remark upon. And I found this old video. And I'll tell you more about it, but just ...(Music)(Video) Narrator: Of all things Americans are, we are makers. With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form, and we fashion. Makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.DD: So it goes on to show you people making things out of wood, a grandfather making a ship in a bottle, a woman making a pie — somewhat standard fare of the day. But it was a sense of pride that we made things, that the world around us was made by us. It didn't just exist. We made it, and we were connected to it that way. And I think that's tremendously important. Now I'm going to tell you one funny thing about this. This particular reel — it's an industrial video — but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 — in the Detroit area, in fact — and it preceded Alfred Hitchcock's ""Psycho."" (Laughter) So I like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this, plus ""Psycho.""This is Andrew Archer. I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire. Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota. And I talked to his mom, and I ended up doing a story on him for a magazine called Kidrobot. He's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys. He liked to take things apart. His mother gave him a part of the garage, and he collected things from yard sales, and he made stuff. And then he didn't particularly like school that much, but he got involved in robotics competitions, and he realized he had a talent, and, more importantly, he had a real passion for it. And he began building robots. And when I sat down next to him, he was telling me about a company he formed, and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor. And that's why he moved to Michigan. But he also moved here to meet other people doing what he's doing. And this kind of gets to this important idea today.This is Jeff and Bilal and several others here in a hackerspace. And there's about three hackerspaces or more in Detroit. And there's probably even some new ones since I've been here last. But these are like clubs — they're sharing tools, sharing space, sharing expertise in what to make. And so it's a very interesting phenomenon that's going across the world. But essentially these are people that are playing with technology. Let me say that again: playing. They don't necessarily know what they're doing or why they're doing it. They're playing to discover what the technology can do, and probably to discover what they can do themselves, what their own capabilities are.Now the other thing that I think is taking off, another reason making is taking off today, is there's some great new tools out there. And you can't see this very well on the screen, but Arduino — Arduino is an open-source hardware platform. It's a micro-controller. If you don't know what those are, they're just the ""brains."" So they're the brains of maker projects, and here's an example of one. And I don't know if you can see it that well, but that's a mailbox — so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino. So you figure out how to program this, and you put this in your mailbox. And when someone opens your mailbox, you get a notification, an alert message goes to your iPhone. Now that could be a dog door, it could be someone going somewhere where they shouldn't, like a little brother into a little sister's room. There's all kinds of different things that you can imagine for that.Now here's something — a 3D printer. That's another tool that's really taken off — really, really interesting. This is Makerbot. And there are industrial versions of this — about 20,000 dollars. These guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars, and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3D printers. Now they don't know what they want to do with it, but they're going to figure it out. They will only figure it out by getting their hands on it and playing with it. One of the coolest things is, Makerbot sent out an upgrade, some new brackets for the box. Well you printed out the brackets and then replaced the old brackets with the new ones. Isn't that cool?So makers harvest technology from all the places around us. This is a radar speed detector that was developed from a Hot Wheels toy. And they do interesting things. They're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think — the military is doing drones — well, there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes, or vehicles — something that you could program to fly on its own, without a stick or anything, to figure out what path it's going. Fascinating work they're doing.We just had an issue on space exploration, DIY space exploration. This is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space. You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars. Think how much money and how many years it took NASA to get satellites into space. In fact, these guys actually work for NASA, and they're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components, cheap things that aren't specialized that they can combine and send up into space.Makers are a source of innovation, and I think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry. This is Steve Wozniak. Where does he learn about computers? It's the Homebrew Computer Club — just like a hackerspace. And he says, ""I could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free."" Well he did a little bit better than free. But it's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries — even like Henry Ford — come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups.Well, if I haven't convinced you that you're a maker, I hope I could convince you that our next generation should be makers, that kids are particularly interested in this, in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots. And we've got to get this into schools, or into communities in many, many ways — the ability to tinker, to shape and reshape the world around us. There's a great opportunity today — and that's what I really care about the most. An the answer to the question: what will America make? It's more makers.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dale_dougherty_we_are_makers
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"I'm going to make an argument today that may seem a little bit crazy: social media and the end of gender. Let me connect the dots. I'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love, or love to hate, are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender. I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender.If you hadn't noticed, our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender, and I think that's going to change. Now most media companies — television, radio, publishing, games, you name it — they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences. It's old-school demographics. They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us. Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways — you have certain taste, that you like certain things. And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics.Age demographics: the 18 to 49 demo has had a huge impact on all mass media programming in this country since the 1960s, when the baby boomers were still young. Now they've aged out of that demographic, but it's still the case that powerful ratings companies like Nielson don't even take into account viewers of television shows over age 54. In our media environment, it's as if they don't even exist. Now, if you watch ""Mad Men,"" like I do — it's a popular TV show in the States — Dr. Faye Miller does something called psychographics, which first came about in the 1960s, where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers. But psychographics really haven't had a huge impact on the media business. It's really just been basic demographics.So I'm at the Norman Lear Center at USC, and we've done a lot of research over the last seven, eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad. And in the last three years, we've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed, and we've discovered some very interesting things. All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them. But those categories mean even less now than they did before, because with online networking tools, it's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes. We're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online. And we can lie about our age online, too, pretty easily. We can also connect with people based on our very specific interests. We don't need a media company to help do this for us.So the traditional media companies, of course, are paying very close attention to these online communities. They know this is the mass audience of the future; they need to figure it out. But they're having a hard time doing it because they're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them, because that's how ad rates are still determined. When they're monitoring your clickstream — and you know they are — they have a really hard time figuring out your age, your gender and your income. They can make some educated guesses. But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you. That's easier for them to find out than who you are. And even though that's still sort of creepy, there is an upside to having your taste monitored. Suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it hasn't been before. It had been presumed before.So when you look online at the way people aggregate, they don't aggregate around age, gender and income. They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like, and if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories. I'd much rather know whether you like ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer"" rather than how old you are. That would tell me something more substantial about you.Now there's something else that we've discovered about social media that's actually quite surprising. It turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution. If you look at the statistics — these are worldwide statistics — in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies. And then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites, they truly dominate the social media space, which is a space that's having a huge impact on old media. The question is: what sort of impact is this going to have on our culture, and what's it going to mean for women? If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media, then does that mean that women are going to take over global media? Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows? Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks? Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape?Well, I actually don't think that's going to be the case. I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere. But I think women are actually going to be — ironically enough — responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the ""chick flick"" and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things — that Hispanics like certain things, that young people like certain things. This is far too simplistic. The future entertainment media that we're going to see is going to be very data-driven, and it's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online, where women are really driving the action.So you may be asking, well why is it important that I know what entertains people? Why should I know this? Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this. But my argument is that, if you want to understand the global village, it's probably a good idea that you figure out what they're passionate about, what amuses them, what they choose to do in their free time. This is a very important thing to know about people. I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives. And I do it not just because it's fun — though actually, it is really fun — but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives — for instance, on their political beliefs and on their health. And so, if you have any interest in understanding the world, looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start.So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics. Can you even imagine what that looks like? I can't wait to find out what it looks like.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_social_media_and_the_end_of_gender
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"Running: it's basically just right, left, right, left, yeah? I mean, we've been doing it for two million years, so it's kind of arrogant to assume that I've got something to say that hasn't been said and performed better a long time ago. But the cool thing about running, as I've discovered, is that something bizarre happens in this activity all the time. Case in point: A couple months ago, if you saw the New York City Marathon, I guarantee you, you saw something that no one has ever seen before.An Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu turns up at the starting line. She's 37 years old. She hasn't won a marathon of any kind in eight years, and a few months previously, she had almost died in childbirth. Derartu Tulu was ready to hang it up and retire from the sport, but she decided she'd go for broke and try for one last big payday in the marquee event, the New York City Marathon. Except — bad news for Derartu Tulu — some other people had the same idea, including the Olympic gold medalist, and Paula Radcliffe, who is a monster, the fastest woman marathoner in history by far. Only 10 minutes off the men's world record, Paula Radcliffe is essentially unbeatable. That's her competition.The gun goes off, and — I mean, she's not even an underdog; she's, like, under the underdogs. But the under-underdog hangs tough, and 22 miles into a 26-mile race, there is Derartu Tulu, up there with the lead pack. Now, this is when something really bizarre happens. Paula Radcliffe, the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck from Derartu Tulu's under-underdog hands, suddenly grabs her leg and starts to fall back. So we all know what to do in this situation, right? You give her a quick crack in the teeth with your elbow and blaze for the finish line. Derartu Tulu ruins the script. Instead of taking off, she falls back and she grabs Paula Radcliffe, and says, ""Come on. Come with us. You can do it."" So Paula Radcliffe, unfortunately, does it. She catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line. But then she falls back again. The second time, Derartu Tulu grabs her and tries to pull her. And Paula Radcliffe, at that point, says, ""I'm done. Go."" So that's a fantastic story, and we all know how it ends. She loses the check, but she goes home with something bigger and more important. Except Derartu Tulu ruins the script again. Instead of losing, she blazes past the lead pack and wins. Wins the New York City Marathon, goes home with a big fat check.It's a heartwarming story, but if you drill a little bit deeper, you've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there. When you have two outliers in one organism, it's not a coincidence. When you have someone who is more competitive and more compassionate than anybody else in the race, again, it's not a coincidence. You show me a creature with webbed feet and gills; somehow water's involved.Someone with that kind of heart, there's some kind of connection there. And the answer to it, I think, can be found down in the Copper Canyons of Mexico, where there's a reclusive tribe, called the Tarahumara Indians. Now, the Tarahumara are remarkable for three things. Number one is: they have been living essentially unchanged for the past 400 years. When the conquistadors arrived in North America you had two choices: you either fight back and engage or you could take off. The Mayans and Aztecs engaged, which is why there are very few Mayans and Aztecs. The Tarahumara had a different strategy. They took off and hid in this labyrinthine, networking, spider-webbing system of canyons called the Copper Canyons. And there they've remained since the 1600s, essentially the same way they've always been.The second thing remarkable about the Tarahumara is: deep into old age — 70 to 80 years old — these guys aren't running marathons; they're running mega-marathons. They're not doing 26 miles, they're doing 100, 150 miles at a time, and apparently without injury, without problems.The last thing that's remarkable about the Tarahumara is: all the things we're going to be talking about today, all the things we're trying to use all of our technology and brain power to solve — things like heart disease and cholesterol and cancer; crime, warfare and violence; clinical depression — all this stuff — the Tarahumara don't know what you're talking about. They are free from all of these modern ailments.So what's the connection? Again, we're talking about outliers; there's got to be some kind of cause and effect. Well, there are teams of scientists at Harvard and the University of Utah that are bending their brains and trying to figure out what the Tarahumara have known forever. They're trying to solve those same kinds of mysteries. And once again, a mystery wrapped inside of a mystery — perhaps the key to Derartu Tulu and the Tarahumara is wrapped in three other mysteries, which go like this: Three things — if you have the answer, come up and take the microphone, because nobody else knows the answer. If you know it, you're smarter than anybody on planet Earth.Mystery number one is this: Two million years ago, the human brain exploded in size. Australopithecus had a tiny little pea brain. Suddenly humans show up, Homo erectus, big old melon head. To have a brain of that size, you need to have a source of condensed caloric energy. In other words, early humans are eating dead animals — no argument, that's a fact. The only problem is, the first edged weapons only appeared about 200,000 years ago.So somehow, for nearly two million years, we are killing animals without any weapons. Now, we're not using our strength, because we are the biggest sissies in the jungle. Every other animal is stronger than we are, they have fangs, they have claws, they have nimbleness, they have speed. We think Usain Bolt is fast. Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel. We're not fast. That would be an Olympic event: turn a squirrel loose, whoever catches it gets a gold medal.(Laughter)So no weapons, no speed, no strength, no fangs, no claws. How were we killing these animals? Mystery number one.Mystery number two: Women have been in the Olympics for quite some time now, but one thing that's remarkable about all women sprinters: they all suck; they're terrible. There's not a fast woman on the planet and there never has been. The fastest woman to ever run a mile did it in 4:15. I could throw a rock and hit a high-school boy who can run faster than 4:15. For some reason, you guys are just really slow. But —(Laughter)But, you get to the marathon we were just talking about — you've only been allowed to run the marathon for 20 years, because prior to the 1980s, medical science said if a woman tried to run 26 miles — does anyone know what would happen if you tried to run 26 miles? Why you were banned from the marathon before the 1980s?Audience Member: Her uterus would be torn.Christopher McDougall: Her uterus would be torn, yes. Torn reproductive organs. The uterus would literally fall out of the body.(Laughter)Now, I've been to a lot of marathons, and I've yet to see any ...(Laughter)So it's only been 20 years that women have been allowed to run the marathon. In that very short learning curve, you've gone from broken organs up to the fact that you're only 10 minutes off the male world record.Then you go beyond 26 miles, into the distance that medical science also told us would be fatal to humans — remember Pheidippides died when he ran 26 miles — you get to 50 and 100 miles, and suddenly, it's a different game. You take a runner like Ann Trason or Nikki Kimball or Jenn Shelton, put them in a race of 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world, and it's a coin toss who's going to win. I'll give you an example. A couple years ago, Emily Baer signed up for a race called the Hardrock 100, which tells you all you need to know about the race. They give you 48 hours to finish this race. Well, Emily Baer — 500 runners — she finishes in eighth place, in the top 10, even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race.(Laughter)And yet, she beat 492 other people. The last mystery: Why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer? The third mystery is this: At the University of Utah, they started tracking finishing times for people running the marathon. What they found is that if you start running the marathon at age 19, you'll get progressively faster, year by year, until you reach your peak at age 27. And then after that, you succumb to the rigors of time. And you'll get slower and slower, until eventually you're back to running the same speed you were at age 19. So about seven, eight years to reach your peak, and then gradually you fall off your peak, until you go back to the starting point. You'd think it might take eight years to go back to the same speed, maybe 10 years — no, it's 45 years. 64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19. Now, I defy you to come up with any other physical activity — and please don't say golf — something that's actually hard —(Laughter)where geriatrics are performing as well as they did as teenagers.So you have these three mysteries. Is there one piece in the puzzle which might wrap all these things up? You've got to be careful anytime someone looks back in prehistory and tries to give you a global answer because, it being prehistory, you can say whatever the hell you want and get away with it. But I'll submit this to you: If you put one piece in the middle of this jigsaw puzzle, suddenly it all starts to form a coherent picture. If you're wondering why the Tarahumara don't fight and don't die of heart disease, why a poor Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu can be the most compassionate and yet the most competitive, and why we somehow were able to find food without weapons, perhaps it's because humans, as much as we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe, actually evolved as nothing more than a pack of hunting dogs.Maybe we evolved as a hunting pack animal. Because the one advantage we have in the wilderness — again, it's not our fangs, our claws or our speed — the only thing we do really well is sweat. We're really good at being sweaty and smelly. Better than any other mammal on Earth, we can sweat really well. But the advantage of that little bit of social discomfort is the fact that, when it comes to running under hot heat for long distances, we're superb — the best on the planet. You take a horse on a hot day, and after about five or six miles, that horse has a choice: it's either going to breathe or it's going to cool off. But it ain't doing both. We can. So what if we evolved as hunting pack animals? What if the only natural advantage we had in the world was the fact that we could get together as a group, go out there on that African savanna, pick out an antelope, go out as a pack, and run that thing to death? That's all we could do. We could run really far on a hot day.Well, if that's true, a couple other things had to be true as well. The key to being part of a hunting pack is the word ""pack."" If you go out by yourself and try to chase an antelope, I guarantee there will be two cadavers out in the savanna. You need a pack to pull together. You need to have those 64- and 65-year-olds who have been doing this for a long time to understand which antelope you're trying to catch. The herd explodes and it gathers back again. Those expert trackers have to be part of the pack. They can't be 10 miles behind. You need the women and the adolescents there, because the two times in your life you most benefit from animal protein is when you're a nursing mother and a developing adolescent. It makes no sense to have the antelope over there, dead, and the people who want to eat it 50 miles away. They need to be part of the pack. You need those 27-year-old studs at the peak of their powers ready to drop the kill, and you need those teenagers who are learning the whole thing involved. The pack stays together.Another thing that has to be true: this pack cannot be materialistic. You can't be hauling all your crap around, trying to chase the antelope. You can't be a pissed-off pack. You can't be bearing grudges, like, ""I'm not chasing that guy's antelope. He pissed me off. Let him go chase his own antelope."" The pack has got to be able to swallow its ego, be cooperative, and pull together. What you end up with, in other words, is a culture remarkably similar to the Tarahumara, a tribe that has remained unchanged since the Stone Age. It's a really compelling argument that maybe the Tarahumara are doing exactly what all of us had done for two million years, that it's us in modern times who have sort of gone off the path.You know, we look at running as this kind of alien, foreign thing, this punishment you've got to do because you ate pizza the night before. But maybe it's something different. Maybe we're the ones who have taken this natural advantage we had and we spoiled it. How do we spoil it? Well, how do we spoil anything? We try to cash in on it. Right? We try to can it and package it and make it ""better"" and then sell it to people. And then what happened was, we started creating these fancy cushioned things which can make running ""better,"" called running shoes.The reason I get personally pissed-off about running shoes is because I bought a million of them and I kept getting hurt. And I think if anybody in here runs — I just had a conversation with Carol. We talked for two minutes backstage, and she talked about plantar fasciitis. You talk to a runner, I guarantee within 30 seconds, the conversation turns to injury. So if humans evolved as runners, if that's our one natural advantage, then why are we so bad at it? Why do we keep getting hurt?A curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time. If you read folklore and mythology, any kind of myths, any kind of tall tales, running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor. It's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain. Geronimo used to say, ""My only friends are my legs. I only trust my legs."" That's because an Apache triathlon used to be you'd run 50 miles across the desert, engage in hand-to-hand combat, steal a bunch of horses, and slap leather for home. Geronimo was never saying, ""You know something, my Achilles — I'm tapering. I've got to take this week off."" Or, ""I need to cross-train. I didn't do yoga. I'm not ready.""(Laughter)Humans ran and ran all the time. We are here today. We have our digital technology. All of our science comes from the fact that our ancestors were able to do something extraordinary every day, which was just rely on their naked feet and legs to run long distances.So how do we get back to that again? Well, I would submit to you the first thing is: get rid of all packaging, all the sales, all the marketing. Get rid of all the stinking running shoes. Stop focusing on urban marathons, which, if you do four hours, you suck, and if you do 3:59:59, you're awesome, because you qualified for another race. We need to get back to that sense of playfulness and joyfulness and, I would say, nakedness, that has made the Tarahumara one of the healthiest and serene cultures in our time. So what's the benefit? So what? So you burn off the Häagen-Dazs from the night before.But maybe there's another benefit there as well. Without getting too extreme about this, imagine a world where everybody could go out the door and engage in the kind of exercise that's going to make them more relaxed, more serene, more healthy, burn off stress — where you don't come back into your office a raging maniac anymore, or go home with a lot of stress on top of you again. Maybe there's something between what we are today and what the Tarahumara have always been. I don't say let's go back to the Copper Canyons and live on corn and maize, which is the Tarahumara's preferred diet, but maybe there's somewhere in between. And if we find that thing, maybe there is a big fat Nobel Prize out there. Because if somebody could find a way to restore that natural ability that we all enjoyed for most of our existence up until the 1970s or so, the benefits — social and physical and political and mental — could be astounding.What I've been seeing today is there is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who've gotten rid of their shoes. And what they have found uniformly is, you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments. And what you find is something the Tarahumara have known for a very long time: that this can be a whole lot of fun. I've experienced it personally myself. I was injured all my life; then in my early 40s, I got rid of my shoes and my running ailments have gone away, too.So hopefully it's something we can all benefit from. I appreciate your listening to this story.Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_mcdougall_are_we_born_to_run
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"""What I Will""I will not dance to your war drum. I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. I will not dance to that beating. I know that beat. It is lifeless. I know intimately that skin you are hitting. It was alive once, hunted, stolen, stretched. I will not dance to your drummed-up war. I will not pop, spin, break for you. I will not hate for you or even hate you. I will not kill for you. Especially I will not die for you. I will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide. I will not side with you or dance to bombs because everyone is dancing. Everyone can be wrong. Life is a right, not collateral or casual. I will not forget where I come from. I will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved near, and our chanting will be dancing. Our humming will be drumming. I will not be played. I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat. I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death. Your war drum ain't louder than this breath. Haaa.What's up TED people? Let me hear you make some noise.(Applause)A bunch of pacifists. Confused, aspiring pacifists. I understand.I've been wrong a lot lately. Like a lot. So I couldn't figure out what to read today. I mean, I've been saying I've been prepping. What that means is prepping my outfit, (Laughter) prepping options, trying to figure out what I'm coming behind and going in front of. Poetry does that. It preps you. It aims you.So I am going to read a poem that was chosen just now. But I'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here. Hold her now with you. You don't need to say her name out loud, you can just hold her. Are you holding her?This is ""Break Clustered.""All holy history banned. Unwritten books predicted the future, projected the past. But my head unwraps around what appears limitless, man's creative violence. Whose son shall it be? Which male child will perish a new day? Our boys' deaths galvanize. We cherish corpses. We mourn women, complicated. Bitches get beat daily. Profits made, prophets ignored. War and tooth, enameled salted lemon childhoods. All colors run, none of us solid. Don't look for shadow behind me. I carry it within. I live cycles of light and darkness. Rhythm is half silence. I see now, I never was one and not the other. Sickness, health, tender violence. I think now I never was pure. Before form I was storm, blind, ign'ant — still am. Human contracted itself blind, malignant. I never was pure. Girl spoiled before ripened. Language can't math me. I experience exponentially. Everything is everything. One woman loses 15, maybe 20, members of her family. One woman loses six. One woman loses her head. One woman searches rubble. One woman feeds on trash. One woman shoots her face. One woman shoots her husband. One woman straps herself. One woman gives birth to a baby. One woman gives birth to borders. One woman no longer believes love will ever find her. One woman never did. Where do refugee hearts go? Broken, dissed, placed where they're not from, don't want to be missed. Faced with absence. We mourn each one or we mean nothing at all. My spine curves spiral. Precipice running to and running from human beings. Cluster bombs left behind. De facto landmines. A smoldering grief. Harvest contaminated tobacco. Harvest bombs. Harvest baby teeth. Harvest palms, smoke. Harvest witness, smoke. Resolutions, smoke. Salvation, smoke. Redemption, smoke. Breathe. Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suheir_hammad_poems_of_war_peace_women_power
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"What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. (Laughter)Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century. It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior — I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family. And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. (Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out.So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today. The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. (Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue.(Laughter)The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. We should stop looking outside. It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. It's particularly important — this isn't on the World Wide Web, is it? I'm about to get fired — it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies — the ""abattoirs of the human soul,"" as I call them. (Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [as] they can get away with. It's in their nature; it's in their DNA; it's what they do — even the good, well-intentioned companies. On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. On the other hand, it's a nightmare — it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life.The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have breakfast with my wife and children. Have sex again. (Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. Do three hours' work. Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime. Do another three hours' work. Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. Meditate for half an hour. Have sex. Walk the dog. Have sex again. Go to bed. (Applause) How often do you think I have that day? (Laughter) We need to be realistic. You can't do it all in one day. We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the ""I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left."" (Laughter) A day is too short; ""after I retire"" is too long. There's got to be a middle way.A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. A friend came to see me last year — and she doesn't mind me telling this story — a friend came to see me last year and said, ""Nigel, I've read your book. And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. It's totally dominated by work. I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day. All of my relationships have failed. There's nothing in my life apart from my work. So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. So I joined a gym."" (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn't more balanced; it's more fit. (Laughter) Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life — there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side. And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas — not just do 50 stomach crunches.Now that can be daunting. Because people say, ""Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit. You want me to go to church and call my mother."" And I understand. I truly understand how that can be daunting. But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, ""Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son"" — Harry — ""up from school."" Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared a pizza for two, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's ""James and the Giant Peach."" I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, ""Goodnight, mate,"" and walked out of his bedroom. As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, ""Dad?"" I went, ""Yes, mate?"" He went, ""Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever."" I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation.Now my point is the small things matter. Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. Moreover, I think, it can transform society. Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like. And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nigel_marsh_how_to_make_work_life_balance_work
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"Ever since I was a little girl seeing ""Star Wars"" for the first time, I've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots. And as a little girl, I loved the idea of a robot that interacted with us much more like a helpful, trusted sidekick — something that would delight us, enrich our lives and help us save a galaxy or two. I knew robots like that didn't really exist, but I knew I wanted to build them.So 20 years pass — I am now a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence, the year is 1997, and NASA has just landed the first robot on Mars. But robots are still not in our home, ironically. And I remember thinking about all the reasons why that was the case. But one really struck me. Robotics had really been about interacting with things, not with people — certainly not in a social way that would be natural for us and would really help people accept robots into our daily lives. For me, that was the white space; that's what robots could not do yet. And so that year, I started to build this robot, Kismet, the world's first social robot. Three years later — a lot of programming, working with other graduate students in the lab — Kismet was ready to start interacting with people.(Video) Scientist: I want to show you something.Kismet: (Nonsense)Scientist: This is a watch that my girlfriend gave me.Kismet: (Nonsense)Scientist: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too. I almost lost it this week.Cynthia Breazeal: So Kismet interacted with people like kind of a non-verbal child or pre-verbal child, which I assume was fitting because it was really the first of its kind. It didn't speak language, but it didn't matter. This little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us — and with that, the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots.So over the past several years I've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots, now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students. And one of my favorite robots is Leonardo. We developed Leonardo in collaboration with Stan Winston Studio. And so I want to show you a special moment for me of Leo. This is Matt Berlin interacting with Leo, introducing Leo to a new object. And because it's new, Leo doesn't really know what to make of it. But sort of like us, he can actually learn about it from watching Matt's reaction.(Video) Matt Berlin: Hello, Leo. Leo, this is Cookie Monster. Can you find Cookie Monster? Leo, Cookie Monster is very bad. He's very bad, Leo. Cookie Monster is very, very bad. He's a scary monster. He wants to get your cookies.(Laughter)CB: All right, so Leo and Cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start, but they get along great now.So what I've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology, where it's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality. And with that shift in thinking, we can now start to imagine new questions, new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise. But what do I mean when I say ""push our social buttons?"" Well, one of the things that we've learned is that, if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language, the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use — like Nexi, our humanoid robot, is doing here — what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people. People use these cues to determine things like how persuasive someone is, how likable, how engaging, how trustworthy. It turns out it's the same for robots.It's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior. To answer questions like, how is it that, from a brief encounter, we're able to make an estimate of how trustworthy another person is? Mimicry's believed to play a role, but how? Is it the mimicking of particular gestures that matters? It turns out it's really hard to learn this or understand this from watching people because when we interact we do all of these cues automatically. We can't carefully control them because they're subconscious for us. But with the robot, you can.And so in this video here — this is a video taken from David DeSteno's lab at Northeastern University. He's a psychologist we've been collaborating with. There's actually a scientist carefully controlling Nexi's cues to be able to study this question. And the bottom line is — the reason why this works is because it turns out people just behave like people even when interacting with a robot. So given that key insight, we can now start to imagine new kinds of applications for robots. For instance, if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues, maybe they would be a cool, new communication technology. So imagine this: What about a robot accessory for your cellphone? You call your friend, she puts her handset in a robot, and, bam! You're a MeBot — you can make eye contact, you can talk with your friends, you can move around, you can gesture — maybe the next best thing to really being there, or is it?To explore this question, my student, Siggy Adalgeirsson, did a study where we brought human participants, people, into our lab to do a collaborative task with a remote collaborator. The task involved things like looking at a set of objects on the table, discussing them in terms of their importance and relevance to performing a certain task — this ended up being a survival task — and then rating them in terms of how valuable and important they thought they were. The remote collaborator was an experimenter from our group who used one of three different technologies to interact with the participants. The first was just the screen. This is just like video conferencing today. The next was to add mobility — so, have the screen on a mobile base. This is like, if you're familiar with any of the telepresence robots today — this is mirroring that situation. And then the fully expressive MeBot.So after the interaction, we asked people to rate their quality of interaction with the technology, with a remote collaborator through this technology, in a number of different ways. We looked at psychological involvement — how much empathy did you feel for the other person? We looked at overall engagement. We looked at their desire to cooperate. And this is what we see when they use just the screen. It turns out, when you add mobility — the ability to roll around the table — you get a little more of a boost. And you get even more of a boost when you add the full expression. So it seems like this physical, social embodiment actually really makes a difference.Now let's try to put this into a little bit of context. Today we know that families are living further and further apart, and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance. For me, I have three young boys, and I want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents. But my parents live thousands of miles away, so they just don't get to see each other that often. We try Skype, we try phone calls, but my boys are little — they don't really want to talk; they want to play. So I love the idea of thinking about robots as a new kind of distance-play technology. I imagine a time not too far from now — my mom can go to her computer, open up a browser and jack into a little robot. And as grandma-bot, she can now play, really play, with my sons, with her grandsons, in the real world with his real toys. I could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters, with their friends, and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house, like sharing a bedtime story. And through this technology, being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren's lives in a way that's not possible today.Let's think about some other domains, like maybe health. So in the United States today, over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese, and now it's a big problem with our children as well. And we know that as you get older in life, if you're obese when you're younger, that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life, but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system. But if robots can be engaging, if we like to cooperate with robots, if robots are persuasive, maybe a robot can help you maintain a diet and exercise program, maybe they can help you manage your weight. Sort of like a digital Jiminy — as in the well-known fairy tale — a kind of friendly, supportive presence that's always there to be able to help you make the right decision in the right way at the right time to help you form healthy habits. So we actually explored this idea in our lab.This is a robot, Autom. Cory Kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work. And it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach. It had a couple of simple non-verbal skills it could do. It could make eye contact with you. It could share information looking down at a screen. You'd use a screen interface to enter information, like how many calories you ate that day, how much exercise you got. And then it could help track that for you. And the robot spoke with a synthetic voice to engage you in a coaching dialogue modeled after trainers and patients and so forth. And it would build a working alliance with you through that dialogue. It could help you set goals and track your progress, and it would help motivate you.So an interesting question is, does the social embodiment really matter? Does it matter that it's a robot? Is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters? To explore that question, we did a study in the Boston area where we put one of three interventions in people's homes for a period of several weeks. One case was the robot you saw there, Autom. Another was a computer that ran the same touch-screen interface, ran exactly the same dialogues. The quality of advice was identical. And the third was just a pen and paper log, because that's the standard intervention you typically get when you start a diet-and-exercise program.So one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost, but really how long they interacted with the robot. Because the challenge is not losing weight, it's actually keeping it off. And the longer you could interact with one of these interventions, well that's indicative, potentially, of longer-term success. So the first thing I want to look at is how long, how long did people interact with these systems. It turns out that people interacted with the robot significantly more, even though the quality of the advice was identical to the computer. When it asked people to rate it on terms of the quality of the working alliance, people rated the robot higher and they trusted the robot more. (Laughter) And when you look at emotional engagement, it was completely different. People would name the robots. They would dress the robots. (Laughter) And even when we would come up to pick up the robots at the end of the study, they would come out to the car and say good-bye to the robots. They didn't do this with a computer.The last thing I want to talk about today is the future of children's media. We know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today, whether it's television or computer games or whatnot. My sons, they love the screen. They love the screen. But I want them to play; as a mom, I want them to play, like, real-world play. And so I have a new project in my group I wanted to present to you today called Playtime Computing that's really trying to think about how we can take what's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child, where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play. So here's the first exploration of this idea, where characters can be physical or virtual, and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back. I like to think of this as the Atari Pong of this blended-reality play.But we can push this idea further. What if — (Game) Nathan: Here it comes. Yay! CB: — the character itself could come into your world? It turns out that kids love it when the character becomes real and enters into their world. And when it's in their world, they can relate to it and play with it in a way that's fundamentally different from how they play with it on the screen. Another important idea is this notion of persistence of character across realities. So changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world. So here, Nathan has changed the letter A to the number 2. You can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world. So they are now sending the character back into that world. And now it's got number power.And then finally, what I've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids, where they really feel like they are part of that story, a part of that experience. And I really want to spark their imaginations the way mine was sparked as a little girl watching ""Star Wars."" But I want to do more than that. I actually want them to create those experiences. I want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own. So we've been exploring a lot of ideas in telepresence and mixed reality to literally allow kids to project their ideas into this space where other kids can interact with them and build upon them. I really want to come up with new ways of children's media that foster creativity and learning and innovation. I think that's very, very important.So this is a new project. We've invited a lot of kids into this space, and they think it's pretty cool. But I can tell you, the thing that they love the most is the robot. What they care about is the robot. Robots touch something deeply human within us. And so whether they're helping us to become creative and innovative, or whether they're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance, or whether they are our trusted sidekick who's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves, for me, robots are all about people.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_breazeal_the_rise_of_personal_robots
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"Hawa Abdi: Many people — 20 years for Somalia — [were] fighting. So there was no job, no food. Children, most of them, became very malnourished, like this. Deqo Mohamed: So as you know, always in a civil war, the ones affected most [are] the women and children. So our patients are women and children. And they are in our backyard. It's our home. We welcome them. That's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people, where 75 percent of them are women and children. Pat Mitchell: And this is your hospital. This is the inside. HA: We are doing C-sections and different operations because people need some help. There is no government to protect them. DM: Every morning we have about 400 patients, maybe more or less. But sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses, and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them. But we take the severe ones, and we reschedule the other ones the next day. It is very tough. And as you can see, it's the women who are carrying the children; it's the women who come into the hospitals; it's the women [are] building the houses. That's their house. And we have a school. This is our bright — we opened [in the] last two years [an] elementary school where we have 850 children, and the majority are women and girls. (Applause) PM: And the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic. Would you explain the rules for admission? HA: The people who are coming to us, we are welcoming. We are sharing with them whatever we have. But there are only two rules. First rule: there is no clan distinguished and political division in Somali society. [Whomever] makes those things we throw out. The second: no man can beat his wife. If he beat, we will put [him] in jail, and we will call the eldest people. Until they identify this case, we'll never release him. That's our two rules. (Applause) The other thing that I have realized, that the woman is the most strong person all over the world. Because the last 20 years, the Somali woman has stood up. They were the leaders, and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations. We are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war. We can reconcile. We can do everything. (Applause) DM: As my mother said, we are the future hope, and the men are only killing in Somalia. So we came up with these two rules. In a camp with 90,000 people, you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights. So there is no clan division, and no man can beat his wife. And we have a little storage room where we converted a jail. So if you beat your wife, you're going to be there. (Applause) So empowering the women and giving the opportunity — we are there for them. They are not alone for this. PM: You're running a medical clinic. It brought much, much needed medical care to people who wouldn't get it. You're also running a civil society. You've created your own rules, in which women and children are getting a different sense of security. Talk to me about your decision, Dr. Abdi, and your decision, Dr. Mohamed, to work together — for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances. HA: My age — because I was born in 1947 — we were having, at that time, government, law and order. But one day, I went to the hospital — my mother was sick — and I saw the hospital, how they [were] treating the doctors, how they [are] committed to help the sick people. I admired them, and I decided to become a doctor. My mother died, unfortunately, when I was 12 years [old]. Then my father allowed me to proceed [with] my hope. My mother died in [a] gynecology complication, so I decided to become a gynecology specialist. That's why I became a doctor. So Dr. Deqo has to explain. DM: For me, my mother was preparing [me] when I was a child to become a doctor, but I really didn't want to. Maybe I should become an historian, or maybe a reporter. I loved it, but it didn't work. When the war broke out — civil war — I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children. And I thought, maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist. (Laughter) So I went to Russia, and my mother also, [during the] time of [the] Soviet Union. So some of our character, maybe we will come with a strong Soviet background of training. So that's how I decided [to do] the same. My sister was different. She's here. She's also a doctor. She graduated in Russia also. (Applause) And to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war — when I was 16, and my sister was 11, when the civil war broke out. So it was the need and the people we saw in the early '90s — that's what made us go back and work for them. PM: So what is the biggest challenge working, mother and daughter, in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations? HA: Yes, I was working in a tough situation, very dangerous. And when I saw the people who needed me, I was staying with them to help, because I [could] do something for them. Most people fled abroad. But I remained with those people, and I was trying to do something — [any] little thing I [could] do. I succeeded in my place. Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other, who are not fighting. But we try to stand on our feet, to do something, little things, we can for our people. And I'm thankful for my daughters. When they come to me, they help me to treat the people, to help. They do everything for them. They have done what I desire to do for them. PM: What's the best part of working with your mother, and the most challenging part for you? DM: She's very tough; it's most challenging. She always expects us to do more. And really when you think [you] cannot do it, she will push you, and I can do it. That's the best part. She shows us, trains us how to do and how to be better [people] and how to do long hours in surgery — 300 patients per day, 10, 20 surgeries, and still you have to manage the camp — that's how she trains us. It is not like beautiful offices here, 20 patients, you're tired. You see 300 patients, 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage. PM: But you do it for good reasons. (Applause) Wait. Wait. HA: Thank you. DM: Thank you. (Applause) HA: Thank you very much. DM: Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/mother_and_daughter_doctor_heroes_hawa_abdi_deqo_mohamed
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"I'd like to start with a couple of quick examples. These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider. They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made. The nearest we've come is with aramid fiber. And to make that, it involves extremes of temperature, extremes of pressure and loads of pollution. And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water. It does suggest we've still got a bit to learn. This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away. That's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors. And what's more, this guy doesn't need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels.So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver. If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use. And if we're to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about. Firstly, radical increases in resource efficiency. Secondly, shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model. And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy. And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we're going to need.You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period. And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it. So I'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas. And let's start with radical increases in resource efficiency. When we were working on the Eden Project, we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular, but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried. It was a hell of a challenge, and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues. So for instance, it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels. Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons.The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons. And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes. And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes. So we started exploring this material called ETFE. It's a high-strength polymer. And what you do is you put it together in three layers, you weld it around the edge, and then you inflate it. And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing. So that was a factor-100 saving. And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another. So with such large, lightweight pillows, we had much less steel. With less steel we were getting more sunlight in, which meant we didn't have to put as much extra heat in winter. And with less overall weight in the superstructure, there were big savings in the foundations. And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building.So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency — delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input. And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions. So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells. There's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool.So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea. The way we tend to use resources is we extract them, we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them. Nature works very differently. In ecosystems, the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system. And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems. And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles. And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste. It was ending up in landfills. Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste. And I'm just going to talk through this animation.So they were paid to collect it from the restaurants. They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding. When that was soiled, they were paid again to collect it. They put it into worm recomposting systems, which produced a lot of worms, which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produced caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants. So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model, and it created more value in the process. Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value. And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing. And I know it's a quirky example, but I think the implications of this are quite radical, because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem — waste — into a massive opportunity.And particularly in cities — we could look at the whole metabolism of cities, and look at those as opportunities. And that's what we're doing on the next project I'm going to talk about, the Mobius Project, where we're trying to bring together a number of activities, all within one building, so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another. And the kind of elements I'm talking about are, firstly, we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse, a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas. Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid. We'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms. We'd have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant. And we'd also have a coffee shop, and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms.So you can see that we're bringing together cycles of food, energy and water and waste all within one building. And just for fun, we've proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore. Some of you may recognize this. And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities.So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we're working on at the moment. It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago. So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests. And during the evolution of life on the Earth, it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy. The converse is also true. The more vegetation we lose, the more that's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification. And this animation, this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years, and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot, and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt, or maybe even reverse, desertification.And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts, there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity. This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle, and it's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert. The way it does this is it comes out at night, crawls to the top of a sand dune, and because it's got a matte black shell, is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings. So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle's shell. Just before sunrise, he tips his shell up, the water runs down into his mouth, has a good drink, goes off and hides for the rest of the day. And the ingenuity, if you could call it that, goes even further. Because if you look closely at the beetle's shell, there are lots of little bumps on that shell. And those bumps are hydrophilic; they attract water. Between them there's a waxy finish which repels water. And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle's shell. So even when there's only a small amount of moisture in the air, it's able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth. So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment — and in that sense, very relevant to the kind of challenges we're going to be facing over the next few years, next few decades.We're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse. This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process. So inside it's cool and humid, which means the plants need less water to grow. And then at the back of the greenhouse, it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle. And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside. So they just started spreading this on the land around, and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area. This photograph was taken on completion day, and just one year later, it looked like that. So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land — and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design.So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits. And when you think about nature, often you think about it as being all about competition. But actually in mature ecosystems, you're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships. So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters. And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create electricity. And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms — 10,000 times. So our energy problems are not intractable. It's a challenge to our ingenuity. And the kind of synergies I'm talking about are, firstly, both these technologies work very well in hot, sunny deserts. CSP needs a supply of demineralized freshwater. That's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces. CSP produces a lot of waste heat. We'll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits. And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight. So this is how this scheme would look. The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind. We'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way.Some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts. And with biomimicry, if you've got an underutilized resource, you don't think, ""How am I going to dispose of this?"" You think, ""What can I add to the system to create more value?"" And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages. When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate. And that builds up on the evaporators — and that's what that image on the left is — gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate. So after a while, we could take that out, use it as a lightweight building block. And if you think about the carbon in that, that would have come out of the atmosphere, into the sea and then locked away in a building product.The next thing is sodium chloride. You can also compress that into a building block, as they did here. This is a hotel in Bolivia. And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them. And there's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater. So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries. And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants. And it's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse. Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine. We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts, transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity. Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas.So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy. They're not just possible; they're critical. And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions. But perhaps more than anything, what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design. Far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language. But here it's about synergies and abundance and optimizing. And this is an important point.Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, ""If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don't sit around talking about carpentry. No, you need to set people's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores."" And that's what we need to do, so let's be positive, and let's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we've ever seen.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_genius_in_architecture
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"(Whistling)(Whistling ends)(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much. That was whistling. I'm trying to do this in English. What is a chubby, curly-haired guy from Holland — why is he whistling? Well actually, I've been whistling since the age of four, about four. My dad was always whistling around the house, and I just thought that's part of communication in my family. So I whistled along with him. And actually, until I was 34, I always annoyed and irritated people with whistling, because, to be honest, my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior. I whistled alone, I whistled in the classroom, I whistled on bike, I whistled everywhere.And I also whistled at a Christmas Eve party with my family-in-law. And they had some, in my opinion, terrible Christmas music. And when I hear music that I don't like, I try to make it better.(Laughter)So when ""Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"" — you know it?(Whistling)But it can also sound like this.(Whistling)But during a Christmas party — at dinner, actually — it's very annoying. So my sister-in-law asked me a few times, ""Please stop whistling."" And I just couldn't. And at one point — and I had some wine, I have to admit that — at one point I said, ""If there was a contest, I would join.""And two weeks later, I received a text message: ""You're going to America.""(Laughter)So, OK, I'm going to America. I would love to, but why? So I immediately called her up, of course. She googled, and she found this World Whistling Championship in America, of course.(Laughter)She didn't expect me to go there. And I would have lost my face. I don't know if that's correct English. But the Dutch people here will understand what I mean.(Laughter)I lost my face.(Applause)And she thought, ""He will never go there."" But actually, I did. So I went to Louisburg, North Carolina, southeast of the United States, and I entered the world of whistling. And I also entered the World Championship, and I won there, in 2004.(Applause)That was great fun, of course. And to defend my title — like judokas do and sportsmen — I thought, well let's go back in 2005 — and I won again.(Laughter)Then I couldn't participate for a few years. And in 2008, I entered again in Japan, Tokyo, and I won again. So what happened now is I'm standing here in Rotterdam, in the beautiful city, on a big stage, and I'm talking about whistling. And actually, I earn my money whistling, at the moment. So I quit my day job as a nurse.(Applause)And I try to live my dream — well, actually, it was never my dream, but it sounds so good.(Laughter)OK, I'm not the only one whistling here. You say, ""Huh, what do you mean?"" Well actually, you are going to whistle along. And then always the same thing happens: people are watching each other and think, ""Oh, my God. Why? Can I go away?"" No, you can't.(Laughter)Actually, it's very simple. The track that I will whistle is called ""Fête de la Belle."" It's about 80 minutes long.(Laughter)No, no, no. It's four minutes long. And I want to first rehearse with you your whistling. Yes, so I whistle the tone.(Whistling)(Laughter)Sorry, I forgot one thing — you whistle the same tone as me.(Laughter)I heard a wide variety of tones.(Geert Chatrou and audience whistling)(Whistling ends)This is very promising.(Laughter)This is very promising. I'll ask the technicians to start the music. And if it's started, I just point where you whistle along, and we will see what happens.(Laughter)Oh, I'm so sorry, technicians.(Laughter)I'm so used to that.(Laughter)I start it myself.(Laughter)OK, here it is.(Laughter)(Music)(Whistling)(Whistling ends)(Music)OK.(Whistling)It's easy, isn't it?(Whistling)Now comes the solo, I propose I do that myself, OK?(Music)(Whistling)(Applause)Max Westerman: Geert Chatrou, the World Champion of Whistling.Geert Chatrou: Thank you. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/a_whistleblower_you_haven_t_heard
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"We're here to celebrate compassion. But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem. As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word ""compassion"" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism. It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing, or it's seen as potentially depressing. Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word ""compassion"" was translated as ""pity.""Now compassion, when it enters the news, too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time. Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images. And so what I'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection. And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others.When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s, we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that. Now the word ""tolerance,"" if you look at it in the dictionary, connotes ""allowing,"" ""indulging"" and ""enduring."" In the medical context that it comes from, it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent. And it's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough. And the going is pretty rough right now. I think that without perhaps being able to name it, we are collectively experiencing that we've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue.Compassion is a worthy successor. It is organic, across our religious, spiritual and ethical traditions, and yet it transcends them. Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces. So what is it, three-dimensionally? What are its kindred and component parts? What's in its universe of attendant virtues? To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind. Now ""kindness"" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche. But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues. And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification.Compassion is also curious. Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity. I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles, Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi. They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims, and as they do that, they cultivate what they call ""curiosity without assumptions."" Well that's going to be a breeding ground for compassion.Compassion can be synonymous with empathy. It can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation, but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence. It's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there, just showing up. I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty — and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping. I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value. And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery — encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like — because it is visible. When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible. It is so important when we're communicating big ideas — but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion — to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood — the color and complexity of life.And compassion does seek physicality. I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford. And I don't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him, but he's paraplegic. He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister. Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again, and — and he does experience this as an ""and"" rather than a ""but"" — and he experiences himself to be healed and whole. And as a teacher of yoga, he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability, health, illness and aging. He says that he's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we're all on. He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. And Matthew has made this remarkable observation that I'm just going to offer you and let it sit. I can't quite explain it, and he can't either. But he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body, in all its frailty and its grace, without, at the same time, becoming more compassionate towards all of life.Compassion also looks like this. This is Jean Vanier. Jean Vanier helped found the L'Arche communities, which you can now find all over the world, communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities — mostly Down syndrome. The communities that Jean Vanier founded, like Jean Vanier himself, exude tenderness. ""Tender"" is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting. We spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive, and I spend a lot of time being those things too. And compassion can also have those qualities. But again and again, lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness. Jean Vanier says that his work, like the work of other people — his great, beloved, late friend Mother Teresa — is never in the first instance about changing the world; it's in the first instance about changing ourselves. He's says that what they do with L'Arche is not a solution, but a sign. Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities.And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies. We need those things too, but we're also bumping up against their limits. And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story — that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change. Our traditions have always known this, and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us. There is, of course, a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world — tikkun olam.And I'll never forget hearing that story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her, that in the beginning of the Creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces. It lodged as shards inside every aspect of the Creation. And that the highest human calling is to look for this light, to point at it when we see it, to gather it up, and in so doing, to repair the world. Now this might sound like a fanciful tale. Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way. Rachel Naomi Remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time, because this story insists that each and every one of us, frail and flawed as we may be, inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch.Stories like this, signs like this, are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us. Rachel Naomi Remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors. And this trend of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing, how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine — the work Fred Luskin is doing — I think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century — that science, in fact, is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism. This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion.But here's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion. We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2. We don't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn't have her. We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South.Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century. He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old. And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less. He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages. Some of his favorites were Moses, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi — he adored his contemporary, Gandhi. And Einstein said — and I think this is a quote, again, that has not been passed down in his legacy — that ""these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge.""Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is. I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word ""compassion"" in our culture — we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy. So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral — it's not. This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar. And by the look of that paunch, he hasn't been doing enough yoga. We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website, and someone said, ""When I look at the first photo, I ask myself, what was he thinking? And when I look at the second, I ask, what kind of person was he? What kind of man is this?""Well, he was complicated. He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others. And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination. Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being. So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Dorothy Day. So was Mother Teresa. So are we all. And I want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion — following on what Fred Luskin says — that these flaws just make us human.Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems. But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others. Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with Crohn's disease. Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist. And Karen Armstrong, I think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that, with a zigzag, have led to the Charter for Compassion. Compassion can't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity.So I want to propose a final definition of compassion — this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way — and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology. Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this, and we need them to mine it for us now. But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious.So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing and say that humanity, the future of humanity, needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/krista_tippett_reconnecting_with_compassion
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"I want you to take a look at this baby. What you're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch. But today I'm going to talk to you about something you can't see. What's going on up in that little brain of hers. The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science. And what we're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the ""celestial openness"" of the child's mind.What we see here is a mother in India, and she's speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language. And she's talking to her baby. What this mother — and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world — understands is that, to preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies. And therein lies a critical puzzle. Why is it that you can't preserve a language by speaking to you and I, to the adults? Well, it's got to do with your brain. What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning. The way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis.(Laughter)And you'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language. The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map. No scientists dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way.Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language. We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. So we've been studying the babies using a technique that we're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages. The baby sits on a parent's lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes — like from ""ah"" to ""ee."" If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum. A six-monther adores the task.What have we learned? Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as ""citizens of the world."" They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using, and that's remarkable because you and I can't do that. We're culture-bound listeners. We can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages. So the question arises: When do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are? And the answer: before their first birthdays. What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to ""ra"" and ""la"" — sounds important to English, but not to Japanese. So at six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent. Two months later, something incredible occurs. The babies in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn.So the question is: What's happening during this critical two-month period? This is the critical period for sound development, but what's going on up there? So there are two things going on. The first is that the babies are listening intently to us, and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk — they're taking statistics. So listen to two mothers speaking motherese — the universal language we use when we talk to kids — first in English and then in Japanese.(Video) Ah, I love your big blue eyes — so pretty and nice.(Japanese)Patricia Kuhl: During the production of speech, when babies listen, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear. And those distributions grow. And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different. English has a lot of Rs and Ls. The distribution shows. And the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which is known as the Japanese ""R."" So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are. But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development.So what we're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about. We're arguing from a mathematical standpoint that the learning of language material may slow down when our distributions stabilize. It's raising lots of questions about bilingual people. Bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once and flip between them, one after the other, depending on who they're speaking to.So we asked ourselves, can the babies take statistics on a brand new language? And we tested this by exposing American babies who'd never heard a second language to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period. We knew that, when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. Six to eight months, they're totally equivalent. Two months later, something incredible happens. But the Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies. What we did was expose American babies, during this period, to Mandarin. It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions. Here's what it looked like in the laboratory.(Mandarin)PK: So what have we done to their little brains?(Laughter)We had to run a control group to make sure that coming into the laboratory didn't improve your Mandarin skills. So a group of babies came in and listened to English. And we can see from the graph that exposure to English didn't improve their Mandarin. But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions. They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who'd been listening for 10 and a half months. What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language. Whatever you put in front of them, they'll take statistics on.But we wondered what role the human being played in this learning exercise. So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage, the same 12 sessions, but over a television set. And another group of babies who had just audio exposure and looked at a teddy bear on the screen. What did we do to their brains? What you see here is the audio result — no learning whatsoever — and the video result — no learning whatsoever. It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics. The social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics.We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions, as opposed to in front of human beings. Thankfully, we have a new machine, magnetoencephalography, that allows us to do this. It looks like a hair dryer from Mars. But it's completely safe, completely noninvasive and silent. We're looking at millimeter accuracy with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy using 306 SQUIDs — these are superconducting quantum interference devices — to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking. We're the first in the world to record babies in an MEG machine while they are learning.So this is little Emma. She's a six-monther. And she's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears. You can see, she can move around. We're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap, so she's free to move completely unconstrained. It's a technical tour de force. What are we seeing? We're seeing the baby brain. As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence, getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality, one brain area causing another to activate.We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child's brain development. We're going to be able to see a child's brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read, as they solve a math problem, as they have an idea. And we're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning. Just as the poets and writers described, we're going to be able to see, I think, that wondrous openness, utter and complete openness, of the mind of a child. In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies
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"I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days, talking to groups of students and professionals, and everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes. On the one hand, people say, ""The time for change is now."" They want to be part of it. They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning. But on the other hand, I hear people talking about fear, a sense of risk-aversion. They say, ""I really want to follow a life of purpose, but I don't know where to start. I don't want to disappoint my family or friends."" I work in global poverty. And they say, ""I want to work in global poverty, but what will it mean about my career? Will I be marginalized? Will I not make enough money? Will I never get married or have children?"" And as a woman who didn't get married until I was a lot older — and I'm glad I waited — (Laughter) — and has no children, I look at these young people and I say, ""Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is only to be human. And nothing important happens in life without a cost."" These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level. Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the costs. We don't talk about the sacrifice.One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South. In a short story called ""Oh Yes,"" she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl, and she looks at her child with a sense of pride, but she also wonders, what price will she pay? ""Better immersion than to live untouched."" But the real question is, what is the cost of not daring? What is the cost of not trying?I've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion. One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok. She was a leader of the Menominee tribe, a Native American peoples. And when we would gather as fellows, she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions. And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future, looking at them from the Earth, and they would look at them, holding them as stewards for that future. Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other, not only as human beings, but to every living thing on the planet.And tragically, in 1999, when she was in Colombia working with the U'wa people, focused on preserving their culture and language, she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC. And whenever we would gather the fellows after that, we would leave a chair empty for her spirit. And more than a decade later, when I talk to NGO fellows, whether in Trenton, New Jersey or the office of the White House, and we talk about Ingrid, they all say that they're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life's mission. And when we think about legacy, I can think of no more powerful one, despite how short her life was.And I've been touched by Cambodian women — beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia. And I met them in the early '90s. In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers. And at the end of the war, there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living. And the women, who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors, told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps. They said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance, hoping that others were alive and doing the same.And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage, her hands at her side, and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was. And these big tears fell down her face, but she never lifted her hands to move them. And the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls, because they had grown too old already, but the next generation. And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands — beautiful rhythms — as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors. And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray. Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future. And what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we cannot measure.I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership. And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider. In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank. And one of the women was Agnes — there on your extreme left — she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda. We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women.But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end. And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women. She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide. And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves — and in the extreme, to do terrible things.And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men. I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male. And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide. And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun.Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us. One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination — the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective. And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera. And they're incredible guys. And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it. And then they created a business plan competition. Then they decided that they would do TEDx's.And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men. Alex, in some ways, said it best. He said, ""We used to feel like nobodies, but now we feel like somebodies."" And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link. What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other. And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance. And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare — the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs. And they're doing it. And my hat's off to you in Kibera.My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive. At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital — money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions. We leave our money for 10 to 15 years, and when we get it back, we invest in other innovations that focus on change. I know it works. We've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies, and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets. This year alone, they've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing, emergency services, solar energy, so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems.Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions, easy categories, because we don't see profit as a blunt instrument. But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit. And ultimately, we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact, measuring what is most important to us. And my dream is we'll have a world one day where we don't just honor those who take money and make more money from it, but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways. And it's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change.Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side — one based on violence and the other on transcendence. I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers. And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don't believe are fully Muslim. And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives, but they did more, because they created more hatred, more rage, more fear and certainly despair.But less than 24 hours, I was 13 miles away from those mosques, visiting one of our Acumen investees, an incredible man, Jawad Aslam, who dares to live a life of immersion. Born and raised in Baltimore, he studied real estate, worked in commercial real estate, and after 9/11 decided he was going to Pakistan to make a difference. For two years, he hardly made any money, a tiny stipend, but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui. And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price. He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes. It took almost two years just to register the land. But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person's action.Today, 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community. And there's schools and clinics and shops. But there's only one mosque. And so I asked Jawad, ""How do you guys navigate? This is a really diverse community. Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays?"" He said, ""Long story. It was hard, it was a difficult road, but ultimately the leaders of the community came together, realizing we only have each other. And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams, and those imams would take turns, they would rotate who would say Friday prayer. But the whole community, all the different sects, including Shi'a and Sunni, would sit together and pray.""We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds. We face huge issues as a world — the financial crisis, global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness. And every day we have a choice. We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was, a fear of each other, distancing and blame. Or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation, transcendence, compassion and love, but also accountability and justice.I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South — in this case, New Orleans. And he said that every day this six-year-old, dressed in her beautiful dress, would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily, calling her a monster, threatening to poison her — distorted faces. And every day he would watch her, and it looked like she was talking to the people. And he would say, ""Ruby, what are you saying?"" And she'd say, ""I'm not talking."" And finally he said, ""Ruby, I see that you're talking. What are you saying?"" And she said, ""Dr. Coles, I am not talking; I'm praying."" And he said, ""Well, what are you praying?"" And she said, ""I'm praying, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.'"" At age six, this child was living a life of immersion, and her family paid a price for it. But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education.My final story is about a young, beautiful man named Josephat Byaruhanga, who was another Acumen Fund fellow, who hails from Uganda, a farming community. And we placed him in a company in Western Kenya, just 200 miles away. And he said to me at the end of his year, ""Jacqueline, it was so humbling, because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture. But especially when I was talking to the African women, I sometimes made these mistakes — it was so hard for me to learn how to listen."" And he said, ""So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice. Because at the height of the season, at the height of its powers, it's beautiful, it's green, it nourishes the world, it reaches to the heavens."" And he said, ""But right before the harvest, it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came.""We need leaders. We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can, ourselves, extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man, woman and child on this planet. And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone. Robert Kennedy once said that ""few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events."" And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written. Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other. So may each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives, but in the end, it is all that will sustain us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jacqueline_novogratz_inspiring_a_life_of_immersion
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"I'm speaking to you about what I call the ""mesh."" It's essentially a fundamental shift in our relationship with stuff, with the things in our lives. And it's starting to look at — not always and not for everything — but in certain moments of time, access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them. And so it's the pursuit of better things, easily shared. And we come from a long tradition of sharing. We've shared transportation. We've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam. We've also shared other sorts of entertainment — sports arenas, public parks, concert halls, libraries, universities. All these things are share-platforms, but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what I refer to as the ""mother of all share-platforms.""And as I think about the mesh and I think about, well, what's driving it, how come it's happening now, I think there's a number of vectors that I want to give you as background. One is the recession — that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value — so starting to align the value with the true cost. Secondly, population growth and density into cities. More people, smaller spaces, less stuff. Climate change: we're trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet. Also, there's been this recent distrust of big brands, global big brands, in a bunch of different industries, and that's created an opening. Research is showing here, in the States, and in Canada and Western Europe, that most of us are much more open to local companies, or brands that maybe we haven't heard of. Whereas before, we went with the big brands that we were sure we trusted. And last is that we're more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before — except for if you're sitting next to someone.(Laughter)The other thing that's worth considering is that we've made a huge investment over decades and decades, and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance. It's a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point A to point B and move things that way. It's also — Web and mobile allow us to be connected and create all kinds of platforms and systems, and the investment of those technologies and that infrastructure is really our inheritance. It allows us to engage in really new and interesting ways.And so for me, a mesh company, the ""classic"" mesh company, brings together these three things: our ability to connect to each other — most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are GPS-enabled and Web-enabled — allows us to find each other and find things in time and space. And third is that physical things are readable on a map — so restaurants, a variety of venues, but also with GPS and other technology like RFID and it continues to expand beyond that, we can also track things that are moving, like a car, a taxicab, a transit system, a box that's moving through time and space. And so that sets up for making access to get goods and services more convenient and less costly in many cases than owning them.For example, I want to use Zipcar. How many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing? Wow, that's great. Okay, thank you. Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world. They did not invent car-sharing. Car-sharing was actually invented in Europe. One of the founders went to Switzerland, saw it implemented someplace, said, ""Wow, that looks really cool. I think we can do that in Cambridge,"" brought it to Cambridge and they started — two women — Robin Chase being the other person who started it. Zipcar got some really important things right. First, they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir. And so they were very clever about the way that they packaged car-sharing. They made it sexy. They made it fresh. They made it aspirational. If you were a member of the club, when you're a member of a club, you're a Zipster. The cars they picked didn't look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something. They picked these sexy cars. They targeted to universities. They made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching. It was a very nice experience, and the cars were clean and reliable, and it all worked.And so from a branding perspective, they got a lot right. But they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company. They understand that they are an information company. Because when we buy a car we go to the dealer once, we have an interaction, and we're chow — usually as quickly as possible. But when you're sharing a car and you have a car-share service, you might use an E.V. to commute, you get a truck because you're doing a home project. When you pick your aunt up at the airport, you get a sedan. And you're going to the mountains to ski, you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing. Meanwhile, these guys are sitting back, collecting all sorts of data about our behavior and how we interact with the service. And so it's not only an option for them, but I believe it's an imperative for Zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us, to be like a concierge service. Because we give them so much information, and they are entitled to really see how it is that we're moving. They're in really good shape to anticipate what we're going to want next.And so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car? What percentage of the time? Any guesses? Those are really very good. I was imagining it was like 20 percent when I first started. The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent. And so basically even if you think it's 10 percent, 90 percent of the time, something that costs us a lot of money — personally, and also we organize our cities around it and all sorts of things — 90 percent of the time it's sitting around. So for this reason, I think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that, if we squeeze hard on things that we've thrown away, there's a lot of value in those things. What set up with Zipcar — Zipcar started in 2000.In the last year, 2010, two car companies started, one that's in the U.K. called WhipCar, and the other one, RelayRides, in the U.S. They're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services, because the two things that really work for car-sharing is, one, the car has to be available, and two, it's within one or two blocks of where you stand. Well the car that's one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor's car, and it's probably also available. So people have created this business. Zipcar started a decade earlier, in 2000. It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service. WhipCar, which started April of last year, it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service. So, really interesting. People are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they're not using it. So it's like vacation rentals for cars. Since I'm here — and I hope some people in the audience are in the car business — (Laughter) — I'm thinking that, coming from the technology side of things — we saw cable-ready TVs and WiFi-ready Notebooks — it would be really great if, any minute now, you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off. Because it just creates more flexibility. It allows us as owners to have other options. And I think we're going there anyway.The opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses — and those are businesses like Zipcar or Netflix that are full mesh businesses, or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies, car manufacturers, who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand, or as really a test, I think — is to make sharing irresistible. We have experiences in our lives, certainly, when sharing has been irresistible. It's just, how do we make that recurrent and scale it? We know also, because we're connected in social networks, that it's easy to create delight in one little place. It's contagious because we're all connected to each other. So if I have a terrific experience and I tweet it, or I tell five people standing next to me, news travels. The opposite, as we know, is also true, often more true.So here we have LudoTruck, which is in L.A., doing the things that gourmet food trucks do, and they've gathered quite a following. In general, and maybe, again, it's because I'm a tech entrepreneur, I look at things as platforms. Platforms are invitations. So creating Craigslist or iTunes and the iPhone developer network, there are all these networks — Facebook as well. These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience. And honestly, it's full of surprises. Because I don't think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at Facebook, around Facebook, for example, two years ago, when Mark announced that they were going to go with a platform.So in this way, I think that cities are platforms, and certainly Detroit is a platform. The invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs — it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive. It's inviting participation, and cities have, historically, invited all sorts of participation. Now we're saying that there's other options as well. So, for example, city departments can open up transit data. Google has made available transit data API. And so there's about seven or eight cities already in the U.S. that have provided the transit data, and different developers are building applications. So I was having a coffee in Portland, and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes. And so it's reliable, real data that's right in my face, where I am, so I can finish the latte.There's this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now: about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space. That space is not vital. The areas around it lack vitality and vibrancy and engagement. There's this thing — how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops? Oh, great. So I'm a big fan of this. And this is a very mesh-y thing. Essentially, there are all sorts of restaurants in Oakland, near where I live. There's a pop-up general store every three weeks, and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies. Super fun, and it happens in a very transitional neighborhood. Subsequent to that, after it's been going for about a year now, they actually started to lease and create and extend. An area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people. So this is an example. The Crafty Fox is this woman who's into crafts, and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London. But these sorts of things are happening in many different environments. From my perspective, one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency. It creates two of the favorite words of any businessperson: sold out. And the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing.So a lot of what we see in the mesh, and a lot of what we have in the platform that we built allows us to define, refine and scale. It allows us to test things as an entrepreneur, to go to market, to be in conversation with people, listen, refine something and go back. It's very cost-effective, and it's very mesh-y. The infrastructure enables that.In closing, and as we're moving towards the end, I just also want to encourage — and I'm willing to share my failures as well, though not from the stage. (Laughter) I would just like to say that one of the big things, when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other, but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation, is by sharing failures. And one quick example is Velib, in 2007, came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition, a very big bike-sharing service. They made a lot of mistakes. They had some number of big successes. But they were very transparent, or they had to be, in the way that they exposed what worked and didn't work. And so B.C. in Barcelona and B-cycle and Boris Bikes in London — no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises that happened in Paris. So the opportunity when we're connected is also to share failures and successes.We're at the very beginning of something that, what we're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward, is inviting, it's engaging, but it's very early. I have a website — it's a directory — and it started with about 1,200 companies, and in the last two-and-a-half months it's up to about 3,300 companies. And it grows on a very regular daily basis. But it's very much at the beginning.So I just want to welcome all of you onto the ride. And thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_gansky_the_future_of_business_is_the_mesh
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"Pat Mitchell: What is the story of this pin?Madeleine Albright: This is ""Breaking the Glass Ceiling.""PM: Oh. That was well chosen, I would say, for TEDWomen.MA: Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen. And none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for Saddam Hussein. I'll tell you what happened. I went to the United Nations as an ambassador, and it was after the Gulf War, and I was an instructed ambassador. And the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions, and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly, which he deserved — he had invaded another country. And so all of a sudden, a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things, but among them an ""unparalleled serpent."" And so I happened to have a snake pin. So I wore it when we talked about Iraq. (Laughter) And when I went out to meet the press, they zeroed in, said, ""Why are you wearing that snake pin?"" I said, ""Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent."" And then I thought, well this is fun. So I went out and I bought a lot of pins that would, in fact, reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day. So that's how it all started.PM: So how large is the collection?MA: Pretty big. It's now traveling. At the moment it's in Indianapolis, but it was at the Smithsonian. And it goes with a book that says, ""Read My Pins.""(Laughter)PM: So is this a good idea. I remember when you were the first woman as Secretary of State, and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing, how you looked — the thing that happens to a lot of women, especially if they're the first in a position. So how do you feel about that — the whole —MA: Well, it's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing. But people did pay attention to what clothes I had. What was interesting was that, before I went up to New York as U.N. ambassador, I talked to Jeane Kirkpatrick, who'd been ambassador before me, and she said, ""You've got to get rid of your professor clothes. Go out and look like a diplomat."" So that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping. But still, there were all kinds of questions about — ""did you wear a hat?"" ""How short was your skirt?"" And one of the things — if you remember Condoleezza Rice was at some event and she wore boots, and she got criticized over that. And no guy ever gets criticized. But that's the least of it.PM: It is, for all of us, men and women, finding our ways of defining our roles, and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future. How did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother, a grandmother, nurturing ... and so how did you handle that?MA: Well the interesting part was I was asked what it was like to be the first woman Secretary of State a few minutes after I'd been named. And I said, ""Well I've been a woman for 60 years, but I've only been Secretary of State for a few minutes."" So it evolved. (Laughter) But basically I love being a woman. And so what happened — and I think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this — I went to my first meeting, first at the U.N., and that's when this all started, because that is a very male organization. And I'm sitting there — there are 15 members of the Security Council — so 14 men sat there staring at me, and I thought — well you know how we all are. You want to get the feeling of the room, and ""do people like me?"" and ""will I really say something intelligent?"" And all of a sudden I thought, ""Well, wait a minute. I am sitting behind a sign that says 'The United States,' and if I don't speak today then the voice of the United States will not be heard,"" and it was the first time that I had that feeling that I had to step out of myself in my normal, reluctant female mode and decide that I had to speak on behalf of our country. And so that happened more at various times, but I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman. I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary. But I have to tell you, I have my youngest granddaughter, when she turned seven last year, said to her mother, my daughter, ""So what's the big deal about Grandma Maddie being Secretary of State? Only girls are Secretary of State.""(Laughter)(Applause)PM: Because in her lifetime — MA: That would be so.PM: What a change that is. As you travel now all over the world, which you do frequently, how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls? Where are we?MA: I think we're slowly changing, but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different. And therefore it means that we have to remember that, while many of us have had huge opportunities — and Pat, you have been a real leader in your field — is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women. And so what I have felt — and I have looked at this from a national security issue — when I was Secretary of State, I decided that women's issues had to be central to American foreign policy, not just because I'm a feminist, but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is greater economic prosperity. So I think that it behooves us — those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice — that we need to help other women. And I really dedicated myself to that, both at the U.N. and then as Secretary of State.PM: And did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy?MA: From some people. I think that they thought that it was a soft issue. The bottom line that I decided was actually women's issues are the hardest issues, because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects, and because, as I said, it is really central to the way that we think about things. Now for instance, some of the wars that took place when I was in office, a lot of them, the women were the main victims of it. For instance, when I started, there were wars in the Balkans. The women in Bosnia were being raped. We then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues. And by the way, one of the things that I did at that stage was, I had just arrived at the U.N., and when I was there, there were 183 countries in the U.N. Now there are 192. But it was one of the first times that I didn't have to cook lunch myself. So I said to my assistant, ""Invite the other women permanent representatives."" And I thought when I'd get to my apartment that there'd be a lot of women there. I get there, and there are six other women, out of 183. So the countries that had women representatives were Canada, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica, Lichtenstein and me. So being an American, I decided to set up a caucus. (Laughter) And so we set it up, and we called ourselves the G7.(Laughter)PM: Is that ""Girl 7?"" MA: Girl 7.And we lobbied on behalf of women's issues. So we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal. And then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war, that it was against humanity.(Applause)PM: So when you look around the world and you see that, in many cases — certainly in the Western world — women are evolving into more leadership positions, and even other places some barriers are being brought down, but there's still so much violence, still so many problems, and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables. Now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren't, when there was maybe you — one voice, maybe one or two others. Do you believe, and can you tell us why, there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis?MA: Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. If you think that, you've forgotten high school. (Laughter) But the bottom line is that there is a way, when there are more women at the table, that there's an attempt to develop some understanding. So for instance, what I did when I went to Burundi, we'd got Tutsi and Hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in Rwanda. And so I think the capability of women to put themselves — I think we're better about putting ourselves into the other guy's shoes and having more empathy. I think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room.When I was Secretary of State, there were only 13 other women foreign ministers. And so it was nice when one of them would show up. For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union. And it was really terrific. Because one of the things I think you'll understand. We went to a meeting, and the men in my delegation, when I would say, ""Well I feel we should do something about this,"" and they'd say, ""What do you mean, you feel?"" And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me. And all of a sudden we were talking about arms control, and she said, ""Well I feel we should do this."" And my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden. But I think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions. The other thing that I think is really important: A lot of national security policy isn't just about foreign policy, but it's about budgets, military budgets, and how the debts of countries work out. So if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts, they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries.PM: So how do we get this balance we're looking for, then, in the world? More women's voices at the table? More men who believe that the balance is best?MA: Well I think one of the things — I'm chairman of the board of an organization called the National Democratic Institute that works to support women candidates. I think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office, to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices. I think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other. Now I have a saying that I feel very strongly about, because I am of a certain age where, when I started in my career, believe it or not, there were other women who criticized me: ""Why aren't you in the carpool line?"" or ""Aren't your children suffering because you're not there all the time?"" And I think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty. In fact, I think ""guilt"" is every woman's middle name. And so I think what needs to happen is we need to help each other. And my motto is that there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.(Applause)PM: Well Secretary Albright, I guess you'll be going to heaven. Thank you for joining us today.MA: Thank you all. Thanks Pat.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/madeleine_albright_on_being_a_woman_and_a_diplomat
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"It's Monday morning. In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen. At Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession. In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying, trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it. And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital, trying to work out whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said, ""You must make him drink today,"" — my father's been nil by mouth for a week — or whether, by giving him this bottle, I might actually kill him.We face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives, and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions. We talk things over with our friends, we scour the Internet, we search through books. But still, even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon Recommends, it's still experts that we rely upon most — especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters. Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can — that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own. And in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.But I believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals. It's not that experts have not massively contributed to the world — of course they have. The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom. We've surrendered our power, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide. This is no exaggeration. In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak. The results were quite extraordinary. As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off. It literally flat-lined. And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or wrong.But experts do get things wrong. Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10? Did you know that if you file your tax returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you? And then there's, of course, the example that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living through the worst recession since the 1930s. For the sake of our health, our wealth and our collective security, it's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on. And I'm saying this as an economist who, over the past few years, has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why, but also — and I'm aware of the irony here — as an expert myself, as a professor, as somebody who advises prime ministers, heads of big companies, international organizations, but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change, that we need to become more open-minded, more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view. So in order to help you understand where I'm coming from, let me bring you into my world, the world of experts.Now there are, of course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions. But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus. Alan Greenspan's proclamations that the years of economic growth would go on and on, not challenged by his peers, until after the crisis, of course. You see, we also learn that experts are located, are governed, by the social and cultural norms of their times — whether it be the doctors in Victorian England, say, who sent women to asylums for expressing sexual desire, or the psychiatrists in the United States who, up until 1973, were still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness.And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks — because we've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're about to bring by market. The study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study.And we've also got to be aware that experts, of course, also make mistakes. They make mistakes every single day — mistakes born out of carelessness. A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot, and also mistakes born out of thinking errors. A common thinking error of radiologists, for example — when they look at CT scans — is that they're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient's problem to be. So if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say, what happens is that, if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan, they literally stop looking at it — thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient's lungs.I've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts. These are, of course, not the only insights I could share, but I hope they give you a clear sense at least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them, why we need to rebel and why we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on. But how can we do this? Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies. First, we've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles. This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D. in every single subject, you'll be relieved to hear. But it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when, for example, we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand. Why was it that, when I had an operation, my doctor said to me, ""Beware, Ms. Hertz, of hyperpyrexia,"" when he could have just as easily said, ""Watch out for a high fever."" You see, being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs, their equations, their forecasts, their prophecies, and being armed with the questions to do that — questions like: What are the assumptions that underpin this? What is the evidence upon which this is based? What has your investigation focused on? And what has it ignored?It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first, primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men. It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women. And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs don't work nearly as well on women as they do on men — and the drugs that do work well work so well that they're actively harmful for women to take. Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed.Second, we need to create the space for what I call ""managed dissent."" If we are to shift paradigms, if we are to make breakthroughs, if we are to destroy myths, we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out, in which we're bringing in new, diverse, discordant, heretical views into the discussion, fearlessly, in the knowledge that progress comes about, not only from the creation of ideas, but also from their destruction — and also from the knowledge that, by surrounding ourselves by divergent, discordant, heretical views. All the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter. Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true. And that's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent.Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy. In meetings, he looks out for the person in the room — arms crossed, looking a bit bemused — and draws them into the discussion, trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion, so that they have dissent within the room. Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference. But we need to go even further. We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are. The conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced degrees, fancy titles, diplomas, best-selling books — high-status individuals. But just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise — whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO's, but also shop-girls — yeah.Best Buy, the consumer electronics company, gets all its employees — the cleaners, the shop assistants, the people in the back office, not just its forecasting team — to place bets, yes bets, on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before Christmas, on whether customers' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company, on whether a project will come in on time. By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company, Best Buy was able to discover, for example, that the store that it was going to open in China — its big, grand store — was not going to open on time. Because when it asked its staff, all its staff, to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not, a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening. It turned out that they were aware, as no one else within the company was, of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts, nor the experts on the ground in China, were even aware of.The strategies that I have discussed this evening — embracing dissent, taking experts on, democratizing expertise, rebellious strategies — are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing, complex, difficult times. For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on, if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical, if we devolve authority, if we are rebellious, but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance, uncertainty and doubt, and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too, we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century. For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following, blindly accepting, blindly trusting. Now is the time to face the world with eyes wide open — yes, using experts to help us figure things out, for sure — I don't want to completely do myself out of a job here — but being aware of their limitations and, of course, also our own.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/noreena_hertz_how_to_use_experts_and_when_not_to
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"Our face is hugely important because it's the external, visual part that everybody else sees. Let's not forget it's a functional entity. We have strong skull bones that protect the most important organ in our body: the brain. It's where our senses are located, our special senses — our vision, our speech, our hearing, our smell, our taste. And this bone is peppered, as you can see, with the light shining through the skull with cavities, the sinuses, which warm and moisten the air we breathe. But also imagine if they were filled with solid bone — our head would be dead weight, we wouldn't be able to hold it erect, we wouldn't be able to look at the world around us. This woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she can't breathe and eat.Attached to the facial bones that define our face's structure are the muscles that deliver our facial expression, our universal language of expression, our social-signaling system. And overlying this is the skin drape, which is a hugely complex three-dimensional structure — taking right-angled bends here and there, having thin areas like the eyelids, thick areas like the cheek, different colors. And then we have the sensual factor of the face. Where do we like to kiss people? On the lips. Nibble the ears maybe. It's the face where we're attracted to with that.But let's not forget the hair. You're looking at the image on your left-hand side — that's my son with his eyebrows present. Look how odd he looks with the eyebrows missing. There's a definite difference. And imagine if he had hair sprouting from the middle of his nose, he'd look even odder still.Dysmorphophobia is an extreme version of the fact that we don't see ourselves as others see us. It's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves, and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live. Dysmorphophobia is a perversion of this where people who may be very good looking regard themselves as hideously ugly and are constantly seeking surgery to correct their facial appearance. They don't need this. They need psychiatric help. Max has kindly donated his photograph to me. He doesn't have dysmorphophobia, but I'm using his photograph to illustrate the fact that he looks exactly like a dysmorphophobic. In other words, he looks entirely normal.Age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes. So children judge themselves, learn to judge themselves, by the behavior of adults around them. Here's a classic example: Rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that's growing out through her skull, has obliterated her nose, and she's having difficulty seeing. As you can see, it's blocking her vision. She's also in danger, when she damages this, of bleeding profusely. Our research has shown that the parents and close loved ones of these children adore them. They've grown used to their face; they think they're special. Actually, sometimes the parents argue about whether these children should have the lesion removed. And occasionally they suffer intense grief reactions because the child they've grown to love has changed so dramatically and they don't recognize them. But other adults say incredibly painful things. They say, ""How dare you take this child out of the house and terrify other people. Shouldn't you be doing something about this? Why haven't you had it removed?"" And other children in curiosity come up and poke the lesion, because — a natural curiosity. And that obviously alerts the child to their unusual nature. After surgery, everything normalizes. The adults behave more naturally, and the children play more readily with other children.As teenagers — just think back to your teenage years — we're going through a dramatic and often disproportionate change in our facial appearance. We're trying to struggle to find our identity. We crave the approval of our peers. So our facial appearance is vital to us as we're trying to project ourselves to the world. Just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days. How long did you spend looking in the mirror every day, practicing your sardonic look, practicing your serious look, trying to look like Sean Connery, as I did, trying to raise one eyebrow? It's a crippling time.I've chosen to show this profile view of Sue because what it shows is her lower jaw jutting forward and her lower lip jutting forward. I'd like you all in the audience now to push your lower jaw forward. Turn to the person next to you, push your lower jaws forward. Turn to the person next to you and look at them — they look miserable. That's exactly what people used to say to Sue. She wasn't miserable at all. But people used to say to her, ""Why are you so miserable?"" People were making misjudgments all the time on her mood. Teachers and peers were underestimating her; she was teased at school. So she chose to have facial surgery. After the facial surgery, she said, ""My face now reflects my personality. People know now that I'm enthusiastic, that I'm a happy person."" And that's the change that can be achieved for teenagers.Is this change, though, a real change, or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves? Well we studied teenagers' attitudes to photographs of patients having this corrective facial surgery. And what we found was — we jumbled up the photographs so they couldn't recognize the before and after — what we found was that the patients were regarded as being more attractive after the surgery. Well that's not surprising, but we also asked them to judge them on honesty, intelligence, friendliness, violence. They were all perceived as being less than normal in all those characteristics — more violent, etc. — before the surgery. After the surgery, they were perceived as being more intelligent, more friendly, more honest, less violent — and yet we hadn't operated on their intellect or their character.When people get older, they don't necessarily choose to follow this kind of surgery. Their presence in the consultation suite is a result of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What happens to them is that they may have suffered cancer or trauma. So this is a photograph of Henry, two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face — his cheekbone, his upper jaw, his eye-socket. He looks pretty good at this stage. But over the course of the next 15 years he had 14 more operations, as the disease ravaged his face and destroyed my reconstruction regularly. I learned a huge amount from Henry. Henry taught me that you can carry on working. He worked as an advocate. He continued to play cricket. He enjoyed life to the full, and this was probably because he had a successful, fulfilling job and a caring family and was able to participate socially. He maintained a calm insouciance. I don't say he overcame this; he didn't overcome it. This was something more than that. He ignored it. He ignored the disfigurement that was happening in his life and carried on oblivious to it. And that's what these people can do.Henriapi illustrates this phenomenon as well. This is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of Nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the United Kingdom to have operated on. It was my longest operation. It took 23 hours. I did it with my neurosurgeon. We removed all the bones at the right side of his face — his eye, his nose, the skull bones, the facial skin — and reconstructed him with tissue from the back. He continued to work as a psychiatric nurse. He got married. He had a son called Jeremiah. And again, he said, ""This painting of me with my son Jeremiah shows me as the successful man that I feel that I am."" His facial disfigurement did not affect him because he had the support of a family; he had a successful, fulfilling job.So we've seen that we can change people's faces. But when we change people's faces, are we changing their identity — for better or for worse? For instance, there are two different types of facial surgery. We can categorize it like that. We can say there are patients who choose to have facial surgery — like Sue. When they have facial surgery, they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people. They don't feel different. They feel that they've actually gained what they never had, that their face now reflects their personality. And actually that's probably the difference between cosmetic surgery and this kind of surgery. Because you might say, ""Well, this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic."" If you do cosmetic surgery, patients are often less happy. They're trying to achieve difference in their lives. Sue wasn't trying to achieve difference in her life. She was just trying to achieve the face that matched her personality.But then we have other people who don't choose to have facial surgery. They're people who have their face shot off. I'll move it off, and we'll have a blank slide for those who are squeamish amongst you. They have it forced upon them. And again, as I told you, if they have a caring family and good work life, then they can lead normal and fulfilled lives. Their identity doesn't change.Is this business about appearance and preoccupation with it a Western phenomenon? Muzetta's family give the lie to this. This is a little Bangladeshi girl from the east end of London who's got a huge malignant tumor on the right side of her face, which has already made her blind and which is rapidly growing and is going to kill her shortly. After she had surgery to remove the tumor, her parents dressed her in this beautiful green velvet dress, a pink ribbon in her hair, and they wanted the painting to be shown around the world, despite the fact that they were orthodox Muslims and the mother wore a full burqa. So it's not simply a Western phenomenon.We make judgments on people's faces all the time. It's been going on since we can think of Lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces. He said you could see criminal faces, judging them just on the photographs that were showed. Good-looking people are always judged as being more friendly. We look at O.J. — he's a good-looking guy. We'd like to spend time with him. He looks friendly. Now we know that he's a convicted wife-batterer, and actually he's not the good guy. And beauty doesn't equate to goodness, and certainly doesn't equate to contentment.So we've talked about the static face and judging the static face, but actually, we're more comfortable with judging the moving face. We think we can judge people on their expressions. U.K. jurors in the U.K. justice system like to see a live witness to see whether they can pick up the telltale signs of mendacity — the blink, the hesitation. And so they want to see live witnesses. Todorov tells us that, in a tenth of a second, we can make a judgment on somebody's face. Are we uncomfortable with this image? Yes, we are. Would we be happy if our doctor's face, our lawyer's face, our financial adviser's face was covered? We'd be pretty uncomfortable. But are we good at making the judgments on facial appearance and movement? The truth is that there's a five-minute rule, not the tenth-of-a-second rule like Todorov, but a five-minute rule. If you spend five minutes with somebody, you start looking beyond their facial appearance, and the people who you're initially attracted to may seem boring and you lose interest in them, and the people who you didn't immediately seek out, because you didn't find them particularly attractive, become attractive people because of their personality.So we've talked a lot about facial appearance. I now want to share a little bit of the surgery that we do — where we're at and where we're going. This is an image of Ann who's had her right jaw removed and the base of her skull removed. And you can see in the images afterward, we've managed to reconstruct her successfully. But that's not good enough. This is what Ann wants. She wants to be out kayaking, she wants to be out climbing mountains. And that's what she achieved, and that's what we have to get to.This is a horrific image, so I'm putting my hand up now. This is a photograph of Adi, a Nigerian bank manager who had his face shot off in an armed robbery. And he lost his lower jaw, his lip, his chin and his upper jaw and teeth. This is the bar that he set for us. ""I want to look like this. This is how I looked before."" So with modern technology, we used computers to make models. We made a model of the jaw without bone in it. We then bent a plate up to it. We put it in place so we knew it was an accurate position. We then put bone and tissue from the back. Here you can see the plate holding it, and you can see the implants being put in — so that in one operation we achieve this and this. So the patient's life is restored. That's the good news. However, his chin skin doesn't look the same as it did before. It's skin from his back. It's thicker, it's darker, it's coarser, it doesn't have the contours. And that's where we're failing, and that's where we need the face transplant.The face transplant has a role probably in burns patients to replace the skin. We can replace the underlying skeletal structure, but we're still not good at replacing the facial skin. So it's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium. But the patients are going to have to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives. What does that mean? They have an increased risk of infection, an increased risk of malignancy. This is not a life-saving transplant — like a heart, or liver, or lung transplant — it is a quality-of-life transplant, and as a result, are the patients going to say, if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on, ""I wish I'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because I'm now dying of a malignant cancer""? We don't know yet. We also don't know what they feel about recognition and identity. Bernard Devauchelle and Sylvie Testelin, who did the first operation, are studying that. Donors are going to be short on the ground, because how many people want to have their loved one's face removed at the point of death? So there are going to be problems with face transplantation.So the better news is the future's almost here — and the future is tissue engineering. Just imagine, I can make a biologically-degradable template. I can put it in place where it's meant to be. I can sprinkle a few cells, stem cells from the patient's own hip, a little bit of genetically engineered protein, and lo and behold, leave it for four months and the face is grown. This is a bit like a Julia Child recipe.But we've still got problems. We've got mouth cancer to solve. We're still not curing enough patients — it's the most disfiguring cancer. We're still not reconstructing them well enough. In the U.K. we have an epidemic of facial injuries among young people. We still can't get rid of scars. We need to do research. And the best news of all is that surgeons know that we need to do research. And we've set up charities that will help us fund the clinical research to determine the best treatment practice now and better treatment into the future, so we don't just sit on our laurels and say, ""Okay, we're doing okay. Let's leave it as it is.""Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_hutchison_saving_faces
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"As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders — three old women who took care of me while my parents worked. The year is 1963. We're at the ocean. It's twilight. We're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides. It's a stretch of beach we know so well. The smooth stones on the sand are familiar to us. If you saw these women on the street in their faded clothes, you might dismiss them as poor and simple. That would be a mistake. These women are descendants of Polynesian navigators, trained in the old ways by their elders, and now they're passing it on to me. They teach me the names of the winds and the rains, of astronomy according to a genealogy of stars. There's a new moon on the horizon. Hawaiians say it's a good night for fishing. They begin to chant.[Hawaiian chant]When they finish, they sit in a circle and ask me to come to join them. They want to teach me about my destiny. I thought every seven-year-old went through this. (Laughter) ""Baby girl, someday the world will be in trouble. People will forget their wisdom. It will take elders' voices from the far corners of the world to call the world into balance. You will go far away. It will sometimes be a lonely road. We will not be there. But you will look into the eyes of seeming strangers, and you will recognize your ohana, your family. And it will take all of you. It will take all of you."" These words, I hold onto all my life. Because the idea of doing it alone terrifies me.The year is 2007. I'm on a remote island in Micronesia. Satawal is one half-mile long by one mile wide. It's the home of my mentor. His name is Pius Mau Piailug. Mau is a palu, a navigator priest. He's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world. There are fewer than a handful of palu left on this island. Their tradition is so extraordinary that these mariners sailed three million square miles across the Pacific without the use of instruments. They could synthesize patterns in nature using the rising and setting of stars, the sequence and direction of waves, the flight patterns of certain birds. Even the slightest hint of color on the underbelly of a cloud would inform them and help them navigate with the keenest accuracy.When Western scientists would join Mau on the canoe and watch him go into the hull, it appeared that an old man was going to rest. In fact, the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel. It is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves. Mau was, in fact, gathering explicit data using his entire body. It's what he had been trained to do since he was five years old. Now science may dismiss this methodology, but Polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel.The palu also had an uncanny ability to forecast weather conditions days in advance. Sometimes I'd be with Mau on a cloud-covered night and we'd sit at the easternmost coast of the island, and he would look out, and then he would say, ""Okay, we go."" He saw that first glint of light — he knew what the weather was going to be three days from now.Their achievements, intellectually and scientifically, are extraordinary, and they are so relevant for these times that we are in when we are riding out storms. We are in such a critical moment of our collective history. They have been compared to astronauts — these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island. Their canoes, our rockets; their sea, our space. The wisdom of these elders is not a mere collection of stories about old people in some remote spot. This is part of our collective narrative. It's humanity's DNA. We cannot afford to lose it.The year is 2010. Just as the women in Hawaii that raised me predicted, the world is in trouble. We live in a society bloated with data, yet starved for wisdom. We're connected 24/7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high. We must course-correct. An African shaman said, ""Your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes."" The link between the past and the future is fragile. This I know intimately, because even as I travel throughout the world to listen to these stories and record them, I struggle. I am haunted by the fact that I no longer remember the names of the winds and the rains.Mau passed away five months ago, but his legacy and lessons live on. And I am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them, as potent as the Micronesian navigators, that are going dismissed, that this is a testament to brilliant, brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly. Because when an elder dies a library is burned, and throughout the world, libraries are ablaze.I am grateful for the fact that I had a mentor like Mau who taught me how to navigate. And I realize through a lesson that he shared that we continue to find our way. And this is what he said: ""The island is the canoe; the canoe, the island."" And what he meant was, if you are voyaging and far from home, your very survival depends on everyone aboard. You cannot make the voyage alone, you were never meant to. This whole notion of every man for himself is completely unsustainable. It always was.So in closing I would offer you this: The planet is our canoe, and we are the voyagers. True navigation begins in the human heart. It's the most important map of all. Together, may we journey well.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_lindsey_curating_humanity_s_heritage
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"I admit that I'm a little bit nervous here because I'm going to say some radical things, about how we should think about cancer differently, to an audience that contains a lot of people who know a lot more about cancer than I do. But I will also contest that I'm not as nervous as I should be because I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. (Laughter) And that this, in fact, will be the way that we treat cancer in the future. In order to talk about cancer, I'm going to actually have to — let me get the big slide here. First, I'm going to try to give you a different perspective of genomics. I want to put it in perspective of the bigger picture of all the other things that are going on — and then talk about something you haven't heard so much about, which is proteomics. Having explained those, that will set up for what I think will be a different idea about how to go about treating cancer.So let me start with genomics. It is the hot topic. It is the place where we're learning the most. This is the great frontier. But it has its limitations. And in particular, you've probably all heard the analogy that the genome is like the blueprint of your body, and if that were only true, it would be great, but it's not. It's like the parts list of your body. It doesn't say how things are connected, what causes what and so on. So if I can make an analogy, let's say that you were trying to tell the difference between a good restaurant, a healthy restaurant and a sick restaurant, and all you had was the list of ingredients that they had in their larder. So it might be that, if you went to a French restaurant and you looked through it and you found they only had margarine and they didn't have butter, you could say, ""Ah, I see what's wrong with them. I can make them healthy."" And there probably are special cases of that. You could certainly tell the difference between a Chinese restaurant and a French restaurant by what they had in a larder. So the list of ingredients does tell you something, and sometimes it tells you something that's wrong. If they have tons of salt, you might guess they're using too much salt, or something like that. But it's limited, because really to know if it's a healthy restaurant, you need to taste the food, you need to know what goes on in the kitchen, you need the product of all of those ingredients.So if I look at a person and I look at a person's genome, it's the same thing. The part of the genome that we can read is the list of ingredients. And so indeed, there are times when we can find ingredients that [are] bad. Cystic fibrosis is an example of a disease where you just have a bad ingredient and you have a disease, and we can actually make a direct correspondence between the ingredient and the disease. But most things, you really have to know what's going on in the kitchen, because, mostly, sick people used to be healthy people — they have the same genome. So the genome really tells you much more about predisposition. So what you can tell is you can tell the difference between an Asian person and a European person by looking at their ingredients list. But you really for the most part can't tell the difference between a healthy person and a sick person — except in some of these special cases.So why all the big deal about genetics? Well first of all, it's because we can read it, which is fantastic. It is very useful in certain circumstances. It's also the great theoretical triumph of biology. It's the one theory that the biologists ever really got right. It's fundamental to Darwin and Mendel and so on. And so it's the one thing where they predicted a theoretical construct. So Mendel had this idea of a gene as an abstract thing, and Darwin built a whole theory that depended on them existing, and then Watson and Crick actually looked and found one. So this happens in physics all the time. You predict a black hole, and you look out the telescope and there it is, just like you said. But it rarely happens in biology. So this great triumph — it's so good, there's almost a religious experience in biology. And Darwinian evolution is really the core theory.So the other reason it's been very popular is because we can measure it, it's digital. And in fact, thanks to Kary Mullis, you can basically measure your genome in your kitchen with a few extra ingredients. So for instance, by measuring the genome, we've learned a lot about how we're related to other kinds of animals by the closeness of our genome, or how we're related to each other — the family tree, or the tree of life. There's a huge amount of information about the genetics just by comparing the genetic similarity. Now of course, in medical application, that is very useful because it's the same kind of information that the doctor gets from your family medical history — except probably, your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do. And so by reading the genome, we can find out much more about your family than you probably know. And so we can discover things that probably you could have found by looking at enough of your relatives, but they may be surprising. I did the 23andMe thing and was very surprised to discover that I am fat and bald. (Laughter) But sometimes you can learn much more useful things about that.But mostly what you need to know, to find out if you're sick, is not your predispositions, but it's actually what's going on in your body right now. So to do that, what you really need to do, you need to look at the things that the genes are producing and what's happening after the genetics, and that's what proteomics is about. Just like genome mixes the study of all the genes, proteomics is the study of all the proteins. And the proteins are all of the little things in your body that are signaling between the cells — actually, the machines that are operating — that's where the action is. Basically, a human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die, and when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation. And so the trick is — unfortunately, we don't have an easy way to measure these like we can measure the genome.So the problem is that measuring — if you try to measure all the proteins, it's a very elaborate process. It requires hundreds of steps, and it takes a long, long time. And it matters how much of the protein it is. It could be very significant that a protein changed by 10 percent, so it's not a nice digital thing like DNA. And basically our problem is somebody's in the middle of this very long stage, they pause for just a moment, and they leave something in an enzyme for a second, and all of a sudden all the measurements from then on don't work. And so then people get very inconsistent results when they do it this way. People have tried very hard to do this. I tried this a couple of times and looked at this problem and gave up on it.I kept getting this call from this oncologist named David Agus. And Applied Minds gets a lot of calls from people who want help with their problems, and I didn't think this was a very likely one to call back, so I kept on giving him to the delay list. And then one day, I get a call from John Doerr, Bill Berkman and Al Gore on the same day saying return David Agus's phone call. (Laughter) So I was like, ""Okay. This guy's at least resourceful."" (Laughter) So we started talking, and he said, ""I really need a better way to measure proteins."" I'm like, ""Looked at that. Been there. Not going to be easy."" He's like, ""No, no. I really need it. I mean, I see patients dying every day because we don't know what's going on inside of them. We have to have a window into this."" And he took me through specific examples of when he really needed it. And I realized, wow, this would really make a big difference, if we could do it, and so I said, ""Well, let's look at it.""Applied Minds has enough play money that we can go and just work on something without getting anybody's funding or permission or anything. So we started playing around with this. And as we did it, we realized this was the basic problem — that taking the sip of coffee — that there were humans doing this complicated process and that what really needed to be done was to automate this process like an assembly line and build robots that would measure proteomics. And so we did that, and working with David, we made a little company called Applied Proteomics eventually, which makes this robotic assembly line, which, in a very consistent way, measures the protein. And I'll show you what that protein measurement looks like.Basically, what we do is we take a drop of blood out of a patient, and we sort out the proteins in the drop of blood according to how much they weigh, how slippery they are, and we arrange them in an image. And so we can look at literally hundreds of thousands of features at once out of that drop of blood. And we can take a different one tomorrow, and you will see your proteins tomorrow will be different — they'll be different after you eat or after you sleep. They really tell us what's going on there. And so this picture, which looks like a big smudge to you, is actually the thing that got me really thrilled about this and made me feel like we were on the right track. So if I zoom into that picture, I can just show you what it means. We sort out the proteins — from left to right is the weight of the fragments that we're getting, and from top to bottom is how slippery they are. So we're zooming in here just to show you a little bit of it. And so each of these lines represents some signal that we're getting out of a piece of a protein. And you can see how the lines occur in these little groups of bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. And that's because we're measuring the weight so precisely that — carbon comes in different isotopes, so if it has an extra neutron on it, we actually measure it as a different chemical. So we're actually measuring each isotope as a different one.And so that gives you an idea of how exquisitely sensitive this is. So seeing this picture is sort of like getting to be Galileo and looking at the stars and looking through the telescope for the first time, and suddenly you say, ""Wow, it's way more complicated than we thought it was."" But we can see that stuff out there and actually see features of it. So this is the signature out of which we're trying to get patterns. So what we do with this is, for example, we can look at two patients, one that responded to a drug and one that didn't respond to a drug, and ask, ""What's going on differently inside of them?"" And so we can make these measurements precisely enough that we can overlay two patients and look at the differences.So here we have Alice in green and Bob in red. We overlay them. This is actual data. And you can see, mostly it overlaps and it's yellow, but there's some things that just Alice has and some things that just Bob has. And if we find a pattern of things of the responders to the drug, we see that in the blood, they have the condition that allows them to respond to this drug. We might not even know what this protein is, but we can see it's a marker for the response to the disease. So this already, I think, is tremendously useful in all kinds of medicine. But I think this is actually just the beginning of how we're going to treat cancer. So let me move to cancer.The thing about cancer — when I got into this, I really knew nothing about it, but working with David Agus, I started watching how cancer was actually being treated and went to operations where it was being cut out. And as I looked at it, to me it didn't make sense how we were approaching cancer, and in order to make sense of it, I had to learn where did this come from. We're treating cancer almost like it's an infectious disease. We're treating it as something that got inside of you that we have to kill. So this is the great paradigm. This is another case where a theoretical paradigm in biology really worked — was the germ theory of disease. So what doctors are mostly trained to do is diagnose — that is, put you into a category and apply a scientifically proven treatment for that diagnosis — and that works great for infectious diseases. So if we put you in the category of you've got syphilis, we can give you penicillin. We know that that works. If you've got malaria, we give you quinine or some derivative of it. And so that's the basic thing doctors are trained to do, and it's miraculous in the case of infectious disease — how well it works. And many people in this audience probably wouldn't be alive if doctors didn't do this.But now let's apply that to systems diseases like cancer. The problem is that, in cancer, there isn't something else that's inside of you. It's you; you're broken. That conversation inside of you got mixed up in some way. So how do we diagnose that conversation? Well, right now what we do is we divide it by part of the body — you know, where did it appear? — and we put you in different categories according to the part of the body. And then we do a clinical trial for a drug for lung cancer and one for prostate cancer and one for breast cancer, and we treat these as if they're separate diseases and that this way of dividing them had something to do with what actually went wrong. And of course, it really doesn't have that much to do with what went wrong because cancer is a failure of the system. And in fact, I think we're even wrong when we talk about cancer as a thing. I think this is the big mistake. I think cancer should not be a noun. We should talk about cancering as something we do, not something we have. And so those tumors, those are symptoms of cancer. And so your body is probably cancering all the time, but there are lots of systems in your body that keep it under control.And so to give you an idea of an analogy of what I mean by thinking of cancering as a verb, imagine we didn't know anything about plumbing, and the way that we talked about it, we'd come home and we'd find a leak in our kitchen and we'd say, ""Oh, my house has water."" We might divide it — the plumber would say, ""Well, where's the water?"" ""Well, it's in the kitchen."" ""Oh, you must have kitchen water."" That's kind of the level at which it is. ""Kitchen water, well, first of all, we'll go in there and we'll mop out a lot of it. And then we know that if we sprinkle Drano around the kitchen, that helps. Whereas living room water, it's better to do tar on the roof."" And it sounds silly, but that's basically what we do. And I'm not saying you shouldn't mop up your water if you have cancer, but I'm saying that's not really the problem; that's the symptom of the problem.What we really need to get at is the process that's going on, and that's happening at the level of the proteonomic actions, happening at the level of why is your body not healing itself in the way that it normally does? Because normally, your body is dealing with this problem all the time. So your house is dealing with leaks all the time, but it's fixing them. It's draining them out and so on. So what we need is to have a causative model of what's actually going on, and proteomics actually gives us the ability to build a model like that.David got me invited to give a talk at National Cancer Institute and Anna Barker was there. And so I gave this talk and said, ""Why don't you guys do this?"" And Anna said, ""Because nobody within cancer would look at it this way. But what we're going to do, is we're going to create a program for people outside the field of cancer to get together with doctors who really know about cancer and work out different programs of research."" So David and I applied to this program and created a consortium at USC where we've got some of the best oncologists in the world and some of the best biologists in the world, from Cold Spring Harbor, Stanford, Austin — I won't even go through and name all the places — to have a research project that will last for five years where we're really going to try to build a model of cancer like this. We're doing it in mice first, and we will kill a lot of mice in the process of doing this, but they will die for a good cause. And we will actually try to get to the point where we have a predictive model where we can understand, when cancer happens, what's actually happening in there and which treatment will treat that cancer.So let me just end with giving you a little picture of what I think cancer treatment will be like in the future. So I think eventually, once we have one of these models for people, which we'll get eventually — I mean, our group won't get all the way there — but eventually we'll have a very good computer model — sort of like a global climate model for weather. It has lots of different information about what's the process going on in this proteomic conversation on many different scales. And so we will simulate in that model for your particular cancer — and this also will be for ALS, or any kind of system neurodegenerative diseases, things like that — we will simulate specifically you, not just a generic person, but what's actually going on inside you.And in that simulation, what we could do is design for you specifically a sequence of treatments, and it might be very gentle treatments, very small amounts of drugs. It might be things like, don't eat that day, or give them a little chemotherapy, maybe a little radiation. Of course, we'll do surgery sometimes and so on. But design a program of treatments specifically for you and help your body guide back to health — guide your body back to health. Because your body will do most of the work of fixing it if we just sort of prop it up in the ways that are wrong. We put it in the equivalent of splints. And so your body basically has lots and lots of mechanisms for fixing cancer, and we just have to prop those up in the right way and get them to do the job.And so I believe that this will be the way that cancer will be treated in the future. It's going to require a lot of work, a lot of research. There will be many teams like our team that work on this. But I think eventually, we will design for everybody a custom treatment for cancer.So thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_two_frontiers_of_cancer_treatment
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"(Applause)(Music)(Applause)Angella Ahn: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you so much. We are so honored to be here at TEDWomen, sharing our music with you. What an exciting and inspiring event. What you just heard is ""Skylife"" by David Balakrishnan. We want to play you one more selection. It's by Astor Piazzolla, an Argentine composer. And we talk about different ideas — he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart. This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart, beautiful music, wasn't the most popular thing in the classical music world. It was more atonal and twelve-tone. And he insisted on beautiful music. So this is ""Oblivion"" by Astor Piazzolla.Thank you.(Music) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ahn_trio_a_modern_take_on_piano_violin_cello
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"Ten years ago exactly, I was in Afghanistan. I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and I witnessed, as a reporter for Al Jazeera, the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that. Then, two years later, I covered another war — the war in Iraq. I was placed at the center of that war because I was covering the war from the northern part of Iraq. And the war ended with a regime change, like the one in Afghanistan. And that regime that we got rid of was actually a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, that for decades created a great sense of paralysis within the nation, within the people themselves. However, the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world.For decades, we have lived under authoritarian regimes — in the Arab world, in the Middle East. These regimes created something within us during this period. I'm 43 years old right now. For the last 40 years, I have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us — old, aged, authoritarian, corrupt situations — regimes that we have seen around us. And for a moment I was wondering, are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground, a change that does not come through foreign intervention, through the misery of occupation, through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes? The Iraqis: yes, they got rid of Saddam Hussein, but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad, they felt that their dignity had suffered. And this is why they revolted. This is why they did not accept. And actually other regimes, they told their citizens, ""Would you like to see the situation of Iraq? Would you like to see civil war, sectarian killing? Would you like to see destruction? Would you like to see foreign troops on your land?"" And the people thought for themselves, ""Maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in, instead of having the second scenario."" That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen.For 10 years, unfortunately we have found ourselves reporting images of destruction, images of killing, of sectarian conflicts, images of violence, emerging from a magnificent piece of land, a region that one day was the source of civilizations and art and culture for thousands of years. Now I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived. A new generation, well-educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us. We have found a new way to express our feelings and to express our dreams: these young people who have restored self-confidence in our nations in that part of the world, who have given us new meaning for freedom and empowered us to go down to the streets. Nothing happened. No violence. Nothing. Just step out of your house, raise your voice and say, ""We would like to see the end of the regime.""This is what happened in Tunisia. Over a few days, the Tunisian regime that invested billions of dollars in the security agencies, billions of dollars in maintaining, trying to maintain, its prisons, collapsed, disappeared, because of the voices of the public. People who were inspired to go down to the streets and to raise their voices, they tried to kill. The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people. They found something called Facebook. They found something called Twitter. They were surprised by all of these kinds of issues. And they said, ""These kids are misled."" Therefore, they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them, bring them back home. This is what they were telling. This is their propaganda. ""Bring these kids home because they are misled."" But yes, these youth who have been inspired by universal values, who are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and, at the same time, realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it — not using violence, not trying to create chaos — these young people, they did not go home. Parents actually went to the streets and they supported them. And this is how the revolution was born in Tunisia.We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years, and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there. But we found that these people in the street, all of them are our reporters, feeding our newsroom with pictures, with videos and with news. And suddenly that newsroom in Doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people — people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority. And then we took that decision: We are unrolling the news. We are going to be the voice for these voiceless people. We are going to spread the message. Yes, some of these young people are connected to the Internet, but the connectivity in the Arab world is very little, is very small, because of many problems that we are suffering from. But Al Jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified [it]. We put it in every sitting room in the Arab world — and internationally, globally, through our English channel.And then people started to feel that there's something new happening. And then Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali decided to leave. And then Egypt started, and Hosni Mubarak decided to leave. And now Libya as you see it. And then you have Yemen. And you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of, ""How do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant?"" I want to tell you something, that the Internet and connectivity has created [a] new mindset. But this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from. And while this was the major difference between many initiatives before to create change, before we thought, and governments told us — and even sometimes it was true — that change was imposed on us, and people rejected that, because they thought that it is alien to their culture. Always, we believed that change will spring from within, that change should be a reconciliation with culture, cultural diversity, with our faith in our tradition and in our history, but at the same time, open to universal values, connected with the world, tolerant to the outside. And this is the moment that is happening right now in the Arab world. This is the right moment, and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region.How did the elite deal with that — the so-called political elite? In front of Facebook, they brought the camels in Tahrir Square. In front of Al Jazeera, they started creating tribalism. And then when they failed, they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from Tel Aviv and Washington in order to divide the Arab world. They started telling the West, ""Be aware of Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is taking over our territories. These are Islamists trying to create new Imaras. Be aware of these people who [are] coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization."" Fortunately, people right now cannot be deceived. Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception. They could not, and they cannot, imagine how they could really deal with this reality. They have lost. They have been detached from their people, from the masses, and now we are seeing them collapsing one after the other.Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution. We do not create revolutions. However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage. We were banned from Egypt, and our correspondents, some of them were arrested. But most of our camera people and our journalists, they went underground in Egypt — voluntarily — to report what happened in Tahrir Square. For 18 days, our cameras were broadcasting, live, the voices of the people in Tahrir Square. I remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone — ordinary person who I don't know — from Tahrir Square. He told me, ""We appeal to you not to switch off the cameras. If you switch off the cameras tonight, there will be a genocide. You are protecting us by showing what is happening at Tahrir Square."" I felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them, ""Make your best not to switch off the cameras at night, because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story — and they feel protected as well.""So we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world. We have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world. Let us not repeat the mistake of Iran, of [the] Mosaddeq revolution. Let us free ourselves — especially in the West — from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest, or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security. The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. Let us accept the choice of the people. Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future. The future should be ruled by people themselves, even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us. But the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the Middle East at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world, for the West and the East, to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the Arab world, rather than the images of violence and terrorism. Let us support these people. Let us stand for them. And let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change, and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance. The future has arrived, and the future is now. I thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: I just have a couple of questions for you. Thank you for coming here. How would you characterize the historical significance of what's happened? Is this a story-of-the-year, a story-of-the-decade or something more?Wadah Khanfar: Actually, this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered. We have covered many wars. We have covered a lot of tragedies, a lot of problems, a lot of conflict zones, a lot of hot spots in the region, because we were centered at the middle of it. But this is a story — it is a great story; it is beautiful. It is not something that you only cover because you have to cover a great incident. You are witnessing change in history. You are witnessing the birth of a new era. And this is what the story's all about.CA: There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical, or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos. You really believe that if there are democratic elections in Egypt now, that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you've spoken about so inspiringly?WK: And people actually, after the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime, the youth who have organized themselves in certain groups and councils, they are guarding the transformation and they are trying to put it on a track in order to satisfy the values of democracy, but at the same time also to make it reasonable and to make it rational, not to go out of order. In my opinion, these people are much more wiser than, not only the political elite, even the intellectual elite, even opposition leaders including political parties. At this moment in time, the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old — including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes.(Applause)CA: We are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way. What should people here at TED, here in the West, do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what's happening here?WK: I think we have discovered a very important issue in the Arab world — that people care, people care about this great transformation. Mohamed Nanabhay who's sitting with us, the head of Aljazeera.net, he told me that a 2,500 percent increase of accessing our website from various parts of the world. Fifty percent of it is coming from America. Because we discovered that people care, and people would like to know — they are receiving the stream through our Internet. Unfortunately in the United States, we are not covering but Washington D.C. at this moment in time for Al Jazeera English. But I can tell you, this is the moment to celebrate through connecting ourselves with those people in the street and expressing our support to them and expressing this kind of feeling, universal feeling, of supporting the weak and the oppressed to create a much better future for all of us.CA: Well Wadah, a group of members of the TED community, TEDxCairo, are meeting as we speak. They've had some speakers there. I believe they've heard your talk. Thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wadah_khanfar_a_historic_moment_in_the_arab_world
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"Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris, and the phone rang and I heard, ""Hey, JR, you won the TED Prize 2011. You have to make a wish to save the world."" I was lost. I mean, I can't save the world. Nobody can. The world is fucked up. Come on, you have dictators ruling the world, population is growing by millions, there's no more fish in the sea, the North Pole is melting and as the last TED Prize winner said, we're all becoming fat. (Laughter) Except maybe French people. Whatever. So I called back and I told her, ""Look, Amy, tell the TED guys I just won't show up. I can't do anything to save the world."" She said, ""Hey, JR, your wish is not to save the world, but to change the world."" ""Oh, all right."" (Laughter) ""That's cool."" I mean, technology, politics, business do change the world — not always in a good way, but they do. What about art? Could art change the world?I started when I was 15 years old. And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world. I was doing graffiti — writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. It was like leaving our mark on society, to say, ""I was here,"" on the top of a building.So when I found a cheap camera on the subway, I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies — really small photos just that size. That's how, at 17 years old, I started pasting them. And I did my first ""expo de rue,"" which means sidewalk gallery. And I framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising. I mean, the city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.So that's Paris. I would change — depending on the places I would go — the title of the exhibition. That's on the Champs-Elysees. I was quite proud of that one. Because I was just 18 and I was just up there on the top of the Champs-Elysees. Then when the photo left, the frame was still there.(Laughter)November 2005: the streets are burning. A large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of Paris. Everyone was glued to the TV, watching disturbing, frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood. I mean, these kids, without control, throwing Molotov cocktails, attacking the cops and the firemen, looting everything they could in the shops. These were criminals, thugs, dangerous, destroying their own environment.And then I saw it — could it be possible? — my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car — a pasting I'd done a year earlier — an illegal one — still there. I mean, these were the faces of my friends. I know those guys. All of them are not angels, but they're not monsters either. So it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television.So I went back there with a 28 mm lens. It was the only one I had at that time. But with that lens, you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person. So you can do it only with their trust. So I took full portraits of people from Le Bosquet. They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves. And then I pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of Paris with the name, age, even building number of these guys. A year later, the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris. And we go from thug images, who've been stolen and distorted by the media, who's now proudly taking over his own image. That's where I realized the power of paper and glue. So could art change the world?A year later, I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict. I mean, at that time, trust me, they were only referring to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. So with my friend Marco, we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis. Are they so different? When we got there, we just went in the street, started talking with people everywhere, and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media. So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs — taxi-driver, lawyer, cooks. Asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment. Not a smile — that really doesn't tell about who you are and what you feel. They all accepted to be pasted next to the other. I decided to paste in eight Israeli and Palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall. We launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever. We called the project Face 2 Face.The experts said, ""No way. The people will not accept. The army will shoot you, and Hamas will kidnap you."" We said, ""Okay, let's try and push as far as we can."" I love the way that people will ask me, ""How big will my photo be?"" ""It will be as big as your house."" When we did the wall, we did the Palestinian side. So we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough. And so Palestinians guys say, ""Calm down. No wait. I'm going to find you a solution."" So he went to the Church of Nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen Jesus being born. (Laughter) We did Face 2 Face with only six friends, two ladders, two brushes, a rented car, a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper. We had all sorts of help from all walks of life.Okay, for example, that's Palestine. We're in Ramallah right now. We're pasting portraits — so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market. People come around us and start asking, ""What are you doing here?"" ""Oh, we're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an Israeli and a Palestinian doing the same job. And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers."" And then there was always a silence. ""You mean you're pasting an Israeli face — doing a face — right here?"" ""Well, yeah, yeah, that's part of the project."" And I would always leave that moment, and we would ask them, ""So can you tell me who is who?"" And most of them couldn't say.(Applause)We even pasted on Israeli military towers, and nothing happened. When you paste an image, it's just paper and glue. People can tear it, tag on it, or even pee on it — some are a bit high for that, I agree — but the people in the street, they are the curator. The rain and the wind will take them off anyway. They are not meant to stay. But exactly four years after, the photos, most of them are still there. Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible — and, you know what, even easy. We didn't push the limit; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought.In the Middle East, I experienced my work in places without [many] museums. So the reactions in the street were kind of interesting. So I decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums. When you go in these developing societies, women are the pillars of their community, but the men are still the ones holding the streets. So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos. I called that project Women Are Heroes. When I listened to all the stories everywhere I went on the continents, I couldn't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict. I just observed. Sometimes there was no words, no sentence, just tears. I just took their pictures and pasted them.Women Are Heroes took me around the world. Most of the places I went to, I decided to go there because I've heard about it through the media. So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro — the first favela of Brazil named Providencia. Three kids — that was three students — were [detained] by the army because they were not carrying their papers. And the army took them, and instead of bringing them to the police station, they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces. I was shocked. All Brazil was shocked. I heard it was one of the most violent favelas, because the largest drug cartel controls it. So I decided to go there.When I arrived — I mean, I didn't have any contact with any NGO. There was none in place — no association, no NGOs, nothing — no eyewitnesses. So we just walked around, and we met a woman, and I showed her my book. And she said, ""You know what? We're hungry for culture. We need culture out there."" So I went out and I started with the kids. I just took a few photos of the kids, and the next day I came with the posters and we pasted them. The day after, I came back and they were already scratched. But that's okay. I wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them.Then the next day, I held a meeting on the main square and some women came. They were all linked to the three kids that got killed. There was the mother, the grandmother, the best friend — they all wanted to shout the story. After that day, everyone in the favela gave me the green light. I took more photos, and we started the project. The drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place, so I told them, ""You know what? I'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons. You see that enough in the media. What I want to show is the incredible life and energy. I've been seeing it around me the last few days."" So that's a really symbolic pasting, because that's the first one we did that you couldn't see from the city. And that's where the three kids got arrested, and that's the grandmother of one of them. And on that stairs, that's where the traffickers always stand and there's a lot of exchange of fire. Everyone there understood the project. And then we pasted everywhere — the whole hill.(Applause)What was interesting is that the media couldn't get in. I mean, you should see that. They would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens, and we would see ourselves, on TV, pasting. And they would put a number: ""Please call this number if you know what's going on in Providencia."" We just did a project and then left so the media wouldn't know. So how can we know about the project? So they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them. So you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women.We kept traveling. We went to Africa, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya. In war-torn places like Monrovia, people come straight to you. I mean, they want to know what you're up to. They kept asking me, ""What is the purpose of your project? Are you an NGO? Are you the media?"" Art. Just doing art. Some people question, ""Why is it in black and white? Don't you have color in France?"" (Laughter) Or they tell you, ""Are these people all dead?"" Some who understood the project would explain it to others. And to a man who did not understand, I heard someone say, ""You know, you've been here for a few hours trying to understand, discussing with your fellows. During that time, you haven't thought about what you're going to eat tomorrow. This is art."" I think it's people's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects. And then it becomes more. It becomes a desire, a need, an armor. On this bridge that's in Monrovia, ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war. Women are always the first ones targeted during conflict.This is Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums of Africa. You might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008. This time we covered the roofs of the houses, but we didn't use paper, because paper doesn't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house — vinyl does. Then art becomes useful. So the people kept it. You know what I love is, for example, when you see the biggest eye there, there are so [many] houses inside. And I went there a few months ago — photos are still there — and it was missing a piece of the eye. So I asked the people what happened. ""Oh, that guy just moved."" (Laughter) When the roofs were covered, a woman said as a joke, ""Now God can see me."" When you look at Kibera now, they look back.Okay, India. Before I start that, just so you know, each time we go to a place, we don't have authorization, so we set up like commandos — we're a group of friends who arrive there, and we try to paste on the walls. But there are places where you just can't paste on a wall. In India it was just impossible to paste. I heard culturally and because of the law, they would just arrest us at the first pasting. So we decided to paste white, white on the walls. So imagine white guys pasting white papers. So people would come to us and ask us, ""Hey, what are you up to?"" ""Oh, you know, we're just doing art."" ""Art?"" Of course, they were confused. But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets, and the more dust you would have going up in the air, on the white paper you can almost see, but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker. So the more dust you have, the more it will reveal the photo. So we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves. (Applause) Thank you. So we didn't get caught this time.Each project — that's a film from Women Are Heroes. (Music) Okay. For each project we do a film. And most of what you see — that's a trailer from ""Women Are Heroes"" — its images, photography, taken one after the other. And the photos kept traveling even without us. (Laughter) (Applause) Hopefully, you'll see the film, and you'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos. Because that's a big part of it. There's layers behind each photo. Behind each image is a story.Women Are Heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities, and the women kept that dynamic after we left. For example, we did books — not for sale — that all the community would get. But to get it, they would have to [get] it signed by one of the women. We did that in most of the places. We go back regularly. And so in Providencia, for example, in the favela, we have a cultural center running there. In Kibera, each year we cover more roofs. Because of course, when we left, the people who were just at the edge of the project said, ""Hey, what about my roof?"" So we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project.A really important point for me is that I don't use any brand or corporate sponsors. So I have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects. (Applause) And that is for me one of the more important things in the work. I think, today, as important as the result is the way you do things. And that has always been a central part of the work. And what's interesting is that fine line that I have with images and advertising. We just did some pasting in Los Angeles on another project in the last weeks. And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum. But yesterday the city called them and said, ""Look, you're going to have to tear it down. Because this can be taken for advertising, and because of the law, it has to be taken down."" But tell me, advertising for what?The people I photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community. But they asked me for a promise basically. They asked me, ""Please, make our story travel with you."" So I did. That's Paris. That's Rio. In each place, we built exhibitions with a story, and the story traveled. You understand the full scope of the project. That's London. New York. And today, they are with you in Long Beach.All right, recently I started a public art project where I don't use my artwork anymore. I use Man Ray, Helen Levitt, Giacomelli, other people's artwork. It doesn't matter today if it's your photo or not. The importance is what you do with the images, the statement it makes where it's pasted. So for example, I pasted the photo of the minaret in Switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country. (Applause) This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground.In some ways, art can change the world. Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world. Art can create an analogy. Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables you to change the world. When I do my work, I have two kinds of reactions. People say, ""Oh, why don't you go in Iraq or Afghanistan. They would be really useful."" Or, ""How can we help?"" I presume that you belong to the second category, and that's good, because for that project, I'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them.So now my wish is: (mock drum roll) (Laughter) I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world inside out. And this starts right now. Yes, everyone in the room. Everyone watching. I wanted that wish to actually start now. So a subject you're passionate about, a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos — tell me what you stand for. Take the photos, the portraits, upload it — I'll give you all the details — and I'll send you back your poster. Join by groups and reveal things to the world. The full data is on the website — insideoutproject.net — that is launching today.What we see changes who we are. When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts. So I hope that, together, we'll create something that the world will remember. And this starts right now and depends on you.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jr_s_ted_prize_wish_use_art_to_turn_the_world_inside_out
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"This is Revolution 2.0. No one was a hero. No one was a hero. Because everyone was a hero. Everyone has done something. We all use Wikipedia. If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content, and at the end of the day you've built the largest encyclopedia in the world. From just an idea that sounded crazy, you have the largest encyclopedia in the world.And in the Egyptian revolution, the Revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something, small or big. They contributed something — to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions. It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing. If you look at the scene, Egypt, for 30 years, had been in a downhill — going into a downhill. Everything was going bad. Everything was going wrong. We only ranked high when it comes to poverty, corruption, lack of freedom of speech, lack of political activism. Those were the achievements of our great regime. Yet, nothing was happening. And it's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated. In fact, people were extremely frustrated. But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear. Everyone was scared. Not everyone. There were actually a few brave Egyptians that I have to thank for being so brave — going into protests as a couple of hundred, getting beaten up and arrested. But in fact, the majority were scared. Everyone did not want really to get in trouble.A dictator cannot live without the force. They want to make people live in fear. And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years, and here comes the Internet, technology, BlackBerry, SMS. It's helping all of us to connect. Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that, ""Wow, I'm not alone. There are a lot of people who are frustrated."" There are lots of people who are frustrated. There are lots of people who actually share the same dream. There are lots of people who care about their freedom. They probably have the best life in the world. They are living in happiness. They are living in their villas. They are happy. They don't have problems. But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian.A lot of us, we're not really happy when we see a video of an Egyptian man who's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of Egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country. The Internet has played a great role, helping these people to speak up their minds, to collaborate together, to start thinking together. It was an educational campaign.Khaled Saeed was killed in June 2010. I still remember the photo. I still remember every single detail of that photo. The photo was horrible. He was tortured, brutally tortured to death. But then what was the answer of the regime? ""He choked on a pile of hash"" — that was their answer: ""He's a criminal. He's someone who escaped from all these bad things."" But people did not relate to this. People did not believe this. Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth. And everyone started to think that ""this guy could be my brother."" He was a middle-class guy. His photo was remembered by all of us.A page was created. An anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page, and there was no plan. ""What are we going to do?"" ""I don't know."" In a few days, tens of thousands of people there — angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs, ""Enough. Get those who killed this guy. To just bring them to justice."" But of course, they don't listen. It was an amazing story — how everyone started feeling the ownership. Everyone was an owner in this page. People started contributing ideas. In fact, one of the most ridiculous ideas was, ""Hey, let's have a silent stand. Let's get people to go in the street, face the sea, their back to the street, dressed in black, standing up silently for one hour, doing nothing and then just leaving, going back home."" For some people, that was like, ""Wow, silent stand. And next time it's going to be vibration."" People were making fun of the idea. But actually when people went to the street — the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria — it felt like — it was amazing. It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream, the same frustration, the same anger, the same desire for freedom. And they were doing this thing. But did the regime learn anything? Not really. They were actually attacking them. They were actually abusing them, despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were — they were not even protesting. And things had developed until the Tunisian revolution.This whole page was, again, managed by the people. In fact, the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas, help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing. People were taking shots and photos; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt; people were suggesting ideas, they were actually voting on ideas, and then they were executing the ideas; people were creating videos. Everything was done by the people to the people, and that's the power of the Internet. There was no leader. The leader was everyone on that page. The Tunisian experiment, as Amir was saying, inspired all of us, showed us that there is a way. Yes we can. We can do it. We have the same problems; we can just go in the streets.And when I saw the street on the 25th, I went back and said, ""Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th. The revolution is happening. This is not the end, this is the beginning of the end."" I was detained on the 27th night. Thank God I announced the locations and everything. But they detained me. And I'm not going to talk about my experience, because this is not about me. I was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed. And I did not really hear anything. I did not know anything. I was not allowed to speak with anyone. And I went out. The next day I was in Tahrir. Seriously, with the amount of change I had noticed in this square, I thought it was 12 years. I never had in my mind to see this Egyptian, the amazing Egyptian. The fear is no longer fear. It's actually strength — it's power. People were so empowered. It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights. Completely opposite. Extremism became tolerance.Who would [have] imagined before the 25th, if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them, and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of Christians are going to protect them — this is amazing. All the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda, or mainstream media, are proven wrong. This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man, the Egyptian woman, how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream.When I saw that, I went back and I wrote on Facebook. And that was a personal belief, regardless of what's going on, regardless of the details. I said that, ""We are going to win. We are going to win because we don't understand politics. We're going to win because we don't play their dirty games. We're going to win because we don't have an agenda. We're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We're going to win because we have dreams. We're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams."" And that's actually what happened. We won. And that's not because of anything, but because we believed in our dream. The winning here is not the whole details of what's going to happen in the political scene. The winning is the winning of the dignity of every single Egyptian.Actually, I had this taxi driver telling me, ""Listen, I am breathing freedom. I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years."" For me that's winning, regardless of all the details.My last word to you is a statement I believe in, which Egyptians have proven to be true, that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.Thanks a lot.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_inside_the_egyptian_revolution
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"Well, this is about state budgets. This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning. But I want to tell you, I think it's an important topic that we need to care about. State budgets are big, big money — I'll show you the numbers — and they get very little scrutiny. The understanding is very low. Many of the people involved have special interests or short-term interests that get them not thinking about what the implications of the trends are. And these budgets are the key for our future; they're the key for our kids. Most education funding — whether it's K through 12, or the great universities or community colleges — most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets.But we have a problem. Here's the overall picture. U.S. economy is big — 14.7 trillion. Now out of that pie, the government spends 36 percent. So this is combining the federal level, which is the largest, the state level and the local level. And it's really in this combined way that you get an overall sense of what's going on, because there's a lot of complex things like Medicaid and research money that flow across those boundaries. But we're spending 36 percent. Well what are we taking in? Simple business question. Answer is 26 percent. Now this leaves 10 percent deficit, sort of a mind-blowing number. And some of that, in fact, is due to the fact that we've had an economic recession. Receipts go down, some spending programs go up, but most of it is not because of that. Most of it is because of ways that the liabilities are building up and the trends, and that creates a huge challenge. In fact, this is the forecast picture. There are various things in here: I could say we might raise more revenue, or medical innovation will make the spending even higher. It is an increasingly difficult picture, even assuming the economy does quite well — probably better than it will do. This is what you see at this overall level.Now how did we get here? How could you have a problem like this? After all, at least on paper, there's this notion that these state budgets are balanced. Only one state says they don't have to balance the budget. But what this means actually is that there's a pretense. There's no real, true balancing going on, and in a sense, the games they play to hide that actually obscure the topic so much that people don't see things that are actually pretty straight-forward challenges. When Jerry Brown was elected, this was the challenge that was put to him. That is, through various gimmicks and things, a so-called balanced budget had led him to have 25 billion missing out of the 76 billion in proposed spending. Now he's put together some thoughts: About half of that he'll cut, another half, perhaps in a very complex set of steps, taxes will be approved. But even so, as you go out into those future years, various pension costs, health costs go up enough, and the revenue does not go up enough. So you get a big squeeze.What were those things that allowed us to hide this? Well, some really nice little tricks. And these were somewhat noticed. The paper said, ""It's not really balanced. It's got holes. It perpetuates deficit spending. It's riddled with gimmicks."" And really when you get down to it, the guys at Enron never would have done this. This is so blatant, so extreme. Is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do? They borrow money. They're not supposed to, but they figure out a way. They make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out. They sell off the assets. They defer the payments. They sell off the revenues from tobacco. And California's not unique. In fact, there's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don't face this big challenge. So it's systemic across the entire country. It really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations — health care, where innovation makes it more expensive, early retirement and pension, where the age structure gets worse for you, and just generosity — that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time, that you've got a problem. This is the retiree health care benefits. Three million set aside, 62 billion dollar liability — much worse than the car companies. And everybody looked at that and knew that that was headed toward a huge problem. The forecast for the medical piece alone is to go from 26 percent of the budget to 42 percent.Well what's going to give? Well in order to accommodate that, you would have to cut education spending in half. It really is this young versus the old to some degree. If you don't change that revenue picture, if you don't solve what you're doing in health care, you're going to be deinvesting in the young. The great University of California university system, the great things that have gone on, won't happen. So far it's meant layoffs, increased class sizes. Within the education community there's this discussion of, ""Should it just be the young teachers who get laid off, or the less good teachers who get laid off?"" And there's a discussion: if you're going to increase class sizes, where do you do that? How much effect does that have? And unfortunately, as you get into that, people get confused and think, well maybe you think that's okay. In fact, no, education spending should not be cut. There's ways, if it's temporary, to minimize the impact, but it's a problem. It's also really a problem for where we need to go. Technology has a role to play. Well we need money to experiment with that, to get those tools in there. There's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness, measuring them, giving them feedback, taking videos in the classroom. That's something I think is very, very important. Well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay. In a situation where you have growth, you put the new money into this. Or even if you're flat, you might shift money into it. But with the type of cuts we're talking about, it will be far, far harder to get these incentives for excellence, or to move over to use technology in the new way.So what's going on? Where's the brain trust that's in error here? Well there really is no brain trust. (Laughter) It's sort of the voters. It's sort of us showing up. Just look at this spending. California will spend over 100 billion, Microsoft, 38, Google, about 19. The amount of IQ in good numeric analysis, both inside Google and Microsoft and outside, with analysts and people of various opinions — should they have spent on that? No, they wasted their money on this. What about this thing? — it really is quite phenomenal. Everybody has an opinion. There's great feedback. And the numbers are used to make decisions. If you go over the education spending and the health care spending — particularly these long-term trends — you don't have that type of involvement on a number that's more important in terms of equity, in terms of learning.So what do we need to do? We need better tools. We can get some things out on the Internet. I'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture. We need lots more. There's a few good books, one about school spending and where the money comes from — how that's changed over time, and the challenge. We need better accounting. We need to take the fact that the current employees, the future liabilities they create, that should come out of the current budget. We need to understand why they've done the pension accounting the way they have. It should be more like private accounting. It's the gold standard. And finally, we need to really reward politicians. Whenever they say there's these long-term problems, we can't say, ""Oh, you're the messenger with bad news? We just shot you."" In fact, there are some like these: Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson and others, who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem. But in fact, their work was sort of pushed off. In fact, the week afterwards, some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions. So we need these pieces.Now I think this is a solvable problem. It's a great country with lots of people. But we have to draw those people in, because this is about education. And just look at what happened with the tuitions with the University of California and project that out for another three, four, five years — it's unaffordable. And that's the kind of thing — the investment in the young — that makes us great, allows us to contribute. It allows us to do the art, the biotechnology, the software and all those magic things. And so the bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_how_state_budgets_are_breaking_us_schools
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"There's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs. The fact is that we're living longer. Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and the problem is, as we age, our organs tend to fail more, and so currently there are not enough organs to go around. In fact, in the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up. So this is now a public health crisis.So that's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine. It really involves many different areas. You can use, actually, scaffolds, biomaterials — they're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt — but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate. Or we can use cells alone, either your very own cells or different stem cell populations. Or we can use both. We can use, actually, biomaterials and the cells together. And that's where the field is today.But it's actually not a new field. Interestingly, this is a book that was published back in 1938. It's titled ""The Culture of Organs."" The first author, Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize winner. He actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels, and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by Alexis. But I want you to note his co-author: Charles Lindbergh. That's the same Charles Lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with Alexis at the Rockefeller Institute in New York in the area of the culture of organs.So if the field's been around for so long, why so few clinical advances? And that really has to do to many different challenges. But if I were to point to three challenges, the first one is actually the design of materials that could go in your body and do well over time. And many advances now, we can do that fairly readily. The second challenge was cells. We could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body. Over the last 20 years, we've basically tackled that. Many scientists can now grow many different types of cells. Plus we have stem cells. But even now, 2011, there's still certain cells that we just can't grow from the patient. Liver cells, nerve cells, pancreatic cells — we still can't grow them even today. And the third challenge is vascularity, the actual supply of blood to allow those organs or tissues to survive once we regenerate them.So we can actually use biomaterials now. This is actually a biomaterial. We can weave them, knit them, or we can make them like you see here. This is actually like a cotton candy machine. You saw the spray going in. That was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure, this tubularized structure, which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so. And that's exactly what we did here.This is actually a patient who [was] presented with a deceased organ, and we then created one of these smart biomaterials, and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient's structure. What we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge, if you will, and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue. And you see that patient now six months after with an X-ray showing you the regenerated tissue, which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope. We can also use cells alone. These are actually cells that we obtained. These are stem cells that we create from specific sources, and we can drive them to become heart cells, and they start beating in culture. So they know what to do. The cells genetically know what to do, and they start beating together. Now today, many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease. So that's actually now in patients.Or if we're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures, we can then use the patient's own cells, or some cell population, and the biomaterials, the scaffolds, together. So the concept here: so if you do have a deceased or injured organ, we take a very small piece of that tissue, less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then tease the cells apart, we grow the cells outside the body. We then take a scaffold, a biomaterial — again, looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt — we then shape that material, and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time — very much like baking a layer cake, if you will. We then place it in an oven-like device, and we're able to create that structure and bring it out. This is actually a heart valve that we've engineered, and you can see here, we have the structure of the heart valve and we've seeded that with cells, and then we exercise it. So you see the leaflets opening and closing — of this heart valve that's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies.Another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders. We actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient — less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then grow the cells outside the body, take the scaffold, coat the scaffold with the cells — the patient's own cells, two different cell types. We then put it in this oven-like device. It has the same conditions as the human body — 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen. A few weeks later, you have your engineered organ that we're able to implant back into the patient. For these specific patients, we actually just suture these materials. We use three-dimensional imagining analysis, but we actually created these biomaterials by hand.But we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells. We use now some type of technologies, where for solid organs, for example, like the liver, what we do is we take discard livers. As you know, a lot of organs are actually discarded, not used. So we can take these liver structures, which are not going to be used, and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away. Two weeks later, you have something that looks like a liver. You can hold it like a liver, but it has no cells; it's just a skeleton of the liver. And we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells, preserving the blood vessel tree. So we actually perfuse first the blood vessel tree with the patient's own blood vessel cells, and we then infiltrate the parenchyma with the liver cells. And we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology.Another technology that we've used is actually that of printing. This is actually a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells. And you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure, and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure. And there's a 3D elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through. And then finally you're able to get that structure out. You can pop that structure out of the printer and implant it. And this is actually a piece of bone that I'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here. That was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques.Another more advanced technology we're looking at right now, our next generation of technologies, are more sophisticated printers. This particular printer we're designing now is actually one where we print right on the patient. So what you see here — I know it sounds funny, but that's the way it works. Because in reality, what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound, and you have a scanner, basically like a flatbed scanner. That's what you see here on the right side. You see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves.This is how it actually works. Here's the scanner going through, scanning the wound. Once it's scanned, it sends information in the correct layers of cells where they need to be. And now you're going to see here a demo of this actually being done in a representative wound. And we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material. So once those cells are on the patient they will stick where they need to be. And this is actually new technology still under development.We're also working on more sophisticated printers. Because in reality, our biggest challenge are the solid organs. I don't know if you realize this, but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney. Patients are dying every day because we don't have enough of those organs to go around. So this is more challenging — large organ, vascular, a lot of blood vessel supply, a lot of cells present. So the strategy here is — this is actually a CT scan, an X-ray — and we go layer by layer, using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient's own kidneys. We then are able to actually image those, do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics, and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form. So we go layer by layer through the organ, analyzing each layer as we go through the organ, and we then are able to send that information, as you see here, through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient. This actually shows the actual printer. And this actually shows that printing.In fact, we actually have the printer right here. So while we've been talking today, you can actually see the printer back here in the back stage. That's actually the actual printer right now, and that's been printing this kidney structure that you see here. It takes about seven hours to print a kidney, so this is about three hours into it now. And Dr. Kang's going to walk onstage right now, and we're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today. Put a pair of gloves here. Thank you. Go backwards. So, these gloves are a little bit small on me, but here it is. You can actually see that kidney as it was printed earlier today.(Applause)Has a little bit of consistency to it. This is Dr. Kang who's been working with us on this project, and part of our team. Thank you, Dr. Kang. I appreciate it.(Applause)So this is actually a new generation. This is actually the printer that you see here onstage. And this is actually a new technology we're working on now. In reality, we now have a long history of doing this. I'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while.And this is actually a very brief clip — only about 30 seconds — of a patient who actually received an organ.(Video) Luke Massella: I was really sick. I could barely get out of bed. I was missing school. It was pretty much miserable. I couldn't go out and play basketball at recess without feeling like I was going to pass out when I got back inside. I felt so sick. I was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis, and I don't even like to think about what my life would be like if I was on that. So after the surgery, life got a lot better for me. I was able to do more things. I was able to wrestle in high school. I became the captain of the team, and that was great. I was able to be a normal kid with my friends. And because they used my own cells to build this bladder, it's going to be with me. I've got it for life, so I'm all set.(Applause)Juan Enriquez: These experiments sometimes work, and it's very cool when they do. Luke, come up please.(Applause)So Luke, before last night, when's the last time you saw Tony?LM: Ten years ago, when I had my surgery — and it's really great to see him.(Laughter)(Applause)JE: And tell us a little bit about what you're doing.LM: Well right now I'm in college at the University of Connecticut. I'm a sophomore and studying communications, TV and mass media, and basically trying to live life like a normal kid, which I always wanted growing up. But it was hard to do that when I was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder weren't working. I went through about 16 surgeries, and it seemed impossible to do that when I was in kidney failure when I was 10. And this surgery came along and basically made me who I am today and saved my life.(Applause)JE: And Tony's done hundreds of these?LM: What I know from, he's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff. I know I was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery. And when I was 10, I didn't realize how amazing it was. I was a little kid, and I was like, ""Yeah. I'll have that. I'll have that surgery."" (Laughter) All I wanted to do was to get better, and I didn't realize how amazing it really was until now that I'm older and I see the amazing things that he's doing.JE: When you got this call out of the blue — Tony's really shy, and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as Tony to allow us to bring Luke. So Luke, you go to your communications professors — you're majoring in communications — and you ask them for permission to come to TED, which might have a little bit to do with communications, and what was their reaction?LM: Most of my professors were all for it, and they said, ""Bring pictures and show me the clips online,"" and ""I'm happy for you."" There were a couple that were a little stubborn, but I had to talk to them. I pulled them aside.JE: Well, it's an honor and a privilege to meet you. Thank you so much. (LM: Thank you so much.)JE: Thank you, Tony.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney
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"So I was born on the last day of the last year of the '70s. I was raised on ""Free to be you and me"" — (cheering) hip-hop — not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house. Thank you. Thank you for hip-hop — and Anita Hill. (Cheering) My parents were radicals — (Laughter) who became, well, grown-ups. My dad facetiously says, ""We wanted to save the world, and instead we just got rich."" We actually just got ""middle class"" in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but you get the picture. I was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy.At this ripe old age of 30, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible, beautiful time, and I've decided, for me, it's been a real journey and paradox. The first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it. Feminism was the water I grew up in. When I was just a little girl, my mom started what is now the longest-running women's film festival in the world. So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons, I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women. You can see how this had an influence. But she was not the only feminist in the house.My dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son, but not his daughter. (Applause) He's actually here today. (Applause) The trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet, not a businessman, but the intention was really good.(Laughter)In any case, I didn't readily claim the feminist label, even though it was all around me, because I associated it with my mom's women's groups, her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads — none of which had much cachet in the hallways of Palmer High School where I was trying to be cool at the time. But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing, so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them — never, of course, admitting that I was doing so. I didn't actually claim the feminist label until I went to Barnard College and I heard Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner speak for the first time. They were the co-authors of a book called ""Manifesta."" So what very profound epiphany, you might ask, was responsible for my feminist click moment? Fishnet stockings. Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them. I thought they were really hot. I decided, okay, I can claim the feminist label. Now I tell you this — I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself, because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics, that beauty, that fun do matter. There are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness. Anyone heard of these two guys as an example?So my feminism is very indebted to my mom's, but it looks very different. My mom says, ""patriarchy."" I say, ""intersectionality."" So race, class, gender, ability, all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman. Pay equity? Yes. Absolutely a feminist issue. But for me, so is immigration. (Applause) Thank you. My mom says, ""Protest march."" I say, ""Online organizing."" I co-edit, along with a collective of other super-smart, amazing women, a site called Feministing.com. We are the most widely read feminist publication ever, and I tell you this because I think it's really important to see that there's a continuum.Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising. But we also have a straightforward political impact. Feministing has been able to get merchandise pulled off the shelves of Walmart. We got a misogynist administrator sending us hate-mail fired from a Big Ten school. And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say, ""I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site. I realized feminism wasn't about man-hating and Birkenstocks."" So we're able to pull in the next generation in a totally new way.My mom says, ""Gloria Steinem."" I say, ""Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Miriam Perez, Ann Friedman, Jessica Valenti, Vanessa Valenti, and on and on and on and on."" We don't want one hero. We don't want one icon. We don't want one face. We are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing, community organizing, changing institutions from the inside out — all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started. Thank you.(Applause)Which brings me to the second paradox: sobering up about our smallness and maintaining faith in our greatness all at once. Many in my generation — because of well-intentioned parenting and self-esteem education — were socialized to believe that we were special little snowflakes — (Laughter) who were going to go out and save the world. These are three words many of us were raised with. We walk across graduation stages, high on our overblown expectations, and when we float back down to earth, we realize we don't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway. The mainstream media often paints my generation as apathetic, and I think it's much more accurate to say we are deeply overwhelmed. And there's a lot to be overwhelmed about, to be fair — an environmental crisis, wealth disparity in this country unlike we've seen since 1928, and globally, a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity. Xenophobia's on the rise. The trafficking of women and girls. It's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed.I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002. I was fired up; I was ready to make a difference. I went out and I worked at a non-profit, I went to grad school, I phone-banked, I protested, I volunteered, and none of it seemed to matter. And on a particularly dark night of December of 2004, I sat down with my family, and I said that I had become very disillusioned. I admitted that I'd actually had a fantasy — kind of a dark fantasy — of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the White House steps. My mom took a drink of her signature Sea Breeze, her eyes really welled with tears, and she looked right at me and she said, ""I will not stand for your desperation."" She said, ""You are smarter, more creative and more resilient than that.""Which brings me to my third paradox. Growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well. (Laughter) (Applause) There's a writer I've been deeply influenced by, Parker Palmer, and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed ""between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves."" You may have guessed by now, I did not light myself on fire. I did what I know to do in desperation, which is write. I wrote the book I needed to read. I wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work. I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson, the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists, who's dedicating her life to environmental justice. I wrote about Emily Apt who initially became a caseworker in the welfare system because she decided that was the most noble thing she could do, but quickly learned, not only did she not like it, but she wasn't really good at it. Instead, what she really wanted to do was make films. So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact. I wrote about Maricela Guzman, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, who joined the military so she could afford college. She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women's Action Network.What I learned from these people and others was that I couldn't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals. Many of them are working in deeply intractable systems — the military, congress, the education system, etc. But what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force. And at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important than that? Cornel West says, ""Of course it's a failure. But how good a failure is it?"" This isn't to say we give up our wildest, biggest dreams. It's to say we operate on two levels. On one, we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part. But on the other, we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person's day more kind, more just, etc.So when I was a little girl, I had a couple of very strange habits. One of them was I used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home, and I would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom's cold toes with my right hand. (Laughter) I was listening to her talk on the phone, which she did a lot. She was talking about board meetings, she was founding peace organizations, she was coordinating carpools, she was consoling friends — all these daily acts of care and creativity. And surely, at three and four years old, I was listening to the soothing sound of her voice, but I think I was also getting my first lesson in activist work.The activists I interviewed had nothing in common, literally, except for one thing, which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences. So often, particularly at a young age, we look far afield for our models of the meaningful life, and sometimes they're in our own kitchens, talking on the phone, making us dinner, doing all that keeps the world going around and around. My mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory, or certainty, or security even. It's about embracing the paradox. It's about acting in the face of overwhelm. And it's about loving people really well. And at the end of the day, these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/courtney_martin_reinventing_feminism
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"Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage.(Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five. This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America — a nice clean band here — and this part of Africa. We can integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capital sigma. National Assembly: They create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol. Start differentiating into effector and memory cells. A galaxy. Hey! There's another galaxy. Oh, look! There's another galaxy. And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.(Laughter)(Applause)(Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. And some of you all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely. And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just as a kind of nice-to-have, just kind of a supplement for my cousins, something that might give them a refresher or something.And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened. Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.(Laughter)And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first it's very unintuitive, but when you think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos; if they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch at their own time and pace. Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, ""Do you understand this?"" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room.The other thing that happened is — I put them on YouTube just — I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. These are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. Someone wrote it on YouTube, it was a YouTube comment: ""First time I smiled doing a derivative.""(Laughter)Let's pause here. This person did a derivative, and then they smiled.(Laughter)In response to that same comment — this is on the thread, you can go on YouTube and look at the comments — someone else wrote: ""Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'""(Laughter)We get a lot of feedback along those lines. This clearly was helping people. But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have. This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: ""My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it. We could not believe it. He is so excited."" And so you can imagine, here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund — it was very strange for me to do something of social value.(Laughter)(Applause)But I was excited, so I kept going. And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to.(Laughter)Assuming he was good. We don't know.(Laughter)The other thing that happened — and even at this point, I said, ""OK, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home-schoolers."" But I didn't think it would somehow penetrate the classroom. Then I started getting letters from teachers, and the teachers would write, saying, ""We've used your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do —"" And this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow — ""what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom.""And I want to pause here —(Applause)I want to pause here, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit — the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing — and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom — by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience — 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students — blank faces, slightly antagonistic — and now it's a human experience, now they're actually interacting with each other.So once the Khan Academy — I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization — we're a not-for-profit — the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers were doing to its natural conclusion? And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need, until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. The paradigm here seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student — what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power. Then you build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to — imagine learning to ride a bicycle. Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you a bicycle for two weeks, then I come back after two weeks, and say, ""Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist."" So I put a big ""C"" stamp on your forehead —(Laughter)and then I say, ""Here's a unicycle.""(Laughter)But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is: learn math the way you'd learn anything, like riding a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary, until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to fail. But we do expect mastery.This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. You can go to the site right now, it's all free, not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single-digit addition, it's like one plus one is equal to two. The paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules.Further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything — well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine — and this is what we are working on — from this knowledge map, you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, or getting one-size-fits-all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, that software, for roughly half of their math class. I want to be clear: we don't view this as a complete math education. What it does is — this is what's happening in Los Altos — it frees up time — it's the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot-building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace — this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos school district — and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it — no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, ""Let me intervene on the red kids."" Or even better, ""Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer.""(Applause)Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: ""What don't you understand? What do you understand?"" and all the rest. So our paradigm is to arm teachers with as much data as possible — data that, in any other field, is expected, in finance, marketing, manufacturing — so the teachers can diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. Now teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they've spent each day, what videos they've watched, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on. The data gets pretty granular, so you can see the exact problems the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first one the student attempted. They watched the video over there. And you can see, eventually they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster — the height is how long it took them.When you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone — in education-speak, ""differentiated learning"" — but it's kind of crazy, what happens when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and a group who are a little bit slower. In a traditional model, in a snapshot assessment, you say, ""These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes."" But when you let students work at their own pace — we see it over and over again — you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over again. It makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time.Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And that brings up an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is: student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is sitting next to students and working with them. Now, 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.As valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what it does to the adult learner, who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff they should have known before going back to college. Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta, who has to help his family during the day, and that's the reason he or she can't go to school. Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate, or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know. Now imagine what happens where — we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom. But this is all one system. There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. And that's essentially what we're trying to build.Thank you.(Applause)Bill Gates: I'll ask about two or three questions.Salman Khan: Oh, OK.(Applause continues)(Applause ends)BG: I've seen some things you're doing in the system, that have to do with motivation and feedback — energy points, merit badges. Tell me what you're thinking there.SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. I have to be clear, it's not just me anymore. I'm still doing all the videos, but we have a rock-star team doing the software. We've put a bunch of game mechanics in there, where you get badges, we're going to start having leader boards by area, you get points. It's actually been pretty interesting. Just the wording of the badging, or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth-graders or sixth-graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them.(Laughter)BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about?SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, ""What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?"" I said, ""Well, every student would work at their own pace, on something like this, we'd give a dashboard."" They said, ""This is kind of radical. We have to think about it."" Me and the rest of the team were like, ""They're never going to want to do this."" But literally the next day they were like, ""Can you start in two weeks?""(Laughter)BG: So fifth-grade math is where that's going on right now?SK: It's two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes. They're doing it at the district level. I think what they're excited about is they can follow these kids, not only in school; on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. We can track everything, track them as they go through the entire district. Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see.BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. So you're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they need?SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. And they're saying, ""Hey, this is nice, but —"" Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, ""I have a feeling a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic."" So we made that focus diagram. So it's all been teacher-driven. It's been pretty crazy.BG: Is this ready for prime time? Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out?SK: Yeah, it's ready. We've got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more.(Laughter)No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing. The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people?SK: Absolutely. And this is something I recommend everyone in this audience do. Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. But yeah, it's all there.BG: Well, it's amazing. I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education.BG: Thank you. SK: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education
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"Imagine if you could record your life — everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered. Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago. This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal. And on this day, at this moment, we walked into the house with our first child, our beautiful baby boy. And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system.(Video) Man: Okay.Deb Roy: This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house, if you looked up, you'd see a camera and a microphone, and if you looked down, you'd get this bird's-eye view of the room. Here's our living room, the baby bedroom, kitchen, dining room and the rest of the house. And all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture. So here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and, finally, lights out for the day. Over the course of three years, we recorded eight to 10 hours a day, amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video.So you're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made. (Laughter) And what this data represents for our family at a personal level, the impact has already been immense, and we're still learning its value. Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments, not posed moments, are captured there, and we're starting to learn how to discover them and find them.But there's also a scientific reason that drove this project, which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language — that child being my son. And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition. So we're looking here at one of the first things we started to do. This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and as we move through space and through time, a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen.In order to convert this opaque, 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see, we use motion analysis to pull out, as we move through space and through time, what we call space-time worms. And this has become part of our toolkit for being able to look and see where the activities are in the data, and with it, trace the pattern of, in particular, where my son moved throughout the home, so that we could focus our transcription efforts, all of the speech environment around my son — all of the words that he heard from myself, my wife, our nanny, and over time, the words he began to produce. So with that technology and that data and the ability to, with machine assistance, transcribe speech, we've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts. And with that, let me take you now for a first tour into the data.So you've all, I'm sure, seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time. I'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form. My son, soon after his first birthday, would say ""gaga"" to mean water. And over the course of the next half-year, he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form, ""water."" So we're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds. No video here, so you can focus on the sound, the acoustics, of a new kind of trajectory: gaga to water.(Audio) Baby: Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water.DR: He sure nailed it, didn't he.(Applause)So he didn't just learn water. Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order. And because we have full transcripts, we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday. He was an early talker. And so we started to analyze why. Why were certain words born before others? This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us. The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is, on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances. And the [horizontal] axis is time.And all of the data, we aligned based on the following idea: Every time my son would learn a word, we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word. And we would plot the relative length of the utterances. And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity. And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost precisely with when each word was born — word after word, systematically. So it appears that all three primary caregivers — myself, my wife and our nanny — were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. And the implications of this — there are many, but one I just want to point out, is that there must be amazing feedback loops. Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him. That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now.But that's looking at the speech context. What about the visual context? We're not looking at — think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house. We've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras, and we've done some optical correction, and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life. So welcome to my home. This is a moment, one moment captured across multiple cameras. The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine, where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system. What I'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes, again, of just life in the living room. That's me and my son on the floor. And there's video analytics that are tracking our movements. My son is leaving red ink. I am leaving green ink. We're now on the couch, looking out through the window at cars passing by. And finally, my son playing in a walking toy by himself.Now we freeze the action, 30 minutes, we turn time into the vertical axis, and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we've just left behind. And we see these amazing structures — these little knots of two colors of thread we call ""social hot spots."" The spiral thread we call a ""solo hot spot."" And we think that these affect the way language is learned. What we'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they're learned — so in other words, the relationship between words and what they're about in the world.So here's how we're approaching this. In this video, again, my son is being traced out. He's leaving red ink behind. And there's our nanny by the door.(Video) Nanny: You want water? (Baby: Aaaa.) Nanny: All right. (Baby: Aaaa.)DR: She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water. And what we've done is use the word ""water"" to tag that moment, that bit of activity. And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water. And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape. We call these wordscapes. This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen. That's where those big peaks are over to the left. And just for contrast, we can do this with any word. We can take the word ""bye"" as in ""good bye."" And we're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house. And we look, and we find, as you would expect, a contrast in the landscape where the word ""bye"" occurs much more in a structured way. So we're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition, and that's ongoing work now.In my lab, which we're peering into now, at MIT — this is at the media lab. This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space. Three of the key people in this project, Philip DeCamp, Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here. Philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you're seeing. And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis, and he made the following observation: that ""just the way that we're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language, that same idea we can take out of your home, Deb, and we can apply it to the world of public media."" And so our effort took an unexpected turn.Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place. We've started analyzing television content using the same principles — analyzing event structure of a TV signal — episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure. And we're now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States. And you don't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people's conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds.So we're pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens. You have the event structure, the common ground that the words are about, coming out of the television feeds; you've got the conversations that are about those topics; and through semantic analysis — and this is actually real data you're looking at from our data processing — each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal. And the same idea now can be built up. And we get this wordscape, except now words are not assembled in my living room. Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that's driving the conversations. And what we're seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television. Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere.And so fundamentally, rather than, for example, measuring content based on how many people are watching, this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content. And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people. This is a subset of data from our database — just 50,000 out of several million — and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources. And if you put them on one plain, a second plain is where the content lives. So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph. And then the important third dimension. Each of the links that you're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content. And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content. And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways.So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible. We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will. And there are fascinating dynamics at play. It's not one way. A piece of content, an event, causes someone to talk. They talk to other people. That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media, and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior.Another example — very different — another actual person in our database — and we're finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these. We've given this person a name. This is a pro-amateur, or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate. So a lot of people are following this person — very influential — and they have a propensity to talk about what's on TV. So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together.One last example from this data: Sometimes it's actually a piece of content that is special. So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago, and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable. A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what's on the broadcast. And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language. We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content.So, to summarize, the idea is this: As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals.And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission — granted. And then I went on to reflect, ""Isn't it amazing, this entire database, all these recordings, I'm going to hand off to you and to your sister"" — who arrived two years later — ""and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never, with your biological memory, possibly remember the way you can now?"" And he was quiet for a moment. And I thought, ""What am I thinking? He's five years old. He's not going to understand this."" And just as I was having that thought, he looked up at me and said, ""So that when I grow up, I can show this to my kids?"" And I thought, ""Wow, this is powerful stuff.""So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family. This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once — captured on film. And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through. It's a cluttered environment; it's natural life. My mother's in the kitchen, cooking, and, of all places, in the hallway, I realize he's about to do it, about to take more than two steps. And so you hear me encouraging him, realizing what's happening, and then the magic happens. Listen very carefully. About three steps in, he realizes something magic is happening, and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in, and he takes a breath in, and he whispers ""wow"" and instinctively I echo back the same. And so let's fly back in time to that memorable moment.(Video) DR: Hey. Come here. Can you do it? Oh, boy. Can you do it? Baby: Yeah. DR: Ma, he's walking.(Laughter)(Applause)DR: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word
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"This is a river. This is a stream. This is a river. This is happening all over the country. There are tens of thousands of miles of dewatered streams in the United States. On this map, the colored areas represent water conflicts. Similar problems are emerging in the East as well. The reasons vary state to state, but mostly in the details. There are 4,000 miles of dewatered streams in Montana alone. They would ordinarily support fish and other wildlife. They're the veins of the ecosystem, and they're often empty veins.I want to tell you the story of just one of these streams, because it's an archetype for the larger story. This is Prickly Pear Creek. It runs through a populated area from East Helena to Lake Helena. It supports wild fish including cutthroat, brown and rainbow trout. Nearly every year for more than a hundred years ... it looked like this in the summer. How did we get here? Well, it started back in the late 1800s when people started settling in places like Montana. In short, there was a lot of water and there weren't very many people. But as more people showed up wanting water, the folks who were there first got a little concerned, and in 1865, Montana passed its first water law. It basically said, everybody near the stream can share in the stream. Oddly, a lot of people showed up wanting to share the stream, and the folks who were there first got concerned enough to bring out their lawyers. There were precedent-setting suits in 1870 and 1872, both involving Prickly Pear Creek. And in 1921, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Prickly Pear that the folks who were there first had the first, or ""senior water rights."" These senior water rights are key.The problem is that all over the West now it looks like this. Some of these creeks have claims for 50 to 100 times more water than is actually in the stream. And the senior water rights holders, if they don't use their water right, they risk losing their water right — along with the economic value that goes with it. So they have no incentive to conserve. So it's not just about the number of people; the system itself creates a disincentive to conserve because you can lose your water right if you don't use it. So after decades of lawsuits and 140 years, now, of experience, we still have this. It's a broken system. There's a disincentive to conserve, because if you don't use your water right, you can lose your water right. And I'm sure you all know, this has created significant conflicts between the agricultural and environmental communities.OK, now I'm going to change gears here. Most of you will be happy to know that the rest of the presentation's free ...(Laughter)and some of you'll be happy to know that it involves beer.(Laughter)There's another thing happening around the country, which is that companies are starting to get concerned about their water footprint. They're concerned about securing an adequate supply of water, they're trying to be really efficient with their water use, and they're concerned about how their water use affects the image of their brand. Well, it's a national problem, but I'm going to tell you another story from Montana ... and it involves beer. I bet you didn't know, it takes about 5 pints of water to make a pint of beer. If you include all the drain, it takes more than a hundred pints of water to make a pint of beer.Now the brewers in Montana have already done a lot to reduce their water consumption, but they still use millions of gallons of water. I mean, there's water in beer. So what can they do about this remaining water footprint that can have serious effects on the ecosystem? These ecosystems are really important to the Montana brewers and their customers. After all, there's a strong correlation between water and fishing, and for some, there's a strong correlation between fishing and beer.(Laughter)So the Montana brewers and their customers are concerned and they're looking for some way to address the problem.So how can they address this remaining water footprint? Remember Prickly Pear. Up until now, business water stewardship has been limited to measuring and reducing, and we're suggesting that the next step is to restore. Remember Prickly Pear. It's a broken system. You've got a disincentive to conserve, because if you don't use your water right, you risk losing your water right. Well, we decided to connect these two worlds — the world of the companies with their water footprints and the world of the farmers with their senior water rights on these creeks. In some states, senior water rights holders can leave their water in the stream while legally protecting it from others, and maintaining their water right. After all, it is their water right, and if they want to use that water right to help the fish grow in the stream, it's their right to do so. But they have no incentive to do so.So, working with local water trusts, we created an incentive to do so. We pay them to leave their water in stream. That's what's happening here. This individual has made the choice and is closing this water diversion, leaving the water in the stream. He doesn't lose the water right, he just chooses to apply that right, or some portion of it, to the stream, instead of to the land. Because he's the senior water-rights holder, he can protect the water from other users in the stream. OK? He gets paid to leave the water in the stream.This guy's measuring the water that this leaves in the stream. We then take the measured water, we divide it into thousand-gallon increments. Each increment gets a serial number and a certificate, and then the brewers and others buy those certificates as a way to return water to these degraded ecosystems. The brewers pay to restore water to the stream. It provides a simple, inexpensive and measurable way to return water to these degraded ecosystems, while giving farmers an economic choice and giving businesses concerned about their water footprints an easy way to deal with them.After 140 years of conflict and 100 years of dry streams, a circumstance that litigation and regulation has not solved, we put together a market-based, willing buyer, willing seller solution — a solution that does not require litigation. It's about giving folks concerned about their water footprints a real opportunity to put water where it's critically needed, into these degraded ecosystems, while at the same time providing farmers a meaningful economic choice about how their water is used.These transactions create allies, not enemies. They connect people rather than dividing them. And they provide needed economic support for rural communities. And most importantly, it's working. We've returned more than four billion gallons of water to degraded ecosystems. We've connected senior water-rights holders with brewers in Montana, with hotels and tea companies in Oregon, and with high-tech companies that use a lot of water in the Southwest. And when we make these connections, we can and we do turn this ... into this.(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_harmon_how_the_market_can_keep_streams_flowing
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"When I got my current job, I was given a good piece of advice, which was to interview three politicians every day. And from that much contact with politicians, I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They have what I called ""logorrhea dementia,"" which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane. (Laughter) But what they do have is incredible social skills. When you meet them, they lock into you, they look you in the eye, they invade your personal space, they massage the back of your head.I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal — squeezing it. I once — this was years ago — I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate. And they were friends, and they hugged each other and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart. And they were moving and grinding and moving their arms up and down each other. And I was like, ""Get a room. I don't want to see this."" But they have those social skills.Another case: Last election cycle, I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire, and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons: Bip, Chip, Rip, Zip, Lip and Dip. (Laughter) And he's going into a diner. And he goes into the diner, introduces himself to a family and says, ""What village are you from in New Hampshire?"" And then he describes the home he owned in their village. And so he goes around the room, and then as he's leaving the diner, he first-names almost everybody he's just met. I was like, ""Okay, that's social skill.""But the paradox is, when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode, that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants. So in the course of my career, I have covered a series of failures. We sent economists in the Soviet Union with privatization plans when it broke up, and what they really lacked was social trust. We invaded Iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities. We had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid. For 30 years, I've been covering school reform and we've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes — charters, private schools, vouchers — but we've had disappointing results year after year. And the fact is, people learn from people they love. And if you're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student, you're not talking about that reality. But that reality is expunged from our policy-making process.And so that's led to a question for me: Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy? And I came to the conclusion, this is a symptom of a larger problem. That, for centuries, we've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we're divided selves, that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. And it's led to a view of human nature that we're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives, and it's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is. And it's produced a great amputation, a shallow view of human nature.We're really good at talking about material things, but we're really bad at talking about emotions. We're really good at talking about skills and safety and health; we're really bad at talking about character. Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher, said that, ""We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue, honor, goodness, but we no longer have a system by which to connect them."" And so this has led to a shallow path in politics, but also in a whole range of human endeavors.You can see it in the way we raise our young kids. You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out, and they're wearing these 80-pound backpacks. If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground. You see these cars that drive up — usually it's Saabs and Audis and Volvos, because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy — that's fine. They get picked up by these creatures I've called uber-moms, who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. And you can usually tell the uber-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children. (Laughter) So at the moment of conception, they're doing little butt exercises. Babies flop out, they're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things.Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened, so they take them to Ben & Jerry's ice cream company with its own foreign policy. In one of my books, I joke that Ben & Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste — doesn't kill germs, just asks them to leave. It would be a big seller. (Laughter) And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula, and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. (Laughter) They buy these seaweed-based snacks there called Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for kids who come home and say, ""Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer.""(Laughter)And so the kids are raised in a certain way, jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure — SAT prep, oboe, soccer practice. They get into competitive colleges, they get good jobs, and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner, and they make a ton of money. And sometimes you can see them at vacation places like Jackson Hole or Aspen. And they've become elegant and slender — they don't really have thighs; they just have one elegant calve on top of another. (Laughter) They have kids of their own, and they've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people, so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein, their daughters looks like Halle Berry — I don't know how they've done that. They get there and they realize it's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights. So they've got these furry 160-pound dogs — all look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters.And then when they get old, they haven't really developed a philosophy of life, but they've decided, ""I've been successful at everything; I'm just not going to die."" And so they hire personal trainers; they're popping Cialis like breath mints. You see them on the mountains up there. They're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis. (Laughter) And as they whiz by you, it's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet going up the hill.(Laughter)And so this is part of what life is, but it's not all of what life is. And over the past few years, I think we've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are. And it's not based on theology or philosophy, it's in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology, we're developing a revolution in consciousness. And when you synthesize it all, it's giving us a new view of human nature. And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism, it's a new enchantment. And I think when you synthesize this research, you start with three key insights.The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work. And so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. And this leads to oddities. One of my favorite is that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, people named Lawrence become lawyers, because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar, which is why I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks. (Laughter) Another finding is that the unconscious, far from being dumb and sexualized, is actually quite smart. So one of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture. It's really hard to imagine a sofa, how it's going to look in your house. And the way you should do that is study the furniture, let it marinate in your mind, distract yourself, and then a few days later, go with your gut, because unconsciously you've figured it out.The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking. People with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart, they're actually sometimes quite helpless. And the ""giant"" in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning — Antonio Damasio. And one of the things he's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value. And so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom.Now I'm a middle-aged guy. I'm not exactly comfortable with emotions. One of my favorite brain stories described these middle-aged guys. They put them into a brain scan machine — this is apocryphal by the way, but I don't care — and they had them watch a horror movie, and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives. And the brain scans were identical in both activities. It was just sheer terror. So me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony, but it is the central organizing process of the way we think. It tells us what to imprint. The brain is the record of the feelings of a life.And the third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals. We're social animals, not rational animals. We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds. When we watch a car chase in a movie, it's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase. When we watch pornography, it's a little like having sex, though probably not as good. And we see this when lovers walk down the street, when a crowd in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion, the deep interpenetration. And this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing, I think, politics, a different way, most importantly, of seeing human capital.We are now children of the French Enlightenment. We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are — that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy. And this work corrects that bias in our culture, that dehumanizing bias. It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily — things like grades, SAT's, degrees, the number of years in schooling. What it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for. And so let me list just a couple of the things I think this research points us toward trying to understand.The first gift, or talent, is mindsight — the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. Babies come with this ability. Meltzoff, who's at the University of Washington, leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old. He wagged his tongue at the baby. The baby wagged her tongue back. Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom's mind and to download what they find — their models of how to understand reality. In the United States, 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people. And those people who have models of how to relate have a huge head start in life. Scientists at the University of Minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy, at age 18 months, who was going to graduate from high school, based on who had good attachment with mom. Twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships. They are what we call avoidantly attached. They have trouble relating to other people. They go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind — wanting to get close to people, but not really having the models of how to do that. And so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another.A second skill is equipoise, the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. So for example, we are overconfidence machines. Ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers. Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills. Time magazine asked Americans, ""Are you in the top one percent of earners?"" Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top one percent of earners. (Laughter) This is a gender-linked trait, by the way. Men drown at twice the rate of women, because men think they can swim across that lake. But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. They have epistemological modesty. They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. They are curious. And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ.The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts — it's a Greek word. It's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment — derive a gist. One of my colleagues at the Times did a great story about soldiers in Iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an IED, a landmine, in the street. They couldn't tell you how they did it, but they could feel cold, they felt a coldness, and they were more often right than wrong. The third is what you might call sympathy, the ability to work within groups. And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals. And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation.Then you could talk about a trait like blending. Any child can say, ""I'm a tiger,"" pretend to be a tiger. It seems so elementary. But in fact, it's phenomenally complicated to take a concept ""I"" and a concept ""tiger"" and blend them together. But this is the source of innovation. What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept ""Western art"" and the concept ""African masks"" and blend them together — not only the geometry, but the moral systems entailed in them. And these are skills, again, we can't count and measure.And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence. And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige. The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task — when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love. That is what the unconscious mind hungers for. And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused.And one of the most beautiful descriptions I've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana. He was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship. When their kids were five and two, Carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly. And Hofstadter wrote a book called ""I Am a Strange Loop."" In the course of that book, he describes a moment — just months after Carol has died — he comes across her picture on the mantel, or on a bureau in his bedroom.And here's what he wrote: ""I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit — the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized that, though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain.""The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom. Through his suffering, Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are. Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been. And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness — these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism. And when Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times. Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_the_social_animal
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"I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light. We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes. The Sun burns our peripheral vision. We see light reflected off the Moon. And in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe has come to us through light, across vast eras in cosmic history. And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe — these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang.And yet, the universe is not a silent movie because the universe isn't silent. I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum. It can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold. Now we'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe — a sonic composition. And while we've never heard the sounds from space, we really should, in the next few years, start to turn up the volume on what's going on out there.So in this ambition to capture songs from the universe, we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have, because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song, which I'd like to play for you — some of our predictions for what that song will be like. Now black holes are dark against a dark sky. We can't see them directly. They're not brought to us with light, at least not directly. We can see them indirectly, because black holes wreak havoc on their environment. They destroy stars around them. They churn up debris in their surroundings. But they won't come to us directly through light. We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background, but we haven't yet. And yet black holes may be heard even if they're not seen, and that's because they bang on space-time like a drum.Now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to Albert Einstein — to whom we owe so much. Einstein realized that if space were empty, if the universe were empty, it would be like this picture, except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it. But if we were freely falling through the space, even without this helpful grid, we might be able to paint it ourselves, because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines, undeflected straight paths through the universe. Einstein also realized — and this is the real meat of the matter — that if you put energy or mass in the universe, it would curve space, and a freely falling object would pass by, let's say, the Sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space. It was Einstein's great general theory of relativity. Now even light will be bent by those paths. And you can be bent so much that you're caught in orbit around the Sun, as the Earth is, or the Moon around the Earth. These are the natural curves in space.What Einstein did not realize was that, if you took our Sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers — so you took a million times the mass of the Earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across, you would make a black hole, an object so dense that if light veered too close, it would never escape — a dark shadow against the universe. It wasn't Einstein who realized this, it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I — joined the German army already an accomplished scientist, working on the Russian front. I like to imagine Schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire, and then, in between, calculating Einstein's equations — as you do in the trenches. And he was reading Einstein's recently published general theory of relativity, and he was thrilled by this theory. And he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary: curves so strong that space would rain down into them, space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole. And even light could not escape this current. Light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be, and all that would be left would be a shadow.Now he wrote to Einstein, and he said, ""As you will see, the war has been kind to me enough. Despite the heavy gunfire, I've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas."" And Einstein was very impressed with his exact solution, and I should hope also the dedication of the scientist. This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions. And he took Schwarzschild's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week. But Einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity. He did not believe they existed in nature. He thought nature would protect us from their formation. It was decades before the term ""black hole"" was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects — in fact they're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime.Now our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough. But if we did a little thought experiment — as Einstein was very fond of doing — we could imagine putting the Sun crushed down to six kilometers, and putting a tiny little Earth around it in orbit, maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun. And it would be self-illuminated, because now the Sun's gone, we have no other source of light — so let's make our little Earth self-illuminated. And you would realize you could put the Earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole. This crushed black hole actually would fit inside Manhattan, more or less. It might spill off into the Hudson a little bit before it destroyed the Earth. But basically that's what we're talking about. We're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of Manhattan.So we move this Earth very close — 30 kilometers outside — and we notice it's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole. There's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe, but you actually have to get very close to fall in. But what's very impressive is that, from our vantage point, we can always see the Earth. It cannot hide behind the black hole. The light from the Earth, some of it falls in, but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us. So you can't hide anything behind a black hole. If this were Battlestar Galactica and you're fighting the Cylons, don't hide behind the black hole. They can see you.Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole — it's not massive enough — but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy. And if one were to eclipse the Milky Way, this is what it would look like. We would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and its luminous dust lanes. And if we were to fall towards this black hole, we would see all of that light lensed around it, and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened. It would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we couldn't, anymore than light can escape.But even though the black hole is dark from the outside, it's not dark on the inside, because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us. And even though, due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation, our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time, it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us, right before we were crushed to death by the black hole. It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a total death experience. (Laughter) And there's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel.Now we've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole, but black holes can be heard, even if they're not seen. Imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation — imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together. Maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes — each one 10 times the mass of the Sun. So now we're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across. They can be spinning hundreds of times a second. At the end of their lives, they're going around each other very near the speed of light. So they're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second, and as they do so, they not only curve space, but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space, an actual wave on space-time. Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe. And they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light.This computer simulation is due to a relativity group at NASA Goddard. It took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem. This was one of the groups. It shows two black holes in orbit around each other, again, with these helpfully painted curves. And if you can see — it's kind of faint — but if you can see the red waves emanating out, those are the gravitational waves. They're literally the sounds of space ringing, and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning, quiet black hole at the end of the day. If you were standing near enough, your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space. You would literally hear the sound. Now of course, your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully, so you might have trouble understanding what's going on. But I'd like to play for you the sound that we predict.This is from my group — a slightly less glamorous computer modeling. Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole. The sound you're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close. If it gets far away, it's a little too quiet. But it comes in like a mallet, and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum. And we can predict what the sound will be. We know that, as it falls in, it gets faster and it gets louder. And eventually, we're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy. (Thumping) Then it's gone. Now I've never heard it that loud — it's actually more dramatic. At home it sounds kind of anticlimactic. It's sort of like ding, ding, ding.This is another sound from my group. No, I'm not showing you any images, because black holes don't leave behind helpful trails of ink, and space is not painted, showing you the curves. But if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this, you want to get moving. (Laughter) Want to get away from the sound. Both black holes are moving. Both black holes are getting closer together. In this case, they're both wobbling quite a lot. And then they're going to merge. (Thumping) Now it's gone. Now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging — that it chirps up at the end. Now that's our prediction for what we'll see.Luckily we're at this safe distance in Long Beach, California. And surely, somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged. And surely, the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years, or a million years, at the speed of light to get to us. But the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear. There are very industrious experiments being built on Earth — one called LIGO — which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers. It's a remarkably ambitious experiment, and it's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years — to pick this up. There's also a mission proposed for space, which hopefully will launch in the next ten years, called LISA. And LISA will be able to see super-massive black holes — black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun.In this Hubble image, we see two galaxies. They look like they're frozen in some embrace. And each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core. But they're not frozen; they're actually merging. These two black holes are colliding, and they will merge over a billion-year time scale. It's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration. But LISA could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe's history, the last 15 minutes before they fall together. And it's not just black holes, but it's also any big disturbance in the universe — and the biggest of them all is the Big Bang. When that expression was coined, it was derisive — like, ""Oh, who would believe in a Big Bang?"" But now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang. It might make a sound.This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside. We don't ever want to do that actually. We want to be inside the universe because there's no such thing as standing outside the universe. So imagine you're inside the Big Bang. It's everywhere, it's all around you, and the space is wobbling chaotically. Fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us. Galaxies form, and generations of stars form in those galaxies, and around one star, at least one star, is a habitable planet. And here we are frantically building these experiments, doing these calculations, writing these computer codes.Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided. That song has been ringing through space for all that time. We weren't even here. It gets closer and closer — 40,000 years ago, we're still doing cave paintings. It's like hurry, build your instruments. It's getting closer and closer, and in 20 ... whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity — we'll build them, we'll turn on the machines and, bang, we'll catch it — the first song from space. If it was the Big Bang we were going to pick up, it would sound like this. (Static) It's a terrible sound. It's literally the definition of noise. It's white noise; it's such a chaotic ringing. But it's around us everywhere, presumably, if it hasn't been wiped out by some other process in the universe. And if we pick it up, it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation, of our observable universe.So within the next few years, we'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit, render the universe in audio. But if we detect those earliest moments, it'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang, which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest, most elusive, questions. If we run the movie of our universe backwards, we know that there was a Big Bang in our past, and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it, but was our Big Bang the only Big Bang? I mean we have to ask, has it happened before? Will it happen again? I mean, in the spirit of rising to TED's challenge to reignite wonder, we can ask questions, at least for this last minute, that honestly might evade us forever.But we have to ask: Is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history? Or, is it possible that we're just a branch off of a multiverse — each branch with its own Big Bang in its past — maybe some of them with black holes playing drums, maybe some without — maybe some with sentient life, and maybe some without — not in our past, not in our future, but somehow fundamentally connected to us? So we have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse, are there creatures? Here's my multiverse creatures. Are there other creatures in the multiverse, wondering about us and wondering about their own origins? And if they are, I can imagine them as we are, calculating, writing computer code, building instruments, trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there.Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janna_levin_the_sound_the_universe_makes
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"Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood. When I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company. Now in our town, where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff, you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action.I remember my first fire. I was the second volunteer on the scene, so there was a pretty good chance I was going to get in. But still it was a real footrace against the other volunteers to get to the captain in charge to find out what our assignments would be. When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life. Here it was, the middle of the night, she was standing outside in the pouring rain, under an umbrella, in her pajamas, barefoot, while her house was in flames.The other volunteer who had arrived just before me — let's call him Lex Luther — (Laughter) got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog. The dog! I was stunned with jealousy. Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds. Well, I was next. The captain waved me over. He said, ""Bezos, I need you to go into the house. I need you to go upstairs, past the fire, and I need you to get this woman a pair of shoes."" (Laughter) I swear. So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went — up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes.Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero. (Laughter) I carried my payload back downstairs where I met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door. We took our treasures outside to the homeowner, where, not surprisingly, his received much more attention than did mine. A few weeks later, the department received a letter from the homeowner thanking us for the valiant effort displayed in saving her home. The act of kindness she noted above all others: someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes.(Laughter)In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis. And you know what I've learned? They all matter. So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait. Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life. If you have something to give, give it now. Serve food at a soup kitchen. Clean up a neighborhood park. Be a mentor.Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one. So get in the game. Save the shoes.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Mark, Mark, come back.(Applause)Mark Bezos: Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bezos_a_life_lesson_from_a_volunteer_firefighter
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"There's a beautiful statement on the screen that says, ""Light creates ambiance, light makes the feel of a space, and light is also the expression of structure."" Well, that was not by me. That was, of course, by Le Corbusier, the famous architect. And here you can see what he meant in one of his beautiful buildings — the chapel Notre Dame Du Haut De Ronchamp — where he creates this light that he could only make because there's also dark. And I think that is the quintessence of this 18-minute talk — that there is no good lighting that is healthy and for our well-being without proper darkness.So this is how we normally would light our offices. We have codes and standards that tell us that the lights should be so much Lux and of great uniformity. This is how we create uniform lighting from one wall to the other in a regular grid of lamps. And that is quite different from what I just showed you from Le Corbusier. If we would apply these codes and standards to the Pantheon in Rome, it would never have looked like this, because this beautiful light feature that goes around there all by itself can only appear because there is also darkness in that same building. And the same is more or less what Santiago Calatrava said when he said, ""Light: I make it in my buildings for comfort."" And he didn't mean the comfort of a five-course dinner as opposed to a one-course meal, but he really meant the comfort of the quality of the building for the people. He meant that you can see the sky and that you can experience the sun. And he created these gorgeous buildings where you can see the sky, and where you can experience the sun, that give us a better life in the built environment, just because of the relevance of light in its brightness and also in its shadows.And what it all boils down to is, of course, the sun. And this image of the Sun may suggest that the Sun is something evil and aggressive, but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the Sun, and light is only a manifestation of that energy.The sun is for dynamics, for color changes. The sun is for beauty in our environment, like in this building — the High Museum in Atlanta, which has been created by Renzo Piano from Italy, together with Arup Lighting, a brilliant team of lighting designers, who created a very subtle modulation of light across the space, responding to what the sun does outside, just because of all these beautiful openings in the roof. So in an indirect way, you can see the sun. And what they did is they created an integral building element to improve the quality of the space that surrounds the visitors of the museum. They created this shade that you can see here, which actually covers the sun, but opens up to the good light from the sky. And here you can see how they really crafted a beautiful design process with physical models, with quantitative as well as qualitative methods, to come to a final solution that is truly integrated and completely holistic with the architecture. They allowed themselves a few mistakes along the way. As you can see here, there's some direct light on the floor, but they could easily figure out where that comes from. And they allow people in that building to really enjoy the sun, the good part of the sun.And enjoying the sun can be in many different ways, of course. It can be just like this, or maybe like this, which is rather peculiar, but this is in 1963 — the viewing of a sun eclipse in the United States. And it's just a bit bright up there, so these people have found a very intriguing solution. This is, I think, a very illustrative image of what I try to say — that the beautiful dynamics of sun, bringing these into the building, creates a quality of our built environment that truly enhances our lives. And this is all about darkness as much as it is about lightness, of course, because otherwise you don't see these dynamics.As opposed to the first office that I showed you in the beginning of the talk, this is a well-known office, which is the Weidt Group. They are in green energy consulting, or something like that. And they really practice what they preach because this office doesn't have any electric lighting at all. It has only, on one side, this big, big glass window that helps to let the sunlight enter deep into the space and create a beautiful quality there and a great dynamic range. So it can be very dim over there, and you do your work, and it can be very bright over there, and you do your work. But actually, the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull, and therefore helps us to enhance our lives.I really owe a short introduction of this man to you. This is Richard Kelly who was born 100 years ago, which is the reason I bring him up now, because it's kind of an anniversary year. In the 1930s, Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design. And he coined three terms, which are ""focal glow,"" ""ambient luminescence"" and ""play of the brilliants"" — three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience.So to begin with, focal glow. He meant something like this — where the light gives direction to the space and helps you to get around. Or something like this, which is the lighting design he did for General Motors, for the car showroom. And you enter that space, and you feel like, ""Wow! This is so impressive,"" just because of this focal point, this huge light source in the middle. To me, it is something from theater, and I will get back to that a little bit later. It's the spotlight on the artist that helps you to focus. It could also be the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and lights up a patch of the land, highlighting it compared to the dim environment. Or it can be in today's retail, in the shopping environment — lighting the merchandise and creating accents that help you to get around.Ambient luminescence is something very different. Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite, something without any focus, something where all details actually dissolve in infinity. And I see it as a very comfortable kind of light that really helps us to relax and to contemplate. It could also be something like this: the National Museum of Science in London, where this blue is embracing all the exhibitions and galleries in one large gesture.And then finally, Kelly's play of brilliants added to that really some play, I think, of the skyline of Hong Kong, or perhaps the chandelier in the opera house, or in the theater here, which is the decoration, the icing on the cake, something playful, something that is just an addition to the architectural environment, I would say. These three distinct elements, together, make a lighting environment that helps us to feel better. And we can only create these out of darkness. And I will explain that further. And I guess that is something that Richard Kelly, here on the left, was explaining to Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe. And behind them, you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design.Those times, there were some early attempts also for light therapy already. You can see here a photo from the United States Library of Medicine, where people are put in the sun to get better. It's a little bit of a different story, this health aspect of light, than what I'm telling you today. In today's modern medicine, there is a real understanding of light in an almost biochemical way. And there is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for. But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light. And by modulating the amount of blue in our environment, we can help people to relax, or to be alert, to fall asleep, or to stay awake.And that is how, maybe in the near future, light can help hospitals to make people better sooner, recover them quicker. Maybe in the airplane, we can overcome jet lag like that. Perhaps in school, we can help children to learn better because they concentrate more on their work. And you can imagine a lot more applications. But I would like to talk further about the combination of light and darkness as a quality in our life.So light is, of course, for social interaction also — to create relationships with all the features around us. It is the place where we gather around when we have to say something to each other. And it is all about this planet. But when you look at this planet at night, it looks like this. And I think this is the most shocking image in my talk today. Because all this light here goes up to the sky. It never reaches the ground where it was meant for. It never is to the benefit of people. It only spoils the darkness. So at a global scale, it looks like this. And, I mean, that is quite amazing, what you see here — how much light goes up into the sky and never reaches the ground. Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be, it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything.The world is changing though, and urbanization is a big driver of everything. I took this photo two weeks ago in Guangzhou, and I realized that 10 years ago, there was nothing like this, of these buildings. It was just a much smaller city, and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous. And we have to understand these main questions: How do people move through these new urban spaces? How do they share their culture? How do we tackle things like mobility? And how can light help there? Because the new technologies, they seem to be in a really interesting position to contribute to the solutions of urbanization and to provide us with better environments.It's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps. And of course, we had the metal-halide lamps and fluorescent lamps and things like that. Now we have LED, but here you see the latest one, and you see how incredibly small it is. And this is exactly what offers us a unique opportunity, because this tiny, tiny size allows us to put the light wherever we really need it. And we can actually leave it out where it's not needed at all and where we can preserve darkness. So that is a really interesting proposition, I think, and a new way of lighting the architectural environment with our well-being in mind. The problem is, though, that I wanted to explain to you how this really works — but I can have four of these on my finger, so you would not be able to really see them. So I asked our laboratory to do something about it, and they said, ""Well, we can do something."" They created for me the biggest LED in the world especially for TEDx in Amsterdam.So here it is. It's the same thing as you can see over there — just 200 times bigger. And I will very quickly show you how it works. So just to explain. Now, every LED that is made these days gives blue light. Now, this is not very pleasant and comfortable. And for that reason, we cover the LED with a phosphor cap. And the phosphor is excited by the blue and makes the light white and warm and pleasant. And then when you add the lens to that, you can bundle the light and send it wherever you need it without any need to spill any light to the sky or anywhere else. So you can preserve the darkness and make the light. I just wanted to show that to you so you understand how this works.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)We can go further. So we have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness? Can we be much more gentle with light? Like here — this is a very low light level actually. Can we engage people more in the lighting projects that we create, so they really want to connect with it, like here? Or can we create simply sculptures that are very inspiring to be in and to be around? And can we preserve the darkness? Because to find a place like this today on Earth is really very, very challenging. And to find a starry sky like this is even more difficult.Even in the oceans, we are creating a lot of light that we could actually ban also for animal life to have a much greater well-being. And it's known that migrating birds, for example, get very disoriented because of these offshore platforms. And we discovered that when we make those lights green, the birds, they actually go the right way. They are not disturbed anymore. And it turns out once again that spectral sensitivity is very important here.In all of these examples, I think, we should start making the light out of darkness, and use the darkness as a canvas — like the visual artists do, like Edward Hopper in this painting. I think that there is a lot of suspense in this painting. I think, when I see it, I start to think, who are those people? Where have they come from? Where are they going? What just happened? What will be happening in the next five minutes? And it only embodies all these stories and all this suspense because of the darkness and the light.Edward Hopper was a real master in creating the narration by working with light and dark. And we can learn from that and create more interesting and inspiring architectural environments. We can do that in commercial spaces like this. And you can still also go outside and enjoy the greatest show in the universe, which is, of course, the universe itself. So I give you this wonderful, informative image of the sky, ranging from the inner city, where you may see one or two stars and nothing else, all the way to the rural environments, where you can enjoy this great and gorgeous and beautiful performance of the constellations and the stars.In architecture, it works just the same. By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives. This is the most well-known example, Tadao Ando's Church of the Light. But I also think of Peter Zumthor's spa in Vals, where light and dark, in very gentle combinations, alter each other to define the space. Or Richard MacCormac's Southwark tube station in London, where you can really see the sky, even though you are under the ground.And finally, I want to point out that a lot of this inspiration comes from theater. And I think it's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks. It wouldn't be such an inspiring scenography without this theater. And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rogier_van_der_heide_why_light_needs_darkness
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"If I should have a daughter, instead of ""Mom,"" she's going to call me ""Point B,"" because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, ""Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.""And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried. ""And, baby,"" I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick; I've done it a million times. You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. Okay, there's a few that chocolate can't fix.But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. That there'll be days like this.(Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said. When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away. You will put the wind in win some, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.""Baby,"" I'll tell her, ""remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more."" Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. Always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want — technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? Go. Okay.So here are three things I know to be true. I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, ""A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order."" I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool.(Laughter)And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke.(Laughter)Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was out standing in his field.(Laughter)I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding. So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, ""Oh, that's what this is all about,"" and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable. And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know. So I decided to give it a try. My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me.The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, ""Hey, I really felt that. Thanks."" And lightning struck. I was hooked.I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about. In fact, they welcomed me.And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken-word poetry didn't have to be indignant, it could be fun or painful or serious or silly. The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was 14. They told me, ""Write about being 14."" So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant, grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, ""Hey, I really felt that too.""Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps. Step one was the moment I said, ""I can. I can do this."" And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. Step two was the moment I said, ""I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week."" And step three began when I realized I didn't have to write indignant poems, if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It's not just the adage ""Write what you know."" It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken-word poetry. And actually, Phil Kaye and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E. as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me. But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus.And we saw over and over the way that spoken-word poetry cracks open locks. But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is ""10 Things I Know to be True."" And here's what happens, you would discover it too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before. Fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in.And most people respond really well to this exercise. But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced. Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems. ""Miss,"" she'd say, ""I'm just not interesting. I don't have anything interesting to say."" So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list ""10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now."" Number three on Charlotte's list was, ""I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age."" I asked her what that meant, and she said, ""Miss, it's kind of a long story."" And I said, ""Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me."" And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before. And the poem began, ""Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man.""(Laughter)""Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool — nothing but swim trunks on — diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion? After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god.""(Laughter)(Applause)Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them. I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.It's not that I think that spoken-word poetry is the ideal art form. I'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story. I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems. But I teach spoken-word poetry because it's accessible. Not everyone can read music or owns a camera, but everyone can communicate in some way, and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from. Plus, spoken-word poetry allows for immediate connection. It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie who will connect with what you've shared. And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14. Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in. I'm so lucky that there's this archive of performances that I can share with my students. It allows for even more opportunities for them to find a poet or a poem that they connect to.Once you've figured this out, it is tempting to keep writing the same poem, or keep telling the same story, over and over, once you've figured out that it will gain you applause. It's not enough to just teach that you can express yourself. You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself. And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. Because step three never ends. But you don't get to start on step three, until you take step one first: ""I can.""I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did. I watched her realize that, by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she's doing, she can create poems that only Charlotte can write, about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer. And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell — like this story. I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film — And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end? I wondered whether I'd get to the end of this talk and finally have figured it all out, or not.And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club, but it's possible that it was much earlier. In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal. I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th. It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. I think that we all did. I would like to help others rediscover that wonder — to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out.So I'd like to close with this poem.When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, ""This? I've done this before."" She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, ""Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby."" And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and — she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk — they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth — that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible — I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it — and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter
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"I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. And Grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand washed laundry for seven children. And now she was going to watch electricity do that work.My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, ""No, no, no, no. Let me, let me push the button."" And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, ""Oh, fantastic! I want to see this! Give me a chair! Give me a chair! I want to see it,"" and she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program. She was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.Today, in Sweden and other rich countries, people are using so many different machines. Look, the homes are full of machines. I can't even name them all. And they also, when they want to travel, they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations. And yet, in the world, there are so many people who still heat the water on fire, and they cook their food on fire. Sometimes they don't even have enough food, and they live below the poverty line. There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day. And the richest people over there — there's one billion people — and they live above what I call the ""air line,"" because they spend more than $80 a day on their consumption.But this is just one, two, three billion people, and obviously there are seven billion people in the world, so there must be one, two, three, four billion people more who live in between the poverty and the air line. They have electricity, but the question is, how many have washing machines? I've done the scrutiny of market data, and I've found that, indeed, the washing machine has penetrated below the air line, and today there's an additional one billion people out there who live above the ""wash line."" (Laughter) And they consume more than $40 per day. So two billion have access to washing machines.And the remaining five billion, how do they wash? Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash? Because it remains hard work for women to wash. They wash like this: by hand. It's a hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week. And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home, or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off. And they want the washing machine. They don't want to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so relatively low productivity. And there's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma. Look here, two generations ago in Sweden — picking water from the stream, heating with firewood and washing like that. They want the washing machine in exactly the same way.But when I lecture to environmentally-concerned students, they tell me, ""No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines."" How can we tell this woman that she ain't going to have a washing machine? And then I ask my students, I've asked them — over the last two years I've asked, ""How many of you doesn't use a car?"" And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, ""I don't use a car."" And then I put the really tough question: ""How many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bed sheets?"" And no one raised their hand. Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines.(Laughter)So how come [this is] something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it? What is special with this? I had to do an analysis about the energy used in the world. Here we are. Look here, you see the seven billion people up there: the air people, the wash people, the bulb people and the fire people. One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel — oil, coal or gas. That's what most of electricity and the energy in the world is. And it's 12 units used in the entire world, and the richest one billion, they use six of them. Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world's population. And these ones who have washing machines, but not a house full of other machines, they use two. This group uses three, one each. And they also have electricity. And over there they don't even use one each. That makes 12 of them.But the main concern for the environmentally-interested students — and they are right — is about the future. What are the trends? If we just prolong the trends, without any real advanced analysis, to 2050, there are two things that can increase the energy use. First, population growth. Second, economic growth. Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman. And [with] that you will get two extra, but that won't change the energy use very much.What will happen is economic growth. The best of here in the emerging economies — I call them the New East — they will jump the air line. ""Wopp!"" they will say. And they will start to use as much as the Old West are doing already. And these people, they want the washing machine. I told you. They'll go there. And they will double their energy use. And we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light. And they'll get a two-child family without a stop in population growth. But the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units. And these 22 units — still the richest people use most of it. So what needs to be done? Because the risk, the high probability of climate change is real. It's real. Of course they must be more energy-efficient. They must change behavior in some way. They must also start to produce green energy, much more green energy. But until they have the same energy consumption per person, they shouldn't give advice to others — what to do and what not to do. (Applause) Here we can get more green energy all over.This is what we hope may happen. It's a real challenge in the future. But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine. She's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone — so happy that she even voted for her. And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world — moving from minister of energy to president. If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them.And what's the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, ""Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library."" Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children's books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the ""ABC's"" — this is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. And she also got books for herself. She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. And we really, we really loved this machine.And what we said, my mother and me, ""Thank you industrialization. Thank you steel mill. Thank you power station. And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine
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"I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival. It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day — where fun is serious business. And no, this isn't Burning Man or San Francisco. (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, meet your cousins. This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo. Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative. That means we all share a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother, who lived around six million years ago. Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression.(Laughter)But unfortunately, we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution. But bonobos show us the other side of the coin. While chimpanzees are dominated by big, scary guys, bonobo society is run by empowered females. These guys have really worked something out, since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet. But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes. They live in the depths of the Congolese jungle, and it has been very difficult to study them.The Congo is a paradox — a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself — the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War. Not surprisingly, this destruction also endangers bonobo survival. Bushmeat trades and forest loss means we couldn't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world — and we're not even sure of that to be honest. Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees.Who are these cousins? We know them as the ""make love, not war"" apes since they have frequent, promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems — since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra. Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives. Play is not just child's games. For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. It's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game. Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity — diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections. And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual. Play is the glue that binds us together.Now, I don't know how you play, but I want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild. First, it's a ball game bonobo-style — and I do not mean football. So here, we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game. Have a look what she's doing. It might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase, ""she's got him by the balls."" (Laughter) Only I think that he's rather loving it here, right? Yeah. (Laughter) So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans. And this video is really interesting because it shows — this video's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play — such as testicles — and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust — while at the same time being tremendous fun.But play's a shapeshifter. (Laughter) Play's a shapeshifter, and it can take many forms, some of which are more quiet, imaginative, curious — maybe where wonder is discovered anew. And I want you to see, this is Fuku, a young female, and she is quietly playing with water. I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds. And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity.So these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present. But they also hold a secret for our future, a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation. The secret is that play is the key to these capacities. In other words, play is our adaptive wildcard. In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play. But will we make the most of our playfulness? Play is not frivolous. Play's essential. For bonobos and humans alike, life is not just red in tooth and claw. In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent.And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_behncke_evolution_s_gift_of_play_from_bonobo_apes_to_humans
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"Today I want to talk about design, but not design as we usually think about it. I want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific, biotechnological culture, where, for really the first time in history, we have the power to design bodies, to design animal bodies, to design human bodies. In the history of our planet, there have been three great waves of evolution.The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution. So, as you all know, species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments, and the pressures of those environments selected which changes, through random mutation in species, were going to be preserved. Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution, which was we changed the environment in which we evolved. We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization. And that has been the second great — couple 100,000 years, 150,000 years — flow of our evolution. By changing our environment, we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve. Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities, all the way through modern medicine, we have changed our own evolution. Now we're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history, which has been called many things: ""intentional evolution,"" ""evolution by design"" — very different than intelligent design — whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet.So I want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species, as well as our cultures, because of this change. Now we actually have been doing it for a long time. We started selectively breeding animals many, many thousands of years ago. And if you think of dogs for example, dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures. There isn't a dog on this earth that's a natural creature. Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like. But we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them. We don't have to do it that way anymore.This is a beefalo. A beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid. And they are now making them, and someday, perhaps pretty soon, you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket. This is a geep, a goat-sheep hybrid. The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards. I think they said it tasted like chicken. This is a cama. A cama is a camel-llama hybrid, created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama. And they are now using these in certain cultures. Then there's the liger. This is the largest cat in the world — the lion-tiger hybrid. It's bigger than a tiger. And in the case of the liger, there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild. But these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology. And then finally, everybody's favorite, the zorse. None of this is Photoshopped. These are real creatures. And so one of the things we've been doing is using genetic enhancement, or genetic manipulation, of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics. And if that were all this was about, then it would be an interesting thing. But something much, much more powerful is happening now.These are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish. We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow. Well, they've now taken that gene, that bioluminescent gene, and put it into mammal cells. These are normal cells. And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light. Once they could do that with cells, they could do it with organisms. So they did it with mouse pups, kittens. And by the way, the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that's a bioluminescent gene from coral, while this is from jellyfish. They did it with pigs. They did it with puppies. And, in fact, they did it with monkeys. And if you can do it with monkeys — though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes — if they can do it in monkeys, they can probably figure out how to do it in apes, which means they can do it in human beings. In other words, it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark. Be easier to find us at night.And in fact, right now in many states, you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets. These are zebra fish. They're normally black and silver. These are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow, green, red, and they are actually available now in certain states. Other states have banned them. Nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures. There is no area of the government — not the EPA or the FDA — that controls genetically-engineered pets. And so some states have decided to allow them, some states have decided to ban them.Some of you may have read about the FDA's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon. The salmon on top is a genetically engineered Chinook salmon, using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat, to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed. And right now the FDA is trying to make a final decision on whether, pretty soon, you could be eating this fish — it'll be sold in the stores. And before you get too worried about it, here in the United States, the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it. So even as we worry about it, we have allowed it to go on in this country — much different in Europe — without any regulation, and even without any identification on the package.These are all the first cloned animals of their type. So in the lower right here, you have Dolly, the first cloned sheep — now happily stuffed in a museum in Edinburgh; Ralph the rat, the first cloned rat; CC the cat, for cloned cat; Snuppy, the first cloned dog — Snuppy for Seoul National University puppy — created in South Korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo, which he had not. He actually was the first person to clone a dog, which is a very difficult thing to do, because dog genomes are very plastic. This is Prometea, the first cloned horse. It's a Haflinger horse cloned in Italy, a real ""gold ring"" of cloning, because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings. In other words, the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed. But if you can clone that horse, you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud. These were the first cloned calves, the first cloned grey wolves, and then, finally, the first cloned piglets: Alexis, Chista, Carrel, Janie and Dotcom.(Laughter)In addition, we've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species. This is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create. So with antithrombin in that goat — that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that GTC Genetics wants to create. And then in addition, transgenic pigs, knockout pigs, from the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea, are pigs that they are going to use, in fact, to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them, instead of producing them in an industrial way.These are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species. The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate. A somatic cell, a body cell, was taken from its body, gestated in the ovum of a cow, and then that cow gave birth to a guar. Same thing happened with the mouflon, where it's an endangered species of sheep. It was gestated in a regular sheep body, which actually raises an interesting biological problem. We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies. We have our nucleic DNA that everybody thinks of as our DNA, but we also have DNA in our mitochondria, which are the energy packets of the cell. That DNA is passed down through our mothers. So really, what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon, but a guar with cow mitochondria, and therefore cow mitochondrial DNA, and a mouflon with another species of sheep's mitochondrial DNA. These are really hybrids, not pure animals. And it raises the question of how we're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology — a question that we're not really sure yet how to solve.This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach. And what they've done here is they've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top, and it's on a big computer tracking ball. And now, using a joystick, they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right, forwards or backwards. They've created a kind of insect bot, or bugbot. It gets worse than that — or perhaps better than that. This actually is one of DARPA's very important — DARPA is the Defense Research Agency — one of their projects. These goliath beetles are wired in their wings. They have a computer chip strapped to their backs, and they can fly these creatures around the lab. They can make them go left, right. They can make them take off. They can't actually make them land. They put them about one inch above the ground, and then they shut everything off and they go pfft. But it's the closest they can get to a landing.And in fact, this technology has gotten so developed that this creature — this is a moth — this is the moth in its pupa stage, and that's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology, so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth, it is already prewired. The wires are already in its body, and they can just hook it up to their technology, and now they've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance. They can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones.It's not just insects. This is the ratbot, or the robo-rat by Sanjiv Talwar at SUNY Downstate. Again, it's got technology — it's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres; it's got a camera on top of its head. The scientists can make this creature go left, right. They have it running through mazes, controlling where it's going. They've now created an organic robot. The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar's lab said, ""Is this ethical? We've taken away the autonomy of this animal."" I'll get back to that in a minute.There's also been work done with monkeys. This is Miguel Nicolelis of Duke. He took owl monkeys, wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved, especially looking at the movement of their right arm. The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways. They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm, which you see here in the picture, put the arm in another room. Pretty soon, the computer learned, by reading the monkey's brainwaves, to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey's arm did. Then he put a video monitor in the monkey's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm, and the monkey got fascinated. The monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm, this prosthetic arm would do. And eventually she was moving it and moving it, and eventually stopped moving her right arm and, staring at the screen, could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves — which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms.And it's not just technology that we're putting into animals. This is Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida. He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons — so these are just individual neurons from rats — put them on a chip. They self-aggregated into a network, became an integrated chip. And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator. So now we have organic computer chips made out of living, self-aggregating neurons. Finally, Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern took a completely intact, independent lamprey eel brain. This is a brain from a lamprey eel. It is living — fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides, attached photosensitive sensors to the brain, put it into a cart — here's the cart, the brain is sitting there in the middle — and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart, when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart, the cart moves toward the light; when you turn it off, it moves away. It's photophilic. So now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain. Is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts, sitting there in its nutrient medium? I don't know, but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding.So, we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes. This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts. He altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin, put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being. Genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation. This is where we are in this process.Finally, not that long ago, Craig Venter created the first artificial cell, where he took a cell, took a DNA synthesizer, which is a machine, created an artificial genome, put it in a different cell — the genome was not of the cell he put it in — and that cell then reproduced as the other cell. In other words, that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent — it did not have an organic parent. And so, asks The Economist: ""The first artificial organism and its consequences.""So you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that. (Laughter) But in fact, that's not what Frankenstein's lab looks like. This is what Frankenstein's lab looks like. This is a DNA synthesizer, and here at the bottom are just bottles of A, T, C and G — the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain.And so, we need to ask ourselves some questions. For the first time in the history of this planet, we are able to directly design organisms. We can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power, and it confers on us a responsibility. Is everything okay? Is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want? Do we have free reign to design animals? Do we get to go someday to Pets 'R' Us and say, ""Look, I want a dog. I'd like it to have the head of a Dachshund, the body of a retriever, maybe some pink fur, and let's make it glow in the dark""? Does industry get to create creatures who, in their milk, in their blood, and in their saliva and other bodily fluids, create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines? Do we get to create organic robots, where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings?And then the final step of this, once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then? It's already happening. It's not science fiction. We are not only already using these things in animals, some of them we're already beginning to use on our own bodies.We are now taking control of our own evolution. We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet. It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now. It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering
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"I want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities, or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again. We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons. These are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning, and it will give you extra strength, and it will further enhance your speed, and it will help you, for instance, to manage your balance. It is actually the true integration of the man and the machine. But not only that — it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there.This is just not some blue sky thinking. To show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the American soldier, that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs, and they are being asked to carry more equipment. Obviously, this is resulting in some major complications — back injuries, 30 percent of them — chronic back injuries. So we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue. So let me now introduce to you HULC — or the Human Universal Load Carrier.Soldier: With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours. Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and high-agility movements. It senses what I want to do, where I want to go, and then augments my strength and endurance.Eythor Bender: We are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device, this new exoskeleton this year. So this is for real. Now let's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users, something that I'm particularly passionate about. There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide. This is about one percent of the total population. And that's actually a conservative estimate. We are talking here about, oftentimes, very young individuals with spinal cord injuries, that in the prime of their life — 20s, 30s, 40s — hit a wall and the wheelchair's the only option. But it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers. And the only option, pretty much — when it's stroke or other complications — is the wheelchair. And that is actually for the last 500 years, since its very successful introduction, I must say. So we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility. Let me now introduce you to eLEGS that is worn by Amanda Boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured, and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now.(Applause)Amanda Boxtel: Thank you.(Applause)EB: Amanda is wearing our eLEGS set. It has sensors. It's completely non-invasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back. There are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips, as well as her knee joints, that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait.AB: I was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me. In a split second, I lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis. Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, ""Amanda, you'll never walk again."" And that was 19 yeas ago. He robbed every ounce of hope from my being. Adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again, to rock climb and even handcycle. But nothing has been invented that enables me to walk, until now.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)EB: As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you. It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations — not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone.AB: Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eythor_bender_demos_human_exoskeletons
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"(Singing)(Singing ends)(Applause)Pep Rosenfeld: Folks, you've just met Claron McFadden. She is a world-class soprano singer who studied in Rochester, New York. Her celebrated operatic roles are numerous and varied. In August 2007, Claron was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts, winning praise for her brilliance, her amazing and extensively wide repertoire and her vivid stage personality. Please welcome Claron McFadden.(Applause)Claron McFadden: The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal. For me, the human voice is the vessel on which all emotions travel — except, perhaps, jealousy. And the breath, the breath is the captain of that vessel. A child is born, takes its first breath —(Inhales)Whah! And we behold the wondrous beauty of vocal expression — mysterious, spontaneous and primal.A few years ago, I did a meditation retreat in Thailand. I wanted a place where I would have total silence and total solitude. I spent two weeks at this retreat in my own little hut — no music, no nothing — sounds of nature, trying to find the essence of concentration, being in the moment.On my last day, the woman who looked after the place, she came and we spoke for a minute, and then she said to me, ""Would you sing something for me?"" And I thought, but this is a place of total quiet and silence. I can't make noise. She said, ""Please, sing for me."" So I closed my eyes, I took breath and the first thing that came up and out was ""Summertime,"" Porgy and Bess.(Singing) Summertime and the livin' is easy. Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high. Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'. So hush little baby, don't you cry.And I opened my eyes, and I saw that she had her eyes closed. And after a moment, she opened her eyes and she looked at me and she said, ""It's like meditation.""And in that moment I understood that everything I had gone to Thailand to look for, to search for, I had it already in my singing — the calm, but alertness, the focus, but awareness, and being totally in the moment. When you're totally in the moment — when I'm totally in the moment, the vessel of expression is open. The emotions can flow from me to you and back. It's an extremely profound experience.There's a piece by a composer, an American composer called John Cage. It's called ""Aria."" It was written for an amazing singer called Cathy Berberian. And the thing about this piece that's so special — if you see it behind me — it's not notated in any way. No notes, no flats, no sharps. But it's a kind of structure. And the singer, within this structure, has total freedom to be creative, spontaneous.For example, there are different colors and each color gets a different type of singing — pop, country and western, opera, jazz — and you just have to be consistent with that color. You see there are different lines. You choose in your own tempo in your own way to follow the line, but you must respect it, more or less. And these little dots, these represent a sort of sound that's not a vocal, not a lyrical way of expressing the voice. Using the body — it could be sneezing, it could be coughing, animals —(Audience member coughs)Exactly. (Laughter)Clapping, whatever. And there's different text. There's Armenian, Russian, French, English, Italian. So within this structure, one is free. To me, this piece is an ode to the voice, because it's mysterious, as we can see. It's quite spontaneous. And it's primal. So I would like to share this piece with you, It's ""Aria,"" of John Cage.(Singing in various languages)Hampart-zoumDirouhiDi questa TerraNaprasnoConscience et(Barks)(Singing) AriseTsk, tsk, tsk.(Singing)Vidiel’afacilmenteE io sono per te(Robotic voice) No other wayDans l'espace, so help(Singing)Si justeDvidzénya bistri(Claps)(Singing)On pekrásenidyot a k uO a k ho aSivayoot eternal loosin(Sneezes)(Laughs)Shh!(Singing)Gloobinoí più chiaraSi ceci est cela cela est ceciTotalmente soi whom they sought to slayTo have the fruits gloireJ’écoute ...À la vie…Leggermente snédznoiCoo cooP k t dBanalitéK o e(Makes the sound of a kiss)(Singing)In armonia(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/claron_mcfadden_singing_the_primal_mystery
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"I know what you're thinking. You think I've lost my way, and somebody's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat. (Applause) I get that all the time in Dubai. ""Here on holiday are you, dear?"" (Laughter) ""Come to visit the children? How long are you staying?""Well actually, I hope for a while longer yet. I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years. (Applause) And in that time, I have seen a lot of changes. Now that statistic is quite shocking. And I want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of English. I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi. And one fine day, she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary. But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses — medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal. How did those students get all that knowledge? Of course, from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents. It's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations.But sadly, today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. A language dies every 14 days. Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language. Could there be a connection? Well I don't know. But I do know that I've seen a lot of changes. When I first came out to the Gulf, I came to Kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post. Actually, not that long ago. That is a little bit too early. But nevertheless, I was recruited by the British Council, along with about 25 other teachers. And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait. We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education. And of course, the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth.Okay. Now this is the major change that I've seen — how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today. No longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum, and no longer the sole domain of mother England, it has become a bandwagon for every English-speaking nation on earth. And why not? After all, the best education — according to the latest World University Rankings — is to be found in the universities of the U.K. and the U.S. So everybody wants to have an English education, naturally. But if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test.Now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone? Perhaps you have a computer scientist who's a genius. Would he need the same language as a lawyer, for example? Well, I don't think so. We English teachers reject them all the time. We put a stop sign, and we stop them in their tracks. They can't pursue their dream any longer, 'til they get English. Now let me put it this way: if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer, would I stop him from entering my British University? I don't think so. But indeed, that is exactly what we do. We English teachers are the gatekeepers. And you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough. Now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society. Maybe the barrier would be too universal.Okay. ""But,"" I hear you say, ""what about the research? It's all in English."" So the books are in English, the journals are done in English, but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It feeds the English requirement. And so it goes on. I ask you, what happened to translation? If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there was lots of translation then. They translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic, into Persian, and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the Romance languages. And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe. Now don't get me wrong; I am not against teaching English, all you English teachers out there. I love it that we have a global language. We need one today more than ever. But I am against using it as a barrier. Do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English, or Chinese? We need more than that. Where do we draw the line? This system equates intelligence with a knowledge of English, which is quite arbitrary.(Applause)And I want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English, they didn't have to pass an English test. Case in point, Einstein. He, by the way, was considered remedial at school because he was, in fact, dyslexic. But fortunately for the world, he did not have to pass an English test. Because they didn't start until 1964 with TOEFL, the American test of English. Now it's exploded. There are lots and lots of tests of English. And millions and millions of students take these tests every year. Now you might think, you and me, ""Those fees aren't bad, they're okay,"" but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people. So immediately, we're rejecting them.(Applause)It brings to mind a headline I saw recently: ""Education: The Great Divide."" Now I get it, I understand why people would want to focus on English. They want to give their children the best chance in life. And to do that, they need a Western education. Because, of course, the best jobs go to people out of the Western Universities, that I put on earlier. It's a circular thing.Okay. Let me tell you a story about two scientists, two English scientists. They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals. But they couldn't get the results they wanted. They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German. So bingo, problem solved. If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more.My daughter came to England from Kuwait. She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic. It's an Arabic-medium school. She had to translate it into English at her grammar school. And she was the best in the class at those subjects. Which tells us that when students come to us from abroad, we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know, and they know it in their own language. When a language dies, we don't know what we lose with that language.This is — I don't know if you saw it on CNN recently — they gave the Heroes Award to a young Kenyan shepherd boy who couldn't study at night in his village, like all the village children, because the kerosene lamp, it had smoke and it damaged his eyes. And anyway, there was never enough kerosene, because what does a dollar a day buy for you? So he invented a cost-free solar lamp. And now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home. (Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: ""The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent."" A simple idea, but it could have such far-reaching consequences.People who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know. Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark. Let us celebrate diversity. Mind your language. Use it to spread great ideas.(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_ryan_ideas_in_all_languages_not_just_english
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"The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple. We don't want Iran to get the bomb. Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems. Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge. The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology. But if we manage to place a good Windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box, then we are in business. And this is the plot behind Stuxnet.So we start with a Windows dropper. The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed — mission accomplished. That's easy, huh? I want to tell you how we found that out. When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was. The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems. So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out. And then some very funny things happened. Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese — sniffed, but didn't want to eat. Didn't make sense to me. And after we experimented with different flavors of cheese, I realized, well, this is a directed attack. It's completely directed. The dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found, and even if the actual program code that it's trying to infect is actually running on that target. And if not, Stuxnet does nothing.So that really got my attention, and we started to work on this nearly around the clock, because I thought, ""Well, we don't know what the target is. It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany. So we better find out what the target is soon."" So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs — a smaller one and a bigger one. And we also saw that they are very professionally engineered by people who obviously had all insider information. They knew all the bits and bites that they had to attack. They probably even know the shoe size of the operator. So they know everything.And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science. It's way above everything that we have ever seen before. Here you see a sample of this actual attack code. We are talking about — around about 15,000 lines of code. Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language. And I want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code. So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do.And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world — to potential real world targets. So we do need target theories that we can prove or disprove. In order to get target theories, we remember that it's definitely hardcore sabotage, it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in Iran, because that's where most of the infections had been reported. Now you don't find several thousand targets in that area. It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant.So I told my assistant, ""Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base."" And I phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data. And that worked pretty well. So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control. The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see. And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode. What we also saw is that the goal of the attack was really to do it slowly and creepy — obviously in an effort to drive maintenance engineers crazy, that they would not be able to figure this out quickly.The big digital warhead — we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures. So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it. I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges. So that made sense, that was a match.And it even got better. These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages. And guess what we found in the attack code? An almost identical structure. So again, that was a real good match. And this gave us very high confidence for what we were looking at. Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this. These results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor. And we often went into just a dead end and had to recover.Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles. The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves. So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is. It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz. So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet.Here's some very cool stuff that we saw — really knocked my socks off. Down there is the gray box, and on the top you see the centrifuges. Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors — so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors — and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data. And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet. So it's just like from the Hollywood movies where during the heist, the observation camera is fed with prerecorded video. That's cool, huh?The idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room. It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive. The idea is to circumvent a digital safety system. We need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough. So for example, in a power plant, when your big steam turbine gets too over speed, you must open relief valves within a millisecond. Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator. So this is where we need digital safety systems. And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen. Your plant can blow up. And neither your operators nor your safety system will notice it. That's scary.But it gets worse. And this is very important, what I'm going to say. Think about this: this attack is generic. It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment. So it would work as well, for example, in a power plant or in an automobile factory. It is generic. And you don't have — as an attacker — you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet. You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading. Just spread it as wide as possible. And if you do that, what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction. That's the consequence that we have to face. So unfortunately, the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the Middle East. They're in the United States and Europe and in Japan. So all of the green areas, these are your target-rich environments. We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now.Thanks.(Applause)Chris Anderson: I've got a question. Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this. Is that your opinion?Ralph Langner: Okay, you really want to hear that? Yeah. Okay. My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel. So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower. There is only one, and that's the United States — fortunately, fortunately. Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger.CA: Thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us. Thank you, Ralph.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ralph_langner_cracking_stuxnet_a_21st_century_cyberweapon
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"Adrian Kohler: Well, we're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse.Basil Jones: But actually we're going to start this evolution with a hyena.AK: The ancestor of the horse. Okay, we'll do something with it. (Laughter) Hahahaha. The hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called ""Faustus in Africa,"" a Handspring Production from 1995, where it had to play draughts with Helen of Troy. This production was directed by South African artist and theater director, William Kentridge. So it needed a very articulate front paw. But, like all puppets, it has other attributes.BJ: One of them is breath, and it kind of breathes.AK: Haa haa haaa.BJ: Breath is really important for us. It's the kind of original movement for any puppet for us onstage. It's the thing that distinguishes the puppet —AK: Oops.BJ: From an actor. Puppets always have to try to be alive. It's their kind of ur-story onstage, that desperation to live.AK: Yeah, it's basically a dead object, as you can see, and it only lives because you make it. An actor struggles to die onstage, but a puppet has to struggle to live. And in a way that's a metaphor for life.BJ: So every moment it's on the stage, it's making the struggle. So we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology — (Laughter) to turn nouns into verbs.AK: Well actually I prefer to say that it's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life.BJ: Okay so.AK: It has ears that move passively when the head goes.BJ: And it has these bulkheads made out of plywood, covered with fabric — curiously similar, in fact, to the plywood canoes that Adrian's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop.AK: In Port Elizabeth, the village outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa.BJ: His mother was a puppeteer. And when we met at art school and fell in love in 1971, I hated puppets. I really thought they were so beneath me. I wanted to become an avant-garde artist — and Punch and Judy was certainly not where I wanted to go. And, in fact, it took about 10 yearsto discover the Bambara Bamana puppets of Mali in West Africa, where there's a fabulous tradition of puppetry, to learn a renewed, or a new, respect for this art form.AK: So in 1981, I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company. And 20 years later, miraculously, we collaborated with a company from Mali, the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako, where we made a piece about a tall giraffe. It was just called ""Tall Horse,"" which was a life-sized giraffe.BJ: And here again, you see the same structure. The bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane, but it's ultimately the same structure. It's got two people inside it on stilts, which give them the height, and somebody in the front who's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head.AK: The person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail, a bit like the hyena — same mechanism, just a bit bigger. And he's controlling the ear movement.BJ: So this production was seen by Tom Morris of the National Theatre in London. And just around that time, his mother had said, ""Have you seen this book by Michael Morpurgo called 'War Horse'?""AK: It's about a boy who falls in love with a horse. The horse is sold to the First World War, and he joins up to find his horse.BJ: So Tom gave us a call and said, ""Do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the National Theatre?""AK: It seemed a lovely idea.BJ: But it had to ride. It had to have a rider.AK: It had to have a rider, and it had to participate in cavalry charges. (Laughter) A play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the National Theatre in London. But they agreed to go along with it for a while. So we began with a test.BJ: This is Adrian and Thys Stander, who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse, and our next-door neighbor Katherine, riding on a ladder. The weight is really difficult when it's up above your head.AK: And once we put Katherine through that particular brand of hell, we knew that we might be able to make a horse, which could be ridden. So we made a model. This is a cardboard model, a little bit smaller than the hyena. You'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there.BJ: And the two manipulators are inside. But we didn't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator, because we couldn't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time.AK: We started work on the prototype after the model was approved, and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated. We had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones. And we had a crate built for it. It had to be shipped to London. We were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in Cape Town, and it got to midnight and we hadn't done that yet.BJ: So we got a camera, and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances. And we sent it off to the National Theatre, hoping that they believed that we created something that worked. (Laughter)AK: A month later, we were there in London with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us.BJ: About 40 people.AK: We were terrified. We opened the lid, we took the horse out, and it did work; it walked and it was able to be ridden. Here I have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype. This is in the National Theatre studio, the place where they cook new ideas. It had by no means got the green light yet. The choreographer, Toby Sedgwick, invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse, which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs, grew up into the big horse. And Nick Starr, the director of the National Theatre, saw that particular moment, he was standing next to me — he nearly wet himself. And so the show was given the green light. And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely. Here is the plan.(Laughter)And here is our factory in Cape Town where we make horses. You can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there. The horses are completely handmade. There is very little 20th century technology in them. We used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces. But because they have to be light and flexible, and each one of them is different, they can't be mass-produced, unfortunately. So here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in London. And now we would like to introduce you to Joey. Joey boy, you there? Joey. (Applause) (Applause) Joey. Joey, come here. No, no, I haven't got it. He's got it; it's in his pocket.BJ: Joey. AK: Joey, Joey, Joey, Joey. Come here. Stand here where people can see you. Move around. Come on. I'd just like to describe — I won't talk too loud. He might get irritated. Here, Craig is working the head. He has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand. Each one of them operates either an ear, separately, or the head, up and down. But he also controls the head directly by using his hand. The ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse. When they point right back, the horse is fearful or angry, depending upon what's going on in front of him, around him. Or, when he's more relaxed, the head comes down and the ears listen, either side. Horses' hearing is very important. It's almost more important than their eyesight. Over here, Tommy's got what you call the heart position. He's working the leg. You see the string tendon from the hyena, the hyena's front leg, automatically pulls the hoop up. (Laughter) Horses are so unpredictable. (Laughter) The way a hoof comes up with a horse immediately gives you the feeling that it's a convincing horse action. The hind legs have got the same action.BJ: And Mikey also has, in his fingers, the ability to move the tail from left to right, and up and down with the other hand. And together, there's quite a complex possibility of tail expression.AK: You want to say something about the breathing?BJ: We had a big challenge with breathing. Adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that — because that's how a horse would breathe, with an expanded chest. But we realized that, if that were to be happening, you wouldn't, as an audience, see the breath. So he made a channel in here, and the chest moves up and down in that channel. So it's anti-naturalistic really, the up and down movement, but it feels like breath. And it's very, very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees.AK: Other emotional stuff. If I were to touch the horse here on his skin, the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver. You'll notice, of course, that the puppet is made out of cane lines. And I would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice, that I was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space. But of course, it was the cane is light, the cane is flexible, the cane is durable and the cane is moldable. And so it was a very practical reason why it was made of cane.The skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh, which, if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear, she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike. You see the skeletal structure of it. Or if you light it from above, it becomes more solid. Again, that was a practical consideration. The guys inside the horse have to be able to see out. They have to be able to act along with their fellow actors in the production. And it's very much an in-the-moment activity that they're engaged in. It's three heads making one character.But now we would like you to put Joey through some paces. And plant.(Whinny)Thank you. And now just — (Applause) All the way from sunny California we have Zem Joaquin who's going to ride the horse for us.(Applause)(Applause)(Music)So we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly.BJ: Not being able to talk to one another while they're onstage because they're mic'd. The sound that that very large chest makes, of the horse — the whinnying and the nickering and everything — that starts usually with one performer, carries on with a second person and ends with a third.AK: Mikey Brett from Leicestershire. (Applause) Mikey Brett, Craig, Leo, Zem Joaquin and Basil and me.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/handpring_puppet_co_the_genius_puppetry_behind_war_horse
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"As a boy, I loved cars. When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. Like this. And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year. Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere. So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. We built the hardware and the software. We made it learn from us, and we set it free in the desert. And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. Yet I still hadn't saved a single life.Since, our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves — any street in California. We've driven 140,000 miles. Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving. It's the perfect driving mechanism. We've driven in cities, like in San Francisco here. We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.We've encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is without a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't even notice. Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. (Laughter) Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts.(Video) Man: Oh, my God. What? Second Man: It's driving itself.Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who died. Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people? And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error, and can therefore be prevented by machines?Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane — improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes, and do away with all traffic jams on highways? Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute? You could regain this time. This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone. And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car
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"I wanted to be a rock star. I dreamed of it, and that's all I dreamed of. To be more accurate, I wanted to be a pop star. This was in the late '80s. And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran. They wouldn't have me. I didn't read music, but I played synthesizers and drum machines. And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada. And I was certain that's what my life would be.And when I went to college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when I was 18, I was stunned to find that there was not a Pop Star 101, or even a degree program for that interest. And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir. And I said, ""Yes, I would love to do that. It sounds great."" And I left the room and said, ""No way."" The choir people in my high school were pretty geeky, and there was no way I was going to have anything to do with those people. And about a week later, a friend of mine came to me and said, ""Listen, you've got to join choir. At the end of the semester, we're taking a trip to Mexico, all expenses paid. And the soprano section is just full of hot girls."" And so I figured for Mexico and babes, I could do just about anything.And I went to my first day in choir, and I sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing. They opened their scores, the conductor gave the downbeat, and boom, they launched into the Kyrie from the ""Requiem"" by Mozart. In my entire life I had seen in black and white, and suddenly everything was in shocking Technicolor. The most transformative experience I've ever had — in that single moment, hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing, people together, the shared vision. And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself. And there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section, as it turns out.I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life. I had learned to read music by then, or slowly learning to read music. And that piece was published, and then I wrote another piece, and that got published. And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School. And I find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor.Well a couple of years ago, a friend of mine emailed me a link, a YouTube link, and said, ""You have got to see this."" And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me, singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called ""Sleep.""(Video) Britlin Losee: Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre. My name is Britlin Losee, and this is a video that I'd like to make for you. Here's me singing ""Sleep."" I'm a little nervous, just to let you know. ♫ If there are noises ♫ ♫ in the night ♫Eric Whitacre: I was thunderstruck. Britlin was so innocent and so sweet, and her voice was so pure. And I even loved seeing behind her; I could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room. Such an intimate video.And I had this idea: if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing, sing their parts — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — wherever they were in the world, post their videos to YouTube, we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir. So I wrote on my blog, ""OMG OMG."" I actually wrote, ""OMG,"" hopefully for the last time in public ever. (Laughter) And I sent out this call to singers. And I made free the download of the music to a piece that I had written in the year 2000 called ""Lux Aurumque,"" which means ""light and gold."" And lo and behold, people started uploading their videos.Now I should say, before that, what I did is I posted a conductor track of myself conducting. And it's in complete silence when I filmed it, because I was only hearing the music in my head, imagining the choir that would one day come to be. Afterwards, I played a piano track underneath so that the singers would have something to listen to. And then as the videos started to come in ...(Singing) This is Cheryl Ang from Singapore.(Singing) This is Evangelina Etienne(Singing) from Massachusetts.(Singing) Stephen Hanson from Sweden.(Singing) This is Jamal Walker from Dallas, Texas.(Singing)There was even a little soprano solo in the piece, and so I had auditions. And a number of sopranos uploaded their parts. I was told later, and also by lots of singers who were involved in this, that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take — they uploaded it. Here's our winner of the soprano solo. This is Melody Myers from Tennessee. (Singing) I love the little smile she does right over the top of the note — like, ""No problem, everything's fine.""(Laughter)And from the crowd emerged this young man, Scott Haines. And he said, ""Listen, this is the project I've been looking for my whole life. I'd like to be the person to edit this all together."" I said, ""Thank you, Scott. I'm so glad that you found me."" And Scott aggregated all of the videos. He scrubbed the audio. He made sure that everything lined up. And then we posted this video to YouTube about a year and a half ago. This is ""Lux Aurumque"" sung by the Virtual Choir.(Singing)I'll stop it there in the interest of time. (Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. So there's more. There's more. Thank you so much.And I had the same reaction you did. I actually was moved to tears when I first saw it. I just couldn't believe the poetry of all of it — these souls all on their own desert island, sending electronic messages in bottles to each other. And the video went viral. We had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it. And because of that, then a lot of singers started saying, ""All right, what's Virtual Choir 2.0?"" And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing, ""Sleep,"" which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 — poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri. And again, I posted a conductor video, and we started accepting submissions. This time we got some more mature members. (Singing) And some younger members.(Video) Soprano: ♫ Upon my pillow ♫ ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: That's Georgie from England. She's only nine. Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever seen?Someone did all eight videos — a bass even singing the soprano parts. This is Beau Awtin. (Video) Beau Awtin: ♫ Safe in bed ♫EW: And our goal — it was sort of an arbitrary goal — there was an MTV video where they all sang ""Lollipop"" and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody. And there were 900 people involved in that. So I told the singers, ""That's our goal. That's the number for us to beat."" And we just closed submissions January 10th, and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries. Thank you. (Applause) From Malta, Madagascar, Thailand, Vietnam, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, as far north as Alaska and as far south as New Zealand.And we also put a page on Facebook for the singers to upload their testimonials, what it was like for them, their experience singing it. And I've just chosen a few of them here. ""My sister and I used to sing in choirs together constantly. Now she's an airman in the air force constantly traveling. It's so wonderful to sing together again!"" I love the idea that she's singing with her sister. ""Aside from the beautiful music, it's great just to know I'm part of a worldwide community of people I never met before, but who are connected anyway."" And my personal favorite, ""When I told my husband that I was going to be a part of this, he told me that I did not have the voice for it."" Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you have heard that too. Me too. ""It hurt so much, and I shed some tears, but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words. It is a dream come true to be part of this choir, as I've never been part of one. When I placed a marker on the Google Earth Map, I had to go with the nearest city, which is about 400 miles away from where I live. As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world.""So two things struck me deeply about this. The first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other. It doesn't matter the technology. And the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection. It wasn't a virtual choir. There are people now online that are friends; they've never met. But, I know myself too, I feel this virtual esprit de corps, if you will, with all of them. I feel a closeness to this choir — almost like a family.What I'd like to close with then today is the first look at ""Sleep"" by Virtual Choir 2.0. This will be a premiere today. We're not finished with the video yet. You can imagine, with 2,000 synchronized YouTube videos, the render time is just atrocious. But we do have the first three minutes. And it's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first. You're the very first people to see this. This is ""Sleep,"" the Virtual Choir.(Video) Virtual Choir: ♫ The evening hangs ♫ ♫ beneath the moon ♫ ♫ A silver thread on darkened dune ♫ ♫ With closing eyes and resting head ♫ ♫ I know that sleep is coming soon ♫ ♫ Upon my pillow, ♫ ♫ safe in bed, ♫ ♫ a thousand pictures fill my head ♫ ♫ I cannot sleep ♫ ♫ my mind's aflight ♫ ♫ and yet my limbs seem made of lead ♫ ♫ If there are noises in the night ♫Eric Whitacre: Thank you very, very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_choir_2_000_voices_strong
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"I'm a huge believer in hands-on education. But you have to have the right tools. If I'm going to teach my daughter about electronics, I'm not going to give her a soldering iron. And similarly, she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands. So my wonderful student Sam and I decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of: Play-Doh. And so we spent a summer looking at different Play-Doh recipes. And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough — pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen. We have two favorite recipes — one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt. And they're great. We can make great little sculptures with these.But the really cool thing about them is when we put them together. You see that really salty Play-Doh? Well, it conducts electricity. And this is nothing new. It turns out that regular Play-Doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity, and high school physics teachers have used that for years. But our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial Play-Doh. And that sugar dough? Well it's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough. So what does that mean? Well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits — circuits that the most creative, tiny, little hands can build on their own.(Applause)And so I want to do a little demo for you. So if I take this salt dough, again, it's like the play-dough you probably made as kids, and I plug it in — it's a two-lead battery pack, simple battery pack, you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else — we can actually then light things up. But if any of you have studied electrical engineering, we can also create a short circuit. If I push these together, the light turns off. Right, the current wants to run through the play-dough, not through that LED. If I separate them again, I have some light. Well now if I take that sugar dough, the sugar dough doesn't want to conduct electricity. It's like a wall to the electricity. If I place that between, now all the dough is touching, but if I stick that light back in, I have light. In fact, I could even add some movement to my sculptures. If I want a spinning tail, let's grab a motor, put some play-dough on it, stick it on and we have spinning.(Applause)And once you have the basics, we can make a slightly more complicated circuit. We call this our sushi circuit. It's very popular with kids. I plug in again the power to it. And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits. I can start plugging in lots of lights. And we can start talking about things like electrical load. What happens if I put in lots of lights and then add a motor? It'll dim. We can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we've done. You could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this.So this is all in your home kitchen. We've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab. We have a website, it's all there. These are the home recipes. We've got some videos. You can make them yourselves. And it's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone. We've had a mom in Utah who used them with her kids, to a science researcher in the U.K., and curriculum developers in Hawaii.So I would encourage you all to grab some Play-Doh, grab some salt, grab some sugar and start playing. We don't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers, but maybe we should.Have fun. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/annmarie_thomas_squishy_circuits
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"Ten years ago, on a Tuesday morning, I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It was a routine training jump, like many more I'd done since I became a paratrooper 27 years before. We went down to the airfield early because this is the Army and you always go early. You do some routine refresher training, and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you. And you put on the T-10 parachute. And you're very careful how you put the straps, particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs. And then you put on your reserve, and then you put on your heavy rucksack. And then a jumpmaster comes, and he's an experienced NCO in parachute operations. He checks you out, he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed, your shoulders are crushed down, and, of course, he's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well. Then you sit down, and you wait a little while, because this is the Army. Then you load the aircraft, and then you stand up and you get on, and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this, in a line of people, and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft. And you wait a little bit longer, because this is the Air Force teaching the Army how to wait.Then you take off. And it's painful enough now — and I think it's designed this way — it's painful enough so you want to jump. You didn't really want to jump, but you want out. So you get in the aircraft, you're flying along, and at 20 minutes out, these jumpmasters start giving you commands. They give 20 minutes — that's a time warning. You sit there, OK. Then they give you 10 minutes. And of course, you're responding with all of these. And that's to boost everybody's confidence, to show that you're not scared. Then they give you, ""Get ready."" Then they go, ""Outboard personnel, stand up."" If you're an outboard personnel, now you stand up. If you're an inboard personnel, stand up. And then you hook up, and you hook up your static line. And at that point, you think, ""Hey, guess what? I'm probably going to jump. There's no way to get out of this at this point."" You go through some additional checks, and then they open the door.And this was that Tuesday morning in September, and it was pretty nice outside. So nice air comes flowing in. The jumpmasters start to check the door. And then when it's time to go, a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes, ""Go."" The first guy goes, and you're just in line, and you just kind of lumber to the door. Jump is a misnomer; you fall. You fall outside the door, you're caught in the slipstream. The first thing you do is lock into a tight body position — head down in your chest, your arms extended, put over your reserve parachute. You do that because, 27 years before, an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that. I have no idea whether it makes any difference, but he seemed to make sense, and I wasn't going to test the hypothesis that he'd be wrong. And then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open. If you don't get an opening shock, you don't get a parachute — you've got a whole new problem set. But typically you do; typically it opens. And of course, if your leg straps aren't set right, at that point you get another little thrill. Boom.So then you look around, you're under a canopy and you say, ""This is good."" Now you prepare for the inevitable. You are going to hit the ground. You can't delay that much. And you really can't decide where you hit very much, because they pretend you can steer, but you're being delivered. So you look around, where you're going to land, you try to make yourself ready. And then as you get close, you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line, so that it's not on you when you land, and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall. Now the Army teaches you to do five points of performance — the toes of your feet, your calves, your thighs, your buttocks and your push-up muscles. It's this elegant little land, twist and roll. And that's not going to hurt. In 30-some years of jumping, I never did one. (Laughter) I always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window.(Laughter)And as soon as I hit, the first thing I did is I'd see if I'd broken anything that I needed. I'd shake my head, and I'd ask myself the eternal question: ""Why didn't I go into banking?"" (Laughter) And I'd look around, and then I'd see another paratrooper, a young guy or girl, and they'd have pulled out their M4 carbine and they'd be picking up their equipment. They'd be doing everything that we had taught them. And I realized that, if they had to go into combat, they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders. And I realized that, if they came out of combat, it would be because we led them well. And I was hooked again on the importance of what I did.So now I do that Tuesday morning jump, but it's not any jump — that was September 11th, 2001. And when we took off from the airfield, America was at peace. When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed. And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real — and leadership seemed important. But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general. I'd been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn't know it.I was raised with traditional stories of leadership: Robert E. Lee, John Buford at Gettysburg. And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership. This was my father in Vietnam. And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful; they didn't lie, cheat, steal or abandon their comrades. And I still believe real leaders are like that. But in my first 25 years of career, I had a bunch of different experiences.One of my first battalion commanders, I worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with Lt. McChrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march, and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds. And I'm not sure that was real interaction. But then a couple of years later, when I was a company commander, I went out to the National Training Center. And we did an operation, and my company did a dawn attack — you know, the classic dawn attack: you prepare all night, move to the line of departure. And I had an armored organization at that point. We move forward, and we get wiped out — I mean, wiped out immediately. The enemy didn't break a sweat doing it. And after the battle, they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an ""after action review"" to teach you what you've done wrong. Sort of leadership by humiliation. They put a big screen up, and they take you through everything: ""and then you didn't do this, and you didn't do this, etc."" I walked out feeling as low as a snake's belly in a wagon rut. And I saw my battalion commander, because I had let him down. And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, ""Stanley, I thought you did great."" And in one sentence, he lifted me, put me back on my feet, and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure.When 9/11 came, 46-year-old Brig. Gen. McChrystal sees a whole new world. First, the things that are obvious, that you're familiar with: the environment changed — the speed, the scrutiny, the sensitivity of everything now is so fast, sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it. But everything we do is in a different context. More importantly, the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries. And instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them, I'm now leading a force that's dispersed, and I've got to use other techniques. I've got to use video teleconferences, I've got to use chat, I've got to use email, I've got to use phone calls — I've got to use everything I can, not just for communication, but for leadership. A 22-year-old individual operating alone, thousands of miles from me, has got to communicate to me with confidence. I have to have trust in them and vice versa. And I also have to build their faith. And that's a new kind of leadership for me.We had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations. An emerging opportunity came — didn't have time to get everybody together. So we had to get complex intelligence together, we had to line up the ability to act. It was sensitive, we had to go up the chain of command, convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium. We failed. The mission didn't work. And so now what we had to do is I had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force, rebuild their confidence — me and them, and them and me, and our seniors and us as a force — all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder. Entirely new requirement.Also, the people had changed. You probably think that the force that I led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons. In reality, much of the force I led looked exactly like you. It was men, women, young, old — not just from military; from different organizations, many of them detailed to us just from a handshake. And so instead of giving orders, you're now building consensus and you're building a sense of shared purpose. Probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference, the ages, had changed so much. I went down to be with a Ranger platoon on an operation in Afghanistan, and on that operation, a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a Taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team. We talked about the operation, and then at the end I did what I often do with a force like that. I asked, ""Where were you on 9/11?"" And one young Ranger in the back — his hair's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold Afghan wind — he said, ""Sir, I was in the sixth grade."" And it reminded me that we're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness, and yet he has different experiences, in many cases a different vocabulary, a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than I do and many of the other senior leaders. And yet, we need to have that shared sense.It also produced something which I call an inversion of expertise, because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot, that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn't what the force was doing anymore. So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven't done what the people you're leading are doing? And it's a brand new leadership challenge. And it forced me to become a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower. And yet, again, you're not all in one room. Then another thing. There's an effect on you and on your leaders. There's an impact, it's cumulative. You don't reset, or recharge your battery every time.I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces. And I remembered his son was in our force. And I said, ""John, where's your son? And how is he?"" And he said, ""Sir, he's fine. Thanks for asking."" I said, ""Where is he now?"" And he pointed at the screen, he said, ""He's in that firefight."" Think about watching your brother, father, daughter, son, wife in a firefight in real time and you can't do anything about it. Think about knowing that over time. And it's a new cumulative pressure on leaders.And you have to watch and take care of each other. I probably learned the most about relationships. I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger — and there are more than 2,000 of them — says a six-stanza Ranger creed. You may know one line of it, it says, ""I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy."" And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. It's a promise. Every Ranger promises every other Ranger, ""No matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming."" And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing.And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with — godfather to one of their kids — he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, ""I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive."" And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career.And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. That was my journey. I hope it's not over. I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. This isn't easy stuff. It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. (Laughter) And it isn't always fair. You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stanley_mcchrystal
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"So what does the happiest man in the world look like? He certainly doesn't look like me. He looks like this. His name is Matthieu Ricard. So how do you get to be the happiest man in the world? Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain. And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex. And Matthieu's happiness measure is off the charts. He's by far the happiest man ever measured by science. Which leads us to a question: What was he thinking when he was being measured? Perhaps something very naughty. (Laughter) Actually, he was meditating on compassion. Matthieu's own experience is that compassion is the happiest state ever.Reading about Matthieu was one of the pivotal moments of my life. My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime — and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale. And learning about Matthieu gave me a new angle to look at my work. Matthieu's brain scan shows that compassion is not a chore. Compassion is something that creates happiness. Compassion is fun. And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game. Because if compassion was a chore, nobody's going to do it, except maybe the Dalai Lama or something. But if compassion was fun, everybody's going to do it. Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun.But fun is not enough. What if compassion is also profitable? What if compassion is also good for business? Then, every boss, every manager in the world, will want to have compassion — like this. That would create the conditions for world peace. So, I started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting. Fortunately, I didn't have to look very far. Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes — in Google, my company.I know there are other compassionate companies in the world, but Google is the place I'm familiar with because I've been there for 10 years, so I'll use Google as the case study. Google is a company born of idealism. It's a company that thrives on idealism. And maybe because of that, compassion is organic and widespread company-wide. In Google, expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern. It's sort of a funny pattern. It starts with a small group of Googlers taking the initiative to do something. And they don't usually ask for permission; they just go ahead and do it, and then other Googlers join in, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And sometimes it gets big enough to become official. So in other words, it almost always starts from the bottom up.And let me give you some examples. The first example is the largest annual community event — where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities — was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official, because it just became too big. Another example, three Googlers — a chef, an engineer and, most funny, a massage therapist — three of them, they learned about a region in India where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility. So what do they do? They just go ahead and start a fundraiser. And they raise enough money to build this hospital — the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people. During the Haiti earthquake, a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones. And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices.In China for example, one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China, involving more than 1,000 schools in China, working on issues such as education, poverty, health care and the environment. There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts. And this idea, again, came from the grassroots, from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job. And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy. It was two persons saying, ""Let's do this,"" and the company said, ""Yes."" So it turns out that Google is a compassionate company, because Googlers found compassion to be fun.But again, fun is not enough. There are also real business benefits. So what are they? The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders. What does that mean? There are three components of compassion. There is the affective component, which is, ""I feel for you."" There is the cognitive component, which is, ""I understand you."" And there is a motivational component, which is, ""I want to help you."" So what has this got to do with business leadership? According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins, and documented in the book ""Good to Great,"" it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness. And he calls them ""Level 5 leaders."" These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, possess two important qualities, and they are humility and ambition. These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good. And because they're ambitious for a greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos. And they, according to the research, make the best business leaders. And if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion, we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion — understanding people and empathizing with people — inhibits, tones down, what I call the excessive self-obsession that's in us, therefore creating the conditions for humility.The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good. In other words, compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders. And this is the first compelling business benefit. The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce. Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good. It creates a vibrant, energetic community where people admire and respect each other. I mean, you come to work in the morning, and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India. It's like how can you not be inspired by those people — your own coworkers? So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration, initiative and creativity. It makes us a highly effective company.So, having said all that, what is the secret formula for brewing compassion in the corporate setting? In our experience, there are three ingredients. The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good. So always think: how is your company and your job serving the greater good? Or, how can you further serve the greater good? This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in. That's one.The second ingredient is autonomy. So in Google, there's a lot of autonomy. And one of our most popular managers jokes that, this is what he says, ""Google is a place where the inmates run the asylum."" And he considers himself one of the inmates. If you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free, they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way.The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth. Leadership training in Google, for example, places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, empathy and compassion, because we believe that leadership begins with character. We even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence, which we jokingly call ""Searching Inside Yourself."" It's less naughty than it sounds. So I'm an engineer by training, but I'm one of the creators and instructors of this course, which I find kind of funny, because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence. What a company.(Laughter)So ""Search Inside Yourself"" — how does it work? It works in three steps. The first step is attention training. Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence. The second step follows the first step.The second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery. So using the supercharged attention from step one, we create a high-resolution perception into the cognitive and emotive processes. What does that mean? It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, objectivity and from a third-person perspective. And once you can do that, you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery.The third step, following the second step, is to create new mental habits. What does that mean? Imagine this. Imagine whenever you meet any other person, any time you meet a person, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, ""I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy."" Imagine you can do that. Having this habit, this mental habit, changes everything at work. Because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people, and it creates trust, and trust creates a lot of good working relationships. And this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace. Someday, we hope to open-source ""Search Inside Yourself"" so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference.And in closing, I want to end the same place I started, with happiness. I want to quote this guy — the guy in robes, not the other guy — the Dalai Lama, who said, ""If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."" I found this to be true, both on the individual level and at a corporate level. And I hope that compassion will be both fun and profitable for you too.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chade_meng_tan_everyday_compassion_at_google
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"I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous. I went to prison — difficult. I worked in a coal mine — dangerous. I filmed in war zones — difficult and dangerous. And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this — fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end. In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience. So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different.So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay. I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk. (Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again — (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be. So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it. But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity. (Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks? It's a lot. That's just a working title, by the way. (Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights.Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty. But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising. And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys. (Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie.(Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising. So the movie will be called ""The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."" So what happens in ""The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,"" is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end — from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X. Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ... these people will be married to the film in perpetuity — forever. And so the film explores this whole idea — (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.) It's what? (MK: It's redundant.) In perpetuity, forever? I'm a redundant person. (MK: I'm just saying.) That was more for emphasis. It was, ""In perpetuity. Forever."" But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film. So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ... the greatest car you ever drove from ""The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,"" the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of ""The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.""Xavier Kochhar: So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film? (MS: Get them to finance the film.)MS: And actually we show the whole process of how does it work. The goal of this whole film is transparency. You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie. So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish. And I would love for CEG to help make it happen.Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience.Guy: I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though.XK: Do you have a perspective — I don't want to use ""angle"" because that has a negative connotation — but do you know how this is going to play out? (MS: No idea.)David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this?MS: 1.5 million. (DC: Okay.)John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands.XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots.MS: What do you think the response is going to be?Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be ""no.""MS: But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me?JK: Both.MS: ... Meaning not so optimistic. So, sir, can you help me? I need help.MK: I can help you.MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome.MK: We've gotta figure out which brands.MS: Yeah. (MK: That's the challenge.) When you look at the people you deal with ..MK: We've got some places we can go. (MS: Okay.) Turn the camera off.MS: I thought ""Turn the camera off"" meant, ""Let's have an off-the-record conversation."" Turns out it really means, ""We want nothing to do with your movie.""MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared. None of them wanted anything to do with this movie. I was amazed. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project. And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible. Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses? No, that's what I thought.But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this. Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever. That wouldn't have been a problem at all. This would have been fine. But what this image represents was the problem. See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is —- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up. So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No. (Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency — free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices — that last line being probably the biggest problem. You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days. Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it. But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes. But why? Well, transparency is scary — (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear. (Laughter) It's unpredictable — (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road. And it's also very risky. (Laughter) What else is risky? Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip. (Laughter) That's very risky.Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, ""No, we want you to tell a story. We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story."" See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie — and there he is giving me the look he often gave me — he would say, ""Son, there's three sides to every story. There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story."" Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story. But with only one company, one agency willing to help me — and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years — I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team. So what you suddenly started to realize — or what I started to realize — is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem.(Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make. And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have. And then my friends who make small independent films say, ""Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?"" And the movie is called ""The Greatest Movie Ever Sold."" So how specifically will we see Ban in the film? Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant. While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, ""Are you fresh enough for this interview? Are you ready? You look a little nervous. I want to help you calm down. So maybe you should put some one before the interview."" So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents. Whether it's a ""Floral Fusion"" or a ""Paradise Winds,"" they'll have their chance. We will have them geared for both male or female — solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be. That's the two-cent tour. So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour.Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand. Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand. So we don't have the budgets that other brands have. So doing things like this — you know, remind people about Ban — is kind of why were interested in it.MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban? Ban is blank.KF: That's a great question.(Laughter)Woman: Superior technology.MS: Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit.Man: We talk about bold, fresh. I think ""fresh"" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus ""fights odor and wetness."" It keeps you fresh. How do we keep you fresher longer — better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher. Things like that that are more of that positive benefit.MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation. What about me? What about a regular guy? I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes. They need to tell me about my brand.(Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand?Man: Um, my brand? I don't know. I like really nice clothes.Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day.MS: All right, what is brand Gerry?Gerry: Unique. (MS: Unique.)Man: I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor. I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that. But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too.Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz.Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly.Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl — I don't know.Man 3: I'm the pet guy. I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world. So I guess that's my brand. In my warped little industry, that's my brand.Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods.Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand. Is that something?Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand.Tom: I'm Tom.MS: Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly.(Laughter)And what I realized is I needed an expert. I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your ""brand personality."" And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg. They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality. If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me.(Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right?MS: I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family.A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are.MS: These are the people who shape the way I look at the world.A: Tell me about this world.MS: This world? I think your world is the world that you live in — like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do. All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia.A: What's the next one you want to talk about?MS: The next one: This was the best day ever.A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are?MS: It's like, who do I want to be? I like things that are different. I like things that are weird. I like weird things.A: Tell me about the ""why"" phase — what does that do for us? What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now? Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent? Tell me a little bit about that part. ... A little more about you that is not who you are. What are some other metamorphoses that you've had? ... Doesn't have to be fear. What kind of roller coaster are you on?MS: EEEEEE! (A: Thank you.) No, thank you.A: Thanks for you patience. (MS: Great job.)A: Yeah. (MS: Thanks a lot.) All right.MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this. There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there.Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality — the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand. Those are juxtaposed very nicely together. And I think there's almost a paradox with those. And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both. Most companies tend to — and it's human nature — to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see. What other brands are like that? The first on here is the classic, Apple. And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue. Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing.MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand? If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be? Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing? Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative? Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf. Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007? Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah? Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda?Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, ""no,"" they didn't want any part of this project. They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product. But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell — stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind.They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing. We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising. In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no flyers, nothing. (Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America. What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly.And that's what these brands did. They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, ""Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind. I'm going to deal directly with the artist. I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world.""And how has that been for them? Has it been successful? Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look. According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then — and this isn't even the whole thing — we've had 900 million media impressions for this film. That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period. That's only online — no print, no TV. The film hasn't even been distributed yet. It's not even online. It's not even streaming. It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet. So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum. And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part.What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity. I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged. I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks. We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them. Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear. We've got to put that bear in a cage. (Laughter) Embrace fear. Embrace risk. One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk.And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency. Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way. And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, ""Embrace Transparency,"" has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay. (Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world. EMC presents: ""Embrace Transparency.""Thank you very much, guys.(Applause)June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100? MS: That is a fantastic question. I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation — a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/morgan_spurlock_the_greatest_ted_talk_ever_sold
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"I have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects. But the coolest I ever worked on was around this guy. This guy's name is TEMPT. TEMPT was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s. And he came up home from a run one day and said, ""Dad, my legs are tingling."" And that was the onset of ALS. So TEMPT is now completely paralyzed. He only has use of his eyes.I was exposed to him. I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world. And so we decided that we were going to sponsor Tony, TEMPT, and his cause. So I went and met with his brother and father and said, ""We're going to give you this money. What are you going to do with it?"" And his brother said, ""I just want to be able to talk to Tony again. I just want to be able to communicate with him and him to be able to communicate with me."" And I said, ""Wait a second, isn't that — I've seen Stephen Hawking — don't all paralyzed people have the ability to communicate via these devices?"" And he said, ""No, unless you're in the upper echelon and you've got really amazing insurance, you can't actually do that. These devices aren't accessible to people."" And I said, ""Well, how do you actually communicate?"" Has everyone seen the movie ""The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?"" That's how they communicate — so run their finger along. I said, ""That's archaic. How can that be?""So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash. I committed to his brother and his father right then and there — I'm like, ""All right, here's the deal: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a machine, and we're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again. Because it's a travesty that someone who still has all of that in him isn't able to communicate it.""So I spoke at a conference a couple months after that. I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space. So they go around and do art installations like this. All the things that go up there, they said there's a life cycle. First it starts with the sexual organs, then it starts with cuss words, then it was Bush slanders and then people actually got to art. But there was always a life cycle to their presentations. So I went home and was having dinner with my wife and was telling her about this, and we were like, ""Well wait a second. If we know that this technology exists where you can use your eyes to control things, why don't we figure out a way for TEMPT to control a laser and he could do graf again? Well that would be awesome.""So that started the journey. And about two years later, about a year later, after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around, we'd accomplished a couple things. One, we battered down the doors of the insurance companies, and we actually got TEMPT a machine that let him communicate — a Stephen Hawking machine. (Applause) Which was awesome. And he's seriously one of the funniest — I call him Yoda, because you talk to the guy, you get an email from him, and you're like, ""I'm not worthy. This guy's so amazing.""The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world — literally every corner of the world — into our house. My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house. A lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls. But for over two weeks, we programmed, we went to the Venice boardwalk, my kids got involved, my dog got involved, and we created this.This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description. This is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach boardwalk, some copper wire and some stuff from Home Depot and Radio Shack. We took a PS3 camera, hacked it open, mounted it to an LED light, and now there's a device that is free — you build this yourself, we publish the code for free, you download the software for free. And now we've created a device that has absolutely no limitations. There's no insurance company that can say ""No."" There's no hospital that can say ""No."" Anybody who's paralyzed now has access to actually draw or communicate using only their eyes.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you guys very much. That was awesome.So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room. I love this picture, because this is someone else's room and that's his room. So there's all this hustle and bustle going on for the big unveiling. And after over a year of planning, two weeks of programming, carb-fest and all-night sessions, Tony drew again for the first time in seven years. And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking over his life support system. We kicked his bed so that he could see out. And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital. And he drew again for the first time, in front of his family and friends — and you can only imagine what the feeling in the parking lot was. The funny thing was, we had to break into the parking lot too, so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too.(Laughter)So at the end of this, he sent us an email, and this is what the email said: ""That was the first time I've drawn anything for seven years. I feel like I had been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could breathe."" Isn't that awesome?(Applause)So that's kind of our battle cry. That's what keeps us going and keeps us developing. And we've got such a long way to go with this. This is an amazing device, but it's the equivalent of an Etch A Sketch. And someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more. So we're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger.Since that time, we've had all kinds of acknowledgment. We've won a bunch of awards. Remember, it's free; none of us are making any money on this thing. It's all coming out of our own pockets. So the awards were like, ""Oh, this is fantastic."" Armstrong Twittered about us, and then in December, Time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010, which was really cool.(Applause)The coolest thing about this — and this is what's completing the whole circle — is that in April of this year, at the Geffen MOCA in downtown Los Angeles, there's going to be an exhibition called ""Art of the Streets."" And ""Art of the Streets"" is going to have pretty much the bad-asses of the street art scene — Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KAWS — all of these guys will be there. TEMPT's going to be in the show, which is pretty awesome.(Applause)So basically this is my point: If you see something that's not possible, make it possible. Everything in this room wasn't possible — this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter — wasn't possible at one point. Make it possible, everyone in this room. I'm not a programmer, never done anything with ocular recognition technology, but I just recognized something and associated myself with amazing people so that we could make something happen. And this is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who?Thank you guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mick_ebeling_the_invention_that_unlocked_a_locked_in_artist
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"Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17? Do you know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be a biker chick. (Laughter) I wanted to race cars, and I wanted to be a cowgirl, and I wanted to be Mowgli from ""The Jungle Book."" Because they were all about being free, the wind in your hair — just to be free. And on my seventeenth birthday, my parents, knowing how much I loved speed, gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday. Not that we could have afforded I drive, but to give me the dream of driving.And on my seventeenth birthday, I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence, as I always had all my life — my visually impaired sister — to go to see an eye specialist. Because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters. And my little sister wanted to be a pilot — God help her. So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun. And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday. And he said, ""So what are you going to do to celebrate?"" And I took that driving lesson, and I said, ""I'm going to learn how to drive."" And then there was a silence — one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong. And he turned to my mother, and he said, ""You haven't told her yet?"" On my seventeenth birthday, as Janis Ian would best say, I learned the truth at 17. I am, and have been since birth, legally blind.And you know, how on earth did I get to 17 and not know that? Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, ""A Boy Named Sue."" I'm the eldest of three. I was born in 1971. And very shortly after my birth, my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism. And what the hell does that mean to you? So let me just tell you, the great part of all of this? I can't see this clock and I can't see the timing, so holy God, woohoo! (Laughter) I might buy some more time. But more importantly, let me tell you — I'm going to come up really close here. Don't freak out, Pat. Hey. See this hand? Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline. Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney. (Laughter) And every woman, you are so beautiful. And when I want to look beautiful, I step three feet away from the mirror, and I don't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting I've done all my life from all the dark lights.The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision. No special needs schools. No labels. No limitations. My ability and my potential. And they decided to tell me that I could see. So just like Johnny Cash's Sue, a boy given a girl's name, I would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive, when they were no longer there to protect me, or just take it all away. But more significantly, they gave me the ability to believe, totally, to believe that I could. And so when I heard that eye specialist tell me all the things, a big fat ""no,"" everybody imagines I was devastated. And don't get me wrong, because when I first heard it — aside from the fact that I thought he was insane — I got that thump in my chest, just that ""huh?"" But very quickly I recovered. It was like that. The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me. And I swear to God, I walked out of his office, ""I will drive. I will drive. You're mad. I'll drive. I know I can drive.""And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child — he taught me how to sail, knowing I could never see where I was going, I could never see the shore, and I couldn't see the sails, and I couldn't see the destination. But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face. And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive. And for the next 11 years, I swore nobody would ever find out that I couldn't see, because I didn't want to be a failure, and I didn't want to be weak. And I believed I could do it. So I rammed through life as only a Casey can do. And I was an archeologist, and then I broke things. And then I managed a restaurant, and then I slipped on things. And then I was a masseuse. And then I was a landscape gardener. And then I went to business school. And you know, disabled people are hugely educated. And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture. And they didn't even know. And it's extraordinary how far belief can take you.In 1999, two and a half years into that job, something happened. Wonderfully, my eyes decided, enough. And temporarily, very unexpectedly, they dropped. And I'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world, where you work hard, play hard, you gotta be the best, you gotta be the best. And two years in, I really could see very little. And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999, saying something I never imagined that I would say. I was 28 years old. I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do. And I simply said, ""I'm sorry. I can't see, and I need help."" Asking for help can be incredibly difficult. And you all know what it is. You don't need to have a disability to know that. We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure. And it's frightening, isn't it? But all that belief had fueled me so long.And can I tell you, operating in the sighted world when you can't see, it's kind of difficult — it really is. Can I tell you, airports are a disaster. Oh, for the love of God. And please, any designers out there? OK, designers, please put up your hands, even though I can't even see you. I always end up in the gents' toilets. And there's nothing wrong with my sense of smell. But can I just tell you, the little sign for a gents' toilet or a ladies' toilet is determined by a triangle. Have you ever tried to see that if you have Vaseline in front of your eyes? It's such a small thing, right? And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you're not, or to be somebody that you aren't?And so after admitting I couldn't see to HR, they sent me off to an eye specialist. And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life. But before I got to him, I was so lost. I had no idea who I was anymore. And that eye specialist, he didn't bother testing my eyes. God no, it was therapy. And he asked me several questions, of which many were, ""Why? Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself? And do you love what you do, Caroline?"" And you know, when you go to a global consulting firm, they put a chip in your head, and you're like, ""I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture."" (Laughter) To leave would be failure. And he said, ""Do you love it?"" I couldn't even speak I was so choked up. I just was so — how do I tell him? And then he said to me, ""What did you want to be when you were little?"" Now listen, I wasn't going to say to him, ""Well, I wanted to race cars and motorbikes."" Hardly appropriate at this moment in time. He thought I was mad enough anyway. And as I left his office, he called me back and he said, ""I think it's time. I think it's time to stop fighting and do something different."" And that door closed. And that silence just outside a doctor's office, that many of us know. And my chest ached. And I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea. But I did know the game was up.And I went home, and, because the pain in my chest ached so much, I thought, ""I'll go out for a run."" Really not a very sensible thing to do. And I went on a run that I know so well. I know this run so well, by the back of my hand. I always run it perfectly fine. I count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with. And there was a rock that I always missed. And I'd never fallen on it, never. And there I was crying away, and smash, bash on my rock. Broken, fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000, typical Irish weather on a Wednesday — gray, snot, tears everywhere, ridiculously self-pitying.And I was floored, and I was broken, and I was angry. And I didn't know what to do. And I sat there for quite some time going, ""How am I going to get off this rock and go home? Because who am I going to be? What am I going to be?"" And I thought about my dad, and I thought, ""Good God, I'm so not Sue now."" And I kept thinking over and over in my mind, what had happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn't I understand? And you know, the extraordinary part of it is I just simply had no answers. I had lost my belief. Look where my belief had brought me to. And now I had lost it. And now I really couldn't see. I was crumpled. And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, ""What do you want to be? What do you want to be? What did you want to be when you were little? Do you love what you do? Do something different. What do you want to be? Do something different. What do you want to be?"" And really slowly, slowly, slowly, it happened. And it did happen this way. And then the minute it came, it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart — something different. ""Well, how about Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book'? You don't get more different than that."" And the moment, and I mean the moment, the moment that hit me, I swear to God, it was like woo hoo! You know — something to believe in. And nobody can tell me no. Yes, you can say I can't be an archeologist. But you can't tell me, no, I can't be Mowgli, because guess what? Nobody's ever done it before, so I'm going to go do it. And it doesn't matter whether I'm a boy or a girl, I'm just going to scoot.And so I got off that rock, and, oh my God, did I run home. And I sprinted home, and I didn't fall, and I didn't crash. And I ran up the stairs, and there was one of my favorite books of all time, ""Travels on My Elephant"" by Mark Shand — I don't know if any of you know it. And I grabbed this book off, and I'm sitting on the couch going, ""I know what I'm going to do. I know how to be Mowgli. I'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant. I'm going to be an elephant handler."" And I had no idea how I was going to be an elephant handler. From global management consultant to elephant handler. I had no idea how. I had no idea how you hire an elephant, get an elephant. I didn't speak Hindi. I'd never been to India. Hadn't a clue. But I knew I would. Because, when you make a decision at the right time and the right place, God, that universe makes it happen for you.Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi. And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India. (Applause) The most powerful thing of all, it's not that I didn't achieve before then. Oh my God, I did. But you know, I was believing in the wrong thing. Because I wasn't believing in me, really me, all the bits of me — all the bits of all of us. Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we're not? And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens.And you know what, that trip, that thousand kilometers, it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations. Six thousand people got to see because of that. When I came home off that elephant, do you know what the most amazing part was? I chucked in my job at Accenture. I left, and I became a social entrepreneur, and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family, which deals with Asian elephant conservation. And I set up Kanchi, because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant, because disability is like the elephant in the room. And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way — no charity, no pity. But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible. It was extraordinary. That's what I wanted to do. And I never thought about noes anymore, or not seeing, or any of that kind of nothing. It just seemed that it was possible.And you know, the oddest part is, when I was on my way traveling here to TED, I'll be honest, I was petrified. And I speak, but this is an amazing audience, and what am I doing here? But as I was traveling here, you'll be very happy to know, I did use my white symbol stick cane, because it's really good to skip queues in the airport. And I got my way here being happily proud that I couldn't see. And the one thing is that a really good friend of mine, he texted me on the way over, knowing I was scared. Even though I present confident, I was scared. He said, ""Be you."" And so here I am. This is me, all of me.(Applause)And I have learned, you know what, cars and motorbikes and elephants, that's not freedom. Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom. And I never needed eyes to see — never. I simply needed vision and belief. And if you truly believe — and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart — you can make change happen. And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us — woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever — everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves. I no longer want anybody to be invisible. We all have to be included. And stop with the labels, the limiting. Losing of labels, because we are not jam jars. We are extraordinary, different, wonderful people.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caroline_casey_looking_past_limits
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"(Applause)Thank you.(Music)♫ Slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds. ♫ ♫ Standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls. ♫ ♫ Cutting through the veil of illusion. ♫ ♫ Moving beyond past conclusions. ♫ ♫ Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere right now, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ Searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we're throwing away. ♫ ♫ Trying to see the world ♫ ♫ through the junk we produce everyday. ♫ ♫ They say nothing lasts forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in history, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ The Romans, the Spanish ♫ ♫ the British, the Dutch, ♫ ♫ American exceptionalism, so out of touch. ♫ ♫ The folly of empire repeating its course, ♫ ♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time. ♫ ♫ But the world can't take it very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change things, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ ♫ They say nothing last forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it, that you can see. ♫ ♫ If the oceans don't make it, neither will we. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change the outcome, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_browne_if_i_could_be_anywhere
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"First, a video. Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush — tasty mush — but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure — in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange.And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls ""Goldilocks conditions"" — not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it.(Laughter)Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter — quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and — bam! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close.You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquids, such as water. Why? Well, in gases, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of liquid water. And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple — single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the Ice Age tundra of Siberia — tough, tough environment — into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning — learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.So — Here we are, back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.And now, finally — this is what I want. I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high-school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.I thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history
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"How often do we hear that people just don't care? How many times have you been told that real, substantial change isn't possible because most people are too selfish, too stupid or too lazy to try to make a difference in their community? I propose to you today that apathy as we think we know it doesn't actually exist; but rather, that people do care, but that we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way.I'll give you some examples of what I mean. Let's start with city hall. You ever see one of these before? This is a newspaper ad. It's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what's happening. As you can see, it's impossible to read. You need to get halfway down to even find out which address they're talking about, and then further down, in tiny 10-point font, to find out how to actually get involved. Imagine if the private sector advertised in the same way — if Nike wanted to sell a pair of shoes —(Laughter)And put an ad in the paper like that.(Applause)Now, that would never happen. You'll never see an ad like that, because Nike actually wants you to buy their shoes, whereas the city of Toronto clearly doesn't want you involved with the planning process, otherwise their ads would look something like this, with all the information laid out clearly. As long as the city's putting out notices like this to try to get people engaged, then of course people aren't going to be engaged. But that's not apathy; that's intentional exclusion.Public space.(Applause)The manner in which we mistreat our public spaces is a huge obstacle towards any type of progressive political change, because we've essentially put a price tag on freedom of expression. Whoever has the most money gets the loudest voice, dominating the visual and mental environment. The problem with this model is there are some amazing messages that need to be said, that aren't profitable to say. So you're never going to see them on a billboard.The media plays an important role in developing our relationship with political change, mainly by ignoring politics and focusing on celebrities and scandals, but even when they do talk about important political issues, they do it in a way that I feel discourages engagement. I'll give you an example. The ""Now"" magazine from last week: progressive, downtown weekly in Toronto. This is the cover story. It's an article about a theater performance, and it starts with basic information about where it is, in case you actually want to go and see it after you've read the article — where, the time, the website. Same with this — it's a movie review. An art review. A book review — where the reading is in case you want to go. A restaurant — you might not want to just read about it, maybe you want to go there. So they tell you where it is, the prices, the address, the phone number, etc.Then you get to their political articles. Here's a great article about an important election race that's happening. It talks about the candidates, written very well, but no information, no follow-up, no websites for the campaigns, no information about when the debates are, where the campaign offices are. Here's another good article, about a new campaign opposing privatization of transit, without any contact information for the campaign. The message seems to be that the readers are most likely to want to eat, maybe read a book, maybe see a movie, but not be engaged in their community. You might think this is a small thing, but I think it's important, because it sets a tone and it reinforces the dangerous idea that politics is a spectator sport.Heroes: How do we view leadership? Look at these 10 movies. What do they have in common? Anyone? They all have heroes who were chosen. Someone came up to them and said, ""You're the chosen one. There's a prophecy. You have to save the world."" And then they go off and save the world because they've been told to, with a few people tagging along. This helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders — because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about. A heroic effort is a collective effort, number one. Number two, it's imperfect; it's not very glamorous, and doesn't suddenly start and suddenly end. It's an ongoing process your whole life. But most importantly, it's voluntary. It's voluntary. As long as we're teaching our kids that heroism starts when someone scratches a mark on your forehead, or someone tells you you're part of a prophecy, they're missing the most important characteristic of leadership, which is that it comes from within. It's about following your own dreams, uninvited, and then working with others to make those dreams come true.Political parties: oh, boy. Political parties could and should be one of the basic entry points for people to get engaged in politics. Instead, they've become, sadly, uninspiring and uncreative organizations that rely so heavily on market research and polling and focus groups that they end up all saying the same thing, pretty much regurgitating back to us what we already want to hear at the expense of putting forward bold and creative ideas. And people can smell that, and it feeds cynicism.(Applause)Charitable status. Groups who have charitable status in Canada aren't allowed to do advocacy. This is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change, because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced, especially during election time. Which leads us to the last one, which is: our elections.As you may have noticed, our elections in Canada are a complete joke. We use out-of-date systems that are unfair and create random results. Canada's currently led by a party that most Canadians didn't actually want. How can we honestly and genuinely encourage more people to vote when votes don't count in Canada? You add all this up together, and of course people are apathetic. It's like trying to run into a brick wall.Now, I'm not trying to be negative by throwing all these obstacles out and explaining what's in our way. Quite the opposite — I actually think people are amazing and smart and that they do care, but that, as I said, we live in this environment where all these obstacles are being put in our way. As long as we believe that people, our own neighbors, are selfish, stupid or lazy, then there's no hope. But we can change all those things I mentioned. We can open up city hall. We can reform our electoral systems. We can democratize our public spaces.My main message is: if we can redefine apathy, not as some kind of internal syndrome, but as a complex web of cultural barriers that reinforces disengagement, and if we can clearly define, clearly identify what those obstacles are, and then if we can work together collectively to dismantle those obstacles, then anything is possible.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy
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"Roger Ebert: These are my words, but this is not my voice. This is Alex, the best computer voice I've been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh. For most of my life, I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak. It was like breathing. In those days, I was living in a fool's paradise. After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me.For several days now, we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED. I used to be able to talk like that. Maybe I wasn't as smart, but I was at least as talkative. I want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself, and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away. However, I've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous. So I've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me. I will start with my wife, Chaz.Chaz Ebert: It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak. Going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006, I expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show, 'Ebert and Roeper at the Movies.' I had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation. The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw. My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected.(Laughter)(Laughter)CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world. The first surgery was a great success. I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good. Two weeks later, I was ready to return home. I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song 'I'm Your Man' for my doctors and nurses. Suddenly, I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding. My carotid artery had ruptured. Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there. Chaz told me that if that song hadn't played for so long, I might have already been in the car, on the way home, and would have died right there and then. So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life.(Applause)There was a second surgery — which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart. And then a third attempt, which also patched me back together pretty well, until it failed. A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture. And before I left the hospital, after a year of being hospitalized, I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery.There was no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again; it just sort of became obvious. Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system. We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds. Therefore, the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air. Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal, and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless.Dean Ornish: At first for a long time, I wrote messages in notebooks. Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice. This was faster, and nobody had to try to read my handwriting. I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence."" (Laughter) ""It was the clearest I could find. Then Apple released the Alex voice, which was the best I'd heard. It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark. When it saw a period, it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air. There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices, and I've experimented with them. For me, they share a fundamental problem: they're too slow. When I find myself in a conversational situation, I need to type fast and to jump right in. People don't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase.But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice? How does that affect who you are as a person? When people hear Alex speaking my words, do they experience a disconnect? Does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next? How did I feel not being able to speak? I felt, and I still feel, a lot of distance from the human mainstream. I've become uncomfortable when I'm separated from my laptop. Even then, I'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties.So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years. At first I was against it. I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer. There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own. But I decided then to just give it a try. So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices. They'd never made one from previously-recorded materials. All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth. But they were willing to give it a try.So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice, including several audio commentary tracks that I'd made for movies on DVDs. And it sounded like me, it really did. There was a reason for that; it was me. But it wasn't that simple. The tapes from my TV show weren't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved — movie soundtracks, for example, or Gene Siskel arguing with me — (Laughter) and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn't fit into a sentence well enough.I'll let you hear a sample of that voice. These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program. And here's the voice we call Roger Jr. or Roger 2.0.Roger 2.0: Oprah, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show. We have been talking for a long time, and now here we are again. This is the first version of my computer voice. It still needs improvement, but at least it sounds like me and not like HAL 9000. When I heard it the first time, it sent chills down my spine. When I type anything, this voice will speak whatever I type. When I read something, it will read in my voice. I have typed these words in advance, as I didn't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing.The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc. It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on ""Casablanca"" and ""Citizen Kane."" This is the first voice they've created for an individual. There are several very good voices available for computers, but they all sound like somebody else, while this voice sounds like me. I plan to use it on television, radio and the Internet. People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems. Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves. But I've got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can.(Laughter)Roger Ebert: As you can hear, it sounds like me, but the words jump up and down. The flow isn't natural. The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice, and I'm optimistic about it. But so far, the Apple Alex voice is the best one I've heard. I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex. He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice. A very large sample is needed.John Hunter: All my life I was a motormouth. Now I have spoken my last words, and I don't even remember for sure what they were. I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled ""I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."" On Wednesday, David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe. For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all. For almost all the years of life on Earth, there was no intelligent life. Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible. In cosmological terms, that was about 10 minutes ago. Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer. That has mostly happened in my lifetime.Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000. When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback. It was about 1960. As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO. The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. The programmers said it could assist students in their learning.I doubt, on that day 50 years ago, they even dreamed of what Salman Khan has accomplished. But that's not the point. The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago, an instant in time. It continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers, until only five years ago. I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games.Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today. But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce. (Laughter) I'm here as a man who wants to communicate.All of this has happened in my lifetime. I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times. I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100's. And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections, they didn't know what I was talking about. When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow. Does anybody remember that?"" (Applause) ""The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble. I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter.(Laughter)CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. It is unimaginable what will happen next. It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others.For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widely than ever before. I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. They aren't an improvement, but they're the best I can do. They give me a way to speak. Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz. But online, everybody speaks at the same speed.This whole adventure has been a learning experience. Every time there was a surgery that failed, I was left with a little less flesh and bone. Now I have no jaw left at all. While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily. Ironic that my legs are fine, and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk. When you see me today, I look like the Phantom of the Opera.But no you don't.(Laughter)(Applause)It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles. People — (Applause) People talk loudly —I'm so sorry. Excuse me.(Applause)People talk loudly and slowly to me. Sometimes they assume I am deaf. There are people who don't want to make eye contact.Believe me, he didn't mean this as — anyway, let me just read it. (Laughter) You should never let your wife read something like this.(Laughter)It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression. I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way. One of my Twitter friends can type only with his toes. One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple. (Laughter) Google him and he will make you laugh. All of these people are saying, in one way or another, that what you see is not all you get.So I have not come here to complain. I have much to make me happy and relieved. I seem, for the time being, to be cancer-free. I am writing as well as ever. I am productive. If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit. I would be trapped inside my head. Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.RE: Wait. I have one more thing to add. A guy goes into a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, ""You're crazy."" The guy says, ""I want a second opinion."" The psychiatrist says, ""All right, you're ugly.""(Laughter)You all know the test for artificial intelligence — the Turing test. A human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer. If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test. I now propose a test for computer voices — the Ebert test. If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roger_ebert_remaking_my_voice
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"Hi, my name is Marcin — farmer, technologist. I was born in Poland, now in the U.S. I started a group called Open Source Ecology. We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist — things from tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers. Then we set out to create an open source, DIY, do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost. We call this the Global Village Construction Set.So let me tell you a story. So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless. I had no practical skills. The world presented me with options, and I took them. I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle. So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming. I bought a tractor — then it broke. I paid to get it repaired — then it broke again. Then pretty soon, I was broke too.I realized that the truly appropriate, low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn't exist yet. I needed tools that were robust, modular, highly efficient and optimized, low-cost, made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime, not designed for obsolescence. I found that I would have to build them myself. So I did just that. And I tested them. And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale.So then I published the 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos and budgets on a wiki. Then contributors from all over the world began showing up, prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits. So far, we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines. And now the project is beginning to grow on its own.We know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity. And the same is starting to happen with hardware too. We're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people's lives in such tangible material ways. If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing, then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential.That's not only in the developing world. Our tools are being made for the American farmer, builder, entrepreneur, maker. We've seen lots of excitement from these people, who can now start a construction business, parts manufacturing, organic CSA or just selling power back to the grid. Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit.I've planted a hundred trees in a day. I've pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days. From what I've seen, this is only the beginning.If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant. A greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity. We're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski
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"So I was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers: Thomas Starzl, who performed the world's first successful liver transplant in 1967, and Sir Roy Calne, who performed the first liver transplant in the U.K. in the following year. I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds. Now when I look back, the transplant was actually the easiest part. Next, raising the money to fund the procedure. But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators — a matter which was debated in the parliament — that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country. But 20 years on, my patient, Surinder, is Asia's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date. (Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son.(Applause)But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate. The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around. As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant. In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs. The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation. And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living, related donors — relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ, like a split liver graft, to a relative or loved one.But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs, the gift of life was then extended from living, related donors to now living, unrelated donors. And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy. How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from, for example, a submissive spouse, an in-law, a servant, a slave, an employee? Where and how can we draw the line? In my part of the world, too many people live below the poverty line. And in some areas, the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living, unrelated donors.Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners. I was also pregnant at the time. Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman's life. But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts — thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room. And at each time, I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners' eyes follow me. And for two years, I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4:30 am on a Friday morning, driving to the prison, getting down, gloved and scrubbed, ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner, remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon. No doubt, I was informed, the consent had been obtained.But, in my life, the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict — conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk. In my team, the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience. Some of us may have been sublimated, but really none of us remained the same. I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. And in my mind, I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence. It made me wonder if there could be a better way — a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide.Now just about that time, the practice of surgery evolved from big to small, from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures, tiny incisions. And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells. In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants. I witnessed the technical difficulty. And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells. I thought to myself, why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas — the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes — and transplant these cells? — technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ.And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s. The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types — heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells — captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public. I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells. And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants.Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells. Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage, chiefly because of their pluripotency — that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types. But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells — the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos — has encouraged research into other types of stem cells.Now to the ridicule of my colleagues, I inspired my lab to focus on what I thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells, adipose tissue, or fat, yes fat — nowadays available in abundant supply — you and I, I think, would be very happy to get rid of anyway. Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells. And adult stem cells are found in you and me — in our blood, in our bone marrow, in our fat, our skin and other organs. And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells. But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells. And here is the limitation: adult stem cells are mature cells, and, like mature human beings, these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types, as embryonic stem cells [can].But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery. They discovered that adult cells, taken from you and me, could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells, which they termed IPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells. And so guess what, scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells — aging adult cells from you and me — they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells. And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells — cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants. If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos.Indeed, there is a lot of hype, but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases — are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you?In May 2006, something horrible happened to me. I was about to start a robotic operation, but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room, I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness. Earlier that week, I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing — yes, I fell. And I started to see floaters and stars, which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure. What happened to me might have been catastrophic, if not for the fact that I was in reach of good surgical access. And I had my vision restored, but not before a prolonged period of convalescence — three months — in a head down position. This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases.37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision. Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide. Indeed, we live in both challenging as well as exciting times. As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells.It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured, our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation. And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue. Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver. As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases.What lies ahead? Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. 1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly. 4.8 million suffer cardiac failure. Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function. There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease. While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology.Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings — small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement. Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs. Powerful new technologies always present enigmas. As we speak, the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval. And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial.The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers. Each one has his story. My story has been about my journey from organs to cells — a journey through controversy, inspired by hope — hope that, as we age, you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_lim
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"My students often ask me, ""What is sociology?"" And I tell them it's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see. And they say, ""So, how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?"" And I say, ""Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person.""Here, I'll give you an example. So I imagine my life if, a hundred years ago, China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal. And they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here. And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, railcar by railcar, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world. And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so. And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal. And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation. This is what I saw. I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next. And I asked myself the question: How is it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because coal is such a wealthy resource; it's so much money? And I realize: because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States, who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves. And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by. And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship. Does this sound familiar?And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal. And everywhere, there were symbols of the Chinese — everywhere, a constant reminder. And back in China, what do they say in China? Nothing! They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal. If you ask them, they'll say, ""Well, you know, we need the coal. I mean, come on, I'm not going to turn down my thermostat. You can't expect that."" And so, I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people. And we fight back, and it gets really ugly. And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way. And before we know it, they send in the tanks and they send in the troops. And lots of people are dying. And it's a very, very difficult situation.Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there, or a truck full of soldiers? Just imagine what you would feel, because you know why they're here; you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy. That's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that.OK, so that's the warm-up. That's the warm-up. Now we're going to have the real radical experiment. So, for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East — in particular, in Iraq. And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle-class family in Baghdad. What you want is the best for your kids. You want your kids to have a better life. And you watch the news, you pay attention. You read the newspaper, you go down to the coffee shop with your friends, you read the newspapers from around the world. Sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States. You have a sense of what the Americans are thinking. But really, you just want a better life for yourself. That's what you want. You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq. You want a better life for yourself.So here, let me help you. Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking. Number one: this incursion into your land these past 20 years and before — the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, is oil. It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. People back in the United States know it's about oil. It's because somebody else has a design for your resource. It's your resource — it's not somebody else's. It's your land; it's your resource. Somebody else has a design for it. And you know why they have a design? You know why they have their eyes set on it? Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil — foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own.And what else do you think about these people? The Americans, they're rich. Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars. They all have blond hair, blue eyes. They're happy. You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression. And that's what you get. And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil. And back home, what do you see? Poverty, despair, struggle. Look, you don't live in a wealthy country. I mean — this is Iraq. This is what you see. You see people struggling to get by. It's not easy; you see a lot of poverty. And you feel something about this. These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see?Something else you see that you talk about — Americans don't talk about this, but you do — there's this thing, this militarization of the world, and it's centered right in the United States. And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending. Four percent of the world's population! And you feel it; you see it every day. It's part of your life. And you talk about it with your friends. You read about it. And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. And what you see, something else: the United States, the hub of democracy around the world — they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world. There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. That's odd.Oh — these incursions, these two wars, the 10 years of sanctions, the eight years of occupation, the insurgency that's been unleashed on your people, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? All because of oil. You can't help but think that. You talk about it. It's in the forefront of your mind, always. You say, ""How is that possible?"" And this man, he's everyman — your grandfather, your uncle, your father, your son, your neighbor, your professor, your student. Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow. Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence, the bloodshed, the pain, the horror — everybody. Not a single person in your country has not been touched.But there's something else. There's something else about these people, these Americans who are there. There's something else about them that you see that they don't see themselves. And what do you see? They're Christians! They're Christians. They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles. Their Bibles have a little insignia that says ""US Army"" on them. And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country — and you know the reason — before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god. Why? Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis — they're not Americans. You don't want Americans to die — ""Protect Our Troops."" And you feel something about that — of course you do. And they do wonderful things. You read about it, you hear about it. They're there to build schools and help people. That's what they want to do. They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference.And this guy, you get a guy like Lt. Gen. William Boykin. Here's a guy who says that your god is a false god. Your god's an idol; his god is the true god. The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity — just get rid of your religion. And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy. They don't know anything about him, but you do. You pass it around. You pass his words around. I mean, this is serious. You're afraid. He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq. And you're thinking, ""My God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that."" And this word here — George Bush called this war a crusade. Man, the Americans, they're just like, ""Ah, crusade. Whatever. I don't know what that means."" You know what it means — it's a holy war against Muslims. Look, invade, subdue them, take their resources. If they won't submit, kill them. That's what this is about. And you're thinking, ""My God, these Christians are coming to kill us."" This is frightening. You feel frightened. Of course you feel frightened.And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Qurans, right? And the Americans: ""Ah, he's a knucklehead. He's a former hotel manager; he's got three dozen members of his church ..."" They laugh him off. You don't laugh him off, because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit. Of course this is how Americans think. So people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting. ""He wants to burn Qurans, our holy book. These Christians — who are these Christians? They're so evil, they're so mean — this is what they're about?"" This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi. Of course you're going to think this.And then your cousin says, ""Hey coz, check out this website. You've got to see this — Bible Boot Camp. These Christians are nuts! They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus. They take little kids and run them through these things till they teach them how to say, 'Sir! Yes, sir!' and things like 'grenade toss' and 'weapons care and maintenance.' And go to the website — it says 'US Army' right on it. I mean, these Christians, they're nuts. How can they do this to their little kids?"" And you're reading this website. And of course, Christians in the United States, or anybody, says, ""This is some little church in the middle of nowhere."" You don't know that. For you, this is like, all Christians. It's all over the Web: ""Bible Boot Camp."" And look at this. They even teach their kids — they train them in the same way the US Marines train. Isn't that interesting. And it scares you, and it frightens you.So these guys, you see them. You see, I, Sam Richards — I know who these guys are. They're my students, my friends; I know what they're thinking. You don't know. When you see them, they're something else. They're something else. That's what they are to you. We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way. So here. Of course, you've got it wrong. You're generalizing. It's wrong. You don't understand the Americans. It's not a Christian invasion. We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons. You have it wrong. You've missed it. And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists. Of course you don't. Very few people do. But — some of you do. And this is a perspective. OK. So now, here's what we're going to do.Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now, and step back into your normal shoes. So everyone's back in the room. OK? Now here comes the radical experiment. So we're all back home. This photo: this woman — man, I feel her. I feel her. She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor. She's anybody to me. These guys standing there, everybody in the photo — I feel this photo, man. So here's what I want you to do.Let's go back to my first example, of the Chinese. I want you to go there. It's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States. What I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising. And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese. As an American, how do you feel about this picture? What do you think about that scene?OK, try this. Bring it back. This is the scene here. It's an American, American soldiers, American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now, put yourself in the shoes, go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq. What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman?OK, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here. And so I'm going to invite you to take a risk with me. These gentlemen here, they're insurgents. They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans. And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded. Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them. Can you feel the rage? Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks? Can you go there? It shouldn't be that difficult. You just — oh, man. Now, put yourself in their shoes. Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders? Which one? Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country? Can you imagine that maybe one of them, in the morning, bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, ""Dear, I'll be back later. I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives. I'm going out to look out for us, the future of our country."" Can you imagine that? Can you imagine saying that? Can you go there? What do you think they're feeling? You see, that's empathy. It's also understanding.[understand]Now, you might ask, ""OK, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing? Why would you use this example of all examples?"" And I say, because. You're allowed to hate these people. You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch — one tiny inch — then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life. You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane; or your teenage son; or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings. Whatever it is, you can go so far. And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world. Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're seeing the world differently. Everything has changed. Everything in your life has changed. And that's, of course, what this is about.Attend to other lives, other visions. Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves. I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq. But as a sociologist, what I am saying is: I understand. And now perhaps — perhaps — you do, too.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy
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"So it's 1995, I'm in college, and a friend and I go on a road trip from Providence, Rhode Island to Portland, Oregon. And you know, we're young and unemployed, so we do the whole thing on back roads through state parks and national forests — basically the longest route we can possibly take. And somewhere in the middle of South Dakota, I turn to my friend and I ask her a question that's been bothering me for 2,000 miles. ""What's up with the Chinese character I keep seeing by the side of the road?"" My friend looks at me totally blankly. There's actually a gentleman in the front row who's doing a perfect imitation of her look. (Laughter) And I'm like, ""You know, all the signs we keep seeing with the Chinese character on them."" She just stares at me for a few moments, and then she cracks up, because she figures out what I'm talking about. And what I'm talking about is this. (Laughter) Right, the famous Chinese character for picnic area.(Laughter)I've spent the last five years of my life thinking about situations exactly like this — why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us, and how we behave when that happens, and what all of this can tell us about human nature. In other words, as you heard Chris say, I've spent the last five years thinking about being wrong. This might strike you as a strange career move, but it actually has one great advantage: no job competition. (Laughter) In fact, most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. We get it in the abstract. We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. The human species, in general, is fallible — okay fine.But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window — and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about. And the thing is, the present tense is where we live. We go to meetings in the present tense; we go on family vacations in the present tense; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense. So effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything.I think this is a problem. I think it's a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. And second, why it's such a problem. And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make.So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right? One reason, actually, has to do with a feeling of being wrong. So let me ask you guys something — or actually, let me ask you guys something, because you're right here: How does it feel — emotionally — how does it feel to be wrong? Dreadful. Thumbs down. Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing — thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong? (Laughter) Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny, like my stupid Chinese character mistake. But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything.I'll give you an analogy. Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine — he's a bird, he can fly. But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. And what's funny — at least if you're six years old — is that the coyote's totally fine too. He just keeps running — right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air. That's when he falls. When we're wrong about something — not when we realize it, but before that — we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down. You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground. So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.(Laughter)So this is one reason, a structural reason, why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness. I call this error blindness. Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late. But there's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well — and this one is cultural. Think back for a moment to elementary school. You're sitting there in class, and your teacher is handing back quiz papers, and one of them looks like this. This is not mine, by the way. (Laughter) So there you are in grade school, and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper. It's the dumb kid, the troublemaker, the one who never does his homework. So by the time you are nine years old, you've already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits — and second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes.We learn these really bad lessons really well. And a lot of us — and I suspect, especially a lot of us in this room — deal with them by just becoming perfect little A students, perfectionists, over-achievers. Right, Mr. CFO, astrophysicist, ultra-marathoner? (Laughter) You're all CFO, astrophysicists, ultra-marathoners, it turns out. Okay, so fine. Except that then we freak out at the possibility that we've gotten something wrong. Because according to this, getting something wrong means there's something wrong with us. So we just insist that we're right, because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe.So let me tell you a story. A couple of years ago, a woman comes into Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for a surgery. Beth Israel's in Boston. It's the teaching hospital for Harvard — one of the best hospitals in the country. So this woman comes in and she's taken into the operating room. She's anesthetized, the surgeon does his thing — stitches her back up, sends her out to the recovery room. Everything seems to have gone fine. And she wakes up, and she looks down at herself, and she says, ""Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages?"" Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one. When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting. He said, ""For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient."" (Laughter) The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous.This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy. So this is a huge practical problem. But it's also a huge social problem.Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. (Laughter) They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. So this is a catastrophe.This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring. The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't. We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this. And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong.1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about ""I think therefore I am,"" this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote ""Fallor ergo sum"" — ""I err therefore I am."" Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. It's totally fundamental to who we are. Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life. And so I'm listening and I'm listening, and at some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong. And my first thought was, ""I've lost it. I've become the crazy wrongness lady. I just imagined it everywhere,"" which has happened. But a couple of months later, I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass, who's the host of the show. And I mentioned this to him, and he was like, ""No actually, that's true. In fact,"" he says, ""as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. And the crypto-theme is: 'I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead.' And the thing is,"" says Ira Glass, ""we need this. We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work."" And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong.But, you know, our stories are like this because our lives are like this. We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead. George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East. And something else happened instead. And Hosni Mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life, until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son. And something else happened instead. And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together. And something else happened instead. And I have to tell you that I thought I was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize. And something else happened instead.(Laughter)I mean, this is life. For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us. No offense, but this entire conference is an unbelievable monument to our capacity to get stuff wrong. We just spent an entire week talking about innovations and advancements and improvements, but you know why we need all of those innovations and advancements and improvements? Because half the stuff that's the most mind-boggling and world-altering — TED 1998 — eh. (Laughter) Didn't really work out that way, did it? (Laughter) Where's my jet pack, Chris?(Laughter)(Applause)So here we are again. And that's how it goes. We come up with another idea. We tell another story. We hold another conference. The theme of this one, as you guys have now heard seven million times, is the rediscovery of wonder. And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, ""Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.""Thank you.(Applause)Thank you guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong
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"I'm very fortunate to be here. I feel so fortunate. I've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me. I called my wife Leslie, and I said, ""You know, there's so many good people trying to do so much good. It feels like I've landed in a colony of angels."" It's a true feeling. But let me get to the talk — I see the clock is running.I'm a public school teacher, and I just want to share a story of my superintendent. Her name is Pam Moran in Albemarle County, Virginia, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And she's a very high-tech superintendent. She uses smart boards, she blogs, she Tweets, she does Facebook, she does all this sort of high-tech stuff. She's a technology leader and instructional leader. But in her office, there's this old wooden, weather-worn table, kitchen table — peeling green paint, it's kind of rickety. And I said, ""Pam, you're such a modern, cutting-edge person. Why is this old table in your office?""And she told me, she said, ""You know, I grew up in Southwestern Virginia, in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural Virginia, and this table was in my grandfather's kitchen. And we'd come in from playing, he'd come in from plowing and working, and we'd sit around that table every night. And as I grew up, I heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table, I began to call it the wisdom table. And when he passed on, I took this table with me and brought it to my office, and it reminds me of him. It reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes."" The project I'm going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space. And I'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table, really.It all started back in 1977. I was a young man, and I had been dropping in and out of college. And my parents were very patient, but I had been doing intermittent sojourns to India on a mystical quest. And I remember the last time I came back from India — in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my John Lennon glasses — and I said to my father, ""Dad, I think I've just about found spiritual enlightenment."" He said, ""Well there's one more thing you need to find."" I said, ""What is that, dad?"" ""A job."" (Laughter) And so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something. So I got a degree and it turned out to be education. It was an experimental education program. It could have been dentistry, but the word ""experimental"" was in it, and so that's what I had to go for.And I went in for a job interview in the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, the capital city, bought a three-piece suit — my concession to convention — kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes — at the time it was the '70s — and I walked in, and I sat down and had an interview. And I guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor, her name was Anna Aro, said I had the job teaching gifted children. And I was so shocked, so stunned, I got up and said, ""Well, thank you, but what do I do?"" (Laughter) Gifted education hadn't really taken hold too much. There weren't really many materials or things to use. And I said, ""What do I do?"" And her answer shocked me. It stunned me. Her answer set the template for the entire career I was to have after that. She said, ""What do you want to do?"" And that question cleared the space. There was no program directive, no manual to follow, no standards in gifted education in that way. And she cleared such a space that I endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students, an empty space, whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding.So this happened in 1978, and I was teaching many years later, and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker. His name is Chris Farina. Chris Farina is here today at his own cost. Chris, could you stand up and let them see you — a young, visionary filmmaker who's made a film. (Applause) This film is called ""World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements."" He proposed the film to me — it's a great title. He proposed the film to me, and I said, ""Yeah, maybe it'll be on local TV, and we can say hi to our friends."" But the film has really gone places. Now it's still in debt, but Chris has managed, through his own sacrifice, to get this film out. So we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me, more than a story about one teacher. It's a story that's a testament to teaching and teachers. And it's a beautiful thing.And the strange thing is, when I watch the film — I have the eerie sensation of seeing it — I saw myself literally disappear. What I saw was my teachers coming through me. I saw my geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Rucell's wry smile under his handlebar mustache. That's the smile I use — that's his smile. I saw Jan Polo's flashing eyes. And they weren't flashing in anger, they were flashing in love, intense love for her students. And I have that kind of flash sometimes. And I saw Miss Ethel J. Banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day. And you know, she had that old-school teacher stare. You know the one. (Laughter) ""And I'm not even talking about you behind me, because I've got eyes in the back of my head."" (Laughter) You know that teacher? I didn't use that stare very often, but I do have it in my repertoire. And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me.And then I saw my own parents, my first teachers. My father, very inventive, spatial thinker. That's my brother Malcolm there on the right. And my mother, who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in Virginia, who was my inspiration. And really, I feel as though, when I see the film — I have a gesture she does, like this — I feel like I am a continuation of her gesture. I am one of her teaching gestures. And the beautiful thing was, I got to teach my daughter in elementary school, Madeline. And so that gesture of my mother's continues through many generations. It's an amazing feeling to have that lineage. And so I'm here standing on the shoulders of many people. I'm not here alone. There are many people on this stage right now.And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something — I didn't say interactive; we didn't have that term in 1978 — but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers.There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it — even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries — some are rich; some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a Prime Minister, Secretary of State, Minister of Defense and a CFO, or Comptroller. I choose the Prime Minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather.(Laughter)That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have — let's see — ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week. (Laughter) (Applause) And they've done it several times too.(Laughter)So I also have in the game a saboteur — some child — it's basically a troublemaker — and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's ""The Art of War."" Fourth-graders understand it — nine years old — and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow — at first they do — the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.Stewart Brand is here, and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force. And in the game, sometimes students actually form a peace force. I'm just a clock watcher. I'm just a clarifier. I'm just a facilitator. The students run the game. I have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing. So I'll just share with you ...(Video) Boy: The World Peace Game is serious. You're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world. See, Mr. Hunter is doing that because he says his time has messed up a lot, and he's trying to tell us how to fix that problem.John Hunter: I offered them a — (Applause) Actually, I can't tell them anything because I don't know the answer. And I admit the truth to them right up front: I don't know. And because I don't know, they've got to dig up the answer. And so I apologize to them as well. I say, ""I'm so sorry, boys and girls, but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape, and we hope you can fix it for us, and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it."" It's a sincere apology, and they take it very seriously.Now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like. Well when we have the game start, here's what you see.(Video) JH: All right, we're going into negotiations as of now. Go. (Chatter)JH: My question to you is, who's in charge of that classroom? It's a serious question: who is really in charge? I've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time. There's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that I simply don't have to do what I thought I had to do as a beginning teacher: control every conversation and response in the classroom. It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it to them openly. So I'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that have happened.In this game we had a little girl, and she was the Defense Minister of the poorest nation. And the Defense Minister — she had the tank corps and Air Force and so forth. And she was next door to a very wealthy, oil-rich neighbor. Without provocation, suddenly she attacked, against her Prime Minister's orders, the next-door neighbor's oil fields. She marched into the oil field reserves, surrounded it, without firing a shot, and secured it and held it. And that neighbor was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up.We were all upset with her, ""Why are you doing this? This is the World Peace Game. What is wrong with you?"" (Laughter) This was a little girl and, at nine years old, she held her pieces and said, ""I know what I'm doing."" To her girlfriends she said that. That's a breach there. And we learned in this, you don't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks. (Laughter) They are the toughest opponents. And we were very upset. I thought I was failing as a teacher. Why would she do this?But come to find out, a few game days later — and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team — actually there's a negotiation period with all teams, and each team takes a turn, then we go back in negotiation, around and around, so each turn around is one game day. So a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world. Had they had their fuel supplies, they would have done it. She was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game.Now she used a small war to avert a larger war, so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right, conditional good, or not right. That's the kind of thinking that we put them in, the situations. I could not have designed that in teaching it. It came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom.(Applause)Another example, a beautiful thing happened. We have a letter in the game. If you're a military commander and you wage troops — the little plastic toys on the board — and you lose them, I put in a letter. You have to write a letter to their parents — the fictional parents of your fictional troops — explaining what happened and offering your condolences. So you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat. And so we had this situation come up — last summer actually, at Agnor-Hurt School in Albemarle County — and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said, ""Mr. Hunter, let's ask — there's a parent over there."" There was a parent visiting that day, just sitting in the back of the room. ""Let's ask that mom to read the letter. It'll be more realer if she reads it."" So we did, we asked her, and she gamely picked up the letter. ""Sure."" She started reading. She read one sentence. She read two sentences. By the third sentence, she was in tears. I was in tears. Everybody understood that when we lose somebody, the winners are not gloating. We all lose. And it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding.I'll show you what my friend David says about this. He's been in many battles.(Video) David: We've really had enough of people attacking. I mean, we've been lucky [most of] the time. But now I'm feeling really weird because I'm living what Sun Tzu said one week. One week he said, ""Those who go into battle and win will want to go back, and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win."" And so I've been winning battles, so I'm going into battles, more battles. And I think it's sort of weird to be living what Sun Tzu said.JH: I get chills every time I see that. That's the kind of engagement you want to have happen. And I can't design that, I can't plan that, and I can't even test that. But it's self-evident assessment. We know that's an authentic assessment of learning. We have a lot of data, but I think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what's going on.So I'll just share a third story. This is about my friend Brennan. We had played the game one session after school for many weeks, about seven weeks, and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises. The way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and every country's asset value has to be increased above its starting point. Some are poor, some are wealthy. There are billions. The World Bank president was a third-grader one time. He says, ""How many zeros in a trillion? I've got to calculate that right away."" But he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him.So the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer. There was no way they could win. And we were approaching four o'clock, our cut-off time — there was about a minute left — and despair just settled over the room. I thought, I'm failing as a teacher. I should have gotten it so they could have won. They shouldn't be failing like this. I've failed them. And I was just feeling so sad and dejected. And suddenly, Brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell, the bell I ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets, and he ran back to his seat, rang the bell. Everybody ran to his chair: there was screaming; there was yelling, waving of their dossiers. They get these dossiers full of secret documents. They were gesticulating; they were running around. I didn't know what they were doing. I'd lost control of my classroom. Principal walks in, I'm out of a job. The parents were looking in the window.And Brennan runs back to his seat. Everybody runs back to their seat. He rings the bell again. He says, ""We have"" — and there's 12 seconds left on the clock — ""we have, all nations, pooled all our funds together. And we've got 600 billion dollars. We're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country. And if they accept it, it'll raise their asset value and we can win the game. Will you accept it?"" And there are three seconds left on the clock. Everybody looks at this prime minister of that country, and he says, ""Yes."" And the game is won. Spontaneous compassion that could not be planned for, that was unexpected and unpredictable.Every game we play is different. Some games are more about social issues, some are more about economic issues. Some games are more about warfare. But I don't try to deny them that reality of being human. I allow them to go there and, through their own experience, learn, in a bloodless way, how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing. And they find out what is right their own way, their own selves. And so in this game, I've learned so much from it, but I would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world, they may save us all. If only.And on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders I'm standing, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hunter_on_the_world_peace_game
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"I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon, which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it. My own interest in this subject, and my passion for it, began rather accidentally. I had bought a copy of this book, ""The Universe and Dr. Einstein"" — a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle. A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes. And as it happened, I read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot. And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do. And that feeling hasn't left me yet.That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career — from being a software engineer to become a science writer — so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others. And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail. So it took me from places like Chile — the Atacama Desert in Chile — to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole.And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips. I have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting, literally at times, their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe.And I first begin with a pie chart — and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation — but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos. All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter — the stuff that we're all made of — and that's four percent of the universe. Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent. So if you look at this pie chart, 96 percent of the universe, at this point in our exploration of it, is unknown or not well understood. And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter. And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors. And the reason why they have to go underground is that, if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth, the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays, ambient radio activity, even our own bodies. You might not believe it, but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment. So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector.And I went to see one of these experiments, and this is actually — you can barely see it, and the reason for that is it's entirely dark in there — this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960. And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s. And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight. And today, you would see this inside the mine, half a mile underground. This is one of the largest underground labs in the world. And, among other things, they're looking for dark matter.There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly. If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about — one of them being neutrinos. And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules. When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino. But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this. You need something like tens of megatons of water — almost a gigaton of water — in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino. And where in the world would you find such water? Well the Russians have a tank in their own backyard.This is Lake Baikal. It is the largest lake in the world. It's 800 km long. It's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places, and one to two kilometers deep. And what the Russians are doing is they're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light. And this is the scene that greeted me when I landed there. This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter. The lake is entirely frozen. And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working. The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don't have the money to work in summer and spring, which, if they did that, they would need ships and submersibles to do their work. So they wait until winter — the lake is completely frozen over — and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work.So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter. They have to drill holes in the ice, dive down into the water — cold, cold water — to get hold of the instrument, bring it up, do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do, put it back and get out before the ice melts. Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it's full of cracks. And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving. I still don't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest, but that tells you how hard he was working. And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist. And they have dedicated their lives to it. And just to give you an idea, they have spent 20 million over 20 years. It's very harsh conditions. They work on a shoestring budget. The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack. And it's that basic, but they do this every year.From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope. The Very Large Telescope is one of these things that astronomers do — they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively. I can tell you for a fact, that the next one that they're planning is called The Extremely Large Telescope. (Laughter) And you wouldn't believe it, but the one after that is going to be called The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. But nonetheless, it's an extraordinary piece of engineering. These are four 8.2 meter telescopes. And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time. And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about.And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror. Each mirror, there are four of them, is made of a single piece of glass, a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic, that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [to] imagine a city like Paris, with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower, if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy, you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high. And that's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured. An extraordinary set of telescopes. Here's another view of the same. The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert. The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies.Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica. I want to spend most of my time on this part of the world. This is cosmology's final frontier. Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica. I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up. And that's where they do their experiments, and then the balloon, the payload, is brought down. So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica. And here we are about to board our bus. And I don't know if you can read the lettering, but it says, ""Ivan the Terribus."" And that's taking us to McMurdo.And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo. And you barely might be able to make out this hut here. This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole. Because it's so cold, the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it, with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there. It's an extraordinary place. This is McMurdo itself. About a thousand people work here in summer, and about 200 in winter when it's completely dark for six months.I was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument. This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km. What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight. So you're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km. And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica — I won't go into the reasons why — but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather. The weather, as you can imagine, this is summer, and you're standing on 200 ft of ice. And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top. And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon — the fabric, parachute and everything — on the ice and then fill it up with helium. And that process takes about two hours.And the weather can change as they're putting together this whole assembly. For instance, here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind, which is eventually going to be filled up with helium. Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium. Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station. And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon. The fabric alone weighs two tons. In order to minimize the weight, it's very thin, it's as thin as a sandwich wrapper. And if they have to pack it back, they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again — except, when they did it first, it would have been done in Texas. Here, they can't do it with the kind shoes they're wearing, so they have to take their shoes off, get barefoot into the boxes, in this cold, and do that kind of work. That's the kind of dedication these people have.Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight. Here's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end. So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload. And remember, all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold, in sub-zero temperatures. They're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff, but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that. And I would like to share with you a launch.(Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon.Anil Ananthaswamy: And I'll finally like to leave you with two images. This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India. And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side. And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery. This is a close-up of the Buddhist monastery. And I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has. One is exploring the cosmos on the outside, and the other one is exploring our interior being. And both require silence of some sort.And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever. And it was very obvious that, if we destroy these silent places on Earth, we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards, because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_ananthaswamy
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"Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack. It sounds scary.Well, I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting in 1D. I was the only one who could talk to the flight attendants. So I looked at them right away, and they said, ""No problem. We probably hit some birds."" The pilot had already turned the plane around, and we weren't that far. You could see Manhattan. Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time.The pilot lines up the plane with the Hudson River. That's usually not the route.(Laughter)He turns off the engines. Now, imagine being in a plane with no sound. And then he says three words. The most unemotional three words I've ever heard. He says, ""Brace for impact."" I didn't have to talk to the flight attendant anymore.(Laughter)I could see in her eyes, it was terror. Life was over.Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. I learned that it all changes in an instant. We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn't, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did. As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, ""I collect bad wines."" Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. I no longer want to postpone anything in life. And that urgency, that purpose, has really changed my life.The second thing I learned that day — and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot —(Laughter)I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. I've lived a good life. In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. But in my humanity, I also allow my ego to get in. And I regretted the time I wasted on things that did not matter with people that matter. And I thought about my relationship with my wife, with my friends, with people. And after, as I reflected on that, I decided to eliminate negative energy from my life. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. I've not had a fight with my wife in two years. It feels great. I no longer try to be right; I choose to be happy.The third thing I learned — and this is as your mental clock starts going, ""15, 14, 13."" You can see the water coming. I'm saying, ""Please blow up."" I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. But it was very sad. I didn't want to go; I love my life. And that sadness really framed in one thought, which is, I only wish for one thing. I only wish I could see my kids grow up. About a month later, I was at a performance by my daughter — first-grader, not much artistic talent —(Laughter)Yet!(Laughter)And I'm bawling, I'm crying, like a little kid. And it made all the sense in the world to me. I realized at that point, by connecting those two dots, that the only thing that matters in my life is being a great dad. Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad.I was given the gift of a miracle, of not dying that day. I was given another gift, which was to be able to see into the future and come back and live differently. I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane — and please don't — but imagine, and how would you change? What would you get done that you're waiting to get done because you think you'll be here forever? How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in them? And more than anything, are you being the best parent you can?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ric_elias
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"How would you like to be better than you are? Suppose I said that, with just a few changes in your genes, you could get a better memory — more precise, more accurate and quicker. Or maybe you'd like to be more fit, stronger, with more stamina. Would you like to be more attractive and self-confident? How about living longer with good health? Or perhaps you're one of those who's always yearned for more creativity. Which one would you like the most? Which would you like, if you could have just one? (Audience Member: Creativity.) Creativity. How many people would choose creativity? Raise your hands. Let me see. A few. Probably about as many as there are creative people here. (Laughter) That's very good. How many would opt for memory? Quite a few more. How about fitness? A few less. What about longevity? Ah, the majority. That makes me feel very good as a doctor. If you could have any one of these, it would be a very different world. Is it just imaginary? Or, is it, perhaps, possible?Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject. The great 20th-century geneticist, T.G. Dobzhansky, who was also a communicant in the Russian Orthodox Church, once wrote an essay that he titled ""Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution."" Now if you are one of those who does not accept the evidence for biological evolution, this would be a very good time to turn off your hearing aid, take out your personal communications device — I give you permission — and perhaps take another look at Kathryn Schultz's book on being wrong, because nothing in the rest of this talk is going to make any sense whatsoever to you. (Laughter) But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future? Does it apply to others, or does it apply to us?This is another look at the tree of life. In this picture, I've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms: it has survived; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment. The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in. We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago. In the interval, there have been perhaps 20 or 25 different species of hominids. Some have come and gone. We have been here for about 130,000 years. It may seem like we're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life, but actually, for the most part, the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same.Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics? This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas. And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body? Maybe 10 times more. I mean think of it, when Antonio Damasio asks about your self-image, do you think about the bacteria? Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria. It's warm, it's dark, it's moist, it's very cozy. And you're going to provide all the nutrition that they could possibly want with no effort on their part. It's really like an Easy Street for bacteria, with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit. But otherwise, you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria, just as they are essential to your life. They help in the digestion of essential nutrients, and they protect you against certain diseases.But what will come in the future? Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? Or, are we destined to become something different — something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment? Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago — the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years — the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth — the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago — and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years. In this vast unfinished symphony of the universe, life on Earth is like a brief measure; the animal kingdom, like a single measure; and human life, a small grace note. That was us. That also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk, so I hope you enjoyed it.(Laughter)Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class. I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology. I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells. But at the time multi-celled organisms come online, things start to change. Sexual reproduction enters the picture. And very importantly, with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome, the rest of the body becomes expendable. In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction.Now I have to confess, when I was a college undergraduate, I thought, okay, sex/death, sex/death, death for sex — it seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but with each passing year, I've come to have increasing doubts. I've come to understand the sentiments of George Burns, who was performing still in Las Vegas well into his 90s. And one night, there's a knock at his hotel room door. He answers the door. Standing before him is a gorgeous, scantily clad showgirl. She looks at him and says, ""I'm here for super sex."" ""That's fine,"" says George, ""I'll take the soup.""(Laughter)I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution — not necessarily contradictory, just different. I was trying to preserve the body. I wanted to keep us healthy. I wanted to restore health from disease. I wanted us to live long and healthy lives. Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea. I think we would all understand the sentiment that Woody Allen expressed when he said, ""I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.""(Laughter)Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success. At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them.So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities. The first is that we will not evolve. We have reached a kind of equipoise. And the reasoning behind that would be, first, we have, through medicine, managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population. And secondly, we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it. And by the way, we immigrate and circulate and intermix so much that you can't any longer have the isolation that is necessary for evolution to take place.A second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind, natural, imposed by the forces of nature. And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly, but they are inexorable. And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way.But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility. I call it neo-evolution — the new evolution that is not simply natural, but guided and chosen by us as individuals in the choices that we will make. Now how could this come about? How could it be possible that we would do this? Consider, first, the reality that people today, in some cultures, are making choices about their offspring. They're, in some cultures, choosing to have more males than females. It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing.Think also, if it were possible ever for you to choose, not simply to choose the sex of your child, but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases. What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke? Wouldn't you want to make those changes in your genes? If we look ahead, these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible.The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years. It cost 2.7 billion dollars. The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months. Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week. It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone. Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way — what Frances Arnold calls ""directed evolution."" A couple of years ago, the Lasker Prize was awarded to the scientist Shinya Yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell, a fibroblast, and by manipulating just four genes, he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell — a cell potentially capable of becoming any cell in your body.These changes are coming. The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses. Believe it or not, there's an experimental trial going on with vaccine against influenza that has been grown in the cells of a tobacco plant. Can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco?These are all reality today, and [in] the future, will be evermore possible. Imagine then just two other little changes. You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring? What if you could change the sperm and the ova, or change the newly fertilized egg, and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life — eliminate the diabetes, eliminate the hemophilia, reduce the risk of cancer? Who doesn't want healthier children? And then, that same analytic technology, that same engine of science that can produce the changes to prevent disease, will also enable us to adopt super-attributes, hyper-capacities — that better memory. Why not have the quick wit of a Ken Jennings, especially if you can augment it with the next generation of the Watson machine? Why not have the quick twitch muscle that will enable you to run faster and longer? Why not live longer? These will be irresistible.And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution. We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years — and maybe even in the next 100 years. These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them. Will we use these choices to make a society that is better, that is more successful, that is kinder? Or, will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others of us? Will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform, or more robust and more versatile? These are the kinds of questions that we will have to face.And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely? For better or worse, and sooner than you may think, these choices will be up to us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harvey_fineberg_are_we_ready_for_neo_evolution
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"So, security is two different things: it's a feeling, and it's a reality. And they're different. You could feel secure even if you're not. And you can be secure even if you don't feel it. Really, we have two separate concepts mapped onto the same word. And what I want to do in this talk is to split them apart — figuring out when they diverge and how they converge. And language is actually a problem here. There aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about. So if you look at security from economic terms, it's a trade-off.Every time you get some security, you're always trading off something. Whether this is a personal decision — whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home — or a national decision, where you're going to invade a foreign country — you're going to trade off something: money or time, convenience, capabilities, maybe fundamental liberties. And the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off. You've heard in the past several years, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is not in power. That might be true, but it's not terribly relevant. The question is: Was it worth it? And you can make your own decision, and then you'll decide whether the invasion was worth it. That's how you think about security: in terms of the trade-off.Now, there's often no right or wrong here. Some of us have a burglar alarm system at home and some of us don't. And it'll depend on where we live, whether we live alone or have a family, how much cool stuff we have, how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft. In politics also, there are different opinions. A lot of times, these trade-offs are about more than just security, and I think that's really important. Now, people have a natural intuition about these trade-offs. We make them every day. Last night in my hotel room, when I decided to double-lock the door, or you in your car when you drove here; when we go eat lunch and decide the food's not poison and we'll eat it.We make these trade-offs again and again, multiple times a day. We often won't even notice them. They're just part of being alive; we all do it. Every species does it. Imagine a rabbit in a field, eating grass. And the rabbit sees a fox. That rabbit will make a security trade-off: ""Should I stay, or should I flee?"" And if you think about it, the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce, and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve. So you'd think that us, as a successful species on the planet — you, me, everybody — would be really good at making these trade-offs. Yet it seems, again and again, that we're hopelessly bad at it.And I think that's a fundamentally interesting question. I'll give you the short answer. The answer is, we respond to the feeling of security and not the reality. Now, most of the time, that works. Most of the time, feeling and reality are the same. Certainly that's true for most of human prehistory. We've developed this ability because it makes evolutionary sense. One way to think of it is that we're highly optimized for risk decisions that are endemic to living in small family groups in the East African Highlands in 100,000 BC. 2010 New York, not so much. Now, there are several biases in risk perception. A lot of good experiments in this. And you can see certain biases that come up again and again. I'll give you four.We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks — so, flying versus driving. The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar. One example would be: people fear kidnapping by strangers, when the data supports that kidnapping by relatives is much more common. This is for children. Third, personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks. So, Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. And the fourth is: people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control. So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. If a risk is thrust upon you — terrorism is a good example — you'll overplay it, because you don't feel like it's in your control.There are a bunch of other of these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions. There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. So you can imagine how that works. If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around. You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. This works, until you invent newspapers, because what newspapers do is repeat again and again rare risks. I tell people: if it's in the news, don't worry about it, because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.(Laughter)When something is so common, it's no longer news. Car crashes, domestic violence — those are the risks you worry about. We're also a species of storytellers. We respond to stories more than data. And there's some basic innumeracy going on. I mean, the joke ""One, two, three, many"" is kind of right. We're really good at small numbers. One mango, two mangoes, three mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes — it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. So one half, one quarter, one fifth — we're good at that. One in a million, one in a billion — they're both almost never.So we have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. And what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. And the result is that feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. Now, you either have a feeling — you feel more secure than you are, there's a false sense of security. Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity.I write a lot about ""security theater,"" which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything. There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. Maybe it's what the CIA is supposed to do for us. So back to economics. If economics, if the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security, then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives is to make people feel secure. And there are two ways to do this.One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't notice. Right? So what makes people notice? Well, a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. But if you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. Enough real-world examples helps. We all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a feeling about it that basically matches reality. Security theater is exposed when it's obvious that it's not working properly.OK. So what makes people not notice? Well, a poor understanding. If you don't understand the risks, you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't match reality. Not enough examples. There's an inherent problem with low-probability events. If, for example, terrorism almost never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures. This is why you keep sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. There aren't enough examples of failures. Also, feelings that cloud the issues — the cognitive biases I talked about earlier: fears, folk beliefs — basically, an inadequate model of reality.So let me complicate things. I have feeling and reality. I want to add a third element. I want to add ""model."" Feeling and model are in our head, reality is the outside world; it doesn't change, it's real. Feeling is based on our intuition, model is based on reason. That's basically the difference. In a primitive and simple world, there's really no reason for a model, because feeling is close to reality. You don't need a model. But in a modern and complex world, you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face.There's no feeling about germs. You need a model to understand them. This model is an intelligent representation of reality. It's, of course, limited by science, by technology. We couldn't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them. It's limited by our cognitive biases. But it has the ability to override our feelings. Where do we get these models? We get them from others. We get them from religion, from culture, teachers, elders.A couple years ago, I was in South Africa on safari. The tracker I was with grew up in Kruger National Park. He had some very complex models of how to survive. And it depended on if you were attacked by a lion, leopard, rhino, or elephant — and when you had to run away, when you couldn't run away, when you had to climb a tree, when you could never climb a tree. I would have died in a day. But he was born there, and he understood how to survive. I was born in New York City. I could have taken him to New York, and he would have died in a day.(Laughter)Because we had different models based on our different experiences. Models can come from the media, from our elected officials ... Think of models of terrorism, child kidnapping, airline safety, car safety. Models can come from industry. The two I'm following are surveillance cameras, ID cards, quite a lot of our computer security models come from there.A lot of models come from science. Health models are a great example. Think of cancer, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. All of our feelings of security about those diseases come from models given to us, really, by science filtered through the media. So models can change. Models are not static. As we become more comfortable in our environments, our model can move closer to our feelings.So an example might be, if you go back 100 years ago, when electricity was first becoming common, there were a lot of fears about it. There were people who were afraid to push doorbells, because there was electricity in there, and that was dangerous. For us, we're very facile around electricity. We change light bulbs without even thinking about it. Our model of security around electricity is something we were born into. It hasn't changed as we were growing up. And we're good at it. Or think of the risks on the Internet across generations — how your parents approach Internet security, versus how you do, versus how our kids will.Models eventually fade into the background. ""Intuitive"" is just another word for familiar. So as your model is close to reality and it converges with feelings, you often don't even know it's there. A nice example of this came from last year and swine flu. When swine flu first appeared, the initial news caused a lot of overreaction. Now, it had a name, which made it scarier than the regular flu, even though it was more deadly. And people thought doctors should be able to deal with it. So there was that feeling of lack of control. And those two things made the risk more than it was.As the novelty wore off and the months went by, there was some amount of tolerance; people got used to it. There was no new data, but there was less fear. By autumn, people thought the doctors should have solved this already. And there's kind of a bifurcation: people had to choose between fear and acceptance — actually, fear and indifference — and they kind of chose suspicion. And when the vaccine appeared last winter, there were a lot of people — a surprising number — who refused to get it. And it's a nice example of how people's feelings of security change, how their model changes, sort of wildly, with no new information, with no new input. This kind of thing happens a lot.I'm going to give one more complication. We have feeling, model, reality. I have a very relativistic view of security. I think it depends on the observer. And most security decisions have a variety of people involved. And stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision. And I call that their agenda. And you see agenda — this is marketing, this is politics — trying to convince you to have one model versus another, trying to convince you to ignore a model and trust your feelings, marginalizing people with models you don't like. This is not uncommon. An example, a great example, is the risk of smoking. In the history of the past 50 years, the smoking risk shows how a model changes, and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it doesn't like.Compare that to the secondhand smoke debate — probably about 20 years behind. Think about seat belts. When I was a kid, no one wore a seat belt. Nowadays, no kid will let you drive if you're not wearing a seat belt. Compare that to the airbag debate, probably about 30 years behind. All examples of models changing. What we learn is that changing models is hard. Models are hard to dislodge. If they equal your feelings, you don't even know you have a model. And there's another cognitive bias I'll call confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs. So evidence against our model, we're likely to ignore, even if it's compelling. It has to get very compelling before we'll pay attention.New models that extend long periods of time are hard. Global warming is a great example. We're terrible at models that span 80 years. We can do ""to the next harvest."" We can often do ""until our kids grow up."" But ""80 years,"" we're just not good at. So it's a very hard model to accept. We can have both models in our head simultaneously — that kind of problem where we're holding both beliefs together, the cognitive dissonance. Eventually, the new model will replace the old model.Strong feelings can create a model. September 11 created a security model in a lot of people's heads. Also, personal experiences with crime can do it, personal health scare, a health scare in the news. You'll see these called ""flashbulb events"" by psychiatrists. They can create a model instantaneously, because they're very emotive. So in the technological world, we don't have experience to judge models. And we rely on others. We rely on proxies. And this works, as long as it's the correct others.We rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe. I flew here yesterday. I didn't check the airplane. I relied on some other group to determine whether my plane was safe to fly. We're here, none of us fear the roof is going to collapse on us, not because we checked, but because we're pretty sure the building codes here are good. It's a model we just accept pretty much by faith. And that's OK.Now, what we want is people to get familiar enough with better models, have it reflected in their feelings, to allow them to make security trade-offs. When these go out of whack, you have two options. One, you can fix people's feelings, directly appeal to feelings. It's manipulation, but it can work. The second, more honest way is to actually fix the model. Change happens slowly. The smoking debate took 40 years — and that was an easy one. Some of this stuff is hard. Really, though, information seems like our best hope.And I lied. Remember I said feeling, model, reality; reality doesn't change? It actually does. We live in a technological world; reality changes all the time. So we might have, for the first time in our species: feeling chases model, model chases reality, reality's moving — they might never catch up. We don't know. But in the long term, both feeling and reality are important.And I want to close with two quick stories to illustrate this. 1982 — I don't know if people will remember this — there was a short epidemic of Tylenol poisonings in the United States. It's a horrific story. Someone took a bottle of Tylenol, put poison in it, closed it up, put it back on the shelf, someone else bought it and died. This terrified people. There were a couple of copycat attacks. There wasn't any real risk, but people were scared. And this is how the tamper-proof drug industry was invented. Those tamper-proof caps? That came from this. It's complete security theater. As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it. I'll give you one: a syringe. But it made people feel better. It made their feeling of security more match the reality.Last story: a few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth. I visit her in the hospital. It turns out, when a baby's born now, they put an RFID bracelet on the baby, a corresponding one on the mother, so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward, an alarm goes off. I said, ""Well, that's kind of neat. I wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals."" I go home, I look it up. It basically never happens.(Laughter)But if you think about it, if you are a hospital, and you need to take a baby away from its mother, out of the room to run some tests, you better have some good security theater, or she's going to rip your arm off.(Laughter)So it's important for us, those of us who design security, who look at security policy — or even look at public policy in ways that affect security. It's not just reality; it's feeling and reality. What's important is that they be about the same. It's important that, if our feelings match reality, we make better security trade-offs.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier
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"I thought I'd talk a little bit about how nature makes materials. I brought along with me an abalone shell. This abalone shell is a biocomposite material that's 98 percent by mass calcium carbonate and two percent by mass protein. Yet, it's 3,000 times tougher than its geological counterpart. And a lot of people might use structures like abalone shells, like chalk. I've been fascinated by how nature makes materials, and there's a lot of secrets to how they do such an exquisite job. Part of it is that these materials are macroscopic in structure, but they're formed at the nano scale. They're formed at the nano scale, and they use proteins that are coded by the genetic level that allow them to build these really exquisite structures.So something I think is very fascinating is: What if you could give life to non-living structures, like batteries and like solar cells? What if they had some of the same capabilities that an abalone shell did, in terms of being able to build really exquisite structures at room temperature and room pressure, using nontoxic chemicals and adding no toxic materials back into the environment? So that's kind of the vision that I've been thinking about. And so what if you could grow a battery in a Petri dish? Or what if you could give genetic information to a battery so that it could actually become better as a function of time, and do so in an environmentally friendly way?And so, going back to this abalone shell, besides being nanostructured, one thing that's fascinating is, when a male and female abalone get together, they pass on the genetic information that says, ""This is how to build an exquisite material. Here's how to do it at room temperature and pressure, using nontoxic materials."" Same with diatoms, which are shown right here, which are glasseous structures. Every time the diatoms replicate, they give the genetic information that says, ""Here's how to build glass in the ocean that's perfectly nanostructured."" And you can do it the same, over and over again."" So what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery? I like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year old.But anyone who's ever had or knows small children knows, they're incredibly complex organisms. If you wanted to convince them to do something they don't want to do, it's very difficult. So when we think about future technologies, we actually think of using bacteria and viruses — simple organisms. Can you convince them to work with a new toolbox, so they can build a structure that will be important to me?Also, when we think about future technologies, we start with the beginning of Earth. Basically, it took a billion years to have life on Earth. And very rapidly, they became multi-cellular, they could replicate, they could use photosynthesis as a way of getting their energy source. But it wasn't until about 500 million years ago — during the Cambrian geologic time period — that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials. Before that, they were all soft, fluffy structures. It was during this time that there was increased calcium, iron and silicon in the environment, and organisms learned how to make hard materials. So that's what I would like to be able to do, convince biology to work with the rest of the periodic table.Now, if you look at biology, there's many structures like DNA, antibodies, proteins and ribosomes you've heard about, that are nanostructured — nature already gives us really exquisite structures on the nano scale. What if we could harness them and convince them to not be an antibody that does something like HIV? What if we could convince them to build a solar cell for us? Here are some examples. Natural shells, natural biological materials. The abalone shell here. If you fracture it, you can look at the fact that it's nanostructured. There's diatoms made out of SiO2, and there are magnetotactic bacteria that make small, single-domain magnets used for navigation. What all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nano scale, and they have a DNA sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures. Now, going back to the abalone shell, the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins. These proteins are very negatively charged. They can pull calcium out of the environment, and put down a layer of calcium and then carbonate, calcium and carbonate. It has the chemical sequences of amino acids which says, ""This is how to build the structure. Here's the DNA sequence, here's the protein sequence in order to do it."" So an interesting idea is, what if you could take any material you wanted, or any element on the periodic table, and find its corresponding DNA sequence, then code it for a corresponding protein sequence to build a structure, but not build an abalone shell — build something that nature has never had the opportunity to work with yet.And so here's the periodic table. I absolutely love the periodic table. Every year for the incoming freshman class at MIT, I have a periodic table made that says, ""Welcome to MIT. Now you're in your element.""(Laughter)And you flip it over, and it's the amino acids with the pH at which they have different charges. And so I give this out to thousands of people. And I know it says MIT and this is Caltech, but I have a couple extra if people want it. I was really fortunate to have President Obama visit my lab this year on his visit to MIT, and I really wanted to give him a periodic table. So I stayed up at night and talked to my husband, ""How do I give President Obama a periodic table? What if he says, 'Oh, I already have one,' or, 'I've already memorized it?'""(Laughter)So he came to visit my lab and looked around — it was a great visit. And then afterward, I said, ""Sir, I want to give you the periodic table, in case you're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight.""(Laughter)I thought ""molecular weight"" sounded much less nerdy than ""molar mass.""(Laughter)And he looked at it and said, ""Thank you. I'll look at it periodically.""(Laughter)(Applause)Later in a lecture that he gave on clean energy, he pulled it out and said, ""And people at MIT, they give out periodic tables."" So ...So basically what I didn't tell you is that about 500 million years ago, the organisms started making materials, but it took them about 50 million years to get good at it — 50 million years to learn how to perfect how to make that abalone shell. And that's a hard sell to a graduate student: ""I have this great project ... 50 million years ..."" So we had to develop a way of trying to do this more rapidly. And so we use a nontoxic virus called M13 bacteriophage, whose job is to infect bacteria. Well, it has a simple DNA structure that you can go in and cut and paste additional DNA sequences into it, and by doing that, it allows the virus to express random protein sequences.This is pretty easy biotechnology, and you could basically do this a billion times. So you can have a billion different viruses that are all genetically identical, but they differ from each other based on their tips, on one sequence, that codes for one protein. Now if you take all billion viruses, and put them in one drop of liquid, you can force them to interact with anything you want on the periodic table. And through a process of selection evolution, you can pull one of a billion that does something you'd like it to do, like grow a battery or a solar cell.Basically, viruses can't replicate themselves; they need a host. Once you find that one out of a billion, you infect it into a bacteria, and make millions and billions of copies of that particular sequence. The other thing that's beautiful about biology is that biology gives you really exquisite structures with nice link scales. These viruses are long and skinny, and we can get them to express the ability to grow something like semiconductors or materials for batteries.Now, this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab. We engineered a virus to pick up carbon nanotubes. One part of the virus grabs a carbon nanotube, the other part of the virus has a sequence that can grow an electrode material for a battery, and then it wires itself to the current collector. And so through a process of selection evolution, we went from being able to have a virus that made a crummy battery to a virus that made a good battery to a virus that made a record-breaking, high-powered battery that's all made at room temperature, basically at the benchtop. That battery went to the White House for a press conference, and I brought it here. You can see it in this case that's lighting this LED. Now if we could scale this, you could actually use it to run your Prius, which is kind of my dream — to be able to drive a virus-powered car.(Laughter)But basically you can pull one out of a billion, and make lots of amplifications to it. Basically, you make an amplification in the lab, and then you get it to self-assemble into a structure like a battery. We're able to do this also with catalysis. This is the example of a photocatalytic splitting of water. And what we've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna, and you get an energy transfer across the virus. And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, that can be used for clean fuels. I brought an example of that with me today. My students promised me it would work. These are virus-assembled nanowires. When you shine light on them, you can see them bubbling. In this case, you're seeing oxygen bubbles come out.(Applause)Basically, by controlling the genes, you can control multiple materials to improve your device performance.The last example are solar cells. You can also do this with solar cells. We've been able to engineer viruses to pick up carbon nanotubes and then grow titanium dioxide around them, and use it as a way of getting electrons through the device. And what we've found is through genetic engineering, we can actually increase the efficiencies of these solar cells to record numbers for these types of dye-sensitized systems. And I brought one of those as well, that you can play around with outside afterward. So this is a virus-based solar cell. Through evolution and selection, we took it from an eight percent efficiency solar cell to an 11 percent efficiency solar cell.So I hope that I've convinced you that there's a lot of great, interesting things to be learned about how nature makes materials, and about taking it the next step, to see if you can force or take advantage of how nature makes materials, to make things that nature hasn't yet dreamed of making.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_belcher_using_nature_to_grow_batteries
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"So for the past year and a half, my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book. It's called ""Our Choice"" and the author is Al Gore. It's the sequel to ""An Inconvenient Truth,"" and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis.The book starts like this. This is the cover. As the globe spins, we can see our location, and we can open the book and swipe through the chapters to browse the book. Or, we can scroll through the pages at the bottom. And if we wanted to zoom into a page, we can just open it up. And anything you see in the book, you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up. And if you want to go back and read the book again, you just fold it back up and put it back on the page. And so this works the same way; you pick it up and pop it open.(Audio) Al Gore: I consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they're a beautiful addition to the landscape.Mike Matas: And so throughout the whole book, Al Gore will walk you through and explain the photos. This photo, you can you can even see on an interactive map. Zoom into it and see where it was taken. And throughout the book, there's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations. So you can open this one.(Audio) AG: Most modern wind turbines consist of a large ...MM: It starts playing immediately. And while it's playing, we can pinch and peak back at the page, and the movie keeps playing. Or we can zoom out to the table of contents, and the video keeps playing. But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics. This one shows the wind potential all around the United States. But instead of just showing us the information, we can take our finger and explore, and see, state by state, exactly how much wind potential there is. We can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power.This is one of my favorites. So this shows ... (Laughter) (Applause) When the wind is blowing, any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery. And as the wind starts dying down, any excess energy will be diverted back into the house — the lights never go out. And this whole book, it doesn't just run on the iPad. It also runs on the iPhone. And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone. And it works the exact same way. You can pinch into any page. Open it up.So that's Push Pop Press' first title, Al Gore's ""Our Choice."" Thank you. (Applause)Chris Anderson: That's spectacular. Do you want to be a publisher, a technology licenser? What is the business here? Is this something that other people can do?MM: Yeah, we're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content. So Melcher Media's team, who's on the East coast — and we're on the West coast, building the software — takes our tool and, every day, drags in images and text.CA: So you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that? (MM: Yes.) All right. Mike, thanks so much.MM: Thank you. (CA: Good luck.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas
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"My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a toymaker. I've been making toys for the last 30 years. The early '70s, I was in college. It was a very revolutionary time. It was a political ferment, so to say — students out in the streets of Paris, revolting against authority. America was jolted by the anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement. In India, we had the Naxalite movement, the [unclear] movement. But you know, when there is a political churning of society, it unleashes a lot of energy. The National Movement of India was testimony to that. Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National Movement. Now in the early '70s, one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village schools.There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR. At 31, he was not able to relate the kind of [unclear] research, which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people. So he designed and went and started a village science program. Many people were inspired by this. The slogan of the early '70s was ""Go to the people. Live with them; love them. Start from what they know. Build on what they have."" This was kind of the defining slogan.Well I took one year. I joined Telco, made TATA trucks, pretty close to Pune. I worked there for two years, and I realized that I was not born to make trucks. Often one doesn't know what one wants to do, but it's good enough to know what you don't want to do. So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program. And it was a turning point. It was a very small village — a weekly bazaar where people, just once in a week, they put in all the vats. So I said, ""I'm going to spend a year over here."" So I just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside. And one thing which I found was this black rubber.This is called a cycle valve tube. When you pump in air in a bicycle, you use a bit of this. And some of these models — so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube, you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible joint. It's a joint of tubes. You start by teaching angles — an acute angle, a right angle, an obtuse angle, a straight angle. It's like its own little coupling. If you have three of them, and you loop them together, well you make a triangle. With four, you make a square, you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon, you make all these kind of polygons. And they have some wonderful properties. If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile. You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle. You give it a push, this becomes a parallelogram. But this is very shaky. Look at the pentagon, for instance, pull this out — it becomes a boat shape trapezium. Push it and it becomes house shaped. This becomes an isosceles triangle — again, very shaky. This square might look very square and prim. Give it a little push — this becomes a rhombus. It becomes kite-shaped. But give a child a triangle, he can't do a thing to it.Why use triangles? Because triangles are the only rigid structures. We can't make a bridge with squares because the train would come, it would start doing a jig. Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in India, they might not have gone to engineering college, but no one makes a roof placed like this. Because if they put tiles on top, it's just going to crash. They always make a triangular roof. Now this is people science.And if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick, you'll get a T joint. And if I were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle, I would make a tetrahedron. So you make all these 3D shapes. You make a tetrahedron like this. And once you make these, you make a little house. Put this on top. You can make a joint of four. You can make a joint of six. You just need a ton. Now this was — you make a joint of six, you make an icosahedron. You can play around with it. This makes an igloo. Now this is in 1978. I was a 24-year-old young engineer. And I thought this was so much better than making trucks. (Applause) If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4. Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom.Well since then, I just thought that I've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country — village schools, government schools, municipal schools, Ivy League schools — I've been invited by most of them. And every time I go to a school, I see a gleam in the eyes of the children. I see hope. I see happiness in their faces. Children want to make things. Children want to do things.Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps. Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon. It's a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon. And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it. So all you do is — it's a very kind of provocative statement — this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [unclear] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube. And this is how you make a valve. You put a little sticky tape. This is one-way traffic. Well we make lots and lots of pumps. And this is the other one — that you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts. Now this is what you do, is you bend both these legs into a triangle, and you just wrap some tape around. And this is the pump. And now, if you have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler. It's like a centrifuge. If you spin something, it tends to fly out.(Applause)Well in terms of — if you were in Andhra Pradesh, you would make this with the palmyra leaf. Many of our folk toys have great science principles. If you spin-top something, it tends to fly out. If I do it with both hands, you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man. Right. This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing. There are four pictures. You see insects, you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies, frogs, snakes, eagles. Here's a paper which you could [unclear] — designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928, Arthur Stone, documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books. But this is great fun for children. They all study about the food chain. The insects are eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes; the snakes are eaten by the eagles. And this can be, if you had a whole photocopy paper — A4 size paper — you could be in a municipal school, you could be in a government school — a paper, a scale and a pencil — no glue, no scissors. In three minutes, you just fold this up. And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination. If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon. With a bigger one, you make a bigger one.Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here. And you put a little fan here. And this is a hundred-year-old toy. There have been six major research papers on this. There's some grooves over here, you can see. And if I take a reed — if I rub this, something very amazing happens. Six major research papers on this. As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this. He wrote a paper on this. And you don't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause) This is there for every child, and every child can enjoy this. If you want to put a colored disk, well all these seven colors coalesce. And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around.This is a straw. What we've done, we've just sealed both the ends with tape, nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner, so there's holes in the opposite corners, there's a little hole over here. This is a kind of a blowing straw. I just put this inside this. There's a hole here, and I shut this. And this costs very little money to make — great fun for children to do.What we do is make a very simple electric motor. Now this is the simplest motor on Earth. The most expensive thing is the battery inside this. If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it. This is an old bicycle tube, which gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins. This is a permanent magnet. Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet. It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin. We made 30,000.Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it out. When teachers make it, children make it. You can see a gleam in their eye. They get a thrill of what science is all about. And this science is not a rich man's game. In a democratic country, science must reach to our most oppressed, to the most marginalized children. This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools. Over 100,000 children learn science this way. And we're just trying to see possibilities.Look, this is the tetrapak — awful materials from the point of view of the environment. There are six layers — three layers of plastic, aluminum — which are are sealed together. They are fused together, so you can't separate them. Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron. So something which is trash, which is choking all the seabirds, you could just recycle this into a very, very joyous — all the platonic solids can be made with things like this.This is a little straw, and what you do is you just nip two corners here, and this becomes like a baby crocodile's mouth. You put this in your mouth, and you blow. (Honk) It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they say. You're not able to see how the sound is produced, because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth. I'm going to keep this outside, to blow out. I'm going to suck in air. (Honk) So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations. The other is that you keep blowing at it, keep making the sound, and you keep cutting it. And something very, very nice happens. (Honk) (Applause) And when you get a very small one — (Honk) This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this.Well before I go any further, this is something worth sharing. This is a touching slate meant for blind children. This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate, and this is my drawing pen, which is basically a film box. It's basically like a fisherman's line, a fishing line. And this is wool over here. If I crank the handle, all the wool goes inside. And what a blind child can do is to just draw this. Wool sticks on Velcro. There are 12 million blind children in our country — (Applause) who live in a world of darkness. And this has come as a great boon to them. There's a factory out there making our children blind, not able to provide them with food, not able to provide them with vitamin A. But this has come as a great boon for them. There are no patents. Anyone can make it.This is very, very simple. You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator. These are two magnets. This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs. Small pulley and two strong magnets. And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED. If I spin this pulley, the small one's going to spin much faster. There will be a spinning magnetic field. Lines, of course, would be cut, the force will be generated. And you can see, this LED is going to glow. So this is a small crank generator.Well, this is, again, it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts. And what you can do is just, if you give it a twirl, well they just keep going on. And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on. And they'd be absolutely joyous playing with this.Well in the end, what we can also do: we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps. This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar. It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause) When first you see Nehru and Gandhi, this is the Nehru cap — just half a newspaper. We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them. And this is — you can see — this is a flapping bird. All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares. And if you have one of these birds — children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years. And you can see, this is a little fantail bird.Well in the end, I'll just end with a story. This is called ""The Captain's Hat Story."" The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship. It goes very slowly. And there were lots of passengers on the ship, and they were getting bored, so the captain invited them on the deck. ""Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance, and I'll provide you with good food and drinks."" And the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia. The first day, it was a huge umbrella cap, like a captain's cap. That night, when the passengers would be sleeping, he would give it one more fold, and the second day, he would be wearing a fireman's cap — with a little shoot just like a designer cap, because it protects the spinal cord. And the second night, he would take the same cap and give it another fold. And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap — just like an adventurer's cap. And the third night, he would give it two more folds — and this is a very, very famous cap. If you've seen any of our Bollywood films, this is what the policeman wears, it's called a zapalu cap. It's been catapulted to international glory.And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship. So that's a ship. And now the end: everyone was enjoying the journey very much. They were singing and dancing. Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves. And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves. A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down. And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down. And there's a third one over here. This swallows the bridge and knocks it down. And the ship sinks, and the captain has lost everything, but for a life jacket.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arvind_gupta_turning_trash_into_toys_for_learning
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"Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. And the journalist was asking him, ""Why is this so important?"" And Zuckerberg said, ""A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."" And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like.So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. It meant a connection to the world. It meant something that would connect us all together. And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But there's this shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time — my Facebook page. I'm progressive, politically — big surprise — but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. They disappeared.So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. Google's doing it too. If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at — everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located — that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's.But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google ""Egypt"" and to send me screen shots of what they got. So here's my friend Scott's screen shot. And here's my friend Daniel's screen shot. When you put them side-by-side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. Scott's results were full of them. And this was the big story of the day at that time. That's how different these results are becoming.So it's not just Google and Facebook either. This is something that's sweeping the Web. There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times — all flirting with personalization in various ways. And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. As Eric Schmidt said, ""It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.""So I do think this is a problem. And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. They enter the queue, they just zip right out. So ""Iron Man"" zips right out, and ""Waiting for Superman"" can wait for a really long time.What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. You know we all want to be someone who has watched ""Rashomon,"" but right now we want to watch ""Ace Ventura"" for the fourth time. (Laughter) So the best editing gives us a bit of both. It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food.What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. In a broadcast society — this is how the founding mythology goes — in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now. What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important — this is what TED does — other points of view.And the thing is, we've actually been here before as a society. In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. Then people noticed that they were doing something really important. That, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information, that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century. And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web. And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing.I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google — Larry and Sergey — people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that. But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't. Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles
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"Phyllis Rodriguez: We are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship. And it is. And yet, it feels natural to us now.I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. We didn't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later. At the time, we knew that it was political. We were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son — my husband, Orlando, and I and our family. And when I saw it — and yet, through the shock, the terrible shock, and the terrible explosion in our lives, literally, we were not vengeful. And a couple of weeks later when Zacarias Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism, and the U.S. government called for a death penalty for him, if convicted, my husband and I spoke out in opposition to that, publicly. Through that and through human rights groups, we were brought together with several other victims' families.When I saw Aicha in the media, coming over when her son was indicted, and I thought, ""What a brave woman. Someday I want to meet that woman when I'm stronger."" I was still in deep grief; I knew I didn't have the strength. I knew I would find her someday, or we would find each other. Because, when people heard that my son was a victim, I got immediate sympathy. But when people learned what her son was accused of, she didn't get that sympathy. But her suffering is equal to mine.So we met in November 2002, and Aicha will now tell you how that came about.(Translator) Aicha el-Wafi: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui. And I asked the Organization of Human Rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims. So they introduced me to five families. And I saw Phyllis, and I watched her. She was the only mother in the group. The others were brothers, sisters. And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother, just like me. I suffered a lot as a mother. I was married when I was 14. I lost a child when I was 15, a second child when I was 16. So the story with Zacarias was too much really. And I still suffer, because my son is like he's buried alive. I know she really cried for her son. But she knows where he is. My son, I don't know where he is. I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he's tortured. I don't know what happened to him.So that's why I decided to tell my story, so that my suffering is something positive for other women. For all the women, all the mothers that give life, you can give back, you can change. It's up to us women, because we are women, because we love our children. We must be hand-in-hand and do something together. It's not against women, it's for us, for us women, for our children. I talk against violence, against terrorism. I go to schools to talk to young, Muslim girls so they don't accept to be married against their will very young. So if I can save one of the young girls, and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as I did, well this is something good. This is why I'm here in front of you.PR: I would like to say that I have learned so much from Aicha, starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members — which was a very private meeting with security, because it was November 2002, and, frankly, we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country — those of us family members. But we were all so nervous. ""Why does she want to meet us?"" And then she was nervous. ""Why did we want to meet her?"" What did we want from each other? Before we knew each others' names, or anything, we had embraced and wept. Then we sat in a circle with support, with help, from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation. And Aicha started, and she said, ""I don't know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your families. I know what it is to suffer, and I feel that if there is a crime, a person should be tried fairly and punished."" But she reached out to us in that way, and it was, I'd like to say, it was an ice-breaker. And what happened then is we all told our stories, and we all connected as human beings. By the end of the afternoon — it was about three hours after lunch — we'd felt as if we'd known each other forever.Now what I learned from her, is a woman, not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then, and what was being done to her son, but the life she's had. I never had met someone with such a hard life, from such a totally different culture and environment from my own. And I feel that we have a special connection, which I value very much. And I think it's all about being afraid of the other, but making that step and then realizing, ""Hey, this wasn't so hard. Who else can I meet that I don't know, or that I'm so different from?""So, Aicha, do you have a couple of words for conclusion? Because our time is up.(Laughter)(Translator) AW: I wanted to say that we have to try to know other people, the other. You have to be generous, and your hearts must be generous, your mind must be generous. You must be tolerant. You have to fight against violence. And I hope that someday we'll all live together in peace and respecting each other. This is what I wanted to say.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/9_11_healing_the_mothers_who_found_forgiveness_friendship
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"Good afternoon, everybody. I've got something to show you. (Laughter) Think about this as a pixel, a flying pixel. This is what we call, in our lab, sensible design. Let me tell you a bit about it. Now if you take this picture — I'm Italian originally, and every boy in Italy grows up with this picture on the wall of his bedroom — but the reason I'm showing you this is that something very interesting happened in Formula 1 racing over the past couple of decades. Now some time ago, if you wanted to win a Formula 1 race, you take a budget, and you bet your budget on a good driver and a good car. And if the car and the driver were good enough, then you'd win the race. Now today, if you want to win the race, actually you need also something like this — something that monitors the car in real time, has a few thousand sensors collecting information from the car, transmitting this information into the system, and then processing it and using it in order to go back to the car with decisions and changing things in real time as information is collected. This is what, in engineering terms, you would call a real time control system. And basically, it's a system made of two components — a sensing and an actuating component.What is interesting today is that real time control systems are starting to enter into our lives. Our cities, over the past few years, just have been blanketed with networks, electronics. They're becoming like computers in open air. And, as computers in open air, they're starting to respond in a different way to be able to be sensed and to be actuated. If we fix cities, actually it's a big deal. Just as an aside, I wanted to mention, cities are only two percent of the Earth's crust, but they are 50 percent of the world's population. They are 75 percent of the energy consumption — up to 80 percent of CO2 emissions. So if we're able to do something with cities, that's a big deal. Beyond cities, all of this sensing and actuating is entering our everyday objects.That's from an exhibition that Paola Antonelli is organizing at MoMA later this year, during the summer. It's called ""Talk to Me."" Well our objects, our environment is starting to talk back to us. In a certain sense, it's almost as if every atom out there were becoming both a sensor and an actuator. And that is radically changing the interaction we have as humans with the environment out there. In a certain sense, it's almost as if the old dream of Michelangelo ... you know, when Michelangelo sculpted the Moses, at the end it said that he took the hammer, threw it at the Moses — actually you can still see a small chip underneath — and said, shouted, ""Perché non parli? Why don't you talk?"" Well today, for the first time, our environment is starting to talk back to us. And I'll show just a few examples — again, with this idea of sensing our environment and actuating it.Let's starting with sensing. Well, the first project I wanted to share with you is actually one of the first projects by our lab. It was four and a half years ago in Italy. And what we did there was actually use a new type of network at the time that had been deployed all across the world — that's a cellphone network — and use anonymous and aggregated information from that network, that's collected anyway by the operator, in order to understand how the city works. The summer was a lucky summer — 2006. It's when Italy won the soccer World Cup. Some of you might remember, it was Italy and France playing, and then Zidane at the end, the headbutt. And anyway, Italy won at the end.(Laughter)Now look at what happened that day just by monitoring activity happening on the network. Here you see the city. You see the Colosseum in the middle, the river Tiber. It's morning, before the match. You see the timeline on the top. Early afternoon, people here and there, making calls and moving. The match begins — silence. France scores. Italy scores. Halftime, people make a quick call and go to the bathroom. Second half. End of normal time. First overtime, second. Zidane, the headbutt in a moment. Italy wins. Yeah. (Laughter) (Applause) Well, that night, everybody went to celebrate in the center. You saw the big peak. The following day, again everybody went to the center to meet the winning team and the prime minister at the time. And then everybody moved down. You see the image of the place called Circo Massimo, where, since Roman times, people go to celebrate, to have a big party, and you see the peak at the end of the day. Well, that's just one example of how we can sense the city today in a way that we couldn't have done just a few years ago.Another quick example about sensing: it's not about people, but about things we use and consume. Well today, we know everything about where our objects come from. This is a map that shows you all the chips that form a Mac computer, how they came together. But we know very little about where things go. So in this project, we actually developed some small tags to track trash as it moves through the system. So we actually started with a number of volunteers who helped us in Seattle, just over a year ago, to tag what they were throwing away — different types of things, as you can see here — things they would throw away anyway. Then we put a little chip, little tag, onto the trash and then started following it. Here are the results we just obtained.(Music)From Seattle ... after one week. With this information we realized there's a lot of inefficiencies in the system. We can actually do the same thing with much less energy. This data was not available before. But there's a lot of wasted transportation and convoluted things happening. But the other thing is that we believe that if we see every day that the cup we're throwing away, it doesn't disappear, it's still somewhere on the planet. And the plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change. So that was the reason for the project.My colleague at MIT, Assaf Biderman, he could tell you much more about sensing and many other wonderful things we can do with sensing, but I wanted to go to the second part we discussed at the beginning, and that's actuating our environment. And the first project is something we did a couple of years ago in Zaragoza, Spain. It started with a question by the mayor of the city, who came to us saying that Spain and Southern Europe have a beautiful tradition of using water in public space, in architecture. And the question was: How could technology, new technology, be added to that? And one of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing. You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water. If those pixels fall, you can write on it, you can show patterns, images, text. And even you can approach it, and it will open up to let you jump through, as you see in this image.Well, we presented this to Mayor Belloch. He liked it very much. And we got a commission to design a building at the entrance of the expo. We called it Digital Water Pavilion. The whole building is made of water. There's no doors or windows, but when you approach it, it will open up to let you in. (Music) The roof also is covered with water. And if there's a bit of wind, if you want to minimize splashing, you can actually lower the roof. Or you could close the building, and the whole architecture will disappear, like in this case. You know, these days, you always get images during the winter, when they take the roof down, of people who have been there and said, ""They demolished the building."" No, they didn't demolish it, just when it goes down, the architecture almost disappears. Here's the building working. You see the person puzzled about what was going on inside. And here was myself trying not to get wet, testing the sensors that open the water.Well, I should tell you now what happened one night when all of the sensors stopped working. But actually that night, it was even more fun. All the kids from Zaragoza came to the building, because the way of engaging with the building became something different. Not anymore a building that would open up to let you in, but a building that would still make cuts and holes through the water, and you had to jump without getting wet.(Video) (Crowd Noise)And that was, for us, was very interesting, because, as architects, as engineers, as designers, we always think about how people will use the things we design. But then reality's always unpredictable. And that's the beauty of doing things that are used and interact with people.Here is an image then of the building with the physical pixels, the pixels made of water, and then projections on them. And this is what led us to think about the following project I'll show you now. That's, imagine those pixels could actually start flying. Imagine you could have small helicopters that move in the air, and then each of them with a small pixel in changing lights — almost as a cloud that can move in space. Here is the video.(Music)So imagine one helicopter, like the one we saw before, moving with others, in synchrony. So you can have this cloud. You can have a kind of flexible screen or display, like this — a regular configuration in two dimensions. Or in regular, but in three dimensions, where the thing that changes is the light, not the pixels' position. You can play with a different type. Imagine your screen could just appear in different scales or sizes, different types of resolution. But then the whole thing can be just a 3D cloud of pixels that you can approach and move through it and see from many, many directions. Here is the real Flyfire control and going down to form the regular grid as before. When you turn on the light, actually you see this. So the same as we saw before. And imagine each of them then controlled by people. You can have each pixel having an input that comes from people, from people's movement, or so and so.I want to show you something here for the first time. We've been working with Roberto Bolle, one of today's top ballet dancers — the étoile at Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan — and actually captured his movement in 3D in order to use it as an input for Flyfire. And here you can see Roberto dancing. You see on the left the pixels, the different resolutions being captured. It's both 3D scanning in real time and motion capture. So you can reconstruct a whole movement. You can go all the way through. But then, once we have the pixels, then you can play with them and play with color and movement and gravity and rotation. So we want to use this as one of the possible inputs for Flyfire.I wanted to show you the last project we are working on. It's something we're working on for the London Olympics. It's called The Cloud. And the idea here is, imagine, again, we can involve people in doing something and changing our environment — almost to impart what we call cloud raising — like barn raising, but with a cloud. Imagine you can have everybody make a small donation for one pixel. And I think what is remarkable that has happened over the past couple of years is that, over the past couple of decades, we went from the physical world to the digital one. This has been digitizing everything, knowledge, and making that accessible through the Internet.Now today, for the first time — and the Obama campaign showed us this — we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one. This can be, in our case, we want to use it for designing and doing a symbol. That means something built in a city. But tomorrow it can be, in order to tackle today's pressing challenges — think about climate change or CO2 emissions — how we can go from the digital world to the physical one. So the idea that we can actually involve people in doing this thing together, collectively.The cloud is a cloud, again, made of pixels, in the same way as the real cloud is a cloud made of particles. And those particles are water, where our cloud is a cloud of pixels. It's a physical structure in London, but covered with pixels. You can move inside, have different types of experiences. You can actually see from underneath, sharing the main moments for the Olympics in 2012 and beyond, and really using it as a way to connect with the community. So both the physical cloud in the sky and something you can go to the top [of], like London's new mountaintop. You can enter inside it. And a kind of new digital beacon for the night — but most importantly, a new type of experience for anybody who will go to the top.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carlo_ratti_architecture_that_senses_and_responds
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"So as a fashion designer, I've always tended to think of materials something like this, or this, or maybe this. But then I met a biologist, and now I think of materials like this — green tea, sugar, a few microbes and a little time. I'm essentially using a kombucha recipe, which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria, yeasts and other micro-organisms, which spin cellulose in a fermentation process. Over time, these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface.So we start by brewing the tea. I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time, and then while it's still hot, add a couple of kilos of sugar. We stir this in until it's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath. We need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees C. And then we're ready to add the living organism. And along with that, some acetic acid. And once you get this process going, you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid. We need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth. And I use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it. And actually, in hot weather, I can just grow it outside. So this is my mini fabric farm.After about three days, the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid. So this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing. And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid. So they're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose. And they're sticking together, forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface. After about two to three weeks, we're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness. So the bath on the left is after five days, and on the right, after 10. And this is a static culture. You don't have to do anything to it; you just literally watch it grow. It doesn't need light.And when it's ready to harvest, you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold, soapy water. At this point, it's really heavy. It's over 90 percent water, so we need to let that evaporate. So I spread it out onto a wooden sheet. Again, you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air. And as it's drying, it's compressing, so what you're left with, depending on the recipe, is something that's either like a really light-weight, transparent paper, or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather. And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally, or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape. And as it evaporates, it will knit itself together, forming seams.So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea. I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin, which intrigues me. Since it's organic, I'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals. I can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation. Using fruit and vegetable staining, create organic patterning. And using indigo, make it anti-microbial. And in fact, cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark. And because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose, it just takes one, and a really short one at that.What I can't yet do is make it water-resistant. So if I was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today, I would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water. The dress would get really heavy, and eventually the seams would probably fall apart — leaving me feeling rather naked. Possibly a good performance piece, but definitely not ideal for everyday wear. What I'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that I need. So what I want to do is say to a future bug, ""Spin me a thread. Align it in this direction. Make it hydrophobic. And while you're at it, just form it around this 3D shape.""Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing, and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels, possibly even replacement bone tissue. But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire. Obviously, as a designer, that's really exciting because then I start to think, wow, we could actually imagine growing consumable products.What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency. So we only grow what we need. There's no waste. And in fact, we could make it from a waste stream — so for example, a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant. Finally, at the end of use, we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings. What I'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources.Ultimately, maybe it won't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact. We could, for example, imagine growing a lamp, a chair, a car or maybe even a house. So I guess what my question to you is: in the future, what would you choose to grow? Thank you very much.(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Suzanne, just a curiosity, what you're wearing is not random. (Suzanne Lee: No.) This is one of the jackets you grew?SL: Yes, it is. It's probably — part of the project's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes. (Laughter) It's absorbing my sweat, and it's feeding on it.BG: Okay, so we'll let you go and save it, and rescue it. Suzanne Lee. (SL: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes
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"The universe is really big. We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this. Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 100 billion is the only number you need to know. The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years. (Laughter) Which tells you something about our place in the universe.One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it. It's extremely beautiful. I've often wondered, what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn't have any. But we would also like to understand it. As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this? One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time. If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you. And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster. So we say the universe is expanding.What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together. In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter. If you squeeze things together, the temperature goes up. That kind of makes sense to us. The thing that doesn't make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth. You might think that that's not a surprise. The air in this room is very smooth. You might say, ""Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out."" But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room. In particular, things were a lot denser. The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang.What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each. At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big — literally — at early times. And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections, without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else. Because if there had been, they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole. Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it's a delicate arrangement. It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. There is something that made it that way. We would like to know what.So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You've heard of entropy. It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tombstone now — that really quantifies what entropy is. And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe.The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy. That's a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out. This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future. Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing — the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future. The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing. Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy. What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place.The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth. We'd like to understand that. That's our job as cosmologists. Unfortunately, it's actually not a problem that we've been giving enough attention to. It's not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, ""What are the problems we're trying to address?"" One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman. 50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures. He gave the popular lectures that became ""The Character of Physical Law."" He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became ""The Feynman Lectures on Physics."" He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became ""The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation."" In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle: Why did the early universe have such a small entropy?So he says — I'm not going to do the accent — he says, ""For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding."" So that's our job. We want to know — this is 50 years ago, ""Surely,"" you're thinking, ""we've figured it out by now."" It's not true that we've figured it out by now.The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn't know before. We learned that it's accelerating. The universe is not only expanding. If you look at the galaxy, it's moving away. If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster. Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating. Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy. It's just the idea that empty space itself has energy.In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there's stuff, whether or not there's particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there's still energy, even in the space itself. And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe. It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other. Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands. The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger. This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. For one thing, the universe will expand forever.Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do. Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future. Einstein was fond of this idea. But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever. 14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future. Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, space looks finite to us. Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see. There's a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon. So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us. Finally, empty space has a temperature.In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics. The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates. A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates. The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations. And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space. So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever. Well what is the implication of that?That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century. He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy. But that's a probabilistic statement. It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge. It's not something you have to worry about — the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us. It's very, very unlikely. Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever, that would happen. Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained.So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium. He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe. He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton — they were absolute; they just stuck there forever. So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere — the everything molecules. But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations. And then, of course, in the natural course of things, they will expand back. So it's not that entropy must always increase — you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations.Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas — the multiverse and the anthropic principle. He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there. Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time. We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium. So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back. But there will also be large fluctuations. Occasionally, you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies. So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible. That's the region where entropy is low. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time.Now your homework assignment is to really think about this, to contemplate what it means. Carl Sagan once famously said that ""in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe."" But he was not right. In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie. That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie. So this scenario makes predictions. And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal. Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy.The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right. This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation. Even if you left our galaxy out, you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies. And Feynman also understood this. Feynman says, ""From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we've never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we've just looked at — high entropy. If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it. We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation."" So that's good. The question is then what is the right answer? If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy? And I would love to tell you the answer, but I'm running out of time.(Laughter)Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists. I just showed you this picture. The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so. It's cooling off. But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more. If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning. They will fall into black holes. We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes. That universe will last 10 to the 100 years — a lot longer than our little universe has lived. The future is much longer than the past. But even black holes don't last forever. They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space. That empty space lasts essentially forever. However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space. So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe. They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years.So here's two questions for you. Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang? Why aren't we in empty space? You might say, ""Well there's nothing there to be living,"" but that's not right. You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness. Why aren't you? More homework assignment for you.So like I said, I don't actually know the answer. I'm going to give you my favorite scenario. Either it's just like that. There is no explanation. This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions. Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe. An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, ""Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator."" That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken. Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken. Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations. If that's true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse. That's my favorite scenario.So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation. My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history. And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities. We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse. And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations. This is a prediction. I might be wrong. But we've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like, why it came to be in the way it did for many, many years. It's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sean_carroll_distant_time_and_the_hint_of_a_multiverse
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"It's great being here at TED. You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet. The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted. And you can't tell the story about pollinators — bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies — without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years.I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years. To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of. It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it.When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action. We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat. And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind. It's like the canary in the coalmine. If they disappear, so do we. It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it.What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers: ""What motivates the pollinators?"" Well, their answer was, ""It's all about risk and reward."" Like a wide-eyed kid, I'd say, ""Why is that?"" And they'd say, ""Well, because they want to survive."" I go, ""Why?"" ""Well, in order to reproduce."" ""Well, why?"" And I thought that they'd probably say, ""Well, it's all about sex."" And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, ""Nothing lasts forever. Everything in the universe wears out.""And that blew my mind. Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again.So here is some nectar from my film. I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden. And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder. Here are some images from the film.(Music)(Applause)Thank you. Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_the_hidden_beauty_of_pollination
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"My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. We didn't even have a telephone. All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it.I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, ""Have You Ever."" I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet. National Geographic doesn't do this, so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you.And what these images are — you'll see them at the start of the slide show — there's only about four images — but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest. It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear. It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear. There are only 200 of these bears left. They're more rare than the panda bear.I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one. I thought, my career's over. I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic. What in the heck was I thinking? So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me. Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses.(Laughter)And after two months of sitting there — one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it. And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest. He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep. And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him.So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions. Please enjoy.(Music)Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫(Applause)Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over. My clock is ticking. OK, let's stop. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level. And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years. Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years. And what does that mean? After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news. You glaze over with it. And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this. And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem. Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years.And there's no better, sexier, more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on. Polar bears are amazing hunters. This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores. There was no ice around. But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it. And this bear swam out to that seal — 800 lb. bearded seal — grabbed it, swam back and ate it. And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him — about 20 feet away — to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal. And as he ate, he was so full — he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly — and as he ate inside one side of his mouth, he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth.So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing. We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic. When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears. And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place. We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out. I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice. These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice.Here's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them; they're safe at this point. They're not going to die of hypothermia. They're going to get to land. But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem.These ringed seals, these are the ""fatsicles"" of the Arctic. These little, fat dumplings, 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear. And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here. These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice. They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice. And here's a picture of sick ice. This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old. And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process.And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea. The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place. I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive. But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner. In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms. And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life. So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden. It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden. Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden.Here's me in my office. I hope you appreciate yours. This is after an hour under the ice. I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet. And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water. After an hour in these conditions, it's so extreme that, when I go down, almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head. And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over. I get to hand my camera to my assistant, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, ""Woo. Woo. Woo."" Which means, ""Take my camera."" And he thinks I'm saying, ""Take my picture."" So we had this little communication breakdown. (Laughter) But it's worth it.I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made. I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo. I got very nervous — no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me — and I thought, ""I'm in trouble."" But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle. This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here. And when you have low  productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down.This is a bowhead whale. Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now. This very whale right here could be over 250 years old. This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution. It could have survived 150 years of whaling. And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South.Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water. But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod. And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods.Alright, my favorite part. When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other. Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals. Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation. They've got that wryly smile on their mouth. They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body. They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary. And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal. And people were like, ""We knew they were vicious. We knew they were."" And so people love to form their opinions. And that's when I got a story idea: I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake — find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood. So this is that story. Oh, and they also happen to eat Happy Feet.(Laughter)As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad. It doesn't work that way. The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous. This is just the food chain unfolding. They're also big. They're not these little harbor seals. They are 12 ft. long, a thousand pounds. And they're also curiously aggressive. You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon. The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked. All the leopard seal was doing — it's just biting a balloon. It just sees this big balloon in the ocean — it doesn't have hands — it's going to take a little bite, the boat pops, and off they go.(Laughter)So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage — isn't that beautiful — after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica. I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide. His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden — Goran. And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one. So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal. And even in his voice, he goes, ""That's a bloody big seal, ya."" (Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth. And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one.And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat. And we're trying to not fall in the water. And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, ""This is a good seal, ya. It's time for you to get in the water."" (Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, ""Forget that."" But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter ""F."" But he was right. He scolded me out, and said, ""This is why we're here. And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic. And now you've got to deliver. And you can't publish excuses.""So I had such dry mouth — probably not as bad as now — but I had such, such dry mouth. And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs. I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips. I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water. And this was the first thing she did. She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera — and her teeth are up here and down here — but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice. He said, ""If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away.""(Laughter)So that's all I had to work with at that point. But I just started to shoot these pictures. So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened — she totally relaxed. She went off, she got a penguin. She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go. The penguin swims toward me, takes off. She grabs another one. She does this over and over. And it dawned on me that she's trying to feed me a penguin. Why else would she release these penguins at me? And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face. You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, ""This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean.""(Laughter)So realizing I couldn't catch swimming penguins, she'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me, bobbing like this, and she'd let them go. This didn't work. I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing. And so that didn't work. So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me. This went on for four days. This just didn't happen a couple of times. And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins. (Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away. And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like, ""Are you for real?"" Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin. Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating — and I'm not breeding, so ...(Laughter)And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head. She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around. She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream. And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face. She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve. But yet she didn't stop. She would not stop trying to feed me penguins.And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gok-gok-gok-gok. And I thought, she's about to bite. She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me. What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display. She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me.(Laughter)That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with. I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter. They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears. And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment. I get emotional. Sorry.It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you. And I'm so passionate about it. Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go. We've got to get the story out now. Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thanks very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_nicklen_tales_of_ice_bound_wonderlands
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"Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm going to talk about a new, old material that still continues to amaze us, and that might impact the way we think about material science, high technology — and maybe, along the way, also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation. So that's kind of a bold statement. I'll tell you a little bit more. This material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true. It's sustainable; it's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature — and is biodegradable with a clock, so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years. It's edible; it's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response. It actually gets reintegrated in the body. And it's technological, so it can do things like microelectronics, and maybe photonics do. And the material looks something like this. In fact, this material you see is clear and transparent. The components of this material are just water and protein.So this material is silk. So it's kind of different from what we're used to thinking about silk. So the question is, how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia? The process of discovery, generally, is inspired by nature. And so we marvel at silk worms — the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber. The silk worm does a remarkable thing: it uses these two ingredients, protein and water, that are in its gland, to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection — so comparable to technical fibers like Kevlar. And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things. We want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid Kevlar, to this natural Kevlar.So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material. And this is an insight that came, about two decades ago, from a person that I'm very fortunate to work with, David Kaplan. And so we get this starting material. And so this starting material is back to the basic building block. And then we use this to do a variety of things — like, for example, this film. And we take advantage of something that is very simple. The recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do. They find their way to self-assemble. So the recipe is simple: you take the silk solution, you pour it, and you wait for the protein to self-assemble. And then you detach the protein and you get this film, as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates.But I mentioned that the film is also technological. And so what does that mean? It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology, like microelectronics and nanoscale technology. And the image of the DVD here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface, which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale. So it would be able to replicate the information that is on the DVD. And we can store information that's film with water and protein. So we tried something out, and we wrote a message in a piece of silk, which is right here, and the message is over there. And much like in the DVD, you can read it out optically. And this requires a stable hand, so this is why I decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people. So let me see. So as you see the film go in transparently through there, and then ... (Applause) And the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that.So once you have these attributes of this material, then you can do a lot of things. It's actually not limited to films. And so the material can assume a lot of formats. And then you go a little crazy, and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays, like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes. Or you can do beautiful things that, if the camera can capture, you can make. You can add a third dimensionality to the film. And if the angle is right, you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk. But you can do other things. You can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light, and so we've made optical fibers.But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics. And you can think of different formats. So for instance, if you're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle, we do microneedle arrays. What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that's made of silk — just to give you a sense of size. You can do bigger things. You can do gears and nuts and bolts — that you can buy at Whole Foods. And the gears work in water as well. So you think of alternative mechanical parts. And maybe you can use that liquid Kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins, for example, or maybe an entire bone. And so you have here a little example of a small skull — what we call mini Yorick. (Laughter) But you can do things like cups, for example, and so, if you add a little bit of gold, if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods. You can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap. Or if you're fashion forward, some silk LED tattoos.So there's versatility, as you see, in the material formats, that you can do with silk. But there are still some unique traits. I mean, why would you want to do all these things for real? I mentioned it briefly at the beginning; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible. And you see here a picture of a tissue section. And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible? You can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted. Which means that all the devices that you've seen before and all the formats, in principle, can be implanted and disappear. And what you see there in that tissue section, in fact, is you see that reflector tape. So, much like you're seen at night by a car, then the idea is that you can see, if you illuminate tissue, you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk. And you see there, it gets reintegrated in tissue. And reintegration in the human body is not the only thing, but reintegration in the environment is important. So you have a clock, you have protein, and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt — (Applause) unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday. It's edible, so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food. It doesn't taste good, so I'm going to need some help with that.But probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle. Silk, during its self-assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter. And so if you change the recipe, and you add things when you pour — so you add things to your liquid silk solution — where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines, the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants. So it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive. So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together — a fractured bone together — and deliver drugs at the same, while your bone is healing, for example. Or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge. So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it. And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C, so 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin. And so that could be —- (Applause) that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels. (Laughter) And of course, there's no use in storage if you can't use [it].And so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have, that they're programmably degradable. And so what you see there is the difference. In the top, you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade, and in the bottom, a film that has been programmed to degrade in water. And what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it. So it allows for the recovery of what we've stored before. And so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you've seen.So the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread. We're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do, whether you want to replace a vein or a bone, or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics, perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt, maybe carry your drugs in your pocket, deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert, the answer may be in a thread of silk.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fiorenzo_omenetto_silk_the_ancient_material_of_the_future
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"When I was a child, I always wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to save the world and make everyone happy. But I knew that I'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true. So I used to embark on these imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton, which was a lot of fun, but didn't yield much result. When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers, I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science, to find a more useful truth.I started my journey in California, with a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook, and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life. By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be,(Laughter)how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others. In another yearbook, I stumbled upon Barry Obama's picture. When I first saw his picture, I thought that his superpowers came from his super collar.(Laughter)But now I know it was all in his smile.Another aha! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players. The researchers found that the span of a player's smile could actually predict the span of his life. Players who didn't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years, where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years.(Laughter)The good news is that we're actually born smiling. Using 3D ultrasound technology, we can now see that developing babies appear to smile, even in the womb. When they're born, babies continue to smile — initially, mostly in their sleep. And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice. Smiling is one of the most basic, biologically uniform expressions of all humans.In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea, Paul Ekman, the world's most renowned researcher on facial expressions, found that even members of the Fore tribe, who were completely disconnected from Western culture, and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals,(Laughter)attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would. So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing, we smile often, and use smiles to express joy and satisfaction.How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day? Raise your hand if you do. Oh, wow. Outside of this room, more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day, whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five. In fact, those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children, who smile as many as 400 times per day.Have you ever wondered why being around children, who smile so frequently, makes you smile very often? A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles. You ask why? Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious, and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles. Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically helps us understand whether our smile is fake or real, so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler.In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France, subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles. Without the pencil, subjects were excellent judges, but with the pencil in their mouth — when they could not mimic the smile they saw — their judgment was impaired.(Laughter)In addition to theorizing on evolution in ""The Origin of Species,"" Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory. His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better, rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good. In his study, Darwin actually cited a French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, who sent electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles. Please, don't try this at home.(Laughter)In a related German study, researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles. The finding supported Darwin's theory, by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain, in a way that helps us feel better when we smile. Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate — a well-regarded pleasure inducer — cannot match.British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate.(Laughter)Wait — The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds sterling in cash.(Laughter)That's like 25 grand a smile. It's not bad. And think about it this way: 25,000 times 400 — quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day.(Laughter)And unlike lots of chocolate, lots of smiling can actually make you healthier. Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphins, and reduce overall blood pressure.And if that's not enough, smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others. A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile, you don't only appear to be more likable and courteous, but you actually appear to be more competent.So whenever you want to look great and competent, reduce your stress or improve your marriage, or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality chocolate without incurring the caloric cost, or as if you found 25 grand in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn't worn for ages, or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer, healthier, happier life, smile.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_gutman_the_hidden_power_of_smiling
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"My name is Amit. And 18 months ago, I had another job at Google, and I pitched this idea of doing something with museums and art to my boss who's actually here, and she allowed me to do it. And it took 18 months. A lot of fun, negotiations and stories, I can tell you, with 17 very interesting museums from nine countries. But I'm going to focus on the demo. There are a lot of stories about why we did this.I think my personal story is explained very simply on the slide, and it's access. And I grew up in India. I had a great education — I'm not complaining — but I didn't have access to a lot of these museums and these artworks. And so when I started traveling and going to these museums, I started learning a lot. And while working at Google, I tried to put this desire to make it more accessible with technology together. So we formed a team, a great team of people, and we started doing this.I'm going to probably get into the demo and then tell you a couple of the interesting things we've had since launch. So, simple: you come to GoogleArtProject.com. You look around at all these museums here. You've got the Uffizi, you've got the MoMA, the Hermitage, the Rijks, the Van Gogh. I'm going to actually get to one of my favorites, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Two ways of going in — very simple. Click and, bang, you're in this museum. It doesn't matter where you are — Bombay, Mexico, it doesn't really matter. You move around, you have fun. You want to navigate around the museum? Open the plan up, and, in one click, jump. You're in there, you want to go to the end of the corridor. Keep going. Have fun. Explore.(Applause)Thanks. I haven't come to the best part.(Laughter)So now I'm in front of one of my favorite paintings, ""The Harvesters"" by Pieter Bruegel at the Met. I see this plus sign. If the museum has given us the image, you click on it. Now this is one of the images. So this is all of the meta-data information. For those of you who are truly interested in art, you can click this — but I'm going to click this off right now. And this is one of these images that we captured in what we call gigapixel technology. So this image, for example, has close to, I think, around 10 billion pixels. And I get a lot of people asking me: ""What do you get for 10 billion pixels?"" So I'm going to try and show you what you really get for 10 billion pixels. You can zoom around very simply. You see some fun stuff happening here. I love this guy; his expression is priceless.But then you really want to go deep. And so I started playing around, and I found something going on over here. And I was like, ""Hold on. That sounds interesting."" Went in, and I started noticing that these kids were actually beating something. I did a little research, spoke to a couple of my contacts at the Met, and actually found out that this is a game called squall, which involves beating a goose with a stick on Shrove Tuesday. And apparently it was quite popular. I don't know why they did it, but I learned something about it. Now just to get really deep in, you can really get to the cracks. Now just to give you some perspective, I'm going to zoom out so you really see what you get. Here is where we were, and this is the painting.(Applause)The best is yet to come — so in a second. So now let's just quickly jump into the MoMA, again in New York. So another one of my favorites, ""The Starry Night."" Now the example I showed you was all about finding details. But what if you want to see brush strokes? And what if you want to see how Van Gogh actually created this masterpiece? You zoom in. You really go in. I'm going to go to one of my favorite parts in this painting, and I'm really going to get to the cracks. This is ""The Starry Night,"" I think, never seen like this before.I'm going to show you my other favorite feature. There's a lot of other stuff here, but I don't have time. This is the real cool part. It's called Collections. Any one of you, anybody — doesn't matter if you're rich, if you're poor, if you have a fancy house — doesn't matter. You can go and create your own museum online — create your own collection across all these images. Very simply, you go in — and I've created this, called The Power of Zoom — you can just zoom around. This is ""The Ambassadors,"" based in the National Gallery. You can annotate the stuff, send it to your friends and really get a conversation going about what you're feeling when you go through these masterpieces.So I think, in conclusion, for me, the main thing is that all the amazing stuff here does not really come from Google. It doesn't, in my opinion, even come from the museums. I probably shouldn't say that. It really comes from these artists. And that's been my humbling experience in this. I mean, I hope in this digital medium that we do justice to their artwork and represent it properly online. And the biggest question I get asked nowadays is, ""Did you do this to replicate the experience of going to a museum?"" And the answer is no. It's to supplement the experience.And that's it. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amit_sood_building_a_museum_of_museums_on_the_web
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"I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend, Richard Feynman. I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew. I'm sure there are people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman.Richard Feynman was a very complex man. He was a man of many, many parts. He was, of course, foremost, a very, very, very great scientist. He was an actor. You saw him act. I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. They were fantastic. He was a philosopher. He was a drum player. He was a teacher par excellence. Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman. He was brash, irreverent. He was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upmanship. He loved intellectual battle. He had a gargantuan ego. But the man had, somehow, a lot of room at the bottom. And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case — I can't speak for anybody else, but in my case — a lot of room for another big ego. Well, not as big as his, but fairly big. I always felt good with Dick Feynman.It was always fun to be with him. He always made me feel smart. How can somebody like that make you feel smart? Somehow he did. He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever. And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together. We never published a paper together, but we did have a lot of fun.He loved to win, win these little macho games we would sometimes play. And he didn't only play them with me, but with all sorts of people. He would almost always win. But when he didn't win, when he lost, he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won.I remember once he told me a story about a joke the students played on him. I think it was for his birthday — they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. It may still exist; I don't know. Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. The students went there in advance, and arranged that they'd all order Feynman sandwiches. One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches. Feynman loved this story. He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. When he finished the story, I said to him, ""Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich."" And without skipping a beat at all, he said, ""Well, they'd be about the same. The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham."" ""Ham"" as in bad actor.(Laughter)Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, ""Yeah, but a lot less baloney.""(Laughter)(Applause)The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense — phoniness, false sophistication, jargon. I remember sometime during the mid-'80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman would meet a couple of times up in San Francisco — at some very rich guy's house — up in San Francisco for dinner. And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. These guys were philosophers of mind. Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness. And they were full of all kinds of jargon. I'm trying to remember the words — ""monism,"" ""dualism,"" categories all over the place. I didn't know what those meant, neither did Dick or Sydney, for that matter.And what did we talk about? Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds? There's one obvious thing to talk about: Can a machine become a mind? Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being that is conscious? We sat around and talked about this — we of course never resolved it. But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-ophizing. It's a scientific question, after all. And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman.(Laughter)Feynman let them have it — both barrels, right between the eyes. It was brutal; it was funny — ooh, it was funny. But it was really brutal. He really popped their balloon. But the amazing thing was — Feynman had to leave a little early; he wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early. And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers. And the amazing thing is these guys were flying. They were so happy. They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud ... And it was something special. I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did.Dick — he was my friend; I did call him Dick — Dick and I had a little bit of a rapport. I think it may have been a special rapport that he and I had. We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things. I also like the intellectual macho games. Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them. And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. I don't think he was right. I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves. But he was convinced of this. And the man was incredibly curious. And he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection.And one day, we were walking. We were in France, in Les Houches. We were up in the mountains, 1976. And Feynman said to me, ""Leonardo ..."" The reason he called me ""Leonardo"" is because we were in Europe, and he was practicing his French.(Laughter)And he said, ""Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid?"" I said, ""Well, my real hero was my father. He was a working man, had a fifth-grade education. He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance.""And Feynman's eyes just opened up. He went off like a lightbulb. And he said that he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father. In fact, he had been convinced at one time that to be a good physicist, it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened.He said he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary, a necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist. Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. He wanted to go out and do an experiment.(Laughter)Well, he did. He went out and did an experiment. He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, ""Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?"" They were all men, and to a man, every single one of them said, ""My mother.""(Laughter)There went that theory, down the trash can of history.(Laughter)But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with his father as he had with his father. And for some time, he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows?But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist. Feynman's style — no, ""style"" is not the right word. ""Style"" makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn, or the suit he was wearing. It's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it. Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible. If it wasn't possible, you had to use something fancier. No doubt, part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could. But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it. In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked.There was a theory. It was due to a Russian mathematical physicist. It was a complicated theory; I'll tell you what it was soon enough. It was a terribly complicated theory, full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth. And it sort of worked, but it didn't work very well. The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart. And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other.Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out. He had an idea, a very clear idea. He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like. He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles. The small number of simple principles were very, very simple. The first one was that when helium atoms touch each other, they repel. The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other. The other fact is that in the ground state — the lowest energy state of a quantum system — the wave function is always very smooth; it has the minimum number of wiggles.So he sat down — and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil — and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of, which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between. He wrote down a simple thing — so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high-school student who didn't even have calculus could understand what he wrote down. The thing was, that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium, and then some.I've always wondered whether the professionals — the real professional helium physicists — were just a little bit embarrassed by this. They had their super-powerful technique, and they couldn't do as well. Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was. It was the technique of Feynman diagrams.(Laughter)He did it again in 1968. In 1968, in my own university — I wasn't there at the time — they were exploring the structure of the proton. The proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles; this was more or less known. And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams. That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for — to understand particles. The experiments that were going on were very simple: you simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron. This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for.The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated. They're difficult integrals. If you could do all of them, you would have a very precise theory, but you couldn't — they were just too complicated. People were trying to do them. You could do a one-loop diagram. Don't worry about one loop. One loop, two loops — maybe you could do a three-loop diagram, but beyond that, you couldn't do anything.Feynman said, ""Forget all of that. Just think of the proton as an assemblage, a swarm, of little particles."" He called them ""partons."" He said, ""Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast."" Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow. The electron hits it suddenly — it's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton. What do you see? You see a frozen bunch of partons. They don't move, and because they don't move during the course of the experiment, you don't have to worry about how they're moving. You don't have to worry about the forces between them. You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons."" This was the key to analyzing these experiments. Extremely effective. Somebody said the word ""revolution"" is a bad word. I suppose it is, so I won't say ""revolution,"" but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that.Well, I had some more that I was going to tell you about my connection with Feynman, what he was like, but I see I have exactly half a minute. So I think I'll just finish up by saying: I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event. I think he would have said, ""I don't need this."" But ...(Laughter)How should we honor Feynman? How should we really honor Feynman? I think the answer is we should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leonard_susskind_my_friend_richard_feynman
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"Think about your day for a second. You woke up, felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door, encountered new colleagues and had great discussions, and felt in awe when you found something new. But I bet there's something you didn't think about today — something so close to home that you probably don't think about it very often at all. And that's that all the sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain.Now the brain may not look like much from the outside — a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh, amorphous — but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain, and to see the intricacy of what lies within. And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons. Now unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts — we know how they work, because we humans designed them — the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands. They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules. And they project and connect to different brain regions, and they also change different ways in different disease states.Let's make it concrete. There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors. It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia. It's called the basket cell. And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about. New ones are being discovered everyday. As just a second example: these pyramidal cells, large cells, they can span a significant fraction of the brain. They're excitatory. And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy. Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device. They receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs, which then, if they pass a certain threshold, will go to thousands of downstream partners. And this process, which takes just a millisecond or so, happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells, as long as you live and think and feel.So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does? Ideally, we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies. If we could activate cells, we could see what powers they can unleash, what they can initiate and sustain. If we could turn them off, then we could try and figure out what they're necessary for. And that's a story I'm going to tell you about today. And honestly, where we've gone through over the last 11 years, through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off, both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans.Now before I tell you about the technology, the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room, if we live long enough, will encounter, perhaps, a brain disorder. Already, a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them, and the numbers don't do it justice though. These disorders — schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction — they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are. They take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people. Now in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders, and while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders, practically none of them can be considered to be cured. And part of that's because we're bathing the brain in the chemical. This elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance. That's also why, perhaps, most of the drugs, and not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too.Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain. And for Parkinson's disease, Cochlear implants, these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder. But electricity also will go in all directions — the path of least resistance, which is where that phrase, in part, comes from. And it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix. So again, we're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control. Could we dial-in information precisely where we want it to go?So when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago, I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist, and the first thing I thought about was, if these neurons are electrical devices, all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance. If we could turn on the electricity in one cell, but not its neighbors, that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells, figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they're embedded. And also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry. Now how are we going to do that? Well there are many molecules that exist in nature, which are able to convert light into electricity. You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells. If we can install these molecules in neurons somehow, then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light. And their neighbors, which don't have the molecule, would not. There's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen, and that's the ability to get light into the brain. And to do that — the brain doesn't feel pain — you can put — taking advantage of all the effort that's gone into the Internet and communications and so on — optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate, in animal models for example, in pre-clinical studies, these neurons and to see what they do.So how do we do this? Around 2004, in collaboration with Gerhard Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition. There's a certain alga that swims in the wild, and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally. And it senses light with a little eye-spot, which works not unlike how our eye works. In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity. So these molecules are called channelrhodopsins. And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about. When blue light hits it, it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot, and that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery.So what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons. And because it's a protein, it's encoded for in the DNA of this organism. So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons. So it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy, and lots of viruses were coming along. So this turned out to be very simple to do. And early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try. You take this DNA and you put it into a neuron. The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof, and the next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light. So this is very powerful.One of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors. And you can do that; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others. And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells. This field has now come to be known as optogenetics. And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network. And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated.So for example, lets sort of consider that basket cell I told you about earlier — the one that's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory. If we can deliver that gene to these cells — and they're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene, of course — and then flash blue light over the entire brain network, just these cells are going to be driven. And when the light turns off, these cells go back to normal, so they don't seem to be averse against that. Not only can you use this to study what these cells do, what their power is in computing in the brain, but you can also use this to try to figure out — well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells, if indeed they're atrophied.Now I want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we're using this, both at the scientific, clinical and pre-clinical levels. One of the questions we've confronted is, what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward? Because if you could find those, those would be some of the signals that could drive learning. The brain will do more of whatever got that reward. And also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction. So if we could figure out what cells they are, we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against, or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability. So to do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorella group, where one side of this little box, if the animal goes there, the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light. So if these cells can mediate reward, the animal should go there more and more. And so that's what happens.This animal's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there, and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that. And he'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times. These are the dopamine neurons, which some of you may have heard about, in some of the pleasure centers in the brain. Now we've shown that a brief activation of these is enough, indeed, to drive learning. Now we can generalize the idea. Instead of one point in the brain, we can devise devices that span the brain, that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns — arrays of optical fibers, each coupled to its own independent miniature light source. And then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish — like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen. Or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders.And one story I want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder — a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear. And one of the things that we did was to adopt a very classical model of fear. This goes back to the Pavlovian days. It's called Pavlovian fear conditioning — where a tone ends with a brief shock. The shock isn't painful, but it's a little annoying. And over time — in this case, a mouse, which is a good animal model, commonly used in such experiments — the animal learns to fear the tone. The animal will react by freezing, sort of like a deer in the headlights. Now the question is, what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear? So what we do is we play that tone again after it's been associated with fear. But we activate targets in the brain, different ones, using that optical fiber array I told you about in the previous slide, in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear.And so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we're working on now. This is an area in the prefrontal cortex, a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states. And the animal's going to hear a tone — and a flash of light occurred there. There's no audio on this, but you can see the animal's freezing. This tone used to mean bad news. And there's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner, so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this. And now this next clip is just eight minutes later. And the same tone is going to play, and the light is going to flash again. Okay, there it goes. Right now. And now you can see, just 10 minutes into the experiment, that we've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory.Now over the last couple of years, we've gone back to the tree of life because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off. If we could do that, this could be extremely powerful. If you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds, you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they're embedded. And we've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life — every kingdom of life except for animals, we see slightly differently. And we found all sorts of molecules, they're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins, that respond to green and yellow light. And they do the opposite thing of the molecule I told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin.Let's give an example of where we think this is going to go. Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive. Now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain. But that's obviously irreversible, and there could be side effects. What if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time, until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state — sort of like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state. So this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light, and we beam light in, and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure, we're hoping to be able to turn it off. And so we don't have data to show you on this front, but we're very excited about this.Now I want to close on one story, which we think is another possibility — which is that maybe these molecules, if you can do ultra-precise control, can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic, an optical prosthetic. I already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon. Seventy-five thousand people have Parkinson's deep-brain stimulators implanted. Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants, which allow them to hear. There's another thing, which is you've got to get these genes into cells. And new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus, which probably most of us around this room have, and it doesn't have any symptoms, which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body. And so far, there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus.There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life. Most of us don't have fungi or algae in our brains, so what is our brain going to do if we put that in? Are the cells going to tolerate it? Will the immune system react? In its early days — these have not been done on humans yet — but we're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this, and so far we haven't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light. So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it.I wanted to close with one story, which we think could potentially be a clinical application. Now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors, our light sensors that are in the back of our eye, are gone. And the retina, of course, is a complex structure. Now let's zoom in on it here, so we can see it in more detail. The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top, and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations until finally that layer of cells at the bottom, the ganglion cells, relay the information to the brain, where we see that as perception. In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed. Now how could you repair this? It's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored, because there's nothing for the drug to bind to. On the other hand, light can still get into the eye. The eye is still transparent and you can get light in. So what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras. And because there's so many of these cells in the eye, potentially, they could be very high-resolution cameras.So this is some work that we're doing. It's being led by one of our collaborators, Alan Horsager at USC, and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company Eos Neuroscience, which is funded by the NIH. And what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze. It's a six-arm maze. And there's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move, or he'll just sit there. And the goal, of course, of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port. Now mice are smart, so this mouse solves the maze eventually, but he does a brute-force search. He's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform. So he's not using vision to do it. These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans. And so we're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach.So how are we going to solve this? We're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide. We're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera — just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive. Light is converted to electricity on them. So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus. And now you can see, the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again. And to point out the power of this: these animals are able to get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives. So this pre-clinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future.To close, I want to point out that we're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology. We're developing these tools, but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world, so people can study and try to treat different disorders. And our hope is that, by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them, we can take some of these intractable disorders that I told you about earlier, practically none of which are cured, and in the 21st century make them history.Thank you.(Applause)Juan Enriquez: So some of the stuff is a little dense. (Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs, and being able to target those specifically is a first step. The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors, like an on/off switch.Ed Boyden: That's right.JE: Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code.EB: Right, yeah. So with blue light, we can drive information, and it's in the form of a one. And by turning things off, it's more or less a zero. So our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities.JE: And in theory, that means that, as a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches, you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros.EB: Sure, yeah. We're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings, and use that to understand more about the brain.JE: Does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them?EB: Well that's something we're starting to work on very hard. We're now working on some work where we're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too. So we can record information and then drive information back in — sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing.JE: Well, that might change a couple things. Thank you. (EB: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_boyden
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"Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick. I have a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings. When I was growing up, I was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale. And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold. And there on the smaller scale, the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument, was a materiality and a soulfulness. And this influenced me. The first building I built was 20 years ago. And since, in the last 20 years, I've developed a studio in London. Sorry, this was my mother, by the way, in her bead shop in London. I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that.I'm just going to show, for people who don't know my studio's work, a few projects that we've worked on. This is a hospital building. This is a shop for a bag company. This is studios for artists. This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball. And this is a window display. And this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. And this is a temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk. And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain.And just very quickly, something we've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of London to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again. Because the original Routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with, which had this open platform at the back — in fact, I think all our Routemasters are here in California now actually. But they aren't in London. And so you're stuck on a bus. And if the bus is going to stop and it's three yards away from the bus stop, you're just a prisoner. But the mayor of London wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform. So we've been working with Transport for London, and that organization hasn't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years. And so we've been very lucky to have a chance to work. The brief is that the bus should use 40 percent less energy. So it's got hybrid drive. And we've been working to try to improve everything from the fabric to the format and structure and aesthetics.I was going to show four main projects. And this is a project for a bridge. And so we were commissioned to design a bridge that would open. And openings seemed — everyone loves opening bridges, but it's quite a basic thing. I think we all kind of stand and watch. But the bridges that we saw that opened and closed — I'm slightly squeamish — but I once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball. And as he was diving, someone had stamped on his knee, and it had broken like this. And then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just couldn't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken.And so this is in Paddington in London. And it's a very boring bridge, as you can see. It's just steel and timber. But instead of what it is, our focus was on the way it worked. (Applause) So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other. (Applause) We actually had to halve its speed, because everyone was too scared when we first did it. So that's it speeded up.A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station — so a power station that uses organic waste material. In the news, the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from is in all the papers all the time. And we used to be quite proud of the way we generated power. But recently, any annual report of a power company doesn't have a power station on it. It has a child running through a field, or something like that.(Laughter)And so when a consortium of engineers approached us and asked us to work with them on this power station, our condition was that we would work with them and that, whatever we did, we were not just going to decorate a normal power station. And instead, we had to learn — we kind of forced them to teach us. And so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements, and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that weren't being capitalized on. That just taking a field and banging all these things out isn't necessarily the most efficient way that they could work.So we looked at how we could compose all those elements — instead of just litter, create one composition. And what we found — this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain. It was voted the worst place in Britain to live. And there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station. So it felt this has a social dimension. It has a symbolic importance. And we should be proud of where our power is coming from, rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of.So we were looking at how we could make a power station, that, instead of keeping people out and having a big fence around the outside, could be a place that pulls you in. And it has to be — I'm trying to get my — 250 feet high. So it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in, and using the spare soil that's there on the site, we could make a power station that was silent as well. Because just that soil could make the acoustic difference. And we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this.The finished project is meant to be more than just a power station. It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top. (Laughter) And it's a power park. So people can come and really experience this and also look out all around the area, and use that height that we have to have for its function.In Shanghai, we were invited to build — well we weren't invited; what am I talking about. We won the competition, and it was painful to get there. (Laughter) So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion. And an expo is a totally bonkers thing. There's 250 pavilions. It's the world's biggest ever expo that had ever happened. So there are up to a million people there everyday. And 250 countries all competing. And the British government saying, ""You need to be in the top five."" And so that became the governmental goal — is, how do you stand out in this chaos, which is an expo of stimulus? So our sense was we had to do one thing, and only one thing, instead of trying to have everything. And so what we also felt was that whatever we did we couldn't do a cheesy advert for Britain.(Laughter)But the thing that was true, the expo was about the future of cities, and particularly the Victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities. And the world's first public park of modern times was in Britain. And the world's first major botanical institution is in London, and they have this extraordinary project where they've been collecting 25 percent of all the world's plant species. So we suddenly realized that there was this thing. And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful, and I've never met anyone who says, ""I don't like trees."" And the same with flowers. I've never met anyone who says, ""I don't like flowers."" But we realized that seeds — there's been this very serious project happening — but that seeds — at these major botanical gardens, seeds aren't on show. But you just have to go to a garden center, and they're in little paper packets. But this phenomenal project's been happening. So we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds, some kind of seed cathedral.But how could we show these teeny-weeny things? And the film ""Jurassic Park"" actually really helped us. Because the DNA of the dinosaur that was trapped in the amber gave us some kind of clue that these tiny things could be trapped and be made to seem precious, rather than looking like nuts. So the challenge was, how are we going to bring light and expose these things? We didn't want to make a separate building and have separate content. So we were trying to think, how could we make a whole thing emanate. By the way, we had half the budget of the other Western nations. So that was also in the mix with the site the size of a football pitch. And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue.(Video) Voice Over: The new Play-Doh Mop Top Hair Shop. Song: ♫ We've got the Mop Tops, the Play-Doh Mop Tops ♫ ♫ Just turn the chair and grow Play-Doh hair ♫ ♫ They're the Mop Tops ♫Thomas Heatherwick: Okay, you get the idea. So the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us, and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box, very simple box element, and make it a building that could move in the wind. So the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows. And inside, the daylight — each one is an optic and it brings light into the center. And by night, artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside. And to make the project affordable, we focused our energy. Instead of building a building as big as the football pitch, we focused it on this one element. And the government agreed to do that and not do anything else, and focus our energy on that. And so the rest of the site was a public space. And with a million people there a day, it just felt like offering some public space.We worked with an AstroTurf manufacturer to develop a mini-me version of the seed cathedral, so that, even if you're partially-sighted, that it was kind of crunchy and soft, that piece of landscape that you see there. And then, you know when a pet has an operation and they shave a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur — in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral, in effect, we've shaved it.And inside there's nothing; there's no famous actor's voice; there's no projections; there's no televisions; there's no color changing. There's just silence and a cool temperature. And if a cloud goes past, you can see a cloud on the tips where it's letting the light through. This is the only project that we've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings.(Laughter)A key thing was how people would interact. I mean, in a way it was the most serious thing you could possible do at the expo. And I just wanted to show you. The British government — any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have. And there was a lot of terror. But there was an underlying support. And so there was a moment when suddenly — actually, the next thing. This is the head of U.K. Trade and Investment, who was our client, with the Chinese children, using the landscape.(Video) Children: One, two, three, go.(Laughter)TH: I'm sorry about my stupid voice there.(Laughter)So finally, texture is something. In the projects we've been working on, these slick buildings, where they might be a fancy shape, but the materiality feels the same, is something that we've been trying to research really, and explore alternatives. And the project that we're building in Malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer. And it's in a piece of land that's this site. And the mayor of Kuala Lumpur said that, if this developer would give something that gave something back to the city, they would give them more gross floor area, buildable. So there was an incentive for the developer to really try to think about what would be better for the city.And the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower, and you squeeze a few trees around the edge, and you see cars parked. It's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience, and the rest of it is just for postcards. The lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this. So if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom, we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer. And by linking these together, we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest, instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings.(Applause)So we're building these buildings. They're actually identical, so it's quite cost-effective. They're just chopped at different heights. But the key part is trying to give back an extraordinary piece of landscape, rather than engulf it. And that's my final slide.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: So thank you. Thank you, Thomas. You're a delight. Since we have an extra minute here, I thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these seeds, which maybe came from the shaved bit of the building.TH: These are a few of the tests we did when we were building the structure. So there were 66,000 of these. This optic was 22 feet long. And so the daylight was just coming — it was caught on the outside of the box and was coming down to illuminate each seed. Waterproofing the building was a bit crazy. Because it's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway, but if you say you're going to drill 66,000 holes in it — we had quite a time. There was one person in the contractors who was the right size — and it wasn't a child — who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building.JC: Thank you, Thomas.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_heatherwick
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"I'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist, so I put children to sleep for a living. (Laughter) And I'm an academic, so I put audiences to sleep for free. (Laughter) But what I actually mostly do is I manage the pain management service at the Packard Children's Hospital up at Stanford in Palo Alto. And it's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that I want to bring to you the message this morning, that pain is a disease.Now most of the time, you think of pain as a symptom of a disease, and that's true most of the time. It's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation. But about 10 percent of the time, after the patient has recovered from one of those events, pain persists. It persists for months and oftentimes for years, and when that happens, it is its own disease. And before I tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it, I want to show you how it feels for my patients. So imagine, if you will, that I'm stroking your arm with this feather, as I'm stroking my arm right now. Now, I want you to imagine that I'm stroking it with this. Please keep your seat. (Laughter) A very different feeling. Now what does it have to do with chronic pain? Imagine, if you will, these two ideas together. Imagine what your life would be like if I were to stroke it with this feather, but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling — and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain. In fact, imagine something even worse. Imagine I were to stroke your child's arm with this feather, and their brain [was] telling them that they were feeling this hot torch.That was the experience of my patient, Chandler, whom you see in the photograph. As you can see, she's a beautiful, young woman. She was 16 years old last year when I met her, and she aspired to be a professional dancer. And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals, she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist. Now you would probably imagine, as she did, that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person's life. Wrap it in an ACE bandage, take some ibuprofen for a week or two, and that's the end of the story. But in Chandler's case, that was the beginning of the story. This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain. You can see that the arm is discolored, purplish in color. It was cadaverically cold to the touch. The muscles were frozen, paralyzed — dystonic is how we refer to that. The pain had spread from her wrist to her hands, to her fingertips, from her wrist up to her elbow, almost all the way to her shoulder.But the worst part was, not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day. The worst part was that she had allodynia, the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch. The lightest touch of her arm — the touch of a hand, the touch even of a sleeve, of a garment, as she put it on — caused excruciating, burning pain.How can the nervous system get this so wrong? How can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame? Well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house. In your house, wires run in the wall, from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb. And when you turn the switch on, the light goes on. And when you turn the switch off, the light goes off. So people imagine the nervous system is just like that. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, these wires in your arm — that, of course, we call nerves — transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires, new nerves, take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt.But the situation, of course, in the human body is far more complicated than that. Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion, in fact, what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions — laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord — and they start interacting with other adjacent cells. These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together, like the nerves. But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences. These glial cells become activated. Their DNA starts to synthesize new proteins, which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves, and they start releasing their neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells, and so on and so forth, until what we have is a positive feedback loop.It's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch, the toilet flushed three doors down, or your dishwasher went on, or your computer monitor turned off. That's crazy, but that's, in fact, what happens with chronic pain. And that's why pain becomes its own disease. The nervous system has plasticity. It changes, and it morphs in response to stimuli.Well, what do we do about that? What can we do in a case like Chandler's? We treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time. We treat them with symptom-modifying drugs — painkillers — which are, frankly, not very effective for this kind of pain. We take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet, and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics. And most importantly, what we do is we use a rigorous, and often uncomfortable, process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life. And we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency, despair and depression that always accompanies severe, chronic pain.It's successful, as you can see from this video of Chandler, who, two months after we first met her, is now doings a back flip. And I had lunch with her yesterday because she's a college student studying dance at Long Beach here, and she's doing absolutely fantastic.But the future is actually even brighter. The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain. So I have hopethat in the future, the prophetic words of George Carlin will be realized, who said, ""My philosophy: No pain, no pain.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elliot_krane_the_mystery_of_chronic_pain
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"So I want to take you on a trip to an alien world. And it's not a trip that requires light-years of travel, but it's to a place where it's defined by light.So it's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light. I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence. I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs. I also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution. But mostly I'm entranced by it. Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly. And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called Deep Rover.This next video clip, you're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence. And the first thing you're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across.(Video) Narrator: In front of the sub, a mess screen will come into contact with the soft-bodied creatures of the deep sea. With the sub's lights switched off, it is possible to see their bioluminescence — the light produced when they collide with the mesh. This is the first time it has ever been recorded.Edith Widder: So I recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye. Which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible. But just to try to prove that fact to you, I've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration.(Laughter)So, if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible, I have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it. And you'll note there's no light coming from them right now, either because they're dead — (Laughter) or because I need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like.(Gasps)Oops. Sorry.(Laughter)I spend most of my time working in the dark; I'm used to that. Okay.So that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate, a single-celled alga. So why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light? Well, it uses it to defend itself from its predators. The flash is like a scream for help. It's what's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm, and just like the alarm on your car or your house, it's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder, thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away.There's a lot of animals that use this trick, for example this black dragonfish. It's got a light organ under its eye. It's got a chin barbel. It's got a lot of other light organs you can't see, but you'll see in here in a minute. So we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime, because the top speed of this fish is one knot, which was the top speed of the submersible. But it was worth it, because we caught it in a special capture device, brought it up into the lab on the ship, and then everything on this fish lights up. It's unbelievable. The light organs under the eyes are flashing. That chin barbel is flashing. It's got light organs on its belly that are flashing, fin lights. It's a scream for help; it's meant to attract attention. It's phenomenal. And you normally don't get to see this because we've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets.There's other ways you can defend yourself with light. For example, this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud. This blinds or distracts the predator. This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this. Now it may look like a tasty morsel, or a pig's head with wings — (Laughter) but if it's attacked, it puts out a barrage of light — in fact, a barrage of photon torpedoes. I just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing. It's phenomenal.So there's a lot of animals in the open ocean — most of them that make light. And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange. And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in ""Avatar,"" but you don't have to travel to Pandora to see them. They're things like this.This is a golden coral, a bush. It grows very slowly. In fact, it's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old, which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed. The other reason is this amazing bush glows. So if you brush up against it, any place you brushed against it, you get this twinkling blue-green light that's just breathtaking. And you see things like this. This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — just all manner of creatures all over this thing. And these are flytrap anemones. Now if you poke it, it pulls in its tentacles. But if you keep poking it, it starts to produce light. And it actually ends up looking like a galaxy. It produces these strings of light, presumably as some form of defense.There are starfish that can make light. And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms. This looks like a plant, but it's actually an animal. And it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock. So it can actually hold itself in very strong currents, as you see here. But if we collect it very gently, and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock, it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume, changing color as it goes, from green to blue. Colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure. (Laughter) But we have no idea why it does that.Here's another one. This is also a sea pen. It's got a brittle star hitching a ride. It's a green saber of light. And like the one you just saw, it can produce these as bands of light. So if I squeeze the base, the bands go from base to tip. If I squeeze the tip, they go from tip to base. So what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle? (Gasps) I'd be very interested in your theories about what that's about.(Laughter)So there's a language of light in the deep ocean, and we're just beginning to understand it, and one way we're going about that is we're imitating a lot of these displays. This is an optical lure that I've used. We call it the electronic jellyfish. It's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays. And we view it with a camera system I developed called Eye-in-the-Sea that uses far red light that's invisible to most animals, so it's unobtrusive. So I just want to show you some of the responses we've elicited from animals in the deep sea.So the camera's black and white. It's not high-resolution. And what you're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of — like the cockroaches of the ocean — there are isopods all over it. And right in the front is the electronic jellyfish. And when it starts flashing, it's just going to be one of the LEDs that's flashing very fast. But as soon as it starts to flash — and it's going to look big, because it blooms on the camera — I want you to look right here. There's something small there that responds. We're talking to something. It looks like a little of string pearls basically — in fact, three strings of pearls. And this was very consistent. This was in the Bahamas at about 2,000 feet. We basically have a chat room going on here, because once it gets started, everybody's talking. And I think this is actually a shrimp that's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water. But the cool thing is, we're talking to it. We don't know what we're saying. Personally, I think it's something sexy.(Laughter)And then finally, I want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world's first deep-sea webcam, which we had installed in Monterey Canyon last year. We've only just begun to analyze all of this data. This is going to be a glowing source first, which is like bioluminescent bacteria. And it is an optical cue that there's carrion on the bottom of the ocean. So this scavenger comes in, which is a giant sixgill shark. And I can't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in, because there's bait right there. But if it had been following the odor plume, it would have come in from the other direction. And it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish. That's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark.Okay, so this next one is from the webcam, and it's going to be this pinwheel display. And this is a burglar alarm. And that was a Humboldt squid, a juvenile Humboldt squid, about three feet long. This is at 3,000 feet in Monterey Canyon. But if it's a burglar alarm, you wouldn't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly. It's supposed to be attacking what's attacking the jellyfish. But we did see a bunch of responses like this. This guy is a little more contemplative. ""Hey, wait a minute. There's supposed to be something else there."" He's thinking about it. But he's persistent. He keeps coming back. And then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more, and thinks, ""Maybe if I come in from a different angle."" (Laughter) Nope.So we are starting to get a handle on this, but only just the beginnings. We need more eyes on the process. So if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible, by all means, climb in and take the plunge. This is something that should be on everybody's bucket list, because we live on an ocean planet. More than 90 percent, 99 percent, of the living space on our planet is ocean. It's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures, alien life forms that you don't have to travel to another planet to see.But if you do take the plunge, please remember to turn out the lights. But I warn you, it's addictive.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_the_weird_and_wonderful_world_of_bioluminescence
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"I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world. And I think that's true. However, I also have reason to believe that many, if not most, of you are actually tying your shoes incorrectly.(Laughter)Now I know that seems ludicrous. I know that seems ludicrous. And believe me, I lived the same sad life until about three years ago. And what happened to me was I bought, what was for me, a very expensive pair of shoes. But those shoes came with round nylon laces, and I couldn't keep them tied. So I went back to the store and said to the owner, ""I love the shoes, but I hate the laces."" He took a look and said, ""Oh, you're tying them wrong."" Now up until that moment, I would have thought that, by age 50, one of the life skills that I had really nailed was tying my shoes.(Laughter)But not so — let me demonstrate.This is the way that most of us were taught to tie our shoes. Now as it turns out — thank you.(Applause)Wait, there's more. As it turns out —(Laughter)there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form. And here's how to tell. If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe. That's the weak form of the knot.But not to worry. If we start over and simply go the other direction around the bow, we get this, the strong form of the knot. And if you pull the cords under the knot, you will see that the bow orients itself along the transverse axis of the shoe. This is a stronger knot. It will come untied less often. It will let you down less, and not only that, it looks better.We're going to do this one more time.(Applause)Start as usual —(Applause)go the other way around the loop. This is a little hard for children, but I think you can handle it. Pull the knot. There it is: the strong form of the shoe knot.Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out — something you already know — that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else.(Laughter)Live long and prosper.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes
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"So I think data can actually make us more human. We're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we're living our lives, and it's enabling us to tell some amazing stories. Recently, a wise media theorist Tweeted, ""The 19th century culture was defined by the novel, the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema, and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface."" And I believe this is going to prove true. Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories. So I'm going to show you a few of the projects that I've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems.This is a project called Flight Patterns. What you're looking at is airplane traffic over North America for a 24-hour period. As you see, everything starts to fade to black, and you see people going to sleep. Followed by that, you see on the West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. And you'll see everybody waking up on the East coast, followed by European flights coming in the upper right-hand corner. Everybody's moving from the East coast to the West coast. You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner.I think it's one thing to say there's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time, and it's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows. This is a time-lapse image of that exact same data, but I've color-coded it by type, so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us. And I started making these, and I put them into Google Maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there. So here we can see the white represents low altitudes, and the blue are higher altitudes. And you can zoom in. This is taking a look at Atlanta. You can see this is a major shipping airport, and there's all kinds of activity there. You can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer. See again, the diversity. And you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have. This is scrolling up the East coast. You can see some of the chaos that's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other.So zooming back out real quick, we see, again, the U.S. — you get Florida down in the right-hand corner. Moving across to the West coast, you see San Francisco and Los Angeles — big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona. And that's us down there in L.A. and Long Beach on the bottom. I started taking a look as well at different perimeters, because you can choose what you want to pull out from the data. This is looking at ascending versus descending flights. And you can see, over time, the ways the airports change. You see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen. And you can see, eventually the airport actually flips directions.So this is another project that I worked on with the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT. This is visualizing international communications. So it's how New York communicates with other international cities. And we set this up as a live globe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Design the Elastic Mind exhibition. And it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset, so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through AT&T's data and revealing itself. This is another project I worked on with Sensible Cities Lab and CurrentCity.org. And it's visualizing SMS messages being sent in the city of Amsterdam. So you're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city, until we approach New Year's Eve, where everybody says, ""Happy New Year!""(Laughter)So this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city. This is looking at another event. This is called Queen's Day. So again, you get this daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city. And then you're going to see people start to gather in the center of the city to celebrate the night before, which happens right here. And then you can see people celebrating the next day. And you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases.So now on to something completely different. Some of you may recognize this. This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine. And it's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well, except for one thing: it's not a robot at all. There's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player. This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk — named after this guy. And it's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people, but really difficult for computers. So they made this web service and said, ""Any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people."" The nerdy side of me thought, ""Wow, this is amazing. I can tap into thousands of people's minds."" And the other nerdy side of me thought, ""This is horrible. This is completely bizarre. What does this mean for the future of mankind, where we're all plugged into this borg?"" I was probably being a little extreme. But what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we're working on, and we're just doing these little labors?So I created this drawing tool. I asked people to draw a sheep facing to the left. And I said, ""I'll pay you two cents for your contribution."" And I started collecting sheep. And I collected a lot, a lot of different sheep. Lots of sheep. I took the first 10,000 sheep that I collected, and I put them on a website called TheSheepMarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep. You can't pick individual sheep, but you can buy a single plate block of stamps as a commodity. And juxtaposed against this grid, you see actually, by rolling over each individual one, the humanity behind this hugely mechanical process. I think there's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil — something we can all relate to, this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing. I think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid. Kind of amazing what some people did.So here's a few statistics from the project. Approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour, which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour. There were 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet ""sheep-like"" criteria and were thrown out of the flock. (Laughter) The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes. That gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication. And there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project, or were unique IP addresses — so about how many people contributed. But only one of them out of the 7,599 said this. (Laughter) Which I was pretty surprised by. I expected people to be wondering, ""Why did I draw a sheep?"" And I think it's a pretty valid question.And there's a lot of reasons why I chose sheep. Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts, the first to be selectively bred for production traits, the first animal to be cloned. Obviously, we think of sheep as followers. And there's this reference to ""Le Petit Prince"" where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep. He draws sheep after sheep. The narrator's only appeased when he draws a box. And he says, ""It's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep. It's about your own interpretation and doing something different."" And I like that.So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin's ""Modern Times."" It's showing Charlie Chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the Industrial Revolution. So there were no longer shoe makers, but now there are people slapping soles on people's shoes. And the whole idea of one's relationship to their work changed a lot. So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool. This basically allowed — what you see on the left side is the original frame, and on the right side you see that frame as interpreted by 16 people who have no idea what it is they're doing.And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima. We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for, which is making money. So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces, and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk. We asked people to draw what it was that they saw. But here there was no sheep-like criteria. People, if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face, it actually made it into the bill. So what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do. So we took these hundred dollar bills, and we put them on a website called TenThousandsCents.com, where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions. And you can also trade real hundred-dollar bills for fake hundred-dollar bills and make a donation to the Hundred Dollar Laptop Project, which is now known as One Laptop Per Child. This is again showing all the different contributions. You see some people did beautiful stipple renderings, like this one on top — spent a long time making realistic versions. And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces. Here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing, ""$0.01!!! Really?"" That's all I'm getting paid for this?(Laughter)So the last Mechanical Turk project I'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000. This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey. You may recognize these two guys. This is Max Mathews and John Kelly from Bell Labs in the '60s, where they created the song ""Daisy Bell,"" which was the world's first singing computer. You may recognize it from ""2001: A Space Odyssey."" When HAL's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song, as a reference to when computers became human. So we resynthesized this song. This is what that sounded like. We broke down all the individual notes in the singing as well as the phonemes in the singing.Daisy Bell: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ... ♫Aaron Koblin: And we took all of those individual pieces, and we fed them into another Turk request. This is what it would look like if you went to the site. You type in your code, but you first test your mic. You'd be fed a simple audio clip. (Honk) And then you'd do your best to recreate that with your own voice. After previewing it and confirming it's what you submitted, you could submit it into the Mechanical Turk with no other context. And this is what we first got back from the very first set of submissions.Recording: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'll look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫AK: So James Surowieki has this idea of the wisdom of crowds, that says that a whole bunch of people are smarter than any individual. We wanted to see how this applies to collaborative, distributed music making, where nobody has any idea what it is they're working on. So if you go to the BicycleBuiltforTwoThousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together. I'm sorry for this.(Noise)Chorus: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ Give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'd look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫AK: So stepping back for a quick second, when I was at UCLA going to grad school, I was also working at a place called the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. And I was writing software to visualize laser scanners. So basically motion through 3D space. And this was seen by a director in L.A. named James Frost who said, ""Wait a minute. You mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video?"" So we did exactly that. We made a music video for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead. And I think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers, but we also open sourced it, and we made it released as a Google Code project, where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it. And people were making some amazing things. This is actually two of my favorites: the pin-board Thom Yorke and a LEGO Thom Yorke. A whole YouTube channel of people submitting really interesting content. More recently, somebody even 3D-printed Thom Yorke's head, which is a little creepy, but pretty cool.So with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on, I was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something. And I met a music video director named Chris Milk. And we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project. But we knew we really needed the right person to kind of rally behind and build something for. So we put the idea on the back burner for a few months. And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin, who was finishing up Johnny Cash's final album called ""Ain't No Grave."" The lyrics to the leading track are ""Ain't no grave can hold my body down."" So we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for Johnny Cash.So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. doob, who's a much better programmer than I am, and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool. As you know, an animation is a series of images. So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash, and at eight frames a second, we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video. So I don't have time to play the entire thing for you, but I want to show you two short clips. One is the beginning of the music video. And that's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly.(Music)(Video) Johnny Cash: ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body down ♫ ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold body down ♫ ♫ When I hear the trumpet sound ♫ ♫ I'm going to ride right out of the ground ♫ ♫ Ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body ... ♫(Applause)AK: What better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs.Collaborator: I felt really sad when he died. And I just thought it'd be wonderful, it'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory.Collaborator Two: It really allows this last recording of his to be a living, breathing memorial.Collaborator Three: For all of the frames to be drawn by fans, each individual frame, it's got a very powerful feeling to it.Collaborator Four: I've seen everybody from Japan, Venezuela, to the States, to Knoxville, Tennessee.Collaborator Five: As much as is different from frame to frame, it really is personal. Collaborator Six: Watching the video in my room, I could see me not understanding at the beginning of it. And I just worked and worked through problems, until my little wee battles that I was fighting within the picture all began to resolve themselves. You can actually see the point when I know what I'm doing, and a lot of light and dark comes into it. And in a weird way, that's what I actually like about Johnny Cash's music as well. It's the sum total of his life, all the things that had happened — the bad things, the good things. You're hearing a person's life.AK: So if you go to the website JohnnyCashProject.com, what you'll see is the video playing above. And below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project. So this isn't finished at all, but it's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate. If you roll over any one of those individual thumbnails, you can see the person who drew that individual thumbnail and where they were located. And if you find one that you're interested in, you can actually click on it and open up an information panel where you're able to rate that frame, which helps it bubble up to the top. And you can also see the way that it was drawn. Again, you can get the playback and personal contribution. In addition to that, it's listed, the artist's name, the location, how long they spent drawing it. And you can pick a style. So this one was tagged ""Abstract."" But there's a bunch of different styles. And you can sort the video a number of different ways. You can say, ""I want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version. And then this is, again, the abstract version, which ends up getting a little bit crazy.So the last project I want to talk to you about is another collaboration with Chris Milk. And this is called ""The Wilderness Downtown."" It's an online music video for the Arcade Fire. Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers, where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast. And we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the Web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen. But most importantly, I think, we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the Johnny Cash Project, where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone. What if we had a very low commitment, but delivered something individually unique to each person who contributed?So the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up. And you type in the address — it actually creates a music video specifically for you, pulling in Google maps and Streetview images into the experience itself. So this should really be seen at home with you typing in your own address, but I'm going to give you a little preview of what you can expect.(Video) Win Butler: ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Still moving through the pain ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫AK: So I think, if there's one thing to take away from my talk today, it's that an interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together.Thanks a lot.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_koblin
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"I want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea. Actually, it's a really big idea. But to get us started, I want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world. Now I bet, in this audience, you're thinking of some really incredible technology, some stuff that I haven't even heard of, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure, pretty sure, that absolutely nobody is thinking of this. This is a polio vaccine.And it's a great thing actually that nobody's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted. This is a great technology. We can take it completely for granted. But it wasn't always that way. Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story. People were terrified of this disease. They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic. And it was because of scenes like this. In this scene, people are living in an iron lung. These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before, and then two days later, they can no longer breathe, and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs, but also their breathing muscles. And they were going to spend the rest of their lives, usually, in this iron lung to breathe for them.This disease was terrifying. There was no cure, and there was no vaccine. The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it. Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine. It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s. Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact. As you can see, the virus stopped, and it stopped very, very fast.But this wasn't the case everywhere in the world. And it happened so fast in the United States, however, that even just last month Jon Stewart said this:(Video) Jon Stewart: Where is polio still active? Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated.Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated. But the reality is that polio still exists today. We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists. This is the picture. There's not very much left in the world. But the reason there's not very much left is because there's been an extraordinary public/private partnership working behind the scenes, almost unknown, I'm sure to most of you here today. It's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease, and it's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic.But just last year, we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn't good enough with a virus like polio. And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks. Hundreds of people were paralyzed. Hundreds of people died — children as well as adults. And in both cases, we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses, and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries. They had come from thousands of miles away. And in one case, it originated on another continent. And not only that, but when they came into these countries, then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia, where, for the first time in over a decade last year, children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years.Now all of these outbreaks that I just showed you, these are under control now, and it looks like they'll probably stop very, very quickly. But the message was very clear. Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease. It's just happening in another part of the world. And our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis.So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do. We're not trying to control polio. We're not trying to get it down to just a few cases, because this disease is like a root fire; it can explode again if you don't snuff it out completely. So what we're looking for is a permanent solution. We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world. So we're looking for a permanent solution, and this is where we get lucky. This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary. This virus can only survive in people. It can't live for a very long time in people. It doesn't survive in the environment hardly at all. And we've got pretty good vaccines, as I've just showed you. So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely. What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth.Now we don't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this, to eradicating diseases. It's been tried six times in the last century, and it's been successful exactly once. And this is because disease eradication, it's still the venture capital of public health. The risks are massive, but the pay-off — economic, humanitarian, motivational — it's absolutely huge. One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days — in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs. And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone. So those are the kind of stakes that we're after.But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard. And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that. The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox. And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries. So it was a massive effort. The second challenge we had was — in contrast to the smallpox vaccine, which was very stable, and a single dose protected you for life — the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile. It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it's exposed to too much heat, and we can tell that it's not a good vaccine to use on a child — it's not potent; it's not going to protect them. Even then, kids need many doses of the vaccine.But the third challenge we have — and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge — is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy — every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash. So you could get around the disease; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off. With polio it's almost completely different. The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease. So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox.We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history. There's over 10 million people, probably 20 million people, largely volunteers, who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime. These people, these 20 million people, vaccinate over 500 million children every single year, multiple times at the peak of our operation. Now giving the polio vaccine is simple. It's just two drops, like that. But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher. And these vaccinators, these volunteers, they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest, densest urban slums in the world. They've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. And they also have to dodge bullets, because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children, even in areas affected by conflict.One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago — a place which has eradicated polio, not once, but twice, because they got reinfected. He was sitting outside of the road, watching one of these polio campaigns unfold, and a few months later he wrote: ""This is foreign aid at its most heroic."" And these heroes, they come from every walk of life, all sorts of backgrounds. But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International. This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years. They're right at the center of the whole thing.Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication — more than 15 years, much longer than it should have — but once it was built, the results were striking. Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here. And in each of those, it was only part of the country. And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide — proof of concept. And then today, there's been a 99 percent reduction — greater than 99 percent reduction — in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease. When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus. Last year, it was 1,000.And at the same time, the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas. It's been working to help control pandemic flu, SARS for example. It's also tried to save children by doing other things — giving vitamin A drops, giving measles shots, giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns. But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict.So things were looking very exciting, and then about five years ago, this virus, this ancient virus, started to fight back. The first problem we ran into was that, in these last four countries, the strongholds of this virus, we just couldn't seem to get the virus rooted out. And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades. And then, in one of the most important, tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world, we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have. In conditions like this, the vaccine just couldn't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to.Now at that time, there was a great, as you can imagine, frustration — let's call it frustration — it started to grow very, very quickly. And all of a sudden, some very important voices in the world of public health started to say, ""Hang on. We should abandon this idea of eradication. Let's settle for control — that's good enough."" Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds, it's a false premise. The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year. There's absolutely no question.These are children like Umar. Umar is seven years old, and he's from northern Nigeria. He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters. Umar also has polio. Umar was paralyzed for life. His right leg was paralyzed in 2004. This leg, his right leg, now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl, because it's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends, keep up with his brothers and sisters, than to get up on his crutches and walk. But Umar is a fantastic student. He's an incredible kid. As you probably can't see the detail here, but this is his report card, and you'll see, he's got perfect scores. He got 100 percent in all the important things, like nursery rhymes, for example there. But you know I'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days, but it's not true. Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances.The reality of polio today is something very different. Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world. It leaves their children paralyzed, and it drags their families deeper into poverty, because they're desperately searching and they're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have, trying in vain to find a cure for their children. We think children deserve better. And so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago, when people were saying, ""We should call it off,"" the Polio Partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions, new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again.In northern India, we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this, so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters, so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services. In northern Nigeria, the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders, they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence.And now they've even started using these devices — speaking of cool technology — these little devices, little GIS trackers like this, which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators. And then they can track them, and at the end of the day, they look and see, did these guys get every single street, every single house. This is the kind of commitment now we're seeing to try and reach all of the children we've been missing. And in Afghanistan, we're trying new approaches — access negotiators. We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child.But as we tried these extraordinary things, as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics, we went back to the vaccine — it's a 50-year-old vaccine — and we thought, surely we can make a better vaccine, so that when they finally get to these kids, we can have a better bang for our buck. And this started an incredible collaboration with industry, and within six months, we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted, just two years ago, the last two types of polio in the world. Now June the ninth, 2009, we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine, and it turned out to be a game-changer. The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had, and we immediately started using this. Well, in a couple of months we had to get it out of production. And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world. And we didn't start with the easy places. The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan, because it's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this.Now here at TED, over the last couple of days, I've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible. So this morning at about seven o'clock, I decided that we'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again, so that you could see something that's just unfolding today, which proves that the impossible is possible. And only two years ago, people were saying that this is impossible. Now remember, northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio. Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio — Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — 500,000 children every single month. Sanitation is terrible, and our old vaccine, you remember, worked half as well as it should have. And yet, the impossible is happening. Today marks exactly six months — and for the first time in history, not a single child has been paralyzed in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar.(Applause)India's not unique. In Umar's home country of Nigeria, a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year. And in the last six months, we've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history.Ladies and gentlemen, with a combination of smart people, smart technology and smart investments, polio can now be eradicated anywhere. We have major challenges, you can imagine, to finish this job, but as you've also seen, it's doable, it has great secondary benefits, and polio eradication is a great buy. And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services. And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice. The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children. It's ready to reach them with bed nets, with other things. But capitalizing on their enthusiasm, capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago.Finishing polio is a smart thing to do, and it's the right thing to do. Now we're in tough times economically. But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio, ""There's never a wrong time to do the right thing."" Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do. And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years. We have a new vaccine, we have new resolve, and we have new tactics. We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history. But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease. Here's a great idea to spread: End polio now. Help us tell the story. Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever.Thank you.(Applause)Bill Gates: Well Bruce, where do you think the toughest places are going to be? Where would you say we need to be the smartest?BA: The four places where you saw, that we've never stopped — northern Nigeria, northern India, the southern corner of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan — they're going to be the toughest. But the interesting thing is, of those three, India's looking real good, as you just saw in the data. And Afghanistan, Afghanistan, we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly. It keeps getting reinfected. So the tough ones: going to get the top of Nigeria finished and getting Pakistan finished. They're going to be the tough ones.BG: Now what about the money? Give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year. And is it easy to raise that money? And what's it going to be like the next couple of years?BA: It's interesting. We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year. That's what it costs to reach 500 million children. It sounds like a lot of money; it is a lot of money. But when you're reaching 500 million children multiple times — 20, 30 cents to reach a child — that's not very much money. But right now we don't have enough of that. We have a big gap in that money. We're cutting corners, and every time we cut corners, more places get infected that shouldn't have, and it just slows us down. And that great buy costs us a little bit more.BG: Well, hopefully we'll get the word out, and the governments will keep their generosity up. So good luck. We're all in this with you. Thank you. (BA: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_aylward_how_we_ll_stop_polio
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"The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian artist, as an Iranian woman artist, as an Iranian woman artist living in exile. Well, it has its pluses and minuses. On the dark side, politics doesn't seem to escape people like me. Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives. If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture — at times, execution. If you're living outside like me, you're faced with life in exile — the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family. Therefore, we don't find the moral, emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility.Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice, the speaker of my people, even if I have, indeed, no access to my own country. Also, people like myself, we're fighting two battles on different grounds. We're being critical of the West, the perception of the West about our identity — about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. We are there to take pride and insist on respect. And at the same time, we're fighting another battle. That is our regime, our government — our atrocious government, [that] has done every crime in order to stay in power. Our artists are at risk. We are in a position of danger. We pose a threat to the order of the government.But ironically, this situation has empowered all of us, because we are considered, as artists, central to the cultural, political, social discourse in Iran. We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope to our people. We are the reporters of our people, and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance. I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression. For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. From the fact that they are only serving one audience, mainly the Western culture. But also, I worry about the West, because often in this country, in this Western world that we have, culture risks being a form of entertainment. Our people depend on our artists, and culture is beyond communication.My journey as an artist started from a very, very personal place. I did not start to make social commentary about my country. The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. While I was absent from Iran, the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture. I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in the society. But instead, I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn't recognize anymore. More so, I became very interested, as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions, I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution — how, indeed, it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting, in the way the women of Iran, historically, seemed to embody the political transformation. So in a way, by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country.So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life, and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse — the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of God, faith, but violence and crime and cruelty. For me, this became incredibly important. And yet, I had an unusual position toward this. I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution. This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn't know I would discover. So my art became slightly more critical. My knife became a little sharper. And I fell into a life in exile. I am a nomadic artist. I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. I go everywhere to make believe it's Iran.Now I am making films. Last year, I finished a film called ""Women Without Men."" ""Women Without Men"" returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader, Dr. Mossadegh. The book is written by an Iranian woman, Shahrnush Parsipur. It's a magical realist novel. This book is banned, and she spent five years in prison. My obsession with this book, and the reason I made this into a film, is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female — traditionally, historically in Iran — and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change, freedom and democracy — while the country of Iran, equally, as if another character, also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions.I made this film because I felt it's important for it to speak to the Westerners about our history as a country. That all of you seem to remember Iran after the Islamic Revolution. That Iran was once a secular society, and we had democracy, and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government. This film also speaks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamicized — in the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way we had intellectual life. And most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. These are some of the shots actually from my film. These are some of the images of the coup. And we made this film in Casablanca, recreating all the shots.This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story, but also a feminine story. Being a visual artist, indeed, I am foremost interested to make art — to make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism, and become an important, timeless, universal work of art. The challenge I have is how to do that. How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. How to move you with your emotions, but also make your mind work. These are some of the images and the characters of the film. Now comes the green movement — the summer of 2009, as my film is released — the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran.What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice, repeats itself now again in Tehran. The green movement significantly inspired the world. It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. What was most significant for me was, once again, the presence of the women. They're absolutely inspirational for me. If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran — women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist. These women and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside.I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women. That, under all circumstances, they have pushed the boundary. They have confronted the authority. They have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way. And once again, they proved themselves. I stand here to say that Iranian women have found a new voice, and their voice is giving me my voice. And it's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the West only for now.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shirin_neshat_art_in_exile
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"A few weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia. And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was to go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam. And I did that; I put on my ritualistic dress, I went to the holy mosque, I did my prayers, I observed all the rituals. And meanwhile, besides all the spirituality, there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty interesting for me: there was no separation of sexes. In other words, men and women were worshiping all together. They were together while doing tawāf, the circular walk around the Kaaba. They were together while praying.And if you wonder why this is interesting at all, you have to see the rest of Saudi Arabia, because this a country which is strictly divided between the sexes. In other words: as men, you are simply not supposed to be in the same physical space with women. And I noticed this in a very funny way. I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca. I headed to the nearest Burger King restaurant. And I went there — I noticed that there was a male section, which is carefully separated from the female section. I had to pay, order and eat in the male section. ""It's funny,"" I said to myself, ""You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King?""(Laughter)Quite, quite ironic. Ironic, and it's also, I think, quite telling, because the Kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam, that of prophet Muhammad. And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women, the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly. But apparently, that was not an issue at the time. So the rituals came that way. This is also, I think, confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran — the very core of Islam, the divine core of Islam — that all Muslims, equally myself, believe.And I think it's not an accident that you don't find this idea in the very origin of Islam, because many scholars who study the history of Islamic thought — Muslim scholars or Westerners — think that, actually, the practice of dividing men and women physically came as a later development in Islam, as Muslims adopted some preexisting cultures and traditions of the Middle East. Seclusion of women was actually a Byzantine and Persian practice, and Muslims adopted it and made it a part of their religion.Actually, this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon. What we call today Islamic law, and especially Islamic culture — and there are many Islamic cultures, actually; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in Istanbul or Turkey. But still, if you're going to speak about a Muslim culture, this has a core: the divine message which began the religion. But then many traditions, perceptions, practices were added on top of it. And these were traditions of the Middle East medieval traditions.There are two important messages, or two lessons, to take from that reality. First of all, Muslims — pious, conservative, believing Muslims who want to be loyal to their religion — should not cling onto everything in their culture, thinking that that's divinely mandated. Maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed. On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains. Maybe it's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam.There is a practice called female circumcision. It's something terrible, horrible. It is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure. And Westerners — Europeans or Americans — who didn't know about this before, [saw] this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa. And they've thought, ""Oh, what a horrible religion that is, which ordains something like that."" But when you look at female circumcision, you see that it has nothing to do with Islam; it's just a North African practice which predates Islam. It was there for thousands of years. And, quite tellingly, some Muslims do practice it — the Muslims in North Africa, not in other places. But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa — the animists, some Christians and even a Jewish tribe in North Africa — are known to practice female circumcision. So what might look like a problem within Islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that Muslims have subscribed to.The same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the Western media — and which is, of course, a horrible tradition. And we see, truly, in some Muslim communities, that tradition. But in the non-Muslim communities of the Middle East, such as some Christian communities, Eastern communities, you see the same practice. We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey's Armenian community just a few months ago.Now, these are things about general culture, but I'm also very much interested in political culture and whether liberty and democracy is appreciated, or whether there's an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to impose things on the citizens. And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called ""Islamic regimes,"" such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the worst case, the Taliban in Afghanistan, they are pretty authoritarian — no doubt about that.For example, in Saudi Arabia, there is a phenomenon called the religious police. And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force — like, women are forced to cover their heads — wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover. Now that is pretty authoritarian, and that's something I'm very much critical of. But when I realized that the non-Muslim, or the non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography sometimes behaved similarly, I realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole region, not just Islam. Let me give you an example: in Turkey, where I come from, which is a very hyper-secular republic, until very recently, we used to have what I call ""secularism police,"" which would guard the universities against veiled students. In other words, they would force students to uncover their heads. And I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it. It should be the citizen's decision.But when I saw that, I said, ""Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that. But the secular-minded people can be influenced by that. Maybe it's a problem of the political culture, and we have to think about how to change that political culture."" Now, these are some of the questions I had in mind a few years ago when I sat down to write a book. I said, ""Well, I will do research about how Islam actually came to be what it is today, and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken."" The name of the book is ""Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty."" And as the subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty.And there are strengths in Islamic tradition. Islam, actually, as a monotheistic religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea of the individual in the Middle East, and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe. You can derive many ideas from that. But besides that, I also saw problems within Islamic tradition. But one thing was curious: most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later, not from the very divine core of Islam, the Koran, but from, again, traditions and mentalities, or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the Middle Ages. The Koran, for example, doesn't condone stoning. There is no punishment for apostasy. There is no punishment for personal sins like drinking. These things which make Islamic law, the troubling aspects of Islamic law, were developed into later interpretations of Islam.Which means that Muslims can, today, look at those things and say, ""Well, the core of our religion is here to stay with us. It's our faith, and we will be loyal to it. But we can change how it was interpreted, because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages. Now we're living in a different world, with different values and political systems."" That interpretation is quite possible and feasible.Now, if I were the only person thinking that way, we would be in trouble. But that's not the case at all. Actually, from the 19th century on, there's a whole revisionist, reformist — whatever you call it — tradition, a trend in Islamic thinking. These were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century, and later, 20th century, which looked at Europe, basically, and saw that Europe has many things to admire, like science and technology. But not just that; also democracy, parliament, the idea of representation, the idea of equal citizenship. These Muslim thinkers, intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century, looked at Europe, saw these things, and said, ""Why don't we have these things?"" And they looked back at Islamic tradition, and saw that there are problematic aspects, but they're not the core of the religion, so maybe they can be re-understood, and the Koran can be reread in the modern world.That trend is generally called Islamic modernism, and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen, not just as an intellectual idea, though, but also as a political program. And that's why, actually, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms — reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion. That's why the Ottoman Empire, in its last decades, turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time.Similarly, in the Arab world, there was what the great Arab historian Albert Hourani defines as the Liberal Age. He has a book, ""Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,"" and the Liberal Age, he defines as 19th century and early 20th century. Quite notably, this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among Islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians. But there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century, because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic modernist line. And in place of that, what happens is that Islamism grows as an ideology which is authoritarian, which is quite strident, which is quite anti-Western, and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision.So Islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the 20th-century Islamic world. And even the very extreme forms of Islamism led to terrorism in the name of Islam — which is actually a practice that I think is against Islam, but some, obviously, extremists, did not think that way. But there is a curious question: If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, why did Islamism become so popular in the rest of the 20th century? And this is a question, I think, which needs to be discussed carefully. In my book, I went into that question as well. And actually, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. Just look at the political history of the 20th century, and you see things have changed a lot. The contexts have changed.In the 19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example, they were independent; they were more self-confident. In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized. And when you have colonialization, what do you have? You have anti-colonialization. So Europe is not just an example now to emulate; it's an enemy to fight and to resist. So there's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world, and what you see is more of a defensive, rigid, reactionary strain, which led to Arab socialism, Arab nationalism and ultimately to the Islamist ideology. And when the colonial period ended, what you had in place of that was generally secular dictators, which say they're a country, but did not bring democracy to the country, and established their own dictatorship. And I think the West, at least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for their interests. But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country and suppressed Islamic groups in their country actually made the Islamists much more strident.So in the 20th century, you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world, where you have a dictatorship suppressing its own people, including the Islamic pious, and they're reacting in reactionary ways. There was one country, though, which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle. And that's the country where I come from, Turkey. Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. That's one thing to remember; it did not share the same anti-colonial hype that you can find in some other countries in the region. Secondly, and most importantly, Turkey became a democracy earlier than any of the countries we are talking about. In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more autocratic secular regime, which was in the beginning of Turkey. And the pious Muslims in Turkey saw that they could change the political system by voting. And they realized that democracy is something compatible with Islam, compatible with their values, and they've been supportive of democracy. That's an experience that not every other Muslim nation in the Middle East had, until very recently.Secondly, in the past two decades, thanks to globalization, thanks to the market economy, thanks to the rise of a middle class, we in Turkey see what I define as a rebirth of Islamic modernism. Now, there's the more urban middle-class pious Muslims who, again, look at their tradition and see that there are some problems in the tradition, and understand that they need to be changed and questioned and reformed. And they look at Europe, and see an example, again, to follow. They see an example, at least, to take some inspiration from. That's why the EU process, Turkey's effort to join the EU, has been supported inside Turkey by the Islamic pious, while some secular nationalists were against it. Well, that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that not all Europeans are that welcoming, but that's another discussion. But the pro-EU sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well, of course.And thanks to that, Turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in which Islam and the most pious understandings of Islam have become part of the democratic game, and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of the country. And this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the Islamic movements or some of the countries in the Arab world.You must have all seen the Arab Spring, which began in Tunis and in Egypt. Arab masses just revolted against their dictators. They were asking for democracy; they were asking for freedom. And they did not turn out to be the Islamist boogeyman that the dictators were always using to justify their regime. They said, ""We want freedom; we want democracy. We are Muslim believers, but we want to be living as free people in free societies."" Of course, this is a long road. Democracy is not an overnight achievement; it's a process. But this is a promising era in the Muslim world.And I believe that the Islamic modernism which began in the 19th century, but which had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the Muslim world, is having a rebirth. And I think the takeaway message from that would be that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West, has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy, create its own way to liberalism, create its own way to freedom. They just should be allowed to work for that.Thanks so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mustafa_akyol_faith_versus_tradition_in_islam
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(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gupta_and_joshua_roman_duet_on_passacaglia
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"Many believe driving is an activity solely reserved for those who can see. A blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task, until now. Hello, my name is Dennis Hong, and we're bringing freedom and independence to the blind by building a vehicle for the visually impaired.So before I talk about this car for the blind, let me briefly tell you about another project that I worked on called the DARPA Urban Challenge. Now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself. You press start, nobody touches anything, and it can reach its destination fully autonomously. So in 2007, our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition. So about that time, the National Federation of the Blind, or NFB, challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently. We decided to give it a try, because we thought, ""Hey, how hard could it be?"" We have already an autonomous vehicle. We just put a blind person in it and we're done, right? (Laughter) We couldn't have been more wrong. What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around, but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive. So we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch.So to test this crazy idea, we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility. And in the summer of 2009, we invited dozens of blind youth from all over the country and gave them a chance to take it for a spin. It was an absolutely amazing experience. But the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment, in a flat, closed-off parking lot — even the lanes defined by red traffic cones.So with this success, we decided to take the next big step, to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads. So how does it work? Well, it's a rather complex system, but let me try to explain it, maybe simplify it. So we have three steps. We have perception, computation and non-visual interfaces. Now obviously the driver cannot see, so the system needs to perceive the environment and gather information for the driver. For that, we use an initial measurement unit. So it measures acceleration, angular acceleration — like a human ear, inner ear. We fuse that information with a GPS unit to get an estimate of the location of the car. We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road. And we also use three laser range finders. The lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles — a car approaching from the front, the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads, any obstacles around the vehicle.So all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer, and the computer can do two things. One is, first of all, process this information to have an understanding of the environment — these are the lanes of the road, there's the obstacles — and convey this information to the driver. The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car. So we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle. But the problem is this: How do we convey this information and instructions to a person who cannot see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive? So for this, we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology. So starting from a three-dimensional ping sound system, a vibrating vest, a click wheel with voice commands, a leg strip, even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot. But today we're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces.Now the first interface is called a DriveGrip. So these are a pair of gloves, and it has vibrating elements on the knuckle part so you can convey instructions about how to steer — the direction and the intensity. Another device is called SpeedStrip. So this is a chair — as a matter of fact, it's actually a massage chair. We gut it out, and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns, and we actuate them to convey information about the speed, and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal. So over here, you can see how the computer understands the environment, and because you cannot see the vibration, we actually put red LED's on the driver so that you can see what's happening. This is the sensory data, and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer.So these two devices, DriveGrip and SpeedStrip, are very effective. But the problem is these are instructional cue devices. So this is not really freedom, right? The computer tells you how to drive — turn left, turn right, speed up, stop. We call this the ""backseat-driver problem."" So we're moving away from the instructional cue devices, and we're now focusing more on the informational devices. A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix. So think of it as a monitor for the blind. So it's a small tablet, has many holes in it, and compressed air comes out, so it can actually draw images. So even though you are blind, you can put your hand over it, you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles. Actually, you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature. So it's actually a multi-dimensional user interface. So here you can see the left camera, the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the AirPix. For this, we're showing a simulator, a blind person driving using the AirPix. This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces. So basically that's how it works.So just a month ago, on January 29th, we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event. We also had some surprises. Let's take a look.(Music)(Video) Announcer: This is an historic day in January. He's coming up to the grandstand, fellow Federationists.(Cheering)(Honking)There's the grandstand now. And he's [unclear] following that van that's out in front of him. Well there comes the first box. Now let's see if Mark avoids it. He does. He passes it on the right. Third box is out. The fourth box is out. And he's perfectly making his way between the two. He's closing in on the van to make the moving pass. Well this is what it's all about, this kind of dynamic display of audacity and ingenuity. He's approaching the end of the run, makes his way between the barrels that are set up there.(Honking)(Applause)Dennis Hong: I'm so happy for you. Mark's going to give me a ride back to the hotel.Mark Riccobono: Yes.(Applause)DH: So since we started this project, we've been getting hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls from people from all around the world. Letters thanking us, but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one: ""Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine."" (Laughter) But sometimes — (Laughter) But sometimes I also do get — I wouldn't call it hate mail — but letters of really strong concern: ""Dr. Hong, are you insane, trying to put blind people on the road? You must be out of your mind."" But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle, and it's not going to be on the road until it's proven as safe as, or safer than, today's vehicle. And I truly believe that this can happen.But still, will the society, would they accept such a radical idea? How are we going to handle insurance? How are we going to issue driver's licenses? There's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality. Of course, the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind. But potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project. The sensors that are used can see through the dark, the fog and rain. And together with this new type of interfaces, we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people. Or for the blind, everyday home appliances — in the educational setting, in the office setting. Just imagine, in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what's written and read using these non-visual interfaces. This is priceless. So today, the things I've showed you today, is just the beginning.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dennis_hong_making_a_car_for_blind_drivers
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"I spent the best part of last year working on a documentary about my own happiness — trying to see if I can actually train my mind in a particular way, like I can train my body, so I can end up with an improved feeling of overall well-being. Then this January, my mother died, and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me. So in a very typical, silly designer fashion, after years worth of work, pretty much all I have to show for it are the titles for the film.(Music)They were still done when I was on sabbatical with my company in Indonesia. We can see the first part here was designed here by pigs. It was a little bit too funky, and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way — fashion. My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest, and monkeys, of course, are supposed to be the happiest of all animals. So we trained them to be able to do three separate words, to lay out them properly. You can see, there still is a little bit of a legibility problem there. The serif is not really in place. So of course, what you don't do properly yourself is never deemed done really. So this is us climbing onto the trees and putting it up over the Sayan Valley in Indonesia.In that year, what I did do a lot was look at all sorts of surveys, looking at a lot of data on this subject. And it turns out that men and women report very, very similar levels of happiness. This is a very quick overview of all the studies that I looked at. That climate plays no role. That if you live in the best climate, in San Diego in the United States, or in the shittiest climate, in Buffalo, New York, you are going to be just as happy in either place. If you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the U.S., any salary increase you're going to experience will have only a tiny, tiny influence on your overall well-being. Black people are just as happy as white people are. If you're old or young it doesn't really make a difference. If you're ugly or if you're really, really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever. You will adapt to it and get used to it. If you have manageable health problems it doesn't really matter.Now this does matter. So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left — meaning that, if you have a lot of friends, and you have meaningful friendships, that does make a lot of difference. As well as being married — you are likely to be much happier than if you are single.A fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt, came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind. He says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant, the unconscious. And the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do, but the elephant really has his own ideas. If I look at my own life, I'm born in 1962 in Austria. If I would have been born a hundred years earlier, the big decisions in my life would have been made for me — meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected. I, of course, and all of us, are very much in charge of these big decisions in our lives. We live where we want to be — at least in the West. We become what we really are interested in. We choose our own profession, and we choose our own partners. And so it's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of.If you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called George, when he decides on where he wants to live — is it Florida or North Dakota? — he goes and lives in Georgia. And if you look at a guy called Dennis, when he decides what to become — is it a lawyer, or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher? — best chance is that he wants to become a dentist. And if Paula decides should she marry Joe or Jack, somehow Paul sounds the most interesting. And so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons, it remains statistically true that there are more Georges living in Georgia and there are more Dennises becoming dentists and there are more Paulas who are married to Paul than statistically viable. (Laughter) Now I, of course, thought, ""Well this is American data,"" and I thought, ""Well, those silly Americans. They get influenced by things that they're not aware of. This is just completely ridiculous."" Then, of course, I looked at my mom and my dad — (Laughter) Karolina and Karl, and grandmom and granddad, Josefine and Josef. So I am looking still for a Stephanie. I'll figure something out.If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer, the easiest answer, of course, is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don't like to do — for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do. I'm a big list maker, so I came up with a list. One of them is to think without pressure. This is a project we're working on right now with a very healthy deadline. It's a book on culture, and, as you can see, culture is rapidly drifting around. Doing things like I'm doing right now — traveling to Cannes. The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali — clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture, not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there. Quite consciously, design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques, just basically to fight straightforward adaptation.Being close to the content — that's the content really is close to my heart. This is a bus, or vehicle, for a charity, for an NGO that wants to double the education budget in the United States — carefully designed, so, by two inches, it still clears highway overpasses. Having end results — things that come back from the printer well, like this little business card for an animation company called Sideshow on lenticular foils. Working on projects that actually have visible impacts, like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous. It just came out six months ago, and it's getting unbelievable traction right now in Germany. And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest.And lately, to be involved in projects where I know about 50 percent of the project technique-wise and the other 50 percent would be new. So in this case, it's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens. And I of course knew stuff, as a designer, about typography, even though we worked with those animals not so successfully. But I didn't quite know all that much about movement or film. And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project. But also because the content was very close. In this case, ""Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development"" — I've been keeping a diary since I was 12. And I've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way. In this case also because it's part of one of the many sentiments that we build the whole series on — that all the sentiments originally had come out of the diary.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_7_rules_for_making_more_happiness
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"This is a representation of your brain, and your brain can be broken into two parts. There's the left half, which is the logical side, and then the right half, which is the intuitive. And so if we had a scale to measure the aptitude of each hemisphere, then we can plot our brain. And for example, this would be somebody who's completely logical. This would be someone who's entirely intuitive. So where would you put your brain on this scale? Some of us may have opted for one of these extremes, but I think for most people in the audience, your brain is something like this — with a high aptitude in both hemispheres at the same time. It's not like they're mutually exclusive or anything. You can be logical and intuitive.And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas. But at the same time, we need a good deal of intuition to actually make the experiments work. How do we develop this intuition? Well we like to play with stuff. So we go out and play with it, and then we see how it acts, and then we develop our intuition from there. And really you do the same thing.So some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time. I mean, it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time, but you weren't born with this notion, you developed it. And I remember watching a kid playing on a car stop. He was just a toddler and he wasn't very good at it, and he kept falling over. But I bet playing with this car stop taught him a really valuable lesson, and that's that large things don't let you get right past them, and that they stay in one place.And so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world, unless you're a particle physicist. It'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist, because they don't play with car stops, they play with these little weird particles. And when they play with their particles, they find they do all sorts of really weird things — like they can fly right through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time. And so they wrote down all these observations, and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics.And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles. But you didn't need it to describe the large, everyday objects around us. This didn't really sit well with my intuition, and maybe it's just because I don't play with particles very often. Well, I play with them sometimes, but not very often. And I've never seen them. I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle. But it didn't sit well with my logical side either. Because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics? I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. And so I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics. So a few years ago, I set off to do just that.So I made one. This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition. So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip. And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle. And that's this piece of metal I'm going to be talking about in a minute. This is a photograph of the object. And here I'll zoom in a little bit. We're looking right there in the center. And then here's a really, really big close-up of the little piece of metal. So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge. And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip. I went into a clean room with a fresh silicon wafer, and then I just cranked away at all the big machines for about 100 hours. For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine — to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device. This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it.Here, let me give you an analogy. You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator? I mean, when I'm in an elevator all alone, I do all sorts of weird things, but then other people get on board and I stop doing those things because I don't want to bother them, or, frankly, scare them. So quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way. The fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people, but it's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room. And so we knew, if we wanted to see this piece of metal behave quantum mechanically, we're going to have to kick out all the other passengers.And so that's what we did. We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted. And so we measured its motion. We found it was moving in really weird ways. Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating, and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this — like expanding and contracting bellows. And by giving it a gentle nudge, we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time — something that's only allowed with quantum mechanics.So what I'm telling you here is something truly fantastic. What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time? So let's think about the atoms. So in one case: all the trillions of atoms that make up that chunk of metal are sitting still and at the same time those same atoms are moving up and down. Now it's only at precise times when they align. The rest of the time they're delocalized. That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places. I think this is really cool. (Laughter) Really.(Applause)It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you. So if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time, that chunk of metal can be in two different places, then why not you? I mean, this is just my logical side talking. So imagine if you're in multiple places at the same time, what would that be like? How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space?There's one more part to the story. It's when we warmed it up, and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box, we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece. And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space.You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected. Well, that's not quite right. It's more than that; it's deeper. It's that those connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are, and that's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_o_connell_making_sense_of_a_visible_quantum_object
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"I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. But I don't buy anything new. I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. Aww, thank you. Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. I mean, what am I going to find today? Is it going to be my size? Will I like the color? Will it be under $20? If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won.I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought. I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear — (Laughter) that means I found a few things. And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. Does that sound good? (Applause) So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new.So let's start with Sunday. I call this ""Shiny Tiger."" You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. You can almost always look phenomenal for under $50. This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week.Monday: Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. (Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you.Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. Just be who you are. If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it.Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. I like to smile and say, ""Thank you.""Thursday: Confidence is key. If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience. We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. Thank you.(Applause)Friday: A universal truth — five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything.And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations.So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessi_arrington_wearing_nothing_new
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"Power. That is the word that comes to mind. We're the new technologists. We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power. How much power do we have? Scene from a movie: ""Apocalypse Now"" — great movie. We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz. The way we're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off. So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in. And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music. ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power. That's the kind of power I feel in this room. That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have.Let's take an example. What can we do with just one person's data? What can we do with that guy's data? I can look at your financial records. I can tell if you pay your bills on time. I know if you're good to give a loan to. I can look at your medical records; I can see if your pump is still pumping — see if you're good to offer insurance to. I can look at your clicking patterns. When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before. And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell. I can tell with data analysis what you're going to do before you even do it. I know what you like. I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone.Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have. But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do. I'm here to talk about what we should do. What's the right thing to do?Now I see some puzzled looks like, ""Why are you asking us what's the right thing to do? We're just building this stuff. Somebody else is using it."" Fair enough. But it brings me back. I think about World War II — some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion — just nuclear stuff. We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build. We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology.So what should we be doing with that guy's data? Should we be collecting it, gathering it, so we can make his online experience better? So we can make money? So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good? Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone? Which one is it? How should we figure it out?I know: crowdsource. Let's crowdsource this. So to get people warmed up, let's start with an easy question — something I'm sure everybody here has an opinion about: iPhone versus Android. Let's do a show of hands — iPhone. Uh huh. Android. You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones. (Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder. Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good? Or should we leave him alone? Collect his data. Leave him alone. You're safe. It's fine. (Laughter) Okay, last question — harder question — when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one? Kant. Mill. Not as many votes. (Laughter) Yeah, that's a terrifying result. Terrifying, because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions.How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework? We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system. What's a moral operating system? We all know right and wrong, right? You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong. Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad. But how do we figure out what's right and wrong? And from day to day, we have the techniques that we use. Maybe we just follow our gut. Maybe we take a vote — we crowdsource. Or maybe we punt — ask the legal department, see what they say. In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do. And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do.So let's get a moral framework. We're numbers people, living by numbers. How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework? I know a guy who did exactly that. A brilliant guy — he's been dead 2,500 years. Plato, that's right. Remember him — old philosopher? You were sleeping during that class. And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did. He was worried about right and wrong. He wanted to know what is just. But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this. He says something's just. She says something else is just. It's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too. I'm just going back and forth; I'm not getting anywhere. I don't want opinions; I want knowledge. I want to know the truth about justice — like we have truths in math. In math, we know the objective facts. Take a number, any number — two. Favorite number. I love that number. There are truths about two. If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four. That's true no matter what thing you're talking about. It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form. When you have two of anything — two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions — those all partake of the form of two. They all participate in the truths that two has. They all have two-ness in them. And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion.What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math? What if there were a pure form of justice? What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice? Then you would know what was really just and what wasn't. It wouldn't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances. That's a stunning vision. I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious. That's as ambitious as we are. He wants to solve ethics. He wants objective truths. If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework.If you don't think that way, well, you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy, because the tidy idea, you know, people criticized it. Aristotle, in particular, he was not amused. He thought it was impractical. Aristotle said, ""We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows."" Aristotle thought ethics wasn't a lot like math. He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path. If you think that, Plato's not your guy. But don't give up. Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework.How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do? That sound familiar? That's a utilitarian moral framework. John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this — nice guy besides — and only been dead 200 years. So basis of utilitarianism — I'm sure you're familiar at least. The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this. But here's the way it works. What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain? It does something intrinsic to the act. It's not like its relation to some abstract form. It's just a matter of the consequences. You just look at the consequences and see if, overall, it's for the good or for the worse. That would be simple. Then we know what to do.Let's take an example. Suppose I go up and I say, ""I'm going to take your phone."" Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation. I thought, that guy looks suspicious. And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout — or whoever took over after Bin Laden — and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell. I'm going to find that out, and when I find that out, I'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause. That has a very high utility to prevent that damage. And compared to the little pain that it's going to cause — because it's going to be embarrassing when I'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit — that's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone. If you feel that way, that's a utilitarian choice.But maybe you don't feel that way either. Maybe you think, it's his phone. It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that. He has autonomy. It doesn't matter what the calculations are. There are things that are intrinsically wrong — like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong. Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it. He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules. It's not a matter of calculation.So let's stop. We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket. And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes. So let's cut to the chase. How should we be making our decisions? Is it Plato, is it Aristotle, is it Kant, is it Mill? What should we be doing? What's the answer? What's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do, whether we should use that guy's data or not? What's the formula? There's not a formula. There's not a simple answer.Ethics is hard. Ethics requires thinking. And that's uncomfortable. I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers. But they can't. You can't just take human thinking and put it into a machine. We're the ones who have to do it. Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it. Not only can we think, we must. Hannah Arendt said, ""The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil. It arises from not thinking."" That's what she called the ""banality of evil."" And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person.So let's do that. Let's think. In fact, let's start right now. Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, ""What should I be doing?"" Bring that to mind, and now reflect on that and say, ""How did I come up that decision? What did I do? Did I follow my gut? Did I have somebody vote on it? Or did I punt to legal?"" Or now we have a few more choices. ""Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would? Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right?"" Think about it. Really bring it to mind. This is important. It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this. Are you ready? Go.Stop. Good work. What you just did, that's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power.Now the next step — try this. Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision. Not right now. Wait till I finish talking. Do it over lunch. And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you. Find an artist or a writer — or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them. In fact, find somebody from the humanities. Why? Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists. Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together. It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference. And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective. You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature. You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater — how does that bear upon venture capital? Well that's interesting. That's a different way of thinking. And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions.So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend. And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this — maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music. ♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, ""You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner. It's based on Norse legend. It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry."" That's interesting. Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera. We're moved because it's about the battle between good and evil, about right and wrong. And we care about right and wrong. We care what happens in that opera. We care what happens in ""Apocalypse Now."" And we certainly care what happens with our technologies.We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news. We're the ones writing this opera. This is our movie. We figure out what will happen with this technology. We determine how this will all end.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/damon_horowitz
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"When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams. I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist, and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur. And so that's what I've been striving for all of my life. I was very fortunate early in my career. I was fortunate in finding things. I wasn't very good at reading things. In fact, I don't read much of anything. I am extremely dyslexic, and so reading is the hardest thing I do. But instead, I go out and I find things. Then I just pick things up. I basically practice for finding money on the street. (Laughter) And I wander about the hills, and I have found a few things.And I have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the Western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests, the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones. And it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs weren't the big, stupid, green reptiles that people had thought for so many years. People were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special.And so, at that time, I was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues. We were able to actually say that dinosaurs — based on the evidence we had — that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young, brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds. So it was pretty interesting stuff. I have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social. We have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults. The appearance of them would have been different — which it is in all social animals. In social groups of animals, the juveniles always look different than the adults. The adults can recognize the juveniles; the juveniles can recognize the adults. And so we're making a better picture of what a dinosaur looks like. And they didn't just all chase Jeeps around.(Laughter)But it is that social thing that I guess attracted Michael Crichton. And in his book, he talked about the social animals. And then Steven Spielberg, of course, depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures. The theme of this story is building a dinosaur, and so we come to that part of ""Jurassic Park."" Michael Crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life. You all know the story, right. I mean, I assume everyone here has seen ""Jurassic Park.""If you want to make a dinosaur, you go out, you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap — otherwise known as amber — that has some blood-sucking insects in it, good ones, and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some DNA, because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur DNA out. And you take your DNA back to the laboratory and you clone it. And I guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg, or something like that, and then you wait, and, lo and behold, out pops a little baby dinosaur. And everybody's happy about that. (Laughter) And they're happy over and over again. They keep doing it; they just keep making these things. And then, then, then, and then ... Then the dinosaurs, being social, act out their socialness, and they get together, and they conspire. And, of course, that's what makes Steven Spielberg's movie — conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around.So I assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect, and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitos. (Laughter) (Applause) And probably a whole bunch of trees as well.Now if you want dinosaur DNA, I say go to the dinosaur. So that's what we've done. Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen. And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing. And so she looked into the bone of this T. rex, one of the thigh bones, and she actually found some very interesting structures in there. They found these red circular-looking objects, and they looked, for all the world, like red blood cells. And they're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone. And so she thought, well, what the heck. So she sampled some material out of it. Now it wasn't DNA; she didn't find DNA. But she did find heme, which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin. And that was really cool. That was interesting. That was — here we have 65-million-year-old heme. Well we tried and tried and we couldn't really get anything else out of it.So a few years went by, and then we started the Hell Creek Project. And the Hell Creek Project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find, and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them. And out in eastern Montana there's a lot of space, a lot of badlands, and not very many people, and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff. And we did find a lot of stuff. We found a lot of Tyrannosaurs, but we found one special Tyrannosaur, and we called it B-rex. And B-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock. It wasn't a very complete T. rex, and it wasn't a very big T. rex, but it was a very special B-rex. And I and my colleagues cut into it, and we were able to determine, by looking at lines of arrested growth, some lines in it, that B-rex had died at the age of 16. We don't really know how long dinosaurs lived, because we haven't found the oldest one yet. But this one died at the age of 16.We gave samples to Mary Schweitzer, and she was actually able to determine that B-rex was a female based on medullary tissue found on the inside of the bone. Medullary tissue is the calcium build-up, the calcium storage basically, when an animal is pregnant, when a bird is pregnant. So here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs. But Mary went further. She took the bone, and she dumped it into acid. Now we all know that bones are fossilized, and so if you dump it into acid, there shouldn't be anything left. But there was something left. There were blood vessels left. There were flexible, clear blood vessels. And so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur. It was extraordinary. But she also found osteocytes, which are the cells that laid down the bones. And try and try, we could not find DNA, but she did find evidence of proteins.But we thought maybe — well, we thought maybe that the material was breaking down after it was coming out of the ground. We thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast. And so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer, and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples. And we did. We got better material. The cells looked better. The vessels looked better. Found the protein collagen. I mean, it was wonderful stuff. But it's not dinosaur DNA. So we have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast. We're just not going to be able to do what they did in ""Jurassic Park."" We're not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur.But birds are dinosaurs. Birds are living dinosaurs. We actually classify them as dinosaurs. We now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs. So the non-avian dinosaurs are the big clunky ones that went extinct. Avian dinosaurs are our modern birds. So we don't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them.(Laughter)I know, you're as bad as the sixth-graders. (Laughter) The sixth-graders look at it and they say, ""No."" (Laughter) ""You can call it a dinosaur, but look at the velociraptor: the velociraptor is cool."" (Laughter) ""The chicken is not."" (Laughter) So this is our problem, as you can imagine. The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean it really is. You can't argue with it because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way. (Laughter) (Applause) But the sixth-graders demand it. ""Fix the chicken."" (Laughter) So that's what I'm here to tell you about: how we are going to fix a chicken.So we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken. Because evolution works, we actually have some evolutionary tools. We'll call them biological modification tools. We have selection. And we know selection works. We started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a Maltese. I mean, that's — that's definitely genetic modification. Or any of the other funny-looking little dogs. We also have transgenesis. Transgenesis is really cool too. That's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one. That's how people make GloFish. You take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish, and, puff, they glow. And that's pretty cool. And they obviously make a lot of money off of them. And now they're making Glow-rabbits and Glow-all-sorts-of-things. I guess we could make a glow chicken. (Laughter) But I don't think that'll satisfy the sixth-graders either.But there's another thing. There's what we call atavism activation. And atavism activation is basically — an atavism is an ancestral characteristic. You heard that occasionally children are born with tails, and it's because it's an ancestral characteristic. And so there are a number of atavisms that can happen. Snakes are occasionally born with legs. And here's an example. This is a chicken with teeth. A fellow by the name of Matthew Harris at the University of Wisconsin in Madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth, and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens. Now that's a good characteristic. We can save that one. We know we can use that. We can make a chicken with teeth. That's getting closer. That's better than a glowing chicken.(Laughter)A friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Dr. Hans Larsson at McGill University, is actually looking at atavisms. And he's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop, and he's interested in how birds actually lost their tail. He's also interested in the transformation of the arm, the hand, to the wing. He's looking for those genes as well. And I said, ""Well, if you can find those, I can just reverse them and make what I need to make for the sixth-graders."" And so he agreed. And so that's what we're looking into.If you look at dinosaur hands, a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it. Archaeopteryx, which is a bird, a primitive bird, still has that very primitive hand. But as you can see, the pigeon, or a chicken or anything else, another bird, has kind of a weird-looking hand, because the hand is a wing. But the cool thing is that, if you look in the embryo, as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand. It has the three fingers, the three digits. But a gene turns on that actually fuses those together. And so what we're looking for is that gene. We want to stop that gene from turning on, fusing those hands together, so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand, like the archaeopteryx. And the same goes for the tails. Birds have basically rudimentary tails. And so we know that in embryo, as the animal is developing, it actually has a relatively long tail. But a gene turns on and resorbs the tail, gets rid of it. So that's the other gene we're looking for. We want to stop that tail from resorbing.So what we're trying to do really is take our chicken, modify it and make the chickenosaurus. (Laughter) It's a cooler-looking chicken. But it's just the very basics. So that really is what we're doing. And people always say, ""Why do that? Why make this thing? What good is it?"" Well, that's a good question. Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things. And quite frankly, I think if Colonel Sanders was to be careful how he worded it, he could actually advertise an extra piece. (Laughter)Anyway — When our dino-chicken hatches, it will be, obviously, the poster child, or what you might call a poster chick, for technology, entertainment and design.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken
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"This story is about taking imagination seriously. Fourteen years ago, I first encountered this ordinary material, fishnet, used the same way for centuries. Today, I'm using it to create permanent, billowing, voluptuous forms the scale of hard-edged buildings in cities around the world. I was an unlikely person to be doing this. I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.I went off on my own to become an artist, and I painted for 10 years, when I was offered a Fulbright to India. Promising to give exhibitions of paintings, I shipped my paints and arrived in Mahabalipuram. The deadline for the show arrived — my paints didn't. I had to do something. This fishing village was famous for sculpture. So I tried bronze casting. But to make large forms was too heavy and expensive. I went for a walk on the beach, watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand. I'd seen it every day, but this time I saw it differently — a new approach to sculpture, a way to make volumetric form without heavy solid materials.My first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen. It's a self-portrait titled ""Wide Hips."" (Laughter) We hoisted them on poles to photograph. I discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns. I was mesmerized. I continued studying craft traditions and collaborating with artisans, next in Lithuania with lace makers. I liked the fine detail it gave my work, but I wanted to make them larger — to shift from being an object you look at to something you could get lost in.Returning to India to work with those fishermen, we made a net of a million and a half hand-tied knots — installed briefly in Madrid. Thousands of people saw it, and one of them was the urbanist Manual Sola-Morales who was redesigning the waterfront in Porto, Portugal. He asked if I could build this as a permanent piece for the city. I didn't know if I could do that and preserve my art. Durable, engineered, permanent — those are in opposition to idiosyncratic, delicate and ephemeral.For two years, I searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays, salt, air, pollution, and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind. We needed something to hold the net up out there in the middle of the traffic circle. So we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring. We had to engineer it to move gracefully in an average breeze and survive in hurricane winds. But there was no engineering software to model something porous and moving. I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for America's Cup racing yachts named Peter Heppel. He helped me tackle the twin challenges of precise shape and gentle movement.I couldn't build this the way I knew because hand-tied knots weren't going to withstand a hurricane. So I developed a relationship with an industrial fishnet factory, learned the variables of their machines, and figured out a way to make lace with them. There was no language to translate this ancient, idiosyncratic handcraft into something machine operators could produce. So we had to create one. Three years and two children later, we raised this 50,000-square-foot lace net. It was hard to believe that what I had imagined was now built, permanent and had lost nothing in translation.(Applause)This intersection had been bland and anonymous. Now it had a sense of place. I walked underneath it for the first time. As I watched the wind's choreography unfold, I felt sheltered and, at the same time, connected to limitless sky. My life was not going to be the same. I want to create these oases of sculpture in spaces of cities around the world. I'm going to share two directions that are new in my work.Historic Philadelphia City Hall: its plaza, I felt, needed a material for sculpture that was lighter than netting. So we experimented with tiny atomized water particles to create a dry mist that is shaped by the wind and in testing, discovered that it can be shaped by people who can interact and move through it without getting wet. I'm using this sculpture material to trace the paths of subway trains above ground in real time — like an X-ray of the city's circulatory system unfolding.Next challenge, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver asked, could I represent the 35 nations of the Western hemisphere and their interconnectedness in a sculpture? (Laughter) I didn't know where to begin, but I said yes. I read about the recent earthquake in Chile and the tsunami that rippled across the entire Pacific Ocean. It shifted the Earth's tectonic plates, sped up the planet's rotation and literally shortened the length of the day. So I contacted NOAA, and I asked if they'd share their data on the tsunami, and translated it into this. Its title: ""1.26"" refers to the number of microseconds that the Earth's day was shortened.I couldn't build this with a steel ring, the way I knew. Its shape was too complex now. So I replaced the metal armature with a soft, fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel. The sculpture could now be entirely soft, which made it so light it could tie in to existing buildings — literally becoming part of the fabric of the city. There was no software that could extrude these complex net forms and model them with gravity. So we had to create it.Then I got a call from New York City asking if I could adapt these concepts to Times Square or the High Line. This new soft structural method enables me to model these and build these sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers. They don't have funding yet, but I dream now of bringing these to cities around the world where they're most needed.Fourteen years ago, I searched for beauty in the traditional things, in craft forms. Now I combine them with hi-tech materials and engineering to create voluptuous, billowing forms the scale of buildings. My artistic horizons continue to grow.I'll leave you with this story. I got a call from a friend in Phoenix. An attorney in the office who'd never been interested in art, never visited the local art museum, dragged everyone she could from the building and got them outside to lie down underneath the sculpture. There they were in their business suits, laying in the grass, noticing the changing patterns of wind beside people they didn't know, sharing the rediscovery of wonder.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janet_echelman
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"In 2007, I decided that we needed to reconceptualize how we thought about economic development. Our new goal should be that when every family thinks about where they want to live and work, they should be able to choose between at least a handful of different cities that were all competing to attract new residents. Now we're a long way away from that goal right now. There are billions of people in developing countries who don't have even a single city that would be willing to welcome them. But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than it costs to build them. So we could easily supply the world with dozens, maybe hundreds, of new cities.Now this might sound preposterous to you if you've never thought about new cities. But just substitute apartment building for cities. Imagine half the people who wanted to be in apartments already had them; the other half aren't there yet. You could try and expand the capacity by doing additions on all the existing apartments. But you know what you'd run into is those apartments and the surrounding areas have rules to avoid discomfort and the distractions of construction. So it's extremely hard to do all of those additions. But you could go out someplace brand new, build a brand new apartment building, as long as the rules there were ones that facilitated construction rather than getting in the way. So I proposed that governments create new reform zones big enough to hold cities and gave them a name: charter cities.Later I learned that at about this same time, Javier and Octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in Honduras. They knew that about 75,000 Hondurans every year would leave to go to the United States, and they wanted to ask, what could they do to make sure that those people could stay and do the same things in Honduras. At one point, Javier said to Octavio, ""What if we took some of our empty land — what if we just gave it to an embassy — give some to the U.S. embassy; give some to the Canadian embassy — and then if people want to go work under the rules of Canada or under the rules of the United States, they can go get jobs, do everything they do on those embassy grounds that they would otherwise have to go to Canada or the U.S. to do?""In the summer of 2009, Honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis. At the next regularly scheduled election, Pepe Lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform, but reconciliation as well. He asked Octavio to be his chief of staff. Meanwhile, I was getting ready to give a talk at TEDGlobal. Through a process of refinement, trial and error, a lot of user testing, I tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials. The first point was the importance of rules, like those rules that say you can't come in and disturb all the existing apartment holders. We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but it takes technologies and rules to get progress, and it's usually the rules that hold us back.In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio a link to the TEDTalk. He showed it to Javier. They called me. They said, ""Let's present this to the leaders of our country."" So in December we met in Miami, in a hotel conference room. I tried to explain this point about how valuable cities are, how much more valuable they are than they cost. And I used this slide showing how valuable the raw land is in a place like New York City: notice, land that's worth thousands of dollars, in some cases, per square meter. But it was a fairly abstract discussion, and at some point when there was a pause, Octavio said, ""Paul, maybe we could watch the TEDTalk.""(Laughing)So the TEDTalk laid out in very simple terms, a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land, a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in, to go live under those rules or not. So I was asked by the president of Honduras who said that we need to do this project, this is important, this could be the way forward for our country. I was asked to come to Tegucigalpa and talk again on January fourth and fifth. So I presented another fact-filled lecture that included a slide like this, which tried to make the point that, if you want to create a lot of value in a city, it has to be very big. This is a picture of Denver, and the outline is the new airport that was built in Denver. This airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers. So I was trying to persuade the Hondurans, if you build a new city, you've got to start with a site that's at least 1,000 square kilometers. That's more than 250 hundred-thousand acres. Everybody applauded politely. The faces in the audience were very serious and attentive. The leader of the congress came up on stage and said, ""Professor Romer, thank you very much for your lecture, but maybe we could watch the TEDTalk. I've got it here on my laptop."" So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk.And it got to the essence, which is that a new city could offer new choices for people. There would be a choice of a city which you could go to which could be in Honduras, instead of hundreds of miles away in the North. And it also involved new choices for leaders. Because the leaders in the government there in Honduras would need help from partner countries, who could benefit from partner countries who help them set up the rules in this charter and the enforcement, so everybody can trust that the charter really will be enforced. And the insight of President Lobo was that that assurance of enforcement that I was thinking about as a way to get the foreign investors to come in and build the city could be equally important for all the different parties in Honduras who had suffered for so many years from fear and distrust.We went and looked at a site. This picture's from there. It easily could hold a thousand square kilometers. And shortly thereafter, on January 19th, they voted in the congress to amend their constitution to have a constitutional provision that allows for special development regions. In a country which had just gone through this wrenching crisis, the vote in the congress in favor of this constitutional amendment was 124 to one. All parties, all factions in society, backed this. To be part of the constitution, you actually have to pass it twice in the congress. On February 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one.Immediately after that vote, on February 21st to the 24th, a delegation of about 30 Hondurans went to the two places in the world that are most interested in getting into the city building business. One is South Korea. This is a picture of a big, new city center that's being built in South Korea — bigger than downtown Boston. Everything you see there was built in four years, after they spent four years getting the permits. The other place that's very interested in city building is Singapore. They've actually built two cities already in China and are preparing the third.So if you think about this practically, here's where we are. They've got a site; they're already thinking about this site for the second city. They're putting in place a legal system that could allow for managers to come in, and also an external legal system. One country has already volunteered to let its supreme court be the court of final appeal for the new judicial system there. There's designers and builders of cities who are very interested. They even can bring with them some financing. But the one thing you know they've already solved is that there's lots of tenants. There's lots of businesses that would like to locate in the Americas, especially in a place with a free trade zone, and there's lots of people who'd like to go there. Around the world, there's 700 million people who say they'd like to move permanently someplace else right now.There's a million a year who leave Latin America to go to the United States. Many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job — sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing. Sadly, sometimes there are even children who are trying to get reunited with their parents that they haven't seen, in some cases, for a decade.So what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in Honduras? Or to build a dozen of these, or a hundred of these, around the world? What kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents? This is an idea worth spreading. And my friends from Honduras asked me to say thank you, TED.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_the_world_s_first_charter_city
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"I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, each conceiving a baby, OK? So two couples each conceiving one baby. Now I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception, because if you do, you're not going to listen to me, so just imagine that for a moment. And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, meeting that X chromosome of the egg. And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg. Both are viable; both take off. We'll come back to these people later.So I wear two hats in most of what I do. As the one hat, I do history of anatomy. I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy — meaning human bodies, animal bodies — how they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; how have they thought about bodies. The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate — or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate — for people who are patients of doctors. In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms. So some of what I've worked on, for example, is people who are conjoined twins — two people within one body. Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism — so people who are much shorter than typical. And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex — so people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types. And as a general term, we can use the term ""intersex"" for this.Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that isn't standard for male or female. So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes. So in the fetal life, those testes are pumping out testosterone. But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, the body doesn't react to the testosterone. And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome. So lots of levels of testosterone, but no reaction to it. As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path. When the child is born, she looks like a girl. She is a girl, she is raised as a girl. And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, but she's not getting her period, that somebody figures out something's up here. And they do some tests and figure out that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, she has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome.Now what's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male, but they're really not. Females, like males, have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands. They're in the back of our body. And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone. Most females like me — I believe myself to be a typical female — I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up, but I think I'm probably typical — most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive. We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens. The consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. So sex is really complicated — it's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum — in some ways, they can be all over the place.Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy, and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside. What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment. And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinized, his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones. And he was born looking like a boy — nobody suspected anything. And it was only when he had reached the age of 19 that he began to have enough medical problems from menstruating internally, that doctors figured out that, in fact, he was female, internally.OK, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex. Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it. And we're not exactly sure why that happens.So sex can come in lots of different varieties. The reason that children with these kinds of bodies — whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, or it's an intersex type — are often ""normalized"" by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health. In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy. The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories. Our system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity. So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, to have an African anatomy in terms of your history. And so we have this terribly simplistic idea. And when we're faced with a body that actually presents us something quite different, it startles us in terms of those categorizations.So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism. And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism. You can imagine how startling then it is when you have children who are born who are two people inside of one body. Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year when South African runner, Caster Semenya, had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, ""Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?"" And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test.In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit: Nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature. So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories, that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. And it's not just in terms of sex. It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed.As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas. We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only, really, by a few nucleotides? And as we get farther and farther with our science, we get more and more into a discomforted zone, where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic.So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life. One of the places we're seeing it, for example, in our culture, in the United States today, is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life. We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life. We have very difficult conversations nowadays — probably not out in the open as much as within medicine — about the question of when somebody's dead. In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead. At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose, and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet. If it stopped twitching, you bury them. But today, we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings. And as a consequence, we have to struggle with this really difficult question about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before.Now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories would make somebody like me really happy. I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous. Understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense. It makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy. So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you a huge fan of the Founding Fathers. I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great. I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did, that I find myself watching that cheesy musical ""1776"" every few years, and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable. It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers.The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists, and this is why. What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years. So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy. The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright. They had a concept of blue blood. They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth. The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and that concept was ""all men are created equal."" They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, and that was a really radical thing to do.Now they were doing it in part because they were part of an Enlightenment system where two things were growing up together. And that was democracy growing up, but it was also science growing up at the same time. And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in the concept of a naturalistic world. They were moving away from supernatural explanations, and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright.They were moving towards a naturalistic concept. And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God. They don't talk about God and God's nature. They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are. So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality. And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way the Civil Rights Movement of the future. They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great.So what happened years afterwards? What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said, ""The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc."" And women successfully argued that. Next came the successful Civil Rights Movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, ""Ain't I a woman?"" We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights Movement saying, ""I am a man."" Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. We see the same thing with the disability rights movement.The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions. Mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, anatomically, in our culture. For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human. I don't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy. I don't want to say a five-year-old should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry. So there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that I think we should retain. But the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are and why do we retain them, and do they have meaning.So let's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk. We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, so she's born on June 1, 1980. Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1, 1980. Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does — the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink. Henry has to wait for all of that, not because he's actually any different in age, biologically, except in terms of when he was born.We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are. Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male — although I haven't told you that he's the XY one — by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, which Mary does not need to worry about. Mary, meanwhile, cannot in all the states have the same right that Henry has in all the states, namely, the right to marry. Henry can marry, in every state, a woman, but Mary can only marry today in a few states, a woman.So we have these anatomical categories that persist, that are in many ways problematic and questionable. And the question to me becomes: What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that's been based on anatomy might start falling apart? I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time, it feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us. So where do we go? It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: ""We have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere."" But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position.So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome. In practice they don't test people for their chromosomes. But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome.If we look at one of the Founding Fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us something of a solution in his ""I have a dream"" speech. He says we should judge people ""based not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character,"" moving beyond anatomy. And I want to say, ""Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea."" But in practice, how do you do it? How do you judge people based on the content of character? I also want to point out that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know. I also want to say there are probably also some yellow Labradors that I know that are more capable of informed, intelligent, mature decisions about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that I know.So how do we operationalize the question of content of character? It turns out to be really difficult. And part of me also wonders, what if content of character turns out to be something that's scannable in the future — able to be seen with an fMRI? Do we really want to go there? I'm not sure where we go.What I do know is that it seems to be really important to think about the idea of the United States being in the lead of thinking about this issue of democracy. We've done a really good job struggling with democracy, and I think we would do a good job in the future. We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered, unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, in which case he's allowed to live.We don't have that kind of situation. I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with — a surgeon I talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself. But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he'll do this surgery — this was a very high-risk surgery — his answer was that, in this other nation, these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this. My response to him was, ""Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery?"" The United States has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are, without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. So I think we have to be in the lead.Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you that I've been talking a lot about the Fathers. And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers. And I want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist, and that is that I think that there may be different kinds of insights that can come from different kinds of anatomies, particularly when we have people thinking in groups. For years, because I've been interested in intersex, I've also been interested in sex-difference research. And one of the things that I've been interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world. And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average — not everyone, but on average — are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are, basically, vulnerable within the group. And so if we think about that, we have an interesting situation in hands.Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my graduate advisors who knew I was interested in feminism — I considered myself a feminist, as I still do, asked a really strange question. He said, ""Tell me what's feminine about feminism."" And I thought, ""Well, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism."" But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism. That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships, and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable.So whereas the Fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of not just how to protect, but how to care for each other. And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships. So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we're thinking about what we do for each other.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alice_dreger_is_anatomy_destiny
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"From all outward appearances, John had everything going for him. He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit, and he'd only owned it for five years. The school where he graduated from with his master's had just offered him a teaching appointment, which meant not only a salary, but benefits for the first time in ages. And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression.On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below. Remarkably — no, miraculously — he lived. The fall shattered his right arm, broke every rib that he had, punctured his lung, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry, where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain, contacted the boat's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital.And that's actually where our story begins. Because once John committed himself to putting his life back together — first physically, then emotionally, and then spiritually — he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did.Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail. But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time. This truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them. And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life, because of our taboos around suicide, we're not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing. And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in.I know John's story very well because I'm John. And this is, today, the first time in any sort of public setting I've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on. But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide, and sitting last year at TEDActive, I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading — and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help.As the Trevor Project says, it gets better. It gets way better. And I'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you, to urge you, that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide, or you know somebody who has, talk about it; get help. It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jd_schramm
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"A couple of years ago, when I was attending the TED conference in Long Beach, I met Harriet. We'd actually met online before — not the way you're thinking. We were introduced because we both knew Linda Avey, one of the founders of the first online personal genomic companies. And because we shared our genetic information with Linda, she could see that Harriet and I shared a very rare type of mitochondrial DNA, haplotype K1a1b1a, which meant we were distantly related. We actually share the same genealogy with Ötzi the Iceman. So — Ötzi, Harriet and me. And being the current day, of course, we started our own Facebook group. You're all welcome to join. When I met Harriet in person the next year at the TED conference, she'd gone online and ordered our own happy haplotype T-shirts.(Laughter)Why am I telling you this story? What does it have to do with the future of health? Well, the way I met Harriet is an example of how leveraging cross-disciplinary, exponentially growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness — from low-cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bioinformatics to the connection of the Internet and social networking. What I'd like to talk about today is understanding these exponential technologies. We often think linearly. But if you think about it, if you have a lily pad and it just divided every single day — two, four, eight, sixteen — in 15 days, you'd have 32,000. What do you think you'd have in a month? We're at a billion. If we start to think exponentially, we can see how this is starting to affect all the technologies around us.Many of these technologies, speaking as a physician and innovator, we can start to leverage, to impact the future of our own health and of health care, and to address many of the major challenges in health care today, ranging from the exponential costs to the aging population, the way we really don't use information very well today, the fragmentation of care and the often very difficult course of adoption of innovation. And one of the major things we can do is move the curve to the left. We spend most of our money on the last 20 percent of life. What if we could incentivize physicians in the health care system and our own selves to move the curve to the left and improve our health, leveraging technology as well? Now my favorite example of exponential technology, we all have in our pocket. If you think about it, these are really dramatically improving. I mean, this is the iPhone 4. Imagine what the iPhone 8 will be able to do.Now, I've gained some insight into this. I've been the track share for the medicine portion of a new institution called Singularity University, based in Silicon Valley. We bring together each summer about 100 very talented students from around the world. And we look at these exponential technologies from medicine, biotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, space, and address how we can cross-train and leverage these to impact major unmet goals. We also have seven-day executive programs. And coming up next month is FutureMed, a program to help cross-train and leverage technologies into medicine.Now, I mentioned the phone. These mobile phones have over 20,000 different mobile apps available. There's one out of the UK where you can pee on a little chip, connect it to your iPhone, and check for an STD. I don't know if I'd try that, but it's available. There are other sorts of applications. Merging your phone and diagnostics, for example, measuring your blood glucose on your iPhone and sending that to your physician, so they can better understand and you can better understand your blood sugars as a diabetic. So let's see how exponential technologies are taking health care. Let's start with faster. It's no secret that computers, through Moore's law, are speeding up faster and faster.We can do more powerful things with them. They're really approaching — in many cases, surpassing — the ability of the human mind. But where I think computational speed is most applicable is in imaging. The ability now to look inside the body in real time with very high resolution is really becoming incredible. And we're layering multiple technologies — PET scans, CT scans and molecular diagnostics — to find and seek things at different levels. Here you're going to see the very highest resolution MRI scan done today, of Marc Hodosh, the curator of TEDMED. And now we can see inside of the brain at a resolution and ability never before available, and essentially learn how to reconstruct and maybe even reengineer or backwards engineer the brain, so we can better understand pathology, disease and therapy. We can look inside with real-time fMRI in the brain at real time. And by understanding these sorts of processes and these connections, we're going to understand the effects of medication or meditation and better personalize and make effective, for example, psychoactive drugs.The scanners for these are getting smaller, less expensive and more portable. And this sort of data explosion available from these is really almost becoming a challenge. The scan of today takes up about 800 books, or 20 gigabytes. The scan in a couple of years will be one terabyte, or 800,000 books. How do you leverage that information? Let's get personal. I won't ask who here's had a colonoscopy, but if you're over age 50, it's time for your screening colonoscopy. How'd you like to avoid the pointy end of the stick? Now there's essentially virtual colonoscopy. Compare those two pictures. As a radiologist, you can basically fly through your patient's colon, and augmenting that with artificial intelligence, potentially identify a lesion that we might have missed, but using AI on top of radiology, we can find lesions that were missed before. Maybe this will encourage people to get colonoscopies that wouldn't have otherwise.This is an example of this paradigm shift. We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and, I would say, mobile now — this era of digital medicine. Even my stethoscope is now digital, and of course, there's an app for that. We're moving, obviously, to the era of the tricorder. So the handheld ultrasound is basically surpassing and supplanting the stethoscope. These are now at a price point of what used to be 100,000 euros or a couple hundred-thousand dollars. For about 5,000 dollars, I can have the power of a very powerful diagnostic device in my hand. Merging this now with the advent of electronic medical records — in the US, we're still less than 20 percent electronic; here in the Netherlands, I think it's more than 80 percent.Now that we're switching to merging medical data, making it available electronically, we can crowd-source the information, and as a physician, I can access my patients' data from wherever I am, just through my mobile device. And now, of course, we're in the era of the iPad, even the iPad 2. Just last month, the first FDA-approved application was approved to allow radiologists to do actual reading on these sorts of devices. So certainly, the physicians of today, including myself, are completely reliable on these devices. And as you saw just about a month ago, Watson from IBM beat the two champions in ""Jeopardy."" So I want you to imagine when, in a couple of years, we've started to apply this cloud-based information, when we really have the AI physician and leverage our brains to connectivity to make decisions and diagnostics at a level never done. Already today, you don't need to go to your physician in many cases. Only in about 20 percent of visits do you need to lay hands on the patient. We're now in the era of virtual visits. From Skype-type visits you can do with American Well, to Cisco, that's developed a very complex health presence system,the ability to interact with your health care provider is different. And these are being augmented even by our devices, again, today. My friend Jessica sent me a picture of her head laceration, so I can save her a trip to the emergency room, and do diagnostics that way. Or maybe we can leverage today's gaming technology, like the Microsoft Kinect, hack that to enable diagnostics, for example, in diagnosing stroke, using simple motion detection, using $100 devices. We can actually now visit our patients robotically. This is the RP7; if I'm a hematologist, I can visit another clinic or hospital. These are being augmented by a whole suite of tools actually in the home now. We already have wireless scales. You step on the scale, tweet your weight to your friends, they can keep you in line.We have wireless blood pressure cuffs. A whole gamut of technologies are being put together. Instead of wearing kludgy devices, we put on a simple patch. This was developed at Stanford. It's called iRhythm; it completely supplants the prior technology at a much lower price point, with much more effectivity. We're also in the era today of quantified self. Consumers now can basically buy $100 devices, like this little Fitbit. I can measure my steps, my caloric outtake. I can get insight into that on a daily basis and share it with my friends or physician. There's watches that measure your heart rate, Zeo sleep monitors, a suite of tools that enable you to leverage and have insight into your own health.As we start to integrate this information, we'll know better what to do with it, and have better insight into our own pathologies, health and wellness. There's even mirrors that can pick up your pulse rate. And I would argue, in the future, we'll have wearable devices in our clothes, monitoring us 24/7. And just like the OnStar system in cars, your red light might go on. It won't say ""check engine""; it'll be a ""check your body"" light, and you'll go get it taken care of. Probably in a few years, you'll look in your mirror and it'll be diagnosing you.(Laughter)For those of you with kiddos at home, how would you like a wireless diaper that supports your —(Laughter)More information, I think, than you might need, but it's going to be here.Now, we've heard a lot today about technology and connection. And I think some of these technologies will enable us to be more connected with our patients, to take more time and do the important human-touch elements of medicine, as augmented by these technologies. Now, we've talked about augmenting the patient. How about augmenting the physician? We're now in the era of super-enabling the surgeon, who can now go into the body and do robotic surgery, which is here today, at a level that was not really possible even five years ago. And now this is being augmented with further layers of technology, like augmented reality. So the surgeon can see inside the patient, through their lens, where the tumor is, where the blood vessels are. This can be integrated with decision support. A surgeon in New York can help a surgeon in Amsterdam, for example. And we're entering an era of truly scarless surgery called NOTES, where the robotic endoscope can come out the stomach and pull out that gallbladder, all in a scarless way and robotically. This is called NOTES, and it's coming — basically scarless surgery, as mediated by robotic surgery.Now, how about controlling other elements? For those who have disabilities — the paraplegic, there's the brain-computer interface, or BCI, where chips have been put on the motor cortex of completely quadriplegic patients, and they can control a cursor or a wheelchair or, potentially, a robotic arm. These devices are getting smaller and going into more and more of these patients. Still in clinical trials, but imagine when we can connect these, for example, to the amazing bionic limb, such as the DEKA Arm, built by Dean Kamen and colleagues, which has 17 degrees of motion and freedom, and can allow the person who's lost a limb to have much higher dexterity or control than they've had in the past.So we're really entering the era of wearable robotics, actually. If you haven't lost a limb but had a stroke, you can wear these augmented limbs. Or if you're a paraplegic — I've visited the folks at Berkeley Bionics — they've developed eLEGS. I took this video last week. Here's a paraplegic patient, walking by strapping on these exoskeletons. He's otherwise completely wheelchair-bound. This is the early era of wearable robotics. And by leveraging these sorts of technologies, we're going to change the definition of disability to, in some cases, be superability, or super-enabling. This is Aimee Mullins, who lost her lower limbs as a young child, and Hugh Herr, who's a professor at MIT, who lost his limbs in a climbing accident. And now both of them can climb better, move faster, swim differently with their prosthetics than us normal-abled persons.How about other exponentials? Clearly the obesity trend is exponentially going in the wrong direction, including with huge costs. But the trend in medicine is to get exponentially smaller. A few examples: we're now in the era of ""Fantastic Voyage,"" the iPill. You can swallow this completely integrated device. It can take pictures of your GI system, help diagnose and treat as it moves through your GI tract. We get into even smaller micro-robots that will eventually, autonomously, move through your system, and be able to do things surgeons can't do in a much less invasive manner. Sometimes these might self-assemble in your GI system, and be augmented in that reality.On the cardiac side, pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place, so no need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them. And they'll be wirelessly telemetered to your mobile devices, so you can go places and be monitored remotely. These are shrinking even further. This one is in prototyping by Medtronic; it's smaller than a penny. Artificial retinas, the ability to put arrays on the back of the eyeball and allow the blind to see — also in early trials, but moving into the future. These are going to be game-changing. Or for those of us who are sighted, how about having the assisted-living contact lens? Bluetooth, Wi-Fi available — beams back images to your eye.(Laughter)Now, if you have trouble maintaining your diet, it might help to have some extra imagery to remind you how many calories are going to be coming at you.How about enabling the pathologist to use their cell phone to see at a microscopic level and to lumber that data back to the cloud and make better diagnostics? In fact, the whole era of laboratory medicine is completely changing. We can now leverage microfluidics, like this chip made by Steve Quake at Stanford. Microfluidics can replace an entire lab of technicians; put it on a chip, enable thousands of tests at the point of care, anywhere in the world. This will really leverage technology to the rural and the underserved and enable what used to be thousand-dollar tests to be done for pennies, and at the point of care. If we go down the small pathway a little bit further, we're entering the era of nanomedicine, the ability to make devices super-small, to the point where we can design red blood cells or microrobots that monitor our blood system or immune system, or even those that might clear out the clots from our arteries.Now how about exponentially cheaper? Not something we usually think about in the era of medicine, but hard disks used to be 3,400 dollars for 10 megabytes — exponentially cheaper. In genomics now, the genome cost about a billion dollars about 10 years ago, when the first one came out. We're now approaching essentially a $1,000 genome, probably next year. And in two years, a $100 genome. What will we do with $100 genomes? Soon we'll have millions of these tests available. Then it gets interesting, when we start to crowd-source that information, and enter the era of true personalized medicine: the right drug for the right person at the right time, instead of what we're doing now, which is the same drug for everybody, blockbuster drug medications, which don't work for the individual. Many different companies are working on leveraging these approaches.I'll show you a simple example, from 23andMe again. My data indicates I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness. But if I take that same data, upload it to deCODEme, I can look at my risk for type 2 diabetes; I'm at almost twice the risk. I might want to watch how much dessert I have at lunch, for example. It might change my behavior. Leveraging my knowledge of my pharmacogenomics: how my genes modulate, what my drugs do and what doses I need will become increasingly important, and once in the hands of individuals and patients, will make better drug dosing and selection available.So again, it's not just genes, it's multiple details — our habits, our environmental exposures. When was the last time your doctor asked where you've lived? Geomedicine: where you live, what you've been exposed to, can dramatically affect your health. We can capture that information. Genomics, proteomics, the environment — all this data streaming at us individually and as physicians: How do we manage it? We're now entering the era of systems medicine, systems biology, where we can start to integrate all this information. And by looking at the patterns, for example, in our blood, of 10,000 biomarkers in a single test, we can look at patterns and detect disease at a much earlier stage. This is called by Lee Hood, the father of the field, P4 Medicine. We'll be predictive and know what you're likely to have. We can be preventative; that prevention can be personalized. More importantly, it'll be increasingly participatory. Through websites like PatientsLikeMe or managing your data on Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health, leveraging this together in participatory ways will be increasingly important.I'll finish up with exponentially better. We'd like to get therapies better and more effective. Today we treat high blood pressure mostly with pills. What if we take a new device, knock out the nerve vessels that help mediate blood pressure, and in a single therapy, basically cure hypertension? This is a new device doing essentially that. It should be on the market in a year or two. How about more targeted therapies for cancer? I'm an oncologist and know that most of what we give is essentially poison. We learned at Stanford and other places that we can discover cancer stem cells, the ones that seem to be really responsible for disease relapse. So if you think of cancer as a weed, we often can whack the weed away and it seems to shrink, but it often comes back. So we're attacking the wrong target. The cancer stem cells remain, and the tumor can return months or years later. We're now learning to identify the cancer stem cells and identify those as targets and go for the long-term cure. We're entering the era of personalized oncology, the ability to leverage all of this data together, analyze the tumor and come up with a real, specific cocktail for the individual patient.I'll close with regenerative medicine. I've studied a lot about stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are particularly powerful. We have adult stem cells throughout our body; we use those in bone marrow transplantation. Geron, last year, started the first trial using human embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries. Still a phase I trial, but evolving. We've been using adult stem cells in clinical trials for about 15 years to approach a whole range of topics, particularly cardiovascular disease. If we take our own bone marrow cells and treat a patient with a heart attack, we can see much improved heart function and better survival using our own bone marrow derived cells after a heart attack.I invented a device called the MarrowMiner, a much less invasive way for harvesting bone marrow. It's now been FDA approved; hopefully on the market in the next year. Hopefully you can appreciate the device going through the patient's body removing bone marrow, not with 200 punctures, but with a single puncture, under local anesthesia.Where is stem-cell therapy going? If you think about it, every cell in your body has the same DNA you had when you were an embryo. We can now reprogram your skin cells to actually act like a pluripotent embryonic stem cell and utilize those, potentially, to treat multiple organs in the same patient, making personalized stem cell lines. I think there'll be a new era of your own stem cell banking to have in the freezer your own cardiac cells, myocytes and neural cells to use them in the future, should you need them. We're integrating this now with a whole era of cellular engineering, and integrating exponential technologies for essentially 3D organ printing, replacing the ink with cells, and essentially building and reconstructing a 3D organ.That's where things are heading. Still very early days, but I think, as integration of exponential technologies, this is the example. So in closing, as you think about technology trends and how to impact health and medicine, we're entering an era of miniaturization, decentralization and personalization. And by pulling these things together, if we start to think about how to understand and leverage them, we're going to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick. Because I know as a doctor, if someone comes to me with stage I disease, I'm thrilled; we can often cure them. But often it's too late, and it's stage III or IV cancer, for example. So by leveraging these technologies together, I think we'll enter a new era that I like to call stage 0 medicine. And as a cancer doctor, I'm looking forward to being out of a job.Thanks very much.(Applause)Host: Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Take a bow, take a bow.","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kraft_medicine_s_future
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"I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater. And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky, colorful characters who were great at making with their hands. And my childhood is more hick than I could ever possibly relate to you, and also more intellectual than you would ever expect. For instance, me and my sister, when we were little, we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains. (Laughter) But on the other side of that, though, we were big readers in our house. And if the TV was on, we were watching a documentary. And my dad is the most voracious reader I know. He can read a novel or two a day.But when I was little, I remember, he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun. And what was so amazing to me about that — well he would be in his recliner, would holler for me to fetch the BB gun, and I'd go get it. And what was amazing to me — well it was pretty kickass; he was killing a fly in the house with a gun — but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough how to pump it. And he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on.So I should talk about art. (Laughter) Or we'll be here all day with my childhood stories. I love contemporary art, but I'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene. A few years ago, I spent months in Europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world. And I was struck by going to so many, one after the other, with some clarity of what it was that I was longing for. And I was longing for several things that I wasn't getting, or not getting enough of. But two of the main things: one of it, I was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public, that was accessible. And the second thing that I was longing for was some more exquisite craftsmanship and technique.So I started thinking and listing what all it was that I thought would make a perfect biennial. So I decided, I'm going to start my own biennial. I'm going to organize it and direct it and get it going in the world. So I thought, okay, I have to have some criteria of how to choose work. So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things. One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test. And what that is is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet. It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently. And then my other second set of rules — I hate to say ""rules"" because it's art — my criteria would be the three H's, which is head, heart and hands. And great art would have ""head"": it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have ""heart"" in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have ""hand"" in that it would be greatly crafted.So I started thinking about how am I going to do this biennial, how am I going to travel the world and find these artists? And then I realized one day, there's an easier solution to this. I'm just going to make the whole thing myself. (Laughter) And so this is what I did. So I thought, a biennial needs artists. I'm going to do an international biennial; I need artists from all around the world. So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world. I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work.(Laughter)(Applause)I felt, oh this is the kind of project that I could spend my whole life doing. So I decided, I'm going to make this a real biennial. It's going to be two years of studio work. And I'm going to create this in two years, and I have. So I should start to talk about these guys. Well the range is quite a bit. And I'm such a technician, so I loved this project, getting to play with all the techniques. So for example, in realist paintings, it ranges from this, which is kind of old masters style, to really realistic still-life, to this type of painting where I'm painting with a single hair. And then at the other end, there's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one, and outdoor installations like this one and this one. I know I should mention: I'm making all these things. This isn't Photoshopped. I'm under the river with those fish.So now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you. This is Nell Remmel. Nell is interested in agricultural processes, and her work is based in these practices. This piece, which is called ""Flipped Earth"" — she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground. And by taking giant mirrors — (Applause) and here she's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt. And this is 22 feet long. And what I loved about her work is, when I would walk around it and look down into the sky, looking down to watch the sky, and it unfolded in a new way. And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground's dark, but there's still the light above, bright above. And so you're standing there and everything else is dark, but there's this portal that you want to jump in. This piece was great. This is in my parents' backyard in Arkansas. And I love to dig a hole. So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt.The next artist is Kay Overstry, and she's interested in ephemerality and transience. And in her most recent project, it's called ""Weather I Made."" And she's making weather on her body's scale. And this piece is ""Frost."" And what she did was she went out on a cold, dry night and breathed back and forth on the lawn to leave — to leave her life's mark, the mark of her life. (Applause) And so this is five-foot, five-inches of frost that she left behind. The sun rises, and it melts away. And that was played by my mom.So the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a collective of Japanese artists — (Laughter) in Tokyo. And they were interested in developing a new, alternative art space, and they needed funding for it, so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects. One of these is scratch-off masterpieces. (Laughter) And so what they're doing — each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card, which they sell for 10 bucks, they drew original works of art. And you buy one, and maybe you get a real piece, and maybe not. Well this has sparked a craze in Japan, because everyone's wanting a masterpiece. And the ones that are the most sought after are the ones that are only barely scratched off. And all these works, in some way, talk about luck or fate or chance. Those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win.And in this one it's called ""Drawing the Short Stick."" (Laughter) I love this piece because I have a little cousin at home who introduced me — which I think is such a great introduction — to a friend one day as, ""This is my cousin Shea. He draws sticks real good."" (Laughter) Which is one of the best compliments ever.This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a large project, called ""Art for the Peoples."" And within this project, he's doing a smaller project called ""Artists in Residence."" And what he does is — (Laughter) he spends a week at a time with a family. And he shows up on their porch, their doorstep, with a toothbrush and pajamas, and he's ready to spend the week with them. And using only what's present, he goes in and makes a little abode studio to work out of. And he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is. He has all these discussions with their family, and he digs through everything they have, and he finds materials to make work. And he makes a work that answers what they think great art is. For this family, he made this still-life painting. And whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property.This next project, this is by Jaochim Parisvega, and he's interested in — he believes art is everywhere waiting — that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen. And he provides this push by harnessing natural forces, like in his series where he used rain to make paintings. This project is called ""Love Nests."" What he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him. So he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them, and they crafted his nests for him. And this one's called ""Lovelock's Nest."" This one's called ""Mixtape Love Song's Nest."" (Laughter) And this one's called ""Lovemaking Nest."" (Laughted)Next is Sylvia Slater. Sylvia's interested in art training. She's a very serious Swiss artist. (Laughter) And she was thinking about her friends and family who work in chaos-ridden places and developing countries, and she was thinking, what can I make that would be of value to them, in case something bad happens and they have to buy their way across the border or pay off a gunman? And so she came up with creating these pocket-sized artworks that are portraits of the person that would carry them. And you would carry this around with you, and if everything went to hell, you could make payments and buy your life. So this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director. So hopefully what happens is you never use it, and it's an heirloom that you pass down. And she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments, or they could be like these, which are leaves that can be payments. And so they're valuable. This is precious metals and gemstones. And this one had to get broken up. He had to break off a piece to get out of Egypt recently.This is by a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland. And they're interested in creating culture, just tradition. So what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area. So this is in Eastern Tennessee, and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death. So they came up with ""dig jigs."" And a dig jig — a dig jig is where, for a milestone anniversary or a birthday, you gather all your friends and family together and you dance on where you're going to be buried. (Laughter) And we got a lot of attention when we did it. I talked my family into doing this, and they didn't know what I was doing. And I was like, ""Get dressed for a funeral. We're going to go do some work."" And so we got to the grave and made this, which was hilarious — the attention that we got. So what happens is you dance on the grave, and after you've done your dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are. And you in essence have a funeral that you get to be present for. That's my mom and dad.This is by Jason Birdsong. He is interested in how we see as an animal, how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage. You know, we look down a dark alley or a jungle path, trying to make out a face or a creature. We just have that natural way of seeing. And he plays with this idea. And this piece: those aren't actually leaves. They're butterfly specimens who have a natural camouflage. So he pairs these up. There's another pile of leaves. Those are actually all real butterfly specimens. And he pairs these up with paintings. Like this is a painting of a snake in a box. So you open the box and you think, ""Whoa, there's a snake in there."" But it's actually a painting. So he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage.(Laughter)The next artist is Hazel Clausen. Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided, ""You know, I would learn a lot about culture if I created a culture that doesn't exist from scratch."" So that's what she did. She created the Swiss people named the Uvulites, and they have this distinctive yodeling song that they use the uvula for. And also they reference how the uvula — everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit. And that's the symbol of their culture. And this is from a documentary called ""Sexual Practices and Populations Control Among the Uvulites."" This is a typical angora embroidery for them. This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer. (Laughter) And actually this is my Aunt Irene. It was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things. And I crack up at this piece, because when I see it I know that's French angora and all antique German ribbons and wool that I got in a Nebraska mill and carried around for 10 years and then antique Chinese skirts.The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans, and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time. (Laughter) And they're really interested in how over-coddled we've become. So this is one of their comments on how over-coddled we've become. And what they've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence. (Laughter) (Applause) And this is called ""Horse Sense Fence.""The next artist is K. M. Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist. And he's reworking a Confucian art tradition of scholar stones. Next is Maynard Sipes. And I love Maynard Sipes, but he's off in his own world, and, bless his heart, he's so paranoid. Next is Roy Penig, a really interesting Kentucky artist, and he's the nicest guy. He even once traded a work of art for a block of government cheese because the person wanted it so badly.Next is an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and this is from a project of hers called ""What an Artwork Does When We're Not Watching."" (Laughter) Next is by a Lithuanian fortune teller, Jurgi Petrauskas. Next is Ginger Cheshire. This is from a short film of hers called ""The Last Person."" And that's my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby. The next, this is by Sam Sandy. He's an Australian Aboriginal elder, and he's also an artist. And this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he's doing.This is from Estelle Willoughsby. She heals with color. And she's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists, even though she's going to be 90 next year. (Laughter) This is by Z. Zhou, and he's interested in stasis. Next is by Hilda Singh, and she's doing a whole project called ""Social Outfits.""Next is by Vera Sokolova. And I have to say, Vera kind of scares me. You can't look her directly in the eyes because she's kind of scary. And it's good that she's not real; she'd be mad that I said that. (Laughter) And she's an optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics. Next, this is by Thomas Swifton. This is from a short film, ""Adventures with Skinny."" (Laughter) And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of short films.And after this one, there's 77 other artists. And all together with those other 77 you're not seeing, that's my biennial. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shea_hembrey_how_i_became_100_artists
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"I'm here today to start a revolution. Now before you get up in arms, or you break into song, or you pick a favorite color, I want to define what I mean by revolution. By revolution, I mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave — the way we think and the way we behave. Now why, Steve, why do we need a revolution? We need a revolution because things aren't working; they're just not working. And that makes me really sad because I'm sick and tired of things not working. You know, I'm sick and tired of us not living up to our potential. I'm sick and tired of us being last.And we are last place in so many things — for example, social factors. We're last place in Europe in innovation. There we are right at the end, right at the bottom, last place as a culture that doesn't value innovation. We're last place in health care, and that's important for a sense of well-being. And there we are, not just last in the E.U., we're last in Europe, at the very bottom. And worst of all, it just came out three weeks ago, many of you have seen it, The Economist. We're the saddest place on Earth, relative to GDP per capita — the saddest place on Earth. That's social. Let's look at education. Where do we rank three weeks ago in another report by the OECD? Last in reading, math and science. Last. Business: The lowest perception in the E.U. that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society. Why as a result, what happens? The lowest percentage of entrepreneurs starting businesses. And this is despite the fact that everybody knows that small business is the engine of economies. We hire the most people; we create the most taxes. So if our engine's broken, guess what? Last in Europe GDP per capita. Last. So it's no surprise, guys, that 62 percent of Bulgarians are not optimistic about the future. We're unhappy, we have bad education, and we have the worst businesses.And these are facts, guys. This isn't story tale; it's not make-believe. It's not. It's not a conspiracy I have got against Bulgaria. These are facts. So I think it should be really, really clear that our system is broken. The way we think, the way we behave, our operating system of behaving is broken. We need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform Bulgaria for the better, for ourselves, for our friends, for our family and for our future. How did this happen? Let's be positive now. We're going to get positive. How did this happen? I think we're last because — and this is going to be drastic to some of you — because we are handicapping ourselves. We're holding ourselves back because we don't value play. I said ""play,"" all right.In case some of you forgot what play is, this is what play looks like. Babies play, kids play, adults play. We don't value play. In fact, we devalue play. And we devalue it in three areas. Let's go back to the same three areas. Social: 45 years of what? Of communism — of valuing the society and the state over the individual and squashing, inadvertently, creativity, individual self-expression and innovation. And instead, what do we value? Because it's shown the way we apply, generate and use knowledge is affected by our social and institutional context, which told us what in communism? To be serious. To be really, really serious. It did. (Applause) Be serious. I can't tell you how many times I've been scolded in the park for letting my kids play on the ground. Heaven forbid they play in the dirt, the kal, or even worse, lokvi, water — that will kill them. I have been told by babas and dyados that we shouldn't let our kids play so much because life is serious and we need to train them for the seriousness of life.We have a serious meme running through. It's a social gene running through us. It's a serious gene. It's 45 years of it that's created what I call the ""baba factor."" (Laughter) (Applause) And here's how it works. Step one: woman says, ""I want to have a baby. Iskam baby."" Step two: we get the baby. Woohoo! But then what happens in step three? I want to go back to work because I need to further my career or I just want to go have coffees. I'm going to give bebko to baba. But we need to remember that baba's been infected by the serious meme for 45 years. So what happens? She passes that virus on to baby, and it takes a really, really, really long time — as the redwood trees — for that serious meme to get out of our operating system.What happens then? It goes into education where we have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years, that values rote learning, memorization and standardization, and devalues self-expression, self-exploration, questioning, creativity and play. It's a crap system. True story: I went looking for a school for my kid. We went to this prestigious little school and they say they're going to study math 10 times a week and science eight times a week and reading five times a day and all this stuff. And we said, ""Well what about play and recess?"" And they said, ""Ha. There won't be a single moment in the schedule."" (Laughter) And we said, ""He's five."" What a crime. What a crime. And it's a crime that our education system is so serious because education is serious that we're creating mindless, robotic workers to put bolts in pre-drilled holes. But I'm sorry, the problems of today are not the problems of the Industrial Revolution. We need adaptability, the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative. We don't need mechanized workers. But no, now our meme goes into work where we don't value play. We create robotic workers that we treat like assets, to lever and just throw away.What are qualities of a Bulgarian work? Autocratic — do what I say because I'm the chef. I'm the boss and I know better than you. Untrusting — you're obviously a criminal, so I'm going to install cameras. (Laughter) Controlling — you're obviously an idiot, so I'm going to make a zillion little processes for you to follow so you don't step out of the box. So they're restrictive — don't use your mobile phone, don't use your laptop, don't search the Internet, don't be on I.M. That's somehow unprofessional and bad. And at the end of the day, it's unfulfilling because you're controlled, you're restricted, you're not valued and you're not having any fun. In social, in education and in our business, don't value play. And that's why we're last, because we don't value play.And you can say, ""That's ridiculous, Steve. What a dumb idea. It can't be because of play. Just play, that's a stupid thing."" We have the serious meme in us. Well I'm going to say no. And I will prove it to you in the next part of the speech — that play is the catalyst, it is the revolution, that we can use to transform Bulgaria for the better. Play: our brains are hardwired for play. Evolution has selected, over millions and billions of years, for play in animals and in humans. And you know what? Evolution does a really, really good job of deselecting traits that aren't advantageous to us and selecting traits for competitive advantage. Nature isn't stupid, and it selected for play. Throughout the animal kingdom, for example: ants. Ants play. Maybe you didn't know that. But when they're playing, they're learning the social order and dynamics of things. Rats play, but what you might not have known is that rats that play more have bigger brains and they learn tasks better, skills. Kittens play. We all know kittens play. But what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially. They can still hunt, but they can't be social. Bears play. But what you may not know is that bears that play more survive longer. It's not the bears that learn how to fish better. It's the ones that play more.And a final really interesting study — it's been shown, a correlation between play and brain size. The more you play, the bigger the brains there are. Dolphins, pretty big brains, play a lot. But who do you think with the biggest brains are the biggest players? Yours truly: humans. Kids play, we play — of every nationality, of every race, of every color, of every religion. It's a universal thing — we play. And it's not just kids, it's adults too.Really cool term: neoteny — the retention of play and juvenile traits in adults. And who are the biggest neotenists? Humans. We play sports. We do it for fun, or as Olympians, or as professionals. We play musical instruments. We dance, we kiss, we sing, we just goof around. We're designed by nature to play from birth to old age. We're designed to do that continuously — to play and play a lot and not stop playing. It is a huge benefit. Just like there's benefits to animals, there's benefits to humans. For example, it's been shown to stimulate neural growth in the amygdala, in the area where it controls emotions. It's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening. As a result, what happens? We develop more emotional maturity if we play more. We develop better decision-making ability if we play more.These guys are facts. It's not fiction, it's not story tales, it's not make-believe; it's cold, hard science. These are the benefits to play. It is a genetic birthright that we have, like walking or speaking or seeing. And if we handicap ourselves with play, we handicap ourselves as if we would with any other birthright that we have. We hold ourselves back. Little exercise just for a second: close your eyes and try to imagine a world without play. Imagine a world without theater, without the arts, without song, without dancing, without soccer, without football, without laughter. What does this world look like? It's pretty bleak. It's pretty glum.Now imagine your workplace. Is it fun? Is it playful? Or maybe the workplace of your friends — here we're forward thinking. Is it fun? Is it playful? Or is it crap? Is it autocratic, controlling, restrictive and untrusting and unfulfilling? We have this concept that the opposite of play is work. We even feel guilty if we're seen playing at work. ""Oh, my colleagues see me laughing. I must not have enough work,"" or, ""Oh, I've got to hide because my boss might see me. He's going to think I'm not working hard."" But I have news for you: our thinking is backwards.The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression. It's depression. In fact, play improves our work. Just like there's benefits for humans and animals, there's benefits for play at work. For example, it stimulates creativity. It increases our openness to change. It improves our ability to learn. It provides a sense of purpose and mastery — two key motivational things that increase productivity, through play. So before you start thinking of play as just not serious, play doesn't mean frivolous. You know, the professional athlete that loves skiing, he's serious about it, but he loves it. He's having fun, he's in the groove, he's in the flow. A doctor might be serious, but laughter's still a great medicine. Our thinking is backwards. We shouldn't be feeling guilty. We should be celebrating play.Quick example from the corporate world. FedEx, easy motto: people, service, profit. If you treat your people like people, if you treat them great, they're happier, they're fulfilled, they have a sense of mastery and purpose. What happens? They give better service — not worse, but better. And when customers call for service and they're dealing with happy people that can make decisions and are fulfilled, how do the customers feel? They feel great. And what do great customers do, great-feeling customers? They buy more of your service and they tell more of their friends, which leads to more profit. People, service, profit. Play increases productivity, not decreases.And you're going to say, ""Gee, that can work for FedEx out there in the United States, but it can't work in Bulgaria. No way. We're different."" It does work in Bulgaria, you guys. Two reasons. One, play is universal. There's nothing weird about Bulgarians that we can't play, besides the serious meme that we have to kick out. Two, I've tried it. I've tried at Sciant. When I got there, we had zero happy customers. Not one customer would refer us. I asked them all. We had marginal profit — I did. We had marginal profits, and we had unhappy stakeholders. Through some basic change, change like improving transparency, change like promoting self-direction and collaboration, encouraging collaboration, not autocracy, the things like having a results-focus. I don't care when you get in in the morning. I don't care when you leave. I care that your customer and your team is happy and you're organized with that. Why do I care if you get in at nine o'clock? Basically promoting fun. Through promoting fun and a great environment, we were able to transform Sciant and, in just three short years — sounds like a long time, but change is slow — every customer, from zero to every customer referring us, above average profits for the industry and happy stakeholders. And you can say, ""Well how do you know they're happy?"" Well we did win, every year that we entered, one of the rankings for best employer for small business. Independent analysis from anonymous employees on their surveys. It does, and it can, work in Bulgaria. There's nothing holding us back, except our own mentality about play.So some steps that we can take — to finish up — how to make this revolution through play. First of all, you have to believe me. If you don't believe me, well just go home and think about it some more or something. Second of all, if you don't have the feeling of play in you, you need to rediscover play. Whatever it was that as a kid you used to enjoy, that you enjoyed only six months ago, but now that you've got that promotion you can't enjoy, because you feel like you have to be serious, rediscover it. I don't care if it's mountain biking or reading a book or playing a game. Rediscover that because you're the leaders, the innovation leaders, the thought leaders. You're the ones that have to go back to the office or talk to your friends and ignite the fire of change in the play revolution. You guys have to, and if you're not feeling it, your colleagues, your employees, aren't going to feel it. You've got to go back and say, ""Hey, I'm going to trust you."" Weird concept: I hired you; I should trust you. I'm going to let you make decisions. I'm going to empower you, and I'm going to delegate to the lowest level, rather than the top. I'm going to encourage constructive criticism. I'm going to let you challenge authority. Because it's by challenging the way things are always done is that we are able to break out of the rut that we're in and create innovative solutions to problems of today.We're not always right as leaders. We're going to eradicate fear. Fear is the enemy of play. And we're going to do things like eliminate restrictions. You know what, let them use their mobile phone for personal calls — heaven forbid. Let them be on the Internet. Let them be on instant messengers. Let them take long lunches. Lunch is like the recess for work. It's when you go out in the world and you recharge your brain, you meet your friends, you have a beer, you have some food, you talk, you get some synergy of ideas that maybe you wouldn't have had before. Let them do it. Give them some freedom, and in general, let them play. Let them have fun at the workplace. We spend so much of our lives at the workplace, and it's supposed to be, what, a miserable grind, so that 20 years from now, we wake up and say, ""Is this it? Is that all there was?"" Unacceptable. Nepriemliv. (Laughter)So in summary, we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave, but we don't need a workers' revolution. We don't need a workers' revolution. What we need is a players' uprising. What we need is a players' uprising. What we need is a players' uprising. Seriously, we need to band together. Today is the start of the uprising. But what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution. You need to go and share your ideas and your success stories of what worked about reinvigorating our lives, our schools, and our work with play; about how play promotes a sense of promise and self-fulfillment; of how play promotes innovation and productivity, and, ultimately, how play creates meaning. Because we can't do it alone. We have to do it together, and together, if we do this and share these ideas on play, we can transform Bulgaria for the better.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond
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"As an artist, connection is very important to me. Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected. I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs. I was in awe. My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me. The icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water, and I could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year.Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves. Each iceberg has its own individual personality. They have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences. Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion.It's easy to think, when you look at an iceberg, that they're isolated, that they're separate and alone, much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves. But the reality is far from it. As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere. As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life.I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again. It is not a death when they melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life. Some of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young — a couple thousand years old. And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old.The last pictures I'd like to show you are of an iceberg that I photographed in Qeqetarsuaq, Greenland. It's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling. So here it is. You can see on the left side a small boat. That's about a 15-foot boat. And I'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline. You can see here, it begins to roll, and the boat has moved to the other side, and the man is standing there. This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg. It's about 120 feet above the water, or 40 meters. And this video is real time.(Music)And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/camille_seaman_haunting_photos_of_ice
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"(Music)Text: BeatJazz. BeatJazz is: 1. Live looping, 2. Jazz improvisation And 3. ""Gestural"" sound design. Accelerometers on each hand read hand position. The color of the lights indicates which sound I am playing.Red = Drums, Blue = Bass, Green = Chords, Orange = Leads, Purple = PadsThe mouthpiece consists of ... a button, two guitar picks and lots of hot glue. The heads-up display is a smartphone that displays system parameters.Why? To atomize music culture so that ALL past, present and future genres can be studied and abstracted, live. And ""BeatJazzers"" become as common as D.J.'s. But mostly ... to MAKE the future rather than wait for it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/onyx_ashanti_this_is_beatjazz
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"(Music)(Applause)Thank you.Imagining a solo cello concert, one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites. As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up. Late at night, after hours of practicing, I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents' stereo. It all became music to me. I didn't hear the boundaries.I still start every day practicing playing Bach. His music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me. But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression, I realized that with today's technological resources, there's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument.The power and coherency that comes from one person hearing, perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience. The excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept. The excitement from using multi-tracking, the way I did in the piece you will hear next, comes from the attempt to build and create a whole universe with many diverse layers, all generated from a single source. My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas.When composers write music for me, I ask them to forget what they know about the cello. I hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds I have never heard before. I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. I become the medium through which the music is being channeled, and in the process, when all is right, the music is transformed and so am I.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maya_beiser_s_and_her_cello_s
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"By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company. And for most of those years, I worried about, how am I going to sell more cars and trucks? But today I worry about, what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks? What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples?My life is guided by two great passions, and the first is automobiles. I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company. I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway. And I decided about that time, about age 10, that it would be really cool if I was a test driver. So my parents would go to dinner. They'd sit down; I'd sneak out of the house. I'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway, and it was a blast. And that went on for about two years, until — I think I was about 12 — my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III. And it was snowing that day. So he and mom went to dinner, and I snuck out and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow. My dad finished dinner early that evening. And he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time I hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car — and almost ended up in the front hall. So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while. But I really began to love cars then. And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang. And even though the color was pretty hideous, I did love the car, and it really cemented my love affair with cars that's continued on to this day.But cars are really more than a passion of mine; they're quite literally in my blood. My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone. So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me. But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them. Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress. And that's a belief that I share.My other great passion is the environment. And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about. And it really struck me as the years went by, in a very negative way, when I would go to some stream that I'd loved, and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies, and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it. And so even at a young age, that really resonated with me, and the whole notion of environmental preservation, at a very basic level, sunk in with me.As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world. But it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature. And that was true until I got to college. And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise when I would go to class and a number of my professors would say that Ford Motor Company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country. They thought that we were more interested, as an industry, in profits, rather than progress, and that we filled the skies with smog — and frankly, we were the enemy.I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do. But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there. And as I look back over 30 years ago, it was a little naive to think at that age that I could. But I wanted to. And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong. In fact, when I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced by those in my own company, and certainly by those in the industry. I had some very interesting conversations, as you can imagine. There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with ""environmental wackos."" I was considered a radical. And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists. (Laughter) Of course, I had no intention of doing that, and I kept speaking out about the environment, and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability. And in time, my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today. I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we've got to get on with it.And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues, of cars and the environment — not only at Ford, but really as an industry. We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights. And with new technology, we're reducing — and I believe, someday we'll eliminate — CO2 emissions. We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great. We're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word — economically, socially and environmentally. And actually, although we've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I can see the day where my two great passions — cars and the environment — actually come into harmony.But unfortunately, as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem — and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do, but I can see where we will — but even as we're in the process of doing that, another huge problem is looming, and people aren't noticing. And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is. The problem, put in its simplest terms, is one of mathematics. Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion. And at that population level, our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth. And with that growth comes some severe practical problems, one of which is our transportation system simply won't be able to deal with it.When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer. Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide. But with more people and greater prosperity around the world, that number's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century. And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before. Now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives. Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources. But that's nothing compared to what's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest. Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute. And last summer — many of you probably saw this — there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China. In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more.So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing. When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam. So, if we make no changes today, what does tomorrow look like? Well I think you probably already have the picture. Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really very, very inconvenient, but that's all they are. But the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care, particularly to people that live in city centers. And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised. So what's going to solve this?Well the answer isn't going to be more of the same. My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, ""If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.'"" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads. When America began moving west, we didn't add more wagon trains, we built railroads. And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system. Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future. We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more. We don't want to waste our time sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots. We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers. And frankly, that's the kind of system that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable.Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world. The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another, and they go underneath the city streets. And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways. On New York City's 34th Street, gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors. Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes. Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there. It's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system. So parking garages, buses, trains, they all operate within the same system. Now shared car services are also springing up around the world, and these efforts, I think, are great. They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel.These are all really good ideas that will move us forward. But what really inspires me is what's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other. Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network. Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan. And every night I go home, my commute is a total crapshoot. And I often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home. But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other. So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic, it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way. And these systems are being tested right now, and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon.But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless. So just imagine: one day very soon, you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system. So you get in your car, and as you get in your car, your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive — no more driving around looking for one, which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today's cars in urban areas — is looking for parking spots. Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one. Or being at a future TED Conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time. This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system.So I think it's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem. But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues, and also fossil fuels, there is no one silver bullet. The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions. Now I know we can develop the technology that's going to make this work, but we've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions — whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven't even thought of yet; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options.We need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue. Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem. And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge — and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field. We need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock. But we need people like all of you in this room, leading thinkers. I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue. And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge.This isn't going to be solved by any one person or one group. It's going to really require a national energy policy, frankly for each country, because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels, traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are. But we need to get going, and we need to get going today. And we must have an infrastructure that's designed to support this flexible future.You know, we've come a long way. Since the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime. And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around. We don't want to regress and lose that freedom. We're on our way to solving — and as I said earlier, I know we've got a long way to go — the one big issue that we're all focused on that threatens it, and that's the environmental issue, but I believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock. Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted, which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world. And it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this. Because, if you can envision, as I do, a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today, that's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow.I believe we're at our best when we're confronted with big issues. This is a big one, and it won't wait. So let's get started now.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_gridlock
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"I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. It's a rare condition. And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me, there's a certain kind of awkwardness. I can see it in their eyes. They want to ask me something. And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: ""If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?"" (Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots — a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.I want to talk to you briefly about perception. When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him — little details that other people seem to miss. Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.Here are three questions drawn from my work. Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. For example, the calculation: can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? Or look at the foreign word and the sounds: can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. I'm an extreme example of this.My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them — every number with its own shape and character. One is a flash of white light. Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. Three is green. Four is blue. Five is yellow.I paint as well. And here is one of my paintings. It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. What about bigger numbers? Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. It's an infinite number — literally goes on forever. In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. And this is an opening phrase from the novel ""Lolita."" And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. Another example: a little bit more mathematical. And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from ""The Great Gatsby."" There is a procession of syllables — wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three — one, two, three. And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right.Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 64 multiplied by 75. If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. What about 75? Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind — something like this. 64 becomes 6,400. And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. Four across, four up and down — it's 16. So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. That's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 — 4,800, the answer to the sum. Easy when you know how.(Laughter)The second question was an Icelandic word. I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. So let me narrow the choices down to two. Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? What do you say? Okay. Some people say it's happy. Most people, a majority of people, say sad. And it actually means sad. (Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener.Let's have a look at the third question. It's a line from a poem by John Keats. Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. And if we think of that — let me put the picture up — the fibers represent vulnerability. They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. The hare itself, the animal — not a cat, not a dog, a hare — why a hare? Because think of the picture — not the word, the picture. The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble.So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_tammet_different_ways_of_knowing
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"You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact. And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist. You can have me as a farmer, or in leathers, and no one has ever chose farmer. I'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies. And you know, an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace. You've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany.That's a painting of a circle. A friend of mine did that — Richard Bollingbroke. It's the kind of complicated circle that I'm going to tell you about. My circle began back in the '60s in high school in Stow, Ohio where I was the class queer. I was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys' room, until one teacher saved my life. She saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers' lounge. She did it in secret. She did it for three years. And I had to get out of town. I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and I ended up in San Francisco, California — met a lover — and back in the '80s, found it necessary to begin work on AIDS organizations.About three or four years ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher, Mrs. Posten, who said, ""I need to see you. I'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults. Could you please come to Ohio, and please bring that man that I know you have found by now. And I should mention that I have pancreatic cancer, and I'd like you to please be quick about this.""Well, the next day we were in Cleveland. We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice. We found her one, we got her there, and we took care of her and watched over her family, because it was necessary. It's something we knew how to do. And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands. And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle — and that epiphany I talked about presented itself.The epiphany is that death is a part of life. She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers. And you know, that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does. It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy it's been mentioned so much here today. It also needs — it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's our job to hand those things out.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jok_church_a_circle_of_caring
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"Space, we all know what it looks like. We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like.And indeed, most people associate space with silence. But the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking. And yet despite this, hardly any of us have ever heard space. How many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star? Well in case you've ever wondered, this is what the Sun sounds like.(Static) (Crackling) (Static) (Crackling)This is the planet Jupiter.(Soft crackling)And this is the space probe Cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of Saturn.(Crackling)This is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter, spinning in the distant universe.(Tapping)So my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe. And you may wonder, how do we know what these sounds are? How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar? Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy. Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky. And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques. And therefore, it's through listening that we've come to uncover some of the universe's most important secrets — its scale, what it's made of and even how old it is.So today, I'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening. It's punctuated by three quick anecdotes, which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space. Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology — and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today: the telephone.It's 1876, it's in Boston, and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone. A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire, which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston. The line carried the telephone signals that would later make Bell a household name. But like any long length of charged wire, it also inadvertently became an antenna. Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected. Now you have to remember, this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves — 15 years before Nikola Tesla's four-tuned circuit — nearly 20 years before Marconi's first broadcast. So Thomas Watson wasn't listening to us. We didn't have the technology to transmit.So what were these strange noises? Watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature. Some of the crackles and pops were lightning, but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin. Using the very first telephone, Watson was in fact dialed into the heavens. As he correctly guessed, some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun. It was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to — a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora. So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution, Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves. He had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them.Fast-forward 50 years, and Bell and Watson's technology has completely transformed global communications. But going from slinging some wire across rooftops in Boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the Atlantic Ocean seabed is no easy matter. And so before long, Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution. Radio could carry sound without wires. But the medium is lossy — it's subject to a lot of noise and interference. So Bell employed an engineer to study those noises, to try and find out where they came from, with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec, which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony.Most of the noises that the engineer, Karl Jansky, investigated were fairly prosaic in origin. They turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power. But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn't identify, and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day. Now any astronomer will tell you, this is the telltale sign of something that doesn't originate from Earth. Jansky had made a historic discovery, that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves. Fifty years on from Watson's accidental encounter with the Sun, Jansky's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration: the radio astronomy age. Over the next few years, astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky, about Jupiter and the Sun, by listening.Let's jump ahead again. It's 1964, and we're back at Bell Labs. And once again, two scientists have got a problem with noise. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision. They were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity. There was a glitch in their soundtrack. A mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research. It was in the microwave range, and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously. Now this didn't make any sense, and like any reasonable engineer or scientist, they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself, it must be the dish. There were pigeons roosting in the dish. And so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings, get the disk kind of operational again, normal operations would resume.But the noise didn't disappear. The mysterious noise that Penzias and Wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard. It was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe. This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago. So our story ends at the beginning — the beginning of all things, the Big Bang. This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard — the oldest sound that you're ever going to hear, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.(Fuzz)Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_a_history_of_the_universe_in_sound
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"My name is Joshua Walters. I'm a performer.(Beatboxing)(Laughter)(Applause)But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ.(Laughter)I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. They're just practicing. One day they'll get here. Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. ""Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some — why don't we give you some Zyprexa. Okay? Mmhmm? At least that's what it says on my pen."" (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. I can feel your noise. The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. When I got out I had a choice. I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness.(Bugle sound)There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive — at least the hypomanic edge part of it. Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible.And there's a book — John Gartner. John Gartner wrote this book called ""The Hypomanic Edge"" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called ""Touched With Fire"" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. Some of them committed suicide. So it wasn't all the good side of the illness.Now recently, there's been development in this field. And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: ""Just Manic Enough."" Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum — you know what I'm talking about — not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum — where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. (Laughter) Your call. Your call. And everyone's somewhere in the middle. Everyone's somewhere in the middle.So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. Maybe no one's really crazy. Everyone is just a little bit mad. How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much depends on how lucky you are.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_walters_on_being_just_crazy_enough
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"My name is Emiliano Salinas and I'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in the violent atmosphere this country is living in right now. I was born in 1976. I grew up in a traditional Mexican family. As a child, I had a pretty normal life: I would go to school, play with my friends and cousins. But then my father became President of Mexico and my life changed.What I'm about to say, at least some of what I'm about to say, will cause controversy. Firstly, because I'm the one who's going to say it. And secondly, because what I'm going to say is true, and it will make a lot of people nervous because it's something we don't want to hear. But it's imperative that we listen because it's undeniable and definitive. It will also make members of criminal organizations nervous for the same reasons. I'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in this phenomenon, and about four different response levels we citizens have against violence. I know many will find it difficult to separate the fact that I'm Carlos Salinas de Gortari's son from the fact that I'm a citizen concerned about the country's current situation. Don't worry. It's not necessary for understanding the importance of what I'm going to say.I think we have a problem in Mexico. We have a big problem. I think there's consensus on this. No one argues — we all agree there's a problem. What we don't agree on is what the problem actually is. Is it the Zetas? The drug traffickers? The government? Corruption? Poverty? Or is it something else? I think none of these is the problem. I don't mean they don't deserve attention. But we won't be able to take care of any of those things if we don't solve the real problem we have in Mexico first.The real problem we have is most of us Mexicans, we believe we are victims of our circumstances. We are a country of victims. Historically, we've always acted as victims of something or somebody. We were victims of the Spaniards. Then we were victims of the French. Then we were victims of Don Porfirio. Then we were victims of the PRI. Even of Salinas. And of El Peje. And now of the Zetas and the traffickers and the criminals and the kidnappers ... Hold on! Wait a minute! What if none of these things is the problem? The problem is not the things we feel victims of. The problem is that we play the role of victims. We need to open our eyes and see that we are not victims. If only we stopped feeling like victims, if we stopped acting as victims, our country would change so much!I'm going to talk about how to go from a society that acts as a victim of circumstances to a responsible, involved society that takes the future of its country in its own hands. I'm going to talk about four different levels of civil response against violence, from weakest to strongest. The first level, the weakest level of civil response against violence, is denial and apathy. Today, much of Mexican society is in denial of the situation we're going through. We want to go on with our daily life even though we are not living under normal circumstances. Daily life in our country is, to say the least, under extraordinary, exceptional circumstances. It's like someone who has a serious illness and pretends it's the flu and it will just go away. We want to pretend that Mexico has the flu. But it doesn't. Mexico has cancer. And if we don't do something about it, the cancer will end up killing it.We need to move Mexican society from denial and apathy to the next level of citizen response, which is, effectively, recognition. And that recognition will sow fear — recognizing the seriousness of the situation. But, fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something. Many people in Mexico are afraid today. We're very afraid. And we're acting out of that fear. And let me tell you what the problem is with acting out of fear — and this is the second level of civil response: fear.Let's think about Mexican streets: they're unsafe because of violence, so people stay at home. Does that make streets more or less safe? Less safe! So streets become more desolate and unsafe, so we stay home more — which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe, and we stay home even more. This vicious circle ends up with the whole population stuck inside their houses, scared to death — even more afraid than when we were out on the streets. We need to confront this fear. We need to move Mexican society, the members of society who are at this level, to the next level, which is action.We need to face our fears and take back our streets, our cities, our neighborhoods. For many people, acting involves courage. We go from fear to courage. They say, ""I can't take it anymore. Let's do something about it."" Recently — this is a sensitive figure — 35 public lynchings have been recorded so far in 2010 in Mexico. Usually it's one or two a year. Now we're experiencing one every week. This shows that society is desperate and it's taking the law into its own hands. Unfortunately, violent action — though action is better than no action — but taking part in it only disguises violence. If I'm violent with you and you respond with violence, you become part of the violence and you just disguise my violence.So civil action is vital, but it's also vital to take people who are at the level of courage and violent action to the next level, which is non-violent action. It's pacific, coordinated civil action, which doesn't mean passive action. It means it's determined and effective, but not violent. There are examples of this kind of action in Mexico. Two years ago, in Galena City, Chihuahua, a member of the community was kidnapped, Eric Le Barón. His brothers, Benjamín and Julián, got together with the rest of the community to think of the best course of action: to pay the ransom, to take up arms and go after the kidnappers or to ask the government for help.In the end, Benjamín and Julián decided the best thing they could do was to organize the community and act together. So what did they do? They mobilized the whole community of Le Barón to go to Chihuahua, where they organized a sit-in in the central park of the city. They sent a message to the kidnappers: ""If you want your ransom come and get it. We'll be waiting for you right here."" They stayed there. Seven days later, Eric was set free and was able to return home. This is an example of what an organized society can do, a society that acts.Of course, criminals can respond. And in this case, they did. On July 7th, 2009, Benjamín Le Barón was murdered. But Julián Le Barón keeps working and he has been mobilizing communities in Chihuahua for over a year. And for over a year he has known that a price has been put on his head. But he keeps fighting. He keeps organizing. He keeps mobilizing. These heroic acts are present all over the country. With a thousand Juliáns working together, Mexico would be a very different country. And they're out there! They just have to raise their hands. I was born in Mexico, I grew up in Mexico and along the way, I learned to love Mexico. I think anyone who has stepped foot on this land — not to mention all Mexican people — will agree that it's not difficult to love Mexico.I've traveled a lot and nowhere else have I found the passion Mexicans have. That devotion we feel for the national football team. That devotion we show in helping victims of disasters, such as the earthquake in 1985 or this year's floods. The passion with which we've been singing the national anthem since we were kids. When we thought Masiosare was the strange enemy, and we sang, with a childlike heart, ""a soldier in each son."" I think the biggest insult, the worst way you can offend a Mexican is to insult their mother. A mother is the most sacred thing in life. Mexico is our mother and today she cries out for her children. We are going through the darkest moment in our recent history. Our mother, Mexico, is being violated before our very eyes. What are we going to do? Masiosare, the strange enemy, is here. Where is the soldier in each son?Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest civil fighters of all time, said, ""Be the change you wish to see in the world."" Today in Mexico we're asking for Gandhis. We need Gandhis. We need men and women who love Mexico and who are willing to take action. This is a call for every true Mexican to join this initiative. This is a call so that every single thing we love about Mexico — the festivals, the markets, the restaurants, the cantinas, the tequila, the mariachis, the serenades, the posadas, El Grito, the Day of the Dead, San Miguel, the joy, the passion for life, the fight and everything it means to be Mexican — doesn't disappear from this world.We're facing a very powerful opponent. But we are many more. They can take a man's life. Anyone can kill me, or you, or you. But no one can kill the spirit of true Mexicans. The battle is won, but we still have to fight it. 2000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal said something that today echoes in the heart of every true Mexican. He said, ""Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emiliano_salinas_a_civil_response_to_violence
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"I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist — no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. What might they find? Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers — buried in the hills somewhere in North America — massive versions of these same symbols. Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future?This is no hypothetical question. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. The Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. Given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. They've found small objects such as these.Here's an example of one of these objects. Well obviously this is a replica. But who is this person? A king? A god? A priest? Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? We don't know. But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say, and that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. We don't know what any of these symbols mean.The symbols are most commonly found on seals. So you see up there one such object. It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. Now that's a magnificent piece of art. So how big do you think that is? Perhaps that big? Or maybe that big? Well let me show you. Here's a replica of one such seal. It's only about one inch by one inch in size — pretty tiny. So what were these used for? We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? These were used to make those kinds of packing slips. You might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. Perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other — we don't know. We need to decipher the script to answer that question.Deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. First, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. There's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. If you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit.There's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian.Which of these hypotheses can be true? We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. First, there's no Rosetta Stone. I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. We don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny.And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. In the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. And why was I fascinated? Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. My career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on.But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. Are you ready?The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. Here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. Can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. Okay. Left to right? Oh, it's almost 50/50. Okay. The answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the sign. One of the signs is also below the text on the top. This suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left, and so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. And the Indus script now has this particular property.What other properties of language does the script show? Languages contain patterns. If I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? Most of you said U, which is right. Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. There's a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. And this is very similar to a Q and U example. This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign, and this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script.Given such patterns, here was our idea. The idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. Given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. Here are some examples. You may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune.What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. In the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. There's also practical use for this particular procedure. There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. Here's an example of one such text. And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. Here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze.Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. Such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. This is a physics and information theory term. But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. How many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? You might have encountered the stuck-key problem — so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. This kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. What about the Indus script? Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. At the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters — and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them in the very high range. At the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range.Now what about the Indus script? We found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. When this result was first published, it was highly controversial. There were people who raised a hue and cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. I even started to get some hate mail. My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. Who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? What does this result really show? It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. What other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language?Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. If you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. The same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. The computer found several texts — two of them are shown here — that have very unusual patterns. So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. This sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair.Why is that the case? We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. And why were they found there? What I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived, and so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. It's just like our English and Dutch example. And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. This suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language.If it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? That's our next big challenge. So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. Most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. So as an example, here's a word. Can you write it using pictures? I'll give you a couple seconds. Got it? Okay. Great. Here's my solution. You could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf — and that's ""belief,"" right. There could be other solutions. In the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. You have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles because the stakes are so high if you solve it.My colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola, have been making some headway on this particular problem. And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. Here's a really short text. It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is ""meen"" which happens to sound just like the word for star. And so seven stars would stand for ""elu meen,"" which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. Similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to ""aru meen,"" which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. And that could be translated into ""mey meen,"" which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. So that was pretty exciting. It looks like we're getting somewhere.But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? Well not yet. So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.Why should we care? The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. These are our ancestors — yours and mine. They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. If we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. What would they tell us? What would we find out about them? About us? I can't wait to find out.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_stone_for_the_indus_script
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"It's an amazing thing that we're here to talk about the year of patients rising. You heard stories earlier today about patients who are taking control of their cases, patients who are saying, ""You know what, I know what the odds are, but I'm going to look for more information. I'm going to define what the terms of my success are."" I'm going to be sharing with you how, four years ago, I almost died — found out I was, in fact, already almost dead — and what I then found out about what's called the e-Patient movement. I'll explain what that term means. I had been blogging under the name ""Patient Dave,"" and when I discovered this, I just renamed myself e-Patient Dave.Regarding the word ""patient"": When I first started a few years ago getting involved in health care and attending meetings as just a casual observer, I noticed that people would talk about patients as if it was somebody who's not in the room here — somebody out there. Some of our talks today, we still act like that. But I'm here to tell you: ""patient"" is not a third-person word. All right? You yourself will find yourself in a hospital bed — or your mother, your child — there are heads nodding, people who say, ""Yes, I know exactly what you mean.""So when you hear what I'm going to talk about here today, first of all, I want to say that I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role in helping health care, in fixing health care. One of the senior doctors at my hospital, Charlie Safran, and his colleague, Warner Slack, have been saying for decades that the most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient. They have been saying that since the 1970s.Now, I'm going to step back in history. This is from July, 1969. I was a freshman in college, and this was when we first landed on the Moon. And it was the first time we had ever seen from another surface — that's the place where you and I are right now, where we live. The world was changing. It was about to change in ways that nobody could foresee. A few weeks later, Woodstock happened. Three days of fun and music. Here, just for historical authenticity, is a picture of me in that year.(Laughter)Yeah, the wavy hair, the blue eyes — it was really something.That fall of 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog came out. It was a hippie journal of self-sufficiency. We think of hippies of being just hedonists, but there's a very strong component — I was in that movement — a very strong component of being responsible for yourself. This book's title's subtitle is ""Access to Tools."" It talked about how to build your own house, how to grow your own food, all kinds of things. In the 1980s, this young doctor, Tom Ferguson, was the medical editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He saw that the great majority of what we do in medicine and health care is taking care of ourselves. In fact, he said it was 70 to 80 percent of how we actually take care of our bodies. Well, he also saw that when health care turns to medical care because of a more serious disease, the key thing that holds us back is access to information. And when the Web came along, that changed everything, because not only could we find information, we could find other people like ourselves who could gather, who could bring us information. And he coined this term ""e-Patients"" — equipped, engaged, empowered, enabled. Obviously, at this stage of life he was in a somewhat more dignified form than he was back then.Now, I was an engaged patient long before I ever heard of the term. In 2006, I went to my doctor for a regular physical, and I had said, ""I have a sore shoulder."" Well, I got an X-ray, and the next morning — you may have noticed, those of you who have been through a medical crisis will understand this. This morning, some of the speakers named the date when they found out about their condition. For me, it was 9am on January 3, 2007. I was at the office; my desk was clean. I had the blue partition carpet on the walls. The phone rang and it was my doctor. He said, ""Dave, I pulled up the X-ray image on the screen on the computer at home."" He said, ""Your shoulder is going to be fine, but Dave, there's something in your lung."" And if you look in that red oval, that shadow was not supposed to be there. To make a long story short, I said, ""So you need me to get back in there?"" He said, ""Yeah, we're going to need to do a CT scan of your chest."" In parting, I said, ""Is there anything I should do?"" He said — think about this one, this is the advice your doctor gives you: ""Just go home and have a glass of wine with your wife.""I went in for the CAT scan. It turns out there were five of these things in both my lungs. So at that point we knew that it was cancer. We knew it wasn't lung cancer. That meant it was metastasized from somewhere. The question was, where from? So I went in for an ultrasound. I got to do what many women have — the jelly on the belly and the, ""Bzzzz!"" My wife came with me. She's a veterinarian, so she's seen lots of ultrasounds. I mean, she knows I'm not a dog.(Laughter)This is an MRI image. This is much sharper than an ultrasound would be. What we saw in that kidney was that big blob there. There were actually two of these: one was growing out the front and had already erupted and latched onto the bowel. One was growing out the back and it attached to the psoas muscle, which is a big muscle in the back that I'd never heard of, but all of a sudden I cared about it.(Laughter)I went home.Now, I've been Googling — I've been online since 1989, on CompuServe. I went home, and I know you can't read the details here; that's not important. My point is, I went to a respected medical website, WebMD, because I know how to filter out junk. I also found my wife online. Before I met her, I went through some suboptimal search results.(Laughter)So I looked for quality information. There's so much about trust — what sources of information can we trust? Where does my body end and an invader start? A cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue. How does that happen? Where does medical ability end and start? Well, so what I read on WebMD: ""The prognosis is poor for progressing renal cell cancer. Almost all patients are incurable."" I've been online long enough to know if I don't like the first results I get, I go look for more. And what I found on other websites was, even by the third page of Google results: ""Outlook is bleak."" ""Prognosis is grim."" And I'm thinking, ""What the heck?"" I didn't feel sick at all. I mean, I'd been getting tired in the evening, but I was 56 years old, you know? I was slowly losing weight, but for me, that was what the doctor told me to do. It was really something.And this is the diagram of stage 4 kidney cancer from the drug I eventually got. Totally by coincidence, there's that thing in my lung. In the left femur, the left thigh bone, there's another one. I had one. My leg eventually snapped. I fainted and landed on it, and it broke. There's one in the skull, and then for good measure, I had these other tumors, including, by the time my treatment started, one was growing out of my tongue. I had kidney cancer growing out of my tongue. And what I read was that my median survival was 24 weeks. This was bad. I was facing the grave. I thought, ""What's my mother's face going to look like on the day of my funeral?"" I had to sit down with my daughter and say, ""Here's the situation."" Her boyfriend was with her. I said, ""I don't want you guys to get married prematurely, just so you can do it while Dad's still alive."" It's really serious. If you wonder why patients are motivated and want to help, think about this.Well, my doctor prescribed a patient community, ACOR.org, a network of cancer patients, of all amazing things. Very quickly they told me, ""Kidney cancer is an uncommon disease. Get yourself to a specialist center. There is no cure, but there's something that sometimes works — it usually doesn't — called high-dosage interleukin. Most hospitals don't offer it, so they won't even tell you it exists. Don't let them give you anything else first. And by the way, here are four doctors in your part of the United States who offer it, and their phone numbers."" How amazing is that?(Applause)Here's the thing: Here we are, four years later — you can't find a website that gives patients that information. Government-approved, American Cancer Society, but patients know what patients want to know. It's the power of patient networks. This amazing substance — again, I mentioned: Where does my body end? My oncologist and I talk a lot these days because I try to keep my talks technically accurate. And he said, ""You know, the immune system is good at detecting invaders, bacteria coming from outside, but when it's your own tissue that you've grown, it's a whole different thing."" And I went through a mental exercise, actually, because I started a patient support community of my own on a website, and one of my friends — one of my relatives, actually — said, ""Look, Dave, who grew this thing? Are you going to set yourself up as mentally attacking yourself?"" So we went into it. The story of how all that happened is in the book.Anyway, this is the way the numbers unfolded. Me being me, I put the numbers from my hospital's website, for my tumor sizes, into a spreadsheet. Don't worry about the numbers. You see, that's the immune system. Amazing thing, those two yellow lines are where I got the two doses of interleukin two months apart. And look at how the tumor sizes plummeted in between. Just incredible. Who knows what we'll be able to do when we learn to make more use of it?The punch line is that a year and a half later, I was there when this magnificent young woman, my daughter, got married. And when she came down those steps, and it was just her and me for that moment, I was so glad that she didn't have to say to her mother, ""I wish Dad could have been here."" And this is what we're doing when we make health care better.Now, I want to talk briefly about a couple of other patients who are doing everything in their power to improve health care. This is Regina Holliday, a painter in Washington DC, whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease. She's painting, here, a mural of his horrible final weeks in the hospital. One of the things that she discovered was that her husband's medical record in this paper folder was just disorganized. And she thought, ""You know, if I have a nutrition facts label on the side of a cereal box, why can't there be something that simple telling every new nurse who comes on duty, every new doctor, the basics about my husband's condition?"" So she painted this medical facts mural with a nutrition label, something like that, in a diagram of him. She then, last year, painted this diagram.She studied health care like me. She came to realize there were a lot of people who'd written patient-advocate books that you just don't hear about at medical conferences. Patients are such an underutilized resource. Well, as it said in my introduction, I've gotten somewhat known for saying that patients should have access to their data. I actually said at one conference a couple of years ago, ""Give me my damn data, because you people can't be trusted to keep it clean."" And here, she has our ""damned"" data — it's a pun — which is starting to break out, starting to break through — the water symbolizes our data.And in fact, I want to do a little something improvisational for you. There's a guy on Twitter that I know, a health IT guy outside Boston, and he wrote the e-Patient rap. And it goes like this.(Laughter)(Beatboxing)(Rapping) Gimme my damn data I wanna be an e-Patient just like Dave Gimme my damn data, 'cause it's my life to save (Normal voice) Now, I'm not going to go any further —(Applause) (Cheering)Well, thank you. That shot the timing.(Laughter)Think about the possibility. Why is it that iPhones and iPads advance far faster than the health tools that are available to you to help take care of your family? Here's a website, VisibleBody.com, that I stumbled across. And I thought, ""You know, I wonder what my psoas muscle is?"" So you can click on things and remove it. And I saw, ""Aha! That's the kidney and the psoas muscle."" I was rotating it in 3D and saying, ""I understand now."" And then I realized it reminded me of Google Earth, where you can fly to any address. And I thought, ""Why not take this and connect it to my digital scan data and have Google Earth for my body?"" What did Google come out with this year? Now there's Google Body browser. But you see, it's still generic. It's not my data. But if we can get that data out from behind the dam so software innovators can pounce on it the way software innovators like to do, who knows what we'll be able to come up with.One final story. This is Kelly Young, a rheumatoid arthritis patient from Florida. This is a live story, unfolding just in the last few weeks. RA patients, as they call themselves — her blog is ""RA Warrior"" — have a big problem, because 40 percent of them have no visible symptoms. And that makes it really hard to tell how the disease is going, and some doctors think, ""Yeah right, you're really in pain."" Well, she found, through her online research, a nuclear bone scan that's usually used for cancer, but it can also reveal inflammation. And she saw that if there is no inflammation, then the scan is a uniform gray. So she took it. And the radiologist's report said, ""No cancer found."" Well, that's not what he was supposed to do with it. So she wanted to have it read again, and her doctor fired her. She pulled up the CD. He said, ""If you don't want to follow my instructions, go away."" So she pulled up the CD of the scan images, and look at all those hot spots. And she's now actively engaged on her blog in looking for assistance in getting better care. See, that is an empowered patient — no medical training.We are, you are, the most underused resource in health care. What she was able to do was because she had access to the raw data. How big a deal was this? Well at TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee himself, inventor of the Web, gave a talk where he said the next big thing is not to have your browser find other people's articles about the data, but the raw data. And he got them chanting by the end of the talk, ""Raw data now! Raw data now!"" And I ask you, three words, please, to improve health care: Let patients help! Let patients help! Let patients help! Let patients help!Thank you.(Applause)For all the patients around the world watching this on the Webcast, God bless you, everyone. Let patients help.Host: And bless yourself. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_debronkart_meet_e_patient_dave
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"The Highline is an old, elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan. And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave. And it became known as ""Death Avenue"" because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front, and he became known as the ""West Side Cowboy."" But even with a cowboy, about one person a month was killed and run over. So they elevated it. They built it 30 ft. in the air, right through the middle of the city. But with the rise of interstate trucking, it was used less and less. And by 1980, the last train rode. It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys — they say, at Thanksgiving — from the meatpacking district. And then it was abandoned.And I live in the neighborhood, and I first read about it in the New York Times, in an article that said it was going to be demolished. And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer, but I realized no one was doing anything. I went to my first community board meeting — which I'd never been to one before — and sat next to another guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer. And at the end of the meeting, we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project; most people wanted to tear it down. So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line. And the goal at first was just saving it from demolition, but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it.And what first attracted me, or interested me, was this view from the street — which is this steel structure, sort of rusty, this industrial relic. But when I went up on top, it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River. And that's really where we started, the idea coalesced around, let's make this a park, and let's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape.At the time, there was a lot of opposition. Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down. I'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement. Mayor Bloomberg came in office, he was very supportive, but we still had to make the economic case. This was after 9/11; the city was in tough times. So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case. And it turns out, we got those numbers wrong. We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build. So far it's cost about 150 million. And the main case was, this is going to make good economic sense for the city. So we said over a 20-year time period, the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million. That was enough. It really got the city behind it. It turns out we were wrong on that. Now people estimate it's created about a half a billion dollars, or will create about a half a billion dollars, in tax revenues for the city. We did a design competition, selected a design team. We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape. There's three sections.We opened the fist section in 2009. It's been successful beyond our dreams. Last year we had about two million people, which is about 10 times what we ever estimated. This is one of my favorite features in section one. It's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave. And the first section ends at 20th St. right now. The other thing, it's generated, obviously, a lot of economic value; it's also inspired, I think, a lot of great architecture. There's a point, you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Neil Denari. And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line. And this has been designed by Renzo Piano. And they're going to break ground in May.And we've already started construction on section two. This is one of my favorite features, this flyover where you're eight feet off the surface of the High Line, running through a canopy of trees. The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city. This was just installed last month. And then the last section was going to go around the rail yards, which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan. And the city has planned — for better or for worse — 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around.But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people. And honestly, even though I love the designs that we were building, I was always frightened that I wouldn't really love it, because I fell in love with that wildscape — and how could you recreate that magic? But what I found is it's in the people and how they use it that, to me, makes it so special. Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line. And I realized New Yorkers don't hold hands; we just don't do that outside. But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_hammond_building_a_park_in_the_sky
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"A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit — like watching the news — from your life.There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges. The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month. And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. For fun!(Laughter)Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges.I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. So I did. By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. You might be sleep-deprived, but you'll finish your novel. Now is my book the next great American novel? No. I wrote it in a month. It's awful.(Laughter)But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say, ""I'm a computer scientist."" No, no, if I want to, I can say, ""I'm a novelist.""(Laughter)So here's one last thing I'd like to mention. I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. There's nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges. In fact, they're a ton of fun. But they're less likely to stick. When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.(Laughter)So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for? I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot! For the next 30 days.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days
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"So I'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food. I've been interested in food for a long time. I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this. I went to chef school in France. And there is a way the world both envisions food, the way the world writes about food and learns about food. And it's largely what you would find in these books. And it's a wonderful thing. But there's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established.In the last 20 years, people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food. In fact, understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking — some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth. But that's not in any of those books. There's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed, some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food. There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria. He's developed a very avant-garde cuisine. A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal, he's developed his avant-garde cuisine. None of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books. None of them are taught in cooking schools. In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants. And finally, there's the old way of viewing food is the old way.And so a few years ago — fours years ago, actually — I set out to say, is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder? Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before? So we tried, and I'll show you what we came up with. This is a picture called a cutaway. This is actually the first picture I took in the book. The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli. And this magic view allows you to see all of what's happening while the broccoli steams. Then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact.And the hope was two-fold. One is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli. But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical, maybe a little bit more scientific, maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have. Because with that beautiful photo, maybe I can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time. Steaming ought to be faster. It turns out it isn't because of something called film condensation, and this explains that.Well, that first cutaway picture worked, so we said, ""Okay, let's do some more."" So here's another one. We discovered why woks are the shape they are. This shaped wok doesn't work very well; this caught fire three times. But we had a philosophy, which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second.(Laughter)And one of our canning cutaways. Once you start cutting things in half, you kind of get carried away, so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan. And each of these text blocks explains a key thing that's going on. In this case, boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic. You don't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid. So this is great for pickled vegetables, which is what we're canning here.Here's our hamburger cutaway. One of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish. So you can lavish all the same care, all the same technique, on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish. And if you do lavish as much technique as possible, and you try to make the highest quality hamburger, it gets to be a little bit involved. The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called ""The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer."" Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe, if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff, it does take about 30 hours. Of course, you're not actually working the whole time. Most of the time is kind of sitting there.The point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers, because, believe it or not, there is something to the physics and chemistry — in particular, those flames underneath the burger. Most of the characteristic char-grilled taste doesn't come from the wood or the charcoal. Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference. Mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing, or burning. So it's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste.Now you might wonder, how do we make these cutaways? Most people assume we use Photoshop. And the answer is: no, not really; we use a machine shop. And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half. So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world. (Laughter) We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half. The manufacturer said, ""What would it take for you to cut one in half?"" I said, ""It would have to show up free."" And so it showed up, we used it a little while, we cut it in half.Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots. We would glue a piece of Pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front. We used a red, very high-temperature silicon to do that. The great thing is, when you cut something in half, you have another half. So you photograph that in exactly the same position, and then you can substitute in — and that part does use Photoshop — just the edges. So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires, and then they take the wires away digitally so you're flying through the air.In most cases, though, there was no glass. Like for the hamburger, we just cut the damn barbecue. And so those coals that kept falling off the edge, we kept having to put them back up. But again, it only has to work for a thousandth of a second. The wok shot caught fire three times. What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh! One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way. But hey, they grow back.In addition to cutaways, we also explain physics. This is Fourier's law of heat conduction. It's a partial differential equation. We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. But to make them palatable, we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this. We've got lots of little tidbits in the book. Everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage, right? But you probably don't know that much about James Watt. But now you will; we put a biography of James Watt in. It's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt, and where he got his inspiration. It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey.We also did a lot of calculation. I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook. Here's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue, or other radiant heat source, goes as you move away from it. So as you move vertically away from this surface, the heat falls off. As you move side to side, it moves off. That horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot. That's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent. So that's the place where you really want to cook. And it's got this funny horn-shaped thing, which as far as I know, again, the first cookbook to ever do this. Now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it. You know, there's two ways you can make a product. You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want, or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it.Here's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger. If you really want great hamburger, it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain. And it's really simple, as you can see here. As it comes out of the grinder, you just have a little tray, and you just take it off in little passes, build it up, slice it vertically. Here's the final hamburger. This is the 30-hour hamburger. We make every aspect of this burger. The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it. We also have things about how to make the bun. There's a mushroom, ketchup — it goes on and on.Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here. The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics. Isn't that beautiful? We have a very high-speed camera, which we had lots of fun with on the book. The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600. That's what's happening to the water inside that popcorn. So it's a great illustration of that.Now I'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual. We have a chapter on gels. And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI, I thought, well, let's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin. Well, if you have a high-speed camera, and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around, pretty soon somebody does this. (Gasps) Now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot — that's why you shouldn't get shot. The other amazing thing is, when this ballistics gelatin comes down, it falls back down as a nice block.Anyway, here's the book. Here it is. 2,438 pages. And they're nice big pages too. (Applause) A friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen, so there's a sixth volume that has washable, waterproof paper.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cut_your_food_in_half
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"Do you know how many species of flowering plants there are? There are a quarter of a million — at least those are the ones we know about — a quarter of a million species of flowering plants. And flowers are a real bugger. They're really difficult for plants to produce. They take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources. Why would they go to that bother? And the answer of course, like so many things in the world, is sex. I know what's on your mind when you're looking at these pictures. And the reason that sexual reproduction is so important — there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce. You can take cuttings; they can sort of have sex with themselves; they can pollinate themselves. But they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches. Evolution works that way.Now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen. Some of you may have seen some of these pictures before. As I say, every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these. And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants. And that's actually rather useful for forensics and so on. Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen, and that's a very inefficient process, which is why it gets up our noses so much. Because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it, hoping that your sex cells, your male sex cells, which are held within the pollen, will somehow reach another flower just by chance. So all the grasses, which means all of the cereal crops, and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen. But most species actually use insects to do their bidding, and that's more intelligent in a way, because the pollen, they don't need so much of it. The insects and other species can take the pollen, transfer it directly to where it's required.So we're aware, obviously, of the relationship between insects and plants. There's a symbiotic relationship there, whether it's flies or birds or bees, they're getting something in return, and that something in return is generally nectar. Sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations — the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation. The plant gets something, and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else. Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way. There are markings on many plants that look like other insects. These are the anthers of a lily, cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it, the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with. And there's an orchid that might look to you as if it's got jaws, and in a way, it has; it forces the insect to crawl out, getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else.Orchids: there are 20,000, at least, species of orchids — amazingly, amazingly diverse. And they get up to all sorts of tricks. They have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding. This orchid, known as Darwin's orchid, because it's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it — you can see that there's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid. And basically what the insect has to do — we're in the middle of the flower — it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar. And Darwin said, looking at this flower, ""I guess something has coevolved with this."" And sure enough, there's the insect. And I mean, normally it kind of rolls it away, but in its erect form, that's what it looks like.Now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators, then, just as in human sex, people might start to deceive. They might say, ""I've got a bit of nectar. Do you want to come and get it?"" Now this is a plant. This is a plant here that insects in South Africa just love, and they've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom. And this is the mimic. So this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant. And here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic, because the mimic doesn't give it any nectar. It thought it would get some. So not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant, it's also — if you look very closely just at the head end, you can see that it's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant, if only some botanist hadn't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card.(Laughter)Now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom. This flower with its black dots: they might look like black dots to us, but if I tell you, to a male insect of the right species, that looks like two females who are really, really hot to trot. (Laughter) And when the insect gets there and lands on it, dousing itself in pollen, of course, that it's going to take to another plant, if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture, you can see that there are actually some patterning there, which is three-dimensional. So it probably even feels good for the insect, as well as looking good.And these electron microscope pictures — here's one of an orchid mimicking an insect — you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye, have very, very different textures to what an insect might perceive. And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles. And under the scanning electron microscope, you can see the surface there — really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at. Sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect, even to us. I mean, I think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast. It's a wonderful, amazing thing.This one's clever. It's called obsidian. I think of it as insidium sometimes. To the right species of bee, this looks like another very aggressive bee, and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away, and, of course, covers itself with pollen. The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects. And this one doesn't have anything for them. So it's deceiving on two levels — fabulous.(Laughter)Here we see ylang ylang, the component of many perfumes. I actually smelt someone with some on earlier. And the flowers don't really have to be that gaudy. They're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that'll have it. This one doesn't smell so good. This is a flower that really, really smells pretty nasty and is designed, again, evolved, to look like carrion. So flies love this. They fly in and they pollinate. This, which is helicodiceros, is also known as dead horse arum. I don't know what a dead horse actually smells like, but this one probably smells pretty much like it. It's really horrible. And blowflies just can't help themselves. They fly into this thing, and they fly all the way down it. They lay their eggs in it, thinking it's a nice bit of carrion, and not realizing that there's no food for the eggs, that the eggs are going to die, but the plant, meanwhile, has benefited, because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower — fantastic.Here's arum, arum maculatum, ""lords and ladies,"" or ""cuckoo-pint"" in this country. I photographed this thing last week in Dorset. This thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature — amazing. And if you look down into it, there's this sort of dam past the spadix, flies get attracted by the heat — which is boiling off volatile chemicals, little midges — and they get trapped underneath in this container. They drink this fabulous nectar and then they're all a bit sticky. At night they get covered in pollen, which showers down over them, and then the bristles that we saw above, they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out, covered in pollen — fabulous thing.Now if you think that's fabulous, this is one of my great favorites. This is the philodendron selloum. For anyone here from Brazil, you'll know about this plant. This is the most amazing thing. That sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long. And it does something that no other plant that I know of does, and that is that when it flowers — that's the spadix in the middle there — for a period of about two days, it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals. So instead of having starch, which is the food of plants, it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it's burning fat, metabolizing, about the rate of a small cat. And that's twice the energy output, weight for weight, than a hummingbird — absolutely astonishing. This thing does something else which is unusual. Not only will it raise itself to 115 Fahrenheit, 43 or 44 degrees Centigrade, for two days, but it keeps constant temperature. There's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature. ""Now why does it do this,"" I hear you ask. Now wouldn't you know it, there's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature. And they get inside, and they get it all on. (Laughter) And the plant showers them with pollen, and off they go and pollinate. And what a wonderful thing it is.Now most pollinators that we think about are insects, but actually in the tropics, many birds and butterflies pollinate. And many of the tropical flowers are red, and that's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us, we think, and can see the color red very well. But if you look at the spectrum, birds and us, we see red, green and blue and see that spectrum. Insects see green, blue and ultraviolet, and they see various shades of ultraviolet. So there's something that goes on off the end there. ""And wouldn't it be great if we could somehow see what that is,"" I hear you ask. Well yes we can. So what is an insect seeing? Last week I took these pictures of rock rose, helianthemum, in Dorset. These are little yellow flowers like we all see, little yellow flowers all over the place. And this is what it looks like with visible light. This is what it looks like if you take out the red. Most bees don't perceive red. And then I put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very, very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what I got. And that's a real fantastic bull's eye.Now we don't know exactly what a bee sees, any more than you know what I'm seeing when I call this red. We can't know what's going on in — let alone an insect's — another human being's mind. But the contrast will look something like that, so standing out a lot from the background. Here's another little flower — different range of ultraviolet frequencies, different filters to match the pollinators. And that's the sort of thing that it would be seeing. Just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property — no flower was damaged in the process of this shot; it was just attached to the tripod, not killed — then under ultraviolet light, look at that. And that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light. So maybe the chemical in that would be useful.Finally, there's one of evening primrose that Bjorn Rorslett from Norway sent me — fantastic hidden pattern. And I love the idea of something hidden. I think there's something poetic here, that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter, the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus — actually the clouds of Venus. That's the main use of that filter. Venus, of course, is the god of love and fertility, which is the flower story. And just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding, they've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death, and particularly at marriage, which, when you think of it, is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_the_beautiful_tricks_of_flowers
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"There was a time in my life when everything seemed perfect. Everywhere I went, I felt at home. Everyone I met, I felt I knew them for as long as I could remember. And I want to share with you how I came to that place and what I've learned since I left it.This is where it began. And it raises an existential question, which is, if I'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness, why am I not visible in the photograph, and where is this time and place? This is Los Angeles, California, where I live. This is a police photo. That's actually my car. We're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles, called Cedars-Sinai. And the situation is that a car full of paramedics on their way home from the hospital after work have run across the wreckage, and they've advised the police that there were no survivors inside the car, that the driver's dead, that I'm dead. And the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver. And when they do, they find that behind the glass, they find me. And my skull's crushed and my collar bone is crushed; all but two of my ribs, my pelvis and both arms — they're all crushed, but there is still a pulse. And they get me to that nearby hospital, Cedars-Sinai, where that night I receive, because of my internal bleeding, 45 units of blood — which means full replacements of all the blood in me — before they're able to staunch the flow. I'm put on full life support, and I have a massive stroke, and my brain drops into a coma.Now comas are measured on a scale from 15 down to three. Fifteen is a mild coma. Three is the deepest. And if you look, you'll see that there's only one way you can score three. It's essentially there's no sign of life from outside at all. I spent more than a month in a Glasgow Coma Scale three, and it is inside that deepest level of coma, on the rim between my life and my death, that I'm experiencing the full connection and full consciousness of inner space.From my family looking in from outside, what they're trying to figure out is a different kind of existential question, which is, how far is it going to be possible to bridge from the comatose potential mind that they're looking at to an actual mind, which I define simply as the functioning of the brain that is remaining inside my head. Now to put this into a broader context, I want you to imagine that you are an eternal alien watching the Earth from outer space, and your favorite show on intergalactic satellite television is the Earth channel, and your favorite show is the Human Show. And the reason I think it would be so interesting to you is because consciousness is so interesting. It's so unpredictable and so fragile.And this is how we began. We all began in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia. The show began with tremendous special effects, because there were catastrophic climate shifts — which sort of sounds interesting as a parallel to today. Because of the Earth tilting on its axis and those catastrophic climate shifts, we had to figure out how to find better food, and we had to learn — there's Lucy; that's how we all began — we had to learn how to crack open animal bones, use tools to do that, to feed on the marrow, to grow our brains more. So we actually grew our consciousness in response to this global threat.Now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in India, in Madhya Pradesh, there's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found. It's a cupule that took 40 to 50,000 blows with a stone tool to create, and it's the first known expression of art on the planet. And the reason it connects us with consciousness today is that all of us still today, the very first shape we draw as a child is a circle. And then the next thing we do is we put a dot in the center of the circle. We create an eye — and the eye that evolves through all of our history. There's the Egyptian god Horus, which symbolizes prosperity, wisdom and health. And that comes down right way to the present with the dollar bill in the United States, which has on it an eye of providence.So watching all of this show from outer space, you think we get it, we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness. Because it's the first thing we draw; we surround ourselves with images of it; it's probably the most common image on the planet. But we don't. We take our consciousness for granted. While I was producing in Los Angeles, I never thought about it for a second. Until it was stripped from me, I never thought about it. And what I've learned since that event and during my recovery is that consciousness is under threat on this planet in ways it's never been under threat before. These are just some examples.And the reason I'm so honored to be here to talk today in India is because India has the sad distinction of being the head injury capital of the world. That statistic is so sad. There is no more drastic and sudden gap created between potential and actual mind than a severe head injury. Each one can entail up to a decade of rehabilitation, which means that India, unless something changes, is accumulating a need for millennia of rehabilitation. What you find in the United States is an injury every 20 seconds — that's one and a half million every year — stroke every 40 seconds, Alzheimer's disease, every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that. All of these represent gaps between potential mind and actual mind.And here are some of the other categories, if you look at the whole planet. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is the number one disease on Earth in terms of years lived with disability. We find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44. Our children are becoming depressed at an alarming rate. I discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide. If you look at some of these other items — concussions. Half of E.R. admissions from adolescents are for concussions. If I talk about migraine, 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches. Fifteen percent suffer migraines that wipe them out for days on end.All of this is leading — computer addiction, just to cover that: the most frequent thing we do is use digital devices. The average teenager sends 3,300 texts every [month]. We're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift. So what you'd be wondering, watching the Human Show, is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness, or are we going to continue to retreat?And that then might lead you to watch an episode one day of Cedars-Sinai medical center and a consideration of the difference between potential mind and actual mind. This is a dense array EEG MRI tracking 156 channels of information. It's not my EEG at Cedars; it's your EEG tonight and last night. It's the what our minds do every night to digest the day and to prepare to bridge from the potential mind when we're asleep to the actual mind when we awaken the following morning. This is how I was when I returned from the hospital after nearly four months. The horseshoe shape you can see on my skull is where they operated and went inside my brain to do the surgeries they needed to do to rescue my life. But if you look into the eye of consciousness, that single eye you can see, I'm looking down, but let me tell you how I felt at that point. I didn't feel empty; I felt everything simultaneously. I felt empty and full, hot and cold, euphoric and depressed because the brain is the world's first fully functional quantum computer; it can occupy multiple states at the same time. And with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged, I felt everything simultaneously.But let's swivel around and look at me frontally. This is now flash-forward to the point in time where I've been discharged by the health system. Look into those eyes. I'm not able to focus those eyes. I'm not able to follow a line of text in a book. But the system has moved me on because, as my family started to discover, there is no long-term concept in the health care system. Neurological damage, 10 years of rehab, requires a long-term perspective.But let's take a look behind my eyes. This is a gamma radiation spec scan that uses gamma radiation to map three-dimensional function within the brain. It requires a laboratory to see it in three dimension, but in two dimensions I think you can see the beautiful symmetry and illumination of a normal mind at work. Here's my brain. That is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke. So my family, as we moved forward and discovered that the health care system had moved us by, had to try to find solutions and answers. And during that process — it took many years — one of the doctors said that my recovery, my degree of advance, since the amount of head injury I'd suffered, was miraculous. And that was when I started to write a book, because I didn't think it was miraculous. I thought there were miraculous elements, but I also didn't think it was right that one should have to struggle and search for answers when this is a pandemic within our society.So from this experience of my recovery, I want to share four particular aspects — I call them the four C's of consciousness — that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that I work with every day. The first C is cognitive training. Unlike the smashed glass of my car, plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility, with treatment, to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness. Plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason — hope for our ability to rebuild that function. Indeed, the mind can redefine itself, and this is demonstrated by two specialists called Hagen and Silva back in the 1970's. The global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting, but with appropriate treatment, they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure. But what I discovered is it's almost impossible to find anyone who provides that treatment or care.Here's what my neuropsychologist provided for me when I actually found somebody who could apply it. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to talk about the various subtests. Let's just talk about full-scale I.Q. Full-scale I.Q. is the mental processing — how fast you can acquire information, retain it and retrieve it — that is essential for success in life today. And you can see here there are three columns. Untestable — that's when I'm in my coma. And then I creep up to the point that I get a score of 79, which is just below average. In the health care system, if you touch average, you're done. That's when I was discharged from the system. What does average I.Q. really mean? It meant that when I was given two and a half hours to take a test that anyone here would take in 50 minutes, I might score an F. This is a very, very low level in order to be kicked out of the health care system. Then I underwent cognitive training. And let me show you what happened to the right-hand column when I did my cognitive training over a period of time. This is not supposed to occur. I.Q. is supposed to stabilize and solidify at the age of eight.Now the Journal of the National Medical Association gave my memoir a full clinical review, which is very unusual. I'm not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever. But they felt the evidences that there was important, valuable information in the book, and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it. But they asked one question. They said, ""Is this repeatable?"" That was a fair question because my memoir was simply how I found solutions that worked for me.The answer is yes, and for the first time, it's my pleasure to be able to share two examples. Here's somebody, what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11. And here's another person in, call it, high school and college. And this person is particularly interesting. I won't go into the intrascatter that's in the subtests, but they still had a neurologic issue. But that person could be identified as having a learning disability. And with accommodation, they went on to college and had a full life in terms of their opportunities.Second aspect: I still had crushing migraine headaches. Two elements that worked for me here are — the first is 90 percent, I learned, of head and neck pain is through muscular-skeletal imbalance. The craniomandibular system is critical to that. And when I underwent it and found solutions, this is the interrelationship between the TMJ and the teeth. Up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder, disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body. I was fortunate to find a dentist who applied this entire universe of technology you're about to see to establish that if he repositioned my jaw, the headaches pretty much resolved, but that then my teeth weren't in the right place. He then held my jaw in the right position while orthodontically he put my teeth into correct alignment. So my teeth actually hold my jaw in the correct position. This affected my entire body.If that sounds like a very, very strange thing to say and rather a bold statement — How can the jaw affect the entire body? — let me simply point out to you, if I ask you tomorrow to put one grain of sand between your teeth and go for a nice long walk, how far would you last before you had to remove that grain of sand? That tiny misalignment. Bear in mind, there are no nerves in the teeth. That's why the same between the before and after that this shows, it's hard to see the difference. Now just trying putting a few grains of sand between your teeth and see the difference it makes. I still had migraine headaches.The next issue that resolved was that, if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance, the other 10 percent, largely — if you set aside aneurysms, brain cancer and hormonal issues — is the circulation. Imagine the blood flowing through your body — I was told at UCLA Medical Center — as one sealed system. There's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it, and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood. That's basically it. If you press on a hose pipe in a sealed system, it bulges someplace else. If that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body, your brain, you get a vascular migraine. This is a level of pain that's only known to other people who suffer vascular migraines. Using this technology, this is mapping in three dimensions. This is an MRI MRA MRV, a volumetric MRI. Using this technology, the specialists at UCLA Medical Center were able to identify where that compression in the hose pipe was occurring. A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body. And in the following months and years, I felt the neurological flow of life itself returning.Communication, the next C. This is critical. All consciousness is about communication. And here, by great fortune, one of my father's clients had a husband who worked at the Alfred Mann Foundation for Scientific Research. Alfred Mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness, whether to restore hearing to the deaf, vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed. And I'm just going to give you an example today of movement to the paralyzed. I've brought with me, from Southern California, the FM device. This is it being held in the hand. It weighs less than a gram. So two of them implanted in the body would weigh less than a dime. Five of them would still weigh less than a rupee coin.Where does it go inside the body? It has been simulated and tested to endure in the body corrosion-free for over 80 years. So it goes in and it stays there. Here are the implantation sites. The concept that they're working towards — and they have working prototypes — is that we placed it throughout the motor points of the body where they're needed. The main unit will then go inside the brain. An FM device in the cortex of the brain, the motor cortex, will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm, let's say, in real time, if they've lost control of their arm. And other FM devices implanted in fingertips, on contacting a surface, will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain, so that the person feels a sense of touch. Is this science fiction? No, because I'm wearing the first application of this technology. I don't have the ability to control my left foot. A radio device is controlling every step I take, and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time I walk.And in closing, I want to share the personal reason why this meant so much to me and changed the direction of my life. In my coma, one of the presences I sensed was someone I felt was a protector. And when I came out of my coma, I recognized my family, but I didn't remember my own past. Gradually, I remembered the protector was my wife. And I whispered the good news through my broken jaw, which was wired shut, to my night nurse. And the following morning, my mother came to explain that I'd not always been in this bed, in this room, that I'd been working in film and television and that I had been in a crash and that, yes, I was married, but Marcy had been killed instantly in the crash. And during my time in coma, she had been laid to rest in her hometown of Phoenix. Now in the dark years that followed, I had to work out what remained for me if everything that made today special was gone. And as I discovered these threats to consciousness and how they are surrounding the world and enveloping the lives of more and more people every day, I discovered what truly remained. I believe that we can overcome the threats to our consciousness, that the Human Show can stay on the air for millennia to come. I believe that we can all rise and shine.Thank you very much.(Applause)Lakshmi Pratury: Just stay for a second. Just stay here for a second.(Applause)You know, when I heard Simon's — please sit down; I just want to talk to him for a second — when I read his book, I went to LA to meet him. And so I was sitting in this restaurant, waiting for a man to come by who obviously would have some difficulty ... I don't know what I had in my mind. And he was walking around. I didn't expect that person that I was going to meet to be him. And then we met and we talked, and I'm like, he doesn't look like somebody who was built out of nothing. And then I was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery. And we have his book outside in the bookshop. The thing that amazed me is the painstaking detail with which he has written every hospital he has been to, every treatment he got, every near-miss he had, and how accidentally he stumbled upon innovations. So I think this one detail went past people really quick. Tell a little bit about what you're wearing on your leg.Simon Lewis: I knew when I was timing this that there wouldn't be time for me to do anything about — Well this is it. This is the control unit. And this records every single step I've taken for, ooh, five or six years now. And if I do this, probably the mic won't hear it. That little chirp followed by two chirps is now switched on. When I press it again, it'll chirp three times, and that'll mean that it's armed and ready to go. And that's my friend. I mean, I charge it every night. And it works. It works. And what I would love to add because I didn't have time ...What does it do? Well actually, I'll show you down here. This down here, if the camera can see that, that is a small antenna. Underneath my heel, there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground — what's called the heel lift. This thing blinks all the time; I'll leave it out, so you might be able to see it. But this is blinking all the time. It's sending signals in real time. And if you walk faster, if I walk faster, it detects what's called the time interval, which is the interval between each heel lift. And it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation. The other things they've worked on — I didn't have time to say this in my talk — is they've restored functional hearing to thousands of deaf people.I could tell you the story: this was going to be an abandoned technology, but Alfred Mann met the doctor who was going to retire, [Dr. Schindler.] And he was going to retire — all the technology was going to be lost, because not a single medical manufacturer would take it on because it was a small issue. But there's millions of deaf people in the world, and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now. It works. And the other thing is they're working on artificial retinas for the blind. And this, this is the implantable generation. Because what I didn't say in my talk is this is actually exoskeletal. I should clarify that. Because the first generation is exoskeletal, it's wrapped around the leg, around the affected limb. I must tell you, they're an amazing — there's a hundred people who work in that building — engineers, scientists, and other team members — all the time.Alfred Mann has set up this foundation to advance this research because he saw there's no way venture capital would come in for something like this. The audience is too small. You'd think, there's plenty of paralyzed people in the world, but the audience is too small, and the amount of research, the time it takes, the FDA clearances, the payback time is too long for V.C. to be interested. So he saw a need and he stepped in. He's a very, very remarkable man. He's done a lot of very cutting-edge science.LP: So when you get a chance, spend some time with Simon. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_lewis_don_t_take_consciousness_for_granted
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"Good morning everybody.I work with really amazing, little, itty-bitty creatures called cells. And let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in the lab. I work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment. We plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes. And we feed them — sterilely of course — with what we call cell culture media — which is like their food — and we grow them in incubators.Why do I do this? We observe the cells in a plate, and they're just on the surface. But what we're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them. What does that even mean? Well it means growing an actual heart, let's say, or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body. Not only that, but they can also be used for disease models. And for this purpose, traditional cell culture techniques just really aren't enough. The cells are kind of homesick; the dish doesn't feel like their home. And so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive. We call this the biomimetic paradigm — copying nature in the lab.Let's take the example of the heart, the topic of a lot of my research. What makes the heart unique? Well, the heart beats, rhythmically, tirelessly, faithfully. We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes. These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab. What else do we know about the heart? Well, heart cells are pretty greedy. Nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very, very dense blood supply. In the lab, we micro-pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells, and this allows us to flow the cell culture media, the cells' food, through the scaffolds where we're growing the cells — a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart.So this brings me to lesson number one: life can do a lot with very little. Let's take the example of electrical stimulation. Let's see how powerful just one of these essentials can be. On the left, we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that I engineered from rat cells in the lab. It's about the size of a mini marshmallow. And after one week, it's beating. You can see it in the upper left-hand corner. But don't worry if you can't see it so well. It's amazing that these cells beat at all. But what's really amazing is that the cells, when we electrically stimulate them, like with a pacemaker, that they beat so much more.But that brings me to lesson number two: cells do all the work. In a sense, tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here, because structural engineers build bridges and big things, computer engineers, computers, but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves. What does this mean for us? Let's do something really simple. Let's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept. Let's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way. ""We are what we eat,"" could easily be described as, ""We are what our cells eat."" And in the case of the flora in our gut, these cells may not even be human. But it's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life. Behind every sound, sight, touch, taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us. It begs the question: shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies?I invite you to talk about this with me further, and in the meantime, I wish you luck. May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nina_tandon_caring_for_cells
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"So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984.(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion. We shall prevail. Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like ""1984.""Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today. Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free. Fast-forward more than two decades: Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store. The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups. His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize. The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany. And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks.So here's the thing. We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question.So here's the situation. In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states. But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation-states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world. After all, even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year.And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond. As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, ""If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet."" But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated. On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March. And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles. But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations. And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces. And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there.And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May — not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali. But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence. In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet. But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem.In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, ""Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy. But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power? As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, ""Before, things were simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. Today, things are a lot more subtle."" Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends.The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks. Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology. This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world — which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service. But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace. In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons. But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling. You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government.Now in China, you have the ""great firewall,"" as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google+ and many of the other overseas websites. And that's done in part with the help from Western technology. But that's only half of the story. The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet, known as a system of self-discipline. In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline — i.e. policing their content. And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients.In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites. But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site. And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money. This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable. So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services.So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys. Of course, it's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is. The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us.So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable. We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that. How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit?And government regulation often isn't helping all that much. You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, ""We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest."" But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous ""three-strikes"" law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens. And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior.So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do. It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy. Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day. It's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations, and that you get the right corporate behavior. We need to make the same approach with the Internet.We also are going to need political innovation. Eight hundred years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the Divine Right of Kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules. This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed — which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond. So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked.And what does that look like? At the moment, we still don't know. But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering. Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_mackinnon_let_s_take_back_the_internet
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"Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around? Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, ""How could we have predicted that?"" or ""How could we have better prepared for that?"" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least, and beyond. I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies.So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. An identity was defined primarily by religion. And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that. In the age of globalization, we moved on. I call it the era of citizenship — where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. You could be American-Italian; you could be American-Irish; you could be British-Pakistani.But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age The New York Times dubbed recently as ""the age of behavior."" How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on.If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders, and I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world.And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. I was, by the way — I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K. Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K. At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world — by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. We felt that they were out of date. I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state. The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances.So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world.If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. In others, headscarves are being banned. In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. Now that never would have been possible before. They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon.Where does that leave democracy aspirants? Well I believe they're getting left far behind. And I'll give you an example here at this stage. If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation-state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization.So why are they succeeding? And why are democracy aspirants falling behind? Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their narratives — the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West — these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause — the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately.If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. And that's the power of social movements. They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists.One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. So that begs the next question. Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism — Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society — why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? And I believe that's for four reasons. I believe, number one, it's complacency. Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture.The second, I believe, is political correctness. That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that — we associate believing in the universality of our values — with extremists. Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal. But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism.And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party — wanting to rule by military dictatorship. And then you have a third party saying, ""Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy."" So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. And then people say, ""We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. Let's bring the military back again.""And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice.When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. Is it just about grievances? Is it just about a lack of education? Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society. Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician — not an ill-educated man. International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground.And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture — which is necessarily more than just elections. But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections. Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations.So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics — movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here — the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship — i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground.Now to conclude, how does that happen? Well, Egypt is a good starting point. The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. We need to move one step beyond that now. We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values.But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. In the '80s and '90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole.And the aspiration that we have at the moment — as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism — is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi, where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. And it's with that thought that I'll end.And my time is up, and thank you for your time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maajid_nawaz_a_global_culture_to_fight_extremism
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"It's the Second World War. A German prison camp. And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem. The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn't really understand. The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin. But he doesn't know whether it's an infection, whether it's to do with malnutrition. He doesn't know how to cure it. And he's operating in a hostile environment. And people do terrible things in wars. The German camp guards, they've got bored. They've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun. On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners. He said he heard suspicious laughter. And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself.So the situation seemed pretty desperate. But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person. He'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market. Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is. Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British. It looks like crude oil. It tastes ... zesty. And importantly, it's a rich source of vitamin B12. So Archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups. He gives half of them vitamin C. He gives half of them vitamin B12. He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book. And after just a few days, it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness, marmite is the cure.So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp. Now you've got to imagine at the moment — forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair. He hasn't been able to shave — a sort of Billy Connolly figure. Cochrane, he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent — in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent — and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world. And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations. And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps because he's convinced that the situation is hopeless. But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane's exercise book and says to his colleagues, ""This evidence is incontrovertible. If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime."" And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover.Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. And he had a name for it. He called it the God complex. Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution.Now Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot. And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot. Now I'm an economist, I'm not a doctor, but I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. I see it in our business leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for — people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. And you know, with the future billions that we've been hearing about, the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way.Well let me give you an example. Imagine for a moment that, instead of Tim Harford in front of you, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs. You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED. (Laughter) And he'd be showing you these amazing statistics, these amazing animations. And they are brilliant; it's wonderful work. But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out. So it'll show you GDP per capita, population, longevity, that's about it. So three pieces of data for each country — three pieces of data. Three pieces of data is nothing. I mean, have a look at this graph.This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo. He's at MIT. Now you won't be able to understand a word of it, but this is what it looks like. Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products, and he's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products. And it's wonderful, wonderful work. You show all these interconnections, all these interrelations. And I think it'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow. Brilliant work. Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works. And what we learned is Cesar's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine.Five thousand products — that's still nothing. Five thousand products — imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo's data. Imagine you had one second per product category. In about the length of this session, you would have counted all 5,000. Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart. There are 100,000 there. It would take you all day. Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York. It's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan. If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York — there are 10 billion of them — it would take you 317 years. This is how complex the economy we've created is. And I'm just counting toasters here. I'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem. The complexity here is unbelievable. And just a piece of context — the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services. You could count them in five minutes.So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us. This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting. We tend to retreat and say, ""We can draw a picture, we can post some graphs, we get it, we understand how this works."" And we don't. We never do. Now I'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here. I'm not trying to say we can't solve complicated problems in a complicated world. We clearly can. But the way we solve them is with humility — to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works. And we have a problem-solving technique that works. Now you show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.Here's an example. This baby was produced through trial and error. I realize that's an ambiguous statement. Maybe I should clarify it. This baby is a human body: it evolved. What is evolution? Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection — trial and error, trial and error. And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error. You could use it in an industrial context.So let's say you wanted to make detergent. Let's say you're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool. How do you do it? Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent. You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle. You create a spray of detergent. Then the spray dries. It turns into powder. It falls to the floor. You scoop it up. You put it in cardboard boxes. You sell it at a supermarket. You make lots of money. How do you design that nozzle? It turns out to be very important. Now if you ascribe to the God complex, what you do is you find yourself a little God. You find yourself a mathematician; you find yourself a physicist — somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid. And he will, or she will, calculate the optimal design of the nozzle. Now Unilever did this and it didn't work — too complicated. Even this problem, too complicated.But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem — trial and error, variation and selection. You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle. You try out all 10; you keep the one that works best. You create 10 variations on that one. You try out all 10. You keep the one that works best. You try out 10 variations on that one. You see how this works, right? And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle. It looks a bit like a chess piece — functions absolutely brilliantly. We have no idea why it works, no idea at all. And the moment you step back from the God complex — let's just try to have a bunch of stuff; let's have a systematic way of determining what's working and what's not — you can solve your problem.Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize. And we've heard a lot about how economies function. The U.S. economy is still the world's greatest economy. How did it become the world's greatest economy? I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. That is a huge failure rate. It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year. Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans. And eventually, they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets — (Laughter) if, of course, they haven't already done so. I sometimes wonder. But it's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence, this incredible performance of Western economies. It didn't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge. It's come through trial and error.Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, ""Well Tim, it's kind of obvious. Obviously trial and error is very important. Obviously experimentation is very important. Now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing?""So I say, okay, fine. You think it's obvious? I will admit it's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don't have a correct answer. Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer. And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers. And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid. When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing. When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says, ""I want to fix our health system. I want to fix our education system. I have no idea how to do it. I have half a dozen ideas. We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail. Then we'll test some other ideas out. We'll find some that work. We'll build on those. We'll get rid of the ones that don't."" — when a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works, and that — thank you.(Applause)Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex. Because it's so hard to admit our own fallibility. It's so uncomfortable. And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody. There's this one trial he ran many years after World War II. He wanted to test out the question of, where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks? Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital, or should they recover at home? All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down. They had the God complex in spades. They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment.Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this. He ran his trial. And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, ""Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results. They're not statistically significant. But we have something. And it turns out that you're right and I'm wrong. It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home. They should be in hospital."" And there's this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, ""We always said you were unethical, Archie. You're killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now. Shut it down at once."" And there's this huge hubbub. Archie lets it die down. And then he says, ""Well that's very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around. It turns out your hospitals are killing people, and they should be at home. Would you like to close down the trial now, or should we wait until we have robust results?"" Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room.But Cochrane would do that kind of thing. And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, ""Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything. I do not want to have my opinions challenged. I do not want to have my conclusions tested."" It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law. Cochrane understood that uncertainty, that fallibility, that being challenged, they hurt. And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that. Now I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. It isn't easy. It's incredibly painful.And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject, I've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject. So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem. You prove one, you prove the other. But it was always a conjecture. Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true. And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself. His friend, Goro Shimura — who worked on the mathematics with him — many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life. He said, ""He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to emulate him, but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford
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"Pat Mitchell: You have brought us images from the Yemen Times. And take us through those, and introduce us to another Yemen.Nadia Al-Sakkaf: Well, I'm glad to be here. And I would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in Yemen. This picture shows a revolution started by women, and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest. The other picture is the popularity of the real need for change. So many people are there. The intensity of the upspring. This picture shows that the revolution has allowed opportunities for training, for education. These women are learning about first aid and their rights according to the constitution.I love this picture. I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below. And they were excluded from decision-making, and now they are in the forefront of the news, raising the flag. English — you will see, this is jeans and tights, and an English expression — the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country. And expression also, it has brought talents. Yemenis are using cartoons and art, paintings, comics, to tell the world and each other about what's going on.Obviously, there's always the dark side of it. And this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay. The solidarity of millions of Yemenis across the country just demanding the one thing. And finally, lots of people are saying that Yemen's revolution is going to break the country. Is it going to be so many different countries? Is it going to be another Somalia? But we want to tell the world that, no, under the one flag, we'll still remain as Yemeni people.PM: Thank you for those images, Nadia. And they do, in many ways, tell a different story than the story of Yemen, the one that is often in the news. And yet, you yourself defy all those characterizations. So let's talk about the personal story for a moment. Your father is murdered. The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper. How did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper, especially in such times of conflict?NA: Well, let me first warn you that I'm not the traditional Yemeni girl. I've guessed you've already noticed this by now. (Laughter) In Yemen, most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life. But there's so much potential. I wish I could show you my Yemen. I wish you could see Yemen through my eyes. Then you would know that there's so much to it. And I was privileged because I was born into a family, my father would always encourage the boys and the girls. He would say we are equal. And he was such an extraordinary man. And even my mother — I owe it to my family. A story: I studied in India. And in my third year, I started becoming confused because I was Yemeni, but I was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college. And I went back home and I said, ""Daddy, I don't know who I am. I'm not a Yemeni; I'm not an Indian."" And he said, ""You are the bridge."" And that is something I will keep in my heart forever. So since then I've been the bridge, and a lot of people have walked over me.PM: I don't think so. (Laughter)NA: But it just helps tell that some people are change agents in the society. And when I became editor-in-chief after my brother actually — my father passed away in 1999, and then my brother until 2005 — and everybody was betting that I will not be able to do it. ""What's this young girl coming in and showing off because it's her family business,"" or something. It was very hard at first. I didn't want to clash with people. But with all due respect to all the men, and the older men especially, they did not want me around. It was very hard, you know, to impose my authority. But a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do.(Applause)And in the first year, I had to fire half of the men. (Laughter) (Applause) Brought in more women. Brought in younger men. And we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today. The other thing is that it's about professionalism. It's about proving who you are and what you can do. And I don't know if I'm going to be boasting now, but in 2006 alone, we won three international awards. One of them is the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award. So that was the answer to all the Yemeni people. And I want to score a point here, because my husband is in the room over there. If you could please stand up, [unclear]. He has been very supportive of me.(Applause)PM: And we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper. But in assuming this responsibility and going about it as you have, you have become a bridge between an older and traditional society and the one that you are now creating at the paper. And so along with changing who worked there, you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into, in particular with women, and it has to do with outside image, dress, the veiled woman. So how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you?NA: As you know, the image of a lot of Yemeni women is a lot of black and covered, veiled women. And this is true. And a lot of it is because women are not able, are not free, to show their face to their self. It's a lot of traditional imposing coming by authority figures such as the men, the grandparents and so on. And it's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say, ""I am as much contributing to this family, or more, than you are."" And the more empowered the women become, the more they are able to remove the veil, for example, or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel.So the other face of Yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil, and it's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it. And I have done this throughout my work. I've tried to encourage young girls. We started with, you can take it off in the office. And then after that, you can take it off on assignments. Because I didn't believe a journalist can be a journalist with — how can you talk to people if you have your face covered? — and so on; it's just a movement.And I am a role model in Yemen. A lot of people look up to me. A lot of young girls look up to me. And I need to prove to them that, yes, you can still be married, you can still be a mother, and you can still be respected within the society, but at the same time, that doesn't mean you [should] just be one of the crowd. You can be yourself and have your face.PM: But by putting yourself personally out there — both projecting a different image of Yemeni women, but also what you have made possible for the women who work at the paper — has this put you in personal danger?NA: Well the Yemen Times, across 20 years, has been through so much. We've suffered prosecution; the paper was closed down more than three times. It's an independent newspaper, but tell that to the people in charge. They think that if there's anything against them, then we are being an opposition newspaper. And very, very difficult times. Some of my reporters were arrested. We had some court cases. My father was assassinated. Today, we are in a much better situation. We've created the credibility. And in times of revolution or change like today, it is very important for independent media to have a voice. It's very important for you to go to YemenTimes.com, and it's very important to listen to our voice.And this is probably something I'm going to share with you in Western media probably — and how there's a lot of stereotypes — thinking of Yemen in one single frame: this is what Yemen is all about. And that's not fair. It's not fair for me; it's not fair for my country. A lot of reporters come to Yemen and they want to write a story on Al-Qaeda or terrorism. And I just wanted to share with you: there's one reporter that came. He wanted to do a documentary on what his editors wanted. And he ended up writing about a story that even surprised me — hip hop — that there are young Yemeni men who express themselves through dancing and puchu puchu. (Laughter) That thing. (PM: Rap. Break dancing.) Yeah, break dancing. I'm not so old. I'm just not in touch.(Laughter)(Applause)PM: Yes, you are. Actually, that's a documentary that's available online; the video's online.NA: ShaketheDust.org.PM: ""Shake the Dust."" (NA: ""Shake the Dust."")PM: ShaketheDust.org. And it definitely does give a different image of Yemen. You spoke about the responsibility of the press. And certainly, when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we've created fear and danger, often from lack of knowledge, lack of real understanding, how do you see the way that the Western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region, but in particular, in your country?NA: Well there is a saying that says, ""You fear what you don't know, and you hate what you fear."" So it's about the lack of research, basically. It's almost, ""Do your homework,"" — some involvement. And you cannot do parachute reporting — just jump into a country for two days and think that you've done your homework and a story. So I wish that the world would know my Yemen, my country, my people. I am an example, and there are others like me. We may not be that many, but if we are promoted as a good, positive example, there will be others — men and women — who can eventually bridge the gap — again, coming to the bridge — between Yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion.I think Yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years. It's natural. But after the two years, which is a price we are willing to pay, we are going to stand up again on our feet, but in the new Yemen with a younger and more empowered people — democratic.(Applause)PM: Nadia, I think you've just given us a very different view of Yemen. And certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for. And the very best of luck to you. YemenTimes.com.NA: On Twitter also.PM: So you are plugged in.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nadia_al_sakkaf_see_yemen_through_my_eyes
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"I love the Internet. It's true. Think about everything it has brought us. Think about all the services we use, all the connectivity, all the entertainment, all the business, all the commerce. And it's happening during our lifetimes. I'm pretty sure that one day we'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now. This time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online, the generation that built something really and truly global. But yes, it's also true that the Internet has problems, very serious problems, problems with security and problems with privacy. I've spent my career fighting these problems.So let me show you something. This here is Brain. This is a floppy disk — five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by Brain.A. It's the first virus we ever found for PC computers. And we actually know where Brain came from. We know because it says so inside the code. Let's take a look. All right. That's the boot sector of an infected floppy, and if we take a closer look inside, we'll see that right there, it says, ""Welcome to the dungeon."" And then it continues, saying, 1986, Basit and Amjad. And Basit and Amjad are first names, Pakistani first names. In fact, there's a phone number and an address in Pakistan.(Laughter)Now, 1986. Now it's 2011. That's 25 years ago. The PC virus problem is 25 years old now. So half a year ago, I decided to go to Pakistan myself. So let's see, here's a couple of photos I took while I was in Pakistan. This is from the city of Lahore, which is around 300 kilometers south from Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was caught. Here's a typical street view. And here's the street or road leading to this building, which is 730 Nizam block at Allama Iqbal Town. And I knocked on the door. (Laughter) You want to guess who opened the door? Basit and Amjad; they are still there. (Laughter) (Applause) So here standing up is Basit. Sitting down is his brother Amjad. These are the guys who wrote the first PC virus. Now of course, we had a very interesting discussion. I asked them why. I asked them how they feel about what they started. And I got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both Basit and Amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years. So there is some sort of justice in the world after all.Now, the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more. So let me just show you a couple of examples of what they used to look like. What I'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer. So let me just mount some drives. Go over there. What we have here is a list of old viruses. So let me just run some viruses on my computer.For example, let's go with the Centipede virus first. And you can see at the top of the screen, there's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one. You know that you're infected because it actually shows up. Here's another one. This is the virus called Crash, invented in Russia in 1992. Let me show you one which actually makes some sound. (Siren noise) And the last example, guess what the Walker virus does? Yes, there's a guy walking across your screen once you get infected. So it used to be fairly easy to know that you're infected by a virus, when the viruses were written by hobbyists and teenagers.Today, they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers. Today, viruses are a global problem. What we have here in the background is an example of our systems that we run in our labs, where we track virus infections worldwide. So we can actually see in real time that we've just blocked viruses in Sweden and Taiwan and Russia and elsewhere. In fact, if I just connect back to our lab systems through the Web, we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses, how many new examples of malware we find every single day. Here's the latest virus we've found, in a file called Server.exe. And we found it right over here three seconds ago — the previous one, six seconds ago. And if we just scroll around, it's just massive. We find tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands. And that's the last 20 minutes of malware every single day.So where are all these coming from then? Well today, it's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses. It's gangs like — let's go to GangstaBucks.com. This is a website operating in Moscow where these guys are buying infected computers. So if you are a virus writer and you're capable of infecting Windows computers, but you don't know what to do with them, you can sell those infected computers — somebody else's computers — to these guys. And they'll actually pay you money for those computers. So how do these guys then monetize those infected computers? Well there's multiple different ways, such as banking trojans, which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking, or keyloggers. Keyloggers silently sit on your computer, hidden from view, and they record everything you type. So you're sitting on your computer and you're doing Google searches. Every single Google search you type is saved and sent to the criminals. Every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals. Same thing with every single password and so on.But the thing that they're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store. Because when you do purchases in online stores, you will be typing in your name, the delivery address, your credit card number and the credit card security codes. And here's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago. That's the credit card number, that's the expiration date, that's the security code, and that's the name of the owner of the card. Once you gain access to other people's credit card information, you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information. And that, obviously, is a problem. We now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime.One example of how these guys actually are capable of monetizing their operations: we go and have a look at the pages of INTERPOL and search for wanted persons. We find guys like Bjorn Sundin, originally from Sweden, and his partner in crime, also listed on the INTERPOL wanted pages, Mr. Shaileshkumar Jain, a U.S. citizen. These guys were running an operation called I.M.U., a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions. They are both right now on the run. Nobody knows where they are. U.S. officials, just a couple of weeks ago, froze a Swiss bank account belonging to Mr. Jain, and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it.So the amount of money online crime generates is significant. And that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks. We know that online criminals are hiring programmers, hiring testing people, testing their code, having back-end systems with SQL databases. And they can afford to watch how we work — like how security people work — and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build. They also use the global nature of Internet to their advantage. I mean, the Internet is international. That's why we call it the Internet.And if you just go and take a look at what's happening in the online world, here's a video built by Clarified Networks, which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world. This operation, believed to be originally from Estonia, moves around from one country to another as soon as the website is tried to shut down. So you just can't shut these guys down. They will switch from one country to another, from one jurisdiction to another — moving around the world, using the fact that we don't have the capability to globally police operations like this. So the Internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world. Now, criminals who weren't capable of reaching us before can reach us.So how do you actually go around finding online criminals? How do you actually track them down? Let me give you an example. What we have here is one exploit file. Here, I'm looking at the Hex dump of an image file, which contains an exploit. And that basically means, if you're trying to view this image file on your Windows computer, it actually takes over your computer and runs code.Now, if you'll take a look at this image file — well there's the image header, and there the actual code of the attack starts. And that code has been encrypted, so let's decrypt it. It has been encrypted with XOR function 97. You just have to believe me, it is, it is. And we can go here and actually start decrypting it. Well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted. And I know, it doesn't really look much different from the original. But just keep staring at it. You'll actually see that down here you can see a Web address: unionseek.com/d/ioo.exe And when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program. And that's a backdoor which will take over your computer.But even more interestingly, if we continue decrypting, we'll find this mysterious string, which says O600KO78RUS. That code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature. It's not used for anything. And I was looking at that, trying to figure out what it means. So obviously I Googled for it. I got zero hits; wasn't there. So I spoke with the guys at the lab. And we have a couple of Russian guys in our labs, and one of them mentioned, well, it ends in RUS like Russia. And 78 is the city code for the city of St. Petersburg. For example, you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that. So I went looking for contacts in St. Petersburg, and through a long road, we eventually found this one particular website.Here's this Russian guy who's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website, and he runs a blog under the popular Live Journal. And on this blog, he blogs about his life, about his life in St. Petersburg — he's in his early 20s — about his cat, about his girlfriend. And he drives a very nice car. In fact, this guy drives a Mercedes-Benz S600 V12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower. Now that's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in St. Petersburg.How do I know about this car? Because he blogged about the car. He actually had a car accident. In downtown St. Petersburg, he actually crashed his car into another car. And he put blogged images about the car accident — that's his Mercedes — right here is the Lada Samara he crashed into. And you can actually see that the license plate of the Samara ends in 78RUS. And if you actually take a look at the scene picture, you can see that the plate of the Mercedes is O600KO78RUS. Now I'm not a lawyer, but if I would be, this is where I would say, ""I rest my case.""(Laughter)So what happens when online criminals are caught? Well in most cases it never gets this far. The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down. I wish it would be easier; unfortunately it isn't.But things are also changing at a very rapid pace. You've all heard about things like Stuxnet. So if you look at what Stuxnet did is that it infected these. That's a Siemens S7-400 PLC, programmable logic [controller]. And this is what runs our infrastructure. This is what runs everything around us. PLC's, these small boxes which have no display, no keyboard, which are programmed, are put in place, and they do their job. For example, the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these. And when Stuxnet infects one of these, that's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about. Because everything around us is being run by these. I mean, we have critical infrastructure. You go to any factory, any power plant, any chemical plant, any food processing plant, you look around — everything is being run by computers.Everything is being run by computers. Everything is reliant on these computers working. We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail.(Laughter)(Applause)So preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted aren't there. It's actually very basic stuff — thinking about continuity, thinking about backups, thinking about the things that actually matter.Now I told you — (Laughter) I love the Internet. I do. Think about all the services we have online. Think about if they are taken away from you, if one day you don't actually have them for some reason or another. I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that. I'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime. Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us.(Laughter)I've spent my life defending the Net, and I do feel that if we don't fight online crime, we are running a risk of losing it all. We have to do this globally, and we have to do it right now. What we need is more global, international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs — these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks. That's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls. What actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks, and even more importantly, we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime, but haven't yet done it. We have to find the people with the skills, but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_fighting_viruses_defending_the_net
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"Embracing otherness. When I first heard this theme, I thought, well, embracing otherness is embracing myself. And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today.We each have a self, but I don't think that we're born with one. You know how newborn babies believe they're part of everything; they're not separate? Well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly. It's like that initial stage is over — oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive. It's no longer valid or real. What is real is separateness, and at some point in early babyhood, the idea of self starts to form. Our little portion of oneness is given a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details, opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, our identity. And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world. But the self is a projection based on other people's projections. Is it who we really are? Or who we really want to be, or should be?So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up. The self that I attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again. And my panic at not having a self that fit, and the confusion that came from my self being rejected, created anxiety, shame and hopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time. But in retrospect, the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern. The self changed, got affected, broken, destroyed, but another one would evolve — sometimes stronger, sometimes hateful, sometimes not wanting to be there at all. The self was not constant. And how many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place?I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s. My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe. Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people. But nature had its wicked way, and brown babies were born. But from about the age of five, I was aware that I didn't fit. I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. I was an anomaly, and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug in. Because the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong. That confirms its existence and its importance. And it is important. It has an extremely important function. Without it, we literally can't interface with others. We can't hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity, of success. But my skin color wasn't right. My hair wasn't right. My history wasn't right. My self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, I didn't really exist. And I was ""other"" before being anything else — even before being a girl. I was a noticeable nobody.Another world was opening up around this time: performance and dancing. That nagging dread of self-hood didn't exist when I was dancing. I'd literally lose myself. And I was a really good dancer. I would put all my emotional expression into my dancing. I could be in the movement in a way that I wasn't able to be in my real life, in myself.And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film. I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good. It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self — one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to. But the shooting day would end, and I'd return to my gnarly, awkward self.By 19, I was a fully-fledged movie actor, but still searching for definition. I applied to read anthropology at university. Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview, and she asked me, ""How would you define race?"" Well, I thought I had the answer to that one, and I said, ""Skin color."" ""So biology, genetics?"" she said. ""Because, Thandie, that's not accurate. Because there's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and, say, a white Norwegian. Because we all stem from Africa. So in Africa, there's been more time to create genetic diversity."" In other words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact. On the one hand, result. Right? On the other hand, my definition of self just lost a huge chunk of its credibility. But what was credible, what is biological and scientific fact, is that we all stem from Africa — in fact, from a woman called Mitochondrial Eve who lived 160,000 years ago. And race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance.Strangely, these revelations didn't cure my low self-esteem, that feeling of otherness. My desire to disappear was still very powerful. I had a degree from Cambridge; I had a thriving career, but my self was a car crash, and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist's couch. And of course I did. I still believed my self was all I was. I still valued self-worth above all other worth, and what was there to suggest otherwise? We've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self. Look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates, the revenue it turns over. We'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing. But it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death.But there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection — and that thing is oneness, our essence. The self's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it's connected to its creator — to you and to me. And that can happen with awareness — awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood. For a start, we can think about all the times when we do lose ourselves. It happens when I dance, when I'm acting. I'm earthed in my essence, and my self is suspended. In those moments, I'm connected to everything — the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy from the audience. All my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel — that feeling of oneness.And when I'm acting a role, I inhabit another self, and I give it life for awhile, because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment. And I've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to Secretary of State in 2004. And no matter how other these selves might be, they're all related in me. And I honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure. I always wondered why I could feel others' pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody. It's because I didn't have a self to get in the way. I thought I lacked substance, and the fact that I could feel others' meant that I had nothing of myself to feel. The thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment.And when I realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function, a funny thing happened. I stopped giving it so much authority. I give it its due. I take it to therapy. I've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior. But I'm not ashamed of my self. In fact, I respect my self and its function. And over time and with practice, I've tried to live more and more from my essence. And if you can do that, incredible things happen.I was in Congo in February, dancing and celebrating with women who've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways — destroyed because other brutalized, psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves' addiction to iPods, Pads, and bling, which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain, their suffering, their death. Because, hey, if we're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life, then we're devaluing and desensitizing life. And in that disconnected state, yeah, we can build factory farms with no windows, destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war. So here's a note to self: The cracks have started to show in our constructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oil and blood, rivers of it.Crucially, we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the Earth and every other living thing. We've just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other — billions of each other. Only we're not living with each other; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.Let's live with each other and take it a breath at a time. If we can get under that heavy self, light a torch of awareness, and find our essence, our connection to the infinite and every other living thing. We knew it from the day we were born. Let's not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness. It's more a reality than the ones our selves have created. Imagine what kind of existence we can have if we honor inevitable death of self, appreciate the privilege of life and marvel at what comes next. Simple awareness is where it begins.Thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thandie_newton_embracing_otherness_embracing_myself
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"This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo. But it's also a fiction. There's a lot of work that went into it after that. And what he's done is he's actually reshaped, digitally, all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones index. So what you see, that precipice, that high precipice with the valley, is the 2008 financial crisis. The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there. I don't know where we are now. This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong. And similar topography. I wonder why.And this is art. This is metaphor. But I think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth, and it's with those teeth that I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math — not just financial math, but math in general. That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it — the world around us and the world inside us. And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real.And I was thinking about this, of all places, on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago, because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary. And I said, ""So what were you doing?""And he said, ""Well we were mostly breaking stealth.""And I said, ""That's a good job. That's interesting. How does that work?"" And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works. And so — this is an over-simplification — but basically, it's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky. It's not just going to disappear. But if you can take this big, massive thing, and you could turn it into a million little things — something like a flock of birds — well then the radar that's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky. And if you're a radar, that's a really bad job.And he said, ""Yeah."" He said, ""But that's if you're a radar. So we didn't use a radar; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals, electronic communication. And whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication, we thought, 'Probably has something to do with the Americans.'""And I said, ""Yeah. That's good. So you've effectively negated 60 years of aeronautic research. What's your act two? What do you do when you grow up?"" And he said, ""Well, financial services."" And I said, ""Oh."" Because those had been in the news lately. And I said, ""How does that work?"" And he said, ""Well there's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now, and I'm one of them."" And I said, ""What's the black box for Wall Street?""And he said, ""It's funny you ask that, because it's actually called black box trading. And it's also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading."" And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had, which is that they're moving these positions — whether it's Proctor & Gamble or Accenture, whatever — they're moving a million shares of something through the market. And if they do that all at once, it's like playing poker and going all in right away. You just tip your hand. And so they have to find a way — and they use algorithms to do this — to break up that big thing into a million little transactions. And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market.So if you need to have some image of what's happening in the stock market right now, what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide, and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act. And all of that's great, and it's fine. And that's 70 percent of the United States stock market, 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension, your mortgage.And what could go wrong? What could go wrong is that a year ago, nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes, and they called it the Flash Crash of 2:45. All of a sudden, nine percent just goes away, and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it, nobody asked for it. Nobody had any control over what was actually happening. All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said, ""Stop.""And that's the thing, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read. And we've rendered something illegible, and we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world that we've made. And we're starting to make our way. There's a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don't know what, and they reach into all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don't understand — which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight.And the gag is that, of course, these aren't just running through the market. You can find these kinds of things wherever you look, once you learn how to look for them. You can find it here: this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon. You may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars. It's out of print — still ... (Laughter) If you had bought it at 1.7, it would have been a bargain. A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling. And the question is: Nobody was buying or selling anything; what was happening? And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street. And when you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other, without any human oversight, without any adult supervision to say, ""Actually, 1.7 million is plenty.""(Laughter)And as with Amazon, so it is with Netflix. And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years. They started with Cinematch, and they've tried a bunch of others — there's Dinosaur Planet; there's Gravity. They're using Pragmatic Chaos now. Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing. It's trying to get a grasp on you, on the firmware inside the human skull, so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next — which is a very, very difficult problem. But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don't really quite have it down, it doesn't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has. Pragmatic Chaos, like all Netflix algorithms, determines, in the end, 60 percent of what movies end up being rented. So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies.But what if you could rate those movies before they get made? Wouldn't that be handy? Well, a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood, and they have ""story algorithms"" — a company called Epagogix. And you can run your script through there, and they can tell you, quantifiably, that that's a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie. And the thing is, is that this isn't Google. This isn't information. These aren't financial stats; this is culture. And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know? What would it look like?And they're in your house. They're in your house. These are two algorithms competing for your living room. These are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means. And you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them, and they're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom. And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched. It's super-real and it's happening around you.You feel it most when you're in a sealed metal box, a new-style elevator; they're called destination-control elevators. These are the ones where you have to press what floor you're going to go to before you get in the elevator. And it uses what's called a bin-packing algorithm. So none of this mishegas of letting everybody go into whatever car they want. Everybody who wants to go to the 10th floor goes into car two, and everybody who wants to go to the third floor goes into car five. And the problem with that is that people freak out. People panic. And you see why. You see why. It's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation, like the buttons. (Laughter) Like the things that people use. All it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says, ""Stop."" And this is what we're designing for. We're designing for this machine dialect. And how far can you take that? How far can you take it? You can take it really, really far.So let me take it back to Wall Street. Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else, which is speed. And they operate on milliseconds and microseconds. And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser. So if you were an algorithm, you'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper — throwing out all the furniture, all the infrastructure for human use, and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in — all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet.And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system. And of course, it is, but it's distributed from places. In New York, this is where it's distributed from: the Carrier Hotel located on Hudson Street. And this is really where the wires come right up into the city. And the reality is that the further away you are from that, you're a few microseconds behind every time. These guys down on Wall Street, Marco Polo and Cherokee Nation, they're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the Carrier Hotel. And that's going to keep happening. We're going to keep hollowing them out, because you, inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could.But if you zoom out, if you zoom out, you would see an 825-mile trench between New York City and Chicago that's been built over the last few years by a company called Spread Networks. This is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse — just for these algorithms, just for the Carnival and the Knife. And when you think about this, that we're running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know, that's a kind of manifest destiny; and we'll always look for a new frontier.Unfortunately, we have our work cut out for us. This is just theoretical. This is some mathematicians at MIT. And the truth is I don't really understand a lot of what they're talking about. It involves light cones and quantum entanglement, and I don't really understand any of that. But I can read this map, and what this map says is that, if you're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are, that's where people are, where the cities are, you're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively. And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean. So that's what we'll do: we'll build bubbles or something, or platforms. We'll actually part the water to pull money out of the air, because it's a bright future if you're an algorithm.(Laughter)And it's not the money that's so interesting actually. It's what the money motivates, that we're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency. And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar's photographs, and you realize that they're not metaphor, they're prophecy. They're prophecy for the kind of seismic, terrestrial effects of the math that we're making. And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird, uneasy collaboration between nature and man. But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms — the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival. And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world
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"It is a dream of mankind to fly like a bird. Birds are very agile. They fly, not with rotating components, so they fly only by flapping their wings. So we looked at the birds, and we tried to make a model that is powerful, ultralight, and it must have excellent aerodynamic qualities that would fly by its own and only by flapping its wings.So what would be better than to use the herring gull, in its freedom, circling and swooping over the sea, and to use this as a role model? So we bring a team together. There are generalists and also specialists in the field of aerodynamics, in the field of building gliders. And the task was to build an ultralight indoor-flying model that is able to fly over your heads. So be careful later on.(Laughter)And this was one issue: to build it that lightweight that no one would be hurt if it fell down.So why do we do all this? We are a company in the field of automation, and we'd like to do very lightweight structures because that's energy efficient, and we'd like to learn more about pneumatics and air flow phenomena.So I now would like you to put your seat belts on and put your hats on. So maybe we'll try it once — to fly a SmartBird.Thank you.(Applause)(Cheers)(Applause)(Applause ends)(Applause)So we can now look at the SmartBird. So here is one without a skin. We have a wingspan of about two meters. The length is one meter and six, and the weight is only 450 grams. And it is all out of carbon fiber. In the middle we have a motor, and we also have a gear in it, and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor. So within the motor, we have three Hall sensors, so we know exactly where the wing is. And if we now beat up and down —(Mechanical sounds)We have the possibility to fly like a bird. So if you go down, you have the large area of propulsion, and if you go up, the wings are not that large, and it is easier to get up.So, the next thing we did, or the challenges we did, was to coordinate this movement. We have to turn it, go up and go down. We have a split wing. With the split wing, we get the lift at the upper wing, and we get the propulsion at the lower wing. Also, we see how we measure the aerodynamic efficiency. We had knowledge about the electromechanical efficiency and then we can calculate the aerodynamic efficiency. So therefore, it rises up from passive torsion to active torsion, from 30 percent up to 80 percent.Next thing we have to do, we have to control and regulate the whole structure. Only if you control and regulate it, you will get that aerodynamic efficiency. So the overall consumption of energy is about 25 watts at takeoff and 16 to 18 watts in flight.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Markus, we should fly it once more.Markus Fischer: Yeah, sure.(Audience) Yeah!(Laughter)(Gasps)(Cheers)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/a_robot_that_flies_like_a_bird
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"The question today is not: Why did we invade Afghanistan? The question is: why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later? Why are we spending $135 billion? Why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground? Why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict? How has this happened? The last 20 years has been the age of intervention, and Afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy. We came out of the end of the Cold War in despair. We faced Rwanda; we faced Bosnia, and then we rediscovered our confidence. In the third act, we went into Bosnia and Kosovo and we seemed to succeed. In the fourth act, with our hubris, our overconfidence developing, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the fifth act, we plunged into a humiliating mess.So the question is: What are we doing? Why are we still stuck in Afghanistan? And the answer, of course, that we keep being given is as follows: we're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9/11, and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security. In the words of President Obama, ""If the Taliban take over again, they will invite back Al-Qaeda, who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can."" The story that we're told is that there was a ""light footprint"" initially — in other words, that we ended up in a situation where we didn't have enough troops, we didn't have enough resources, that Afghans were frustrated — they felt there wasn't enough progress and economic development and security, and therefore the Taliban came back — that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments, but we still didn't put enough troops on the ground. And that it wasn't until 2009, when President Obama signed off on a surge, that we finally had, in the words of Secretary Clinton, ""the strategy, the leadership and the resources."" So, as the president now reassures us, we are on track to achieve our goals.All of this is wrong. Every one of those statements is wrong. Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security. It is extremely unlikely the Taliban would ever be able to take over the country — extremely unlikely they'd be able to seize Kabul. They simply don't have a conventional military option. And even if they were able to do so, even if I'm wrong, it's extremely unlikely the Taliban would invite back Al-Qaeda. From the Taliban's point of view, that was their number one mistake last time. If they hadn't invited back Al-Qaeda, they would still be in power today.And even if I'm wrong about those two things, even if they were able to take back the country, even if they were to invite back Al-Qaeda, it's extremely unlikely that Al-Qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the United States or harm Europe. Because this isn't the 1990s anymore. If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni, we would hit them very hard, and it would be very, very difficult for the Taliban to protect them.Furthermore, it's simply not true that what went wrong in Afghanistan is the light footprint. In my experience, in fact, the light footprint was extremely helpful. And these troops that we brought in — it's a great picture of David Beckham there on the sub-machine gun — made the situation worse, not better. When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002, what I saw was scenes like this. A girl, if you're lucky, in the corner of a dark room — lucky to be able to look at the Koran. But in those early days when we're told we didn't have enough troops and enough resources, we made a lot of progress in Afghanistan. Within a few months, there were two and a half million more girls in school. In Sangin where I was sick in 2002, the nearest health clinic was within three days walk. Today, there are 14 health clinics in that area alone. There was amazing improvements. We went from almost no Afghans having mobile telephones during the Taliban to a situation where, almost overnight, three million Afghans had mobile telephones. And we had progress in the free media. We had progress in elections — all of this with the so-called light footprint.But when we began to bring more money, when we began to invest more resources, things got worse, not better. How? Well first see, if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like Afghanistan where the entire revenue of the Afghan state is one billion dollars a year, you drown everything. It's not simply corruption and waste that you create; you essentially replace the priorities of the Afghan government, the elected Afghan government, with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities. And the same is true for the troops.When I walked across Afghanistan, I stayed with people like this. This is Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj. Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host. He was very generous, like many of the Afghans I stayed with. But he was also considerably more conservative, considerably more anti-foreign, considerably more Islamist than we'd like to acknowledge. This man, for example, Mullah Mustafa, tried to shoot me. And the reason I'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is I was somewhat frightened, and I was too afraid on this occasion to ask him, having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house, why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me. But 18 months later, I asked him why he had tried to shoot me. And Mullah Mustafa — he's the man with the pen and paper — explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph, Nadir Shah had bet him that he couldn't hit me. Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa. It's not; it's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence. But it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it.2005, Anthony Fitzherbert, an agricultural engineer, could travel through Helmand, could stay in Nad Ali, Sangin and Ghoresh, which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place. Today, he could never do that. So the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the Taliban insurgency is mistaken. Rather than preceding the insurgency, the Taliban followed the troop deployment, and as far as I'm concerned, the troop deployment caused their return.Now is this a new idea? No, there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years. I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently, who've traveled to almost every district in the country. Andrew Wilder, for example, born on the Pakistan-Iranian border, served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Paul Fishstein who began working there in 1978 — worked for Save the Children, ran the Afghan research and evaluation unit. These are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making Afghanistan less secure, not more secure — that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work. And yet, nobody listened to them. Instead, there was a litany of astonishing optimism.Beginning in 2004, every general came in saying, ""I've inherited a dismal situation, but finally I have the right resources and the correct strategy, which will deliver,"" in General Barno's word in 2004, the ""decisive year."" Well guess what? It didn't. But it wasn't sufficient to prevent General Abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver, in 2005, the ""decisive year."" Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the ""crunch year."" Or in 2007, the Norwegian deputy foreign minister, Espen Eide, to say that that would deliver the ""decisive year."" Or in 2008, Major General Champoux to come in and say he would deliver the ""decisive year."" Or in 2009, my great friend, General Stanley McChrystal, who said that he was ""knee-deep in the decisive year."" Or in 2010, the U.K. foreign secretary, David Miliband, who said that at last we would deliver the ""decisive year."" And you'll be delighted to hear in 2011, today, that Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, assures us that we are in the ""decisive year.""(Applause)How do we allow any of this to happen? Well the answer, of course, is, if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country, you co-opt almost everybody. Even the aid agencies, who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics, are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security. They're worried, in other words, that if anybody believes that it wasn't such a threat — Oxfam, Save the Children wouldn't get the money to build their hospitals and schools. It's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest. It's very difficult for a politician, because you're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain. You feel deep, deep guilt. You exaggerate your fears, and you're terrified about the humiliation of defeat.What is the solution to this? Well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like Michael Semple, or those other people, who are telling the truth, who know the country, who've spent 30 years on the ground — and most importantly of all, the missing component of this — Afghans themselves, who understand what is going on. We need to somehow get their message to the policymakers. And this is very difficult to do because of our structures.The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government. Very, very sadly, our foreign services, the United Nations, the military in these countries have very little idea of what's going on. The average British soldier is on a tour of only six months; Italian soldiers, on tours of four months; the American military, on tours of 12 months. Diplomats are locked in embassy compounds. When they go out, they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour.In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. And there was not a single Pashto speaker. In the Afghan section in London responsible for governing Afghan policy on the ground, I was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in Afghanistan. So we need to change that institutional culture. And I could make the same points about the United States and the United Nations.Secondly, we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals. We need to make sure that we're a little bit suspicious, that we understand that optimism is in the DNA of the military, that we don't respond to it with quite as much alacrity. And thirdly, we need to have some humility. We need to begin from the position that our knowledge, our power, our legitimacy is limited. This doesn't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster. It isn't.Bosnia and Kosovo were signal successes, great successes. Today when you go to Bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened. It's almost impossible to believe the progress we've made since 1994. Refugee return, which the United Nations High Commission for Refugees thought would be extremely unlikely, has largely happened. A million properties have been returned. Borders between the Bosniak territory and the Bosnian-Serb territory have calmed down. The national army has shrunk. The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden.This has been done by an incredible, principled effort by the international community, and, of course, above all, by Bosnians themselves. But you need to look at context. And this is what we've lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. You need to understand that in those places what really mattered was, firstly, the role of Tudman and Milosevic in coming to the agreement, and then the fact those men went, that the regional situation improved, that the European Union could offer Bosnia something extraordinary: the chance to be part of a new thing, a new club, a chance to join something bigger.And finally, we need to understand that in Bosnia and Kosovo, a lot of the secret of what we did, a lot of the secret of our success, was our humility — was the tentative nature of our engagement. We criticized people a lot in Bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals. We criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees. But that slowness, that caution, the fact that President Clinton initially said that American troops would only be deployed for a year, turned out to be a strength, and it helped us to put our priorities right.One of the saddest things about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we've got our priorities out of sync. We're not matching our resources to our priorities. Because if what we're interested in is terrorism, Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan. If what we're interested in is regional stability, Egypt is far more important. If what we're worried about is poverty and development, sub-Saharan Africa is far more important. This doesn't mean that Afghanistan doesn't matter, but that it's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage.So if I can finish with a metaphor for intervention, what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue. Why mountain rescue? Because when people talk about intervention, they imagine that some scientific theory — the Rand Corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population. This is the wrong way of looking at it. You need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue.When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue, you look for somebody who knows the terrain. It's about context. You understand that you can prepare, but the amount of preparation you can do is limited — you can take some water, you can have a map, you can have a pack. But what really matters is two kinds of problems — problems that occur on the mountain which you couldn't anticipate, such as, for example, ice on a slope, but which you can get around, and problems which you couldn't anticipate and which you can't get around, like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather.And the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain, in every temperature, at every period — a guide who, above all, knows when to turn back, who doesn't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them. What we look for in firemen, in climbers, in policemen, and what we should look for in intervention, is intelligent risk takers — not people who plunge blind off a cliff, not people who jump into a burning room, but who weigh their risks, weigh their responsibilities. Because the worst thing we have done in Afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option. It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable. And if we can resist this crazy slogan, we shall discover — in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, and anywhere else we go in the world — that if we can often do much less than we pretend, we can do much more than we fear.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Rory, you mentioned Libya at the end. Just briefly, what's your take on the current events there and the intervention?Rory Stewart: Okay, I think Libya poses the classic problem. The problem in Libya is that we are always pushing for the black or white. We imagine there are only two choices: either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation. And we are always being tempted up to our neck. We put our toes in and we go up to our neck. What we should have done in Libya is we should have stuck to the U.N. resolution. We should have limited ourselves very, very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in Benghazi. We could have done that. We set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because Gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours. Instead of which, we've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change. In doing so, we've destroyed our credibility with the Security Council, which means it's very difficult to get a resolution on Syria, and we're setting ourselves up again for failure. Once more, humility, limits, honesty, realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of.BG: Rory, thank you very much.RS: Thank you. (BG: Thank you.)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_stewart_time_to_end_the_war_in_afghanistan
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"Cities are the crucible of civilization. They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities. Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy — they're all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where all these problems come from. And the tsunami of problems that we feel we're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet.Here's some numbers. Two hundred years ago, the United States was less than a few percent urbanized. It's now more than 82 percent. The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago. China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years. Now listen to this: Every week for the foreseeable future, until 2050, every week more than a million people are being added to our cities. This is going to affect everything. Everybody in this room, if you stay alive, is going to be affected by what's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon. However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution. Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth and so on. So we have this kind of dual nature. And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities.Now these are my comrades in arms. This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people, and they've done all the work, and I'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together.(Laughter)So here's the problem: This is what we all want. The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this, having things like this, doing things like this, with economies that are growing like this, not realizing that entropy produces things like this, this, this and this. And the question is: Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050, or is it going to be this? That's the question. I must say, many of the indicators look like this is what it's going to look like, but let's talk about it.So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities. And scientific theory means quantifiable — relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework. That's the quest. Is that conceivable? Are there universal laws? So here's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem. The first is: Are cities part of biology? Is London a great big whale? Is Edinburgh a horse? Is Microsoft a great big anthill? What do we learn from that? We use them metaphorically — the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on — is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it? And if that is the case, how come that it's very hard to kill a city? You could drop an atom bomb on a city, and 30 years later it's surviving. Very few cities fail. All companies die, all companies. And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust.So is that just another version of this? Well we understand this very well. That is, you ask any generic question about this — how many trees of a given size, how many branches of a given size does a tree have, how many leaves, what is the energy flowing through each branch, what is the size of the canopy, what is its growth, what is its mortality? We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions. And the idea is can we do the same for this? So the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life, is that it is scalable, it works over an extraordinary range. This is just a tiny range actually: It's us mammals; we're one of these. The same principles, the same dynamics, the same organization is at work in all of these, including us, and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size. And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust — scalability. We're going to discuss that in a moment more.But you know, at a local level, you scale; everybody in this room is scaled. That's called growth. Here's how you grew. Rat, that's a rat — could have been you. We're all pretty much the same. And you see, you're very familiar with this. You grow very quickly and then you stop. And that line there is a prediction from the same theory, based on the same principles, that describes that forest. And here it is for the growth of a rat, and those points on there are data points. This is just the weight versus the age. And you see, it stops growing. Very, very good for biology — also one of the reasons for its great resilience. Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm. This is what we believe. This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us, particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner: hockey sticks. This is a bunch of software companies — and what it is is their revenue versus their age — all zooming away, and everybody making millions and billions of dollars.Okay, so how do we understand this? So let's first talk about biology. This is explicitly showing you how things scale, and this is a truly remarkable graph. What is plotted here is metabolic rate — how much energy you need per day to stay alive — versus your weight, your mass, for all of us bunch of organisms. And it's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10, otherwise you couldn't get everything on the graph. And what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line. Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe, there's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this. It's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms, each subsystem, each cell type, each gene, has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history. And yet, despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection, they've been constrained to lie on a line.Something else is going on. Before I talk about that, I've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve, this straight line. It's three-quarters, roughly, which is less than one — and we call that sublinear. And here's the point of that. It says that, if it were linear, the steepest slope, then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy. But it's sublinear, and what that translates into is that, if you double the size of the organism, you actually only need 75 percent more energy. So a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale. The bigger you are systematically, according to very well-defined rules, less energy per capita. Now any physiological variable you can think of, any life history event you can think of, if you plot it this way, looks like this. There is an extraordinary regularity. So you tell me the size of a mammal, I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology, life history, etc.And the reason for this is because of networks. All of life is controlled by networks — from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level. And you're very familiar with these networks. That's a little thing that lives inside an elephant. And here's the summary of what I'm saying. If you take those networks, this idea of networks, and you apply universal principles, mathematizable, universal principles, all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow, including the description of the forest, the description of your circulatory system, the description within cells. One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that, systematically, the pace of life decreases as you get bigger. Heart rates are slower; you live longer; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower, etc.The question is: Is any of this true for cities and companies? So is London a scaled up Birmingham, which is a scaled up Brighton, etc., etc.? Is New York a scaled up San Francisco, which is a scaled up Santa Fe? Don't know. We will discuss that. But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you. Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals. Here's just a symbolic picture of that. And here's scaling of cities. This shows that in this very simple example, which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size — plotted in the same way as the biology — you see exactly the same kind of thing.There is a scaling. That is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size. The slope of that is less than linear. There is an economy of scale. Less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are — not surprising. But here's what's surprising. It scales in the same way everywhere. This is just European countries, but you do it in Japan or China or Colombia, always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree. And any infrastructure you look at — whether it's the length of roads, length of electrical lines — anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way. It's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on. But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities, quantities that have no analog in biology, that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago. The top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way. And the bottom one is you lot — super-creatives plotted in the same way. And what you see is a scaling phenomenon. But most important in this, the exponent, the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate, is bigger than one — it's about 1.15 to 1.2. Here it is, which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita, unlike biology — higher wages, more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger, more patents per capita, more crime per capita.And we've looked at everything: more AIDS cases, flu, etc. And here, they're all plotted together. Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP — GDP of the city — crime and patents all on one graph. And you can see, they all follow the same line. And here's the statement. If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of. It goes up by 15 percent, and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure. This, no doubt, is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities. Because they think that all those wonderful things — like creative people, wealth, income — is what attracts them, forgetting about the ugly and the bad.What is the reason for this? Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon. This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet — Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter. Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently. Something universal is going on. The universality, to repeat, is us — that we are the city. And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions. So there it is, I've said it again. So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure, unlike biology, which had sublinear scaling, economies of scale, you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger. If it's social networks with super-linear scaling — more per capita — then the theory says that you increase the pace of life. The bigger you are, life gets faster. On the left is the heart rate showing biology. On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase.Lastly, I want to talk about growth. This is what we had in biology, just to repeat. Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior. You grow fast and then stop — part of our resilience. That would be bad for economies and cities. And indeed, one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation, then indeed you get, from the same theory, a beautiful rising exponential curve — lovely. And in fact, if you compare it to data, it fits very well with the development of cities and economies. But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse. And it's destined to collapse for many reasons — kind of Malthusian reasons — that you run out of resources. And how do you avoid that? Well we've done it before.What we do is, as we grow and we approach the collapse, a major innovation takes place and we start over again, and we start over again as we approach the next one, and so on. So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse. The catch, however, to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster. So the image is that we're not only on a treadmill that's going faster, but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster. We have to accelerate on a continuous basis. And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack?So lastly, I'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies. See companies, they scale. The top one, in fact, is Walmart on the right. It's the same plot. This happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees. We could use sales, anything you like. There it is: after some little fluctuations at the beginning, when companies are innovating, they scale beautifully. And we've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States, may I say. And I'm only showing you a little bit of this.What is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology, indicating that they're dominated, not by super-linear innovation and ideas; they become dominated by economies of scale. In that interpretation, by bureaucracy and administration, and they do it beautifully, may I say. So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart. If it has this sublinear scaling, the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth. There's Walmart. Doesn't look very sigmoidal. That's what we like, hockey sticks. But you notice, I've cheated, because I've only gone up to '94. Let's go up to 2008. That red line is from the theory. So if I'd have done this in 1994, I could have predicted what Walmart would be now. And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies. There they are. That's 23,000 companies. They all start looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations
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"I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life. But I want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man. This is Hermann Goering. Goering was Hitler's second in command in World War II, his designated successor. And like Hitler, Goering fancied himself a collector of art. He went through Europe, through World War II, stealing, extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection. And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer. Hitler had two of them, and he didn't have any. So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars. And it was his favorite artwork ever.World War II came to an end, and Goering was captured, tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death. Then the Allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him. And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren. Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason, which is itself punishable by death. Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren confessed. But he didn't confess to treason. He said, ""I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi. I painted it myself; I'm a forger."" Now nobody believed him. And he said, ""I'll prove it. Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi. I also need alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I can work."" (Laughter) So they brought him in. He painted a beautiful Vermeer. And then the charges of treason were dropped. He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a year sentence and died a hero to the Dutch people. There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg.Now Goering was, by all accounts, a terrible man. Even for a Nazi, he was a terrible man. His American interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath. But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery. According to his biographer, ""He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world."" (Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards. He had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that. It looked the same, but it had a different origin, it was a different artwork.It wasn't just him who was in for a shock. Once van Meegeren was on trial, he couldn't stop talking. And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists. In particular, ""The Supper at Emmaus"" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work — people would come [from] all over the world to see it — was actually a forgery. It was not that painting, but that painting. And when that was discovered, it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum.Why does this matter? I'm a psychologists — why do origins matter so much? Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from? Well there's an answer that many people would give. Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status. Among other things, if you want to show off how rich you are, how powerful you are, it's always better to own an original than a forgery because there's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries. I don't doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there's something else going on. I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is. I want to suggest that this is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things.So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep — and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences. So take food. Would you eat this? Well, a good answer is, ""It depends. What is it?"" Some of you would eat it if it's pork, but not beef. Some of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork. Few of you would eat it if it's a rat or a human. Some of you would eat it only if it's a strangely colored piece of tofu. That's not so surprising.But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating. So one demonstration of this was done with young children. How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk — to think they taste better? It's simple, you tell them they're from McDonald's. They believe McDonald's food is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier.How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? It's very simple: pour it from an expensive bottle. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist. They get people into a fMRI scanner, and while they're lying there, through a tube, they get to sip wine. In front of them on a screen is information about the wine. Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine. But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree. It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way.Or take sex. These are stimuli I've used in some of my studies. And if you simply show people these pictures, they'll say these are fairly attractive people. But how attractive you find them, how sexually or romantically moved you are by them, rests critically on who you think you're looking at. You probably think the picture on the left is male, the one on the right is female. If that belief turns out to be mistaken, it will make a difference. (Laughter) It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are. It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter, your mother or father. Knowing somebody's your kin typically kills the libido. Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.(Laughter)A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion. Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates. Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic. People have murdered those that they loved, believing that they were murdering an imposter. But there's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending. This was recorded in 1931. ""Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover."" But that was before she got Capgras syndrome. After she got it, ""She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome and aristocratic."" Of course, it was the same man, but she was seeing him in different ways.As a third example, consider consumer products. So one reason why you might like something is its utility. You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you. But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history. The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction. The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars. And in fact, there's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people. (Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all. According to an unconfirmed report, a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes. They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago.(Applause)Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects. Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in that it has value because of its history — maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child's baby shoes — so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back. You could get something that looked like it or felt like it, but you couldn't get the same object back. With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck, we've looked to see what sort of factors, what sort of history, matters for the objects that people like. So in one of our experiments, we asked people to name a famous person who they adored, a living person they adored.So one answer was George Clooney. Then we asked them, ""How much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater?"" And the answer is a fair amount — more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn't adore. Then we asked other groups of subjects — we gave them different restrictions and different conditions. So for instance, we told some people, ""Look, you can buy the sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it, and you can't resell it."" That drops the value of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we like it. But what really causes an effect is you tell people, ""Look, you could resell it, you could boast about it, but before it gets to you, it's thoroughly washed."" That causes a huge drop in the value. As my wife put it, ""You've washed away the Clooney cooties.""(Laughter)So let's go back to art. I would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall. If people want to get me something at the end of the conference, you could buy me a Chagall. But I don't want a duplicate, even if I can't tell the difference. That's not because, or it's not simply because, I'm a snob and want to boast about having an original. Rather, it's because I want something that has a specific history. In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed. The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book ""The Art Instinct"" makes the case that, ""The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation."" And that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery. They may look alike, but they have a different history. The original is typically the product of a creative act, the forgery isn't. I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art.This is a work by Jackson Pollock. Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock? Okay. Who here, it does nothing for them? They just don't like it. I'm not going to make a claim about who's right, but I will make an empirical claim about people's intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so than the people who don't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy. I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars — in large part because she's a very young artist.This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old. The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting. And they then reported that her father was coaching her. When this came out on television, the value of her art dropped to nothing. It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed.I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music. This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist. And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment. The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell? So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. And here's a brief clip of this. (Violin music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars. Not bad. It's also not good. Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell. He actually made 20 dollars more than that, but he didn't count it. Because this woman comes up — you see at the end of the video — she comes up. She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair. So she's stunned that he's standing in a subway station. So she's struck with pity. She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20.(Laughter)(Applause)The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, ""4'33""."" As many of you know, this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds — that period of silence. And people have different views on this. But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes. (Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence.(Laughter)Now I've been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I've said applies as well to pain. And how you think about what you're experiencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine. And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks. So it was a series of five painful shocks. Half of them are told that they're being given the shocks by somebody in another room, but the person in the other room doesn't know they're giving them shocks. There's no malevolence, they're just pressing a button. The first shock is recorded as very painful. The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. The third drops, the fourth, the fifth. The pain gets less. In the other condition, they're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose — knows they're shocking them. The first shock hurts like hell. The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose.The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure. Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it — as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides. The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, ""The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.""And I'll end with that. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure
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"Well after many years working in trade and economics, four years ago, I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability. And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can't even obtain a meal. This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian. And I carry this around as a symbol, really, of the challenge and also the hope. Because one cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning, about a billion people on Earth — or one out of every seven — woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. One out of every seven people.First, I'll ask you: Why should you care? Why should we care? For most people, if they think about hunger, they don't have to go far back on their own family history — maybe in their own lives, or their parents' lives, or their grandparents' lives — to remember an experience of hunger. I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience. Some are driven by compassion, feel it's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity. As Gandhi said, ""To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of God."" Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world. We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight. The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history. One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food.Others think about Malthusian nightmares. Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades? This is not a negotiable thing, hunger. People have to eat. There's going to be a lot of people. This is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain. But I actually came to this issue in a different way. This is a picture of me and my three children. In 1987, I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television. And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia. One two years earlier had killed more than a million people. But it never struck me as it did that moment, because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby, and she had no milk to nurse. And the baby's cry really penetrated me, as a mother. And I thought, there's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food — the most fundamental expectation of every human being. And it was at that moment that I just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem.This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for. We know how to fix hunger. A hundred years ago, we didn't. We actually have the technology and systems. And I was just struck that this is out of place. At our time in history, these images are out of place. Well guess what? This is last week in northern Kenya. Yet again, the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day. In fact, what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger. This is more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. And we know that the issue is not just production of food.One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug, my hero. But today I'm going to talk about access to food, because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis, there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories. So why is it that we have a billion people who can't find food? And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge. In 2008, Lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days — from conception to two years old — does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible. Their brains and bodies will be stunted. And here you see a brain scan of two children — one who had adequate nutrition, another, neglected and who was deeply malnourished. And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children. And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don't form. And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies, which I'll talk about later. But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years.So this burden of knowledge drives me. Because actually we know how to fix it very simply. And yet, in many places, a third of the children, by the time they're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this. I'd like to talk about some of the things I've seen on the front lines of hunger, some of the things I've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector. I'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is.Well first, I'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth, breastfeeding. You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life. But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively. In Mauritania, less than three percent. This is something that can be transformed with knowledge. This message, this word, can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business; it's a brilliant way of saving your child's life. And so today we focus on not just passing out food, but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment, and teaching them about breastfeeding.The second thing I'd like to talk about: If you were living in a remote village somewhere, your child was limp, and you were in a drought, or you were in floods, or you were in a situation where there wasn't adequate diversity of diet, what would you do? Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars, like we can, and pick the right one to match? Well I find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count. And I go to those shops, if there are any, or out to the fields to see what they can get, and they cannot obtain the nutrition. Even if they know what they need to do, it's not available.And I'm very excited about this, because one thing we're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops. And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs. It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as, what I call, food for humanity. We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan — really about three of them. But this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this. One package, 17 cents a day — their malnutrition is overcome. So I am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods. And this is climate-proof. It doesn't need to be refrigerated, it doesn't need water, which is often lacking. And these types of technologies, I see, have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition, malnutrition out on the front lines.The next thing I want to talk about is school feeding. Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. When disaster strikes — the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things — there is nothing to fall back on. And usually the institutions — churches, temples, other things — do not have the resources to provide a safety net. What we have found working with the World Bank is that the poor man's safety net, the best investment, is school feeding. And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers, you have a transformative effect. Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal. But when that food is there, it's transformative. It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life.But what is most amazing is the effect on girls. In countries where girls don't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school, we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys. We see a transformation in attendance by girls. And there was no argument, because it's incentive. Families need the help. And we find that if we keep girls in school later, they'll stay in school until they're 16, and won't get married if there's food in school. Or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week — it costs about 50 cents — will keep a girl in school, and they'll give birth to a healthier child, because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation.We know that there's boom and bust cycles of hunger. We know this. Right now on the Horn of Africa, we've been through this before. So is this a hopeless cause? Absolutely not. I'd like to talk about what I call our warehouses for hope. Cameroon, northern Cameroon, boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades. Food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons. Well two years ago, we decided, let's transform the model of fighting hunger, and instead of giving out the food aid, we put it into food banks. And we said, listen, during the lean season, take the food out. You manage, the village manages these warehouses. And during harvest, put it back with interest, food interest. So add in five percent, 10 percent more food. For the past two years, 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid — they're self-sufficient. And the food banks are growing. And they're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village. But they've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources. I love this idea that came from the village level: three keys to unlock that warehouse. Food is gold there. And simple ideas can transform the face, not of small areas, of big areas of the world.I'd like to talk about what I call digital food. Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine. Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize for saying, ""Guess what, famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it."" We certainly saw that in 2008. We're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year. Food can be there and people can't buy it.Well this picture — I was in Hebron in a small shop, this shop, where instead of bringing in food, we provide digital food, a card. It says ""bon appetit"" in Arabic. And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items. They have to be nutritious, and they have to be locally produced. And what's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry — where this card's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus — the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent. The shopkeepers are hiring more people. It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving. We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways.Perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that Bill Gates, Howard Buffett and others have supported boldly, which is to ask the question: What if, instead of looking at the hungry as victims — and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families — what if we view them as the solution, as the value chain to fight hunger? What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food — there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with — what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere? And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries. And guess what? In virtually every case, when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market — if you say, ""We will buy 300 metric tons of this. We'll pick it up. We'll make sure it's stored properly."" — their yields have gone up two-, three-, fourfold and they figure it out, because it's the first guaranteed opportunity they've had in their life. And we're seeing people transform their lives. Today, food aid, our food aid — huge engine — 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world. Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food.Now you'd ask, can this be done at scale? These are great ideas, village-level ideas. Well I'd like to talk about Brazil, because I've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years, when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now. And what I've found is, rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things, they invested in a school feeding program. And they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity. And they're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day. And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty. It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil, and it's at scale, and it's creating opportunities. I've gone out there; I've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this.Now if we look at the economic imperative here, this isn't just about compassion. The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger — the cost to society, the burden it has to bear — is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year. And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year. Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars — 10.3 — to address malnutrition in those countries. You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity.The amazing thing I've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader. When a leader says, ""Not under my watch,"" everything begins to change. And the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this. And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important. Because food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person, nation by nation. We have to stand together. And we're seeing nations in Africa. WFP's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations.What I would like to offer here is a challenge. I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, ""No more. No more are we going to accept this."" And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/josette_sheeran_ending_hunger_now
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"We are losing our listening. We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it. We retain just 25 percent of what we hear. Now — not you, not this talk, but that is generally true.(Laughter)Let's define listening as making meaning from sound. It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction.We use some pretty cool techniques to do this. One of them is pattern recognition. (Crowd noises) So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, ""David, Sara, pay attention"" — some of you just sat up. We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name. Differencing is another technique we use. If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, (Pink noise) you would literally cease to hear it. We listen to differences; we discount sounds that remain the same.And then there is a whole range of filters. These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to. Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters. But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now. I'll give you one example of that. Intention is very important in sound, in listening. When I married my wife, I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time. Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.(Laughter)But it's a great intention to have in a relationship.(Laughter)But that's not all. Sound places us in space and in time. If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces; you're aware of how many people are around you, because of the micro-noises you're receiving. And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it. In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future. So, ""Sonority is time and meaning"" — a great quote.I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening. Why did I say that? Well, there are a lot of reasons for this. First of all, we invented ways of recording — first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well. The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared. Secondly, the world is now so noisy, (Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen. Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles. In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.We're becoming impatient. We don't want oratory anymore; we want sound bites. And the art of conversation is being replaced — dangerously, I think — by personal broadcasting. I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the UK. We're becoming desensitized. Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention. And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated.This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening. This is not trivial, because listening is our access to understanding. Conscious listening always creates understanding, and only without conscious listening can these things happen. A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed. So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening. Would you like that?Audience: Yes!Good. The first one is silence. Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate, so that you can hear the quiet again. If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine.Second, I call this ""the mixer."" (Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this — and we all spend a lot of time in places like this — listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear? How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to? You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake. How many birds am I hearing? Where are they? Where are those ripples? It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening.Third, this exercise I call ""savoring,"" and this is a beautiful exercise. It's about enjoying mundane sounds. This, for example, is my tumble dryer.(Dryer)It's a waltz — one, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three. I love it! Or just try this one on for size.(Coffee grinder)Wow! So, mundane sounds can be really interesting — if you pay attention. I call that the ""hidden choir"" — it's around us all the time.The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these, if you just take one thing away. This is listening positions — the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to. This is playing with those filters. Remember I gave you those filters? It's starting to play with them as levers, to get conscious about them and to move to different places. These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use. There are many. Have fun with that. It's very exciting.And finally, an acronym. You can use this in listening, in communication. If you're in any one of those roles — and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk — the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for ""juice"" or ""essence."" And RASA stands for ""Receive,"" which means pay attention to the person; ""Appreciate,"" making little noises like ""hmm,"" ""oh,"" ""OK""; ""Summarize"" — the word ""so"" is very important in communication; and ""Ask,"" ask questions afterwards.Now sound is my passion, it's my life. I wrote a whole book about it. So I live to listen. That's too much to ask for most people. But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully — connected in space and in time to the physical world around us, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart.That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill. Why is it not taught? It's crazy. And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about, and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time, or at least capable of doing it.Now, I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything. So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other, take this mission out. And let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious, listening world — a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace.Thank you for listening to me today.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_5_ways_to_listen_better
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"By the end of this year, there'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites. The one thing that all of them have in common is that they're going to die. While that might be a somewhat morbid thought, I think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring.What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller, who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer. And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died. Here's what he wrote in starting that out. He said, ""Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote — the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.""Now, while as a journalist, Miller's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most, the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that's something completely different than anything that's been created by any previous generation.Consider a few stats for a moment. Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day. And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month. So when you think about your parents or your grandparents, at best they may have created some photos or home videos, or a diary that lives in a box somewhere. But today we're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that's going to live in the cloud indefinitely, years after we're gone. And I think that's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists.Now to be clear, I'm a journalist and not a technologist, so what I'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like. Now we're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die. One of them actually, fittingly enough, found me when I checked into a deli at a restaurant in New York on foursquare.(Recording) Adam Ostrow: Hello. Death: Adam? AO: Yeah. Death: Death can catch you anywhere, anytime, even at the Organic. AO: Who is this? Death: Go to ifidie.net before it's too late.(Laughter)Adam Ostrow: Kind of creepy, right? So what that service does, quite simply, is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die. Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories. And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones, complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die. But what I think comes next is far more interesting.Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy who, back in March, demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video. I think as machines' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve, it's going to become possible to analyze an entire life's worth of content — the Tweets, the photos, the videos, the blog posts — that we're producing in such massive numbers. And I think as that happens, it's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we're creating and technology's ability to make sense of it all.Now we're already starting to see some experiments here. One service called My Next Tweet analyzes your entire Twitter stream, everything you've posted onto Twitter, to make some predictions as to what you might say next. Well right now, as you can see, the results can be somewhat comical. You can imagine what something like this might look like five, 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve. Taking it a step further, MIT's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans. But what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime?Finally, think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States, where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper. What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms — interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive? I think that's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we're producing and technology's ability to understand it both expand exponentially. Now in closing, I think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality — and if so, what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status_update
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"Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide? And these are base stations. And we also have more than five billion of these devices here. These are cellular mobile phones. And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month. This is a 6 with 14 zeroes — a very large number. And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water. We use it everyday. We use it in our everyday lives now — in our private lives, in our business lives. And we even have to be asked sometimes, very kindly, to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons. And it's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has, because it's so fundamental to our lives.And one of the issues is capacity. The way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves — in particular, radio waves. And radio waves are limited. They are scarce; they are expensive; and we only have a certain range of it. And it's this limitation that doesn't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month. And we are simply running out of spectrum. There's another problem. That is efficiency. These 1.4 million cellular radio masts, or base stations, consume a lot of energy. And mind you, most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves, it is used to cool the base stations. Then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent. And that creates a big problem. Then there's another issue that you're all aware of. You have to switch off your mobile phone during flights. In hospitals, they are security issues. And security is another issue. These radio waves penetrate through walls. They can be intercepted, and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions.So these are the main four issues. But on the other hand, we have 14 billion of these: light bulbs, light. And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. So let's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, where we have gamma rays. You don't want to get close to gamma rays, it could be dangerous. X-rays, useful when you go to hospitals. Then there's ultraviolet light. it's good for a nice suntan, but otherwise dangerous for the human body. Infrared — due to eye safety regulations, can be only used with low power. And then we have the radio waves, they have the issues I've just mentioned. And in the middle there, we have this visible light spectrum. It's light, and light has been around for many millions of years. And in fact, it has created us, has created life, has created all the stuff of life. So it's inherently safe to use. And wouldn't it be great to use that for wireless communications?Not only that, I compared [it to] the entire spectrum. I compared the radio waves spectrum — the size of it — with the size of the visible light spectrum. And guess what? We have 10,000 times more of that spectrum, which is there for us to use. So not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum, let's compare that with a number I've just mentioned. We have 1.4 million expensively deployed, inefficient radio cellular base stations. And multiply that by 10,000, then you end up at 14 billion. 14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already. So we have the infrastructure there. Look at the ceiling, you see all these light bulbs. Go to the main floor, you see these light bulbs.Can we use them for communications? Yes. What do we need to do? The one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs, florescent lights, with this new technology of LED, LED light bulbs. An LED is a semiconductor. It's an electronic device. And it has a very nice acute property. Its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds, and it can be switched off at very high speeds. And this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology. So let's show how we do that. Let's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum — go to remote controls. You all know remote controls have an infrared LED — basically you switch on the LED, and if it's off, you switch it off. And it creates a simple, low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second, 20,000 bits per second. Not usable for a YouTube video.What we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb. We transmit with our technology, not only a single data stream, we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel, at even higher speeds. And the technology we have developed — it's called SIM OFDM. And it's spacial modulation — these are the only technical terms, I'm not going into details — but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data.You will say, ""Okay, this is nice — a slide created in 10 minutes."" But not only that. What we've done is we have also developed a demonstrator. And I'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator. And what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp. We fit in an LED light bulb, worth three U.S. dollars, put in our signal processing technology. And then what we have here is a little hole. And the light goes through that hole. There's a receiver. The receiver will convert these little, subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal. And that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream. In the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones. And not only integrate a photo detector here, but maybe use the camera inside.So what happens when I switch on that light? As you would expect, it's a light, a desk lamp. Put your book beneath it and you can read. It's illuminating the space. But at the same time, you see this video coming up here. And that's a video, a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam. You're critical. You think, ""Ha, ha, ha. This is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here."" But let me do this.(Applause)Once again. Still don't believe? It is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream. And if you look at the light, it is illuminating as you would expect. You don't notice with your human eye. You don't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude that we impress onto this light bulb. It's serving the purpose of illumination, but at the same time, we are able to transmit this data. And you see, even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver. It can ignore that constant light, because all the receiver's interested in are subtle changes. You also have a critical question now, and you say, ""Okay, do I have to have the light on all the time to have this working?"" And the answer is yes. But, you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off. And you are still able to transmit data — that's possible.So I've mentioned to you the four challenges. Capacity: We have 10,000 times more spectrum, 10,000 times more LEDs installed already in the infrastructure there. You would agree with me, hopefully, there's no issue of capacity anymore. Efficiency: This is data through illumination — it's first of all an illumination device. And if you do the energy budget, the data transmission comes for free — highly energy efficient. I don't mention the high energy efficiency of these LED light bulbs. If the whole world would deploy them, you would save hundreds of power plants. That's aside.And then I've mentioned the availability. You will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital. You need to see what to do. You have lights in an aircraft. So it's everywhere in a day there is light. Look around. Everywhere. Look at your smart phone. It has a flashlight, an LED flashlight. These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission.And then there's security. You would agree with me that light doesn't penetrate through walls. So no one, if I have a light here, if I have secure data, no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data. And there's only data where there is light. So if I don't want that receiver to receive the data, then what I could do, turn it away. So the data goes in that direction, not there anymore. Now we can in fact see where the data is going to.So for me, the applications of it, to me, are beyond imagination at the moment. We have had a century of very nice, smart application developers. And you only have to notice, where we have light, there is a potential way to transmit data. But I can give you a few examples. Well you may see the impact already now. This is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean. And they use light to illuminate space down there. And this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things [use] to communicate with each other.Intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant — you can't use RF, it may generate antenna sparks, but you can use light — you see plenty of light there. In hospitals, for new medical instruments; in streets for traffic control. Cars have LED-based headlights, LED-based back lights, and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information. Traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on. And then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world. And every street lamp could be a free access point. We call it, in fact, a Li-Fi, light-fidelity. And then we have these aircraft cabins. There are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin, and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data. So you could enjoy your most favorite TED video on your long flight back home. Online life. So that is a vision, I think, that is possible.So, all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device. And this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission. And it's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days. And in the future, you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs, you may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide — for a cleaner, a greener, and even a brighter future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_wireless_data_from_every_light_bulb
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"Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. It's just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound.And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests. Languages are genes talking, getting things that they want. And just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth.Now language's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can't read, phrases you can't use and words you can't say. In fact, the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language. According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven. Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages — confused them by giving them different languages. And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating. Even today, we know that there are words we cannot use, phrases we cannot say, because if we do so, we might be accosted, jailed, or even killed. And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths.Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there's something worth explaining. And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species? Now it's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees. Now these chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence. But if they really were intelligent, why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel? And if they really were intelligent, why would they crack open nuts with a rock? Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them? Why not? I mean, that's what we do.Now the reason the chimpanzees don't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. As a result, they can't improve on others' ideas or learn from others' mistakes — benefit from others' wisdom. And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts.Now this may sound arrogant, or even full of hubris. How do we know this? Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did. These upright apes evolved on the African savanna about two million years ago, and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands. But if we look at the fossil record, we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years. You can follow it through the fossil record. Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change. It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning. Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia.Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, ""monkey see, monkey do,"" the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that — at least not very much. And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it — something from a Barnum & Bailey circus.But by comparison, we can learn. We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do. We can then choose, from among a range of options, the best one. We can benefit from others' ideas. We can build on their wisdom. And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses. And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives. I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. And all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation. The chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this auditorium, my microphone, the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you — all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation.Now to many commentators, cumulative cultural adaptation, or social learning, is job done, end of story. Our species can make stuff, therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has. In fact, we can even make the ""stuff of life"" — as I just said, all the stuff around us. But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story. Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma, the resolution of which, it's fair to say, would determine not only the future course of our psychology, but the future course of the entire world. And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language.And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft. If I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them. If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish, or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better, or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch, I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills, and maybe even catch that fish before you do. Social learning really is visual theft. And in any species that acquired it, it would behoove you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you.And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis. And we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring. One of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups. Because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives. Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago. And this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas, there are fewer innovations. And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck. So if we'd chosen that path, our evolutionary path would have led into the forest — and been a short one indeed.The other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others. Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own. Well, we chose the second option, and language is the result.Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft. Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation — for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities. And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings. Just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit, language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit. And we take this utterly for granted, because we're a species that is so at home with language,but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language. And to see why, consider two scenarios from early in our evolution. Let's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads, but you're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached. Two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts, but they're hopeless at making the arrowheads. So what you do is — one of those people has not really acquired language yet. And let's pretend the other one is good at language skills.So what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads, and you walk up to the one that can't speak very well, and you put the arrowheads down in front of him, hoping that he'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows. But he looks at the pile of arrowheads, thinks they're a gift, picks them up, smiles and walks off. Now you pursue this guy, gesticulating. A scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads. Okay, now replay this scene now, and you're approaching the one who has language. You put down your arrowheads and say, ""I'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows. I'll split you 50/50."" The other one says, ""Fine. Looks good to me. We'll do that."" Now the job is done.Once we have language, we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn't have before we acquired it. And this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos, languishing. That's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites. All right, if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true, any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity. And this is exactly what the archeological record shows.If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world. But when our species arose about 200,000 years ago, sometime after that we quickly walked out of Africa and spread around the entire world, occupying nearly every habitat on Earth. Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs. And so we prospered in a way that no other animal has. Language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved. It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised.Language really is the voice of our genes. Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre. As we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages. Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth. Now you might say, well, this is just natural. As we diverge, our languages are naturally going to diverge. But the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on Earth is found where people are most tightly packed together.If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea, we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages, different human languages, spoken on that island alone. There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles. Now, incredible as this sounds, I once met a Papuan man, and I asked him if this could possibly be true. And he said to me, ""Oh no. They're far closer together than that."" And it's true; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile. And this is also true of some remote oceanic islands.And so it seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside. And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups. They slow the flow of technologies. And they even slow the flow of genes. Now I can't speak for you, but it seems to be the case that we don't have sex with people we can't talk to. (Laughter) Now we have to counter that, though, against the evidence we've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.(Laughter)Okay, this tendency we have, this seemingly natural tendency we have, towards isolation, towards keeping to ourselves, crashes head first into our modern world. This remarkable image is not a map of the world. In fact, it's a map of Facebook friendship links. And when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude, it literally draws a map of the world. Our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past. And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden. Because these different languages impose a barrier, as we've just seen, to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom. And they impose a barrier to cooperation.And nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the European Union, whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages. The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages. That's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone. Now think of the absurdity of this situation. If 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table, speaking their 23 languages, some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities. The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators. And in 2007 alone — and I'm sure there are more recent figures — something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone.And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question. And that question is whether in this modern, globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages.To put it this way, nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist. One of them always drives the other extinct. And we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization. There are lots and lots of ways of measuring things — weighing them and measuring their length — but the metric system is winning. There are lots and lots of ways of measuring time, but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world. There are many, many ways of imprinting CDs or DVDs, but those are all being standardized as well. And you can probably think of many, many more in your own everyday lives.And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma. And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases. And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity, his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language.Thank you.(Applause)Matt Ridley: Mark, one question. Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us. Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language?Mark Pagel: This is a very good question. So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language. The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is — here's a simple analogy: Ferraris are cars that have engines. My car has an engine, but it's not a Ferrari. Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don't, all by themselves, determine the outcome of very complicated things like language. What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths — who knows. But that doesn't tell us they necessarily had language.MR: Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_pagel_how_language_transformed_humanity
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"Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms. Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us. What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors? Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems. And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures. The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment. And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us.We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here — environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning. Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health. At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air. And we looked at three different types of rooms. We looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated, which are the data points in the blue. We looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated, where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable, but they made them operable for our study. And we also sampled the outdoor air.If you look at the x-axis of this graph, you'll see that what we commonly want to do — which is keeping the outdoors out — we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation. So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types. But if you look at the blue data points, which is mechanically ventilated air, it's not as diverse. But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health. If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors.So to understand why this was the case, we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram, which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples. The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart. And the first things that you can see from this graph is, if you look at the blue data points, which are the mechanically ventilated air, they're not simply a subset of the green data points, which are the outdoor air.What we've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans. It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth, our spit. And this is because we're all constantly shedding microbes. So all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another. And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt.Why does this matter? It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States. Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings. And the model that we're working with in hospitals, and also with many, many different buildings, is to keep the outdoors out. And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health. And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections, or hospital-acquired infections, this is a clue that it's a good time to reconsider our current practices.So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors. I've heard somebody say that you're as healthy as your gut. And for this reason, many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora. And what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_green_are_we_filtering_the_wrong_microbes
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"So today, I want us to reflect on the demise of guys. Guys are flaming out academically; they're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women. Other than that, there's not much of a problem. So what's the data? So the data on dropping out is amazing. Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school. There's a 10 percent differential between getting BA's and all graduate programs, with guys falling behind girls. Two-thirds of all students in special ed. remedial programs are guys. And as you all know, boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder — and therefore we drug them with Ritalin.What's the evidence of wiping out? First, it's a new fear of intimacy. Intimacy means physical, emotional connection with somebody else — and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous, contradictory, phosphorescent signals. (Laughter) And every year there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students. And we're seeing a steady increase among males. And this is two kinds. It's a social awkwardness. The old shyness was a fear of rejection. It's a social awkwardness like you're a stranger in a foreign land. They don't know what to say, they don't know what to do, especially one-on-one [with the] opposite sex. They don't know the language of face contact, the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else.There's something I'm developing here called social intensity syndrome, which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating. It turns out, from earliest childhood, boys, and then men, prefer the company of guys — physical company. And there's actually a cortical arousal we're looking at, because guys have been with guys in teams, in clubs, in gangs, in fraternities, especially in the military, and then in pubs. And this peaks at Super Bowl Sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers, rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom. The problem is they now prefer [the] asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships.What are the causes? Well, it's an unintended consequence. I think it's excessive Internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography. The problem is these are arousal addictions. Drug addiction, you simply want more. Arousal addiction, you want different. Drugs, you want more of the same — different. So you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained.And the problem is the industry is supplying it. Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he's played 10,000 hours of video games, most of that in isolation. As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don't know the difference between making love and doing porn. The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week. And there's some guy watching a hundred, obviously. (Laughter) And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America — 15 billion annually. For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 now made porn videos.So the effect, very quickly, is it's a new kind of arousal. Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive. They're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly.So what's the solution? It's not my job. I'm here to alarm. It's your job to solve.(Laughter)(Applause)But who should care? The only people who should care about this is parents of boys and girls, educators, gamers, filmmakers and women who would like a real man who they can talk to, who can dance, who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs. No offense to banana slug owners. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge
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"For a long time, there was me, and my body. Me was composed of stories, of cravings, of strivings, of desires of the future. Me was trying not to be an outcome of my violent past, but the separation that had already occurred between me and my body was a pretty significant outcome. Me was always trying to become something, somebody. Me only existed in the trying. My body was often in the way.Me was a floating head. For years, I actually only wore hats. It was a way of keeping my head attached. It was a way of locating myself. I worried that [if] I took my hat off I wouldn't be here anymore. I actually had a therapist who once said to me, ""Eve, you've been coming here for two years, and, to be honest, it never occurred to me that you had a body."" All this time I lived in the city because, to be honest, I was afraid of trees. I never had babies because heads cannot give birth. Babies actually don't come out of your mouth.As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies — in particular, their vaginas, because I thought vaginas were kind of important. This led to me writing ""The Vagina Monologues,"" which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere I could. I did this in front of many strangers. One night on stage, I actually entered my vagina. It was an ecstatic experience. It scared me, it energized me, and then I became a driven person, a driven vagina.I began to see my body like a thing, a thing that could move fast, like a thing that could accomplish other things, many things, all at once. I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself. I didn't heed it; no, I organized it and I directed it. I didn't have patience for my body; I snapped it into shape. I was greedy. I took more than my body had to offer. If I was tired, I drank more espressos. If I was afraid, I went to more dangerous places.Oh sure, sure, I had moments of appreciation of my body, the way an abusive parent can sometimes have a moment of kindness. My father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday, for example. I heard people murmur from time to time that I should love my body, so I learned how to do this. I was a vegetarian, I was sober, I didn't smoke. But all that was just a more sophisticated way to manipulate my body — a further disassociation, like planting a vegetable field on a freeway.As a result of me talking so much about my vagina, many women started to tell me about theirs — their stories about their bodies. Actually, these stories compelled me around the world, and I've been to over 60 countries. I heard thousands of stories, and I have to tell you, there was always this moment where the women shared with me that particular moment when she separated from her body — when she left home. I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, left for dead in parking lots, acid burned in their kitchens. Some women became quiet and disappeared. Other women became mad, driven machines like me.In the middle of my traveling, I turned 40 and I began to hate my body, which was actually progress, because at least my body existed enough to hate it. Well my stomach — it was my stomach I hated. It was proof that I had not measured up, that I was old and not fabulous and not perfect or able to fit into the predetermined corporate image in shape. My stomach was proof that I had failed, that it had failed me, that it was broken. My life became about getting rid of it and obsessing about getting rid of it. In fact, it became so extreme I wrote a play about it. But the more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became. It became entertainment; it became a new kind of commodity, something I was selling.Then I went somewhere else. I went outside what I thought I knew. I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. And I heard stories that shattered all the other stories. I heard stories that got inside my body. I heard about a little girl who couldn't stop peeing on herself because so many grown soldiers had shoved themselves inside her. I heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that. There are thousands of these stories, and many of the women had holes in their bodies — holes, fistula — that were the violation of war — holes in the fabric of their souls. These stories saturated my cells and nerves, and to be honest, I stopped sleeping for three years.All the stories began to bleed together. The raping of the Earth, the pillaging of minerals, the destruction of vaginas — none of these were separate anymore from each other or me. Militias were raping six-month-old babies so that countries far away could get access to gold and coltan for their iPhones and computers. My body had not only become a driven machine, but it was responsible now for destroying other women's bodies in its mad quest to make more machines to support the speed and efficiency of my machine.Then I got cancer — or I found out I had cancer. It arrived like a speeding bird smashing into a windowpane. Suddenly, I had a body, a body that was pricked and poked and punctured, a body that was cut wide open, a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged and reconstructed, a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it, a body that was burning from chemicals. Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection. I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world, and it wasn't happening later, it was happening now.Suddenly, my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants — and they're usually poor — the cancer inside the coal miner's lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women's uteruses from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.In his new and visionary book, ""New Self, New World,"" the writer Philip Shepherd says, ""If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong."" Before cancer, the world was something other. It was as if I was living in a stagnant pool and cancer dynamited the boulder that was separating me from the larger sea. Now I am swimming in it. Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it, and I love the mud on my legs and feet. Now I make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the Seine, and I hunger for the green fields in the bush outside Bukavu. And when it rains hard rain, I scream and I run in circles.I know that everything is connected, and the scar that runs the length of my torso is the markings of the earthquake. And I am there with the three million in the streets of Port-au-Prince. And the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world. I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation, the 16 ounces of puss, is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico, and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish. And the catheters they shoved into me without proper medication made me scream out the way the Earth cries out from the drilling.In my second chemo, my mother got very sick and I went to see her. And in the name of connectedness, the only thing she wanted before she died was to be brought home by her beloved Gulf of Mexico. So we brought her home, and I prayed that the oil wouldn't wash up on her beach before she died. And gratefully, it didn't. And she died quietly in her favorite place.And a few weeks later, I was in New Orleans, and this beautiful, spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me. And I was honored. And I went to her house, and it was morning, and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains. And my friend was preparing this big bowl, and I said, ""What is it?"" And she said, ""It's for you. The flowers make it beautiful, and the honey makes it sweet."" And I said, ""But what's the water part?"" And in the name of connectedness, she said, ""Oh, it's the Gulf of Mexico."" And I said, ""Of course it is."" And the other women arrived and they sat in a circle, and Michaela bathed my head with the sacred water. And she sang — I mean her whole body sang. And the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother.And as the warm Gulf washed over my naked head, I realized that it held the best and the worst of us. It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion. It was all the lies that got told before and after. It was the honey in the water that made it sweet, it was the oil that made it sick. It was my head that was bald — and comfortable now without a hat. It was my whole self melting into Michaela's lap. It was the tears that were indistinguishable from the Gulf that were falling down my cheek. It was finally being in my body. It was the sorrow that's taken so long. It was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection. It was the continuing devastating war in the Congo and the indifference of the world. It was the Congolese women who are now rising up. It was my mother leaving, just at the moment that I was being born. It was the realization that I had come very close to dying — in the same way that the Earth, our mother, is barely holding on, in the same way that 75 percent of the planet are hardly scraping by, in the same way that there is a recipe for survival.What I learned is it has to do with attention and resources that everybody deserves. It was advocating friends and a doting sister. It was wise doctors and advanced medicine and surgeons who knew what to do with their hands. It was underpaid and really loving nurses. It was magic healers and aromatic oils. It was people who came with spells and rituals. It was having a vision of the future and something to fight for, because I know this struggle isn't my own. It was a million prayers. It was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms. It was a lot of anger, insane humor, a lot of attention, outrage. It was energy, love and joy. It was all these things. It was all these things. It was all these things in the water, in the world, in my body.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler
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"Climate change is already a heavy topic, and it's getting heavier because we're understanding that we need to do more than we are. We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions. That's, to put it mildly, not what's on the table now. And it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face. And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us, we tend to seek simple answers. And I think this is what we've done with climate change. We look at where the emissions are coming from — they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth, and we say, okay, well the problem is that they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning, so therefore, the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. And while, of course, we do need clean energy, I would put to you that it's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it.And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing. That shouldn't be news to any of us. However, it's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization. By mid-century, we're going to have about eight billion — perhaps more — people living in cities or within a day's travel of one. We will be an overwhelmingly urban species. In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for eight billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global North live in today, we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy. It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy. So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution.The solution, in fact, may be closer to hand than we think, because all of those cities we're building are opportunities. Every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants. We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing — I choose to turn this light switch on — but really, enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in. I won't show you very many graphs today, but if I can just focus on this one for a moment, it really tells us a lot of what we need to know — which is, quite simply, that if you look, for example, at transportation, a major category of climate emissions, there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air. And the correlation, of course, is that denser places tend to have lower emissions — which isn't really all that difficult to figure out, if you think about it.Basically, we substitute, in our lives, access to the things we want. We go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place. And we're basically using mobility to get the access we need. But when we live in a denser community, suddenly what we find, of course, is that the things we need are close by. And since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place, suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable. And it is possible, of course, to increase the density of the communities around us.Some places are doing this with new eco districts, developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods, which is nice work if you can get it, but most of the time, what we're talking about is, in fact, reweaving the urban fabric that we already have. So we're talking about things like infill development: really sharp little changes to where we have buildings, where we're developing. Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there. Increasingly, we're realizing that we don't even need to densify an entire city. What we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we don't drive as much and so on. And that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot. So you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city.And we find that when we do that, we can, in fact, have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results. Now we may find that there are places that are really, really dense and still hold onto their cars, but the reality is that, by and large, what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect, where people simply stop driving as much, and increasingly, more and more people, if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home, give up their cars altogether. And this is a huge, huge energy savings, because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars. We have the manufacture of the car, the disposal of the car, all of the parking and freeways and so on. When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn't use any of them really, you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent.And people are embracing this. All around the world, we're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life. People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood. And when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we're starting to see, what you find is, in fact, even more access suffused into spaces. Some of it's transportation access. This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case, how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation. Some of it is about walking. It's not all perfect yet. This is Google Walking Maps. I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway, and it told me to go via Guernsey. It did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths, though. (Laughter) But the technologies are getting better, and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation. And as we just heard earlier, of course, we're also learning how to put information on dumb objects. Things that don't have any wiring in them at all, we're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation.Part of what we're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption, which is to get a bunch of stuff, is not, in fact, how we really live best in dense environments. What we're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things. My favorite example is a drill. Who here owns a drill, a home power drill? Okay. I do too. The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime, depending on who you ask. And so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time, use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit. Our cities, I would put to you, are stockpiles of these surplus capacities. And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities — such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit — what we probably will find is that, in fact, turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them, is a far smarter way to go.And in fact, even space itself is turning into a service. We're finding that people can share the same spaces, do stuff with vacant space. Buildings are becoming bundles of services. So we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on — like heating, cooling etc. — and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on. So we light our buildings with daylight. We cool them with breezes. We heat them with sunshine. In fact, when we use all these things, what we've found is that, in some cases, energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent. Which brings on another threshold effect I like to call furnace dumping, which is, quite simply, if you have a building that doesn't need to be heated with a furnace, you save a whole bunch of money up front. These things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives.Now when we look at being able to slash our product use, slash our transportation use, slash our building energy use, all of that is great, but it still leaves something behind. And if we're going to really, truly become sustainable cities, we need to think a little differently. This is one way to do it. This is Vancouver's propaganda about how green a city they are. And certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery. So we have visions like this. We have visions like this. We have visions like this.Now all of these are fine projects, but they really have missed an essential point, which is it's not about the leaves above, it's about the systems below. Do they, for instance, capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use? Water is energy intensive. Do they, perhaps, include green infrastructure, so that we can take runoff and water that's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees? Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by, for example, connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration? Do they allow for pollination, pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities? Do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth, and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon — take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities?I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible, they're being done right now, and that it's a darn good thing. Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, ""by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP."" And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people, living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast. But if we think differently, I think that, in fact, we can have cities that are not only zero emissions, but have unlimited possibilities as well.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_steffen
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"For as long as I can remember, I have felt a very deep connection to animals and to the ocean. And at this age, my personal idol was Flipper the dolphin. And when I first learned about endangered species, I was truly distressed to know that every day, animals were being wiped off the face of this Earth forever. And I wanted to do something to help, but I always wondered: What could one person possibly do to make a difference? And it would be 30 years, but I would eventually get the answer to that question.When these heartbreaking images of oiled birds finally began to emerge from the Gulf of Mexico last year during the horrific BP oil spill, a German biologist by the name of Silvia Gaus was quoted as saying, ""We should just euthanize all oiled birds, because studies have shown that fewer than one percent of them survive after being released."" And I could not disagree more. In addition, I believe that every oiled animal deserves a second chance at life. And I want to tell you why I feel so strongly about this.On June 23, 2000, a ship named the Treasure sank off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, spilling 1,300 tons of fuel, which polluted the habitats of nearly half the entire world population of African penguins. Now, the ship sank between Robben Island to the south, and Dassen Island to the north — two of the penguins' main breeding islands. And exactly six years and three days earlier, on June 20, 1994, a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island, oiling 10,000 penguins, half of which died.Now when the Treasure sank in 2000, it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin, which at the time, was listed as a threatened species. And soon, nearly 20,000 penguins were covered with this toxic oil. The local seabird rescue center, named SANCCOB, immediately launched a massive rescue operation, and this soon would become the largest animal rescue ever undertaken.At the time, I was working down the street. I was a penguin aquarist at the New England Aquarium. And exactly 11 years ago yesterday, the phone rang in the penguin office. And with that call, my life would change forever. It was Estelle van Der Merwe calling from SANCCOB, saying, ""Please come help. We have thousands of oiled penguins and thousands of willing but completely inexperienced volunteers. And we need penguin experts to come train and supervise them."" So two days later, I was on a plane headed for Cape Town with a team of penguin specialists.And the scene inside of this building was devastating and surreal. In fact, many people compared it to a war zone. Last week, a 10-year-old girl asked me: ""What did it feel like when you first walked into that building and saw so many oiled penguins?"" And this is what happened. I was instantly transported back to that moment in time. Penguins are very vocal birds and really, really noisy, so I expected to walk into this building and be met with this cacophony of honking and braying and squawking. But instead, when we stepped through those doors and into the building, it was eerily silent. So it was very clear these were stressed, sick, traumatized birds.The other thing that was so striking was the sheer number of volunteers. Up to 1,000 people a day came to the rescue center. Eventually, over the course of this rescue, more than 12-and-a-half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to Cape Town, to help save these birds. And the amazing thing was that not one of them had to be there. Yet they were. So for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity, this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring.So the day after we arrived, two of us from the aquarium were put in charge of room two. Room two had more than 4,000 oiled penguins in it. Now, mind you — three days earlier, we had 60 penguins under our care, so we were definitely overwhelmed and just a bit terrified — at least I was. Personally, I really didn't know if I was capable of handling such a monstrous task. And collectively, we really didn't know if we could pull this off. Because we all knew that just six years earlier, half as many penguins had been oiled and rescued, and only half of them had survived. So would it be humanly possible to save this many oiled penguins? We just did not know.But what gave us hope were these incredibly dedicated and brave volunteers, three of whom here are force-feeding penguins. You may notice they're wearing very thick gloves. And what you should know about African penguins is that they have razor-sharp beaks. And before long, our bodies were covered head to toe with these nasty wounds inflicted by the terrified penguins.Now the day after we arrived, a new crisis began to unfold. The oil slick was now moving north towards Dassen Island, and the rescuers despaired, because they knew if the oil hit, it would not be possible to rescue any more oiled birds. And there really were no good solutions. But then finally, one of the researchers threw out this crazy idea. He said, ""OK, why don't we try and collect the birds at the greatest risk of getting oiled"" — they collected 20,000 — ""and we'll ship them 500 miles up the coast to Port Elizabeth in these open-air trucks, and release them into the clean waters there and let them swim back home?""(Laughter)So three of those penguins — Peter, Pamela and Percy — wore satellite tags, and the researchers crossed their fingers and hoped that by the time they got back home, the oil would be cleaned up from their islands. And luckily, the day they arrived, it was. So it had been a huge gamble, but it had paid off. And so they know now that they can use this strategy in future oil spills.So in wildlife rescue as in life, we learn from each previous experience, and we learn from both our successes and our failures. And the main thing learned during the Apollo Sea rescue in '94 was that most of those penguins had died due to the unwitting use of poorly ventilated transport boxes and trucks, because they just had not been prepared to deal with so many oiled penguins at once. So in these six years between these two oil spills, they've built thousands of these well-ventilated boxes. And as a result, during the Treasure rescue, just 160 penguins died during the transport process, as opposed to 5,000. So this alone was a huge victory.Something else learned during the Apollo rescue was how to train the penguins to take fish freely from their hands, using these training boxes. And we used this technique again during the Treasure rescue. But an interesting thing was noted during the training process. The first penguins to make that transition to free feeding were the ones that had a metal band on their wing from the Apollo Sea spill six years earlier. So penguins learn from previous experience, too.So all of those penguins had to have the oil meticulously cleaned from their bodies. It would take two people at least an hour just to clean one penguin. When you clean a penguin, you first have to spray it with a degreaser. And this brings me to my favorite story from the Treasure rescue. About a year prior to this oil spill, a 17-year-old student had invented a degreaser. And they'd been using it at SANCCOB with great success, so they began using it during the Treasure rescue. But partway through, they ran out. So in a panic, Estelle from SANCCOB called the student and said, ""Please, you have to make more!"" So he raced to the lab and made enough to clean the rest of the birds. So I just think it is the coolest thing that a teenager invented a product that helped save the lives of thousands of animals.So what happened to those 20,000 oiled penguins? And was Silvia Gaus right? Should we routinely euthanize all oiled birds because most of them are going to die anyway? Well, she could not be more wrong. After half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor, more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild. And we know from follow-up studies that they have lived just as long as never-oiled penguins, and bred nearly as successfully.And in addition, about 3,000 penguin chicks were rescued and hand raised. And again, we know from long-term monitoring that more of these hand-raised chicks survive to adulthood and breeding age than do parent-raised chicks. Armed with this knowledge, SANCCOB has a chick-bolstering project, and every year, they rescue and raise abandoned chicks, and they have a very impressive, 80 percent success rate. This is critically important, because one year ago, the African penguin was declared endangered. And they could be extinct in less than 10 years if we don't do something now to protect them.So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience? Personally, I learned that I am capable of handling so much more than I ever dreamed possible. And I learned that one person can make a huge difference. Just look at that 17-year-old. And when we come together and work as one, we can achieve extraordinary things. And truly, to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is the most rewarding experience you can possibly have.So I'd like to leave you with one final thought and a challenge, if you will. My mission as The Penguin Lady is to raise awareness and funding to protect penguins. But why should any of you care about penguins? Well, you should care because they're an indicator species. And simply put: if penguins are dying, it means our oceans are dying. And we ultimately will be affected, because, as Sylvia Earle says, ""The oceans are our life-support system."" And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming. And these are two things that each one of us actually has the power to do something about. So if we each do our part, together, we can make a difference, and we can help keep penguins from going extinct. Humans have always been the greatest threat to penguins, but we are now their only hope.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dyan_denapoli_the_great_penguin_rescue
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"I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world. I couldn't understand the starvation, the destruction, the killing of innocent people. Making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do. And when I was 12, I became an actor. I was bottom of the class. I haven't got any qualifications. I was told I was dyslexic. In fact, I have got qualifications. I got a D in pottery, which was the one thing that I did get — which was useful, obviously. And so concern is where all of this comes from. And then, being an actor, I was doing these different kinds of things, and I felt the content of the work that I was involved in really wasn't cutting it, that there surely had to be more.And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward. And that fascinated me, because I'd been messing around with a camera most of my life. And then I thought, well maybe I could do something. Maybe I could become a filmmaker. Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference. Maybe there's a little change I can get involved in. So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that. Could I go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on? Because it's obviously incredibly frightening.But I realized that, having been messing around with structure as an actor, that a series of sound bites in itself wasn't enough, that there needed to be a mountain to climb, there needed to be a journey that I had to take. And if I took that journey, no matter whether it failed or succeeded, it would be completely irrelevant. The point was that I would have something to hook the questions of — is humankind fundamentally evil? Is the destruction of the world inevitable? Should I have children? Is that a responsible thing to do? Etc., etc.So I was thinking about peace, and then I was thinking, well where's the starting point for peace? And that was when I had the idea. There was no starting point for peace. There was no day of global unity. There was no day of intercultural cooperation. There was no day when humanity came together, separate in all of those things and just shared it together — that we're in this together, and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival. That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces — if we did it just for a day.So obviously we didn't have any money. I was living at my mom's place. And we started writing letters to everybody. You very quickly work out what is it that you've got to do to fathom that out. How do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September? And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number. He was a prisoner of war. He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki. It poisoned his blood. He died when I was 11. So he was like my hero. And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left, 23 came back, two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground. And that's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace.So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999. And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations — literally wrote to everybody. And very quickly, some letters started coming back. And we started to build this case. And I remember the first letter. One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama. And of course we didn't have the money; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of [this mail]. A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying, ""This is an amazing thing. Come and see me. I'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace."" And we didn't have money for the flight. And I rang Sir Bob Ayling, who was CEO of BA at the time, and said, ""Mate, we've got this invitation. Could you give me a flight? Because we're going to go see him."" And of course, we went and saw him and it was amazing. And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward.And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 — this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence — we invited thousands of people. Well not thousands — hundreds of people, lots of people — all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day. And we invited everybody, and no press showed up. There were 114 people there — they were mostly my friends and family. And that was kind of like the launch of this thing. But it didn't matter because we were documenting, and that was the thing. For me, it was really about the process. It wasn't about the end result. And that's the beautiful thing about the camera. They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword. I think the camera is. And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually.So anyway, we began the journey. And here you see people like Mary Robinson, I went to see in Geneva. I'm cutting my hair, it's getting short and long, because every time I saw Kofi Annan, I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it, and that was kind of what was going on. (Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now. So Mary Robinson, she said to me, ""Listen, this is an idea whose time has come. This must be created."" Kofi Annan said, ""This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground."" The OAU at the time, led by Salim Ahmed Salim, said, ""I must get the African countries involved."" Dr. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace laureate, president now of Costa Rica, said, ""I'll do everything that I can."" So I went and saw Amr Moussa at the League of Arab States. I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on — while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense.And then we were listening to the people. We were documenting everywhere. 76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited. And I've always spoken to women and children wherever I've gone. I've recorded 44,000 young people. I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts. I'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry, their art, their literature, their music, their sport, whatever it might be. And we were listening to everybody.And it was an incredibly thing, working with the U.N. and working with NGOs and building this case. I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day. And the stronger the case and the more detailed it was, the better chance we had of creating this day. And it was this stuff, this, where I actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened, it didn't actually matter. It didn't matter if it didn't create a day of peace. The fact is that, if I tried and it didn't work, then I could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite — until, it was in Somalia, picking up that young girl. And this young child who'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic, and that young boy who was a child soldier, who told me he'd killed people — he was about 12 — these things made me realize that this was not a film that I could just stop. And that actually, at that moment something happened to me, which obviously made me go, ""I'm going to document. If this is the only film that I ever make, I'm going to document until this becomes a reality."" Because we've got to stop, we've got to do something where we unite — separate from all the politics and religion that, as a young person, is confusing me. I don't know how to get involved in that process.And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York. The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly, with 54 co-sponsors, the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September, as a fixed calendar date, and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world. (Applause) Yeah, but there were hundreds of individuals, obviously, who made that a reality. And thank you to all of them. That was an incredible moment. I was at the top of the General Assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen. And as I mentioned, when it started, we were at the Globe, and there was no press. And now I was thinking, ""Well, the press it really going to hear this story."" And suddenly, we started to institutionalize this day.Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference. And it was 8:00 AM when I stood there. And I was waiting for him to come down, and I knew that he was on his way. And obviously he never came down. The statement was never made. The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives, there and then subsequently all over the world. It never happened. And I remember thinking, ""This is exactly why, actually, we have to work even harder. And we have to make this day work. It's been created; nobody knows. But we have to continue this journey, and we have to tell people, and we have to prove it can work.""And I left New York freaked, but actually empowered. And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did, then maybe we wouldn't see things like that. I remember putting that film out and going to cynics. I was showing the film, and I remember being in Israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film — that it's just a day of peace, it doesn't mean anything. It's not going to work; you're not going to stop the fighting in Afghanistan; the Taliban won't listen, etc., etc. It's just symbolism. And that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways, because it couldn't not work. I'd spoken in Somalia, Burundi, Gaza, the West Bank, India, Sri Lanka, Congo, wherever it was, and they'd all tell me, ""If you can create a window of opportunity, we can move aid, we can vaccinate children. Children can lead their projects. They can unite. They can come together. If people would stop, lives will be saved."" That's what I'd heard. And I'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about.And so I went back to the United Nations. I decided that I'd continue filming and make another movie. And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years. We started moving around the corridors of the U.N. system, governments and NGOs, trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it, see if we could make it possible. And after lots and lots of meetings obviously, I'm delighted that this man, Ahmad Fawzi, one of my heroes and mentors really, he managed to get UNICEF involved. And UNICEF, God bless them, they said, ""Okay, we'll have a go."" And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan. It was historical. Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society, etc., etc., etc.? And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it, and I was thinking, ""This is it. This is the possibility of it maybe working. But even if it doesn't, at least the door is open and there's a chance.""And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law. And I saw him because he was an actor, I was an actor, I had a connection to him, because we needed to get to the press, we needed this attraction, we needed the media to be involved. Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there'd be more — when we got into certain areas, maybe there would be more people interested. And maybe we'd be helped financially a little bit more, which had been desperately difficult. I won't go into that. So Jude said, ""Okay, I'll do some statements for you.""While I was filming these statements, he said to me, ""Where are you going next?"" I said, ""I'm going to go to Afghanistan."" He said, ""Really?"" And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest. So I said to him, ""Do you want to come with me? It'd be really interesting if you came. It would help and bring attention. And that attention would help leverage the situation, as well as all of the other sides of it."" I think there's a number of pillars to success. One is you've got to have a great idea. The other is you've got to have a constituency, you've got to have finance, and you've got to be able to raise awareness. And actually I could never raise awareness by myself, no matter what I'd achieved. So these guys were absolutely crucial. So he said yes, and we found ourselves in Afghanistan.It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there, I was talking to various people, and they were saying to me, ""You've got to get everybody involved here. You can't just expect it to work. You have to get out and work."" And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government. I mean, we basically sat down with everybody — in and out of schools with ministers of education, holding these press conferences, which of course, now were loaded with press, everybody was there. There was an interest in what was going on. This amazing woman, Fatima Gailani, was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians. And her Afghan network was just absolutely everywhere. And she was really crucial in getting the message in.And then we went home. We'd sort of done it. We had to wait now and see what happened. And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban. And that letter basically said, ""We'll observe this day. We will observe this day. We see it as a window of opportunity. And we will not engage. We're not going to engage."" And that meant that humanitarian workers wouldn't be kidnapped or killed. And then suddenly, I obviously knew at this point, there was a chance. And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping. (Applause) And like the General Assembly, obviously the most wonderful, wonderful moment.And so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back. We put it into Dari and Pashto. We put it in the local dialects. We went back to Afghanistan, because the next year was coming, and we wanted to support. But more importantly, we wanted to go back, because these people in Afghanistan were the heroes. They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. — and they made it real. And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say, ""Look, you guys made this possible. And thank you very much."" And we gave the film over. Obviously it was shown, and it was amazing.And then that year, that year, 2008, this ISAF statement from Kabul, Afghanistan, September 17th: ""General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September."" They were saying they would stop. And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that, in Afghanistan, because of this work, the violence was down by 70 percent. 70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least. And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything.And I remember being stuck in New York, this time because of the volcano, which was obviously much less harmful. And I was there thinking about what was going on. And I kept thinking about this 70 percent. 70 percent reduction in violence — in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn't do. And that made me think that, if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan, then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere. We have to go for a global truce. We have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce, go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities, both domestically and internationally, ever recorded.That's exactly what we must do. And on the 21st of September this year, we're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process, to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities. And we will utilize all kinds of things — have a dance and social media and visiting on Facebook and visit the website, sign the petition. And it's in the six official languages of the United Nations. And we'll globally link with government, inter-government, non-government, education, unions, sports. And you can see the education box there. We've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce. And obviously the life-saving is increased, the concepts help.Linking up with the Olympics — I went and saw Seb Coe. I said, ""London 2012 is about truce. Ultimately, that's what it's about."" Why don't we all team up? Why don't we bring truce to life? Why don't you support the process of the largest ever global truce? We'll make a new film about this process. We'll utilize sport and football. On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be. So, utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action. And ultimately, we have to try that. We have to work together.And when I stand here in front of all of you, and the people who will watch these things, I'm excited, on behalf of everybody I've met, that there is a possibility that our world could unite, that we could come together as one, that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues, brought about by individuals. I was with Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi. I think he's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics — in Afghanistan, in Iraq. He's an amazing man. And I sat with him a few weeks ago. And I said to him, ""Mr. Brahimi, is this nuts, going for a global truce? Is this possible? Is it really possible that we could do this?"" He said, ""It's absolutely possible."" I said, ""What would you do? Would you go to governments and lobby and use the system?"" He said, ""No, I'd talk to the individuals."" It's all about the individuals. It's all about you and me. It's all about partnerships. It's about your constituencies; it's about your businesses. Because together, by working together, I seriously think we can start to change things.And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago — because I did a little rehearsal — and he said, ""I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white."" And it then made me think about a glass of water, which is clear. If you put one drop, one drop of something, in that water, it'll change it forever.By working together, we can create peace one day. Thank you TED. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thanks a lot.(Applause)Thank you very much. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_gilley_one_day_of_peace
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"Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we can't walk. By studying those twinkling lights though, we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life.In this image of the Tokyo skyline, I've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block, the Kepler Mission. Can you see it? There we go. This is just a tiny part of the sky the Kepler stares at, where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars, all at once, every half hour, and very precisely.And what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us. In just over two years of operations, we've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars. To give you some perspective, in the previous two decades of searching, we had only known about 400 prior to Kepler.When we see these little dips in the light, we can determine a number of things. For one thing, we can determine that there's a planet there, but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star. That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall. And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire: You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you're warm, but not so close that you're too toasty and you get burned.However, there's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall. And I'll tell you why. This is our star. This is our Sun. It's shown here in visible light. That's the light that you can see with your own human eyes. You'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball — that Sun that we all draw when we're children. But you'll notice something else, and that's that the face of the Sun has freckles. These freckles are called sunspots, and they are just one of the manifestations of the Sun's magnetic field. They also cause the light from the star to vary. And we can measure this very, very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects.However, these are just the tip of the iceberg. If we had UV eyes or X-ray eyes, we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our Sun's magnetic activity — the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well. Just think, even when it's cloudy outside, these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time. So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable, whether it might be amenable to life, we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is, but we want to know about its space weather — this high-energy radiation, the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation.And so, we can't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system. I'm showing here Venus, Earth and Mars — three planets in our own solar system that are roughly the same size, but only one of which is really a good place to live. But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe.Kepler won't find a planet around every single star it looks at. But really, every measurement it makes is precious, because it's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets, and how it's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe. While it's Kepler the telescope, the instrument that stares, it's we, life, who are searching.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lucianne_walkowicz_finding_planets_around_other_stars
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"So the type of magic I like, and I'm a magician, is magic that uses technology to create illusions. So I would like to show you something I've been working on. It's an application that I think will be useful for artists — multimedia artists in particular. It synchronizes videos across multiple screens of mobile devices. I borrowed these three iPods from people here in the audience to show you what I mean. And I'm going to use them to tell you a little bit about my favorite subject: deception.(Music)One of my favorite magicians is Karl Germain. He had this wonderful trick where a rosebush would bloom right in front of your eyes. But it was his production of a butterfly that was the most beautiful.(Recording) Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, the creation of life.(Applause)(Music)Marco Tempest: When asked about deception, he said this:Announcer: Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you — and he does.MT: I like to think of myself as an honest magician. I use a lot of tricks, which means that sometimes I have to lie to you. Now I feel bad about that. But people lie every day.(Ringing)Hold on.Phone: Hey, where are you?MT: Stuck in traffic. I'll be there soon. You've all done it.(Laughter)(Music)Right: I'll be ready in just a minute, darling.Center: It's just what I've always wanted.Left: You were great.MT: Deception, it's a fundamental part of life. Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women — assuming the women they asked told the truth.(Laughing)We deceive to gain advantage and to hide our weaknesses. The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.Some people deceive for money. Let's play a game. Three cards, three chances.Announcer: One five will get you 10, 10 will get you 20. Now, where's the lady? Where is the queen?MT: This one? Sorry. You lose. Well, I didn't deceive you. You deceived yourself. Self-deception. That's when we convince ourselves that a lie is the truth. Sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart. Compulsive gamblers are experts at self-deception.(Slot machine)They believe they can win. They forget the times they lose.The brain is very good at forgetting. Bad experiences are quickly forgotten. Bad experiences quickly disappear. Which is why in this vast and lonely cosmos, we are so wonderfully optimistic. Our self-deception becomes a positive illusion — why movies are able to take us onto extraordinary adventures; why we believe Romeo when he says he loves Juliet; and why single notes of music, when played together, become a sonata and conjure up meaning.That's ""Clair De lune."" Its composer, called Debussy, said that art was the greatest deception of all. Art is a deception that creates real emotions — a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.[MAGIC](Music fades slowly)(Applause)Thank you. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_the_magic_of_truth_and_lies_on_ipods
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"So, I was in the hospital for a long time. And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me — said, ""Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you."" I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry. And what's the brilliant idea he had? He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric.It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life — because I had to keep the width the same. When I got back to his office, I wasn't really sure. I said, ""Can I see some evidence for this?"" So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots — not very informative. I said, ""What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? What would happen then?"" ""Oh, don't worry about it,"" he said. ""We have lasers; we can whiten it out."" But I was still concerned, so I said, ""You know what, I'm not going to do it.""And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right, so that means a lot. (Laughter) And he said, ""Dan, what's wrong with you? Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric? Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently?"" None of those happened. And this was very surprising to me, because I've gone through many treatments — there were many treatments I decided not to do — and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. But I decided not to have this treatment. And I went to his deputy and asked him, ""What was going on? Where was this guilt trip coming from?"" And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing.(Laughter)Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck. Right, that's what he seems like. But let me give you a different perspective on the same story. A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab. And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that's what we got — I was very happy — aside from one person. There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test.So I looked carefully at this guy. He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample. And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy. ""Fantastic!"" I thought. ""Let's throw him out. Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample?""But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, ""What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? What would have happened if he was in the other group? Would we have thrown him out then?"" We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, ""Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low,"" because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could. So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment.But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. And I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. Maybe we don't recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens.The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us. When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science. I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. I wasn't doing something bad. In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along. But this was not the case. I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances.I do want to leave you with one positive thought. I mean, this is all very depressing, right — people have conflicts of interest, we don't see it, and so on. The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things. And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_beware_conflicts_of_interest
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"What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans. But before doing that, I just briefly want to remind you about what you already know: that our genomes, our genetic material, are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of DNA, which is this famous double-helical molecule. And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A, T, C and G. And the information is there twice — one on each strand — which is important, because when new cells are formed, these strands come apart, new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process.But nothing, of course, in nature is totally perfect, so sometimes an error is made and a wrong letter is built in. And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room, for example. If we compare my genome to the genome of you, approximately every 1,200, 1,300 letters will differ between us. And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time. So if we add in a chimpanzee here, we will see more differences. Approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee.And if you're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA, or the whole genome, you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe. And generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this. In this case, it's very simple. The two human DNA sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently. Farther back is there one shared with chimpanzees. And because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time, you can transform these differences to estimates of time, where the two humans, typically, will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago, and with the chimpanzees, it will be in the order of five million years ago.So what has now happened in the last few years is that there are account technologies around that allow you to see many, many pieces of DNA very quickly. So we can now, in a matter of hours, determine a whole human genome. Each of us, of course, contains two human genomes — one from our mothers and one from our fathers. And they are around three billion such letters long. And we will find that the two genomes in me, or one genome of mine we want to use, will have about three million differences in the order of that. And what you can then also begin to do is to say, ""How are these genetic differences distributed across the world?"" And if you do that, you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa. And if you look outside Africa, you actually find less genetic variation. This is surprising, of course, because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in Africa than outside Africa. Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation.Moreover, almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa. But if you look in Africa, there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside. So a model to explain this is that a part of the African variation, but not all of it, [has] gone out and colonized the rest of the world. And together with the methods to date these genetic differences, this has led to the insight that modern humans — humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me — evolved in Africa, quite recently, between 100 and 200,000 years ago. And later, between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so, went out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world.So what I often like to say is that, from a genomic perspective, we are all Africans. We either live inside Africa today, or in quite recent exile. Another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world, in many places, and they tend to vary as gradients, from a bird's-eye perspective at least. And since there are many genetic variants, and they have different such gradients, this means that if we determine a DNA sequence — a genome from one individual — we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from, provided that its parents or grandparents haven't moved around too much.But does this then mean, as many people tend to think, that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people — on different continents, for example? Well we can begin to ask those questions also. There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals — their genomes — from different parts of the world. They've sequenced 185 Africans from two populations in Africa. [They've] sequenced approximately equally [as] many people in Europe and in China. And we can begin to say how much variance do we find, how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences. And it's a lot: 38 million variable positions.But we can then ask: Are there any absolute differences between Africans and non-Africans? Perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed. And with absolute difference — and I mean a difference where people inside Africa at a certain position, where all individuals — 100 percent — have one letter, and everybody outside Africa has another letter. And the answer to that, among those millions of differences, is that there is not a single such position. This may be surprising. Maybe a single individual is misclassified or so. So we can relax the criterion a bit and say: How many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in Africa have one variant, 95 percent another variant, and the number of that is 12.So this is very surprising. It means that when we look at people and see a person from Africa and a person from Europe or Asia, we cannot, for a single position in the genome with 100 percent accuracy, predict what the person would carry. And only for 12 positions can we hope to be 95 percent right. This may be surprising, because we can, of course, look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from. So what this means now is that those traits we then look at and so readily see — facial features, skin color, hair structure — are not determined by single genes with big effects, but are determined by many different genetic variants that seem to vary in frequency between different parts of the world.There is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that I think is worthwhile to consider, and that is that, in a very literal sense, they're really on the surface of our bodies. They are what we just said — facial features, hair structure, skin color. There are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest, or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies. But so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment, in a direct confrontation, if you like. It's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them. But if we look on other parts of our bodies where we don't directly interact with the environment — our kidneys, our livers, our hearts — there is no way to say, by just looking at these organs, where in the world they would come from.So there's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in Africa, and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so, they were not alone on the planet. There were other forms of humans around, most famously perhaps, Neanderthals — these robust forms of humans, compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right — that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years. So an interesting question is, what happened when we met? What happened to the Neanderthals?And to begin to answer such questions, my research group — since over 25 years now — works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old. So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA, how you convert it to a form you can sequence. You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself. And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far. And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today.And one question that you may then want to ask is, what happened when we met? Did we mix or not? And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today. So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals, starting with two Africans, looking at the two African genomes, finding places where they differ from each other, and in each case ask: What is a Neanderthal like? Does it match one African or the other African? We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa. They should be equal, have no reason to be closer to one African than another African. And that's indeed the case. Statistically speaking, there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other. But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African. Then, significantly more often, does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African. The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often. This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China.So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals. Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living. If they then mixed with each other there, then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside Africa carried with them this Neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world. So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA, we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world. And the first place we've done that is in Southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains at a place called Denisova, a cave site in this mountain here, where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone — this is a copy of it — that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human. And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual, even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually, and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today. And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago. And further back, 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans.So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals, but far back and then have a long independent history. We call this group of humans, that we then described for the first time from this tiny, tiny little piece of bone, the Denisovans, after this place where they were first described. So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals: Did they mix with ancestors of present day people? If we ask that question, and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world, we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today. But we do find it in Papua New Guinea and in other islands in Melanesia and the Pacific. So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past, since we don't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia.So from studying these genomes of extinct humans, we're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of Africa. In the West, there were Neanderthals; in the East, there were Denisovans — maybe other forms of humans too that we've not yet described. We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past. Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa, came out of Africa, presumably in the Middle East. They meet Neanderthals, mix with them, continue to spread over the world, and somewhere in Southeast Asia, they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific. And then these earlier forms of humans disappear, but they live on a little bit today in some of us — in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans.Does this then mean that there is after all some absolute difference between people outside Africa and inside Africa in that people outside Africa have this old component in their genome from these extinct forms of humans, whereas Africans do not? Well I don't think that is the case. Presumably, modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa. They spread across Africa also, of course, and there were older, earlier forms of humans there. And since we mixed elsewhere, I'm pretty sure that one day, when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in Africa, we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in Africa.So to sum up, what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans? We learn perhaps many things, but one thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the lesson is that we have always mixed. We mixed with these earlier forms of humans, wherever we met them, and we mixed with each other ever since.Thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/svante_paeaebo_dna_clues_to_our_inner_neanderthal
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"I'm a filmmaker. For the last 8 years, I have dedicated my life to documenting the work of Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means. When I travel with my work across Europe and the United States, one question always comes up: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Why aren't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance?The challenge I face when I hear this question is that often I have just returned from the Middle East where I spent my time filming dozens of Palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from Israeli soldiers and settlers. These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region. Yet, most of you have probably never heard about them. This divide between what's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful.So I'm here today to talk about the power of attention, the power of your attention, and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere — but today, my case study is going to be Palestine. I believe that what's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence, but for us to start paying attention to those who already are. Allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called Budrus.About seven years ago, they faced extinction, because Israel announced it would build a separation barrier, and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village. They would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded, so they would lose free access to the rest of the West Bank. Through inspired local leadership, they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening.Let me show you some brief clips, so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground.(Music)Palestinian Woman: We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel. Here in Budrus, we realized the wall would steal our land.Israeli Man: The fence has, in fact, created a solution to terror.Man: Today you're invited to a peaceful march. You are joined by dozens of your Israeli brothers and sisters.Israeli Activist: Nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition.Woman: We saw the men trying to push the soldiers, but none of them could do that. But I think the girls could do it.Fatah Party Member: We must empty our minds of traditional thinking.Hamas Party Member: We were in complete harmony, and we wanted to spread it to all of Palestine.Chanting: One united nation. Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front! News Anchor: The clashes over the fence continue.Reporter: Israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd. They were allowed to use any force necessary.(Gunshots)Man: These are live bullets. It's like Fallujah. Shooting everywhere.Israeli Activist: I was sure we were all going to die. But there were others around me who weren't even cowering.Israeli Soldier: A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [unclear].Protester: This is a peaceful march. There is no need to use violence.Chanting: We can do it! We can do it! We can do it!Julia Bacha: When I first heard about the story of Budrus, I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago, in 2003. What was even more surprising was the fact that Budrus was successful. The residents, after 10 months of peaceful resistance, convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories. This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow, or even survive, in Palestine.Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause. If violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the Palestinian issue, it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight.The power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room. The surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit. The tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior, since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it. Parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children. But that's true for adults too. In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced, depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention.I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today. In the course of taking my film to villages in the West Bank, in Gaza and in East Jerusalem, I have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation.In a village called Wallajeh, which sits very close to Jerusalem, the community was facing a very similar plight to Budrus. They were going to be surrounded, lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access, either to the West Bank or Jerusalem. They had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention. So we organized a screening. A week later, they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date. The organizers say that the villagers, upon seeing the story of Budrus documented in a film, felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing, that people cared. So they kept on going.On the Israeli side, there is a new peace movement called Solidariot, which means solidarity in Hebrew. The leaders of this movement have been using Budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools. They report that Israelis who had never been active before, upon seeing the film, understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities. The examples of Wallajeh and the Solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior. Now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like Bil'in, Ni'lin, Wallajeh, in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan — the nonviolent leaders would become more visible, valued and effective in their work.I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don't pay attention to these efforts, they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened. But I have seen first hand that if we do, they will multiply. If they multiply, their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation. These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus. Let's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_bacha
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"Today I'd like to show you the future of the way we make things. I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling, replicating and repairing themselves. So I'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing, and then compare that to some natural systems.So in the current state of manufacturing, we have skyscrapers — two and a half years [of assembly time], 500,000 to a million parts, fairly complex, new, exciting technologies in steel, concrete, glass. We have exciting machines that can take us into space — five years [of assembly time], 2.5 million parts.But on the other side, if you look at the natural systems, we have proteins that have two million types, can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds, or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour. So there's all of this complexity in our natural systems, but they're extremely efficient, far more efficient than anything we can build, far more complex than anything we can build. They're far more efficient in terms of energy. They hardly ever make mistakes. And they can repair themselves for longevity.So there's something super interesting about natural systems. And if we can translate that into our built environment, then there's some exciting potential for the way that we build things. And I think the key to that is self-assembly.So if we want to utilize self-assembly in our physical environment, I think there's four key factors. The first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build — so our buildings and machines. And we need to decode that into simple sequences — basically the DNA of how our buildings work. Then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up, or reconfigure. We need some energy that's going to allow that to activate, allow our parts to be able to fold up from the program. And we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want.So I'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future. The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot. So these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots — 8 ft., 12 ft. long proteins. They're embedded with mechanical electrical devices, sensors. You decode what you want to fold up into, into a sequence of angles — so negative 120, negative 120, 0, 0, 120, negative 120 — something like that; so a sequence of angles, or turns, and you send that sequence through the string. Each unit takes its message — so negative 120 — it rotates to that, checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor.So these are the brilliant scientists, engineers, designers that worked on this project. And I think it really brings to light: Is this really scalable? I mean, thousands of dollars, lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot. Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part? The next one questions that and looks at passive nature, or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability. But it goes a step further, and it tries to have actual computation. It basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing, the digital logic gate, directly into your parts.So this is a NAND gate. You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that's going to do your computing, and you have two input tetrahedrons. One of them is the input from the user, as you're building your bricks. The other one is from the previous brick that was placed. And then it gives you an output in 3D space. So what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do. It computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do. And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space — so up or down. So on the left-hand side, [1,1] input equals 0 output, which goes down. On the right-hand side, [0,0] input is a 1 output, which goes up. And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build.So they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed. So that means that we can have some form of self-replication. In this case I call it self-guided replication, because your structure contains the exact blueprints. If you have errors, you can replace a part. All the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it. So you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one. It's directly embedded; there's no external instructions.So the last project I'll show is called Biased Chains, and it's probably the most exciting example that we have right now of passive self-assembly systems. So it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system. So basically you have a chain of elements. Each element is completely identical, and they're biased. So each chain, or each element, wants to turn right or left. So as you assemble the chain, you're basically programming it. You're telling each unit if it should turn right or left. So when you shake the chain, it then folds up into any configuration that you've programmed in — so in this case, a spiral, or in this case, two cubes next to each other. So you can basically program any three-dimensional shape — or one-dimensional, two-dimensional — up into this chain completely passively.So what does this tell us about the future? I think that it's telling us that there's new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines. There's new programmability in these parts. And from that you have new possibilities for computing. We'll have spatial computing. Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute. That's amazing parallel and distributed computing power, new design possibilities. So it's exciting potential for this. So I think these projects I've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future, if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/skylar_tibbits_can_we_make_things_that_make_themselves
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"I want to address the issue of compassion. Compassion has many faces. Some of them are fierce; some of them are wrathful; some of them are tender; some of them are wise. A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, ""Love and compassion are necessities. They are not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive."" And I would suggest, it is not only humanity that won't survive, but it is all species on the planet, as we've heard today. It is the big cats, and it's the plankton.Two weeks ago, I was in Bangalore in India. I was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of Bangalore. And early in the morning, I went into the ward. In that hospice, there were 31 men and women who were actively dying. And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly, fragile, obviously in the latter phase of active dying. I looked into her face. I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion.And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: ""What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?"" And Yudhisthira replied, ""The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don't realize it can happen to us."" I looked up. Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore. I looked into the face of one of these women, and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present. I watched her hands as she bathed an old man.My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person. And it reminded me of something that I had just been present for. Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. And we run clinics in these very remote regions where there's no medical care whatsoever.And on the first day at Simikot in Humla, far west of Nepal, the most impoverished region of Nepal, an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags. And he walked in, and somebody said something to him, we realized he was deaf, and we looked into the rags, and there was this pair of eyes. The rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned. Again, the eyes and hands of Avalokiteshvara. It was the young women, the health aids, who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds.I know those hands and eyes; they touched me as well. They touched me at that time. They have touched me throughout my 68 years. They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed. And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me. And that woman did not have sentimental compassion. She had phenomenal strength. And it was really her strength, I believe, that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life.So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of? And there are various facets. And there's referential and non-referential compassion. But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering. But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome.Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years. I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [prison] for six years. And I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience, from working with dying people and training caregivers, that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe.And when I worked in the prison system, it was so clear to me, this: that many of us in this room, and almost all of the men that I worked with on death row, the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered. That compassion is actually an inherent human quality. It is there within every human being. But the conditions for compassion to be activated, to be aroused, are particular conditions. I had that condition, to a certain extent, from my own childhood illness. Eve Ensler, whom you'll hear later, has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through.And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear. And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear. And in that paralysis, of course, our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed. The very word terror is global. The very feeling of terror is global. So our work, in a certain way, is to address this imago, this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe.Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities. For example: A person who is cultivating compassion, when they are in the presence of suffering, they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do. However, they return to baseline a lot sooner. This is called resilience. Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us.Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration. It hooks up all parts of the brain. Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system. Hey, we live in a very noxious world. (Laughter) Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity.You know, if compassion is so good for us, I have a question. Why don't we train our children in compassion? (Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering? And if compassion is so good for us, why don't we vote on compassion? Why don't we vote for people in our government based on compassion, so that we can have a more caring world? In Buddhism, we say, ""it takes a strong back and a soft front."" It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. And that is the mental quality of equanimity.But it also takes a soft front — the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart. And the archetype of this in Buddhism is Avalokiteshvara, Kuan-Yin. It's a female archetype: she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. She stands with 10,000 arms, and in every hand, there is an instrument of liberation, and in the palm of every hand, there are eyes, and these are the eyes of wisdom. I say that, for thousands of years, women have lived, exemplified, met in intimacy, the archetype of Avalokitesvara, of Kuan-Yin, she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world.Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered, unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is. They have infused societies with kindness, and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half. And they have actualized compassion through direct action. Jody Williams called it: It's good to meditate. I'm sorry, you've got to do a little bit of that, Jody. Step back, give your mother a break, okay.(Laughter)But the other side of the equation is you've got to come out of your cave. You have to come into the world like Asanga did, who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave. He said, ""I'm out of here."" He's going down the path. He sees something in the path. He looks, it's a dog, he drops to his knees. He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg. The wound is just filled with maggots. He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them. And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness.I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men — with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings. The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire. May we actualize that capacity for women everywhere.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joan_halifax
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"I didn't always love unintended consequences, but I've really learned to appreciate them. I've learned that they're really the essence of what makes for progress, even when they seem to be terrible. And I'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do.Let's go to 40,000 years before the present, to the time of the cultural explosion, when music, art, technology, so many of the things that we're enjoying today, so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED were born. And the anthropologist Randall White has made a very interesting observation: that if our ancestors 40,000 years ago had been able to see what they had done, they wouldn't have really understood it. They were responding to immediate concerns. They were making it possible for us to do what they do, and yet, they didn't really understand how they did it.Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present. And this is when it really gets interesting. What about the domestication of grains? What about the origins of agriculture? What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment? And I could just imagine the committees reporting back to them on where agriculture was going to take humanity, at least in the next few hundred years. It was really bad news. First of all, worse nutrition, maybe shorter life spans. It was simply awful for women. The skeletal remains from that period have shown that they were grinding grain morning, noon and night. And politically, it was awful. It was the beginning of a much higher degree of inequality among people. If there had been rational technology assessment then, I think they very well might have said, ""Let's call the whole thing off.""Even now, our choices are having unintended effects. Historically, for example, chopsticks — according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan — resulted in long-term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public. And we are also changing our teeth right now. There is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time. That's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence. But I think from the point of view of a Neanderthal, there would have been a lot of disapproval of the wimpish choppers that we now have. So these things are kind of relative to where you or your ancestors happen to stand.In the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences, and there was a very healthy sense of caution, reflected in the Tree of Knowledge, in Pandora's Box, and especially in the myth of Prometheus that's been so important in recent metaphors about technology. And that's all very true. The physicians of the ancient world — especially the Egyptians, who started medicine as we know it — were very conscious of what they could and couldn't treat. And the translations of the surviving texts say, ""This I will not treat. This I cannot treat."" They were very conscious. So were the followers of Hippocrates. The Hippocratic manuscripts also — repeatedly, according to recent studies — show how important it is not to do harm. More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing. But he did his best, and he kept meticulous records that let him transform that branch of medicine.Now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century, we find a new style of technology. What we find is, no longer simple tools, but systems. We find more and more complex arrangements of machines that make it harder and harder to diagnose what's going on. And the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century, who were the original hackers. Thomas Edison would have been very, very comfortable in the atmosphere of a software firm today. And these hackers had a word for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems that they called bugs. That was the origin of the word ""bug."" This consciousness, though, was a little slow to seep through the general population, even people who were very, very well informed.Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times — at least until 1918 — registered with the U.S. Patent Office. That was the Paige typesetter. The Paige typesetter had 18,000 parts. The patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures. It was such a beautiful machine because it did everything that a human being did in setting type — including returning the type to its place, which was a very difficult thing. And Mark Twain, who knew all about typesetting, really was smitten by this machine. Unfortunately, he was smitten in more ways than one, because it made him bankrupt, and he had to tour the world speaking to recoup his money. And this was an important thing about 19th century technology, that all these relationships among parts could make the most brilliant idea fall apart, even when judged by the most expert people.Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated. And that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger. The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries, was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship. And this was the result of the tragic loss of lives of people who could not get into them. However, there was another case, the Eastland, a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915, and it killed 841 people — that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the Titanic. The reason for it, in part, was the extra life boats that were added that made this already unstable ship even more unstable. And that again proves that when you're talking about unintended consequences, it's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw. It's really a question of the system, how the ship was loaded, the ballast and many other things.So the 20th century, then, saw how much more complex reality was, but it also saw a positive side. It saw that invention could actually benefit from emergencies. It could benefit from tragedies. And my favorite example of that — which is not really widely known as a technological miracle, but it may be one of the greatest of all times, was the scaling up of penicillin in the Second World War. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but even by 1940, no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced. A number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it. They were working on it independently, and they weren't getting anywhere. And the Government Research Bureau brought representatives together and told them that this is something that has to be done. And not only did they do it, but within two years, they scaled up penicillin from preparation in one-liter flasks to 10,000-gallon vats. That was how quickly penicillin was produced and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time. In the Second World War, too, the existence of solar radiation was demonstrated by studies of interference that was detected by the radar stations of Great Britain. So there were benefits in calamities — benefits to pure science, as well as to applied science and medicine.Now when we come to the period after the Second World War, unintended consequences get even more interesting. And my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976, when it was discovered that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters, but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of Legionella bacillus. Well, technology to the rescue. So chemists got to work, and they developed a bactericide that became widely used in those systems.But something else happened in the early 1980s, and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic of failures of tape drives all over the United States. And IBM, which made them, just didn't know what to do. They commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate, and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts. What happened was the bactericide was formulated with minute traces of tin. And these tin particles were deposited on the tape heads and were crashing the tape heads. So they reformulated the bactericide. But what's interesting to me is that this was the first case of a mechanical device suffering, at least indirectly, from a human disease. So it shows that we're really all in this together.(Laughter)In fact, it also shows something interesting, that although our capabilities and technology have been expanding geometrically, unfortunately, our ability to model their long-term behavior, which has also been increasing, has been increasing only arithmetically. So one of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight. One other very positive consequence of 20th century technology, though, was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances. There are two historians of business at the University of Maryland, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, who have done some extremely interesting work, much of it still unpublished, on the history of major innovations. They have combined the list of major innovations, and they've discovered that the greatest number, the greatest decade, for fundamental innovations, as reflected in all of the lists that others have made — a number of lists that they have merged — was the Great Depression.And nobody knows just why this was so, but one story can reflect something of it. It was the origin of the Xerox copier, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. And Chester Carlson, the inventor, was a patent attorney. He really was not intending to work in patent research, but he couldn't really find an alternative technical job. So this was the best job he could get. He was upset by the low quality and high cost of existing patent reproductions, and so he started to develop a system of dry photocopying, which he patented in the late 1930s — and which became the first dry photocopier that was commercially practical in 1960. So we see that sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity.What does this mean? It means, I think, that we're living in a time of unexpected possibilities. Think of the financial world, for example. The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash. And he published that book in the early 1930s, and the book still exists in further editions and is still a fundamental textbook. So many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters.Now think of the large and small plagues that we have now — bed bugs, killer bees, spam — and it's very possible that the solutions to those will really extend well beyond the immediate question. If we think, for example, of Louis Pasteur, who in the 1860s was asked to study the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry, and his discoveries were really the beginning of the germ theory of disease. So very often, some kind of disaster — sometimes the consequence, for example, of over-cultivation of silk worms, which was a problem in Europe at the time — can be the key to something much bigger.So this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences. We need to take a really positive view. We need to see what they can do for us. We need to learn from those figures that I mentioned. We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing, who killed patients in the course of his early operations. He had to have some errors. He had to have some mistakes. And he learned meticulously from his mistakes. And as a result, when we say, ""This isn't brain surgery,"" that pays tribute to how difficult it was for anyone to learn from their mistakes in a field of medicine that was considered so discouraging in its prospects. And we can also remember how the pharmaceutical companies were willing to pool their knowledge, to share their knowledge, in the face of an emergency, which they hadn't really been for years and years. They might have been able to do it earlier.The message, then, for me, about unintended consequences is chaos happens; let's make better use of it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_tenner_unintended_consequences
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"I am the daughter of a forger, not just any forger ... When you hear the word ""forger,"" you often understand ""mercenary."" You understand ""forged currency,"" ""forged pictures."" My father is no such man. For 30 years of his life, he made false papers — never for himself, always for other people, and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed. Let me introduce him. Here is my father at age 19. It all began for him during World War II, when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop. He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance. And it's not a banal story — after the liberation he continued to make false papers until the '70s.When I was a child I knew nothing about this, of course. This is me in the middle making faces. I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children. I had a ""normal"" dad like everybody else, apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ... well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather. Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator, and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly. And, of course, he never talked about his past life when he was a forger.There was, however, an incident I'm going to tell you about, that perhaps could have led me suspect something. I was in high school and got a bad grade, a rare event for me, so I decided to hide it from my parents. In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature. I started working on my mother's signature, because my father's is absolutely impossible to forge. So, I got working. I took some sheets of paper and started practicing, practicing, practicing, until I reached what I thought was a steady hand, and went into action. Later, while checking my school bag, my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged. She yelled at me like she never had before. I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets, and then I waited for my father to come back from work with, one could say, much apprehension. I heard him come in. I remained under the blankets. He entered my room, sat on the corner of the bed, and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head, and when he saw me he started laughing. He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand. Then he said, ""But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder! Can't you see it's really too small?"" Indeed, it's rather small.I was born in Algeria. There I would hear people say my father was a ""moudjahid"" and that means ""fighter."" Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations, and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life, especially that he had ""done"" World War II, that he had ""done"" the Algerian war. And in my head I would be thinking that ""doing"" a war meant being a soldier. But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent, I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun. And indeed, I was very far from the mark.One day, while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality, I happened to see some documents that caught my attention. These are real! These are mine, I was born an Argentinean. But the document I happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services. And then, suddenly, I went ""wow!"" My father, a secret agent? It was very James Bond. I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer. And later, I told myself that one day I would have to question him. And then I became a mother and had a son, and finally decided it was time — that he absolutely had to talk to us. I had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday, and suddenly I was very, very afraid. I feared he'd go and take his silences with him, and take his secrets with him. I managed to convince him that it was important for us, but possibly also for other people that he shared his story. He decided to tell it to me and I made a book, from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later.So, his story. My father was born in Argentina. His parents were of Russian descent. The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s. His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor. So at the age of 14 my father had to work. And with his only diploma, his primary education certificate, he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner. That's where he discovered something totally magical, and when he talks about it, it's fascinating — it's the magic of dyeing chemistry. During that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15. This coincided with the time when he threw himself body and soul into chemistry because it was the only consolation for his sadness. All day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge, and at night, when no one was looking, he'd put his experience to practice. He was mostly interested in ink bleaching.All this to tell you that if my father became a forger, actually, it was almost by accident. His family was Jewish, so they were hounded. Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers. Well, they were out, but they were always in danger. The big ""Jew"" stamp was still on their papers. It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents. My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted, he'd never thought of false papers. But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance.In those times documents had hard covers, they were filled in by hand, and they stated your job. In order to survive, he needed to be working. He asked the man to write ""dyer."" Suddenly the man looked very, very interested. As a ""dyer,"" do you know how to bleach ink marks? Of course he knew. And suddenly the man started explaining that actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem: even the top experts could not manage to bleach an ink, called ""indelible,"" the ""Waterman"" blue ink. And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it. Now, of course, the man was very impressed with this young man of 17 who could immediately give him the formula, so he recruited him. And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case: the so-called ""correction pen."" (Applause)But it was only the beginning. That's my father. As soon as he got to the lab, even though he was the youngest, he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents. All the movements stopped at falsifying. But demand was ever-growing and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents. He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch. He started a press. He started photoengraving. He started making rubber stamps. He started inventing all kind of things — with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel. Anyway, he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output. He had made a simple calculation: In one hour he could make 30 forged documents. If he slept one hour, 30 people would die.This sense of responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 — and also his guilt for being a survivor, since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not — stayed with him all his life. And this is maybe what explains why, for 30 years, he continued to make false papers at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices. I'd like to talk about those sacrifices, because there were many. There were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid. To him, being paid would have meant being a mercenary. If he had accepted payment, he wouldn't be able to say ""yes"" or ""no"" depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause. So he was a photographer by day, and a forger by night for 30 years. He was broke all of the time.Then there were the emotional sacrifices: How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets? How can one explain what one does at night in the lab, every single night? Of course, there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that I understood much later. One day my father introduced me to my sister. He also explained to me that I had a brother, too, and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four, and they were 30 years older than me. They are both in their sixties now.In order to write the book, I asked my sister questions. I wanted to know who my father was, who was the father she had known. She explained that the father that she'd had would tell them he'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk. They would get all dressed up and wait for him, but he would almost never come. He'd say, ""I'll call."" He wouldn't call. And then he would not come. Then one day he totally disappeared. Time passed, and they thought he had surely forgotten them, at first. Then as time passed, at the end of almost two years, they thought, ""Well, perhaps our father has died."" And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about because it was painful. And while my half brother and sister thought they'd been abandoned, orphaned, my father was making false papers. And if he did not tell them, it was of course to protect them.After the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine before the creation of Israel. And then, as he was a staunch anti-colonialist, he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war. After the Algerian war, at the heart of the international resistance movements, his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door. In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola. And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party. He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans.There was also Latin America. My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico. Then there was the Vietnam War. My father made false papers for the American deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese. Europe was not spared either. My father made false papers for the dissidents against Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, against the colonels' dictatorship in Greece, and even in France. There, just once, it happened in May of 1968. My father watched, benevolently, of course, the demonstrations of the month of May, but his heart was elsewhere, and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve.Once, though, he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize. (Laughter) He was much younger in those days, and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting. He told me that those false papers were the most media-relevant and the least useful he'd had to make in all his life. But, he agreed to do it, even though Daniel Cohn-Bendit's life was not in danger, just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities, and to show them that there's nothing more porous than borders — and that ideas have no borders.All my childhood, while my friends' dads would tell them Grimm's fairy tales, my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles. And those heroes did not need an army behind them. Anyhow, nobody would have followed them, except for a handful [of] men and women of conviction and courage. I understood much later that actually it was his own story my father would tell me to get me to sleep. I asked him whether, considering the sacrifices he had to make, he ever had any regrets. He said no. He told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything. He was persuaded, and he's still convinced that another world is possible — a world where no one would ever need a forger. He's still dreaming about it. My father is here in the room today. His name is Adolfo Kaminsky and I'm going to ask him to stand up. (Applause) Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kaminsky
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"What I'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive. Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive. So this is a start. Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth. There's been four billion years of organic, biological life. And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world. And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology.Before we do that, I want to kind of put biology in its place. And I'm absolutely enthralled by biology. I love to do synthetic biology. I love things that are alive. I love manipulating the infrastructure of biology. But within that infrastructure, we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution. And evolution, although it was established well over 100 years ago by Charles Darwin and a vast number of other people, evolution still is a little bit intangible. And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest. And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way. Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing, and some winning.So bearing that in mind, as a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? And this seems quite a profound question. And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day. So when I thought about it, then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer. And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell — a bacteria.So this raises three really important questions: What is life? Is biology special? Biologists seem to think so. Is matter evolvable? Now if we answer those questions in reverse order, the third question — is matter evolvable? — if we can answer that, then we're going to know how special biology is, and maybe, just maybe, we'll have some idea of what life really is.So here's some inorganic life. This is a dead crystal, and I'm going to do something to it, and it's going to become alive. And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing. This is an inorganic tube. And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive. Of course, they're not alive. It's a chemistry experiment where I've made a crystal garden. But when I saw this, I was really fascinated, because it seemed lifelike. And as I pause for a few seconds, have a look at the screen. You can see there's architecture growing, filling the void. And this is dead. So I was positive that, if somehow we can make things mimic life, let's go one step further. Let's see if we can actually make life.But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe. In fact, we were the only people in the universe. Now, that's a bit boring. So as a chemist, I wanted to say, ""Hang on. What is going on here? Is life that improbable?"" And this is really the question. I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars. And in fact, let's take that one step further. Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well. And so the problem with chemists — and this is a massive advantage as well — is we like to focus on our elements. In biology, carbon takes center stage. And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life. In fact, we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate. We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards.Well what about matter? If we can make matter alive, would we have a matterhazard? So think, this is a serious question. If your pen could replicate, that would be a bit of a problem. So we have to think differently if we're going to make stuff come alive. And we also have to be aware of the issues. But before we can make life, let's think for a second what life really is characterized by. And forgive the complicated diagram. This is just a collection of pathways in the cell. And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing. Synthetic biologists are manipulating it. Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease. And you have all these pathways going on at the same time. You have regulation; information is transcribed; catalysts are made; stuff is happening. But what does a cell do? Well it divides, it competes, it survives. And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life.But what else is life characterized by? Well, I like think of it as a flame in a bottle. And so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating, metabolizing, burning through chemistries. And so we have to understand that if we're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life, we need to power it somehow. So before we can really start to make life, we have to really think about where it came from. And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere — maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else. But the real honest answer is, we just don't know, because there is a problem with the origin. Imagine way back, four and a half billion years ago, there is a vast chemical soup of stuff. And from this stuff we came.So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from stuff on planet Earth. And we went through a variety of worlds. The RNA people would talk about the RNA world. We somehow got to proteins and DNA. We then got to the last ancestor. Evolution kicked in — and that's the cool bit. And here we are. But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history. So we don't know how we got here.So there are two options: intelligent design, direct and indirect — so God, or my friend. Now talking about E.T. putting us there, or some other life, just pushes the problem further on. I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist. The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity. This seems most likely. So we have some kind of primordial soup. And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids. And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins. But life begins, what does that mean? What is life? What is this stuff of life?So in the 1950s, Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment, where they did the equivalent in the chemical world. They took the basic ingredients, put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through. And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell. So the whole area's been stuck for a while, and it got reignited in the '80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on.In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats. So what we're trying to do is do reactions — not in one flask, but in tens of flasks, and connect them together, as you can see with this flow system, all these pipes. We can do it microfluidically, we can do it lithographically, we can do it in a 3D printer, we can do it in droplets for colleagues. And the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away. But that's probably going to end in failure, so we need to be a bit more focused.And the answer, of course, lies with mice. This is how I remember what I need as a chemist. I say, ""Well I want molecules."" But I need a metabolism, I need some energy. I need some information, and I need a container. Because if I want evolution, I need containers to compete. So if you have a container, it's like getting in your car. ""This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car."" And I imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life. So these things together give us evolution, perhaps. And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal.So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules. And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit. There's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present. And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins, but there's no carbon in sight. Carbon is banned. And so with this Lego kit, we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA. But we need to make some containers. And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them. And you can see on the screen a cell being made. And we're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell. And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes, in real cells, and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism, a molecular survival of the fittest.And this movie here shows this competition between molecules. Molecules are competing for stuff. They're all made of the same stuff, but they want their shape to win. They want their shape to persist. And that is the key. If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete. If we manage to do that, forget the molecular detail.Let's zoom out to what that could mean. So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology, to us. If we could get evolution into the material world, then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution. And that's really worth thinking about. Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe? Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete? So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution. So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life — that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything — we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in.So imagine we make a little cell. We want to put it out in the environment, and we want it to be powered by the Sun. What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on. And we don't use design anymore. We find what works. We should take our inspiration from biology. Biology doesn't care about the design unless it works. So this will reorganize the way we design things. But not only just that, we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology. Wouldn't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn't really deal with? The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution. Evolution cannot be cut apart. You need to somehow find the fitness function. And the profound realization for me is that, if this works, the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level, and we really start talking about selfish matter.And what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff? You're sitting on chairs. They're inanimate, they're not alive. But you are made of stuff, and you are using stuff, and you enslave stuff. So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting. And we're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive. And again, when you're thinking about how improbable this is, remember, five billion years ago, we were not here, and there was no life. So what will that tell usabout the origin of life and the meaning of life? But perhaps, for me as a chemist, I want to keep away from general terms; I want to think about specifics. So what does it mean about defining life? We really struggle to do this. And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life. I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Just a quick question on timeline. You believe you're going to be successful in this project? When?Lee Cronin: So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in. We're proposing to do it in just a few hours, once we've set up the right chemistry.CA: And when do you think that will happen?LC: Hopefully within the next two years.CA: That would be a big story. (Laughter) In your own mind, what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life, walking or oozing or something?LC: I think it's 100 percent. Because the thing is, we are so chauvinistic to biology, if you take away carbon, there's other things that can happen. So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for. Don't go and look for carbon, go and look for evolvable stuff.CA: Lee Cronin, good luck. (LC: Thank you very much.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive
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"Hi everyone. I'm an artist and a dad — second time around. Thank you. And I want to share with you my latest art project. It's a children's book for the iPad. It's a little quirky and silly. It's called ""Pop-It,"" And it's about the things little kids do with their parents.(Music)So this is about potty training — as most of you, I hope, know. You can tickle the rug. You can make the baby poop. You can do all those fun things. You can burst bubbles. You can draw, as everyone should.But you know, I have a problem with children's books: I think they're full of propaganda. At least an Indian trying to get one of these American books in Park Slope, forget it. It's not the way I was brought up. So I said, ""I'm going to counter this with my own propaganda."" If you notice carefully, it's a homosexual couple bringing up a child. You don't like it? Shake it, and you have a lesbian couple. (Laughter) Shake it, and you have a heterosexual couple. You know, I don't even believe in the concept of an ideal family.I have to tell you about my childhood. I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters. Basically, I was brought up to be a good Samaritan, and I am. And I'd go at the end of the day to a traditional Hindu house, which was probably the only Hindu house in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood. Basically, I celebrated every religious function. In fact, when there was a wedding in our neighborhood, all of us would paint our houses for the wedding. I remember we cried profusely when the little goats we played with in the summer became biriani. (Laughter) We all had to fast during Ramadan. It was a very beautiful time.But I must say, I'll never forget, when I was 13 years old, this happened. Babri Masjid — one of the most beautiful mosques in India, built by King Babur, I think, in the 16th century — was demolished by Hindu activists. This caused major riots in my city. And for the first time, I was affected by this communal unrest. My little five-year-old kid neighbor comes running in, and he says, ""Rags, Rags. You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims. Be careful."" I'm like, ""Dude, I'm Hindu."" (Laughter) He's like, ""Huh!""You know, my work is inspired by events such as this. Even in my gallery shows, I try and revisit historic events like Babri Masjid, distill only its emotional residue and image my own life. Imagine history being taught differently.Remember that children's book where you shake and the sexuality of the parents change? I have another idea. It's a children's book about Indian independence — very patriotic. But when you shake it, you get Pakistan's perspective. Shake it again, and you get the British perspective.(Applause)You have to separate fact from bias, right. Even my books on children have cute, fuzzy animals. But they're playing geopolitics. They're playing out Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan. You know, I'm making a very important argument. And my argument [is] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage. After all, children's books are manuals on parenting, so you better give them children's books that teach them perspectives. And conversely, only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them.I'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy. You know, I can't promise my child a life without bias — we're all biased — but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raghava_kk_shake_up_your_story
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"My topic is economic growth in China and India. And the question I want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth. You may say this is not fair, because I'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy. Actually, exactly the opposite is what I'm going to do. I'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy, rather than against democracy.The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India. Over the last 30 years, in terms of the GDP growth rates, China has grown at twice the rate of India. In the last five years, the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth. But over the last 30 years, China undoubtedly has done much better than India. One simple answer is China has Shanghai and India has Mumbai. Look at the skyline of Shanghai. This is the Pudong area. The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India. The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law. It can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process, evict millions of people — that's just a small technical issue. Whereas in India, you cannot do that, because you have to listen to the public. You're being constrained by the public's opinion. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with that view. In an interview printed in the financial press of India, He said that he wants to make Mumbai another Shanghai. This is an Oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values, and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of Shanghai.So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth, that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development: infrastructures, airports, highways, bridges, things like that. And you need a strong government to do that, because you cannot respect private property rights. You cannot be constrained by the public's opinion. You need also state ownership, especially of land assets, in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly. The implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth, rather than a facilitator of economic growth. Here's the key question. Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth? This is a key issue. If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth, then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth. If you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe, then you will put less emphasis on strong government.So to illustrate that question, let me give you two countries. And for the sake of brevity, I'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2. Country 1 has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures. Country 1 has more telephones, and Country 1 has a longer system of railways. So if I were to ask you, ""Which is China and which is India, and which country has grown faster?"" if you believe in the infrastructure view, then you will say, ""Country 1 must be China. They must have done better, in terms of economic growth. And Country 2 is possibly India.""Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union, and the data referred to 1989. After the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones, the country collapsed. That's not too good. The picture there is Khrushchev. I know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the Soviet Union, but that's the best picture that I can find. (Laughter) Telephones, infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth. Country 2, that has fewer telephones, is China. Since 1989, the country has performed at a double-digit rate every year for the last 20 years. If you know nothing about China and the Soviet Union other than the fact about their telephones, you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades.Country 1, that has a longer system of railways, is actually India. And Country 2 is China. This is a very little known fact about the two countries. Yes, today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India. But for many years, until the late 1990s, China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India. In developing countries, the most common mode of transportation is the railways, and the British built a lot of railways in India. India is the smaller of the two countries, and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s. So clearly, infrastructure doesn't explain why China did better before the late 1990s, as compared with India.In fact, if you look at the evidence worldwide, the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth. The economy grows, government accumulates more resources, and the government can invest in infrastructure — rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth. And this is clearly the story of the Chinese economic growth. Let me look at this question more directly. Is democracy bad for economic growth? Now let's turn to two countries, Country A and Country B. Country A, in 1990, had about $300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B, which had $460 in per capita GDP. By 2008, Country A has surpassed Country B with $700 per capita GDP as compared with $650 per capita GDP. Both countries are in Asia.If I were to ask you, ""Which are the two Asian countries? And which one is a democracy?"" you may argue, ""Well, maybe Country A is China and Country B is India."" In fact, Country A is democratic India, and Country B is Pakistan — the country that has a long period of military rule. And it's very common that we compare India with China. That's because the two countries have about the same population size. But the more natural comparison is actually between India and Pakistan. Those two countries are geographically similar. They have a complicated, but shared common history. By that comparison, democracy looks very, very good in terms of economic growth.So why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments? One reason is the East Asian Model. In East Asia, we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s. The problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries, ""Have you won the lottery?"" And they all tell you, ""Yes, we have won the lottery."" And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent. The reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and didn't end up winning the prize.For each of these successful authoritarian governments in East Asia, there's a matched failure. Korea succeeded, North Korea didn't. Taiwan succeeded, China under Mao Zedong didn't. Burma didn't succeed. The Philippines didn't succeed. If you look at the statistical evidence worldwide, there's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth. So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias — it is known as selecting on a dependent variable, something we always tell our students to avoid.So exactly why did China grow so much faster? I will take you to the Cultural Revolution, when China went mad, and compare that country's performance with India under Indira Gandhi. The question there is: Which country did better, China or India? China was during the Cultural Revolution. It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution, China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP. So that's when China was mad. The whole country went mad. It must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the Cultural Revolution. The advantage the country had was human capital — nothing else but human capital.This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s. And this is the earliest data that I can find. The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India. The contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between Chinese women and Indian women. I haven't told you about the definition of literacy. In China, the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters. In India, the definition of literacy, operating definition of literacy, is the ability, the grand ability, to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak. The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated. If you go to other sources of data such as Human Development Index, that data series, go back to the early 1970s, you see exactly the same contrast. China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India.Life expectancies: as early as 1965, China had a huge advantage in life expectancy. On average, as a Chinese in 1965, you lived 10 years more than an average Indian. So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian, you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer. If you made that decision in 1965, the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution. So you have to always think carefully about these decisions.If you cannot chose your nationality, then you will want to become an Indian man. Because, as an Indian man, you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis Indian women. This is an extremely strange fact. It's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern. It shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the Indian society against women. The good news is, by 2006, India has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy. Today, Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men. So India is reverting to the normal. But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality.These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India. In China, it's all women. 60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country, whereas in India, it's all men. Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title, ""India Poised to Overtake China in Textile."" By looking at these two pictures, I say no, it won't overtake China for a while. If you look at other East Asian countries, women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off — in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia. India still has a long way to go to catch up with China.Then the issue is, what about the Chinese political system? You talk about human capital, you talk about education and public health. What about the political system? Isn't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China? Actually, the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that. It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system. Statically, China is a one-party system, authoritarian — there's no question about it. Dynamically, it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic. When you explain change — for example, economic growth; economic growth is about change — when you explain change, you use other things that have changed to explain change, rather than using the constant to explain change. Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change, but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change.In terms of the political changes, they have introduced village elections. They have increased the security of proprietors. And they have increased the security with long-term land leases. There are also financial reforms in rural China. There is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in China. To me, the pace of political changes is too slow, too gradual. And my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges, because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms. But nevertheless, the system has moved in a more liberal direction, moved in a more democratic direction.You can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on India. In fact, when India was growing at a Hindu rate of growth — about one percent, two percent a year — that was when India was least democratic. Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975. The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations. A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms, the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule, privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts. So the dynamic perspective fits both with China and in India in terms of the direction.Why do many people believe that India is still a growth disaster? One reason is they are always comparing India with China. But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth. If you are a NBA player and you are always being compared to Michael Jordan, you're going to look not so impressive. But that doesn't mean that you're a bad basketball player. Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark. In fact, if you compare India with the average developing country, even before the more recent period of acceleration of Indian growth — now India is growing between eight and nine percent — even before this period, India was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies. This is a very impressive record indeed.Let's think about the future: the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant. Which country has the growth momentum? China, I believe, still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals — mostly the social capital, the public health, the sense of egalitarianism that you don't find in India. But I believe that India has the momentum. It has the improving fundamentals. The government has invested in basic education, has invested in basic health. I believe the government should do more, but nevertheless, the direction it is moving in is the right direction. India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth, whereas China is still struggling with political reforms.I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth. And it's very important to have political reforms, to have widely shared benefits of economic growth. I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist. Hopefully, five years from now, I'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yasheng_huang
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"Now this is a very un-TED-like thing to do, but let's kick off the afternoon with a message from a mystery sponsor.Anonymous: Dear Fox News, it has come to our unfortunate attention that both the name and nature of Anonymous has been ravaged. We are everyone. We are no one. We are anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. We are but the base of chaos.Misha Glenny: Anonymous, ladies and gentlemen — a sophisticated group of politically motivated hackers who have emerged in 2011. And they're pretty scary. You never know when they're going to attack next, who or what the consequences will be. But interestingly, they have a sense of humor. These guys hacked into Fox News' Twitter account to announce President Obama's assassination. Now you can imagine the panic that would have generated in the newsroom at Fox. ""What do we do now? Put on a black armband, or crack open the champagne?"" (Laughter) And of course, who could escape the irony of a member of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. being a victim of hacking for a change.(Laughter)(Applause)Sometimes you turn on the news and you say, ""Is there anyone left to hack?"" Sony Playstation Network — done, the government of Turkey — tick, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency — a breeze, the CIA — falling off a log. In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't. I mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the FBI have been hacked. Is nothing sacred anymore, for heaven's sake?Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous — and they would say this themselves — they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data. But there is also a very serious aspect to Anonymous — they are ideologically driven. They claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy. They say that governments are trying to take over the Internet and control it, and that they, Anonymous, are the authentic voice of resistance — be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships, against global media corporations, or against intelligence agencies, or whoever it is. And their politics are not entirely unattractive. Okay, they're a little inchoate. There's a strong whiff of half-baked anarchism about them. But one thing is true: we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the Internet. The Web links everything, and very soon it will mediate most human activity. Because the Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an old-age dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom.Now this is a very complicated struggle. And unfortunately, for mortals like you and me, we probably can't understand it very well. Nonetheless, in an unexpected attack of hubris a couple of years ago, I decided I would try and do that. And I sort of get it. These were the various things that I was looking at as I was trying to understand it. But in order to try and explain the whole thing, I would need another 18 minutes or so to do it, so you're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion, and let me assure you that all of these issues are involved in cybersecurity and control of the Internet one way or the other, but in a configuration that even Stephen Hawking would probably have difficulty trying to get his head around. So there you are. And as you see, in the middle, there is our old friend, the hacker. The hacker is absolutely central to many of the political, social and economic issues affecting the Net. And so I thought to myself, ""Well, these are the guys who I want to talk to."" And what do you know, nobody else does talk to the hackers. They're completely anonymous, as it were.So despite the fact that we are beginning to pour billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, into cybersecurity — for the most extraordinary technical solutions — no one wants to talk to these guys, the hackers, who are doing everything. Instead, we prefer these really dazzling technological solutions, which cost a huge amount of money. And so nothing is going into the hackers. Well, I say nothing, but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit in Turin, Italy called the Hackers Profiling Project. And they are doing some fantastic research into the characteristics, into the abilities and the socialization of hackers. But because they're a U.N. operation, maybe that's why governments and corporations are not that interested in them. Because it's a U.N. operation, of course, it lacks funding. But I think they're doing very important work. Because where we have a surplus of technology in the cybersecurity industry, we have a definite lack of — call me old-fashioned — human intelligence.Now, so far I've mentioned the hackers Anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group. Of course, the criminal justice system treats them as common old garden criminals. But interestingly, Anonymous does not make use of its hacked information for financial gain. But what about the real cybercriminals? Well real organized crime on the Internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a website, which led to the industrialization of cybercrime. Welcome to the now forgotten realm of CarderPlanet. This is how they were advertising themselves a decade ago on the Net. Now CarderPlanet was very interesting. Cybercriminals would go there to buy and sell stolen credit card details, to exchange information about new malware that was out there. And remember, this is a time when we're seeing for the first time so-called off-the-shelf malware. This is ready for use, out-of-the-box stuff, which you can deploy even if you're not a terribly sophisticated hacker.And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals. And its creators were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial, because they were faced with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals. And that challenge is: How do you do business, how do you trust somebody on the Web who you want to do business with when you know that they're a criminal? (Laughter) It's axiomatic that they're dodgy, and they're going to want to try and rip you off. So the family, as the inner core of CarderPlanet was known, came up with this brilliant idea called the escrow system. They appointed an officer who would mediate between the vendor and the purchaser. The vendor, say, had stolen credit card details; the purchaser wanted to get a hold of them. The purchaser would send the administrative officer some dollars digitally, and the vendor would sell the stolen credit card details. And the officer would then verify if the stolen credit card worked. And if they did, he then passed on the money to the vendor and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser. And it was this which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web. And after that, it just went wild. We had a champagne decade for people who we know as Carders.Now I spoke to one of these Carders who we'll call RedBrigade — although that wasn't even his proper nickname — but I promised I wouldn't reveal who he was. And he explained to me how in 2003 and 2004 he would go on sprees in New York, taking out $10,000 from an ATM here, $30,000 from an ATM there, using cloned credit cards. He was making, on average a week, $150,000 — tax free of course. And he said that he had so much money stashed in his upper-East side apartment at one point that he just didn't know what to do with it and actually fell into a depression. But that's a slightly different story, which I won't go into now. Now the interesting thing about RedBrigade is that he wasn't an advanced hacker. He sort of understood the technology, and he realized that security was very important if you were going to be a Carder, but he didn't spend his days and nights bent over a computer, eating pizza, drinking coke and that sort of thing. He was out there on the town having a fab time enjoying the high life.And this is because hackers are only one element in a cybercriminal enterprise. And often they're the most vulnerable element of all. And I want to explain this to you by introducing you to six characters who I met while I was doing this research. Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT — born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982. Now he developed his social and moral compass on the Black Sea port during the 1990s. This was a sink-or-swim environment where involvement in criminal or corrupt activities was entirely necessary if you wanted to survive. As an accomplished computer user, what Dimitry did was to transfer the gangster capitalism of his hometown onto the Worldwide Web. And he did a great job in it. You have to understand though that from his ninth birthday, the only environment he knew was gangsterism. He knew no other way of making a living and making money.Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi — founder of DarkMarket, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As an eight year-old, he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city, looking for Tamils like Renu to murder. At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military, accused of being a terrorist, and his parents sent him on his own to Britain as a refugee seeking political asylum. At 13, with only little English and being bullied at school, he escaped into a world of computers where he showed great technical ability, but he was soon being seduced by people on the Internet. He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud, and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs jail in London in 2012.Matrix001, who was an administrator at DarkMarket. Born in Southern Germany to a stable and well-respected middle class family, his obsession with gaming as a teenager led him to hacking. And he was soon controlling huge servers around the world where he stored his games that he had cracked and pirated. His slide into criminality was incremental. And when he finally woke up to his situation and understood the implications, he was already in too deep.Max Vision, aka ICEMAN — mastermind of CardersMarket. Born in Meridian, Idaho. Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of Santa Clara, California in the late 90s for private companies and voluntarily for the FBI. Now in the late 1990s, he discovered a vulnerability on all U.S. government networks, and he went in and patched it up — because this included nuclear research facilities — sparing the American government a huge security embarrassment. But also, because he was an inveterate hacker, he left a tiny digital wormhole through which he alone could crawl. But this was spotted by an eagle-eye investigator, and he was convicted. At his open prison, he came under the influence of financial fraudsters, and those financial fraudsters persuaded him to work for them on his release. And this man with a planetary-sized brain is now serving a 13-year sentence in California.Adewale Taiwo, aka FreddyBB — master bank account cracker from Abuja in Nigeria. He set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup, bankfrauds@yahoo.co.uk before arriving in Britain in 2005 to take a Masters in chemical engineering at Manchester University. He impressed in the private sector, developing chemical applications for the oil industry while simultaneously running a worldwide bank and credit card fraud operation that was worth millions until his arrest in 2008.And then finally, Cagatay Evyapan, aka Cha0 — one of the most remarkable hackers ever, from Ankara in Turkey. He combined the tremendous skills of a geek with the suave social engineering skills of the master criminal. One of the smartest people I've ever met. He also had the most effective virtual private network security arrangement the police have ever encountered amongst global cybercriminals.Now the important thing about all of these people is they share certain characteristics despite the fact that they come from very different environments. They are all people who learned their hacking skills in their early to mid-teens. They are all people who demonstrate advanced ability in maths and the sciences. Remember that, when they developed those hacking skills, their moral compass had not yet developed. And most of them, with the exception of SCRIPT and Cha0, they did not demonstrate any real social skills in the outside world — only on the Web.And the other thing is the high incidence of hackers like these who have characteristics which are consistent with Asperger's syndrome. Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge. And he has done path-breaking work on autism and confirmed, also for the authorities here, that Gary McKinnon — who is wanted by the United States for hacking into the Pentagon — suffers from Asperger's and a secondary condition of depression. And Baron-Cohen explained that certain disabilities can manifest themselves in the hacking and computing world as tremendous skills, and that we should not be throwing in jail people who have such disabilities and skills because they have lost their way socially or been duped.Now I think we're missing a trick here, because I don't think people like Max Vision should be in jail. And let me be blunt about this. In China, in Russia and in loads of other countries that are developing cyber-offensive capabilities, this is exactly what they are doing. They are recruiting hackers both before and after they become involved in criminal and industrial espionage activities — are mobilizing them on behalf of the state. We need to engage and find ways of offering guidance to these young people, because they are a remarkable breed. And if we rely, as we do at the moment, solely on the criminal justice system and the threat of punitive sentences, we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame.Thank you very much for listening.(Applause)Chris Anderson: So your idea worth spreading is hire hackers. How would someone get over that kind of fear that the hacker they hire might preserve that little teensy wormhole?MG: I think to an extent, you have to understand that it's axiomatic among hackers that they do that. They're just relentless and obsessive about what they do. But all of the people who I've spoken to who have fallen foul of the law, they have all said, ""Please, please give us a chance to work in the legitimate industry. We just never knew how to get there, what we were doing. We want to work with you.""Chris Anderson: Okay, well that makes sense. Thanks a lot Misha.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/misha_glenny_hire_the_hackers
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"My name is Kate Hartman. And I like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate. So I'm specifically interested in how we, as humans, relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us. (Laughter) So just to give you a bit of context, as June said, I'm an artist, a technologist and an educator. I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics. And much of what I do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form.And so anytime I talk about what I do, I like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter. And it's pretty simple. Everybody's got one — all of you. I can guarantee, everyone in this room, all of you over there, the people in the cushy seats, the people up top with the laptops — we all have bodies. Don't be ashamed. It's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world. And so when working as an interaction designer, or as an artist who deals with participation — creating things that live on, in or around the human form — it's really a powerful space to work within.So within my own work, I use a broad range of materials and tools. So I communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing. And to tell you a bit about the things that I make, the easiest place to start the story is with a hat. And so it all started several years ago, late one night when I was sitting on the subway, riding home, and I was thinking. And I tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little. And so I was thinking about how it might be great if I could just take all these noises — like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head — if I could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that I could share them with somebody else. And so I went home, and I made a prototype of this hat. And I called it the Muttering Hat, because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you, but you could detach them and share them with somebody else.(Laughter)So I make other hats as well. This one is called the Talk to Yourself Hat. (Laughter) It's fairly self-explanatory. It physically carves out conversation space for one. And when you speak out loud, the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears. (Laughter) And so when I make these things, it's really not so much about the object itself, but rather the negative space around the object. So what happens when a person puts this thing on? What kind of an experience do they have? And how are they transformed by wearing it?So many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves. So this particular device is called the Gut Listener. And it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards. (Laughter) And so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication. And so the Inflatable Heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves. So they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions. So they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst. (Laughter) And some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences. So the Discommunicator is a tool for arguments. (Laughter) And so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange, but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered. (Laughter) And in the end, some of these things just act as invitations. So the Ear Bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say.So even though I'm really interested in the relationship between people, I also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us. And so when I was first living in New York City a few years back, I was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how I would like to better relate to them. And I thought, ""Well, hey! Maybe if I want to better relate to walls, maybe I need to be more wall-like myself."" So I made a wearable wall that I could wear as a backpack. And so I would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that I could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me.(Laughter)And so jumping off of that, thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world, I have this ongoing project called Botanicalls — which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols. So when a plant is thirsty, it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like Twitter. And so this really shifts the human/plant dynamic, because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time.And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers — of course. And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations. (Laughter) Because there seems to be an issue. The glaciers are actually leaving us. They're both shrinking and retreating — and some of them have disappeared altogether.And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers. And this one's particularly interesting, because, of all the glaciers in North America, it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year. They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier.And this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter. When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do? There's no kind of social protocol for this. I really just don't even know how to say hello. Do I carve a message in the snow? Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes — ice cube Morse code. Or perhaps I need to make myself a speaking tool, like an icy megaphone that I can use to amplify my voice when I direct it at the ice. But really the most satisfying experience I've had is the act of listening, which is what we need in any good relationship.And I was really struck by how much it affected me. This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier. And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days, I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit. (Laughter) And so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice. And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug.So, yea, this is actually just the beginning. These are initial musings for this project. And just as with the wall, how I wanted to be more wall-like, with this project, I'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace. And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines — artists, technologists, scientists — to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations.So beyond that, in closing, I'd just like to say that we're in this era of communications and device proliferation, and it's really tremendous and exciting and sexy, but I think what's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_hartman_the_art_of_wearable_communication
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"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the human genome.(Applause)Chromosome one — top left, bottom right — are the sex chromosomes. Women have two copies of that big X chromosome; men have the X and, of course, that small copy of the Y. Sorry boys, but it's just a tiny little thing that makes you different. So if you zoom in on this genome, then what you see, of course, is this double-helix structure — the code of life spelled out with these four biochemical letters, or we call them bases: A, C, G and T. How many are there in the human genome? Three billion. Is that a big number? Well, everybody can throw around big numbers. But in fact, if I were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280x800-resolution screen, we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome. So it's really quite big.And perhaps because of its size, a group of people — all, by the way, with Y chromosomes — decided they would want to sequence it.(Laughter)And so 15 years, actually, and about four billion dollars later, the genome was sequenced and published. In 2003, the final version was published, and they keep working on it. That was all done on a machine like this. It costs about a dollar for each base — a very slow way of doing it.Well, folks, I'm here to tell you that the world has completely changed, and none of you know about it. So now what we do is take a genome, we make maybe 50 copies of it, we cut all those copies up into little 50-base reads, and then we sequence them, massively parallel. Then we bring that into software and reassemble it, and tell you what the story is. So to give you a picture of what this looks like, the Human Genome Project: 3 gigabases, right? One run on one of these modern machines: 200 gigabases in a week. And that 200 is going to change to 600 this summer, and there's no sign of this pace slowing. The price of a base, to sequence a base, has fallen 100 million times. That's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998, waiting until 2011, and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice.(Laughter)World population, PC placements, the archive of all of medical literature, Moore's law, the old way of sequencing, and here's all the new stuff. Guys, this is a long scale; you don't typically see lines that go up like that. So the worldwide capacity to sequence human genomes is something like 50,000 to 100,000 human genomes this year. We know this based on the machines that are being placed. This is expected to double, triple or maybe quadruple year over year for the foreseeable future. In fact, there's one lab in particular that represents 20 percent of all that capacity: It's called the Beijing Genomics Institute. The Chinese are absolutely winning this race to the new Moon, by the way. What does this mean for medicine?So a woman, age 37, presents with stage 2 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. She is treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. She goes home. Two years later, she comes back with stage 3C ovarian cancer, unfortunately; treated again with surgery and chemotherapy. She comes back three years later at age 42 with more ovarian cancer, more chemotherapy. Six months later, she comes back with acute myeloid leukemia. She goes into respiratory failure and dies eight days later.So first: the way in which this woman was treated, in as little as 10 years, will look like bloodletting. And it's because of people like my colleague, Rick Wilson, at the Genome Institute at Washington University, who decided to take a look at this woman postmortem. And he took skin cells, healthy skin and cancerous bone marrow, and sequenced the whole genomes of both of them in a couple of weeks, no big deal. Then he compared those two genomes in software, and what he found, among other things, was a deletion — a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called TP53. If you have this deleterious mutation in this gene, you're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life.So unfortunately, this doesn't help this woman, but it does have severe — profound, if you will — implications to her family. I mean, if they have the same mutation, and they get this genetic test and they understand it, then they can get regular screens and can catch cancer early, and potentially live a significantly longer life.Let me introduce you to the Beery twins, diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two. Their mom is a very brave woman who didn't believe it; the symptoms weren't matching up. And through some heroic efforts and a lot of Internet searching, she was able to convince the medical community that, in fact, they had something else. They had dopa-responsive dystonia. And so they were given L-Dopa, and their symptoms did improve, but they weren't totally asymptomatic. Significant problems remained.Turns out the gentleman in this picture is a guy named Joe Beery, who was lucky enough to be the CIO of a company called Life Technologies. They're one of two companies that makes these massive whole-genome sequencing tools. And so he got his kids sequenced. What they found was a series of mutations in a gene called SPR, which is responsible for producing serotonin, among other things. So on top of L-Dopa, they gave these kids a serotonin precursor drug, and they're effectively normal now. Guys, this would never have happened without whole-genome sequencing. At the time — this was a few years ago — it cost $100,000. Today it's $10,000, next year, $1,000, the year after, $100, give or take a year. That's how fast this is moving.So here's little Nick — likes Batman and squirt guns. And it turns out Nick shows up at the children's hospital with this distended belly, like a famine victim. And it's not that he's not eating; it's that when he eats, his intestine basically opens up and feces spill out into his gut. So a hundred surgeries later, he looks at his mom and says, ""Mom, please pray for me. I'm in so much pain."" His pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what's going on, but he says, ""Let's get this kid's genome sequenced."" And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death. So the theory is that he's having some immunological reaction to what's going on — to the food, essentially. And that's a natural reaction, which causes some programmed cell death, but the gene that regulates that down is broken. And so this informs, among other things, of course, a treatment for bone marrow transplant, which he undertakes. And after nine months of grueling recovery, he's now eating steak with A1 sauce.(Laughter)The prospect of using the genome as a universal diagnostic is upon us today. Today. It's here. And what it means for all of us is that everybody in this room could live an extra 5, 10, 20 years, just because of this one thing. Which is a fantastic story, unless you think about humanity's footprint on the planet, and our ability to keep up food production. So it turns out that the very same technology is also being used to grow new lines of corn, wheat, soybean and other crops that are highly tolerant of drought, of flood, of pests and pesticides. Now, look — as long as we continue to increase the population, we'll have to continue to grow and eat genetically modified foods. And that's the only position I'll take today. Unless there's anybody in the audience who'd like to volunteer to stop eating? None, not one.This is a typewriter, a staple of every desktop for decades. And, in fact, the typewriter was essentially deleted by this thing. And then more general versions of word processors came about. But ultimately, it was a disruption on top of a disruption. It was Bob Metcalfe inventing the Ethernet, and the connection of all these computers that fundamentally changed everything. Suddenly we had Netscape, we had Yahoo. And we had, indeed, the entire dot-com bubble.(Laughter)Not to worry though, that was quickly rescued by the iPod, Facebook and, indeed, Angry Birds.(Laughter)Look, this is where we are today. This is the genomic revolution today. This is where we are. What I'd like you to consider is: What does it mean when these dots don't represent the individual bases of your genome, but they connect to genomes all across the planet? I just recently had to buy life insurance, and I was required to answer: A. I have never had a genetic test; B. I've had one, here you go; or C. I've had one and I'm not telling. Thankfully, I was able to answer A, and I say that honestly, in case my life insurance agent is listening. But what would have happened if I had said C?Consumer applications for genomics will flourish. Do you want to see if you're genetically compatible with your girlfriend? DNA sequencing on your iPhone? There's an app for that.(Laughter)Personalized genomic massage, anyone? There's already a lab today that tests for allele 334 of the AVPR1 gene, the so-called cheating gene.(Laughter)So anybody who's here today with your significant other, just turn over to them, swab their mouth, send it to the lab and you'll know for sure.(Laughter)Do you really want to elect a president whose genome suggests cardiomyopathy? Think of it — it's 2016, and the leading candidate releases not only her four years of back-tax returns, but also her personal genome. And it looks really good. Then she challenges all her competitors to do the same. Do you think that's not going to happen? Do you think it would have helped John McCain?(Laughter)How many people in the audience have the last name Resnick, like me? Raise your hand. Anybody? Nobody. Typically, there's one or two. So my father's father was one of 10 Resnick brothers. They all hated each other, and all moved to different parts of the planet. So it's likely I'm related to every Resnick that I ever meet, but I don't know. So imagine if my genome were De-identified, sitting in software, And a third cousin's genome was also sitting there, and there was software that could compare the two and make these associations. Not hard to imagine. My company has software that does this right now. Imagine one more thing, that that software is able to ask both parties for mutual consent: ""Would you be willing to meet your third cousin?"" And if we both say yes — voilà! Welcome to Chromosomally LinkedIn.(Laughter)Now this is probably a good thing, right? Bigger clan gatherings and so on. But maybe it's a bad thing as well. How many fathers in the room? Raise your hands. OK, so experts think that one to three percent of you are not actually the father of your child.(Laughter)Look —(Laughter)These genomes, these 23 chromosomes, they don't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society — at least not yet. And like any new technology, it's really in humanity's hands to wield it for the betterment of mankind or not. And so I urge you all to wake up and to tune in and to influence the genomic revolution that's happening all around you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_resnick_welcome_to_the_genomic_revolution
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"I want to say that really and truly, after these incredible speeches and ideas that are being spread, I am in the awkward position of being here to talk to you today about television. So most everyone watches TV. We like it. We like some parts of it. Here in America, people actually love TV. The average American watches TV for almost 5 hours a day. Okay? Now I happen to make my living these days in television, so for me, that's a good thing. But a lot of people don't love it so much. They, in fact, berate it. They call it stupid, and worse, believe me. My mother, growing up, she called it the ""idiot box.""But my idea today is not to debate whether there's such a thing as good TV or bad TV; my idea today is to tell you that I believe television has a conscience. So why I believe that television has a conscience is that I actually believe that television directly reflects the moral, political, social and emotional need states of our nation — that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system. So all these things are uniquely human, and they all add up to our idea of conscience.Now today, we're not talking about good and bad TV. We're talking about popular TV. We're talking about top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over the course of 50 years. How do these Nielsen ratings reflect not just what you've heard about, which is the idea of our social, collective unconscious, but how do these top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over 50 years reflect the idea of our social conscience? How does television evolve over time, and what does this say about our society?Now speaking of evolution, from basic biology, you probably remember that the animal kingdom, including humans, have four basic primal instincts. You have hunger; you have sex; you have power; and you have the urge for acquisitiveness. As humans, what's important to remember is that we've developed, we've evolved over time to temper, or tame, these basic animal instincts. We have the capacity to laugh and cry. We feel awe, we feel pity. That is separate and apart from the animal kingdom. The other thing about human beings is that we love to be entertained. We love to watch TV. This is something that clearly separates us from the animal kingdom. Animals might love to play, but they don't love to watch.So I had an ambition to discover what could be understood from this uniquely human relationship between television programs and the human conscious. Why has television entertainment evolved the way it has? I kind of think of it as this cartoon devil or angel sitting on our shoulders. Is television literally functioning as our conscience, tempting us and rewarding us at the same time?So to begin to answer these questions, we did a research study. We went back 50 years to the 1959/1960 television season. We surveyed the top-20 Nielsen shows every year for 50 years — a thousand shows. We talked to over 3,000 individuals — almost 3,600 — aged 18 to 70, and we asked them how they felt emotionally. How did you feel watching every single one of these shows? Did you feel a sense of moral ambiguity? Did you feel outrage? Did you laugh? What did this mean for you? So to our global TED audiences, I want to say that this was a U.S. sample. But as you can see, these emotional need states are truly universal. And on a factual basis, over 80 percent of the U.S.'s most popular shows are exported around the world. So I really hope our global audiences can relate.Two acknowledgments before our first data slide: For inspiring me to even think about the idea of conscience and the tricks that conscience can play on us on a daily basis, I thank legendary rabbi, Jack Stern. And for the way in which I'm going to present the data, I want to thank TED community superstar Hans Rosling, who you may have just seen.Okay, here we go. So here you see, from 1960 to 2010, the 50 years of our study. Two things we're going to start with — the inspiration state and the moral ambiguity state, which, for this purpose, we defined inspiration as television shows that uplift me, that make me feel much more positive about the world. Moral ambiguity are televisions shows in which I don't understand the difference between right and wrong. As we start, you see in 1960 inspiration is holding steady. That's what we're watching TV for. Moral ambiguity starts to climb. Right at the end of the 60s, moral ambiguity is going up, inspiration is kind of on the wane. Why? The Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK is shot, the Civil Rights movement, race riots, the Vietnam War, MLK is shot, Bobby Kennedy is shot, Watergate. Look what happens. In 1970, inspiration plummets. Moral ambiguity takes off. They cross, but Ronald Reagan, a telegenic president, is in office. It's trying to recover. But look, it can't: AIDS, Iran-Contra, the Challenger disaster, Chernobyl. Moral ambiguity becomes the dominant meme in television from 1990 for the next 20 years.Take a look at this. This chart is going to document a very similar trend. But in this case, we have comfort — the bubble in red — social commentary and irreverence in blue and green. Now this time on TV you have ""Bonanza,"" don't forget, you have ""Gunsmoke,"" you have ""Andy Griffith,"" you have domestic shows all about comfort. This is rising. Comfort stays whole. Irreverence starts to rise. Social commentary is all of a sudden spiking up. You get to 1969, and look what happens. You have comfort, irreverence, and social commentary, not only battling it out in our society, but you literally have two establishment shows — ""Gunsmoke"" and ""Gomer Pyle"" — in 1969 are the number-two- and number-three-rated television shows. What's number one? The socially irreverent hippie show, ""Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In."" They're all living together, right. Viewers had responded dramatically.Look at this green spike in 1966 to a bellwether show. When you guys hear this industry term, a breakout hit, what does that mean? It means in the 1966 television season, The ""Smothers Brothers"" came out of nowhere. This was the first show that allowed viewers to say, ""My God, I can comment on how I feel about the Vietnam War, about the presidency, through television?"" That's what we mean by a breakout show.So then, just like the last chart, look what happens. In 1970, the dam bursts. The dam bursts. Comfort is no longer why we watch television. Social commentary and irreverence rise throughout the 70s. Now look at this. The 70s means who? Norman Lear. You have ""All in the Family,"" ""Sanford and Son,"" and the dominant show — in the top-10 for the entire 70s — ""MAS*H."" In the entire 50 years of television that we studied, seven of 10 shows ranked most highly for irreverence appeared on air during the Vietnam War, five of the top-10 during the Nixon administration. Only one generation, 20 years in, and we discovered, Wow! TV can do that? It can make me feel this? It can change us? So to this very, very savvy crowd, I also want to note the digital folks did not invent disruptive. Archie Bunker was shoved out of his easy chair along with the rest of us 40 years ago.This is a quick chart. Here's another attribute: fantasy and imagination, which are shows defined as, ""takes me out of my everyday realm"" and ""makes me feel better."" That's mapped against the red dot, unemployment, which is a simple Bureau of Labor Department statistic. You'll see that every time fantasy and imagination shows rise, it maps to a spike in unemployment. Do we want to see shows about people saving money and being unemployed? No. In the 70s you have the bellwether show ""The Bionic Woman"" that rocketed into the top-10 in 1973, followed by the ""Six Million-Dollar Man"" and ""Charlie's Angels."" Another spike in the 1980s — another spike in shows about control and power. What were those shows? Glamorous and rich. ""Dallas,"" ""Fantasy Island."" Incredible mapping of our national psyche with some hard and fast facts: unemployment.So here you are, in my favorite chart, because this is our last 20 years. Whether or not you're in my business, you have surely heard or read of the decline of the thing called the three-camera sitcom and the rise of reality TV. Well, as we say in the business, X marks the spot. The 90s — the big bubbles of humor — we're watching ""Friends,"" ""Frasier,"" ""Cheers"" and ""Seinfeld."" Everything's good, low unemployment. But look: X marks the spot. In 2001, the September 2001 television season, humor succumbs to judgment once and for all. Why not? We had a 2000 presidential election decided by the Supreme Court. We had the bursting of the tech bubble. We had 9/11. Anthrax becomes part of the social lexicon. Look what happens when we keep going. At the turn of the century, the Internet takes off, reality television has taken hold. What do people want in their TV then? I would have thought revenge or nostalgia. Give me some comfort; my world is falling apart. No, they want judgment. I can vote you off the island. I can keep Sarah Palin's daughter dancing. I can choose the next American Idol. You're fired. That's all great, right?So as dramatically different as these television shows, pure entertainment, have been over the last 50 years — what did I start with? — one basic instinct remains. We're animals, we need our moms. There has not been a decade of television without a definitive, dominant TV mom. The 1950s: June Cleever in the original comfort show, ""Leave it to Beaver."" Lucille Ball kept us laughing through the rise of social consciousness in the 60s. Maude Findlay, the epitome of the irreverent 1970s, who tackled abortion, divorce, even menopause on TV. The 1980s, our first cougar was given to us in the form of Alexis Carrington. Murphy Brown took on a vice president when she took on the idea of single parenthood. This era's mom, Bree Van de Kamp. Now I don't know if this is the devil or the angel sitting on our conscience, sitting on television's shoulders, but I do know that I absolutely love this image.So to you all, the women of TEDWomen, the men of TEDWomen, the global audiences of TEDWomen, thank you for letting me present my idea about the conscience of television. But let me also thank the incredible creators who get up everyday to put their ideas on our television screens throughout all these ages of television. They give it life on television, for sure, but it's you as viewers, through your collective social consciences, that give it life, longevity, power or not.So thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lauren_zalaznick
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"Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about past and future billions. We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived. And we know that most of them are dead. And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know that most of them were or are very poor — did not live for very long. Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today. We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth.Economic historians call this ""The Great Divergence."" And this slide here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer you. It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic product, so average income. One, the red line, is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income. And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese. And this chart goes back to 1500. And you can see here that there's an exponential Great Divergence. They start off pretty close together. In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. When you get to the 1970s, which is where this chart ends, the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average Indian. And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living. It's based on purchasing power parity. The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s.So why? This wasn't just an economic story. If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny — five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires — 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. And notice, most of that went to the motherland, to the imperial metropoles, not to their colonial possessions.Now you can't just blame this on imperialism — though many people have tried to do so — for two reasons. One, empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500. Everybody did empire. They beat preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans. So it really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence. In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after decolonization. This is not a new question.Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, [posed] it through his character Rasselas in his novel ""Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,"" published in 1759. ""By what means are the Europeans thus powerful; or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither?""That's a great question. And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners — by the people in the rest of the world — like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire — who said in a book published in 1731, ""Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?"" Unlike Rasselas, Muteferrika had an answer to that question, which was correct. He said it was ""because they have laws and rules invented by reason."" It's not geography.You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography. We know that's wrong, because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions. We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result. Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz. If you still don't believe me, we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula. And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism. And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany. Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly, but in almost every other respect, it's a huge divergence. Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character, popular explanations for this kind of thing, are really significant.It's the ideas. It's the institutions. This must be true because a Scotsman said it. And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED. So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman. He was Adam Smith — not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery — though he is very smart indeed. (Laughter) Smith — and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful statue — Smith, in the ""Wealth of Nations"" published in 1776 — that's the most important thing that happened that year ... (Laughter) You bet. There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but ...(Laughter)""China seems to have been long stationary, and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of."" That is so right and so cool. And he said it such a long time ago.But you know, this is a TED audience, and if I keep talking about institutions, you're going to turn off. So I'm going to translate this into language that you can understand. Let's call them the killer apps. I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest. And they're kind of like the apps on your phone, in the sense that they look quite simple. They're just icons; you click on them. But behind the icon, there's complex code. It's the same with institutions. There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence. One, competition. Two, the scientific revolution. Three, property rights. Four, modern medicine. Five, the consumer society. And six, the work ethic. You can play a game and try and think of one I've missed at, or try and boil it down to just four, but you'll lose.(Laughter)Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process. Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns. The ancestor of the modern corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th century. Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing.The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics. Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate. Think of what that means. That really was a killer application. (Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution anywhere else. The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there. In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God.Property rights: It's not the democracy, folks; it's having the rule of law based on private property rights. That's what makes the difference between North America and South America. You could turn up in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying, ""I'll work for nothing for five years. You just have to feed me."" But at the end of it, you've got a hundred acres of land. That's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide. That's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors. And you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between North and South. Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900. Hardly anyone in South America did. That's another killer app.Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people. And this was another killer app — the very opposite of a killer, because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy. It even did that in the European empires. Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise. It doesn't rise any faster after these countries become independent. The empires weren't all bad.The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point. You need people to want to wear tons of clothes. You've all bought an article of clothing in the last month; I guarantee it. That's the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself. Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it. The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent. Very few Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi's road.Finally, the work ethic. Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant. He was wrong. Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work. We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon. In fact, the West has lost its work ethic. Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German — a thousand. And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and that is the end of the Great Divergence.Who's got the work ethic now? Take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds. At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study, is the Shanghai district of China. The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S. and Albania and Tunisia. You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation. You're wrong. In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead. Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany. Why? Because the killer apps can be downloaded. It's open source. Any society can adopt these institutions, and when they do, they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 — only faster.This is the Great Reconvergence, and it's the biggest story of your lifetime. Because it's on your watch that this is happening. It's our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. Now it's just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times.So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China. The first is, can you delete these apps, and are we in the process of doing so in the Western world? The second question is, does the sequencing of the download matter? And could Africa get that sequencing wrong? One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights. Warning: that may not work. And third, can China do without killer app number three? That's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law. That's the basis for the Western model of representative government. Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year. He's now free again, having been detained, as you know, for some time. But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt.Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938. And I think these words really nail it: ""It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is civilization — and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture,"" what all TEDsters care about most. ""When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people."" That's so true.I don't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable, because I don't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model, beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole's ""Course of Empire"" paintings. That's not the way history works. That's not the way the West rose, and I don't think it's the way the West will fall. The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos. That's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations. No, we may hang on, despite the huge burdens of debt that we've accumulated, despite the evidence that we've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo. But one thing is for sure, the Great Divergence is over, folks.Thanks very much.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Niall, I am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that's booming, which is Latin America. What's your view on that?Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South America. I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, ""Hey, is South America part of the West?"" He was an expert in Latin American history. He said, ""I don't know; I'll have to think about that."" That tells you something really important. I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a very bright future indeed. So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia.BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends. Mostly they're worried about each other. The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow. The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow. And that's all we seem to be caring about recently.NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now — both sides of the Atlantic — is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture. And it's a crisis that has its structural facet — it's partly to do with demographics. But it's also, of course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector. That crisis, which has been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an epiphenomenon. The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy. I think that's its real importance.BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of_prosperity
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"Erez Lieberman Aiden: Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. But we at Harvard were wondering if this was really true. (Laughter) So we assembled a team of experts, spanning Harvard, MIT, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors, the Google. And we cogitated about this for about four years. And we came to a startling conclusion. Ladies and gentlemen, a picture is not worth a thousand words. In fact, we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words.Jean-Baptiste Michel: So how did we get to this conclusion? So Erez and I were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history: change over time. So many books actually have been written over the years. So we were thinking, well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books. Now of course, if there's a scale for how awesome that is, that has to rank extremely, extremely high. Now the problem is there's an X-axis for that, which is the practical axis. This is very, very low.(Applause)Now people tend to use an alternative approach, which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully. This is extremely practical, but not so awesome. What you really want to do is to get to the awesome yet practical part of this space. So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach. They have digitized millions of books. So what that means is, one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button. That's very practical and extremely awesome.ELA: Let me tell you a little bit about where books come from. Since time immemorial, there have been authors. These authors have been striving to write books. And this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago. Since then, the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions, publishing books. Now if those books are not lost to history, then they are somewhere in a library, and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by Google, which has scanned 15 million books to date.Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome — a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over — a veritable shard of our cultural genome. Of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole ... (Laughter) was what any self-respecting researchers would have done. We took a page out of XKCD, and we said, ""Stand back. We're going to try science.""(Laughter)JM: Now of course, we were thinking, well let's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it. Now we're thinking, what data can we release? Well of course, you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books. Now Google, and Jon Orwant in particular, told us a little equation that we should learn. So you have five million, that is, five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit. So, although that would be really, really awesome, again, that's extremely, extremely impractical. (Laughter)Now again, we kind of caved in, and we did the very practical approach, which was a bit less awesome. We said, well instead of releasing the full text, we're going to release statistics about the books. So take for instance ""A gleam of happiness."" It's four words; we call that a four-gram. We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008. That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time. We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books, and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing.ELA: So those two billion lines, we call them two billion n-grams. What do they tell us? Well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends. Let me give you an example. Let's suppose that I am thriving, then tomorrow I want to tell you about how well I did. And so I might say, ""Yesterday, I throve."" Alternatively, I could say, ""Yesterday, I thrived."" Well which one should I use? How to know?As of about six months ago, the state of the art in this field is that you would, for instance, go up to the following psychologist with fabulous hair, and you'd say, ""Steve, you're an expert on the irregular verbs. What should I do?"" And he'd tell you, ""Well most people say thrived, but some people say throve."" And you also knew, more or less, that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair, (Laughter) ""Tom, what should I say?"" He'd say, ""Well, in my day, most people throve, but some thrived."" So now what I'm just going to show you is raw data. Two rows from this table of two billion entries. What you're seeing is year by year frequency of ""thrived"" and ""throve"" over time. Now this is just two out of two billion rows. So the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide.(Laughter)(Applause)JM: Now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words. For instance, this one. If you just take influenza, you will see peaks at the time where you knew big flu epidemics were killing people around the globe.ELA: If you were not yet convinced, sea levels are rising, so is atmospheric CO2 and global temperature.JM: You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist.(Laughter)ELA: You can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing. For instance, let me tell you the history of the year 1950. Pretty much for the vast majority of history, no one gave a damn about 1950. In 1700, in 1800, in 1900, no one cared. Through the 30s and 40s, no one cared. Suddenly, in the mid-40s, there started to be a buzz. People realized that 1950 was going to happen, and it could be big. (Laughter) But nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950. (Laughter) People were walking around obsessed. They couldn't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950, all the things they were planning to do in 1950, all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950. In fact, 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter, people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened, in '51, '52, '53. Finally in 1954, someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé. (Laughter) And just like that, the bubble burst.(Laughter)And the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record, with a little twist, because now we've got these nice charts. And because we have these nice charts, we can measure things. We can say, ""Well how fast does the bubble burst?"" And it turns out that we can measure that very precisely. Equations were derived, graphs were produced, and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year. We are losing interest in the past more rapidly.JM: Now a little piece of career advice. So for those of you who seek to be famous, we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures, authors, actors and so on. So if you want to become famous early on, you should be an actor, because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s — you're still young, it's really great. Now if you can wait a little bit, you should be an author, because then you rise to very great heights, like Mark Twain, for instance: extremely famous. But if you want to reach the very top, you should delay gratification and, of course, become a politician. So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s, and become very, very famous afterward. So scientists also tend to get famous when they're much older. Like for instance, biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors. One mistake you should not do is become a mathematician. (Laughter) If you do that, you might think, ""Oh great. I'm going to do my best work when I'm in my 20s."" But guess what, nobody will really care.(Laughter)ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany.Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. Here's a simple way to do it. Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. So that's sort of what we expect. And we compare that to the fame that we observe. And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda.JM: Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations. So for instance, here — this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there's no known suppression — it would be like this, basically tightly centered on one. What you expect is basically what you observe. This is distribution as seen in Germany — very different, it's shifted to the left. People talked about it twice less as it should have been. But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider. There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been. But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda. This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record.ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method. It's kind of like genomics. Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome. Culturomics is similar. It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture. Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record. The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it. Why can everyone do it? Everyone can do it because three guys, Jon Orwant, Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google, saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer, and they said, ""This is so fun. We have to make this available for people."" So in two weeks flat — the two weeks before our paper came out — they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public. And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately — also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears.JM: Now this was used over a million times on the first day, and this is really the best of all the queries. So people want to be their best, put their best foot forward. But it turns out in the 18th century, people didn't really care about that at all. They didn't want to be their best, they wanted to be their beft. So what happened is, of course, this is just a mistake. It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F. Now of course, Google didn't pick this up at the time, so we reported this in the science article that we wrote. But it turns out this is just a reminder that, although this is a lot of fun, when you interpret these graphs, you have to be very careful, and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences.ELA: People have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes. (Laughter) Actually, we're not going to have to talk, we're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent. This person was interested in the history of frustration. There's various types of frustration. If you stub your toe, that's a one A ""argh."" If the planet Earth is annihilated by the Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass, that's an eight A ""aaaaaaaargh."" This person studies all the ""arghs,"" from one through eight A's. And it turns out that the less-frequent ""arghs"" are, of course, the ones that correspond to things that are more frustrating — except, oddly, in the early 80s. We think that might have something to do with Reagan.(Laughter)JM: There are many usages of this data, but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized. Google has started to digitize 15 million books. That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published. It's a sizable chunk of human culture. There's much more in culture: there's manuscripts, there newspapers, there's things that are not text, like art and paintings. These all happen to be on our computers, on computers across the world. And when that happens, that will transform the way we have to understand our past, our present and human culture.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books
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"I am a reformed marketer, and I now work in international development. In October, I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the [second] largest country in Africa. In fact, it's as large as Western Europe, but it only has 300 miles of paved roads. The DRC is a dangerous place. In the past 10 years, five million people have died due to a war in the east. But war isn't the only reason that life is difficult in the DRC.There are many health issues as well. In fact, the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults. This might not sound like a large number, but in a country with 76 million people, it means there are 930,000 that are infected. And due to the poor infrastructure, only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need. Which is why, in part, donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost.And so while I was in the DRC, I spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms, including Damien. Damien runs a hotel outside of Kinshasa. It's a hotel that's only open until midnight, so it's not a place that you stay. But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come. Now Damien knows all about condoms, but he doesn't sell them. He said there's just not in demand. It's not surprising, because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms.Joseph and Christine, who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms, said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost, and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them, their customers don't buy the branded versions. They like the generics.And as a marketer, I found that curious. And so I started to look at what the marketing looked like. And it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms: fear, financing and fidelity. They name the condoms things like Vive, ""to live"" or Trust. They package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of HIV, put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them, show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently.Now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom. (Laughter) What is it that you think about just before you get a condom? Sex! And the private companies that sell condoms in these places, they understand this. Their marketing is slightly different. The name might not be much different, but the imagery sure is. Some brands are aspirational, and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative.And this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing: understanding who's the audience. And for donor agencies, unfortunately, the audience tends to be people that aren't even in the country they're working [in]. It's people back home, people that support their work, people like these. But if what we're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, we need to think about the customer, the people whose behavior needs to change — the couples, the young women, the young men — whose lives depend on it.And so the lesson is this: it doesn't really matter what you're selling; you just have to think about who is your customer, and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior. It might just save their lives.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_lockwood_selling_condoms_in_the_congo
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"Everyone's familiar with cancer, but we don't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease. The Tasmanian devil has shown us that, not only can cancer be a contagious disease, but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction.So first of all, what is a Tasmanian devil? Many of you might be familiar with Taz, the cartoon character, the one that spins around and around and around. But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil, and it's the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. A marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo. The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes.(Screaming)(Laughter)The Tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger, and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals. [The] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania, which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia. And despite their ferocious appearance, Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals. In fact, growing up in Tasmania, it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild.But the Tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline. And in fact, there's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years. And the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease, a contagious cancer.The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face. At the time, this was thought to be a one-off. Animals, just like humans, sometimes get strange tumors. However, we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease, which is now an epidemic spreading through Tasmania. The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave. Now there's only a small part of the population, which remains unaffected.This disease appears first as tumors, usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils. These tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors, such as these ones here. And the next image I'm going to show is quite gruesome. But inevitably, these tumors progress towards being enormous, ulcerating tumors like this one here.This one in particular sticks in my mind, because this is the first case of this disease that I saw myself. And I remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating, foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw. She hadn't eaten for days. Her guts were swimming with parasitic worms. Her body was riddled with secondary tumors. And yet, she was feeding three little baby Tasmanian devils in her pouch. Of course, they died along with the mother. They were too young to survive without their mother. In fact, in the area where she comes from, more than 90 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease.Scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer, this infectious cancer, that was spreading through the Tasmanian devil population. And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women, which is spread by a virus, and to the AIDS epidemic, which is associated with a number of different types of cancer. All the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus. However, we now know — and I'll tell you right now — that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus. In fact, the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister, and something that we hadn't really thought of before. But in order for me to explain what that is, I need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself.Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year. One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives. I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14. Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself. Paradoxically, once established, natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer. Natural selection is survival of the fittest. And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution.That's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat. It evolves. Throw a drug at it, and resistant cells will grow back. An amazing fact is that, given the right environment and the right nutrients, a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever. However cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies, and its continued growth, its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues, leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself.So cancer could be thought of as a strange, short-lived, self-destructive life form — an evolutionary dead end. But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation. And the answer came from studying the Tasmanian devil cancer's DNA. This was work from many people, but I'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that I did a few years ago.The next slide is going to be gruesome. This is Jonas. He's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face. And being a geneticist, I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations. So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body. I took these back to the lab. I extracted DNA from them. And when I looked at the sequence of the DNA, and compared the sequence of Jonas' tumor to that of the rest of his body, I discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile. In fact, Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you. What this told us was that Jonas' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body. In fact, more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil — and Jonas was clearly a male.So how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on Jonas' face? Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania. We found that all of these cancers shared the same DNA. Think about that for a minute. That means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil, that have broken free of that first devil's body and spread through the entire Tasmanian devil population.But how can a cancer spread in a population? Well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild. They tend to bite each other, often quite ferociously and usually on the face. We think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor, get into the saliva. When the devil bites another devil, it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil, so the tumor continues to grow. So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer. It's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it. It spreads through the population, has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system, and it's the only cancer that we know of that's threatening an entire species with extinction.But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils, why hasn't it happened in other animals or even humans? Well the answer is, it has. This is Kimbo. He's a dog that belongs to a family in Mombasa in Kenya. Last year, his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region. She took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting. And if you're squeamish, please look away now. He discovered this, a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo's penis. The vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor, a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs. And just as the Tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells, so is this dog cancer.But this dog cancer is quite remarkable, because it spread all around the world. And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia. We also believe this cancer might be very old. In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals. This cancer is remarkable. It's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of. It's a living relic of the distant past.So we've seen that this can happen in animals. Could cancers be contagious between people? Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam, a cancer doctor in the 1950s. Ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else. And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer, who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary. Most of the people that Dr. Southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells. But a small number of them did, and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill — whose immune systems were probably compromised.What this tells us, ethical issues aside, is that ... (Laughter) it's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people. However, under some circumstances, it can happen. And I think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future.So just finally, cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments. But that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer. In fact, I believe, given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer's growth, we can defeat cancer. My personal aim is to defeat the Tasmanian devil cancer. Let's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_murchison
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"So I just want to tell you my story. I spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace. And naturally, I encounter a lot of resistance, because it's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning. But I have a problem with that belief, because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems.So I was curious about why there was a disconnect between the way our society perceives doodling and the way that the reality is. So I discovered some very interesting things. For example, there's no such thing as a flattering definition of a doodle. In the 17th century, a doodle was a simpleton or a fool — as in Yankee Doodle. In the 18th century, it became a verb, and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone. In the 19th century, it was a corrupt politician. And today, we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition, at least to me, which is the following: To doodle officially means to dawdle, to dilly dally, to monkey around, to make meaningless marks, to do something of little value, substance or import, and — my personal favorite — to do nothing. No wonder people are averse to doodling at work. Doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work; it's totally inappropriate.(Laughter)Additionally, I've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them, of course, for doodling in classrooms. And they have bosses who scold them for doodling in the boardroom. There is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something. And unfortunately, the press tends to reinforce this norm when they're reporting on a doodling scene — of an important person at a confirmation hearing and the like — they typically use words like ""discovered"" or ""caught"" or ""found out,"" as if there's some sort of criminal act being committed.And additionally, there is a psychological aversion to doodling — thank you, Freud. In the 1930s, Freud told us all that you could analyze people's psyches based on their doodles. This is not accurate, but it did happen to Tony Blair at the Davos Forum in 2005, when his doodles were, of course, ""discovered"" and he was labeled the following things. Now it turned out to be Bill Gates' doodle. (Laughter) And Bill, if you're here, nobody thinks you're megalomaniacal. But that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles.And here is the real deal. Here's what I believe. I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we're almost blinded to the value of doodling. And I'm not comfortable with that. And so because of that belief that I think needs to be burst, I'm here to send us all hurtling back to the truth. And here's the truth: doodling is an incredibly powerful tool, and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn.So here's a new definition for doodling. And I hope there's someone in here from The Oxford English Dictionary, because I want to talk to you later. Here's the real definition: Doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. That is why millions of people doodle. Here's another interesting truth about the doodle: People who doodle when they're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but in reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus. Additionally, it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing.There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions. They are visual, auditory, reading and writing and kinesthetic. Now in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it, we have to engage at least two of those modalities, or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience. The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience. That is a pretty solid contribution for a behavior equated with doing nothing.This is so nerdy, but this made me cry when I discovered this. So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children, and they found that, across space and time, all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow. In other words, they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order. And I think that is incredible. I think that means doodling is native to us and we simply are denying ourselves that instinct. And finally, a lot a people aren't privy to this, but the doodle is a precursor to some of our greatest cultural assets. This is but one: this is Frank Gehry the architect's precursor to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.So here is my point: Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room. On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high. And I will go you one further. Because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form, it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy. My friends, the doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought. In reality, it is one of its greatest allies.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sunni_brown
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"A few months ago, a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live, and she was brought in confused. Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170. Within a few minutes, she went into cardiac collapse. She was resuscitated, stabilized, whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room, because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung. And the CAT scan revealed no blood clots in the lung, but it showed bilateral, visible, palpable breast masses, breast tumors, that had metastasized widely all over the body. And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years. Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses, touch the breast mass, intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her.Ladies and gentlemen, that is not an unusual story. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI or orthopedic consult. I am not a Luddite. I teach at Stanford. I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology. But I'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam, when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient, we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable, early stage, but we're losing much more than that. We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship. This may actually be heresy to say this at TED, but I'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation, I think, in medicine to come in the next 10 years, and that is the power of the human hand — to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment.I'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize. This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since we're in Edinburgh, I'm a big fan of Conan Doyle. You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh, and his character, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell. Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts. And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students.So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department, students all around him, patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in. And a woman comes in with a child, and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange. The woman says, ""Good Morning."" Bell says, ""What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland?"" She says, ""It was good."" And he says, ""What did you do with the other child?"" She says, ""I left him with my sister at Leith."" And he says, ""And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary?"" She says, ""I did."" And he says, ""Would you still be working at the linoleum factory?"" And she says, ""I am.""And Bell then goes on to explain to the students. He says, ""You see, when she said, 'Good morning,' I picked up her Fife accent. And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland. And so she must have taken the ferry over. You notice that the coat she's carrying is too small for the child who is with her, and therefore, she started out the journey with two children, but dropped one off along the way. You notice the clay on the soles of her feet. Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, except in the botanical gardens. And therefore, she took a short cut down Inverleith Row to arrive here. And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland."" And when Bell actually strips the patient, begins to examine the patient, you can only imagine how much more he would discern. And as a teacher of medicine, as a student myself, I was so inspired by that story.But you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way, using our senses, is quite recent. The picture I'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who, in the late 1700s, discovered percussion. And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper. And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder. And so when Auenbrugger became a physician, he began to do the same thing. He began to tap on the chests of his patients, on their abdomens. And basically everything we know about percussion, which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day — organ enlargement, fluid around the heart, fluid in the lungs, abdominal changes — all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript ""Inventum Novum,"" ""New Invention,"" which would have disappeared into obscurity, except for the fact that this physician, Corvisart, a famous French physician — famous only because he was physician to this gentleman — Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work.And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope. Laennec, it is said, was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick. One was scratching at the end of the stick, another child listened at the other end. And Laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called ""the cylinder."" Later he renamed it the stethoscope. And that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born. So within a few years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of a sudden, the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis.If you'll recall, prior to that time, no matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut — short on the sides, long in the back — and pull your tooth while he was at it. He made no attempt at diagnosis. In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected. But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body.And this particular painting, I think, represents the pinnacle, the peak, of that clinical era. This is a very famous painting: ""The Doctor"" by Luke Fildes. Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate, who then established the Tate Gallery. And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance. And it's interesting that Fildes picked this topic. Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness. And Fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two, three nights, that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time — almost a tribute to this physician. And hence the painting ""The Doctor,"" a very famous painting. It's been on calendars, postage stamps in many different countries. I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011? Would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient?I've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who's in the computer. I've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer. I call it the iPatient. The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America. The real patient often wonders, where is everyone? When are they going to come by and explain things to me? Who's in charge? There's a real disjunction between the patient's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care.I want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when I was in training. The focus was around the patient. We went from bed to bed. The attending physician was in charge. Too often these days, rounds look very much like this, where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient. The discussion is all about images on the computer, data. And the one critical piece missing is that of the patient.Now I've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you. One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer, had a small breast cancer detected — had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived. This is when I was in Texas. And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care. And she found the place and decided to go there, went there. Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town, getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist.And I pressed her, and I asked her, ""Why did you come back and get your care here?"" And she was reluctant to tell me. She said, ""The cancer center was wonderful. It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there. But,"" she said, ""but they did not touch my breasts."" Now you and I could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts. They had her scanned inside out. They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level; they had no need to touch her breasts.But to her, it mattered deeply. It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who, every time she went, examined both breasts including the axillary tail, examined her axilla carefully, examined her cervical region, her inguinal region, did a thorough exam. And to her, that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed. I was very influenced by that anecdote.I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford. I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue. This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy. I say that because these are difficult patients. They have often been rejected by their families, have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who's about to disappoint them. And I learned very early on with my first patient that I could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes. There was just no way. And if I tried, I'd disappoint them.And so I hit on this method where I invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit, and I tried not to interrupt them. We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds. And if I ever get to heaven, it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient. I then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence, and when the patient came for the physical, I was able to do a thorough physical, because I had nothing else to do. I like to think that I do a thorough physical exam, but because the whole visit was now about the physical, I could do an extraordinarily thorough exam.And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit. And I began my ritual. I always begin with the pulse, then I examine the hands, then I look at the nail beds, then I slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node, and I was into my ritual. And when my ritual began, this very voluble patient began to quiet down. And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role. And when I was done, the patient said to me with some awe, ""I have never been examined like this before."" Now if that were true, it's a true condemnation of our health care system, because they had been seen in other places.I then proceeded to tell the patient, once the patient was dressed, the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions, which is, ""This is not in your head. This is real. The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection. The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do."" And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere.And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor, the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness, it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination. Something of importance had transpired in the exchange. I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story. And they immediately said to me, ""Well you are describing a classic ritual."" And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation.We marry, for example, with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss. I'm not sure why you're laughing. That was the original intent, was it not? We signal transitions of power with rituals. We signal the passage of a life with rituals. Rituals are terribly important. They're all about transformation. Well I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch — I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance. And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship.I am a writer, and I want to close by reading you a short passage that I wrote that has to do very much with this scene. I'm an infectious disease physician, and in the early days of HIV, before we had our medications, I presided over so many scenes like this. I remember, every time I went to a patient's deathbed, whether in the hospital or at home, I remember my sense of failure — the feeling of I don't know what I have to say; I don't know what I can say; I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And out of that sense of failure, I remember, I would always examine the patient. I would pull down the eyelids. I would look at the tongue. I would percuss the chest. I would listen to the heart. I would feel the abdomen. I remember so many patients, their names still vivid on my tongue, their faces still so clear. I remember so many huge, hollowed out, haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual. And then the next day, I would come, and I would do it again.And I wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient. ""I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications. When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion. And as I wondered what he was up to, his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt, fumbling with his buttons. I realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me. It was an offering, an invitation. I did not decline.I percussed. I palpated. I listened to the chest. I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him. Neither of us could skip this ritual, which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung, or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure. No, this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients. Although, God knows, of late, in our hubris, we seem to have drifted away. We seem to have forgotten — as though, with the explosion of knowledge, the whole human genome mapped out at our feet, we are lulled into inattention, forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician, necessary for the patient — forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient.And the message, which I didn't fully understand then, even as I delivered it, and which I understand better now is this: I will always, always, always be there. I will see you through this. I will never abandon you. I will be with you through the end.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/abraham_verghese_a_doctor_s_touch
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"What I want to talk about today is one idea. It's an idea for a new kind of school, which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work. And it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon. Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation, which, over many decades, has come up with many innovations in education, like the Open University and things like Extended Schools, Schools for Social Entrepreneurs, Summer Universities and the School of Everything.And about five years ago, we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the U.K. And we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems. One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn't like school, couldn't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs. And employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren't actually ready for real work, didn't have the right attitudes and experience.And so we try to ask: What kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in, not fighting to stay out? And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some of the academic research, which showed the importance of what's now called non-cognitive skills — the skills of motivation, resilience — and that these are as important as the cognitive skills — formal academic skills — we came up with an answer, a very simple answer in a way, which we called the Studio School. And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated. You work by learning, and you learn by working. And the design we came up with had the following characteristics.First of all, we wanted small schools — about 300, 400 pupils — 14 to 19 year-olds, and critically, about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms, but through real-life, practical projects, working on commission to businesses, NGO's and others. That every pupil would have a coach, as well as teachers, who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business. And all of this will be done within the public system, funded by public money, but independently run. And all at no extra cost, no selection, and allowing the pupils the route into university, even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well. Underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real — all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does.Now that was a nice idea, so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase. We tried it out, first in Luton — famous for its airport and not much else, I fear — and in Blackpool — famous for its beaches and leisure. And what we found — and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them — but we found that the young people loved it. They found it much more motivational, much more exciting than traditional education. And perhaps most important of all, two years later when the exam results came through, the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top — in fact, pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of GCSE's, which is the British marking system.Now not surprisingly, that influenced some people to think we were onto something. The minister of education down south in London described himself as a ""big fan."" And the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today. And indeed, the head of the Chambers of Commerce is now the chairman of the Studio Schools Trust and helping it, not just with big businesses, but small businesses all over the country.We started with two schools. That's grown this year to about 10. And next year, we're expecting about 35 schools open across England, and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening — a pretty rapid spread of this idea. Interestingly, it's happened almost entirely without media coverage. It's happened almost entirely without big money behind it. It spread almost entirely through word of mouth, virally, across teachers, parents, people involved in education. And it spread because of the power of an idea — so the very, very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal, things like working in teams, doing practical projects, and putting them right at the heart of learning, rather than on the edges.Now there's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn. This is one from Yorkshire where, in fact, my nephew, I hope, will be able to attend it. And this one is focused on creative and media industries. Other ones have a focus on health care, tourism, engineering and other fields.We think we're onto something. It's not perfect yet, but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands, possibly millions, of teenagers who are really bored by schooling. It doesn't animate them. They're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour. They want to do things, they want to get their hands dirty, they want education to be for real. And my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us.We feel we're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the Studio School idea into something which is present, not as a universal answer for every child, but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world. And I hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/geoff_mulgan_a_short_intro_to_the_studio_school
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"I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana, West Africa. Ghana felt safe to me as a child. I was free, I was happy. The early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in Ghana. But then by the end of the decade, the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement.In 1979, I witnessed my first military coup. We the children had gathered at a friend's house. It was a dimly lit shack. There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background, and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole. The firing squad aimed, fired — the general was dead. Now this was being broadcast live. And shortly after, we left the country, and we returned to Switzerland.Now Europe came as a shock to me, and I think I started feeling the need to shed my skin in order to fit in. I wanted to blend in like a chameleon. I think it was a tactic of survival. And it worked, or so I believed.So here I was in 2008 wondering where I was in my life. And I felt I was being typecast as an actor. I was always playing the exotic African. I was playing the violent African, the African terrorist. And I was thinking, how many terrorists could I possibly play before turning into one myself? And I had become ashamed of the other, the African in me. And fortunately I decided in 2008 to return to Ghana, after 28 years of absence. I wanted to document on film the 2008 presidential elections. And there, I started by searching for the footprints in my childhood. And before I even knew it, I was suddenly on a stage surrounded by thousands of cheering people during a political rally.And I realized that, when I'd left the country, free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream. And now that I'd returned, that dream had become reality, though a fragile reality. And I was thinking, was Ghana searching for its identity like I was looking for my identity? Was what was happening in Ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me? And it was as if through the standards of my Western life, I hadn't lived up to my full potential. I mean, nor had Ghana, even though we had been trying very hard.Now in 1957, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence. In the late 50s, Ghana and Singapore had the same GDP. I mean, today, Singapore is a First World country and Ghana is not. But maybe it was time to prove to myself, yes, it's important to understand the past, it is important to look at it in a different light, but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present.So here I was, December 7th, 2008. The polling stations opened to the voters at 7:00 AM, but voters, eager to take their own political fate into their hands, were starting to line up at 4:00 AM in the morning. And they had traveled from near, they had traveled from far, because they wanted to make their voices heard. And I asked one of the voters, I said, ""Whom are you going to vote for?"" And he said, ""I'm sorry, I can't tell you."" He said that his vote was in his heart. And I understood, this was their election, and they weren't going to let anyone take it away from them.Now the first round of the voting didn't bring forth a clear winner — so nobody had achieved the absolute majority — so voting went into a second round three weeks later. The candidates were back on the road; they were campaigning. The rhetoric of the candidates, of course, changed. The heat was on. And then the cliche came to haunt us. There were claims of intimidation at the polling stations, of ballot boxes being stolen. Inflated results started coming in and the mob was starting to get out of control. We witnessed the eruption of violence in the streets. People were being beaten brutally. The army started firing their guns. People were scrambling. It was complete chaos. And my heart sank, because I thought, here we are again. Here is another proof that the African is not capable of governing himself. And not only that, I am documenting it — documenting my own cultural shortcomings.So when the echo of the gunshots had lingered, it was soon drowned by the chanting of the mob, and I didn't believe what I was hearing. They were chanting, ""We want peace. We want peace."" And I realized it had to come from the people. After all, they decide, and they did. So the sounds that were before distorted and loud, were suddenly a melody. The sounds of the voices were harmonious. So it could happen. A democracy could be upheld peacefully. It could be, by the will of the masses who were now urgently pressing with all their heart and all their will for peace.Now here's an interesting comparison. We in the West, we preach the values, the golden light of democracy, that we are the shining example of how it's done. But when it comes down to it, Ghana found itself in the same place in which the U.S. election stalled in the 2000 presidential elections — Bush versus Gore. But instead of the unwillingness of the candidates to allow the system to proceed and the people to decide, Ghana honored democracy and its people. It didn't leave it up to the Supreme Court to decide; the people did.Now the second round of voting did not bring forth a clear winner either. I mean, it was so incredibly close. The electoral commissioner declared, with the consent of the parties, to run an unprecedented second re-run. So the people went back to the polls to determine their own president, not the legal system. And guess what, it worked. The defeated candidate gave up power and made way for Ghana to move into a new democratic cycle. I mean, at the absolute time for the absolute need of democracy, they did not abuse their power. The belief in true democracy and in the people runs deep, proving that the African is capable of governing himself.Now the uphill battle for Ghana and for Africa is not over, but I have proof that the other side of democracy exists, and that we must not take it for granted. Now I have learned that my place is not just in the West or in Africa, and I'm still searching for my identity, but I saw Ghana create democracy better. Ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently. And yes, we Africans can.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jarreth_merz_filming_democracy_in_ghana
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"So I'm a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I'm an epidemiologist. And nobody really knows what epidemiology is. Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you. And it's best understood through example as the science of those crazy, wacky newspaper headlines. And these are just some of the examples.These are from the Daily Mail. Every country in the world has a newspaper like this. It has this bizarre, ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. Here are some of the things they said cause cancer: divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee. Some things they say prevent cancer: crusts, red pepper, licorice and coffee. So you can see there are contradictions. Coffee both causes and prevents cancer. As you start to read on, you can see that maybe there's some political valence behind some of this. For women, housework prevents breast cancer, but for men, shopping could make you impotent.(Laughter)So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this. And what I hope to show is that unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims isn't a kind of nasty, carping activity; it's socially useful. But it's also an extremely valuable explanatory tool, because real science is about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position. That's what happens in academic journals, it's what happens at academic conferences — the Q&A session after a postdoc presents data is often a bloodbath. And nobody minds that; we actively welcome it. It's like a consenting intellectual S&M activity.(Laughter)So what I'm going to show you is all of the main things, all of the main features of my discipline, evidence-based medicine. And I will talk you through all of these and demonstrate how they work, exclusively using examples of people getting stuff wrong.We'll start with the absolute weakest form of evidence known to man, and that is authority. In science, we don't care how many letters you have after your name — we want to know what your reasons are for believing something. How do you know that something is good for us or bad for us? But we're also unimpressed by authority because it's so easy to contrive. This is somebody called Dr. Gillian McKeith, PhD, or, to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith.(Laughter)Again, every country has somebody like this. She is our TV diet guru. She has five series of prime-time television, giving out very lavish and exotic health advice. She, it turns out, has a non-accredited correspondence course PhD from somewhere in America. She also boasts that she's a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, which sounds very glamorous; you get a certificate. This one belongs to my dead cat, Hettie. She was a horrible cat. You go to the website, fill out the form, give them $60, it arrives in the post. That's not the only reason we think this person is an idiot. She also says things like eat lots of dark green leaves, they contain chlorophyll and really oxygenate your blood. And anybody who's done school biology remembers that chlorophyll and chloroplasts only make oxygen in sunlight, and it's quite dark in your bowels after you've eaten spinach.Next, we need proper science, proper evidence. So: ""Red wine can help prevent breast cancer."" This is a headline from The Daily Telegraph in the UK. ""A glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer."" So you find this paper, and find that it is a real piece of science. It's a description of the changes in the behavior of one enzyme when you drip a chemical extracted from some red grape skin onto some cancer cells in a dish on a bench in a laboratory somewhere. And that's a really useful thing to describe in a scientific paper. But on the question of your own personal risk of getting breast cancer if you drink red wine, it tells you absolutely bugger all. Actually, it turns out that your risk of breast cancer increases slightly with every amount of alcohol you drink. So what we want are studies in real human people.And here's another example. This is from Britain's ""leading"" diet nutritionist in the Daily Mirror, our second-biggest selling newspaper. ""An Australian study in 2001 found that olive oil, in combination with fruits, vegetables and pulses, offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings,"" and give the advice: ""If you eat olive oil and vegetables, you'll have fewer wrinkles."" They helpfully tell you how to find the paper, and what you find is an observational study. Obviously, nobody has been able to go back to 1930, get all the people born in one maternity unit, and half of them eat lots of fruit and veg and olive oil, half of them eat McDonald's, and then we see how many wrinkles you've got later.You have to take a snapshot of how people are now. And what you find is, of course: people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer wrinkles. But that's because people who eat fruit and veg and olive oil are freaks — they're not normal, they're like you; they come to events like this.(Laughter)They're posh, they're wealthy, less likely to have outdoor jobs, less likely to do manual labor, they have better social support, are less likely to smoke; for a host of fascinating, interlocking social, political and cultural reasons, they're less likely to have wrinkles. That doesn't mean it's the vegetables or olive oil.(Laughter)So ideally, what you want to do is a trial. People think they're familiar with the idea of a trial. Trials are old; the first one was in the Bible, Daniel 1:12. It's straightforward: take a bunch of people, split them in half, treat one group one way, the other group, the other way. A while later, you see what happened to each of them. I'm going to tell you about one trial, which is probably the most well-reported trial in the UK news media over the past decade. This is the trial of fish oil pills. The claim: fish oil pills improve school performance and behavior in mainstream children. They said, ""We did a trial. All the previous ones were positive, this one will be too."" That should ring alarm bells: if you know the answer to your trial, you shouldn't be doing one. Either you've rigged it by design, or you've got enough data so there's no need to randomize people anymore.So this is what they were going to do in their trial: They were taking 3,000 children, they were going to give them these huge fish oil pills, six of them a day, and then, a year later, measure their school exam performance and compare their performance against what they predicted their exam performance would have been if they hadn't had the pills. Now, can anybody spot a flaw in this design?(Laughter)And no professors of clinical trial methodology are allowed to answer this question. So there's no control group. But that sounds really techie, right? That's a technical term. The kids got the pills, and their performance improved.What else could it possibly be if it wasn't the pills? They got older; we all develop over time. And of course, there's the placebo effect, one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just taking a pill and performance or pain improving; it's about our beliefs and expectations, the cultural meaning of a treatment. And this has been demonstrated in a whole raft of fascinating studies comparing one kind of placebo against another. So we know, for example, that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for gastric ulcers than one sugar pill. Two sugar pills a day beats one a day. That's an outrageous and ridiculous finding, but it's true. We know from three different studies on three different types of pain that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment than a sugar pill, a dummy pill with no medicine in it, not because the injection or pills do anything physically to the body, but because an injection feels like a much more dramatic intervention. So we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated, which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo, where one half of the people get the real treatment, and the other half get placebo.But that's not enough. What I've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes. What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices, but slightly more sophisticated versions of them, in order to distort the evidence they give to doctors and patients, and which we use to make vitally important decisions.So firstly, trials against placebo: everybody thinks a trial should be a comparison of your new drug against placebo. But in a lot of situations that's wrong; often, we already have a good treatment currently available. So we don't want to know that your alternative new treatment is better than nothing, but that it's better than the best available treatment we have. And yet, repeatedly, you consistently see people doing trials still against placebo. And you can get licensed to bring your drug to market with only data showing that it's better than nothing, which is useless for a doctor like me trying to make a decision.But that's not the only way you can rig your data. You can also rig your data by making the thing you compare your new drug against really rubbish. You can give the competing drug in too low a dose, so people aren't properly treated. You can give the competing drug in too high a dose, so people get side effects. And this is exactly what happened with antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia. Twenty years ago, a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in; the promise was they would have fewer side effects. So people set about doing trials of the new drugs against the old drugs. But they gave the old drugs in ridiculously high doses: 20 milligrams a day of haloperidol. And it's a foregone conclusion if you give a drug at that high a dose, it will have more side effects, and your new drug will look better.Ten years ago, history repeated itself, when risperidone, the first of the new-generation antipsychotic drugs, came off copyright, so anybody could make copies. Everybody wanted to show their drug was better than risperidone, so you see trials comparing new antipsychotic drugs against risperidone at eight milligrams a day. Again, not an insane dose, not an illegal dose, but very much at the high end of normal. So you're bound to make your new drug look better. And so it's no surprise that overall, industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials.But — and it's a big but —(Laughter)it turns out, when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials, that they're actually better than independently sponsored trials. And yet, they always manage to get the result that they want. So how does this work?(Laughter)How can we explain this strange phenomenon? Well, it turns out that what happens is the negative data goes missing in action; it's withheld from doctors and patients. And this is the most important aspect of the whole story. It's at the top of the pyramid of evidence. We need to have all of the data on a particular treatment to know whether or not it really is effective. There are two different ways you can spot whether some data has gone missing. You can use statistics or you can use stories. I prefer statistics, so that's what I'll do first.This is a funnel plot. A funnel plot is a very clever way of spotting if small negative trials have disappeared, have gone missing in action. This is a graph of all of the trials done on a particular treatment. As you go up towards the top of the graph, what you see is each dot is a trial. As you go up, those are bigger trials, so they've got less error; they're less likely to be randomly false positives or negatives. So they all cluster together. The big trials are closer to the true answer. Then as you go further down at the bottom, what you can see is, on this side, spurious false negatives, and over on this side, spurious false positives. If there is publication bias, if small negative trials have gone missing in action, you can see it on one of these graphs. So you see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared. This is a graph demonstrating the presence of publication bias in studies of publication bias. And I think that's the funniest epidemiology joke you will ever hear.(Laughter)That's how you can prove it statistically. But what about stories? Well, they're heinous, they really are. This is a drug called reboxetine. This is a drug which I, myself, have prescribed to patients. And I'm a very nerdy doctor. I hope I go out of my way to try and read and understand all the literature. I read the trials on this. They were all positive, all well-conducted. I found no flaw. Unfortunately, it turned out, that many of these trials were withheld. In fact, 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients. Now if you think about it, if I tossed a coin a hundred times, and I'm allowed to withhold from you the answers half the times, then I can convince you that I have a coin with two heads. If we remove half of the data, we can never know what the true effect size of these medicines is.And this is not an isolated story. Around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld, but it goes way beyond that. The Nordic Cochrane Group were trying to get ahold of the data on that to bring it all together. The Cochrane Groups are an international nonprofit collaboration that produce systematic reviews of all of the data that has ever been shown. And they need to have access to all of the trial data. But the companies withheld that data from them. So did the European Medicines Agency — for three years.This is a problem that is currently lacking a solution. And to show how big it goes, this is a drug called Tamiflu, which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on. And they spend that money on the promise that this is a drug which will reduce the rate of complications with flu. We already have the data showing it reduces the duration of your flu by a few hours. But I don't care about that, governments don't care. I'm sorry if you have the flu, I know it's horrible, but we're not going to spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the duration of your flu symptoms by half a day. We prescribe these drugs. We stockpile them for emergencies on the understanding they'll reduce the number of complications, which means pneumonia and death. The infectious diseases Cochrane Group, which are based in Italy, has been trying to get the full data in a usable form out of the drug companies, so they can make a full decision about whether this drug is effective or not, and they've not been able to get that information. This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today. We cannot make decisions in the absence of all of the information.So it's a little bit difficult from there to spin in some kind of positive conclusion. But I would say this: I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant. All of these things are happening in plain sight, and they're all protected by a force field of tediousness. And I think, with all of the problems in science, one of the best things that we can do is to lift up the lid, finger around at the mechanics and peer in.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science
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"(Music)♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they keep talking of love, ♫ ♫ if they come near me, ♫ ♫ if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand. ♫ ♫ I don't understand myself, ♫ ♫ why they talk of magic, ♫ ♫ that no one withstands, ♫ ♫ if he sees me, if he passes by. ♫ ♫ But if the red light is on ♫ ♫ in the middle of the night ♫ ♫ and everybody listens to my song, ♫ ♫ then it is plain to see. ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ My feet, they glide and float, ♫ ♫ my eyes, they lure and glow. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced, 'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫ ♫ In my veins, ♫ ♫ runs a dancer's blood, ♫ ♫ because my beautiful mother ♫ ♫ was the Queen of dance ♫ ♫ in the gilded Alcazar. ♫ ♫ She was so very beautiful, ♫ ♫ I often saw her in my dreams. ♫ ♫ If she beat the tambourine ♫ ♫ to her beguiling dance, all eyes were glowing admiringly. ♫ ♫ She reawakened in me, ♫ ♫ mine is the same lot. ♫ ♫ I dance like her at midnight ♫ ♫ and from deep within I feel: ♫ ♫ My lips, they give so fiery a kiss, ♫ ♫ my limbs, they are supple and soft. ♫ ♫ It is written for me in the stars, ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss, thou shalt love. ♫ ♫ And I dance as if entranced,  'cause I know, ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss. ♫(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danielle_de_niese_a_flirtatious_aria
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"The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of ""China's Got Talent"" show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium. Guess who was the performing guest? Susan Boyle. And I told her, ""I'm going to Scotland the next day."" She sang beautifully, and she even managed to say a few words in Chinese: 送你葱 So it's not like ""hello"" or ""thank you,"" that ordinary stuff. It means ""green onion for free."" Why did she say that? Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle — a 50-some year-old woman, a vegetable vendor in Shanghai, who loves singing Western opera, but she didn't understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese. (Laughter) And the last sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was ""green onion for free."" So [as] Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together. That was hilarious.So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness. They were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought them through. And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams. Well, being different is not that difficult. We are all different from different perspectives. But I think being different is good, because you present a different point of view. You may have the chance to make a difference.My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20, 30 years. I remember that in the year of 1990, when I was graduating from college, I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing, Great Wall Sheraton — it's still there. So after being interrogated by this Japanese manager for a half an hour, he finally said, ""So, Miss Yang, do you have any questions to ask me?"" I summoned my courage and poise and said, ""Yes, but could you let me know, what actually do you sell?"" I didn't have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel. That was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel.Around the same time, I was going through an audition — the first ever open audition by national television in China — with another thousand college girls. The producer told us they were looking for some sweet, innocent and beautiful fresh face. So when it was my turn, I stood up and said, ""Why [do] women's personalities on television always have to be beautiful, sweet, innocent and, you know, supportive? Why can't they have their own ideas and their own voice?"" I thought I kind of offended them. But actually, they were impressed by my words. And so I was in the second round of competition, and then the third and the fourth. After seven rounds of competition, I was the last one to survive it. So I was on a national television prime-time show. And believe it or not, that was the first show on Chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script. (Applause) And my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people.Well after a few years, I decided to go to the U.S. and Columbia University to pursue my postgraduate studies, and then started my own media company, which was unthought of during the years that I started my career. So we do a lot of things. I've interviewed more than a thousand people in the past. And sometimes I have young people approaching me say, ""Lan, you changed my life,"" and I feel proud of that. But then we are also so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country. I was in Beijing's bidding for the Olympic Games. I was representing the Shanghai Expo. I saw China embracing the world and vice versa. But then sometimes I'm thinking, what are today's young generation up to? How are they different, and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China, or at large, the world?So today I want to talk about young people through the platform of social media. First of all, who are they? [What] do they look like? Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei — 20 years old, beautiful. She showed off her expensive bags, clothes and car on her microblog, which is the Chinese version of Twitter. And she claimed to be the general manager of Red Cross at the Chamber of Commerce. She didn't realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning, almost a turmoil, against the credibility of Red Cross. The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had to open a press conference to clarify it, and the investigation is going on.So far, as of today, we know that she herself made up that title — probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity. All those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend, who used to be a board member in a subdivision of Red Cross at Chamber of Commerce. It's very complicated to explain. But anyway, the public still doesn't buy it. It is still boiling. It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions, which lacked transparency in the past. And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog.Microblog boomed in the year of 2010, with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled. Sina.com, a major news portal, alone has more than 140 million microbloggers. On Tencent, 200 million. The most popular blogger — it's not me — it's a movie star, and she has more than 9.5 million followers, or fans. About 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people, under 30 years old. And because, as you know, the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government, social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit. But because you don't have many other openings, the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong, active and even violent.So through microblogging, we are able to understand Chinese youth even better. So how are they different? First of all, most of them were born in the 80s and 90s, under the one-child policy. And because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls, now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women. That could pose a potential danger to the society, but who knows; we're in a globalized world, so they can look for girlfriends from other countries. Most of them have fairly good education. The illiteracy rate in China among this generation is under one percent. In cities, 80 percent of kids go to college. But they are facing an aging China with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent this year, and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030. And you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially, and taking care of them when they're sick. So it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old.So making a living is not that easy for young people. College graduates are not in short supply. In urban areas, college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 U.S. dollars a month, while the average rent is above $500. So what do they do? They have to share space — squeezed in very limited space to save money — and they call themselves ""tribe of ants."" And for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment, they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment. That ratio in America would only cost a couple five years to earn, but in China it's 30 to 40 years with the skyrocketing real estate price.Among the 200 million migrant workers, 60 percent of them are young people. They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas. Most of them don't want to go back to the countryside, but they don't have the sense of belonging. They work for longer hours with less income, less social welfare. And they're more vulnerable to job losses, subject to inflation, tightening loans from banks, appreciation of the renminbi, or decline of demand from Europe or America for the products they produce. Last year, though, an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufacturing compound in China: 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide, just one by one like causing a contagious disease. But they died because of all different personal reasons. But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation, both physical and mental, of these migrant workers.For those who do return back to the countryside, they find themselves very welcome locally, because with the knowledge, skills and networks they have learned in the cities, with the assistance of the Internet, they're able to create more jobs, upgrade local agriculture and create new business in the less developed market. So for the past few years, the coastal areas, they found themselves in a shortage of labor.These diagrams show a more general social background. The first one is the Engels coefficient, which explains that the cost of daily necessities has dropped its percentage all through the past decade, in terms of family income, to about 37-some percent. But then in the last two years, it goes up again to 39 percent, indicating a rising living cost. The Gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4. Now it's 0.5 — even worse than that in America — showing us the income inequality. And so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility. And also, the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful is quite widespread. So any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even unrest.So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging, we can see what young people care most about. Social justice and government accountability runs the first in what they demand. For the past decade or so, a massive urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports on the forced demolition of private property. And it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation. Sometimes people get killed, and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest. So when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the Internet, people cry for the government to take actions to stop this.So the good news is that earlier this year, the state council passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passed the right to order forced demolition from local governments to the court. Similarly, many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the Internet. We heard about polluted air, polluted water, poisoned food. And guess what, we have faked beef. They have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or fish, and it turns it to look like beef. And then lately, people are very concerned about cooking oil, because thousands of people have been found [refining] cooking oil from restaurant slop. So all these things have aroused a huge outcry from the Internet. And fortunately, we have seen the government responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns.While young people seem to be very sure about their participation in public policy-making, but sometimes they're a little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life. China is soon to pass the U.S. as the number one market for luxury brands — that's not including the Chinese expenditures in Europe and elsewhere. But you know what, half of those consumers are earning a salary below 2,000 U.S. dollars. They're not rich at all. They're taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status. And this is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle. But of course, we do have young people who would still prefer to smile, whether in a BMW or [on] a bicycle.So in the next picture, you see a very popular phenomenon called ""naked"" wedding, or ""naked"" marriage. It does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding, but it shows that these young couples are ready to get married without a house, without a car, without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet, to show their commitment to true love. And also, people are doing good through social media. And the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped dogs for food processing was spotted and stopped on the highway with the whole country watching through microblogging. People were donating money, dog food and offering volunteer work to stop that truck. And after hours of negotiation, 500 dogs were rescued. And here also people are helping to find missing children. A father posted his son's picture onto the Internet. After thousands of resends in relay, the child was found, and we witnessed the reunion of the family through microblogging.So happiness is the most popular word we have heard through the past two years. Happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values, but also, it's about the environment. People are thinking about the following questions: Are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher GDP? How are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth, to keep sustainability and stability? And also, how capable is the system of self-correctness to keep more people content with all sorts of friction going on at the same time? I guess these are the questions people are going to answer. And our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yang_lan
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"So, I have a strange career. I know it because people come up to me, like colleagues, and say, ""Chris, you have a strange career.""(Laughter)And I can see their point, because I started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist. And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions, and I was only 14 years old — No, no, I wasn't 14 years old. But after that, I actually had my own lab in the Computational Neuroscience department, and I wasn't doing any neuroscience. Later, I would work on evolutionary genetics, and I would work on systems biology.But I'm going to tell you about something else today. I'm going to tell you about how I learned something about life. And I was actually a rocket scientist. I wasn't really a rocket scientist, but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California, where it's warm; whereas now I am in the mid-West, and it's cold. But it was an exciting experience. One day, a NASA manager comes into my office, sits down and says, ""Can you please tell us, how do we look for life outside Earth?"" And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation. Yet, I had a very good answer. I said, ""I have no idea.""(Laughter)And he told me, ""Biosignatures, we need to look for a biosignature."" And I said, ""What is that?"" And he said, ""It's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life."" And I said, ""Really? Because isn't that easy? I mean, we have life. Can't you apply a definition, for example, a Supreme Court-like definition of life?""And then I thought about it a little bit, and I said, ""Well, is it really that easy? Because, yes, if you see something like this, then all right, fine, I'm going to call it life — no doubt about it. But here's something."" And he goes, ""Right, that's life too. I know that."" Except, if you think that life is also defined by things that die, you're not in luck with this thing, because that's actually a very strange organism. It grows up into the adult stage like that and then goes through a Benjamin Button phase, and actually goes backwards and backwards until it's like a little embryo again, and then actually grows back up, and back down and back up — sort of yo-yo — and it never dies. So it's actually life, but it's actually not as we thought life would be. And then you see something like that. And he was like, ""My God, what kind of a life form is that?"" Anyone know? It's actually not life, it's a crystal.So once you start looking and looking at smaller and smaller things — so this particular person wrote a whole article and said, ""Hey, these are bacteria."" Except, if you look a little bit closer, you see, in fact, that this thing is way too small to be anything like that. So he was convinced, but, in fact, most people aren't. And then, of course, NASA also had a big announcement, and President Clinton gave a press conference, about this amazing discovery of life in a Martian meteorite. Except that nowadays, it's heavily disputed. If you take the lesson of all these pictures, then you realize, well, actually, maybe it's not that easy. Maybe I do need a definition of life in order to make that kind of distinction.So can life be defined? Well how would you go about it? Well of course, you'd go to Encyclopedia Britannica and open at L. No, of course you don't do that; you put it somewhere in Google. And then you might get something.(Laughter)And what you might get — and anything that actually refers to things that we are used to, you throw away. And then you might come up with something like this. And it says something complicated with lots and lots of concepts. Who on Earth would write something as convoluted and complex and inane? Oh, it's actually a really, really, important set of concepts. So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only. And if you take a look at that, this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life. And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with. Because the idea was that, with concepts like that, maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life.And so if you go and ask yourself, ""What on Earth is artificial life?"", let me give you a whirlwind tour of how all this stuff came about. And it started out quite a while ago, when someone wrote one of the first successful computer viruses. And for those of you who aren't old enough, you have no idea how this infection was working — namely, through these floppy disks. But the interesting thing about these computer virus infections was that, if you look at the rate at which the infection worked, they show this spiky behavior that you're used to from a flu virus. And it is in fact due to this arms race between hackers and operating system designers that things go back and forth. And the result is kind of a tree of life of these viruses, a phylogeny that looks very much like the type of life that we're used to, at least on the viral level.So is that life? Not as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because these things don't evolve by themselves. In fact, they have hackers writing them. But the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further, when a scientist working at the Santa Fe Institute decided, ""Why don't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve?"" And this was Steen Rasmussen. And he designed this system, but it really didn't work, because his viruses were constantly destroying each other. But there was another scientist who had been watching this, an ecologist. And he went home and says, ""I know how to fix this."" And he wrote the Tierra system, and, in my book, is in fact one of the first truly artificial living systems — except for the fact that these programs didn't really grow in complexity.So having seen this work, worked a little bit on this, this is where I came in. And I decided to create a system that has all the properties that are necessary to see, in fact, the evolution of complexity, more and more complex problems constantly evolving. And of course, since I really don't know how to write code, I had help in this. I had two undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology that worked with me. That's Charles Ofria on the left, Titus Brown on the right. They are now, actually, respectable professors at Michigan State University, but I can assure you, back in the day, we were not a respectable team. And I'm really happy that no photo survives of the three of us anywhere close together.But what is this system like? Well I can't really go into the details, but what you see here is some of the entrails. But what I wanted to focus on is this type of population structure. There's about 10,000 programs sitting here. And all different strains are colored in different colors. And as you see here, there are groups that are growing on top of each other, because they are spreading. Any time there is a program that's better at surviving in this world, due to whatever mutation it has acquired, it is going to spread over the others and drive the others to extinction.So I'm going to show you a movie where you're going to see that kind of dynamic. And these kinds of experiments are started with programs that we wrote ourselves. We write our own stuff, replicate it, and are very proud of ourselves. And we put them in, and what you see immediately is that there are waves and waves of innovation. By the way, this is highly accelerated, so it's like a 1000 generations a second. But immediately, the system goes like, ""What kind of dumb piece of code was this? This can be improved upon in so many ways, so quickly."" So you see waves of new types taking over the other types. And this type of activity goes on for quite a while, until the main easy things have been acquired by these programs. And then, you see sort of like a stasis coming on where the system essentially waits for a new type of innovation, like this one, which is going to spread over all the other innovations that were before and is erasing the genes that it had before, until a new type of higher level of complexity has been achieved. And this process goes on and on and on.So what we see here is a system that lives in very much the way we're used to how life goes. But what the NASA people had asked me really was, ""Do these guys have a biosignature? Can we measure this type of life? Because if we can, maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids."" So I said, ""Well, perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process. In fact, it should perhaps make use of the concepts that I developed just in order to sort of capture what a simple living system might be.""And the thing I came up with — I have to first give you an introduction about the idea, and maybe that would be a meaning detector, rather than a life detector. And the way we would do that — I would like to find out how I can distinguish text that was written by a million monkeys, as opposed to text that is in our books. And I would like to do it in such a way that I don't actually have to be able to read the language, because I'm sure I won't be able to. As long as I know that there's some sort of alphabet. So here would be a frequency plot of how often you find each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in a text written by random monkeys. And obviously, each of these letters comes off about roughly equally frequent.But if you now look at the same distribution in English texts, it looks like that. And I'm telling you, this is very robust across English texts. And if I look at French texts, it looks a little bit different, or Italian or German. They all have their own type of frequency distribution, but it's robust. It doesn't matter whether it writes about politics or about science. It doesn't matter whether it's a poem or whether it's a mathematical text. It's a robust signature, and it's very stable. As long as our books are written in English — because people are rewriting them and recopying them — it's going to be there.So that inspired me to think about, well, what if I try to use this idea in order, not to detect random texts from texts with meaning, but rather detect the fact that there is meaning in the biomolecules that make up life. But first I have to ask: what are these building blocks, like the alphabet, elements that I showed you? Well it turns out, we have many different alternatives for such a set of building blocks. We could use amino acids, we could use nucleic acids, carboxylic acids, fatty acids. In fact, chemistry's extremely rich, and our body uses a lot of them.So that we actually, to test this idea, first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids. And here's the result. Here is, in fact, what you get if you, for example, look at the distribution of amino acids on a comet or in interstellar space or, in fact, in a laboratory, where you made very sure that in your primordial soup, there is no living stuff in there. What you find is mostly glycine and then alanine and there's some trace elements of the other ones. That is also very robust — what you find in systems like Earth where there are amino acids, but there is no life.But suppose you take some dirt and dig through it and then put it into these spectrometers, because there's bacteria all over the place; or you take water anywhere on Earth, because it's teaming with life, and you make the same analysis; the spectrum looks completely different. Of course, there is still glycine and alanine, but in fact, there are these heavy elements, these heavy amino acids, that are being produced because they are valuable to the organism. And some other ones that are not used in the set of 20, they will not appear at all in any type of concentration. So this also turns out to be extremely robust. It doesn't matter what kind of sediment you're using to grind up, whether it's bacteria or any other plants or animals. Anywhere there's life, you're going to have this distribution, as opposed to that distribution. And it is detectable not just in amino acids.Now you could ask: Well, what about these Avidians? The Avidians being the denizens of this computer world where they are perfectly happy replicating and growing in complexity. So this is the distribution that you get if, in fact, there is no life. They have about 28 of these instructions. And if you have a system where they're being replaced one by the other, it's like the monkeys writing on a typewriter. Each of these instructions appears with roughly the equal frequency. But if you now take a set of replicating guys like in the video that you saw, it looks like this. So there are some instructions that are extremely valuable to these organisms, and their frequency is going to be high. And there's actually some instructions that you only use once, if ever. So they are either poisonous or really should be used at less of a level than random. In this case, the frequency is lower. And so now we can see, is that really a robust signature? I can tell you indeed it is, because this type of spectrum, just like what you've seen in books, and just like what you've seen in amino acids, it doesn't really matter how you change the environment, it's very robust, it's going to reflect the environment.So I'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did. And I have to explain to you, the top of this graph shows you that frequency distribution that I talked about. Here, that's the lifeless environment where each instruction occurs at an equal frequency. And below there, I show, in fact, the mutation rate in the environment. And I'm starting this at a mutation rate that is so high that even if you would drop a replicating program that would otherwise happily grow up to fill the entire world, if you drop it in, it gets mutated to death immediately. So there is no life possible at that type of mutation rate. But then I'm going to slowly turn down the heat, so to speak, and then there's this viability threshold where now it would be possible for a replicator to actually live. And indeed, we're going to be dropping these guys into that soup all the time.So let's see what that looks like. So first, nothing, nothing, nothing. Too hot, too hot. Now the viability threshold is reached, and the frequency distribution has dramatically changed and, in fact, stabilizes. And now what I did there is, I was being nasty, I just turned up the heat again and again. And of course, it reaches the viability threshold. And I'm just showing this to you again because it's so nice. You hit the viability threshold. The distribution changes to ""alive!"" And then, once you hit the threshold where the mutation rate is so high that you cannot self-reproduce, you cannot copy the information forward to your offspring without making so many mistakes that your ability to replicate vanishes. And then, that signature is lost.What do we learn from that? Well, I think we learn a number of things from that. One of them is, if we are able to think about life in abstract terms — and we're not talking about things like plants, and we're not talking about amino acids, and we're not talking about bacteria, but we think in terms of processes — then we could start to think about life not as something that is so special to Earth, but that, in fact, could exist anywhere. Because it really only has to do with these concepts of information, of storing information within physical substrates — anything: bits, nucleic acids, anything that's an alphabet — and make sure that there's some process so that this information can be stored for much longer than you would expect — the time scales for the deterioration of information. And if you can do that, then you have life.So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone, without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear, as far as the type of life on Earth is. And that, in a sense, removes us again, like all of our scientific discoveries, or many of them — it's this continuous dethroning of man — of how we think we're special because we're alive. Well, we can make life; we can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it. And once we have that, then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say, if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate, then we can go out and try other worlds, figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be, figure enough about the normal chemistry, the geochemistry of the planet, so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life, and then look for large deviations from this — this thing sticking out, which says, ""This chemical really shouldn't be there."" Now we don't know that there's life then, but we could say, ""Well at least I'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from."" And that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we cannot visibly see it.And so that's really the only take-home message that I have for you. Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets. And if we remove the mystery of life, then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live, and how perhaps we're not as special as we always think we are. And I'm going to leave you with that.And thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christophe_adami_finding_life_we_can_t_imagine
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"What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment.(Laughter)(Applause)Sound familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? Three times. So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years.Well I'm here to suggest there's a better way, that less might actually equal more. I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college — in your dorm, traveling — in a hotel room, camping — rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat. Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time. So I'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint. It's actually a great way to save you some money. And it's going to give you a little more ease in your life.So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area. First up: crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com. I wanted it all — home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear. With over 300 entries from around the world, I got it, my own little jewel box. By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft. instead of 600, immediately I'm saving 200 grand. Smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities — save some more money there, but also a smaller footprint. And because it's really designed around an edited set of possessions — my favorite stuff — and really designed for me, I'm really excited to be there.So how can you live little? Three main approaches. First of all, you have to edit ruthlessly. We've got to clear the arteries of our lives. And that shirt that I hadn't worn in years? It's time for me to let it go. We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, ""Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?"" By all means, we should buy and own some great stuff. But we want stuff that we're going to love for years, not just stuff.Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy. We want space efficiency. We want things that are designed for how they're used the vast majority of the time, not that rare event. Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three? So we want things that nest, we want things that stack, and we want it digitized. You can take paperwork, books, movies, and you can make it disappear — it's magic.Finally, we want multifunctional spaces and housewares — a sink combined with a toilet, a dining table becomes a bed — same space, a little side table stretches out to seat 10. In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here, we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space. Look at the coffee table — it grows in height and width to seat 10. My office folds away, easily hidden. My bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers. Guests? Move the moving wall, have some fold-down guest beds. And of course, my own movie theater.So I'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft. But consider the benefits of an edited life. Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000. Most of us, maybe all of us, are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags, maybe a small space, a hotel room. So when you go home and you walk through your front door, take a second and ask yourselves, ""Could I do with a little life editing? Would that give me a little more freedom? Maybe a little more time?""What's in the box? It doesn't really matter. I know I don't need it. What's in yours? Maybe, just maybe, less might equal more. So let's make room for the good stuff.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_less_stuff_more_happiness
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"I'm a garbage man. And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. And I'd like to start at the very beginning. Think back when you were just a kid. How did look at the stuff in your life? Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It's my stuff if I saw it first. The entire pile is my stuff if I'm building something. The more stuff that's mine, the better. And of course, it's your stuff if it's broken.(Laughter)Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it's become pretty clear to me that we don't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. And let me tell you why I have that perspective. Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people's discarded stuff. Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world — well less than one percent. In fact, the United Nations estimates that there's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year — and that's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains.Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place. And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams. Because as we've heard all week at TED, the world's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted.And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day? It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world. And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract. And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today.The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff, particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner. Most of what's extracted from our end-of-life stuff, if it makes it to a recycler, are the metals. To put that in perspective — and I'm using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it's the most common metal — if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered. In fact, it's more like five percent. Most of it's incinerated or landfilled.Now most people think that's because plastics are a throw-away material, have very little value. But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel. And there's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel. So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material? Well it's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another. They have very different densities. They have different electrical and magnetic properties. And they even have different colors. So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials. Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range. They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties. And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know. So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don't work for plastics.Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world — and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe — finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling. People, for as little as a dollar a day, pick through our stuff. They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals — circuit boards and so forth — and they leave behind mostly what they can't recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics. Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here. And they extract the metals by hand. Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. I call this environmental arbitrage. And it's not fair, it's not safe and it's not sustainable.Now because the plastics are so plentiful — and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously — but people do try to recover the plastics. This is just one example. This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. They store the plastics on the roofs. They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can. And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the ""burn and sniff"" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic. None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way. And by the way, please don't try this technique at home.So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics? Well I certainly believe that it's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke. So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world. Because after all, we're doing above-ground mining. And we eventually broke the code. This is the last frontier of recycling. It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth. And we finally figured out how to do it. And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics.The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day. We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics. And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well. Well a good place to start is with waste. It certainly doesn't cost as much as oil, and it's plentiful, as I hope that you've been able to see from the photographs. And because we're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we're using a mining approach to extract the materials.We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment. We have enormous energy savings. I don't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way. And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them. And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that's made from petrochemicals. Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings. They get to close the loop with their products. And they get to make more sustainable products.In the short time period I have, I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this. It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits. They recover the metals and leave behind what's called shredder residue — it's their waste — a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics. We take out the things that aren't plastics, such as the metals they missed, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, you name it. Even an occasional dead animal, unfortunately. And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling. We're sieving the material, we're using magnets, we're using air classification. It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point.At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics. This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins. We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail. We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade. And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. We then use optical sorting to color sort this material. We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos. We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. And we chop those strands into what are called pellets. And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry. This is the same material that you would get from oil. And today, we're producing it from your old stuff, and it's going right back into your new stuff.(Applause)So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home. And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products.So I hope I've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life. We took our clues from mother nature. Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer — that's a label I've always hated my entire life — and think of yourself as just using resources in one form, until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time. And finally, I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to: ""If it's broken, it's my stuff.""Thank you for your time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle
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"I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust. My job depends upon it. There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion. Up to and around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators — these tyrannical figures who would rehearse, not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it, within an inch of their lives. But I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it. We now have a more democratic view and way of making music — a two-way street. I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine.For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language. That's all I have at the point of sale. It's silent gesture. I can hardly bark out instructions while we're playing.(Music)Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Ensemble.(Applause)So in order for all this to work, obviously I have got to be in a position of trust. I have to trust the orchestra, and, even more crucially, I have to trust myself. Think about it: when you're in a position of not trusting, what do you do? You overcompensate. And in my game, that means you overgesticulate. You end up like some kind of rabid windmill. And the bigger your gesture gets, the more ill-defined, blurry and, frankly, useless it is to the orchestra. You become a figure of fun. There's no trust anymore, only ridicule.And I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again, on these dismal outings with orchestras, I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small scale crescendo really, just a little upsurge in volume. Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me. I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms. And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said, ""Conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand. If you hold it too tightly, you crush it. If you hold it too loosely, it flies away."" I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird.Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust. Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company. So I went out there, and I auditioned, mainly in rural township locations, right around the country. I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers.Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force. And in the last years of the old regime, he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community. Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room, the general atmosphere. Let's be under no illusions. In South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community. So how do we recover from that, ladies and gentlemen? Simply through singing. We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly new trust grew, and indeed friendship blossomed. And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot.So we got some shows off the ground. We started touring them internationally. One of them was ""Carmen."" We then thought we'd make a movie of ""Carmen,"" which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha. The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa, which is a beautifully musical language, if you don't know it. It's called ""U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha"" — literally ""Carmen of Khayelitsha."" I want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music making.(Music)(Applause)Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it's so free. South Africans just make music really freely. And I think, in no small way, that's due to one fundamental fact: they're not bound to a system of notation. They don't read music. They trust their ears. You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat. And then, as if by magic, they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can. Now those of us that live in the West, if I can use that term, I think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music — that somehow it's all about skill and systems. Therefore it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body. And yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis.And if I can broaden this out for a second, I'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity, with total confidence, about movies, probably about literature. But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music? Why is this? And what I'm going to say to you now is I'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears, you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great. I've got a little experiment I want to try with you.Did you know that TED is a tune? A very simple tune based on three notes — T, E, D. Now hang on a minute. I know you're going to say to me, ""T doesn't exist in music."" Well ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system, which composers have been using for hundreds of years, which proves actually that it does. If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G — and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet, same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T — there you go. T, see it's the same as F in music. So T is F. So T, E, D is the same as F, E, D. Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme, which is TED. Have a listen.(Music)Do you hear it? Or do I smell some doubt in the room? Okay, we'll play it for you again now, and we're going to highlight, we're going to poke out the T, E, D. If you'll pardon the expression.(Music)Oh my goodness me, there it was loud and clear, surely. I think we should make this even more explicit. Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea. Would you reckon you need to sing for your tea, I think? I think we need to sing for our tea. We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T, E, D. Will you have a go for me?Audience: T, E, D.Charles Hazlewood: Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings. Shall we try that one again? And look, if you're adventurous, you go up the octave. T, E, D.Audience: T, E, D.CH: Once more with vim. (Audience: T, E, D.)There I am like a bloody windmill again, you see. Now we're going to put that in the context of the music. The music will start, and then at a signal from me, you will sing that. (Music) One more time, with feeling, ladies and gentlemen. You won't make the key otherwise. Well done, ladies and gentlemen. It wasn't a bad debut for the TED choir, not a bad debut at all.Now there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about and wanted to share with you, because it is all about changing perceptions, and, indeed, building a new level of trust. The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board. But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people. And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement. Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion.So I find myself asking: where is music in all of this? You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential. So I decided to create a platform for that potential. It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra. It's called Paraorchestra.I'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had. It was a really extraordinary moment. Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians. Normally when you improvise — and I do it all the time around the world — there's this initial period of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring, an awful pregnant silence. Then suddenly, as if by magic, bang! We're all in there and it's complete bedlam. You can't hear anything. No one's listening. No one's trusting. No one's responding to each other. Now in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes a rapt listening, a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music.(Video) (Music)Nicholas:: My name's Nicholas McCarthy. I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist. And I was born without my left hand — right hand. Can I do that one again?(Music)Lyn: When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane. I become alive.(Music)Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk. There's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing. It's removed some of my paralysis.(Music)(Applause)CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are. Paraorchestra is the name of that project. If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point, please let me know. Now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn, wonderful Austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century — spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, along with his orchestra. Now this prince loved his music, but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterhazy — a long way from the big city of Vienna.Now one day in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle. They weren't allowed to stay there anymore; they had to be returned to Vienna — as I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days. You can imagine, the musicians were disconsolate. Haydn remonstrated with the prince, but to no avail. So given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point.And we're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now. And you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt. I'm pleased to say, the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance, and the musicians were reunited with their families. But I think it sums up my talk rather well, this, that where there is trust, there is music — by extension life. Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_hazlewood
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"What is going on in this baby's mind? If you'd asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.Let me give you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby. After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can't talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do we actually ask them the question?Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did — Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I — was actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli. (Laughter) But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't. So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli — just like a baby and any other sane person. But half the time, what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, ""Mmmmm, broccoli. I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm."" And then she would take a little bit of the crackers, and she'd go, ""Eww, yuck, crackers. I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck."" So she'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted. We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. And then she would simply put her hand out and say, ""Can you give me some?""So the question is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn't figure this out. But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that we don't always want the same thing. And what's more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted.Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old. So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that's actually demonstrated it.The question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? And how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time? I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually in many ways, they're worse than useless, because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there's actually an answer. If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are.And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is a New Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food. On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. So they're very, very good at pecking for grain, and they're not much good at doing anything else. Well it turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months. So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot.There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well what kind of explanation could we have for this? Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. Other creatures, like the crows, aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments.And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal. We're smarter, we're more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space. And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species. My son is 23. (Laughter) And at least until they're 23, we're still popping those worms into those little open mouths.All right, why would we see this correlation? Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. And that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you're going to be helpless. So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, ""A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?"" You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor. So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected. We don't have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world.So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species. So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we're production and marketing. We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use. Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species — kind of like caterpillars and butterflies — except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path.If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn — and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that's what they're for — we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. And there's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about the world. So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go out and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing.So if you want to know what's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this. This is Reverend Bayes's notebook. So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works. All right, now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics?So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world. Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector. But actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn't ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times. Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy. So we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector.Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. They're just learning how to count. But unconsciously, they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. And the other interesting thing is that they're using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies we've just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments we call it ""getting into everything"" or else ""playing.""And there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program. Here's one from Cristine Legare's lab. What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't, and then she showed them an anomaly. And what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes.(Video) Boy: How about this? Same as the other side.Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has just been falsified.(Laughter)Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing.AG: Okay, he's got his experimental notebook out.Boy: What's making this light up. (Laughter) I don't know.AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair.(Laughter)Boy: Oh, it's because this needs to be like this, and this needs to be like this.AG: Okay, hypothesis two.Boy: That's why. Oh.(Laughter)AG: Now this is his next idea. He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. Not working either.Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, not here. Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity.AG: Okay, that's a fourth hypothesis.Boy: It's lighting up. So when you put four. So you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up.AG: Okay,there's his fifth hypothesis.Now that is a particularly — that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds.Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true. I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this.So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing. But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet. So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important. That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn.Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before — when we fall in love with someone new, or when we're in a new city for the first time. And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. So what's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos. (Laughter) That's a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning.(Laughter)Now it's good to be a grownup. I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It's good to be a grownup. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think
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"When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he'd bought. And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels. And as he did so, his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving, were words. And he said to the guy, ""Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see?"" And the watchmaker turned around and said, ""God can see it."" Now I'm not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. But I felt something. And it was a physiological response. And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way.And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it? Now you probably know the answer to this already. You probably think, well, I don't know which one you think it is, but I think it's about feeling beauty. And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things. One of the most early work was done in automotive design — some very exciting work was done there. And during a lot of this work, we found something, or I found something, that really fascinated me, and maybe you can remember it. Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off, click click, when you closed the door in a car? And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly. Remember that? I remember it clearly. Do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that? I remember sitting there thinking, this is fantastic. In fact, I've never found anybody that doesn't like the light that goes out slowly. I thought, well what the hell's that about?So I started to ask myself questions about it. And the first was, I'd ask other people: ""Do you like it?"" ""Yes."" ""Why?"" And they'd say, ""Oh, it feels so natural,"" or, ""It's nice."" I thought, well that's not good enough. Can we cut down a little bit further, because, as a designer, I need the vocabulary, I need the keyboard, of how this actually works. And so I did some experiments. And I suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that — light to dark in six seconds — exactly that. Do you know what it is? Anyone?You see, using this bit, the thinky bit, the slow bit of the brain — using that. And this isn't a think, it's a feel. And would you do me a favor? For the next 14 minutes or whatever it is, will you feel stuff?I don't need you to think so much as I want you to feel it. I felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation. And that thing that I found was the cinema or the theater. It's actually just happened here — light to dark in six seconds. And when that happens, are you sitting there going, ""No, the movie's about to start,"" or are you going, ""That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. I get a sense of anticipation""? Now I'm not a neuroscientist. I don't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex. But it might be. Because the people I speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this. And some of the people I speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater don't get it in the same way. Everybody likes it, but some like it more than others.So this leads me to think of this in a different way. We're not feeling it. We're thinking beauty is in the limbic system — if that's not an outmoded idea. These are the bits, the pleasure centers, and maybe what I'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking. The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex. They arrive first. So how do we make that actually work? And how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know, or what we're going to learn, about something?This is one of the most beautiful things I know. It's a plastic bag. And when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that. Then I found out, post exposure, that this plastic bag if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff, that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure, potable drinking water. And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me.Now I'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit. Would you mind taking the brain out, and I just want you to feel something. Look at that. What are you feeling about it? Is it beautiful? Is it exciting? I'm watching your faces very carefully. There's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that. Maybe there's an innocence to it. Now I'm going to tell you what it is. Are you ready? This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi, five years old, before she died of cancer to the spine. It's the last thing she did, the last physical act. Look at that picture. Look at the innocence. Look at the beauty in it. Is it beautiful now?Stop. Stop. How do you feel? Where are you feeling this? I'm feeling it here. I feel it here. And I'm watching your faces, because your faces are telling me something. The lady over there is actually crying, by the way. But what are you doing? I watch what people do. I watch faces. I watch reactions. Because I have to know how people react to things. And one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty, something stupefyingly delicious, is what I call the OMG. And by the way, there's no pleasure in that face. It's not a ""this is wonderful!"" The eyebrows are doing this, the eyes are defocused, and the mouth is hanging open. That's not the expression of joy. There's something else in that. There's something weird happening. So pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in.Poignancy is a word I love as a designer. It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do. It isn't just about nice. And this is the dilemma, this is the paradox, of beauty. Sensorily, we're taking in all sorts of things — mixtures of things that are good, bad, exciting, frightening — to come up with that sensorial exposure, that sensation of what's going on. Pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl's drawing. And also triumph, this sense of transcendence, this ""I never knew that. Ah, this is something new."" And that's packed in there as well. And as we assemble these tools, from a design point of view, I get terribly excited about it, because these are things, as we've already said, they're arriving at the brain, it would seem, before cognition, before we can manipulate them — electrochemical party tricks.Now what I'm also interested in is: Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty? By that, I mean intrinsically beautiful things, just something that's exquisitely beautiful, that's universally beautiful. Very hard to find. Maybe you've got some examples of it. Very hard to find something that, to everybody, is a very beautiful thing, without a certain amount of information packed in there before. So a lot of it tends to be extrinsic. It's mediated by information before the comprehension. Or the information's added on at the back, like that little girl's drawing that I showed you.Now when talking about beauty you can't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you. And one of the most tedious ones, I think, was saying that beauty was about symmetry. Well it obviously isn't. This is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people, and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face. And they found that it was almost exact coincidence. So it wasn't about symmetry. In fact, this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face, of which both sides are beautiful. But they're both different.And as a designer, I can't help meddling with this, so I pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this, and tried to understand what the individual elements were, but feeling it as I go. Now I can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if I look at that eye. I'm not getting it off the eyebrow. And the earhole isn't doing it to me at all. So I don't know how much this is helping me, but it's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off. And as I say, I'm not a neuroscientist, but to understand how I can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements.Anais Nin and the Talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are, but as we are. So I'm going to shamelessly expose something to you, which is beautiful to me. And this is the F1 MV Agusta. Ahhhh. It is really — I mean, I can't express to you how exquisite this object is. But I also know why it's exquisite to me, because it's a palimpsest of things. It's masses and masses of layers. This is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension. It's something much bigger. Layer after layer of legend, sport, details that resonate. I mean, if I just go through some of them now — I know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects, and that does it consummately well, you can see it can. So that's getting me excited. And I feel that here.This bit, the big secret of automotive design — reflection management. It's not about the shapes, it's how the shapes reflect light. Now that thing, light flickers across it as you move, so it becomes a kinetic object, even though it's standing still — managed by how brilliantly that's done on the reflection. This little relief on the footplate, by the way, to a rider means there's something going on underneath it — in this case, a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably, taking the power from the engine. I'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things.Titanium lacquer on this. I can't tell you how wonderful this is. That's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel. I'm really getting into this now. And of course, a racing bike doesn't have a prop stand, but this one, because it's a road bike, it all goes away and it folds into this little gap. So it disappears. And then I can't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator, which is curved. Why would you do that? Because I know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics. So it's more expensive, but it's wonderful. And to cap it all, brand royalty — Agusta, Count Agusta, from the great histories of this stuff.The bit that you can't see is the genius that created this. Massimo Tamburini. They call him ""The Plumber"" in Italy, as well as ""Maestro,"" because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time. There's so little compromise on this, you can't see it.But unfortunately, the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty. We have to deal with it. So I have to work with a supply chain, and I've got to work with the technologies, and I've got to work with everything else all the time, and so compromises start to fit into it. And so look at her. I've had to make a bit of a compromise there. I've had to move that part across, but only a millimeter. No one's noticed, have they yet? Did you see what I did? I moved three things by a millimeter. Pretty? Yes. Beautiful? Maybe lesser. But then, of course, the consumer says that doesn't really matter. So that's okay, isn't it? Another millimeter? No one's going to notice those split lines and changes. It's that easy to lose beauty, because beauty's incredibly difficult to do. And only a few people can do it. And a focus group cannot do it. And a team rarely can do it. It takes a central cortex, if you like, to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time.This is a beautiful water bottle — some of you know of it — done by Ross Lovegrove, the designer. This is pretty close to intrinsic beauty. This one, as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this. It's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious. I might like it more than you like it, because I know how bloody hard it is to do it. It's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that, that comes out of the tool correctly, that goes down the line without falling over. Underneath this, like the story of the swan, is a million things very difficult to do. So all hail to that. It's a fantastic example, a simple object. And the one I showed you before was, of course, a massively complex one. And they're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it.You all, I guess, like me, enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance. And part of the joy of it is, you know the difficulty. You also may be taking into account the fact that it's incredibly painful. Anybody seen a ballet dancer's toes when they come out of the points? While she's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you, something horrible's going on down here. The comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what's actually going on.Now I'm using microseconds wrongly here, so please ignore me. But what I have to do now, feeling again, what I've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes, of these triggers into something early on in the process, that you pick it up, not through your thinking, but through your feeling. So we're going to have a little experiment. Right, are you ready? I'm going to show you something for a very, very brief moment. Are you ready? Okay. Did you think that was a bicycle when I showed it to you at the first flash? It's not. Tell me something, did you think it was quick when you first saw it? Yes you did. Did you think it was modern? Yes you did. That blip, that information, shot into you before that. And because your brain starter motor began there, now it's got to deal with it. And the great thing is, this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it's green technology and it's good for you and it's light and it's all part of the future.So is that wrong? Well in this case it isn't, because it's a very, very ecologically-sound piece of technology. But you're a slave of that first flash. We are slaves to the first few fractions of a second — and that's where much of my work has to win or lose, on a shelf in a shop. It wins or loses at that point. You may see 50, 100, 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it, but I have to work within that domain, to ensure that it gets you there first.And finally, the layer that I love, of knowledge. Some of you, I'm sure, will be familiar with this. What's incredible about this, and the way I love to come back to it, is this is taking something that you hate or bores you, folding clothes, and if you can actually do this — who can actually do this? Anybody try to do this? Yeah? It's fantastic, isn't it? Look at that. Do you want to see it again? No time. It says I have two minutes left, so we can't do this. But just go to the Web, YouTube, pull it down, ""folding T-shirt."" That's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your T-shirt. You didn't maybe know it. But how do you feel about it? It feels fantastic when you do it, you look forward to doing it, and when you tell somebody else about it — like you probably have — you look really smart. The knowledge bubble that sits around the outside, the stuff that costs nothing, because that knowledge is free — bundle that together and where do we come out?Form follows function? Only sometimes. Only sometimes. Form is function. Form is function. It informs, it tells us, it supplies us answers before we've even thought about it. And so I've stopped using words like ""form,"" and I've stopped using words like ""function"" as a designer. What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things. Because if I can get that right, I can make them wonderful, and I can make them repeatedly wonderful. And you know what those products and services are, because you own some of them. They're the things that you'd snatch if the house was on fire. Forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_seymour_how_beauty_feels
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"Well we all know the World Wide Web has absolutely transformed publishing, broadcasting, commerce and social connectivity, but where did it all come from? And I'll quote three people: Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee. So let's just run through these guys.This is Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government's chief scientific adviser during the war. And in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly. And the article was called ""As We May Think."" And what Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we use information is broken. We don't work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth. The brain works by association. With one item in its thought, it snaps instantly to the next item. And the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process.And so he suggested a machine, and he called it the memex. And the memex would link information, one piece of information to a related piece of information and so forth. Now this was in 1945. A computer in those days was something the secret services used to use for code breaking. And nobody knew anything about it. So this was before the computer was invented. And he proposed this machine called the memex. And he had a platform where you linked information to other information, and then you could call it up at will.So spinning forward, one of the guys who read this article was a guy called Doug Engelbart, and he was a U.S. Air Force officer. And he was reading it in their library in the Far East. And he was so inspired by this article, it kind of directed the rest of his life. And by the mid-60s, he was able to put this into action when he worked at the Stanford Research Lab in California. He built a system. The system was designed to augment human intelligence, it was called. And in a premonition of today's world of cloud computing and softwares of service, his system was called NLS for oN-Line System.And this is Doug Engelbart. He was giving a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968. What he showed — he sat on a stage like this, and he demonstrated this system. He had his head mic like I've got. And he works this system. And you can see, he's working between documents and graphics and so forth. And he's driving it all with this platform here, with a five-finger keyboard and the world's first computer mouse, which he specially designed in order to do this system. So this is where the mouse came from as well.So this is Doug Engelbart. The trouble with Doug Engelbart's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds. So for a personal computer, a few million pounds was like having a personal jet plane; it wasn't really very practical.But spin on to the 80s when personal computers did arrive, then there was room for this kind of system on personal computers. And my company, OWL built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh. And we delivered the world's first hypertext system. And this began to get a head of steam. Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard, and they made a bit of a fuss about it. They had a 12-page supplement in the Wall Street Journal the day it launched. The magazines started to cover it. Byte magazine and Communications at the ACM had special issues covering hypertext. We developed a PC version of this product as well as the Macintosh version. And our PC version became quite mature.These are some examples of this system in action in the late 80s. You were able to deliver documents, were able to do it over networks. We developed a system such that it had a markup language based on html. We called it hml: hypertext markup language. And the system was capable of doing very, very large documentation systems over computer networks.So I took this system to a trade show in Versailles near Paris in late November 1990. And I was approached by a nice young man called Tim Berners-Lee who said, ""Are you Ian Ritchie?"" and I said, ""Yeah."" And he said, ""I need to talk to you."" And he told me about his proposed system called the World Wide Web. And I thought, well, that's got a pretentious name, especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office. But he was completely convinced that his World Wide Web would take over the world one day. And he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it, because his system didn't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything; it was just plain text. I thought, well, you know, interesting, but a guy from CERN, he's not going to do this. So we didn't do it.In the next couple of years, the hypertext community didn't recognize him either. In 1992, his paper was rejected for the Hypertext Conference. In 1993, there was a table at the conference in Seattle, and a guy called Marc Andreessen was demonstrating his little browser for the World Wide Web. And I saw it, and I thought, yep, that's it. And the very next year, in 1994, we had the conference here in Edinburgh, and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker.So that puts me in pretty illustrious company. There was a guy called Dick Rowe who was at Decca Records and turned down The Beatles. There was a guy called Gary Kildall who went flying his plane when IBM came looking for an operating system for the IBM PC, and he wasn't there, so they went back to see Bill Gates. And the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, I guess.On the other hand, there's Marc Andreessen who wrote the world's first browser for the World Wide Web. And according to Fortune magazine, he's worth 700 million dollars. But is he happy?(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ian_ritchie_the_day_i_turned_down_tim_berners_lee
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"Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar.(Laughter)Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We're all liars. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building.Now, speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, ""Liespotting,"" no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, ""It's okay, we'll email you.""(Laughter)I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, ""Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?""So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, ""Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying."" No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, ""Nice song."" ""Honey, you don't look fat in that, no."" Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, ""You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. So sorry.""But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us.Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man, British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, ""Look, I've got one rule."" And this was Henry's rule, he said, ""Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for."" And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for?And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer — the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies.On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other.(Laughter)Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.Lying's complex. It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.(Laughter)Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here's Koko with her kitten. It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall.(Laughter)We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It's starts really, really early. How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment.(Laughter)Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic — in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It's been very confusing for a long time now.What do you do? Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We're going to start with speech.(Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.(Applause)Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: ""that woman."" We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had said, ""Well, to tell you the truth ..."" or Richard Nixon's favorite, ""In all candor ..."" he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter that knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail — and we're all really glad he didn't do that — he would have further discredited himself.Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: ""No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips."" And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips.(Laughter)Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest.Now we're going to look at the hot spots. Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, ""Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks."" They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment.Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells.Why do they do that? Well, we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say ""yes,"" we shake our heads ""no."" We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now, that smile is known in the trade as ""duping delight.""And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start — for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, ""yes"" while shaking his head ""no,"" slightly shrugging his shoulders.(Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen.Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody —JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. But I'm happy to participate in one.PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There are going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you've got two people on an even playing field. It's still somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. Here's what it looks like. It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It's the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows — and it doesn't always follow — look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, ""No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you.""Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower.Now here's the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags. We're human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that's your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. Don't try to be like those folks on ""Law & Order"" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don't be too aggressive, it doesn't work.Now, we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers — one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like.This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video.(Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that — maybe it'll fade too with time — but I don't think so. That bothers me the most.PM: Now I'm going to show you a videoof an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony.(Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don't understand it, and I never will.PM: Okay, there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions.Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door?Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, ""Character's who you are in the dark."" And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency — character integrity — that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code.When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, ""Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized."" And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit.And that's the truth. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pamela_meyer_how_to_spot_a_liar
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"So I'm here to explain why I'm wearing these ninja pajamas. And to do that, I'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies. So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A, BPA. It's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics. So BPA mimics the body's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems. And it's everywhere. A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older. But it's just one chemical. The Center for Disease Control in the U.S. says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury.To me, this says three things. First, don't become a cannibal. Second, we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution. And third, our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins. So what happens to all these toxins when we die? The short answer is: They return to the environment in one way or another, continuing the cycle of toxicity. But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse. If you're cremated, all those toxins I mentioned are released into the atmosphere. And this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year.And in a traditional American funeral, a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive. It's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition — a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel. So by trying to preserve our dead bodies, we deny death, poison the living and further harm the environment. Green or natural burials, which don't use embalming, are a step in the right direction, but they don't address the existing toxins in our bodies. I think there's a better solution.I'm an artist, so I'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art, science and culture. The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies. The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom — a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost. But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom. I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil. So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body.So today, I'm collecting what I shed or slough off — my hair, skin and nails — and I'm feeding these to edible mushrooms. As the mushrooms grow, I pick the best feeders to become Infinity Mushrooms. It's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife. So when I die, the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it. All right, so for some of you, this may be really, really out there. (Laughter) Just a little.I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food. We want to eat, not be eaten by, our food. But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment. See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay. It's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet.Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture, a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles. The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation — the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies.And now about these ninja pajamas. Once it's completed, I plan to integrate the Infinity Mushrooms into a number of objects. First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit. (Laughter) I'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit. It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores. The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots.I'm also making a decompiculture kit, a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation. These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly, a kind of second skin, which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms. So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects. And believe it or not, a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms.(Laughter)What I've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment. I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom. The Decompiculture Society shares a vision of a cultural shift, from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture, a radical acceptance of death and decomposition.Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment, as the research on environmental toxins confirms. And the saying goes, we came from dust and will return to dust. And once we understand that we're connected to the environment, we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet. I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee
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"I'd like to take you to another world. And I'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than one dollar a day. I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me. I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor — all laid out. Then, I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years. (Laughter) The whole world was laid out for me. Everything was at my feet. I could do nothing wrong. And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like.So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, ""I'd like to live and work in a village."" Mother went into a coma. (Laughter) ""What is this? The whole world is laid out for you, the best jobs are laid out for you, and you want to go and work in a village? I mean, is there something wrong with you?"" I said, ""No, I've got the best eduction. It made me think. And I wanted to give something back in my own way."" ""What do you want to do in a village? No job, no money, no security, no prospect."" I said, ""I want to live and dig wells for five years."" ""Dig wells for five years? You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years?"" She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down.But then, I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which are never brought into the mainstream — which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College — college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. I went to this village for the first time. Elders came to me and said, ""Are you running from the police?"" I said, ""No."" (Laughter) ""You failed in your exam?"" I said, ""No."" ""You didn't get a government job?"" I said, ""No."" ""What are you doing here? Why are you here? The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village? Is there something wrong with you you're not telling us?"" I said, ""No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor. What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college.""So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice. They said, ""Please, don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college."" So it's the only college in India where, if you should have a Ph.D. or a Master's, you are disqualified to come. You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. You have to work with your hands. You have to have a dignity of labor. You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism.Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal. It needs to be used, needs to be applied, needs to be shown to the world outside — that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today.So the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi. You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor. There are no contracts, no written contracts. You can stay with me for 20 years, go tomorrow. And no one can get more than $100 a month. You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. Whatever idea you have, come and try it. It doesn't matter if you fail. Battered, bruised, you start again. It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. And it's the only college where we don't give a certificate. You are certified by the community you serve. You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer.So when I said that, they said, ""Well show us what is possible. What are you doing? This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can't show it on the ground."" So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft. 150 people lived there, worked there. They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. I said, ""Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college."" We are the only ones who actually returned the award for $50,000, because they didn't believe us, and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia.I asked a forester — high-powered, paper-qualified expert — I said, ""What can you build in this place?"" He had one look at the soil and said, ""Forget it. No way. Not even worth it. No water, rocky soil."" I was in a bit of a spot. And I said, ""Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?'"" He looked quietly at me and said, ""You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work."" This is what it looks like today.Went to the roof, and all the women said, ""Clear out. The men should clear out because we don't want to share this technology with the men. This is waterproofing the roof."" (Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don't know. But it actually doesn't leak. Since 1986, it hasn't leaked. This technology, the women will not share with the men.(Laughter)It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified. All the power comes from the sun. 45 kilowatts of panels on the roof. And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years. So long as the sun shines, we'll have no problem with power. But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who's only done eight years of primary schooling — never been to school, never been to college. He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed.Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked. But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women, illiterate women, who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker. It's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker. Unfortunately, they're almost half German, they're so precise. (Laughter) You'll never find Indian women so precise. Absolutely to the last inch, they can make that cooker. And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking.We have a dentist — she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist. She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children. Barefoot technology: this was 1986 — no engineer, no architect thought of it — but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs. Very little water is wasted. All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted. If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater.60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals — sheep, goats — domestic chores. So we thought of starting a school at night for the children. Because the night schools of Tilonia, over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools. Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher. And what do we teach in these schools? Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick. This is what we teach in the night schools. But all the schools are solar-lit.Every five years we have an election. Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister. The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening. She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy, a minister for health. And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children. She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden. First time ever going out of her village. Never seen Sweden. Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening. And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and said, ""Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from? She's only 12 years old, and she's not dazzled by anything."" And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, ""Please tell her I'm the prime minister.""(Laughter)(Applause)Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry. Puppets is the way we communicate. You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old. He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher. He's my doctor. He's my lawyer. He's my donor. He actually raises money, solves my disputes. He solves my problems in the village. If there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, ""Shake hands. The attendance must not drop."" These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports.(Laughter)(Applause)So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan — all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained. And we went to Ladakh, and we asked this woman — this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all snowed up on both sides — and we asked this woman, ""What was the benefit you had from solar electricity?"" And she thought for a minute and said, ""It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter.""(Laughter)Went to Afghanistan. One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable. (Laughter) Men are restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate. (Laughter) All across the globe, you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate. Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city, looking for a job. So we came up with a great solution: train grandmothers. What's the best way of communicating in the world today? Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman.(Laughter)(Applause)So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, ""We want to take them to India."" They said, ""Impossible. They don't even go out of their rooms, and you want to take them to India."" I said, ""I'll make a concession. I'll take the husbands along as well."" So I took the husbands along. Of course, the women were much more intelligent than the men. In six months, how do we train these women? Sign language. You don't choose the written word. You don't choose the spoken word. You use sign language. And in six months they can become solar engineers. They go back and solar-electrify their own village.This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village, set up a workshop — the first village ever to be solar-electrified in Afghanistan [was] by the three women. This woman is an extraordinary grandmother. 55 years old, and she's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan. And they haven't collapsed. She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC. He didn't know. Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan.We went to Africa, and we did the same thing. All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language. But their body language is great. They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers. I went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night — comes across this village. Comes back, goes into the village, says, ""Well what's the story?"" They said, ""These two grandmothers ... "" ""Grandmothers?"" The minister couldn't believe what was happening. ""Where did they go?"" ""Went to India and back."" Went straight to the president. He said, ""Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone?"" He said, ""No."" Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day. ""What's the story."" So he summoned me and said, ""Can you train me 150 grandmothers?"" I said, ""I can't, Mr. President. But they will. The grandmothers will."" So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone. And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone.Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia. Went to this village. I knew which woman I would like to take. The community got together and said, ""Take these two women."" I said, ""No, I want to take this woman."" They said, ""Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her."" I said, ""I like the body language. I like the way she speaks."" ""Difficult husband; not possible."" Called the husband, the husband came, swaggering, politician, mobile in his hand. ""Not possible."" ""Why not?"" ""The woman, look how beautiful she is."" I said, ""Yeah, she is very beautiful."" ""What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?"" That was his biggest fear. I said, ""She'll be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile."" She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger. She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran. She handled the national press, and she was a star. And when I went back six months later, I said, ""Where's your husband?"" ""Oh, somewhere. It doesn't matter."" (Laughter) Success story.(Laughter)(Applause)I'll just wind up by saying that I think you don't have to look for solutions outside. Look for solutions within. And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you. They're all over the world. Don't even worry. Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world.I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi. ""First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy
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"Why can't we solve these problems? We know what they are. Something always seems to stop us. Why? I remember March the 15th, 2000. The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. In the newspaper it said ""it was all part of a normal process."" A little bit further on in the article it said ""a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace."" That same word, ""normal,"" had two different, almost opposite meanings.If we walk into the B15 iceberg when we leave here today, we're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall, 76 miles long, 17 miles wide, and it's going to weigh two gigatons. I'm sorry, there's nothing normal about this. And yet I think it's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions. Only 90 days after this, arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred. It was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome. This is the code that's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are. And if we just take one cell's worth of this code and unwind it, it's a meter long, two nanometers thick. Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness.And I wondered, what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places, where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms? And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron? So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there, and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas.Six and a half years later, a hundred and eighty researchers, they have some amazing developments in the lab, and I will show you three of those today, such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead, we can generate all the energy we need right where we are, cleanly, safely, and cheaply. Think of the space that we spend most of our time. A tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun. We like the light that comes into the room, but in the middle of summer, all that heat is coming into the room that we're trying to keep cool. In winter, exactly the opposite is happening. We're trying to heat up the space that we're in, and all that is trying to get out through the window.Wouldn't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in? One of the materials that can do this is a remarkable material, carbon, that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction where graphite is blasted by a vapor, and when the vaporized carbon condenses, it condenses back into a different form: chickenwire rolled up. But this chickenwire carbon, called a carbon nanotube, is a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of one of your hairs. It's a thousand times more conductive than copper. How is that possible? One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently. You think of carbon as black. Carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible. And when it's in this form, if I combine it with a polymer and affix it to your window when it's in its colored state, it will reflect away all heat and light, and when it's in its bleached state it will let all the light and heat through and any combination in between. To change its state, by the way, takes two volts from a millisecond pulse. And once you've changed its state, it stays there until you change its state again.As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida, we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist, and he was working on a pretty incredible thing. Imagine if we didn't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night. We'd have to see at night, right? This lets you do it. It's a nanomaterial, two nanomaterials, a detector and an imager. The total width of it is 600 times smaller than the width of a decimal place. And it takes all the infrared available at night, converts it into an electron in the space of two small films, and is enabling you to play an image which you can see through. I'm going to show to TEDsters, the first time, this operating. Firstly I'm going to show you the transparency. Transparency is key. It's a film that you can look through. And then I'm going to turn the lights out. And you can see, off a tiny film, incredible clarity.As we were working on this, it dawned on us: this is taking infrared radiation, wavelengths, and converting it into electrons. What if we combined it with this? Suddenly you've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window. But because it's flexible, it can be on any surface whatsoever. The power plant of tomorrow is no power plant. We talked about generating and using. We want to talk about storing energy, and unfortunately the best thing we've got going is something that was developed in France a hundred and fifty years ago, the lead acid battery. In terms of dollars per what's stored, it's simply the best.Knowing that we're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power, we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas, and we gave them this diagram. It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. We said, ""Could you build this?"" And these scientists, instead of laughing at us, said, ""Yeah."" And what they built was eBox. EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside, hold it until you need it, and then be able to release it and pass it off. Being able to do that means that I can generate energy cleanly, efficiently and cheaply right where I am. It's my energy. And if I don't need it, I can convert it back up on the window to energy, light, and beam it, line of site, to your place. And for that I do not need an electric grid between us.The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free. If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece, which is water. Each of us, every day, need just eight glasses of this, because we're human. When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants. 19 trillion dollars is what we're going to have to spend. These also require tremendous amounts of energy. In fact, it's going to require twice the world's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water. We're simply not going to do that. But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need.I'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists, no kinder than many of the people in the world, but they have a magic look at the world. And I'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world. It's been a long time in coming for me. 18 years ago, I saw a photograph in the paper. It was taken by Kevin Carter who went to the Sudan to document their famine there. I've carried this photograph with me every day since then. It's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst. By any standard this is wrong. It's just wrong. We can do better than this. We should do better than this.And whenever I go round to somebody who says, ""You know what, you're working on something that's too difficult. It'll never happen. You don't have enough money. You don't have enough time. There's something much more interesting around the corner,"" I say, ""Try saying that to her."" That's what I say in my mind. And I just say ""thank you,"" and I go on to the next one. This is why we have to solve our problems, and I know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature, the stuff of life: the simple electron.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/justin_hall_tipping_freeing_energy_from_the_grid
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"Good afternoon. If you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks, you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China and the U.S. regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google. Many things have been said about this. Some people have called a cyberwar what may actually be just a spy operation — and obviously, a quite mishandled one. However, this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons.It so happens that these weapons are dangerous. They're of a new nature: they could lead the world into a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle. These virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world. In 1982, in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet Siberia, a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons, the equivalent of a fourth of the Hiroshima bomb. Now we know today — this was revealed by Thomas Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary — this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline.More recently, the U.S. government revealed that in September 2008, more than 3 million people in the state of Espirito Santo in Brazil were plunged into darkness, victims of a blackmail operation from cyber pirates. Even more worrying for the Americans, in December 2008 the holiest of holies, the IT systems of CENTCOM, the central command managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have been infiltrated by hackers who used these: plain but infected USB keys. And with these keys, they may have been able to get inside CENTCOM's systems, to see and hear everything, and maybe even infect some of them. As a result, the Americans take the threat very seriously. I'll quote General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the Americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities.And across the world today, we see a sort of cyber arms race, with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or even Iran. Yet, what you'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or the French Department of Defence is that the question isn't really who's the enemy, but actually the very nature of cyber weapons. And to understand why, we must look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace. For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day — the massive Vauban-style fortifications — and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe. which was indeed the case in Europe between 1650 and 1750.Similarly, if we'd had this talk 30 or 40 years ago, we would have seen how the rise of nuclear weapons, and the threat of mutually assured destruction they imply, prevents a direct fight between the two superpowers. However, if we'd had this talk 60 years ago, we would have seen how the emergence of new aircraft and tank technologies, which give the advantage to the attacker, make the Blitzkrieg doctrine very credible and thus create the possibility of war in Europe. So military technologies can influence the course of the world, can make or break world peace — and there lies the issue with cyber weapons.The first issue: Imagine a potential enemy announcing they're building a cyberwar unit, but only for their country's defense. Okay, but what distinguishes it from an offensive unit? It gets even more complicated when the doctrines of use become ambiguous. Just 3 years ago, both the U.S. and France were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace, strictly to defend their IT systems. But today both countries say the best defense is to attack. And so, they're joining China, whose doctrine of use for 15 years has been both defensive and offensive.The second issue: Your country could be under cyberattack with entire regions plunged into total darkness, and you may not even know who's attacking you. Cyber weapons have this peculiar feature: they can be used without leaving traces. This gives a tremendous advantage to the attacker, because the defender doesn't know who to fight back against. And if the defender retaliates against the wrong adversary, they risk making one more enemy and ending up diplomatically isolated. This issue isn't just theoretical.In May 2007, Estonia was the victim of cyberattacks, that damaged its communication and banking systems. Estonia accused Russia. But NATO, though it defends Estonia, reacted very prudently. Why? Because NATO couldn't be 100% sure that the Kremlin was indeed behind these attacks. So to sum up, on the one hand, when a possible enemy announces they're building a cyberwar unit, you don't know whether it's for attack or defense. On the other hand, we know that these weapons give an advantage to attacking.In a major article published in 1978, Professor Robert Jervis of Columbia University in New York described a model to understand how conflicts could arise. In this context, when you don't know if the potential enemy is preparing for defense or attack, and if the weapons give an advantage to attacking, then this environment is most likely to spark a conflict. This is the environment that's being created by cyber weapons today, and historically it was the environment in Europe at the onset of World War I. So cyber weapons are dangerous by nature, but in addition, they're emerging in a much more unstable environment.If you remember the Cold War, it was a very hard game, but a stable one played only by two players, which allowed for some coordination between the two superpowers. Today we're moving to a multipolar world in which coordination is much more complicated, as we have seen at Copenhagen. And this coordination may become even trickier with the introduction of cyber weapons. Why? Because no nation knows for sure whether its neighbor is about to attack. So nations may live under the threat of what Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling called the ""reciprocal fear of surprise attack,"" as I don't know if my neighbor is about to attack me or not — I may never know — so I might take the upper hand and attack first.Just last week, in a New York Times article dated January 26, 2010, it was revealed for the first time that officials at the National Security Agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the U.S. was about to be cyberattacked. And these preemptive attacks might not just remain in cyberspace. In May 2009, General Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. nuclear forces, stated that in the event of cyberattacks against the U.S., all options would be on the table.Cyber weapons do not replace conventional or nuclear weapons — they just add a new layer to the existing system of terror. But in doing so, they also add their own risk of triggering a conflict — as we've just seen, a very important risk — and a risk we may have to confront with a collective security solution which includes all of us: European allies, NATO members, our American friends and allies, our other Western allies, and maybe, by forcing their hand a little, our Russian and Chinese partners.The information technologies Joël de Rosnay was talking about, which were historically born from military research, are today on the verge of developing an offensive capability of destruction, which could tomorrow, if we're not careful, completely destroy world peace.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_philippe_goldstein_how_cyberattacks_threaten_real_world_peace
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"So today, I would like to talk with you about bionics, which is the popular term for the science of replacing part of a living organism with a mechatronic device, or a robot. It is essentially the stuff of life meets machine. And specifically, I'd like to talk with you about how bionics is evolving for people with arm amputations.This is our motivation. Arm amputation causes a huge disability. I mean, the functional impairment is clear. Our hands are amazing instruments. And when you lose one, far less both, it's a lot harder to do the things we physically need to do. There's also a huge emotional impact. And actually, I spend as much of my time in clinic dealing with the emotional adjustment of patients as with the physical disability. And finally, there's a profound social impact. We talk with our hands. We greet with our hands. And we interact with the physical world with our hands. And when they're missing, it's a barrier. Arm amputation is usually caused by trauma, with things like industrial accidents, motor vehicle collisions or, very poignantly, war. There are also some children who are born without arms, called congenital limb deficiency.Unfortunately, we don't do great with upper-limb prosthetics. There are two general types. They're called body-powered prostheses, which were invented just after the Civil War, refined in World War I and World War II. Here you see a patent for an arm in 1912. It's not a lot different than the one you see on my patient. They work by harnessing shoulder power. So when you squish your shoulders, they pull on a bicycle cable. And that bicycle cable can open or close a hand or a hook or bend an elbow. And we still use them commonly, because they're very robust and relatively simple devices.The state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses. These are motorized devices that are controlled by little electrical signals from your muscle. Every time you contract a muscle, it emits a little electricity that you can record with antennae or electrodes and use that to operate the motorized prosthesis. They work pretty well for people who have just lost their hand, because your hand muscles are still there. You squeeze your hand, these muscles contract. You open it, these muscles contract. So it's intuitive, and it works pretty well.Well how about with higher levels of amputation? Now you've lost your arm above the elbow. You're missing not only these muscles, but your hand and your elbow too. What do you do? Well our patients have to use very code-y systems of using just their arm muscles to operate robotic limbs. We have robotic limbs. There are several available on the market, and here you see a few. They contain just a hand that will open and close, a wrist rotator and an elbow. There's no other functions. If they did, how would we tell them what to do?We built our own arm at the Rehab Institute of Chicago where we've added some wrist flexion and shoulder joints to get up to six motors, or six degrees of freedom. And we've had the opportunity to work with some very advanced arms that were funded by the U.S. military, using these prototypes, that had up to 10 different degrees of freedom including movable hands. But at the end of the day, how do we tell these robotic arms what to do? How do we control them? Well we need a neural interface, a way to connect to our nervous system or our thought processes so that it's intuitive, it's natural, like for you and I.Well the body works by starting a motor command in your brain, going down your spinal cord, out the nerves and to your periphery. And your sensation's the exact opposite. You touch yourself, there's a stimulus that comes up those very same nerves back up to your brain. When you lose your arm, that nervous system still works. Those nerves can put out command signals. And if I tap the nerve ending on a World War II vet, he'll still feel his missing hand. So you might say, let's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals, or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there. And these are very exciting research areas, but it's really, really hard. You have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons — ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts. And it's just too hard to use now and for my patients today.So we developed a different approach. We're using a biological amplifier to amplify these nerve signals — muscles. Muscles will amplify the nerve signals about a thousand-fold, so that we can record them from on top of the skin, like you saw earlier. So our approach is something we call targeted reinnervation. Imagine, with somebody who's lost their whole arm, we still have four major nerves that go down your arm. And we take the nerve away from your chest muscle and let these nerves grow into it. Now you think, ""Close hand,"" and a little section of your chest contracts. You think, ""Bend elbow,"" a different section contracts. And we can use electrodes or antennae to pick that up and tell the arm to move. That's the idea.So this is the first man that we tried it on. His name is Jesse Sullivan. He's just a saint of a man — 54-year-old lineman who touched the wrong wire and had both of his arms burnt so badly they had to be amputated at the shoulder. Jesse came to us at the RIC to be fit with these state-of-the-art devices, and here you see them. I'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side. And he picks which joint he wants to move with those chin switches. On the left side he's got a modern motorized prosthesis with those three joints, and he operates little pads in his shoulder that he touches to make the arm go. And Jesse's a good crane operator, and he did okay by our standards.He also required a revision surgery on his chest. And that gave us the opportunity to do targeted reinnervation. So my colleague, Dr. Greg Dumanian, did the surgery. First, we cut away the nerve to his own muscle, then we took the arm nerves and just kind of had them shift down onto his chest and closed him up. And after about three months, the nerves grew in a little bit and we could get a twitch. And after six months, the nerves grew in well, and you could see strong contractions. And this is what it looks like. This is what happens when Jesse thinks open and close his hand, or bend or straighten your elbow. You can see the movements on his chest, and those little hash marks are where we put our antennae, or electrodes. And I challenge anybody in the room to make their chest go like this. His brain is thinking about his arm. He has not learned how to do this with the chest. There is not a learning process. That's why it's intuitive.So here's Jesse in our first little test with him. On the left-hand side, you see his original prosthesis, and he's using those switches to move little blocks from one box to the other. He's had that arm for about 20 months, so he's pretty good with it. On the right side, two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis — which, by the way, is the same physical arm, just programmed a little different — you can see that he's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks. And we're only able to use three of the signals at this time.Then we had one of those little surprises in science. So we're all motivated to get motor commands to drive robotic arms. And after a few months, you touch Jesse on his chest, and he felt his missing hand. His hand sensation grew into his chest again probably because we had also taken away a lot of fat, so the skin was right down to the muscle and deinnervated, if you would, his skin. So you touch Jesse here, he feels his thumb; you touch it here, he feels his pinky. He feels light touch down to one gram of force. He feels hot, cold, sharp, dull, all in his missing hand, or both his hand and his chest, but he can attend to either. So this is really exciting for us, because now we have a portal, a portal, or a way to potentially give back sensation, so that he might feel what he touches with his prosthetic hand. Imagine sensors in the hand coming up and pressing on this new hand skin. So it was very exciting.We've also gone on with what was initially our primary population of people with above-the-elbow amputations. And here we deinnervate, or cut the nerve away, just from little segments of muscle and leave others alone that give us our up-down signals and two others that will give us a hand open and close signal. This was one of our first patients, Chris. You see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use, and on the right, it is two months. He's about four or five times as fast with this simple little performance metric.All right. So one of the best parts of my job is working with really great patients who are also our research collaborators. And we're fortunate today to have Amanda Kitts come and join us. Please welcome Amanda Kitts.(Applause)So Amanda, would you please tell us how you lost your arm?Amanda Kitts: Sure. In 2006, I had a car accident. And I was driving home from work, and a truck was coming the opposite direction, came over into my lane, ran over the top of my car and his axle tore my arm off.Todd Kuiken: Okay, so after your amputation, you healed up. And you've got one of these conventional arms. Can you tell us how it worked?AK: Well, it was a little difficult, because all I had to work with was a bicep and a tricep. So for the simple little things like picking something up, I would have to bend my elbow, and then I would have to cocontract to get it to change modes. When I did that, I had to use my bicep to get the hand to close, use my tricep to get it to open, cocontract again to get the elbow to work again.TK: So it was a little slow?AK: A little slow, and it was just hard to work. You had to concentrate a whole lot.TK: Okay, so I think about nine months later that you had the targeted reinnervation surgery, took six more months to have all the reinnervation. Then we fit her with a prosthesis. And how did that work for you?AK: It works good. I was able to use my elbow and my hand simultaneously. I could work them just by my thoughts. So I didn't have to do any of the cocontracting and all that.TK: A little faster?AK: A little faster. And much more easy, much more natural.TK: Okay, this was my goal. For 20 years, my goal was to let somebody [be] able to use their elbow and hand in an intuitive way and at the same time. And we now have over 50 patients around the world who have had this surgery, including over a dozen of our wounded warriors in the U.S. armed services. The success rate of the nerve transfers is very high. It's like 96 percent. Because we're putting a big fat nerve onto a little piece of muscle. And it provides intuitive control. Our functional testing, those little tests, all show that they're a lot quicker and a lot easier. And the most important thing is our patients have appreciated it.So that was all very exciting. But we want to do better. There's a lot of information in those nerve signals, and we wanted to get more. You can move each finger. You can move your thumb, your wrist. Can we get more out of it? So we did some experiments where we saturated our poor patients with zillions of electrodes and then had them try to do two dozen different tasks — from wiggling a finger to moving a whole arm to reaching for something — and recorded this data. And then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms, called pattern recognition. See.(Laughter)And here you can see, on Jesse's chest, when he just tried to do three different things, you can see three different patterns. But I can't put in an electrode and say, ""Go there."" So we collaborated with our colleagues in University of New Brunswick, came up with this algorithm control, which Amanda can now demonstrate.AK: So I have the elbow that goes up and down. I have the wrist rotation that goes — and it can go all the way around. And I have the wrist flexion and extension. And I also have the hand closed and open.TK: Thank you, Amanda. Now this is a research arm, but it's made out of commercial components from here down and a few that I've borrowed from around the world. It's about seven pounds, which is probably about what my arm would weigh if I lost it right here. Obviously, that's heavy for Amanda. And in fact, it feels even heavier, because it's not glued on the same. She's carrying all the weight through harnesses.So the exciting part isn't so much the mechatronics, but the control. So we've developed a small microcomputer that is blinking somewhere behind her back and is operating this all by the way she trains it to use her individual muscle signals. So Amanda, when you first started using this arm, how long did it take to use it?AK: It took just about probably three to four hours to get it to train. I had to hook it up to a computer, so I couldn't just train it anywhere. So if it stopped working, I just had to take it off. So now it's able to train with just this little piece on the back. I can wear it around. If it stops working for some reason, I can retrain it. Takes about a minute.TK: So we're really excited, because now we're getting to a clinically practical device. And that's where our goal is — to have something clinically pragmatic to wear. We've also had Amanda able to use some of our more advanced arms that I showed you earlier. Here's Amanda using an arm made by DEKA Research Corporation. And I believe Dean Kamen presented it at TED a few years ago. So Amanda, you can see, has really good control. It's all the pattern recognition. And it now has a hand that can do different grasps. What we do is have the patient go all the way open and think, ""What hand grasp pattern do I want?"" It goes into that mode, and then you can do up to five or six different hand grasps with this hand. Amanda, how many were you able to do with the DEKA arm?AK: I was able to get four. I had the key grip, I had a chuck grip, I had a power grasp and I had a fine pinch. But my favorite one was just when the hand was open, because I work with kids, and so all the time you're clapping and singing, so I was able to do that again, which was really good.TK: That hand's not so good for clapping.AK: Can't clap with this one.TK: All right. So that's exciting on where we may go with the better mechatronics, if we make them good enough to put out on the market and use in a field trial. I want you to watch closely.(Video) Claudia: Oooooh!TK: That's Claudia, and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic. She had a little sensor at the end of her prosthesis that then she rubbed over different surfaces, and she could feel different textures of sandpaper, different grits, ribbon cable, as it pushed on her reinnervated hand skin. She said that when she just ran it across the table, it felt like her finger was rocking. So that's an exciting laboratory experiment on how to give back, potentially, some skin sensation.But here's another video that shows some of our challenges. This is Jesse, and he's squeezing a foam toy. And the harder he squeezes — you see a little black thing in the middle that's pushing on his skin proportional to how hard he squeezes. But look at all the electrodes around it. I've got a real estate problem. You're supposed to put a bunch of these things on there, but our little motor's making all kinds of noise right next to my electrodes. So we're really challenged on what we're doing there.The future is bright. We're excited about where we are and a lot of things we want to do. So for example, one is to get rid of my real estate problem and get better signals. We want to develop these little tiny capsules about the size of a piece of risotto that we can put into the muscles and telemeter out the EMG signals, so that it's not worrying about electrode contact. And we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback. We want to build a better arm. This arm — they're always made for the 50th percentile male — which means they're too big for five-eighths of the world. So rather than a super strong or super fast arm, we're making an arm that is — we're starting with, the 25th percentile female — that will have a hand that wraps around, opens all the way, two degrees of freedom in the wrist and an elbow. So it'll be the smallest and lightest and the smartest arm ever made. Once we can do it that small, it's a lot easier making them bigger.So those are just some of our goals. And we really appreciate you all being here today. I'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side, with yesterday's theme. So Amanda came jet-lagged, she's using the arm, and everything goes wrong. There was a computer spook, a broken wire, a converter that sparked. We took out a whole circuit in the hotel and just about put on the fire alarm. And none of those problems could I have dealt with, but I have a really bright research team. And thankfully Dr. Annie Simon was with us and worked really hard yesterday to fix it. That's science. And fortunately, it worked today.So thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/todd_kuiken_a_prosthetic_arm_that_feels
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"(Music)What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007. The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this. Every single bead, every single colored band, represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note. I find weather extremely fascinating. Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us. So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible.All of my work begins very simple. I extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices — generally anything I can find in the hardware store. I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet — satellite images, weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys. That's both historical as well as real data. And then I compile all of these numbers on these clipboards that you see here. These clipboards are filled with numbers. And from all of these numbers, I start with only two or three variables. That begins my translation process.My translation medium is a very simple basket. A basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements. When I assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements, I can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form. I use natural reed, because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control. That means that it is the numbers that control the form, not me. What I come up with are forms like these. These forms are completely made up of weather data or science data. Every colored bead, every colored string, represents a weather element. And together, these elements, not only construct the form, but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph.When you step closer, you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers. The vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day. So all the way around, you have a 24-hour timeline. But it's also used to assign a temperature range. On that grid, I can then weave the high tide readings, water temperature, air temperature and Moon phases. I also translate weather data into musical scores. And musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it.So all of these scores are made up of weather data. Every single color, dot, every single line, is a weather element. And together, these variables construct a score. I use these scores to collaborate with musicians. This is the 1913 Trio performing one of my pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Meanwhile, I use these scores as blueprints to translate into sculptural forms like this, that function still in the sense of being a three-dimensional weather visualization, but now they're embedding the visual matrix of the musical score, so it can actually be read as a musical score.What I love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art, versus science. This piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it. You place it in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture. You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data. You place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score. And I really like that, because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music.The other reason why I really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science. And not everyone has a Ph.D. in science. So for me, that was my way into it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathalie_miebach
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"You all know the truth of what I'm going to say. I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. I'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I'm going to be showing you exist.But first, see what a miserable lot we are. (Laughter) I want to start though with a paradox. This shows you life expectancy against gross national income — how rich countries are on average. And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. There's no suggestion of a relationship there. But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. This, again, is life expectancy.These are small areas of England and Wales — the poorest on the right, the richest on the left. A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. So income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them. The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or social position, social status — where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. And as soon as you've got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger or smaller?And that's what I'm going to show you. I'm not using any hypothetical data. I'm taking data from the U.N. — it's the same as the World Bank has — on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies. The measure we've used, because it's easy to understand and you can download it, is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country. And you see in the more equal countries on the left — Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden — the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. But on the more unequal end — U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore — the differences are twice as big. On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies.Now I'm going to show you what that does to our societies. We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder. Internationally comparable data on life expectancy, on kids' maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness — which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction — and social mobility. We put them all in one index. They're all weighted equally. Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things. And there, you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I've just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data. The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. It's an extraordinarily close correlation. But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no correlation anymore.We were a little bit worried that people might think we'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence, so we also did a paper in the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being. It has 40 different components put together by other people. It contains whether kids can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, what immunization rates are like, whether there's bullying at school. Everything goes into it. Here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality. Kids do worse in the more unequal societies. Highly significant relationship. But once again, if you look at that measure of child well-being, in relation to national income per person, there's no relationship, no suggestion of a relationship.What all the data I've shown you so far says is the same thing. The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world. But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much. I'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index. Here, for instance, is trust. It's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted. It comes from the World Values Survey. You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others. But in the more equal societies, it rises to 60 or 65 percent. And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital, very similar relationships closely related to inequality.I may say, we did all this work twice. We did it first on these rich, developed countries, and then as a separate test bed, we repeated it all on the 50 American states — asking just the same question: do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures? So here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality. Very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust. Same thing is going on. Basically we found that almost anything that's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed. We're not just talking about a fluke.This is mental illness. WHO put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year. And it goes from about eight percent up to three times that — whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others. And again, closely related to inequality.This is violence. These red dots are American states, and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. But look at the scale of the differences. It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150. This is the proportion of the population in prison. There's a about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side. But it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison. That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. In some places, that's part of it. But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. And the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty. Here we have children dropping out of high school. Again, quite big differences. Extraordinarily damaging, if you're talking about using the talents of the population.This is social mobility. It's actually a measure of mobility based on income. Basically, it's asking: do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? And at the more unequal end, fathers' income is much more important — in the U.K., USA. And in Scandinavian countries, fathers' income is much less important. There's more social mobility. And as we like to say — and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here — if Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark.(Laughter)(Applause)I've shown you just a few things in italics here. I could have shown a number of other problems. They're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient. But there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries — not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. Think of the expense, the human cost of that.I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points. One is that, in graph after graph, we find the countries that do worse, whatever the outcome, seem to be the more unequal ones, and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. So what we're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality. It's not just one or two things that go wrong, it's most things.The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways. The position of women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world. But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality. Sweden has huge differences in earnings, and it narrows the gap through taxation, general welfare state, generous benefits and so on. Japan is rather different though. It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax. It has lower taxes. It has a smaller welfare state. And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same contrast. There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax. So we conclude that it doesn't much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow.I am not talking about perfect equality, I'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies. Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are affected by inequality. There seems to be some truth in John Donne's ""No man is an island."" And in a number of studies, it's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy. This is just one example. It's infant mortality. Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification. And so it's anachronistically a classification by fathers' occupations, so single parents go on their own. But then where it says ""low social class,"" that's unskilled manual occupations. It goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle, then the junior non-manual, going up high to the professional occupations — doctors, lawyers, directors of larger companies.You see there that Sweden does better than Britain all the way across the social hierarchy. The biggest differences are at the bottom of society. But even at the top, there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society. We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. And that seems to be the general picture — that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom, but has some benefits even at the top.But I should say a few words about what's going on. I think I'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality. More to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority, of being valued and devalued, respected and disrespected. And of course, those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society. It also leads to status insecurity. We worry more about how we're judged and seen by others, whether we're regarded as attractive, clever, all that kind of thing. The social-evaluative judgments increase, the fear of those social-evaluative judgments.Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured. And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol, the central stress hormone. And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat — threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance. Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress.Now we have been criticized. Of course, there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising. I should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data, we never pick and choose data. We have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at, it goes into the analysis. Our data source decides whether it's reliable data, we don't. Otherwise that would introduce bias.What about other countries? There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals. This isn't confined to these countries here, hiding a very simple demonstration. The same countries, the same measure of inequality, one problem after another. Why don't we control for other factors? Well we've shown you that GNP per capita doesn't make any difference. And of course, others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on.What about causality? Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality. We spend a good bit of time. And indeed, people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on.I should say that to deal with this, we've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things. We've got to constrain income, the bonus culture incomes at the top. I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can. I think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's exciting.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson
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"Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I last did a TED Talk I think about seven years ago or so. I talked about spaghetti sauce. And so many people, I guess, watch those videos. People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term — (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years. And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me.(Laughter)The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era. And the man's name is Carl Norden. Carl Norden was born in 1880. And he was Swiss. And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects. And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. He's an engineer. He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small, expensive, exquisite objects.And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule.In any case, Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane. Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, that was obviously a really difficult problem. It's a complicated physics problem. You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air, going at hundreds of miles an hour, and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb, towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover and all kinds of other impediments. And all sorts of people, moving up to the First World War and between the wars, tried to solve this problem, and nearly everybody came up short. The bombsights that were available were incredibly crude.But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code. And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device. It weighs about 50 lbs. It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges. And he makes this complicated thing. And what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this particular object, visually sight the target, because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber, and then they plug in the altitude of the plane, the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target. And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb. And as Norden famously says, ""Before that bombsight came along, bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more."" But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft.Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the news of the Norden bombsight. It was like manna from heaven. Here was an army that had just had experience in the First World War, where millions of men fought each other in the trenches, getting nowhere, making no progress, and here someone had come up with a device that allowed them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy.And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars — billion dollars in 1940 dollars — developing the Norden bombsight. And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars. Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era. And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against the Japanese.And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance, because Norden was a committed Christian. In fact, he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, because in his eyes, only God could invent things. He was simply the instrument of God's will. And what was God's will? Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible.And what did the Norden bombsight do? Well it allowed you to do that. It allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb. So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000 each — again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money. And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them — long extensive, months-long training sessions — because these things are essentially analog computers; they're not easy to use. And they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath, to swear that if they're ever captured, they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy, because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology.And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, it's escorted there by a series of armed guards. And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it. And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards. It's never allowed to be photographed. And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it. The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail.So what happens during the Second World War? Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail. In practice, the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., but that's under perfect conditions. And of course, in wartime, conditions aren't perfect. First of all, it's really hard to use — really hard to use. And not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog computer. Secondly, it breaks down a lot. It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings, and they don't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle.Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes. Well in a real war, you can't do that; you'll get shot down. So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds. And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well under those conditions.But most of all, the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target. But of course, what happens in real life? There are clouds, right. It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate. Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945? Not a lot.And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany. And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres. And over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight. Well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant? 10 percent. 10 percent. And of those 10 percent that landed, 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds. The Leuna chemical plant, after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war, was up and running within weeks.And by the way, all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis? Well it turns out that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss, was very enamored of German engineers. So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them, including a man named Hermann Long who, in 1938, gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis. So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war — which also, by the way, didn't work very well.(Laughter)So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights. We live in a time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running around, saying that they've invented gadgets that will forever change our world. They've invented websites that will allow people to be free. They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make our world forever better.If you go into the military, you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well. If you go to the Pentagon, they will say, ""You know what, now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft."" And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now. But we need to be very clear about how little that means.In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor. And their mission was to find and to destroy — remember the Scud missile launchers, those surface-to-air missiles that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis? The mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers. And so they flew missions day and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge.And after the war was over, there was an audit done — as the army always does, the air force always does — and they asked the question: how many Scuds did we actually destroy? You know what the answer was? Zero, not a single one. Now why is that? Is it because their weapons weren't accurate? Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate. They could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft. The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were. The problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel. That's always been the harder problem when it comes to fighting wars.Or take the battle in Afghanistan. What is the signature weapon of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan? It's the drone. What is the drone? Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision. And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants. Now what is the accuracy of those drones? Well it's extraordinary. We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes. 95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right? That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare.But do you know what the crucial thing is? In that exact same period that we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold. As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us. I have not described to you a success story. I've described to you the opposite of a success story.And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make. We think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are much more complex than that. The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.There's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight. And that is, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima. And as was typical with the Norden bombsight, the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft. But of course, it didn't matter. And that's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight. the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, which didn't need a bombsight at all.Meanwhile, back in New York, no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima. He was a committed Christian. He thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war. It would have broken his heart.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell
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"I moved to Boston 10 years ago from Chicago, with an interest in cancer and in chemistry. You might know that chemistry is the science of making molecules or, to my taste, new drugs for cancer. And you might also know that, for science and medicine, Boston is a bit of a candy store. You can't roll a stop sign in Cambridge without hitting a graduate student. The bar is called the Miracle of Science. The billboards say ""Lab Space Available.""And it's fair to say that in these 10 years, we've witnessed absolutely the start of a scientific revolution — that of genome medicine. We know more about the patients that enter our clinic now than ever before. And we're able, finally, to answer the question that's been so pressing for so many years: Why do I have cancer? This information is also pretty staggering. You might know that, so far, in just the dawn of this revolution, we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes, and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers, causes of cancer.Yet comparatively, we have about a dozen targeted medications. And this inadequacy of cancer medicine really hit home when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We didn't fly him to Boston. We didn't sequence his genome. It's been known for decades what causes this malignancy. It's three proteins: ras, myc, p53. This is old information we've known since about the 80s, yet there's no medicine I can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three ... Horsemen of the Apocalypse that is cancer. There's no ras, no myc, no p53 drug.And you might fairly ask: Why is that? And the very unsatisfying yet scientific answer is: it's too hard. That for whatever reason, these three proteins have entered a space, in the language of our field, that's called the undruggable genome — which is like calling a computer unsurfable or the Moon unwalkable. It's a horrible term of trade. But what it means is that we've failed to identify a greasy pocket in these proteins, into which we, like molecular locksmiths, can fashion an active, small, organic molecule or drug substance.Now, as I was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem-cell transplantation, what we had instead, cascading through the regulatory network at the FDA, were these substances: arsenic, thalidomide, and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas. And this is the 21st century. And so, I guess you'd say, dissatisfied with the performance and quality of these medicines, I went back to school, in chemistry, with the idea that perhaps by learning the trade of discovery chemistry and approaching it in the context of this brave new world of the open source, the crowd source, the collaborative network that we have access to within academia, that we might more quickly bring powerful and targeted therapies to our patients.And so, please consider this a work in progress, but I'd like to tell you today a story about a very rare cancer called midline carcinoma, about the undruggable protein target that causes this cancer, called BRD4, and about a molecule developed at my lab at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, called JQ1, which we affectionately named for Jun Qi, the chemist that made this molecule. Now, BRD4 is an interesting protein.You might ask: with all the things cancer's trying to do to kill our patient, how does it remember it's cancer? When it winds up its genome, divides into two cells and unwinds again, why does it not turn into an eye, into a liver, as it has all the genes necessary to do this? It remembers that it's cancer. And the reason is that cancer, like every cell in the body, places little molecular bookmarks, little Post-it notes, that remind the cell, ""I'm cancer; I should keep growing."" And those Post-it notes involve this and other proteins of its class — so-called bromodomains. So we developed an idea, a rationale, that perhaps if we made a molecule that prevented the Post-it note from sticking by entering into the little pocket at the base of this spinning protein, then maybe we could convince cancer cells, certainly those addicted to this BRD4 protein, that they're not cancer.And so we started to work on this problem. We developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called JQ1. Now, not being a drug company, we could do certain things, we had certain flexibilities, that I respect that a pharmaceutical industry doesn't have. We just started mailing it to our friends. I have a small lab. We thought we'd just send it to people and see how the molecule behaves. We sent it to Oxford, England, where a group of talented crystallographers provided this picture, which helped us understand exactly how this molecule is so potent for this protein target. It's what we call a perfect fit of shape complementarity, or hand in glove.Now, this is a very rare cancer, this BRD4-addicted cancer. And so we worked with samples of material that were collected by young pathologists at Brigham and Women's Hospital. And as we treated these cells with this molecule, we observed something really striking. The cancer cells — small, round and rapidly dividing, grew these arms and extensions. They were changing shape. In effect, the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell.This got us very excited. The next step would be to put this molecule into mice. The only problem was there's no mouse model of this rare cancer. And so at the time we were doing this research, I was caring for a 29-year-old firefighter from Connecticut who was very much at the end of life with this incurable cancer. This BRD4-addicted cancer was growing throughout his left lung. And he had a chest tube in that was draining little bits of debris. And every nursing shift, we would throw this material out. And so we approached this patient and asked if he would collaborate with us. Could we take this precious and rare cancerous material from this chest tube and drive it across town and put it into mice and try to do a clinical trial at a stage that with a prototype drug, well, that would be, of course, impossible and, rightly, illegal to do in humans. And he obliged us. At the Lurie Family Center for Animal Imaging, our colleague, Andrew Kung, grew this cancer successfully in mice without ever touching plastic.And you can see this PET scan of a mouse — what we call a pet PET. The cancer is growing as this red, huge mass in the hind limb of this animal. And as we treat it with our compound, this addiction to sugar, this rapid growth, faded. And on the animal on the right, you see that the cancer was responding. We've completed, now, clinical trials in four mouse models of this disease. And every time, we see the same thing. The mice with this cancer that get the drug live, and the ones that don't rapidly perish.So we started to wonder, what would a drug company do at this point? Well, they probably would keep this a secret until they turn the prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance. So we did just the opposite. We published a paper that described this finding at the earliest prototype stage. We gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule, typically a secret in our discipline. We told people exactly how to make it. We gave them our email address, suggesting that if they write us, we'll send them a free molecule.(Laughter)We basically tried to create the most competitive environment for our lab as possible. And this was, unfortunately, successful.(Laughter)Because now, we've shared this molecule, just since December of last year, with 40 laboratories in the United States and 30 more in Europe — many of them pharmaceutical companies, seeking now to enter this space, to target this rare cancer that, thankfully right now, is quite desirable to study in that industry. But the science that's coming back from all of these laboratories about the use of this molecule has provided us insights we might not have had on our own. Leukemia cells treated with this compound turn into normal white blood cells. Mice with multiple myeloma, an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow, respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug. You might know that fat has memory. I'll nicely demonstrate that for you.(Laughter)In fact, this molecule prevents this adipocyte, this fat stem cell, from remembering how to make fat, such that mice on a high-fat diet, like the folks in my hometown of Chicago —(Laughter)fail to develop fatty liver, which is a major medical problem.What this research taught us — not just my lab, but our institute, and Harvard Medical School more generally — is that we have unique resources in academia for drug discovery; that our center, which has tested perhaps more cancer molecules in a scientific way than any other, never made one of its own. For all the reasons you see listed here, we think there's a great opportunity for academic centers to participate in this earliest, conceptually tricky and creative discipline of prototype drug discovery.So what next? We have this molecule, but it's not a pill yet. It's not orally bioavailable. We need to fix it so we can deliver it to our patients. And everyone in the lab, especially following the interaction with these patients, feels quite compelled to deliver a drug substance based on this molecule. It's here where I'd say that we could use your help and your insights, your collaborative participation. Unlike a drug company, we don't have a pipeline that we can deposit these molecules into. We don't have a team of salespeople and marketeers to tell us how to position this drug against the other. What we do have is the flexibility of an academic center to work with competent, motivated, enthusiastic, hopefully well-funded people to carry these molecules forward into the clinic while preserving our ability to share the prototype drug worldwide.This molecule will soon leave our benches and go into a small start-up company called Tensha Therapeutics. And, really, this is the fourth of these molecules to kind of ""graduate"" from our little pipeline of drug discovery, two of which — a topical drug for lymphoma of the skin and an oral substance for the treatment of multiple myeloma — will actually come to the bedside for the first clinical trial in July of this year — for us, a major and exciting milestone. I want to leave you with just two ideas. The first is: if anything is unique about this research, it's less the science than the strategy. This, for us, was a social experiment — an experiment in ""What would happen if we were as open and honest at the earliest phase of discovery chemistry research as we could be?""This string of letters and numbers and symbols and parentheses that can be texted, I suppose, or Twittered worldwide, is the chemical identity of our pro compound. It's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies, the information on how these early prototype drugs might work. Yet this information is largely a secret. And so we seek, really, to download from the amazing successes of the computer-science industry, two principles — that of open source and that of crowdsourcing — to quickly, responsibly accelerate the delivery of targeted therapeutics to patients with cancer.Now, the business model involves all of you. This research is funded by the public. It's funded by foundations. And one thing I've learned in Boston is that you people will do anything for cancer, and I love that. You bike across the state, you walk up and down the river.(Laughter)I've never seen, really, anywhere, this unique support for cancer research. And so I want to thank you for your participation, your collaboration and most of all, for your confidence in our ideas.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research
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"(Applause)(Applause)I am a papercutter. (Laughter) I cut stories. So my process is very straightforward. I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't. And as my image is already inside the paper, I just have to remove what's not from that story. So I didn't come to papercutting in a straight line. In fact, I see it more as a spiral.I was not born with a blade in my hand. And I don't remember papercutting as a child. As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist. But I was also a rebel. And I left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs. So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady. I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico, one year in Egypt. I moved for two years in Taiwan. And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide. And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia.So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist. (Applause) I chose papercutting because paper is cheap, it's light, and you can use it in a lot of different ways. And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it's very efficient. And it's also just getting to the essential of things. So the word ""silhouette"" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette. And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn't afford paintings anymore, and they needed to have their portrait ""a la silhouette."" (Laughter) So I made series of images, cuttings, and I assembled them in portfolios. And people told me — like these 36 views of the Empire State building — they told me, ""You're making artist books.""So artist books have a lot of definitions. They come in a lot of different shapes. But to me, they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story. They can be with words or without words. And I have a passion for images and for words. I love pun and the relation to the unconscious. I love oddities of languages. And everywhere I lived, I learned the languages, but never mastered them. So I'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages.So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French. And my daily language is English. So I did a series of work where it was identical words in French and in English. So one of these works is the ""Spelling Spider."" So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee. (Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web. (Laughter) And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet. So you can read ""architecture active"" or ""active architecture."" So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives. So if you don't know one of these languages, it's instant learning.And one ancient form of the book is scrolls. So scrolls are very convenient, because you can create a large image on a very small table. So the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image, so it makes a very freestyle architecture. And I'm making all those kinds of windows. So it's to look beyond the surface. It's to have a look at different worlds. And very often I've been an outsider. So I want to see how things work and what's happening. So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit. And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do, and what are the words, colloquialisms, that we have with the expressions.It's all if. So what if we were living in balloon houses? It would make a very uplifting world. And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet. It would be so light. So sometimes I view from the inside, like EgoCentriCity and the inner circles. Sometimes it's a global view, to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams. And we can use them also as a safety net.And my inspirations are very eclectic. I'm influenced by everything I read, everything I see. I have some stories that are humorous, like ""Dead Beats."" (Laughter) Other ones are historical. Here it's ""CandyCity."" It's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar. It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between. And sometimes I have an emotional response to news, such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Other times, it's not even my stories. People tell me their lives, their memories, their aspirations, and I create a mindscape. I channel their history [so that] they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities. I call them Freudian cities.I cannot speak for all my images, so I'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title. ""ModiCity."" ""ElectriCity."" ""MAD Growth on Columbus Circle."" ""ReefCity."" ""A Web of Time."" ""Chaos City."" ""Daily Battles."" ""FeliCity."" ""Floating Islands."" And at one point, I had to do ""The Whole Nine Yards."" So it's actually a papercut that's nine yards long. (Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected. One story leads to another. I was also interested in the physicality of this format, because you have to walk to see it.And parallel to my cutting is my running. I started with small images, I started with a few miles. Larger images, I started to run marathons. Then I went to run 50K, then 60K. Then I ran 50 miles — ultramarathons. And I still feel I'm running, it's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter.(Laughter)And running gives me a lot of energy. Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. The result is ""Hells and Heavens."" It's two panels 13 ft. high. They were installed in the museum on two floors, but in fact, it's a continuous image. And I call it ""Hells and Heavens"" because it's daily hells and daily heavens. There is no border in between. Some people are born in hells, and against all odds, they make it to heavens. Other people make the opposite trip. That's the border. You have sweatshops in hells. You have people renting their wings in the heavens. And then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action, and the result puts you in hells or in heavens. So the whole ""Hells and Heavens"" is about free will and determinism.And in papercutting, you have the drawing as the structure itself. So you can take it off the wall. Here it's an artist book installation called ""Identity Project."" It's not autobiographical identities. They are more our social identities. And then you can just walk behind them and try them on. So it's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity.That's another artist book project. In fact, in the picture, you have two of them. It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City. Why do I call it a book? It's called ""Fashion Statement,"" and there are quotes about fashion, so you can read it, and also, because the definition of artist book is very generous. So artist books, you take them off the wall. You take them for a walk. You can also install them as public art. Here it's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it's called ""Floating Memories."" So it's regional memories, and they are just randomly moved by the wind.I love public art. And I entered competitions for a long time. After eight years of rejection, I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City. It was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen. I made an artist book that's in stainless steel instead of paper. I called it ""Working in the Same Direction."" But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions. With public art, I could also make cut glass. Here it's faceted glass in the Bronx. And each time I make public art, I want something that's really relevant to the place it's installed. So for the subway in New York, I saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading. It is travel in time, travel on time. And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories.Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California. So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose. So I started in the center with the acorn for the Ohlone Indian civilization. Then I have the fruit from Europe for the ranchers. And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today. And it's still growing. So the technique, it's cut, sandblasted, etched and printed glass into architectural glass. And outside the library, I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind. I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge. I also planted the bibliotree. So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages. And it's all about international writing systems. And on the branches you have library material growing. You can also have function and form with public art. So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench. But you have a bonus with this bench. Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts, you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs.(Laughter)Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station. And it's called ""Seeds of the Future are Planted Today."" It's a story about transformation and connections. So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter, and not to have objects falling on the rails. To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers, it's fantastic. And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing. So each building has its own personality. And sometimes it's about a legacy of the neighborhood, like in Morrisania, about the jazz history. And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street. It's called Rue des Prairies — Prairie Street. So I brought back the rabbit, the dragonfly, to stay in that street.And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year. So that was a very captive audience. And I wanted to give them an escape. I created ""All Around Town."" It is a papercutting, and then after, I added color on the computer. So I can call it techno-crafted.And along the way, I'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques. But the result is always to have stories. So the stories, they have a lot of possibilities. They have a lot of scenarios. I don't know the stories. I take images from our global imagination, from cliché, from things we are thinking about, from history. And everybody's a narrator, because everybody has a story to tell. But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world. And in all these universes, it's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with, but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic. And it's what story cutting is all about.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beatrice_coron_stories_cut_from_paper
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"Hi there. I'm Hasan. I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, ""Do you paint?"" or ""What kind of medium do you work in?"" Well most of my work that I work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique. So what I'm really interested in is creative problem solving. And I had a little bit of a problem a few years ago. So let me show you a little of that.So it started over here. And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002. I was flying back to the U.S. from an exhibition overseas. And as I was coming back, well I was taken by the FBI, met by an FBI agent, and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions — ""Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you talking with? Why were you there? Who pays for your trips?"" — all these little details. And then literally just out of nowhere, the guy asks me, ""Where were you September 12th?"" And when most of us get asked, ""Where were you September 12th?"" or any date for that fact, it's like, ""I don't exactly remember, but I can look it up for you.""So I pulled out my little PDA, and I said, ""Okay, let's look up my appointments for September 12th."" I had September 12th — from 10:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., I paid my storage bill. From 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., I met with Judith who was one of my graduate students at the time. From 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., I taught my intro class, 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., I taught my advanced class. ""Where were you the 11th?"" ""Where were you the 10th?"" ""Where were you the 29th? the 30th?"" ""Where were you October 5th?"" We read about six months of my calendar. And I don't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what I did. But good thing I did, because I don't look good in orange.(Laughter)So he asked me — (Applause) ""So this storage unit that you paid the rent on, what did you have in it?"" This was in Tampa, Florida, so I was like, ""Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida. Furniture that I can't fit in my ratty apartment. Just assorted garage sale junk, because I'm a pack rat."" And he looks at me really confused and says, ""No explosives?"" (Laughter) I was like, ""No, no. I'm pretty certain there were no explosives. And if there were, I would have remembered that one."" And he's still a little confused, but I think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I'm not exactly a terrorist threat. And so we're sitting there, and eventually after about an hour, hour and a half of just going back and forth, he says, ""Okay, I have enough information here. I'm going to pass this onto the Tampa office. They're the ones who initiated this. They'll follow up with you, and we'll take care of it."" I was like, ""Great.""So I got home and the phone rings, and a man introduced himself. Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life — back and forth, not six months continuously. By the way, you folks know that in the United States, you can't take photographs of federal buildings, but Google can do it for you. So to the folks from Google, thank you. (Applause) So I spent a lot of time in this building. Questions like: ""Have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the United States or a foreign nation?"" And you also have to consider the state of mind you're in when you're doing this. You're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death. Or questions such as — actually, during the polygraph, which was how it finally ended after nine consecutive of them —one of the polygraph questions was ... well the first one was, ""Is your name Hasan?"" ""Yes."" ""Are we in Florida?"" ""Yes."" ""Is today Tuesday?"" ""Yes."" Because you have to base it on a yes or no. Then, of course, the next question is: ""Do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?"" I work at a university. (Laughter) So I was like, ""Maybe you want to ask some of my colleagues that directly."" But they said, ""Okay, aside from what we had discussed, do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?"" I was like, ""No.""So at the end of six months of this and nine consecutive polygraphs, they said, ""Hey, everything's fine."" I was like, ""I know. That's what I've been trying to tell you guys all along. I know everything's fine."" So they're looking at me really odd. And it's like, ""Guys, I travel a lot."" This is with the FBI. And I was like, ""All we need is Alaska not to get the last memo, and here we go all over again."" And there was a sincere concern there. And he was like, ""You know, if you get into trouble, give us a call — we'll take care of it.""So ever since then, before I would go anywhere, I would call the FBI. I would tell them, ""Hey guys, this is where I'm going. This is my flight. Northwest flight seven coming into Seattle on March 12th"" or whatever. A couple weeks later, I'd call again, let them know. It wasn't that I had to, but I chose to. Just wanted to say, ""Hey guys. Don't want to make it look like I'm making any sudden moves."" (Laughter) ""I don't want you guys to think that I'm about to flee. Just letting you know. Heads up."" And so I just kept doing this over and over and over. And then the phone calls turned into emails, and the emails got longer and longer and longer ... with pictures, with travel tips. Then I'd make websites. And then I built this over here. Let me go back to it over here.So I actually designed this back in 2003. So this kind of tracks me at any given moment. I wrote some code for my mobile phone. Basically, what I decided is okay guys, you want to watch me, that's cool. But I'll watch myself. It's okay. You don't have to waste your energy or your resources. And I'll help you out. So in the process, I start thinking, well what else might they know about me? Well they probably have all my flight records, so I decided to put all my flight records from birth online. So you can see, Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta. And then you see, these are some of the meals that I've been fed on the planes. This was on Delta 719 going from JFK to San Francisco. See that? They won't let me on a plane with that, but they'll give it to me on the plane. (Laughter) These are the airports that I hang out in, because I like airports. That's Kennedy airport, May 19th, Tuesday. This is in Warsaw. Singapore. You can see, they're kind of empty.These images are shot really anonymously to the point where it could be anyone. But if you can cross-reference this with the other data, then you're basically replaying the roll of the FBI agent and putting it all together. And when you're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence, you're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner. At the time that this was going on, the last thing on my mind was ""art project."" I was certainly not thinking, hey, I got new work here. But after going through this, after realizing, well what just happened? And after piecing together this, this and this, this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this, and it actually became this project.So these are the stores that I shop in — some of them — because they need to know. This is me buying some duck flavored paste at the Ranch 99 in Daly City on Sunday, November 15th. At Coreana Supermarket buying my kimchi because I like kimchi. And I bought some crabs too right around there, and some chitlins at the Safeway in Emoryville. And laundry too. Laundry detergent at West Oakland — East Oakland, sorry. And then my pickled jellyfish at the Hong Kong Supermarket on Route 18 in East Brunswick. Now if you go to my bank records, it'll actually show something from there, so you know that, on May 9th, that I bought $14.79 in fuel from Safeway Vallejo.So not only that I'm giving this information here and there, but now there's a third party, an independent third party, my bank, that's verifying that, yes indeed, I was there at this time. So there's points, and these points are actually being cross-referenced. And there's a verification taking place. Sometimes they're really small purchases. So 34 cents foreign transaction fee. All of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts, and everything pops up right away.Sometimes there's a lot of information. This is exactly where my old apartment in San Francisco was. And then sometimes you get this. Sometimes you just get this, just an empty hallway in Salt Lake City, January 22nd. And I can tell you exactly who I was with, where I was, because this is what I had to do with the FBI. I had to tell them every little detail of everything. I spend a lot of time on the road. This is a parking lot in Elko, Nevada off of Route 80 at 8:01 p.m. on August 19th. I spend a lot of time in gas stations too — empty train stations. So there's multiple databases. And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of images. There's actually 46,000 images right now on my site, and the FBI has seen all of them — at least I trust they've seen all of them. And then sometimes you don't get much information at all, you just get this empty bed. And sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information. So you get something like this. This, by the way, is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California — Vietnamese sandwich.So there's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations, empty gas stations. These are some of the meals that I've been cooking at home. So how do you know these are meals eaten at home? Well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times. So again, you have to do some detective work here. So sometimes the databases get so specific. These are all tacos eaten in Mexico City near a train station on July fifth to July sixth. At 11:39 a.m. was this one. At 1:56 p.m. was this one. At 4:59 p.m. was this one. So I time-stamp my life every few moments. Every few moments I shoot the image.Now it's all done on my iPhone, and it all goes straight up to my server, and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together. They need to know where I'm doing my business, because they want to know about my business. So on December 4th, I went here. And on Sunday, June 14th at 2009 — this was actually about two o'clock in the afternoon in Skowhegan, Maine — this was my apartment there. So what you're basically seeing here is all bits and pieces and all this information.If you go to my site, there's tons of things. And really, it's not the most user-friendly interface. It's actually quite user-unfriendly. And one of the reasons, also being part of the user-unfriendliness, is that everything is there, but you have to really work through it. So by me putting all this information out there, what I'm basically telling you is I'm telling you everything. But in this barrage of noise that I'm putting out, I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life. And you know very little about me actually. And really so I've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy, particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded, there's no need to delete information anymore.So what do you do when everything is out there? Well you have to take control over it. And if I give you this information directly, it's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces. The other thing that's also interesting that's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies — and it doesn't matter who they are — they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information, or restricted access to information. And the reason their information has any value is, well, because no one else has access to it. And by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you, the information that the FBI has has no value, so thus devaluing their currency. And I understand that, on an individual level, it's purely symbolic. But if 300 million people in the U.S. started doing this, we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up. Because it just wouldn't work if everybody was sharing everything. And we're getting to that.When I first started this project, people were looking at me and saying, ""Why would you want to tell everybody what you're doing, where you're at? Why are you posting these photos?"" This was an age before people were Tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people. So in a way, I'm glad that I'm completely obsolete. I'm still doing this project, but it is obsolete, because you're all doing it. This is something that we all are doing on a daily basis, whether we're aware of it or not. So we're creating our own archives and so on.And you know, some of my friends have always said, ""Hey, you're just paranoid. Why are you doing this? Because no one's really watching. No one's really going to bother you."" So one of the things that I do is I actually look through my server logs very carefully. Because it's about surveillance. I'm watching who's watching me. And I came up with these. So these are some of my sample logs. And just little bits and pieces, and you can see some of the things there. And I cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see. So you can see that the Homeland Security likes to come by — Department of Homeland Security. You can see the National Security Agency likes to come by. I actually moved very close to them. I live right down the street from them now. Central Intelligence Agency. Executive Office of the President. Not really sure why they show up, but they do. I think they kind of like to look at art. And I'm glad that we have patrons of the arts in these fields.So thank you very much. I appreciate it.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Hasan, just curious. You said, ""Now everything automatically goes from my iPhone,"" but actually you do take the pictures and put on information. So how many hours of the day does that take?HE: Almost none. It's no different than sending a text. It's no different than checking an email. It's one of those things, we got by just fine before we had to do any of those. So it's just become another day. I mean, when we update a status message, we don't really think about how long that's going to take. So it's really just a matter of my phone clicking a couple of clicks, send, and then it's done. And everything's automated at the other end.BG: On the day you are in a place where there is no coverage, the FBI gets crazy?HE: Well it goes to the last point that I was at. So it holds onto the very last point. So if I'm on a 12-hour flight, you'll see the last airport that I departed from.BG: Hasan, thank you very much. (HE: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hasan_elahi
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"Is there anything unique about human beings? There is. We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. We're obsessed with morality as social creatures. We need to know why people are doing what they're doing. And I personally am obsessed with morality. It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom. As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody. I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions. But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality. I want to know if there was a moral molecule.After 10 years of experiments, I found it. Would you like to see it? I brought some with me. This little syringe contains the moral molecule. (Laughter) It's called oxytocin. So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex.So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. I did what most of us do — I tried it on some colleagues. One of them told me, ""Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea. It is,"" he said, ""only a female molecule. It can't be that important."" But I countered, ""Well men's brains make this too. There must be a reason why."" But he was right, it was a stupid idea. But it was testably stupid. In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral.Turns out it wasn't so easy. First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus to cause its release. And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life, and degrades rapidly at room temperature. So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin, have to grab it fast and keep it cold. I think I can do that. Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. Then I had to measure morality.So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project. So I started smaller. I studied one single virtue: trustworthiness. Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are by and large low trust countries. So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty.But I'm also a skeptic. I don't want to just ask people, ""Are you trustworthy?"" So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research. If you're so virtuous, show me the money. So what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money. Let me show you how we do that. So we recruit some people for an experiment. They all get $10 if they agree to show up. We give them lots of instruction, and we never ever deceive them. Then we match them in pairs by computer. And in that pair, one person gets a message saying, ""Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab?"" The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them. You only do it one time. Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account. You're going to make them a lot wealthier. And they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money. Do you want to keep it all, or do you want to send some amount back?So think about this experiment for minute. You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half. Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood. And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger? So this was the birth of vampire economics. Make a decision and give me some blood.So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. But in fact, economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money. They assumed money is good, why not keep it all?That's not what we found. We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money, and of those who received money, 95 percent returned some of it. But why? Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned. So we have a biology of trustworthiness.But wait. What's wrong with this experiment? Two things. One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation. So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect. But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness. I didn't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness. So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly. I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain. And I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler. So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo, had that same trust test with money, and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust, we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger — all without altering mood or cognition.So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent. We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent. We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. These include massage, dancing and praying. Yes, my mom was happy about that last one. And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers.But why do they do this? What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer. After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin. The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people. It's empathy that makes us help other people. It's empathy that makes us moral.Now this idea is not new. A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called ""The Theory of Moral Sentiments."" In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason. He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain. So I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy. So I tend to do those things. Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called ""The Wealth of Nations"" — the founding document of economics. But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral. I just found the molecule behind it. But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. In particular, it tells us why we see immorality.So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980. I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. You sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you. So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box. Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside. And he said, ""Hey, I was in the men's room. I just found this. What do you think we should do with it?"" ""I don't know, put it in the lost and found."" ""Well this is very valuable. We have to find the owner for this."" I said, ""Yea.""So we're trying to decide what to do with this, and the phone rings. And a man says very excitedly, ""I was in your gas station a while ago, and I bought this jewelry for my wife, and I can't find it."" I said, ""Pearl necklace?"" ""Yeah."" ""Hey, a guy just found it."" ""Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number. Tell that guy to wait half an hour. I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward."" Great, so I tell the guy, ""Look, relax. Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good."" He said, ""I can't do it. I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go."" Again he asked me, ""What do you think we should do?"" I'm in high school. I have no idea. So I said, ""I'll hold it for you."" He said, ""You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward."" I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars, and when the guy comes ... ""You see it. I was conned. So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon. So the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him, it's that he shows he trusts the victim. Now we know what happens. The victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse, giving away the money.So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems? We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin. If there's money on the table, they keep it all. So there's a technical word for these people in my lab. We call them bastards. (Laughter) These are not people you want to have a beer with. They have many of the attributes of psychopaths.Now there are other ways the system can be inhibited. One is through improper nurturing. So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus. You need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly. Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin. So we all know this, when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best.There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting — through the action of testosterone. So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men. And instead of sharing money, they become selfish. But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish. (Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality. We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel. And we have testosterone. And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women — we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. We don't need God or government telling us what to do. It's all inside of us.So you may be wondering: these are beautiful laboratory experiments, do they really apply to real life? Yeah, I've been worrying about that too. So I've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives. So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England. 200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion. I didn't know a single person. And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall. And I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes. And I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows.(Laughter)And guess what? Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way. Who is the center of the wedding solar system? The bride. She had the biggest increase in oxytocin. Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? Her mother, that's right. Her mother was number two. Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends — arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun. So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally. Why? Because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species.I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers. So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin. And there are so many ways we can connect to people. For example, through social media. Many people are Tweeting right now. So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin.So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System. And they had the reporters and their producers participate. And one of these guys, he must have been 22, he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin. I mean, astounding; no one has this. So he was using social media in private. When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, ""Look, I don't know what this guy was doing,"" but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend. They checked. He was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page. There you go. That's connection. So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal.Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands — very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia. There are 800 different languages in the highlands. These are the most primitive people in the world. And they indeed also release oxytocin.So oxytocin connects us to other people. Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. And it's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest. Let me show it to you. Come here. Give me a hug. (Laughter) There you go.(Applause)So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day. We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. Dr. Love says eight hugs a day. Eight hugs a day — you'll be happier and the world will be a better place. Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin
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"What is it about flying cars? We've wanted to do this for about a hundred years. And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success. But we haven't yet gotten to the point where on your way here this morning you see something that really, truly seamlessly integrates the two-dimensional world that we're comfortable in with the three-dimensional sky above us — that, I don't know about you, but I really enjoy spending time in.We looked at the historical attempts that had been out there and realized that, despite the fact that we have a lot of modern innovations to draw on today that weren't available previously — we have modern composite materials, we have aircraft engines that get good fuel economy and have better power-to-rate ratios than have ever been available, we have glass cockpit avionics that bring the information you need to fly directly to you in the cockpit — but without fundamentally addressing the problem from a different perspective, we realized that we were going to be getting the same result that people had been getting for the last hundred years, which isn't where we want to be right now. So instead of trying to make a car that can fly, we decided to try to make a plane that could drive.And the result is the Terrafugia Transition. It's a two-seat, single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane. You take off and land at a local airport. Then once you're on the ground, you fold up the wings, drive it home, park it in your garage. And it works. After two years of an innovative design and construction process, the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008.Now like with anything that's really different from the status quo, it didn't always go so well testing that aircraft. And we discovered that it's a very good thing that, when you go home with something that's been broken, you've actually learned a lot more than when you managed to tick off all of your test objectives the first time through. Still, we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we'd all helped build in the air, off the ground, like it was supposed to be. And on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate New York, we got to do that for the first time. The picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time. And we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over.The flight testing that followed that was as basic and low-risk as we could make it, but it still accomplished what we needed to to take the program to the next step and to gain the credibility that we needed within our eventual market, the general aviation community, and with the regulators that govern the use of design of aircraft, particularly in the States. The FAA, about a year ago, gave us an exemption for the Transition to allow us to have an additional 110 lbs. within the light sport aircraft category. Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very important, because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it, but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it. A sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time. And at 110 lbs., that's very important for solving the other side of the equation — driving.It turns out that driving, with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles, is actually a harder problem to solve than flying. For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground, this may be counter-intuitive, but driving has potholes, cobblestones, pedestrians, other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with. Fortunately, necessity remains the mother of invention, and a lot of the design work that we're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground — everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic, to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you're flying or the wheels on the ground, to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we'll see in a moment, to crash safety features. We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car.Now this also, as good as it is, wasn't quite enough. The regulations for vehicles on the road weren't written with an airplane in mind. So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Now you may have seen in the news recently, they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the Transition to be sold in the same category as SUVs and light trucks. As a multi-purpose passenger vehicle, it is now officially ""designed for occasional off-road use.""(Laughter)Now let's see it in action. You can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane. You're not powering the propeller, you're powering the wheels. And it is under seven feet tall, so it will fit in a standard construction garage. And that's the automated wing-folding mechanism. That's real time. You just push a few buttons in the cockpit, and the wings come out. Once they're fully deployed, there's a mechanical lock that goes into place, again, from inside the cockpit. And they're now fully capable of handling any of the loads you would see in flight — just like putting down your convertible top. And you're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that.(Video) Test Pilot: Until the vehicle flies, 75 percent of your risk is that first flight.Radio: It actually flew. Yes.Radio 2: That was gorgeous.Radio: What did you think of that? That was beautiful from up here, I tell you.AMD: See, we're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop. And our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight, which was that it was ""remarkably unremarkable."" He would go onto tell us that the Transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot. So despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary, we really focused on doing as little new as possible. We leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing. When we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box, we use an incremental design, build, test, redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps.Now since we started Terrafugia about 6 years ago, we've had a lot of those baby steps. We've gone from being three of us working in the basement at MIT while we were still in graduate school to about two-dozen of us working in an initial production facility outside of Boston. We've had to overcome challenges like keeping the weight below the light sport limit that I talked about, figuring out how to politely respond when a regulator tells you, ""But that won't fit through a toll booth with the wings extended — (Laughter) to all of the other associated durability and engineering issues that we talked about on the ground. Still, if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we're working on right now, those first deliveries to the, about a hundred, people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year.The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes. And I'm certainly not out to replace your Chevy, but I do think that the Transition should be your next airplane. Here's why. While nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports, there is a huge underutilized resource out there. There are thousands of local airstrips that don't see nearly as many aircraft operations a day as they could. On average, there's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the United States. The Transition gives you a safer, more convenient and more fun way of using this resource.For those of you who aren't yet pilots, there's four main reasons why those of us who are don't fly as much as we'd like to: the weather, primarily, cost, long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination. Now, bad weather comes in, just land, fold up the wings, drive home. Doesn't matter if it rains a little, you have a windshield wiper. Instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger, park it in your garage. And the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas. Door-to-door travel time is reduced, because now, instead of lugging bags, finding a parking space, taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger, you're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go. And mobility to your destination is clearly solved. Just fold up the wings and keep going.The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller, more accessible place. It also continues to be a fabulous adventure. I hope you'll each take a moment to think about how you could use something like this to give yourself more access to your own world, and to make your own travel more convenient and more fun.Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anna_mracek_dietrich_a_plane_you_can_drive
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"I'm a neuroscientist. And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain. But I want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life, because it's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function. And that is, why do we and other animals have brains? Not all species on our planet have brains, so if we want to know what the brain is for, let's think about why we evolved one. Now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think, and that's completely wrong. If you think about this question for any length of time, it's blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. Now that's not quite true. There's one other way, and that's through sweating. But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles.So think about communication — speech, gestures, writing, sign language — they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life.Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here — the humble sea squirt. Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject.(Applause)So I am a movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain — don't let anyone tell you that it's not true. Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement? And the answer is we're doing extremely poorly; it's a very hard problem. But we can look at how well we're doing by thinking about how well we're doing building machines which can do what humans can do.Think about the game of chess. How well are we doing determining what piece to move where? If you pit Garry Kasparov here, when he's not in jail, against IBM's Deep Blue, well the answer is IBM's Deep Blue will occasionally win. And I think if IBM's Deep Blue played anyone in this room, it would win every time. That problem is solved. What about the problem of picking up a chess piece, dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board? If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily. There's no competition at all.Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard? One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem — look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win. So it's a very simple algorithm. Now of course there are other moves, but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution. When it comes to being dexterous, it's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous. And we'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world, which has a lot of problems.But let me show you cutting-edge robotics. Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages. So this is the end of a Ph.D. project from one of the best robotics institutes. And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass. It's a hard problem because the water sloshes about, but it can do it. But it doesn't do it with anything like the agility of a human. Now if you want this robot to do a different task, that's another three-year Ph.D. program. There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics.Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance. So what I'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking. Now the Americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking. It's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order. And this is her getting the world record in real time. (Laughter) (Applause) And she's pretty happy. We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that, and that's what we'd like to know.So in my group, what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement. And it sounds like an easy problem. You send a command down, it causes muscles to contract. Your arm or body moves, and you get sensory feedback from vision, from skin, from muscles and so on. The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be. So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is, for example, sensory feedback is extremely noisy. Now by noise, I do not mean sound. We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal. So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard ""crrcckkk"" on the station you wanted to hear, that was the noise. But more generally, this noise is something that corrupts the signal.So for example, if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand, you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback. Similarly, when you put motor output on movement output, it's extremely noisy. Forget about trying to hit the bull's eye in darts, just aim for the same spot over and over again. You have a huge spread due to movement variability. And more than that, the outside world, or task, is both ambiguous and variable. The teapot could be full, it could be empty. It changes over time. So we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise.Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise. So if you're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars.Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability. And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory. And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty. And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions.So let's think about the inference. You want to generate beliefs about the world. So what are beliefs? Beliefs could be: where are my arms in space? Am I looking at a cat or a fox? But we're going to represent beliefs with probabilities. So we're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one — zero meaning I don't believe it at all, one means I'm absolutely certain. And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty. And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference. You have data, and data in neuroscience is sensory input. So I have sensory input, which I can take in to make beliefs. But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge. You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories. And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs.And I've put the formula up there. I'm not going to explain what that formula is, but it's very beautiful. And it has real beauty and real explanatory power. And what it really says, and what you want to estimate, is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input. So let me give you an intuitive example. Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you. There are two sources of information Bayes' rule tells you. There's sensory evidence — you can use visual information auditory information, and that might tell you it's going to land in that red spot. But you know that your senses are not perfect, and therefore there's some variability of where it's going to land shown by that cloud of red, representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1.That information is available in the current shot, but there's another source of information not available on the current shot, but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis, and that's that the ball doesn't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match. If you're playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it in that green area, which is the prior distribution, making it hard for you to return. Now both these sources of information carry important information. And what Bayes' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow, which have the ellipses, and that's my belief. So it's the optimal way of combining information.Now I wouldn't tell you all this if it wasn't that a few years ago, we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills. And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines. As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way.Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula. And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs. So that really means I have to make predictions of the future. And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it's going to get. And moreover, it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do. And to do that, I'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input. So you send a command out, you get sensory feedback back, and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus.But you can imagine looking inside the brain. And here's inside the brain. You might have a little predictor, a neural simulator, of the physics of your body and your senses. So as you send a movement command down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions. So as I shake this ketchup bottle, I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row. And if I've got a good predictor, it predicts the same thing.Well why would I bother doing that? I'm going to get the same feedback anyway. Well there's good reasons. Imagine, as I shake the ketchup bottle, someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me. Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act. So I get two sources. I get you tapping on it, and I get me shaking it, but from my senses' point of view, that is combined together into one source of information.Now there's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events. Because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that's going on inside my body. So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction — which is only based on your movement commands — with the reality. Any discrepancy should hopefully be external. So as I go around the world, I'm making predictions of what I should get, subtracting them off. Everything left over is external to me.What evidence is there for this? Well there's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person. And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling. It's been known for a long time, you can't tickle yourself as well as other people can. But it hasn't really been shown, it's because you have a neural simulator, simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense. So we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem. And in effect, what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot, and they're going to move that back and forward. And then we're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot, which is going to tickle their palm with another stick. And then we're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness.I'll show you just one part of our study. And here I've taken away the robots, but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward. And we replay that to the other hand with a time delay. Either no time delay, in which case light would just tickle your palm, or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second. So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things — sinusoidal movement. The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle. All we're playing with is a tempo causality. And as we go from naught to 0.1 second, it becomes more ticklish. As you go from 0.1 to 0.2, it becomes more ticklish at the end. And by 0.2 of a second, it's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything. So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality. And based on this illustration, we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations.Now I have to admit, these are the worst studies my lab has ever run. Because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes, you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant. So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena. And in the intervening years I had two daughters. And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys, they get into fights — which started with one of them doing something to the other, the other retaliating. It quickly escalates. And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force. Now when I screamed at my children to stop, sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder.Now I happen to know my children don't lie, so I thought, as a neuroscientist, it was important how I could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths. And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command. They predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off. So they actually think they've hit the person less hard than they have — rather like the tickling. Whereas the passive recipient doesn't make the prediction, feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, the first person will think it's been escalated.So we decided to test this in the lab. (Laughter) Now we don't work with children, we don't work with hitting, but the concept is identical. We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game. And so here's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other. And the game is very simple. We started with a motor with a little lever, a little force transfuser. And we use this motor to apply force down to player one's fingers for three seconds and then it stops. And that player's been told, remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject's finger through a force transfuser — and they do that. And player two's been told, remember the experience of that force. Use your other hand to apply the force back down. And so they take it in turns to apply the force they've just experienced back and forward.But critically, they're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms. So they don't know the rules the other person's playing by. And what we've measured is the force as a function of terms. And if we look at what we start with, a quarter of a Newton there, a number of turns, perfect would be that red line. And what we see in all pairs of subjects is this — a 70 percent escalation in force on each go. So it really suggests, when you're doing this — based on this study and others we've done — that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing. So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts. So we've made inferences, we've done predictions, now we have to generate actions. And what Bayes' rule says is, given my beliefs, the action should in some sense be optimal.But we've got a problem. Tasks are symbolic — I want to drink, I want to dance — but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence. And there's a big gap between the task and the movement system. So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways. So think about just a point to point movement. I could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths. Having chosen a particular path, I can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations. And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed. So I have a huge amount of choice to make. Now it turns out, we are extremely stereotypical. We all move the same way pretty much.And so it turns out we're so stereotypical, our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping. So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion, your brain's circuitry would understand instantly what's going on. Now this is a bunch of dots moving. You will know what this person is doing, whether happy, sad, old, young — a huge amount of information. If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit, you would have absolutely no idea what's going on.So why is it that we move the particular ways we do? Well let's think about what really happens. Maybe we don't all quite move the same way. Maybe there's variation in the population. And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation. So in evolutionary scales, movements get better. And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning.So what is it about a movement which is good or bad? Imagine I want to intercept this ball. Here are two possible paths to that ball. Well if I choose the left-hand path, I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time. But there's noise added to this. So what I actually get, based on this lovely, smooth, desired force, is a very noisy version. So if I pick the same command through many times, I will get a different noisy version each time, because noise changes each time. So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way. If I choose a different way of moving — on the right for example — then I'll have a different command, different noise, playing through a noisy system, very complicated. All we can be sure of is the variability will be different. If I move in this particular way, I end up with a smaller variability across many movements. So if I have to choose between those two, I would choose the right one because it's less variable.And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise. And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger. So you want to avoid big forces as one principle. So we've shown that using this, we can explain a huge amount of data — that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise.So I hope I've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement. And it's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that. But it's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation. There are many diseases which effect movement. And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology. And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan. So you're a movement — (DW: Chauvinist.) — chauvinist. Does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about — the dreaming, the yearning, the falling in love and all these things — are a kind of side show, an accident?DW: No, no, actually I think they're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end. So I think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you're laying down memories of childhood. The fact that we forget most of our childhood, for example, is probably fine, because it doesn't effect our movements later in life. You only need to store things which are really going to effect movement.CA: So you think that people thinking about the brain, and consciousness generally, could get real insight by saying, where does movement play in this game?DW: So people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake. You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision. And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way.CA: Well that was quite fascinating. Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains
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"So magic is a very introverted field. While scientists regularly publish their latest research, we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets. That's true even amongst peers. But if you look at creative practice as a form of research, or art as a form of R&D for humanity, then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research?Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic. And about three years ago, I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic — tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster.Today, I'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations. It's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system, or a digital storytelling tool. Could we bring down the lights please? Thank you. So let's give this a try. And I'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life.(Applause)(Music)Terribly sorry. I forgot the floor.Wake up.Hey.Come on.(Music)Please.(Music)Come on.Ah, sorry about that. Forgot this.(Music)Give it another try.Okay.He figured out the system.(Music)(Laughter)(Applause)(Music)Uh oh.(Music)All right. Let's try this. Come on.(Music)(Laughter)(Music)Hey.(Music)You heard her, go ahead.(Laughter)(Applause)Bye-bye.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_the_augmented_reality_of_techno_magic
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"The story I want to tell you about, started to me, in 1996 when I was studying in England. One day, I was glancing through my bank statement (I didn't have much to look at) and I've noticed that in the upper corner there was a symbol, that I'm going to show you, saying that document had been made in plain language, for me to understand it. The idea interested me; I tried to find out what that was and I found out that there was a campaign for the simplification of language, which was the ""Plain English Campaign"". I thought it was a fabulous idea, for about  one day or two, and I've never thought about it since. When I came back to Portugal, for good, I came across with several documents - for example,  my work contract, the papers I had to sign to buy a house,  the electricity bill — a series of documents that reminded me of  that bank statement. Not because they were equally clear and simple, but because they were the exact opposite. Because I had to read everything twice or thrice,  to begin to understand what was written there. And then, that little seed that had been sown in 1996, started germinating. And one day, I found myself entering through my boss' office and quitting  my job to dedicate myself to this. And so, what did I find out, right off the start? I found out that it was a much more severe problem  than I thought. It wasn't only about these documents being  complex and annoying, it was the fact that Portuguese people's literacy — literacy is the hability to understand written documents — is extremely low. I'm going to show you a chart about Portuguese people's literacy [rate]. You know that about 10, 11% of people, in Portugal,don't know how to read nor write at all, yet. Over there are those who know, or say they know,  how to read and write. So, what do we have? We have that group of red people in level 1,  which is the lowest in literacy [rate]. They are persons who are able to join letters, but they can't, actually, understand. For example, if a person, from that red group,  has to pick up the package leaflet of a medicinal product,  to give a dose of medicine to his/her child, he/she can't, can't understand the information. 50% of the Portuguese. Then we have 30% more,  those yellow ones, over there, people who get by on the daily basis. That is, if they don't have to read anything too new  or too different, they will manage. But, for example, if they work in a factory and  a new machine arrives and they have to read the machine's manual  to be able to work with it, they can't do it anymore. And there they go, 80% of the Portuguese people. Then we have a few more that can handle documents, as long as they are not too complex, and we have 5% of the population that  can handle really complex documents. Now, just so you don't think this is normal,  that over there is Sweden. While we have 20% of people with the literacy  considered essential for a daily basis, Sweden has 75%. And looking at that, what did I realize? I realized we live in an apartheid of information. I realized that there's a small minority of people  who has indeed access to information and can use it to their advantage and  a huge majority that can't. And because they can't, they are excluded  and they are impaired. Let me give you an example. That one is Mr. Domingos, my building's doorkeeper. Mr. Domingos started to read at the age of 27, so, he falls in that yellow group that  we have seen a little while ago. From time to time, I'm arriving home and he says: ""Miss Sandra!""; ""Yes, Mr. Domingos."" ""Here is a little letter."" So, the deal is: when Mr. Domingos or someone in the family or in the neighbourhood receives something that they don't understand,  they come to me and I help them to translate it. And so, that time he said to me like this: ""Oh, Miss Sandra, I'm about to throw this away,  but check it if this is important."" It was very important. He had been waiting,  for quite a while, to have a knee surgery and that was the letter of the famous surgery-bank checks. When a person is waiting for a long time, they get a bank check and with that bank check  they can have that surgery in the private sector. It was almost thrown away into the garbage,  Mr. Domingos' letter. In that same year, I've found out, only 20% of people had used these  surgery-bank checks. The other 80%, I don't believe they had been cured while they were waiting. They most likely did the same as Mr. Domingos: ""Ah! What's this? I'm not understanding,  it's going to the garbage"". They lost the opportunity to have the surgery  they needed. What happens here? When people don't understand this has severe consequences — to the individual,  but also for the country. When I don't understand which are my rights,  the benefits I can have access to, I can't understand my duties and I'm not  an active and participative citizen either. Now, maybe, you are sitting there and thinking: ""Yeah, poor Mr. Domingos... Bad luck, isn't it?  Me?! I'm in the green ones."" ""I'm absolutely sure that I'm one of the green ones.  I was selected to come to TED! Hum?"" (Laughter) So the deal is: I have here some texts to read to you and I'm going to see what color are you  when I finish reading. So, come on, this is an automobile insurance  contract. It says this: ""Unless contrary stipulation, the decease of the ensured person, the ensured capital is provided, in case of predeceasing of the beneficiary relatively to the ensured person, to the heirs of the last, in case of the simultaneous decease of the ensured person and of the beneficiary, to the heirs of the last"". Hum? (Laughter) Next, there's another one, from the medicines'  package leaflet, that says the following: ""Warning! It may also occur erythema, edema,  vesiculation, keratolysis and urticaria."" Hum? Are you clear? And this one is really good. This one, I signed a renting contract to the new office on Friday and I laughed my head off. So, it said: ""I, as a cosigner, assume the opportune  payment of the rents, waiving the benefits of the division  and prior foreclosure."" When I heard ""opportune payment"" [""storm payment""  in Portuguese], I imagined myself bursting in there, slamming the door and saying: ""Here's the money!!!"" (Laughter) But it's not! (Laughter) (Applause) But it's not! (Applause) (Applause) (Applause) So, it's this: when we leave our area of expertise — and it only takes a little; there is no need to go  to the string theory or something like that, it only takes a little... (Laughter) What happens? We get as lost as Mr. Domingos. And these documents are not written  by experts to experts, as the ones from the string theory. No! These are documents written for me,  these are the public documents, the public documents I need to understand  in my daily life, to govern myself, to live my life. These are the renting contracts, the package leaflet  of the medicines. It's all this. The electricity bills. This has to be clear, so that I can understand. Because, if I can't understand, what happens? I make mistakes, I get wrong. I'm going to give you an example of mistakes that  were committed, bad decisions made for not being able to understand documents. Do you remember the subprime crisis that  took place in the United States? What happened? People signed those loans to buy houses, without truly understanding what they were signing. Because if they knew what they were signing, they'd know that as soon as the interest rate started to rise, the monthly payment would also increase, they wouldn't be able to pay anymore and  they would end up without a house. So, the rest, after that, next, everything  crumbled down and we know the rest. Do you think that if there was a culture of clarity  in the financial sector things would have got up to where they've got? I don't think so. So, how do you solve this problem, this such big difference between the  literacy [rate] of the Portuguese, that is down here, and the complexity  of the public documents, those ones we need to understand in our daily lives, sorry, that are up here? So, the first think that comes to mind is, ""If literacy is down here, let's make it rise"" — isn't it? Let's educate people. Let's, let's... of course we will,  of course we will educate people. The thing is, it's hard and it's slow.  And I don't even want to imagine how many generations it will take until we are  at Sweden's level. But, besides that, it's not only because it is slow.  There is another problem. If the language of the documents  isn't simpler, we've already seen that people, even with  a high literacy level, like you, if the language is hard, they don't get cleared, they continue to be unable to understand these documents. So, besides increasing literacy [rate], and for now, it's much more important to reduce  the complexity of documents and simplify the language. I'm going to show you an example. When I talk about simplifying the language.  Notice! On the left side of a contract: ""It is agreed that the insurance company, bla bla bla,  bla bla bla, bla bla..."" This is a before and after example. What do we mean with simplifying language? It's communicating in a simple and clear way,  enabling our reader to understand it at first glance. What do you prefer? Before or after? There isn't much doubt, is there? So, how is this achieved? How can you make  the State and companies communicate with citizens in a language they can understand  at first glance? There are several ways. There are countries  that are going by the path of legislation. For example, Sweden and the United States  introduced, last year, a legislation that forces the State to communicate with people in  a language they can understand. And you think, ""Well, that's normal.  They are countries that are a bit ahead. ""Sweden, maybe, much more than the United States. ""But they are countries that are a bit ahead. ""It would be nice if in our country there was also  legislation towards that, wouldn't it be?"" So it would. And there is! Since 1999. The Law of the Administrative Modernization  says that the communication between the State and the people should be simple, clear, concise, meaningful,  without acronyms, bla bla bla... But the thing is: it is not applied. So, the question, the path of going through legislation,  enforcing through legislation, works in those countries where laws  are made to be applied. Now, there is another way, the way of marketing. How does that work? It's like this: private companies change their language;  communicate in a clearer and simpler way, they make a big fuss about it, consumers love it, the sales rise, it works beautifully. But it works for the private sector. Now, what is the third path, and to me,  the most important one? It's the path of civil movements, that are based in a mentality shift. In countries where this really went forward — do you remember the English label, of the ""Plain English Campaign""? — this is all based on a consumers' movement. So, what does it take for that civic movement  to happen? We need to understand two very important things: First, wanting to understand these  public documents is not a whim, is not an intellectual curiosity. It is a necessity that I have in my daily life. And above all, it is a right, it is everyone's right. On this side we have: understanding is a right. And we have to understand another thing too, which is: he who writes, has to write in order  to be understood. How do we get there? First of all: we have to become demanding  consumers and citizens. Think it this way: next time someone  gives you a document that you just simply don't understand, don't be shy, don't keep quiet, pretending that you are  understanding everything. No! Demand to understand. Ask. I know that this is not easy. Turn to the gentleman  in the little suite and say: ""Look here, this contract, this part,  what does this mean?"" It's not easy, and perhaps it's even a bit  embarrassing, isn't it? But it is not. It's a sign of intelligence. What do you teach your children when  they have doubts in school? ""Don't say nothing to anyone, shut up really good  and act smart."" No, you don't, right? You say: ""Look, when you don't understand, you put your hand  up in the air and ask the teacher until you are cleared."" And that is exactly what we have to do,  as consumers and citizens. So, next time you come across with  a document you don't understand, demand to understand, put aside your pride and ask until you get completely cleared. Then, there's the other side, which is: ""Okay, these awful documents ""which are in circulation, they don't grow on trees. ""Someone wrote them."" Hum? Maybe, among this big group, some persons... I don't know, some lawyers, some public employees — I'm not asking you to identify yourselves, but I ask you to search your own conscience. How many times do you write documents  for the general public, for people that don't share your language, and you write them in a language that  only you will understand? And you'll say: ""Ah, that's because  there is a reason, here!"" Dear friends, I already heard all the reasons. There are thousands of reasons. They go like these: ""Ah, it's the house's culture""; ""Oh, my boss!"" ""Oh, the judge! And what if this goes to court?"" ""What you want is to destroy language.  We have to educate people."" ""We can't lower the level""; bla, bla, bla... I've seen all of this. These are excuses. A while ago, they told us about Einstein. Einstein said this: ""If you can't write about a subject, in a simple way, it's because, in fact,  you don't understand it."" So, if you... (Applause) To Einstein... (Applause) To Einstein...(Applause) So — ah, ah, I don't have time! — so, if you do know what you want to say —  don't you? — you are aware of what you want to say, you just have to do one thing: believe that it is  possible to write in a simple way. And how do you do that? It's very easy. You write to your grandmother.  Hum? You write to your grandmother. I'm going  to show grandma to you. (Laughter) You write with respect and without paternalism. And you use three techniques that I'm going  to teach you. First of all: Start by the most important. Grandma has a lot to do. She is not going to read three pages to get to the main idea. Start by the most important. Next, use short sentences, because grandma, like anyone of us, if you make very long sentences, she gets to the end and she can't remember what  you said in the beginning, anymore. And lastly, the third, use plain words, those ones  that grandma knows. Alright? It's easy! Before I leave, I would like to talk to you about ""Clara"" (Clear).  ""Clara"" is a project of social responsibility. It has this mission: to change the way how public communication is made. What do we do? We are going to launch this year  a collection of ""Claro"" guides, that is, we are going to pick very, very,  very complex subjects and put them simple. We are going to start with the  ""Claro"" Guide of Justice. I think it is an area... that comes in handy.  (Applause) And now I'm going to follow Manuel [Forjaz]'s advise.  If it's time to ask, whoever wants to sponsor the  ""Claro"" Guide of Justice — I don't know... for example, the EDP Foundation, or...ha? — come talk to me later. Another thing we will do is to grant prizes  to the worse and best documents, because, indeed, there are people who are working to communicate in a clearer way, and that have to be rewarded, and there are lazy people that do nothing  about it and need to be humiliated. So, we'll give prizes to the worst and to the best. I'm counting on your help. (Applause) (Applause) We are going to launch... we are going to launch the campaign via Clara's Facebook, so, send your friendship request and  you'll be up to date. But, lastly, above all, what does ""Clara"" want? It wants to put two little things in your heads. The first one: demand to understand. Don't be shy. And write in order to be understood.  Write to your grandma. And if you don't have a grandmother, write to  Mr. Domingos, he will like it. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sandra_fisher_martins_the_right_to_understand
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"So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side. So we go from, say, this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life, and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side. Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two. We'll just take one example here: a virus is a natural system, right? But it's very simple. It's very simplistic. It doesn't really satisfy all the requirements, it doesn't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to, say, reproduce and evolve.But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum — so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory, mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems. Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life.So what are these characteristics that I'm talking about? These are them. We consider first that life has a body. Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment. Life also has a metabolism. Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself. Life also has a kind of inheritable information. Now we, as humans, we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring. If we couple the first two — the body and the metabolism — we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate, and if we coupled these now to inheritable information, we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike, and would perhaps evolve. And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life.So how do we do this? Well, we use a model system that we term a protocell. You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell. It is a simple chemical model of a living cell, and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together, play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive. In the laboratory what we want to do is much the same, but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules — so a drastic reduction in complexity, but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike. And so what we do is, we start simple and we work our way up to living systems. Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc, a hundred years ago, considering a kind of synthetic biology: ""The synthesis of life, should it ever occur, will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea."" That's his first statement. So if we actually create life in the laboratories, it's probably not going to impact our lives at all.""If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life"" — so, the ones I just discussed — ""to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment."" So we start simple, we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life, and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike. This is how we can start to make a protocell. We use this idea called self-assembly. What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures. So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before. And in this particular example, what I took is some membrane molecules, mixed those together in the right environment, and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here. These membranes are also quite similar, morphologically and functionally, to the membranes in your body, and we can use these, as they say, to form the body of our protocell.Likewise, we can work with oil and water systems. As you know, when you put oil and water together, they don't mix, but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form, and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell, as you will see later. So that's just forming some body stuff, right? Some architectures. What about the other aspects of living systems? So we came up with this protocell model here that I'm showing. We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite. This is natural from the environment, this clay. It forms a surface that is, say, chemically active. It could run a metabolism on it. Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red — this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule — it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay. This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph. So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right?So we're on a road towards living systems. But if you saw this protocell, you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive. It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything. So, something is missing. Some things are missing. So some things that are missing is, for example, if you had a flow of energy through a system, what we'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself, much like living systems do. So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one. In this protocell model, it's just an oil droplet, but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something, to actually become dynamic, as we'll see here. You add the droplet to the system. It's a pool of water, and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system. Okay? Oil droplet forms through self-assembly, has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy, and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment.As we heard earlier, movement is very important in these kinds of living systems. It is moving around, exploring its environment, and remodeling its environment, as you see, by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell. So it's acting, in a sense, like a living system trying to preserve itself. We take this same moving protocell here, and we put it in another experiment, get it moving. Then I'm going to add some food to the system, and you'll see that in blue here, right? So I add some food source to the system. The protocell moves. It encounters the food. It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there. Alright? So not only do we have this system that has a body, it has a metabolism, it can use energy, it moves around. It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself.Now, this doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have a neural system. This is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior. If we count the number of chemicals in that system, actually, including the water that's in the dish, we have five chemicals that can do this. So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do, and depending on the conditions, we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment. On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other, and they form a kind of a dance, a complex dance with each other. Right? So not only do individual protocells have behavior, what we've interpreted as behavior in this system, but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have. So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells. We're going to make two different kinds. Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that, when activated, the protocell starts to vibrate around, just dancing. So remember, these are primitive things, so dancing protocells, that's very interesting to us. (Laughter)The second protocell has a different chemistry inside, and when activated, the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one. Right? And we just put these two together in the same system. So there's population A, there's population B, and then we activate the system, and protocell Bs, they're the blue ones, they all come together. They fuse together to form one big blob, and the other protocell just dances around. And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up, and then, game over. So then I repeated this experiment a bunch of times, and one time something very interesting happened. So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB. That didn't happen before. There it goes. There's a protocell AB now in this system. Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit, while protocell B does the fusing, okay?But then something even more interesting happens. Watch when these two large protocells, the hybrid ones, fuse together. Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event. Right. (Laughter) Just with blobs of chemicals, again. So the way this works is, you have a simple system of five chemicals here, a simple system here. When they hybridize, you then form something that's different than before, it's more complex than before, and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication.So since we can make some interesting protocells that we like, interesting colors and interesting behaviors, and they're very easy to make, and they have interesting lifelike properties, perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the Earth. Perhaps these represent an easily accessible step, one of the first steps by which life got started on the early Earth. Certainly, there were molecules present on the early Earth, but they wouldn't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments. Rather, they'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff, because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds. Think of it like a primordial ooze, okay? And it's a pool that's too difficult to fully characterize, even by modern methods, and the product looks brown, like this tar here on the left. A pure compound is shown on the right, for contrast.So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen, you put them in a pan, and you apply energy. You turn up the heat, you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar, forming a brownish caramel, right? If you let that go unregulated, you'll continue to make and break chemical bonds, forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan, right, that's difficult to wash out. So that's what the origin of life would have looked like. You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth, four, 4.5 billion years ago. So the challenge then is, throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab, and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze.So we're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we've seen previously, and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar — this diverse, very complex, organic black tar. And we put them into one of these experiments, as you've seen earlier, and then we watch lively movement that comes out. They look really good, very nice movement, and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other, similar to what we've seen before — but again, working with just primordial conditions, no pure chemicals. These are also, these tar-fueled protocells, are also able to locate resources in their environment. I'm going to add some resource from the left, here, that defuses into the system, and you can see, they really like that. They become very energetic, and able to find the resource in the environment, similar to what we saw before. But again, these are done in these primordial conditions, really messy conditions, not sort of sterile laboratory conditions. These are very dirty little protocells, as a matter of fact. (Laughter) But they have lifelike properties, is the point.So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems. And not only that, but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there — life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth. And that leads me to the next term, which is ""weird life."" This is a term by Steve Benner. This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States, wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe, okay, especially if that life is very different from life on Earth. If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there, how could we even recognize it as life?Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is — and they're listed here. The first is, the system has to be in non-equilibrium. That means the system cannot be dead, in a matter of fact. Basically what that means is, you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself. This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem. Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet. Secondly, life needs to be in liquid form, so that means even if we had some interesting structures, interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid, then this is not a good place for life. And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself.Now today, I told you about very strange and weird protocells — some that contain clay, some that have primordial ooze in them, some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them. Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties. But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems. So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_hanczyc_the_line_between_life_and_not_life
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"Hi. Today, I'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects, done in collaboration with Danish artist Soren Pors. We call ourselves Pors and Rao, and we live and work in India.I'd like to begin with my very first object, which I call ""The Uncle Phone."" And it was inspired by my uncle's peculiar habit of constantly asking me to do things for him, almost like I were an extension of his body — to turn on the lights or to bring him a glass of water, a pack of cigarettes. And as I grew up, it became worse and worse, And I started to think of it as a form of control. But of course, I could never say anything, because the uncle is a respected figure in the Indian family. And the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone. He would hold on to the receiver and expect me to dial a number for him. And so as a response and as a gift to my uncle, I made him ""The Uncle Phone."" It's so long that it requires two people to use it. It's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that's designed for one person.But the problem is that, when I left home and went to college, I started missing his commands. And so I made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email. So what he had to do was take a piece of paper, roll it into the carriage, type his email or command and pull the paper out. This device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email. So here you can see, we embedded a lot of electronics that understands all of the mechanical actions and converts it to digital. So my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface. And of course, the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism, the way my uncle likes it.The next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call ""The Pygmies."" And we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy, sensitive and sweet creatures. So how it works is we have these panels, which we have on the wall, and behind them, we have these little creatures which hide. And as soon as it's silent, they sort of creep out. And if it's even more silent, they stretch their necks out. And at the slightest sound, they hide back again.So we had these panels on three walls of a room. And we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them. So this is how it works. This is a video prototype. So when it's quiet, it's sort of coming out from behind the panels. And they hear like humans do, or real creatures do. So they get immune to sounds that scare them after awhile. And they don't react to background sounds. You'll hear a train in moment that they don't react to. (Noise) But they react to foreground sounds. You'll hear that in a second. (Whistling) So we worked very hard to make them as lifelike as possible. So each pygmy has its own behavior, psyche, mood swings, personalities and so on. So this is a very early prototype. Of course, it got much better after that. And we made them react to people, but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them.This is a video installation called ""The Missing Person."" And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility. How would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility? So we worked with a company that specializes in camera surveillance, and we asked them to develop a piece of software with us, using a camera that could look at people in the room, track them and replace one person with the background, rendering them invisible.So I'm just going to show you a very early prototype. On the right side you can see my colleague Soren, who's actually in the space. And on the left side, you'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible. Soren enters the room. Pop! He goes invisible. And you can see that the camera is tracking him and erasing. It's a very early video, so we haven't yet dealt with the overlap and all of that, but that got refined pretty soon, later. So how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space, and we had one monitor, one on each wall. And as people walked into the room, they would see themselves in the monitor, except with one difference: one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room.So this is a work called ""The Sun Shadow."" And it was almost like a sheet of paper, like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun. And from the front, this object appeared to be very strong and robust, and from the side, it almost seemed very weak. So people would walking into the room and they'd almost ignore it, thinking it was some crap laying around. But as soon as they passed by, it would start to climb up the wall in jerky fashion. And it would get exhausted, and it would collapse every time.(Laughter)So this work is a caricature of an upside-down man. His head is so heavy, full of heavy thoughts, that it's sort of fallen into his hat, and his body's grown out of him almost like a plant. Well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement. And it's kind of constrained by that circle. Because if that circle weren't there, and the floor was very even, it would start to wander about in the space. And there's no wires. So I'll just show you an instance — so when people enter the room, it activates this object. And it very slowly, over a few minutes, sort of painfully goes up, and then it gains momentum and it looks like it's almost about to fall. And this is an important moment, because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help, or save the subject. But it doesn't really need it, because it, again, sort of manages to pull itself up.So this work was a real technical challenge for us, and we worked very hard, like most of our works, over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics. And it was very important for us to establish the exact moment that it would fall, because if we made it in a way that it would topple over, then it would damage itself, and if it didn't fall enough, it wouldn't instill that fatalism, or that sense of wanting to go and help it. So I'm going to show you a very quick video where we are doing a test scenario — it's much faster. That's my colleague. He's let it go. Now he's getting nervous, so he's going to go catch it. But he doesn't need to, because it manages to lift itself up on its own.So this is a work that we were very intrigued with, working with the aesthetic of fur embedded with thousands of tiny different sizes of fiber optics, which twinkle like the night sky. And it's at the scale of the night sky. So we wrapped this around a blob-like form, which is in the shape of a teddy bear, which was hanging from the ceiling. And the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear, which is very comforting and intimate. And the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space, and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky.So this is the last work, and a work in progress, and it's called ""Space Filler."" Well imagine a small cube that's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room, and as you approached it, it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that's twice its height and [eight] times its volume. And so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it — almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something.So we work with a lot of technology, but we don't really love technology, because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years. But we use it because we're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create. And once a creature pops into our minds, it's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aparna_rao_high_tech_art_with_a_sense_of_humor
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"I'd like to start with a short story. It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp. They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him. And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work.Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system. Let me show you how it works. Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light. The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates. The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program. All of this happens in seconds. Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast. They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution. A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second. So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry.Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban. They were gone in an instant. And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas. This clearly devastated me, and I couldn't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of the many, many heritage sites all over the world. Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites. We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive.To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects. Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui — and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points — Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects. As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal. The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers. We also produce media for dissemination to the public — free through the CyArk website. These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc.What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions. This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal. In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs. And here, this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal, and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site. And so this is not a video. This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy. And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle. It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education.And finally, we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools. The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them. Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena — floods, tornadoes, etc. — take their toll. However, what occurred to me was human-caused destruction, which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction, but actually it was accelerating. This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece — and a significant piece — of our collective memory. Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from.Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war. This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet. Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work. And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge — and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years.We do have the technology that's scaleable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500. In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future.Let me close with another short story. Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs. The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website. Last March, we received very sad news. The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. A few days later, we received a call: ""Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction?"" Our answer, of course, was yes.Let me leave you with a final thought. Our heritage is much more than our collective memory — it's our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along. Thank you.(Applause) Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.Well, I'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology and so, while I've been speaking, you have been scanned. (Laughter) The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen. (Applause)This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points. You can look at it from on top, from the ceiling. You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create. So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes. (Laughter)I'd like to thank the wizards here. We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland. David. (Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. Let's give them a hand.(Applause)Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_kacyra_ancient_wonders_captured_in_3d
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"Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain. We chart it, we've described it, we've drawn it, we've mapped it. Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology — think Google Maps, think GPS — the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation.So let's take a look at the brain. Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, ""It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain."" Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray. And this outer layer, this is the vasculature, which is incredible, around a human brain. This is the blood vessels. 20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ. That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists.Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain. So for example, they can see in the back part of the brain, which is just turning around there. There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now. It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement. On the side here, this is temporal cortex. This is the area where primary auditory processing — so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers. Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making — it's the last to mature in late adulthood. This is where all your decision-making processes are going on. It's the place where you're deciding right now you probably aren't going to order the steak for dinner.So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there. But there's actually a lot of structure there. It's cells and it's wires all wired together. So about a hundred years ago, some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells. And that's shown here in the the very light blue. You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained. And what you can see is it's very non-uniform. You see a lot more structure there. So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex. It's one continuous processing unit, if you will. But you can also see things underneath there as well. And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through. They're probably less cell dense. So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain. And as you can see, they're very non-uniformly distributed. And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function. And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells.So let's take a deeper look. Let's look at neurons. So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons. There are also these smaller cells as you'll see. These are support cells — astrocytes glia. And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input. They're storing it, they're processing it. Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain. And each neuron itself is largely unique. The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry. These are proteins. They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement. They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with. And they're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do.So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes. We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. We get one from mom, one from dad. And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes. They're encoded in the DNA. And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on.And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on. So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains. So we sent our lab technician out. We were seeking normal human brains. What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office. This a place where the dead are brought in. We are seeking normal human brains. There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains. We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board — we do a toxicology workup. And we're very careful about the brains that we do take. We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death. Because what we're trying to measure, the RNA — which is the readout from our genes — is very labile, and so we have to move very quickly.One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains. Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life. And men are much more likely to have their significant other, spouse, give consent than the other way around.(Laughter)So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what's called an MR. This is magnetic resonance imaging — MRI. It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data. So we collect this MR. And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map. The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging. This maps the large cabling in the brain. And again, you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways, if you will. The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices. And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle. And in Seattle, we take these — this is a whole human hemisphere — and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer. There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide. We're going to then apply one of those stains to it, and we scan it. And then what we get is our first mapping.So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments. You could consider this state boundaries, if you will, those pretty broad outlines. From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat. And this is just showing this here — this frozen tissue, and it's being cut. This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width. And remember, it's frozen. And so you can see here, old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied. We take a microscope slide. Then we very carefully melt onto the slide. This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it. And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this.So again this is what they can see under the microscope. You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places. And from there it's routine. They understand where to make these assignments. And they can make basically what's a reference atlas. This is a more detailed map.Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection. So the technician takes the instructions. They scribe along a place there. And then the laser actually cuts. You can see that blue dot there cutting. And that tissue falls off. You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time. There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue. We take that tissue, we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology, and then we put a florescent tag on it. We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray.Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass. This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome. And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample.Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain. We're taking over a thousand samples for each brain. This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus. It's involved in learning and memory. And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples. So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples.So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain. We've done right now two human brains-worth of data. We've put all of that together into one thing, and I'll show you what that synthesis looks like. It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world. They don't even have to log in to come use this tool, mine this data, find interesting things out with this. So here's the modalities that we put together. You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before. Here's the MR. It provides the framework. There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures.But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on. So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree. Green is the sort of cool areas where it's not turned on. And each gene gives us a fingerprint. And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available.So what can scientists learn about this data? We're just starting to look at this data ourselves. There's some basic things that you would want to understand. Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin. These are commonly prescribed antidepressants. Now remember, we're assaying genes. Genes send the instructions to make proteins. Proteins are targets for drugs. So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off, etc. So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to. In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on. And for the first time, we can actually do that. We can do that in multiple individuals that we've assayed too.So now we can look throughout the brain. We can see this unique fingerprint. And we get confirmation. We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on — for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected — but we also get to see the whole thing. We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there. It's as interesting a side effect as it could be. One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint. So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize.Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, ""Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X."" And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations. They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes. But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes. It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where. And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource. Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity. They can start to look at common pathways — other things that they simply haven't been able to do before.So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality. And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar. We're similar at the genetic level. And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar. And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated. And then we find some outliers, some things that lie beyond the cloud. And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle. So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level.Now what do those differences look like? This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were — and they're quite subtle. These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type. These are two genes that we found as good examples. One is called RELN — it's involved in early developmental cues. DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia. These aren't schizophrenic individuals, but they do show some population variation. And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells. It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there. Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know. Those kinds of studies require much larger populations.So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go. I think these resources are incredibly valuable. They give researchers a handle on where to go. But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point. We're certainly going to be looking at more. I'll just close by saying that the tools are there, and this is truly an unexplored, undiscovered continent. This is the new frontier, if you will. And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_jones_a_map_of_the_brain
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"I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. Because I was new to the city, I didn't have access to a stage, so I decided to create my own in public places.So the first project we're going to take a look at is the very first No Pants Subway Ride. Now, this took place in January of 2002. And this woman is the star of the video. She doesn't know she's being filmed. She's being filmed with a hidden camera. This is on the 6 train in New York City. And this is the first stop along the line. These are two Danish guys who come in and sit down next to the hidden camera. And that's me right there in a brown coat. It's about 30 degrees outside. I'm wearing a hat. I'm wearing a scarf. And the girl's going to notice me right here.(Laughter)And as you'll see now, I'm not wearing pants.(Laughter)At this point — at this point she's noticed me, but in New York there's weirdos on any given train car. One person's not that unusual. She goes back to reading her book, which is unfortunately titled ""Rape.""(Laughter)So she's noticed the unusual thing, but she's gone back to her normal life.Now, in the meantime, I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well. They're going to be entering this car one by one. We'll act as though we don't know each other. And we'll act as if it's just an unfortunate mistake we've made, forgetting our pants on this cold January day.(Laughter)(Laughter continues)So at this point, she decides to put the rape book away.(Laughter)And she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings. In the meantime, the two Danish guys to the left of the camera, they're cracking up. They think this is the funniest thing they've ever seen before. And watch her make eye contact with them right about now.(Laughter)And I love that moment in this video, because before it became a shared experience, it was something that was maybe a little bit scary, or something that was at least confusing to her. And then, once it became a shared experience, it was funny and something that she could laugh at.So the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line.(Laughter)So the video won't show everything. This goes on for another four stops. A total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear. At the eighth stop, a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar — like you might sell batteries or candy on the train. We all very matter-of-factly bought a pair of pants, put them on and said, ""Thank you. That's exactly what I needed today,"" and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions.(Applause)Thank you.So that's a still from the video there. And I love that girl's reaction so much. And watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what I do. And really one of the points of Improv Everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people. It's a prank, but it's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell. And her reaction inspired me to do a second annual No Pants Subway Ride. And we've continued to do it every year. This January, we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York — almost every single train line in the city. And also in 50 other cities around the world, people participated.(Laughter)As I started taking improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians, I started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects. So I could do more large-scale projects. Well, one day I was walking through Union Square, and I saw this building, which had just been built in 2005. There was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing. It was very peculiar, because it was dark out, but she was backlit with florescent lighting. She was very much onstage and I couldn't figure out why she was doing it. After about 15 seconds, her friend appeared — she had been hiding behind a display. They laughed, hugged each other and ran away. Maybe she had been dared to do this. So I got inspired by that. Looking at the entire facade — there were 70 total windows — and I knew what I had to do.(Laughter)So this project is called Look Up More. We had 70 actors dress in black. This was completely unauthorized. We didn't let the stores know we were coming. And I stood in the park giving signals. The first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out ""Look Up More,"" the name of the project. The second signal was for everybody to do jumping jacks together. You'll see that start right here.(Laughter)And then we had dancing. We had everyone dance. And then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them.(Laughter)So then I gave a new hand signal, which signaled the next soloist down below in Forever 21, and he danced. There were several other activities. We had people jumping up and down, people dropping to the ground. And I was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt, putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement. And because it was in Union Square Park, right by a subway station, there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing. There's a better photo of it.So that particular event was inspired by a moment that I happened to stumble upon. The next project I want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger. A high school kid in Texas wrote me in 2006 and said, ""You should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a Best Buy and stand around.""(Laughter)(Applause)So I wrote this high school kid back immediately and I said, ""Yes, you are correct. I think I'll try to do that this weekend. Thank you."" So here's the video.So again, this is 2005. This is the Best Buy in New York City. We had about 80 people show up to participate, entering one by one. There was an eight-year-old girl, a 10-year-old girl. There was also a 65-year-old man who participated. So a very diverse group of people.(Laughter)And I told people, ""Don't work. Don't actually do work. But also, don't shop. Just stand around and don't face products."" Now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt. Everybody else is one of our actors.(Laughter)The lower-level employees thought it was very funny. Several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us. A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers. The managers and the security guards, on the other hand, did not find it particularly funny. You can see them in this footage. They're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt. And we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911.(Laughter)So they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming, ""Watch out, the cops are coming."" And you can see the cops in this footage right here. That's a cop wearing black right there, being filmed with a hidden camera. Ultimately, the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not, in fact, illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants.(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)So we had been there for 20 minutes; we were happy to exit the store. One thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras. And they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags. But the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the Best Buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop. So I like that concept of using their own technology against them.(Laughter)I think our best projects are ones that are site-specific and happen at a particular place for a reason. And one morning, I was riding the subway. I had to make a transfer at the 53rd St. stop where there are these two giant escalators. And it's a very depressing place to be in the morning, it's very crowded. So I decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning. So this was in the winter of 2009 — 8:30 in the morning. It's morning rush hour. It's very cold outside. People are coming in from Queens, transferring from the E train to the 6 train. And they're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs.[Rob wants] [to give you](Laughter)[a high five!](Laughter)[Get ready!](Laughter)(Applause)Thank you. So there's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better. He gave 2,000 high fives that day, and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick. And that was done also without permission, although no one seemed to care.So I'd say over the years, one of the most common criticisms I see of Improv Everywhere left anonymously on YouTube comments is: ""These people have too much time on their hands."" And you know, not everybody's going to like everything you do, and I've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to Internet comments, but that one's always bothered me, because we don't have too much time on our hands. The participants in Improv Everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other New Yorkers, they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way.You know, every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games. And I've never seen anybody comment, looking at a football game, ""All those people in the stands, they have too much time on their hands."" And of course they don't. It's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon, watching a football game in a stadium. But I think it's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the Grand Central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the New York Public Library.(Laughter)Or listening to the same MP3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park, or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical, or diving into the ocean in Coney Island wearing formal attire.(Laughter)You know, as kids, we're taught to play. And we're never given a reason why we should play. It's just acceptable that play is a good thing. And I think that's sort of the point of Improv Everywhere. It's that there is no point and that there doesn't have to be a point. We don't need a reason. As long as it's fun and it seems like it's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time, then that's enough for us. And I think, as adults, we need to learn that there's no right or wrong way to play.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity
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"I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. One of the fascinating things about what we were working on is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies, things that had never been seen before. Not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things about the body that just made you marvel.I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. And your entire body, everything — your hair, skin, bone, nails — everything is made of collagen. And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye. In your eye, it becomes a grid formation, and therefore, it becomes transparent, as opposed to opaque. So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. Because we kept on seeing this in different parts of the body.One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH. And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies. So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware — Paul Lauterbur — then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. I got the data. And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, ""From Conception to Birth.""(Music)[From Conception to Birth][Oocyte][Sperm][Egg Inseminated][24 Hours: Baby's first division][The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...][And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.][Early Embryo][Yolk sack still feeding baby.][25 Days: Heart chamber developing.][32 Days: Arms & hands are developing][36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae][These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus.][If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.][45 Days][Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.][51 Days][Developing retina, nose and fingers][The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.][12 Weeks: Indifferent penis][Girl or boy yet to be determined][8 Months][Delivery: The expulsion stage][The moment of birth](Applause)Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. But as you can see, when you actually start working on this data, it's pretty spectacular. And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, ""I'm here to stay."" Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, ""I'm here to stay, plant me,"" building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information?I'm going to show you something pretty unique. Here's a human heart at 25 days. It's just basically two strands. And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart — and then basically the development of the entire human body. The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension.Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. Then you start to take a look at adult life. Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. It's just a tiny sub-substructure, microscopic. But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. And only one mile is visible. 59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today.And then instructions set, from the brain to every other part of the body — look at the complexity of the folding. Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information, so as you actually watch the baby's brain grow. And this is one of the things we're doing. We're launching two new studies of scanning babies' brains from the moment they're born. Every six months until they're six years old, we're going to be doing about 250 children, watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us.And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension — the magic that is existence, that is us?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alexander_tsiaras_conception_to_birth_visualized
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"(Music)[music by Moby][Grand Canyon]Narrator: Many of the tests are conducted while Yves is strapped onto the wing, because Yves' body is an integral part of the aircraft.[Wind tunnel tests]Narrator: The wing has no steering controls, no flaps, no rudder. Yves uses his body to steer the wing.Stefan Von Bergen: Well, he turns by just putting his head on one or the other side. And sometimes he assists that with his hands, sometimes even with the leg. He's acting as a human fuselage, so to say. And that's quite unique.Narrator: When he arches his back, he gains altitude. When he pushes his shoulders forward, he goes into a dive.[Swiss Alps][Strait of Gibraltar crossing][English Channel crossing]Commentator One: There he goes. There is Yves Rossy. And I think the wing is open. So our first critical moment, it's open. He is down. Is he flying?Commentator Two: It looks like he's stabilized. He's starting to make his climb.Commentator One: There's that 90 degree turn. He's out over the channel. There is Yves Rossy. There is no turning back now. He is over the English Channel and under way. Ladies and gentlemen, a historic flight has begun.[Images: National Geographic]Commentator Two: And as he approaches the ground, he's going to pull down on those toggles to flare, slow himself down just a little bit, and then come in for a nice landing.Commentator One: There he is. Yves Rossy has landed in England.Bruno Giussani: And now he's in Edinburgh. Yves Rossy!(Applause)(Applause ends)And his equipment as well. Yves, welcome. It is quite amazing. Those sequences were shot over the last three years in various moments of your activities. And there were many, many others. So it's possible to fly almost like a bird. What is it like to be up there?Yves Rossy: It's fun. It's fun.(Laughter)I don't have feathers. But I feel like a bird sometimes. It's really an unreal feeling, because normally you have a big thing, a plane, around you. And when I strap just this little harness, this little wing, I really have the feeling of being a bird.BG: How did you start to become Jetman?YR: It was about 20 years ago, when I discovered free falling. When you go out of an airplane, you are almost naked. You take a position like that. And especially when you take a tracking position, you have the feeling that you are flying. And that's the nearest thing to the dream. You have no machine around you. You are just in the element. It's very short and only in one direction.(Laughter)So the idea was, okay, keep that feeling of freedom, but change the vector and increase the time.BG: So I'm kind of curious, what's your top speed?YR: It's about 300 km per hour before looping. That means about 190 miles per hour.BG: What's the weight of the equipment you're carrying?YR: When I exit full of kerosene, I'm about 55 kilos. I have 55 kilos on my back.BG: And you're not piloting? There is no handle, no steering, nothing? It is purely your body, and the wings become part of the body and vice versa?YR: That's really the goal, because if you put in steering, then you reinvent the airplane. And I wanted to keep this freedom of movement. And it's really like the kid playing the airplane. I want to go down like that. And up I climb, I turn. It's really pure flying. It's not steering, it's flight.BG: What kind of training do you do, you personally, for that?YR: Actually, I try to stay just fit. I don't do special physical training. I just try to keep my mobility through new activities. For example, last winter I began with kite surfing. So, new things. So you have to adapt. I'm quite an experienced manager of systems as a pilot, but this is, really — You need fluidity, you need to be agile and also to adapt really fast.BG: Somebody in the audience asked me, ""How does he breathe up there?"" Because you're going fast and you're up at 3,000 meters or so.YR: Okay, up to 3,000 meters, it's not such a big problem with oxygen. But for example, bikers, they have the same speed. Just with the helmet, integral helmet, it's really no problem to breathe.BG: Describe for me the equipment, since you have it here. So Breitling's four engines.YR: Yeah, two-meter span. Ultra-stable profile. Four little engines, 22 kilos thrust each, turbines, working with kerosene. Harness, parachute. My only instruments are an altimeter and time. I know I have about eight minutes fuel. So I just check before it's finished.(Laughter)And yeah, that's all. Two parachutes. That means, if I have a problem with the first one I pull, I still have the possibility to open the second one. And this is my life. That's the real important thing about safety. I did use that during these last 15 years about 20 times. Never with that type of wing, but at the beginning. I can release my wing when I am in a spin or unstable.BG: We saw the 2009 crossing of the Gibraltar Strait where you lost control and then you dived down into the clouds and in the ocean. So that was one of those cases where you let the wings go, right?YR: Yeah. I did try in the clouds, but you lose orientation completely. So I did try to take, again, a climb altitude. I thought, okay, I will go out. But most probably, I did something like that.(Laughter)BG: Something that is not very safe, the image.YR: You feel great, but —(Laughter)But you have not the right altitude. So the next thing I saw was just blue. It was the sea. I have also an audible altimeter. So I was at my minimum altitude in that vector — fast — so I pulled that. And then I did open my chute.BG: So the wings have their own parachute, and you have your two parachutes.YR: Exactly. There is a rescue parachute for the wing for two reasons: so I can repair it afterward and especially so nobody takes that, just on his head.BG: I see. Maybe come back here. This is risky stuff indeed. People have died trying to do this kind of thing. And you don't look like a crazy guy; you're a Swiss airline pilot, so you're rather a checklist kind of guy. I assume you have standards.YR: Yeah. I have no checklist for that.(Laughter)BG: Let's not tell your employer.(Laughter)YR: No, that's really two worlds. Civil aviation is something that we know very well. We have a hundred years of experience. And you can adapt really precisely. With that, I have to adapt to something new. That means improvise. So it's really a play between these two approaches. Something that I know very well, these principles. For example, we have two engines on an Airbus; with only one engine, you can fly it. So plan B, always a plan B. In a fighter, you have an ejection seat. That's my ejection seat. So I have the approach of a professional pilot with the respect of a pioneer in front of Mother Nature.BG: It's well said. What happens if one of the engines stops?YR: I do a roll. And then I stabilize, and according to my altitude, I continue on two or three engines. It's sometimes possible. It's quite complicated to explain, but according to which regime I was, I can continue on two and try to get a nice place to land, and then I open my parachute.BG: So the beginning of the flight is actually you jump off a plane or a helicopter, and you go on a dive and accelerate the engines, and then you basically take off mid-air somewhere. And then the landing, as we have seen, arriving on this side of the Channel, is through a parachute. So just as a curiosity, where did you land when you flew over the Grand Canyon? Did you land on the rim, down at the bottom?YR: It was down on the bottom. And I came back afterward on the sled of the helicopter back. But it was too stony and full of cactus on top.(Laughter)BG: That's exactly why I asked the question.YR: And also, the currents are quite funny there. There is big thermal activity, big difference in altitude also. So it was much safer for me to land at the bottom.BG: I think that right now, many people are asking, ""When are you developing a double-seater so they can fly with you?""YR: I have a standard answer. Have you ever seen tandem birds?(Laughter)BG: Perfect answer.(Applause)(Applause ends)BG: Yves, one last question. What's next for you? What's next for Jetman?YR: First, to instruct a younger guy. I want to share it, to do formation flights. And I plan to start from a cliff, like catapulted from a cliff.BG: So instead of jumping off a plane, yes?YR: Yes, with the final goal to take off, but with initial speed. Really, I go step by step. It seems a little bit crazy, but it's not. It's possible to start already now, it's just too dangerous.(Laughter) Thanks to the increasing technology, better technology, it will be safe. And I hope it will be for everybody.BG: Yves, thank you very much. Yves Rossy.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yves_rossy_fly_with_the_jetman
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"I've always had a fascination for computers and technology, and I made a few apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. I'd like to share a couple with you today. My first app was a unique fortune teller called ""Earth Fortune"" that would display different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune was. My favorite and most successful app is ""Bustin Jieber,"" which is —(Laughter)which is a Justin Bieber whack-a-mole.(Laughter)I created it because a lot of people at school disliked Justin Bieber a little bit, so I decided to make the app. So I went to work programming it, and I released it just before the holidays in 2010. A lot of people ask me, how did I make these? A lot of times it's because the person who asked the question wants to make an app also. A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them, and it's difficult, because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program. I mean, for soccer, you could go to a soccer team. For violin, you could get lessons for a violin. But what if you want to make an app? And the kid's parents might have done some of these things when they were young, but not many parents have written apps.(Laughter)Where do you go to find out how to make an app? Well, this is how I approached it, this is what I did. First of all, I've been programming in multiple other programming languages to get the basics down, such as Python, C, Java, etc. And then Apple released the iPhone, and with it, the iPhone software development kit, and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iPhone app. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me, and after playing with the software development kit a little bit, I made a couple of apps, I made some test apps. One of them happened to be ""Earth Fortune,"" and I was ready to put ""Earth Fortune"" on the App Store, and so I persuaded my parents to pay the 99 dollar fee to be able to put my apps on the App Store. They agreed, and now I have apps on the App Store. I've gotten a lot of interest and encouragement from my family, friends, teachers and even people at the Apple Store, and that's been a huge help to me.I've gotten a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs, and I've started an app club at school, and a teacher at my school is kindly sponsoring my app club. Any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app. This is so I can share my experiences with others. There's these programs called the iPad Pilot Program, and some districts have them. I'm fortunate enough to be part of one. A big challenge is, how should the iPads be used, and what apps should we put on the iPads? So we're getting feedback from teachers at the school to see what kind of apps they'd like. When we design the app and we sell it, it will be free to local districts; and other districts that we sell to — all the money from that will go into the local ed foundations.These days, students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology.(Laughter)So —(Laughter)Sorry.(Laughter)So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it.(Laughter)I'd like to finish up by saying what I'd like to do in the future. First of all, I'd like to create more apps, more games. I'm working with a third party company to make an app. I'd like to get into Android programming and development, and I'd like to continue my app club, and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_suarez_a_12_year_old_app_developer
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"Have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging? This is a dream of the ages. But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible. They thought you just wear out, there's nothing you can do about it — kind of like an old shoe. But if you look in nature, you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans. Now these animals are different from one another, because they have different genes. So that suggests that somewhere in these genes, somewhere in the DNA, are genes for aging, genes that allow them to have different lifespans. So if there are genes like that, then you can imagine that, if you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan. And if you could do that, then you could find the genes for aging. And if they exist and you can find them, then maybe one could eventually do something about it.So we've set out to look for genes that control aging. And we didn't study any of these animals. Instead, we studied a little, tiny, round worm called C. elegans, which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence. And we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant. So we started to change genes at random, looking for long-lived animals. And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm.So you can see in black, after a month — they're very short-lived; that's why we like to study them for studies of aging — in black, after a month, the normal worms are all dead. But at that time, most of the mutant worms are still alive. And it isn't until twice as long that they're all dead. And now I want to show what they actually look like in this movie here. So the first thing you're going to see is the normal worm when it's about college student age — a young adult. It's quite a cute little fellow. And next you're going to see the long-lived mutant when it's young. So this animal is going to live twice as long. Is it miserable? It doesn't seem to be. It's active. You can't tell the difference really. And they can be completely fertile — have the same number of progeny as the normal worms do.Now get out your handkerchiefs here. You're going to see, in just two weeks, the normal worms are old. You can see the little head moving down at the bottom there. But everything else is just lying there. The animal's clearly in the nursing home. And if you look at the tissues of the animal, they're starting to deteriorate. You know, even if you've never seen one of these little C. elegans — which probably most of you haven't seen one — you can tell they're old — isn't that interesting?So there's something about aging that's kind of universal. And now here is the daf-2 mutant. One gene is changed out of 20,000, and look at it. It's the same age, but it's not in the nursing home; it's going skiing. This is what's really cool: it's aging more slowly. It takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day. And when I tell people about this, they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80. But it's really more like this: let's say you're a 30 year-old guy — or in your 30s — and you're a bachelor and you're dating people. And you meet someone you really like, you get to know her. And you're in a restaurant, and you say, ""Well how old are you?"" She says, ""I'm 60."" That's what it's like. And you would never know. You would never know, until she told you.(Laughter)Okay. So what is the daf-2 gene? Well as you know, genes, which are part of the DNA, they're instructions to make a protein that does something. And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor. So what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell. So part of it is like a baseball glove. Part of it's on the outside, and it's catching the hormone as it comes by in green. And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell.Okay, so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell? I just told you that, if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell, that you get a receptor that doesn't work as well; the animal lives longer. So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging. That's what that arrow means. It speeds up aging. It makes it go faster. So it's like the animal has the grim reaper inside of itself, speeding up aging. So this is altogether really, really interesting. It says that aging is subject to control by the genes, and specifically by hormones. So what kind of hormones are these? There's lots of hormones. There's testosterone, adrenalin. You know about a lot of them. These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies. The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1.Now you've all heard of at least insulin. Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal. And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth. So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time, but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about — maybe they also affect aging. And it's looking like that's the case.So after we made our discoveries with little C. elegans, people who worked on other kinds of animals started asking, if we made the same daf-2 mutation, the hormone receptor mutation, in other animals, will they live longer? And that is the case in flies. If you change this hormone pathway in flies, they live longer. And also in mice — and mice are mammals like us. So it's an ancient pathway, because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals. And also, the common precursor also gave rise to people.So maybe it's working in people the same way. And there are hints of this. So for example, there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City. And just like any population, most of the people live to be about 70 or 80, but some live to be 90 or 100. And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations — that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1. And these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted. It damaged the gene. So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging.So the next question, of course, is: Is there any effect on age-related disease? As you age, you're much more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, all sorts of diseases. It turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases. They hardly get cancer, and when they do it's not as severe. So it's really interesting, and it makes sense in a way, that they're still young, so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old? So it suggests that, if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to take to replicate some of these effects in humans, maybe we would have a way of combating lots of different age-related diseases all at once. So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging? How could that work?Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants, a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues, and repair damage. And the way that they're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO. So in a daf-2 mutant — you see that I have the X drawn here through the receptor. The receptor isn't working as well. Under those conditions, the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus — that little compartment there in the middle of the cell — and it's sitting down on a gene binding to it. You see one gene. There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO. And it's just sitting on one of them.So FOXO turns on a lot of genes. And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well — to fold correctly and function correctly. And it can also escort them to the garbage cans of the cell and recycle them if they're damaged. DNA repair genes are more active in these animals. And the immune system is more active. And many of these different genes, we've shown, actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant. So it's really interesting. These animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do. They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage, which we think makes them live longer.So what about the normal worm? Well when the daf-2 receptor is active, then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is. So it can't turn the genes on. That's how it works. That's why we don't see the long lifespan, until we have the daf-2 mutant. But what good is this for the worm? Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions — in the good times — when food is plentiful and there's not a lot of stress in the environment. Then they promote the uptake of nutrients. You can store the food, use it for energy, grow, etc.But what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop — for example, having limited food supply. And that, we think, is registered by the animal as a danger signal, a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity. So it activates FOXO, FOXO goes to the DNA, and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself. And that's why we think the animals live longer.So you can think of FOXO as being like a building superintendent. So maybe he's a little bit lazy, but he's there, he's taking care of the building. But it's deteriorating. And then suddenly, he learns that there's going to be a hurricane. So he doesn't actually do anything himself. He gets on the telephone — just like FOXO gets on the DNA — and he calls up the roofer, the window person, the painter, the floor person. And they all come and they fortify the house. And then the hurricane comes through, and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in. And not only that, it can also just last longer, even if there isn't a hurricane. So that's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists.Now the really cool thing about FOXO is that there are different forms of it. We all have FOXO genes, but we don't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene. Just like we all have eyes, but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes. And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100. And that's the case all over the world, as you can see from these stars. And each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked, ""Okay, are there differences in the type of FOXO genes among people who live a really long time?"" and there are. We don't know the details of how this works, but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people. And that means that, maybe if we tweak it a little bit, we can increase the health and longevity of people.So this is really exciting to me. A FOXO is a protein that we found in these little, round worms to affect lifespan, and here it affects lifespan in people. So we've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases. And I'm really optimistic that this is going to work.There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging. And for at least one of them, there is a drug. There's one called TOR, which is another nutrient sensor, like the insulin pathway. And mutations that damage the TOR gene — just like the daf-2 mutations — extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice. But in this case, there's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity. And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse — even when it's pretty old, like age 60 for a human, that old for a mouse — if you give the mouse rapamycin, it will live longer.Now I don't want you all to go out taking rapamycin. It is a drug for people, but the reason is it suppresses the immune system. So people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected. So this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer. But still, here in the year 2011, there's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan, which comes out of this science that's been done in all these different animals.So I'm really optimistic, and I think it won't be too long, I hope, before this age-old dream begins to come true.Thank you.(Applause)Matt Ridley: Thank you, Cynthia. Let me get this straight. Although you're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me, what you could do now pretty well in the lab, if you were allowed ethically, is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer?CK: Ah, so the kinds of drugs I was talking about would not change the genes, they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity. So if you stop taking the drug, the protein would go back to normal. You could change the genes in principle. There isn't the technology to do that. But I don't think that's a good idea. And the reason is that these hormones, like the insulin and the IGF hormones and the TOR pathway, they're essential. If you knock them out completely, then you're very sick. So it might be that you would just have to fine tune it very carefully to get the benefits without getting any problems. And I think that's much better, that kind of control would be much better as a drug. And also, there are other ways of activating FOXO that don't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer.MR: I wasn't suggesting that I was going to go and do it, but ... (Laughter) There's a phenomenon which you have written about and spoken about, which is a negligible senescence. There are some creatures on this planet already that don't really do aging. Just move to one side for us, if you would.CK: There are. There are some animals that don't seem to age. For example, there are some tortoises called Blanding's turtles. And they grow to be about this size. And they've been tagged, and they've been found to be 70 years old. And when you look at these 70 year-old turtles, you can't tell the difference, just by looking, between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles. And the 70 year-old ones, actually they're better at scouting out the good nesting places, and they also have more progeny every year. And there are other examples of these kinds of animals, like turns, certain kinds of birds are like this. And nobody knows if they really can live forever, or what keeps them from aging. It's not clear.If you look at birds, which live a long time, cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide, things like that. And our long-lived mutants are too. They're more resistant to these kinds of stresses. So it could be that the pathways that I've been talking about, which are set to run really quickly in the worm, have a different normal set point in something like a bird, so that a bird can live a lot longer. And maybe they're even set really differently in animals with no senescence at all — but we don't know.MR: But what you're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death, so much as extending human youthspan.CK: Yes, that's right. It's more like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, ""Why isn't this human getting old?"" They're not getting old in the dog's lifespan. It's more like that. But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.MR: Thank you very much indeed, Cynthia Kenyon.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hint_of_longer_lives
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"I'd like to apologize, first of all, to all of you because I have no form of PowerPoint presentation. So what I'm going to do is, every now and again, I will make this gesture, and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy, you can imagine what you'd like to see.I do a radio show. The radio show is called ""The Infinite Monkey Cage."" It's about science, it's about rationalism. So therefore, we get a lot of complaints every single week — complaints including one we get very often, which is to say the very title, ""Infinite Monkey Cage,"" celebrates the idea of vivisection. We have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy.(Laughter)We also had someone else who said, ""'The Infinite Monkey Cage' idea is ridiculous. An infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of Shakespeare. We know this because they did an experiment."" Yes, they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.(Laughter)So the main element though, the main complaint we get — and one that I find most worrying — is that people say, ""Oh, why do you insist on ruining the magic? You bring in science, and it ruins the magic."" Now I'm an arts graduate; I love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing. That's what I do. But I also don't understand how it does ruin the magic. All of the magic, I think, that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful.Astrology, for instance: like many rationalists, I'm a Pisces. (Laughter) Now astrology — we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted; that you'll, perhaps today, meet a lucky man who's wearing a hat. That is gone. But if we want to look at the sky and see predictions, we still can. We can see predictions of galaxies forming, of galaxies colliding into each other, of new solar systems. This is a wonderful thing. If the Sun could one day — and indeed the Earth, in fact — if the Earth could read its own astrological, astronomical chart, one day it would say, ""Not a good day for making plans. You'll been engulfed by a red giant.""And that to me as well, that if you think I'm worried about losing worlds, well Many Worlds theory — one of the most beautiful, fascinating, sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation — is a wonderful thing. That every person here, every decision that you've made today, every decision you've made in your life, you've not really made that decision, but in fact, every single permutation of those decisions is made, each one going off into a new universe. That is a wonderful idea. If you ever think that your life is rubbish, always remember there's another you that's made much worse decisions than that. (Laughter) If you ever think, ""Ah, I want to end it all,"" don't end it all. Remember that in the majority of universes, you don't even exist in the first place. This to me, in its own strange way, is very, very comforting.Now reincarnation, that's another thing gone — the afterlife. But it's not gone. Science actually says we will live forever. Well, there is one proviso. We won't actually live forever. You won't live forever. Your consciousness, the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me — that gets this one go. But every single thing that makes us, every atom in us, has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things. We have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people's knees. Who knows, maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon's knee. That is a good thing. Unlike the occupants of the universe, the universe itself is not wasteful. We are all totally recyclable. And when we die, we don't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs. This is a wonderful thing.Understanding, to me, does not remove the wonder and the joy. For instance, my wife could turn to me and she may say, ""Why do you love me?"" And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, ""Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors."" (Laughter) Though I'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well. And that is a wonderful thing there. Love does not die because of that thing.Pain doesn't go away either. This is a terrible thing, even though I understand pain. If someone punches me — and because of my personality, this is recently a regular occurrence — I understand where the pain comes from. It is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant — that's what it is. But at no point can I react and go, ""Ha! Is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you've got?"" No, I just spit out a tooth.(Laughter)And that is all of these different things — the love for my child. I have a son. His name is Archie. I'm very lucky, because he's better than all the other children. Now I know you don't think that. You may well have your own children and think, ""Oh no, my child's best."" That's the wonderful thing about evolution — the predilection to believe that our child is best. Now in many ways, that's just a survival thing. The fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes, and therefore we love it. But we don't notice that bit; we just unconditionally love. That is a wonderful thing. Though I should say that my son is best and is better than your children. I've done some tests.And all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder. Even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework, for instance. Perhaps you've been at home for a week on your own. You house is in a terrible state. Your partner is about to return. You think, what should I do? Do nothing. All you have to do is, when she walks in, using a quantum interpretation, say, ""I'm so sorry. I stopped observing the house for a moment, and when I started observing again, everything had happened."" (Laughter) That's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming.For me, it's a very, very important thing. Even on my journey up here — the joy that I have on my journey up here every single time. If you actually think, you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful. I'm sitting on a train. Every time I breathe in, I'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen. I'm sitting on a chair. Even though I know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space, I find it comfortable. I look out the window, and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window, framed in that window, wherever we are, I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth. If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed. And I realize I'm observing this with the brain, the human brain, the most complex thing in the known universe. That, to me, is an incredible thing. And do you know what, that might be enough.Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, once said, ""The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless."" Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism. But for me, it doesn't. That is a wonderful thing. I'm glad the universe is pointless. It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, ""What have you been doing, you idiot? That's not the point."" I can make my own purpose. You can make your own purpose. We have the individual power to go, ""This is what I want to do."" And in a pointless universe, that, to me, is a wonderful thing. I have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation. You, I imagine, can do much better things with your time.Thank you very much. Goodbye.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_ince_science_versus_wonder
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"I want to talk to you about something kind of big. We'll start here. Sixty-five million years ago —(Laughter)the dinosaurs had a bad day.(Laughter)A chunk of rock six miles across, moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet, slammed into the Earth. It released its energy all at once, and it was an explosion that was mind-numbing. If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together, and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment. The dinosaurs had a really bad day. OK?Now, a six-mile-wide rock is very large. We all live here in Boulder. If you look out your window and see Longs Peak — you're probably familiar with it — now, scoop up Longs Peak and put it out in space. Take ... Meeker, Mt. Meeker. Lump that in there, and put that in space as well. And Mt. Everest. And K2. And the Indian peaks. Then you're starting to get an idea of how much rock we're talking about, OK? We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left. It hit in what we now know as Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico. You can see here, there's the Yucatan Peninsula, if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there. Here is how big of a crater was left. It was huge.To give you a sense of the scale ... there you go. The scale here is 50 miles on top, a hundred kilometers on the bottom. This thing was 300 kilometers across — 200 miles — an enormous crater that excavated out vast amounts of earth that splashed around the globe and set fires all over the planet, threw up enough dust to block out the sun. It wiped out 75 percent of all species on Earth. Now, not all asteroids are that big.Some of them are smaller. Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992. It came in on a Friday night. Why is that important? Because back then, video cameras were just starting to become popular, and parents would bring them to their kids' football games to film their kids playing football. And since this came in on a Friday, they were able to get this great footage of this thing breaking up as it came in over West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey until it did that to a car in New York.(Laughter)Now, this is not a 200-mile-wide crater, but then again, you can see the rock, which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage. Now, this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in. It broke up through atmospheric pressure, it crumbled, and then the pieces fell apart and did some damage. Now, you wouldn't want that falling on your foot or your head, because it would do that to it. That would be bad. But it won't wipe out, you know, all life on Earth, so that's fine.But it turns out, you don't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage. There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock, and in fact, if any of you have ever been to near Winslow, Arizona, there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called ""Meteor Crater."" To give you a sense of scale, this is about a mile wide. If you look up at the top, that's a parking lot, and those are recreational vehicles right there. So it's about a mile across, 600 feet deep. The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across, so roughly the size of Macky Auditorium here. It came in at speeds that were tremendous, slammed into the ground, blew up, and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb — a very hefty bomb. This was 50,000 years ago, so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope, or something like that out in the desert, but it probably would not have caused global devastation.It turns out that these things don't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage. Now, in 1908, over Siberia, near the Tunguska region — for those of you who are Dan Aykroyd fans and saw ""Ghostbusters,"" when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Siberia blast of 1909, where he got the date wrong, but that's OK.(Laughter)It was 1908. That's fine. I can live with that.(Laughter)Another rock came into the Earth's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground, several miles up above the surface of the Earth. The heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it, and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles. This did a huge amount of damage. And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in. In Meteor Crater, it was made of metal, and metal is much tougher, so it made it to the ground. The one over Tunguska was probably made of rock, and that's much more crumbly, so it blew up in the air.Either way, these are tremendous explosions — 20 megatons. Now, when these things blow up, they're not going to do global ecological damage. They're not going to do something like the dinosaur killer did. They're just not big enough. But they will do global economic damage, because they don't have to hit, necessarily, to do this kind of damage. They don't have to do global devastation. If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere, it would cause a panic. But if it came over a city, an important city — not that any city is more important than others, but some of them we depend on more on the global economic basis — that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization. So, now that I've scared the crap out of you —(Laughter)what can we do about this? This is a potential threat. Let me note that we have not had a giant impact like the dinosaur killer for 65 million years. They're very rare. The smaller ones happen more often, but probably on the order of a millennium, every few centuries or every few thousand years. But it's still something to be aware of. Well, what do we do about them? The first thing we have to do is find them. This is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009. It's right here. But you can see that it's extremely faint. I don't know if you can see that in the back row. These are just stars.This is a rock that was about 30 yards across, so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over Tunguska and hit Arizona 50,000 years ago. These things are faint. They're hard to see, and the sky is really big. We have to find these things first. Well, the good news is, we're looking for them. NASA has devoted money to this; the National Science Foundation and other countries are interested in doing this. We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat.That's a great first step. But what's the second step? The second step is if we see one heading toward us, we have to stop it. What do we do? You've probably heard about the asteroid Apophis. If you haven't yet, you will. If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks, anyway.(Laughter)Apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004. It's roughly 250 [meters] across, so it's pretty big — bigger than a football stadium. And it's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029. And it's going to pass us so close that it's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites. The Earth's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it's just right, if it passes through this region of space, this kidney-bean-shaped region called the keyhole, the Earth's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later, on April 13 — which is a Friday, I'll note — in the year 2036 —(Laughter)you can't plan that kind of stuff —(Laughter)Apophis is going to hit us. And it's 250 meters across, so it would do unbelievable damage. The good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million, roughly — very, very low odds. So I personally am not lying awake at night worrying about this at all. I don't think Apophis is a problem. In fact, Apophis is a blessing in disguise, because it woke us up to the dangers of these things. This thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now. It won't, but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids.We didn't really necessarily understand these keyholes, and now we do, and it turns out that's really important, because how do you stop an asteroid like this? Well, let me ask you: What happens if you're standing in the road and a car's headed for you? What do you do? You do this. Right? Move, and the car goes past you. But we can't move the Earth, at least not easily, but we can move a small asteroid.And it turns out, we've even done it. In the year 2005, NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact, which slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet. Comets are very much like asteroids. The purpose wasn't to push it out of the way; the purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet, which we learned quite a bit about. We did move the comet a little tiny bit — not very much, but that wasn't the point. However, think about this: This thing is orbiting the Sun at 10, 20 miles per second. We shot a space probe at it and hit it, OK? Imagine how hard that must be, and we did it. That means we can do it again. If we see an asteroid that's coming toward us, headed right for us, and we have two years to go? Boom! We hit it. You know, if you watch the movies —(Laughter)you might think: Why don't we use a nuclear weapon? Well, you can try that, but the problem is timing. Shoot a nuclear weapon at this thing, you have to blow it up within a few milliseconds of tolerance, or else you'll miss it. And there are a lot of other problems with that; it's very hard to do. But just hitting something? That's pretty easy. I think even NASA can do that, and proved that they can.(Laughter)The problem is, if you hit this asteroid, you've changed the orbit, you measure the orbit, then you find out, oh yeah, we just pushed it into a keyhole, and now it's going to hit us in three years. Well, my opinion is: fine! It's not hitting us in six months — that's good.Now we have three years to do something else. And you can hit it again. That's kind of ham-fisted; you might just push it into a third keyhole or whatever, so you don't do that. And this is the part — it's the part I just love.(Laughter)After the big macho ""Grr ... bam! We're gonna hit this thing in the face,"" then we bring in the velvet gloves.(Laughter)There's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts, and they call themselves The B612 Foundation. For those of you who've read ""The Little Prince,"" you understand that reference, I hope — the little prince lived on an asteroid called B612. These are smart guys — men and women — astronauts, like I said, engineers. Rusty Schweickart, who was an Apollo 9 astronaut, is on this. Dan Durda, my friend who made this image, works here at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, on Walnut Street. He created this image for this. He's actually one of the astronomers who works for them. If we see an asteroid that's going to hit the Earth and we have enough time, we can hit it to move it into a better orbit.But then what we do is launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two. It doesn't have to be huge — a couple of tons, not that big — and you park it near the asteroid. You don't land on it, because these things are tumbling end over end. It's very hard to land on them. Instead you get near it. The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe, and the probe has a couple of tons of mass. It has a little tiny bit of gravity, but it's enough that it can pull the asteroid, and you have your rocket set up — you can barely see it here, but there's rocket plumes — and these guys are connected by their own gravity, and if you move the probe very slowly — very, very gently, you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit. You can even put in orbit around the Earth where we could mine it, although that's a whole other thing; I won't go into that.(Laughter)But we'd be rich!(Laughter)So think about this, right? There are these giant rocks flying out there, and they're hitting us, and they're doing damage to us. But we've figured out how to do this, and all the pieces are in place to do this. We have astronomers with telescopes, looking for them. We have very, very smart people, who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem, and we have the technology to do this. This probe actually can't use chemical rockets. Chemical rockets provide too much thrust, too much push. The probe would just shoot away.We invented something called an ion drive, which is a very, very, very low-thrust engine. It generates the force a piece of paper would have on your hand — incredibly light, but it can run for months and years, providing that very gentle push. If anybody here is a fan of the original ""Star Trek,"" they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive, and Spock said, ""They're very technically sophisticated. They're a hundred years ahead of us with this drive."" Yeah, we have an ion drive now. We don't have the Enterprise, but we've got an ion drive now.(Laughter)(Applause)Spock.(Laughter) So ... That's the difference — that's the difference between us and the dinosaurs. This happened to them. It doesn't have to happen to us. The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote, and so we can change our future.(Laughter)We have the ability to change our future. Sixty-five million years from now, we don't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/phil_plait_how_to_defend_earth_from_asteroids
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"Let me introduce to you Rezero. This little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at ETH-Zurich.Our robot belongs to a family of robots called Ballbots. Instead of wheels, a Ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball. The main characteristics of such a system is that there's one sole contact point to the ground. This means that the robot is inherently unstable. It's like when I am trying to stand on one foot.You might ask yourself, what's the usefulness of a robot that's unstable? Now we'll explain that in a second. Let me first explain how Rezero actually keeps his balance. Rezero keeps his balance by constantly measuring his pitch angle with a sensor. He then counteracts and avoids toppling over by turning the motors appropriately. This happens 160 times per second, and if anything fails in this process, Rezero would immediately fall to the ground.Now to move and to balance, Rezero needs to turn the ball. The ball is driven by three special wheels that allow Rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time. Due to his instability, Rezero is always in motion. Now here's the trick. It's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very [dynamically]. Let's play a little. You may have wondered what happens if I give the robot a little push. In this mode, he's trying to maintain his position.For the next demo, I'd like you to introduce to my colleagues Michael, on the computer, and Thomas who's helping me onstage. In the next mode, Rezero is passive, and we can move him around. With almost no force I can control his position and his velocity. I can also make him spin. In the next mode, we can get Rezero to follow a person. He's now keeping a constant distance to Thomas. This works with a laser sensor that's mounted on top of Rezero. With the same method, we can also get him to circle a person. We call this the orbiting mode. All right, thank you, Thomas. (Applause)Now, what's the use of this technology? For now, it's an experiment, but let me show you some possible future applications. Rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks. With a screen it could inform people or show them around in a fun and entertaining way. In a hospital, this device could be used to carry around medical equipment. Due to the Ballbot system, it has a very small footprint and it's also easy to move around. And of course, who wouldn't like to take a ride on one of these. And these are more practical applications. But there's also a certain beauty within this technology.(Music)(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_fankhauser_meet_rezero_the_dancing_ballbot
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"Ladies and gentlemen, gather around. I would love to share with you a story.Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book. Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling. It was venerable. It was ubiquitous. But it was a little bit boring. Because in its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device. But then one author arrived, and he changed the game forever. (Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer. Lothar Meggendorfer put his foot down, and he said, ""Genug ist genug!"" He grabbed his pen, he snatched his scissors. This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold. History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as — who else? — the world's first true inventor of the children's pop-up book. (Music) For this delight and for this wonder, people rejoiced. (Cheering) They were happy because the story survived, and that the world would keep on spinning.Lothar Meggendorfer wasn't the first to evolve the way a story was told, and he certainly wasn't the last. Whether storytellers realized it or not, they were channeling Meggendorfer's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville, radio news to radio theater, film to film in motion to film in sound, color, 3D, on VHS and on DVD. There seemed to be no cure for this Meggendorferitis.And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around. (Laughter) Because, not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world, but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices. For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine. One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D. (Laughter) And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate.And after all this, everyone paused; they took a step back. They realized that, in 6,000 years of storytelling, they've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls. And this was a cause for celebration. The art of storytelling has remained unchanged. And for the most part, the stories are recycled. But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty.And they remembered a man, one amazing German, every time a new storytelling device popped up next. And for that, the audience — the lovely, beautiful audience — would live happily ever after. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_sabia_the_technology_of_storytelling
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"I, like many of you, am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities. And there are days — I don't know about the rest of you — but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. And some days, that can even be a little scary. But what I'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open-source collaboration.A couple of years ago, I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan, in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment. Now at the time that I was reading this, it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment. So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future. But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article — it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system.So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. And that you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants' root systems. Now to a vegetable plant, my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space. But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control.Fast-forward two years later: we now have window farms, which are vertical, hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors. And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom, which periodically sends this liquid nutrient solution up to the top, which then trickles down through plants' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets — so there's no dirt involved. Now light and temperature vary with each window's microclimate, so a window farm requires a farmer, and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm, and whether she is going to feed her food organically.Back at the time, a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing. And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. So I decided that, instead of creating a product, what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of codevelopers.The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked. We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window. And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff. But the first few systems were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved.(Laughter)So to bring on more codevelopers, what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs, we explained how they worked, and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems. And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us. So actually now on this website, we have 18,000 people. And we have window farms all over the world.What we're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R&D, or research and development. But what we call it is R&D-I-Y, or ""research and develop it yourself.""(Laughter)So, for example, Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps. It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right, but once we did, we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half. Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments, like lots of other window farmers, and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients. And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they're now making open source and part of the project.So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software. And with every open source project, the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns, and the universal concerns. So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone. And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.So for do-it-yourselfers, we provide free, very well-tested instructions so that anyone, anywhere around the world, can build one of these systems for free. And there's a patent pending on these systems as well that's held by the community. And to fund the project, we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don't have time to build their own systems.Now within our community, a certain culture has appeared. In our culture, it is better to be a tester who supports someone else's idea than it is to be just the idea guy. What we get out of this project is support for our own work, as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs. But I think that Eleen expresses best what we really get out of this, which is the actual joy of collaboration. So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we're all talking about as environmentalists and food people, maybe we just need to ditch the term ""consumer"" and get behind the people who are doing stuff.Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own. And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems. And we're building upon innovations of generations who went before us. And we're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now. So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united, and to declare that we are all still pioneers.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/britta_riley_a_garden_in_my_apartment
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"If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever. Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.At the age of 19, the day after I graduated high school, I moved to a place where it snowed and I became a massage therapist. With this job all I needed were my hands and my massage table by my side and I could go anywhere. For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. That is, until my life took a detour. I went home from work early one day with what I thought was the flu, and less than 24 hours later I was in the hospital on life support with less than a two percent chance of living. It wasn't until days later as I lay in a coma that the doctors diagnosed me with bacterial meningitis, a vaccine-preventable blood infection. Over the course of two and a half months I lost my spleen, my kidneys, the hearing in my left ear and both of my legs below the knee.When my parents wheeled me out of the hospital I felt like I had been pieced back together like a patchwork doll. I thought the worst was over until weeks later when I saw my new legs for the first time. The calves were bulky blocks of metal with pipes bolted together for the ankles and a yellow rubber foot with a raised rubber line from the toe to the ankle to look like a vein. I didn't know what to expect, but I wasn't expecting that.With my mom by my side and tears streaming down our faces, I strapped on these chunky legs and I stood up. They were so painful and so confining that all I could think was, how am I ever going to travel the world in these things? How was I ever going to live the life full of adventure and stories, as I always wanted? And how was I going to snowboard again?That day, I went home, I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months: me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. I was absolutely physically and emotionally broken.But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. And that is when it dawned on me that I didn't have to be five-foot-five anymore. I could be as tall as I wanted! (Laughter) (Applause) Or as short as I wanted, depending on who I was dating. (Laughter) And if I snowboarded again, my feet aren't going to get cold. (Laughter) And best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales rack. (Laughter) And I did! So there were benefits here.It was this moment that I asked myself that life-defining question: If my life were a book and I were the author, how would I want the story to go? And I began to daydream. I daydreamed like I did as a little girl and I imagined myself walking gracefully, helping other people through my journey and snowboarding again. And I didn't just see myself carving down a mountain of powder, I could actually feel it. I could feel the wind against my face and the beat of my racing heart as if it were happening in that very moment. And that is when a new chapter in my life began.Four months later I was back up on a snowboard, although things didn't go quite as expected: My knees and my ankles wouldn't bend and at one point I traumatized all the skiers on the chair lift when I fell and my legs, still attached to my snowboard — (Laughter) — went flying down the mountain, and I was on top of the mountain still. I was so shocked, I was just as shocked as everybody else, and I was so discouraged, but I knew that if I could find the right pair of feet that I would be able to do this again. And this is when I learned that our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: one, stop us in our tracks or two, force us to get creative.I did a year of research, still couldn't figure out what kind of legs to use, couldn't find any resources that could help me. So I decided to make a pair myself. My leg maker and I put random parts together and we made a pair of feet that I could snowboard in. As you can see, rusted bolts, rubber, wood and neon pink duct tape. And yes, I can change my toenail polish. It was these legs and the best 21st birthday gift I could ever receive — a new kidney from my dad — that allowed me to follow my dreams again. I started snowboarding, then I went back to work, then I went back to school.Then in 2005 I cofounded a nonprofit organization for youth and young adults with physical disabilities so they could get involved with action sports. From there, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa, where I helped to put shoes on thousands of children's feet so they could attend school.And just this past February, I won two back-to-back World Cup gold medals — (Applause) — which made me the highest ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world.Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no. Because my legs haven't disabled me, if anything they've enabled me. They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in the possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything.It's believing in those dreams and facing our fears head-on that allows us to live our lives beyond our limits. And although today is about innovation without borders, I have to say that in my life, innovation has only been possible because of my borders. I've learned that borders are where the actual ends, but also where the imagination and the story begins.So the thought that I would like  to challenge you with today is that maybe instead of looking at  our challenges and our limitations as something negative or bad, we can begin to look at them as blessings, magnificent gifts that can be used to ignite our imaginations and help us go further than we ever knew we could go. It's not about breaking down borders. It's about pushing off of them and seeing what amazing places they might bring us. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_purdy_living_beyond_limits
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"Meet Tony. He's my student. He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison. When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, ""It was mom's gun. Just flash it, scare the guy. He's a punk. He took some money; we'll take his money. That'll teach him. Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.'"" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop. There's the punk on the ground, puddle of blood. And that's felony murder — 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky.So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, ""In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics,"" Tony interrupts me. ""What are you going to teach me about right and wrong? I know what is wrong. I have done wrong. I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong. If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name. I'm a convict; I am branded 'wrong.' What are you going to tell me about right and wrong?""So I say to Tony, ""Sorry, but it's worse than you think. You think you know right and wrong? Then can you tell me what wrong is? No, don't just give me an example. I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong. What is that idea? What makes something wrong? How do we know that it's wrong? Maybe you and I disagree. Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong. Maybe it's you, maybe it's me — but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion. We are here for knowledge. Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy.""And something changes for Tony. ""Could be I'm wrong. I'm tired of being wrong. I want to know what is wrong. I want to know what I know."" What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder — what Kant called ""admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within."" What can creatures like us know of such things? It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence — what Heidegger called ""the always already there."" It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it — what Socrates called ""the examined life."" Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing. Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact.So Tony starts doing his homework. He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies. Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle. His body is in prison, but his mind is free. Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous. That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton.So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, ""I don't know. Let us think about that."" Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there. It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy. And I say to Tony, ""Let's do this.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/damon_horowitz_philosophy_in_prison
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"My subject today is learning. And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz. Ready? When does learning begin? Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. Or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth.Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. Now I'm a science reporter. I write books and magazine articles. And I'm also a mother. And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called ""Origins."" ""Origins"" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book. And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old ""Peanuts"" cartoon. But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. Once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's.How can we know this? Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss' ""The Cat in the Hat"" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it — its mother. It even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. It's also tastes and smells. By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as ""yuck."" What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. But before I get to that, I want to address something that you may be wondering about. The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus — like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. But actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And often it does something more. It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's ""Magic Flute"" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food. The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades — so cold the water in the canals froze solid. Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day — a quarter of what they consumed before the war. As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. The specter of mass starvation loomed. And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies.The ""Hunger Winter,"" as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. But there was another population that was affected — the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. But others wouldn't be discovered for many years. Decades after the ""Hunger Winter,"" researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. These individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance — a precursor of diabetes.Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.But that may not be all that's going on. It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems — an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. This is what happened to the children of the Dutch ""Hunger Winter."" And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet. The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.Here's another story. At 8:46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York — commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street. 1,700 of these people were pregnant women. When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster — the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack. In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD — an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. But there's another way of thinking about PTSD. What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD — a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger — could save someone's life. The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant. It would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, ""Be careful.""Let me be clear. Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/annie_murphy_paul_what_we_learn_before_we_re_born
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"(Music)Good afternoon.As you're all aware, we face difficult economic times. I come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden.This idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at MIT. He was struggling to explain something to me: a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter. Now he confused me from the very start, because light doesn't cool things down. It makes it hotter. It's happening right now. The reason that you can see me standing here is because this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons, and they're moving randomly through the space, near the speed of light. All of them are different colors, they're rippling with different frequencies, and they're bouncing off every surface, including me, and some of those are flying directly into your eyes, and that's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here.Now a laser is different. It also uses photons, but they're all synchronized, and if you focus them into a beam, what you have is an incredibly useful tool. The control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye, you can use it to store massive amounts of data, and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain. First you trap atoms in a special bottle. It uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms from the noise of the environment. And the atoms themselves are quite violent, but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency, an atom will briefly absorb those photons and tend to slow down. Little by little it gets colder until eventually it approaches absolute zero.Now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough, something truly bizarre happens. It's no longer a solid, a liquid or a gas. It enters a new state of matter called a superfluid. The atoms lose their individual identity, and the rules from the quantum world take over, and that's what gives superfluids such spooky properties. For example, if you shine light through a superfluid, it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour. Another spooky property is that it flows with absolutely no viscosity or friction, so if you were to take the lid off that bottle, it won't stay inside. A thin film will creep up the inside wall, flow over the top and right out the outside. Now of course, the moment that it does hit the outside environment, and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree, it immediately turns back into normal matter. Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we've ever discovered. And this is the great pleasure of science: the defeat of our intuition through experimentation.But the experiment is not the end of the story, because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people. I have a Ph.D in molecular biology. I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about. So as my friend was trying to explain that experiment, it seemed like the more he said, the less I understood. Because if you're trying to give someone the big picture of a complex idea, to really capture its essence, the fewer words you use, the better. In fact, the ideal may be to use no words at all. I remember thinking, my friend could have explained that entire experiment with a dance. Of course, there never seem to be any dancers around when you need them.Now, the idea is not as crazy as it sounds. I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D. Instead of explaining their research with words, scientists have to explain it with dance. Now surprisingly, it seems to work. Dance really can make science easier to understand. But don't take my word for it. Go on the Internet and search for ""Dance Your Ph.D."" There are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you.The most surprising thing that I've learned while running this contest is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research. For example, at the University of Minnesota, there's a biomedical engineer named David Odde, and he works with dancers to study how cells move. They do it by changing their shape. When a chemical signal washes up on one side, it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side, because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment. So that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions. But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside, because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers, and those fibers are constantly falling apart. But just as quickly as they explode, more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer, so it's constantly changing just to remain exactly the same. Now, David builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab, but before he does that, he works with dancers to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place. It's basically efficient brainstorming, and when I visited David to learn about his research, he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method: PowerPoint.And this brings me to my modest proposal. I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy.(Laughter) (Applause)Now it does depend on how you measure it, of course, but one estimate has put the drain at 250 million dollars per day. Now that assumes half-hour presentations for an average audience of four people with salaries of 35,000 dollars, and it conservatively assumes that about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time, and given that there are some apparently 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day, that would indeed add up to an annual waste of 100 billion dollars. Of course, that's just the time we're losing sitting through presentations. There are other costs, because PowerPoint is a tool, and like any tool, it can and will be abused. To borrow a concept from my country's CIA, it helps you to soften up your audience. It distracts them with pretty pictures, irrelevant data. It allows you to create the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and most destructively, the illusion of understanding.So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt. Our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money. One idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts. For example, our National Endowment for the Arts, with its $150 million budget, slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent. One certainly can't argue with those numbers. However, once we eliminate public funding for the arts, there will be some drawbacks. The artists on the street will swell the ranks of the unemployed. Many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution, and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods. All of this could wipe out the savings we're hoping to make in the first place.I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. Once we eliminate public funding for the artists, let's put them back to work by using them instead of PowerPoint. As a test case, I propose we start with American dancers. After all, they are the most perishable of their kind, prone to injury and very slow to heal due to our health care system. Rather than dancing our Ph.Ds, we should use dance to explain all of our complex problems. Imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank. It's sure to help.Of course someday, in the deep future, a technology of persuasion even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented, rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric. However, I trust that by that day, we shall have passed this present financial calamity. Perhaps by then we will be able to afford the luxury of just sitting in an audience with no other purpose than to witness the human form in motion. (Music) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_bohannon_dance_vs_powerpoint_a_modest_proposal
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"Now when we think of our senses, we don't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved, from a biological perspective. We don't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses, but that's probably why our senses really evolved — to keep us safe, to allow us to live. Really when we think of our senses, or when we think of the loss of the sense, we really think about something more like this: the ability to touch something luxurious, to taste something delicious, to smell something fragrant, to see something beautiful. This is what we want out of our senses. We want beauty; we don't just want function. And when it comes to sensory restoration, we're still very far away from being able to provide beauty. And that's what I'd like to talk to you a little bit about today.Likewise for hearing. When we think about why we hear, we don't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren, although clearly that's an important thing. Really what we want to hear is music.(Music)So many of you know that that's Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Many of you know that he was deaf, or near profoundly deaf, when he wrote that. Now I'd like to impress upon you how unusual it is that we can hear music. Music is just one of the strangest things that there is. It's acoustic vibrations in the air, little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum. Somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones, which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music. That process is entirely abstract and very, very unusual. And we could discuss that topic alone for days to really try to figure out, how is it that we hear something that's emotional from something that starts out as a vibration in the air?Turns out that if you have hearing loss, most people that lose their hearing lose it at what's called the cochlea, the inner ear. And it's at the hair cell level that they do this. Now if you had to pick a sense to lose, I have to be very honest with you and say, we're better at restoring hearing than we are at restoring any sense that there is. In fact, nothing even actually comes close to our ability to restore hearing. And as a physician and a surgeon, I can confidently tell my patients that if you had to pick a sense to lose, we are the furthest along medically and surgically with hearing. As a musician, I can tell you that if I had to have a cochlear implant, I'd be heartbroken. I'd just be plainly heartbroken, because I know that music would never sound the same to me.Now this is a video that I'm going to show you of a girl who's born deaf. She's in a very supportive environment. Her mother's doing everything she can. Okay, play that video please.(Video) Mother: That's an owl. Owl, yeah. Owl. Owl. Yeah. Baby. Baby. You want it? (Kiss)Charles Limb: Now despite everything going for this child in terms of family support and simple infused learning, there is a limitation to what a child who's deaf, an infant who was born deaf, has in this world in terms of social, educational, vocational opportunities. I'm not saying that they can't live a beautiful, wonderful life. I'm saying that they're going to face obstacles that most people who have normal hearing will not have to face.Now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years. I mean literally, they used to do things like stick ear-shaped objects onto your ears and stick funnels in. And that was the best you could do for hearing loss. Back then you couldn't even look at the eardrum. So it's not too surprising that there were no good treatments for hearing loss.And now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure. It's surgically placed inside the inner ear. It takes about an hour and a half to two hours, depending on where it's done, under general anesthesia. And in the end, you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea. Now actually, this is quite crude in comparison to our regular inner ear.But here is that same girl who is implanted now. This is her 10 years later. And this is a video that was taken by my surgical mentor, Dr. John Niparko, who implanted her. If we could play this video please.(Video) John Niparko: So you've written two books?Girl: I have written two books. (Mother: Was the other one a book or a journal entry?) Girl: No, the other one was a book. (Mother: Oh, okay.)JN: Well this book has seven chapters, and the last chapter is entitled ""The Good Things About Being Deaf."" Do you remember writing that chapter?Girl: Yes I do. I remember writing every chapter.JN: Yeah. Girl: Well sometimes my sister can be kind of annoying. So it comes in handy to not be annoyed by her.JN: I see. And who is that?Girl: Holly. (JN: Okay.)Mother: Her sister. (JN: Her sister.) Girl: My sister.JN: And how can you avoid being annoyed by her?Girl: I just take off my CI, and I don't hear anything. (Laughter) It comes in handy.JN: So you don't want to hear everything that's out there?Girl: No.CL: And so she's phenomenal. And there's no way that you can't look at that as an overwhelming success. It is. It's a huge success story in modern medicine. However, despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language, you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can't hear music almost at all. In fact, most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad. And so when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody's life, we have a long way to go when it comes to audition.Now there are a lot of reasons for that. I mentioned earlier the fact that music is a different capacity because it's abstract. Language is very different. Language is very precise. In fact, the whole reason we use it is because it has semantic-specificity. When you say a word, what you care is that word was perceived correctly. You don't care that the word sounded pretty when it was spoken.Music is entirely different. When you hear music, if it doesn't sound good, what's the point? There's really very little point in listening to music when it doesn't sound good to you. The acoustics of music are much harder than those of language. And you can see on this figure, that the frequency range and the decibel range, the dynamic range of music is far more heterogeneous. So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant, what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission. Because I always view music as the pinnacle of hearing. If you can hear music, you should be able to hear anything.Now the problems begin first with pitch perception. I mean, most of us know that pitch is a fundamental building block of music. And without the ability to perceive pitch well, music and melody is a very difficult thing to do — forget about a harmony and things like that. Now this is a MIDI arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Prelude. Now if we could just play this.(Music)Okay, now if we consider that in a cochlear implant patient pitch perception could be off as much as two octaves, let's see what happens here when we randomize this to within one semitone. We would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users. Go ahead and play this one.(Music)Now my goal in showing you that is to show you that music is not robust to degradation. You distort it a little bit, especially in terms of pitch, and you've changed it. And it might be that you kind of like that. That's kind of hypnotic. But it certainly wasn't the way the music was intended. And you're not hearing the same thing that most people who have normal hearing are hearing.Now the other issue comes with, not just the ability to tell pitches apart, but the ability to tell sounds apart. Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument. If we could play these two sound clips in succession. (Trumpet) The trumpet. And the second one. (Violin) That's a violin. These have similar wave forms. They're both sustained instruments. Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments. The sound quality, or the sound of the sound is how I like to describe timbre, tone color — they cannot tell these things whatsoever. This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth.Now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech, have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody, what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech. You would think that because these implants are optimized for speech, they were designed for speech. But actually if you look at melody, what you find is that there's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls. So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception.Now the next question is, well how does it really sound? Now we've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users. I'm going to play you two clips of Usher, one which is normal and one which has almost no high frequencies, almost no low frequencies and not even that many mid frequencies. Go ahead and play that.(Music)(Limited Frequency Music)I had patients tell me that those sound the same. They cannot differentiate sound quality differences between those two clips. Again, we are very, very far away in just getting to where we want to get to.Now the question comes to mind: Is there any hope? And yes, there is hope. Now I don't know if anybody knows who this is. This is ... does somebody know? This is Beethoven. Now why would we know what Beethoven's skull looks like? Because his grave was exhumed. And it turns out that his temporal bones were harvested when he died to try to look at the cause of his deafness, which is why he has molding clay and his skull is bulging out on the side there. But Beethoven composed music long after he lost his hearing. What that suggests is that, even in the case of hearing loss, the capacity for music remains. The brains remain hardwired for music.I've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants. This is a cat that's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food.(Music)Text: Beethoven doesn't excite her. (Music) The ""1812 Overture"" isn't worth waking for. (Trumpet) But she jumps to action when called to duty! (Trumpet)CL: Now I'm not suggesting that the cat is hearing that trumpet the way we're hearing it. I'm suggesting that with training you can imbue a musical sound with significance, even in a cat. If we were to direct efforts towards training cochlear implant users to hear music — because right now there's virtually no effort put towards that, no rehabilitative strategies, very little in the way of technological advances to actually improve music — we would come a long way.Now I want to show you one last video. And this is of a student of mine named Joseph who I had the good fortune to work with for three years in my lab. He's deaf, and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant. And here's a video of Joseph.(Music)(Video) Joseph: I was born in 1986. And at about four months old, I was diagnosed with profoundly severe hearing loss. Not long after, I was fitted with hearing aids. But although these hearing aids were the most powerful hearing aids on the market at the time, they weren't very helpful. So as a result, I had to rely on lip reading a lot, and I couldn't really hear what people were saying. When I was 12 years old, I was one of the first few people in Singapore who underwent cochlear implantation. And not long after I got my cochlear implant, I started learning how to play piano. And it was absolutely wonderful. Since then, I've never looked back.CL: Joseph is phenomenal. He's brilliant. He is now a medical student at Yale University, and he's contemplating a surgical career — one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery. There are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere. And this is really unheard of stuff, and this is all because of this technology. And the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain. Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant, because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time. You don't actually have to hear it. I know he doesn't hear well, because I've heard him do Karaoke. (Laughter) And it's one of the most awful things — heartwarming, but awful. (Laughter) And so there is certainly a lot of hope, but there's a lot more that needs to be done.So I just want to conclude with the following words. When it comes to restoration of hearing, we have certainly come a long way, a remarkably long way. And we have a much longer way to go when it comes to the idea of restoring perfect hearing. And let me tell you right now, it's fine that we would all be very happy with speech. But I tell you, if we lost our hearing, if anyone here suddenly lost your hearing, you would want perfect hearing back. You wouldn't want decent hearing, you would want perfect hearing. Restoration of basic sensory function is critical. And I don't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function. But it's really restoration of the ability to perceive beauty where we can get inspiring. And I don't think that we should give up on beauty.And I want to thank you for your time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_building_the_musical_muscle
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"So that's Johnny Depp, of course. And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder. And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo. Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder ""Winona forever."" And then three years later — which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards — they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done. And now his shoulder says, ""Wino forever.""(Laughter)So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo. I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time. Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30. That didn't happen to me. I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly. And by ""regretted it,"" I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place — this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side — and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street. (Laughter) Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares. (Laughter) And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute.And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets. I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. I do that hourly. But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand. I learned a lesson from it. It somehow got me to where I am in life right now. And okay, I wouldn't change it. In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.This idea is nicely captured by this quote: ""Things without all remedy should be without regard; what's done is done."" And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first — something we might all agree to sign onto ... until I tell you who said it. Right, so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people. And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was. Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage. So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions. So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy. But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it.So let's start off by defining some terms. What is regret? Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past. So in other words, regret requires two things. It requires, first of all, agency — we had to make a decision in the first place. And second of all, it requires imagination. We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present. And in fact, the more we have of either of these things — the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be.So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight. You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20. Why? Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome. ""I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. I should have gone through that yellow light."" These are the classic conditions that create regret. We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well.Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things. This session today is about behavioral economics. And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain. We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them — buyer's remorse, basically. But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life? Here's what the answers turn out to look like.So top six regrets — the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education. 33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education. We wish we'd gotten more of it. We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have. We wish we'd chosen to study a different topic. Others very high on our list of regrets include career, romance, parenting, various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time — or actually more specifically, how we fail to spend our leisure time. The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community.So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance. But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank. They account for less than three percent of our total regrets. So if you're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap, or company A versus company B, or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius, you know what, let it go. Odds are, you're not going to care in five years.But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like? We all know the short answer. It feels terrible. Regret feels awful. But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways. So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial. When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night. And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head. And the thought was, ""Make it go away!"" This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response. I mean, it's right up there with, ""I want my mommy!"" We're not trying to solve the problem. We're not trying to understand how the problem came about. We just want it to vanish.The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment. So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, ""How could I have done that? What was I thinking?"" This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret. We can't identify with that part. We don't understand that part. And we certainly don't have any empathy for that part — which explains the third consistent component of regret, which is an intense desire to punish ourselves. That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, ""I could have kicked myself."" The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative. To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing. Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop. So it's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night, thinking, ""Make it go away."" It's that I sat there and I thought, ""Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away."" So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret.But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one. And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call. That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts. And then I thought about how, much as travel insurance doesn't cover acts of God, probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy. In point of fact, no insurance covers acts of idiocy. The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of, frankly, a fairly indifferent universe.This is obviously an incredibly painful experience. And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture — Control-Z like the computer command, undo. We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense. We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem — we can undo and unfriend and unfollow. And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot. Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control. And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists — and I know where of I speak — this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right.Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes. But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about. So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life. (Laughter) Text: Relpy to all. And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret. You can accidentally hit ""reply all"" to an email and torpedo a relationship. Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work. Or you can have your last day at work.And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life. Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives. Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring. I mean, even the stupid ""reply all"" regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days.So how are we supposed to live with this? I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. (Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them. That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends. And that's just regret about tattoos. We are all in this together.The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. I don't think that's the case though. All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us.The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds — except for tattoos, which are permanent. So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. And do you guys just want to see it? All right. Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed. Because it's actually not that hideous. I didn't tattoo Marilyn Manson's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something. When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks. It's just that I don't like how it looks. And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist. But I'll let you see it anyway.This is my tattoo. I can guess what some of you are thinking. So let me reassure you about something. Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are. I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling. And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time. Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and, simultaneously, how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north. And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image. And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device.Well it did. But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead. It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body — partly as a writer, but also just as a human being. Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret
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"(Singing) I see the moon. The moon sees me. The moon sees somebody that I don't see. God bless the moon, and God bless me. And God bless the somebody that I don't see. If I get to heaven, before you do, I'll make a hole and pull you through. And I'll write your name on every star, and that way the world won't seem so far.The astronaut will not be at work today. He has called in sick. He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock. There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch, raindrops against the window and not even the hint of coffee in the kitchen air. Everybody is in a tizzy. The engineers on the 15th floor have stopped working on their particle machine. The anti-gravity room is leaking, and even the freckled kid with glasses, whose only job is to take out the trash, is nervous, fumbles the bag, spills a banana peel and a paper cup. Nobody notices. They are too busy recalculating what this all mean for lost time. How many galaxies are we losing per second? How long before next rocket can be launched? Somewhere an electron flies off its energy cloud. A black hole has erupted. A mother finishes setting the table for dinner. A Law & Order marathon is starting. The astronaut is asleep. He has forgotten to turn off his watch, which ticks, like a metal pulse against his wrist. He does not hear it. He dreams of coral reefs and plankton. His fingers find the pillowcase's sailing masts. He turns on his side, opens his eyes at once. He thinks that scuba divers must have the most wonderful job in the world. So much water to glide through!(Applause)Thank you.When I was little, I could not understand the concept that you could only live one life. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean, I literally thought that I was going to get to do everything there was to do and be everything there was to be. It was only a matter of time. And there was no limitation based on age or gender or race or even appropriate time period. I was sure that I was going to actually experience what it felt like to be a leader of the civil rights movement or a ten-year old boy living on a farm during the dust bowl or an emperor of the Tang dynasty in China. My mom says that when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my typical response was: princess-ballerina-astronaut. And what she doesn't understand is that I wasn't trying to invent some combined super profession. I was listing things I thought I was gonna get to be: a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut. and I'm pretty sure the list probably went on from there. I usually just got cut off. It was never a question of if I was gonna get to do something so much of a question of when.And I was sure that if I was going to do everything, that it probably meant I had to move pretty quickly, because there was a lot of stuff I needed to do. So my life was constantly in a state of rushing. I was always scared that I was falling behind. And since I grew up in New York City, as far as I could tell, rushing was pretty normal. But, as I grew up, I had this sinking realization, that I wasn't gonna get to live any more than one life. I only knew what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York City, not a teenage boy in New Zealand, not a prom queen in Kansas. I only got to see through my lens. And it was around this time that I became obsessed with stories, because it was through stories that I was able to see through someone else's lens, however briefly or imperfectly. And I started craving hearing other people's experiences because I was so jealous that there were entire lives that I was never gonna get to live, and I wanted to hear about everything that I was missing. And by transitive property, I realized that some people were never gonna get to experience what it felt like to be a teenage girl in New York city. Which meant that they weren't gonna know what the subway ride after your first kiss feels like, or how quiet it gets when its snows. And I wanted them to know, I wanted to tell them.And this became the focus of my obsession. I busied myself telling stories and sharing stories and collecting them. And it's not until recently that I realized that I can't always rush poetry. In April for National Poetry Month, there's this challenge that many poets in the poetry community participate in, and its called the 30/30 Challenge. The idea is you write a new poem every single day for the entire month of April. And last year, I tried it for the first time and was thrilled by the efficiency at which I was able to produce poetry. But at the end of the month, I looked back at these 30 poems I had written and discovered that they were all trying to tell the same story, it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out the way that it wanted to be told. And I realized that this is probably true of other stories on an even larger scale. I have stories that I have tried to tell for years, rewriting and rewriting and constantly searching for the right words.There's a French poet and essayist by the name of Paul Valéry who said a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. And this terrifies me because it implies that I could keep re-editing and rewriting forever and its up to me to decide when a poem is finished and when I can walk away from it. And this goes directly against my very obsessive nature to try to find the right answer and the perfect words and the right form. And I use poetry in my life, as a way to help me navigate and work through things. But just because I end the poem, doesn't mean that I've solved what it was I was puzzling through. I like to revisit old poetry because it shows me exactly where I was at that moment and what it was I was trying to navigate and the words that I chose to help me.Now, I have a story that I've been stumbling over for years and years and I'm not sure if I've found the prefect form, or whether this is just one attempt and I will try to rewrite it later in search of a better way to tell it. But I do know that later, when I look back I will be able to know that this is where I was at this moment and this is what I was trying to navigate, with these words, here, in this room, with you.So — Smile.It didn't always work this way. There's a time you had to get your hands dirty. When you were in the dark, for most of it, fumbling was a given. If you needed more contrast, more saturation, darker darks and brighter brights, they called it extended development. It meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals, longer up to your wrist. It wasn't always easy. Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer. Young, red-faced with his sleeves rolled up, fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins, he looked like Popeye the sailor man come to life. Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair, he showed up to World War II, with a smirk and a hobby. When they asked him if he knew much about photography, he lied, learned to read Europe like a map, upside down, from the height of a fighter plane, camera snapping, eyelids flapping the darkest darks and brightest brights. He learned war like he could read his way home.When other men returned, they would put their weapons out to rest, but he brought the lenses and the cameras home with him. Opened a shop, turned it into a family affair. My father was born into this world of black and white. His basketball hands learned the tiny clicks and slides of lens into frame, film into camera, chemical into plastic bin. His father knew the equipment but not the art. He knew the darks but not the brights. My father learned the magic, spent his time following light. Once he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire, hunted it with his camera for a week. ""Follow the light,"" he said. ""Follow the light.""There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs. The loft on Wooster Street with the creaky hallways, the twelve-foot ceilings, white walls and cold floors. This was my mother's home, before she was mother. Before she was wife, she was artist. And the only two rooms in the house, with walls that reached all the way up to the ceiling, and doors that opened and closed, were the bathroom and the darkroom. The darkroom she built herself, with custom-made stainless steel sinks, an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved up and down by a giant hand crank, a bank of color-balanced lights, a white glass wall for viewing prints, a drying rack that moved in and out from the wall. My mother built herself a darkroom. Made it her home. Fell in love with a man with basketball hands, with the way he looked at light.They got married. Had a baby. Moved to a house near a park. But they kept the loft on Wooster Street for birthday parties and treasure hunts. The baby tipped the grayscale, filled her parents' photo albums with red balloons and yellow icing. The baby grew into a girl without freckles, with a crooked smile, who didn’t understand why her friends did not have darkrooms in their houses, who never saw her parents kiss, who never saw them hold hands.But one day, another baby showed up. This one with perfect straight hair and bubble gum cheeks. They named him sweet potato. When he laughed, he laughed so loudly he scared the pigeons on the fire escape And the four of them lived in that house near the park. The girl with no freckles, the sweet potato boy, the basketball father and darkroom mother and they lit their candles and said their prayers, and the corners of the photographs curled.One day, some towers fell. And the house near the park became a house under ash, so they escaped in backpacks, on bicycles to darkrooms But the loft of Wooster Street was built for an artist, not a family of pigeons, and walls that do not reach the ceiling do not hold in the yelling and the man with basketball hands put his weapons out to rest. He could not fight this war, and no maps pointed home. His hands no longer fit his camera, no longer fit his wife's, no longer fit his body. The sweet potato boy mashed his fists into his mouth until he had nothing more to say.So, the girl without freckles went treasure hunting on her own. And on Wooster Street, in a building with the creaky hallways and the loft with the 12-foot ceilings and the darkroom with too many sinks under the color-balanced lights, she found a note, tacked to the wall with a thumb-tack, left over from a time before towers, from the time before babies. And the note said: ""A guy sure loves the girl who works in the darkroom."" It was a year before my father picked up a camera again. His first time out, he followed the Christmas lights, dotting their way through New York City's trees, tiny dots of light, blinking out at him from out of the darkest darks.A year later he traveled across the country to follow a forest fire stayed for a week hunting it with his camera, it was ravaging the West Coast eating 18-wheeler trucks in its stride. On the other side of the country, I went to class and wrote a poem in the margins of my notebook. We have both learned the art of capture. Maybe we are learning the art of embracing. Maybe we are learning the art of letting go.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live
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"Good afternoon, I'm proud to be here at TEDxKrakow. I'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon which can, and actually is changing the world, and whose name is people power. I'll start with an anecdote, or for those of you who are Monty Python lovers, a Monty Python type of sketch. Here it is.It is December 15, 2010. Somebody gives you a bet: you will look at a crystal ball, and you will see the future; the future will be accurate. But you need to share it with the world. OK, curiosity killed the cat, you take the bet, you look at the crystal ball. One hour later, you're sitting in a building of the national TV, in a top show, and you tell the story. Before the end of 2011, Ben Ali, and Mubarak, and Gaddafi would be down, and prosecuted. Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria would be either challenged, or already on their knees. Osama bin Laden would be dead, and Ratko Mladic would be in the Hague.Now, the anchor watches you with a strange gaze on his face. And then, on top of it you add: ""And thousands of young people from Athens, Madrid and New York will demonstrate for social justice, claiming they are inspired by Arabs.""Next thing you know, two guys in white appear, they give you the strange t-shirt, take you to the nearest mental institution. So I would like to speak a little bit about the phenomenon which is behind what already seems to be a very bad year for bad guys. And this phenomenon is called people power.Well, people power has been there for a while. It helped Gandhi kick the Brits from India, it helped Martin Luther King win his historic racial struggle. It helped a local, Lech Walesa, to kick out one million Soviet troops from Poland, and in beginning the end of the Soviet Union as we know it.So what's new in it? What seems to be very new, which is the idea I would like to share with you today, is that there is a set of rules and skills which can be learned and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle. If this is true, we can help these movements.Well, the first one - analytic skills. I'll try where it all started in the Middle East. And for so many years, we were living with a completely wrong perception of the Middle East. It was looking like the frozen region. Literally a refrigerator. And there were only two types of meal there. Steak, which stands for a Mubarak-Ben Ali type of military police dictatorship, or a potato, which stands for a Tehran type of theocracies. And everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened, and millions of young, mainly secular people stepped out to do the change. Guess what - they didn't watch the demographics. What is the average age of an Egyptian? 24. How long was Mubarak in power? 31. So, this system was just obsolete, they expired. And young people of the Arab world have awakened one morning, and understood that power lies in their hands. The rest is the year in front of us. And guess what? The same Generation Y, with their rules, with their tools, with their games, and with their language, which sounds a little bit strange to me. I'm 38 now. And can you look at the age of the people on the streets of Europe? It seems that Generation Y is coming.Now, let me set another example. I'm meeting different people throughout the world, and they are, you know, academics, and professors, and doctors, and they will always talk conditions. They will say: ""People power will work only if the regime is not too oppressive."" They will say: ""People power will work, if the annual income of the country is between X and Z."" They will say: ""People power will work only if there is a foreign pressure."" They will say: ""People power will work only if there is no oil."" And, I mean, there is a set of conditions. Well, the news here is that your skills during the conflict seem to be more important than the conditions. Namely, the skills of unity, planning, and maintaining nonviolent discipline.Let me give you an example. I come from a country called Serbia. It took us 10 years to unite 18 opposition party leaders, with their big egos, behind one single candidate against the Balkan dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Guess what? That was the day of his defeat. You look at the Egyptians, they fight on Tahrir Square, they get rid of their individual symbols, they appear on the street only with the flag of Egypt. I will give you a counter-example. You see nine presidential candidates running against Lukashenko, you all know the outcome. So unity is a big thing. And this can be achieved. Same with planning. Somebody has lied to you about the successful and spontaneous nonviolent revolution. That thing doesn't exist in the world. Whenever you see young people in front of the row trying to fraternize with the police or military, somebody was thinking about it before.Now, at the end, nonviolent discipline. And this is probably the game-changer. If you maintain nonviolent discipline, you'll exclusively win. You have 100,000 people in a nonviolent march, one idiot or agent-provocateur throwing a stone. Guess what takes all the cameras. That one guy. One single act of violence can literally destroy your movement.Now, let me move to another place. It's the selection of strategies and tactics. There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow. First, you start small. Second, you pick the battles you can win. It's only 200 of us in this room. We won't call for the march of a million. But what if we organized the spraying of graffiti throughout the night, all over Krakow. The city will know. So, we pick tactics accommodated to the event, especially this thing we call the small tactics of dispersion. They're very useful in violent oppression. We are actually witnessing the picture of one of the best tactics ever used. It was on Tahrir square, where the international community was constantly frightened that, you know, the Islamists will overtake the revolution. What they organized — Christians protecting Muslims where they are praying, a Coptic wedding cheered by thousands of Muslims, the world has just changed the picture, but somebody was thinking about this previously. So there are so many things you can do instead of getting into one place, shouting, and you know, showing off in front of the security forces.Now, there is also another very important dynamic. And this is a dynamic that analysts normally don't see. This is the dynamic between fear and apathy on the one side, and enthusiasm and humor on another side. So, it works like in a video game. You have the fear high, you have status quo. You have the enthusiasm higher, you see the fear is starting to melt. Day two, you see people running towards the police instead of from the police, in Egypt. You can tell that something is happening there.And then, it's about the humor. Humor is such a powerful game-changer, and of course, it was very big in Poland. You know, we were just a small group of crazy students in Serbia when we made this big skit. We put the big petrol barrel with a portrait of Mr. President on it, in the middle of the Main Street. There was a hole in the top. So you could literally come, put a coin in, get a baseball bat, and hit his face. Sounds loud. And within minutes, we were sitting in a nearby café having coffee, and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing. Well, that's just the beginning of the show. The real show starts when the police appears.(Laughter)""What will they do?"" Arrest us? We were nowhere to be seen. We were like three blocks away, observing it from our espresso bar. Arrest the shoppers, with kids? Doesn't make sense. Of course, you could bet, they did the most stupid thing. They arrested the barrel. And now, the picture of the smashed face on the barrel, with the policemen dragging it to the police car, that was the best day for newspaper photographers that they will ever have.So, I mean, these are the things you can do. And you can always use humor. There is also one big thing about humor, it really hurts. Because these guys really are taking themselves too seriously. When you start to mock them, it hurts.Now, everybody is talking about His Majesty, the Internet, and it is also a very useful skill. But don't rush to label things like ""a Facebook Revolution,"" ""Twitter Revolution."" Don't mix the tools with the substance. It is true that the Internet and the new media are very useful in making things faster and cheaper. They also make it a bit safer for the participants, because they give partial anonymity.We're watching the great example of something else the Internet can do. It can put the price tag of state-sponsored violence over a nonviolent protester. This is the famous group ""We are all Khaled Said,"" made by Wael Ghonim in Egypt, and his friend. This is the mutilated face of the guy who was beaten by the police. This is how he became known to the public, and this is what probably became the straw that broke the camel's back.But here is also the bad news. The nonviolent struggle is won in the real world, in the streets. You will never change your society towards democracy, or, you know, the economy, if you sit down and click. There are risks to be taken, and there are living people who are winning the struggle.Well, the million-dollar question. What will happen in the Arab world? And though young people from the Arab world were pretty successful in bringing down three dictators, shaking the region, kind of persuading the clever kings from Jordan and Morocco to do substantial reforms, it is yet to be seen what will be the outcome. Whether the Egyptians and Tunisians will make it through the transition, or this will end in bloody ethnic and religious conflicts, whether the Syrians will maintain nonviolent discipline, faced with a brutal daily violence which kills thousands already, or they will slip into violent struggle and make ugly civil war. Will these revolutions be pushed through the transitions and democracy or be overtaken by the military or extremists of all kinds? We cannot tell. The same works for the Western sector, where you can see all these excited young people protesting around the world, occupying this, occupying that. Are they going to become the world wave? Are they going to find their skills, their enthusiasm, and their strategy to find what they really want and push for the reform, or will they just stay complaining about the endless list of the things they hate? This is the difference between the two paths.Now, what do the statistics have? My friend Maria Stephan's book talks a lot about violent and nonviolent struggle, and there are some shocking data. If you look at the last 35 years and different social transitions, from dictatorship to democracy, you will see that, out of 67 different cases, in 50 of these cases it was nonviolent struggle which was the key power. This is one more reason to look at this phenomenon, this is one more reason to look at Generation Y. Enough for me to give them credit, and hope that they will find their skills and their courage to use nonviolent struggle and thus fix at least a part of the mess our generation is making in this world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/srdja_popovic_how_to_topple_a_dictator
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"How many of you had to fill out a web form where you've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really annoying?(Laughter)OK, outstanding. So I invented that.(Laughter)Or I was one of the people who did it. That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And it is there to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are a human and not a computer program that was written to submit the form millions of times. The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted characters, whereas programs can't do it as well yet. In the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets, two at a time.CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet. And since they're used so often, a lot of times the sequence of random characters shown to the user is not so fortunate. So this is an example from the Yahoo registration page. The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W, A, I, T, which, of course, spell a word. But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later.[Help! I've been waiting for over 20 minutes and nothing happens.](Laughter)This person thought they needed to wait. This, of course, is not as bad as this poor person.(Laughter)CAPTCHA Project is something that we did at Carnegie Melllon over 10 years ago, and it's been used everywhere. Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later, which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA. This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA, which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon, then we turned it into a start-up company. And then about a year and a half ago, Google actually acquired this company.Let me tell you what this project started. This project started from the following realization: It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world. When I first heard this, I was quite proud of myself. I thought, look at the impact my research has had. But then I started feeling bad. Here's the thing: each time you type a CAPTCHA, essentially, you waste 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs.(Laughter)So then I started feeling bad.(Laughter)And then I started thinking, of course, we can't just get rid of CAPTCHAs, because the security of the web depends on them. But then I started thinking, can we use this effort for something that is good for humanity? So see, here's the thing. While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do. So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds? Is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve, yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA, they solve a little bit of this problem? And the answer to that is ""yes,"" and this is what we're doing now.Nowadays, while you're typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you're helping us to digitize books. Let me explain how this works. There's a lot of projects trying to digitize books. Google has one. The Internet Archive has one. Amazon, with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books. Basically, the way this works is you start with an old book. You've seen those things, right? Like a book?(Laughter)So you start with a book and then you scan it.Now, scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page. It gives you an image for every page. This is an image with text for every page of the book. The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher the words in this image. That's using a technology called OCR, for optical character recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there. Now, the problem is that OCR is not perfect. Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words. For things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words. So now we're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we're getting people to read them for us while they're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet.So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you're typing are actually words from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize. The reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book, it didn't know what it was and it's going to present it to you. But since it doesn't know the answer, it cannot grade it. So we give you another word, for which the system does know the answer. We don't tell you which one's which and we say, please type both. And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system knows the answer, it assumes you are human and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly. And if we repeat this process to 10 different people and they agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately.So this is how the system works. And since we released it about three or four years ago, a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA, where people wasted their time, to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books. So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book. Facebook: Every time you add a friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book. Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using reCAPTCHA. And the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words we're digitizing per day is really large. It's about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year. And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet.(Applause)Now, of course, since we're doing so many words per day, funny things can happen. This is especially true because now we're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other. So funny things can happen. For example, we presented this word. It's the word ""Christians""; there's nothing wrong with it. But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word, bad things can happen. So we get this.[bad Christians]But it's even worse, because the website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God.(Laughter)Oops.(Laughter)Here's another really bad one. JohnEdwards.com[Damn liberal](Laughter)So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday. Of course, we're not just insulting people. Here's the thing. Since we're presenting two randomly chosen words, interesting things can happen. So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA art. I'm sure some of you have heard about it. Here's how it works. Imagine you're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar, like this CAPTCHA.[invisible toaster]What you're supposed to do is you take a screenshot of it. Then of course, you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book. But first you take a screenshot and then you draw something that is related to it.(Laughter)That's how it works.(Laughter)There are tens of thousands of these. Some of them are very cute.[clenched it](Laughter)Some of them are funnier.[stoned Founders](Laughter)And some of them, like paleontological shvisle ...(Laughter)they contain Snoop Dogg.(Laughter)OK, so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA. So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project. This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCHA: 750 million, a little over 10 percent of the world's population, has helped us digitize human knowledge. And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda. So the question that motivates my research is the following: If you look at humanity's large-scale achievements, these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically — like, for example, building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon — there is a curious fact about them, and it is that they were all done with about the same number of people. It's weird; they were all done with about 100,000 people. And the reason for that is because, before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge. So the question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million?So based on this question, we've had a lot of different projects that we've been working on. Let me tell you about one that I'm most excited about. This is something that we've been semiquietly working on for the last year and a half or so. It hasn't yet been launched. It's called Duolingo. Since it hasn't been launched, shhh!(Laughter)Yeah, I can trust you'll do that. So this is the project. Here's how it started. It started with me posing a question to my graduate student, Severin Hacker. OK, that's Severin Hacker. So I posed the question to my graduate student. By the way, you did hear me correctly; his last name is Hacker.(Laughter)So I posed this question to him: How can we get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free? There's a lot of things to say about this question. First of all, translating the web. Right now, the web is partitioned into multiple languages. A large fraction of it is in English. If you don't know English, you can't access it. But there's large fractions in other different languages, and if you don't know them, you can't access it. So I would like to translate all of the web, or at least most of it, into every major language. That's what I would like to do.Now, some of you may say, why can't we use computers to translate? Machine translation is starting to translate some sentences here and there. Why can't we use it to translate the web? The problem with that is it's not yet good enough and it probably won't be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn't, since it makes so many mistakes, you don't know whether to trust it or not.So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine. Actually, it was a forum post. It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript. It was translated from Japanese into English. So I'll just let you read. This person starts apologizing for the fact that it's translated with a computer. So the next sentence is going to be the preamble to the question. So he's just explaining something. Remember, it's a question about JavaScript.[At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.](Laughter)Then comes the first part of the question.[How many times like the wind, a pole, and the dragon?](Laughter)Then comes my favorite part of the question.[This insult to father's stones?](Laughter)And then comes the ending, which is my favorite part of the whole thing.[Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you.](Laughter)OK, so computer translation, not yet good enough. So back to the question. So we need people to translate the whole web. So now the next question you may have is, well, why can't we just pay people to do this? We could pay professional translators to translate the whole web. We could do that. Unfortunately, it would be extremely expensive. For example, translating a tiny fraction of the whole web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish. OK? Wikipedia exists in Spanish, but it's very small compared to the size of English. It's about 20 percent of the size of English. If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish, it would cost at least 50 million dollars — and this is even at the most exploited, outsourcing country out there. So it would be very expensive. So what we want to do is, we want to get 100 million people translating the web into every major language for free.If this is what you want to do, you quickly realize you're going to run into two big hurdles, two big obstacles. The first one is a lack of bilinguals. So I don't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the web who are bilingual enough to help us translate. That's a big problem. The other problem you're going to run into is a lack of motivation. How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the web for free? Normally, you have to pay people to do this. So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free? When we were starting to think about this, we were blocked by these two things. But then we realized, there's a way to solve both these problems with the same solution. To kill two birds with one stone. And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals, and that is language education.So it turns out that today, there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language. People really want to learn a foreign language. And it's not just because they're being forced to do so in school. In the US alone, there are over five million people who have paid over $500 for software to learn a new language. So people really want to learn a new language. So what we've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website — it's called Duolingo — where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the web. And so basically, they're learning by doing.So the way this works is whenever you're a just a beginner, we give you very simple sentences. There's a lot of very simple sentences on the web. We give you very simple sentences along with what each word means. And as you translate them and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language. And as you get more advanced, we give you more complex sentences to translate. But at all times, you're learning by doing.Now, the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works. People are really learning a language. We're mostly done building it and now we're testing it. People really can learn a language with it. And they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software. So people really do learn a language. And not only do they learn it as well, but actually it's more interesting. Because with Duolingo, people are learning with real content. As opposed to learning with made-up sentences, people are learning with real content, which is inherently interesting. So people really do learn a language.But perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they're just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising. So let me show you one example. This is a sentence that was translated from German into English. The top is the German. The middle is an English translation that was done by a professional translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation. And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo, none of whom knew any German before they started using the site. If you can see, it's pretty much perfect. Of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator.Now, even though we're combining the translations, the site actually can translate pretty fast. So let me show you, this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish. Remember, this is 50 million dollars' worth of value. So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish, we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users. And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users. Since all the projects my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users, we're hopeful that we'll be able to translate extremely fast.Now, the thing that I'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education. So here's the thing: The current business model for language education is the student pays, and in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone 500 dollars.(Laughter)That's the current business model. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world's population doesn't have 500 dollars. So it's extremely unfair towards the poor. This is totally biased towards the rich. Now, see, in Duolingo, because while you learn, you're actually creating value, you're translating stuff — which, for example, we could charge somebody for translations, so this is how we could monetize this. Since people are creating value while they're learning, they don't have to pay with their money, they pay with their time. But the magical thing here is that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language. So the nice thing about Duolingo is, I think, it provides a fair business model — one that doesn't discriminate against poor people.So here's the site. Thank you.(Applause)We haven't yet launched, but if you go there, you can sign up to be part of our private beta, which is probably going to start in three or four weeks. We haven't yet launched it.By the way, I'm the one talking here, but Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team,some of whom are here. So thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration
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"I'm here to spread the word about the magnificence of spiders and how much we can learn from them. Spiders are truly global citizens. You can find spiders in nearly every terrestrial habitat. This red dot marks the Great Basin of North America, and I'm involved with an alpine biodiversity project there with some collaborators. Here's one of our field sites, and just to give you a sense of perspective, this little blue smudge here, that's one of my collaborators. This is a rugged and barren landscape, yet there are quite a few spiders here. Turning rocks over revealed this crab spider grappling with a beetle.Spiders are not just everywhere, but they're extremely diverse. There are over 40,000 described species of spiders. To put that number into perspective, here's a graph comparing the 40,000 species of spiders to the 400 species of primates. There are two orders of magnitude more spiders than primates. Spiders are also extremely old. On the bottom here, this is the geologic timescale, and the numbers on it indicate millions of years from the present, so the zero here, that would be today. So what this figure shows is that spiders date back to almost 380 million years. To put that into perspective, this red vertical bar here marks the divergence time of humans from chimpanzees, a mere seven million years ago.All spiders make silk at some point in their life. Most spiders use copious amounts of silk, and silk is essential to their survival and reproduction. Even fossil spiders can make silk, as we can see from this impression of a spinneret on this fossil spider. So this means that both spiders and spider silk have been around for 380 million years. It doesn't take long from working with spiders to start noticing how essential silk is to just about every aspect of their life. Spiders use silk for many purposes, including the trailing safety dragline, wrapping eggs for reproduction, protective retreats and catching prey.There are many kinds of spider silk. For example, this garden spider can make seven different kinds of silks. When you look at this orb web, you're actually seeing many types of silk fibers. The frame and radii of this web is made up of one type of silk, while the capture spiral is a composite of two different silks: the filament and the sticky droplet. How does an individual spider make so many kinds of silk? To answer that, you have to look a lot closer at the spinneret region of a spider. So silk comes out of the spinnerets, and for those of us spider silk biologists, this is what we call the ""business end"" of the spider. (Laughter) We spend long days ... Hey! Don't laugh. That's my life. (Laughter) We spend long days and nights staring at this part of the spider. And this is what we see. You can see multiple fibers coming out of the spinnerets, because each spinneret has many spigots on it. Each of these silk fibers exits from the spigot, and if you were to trace the fiber back into the spider, what you would find is that each spigot connects to its own individual silk gland. A silk gland kind of looks like a sac with a lot of silk proteins stuck inside. So if you ever have the opportunity to dissect an orb-web-weaving spider, and I hope you do, what you would find is a bounty of beautiful, translucent silk glands.Inside each spider, there are hundreds of silk glands, sometimes thousands. These can be grouped into seven categories. They differ by size, shape, and sometimes even color. In an orb-web-weaving spider, you can find seven types of silk glands, and what I have depicted here in this picture, let's start at the one o'clock position, there's tubuliform silk glands, which are used to make the outer silk of an egg sac. There's the aggregate and flagelliform silk glands which combine to make the sticky capture spiral of an orb web. Pyriform silk glands make the attachment cement — that's the silk that's used to adhere silk lines to a substrate. There's also aciniform silk, which is used to wrap prey. Minor ampullate silk is used in web construction. And the most studied silk line of them all: major ampullate silk. This is the silk that's used to make the frame and radii of an orb web, and also the safety trailing dragline.But what, exactly, is spider silk? Spider silk is almost entirely protein. Nearly all of these proteins can be explained by a single gene family, so this means that the diversity of silk types we see today is encoded by one gene family, so presumably the original spider ancestor made one kind of silk, and over the last 380 million years, that one silk gene has duplicated and then diverged, specialized, over and over and over again, to get the large variety of flavors of spider silks that we have today. There are several features that all these silks have in common. They all have a common design, such as they're all very long — they're sort of outlandishly long compared to other proteins. They're very repetitive, and they're very rich in the amino acids glycine and alanine. To give you an idea of what a spider silk protein looks like, this is a dragline silk protein, it's just a portion of it, from the black widow spider. This is the kind of sequence that I love looking at day and night. (Laughter)So what you're seeing here is the one letter abbreviation for amino acids, and I've colored in the glycines with green, and the alanines in red, and so you can see it's just a lot of G's and A's. You can also see that there's a lot of short sequence motifs that repeat over and over and over again, so for example there's a lot of what we call polyalanines, or iterated A's, AAAAA. There's GGQ. There's GGY. You can think of these short motifs that repeat over and over again as words, and these words occur in sentences. So for example this would be one sentence, and you would get this sort of green region and the red polyalanine, that repeats over and over and over again, and you can have that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times within an individual silk molecule.Silks made by the same spider can have dramatically different repeat sequences. At the top of the screen, you're seeing the repeat unit from the dragline silk of a garden argiope spider. It's short. And on the bottom, this is the repeat sequence for the egg case, or tubuliform silk protein, for the exact same spider. And you can see how dramatically different these silk proteins are — so this is sort of the beauty of the diversification of the spider silk gene family. You can see that the repeat units differ in length. They also differ in sequence. So I've colored in the glycines again in green, alanine in red, and the serines, the letter S, in purple. And you can see that the top repeat unit can be explained almost entirely by green and red, and the bottom repeat unit has a substantial amount of purple. What silk biologists do is we try to relate these sequences, these amino acid sequences, to the mechanical properties of the silk fibers.Now, it's really convenient that spiders use their silk completely outside their body. This makes testing spider silk really, really easy to do in the laboratory, because we're actually, you know, testing it in air that's exactly the environment that spiders are using their silk proteins. So this makes quantifying silk properties by methods such as tensile testing, which is basically, you know, tugging on one end of the fiber, very amenable. Here are stress-strain curves generated by tensile testing five fibers made by the same spider. So what you can see here is that the five fibers have different behaviors. Specifically, if you look on the vertical axis, that's stress. If you look at the maximum stress value for each of these fibers, you can see that there's a lot of variation, and in fact dragline, or major ampullate silk, is the strongest of these fibers. We think that's because the dragline silk, which is used to make the frame and radii for a web, needs to be very strong.On the other hand, if you were to look at strain — this is how much a fiber can be extended — if you look at the maximum value here, again, there's a lot of variation and the clear winner is flagelliform, or the capture spiral filament. In fact, this flagelliform fiber can actually stretch over twice its original length. So silk fibers vary in their strength and also their extensibility. In the case of the capture spiral, it needs to be so stretchy to absorb the impact of flying prey. If it wasn't able to stretch so much, then basically when an insect hit the web, it would just trampoline right off of it. So if the web was made entirely out of dragline silk, an insect is very likely to just bounce right off. But by having really, really stretchy capture spiral silk, the web is actually able to absorb the impact of that intercepted prey.There's quite a bit of variation within the fibers that an individual spider can make. We call that the tool kit of a spider. That's what the spider has to interact with their environment. But how about variation among spider species, so looking at one type of silk and looking at different species of spiders? This is an area that's largely unexplored but here's a little bit of data I can show you. This is the comparison of the toughness of the dragline spilk spun by 21 species of spiders. Some of them are orb-weaving spiders and some of them are non-orb-weaving spiders. It's been hypothesized that orb-weaving spiders, like this argiope here, should have the toughest dragline silks because they must intercept flying prey. What you see here on this toughness graph is the higher the black dot is on the graph, the higher the toughness.The 21 species are indicated here by this phylogeny, this evolutionary tree, that shows their genetic relationships, and I've colored in yellow the orb-web-weaving spiders. If you look right here at the two red arrows, they point to the toughness values for the draglines of nephila clavipes and araneus diadematus. These are the two species of spiders for which the vast majority of time and money on synthetic spider silk research has been to replicate their dragline silk proteins. Yet, their draglines are not the toughest. In fact, the toughest dragline in this survey is this one right here in this white region, a non orb-web-weaving spider. This is the dragline spun by scytodes, the spitting spider. Scytodes doesn't use a web at all to catch prey. Instead, scytodes sort of lurks around and waits for prey to get close to it, and then immobilizes prey by spraying a silk-like venom onto that insect. Think of hunting with silly string. That's how scytodes forages. We don't really know why scytodes needs such a tough dragline, but it's unexpected results like this that make bio-prospecting so exciting and worthwhile. It frees us from the constraints of our imagination.Now I'm going to mark on the toughness values for nylon fiber, bombyx — or domesticated silkworm silk — wool, Kevlar, and carbon fibers. And what you can see is that nearly all the spider draglines surpass them. It's the combination of strength, extensibility and toughness that makes spider silk so special, and that has attracted the attention of biomimeticists, so people that turn to nature to try to find new solutions. And the strength, extensibility and toughness of spider silks combined with the fact that silks do not elicit an immune response, have attracted a lot of interest in the use of spider silks in biomedical applications, for example, as a component of artificial tendons, for serving as guides to regrow nerves, and for scaffolds for tissue growth.Spider silks also have a lot of potential for their anti-ballistic capabilities. Silks could be incorporated into body and equipment armor that would be more lightweight and flexible than any armor available today. In addition to these biomimetic applications of spider silks, personally, I find studying spider silks just fascinating in and of itself. I love when I'm in the laboratory, a new spider silk sequence comes in. That's just the best. (Laughter) It's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that's why I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk. The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer. You'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man. To borrow from the writings of a spider named Charlotte, silk is terrific.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cheryl_hayashi_the_magnificence_of_spider_silk
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"Over the last 13 years — one, three, 13 years — I've been part of an exceptional team at InSightec in Israel and partners around the world for taking this idea, this concept, noninvasive surgery, from the research lab to routine clinical use. And this is what I'll tell you about. 13 years — for some of you, you can empathize with that number. For me, today, on this date, it's like a second bar mitzvah experience.(Laughter)So this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies. One is the focused ultrasound, and the other one is the vision-enabled magnetic resonance imaging. So let's first talk about focused ultrasound. And I hold in my hand a tissue-mimicking phantom. It is made out of silicon. It is transparent, made just for you. So you see, it's all intact, completely transparent. I'll take you now to the acoustic lab. You see the phantom within the aquarium. This is a setup I put in a physics lab. On the right-hand side, you see an ultrasonic transducer. So the ultrasonic transducer emits basically an ultrasonic beam that focuses inside the phantom. Okay, when you hear the click, this is when the energy starts to emit and you see a little lesion form inside the phantom. Okay, so everything around it is whole and intact. It's just a lesion formed inside. So think about, this is in your brain. We need to reach a target inside the brain. We can do it without harming any tissue. So this is, I think, the first kosher Hippocratic surgical system.(Laughter)Okay, so let's talk a little bit about ultrasound, the force of ultrasound. You know all about imaging, right, ultrasound imaging. And you know also about lithotripsy — breaking kidney stones. But ultrasound can be shaped to be anything in between, because it's a mechanical force. Basically, it's a force acting on a tissue that it transverses. So you can change the intensity, the frequency, the duration, the pulse shape of the ultrasound to create anything from an airbrush to a hammer. And I am going to show you multiple applications in the medical field that can be enabled just by focusing, physically focusing.So this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all. When I was born, this idea was already conceived by pioneers such as the Fry brothers and Lars Leksell, who is know actually as the inventor of the gammaknife. But you may not know that he tried to perform lobotomies in the brain, noninvasively, with focused ultrasound in the '50s. He failed, so he then invented the gammaknife. And it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed. And there was something fundamental that they were missing. They were missing the vision. It wasn't until the invention of the MR and really the integration of MR with focused ultrasound that we could get the feedback — both the anatomical and the physiological in order to have a completely noninvasive, closed-loop surgical procedure.So this is how it looks, you know, the operating room of the future today. This is an MR suite with a focused ultrasound system. And I will give you several examples. So the first one is in the brain. One of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders, like Parkinson's or essential tremor. What is typical to those conditions, to essential tremor for example, is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you, or write legibly so people can understand it, and be really independent in your life without the help of others.So I'd like you to meet John. John is a retired professor of history from Virginia. So he suffered from essential tremor for many years. And medication didn't help him anymore. And many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain. And about four or five months ago, he underwent an experimental procedure. It is approved under an FDAIDE at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville using focused ultrasound to ablate a point in his thalamus. And this is his handwriting. ""On June 20th,"" if you can read it, ""2011."" This is his handwriting on the morning of the treatment before going into the MR So now I'll take you through [what] a typical procedure like that looks like, [what] noninvasive surgery looks like.So we put the patient on the MR table. We attach a transducer, in this case, to the brain, but if it will be a different organ, it will be a different transducer attached to the patient. And the physician will then take a regular MR scan. And the objective of that? I don't have a pointer here, but you see the green, sort of rectangle or trapezoid? This is the sort of general area of the treatment. It's a safety boundary around the target. It's a target in the thalamus. So once those pictures are acquired and the physician has drawn all the necessary safety limits and so on, he selects basically a point — you see the round point in the middle where the cursor is — and he presses this blue button called ""sonicate."" We call this instance of injecting the energy, we call it sonication. The only handwork the physician does here is moving a mouse. This is the only device he needs in this treatment.So he presses ""sonicate,"" and this is what happens. You see the transducer, the light blue. There's water in between the skull and the transducer. And it does this burst of energy. It elevates the temperature. We first need to verify that we are on target. So the first sonication is at lower energy. It doesn't do any damage, but it elevates the temperature by a few degrees. And one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the MR is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively. This is really a unique capability of the MR. It is not being used in regular diagnostic imaging. But here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time. And you can see the points there on the graph. The temperature was raised to 43 degrees C temporarily. This doesn't cause any damage. But the point is we are right on target. So once the physician verifies that the focus spot is on the target he has chosen, then we move to perform a full-energy ablation like you see here. And you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees C. If you do it for more than a second, it's enough to basically destroy the proteins of the cells.This is the outcome from a patient perspective — same day after the treatment. This is an immediate relief. (Applause) Thank you. John is one of [about] a dozen very heroic, courageous people who volunteered for the study. And you have to understand what is in people's mind when they are willing to take the risk. And this is a quote from John after he wrote it. He said, ""Miraculous."" And his wife said, ""This is the happiest moment of my life."" And you wonder why. I mean, one of the messages I like to carry over is, what about defending quality of life? I mean, those people lose their independence. They are dependent on others. And John today is fully independent. He returned to a normal life routine. And he also plays golf, like you do in Virginia when you are retired. Okay, so you can see here the spot. It's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain. There's no damage outside. He suffers from no neurodeficit. There's no recovery needed, no nothing. He's back to his normal life.Let's move now to a more painful subject. Pain is something that can make your life miserable. And people are suffering from all kinds of pain like neuropathic pain, lower-back pain and cancer pain from bone metastases, when the metastases get to your bones, sometimes they are very painful. All those I've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain, again, very fast. And I would like to tell you about PJ. He's a 78 year-old farmer who suffered from — how should I say it? — it's called pain in the butt. He had metastases in his right buttock, and he couldn't sit even with medication. He had to forgo all the farm activities. He was treated with radiation therapy, state-of-the-art radiation therapy, but it didn't help. Many patients like that favor radiation therapy.And again, he volunteered to a pivotal study that we ran worldwide, also in the U.S. And his wife actually took him. They drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital. He had to sit on a cushion, stand still, not move, because it was very painful. He took the treatment, and on the way back, he drove the truck by himself. So again, this is an immediate relief. And you have to understand what those people feel and what their family experiences when it happens. He returned again to his daily routine on the farm. He rides his tractor. He rides his horse to their mountain cabin regularly. And he has been very happy.But now, you ask me, but what about war, the war on cancer? Show us some primary cancer. What can be done there? So I have good news and bad news. The good news: there's a lot that can be done. And it has been shown actually outside of the U.S. And doing that in the U.S. is very painful. I don't see, without this nation taking it as some collective will or something that is a national goal to make that happen, it will not happen. And it's not just because of regulation; it's because of the amount of money needed under the current evidence-based medicine and the size of trials and so on to make it happen.So the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer. They were the first to be treated by focused ultrasound. And we have better-than-surgery results in breasts. But I have a message for the men here. We heard here yesterday Quyen talking about the adverse event trait in prostate cancer. There is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by MR, because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy — treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland, and by that, avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence. Well, there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen — quite lethal, very lethal actually — pancreas, liver, kidney. The challenge there with a breathing and awake patient — and in all our treatments, the patient is awake and conscious and speaks with the physician — is you have to teach the MR some tricks how to do it in real time. And this will take time. This will take two years.But I have now a message to the ladies. And this is, in 2004, the FDA has approved MR-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids. Women suffer from that disease. All those tumors have heavy bleeding during periods, abdominal pressure, back pain, frequent urination. And sometimes, they cannot even conceive and become pregnant because of the fibroid. This is Frances. She was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized fibroid. This is a big fibroid. She was offered a hysterectomy, but this is an inconceivable proposition for someone who wants to keep her pregnancy option. So she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008. And in 2010, she became a first-time mother to a healthy baby. So new life was born.(Applause)So in conclusion, I'd like to leave you with actually four messages. One is, think about the amount of suffering that is saved from patients undergoing noninvasive surgery, and also the economical and emotional burden removed from their families and communities and the society at large — and I think also from their physicians, by the way. And the other thing I would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table [who] is awake and can even monitor the treatment. In all our treatments, the patient holds a stop sonication button. He can stop the surgery at any moment.And with that note, I would like to thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yoav_medan_ultrasound_surgery_healing_without_cuts
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"Okay, I have no idea what we're going to play. I won't be able to tell you what it is until it happens. I didn't realize there was going to be a little music before. So I think I'm going to start with what I just heard.(Music)(Applause)Okay, so first of all, let's welcome Mr. Jamire Williams on the drums, (Applause) Burniss Travis on the bass, (Applause) and Mr. Christian Sands on the piano.(Applause)So the bandstand, as we call it, this is an incredible space. It is really a sacred space. And one of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future, or the past. You really are alive right here in this moment. There are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand. We had no idea what key we were going to play in. In the middle, we sort of made our way into a song called ""Titi Boom."" But that could have happened — maybe, maybe not. Everyone's listening. We're responding. You have no time for projected ideas.So the idea of a mistake: From the perspective of a jazz musician, it's easier to talk about someone else's mistake. So the way I perceive a mistake when I'm on the bandstand — first of all, we don't really see it as a mistake. The only mistake lies in that I'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did. Every ""mistake"" is an opportunity in jazz. So it's hard to even describe what a funny note would be.So for example, if I played a color, like we were playing on a palette, that sounded like this ... (Music) So if Christian played a note — like play an F. (Music) See, these are all right inside of the color palette. If you played an E. See, these all lie right inside of this general emotional palette that we were painting. If you played an F# though, (Dissonance) to most people's ears, they would perceive that as a mistake.So I'm going to show you, we're going to play just for a second. And we're going to play on this palette. And at some point, Christian will introduce this note. And we won't react to it. He'll introduce it for a second and then I'll stop, I'll talk for a second. We'll see what happens when we play with this palette.(Music)So someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake. The only way that I would say it was a mistake is in that we didn't react to it. It was an opportunity that was missed. So it's unpredictable. We'll paint this palette again. He'll play it. I don't know how we'll react to it, but something will change. We'll all accept his ideas, or not.(Music)So you see, he played this note. I ended up creating a melody out of it. The texture changed in the drums this time. It got a little bit more rhythmic, a little bit more intense in response to how I responded to it. So there is no mistake. The only mistake is if I'm not aware, if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we don't allow for creativity.So jazz, this bandstand is absolutely amazing. It's a very purifying experience. And I know that I speak for all of us when I tell you that we don't take it for granted. We know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing. So how does this all relate to behavioral finance? Well we're jazz musicians, so stereotypically we don't have a great relationship to finance.(Laughter)Anyway, I just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it. And the other dynamic of it is that we don't micromanage in jazz. You have some people who do. But what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities. If I come up and I dictate to the band that I want to play like this and I want the music to go this way, and I just jump right in ... ready, just play some time. One, two, one, two, three, four. (Music) It's kind of chaotic because I'm bullying my ideas. I'm telling them, ""You come with me over this way.""If I really want the music to go there, the best way for me to do it is to listen. This is a science of listening. It has far more to do with what I can perceive than what it is that I can do. So if I want the music to get to a certain level of intensity, the first step for me is to be patient, to listen to what's going on and pull from something that's going on around me. When you do that, you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more, and gradually it builds. Watch. One, two, a one, two, three, four.(Music)Totally different experience when I'm pulling ideas. It's much more organic. It's much more nuanced. It's not about bullying my vision or anything like that. It's about being here in the moment, accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand
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"My travels to Afghanistan began many, many years ago on the eastern border of my country, my homeland, Poland. I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales. A land where every field hides a grave, where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century.Behind the destruction, I found a soul of places. I met humble people. I heard their prayer and ate their bread. Then I have been walking East for 20 years — from Eastern Europe to Central Asia — through the Caucasus Mountains, Middle East, North Africa, Russia. And I ever met more humble people. And I shared their bread and their prayer. This is why I went to Afghanistan.One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River. I was alone on foot. And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport. But he gave me a cup of tea. And I understood that his surprise was my protection.So I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran's border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor. And in this way I could find noor, the hidden light of Afghanistan. My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica. I heard prayers of the Sufi — humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban. Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India. The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears, and welcomed as a gift.What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect, about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium? These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war. These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen.What do we know about the women 10 years after the war? Clothed in this nylon bag, made in China, with the name of burqa. I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school. 13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions. And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried.What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh? The region is not secure, but full of the Taliban, and they did it.My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/monika_bulaj_the_hidden_light_of_afghanistan
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"I want to talk to you about one of the biggest myths in medicine, and that is the idea that all we need are more medical breakthroughs and then all of our problems will be solved. Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything's changed. That's a very appealing picture, however, it's just not true. In fact, medicine today is a team sport. And in many ways, it always has been. I'd like to share with you a story about how I've experienced this very dramatically in my own work.I'm a surgeon, and we surgeons have always had this special relationship with light. When I make an incision inside a patient's body, it's dark. We need to shine light to see what we're doing. And this is why, traditionally, surgeries have always started so early in the morning — to take advantage of daylight hours. And if you look at historical pictures of the early operating rooms, they have been on top of buildings. For example, this is the oldest operating room in the Western world, in London, where the operating room is actually on top of a church with a skylight coming in. And then this is a picture of one of the most famous hospitals in America. This is Mass General in Boston. And do you know where the operating room is? Here it is on the top of the building with plenty of windows to let light in.So nowadays in the operating room, we no longer need to use sunlight. And because we no longer need to use sunlight, we have very specialized lights that are made for the operating room. We have an opportunity to bring in other kinds of lights — lights that can allow us to see what we currently don't see. And this is what I think is the magic of fluorescence.So let me back up a little bit. When we are in medical school, we learn our anatomy from illustrations such as this where everything's color-coded. Nerves are yellow, arteries are red, veins are blue. That's so easy anybody could become a surgeon, right? However, when we have a real patient on the table, this is the same neck dissection — not so easy to tell the difference between different structures. We heard over the last couple days what an urgent problem cancer still is in our society, what a pressing need it is for us to not have one person die every minute. Well if cancer can be caught early, enough such that someone can have their cancer taken out, excised with surgery, I don't care if it has this gene or that gene, or if it has this protein or that protein, it's in the jar. It's done, it's out, you're cured of cancer.This is how we excise cancers. We do our best, based upon our training and the way the cancer looks and the way it feels and its relationship to other structures and all of our experience, we say, you know what, the cancer's gone. We've made a good job. We've taken it out. That's what the surgeon is saying in the operating room when the patient's on the table. But then we actually don't know that it's all out. We actually have to take samples from the surgical bed, what's left behind in the patient, and then send those bits to the pathology lab. In the meanwhile, the patient's on the operating room table. The nurses, anesthesiologist, the surgeon, all the assistants are waiting around. And we wait. The pathologist takes that sample, freezes it, cuts it, looks in the microscope one by one and then calls back into the room. And that may be 20 minutes later per piece. So if you've sent three specimens, it's an hour later. And very often they say, ""You know what, points A and B are okay, but point C, you still have some residual cancer there. Please go cut that piece out."" So we go back and we do that again, and again.And this whole process: ""Okay you're done. We think the entire tumor is out."" But very often several days later, the patient's gone home, we get a phone call: ""I'm sorry, once we looked at the final pathology, once we looked at the final specimen, we actually found that there's a couple other spots where the margins are positive. There's still cancer in your patient."" So now you're faced with telling your patient, first of all, that they may need another surgery, or that they need additional therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy. So wouldn't it be better if we could really tell, if the surgeon could really tell, whether or not there's still cancer on the surgical field? I mean, in many ways, the way that we're doing it, we're still operating in the dark.So in 2004, during my surgical residency, I had the great fortune to meet Dr. Roger Tsien, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2008. Roger and his team were working on a way to detect cancer, and they had a very clever molecule that they had come up with. The molecule they had developed had three parts. The main part of it is the blue part, polycation, and it's basically very sticky to every tissue in your body.So imagine that you make a solution full of this sticky material and inject it into the veins of someone who has cancer, everything's going to get lit up. Nothing will be specific. There's no specificity there. So they added two additional components. The first one is a polyanionic segment, which basically acts as a non-stick backing like the back of a sticker. So when those two are together, the molecule is neutral and nothing gets stuck down. And the two pieces are then linked by something that can only be cut if you have the right molecular scissors — for example, the kind of protease enzymes that tumors make. So here in this situation, if you make a solution full of this three-part molecule along with the dye, which is shown in green, and you inject it into the vein of someone who has cancer, normal tissue can't cut it. The molecule passes through and gets excreted. However, in the presence of the tumor, now there are molecular scissors that can break this molecule apart right there at the cleavable site. And now, boom, the tumor labels itself and it gets fluorescent.So here's an example of a nerve that has tumor surrounding it. Can you tell where the tumor is? I couldn't when I was working on this. But here it is. It's fluorescent. Now it's green. See, so every single one in the audience now can tell where the cancer is. We can tell in the operating room, in the field, at a molecular level, where is the cancer and what the surgeon needs to do and how much more work they need to do to cut that out. And the cool thing about fluorescence is that it's not only bright, it actually can shine through tissue. The light that the fluorescence emits can go through tissue. So even if the tumor is not right on the surface, you'll still be able to see it.In this movie, you can see that the tumor is green. There's actually normal muscle on top of it. See that? And I'm peeling that muscle away. But even before I peel that muscle away, you saw that there was a tumor underneath. So that's the beauty of having a tumor that's labeled with fluorescent molecules. That you can, not only see the margins right there on a molecular level, but you can see it even if it's not right on the top — even if it's beyond your field of view. And this works for metastatic lymph nodes also.Sentinel lymph node dissection has really changed the way that we manage breast cancer, melanoma. Women used to get really debilitating surgeries to excise all of the axillary lymph nodes. But when sentinel lymph node came into our treatment protocol, the surgeon basically looks for the single node that is the first draining lymph node of the cancer. And then if that node has cancer, the woman would go on to get the axillary lymph node dissection. So what that means is if the lymph node did not have cancer, the woman would be saved from having unnecessary surgery.But sentinel lymph node, the way that we do it today, is kind of like having a road map just to know where to go. So if you're driving on the freeway and you want to know where's the next gas station, you have a map to tell you that that gas station is down the road. It doesn't tell you whether or not the gas station has gas. You have to cut it out, bring it back home, cut it up, look inside and say, ""Oh yes, it does have gas."" So that takes more time. Patients are still on the operating room table. Anesthesiologists, surgeons are waiting around. That takes time.So with our technology, we can tell right away. You see a lot of little, roundish bumps there. Some of these are swollen lymph nodes that look a little larger than others. Who amongst us hasn't had swollen lymph nodes with a cold? That doesn't mean that there's cancer inside. Well with our technology, the surgeon is able to tell immediately which nodes have cancer. I won't go into this very much, but our technology, besides being able to tag tumor and metastatic lymph nodes with fluorescence, we can also use the same smart three-part molecule to tag gadolinium onto the system so you can do this noninvasively. The patient has cancer, you want to know if the lymph nodes have cancer even before you go in. Well you can see this on an MRI.So in surgery, it's important to know what to cut out. But equally important is to preserve things that are important for function. So it's very important to avoid inadvertent injury. And what I'm talking about are nerves. Nerves, if they are injured, can cause paralysis, can cause pain. In the setting of prostate cancer, up to 60 percent of men after prostate cancer surgery may have urinary incontinence and erectile disfunction. That's a lot of people to have a lot of problems — and this is even in so-called nerve-sparing surgery, which means that the surgeon is aware of the problem, and they are trying to avoid the nerves.But you know what, these little nerves are so small, in the context of prostate cancer, that they are actually never seen. They are traced just by their known anatomical path along vasculature. And they're known because somebody has decided to study them, which means that we're still learning about where they are. Crazy to think that we're having surgery, we're trying to excise cancer, we don't know where the cancer is. We're trying to preserve nerves; we can't see where they are.So I said, wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to see nerves with fluorescence? And at first this didn't get a lot of support. People said, ""We've been doing it this way for all these years. What's the problem? We haven't had that many complications."" But I went ahead anyway. And Roger helped me. And he brought his whole team with him. So there's that teamwork thing again. And we eventually discovered molecules that were specifically labeling nerves. And when we made a solution of this, tagged with the fluorescence and injected in the body of a mouse, their nerves literally glowed. You can see where they are.Here you're looking at a sciatic nerve of a mouse, and you can see that that big, fat portion you can see very easily. But in fact, at the tip of that where I'm dissecting now, there's actually very fine arborizations that can't really be seen. You see what looks like little Medusa heads coming out. We have been able to see nerves for facial expression, for facial movement, for breathing — every single nerve — nerves for urinary function around the prostate. We've been able to see every single nerve. When we put these two probes together ... So here's a tumor. Do you guys know where the margins of this tumor is? Now you do. What about the nerve that's going into this tumor? That white portion there is easy to see. But what about the part that goes into the tumor? Do you know where it's going? Now you do.Basically, we've come up with a way to stain tissue and color-code the surgical field. This was a bit of a breakthrough. I think that it'll change the way that we do surgery. We published our results in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Nature Biotechnology. We received commentary in Discover magazine, in The Economist. And we showed it to a lot of my surgical colleagues. They said, ""Wow! I have patients who would benefit from this. I think that this will result in my surgeries with a better outcome and fewer complications.""What needs to happen now is further development of our technology along with development of the instrumentation that allows us to see this sort of fluorescence in the operating room. The eventual goal is that we'll get this into patients. However, we've discovered that there's actually no straightforward mechanism to develop a molecule for one-time use. Understandably, the majority of the medical industry is focused on multiple-use drugs, such as long-term daily medications. We are focused on making this technology better. We're focused on adding drugs, adding growth factors, killing nerves that are causing problems and not the surrounding tissue. We know that this can be done and we're committed to doing it.I'd like to leave you with this final thought. Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough. It is not a sprint. It is not an event for the solo runner. Successful innovation is a team sport, it's a relay race. It requires one team for the breakthrough and another team to get the breakthrough accepted and adopted. And this takes the long-term steady courage of the day-in day-out struggle to educate, to persuade and to win acceptance. And that is the light that I want to shine on health and medicine today.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/quyen_nguyen_color_coded_surgery
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"I'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature. The bad news is that mother nature's back office isn't working yet, so those invoices don't get issued. But we need to do something about this problem. I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest, but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature, and which doesn't get priced by the markets.A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8+5. And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern. They asked themselves a question: If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change, well why can't the same be done for conservation? Why can't an equivalent case be made for nature? And the answer is: Yeah, it can. But it's not that straightforward. Biodiversity, the living fabric of this planet, is not a gas. It exists in many layers, ecosystems, species and genes across many scales — international, national, local, community — and doing for nature what Lord Stern and his team did for nature is not that easy.And yet, we began. We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers. And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that, in fact, we were losing natural capital — the benefits that flow from nature to us. We were losing it at an extraordinary rate — in fact, of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital. This came out in 2008, which was, of course, around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars. So this was comparable in size to that kind of loss. We then have gone on since to present for [the] international community, for governments, for local governments and for business and for people, for you and me, a whole slew of reports, which were presented at the U.N. last year, which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it.What is this about? A picture that you're familiar with — the Amazon rainforests. It's a massive store of carbon, it's an amazing store of biodiversity, but what people don't really know is this also is a rain factory. Because the northeastern trade winds, as they go over the Amazonas, effectively gather the water vapor. Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin. This rainfall cycle, this rainfall factory, effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America. But the question arises: Okay, so how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas, which produces that rainfall? And the answer is zilch, exactly zero. That's the economic invisibility of nature. That can't keep going on, because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful. Economics has become the currency of policy. And unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results that we are seeing, which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset.It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests. No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again. So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level. At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth. That's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally. It completely passes below the radar screen. But when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice? Or for that matter, if you look at the genetic level, 60 percent of medicines were prospected, were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef. Once again, most of that doesn't get paid.And that brings me to another aspect of this, which is, to whom should this get paid? That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule, which then became the medicine. They were the ones that didn't get paid. And if you look at the species level, you saw about fish. Today, the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor, the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods, to feed their families. Something like a billion people depend on fish, the quantity of fish in the oceans. A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein. And at this rate at which we are losing fish, it is a human problem of enormous dimensions, a health problem of a kind we haven't seen before. And finally, at the ecosystem level, whether it's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests, or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats, or whether it's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest, it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services.We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, even though ecosystem services — these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free — they're not very big in percentage terms of GDP — two, four, eight, 10, 15 percent — but in these countries, if we measure how much they're worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent. That's the difference. Because these are important benefits for the poor. And you can't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset, the most important asset, which is your development asset, that is ecological infrastructure.How bad can things get? Well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance. It's basically a measure of how many tigers, toads, ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around. The green represents the percentage. If you start green, it's like 80 to 100 percent. If it's yellow, it's 40 to 60 percent. And these are percentages versus the original state, so to speak, the pre-industrial era, 1750.Now I'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this. And just watch the change in colors in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us. See that again. The only places that remain green — and that's not good news — is, in fact, places like the Gobi Desert, like the tundra and like the Sahara. But that doesn't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place. This is the challenge. The reason this is happening boils down, in my mind, to one basic problem, which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits. We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth, it's common goods.And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much — it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured — compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms. But of course, if you look at exactly what those profits are, almost 8,000 of those dollars are, in fact, subsidies. So you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it's more like 1,200 to 600. That's not that hard.But on the other hand, if you start measuring, how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use? Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects, that answer is more like $12,000 of cost. And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries, the fish nurseries, that provide fish for the poor, that answer is more like $11,000. So now look at the different lens. If you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits, you get a completely different answer, which is clearly conservation makes more sense, and not destruction.So is this just a story from South Thailand? Sorry, this is a global story. And here's what the same calculation looks like, which was done recently — well I say recently, over the last 10 years — by a group called TRUCOST. And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations, what are the externalities? In other words, what are the costs of doing business as usual? This is not illegal stuff, this is basically business as usual, which causes climate-changing emissions, which have an economic cost. It causes pollutants being issued, which have an economic cost, health cost and so on. Use of freshwater. If you drill water to make coke near a village farm, that's not illegal, but yes, it costs the community.Can we stop this, and how? I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital. Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, and we need to recognize and build that into our systems. When we measure GDP as a measure of economic performance at the national level, we don't include our biggest asset at the country level. When we measure corporate performances, we don't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society. That has to stop. In fact, this was what really inspired my interest in this phase. I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project. That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward — looking at China with its stellar growths of eight, nine, 10 percent and wondering, why can we do the same? And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn't make sense. This is going to create more cost to society and more losses. So we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for India and its states. That's how my interests began and went to the TEEB project. Calculating this at the national level is one thing, and it has begun. And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES — Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services.But calculating this at the next level, that means at the business sector level, is important. And actually we've done this with the TEEB project. We've done this for a very difficult case, which was for deforestation in China. This is important, because in China in 1997, the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society. Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths. So clearly there was a problem with deforestation. It was associated largely with the construction industry.And the Chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling. A retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs — the cost of loss of topsoil, the cost of loss of waterways, the lost productivity, the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors, desertification and so on — those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber. So in fact, the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China. Of course, after the event one can be wise.The way to do this is to do it on a company basis, to take leadership forward, and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost, and to disclose these answers. Someone once asked me, ""Who is better or worse, is it Unilever or is it P&G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia?"" And I couldn't answer because neither of these companies, good though they are and professional though they are, do not calculate or disclose their externalities.But if we look at companies like PUMA — Jochen Zeitz, their CEO and chairman, once challenged me at a function, saying that he's going to implement my project before I finish it. Well I think we kind of did it at the same time, but he's done it. He's basically worked the cost to PUMA. PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover, 300 million dollars of profits, 200 million dollars after tax, 94 million dollars of externalities, cost to business. Now that's not a happy situation for them, but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say, ""Here's what we are measuring. We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure.""That's an example, I think, for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from. If more companies did this, and if more sectors engaged this as sectors, you could have analysts, business analysts, and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies. Today we can't yet do that, but I think the path is laid out. This can be done. And I'm delighted that the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the U.K. has already set up a coalition to do this, an international coalition.The other favorite, if you like, solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets. And by the way, these are my favorites — externalities calculation and green carbon markets. TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it, but these are the favorites. What's green carbon? Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace. It's about energy emissions. The European Union ETS is the main marketplace. It's not doing too well. We've over-issued. A bit like inflation: you over-issue currency, you get what you see, declining prices. But that's all about energy and industry.But what we're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon, that is soot. What we're also missing is blue carbon, which, by the way, is the largest store of carbon — more than 55 percent. Thankfully, the flux, in other words, the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa, is more or less balanced. In fact, what's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions, which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans. More of that in a minute.And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture. Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions. We have the means already in our hands, through a structure, through a mechanism, called REDD Plus — a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme. So we actually have some movement forward. But the thing is to do a lot more of that.Will this solve the problem? Will economics solve everything? Well I'm afraid not. There is an area that is the oceans, coral reefs. As you can see, they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean. These red dots, these red areas, basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people. So that's almost an eighth of society. And the sad thing is that, as these coral reefs are lost — and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs — we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species, the warm water corals, we're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans, but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries.So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations, what we have done is we've made an ethical choice. We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs. Well what I will say to you in parting is that we may have done that. Let's think about it and what it means, but please, let's not do more of that. Because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital. I don't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pavan_sukhdev_what_s_the_price_of_nature
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"Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way. Homaro Cantu: And I'm Homaro. BR: And we're chefs. So when Moto opened in 2004, people didn't really know what to expect. A lot of people thought that it was a Japanese restaurant, and maybe it was the name, maybe it was the logo, which was like a Japanese character, but anyway, we had all these requests for Japanese food, which is really not what we did. And after about the ten thousandth request for a maki roll, we decided to give the people what they wanted. So this picture is an example of printed food, and this was the first foray into what we like to call flavor transformation. So this is all the ingredients, all the flavor of, you know, a standard maki roll, printed onto a little piece of paper.HC: So our diners started to get bored with this idea, and we decided to give them the same course twice, so here we actually took an element from the maki roll and and took a picture of a dish and then basically served that picture with the dish. So this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood. The champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter) BR: But it's not all just edible pictures. We decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar — so in this case, we have carrot cake. So we take a carrot cake, put it in a blender, and we have kind of like a carrot cake juice, and then that went into a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create this hollow shell of carrot cake ice cream, I guess, and it comes off looking like, you know, Jupiter's floating around your plate.So yeah, we're transforming things into something that you have absolutely no reference for. HC: And here's something we have no reference to eat. This is a cigar, and basically it's a Cuban cigar made out of a Cuban pork sandwich, so we take these spices that go into the pork shoulder, we fashion that into ash. We take the sandwich and wrap it up in a collard green, put an edible label that bears no similarity to a Cohiba cigar label, and we put it in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge you about twenty bucks for it. (Laughter) HC: Delicious.BR: That's not it, though. Instead of making foods that look like things that you wouldn't eat, we decided to make ingredients look like dishes that you know. So this is a plate of nachos. The difference between our nachos and the other guy's nachos, is that this is actually a dessert. So the chips are candied, the ground beef is made from chocolate, and the cheese is made from a shredded mango sorbet that gets shredded into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese. And after doing all of this dematerialization and reconfiguring of this, of these ingredients, we realized that it was pretty cool, because as we served it, we learned that the dish actually behaves like the real thing, where the cheese begins to melt. So when you're looking at this thing in the dining room, you have this sensation that this is actually a plate of nachos, and it's not really until you begin tasting it that you realize this is a dessert, and it's just kind of like a mind-ripper. (Laughter)HC: So we had been creating all of these dishes out of a kitchen that was more like a mechanic's shop than a kitchen, and the next logical step for us was to install a state-of-the-art laboratory, and that's what we have here. So we put this in the basement, and we got really serious about food, like serious experimentation. BR: One of the really cool things about the lab, besides that we have a new science lab in the kitchen, is that, you know, with this new equipment, and this new approach, all these different doors to creativity that we never knew were there began to open, and so the experiments and the food and the dishes that we created, they just kept going further and further out there.HC: Let's talk about flavor transformation, and let's actually make some cool stuff. You see a cow with its tongue hanging out. What I see is a cow about to eat something delicious. What is that cow eating? And why is it delicious? So the cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that? And basically the reaction tends to be kind of like this. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, that's our chef de cuisine, Chris Jones. This is not the only guy that just flips out when we assign a ridiculous task, but a lot of these ideas, they're hard to understand. They're hard to just get automatically.There's a lot of research and a lot of failure, trial and error — I guess, more error — that goes into each and every dish, so we don't always get it right, and it takes a while for us to be able to explain that to people. HC: So, after about a day of Chris and I staring at each other, we came up with something that was pretty close to the hamburger patty, and as you can see it basically forms like hamburger meat. This is made from three ingredients: beets, barley, corn, and so it actually cooks up like hamburger meat, looks and tastes like hamburger meat, and not only that, but it's basically removing the cow from the equation. So replicating food, taking it into that next level is where we're going. (Applause)BR: And it's definitely the world's first bleeding veggie burger, which is a cool side effect. And a miracle berry, if you're not familiar with it, is a natural ingredient, and it contains a special property. It's a glycoprotein called miraculin, a naturally occurring thing. It still freaks me out every time I eat it, but it has a unique ability to mask certain taste receptors on your tongue, so that primarily sour taste receptors, so normally things that would taste very sour or tart, somehow begin to taste very sweet. HC: You're about to eat a lemon, and now it tastes like lemonade. Let's just stop and think about the economic benefits of something like that. We could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas, and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit.BR: So you see us here cutting up some watermelon. The idea with this is that we're going to eliminate tons of food miles, wasted energy, and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna, or any exotic produce or item from a very far-away place, with local, organic produce; so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin. HC: So if miracle berries take sour things and turn them into sweet things, we have this other pixie dust that we put on the watermelon, and it makes it go from sweet to savory. So after we do that, we put it into a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed, some spices, and we roll it, and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna. So the key now is to make it behave like tuna. BR: And then after a quick dip into some liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear, we really have something that looks, tastes and behaves like the real thing.HC: So the key thing to remember here is, we don't really care what this tuna really is. As long as it's good for you and good for the environment, it doesn't matter. But where is this going? How can we take this idea of tricking your tastebuds and leapfrog it into something that we can do today that could be a disruptive food technology? So here's the next challenge. I told the staff, let's just take a bunch of wild plants, think of them as food ingredients. As long as they're non-poisonous to the human body, go out around Chicago sidewalks, take it, blend it, cook it and then have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto. Let's charge them a boatload of cash for this and see what they think. (Laughter)BR: Yeah, so you can imagine, a task like this — this is another one of those assignments that the kitchen staff hated us for. But we really had to almost relearn how to cook in general, because these are ingredients, you know, plant life that we're, one, unfamiliar with, and two, we have no reference for how to cook these things because people don't eat them. So we really had to think about new, creative ways to flavor, new ways to cook and to change texture — and that was the main issue with this challenge.HC: So this is where we step into the future and we leapfrog ahead. So developing nations and first-world nations, imagine if you could take these wild plants and consume them, food miles would basically turn into food feet. This disruptive mentality of what food is would essentially open up the encyclopedia of what raw ingredients are, even if we just swapped out, say, one of these for flour, that would eliminate so much energy and so much waste. And to give you a simple example here as to what we actually fed these customers, there's a bale of hay there and some crab apples. And basically we took hay and crab apples and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients. People swore they were eating barbecue sauce, and this is free food. BR: Thanks, guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/homaro_cantu_ben_roche_cooking_as_alchemy
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"I'm actually going to share something with you I haven't talked about probably in more than 10 years. So bear with me as I take you through this journey. When I was 22 years old, I came home from work, put a leash on my dog and went for my usual run. I had no idea that at that moment, my life was going to change forever. While I was preparing my dog for the run, a man was finishing drinking at a bar, picked up his car keys, got into a car and headed south, or wherever he was. I was running across the street, and the only thing that I actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head. And I remember putting my hands on the ground and feeling my life's blood emptying out of my neck and my mouth.What had happened is, he ran a red light and hit me and my dog. She ended up underneath the car. I flew out in front of the car, and then he ran over my legs. My left leg got caught up in the wheel well — spun it around. The bumper of the car hit my throat, slicing it open. I ended up with blunt chest trauma. Your aorta comes up behind your heart, it's your major artery — and it was severed, so my blood was gurgling out of my mouth. It foamed, and ... horrible things were happening to me. I had no idea what was going on, but strangers intervened, kept my heart moving, beating. I say ""moving,"" because it was quivering, and they were trying to put a beat back into it.Somebody was smart and put a Bic pen in my neck to open up my airway, so I could get some air in there. And my lung collapsed, so somebody cut me open and put a pen in there as well, to stop that catastrophic event from happening. Somehow I ended up at the hospital. I was wrapped in ice, and then eventually put into a drug-induced coma.Eighteen months later, I woke up. I was blind, I couldn't speak and I couldn't walk. I was 64 pounds. The hospital really has no idea what to do with people like that. And in fact, they started to call me a ""gomer."" That's another story we won't even get into. I had so many surgeries to put my neck back together, to repair my heart a few times.Some things worked, some things didn't. I had lots of titanium put in me; cadaver bones, to try to get my feet moving the right way. And I ended up with a plastic nose, porcelain teeth and all kinds of other things. But eventually, I started to look human again. But ... It's hard sometimes to talk about these things, so bear with me. I had more than 50 surgeries. But who's counting?(Laughter)So eventually, the hospital decided it was time for me to go. They needed to open up space for somebody else that they thought could come back from whatever they were going through. Everybody lost faith in me being able to recover. So they basically put a map up on the wall, threw a dart, and it landed at a senior home, here in Colorado. And I know all of you are scratching your head: ""A senior citizens' home? What in the world are you going to do there?"" But if you think about all of the skills and talent that are in this room right now, that's what a senior home has. So there were all these skills and talents that these seniors had. The one advantage they had over most of you is wisdom, because they had a long life. And I needed that wisdom at that moment in my life.But imagine what it was like for them when I showed up at their doorstep. At that point, I had gained four pounds, so I was 68 pounds. I was bald. I was wearing hospital scrubs. And somebody donated tennis shoes for me. And I had a white cane in one hand and a suitcase full of medical records in another hand. So the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting.(Laughter)So they pulled back and they were looking at each other, and they were going, ""OK, what skills do we have in this room? This kid needs a lot of work.""So they eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs. But one of the first things they needed to do was assess what I needed right away. I needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being, since I'd been eating through a tube in my chest and through my veins. So I had to go through trying to eat again. And they went through that process. And then they had to figure out: ""Well, she needs furniture. She is sleeping in the corner of this apartment."" So they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture — gave me pots and pans, blankets — everything.And then the next thing that I needed was a makeover.(Laughter)So out went the green scrubs, and in came the polyester and floral prints.(Laughter)We're not going to talk about the hairstyles they tried to force on me once my hair grew back. But I did say no to the blue hair.(Laughter)So eventually, what went on is, they decided that, well, I need to learn to speak. You can't be an independent person if you're not able to speak and you can't see. So they figured not being able to see is one thing, but they need to get me to talk. So while Sally, the office manager, was teaching me to speak in the day — it's hard, because when you're a kid, you take things for granted. You learn things unconsciously. But for me, I was an adult and it was embarrassing, and I had to learn how to coordinate my new throat with my tongue and my new teeth and my lips, and capture the air and get the word out. So, I acted like a two-year-old, and refused to work.But the men had a better idea. They were going to make it fun for me. So they were teaching me cuss-word Scrabble at night.(Laughter)And then, secretly, how to swear like a sailor.(Laughter)I'm going to just leave it to your imagination as to what my first words were —(Laughter)when Sally finally got my confidence built.(Laughter)So I moved on from there. And a former teacher who happened to have Alzheimer's took on the task of teaching me to write. The redundancy was actually good for me. So, we'll just keep moving on.(Laughter)One of the pivotal times for me was actually learning to cross the street again as a blind person. So close your eyes. Now imagine you have to cross a street. You don't know how far that street is, and you don't know if you're going straight. And you hear cars whizzing back and forth, and you had a horrible accident that landed you in this situation. So there were two obstacles I had to get through. One was post-traumatic stress disorder. Every time I approached the corner or the curb, I would panic. And the second one was actually trying to figure out how to cross that street.So one of the seniors just came up to me, and she pushed me up to the corner and said, ""When you think it's time to go, just stick the cane out there. If it's hit, don't cross the street.""(Laughter)Made perfect sense.(Laughter)But by the third cane that went whizzing across the road —(Laughter)they realized that they needed to put their resources together, and they raised funds so that I could go to the Braille Institute and actually gain the skills to be a blind person, and also to go get a guide dog, who transformed my life. And I was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me, and also the guide dog and skill set I had gained.Ten years later, I gained my sight back. Not magically — I opted in for three surgeries, and one of them was experimental. It was actually robotic surgery that removed a hematoma from behind my eye.The biggest change for me was that the world moved forward, that there were innovations and all kinds of new things — cellphones, laptops, all these things that I had never seen before. And as a blind person, your visual memory fades, and is replaced with how you feel about things and how things sound and how things smell.So one day, I was in my room and I saw this thing sitting in my room. I thought it was a monster, so I was walking around it. And I go, ""I'm just going to touch it."" And I touched it and I went, ""Oh my God, it's a laundry basket.""(Laughter)Everything is different when you're a sighted person, because you take that for granted. But when you're blind, you have the tactile memory for things.The biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that I'd lost 10 years of my life. I thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends. But when I looked down, I realized that time marched on for me, too, and that I needed to get caught up. So I got going on it.We didn't have words like ""crowdsourcing"" and ""radical collaboration"" when I had my accident. But the concept held true — people working with people to rebuild me; people working with people to reeducate me. I wouldn't be standing here today if it wasn't for extreme radical collaboration.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ramona_pierson_an_unexpected_place_of_healing
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"So, my name is Roger Doiron, and I have a subversive plot.(Laughter)(Applause)It is so subversive, in fact, that it has the potential to radically alter the balance of power, not only in our own country, but in the entire world. Now I realize, I'm sounding —(Laughter)a little bit like Dr. Evil now. I understand that. But trust me — we have very, very little in common. His plots are all about destruction and secrecy, whereas my plots are about creation and openness. In fact, my plot can only work if I share it with as many people as possible. So I'm going to share it with you now, but you have to promise me you're going to share it in turn.So here it is. Huh. That's not so good, is it? There's nothing particularly radical or revolutionary about a patch of grass. What starts to get interesting is when we turn it into this.Now, I would like to suggest to you all that gardening is a subversive activity.(Laughter)Think about this: food is a form of energy. It's what our body runs on, but it's also a form of power. And when we encourage people to grow some of their own food, we're encouraging them to take power into their hands, power over their diet, power over their health and some power over their pocketbooks. So I think that's quite subversive, because we're also necessarily talking about taking that power away from someone else, from other actors in society that currently have power over food and health. You can think about who those actors might be.I also look at gardening as a sort of healthy gateway drug, you might say, to other forms of food freedom. It's not long after you plant a garden that you start to say, ""Hey, I need to start to learn how to cook.""(Laughter)""You know, I might want to look into food preservation or I might want to look up where my local farmer's market is located in my town.""Now the other thing, of course, with planting a garden, especially a garden in front of a white house and on a sunny south lawn, is you never know who you might influence.(Laughter)Now, I'm not exactly sure what my white house garden's influence was on the First Lady's, but I can tell you this: she's had an enormous influence on me since planting hers. Now it hasn't been —(Laughter)it hasn't been in the area of fashion. I understand that she's just in a completely different league there, and I'm not even trying to compete. But she's really inspired me to think much more boldly about the role that I want to have in the garden movement.And so this is sort of what I'm aspiring to here.(Laughter)Now, pretty modest, right? I like this picture. I think it sort of captures me well, not that I have any divine connections whatsoever, but I like my facial expression there, because, if I've got a worried look on my face, it's not simply because I've got 20 pounds of squash over my head, but it's because I've got some pretty heavy topics on my mind. And I want to share some of those with you right now, starting off in the form of a very short video I've produced for you, which is my best effort to sum up the history of gastronomy in about 15 seconds.(""Also sprach Zarathustra"" plays)(Laughter)So, here we are.(Applause)Now, that's a funny little clip, but it'd be even funnier if it weren't so tragic and if it weren't so true.The reality is that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic, and it's not simply limited to our country. It's spreading around the world right now. And in a sort of parallel universe, we're also seeing that hunger is on the rise. Over 900 million people right now are affected by it. That's three times the population of the United States. But at the same time, world food prices are rising and world population is rising and is set to reach 10 billion people by the end of the century.Now, another thing about the population is we know that it's increasing, but a lot of us don't realize that it's also changing. There's a fundamental shift taking place. As of 2007, we went from being a primarily rural planet to being a primarily urban one, and that has implications for how we're going to feed these people, how we're going to get the food to the people in the cities. Now, I imagine that there are some Stephen King fans in the audience here, and I'm one of them. But I can tell you, I haven't read anything scarier than this here, and that's this statistic: in order to keep up with the growing population, we're going to need to grow more food over the course of the next 50 years than we have grown over the course of the past 10,000 years combined.What makes this even more challenging is that we're going to need to grow all this food with less, and when I say less, I mean a number of things. Less oil, for example. Most reputable geologists believe that we've already reached peak oil production in the world. Now, you might not think in terms of oil and food as being linked, but there's a very strong link, in fact. It takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy in our highly industrialized food system in order to produce one calorie of food energy. We'll also need to grow more food with less water. These three images come from three very different parts of the planet, but they all tell the same story of catastrophic drought.We'll also need to grow more food with less farmland. Here, the pressures differ from one place to the next. In the Global South, we're seeing desertification, whereas in the north, we're seeing suburban sprawl.We'll also have to grow more food with less climate stability and less genetic diversity. Now, this is really important. We need our genetic varieties because they're a sort of insurance policy against climate change. We heard earlier today ""not putting all of our eggs in one basket."" Well, we shouldn't be doing the same with our tomatoes, either.We're also going to need to grow more food with less time. Now here, I'm not simply talking about the ticking time bomb that is the global population. I'm talking about the amount of time we all have in order to put a decent meal on the table. And that ""31"" figure there is not something arbitrary. That's the average amount of time the American family spends preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals per day. 31 minutes. So somewhere in there, we're going to need to also fit in growing food. Alright? And I think we do need to do that, but that's also going to mean that somewhere along the way, something's going to have to give. So it sort of leaves us feeling like this.(Laughter)You know? It's time to leave town or even perhaps leave planets. But where do we go? Where do we go when we only have one planet? And where do we go where the going gets tough?Well, if we were to listen to a lot of our political leaders over the years, we would simply go shopping. Right? Because we have this unwavering belief, especially in American political culture, that we can shop our way out of just about any problem. But the reality is something different. We're not going to solve our food problems and our health problems simply by switching from regular Coke to some future green iteration thereof. And although the large food companies would like us to believe that we can give our children all of the vitamins, minerals and immunity-building substances that they need without even leaving the chocolatey cereal aisle —(Laughter)the truth is something quite different.Now, what's become even more troublesome of late is that even the foods that ought to be healthy aren't always so, and we're starting to lose confidence in our food system, I think. The bigger it becomes and the more complex it becomes. And we've seen this time and time again. This is an image from the latest E. coli outbreak. In this case, it was in Europe, and we think it was started with bean sprouts, of all things.So we have this sort of shopper's dilemma right now. We have all of these different foods — 30,000 foods in the average big-box grocery store — but we have less confidence in those foods, and we have less confidence in the actors that are putting those foods on the shelves. I think we need to redefine what good food is. This is an interesting image from Berlin, Germany, where somebody started planting shopping carts and leaving them around. Those are potatoes, by the way.But in addition to redefining what good food is, I think we need to redefine our living spaces. Instead of seeing this as a yard, we need to think of it more as like a full-service greengrocer. That's, in fact, my yard, and that's how I look at it. That's what we transformed our yard into, and I think a really key message is this one: gardens grow good food. And when I say good food, I mean a number of different things. I mean food that is safe, food that is healthy, food that is absolutely gorgeous and delicious.Another important message is this one: gardens grow healthy kids and families. Those happen to be my two youngest sons, and they look healthy and they are healthy, and I think it has to do with the fact that they grew up in gardens and they know where good food comes from. And in fact, they know how to grow some of it themselves. But in the current economy, I think it's key to get this message out, that gardens also grow important economic savings for families. And you can pretty much take my word on this one, because in addition to crunching the vegetables a couple of years ago, my wife and I also crunched the numbers, and we found out that at the end, we had saved well over 2,000 dollars by growing our own food.So you could be asking this question now: If gardens grow all of these great things, how do we grow more gardens? That's, in fact, the question that my organization, Kitchen Gardens International, is both asking and answering. And our answer is essentially this one: we're going to need to leverage the resources and power that we have, the gardens and gardeners that we have, in order to grow and inspire even more. And as I said before, you never know who you might inspire.(Laughter)Now if this campaign was successful, I think it wasn't simply because we had a visionary First Lady taking up residence at the White House — that certainly was a major part of it — and it wasn't simply because we had some celebrity chefs and authors saying this would be a good idea to do. I think it was ultimately made possible by the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted it to happen. There was a movement that made it happen. And my organization tried to sort of channel some of that energy of the movement and direct it towards the White House. And we had a lot of luck in terms of getting our message out there to the media. We had a petition on Facebook, 110,000 signatures. We had viral images and videos, and we did crazy things like symbolically putting the White House lawn up for sale on eBay.But we need to do even more, and what we're trying to do in my organization is to connect people online, but also to connect people in person. This is an image from a little holiday we invented called ""World Kitchen Garden Day."" It's at the end of August each year, and it's just about bringing people together in gardens to learn from one another, to experience a garden as a community experience. We also need to grow the next generation of gardeners, and we're doing that in the United States and abroad.But there's still so much more that needs to be done, and I think this slide sort of captures where we need to go. We need a road map, and I picked this slide for a reason. We've got a bike garden on the left and a map of the Netherlands on the right. I was in the Netherlands early this year and was absolutely amazed by the amount of bikes on the road; 26 percent of all trips taken in the Netherlands are by bicycle, and it's gotten me thinking: How do we get that happening in terms of food and gardens? How would we get 26 percent of all produce coming from backyard gardens? That might sound like a lot, because we're probably at about two percent at the most right now. But if you take into consideration that at the peak of the victory garden movement last century, 40 percent of all produce was coming from gardens. We can get there again. And I think this is a really good start. The White House garden is certainly very inspirational. That's actually sort of a snapshot of what the garden looked like when it was planted earlier this spring — lots of diversity, lots of healthy crops. However, this is not a good representation of our federal agriculture policy.(Laughter)If we were to take the model here, the diagram of that particular garden, and sort of transpose it onto our federal agriculture policy, we'd get this: billions of billions of dollars going to support just a handful of commodity crops with just that tiny little bit at the top for fruits and vegetables. This is scandalous. This is scandalous. We need to do something about this. I think one place we could start is we could look at the tax code. We're already using the tax code to encourage green transport and green shelter. Why not green food? We're in the midst now of talking about another stimulus package. Why not a garden stimulus package? Why not?(Applause)In terms of other things that we need to be doing, we need to move down to the local level and we need to make sure that gardens are legal. This is an illegal garden. At least it was. It's from Michigan earlier this year. It was planted by a woman, a mother of four, and she nearly faced a 93-day jail sentence because she planted it in her front yard. We still have laws from the 20th century. We need to bring our codes up to the realities that we are facing now. We need to figure out also new ways of getting people into gardens, people who don't have yards. I think we also need to set garden entrepreneurism free, and I'm happy to say, as a Mainer, that we are leading the way in this area. Earlier this year, a number of Maine towns passed local food sovereignty laws that allow town residents to not only grow food where they want to grow it but to also sell it the way they want to sell it and to the people they want to sell it to. I think that's an incentive. There are a lot of gardeners out there that would be interested in scaling up their production if they could, if they had a financial incentive.I also think that we need to examine the composition of the movement right now.(Laughter)If the movement were a 1960s beach flick, it would be ""Where The Boys Aren't.""(Laughter)So I'm going to take you to task, guys. It's not right and it's not fair that the burden of this responsibility — feeding our country and the world — should be with the women. OK?(Applause)And I'm going to challenge the women to come up with really clever, creative ways of getting guys into the gardens, too.(Laughter)Perhaps wearing a bathing suit?(Laughter)But beyond that, I think we need to reexamine the infrastructure that we have in place for gardens. I think we need to create new infrastructure. And this is one of the things my organization is working on right now, sort of a local communications infrastructure, very place-based, that allows people in the same area to connect with one another and to help each other out. I think we're lacking this at the moment —(Laughter)but we can do it. The technology is certainly there.In addition to that, I think we need another type of infrastructure. It would be good if we could all get together. I think if we've learned anything through the TED experience, it's that there is power when we bring people together, and I think we need to bring people together at the local level as well. And I think we can take some inspiration from a previous movement, which was the grange movement, a rural movement which brought farmers together in a single building to meet and to recreate and learn how to become better farmers. I think we need a network of suburban granges now.I think one of the last things that we need is to not lose the fun of food. Food is at its best when it's delicious but shared as part of a community, and I think that gardens can get some of that community vibe back as well. So I'm going to leave with one last video, and I'm going to revisit the short video that I showed you before, but I'm going to suggest an alternative ending. And I think this ending is well within our reach, but it's really going to require that we all pull together. So here's the new history of gastronomy.(""Also sprach Zarathustra"" plays)(Applause)(Applause and cheers)Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/roger_doiron_my_subversive_garden_plot
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"I'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds. The wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder. We should, in fact, because without having this possibility of conscious minds, we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world. We would have no pains, but also no joys. We would have no access to love or to the ability to create. And of course, Scott Fitzgerald said famously that ""he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for."" But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence.So much for the wonder, now for the mystery. This is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate. All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience, this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation, has got major controversies. And there are actually many people that think we should not even touch it; we should just leave it alone, it's not to be solved. I don't believe that, and I think the situation is changing. It would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains, but we certainly can begin to approach the question, and we can begin to see the shape of a solution.And one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do, for example, what you're seeing right now. These are images that come from Hanna Damasio's lab, and which show you, in a living brain, the reconstruction of that brain. And this is a person who is alive. This is not a person that is being studied at autopsy. And even more — and this is something that one can be really amazed about — is what I'm going to show you next, which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections, real pathways. So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons, the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses. And I'm sorry to disappoint you, they don't come in color. But at any rate, they are there. The colors are codes for the direction, from whether it is back to front or vice versa.At any rate, what is consciousness? What is a conscious mind? And we could take a very simple view and say, well, it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams, or when we go under anesthesia, and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia. But what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia, or when we are in deep, dreamless sleep? Well first of all, it is a mind, which is a flow of mental images. And of course consider images that can be sensory patterns, visual, such as you're having right now in relation to the stage and me, or auditory images, as you are having now in relation to my words. That flow of mental images is mind.But there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room. We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now. We own our minds. And we have a sense that it's everyone of us that is experiencing this — not the person who is sitting next to you. So in order to have a conscious mind, you have a self within the conscious mind. So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it. The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind, and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind. So what we need to know to even address this mystery is, number one, how are minds are put together in the brain, and, number two, how selves are constructed.Now the first part, the first problem, is relatively easy — it's not easy at all — but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience. And it's quite clear that, in order to make minds, we need to construct neural maps. So imagine a grid, like the one I'm showing you right now, and now imagine, within that grid, that two-dimensional sheet, imagine neurons. And picture, if you will, a billboard, a digital billboard, where you have elements that can be either lit or not. And depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting, the digital elements, or, for that matter, the neurons in the sheet, you're going to be able to construct a map. This, of course, is a visual map that I'm showing you, but this applies to any kind of map — auditory, for example, in relation to sound frequencies, or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate.Now to bring home the point of how close it is — the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience — I'm going to tell you a personal story. So if I cover my left eye — I'm talking about me personally, not all of you — if I cover my left eye, I look at the grid — pretty much like the one I'm showing you. Everything is nice and fine and perpendicular. But sometime ago, I discovered that if I cover my left eye, instead what I get is this. I look at the grid and I see a warping at the edge of my central-left field.Very odd — I've analyzed this for a while. But sometime ago, through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine, Carmen Puliafito, who developed a laser scanner of the retina, I found out the the following. If I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner, what I get is the following. On the right side, my retina is perfectly symmetrical. You see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins. But on my left retina there is a bump, which is marked there by the red arrow. And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below. And that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image.So just think of this: you have a grid of neurons, and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid, and you get a warping of your mental experience. So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina, which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball, or, for that matter, a sheet of visual cortex. So from the retina you go onto visual cortex. And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina. And in that image there, you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain. You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information.And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps, can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around, which is the association cortex, where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making. And the great beauty is that you can then go from memory, out of those association cortices, and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception. So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is. So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making. And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information.So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images. But what about the self? The self is really the elusive problem. And for a long time, people did not even want to touch it, because they'd say, ""How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?"" And I thought about a solution to this problem. It's the following. We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps.So let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this. I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self — the Me, the I in our own processing — we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day. Well it so happens that we have a singular body. We have one body, not two, not three. And so that is a beginning. There is just one reference point, which is the body. But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior. The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu — for example, the whole management of the chemistries within our body are, in fact, extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason. If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death. So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity. I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day. Because if you don't have that sameness, physiologically, you're going to be sick or you're going to die. So that's one more element for this continuity.And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling. So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain. However, there is a close, permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body.So here's how it looks. Look at the region there. There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. And it is within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body. This is so specific that, for example, if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem, if you damage that as a result of a stroke, for example, what you get is coma or vegetative state, which is a state, of course, in which your mind disappears, your consciousness disappears. What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self, you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence, and, in fact, there can be images going on, being formed in the cerebral cortex, except you don't know they're there. You have, in effect, lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem.But if you consider the green part of the brain stem, nothing like that happens. It is that specific. So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained. You feel, you know, you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly. This is a horrific condition. You don't want to see it. And people are, in fact, imprisoned within their own bodies, but they do have a mind. There was a very interesting film, one of the rare good films done about a situation like this, by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition.So now I'm going to show you a picture. I promise not to say anything about this, except this is to frighten you. It's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem, there are, to make it simple, all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior, different aspects of our body. They are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern. And it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that I believe — and I could be wrong, but I don't think I am — that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings — primordial feelings, by the way.So what is the picture that we get here? Look at ""cerebral cortex,"" look at ""brain stem,"" look at ""body,"" and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body. And you have the cerebral cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are, in fact, the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to, as we should, because that's really the film that is rolling in our minds. But look at the arrows. They're not there for looks. They're there because there's this very close interaction. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between the brain stem and the body.Another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species. So throughout vertebrates, the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours, which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do. Except that they're not as rich as ours, because they don't have a cerebral cortex like we do. That's where the difference is. And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex. Only the wealth of our minds is, not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence, and that we have any sense of person.Now there are three levels of self to consider — the proto, the core and the autobiographical. The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species. It's the autobiographical self which some species have, I think. Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree. And everybody's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree. But the novelty is here.The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future. And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture — religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology. And it is within that culture that we really can get — and this is the novelty — something that is not entirely set by our biology. It is developed in the cultures. It developed in collectives of human beings. And this is, of course, the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation.And finally, you could rightly ask, why care about this? Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made? Three reasons. First, curiosity. Primates are extremely curious — and humans most of all. And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings?Second, understanding society and culture. We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress. And finally, medicine. Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction. Think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious. You have no prayer of treating those diseases effectively and in a non-serendipitous way if you do not know how this works. So that's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we're doing, and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains.Thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness
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"I study how the brain processes information. That is, how it takes information in from the outside world, and converts it into patterns of electrical activity, and then how it uses those patterns to allow you to do things — to see, hear, to reach for an object. So I'm really a basic scientist, not a clinician, but in the last year and a half I've started to switch over, to use what we've been learning about these patterns of activity to develop prosthetic devices, and what I wanted to do today is show you an example of this. It's really our first foray into this. It's the development of a prosthetic device for treating blindness.So let me start in on that problem. There are 10 million people in the U.S. and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them. There are some drug treatments, but they're only effective on a small fraction of the population. And so, for the vast majority of patients, their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices. The problem is that current prosthetics don't work very well. They're still very limited in the vision that they can provide. And so, you know, for example, with these devices, patients can see simple things like bright lights and high contrast edges, not very much more, so nothing close to normal vision has been possible.So what I'm going to tell you about today is a device that we've been working on that I think has the potential to make a difference, to be much more effective, and what I wanted to do is show you how it works. Okay, so let me back up a little bit and show you how a normal retina works first so you can see the problem that we were trying to solve. Here you have a retina. So you have an image, a retina, and a brain. So when you look at something, like this image of this baby's face, it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina, on the front-end cells here, the photoreceptors. Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code. And the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent up to the brain, and so the key thing is that the image ultimately gets converted into a code. And when I say code, I do literally mean code. Like this pattern of pulses here actually means ""baby's face,"" and so when the brain gets this pattern of pulses, it knows that what was out there was a baby's face, and if it got a different pattern it would know that what was out there was, say, a dog, or another pattern would be a house. Anyway, you get the idea.And, of course, in real life, it's all dynamic, meaning that it's changing all the time, so the patterns of pulses are changing all the time because the world you're looking at is changing all the time too. So, you know, it's sort of a complicated thing. You have these patterns of pulses coming out of your eye every millisecond telling your brain what it is that you're seeing. So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration? What happens is is that, the front-end cells die, the photoreceptors die, and over time, all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them, they die too. Until the only things that you have left are these cells here, the output cells, the ones that send the signals to the brain, but because of all that degeneration they aren't sending any signals anymore. They aren't getting any input, so the person's brain no longer gets any visual information — that is, he or she is blind.So, a solution to the problem, then, would be to build a device that could mimic the actions of that front-end circuitry and send signals to the retina's output cells, and they can go back to doing their normal job of sending signals to the brain. So this is what we've been working on, and this is what our prosthetic does. So it consists of two parts, what we call an encoder and a transducer. And so the encoder does just what I was saying: it mimics the actions of the front-end circuitry — so it takes images in and converts them into the retina's code. And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output. So a completely blind retina, even one with no front-end circuitry at all, no photoreceptors, can now send out normal signals, signals that the brain can understand. So no other device has been able to do this.Okay, so I just want to take a sentence or two to say something about the encoder and what it's doing, because it's really the key part and it's sort of interesting and kind of cool. I'm not sure ""cool"" is really the right word, but you know what I mean. So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip. So it's just math. In other words, we're not literally replacing the components of the retina. It's not like we're making a little mini-device for each of the different cell types. We've just abstracted what the retina's doing with a set of equations. And so, in a way, the equations are serving as sort of a codebook. An image comes in, goes through the set of equations, and out comes streams of electrical pulses, just like a normal retina would produce.Now let me put my money where my mouth is and show you that we can actually produce normal output, and what the implications of this are. Here are three sets of firing patterns. The top one is from a normal animal, the middle one is from a blind animal that's been treated with this encoder-transducer device, and the bottom one is from a blind animal treated with a standard prosthetic. So the bottom one is the state-of-the-art device that's out there right now, which is basically made up of light detectors, but no encoder. So what we did was we presented movies of everyday things — people, babies, park benches, you know, regular things happening — and we recorded the responses from the retinas of these three groups of animals. Now just to orient you, each box is showing the firing patterns of several cells, and just as in the previous slides, each row is a different cell, and I just made the pulses a little bit smaller and thinner so I could show you a long stretch of data.So as you can see, the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder-transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns — and it's not perfect, but it's pretty good — and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic, the responses really don't. And so with the standard method, the cells do fire, they just don't fire in the normal firing patterns because they don't have the right code. How important is this? What's the potential impact on a patient's ability to see? So I'm just going to show you one bottom-line experiment that answers this, and of course I've got a lot of other data, so if you're interested I'm happy to show more. So the experiment is called a reconstruction experiment. So what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked, what was the retina seeing at that moment? Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns?So, when we did this for responses from the standard method and from our encoder and transducer. So let me show you, and I'm going to start with the standard method first. So you can see that it's pretty limited, and because the firing patterns aren't in the right code, they're very limited in what they can tell you about what's out there. So you can see that there's something there, but it's not so clear what that something is, and this just sort of circles back to what I was saying in the beginning, that with the standard method, patients can see high-contrast edges, they can see light, but it doesn't easily go further than that. So what was the image? It was a baby's face. So what about with our approach, adding the code? And you can see that it's much better. Not only can you tell that it's a baby's face, but you can tell that it's this baby's face, which is a really challenging task. So on the left is the encoder alone, and on the right is from an actual blind retina, so the encoder and the transducer. But the key one really is the encoder alone, because we can team up the encoder with the different transducer.This is just actually the first one that we tried. I just wanted to say something about the standard method. When this first came out, it was just a really exciting thing, the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all. But there was this limiting factor, the issue of the code, and how to make the cells respond better, produce normal responses, and so this was our contribution. Now I just want to wrap up, and as I was mentioning earlier of course I have a lot of other data if you're interested, but I just wanted to give this sort of basic idea of being able to communicate with the brain in its language, and the potential power of being able to do that. So it's different from the motor prosthetics where you're communicating from the brain to a device. Here we have to communicate from the outside world into the brain and be understood, and be understood by the brain.And then the last thing I wanted to say, really, is to emphasize that the idea generalizes. So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas, for example, the auditory system and the motor system, so for treating deafness and for motor disorders. So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina's output cells, we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve, or jump over damaged areas in the cortex, in the motor cortex, to bridge the gap produced by a stroke.I just want to end with a simple message that understanding the code is really, really important, and if we can understand the code, the language of the brain, things become possible that didn't seem obviously possible before. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheila_nirenberg_a_prosthetic_eye_to_treat_blindness
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"Do you remember the story of Odysseus and the Sirens from high school or junior high school? There was this hero, Odysseus, who's heading back home after the Trojan War. And he's standing on the deck of his ship, he's talking to his first mate, and he's saying, ""Tomorrow, we will sail past those rocks, and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called Sirens. And these women sing an enchanting song, a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die."" Now you would expect, given that, that they would choose an alternate route around the Sirens, but instead Odysseus says, ""I want to hear that song. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men — stay with me — so that you can't hear the song, and then I'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that I can listen and we can all sail by unaffected."" So this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song.And I'd like to think if this was the case, they probably would have rehearsed it a few times. Odysseus would have said, ""Okay, let's do a dry run. You tie me to the mast, and I'm going to beg and plead. And no matter what I say, you cannot untie me from the mast. All right, so tie me to the mast."" And the first mate takes a rope and ties Odysseus to the mast in a nice knot. And Odysseus does his best job playacting and says, ""Untie me. Untie me. I want to hear that song. Untie me."" And the first mate wisely resists and doesn't untie Odysseus. And then Odysseus says, ""I see that you can get it. All right, untie me now and we'll get some dinner."" And the first mate hesitates. He's like, ""Is this still the rehearsal, or should I untie him?"" And the first mate thinks, ""Well, I guess at some point the rehearsal has to end."" So he unties Odysseus, and Odysseus flips out. He's like, ""You idiot. You moron. If you do that tomorrow, I'll be dead, you'll be dead, every single one of the men will be dead. Now just don't untie me no matter what."" He throws the first mate to the ground. This repeats itself through the night — rehearsal, tying to the mast, conning his way out of it, beating the poor first mate up mercilessly. Hilarity ensues.Tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you don't do something regrettable when you have a hot head. Because there's two heads inside one person when you think about it. Scholars have long invoked this metaphor of two selves when it comes to questions of temptation. There is first, the present self. This is like Odysseus when he's hearing the song. He just wants to get to the front row. He just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification. But then there's this other self, the future self. This is Odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife Penelope outside of Ithaca — the other one.So why do we need commitment devices? Well resisting temptation is hard, as the 19th century English economist Nassau William Senior said, ""To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will."" If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them, it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them. It's physically possible to lose weight. It's physically possible to exercise more. But resisting temptation is hard.The other reason that it's difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self. I mean, let's face it, the present self is present. It's in control. It's in power right now. It has these strong, heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth. And the future self is not even around. It's off in the future. It's weak. It doesn't even have a lawyer present. There's nobody to stick up for the future self. And so the present self can trounce all over its dreams. So there's this battle between the two selves that's being fought, and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two.Now I'm a big fan of commitment devices actually. Tying yourself to the mast is the oldest one, but there are other ones such as locking a credit card away with a key or not bringing junk food into the house so you won't eat it or unplugging your Internet connection so you can use your computer. I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers or I would have to give up five dollars.And when you try to execute these commitment devices, you realize the devil is really in the details. Because it's not that easy to get rid of five dollars. I mean, you can't burn it; that's illegal. And I thought, well I could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that. But then I thought, oh, I'm sending myself mixed messages. Because not writing is bad, but giving to charity is good. So then I would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift. And then I kind of flipped that around and thought, well I could give it to the neo-Nazis. But then I was like, that's more bad than writing is good, and so that wouldn't work. So ultimately, I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway. Sometimes a good person would find it, sometimes a bad person would find it. On average, it was just a completely pointless exchange of money that I would regret. (Laughter) Such it is with commitment devices.But despite my like for them, there's two nagging concerns that I've always had about commitment devices, and you might feel this if you use them yourself. So the first is, when you've got one of these devices going, such as this contract to write everyday or pay, it's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control. You're just telling yourself, ""Without you, commitment device, I am nothing, I have no self-discipline."" And then when you're ever in a situation where you don't have a commitment device in place — like, ""Oh my God, that person's offering me a doughnut, and I have no defense mechanism,"" — you just eat it. So I don't like the way that they take the power away from you. I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.The other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them. You say, ""Well, of course I can't write today, because I'm giving a TEDTalk and I have five media interviews, and then I'm going to a cocktail party and then I'll be drunk after that. And so there's no way that this is going to work."" So in effect, you are like Odysseus and the first mate in one person. You're putting yourself, you're binding yourself, and you're weaseling your way out of it, and then you're beating yourself up afterwards.So I've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices. In particular, I'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self. And this is a timely issue. I'm talking about the topic of saving. Now saving is a classic two selves problem. The present self does not want to save at all. It wants to consume. Whereas the future self wants the present self to save. So this is a timely problem. We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s. At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing. And we're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they're in retirement.So what can we do about this? There's a philosopher, Derek Parfit, who said some words that were inspiring to my coauthors and I. He said that, ""We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination."" That is to say, we somehow might not believe that we're going to get old, or we might not be able to imagine that we're going to get old some day. On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous. Of course, we know that we're going to get old. But aren't there things that we believe and don't believe at the same time?So my coauthors and I have used computers, the greatest tool of our time, to assist people's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future. And I'll show you some of these tools right here. The first is called the distribution builder. It shows people what the future might be like by showing them a hundred equally probable outcomes that might be obtained in the future. Each outcome is shown by one of these markers, and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement. Being up at the top means that you're enjoying a high income in retirement. Being down at the bottom means that you're struggling to make ends meet. When you make an investment, what you're really saying is, ""I accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth.""Now you can try to move your outcomes around. You can try to manipulate your fate, like this person is doing, but it costs you something to do it. It means that you have to save more today. Once you find an investment that you're happy with, what people do is they click ""done"" and the markers begin to disappear, slowly, one by one. It simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out. At the end, there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement.Yes, this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement. They're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working. If you're like most people, just seeing that gave you a small sense of elation and joy — just to think about making 50 percent more money in retirement than before. However, had you ended up on the very bottom, it might have given you a slight sense of dread and/or nausea thinking about struggling to get by in retirement. By using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome, people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future.Now people are motivated through emotions, but different people find different things motivating. This is a simulation that uses graphics, but other people find motivating what money can buy, not just numbers. So here I made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes, I show people what those outcomes will get you, in particular apartments that you can afford if you're retiring on 3,000, 2,500, 2,000 dollars per month and so on. As you move down the ladder of apartments, you see that they get worse and worse. Some of them look like places I lived in as a graduate student. And as you get to the very bottom, you're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you don't save anything for retirement, you won't be able to afford any housing at all. Those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the Internet.The last thing I'll show you, the last behavioral time machine, is something that I created with Hal Hershfield, who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project, Bill Sharpe. And what it is is an exploration into virtual reality. So what we do is we take pictures of people — in this case, college-age people — and we use software to age them and show these people what they'll look like when they're 60, 70, 80 years old. And we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior.So this is one of our experiments. Here we see the face of the young subject on the left. He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate. As he moves his savings rate down, it means that he's saving zero when it's all the way here at the left. You can see his current annual income — this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today — is quite high, 91 percent, but his retirement income is quite low. He's going to retire on 44 percent of what he earned while he was working. If he saves the maximum legal amount, his retirement income goes up, but he's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today. Other conditions show people the future self. And from the future self's point of view, everything is in reverse. If you save very little, the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income. Whereas if the present self saves a lot, the future self is delighted, where the income is close up near 100 percent.To bring this to a wider audience, I've been working with Hal and Allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine, in which you not only get to see yourself in the future, but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth. So for instance, here is somebody using the tool. And just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider. The younger face gets happier and happier, saving nothing. The older face is miserable. And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate. And then it's a high savings rate. The younger face is getting unhappy. The older face is quite pleased with the decision. We're going to see if this has an effect on what people do. And what's nice about it is it's not something that biasing people actually, because as one face smiles, the other face frowns. It's not telling you which way to put the slider, it's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self.Your decisions today are going to determine its well-being. And that's something that's easy to forget. This use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older. There are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke, if they get too much exposure to the sun, if they gain weight and so on. And what's good is, unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith, you don't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality. There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing. This is actually a picture of Hal, my coauthor. You might recognize him from the previous demos. And just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding, aging and weight gain software to see how he would look. Hal is here, so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image. And I'll close it there.On behalf of Hal and myself, I wish all the best to your present and future selves. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goldstein_the_battle_between_your_present_and_future_self
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"In 1994, I walked into a prison in Cambodia, and I met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel. And as I looked into his eyes, I realized that for the hundreds of letters I had written for political prisoners, that I would never have written a letter for him, because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody. He was not a political prisoner. He was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle. What I also realized at that point was that it was not only Cambodia, but of the 113 developing countries that torture, 93 of these countries have all passed laws that say you have a right to a lawyer and you have a right not to be tortured.And what I recognized was that there was an incredible window of opportunity for us as a world community to come together and end torture as an investigative tool. We often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst, but, in fact, 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners. It is for people who are in broken-down legal systems, and unfortunately because torture is the cheapest form of investigation — it's cheaper than having a legal system, cheaper than having a lawyer and early access to counsel — it is what happens most of the time. I believe today that it is possible for us as a world community, if we make a decision, to come together and end torture as an investigative tool in our lifetime, but it will require three things. First is the training, empowerment, and connection of defenders worldwide.The second is insuring that there is systematic early access to counsel. And the third is commitment. So in the year 2000, I began to wonder, what if we came together? Could we do something for these 93 countries? And I founded International Bridges to Justice which has a specific mission of ending torture as an investigative tool and implementing due process rights in the 93 countries by placing trained lawyers at an early stage in police stations and in courtrooms. My first experiences, though, did come from Cambodia, and at the time I remember first coming to Cambodia and there were, in 1994, still less than 10 attorneys in the country because the Khmer Rouge had killed them all.And even 20 years later, there was only 10 lawyers in the country, so consequently you'd walk into a prison and not only would you meet 12-year-old boys, you'd meet women and you'd say, ""Why are you here?"" Women would say, ""Well I've been here for 10 years because my husband committed a crime, but they can't find him."" So it's just a place where there was no rule of law.The first group of defenders came together and I still remember, as I was training, I said, ""Okay, what do you do for an investigation?"" And there was silence in the class, and finally one woman stood up, [inaudible name], and she said ""Khrew,"" which means ""teacher."" She said, ""I have defended more than a hundred people, and I've never had to do any investigation, because they all come with confessions.""And we talked about, as a class, the fact that number one, the confessions might not be reliable, but number two, we did not want to encourage the police to keep doing this, especially as it was now against the law. And it took a lot of courage for these defenders to decide that they would begin to stand up and support each other in implementing these laws. And I still remember the first cases where they came, all 25 together, she would stand up, and they were in the back, and they would support her, and the judges kept saying, ""No, no, no, no, we're going to do things the exact same way we've been doing them.""But one day the perfect case came, and it was a woman who was a vegetable seller, she was sitting outside of a house. She said she actually saw the person run out who she thinks stole whatever the jewelry was, but the police came, they got her, there was nothing on her. She was pregnant at the time. She had cigarette burns on her. She'd miscarried. And when they brought her case to the judge, for the first time he stood up and he said, ""Yes, there's no evidence except for your torture confession and you will be released.""And the defenders began to take cases over and over again and you will see, they have step by step began to change the course of history in Cambodia. But Cambodia is not alone. I used to think, well is it Cambodia? Or is it other countries? But it is in so many countries.In Burundi I walked into a prison and it wasn't a 12-year-old boy, it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone. Or a woman, I picked up her baby, really cute baby, I said ""Your baby is so cute."" It wasn't a baby, she was three. And she said ""Yeah, but she's why I'm here,"" because she was accused of stealing two diapers and an iron for her baby and still had been in prison. And when I walked up to the prison director, I said, ""You've got to let her out. A judge would let her out."" And he said, ""Okay, we can talk about it, but look at my prison. Eighty percent of the two thousand people here are without a lawyer. What can we do?"" So lawyers began to courageously stand up together to organize a system where they can take cases. But we realized that it's not only the training of the lawyers, but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference.For example, in Cambodia, it was that [inaudible name] did not go alone but she had 24 lawyers with her who stood up together. And in the same way, in China, they always tell me, ""It's like a fresh wind in the desert when we can come together."" Or in Zimbabwe, where I remember Innocent, after coming out of a prison where everybody stood up and said, ""I've been here for one year, eight years, 12 years without a lawyer,"" he came and we had a training together and he said, ""I have heard it said"" — because he had heard people mumbling and grumbling — ""I have heard it said that we cannot help to create justice because we do not have the resources."" And then he said, ""But I want you to know that the lack of resources is never an excuse for injustice."" And with that, he successfully organized 68 lawyers who have been systematically taking the cases.The key that we see, though, is training and then early access. I was recently in Egypt, and was inspired to meet with another group of lawyers, and what they told me is that they said, ""Hey, look, we don't have police on the streets now. The police are one of the main reasons why we had the revolution. They were torturing everybody all the time."" And I said, ""But there's been tens of millions of dollars that have recently gone in to the development of the legal system here. What's going on?"" I met with one of the development agencies, and they were training prosecutors and judges, which is the normal bias, as opposed to defenders. And they showed me a manual which actually was an excellent manual. I said, ""I'm gonna copy this."" It had everything in it. Lawyers can come at the police station. It was perfect. Prosecutors were perfectly trained. But I said to them, ""I just have one question, which is, by the time that everybody got to the prosecutor's office, what had happened to them?"" And after a pause, they said, ""They had been tortured.""So the pieces are, not only the training of the lawyers, but us finding a way to systematically implement early access to counsel, because they are the safeguard in the system for people who are being tortured. And as I tell you this, I'm also aware of the fact that it sounds like, ""Oh, okay, it sounds like we could do it, but can we really do it?"" Because it sounds big. And there are many reasons why I believe it's possible. The first reason is the people on the ground who find ways of creating miracles because of their commitment. It's not only Innocent, who I told you about in Zimbabwe, but defenders all over the world who are looking for these pieces. We have a program called JusticeMakers, and we realized there are people that are courageous and want to do things, but how can we support them? So it's an online contest where it's only five thousand dollars if you come up with and innovative way of implementing justice. And there are 30 JusticeMakers throughout the world, from Sri Lanka to Swaziland to the DRC, who with five thousand dollars do amazing things, through SMS programs, through paralegal programs, through whatever they can do.And it's not only these JusticeMakers, but people we courageously see figure out who their networks are and how they can move it forward.So in China, for instance, great laws came out where it says police cannot torture people or they will be punished. And I was sitting side by side with one of our very courageous lawyers, and said, ""How can we get this out? How can we make sure that this is implemented? This is fantastic."" And he said to me, ""Well, do you have money?"" And I said, ""No."" And he said, ""That's okay, we can still figure it out."" And on December 4, he organized three thousand members of the Youth Communist League, from 14 of the top law schools, who organized themselves, developed posters with the new laws, and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights. So I talked about the fact that we need to train and support defenders. We need to systematically implement early access to counsel. But the third and most important thing is that we make a commitment to this.And people often say to me, ""You know, this is great, but it's wildly idealistic. Never going to happen."" And the reason that I think that those words are interesting is because those were the same kinds of words that were used for people who decided they would end slavery, or end apartheid. It began with a small group of people who decided they would commit.Now, there's one of our favorite poems from the defenders, which they share from each other, is: ""Take courage friends, the road is often long, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high, but deep down, you are not alone."" And I believe that if we can come together as a world community to support not only defenders, but also everyone in the system who is looking towards it, we can end torture as an investigative tool. I end always, because I'm sure the questions are — and I'd be happy to talk to you at any point — ""But what can I really do?"" Well, I would say this. First of all, you know what you can do. But second of all, I would leave you with the story of Vishna, who actually was my inspiration for starting International Bridges to Justice.Vishna was a 4-year-old boy when I met him who was born in a Cambodian prison in Kandal Province. But because he was born in the prison, everybody loved him, including the guards, so he was the only one who was allowed to come in and out of the bars. So, you know, there's bars. And by the time that Vishna was getting bigger, which means what gets bigger? Your head gets bigger. So he would come to the first bar, the second bar and then the third bar, and then really slowly move his head so he could fit through, and come back, third, second, first. And he would grab my pinkie, because what he wanted to do every day is he wanted to go visit. You know, he never quite made it to all of them every day, but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners. And I would lift him, and he would put his fingers through. Or if they were dark cells, it was like iron corrugated, and he would put his fingers through.And most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine, and they looked forward to him. And I was like, here's Vishna. He's a 4-year-old boy. He was born in a prison with almost nothing, no material goods, but he had a sense of his own heroic journey, which I believe we are all born into. He said, ""Probably I can't do everything. But I'm one. I can do something. And I will do the one thing that I can do."" So I thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together, and invite you into this journey with us.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_tse_how_to_stop_torture
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"I've been in Afghanistan for 21 years. I work for the Red Cross and I'm a physical therapist. My job is to make arms and legs — well it's not completely true. We do more than that. We provide the patients, the Afghan disabled, first with the physical rehabilitation then with the social reintegration. It's a very logical plan, but it was not always like this. For many years, we were just providing them with artificial limbs. It took quite many years for the program to become what it is now.Today, I would like to tell you a story, the story of a big change, and the story of the people who made this change possible. I arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims. And then, not only for war victims, but it was for any kind of patient. I was also working in the orthopedic center, we call it. This is the place where we make the legs. At that time I found myself in a strange situation. I felt not quite ready for that job. There was so much to learn. There were so many things new to me. But it was a terrific job. But as soon as the fighting intensified, the physical rehabilitation was suspended. There were many other things to do. So the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority. It was a strange sensation. Anyway, you know every time I make this speech — it's not the first time — but it's an emotion. It's something that comes out from the past. It's 21 years, but they are still all there.Anyway, in 1992, the Mujahideen took all Afghanistan. And the orthopedic center was closed. I was assigned to work for the homeless, for the internally displaced people. But one day, something happened. I was coming back from a big food distribution in a mosque where tens and tens of people were squatting in terrible conditions. I wanted to go home. I was driving. You know, when you want to forget, you don't want to see things, so you just want to go to your room, to lock yourself inside and say, ""That's enough."" A bomb fell not far from my car — well, far enough, but big noise. And everybody disappeared from the street. The cars disappeared as well. I ducked. And only one figure remained in the middle of the road. It was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away.Well I'm not a particularly brave person, I have to confess it, but I could not just ignore him. So I stopped the car and I went to help. The man was without legs and only with one arm. Behind him there was a child, his son, red in the face in an effort to push the father. So I took him into a safe place. And I ask, ""What are you doing out in the street in this situation?"" ""I work,"" he said. I wondered, what work? And then I ask an even more stupid question: ""Why don't you have the prostheses? Why don't you have the artificial legs?"" And he said, ""The Red Cross has closed."" Well without thinking, I told him ""Come tomorrow. We will provide you with a pair of legs."" The man, his name was Mahmoud, and the child, whose name was Rafi, left. And then I said, ""Oh, my God. What did I say? The center is closed, no staff around. Maybe the machinery is broken. Who is going to make the legs for him?"" So I hoped that he would not come. This is the streets of Kabul in those days. So I said, ""Well I will give him some money.""And so the following day, I went to the orthopedic center. And I spoke with a gatekeeper. I was ready to tell him, ""Listen, if someone such-and-such comes tomorrow, please tell him that it was a mistake. Nothing can be done. Give him some money."" But Mahmoud and his son were already there. And they were not alone. There were 15, maybe 20, people like him waiting. And there was some staff too. Among them there was my right-hand man, Najmuddin. And the gatekeeper told me, ""They come everyday to see if the center will open."" I said, ""No. We have to go away. We cannot stay here."" They were bombing — not very close — but you could hear the noise of the bombs. So, ""We cannot stay here, it's dangerous. It's not a priority."" But Najmuddin told me, ""Listen now, we're here."" At least we can start repairing the prostheses, the broken prostheses of the people and maybe try to do something for people like Mahmoud."" I said, ""No, please. We cannot do that. It's really dangerous. We have other things to do."" But they insisted. When you have 20 people in front of you, looking at you and you are the one who has to decide ...So we started doing some repairs. Also one of the physical therapists reported that Mahmoud could be provided with a leg, but not immediately. The legs were swollen and the knees were stiff, so he needed a long preparation. Believe me, I was worried because I was breaking the rules. I was doing something that I was not supposed to do. In the evening, I went to speak with the bosses at the headquarters, and I told them — I lied — I told them, ""Listen, we are going to start a couple of hours per day, just a few repairs."" Maybe some of them are here now.(Laughter)So we started. I was working, I was going everyday to work for the homeless. And Najmuddin was staying there, doing everything and reporting on the patients. He was telling me, ""Patients are coming."" We knew that many more patients could not come, prevented by the fighting. But people were coming. And Mahmoud was coming every day. And slowly, slowly week after week his legs were improving. The stump or cast prosthesis was made, and he was starting the real physical rehabilitation. He was coming every day, crossing the front line. A couple of times I crossed the front line in the very place where Mahmoud and his son were crossing. I tell you, it was something so sinister that I was astonished he could do it every day.But finally, the great day arrived. Mahmoud was going to be discharged with his new legs. It was April, I remember, a very beautiful day. April in Kabul is beautiful, full of roses, full of flowers. We could not possibly stay indoors, with all these sandbags at the windows. Very sad, dark. So we chose a small spot in the garden. And Mahmoud put on his prostheses, the other patients did the same, and they started practicing for the last time before being discharged.Suddenly, they started fighting. Two groups of Mujahideen started fighting. We could hear in the air the bullets passing. So we dashed, all of us, towards the shelter. Mahmoud grabbed his son, I grabbed someone else. Everybody was grabbing something. And we ran. You know, 50 meters can be a long distance if you are totally exposed, but we managed to reach the shelter. Inside, all of us panting, I sat a moment and I heard Rafi telling his father, ""Father, you can run faster than me."" (Laughter) And Mahmoud, ""Of course I can. I can run, and now you can go to school. No need of staying with me all the day pushing my wheelchair."" Later on, we took them home. And I will never forget Mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair. And then I understood, physical rehabilitation is a priority. Dignity cannot wait for better times.From that day on, we never closed a single day. Well sometimes we were suspended for a few hours, but we never, we never closed it again. I met Mahmoud one year later. He was in good shape — a bit thinner. He needed to change his prostheses — a new pair of prostheses. I asked about his son. He told me, ""He's at school. He'd doing quite well."" But I understood he wanted to tell me something. So I asked him, ""What is that?"" He was sweating. He was clearly embarrassed. And he was standing in front of me, his head down. He said, ""You have taught me to walk. Thank you very much. Now help me not to be a beggar anymore."" That was the job. ""My children are growing. I feel ashamed. I don't want them to be teased at school by the other students."" I said, ""Okay."" I thought, how much money do I have in my pocket? Just to give him some money. It was the easiest way. He read my mind, and he said, ""I ask for a job."" And then he added something I will never forget for the rest of my life. He said, ""I am a scrap of a man, but if you help me, I'm ready to do anything, even if I have to crawl on the ground."" And then he sat down. I sat down too with goosebumps everywhere.Legless, with only one arm, illiterate, unskilled — what job for him? Najmuddin told me, ""Well we have a vacancy in the carpentry shop."" ""What?"" I said, ""Stop."" ""Well yes, we need to increase the production of feet. We need to employ someone to glue and to screw the sole of the feet. We need to increase the production."" ""Excuse me?"" I could not believe. And then he said, ""No, we can modify the workbench maybe to put a special stool, a special anvil, special vice, and maybe an electric screwdriver."" I said, ""Listen, it's insane. And it's even cruel to think of anything like this. That's a production line and a very fast one. It's cruel to offer him a job knowing that he's going to fail."" But with Najmuddin, we cannot discuss. So the only things I could manage to obtain was a kind of a compromise. Only one week — one week try and not a single day more. One week later, Mahmoud was the fastest in the production line. I told Najmuddin, ""That's a trick. I can't believe it."" The production was up 20 percent. ""It's a trick, it's a trick,"" I said. And then I asked for verification. It was true.The comment of Najmuddin was Mahmoud has something to prove. I understood that I was wrong again. Mahmoud had looked taller. I remember him sitting behind the workbench smiling. He was a new man, taller again. Of course, I understood that what made him stand tall — yeah they were the legs, thank you very much — but as a first step, it was the dignity. He has regained his full dignity thanks to that job. So of course, I understood. And then we started a new policy — a new policy completely different. We decided to employ as many disabled as possible to train them in any possible job. It became a policy of ""positive discrimination,"" we call it now.And you know what? It's good for everybody. Everybody benefits from that — those employed, of course, because they get a job and dignity. But also for the newcomers. They are 7,000 every year — people coming for the first time. And you should see the faces of these people when they realize that those assisting them are like them. Sometimes you see them, they look, ""Oh."" And you see the faces. And then the surprise turns into hope. And it's easy for me as well to train someone who has already passed through the experience of disability. Poof, they learn much faster — the motivation, the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different, completely. Scraps of men do not exist.People like Mahmoud are agents of change. And when you start changing, you cannot stop. So employing people, yes, but also we started programming projects of microfinance, education. And when you start, you cannot stop. So you do vocational training, home education for those who cannot go to school. Physical therapies can be done, not only in the orthopedic center, but also in the houses of the people. There is always a better way to do things. That's Najmuddin, the one with the white coat. Terrible Najmuddin, is that one. I have learned a lot from people like Najmuddin, Mahmoud, Rafi. They are my teachers.I have a wish, a big wish, that this way of working, this way of thinking, is going to be implemented in other countries. There are plenty of countries at war like Afghanistan. It is possible and it is not difficult. All we have to do is to listen to the people that we are supposed assist, to make them part of the decision-making process and then, of course, to adapt. This is my big wish.Well don't think that the changes in Afghanistan are over; not at all. We are going on. Recently we have just started a program, a sport program — basketball for wheelchair users. We transport the wheelchairs everywhere. We have several teams in the main part of Afghanistan. At the beginning, when Anajulina told me, ""We would like to start it,"" I hesitated. I said, ""No,"" you can imagine. I said, ""No, no, no, no, we can't."" And then I asked the usual question: ""Is it a priority? Is it really necessary?"" Well now you should see me. I never miss a single training session. The night before a match I'm very nervous. And you should see me during the match. I shout like a true Italian.(Laughter)What's next? What is going to be the next change? Well I don't know yet, but I'm sure Najmuddin and his friends, they have it already in mind.That was my story. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alberto_cairo_there_are_no_scraps_of_men
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"I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement. And I've done this in three parts. So first I started with the mind. And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z — or, more precisely, from ""a-ak"" to ""Zywiec."" And here's a little image of that. And this was an amazing year. It was really a fascinating journey. It was painful at times, especially for those around me. My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. So it had its downsides.But after that, I decided to work on the spirit. As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all. I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) Not really. But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it. So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible. And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard — because Leviticus says you cannot shave. So this is what I looked like by the end. Thank you for that reaction. (Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski. I got both of them. So there was the topiary there. And there's the sheep.Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. And I just finished a couple of months ago. And I have to say, thank God. Because living so healthily was killing me. (Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling. I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers. And they were telling me all the things I had to do. I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure. I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book. I had to put on sunscreen. This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen. And you have to reapply it every two to four hours. So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen. I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year. There was the washing of hands. I had to do that properly. And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs. So that took a lot of time.I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health. I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council. They started a public campaign that says, ""A walking helmet is a good helmet."" So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around. And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets. (Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that. Now it's a little extreme, I admit. But if you think about this, this is actually — the ""Freakonomics"" authors wrote about this — that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple.So I finished, and it was a success in a sense. All of the markers went in the right direction. My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant. So that was nice. And it was successful overall. But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy. I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family. And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health.So I finished. And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over. I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself. It was like something out of Caligula. (Laughter) Without the sex part. Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening. But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely. And I finally have stabilized. So now I'm back to adopting many — not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore — but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year. It was really a life-changing project. And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them. Let me just tell you two really quickly.The first is — and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out — but I live a much quieter life now. Because we live in such a noisy world. There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy. (Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard — not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response. A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage. The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year. And it was done in Europe. And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution. So they think it's actually very deadly.And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain. It really impairs cognition. And our Founding Fathers knew about this. When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate. So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist. So as a patriot, I felt it was important to — I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way.And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that — and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED — that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them. And just to give you one instance of this: food. The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable. But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food. To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel. So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes — throw in some sunflower seeds. And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos. (Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person.So that is it. The book about it comes out in April. It's called ""Drop Dead Healthy."" And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour. That's my greatest hope.So thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aj_jacobs_how_healthy_living_nearly_killed_me
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"There have been many revolutions over the last century, but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution. We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did — think about that. That's an entire second adult lifetime that's been added to our lifespan. And yet, for the most part, our culture has not come to terms with what this means. We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the metaphor, the old metaphor. You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.(Laughter)Age as pathology.But many people today — philosophers, artists, doctors, scientists — are taking a new look at what I call ""the third act"" — the last three decades of life. They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance, as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood. And they are asking — we should all be asking: How do we use this time? How do we live it successfully? What is the appropriate new metaphor for aging?I've spent the last year researching and writing about this subject. And I have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase — the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness, and authenticity. Age not at all as pathology. Age as potential. And guess what? This potential is not for the lucky few. It turns out, most people over 50 feel better, are less stressed, less hostile, less anxious. We tend to see commonalities more than differences. Some of the studies even say we're happier.(Laughter)This is not what I expected, trust me. I come from a long line of depressives. As I was approaching my late 40s, when I would wake up in the morning, my first six thoughts would all be negative. And I got scared. I thought, ""Oh my gosh. I'm going to become a crotchety old lady."" But now that I am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act, I realize I've never been happier. I have such a powerful feeling of well-being. And I've discovered that when you're inside oldness, as opposed to looking at it from the outside, fear subsides. You realize you're still yourself — maybe even more so. Picasso once said, ""It takes a long time to become young.""(Laughter)I don't want to romanticize aging. Obviously, there's no guarantee that it can be a time of fruition and growth. Some of it is a matter of luck. Some of it, obviously, is genetic. One third of it, in fact, is genetic. And there isn't much we can do about that. But that means that two-thirds of how well we do in the third act, we can do something about. We're going to discuss what we can do to make these added years really successful, and use them to make a difference.Now, let me say something about the staircase, which may seem like an odd metaphor for seniors, given the fact that many seniors are challenged by stairs.(Laughter)Myself included. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world — everything — is in a state of decline and decay — the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards, the staircase, bringing us into wholeness, authenticity, and wisdom.And here's an example of what I mean. This upward ascension can happen even in the face of extreme physical challenges. About three years ago, I read an article in the New York Times. It was about a man named Neil Selinger — 57 years old, a retired lawyer, who had joined the writers' group at Sarah Lawrence, where he found his writer's voice. Two years later, he was diagnosed with ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It's a terrible disease. It's fatal. It wastes the body, but the mind remains intact. In this article, Mr. Selinger wrote the following to describe what was happening to him. And I quote: ""As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. As I diminished, I grew. As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself."" Neil Selinger, to me, is the embodiment of mounting the staircase in his third act.Now we're all born with spirit, all of us, but sometimes it gets tamped down beneath the challenges of life, violence, abuse, neglect. Perhaps our parents suffered from depression. Perhaps they weren't able to love us beyond how we performed in the world. Perhaps we still suffer from a psychic pain, a wound. Perhaps we feel that many of our relationships have not had closure. And so we can feel unfinished. Perhaps the task of the third act is to finish up the task of finishing ourselves.For me, it began as I was approaching my third act, my 60th birthday. How was I supposed to live it? What was I supposed to accomplish in this final act? And I realized that, in order to know where I was going, I had to know where I'd been. And so I went back and I studied my first two acts, trying to see who I was then, who I really was, not who my parents or other people told me I was, or treated me like I was. But who was I? Who were my parents — not as parents, but as people? Who were my grandparents? How did they treat my parents? These kinds of things.I discovered, a couple of years later, that this process that I had gone through is called by psychologists ""doing a life review."" And they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person's life. You may discover, as I did, that a lot of things that you used to think were your fault, a lot of things you used to think about yourself, really had nothing to do with you. It wasn't your fault; you're just fine. And you're able to go back and forgive them. And forgive yourself. You're able to free yourself from your past. You can work to change your relationship to your past.Now while I was writing about this, I came upon a book called ""Man's Search for Meaning"" by Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who'd spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. And he wrote that, while he was in the camp, he could tell, should they ever be released, which of the people would be OK, and which would not. And he wrote this: ""Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived — not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger.""Perhaps the central purpose of the third act is to go back and to try, if appropriate, to change our relationship to the past. It turns out that cognitive research shows when we are able to do this, it manifests neurologically — neural pathways are created in the brain. You see, if you have, over time, reacted negatively to past events and people, neural pathways are laid down by chemical and electrical signals that are sent through the brain. And over time, these neural pathways become hardwired. They become the norm — even if it's bad for us, because it causes us stress and anxiety.If, however, we can go back and alter our relationship, re-vision our relationship to past people and events, neural pathways can change. And if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past, that becomes the new norm. It's like resetting a thermostat. It's not having experiences that makes us wise. It's reflecting on the experiences that we've had that makes us wise and that helps us become whole, brings wisdom and authenticity. It helps us become what we might have been.Women start off whole, don't we? I mean, as girls, we're feisty — ""Yeah? Who says?""(Laughter)We have agency. We are the subjects of our own lives. But very often, many, if not most of us, when we hit puberty, we start worrying about fitting in and being popular. And we become the subjects and objects of other people's lives. But now, in our third acts, it may be possible for us to circle back to where we started, and know it for the first time. And if we can do that, it will not just be for ourselves. Older women are the largest demographic in the world. If we can go back and redefine ourselves and become whole, this will create a cultural shift in the world, and it will give an example to younger generations so that they can reconceive their own lifespan.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_fonda_life_s_third_act
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"There's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century. It was said to echo in Churchill's brain in the 1930s. And the poem goes: ""On the idle hill of summer, lazy with the flow of streams, hark I hear a distant drummer, drumming like a sound in dreams, far and near and low and louder on the roads of earth go by, dear to friend and food to powder, soldiers marching, soon to die."" Those who are interested in poetry, the poem is ""A Shropshire Lad"" written by A.E. Housman.But what Housman understood, and you hear it in the symphonies of Nielsen too, was that the long, hot, silvan summers of stability of the 19th century were coming to a close, and that we were about to move into one of those terrifying periods of history when power changes. And these are always periods, ladies and gentlemen, accompanied by turbulence, and all too often by blood.And my message for you is that I believe we are condemned, if you like, to live at just one of those moments in history when the gimbals upon which the established order of power is beginning to change and the new look of the world, the new powers that exist in the world, are beginning to take form. And these are — and we see it very clearly today — nearly always highly turbulent times, highly difficult times, and all too often very bloody times. By the way, it happens about once every century.You might argue that the last time it happened — and that's what Housman felt coming and what Churchill felt too — was that when power passed from the old nations, the old powers of Europe, across the Atlantic to the new emerging power of the United States of America — the beginning of the American century. And of course, into the vacuum where the too-old European powers used to be were played the two bloody catastrophes of the last century — the one in the first part and the one in the second part: the two great World Wars. Mao Zedong used to refer to them as the European civil wars, and it's probably a more accurate way of describing them.Well, ladies and gentlemen, we live at one of those times. But for us, I want to talk about three factors today. And the first of these, the first two of these, is about a shift in power. And the second is about some new dimension which I want to refer to, which has never quite happened in the way it's happening now. But let's talk about the shifts of power that are occurring to the world. And what is happening today is, in one sense, frightening because it's never happened before. We have seen lateral shifts of power — the power of Greece passed to Rome and the power shifts that occurred during the European civilizations — but we are seeing something slightly different. For power is not just moving laterally from nation to nation. It's also moving vertically.What's happening today is that the power that was encased, held to accountability, held to the rule of law, within the institution of the nation state has now migrated in very large measure onto the global stage. The globalization of power — we talk about the globalization of markets, but actually it's the globalization of real power. And where, at the nation state level that power is held to accountability subject to the rule of law, on the international stage it is not. The international stage and the global stage where power now resides: the power of the Internet, the power of the satellite broadcasters, the power of the money changers — this vast money-go-round that circulates now 32 times the amount of money necessary for the trade it's supposed to be there to finance — the money changers, if you like, the financial speculators that have brought us all to our knees quite recently, the power of the multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries. These live in a global space which is largely unregulated, not subject to the rule of law, and in which people may act free of constraint.Now that suits the powerful up to a moment. It's always suitable for those who have the most power to operate in spaces without constraint, but the lesson of history is that, sooner or later, unregulated space — space not subject to the rule of law — becomes populated, not just by the things you wanted — international trade, the Internet, etc. — but also by the things you don't want — international criminality, international terrorism. The revelation of 9/11 is that even if you are the most powerful nation on earth, nevertheless, those who inhabit that space can attack you even in your most iconic of cities one bright September morning. It's said that something like 60 percent of the four million dollars that was taken to fund 9/11 actually passed through the institutions of the Twin Towers which 9/11 destroyed. You see, our enemies also use this space — the space of mass travel, the Internet, satellite broadcasters — to be able to get around their poison, which is about destroying our systems and our ways.Sooner or later, sooner or later, the rule of history is that where power goes governance must follow. And if it is therefore the case, as I believe it is, that one of the phenomenon of our time is the globalization of power, then it follows that one of the challenges of our time is to bring governance to the global space. And I believe that the decades ahead of us now will be to a greater or lesser extent turbulent the more or less we are able to achieve that aim: to bring governance to the global space.Now notice, I'm not talking about government. I'm not talking about setting up some global democratic institution. My own view, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is that this is unlikely to be done by spawning more U.N. institutions. If we didn't have the U.N., we'd have to invent it. The world needs an international forum. It needs a means by which you can legitimize international action. But when it comes to governance of the global space, my guess is this won't happen through the creation of more U.N. institutions. It will actually happen by the powerful coming together and making treaty-based systems, treaty-based agreements, to govern that global space.And if you look, you can see them happening, already beginning to emerge. The World Trade Organization: treaty-based organization, entirely treaty-based, and yet, powerful enough to hold even the most powerful, the United States, to account if necessary. Kyoto: the beginnings of struggling to create a treaty-based organization. The G20: we know now that we have to put together an institution which is capable of bringing governance to that financial space for financial speculation. And that's what the G20 is, a treaty-based institution.Now there's a problem there, and we'll come back to it in a minute, which is that if you bring the most powerful together to make the rules in treaty-based institutions, to fill that governance space, then what happens to the weak who are left out? And that's a big problem, and we'll return to it in just a second.So there's my first message, that if you are to pass through these turbulent times more or less turbulently, then our success in doing that will in large measure depend on our capacity to bring sensible governance to the global space. And watch that beginning to happen. My second point is, and I know I don't have to talk to an audience like this about such a thing, but power is not just shifting vertically, it's also shifting horizontally.You might argue that the story, the history of civilizations, has been civilizations gathered around seas — with the first ones around the Mediterranean, the more recent ones in the ascendents of Western power around the Atlantic. Well it seems to me that we're now seeing a fundamental shift of power, broadly speaking, away from nations gathered around the Atlantic [seaboard] to the nations gathered around the Pacific rim. Now that begins with economic power, but that's the way it always begins. You already begin to see the development of foreign policies, the augmentation of military budgets occurring in the other growing powers in the world. I think actually this is not so much a shift from the West to the East; something different is happening.My guess is, for what it's worth, is that the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 10 years, 15, but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered; it has radically changed. We are coming out of 50 years, most unusual years, of history in which we have had a totally mono-polar world, in which every compass needle for or against has to be referenced by its position to Washington — a world bestrode by a single colossus. But that's not a usual case in history. In fact, what's now emerging is the much more normal case of history. You're beginning to see the emergence of a multi-polar world.Up until now, the United States has been the dominant feature of our world. They will remain the most powerful nation, but they will be the most powerful nation in an increasingly multi-polar world. And you begin to see the alternative centers of power building up — in China, of course, though my own guess is that China's ascent to greatness is not smooth. It's going to be quite grumpy as China begins to democratize her society after liberalizing her economy. But that's a subject of a different discussion. You see India, you see Brazil. You see increasingly that the world now looks actually, for us Europeans, much more like Europe in the 19th century.Europe in the 19th century: a great British foreign secretary, Lord Canning, used to describe it as the ""European concert of powers."" There was a balance, a five-sided balance. Britain always played to the balance. If Paris got together with Berlin, Britain got together with Vienna and Rome to provide a counterbalance. Now notice, in a period which is dominated by a mono-polar world, you have fixed alliances — NATO, the Warsaw Pact. A fixed polarity of power means fixed alliances. But a multiple polarity of power means shifting and changing alliances. And that's the world we're coming into, in which we will increasingly see that our alliances are not fixed. Canning, the great British foreign secretary once said, ""Britain has a common interest, but no common allies."" And we will see increasingly that even we in the West will reach out, have to reach out, beyond the cozy circle of the Atlantic powers to make alliances with others if we want to get things done in the world.Note, that when we went into Libya, it was not good enough for the West to do it alone; we had to bring others in. We had to bring, in this case, the Arab League in. My guess is Iraq and Afghanistan are the last times when the West has tried to do it themselves, and we haven't succeeded. My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years — I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire — of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values. You know, up until now, if the West got its act together, it could propose and dispose in every corner of the world. But that's no longer true. Take the last financial crisis after the Second World War. The West got together — the Bretton Woods Institution, World Bank, International Monetary Fund — the problem solved. Now we have to call in others. Now we have to create the G20. Now we have to reach beyond the cozy circle of our Western friends.Let me make a prediction for you, which is probably even more startling. I suspect we are now reaching the end of 400 years when Western power was enough. People say to me, ""The Chinese, of course, they'll never get themselves involved in peace-making, multilateral peace-making around the world."" Oh yes? Why not? How many Chinese troops are serving under the blue beret, serving under the blue flag, serving under the U.N. command in the world today? 3,700. How many Americans? 11. What is the largest naval contingent tackling the issue of Somali pirates? The Chinese naval contingent. Of course they are, they are a mercantilist nation. They want to keep the sea lanes open. Increasingly, we are going to have to do business with people with whom we do not share values, but with whom, for the moment, we share common interests. It's a whole new different way of looking at the world that is now emerging.And here's the third factor, which is totally different. Today in our modern world, because of the Internet, because of the kinds of things people have been talking about here, everything is connected to everything. We are now interdependent. We are now interlocked, as nations, as individuals, in a way which has never been the case before, never been the case before. The interrelationship of nations, well it's always existed. Diplomacy is about managing the interrelationship of nations. But now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico, it's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down, the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia, food riots in Africa.We are all now deeply, deeply, deeply interconnected. And what that means is the idea of a nation state acting alone, not connected with others, not working with others, is no longer a viable proposition. Because the actions of a nation state are neither confined to itself, nor is it sufficient for the nation state itself to control its own territory, because the effects outside the nation state are now beginning to affect what happens inside them.I was a young soldier in the last of the small empire wars of Britain. At that time, the defense of my country was about one thing and one thing only: how strong was our army, how strong was our air force, how strong was our navy and how strong were our allies. That was when the enemy was outside the walls. Now the enemy is inside the walls. Now if I want to talk about the defense of my country, I have to speak to the Minister of Health because pandemic disease is a threat to my security, I have to speak to the Minister of Agriculture because food security is a threat to my security, I have to speak to the Minister of Industry because the fragility of our hi-tech infrastructure is now a point of attack for our enemies — as we see from cyber warfare — I have to speak to the Minister of Home Affairs because who has entered my country, who lives in that terraced house in that inner city has a direct effect on what happens in my country — as we in London saw in the 7/7 bombings. It's no longer the case that the security of a country is simply a matter for its soldiers and its ministry of defense. It's its capacity to lock together its institutions.And this tells you something very important. It tells you that, in fact, our governments, vertically constructed, constructed on the economic model of the Industrial Revolution — vertical hierarchy, specialization of tasks, command structures — have got the wrong structures completely. You in business know that the paradigm structure of our time, ladies and gentlemen, is the network. It's your capacity to network that matters, both within your governments and externally.So here is Ashdown's third law. By the way, don't ask me about Ashdown's first law and second law because I haven't invented those yet; it always sounds better if there's a third law, doesn't it? Ashdown's third law is that in the modern age, where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others. The most important bit about your structure — whether you're a government, whether you're an army regiment, whether you're a business — is your docking points, your interconnectors, your capacity to network with others. You understand that in industry; governments don't.But now one final thing. If it is the case, ladies and gentlemen — and it is — that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before, then it's also the case that we share a destiny with each other. Suddenly and for the very first time, collective defense, the thing that has dominated us as the concept of securing our nations, is no longer enough. It used to be the case that if my tribe was more powerful than their tribe, I was safe; if my country was more powerful than their country, I was safe; my alliance, like NATO, was more powerful than their alliance, I was safe. It is no longer the case. The advent of the interconnectedness and of the weapons of mass destruction means that, increasingly, I share a destiny with my enemy.When I was a diplomat negotiating the disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union in Geneva in the 1970s, we succeeded because we understood we shared a destiny with them. Collective security is not enough. Peace has come to Northern Ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game couldn't work. They shared a destiny with their enemies. One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides, both Israel and, I think, the Palestinians, do not understand that they share a collective destiny. And so suddenly, ladies and gentlemen, what has been the proposition of visionaries and poets down the ages becomes something we have to take seriously as a matter of public policy.I started with a poem, I'll end with one. The great poem of John Donne's. ""Send not for whom the bell tolls."" The poem is called ""No Man is an Island."" And it goes: ""Every man's death affected me, for I am involved in mankind, send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."" For John Donne, a recommendation of morality. For us, I think, part of the equation for our survival.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paddy_ashdown_the_global_power_shift
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"There's currently over a thousand TED Talks on the TED website. And I guess many of you here think that this is quite fantastic, except for me, I don't agree with this. I think we have a situation here. Because if you think about it, 1,000 TED Talks, that's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading. How on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas? Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand TED videos, it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so. And I did a little calculation of this. The damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $15,000. So having seen this danger to the economy, I thought, we need to find a solution to this problem.Here's my approach to it all. If you look at the current situation, you have a thousand TED Talks. Each of those TED Talks has an average length of about 2,300 words. Now take this together, and you end up with 2.3 million words of TED Talks, which is about three Bibles-worth of content.(Laughter)The obvious question here is, does a TED Talk really need 2,300 words? Isn't there something shorter? I mean, if you have an idea worth spreading, surely you can put it into something shorter than 2,300 words. The only question is, how short can you get? What's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a TED Talk?While I was pondering this question, I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway, who allegedly said that these six words here: ""For sale: baby shoes, never worn,"" were the best novel he had ever written. And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs where people were asked, take your whole life and please sum this up into six words, such as these here: ""Found true love, married someone else."" Or ""Living in existential vacuum; it sucks."" I actually like that one. So if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words, you don't need more than six words for a TED Talk. We could have been done by lunch here.(Laughter)And if you did this for all thousand TED Talks, you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000. So I thought this was quite worthwhile.So I started asking all my friends, please take your favorite TED Talk and put that into six words. So here are some of the results that I received. I think they're quite nice. For example, Dan Pink's talk on motivation, which was pretty good, if you haven't seen it: ""Drop carrot. Drop stick. Bring meaning."" It's what he's basically talking about in those 18,5 minutes. Or some even included references to the speakers, such as Nathan Myhrvold's speaking style, or the one of Tim Ferriss, which might be considered a bit strenuous at times.The challenge here is, if I try to systematically do this, I would probably end up with a lot of summaries, but not with many friends in the end. So I had to find a different method, preferably involving total strangers. And luckily, there's a website for that, called Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can post tasks that you don't want to do yourself, such as ""Please summarize this text for me in six words."" And I didn't allow any low-cost countries to work on this, but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents, which I think is a pretty good price.Even then, unfortunately, it's not possible to summarize each TED Talk individually. Because if you do the math, you have a thousand TED Talks, you pay 10 cents each; you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks, because some of them will probably be, or are, really bad. So I would end up paying hundreds of dollars. So I thought of a different way, by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. So what if I don't let people summarize individual TED Talks to six words, but give them 10 TED Talks at the same time and say, ""Please do a six-word summary for that one."" I would cut my costs by 90 percent. So for $60, I could summarize a thousand TED Talks into just 600 summaries, which would actually be quite nice.Some of you might actually right now be thinking, it's downright crazy to have 10 TED Talks summarized into just six words. But it's actually not, because there's an example by statistics professor Hans Rosling. I guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks. He's got eight talks online, and those can basically be summed up into just four words, because that's all he's basically showing us, our intuition is really bad. He always proves us wrong.So people on the Internet, some didn't do so well. And when I asked them to summarize the 10 TED Talks at the same time, some took the easy route out. They just had some general comment. There were others — and I found this quite cheeky — They used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if I'd been too much on Google lately.(Laughter)And finally also, I never understood this, some people really came up with their own version of the truth. I don't know any TED Talk that contains this.But, oh well. In the end, however, and this is really amazing, for each of those 10 TED Talk clusters that I submitted, I actually received meaningful summaries. Here are some of my favorites. For example, for the TED Talks about food, someone summed this up into: ""Food shaping body, brains and environment,"" which I think is pretty good. Or happiness: ""Striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness.""So here I was. I had started out with a thousand TED Talks and I had 600 six-word summaries for those. Actually, it sounded nice in the beginning, but when you look at 600 summaries, it's quite a lot, it's a huge list.(Laughter)So I thought, I probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries, and this is exactly what I did. So I took the 600 summaries that I had, put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com and asked people to do summaries of those. Again, there were some misunderstandings. For example, when I had a cluster of all the ""Beautiful"" talks, someone thought I was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line. But in the end, amazingly, again, people were able to do it. For example, all the courageous TED Talks: ""People dying"" or ""People suffering"" was also one, ""with easy solutions around."" Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TED Talk: ""Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer."" I mean that's the essence of it all.Now I had my nine groups, but, I mean, it's already quite a reduction. But of course, once you are that far, you're not really satisfied. I wanted to go all the way, all the way down the distillery, starting out with a thousand TED Talks. I wanted to have a thousand TED Talks summarized into just six words — which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content. And I would only pay $99.50 — so stay even below $100 for it.So I had 50 overall summaries done. This time I paid 25 cents because I thought the task was a bit harder. And unfortunately, when I first received the answers — and here, you'll see six of the answers — I was a bit disappointed. Because I think you'll agree, they all summarize some aspect of TED, but to me, they felt a bit bland, or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them. So I was almost ready to give up when one night, I played around with these sentences and found out that there's actually a beautiful solution in here. So here it is, a crowd-sourced, six-word summary of a thousand TED Talks at the value of $99.50: ""Why the worry? I'd rather wonder.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_wernicke_1000_tedtalks_6_words
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"I was told to come here and tell you all stories, but what I'd like to do is instead tell you why I'm suspicious of stories, why stories make me nervous. In fact, the more inspired a story makes me feel, very often, the more nervous I get. (Laughter) So the best stories are often the trickiest ones. The good and bad things about stories is that they are a kind of filter. They take a lot of information, and they leave some of it out, and they keep some of it in. But the thing about this filter is that it always leaves the same things in. You're always left with the same few simple stories. There is the old saying that just about every story can be summed up as ""a stranger came to town."" There is a book by Christopher Booker, where he claims there are really just seven types of stories. There is monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, rebirth. You don't have to agree with that list exactly, but the point is this: if you think in terms of stories, you're telling yourself the same things over and over again. There was a study done, we asked some people— people were asked to describe their lives. When asked to describe their lives, what is interesting is how few people said ""mess"". (Laughter) It's probably the best answer, I don't mean that in a bad way. ""Mess"" can be liberating, ""mess"" can be empowering, ""mess"" can be a way of drawing upon multiple strengths. But what people wanted to say was, ""My life is a journey."" 51% wanted to turn his or her life into a story. 11% said, ""My life is a battle."" Again, that is a kind of story. 8% said, ""My life is a novel."" 5% said, ""My life is a play."" I don't think anyone said, ""My life is a reality TV show."" (Laughter) But again, we're imposing order on the mess we observe, and it's taking the same patterns, and the thing is when something is in the form of a story, often, we remember it when we shouldn't. So how many of you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree? It's not obvious that is exactly what happened. The story of Paul Revere, it's not obvious that that is exactly the way it happened. So again, we should be suspicious of stories. We're biologically programmed to respond to them. They contain a lot of information. They have social power. They connect us to other people. So they are like a candy that we're fed when we consume political information, when we read novels. When we read non-fiction books, we're really being fed stories. Non-fiction is, in a sense, the new fiction. The book may happen to say true things, but again, everything's taking the same form of these stories. So what are the problems of relying too heavily on stories? You view your life like this instead of the mess that it is or it ought to be. But more specifically, I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple, for the point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18 minutes, but most narratives  you can present in a sentence or two. When you strip away detail, you tend to tell stories in terms of good versus evil, whether it's a story about your own life or a story about politics. I know some things actually are good versus evil, we all know this, right? But I think, as a general rule, we're too inclined to tell the good versus evil story. As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you're telling a good versus evil story, you're basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it's, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don't have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good versus evil story, and by pressing that button, you're lowering your IQ by ten points or more. Another set of stories that are popular— if you know Oliver Stone's movies, or Michael Moore's movies, you can't make a movie and say: ""It was all a big accident."" No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action, but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So when you hear stories about plots, or even stories about good people plotting things together, just like when you're watching movies, this, again, is reason to be suspicious. As a good rule of thumb, if you're asking: ""When I hear a story, when should I be especially suspicious?"" If you hear a story and you think: ""Wow, that would make a great movie!"" (Laughter) That's when the ""uh-oh"" reaction should pop in a bit more, and you should start thinking in terms of how the whole thing is maybe a bit of a mess. Another common story or storyline is the claim that we ""have to get tough"". You'll hear this in so many contexts. We have to get tough with the banks. We had to get tough with the labor unions. We need to get tough with some other country, some foreign dictator, someone we're negotiating with. Again, the point is not against getting tough. Sometimes we should get tough. That we got tough with the Nazis was a good thing. But this is again a story we fall back upon all too readily, all too quickly. When we don't really know why something happened, we blame someone, and we say: ""We need to get tough with them!"" As if it had never occurred to your predecessor, this idea of getting tough. I view it usually as a kind of mental laziness. It's a simple story you tell: ""We need to get tough, we needed to get tough, we will have to get tough."" Usually, that is a kind of warning signal. Another kind of problem with stories is you can only fit so many stories into your mind at once, or in the course of a day, or even over the course of a lifetime. So your stories are serving too many purposes. For instance, just to get out of bed in the morning, you tell yourself the story that your job is really important, what you're doing is really important (Laughter) and maybe it is, but I tell myself that story even when it's not. And you know what? That story works. It gets me out of bed. It's a kind of self-deception, but the problem comes when I need to change that story. The whole point of the story is that I grab onto it and I hold it, and it gets me out of bed. So when I'm really doing something that is actually just a waste of time, in my mess of a life, I'm too tied into my story that got me out of bed, and ideally, I ought to have some very complex story map in my mind, you know, with combinatorials and a matrix of computation, and the like, but that is not how stories work. Stories in order to work  have to be simple, easily grasped, easily told to others, easily remembered. So stories will serve dual and conflicting purposes, and very often they will lead us astray. I used to think I was within the camp of economists, I was one of the good guys, and I was allied with other good guys, and we were fighting the ideas of the bad guys. I used to think that! And probably, I was wrong. Maybe sometimes, I'm one of the good guys, but on some issues, I finally realized: ""Hey, I wasn't one of the good guys."" I'm not sure I was the bad guy in the sense of having evil intent, but it was very hard for me to get away with that story. One interesting thing about cognitive biases is they are the subject of so many books these days. There's the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book, like the one-title book, all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is that we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. Why don't these books tell us that? It's because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you're learning about some of your biases, but you're making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias. Often, people buy them as a kind of talisman, like: ""I bought this book. I won't be 'Predictably Irrational'."" (Laughter) It's like people want to hear the worst, so psychologically, they can prepare for it or defend against it. It's why there is such a market for pessimism. But to think that by buying the book gets you somewhere, that's maybe the bigger fallacy. It's just like the evidence that shows that the most dangerous people are those who have been taught some financial literacy. They're the ones who go out and make the worst mistakes. It's the people who realize they don't know anything at all, that end up doing pretty well. A third problem with stories is that outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but, of course, that's not how it is, advertising works on all of us. So if you're too attached to stories, what will happen is people selling products come along, and they will bundle their product with a story. You're like, ""Hey, a free story!"" And you end up buying the product, because the product and the story go together. (Laugther) If you think about how capitalism works, there is a bias here. Let's consider two kinds of stories about cars. Story A is: ""Buy this car, and you will have beautiful, romantic partners and a fascinating life."" (Laughter) There are a lot of people who have a financial incentive to promote that story. But, say, the alternative story is: ""You don't actually need a car as nice as your income would indicate. What you usually do is look at what your peers do and copy them. That is a good heuristic for lots of problems, but when it comes to cars, just buy a Toyota."" (Laughter) Maybe Toyota has an incentive there, but even Toyota is making more money off the luxury cars, and less money off the cheaper cars. So if you think which set of stories you end up hearing, you end up hearing the glamor stories, the seductive stories, and again I'm telling you, don't trust them. There are people using your love of stories to manipulate you. Pull back and say: ""What are the messages, what are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell?"" Start telling yourself those, and then see if any of your decisions change. That is one simple way. You can never get out of the pattern of thinking in terms of stories, but you can improve the extent to which you think in stories, and make some better decisions. So if I'm thinking about this talk, I'm wondering, of course, what is it you take away from this talk? What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? One story you might be like the story of the quest. ""Tyler was a man on a quest. Tyler came here, and he told us not to think so much in terms of stories."" That would be a story you could tell about this talk. (Laughter) It would fit a pretty well-known pattern. You might remember it. You could tell it to other people. ""This weird guy came, and he said, 'Don't think in terms of stories. Let me tell you what happened today!'"" (Laughter) And you tell your story. (Laugther) Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, ""I used to think too much in terms of stories (Laughter) but then I heard Tyler Cowen (Laughter) and now I think less in terms of stories!"" That too is a narrative you will remember, you can tell to other people, and again, it may stick. You also could tell a story of deep tragedy. ""This guy Tyler Cowen came (Laughter) and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories (Laughter) about how other people think too much in terms of stories."" (Laughter) So, today, which is it? Is it like quest, rebirth, tragedy? Or maybe some combination of the three? I'm really not sure, and I'm not here to tell you to burn your DVD player and throw out your Tolstoy. To think in terms of stories is fundamentally human. There is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez memoir ""Living to Tell the Tale"" that we use memory in stories to make sense of what we've done, to give meaning to our lives, to establish connections with other people. None of this will go away, should go away, or can go away. But again, as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin, the extra decision. Should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? And what kind of stories should we be suspicious of? Again, I'm telling you it's the stories, very often, that you like the most, that you find the most rewarding, the most inspiring. The stories that don't focus on opportunity cost, or the complex, unintended consequences of human action, because that very often does not make for a good story. So often a story is a story of triumph, a story of struggle; there are opposing forces, which are either evil or ignorant; there is a person on a quest, someone making a voyage, and a stranger coming to town. And those are your categories, but don't let them make you too happy. (Laughter) As an alternative, at the margin - again, no burning of Tolstoy - but just be a little more messy. If I actually had to live those journeys, and quests, and battles, that would be so oppressive to me! It's like, my goodness, can't I just have my life in its messy, ordinary  - I hesitate to use the word - glory but that it's fun for me? Do I really have to follow some kind of narrative? Can't I just live? So be more comfortable with messy. Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make you feel good. It's so easy to pick out a few areas to be agnostic in, and then feel good about it, like, ""I am agnostic about religion, or politics."" It's a kind of portfolio move you make to be more dogmatic elsewhere, right? (Laughter) Sometimes, the most intellectually trustworthy people are the ones who pick one area, and they are totally dogmatic in that, so pig-headedly unreasonable, that you think, ""How can they possibly believe that?"" But it soaks up their stubbornness, and then, on other things, they can be pretty open-minded. So don't fall into the trap of thinking because you're agnostic on some things, that you're being fundamentally reasonable about your self-deception, your stories, and your open-mindedness. (Laughter) [Think about] this idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, [and how] not everything  ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is, but anyway, I'm happy to be invited, and thank you all for listening. (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_stories
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"Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken? Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories. However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger. The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines — specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine, or PhIP — (laughter) which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound.A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells, which can also cause them to metastasize or spread. They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group. Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines. However, no studies exist yet that show how or why. These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens. And as you can see, none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe, which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet.Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea. And I was led to it through a series of events. I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor's office — (Laughter) which was between the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants. They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning.So I was very surprised about this. And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken, which doesn't seem very harmful. But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white. And later in biology class, I learned that it's due to a process called denaturing, which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function. So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis, saying that, could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH?So my idea was born, and I had the project set up and a hypothesis, so what was my next step? Well obviously I had to find a lab to work at because I didn't have the equipment in my school. I thought this would be easy, but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived, and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me. Most of the others either never responded back, said they didn't have the time or didn't have the equipment and couldn't help me. So it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times. However, it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab — so I could finally start my project.The first stage was completed at home, which consisted of marinating the chicken, grilling the chicken, amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab. The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab, which is where I extracted the chemicals, changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken. The final stages, when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken.So when I went through the data, I had very surprising results, because I found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation. When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent. The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent. Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible. And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens.Another important factor that I didn't take into account initially was the time cooked. And I found that if you increase the time cooked, the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases. So the best way to marinate chicken, based on this, is to, not under-cook, but definitely don't over-cook and char the chicken, and marinate in either lemon juice, brown sugar or saltwater.(Applause)Based on these findings, I have a question for you. Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life? Now I'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that's not marinated, you're definitely going to catch cancer and die. However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle.Is it worth it to you? How will you cook your chicken now?(Applause)Shree Bose: Hi everyone. I'm Shree Bose. I was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner. And I want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant. And she's standing in front of you and she's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they're different colors. Sounds ridiculous, right. But that was me years ago. And that was my first science fair project. It got a bit more complicated from there. My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra. My parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects, including a remote controlled garbage can.(Laughter)And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer. And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss. So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15. Good plan. So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab. Got rejected by all except one. And then went on, my next summer, to work under Dr. Basu at the UNT Health Center at Fort Worth, Texas. And that is where the research began.So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to. But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States. In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One in 100 will die from it. Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells.Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug — a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves. Sounds great, right? But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back. And this time, they no longer respond to the drug. It's a huge problem. In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today.So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin. And we wanted to figure this out, because if we could figure that out, then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening. So that's what we set out to do. And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein. So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein, and we saw this huge shift. I mean, on the slide, you can see that on our sensitive side, these cells that are responding to the drug, when we start blocking the protein, the number of dying cells — those colored dots — they're going down. But then on this side, with the same treatment, they're going up — interesting.But those are dots on a screen for you; what exactly does that mean? Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell. And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant. And that's huge. In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug. And that's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness — possibly for many different types of cancer. So that was my work, and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research, with figuring out exactly what this protein does, but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness — so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren.But my work wasn't just about the research. It was about finding my passion. That's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair — cute picture, right — it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor. And ever since then, I've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff — from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys.But like I said, my journey wasn't just about the research, it was about finding my passion, and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn't even know what I was doing. It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing. After all, my story begins with a dried, withered spinach plant and it's only getting better from there.Thank you.(Applause)Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients. 1.6 million deaths worldwide. One death every 20 seconds. People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors. And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined. Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round. It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season?With this question in mind, I started researching, and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit. As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients. At first, I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients. But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients. And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important.So with that in mind, I started researching more, I started investigating more, and I became very passionate. Because I realized that if we could find a way to target remediation, we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively. For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces. They're everywhere. These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant, as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act. Which is surprising to me, because these chemical pollutants, through my research, I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated.So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created. I'm going to show it to you on my laptop. And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today, Julie. And all of Julie's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model. And this can be used by anyone. So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder. So Julie's going to her doctor's office to get treated for her asthma. And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate — which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath.So that peak expiratory flow rate, I've entered it up into the interactive software model. I've also entered in her age, her gender and her height. I've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels. So any user can come in here and click on ""lung function report"" and it'll take them to this report that I created. And this report really drives home the crux of my research.So what it shows — if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner — it shows Julie's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar. This is the measurement that she took in her doctor's office. In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph, it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate, what her exhalation rate or lung health, should be based on her age, gender and height. So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar, and he says, ""Wow, we need to give her steroids, medication and inhalers.""But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids, inhalers and medication, the doctor turns to Julie and says, ""Why don't you go home and clean out your air filters. Clean out the air ducts in your home, in your workplace, in your school. Stop the use of incense and candles. And if you're remodeling your house, take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring."" Because these solutions are natural, these solutions are sustainable, and these solutions are long-term investments — long-term investments that we're making for our generation and for future generations. Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her.So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants. But before I end my talk today, I want to leave you with one saying. And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research. Because what I feel, is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level, that we can't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything.But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality. Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general.So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality, better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations.Thank you.(Applause)Lisa Ling: Right. Can I have Shree and Lauren come up really quickly? Your Google Science Fair champions. Your winners.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/award_winning_teen_age_science_in_action
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"Amongst all the troubling deficits we struggle with today — we think of financial and economic primarily — the ones that concern me most is the deficit of political dialogue — our ability to address modern conflicts as they are, to go to the source of what they're all about and to understand the key players and to deal with them. We who are diplomats, we are trained to deal with conflicts between states and issues between states. And I can tell you, our agenda is full. There is trade, there is disarmament, there is cross-border relations.But the picture is changing, and we are seeing that there are new key players coming onto the scene. We loosely call them ""groups."" They may represent social, religious, political, economic, military realities. And we struggle with how to deal with them. The rules of engagement: how to talk, when to talk, and how to deal with them.Let me show you a slide here which illustrates the character of conflicts since 1946 until today. You see the green is a traditional interstate conflict, the ones we used to read about. The red is modern conflict, conflicts within states. These are quite different, and they are outside the grasp of modern diplomacy. And the core of these key actors are groups who represent different interests inside countries. And the way they deal with their conflicts rapidly spreads to other countries. So in a way, it is everybody's business.Another acknowledgment we've seen during these years, recent years, is that very few of these domestic interstate, intrastate conflicts can be solved militarily. They may have to be dealt with with military means, but they cannot be solved by military means. They need political solutions. And we, therefore, have a problem, because they escape traditional diplomacy. And we have among states a reluctance in dealing with them. Plus, during the last decade, we've been in the mode where dealing with groups was conceptually and politically dangerous. After 9/11, either you were with us or against us. It was black or white. And groups are very often immediately label terrorists. And who would talk to terrorists? The West, as I would see it, comes out of that decade weakened, because we didn't understand the group. So we've spent more time on focusing on why we should not talk to others than finding out how we talk to others.Now I'm not naive. You cannot talk to everybody all the time. And there are times you should walk. And sometimes military intervention is necessary. I happen to believe that Libya was necessary and that military intervention in Afghanistan was also necessary. And my country relies on its security through military alliance, that's clear. But still we have a large deficit in dealing with and understanding modern conflict.Let us turn to Afghanistan. 10 years after that military intervention, that country is far from secure. The situation, to be honest, is very serious. Now again, the military is necessary, but the military is no problem-solver. When I first came to Afghanistan in 2005 as a foreign minister, I met the commander of ISAF, the international troops. And he told me that, ""This can be won militarily, minister. We just have to persevere."" Now four COM ISAF's later, we hear a different message: ""This cannot be won militarily. We need military presence, but we need to move to politics. We can only solve this through a political solution. And it is not us who will solve it; Afghans have to solve it."" But then they need a different political process than the one they were given in 2001, 2002. They need an inclusive process where the real fabric of this very complicated society can deal with their issues.Everybody seems to agree with that. It was very controversial to say three, four, five years ago. Now everybody agrees. But now, as we prepare to talk, we understand how little we know. Because we didn't talk. We didn't grasp what was going on. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC, is talking to everyone, and it is doing so because it is neutral. And that's one reason why that organization probably is the best informed key player to understand modern conflict — because they talk.My point is that you don't have to be neutral to talk. And you don't have to agree when you sit down with the other side. And you can always walk. But if you don't talk, you can't engage the other side. And the other side which you're going to engage is the one with whom you profoundly disagree. Prime Minister Rabin said when he engaged the Oslo process, ""You don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies."" It's hard, but it is necessary.Let me go one step further. This is Tahrir Square. There's a revolution going on. The Arab Spring is heading into fall and is moving into winter. It will last for a long, long time. And who knows what it will be called in the end. That's not the point. The point is that we are probably seeing, for the first time in the history of the Arab world, a revolution bottom-up — people's revolution. Social groups are taking to the streets. And we find out in the West that we know very little about what's happening. Because we never talk to the people in these countries. Most governments followed the dictate of the authoritarian leaders to stay away from these different groups, because they were terrorists. So now that they are emerging in the street and we salute the democratic revolution, we find out how little we know.Right now, the discussion goes, ""Should we talk to the Muslim Brotherhood? Should we talk to Hamas? If we talk to them, we may legitimize them."" I think that is wrong. If you talk in the right way, you make it very clear that talking is not agreeing. And how can we tell the Muslim Brotherhood, as we should, that they must respect minority rights, if we don't accept majority rights? Because they may turn out to be a majority. How can we escape [having] a double-standard, if we at the same time preach democracy and at the same time don't want to deal with the groups that are representative? How will we ever be interlocutors? Now my diplomats are instructed to talk to all these groups. But talking can be done in different ways. We make a distinction between talking from a diplomatic level and talking at the political level. Now talking can be accompanied with aid or not with aid. Talking can be accompanied with inclusion or not inclusion.There's a big array of the ways of dealing with this. So if we refuse to talk to these new groups that are going to be dominating the news in years to come, we will further radicalization, I believe. We will make the road from violent activities into politics harder to travel. And if we cannot demonstrate to these groups that if you move towards democracy, if you move towards taking part in civilized and normal standards among states, there are some rewards on the other side. The paradox here is that the last decade probably was a lost decade for making progress on this.And the paradox is that the decade before the last decade was so promising — and for one reason primarily. And the reason is what happened in South Africa: Nelson Mandela. When Mandela came out of prison after 27 years of captivity, if he had told his people, ""It's time to take up the arms, it's time to fight,"" he would have been followed. And I think the international community would have said, ""Fair enough. It's their right to fight."" Now as you know, Mandela didn't do that. In his memoirs, ""Long Road to Freedom,"" he wrote that he survived during those years of captivity because he always decided to look upon his oppressor as also being a human being, also being a human being. So he engaged a political process of dialogue, not as a strategy of the weak, but as a strategy of the strong. And he engaged talking profoundly by settling some of the most tricky issues through a truth and reconciliation process where people came and talked. Now South African friends will know that was very painful.So what can we learn from all of this? Dialogue is not easy — not between individuals, not between groups, not between governments — but it is very necessary. If we're going to deal with political conflict-solving of conflicts, if we're going to understand these new groups which are coming from bottom-up, supported by technology, which is available to all, we diplomats cannot be sitting back in the banquets believing that we are doing interstate relations. We have to connect with these profound changes.And what is dialogue really about? When I enter into dialogue, I really hope that the other side would pick up my points of view, that I would impress upon them my opinions and my values. I cannot do that unless I send the signals that I will be open to listen to the other side's signals. We need a lot more training on how to do that and a lot more practice on how that can take problem-solving forward. We know from our personal experiences that it's easy sometimes just to walk, and sometimes you may need to fight. And I wouldn't say that is the wrong thing in all circumstances. Sometimes you have to. But that strategy seldom takes you very far. The alternative is a strategy of engagement and principled dialogue. And I believe we need to strengthen this approach in modern diplomacy, not only between states, but also within states.We are seeing some new signs. We could never have done the convention against anti-personnel landmines and the convention that is banning cluster munitions unless we had done diplomacy differently, by engaging with civil society. All of a sudden, NGOs were not only standing in the streets, crying their slogans, but they were taking [them] into the negotiations, partly because they represented the victims of these weapons. And they brought their knowledge. And there was an interaction between diplomacy and the power coming bottom-up. This is perhaps a first element of a change. In the future, I believe, we should draw examples from these different illustrations, not to have diplomacy which is disconnected from people and civil society.And we have to go also beyond traditional diplomacy to the survival issue of our times, climate change. How are we going to solve climate change through negotiations, unless we are able to make civil society and people, not part of the problem, but part of the solution? It is going to demand an inclusive process of diplomacy very different from the one we are practicing today as we are heading to new rounds of difficult climate negotiations, but when we move toward something which has to be much more along a broad mobilization. It's crucial to understand, I believe, because of technology and because of globalization, societies from bottom-up.We as diplomats need to know the social capital of communities. What is it that makes people trust each other, not only between states, but also within states? What is the legitimacy of diplomacy, of the the solution we devise as diplomats if they cannot be reflected and understood by also these broader forces of societies that we now very loosely call groups?The good thing is that we are not powerless. We have never had as many means of communication, means of being connected, means of reaching out, means of including. The diplomatic toolbox is actually full of different tools we can use to strengthen our communication. But the problem is that we are coming out of a decade where we had a fear of touching it. Now, I hope, in the coming years, that we are able to demonstrate through some concrete examples that fear is receding and that we can take courage from that alliance with civil society in different countries to support their problem-solving, among the Afghans, inside the Palestinian population, between the peoples of Palestine and Israel.And as we try to understand this broad movement across the Arab world, we are not powerless. We need to improve the necessary skills, and we need the courage to use them. In my country, I have seen how the council of Islamist groups and Christian groups came together, not as a government initiative, but they came together on their own initiative to establish contact and dialogue in times where things were pretty low-key tension. And when tension increased, they already had that dialogue, and that was a strength to deal with different issues.Our modern Western societies are more complex than before, in this time of migration. How are we going to settle and build a bigger ""We"" to deal with our issues if we don't improve our skills of communication? So there are many reasons, and for all of these reasons, this is time and this is why we must talk.Thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_gahr_store_in_defense_of_dialogue
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"What I'm going to show you are the astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of your body. Now molecules are really, really tiny. And by tiny, I mean really. They're smaller than a wavelength of light, so we have no way to directly observe them. But through science, we do have a fairly good idea of what's going on down at the molecular scale. So what we can do is actually tell you about the molecules, but we don't really have a direct way of showing you the molecules.One way around this is to draw pictures. And this idea is actually nothing new. Scientists have always created pictures as part of their thinking and discovery process. They draw pictures of what they're observing with their eyes, through technology like telescopes and microscopes, and also what they're thinking about in their minds. I picked two well-known examples, because they're very well-known for expressing science through art.And I start with Galileo, who used the world's first telescope to look at the Moon. And he transformed our understanding of the Moon. The perception in the 17th century was the Moon was a perfect heavenly sphere. But what Galileo saw was a rocky, barren world, which he expressed through his watercolor painting.Another scientist with very big ideas, the superstar of biology is Charles Darwin. And with this famous entry in his notebook, he begins in the top left-hand corner with, ""I think,"" and then sketches out the first tree of life, which is his perception of how all the species, all living things on Earth are connected through evolutionary history — the origin of species through natural selection and divergence from an ancestral population.Even as a scientist, I used to go to lectures by molecular biologists and find them completely incomprehensible, with all the fancy technical language and jargon that they would use in describing their work, until I encountered the artworks of David Goodsell, who is a molecular biologist at the Scripps Institute. And his pictures — everything's accurate and it's all to scale. And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like.So this is a transection through blood. In the top left-hand corner, you've got this yellow-green area. The yellow-green area is the fluid of blood, which is mostly water, but it's also antibodies, sugars, hormones, that kind of thing. And the red region is a slice into a red blood cell. And those red molecules are hemoglobin. They are actually red; that's what gives blood its color. And hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and then carry it to other parts of the body.I was very much inspired by this image many years ago, and I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world. What would it look like? And that's how I really began. So let's begin.This is DNA in its classic double helix form. And it's from X-ray crystallography, so it's an accurate model of DNA. If we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands, you see these things that look like teeth. Those are the letters of genetic code, the 25,000 genes you've got written in your DNA. This is what they typically talk about — the genetic code — this is what they're talking about. But I want to talk about a different aspect of DNA science, and that is the physical nature of DNA. It's these two strands that run in opposite directions for reasons I can't go into right now. But they physically run in opposite directions, which creates a number of complications for your living cells, as you're about to see, most particularly when DNA is being copied.And so what I'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual DNA replication machine that's occurring right now inside your body, at least 2002 biology. So DNA's entering the production line from the left-hand side, and it hits this collection, these miniature biochemical machines, that are pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy. So DNA comes in and hits this blue, doughnut-shaped structure and it's ripped apart into its two strands. One strand can be copied directly, and you can see these things spooling off to the bottom there. But things aren't so simple for the other strand because it must be copied backwards. So it's thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time, creating two new DNA molecules.Now you have billions of this machine right now working away inside you, copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity. It's an accurate representation, and it's pretty much at the correct speed for what is occurring inside you. I've left out error correction and a bunch of other things.(Laughter)This was work from a number of years ago— Thank you.(Applause)This is work from a number of years ago, but what I'll show you next is updated science, it's updated technology. So again, we begin with DNA. And it's jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding soup of molecules, which I've stripped away so you can see something. DNA is about two nanometers across, which is really quite tiny. But in each one of your cells, each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long. So to keep the DNA organized and regulate access to the genetic code, it's wrapped around these purple proteins — or I've labeled them purple here. It's packaged up and bundled up. All this field of view is a single strand of DNA. This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome. And we'll come back to chromosomes in a minute.We're pulling out, we're zooming out, out through a nuclear pore, which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA, called the nucleus. All of this field of view is about a semester's worth of biology, and I've got seven minutes, So we're not going to be able to do that today? No, I'm being told, ""No.""This is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope. And it's been filmed under time-lapse, which is why you can see it moving. The nuclear envelope breaks down. These sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes, and we'll focus on them. They go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots. When the cell feels it's ready to go, it rips apart the chromosome. One set of DNA goes to one side, the other side gets the other set of DNA — identical copies of DNA. And then the cell splits down the middle. And again, you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you.Now we're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes, and look at its structure and describe it. So again, here we are at that equator moment. The chromosomes line up. And if we isolate just one chromosome, we're going to pull it out and have a look at its structure. So this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have, at least as far as we've discovered so far inside of us. So this is a single chromosome. And you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome. One is bundled up into one sausage. The other strand is bundled up into the other sausage.These things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell. They're called microtubules, that name's not important. But we're going to focus on the region labeled red here — and it's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes. It is obviously central to the movement of the chromosomes. We have no idea, really, as to how it's achieving that movement.We've been studying this thing they call the kinetochore for over a hundred years with intense study, and we're still just beginning to discover what it's about. It is made up of about 200 different types of proteins, thousands of proteins in total. It is a signal broadcasting system. It broadcasts through chemical signals, telling the rest of the cell when it's ready, when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes. It is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules.It's involved with the growing of the microtubules, and it's able to transiently couple onto them. It's also an attention-sensing system. It's able to feel when the cell is ready, when the chromosome is correctly positioned. It's turning green here because it feels that everything is just right. And you'll see, there's this one little last bit that's still remaining red. And it's walked away down the microtubules. That is the signal broadcasting system sending out the stop signal. And it's walked away — I mean, it's that mechanical. It's molecular clockwork.This is how you work at the molecular scale. So with a little bit of molecular eye candy,(Laughter)we've got kinesins, the orange ones. They're little molecular courier molecules walking one way. And here are the dynein, they're carrying that broadcasting system. And they've got their long legs so they can step around obstacles and so on. So again, this is all derived accurately from the science. The problem is we can't show it to you any other way.Exploring at the frontier of science, at the frontier of human understanding, is mind-blowing. Discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science. But most medical researchers — discovering the stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals, which are to eradicate disease, to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes and to lift people out of poverty.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/drew_berry_animations_of_unseeable_biology
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"(Music)♫ They stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on TV ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ We will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ We will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I believe ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ You've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ Running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫ ♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ Crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said, ""You will grow free on this land"" ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ Aung San Suu Kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ When her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ Now we know the words, let's sing. ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ People of hope ♫ ♫ People of change ♫ ♫ People of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/morley_sings_women_of_hope
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"Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October. There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get. And not knowing where help was needed always ensured that help was in short supply in the areas that needed it most.We've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage, but we still can't do that with water, and here's why. Right now, if you want to test water in the field, you need a trained technician, expensive equipment like this, and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results. It's too slow to get a picture of conditions on the ground before they change, too expensive to implement in all the places that require testing. And it ignores the fact that, in the meanwhile, people still need to drink water. Most of the information that we collected on the cholera outbreak didn't come from testing water; it came from forms like this, which documented all the people we failed to help.Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines — a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they're safe. I've been inspired by that simplicity as I've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people I've ever known. We think there's a simpler solution to this problem — one that can be used by people who face conditions like this everyday.It's in its early stages, but this is what it looks like right now. We call it the Water Canary. It's a fast, cheap device that answers an important question: Is this water contaminated? It doesn't require any special training. And instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place, it uses light. That means there's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place, no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information.To test water, you simply insert a sample and, within seconds, it either displays a red light, indicating contaminated water, or a green light, indicating the sample is safe. This will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold.We're also, on top of that, integrating wireless networking into an affordable device with GPS and GSM. What that means is that each reading can be automatically transmitted to servers to be mapped in real time. With enough users, maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action, containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from. And then, instead of taking days to disseminate this information to the people who need it most, it can happen automatically. We've seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society. I think it's time for us to apply them to water.Our goal over the next year is to get Water Canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation, so we can tackle this problem together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sonaar_luthra_meet_the_water_canary
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"One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't — into the religious and the atheists. And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means. There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous. These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued — they've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game.Now I think it's too easy. I think it's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way. And it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist — if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0. Now what is Atheism 2.0? Well it starts from a very basic premise: of course, there's no God. Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc. Now let's move on; that's not the end of the story, that's the very, very beginning.I'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines: that thinks, ""I can't believe in any of this stuff. I can't believe in the doctrines. I don't think these doctrines are right. But,"" a very important but, ""I love Christmas carols. I really like the art of Mantegna. I really like looking at old churches. I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament."" Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about — people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.So that's a sort of tough choice. I don't think we have to make that choice. I think there is an alternative. I think there are ways — and I'm being both very respectful and completely impious — of stealing from religions. If you don't believe in a religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and mixing, with taking out the best sides of religion. And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, ""What here could we use?"" The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly, I would argue. And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well. And I'd like to run through a few of these today.I'd like to kick off by looking at education. Now education is a field the secular world really believes in. When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money. Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills, it's also going to make us better people. You know the kind of thing a commencement address is, and graduation ceremonies, those lyrical claims that education, the process of education — particularly higher education — will make us into nobler and better human beings. That's a lovely idea. Interesting where it came from.In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked. They asked themselves the following question. They said, where are people going to find the morality, where are they going to find guidance, and where are they going to find sources of consolation? And influential voices came up with one answer. They said culture. It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality. Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen. In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John. Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea. They wanted to replace scripture with culture. And that's a very plausible idea. It's also an idea that we have forgotten.If you went to a top university — let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge — and you said, ""I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,"" they would show you the way to the insane asylum. This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of. Why? They don't think we need it. They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance. They see us as adults, rational adults. What we need is information. We need data, we don't need help.Now religions start from a very different place indeed. All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. We're only just holding it together. Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. But anyway, we're only just holding it together. And we need help. Of course, we need help. And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning.You know, in the 18th century in the U.K., the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley, who went up and down this country delivering sermons, advising people how they could live. He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents, the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich. He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons, the classic medium of delivery of religions.Now we've given up with the idea of sermons. If you said to a modern liberal individualist, ""Hey, how about a sermon?"" they'd go, ""No, no. I don't need one of those. I'm an independent, individual person."" What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture? Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation — and religions know that.Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. Religions go, ""Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it."" That's what all religions tell us: ""Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day."" Otherwise our minds are like sieves.So religions are cultures of repetition. They circle the great truths again and again and again. We associate repetition with boredom. ""Give us the new,"" we're always saying. ""The new is better than the old."" If I said to you, ""Okay, we're not going to have new TED. We're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they're so true. We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever,"" you'd feel cheated. Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset.The other things that religions do is to arrange time. All the major religions give us calendars. What is a calendar? A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. Now we don't think that way. In the secular world we think, ""If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. I'll just come across it."" Nonsense, says the religious world view. Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings.Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon. You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, ""I'm really small. What are my problems?"" It sets things into perspective, etc., etc. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't. Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, ""Look at the Moon."" But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of. You'll be handed rice cakes. And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart. That's very good.The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well — I'm not doing a very good job of this here — but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. But the religious world doesn't think that way. What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it.So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. After every convincing point, people will go, ""Amen, amen, amen."" At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, ""Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior."" If we were doing it like they do it — let's not do it, but if we were to do it — I would tell you something like, ""Culture should replace scripture."" And you would go, ""Amen, amen, amen."" And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, ""Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen."" And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going. All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there.(Applause)The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies. And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness. Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh. They don't just deliver us sermons on this. They don't just give us books or words about this. They tell us to have a bath. So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh. You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea. We don't tend to do that. Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two.Let's look at art now. Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important. A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc. We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches. You've heard that saying. Now I think that the potential is there, but we've completely let ourselves down. And the reason we've let ourselves down is that we're not properly studying how religions handle art.The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake — a ridiculous idea — an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. I couldn't disagree more. The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum — let's admit it — is, ""I don't know what this is about."" But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that. But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art.Now religions have a much saner attitude to art. They have no trouble telling us what art is about. Art is about two things in all the major faiths. Firstly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to love. And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate. And that's what art is. Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. So as you walk around a church, or a mosque or a cathedral, what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is, through your eyes, through your senses, truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind.Essentially it's propaganda. Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view. Now the word ""propaganda"" sets off alarm bells. We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily. Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something. And if that thing is good, there's no problem with it at all.My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions. And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum — if I was a museum curator, I would make a room for love, a room for generosity. All works of art are talking to us about things. And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told, use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind, we would get a lot more out of art. Art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas. Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society. Art should be didactic.Let's think of something else. The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals. They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers. And they tend to be on their own. They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people. And they get depressed and they get sad on their own. And they don't really change much.Now think about religions, think about organized religions. What do organized religions do? They group together, they form institutions. And that has all sorts of advantages. First of all, scale, might. The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal. These are massive machines. They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational, and they're highly disciplined.These are all very good qualities. We recognize them in relation to corporations. And corporations are very like religions in many ways, except they're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs. They're selling us shoes and cars. Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff — the therapists, the poets — are on their own and they have no power, they have no might. So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind. Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.Books alone, books written by lone individuals, are not going to change anything. We need to group together. If you want to change the world, you have to group together, you have to be collaborative. And that's what religions do. They are multinational, as I say, they are branded, they have a clear identity, so they don't get lost in a busy world. That's something we can learn from.I want to conclude. Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields, there is something to learn from the example of religion — even if you don't believe any of it. If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion. If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage. Look very closely at pilgrimage. We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we haven't looked at what religions do with travel. If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art. And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas. You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so.So really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters.AB: You can get shot by both sides. You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe.CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment.AB: Indeed.CA: But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from, which is this sense — that's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who's religious — of spiritual experience, of some kind of connection with something that's bigger than you are. Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0?AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, ""But isn't there something bigger than us, something else?"" And I say, ""Of course."" And they say, ""So aren't you sort of religious?"" And I go, ""No."" Why does that sense of mystery, that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe, need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling? Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it, so I don't feel the need. The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.CA: Actually, let me just ask a question. How many people here would say that religion is important to them? Is there an equivalent process by which there's a sort of bridge between what you're talking about and what you would say to them?AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged. It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things. It's so sad that we constantly say, ""I don't believe so I can't have community, so I'm cut off from morality, so I can't go on a pilgrimage."" One wants to say, ""Nonsense. Why not?"" And that's really the spirit of my talk. There's so much we can absorb. Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion.CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists. But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common. Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging?AB: No, we need to be polite about differences. Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. It's seen as hypocrisy. But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, ""Well you know, I did pray the other day,"" you politely ignore it. You move on. Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ. And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored. They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement.CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing that's not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope?(Laughter)AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of is individual leaders. It doesn't need it. What I've tried to lay out is a framework and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in. I've sketched a sort of broad framework. But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit. If you're in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit. So it's a wiki project.(Laughter)CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0
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"In the 1980s, in communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where the text was coming from. If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought, they could track down who created that thought. And we in the West couldn't understand how anybody would do this, how much this would restrict freedom of speech. We would never do that in our own countries.But today, in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page, in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer. This is happening to us today. And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it. And this is an example of the ways our own governments are using technology against us, the citizens. And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today.If we look at what's really happening in the online world, we can group the attacks based on the attackers. We have three main groups. We have online criminals. Like here, we have Mr. Dmitry Golubov, from the city of Kiev in Ukraine. And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand. These guys make money. They use online attacks to make lots of money — and lots and lots of it. We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires, who made money with their attacks. Here's Vladimir Tsastsin, from Tartu in Estonia. This is [Albert] Gonzalez. This is Stephen Watt. This is Bjorn Sundin. This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so on.These guys make their fortunes online, but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking Trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking, or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer. The US Secret Service, two months ago, froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here, and that bank account had 14.9 million US dollars in it when it was frozen. Mr. Jain himself is on the loose; nobody knows where he is. And I claim it's already today that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world. And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse. In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online.The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money. They're motivated by something else — motivated by protests, motivated by an opinion, motivated by the laughs. Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks.So those are the three main attackers: criminals who do it for the money, hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest, but then the last group are nation states — governments doing the attacks. And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar. This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens. DigiNotar is a certificate authority from the Netherlands — or actually, it was. It was running into bankruptcy last fall, because they were hacked into. Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly. And I asked last week, in a meeting with Dutch government representatives, I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack. And his answer was: yes.So how do people die as the result of a hack like this? Well, DigiNotar is a CA. They sell certificates. What do you do with certificates? Well, you need a certificate if you have a website that has https, SSL encrypted services, services like Gmail. Now we all, or a big part of us, use Gmail or one of their competitors, but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran, where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections, so the local government can't snoop on their discussions. Except they can, if they hack into a foreign CA and issue rogue certificates. And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar.What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt? Well, in Egypt, the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police in April 2011, and when they were looting the building, they found lots of papers. Among those papers was this binder entitled, ""FinFisher."" And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany, which had sold to the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting, at a very large scale, all the communication of the citizens of the country. They had sold this tool for 280,000 euros to the Egyptian government. The company headquarters are right here.So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens. But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well. For example, in Germany, just a couple of weeks ago, the so-called ""State Trojan"" was found, which was a Trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens. If you are a suspect in a criminal case, well, it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped. But today, it goes beyond that. They will tap your Internet connection. They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a Trojan, which enables them to watch all your communication, to listen to your online discussions, to collect your passwords.Now, when we think deeper about things like these, the obvious response from people should be, ""OK, well, that sounds bad, but that doesn't really affect me, because I'm a legal citizen. Why should I worry? Because I have nothing to hide."" And this is an argument which doesn't make sense. Privacy is implied. Privacy is not up for discussion. This is not a question between privacy against security. It's a question of freedom against control. And while we might trust our governments right now, right here in 2011, any rights we give away will be given away for good. And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now? And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years.","https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack
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"I'm going to start here. This is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn a few years ago. The store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar. And kids could bring in drawings and have the store print a sugar plate for the top of their birthday cake.But unfortunately, one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters. They liked to draw the Little Mermaid, they'd like to draw a smurf, they'd like to draw Micky Mouse. But it turns out to be illegal to print a child's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar. And it's a copyright violation. And policing copyright violations for children's birthday cakes was such a hassle that the College Bakery said, ""You know what, we're getting out of that business. If you're an amateur, you don't have access to our machine anymore. If you want a printed sugar birthday cake, you have to use one of our prefab images — only for professionals.""So there's two bills in Congress right now. One is called SOPA, the other is called PIPA. SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's from the Senate. PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property — because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands. And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this. They want to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs.Now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright — although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills — and then they want to remove them from the domain name system. They want to take them out of the domain name system. Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines expect — 74.125.226.212.Now the problem with this model of censorship, of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work. And you'd think that would be a pretty big problem for a law, but Congress seems not to have let that bother them too much. Now the reason it won't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and you'll still go to Google. So the policing layer around the problem becomes the real threat of the act.Now to understand how Congress came to write a bill that won't accomplish its stated goals, but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects, you have to understand a little bit about the back story. And the back story is this: SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century. The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity. If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time — which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty. Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the U.S. public for free — tens of millions of users for simply doing something that wasn't too terrible. This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink.But technology moved on, as technology is wont to do. And slowly, slowly, at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to get eroded — and I don't mean by digital technology; I mean by analog technology. Cassette tapes, video cassette recorders, even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business. Because it turned out we're not really couch potatoes. We don't really like to only consume. We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share. And this freaked the media businesses out — it freaked them out every time. Jack Valenti, who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor, helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone. That was the level of rhetoric.And so the media industries begged, insisted, demanded that Congress do something. And Congress did something. By the early 90s, Congress passed the law that changed everything. And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. What the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 said was, look, if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends, that is not a crime. That's okay. Taping and remixing and sharing with your friends is okay. If you make lots and lots of high quality copies and you sell them, that's not okay. But this taping business, fine, let it go. And they thought that they clarified the issue, because they'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying.But that wasn't what the media businesses wanted. They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop. So when the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was passed, the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if Congress was acting in their framework, they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment. So they went for plan B. It took them a while to formulate plan B.Plan B appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 — something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was a complicated piece of legislation, a lot of moving parts. But the main thrust of the DMCA was that it was legal to sell you uncopyable digital material — except that there's no such things as uncopyable digital material. It would be, as Ed Felton once famously said, ""Like handing out water that wasn't wet."" Bits are copyable. That's what computers do. That is a side effect of their ordinary operation.So in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices. Every DVD player and game player and television and computer you brought home — no matter what you thought you were getting when you bought it — could be broken by the content industries, if they wanted to set that as a condition of selling you the content. And to make sure you didn't realize, or didn't enact their capabilities as general purpose computing devices, they also made it illegal for you to try to reset the copyability of that content. The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means.Now the DMCA had, and is continuing to have, a lot of complicated effects, but in this one domain, limiting sharing, it has mostly not worked. And the main reason it hasn't worked is the Internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined. The mixtape, the fanzine, that was nothing compared to what we're seeing now with the Internet. We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online. We share written things, we share images, we share audio, we share video. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've found. Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made out of what we've found, and all of it horrifies those industries.So PIPA and SOPA are round two. But where the DMCA was surgical — we want to go down into your computer, we want to go down into your television set, down into your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store — PIPA and SOPA are nuclear and they're saying, we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content. Now the mechanism, as I said, for doing this, is you need to take out anybody pointing to those IP addresses. You need to take them out of search engines, you need to take them out of online directories, you need to take them out of user lists. And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they're us, we're the people getting policed. Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another.So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it — guilty until proven innocent. You can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like. Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a dime to police a user, that will crush a service with a hundred million users.So this is the Internet they have in mind. Imagine this sign everywhere — except imagine it doesn't say College Bakery, imagine it says YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. Imagine it says TED, because the comments can't be policed at any acceptable cost. The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share. And the people who provide those capabilities to us — the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs — are in the business of having to police us, or being on the hook for contributory infringement.There's two things you can do to help stop this — a simple thing and a complicated thing, an easy thing and a hard thing. The simple thing, the easy thing, is this: if you're an American citizen, call your representative, call your senator. When you look at the people who co-signed on the SOPA bill, people who've co-signed on PIPA, what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries. You don't have millions and millions of dollars, but you can call your representatives, and you can remind them that you vote, and you can ask not to be treated like a thief, and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken.And if you're not an American citizen, you can contact American citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same. Because this seems like a national issue, but it is not. These industries will not be content with breaking our Internet. If they break it, they will break it for everybody. That's the easy thing. That's the simple thing.The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA, which was purposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. Because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that, that turns out to be really inconvenient. ""We'd prefer not to do that,"" says the content industries. And what they want is not to have to do that. They don't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. They just want the sharing to go away.PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming. Because until we convince Congress that the way to deal with copyright violation is the way copyright violation was dealt with with Napster, with YouTube, which is to have a trial with all the presentation of evidence and the hashing out of facts and the assessment of remedies that goes on in democratic societies. That's the way to handle this.In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. Because that's the real message of PIPA and SOPA. Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming — not producing, not sharing — and we should say, ""No.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea
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"Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? Do you know how many choices you make in typical week? I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week. And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. 50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. Think about your own choices. Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices?Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers. So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. (Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands. So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? (Applause) Thank you.So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. It was a store called Draeger's. Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water — and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? Here's their olive oil aisle. They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees.So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, ""Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?"" And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. Here's their jam aisle. They had 348 different kinds of jam. We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. Now we see the opposite effect. Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24.Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us — at least it's good for our waistlines — but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. So now for the topic of today: financial savings. Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401(k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate.So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s — still not as high as we want it to be. In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. The more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts. Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being.Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. They're more likely to delay choosing — procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. They're more likely to make worse choices — worse financial choices, medical choices. They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques — techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues — that you can easily apply in your businesses.The first: Cut. You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. People are always upset when I say, ""Cut."" They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. When Proctor & Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & Shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent — a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products — one kind of canned tomato sauce.Now in the financial savings world, I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at Harvard. Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. You know, often, people say, ""I don't know how to cut. They're all important choices."" And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, ""Tell me how these choices are different from one another. And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers.""Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary. And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. Here's a description of the road. And I'd like you to read it. And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer. (Light clapping) Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. Is that all? All right, let me show you some more about this. (Laughter) You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. (Honk) Now who's ready to go on this trip. (Applause) (Laughter) I think I might have actually heard more hands.All right. Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. Because the pictures made it feel more real to you. Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash? Because it doesn't feel like real money. And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more.So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with people at ING — employees that are all working at ING — and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401(k) plan. And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. By doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent.The third technique: Categorization. We can handle more categories than we can handle choices. So for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. But you know what? If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600. Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart.Here are two different jewelry displays. One is called ""Jazz"" and the other one is called ""Swing."" If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands. (Light Clapping) Okay, there's some. If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands. Okay, a bit more. Now it turns out you're right. The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what? This is a highly useless categorization scheme. (Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. Who are they actually supposed to be informing?My fourth technique: Condition for complexity. It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. We have to gradually increase the complexity. I'm going to show you one example of what I'm talking about. Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. You've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. Car colors, exterior car colors — I've got 56 choices. Engines, gearshift — four choices. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice.What am I going to look at? How engaged you are. If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you. What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. We're losing them. They go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. It's the same information. It's the same number of choices. The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented. If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose. Even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. It also gets me excited about this big product that I'm putting together, so I'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged.So let me recap. I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload — cut — get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize — make it real; categorize — we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. All of these techniques that I'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices — better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. And the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose
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"What I'm going to do is, I'm going to explain to you an extreme green concept that was developed at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. But before I do that, we have to go over the definition of what green is, 'cause a lot of us have a different definition of it. Green. The product is created through environmentally and socially conscious means. There's plenty of things that are being called green now. What does it actually mean? We use three metrics to determine green. The first metric is: Is it sustainable? Which means, are you preserving what you are doing for future use or for future generations? Is it alternative? Is it different than what is being used today, or does it have a lower carbon footprint than what's used conventionally? And three: Is it renewable? Does it come from Earth's natural replenishing resources, such as sun, wind and water?Now, my task at NASA is to develop the next generation of aviation fuels. Extreme green. Why aviation? The field of aviation uses more fuel than just about every other combined. We need to find an alternative. Also it's a national aeronautics directive. One of the national aeronautics goals is to develop the next generation of fuels, biofuels, using domestic and safe, friendly resources. Now, combating that challenge we have to also meet the big three metric — Actually, extreme green for us is all three together; that's why you see the plus there. I was told to say that. So it has to be the big three at GRC. That's another metric. Ninety-seven percent of the world's water is saltwater. How about we use that? Combine that with number three. Do not use arable land. Because crops are already growing on that land that's very scarce around the world. Number two: Don't compete with food crops. That's already a well established entity, they don't need another entry. And lastly the most precious resource we have on this Earth is fresh water. Don't use fresh water. If 97.5 percent of the world's water is saltwater, 2.5 percent is fresh water. Less than a half percent of that is accessible for human use. But 60 percent of the population lives within that one percent.So, combating my problem was, now I have to be extreme green and meet the big three. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the GreenLab Research Facility. This is a facility dedicated to the next generation of aviation fuels using halophytes. A halophyte is a salt-tolerating plant. Most plants don't like salt, but halophytes tolerate salt. We also are using weeds and we are also using algae. The good thing about our lab is, we've had 3,600 visitors in the last two years. Why do you think that's so? Because we are on to something special.So, in the lower you see the GreenLab obviously, and on the right hand side you'll see algae. If you are into the business of the next generation of aviation fuels, algae is a viable option, there's a lot of funding right now, and we have an algae to fuels program. There's two types of algae growing. One is a closed photobioreactor that you see here, and what you see on the other side is our species — we are currently using a species called Scenedesmus dimorphus. Our job at NASA is to take the experimental and computational and make a better mixing for the closed photobioreactors. Now the problems with closed photobioreactors are: They are quite expensive, they are automated, and it's very difficult to get them in large scale. So on large scale what do they use? We use open pond systems. Now, around the world they are growing algae, with this racetrack design that you see here. Looks like an oval with a paddle wheel and mixes really well, but when it gets around the last turn, which I call turn four — it's stagnant. We actually have a solution for that. In the GreenLab in our open pond system we use something that happens in nature: waves. We actually use wave technology on our open pond systems. We have 95 percent mixing and our lipid content is higher than a closed photobioreactor system, which we think is significant.There is a drawback to algae, however: It's very expensive. Is there a way to produce algae inexpensively? And the answer is: yes. We do the same thing we do with halophytes, and that is: climatic adaptation. In our GreenLab we have six primary ecosystems that range from freshwater all the way to saltwater. What we do: We take a potential species, we start at freshwater, we add a little bit more salt, when the second tank here will be the same ecosystem as Brazil — right next to the sugar cane fields you can have our plants — the next tank represents Africa, the next tank represents Arizona, the next tank represents Florida, and the next tank represents California or the open ocean. What we are trying to do is to come up with a single species that can survive anywhere in the world, where there's barren desert. We are being very successful so far.Now, here's one of the problems. If you are a farmer, you need five things to be successful: You need seeds, you need soil, you need water and you need sun, and the last thing that you need is fertilizer. Most people use chemical fertilizers. But guess what? We do not use chemical fertilizer. Wait a second! I just saw lots of greenery in your GreenLab. You have to use fertilizer. Believe it or not, in our analysis of our saltwater ecosystems 80 percent of what we need are in these tanks themselves. The 20 percent that's missing is nitrogen and phosphorous. We have a natural solution: fish. No we don't cut up the fish and put them in there. Fish waste is what we use. As a matter of fact we use freshwater mollies, that we've used our climatic adaptation technique from freshwater all the way to seawater. Freshwater mollies: cheap, they love to make babies, and they love to go to the bathroom. And the more they go to the bathroom, the more fertilizer we get, the better off we are, believe it or not. It should be noted that we use sand as our soil, regular beach sand. Fossilized coral.So a lot of people ask me, ""How did you get started?"" Well, we got started in what we call the indoor biofuels lab. It's a seedling lab. We have 26 different species of halophytes, and five are winners. What we do here is — actually it should be called a death lab, 'cause we try to kill the seedlings, make them rough — and then we come to the GreenLab. What you see in the lower corner is a wastewater treatment plant experiment that we are growing, a macro-algae that I'll talk about in a minute. And lastly, it's me actually working in the lab to prove to you I do work, I don't just talk about what I do. Here's the plant species. Salicornia virginica. It's a wonderful plant. I love that plant. Everywhere we go we see it. It's all over the place, from Maine all the way to California. We love that plant. Second is Salicornia bigelovii. Very difficult to get around the world. It is the highest lipid content that we have, but it has a shortcoming: It's short. Now you take europaea, which is the largest or the tallest plant that we have. And what we are trying to do with natural selection or adaptive biology — combine all three to make a high-growth, high-lipid plant. Next, when a hurricane decimated the Delaware Bay — soybean fields gone — we came up with an idea: Can you have a plant that has a land reclamation positive in Delaware? And the answer is yes. It's called seashore mallow. Kosteletzkya virginica — say that five times fast if you can. This is a 100 percent usable plant. The seeds: biofuels. The rest: cattle feed. It's there for 10 years; it's working very well. Now we get to Chaetomorpha. This is a macro-algae that loves excess nutrients. If you are in the aquarium industry you know we use it to clean up dirty tanks. This species is so significant to us. The properties are very close to plastic. We are trying right now to convert this macro-algae into a bioplastic. If we are successful, we will revolutionize the plastics industry.So, we have a seed to fuel program. We have to do something with this biomass that we have. And so we do G.C. extraction, lipid optimization, so on and so forth, because our goal really is to come up with the next generation of aviation fuels, aviation specifics, so on and so forth. So far we talked about water and fuel, but along the way we found out something interesting about Salicornia: It's a food product. So we talk about ideas worth spreading, right? How about this: In sub-Saharan Africa, next to the sea, saltwater, barren desert, how about we take that plant, plant it, half use for food, half use for fuel. We can make that happen, inexpensively. You can see there's a greenhouse in Germany that sells it as a health food product. This is harvested, and in the middle here is a shrimp dish, and it's being pickled. So I have to tell you a joke. Salicornia is known as sea beans, saltwater asparagus and pickle weed. So we are pickling pickle weed in the middle. Oh, I thought it was funny. (Laughter) And at the bottom is seaman's mustard. It does make sense, this is a logical snack. You have mustard, you are a seaman, you see the halophyte, you mix it together, it's a great snack with some crackers. And last, garlic with Salicornia, which is what I like. So, water, fuel and food.None of this is possible without the GreenLab team. Just like the Miami Heat has the big three, we have the big three at NASA GRC. That's myself, professor Bob Hendricks, our fearless leader, and Dr. Arnon Chait. The backbone of the GreenLab is students. Over the last two years we've had 35 different students from around the world working at GreenLab. As a matter fact my division chief says a lot, ""You have a green university."" I say, ""I'm okay with that, 'cause we are nurturing the next generation of extreme green thinkers, which is significant.""So, in first summary I presented to you what we think is a global solution for food, fuel and water. There's something missing to be complete. Clearly we use electricity. We have a solution for you — We're using clean energy sources here. So, we have two wind turbines connected to the GreenLab, we have four or five more hopefully coming soon. We are also using something that is quite interesting — there is a solar array field at NASA's Glenn Research Center, hasn't been used for 15 years. Along with some of my electrical engineering colleagues, we realized that they are still viable, so we are refurbishing them right now. In about 30 days or so they'll be connected to the GreenLab.And the reason why you see red, red and yellow, is a lot of people think NASA employees don't work on Saturday — This is a picture taken on Saturday. There are no cars around, but you see my truck in yellow. I work on Saturday. (Laughter) This is a proof to you that I'm working. 'Cause we do what it takes to get the job done, most people know that. Here's a concept with this: We are using the GreenLab for a micro-grid test bed for the smart grid concept in Ohio. We have the ability to do that, and I think it's going to work. So, GreenLab Research Facility. A self-sustainable renewable energy ecosystem was presented today. We really, really hope this concept catches on worldwide. We think we have a solution for food, water, fuel and now energy. Complete. It's extreme green, it's sustainable, alternative and renewable and it meets the big three at GRC: Don't use arable land, don't compete with food crops, and most of all, don't use fresh water.So I get a lot of questions about, ""What are you doing in that lab?"" And I usually say, ""None of your business, that's what I'm doing in the lab."" (Laughter) And believe it or not, my number one goal for working on this project is I want to help save the world.","https://www.ted.com/talks/bilal_bomani_plant_fuels_that_could_power_a_jet
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"Is there a real you? This might seem to you  like a very odd question. Because, you might ask, how do we find the real you, how do you know what the real you is? And so forth.But the idea that there must be a real you, surely that's obvious. If there's anything real  in the world, it's you. Well, I'm not quite sure. At least we have to understand  a bit better what that means. Now certainly, I think there are lots of things in our culture around us which sort of reinforce the idea that for each one of us, we have a kind of a core, an essence. There is something about what it means to be you which defines you, and it's kind of permanent and unchanging. The most kind of crude way in which we have it, are things like horoscopes. You know, people are very wedded to these, actually. People put them on their Facebook profile as though they are meaningul, you even know  your Chinese horoscope as well. There are also  more scientific versions of this, all sorts of ways of profiling personality type, such as the Myers-Briggs tests, for example. I don't know if you've done those. A lot of companies  use these for recruitment. You answer a lot of questions, and this is supposed to reveal something about your core personality. And of course, the popular fascination  with this is enormous. In magazines like this, you'll see, in the bottom left corner, they'll advertise in virtually every issue some kind of personality thing. And if you pick up one of those magazines, it's hard to resist, isn't it? Doing the test to find what is your learning style, what is your loving style, or what is your working style? Are you this kind of person or that?So I think that we have a common-sense idea that there is a kind of core  or essence of ourselves to be discovered. And that this is kind of a permanent truth about ourselves, something that's the same throughout life. Well, that's the idea I want to challenge. And I have to say now, I'll say it a bit later, but I'm not challenging this just because I'm weird, the challenge actually has a very, very long and distinguished history. Here's the common-sense idea. There is you. You are the individuals you are, and you have this kind of core. Now in your life, what happens is that you, of course, accumulate different experiences and so forth. So you have memories, and these memories help  to create what you are. You have desires, maybe for a cookie, maybe for something that we don't want to talk about at 11 o'clock in the morning in a school. You will have beliefs. This is a number plate from someone in America. I don't know whether this number plate, which says ""messiah 1,"" indicates that the driver believes in the messiah, or that they are the messiah. Either way, they have beliefs  about messiahs. We have knowledge. We have sensations and experiences as well. It's not just intellectual things. So this is kind of  the common-sense model, I think, of what a person is. There is a person who has all the things that make up our life experiences.But the suggestion  I want to put to you today is that there's something  fundamentally wrong with this model. And I can show you what's wrong with one click. Which is there isn't actually a ""you"" at the heart of all these experiences. Strange thought? Well, maybe not. What is there, then? Well, clearly there are memories, desires, intentions, sensations, and so forth. But what happens is these things exist, and they're kind of all integrated, they're overlapped, they're connected in various different ways. They're connecting partly, and perhaps even mainly, because they all belong to one body and one brain. But there's also a narrative,  a story we tell about ourselves, the experiences we have when we remember past things. We do things because of other things. So what we desire is partly a result of what we believe, and what we remember is also informing us what we know. And so really, there are all these things, like beliefs, desires,  sensations, experiences, they're all related to each other, and that just is you. In some ways, it's a small difference from the common-sense understanding. In some ways, it's a massive one.It's the shift between thinking of yourself as a thing which has  all the experiences of life, and thinking of yourself as simply that collection of all experiences in life. You are the sum of your parts. Now those parts are also physical parts,  of course, brains, bodies and legs and things, but they aren't so important, actually. If you have a heart transplant, you're still the same person. If you have a memory transplant, are you the same person? If you have a belief transplant,  would you be the same person? Now this idea, that what we are,  the way to understand ourselves, is as not of some permanent being, which has experiences, but is kind of a collection of experiences, might strike you as kind of weird.But actually, I don't think  it should be weird. In a way, it's common sense. Because I just invite you  to think about, by comparison, think about pretty much anything else in the universe, maybe apart from the  very most fundamental forces or powers. Let's take something like water. Now my science isn't very good. We might say something like  water has two parts hydrogen and one parts oxygen, right? We all know that. I hope no one in this room thinks that what that means is there is a thing called water,  and attached to it are hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and that's what water is. Of course we don't. We understand, very easily, very straightforwardly, that water is nothing more than the hydrogen and oxygen molecules suitably arranged. Everything else in the universe is the same. There's no mystery about my watch, for example. We say the watch has a face, and hands, and a mechanism and a battery, But what we really mean is, we don't think  there is a thing called the watch to which we then attach all these bits. We understand very clearly  that you get the parts of the watch, you put them together, and you create a watch. Now if everything else  in the universe is like this, why are we different?Why think of ourselves as somehow not just being  a collection of all our parts, but somehow being a separate, permanent entity which has those parts? Now this view is not particularly new,  actually. It has quite a long lineage. You find it in Buddhism, you find it in 17th,  18th-century philosophy going through to the current day, people like Locke and Hume. But interestingly, it's also a view increasingly being heard reinforced by neuroscience. This is Paul Broks,  he's a clinical neuropsychologist, and he says this: ""We have a deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there,  and it's hard to shake off, probably impossible to shake off,  I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together."" So when you look at the brain, and you look at how the brain makes possible a sense of self, you find that there isn't  a central control spot in the brain. There is no kind of center where everything happens. There are lots of different processes in the brain, all of which operate, in a way, quite independently. But it's because of the way  that they relate that we get this sense of self. The term I use in the book,  I call it the ego trick. It's like a mechanical trick. It's not that we don't exist, it's just that the trick is  to make us feel that inside of us is something more unified than is really there.Now you might think this is a worrying idea. You might think that if it's true, that for each one of us there is no abiding core of self, no permanent essence, does that mean that really, the self is an illusion? Does it mean that we really don't exist? There is no real you. Well, a lot of people actually do use  this talk of illusion and so forth. These are three psychologists, Thomas Metzinger, Bruce Hood, Susan Blackmore, a lot of these people do talk  the language of illusion, the self is an illusion, it's a fiction. But I don't think this is  a very helpful way of looking at it. Go back to the watch. The watch isn't an illusion,  because there is nothing to the watch other than a collection of its parts. In the same way,  we're not illusions either. The fact that we are, in some ways, just this very, very complex collection, ordered collection of things, does not mean we're not real. I can give you  a very sort of rough metaphor for this. Let's take something like a waterfall. These are the Iguazu Falls, in Argentina. Now if you take something like this, you can appreciate the fact  that in lots of ways, there's nothing permanent about this. For one thing, it's always changing. The waters  are always carving new channels. with changes and tides and the weather, some things dry up,  new things are created. Of course the water that flows  through the waterfall is different every single instance. But it doesn't mean that  the Iguazu Falls are an illusion. It doesn't mean it's not real. What it means is we have  to understand what it is as something which has a history, has certain things that keep it together, but it's a process, it's fluid,  it's forever changing.Now that, I think, is a model for understanding ourselves, and I think it's a liberating model. Because if you think that you have this fixed, permanent essence, which is always the same, throughout your life, no matter what, in a sense you're kind of trapped. You're born with an essence, that's what you are until you die, if you believe in an afterlife,  maybe you continue. But if you think of yourself as being, in a way, not a thing as such,  but a kind of a process, something that is changing, then I think that's quite liberating. Because unlike the the waterfalls, we actually have the capacity to channel the direction of our development for ourselves to a certain degree. Now we've got to be careful here, right? If you watch the X-Factor too much, you might buy into this idea that we can all be whatever we want to be. That's not true. I've heard some fantastic musicians this morning, and I am very confident that I could in no way be as good as them. I could practice hard  and maybe be good, but I don't have that really natural ability. There are limits to what we can achieve. There are limits to what  we can make of ourselves. But nevertheless, we do have  this capacity to, in a sense, shape ourselves. The true self, as it were then, is not something that is just there for you to discover, you don't sort of look into your soul and find your true self, What you are partly doing, at least, is actually creating your true self. And this, I think, is very, very significant, particularly at this stage of life you're at. You'll be aware of the fact how much of you changed over recent years. If you have any videos of yourself,  three or four years ago, you probably feel embarrassed  because you don't recognize yourself.So I want to get that message over, that what we need to do is think about ourselves as things that we can shape, and channel and change. This is the Buddha, again: ""Well-makers lead the water, fletchers bend the arrow, carpenters bend a log of wood, wise people fashion themselves."" And that's the idea  I want to leave you with, that your true self is not something  that you will have to go searching for, as a mystery, and maybe never ever find. To the extent you have a true self, it's something that you in part discover, but in part create. and that, I think,  is a liberating and exciting prospect. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_baggini_is_there_a_real_you
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"It is actually a reality today that you can download products from the Web — product data, I should say, from the Web — perhaps tweak it and personalize it to your own preference or your own taste, and have that information sent to a desktop machine that will fabricate it for you on the spot. We can actually build for you, very rapidly, a physical object. And the reason we can do this is through an emerging technology called additive manufacturing, or 3D printing.This is a 3D printer. They have been around for almost 30 years now, which is quite amazing to think of, but they're only just starting to filter into the public arena. And typically, you would take data, like the data of a pen here, which would be a geometric representation of that product in 3D, and we would pass that data with material into a machine. And a process that would happen in the machine would mean layer by layer that product would be built. And we can take out the physical product, and ready to use, or to, perhaps, assemble into something else.But if these machines have been around for almost 30 years, why don't we know about them? Because typically they've been too inefficient, inaccessible, they've not been fast enough, they've been quite expensive. But today, it is becoming a reality that they are now becoming successful. Many barriers are breaking down. That means that you guys will soon be able to access one of these machines, if not this minute. And it will change and disrupt the landscape of manufacturing, and most certainly our lives, our businesses and the lives of our children.So how does it work? It typically reads CAD data, which is a product design data created on professional product design programs. And here you can see an engineer — it could be an architect or it could be a professional product designer — create a product in 3D. And this data gets sent to a machine that slices the data into two-dimensional representations of that product all the way through — almost like slicing it like salami. And that data, layer by layer, gets passed through the machine, starting at the base of the product and depositing material, layer upon layer, infusing the new layer of materials to the old layer in an additive process. And this material that's deposited either starts as a liquid form or a material powder form. And the bonding process can happen by either melting and depositing or depositing then melting. In this case, we can see a laser sintering machine developed by EOS. It's actually using a laser to fuse the new layer of material to the old layer. And over time — quite rapidly actually, in a number of hours — we can build a physical product, ready to take out of the machine and use. And this is quite an extraordinary idea, but it is reality today.So all these products that you can see on the screen were made in the same way. They were all 3D printed. And you can see, they're ranging from shoes, rings that were made out of stainless steal, phone covers out of plastic, all the way through to spinal implants, for example, that were created out of medical-grade titanium, and engine parts. But what you'll notice about all of these products is they're very, very intricate. The design is quite extraordinary. Because we're taking this data in 3D form, slicing it up before it gets past the machine, we can actually create structures that are more intricate than any other manufacturing technology — or, in fact, are impossible to build in any other way. And you can create parts with moving components, hinges, parts within parts.So in some cases, we can abolish totally the need for manual labor. It sounds great. It is great. We can have 3D printers today that build structures like these. This is almost three meters high. And this was built by depositing artificial sandstone layer upon layer in layers of about five millimeters to 10 mm in thickness — slowly growing this structure. This was created by an architectural firm called Shiro. And you can actually walk into it. And on the other end of the spectrum, this is a microstructure. It's created depositing layers of about four microns. So really the resolution is quite incredible. The detail that you can get today is quite amazing.So who's using it? Typically, because we can create products very rapidly, it's been used by product designers, or anyone who wanted to prototype a product and very quickly create or reiterate a design. And actually what's quite amazing about this technology as well is that you can create bespoke products en masse. There's very little economies of scale. So you can now create one-offs very easily. Architects, for example, they want to create prototypes of buildings. Again you can see, this is a building of the Free University in Berlin and it was designed by Foster and Partners. Again, not buildable in any other way. And very hard to even create this by hand.Now this is an engine component. It was developed by a company called Within Technologies and 3T RPD. It's very, very, very detailed inside with the design. Now 3D printing can break away barriers in design which challenge the constraints of mass production. If we slice into this product which is actually sitting here, you can see that it has a number of cooling channels pass through it, which means it's a more efficient product. You can't create this with standard manufacturing techniques even if you tried to do it manually. It's more efficient because we can now create all these cavities within the object that cool fluid. And it's used by aerospace and automotive. It's a lighter part and it uses less material waste. So it's overall performance and efficiency just exceeds standard mass produced products.And then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure, we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants. Typically an implant is more effective within the body if it's more porous, because our body tissue will grow into it. There's a lower chance of rejection. But it's very hard to create that in standard ways. With 3D printing, we're seeing today that we can create much better implants. And in fact, because we can create bespoke products en masse, one-offs, we can create implants that are specific to individuals.So as you can see, this technology and the quality of what comes out of the machines is fantastic. And we're starting to see it being used for final end products. And in fact, as the detail is improving, the quality is improving, the price of the machines are falling and they're becoming quicker. They're also now small enough to sit on a desktop. You can buy a machine today for about $300 that you can create yourself, which is quite incredible.But then it begs the question, why don't we all have one in our home? Because, simply, most of us here today don't know how to create the data that a 3D printer reads. If I gave you a 3D printer, you wouldn't know how to direct it to make what you want it to. But there are more and more technologies, software and processes today that are breaking down those barriers. I believe we're at a tipping point where this is now something that we can't avoid. This technology is really going to disrupt the landscape of manufacturing and, I believe, cause a revolution in manufacturing.So today, you can download products from the Web — anything you would have on your desktop, like pens, whistles, lemon squeezers. You can use software like Google SketchUp to create products from scratch very easily. 3D printing can be also used to download spare parts from the Web. So imagine you have, say, a Hoover in your home and it has broken down. You need a spare part, but you realize that Hoover's been discontinued. Can you imagine going online — this is a reality — and finding that spare part from a database of geometries of that discontinued product and downloading that information, that data, and having the product made for you at home, ready to use, on your demand? And in fact, because we can create spare parts with things the machines are quite literally making themselves. You're having machines fabricate themselves. These are parts of a RepRap machine, which is a kind of desktop printer.But what interests my company the most is the fact that you can create individual unique products en masse. There's no need to do a run of thousands of millions or send that product to be injection molded in China. You can just make it physically on the spot. Which means that we can now present to the public the next generation of customization. This is something that is now possible today, that you can direct personally how you want your products to look.We're all familiar with the idea of customization or personalization. Brands like Nike are doing it. It's all over the Web. In fact, every major household name is allowing you to interact with their products on a daily basis — all the way from Smart Cars to Prada to Ray Ban, for example. But this is not really mass customization; it's known as variant production, variations of the same product. What you could do is really influence your product now and shape-manipulate your product.I'm not sure about you guys, but I've had experiences when I've walked into a store and I've know exactly what I've wanted and I've searched everywhere for that perfect lamp that I know where I want to sit in my house and I just can't find the right thing, or that perfect piece of jewelry as a gift or for myself. Imagine that you can now engage with a brand and interact, so that you can pass your personal attributes to the products that you're about to buy.You can today download a product with software like this, view the product in 3D. This is the sort of 3D data that a machine will read. This is a lamp. And you can start iterating the design. You can direct what color that product will be, perhaps what material. And also, you can engage in shape manipulation of that product, but within boundaries that are safe. Because obviously the public are not professional product designers. The piece of software will keep an individual within the bounds of the possible. And when somebody is ready to purchase the product in their personalized design, they click ""Enter"" and this data gets converted into the data that a 3D printer reads and gets passed to a 3D printer, perhaps on someone's desktop.But I don't think that that's immediate. I don't think that will happen soon. What's more likely, and we're seeing it today, is that data gets sent to a local manufacturing center. This means lower carbon footprint. We're now, instead of shipping a product across the world, we're sending data across the Internet. Here's the product being built. You can see, this came out of the machine in one piece and the electronics were inserted later. It's this lamp, as you can see here. So as long as you have the data, you can create the part on demand.And you don't necessarily need to use this for just aesthetic customization, you can use it for functional customization, scanning parts of the body and creating things that are made to fit. So we can run this through to something like prosthetics, which is highly specialized to an individual's handicap. Or we can create very specific prosthetics for that individual. Scanning teeth today, you can have your teeth scanned and dental coatings made in this way to fit you. While you wait at the dentist, a machine will quietly be creating this for you ready to insert in the teeth.And the idea of now creating implants, scanning data, an MRI scan of somebody can now be converted into 3D data and we can create very specific implants for them. And applying this to the idea of building up what's in our bodies. You know, this is pair of lungs and the bronchial tree. It's very intricate. You couldn't really create this or simulate it in any other way. But with MRI data, we can just build the product, as you can see, very intricately. Using this process, pioneers in the industry are layering up cells today. So one of the pioneers, for example, is Dr. Anthony Atala, and he has been working on layering cells to create body parts — bladders, valves, kidneys. Now this is not something that's ready for the public, but it is in working progress.So just to finalize, we're all individual. We all have different preferences, different needs. We like different things. We're all different sizes and our companies the same. Businesses want different things. Without a doubt in my mind, I believe that this technology is going to cause a manufacturing revolution and will change the landscape of manufacturing as we know it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_harouni_a_primer_on_3d_printing
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"Yeah, so a couple of years ago I was turning 60, and I don't like being 60. (Laughter) And I started grappling with this existential angst of what little I had done with my life. It wasn't the resume of breaking this record here, it was more like, who had I become? How had I spent my valuable time? How could this have gone by like lightning? And I couldn't forgive myself for the countless, countless hours I had lost in negative thought — all the time I had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when I was a kid and career moves and this and this and this. Just why, why didn't I do it better? Why? Why? Why? And then my mother died at 82. And so I starting thinking, not only am I not happy with the past, now I'm getting choked with, ""I've only got 22 years left."" What am I going to do with this short amount of time that's just fleeting? And I'm not in the present whatsoever.And I decided the remedy to all this malaise was going to be for me to chase an elevated dream, an extreme dream, something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion, something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life, every minute of every day, because the dream was so big that I couldn't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction. And I decided, it was an old dream that was lingering, that was from so many years ago, three decades ago — the only sort of world class swim I had tried and failed at back in my 20s — was going from Cuba to Florida. It was deep in my imagination.No one's ever done it without a shark cage. It's daunting. It's more than a hundred miles across a difficult passage of ocean. It's probably, at my speed, at my age — for anybody's speed at anybody's age — going to take 60, maybe 70, hours of continuous swimming, never getting out on the boat.And I started to train. I hadn't swum for 31 years, not a stroke. And I had kept in good shape, but swimming's a whole different animal. As a matter of fact, this picture is supposed to be me during training. It's a smiling face. And when you're training for this sport, you are not smiling. (Laughter) It's an arduous, difficult sport, and I don't remember smiling at any time during this sport. As I said, I respect other sports, and I compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events, but this is a sensory deprivation, a physical duress. And when I started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24-hour swims, I knew I had it, because I was making it through these.And when I said I'm going to go out and do a 15-hour swim, and we're coming into the dock after a long day and it's now night, and we come in and it's 14 hours and 58 minutes and I can touch the dock and we're done, the trainer says, ""That's great. It's 14 hours 58 minutes. Who cares the last two minutes?"" I say, ""No, it's got to be 15 hours,"" and I swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours.And I put together an expedition. It's not that I didn't have help, but honestly, I sort of led, I was the team leader. And to get the government permissions, you read in the paper, you think it's easy to get into Cuba everyday? Try going in with an armada like we had of 50 people and five boats and CNN's crew, etc. The navigation is difficult. There's a big river called the Gulf Stream that runs across and it's not going in the direction you are. It's going to the east and you'd like to go north. It's tricky. And there's dehydration. And there's hypothermia. And there are sharks. And there are all kinds of problems. And I gathered together, honestly, the world's leading experts in every possible way.And a month ago, the 23rd of September, I stood on that shore and I looked across to that long, long faraway horizon and I asked myself, do you have it? Are your shoulders ready? And they were. They were prepared. No stone left unturned. Was the mind ready? You know, you're swimming with the fogged goggles, you're swimming at 60 strokes a minute, so you're never really focused on anything, you don't see well. You've got tight bathing caps over your ears trying to keep the heat of the head, because it's where the hypothermia starts, and so you don't hear very well. You're really left alone with your own thoughts. And I had all kinds of counting systems ready there in English, followed by German, followed by Spanish, followed by French. You save the French for last.And I had songs, I had a playlist in my head — not through headphones, in my own head — of 65 songs. And I couldn't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night, because that's when Neil Young comes out. (Laughter) And it's odd, isn't it? You'd think you'd be singing Leonard Cohen's ""Hallelujah"" out in the majesty of the ocean, not songs about heroin addiction in New York City. But no, for some reason I couldn't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing, ♫ ""A heard you knocking at my cellar door ♫ ♫ I love you baby and I want some more ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, the damage done"" ♫(Applause)The night before I started, I finished Stephen Hawking's ""The Grand Design."" And I couldn't wait to trip the mind fantastic. About the 50th hour, I was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe. Is there an edge? Is this an envelope we're living inside of, or no, does it go onto infinity in both time and space? And there's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this. I couldn't wait to prove the athlete I am, that nobody else in the world can do this swim. And I knew I could do it.And when I jumped into that water, I yelled in my mother's French, ""Courage!"" And I started swimming, and, oh my God, it was glassy. And we knew it, all 50 people on the boat, we all knew this was it, this was our time. And I reminded myself a couple hours in, you know, the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself. First of all, you're going to hit obstacles. And even though you're feeling great at any one moment, don't take it for granted, be ready, because there's going to be pain, there's going to be suffering. It's not going to feel this good all the way across. And I was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things — the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater. You're immersed in the liquid. Your body doesn't like the saltwater. After a couple of days, three days, you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways.But no, two hours in, wham! Never in my life ... I knew there were Portuguese men o' war, all kinds of moon jellies, all kinds of things, but the box jellyfish from the southern oceans is not supposed to be in these waters. And I was on fire — excruciating, excruciating pain. I don't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm. Evidently, a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred-thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin, it's sending a venom. The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish. And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system. So first I feel like boiling hot oil, I've been dipped in. And I'm yelling out, ""Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Help me! Somebody help me!"" And the next thing is paralysis. I feel it in the back and then I feel it in the chest up here, and I can't breathe. And now I'm not swimming with a nice long stroke, I'm sort of crabbing it this way. Then come convulsions.A young man on our boat is an EMT. He dives in to try to help me. He's stung. They drag him out on the boat, and he's — evidently, I didn't see any of this — but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out. He's 29 years old, very well-built, lean, he's six-foot, five, weighs 265 lbs., and he is down. And he is crying and he's yelling to my trainer who's trying to help me. And he's saying, ""Bonnie, I think I'm going to die. My breath is down to three breaths a minute. I need help, and I can't help Diana.""So that was at eight o'clock at night. The doctor, medical team from University of Miami arrived at five in the morning. So I swam through the night, and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots. I didn't get out, but was in the water taking prednisone shots, taking Xanax, oxygen to the face. It was like an ICU unit in the water. (Laughter) And I guess the story is that even Navy SEALS who are stung by the box jelly, they're done. They either die or they quickly get to a hospital.And I swam through the night and I swam through the next day. And the next night at dusk, again, wham! The box jelly again — all across the neck, all across here. And this time, I don't like it, I didn't want to give into it, but there's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim. And I gave in to the staged swim. And they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board. And I got back in. And I swam through that night and into the next day. And at 41 hours, this body couldn't make it. The devastation of those stings had taken the respiratory system down so that I couldn't make the progress I wanted. And the dream was crushed.And how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together. And I knew about the jellyfish, but I was sort of cavalier. A lot of athletes have this, you know, sort of invincibility. They should worry about me. I don't worry about them. I'll just swim right through them. We've got benadryl on board. If I get stung, I'll just grin and bear it. Well there was no grin and bearing this.As a matter of fact, the best advice I got was from an elementary school class in the Caribbean. And I was telling these kids, 120 of them — they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor — and I was telling them about the jellyfish and how they're gelatinous and you can't see them at night especially. And they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles. And they do this wrapping. And they can send the poison into the system.And a little kid from the back was like this. And I said, ""What's your name?"" ""Henry."" ""Henry, what's your question?"" He said, ""Well, I didn't have a question so much as I had a suggestion."" He said, ""You know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs?"" And I said, ""Well it's odd that you've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit, but yeah, I know those guys."" He said, ""That's what you need. You need like a school of fish that would swim in front of you like this."" (Laughter) ""And when the jellyfish come and they wrap their tentacles around the fish, they're going to be busy with them, and you'll just scoot around."" I said, ""Oh, it's like a suicide army."" He said, ""That's what I'm talking about. That's what you need.""And little did I know, that you should listen to eight year-olds. And so I started that swim in a bathing suit like normal, and, no joke, this is it; it came from the shark divers. I finished the swim like this. I was swimming with this thing on. That's how scared of the jellyfish I was.So now what do I do? I wouldn't mind if every one of you came up on this stage tonight and told us how you've gotten over the big disappointments of your lives. Because we've all had them, haven't we? We've all had a heartache. And so my journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat. And I can look at the journey, not just the destination. I can feel proud. I can stand here in front of you tonight and say I was courageous. Yeah.(Applause)Thank you.And with all sincerity, I can say, I am glad I lived those two years of my life that way, because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore, I got there with that goal. When you live that way, when you live with that kind of passion, there's no time, there's no time for regrets, you're just moving forward. And I want to live every day of the rest of my life that way, swim or no swim. But the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes, if cancer has won, if there's death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary.But that ocean's still there. This hope is still alive. And I don't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years, and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida, and I will swim from Cuba to Florida.Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)And so, what after that? Are you going to swim the Atlantic? No, that's the last swim. It's the only swim I'm interested in. But I'm ready. And by the way, a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on Wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was August 22nd 1949, and for some odd reason in Wikipedia, they had my death date too. (Laughter) He said, ""Did you know you're going to die the same place you were born, New York City, and it's going to be in January of '35?"" I said, ""Nope. I didn't know."" And now I'm going to live to 85. I have three more years than I thought.And so I ask myself, I'm starting to ask myself now, even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me, I'm asking myself, and maybe I can ask you tonight too, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, she says, ""So what is it, what is it you're doing, with this one wild and precious life of yours?""Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause) Live it large. Live it large.","https://www.ted.com/talks/diana_nyad_extreme_swimming_with_the_world_s_most_dangerous_jellyfish
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"I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change. And I think it starts with one physician, and that's me. And maybe I've been around long enough that I can afford to give away some of my false prestige to be able to do that. Before I actually begin the meat of my talk, let's begin with a bit of baseball. Hey, why not? We're near the end, we're getting close to the World Series. We all love baseball, don't we? (Laughter) Baseball is filled with some amazing statistics. And there's hundreds of them. ""Moneyball"" is about to come out, and it's all about statistics and using statistics to build a great baseball team. I'm going to focus on one stat that I hope a lot of you have heard of. It's called batting average. So we talk about a 300, a batter who bats 300. That means that ballplayer batted safely, hit safely three times out of 10 at bats. That means hit the ball into the outfield, it dropped, it didn't get caught, and whoever tried to throw it to first base didn't get there in time and the runner was safe. Three times out of 10. Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball? Good, really good, maybe an all-star. Do you know what they call a 400 baseball hitter? That's somebody who hit, by the way, four times safely out of every 10. Legendary — as in Ted Williams legendary — the last Major League Baseball player to hit over 400 during a regular season. Now let's take this back into my world of medicine where I'm a lot more comfortable, or perhaps a bit less comfortable after what I'm going to talk to you about. Suppose you have appendicitis and you're referred to a surgeon who's batting 400 on appendectomies. (Laughter) Somehow this isn't working out, is it? Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who's batting 200 on angioplasties. But, but, you know what? She's doing a lot better this year. She's on the comeback trail. And she's hitting a 257. Somehow this isn't working. But I'm going to ask you a question. What do you think a batting average for a cardiac surgeon or a nurse practitioner or an orthopedic surgeon, an OBGYN, a paramedic is supposed to be? 1,000, very good. Now truth of the matter is, nobody knows in all of medicine what a good surgeon or physician or paramedic is supposed to bat. What we do though is we send each one of them, including myself, out into the world with the admonition, be perfect. Never ever, ever make a mistake, but you worry about the details, about how that's going to happen. And that was the message that I absorbed when I was in med school. I was an obsessive compulsive student. In high school, a classmate once said that Brian Goldman would study for a blood test. (Laughter) And so I did. And I studied in my little garret at the nurses' residence at Toronto General Hospital, not far from here. And I memorized everything. I memorized in my anatomy class the origins and exertions of every muscle, every branch of every artery that came off the aorta, differential diagnoses obscure and common. I even knew the differential diagnosis in how to classify renal tubular acidosis. And all the while, I was amassing more and more knowledge. And I did well, I graduated with honors, cum laude. And I came out of medical school with the impression that if I memorized everything and knew everything, or as much as possible, as close to everything as possible, that it would immunize me against making mistakes. And it worked for a while, until I met Mrs. Drucker. I was a resident at a teaching hospital here in Toronto when Mrs. Drucker was brought to the emergency department of the hospital where I was working. At the time I was assigned to the cardiology service on a cardiology rotation. And it was my job, when the emergency staff called for a cardiology consult, to see that patient in emerg. and to report back to my attending. And I saw Mrs. Drucker, and she was breathless. And when I listened to her, she was making a wheezy sound. And when I listened to her chest with a stethoscope, I could hear crackly sounds on both sides that told me that she was in congestive heart failure. This is a condition in which the heart fails, and instead of being able to pump all the blood forward, some of the blood backs up into the lung, the lungs fill up with blood, and that's why you have shortness of breath. And that wasn't a difficult diagnosis to make. I made it and I set to work treating her. I gave her aspirin. I gave her medications to relieve the strain on her heart. I gave her medications that we call diuretics, water pills, to get her to pee out the access fluid. And over the course of the next hour and a half or two, she started to feel better. And I felt really good. And that's when I made my first mistake; I sent her home. Actually, I made two more mistakes. I sent her home without speaking to my attending. I didn't pick up the phone and do what I was supposed to do, which was call my attending and run the story by him so he would have a chance to see her for himself. And he knew her, he would have been able to furnish additional information about her. Maybe I did it for a good reason. Maybe I didn't want to be a high-maintenance resident. Maybe I wanted to be so successful and so able to take responsibility that I would do so and I would be able to take care of my attending's patients without even having to contact him. The second mistake that I made was worse. In sending her home, I disregarded a little voice deep down inside that was trying to tell me, ""Goldman, not a good idea. Don't do this."" In fact, so lacking in confidence was I that I actually asked the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker, ""Do you think it's okay if she goes home?"" And the nurse thought about it and said very matter-of-factly, ""Yeah, I think she'll do okay."" I can remember that like it was yesterday. So I signed the discharge papers, and an ambulance came, paramedics came to take her home. And I went back to my work on the wards. All the rest of that day, that afternoon, I had this kind of gnawing feeling inside my stomach. But I carried on with my work. And at the end of the day, I packed up to leave the hospital and walked to the parking lot to take my car and drive home when I did something that I don't usually do. I walked through the emergency department on my way home. And it was there that another nurse, not the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker before, but another nurse, said three words to me that are the three words that most emergency physicians I know dread. Others in medicine dread them as well, but there's something particular about emergency medicine because we see patients so fleetingly. The three words are: Do you remember? ""Do you remember that patient you sent home?"" the other nurse asked matter-of-factly. ""Well she's back,"" in just that tone of voice. Well she was back all right. She was back and near death. About an hour after she had arrived home, after I'd sent her home, she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50, which is in severe shock. And she was barely breathing and she was blue. And the emerg. staff pulled out all the stops. They gave her medications to raise her blood pressure. They put her on a ventilator. And I was shocked and shaken to the core. And I went through this roller coaster, because after they stabilized her, she went to the intensive care unit, and I hoped against hope that she would recover. And over the next two or three days, it was clear that she was never going to wake up. She had irreversible brain damage. And the family gathered. And over the course of the next eight or nine days, they resigned themselves to what was happening. And at about the nine day mark, they let her go — Mrs. Drucker, a wife, a mother and a grandmother. They say you never forget the names of those who die. And that was my first time to be acquainted with that. Over the next few weeks, I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine — where I felt alone, isolated, not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel, because you can't talk about it with your colleagues. You know that healthy kind, when you betray a secret that a best friend made you promise never to reveal and then you get busted and then your best friend confronts you and you have terrible discussions, but at the end of it all that sick feeling guides you and you say, I'll never make that mistake again. And you make amends and you never make that mistake again. That's the kind of shame that is a teacher. The unhealthy shame I'm talking about is the one that makes you so sick inside. It's the one that says, not that what you did was bad, but that you are bad. And it was what I was feeling. And it wasn't because of my attending; he was a doll. He talked to the family, and I'm quite sure that he smoothed things over and made sure that I didn't get sued. And I kept asking myself these questions. Why didn't I ask my attending? Why did I send her home? And then at my worst moments: Why did I make such a stupid mistake? Why did I go into medicine? Slowly but surely, it lifted. I began to feel a bit better. And on a cloudy day, there was a crack in the clouds and the sun started to come out and I wondered, maybe I could feel better again. And I made myself a bargain that if only I redouble my efforts to be perfect and never make another mistake again, please make the voices stop. And they did. And I went back to work. And then it happened again. Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto, and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat. It was busy, I was in a bit of a hurry. He kept pointing here. I looked at his throat, it was a little bit pink. And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way. And even as he was walking out the door, he was still sort of pointing to his throat. And two days later I came to do my next emergency shift, and that's when my chief asked to speak to me quietly in her office. And she said the three words: Do you remember? ""Do you remember that patient you saw with the sore throat?"" Well it turns out, he didn't have a strep throat. He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis. You can Google it, but it's an infection, not of the throat, but of the upper airway, and it can actually cause the airway to close. And fortunately he didn't die. He was placed on intravenous antibiotics and he recovered after a few days. And I went through the same period of shame and recriminations and felt cleansed and went back to work, until it happened again and again and again. Twice in one emergency shift, I missed appendicitis. Now that takes some doing, especially when you work in a hospital that at the time saw but 14 people a night. Now in both cases, I didn't send them home and I don't think there was any gap in their care. One I thought had a kidney stone. I ordered a kidney X-ray. When it turned out to be normal, my colleague who was doing a reassessment of the patient noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant and called the surgeons. The other one had a lot of diarrhea. I ordered some fluids to rehydrate him and asked my colleague to reassess him. And he did and when he noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant, called the surgeons. In both cases, they had their operations and they did okay. But each time, they were gnawing at me, eating at me. And I'd like to be able to say to you that my worst mistakes only happened in the first five years of practice as many of my colleagues say, which is total B.S. (Laughter) Some of my doozies have been in the last five years. Alone, ashamed and unsupported. Here's the problem: If I can't come clean and talk about my mistakes, if I can't find the still-small voice that tells me what really happened, how can I share it with my colleagues? How can I teach them about what I did so that they don't do the same thing? If I were to walk into a room — like right now, I have no idea what you think of me. When was the last time you heard somebody talk about failure after failure after failure? Oh yeah, you go to a cocktail party and you might hear about some other doctor, but you're not going to hear somebody talking about their own mistakes. If I were to walk into a room filled with my colleages and ask for their support right now and start to tell what I've just told you right now, I probably wouldn't get through two of those stories before they would start to get really uncomfortable, somebody would crack a joke, they'd change the subject and we would move on. And in fact, if I knew and my colleagues knew that one of my orthopedic colleagues took off the wrong leg in my hospital, believe me, I'd have trouble making eye contact with that person. That's the system that we have. It's a complete denial of mistakes. It's a system in which there are two kinds of physicians — those who make mistakes and those who don't, those who can't handle sleep deprivation and those who can, those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes. And it's almost like an ideological reaction, like the antibodies begin to attack that person. And we have this idea that if we drive the people who make mistakes out of medicine, what will we be left with, but a safe system. But there are two problems with that. In my 20 years or so of medical broadcasting and journalism, I've made a personal study of medical malpractice and medical errors to learn everything I can, from one of the first articles I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show ""White Coat, Black Art."" And what I've learned is that errors are absolutely ubiquitous. We work in a system where errors happen every day, where one in 10 medications are either the wrong medication given in hospital or at the wrong dosage, where hospital-acquired infections are getting more and more numerous, causing havoc and death. In this country, as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors. In the United States, the Institute of Medicine pegged it at 100,000. In both cases, these are gross underestimates, because we really aren't ferreting out the problem as we should. And here's the thing. In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years, we can't keep up with it. Sleep deprivation is absolutely pervasive. We can't get rid of it. We have our cognitive biases, so that I can take a perfect history on a patient with chest pain. Now take the same patient with chest pain, make them moist and garrulous and put a little bit of alcohol on their breath, and suddenly my history is laced with contempt. I don't take the same history. I'm not a robot; I don't do things the same way each time. And my patients aren't cars; they don't tell me their symptoms in the same way each time. Given all of that, mistakes are inevitable. So if you take the system, as I was taught, and weed out all the error-prone health professionals, well there won't be anybody left. And you know that business about people not wanting to talk about their worst cases? On my show, on ""White Coat, Black Art,"" I made it a habit of saying, ""Here's my worst mistake,"" I would say to everybody from paramedics to the chief of cardiac surgery, ""Here's my worst mistake,"" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ""What about yours?"" and I would point the microphone towards them. And their pupils would dilate, they would recoil, then they would look down and swallow hard and start to tell me their stories. They want to tell their stories. They want to share their stories. They want to be able to say, ""Look, don't make the same mistake I did."" What they need is an environment to be able to do that. What they need is a redefined medical culture. And it starts with one physician at a time. The redefined physician is human, knows she's human, accepts it, isn't proud of making mistakes, but strives to learn one thing from what happened that she can teach to somebody else. She shares her experience with others. She's supportive when other people talk about their mistakes. And she points out other people's mistakes, not in a gotcha way, but in a loving, supportive way so that everybody can benefit. And she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system, and when human beings run the system, they will make mistakes from time to time. So the system is evolving to create backups that make it easier to detect those mistakes that humans inevitably make and also fosters in a loving, supportive way places where everybody who is observing in the health care system can actually point out things that could be potential mistakes and is rewarded for doing so, and especially people like me, when we do make mistakes, we're rewarded for coming clean. My name is Brian Goldman. I am a redefined physician. I'm human. I make mistakes. I'm sorry about that, but I strive to learn one thing that I can pass on to other people. I still don't know what you think of me, but I can live with that. And let me close with three words of my own: I do remember. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistakes_can_we_talk_about_that
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"We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors. And in ways both big and small, the narrative of the victim shapes the way we see women. You can't count what you don't see. And we don't invest in what's invisible to us. But this is the face of resilience.Six years ago, I started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict. I set out to write a compelling economic story, one that had great characters, that no one else was telling, and one that I thought mattered. And that turned out to be women.I had left ABC news and a career I loved at the age of 30 for business school, a path I knew almost nothing about. None of the women I had grown up with in Maryland had graduated from college, let alone considered business school. But they had hustled to feed their kids and pay their rent. And I saw from a young age that having a decent job and earning a good living made the biggest difference for families who were struggling.So if you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs. And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women, because they are the population you have left. Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female. I want to introduce you to some of those entrepreneurs I've met and share with you some of what they've taught me over the years.I went to Afghanistan in 2005 to work on a Financial Times piece, and there I met Kamila, a young women who told me she had just turned down a job with the international community that would have paid her nearly $2,000 a month — an astronomical sum in that context. And she had turned it down, she said, because she was going to start her next business, an entrepreneurship consultancy that would teach business skills to men and women all around Afghanistan. Business, she said, was critical to her country's future. Because long after this round of internationals left, business would help keep her country peaceful and secure. And she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women.So I was amazed. I mean here was a girl who had never lived in peace time who somehow had come to sound like a candidate from ""The Apprentice."" (Laughter) So I asked her, ""How in the world do you know this much about business? Why are you so passionate?"" She said, ""Oh Gayle, this is actually my third business. My first business was a dressmaking business I started under the Taliban. And that was actually an excellent business, because we provided jobs for women all around our neighborhood. And that's really how I became an entrepreneur.""Think about this: Here were girls who braved danger to become breadwinners during years in which they couldn't even be on their streets. And at a time of economic collapse when people sold baby dolls and shoe laces and windows and doors just to survive, these girls made the difference between survival and starvation for so many. I couldn't leave the story, and I couldn't leave the topic either, because everywhere I went I met more of these women who no one seemed to know about, or even wish to.I went on to Bosnia, and early on in my interviews I met with an IMF official who said, ""You know, Gayle, I don't think we actually have women in business in Bosnia, but there is a lady selling cheese nearby on the side of the road. So maybe you could interview her."" So I went out reporting and within a day I met Narcisa Kavazovic who at that point was opening a new factory on the war's former front lines in Sarajevo. She had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage, sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members who were counting on her for survival. By the time we met, she had 20 employees, most of them women, who were sending their boys and their girls to school. And she was just the start. I met women running essential oils businesses, wineries and even the country's largest advertising agency.So these stories together became the Herald Tribune business cover. And when this story posted, I ran to my computer to send it to the IMF official. And I said, ""Just in case you're looking for entrepreneurs to feature at your next investment conference, here are a couple of women.""(Applause)But think about this. The IMF official is hardly the only person to automatically file women under micro. The biases, whether intentional or otherwise, are pervasive, and so are the misleading mental images. If you see the word ""microfinance,"" what comes to mind? Most people say women. And if you see the word ""entrepreneur,"" most people think men. Why is that? Because we aim low and we think small when it comes to women.Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect, but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women, because they have so much greater hopes for themselves. They want to move from micro to medium and beyond. And in many places, they're there. In the U.S., women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018. In South Korea and Indonesia, women own nearly half a million firms. China, women run 20 percent of all small businesses. And in the developing world overall, That figure is 40 to 50 percent.Nearly everywhere I go, I meet incredibly interesting entrepreneurs who are seeking access to finance, access to markets and established business networks. They are often ignored because they're harder to help. It is much riskier to give a 50,000 dollar loan than it is to give a 500 dollar loan. And as the World Bank recently noted, women are stuck in a productivity trap. Those in small businesses can't get the capital they need to expand and those in microbusiness can't grow out of them.Recently I was at the State Department in Washington and I met an incredibly passionate entrepreneur from Ghana. She sells chocolates. And she had come to Washington, not seeking a handout and not seeking a microloan. She had come seeking serious investment dollars so that she could build the factory and buy the equipment she needs to export her chocolates to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and far beyond — capital that would help her to employ more than the 20 people that she already has working for her, and capital that would fuel her own country's economic climb.The great news is we already know what works. Theory and empirical evidence Have already taught us. We don't need to invent solutions because we have them — cash flow loans based in income rather than assets, loans that use secure contracts rather than collateral, because women often don't own land. And Kiva.org, the microlender, is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans. And that's just to start.Recently it has become very much in fashion to call women ""the emerging market of the emerging market."" I think that is terrific. You know why? Because — and I say this as somebody who worked in finance — 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade. Because investors saw the potential for return at a time of slowing economic growth, and so they created financial products and financial innovation tailored to the emerging markets.How wonderful would it be if we were prepared to replace all of our lofty words with our wallets and invest 500 billion dollars unleashing women's economic potential? Just think of the benefits when it comes to jobs, productivity, employment, child nutrition, maternal mortality, literacy and much, much more. Because, as the World Economic Forum noted, smaller gender gaps are directly correlated with increased economic competitiveness. And not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation gap — not one.So the great news is this is an incredible opportunity. We have so much room to grow. So you see, this is not about doing good, this is about global growth and global employment. It is about how we invest and it's about how we see women. And women can no longer be both half the population and a special interest group.(Applause)Oftentimes I get into very interesting discussions with reporters who say to me, ""Gayle, these are great stories, but you're really writing about the exceptions."" Now that makes me pause for just a couple reasons. First of all, for exceptions, there are a lot of them and they're important. Secondly, when we talk about men who are succeeding, we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated. And when we talk about women, they are either exceptions to be dismissed or aberrations to be ignored. And finally, there is no society anywhere in all the world that is not changed except by its most exceptional. So why wouldn't we celebrate and elevate these change makers and job creators rather than overlook them?This topic of resilience is very personal to me and in many ways has shaped my life. My mom was a single mom who worked at the phone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night so that I could have every opportunity possible. We shopped double coupons and layaway and consignment stores, and when she got sick with stage four breast cancer and could no longer work, we even applied for food stamps. And when I would feel sorry for myself as nine or 10 year-old girls do, she would say to me, ""My dear, on a scale of major world tragedies, yours is not a three.""(Laughter)And when I was applying to business school and felt certain I couldn't do it and nobody I knew had done it, I went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact. And she told me, ""Never import other people's limitations.""And when I complained to my grandmother, a World War II veteran who worked in film for 50 years and who supported me from the age of 13, that I was terrified that if I turned down a plum assignment at ABC for a fellowship overseas, I would never ever, ever find another job, she said, ""Kiddo, I'm going to tell you two things. First of all, no one turns down a Fulbright, and secondly, McDonald's is always hiring."" (Laughter) ""You will find a job. Take the leap.""The women in my family are not exceptions. The women in this room and watching in L.A. and all around the world are not exceptions. We are not a special interest group. We are the majority. And for far too long, we have underestimated ourselves and been undervalued by others. It is time for us to aim higher when it comes to women, to invest more and to deploy our dollars to benefit women all around the world.We can make a difference, and make a difference, not just for women, but for a global economy that desperately needs their contributions. Together we can make certain that the so-called exceptions begin to rule. When we change the way we see ourselves, others will follow. And it is time for all of us to think bigger.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gayle_tzemach_lemmon_women_entrepreneurs_example_not_exception
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"I want to talk to you about, or share with you, a breakthrough new approach for managing items of inventory inside of a warehouse. We're talking about a pick, pack and ship setting here.So as a hint, this solution involves hundreds of mobile robots, sometimes thousands of mobile robots, moving around a warehouse. And I'll get to the solution. But for a moment, just think about the last time that you ordered something online. You were sitting on your couch and you decided that you absolutely had to have this red t-shirt. So — click! — you put it into your shopping cart. And then you decided that green pair of pants looks pretty good too — click! And maybe a blue pair of shoes — click! So at this point you've assembled your order. You didn't stop to think  for a moment that that might not be a great outfit. But you hit ""submit order."" And two days later, this package shows up on your doorstep. And you open the box and you're like, wow, there's my goo.Did you ever stop to think about how those items of inventory actually found their way inside that box in the warehouse? So I'm here to tell you  it's that guy right there. So deep in the middle of that picture, you see a classic pick-pack worker in a distribution or order fulfillments setting. Classically these pick workers will  spend 60 or 70 percent of their day wandering around the warehouse. They'll often walk as much as 5 or 10 miles in pursuit of those items of inventory. Not only is this an unproductive way to fill orders, it also turns out to be an unfulfilling way to fill orders.So let me tell you where I first bumped into this problem. I was out in the Bay area  in '99, 2000, the dot com boom. I worked for a fabulously spectacular flame-out called Webvan. (Laughter) This company raised hundreds of millions of dollars with the notion that we will deliver grocery orders online. And it really came down to the fact that we couldn't do it cost effectively. Turns out e-commerce was something that was very hard and very costly. In this particular instance we were trying to assemble 30 items of inventory into a few totes, onto a van to deliver to the home. And when you think about it, it was costing us 30 dollars. Imagine, we had an 89¢ can of soup that was costing us one dollar to pick and pack into that tote. And that's before we actually tried to deliver it to the home.So long story short, during my one year at Webvan, what I realized by talking to  all the material-handling providers was that there was no solution designed specifically to solve each base picking. Red item, green, blue, getting those three things in a box. So we said, there's just got to be a better way to do this. Existing material handling was set up to pump pallets and cases of goo to retail stores.Of course Webvan went out of business, and about a year and a half later, I was still noodling on this problem. It was still nagging at me. And I started thinking about it again. And I said, let me just focus briefly on what I wanted as a pick worker, or my vision for how it should work. (Laughter) I said, let's focus on the problem. I have an order here and what I want to do is I want to put red, green and blue in this box right here. What I need is a system where I put out my hand and — poof! — the product shows up  and I pack it into the order, and now we're thinking, this would be a very operator-centric approach to solving the problem. This is what I need. What technology is available to solve this problem? But as you can see, orders can come and go, products can come and go. It allows us to focus on making the pick worker the center of the problem, and providing them the tools to make them as productive as possible.So how did I arrive at this notion? Well, actually it came from a brainstorming exercise, probably a technique that many of you use, It's this notion of testing your ideas. Take a blank sheet, of course, but then test your ideas at the limits — infinity, zero. In this particular case, we challenged ourselves with the idea: What if we had to build a distribution center in China, where it's a very, very low-cost market? And say, labor is cheap, land is cheap. And we said specifically, ""What if it was zero dollars an hour for direct labor and we could build a million- square-foot distribution center?"" So naturally that led to ideas that said, ""Let's put lots of people in the warehouse."" And I said, ""Hold on, zero dollars per hour, what I would do is 'hire' 10,000 workers to come to the warehouse every morning at 8 a.m., walk into the warehouse and pick up one item of inventory and then just stand there. So you hold Captain Crunch, you hold the Mountain Dew, you hold the Diet Coke. If I need it, I'll call you, otherwise just stand there. But when I need Diet Coke and I call it, you guys talk amongst yourselves. Diet Coke walks up to the front — pick it, put it in the tote, away it goes."" Wow, what if the products could walk and talk on their own? That's a very interesting, very powerful way that we could potentially organize this warehouse.So of course, labor isn't free, on that practical versus awesome spectrum. (Laughter) So we said mobile shelving — We'll put them on mobile shelving. We'll use mobile robots and we'll move the inventory around. And so we got underway on that and then I'm sitting on my couch in 2008. Did any of you see the Beijing Olympics, the opening ceremonies? I about fell out of my couch when I saw this. I'm like, that was the idea! (Laughter and Applause) We'll put thousands of people on the warehouse floor, the stadium floor. But interestingly enough, this actually relates to the idea in that these guys were creating some incredibly powerful, impressive digital art, all without computers, I'm told, it was all peer-to-peer coordination and communication. You stand up, I'll squat down. And they made some fabulous art. It speaks to the power of emergence in systems when you let things start to talk with each other. So that was a little bit of the journey.So of course, now what became the practical reality of this idea? Here is a warehouse. It's a pick, pack and ship center that has about 10,000 different SKUs. We'll call them red pens, green pens, yellow Post-It Notes. We send the little orange robots out to pick up the blue shelving pods. And we deliver them to the side of the building. So all the pick workers now get to stay on the perimeter. And the game here is to pick up the shelves, take them down the highway and deliver them straight to the pick worker. This pick worker's life is completely different. Rather than wandering around the warehouse, she gets to stay still in a pick station like this and every product in the building can now come to her.So the process is very productive. Reach in, pick an item, scan the bar code, pack it out. By the time you turn around, there's another product there ready to be picked and packed. So what we've done is take out all of the non-value added walking, searching, wasting, waited time, and we've developed a very  high-fidelity way to pick these orders, where you point at it with a laser, scan the UPC barcode, and then indicate with a light which box it needs to go into. So more productive, more accurate and, it turns out, it's a more interesting office environment for these pick workers. They actually complete the whole order. So they do red, green and blue, not just a part of the order. And they feel a little bit more in control of their environment.So the side effects of this approach are what really surprised us. We knew it was going  to be more productive. But we didn't realize just how pervasive this way of thinking extended to other functions in the warehouse. But what effectively this approach is doing inside of the DC is turning it into a massively parallel processing engine. So this is again a cross-fertilization of ideas. Here's a warehouse and we're thinking about parallel processing supercomputer architectures. The notion here is that you have 10 workers on  the right side of the screen that are now all independent autonomous pick workers. If the worker in station three decides to leave and go to the bathroom, it has no impact on the productivity of the other nine workers. Contrast that, for a moment, with the traditional method of using a conveyor. When one person passes the order to you, you put something in and pass it downstream. Everyone has to be in place for that serial process to work. This becomes a more robust way to think about the warehouse.And then underneath the hoods gets interesting in that we're tracking the popularity of the products. And we're using dynamic and adaptive algorithms to tune the floor of the warehouse. So what you see here potentially the week leading up to Valentine's Day. All that pink chalky candy has moved to the front of the building and is now being picked into a lot of orders in those pick stations. Come in two days after Valentine's Day, and that candy, the leftover candy, has all drifted to the back of the warehouse and is occupying the cooler zone on the thermal map there. One other side effect of this approach using the parallel processing is these things can scale to ginormous. (Laughter) So whether you're doing two pick stations, 20 pick stations, or 200 pick stations, the path planning algorithms and all of the inventory algorithms just work. In this example you see that the inventory has now occupied all the perimeter of the building because that's where the pick stations were. They sorted it out for themselves.So I'll conclude with just one final video that shows how this comes to bear on the pick worker's actual day in the life of. So as we mentioned, the process is to move inventory along the highway and then find your way into these pick stations. And our software in the background understands what's going on  in each station, we direct the pods across the highway and we're attempting to get into a queuing system to present the work to the pick worker. What's interesting is we can even adapt the speed of the pick workers. The faster pickers get more pods and the slower pickers get few. But this pick worker now is literally having that experience that we described before. She puts out her hand. The product jumps into it. Or she has to reach in and get it. She scans it and  she puts it in the bucket. And all of the rest of the technology is kind of behind the scenes. So she gets to now focus on the picking and packing portion of her job. Never has any idle time, never has to leave her mat. And actually we think not only a more productive and more accurate way to fill orders. We think it's a more fulfilling way to fill orders.The reason we can say that, though, is that workers in a lot of these buildings now compete for the privilege of working in the Kiva zone that day. And sometimes we'll catch them on testimonial videos saying such things as, they have more energy after the day to play with their grandchildren, or in one case a guy said, ""the Kiva zone is so stress-free that I've actually stopped taking my blood pressure medication."" (Laughter) That was at a pharmaceutical distributor, so they told us not to use that video. (Laughter)So what I wanted to leave you with today is the notion that when you let things start to think and walk and talk on their own, interesting processes and productivities can emerge. And now I think next time you go to your front step and pick up that box that you just ordered online, you break it open and the goo is in there, you'll have some wonderment as to whether a robot assisted in the picking and packing of that order.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mick_mountz_the_hidden_world_of_box_packing
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"As the highest military commander of the Netherlands, with troops stationed around the world, I'm really honored to be here today.When I look around this TEDxAmsterdam venue, I see a very special audience. You are the reason why I said yes to the invitation to come here today. When I look around, I see people who want to make a contribution. I see people who want to make a better world, by doing groundbreaking scientific work, by creating impressive works of art, by writing critical articles or inspiring books, by starting up sustainable businesses. And you all have chosen your own instruments to fulfill this mission of creating a better world. Some chose the microscope as their instrument. Others chose dancing or painting, or making music like we just heard. Some chose the pen. Others work through the instrument of money.Ladies and gentlemen, I made a different choice.Thanks.Ladies and gentlemen ...(Laughter)(Applause)I share your goals. I share the goals of the speakers you heard before. I did not choose to take up the pen, the brush, the camera. I chose this instrument. I chose the gun.For you, and you heard already, being so close to this gun may make you feel uneasy. It may even feel scary. A real gun at a few feet's distance. Let us stop for a moment and feel this uneasiness. You could even hear it. Let us cherish the fact that probably most of you have never been close to a gun. It means the Netherlands is a peaceful country. The Netherlands is not at war. It means soldiers are not needed to patrol our streets. Guns are not a part of our lives. In many countries, it is a different story. In many countries, people are confronted with guns. They are oppressed. They are intimidated — by warlords, by terrorists, by criminals. Weapons can do a lot of harm. They are the cause of much distress.Why then am I standing before you with this weapon? Why did I choose the gun as my instrument? Today I want to tell you why. Today I want to tell you why I chose the gun to create a better world. And I want to tell you how this gun can help.My story starts in the city of Nijmegen in the east of the Netherlands, the city where I was born. My father was a hardworking baker, but when he had finished work in the bakery, he often told me and my brother stories. And most of the time, he told me this story I'm going to share with you now. The story of what happened when he was a conscripted soldier in the Dutch armed forces at the beginning of the Second World War. The Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Their grim plans were evident. They meant to rule by means of repression. Diplomacy had failed to stop the Germans. Only brute force remained. It was our last resort. My father was there to provide it.As the son of a farmer who knew how to hunt, my father was an excellent marksman. When he aimed, he never missed. At this decisive moment in Dutch history my father was positioned on the bank of the river Waal near the city of Nijmegen. He had a clear shot at the German soldiers who came to occupy a free country, his country, our country. He fired. Nothing happened. He fired again. No German soldier fell to the ground. My father had been given an old gun that could not even reach the opposite riverbank. Hitler's troops marched on, and there was nothing my father could do about it.Until the day my father died, he was frustrated about missing these shots. He could have done something. But with an old gun, not even the best marksman in the armed forces could have hit the mark. So this story stayed with me.Then in high school, I was gripped by the stories of the Allied soldiers — soldiers who left the safety of their own homes and risked their lives to liberate a country and a people that they didn't know. They liberated my birth town. It was then that I decided I would take up the gun — out of respect and gratitude for those men and women who came to liberate us. From the awareness that sometimes only the gun can stand between good and evil.And that is why I took up the gun — not to shoot, not to kill, not to destroy, but to stop those who would do evil, to protect the vulnerable, to defend democratic values, to stand up for the freedom we have to talk here today in Amsterdam about how we can make the world a better place.Ladies and gentlemen, I do not stand here today to tell you about the glory of weapons. I do not like guns. And once you have been under fire yourself, it brings home even more clearly that a gun is not some macho instrument to brag about. I stand here today to tell you about the use of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability. The gun may be one of the most important instruments of peace and stability that we have in this world.Now this may sound contradictory to you. But not only have I seen with my own eyes during my deployments in Lebanon, Sarajevo and as the Netherlands' Chief of Defence, this is also supported by cold, hard statistics. Violence has declined dramatically over the last 500 years. Despite the pictures we are shown daily in the news, wars between developed countries are no longer commonplace. The murder rate in Europe has dropped by a factor of 30 since the Middle Ages. And occurrences of civil war and repression have declined since the end of the Cold War. Statistics show that we are living in a relatively peaceful era.Why? Why has violence decreased? Has the human mind changed? Well, we were talking about the human mind this morning. Did we simply lose our beastly impulses for revenge, for violent rituals, for pure rage? Or is there something else? In his latest book, Harvard professor Steven Pinker — and many other thinkers before him — concludes that one of the main drivers behind less violent societies is the spread of the constitutional state and the introduction, on a large scale, of the state monopoly on the legitimized use of violence — legitimized by a democratically elected government, legitimized by checks and balances and an independent judicial system. In other words, a state monopoly that has the use of violence well under control.Such a state monopoly on violence, first of all, serves as a reassurance. It removes the incentive for an arms race between potentially hostile groups in our societies. Secondly, the presence of penalties that outweigh the benefits of using violence tips the balance even further. Abstaining from violence becomes more profitable than starting a war. Now nonviolence starts to work like a flywheel. It enhances peace even further. Where there is no conflict, trade flourishes. And trade is another important incentive against violence. With trade, there's mutual interdependency and mutual gain between parties. And when there is mutual gain, both sides stand to lose more than they would gain if they started a war. War is simply no longer the best option, and that is why violence has decreased.This, ladies and gentlemen, is the rationale behind the existence of my armed forces. The armed forces implement the state monopoly on violence. We do this in a legitimized way only after our democracy has asked us to do so. It is this legitimate, controlled use of the gun that has contributed greatly to reducing the statistics of war, conflict and violence around the globe. It is this participation in peacekeeping missions that has led to the resolution of many civil wars. My soldiers use the gun as an instrument of peace.And this is exactly why failed states are so dangerous. Failed states have no legitimized, democratically controlled use of force. Failed states do not know of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability. That is why failed states can drag down a whole region into chaos and conflict. That is why spreading the concept of the constitutional state is such an important aspect of our foreign missions. That is why we are trying to build a judicial system right now in Afghanistan. That is why we train police officers, we train judges, we train public prosecutors around the world. And that is why — and in the Netherlands, we are very unique in that — that is why the Dutch constitution states that one of the main tasks of the armed forces is to uphold and promote the international rule of law.Ladies and gentlemen, looking at this gun, we are confronted with the ugly side of the human mind. Every day I hope that politicians, diplomats, development workers can turn conflict into peace and threat into hope. And I hope that one day armies can be disbanded and humans will find a way of living together without violence and oppression. But until that day comes, we will have to make ideals and human failure meet somewhere in the middle. Until that day comes, I stand for my father who tried to shoot the Nazis with an old gun. I stand for my men and women who are prepared to risk their lives for a less violent world for all of us. I stand for this soldier who suffered partial hearing loss and sustained permanent injuries to her leg, when she was hit by a rocket on a mission in Afghanistan.Ladies and gentlemen, until the day comes when we can do away with the gun, I hope we all agree that peace and stability do not come free of charge. It takes hard work, often behind the scenes. It takes good equipment and well-trained, dedicated soldiers. I hope you will support the efforts of our armed forces to train soldiers like this young captain and provide her with a good gun, instead of the bad gun my father was given. I hope you will support our soldiers when they are out there, when they come home and when they are injured and need our care. They put their lives on the line, for us, for you, and we cannot let them down.I hope you will respect my soldiers, this soldier with this gun. Because she wants a better world. Because she makes an active contribution to a better world, just like all of us here today.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_uhm_why_i_chose_a_gun
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"Everybody in our society's life is touched by cancer — if not personally, then through a loved one, a family member, colleague, friend. And once our lives are touched by cancer, we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons, or three tools, that are available to fight the disease: surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. And once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions, again either personally or with our loved ones and family members, we also very quickly learn the benefits, the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools.I'm very thankful to Jay and to Mark and the TEDMED team for inviting me today to describe a fourth tool, a new tool, that we call Tumor Treating Fields. Tumor Treating Fields were invented by Dr. Yoram Palti, professor emeritus at the Technion in Israel. And they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer. To understand how Tumor Treating Fields work, we first need to understand what are electric fields.Let me first address a few popular misconceptions. First of all, electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue. Electric fields are not ionizing radiation, like X-rays or proton beams, that bombard tissue to disrupt DNA. And electric fields are not magnetism. What electric fields are are a field of forces. And these forces act on, attract, bodies that have an electrical charge.The best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity. Gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses. We can all picture astronauts in space. They float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them. But as that space shuttle returns to Earth, and as the astronauts enter the Earth's gravitational field, they begin to see the effects of gravity. They begin to be attracted towards Earth. And as they land, they're fully aligned in the gravitational field. We're, of course, all stuck in the Earth's gravitational field right now. That's why you're all in your chairs. And that's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up, to walk around and to lift things.In cancer, cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth. We can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it's a mini space station. And in that space station we have the genetic material, the chromosomes, within a nucleus. And out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions. Importantly, those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body. As cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates, the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains. These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells. And this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells, two cancer cells become four cancer cells, and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth.Tumor Treating Fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station. And when that cellular space station is within the electric field, it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them. And it prevents them from forming those chains, those mitotic spindles, that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells. What we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours. And they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide, programmed cell death, or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided. And we can observe this.What I'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments. This is cultures, identical cultures, of cervical cancer cells. And we've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains. The first clip shows a normal cell division without the Tumor Treating Fields. What we see are, first of all, a very active culture, a lot of divisions, and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated. And we can see them dividing throughout. When we apply the fields — again, in the identical time-scale to the identical culture — you're going to see something different. The cells round up for division, but they're very static in that position. We'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide. The one within the circle manages. But see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus, even in the dividing cell. The one up there can't divide at all. And then this bubbling, this membrane bubbling, is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell.Formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types. We've applied Tumor Treating Fields to over 20 different cancers in the lab, and we see this effect in all of them. Now importantly, these Tumor Treating Fields have no effect on normal undividing cells.10 years ago, Dr. Palti founded a company called Novocure to develop his discovery into a practical therapy for patients. In that time, Novocure's developed two systems — one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body. The first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer, GBM. GBM affects about 10,000 people in the U.S. each year. It's a death sentence. The expected five year survival is less than five percent. And the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year, and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again.Novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent GBM. So these are patients who had received surgery, high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy, and that had failed and their tumors had grown back. We divided the patients into two groups. The first group received second-line chemotherapy, which is expected to double the life expectancy, versus no treatment at all. And then the second group received only Tumor Treating Field therapy. What we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups — so the chemotherapy treated group and the Tumor Treating Field group — was the same. But importantly, the Tumor Treating Field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients. They had no pain, suffered none of the infections. They had no nausea, diarrhea, constipation, fatigue that would be expected.Based on this trial, in April of this year, the FDA approved Tumor Treating Fields for the treatment of patients with recurrent GBM. Importantly, it was the first time ever that the FDA included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim.So I'm going to show you now one of the patients from this trial. Robert Dill-Bundi is a famous Swiss cycling champion. He won the gold medal in Moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit. And five years ago, Robert was diagnosed with GBM. He received the standard treatments. He received surgery. He received high dose radiation to the head. And he received first-line chemotherapy. A year after this treatment — in fact, this is his baseline MRI. You can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery. And a year after that treatment, his tumor grew back with a vengeance. That cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor.At this point, he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live. He entered our trial. And here we can see him getting the therapy. First of all, these electrodes are noninvasive. They're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor. Here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages. The patients learn to do this themselves And then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life. There's none of the tiredness. There's none of what is called the ""chemo head."" There's no sensation. It doesn't interfere with computers or electrical equipment. And the therapy is delivered continuously at home, without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually.These are Robert's MRIs, again, under only TTField treatment. This is a therapy that takes time to work. It's a medical device; it works when it's on. But what we can see is, by month six, the tumor has responded and it's begun to melt away. It's still there. By month 12, we could argue whether there's a little bit of material around the edges, but it's essentially completely gone. It's now five years since Robert's diagnosis, and he's alive, but importantly, he's healthy and he's at work. I'm going to let him, in this very short clip, describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words.(Video) Robert Dill-Bundi: My quality of life, I rate what I have today a bit different than what most people would assume. I am the happiest, the happiest person in the world. And every single morning I appreciate life. Every night I fall asleep very well, and I am, I repeat, the happiest man in the world, and I'm thankful I am alive.BD: Novocure's also working on lung cancer as the second target. We've run a phase two trial in Switzerland on, again, recurrent patients — patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back. I'm going to show you another clip of a woman named Lydia. Lydia's a 66 year-old farmer in Switzerland. She was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago. She underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years, none of which had an effect. Her cancer continued to grow. Three years ago, she entered the Novocure lung cancer trial.You can see, in her case, she's wearing her transducer arrays, one of the front of her chest, one on the back, and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver. You can see the Tumor Treating Field field generator, but importantly you can also see that she is living her life. She is managing her farm. She's interacting with her kids and her grand kids. And when we talked to her, she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy, she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions. Her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went. Now she can run all of the activities of her farm. It's only the beginning.(Applause)In the lab, we've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and Tumor Treating Fields. There's research underway now at Harvard Medical School to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit. We also believe that Tumor Treating Fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have. There's now a new research project underway at the Karolinska in Sweden to prove that hypothesis.We have more trials planned for lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer. And I firmly believe that in the next 10 years Tumor Treating Fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors. I'm also very hopeful that in the next decades, we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_doyle_treating_cancer_with_electric_fields
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"When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time — I mean, I'm two years older than her now — but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge.There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story —(Laughter)which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before —(Laughter)(Laughter ends)heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet,(Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could — she didn't even see it coming — I was trying hard to be on my best behavior.And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times. I said, ""Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn.""(Laughter)Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won. Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn —(Laughter)with one broken leg.What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven — we had no idea at the time — was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is —(Laughter)If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room — I know who you are, I saw you earlier — that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.(Laughter)So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking — two.But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, ""How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?"" scientists change the answer to ""How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?"" and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. But normal is merely average.And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information, not just how to move people up to the average, but move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive. in fact it's negative. Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. This creates ""the medical school syndrome."" During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them.(Laughter)I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone —(Laughter)from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, ""Shawn, I have leprosy.""(Laughter)Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.(Laughter)We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.I applied to Harvard on a dare. I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go. Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. I assumed everyone there would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. Even in a classroom full of people smarter than you, I felt you'd be happy just to be in that classroom. But what I found is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students — Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy.(Laughter)I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. And in my research and my teaching, I found that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on the competition, the workload, the hassles, stresses, complaints.When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up — I know some of you know this. When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, ""This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's."" It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard. And when they see this, they say, ""Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?""Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, ""We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is illicit drug use. And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness.""(Laughter)I said, ""That's most people's Friday nights.""(Laughter)(Applause)Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, ""I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. You've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive.""The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work
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"I'm going to talk to you today about the design of medical technology for low-resource settings. I study health systems in these countries. And one of the major gaps in care, almost across the board, is access to safe surgery. Now one of the major bottlenecks that we've found that's sort of preventing both the access in the first place, and the safety of those surgeries that do happen, is anesthesia. And actually, it's the model that we expect to work for delivering anesthesia in these environments.Here, we have a scene that you would find in any operating room across the US, or any other developed country. In the background there is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine. And this machine is able to enable surgery and save lives because it was designed with this environment in mind. In order to operate, this machine needs a number of things that this hospital has to offer. It needs an extremely well-trained anesthesiologist with years of training with complex machines to help her monitor the flows of the gas and keep her patients safe and anesthetized throughout the surgery. It's a delicate machine running on computer algorithms, and it needs special care, TLC, to keep it up and running, and it's going to break pretty easily. And when it does, it needs a team of biomedical engineers who understand its complexities, can fix it, can source the parts and keep it saving lives.It's a pretty expensive machine. It needs a hospital whose budget can allow it to support one machine costing upwards of 50 or $100,000. And perhaps most obviously, but also most importantly — and the path to concepts that we've heard about kind of illustrates this — it needs infrastructure that can supply an uninterrupted source of electricity, of compressed oxygen, and other medical supplies that are so critical to the functioning of this machine. In other words, this machine requires a lot of stuff that this hospital cannot offer.This is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural Malawi. In this hospital, there is one person qualified to deliver anesthesia, and she's qualified because she has 12, maybe 18 months of training in anesthesia. In the hospital and in the entire region there's not a single biomedical engineer. So when this machine breaks, the machines that they have to work with break, they've got to try and figure it out, but most of the time, that's the end of the road. Those machines go the proverbial junkyard. And the price tag of the machine that I mentioned could represent maybe a quarter or a third of the annual operating budget for this hospital.And finally, I think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong. This hospital is connected to a very weak power grid, one that goes down frequently. So it runs frequently, the entire hospital, just on a generator. And you can imagine, the generator breaks down or runs out of fuel. And the World Bank sees this and estimates that a hospital in this setting in a low-income country can expect up to 18 power outages per month. Similarly, compressed oxygen and other medical supplies are really a luxury, and can often be out of stock for months or even a year.So it seems crazy, but the model that we have right now is taking those machines that were designed for that first environment that I showed you and donating or selling them to hospitals in this environment. It's not just inappropriate, it becomes really unsafe.One of our partners at Johns Hopkins was observing surgeries in Sierra Leone about a year ago. And the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case. A woman came in, she needed an emergency C-section to save her life and the life of her baby. And everything began pretty auspiciously. The surgeon was on call and scrubbed in. The nurse was there. She was able to anesthetize her quickly, and it was important because of the emergency nature of the situation. And everything began well until the power went out. And now in the middle of this surgery, the surgeon is racing against the clock to finish his case, which he can do — he's got a headlamp. But the nurse is literally running around a darkened operating theater trying to find anything she can use to anesthetize her patient, to keep her patient asleep. Because her machine doesn't work when there's no power. This routine surgery that many of you have probably experienced, and others are probably the product of, has now become a tragedy. And what's so frustrating is this is not a singular event; this happens across the developing world. 35 million surgeries are attempted every year without safe anesthesia.My colleague, Dr. Paul Fenton, was living this reality. He was the chief of anesthesiology in a hospital in Malawi, a teaching hospital. He went to work every day in an operating theater like this one, trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so using that same equipment that became so unreliable, and frankly unsafe, in his hospital. And after umpteen surgeries and, you can imagine, really unspeakable tragedy, he just said, ""That's it. I'm done. That's enough. There has to be something better."" He took a walk down the hall to where they threw all those machines that had just crapped out on them, I think that's the scientific term, and he started tinkering. He took one part from here and another from there, and he tried to come up with a machine that would work in the reality that he was facing.And what he came up with: was this guy. The prototype for the Universal Anesthesia Machine — a machine that would work and anesthetize his patients no matter the circumstances that his hospital had to offer. Here it is, back at home at that same hospital, developed a little further, 12 years later, working on patients from pediatrics to geriatrics.Let me show you a little bit about how this machine works. Voila! Here she is. When you have electricity, everything in this machine begins in the base. There's a built-in oxygen concentrator down there. Now you've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point. Essentially, to deliver anesthesia, you want as pure oxygen as possible, because eventually you're going to dilute it, essentially, with the gas. And the mixture that the patient inhales needs to be at least a certain percentage oxygen or else it can become dangerous. But so in here when there's electricity, the oxygen concentrator takes in room air. Now we know room air is gloriously free, it is abundant, and it's already 21 percent oxygen. So all this concentrator does is take that room air in, filter it and send 95 percent pure oxygen up and across here, where it mixes with the anesthetic agent.Now before that mixture hits the patient's lungs, it's going to pass by here — you can't see it, but there's an oxygen sensor here — that's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered. Now if you don't have power, or, God forbid, the power cuts out in the middle of a surgery, this machine transitions automatically, without even having to touch it, to drawing in room air from this inlet.Everything else is the same. The only difference is that now you're only working with 21 percent oxygen. Now that used to be a dangerous guessing game, because you only knew if you gave too little oxygen once something bad happened. But we've put a long-life battery backup on here. This is the only part that's battery backed up. But this gives control to the provider, whether there's power or not, because they can adjust the flows based on the percentage of oxygen they see that they're giving the patient.In both cases, whether you have power or not, sometimes the patient needs help breathing. It's just a reality of anesthesia, the lungs can be paralyzed. And so we've just added this manual bellows. We've seen surgeries for three or four hours to ventilate the patient on this.So it's a straightforward machine. I shudder to say simple; it's straightforward. And it's by design. You do not need to be a highly trained, specialized anesthesiologist to use this machine, which is good because, in these rural district hospitals, you're not going to get that level of training. It's also designed for the environment that it will be used in.This is an incredibly rugged machine. It has to stand up to the heat and the wear and tear that happens in hospitals in these rural districts. And so it's not going to break very easily, but if it does, virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver. And finally, it's affordable. This machine comes in at an eighth of the cost of the conventional machine that I showed you earlier. So in other words, what we have here is a machine that can enable surgery and save lives, because it was designed for its environment, just like the first machine I showed you.But we're not content to stop there. Is it working? Is this the design that's going to work in place? Well, we've seen good results so far. This is in 13 hospitals in four countries, and since 2010, we've done well over 2,000 surgeries with no clinically adverse events. So we're thrilled. This really seems like a cost-effective, scalable solution to a problem that's really pervasive. But we still want to be sure that this is the most effective and safe device that we can be putting into hospitals.So to do that, we've launched a number of partnerships with NGOs and universities, to gather data on the user interface, on the types of surgeries it's appropriate for, and ways we can enhance the device itself. One of those partnerships is with Johns Hopkins just here in Baltimore. They have a really cool anesthesia simulation lab out in Baltimore. So we're taking this machine and recreating some of the operating theater crises that this machine might face in one of the hospitals that it's intended for, and in a contained, safe environment, evaluating its effectiveness. We're then able to compare the results from that study with real-world experience, because we're putting two of these in hospitals that Johns Hopkins works with in Sierra Leone, including the hospital where that emergency C-section happened.So I've talked a lot about anesthesia, and I tend to do that. I think it is incredibly fascinating and an important component of health. And it really seems peripheral, we never think about it, until we don't have access to it, and then it becomes a gatekeeper. Who gets surgery and who doesn't? Who gets safe surgery and who doesn't? But you know, it's just one of so many ways that design, appropriate design, can have an impact on health outcomes. If more people in the health-delivery space really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries could start their design process, their solution search, from outside of that proverbial box and inside of the hospital — In other words, if we could design for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world, rather than the one that we wished existed — we might just save a lot of lives.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erica_frenkel_the_universal_anesthesia_machine
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"Because I usually take the role of trying to explain to people how wonderful the new technologies that are coming along are going to be, and I thought that, since I was among friends here, I would tell you what I really think and try to look back and try to understand what is really going on here with these amazing jumps in technology that seem so fast that we can barely keep on top of it.So I'm going to start out by showing just one very boring technology slide. And then, so if you can just turn on the slide that's on. This is just a random slide that I picked out of my file. What I want to show you is not so much the details of the slide, but the general form of it. This happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of RISC microprocessors versus the power of local area networks. And the interesting thing about it is that this slide, like so many technology slides that we're used to, is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve. In other words, every step here represents an order of magnitude in performance scale. And this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves. Something really weird is going on here. And that's basically what I'm going to be talking about.So, if you could bring up the lights. If you could bring up the lights higher, because I'm just going to use a piece of paper here. Now why do we draw technology curves in semi-log curves? Well the answer is, if I drew it on a normal curve where, let's say, this is years, this is time of some sort, and this is whatever measure of the technology that I'm trying to graph, the graphs look sort of silly. They sort of go like this. And they don't tell us much. Now if I graph, for instance, some other technology, say transportation technology, on a semi-log curve, it would look very stupid, it would look like a flat line. But when something like this happens, things are qualitatively changing. So if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow, I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds. It's not moving like that. And there's nothing precedented in the history of technology development of this kind of self-feeding growth where you go by orders of magnitude every few years.Now the question that I'd like to ask is, if you look at these exponential curves, they don't go on forever. Things just can't possibly keep changing as fast as they are. One of two things is going to happen. Either it's going to turn into a sort of classical S-curve like this, until something totally different comes along, or maybe it's going to do this. That's about all it can do. Now I'm an optimist, so I sort of think it's probably going to do something like that. If so, that means that what we're in the middle of right now is a transition. We're sort of on this line in a transition from the way the world used to be to some new way that the world is. And so what I'm trying to ask, what I've been asking myself, is what's this new way that the world is? What's that new state that the world is heading toward? Because the transition seems very, very confusing when we're right in the middle of it.Now when I was a kid growing up, the future was kind of the year 2000, and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000. Now here's a conference in which people talk about the future, and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000. It's about as far as we go out. So in other words, the future has kind of been shrinking one year per year for my whole lifetime. Now I think that the reason is because we all feel that something's happening there. That transition is happening. We can all sense it. And we know that it just doesn't make too much sense to think out 30, 50 years because everything's going to be so different that a simple extrapolation of what we're doing just doesn't make any sense at all.So what I would like to talk about is what that could be, what that transition could be that we're going through. Now in order to do that I'm going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff that really has nothing to do with technology and computers. Because I think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things. So the time scale that I would like to look at this on is the time scale of life on Earth. So I think this picture makes sense if you look at it a few billion years at a time.So if you go back about two and a half billion years, the Earth was this big, sterile hunk of rock with a lot of chemicals floating around on it. And if you look at the way that the chemicals got organized, we begin to get a pretty good idea of how they do it. And I think that there's theories that are beginning to understand about how it started with RNA, but I'm going to tell a sort of simple story of it, which is that, at that time, there were little drops of oil floating around with all kinds of different recipes of chemicals in them. And some of those drops of oil had a particular combination of chemicals in them which caused them to incorporate chemicals from the outside and grow the drops of oil. And those that were like that started to split and divide. And those were the most primitive forms of cells in a sense, those little drops of oil.But now those drops of oil weren't really alive, as we say it now, because every one of them was a little random recipe of chemicals. And every time it divided, they got sort of unequal division of the chemicals within them. And so every drop was a little bit different. In fact, the drops that were different in a way that caused them to be better at incorporating chemicals around them, grew more and incorporated more chemicals and divided more. So those tended to live longer, get expressed more.Now that's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life, but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction. Somehow by ways that we don't quite understand, these little drops learned to write down information. They learned to record the information that was the recipe of the cell onto a particular kind of chemical called DNA. So in other words, they worked out, in this mindless sort of evolutionary way, a form of writing that let them write down what they were, so that that way of writing it down could get copied. The amazing thing is that that way of writing seems to have stayed steady since it evolved two and a half billion years ago. In fact the recipe for us, our genes, is exactly that same code and that same way of writing. In fact, every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code.In fact, one of the things that I did just for amusement purposes is we can now write things in this code. And I've got here a little 100 micrograms of white powder, which I try not to let the security people see at airports. (Laughter) But this has in it — what I did is I took this code — the code has standard letters that we use for symbolizing it — and I wrote my business card onto a piece of DNA and amplified it 10 to the 22 times. So if anyone would like a hundred million copies of my business card, I have plenty for everyone in the room, and, in fact, everyone in the world, and it's right here. (Laughter) If I had really been a egotist, I would have put it into a virus and released it in the room.(Laughter)So what was the next step? Writing down the DNA was an interesting step. And that caused these cells — that kept them happy for another billion years. But then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different, which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information, so that they began to get communities of cells. I don't know if you know this, but bacteria can actually exchange DNA. Now that's why, for instance, antibiotic resistance has evolved. Some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin, and it went around sort of creating its little DNA information with other bacteria, and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin, because bacteria communicate. Now what this communication allowed was communities to form that, in some sense, were in the same boat together; they were synergistic. So they survived or they failed together, which means that if a community was very successful, all the individuals in that community were repeated more and they were favored by evolution.Now the transition point happened when these communities got so close that, in fact, they got together and decided to write down the whole recipe for the community together on one string of DNA. And so the next stage that's interesting in life took about another billion years. And at that stage, we have multi-cellular communities, communities of lots of different types of cells, working together as a single organism. And in fact, we're such a multi-cellular community. We have lots of cells that are not out for themselves anymore. Your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell, muscle cell, a brain cell and so on. So these communities began to evolve so that the interesting level on which evolution was taking place was no longer a cell, but a community which we call an organism.Now the next step that happened is within these communities. These communities of cells, again, began to abstract information. And they began building very special structures that did nothing but process information within the community. And those are the neural structures. So neurons are the information processing apparatus that those communities of cells built up. And in fact, they began to get specialists in the community and special structures that were responsible for recording, understanding, learning information. And that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities. And that gave them an evolutionary advantage. Because at that point, an individual — learning could happen within the time span of a single organism, instead of over this evolutionary time span.So an organism could, for instance, learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it. That could happen within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas before they'd built these special information processing structures, that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of thousands of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit. So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, tremendously sped up the whole process of evolution. Because evolution could now happen within an individual. It could happen in learning time scales.But then what happened was the individuals worked out, of course, tricks of communicating. And for example, the most sophisticated version that we're aware of is human language. It's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds basically, and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it. But we're taking something very complicated, turning it into sound, sequences of sounds, and producing something very complicated in your brain. So this allows us now to begin to start functioning as a single organism.And so, in fact, what we've done is we, humanity, have started abstracting out. We're going through the same levels that multi-cellular organisms have gone through — abstracting out our methods of recording, presenting, processing information. So for example, the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction. Telephony, computers, videotapes, CD-ROMs and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we've now built within our society for handling that information. And it all connects us together into something that is much bigger and much faster and able to evolve than what we were before. So now, evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds. And you saw Ty's little evolutionary example where he sort of did a little bit of evolution on the Convolution program right before your eyes.So now we've speeded up the time scales once again. So the first steps of the story that I told you about took a billion years a piece. And the next steps, like nervous systems and brains, took a few hundred million years. Then the next steps, like language and so on, took less than a million years. And these next steps, like electronics, seem to be taking only a few decades. The process is feeding on itself and becoming, I guess, autocatalytic is the word for it — when something reinforces its rate of change. The more it changes, the faster it changes. And I think that that's what we're seeing here in this explosion of curve. We're seeing this process feeding back on itself.Now I design computers for a living, and I know that the mechanisms that I use to design computers would be impossible without recent advances in computers. So right now, what I do is I design objects at such complexity that it's really impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense. I don't know what every transistor in the connection machine does. There are billions of them. Instead, what I do and what the designers at Thinking Machines do is we think at some level of abstraction and then we hand it to the machine and the machine takes it beyond what we could ever do, much farther and faster than we could ever do. And in fact, sometimes it takes it by methods that we don't quite even understand.One method that's particularly interesting that I've been using a lot lately is evolution itself. So what we do is we put inside the machine a process of evolution that takes place on the microsecond time scale. So for example, in the most extreme cases, we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions. Say, ""Computer, would you please make a hundred million random sequences of instructions. Now would you please run all of those random sequences of instructions, run all of those programs, and pick out the ones that came closest to doing what I wanted."" So in other words, I define what I wanted. Let's say I want to sort numbers, as a simple example I've done it with. So find the programs that come closest to sorting numbers.So of course, random sequences of instructions are very unlikely to sort numbers, so none of them will really do it. But one of them, by luck, may put two numbers in the right order. And I say, ""Computer, would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job. Save those. Kill off the rest. And now let's reproduce the ones that sorted numbers the best. And let's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex."" Take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines, and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs. So I've got now a new generation of programs that are produced by combinations of the programs that did a little bit better job. Say, ""Please repeat that process."" Score them again. Introduce some mutations perhaps. And try that again and do that for another generation.Well every one of those generations just takes a few milliseconds. So I can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes, or in the complicated cases, in a few hours. At the end of that, I end up with programs that are absolutely perfect at sorting numbers. In fact, they are programs that are much more efficient than programs I could have ever written by hand.Now if I look at those programs, I can't tell you how they work. I've tried looking at them and telling you how they work. They're obscure, weird programs. But they do the job. And in fact, I know, I'm very confident that they do the job because they come from a line of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job. In fact, their life depended on doing the job.(Laughter)I was riding in a 747 with Marvin Minsky once, and he pulls out this card and says, ""Oh look. Look at this. It says, 'This plane has hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working together to make you a safe flight.' Doesn't that make you feel confident?""(Laughter)In fact, we know that the engineering process doesn't work very well when it gets complicated. So we're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that's very different than engineering. And it lets us produce things of much more complexity than normal engineering lets us produce. And yet, we don't quite understand the options of it. So in a sense, it's getting ahead of us. We're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we'll be able to run this process much faster. So it's feeding back on itself. The thing is becoming faster and that's why I think it seems so confusing. Because all of these technologies are feeding back on themselves. We're taking off.And what we are is we're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas and we can't quite figure out what the hell this thing is we're creating. We're right at that point of transition. But I think that there really is something coming along after us. I think it's very haughty of us to think that we're the end product of evolution. And I think all of us here are a part of producing whatever that next thing is. So lunch is coming along, and I think I will stop at that point, before I get selected out.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_back_to_the_future_of_1994
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"I first became fascinated with octopus at an early age. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama — somebody's got to be from Mobile, right? — and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes, birds of every flavor. It's an absolute magical wonderland to live in — if you're a kid interested in animals, to grow up in. And this delta water flows to Mobile Bay, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico.And I remember my first real contact with octopus was probably at age five or six. I was in the gulf, and I was swimming around and saw a little octopus on the bottom. And I reached down and picked him up, and immediately became fascinated and impressed by its speed and its strength and agility. It was prying my fingers apart and moving to the back of my hand. It was all I could do to hold onto this amazing creature. Then it sort of calmed down in the palms of my hands and started flashing colors, just pulsing all of these colors. And as I looked at it, it kind of tucked its arms under it, raised into a spherical shape and turned chocolate brown with two white stripes. I'm going, ""My gosh!"" I had never seen anything like this in my life! So I marveled for a moment, and then decided it was time to release him, so I put him down. The octopus left my hands and then did the damnedest thing: It landed on the bottom in the rubble and — fwoosh! — vanished right before my eyes.And I knew, right then, at age six, that is an animal that I want to learn more about. So I did. And I went off to college and got a degree in marine zoology, and then moved to Hawaii and entered graduate school at the University of Hawaii. And while a student at Hawaii, I worked at the Waikiki Aquarium. And the aquarium had a lot of big fish tanks but not a lot of invertebrate displays, and being the spineless guy, I thought, well I'll just go out in the field and collect these wonderful animals I had been learning about as a student and bring them in, and I built these elaborate sets and put them on display.Now, the fish in the tanks were gorgeous to look at, but they didn't really interact with people. But the octopus did. If you walked up to an octopus tank, especially early in the morning before anyone arrived, the octopus would rise up and look at you and you're thinking, ""Is that guy really looking at me? He is looking at me!"" And you walk up to the front of the tank. Then you realize that these animals all have different personalities: Some of them would hold their ground, others would slink into the back of the tank and disappear in the rocks, and one in particular, this amazing animal ... I went up to the front of the tank, and he's just staring at me, and he had little horns come up above his eyes. So I went right up to the front of the tank — I was three or four inches from the front glass — and the octopus was sitting on a perch, a little rock, and he came off the rock and he also came down right to the front of the glass. So I was staring at this animal about six or seven inches away, and at that time I could actually focus that close; now as I look at my fuzzy fingers I realize those days are long gone. Anyway, there we were, staring at each other, and he reaches down and grabs an armful of gravel and releases it in the jet of water entering the tank from the filtration system, and — chk chk chk chk chk! — this gravel hits the front of the glass and falls down. He reaches up, takes another armful of gravel, releases it — chk chk chk chk chk! — same thing. Then he lifts another arm and I lift an arm. Then he lifts another arm and I lift another arm. And then I realize the octopus won the arms race, because I was out and he had six left. (Laughter) But the only way I can describe what I was seeing that day was that this octopus was playing, which is a pretty sophisticated behavior for a mere invertebrate.So, about three years into my degree, a funny thing happened on the way to the office, which actually changed the course of my life. A man came into the aquarium. It's a long story, but essentially he sent me and a couple of friends of mine to the South Pacific to collect animals for him, and as we left, he gave us two 16-millimeter movie cameras. He said, ""Make a movie about this expedition."" ""OK, a couple of biologists making a movie — this'll be interesting,"" and off we went. And we did, we made a movie, which had to be the worst movie ever made in the history of movie making, but it was a blast. I had so much fun. And I remember that proverbial light going off in my head, thinking, ""Wait a minute. Maybe I can do this all the time. Yeah, I'll be a filmmaker."" So I literally came back from that job, quit school, hung my filmmaking shingle and just never told anyone that I didn't know what I was doing. It's been a good ride. And what I learned in school though was really beneficial. If you're a wildlife filmmaker and you're going out into the field to film animals, especially behavior, it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are, how they work and, you know, a bit about their behaviors.But where I really learned about octopus was in the field, as a filmmaker making films with them, where you're allowed to spend large periods of time with the animals, seeing octopus being octopus in their ocean homes. I remember I took a trip to Australia, went to an island called One Tree Island. And apparently, evolution had occurred at a pretty rapid rate on One Tree, between the time they named it and the time I arrived, because I'm sure there were at least three trees on that island when we were there. Anyway, one tree is situated right next to a beautiful coral reef. In fact, there's a surge channel where the tide is moving back and forth, twice a day, pretty rapidly. And there's a beautiful reef, very complex reef, with lots of animals, including a lot of octopus. And not uniquely but certainly, the octopus in Australia are masters at camouflage. As a matter of fact, there's one right there. So our first challenge was to find these things, and that was a challenge, indeed. But the idea is, we were there for a month and I wanted to acclimate the animals to us so that we could see behaviors without disturbing them. So the first week was pretty much spent just getting as close as we could, every day a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. And you knew what the limit was: they would start getting twitchy and you'd back up, come back in a few hours. And after the first week, they ignored us. It was like, ""I don't know what that thing is, but he's no threat to me."" So they went on about their business and from a foot away, we're watching mating and courting and fighting and it is just an unbelievable experience.And one of the most fantastic displays that I remember, or at least visually, was a foraging behavior. And they had a lot of different techniques that they would use for foraging, but this particular one used vision. And they would see a coral head, maybe 10 feet away, and start moving over toward that coral head. And I don't know whether they actually saw crab in it, or imagined that one might be, but whatever the case, they would leap off the bottom and go through the water and land right on top of this coral head, and then the web between the arms would completely engulf the coral head, and they would fish out, swim for crabs. And as soon as the crabs touched the arm, it was lights out. And I always wondered what happened under that web. So we created a way to find out, (Laughter) and I got my first look at that famous beak in action. It was fantastic.If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are, they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that. It's like nothing you've ever done.If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen, and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen, get in a sub. You climb in, seal the hatch, turn on a little oxygen, turn on the scrubber, which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe, and they chuck you overboard. Down you go. There's no connection to the surface apart from a pretty funky radio. And as you go down, the washing machine at the surface calms down. And it gets quiet. And it starts getting really nice. And as you go deeper, that lovely, blue water you were launched in gives way to darker and darker blue. And finally, it's a rich lavender, and after a couple of thousand feet, it's ink black. And now you've entered the realm of the mid-water community.You could give an entire talk about the creatures that live in the mid-water. Suffice to say though, as far as I'm concerned, without question, the most bizarre designs and outrageous behaviors are in the animals that live in the mid-water community. But we're just going to zip right past this area, this area that includes about 95 percent of the living space on our planet and go to the mid-ocean ridge, which I think is even more extraordinary.The mid-ocean ridge is a huge mountain range, 40,000 miles long, snaking around the entire globe. And they're big mountains, thousands of feet tall, some of which are tens of thousands of feet and bust through the surface, creating islands like Hawaii. And the top of this mountain range is splitting apart, creating a rift valley. And when you dive into that rift valley, that's where the action is because literally thousands of active volcanoes are going off at any point in time all along this 40,000 mile range. And as these tectonic plates are spreading apart, magma, lava is coming up and filling those gaps, and you're looking land — new land — being created right before your eyes. And over the tops of them is 3,000 to 4,000 meters of water creating enormous pressure, forcing water down through the cracks toward the center of the earth, until it hits a magma chamber where it becomes superheated and supersaturated with minerals, reverses its flow and starts shooting back to the surface and is ejected out of the earth like a geyser at Yellowstone. In fact, this whole area is like a Yellowstone National Park with all of the trimmings.And this vent fluid is about 600 or 700 degrees F. The surrounding water is just a couple of degrees above freezing. So it immediately cools, and it can no longer hold in suspension all of the material that it's dissolved, and it precipitates out, forming black smoke. And it forms these towers, these chimneys that are 10, 20, 30 feet tall. And all along the sides of these chimneys is shimmering with heat and loaded with life. You've got black smokers going all over the place and chimneys that have tube worms that might be eight to 10 feet long. And out of the tops of these tube worms are these beautiful red plumes. And living amongst the tangle of tube worms is an entire community of animals: shrimp, fish, lobsters, crab, clams and swarms of arthropods that are playing that dangerous game between over here is scalding hot and freezing cold.And this whole ecosystem wasn't even known about until 33 years ago. And it completely threw science on its head. It made scientists rethink where life on Earth might have actually begun. And before the discovery of these vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis. But down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis; it's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it, and it's all so ephemeral. You might film this unbelievable hydrothermal vent, which you think at the time has to be on another planet. It's amazing to think that this is actually on earth; it looks like aliens in an alien environment. But you go back to the same vent eight years later and it can be completely dead. There's no hot water. All of the animals are gone, they're dead, and the chimneys are still there creating a really nice ghost town, an eerie, spooky ghost town, but essentially devoid of animals, of course. But 10 miles down the ridge... pshhh! There's another volcano going. And there's a whole new hydrothermal vent community that has been formed. And this kind of life and death of hydrothermal vent communities is going on every 30 or 40 years all along the ridge.And that ephemeral nature of the hydrothermal vent community isn't really different from some of the areas that I've seen in 35 years of traveling around, making films. Where you go and film a really nice sequence at a bay. And you go back, and I'm at home, and I'm thinking, ""Okay, what can I shoot ... Ah! I know where I can shoot that. There's this beautiful bay, lots of soft corals and stomatopods."" And you show up, and it's dead. There's no coral, algae growing on it, and the water's pea soup. You think, ""Well, what happened?"" And you turn around, and there's a hillside behind you with a neighborhood going in, and bulldozers are pushing piles of soil back and forth. And over here there's a golf course going in. And this is the tropics. It's raining like crazy here. So this rainwater is flooding down the hillside, carrying with it sediments from the construction site, smothering the coral and killing it. And fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course — the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals, fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom — and there's your pea soup.But, encouragingly, I've seen just the opposite. I've been to a place that was a pretty trashed bay. And I looked at it, just said, ""Yuck,"" and go and work on the other side of the island. Five years later, come back, and that same bay is now gorgeous. It's beautiful. It's got living coral, fish all over the place, crystal clear water, and you go, ""How did that happen?"" Well, how it happened is the local community galvanized. They recognized what was happening on the hillside and put a stop to it; enacted laws and made permits required to do responsible construction and golf course maintenance and stopped the sediments flowing into the bay, and stopped the chemicals flowing into the bay, and the bay recovered. The ocean has an amazing ability to recover, if we'll just leave it alone.I think Margaret Mead said it best. She said that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And a small group of thoughtful people changed that bay. I'm a big fan of grassroots organizations. I've been to a lot of lectures where, at the end of it, inevitably, one of the first questions that comes up is, ""But, but what can I do? I'm an individual. I'm one person. And these problems are so large and global, and it's just overwhelming."" Fair enough question.My answer to that is don't look at the big, overwhelming issues of the world. Look in your own backyard. Look in your heart, actually. What do you really care about that isn't right where you live? And fix it. Create a healing zone in your neighborhood and encourage others to do the same. And maybe these healing zones can sprinkle a map, little dots on a map. And in fact, the way that we can communicate today — where Alaska is instantly knowing what's going on in China, and the Kiwis did this, and then over in England they tried to ... and everybody is talking to everyone else — it's not isolated points on a map anymore, it's a network we've created. And maybe these healing zones can start growing, and possibly even overlap, and good things can happen. So that's how I answer that question. Look in your own backyard, in fact, look in the mirror. What can you do that is more responsible than what you're doing now? And do that, and spread the word. The vent community animals can't really do much about the life and death that's going on where they live, but up here we can. In theory, we're thinking, rational human beings. And we can make changes to our behavior that will influence and affect the environment, like those people changed the health of that bay.Now, Sylvia's TED Prize wish was to beseech us to do anything we could, everything we could, to set aside not pin pricks, but significant expanses of the ocean for preservation, ""hope spots,"" she calls them. And I applaud that. I loudly applaud that. And it's my hope that some of these ""hope spots"" can be in the deep ocean, an area that has historically been seriously neglected, if not abused. The term ""deep six"" comes to mind: ""If it's too big or too toxic for a landfill, deep six it!"" So, I hope that we can also keep some of these ""hope spots"" in the deep sea. Now, I don't get a wish, but I certainly can say that I will do anything I can to support Sylvia Earle's wish. And that I do.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_degruy_hooked_by_octopus
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"When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car? Here's the problem facing Homer. And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain.So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory. If you have damage there, like in Alzheimer's, you can't remember things including where you parked your car. It's named after Latin for ""seahorse,"" which it resembles. And like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons.So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it. And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other. The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected. And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food.So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here. And when it fires a little spike of electricity, there's going to be a red dot and a click. So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment. And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike. So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal's location. And if we record from lots of different neurons, we'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment, like in this square box shown here. So together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually, ""Where am I now within my environment?""Place cells are also being recorded in humans. So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring. And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town. And place cells in their hippocampi would fire, become active, start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town.So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment? Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important. So the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat's in. And when you expand the box, the firing location expands. The one below likes to fire whenever there's a wall close by to the south. And if you put another wall inside the box, then the cell fires in both place wherever there's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box. So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you — extended buildings and so on — is particularly important for the hippocampus. And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around.So the cell on the left, you can see, it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east, whether it's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table, which the animals are running around. And the cell on the right there fires whenever there's a boundary to the south, whether it's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart. So that's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it's exploring around.We can also test where we think objects are, like this goal flag, in simple environments — or indeed, where your car would be. So we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember. And then, if we put them back in the environment, generally they're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was. But on some trials, we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell.In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment. And what you see, for example, if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment, and then if you ask people where it was, but you've made the environment bigger, where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out. It's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location, and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern. That guides you back to the location that you want to remember.But we also know where we are through movement. So if we take some outbound path — perhaps we park and we wander off — we know because our own movements, which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back. And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell.Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells. But now as the rat explores around, each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid. And if you record from several grid cells — shown here in different colors — each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells. So the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one.So together, it's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment — a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you'd find on a map, but using triangles. And as it moves around, the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is, so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment.Do people have grid cells? Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry, the same orientations of grid, shown in orange here, it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between. So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal. And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats.So back to Homer. He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked. And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells. He's also remembering the path he took out of the car park, which would be represented in the firing of grid cells. Now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire. And he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car. And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car's actually there. Maybe it's been towed. But he knows where it was, so he knows to go and get it.So beyond spatial memory, if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks, like remembering the last time you went to a wedding, for example. So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene, at least, of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them.So if this was happening, your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint. And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space. Another kind of cell, head direction cells, which I didn't mention yet, they fire like a compass according to which way you're facing. They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery, so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding, for example.So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_burgess_how_your_brain_tells_you_where_you_are
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"What I want to talk to you about today is some of the problems that the military of the Western world — Australia, United States, the UK and so on — face in some of the deployments that they're dealing with in the modern world at this time. If you think about the sorts of things we've sent Australian military personnel to in recent years, we've got obvious things like Iraq and Afghanistan, but you've also got things like East Timor and the Solomon Islands, and so on.And a lot of these deployments that we're sending military personnel to these days aren't traditional wars. In fact, a lot of the jobs we're asking military personnel to do in those situations are ones that, in their own countries — Australia, the US and so on — would actually be done by police officers. So there's a bunch of problems that come up for military personnel in these situations, because they're doing things they haven't really been trained for. And they're doing things that those who do them in their own countries are trained very differently for and equipped very differently for.Now, there's a bunch of reasons why we send military personnel, rather than police, to do these jobs. If Australia had to send 1,000 people tomorrow to West Papua, for example, we don't have 1,000 police officers hanging around that could go tomorrow, and we do have 1,000 soldiers that could go. So when we have to send someone, we send the military — they're there, they're available, and heck, they're used to going off and doing these things and living by themselves and not having all this extra support. So they are able to do it in that sense. But they aren't trained the same way police officers are, and they're certainly not equipped the way police officers are, so this has raised a bunch of problems for them when dealing with these issues.One particular thing that's come up that I am especially interested in, is the question of whether, when we're sending military personnel to do these sorts of jobs, we ought to be equipping them differently; and in particular, whether we ought to be giving them access to some of the nonlethal weapons that police have. Since they're doing some of the same jobs, maybe they should have some of those things.And there's a range of places you'd think those things would be really useful. For example, when you've got military checkpoints. If people are approaching these checkpoints and the military personnel are unsure if this person's hostile or not, say this person approaching here, and they say, ""Is this a suicide bomber or not? Is something hidden under their clothes? What's going to happen?"" They don't know if the person is hostile or not. If the person doesn't follow directions, they may end up shooting them, and then find out afterwards either, yes, we shot the right person, or, no, this was just an innocent person who didn't understand what was going on. So if they had nonlethal weapons, then they would say, ""We can use them in that sort of situation. If we shoot someone who wasn't hostile, at least we haven't killed them.""Another situation: this photo is from one of the missions in the Balkans in the late 1990s. This situation is a little bit different, where maybe they know someone is hostile; they've got someone shooting at them or doing something else that's clearly hostile, throwing rocks, whatever. But if they respond, there's a range of other people around who are innocent people, who might also get hurt. It'd be collateral damage that the military often doesn't want to talk about. So again, they'd say, ""With access to nonlethal weapons, if we've got someone we know is hostile, we can do something to deal with them, and know that if we hit anyone else, at least we're not going to kill them.""Another suggestion has been, since we're putting so many robots in the field, we can see the time coming where they're actually going to send robots out in the field that are autonomous. They'll make their own decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot, without a human in the loop. So the suggestion is, if we're going to send robots out and allow them to do this, maybe it would be a good idea if they were armed with nonlethal weapons, so if the robot makes a bad decision and shoots the wrong person, again, they haven't actually killed them.Now, there's a whole range of different sorts of nonlethal weapons, some of which are available now, some of which they're developing. You've got traditional things like pepper spray, OC spray up at the top there, or Tasers over here. The one on the top right here is actually a dazzling laser, intended to just blind the person momentarily and disorient them. You've got nonlethal shotgun rounds that contain rubber pellets instead of the traditional metal ones. And this one in the middle here, the large truck, is called the Active Denial System, something the US military is working on at the moment.It's essentially a big microwave transmitter. It's sort of your classic idea of a heat ray. It goes out to a really long distance, compared to any of these other sorts of things. Anybody who is hit with this feels a sudden burst of heat, and just wants to get out of the way. It is a lot more sophisticated than a microwave oven, but it basically is boiling the water molecules in the very surface level of your skin. So you feel this massive heat, and you go, ""I want to get out of the way."" And they think this will be really useful in places where we need to clear a crowd out of a particular area, if the crowd is being hostile. If we need to keep people away from a particular place, we can do that with these sorts of things.So there's a whole range of different nonlethal weapons we could give military personnel, and there's a whole range of situations where they're looking at them and saying, ""These things would be really useful."" But as I said, the military and the police are very different.(Laughter)Yes, you don't have to look very hard at this to recognize that they might be very different. In particular, the attitude to the use of force and the way they're trained to use force is especially different.The police — and knowing because I've actually helped to train police — police, particularly in Western jurisdictions at least, are trained to De-escalate force, to try and avoid using force wherever possible, and to use lethal force only as an absolute last resort. Military personnel are being trained for war. So they're trained that, as soon as things go bad, their first response is lethal force. The moment the fecal matter hits the rotating turbine —(Laughter)you can start shooting at people. So their attitudes to the use of lethal force are very different, and I think it's fairly obvious that their attitude to the use of nonlethal weapons would also be very different from what it is with the police.And since we've already had so many problems with police use of nonlethal weapons in various ways, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of those things and relate it to the military context. I was very surprised when I started to do this to see that, in fact, even the people who advocated the use of nonlethal weapons by the military hadn't actually done that. They generally seemed to think, ""Why would we care what's happened with the police? We're looking at something different,"" and didn't seem to recognize they were looking at pretty much the same stuff.So I started to investigate some of those issues, and have a look at the way police use nonlethal weapons when they're introduced, and some of the problems that might arise out of those sorts of things when they actually do introduce them. And of course, being Australian, I started looking at stuff in Australia, knowing from my own experience of various times when nonlethal weapons have been introduced in Australia.One of the things I particularly looked at was the use of OC spray — oleoresin capsicum spray, pepper spray — by Australian police, and seeing what had happened when that had been introduced, and those sorts of issues. And one study that I found, a particularly interesting one, was in Queensland, because they had a trial period for the use of pepper spray before they actually introduced it more broadly. And I went and had a look at some of the figures here. Now, when they introduced OC spray in Queensland, they were really explicit. The police minister's and a heap of public statements were made about it. They were saying, ""This is explicitly intended to give police an option between shouting and shooting. This is something they can use instead of a firearm in situations where they would have previously had to shoot someone.""So I looked at all of the police shooting figures. And you can't actually find them very easily for individual Australian states; I could only find these. This is from an Australian Institute of Criminology report. You can see, in the fine print at the top: ""Police shooting deaths"" means not just people shot by police, but people who have shot themselves in the presence of police. But these are the figures across the entire country, and the red arrow represents the point where Queensland said, ""Yes, this is where we're going to give all police officers across the entire state access to OC spray."" So you can see there were six deaths sort of leading up to it, every year for a number of years. There was a spike a few years before, but that wasn't actually Queensland. Anyone know where that was? Wasn't Port Arthur, no. Victoria? Yes, correct. That spike was all Victoria.(Laughter)So it wasn't that Queensland had a particular problem with deaths from police shootings and so on. So, six shootings across the whole country, fairly consistently over the years before.The next two years were the years they studied — 2001, 2002. Anyone want to take a stab at the number of times, given how they've introduced this, the number of times police in Queensland used OC spray in that period? Hundreds? One? Three? A thousand is getting better. Explicitly introduced as an alternative to the use of lethal force — an alternative between shouting and shooting. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if Queensland police didn't have OC spray, they wouldn't have shot 2,226 people in those two years.(Laughter)In fact, if you have a look at the studies they were looking at, the material they were collecting and examining, you can see the suspects were only armed in about 15 percent of cases where OC spray was used.It was routinely being used in this period, and, of course, still is routinely used — because there were no complaints about it, not within the context of this study, anyway — it was routinely being used to deal with people who were violent, who were potentially violent, and also quite frequently used to deal with people who were simply passively noncompliant. This person is not doing anything violent, but they just won't do what we want them to. They're not obeying the directions we're giving them, so we'll give them a shot of the OC spray — that'll speed them up. Everything will work out better that way. This was something explicitly introduced to be an alternative to firearms, but it's being routinely used to deal with a whole range of other sorts of problems.Now one of the particular issues that comes up with military use of nonlethal weapons — and people actually say, ""There might be some problems"" — there's a couple of particular problems that get focused on. One of those problems is: nonlethal weapons may be used indiscriminately. One of the fundamental principles of military use of force is that you have to be discriminate; you have to be careful about who you're shooting at. So one of the problems suggested with nonlethal weapons is that they might be used indiscriminately — that you would use them against a whole range of people, because you don't have to worry so much anymore.And in fact, one particular instance where I think that actually happens was the Dubrovka Theater siege in Moscow in 2002, which probably a lot of you, unlike most of my students at ADFA, are old enough to remember. So, Chechens had come in and taken control of the theater. They were holding something like 700 people hostage. They'd released a bunch of people, but they still had about 700 people hostage. And the Russian military police special forces, ""Spetsnaz,"" came in and stormed the theater. The way they did it was to pump the whole thing full of anesthetic gas. And it turned out that lots of the hostages died as a result of inhaling the gas. It was used indiscriminately. They pumped the whole theater full of the gas.And it's no surprise that people died, because you don't know how much gas each person is going to inhale, what position they'll fall in when they become unconscious, and so on. There were, in fact, only a couple of people who got shot in this episode. So when they had a look at it afterward, there were only a couple of people who'd apparently been shot, by the hostage takers or by the police forces trying to deal with the situation. Virtually everybody that got killed got killed from inhaling the gas. The final toll of hostages is a little unclear, but it's certainly a few more than that, because other people died over the next few days. So this was one problem they talked about, that it might be used indiscriminately.A second problem people sometimes talk about with military use of nonlethal weapons — and it's actually why, in the chemical weapons convention, it's very clear that you can't use riot-control agents as weapons of warfare — is that it's seen that sometimes nonlethal weapons might be used not as an alternative to lethal force, but as a lethal force multiplier: that you use nonlethal weapons first, so your lethal weapons will actually be more effective. The people you'll be shooting at won't be able to get out of the way. They won't be aware of what's happening, and you can kill them better. And that's exactly what happened here. The hostage takers who had been rendered unconscious by the gas were not taken into custody; they were simply shot in the head. So this nonlethal weapon was being used in this case as a lethal force multiplier, to make killing more effective in this particular situation.Another problem I want to quickly mention is that there's a whole heap of problems with the way people are actually taught to use nonlethal weapons, and get trained about them and then tested and so on. Because they're tested in nice, safe environments, and are taught to use them in nice, safe environments — like this, where you can see exactly what's going on. The person spraying the OC spray is wearing a rubber glove to make sure they don't get contaminated, and so on. But they're never used like that.They're used out in the real world, like in Texas, like this:[""Police Taser Great-Grandmother During Traffic Stop""]I confess, this particular case was one that piqued my interest in this. It happened while I was working as a research fellow at the US Naval Academy. News reports started coming up about this situation, where this woman was arguing with a police officer. She wasn't violent. In fact, he was probably six inches taller than me, and she was about this tall. And eventually she said to him, ""Well, I'm going to get back in my car."" And he says, ""If you get back in your car, I'm going to tase you."" And she says, ""Oh, go ahead. Tase me."" And so he does. And it's all captured by the video camera running in the front of the police car. So, she's 72. And it's seen that this is the most appropriate way of dealing with her.And there are other examples of the same sorts of things, where you think, ""Is this really an appropriate way to use nonlethal weapons?"" ""Police Chief Fires Taser into 14 year old Girl's Head."" ""She was running away. What else was I suppose to do?""(Laughter)Or Florida: ""Police Taser 6-year-old Boy at Elementary School."" And they clearly learned a lot from it, because in the same district: ""Police Review Policy After Children Shocked: 2nd Child Shocked by Taser Stun Gun Within Weeks."" Same police district. Another child within weeks of Tasering the six-year-old boy.Just in case you think it's only going to happen in the United States, it happened in Canada as well:[""Mounties Zap 11-year-old Boy""]And a colleague sent me this one from London:[""Arrested Man, 82, Shot with Taser""]But my personal favorite, I have to confess, does come from the US: ""Officers Taser 86-year-old Disabled Woman in her Bed.""(Laughter)I checked the reports on this one. I looked at it. I was really surprised. Apparently, she took up a more threatening position in her bed.(Laughter)I kid you not, that's exactly what it said: ""She took up a more threatening position in her bed."" OK.But I'd remind you — I'm talking about military uses of nonlethal weapons, so why is this relevant? Because police are actually more restrained in the use of force than the military are. They're trained to be more restrained in the use of force than the military are. They're trained to think more, to try and De-escalate. So if you have these problems with police officers with nonlethal weapons, what on earth would make you think it's going to be better with military personnel?The last thing that I would like to say: When I'm talking to the police about what a perfect nonlethal weapon would look like, they almost inevitably say the same thing. They say, ""It's got to be something that's nasty enough that people don't want to be hit with this weapon. So if you threaten to use it, people are going to comply with it. But it's also going to be something that doesn't leave any lasting effects."" In other words, your perfect nonlethal weapon is something that's perfect for abuse. What would these guys have done if they'd had access to Tasers, or to a manned, portable version of the Active Denial System — a small heat ray that you can use on people and not worry about.So I think yes, there may be ways that nonlethal weapons will be great in these situations, but there's also a whole heap of problems that need to be considered as well.Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_coleman_the_moral_dangers_of_non_lethal_weapons
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"Both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic, which Pat said makes 70 percent, but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region's population. Qatar is no exception to the region. It's a very young nation led by young people. We have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the iPods, and for me the abaya, my traditional dress that I'm wearing today.Now this is not a religious garment, nor is it a religious statement. Instead, it's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear. Now I remember a few years ago, a journalist asked Dr. Sheikha, who's sitting here, president of Qatar University — who, by the way, is a woman — he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way. Her answer was quite the contrary. Instead, she felt more free, more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya. She could come to work in her pajamas and nobody would care. (Laughter) Not that you do; I'm just saying.(Laughter)My point is here, people have a choice — just like the Indian lady could wear her sari or the Japanese woman could wear her kimono. We are changing our culture from within, but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions. We know that modernization is happening. And yes, Qatar wants to be a modern nation. But at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our Arab heritage. It's important for us to grow organically. And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance.In fact, research has shown that the more the world is flat, if I use Tom Friedman's analogy, or global, the more and more people are wanting to be different. And for us young people, they're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves. Which is why I prefer the Richard Wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global. We don't want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other. And therefore tradition becomes more important, not less important.Life necessitates a universal world, however, we believe in the security of having a local identity. And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do. We're trying to be part of this global village, but at the same time we're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development. I'm a representation of that phenomenon. And I think a lot of people in this room, I can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself. And I'm sure, although we can't see the people in Washington, they are in the same position. We're continuously trying to straddle different worlds, different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others.So I want to ask a question: What should culture in the 21st century look like? In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, the telephone, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others? How does that impact our desert culture?I'm not sure of how many of you in Washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and, the more recent, Museum of Islamic Art opened in Qatar in 2008. I myself am personalizing these cultural developments, but I also understand that this has to be done organically. Yes, we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions, but what I think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this can't happen from outside, it has to come from within. And guess what? You might be surprised to know that most people in the Gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women.I want to ask you, why do you think this is? Is it because it's a soft option; we have nothing else to do? No, I don't think so. I think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally. It's a natural component for bringing people together, discussing ideas — in the same way we're doing here at TED. We're here, we're part of a community, sharing out ideas and discussing them. Art becomes a very important part of our national identity. The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation's development of cultural identity is very important.You know, art and culture is big business. Ask me. Ask the chairpersons and CEOs of Sotheby's and Christie's. Ask Charles Saatchi about great art. They make a lot of money. So I think women in our society are becoming leaders, because they realize that for their future generations, it's very important to maintain our cultural identities. Why else do Greeks demand the return of the Elgin Marbles? And why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum? Why does it take me months on end to get an export license from London or New York in order to get pieces into my country?In few hours, Shirin Neshat, my friend from Iran who's a very important artist for us will be talking to you. She lives in New York City, but she doesn't try to be a Western artist. Instead, she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture, nation and heritage. She does that through important visual forms of photography and film.In the same way, Qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within. Our mission is of cultural integration and independence. We don't want to have what there is in the West. We don't want their collections. We want to build our own identities, our own fabric, create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us. In a few days, we will be opening the Arab Museum of Modern Art. We have done extensive research to ensure that Arab and Muslim artists, and Arabs who are not Muslims — not all Arabs are Muslims, by the way — but we make sure that they are represented in this new institution. This institution is government-backed and it has been the case for the past three decades. We will open the museum in a few days, and I welcome all of you to get on Qatar Airways and come and join us.(Laughter)Now this museum is just as important to us as the West. Some of you might have heard of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, but I doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in Picasso's studio in Paris in the 1930s. For me it was a new discovery. And I think with time, in the years to come we'll be learning a lot about our Picassos, our Legers and our Cezannes. We do have artists, but unfortunately we have not discovered them yet.Now visual expression is just one form of culture integration. We have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of YouTube and social networking to express their stories, share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices. In a similar way, we have created the Doha Film Institute. Now the Doha Film Institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking. Last year we didn't have one Qatari woman filmmaker. Today I am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 Qatari women filmmakers to edit, tell their own stories in their own voices.(Applause)Now if you'll allow me, I would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture. And this is one of our filmmakers' products.(Video) Boy: Hey listen! Did you know that the stocks are up? Who are you playing? Girl: Uncle Khaled. Here, put on the headscarf. Khaled: Why would I want to put it on? Girl: Do as you're told, young girl. Boy: No, you play mom and I play dad. (Girl: But it's my game.) Play by yourself then. Girl: Women! One word and they get upset. Useless. Thank you. Thank you!(Applause)SM: Going back to straddling between East and West, last month we had our second Doha Tribeca Film Festival here in Doha. The Doha Tribeca Film Festival was held at our new cultural hub, Katara. It attracted 42,000 people, and we showcased 51 films. Now the Doha Tribeca Film Festival is not an imported festival, but rather an important festival between the cities of New York and Doha. It's important for two things. First, it allows us to showcase our Arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, New York City. At the same time, we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world. They're learning our culture, our language, our heritage and realizing we're just as different and just the same as each other.Now over and over again, people have said, ""Let's build bridges,"" and frankly, I want to do more than that. I would like break the walls of ignorance between East and West — no, not the soft option that we have discussed before, but rather the soft power that Joseph Nye has spoken about before. Culture's a very important tool to bring people together. We should not underestimate it.""Know thyself,"" that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling. Now I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading. This is a very interesting journey. I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions. Familiarity destroys and trumps fear. Try it.Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Shokran.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheikha_al_mayassa_globalizing_the_local_localizing_the_global
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"Shall I ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations? I'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old.(Laughter)None, huh?(Laughter) All right. I'm going to talk about dinosaurs. Do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age?(Applause)Dinosaurs are kind of funny, you know.(Laughter)We're going to kind of go in a different direction right now. I hope you all realize that. So I'll just give you my message up front: Try not to go extinct.(Laughter)That's it.(Laughter)People ask me a lot — in fact, one of the most asked questions I get is, why do children like dinosaurs so much? What's the fascination? And I usually just say, ""Well, dinosaurs were big, different and gone."" They're all gone. Well that's not true, but we'll get to the goose in a minute. So that's sort of the theme: big, different and gone. The title of my talk: Shape-shifting Dinosaurs: The cause of a premature extinction.Now I assume that we remember dinosaurs. And there's lots of different shapes. Lots of different kinds. A long time ago, back in the early 1900s, museums were out looking for dinosaurs. They went out and gathered them up. And this is an interesting story. Every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had. So if the museum in Toronto went out and collected a Tyrannosaur, a big one, then the museum in Ottawa wanted a bigger one, and a better one. And that happened for all museums. So everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs. And this was in the early 1900s.By about 1970, some scientists were sitting around and they thought, ""What in the world — Look at these dinosaurs, they're all big. Where are all the little ones?""(Laughter)And they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it: ""Where are the little dinosaurs?""(Laughter)Well, go to a museum, you'll see, see how many baby dinosaurs there are. People assumed — and this was actually a problem — people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs, if they had juvenile dinosaurs, they'd be easy to identify. You'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur.(Laughter)But all they had were big dinosaurs.And it comes down to a couple of things. First off, scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.(Laughter)And so every time they found something that looked a little different, they named it something different. And what happened, of course, is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs.In 1975, a light went on in somebody's head. Dr. Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do, which is different than the way reptiles grow. And in fact, he used the cassowary as an example. And it's kind of cool — if you look at the cassowary, or any of the birds that have crests on their heads, they grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow. Now think about that. They're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny. So allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth. So you can see that if you actually found one that was 80 percent grown and you didn't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary, you would think they were two different animals.So this was a problem, and Peter Dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called Hypacrosaurus. And he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like, if it grew in sort of a linear fashion, it would have a crest about half the size of the adult. But the actual subadult at 65 percent had no crest at all. So this was interesting. So this is where people went astray again. I mean, if they'd have just taken that, taken Peter Dodson's work, and gone on with that, then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have. But scientists have egos; they like to name things. And so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different.Now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur, or any animal, is a young one or an older one. And that's by actually cutting into their bones. But cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do, as you can imagine, because in museums, bones are precious. You go into a museum, and they take really good care of them. They put them in foam, little containers. They're very well taken care of. They don't like it if you come in and want to saw them open and look inside.(Laughter)So they don't normally let you do that.(Laughter)But I have a museum and I collect dinosaurs and I can saw mine open. So that's what I do.(Applause)So if you cut open a little dinosaur, it's very spongy inside, like A. And if you cut into an older dinosaur, it's very massive. You can tell it's mature bone. So it's real easy to tell them apart. So what I want to do is show you these. In North America in the northern plains of the United States and the southern plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, there's this unit of rock called the Hell Creek Formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on Earth. And there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes — I mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct. And so we will evaluate them. And that's sort of what I've been doing. So my students, my staff, we've been cutting them open. Now as you can imagine, cutting open a leg bone is one thing, but when you go to a museum and say, ""You don't mind if I cut open your dinosaur's skull, do you?"" they say, ""Go away.""(Laughter)So here are 12 dinosaurs. And we want to look at these three first.So these are dinosaurs that are called Pachycephalosaurus. And everybody knows that these three animals are related. And the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever. But no one ever considered that they might be more closely related. In other words, people looked at them and they saw the differences. And you all know that if you are going to determine whether you're related to your brother or your sister, you can't do it by looking at differences. You can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities.So people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are. Pachycephalosaurus has a big, thick dome on its head, and it's got some little bumps on the back of its head, and it's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose. And then Stygimoloch, another dinosaur from the same age, lived at the same time, has spikes sticking out the back of its head. It's got a little, tiny dome, and it's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose. And then there's this thing called Dracorex hogwartsia. Guess where that came from? Dragon. So here's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head, no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose.Nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike. But they did look at these three and they said, ""These are three different dinosaurs, and Dracorex is probably the most primitive of them. And the other one is more primitive than the other."" It's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out. But if you line them up, if you just take those three skulls and just line them up, they line up like this. Dracorex is the littlest one, Stygimoloch is the middle-size one, Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one. And one would think, that should give me a clue.(Laughter)But it didn't give them a clue.(Laughter)Because, well we know why. Scientists like to name things.So if we cut open Dracorex — I cut open our Dracorex — and look, it was spongy inside, really spongy inside. I mean, it is a juvenile and it's growing really fast. So it is going to get bigger. If you cut open Stygimoloch, it is doing the same thing. The dome, that little dome, is growing really fast. It's inflating very fast. What's interesting is the spike on the back of the Dracorex was growing very fast as well. The spikes on the back of the Stygimoloch are actually resorbing, which means they're getting smaller as that dome is getting bigger. And if we look at Pachycephalosaurus, Pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing.So just with these three dinosaurs, as a scientist, we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal. Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct.(Laughter)OK.(Laughter)Which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with.So a colleague of mine at Berkeley — he and I were looking at Triceratops. And before the year 2000 — now remember, Triceratops was first found in the 1800s — before 2000, no one had ever seen a juvenile Triceratops. There's a Triceratops in every museum in the world, but no one had ever collected a juvenile. And we know why, right? Because everybody wants to have a big one. So everyone had a big one. So we went out and collected a whole bunch of stuff and we found a whole bunch of little ones. They're everywhere, they're all over the place. So we have a whole bunch of them at our museum.(Laughter)And everybody says it's because I have a little museum. When you have a little museum, you have little dinosaurs.(Laughter)If you look at the Triceratops, you can see it's changing, it's shape-shifting. As the juveniles are growing up, their horns actually curve backwards. And then as they get older, the horns grow forward. And that's pretty cool. If you look along the edge of the frill, they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the Pachycephalosaurs. And then, because the juveniles are in my collection, I cut them open ...(Laughter)and look inside. And the little one is really spongy. And the middle-size one is really spongy. But what was interesting was the adult Triceratops was also spongy. And this is a skull that is two meters long. It's a big skull.But there's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a Triceratops, except it's bigger, and it's called Torosaurus. And Torosaurus, when we cut into it, has mature bone. But it's got these big holes in its shield. And everybody says, ""A Triceratops and a Torosaurus can't possibly be the same animal because one of them's bigger than the other one.""(Laughter)""And it has holes in its frill."" And I said, ""Well do we have any juvenile Torosauruses?"" And they said, ""Well, no, but it has holes in its frill.""So one of my graduate students, John Scannella, looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in Triceratops and, of course it's open, in Torosaurus — so he found the transitional ones between Triceratops and Torosaurus, which was pretty cool. So now we know that Torosaurus is actually a grown-up Triceratops. Now when we name dinosaurs, when we name anything, the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out. So Torosaurus is extinct. Triceratops, if you've heard the news, a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong. They thought Torosaurus should be kept and Triceratops thrown out, but that's not going to happen.(Laughter)All right, so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs. I mean, here's Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan. Anatotitan: giant duck. It's a giant duck-bill dinosaur. Here's another one. So we look at the bone histology. The bone histology tells us that Edmontosaurus is a juvenile, or at least a subadult, and the other one is an adult, and we have an ontogeny. And we get rid of Anatotitan.So we can just keep doing this. And the last one is T. Rex. So there's these two dinosaurs, T. Rex and Nanotyrannus.(Laughter)Again, it makes you wonder.(Laughter)But they had a good question. They were looking at them and they said, ""One's got 17 teeth, and the biggest one's got 12 teeth. And that doesn't make any sense at all, because we don't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older. So it must be true — they must be different."" So we cut into them. And sure enough, Nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone. It looks like it could still get bigger. And at the Museum of the Rockies where we work, I have four T. rexes, so I can cut a whole bunch of them. But I didn't have to cut any of them really, because I just lined up their jaws and it turned out the biggest one had 12 teeth and the next smallest one had 13 and the next smallest had 14. And of course, Nano has 17. And we just went out and looked at other people's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth. So again, real easy to say that Tyrannosaurus ontogeny included Nanotyrannus, and therefore we can take out another dinosaur.(Laughter)So when it comes down to our end Cretaceous, we have seven left. And that's a good number. That's a good number to go extinct, I think. Now as you can imagine, this is not very popular with fourth-graders.(Laughter)Fourth-graders love their dinosaurs, they memorize them. And they're not happy with this.(Laughter)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs
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"I'm here to share my photography. Or is it photography? Because, of course, this is a photograph that you can't take with your camera.Yet, my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15. It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing, but it was a bit different, because using the camera, the process was in the planning instead. And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger. So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time. I felt like anyone could do that.So I wanted to create something different, something where the process starts when you press the trigger. Photos like this: construction going on along a busy road. But it has an unexpected twist. And despite that, it retains a level of realism. Or photos like these — both dark and colorful, but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism. When I say realism, I mean photo-realism. Because, of course, it's not something you can capture really, but I always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph. Photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick. So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really.But what's the trick that makes it look realistic? Is it something about the details or the colors? Is it something about the light? What creates the illusion? Sometimes the perspective is the illusion. But in the end, it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface. It's not really what is realistic, it's what we think looks realistic really.So I think the basics are quite simple. I just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality. And let me show you a simple example. Here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects, something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world. But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional, like it could exist. But at the same time, we know it can't. So we trick our brains, because our brain simply doesn't accept the fact that it doesn't really make sense. And I see the same process with combining photographs. It's just really about combining different realities.So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives. But when combining photographs, this is really important to consider, because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow. So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result. As you can see, these images aren't really special. But combined, they can create something like this.So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective. Secondly, photos combined should have the same type of light. And these two images both fulfill these two requirements — shot at the same height and in the same type of light. The third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless. Make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed. So by matching color, contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images, adding photographic defects like depth of field, desaturated colors and noise, we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image, despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically.So here's another example. (Laughter) One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what's manipulated. But this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations. I personally think that it's easier to actually create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head. But it does require a lot of planning. And getting this idea during winter, I knew that I had several months to plan it, to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically. So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip. The shores are from a different location. The underwater part was captured in a stone pit. And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish.So to achieve a realistic result, I think it comes down to planning. It always starts with a sketch, an idea. Then it's about combining the different photographs. And here every piece is very well planned. And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic. So all the tools are out there, and the only thing that limits us is our imagination.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erik_johansson_impossible_photography
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"I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader? I've asked that question all across the country, and everywhere I ask it, no matter where, there's a huge portion of the audience that won't put up their hand. And I've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us. We've made it about changing the world. We've taken this title of ""leader"" and treat it as something that one day we're going to deserve. But to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we're not comfortable with. And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do, that we've convinced ourselves those are the only things worth celebrating. We start to devalue the things we can do every day, We take moments where we truly are a leader and we don't let ourselves take credit for it, or feel good about it. I've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with amazing people who've helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier. With my short time today, I want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition.I went to a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. And on my last day there, a girl came up to me and said, ""I remember the first time I met you."" And she told me a story that had happened four years earlier. She said, ""On the day before I started university, I was in the hotel room with my mom and dad, and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn't do this, that I wasn't ready for university, that I just burst into tears. My mom and dad were amazing. They were like, ""We know you're scared, but let's just go tomorrow, go to the first day, and if at any point you feel as if you can't do this, that's fine; tell us, and we'll take you home. We love you no matter what.'""She says, ""So I went the next day. I was in line for registration, and I looked around and just knew I couldn't do it; I wasn't ready. I knew I had to quit. I made that decision and as soon as I made it, an incredible feeling of peace came over me. I turned to my mom and dad to tell them we needed to go home, and at that moment, you came out of the student union building wearing the stupidest hat I've ever seen in my life.""(Laughter)""It was awesome. And you had a big sign promoting Shinerama,"" — which is Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis, a charity I've worked with for years — ""And you had a bucketful of lollipops. You were handing the lollipops out to people in line, and talking about Shinerama. All of the sudden, you got to me, and you just stopped. And you stared. It was creepy.""(Laughter)This girl knows what I'm talking about.(Laughter)""Then you looked at the guy next to me, smiled, reached into your bucket, pulled out a lollipop, held it out to him and said, 'You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman next to you.'"" She said, ""I've never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life. He turned beet red, he wouldn't even look at me. He just kind of held the lollipop out like this.""(Laughter)""I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop. As soon as I did, you got this incredibly severe look on your face, looked at my mom and dad and said, 'Look at that! Look at that! First day away from home, and already she's taking candy from a stranger?'""(Laughter)She said, ""Everybody lost it. Twenty feet in every direction, everyone started to howl. I know this is cheesy, and I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in that moment when everyone was laughing, I knew I shouldn't quit. I knew I was where I was supposed to be; I knew I was home. And I haven't spoken to you once in the four years since that day. But I heard that you were leaving, and I had to come and tell you you've been an incredibly important person in my life. I'm going to miss you. Good luck.""And she walks away, and I'm flattened. She gets six feet away, turns around, smiles and goes, ""You should probably know this, too: I'm still dating that guy, four years later.""(Laughter)A year and a half after I moved to Toronto, I got an invitation to their wedding.(Laughter)Here's the kicker: I don't remember that. I have no recollection of that moment. I've searched my memory banks, because that is funny and I should remember doing it and I don't. That was such an eye-opening, transformative moment for me, to think that maybe the biggest impact I'd ever had on anyone's life, a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say, ""You've been an important person in my life,"" was a moment that I didn't even remember.How many of you guys have a lollipop moment, a moment where someone said or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better? All right. How many of you have told that person they did it? See, why not? We celebrate birthdays, where all you have to do is not die for 365 days —(Laughter)Yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it. Every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment. You've made someone's life better by something you said or did. If you think you haven't, think of all the hands that didn't go up when I asked. You're just one of the people who hasn't been told.It's scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, frightening to think we can matter that much to other people. As long as we make leadership something bigger than us, as long as we keep leadership beyond us and make it about changing the world, we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day, from ourselves and from each other.Marianne Williamson said, ""Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. [It] is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light and not our darkness that frightens us."" My call to action today is that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other's lives. We need to get over it so we can move beyond it, and our little brothers and sisters and one day our kids — or our kids right now — can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other's lives, more than money and power and titles and influence. We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments — how many of them we create, how many we acknowledge, how many of them we pay forward and how many we say thank you for. Because we've made leadership about changing the world, and there is no world. There's only six billion understandings of it.And if you change one person's understanding of it, understanding of what they're capable of, understanding of how much people care about them, understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you've changed the whole thing.And if we can understand leadership like that, I think if we can redefine leadership like that, I think we can change everything. And it's a simple idea, but I don't think it's a small one. I want to thank you so much for letting me share it with you today.","https://www.ted.com/talks/drew_dudley_everyday_leadership
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"Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: I was going to ask if there's a doctor in the house. No, I'm just joking. It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body. Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin. And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors.That was the start of my journey to make this film, ""Toxic Baby."" And it doesn't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue. One is that you and I all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn't have. And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations. I'll show you some statistics. So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation. Very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the U.S. In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma. That's a four-fold increase.Again, similar story around the world. In the United States, probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities. Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America. And in Europe, there's certain parts of Europe, where we're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects. Interestingly, one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the U.S. So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty.So it's interesting for me, when I'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things, that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs.(Laughter)Tyrone Hayes: It was a surprise to me as well that I would be talking about pesticides, that I'd be talking about public health, because, in fact, I never thought I would do anything useful. (Laughter) Frogs. In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs. It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world. It's the number one contaminant of groundwater, drinking water, rain water. In 2003, after my studies, it was banned in the European Union, but in that same year, the United States EPA re-registered the compound.We were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine — 0.1 parts per billion — that it produced animals that look like this. These are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes, two ovaries, another large testis, more ovaries, which is not normal ... (Laughter) even for amphibians. In some cases, another species like the North American Leopard Frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes. And you can see these large, yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male's testes. Now my wife tells me, and I'm sure Penelope can as well, that there's nothing more painful than childbirth — which that I'll never experience, I can't really argue that — but I would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five.(Laughter)In recent studies that we've published, we've shown that some of these animals when they're exposed to atrazine, some of the males grow up and completely become females. So these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship. And not only do these genetic males mate with other males, they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they're genetic males. What we proposed, and what we've now generated support for, is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance. Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone. But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen. And as a result, these exposed males lose their testosterone, they're chemically castrated, and they're subsequently feminized because now they're making the female hormone.Now this is what brought me to the human-related issues. Because it turns out that the number one cancer in women, breast cancer, is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase. So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads. In fact, this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole, which blocks aromatase, blocks estrogen, so that if you developed a mutated cell, it doesn't grow into a tumor.Now what's interesting is, of course, that we're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine, the number one contaminant in drinking water, that does the opposite — turns on aromatase, increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors, breast cancer, in humans. What's interesting is, in fact, the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine, the breast cancer promoter, now sells us the blocker — the exact same company. And so I find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it, we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment.PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently. It's a plasticizer. It's a compound that's found in polycarbonate plastic, which is what baby bottles are made out of. And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy. And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies. So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen.Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. And for those of you who are not parents, sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles. But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. So it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is.(Video) PJC: With many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol A, it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children. The baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure. However, if we parents are unaware, we are leaving our children to fend for themselves.TH: And what Penelope says here is even more true. For those of you who don't know, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. Scientists agree now. We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians. 80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline. And I believe, many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline. In part, amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don't have protection from contaminants in the water — no eggshells, no membranes and no placenta. In fact, our invention — by ""our"" I mean we mammals — one of our big inventions was the placenta. But we also start out as aquatic organisms.But it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals, the placenta, cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we're generating new chemicals that it's never seen before. The evidence of that is that studies in rats, again with atrazine, show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion. Because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones.Of those rats that don't abort, atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man's disease. Of those that don't abort, atrazine causes impaired mammary, or breast, development in the exposed daughters in utero, so that their breast don't develop properly. And as a result, when those rats grow up, their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can't make enough milk to nourish their pups.So the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to. And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today.And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb. In addition to that, after the baby's born, our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they're born. We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after their born.PJC: So when Tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ, I'm thinking, how do I demonstrate that? How do you show that? And it's interesting when you make a film like this, because you're stuck trying to visualize science that there's no visualization for. And I have to take a little bit of artistic license.(Video) (Ringing) Old man: Placenta control. What is it? Oh what? (Snoring) (Honk) Puffuffuff, what? Perflourooctanoic acid. Blimey. Never heard of it. PJC: And neither had I actually before I started making this film. And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me? What would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure that's happening everyday, day after day?(Music)(Video) Child: Today, I had some octyphenols, some artificial musks and some bisphenol A. Help me.PJC: It's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this. This is our issue, because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children. We are in effect polluting our children. And this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when I found out I was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat.So my child's death, my baby's death, really brought home the resonance of what I was trying to make in this film. And it's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story, which is not what you originally intend. And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment. This is my toxic baby. And that's something that's just profound and sad, but astonishing because so many of us don't actually know this.TH: One of this things that's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at TEDWomen is that, well, I think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said, ""Turn to the man at your table and tell them, 'When the revolution starts, we've got your back.'"" The truth is, women, you've had our back on this issue for a very long time, starting with Rachel Carson's ""Silent Spring"" to Theo Colborn's ""Our Stolen Future"" to Sandra Steingraber's books ""Living Downstream"" and ""Having Faith."" And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation — like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago — perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area.But for the men here, I want to say it's not just women and children that are at risk. And the frogs that are exposed to atrazine, the testes are full of holes and spaces, because the hormone imbalance, instead of allowing sperm to be generated, such as in the testis here, the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent. It's not just my work in amphibians, but similar work has been shown in fish in Europe, holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from South America and in rats, an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well. And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine.These are just men who live in an agricultural community. Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine. And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men. Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American. And it's not just atrazine they're exposed to. They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas. And many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50.It shouldn't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us, just like Rachel Carson and others have warned. As evident in this slide from Lake Nabugabo in Uganda, the agricultural runoff from this crop, which goes into these buckets, is the sole source of drinking, cooking and bathing water for this village. Now if I told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes, the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear. You would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it. The problem is, in my village, Oakland, in most of our villages, we don't see that connection. We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it.PJC: So it doesn't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue. And I kept thinking over and over again this question. We know so much about global warming and climate change, and yet, we have no concept of what I've been calling internal environmentalism. We know what we're putting out there, we have a sense of those repercussions, but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things, or things are put into our bodies.And it's my feeling and it's my urging being here to know that, as we women move forward as the communicators of this, but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children, bearing the children, we hold most of the buying power in the household, is that it's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of Tyrone and other scientists around the world. And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tyrone_hayes_penelope_jagessar_chaffer_the_toxic_baby
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"Every year in the United States alone, 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together —(Laughter)And not to have sex with anyone else. Ever. He buys a ring, she buys a dress. They go shopping for all sorts of things. She takes him to Arthur Murray for ballroom-dancing lessons. And the big day comes. And they'll stand before God and family and some guy her dad once did business with, and they'll vow that nothing — not abject poverty, not life-threatening illness, not complete and utter misery — will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion.(Laughter)These optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and midlife crises and a cumulative 50-pound weight gain, until that far-off day, when one of them is finally able to rest in peace.(Laughter)You know, because they can't hear the snoring anymore. And then they'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each other's faces and do the Macarena. And we'll be there, showering them with towels and toasters and drinking their free booze and throwing birdseed at them every single time ... even though we know, statistically, half of them will be divorced within a decade.(Laughter)Of course, the other half won't, right? They'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating —(Laughter)Which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll. And some of them will even still be enjoying each other's company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore.And researchers want to know why. I mean, look — it doesn't take a double-blind, placebo-controlled study to figure out what makes a marriage not work: disrespect, boredom, too much time on Facebook, having sex with other people. But you can have the exact opposite of all of those things — respect, excitement, a broken Internet connection, mind-numbing monogamy — and the thing still can go to hell in a handbasket. So, what's going on when it doesn't? What do the folks who make it all the way to side-by-side burial plots have in common? What are they doing right? What can we learn from them? And if you're still happily sleeping solo, why should you stop what you're doing and make it your life's work to find that one special person that you can annoy for the rest of your life?Well, researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out. They stalk blissful couples and study their every move and mannerism. And they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends. And it turns out, the success stories share a few similarities, beyond that they don't have sex with other people.For instance, in the happiest marriages, the wife is thinner and better-looking than the husband.(Laughter)Obvious. Right? It's obvious that this leads to marital bliss, because women — we care a great deal about being thin and good-looking, whereas men mostly care about sex, ideally, with women who are thinner and better looking than they are. The beauty of this research, though, is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy. We just have to be thinner than our partners. So instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising, we just need to wait for them to get fat —(Laughter)Maybe bake a few pies. This is good information to have, and it's not that complicated.(Laughter)Research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives. For example: the happy wife. Instead of pointing out her husband's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run, she might say, ""Wow, honey, thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner.""(Laughter)These are couples who can find good in any situation. ""Yeah, it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire. But it's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars. And it's a good thing you've got all that body fat to keep us warm.""(Laughter)One of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do housework, the more attractive his wife will find him. Because we needed a study to tell us this.(Laughter)But here's what's going on here. The more attractive she finds him, the more sex they have; the more sex they have, the nicer he is to her; the nicer he is to her, the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed, and ultimately, they live happily ever after. In other words, men, you might want to pick it up a notch in the domestic department.Here's an interesting one. One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce. This is an actual study, and let me clarify: the researchers were not looking at documented self-reports of childhood happiness, or even studying old journals. The data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures. Now, I don't know how old all of you are, but when I was a kid, your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called ""film."" And, by God, film was expensive. They didn't take 300 shots of you in that rapid-fire digital video mode and then pick out the nicest, smiliest one for the Christmas card. Oh, no. They dressed you up, they lined you up, and you smiled for the fucking camera like they told you to or you could kiss your birthday party goodbye. But still, I have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and I'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce.So, what else can you do to safeguard your marriage? Do not win an Oscar for best actress.(Laughter)I'm serious. Bettie Davis, Joan Crawford, Halle Berry, Hilary Swank, Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon — all of them single, soon after taking home that statue. They actually call it the Oscar curse. It is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided.And it's not just successfully starring in films that's dangerous. It turns out, merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet.(Laughter)Apparently, the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us, but it obviously hasn't and it probably never will, makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison. And theoretically, I suppose if we opt for a film where someone gets brutally murdered or dies in a fiery car crash, we are more likely to walk out of that theater feeling like we've got it pretty good.(Laughter)Drinking alcohol, it seems, is bad for your marriage. Yeah. I can't tell you anymore about that one because I stopped reading it at the headline. But here's a scary one: divorce is contagious. That's right, when you have a close couple friend split up, it increases your chances of getting a divorce by 75 percent. Now, I have to say, I don't get this one at all. My husband and I have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and Viagra and eHarmony. And I'm thinking they've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could.So now you may be wondering: Why does anyone get married ever? Well, the US federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone's spouse. A list that includes visitation rights in jail, but hopefully, you'll never need that one. But beyond the profound federal perks, married people make more money. We're healthier, physically and emotionally. We produce happier, more stable and more successful kids. We have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends, believe it or not. We even live longer, which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place.(Laughter)Now, if you're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return, I can't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness, who prefers horror movies and doesn't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce, but I can only encourage you to try, because the benefits, as I've pointed out, are significant. The bottom line is: whether you're in it or you're searching for it, I believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting. So I hope you'll use the information I've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors.For instance, in my marriage, I'd say I'm doing OK. One the one hand, I have a husband who's annoyingly lean and incredibly handsome. So I'm obviously going to need fatten him up. And like I said, we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up. So we have to keep an eye on that. And we do like a cocktail or two. On the other hand, I have the fake happy picture thing. And also, my husband does a lot around the house, and would happily never see another romantic comedy as long as he lives.So I've got all those things going for me. But just in case, I plan to work extra hard to not win an Oscar anytime soon. And for the good of your relationships, I would encourage you to do the same. I'll see you at the bar.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jenna_mccarthy_what_you_don_t_know_about_marriage
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"I would like to talk to you about why many ehealth projects fail. And I really think that the most important thing of it is that we stopped listening to patients. And one thing we did at Radboud University is we appointed a Chief Listening Officer. Not in a very scientific way — she puts up a little cup of coffee or a cup of tea and asks patients, family, relatives, ""What's up? How could we help you?"" And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all — maybe not all — but most of the ehealth projects fail, since we stopped listening.This is my weight scale. It's a very simple thing. It's got one knob, on/off. And every morning I hop on it. And yes, I've got a challenge, as you might see. And I put my challenge on 95 kg. But the thing is that it's made this simple that whenever I hop on, it sends my data to Google Health as well. And it's collected by my general practitioner as well, so he can see what's my problem in weight, not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it, but also looking backward. But there's another thing. As some of you might know, I've got more than 4000 followers on Twitter. So every morning, I hop on my weight scale and before I'm in my car, people start talking to me, ""I think you need a light lunch today, Lucien.""(Laughter)But that's the nicest thing that could happen, since this is peer pressure. Peer pressure used to help patients — since this could be used for obesity, it could be used to stop patients from smoking. But on the other hand, it also could be used to get people out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health.As of next week, it will soon be available, there will be this little blood-pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other. And people will be able, from their homes, to take their blood pressure, send it to their doctor and eventually share it with others, for instance, for over a 100 dollars. And this is the point where patients get into position and can collect, not only their own control again, be captain of their own ship, but also can help us in health care due to the challenges that we face, like health-care cost explosion, doubled demand and things like that, make techniques that are easy to use and start with this to embrace patients in the team.And you can do this with techniques like this, but also by crowdsourcing. And one of the things we did, that I would like to share with you introduced by a little video.(Music)(Heart-beat)We've all got navigation controls in our car. We maybe even have it in our cellphone. We perfectly know where all the ATMs are, just about the city of Maastricht. The other thing is we know where all the gas stations are. And sure, we could find fast food chains. But where would be the nearest AED to help this patient? We asked around, and nobody knew. Nobody knew where the nearest lifesaving AED was to be obtained right now.So what we did, we crowdsourced the Netherlands. We set up a website, and asked the crowd, ""If you see an AED, please submit it, tell us where it is, tell us when it's open,"" since sometimes in office hours it's closed, of course. And over 10,000 AEDs in the Netherlands already have been submitted. The next step we took was to find the applications for it. And we built an iPad application. We made an application for Layar: Augmented Reality, to find these AEDs. And whenever you are in a city like Maastricht, and somebody collapses, you can use your iPhone, and within the next weeks also your Microsoft cellphone, to find the nearest AED, which can save lives.And as of today, we would like to introduce this, not only as AED4EU, which is what the product is called, but also AED4US. And we would like to start this on a worldwide level. And ask all of our colleagues in the rest of the world, colleague universities, to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowdsource all these AEDs all around the world, that whenever you're on holiday and somebody collapses, might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you, you can find this.The other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these AEDs. These might be courier services or cable guys, for instance, just to see whether the AED that is submitted is still in place.So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lucien_engelen_crowdsource_your_health
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"Basking sharks are awesome creatures. They are just magnificent. They grow 10 meters long; some say bigger. They might weigh up to two tons. Some say up to five tons. They're the second-largest fish in the world. They're also harmless plankton-feeding animals. And they are thought to be able to filter a cubic kilometer of water every hour and can feed on 30 kilos of zoo plankton a day to survive. They're fantastic creatures. We're very lucky in Ireland, we have plenty of basking sharks and plenty of opportunities to study them.They were very important to coastal communities, going back hundreds of years, especially around the Claddaghduff, Connemara region where subsistence farmers used to sail out on their hookers and open boats, sometimes way offshore to a place called the Sunfish Bank, about 30 miles west of Achill Island, to kill the basking sharks. This is a woodcut from about the 1800s.They were very important, for the oil out of their liver. A third of the basking shark's size is their liver, and it's full of oil, gallons of oil. That oil was used especially for lighting, but also for dressing wounds and other things. In fact, the streetlights in 1742, of Galway, Dublin and Waterford, were lit with sunfish oil. ""Sunfish"" is one of the words for basking sharks. So they were incredibly important animals. They've been around a long time, very important to coastal communities.Probably the best-documented basking shark fishery in the world is that from Achill Island. This is Keem Bay up in Achill Island. Sharks used to come into the bay, and the fishermen would tie a net off the headland, string it out, an old Manila net, and as the shark came round, it would hit the net, the net would collapse on it. It would often drown and suffocate. Or at times, they would row out in their small curraghs and kill it with a lance through the back of the neck. And then they'd tow the sharks back to Purteen Harbour, boil them up, use the oil. They also used the flesh as well, for fertilizer and also would fin the sharks. This is probably the biggest threat to sharks worldwide — the finning of sharks.We're often frightened of sharks, thanks to ""Jaws."" Maybe five or six people get killed by sharks every year. There was someone recently, wasn't there? Just a couple weeks ago. We kill about 100 million sharks a year. So I don't know what the balance is, but I think sharks have more right to be fearful of us than we have of them. It was a well-documented fishery. As you can see here, it peaked in the '50s, where they were killing 1,500 sharks a year. And it declined very fast — a classic boom-and-bust fishery, which suggests that a stock has been depleted or there's low reproductive rates. They killed about 12,000 sharks within this period, literally just by stringing a Manila rope off the tip of Keem Bay up in Achill Island.Sharks were still killed up into the mid-80s, especially out of places like Dunmore East in County Waterford. About two and a half, 3,000 sharks were killed up till '85, mainly by Norwegian vessels. You can't really see, but these are Norwegian basking shark hunting vessels. The black line in the crow's nest signifies this is a shark vessel, rather than a whaling vessel.The importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language. I don't pretend to [know many Irish words], but in Kerry they were often known as ""ainmhide Na seolta,"" ""the monster with the sails."" Another title would be ""liop an dá lapa,"" ""the unwieldy beast with two fins."" ""Liabhán mór,"" suggesting a big animal. Or my favorite, ""liabhán chor gréine,"" ""the great fish of the sun."" That's a lovely, evocative name. On Tory Island — a strange place anyway — they were known as ""muldoons.""(Laughter)No one seems to know why. Hope there's no one from Tory here. Lovely place. But more commonly all around the island, they were known as the sunfish. And this represents their habit of basking on the surface when the sun is out.There's great concern that basking sharks are depleted all throughout the world. Some say it's not population decline, it might be a change in the distribution of plankton. It's been suggested that these sharks would make fantastic indicators of climate change, as they're basically continuous plankton recorders, swimming around with their mouth open. They're now listed as vulnerable under the IUCN. There's movements in Europe to try and stop catching them. There's now a ban on catching and even landing them, even landing ones caught accidentally. They're not protected in Ireland; in fact, they have no legislative status in Ireland whatsoever, despite our importance for the species and also the historical context within which basking sharks reside.We know very little about them. And most of what we do know is based on their habit of coming to the surface — we try and guess what they're doing from their behavior on the surface. I only found out last year, at a conference on the Isle of Man, just how unusual it is to live somewhere where basking sharks regularly, frequently and predictably come to the surface to ""bask."" It's a fantastic opportunity for a scientist to see and experience basking sharks. They are awesome creatures. It gives us a fantastic opportunity to study them, to get access to them.What we've been doing for a couple years — last year was a big year — is we started tagging sharks, so we could try to get some idea of sight fidelity and movement and things like that. So we concentrated mainly in North Donegal and West Kerry as the two areas where I was mainly active. And we tagged them very simply, not very high-tech, with a big, long pole. This is a beachcaster rod with a tag on the end. You go up in your boat and tag the shark. And we were very effective. We tagged 105 sharks last summer. We got 50 in three days off Inishowen Peninsula.Half the challenge to get access is to be in the right place at the right time. But it's a very simple, easy technique; I'll show you what it looks like. We use a pole camera on the boat to actually film the shark. One, it's to try and work out the gender of the shark. We also deployed some satellite tags, so we did use high-tech stuff as well. These are archival tags. What they do is store the data. A satellite tag only works when the air is clear of the water and can send a signal to the satellite. And sharks and fish are underwater most of the time, so this tag actually works out the locations of shark, depending on the timing and the setting of the sun, plus water temperature and depth. And you have to kind of reconstruct the path.What happens is, you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period — in this case, eight months — and literally to the day, the tag popped off, drifted up, said hello to the satellite and sent, not all the data, but enough data for us to use. This is the only way to really work out their behavior and movements when they're underwater.And here's a couple of maps that we've done. In that one, you can see that we tagged both off Kerry. Basically, it spent all its time, the last eight months, in Irish waters. On Christmas, it was out on the shelf edge. Here's one we haven't ground-truthed yet with sea-surface temperature and water depth, but again, the second shark spent most of its time in and around the Irish Sea. Colleagues from the Isle of Man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the Isle of Man to Nova Scotia in about 90 days. Nine and a half thousand kilometers — we never thought that happened.Another colleague in the States tagged about 20 sharks off Massachusetts. His tags didn't really work. All he knows is where he tagged them, and where they popped off. His tags popped off in the Caribbean, and even in Brazil. We thought basking sharks were temperate animals and lived in our latitudes, but in actual fact, they're obviously crossing the equator as well.So very simple things like that, we're trying to learn about basking sharks. One thing that I think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks is. I'm not a geneticist, so I won't pretend to understand the genetics. And that's why it's great to have collaboration. Whereas I'm a field person, I get panic attacks if I have to spend too many hours in a lab with a white coat on. Take me away. So we can work with geneticists who understand that. So when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks, they found that the diversity was incredibly low.If you look at the first line, really, you can see that all these different shark species are all quite similar. I think this means they're all sharks and they've come from a common ancestry. But if you look at nucleotide diversity, which is more genetics that are passed on through the parents, you see that basking sharks, if you look at the first study, was order of magnitude less diverse even than other shark species. You can see this work was only done in 2006.Before 2006, we had no idea of the genetic variability of basking sharks. We had no idea: Did they distinguish into different populations? Were there subpopulations? And that's very important if you want to know what the population size is, and the status of the animals. So, Les Noble in Aberdeen kind of found this a bit unbelievable, really. So he did another study using microsatellites, which is much more expensive, much more time-consuming, and to his surprise, came up with almost identical results.So it does seem to be that basking sharks, for some reason, have incredibly low diversity. And it's thought maybe it was a genetic bottleneck, thought to have been 12,000 years ago, and this has caused a very low diversity. And yet, if you look at the whale shark, which is the other plankton-eating large shark, its diversity is much greater.So it doesn't really make sense at all. They found that there was no genetic differentiation between any of the world's oceans of basking sharks: even though they're found throughout the world, you couldn't tell the difference, genetically, from one from the Pacific, Atlantic, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa. They all basically seem the same. Which, again, is kind of surprising; you wouldn't expect that. I don't understand or pretend to understand this; I suspect most geneticists don't either, but they produce the numbers.So you can actually estimate the population size based on the diversity of the genetics. And Rus Hoelzel came up with an effective population size: 8,200 animals. That's it — 8,000 animals in the world. You're thinking, ""That's ridiculous. No way."" So Les did a finer study, and he found out it came out about 9,000. Using different microsatellites gave the different results, but the mean of all these studies is about 5,000, which I personally don't believe. But then, I am a skeptic. But even if you toss a few numbers around, you're probably talking an effective population of about 20,000 animals. Do you remember how many they killed off Achill in the 70s and the 50s? So what it tells us, actually, is that there's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small. In fact, of those 20,000, 8,000 were thought to be females. There's only 8,000 basking shark females in the world? I don't know. I don't believe it.The problem with this is they were constrained with samples. They didn't get enough samples to really explore the genetics in enough detail. So, where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis? Well, one obvious source is dead sharks — dead sharks, washed up. We might get two or three dead sharks washed up in Ireland a year, if we're kind of lucky. Another source would be fisheries' bycatch. We were getting quite a few caught in surface drift nets. That's banned now, and that'll be good news for the sharks. And some are caught in nets, in trawls. This is a shark that was actually landed in Howth just before Christmas — illegally, because you're not allowed to do that under EU law — and was actually sold for eight euros a kilo as shark steak. They even put a recipe up on the wall, until they were told it was illegal. They actually did get a fine for that.So if you look at all those studies I showed you, the total number of samples worldwide is 86, at present. So it's very important work, and they can ask some really good questions, and tell us about population size and subpopulations and structure, but they're constrained by lack of samples.When we were out tagging our sharks — this is how we tagged them on the front of a RIB, get in there fast — occasionally, the sharks do react. On one occasion, when we were up in Malin Head in Donegal, the shark smacked the side of the boat with his tail, more, I think, in startle to the fact that a boat came near it, rather than the tag going in. And that was fine. We got wet. No problem. And then when myself and Emmett got back to Malin Head, to the pier, I noticed some black slime on the front of the boat. I used to spend a lot of time on commercial fishing boats, and I remember fishermen saying they can tell when a basking shark has been caught in a net, because it leaves a black slime behind. So that must have come from the shark.Now, we had an interest in getting tissue samples for genetics because we knew they were very valuable. We would use conventional methods; I have a crossbow — you see it in my hand there, which we use to sample whales and dolphins for genetic studies as well. So I tried that, I tried many techniques. All it was doing was breaking my arrows, because the shark's skin is just so strong. There was no way we were going to get a sample from that. That wasn't going to work.So when I saw the black slime on the bow of the boat, I thought, ""If you take what you're given in this world ..."" So I scraped it off. I had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists. So I scraped the slime off and sent it to Aberdeen, and said, ""You might try that."" And they sat on it for months. It was only because we had a conference on the Isle of Man. But I kept emailing Les, saying, ""Have you had a chance to look at my slime?"" And he was like, ""Yeah, yeah. Later."" He thought he'd better do it because I never met him before; he might lose face if he hadn't done the thing I sent him.And he was amazed that they actually got DNA from the slime. They amplified it and they tested it, and they found, yes, this was actually basking shark DNA, which was got from the slime. So he was very excited. It became known as ""Simon's shark slime."" And I thought, ""Hey, you know, I can build on this."" So we thought, OK, we're going to try to get out and get some slime. So having spent three-and-a-half thousand on satellite tags ... I then thought I'd invest 7.95 — the price is still on it — in my local hardware store in Kilrush for a mop handle, and even less money on some oven cleaners. And I wrapped the oven cleaner around the edge of the mop handle and ...(Laughter)I was desperate to have an opportunity to get some sharks. And this was into August now, and normally sharks peak in June, July, and you rarely see them, or rarely can be in the right place to find sharks into August. We were desperate, so we rushed out to the Blaskets as soon as we heard there were sharks there, and managed to find some sharks. So by just rubbing the mop handle down the shark as it swam under the boat — you see a shark running under the boat here — we managed to collect slime. And here it is. Look at that lovely black shark slime. And in about half an hour, we got five samples. Five individual sharks were sampled using Simon's Shark Slime Sampling System.(Laughter)(Applause)I've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now, and they're a bit more dramatic. You probably saw the humpback whale footage we got a month or two ago off County Wexford. And you always think you might have some legacy you can leave the world behind, and I was thinking of humpback whales breaching and dolphins. But hey — sometimes these things are sent to you and you just have to take them when they come. So this is possibly going to be my legacy — Simon's Shark Slime.We got more money this year to carry on collecting more and more samples. One thing that is very useful is that we use a pole camera — this is my colleague, Joanne, with a pole camera — where you can look underneath the shark. What you're trying to look at is, the males have claspers, which kind of dangle out behind the back of the shark. So you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark. If we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it, we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female. Because in the moment, they have no way, genetically, of telling the difference between a male and a female, which I find staggering, because they don't know what primers to look for. Being able to tell the gender of a shark is very important for things like policing the trade in basking shark and other species through the sightings, because it is illegal to trade in these sharks. And they are caught and are on the market.So as a field biologist, you just want to get encounters with these animals, and learn as much as you can. They're often quite brief, they're often very seasonally constrained. You just want to learn as much as you can as soon as you can. But isn't it fantastic that you can then offer these samples and opportunities to other disciplines, such as the geneticists, who can gain so much more from that.So as I said, these things are sent to you in strange ways. Grab them while you can. I'll take that as my scientific legacy. Hopefully, I might get something a bit more dramatic and romantic before I die. But for the time being, thank you for that. And keep an eye out for sharks.If you're more interested, we have a basking shark website now set up. So thank you and thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_berrow_how_do_you_save_a_shark_you_know_nothing_about
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"The humanitarian model has barely changed since the early 20th century. Its origins are firmly rooted in the analog age. And there is a major shift coming on the horizon. The catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck Haiti on the 12th of January in 2010. Haiti was a game changer. The earthquake destroyed the capital of Port-au-Prince, claiming the lives of some 320,000 people, rendering homeless about 1.2 million people. Government institutions were completely decapitated, including the presidential palace. I remember standing on the roof of the Ministry of Justice in downtown Port-au-Prince. It was about two meters high, completely squashed by the violence of the earthquake.For those of us on the ground in those early days, it was clear for even the most disaster-hardened veterans that Haiti was something different. Haiti was something we hadn't seen before. But Haiti provided us with something else unprecedented. Haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices.Because out of the urban devastation in Port-au-Prince came a torrent of SMS texts — people crying for help, beseeching us for assistance, sharing data, offering support, looking for their loved ones. This was a situation that traditional aid agencies had never before encountered. We were in one of the poorest countries on the planet, but 80 percent of the people had mobile devices in their hands. And we were unprepared for this, and they were shaping the aid effort.Outside Haiti also, things were looking different. Tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the Internet, converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps, layering them with all sorts of important information — people like Crisis Mappers and Open Street Map — and putting these on the Web for everybody — the media, the aid organizations and the communities themselves — to participate in and to use.Back in Haiti, people were increasingly turning to the medium of SMS. People that were hungry and hurting were signaling their distress, were signaling their need for help. On street sides all over Port-au-Prince, entrepreneurs sprung up offering mobile phone charging stations. They understood more than we did people's innate need to be connected.Never having been confronted with this type of situation before, we wanted to try and understand how we could tap into this incredible resource, how we could really leverage this incredible use of mobile technology and SMS technology. We started talking with a local telecom provider called Voilà, which is a subsidiary of Trilogy International. We had basically three requirements. We wanted to communicate in a two-way form of communication. We didn't want to shout; we needed to listen as well. We wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities. We didn't need to talk to the whole country at the same time. And we wanted it to be easy to use.Out of this rubble of Haiti and from this devastation came something that we call TERA — the Trilogy Emergency Response Application — which has been used to support the aid effort ever since. It has been used to help communities prepare for disasters. It has been used to signal early warning in advance of weather-related disasters. It's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera. And it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence.But does it work? We have just published an evaluation of this program, and the evidence that is there for all to see is quite remarkable. Some 74 percent of people received the data. Those who were intended to receive the data, 74 percent of them received it. 96 percent of them found it useful. 83 percent of them took action — evidence that it is indeed empowering. And 73 percent of them shared it.The TERA system was developed from Haiti with support of engineers in the region. It is a user-appropriate technology that has been used for humanitarian good to great effect. Technology is transformational. Right across the developing world, citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change, positive change, in their own communities. The grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models, the old analog models of control and command.One illustration of the transformational power of technology is in Kibera. Kibera is one of Africa's largest slums. It's on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. It's home to an unknown number of people — some say between 250,000 and 1.2 million. If you were to arrive in Nairobi today and pick up a tourist map, Kibera is represented as a lush, green national park devoid of human settlement.Young people living in Kibera in their community, with simple handheld devices, GPS handheld devices and SMS-enabled mobile phones, have literally put themselves on the map. They have collated crowd-sourced data and rendered the invisible visible. People like Josh and Steve are continuing to layer information upon information, real-time information, Tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use. You can find out about the latest impromptu music session. You can find out about the latest security incident. You can find out about places of worship. You can find out about the health centers. You can feel the dynamism of this living, breathing community. They also have their own news network on YouTube with 36,000 viewers at the moment.They're showing us what can be done with mobile, digital technologies. They're showing that the magic of technology can bring the invisible visible. And they are giving a voice to themselves. They are telling their own story, bypassing the official narrative.And we're seeing from all points on the globe similar stories. In Mongolia for instance, where 30 percent of the people are nomadic, SMS information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns. SMS is even used to hold herder summits from remote participation. And if people are migrating into urban, unfamiliar, concrete environments, they can also be helped in anticipation with social supporters ready and waiting for them based on SMS knowledge. In Nigeria, open-source SMS tools are being used by the Red Cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria. My colleague, Jason Peat, who runs this program, tells me it's 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the traditional way of doing things.And not only is it empowering to the communities, but really importantly, this information stays in the community where it is needed to formulate long-term health polices. We are on a planet of seven billion people, five billion mobile subscriptions. By 2015, there will be three billion smartphones in the world. The U.N. broadband commission has recently set targets to help broadband access in 50 percent of the Developing World, compared to 20 percent today. We are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart, fast mobile devices.People are understanding, from Cairo to Oakland, that there are new ways to come together, there are new ways to mobilize, there are new ways to influence. A transformation is coming which needs to be understood by the humanitarian structures and humanitarian models. The collective voices of people needs to be more integrated through new technologies into the organizational strategies and plans of actions and not just recycled for fundraising or marketing. We need to, for example, embrace the big data, the knowledge that is there from market leaders who understand what it means to use and leverage big data.One idea that I'd like you to consider, for instance, is to take a look at our IT departments. They're normally backroom or basement hardware service providers, but they need to be elevated to software strategists. We need people in our organizations who know what it's like to work with big data. We need technology as a core organizational principle. We need technological strategists in the boardroom who can ask and answer the question, ""What would Amazon or Google do with all of this data?"" and convert it to humanitarian good.The possibilities that new digital technologies are bringing can help humanitarian organizations, not only ensure that people's right to information is met, or that they have their right to communicate, but I think in the future, humanitarian organizations will also have to anticipate the right for people to access critical communication technologies in order to ensure that their voices are heard, that they're truly participating, that they're truly empowered in the humanitarian world. It has always been the elusive ideal to ensure full participation of people affected by disasters in the humanitarian effort. We now have the tools. We now have the possibilities. There are no more reasons not to do it. I believe we need to bring the humanitarian world from analog to digital.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_conneally_digital_humanitarianism
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"The world's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world, Canada's boreal forest. It stretches right across Northern Canada, in Labrador, it's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world: the George River caribou herd, numbering approximately 400,000 animals. Unfortunately, when I was there, I couldn't find one of them, but you have the antlers as proof.All across the boreal, we're blessed with this incredible abundance of wetlands. Wetlands, globally, are one of the most endangered ecosystems. They're absolutely critical ecosystems, they clean air, they clean water, they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases, and they're home to a huge diversity of species. In the boreal, they are also the home where almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species found in North America migrate north to breed and raise their young.In Ontario, the boreal marches down south to the north shore of Lake Superior. And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in Canadian history, the Group of Seven were very inspired by this landscape, and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage, but also an important part of our cultural heritage.In Manitoba, this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site. In Saskatchewan, as across all of the boreal, home to some of our most famous rivers, an incredible network of rivers and lakes that every school-age child learns about, the Peace, the Athabasca, the Churchill here, the Mackenzie, and these networks were the historical routes for the voyageur and the coureur de bois, the first non-aboriginal explorers of Northern Canada that, taking from the First Nations people, used canoes and paddled to explore for a trade route, a Northwest Passage for the fur trade.In the North, the boreal is bordered by the tundra, and just below that, in Yukon, we have this incredible valley, the Tombstone Valley. And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd. Now you've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd in the context of its breeding ground in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Well, the wintering ground is also critical and it also is not protected, and is potentially, could be potentially, exploited for gas and mineral rights.The western border of the boreal in British Columbia is marked by the Coast Mountains, and on the other side of those mountains is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world, the Great Bear Rainforest, and we'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail.All across the boreal, it's home for a huge incredible range of indigenous peoples, and a rich and varied culture. And I think that one of the reasons why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past, know their native languages, the songs, the dances, the traditions, I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness, the span and the wilderness of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem. And I think particularly now, as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis, we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years.In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis of all of these values that we've been talking about, and I think these are some of the core values that make us proud to be Canadians. This is the Alberta tar sands, the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of Saudi Arabia. Trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta are these vast reserves of this sticky, tar-like bitumen. And the mining and the exploitation of that is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before.I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this. If you look at that truck there, it is the largest truck of its kind on the planet. It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high. If I stand beside that truck, my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap. Within the dimensions of that truck, you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily. I did the math. So instead of thinking of that as a truck, think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home. That's not a bad size home. And line those trucks / homes back and forth across there from the bottom all the way to the top. And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is.Now, you can apply that same kind of thinking here as well. Now, here you see — of course, as you go further on, these trucks become like a pixel. Again, imagine those all back and forth there. How large is that one portion of a mine? That would be a huge, vast metropolitan area, probably much larger than the city of Victoria. And this is just one of a number of mines, 10 mines so far right now. This is one section of one mining complex, and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process. No tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval, so it is essentially a rubber stamp.The other method of extraction is what's called the in situ. And here, massive amounts of water are superheated and pumped through the ground, through these vasts networks of pipelines, seismic lines, drill paths, compressor stations. And even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant as the mines, it's even more damaging in some ways. It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness, where there is 90 percent reduction of key species, like woodland caribou and grizzly bears, and it consumes even more energy, more water, and produces at least as much greenhouse gas. So these in situ developments are at least as ecologically damaging as the mines.The oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil. This is one of the reasons why it's called the world's dirtiest oil. It's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in Canada, and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person. The tailings ponds are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet. Oil sands — or rather, I should say tar sands — oil sands is a PR-created term so that the oil companies wouldn't be trying to promote something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance that's the world's dirtiest oil. So they decided to call it oil sands. The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process, three to five barrels of water are taken, polluted and then returned into tailings ponds, the largest toxic impoundments on the planet.SemCrude, just one of the licensees, in just one of their tailings ponds, dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day. That's creating the largest toxic impoundments in the history of the planet. So far, this is enough toxin to cover the face of Lake Erie a foot deep. And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres. That's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan. That's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan up to maybe 120th Street. So this is one of the larger tailings ponds. This might be, what? I don't know, half the size of Manhattan. And you can see in the context, it's just a relatively small section of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50 on stream to be approved soon.And of course, these tailings ponds — well, you can't see many ponds from outer space and you can see these, so maybe we should stop calling them ponds — these massive toxic wastelands are built unlined and on the banks of the Athabasca River. And the Athabasca River drains downstream to a range of aboriginal communities. In Fort Chipewyan, the 800 people there, are finding toxins in the food chain, this has been scientifically proven. The tar sands toxins are in the food chain, and this is causing cancer rates up to 10 times what they are in the rest of Canada.In spite of that, people have to live, have to eat this food in order to survive. The incredibly high price of flying food into these remote Northern aboriginal communities and the high rate of unemployment makes this an absolute necessity for survival. And not that many years ago, I was lent a boat by a First Nations man, and he said, ""When you go out on the river, do not under any circumstances eat the fish. It's carcinogenic."" And yet, on the front porch of that man's cabin, I saw four fish. He had to feed his family to survive. And as a parent, I just can't imagine what that does to your soul. And that's what we're doing.The boreal forest is also perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change. The boreal forest sequesters more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem. And this is absolutely key. So what we're doing is, we're taking the most concentrated greenhouse gas sink — twice as much greenhouse gases are sequestered in the boreal per acre than the tropical rainforests. And what we're doing is we're destroying this carbon sink, turning it into a carbon bomb. And we're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world, which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse-gas emitting oil in the world. And we're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet.This is one of the reasons why Canada, originally a climate change hero — we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord. Now we're the country that has full-time lobbyists in the European Union and Washington DC, threatening trade wars when these countries talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation to limit the import of high-carbon fuels, of greenhouse gas emissions, anything like this, at international conferences, whether they're in Copenhagen or Cancun, international conferences on climate change, we're the country that gets the dinosaur award every single day, as being the biggest obstacle to progress on this issue.Just 70 miles downstream is the world's largest freshwater delta, the Peace-Athabasca Delta, the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways. This is a globally significant wetland, perhaps the greatest on the planet. Incredible habitat for half the bird species you find in North America, migrating here. And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison, and also, of course, critical habitat for another whole range of other species. But it too is being threatened by the massive amount of water being drawn from the Athabasca, which feeds these wetlands, and also the incredible toxic burden of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet, which are leaching in to the food chain for all the species downstream.So as bad as all that is, things are going to get much worse — much, much worse. This is the infrastructure as we see it about now. This is what's planned for 2015. And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline, which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast, punching a pipeline through the agricultural heart of North America, of the United States, and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the United States, and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean-energy future for America.Here you see the route down the Mackenzie valley. This would put a pipeline to take natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the heart of the third largest watershed basin in the world, and the only one which is 95 percent intact. And building a pipeline with an industrial highway would change forever this incredible wilderness, which is a true rarity on the planet today.So the Great Bear Rainforest is just over the hill there, within a few miles, we go from these dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees, maybe 10 inches across, and soon, we're in the coastal temperate rainforest, rain-drenched, 1,000-year-old trees, 20 feet across, a completely different ecosystem. And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world. Some of the greatest densities of some of the most iconic and threatened species on the planet. And yet there's a proposal, of course, to build a pipeline to take huge tankers, 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez, through some of the most difficult-to-navigate waters in the world, where only just a few years ago, a BC ferry ran aground. When one of these tar sands tankers, carrying the dirtiest oil, 10 times as much as the Exxon Valdez, eventually hits a rock and goes down, we're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters this planet has ever seen.And here we have the plan out to 2030. What they're proposing is an almost four-times increase in production, and that would industrialize an area the size of Florida. In doing so, we'll be removing a large part of our greatest carbon sink and replacing it with the most high greenhouse-gas emission oil in the future. The world does not need any more tar mines. The world does not need any more pipelines to wed our addiction to fossil fuels. And the world certainly does not need the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply and further threaten the downstream communities. And let's face it, we all live downstream in an era of global warming and climate change.What we need, is we all need to act to ensure that Canada respects the massive amounts of freshwater that we hold in this country. We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected, and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere. And we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands. And we can do that. there is a huge network all over the world, fighting to stop this project.And I quite simply think that this is not something that should be decided just in Canada. Everyone in this room, everyone across Canada, everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and, I think, a responsibility. Because what we do here is going to change our history, it's going to color our possibility to survive, and for our children to survive and have a rich future.We have an incredible gift in the boreal, an incredible opportunity to preserve our best defense against global warming, but we could let that slip away. The tar sands could threaten not just a large section of the boreal. It compromises the life and the health of some of our most underprivileged and vulnerable people, the aboriginal communities that have so much to teach us. It could destroy the Athabasca Delta, the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet. It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest temperate rainforest in the world. And it could have huge impacts on the future of the agricultural heartland of North America.I hope that you will all, if you've been moved by this presentation, join with the growing international community to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities, to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain, and to say no to the tar sands, and yes to a clean energy future for all. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/garth_lenz_images_of_beauty_and_devastation
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"The things we make have one supreme quality — they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography — or rather the biographies — of one particular object, one remarkable thing. It doesn't, I agree, look very much. It's about the size of a rugby ball. It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet.The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast — because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. And you all know roughly the story.Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia.And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, ""You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians."" And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. It's a great story. It's story we all know. ""The writing on the wall"" is part of our everyday language. What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story.Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight — the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. And Cyrus makes a declaration. And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. In ringing Babylonian — it was written in Babylonian — he says, ""I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world."" They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. So the hyperbole is not actually surprising.And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians — Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar — have captured and enslaved go free. He'll let them return to their countries. And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple.It's a central document in Jewish history. And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. This is the Jewish version of the same story. ""Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. Who is there among you of his people? The Lord God be with him, and let him go up.'"" ""Go up"" — aaleh. The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay.Two great texts, what about the politics? What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. It was the largest empire the world had known until then. Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. And it had to be run in a quite new way. It had to be run in different languages. The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. All of those are respected by Cyrus.Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. The Greek invasions ended that. And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central.The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book ""Cyropaedia"" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Jefferson was a great admirer — the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state.Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost — until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. And it enters now another story. It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. No other evidence. Suddenly, this appeared. And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. It's a great 19th century moment.But — and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated — the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. ""Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name."" Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk.The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. It can only be Jehovah. And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel — the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact.God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. The question is, which god was it? And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, ""I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me."" I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts.(Laughter)That's 1879. 40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. This time, the real politics of the contemporary world — the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side — the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. You all know what happened. The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. And another story of the cylinder begins.The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah.10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran — until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. Then another Iran-Iraq war. And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians — Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. And the obvious emblem is Cyrus.So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. It's the only object they want. They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. It was a huge event. This is the other side of that same picture. It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder — Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of.To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. It was a narrative presented by the president himself.And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. It stands with the American constitution. It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region.A replica of this is at the United Nations. In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely — a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate.In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_macgregor_2600_years_of_history_in_one_object
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"Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose. And whether it's the opening line from ""One Hundred Years of Solitude"" or the fantastical stream of consciousness in ""Autumn of the Patriarch,"" where the words rush by, page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal South American jungle, reading Márquez is a visceral experience. Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation.Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world. And as great as these books were, you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect. But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator's versions as being better than his own, which is an astonishing compliment.So when I heard that the translator, Gregory Rabassa, had written his own book on the subject, I couldn't wait to read it. It's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward, ""If This Be Treason."" And it's a charming read. It's highly recommended for anyone who's interested in the translator's art. But the reason that I mention it is that early on, Rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight: ""Every act of communication is an act of translation.""Now maybe that's been obvious to all of you for a long time, but for me, as often as I'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis, I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light. Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things, communication has been my central passion. Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else. So no ego problems. It's funny, my wife, Daisy, whose family is littered with schizophrenics — and I mean littered with them — once said to me, ""Chris, I already have a brother who thinks he's God. I don't need a husband who wants to be.""(Laughter)Anyway, as I plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was, it was that second part, being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge I was gaining, where the futility of my quest really set in. Time after time, whenever I set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient, it had the opposite effect. Interestingly, when your opening line of communication is, ""Hey, listen up, because I'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you,"" it's amazing how quickly you'll discover both ice and the firing squad.Finally, after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike, I finally got it, a new personal truth all my own, that if I was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that I was gaining, I'd better find a different way of going about it. And that's when I discovered comedy.Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language. If I had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum, I'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies. And I'm not talking about all comedy here, because, clearly, there's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel. What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives — comedy as the philosopher's stone. It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world. Because that's what I take from the theme of this conference: Gained in Translation. That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change. Which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest. Now I'm big on speaking to people's self-interest because we're all wired for that. It's part of our survival package, and that's why it's become so important for us, and that's why we're always listening at that level. And also because that's where, in terms of our own self-interest, we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond, our responsibility to the rest of the world.Now as to what I mean by the best comedy and satire, I mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity. Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating. Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate's fundamental lack of seriousness, cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today. And the key detail of this is that Fey's scripts weren't written by her and they weren't written by the SNL writers. They were lifted verbatim from Palin's own remarks. (Laughter) Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word. Now that's honesty and integrity, and it's also why Fey's performances left such a lasting impression.On the other side of the political spectrum, the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he'd made a direct hit. Now it's not often that I'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with Limbaugh, but it's really hard to argue with that punchline. The description perfectly captured Edwards' personal vanity. And guess what? That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career.Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most — (Applause) (Laughter) it's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy. Survey after survey, from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows.(Applause)Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart's viewers, the larger point remains that Stewart's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts — not because his intent is to inform. It's not. His intent is to be funny. It just so happens that Stewart's brand of funny doesn't work unless the facts are true. And the result is great comedy that's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media. Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection.A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here. And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. And just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses. This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate. Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin, which throws our walls up sky-high. And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest — race, religion, politics, sexuality — only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.Now let me give you an example from my act. I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda, which starts off by asking, how radical is the gay agenda? Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family. (Laughter) Three things I've tried to avoid my entire life. (Laughter) Have at it you radical bastards. The field is yours.(Laughter)And that's followed by these lines about gay adoption: What is the problem with gay adoption? Why is this remotely controversial? If you have a baby and you think that baby's gay, you should be allowed to put it up for adoption. (Laughter) You have given birth to an abomination. Remove it from your household. Now by taking the biblical epithet ""abomination"" and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence, a baby, this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity, through their laughter, to question its validity.Misdirection isn't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve. Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy. There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline. Bill Hicks — and if you don't know his work, you should really Google him — Hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground, where finally the other kid says to him, ""Huh? Well my dad can beat up your dad,"" to which Hicks replies, ""Really? How soon?"" (Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words. (Laughter) Not to mention what it reveals about the adult who's speaking them.And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it's inherently viral. People can't wait to pass along that new great joke. And this isn't some new phenomenon of our wired world. Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV. Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that. And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts — something about the Ignited Negro College Fund. Clearly, it didn't come out of a Tonight Show monologue. And my guess here — and I have no research on this — is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it, you'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession. First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes.(Laughter)But it's when you put all of these elements together — when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that's crafted from honesty and integrity, it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation. Now I have a close friend, Joel Pett, who's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy. I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009. And Joel was explaining to me that, because USA Today was one of America's four papers of record, it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference, which meant that, if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on Monday, the opening day of the conference, it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers.So we started talking about climate change. And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing, which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn't, which, to both of us, seems somewhat intentionally off point. Because first of all, there's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists. Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, proclaiming over and over that the science wasn't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire. And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain. Personally, I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science.(Laughter)But back in 2009, the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science. So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this. Cartoon: ""What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"" (Laughter) You've got to love that idea. (Applause) How about that? How about we create a better world for nothing? Not for God, not for country, not for profit — just as a basic metric for global decision-making.And this cartoon hit the bull's eye. Shortly after the conference was over, Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on. And not long after that, he got another request for a copy from the head of the EPA in California who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in Sacramento last year. And it didn't stop there. To date, Joel's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe. And earlier this year, he got a request from the Green Party in Australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world. (Applause) That is a lot of punch for 14 words.So my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny, because you might just find the question that you've been looking for.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_bliss_comedy_is_translation
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"My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago. I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali. And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic ""The Mahabharata.""So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky. Now we do the same with airplanes. Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out. Now we do the same with drills and machines.The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery. And this made me really sad. I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe. I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends. And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it.When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch. And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me. It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination. So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming. They stopped us from being inspired. And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it.I've been illustrating books since I was 16. And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world. It can know how we're holding it. It can know where we are. It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch. Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial. But what are we doing with it?So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya, an interactive app for the iPad. So it says, ""Place your fingers upon each light."" And so — (Music) It says, ""This box belongs to ... "" And so I type in my name. And actually I become a character in the book. At various points, a little letter drops down to me — and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS — which is actually addressed to me. The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities.Now I've been talking a lot about magic. And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children. This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me. And so over here you need to tilt your iPad, take the fireflies out. And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book.Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble. And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device. And it opens up a map. All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static. This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book. It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well. So I'm just going to enter in.Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary. Over here, these are the Apsaras. So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras? These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book. And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children. And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis. (Music)Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out. But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology. One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects.When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells. And somehow kids don't do that anymore. So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it. In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that. And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online. A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, ""Oh, I saw a fox today."" A child in India says, ""I saw a monkey today."" And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken.In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities. In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house. At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves. And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book.We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together. We're harnessing energy from the sun. We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shilo_shiv_suleman_using_tech_to_enable_dreaming
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"I'm going to talk today about saving more, but not today, tomorrow. I'm going to talk about Save More Tomorrow. It's a program that Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and I devised maybe 15 years ago. The program, in a sense, is an example of behavioral finance on steroids — how we could really use behavioral finance. Now you might ask, what is behavioral finance? So let's think about how we manage our money. Let's start with mortgages. It's kind of a recent topic, at least in the U.S. A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford, and actually slightly bigger than that. And then they foreclose. And then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages.Let's also think about how we manage risks — for example, investing in the stock market. Two years ago, three years ago, about four years ago, markets did well. We were risk takers, of course. Then market stocks seize and we're like, ""Wow. These losses, they feel, emotionally, they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up."" So we're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking.How many of you have iPhones? Anyone? Wonderful. I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone — you're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty. What if you lose your iPhone? What if you do this? How many of you have kids? Anyone? Keep your hands up if you have sufficient life insurance. I see a lot of hands coming down. I would predict, if you're a representative sample, that many more of you insure your iPhones than your lives, even when you have kids. We're not doing that well when it comes to insurance.The average American household spends 1,000 dollars a year on lotteries. And I know it sounds crazy. How many of you spend a thousand dollars a year on lotteries? No one. So that tells us that the people not in this room are spending more than a thousand to get the average to a thousand. Low-income people spend a lot more than a thousand on lotteries. So where does it take us? We're not doing a great job managing money.Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics, trying to understand the money mistakes people make. And I can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that I have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money, and at the end you're going to ask, ""How can we help people?"" And that's what I really want to focus on today. How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make, and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions? And what I'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow.I want to address the issue of savings. We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans. And we're going to look at their saving behavior. First thing to notice is, half of them do not even have access to a 401(k) plan. They cannot make savings easy. They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401(k) plan before they see it, before they can touch it. What about the remaining half of the people? Some of them elect not to save. They're just too lazy. They never get around to logging into a complicated website and doing 17 clicks to join the 401(k) plan. And then they have to decide how they're going to invest in their 52 choices, and they never heard about what is a money market fund. And they get overwhelmed and the just don't join. How many people end up saving to a 401(k) plan? One third of Americans. Two thirds are not saving now.Are they saving enough? Take out those who say they save too little. One out of 10 are saving enough. Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401(k) plan, decide not to save — or don't decide — or save too little. We think we have a problem of people saving too much. Let's look at that. We have one person — well, actually we're going to slice him in half because it's less than one percent. Roughly half a percent of Americans feel that they save too much.What are we going to do about it? That's what I really want to focus on. We have to understand why people are not saving, and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions, and then see how powerful it might be. So let me divert for a second as we're going to identify the problems, the challenges, the behavioral challenges, that prevent people from saving. I'm going to divert and talk about bananas and chocolate.Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week. And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate. How many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical TED event next week? Who would go for bananas? Wonderful. I predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas. Well that's at least what one wonderful study predicted. And then count down the days and see what people ended up eating. The same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later.Self-control is not a problem in the future. It's only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us. What does it have to do with time and savings, this issue of immediate gratification? Or as some economists call it, present bias. We think about saving. We know we should be saving. We know we'll do it next year, but today let us go and spend. Christmas is coming, we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know. So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving, but end up spending.Let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia. But again, a little diversion to the topic of organ donation. Wonderful study comparing different countries. We're going to look at two similar countries, Germany and Austria. And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs — God forbid something really bad happens to you — when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, ""I would like to donate my organs."" Not many people like checking boxes. It takes effort. You need to think. Twelve percent do. Austria, a neighboring country, slightly similar, slightly different. What's the difference? Well, you still have choice. You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not. But when you get your driving license, you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ. Nobody checks boxes. That's kind of too much effort. One percent check the box. The rest do nothing. Doing nothing is very common. Not many people check boxes.What are the implications to saving lives and having organs available? In Germany, 12 percent check the box. Twelve percent are organ donors. Huge shortage of organs, God forbid, if you need one. In Austria, again, nobody checks the box. Therefore, 99 percent of people are organ donors. Inertia, lack of action. What is the default setting if people do nothing, if they keep procrastinating, if they don't check the boxes? Very powerful. We're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401(k) choices. Are we going to make them automatically join the plan, or are they going to be left out? In too many 401(k) plans, if people do nothing, it means they're not saving for retirement, if they don't check the box. And checking the box takes effort.So we've chatted about a couple of behavioral challenges. One more before we flip the challenges into solutions, having to do with monkeys and apples. No, no, no, this is a real study and it's got a lot to do with behavioral economics. One group of monkeys gets an apple, they're pretty happy. The other group gets two apples, one is taken away. They still have an apple left. They're really mad. Why have you taken our apple? This is the notion of loss aversion. We hate losing stuff, even if it doesn't mean a lot of risk. You would hate to go to the ATM, take out 100 dollars and notice that you lost one of those $20 bills. It's very painful, even though it doesn't mean anything. Those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch. So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too, because people, mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending.So we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually. Whether you think about immediate gratification, and the chocolates versus bananas, it's just painful to save now. It's a lot more fun to spend now. We talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box. If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401(k) plan, they're going to keep procrastinating and not join. And last, we talked about loss aversion, and the monkeys and the apples. If people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss, they're not going to be saving for retirement.So we've got these challenges, and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by — take behavioral finance, make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action — flip the challenges into solutions. And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More, not today, Tomorrow. How is it going to solve the challenges we chatted about? If you think about the problem of bananas versus chocolates, we think we're going to eat bananas next week. We think we're going to save more next year. Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year — sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas, volunteering more in the community, exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet.Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action. Save More Tomorrow makes it easy. It's an autopilot. Once you tell me you would like to save more in the future, let's say every January you're going to be saving more automatically and it's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401(k) plan before you see it, before you touch it, before you get the issue of immediate gratification. But what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion? Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful. Well, maybe it shouldn't be just January. Maybe we should make people save more when they make more money. That way, when they make more money, when they get a pay raise, they don't have to cut their spending. They take a little bit of the increase in the paycheck home and spend more — take a little bit of the increase and put it in a 401(k) plan.So that is the program, embarrassingly simple, but as we're going to see, extremely powerful. We first implemented it, Richard Thaler and I, back in 1998. Mid-sized company in the Midwest, blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they cannot save more right away. Saving more today is not an option. We invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise. And here are the results. We're seeing here a three and a half-year period, four pay raises, people who were struggling to save, were saving three percent of their paycheck, three and a half years later saving almost four times as much, almost 14 percent.And there's shoes and bicycles and things on this chart because I don't want to just throw numbers in a vacuum. I want, really, to think about the fact that saving four times more is a huge difference in terms of the lifestyle that people will be able to afford. It's real. It's not just numbers on a piece of paper. Whereas with saving three percent, people might have to add nice sneakers so they can walk, because they won't be able to afford anything else, when they save 14 percent they might be able to maybe have nice dress shoes to walk to the car to drive. This is a real difference. By now, about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place. It's been part of the Pension Protection Act. And needless to say that Thaler and I have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference.Let me wrap with two key messages. One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful. This is just one example. Message two is there's still a lot to do. This is really the tip of the iceberg. If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it, we need to think about that. If you're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they're taking or taking too little risk, we need to think about that. If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets, we need to think about that. The average actually, the record is in Singapore. The average household spends $4,000 a year on lottery tickets. We've got a lot to do, a lot to solve, also in the retirement area when it comes to what people do with their money after retirement.One last question: How many of you feel comfortable that as you're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you're going to retire, when you're going to claim Social Security benefits, what lifestyle to expect, how much to spend every month so you're not going to run out of money? How many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions. One, two, three, four. Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience. Behavioral finance has a long way. There's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shlomo_benartzi_saving_more_tomorrow
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"How can I speak in 10 minutes about the bonds of women over three generations, about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl huddled with her young sister, her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the China Sea more than 30 years ago. Bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go — that small girl now living in San Francisco and speaking to you today. This is not a finished story. It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together. Let me tell you about some of the pieces.Imagine the first piece: a man burning his life's work. He is a poet, a playwright, a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom. Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon — confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste. Words, for so long his friends, now mocked him. He retreated into silence. He died broken by history. He is my grandfather. I never knew him in real life. But our lives are much more than our memories. My grandmother never let me forget his life. My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain, and my lesson was to learn that, yes, history tried to crush us, but we endured.The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea. My mother, Mai, was 18 when her father died — already in an arranged marriage, already with two small girls. For her, life had distilled itself into one task: the escape of her family and a new life in Australia. It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed. So after a four-year saga that defies fiction, a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel. All the adults knew the risks. The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death. Like most adults on the boat, my mother carried a small bottle of poison. If we were captured, first my sister and I, then she and my grandmother would drink.My first memories are from the boat — the steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, the vast and empty horizon. I don't remember the pirates who came many times, but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat, or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours. But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died, the journey's end too much for him, and the first apple I tasted, given to me by the men on the rig. No apple has ever tasted the same.After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne. And the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together. We settled in Footscray, a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants. Unlike the settled middle-class suburbs, whose existence I was oblivious of, there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray. The smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world. And the snippets of halting English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common: They were starting again.My mother worked on farms, then on a car assembly line, working six days, double shifts. Somehow, she found time to study English and gain IT qualifications. We were poor. All the dollars were allocated and extra tuition in English and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out, which was usually new clothes; they were always secondhand. Two pairs of stockings for school, each to hide the holes in the other. A school uniform down to the ankles, because it had to last for six years. And there were rare but searing chants of ""slit-eye"" and the occasional graffiti: ""Asian, go home."" Go home to where? Something stiffened inside me. There was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying, ""I will bypass you.""My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed. My mother was exhausted each night, but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house. My mother suffered from nightmares, all about the boat. And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so I could wake her. She opened a computer store, then studied to be a beautician and opened another business. And the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition, angry and inflexible, and troubled children caught between two worlds.Grants and sponsors were sought. Centers were established. I lived in parallel worlds. In one, I was the classic Asian student, relentless in the demands that I made on myself. In the other, I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious, tragically scarred by violence, drug abuse and isolation. But so many over the years were helped. And for that work, when I was a final-year law student, I was chosen as the Young Australian of the Year. And I was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another, and their edges didn't fit.Tan Le, anonymous Footscray resident, was now Tan Le, refugee and social activist, invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined. I didn't know the protocols. I didn't know how to use the cutlery. I didn't know how to talk about wine. I didn't know how to talk about anything. I wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb — a grandmother, a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years, telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep, the three of us still in the same bed. I told my mother I couldn't do it. She reminded me that I was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat. ""No"" had never been an option. ""Just do it,"" she said, ""and don't be what you're not.""So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and disenfranchised. And the more candidly I spoke, the more I was asked to speak. I met people from all walks of life, so many of them doing the thing they loved, living on the frontiers of possibility. And even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law. There had to be another piece of the jigsaw. And I realized, at the same time, that it is OK to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene — and not just OK, but something to be thankful for, perhaps a gift from the boat. Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province. I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear.Possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged. There was an energy there, an implacable optimism, a strange mixture of humility and daring. So I followed my hunches. I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label ""It can't be done"" was an irresistible challenge. For a year, we were penniless. At the end of each day, I made a huge pot of soup which we all shared. We worked well into each night. Most of our ideas were crazy, but a few were brilliant, and we broke through. I made the decision to move to the US after only one trip. My hunches again. Three months later, I had relocated, and the adventure has continued.Before I close, though, let me tell you about my grandmother. She grew up at a time when Confucianism was the social norm and the local mandarin was the person who mattered. Life hadn't changed for centuries. Her father died soon after she was born. Her mother raised her alone. At 17, she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her. With no support from her husband, she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case, and a far greater sensation when she won.(Laughter)(Applause)""It can't be done"" was shown to be wrong.I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney the moment she died, 600 miles away, in Melbourne. I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side. I knew she had come to say goodbye. My mother phoned minutes later. A few days later, we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket. We told her stories and assured her that we were still with her. At midnight, the monk came and told us he had to close the casket. My mother asked us to feel her hand. She asked the monk, ""Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?"" ""Because you have been holding it since this morning,"" he said. ""You have not let it go.""If there is a sinew in our family, it runs through the women. Given who we were and how life had shaped us, we can now see that the men that might have come into our lives would have thwarted us. Defeat would have come too easily. Now I would like to have my own children, and I wonder about the boat. Who could ever wish it on their own? Yet I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement. Can I give them a bow in their lives, dipping bravely into each wave, the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine, the vast horizon that guarantees nothing? I don't know. But if I could give it and still see them safely through, I would.(Applause)Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today, in the fourth or fifth row.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_my_immigration_story
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"I'm a computer science professor, and my area of expertise is computer and information security. When I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to overhear my grandmother describing to one of her fellow senior citizens what I did for a living. Apparently, I was in charge of making sure that no one stole the computers from the university. (Laughter) And, you know, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for her to think, because I told her I was working in computer security, and it was interesting to get her perspective.But that's not the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say about my work. The most ridiculous thing I ever heard is, I was at a dinner party, and a woman heard that I work in computer security, and she asked me if — she said her computer had been infected by a virus, and she was very concerned that she might get sick from it, that she could get this virus. (Laughter) And I'm not a doctor, but I reassured her that it was very, very unlikely that this would happen, but if she felt more comfortable, she could be free to use latex gloves when she was on the computer, and there would be no harm whatsoever in that.I'm going to get back to this notion of being able to get a virus from your computer, in a serious way. What I'm going to talk to you about today are some hacks, some real world cyberattacks that people in my community, the academic research community, have performed, which I don't think most people know about, and I think they're very interesting and scary, and this talk is kind of a greatest hits of the academic security community's hacks. None of the work is my work. It's all work that my colleagues have done, and I actually asked them for their slides and incorporated them into this talk.So the first one I'm going to talk about are implanted medical devices. Now medical devices have come a long way technologically. You can see in 1926 the first pacemaker was invented. 1960, the first internal pacemaker was implanted, hopefully a little smaller than that one that you see there, and the technology has continued to move forward. In 2006, we hit an important milestone from the perspective of computer security. And why do I say that? Because that's when implanted devices inside of people started to have networking capabilities. One thing that brings us close to home is we look at Dick Cheney's device, he had a device that pumped blood from an aorta to another part of the heart, and as you can see at the bottom there, it was controlled by a computer controller, and if you ever thought that software liability was very important, get one of these inside of you.Now what a research team did was they got their hands on what's called an ICD. This is a defibrillator, and this is a device that goes into a person to control their heart rhythm, and these have saved many lives. Well, in order to not have to open up the person every time you want to reprogram their device or do some diagnostics on it, they made the thing be able to communicate wirelessly, and what this research team did is they reverse engineered the wireless protocol, and they built the device you see pictured here, with a little antenna, that could talk the protocol to the device, and thus control it. In order to make their experience real — they were unable to find any volunteers, and so they went and they got some ground beef and some bacon and they wrapped it all up to about the size of a human being's area where the device would go, and they stuck the device inside it to perform their experiment somewhat realistically. They launched many, many successful attacks. One that I'll highlight here is changing the patient's name. I don't know why you would want to do that, but I sure wouldn't want that done to me. And they were able to change therapies, including disabling the device — and this is with a real, commercial, off-the-shelf device — simply by performing reverse engineering and sending wireless signals to it.There was a piece on NPR that some of these ICDs could actually have their performance disrupted simply by holding a pair of headphones onto them.Now, wireless and the Internet can improve health care greatly. There's several examples up on the screen of situations where doctors are looking to implant devices inside of people, and all of these devices now, it's standard that they communicate wirelessly, and I think this is great, but without a full understanding of trustworthy computing, and without understanding what attackers can do and the security risks from the beginning, there's a lot of danger in this.Okay, let me shift gears and show you another target. I'm going to show you a few different targets like this, and that's my talk. So we'll look at automobiles.This is a car, and it has a lot of components, a lot of electronics in it today. In fact, it's got many, many different computers inside of it, more Pentiums than my lab did when I was in college, and they're connected by a wired network. There's also a wireless network in the car, which can be reached from many different ways. So there's Bluetooth, there's the FM and XM radio, there's actually wi-fi, there's sensors in the wheels that wirelessly communicate the tire pressure to a controller on board. The modern car is a sophisticated multi-computer device.And what happens if somebody wanted to attack this? Well, that's what the researchers that I'm going to talk about today did. They basically stuck an attacker on the wired network and on the wireless network. Now, they have two areas they can attack. One is short-range wireless, where you can actually communicate with the device from nearby, either through Bluetooth or wi-fi, and the other is long-range, where you can communicate with the car through the cellular network, or through one of the radio stations. Think about it. When a car receives a radio signal, it's processed by software. That software has to receive and decode the radio signal, and then figure out what to do with it, even if it's just music that it needs to play on the radio, and that software that does that decoding, if it has any bugs in it, could create a vulnerability for somebody to hack the car.The way that the researchers did this work is, they read the software in the computer chips that were in the car, and then they used sophisticated reverse engineering tools to figure out what that software did, and then they found vulnerabilities in that software, and then they built exploits to exploit those. They actually carried out their attack in real life. They bought two cars, and I guess they have better budgets than I do. The first threat model was to see what someone could do if an attacker actually got access to the internal network on the car. Okay, so think of that as, someone gets to go to your car, they get to mess around with it, and then they leave, and now, what kind of trouble are you in? The other threat model is that they contact you in real time over one of the wireless networks like the cellular, or something like that, never having actually gotten physical access to your car.This is what their setup looks like for the first model, where you get to have access to the car. They put a laptop, and they connected to the diagnostic unit on the in-car network, and they did all kinds of silly things, like here's a picture of the speedometer showing 140 miles an hour when the car's in park. Once you have control of the car's computers, you can do anything. Now you might say, ""Okay, that's silly."" Well, what if you make the car always say it's going 20 miles an hour slower than it's actually going? You might produce a lot of speeding tickets.Then they went out to an abandoned airstrip with two cars, the target victim car and the chase car, and they launched a bunch of other attacks. One of the things they were able to do from the chase car is apply the brakes on the other car, simply by hacking the computer. They were able to disable the brakes. They also were able to install malware that wouldn't kick in and wouldn't trigger until the car was doing something like going over 20 miles an hour, or something like that. The results are astonishing, and when they gave this talk, even though they gave this talk at a conference to a bunch of computer security researchers, everybody was gasping. They were able to take over a bunch of critical computers inside the car: the brakes computer, the lighting computer, the engine, the dash, the radio, etc., and they were able to perform these on real commercial cars that they purchased using the radio network. They were able to compromise every single one of the pieces of software that controlled every single one of the wireless capabilities of the car. All of these were implemented successfully.How would you steal a car in this model? Well, you compromise the car by a buffer overflow of vulnerability in the software, something like that. You use the GPS in the car to locate it. You remotely unlock the doors through the computer that controls that, start the engine, bypass anti-theft, and you've got yourself a car.Surveillance was really interesting. The authors of the study have a video where they show themselves taking over a car and then turning on the microphone in the car, and listening in on the car while tracking it via GPS on a map, and so that's something that the drivers of the car would never know was happening.Am I scaring you yet? I've got a few more of these interesting ones. These are ones where I went to a conference, and my mind was just blown, and I said, ""I have to share this with other people.""This was Fabian Monrose's lab at the University of North Carolina, and what they did was something intuitive once you see it, but kind of surprising. They videotaped people on a bus, and then they post-processed the video. What you see here in number one is a reflection in somebody's glasses of the smartphone that they're typing in. They wrote software to stabilize — even though they were on a bus and maybe someone's holding their phone at an angle — to stabilize the phone, process it, and you may know on your smartphone, when you type a password, the keys pop out a little bit, and they were able to use that to reconstruct what the person was typing, and had a language model for detecting typing. What was interesting is, by videotaping on a bus, they were able to produce exactly what people on their smartphones were typing, and then they had a surprising result, which is that their software had not only done it for their target, but other people who accidentally happened to be in the picture, they were able to produce what those people had been typing, and that was kind of an accidental artifact of what their software was doing.I'll show you two more. One is P25 radios. P25 radios are used by law enforcement and all kinds of government agencies and people in combat to communicate, and there's an encryption option on these phones. This is what the phone looks like. It's not really a phone. It's more of a two-way radio. Motorola makes the most widely used one, and you can see that they're used by Secret Service, they're used in combat, it's a very, very common standard in the U.S. and elsewhere. So one question the researchers asked themselves is, could you block this thing, right? Could you run a denial-of-service, because these are first responders? So, would a terrorist organization want to black out the ability of police and fire to communicate at an emergency? They found that there's this GirlTech device used for texting that happens to operate at the same exact frequency as the P25, and they built what they called My First Jammer. (Laughter) If you look closely at this device, it's got a switch for encryption or cleartext. Let me advance the slide, and now I'll go back. You see the difference? This is plain text. This is encrypted. There's one little dot that shows up on the screen, and one little tiny turn of the switch. And so the researchers asked themselves, ""I wonder how many times very secure, important, sensitive conversations are happening on these two-way radios where they forget to encrypt and they don't notice that they didn't encrypt?""So they bought a scanner. These are perfectly legal and they run at the frequency of the P25, and what they did is they hopped around frequencies and they wrote software to listen in. If they found encrypted communication, they stayed on that channel and they wrote down, that's a channel that these people communicate in, these law enforcement agencies, and they went to 20 metropolitan areas and listened in on conversations that were happening at those frequencies. They found that in every metropolitan area, they would capture over 20 minutes a day of cleartext communication. And what kind of things were people talking about? Well, they found the names and information about confidential informants. They found information that was being recorded in wiretaps, a bunch of crimes that were being discussed, sensitive information. It was mostly law enforcement and criminal. They went and reported this to the law enforcement agencies, after anonymizing it, and the vulnerability here is simply the user interface wasn't good enough. If you're talking about something really secure and sensitive, it should be really clear to you that this conversation is encrypted. That one's pretty easy to fix.The last one I thought was really, really cool, and I just had to show it to you, it's probably not something that you're going to lose sleep over like the cars or the defibrillators, but it's stealing keystrokes. Now, we've all looked at smartphones upside down. Every security expert wants to hack a smartphone, and we tend to look at the USB port, the GPS for tracking, the camera, the microphone, but no one up till this point had looked at the accelerometer. The accelerometer is the thing that determines the vertical orientation of the smartphone. And so they had a simple setup. They put a smartphone next to a keyboard, and they had people type, and then their goal was to use the vibrations that were created by typing to measure the change in the accelerometer reading to determine what the person had been typing. Now, when they tried this on an iPhone 3GS, this is a graph of the perturbations that were created by the typing, and you can see that it's very difficult to tell when somebody was typing or what they were typing, but the iPhone 4 greatly improved the accelerometer, and so the same measurement produced this graph. Now that gave you a lot of information while someone was typing, and what they did then is used advanced artificial intelligence techniques called machine learning to have a training phase, and so they got most likely grad students to type in a whole lot of things, and to learn, to have the system use the machine learning tools that were available to learn what it is that the people were typing and to match that up with the measurements in the accelerometer. And then there's the attack phase, where you get somebody to type something in, you don't know what it was, but you use your model that you created in the training phase to figure out what they were typing. They had pretty good success. This is an article from the USA Today. They typed in, ""The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that Rahm Emanuel is eligible to run for Mayor of Chicago"" — see, I tied it in to the last talk — ""and ordered him to stay on the ballot."" Now, the system is interesting, because it produced ""Illinois Supreme"" and then it wasn't sure. The model produced a bunch of options, and this is the beauty of some of the A.I. techniques, is that computers are good at some things, humans are good at other things, take the best of both and let the humans solve this one. Don't waste computer cycles. A human's not going to think it's the Supreme might. It's the Supreme Court, right? And so, together we're able to reproduce typing simply by measuring the accelerometer. Why does this matter? Well, in the Android platform, for example, the developers have a manifest where every device on there, the microphone, etc., has to register if you're going to use it so that hackers can't take over it, but nobody controls the accelerometer.So what's the point? You can leave your iPhone next to someone's keyboard, and just leave the room, and then later recover what they did, even without using the microphone. If someone is able to put malware on your iPhone, they could then maybe get the typing that you do whenever you put your iPhone next to your keyboard.There's several other notable attacks that unfortunately I don't have time to go into, but the one that I wanted to point out was a group from the University of Michigan which was able to take voting machines, the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs that were going to be used in New Jersey in the election that were left in a hallway, and put Pac-Man on it. So they ran the Pac-Man game.What does this all mean? Well, I think that society tends to adopt technology really quickly. I love the next coolest gadget. But it's very important, and these researchers are showing, that the developers of these things need to take security into account from the very beginning, and need to realize that they may have a threat model, but the attackers may not be nice enough to limit themselves to that threat model, and so you need to think outside of the box.What we can do is be aware that devices can be compromised, and anything that has software in it is going to be vulnerable. It's going to have bugs. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_hacked
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"Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos. It's true. So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters. We all want to be stars — celebrities, singers, comedians — and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do. But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture. Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday. But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment. So how does it happen? Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness. All right, let's go.(Video) Bear Vasquez: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Wooo! Ohhhhh, wowwww!KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park. In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times. (Laughter) This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer. But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear. He just wanted to share a rainbow. Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear. (Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact. And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January. So what happened here? Jimmy Kimmel actually. Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become. Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience.(Video) Rebecca Black: ♫ It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. ♫ ♫ Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. ♫ ♫ Friday, Friday. Gettin' down on Friday. ♫KA: So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope. Rebecca Black's ""Friday"" is one of the most popular videos of the year. It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year. This is a chart of what it looked like. And similar to ""Double Rainbow,"" it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere.So what happened on this day? Well it was a Friday, this is true. And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays. (Laughter) But what about this day, this one particular Friday? Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about. Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter. But what's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience, accelerating the process.And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it. And now there are 10,000 parodies of ""Friday"" on YouTube. Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week. (Laughter) Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon — either by spreading it or by doing something new with it.(Music)So ""Nyan Cat"" is a looped animation with looped music. It's this, just like this. It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year. And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times. (Laughter) Even cats were watching this video. (Laughter) Cats were watching other cats watch this video.(Laughter)But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture. There were remixes. (Laughter) Someone made an old timey version. (Laughter) And then it went international. (Laughter) An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of. Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate.And who could have predicted any of this? Who could have predicted ""Double Rainbow"" or Rebecca Black or ""Nyan Cat?"" What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it? In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have. When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested.(Video) Casey Niestat: So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane.(Laughter)KA: By being totally surprising and humorous, Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times. And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively. And so it all brings us to one big question ...(Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean? Ohhhh. (Laughter)KA: What does it mean? Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity. I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube. No one has to green-light your idea. And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture. And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_allocca_why_videos_go_viral
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"The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet. And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet Planet Ocean. And the oceans are hugely productive, as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis, the production of new life. In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe. In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth, and much of it we don't know about. But I'll tell you some of that today. That also doesn't even get into the whole protein extraction that we do from the ocean. That's about 10 percent of our global needs and 100 percent of some island nations.If you were to descend into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable, it would quickly become pitch black, interrupted only by pinpoints of light from bioluminescent organisms. And if you turn the lights on, you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by, because those are the denizens of the deep, the things that live in the deep ocean. And eventually, the deep sea floor would come into view. This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface than all other habitats combined. And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about this habitat, despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies.And so 10 years ago, an international program began called the Census of Marine Life, which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans. It involved 17 different projects around the world. As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects. And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage that it managed to achieve. It all began when two scientists, Fred Grassle and Jesse Ausubel, met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute. And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it. Well, from that discussion grew this program that involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries around the world who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions at a combined cost of 650 million dollars to study the distribution, diversity and abundance of life in the global ocean.And so what did we find? We found spectacular new species, the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked — from the shoreline to the abyss, form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between. And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life, but rather the taxonomic specialists who can identify and catalog these species that became the limiting step. They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves. There are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans. And as I say, it could be a much larger number.Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada — It's an island off the east coast of that continent — where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history. And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish. It's around 1900. Now, when I was a boy of about his age, I would go out fishing with my grandfather and we would catch fish about half that size. And I thought that was the norm, because I had never seen fish like this. If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed, if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge, it would be half that size still. So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines. Our expectations of what the oceans can produce is something that we don't really appreciate because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes.Now most of us, and I would say me included, think that human exploitation of the oceans really only became very serious in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so. The census actually tried to look back in time, using every source of information they could get their hands on. And so anything from restaurant menus to monastery records to ships' logs to see what the oceans looked like. Because science data really goes back to, at best, World War II, for the most part. And so what they found, in fact, is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans. And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration. So fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day. But the Romans developed salting. And with salting, it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances. And so began industrial fishing.And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have of what sort of loss we've had relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean. They range from 65 to 98 percent for these major groups of organisms, as shown in the dark blue bars. Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect — for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds — there is some recovery. So it's not all hopeless. But for the most part, we've gone from salting to exhausting.Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one. It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida. And so this is a photograph from the 1950s. I want you to notice the scale on the slide, because when you see the same picture from the 1980s, we see the fish are much smaller and we're also seeing a change in terms of the composition of those fish. By 2007, the catch was actually laughable in terms of the size for a trophy fish. But this is no laughing matter. The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we're responsible for it.So what's left? Actually quite a lot. There's a lot of exciting things, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them. And I want to start with a bit on technology, because, of course, this is a TED Conference and you want to hear something on technology. So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean are remotely operated vehicles. So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom. So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict. But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand, and I could tell the pilot, ""I want a sample right there."" And that's exactly what the pilot did for me. That's the sort of technology that's available today that really wasn't available even a decade ago. So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats that are very far from the surface and very far from light.And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans is acoustics, or sound waves. And the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light. And so we can send out sound waves, they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back. And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships. One would send out sound waves that would bounce back. They would be received by a second ship, and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case, of 250 billion herring in a period of about a minute. And that's an area about the size of Manhattan Island. And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool, because knowing how many fish are there is really critical.We can also use satellite tags to track animals as they move through the oceans. And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe, such as this elephant seal, it's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean. And so from that we can produce these tracks. For example, the dark blue shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific. Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful, but stick with me nonetheless.For animals that don't surface, we have something called pop-up tags, which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets. And then at some period of time it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore. Because GPS doesn't work under water. That's why we need these tools. And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways, these hot spots in the ocean, that should be real priority areas for ocean conservation.Now one of the other things that you may think about is that, when you go to the supermarket and you buy things, they're scanned. And so there's a barcode on that product that tells the computer exactly what the product is. Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding. And what barcoding does is use a specific gene called CO1 that's consistent within a species, but varies among species. And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify which species are which even if they look similar to each other, but may be biologically quite different.Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City, who worked with the census. They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City and they barcoded it. Well what they found was mislabeled fish. So for example, they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable, was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish. They also found an endangered species sold as a common one. So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with and also what we're eating.The Ocean Biogeographic Information System is the database for all the census data. It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish. And it contains all the data from the census plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute. And so what you can do with that is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans. What I've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand. This is where our sampling effort has concentrated. Now what you can see is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic, in the North Sea in particular, and also the east coast of North America fairly well. That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region. The cold colors, the blue and the black, show areas where we have almost no data. So even after a 10-year census, there are large areas that still remain unexplored.Now there are a group of scientists living in Texas, working in the Gulf of Mexico who decided really as a labor of love to pull together all the knowledge they could about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico. And so they put this together, a list of all the species, where they're known to occur, and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise. But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill. So all of a sudden, this labor of love for no obvious economic reason has become a critical piece of information in terms of how that system is going to recover, how long it will take and how the lawsuits and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years are likely to be resolved.So what did we find? Well, I could stand here for hours, but, of course, I'm not allowed to do that. But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries from the census. So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity? Where do we find the most species of ocean life? And what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution. And what we see is that for coastal tags, for those organisms that live near the shoreline, they're most diverse in the tropics. This is something we've actually known for a while, so it's not a real breakthrough.What is really exciting though is that the oceanic tags, or the ones that live far from the coast, are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes. This is the sort of data, again, that managers could use if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve. You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale. And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable.Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census are things that are small and hard to see, that certainly wasn't always the case. For example, while it's hard to believe that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists, it did until a few years ago when South African fishermen requested an export permit and scientists realized that this was something new to science. Similarly this Golden V kelp collected in Alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species. Even though it's three meters long, it actually, again, eluded science. Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length. But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it was a lot harder to find. But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things. This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp, it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago — at least it was, until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia. And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness, can hide secrets for a very long time. So, Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out.If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically. And so one of the records that we had was this sooty shearwater, which undergoes these spectacular migrations all the way from New Zealand all the way up to Alaska and back again in search of endless summer as they complete their life cycles. We also talked about the White Shark Cafe. This is a location in the Pacific where white shark converge. We don't know why they converge there, we simply don't know. That's a question for the future.One of the things that we're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive. Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size, not terribly charismatic. But it was only discovered in the early 1980s. But the really interesting thing about it is that, a few years ago, census scientists discovered that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments in the deep Mediterranean Sea. So now they know that, in fact, animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them, and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions.If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor. Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles and not much biomass in between. We found life in the extremes. And so there were new species that were found that live inside ice and help to support an ice-based food web.And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island. And this particular species really captured the public's attention. We also found the deepest vents known yet — 5,000 meters — the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius — vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic where none had been found before. So even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable.Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many. And I'm just going to summarize just a few of them very quickly for you. First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea? We actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean other than marine mammals. And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery how many more species we're likely to discover. And from that, we actually calculate that we know about 16,500 marine species and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go. So we've done pretty well. We've got about 75 percent of the fish, maybe as much as 90 percent. But the fishes, as I say, are the best known.So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms. Now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper that's going to come out in the journal PLoS Biology. And what is does is predict how many more species there are on land and in the ocean. And what they found is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean. That means 91 percent, even after the census, still remain to be discovered. And so that turns out to be about two million species once all is said and done. So we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns.Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile. And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece. And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye. But you can imagine the biomass that represents. But the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are. A single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes. And the oceans themselves are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types. So that's really exciting. What are they all doing out there? We actually don't know.The most exciting thing, I would say, about this census is the role of global science. And so as we see in this image of light during the night, there are lots of areas of the Earth where human development is much greater and other areas where it's much less, but between them we see large dark areas of relatively unexplored ocean. The other point I'd like to make about this is that this ocean's interconnected. Marine organisms do not care about international boundaries; they move where they will. And so the importance then of global collaboration becomes all the more important.We've lost a lot of paradise. For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea are now effectively gone. There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean, which collected more garbage than they did animals. And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be among the most pristine left on Earth. And there are a lot of other pressures. Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs. On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs.And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited, going through this litany of concerns about the ocean, but I want to end on a more positive note. And so the grand challenge then is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left, because there is still spectacular beauty. And the oceans are so productive, there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective, try to do better than we have in the past. So we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them.When we look at pictures like this, they take our breath away, in addition to helping to give us breath by the oxygen that the oceans provide. Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold, they worked under water and they worked above water trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery, the still vast unknown, the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life. So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile, whether you're a stockbroker in New York City or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh, the oceans matter. And as the oceans go so shall we.Thanks for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_snelgrove_a_census_of_the_ocean
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"I'm going to speak about a tiny, little idea. And this is about shifting baseline. And because the idea can be explained in one minute, I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time. And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes. And he was here, as you well know, in '35. And you'd think he was chasing finches, but he wasn't. He was actually collecting fish. And he described one of them as very ""common."" This was the sailfin grouper. A big fishery was run on it until the '80s. Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List. Now this story, we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places, so there is nothing particular about it. But the point is, we still come to Galapagos. We still think it is pristine. The brochures still say it is untouched. So what happens here?The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline. (Laughter) Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa. I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa. And I thought I could blend in. And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there. This was my first sunburn.And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove. And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia. And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana. When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size. They were maturing at five centimeters. They had been pushed genetically. There were still fishes. They were still kind of happy. And the fish also were happy to be there. So nothing has changed, but everything has changed.My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia. In the '70s — well, beginning in the '60s — Europe did lots of development projects. Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers to impose on them industrial fishing. And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4. And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea. And what we caught, we didn't have words for it. What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea. And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom. And actually most of the fish, they are a little spot on the debris, the piles of debris, were coral reef fish. Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down.And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid. Within a year, you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins. The bottom is transformed from, in this case, a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess. This is a dead turtle. They were not eaten, they were thrown away because they were dead. And one time we caught a live one. It was not drowned yet. And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat. This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that's never been fished. But it's not documented.We transform the world, but we don't remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there. If you generalize this, something like this happens. You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. And over time it changes — it changes because people do things, or naturally. Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were.Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn't know they had done so after a few generations. Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore they're not perceived as a big loss. Over time, we concentrate on large animals, and in a sea that means the big fish. They become rarer because we fish them. Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline.And the question is, why do people accept this? Well because they don't know that it was different. And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different. And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented. For example, the anecdote that some present, as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists, because it's not ""scientific."" So you have a situation where people don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past.And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play. Because with marine protected areas, we actually recreate the past. We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low. That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides, which enables them to reset their baseline.How about the people who can't do that because they have no access — the people in the Midwest for example? There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation. This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay. There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago — 500 years ago. And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like ""Avatar."" (Laughter) And if you think about ""Avatar,"" if you think of why people were so touched by it — never mind the Pocahontas story — why so touched by the imagery? Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost. And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do ""Avatar II"" underwater.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_pauly_the_ocean_s_shifting_baseline
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"(Applause)(Video) Announcer: Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked. Announcer Two: Famine in Somalia. Announcer Three: Police pepper spray. Announcer Four: Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines. Announcer Six: Societal decay. Announcer Seven: 65 dead. Announcer Eight: Tsunami warning. Announcer Nine: Cyberattacks. Multiple Announcers: Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado. Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria. Crisis. Death. Disaster. Oh, my God.Peter Diamandis: So those are just a few of the clips I collected over the last six months — could have easily been the last six days or the last six years. The point is that the news media preferentially feeds us negative stories because that's what our minds pay attention to. And there's a very good reason for that. Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala. Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news. And that old newspaper saying, ""If it bleeds it leads,"" is very true. So given all of our digital devices that are bringing all the negative news to us seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it's no wonder that we're pessimistic. It's no wonder that people think that the world is getting worse.But perhaps that's not the case. Perhaps instead, it's the distortions brought to us of what's really going on. Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made over the last century by a series of forces are, in fact, accelerating to a point that we have the potential in the next three decades to create a world of abundance. Now I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems — climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage — we surely do. And as humans, we are far better at seeing the problems way in advance, but ultimately we knock them down.So let's look at what this last century has been to see where we're going. Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled. Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10. Add to that the cost of food, electricity, transportation, communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold. Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years. We truly are living in an extraordinary time. And many people forget this.And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher. In fact, we redefine what poverty means. Think of this, in America today, the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars. The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet, could have never dreamed of such luxuries.Underpinning much of this is technology, and of late, exponentially growing technologies. My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law, and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months. That's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the '70s. Now look at this curve. This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years. I want you to notice two things from this curve. Number one, how smooth it is — through good time and bad time, war time and peace time, recession, depression and boom time. This is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers. It doesn't slow for any of our grand challenges. And also, even though it's plotted on a log curve on the left, it's curving upwards. The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster.And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law, are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies available to all of us. Cloud computing, what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing; sensors and networks; robotics; 3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute personalized production around the planet; synthetic biology; fuels, vaccines and foods; digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I. I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy by IBM's Watson? I mean, that was epic. In fact, I scoured the headlines looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could. And I love this: ""Watson Vanquishes Human Opponents."" Jeopardy's not an easy game. It's about the nuance of human language. And imagine if you would A.I.'s like this on the cloud available to every person with a cellphone.Four years ago here at TED, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university called Singularity University. And we teach our students all of these technologies, and particularly how they can be used to solve humanity's grand challenges. And every year we ask them to start a company or a product or a service that can affect positively the lives of a billion people within a decade. Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today. 30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous. Today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that.When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility. It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant. You see, scarcity is contextual, and technology is a resource-liberating force. Let me give you an example.So this is a story of Napoleon III in the mid-1800s. He's the dude on the left. He invited over to dinner the king of Siam. All of Napoleon's troops were fed with silver utensils, Napoleon himself with gold utensils. But the King of Siam, he was fed with aluminum utensils. You see, aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet, worth more than gold and platinum. It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum. You see, even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass, it doesn't come as a pure metal. It's all bound by oxygen and silicates. But then the technology of electrolysis came along and literally made aluminum so cheap that we use it with throw-away mentality.So let's project this analogy going forward. We think about energy scarcity. Ladies and gentlemen, we are on a planet that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy than we use in a year. 16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface every 88 minutes. It's not about being scarce, it's about accessibility. And there's good news here. For the first time, this year the cost of solar-generated electricity is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India — 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees. The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year. Last month, MIT put out a study showing that by the end of this decade, in the sunny parts of the United States, solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour compared to 15 cents as a national average.And if we have abundant energy, we also have abundant water. Now we talk about water wars. Do you remember when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft back towards the Earth, in 1990 after it just passed Saturn? He took a famous photo. What was it called? ""A Pale Blue Dot."" Because we live on a water planet. We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water. Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater, two percent is ice, and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet, but here too there is hope. And there is technology coming online, not 10, 20 years from now, right now. There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials.And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning, one of the great DIY innovators, I'd like to share with you — he gave me permission to do so — his technology called Slingshot that many of you may have heard of, it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator. It's able to generate a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day out of any source — saltwater, polluted water, latrine — at less than two cents a liter. The chairman of Coca-Cola has just agreed to do a major test of hundreds of units of this in the developing world. And if that pans out, which I have every confidence it will, Coca-Cola will deploy this globally to 206 countries around the planet. This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology, that exists today.And we've seen this in cellphones. My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013. Think about it, that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago. And if they're on a smartphone on Google, they've got access to more knowledge and information than President Clinton did 15 years ago. They're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted. Better than that, the things that you and I spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for — GPS, HD video and still images, libraries of books and music, medical diagnostic technology — are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing into your cellphone.Probably the best part of it is what's coming down the pike in health. Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing with Qualcomm Foundation something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. We're challenging teams around the world to basically combine these technologies into a mobile device that you can speak to, because it's got A.I., you can cough on it, you can do a finger blood prick. And to win, it needs to be able to diagnose you better than a team of board-certified doctors. So literally, imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors, 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers. When this device sequences an RNA or DNA virus that it doesn't recognize, it calls the CDC and prevents the pandemic from happening in the first place.But here, here is the biggest force for bringing about a world of abundance. I call it the rising billion. So the white lines here are population. We just passed the seven billion mark on Earth. And by the way, the biggest protection against a population explosion is making the world educated and healthy. In 2010, we had just short of two billion people online, connected. By 2020, that's going from two billion to five billion Internet users. Three billion new minds who have never been heard from before are connecting to the global conversation. What will these people want? What will they consume? What will they desire? And rather than having economic shutdown, we're about to have the biggest economic injection ever. These people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected into the global economy. And they will get healthier by using the Tricorder, and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy, and by literally being able to use 3D printing and infinite computing [become] more productive than ever before.So what could three billion rising, healthy, educated, productive members of humanity bring to us? How about a set of voices that have never been heard from before. What about giving the oppressed, wherever they might be, the voice to be heard and the voice to act for the first time ever? What will these three billion people bring? What about contributions we can't even predict? The one thing I've learned at the X Prize is that small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things, things that large corporations and governments could only do in the past.Let me share and close with a story that really got me excited. There is a program that some of you might have heard of. It's a game called Foldit. It came out of the University of Washington in Seattle. And this is a game where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids and figure out how the protein is going to fold. And how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality. And it's very important for research in medicine. And up until now, it's been a supercomputer problem.And this game has been played by university professors and so forth. And it's literally, hundreds of thousands of people came online and started playing it. And it showed that, in fact, today, the human pattern recognition machinery is better at folding proteins than the best computers. And when these individuals went and looked at who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn't an MIT professor, it wasn't a CalTech student, it was a person from England, from Manchester, a woman who, during the day, was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic and, at night, was the world's best protein folder.Ladies and gentlemen, what gives me tremendous confidence in the future is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals to take on the grand challenges of this planet. We have the tools with this exponential technology. We have the passion of the DIY innovator. We have the capital of the techno-philanthropist. And we have three billion new minds coming online to work with us to solve the grand challenges, to do that which we must do. We are living into extraordinary decades ahead.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future
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"Let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week, four words that will come to define this century. Here they are: The Earth is full. It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands. Yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we've created a little too much stuff — so much that our economy is now bigger than its host, our planet.This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion — that we're living beyond our means. The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example, calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50 percent more Earth than we've got. In financial terms, this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn, going further into debt every year. But of course, you can't borrow natural resources, so we're burning through our capital, or stealing from the future.So when I say full, I mean really full — well past any margin for error, well past any dispute about methodology. What this means is our economy is unsustainable. I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is. What I'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable. In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop. But that's not possible, you might think. We can't stop economic growth. Because that's what will stop: economic growth. It will stop because of the end of trade resources. It will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources, all the capacity, all the systems of the Earth, which is now having economic damage.When we think about economic growth stopping, we go, ""That's not possible,"" because economic growth is so essential to our society that is is rarely questioned. Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits, it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around. Even though it has delivered many benefits, it is based on a crazy idea — the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. And I'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes. That the crazy idea is just that, it is crazy, and with the Earth full, it's game over.Come on, you're thinking. That's not possible. Technology is amazing. People are innovative. There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things. We can surely sort this out. That's all true. Well, it's mostly true. We are certainly amazing, and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity. So if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth's capacity, we could do that. The problem is we're just warming up this growth engine. We plan to take this highly-stressed economy and make it twice as big and then make it four times as big — not in some distant future, but in less than 40 years, in the life time of most of you. China plans to be there in just 20 years. The only problem with this plan is that it's not possible.In response, some people argue, but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty. We need it to develop technology. We need it to keep social stability. I find this argument fascinating, as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs. It's like the Earth doesn't care what we need. Mother nature doesn't negotiate; she just sets rules and describes consequences. And these are not esoteric limits. This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives.So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient, solar-powered, knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion. It's not that it's not possible to feed, clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives. It certainly is. But the idea that we can gently grow there with a few minor hiccups is just wrong, and it's dangerously wrong, because it means we're not getting ready for what's really going to happen.See what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down. And that's what will happen to us. Many of you will be thinking, but surely we can still stop this. If it's that bad, we'll react. Let's just think through that idea. Now we've had 50 years of warnings. We've had science proving the urgency of change. We've had economic analysis pointing out that, not only can we afford it, it's cheaper to act early. And yet, the reality is we've done pretty much nothing to change course. We're not even slowing down. Last year on climate, for example, we had the highest global emissions ever. The story on food, on water, on soil, on climate is all much the same.I actually don't say this in despair. I've done my grieving about the loss. I accept where we are. It is sad, but it is what it is. But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we're not acting, we're not close to acting and we're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy. And that's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for.So when does this transition begin? When does this breakdown begin? In my view, it is well underway. I know most people don't see it that way. We tend to look at the world, not as the integrated system that it is, but as a series of individual issues. We see the Occupy protests, we see spiraling debt crises, we see growing inequality, we see money's influence on politics, we see resource constraint, food and oil prices. But we see, mistakenly, each of these issues as individual problems to be solved. In fact, it's the system in the painful process of breaking down — our system, of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth, is eating itself alive.I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this, but I won't because, if you want to see it, that evidence is all around you. I want to talk to you about fear. I want to do so because, in my view, the most important issue we face is how we respond to this question. The crisis is now inevitable. This issue is, how will we react? Of course, we can't know what will happen. The future is inherently uncertain.But let's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen. Imagine our economy when the carbon bubble bursts, when the financial markets recognize that, to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control, the oil and coal industries are finished. Imagine China, India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water. Imagine the Middle East without oil income, but with collapsing governments. Imagine our highly-tuned, just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying. Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty.Now imagine what that means for you, your family, your friends, your personal financial security. Imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen. Imagine what you'll tell your children when they ask you, ""So, in 2012, Mom and Dad, what was it like when you'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row, when every scientific body in the world was saying you've got a major problem, when the oceans were acidifying, when oil and food prices were spiking, when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street? When the system was so clearly breaking down, Mom and Dad, what did you do, what were you thinking?""So how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind, when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges? Just take a moment and take a breath and think, what do you feel at this point? Perhaps denial. Perhaps anger. Maybe fear. Of course, we can't know what's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty. But when we think about the kind of possibilities I paint, we should feel a bit of fear.We are in danger, all of us, and we've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat. But this time it's not a tiger at the cave mouth. You can't see the danger at your door. But if you look, you can see it at the door of your civilization. That's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on, because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide. If we feel it now and think it through, we will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Yes, things will get ugly, and it will happen soon — certainly in our lifetime — but we are more than capable of getting through everything that's coming.You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right. The only thing they're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going. When we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things. Think about war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry, and from there to rationing of food and energy. Think about how a company responds to a bankruptcy threat and how a change that seemed impossible just gets done. Think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy.We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. And the good news, this one's a monster. (Laughter) Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead. And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that?There's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way. Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades. I wanted to know what that would take, so I worked with professor Jorgen Randers from Norway to find the answer. We developed a plan called ""The One Degree War Plan"" — so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required. To my surprise, eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap, not very cheap, but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization. We didn't calculate that precisely, but we understand that's very expensive. You can read the details, but in summary, we can transform our economy. We can do it with proven technology. We can do it at an affordable cost. We can do it with existing political structures. The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel. And this is where you come in.When we think about the future I paint, of course we should feel a bit of fear. But fear can be paralyzing or motivating. We need to accept the fear and then we need to act. We need to act like the future depends on it. We need to act like we only have one planet. We can do this. I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do. They're wrong. We can be more, we can be much more. We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago. We've built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology — more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives. The Earth can support that if we choose the right path.We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution — like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality? Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered. Like generations before us, we'll be growing up in war — not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age.We can choose life over fear. We can do what we need to do, but it will take every entrepreneur, every artist, every scientist, every communicator, every mother, every father, every child, every one of us. This could be our finest hour.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_gilding_the_earth_is_full
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"Good morning. I'm here today to talk about autonomous flying beach balls.(Laughter)No, agile aerial robots like this one. I'd like to tell you a little bit about the challenges in building these, and some of the terrific opportunities for applying this technology. So these robots are related to unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the vehicles you see here are big. They weigh thousands of pounds, are not by any means agile. They're not even autonomous. In fact, many of these vehicles are operated by flight crews that can include multiple pilots, operators of sensors, and mission coordinators.What we're interested in is developing robots like this — and here are two other pictures — of robots that you can buy off the shelf. So these are helicopters with four rotors, and they're roughly a meter or so in scale, and weigh several pounds. And so we retrofit these with sensors and processors, and these robots can fly indoors. Without GPS.The robot I'm holding in my hand is this one, and it's been created by two students, Alex and Daniel. So this weighs a little more than a tenth of a pound. It consumes about 15 watts of power. And as you can see, it's about eight inches in diameter. So let me give you just a very quick tutorial on how these robots work.So it has four rotors. If you spin these rotors at the same speed, the robot hovers. If you increase the speed of each of these rotors, then the robot flies up, it accelerates up. Of course, if the robot were tilted, inclined to the horizontal, then it would accelerate in this direction. So to get it to tilt, there's one of two ways of doing it. So in this picture, you see that rotor four is spinning faster and rotor two is spinning slower. And when that happens, there's a moment that causes this robot to roll. And the other way around, if you increase the speed of rotor three and decrease the speed of rotor one, then the robot pitches forward.And then finally, if you spin opposite pairs of rotors faster than the other pair, then the robot yaws about the vertical axis. So an on-board processor essentially looks at what motions need to be executed and combines these motions, and figures out what commands to send to the motors — 600 times a second. That's basically how this thing operates.So one of the advantages of this design is when you scale things down, the robot naturally becomes agile. So here, R is the characteristic length of the robot. It's actually half the diameter. And there are lots of physical parameters that change as you reduce R. The one that's most important is the inertia, or the resistance to motion. So it turns out the inertia, which governs angular motion, scales as a fifth power of R. So the smaller you make R, the more dramatically the inertia reduces. So as a result, the angular acceleration, denoted by the Greek letter alpha here, goes as 1 over R. It's inversely proportional to R. The smaller you make it, the more quickly you can turn.So this should be clear in these videos. On the bottom right, you see a robot performing a 360-degree flip in less than half a second. Multiple flips, a little more time. So here the processes on board are getting feedback from accelerometers and gyros on board, and calculating, like I said before, commands at 600 times a second, to stabilize this robot. So on the left, you see Daniel throwing this robot up into the air, and it shows you how robust the control is. No matter how you throw it, the robot recovers and comes back to him.So why build robots like this? Well, robots like this have many applications. You can send them inside buildings like this, as first responders to look for intruders, maybe look for biochemical leaks, gaseous leaks. You can also use them for applications like construction. So here are robots carrying beams, columns and assembling cube-like structures. I'll tell you a little bit more about this. The robots can be used for transporting cargo. So one of the problems with these small robots is their payload-carrying capacity. So you might want to have multiple robots carry payloads. This is a picture of a recent experiment we did — actually not so recent anymore — in Sendai, shortly after the earthquake. So robots like this could be sent into collapsed buildings, to assess the damage after natural disasters, or sent into reactor buildings, to map radiation levels.So one fundamental problem that the robots have to solve if they are to be autonomous, is essentially figuring out how to get from point A to point B. So this gets a little challenging, because the dynamics of this robot are quite complicated. In fact, they live in a 12-dimensional space. So we use a little trick. We take this curved 12-dimensional space, and transform it into a flat, four-dimensional space. And that four-dimensional space consists of X, Y, Z, and then the yaw angle.And so what the robot does, is it plans what we call a minimum-snap trajectory. So to remind you of physics: You have position, derivative, velocity; then acceleration; and then comes jerk, and then comes snap. So this robot minimizes snap. So what that effectively does, is produce a smooth and graceful motion. And it does that avoiding obstacles. So these minimum-snap trajectories in this flat space are then transformed back into this complicated 12-dimensional space, which the robot must do for control and then execution.So let me show you some examples of what these minimum-snap trajectories look like. And in the first video, you'll see the robot going from point A to point B, through an intermediate point.(Whirring noise)So the robot is obviously capable of executing any curve trajectory. So these are circular trajectories, where the robot pulls about two G's. Here you have overhead motion capture cameras on the top that tell the robot where it is 100 times a second. It also tells the robot where these obstacles are. And the obstacles can be moving. And here, you'll see Daniel throw this hoop into the air, while the robot is calculating the position of the hoop, and trying to figure out how to best go through the hoop. So as an academic, we're always trained to be able to jump through hoops to raise funding for our labs, and we get our robots to do that.(Applause)So another thing the robot can do is it remembers pieces of trajectory that it learns or is pre-programmed. So here, you see the robot combining a motion that builds up momentum, and then changes its orientation and then recovers. So it has to do this because this gap in the window is only slightly larger than the width of the robot. So just like a diver stands on a springboard and then jumps off it to gain momentum, and then does this pirouette, this two and a half somersault through and then gracefully recovers, this robot is basically doing that. So it knows how to combine little bits and pieces of trajectories to do these fairly difficult tasks.So I want change gears. So one of the disadvantages of these small robots is its size. And I told you earlier that we may want to employ lots and lots of robots to overcome the limitations of size. So one difficulty is: How do you coordinate lots of these robots? And so here, we looked to nature. So I want to show you a clip of Aphaenogaster desert ants, in Professor Stephen Pratt's lab, carrying an object. So this is actually a piece of fig. Actually you take any object coated with fig juice, and the ants will carry it back to the nest. So these ants don't have any central coordinator. They sense their neighbors. There's no explicit communication. But because they sense the neighbors and because they sense the object, they have implicit coordination across the group.So this is the kind of coordination we want our robots to have. So when we have a robot which is surrounded by neighbors — and let's look at robot I and robot J — what we want the robots to do, is to monitor the separation between them, as they fly in formation. And then you want to make sure that this separation is within acceptable levels. So again, the robots monitor this error and calculate the control commands 100 times a second, which then translates into motor commands, 600 times a second. So this also has to be done in a decentralized way. Again, if you have lots and lots of robots, it's impossible to coordinate all this information centrally fast enough in order for the robots to accomplish the task. Plus, the robots have to base their actions only on local information — what they sense from their neighbors. And then finally, we insist that the robots be agnostic to who their neighbors are. So this is what we call anonymity.So what I want to show you next is a video of 20 of these little robots, flying in formation. They're monitoring their neighbors' positions. They're maintaining formation. The formations can change. They can be planar formations, they can be three-dimensional formations. As you can see here, they collapse from a three-dimensional formation into planar formation. And to fly through obstacles, they can adapt the formations on the fly. So again, these robots come really close together. As you can see in this figure-eight flight, they come within inches of each other. And despite the aerodynamic interactions with these propeller blades, they're able to maintain stable flight.(Applause)So once you know how to fly in formation, you can actually pick up objects cooperatively. So this just shows that we can double, triple, quadruple the robots' strength, by just getting them to team with neighbors, as you can see here. One of the disadvantages of doing that is, as you scale things up — so if you have lots of robots carrying the same thing, you're essentially increasing the inertia, and therefore you pay a price; they're not as agile. But you do gain in terms of payload-carrying capacity.Another application I want to show you — again, this is in our lab. This is work done by Quentin Lindsey, who's a graduate student. So his algorithm essentially tells these robots how to autonomously build cubic structures from truss-like elements. So his algorithm tells the robot what part to pick up, when, and where to place it. So in this video you see — and it's sped up 10, 14 times — you see three different structures being built by these robots. And again, everything is autonomous, and all Quentin has to do is to give them a blueprint of the design that he wants to build.So all these experiments you've seen thus far, all these demonstrations, have been done with the help of motion-capture systems. So what happens when you leave your lab, and you go outside into the real world? And what if there's no GPS? So this robot is actually equipped with a camera, and a laser rangefinder, laser scanner. And it uses these sensors to build a map of the environment. What that map consists of are features — like doorways, windows, people, furniture — and it then figures out where its position is, with respect to the features. So there is no global coordinate system. The coordinate system is defined based on the robot, where it is and what it's looking at. And it navigates with respect to those features.So I want to show you a clip of algorithms developed by Frank Shen and Professor Nathan Michael, that shows this robot entering a building for the very first time, and creating this map on the fly. So the robot then figures out what the features are, it builds the map, it figures out where it is with respect to the features, and then estimates its position 100 times a second, allowing us to use the control algorithms that I described to you earlier. So this robot is actually being commanded remotely by Frank, but the robot can also figure out where to go on its own. So suppose I were to send this into a building, and I had no idea what this building looked like. I can ask this robot to go in, create a map, and then come back and tell me what the building looks like. So here, the robot is not only solving the problem of how to go from point A to point B in this map, but it's figuring out what the best point B is at every time. So essentially it knows where to go to look for places that have the least information, and that's how it populates this map.So I want to leave you with one last application. And there are many applications of this technology. I'm a professor, and we're passionate about education. Robots like this can really change the way we do K-12 education. But we're in Southern California, close to Los Angeles, so I have to conclude with something focused on entertainment. I want to conclude with a music video. I want to introduce the creators, Alex and Daniel, who created this video.(Applause)So before I play this video, I want to tell you that they created it in the last three days, after getting a call from Chris. And the robots that play in the video are completely autonomous. You will see nine robots play six different instruments. And of course, it's made exclusively for TED 2012. Let's watch.(Sound of air escaping from valve)(Music)(Whirring sound)(Music)(Applause) (Cheers)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_cooperate
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"When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better.(Laughter)I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.(Laughter)Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: ""R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie.""(Laughter)Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly.(Laughter)But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, ""Why are you being so mellow?"" — mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it — all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A third to a half of the population are introverts — a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or three people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now — all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time — these things aren't absolute — but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks — four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research.(Laughter)Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks — which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface.Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right.Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other.And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating — and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer — but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So, no wilderness, no revelations.This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing.And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. So —(Laughter)You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the ""man"" of contemplation. But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like ""Character, the Grandest Thing in the World."" And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him ""A man who does not offend by superiority.""But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like ""How to Win Friends and Influence People."" And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that's the world we're living in today. That's our cultural inheritance.Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems.So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. Guess what? Books. I have a suitcase full of books. Here's Margaret Atwood, ""Cat's Eye."" Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. And here's ""The Guide for the Perplexed"" by Maimonides. But these are not exactly my books. I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors.My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak.But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted — so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way.So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion.(Laughter)And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu.So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. And I call this my ""year of speaking dangerously.""(Laughter)And that actually helped a lot. But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. I mean, we are. And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision.Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions — you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. School, same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part.Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry.So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts
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"Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there's a great deal of hopelessness. And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity. And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world. And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't.And I mention that because I think identity is really important. And we've had some fantastic presentations. And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful. If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things. And so I want to talk about the power of identity. And I didn't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do. I actually learned about this from my grandmother.I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. She was the end of every argument in our family. She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's. She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world.And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving. When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs. And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go. And an hour or two later, if I saw her, she'd come over to me and she'd say, ""Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?"" And if I said, ""No,"" she'd assault me again, and if I said, ""Yes,"" she'd leave me alone. And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her. And the only challenge was that she had 10 children. My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids. And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention. My cousins would be running around everywhere.And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around. And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me. And at first I thought we were playing a game. And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious. And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this, she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said, ""Come on, Bryan. You and I are going to have a talk."" And I remember this just like it happened yesterday. I never will forget it.She took me out back and she said, ""Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you don't tell anybody what I tell you."" I said, ""Okay, Mama."" She said, ""Now you make sure you don't do that."" I said, ""Sure."" Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, ""I want you to know I've been watching you."" And she said, ""I think you're special."" She said, ""I think you can do anything you want to do."" I will never forget it.And then she said, ""I just need you to promise me three things, Bryan."" I said, ""Okay, Mama."" She said, ""The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom."" She said, ""That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her."" Well I adored my mom, so I said, ""Yes, Mama. I'll do that."" Then she said, ""The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing."" And I thought about it and I said, ""Yes, Mama. I'll do that."" Then finally she said, ""The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol."" (Laughter) Well I was nine years old, so I said, ""Yes, Mama. I'll do that.""I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger. When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer — I don't know where he got it — and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. I said, ""No, no, no. That's okay. You all go ahead. I'm not going to have any beer."" My brother said, ""Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do. I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer."" I said, ""No, I don't feel right about that. Y'all go ahead. Y'all go ahead."" And then my brother started staring at me. He said, ""What's wrong with you? Have some beer."" Then he looked at me real hard and he said, ""Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you."" (Laughter) I said, ""Well, what are you talking about?"" He said, ""Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special."" (Laughter) I was devastated.(Laughter)And I'm going to admit something to you. I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. I know this might be broadcast broadly. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol. (Applause) I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity. When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do. When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special. My grandfather was in prison during prohibition. My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases. And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to.Well I've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. Today, there are 2.3 million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have seven million people on probation and parole. And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world. In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes. One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. In urban communities across this country — Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington — 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole.Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty. We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes. And yet, we seem to be very comfortable. The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems. We've been disconnected.It's interesting to me. We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work. My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction. Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And there is this stunning silence.I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young. The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. And we're actually doing some litigation. The only country in the world.I represent people on death row. It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill? I mean, it's fascinating.Death penalty in America is defined by error. For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. A kind of astonishing error rate — one out of nine people innocent. I mean, it's fascinating. In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. It's not our problem. It's not our burden. It's not our struggle.I talk a lot about these issues. I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery. I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. We don't really know very much about it. But for African-Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. They had to worry about being bombed. It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. And these older people come up to me now and they say, ""Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11."" They tell me to say, ""No, tell them that we grew up with that."" And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid.And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. We don't like to talk about our history. And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. We're constantly running into each other. We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that.I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, ""Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about."" He said, ""We don't have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany."" And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, ""There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people."" And I thought about that. What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? I couldn't bear it. It would be unconscionable.And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people — where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white — in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. And yet, there is this disconnect.Well I believe that our identity is at risk. That when we actually don't care about these difficult things, the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated. We love innovation. We love technology. We love creativity. We love entertainment. But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization. And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two. Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world. And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED. But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives.You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen. We do. As rational as we are, as committed to intellect as we are. Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone. They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart. And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things. Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this. He said, ""When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness.""Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in. There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, to exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this. It will get to you.I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott — amazing African-American woman — and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. And these women would get together and just talk.And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she'd say, ""Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We're going to get together and talk. Do you want to come over and listen?"" And I'd say, ""Yes, Ma'am, I do."" And she'd say, ""Well what are you going to do when you get here?"" I said, ""I'm going to listen."" And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen. It would be so energizing and so empowering.And one time I was over there listening to these women talk, and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, ""Now Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. Tell me what you're trying to do."" And I began giving her my rap. I said, ""Well we're trying to challenge injustice. We're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted. We're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice. We're trying to end life without parole sentences for children. We're trying to do something about the death penalty. We're trying to reduce the prison population. We're trying to end mass incarceration.""I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished she looked at me and she said, ""Mmm mmm mmm."" She said, ""That's going to make you tired, tired, tired."" (Laughter) And that's when Ms. Carr leaned forward, she put her finger in my face, she said, ""That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave.""And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. It's just taught me very simple things. I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are.I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story. I sometimes push too hard. I do get tired, as we all do. Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important. And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences. And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult. I start thinking, well, how did that happen? How can a judge turn you into something that you're not? And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid.And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. You should ask for some of that. And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: ""Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive.""(Applause)And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct. There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct. And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it? And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court.(Applause)A couple months went by, and I had just forgotten all about it. And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case. And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed — overwhelmed. And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse. And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful. And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse.And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse. When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, ""Who are you?"" I said, ""I'm a lawyer."" He said, ""You're a lawyer?"" I said, ""Yes, sir."" And this man came over to me and he hugged me. And he whispered in my ear. He said, ""I'm so proud of you."" And I have to tell you, it was energizing. It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful.Well I went into the courtroom. And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in. He said, ""Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?"" I said, ""Yes, sir. I did."" And we started arguing. And people started coming in because they were just outraged. I had written these crazy things. And police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers. And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality.And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth. And he kept looking through the window, and he could hear all of this holler. He kept pacing back and forth. And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table. About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break. And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court. And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. He said, ""Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?"" And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, ""I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.""I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue. Other than writing a check, what could we do?BS: Well there are opportunities all around us. If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment. For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years — one billion dollars. And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest. 56 percent of all rape cases don't result. So there's an opportunity to change that. And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety. And I think that opportunity exists all around us.CA: There's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades. And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates. What would you say to someone who believed that?BS: Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable. The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories. It was this misguided war on drugs. That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population. And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment. And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized. I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less. And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one. And I think that's the orientation that we have to change.(Applause)CA: Bryan, you've struck a massive chord here. You're an inspiring person. Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice
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"A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, ""You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No."" Points out the window. ""You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands. Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No."" Points out the window. ""You see that pier on the lake out there? I built that pier with my bare hands. Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. But you fuck one goat ... ""(Laughter)Storytelling — (Laughter) is joke telling. It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, ""Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story."" And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is ""Make me care"" — please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it's like to not care. You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. That's not by chance, that's by design.So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter? And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning. And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story.And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012. The film is ""John Carter."" It's based on a book called ""The Princess of Mars,"" which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, ""See me at once."" But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property.(Video) Butler: You won't find a keyhole. Thing only opens from the inside. He insisted, no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. You don't acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? Come, let's go inside.AS: What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. You could do it an infinite amount of ways. Sometimes it's as simple as ""Once upon a time ... "" These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, ""Here, let me tell you a story. It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time."" A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end.In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project.(Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter)AS: Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. And it's like a magnet. We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in.I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on ""Finding Nemo."" And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable.I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. And I learned a key insight to character. She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch. She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in ""The Godfather,"" and that probably his spine was to please his father. And it's something that always drove all his choices. Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch. I took to this like a duck to water. Wall-E's was to find the beauty. Marlin's, the father in ""Finding Nemo,"" was to prevent harm. And Woody's was to do what was best for his child. And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices. Sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them.I'm really blessed to be a parent, and watching my children grow, I really firmly believe that you're born with a temperament and you're wired a certain way, and you don't have any say about it, and there's no changing it. All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative. But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. As parents, you're always learning who your children are. They're learning who they are. And you're still learning who you are. So we're all learning all the time. And that's why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die, because life is never static.In 1998, I had finished writing ""Toy Story"" and ""A Bug's Life"" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could. And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: ""Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty."" It's an incredibly insightful definition.When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? An example would be in ""Finding Nemo,"" in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean?In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was ""The Little Mermaid,"" ""Beauty and the Beast,"" ""Aladdin,"" ""Lion King."" So when we pitched ""Toy Story"" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, ""You don't want me to sing, do you?"" And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation.We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. And they were: No songs, no ""I want"" moment, no happy village, no love story. And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. And we got a hold of that fax. And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an ""I want"" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. And a year after that, we did conquer it. And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules.Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. And we had naively thought, well Woody in ""Toy Story"" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace. So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get.(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing? Off the bed. Hey, off the bed! Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody? Woody: No, he is. Slinky? Slink ... Slinky! Get up here and do your job. Are you deaf? I said, take care of them. Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. I don't think what you did was right. Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly? You don't think I was right? Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener?AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. After that, all bets are off. And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story.In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. And that was the year that they restored and re-released ""Lawrence of Arabia."" And I saw that thing seven times in one month. I couldn't get enough of it. I could just tell there was a grand design under it — in every shot, every scene, every line. Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it.(Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Cyclist: Who are you? Who are you?AS: That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked. And this is what my mother took me to when I was five.(Video) Thumper: Come on. It's all right. Look. The water's stiff. Bambi: Yippee! Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi? Come on. Get up. Like this. Ha ha. No, no, no.AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder. And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling — to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. Do unto others what's been done to you. The best stories infuse wonder.When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair. And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, ""He's not going to live."" And I was in the hospital for months. And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.I don't know if I really believe that. I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong. Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given.(Video) (Crying) Marlin: There, there, there. It's okay, daddy's here. Daddy's got you. I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo.AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story
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"What do I know that would cause me, a reticent, Midwestern scientist, to get myself arrested in front of the White House protesting? And what would you do if you knew what I know? Let's start with how I got to this point. I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university.And I was really lucky to go to the University of Iowa where I could study under Professor James Van Allen who built instruments for the first U.S. satellites. Professor Van Allen told me about observations of Venus, that there was intense microwave radiation. Did it mean that Venus had an ionosphere? Or was Venus extremely hot? The right answer, confirmed by the Soviet Venera spacecraft, was that Venus was very hot — 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was kept hot by a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere.I was fortunate to join NASA and successfully propose an experiment to fly to Venus. Our instrument took this image of the veil of Venus, which turned out to be a smog of sulfuric acid. But while our instrument was being built, I became involved in calculations of the greenhouse effect here on Earth, because we realized that our atmospheric composition was changing. Eventually, I resigned as principal investigator on our Venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important. Its changes will affect all of humanity.The greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century. British physicist John Tyndall, in the 1850's, made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation, which is heat. And he showed that gasses such as CO2 absorb heat, thus acting like a blanket warming Earth's surface.I worked with other scientists to analyze Earth climate observations. In 1981, we published an article in Science magazine concluding that observed warming of 0.4 degrees Celsius in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2. That Earth would likely warm in the 1980's, and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century. We also said that the 21st century would see shifting climate zones, creation of drought-prone regions in North America and Asia, erosion of ice sheets, rising sea levels and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage. All of these impacts have since either happened or are now well under way.That paper was reported on the front page of the New York Times and led to me testifying to Congress in the 1980's, testimony in which I emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the Earth's water cycle. Heatwaves and droughts on one hand, directly from the warming, but also, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy, rainfall will become in more extreme events. There will be stronger storms and greater flooding. Global warming hoopla became time-consuming and distracted me from doing science — partly because I had complained that the White House altered my testimony. So I decided to go back to strictly doing science and leave the communication to others.By 15 years later, evidence of global warming was much stronger. Most of the things mentioned in our 1981 paper were facts. I had the privilege to speak twice to the president's climate task force. But energy policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels. By then we had two grandchildren, Sophie and Connor. I decided that I did not want them in the future to say, ""Opa understood what was happening, but he didn't make it clear."" So I decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy.I gave the talk at the University of Iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters. After I informed the New York Times about these restrictions, NASA was forced to end the censorship. But there were consequences. I had been using the first line of the NASA mission statement, ""To understand and protect the home planet,"" to justify my talks. Soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted, never to appear again.Over the next few years I was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies, while still researching the physics of climate change. Let me describe the most important conclusion from the physics — first, from Earth's energy balance and, second, from Earth's climate history.Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed. It reduces Earth's heat radiation to space, so there's a temporary energy imbalance. More energy is coming in than going out, until Earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the Sun. So the key quantity is Earth's energy imbalance. Is there more energy coming in than going out? If so, more warming is in the pipeline. It will occur without adding any more greenhouse gasses.Now finally, we can measure Earth's energy imbalance precisely by measuring the heat content in Earth's heat reservoirs. The biggest reservoir, the ocean, was the least well measured, until more than 3,000 Argo floats were distributed around the world's ocean. These floats reveal that the upper half of the ocean is gaining heat at a substantial rate. The deep ocean is also gaining heat at a smaller rate, and energy is going into the net melting of ice all around the planet. And the land, to depths of tens of meters, is also warming.The total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter. That may not sound like much, but when added up over the whole world, it's enormous. It's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity. It's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year. That's how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day. This imbalance, if we want to stabilize climate, means that we must reduce CO2 from 391 ppm, parts per million, back to 350 ppm. That is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming.Climate change deniers argue that the Sun is the main cause of climate change. But the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record, when the Sun's energy reaching Earth was least. Yet, there was more energy coming in than going out. This shows that the effect of the Sun's variations on climate is overwhelmed by the increasing greenhouse gasses, mainly from burning fossil fuels.Now consider Earth's climate history. These curves for global temperature, atmospheric CO2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and Antarctic ice cores, from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two-mile thick ice sheet. As you see, there's a high correlation between temperature, CO2 and sea level. Careful examination shows that the temperature changes slightly lead the CO2 changes by a few centuries. Climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying, ""Look, the temperature causes CO2 to change, not vice versa."" But that lag is exactly what is expected.Small changes in Earth's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on Earth. When there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer, ice sheets melt. Shrinking ice sheets make the planet darker, so it absorbs more sunlight and becomes warmer. A warmer ocean releases CO2, just as a warm Coca-Cola does. And more CO2 causes more warming. So CO2, methane, and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge, even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing.The important point is that these same amplifying feedbacks will occur today. The physics does not change. As Earth warms, now because of extra CO2 we put in the atmosphere, ice will melt, and CO2 and methane will be released by warming ocean and melting permafrost. While we can't say exactly how fast these amplifying feedbacks will occur, it is certain they will occur, unless we stop the warming. There is evidence that feedbacks are already beginning. Precise measurements by GRACE, the gravity satellite, reveal that both Greenland and Antarctica are now losing mass, several hundred cubic kilometers per year. And the rate has accelerated since the measurements began nine years ago. Methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost.What sea level rise can we look forward to? The last time CO2 was 390 ppm, today's value, sea level was higher by at least 15 meters, 50 feet. Where you are sitting now would be under water. Most estimates are that, this century, we will get at least one meter. I think it will be more if we keep burning fossil fuels, perhaps even five meters, which is 18 feet, this century or shortly thereafter.The important point is that we will have started a process that is out of humanity's control. Ice sheets would continue to disintegrate for centuries. There would be no stable shoreline. The economic consequences are almost unthinkable. Hundreds of New Orleans-like devastations around the world. What may be more reprehensible, if climate denial continues, is extermination of species. The monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use.Global warming is already affecting people. The Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico heatwave and drought last year, Moscow the year before and Europe in 2003, were all exceptional events, more than three standard deviations outside the norm. Fifty years ago, such anomalies covered only two- to three-tenths of one percent of the land area. In recent years, because of global warming, they now cover about 10 percent — an increase by a factor of 25 to 50. So we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe Texas and Moscow heatwaves were not natural; they were caused by global warming. An important impact, if global warming continues, will be on the breadbasket of our nation and the world, the Midwest and Great Plains, which are expected to become prone to extreme droughts, worse than the Dust Bowl, within just a few decades, if we let global warming continue.How did I get dragged deeper and deeper into an attempt to communicate, giving talks in 10 countries, getting arrested, burning up the vacation time that I had accumulated over 30 years? More grandchildren helped me along. Jake is a super-positive, enthusiastic boy. Here at age two and a half years, he thinks he can protect his two and a half-day-old little sister. It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control.Now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple, honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis, with the government not keeping one dime. Most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they'd pay in increased prices. This fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations, creating millions of jobs. It is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future.Several top economists are coauthors on this proposition. Jim DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Protection describes it thusly: ""Transparent. Market-based. Does not enlarge government. Leaves energy decisions to individual choices. Sounds like a conservative climate plan.""But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society, our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide, thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel — mountaintop removal, longwall mining, fracking, tar sands, tar shale, deep ocean Arctic drilling. This path, if continued, guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations. A large fraction of species will be committed to extinction. And increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline. Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth.That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet, we dither, taking no action to divert the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes. If we had started in 2005, it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century. If we start next year, it is six percent per year. If we wait 10 years, it is 15 percent per year — extremely difficult and expensive, perhaps impossible. But we aren't even starting.So now you know what I know that is moving me to sound this alarm. Clearly, I haven't gotten this message across. The science is clear. I need your help to communicate the gravity and the urgency of this situation and its solutions more effectively. We owe it to our children and grandchildren.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_hansen_why_i_must_speak_out_about_climate_change
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"So a couple of years ago I started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate; we have them work in government. The program is called Code for America, and it's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks. We select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments. Instead of sending them off into the Third World, we send them into the wilds of City Hall. And there they make great apps, they work with city staffers. But really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today.So meet Al. Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston. Here it kind of looks like he's looking for a date, but what he's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in, because he knows he's not very good at fighting fires when he's covered in four feet of snow. Now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner? We had a team of fellows in Boston last year through the Code for America program. They were there in February, and it snowed a lot in February last year. And they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants. But one fellow in particular, a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober, noticed something else, and that's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things. So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app.It's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant. So you agree to dig it out when it snows. If you do, you get to name it, and he called the first one Al. And if you don't, someone can steal it from you. So it's got cute little game dynamics on it. This is a modest little app. It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year. But it's doing something that no other government technology does. It's spreading virally.There's a guy in the I.T. department of the City of Honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it, not for snow, but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens. It's very important that these tsunami sirens work, but people steal the batteries out of them. So he's getting citizens to check on them. And then Seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains. And Chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows. So we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this. And this has spread just frictionlessly, organically, naturally.If you know anything about government technology, you know that this isn't how it normally goes. Procuring software usually takes a couple of years. We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months. It was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids. We were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels, it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars. And that's nothing. There is one project in the California court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and it doesn't work. And there are projects like this at every level of government.So an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally, that's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government. It suggests how government could work better — not more like a private company, as many people think it should. And not even like a tech company, but more like the Internet itself. And that means permissionless, it means open, it means generative. And that's important. But what's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government — not as the problem of an ossified institution, but as a problem of collective action. And that's great news, because, it turns out, we're very good at collective action with digital technology.Now there's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively. It's not just Code for America fellows, there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities. They haven't given up on government. They are frustrated as hell with it, but they're not complaining about it, they're fixing it. And these folks know something that we've lost sight of. And that's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the DMV and all those other things that we're really mad about, government is, at its core, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, ""What we do together that we can't do alone.""Now a lot of people have given up on government. And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. Politics is not changing; government is changing. And because government ultimately derives its power from us — remember ""We the people?"" — how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens.Now I didn't know very much about government when I started this program. And like a lot of people, I thought government was basically about getting people elected to office. Well after two years, I've come to the conclusion that, especially local government, is about opossums.This is the call center for the services and information line. It's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city. If you should ever have the chance to staff your city's call center, as our fellow Scott Silverman did as part of the program — in fact, they all do that — you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues, including having an opossum stuck in your house. So Scott gets this call. He types ""Opossum"" into this official knowledge base. He doesn't really come up with anything. He starts with animal control. And finally, he says, ""Look, can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves?"" So that worked. So booya for Scott. But that wasn't the end of the opossums.Boston doesn't just have a call center. It has an app, a Web and mobile app, called Citizens Connect. Now we didn't write this app. This is the work of the very smart people at the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston. So one day — this is an actual report — this came in: ""Opossum in my trashcan. Can't tell if it's dead. How do I get this removed?"" But what happens with Citizens Connect is different. So Scott was speaking person-to-person. But on Citizens Connect everything is public, so everybody can see this. And in this case, a neighbor saw it. And the next report we got said, ""I walked over to this location, found the trashcan behind the house. Opossum? Check. Living? Yep. Turned trashcan on its side. Walked home. Goodnight sweet opossum.""(Laughter)Pretty simple. So this is great. This is the digital meeting the physical. And it's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game. But it's also a great example of government as a platform. And I don't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here. I'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others. So one citizen helped another citizen, but government played a key role here. It connected those two people. And it could have connected them with government services if they'd been needed, but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services. When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities. We call animal control, it just costs a lot of money.Now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it's not the same thing as politics. And most people get that, but they think that one is the input to the other. That our input to the system of government is voting. Now how many times have we elected a political leader — and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected — and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs, and then not that much changes? That's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top. And what's under that is what we call bureaucracy. And we say that word with such contempt. But it's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that's working against us, this other thing, and then we're disempowering ourselves.People seem to think politics is sexy. If we want this institution to work for us, we're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy. Because that's where the real work of government happens. We have to engage with the machinery of government. So that's OccupytheSEC movement has done. Have you seen these guys? It's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that's a response to the SEC's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill. That's not being politically active, that's being bureaucratically active.Now for those of us who've given up on government, it's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children. You have to see the enormous challenges that they're going to face. Do we really think we're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us? We can't do without government, but we do need it to be more effective. The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society. And there's a generation out there that's grown up on the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to architect the systems the right way.Now the average age of our fellows is 28, so I am, begrudgingly, almost a generation older than most of them. This is a generation that's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted. They're not fighting that battle that we're all fighting about who gets to speak; they all get to speak. They can express their opinion on any channel at any time, and they do. So when they're faced with the problem of government, they don't care as much about using their voices. They're using their hands. They're using their hands to write applications that make government work better.And those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better. That could be shoveling out a hydrant, pulling a weed, turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it. And certainly, we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along, and many people do. But these apps are like little digital reminders that we're not just consumers, and we're not just consumers of government, putting in our taxes and getting back services. We're more than that, we're citizens. And we're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship.So the question I have for all of you here: When it comes to the big, important things that we need to do together, all of us together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we also going to be a crowd of hands?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_pahlka_coding_a_better_government
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"Today I'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries. Now I work in the solar technology industry. And my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ... ... paying attention to crowd-sourcing. It's just a quick video of what we do.Huh. Hang on a moment. It might take a moment to load.(Laughter)We'll just — we can just skip — I'll just skip through the video instead ...(Laughter)No.(Laughter)(Laughter)(Music)This is not ...(Laughter)Okay.(Laughter)Solar technology is ... Oh, that's all my time? Okay. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/a_ted_speaker_s_worst_nightmare
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"I want to discuss with you this afternoon why you're going to fail to have a great career.(Laughter)I'm an economist.I do dismal. End of the day, it's ready for dismal remarks. I only want to talk to those of you who want a great career. I know some of you have already decided you want a good career. You're going to fail, too.(Laughter)Because — goodness, you're all cheery about failing.(Laughter)Canadian group, undoubtedly.(Laughter)Those trying to have good careers are going to fail, because, really, good jobs are now disappearing. There are great jobs and great careers, and then there are the high-workload, high-stress, bloodsucking, soul-destroying kinds of jobs, and practically nothing in-between.So people looking for good jobs are going to fail. I want to talk about those looking for great jobs, great careers, and why you're going to fail. First reason is that no matter how many times people tell you, ""If you want a great career, you have to pursue your passion, you have to pursue your dreams, you have to pursue the greatest fascination in your life,"" you hear it again and again, and then you decide not to do it. It doesn't matter how many times you download Steven J.'s Stanford commencement address, you still look at it and decide not to do it.I'm not quite sure why you decide not to do it. You're too lazy to do it. It's too hard. You're afraid if you look for your passion and don't find it, you'll feel like you're an idiot, so then you make excuses about why you're not going to look for your passion. They are excuses, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to go through a whole long list — your creativity in thinking of excuses not to do what you really need to do if you want to have a great career.So, for example, one of your great excuses is:(Sigh)""Well, great careers are really and truly, for most people, just a matter of luck. So I'm going to stand around, I'm going to try to be lucky, and if I'm lucky, I'll have a great career. If not, I'll have a good career."" But a good career is an impossibility, so that's not going to work.Then, your other excuse is, ""Yes, there are special people who pursue their passions, but they are geniuses. They are Steven J. I'm not a genius. When I was five, I thought I was a genius, but my professors have beaten that idea out of my head long since.""(Laughter)""And now I know I am completely competent."" Now, you see, if this was 1950, being completely competent — that would have given you a great career. But guess what? This is almost 2012, and saying to the world, ""I am totally, completely competent,"" is damning yourself with the faintest of praise.And then, of course, another excuse: ""Well, I would do this, I would do this, but, but — well, after all, I'm not weird. Everybody knows that people who pursue their passions are somewhat obsessive. A little strange. Hmm? Hmm? Okay? You know, a fine line between madness and genius. ""I'm not weird. I've read Steven J.'s biography. Oh my goodness — I'm not that person. I am nice. I am normal. I'm a nice, normal person, and nice, normal people — don't have passion.""(Laughter)""Ah, but I still want a great career. I'm not prepared to pursue my passion, so I know what I'm going to do, because I have a solution. I have a strategy. It's the one Mommy and Daddy told me about. Mommy and Daddy told me that if I worked hard, I'd have a good career. So, if you work hard and have a good career, if you work really, really, really hard, you'll have a great career. Doesn't that, like, mathematically make sense?"" Hmm. Not. But you've managed to talk yourself into that.You know what? Here's a little secret: You want to work? You want to work really, really, really hard? You know what? You'll succeed. The world will give you the opportunity to work really, really, really, really hard. But, are you so sure that that's going to give you a great career, when all the evidence is to the contrary?So let's deal with those of you who are trying to find your passion. You actually understand that you really had better do it, never mind the excuses. You're trying to find your passion —(Sigh)and you're so happy. You found something you're interested in.""I have an interest! I have an interest!""You tell me. You say, ""I have an interest!"" I say, ""That's wonderful! And what are you trying to tell me?"" ""Well, I have an interest."" I say, ""Do you have passion?"" ""I have an interest,"" you say. ""Your interest is compared to what?"" ""Well, I'm interested in this."" ""And what about the rest of humanity's activities?"" ""I'm not interested in them."" ""You've looked at them all, have you?"" ""No. Not exactly.""Passion is your greatest love. Passion is the thing that will help you create the highest expression of your talent. Passion, interest — it's not the same thing. Are you really going to go to your sweetie and say, ""Marry me! You're interesting.""(Laughter)Won't happen. Won't happen, and you will die alone.(Laughter)What you want, what you want, what you want, is passion. It is beyond interest. You need 20 interests, and then one of them, one of them might grab you, one of them might engage you more than anything else, and then you may have found your greatest love, in comparison to all the other things that interest you, and that's what passion is.I have a friend, proposed to his sweetie. He was an economically rational person. He said to his sweetie, ""Let us marry. Let us merge our interests.""(Laughter)Yes, he did.""I love you truly,"" he said. ""I love you deeply. I love you more than any other woman I've ever encountered. I love you more than Mary, Jane, Susie, Penelope, Ingrid, Gertrude, Gretel — I was on a German exchange program then. I love you more than —"" All right. She left the room halfway through his enumeration of his love for her. After he got over his surprise at being, you know, turned down, he concluded he'd had a narrow escape from marrying an irrational person. Although, he did make a note to himself that the next time he proposed, it was perhaps not necessary to enumerate all of the women he had auditioned for the part.(Laughter)But the point stands. You must look for alternatives so that you find your destiny, or are you afraid of the word ""destiny""? Does the word ""destiny"" scare you? That's what we're talking about. And if you don't find the highest expression of your talent, if you settle for ""interesting,"" what the hell ever that means, do you know what will happen at the end of your long life? Your friends and family will be gathered in the cemetery, and there beside your gravesite will be a tombstone, and inscribed on that tombstone it will say, ""Here lies a distinguished engineer, who invented Velcro."" But what that tombstone should have said, in an alternative lifetime, what it should have said if it was your highest expression of talent, was, ""Here lies the last Nobel Laureate in Physics, who formulated the Grand Unified Field Theory and demonstrated the practicality of warp drive.""(Laughter)Velcro, indeed!(Laughter)One was a great career. One was a missed opportunity. But then, there are some of you who, in spite of all these excuses, you will find, you will find your passion. And you'll still fail.You're going to fail, because — because you're not going to do it, because you will have invented a new excuse, any excuse to fail to take action, and this excuse, I've heard so many times: ""Yes, I would pursue a great career, but, I value human relationships —(Laughter)more than accomplishment. I want to be a great friend. I want to be a great spouse. I want to be a great parent, and I will not sacrifice them on the altar of great accomplishment.""(Laughter)What do you want me to say? Now, do you really want me to say now, tell you, ""Really, I swear I don't kick children.""(Laughter)Look at the worldview you've given yourself. You're a hero no matter what. And I, by suggesting ever so delicately that you might want a great career, must hate children. I don't hate children. I don't kick them. Yes, there was a little kid wandering through this building when I came here, and no, I didn't kick him.(Laughter)Course, I had to tell him the building was for adults only, and to get out. He mumbled something about his mother, and I told him she'd probably find him outside anyway. Last time I saw him, he was on the stairs crying.(Laughter)What a wimp.(Laughter)But what do you mean? That's what you expect me to say. Do you really think it's appropriate that you should actually take children and use them as a shield? You know what will happen someday, you ideal parent, you? The kid will come to you someday and say, ""I know what I want to be. I know what I'm going to do with my life."" You are so happy. It's the conversation a parent wants to hear, because your kid's good in math, and you know you're going to like what comes next. Says your kid, ""I have decided I want to be a magician. I want to perform magic tricks on the stage.""(Laughter)And what do you say? You say, you say, ""That's risky, kid. Might fail, kid. Don't make a lot of money at that, kid. I don't know, kid, you should think about that again, kid. You're so good at math, why don't you —""The kid interrupts you and says, ""But it is my dream. It is my dream to do this."" And what are you going to say? You know what you're going to say? ""Look kid. I had a dream once, too, but — But —"" So how are you going to finish the sentence with your ""but""? ""But. I had a dream too, once, kid, but I was afraid to pursue it."" Or are you going to tell him this: ""I had a dream once, kid. But then, you were born.""(Laughter)(Applause)Do you really want to use your family, do you really ever want to look at your spouse and your kid, and see your jailers? There was something you could have said to your kid, when he or she said, ""I have a dream."" You could have said — looked the kid in the face and said, ""Go for it, kid! Just like I did."" But you won't be able to say that, because you didn't. So you can't.(Laughter)And so the sins of the parents are visited on the poor children. Why will you seek refuge in human relationships as your excuse not to find and pursue your passion? You know why. In your heart of hearts, you know why, and I'm being deadly serious. You know why you would get all warm and fuzzy and wrap yourself up in human relationships. It is because you are — you know what you are.You're afraid to pursue your passion. You're afraid to look ridiculous. You're afraid to try. You're afraid you may fail. Great friend, great spouse, great parent, great career. Is that not a package? Is that not who you are? How can you be one without the other? But you're afraid.And that's why you're not going to have a great career. Unless — ""unless,"" that most evocative of all English words — ""unless."" But the ""unless"" word is also attached to that other, most terrifying phrase, ""If only I had ..."" ""If only I had ..."" If you ever have that thought ricocheting in your brain, it will hurt a lot.So, those are the many reasons why you are going to fail to have a great career. Unless —Unless.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_have_a_great_career
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"I have a question for you: Are you religious? Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person. Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent. I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference. (Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand. Okay, that's the majority.My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form. My Talk today is about self-transcendence. It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. We talk about being uplifted or elevated.Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor. So here's the metaphor I'm offering today. Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with. But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase. We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness.In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. He collected all kinds of case studies. He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences. One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. And here's what Bradley said about it.(Music)(Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, ""Come."" The next day I rejoiced with trembling. My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. This world had no place in my affections. Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies.JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase. And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. Some shut down the self using meditation. Others use psychedelic drugs. This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god. Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence. But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase. Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature. Others overcome their self at raves.But here's the weirdest place of all: war. So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war. And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences. I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray. Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II. And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle. Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase.(Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. ""I"" passes insensibly into a ""we,"" ""my"" becomes ""our"" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives. It feels somehow uplifting. This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man. The lower level he called the level of the profane. Now profane is the opposite of sacred. It just means ordinary or common. And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals. We want to satisfy our individual desires. We pursue our individual goals. But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change. Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts.Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community. Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness. And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it. Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals. Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended. Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator. And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11.So let me summarize where we are. I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human. I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind. I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred. When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted.So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design? Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands? Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system — this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain — Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake?Well many scientists who study religion take this view. The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well let me show you.In ""The Descent of Man,"" Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality — where did it come from, why do we have it. Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups. He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. He said, ""If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other."" He went on to say that ""Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected."" In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection.Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection. But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection.So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups. So here's a group of guys on a college crew team. Within this team there's competition. There are guys competing with each other. The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team. And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport. Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics. So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other. And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys. Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach. But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats. And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat. They can only win if they all pull together as a team. I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths.The main argument against group selection has always been that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators, but as soon as you have a group of cooperators, they're just going to get taken over by free-riders, individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others. Let me illustrate this for you. Suppose we've got a group of little organisms — they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what — and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative. Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth. And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows.But suppose then that one of them mutates. There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy. It takes advantage of the others. And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller. So here's how things play out. We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food. And in short order, the cooperators are done for. The free-riders have taken over. If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started.But there are solutions to the free-rider problem. It's not that hard a problem. In fact, nature has solved it many, many times. And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat. For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus? It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism. Somehow or other — maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why — but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism.And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens. A superorganism can basically take what it wants. It's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters. And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms. What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history. Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different.Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria. It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives. Once several wasps were all together in the same hive, they had no choice but to cooperate, because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives. And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said.These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere. And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods. Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside. And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives. Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart. We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are. In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines. Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains.Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you. Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest? Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole?Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way. And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way.(Music)(Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained. One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves. The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected. We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained. And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious.I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. Those things came along too recently. I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas. This is why politics is so tribal. Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness. It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas. It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team.And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life. Because human beings are, to some extent, hivish creatures like bees. We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment. We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed. We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort.Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? What should I do with my life? What's missing? What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. It's really comfortable down here on the lower level. Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center.One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia. They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into. They're all searching for their staircase. And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish.Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. ""No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.""JH: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence
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"The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject.For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ... (Laughter) ... if we use pennies.Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. But it's also a morally important one. Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum — whatever sorghum is — losing sorghum.But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene. So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling.(Laughter)(Applause)Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms — one that didn't exist in the 90's. What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. (Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times. (Laughter) It's true. (Applause) I have Excel.(Laughter)The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. And some people think that string theory is tough.(Laughter)Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit. It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law. Some people think this number's a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year.Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. And it was a big Christmas hit. Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket.(Laughter)(Applause)These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media. (Applause) Or about 75,000 jobs.(Laughter)(Applause)Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts. So that's it for now. I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod
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"I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days.The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch. And when I walked in, she was already at the table. I sat down, and she said, ""God, you look like hell."" I said, ""Thanks. I feel really — I'm not functioning."" And she said, ""What's going on?"" And I said, ""I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability. And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data, as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living, I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown. I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea?""(Laughter)And she said, ""I saw your talk live-streamed. It was not really you. It was a little different than what you usually do. But it was great."" And I said, ""This can't happen. YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. And we're going to be talking about 600, 700 people.""(Laughter)And she said, ""Well, I think it's too late.""And I said, ""Let me ask you something."" And she said, ""Yeah."" I said, ""Do you remember when we were in college, really wild and kind of dumb?"" She said, ""Yeah."" I said, ""Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine? Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?""(Laughter)And she goes, ""Uh... no.""(Laughter)Of course, the only thing I could say at that point was, ""Yeah, me neither. Yeah — me neither.""And I'm thinking to myself, ""Brené, what are you doing? Why did you bring this up? Have you lost your mind? Your sisters would be perfect for this.""(Laughter)So I looked back up and she said, ""Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?""(Laughter)And I said, ""I'm just thinking about it a little bit.""(Laughter)She said, ""You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever.""(Laughter)Then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic. ""If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over.""(Laughter)I had no contingency plan for four million.(Laughter)And my life did end when that happened. And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would be frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. But I want to talk about what I've learned.There's two things that I've learned in the last year. The first is: vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Let me ask you honestly — and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably — so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome — how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, ""God, vulnerability is weakness."" How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? The majority of people. Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I've come to the belief — this is my 12th year doing this research — that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage — to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, ""Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We'd like you to come in and speak. We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame.""(Laughter)What would you like for me to talk about? There's three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.(Laughter)So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.(Applause)To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability.The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame. And I'm going to be really honest with you. When I became a ""vulnerability researcher"" and that became the focus because of the TED talk — and I'm not kidding.I'll give you an example. About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store. About from a hundred feet away, this is what I hear: ""Vulnerability TED! Vulnerability TED!""(Laughter)(Laughter ends)I'm a fifth-generation Texan. Our family motto is ""Lock and load."" I am not a natural vulnerability researcher. So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six.(Laughter)And then I hear, ""Vulnerability TED!"" I turn around, I go, ""Hi."" She's right here and she said, ""You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown.""(Laughter)At this point, parents are, like, pulling their children close.(Laughter)""Look away."" And I'm so worn out at this point in my life, I look at her and I actually say, ""It was a fricking spiritual awakening.""(Laughter)(Applause)And she looks back and does this, ""I know.""(Laughter)And she said, ""We watched your TED talk in my book club. Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'""(Laughter)And she said, ""Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'""(Laughter)You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting.(Sighs)So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure — Like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED — I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I started writing and talking about vulnerability. And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it. It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane. ""What do you do?"" ""I study shame."" ""Oh.""(Laughter)And I see you.(Laughter)But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule — not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing — ""you've got to dance with the one who brung ya"". And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. And so I want to walk you in to shame. Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. And we're going to walk in. And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. It is to put on some galoshes — and walk through and find our way around. Here's why.We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right? Yes? We heard that. Yes? Cannot have that conversation without shame. Because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame. We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery, which is, have a checklist. You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. And all-powerful folks don't need checklists.And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here. Myshkin Ingawale, I hope I did right by you.(Applause)I saw the TED Fellows my first day here. And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia, because people were dying unnecessarily. And he said, ""I saw this need. So you know what I did? I made it."" And everybody just burst into applause, and they were like ""Yes!"" And he said, ""And it didn't work.(Laughter)And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked.""You know what the big secret about TED is? I can't wait to tell people this. I guess I'm doing it right now.(Laughter)This is like the failure conference.(Laughter)No, it is.(Applause)You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on the stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times. I don't think the world understands that, because of shame.There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the ""Man in the Arena"" quote. And it goes like this: ""It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly.""And that's what this conference, to me, is about. Life is about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, ""I'm going in and I'm going to try this,"" shame is the gremlin who says, ""Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO."" Shame is that thing.And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, ""I'm going to do this,"" we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes — ""never good enough"" — and, if you can talk it out of that one, ""who do you think you are?"" The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is ""I am bad."" Guilt is ""I did something bad."" How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, ""I'm sorry. I made a mistake?"" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake.There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender. If shame washes over me and washes over Chris, it's going to feel the same. Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame. We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender.For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli, the commercial. ""I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man."" For women, shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.(Laughter)Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket.For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, ""I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men."" And I said, ""I don't study men."" And he said, ""That's convenient.""(Laughter)And I said, ""Why?"" And he said, ""Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?"" I said, ""Yeah."" ""They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else.""So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, ""I unloaded the dishwasher!""(Laughter)But he really listens — because that's all we need — I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work.Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it — to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other. Very quickly, some research by Mahalik at Boston College. He asked, what do women need to do to conform to female norms? The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance.(Laughter)When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence.If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too.And so I'll leave you with this thought. If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is, that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly.So thank you all very much. I really appreciate it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame
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"I'm a believer. I'm a believer in global warming, and my record is good on the subject. But my subject is national security. We have to get off of oil purchased from the enemy. I'm talking about OPEC oil. And let me take you back 100 years to 1912. You're probably thinking that was my birth year. (Laughter) It wasn't. It was 1928. But go back to 1912, 100 years ago, and look at that point what we, our country, was faced with. It's the same energy question that you're looking at today, but it's different sources of fuel. A hundred years ago we were looking at coal, of course, and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil. At that point, we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner, it was cheaper, and it wasn't ours though, it was theirs.So at that point, 1912, we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal. But as we moved on to the period now, 100 years later, we're back really at another decision point. What is the decision point? It's what we're going to use in the future. So from here, it's pretty clear to me, we would prefer to have cleaner, cheaper, domestic, ours — and we have that, we have that — which is natural gas.So here you are, that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil, give or take a few barrels, every day. And the cost annually is three trillion dollars. And one trillion of that goes to OPEC. That has got to be stopped. Now if you look at the cost of OPEC, it cost seven trillion dollars — on the Milken Institute study last year — seven trillion dollars since 1976, is what we paid for oil from OPEC. Now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both. But it's the greatest transfer of wealth, from one group to another in the history of mankind. And it continues.Now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth, you can see here that we have the arrows going into the Mid-East and away from us. And with that, we have found ourselves to be the world's policemen. We are policing the world, and how are we doing that? I know the response to this. I would bet there aren't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world. Raise your hand if you think you know. There are 12. One is under construction by the Chinese and the other 11 belong to us.Why do we have 11 aircraft carriers? Do we have a corner on the market? Are we smarter than anybody else? I'm not sure. If you look at where they're located — and on this slide it's the red blobs on there — there are five that are operating in the Mid-East, and the rest of them are in the United States. They just move back to the Mid-East and those come back. So actually most of the 11 we have are tied up in the Mid-East. Why? Why are they in the Mid-East? They're there to control, keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available. And the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day, which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world. And we're doing it with four percent of the population. Somehow that doesn't seem right. That's not sustainable.So where do we go from here? Does that continue? Yes, it's going to continue. The slide you're looking at here is 1990 to 2040. Over that period you are going to double your demand. And when you look at what we're using the oil for, 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel. So when somebody says, ""Let's go more nuclear, let's go wind, let's go solar,"" fine; I'm for anything American, anything American. But if you're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil, you have to address transportation.So here we are using 20 million barrels a day — producing eight, importing 12, and from the 12, five comes from OPEC. When you look at the biggest user and the second largest user, we use 20 million barrels and the Chinese use 10. The Chinese have a little bit better plan — or they have a plan; we have no plan. In the history of America, we've never had an energy plan. We don't even realize the resources that we have available to us. If you take the last 10 years and bring forward, you've transferred to OPEC a trillion dollars. If you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel, you will pay 2.2 trillion. That's not sustainable either.But the days of cheap oil are over. They're over. They make it very clear to you, the Saudis do, they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments. Now I had people in Washington last week told me, he said, ""The Saudis can produce the oil for five dollars a barrel. That has nothing to do with it. It's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil."" There is no free market for oil. The oil is priced off the margin. And the OPEC nations are the ones that price the oil.So where are we headed from here? We're headed to natural gas. Natural gas will do everything we want it to do. It's 130 octane fuel. It's 25 percent cleaner than oil. It's ours, we have an abundance of it. And it does not require a refinery. It comes out of the ground at 130 octane. Run it through the separator and you're ready to use it. It's going to be very simple for us to use. It's going to be simple to accomplish this. You're going to find, and I'll tell you in just a minute, what you're looking for to make it happen. But here you can look at the list. Natural gas will fit all of those. It will replace or be able to be used for that. It's for power generation, transportation, it's peaking fuel, it's all those.Do we have enough natural gas? Look at the bar on the left. It's 24 trillion. It's what we use a year. Go forward and the estimates that you have from the EIA and onto the industry estimates — the industry knows what they're talking about — we've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that's available to us. How does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent? It would be three times what the Saudis claim they have. And they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil, which I do not believe. I think it's probably 175 billion barrels. But anyway, whether they say they're right or whatever, we have plenty of natural gas.So I have tried to target on where we use the natural gas. And where I've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks. There are eight million of them. You take eight million trucks — these are 18-wheelers — and take them to natural gas, reduce carbon by 30 percent, it is cheaper and it will cut our imports three million barrels. So you will cut 60 percent off of OPEC with eight million trucks. There are 250 million vehicles in America.So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel, is the way I see it. I don't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age. (Laughter) That's your concern. But when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas, because you have plenty of natural gas. But as I said, I'm for anything American.Now let me take you — I've been a realist — I went from theorist early to realist. I'm back to theorist again. If you look at the world, you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent. And here you can see methane, if that's the way you're going to go, that there's plenty of methane — natural gas is methane, methane and natural gas are interchangeable — but if you decide that you're going to use some methane — and I'm gone, so it's up to you — but we do have plenty of methane hydrates.So I think I've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in America. If we do — it's costing us a billion dollars a day for oil. And yet, we have no energy plan. So there's nothing going on that impresses me in Washington on that plan, other than I'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers. If we could do that, I think we would take our first step to an energy plan. If we did, we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thanks for that. So from your point of view, you had this great Pickens Plan that was based on wind energy, and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed. What happened?TBP: I lost 150 million dollars. (Laughter) That'll make you abandon something. No, what happened to us, Chris, is that power, it's priced off the margin. And so the margin is natural gas. And at the time I went into the wind business, natural gas was nine dollars. Today it's two dollars and forty cents. You cannot do a wind deal under six dollars an MCF.CA: So what happened was that, through increased ability to use fracking technology, the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted, which made wind uncompetitive. In a nutshell that's what happened?TBP: That's what happened. We found out that we could go to the source rock, which were the carboniferous shales in the basins. The first one was Barnett Shale in Texas and then the Marcellus up in the Northeast across New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia; and Haynesville in Louisiana. This stuff is everywhere. We are overwhelmed with natural gas.CA: And now you're a big investor in that and bringing that to market?TBP: Well you say a big investor. It's my life. I'm a geologist, got out of school in '51, and I've been in the industry my entire life. Now I do own stocks. I'm not a big natural gas producer. Somebody the other day said I was the second largest natural gas producer in the United States. Don't I wish. But no, I'm not. I own stocks. But I also am in the fueling business.CA: But natural gas is a fossil fuel. You burn it, you release CO2. So you believe in the threat of climate change. Why doesn't that prospect concern you?TBP: Well you're going to have to use something. What do you have to replace it? (Laughter)CA: No, no. The argument that it's a bridge fuel makes sense, because the amount of CO2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal, correct? And so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas. But if that's it and that becomes the reason that renewables don't get invested in, then, long-term, we're screwed anyway, right?TBP: Well I'm not ready to give up, but Jim and I talked there as he left, and I said, ""How do you feel about natural gas?"" And he said, ""Well it's a bridge fuel, is what it is."" And I said, ""Bridge to what? Where are we headed?"" See but again, I told you, I don't have to worry with that. You all do.CA: But I don't think that's right, Boone. I think you're a person who believes in your legacy. You've made the money you need. You're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate. Do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon? Does that make sense?TBP: I don't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program. I can tell you it will be a failure. The government is not successful on these things. They just aren't, it's a bad deal. Look at Solyndra, or whatever it was. I mean, that was told to be a bad idea 10 times, they went ahead and did it anyway. But that only blew out 500 million. I think it's closer to a billion. But Chris, I think where we're headed, the long-term, I don't mind going back to nuclear. And I can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be. One, don't build a reformer on a fault. (Laughter) And number two, do not build a reformer on the ocean. And now I think reformers are safe. Move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers. There isn't anything wrong with nuke. You're going to have to have energy. There is no question. You can't — okay.CA: One of the questions from the audience is, with fracking and the natural gas process, what about the problem of methane leaking from that, methane being a worse global warming gas than CO2? Is that a concern?TBP: Fracking? What is fracking?CA: Fracking.TBP: I'm teasing.(Laughter)CA: We've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here, you know.TBP: No, let me tell you, I've told you what my age was. I got out of school in '51. I witnessed my first frack job at border Texas in 1953. Fracking came out in '47, and don't believe for a minute when our president gets up there and says the Department of Energy 30 years ago developed fracking. I don't know what in the hell he's talking about. I mean seriously, the Department of Energy did not have anything to do with fracking. The first frack job was in '47. I saw my first one in '53. I've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life. Never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else. Now the largest aquifer in North America is from Midland, Texas to the South Dakota border, across eight states — big aquifer: Ogallala, Triassic age. There had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas in that aquifer. There's no problems. I don't understand why the media is focused on Eastern Pennsylvania.CA: All right, so you don't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon. Your picture then I guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately, that we'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive?TBP: Solar and wind, Jim and I agreed on that in 13 seconds. That is, it's going to be a small part, because you can't rely on it.CA: So how does the world get off fossil fuels?TBP: How do we get there? We have so much natural gas, a day will not come where you say, ""Well let's don't use that anymore."" You'll keep using it. It is the cleanest of all. And if you look at California, they use 2,500 buses. LAMTA have been on natural gas for 25 years. The Ft. Worth T has been on it for 25 years. Why? Air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel. Why are all the trash trucks today in Southern California on natural gas? It's because of air quality. I know what you're telling me, and I'm not disagreeing with you. How in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point? And I say, that is your problem.(Laughter)CA: All right, so it's the bridge fuel. What is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out. If someone comes to you with a plan that really looks like it might be part of this solution, are you ready to invest in those technologies, even if they aren't maximized for profits, they might be maximized for the future health of the planet?TBP: I lost 150 million on the wind, okay. Yeah, sure, I'm game for it. Because, again, I'm trying to get energy solved for America. And anything American will work for me.CA: Boone, I really, really appreciate you coming here, engaging in this conversation. I think there's a lot of people who will want to engage with you. And that was a real gift you gave this audience. Thank you so much. (TBP: You bet, Chris. Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/t_boone_pickens_let_s_transform_energy_with_natural_gas
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"One out of two of you women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in your lifetime. So this is the leading killer of women. It's a closely held secret for reasons I don't know. In addition to making this personal — so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart — we're going to wax into the politics. Because the personal, as you know, is political. And not enough is being done about this. And as we have watched women conquer breast cancer through the breast cancer campaign, this is what we need to do now with heart.Since 1984, more women die in the U.S. than men. So where we used to think of heart disease as being a man's problem primarily — which that was never true, but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and '60s, and it was in all the textbooks. It's certainly what I learned when I was training. If we were to remain sexist, and that was not right, but if we were going to go forward and be sexist, it's actually a woman's disease. So it's a woman's disease now.And one of the things that you see is that male line, the mortality is going down, down, down, down, down. And you see the female line since 1984, the gap is widening. More and more women, two, three, four times more women, dying of heart disease than men. And that's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change. So what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, which had been developed in men, by men, for men for the last 50 years — and they work pretty well in men, don't they? — weren't working so well for women. So that was a big wake-up call in the 1980's.Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer. And the breast cancer campaign — again, this is not a competition. We're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign. We need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis. Now sometimes when people see this, I hear this gasp. We can all think of someone, often a young woman, who has been impacted by breast cancer. We often can't think of a young woman who has heart disease. I'm going to tell you why. Heart disease kills people, often very quickly. So the first time heart disease strikes in women and men, half of the time it's sudden cardiac death — no opportunity to say good-bye, no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy, no opportunity to help her pick out a wig.Breast cancer, mortality is down to four percent. And that is the 40 years that women have advocated. Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan stood up and said, ""I'm a breast cancer survivor,"" and it was okay to talk about it. And then physicians have gone to bat. We've done the research. We have effective therapies now. Women are living longer than ever. That has to happen in heart disease, and it's time. It's not happening, and it's time.We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women. As Barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies, ""Yentl,"" she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education. And she wanted to study the Talmud. And so how did she get educated then? She had to impersonate a man. She had to look like a man. She had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had. Bernadine Healy, Dr. Healy, was a cardiologist. And right around that time, in the 1980's, that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up, up, up, up, up, she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said, the Yentl syndrome. Women are dying of heart disease, two, three, four times more than men. Mortality is not going down, it's going up. And she questioned, she hypothesized, is this a Yentl syndrome?And here's what the story is. Is it because women don't look like men, they don't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics, and therefore, they're not recognized for their heart disease. And they're just passed. They don't get treated, they don't get detected, they don't get the benefit of all the modern medicines.Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health. And this is the biggest biomedical enterprise research in the world. And it funds a lot of my research. It funds research all over the place. It was a very big deal for her to become director. And she started, in the face of a lot of controversy, the Women's Health Initiative. And every woman in the room here has benefited from that Women's Health Initiative. It told us about hormone replacement therapy. It's informed us about osteoporosis. It informed us about breast cancer, colon cancer in women. So a tremendous fund of knowledge despite, again, that so many people told her not to do it, it was too expensive. And the under-reading was women aren't worth it. She was like, ""Nope. Sorry. Women are worth it.""Well there was a little piece of that Women's Health Initiative that went to National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is the cardiology part of the NIH. And we got to do the WISE study — and the WISE stands for Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation — and I have chaired this study for the last 15 years. It was a study to specifically ask, what's going on with women? Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease? So in the WISE, 15 years ago, we started out and said, ""Well wow, there's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that."" And our colleagues in Washington, D.C. had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die, compared to men who have heart attacks and die — and again, this is millions of people, happening every day — women, in their fatty plaque — and this is their coronary artery, so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle — women erode, men explode. You're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology.(Laughter)So I'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first. Hollywood heart attack. Ughhhh. Horrible chest pain. EKG goes pbbrrhh, so the doctors can see this hugely abnormal EKG. There's a big clot in the middle of the artery. And they go up to the cath lab and boom, boom, boom get rid of the clot. That's a man heart attack. Some women have those heart attacks, but a whole bunch of women have this kind of heart attack, where it erodes, doesn't completely fill with clot, symptoms are subtle, EKG findings are different — female-pattern. So what do you think happens to these gals? They're often not recognized, sent home. I'm not sure what it was. Might have been gas.So we picked up on that and we said, ""You know, we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS: intravascular ultrasound."" And we said, ""We're going to hypothesize that the fatty plaque in women is actually probably different, and deposited differently, than men."" And because of the common knowledge of how women and men get fat. When we watch people become obese, where do men get fat? Right here, it's just a focal — right there. Where do women get fat? All over. Cellulite here, cellulite here. So we said, ""Look, women look like they're pretty good about putting kind of the garbage away, smoothly putting it away. Men just have to dump it in a single area."" So we said, ""Let's look at these.""And so the yellow is the fatty plaque, and panel A is a man. And you can see, it's lumpy bumpy. He's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries. Panel B is the woman, very smooth. She's just laid it down nice and tidy. (Laughter) And if you did that angiogram, which is the red, you can see the man's disease. So 50 years of honing and crafting these angiograms, we easily recognize male-pattern disease. Kind of hard to see that female-pattern disease. So that was a discovery. Now what are the implications of that? Well once again, women get the angiogram and nobody can tell that they have a problem.So we are working now on a non-invasive — again, these are all invasive studies. Ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively. And again, 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing, we're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests. So this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. We're doing this at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in the Women's Heart Center. We selected this for the research. This is not in your community hospital, but we would hope to translate this. And we're about two and a half years into a five-year study.This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart. And if you look carefully, you can see that there's a black blush right there. And that is microvascular obstruction. The syndrome, the female-pattern now is called microvascular coronary dysfunction, or obstruction. The second reason we really liked MRI is that there's no radiation. So unlike the CAT scans, X-rays, thalliums, for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart, every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation, we say, ""Do we really need that test?"" So we're very excited about M.R. You can't go and order it yet, but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men.What are the downstream consequences then, when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized? This is a figure from an editorial that I published in the European Heart Journal this last summer. And it was just a pictogram to sort of show why more women are dying of heart disease, despite these good treatments that we know and we have work. And when the woman has male-pattern disease — so she looks like Barbara in the movie — they get treated. And when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman, as Barbara does here with her husband, they don't get the treatment. These are our life-saving treatments. And those little red boxes are deaths. So those are the consequences. And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps.There's been wonderful news also about studying women, finally, in heart disease. And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy. If you ask, what is the big difference between women and men physiologically? Why are there women and men? Because women bring new life into the world. That's all stem cells. So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury, doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs, which is one of the things that we're trying to do with stem cell therapy. These are female and male stem cells. And if you had an injured organ, if you had a heart attack and we wanted to repair that injured area, do you want those robust, plentiful stem cells on the top? Or do you want these guys, that look like they're out to lunch?(Laughter)And some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells — and this is in animals and increasingly we're showing this in humans — that female stem cells, when put even into a male body, do better than male stem cells going into a male body. One of the things that we say about all of this female physiology — because again, as much as we're talking about women and heart disease, women do, on average, have better longevity than men — is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women. So this is not a zero-sum game in anyway.Okay, so here's where we started. And remember, paths crossed in 1984, and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease. What has happened in the last 15 years with this work? We are bending the curve. We're bending the curve. So just like the breast cancer story, doing research, getting awareness going, it works, you just have to get it going. Now are we happy with this? We still have two to three more women dying for every man.And I would propose, with the better longevity that women have overall, that women probably should theoretically do better, if we could just get treated. So this is where we are, but we have a long row to hoe. We've worked on this for 15 years. And I've told you, we've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years. So we're 35 years behind. And we'd like to think it's not going to take 35 years. And in fact, it probably won't. But we cannot stop now. Too many lives are at stake.So what do we need to do? You now, hopefully, have a more personal relationship with your heart. Women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns. The women are very good about getting mammograms now. And women do fundraising. Women participate. They have put their money where their mouth is and they have done advocacy and they have joined campaigns. This is what we need to do with heart disease now.And it's political. Women's health, from a federal funding standpoint, sometimes it's popular, sometimes it's not so popular. So we have these feast and famine cycles. So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising. Breast cancer, as we said, kills women, but heart disease kills a whole bunch more. So if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge, we have a lot of lives to save.So thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/noel_bairey_merz_the_single_biggest_health_threat_women_face
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"So my name is Taylor Wilson. I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am. And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point, that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to. So nuclear fusion is our energy future. And the second point, making the case that kids can really change the world.So you may ask — (Applause) You may ask me, well how do you know what our energy future is? Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old. That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor. I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I decided I wanted to make a star.Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion. I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy. Well it doesn't break even. It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in, but it still does some pretty cool stuff. And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno. And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it. So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun. And I'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together, and in the process it has some byproducts, and I utilize those byproducts.So this previous year, I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has. For hundreds of dollars, I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. I built this in my garage.(Applause)And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes. Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes.So that's my fusion reactor in the background there. That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor. Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage, so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians. So maybe I don't want to admit to that. This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world. And this is me with President Obama, showing him my Homeland Security research.(Applause)So in about seven years of doing nuclear research, I started out with a dream to make a ""star in a jar,"" a star in my garage, and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world, and I think other kids can too. So thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_yup_i_built_a_nuclear_fusion_reactor
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"I'm here to give you your recommended dietary allowance of poetry. And the way I'm going to do that is present to you five animations of five of my poems. And let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about. Because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act.But when I was United States Poet Laureate — and I love saying that. (Laughter) It's a great way to start sentences. When I was him back then, I was approached by J. Walter Thompson, the ad company, and they were hired sort of by the Sundance Channel. And the idea was to have me record some of my poems and then they would find animators to animate them. And I was initially resistant, because I always think poetry can stand alone by itself. Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results, in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed. And surely, if you're reading a poem that mentions a cow, you don't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow. I mean, let's let the reader do a little work.But I relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility, and also I'm like a total cartoon junkie since childhood. I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Loony Tunes cartoons. Bugs Bunny is my muse. And this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places. And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places — poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again — I can't help it, it's true — (Laughter) I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines that lasted for a couple of years. So you could tune into poetry as you were flying.And my sense is, it's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. Start a meeting with a poem. That would be an idea you might take with you. When you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio or on a cereal box or whatever, it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.So let us start with the first one. It's a little poem called ""Budapest,"" and in it I reveal, or pretend to reveal, the secrets of the creative process.(Video) Narration: ""Budapest."" My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater. I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly, intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that will allow it to live another day. It wants only to be here tomorrow, dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt, nose pressed against the page, writing a few more dutiful lines while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest or some other city where I have never been.BC: So that makes it seem a little easier. (Applause) Writing is not actually as easy as that for me. But I like to pretend that it comes with ease. One of my students came up after class, an introductory class, and she said, ""You know, poetry is harder than writing,"" which I found both erroneous and profound. (Laughter) So I like to at least pretend it just flows out. A friend of mine has a slogan; he's another poet. He says that, ""If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you ever tried.""(Laughter)The next poem is also rather short. Poetry just says a few things in different ways. And I think you could boil this poem down to saying, ""Some days you eat the bear, other days the bear eats you."" And it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture.(Video) Narration: ""Some Days."" Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs. All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress — perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved. But other days I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table. Very funny. But how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it striding around like a vivid god, your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?(Applause)BC: There's a horror movie in there somewhere. The next poem is called forgetfulness, and it's really just a kind of poetic essay on the subject of mental slippage. And the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia, in other words, forgetting the things that you have read.(Video) Narration: ""Forgetfulness."" The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag. And even now, as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the Moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.(Applause)BC: The next poem is called ""The Country"" and it's based on, when I was in college I met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine. He lived, and still does, in rural Vermont. I lived in New York City. And we would visit each other. And when I would go up to the country, he would teach me things like deer hunting, which meant getting lost with a gun basically — (Laughter) and trout fishing and stuff like that. And then he'd come down to New York City and I'd teach him what I knew, which was largely smoking and drinking. (Laughter) And in that way we traded lore with each other. The poem that's coming up is based on him trying to tell me a little something about a domestic point of etiquette in country living that I had a very hard time, at first, processing. It's called ""The Country.""(Video) Narration: ""The Country."" I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house, because the mice might get into them and start a fire. But your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, are always stowed. Who could sleep that night? Who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper, gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth? Who could not see him rounding a corner, the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam, the sudden flare and the creature, for one bright, shining moment, suddenly thrust ahead of his time — now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid illuminating some ancient night? And who could fail to notice, lit up in the blazing insulation, the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice — one-time inhabitants of what once was your house in the country?(Applause)BC: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. And the last poem is called ""The Dead."" I wrote this after a friend's funeral, but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying, as all eulogists tend to do, which is how happy the deceased would be to look down and see all of us assembled. And that to me was a bad start to the afterlife, having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified. So the little poem is called ""The Dead.""(Video) Narration: ""The Dead."" The dead are always looking down on us, they say. While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity. They watch the tops of our heads moving below on Earth. And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them, which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes.(Applause)BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated. It took a long time — I mean, it's rather uncommon to have this marriage — a long time to put those two together. But then again, it took us a long time to put the wheel and the suitcase together. (Laughter) I mean, we had the wheel for some time. And schlepping is an ancient and honorable art.(Laughter)I just have time to read a more recent poem to you. If it has a subject, the subject is adolescence. And it's addressed to a certain person. It's called ""To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl.""""Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born, you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn't have done that all alone. So never mind; you're fine just being yourself. You're loved for just being you. But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room — no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator? Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life, after you come out of your room and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks. For some reason I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15. But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model. (Laughter) A few centuries later, when he was your age, Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family, but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster. (Laughter) But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland. (Laughter) Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17? We think you're special just being you — playing with your food and staring into space. (Laughter) By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes, but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house.""(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/billy_collins_everyday_moments_caught_in_time
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"I have a question for you: Are you religious? Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person. Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent. I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference. (Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand. Okay, that's the majority.My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form. My Talk today is about self-transcendence. It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. We talk about being uplifted or elevated.Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor. So here's the metaphor I'm offering today. Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with. But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase. We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness.In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. He collected all kinds of case studies. He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences. One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. And here's what Bradley said about it.(Music)(Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, ""Come."" The next day I rejoiced with trembling. My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. This world had no place in my affections. Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies.JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase. And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. Some shut down the self using meditation. Others use psychedelic drugs. This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god. Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence. But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase. Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature. Others overcome their self at raves.But here's the weirdest place of all: war. So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war. And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences. I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray. Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II. And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle. Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase.(Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. ""I"" passes insensibly into a ""we,"" ""my"" becomes ""our"" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives. It feels somehow uplifting. This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man. The lower level he called the level of the profane. Now profane is the opposite of sacred. It just means ordinary or common. And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals. We want to satisfy our individual desires. We pursue our individual goals. But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change. Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts.Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community. Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness. And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it. Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals. Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended. Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator. And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11.So let me summarize where we are. I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human. I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind. I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred. When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted.So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design? Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands? Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system — this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain — Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake?Well many scientists who study religion take this view. The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well let me show you.In ""The Descent of Man,"" Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality — where did it come from, why do we have it. Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups. He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. He said, ""If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other."" He went on to say that ""Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected."" In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection.Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection. But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection.So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups. So here's a group of guys on a college crew team. Within this team there's competition. There are guys competing with each other. The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team. And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport. Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics. So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other. And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys. Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach. But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats. And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat. They can only win if they all pull together as a team. I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths.The main argument against group selection has always been that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators, but as soon as you have a group of cooperators, they're just going to get taken over by free-riders, individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others. Let me illustrate this for you. Suppose we've got a group of little organisms — they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what — and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative. Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth. And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows.But suppose then that one of them mutates. There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy. It takes advantage of the others. And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller. So here's how things play out. We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food. And in short order, the cooperators are done for. The free-riders have taken over. If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started.But there are solutions to the free-rider problem. It's not that hard a problem. In fact, nature has solved it many, many times. And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat. For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus? It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism. Somehow or other — maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why — but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism.And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens. A superorganism can basically take what it wants. It's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters. And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms. What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history. Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different.Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria. It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives. Once several wasps were all together in the same hive, they had no choice but to cooperate, because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives. And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said.These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere. And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods. Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside. And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives. Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart. We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are. In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines. Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains.Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you. Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest? Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole?Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way. And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way.(Music)(Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained. One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves. The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected. We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained. And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious.I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. Those things came along too recently. I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas. This is why politics is so tribal. Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness. It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas. It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team.And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life. Because human beings are, to some extent, hivish creatures like bees. We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment. We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed. We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort.Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? What should I do with my life? What's missing? What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. It's really comfortable down here on the lower level. Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center.One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia. They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into. They're all searching for their staircase. And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish.Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. ""No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.""JH: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_humanity_s_stairway_to_self_transcendence
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"The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject.For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ... (Laughter) ... if we use pennies.Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. But it's also a morally important one. Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum — whatever sorghum is — losing sorghum.But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene. So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling.(Laughter)(Applause)Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms — one that didn't exist in the 90's. What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. (Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times. (Laughter) It's true. (Applause) I have Excel.(Laughter)The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. And some people think that string theory is tough.(Laughter)Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit. It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law. Some people think this number's a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year.Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. And it was a big Christmas hit. Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket.(Laughter)(Applause)These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media. (Applause) Or about 75,000 jobs.(Laughter)(Applause)Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts. So that's it for now. I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod
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"I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days.The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch. And when I walked in, she was already at the table. I sat down, and she said, ""God, you look like hell."" I said, ""Thanks. I feel really — I'm not functioning."" And she said, ""What's going on?"" And I said, ""I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability. And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data, as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living, I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown. I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea?""(Laughter)And she said, ""I saw your talk live-streamed. It was not really you. It was a little different than what you usually do. But it was great."" And I said, ""This can't happen. YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. And we're going to be talking about 600, 700 people.""(Laughter)And she said, ""Well, I think it's too late.""And I said, ""Let me ask you something."" And she said, ""Yeah."" I said, ""Do you remember when we were in college, really wild and kind of dumb?"" She said, ""Yeah."" I said, ""Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine? Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?""(Laughter)And she goes, ""Uh... no.""(Laughter)Of course, the only thing I could say at that point was, ""Yeah, me neither. Yeah — me neither.""And I'm thinking to myself, ""Brené, what are you doing? Why did you bring this up? Have you lost your mind? Your sisters would be perfect for this.""(Laughter)So I looked back up and she said, ""Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?""(Laughter)And I said, ""I'm just thinking about it a little bit.""(Laughter)She said, ""You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever.""(Laughter)Then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic. ""If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over.""(Laughter)I had no contingency plan for four million.(Laughter)And my life did end when that happened. And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would be frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. But I want to talk about what I've learned.There's two things that I've learned in the last year. The first is: vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Let me ask you honestly — and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably — so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome — how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, ""God, vulnerability is weakness."" How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? The majority of people. Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I've come to the belief — this is my 12th year doing this research — that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage — to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, ""Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We'd like you to come in and speak. We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame.""(Laughter)What would you like for me to talk about? There's three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.(Laughter)So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.(Applause)To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability.The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame. And I'm going to be really honest with you. When I became a ""vulnerability researcher"" and that became the focus because of the TED talk — and I'm not kidding.I'll give you an example. About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store. About from a hundred feet away, this is what I hear: ""Vulnerability TED! Vulnerability TED!""(Laughter)(Laughter ends)I'm a fifth-generation Texan. Our family motto is ""Lock and load."" I am not a natural vulnerability researcher. So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six.(Laughter)And then I hear, ""Vulnerability TED!"" I turn around, I go, ""Hi."" She's right here and she said, ""You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown.""(Laughter)At this point, parents are, like, pulling their children close.(Laughter)""Look away."" And I'm so worn out at this point in my life, I look at her and I actually say, ""It was a fricking spiritual awakening.""(Laughter)(Applause)And she looks back and does this, ""I know.""(Laughter)And she said, ""We watched your TED talk in my book club. Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'""(Laughter)And she said, ""Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'""(Laughter)You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting.(Sighs)So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure — Like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED — I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I started writing and talking about vulnerability. And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it. It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane. ""What do you do?"" ""I study shame."" ""Oh.""(Laughter)And I see you.(Laughter)But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule — not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing — ""you've got to dance with the one who brung ya"". And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. And so I want to walk you in to shame. Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. And we're going to walk in. And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. It is to put on some galoshes — and walk through and find our way around. Here's why.We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right? Yes? We heard that. Yes? Cannot have that conversation without shame. Because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame. We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery, which is, have a checklist. You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. And all-powerful folks don't need checklists.And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here. Myshkin Ingawale, I hope I did right by you.(Applause)I saw the TED Fellows my first day here. And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia, because people were dying unnecessarily. And he said, ""I saw this need. So you know what I did? I made it."" And everybody just burst into applause, and they were like ""Yes!"" And he said, ""And it didn't work.(Laughter)And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked.""You know what the big secret about TED is? I can't wait to tell people this. I guess I'm doing it right now.(Laughter)This is like the failure conference.(Laughter)No, it is.(Applause)You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on the stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times. I don't think the world understands that, because of shame.There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the ""Man in the Arena"" quote. And it goes like this: ""It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly.""And that's what this conference, to me, is about. Life is about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, ""I'm going in and I'm going to try this,"" shame is the gremlin who says, ""Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO."" Shame is that thing.And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, ""I'm going to do this,"" we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes — ""never good enough"" — and, if you can talk it out of that one, ""who do you think you are?"" The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is ""I am bad."" Guilt is ""I did something bad."" How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, ""I'm sorry. I made a mistake?"" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake.There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender. If shame washes over me and washes over Chris, it's going to feel the same. Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame. We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender.For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli, the commercial. ""I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man."" For women, shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.(Laughter)Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket.For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, ""I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men."" And I said, ""I don't study men."" And he said, ""That's convenient.""(Laughter)And I said, ""Why?"" And he said, ""Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?"" I said, ""Yeah."" ""They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else.""So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, ""I unloaded the dishwasher!""(Laughter)But he really listens — because that's all we need — I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work.Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it — to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other. Very quickly, some research by Mahalik at Boston College. He asked, what do women need to do to conform to female norms? The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance.(Laughter)When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence.If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too.And so I'll leave you with this thought. If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is, that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly.So thank you all very much. I really appreciate it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame
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"Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, ""The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."" (Laughter) So — (Laughter)So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think you're immortal, on surveys, but — (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece.Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on.So there you go. That's the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now let's see whether we can set you free. I don't promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think I've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. It's been a ride, man. This has been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. There's many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time I've worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that.So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like ""lifesaving."" I really apologize to everybody for doing that, because obviously, we don't. What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then.So what's happening now is there's been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what they're dying of now isn't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the '80s and '90s.So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we haven't really squared with you guys about what's really happening now, and it's about time we did. I kind of woke up to this bit in the late '90s when I met this guy. This guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this. I was called down to the ward to see him. His is the little hand. I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician. He said, ""Look, there's a guy down here. He's got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care. His daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done."" Which is a familiar phrase to us. So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this. You can see his bones through the skin. He's very, very thin, and he is, indeed, very sick with pneumonia, and he's too sick to talk to me, so I talk to his daughter Kathleen, and I say to her, ""Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation?"" And she looked at me and said, ""No, of course not!"" I thought, ""Okay. Take this steady."" And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to me, ""You know, we always thought there'd be time.""Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here. There wasn't this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening. So a group of us started doing survey work, and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in Newcastle, in the Newcastle area, and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating. One in a hundred. And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill. And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large.Now, I work in acute care. This is John Hunter Hospital. And I thought, surely, we do better than that. So a colleague of mine from nursing called Lisa Shaw and I went through hundreds and hundreds of sets of notes in the medical records department looking at whether there was any sign at all that anybody had had any conversation about what might happen to them if the treatment they were receiving was unsuccessful to the point that they would die. And we didn't find a single record of any preference about goals, treatments or outcomes from any of the sets of notes initiated by a doctor or by a patient.So we started to realize that we had a problem, and the problem is more serious because of this.What we know is that obviously we are all going to die, but how we die is actually really important, obviously not just to us, but also to how that features in the lives of all the people who live on afterwards. How we die lives on in the minds of everybody who survives us, and the stress created in families by dying is enormous, and in fact you get seven times as much stress by dying in intensive care as by dying just about anywhere else, so dying in intensive care is not your top option if you've got a choice.And, if that wasn't bad enough, of course, all of this is rapidly progressing towards the fact that many of you, in fact, about one in 10 of you at this point, will die in intensive care. In the U.S., it's one in five. In Miami, it's three out of five people die in intensive care. So this is the sort of momentum that we've got at the moment.The reason why this is all happening is due to this, and I do have to take you through what this is about. These are the four ways to go. So one of these will happen to all of us. The ones you may know most about are the ones that are becoming increasingly of historical interest: sudden death. It's quite likely in an audience this size this won't happen to anybody here. Sudden death has become very rare. The death of Little Nell and Cordelia and all that sort of stuff just doesn't happen anymore. The dying process of those with terminal illness that we've just seen occurs to younger people. By the time you've reached 80, this is unlikely to happen to you. Only one in 10 people who are over 80 will die of cancer.The big growth industry are these. What you die of is increasing organ failure, with your respiratory, cardiac, renal, whatever organs packing up. Each of these would be an admission to an acute care hospital, at the end of which, or at some point during which, somebody says, enough is enough, and we stop.And this one's the biggest growth industry of all, and at least six out of 10 of the people in this room will die in this form, which is the dwindling of capacity with increasing frailty, and frailty's an inevitable part of aging, and increasing frailty is in fact the main thing that people die of now, and the last few years, or the last year of your life is spent with a great deal of disability, unfortunately.Enjoying it so far? (Laughs) (Laughter) Sorry, I just feel such a, I feel such a Cassandra here. (Laughter)What can I say that's positive? What's positive is that this is happening at very great age, now. We are all, most of us, living to reach this point. You know, historically, we didn't do that. This is what happens to you when you live to be a great age, and unfortunately, increasing longevity does mean more old age, not more youth. I'm sorry to say that. (Laughter) What we did, anyway, look, what we did, we didn't just take this lying down at John Hunter Hospital and elsewhere. We've started a whole series of projects to try and look about whether we could, in fact, involve people much more in the way that things happen to them. But we realized, of course, that we are dealing with cultural issues, and this is, I love this Klimt painting, because the more you look at it, the more you kind of get the whole issue that's going on here, which is clearly the separation of death from the living, and the fear — Like, if you actually look, there's one woman there who has her eyes open. She's the one he's looking at, and [she's] the one he's coming for. Can you see that? She looks terrified. It's an amazing picture.Anyway, we had a major cultural issue. Clearly, people didn't want us to talk about death, or, we thought that. So with loads of funding from the Federal Government and the local Health Service, we introduced a thing at John Hunter called Respecting Patient Choices. We trained hundreds of people to go to the wards and talk to people about the fact that they would die, and what would they prefer under those circumstances. They loved it. The families and the patients, they loved it. Ninety-eight percent of people really thought this just should have been normal practice, and that this is how things should work. And when they expressed wishes, all of those wishes came true, as it were. We were able to make that happen for them. But then, when the funding ran out, we went back to look six months later, and everybody had stopped again, and nobody was having these conversations anymore. So that was really kind of heartbreaking for us, because we thought this was going to really take off. The cultural issue had reasserted itself.So here's the pitch: I think it's important that we don't just get on this freeway to ICU without thinking hard about whether or not that's where we all want to end up, particularly as we become older and increasingly frail and ICU has less and less and less to offer us. There has to be a little side road off there for people who don't want to go on that track. And I have one small idea, and one big idea about what could happen.And this is the small idea. The small idea is, let's all of us engage more with this in the way that Jason has illustrated. Why can't we have these kinds of conversations with our own elders and people who might be approaching this? There are a couple of things you can do. One of them is, you can, just ask this simple question. This question never fails. ""In the event that you became too sick to speak for yourself, who would you like to speak for you?"" That's a really important question to ask people, because giving people the control over who that is produces an amazing outcome. The second thing you can say is, ""Have you spoken to that person about the things that are important to you so that we've got a better idea of what it is we can do?"" So that's the little idea.The big idea, I think, is more political. I think we have to get onto this. I suggested we should have Occupy Death. (Laughter) My wife said, ""Yeah, right, sit-ins in the mortuary. Yeah, yeah. Sure."" (Laughter) So that one didn't really run, but I was very struck by this. Now, I'm an aging hippie. I don't know, I don't think I look like that anymore, but I had, two of my kids were born at home in the '80s when home birth was a big thing, and we baby boomers are used to taking charge of the situation, so if you just replace all these words of birth, I like ""Peace, Love, Natural Death"" as an option. I do think we have to get political and start to reclaim this process from the medicalized model in which it's going.Now, listen, that sounds like a pitch for euthanasia. I want to make it absolutely crystal clear to you all, I hate euthanasia. I think it's a sideshow. I don't think euthanasia matters. I actually think that, in places like Oregon, where you can have physician-assisted suicide, you take a poisonous dose of stuff, only half a percent of people ever do that. I'm more interested in what happens to the 99.5 percent of people who don't want to do that. I think most people don't want to be dead, but I do think most people want to have some control over how their dying process proceeds. So I'm an opponent of euthanasia, but I do think we have to give people back some control. It deprives euthanasia of its oxygen supply. I think we should be looking at stopping the want for euthanasia, not for making it illegal or legal or worrying about it at all.This is a quote from Dame Cicely Saunders, whom I met when I was a medical student. She founded the hospice movement. And she said, ""You matter because you are, and you matter to the last moment of your life."" And I firmly believe that that's the message that we have to carry forward. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_saul_let_s_talk_about_dying
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"The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. Because the way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply. If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage, some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid, the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately. But coal plants, nuclear plants can't respond fast enough. A giant battery could. With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal, gas and nuclear do today.You see, the battery is the key enabling device here. With it, we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine. And that changes everything. Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings, here to center stage. Today I want to tell you about such a device. It's called the liquid metal battery. It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs.Now the theme of this year's TED Conference is Full Spectrum. The OED defines spectrum as ""The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part."" So I'm not here today only to tell you how my team at MIT has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world's great problems. I want to go full spectrum and tell you how, in the process of developing this new technology, we've uncovered some surprising heterodoxies that can serve as lessons for innovation, ideas worth spreading. And you know, if we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out; we can't just drill our way out; we can't bomb our way out. We're going to do it the old-fashioned American way, we're going to invent our way out, working together.(Applause)Now let's get started. The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor, Alessandro Volta, at the University of Padua in Italy. His invention gave birth to a new field of science, electrochemistry, and new technologies such as electroplating. Perhaps overlooked, Volta's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor. (Laughter) Until Volta, nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use.Here's the first battery — a stack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. This is the starting point for designing a battery — two electrodes, in this case metals of different composition, and an electrolyte, in this case salt dissolved in water. The science is that simple. Admittedly, I've left out a few details.Now I've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling, but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid — namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super-low cost. We need to think about the problem differently. We need to think big, we need to think cheap.So let's abandon the paradigm of let's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product. Instead, let's invent to the price point of the electricity market. So that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits. This battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements. I say, if you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt — (Laughter) preferably dirt that's locally sourced. And we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that don't cost us a fortune.So about six years ago, I started thinking about this problem. And in order to adopt a fresh perspective, I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage. In fact, I looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity, huge amounts of it. I'm talking about the production of aluminum. The process was invented in 1886 by a couple of 22-year-olds — Hall in the United States and Heroult in France. And just a few short years following their discovery, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material.You're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter. It's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile — row after row of cells that, inside, resemble Volta's battery, with three important differences. Volta's battery works at room temperature. It's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that's a solution of salt and water. The Hall-Heroult cell operates at high temperature, a temperature high enough that the aluminum metal product is liquid. The electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water, but rather salt that's melted. It's this combination of liquid metal, molten salt and high temperature that allows us to send high current through this thing. Today, we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound. That's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy.It is this that caught and held my attention to the point that I became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale. And I did. I made the battery all liquid — liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte. I'll show you how. So I put low-density liquid metal at the top, put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between.So now, how to choose the metals? For me, the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table, enunciated by another professor, Dimitri Mendeleyev. Everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here. And that includes our own bodies. I recall the very moment one day when I was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance, different, opposite density and high mutual reactivity. I felt the thrill of realization when I knew I'd come upon the answer. Magnesium for the top layer. And antimony for the bottom layer. You know, I've got to tell you, one of the greatest benefits of being a professor: colored chalk.(Laughter)So to produce current, magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion, which then migrates across the electrolyte, accepts two electrons from the antimony, and then mixes with it to form an alloy. The electrons go to work in the real world out here, powering our devices. Now to charge the battery, we connect a source of electricity. It could be something like a wind farm. And then we reverse the current. And this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode, restoring the initial constitution of the battery. And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature.It's pretty cool, at least in theory. But does it really work? So what to do next? We go to the laboratory. Now do I hire seasoned professionals? No, I hire a student and mentor him, teach him how to think about the problem, to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose. This is that student, David Bradwell, who, in this image, appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work. What I didn't tell David at the time was I myself wasn't convinced it would work.But David's young and he's smart and he wants a Ph.D., and he proceeds to build — (Laughter) He proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry. And based on David's initial promising results, which were paid with seed funds at MIT, I was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government. And that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people, a mix of graduate students, post-docs and even some undergraduates.And I was able to attract really, really good people, people who share my passion for science and service to society, not science and service for career building. And if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery, their answer would hearken back to President Kennedy's remarks at Rice University in 1962 when he said — and I'm taking liberties here — ""We choose to work on grid-level storage, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.""(Applause)So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery. We start here with our workhorse one watt-hour cell. I called it the shotglass. We've operated over 400 of these, perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries — not just magnesium and antimony. Along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell. I call it the hockey puck. And we got the same remarkable results. And then it was onto the saucer. That's 200 watt-hours. The technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable. But the pace wasn't fast enough for us. So a year and a half ago, David and I, along with another research staff-member, formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product.So today at LMBC, we're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour — 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell. We call that the pizza. And then we've got a four kilowatt-hour cell on the horizon. It's going to be 36 inches in diameter. We call that the bistro table, but it's not ready yet for prime-time viewing. And one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules, aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field. And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours — two million watt-hours. That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households. So here you have it, grid-level storage: silent, emissions-free, no moving parts, remotely controlled, designed to the market price point without subsidy.So what have we learned from all this? (Applause) So what have we learned from all this? Let me share with you some of the surprises, the heterodoxies. They lie beyond the visible. Temperature: Conventional wisdom says set it low, at or near room temperature, and then install a control system to keep it there. Avoid thermal runaway. Liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation. Our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges. Scaling: Conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many. Liquid metal battery is designed to reduce cost by producing fewer, but they'll be larger. And finally, human resources: Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts, seasoned professionals, who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge. To develop liquid metal battery, I hired students and post-docs and mentored them. In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential; when mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential. So you see, the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology, it's a blueprint for inventing inventors, full-spectrum.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy
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"You should be nice to nerds. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, if you don't already have a nerd in your life, you should get one. I'm just saying. Scientists and engineers change the world. I'd like to tell you about a magical place called DARPA where scientists and engineers defy the impossible and refuse to fear failure. Now these two ideas are connected more than you may realize, because when you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible.If you want to know how, ask yourself this question: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? If you really ask yourself this question, you can't help but feel uncomfortable. I feel a little uncomfortable. Because when you ask it, you begin to understand how the fear of failure constrains you, how it keeps us from attempting great things, and life gets dull, amazing things stop happening. Sure, good things happen, but amazing things stop happening.Now I should be clear, I'm not encouraging failure, I'm discouraging fear of failure. Because it's not failure itself that constrains us. The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way. We're tested. And in part, that testing feels an appropriate part of achieving something great. Clemenceau said, ""Life gets interesting when we fail, because it's a sign that we've surpassed ourselves.""In 1895, Lord Kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. In October of 1903, the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly. And two months later on December 17th, Orville Wright powered the first airplane across a beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. That was 1903.One year later, the next declarations of impossibilities began. Ferdinand Foch, a French army general credited with having one of the most original and subtle minds in the French army, said, ""Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value."" 40 years later, aero experts coined the term transonic. They debated, should it have one S or two? You see, they were having trouble in this flight regime, and it wasn't at all clear that we could fly faster than the speed of sound. In 1947, there was no wind tunnel data beyond Mach 0.85. And yet, on Tuesday, October 14th, 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into the cockpit of his Bell X-1 and he flew towards an unknown possibility, and in so doing, he became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. Six of eight Atlas rockets blew up on the pad. After 11 complete mission failures, we got our first images from space. And on that first flight we got more data than in all U-2 missions combined. It took a lot of failures to get there.Since we took to the sky, we have wanted to fly faster and farther. And to do so, we've had to believe in impossible things. And we've had to refuse to fear failure. That's still true today. Today, we don't talk about flying transonically, or even supersonically, we talk about flying hypersonically — not Mach 2 or Mach 3, Mach 20. At Mach 20, we can fly from New York to Long Beach in 11 minutes and 20 seconds. At that speed, the surface of the airfoil is the temperature of molten steel — 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit — like a blast furnace. We are essentially burning the airfoil as we fly it. And we are flying it, or trying to.DARPA's hypersonic test vehicle is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built. It's boosted to near-space atop a Minotaur IV rocket. Now the Minotaur IV has too much impulse, so we have to bleed it off by flying the rocket at an 89 degree angle of attack for portions of the trajectory. That's an unnatural act for a rocket. The third stage has a camera. We call it rocketcam. And it's pointed at the hypersonic glider. This is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one. Now to conceal the shape, we changed the aspect ratio a little bit. But this is what it looks like from the third stage of the rocket looking at the unmanned glider as it heads into the atmosphere back towards Earth.We've flown twice. In the first flight, no aerodynamic control of the vehicle. But we collected more hypersonic flight data than in 30 years of ground-based testing combined. And in the second flight, three minutes of fully-controlled, aerodynamic flight at Mach 20. We must fly again, because amazing, never-been-done-before things require that you fly. You can't learn to fly at Mach 20 unless you fly. And while there's no substitute for speed, maneuverability is a very close second.If a Mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from New York to Long Beach, a hummingbird would take, well, days. You see, hummingbirds are not hypersonic, but they are maneuverable. In fact, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. It can fly up, down, forwards, backwards, even upside-down. And so if we wanted to fly in this room or places where humans can't go, we'd need an aircraft small enough and maneuverable enough to do so.This is a hummingbird drone. It can fly in all directions, even backwards. It can hover and rotate. This prototype aircraft is equipped with a video camera. It weighs less than one AA battery. It does not eat nectar. In 2008, it flew for a whopping 20 seconds, a year later, two minutes, then six, eventually 11. Many prototypes crashed — many. But there's no way to learn to fly like a hummingbird unless you fly. (Applause) It's beautiful, isn't it. Wow. It's great. Matt is the first ever hummingbird pilot. (Applause)Failure is part of creating new and amazing things. We cannot both fear failure and make amazing new things — like a robot with the stability of a dog on rough terrain, or maybe even ice; a robot that can run like a cheetah, or climb stairs like a human with the occasional clumsiness of a human. Or perhaps, Spider Man will one day be Gecko Man. A gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe. One square millimeter of a gecko's footpad has 14,000 hair-like structures called setae. They are used to help it grip to surfaces using intermolecular forces.Today we can manufacture structures that mimic the hairs of a gecko's foot. The result, a four-by-four-inch artificial nano-gecko adhesive. can support a static load of 660 pounds. That's enough to stick six 42-inch plasma TV's to your wall, no nails. So much for Velcro, right?And it's not just passive structures, it's entire machines. This is a spider mite. It's one millimeter long, but it looks like Godzilla next to these micromachines. In the world of Godzilla spider mites, we can make millions of mirrors, each one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, moving at hundreds of thousands of times per second to make large screen displays, so that we can watch movies like ""Godzilla"" in high-def.And if we can build machines at that scale, what about Eiffel Tower-like trusses at the microscale? Today we are making metals that are lighter than Styrofoam, so light they can sit atop a dandelion puff and be blown away with a wisp of air — so light that you can make a car that two people can lift, but so strong that it has the crash-worthiness of an SUV.From the smallest wisp of air to the powerful forces of nature's storms. There are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe. Each lightning bolt heats the air to 44,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the surface of the Sun. What if we could use these electromagnetic pulses as beacons, beacons in a moving network of powerful transmitters? Experiments suggest that lightning could be the next GPS.Electrical pulses form the thoughts in our brains. Using a grid the size of your thumb, with 32 electrodes on the surface of his brain, Tim uses his thoughts to control an advanced prosthetic arm. And his thoughts made him reach for Katie. This is the first time a human has controlled a robot with thought alone. And it is the first time that Tim has held Katie's hand in seven years. That moment mattered to Tim and Katie, and this green goo may someday matter to you. This green goo is perhaps the vaccine that could save your life. It was made in tobacco plants. Tobacco plants can make millions of doses of vaccine in weeks instead of months, and it might just be the first healthy use of tobacco ever.And if it seems far-fetched that tobacco plants could make people healthy, what about gamers that could solve problems that experts can't solve? Last September, the gamers of Foldit solved the three-dimensional structure of the retroviral protease that contributes to AIDS in rhesus monkeys. Now understanding this structure is very important for developing treatments. For 15 years, it was unsolved in the scientific community. The gamers of Foldit solved it in 15 days. Now they were able to do so by working together. They were able to work together because they're connected by the Internet. And others, also connected to the Internet, used it as an instrument of democracy. And together they changed the fate of their nation.The Internet is home to two billion people, or 30 percent of the world's population. It allows us to contribute and to be heard as individuals. It allows us to amplify our voices and our power as a group. But it too had humble beginnings. In 1969, the internet was but a dream, a few sketches on a piece of paper. And then on October 29th, the first packet-switched message was sent from UCLA to SRI. The first two letters of the word ""Login,"" that's all that made it through — an L and an O — and then a buffer overflow crashed the system. (Laughter) Two letters, an L and an O, now a worldwide force.So who are these scientists and engineers at a magical place called DARPA? They are nerds, and they are heroes among us. They challenge existing perspectives at the edges of science and under the most demanding of conditions. They remind us that we can change the world if we defy the impossible and we refuse to fear failure. They remind us that we all have nerd power. Sometimes we just forget.You see, there was a time when you weren't afraid of failure, when you were a great artist or a great dancer and you could sing, you were good at math, you could build things, you were an astronaut, an adventurer, Jacques Cousteau, you could jump higher, run faster, kick harder than anyone. You believed in impossible things and you were fearless. You were totally and completely in touch with your inner superhero. Scientists and engineers can indeed change the world. So can you. You were born to. So go ahead, ask yourself, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?Now I want to say, this is not easy. It's hard to hold onto this feeling, really hard. I guess in some way, I sort of believe it's supposed to be hard. Doubt and fear always creep in. We think someone else, someone smarter than us, someone more capable, someone with more resources will solve that problem. But there isn't anyone else; there's just you. And if we're lucky, in that moment, someone steps into that doubt and fear, takes a hand and says, ""Let me help you believe.""Jason Harley did that for me. Jason started at DARPA on March 18th, 2010. He was with our transportation team. I saw Jason nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. And more so than most, he saw the highs and the lows, the celebrations and the disappointments. And on one particularly dark day for me, Jason sat down and he wrote an email. He was encouraging, but firm. And when he hit send, he probably didn't realize what a difference it would make. It mattered to me. In that moment and still today when I doubt, when I feel afraid, when I need to reconnect with that feeling, I remember his words, they were so powerful.Text: ""There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you.""♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫Voice: Because that's what being a superhero is all about.RD: ""There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you."" And remember, be nice to nerds. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Regina, thank you. I have a couple of questions. So that glider of yours, the Mach 20 glider, the first one, no control, it ended up in the Pacific I think somewhere.RD: Yeah, yeah. It did. (CA: What happened on that second flight?) Yeah, it also went into the Pacific. (CA: But this time under control?) We didn't fly it into the Pacific. No, there are multiple portions of the trajectory that are demanding in terms of really flying at that speed. And so in the second flight, we were able to get three minutes of fully aerodynamic control of the vehicle before we lost it.CA: I imagine you're not planning to open up to passenger service from New York to Long Beach anytime soon.RD: It might be a little warm.CA: What do you picture that glider being used for?RD: Well our responsibility is to develop the technology for this. How it's ultimately used will be determined by the military. Now the purpose of the vehicle though, the purpose of the technology, is to be able to reach anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes.CA: And to carry a payload of more than a few pounds? (RD: Yeah.) Like what's the payload it could carry?RD: Well I don't think we ultimately know what it will be, right. We've got to fly it first.CA: But not necessarily just a camera?RD: No, not necessarily just a camera.CA: It's amazing. The hummingbird?RD: Yeah?CA: I'm curious, you started your beautiful sequence on flight with a plane kind of trying to flap its wings and failing horribly, and there haven't been that many planes built since that flap wings. Why did we think that this was the time to go biomimicry and copy a hummingbird? Isn't that a very expensive solution for a small maneuverable flying object?RD: So I mean, in part, we wondered if it was possible to do it. And you have to revisit these questions over time. The folks at AeroVironment tried 300 or more different wing designs, 12 different forms of the avionics. It took them 10 full prototypes to get something that would actually fly. But there's something really interesting about a flying machine that looks like something you'd recognize. So we often talk about stealth as a means for avoiding any type of sensing, but when things looks just natural, you also don't see them.CA: Ah. So it's not necessarily just the performance. It's partly the look. (RD: Sure.) It's actually, ""Look at that cute hummingbird flying into my headquarters."" (Laughter) Because I think, as well as the awe of looking at that, I'm sure some people here are thinking, technology catches up so quick, how long is it before some crazed geek with a little remote control flies one through a window of the White House? I mean, do you worry about the Pandora's box issue here?RD: Well look, our singular mission is the creation and prevention of strategic surprise. That's what we do. It would be inconceivable for us to do that work if we didn't make people excited and uncomfortable with the things that we do at the same time. It's just the nature of what we do. Now our responsibility is to push that edge. And we have to be, of course, mindful and responsible of how the technology is developed and ultimately used, but we can't simply close our eyes and pretend that it isn't advancing; it's advancing.CA: I mean, you're clearly a really inspiring leader. And you persuade people to go to these great feats of invention, but at a personal level, in a way I can't imagine doing your job. Do you wake up in the night sometimes, just asking questions about the possibly unintended consequences of your team's brilliance?RD: Sure. I think you couldn't be human if you didn't ask those questions.CA: How do you answer them?RD: Well I don't always have answers for them, right. I think that we learn as time goes on. My job is one of the most exhilarating jobs you could have. I work with some of the most amazing people. And with that exhilaration, comes a really deep sense of responsibility. And so you have on the one hand this tremendous lift of what's possible and this tremendous seriousness of what it means.CA: Regina, that was jaw-dropping, as they say. Thank you so much for coming to TED. (RD: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_glider_to_humming_bird_drone
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"Many times I go around the world to speak, and people ask me questions about the challenges, my moments, some of my regrets. 1998: A single mother of four, three months after the birth of my fourth child, I went to do a job as a research assistant. I went to Northern Liberia. And as part of the work, the village would give you lodgings. And they gave me lodging with a single mother and her daughter.This girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade. She was the laughing stock of the community. Her mother was often told by other women, ""You and your child will die poor."" After two weeks of working in that village, it was time to go back. The mother came to me, knelt down, and said, ""Leymah, take my daughter. I wish for her to be a nurse."" Dirt poor, living in the home with my parents, I couldn't afford to. With tears in my eyes, I said, ""No.""Two months later, I go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief. The women's chief of the village has this little girl, fair color like me, totally dirty. And all day she walked around only in her underwear. When I asked, ""Who is that?"" She said, ""That's Wei. The meaning of her name is pig. Her mother died while giving birth to her, and no one had any idea who her father was."" For two weeks, she became my companion, slept with me. I bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll. The night before I left, she came to the room and said, ""Leymah, don't leave me here. I wish to go with you. I wish to go to school."" Dirt poor, no money, living with my parents, I again said, ""No."" Two months later, both of those villages fell into another war. Till today, I have no idea where those two girls are.Fast-forward, 2004: In the peak of our activism, the minister of Gender Liberia called me and said, ""Leymah, I have a nine-year-old for you. I want you to bring her home because we don't have safe homes."" The story of this little girl: She had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months. She came to me bloated, very pale. Every night I'd come from work and lie on the cold floor. She'd lie beside me and say, ""Auntie, I wish to be well. I wish to go to school.""2010: A young woman stands before President Sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together, their father and mother died during the war. She's 19; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them. She's highly athletic. One of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship. Full scholarship. She gets it. Her dream of going to school, her wish of being educated, is finally here. She goes to school on the first day. The director of sports who's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class. And for the next three years, her fate will be having sex with him every day, as a favor for getting her in school.Globally, we have policies, international instruments, work leaders. Great people have made commitments — we will protect our children from want and from fear. The U.N. has the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Countries like America, we've heard things like No Child Left Behind. Other countries come with different things. There is a Millennium Development called Three that focuses on girls. All of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally, I think, has failed.In Liberia, for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls. Teen prostitution is at its peak. In one community, we're told, you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper. Girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night. It's disheartening, it's sad. And then someone asked me, just before my TEDTalk, a few days ago, ""So where is the hope?""Several years ago, a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women. It's not enough to say you have two Nobel laureates from the Republic of Liberia when your girls' kids are totally out there and no hope, or seemingly no hope. We created a space called the Young Girls Transformative Project. We go into rural communities and all we do, like has been done in this room, is create the space. When these girls sit, you unlock intelligence, you unlock passion, you unlock commitment, you unlock focus, you unlock great leaders. Today, we've worked with over 300. And some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps, as young mothers, to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women.One young woman I met, teen mother of four, never thought about finishing high school, graduated successfully; never thought about going to college, enrolled in college. One day she said to me, ""My wish is to finish college and be able to support my children."" She's at a place where she can't find money to go to school. She sells water, sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones. And you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education. Juanita is her name. She takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school. Says, ""Leymah, my wish is to be educated. And if I can't be educated, when I see some of my sisters being educated, my wish has been fulfilled. I wish for a better life. I wish for food for my children. I wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop."" This is the dream of the African girl.Several years ago, there was one African girl. This girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry. Angry, frustrated, really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children, this young girl started a movement, a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace. I will fulfill the wish. This is another African girl's wish. I failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls. I failed to do this. These were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman — I failed, I failed, I failed. So I will do this. Women came out, protested a brutal dictator, fearlessly spoke. Not only did the wish of a piece of doughnut come true, the wish of peace came true. This young woman wished also to go to school. She went to school. This young woman wished for other things to happen, it happened for her.Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate. I'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish, in my tiny capacity, of little African girls — the wish of being educated. We set up a foundation. We're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential.I don't have much to ask of you. I've also been to places in this U.S., and I know that girls in this country also have wishes, a wish for a better life somewhere in the Bronx, a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown L.A., a wish for a better life somewhere in Texas, a wish for a better life somewhere in New York, a wish for a better life somewhere in New Jersey.Will you journey with me to help that girl, be it an African girl or an American girl or a Japanese girl, fulfill her wish, fulfill her dream, achieve that dream? Because all of these great innovators and inventors that we've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world, and all they're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence, unlock the passion, unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves. Let's journey together. Let's journey together.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. Right now in Liberia, what do you see as the main issue that troubles you?LG: I've been asked to lead the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative. As part of my work, I'm doing these tours in different villages and towns — 13, 15 hours on dirt roads — and there is no community that I've gone into that I haven't seen intelligent girls. But sadly, the vision of a great future, or the dream of a great future, is just a dream, because you have all of these vices. Teen pregnancy, like I said, is epidemic.So what troubles me is that I was at that place and somehow I'm at this place, and I just don't want to be the only one at this place. I'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me. I want to look back 20 years from now and see that there's another Liberian girl, Ghanaian girl, Nigerian girl, Ethiopian girl standing on this TED stage. And maybe, just maybe, saying, ""Because of that Nobel laureate I'm here today."" So I'm troubled when I see them like there's no hope. But I'm also not pessimistic, because I know it doesn't take a lot to get them charged up.CA: And in the last year, tell us one hopeful thing that you've seen happening.LG: I can tell you many hopeful things that I've seen happening. But in the last year, where President Sirleaf comes from, her village, we went there to work with these girls. And we could not find 25 girls in high school. All of these girls went to the gold mine, and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things. We took 50 of those girls and we worked with them. And this was at the beginning of elections. This is one place where women were never — even the older ones barely sat in the circle with the men. These girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration. This is a real rural village. And the theme they used was: ""Even pretty girls vote."" They were able to mobilize young women.But not only did they do that, they went to those who were running for seats to ask them, ""What is it that you will give the girls of this community when you win?"" And one of the guys who already had a seat was very — because Liberia has one of the strongest rape laws, and he was one of those really fighting in parliament to overturn that law because he called it barbaric. Rape is not barbaric, but the law, he said, was barbaric. And when the girls started engaging him, he was very hostile towards them. These little girls turned to him and said, ""We will vote you out of office."" He's out of office today.(Applause)CA: Leymah, thank you. Thank you so much for coming to TED.LG: You're welcome. (CA: Thank you.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leymah_gbowee_unlock_the_intelligence_passion_greatness_of_girls
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"This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block. The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together. Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world. They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time. Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time.Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this. It was called the Automatic Binding Brick. And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household. It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced — or 75 bricks for every person on the planet. You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings. LEGO made it accessible. LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination.Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block. The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time.But there's a main difference: The transistor was only for experts. I personally don't accept this, that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, so I decided to change that. Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers.A few years ago I started developing littleBits. Let me show you how they work. LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function. They're pre-engineered to be light, sound, motors and sensors. And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets. So you can't put them the wrong way. The bricks are color-coded. Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire. So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits. You put a blue to a green, you can make light. You can put a knob in between and now you've made a little dimmer. Switch out the knob for a pulse module, which is here, and now you've made a little blinker. Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine. I'm going to stop that.So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful. Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures. So to make this blink faster or slower, you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower. The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library. We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick. Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors — everything should be accessible.We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them. And it's been an incredible experience. The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don't learn at schools. For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch. We've also been taking littleBits to design schools. So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material. Here you see, with felt and paper water bottles, we have Geordie making ...(Clanging)(Buzzing)A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever — just cardboard, wood and paper — and told them ""Make something."" Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball. (Laughter) But wait, this is actually my favorite project. It's a lobster made of playdough that's afraid of the dark.(Laughter)To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material. And we want to make this material accessible to everyone. So littleBits is open-source. You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself. We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours. So go ahead and start inventing.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ayah_bdeir_building_blocks_that_blink_beep_and_teach
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"Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment. Today's its debut. It's a demonstration of augmented reality. And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded. They are live and reacting to me in real time. I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic. So fingers crossed. And keep your eyes on the big screen.Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery. It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder. Magic is deception, but it is a deception we enjoy. To enjoy being deceived, an audience must first suspend its disbelief. It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind.Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that, for a moment, constitutes poetic faith.MT: This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience. Without it, a script is just words. Augmented reality is just the latest technology. And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity. We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had. Without this ability there is no magic.It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller. He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio.Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler. He is an actor playing the part of a magician.MT: Which means magic is theater and every trick is a story. The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction. There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. Now many of them are intensely dramatic. Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape. But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live. Because the best stories always have a happy ending.The tricks of magic have one special element. They are stories with a twist. Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines. He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think.Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error. The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable, but do not, in fact, match what is being done in front of them.MT: In that respect, magic tricks are like jokes. Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination. But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected, we laugh. The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks. The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter. It's fun to be fooled.One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared. We feel compelled to tell them. When I do a trick at a party — (Laughter) that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again. They want to share the experience. That makes my job more difficult, because, if I want to surprise them, I need to tell a story that starts the same, but ends differently — a trick with a twist on a twist. It keeps me busy.Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained. We think in narrative structures. We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood. It's a uniquely human achievement. We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation.Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com. The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story. We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies. We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole. Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be. They give us our identity and a sense of community. And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_a_magical_tale_with_augmented_reality
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"Thank y'all!This is going to be a motivational speech. Because — imagine my motivation standing between this strong, healthy crowd ... and lunch.(Laughter)So ... I'm @Falkvinge on Twitter. Feel free to quote me if I say something memorable, stupid, funny, whatever. I love seeing my name on Twitter.So ... Hi! I'm Rick. I'm a politician. I'm sorry. How many in here have heard of the Swedish Pirate Party before? Let's see a show of hands. OK, that's practically everybody. Probably due to the fact that we are Sweden's neighbor.I frequently ask how many have heard of any other political party and there's always just scattered hands in the audience compared to this first question which is one-half to two-thirds. This is actually the first time ever that does not match. It was practically everybody.So, for those who haven't heard of us: well, the Pirate Party, we love the net. We love copying and sharing, and we love civil liberties. For that, some people call us pirates. Probably in an attempt to make us bow our heads and feel shame. That didn't work very well. We decided to stand tall about it instead.And so in 2006, I founded a new political party. I led it for its first five years. And the European elections, the last European elections, we became the largest party and the most coveted youth demographic, sub-30. And what's interesting is we did that on less than one percent of the competition's budget. We had a campaign budget total of 50,000 euros. They had six million between them — and we beat them. That gave us a cost efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. And I'm gonna share the secret recipe of how we did that.We developed swarm methodologies. And they can be applied to any business or social cause. Well, almost any — there's a small asterisk by the end, and I'll get to that in just a minute. But applying these — and we've done this dozens of times, we know that this works.We've put two people in the European Parliament, we have 45 people in various German state parliaments, we're in the Icelandic parliament, the Czech senate, many, many, many more, local councils — and, as said, we've spread to 70 countries. And that's not bad for a political movement that hasn't even been around for a decade.So today we're going to talk a bit about — how people are motivated to be part of change, to be part of something bigger than themselves. And how you can channel this into an organization that harnesses this great power of wanting to make the world a better place. And in the end, come out a little on the better.When I speak to businesspeople, I frequently make them very upset when I contradict them and say that no, your employees are not your most valuable asset. Your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free. And you don't let them. They get very upset about that.A swarm is a congregation of tens of thousands of volunteers that have chosen of their own will to converge on a common goal. There's this ""Futurama"" quote: ""When push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love — even if it's not a good idea.""(Laughter)I mean, seriously, what kind of idiot thinks they can change the world by starting a political party?(Laughter)This kind of idiot, apparently. But it works! What you need to do is to put a stake in the ground. You need to announce your goal. Just say, ""I want to accomplish this."" I'm going to do this. And it doesn't need to be very costly.My announcement was just two lines in a chat channel. ""Hey, look, the Pirate Party has its website up now after New Year's."" And the address. That was all the advertising I ever did. The next time I had several hundred activists wanting to work with us.When you provide such a focus point, a swarm intelligence emerges. When people can rally to a flag. And that's what gives you this two orders of magnitude of cost efficiency. It's a huge advantage — you're running circles around all the legacy organizations. And there are four goals that need to be fulfilled in your goal in order for this to work.These four criteria are that your goal must be: tangible, credible, inclusive and epic.Let's take a look at them: It needs to be tangible. A lot of people say, ""Well, you know, we should make the world a better place,"" or, ""Yeah, we should all feel good now."" Not going to work. You need a binary. Are we there yet, or are we not there yet?It needs to be credible. Somebody seeing the project plan that you're posting needs to see that, yes, this project plan will take us from where we are to where we want to be. You need to break it down into subgoals that each by themselves are seen as doable, and when you add the subgoals together, we've gone to where we want.It needs to be — and this is where it gets exciting in terms of working swarmwise — it needs to be inclusive. Anybody who sees this project plan needs to immediately say, ""I want to do this — and there's my spot!"" And they will be able to jump right into the project and start working on it without asking anybody's permission. And that is exactly what'll happen.And, last but not least, it needs to be epic. It needs to energize people. It needs to electrify people. Shoot for the moon! On second thought, don't shoot for the moon, we've already been there — shoot for Mars!(Laughter)In contrast, you will never be able to get a volunteer swarm forming around making the most correct tax audit ever. Doesn't electrify people. Go to Mars.A lot of people kind of balk at the obstacles. We're going to climb a huge mountain. So how do you motivate people to do that? Well, it turns out that obstacles are not the problem. Not knowing the obstacles is the problem. If you know how high the mountain is, you know exactly what it takes to scale it. We know exactly how far away Mars is and what it takes to get there. If you can plan it like a project, you can plan what resources you need and you can execute it, exactly like a project.Let's see: we're going to Mars, we need two dozen volunteer rocket scientists, one dozen volunteer metallurgists, some crazy dude who will mix rocket fuel in his backyard and so on.When you can list the resources, you know what you need to get there. When you know what you need to get there, you can go there. And the next thing is to encourage this development of a swarm intelligence, which is where the cost efficiency comes in.There's a TED Talk on motivation that debunks that we work for money, and it presents science on how we're really motivated by three things, in terms of larger creative tasks, when we work for something bigger than ourselves.We work for autonomy, mastery and purpose. We've covered purpose already. As in, working for something bigger, tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. So, where that motivation talk ends, what it doesn't answer is, how do you build an organization that harnesses this motivational power. And this is where working swarmwise comes in, this is where swarm intelligence comes in. Turns out that there are three factors that you optimize for — and each of these are in complete opposite to what you learn at a business school. But it works. We know it works. We have people in many, many parliaments to prove it.Those three factors are: speed, trust and scalability. We optimize for speed by cutting bottlenecks out of the loop, cutting them out of the decision loop. That means cutting yourself out of the decision loop, which can be hard. But you've got to communicate your vision so passionately, so strongly, that everybody knows what the goal is and can find something, some step that takes the movement just a little closer to that goal. And when tens of thousands of people do that on a weekly basis, you become an unstoppable force.We had a three-person rule in our organization, saying that if three self-identified volunteers in the movement were in agreement that something was good for the movement, they had the green light from the highest office to go ahead and act in the name of the organization, including spending resources. When you talk about this kind of empowerment to traditional businesspeople, they think you belong in a zoo. But you know what? I led this organization for five years, there were 50,000 registered members and many, many more anonymous activists. It was not abused once. Everybody had the key to the treasure chest. It was not abused one single time.Turns out when you give people the keys to the castle, and look them in the eye and say, ""I trust you,"" they step up to the plate. And that's a beautiful thing to see happen.Obviously, not everything went according to plan, but that's a different thing. We made mistakes. We should expect mistakes. If you're pioneering something, that means you must, by definition, venture into the unknown. When you're trying the unknown, some things won't go as planned. That's part of the definition of venturing into the unknown. To find the great, you must allow mistakes to happen. So you must communicate that we expect some things to go wrong to create a risk-positive environment. Therefore we optimize for iteration speed. Meaning that we try, we fail, we try again, we fail faster, we fail better, we try again, we fail better again. Maybe after we've tried 15 times, we've mastered some specific subject, so you want to minimize the time it takes to try those 15 times.We optimize on trust. We encourage diversity. You need to communicate your vision so strongly so that everybody can translate it into their own context because language is an incredibly strong inclusionary and exclusionary social marker. This one-brand-fits-all message — forget it! That's what they teach you at business school — it doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't give you the cost-efficiency advantage of working swarmwise.This leads to a lot of different approaches tried in parallel in different social groups who try out different methods of working toward the goal. Some of them will work but in order to find the great ones, you need this diversity. And you need to communicate that we need that diversity. If somebody on this side does not understand what those guys are doing, that's OK because we all trust each other to work for the better of the movement. And it's OK that I don't understand their social context. I'm not expected to — I understand my social context. I contribute with something I know. Make people aware of this diversity.Finally, scalability. Get feet on the ground. Again, in business school, they teach you to use a lean organization. Forget that. Just scale up the organization from the get-go. Start with 10,000 empty boxes and an org chart covering down to every minor city. When you have lots and lots of small responsibilities in such a scaffolding that supports the swarm, supports the activists, you'll find that these boxes in the org charts are getting filled in quite rapidly, and they start to get filled in beyond your horizon with people you've never heard of. And so, this swarm keeps growing to tens of thousands of people, each taking on something small with very, very decentralized mandate to act on the organization. And this is when a swarm intelligence emerges. This is when you have this beehive logic where everybody knows what's to be done. Everybody is taking their own small steps towards it. So the swarm starts to act as a coherent organism. And it's amazing to watch. This is when you're awarded by the cost-efficiency advantage over your competitors by two orders of magnitude. Two orders of magnitude. This is not just a silver bullet.So we've been talking a lot about the big picture today. You can use these swarm methods for a lot of stuff. Do you want to change the world? Do you want to bring clean water to a billion people? Teach three billion people to read? Maybe you're into social change; you want to introduce unconditional basic income. Or maybe you want to take humanity to Mars. You can do this using these methods.You can do this. It's about leadership. It's about deciding what you want to do and telling it to the world. Because no matter whether you think you can or cannot change the world, no matter whether you think you can or cannot change the world, you are probably right.So one question I want everybody here to ask themselves today is the observation that change doesn't just happen, somebody makes it happen — do you want to be that person? Do you want to be that person?And then one last thing: There's one component more that's required to work swarmwise that I haven't mentioned yet. And that is fun. This goes beyond just enjoying your job, this goes beyond having a pinball machine in the office. Because this is actually required to succeed in a swarmwise scenario. This is required to succeed to get that cost-efficiency advantage of two orders of magnitude. For the reason that you need to attract volunteers. And people, in this aspect, are rather predictable. People will go to other people who are having fun. In contrast, they will walk an extra mile to avoid people who are not having fun. So, having fun is more than just having a pinball machine in the office. It's an absolute and unavoidable requirement for organizational and operational success when you're working swarmwise.So, in summary — a recipe for a swarm organization using these motivational methods to a huge competitive advantage. Your goal: it needs to be tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. Your organization needs to be optimized for speed, trust and scalability. You need to enjoy yourselves. And that will reward you with two orders of magnitude of cost-efficiency advantage.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rick_falkvinge_i_am_a_pirate
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"Just a moment ago, my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck. Her text said, ""Mom, you will rock."" I love this. Getting that text was like getting a hug. And so there you have it. I embody the central paradox. I'm a woman who loves getting texts who's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem.Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story. 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row. I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine. In those heady days, we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities. We were exploring different aspects of ourselves. And then we unplugged. I was excited. And, as a psychologist, what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live better lives in the real world.Now fast-forward to 2012. I'm back here on the TED stage again. My daughter's 20. She's a college student. She sleeps with her cellphone, so do I. And I've just written a new book, but this time it's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine. So what happened? I'm still excited by technology, but I believe, and I'm here to make the case, that we're letting it take us places that we don't want to go.Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I've found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they've quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things.So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting. (Laughter) People explain to me that it's hard, but that it can be done. Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents' full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention. This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together. And we even text at funerals. I study this. We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones.Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We're getting used to a new way of being alone together. People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere — connected to all the different places they want to be. People want to customize their lives. They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention. So you want to go to that board meeting, but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you. And some people think that's a good thing. But you can end up hiding from each other, even as we're all constantly connected to each other.A 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he doesn't have colleagues anymore at work. When he goes to work, he doesn't stop by to talk to anybody, he doesn't call. And he says he doesn't want to interrupt his colleagues because, he says, ""They're too busy on their email."" But then he stops himself and he says, ""You know, I'm not telling you the truth. I'm the one who doesn't want to be interrupted. I think I should want to, but actually I'd rather just do things on my Blackberry.""Across the generations, I see that people can't get enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I call it the Goldilocks effect: not too close, not too far, just right. But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships. An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully, ""Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation.""When I ask people ""What's wrong with having a conversation?"" People say, ""I'll tell you what's wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can't control what you're going to say."" So that's the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body — not too little, not too much, just right.Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question. He said, ""Don't all those little tweets, don't all those little sips of online communication, add up to one big gulp of real conversation?"" My answer was no, they don't add up. Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information, they may work for saying, ""I'm thinking about you,"" or even for saying, ""I love you,"" — I mean, look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter — but they don't really work for learning about each other, for really coming to know and understand each other. And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development.Over and over I hear, ""I would rather text than talk."" And what I'm seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they've become almost willing to dispense with people altogether. So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won't. I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I've learned in the past 15 years. That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology. That's why it's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — so many automatic listeners. And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.We're developing robots, they call them sociable robots, that are specifically designed to be companions — to the elderly, to our children, to us. Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other? During my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood. And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal. It seemed to be looking in her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. It comforted her. And many people found this amazing.But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life. That robot put on a great show. And we're vulnerable. People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing. So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy, I was thinking, ""That robot can't empathize. It doesn't face death. It doesn't know life.""And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work. But when I stepped back, I felt myself at the cold, hard center of a perfect storm. We expect more from technology and less from each other. And I ask myself, ""Why have things come to this?""And I believe it's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control. But we're not so comfortable. We are not so much in control.These days, those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies. One, that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, that we will always be heard; and three, that we will never have to be alone. And that third idea, that we will never have to be alone, is central to changing our psyches. Because the moment that people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they fidget, they reach for a device. Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light. Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And so people try to solve it by connecting. But here, connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn't solve, an underlying problem. But more than a symptom, constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves. It's shaping a new way of being.The best way to describe it is, I share therefore I am. We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we're having them. So before it was: I have a feeling, I want to make a call. Now it's: I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text. The problem with this new regime of ""I share therefore I am"" is that, if we don't have connection, we don't feel like ourselves. We almost don't feel ourselves. So what do we do? We connect more and more. But in the process, we set ourselves up to be isolated.How do you get from connection to isolation? You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true. If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.When I spoke at TED in 1996, reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities, I said, ""Those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection."" And that's what I'm calling for here, now: reflection and, more than that, a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us, what it might be costing us. We're smitten with technology. And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking might spoil the romance. But it's time to talk. We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up. But it's not, it's early days. There's plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it, how we build it. I'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves.I see some first steps. Start thinking of solitude as a good thing. Make room for it. Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children. Create sacred spaces at home — the kitchen, the dining room — and reclaim them for conversation. Do the same thing at work. At work, we're so busy communicating that we often don't have time to think, we don't have time to talk, about the things that really matter. Change that. Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. Because it's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection — how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves — but it's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction. I'm optimistic. We have everything we need to start. We have each other. And we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability. That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler.So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are filled with risk. And then there's technology — simpler, hopeful, optimistic, ever-young. It's like calling in the cavalry. An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars, you can ""Finally, love your friends love your body, love your life, online and with avatars."" We're drawn to virtual romance, to computer games that seem like worlds, to the idea that robots, robots, will someday be our true companions. We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends.But our fantasies of substitution have cost us. Now we all need to focus on the many, many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives, our own bodies, our own communities, our own politics, our own planet. They need us. Let's talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make this life the life we can love.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together
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"Hi. (Laughter)I did that for two reasons. First of all, I wanted to give you a good visual first impression. But the main reason I did it is that that's what happens to me when I'm forced to wear a Lady Gaga skanky mic.(Laughter)I'm used to a stationary mic. It's the sensible shoe of public address.(Laughter)But you clamp this thing on my head, and something happens. I just become skanky. (Laughter) So I'm sorry about that. And I'm already off-message.(Laughter)Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books. (""Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper. You cannot turn them off with a switch. Tell your kids."") It all sort of started as a benign mistake, like penicillin. (Laughter)What I really wanted was to be a graphic designer at one of the big design firms in New York City. But upon arrival there, in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews, I found that the only thing I was offered was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf, a book publisher. Now I was stupid, but not so stupid that I turned it down.I had absolutely no idea what I was about to become part of, and I was incredibly lucky. Soon, it had occurred to me what my job was. My job was to ask this question: ""What do the stories look like?"" Because that is what Knopf is. It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world. We bring stories to the public.The stories can be anything, and some of them are actually true. But they all have one thing in common: They all need to look like something. They all need a face. Why? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into. A book designer gives form to content, but also manages a very careful balance between the two.Now, the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University, the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, and wrote the word ""Apple"" underneath, and he said, ""OK. Lesson one. Listen up."" And he covered up the picture and he said, ""You either say this,"" and then he covered up the word, ""or you show this. But you don't do this."" Because this is treating your audience like a moron. (Laughter) And they deserve better.And lo and behold, soon enough, I was able to put this theory to the test on two books that I was working on for Knopf. The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs, and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich. Now the Hepburn book was written in a very conversational style, it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you. The Dietrich book was an observation by her daughter; it was a biography. So the Hepburn story is words and the Dietrich story is pictures, and so we did this. So there you are. Pure content and pure form, side by side. No fighting, ladies.(""What's a Jurassic Park?"") Now, what is the story here? Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber. Genius! (Laughter)Now, luckily for me, I live and work in New York City, where there are plenty of dinosaurs. (Laughter) So, I went to the Museum of Natural History, and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, and I bought a book. And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, and more specifically the lower right-hand corner.Now I took this diagram, and I put it in a Photostat machine, (Laughter) and I took a piece of tracing paper, and I taped it over the Photostat with a piece of Scotch tape — stop me if I'm going too fast — (Laughter) — and then I took a Rapidograph pen — explain it to the youngsters — (Laughter) and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur.I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped — when to keep going would seem like I was going too far. And what I ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being. We're in the middle of the process. And then I just threw some typography on it. Very basic stuff, slightly suggestive of public park signage. (Laughter)Everybody in house loved it, and so off it goes to the author. And even back then, Michael was on the cutting edge. (""Michael Crichton responds by fax:"") (""Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket"") (Laughter) (Applause) That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine. (Laughter) I miss Michael.And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image, just in case they might want to use it. Well, they used it. (Laughter) (Applause)And I was thrilled. We all know it was an amazing movie, and it was so interesting to see it go out into the culture and become this phenomenon and to see all the different permutations of it. But not too long ago, I came upon this on the Web. No, that is not me. But whoever it is, I can't help but thinking they woke up one day like, ""Oh my God, that wasn't there last night. Ooooohh! I was so wasted."" (Laughter)But if you think about it, from my head to my hands to his leg. (Laughter) That's a responsibility. And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly. The book designer's responsibility is threefold: to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author. I want you to look at the author's book and say, ""Wow! I need to read that.""David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony. And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image, and he wanted to explore what was underlying that. For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off of. But when you do, you don't get what you expect. You get something that goes much deeper than that. And David especially loved this design because at book signings, which he does a lot of, he could take a magic marker and do this. (Laughter) Hello! (Laughter)Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called [""Dry""], and it's about his time in rehab. In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic. He did not think so, however, but his coworkers did an intervention and they said, ""You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die.""Now to me, this was always going to be a typographic solution, what I would call the opposite of Type 101. What does that mean? Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography, you get the assignment of, select a word and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right? Very simple stuff. This is going to be the opposite of that. I want this book to look like it's lying to you, desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would.The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine. I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto! Then when we went to press, the printer put a spot gloss on the ink and it really looked like it was running.Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport and he was hiding out in the bookstore spying on who was buying his books. And this woman came up to it, and she squinted, and she took it to the register, and she said to the man behind the counter, ""This one's ruined."" (Laughter) And the guy behind the counter said, ""I know, lady. They all came in that way."" (Laughter) Now, that's a good printing job.A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku, if you will, of the story. This particular story by Osama Tezuka is his epic life of the Buddha, and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next. All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book, but once the book designer has read the text, then he has to be an interpreter and a translator.This story was a real puzzle. This is what it's about. (""Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters."")(Laughter)All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together and I looked at them and I deconstructed them and I put them back together. And so, here's the design, right? And so here's the front and the spine, and it's flat. But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf.Ahh! We come upon them, the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out. Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan. He will not be pleased. Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger. And now, we have to open it up to find out what's going to happen next. Try experiencing that on a Kindle. (Laughter)Don't get me started. Seriously. Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing when he would get a copy of one of his new books from Alfred A. Knopf? He'd smell it. Then he'd run his hand over the rag paper, and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages. All those years, all those books, he never got tired of it. Now, I am all for the iPad, but trust me — smelling it will get you nowhere. (Laughter) Now the Apple guys are texting, ""Develop odor emission plug-in."" (Laughter)And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story. A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, she's entered a new reality that's just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different. And so, we're talking about parallel planes of existence, sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers.So how do we show this? We go back to Hepburn and Dietrich, but now we merge them. So we're talking about different planes, different pieces of paper. So this is on a semi-transparent piece of velum. It's one part of the form and content. When it's on top of the paper board, which is the opposite, it forms this. So even if you don't know anything about this book, you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence. And the object itself invited exploration interaction, consideration and touch.This debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. This is unheard of, both for us the publisher, and the author. We're talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode. (Laughter) Not exactly Jackie Collins. Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, eight printings, and still going strong.So even though we love publishing as an art, we very much know it's a business too, and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, that great art can be great business.So that's my story. To be continued. What does it look like? Yes. It can, it does and it will, but for this book designer, page-turner, dog-eared place-holder, notes in the margins-taker, ink-sniffer, the story looks like this.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_kidd_designing_books_is_no_laughing_matter_ok_it_is
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"You know, cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy. For students, it's quite an experience, but for a school, it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain. So we learned the majority of anatomic classes taught, they do not have a cadaver dissection lab. Maybe those reasons, or depending on where you are, cadavers may not be easily available.So to address this, we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford: virtual dissection table. So we call this Anatomage Table. So with this Anatomage Table, students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver. And the table form is important, and since it's touch-interactive, just like the way they do dissections in the lab, or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table. Our digital body is one-to-one life size, so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy.I'm going to do some demonstrations. As you can see, I use my finger to interact with my digital body. I'm going to do some cuts. I can cut any way I want to, so I cut right here. Then it's going to show inside. And I can change my cut to see different parts. Maybe I can cut there, see the brain, and I can change my cut. You can see some internal organs. So we call this the slicer mode. OK, I'm going to do another cut. Right there. This shows a lot of internal structures. So if I want to see the back side, I can flip and see from behind. Like this. So if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you, that means we did the right job. So our doctors said these are eye candies.So instead of just butchering the body, I'd like to do more clinically meaningful dissections. What I'm going to do is I'm going to peel off all the skin, muscles and bones, just to see a few internal organs. Right here. Let's say I'm going to cut the liver right here. OK. Let's say I'm interested in looking at the heart. I'm going to do some surgery here. I'm going to cut some veins, arteries. Oops! ...You don't want to hear ""oops"" in real surgery. (Laughter) But fortunately, our digital man has ""undo."" (Laughter) Okay.All right then. Let me zoom in. I'm going to make a cut right there. And then you can see the inside of the heart. You can see the atrium and the ventricles, how blood flows to our arteries and veins. Just like this, students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to. It doesn't have to be always dissection. Since it's digital, we can do reverse dissection. So let me show you, I'm going to start with the skeletal structure, and I can add a few internal organs. Yep. Maybe I can add quickly this way. And I can build muscles gradually, just like that. We can see tendons and muscles. Wish I could build my muscle this fast. (Laughter) And this is another way to learn anatomy.Another thing I can show you is, more often than not, doctors get to meet patients in X-ray form. So, Anatomage Table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in X-ray. You can also interact with your X-ray, and also if you want, you can compare with how anatomy would appear in X-ray, too. So when you are done, just bring back the body and then it's ready for another session. It looks like our table also can transform gender, too. It's a female now.So this is Anatomage Table. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_choi_on_the_virtual_dissection_table
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"I call myself a body architect. I trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion. As a body architect, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it.I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab, looking 20 years into the future. I explored the human skin, and how technology can transform the body. I worked on concepts like an electronic tattoo, which is augmented by touch, or dresses that blushed and shivered with light. I started my own experiments. These were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations I was having. These are Q-tips stuck to my roommate with wig glue.(Laughter)I started a collaboration with a friend of mine, Bart Hess — he doesn't normally look like this — and we used ourselves as models. We transformed our apartments into our laboratories, and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way. We were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution.Whilst I was at Philips, we discussed this idea of a maybe technology, something that wasn't either switched on or off, but in between. A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid. And I became obsessed with this idea of blurring the perimeter of the body, so you couldn't see where the skin ended and the near environment started. I set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing, and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile. I was introduced to Robyn, the Swedish pop star, and she was also exploring how technology coexists with raw human emotion. And she talked about how technology with these new feathers, this new face paint, this punk, the way that we identify with the world, and we made this music video.I'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology, and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology, in the future, away from disease and aging. And I thought about this concept of, imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor, modify and biologically enhance it, and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other? Or the way that we attract sexual partners? And would we revert back to being more like animals, more primal modes of communication? I worked with a synthetic biologist, and I created a swallowable perfume, which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out through the skin's surface when you perspire. It completely blows apart the way that perfume is, and provides a whole new format. It's perfume coming from the inside out. It redefines the role of skin, and our bodies become an atomizer.I've learned that there's no boundaries, and if I look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense. But when I look towards the future, the next project is completely unknown and wide open. I feel like I have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me, and it's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas, and they kind of instinctively come out.As a body architect, I've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want. And I feel like I've just got started.So here's to another day at the office.(Laughter) (Applause)Thank you!Thank you!","https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_mcrae_how_can_technology_transform_the_human_body
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"Tonight, I want to have a conversation about this incredible global issue that's at the intersection of land use, food and environment, something we can all relate to, and what I've been calling the other inconvenient truth.But first, I want to take you on a little journey. Let's first visit our planet, but at night, and from space. This is what our planet looks like from outer space at nighttime, if you were to take a satellite and travel around the planet. And the thing you would notice first, of course, is how dominant the human presence on our planet is. We see cities, we see oil fields, you can even make out fishing fleets in the sea, that we are dominating much of our planet, and mostly through the use of energy that we see here at night. But let's go back and drop it a little deeper and look during the daytime. What we see during the day is our landscapes.This is part of the Amazon Basin, a place called Rondônia in the south-center part of the Brazilian Amazon. If you look really carefully in the upper right-hand corner, you're going to see a thin white line, which is a road that was built in the 1970s. If we come back to the same place in 2001, what we're going to find is that these roads spurt off more roads, and more roads after that, at the end of which is a small clearing in the rainforest where there are going to be a few cows. These cows are used for beef. We're going to eat these cows. And these cows are eaten basically in South America, in Brazil and Argentina. They're not being shipped up here. But this kind of fishbone pattern of deforestation is something we notice a lot of around the tropics, especially in this part of the world.If we go a little bit further south in our little tour of the world, we can go to the Bolivian edge of the Amazon, here also in 1975, and if you look really carefully, there's a thin white line through that kind of seam, and there's a lone farmer out there in the middle of the primeval jungle. Let's come back again a few years later, here in 2003, and we'll see that that landscape actually looks a lot more like Iowa than it does like a rainforest. In fact, what you're seeing here are soybean fields. These soybeans are being shipped to Europe and to China as animal feed, especially after the mad cow disease scare about a decade ago, where we don't want to feed animals animal protein anymore, because that can transmit disease. Instead, we want to feed them more vegetable proteins. So soybeans have really exploded, showing how trade and globalization are really responsible for the connections to rainforests and the Amazon — an incredibly strange and interconnected world that we have today.Well, again and again, what we find as we look around the world in our little tour of the world is that landscape after landscape after landscape have been cleared and altered for growing food and other crops.So one of the questions we've been asking is, how much of the world is used to grow food, and where is it exactly, and how can we change that into the future, and what does it mean? Well, our team has been looking at this on a global scale, using satellite data and ground-based data kind of to track farming on a global scale. And this is what we found, and it's startling. This map shows the presence of agriculture on planet Earth. The green areas are the areas we use to grow crops, like wheat or soybeans or corn or rice or whatever. That's 16 million square kilometers' worth of land. If you put it all together in one place, it'd be the size of South America. The second area, in brown, is the world's pastures and rangelands, where our animals live. That area's about 30 million square kilometers, or about an Africa's worth of land, a huge amount of land, and it's the best land, of course, is what you see. And what's left is, like, the middle of the Sahara Desert, or Siberia, or the middle of a rain forest. We're using a planet's worth of land already. If we look at this carefully, we find it's about 40 percent of the Earth's land surface is devoted to agriculture, and it's 60 times larger than all the areas we complain about, our suburban sprawl and our cities where we mostly live. Half of humanity lives in cities today, but a 60-times-larger area is used to grow food. So this is an amazing kind of result, and it really shocked us when we looked at that.So we're using an enormous amount of land for agriculture, but also we're using a lot of water. This is a photograph flying into Arizona, and when you look at it, you're like, ""What are they growing here?"" It turns out they're growing lettuce in the middle of the desert using water sprayed on top. Now, the irony is, it's probably sold in our supermarket shelves in the Twin Cities. But what's really interesting is, this water's got to come from some place, and it comes from here, the Colorado River in North America. Well, the Colorado on a typical day in the 1950s, this is just, you know, not a flood, not a drought, kind of an average day, it looks something like this. But if we come back today, during a normal condition to the exact same location, this is what's left. The difference is mainly irrigating the desert for food, or maybe golf courses in Scottsdale, you take your pick. Well, this is a lot of water, and again, we're mining water and using it to grow food, and today, if you travel down further down the Colorado, it dries up completely and no longer flows into the ocean. We've literally consumed an entire river in North America for irrigation.Well, that's not even the worst example in the world. This probably is: the Aral Sea. Now, a lot you will remember this from your geography classes. This is in the former Soviet Union in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, one of the great inland seas of the world. But there's kind of a paradox here, because it looks like it's surrounded by desert. Why is this sea here? The reason it's here is because, on the right-hand side, you see two little rivers kind of coming down through the sand, feeding this basin with water. Those rivers are draining snowmelt from mountains far to the east, where snow melts, it travels down the river through the desert, and forms the great Aral Sea. Well, in the 1950s, the Soviets decided to divert that water to irrigate the desert to grow cotton, believe it or not, in Kazakhstan, to sell cotton to the international markets to bring foreign currency into the Soviet Union. They really needed the money. Well, you can imagine what happens. You turn off the water supply to the Aral Sea, what's going to happen? Here it is in 1973, 1986, 1999, 2004, and about 11 months ago. It's pretty extraordinary. Now a lot of us in the audience here live in the Midwest. Imagine that was Lake Superior. Imagine that was Lake Huron. It's an extraordinary change.This is not only a change in water and where the shoreline is, this is a change in the fundamentals of the environment of this region. Let's start with this. The Soviet Union didn't really have a Sierra Club. Let's put it that way. So what you find in the bottom of the Aral Sea ain't pretty. There's a lot of toxic waste, a lot of things that were dumped there that are now becoming airborne. One of those small islands that was remote and impossible to get to was a site of Soviet biological weapons testing. You can walk there today. Weather patterns have changed. Nineteen of the unique 20 fish species found only in the Aral Sea are now wiped off the face of the Earth. This is an environmental disaster writ large.But let's bring it home. This is a picture that Al Gore gave me a few years ago that he took when he was in the Soviet Union a long, long time ago, showing the fishing fleets of the Aral Sea. You see the canal they dug? They were so desperate to try to, kind of, float the boats into the remaining pools of water, but they finally had to give up because the piers and the moorings simply couldn't keep up with the retreating shoreline. I don't know about you, but I'm terrified that future archaeologists will dig this up and write stories about our time in history, and wonder, ""What were you thinking?"" Well, that's the future we have to look forward to.We already use about 50 percent of the Earth's fresh water that's sustainable, and agriculture alone is 70 percent of that. So we use a lot of water, a lot of land for agriculture. We also use a lot of the atmosphere for agriculture. Usually when we think about the atmosphere, we think about climate change and greenhouse gases, and mostly around energy, but it turns out agriculture is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases too. If you look at carbon dioxide from burning tropical rainforest, or methane coming from cows and rice, or nitrous oxide from too many fertilizers, it turns out agriculture is 30 percent of the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere from human activity. That's more than all our transportation. It's more than all our electricity. It's more than all other manufacturing, in fact. It's the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any human activity in the world. And yet, we don't talk about it very much.So we have this incredible presence today of agriculture dominating our planet, whether it's 40 percent of our land surface, 70 percent of the water we use, 30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions. We've doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus around the world simply by using fertilizers, causing huge problems of water quality from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, and it's also the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss. So without a doubt, agriculture is the single most powerful force unleashed on this planet since the end of the ice age. No question. And it rivals climate change in importance. And they're both happening at the same time.But what's really important here to remember is that it's not all bad. It's not that agriculture's a bad thing. In fact, we completely depend on it. It's not optional. It's not a luxury. It's an absolute necessity. We have to provide food and feed and, yeah, fiber and even biofuels to something like seven billion people in the world today, and if anything, we're going to have the demands on agriculture increase into the future. It's not going to go away. It's going to get a lot bigger, mainly because of growing population. We're seven billion people today heading towards at least nine, probably nine and a half before we're done. More importantly, changing diets. As the world becomes wealthier as well as more populous, we're seeing increases in dietary consumption of meat, which take a lot more resources than a vegetarian diet does. So more people, eating more stuff, and richer stuff, and of course having an energy crisis at the same time, where we have to replace oil with other energy sources that will ultimately have to include some kinds of biofuels and bio-energy sources. So you put these together. It's really hard to see how we're going to get to the rest of the century without at least doubling global agricultural production.Well, how are we going to do this? How are going to double global ag production around the world?Well, we could try to farm more land. This is an analysis we've done, where on the left is where the crops are today, on the right is where they could be based on soils and climate, assuming climate change doesn't disrupt too much of this, which is not a good assumption. We could farm more land, but the problem is the remaining lands are in sensitive areas. They have a lot of biodiversity, a lot of carbon, things we want to protect. So we could grow more food by expanding farmland, but we'd better not, because it's ecologically a very, very dangerous thing to do.Instead, we maybe want to freeze the footprint of agriculture and farm the lands we have better. This is work that we're doing to try to highlight places in the world where we could improve yields without harming the environment. The green areas here show where corn yields, just showing corn as an example, are already really high, probably the maximum you could find on Earth today for that climate and soil, but the brown areas and yellow areas are places where we're only getting maybe 20 or 30 percent of the yield you should be able to get. You see a lot of this in Africa, even Latin America, but interestingly, Eastern Europe, where Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries used to be, is still a mess agriculturally. Now, this would require nutrients and water. It's going to either be organic or conventional or some mix of the two to deliver that. Plants need water and nutrients. But we can do this, and there are opportunities to make this work.But we have to do it in a way that is sensitive to meeting the food security needs of the future and the environmental security needs of the future. We have to figure out how to make this tradeoff between growing food and having a healthy environment work better.Right now, it's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition. We can grow food in the background — that's a soybean field — and in this flower diagram, it shows we grow a lot of food, but we don't have a lot clean water, we're not storing a lot of carbon, we don't have a lot of biodiversity. In the foreground, we have this prairie that's wonderful from the environmental side, but you can't eat anything. What's there to eat? We need to figure out how to bring both of those together into a new kind of agriculture that brings them all together.Now, when I talk about this, people often tell me, ""Well, isn't blank the answer?"" — organic food, local food, GMOs, new trade subsidies, new farm bills — and yeah, we have a lot of good ideas here, but not any one of these is a silver bullet. In fact, what I think they are is more like silver buckshot. And I love silver buckshot. You put it together and you've got something really powerful, but we need to put them together.So what we have to do, I think, is invent a new kind of agriculture that blends the best ideas of commercial agriculture and the green revolution with the best ideas of organic farming and local food and the best ideas of environmental conservation, not to have them fighting each other but to have them collaborating together to form a new kind of agriculture, something I call ""terraculture,"" or farming for a whole planet.Now, having this conversation has been really hard, and we've been trying very hard to bring these key points to people to reduce the controversy, to increase the collaboration. I want to show you a short video that does kind of show our efforts right now to bring these sides together into a single conversation. So let me show you that. (Music) (""Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota: Driven to Discover"") (Music) (""The world population is growing by 75 million people each year. That's almost the size of Germany. Today, we're nearing 7 billion people. At this rate, we'll reach 9 billion people by 2040. And we all need food. But how? How do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet? We already know climate change is a big problem. But it's not the only problem. We need to face 'the other inconvenient truth.' A global crisis in agriculture. Population growth + meat consumption + dairy consumption + energy costs + bioenergy production = stress on natural resources. More than 40% of Earth's land has been cleared for agriculture. Global croplands cover 16 million km². That's almost the size of South America. Global pastures cover 30 million km². That's the size of Africa. Agriculture uses 60 times more land than urban and suburban areas combined. Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet. We use 2,800 cubic kilometers of water on crops every year. That's enough to fill 7,305 Empire State Buildings every day. Today, many large rivers have reduced flows. Some dry up altogether. Look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert. Or the Colorado River, which no longer flows to the ocean. Fertilizers have more than doubled the phosphorus and nitrogen in the environment. The consequence? Widespread water pollution and massive degradation of lakes and rivers. Surprisingly, agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change. It generates 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than the emissions from all electricity and industry, or from all the world's planes, trains and automobiles. Most agricultural emissions come from tropical deforestation, methane from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilizing. There is nothing we do that transforms the world more than agriculture. And there's nothing we do that is more crucial to our survival. Here's the dilemma... As the world grows by several billion more people, We'll need to double, maybe even triple, global food production. So where do we go from here? We need a bigger conversation, an international dialogue. We need to invest in real solutions: incentives for farmers, precision agriculture, new crop varieties, drip irrigation, gray water recycling, better tillage practices, smarter diets. We need everyone at the table. Advocates of commercial agriculture, environmental conservation, and organic farming... must work together. There is no single solution. We need collaboration, imagination, determination, because failure is not an option. How do we feed the world without destroying it? Yeah, so we face one of the greatest grand challenges in all of human history today: the need to feed nine billion people and do so sustainably and equitably and justly, at the same time protecting our planet for this and future generations. This is going to be one of the hardest things we ever have done in human history, and we absolutely have to get it right, and we have to get it right on our first and only try. So thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_foley_the_other_inconvenient_truth
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"Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets. It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions. I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before. And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect.But soon the idea began spreading virally. People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards. I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq. Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy. PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world. And this is my postcard collection today. You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets.What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection, starting with this one. ""I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. I never did have someone."" Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet. (Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in. I don't know. This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard. This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side.""Dear Birthmother, I have great parents. I've found love. I'm happy."" Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now. ""Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead."" ""I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself.""(Laughter)This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you. I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students. And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students. And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos. And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone. ""Your mic wasn't off during sound check. We all heard you pee."" (Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse. Right. You know what I'm saying.(Laughter)""Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.)"" ""One of these men is the father of my son. He pays me a lot to keep it a secret.""(Laughter)""That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring. It's in my pocket right now."" I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day. It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column. And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard.And he said, ""Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life."" He said, ""My knees are still shaking."" He said, ""For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud. I read some to her, she reads some to me."" He says, ""It's really brought us closer together through the years.And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself. And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away. And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other."" He said, ""But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one."" But she finally did. She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her. And he said, ""She read it once and then she read it again."" And she turned to him and said, ""Is that our cat?"" (Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out. He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending.So I emailed him back and I said, ""Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending."" And he emailed me this picture.(Laughter)""I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer. I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you."" This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty. Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera. Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found, memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos. And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week. And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for. This one's my favorite.(Laughter)Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers. And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge. Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture. ""That's me, my husband and son. The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother. Thank you for making your site. These pictures mean more to me than you know. My son's birth is on this camera. He turns four tomorrow."" Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it — sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers.This is the last postcard I have to share with you today. ""When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again."" When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died. They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive. One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother.Secrets can take many forms. They can be shocking or silly or soulful. They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again.Voicemail recording: First saved voice message. Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today. Have a real happy birthday, and I love you. I'll say bye for now.FW: Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching. Have you ever sent yourself a postcard? Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret?FW: I have one of my own secrets in every book. I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets. And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me.JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book? Has anyone in your life been able to tell?FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frank_warren_half_a_million_secrets
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"I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century. And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion's influence was waning, and he was sort of wondering, I think, what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion. And so he painted this famous painting, ""The Garden of Earthly Delights,"" which some have interpreted as being humanity before the Fall, or being humanity without any Fall at all. And so it makes you wonder, what would happen if we hadn't tasted the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, and what kind of morality would we have.Much later, as a student, I went to a very different garden, a zoological garden in Arnhem where we keep chimpanzees. This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee.(Laughter)And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power-hungry and wrote a book about it. And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition. I painted a whole picture of the animal kingdom and humanity included, was that deep down we are competitors, we are aggressive, we are all out for our own profit, basically. This is the launch of my book. I'm not sure how well the chimpanzees read it, but they surely seemed interested in the book.(Laughter)Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights. And so what you see here is two males who have had a fight. They ended up in a tree, and one of them holds out a hand to the other. And about a second after I took the picture, they came together in the fork of the tree and kissed and embraced each other.And this is very interesting because at the time, everything was about competition and aggression, so it wouldn't make any sense. The only thing that matters is that you win or you lose. But why reconcile after a fight? That doesn't make any sense. This is the way bonobos do it. Bonobos do everything with sex. And so they also reconcile with sex. But the principle is exactly the same. The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict, so you need to do something about it. So my whole picture of the animal kingdom, and including humans also, started to change at that time.So we have this image in political science, economics, the humanities, the philosophy for that matter, that man is a wolf to man. And so deep down, our nature is actually nasty. I think it's a very unfair image for the wolf. The wolf is, after all, a very cooperative animal. And that's why many of you have a dog at home, which has all these characteristics also. And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for. So I started getting interested in those issues and studying that in other animals.So these are the pillars of morality. If you ask anyone, ""What is morality based on?"" these are the two factors that always come out. One is reciprocity, and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness. And the other one is empathy and compassion. And human morality is more than this, but if you would remove these two pillars, there would be not much remaining, I think. So they're absolutely essential.So let me give you a few examples here. This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center, where they trained chimpanzees to cooperate. So this is already about a hundred years ago that we were doing experiments on cooperation. What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in. And of course, there's food on the box. Otherwise they wouldn't be pulling so hard. And so they're bringing in the box. And you can see that they're synchronized. You can see that they work together, they pull at the same moment. It's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn't be able to do that. Now you're going to get a more interesting picture, because now one of the two chimps has been fed. So one of the two is not really interested in the task anymore.(Laughter)(Laughter)(Laughter)[- and sometimes appears to convey its wishes and meanings by gestures.] Now look at what happens at the very end of this.(Laughter)He takes basically everything.(Laughter)There are two interesting parts about this. One is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding he needs the partner — so a full understanding of the need for cooperation. The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he's not interested in the food. Why would that be? Well, that probably has to do with reciprocity. There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors. He will get a return favor at some point in the future. And so that's how this all operates.We do the same task with elephants. Now, it's very dangerous to work with elephants. Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant. Now you can probably make it, but it's going to be a pretty clumsy apparatus, I think. And so what we did in that case — we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik — is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope, a single rope. And if you pull on this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side. So two elephants need to pick it up at exactly the same time, and pull. Otherwise nothing is going to happen and the rope disappears.The first tape you're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus. The apparatus is on the left, with food on it. And so they come together, they arrive together, they pick it up together, and they pull together. So it's actually fairly simple for them. There they are. So that's how they bring it in. But now we're going to make it more difficult. Because the purpose of this experiment is to see how well they understand cooperation. Do they understand that as well as the chimps, for example?What we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other and that elephant needs to be smart enough to stay there and wait and not pull at the rope — because if he pulls at the rope, it disappears and the whole test is over. Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it. But it shows the understanding he has, because he puts his big foot on the rope, stands on the rope and waits there for the other, and then the other is going to do all the work for him. So it's what we call freeloading.(Laughter)But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have. They developed several of these alternative techniques that we did not approve of, necessarily.(Laughter)So the other elephant is now coming ... and is going to pull it in. Now look at the other; it doesn't forget to eat, of course.(Laughter)This was the cooperation and reciprocity part.Now something on empathy. Empathy is my main topic at the moment, of research. And empathy has two qualities: One is the understanding part of it. This is just a regular definition: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And the emotional part. Empathy has basically two channels: One is the body channel, If you talk with a sad person, you're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture, and before you know it, you feel sad. And that's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy, which many animals have. Your average dog has that also. That's why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that, who don't have that kind of empathy. And then there's a cognitive channel, which is more that you can take the perspective of somebody else. And that's more limited. Very few animals, I think elephants and apes, can do that kind of thing.So synchronization, which is part of that whole empathy mechanism, is a very old one in the animal kingdom. In humans, of course, we can study that with yawn contagion. Humans yawn when others yawn. And it's related to empathy. It activates the same areas in the brain. Also, we know that people who have a lot of yawn contagion are highly empathic. People who have problems with empathy, such as autistic children, they don't have yawn contagion. So it is connected.And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head. So that's what you see on the upper-left, an animated head that yawns. And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations.(Laughter)So yawn contagion that you're probably all familiar with — and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now — is something that we share with other animals. And that's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy, and that is universal in the mammals, basically.We also study more complex expressions — This is consolation. This is a male chimpanzee who has lost a fight and he's screaming, and a juvenile comes over and puts an arm around him and calms him down. That's consolation. It's very similar to human consolation. And consolation behavior —(Laughter)it's empathy driven. Actually, the way to study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed, and then to see what young children do. And so it is related to empathy, and that's the kind of expressions we look at.We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about. It's on altruism and chimpanzees, where the question is: Do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else? And for decades it had been assumed that only humans can do that, that only humans worry about the welfare of somebody else. Now we did a very simple experiment. We do that on chimpanzees that live in Lawrenceville, in the field station of Yerkes. And so that's how they live. And we call them into a room and do experiments with them. In this case, we put two chimpanzees side-by-side, and one has a bucket full of tokens, and the tokens have different meanings. One kind of token feeds only the partner who chooses, the other one feeds both of them.So this is a study we did with Vicki Horner. And here, you have the two color tokens. So they have a whole bucket full of them. And they have to pick one of the two colors. You will see how that goes. So if this chimp makes the selfish choice, which is the red token in this case, he needs to give it to us, we pick it up, we put it on a table where there's two food rewards, but in this case, only the one on the right gets food. The one on the left walks away because she knows already that this is not a good test for her. Then the next one is the pro-social token.So the one who makes the choices — that's the interesting part here — for the one who makes the choices, it doesn't really matter. So she gives us now a pro-social token and both chimps get fed. So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward. So it doesn't matter whatsoever. And she should actually be choosing blindly. But what we find is that they prefer the pro-social token. So this is the 50 percent line, that's the random expectation. And especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more.And if the partner puts pressure on them — so if the partner starts spitting water and intimidating them — then the choices go down.(Laughter)It's as if they're saying, ""If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today."" And this is what happens without a partner, when there's no partner sitting there. So we found that the chimpanzees do care about the well-being of somebody else — especially, these are other members of their own group.So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study. And so this became a very famous study. And there are now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well-known. And we did that originally with Capuchin monkeys. And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did. It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees. But with Sarah Brosnan, we started out with Capuchin monkeys.So what we did is we put two Capuchin monkeys side-by-side. Again, these animals, live in a group, they know each other. We take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber. And there's a very simple task that they need to do. And if you give both of them cucumber for the task, the two monkeys side-by-side, they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row. So cucumber, even though it's only really water in my opinion, but cucumber is perfectly fine for them. Now if you give the partner grapes — the food preferences of my Capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket — and so if you give them grapes — it's a far better food — then you create inequity between them. So that's the experiment we did.Recently, we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd never done the task, thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction, and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who gets cucumber — note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine. The first piece she eats. Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens. So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us. And that's what she does. And she gets a grape ... and eats it. The other one sees that. She gives a rock to us now, gets, again, cucumber.(Laughter)(Laughter ends)She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again.(Laughter)So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here.(Laughter)(Applause)I still have two minutes left — let me tell you a funny story about this. This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers. They didn't like this at all. Because they had decided in their minds, I believe, that fairness is a very complex issue, and that animals cannot have it. And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution.(Laughter)And another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness, if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes. Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan, who's been doing this with chimpanzees, had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees where, indeed, the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape. So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness. And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for a while.So let me summarize. I believe there's an evolved morality. I think morality is much more than what I've been talking about, but it would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates, which are empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness. And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak, without necessarily god and religion involved, and to see how we can get to an evolved morality.And I thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals
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"Today, I'd like to talk with you about something that should be a totally uncontroversial topic. But, unfortunately, it's become incredibly controversial.This year, if you think about it, over a billion couples will have sex with one another. Couples like this one, and this one, and this one, and, yes, even this one.(Laughter)And my idea is this — all these men and women should be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child. And they should be able to use one of these birth control methods to act on their decision. Now, I think you'd have a hard time finding many people who disagree with this idea. Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all. They want the power to plan their own lives and to raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families.But, for an idea that is so broadly accepted in private, birth control certainly generates a lot of opposition in public. Some people think when we talk about contraception that it's code for abortion, which it's not. Some people — let's be honest — they're uncomfortable with the topic because it's about sex. Some people worry that the real goal of family planning is to control populations. These are all side issues that have attached themselves to this core idea that men and women should be able to decide when they want to have a child. And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda.The victims of this paralysis are the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Here in Germany, the proportion of people that use contraception is about 66 percent. That's about what you'd expect. In El Salvador, very similar, 66 percent. Thailand, 64 percent. But let's compare that to other places, like Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India. In fact, if Uttar Pradesh was its own country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world. Their contraception rate — 29 percent. Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, 10 percent. Chad, 2 percent. Let's just take one country in Africa, Senegal. Their rate is about 12 percent.But why is it so low? One reason is that the most popular contraceptives are rarely available. Women in Africa will tell you over and over again that what they prefer today is an injectable. They get it in their arm — and they go about four times a year, they have to get it every three months — to get their injection. The reason women like it so much in Africa is they can hide it from their husbands, who sometimes want a lot of children. The problem is every other time a woman goes into a clinic in Senegal, that injection is stocked out. It's stocked out 150 days out of the year. So can you imagine the situation — she walks all this way to go get her injection. She leaves her field, sometimes leaves her children, and it's not there. And she doesn't know when it's going to be available again. This is the same story across the continent of Africa today.And so what we've created as a world has become a life-and-death crisis. There are 100,000 women [per year] who say they don't want to be pregnant and they die in childbirth — 100,000 women a year. There are another 600,000 women [per year] who say they didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and they give birth to a baby and her baby dies in that first month of life. I know everyone wants to save these mothers and these children. But somewhere along the way, we got confused by our own conversation. And we stopped trying to save these lives.So if we're going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future.Now, as a world, there are lots of things we have to do in the global health community if we want to make the world better in the future — things like fight diseases. So many children today die of diarrhea, as you heard earlier, and pneumonia. They kill literally millions of children a year. We also need to help small farmers — farmers who plow small plots of land in Africa — so that they can grow enough food to feed their children. And we have to make sure that children are educated around the world. But one of the simplest and most transformative things we can do is to give everybody access to birth control methods that almost all Germans have access to and all Americans, at some point, they use these tools during their life. And I think as long as we're really clear about what our agenda is, there's a global movement waiting to happen and ready to get behind this totally uncontroversial idea.When I grew up, I grew up in a Catholic home. I still consider myself a practicing Catholic. My mom's great-uncle was a Jesuit priest. My great-aunt was a Dominican nun. She was a schoolteacher and a principal her entire life. In fact, she's the one who taught me as a young girl how to read. I was very close to her. And I went to Catholic schools for my entire childhood until I left home to go to university. In my high school, Ursuline Academy, the nuns made service and social justice a high priority in the school. Today, in the [Gates] Foundation's work, I believe I'm applying the lessons that I learned in high school.So, in the tradition of Catholic scholars, the nuns also taught us to question received teachings. And one of the teachings that we girls and my peers questioned was is birth control really a sin? Because I think one of the reasons we have this huge discomfort talking about contraception is this lingering concern that if we separate sex from reproduction, we're going to promote promiscuity. And I think that's a reasonable question to be asked about contraception — what is its impact on sexual morality?But, like most women, my decision about birth control had nothing to do with promiscuity. I had a plan for my future. I wanted to go to college. I studied really hard in college, and I was proud to be one of the very few female computer science graduates at my university. I wanted to have a career, so I went on to business school and I became one of the youngest female executives at Microsoft.I still remember, though, when I left my parents' home to move across the country to start this new job at Microsoft. They had sacrificed a lot to give me five years of higher education. But they said, as I left home — and I literally went down the front steps, down the porch at home — and they said, ""Even though you've had this great education, if you decide to get married and have kids right away, that's OK by us, too."" They wanted me to do the thing that would make me the very happiest. I was free to decide what that would be. It was an amazing feeling.In fact, I did want to have kids — but I wanted to have them when I was ready. And so now, Bill and I have three. And when our eldest daughter was born, we weren't, I would say, exactly sure how to be great parents. Maybe some of you know that feeling. And so we waited a little while before we had our second child. And it's no accident that we have three children that are spaced three years apart. Now, as a mother, what do I want the very most for my children? I want them to feel the way I did — like they can do anything they want to do in life. And so, what has struck me as I've travelled the last decade for the foundation around the world is that all women want that same thing.Last year, I was in Nairobi, in the slums, in one called Korogocho — which literally means when translated, ""standing shoulder to shoulder."" And I spoke with this women's group that's pictured here. And the women talked very openly about their family life in the slums, what it was like. And they talked quite intimately about what they did for birth control. Marianne, in the center of the screen in the red sweater, she summed up that entire two-hour conversation in a phrase that I will never forget. She said, ""I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another."" And I thought — that's it. That's universal. We all want to bring every good thing to our children.But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing. So many women suffer from domestic violence. And they can't even broach the subject of contraception, even inside their own marriage. There are many women who lack basic education. Even many of the women who do have knowledge and do have power don't have access to contraceptives.For 250 years, parents around the world have been deciding to have smaller families. This trend has been steady for a quarter of a millennium, across cultures and across geographies, with the glaring exception of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The French started bringing down their family size in the mid-1700s. And over the next 150 years, this trend spread all across Europe. The surprising thing to me, as I learned this history, was that it spread not along socioeconomic lines but around cultural lines. People who spoke the same language made that change as a group. They made the same choice for their family, whether they were rich or whether they were poor. The reason that trend toward smaller families spread was that this whole way was driven by an idea — the idea that couples can exercise conscious control over how many children they have. This is a very powerful idea. It means that parents have the ability to affect the future, not just accept it as it is.In France, the average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row until it stabilized. It took so long back then because the contraceptives weren't that good. In Germany, this transition started in the 1880s, and it took just 50 years for family size to stabilize in this country. And in Asia and Latin America, the transition started in the 1960s, and it happened much faster because of modern contraception.I think, as we go through this history, it's important to pause for a moment and to remember why this has become such a contentious issue. It's because some family planning programs resorted to unfortunate incentives and coercive policies. For instance, in the 1960s, India adopted very specific numeric targets and they paid women to accept having an IUD placed in their bodies. Now, Indian women were really smart in this situation. When they went to get an IUD inserted, they got paid six rupees. And so what did they do? They waited a few hours or a few days, and they went to another service provider and had the IUD removed for one rupee. For decades in the United States, African-American women were sterilized without their consent. The procedure was so common it became known as the Mississippi appendectomy — a tragic chapter in my country's history. And as recently as the 1990s, in Peru, women from the Andes region were given anesthesia and they were sterilized without their knowledge.The most startling thing about this is that these coercive policies weren't even needed. They were carried out in places where parents already wanted to lower their family size. Because in region after region, again and again, parents have wanted to have smaller families. There's no reason to believe that African women have innately different desires. Given the option, they will have fewer children. The question is: will we invest in helping all women get what they want now? Or, are we going to condemn them to some century-long struggle, as if this was still revolutionary France and the best method was coitus interruptus?Empowering parents — it doesn't need justification. But here's the thing — our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It's what propels societies forward. In that same slum in Nairobi, I met a young businesswoman, and she was making backpacks out of her home. She and her young kids would go to the local jeans factory and collect scraps of denim. She'd create these backpacks and resell them. And when I talked with her, she had three children, and I asked her about her family. And she said she and her husband decided that they wanted to stop having children after their third one. And so when I asked her why, she simply said, ""Well, because I couldn't run my business if I had another child."" And she explained the income that she was getting out of her business afforded her to be able to give an education to all three of her children. She was incredibly optimistic about her family's future. This is the same mental calculus that hundreds of millions of men and women have gone through. And evidence proves that they have it exactly right. They are able to give their children more opportunities by exercising control over when they have them.In Bangladesh, there's a district called Matlab. It's where researchers have collected data on over 180,000 inhabitants since 1963. In the global health community, we like to say it's one of the longest pieces of research that's been running. We have so many great health statistics. In one of the studies, what did they do? Half the villagers were chosen to get contraceptives. They got education and access to contraception. Twenty years later, following those villages, what we learned is that they had a better quality of life than their neighbors. The families were healthier. The women were less likely to die in childbirth. Their children were less likely to die in the first thirty days of life. The children were better nourished. The families were also wealthier. The adult women's wages were higher. Households had more assets — things like livestock or land or savings. Finally, their sons and daughters had more schooling. So when you multiply these types of effects over millions of families, the product can be large-scale economic development. People talk about the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s — but it wasn't really a miracle. One of the leading causes of economic growth across that region was this cultural trend towards smaller families.Sweeping changes start at the individual family level — the family making a decision about what's best for their children. When they make that change and that decision, those become sweeping regional and national trends. When families in sub-Saharan Africa are given the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves, I think it will help spark a virtuous cycle of development in communities across the continent. We can help poor families build a better future. We can insist that all people have the opportunity to learn about contraceptives and have access to the full variety of methods.I think the goal here is really clear: universal access to birth control that women want. And for that to happen, it means that both rich and poor governments alike must make contraception a total priority. We can do our part, in this room and globally, by talking about the hundreds of millions of families that don't have access to contraception today and what it would do to change their lives if they did have access.I think if Marianne and the members of her women's group can talk about this openly and have this discussion out amongst themselves and in public, we can, too. And we need to start now. Because like Marianne, we all want to bring every good thing to our children. And where is the controversy in that? Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have some questions for Melinda.(Applause ends)Thank you for your courage and everything else.So, Melinda, in the last few years I've heard a lot of smart people say something to the effect of, ""We don't need to worry about the population issue anymore. Family sizes are coming down naturally all over the world. We're going to peak at nine or 10 billion. And that's it."" Are they wrong?Melinda Gates: If you look at the statistics across Africa, they are wrong. And I think we need to look at it, though, from a different lens. We need to look at it from the ground upwards. I think that's one of the reasons we got ourselves in so much trouble on this issue of contraception. We looked at it from top down and said we want to have different population numbers over time. Yes, we care about the planet. Yes, we need to make the right choices. But the choices have to be made at the family level. And it's only by giving people access and letting them choose what to do that you get those sweeping changes that we have seen globally — except for sub-Saharan Africa and those places in South Asia and Afghanistan.CA: Some people on the right in America and in many conservative cultures around the world might say something like this: ""It's all very well to talk about saving lives and empowering women and so on. But, sex is sacred. What you're proposing is going to increase the likelihood that lots of sex happens outside marriage. And that is wrong."" What would you say to them?MG: I would say that sex is absolutely sacred. And it's sacred in Germany, and it's sacred in the United States, and it's sacred in France and so many places around the world. And the fact that 98 percent of women in my country who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives. And I think in that choice, we're also honoring the sacredness of the family and the sacredness of the mother's life and the childrens' lives by saving their lives. To me, that's incredibly sacred, too.CA: So what is your foundation doing to promote this issue? And what could people here and people listening on the web — what would you like them to do?MG: I would say this — join the conversation. We've listed the website up here. Join the conversation. Tell your story about how contraception has either changed your life or somebody's life that you know. And say that you're for this. We need a groundswell of people saying, ""This makes sense. We've got to give all women access — no matter where they live."" And one of the things that we're going to do is do a large event July 11 in London, with a whole host of countries, a whole host of African nations, to all say we're putting this back on the global health agenda. We're going to commit resources to it, and we're going to do planning from the bottom up with governments to make sure that women are educated — so that if they want the tool, they have it, and that they have lots of options available either through their local healthcare worker or their local community rural clinic.CA: Melinda, I'm guessing that some of those nuns who taught you at school are going to see this TED Talk at some point. Are they going to be horrified, or are they cheering you on?MG: I know they're going to see the TED Talk because they know that I'm doing it and I plan to send it to them. And, you know, the nuns who taught me were incredibly progressive. I hope that they'll be very proud of me for living out what they taught us about social justice and service. I have come to feel incredibly passionate about this issue because of what I've seen in the developing world. And for me, this topic has become very close to heart because you meet these women and they are so often voiceless. And yet they shouldn't be — they should have a voice, they should have access. And so I hope they'll feel that I'm living out what I've learned from them and from the decades of work that I've already done at the foundation.CA: So, you and your team brought together today an amazing group of speakers to whom we're all grateful. Did you learn anything?(Laughter)MG: Oh my gosh, I learned so many things. I have so many follow-up questions. And I think a lot of this work is a journey. You heard the discussion about the journey through energy, or the journey through social design, or the journey in the coming and saying, ""Why aren't there any women on this platform?"" And I think for all of us who work on these development issues, you learn by talking to other people. You learn by doing. You learn by trying and making mistakes. And it's the questions you ask. Sometimes it's the questions you ask that helps lead to the answer the next person that can help you answer it. So I have lots of questions for the panelists from today. And I thought it was just an amazing day.CA: Melinda, thank you for inviting all of us on this journey with you.Thank you so much. MG: Great. Thanks, Chris.","https://www.ted.com/talks/melinda_gates_let_s_put_birth_control_back_on_the_agenda
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"I'm a process engineer, I know all about boilers and incinerators and fabric filters, and cyclones, and things like that. But I also have Marfan syndrome. This is an inherited disorder. And in 1992, I participated in a genetic study, and found to my horror, as you can see from the slide, that my ascending aorta was not in the normal range, the green line at the bottom. Everyone in here will be between 3.2-3.6, and I was already up at 4.4. And as you can see, my aorta dilated progressively, and I got closer and closer to the point where surgery was going to be necessary.The surgery on offer was pretty gruesome. Anesthetize you, open your chest, put you on an artificial heart and lung machine, drop your body temperature to about 18 centigrade, stop your heart, cut the aorta out, replace it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta. And most importantly, commit you to a lifetime of anticoagulation therapy. Normally, warfarin. The thought of the surgery was not attractive. The thought of the warfarin was really quite frightening.So I said to myself, ""I'm an engineer, I'm in R&D, this is just a plumbing problem."" ""I can do this, I can change this."" So I set out to change the entire treatment for aortic dilation. The project aim is really quite simple. The only real problem with the ascending aorta in people with Marfan syndrome is that it lacks some tensile strength. So, the possibility exists to simply externally wrap the pipe, and it would remain stable and operate quite happily. If your high-pressure hose pipe or hydraulic line bulges a little, you just wrap some tape around it, it really is that simple. In concept, though not in execution. The great advantage of an external support, for me, was that I could retain all of my own bits, all of my own endothelium and valves, and not need any anticoagulation therapy.So, where do we start? This is a sagittal slice through me. In the middle, you can see that little structure squeezing out, that's the left ventricle, pushing blood out through the aortic valve. You can see two of the leaflets of the aortic valve working there. Up into the ascending aorta. And it's that part, the ascending aorta, which dilates and ultimately bursts, which of course is fatal. We started by organizing image acquisition from magnetic resonance and CT imaging machines, from which to make a model of the patient's aorta.This is a model of my aorta. I've got a real one in my pocket, if anyone would like to look at it, and play with it.(Laughter)You can see it's quite a complex structure. It has a funny tri-lobal shape at the bottom, which contains the aortic valve. It then comes back into a round form, and then tapers and curves off. It's quite a difficult structure to produce. This is a sort of CAD model of me, and this is one of the later CAD models. We went through an iterative process of producing better and better models. When we produced that model, we turned it into a solid, plastic model, as you can see, using a rapid prototyping technique, another engineering technique. We then used that former to manufacture a perfectly bespoke porous textile mesh, which takes the shape of the former and perfectly fits the aorta. So this is absolutely personalized medicine at its best, really. Every patient we do has an absolutely bespoke implant.Once you've made it, the installation is quite easy. John Pepper, bless his heart, professor of cardiothoracic surgery. Never done it before in his life, he put the first one in, didn't like it, he put the second one in. Happy, away I went. Four and a half hours on the table, and everything was done. So the surgical implantation was actually the easiest part.If you compare our new treatment to the existing alternative, the composite aortic root graft, there are one or two startling comparisons which I'm sure will be clear to all of you. Two hours to install one of our devices, compared to 6 hours for the existing treatment. As I said, the existing treatment requires the heart-lung bypass machine, and it requires a total body cooling. We don't need any of that. We work on a beating heart. He opens you up, he accesses the aorta while your heart is beating, all at the right temperature. No breaking into your circulatory system. So it really is great.But for me, absolutely the best point is, there is no anticoagulation therapy required. I don't take any drugs at all, other than recreational ones that I would choose to take.(Laughter)And in fact, if you speak to people who are on long-term warfarin, it is a serious compromise to your quality of life, and even worse, it inevitably foreshortens your life. Likewise, if you have the artificial valve option, you're committed to antibiotic therapy whenever you have any intrusive medical treatment, even trips to the dentist require that you take antibiotics, in case you get an internal infection on the valve. Again, I don't have any of that, so I'm entirely free, my artery is fixed. I haven't got to worry about it, which is a rebirth for me.Back to the theme of the presentation, multidisciplinary research, how on earth does a process engineer used to working with boilers end up producing a medical device which transforms his own life? Well, the answer to that is, a multidisciplinary team. This is a list of the core team, and you can see there aren't only two principal technical disciplines there, medicine and engineering, but also, there are various specialists from within those two disciplines. John Pepper was the cardiac surgeon who did all the actual work on me. But everyone else had to contribute one way or another. Raad Mohiaddin, a medical radiologist. We had to get good-quality images from which to make the CAD model. Warren Thornton, who still does all our CAD models for us, had to write a bespoke piece of CAD code to produce this model from this really rather difficult input data set.There are some barriers to this, though, there are some problems. Jargon is a big one. I would think no one in this room understands the first four jargon points. The engineers amongst you will recognize ""rapid prototyping"" and ""CAD."" The medics amongst you, if there are any, will recognize the first two, but there will be nobody else here that understands all those four words. Taking the jargon out was very important to ensure that everyone in the team understood exactly what was meant when a particular phrase was used.Our disciplinary conventions were funny as well. We took a lot of horizontal slice images through me, produced those slices and used them to build a CAD model. And the very first CAD model we made, the surgeons were playing with it and couldn't quite figure it out. And then we realized that it was actually a mirror image of the real aorta. And it was a mirror image because in the real world, we always look down on plans, plans of houses, or streets, or maps. In the medical world, they look up at plans. So the horizontal images were all in inversion. So, one needs to be careful with disciplinary conventions. Everyone needs to understand what is assumed and what is not.Institutional barriers were another serious headache in the project. The Brompton Hospital was taken over by the Imperial College School of Medicine. And there are some seriously bad relationship problems between the two organizations. I was working with the Imperial and the Brompton, and this generated some serious problems for the project. Really, problems that shouldn't exist.Research & Ethics Committee. If you want to do anything new in surgery, you have to get a license from your local Research & Ethics. I'm sure it's the same in Poland. There will be some form of equivalent which licenses new types of surgery. We didn't only have the bureaucratic problems associated with that, we also had professional jealousies. There were people on the Research & Ethics committee who really didn't want to see John Pepper succeed again. Because he is so successful. And they made extra problems for us.Bureaucratic problems. Ultimately, when you have a new treatment, you have to have a guidance note for all the hospitals in the country. In the UK, we have the National Institute and Clinical Excellence. You have an equivalent in Poland, no doubt. And we had to get past the NICE problem. We now have a great clinical guidance, out on the net. So any other hospitals interested can come along, read the NICE report, get in touch with us, and then get doing it themselves.Funding barriers, another big area to be concerned with. A big problem with understanding one of those perspectives. When we first approached one of the big, charitable UK organizations that fund this kind of stuff, we essentially gave them an engineering proposal. They didn't understand it, they were doctors, next to God, it must be rubbish, they binned it. So in the end, I went after private investors, just gave up on it. Most R&D is going to be institutionally funded, by the Polish Academy of Sciences or the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, or whatever. And you need to get past those people.Jargon is a huge problem when you try to work across disciplines, because in an engineering world, we all understand CAD and RP. Not in the medical world. I suppose the funding bureaucrats ultimately have to get their act together. They've really got to start talking to each other, and exercise a bit of imagination, if that's not too much to ask.(Laughter)Which it probably is.(Laughter)I've coined the phrase ""obstructive conservatism."" So many people in the medical world don't want to change. Particularly when some jumped-up engineer has come along with the answer. They don't want to change. They simply want to do whatever they've done before. And in fact, many surgeons in the UK are still waiting for one of our patients to have some sort of an episode, so that they could say, ""Told you that was no good."" We've actually got 30 patients. At seven and a half years, we've got 90 post-op patient years between us, and we haven't had a single problem. And still, there are people in the UK saying, ""That external aortic root, it will never work, you know.""It really is a problem. I'm sure everyone in this room has come across arrogance amongst medics, doctors, surgeons, at some point. The middle point is simply the way that the doctors protect themselves. ""Well, of course, I'm looking after my patient."" I think it's not good, but that's my view.Egos, of course, again a huge problem. If you work in a multidisciplinary team, you've got to give your guys the benefit of the doubt, you've got to express support for them. Tom Treasure, professor of cardiothoracic surgery. Incredible guy. Dead easy to give him respect. Him giving me respect? Slightly different.(Laughter)That's all the bad news. The good news is, the benefits are stonkingly huge. Translate that one! I bet they can't.(Laughter)When you have a group of people with different professional training, a different professional experience, they not only have a different knowledge base, but also a different perspective on everything. And if you can bring them together, and get them talking and understanding each other, the results can be spectacular. You can find really novel solutions that have never been looked at before, very quickly and easily. You can short-cut huge amounts of work simply by using the extended knowledge base you have. And as a result, it's an entirely different use of the technology and the knowledge around you.The result of all this is that you can get incredibly quick progress on incredibly small budgets. I'm so embarrassed at how cheap it was to get from my idea to me being implanted that I'm not prepared to tell you what it cost, because I suspect there are absolutely standard surgical treatments, probably in the USA, which cost more for a one-off patient than the cost of us getting from my dream to my reality.That's all I want to say, and I've got three minutes left. So, Ewa's going to like me. If you have any questions, please come up and talk to me later on, it would be a pleasure to speak with you.Many thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tal_golesworthy_how_i_repaired_my_own_heart
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"If you had caught me straight out of college in the halls of the Vermont State House where I was a lobbyist in training and asked me what I was going to do with my life, I would have told you that I'd just passed the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, the Chinese equivalency exam, and I was going to go study law in Beijing, and I was going to improve U.S.-China relations through top-down policy changes and judicial system reforms. (Laughter) (Applause) I had a plan, and I never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo.Little did I know what a huge impact it would have on me one night when I was at a party and I heard a sound coming out of a record player in the corner of a room. And it was Doc Watson singing and playing ""Shady Grove."" ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my darlin' ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Going back to Harlan ♫ That sound was just so beautiful, the sound of Doc's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo. And after being totally and completely obsessed with the mammoth richness and history of Chinese culture, it was like this total relief to hear something so truly American and so truly awesome. I knew I had to take a banjo with me to China.So before going to law school in China I bought a banjo, I threw it in my little red truck and I traveled down through Appalachia and I learned a bunch of old American songs, and I ended up in Kentucky at the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention. And I was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me. And they said, ""Hey, do you want to jam?"" And I was like, ""Sure."" So I picked up my banjo and I nervously played four songs that I actually knew with them. And a record executive walked up to me and invited me to Nashville, Tennessee to make a record.(Laughter)It's been eight years, and I can tell you that I didn't go to China to become a lawyer. In fact, I went to Nashville. And after a few months I was writing songs. And the first song I wrote was in English, and the second one was in Chinese.(Music)[Chinese]Outside your door the world is waiting. Inside your heart a voice is calling. The four corners of the world are watching, so travel daughter, travel. Go get it, girl.(Applause)It's really been eight years since that fated night in Kentucky. And I've played thousands of shows. And I've collaborated with so many incredible, inspirational musicians around the world. And I see the power of music. I see the power of music to connect cultures. I see it when I stand on a stage in a bluegrass festival in east Virginia and I look out at the sea of lawn chairs and I bust out into a song in Chinese. [Chinese] And everybody's eyes just pop wide open like it's going to fall out of their heads. And they're like, ""What's that girl doing?"" And then they come up to me after the show and they all have a story. They all come up and they're like, ""You know, my aunt's sister's babysitter's dog's chicken went to China and adopted a girl."" And I tell you what, it like everybody's got a story. It's just incredible. And then I go to China and I stand on a stage at a university and I bust out into a song in Chinese and everybody sings along and they roar with delight at this girl with the hair and the instrument, and she's singing their music.And I see, even more importantly, the power of music to connect hearts. Like the time I was in Sichuan Province and I was singing for kids in relocation schools in the earthquake disaster zone. And this little girl comes up to me. [Chinese] ""Big sister Wong,"" Washburn, Wong, same difference. ""Big sister Wong, can I sing you a song that my mom sang for me before she was swallowed in the earthquake?"" And I sat down, she sat on my lap. She started singing her song. And the warmth of her body and the tears rolling down her rosy cheeks, and I started to cry. And the light that shone off of her eyes was a place I could have stayed forever.And in that moment, we weren't our American selves, we weren't our Chinese selves, we were just mortals sitting together in that light that keeps us here. I want to dwell in that light with you and with everyone. And I know U.S.-China relations doesn't need another lawyer.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/abigail_washburn_building_us_china_relations_by_banjo
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"I got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee, as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything. So the natural question you ask then at that point is, how do I get good at what I'm trying to do? And it became a question of, how do we all get good at what we're trying to do?It's hard enough to learn to get the skills, try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you're taking on. I had to think about how I sew and how I cut, but then also how I pick the right person to come to an operating room. And then in the midst of all this came this new context for thinking about what it meant to be good.In the last few years we realized we were in the deepest crisis of medicine's existence due to something you don't normally think about when you're a doctor concerned with how you do good for people, which is the cost of health care. There's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do. The political fight that we've developed has become one around whether it's the government that's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem. And the answer is yes and no; it's deeper than all of that.The cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us. And in order to understand this, I'm going to take you back a couple of generations. I want to take you back to a time when Lewis Thomas was writing in his book, ""The Youngest Science."" Lewis Thomas was a physician-writer, one of my favorite writers. And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be a medical intern at the Boston City Hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937. It was a time when medicine was cheap and very ineffective. If you were in a hospital, he said, it was going to do you good only because it offered you some warmth, some food, shelter, and maybe the caring attention of a nurse. Doctors and medicine made no difference at all. That didn't seem to prevent the doctors from being frantically busy in their days, as he explained.What they were trying to do was figure out whether you might have one of the diagnoses for which they could do something. And there were a few. You might have a lobar pneumonia, for example, and they could give you an antiserum, an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus, if the intern sub-typed it correctly. If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent. If you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions, you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic — as long as you didn't overdose them and kill them. Beyond these sorts of things, a medical doctor didn't have a lot that they could do.This was when the core structure of medicine was created — what it meant to be good at what we did and how we wanted to build medicine to be. It was at a time when what was known you could know, you could hold it all in your head, and you could do it all. If you had a prescription pad, if you had a nurse, if you had a hospital that would give you a place to convalesce, maybe some basic tools, you really could do it all. You set the fracture, you drew the blood, you spun the blood, looked at it under the microscope, you plated the culture, you injected the antiserum. This was a life as a craftsman.As a result, we built it around a culture and set of values that said what you were good at was being daring, at being courageous, at being independent and self-sufficient. Autonomy was our highest value. Go a couple generations forward to where we are, though, and it looks like a completely different world. We have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have. We can't cure it all. We can't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life. But we can make it possible for most.But what does it take? Well, we've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures. We've discovered 6,000 drugs that I'm now licensed to prescribe. And we're trying to deploy this capability, town by town, to every person alive — in our own country, let alone around the world. And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know it all. We can't do it all by ourselves.There was a study where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you came into a hospital, as it changed over time. And in the year 1970, it took just over two full-time equivalents of clinicians. That is to say, it took basically the nursing time and then just a little bit of time for a doctor who more or less checked in on you once a day. By the end of the 20th century, it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient — specialists, physical therapists, the nurses.We're all specialists now, even the primary care physicians. Everyone just has a piece of the care. But holding onto that structure we built around the daring, independence, self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster. We have trained, hired and rewarded people to be cowboys. But it's pit crews that we need, pit crews for patients.There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care. 60 percent of our asthma, stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. Two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they didn't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene. Our experience as people who get sick, need help from other people, is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to — hardworking, incredibly well-trained and very smart — that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope, but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way.There's another sign that we need pit crews, and that's the unmanageable cost of our care. Now we in medicine, I think, are baffled by this question of cost. We want to say, ""This is just the way it is. This is just what medicine requires."" When you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin, that mostly didn't do the job, to one where, if it gets bad enough, we can do a hip replacement, a knee replacement that gives you years, maybe decades, without disability, a dramatic change, well is it any surprise that that $40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive? It's just the way it is.But I think we're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do. As we've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased, we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care. And vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the least expensive — has fewer complications, the people get more efficient at what they do. And what that means is there's hope. Because [if] to have the best results, you really needed the most expensive care in the country, or in the world, well then we really would be talking about rationing who we're going to cut off from Medicare. That would be really our only choice.But when we look at the positive deviants — the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs — we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful. That is to say, they found ways to get all of the different pieces, all of the different components, to come together into a whole. Having great components is not enough, and yet we've been obsessed in medicine with components. We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think too much about how it all comes together. It's a terrible design strategy actually.There's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said, what if you built a car from the very best car parts? Well it would lead you to put in Porsche brakes, a Ferrari engine, a Volvo body, a BMW chassis. And you put it all together and what do you get? A very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere. And that is what medicine can feel like sometimes. It's not a system.Now a system, however, when things start to come together, you realize it has certain skills for acting and looking that way. Skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure. When you are a specialist, you can't see the end result very well. You have to become really interested in data, unsexy as that sounds.One of my colleagues is a surgeon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he got interested in the question of, well how many CT scans did they do for their community in Cedar Rapids? He got interested in this because there had been government reports, newspaper reports, journal articles saying that there had been too many CT scans done. He didn't see it in his own patients. And so he asked the question, ""How many did we do?"" and he wanted to get the data. It took him three months. No one had asked this question in his community before. And what he found was that, for the 300,000 people in their community, in the previous year they had done 52,000 CT scans. They had found a problem.Which brings us to skill number two a system has. Skill one, find where your failures are. Skill two is devise solutions. I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery. The volume of surgery had spread around the world, but the safety of surgery had not. Now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training, give people more specialization or bring in more technology.Well in surgery, you couldn't have people who are more specialized and you couldn't have people who are better trained. And yet we see unconscionable levels of death, disability that could be avoided. And so we looked at what other high-risk industries do. We looked at skyscraper construction, we looked at the aviation world, and we found that they have technology, they have training, and then they have one other thing: They have checklists. I did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists. And yet, what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better. We got the lead safety engineer for Boeing to help us.Could we design a checklist for surgery? Not for the lowest people on the totem pole, but for the folks who were all the way around the chain, the entire team including the surgeons. And what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than I had understood. You have to think about things like pause points. You need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it's a danger and do something about it. You have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist. And then you need to focus on the killer items. An aviation checklist, like this one for a single-engine plane, isn't a recipe for how to fly a plane, it's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they're not checked.So we did this. We created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams. We had the pause points immediately before anesthesia is given, immediately before the knife hits the skin, immediately before the patient leaves the room. And we had a mix of dumb stuff on there — making sure an antibiotic is given in the right time frame because that cuts the infection rate by half — and then interesting stuff, because you can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected. And we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day, because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you're coming in.We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world, deliberately in places from rural Tanzania to the University of Washington in Seattle. We found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent. It fell in every hospital it went into. The death rates fell 47 percent. This was bigger than a drug.(Applause)And that brings us to skill number three, the ability to implement this, to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things. And it's been slow to spread. This is not yet our norm in surgery — let alone making checklists to go onto childbirth and other areas. There's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we're not a system, forces us to behave with a different set of values. Just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we've had, like humility, discipline, teamwork. This is the opposite of what we were built on: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy.I met an actual cowboy, by the way. I asked him, what was it like to actually herd a thousand cattle across hundreds of miles? How did you do that? And he said, ""We have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around."" They communicate electronically constantly, and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything — (Laughter) — from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle. Even the cowboys are pit crews now. And it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves.Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work, whether in health care, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty, is the great task of our generation as a whole. In every field, knowledge has exploded, but it has brought complexity, it has brought specialization. And we've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize, as individualistic as we want to be, complexity requires group success. We all need to be pit crews now.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/atul_gawande_how_do_we_heal_medicine
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"Last January, my company, Fark.com, was sued along with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources. Gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email. (Laughter) Now it may seem kind of strange that such a thing can actually be patented, but it does happen all the time.Take something already being done and patent it for an emerging technology — like phone calls on the internet or video listings for TV shows or radio but for cellphones, and so on. The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional, and as a result, most of these lawsuits end in settlements. And because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement, no one knows what the terms were. And as a result, the patent troll can claim that they won the case.In the case of Gooseberry Natural Resources, this patent on emailing news releases had sort of a fatal flaw as it pertained to myself, and that was that in the mainstream media world there is only one definition for news release, and it turns out that is press release — as in P.R. Now my company, Fark, deals with news, ostensibly, and as a result we were not in violation of this patent. So case closed, right? Wrong.One of the major problems with patent law is that, in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll, the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant, which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they're suing you on. And this can take quite a while. You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win. That is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll.Now I had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies in order to defend against this lawsuit, but one-by-one they settled out of the case, even though — and this is important — none of these companies infringed on this patent — not a one of them. And they started settling out. The reason they settled out is because it's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit — clearly, two million dollars cheaper in some cases, and much worse if you actually lose. It would also constitute a massive distraction for management of a company, especially a small eight-man shop like my company.Six months into the lawsuit, we finally reached the discovery phase. And in discovery phase, we asked the patent troll to please provide screenshots of Fark where the infringement of their patent was actually occurring. Now perhaps it's because no such screenshots actually existed, but suddenly Gooseberry wanted to settle. Their attorney: ""Ah, yes. My company's having a reorganization on our end."" Never mind the fact that the address led to a strip mall somewhere in Northern L.A. with no employees. ""And we'd like to go ahead and close this out. So would you mind giving us your best and final offer?"" My response: ""How about nothing?!"" (Applause) We didn't have high hopes for that outcome. (Laughter) But they settled. No counter offer.Now, as mentioned before, one of the reasons I can talk to you about this is because there's no non-disclosure agreement on this case. Now how did that happen? Well during the settlement process, when we received our copy, I struck it. My attorney said, ""Nah, no chance of that working."" It came back signed. Now why? You can call them. They're not under NDA either.Now what did I learn from this case? Well, three things. First of all, if you can, don't fight the patent, fight the infringement. Patents are very difficult to overturn. Infringement is a lot easier to disprove. Secondly, make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money. Now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they're able to recover in settlements. If it becomes clear to them that they cannot recover any money, they become less interested in pursuing the case.Finally, make sure that you can tell them that you will make this process as annoying and as painful and as difficult as possible for them. Now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way. It turns out, because they're paid on contingency, it works really, really well in reverse. Don't forget that.So what does all this mean? Well to sum up, it boils down to one thing: Don't negotiate with terrorists. (Applause) Patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history every year. And what do they do with that money? They plow it right back into filing more troll lawsuits.Now this is the point in the Talk where I'm supposed to come up with some kind of a solution for the patent system. And the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system. The health care industry would like stronger protections for inventors. The hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers. And these goals aren't necessarily diametrically opposed, but they are at odds. And as a result, patent trolls can kind of live in the space in between.So unfortunately I'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem. However, I did have this idea, and it was kind of good. And I thought, ""I should patent this."" (Laughter) Behold, patent infringement via mobile device — defined as a computer which is not stationary. My solution: award me this patent and I will troll them out of existence.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/drew_curtis_how_i_beat_a_patent_troll
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"This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India. Now Shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in Uttar Pradesh, and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead. His land was no longer registered in his name. His brothers, Chandrabhan and Phoolchand, were also listed as dead.Family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead, allowing them to inherit their father's share of the ancestral farmland. Because of this, all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home. According to the Yadav family, the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001, but a judge has never appeared.There are several instances in Uttar Pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review. Shivdutt's father's death and a want for his property led to this corruption. He was laid to rest in the Ganges River, where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water.Photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they don't exist, and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life. Yet, these men remain dead. This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future.So this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled ""A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters."" And for this work, I traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. I was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood, chance or circumstance. The subjects I documented ranged from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in India. In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.Each work that I make is comprised of three segments. On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline. This is followed by a text panel, it's designed in scroll form, in which I construct the narrative at stake. And then on the right is what I refer to as a footnote panel. It's a space that's more intuitive in which I present fragments of the story, beginnings of other stories, photographic evidence. And it's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the Internet, in a less linear form. So it's more disordered. And this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline.In my past projects I've often worked in serial form, documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation, but in fact, are fairly abstract. In this project I wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog, something that I couldn't interrupt, curate or edit by choice. This led me to blood. A bloodline is determined and ordered. But the project centers on the collision of order and disorder — the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters.In chapter two, I photograph the descendants of Arthur Ruppin. He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement. He oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the Palestine Land Development Company whose work led to the establishment of a Jewish state. Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state. And I found these maps which you see here. And these are studies commissioned by the Zionist organization for alternative areas for Jewish settlement. In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate. These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965.Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits. He's most often paid for his services in cash, cows or goats. But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment. As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren. In his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here.Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows. One wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits. Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya. It's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes. Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power.You may notice in several of the chapters that I photographed there are empty portraits. These empty portraits represent individuals, living individuals, who couldn't be present. And the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel. They include dengue fever, imprisonment, army service, women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons. And in this particular chapter, it's children whose mothers wouldn't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it.Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting. And within a hundred years, that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion. The European rabbit has no natural predators in Australia, and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land. Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth. These rabbits were bred at a government facility, Biosecurity Queensland, where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them. So they're testing its virulence. During the course of this trial, all of the rabbits died, except for a few, which were euthanized.Haigh's Chocolate, in collaboration with the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia, stopped all production of the Easter Bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the Easter Bilby. Now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that's native to Australia, and actually an animal that is threatened by the European rabbit.In chapter seven, I focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline. So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. This is the only work in which I visually represent the dead. But I only represent those that were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which is recorded as the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed.So when you look at a detail of this work, you can see, the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him. Her name is Zumra. She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well. During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave. And I was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains. However, the other individuals are represented by these blue slides, which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to DNA evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals. They've all been given a proper burial, so what remains are these blue slides at the International Commission for Missing Persons.These are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the Potochari battery factory, which was where the Dutch U.N. soldiers were staying, and also the Serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions. This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them.Chapter 15 is more of a performance piece. I solicited China's State Council Information Office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent China for this project. They chose a large family from Beijing for its size, and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice. This is one of the rare situations where I have no empty portraits. Everyone showed up. You can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline.Previously known as the Department of Foreign Propaganda, the State Council Information Office is responsible for all of China's external publicity operations. It controls all foreign media and image production outside of China from foreign media working within China. It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism. For the footnote panel in this work, this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in Beijing. And I also photographed the gift bag they gave me when I left.These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland. Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history. The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation. There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves. Another section of the family presented their clothing, as opposed to their physical presence, because they didn't want to be identified with the past that I was highlighting. And finally, another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation, so I had to pixelate him out so he's unrecognizable.In the footnote panel that accompanies this work I photographed an official Adolph Hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by British Intelligence with Hans Frank's image on it. It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power.Again, talking about fate, I was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art. These paintings were taken by Hans Frank during the time of the Third Reich. And I'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time. They are Leonardo da Vinci's ""Lady With an Ermine,"" Rembrandt's ""Landscape With Good Samaritan"" and Raphael's ""Portrait of a Youth,"" which has never been found.Chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making, but becomes their own. So this is the Ferraz family and the Novaes family. And they are in an active blood feud. This feud has been going on since 1991 in Northeast Brazil in Pernambuco, and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud, including hired hit men, innocent bystanders and friends. Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power. But it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors. Installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of Louis Novaes, who's the head of the Novaes family, are these turret holes, which were used for shooting and looking.Brazil's northeast state of Pernambuco is one of the nation's most violent regions. It's rooted in a principle of retributive justice, or an eye for an eye, so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area. This story, like many of the stories in my chapters, reads almost as an archetypal episode, like something out of Shakespeare, that's happening now and will happen again in the future. I'm interested in these ideas of repetition. So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face.Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history. Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16. This piece is ordered by age because it can't be ordered by blood. In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted. Children have to leave the orphanage at age 16, despite the fact that there's often nowhere for them to go. It's commonly reported in Ukraine that children, when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution. Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded.This is a boys' bedroom. There's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing. Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October. This is a girls' bedroom. And the director listed the orphanage's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer, four vacuum cleaners, two computers, a video projector, a copy machine, winter shoes and a dentist's drill. This photograph, which I took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms, shows a sign which I had translated when I got home. And it reads: ""Those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future.""There are many more chapters in this project. This is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images. And this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive. And within this accumulation of images and texts, I'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself. But archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information that's collected. And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between. It's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming. And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/taryn_simon_the_stories_behind_the_bloodlines
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"People are living longer and societies are getting grayer. You hear about it all the time. You read about it in your newspapers. You hear about it on your television sets. Sometimes, I'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency, even ease. But make no mistake, longer lives can — and, I believe, will improve quality of life at all ages.Now to put this in perspective, let me just zoom out for a minute. More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined. In the blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of time that we're living. So if you ever feel like you don't have this aging thing quite pegged, don't kick yourself. It's brand new.And because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population, with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age, is being reshaped into a rectangle.And now, if you're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics,(Laughter)these are the ones that should do it. Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old.How did this happen? Well, we're no genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago. This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture — the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being. Through cultural changes, our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives.Now there are problems associated with aging — diseases, poverty, loss of social status. It's hardly time to rest on our laurels. But the more we learn about aging, the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate. Aging brings some rather remarkable improvements — increased knowledge, expertise — and emotional aspects of life improve. That's right, older people are happy. They're happier than middle-aged people, and younger people, certainly.(Laughter)Study after study is coming to the same conclusion.The CDC recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week. And fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people, and younger people as well. And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day. And stress, worry, anger all decrease with age.Now social scientists call this the paradox of aging. I mean, after all, aging is not a piece of cake. So we've asked all sorts of questions to see if we could undo this finding. We've asked whether it may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations. That is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older. We've asked, well, maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence.(Laughter)But the more we've tried to disavow this finding, the more evidence we find to support it.Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period. Originally, the sample was aged 18 to 94. And we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older. Our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time, and we'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times. And every time we paged them, we'd ask them to answer several questions — ""On a one to seven scale, how happy are you right now?"" ""How sad are you right now?"" ""How frustrated are you right now?"" — so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives.And using this intense study of individuals, we find that it's not one particular generation that's doing better than the others, but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience. Now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages. And there is a slight downturn. But at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood.Now it's really too simplistic to say that older people are ""happy."" In our study, they are more positive. But they're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions — sadness at the same time you experience happiness; you know, that tear in the eye when you're smiling at a friend. And other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably. They're more accepting of sadness than younger people are. And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts and debates. Older people can view injustice with compassion, but not despair.And all things being equal, older people direct their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, to positive information more than negative. If we show older, middle-aged, younger people images, like the ones you see on the screen, and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can, older people, but not younger people, remember more positive images than negative images. We've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies, some frowning, some smiling. Older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning, angry faces. In day-to-day life, this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction.But as social scientists, we continue to ask about possible alternatives. We've said, well, maybe older people report more positive emotions because they're cognitively impaired.(Laughter)We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions? Maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we're unable to process negative emotions anymore. But that's not the case. The most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect the most. And under conditions where it really matters, older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information.So how can this be? Well, in our research, we've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time — not just clock time and calendar time, but lifetime. And if there's a paradox of aging, it's that recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways. When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. We might spend time with people we don't even like because it's somehow interesting. We might learn something unexpected.(Laughter)We go on blind dates.(Laughter)You know, after all, if it doesn't work out, there's always tomorrow. People over 50 don't go on blind dates.(Laughter)As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly. We take less notice of trivial matters. We savor life. We're more appreciative, more open to reconciliation. We invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better, so we're happier day-to-day. But that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice.By 2015, there will be more people in the United States over the age of 60 than under 15. What will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people? The numbers won't determine the outcome. Culture will. If we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people, then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages. Societies with millions of talented, emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them, armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known.My father, who is 92, likes to say, ""Let's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_carstensen_older_people_are_happier
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"Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque? Probably not, but people like me do. I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans. And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future.There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones. And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases. But this is only one half of the story.The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response. All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved. And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past.But there are a lot of challenges for this. And first of all, what do we even study? Skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found all over the place. But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information. Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well. Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting. You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they are very rare.(Laughter)So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K. to study a very poorly studied, little known material that's found on people everywhere. It's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus. Many of you may know it by the term tartar. It's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit. And in a typical dentistry visit, you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed. But in ancient times before tooth brushing, up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime.And what's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton, it's abundant in quantity before the present day and it's ubiquitous worldwide. We find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years. And we even find it in neanderthals and animals.And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy. They'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope, and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches, and they'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria. And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on?And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth. We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet. But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems. So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside.And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut. And so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that, from the skeleton alone, has long decomposed. And so by applying ancient DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus, we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet, infection and immunity thousands of years ago.So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens. And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick. And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus.And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christina_warinner_tracking_ancient_diseases_using_plaque
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"A few months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever. And today, after briefly describing what they found, I'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery, namely the possibility that way beyond the Earth, the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, we may find that our universe is not the only universe, but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse.Now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one. I mean, most of us were raised to believe that the word ""universe"" means everything. And I say most of us with forethought, as my four-year-old daughter has heard me speak of these ideas since she was born. And last year I was holding her and I said, ""Sophia, I love you more than anything in the universe."" And she turned to me and said, ""Daddy, universe or multiverse?"" (Laughter)But barring such an anomalous upbringing, it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours, most with fundamentally different features, that would rightly be called universes of their own. And yet, speculative though the idea surely is, I aim to convince you that there's reason for taking it seriously, as it just might be right. I'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts. In part one, I'm going to describe those Nobel Prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed. In part two, I'll offer a solution to that mystery. It's based on an approach called string theory, and that's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story. Finally, in part three, I'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation, which will pull all the pieces of the story together.Okay, part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us, establishing that space itself is stretching, it's expanding. Now this was revolutionary. The prevailing wisdom was that on the largest of scales the universe was static. But even so, there was one thing that everyone was certain of: The expansion must be slowing down. That, much as the gravitational pull of the Earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward, the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion of space.Now let's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers I mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing. And they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies, allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time. Here's the surprise: They found that the expansion is not slowing down. Instead they found that it's speeding up, going faster and faster. That's like tossing an apple upward and it goes up faster and faster. Now if you saw an apple do that, you'd want to know why. What's pushing on it?Similarly, the astronomers' results are surely well-deserving of the Nobel Prize, but they raised an analogous question. What force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed? Well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of Einstein's. You see, we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing, pulls objects together. But in Einstein's theory of gravity, his general theory of relativity, gravity can also push things apart.How? Well according to Einstein's math, if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy, sort of like a uniform, invisible mist, then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive, repulsive gravity, which is just what we need to explain the observations. Because the repulsive gravity of an invisible energy in space — we now call it dark energy, but I've made it smokey white here so you can see it — its repulsive gravity would cause each galaxy to push against every other, driving expansion to speed up, not slow down. And this explanation represents great progress.But I promised you a mystery here in part one. Here it is. When the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up, look at what they found. This number is small. Expressed in the relevant unit, it is spectacularly small. And the mystery is to explain this peculiar number. We want this number to emerge from the laws of physics, but so far no one has found a way to do that.Now you might wonder, should you care? Maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue, a technical detail of interest to experts, but of no relevance to anybody else. Well it surely is a technical detail, but some details really matter. Some details provide windows into uncharted realms of reality, and this peculiar number may be doing just that, as the only approach that's so far made headway to explain it invokes the possibility of other universes — an idea that naturally emerges from string theory, which takes me to part two: string theory.So hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as I now go on to tell you three key things about string theory. First off, what is it? Well it's an approach to realize Einstein's dream of a unified theory of physics, a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe. And the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. It says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely, at first you'll find molecules and then you'll find atoms and subatomic particles. But the theory says that if you could probe smaller, much smaller than we can with existing technology, you'd find something else inside these particles — a little tiny vibrating filament of energy, a little tiny vibrating string. And just like the strings on a violin, they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes. These little fundamental strings, when they vibrate in different patterns, they produce different kinds of particles — so electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, all other particles would be united into a single framework, as they would all arise from vibrating strings. It's a compelling picture, a kind of cosmic symphony, where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little, tiny strings can play.But there's a cost to this elegant unification, because years of research have shown that the math of string theory doesn't quite work. It has internal inconsistencies, unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar — extra dimensions of space. That is, we all know about the usual three dimensions of space. And you can think about those as height, width and depth. But string theory says that, on fantastically small scales, there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them. But even though the dimensions are hidden, they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate. And in string theory, vibration determines everything. So particle masses, the strengths of forces, and most importantly, the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions. So if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions, we should be able to calculate these features, calculate the amount of dark energy.The challenge is we don't know the shape of the extra dimensions. All we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math. Now when these ideas were first developed, there were only about five different candidate shapes, so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe. But over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes. From five, the number grew into the hundreds and then the thousands — A large, but still manageable, collection to analyze, since after all, graduate students need something to do. But then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions, until today. The list of candidate shapes has soared to about 10 to the 500.So, what to do? Well some researchers lost heart, concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions, each giving rise to different physical features, string theory would never make definitive, testable predictions. But others turned this issue on its head, taking us to the possibility of a multiverse. Here's the idea. Maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other. Each is as real as every other, in the sense that there are many universes, each with a different shape, for the extra dimensions. And this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery: the amount of dark energy revealed by the Nobel Prize-winning results.Because you see, if there are other universes, and if those universes each have, say, a different shape for the extra dimensions, then the physical features of each universe will be different, and in particular, the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different. Which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we've now measured would take on a wholly different character. In this context, the laws of physics can't explain one number for the dark energy because there isn't just one number, there are many numbers. Which means we have been asking the wrong question. It's that the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there?And that's a question on which we can make headway. Because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours, whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies, the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies don't form. And in those universes that have much less dark energy, well they collapse back on themselves so quickly that, again, galaxies don't form. And without galaxies, there are no stars, no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes.So we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life. And that would be that. Mystery solved, multiverse found. Now some find this explanation unsatisfying. We're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe. But the point is, if the feature you're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality, then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided.An early example comes from the great astronomer Johannes Kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number — why the Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth. And he worked for decades trying to explain this number, but he never succeeded, and we know why. Kepler was asking the wrong question.We now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars. So hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number, 93 million miles, well that is simply wrongheaded. Instead the right question to ask is, why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance, instead of any of the other possibilities? And again, that's a question we can answer. Those planets which are much closer to a star like the Sun would be so hot that our form of life wouldn't exist. And those planets that are much farther away from the star, well they're so cold that, again, our form of life would not take hold. So we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life. And when it comes to planets and their distances, this clearly is the right kind of reasoning. The point is, when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain, it may also be the right kind of reasoning.One key difference, of course, is we know that there are other planets out there, but so far I've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes. So to pull it all together, we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes. And that takes me to my final part, part three. Because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the Big Bang. You see, when we speak of the Big Bang, we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward.But there's a little secret. The Big Bang leaves out something pretty important, the Bang. It tells us how the universe evolved after the Bang, but gives us no insight into what would have powered the Bang itself. And this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory. It's called inflationary cosmology, which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space. The fuel is based on something called a quantum field, but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it's virtually impossible to use it all up, which means in the inflationary theory, the Big Bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event. Instead the fuel not only generated our Big Bang, but it would also generate countless other Big Bangs, each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes.And now, when we meld this with string theory, here's the picture we're led to. Each of these universes has extra dimensions. The extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes. The different shapes yield different physical features. And we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it's only in our universe that the physical features, like the amount of dark energy, are right for our form of life to take hold. And this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider.One big remaining question, of course, is, could we ever confirm the existence of other universes? Well let me describe one way that might one day happen. The inflationary theory already has strong observational support. Because the theory predicts that the Big Bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded, tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world, yielding a distinctive fingerprint, a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots, across space, which powerful telescopes have now observed. Going further, if there are other universes, the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide. And if our universe got hit by another, that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect. And so exotic as this picture is, it may one day be grounded in observations, establishing the existence of other universes.I'll conclude with a striking implication of all these ideas for the very far future. You see, we learned that our universe is not static, that space is expanding, that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies. But because the expansion is speeding up, in the very far future, those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we won't be able to see them — not because of technological limitations, but because of the laws of physics. The light those galaxies emit, even traveling at the fastest speed, the speed of light, will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us. So astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static, inky, black stillness. And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit — a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong.Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era, like ours, attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies. But would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge? Or would they believe in the black, static empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal? I suspect the latter. Which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration. It appears that it may not always be that way. Because today's astronomers, by turning powerful telescopes to the sky, have captured a handful of starkly informative photons — a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit. and the message echoing across the ages is clear. Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Brian, thank you. The range of ideas you've just spoken about are dizzying, exhilarating, incredible. How do you think of where cosmology is now, in a sort of historical side? Are we in the middle of something unusual historically in your opinion?BG: Well it's hard to say. When we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out, the natural question is, maybe we're already in that position and certain deep, critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves. So from that perspective, maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them.On the other hand, we now can understand how old the universe is. We can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago — and yet, we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches. Holy cow! That's just amazing. So on the one hand, it's just incredible where we've gotten, but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future.CA: You're going to be around for the next few days. Maybe some of these conversations can continue. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. (BG: My pleasure.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life
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"So I want to talk today about money and happiness, which are two things a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, either trying to earn them or trying to increase them. And a lot of us resonate with this phrase, we see it in religions and self-help books: money can't buy happiness. And I want to suggest today that, in fact, that's wrong.(Laughter)I'm at a business school, so that's what we do. So that's wrong, and in fact, if you think that, you're just not spending it right. So instead of spending it the way you usually spend it, maybe if you spent it differently, that might work a little bit better. Before I tell you the ways you can spend it that will make you happier, let's think about the ways we usually spend it that don't, in fact, make us happier. We had a little natural experiment. So CNN, a little while ago, wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery. It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives will be amazing. This article's about how their lives get ruined. What happens when people win the lottery is, one, they spend all the money and go into debt; and two, all of their friends and everyone they've ever met find them and bug them for money. It ruins their social relationships, in fact. So they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery.What was interesting about the article was, people started commenting on the article, readers of the thing. And instead of talking about how it made them realize that money doesn't lead to happiness, everyone started saying, ""You know what I'd do if I won the lottery ...?"" and fantasizing about what they'd do. Here's just two of the ones we saw that are interesting to think about. One person wrote, ""When I win, I'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top.""(Laughter)And another person wrote, ""I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne."" This is even worse: ""... then I'd have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made. Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else.""(Laughter)And so many of the comments were exactly of this type, where people got money and, in fact, it made them antisocial. So I told you it ruins people's lives and their friends bug them. Also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves. We thought maybe the reason money doesn't make us happy is that we're spending it on the wrong things; in particular, we're always spending it on ourselves. And we wondered what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on others. So instead of being antisocial with your money, what if you were more pro-social with it?We thought, let's make people do it and see what happens. Let's have some people do what they usually do, spend money on themselves, and let's make some people give money away, and measure their happiness and see if, in fact, they get happier. The first way we did this was, one Vancouver morning, we went out on the campus at University of British Columbia, approached people and said, ""Do you want to be in an experiment?"" They said, ""Yes."" We asked them how happy they were, and then gave them an envelope. One of the envelopes had things in it that said, ""By 5pm today, spend this money on yourself."" We gave some examples of what you could spend it on. Other people got a slip of paper that said, ""By 5pm today, spend this money on somebody else."" Also inside the envelope was money.And we manipulated how much money we gave them; some people got this slip of paper and five dollars, some got this slip of paper and 20 dollars. We let them go about their day and do whatever they wanted. We found out they did spend it in the way we asked them to. We called them up and asked them, ""What did you spend it on? How happy do you feel now?"" What did they spend it on? These are college undergrads; a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup. One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece. People gave money to homeless people. Huge effect here of Starbucks.(Laughter)So if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee to them, and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can. Some people bought coffee for themselves, the way they usually would, but others bought coffee for somebody else. So the very same purchase, just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else. What did we find when we called at the end of the day? People who spent money on others got happier; people who spent it on themselves, nothing happened. It didn't make them less happy, it just didn't do much for them.The other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn't matter much. People thought 20 dollars would be way better than five. In fact, it doesn't matter how much money you spent. What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself. We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on others instead of on themselves. Of course, these are undergraduates in Canada — not the world's most representative population. They're also fairly wealthy and affluent and other sorts of things.We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries. So we went to Uganda and ran a very similar experiment. Imagine, instead of just people in Canada, we say, ""Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others. Describe it. How happy did it make you?"" Or in Uganda, ""Name the last time you spent money on yourself or others and describe that."" Then we asked them how happy they are, again. And what we see is sort of amazing, because there's human universals on what you do with your money, and real cultural differences on what you do as well. So for example, one guy from Uganda says this: ""I called a girl I wished to love."" They basically went out on a date, and he says at the end that he didn't ""achieve"" her up till now.(Laughter)Here's a guy from Canada. Very similar thing. ""I took my girlfriend out for dinner. We went to a movie, we left early, and then went back to her room for ... cake,"" just cake.(Laughter)Human universal: you spend money on others, you're being nice. Maybe you have something in mind, maybe not. But then we see extraordinary differences. So look at these two. This is a woman from Canada. We say, ""Name a time you spent money on somebody else."" She says, ""I bought a present for my mom. I drove to the mall, bought a present, gave it to my mom."" Perfectly nice thing to do. It's good to get gifts for people you know. Compare that to this woman from Uganda: ""I was walking and met a longtime friend whose son was sick with malaria. They had no money, they went to a clinic and I gave her this money."" This isn't $10,000, it's the local currency. So it's a very small amount of money, in fact. But enormously different motivations here. This is a real medical need, literally a lifesaving donation. Above, it's just kind of, I bought a gift for my mother.What we see again, though, is that the specific way you spend on other people isn't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy, which is really quite important. So you don't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy. You can do small, trivial things and still get the benefits from doing this. These are only two countries. We wanted to look at every country in the world if we could, to see what the relationship is between money and happiness.We got data from the Gallup Organization, which you know from all the political polls happening lately. They asked people, ""Did you donate money to charity recently?"" and, ""How happy are you with life in general?"" We can see what the relationship is between those two things. Are they positively correlated, giving money makes you happy? Or are they negatively correlated? On this map, green will mean they're positively correlated, red means they're negatively correlated. And you can see, the world is crazily green. So in almost every country in the world where we have this data, people who give money to charity are happier people than people who don't give money to charity. I know you're looking at the red country in the middle. I would be a jerk and not tell you what it is, but it's Central African Republic. You can make up stories. Maybe it's different there for some reason. Just below that to the right is Rwanda, though, which is amazingly green.So almost everywhere we look, we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself. What about work, which is where we spend the rest of our time, when we're not with the people we know. We decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing. These are sales teams in Belgium. They work in teams, go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs. We can look and see how well they sell things as a function of being a member of a team. We give people on some teams some money ""Spend it however you want on yourself,"" just like we did with the undergrads in Canada. To other teams we say, ""Here's 15 euro. Spend it on one of your teammates. Buy them something as a gift and give it to them. Then we can see, we've got teams that spend on themselves and these pro-social teams who we give money to make the team better. The reason I have a ridiculous pinata there is one team pooled their money and bought a pinata, they smashed the pinata, the candy fell out and things like that. A silly, trivial thing to do, but think of the difference on a team that didn't do that at all, that got 15 euro, put it in their pocket, maybe bought themselves a coffee, or teams that had this pro-social experience where they bonded together to buy something and do a group activity. What we see is that the teams that are pro-social sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves.One way to think of it is: for every 15 euro you give people for themselves, they put it in their pocket and don't do anything different than before. You don't get money from that; you lose money, since it doesn't motivate them to perform better. But when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates, they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money.You're probably thinking to yourselves, this is all fine, but there's a context that's incredibly important for public policy, and I can't imagine it would work there. And if he doesn't show me that it works here, I don't believe anything he said. I know what you're all thinking about are dodgeball teams.(Laughter)This was a huge criticism that we got, that if you can't show it with dodgeball teams, this is all stupid. So we went and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them, and did the exact same thing as before. So we give people on some teams money to spend on themselves. Other teams, we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates. The teams that spend money on themselves have the same winning percentages as before. The teams we give the money to spend on each other become different teams; they dominate the league by the time they're done.Across all of these different contexts — your personal life, you work life, even things like intramural sports — we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself. So if you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right. The implication isn't you should buy this product instead of that product, and that's the way to make yourself happier. It's that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself, and try giving some of it to other people instead.And we luckily have an opportunity for you. DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools. They post projects like, ""I want to teach Huckleberry Finn and we don't have the books,"" or, ""I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don't have a microscope."" You and I can go on and buy it for them. The teacher and the kids write you thank-you notes, sometimes they send pictures of them using the microscope. It's an extraordinary thing.Go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking less about ""How can I spend money on myself?"" and more about ""If I've got five dollars or 15 dollars, what can I do to benefit other people?"" Ultimately, when you do that, you'll find you benefit yourself much more.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_norton_how_to_buy_happiness
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"It's a great honor to be here. It's a great honor to be here talking about cities, talking about the future of cities. It's great to be here as a mayor. I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people's lives. That's the place to be. And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio. Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place. Actually, you're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world. And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio.(Video) Announcer: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the envelope containing the result. Jacques Rogge: I have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro. (Cheering)EP: Okay, that's very touching, very emotional, but it was not easy to get there. Actually it was a very hard challenge. We had to beat the European monarchy. This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain. We had to beat the powerful Japanese with all of their technology. We had to beat the most powerful man in the world defending his own city. So it was not easy at all. And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that I think fits perfectly to the situation of Rio winning the Olympic bid. We really showed that, yes, we can.And really, this is the reason I came here tonight. I came here tonight to tell you that things can be done, that you don't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way, that cities are a great challenge. It's a difficult task to deal with cities. But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live. I want you all to imagine Rio. You probably think about a city full of energy, a vibrant city full of green. And nobody showed that better than Carlos Saldanha in last year's ""Rio.""(Music) (Video) Bird: This is incredible. (Music)EP: Okay, some parts of Rio are pretty much like that, but it's not like that everywhere. We're like every big city in the world. We've got lots of people, pollution, cars, concrete, lots of concrete. These pictures I'm showing here, they are some pictures from Madureira. It's like the heart of the suburb in Rio. And I want to use an example of Rio that we're doing in Madureira, in this region, to see what we should think as our first commandment.So every time you see a concrete jungle like that, what you've got to do is find open spaces. If you don't have open spaces, you've got to go there and open spaces. So go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces. This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year. It's going to be a place where people can meet, where you can put nature. The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade. So the first commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to be environmentally friendly. Every time you think of a city, you've got to think green. You've got to think green and green.So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you. Let's think that cities are made of people, lots of people together. cities are packed with people. So how do you move these people around? When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities — by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people. So every time you think about moving these people around, you think about high-capacity transportation. But there is a problem. High-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money.So what I'm going to show here is something that was already presented in TED by the former mayor of Curitiba who created that, a city in Brazil, Jaime Lerner. And it's something that we're doing, again, lots in Rio. It's the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit. So you get a bus. It's a simple bus that everybody knows. You transform it inside as a train car. You use separate lanes, dedicated lanes. The contractors, they don't like that. You don't have to dig deep down underground. You can build nice stations. This is actually a station that we're doing in Rio. Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that. This station has the same comfort, the same features as a subway station. A kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway. So spending much less money and doing it much faster, you can really change the way people move.This is a map of Rio. All the lines, the colored lines you see there, it's our high-capacity transportation network. In this present time today, we only carry 18 percent of our population in high-capacity transportation. With the BRTs we're doing, again, the cheapest and fastest way, we're going to move to 63 percent of the population being carried by high-capacity transportation.So remember what I said: You don't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done. You can find original ways to get things done. So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people.Moving to the third commandment. And this is the most controversial one. It has to do with the favelas, the slums — whatever you call it, there are different names all over the world. But the point we want to make here tonight is, favelas are not always a problem. I mean, favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside the favelas. Let me just show a map of Rio again. Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants — More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas. All these red parts are favelas. So you see, they are spread all over the city. This is a typical view of a favela in Rio. You see the contrast between the rich and poor.So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas. The first one is, you can change from what I call a [vicious] circle to a virtual circle. But what you've got to do to get that is you've got to go inside the favelas, bring in the basic services — mainly education and health — with high quality. I'm going to give a fast example here. This was an old building in a favela in Rio — [unclear favela name] — that we just transformed into a primary school, with high quality. This is primary assistance in health that we built inside a favela, again, with high quality. We call it a family clinic. So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality.The second point I want to make about the favelas is, you've got to open spaces in the favela. Bring infrastructure to the favelas, to the slums, wherever you are. Rio has the aim, by 2020, to have all its favelas completely urbanized. Another example, this was completely packed with houses, and then we built this, what we call, a knowledge square. This is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology. We even built a theater there — 3D movie. And this is the kind of change you can get for that. And by the end of the day you get something better than a TED Prize, which is this great laugh from a kid that lives in the favela. So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight is, a city of the future has to be socially integrated. You cannot deal with a city if it's not socially integrated.But moving to our fourth commandment, I really wouldn't be here tonight. Between November and May, Rio's completely packed. We just had last week Carnivale. It was great. It was lots of fun. We have New Year's Eve. There's like two million people on Copacabana Beach. We have problems. We fight floods, tropical rains at this time of the year. You can imagine how people get happy with me watching these kinds of scenes. We have problems with the tropical rains. Almost every year we have these landslides, which are terrible.But the reason I could come here is because of that. This was something we did with IBM that's a little bit more than a year old. It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio. And I wanted to show that I can govern my city, using technology, from here, from Long Beach, so I got here last night and I know everything. We're going to speak now to the Operations Center. This is Osorio, he's our secretary of urban affairs. So Osorio, good to be there with you. I've already told the people that we have tropical rain this time of year. So how's the weather in Rio now?Osorio: The weather is fine. We have fair weather today. Let me get you our weather satellite radar. You see just a little bit of moisture around the city. Absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather, today and in the next few days.EP: Okay, how's the traffic? We, at this time of year, get lots of traffic jams. People get mad at the mayor. So how's the traffic tonight?Osario: Well traffic tonight is fine. Let me get you one of our 8,000 buses. A live transmission in downtown Rio for you, Mr. Mayor. You see, the streets are clear. Now it's 11:00 pm in Rio. Nothing of concern in terms of traffic. I'll get to you now the incidents of the day. We had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon, but nothing of big concern. We are below average in terms of traffic incidents in the city.EP: Okay, so you're showing now some public services. These are the cars.Osorio: Absolutely, Mr. Mayor. Let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks. This is live transmission. We have GPS's in all of our trucks. And you can see them working in all parts of the city. Waste collection on time. Public services working well.EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much. It was great to have you here. We're going to move so that I can make a conclusion. (Applause) Okay, so no files, this place, no paperwork, no distance, 24/7 working. So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight is, a city of the future has to use technology to be present. I don't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city.But everything that I said here tonight, or the commandments, are means, are ways, for us to govern cities — invest in infrastructure, invest in the green, open parks, open spaces, integrate socially, use technology. But at the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. And we cannot see that as a problem. That is fantastic. If there's 3.5 billion now, it's going to be six billion then it's going to be 10 billion. That is great, that means we're going to have 10 billion minds working together, 10 billion talents together.So a city of the future, I really do believe that it's a city that cares about its citizens, integrates socially its citizens. A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party, which are cities.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_paes_the_4_commandments_of_cities
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"To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. I think it might be a lifeline. I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin.Texting: I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting, a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see — hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else — or trying to translate the abbreviations LOL, LMAO, HMU. I can help you with those later. But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids. It might be the only way to communicate with your kids. (Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then it's closer to 4,000. And the secret is she opens every single one. Texting has a 100 percent open rate. Now the parents are really alarmed. It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. I promise she read that text. And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon. Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth. I know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that. We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email. We've also found an unintended consequence. We've been getting text messages back like these. ""I don't want to go to school today. The boys call me faggot."" ""I was cutting, my parents found out, and so I stopped. But I just started again an hour ago."" Or, ""He won't stop raping me. He told me not to tell anyone. It's my dad. Are you there?"" That last one's an actual text message that we received. And yeah, we're there. I will not forget the day we got that text message. And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline. Because this isn't what we do. We do social change. Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us. So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty powerful. It's fast, it's pretty private. No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly. It's real time. We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. That's great. But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data. Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. I want to prevent this shit from happening. So think about a cop. There's something in New York City. The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. And then they started crime mapping. And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things — charting the future essentially. And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent. So think about the data from a crisis text line. There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape — no census. Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence. Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. You could inform legislation. You could inform school policy. You could say to a principal, ""You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock. What's going on in your school?"" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data. Because while people are talking about data, making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade, or Target to know when it's time for me to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father's raping her. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_lublin_texting_that_saves_lives
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"Five hundred seventy-one million two hundred thirty thousand pounds of paper towels are used by Americans every year. If we could — correction, wrong figure — 13 billion used every year. If we could reduce the usage of paper towels, one paper towel per person per day, 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used. We can do that.Now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers. There's the tri-fold. People typically take two or three. There's the one that cuts it, that you have to tear off. People go one, two, three, four, tear. This much, right? There's the one that cuts itself. People go, one, two, three, four. Or there's the same thing, but recycled paper, you have to get five of those because they're not as absorbent, of course.The fact is, you can do it all with one towel. The key, two words: This half of the room, your word is ""shake."" Let's hear it. Shake. Louder.Audience: Shake.Joe Smith: Your word is ""fold.""Audience: Fold.JS: Again.Audience: Fold. JS: Really loud.Audience: Shake. Fold.JS: OK. Wet hands. Shake — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Why 12? Twelve apostles, twelve tribes, twelve zodiac signs, twelve months. The one I like the best: It's the biggest number with one syllable.(Laughter)Tri-fold. Fold ... Dry.(Applause)Audience: Shake.Fold.JS: Cuts itself. Fold. The fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension. You don't have to remember that part, but trust me.(Laughter)Audience: Shake. Fold.JS: Cuts itself. You know the funny thing is, I get my hands drier than people do with three or four, because they can't get in between the cracks. If you think this isn't as good...Audience: Shake. Fold.JS: Now, there's now a real fancy invention, it's the one where you wave your hand and it kicks it out. It's way too big a towel. Let me tell you a secret. If you're really quick, if you're really quick — and I can prove this — this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building. How? As soon as it starts, you just tear it off. It's smart enough to stop. And you get half a towel.Audience: Shake. Fold.JS: Now, let's all say it together. Shake. Fold. You will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel. And remember, one towel per person for one year — 571,230,000 pounds of paper. No small thing. And next year, toilet paper.(Laughter)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_smith_how_to_use_a_paper_towel
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"When we think of games, there's all kinds of things. Maybe you're ticked off, or maybe, you're looking forward to a new game. You've been up too late playing a game. All these things happen to me. But when we think about games, a lot of times we think about stuff like this: first-person shooters, or the big, what we would call AAA games, or maybe you're a Facebook game player. This is one my partner and I worked on. Maybe you play Facebook games, and that's what we're making right now. This is a lighter form of game. Maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in Thanksgiving situations. This would be one of the tragically boring board games that you can figure out. Or maybe you're in your living room, playing with the Wii with the kids, and there's this whole range of games, and that's very much what I think about. I make my living from games, I've been lucky enough to do this since I was 15, which also qualifies as I've never really had a real job.But we think about games as fun, and that's completely reasonable, but let's just think about this. So this one here, this is the 1980 Olympics. Now I don't know where you guys were, but I was in my living room. It was practically a religious event. And this is when the Americans beat the Russians, and this was — yes, it was technically a game. Hockey is a game. But really, was this a game? I mean, people cried. I've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of Monopoly.(Laughter) And so this was an amazing experience.Or, if anybody here is from Boston — So when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series after I believe, 351 years —(Laughter)when they won the World Series, it was amazing. I happened to be living in Springfield at the time, and the best part of it was, you would close the women's door in the bathroom, and I remember seeing ""Go Sox,"" and I thought, really? Or the houses, you'd come out, because every game, well, I think almost every game, went into overtime, right? So we'd be outside, and all the other lights are on in the whole block. And kids — the attendance was down in school, kids weren't going to school, but it's OK, it's the Red Sox, right? I mean, there's education, and then there's the Red Sox, and we know where they're stacked. So this was an amazing experience, and again, yes, it was a game, but they didn't write newspaper articles, people didn't say, ""You know, really, I can die now, because the Red Sox won."" And many people did.So games, it means something more to us. It absolutely means something more.So now, this is an abrupt transition here. There was three years where I actually did have a real job, sort of. I was the head of a college department teaching games, so, again, it was sort of a real job, and now I got to talk about making them as opposed to making them. Part of the job of it, when you're a chair of a department, is to eat, and I did that very well — and so I'm out at a dinner with this guy called Zig Jackson. So this is Zig in this photograph, this is also one of Zig's photographs. He's a photographer. And he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself, and you can see here he's got Zig's Indian Reservation. And this particular shot — this is one of the more traditional shots. This is a rain dancer.And this is one of my favorite shots here. So you can look at this, and maybe you've even seen things like this. This is an expression of culture, right? And this is actually from his Degradation series. And what was most fascinating to me about this series is just, look at that little boy there, can you imagine? We can see that's a traditional Native American. Now I just want to change that guy's race. Just imagine if that's a black guy. So, ""Honey, come here, let's get you a picture with the black guy."" Right? Like, seriously, nobody would do this. It baffles the mind. And so Zig, being Indian, likewise it baffles his mind. His favorite photograph — my favorite photograph of his, which I don't have in here — is Indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of Indians.(Laughter)So I happen to be at dinner with this photographer, and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred, and it was on an Indian Reservation. He'd taken his camera up there to photograph it, but when he got there, he discovered he couldn't do it. He just couldn't capture the picture. And so they were talking back and forth about this question. Do you take the picture or not? And that was fascinating to me as a game designer, because it never occurs to me, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not? Because we just make things that are fun or will make you feel fear, that visceral excitement. But every other medium does it.So this is my kid. This is Maezza, and when she was seven years old, she came home from school one day, and like I do every single day, I asked her, ""What did you do today?"" So she said, ""We talked about the Middle Passage.""Now, this was a big moment. Maezza's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming. I wasn't expecting it at seven, I don't know why, but I wasn't.Anyways, so I asked her, ""How do you feel about that?"" So she proceeded to tell me, and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here. ""The ships start in England, they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean — that's the Middle Passage part — they come to America, where the slaves are sold,"" she's telling me. But Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation, and now they're free.Pause for about 10 seconds.""Can I play a game, Mommy?""And I thought, that's it? And so, you know, this is the Middle Passage, this is an incredibly significant event, and she's treating it like, basically some black people went on a cruise, this is more or less how it sounds to her.(Laughter)And so, to me, I wanted more value in this, so when she asked if she could play a game, I said, ""Yes.""(Laughter)And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. I'm a game designer, so I have this stuff sitting around my house. I said, ""Yeah, you can play a game,"" and I give her a bunch of these, and I tell her to paint them in different families. These are pictures of Maezza when she was — God, it still chokes me up seeing these. So she's painting her little families. So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat. This was the boat, it was made quickly, obviously. And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, ""Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things."" And she says, ""They want to go."" And I said, ""Honey, no, they don't want to go. This is the Middle Passage, Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage."" So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother, and as we're going across the ocean, following these rules, she realizes that she's rolling pretty high, and she says to me, ""We're not going to make it.""And she realizes, we don't have enough food, and so she asks what to do, and I say — remember, she's seven — ""We can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don't get sick and we make it to the other side."" Just the look on her face came over — now mind you this is after a month of — this is Black History Month, right? After a month, she says to me, ""Did this really happen?"" And I said, ""Yes."" And so she said — this is her brother and sister — ""If I came out of the woods, Avalon and Donovan might be gone."" ""Yes."" ""But I'd get to see them in America."" ""No."" ""But what if I saw them? Couldn't we stay together?"" ""So Daddy could be gone."" ""Yes."" She was fascinated by this, and she started to cry, I started to cry, her father started to cry, and now we're all crying. He didn't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage, but there it goes.And so, we made this game, and she got it. She got it because she spent time with these people. It wasn't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie.And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience. This is the game, which I've ended up calling ""The New World,"" because I like the phrase. I don't think the New World felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships.But when this happened, I saw the whole planet; I was so excited. I'd been making games for 20-some years, and then I decided to do it again. My history is Irish. So this is a game called ""Síochán Leat."" It's ""peace be with you."" It's the entire history of my family in a single game.I made another game called ""Train."" I was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics, and if you're going to cover a difficult topic, this is one you need to cover, and I'll let you figure out what that's about on your own.And I also made a game about the Trail of Tears. This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces. I was crazy when I decided to start it, but I'm in the middle of it now. It's the same thing. I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games.And the one I'm working on right now, which is — because I'm right in the middle of it, and these for some reason choke me up like crazy — is a game called ""Mexican Kitchen Workers."" And originally, it was a math problem, more or less. Here's the economics of illegal immigration. And the more I learned about Mexican culture — my partner is Mexican — the more I learned that, you know, for all of us, food is a basic need, and it is obviously with Mexicans, too, but it's much more than that. It's an expression of love. It's an expression of — God, I'm totally choking up way more than I thought. I'll look away from the picture. It's an expression of beauty, it's how they say they love you. It's how they say they care, and you can't hear somebody talk about their Mexican grandmother without saying ""food"" in the first sentence. And so to me, this beautiful culture, this beautiful expression is something that I want to capture through games.And so games, for a change, it changes how we see topics, it changes our perceptions about those people in topics, and it changes ourselves. We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/brenda_brathwaite_gaming_for_understanding
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"We conventionally divide space into private and public realms, and we know these legal distinctions very well because we've become experts at protecting our private property and private space. But we're less attuned to the nuances of the public. What translates generic public space into qualitative space? I mean, this is something that our studio has been working on for the past decade. And we're doing this through some case studies.A large chunk of our work has been put into transforming this neglected industrial ruin into a viable post-industrial space that looks forward and backward at the same time. And another huge chunk of our work has gone into making relevant a site that's grown out of sync with its time. We've been working on democratizing Lincoln Center for a public that doesn't usually have $300 to spend on an opera ticket. So we've been eating, drinking, thinking, living public space for quite a long time. And it's taught us really one thing, and that is to truly make good public space, you have to erase the distinctions between architecture, urbanism, landscape, media design and so on. It really goes beyond distinction.Now we're moving onto Washington, D.C. and we're working on another transformation, and that is for the existing Hirshhorn Museum that's sited on the most revered public space in America, the National Mall. The Mall is a symbol of American democracy. And what's fantastic is that this symbol is not a thing, it's not an image, it's not an artifact, actually it's a space, and it's kind of just defined by a line of buildings on either side.It's a space where citizens can voice their discontent and show their power. It's a place where pivotal moments in American history have taken place. And they're inscribed in there forever — like the march on Washington for jobs and freedom and the great speech that Martin Luther King gave there. The Vietnam protests, the commemoration of all that died in the pandemic of AIDS, the march for women's reproductive rights, right up until almost the present. The Mall is the greatest civic stage in this country for dissent. And it's synonymous with free speech, even if you're not sure what it is that you have to say. It may just be a place for civic commiseration.There is a huge disconnect, we believe, between the communicative and discursive space of the Mall and the museums that line it to either side. And that is that those museums are usually passive, they have passive relationships between the museum as the presenter and the audience, as the receiver of information. And so you can see dinosaurs and insects and collections of locomotives and all of that, but you're really not involved; you're being talked to.When Richard Koshalek took over as director of the Hirshhorn in 2009, he was determined to take advantage of the fact that this museum was sited at the most unique place: at the seat of power in the U.S. And while art and politics are inherently and implicitly together always and all the time, there could be some very special relationship that could be forged here in its uniqueness.The question is, is it possible ultimately for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs? And could the museum be an agent of cultural diplomacy? There are over 180 embassies in Washington D.C. There are over 500 think tanks. There should be a way of harnessing all of that intellectual and global energy into, and somehow through, the museum. There should be some kind of brain trust.So the Hirshhorn, as we began to think about it, and as we evolved the mission, with Richard and his team — it's really his life blood. But beyond exhibiting contemporary art, the Hirshhorn will become a public forum, a place of discourse for issues around arts, culture, politics and policy. It would have the global reach of the World Economic Forum. It would have the interdisciplinarity of the TED Conference. It would have the informality of the town square. And for this new initiative, the Hirshhorn would have to expand or appropriate a site for a contemporary, deployable structure.This is it. This is the Hirshhorn — so a 230-foot-diameter concrete doughnut designed in the early '70s by Gordon Bunshaft. It's hulking, it's silent, it's cloistered, it's arrogant, it's a design challenge. Architects love to hate it. One redeeming feature is it's lifted up off the ground and it's got this void, and it's got an empty core kind of in the spirit and that facade very much corporate and federal style.And around that space, the ring is actually galleries. Very, very difficult to mount shows in there. When the Hirshhorn opened, Ada Louise Huxstable, the New York Times critic, had some choice words: ""Neo-penitentiary modern."" ""A maimed monument and a maimed Mall for a maimed collection.""Almost four decades later, how will this building expand for a new progressive program? Where would it go? It can't go in the Mall. There is no space there. It can't go in the courtyard. It's already taken up by landscape and by sculptures. Well there's always the hole. But how could it take the space of that hole and not be buried in it invisibly? How could it become iconic? And what language would it take?The Hirshhorn sits among the Mall's monumental institutions. Most are neoclassical, heavy and opaque, made of stone or concrete. And the question is, if one inhabits that space, what is the material of the Mall? It has to be different from the buildings there. It has to be something entirely different. It has to be air. In our imagination, it has to be light. It has to be ephemeral. It has to be formless. And it has to be free.(Video)So this is the big idea. It's a giant airbag. The expansion takes the shape of its container and it oozes out wherever it can — the top and sides. But more poetically, we like to think of the structure as inhaling the democratic air of the Mall, bringing it into itself. The before and the after.It was dubbed ""the bubble"" by the press. That was the lounge. It's basically one big volume of air that just oozes out in every direction. The membrane is translucent. It's made of silcon-coated glass fiber. And it's inflated twice a year for one month at a time.This is the view from the inside. So you might have been wondering how in the world did we get this approved by the federal government. It had to be approved by actually two agencies. And one is there to preserve the dignity and sanctity of the Mall. I blush whenever I show this. It is yours to interpret.But one thing I can say is that it's a combination of iconoclasm and adoration. There was also some creative interpretation involved. The Congressional Buildings Act of 1910 limits the height of buildings in D.C. to 130 feet, except for spires, towers, domes and minarets. This pretty much exempts monuments of the church and state. And the bubble is 153 ft. That's the Pantheon next to it. It's about 1.2 million cubic feet of compressed air. And so we argued it on the merits of being a dome.So there it is, very stately, among all the stately buildings in the Mall. And while this Hirshhorn is not landmarked, it's very, very historically sensitive. And so we couldn't really touch its surfaces. We couldn't leave any traces behind. So we strained it from the edges, and we held it by cables. It's a study of some bondage techniques, which are actually very important because it's hit by wind all the time. There's one permanent steel ring at the top, but it can't be seen from any vantage point on the Mall.There are also some restrictions about how much it could be lit. It glows from within, it's translucent. But it can't be more lit than the Capitol or some of the monuments. So it's down the hierarchy on lighting.So it comes to the site twice a year. It's taken off the delivery truck. It's hoisted. And then it's inflated with this low-pressure air. And then it's restrained with the cables. And then it's ballasted with water at the very bottom.This is a very strange moment where we were asked by the bureaucracy at the Mall how much time would it take to install. And we said, well the first erection would take one week. And they really connected with that idea. And then it was really easy all the way through. So we didn't really have that many hurdles, I have to say, with the government and all the authorities.But some of the toughest hurdles have been the technical ones. This is the warp and weft. This is a point cloud. There are extreme pressures. This is a very, very unusual building in that there's no gravity load, but there's load in every direction.And I'm just going to zip through these slides. And this is the space in action. So flexible interior for discussions, just like this, but in the round — luminous and reconfigurable. Could be used for anything, for performances, films, for installations. And the very first program will be one of cultural dialogue and diplomacy organized in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations.Form and content are together here. The bubble is an anti-monument. The ideals of participatory democracy are represented through suppleness rather than rigidity.Art and politics occupy an ambiguous site outside the museum walls, but inside of the museum's core, blending its air with the democratic air of the Mall. And the bubble will inflate hopefully for the first time at the end of 2013.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/liz_diller_a_giant_bubble_for_debate
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"America's public energy conversation boils down to this question: Would you rather die of A) oil wars, or B) climate change, or C) nuclear holocaust, or D) all of the above? Oh, I missed one: or E) none of the above? That's the one we're not normally offered. What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing? Could we have fuel without fear? Could we reinvent fire?You see, fire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern. But now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable. Let's see how.Four-fifths of the world's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo. Those fossil fuels have built our civilization. They've created our wealth. They've enriched the lives of billions. But they also have rising costs to our security, economy, health and environment that are starting to erode, if not outweigh their benefits.So we need a new fire. And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air. But they're really quite distinct.Less than one percent of our electricity is made from oil — although almost half is made from coal. Their uses are quite concentrated. Three-fourths of our oil fuel is transportation. Three-fourths of our electricity powers buildings. And the rest of both runs factories. So very efficient vehicles, buildings and factories save oil and coal, and also natural gas that can displace both of them.But today's energy system is not just inefficient, it is also disconnected, aging, dirty and insecure. So it needs refurbishment. By 2050 though, it could become efficient, connected and distributed with elegantly frugal autos, factories and buildings all relying on a modern, secure and resilient electricity system.We can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal by 2050 and use one-third less natural gas while switching to efficient use and renewable supply. This could cost, by 2050, five trillion dollars less in net present value, that is expressed as a lump sum today, than business as usual — assuming that carbon emissions and all other hidden or external costs are worth zero — a conservatively low estimate. Yet this cheaper energy system could support 158 percent bigger U.S. economy all without needing oil or coal, or for that matter nuclear energy. Moreover, this transition needs no new inventions and no acts of Congress and no new federal taxes, mandate subsidies or laws and running Washington gridlock.Let me say that again. I'm going to tell you how to get the United States completely off oil and coal, five trillion dollars cheaper with no act of Congress led by business for profit. In other words, we're going to use our most effective institutions — private enterprise co-evolving with civil society and sped by military innovation to go around our least effective institutions. And whether you care most about profits and jobs and competitive advantage or national security, or environmental stewardship and climate protection and public health, reinventing fire makes sense and makes money.General Eisenhower reputedly said that enlarging the boundaries of a tough problem makes it soluble by encompassing more options and more synergies. So in reinventing fire, we integrated all four sectors that use energy — transportation, buildings, industry and electricity — and we integrated four kinds of innovation, not just technology and policy, but also design and business strategy. Those combinations yield very much more than the sum of the parts, especially in creating deeply disruptive business opportunities.Oil costs our economy two billion dollars a day, plus another four billion dollars a day in hidden economic and military costs, raising its total cost to over a sixth of GDP. Our mobility fuel goes three-fifths to automobiles. So let's start by making autos oil free. Two-thirds of the energy it takes to move a typical car is caused by its weight. And every unit of energy you save at the wheels, by taking out weight or drag, saves seven units in the tank, because you don't have to waste six units getting the energy to the wheels.Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, epidemic obesity has made our two-ton steel cars gain weight twice as fast as we have. But today, ultralight, ultrastrong materials, like carbon fiber composites, can make dramatic weight savings snowball and can make cars simpler and cheaper to build. Lighter and more slippery autos need less force to move them, so their engines get smaller. Indeed, that sort of vehicle fitness then makes electric propulsion affordable because the batteries or fuel cells also get smaller and lighter and cheaper. So sticker prices will ultimately fall to about the same as today, while the driving cost, even from the start, is very much lower.So these innovations together can transform automakers from wringing tiny savings out of Victorian engine and seal-stamping technologies to the steeply falling costs of three linked innovations that strongly reenforce each other — namely ultralight materials, making them into structures and electric propulsion. The sales can grow and the prices fall even faster with temporary feebates, that is rebates for efficient new autos paid for by fees on inefficient ones.And just in the first two years the biggest of Europe's five feebate programs has tripled the speed of improving automotive efficiency. The resulting shift to electric autos is going to be as game-changing as shifting from typewriters to the gains in computers. Of course, computers and electronics are now America's biggest industry, while typewriter makers have vanished. So vehicle fitness opens a new automotive competitive strategy that can double the oil savings over the next 40 years, but then also make electrification affordable, and that displaces the rest of the oil.America could lead this next automotive revolution. Currently the leader is Germany. Last year, Volkswagen announced that by next year they'll be producing this carbon fiber plugin hybrid getting 230 miles a gallon. Also last year, BMW announced this carbon fiber electric car, they said that its carbon fiber is paid for by needing fewer batteries. And they said, ""We do not intend to be a typewriter maker."" Audi claimed it's going to beat them both by a year.Seven years ago, an even faster and cheaper American manufacturing technology was used to make this little carbon fiber test part, which doubles as a carbon cap. (Laughter) In one minute — and you can tell from the sound how immensely stiff and strong it is. Don't worry about dropping it, it's tougher than titanium. Tom Friedman actually whacked it as hard as he could with a sledgehammer without even scuffing it.But such manufacturing techniques can scale to automotive speed and cost with aerospace performance. They can save four-fifths of the capital needed to make autos. They can save lives because this stuff can absorb up to 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. If we made all of our autos this way, it would save oil equivalent to finding one and a half Saudi Arabias, or half an OPEC, by drilling in the Detroit formation, a very prospective play. And all those mega-barrels under Detroit cost an average of 18 bucks a barrel. They are all-American, carbon-free and inexhaustible.The same physics and the same business logic also apply to big vehicles. In the five years ending with 2010, Walmart saved 60 percent of the fuel per ton-mile in its giant fleet of heavy trucks through better logistics and design. But just the technological savings in heavy trucks can get to two-thirds. And combined with triple to quintuple efficiency airplanes, now on the drawing board, can save close to a trillion dollars.Also today's military revolution in energy efficiency is going to speed up all of these civilian advances in much the same way that military R&D has given us the Internet, the Global Positioning System and the jet engine and microchip industries. As we design and build vehicles better, we can also use them smarter by harnessing four powerful techniques for eliminating needless driving. Instead of just seeing the travel grow, we can use innovative pricing, charging for road infrastructure by the mile, not by the gallon.We can use some smart IT to enhance transit and enable car sharing and ride sharing. We can allow smart and lucrative growth models that help people already be near where they want to be, so they don't need to go somewhere else. And we can use smart IT to make traffic free-flowing. Together, those things can give us the same or better access with 46 to 84 percent less driving, saving another 0.4 trillion dollars, plus 0.3 trillion dollars from using trucks more productively.So 40 years hence, when you add it all up, a far more mobile U.S. economy can use no oil. Saving or displacing barrels for 25 bucks rather than buying them for over a hundred, adds up to a $4 trillion net saving counting all the hidden costs at zero.So to get mobility without oil, to phase out the oil, we can get efficient and then switch fuels. Those 125 to 240 mile-per-gallon-equivalent autos can use any mixture of hydrogen fuel cells, electricity and advanced biofuels. The trucks and planes can realistically use hydrogen or advanced biofuels. The trucks could even use natural gas. But no vehicles will need oil. And the most biofuel we might need, just three million barrels a day, can be made two-thirds from waste without displacing any cropland and without harming soil or climate.Our team speeds up these kinds of oil savings by what we call ""institutional acupuncture."" We figure out where the business logic is congested and not flowing properly, we stick little needles in it to get it flowing, working with partners like Ford and Walmart and the Pentagon.And the long transition is already well under way. In fact, three years ago mainstream analysts were starting to see peak oil, not in supply, but in demand. And Deutsche Bank even said world oil use could peak around 2016.In other words, oil is getting uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices. But the electrified vehicles don't need to burden the electricity grid. Rather, when smart autos exchange electricity and information through smart buildings with smart grids, they're adding to the grid valuable flexibility and storage that help the grid integrate varying solar and wind power.So the electrified autos make the auto and electricity problems easier to solve together than separately. And they also converge the oil story with our second big story, saving electricity and then making it differently. And those twin revolutions in electricity will bring to that sector more numerous and profound and diverse disruptions than any other sector, because we've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures. Changing how we make electricity gets easier if we need less of it. Most of it now is wasted and the technologies for saving it keep improving faster than we're installing them. So the unbought efficiency resource keeps getting ever bigger and cheaper.But as efficiency in buildings and industry starts to grow faster than the economy, America's electricity use could actually shrink, even with the little extra use required for those efficient electrified autos. And we can do this just by reasonably accelerating existing trends.Over the next 40 years, buildings, which use three-quarters of the electricity, can triple or quadruple their energy productivity, saving 1.4 trillion dollars, net present value, with a 33 percent internal rate of return or in English, the savings are worth four times what they cost. And industry can accelerate too, doubling its energy productivity with a 21 percent internal rate of return. The key is a disruptive innovation that we call integrative design that often makes very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings. That is, it can give you expanding returns, not diminishing returns.That is how our 2010 retrofit is saving over two-fifths of the energy in the Empire State Building — remanufacturing those six and a half thousand windows on site into super windows that pass light, but reflect heat. plus better lights and office equipment and such cut the maximum cooling load by a third. And then renovating smaller chillers instead of adding bigger ones saved 17 million dollars of capital cost, which helped pay for the other improvements and reduce the payback to just three years. Integrative design can also increase energy savings in industry. Dow's billion-dollar efficiency investment has already returned nine billion dollars.But industry as a whole has another half-trillion dollars of energy still to save. For example, three-fifths of the world's electricity runs motors. Half of that runs pumps and fans. And those can all be made more efficient, and the motors that turn them can have their system efficiency roughly doubled by integrating 35 improvements, paying back in about a year.But first we ought to be capturing bigger, cheaper savings that are normally ignored and are not in the textbooks. For example, pumps, the biggest use of motors, move liquid through pipes. But a standard industrial pumping loop was redesigned to use at least 86 percent less energy, not by getting better pumps, but just by replacing long, thin, crooked pipes with fat, short, straight pipes. This is not about new technology, it's just rearranging our metal furniture. Of course, it also shrinks the pumping equipment and its capital costs.So what do such savings mean for the electricity that is three-fifths used in motors? Well, from the coal burned at the power plant through all these compounding losses, only a tenth of the fuel energy actually ends up coming out the pipe as flow. But now let's turn those compounding losses around backwards, and every unit of flow or friction that we save in the pipe saves 10 units of fuel cost, pollution and what Hunter Lovins calls ""global weirding"" back at the power plant. And of course, as you go back upstream, the components get smaller and therefore cheaper.Our team has lately found such snowballing energy savings in more than 30 billion dollars worth of industrial redesigns — everything from data centers and chip fabs to mines and refineries. Typically our retrofit designs save about 30 to 60 percent of the energy and pay back in a few years, while the new facility designs save 40 to 90-odd percent with generally lower capital cost.Now needing less electricity would ease and speed the shift to new sources of electricity, chiefly renewables. China leads their explosive growth and their plummeting cost. In fact, these solar power module costs have just fallen off the bottom of the chart. And Germany now has more solar workers than America has steel workers. Already in about 20 states private installers will come put those cheap solar cells on your roof with no money down and beat your utility bill. Such unregulated products could ultimately add up to a virtual utility that bypasses your electric company just as your cellphone bypassed your wireline phone company. And this sort of thing gives utility executives the heebee-jeebees and it gives venture capitalists sweet dreams.Renewables are no longer a fringe activity. For each of the past four years half of the world's new generating capacity has been renewable, mainly lately in developing countries. In 2010, renewables other than big hydro, particularly wind and solar cells, got 151 billion dollars of private investment, and they actually surpassed the total installed capacity of nuclear power in the world by adding 60 billion watts in that one year. That happens to be the same amount of solar cell capacity that the world can now make every year — a number that goes up 60 or 70 percent a year. In contrast, the net additions of nuclear capacity and coal capacity and the orders behind those keep fading because they cost too much and they have too much financial risk. In fact in this country, no new nuclear power plant has been able to raise any private construction capital, despite seven years of 100-plus percent subsidies.So how else could we replace the coal-fired power plants? Well efficiency and gas can displace them all at just below their operating cost and, combined with renewables, can displace them more than 23 times at less than their replacement cost. But we only need to replace them once. We're often told though that only coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on, because they're 24/7, whereas wind and solar power are variable, and hence supposedly unreliable.Actually no generator is 24/7. They all break. And when a big plant goes down, you lose a thousand megawatts in milliseconds, often for weeks or months, often without warning. That is exactly why we've designed the grid to back up failed plants with working plants. And in exactly the same way, the grid can handle wind and solar power's forecastable variations.Hourly simulations show that largely or wholly renewable grids can deliver highly reliable power when they're forecasted, integrated and diversified by both type and location. And that's true both for continental areas like the U.S. or Europe and for smaller areas embedded within a larger grid. That is how, for example, four German states in 2010 were 43 to 52 percent wind powered. Portugal was 45 percent renewable powered, Denmark 36. And it's how all of Europe can shift to renewable electricity. In America, our aging, dirty and insecure power system has to be replaced anyway by 2050. And whatever we replace it with is going to cost about the same, about six trillion dollars at present value — whether we buy more of what we've got or new nuclear and so-called clean coal, or renewables that are more or less centralized.But those four futures at the same cost differ profoundly in their risks, around national security, fuel, water, finance, technology, climate and health. For example, our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack. But that blackout risk disappears, and all of the other risks are best managed, with distributed renewables organized into local micro-grids that normally interconnect, but can stand alone at need. That is, they can disconnect fractally and then reconnect seamlessly.That approach is exactly what the Pentagon is adopting for its own power supply. They think they need that; how about the rest of us that they're defending? We want our stuff to work too. At about the same cost as business as usual, this would maximize national security, customer choice, entrepreneurial opportunity and innovation.Together, efficient use and diverse dispersed renewable supply are starting to transform the whole electricity sector. Traditionally utilities build a lot of giant coal and nuclear plants and a bunch of big gas plants and maybe a little bit of efficiency renewables. And those utilities were rewarded, as they still are in 34 states, for selling you more electricity. However, especially where regulators are now instead rewarding cutting your bills, the investments are shifting radically toward efficiency, demand response, cogeneration, renewables and ways to knit them all together reliably with less transmission and little or no bulk electricity storage.So our energy future is not fate, but choice, and that choice is very flexible. In 1976, for example, government and industry insisted that the amount of energy needed to make a dollar of GDP could never go down. And I heretically suggested it could go down several-fold. Well that's what's actually happened so far. It's fallen by half. But with today's much better technologies, more mature delivery channels and integrative design, we can do far more and even cheaper.So to solve the energy problem, we just needed to enlarge it. And the results may at first seem incredible, but as Marshall McLuhan said, ""Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity."" Now combine the electricity and oil revolutions, both driven by modern efficiency, and you get the really big story: reinventing fire, where business enabled and sped by smart policies in mindful markets can lead the United States completely off oil and coal by 2050, saving 5 trillion dollars, growing the economy 2.6-fold, strengthening out national security, oh, and by the way, by getting rid of the oil and coal, reducing the fossil carbon emissions by 82 to 86 percent.Now if you like any of those outcomes, you can support reinventing fire without needing to like all of them and without needing to agree about which of them is most important. So focusing on outcomes, not motives, can turn gridlock and conflict into a unifying solution to America's energy challenge. This also turns out to be the best way to cope with global challenges — climate change, nuclear proliferation, energy insecurity, energy poverty — all of which make us less safe.Now our team at RMI helps smart companies to get unstuck and speed this journey via six sectoral initiatives, with some more hatching. Of course there's still a lot of old thinking out there too. Former oil man Maurice Strong said, ""Not all the fossils are in the fuel."" But as Edgar Woolard, who used to chair Dupont, reminds us, ""Companies hampered by old thinking won't be a problem because,"" he said,"" they simply won't be around long-term.""I've described not just a once-in-a-civilization business opportunity, but one of the most profound transitions in the history of our species. We humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below, but flowing from above; not scarce, but bountiful; not local, but everywhere; not transient, but permanent; not costly, but free. And but for a little transitional tail of natural gas and a bit of biofuel grown in ways that sustain and endure, this new fire is flameless. Efficiently used, it really can do our work without working our undoing.Each of you owns a piece of that $5 trillion prize. And our new book ""Reinventing Fire"" describes how you can capture it. So with the conversation just begun at ReinventingFire.com, let me invite you each to engage with us and with each other, with everyone around you, to help make the world richer, fairer, cooler and safer by together reinventing fire.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_energy
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"Usually I like working in my shop, but when it's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river, then I just love it. And I'll cut some wood and drill some holes and watch the water, and maybe I'll have to walk around and look for washers. You have no idea how much time I spend.This is the ""Double Raindrop."" Of all my sculptures, it's the most talkative. It adds together the interference pattern from two raindrops that land near each other. Instead of expanding circles, they're expanding hexagons.All the sculptures move by mechanical means. Do you see how there's three peaks to the yellow sine wave? Right here I'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on.Eight hundred two-liter soda bottles — oh yea. (Laughter) Four hundred aluminum cans.Tule is a reed that's native to California, and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious. A single drop of rain increasing amplitude. The spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip.This adds together four different waves. And here I'm going to pull out the double wavelengths and increase the single. The mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys.Four hundred and forty-five strings in a three-dimensional weave. Transferred to a larger scale — actually a lot larger, with a lot of help — 14,064 bicycle reflectors — a 20-day install.""Connected"" is a collaboration with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek. Strings attached to dancers. This is very early rehearsal footage, but the finished work's on tour and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks.A pair of helices and 40 wooden slats. Take your finger and draw this line. Summer, fall, winter, spring, noon, dusk, dark, dawn. Have you ever seen those stratus clouds that go in parallel stripes across the sky? Did you know that's a continuous sheet of cloud that's dipping in and out of the condensation layer? What if every seemingly isolated object was actually just where the continuous wave of that object poked through into our world? The Earth is neither flat nor round. It's wavy.It sounds good, but I'll bet you know in your gut that it's not the whole truth, and I'll tell you why. I have a two-year-old daughter who's the best thing ever. And I'm just going to come out and say it: My daughter is not a wave. And you might say, ""Surely, Rueben, if you took even just the slightest step back, the cycles of hunger and eating, waking and sleeping, laughing and crying would emerge as pattern."" But I would say, ""If I did that, too much would be lost.""This tension between the need to look deeper and the beauty and immediacy of the world, where if you even try to look deeper you've already missed what you're looking for, this tension is what makes the sculptures move. And for me, the path between these two extremes takes the shape of a wave.Let me show you one more. Thank you very much. Thanks. (Applause)Thanks.(Applause)June Cohen: Looking at each of your sculptures, they evoke so many different images. Some of them are like the wind and some are like waves, and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math. Is there an actual inspiration behind each one? Are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it?RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation — like literally two raindrops falling, and just watching that pattern is so stunning. And then just trying to figure out how to make that using stuff. I like working with my hands. There's nothing better than cutting a piece of wood and trying to make it move.JC: And does it ever change? Do you think you're designing one thing, and then when it's produced it looks like something else?RM: The ""Double Raindrop"" I worked on for nine months, and when I finally turned it on, I actually hated it. The very moment I turned it on, I hated it. It was like a really deep-down gut reaction, and I wanted to throw it out. And I happened to have a friend who was over, and he said, ""Why don't you just wait."" And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better, the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it. And so I guess, one, the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes, and two, it does not look like as expected.JC: The relationship evolves over time. Well thank you so much. That was a gorgeous treat for us.RM: Thanks. (JC: Thank you, Reuben.)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/reuben_margolin_sculpting_waves_in_wood_and_time
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"I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world's population can go online to learn, to create and to share. And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow. A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online. As the parent of a nine-year-old girl, that number seems awfully low. (Laughter)But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy. Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not. And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes.Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing. In fact, when I know the data that's being shared and I'm asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits. It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with. But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked, that's when the problem arises. It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business.In fact, there's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us. And when all of that data is held, they can do almost whatever they want with it. This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules. Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe, it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked.So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further. The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you. The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to, but are following me. The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to. And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me, but I have no idea who they are. All of them are connected, as you can see, to form a picture of me on the Web. And this is my profile.So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal. I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day. Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email. I then go to a news site, look for some headlines. And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network.Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, ""Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school?"" And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old, looked at me and said quizzically, ""What's literacy?"" So I sent her online, of course, to look it up. Now let me stop here. We are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. I have navigated to a total of four.So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day. I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day — in this case, actually fairly pedantic — and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile. The red dots have exploded. The gray dots have grown exponentially. All in all, there's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent.I look at this picture and it freaks me out. This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web. And why is this happening? Pretty simple — it's huge business. The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today. And as adults, we're certainly not alone. At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter. And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet, here's her Collusion profile.This is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children's sites. I move from this, from freaked out to enraged. This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate; this is me being a parent. Imagine in the physical world if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement. I can tell you, there isn't a person in this room that would sit idly by. We'd take action. It may not be good action, but we would take action. (Laughter) We can't sit idly by here either. This is happening today.Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. Our voices matter and our actions matter even more.Today we've launched Collusion. You can download it, install it in Firefox, to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods. Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. Because the memory of the Internet is forever. We are being watched. It's now time for us to watch the watchers.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers
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"What you have here is an electronic cigarette. It's something that, since it was invented a year or two ago, has given me untold happiness.(Laughter)A little bit of it, I think, is the nicotine, but there's something much bigger than that; which is, ever since, in the UK, they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again.(Laughter)And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, which is: when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot.(Laughter)If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher.(Laughter)(Applause)So the power of reframing things cannot be overstated. What we have is exactly the same thing, the same activity, but one of them makes you feel great and the other one, with just a small change of posture, makes you feel terrible. And I think one of the problems with classical economics is, it's absolutely preoccupied with reality. And reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness. Why, for example, are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed? Both of them, after all, are in exactly the same stage of life. You both have too much time on your hands and not much money. But pensioners are reportedly very, very happy, whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed. The reason, I think, is that the pensioners believe they've chosen to be pensioners, whereas the young unemployed feel it's been thrust upon them.In England, the upper-middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly, because they've re-branded unemployment. If you're an upper-middle-class English person, you call unemployment ""a year off.""(Laughter)And that's because having a son who's unemployed in Manchester is really quite embarrassing. But having a son who's unemployed in Thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment.(Laughter)But actually, the power to re-brand things — to understand that our experiences, costs, things don't actually much depend on what they really are, but on how we view them — I genuinely think can't be overstated.There's an experiment I think Daniel Pink refers to, where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor. Every now and then, an electric shock is applied to the floor, which pains the dogs. The only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box. And when it nuzzles the button, the electric shock stops. The other dog doesn't have the button. It's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box, but it has no control over the circumstances. Generally, the first dog can be relatively content. The second dog lapses into complete depression.The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives. It's an interesting question. We ask the question — the whole debate in the Western world is about the level of taxation. But I think there's another debate to be asked, which is the level of control we have over our tax money, that what costs us 10 pounds in one context can be a curse; what costs us 10 pounds in a different context, we may actually welcome. You know, pay 20,000 pounds in tax toward health, and you're merely feeling a mug. Pay 20,000 pounds to endow a hospital ward, and you're called a philanthropist. I'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax.(Laughter)So I'll give you one in return: how you frame things really matters. Do you call it ""The bailout of Greece""? Or ""The bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to Greece""?(Laughter)Because they are actually the same thing. What you call them actually affects how you react to them, viscerally and morally. I think psychological value is great, to be absolutely honest. One of my great friends, a professor called Nick Chater, who's the Professor of Decision Sciences in London, believes we should spend far less time looking into humanity's hidden depths, and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows. I think that's true, actually. I think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do. But what we don't have is a really good model of human psychology — at least pre-Kahneman, perhaps, we didn't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering, of neoclassical economics.So people who believed in psychological solutions didn't have a model. We didn't have a framework. This is what Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger calls ""a latticework on which to hang your ideas."" Engineers, economists, classical economists all had a very, very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung. We merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model. And what that means is that, in looking at solutions, we've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions, Newtonian solutions, and not nearly enough to the psychological ones.You know my example of the Eurostar: six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between Paris and London by about 40 minutes. For 0.01 percent of this money, you could have put wi-fi on the trains, which wouldn't have reduced the duration of the journey, but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefulness far more. For maybe 10 percent of the money, you could have paid all of the world's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Château Pétrus to all the passengers.(Laughter)You'd still have five million pounds in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down.(Laughter)Why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically? I think it's because there's an imbalance, an asymmetry in the way we treat creative, emotionally driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas. If you're a creative person, I think, quite rightly, you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you. You have to go in and have a cost-benefit analysis, a feasibility study, an ROI study and so forth. And I think that's probably right. But this does not apply the other way around. People who have an existing framework — an economic framework, an engineering framework — feel that, actually, logic is its own answer. What they don't say is, ""Well, the numbers all seem to add up, but before I present this idea, I'll show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better."" And so we — artificially, I think — prioritize what I'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas.An example of a great psychological idea: the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the London Underground, per pound spent, came when they didn't add any extra trains, nor change the frequency of the trains; they put dot matrix display boards on the platforms — because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait. Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes, knuckle biting, going, ""When's this train going to damn well arrive?""Here's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in Korea. Red traffic lights have a countdown delay. It's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments. Why? Because road rage, impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait. In China, not really understanding the principle behind this, they applied the same principle to green traffic lights —(Laughter)which isn't a great idea. You're 200 yards away, you realize you've got five seconds to go, you floor it.(Laughter)The Koreans, very assiduously, did test both. The accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights.This is all I'm asking for, really, in human decision making, is the consideration of these three things. I'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other. I'm merely saying that when you solve problems, you should look at all three of these equally, and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle.If you actually look at a great business, you'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play. Really successful businesses — Google is a great, great technological success, but it's also based on a very good psychological insight: people believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else. It's an innate thing called ""goal dilution."" Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper about this.Everybody else at the time of Google, more or less, was trying to be a portal. Yes, there's a search function, but you also have weather, sports scores, bits of news. Google understood that if you're just a search engine, people assume you're a very, very good search engine. All of you know this, actually, from when you go in to buy a television, and in the shabbier end of the row of flat-screen TVs, you can see, are these rather despised things called ""combined TV and DVD players."" And we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things, but we look at a combined TV and DVD player and we go, ""Uck. It's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a DVD player."" So we walk out of the shops with one of each. Google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one.I propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn't even realize were problems at all. This is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics. Don't give them 24 white pills; give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first, and then take the blue ones. It's called ""chunking."" The likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle.One of the great mistakes, I think, of economics is it fails to understand that what something is — whether it's retirement, unemployment, cost — is a function, not only of its amount, but also its meaning.This is a toll crossing in Britain. Quite often queues happen at the tolls. Sometimes you get very, very severe queues. You could apply the same principle, actually, to the security lanes in airports. What would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge, but go through a lane that's an express lane? It's not an unreasonable thing to do; it's an economically efficient thing to do. Time means more to some people than others. If you're waiting trying to get to a job interview, you'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane. If you're on the way to visit your mother-in-law, you'd probably prefer —(Laughter)you'd probably prefer to stay on the left.The only problem is if you introduce this economically efficient solution, people hate it ... because they think you're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue, and, ""Why on earth should I pay to subsidize your incompetence?"" On the other hand, change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management, so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company, it goes to charity ... and the mental willingness to pay completely changes. You have a relatively economically efficient solution, but one that actually meets with public approval and even a small degree of affection, rather than being seen as bastardy.So where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money. Actually, my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount, but where I think that money is going. And I think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy. It could revolutionize the public services. It could actually change things quite significantly.[Ludwig Von Mises is my hero.]Here's a guy you all need to study. He's an Austrian School economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna. What was interesting about the Austrian School is they actually grew up alongside Freud. And so they're predominantly interested in psychology. They believed that there was a discipline called praxeology, which is a prior discipline to the study of economics. Praxeology is the study of human choice, action and decision-making. I think they're right. I think the danger we have in today's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology. But as Charlie Munger says, ""If economics isn't behavioral, I don't know what the hell is.""Von Mises, interestingly, believes economics is just a subset of psychology. I think he just refers to economics as ""the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity."" But Von Mises, among many other things, I think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing, the value of perceived value and the fact that we should treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value.We tend to, all of us, even those of us who work in marketing, think of value in two ways: the real value, which is when you make something in a factory or provide a service, and then there's a dubious value, which you create by changing the way people look at things. Von Mises completely rejected this distinction. And he used this following analogy: he referred to strange economists called the French physiocrats, who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land. So if you're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer, you created true value. If however, you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat, you weren't actually creating value, you were exploiting the shepherd.Now, Von Mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing. He says if you run a restaurant, there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor. One of them creates, perhaps, the primary product — the thing we think we're paying for — the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product. And the idea that one of them should have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong.Try this quick thought experiment: imagine a restaurant that serves Michelin-starred food, but where the restaurant smells of sewage and there's human feces on the floor.(Laughter)The best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further, it's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor. And it's vital we understand this.If that seems like a sort of strange, abstruse thing — in the UK, the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day. They decided this wasn't good enough, and they wanted to get it up to 99. The effort to do that almost broke the organization. If, at the same time, you'd gone and asked people, ""What percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day?"" the average answer, or the modal answer, would have been ""50 to 60 percent."" Now, if your perception is much worse than your reality, what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality? That's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks. What you need to do is, first of all, tell people that 98 percent of first-class mail gets there the next day. That's pretty good. I would argue, in Britain, there's a much better frame of reference, which is to tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the UK than in Germany, because generally, in Britain, if you want to make us happy about something, just tell us we do it better than the Germans.(Laughter)(Applause)Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value, and therefore, the actual value is completely transformed. It has to be said of the Germans that the Germans and the French are doing a brilliant job of creating a united Europe. The only thing they didn't expect is they're uniting Europe through a shared mild hatred of the French and Germans. But I'm British; that's the way we like it.(Laughter)What you'll also notice is that, in any case, our perception is leaky. We can't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it. All of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted. When you drive away, your car feels as if it drives better.(Laughter)And the reason for this — unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which I'm not paying him for and I'm unaware of — is because perception is, in any case, leaky.Analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded. I don't just mean through reported pain reduction — actual measured pain reduction. And so perception actually is leaky in any case. So if you do something that's perceptually bad in one respect, you can damage the other.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_perspective_is_everything
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"Four years ago today, exactly, actually, I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie. Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com. My name's Tavi Gevinson, and the title of my talk is ""Still Figuring It Out,"" and the MS Paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today's theme, and has nothing to do with my inability to use PowerPoint. (Laughter)So I edit this site for teenage girls. I'm a feminist. I am kind of a pop culture nerd, and I think a lot about what makes a strong female character, and, you know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence. My own website. So I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted, and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that's played up a lot, like a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot, and it's seen as power. But they're not strong characters who happen to be female. They're completely flat, and they're basically cardboard characters. The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple, when, in actuality, women are complicated, women are multifaceted — not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people. (Laughter)So the flaws are the key. I'm not the first person to say this. What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable.I don't like to acknowledge a problem without also acknowledging those who work to fix it, so just wanted to acknowledge shows like ""Mad Men,"" movies like ""Bridesmaids,"" whose female characters or protagonists are complex, multifaceted. Lena Dunham, who's on here, her show on HBO that premiers next month, ""Girls,"" she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions, and that feels accurate for all people, but you don't see women represented like that as much. Congrats, guys. (Laughs)But I don't feel that — I still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way, and one group that we'll focus on today are teens, because I think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out, and in the '90s there was ""Freaks and Geeks"" and ""My So-Called Life,"" and their characters, Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase, I mean, the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out, basically, but those shows only lasted a season each, and I haven't really seen anything like that on TV since.So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) — around the time when I was, when I started watching those TV shows. I was ending middle school, starting high school — I'm a sophomore now — and I was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you're told you can't be when you're growing up as a girl. You can't be smart and pretty. You can't be a feminist who's also interested in fashion. You can't care about clothes if it's not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you.So I was trying to figure all that out, and I felt a little confused, and I said so on my blog, and I said that I wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because I think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all of the answers. And this is not true, and, actually, reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process, and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year when I — I mean, I think I've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since. But, yeah.So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing, their photography, whatever, to be a member of our staff. I got about 3,000 emails. My editorial director and I went through them and put together a staff of people, and we launched last September. And this is an excerpt from my first editor's letter, where I say that Rookie, we don't have all the answers, we're still figuring it out too, but the point is not to give girls the answers, and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves, but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission, they can ask their own questions, find their own answers, all of that, and Rookie, I think we've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out.So I'm not saying, ""Be like us,"" and ""We're perfect role models,"" because we're not, but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions. I mean, we have articles called ""On Taking Yourself Seriously: How to Not Care What People Think of You,"" but we also have articles like, oops — I'm figuring it out! Ha ha. (Laughter) If you use that, you can get away with anything. We also have articles called ""How to Look Like You Weren't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes.""So all of that being said, I still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site, that aren't just about being totally powerful, maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those.So what I you to take away from my talk, the lesson of all of this, is to just be Stevie Nicks. Like, that's all you have to do. (Laughter) Because my favorite thing about her, other than, like, everything, is that she is very — has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them, and yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tavi_gevinson_a_teen_just_trying_to_figure_it_out
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"Well when I was asked to do this TEDTalk, I was really chuckled, because, you see, my father's name was Ted, and much of my life, especially my musical life, is really a talk that I'm still having with him, or the part of me that he continues to be.Now Ted was a New Yorker, an all-around theater guy, and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician. He didn't read a note, and he was profoundly hearing impaired. Yet, he was my greatest teacher. Because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids, his understanding of music was profound.And for him, it wasn't so much the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you. And he did a painting of this experience, which he called ""In the Realm of Music."" Now Ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this. (Music)But he was tough when it came to music. He said, ""There are only two things that matter in music: what and how. And the thing about classical music, that what and how, it's inexhaustible.""That was his passion for the music. Both my parents really loved it. They didn't know all that much about it, but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them. And I think inspired by that memory, it's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as I can, sort of pass it on through whatever means. And how people get this music, how it comes into their lives, really fascinates me.One day in New York, I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants. And a tough, slouchy kid got up to bat, and he took a swing and really connected. And he watched the ball fly for a second, and then he went, ""Dah dadaratatatah. Brah dada dadadadah."" And he ran around the bases. And I thought, go figure. How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid? How was that passed on? How did he get to hear Mozart?Well when it comes to classical music, there's an awful lot to pass on, much more than Mozart, Beethoven or Tchiakovsky. Because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years. And every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.Now the raw material of it, of course, is just the music of everyday life. It's all the anthems and dance crazes and ballads and marches. But what classical music does is to distill all of these musics down, to condense them to their absolute essence, and from that essence create a new language, a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are. It's a language that's still evolving.Now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of, like concertos and symphonies, but even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment — like this one from the Beethoven Violin Concerto. (Music) It's so simple, so evocative. So many emotions seem to be inside of it. Yet, of course, like all music, it's essentially not about anything. It's just a design of pitches and silence and time.And the pitches, the notes, as you know, are just vibrations. They're locations in the spectrum of sound. And whether we call them 440 per second, A, or 3,729, B flat — trust me, that's right — they're just phenomena. But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood. And the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries, as have our preferences for them.So for example, in the 11th century, people liked pieces that ended like this. (Music) And in the 17th century, it was more like this. (Music) And in the 21st century ... (Music)Now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord, even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room. And the reason you like it is because you've inherited, whether you knew it or not, centuries-worth of changes in musical theory, practice and fashion.And in classical music we can follow these changes very, very accurately because of the music's powerful silent partner, the way it's been passed on: notation. Now the impulse to notate, or, more exactly I should say, encode music has been with us for a very long time. In 200 B.C., a man named Sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the Greeks. (Music)And a thousand years later, this impulse to notate took an entirely different form. And you can see how this happened in these excerpts from the Christmas mass ""Puer Natus est nobis,"" ""For Us is Born."" (Music) In the 10th century, little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune. And in the 12th century, a line was drawn, like a musical horizon line, to better pinpoint the pitch's location.And then in the 13th century, more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly, and that led to the kind of notation we have today. Well notation not only passed the music on, notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely, because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale.Now inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded, saved, considered, prioritized, made into intricate designs. And from this moment, classical music became what it most essentially is, a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature: instinct and intelligence.And there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition. Now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move, but a composer is considering all possible moves, testing them out, prioritizing them out, until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness. Now some of the greatest composers, like Bach, were combinations of these two things. Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master. Mozart was the same way.But every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason, instinct and intelligence. And every musical era had different priorities of these things, different things to pass on, different 'whats' and 'hows'. So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition the big 'what' was to praise God. And by the 1400s, music was being written that tried to mirror God's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky. The 'how' was a style called polyphony, music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in Ptolemy's geocentric universe. This was truly the music of the spheres. (Music)This is the kind of music that Leonardo DaVinci would have known. And perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity meant that something new had to happen — a radical new move, which in 1600 is what did happen. (Music) Singer: Ah, bitter blow! Ah, wicked, cruel fate! Ah, baleful stars! Ah, avaricious heaven!MTT: This, of course, was the birth of opera, and its development put music on a radical new course. The what now was not to mirror the mind of God, but to follow the emotion turbulence of man. And the how was harmony, stacking up the pitches to form chords.And the chords, it turned out, were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions. And the basic chords were the ones we still have with us, the triads, either the major one, which we think is happy, or the minor one, which we perceive as sad. But what's the actual difference between these two chords? It's just these two notes in the middle. It's either E natural, and 659 vibrations per second, or E flat, at 622. So the big difference between human happiness and sadness? 37 freakin' vibrations.So you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions. And in fact, as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature, harmony grew more complex to reflect it. Turns out it was capable of expressing emotions beyond the ability of words.Now with all this possibility, classical music really took off. It's the time in which the big forms began to arise. And the effects of technology began to be felt also, because printing put music, the scores, the codebooks of music, into the hands of performers everywhere. And new and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible. This is when those big forms arose — the symphonies, the sonatas, the concertos.And in these big architectures of time, composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime. A piece like Beethoven's Fifth basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger, over the course of a half an hour, step by exacting step of his route, to the moment when he could make it across to joy. (Music)And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues, like gripping ones of culture, such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality. But whatever direction the music took, one thing until recently was always the same, and that was when the musicians stopped playing, the music stopped.Now this moment so fascinates me. I find it such a profound one. What happens when the music stops? Where does it go? What's left? What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance? Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? And how might that change their lives?To me this is the intimate, personal side of music. It's the passing on part. It's the 'why' part of it. And to me that's the most essential of all. Mostly it's been a person-to-person thing, a teacher-student, performer-audience thing, and then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of passing things on, albeit an impersonal one. People could now hear music all the time, even though it wasn't necessary for them to play an instrument, read music or even go to concerts.And technology democratized music by making everything available. It spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing. And technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes, using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences.At the same time technology, by taking over the role that notation had always played, shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side. The culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that's been sliced, diced, layered and, God knows, distributed and sold. What's the long-term effect of this on us or on music? Nobody knows.The question remains: What happens when the music stops? What sticks with people? Now that we have unlimited access to music, what does stick with us?Well let me show you a story of what I mean by ""really sticking with us."" I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home, and I spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker. He came over to a piano that was there, and he balanced himself and began playing something like this. (Music)And he said something like, ""Me ... boy ... symphony ... Beethoven."" And I suddenly got it, and I said, ""Friend, by any chance are you trying to play this?"" (Music) And he said, ""Yes, yes. I was a little boy. The symphony: Isaac Stern, the concerto, I heard it."" And I thought, my God, how much must this music mean to this man that he would get himself out of his bed, across the room to recover the memory of this music that, after everything else in his life is sloughing away, still means so much to him?Well, that's why I take every performance so seriously, why it matters to me so much. I never know who might be there, who might be absorbing it and what will happen to it in their life.But now I'm excited that there's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music. That's what drives my interest in projects like the TV series ""Keeping Score"" with the San Francisco Symphony that looks at the backstories of music, and working with the young musicians at the New World Symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education.And of course, the New World Symphony led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world. And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype. There's just a role here for so many people — teachers, parents, performers — to be explorers together. Sure, the big events attract a lot of attention, but what really matters is what goes on every single day. We need your perspectives, your curiosity, your voices.And it excites me now to meet people who are hikers, chefs, code writers, taxi drivers, people I never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on. You don't need to worry about knowing anything. If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know. You can start anywhere. Ramble a bit. Follow traces. Get lost. Be surprised, amused inspired. All that 'what', all that 'how' is out there waiting for you to discover its 'why', to dive in and pass it on.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_tilson_thomas_music_and_emotion_through_time
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"I love my food. And I love information. My children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other. (Laughter)But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed, the point in my life when the two passions merged, the journey of learning that took place from that point. And one idea I want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food?I was born in Calcutta — a family where my father and his father before him were journalists, and they wrote magazines in the English language. That was the family business. And as a result of that, I grew up with books everywhere around the house. And I mean books everywhere around the house. And that's actually a shop in Calcutta, but it's a place where we like our books. In fact, I've got 38,000 of them now and no Kindle in sight.But growing up as a child with the books around everywhere, with people to talk to about those books, this wasn't a sort of slightly learned thing.By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books. It wasn't the only passion I had. I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal. And two of the things about Bengal: they like their savory dishes and they like their sweets. So by the time I grew up, again, I had a well-established passion for food. Now I was growing up in the late '60s and early '70s, and there were a number of other passions I was also interested in, but these two were the ones that differentiated me. (Laughter)And then life was fine, dandy. Everything was okay, until I got to about the age of 26, and I went to a movie called ""Short Circuit."" Oh, some of you have seen it. And apparently it's being remade right now and it's going to be coming out next year. It's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life. And as it ran, this thing was saying, ""Give me input. Give me input.""And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing. Energy came to it in some form or shape, data came to it in some form or shape. And I began to think, I wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things I had as input — as if food and information were similar in some form or shape.I started doing some research then, and this was the 25-year journey, and started finding out that actually human beings as primates have far smaller stomachs than should be the size for our body weight and far larger brains.And as I went to research that even further, I got to a point where I discovered something called the expensive tissue hypothesis. That actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static. What changed was the balance of the tissues available. And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue. And what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995. It's a lady named Leslie Aiello.And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other. If you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large, you had to live with a smaller gut.That then set me off completely to say, Okay, these two are connected. So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said, So we were hunter-gathers of information. We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information.Does that really explain what we're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays? Because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted, and those that were in the business of farming information wanted to build fences around it, create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement. So there was always going to be a tension within that. And everything I saw in the cultivation said there were huge fights amongst the foodies between the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers. And this is happening here.When I moved to preparation, this same thing was true, expect that there were two schools. One group of people said you can distill your information, you can extract value, separate it and serve it up, while another group turned around and said no, no you can ferment it. You bring it all together and mash it up and the value emerges that way. The same is again true with information.But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable. Because what I began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this. They'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients. Do you cook it? Do you have it served to you? Do you go to a restaurant? The same is true every time as I started thinking about information.The analogies were getting crazy — that information had sell-by dates, that people had misused information that wasn't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market, on corporate values, etc. And by this time I was hooked. And this is about 23 years into this process.And I began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction, docu-dramas, mockumentaries, whatever you call it. Are we going to reach the stage where information has a percentage for fact associated with it? We start labeling information for the fact percentage? Are we going to start looking at what happens when your information source is turned off, as a famine?Which brings me to the final element of this. Clay Shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload, there is only filter failure. I put it to you that information, if viewed from the point of food, is never a production issue; you never speak of food overload. Fundamentally it's a consumption issue. And we have to start thinking about how we create diets within ourselves, exercise within ourselves, to have the faculties to be able to deal with information, to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly. In fact, when I saw ""Supersize Me,"" I starting thinking of saying, What would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News? (Laughter) Would there be time to be able to work with it?So you start really understanding that you can have diseases, toxins, a need to balance your diet, and once you start looking, and from that point on, everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information, the production of information, the preparation of information, I've looked at from the viewpoint of food. It has probably not helped my waistline any because I like practicing on both sides.But I'd like to leave you with just that question: If you began to think of all the information that you consume the way you think of food, what would you do differently?Thank you very much for your time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jp_rangaswami_information_is_food
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"I'm a very lucky person. I've been privileged to see so much of our beautiful Earth and the people and creatures that live on it. And my passion was inspired at the age of seven, when my parents first took me to Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara Desert. Now imagine a little Brit somewhere that wasn't cold and damp like home. What an amazing experience. And it made me want to explore more.So as a filmmaker, I've been from one end of the Earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before. And what's more, I'm really lucky, because I get to share that with millions of people worldwide. Now the idea of having new perspectives of our planet and actually being able to get that message out gets me out of bed every day with a spring in my step.You might think that it's quite hard to find new stories and new subjects, but new technology is changing the way we can film. It's enabling us to get fresh, new images and tell brand new stories. In Nature's Great Events, a series for the BBC that I did with David Attenborough, we wanted to do just that.Images of grizzly bears are pretty familiar. You see them all the time, you think. But there's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed. So what we did, we went to Alaska, which is where the grizzlies rely on really high, almost inaccessible, mountain slopes for their denning. And the only way to film that is a shoot from the air.(Video) David Attenborough: Throughout Alaska and British Columbia, thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep. There is nothing to eat up here, but the conditions were ideal for hibernation. Lots of snow in which to dig a den. To find food, mothers must lead their cubs down to the coast, where the snow will already be melting. But getting down can be a challenge for small cubs. These mountains are dangerous places, but ultimately the fate of these bear families, and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific, depends on the salmon.KB: I love that shot. I always get goosebumps every time I see it. That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera. And it's a wonderful bit of gear, because it's like having a flying tripod, crane and dolly all rolled into one. But technology alone isn't enough. To really get the money shots, it's down to being in the right place at the right time. And that sequence was especially difficult.The first year we got nothing. We had to go back the following year, all the way back to the remote parts of Alaska. And we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks. And eventually we got lucky. The cloud lifted, the wind was still, and even the bear showed up. And we managed to get that magic moment.For a filmmaker, new technology is an amazing tool, but the other thing that really, really excites me is when new species are discovered. Now, when I heard about one animal, I knew we had to get it for my next series, Untamed Americas, for National Geographic. In 2005, a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador. And what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower. It depends solely on the bat.Now, the series hasn't even aired yet, so you're the very first to see this. See what you think. (Video) Narrator: The tube-lipped nectar bat. A pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower's long flute. But how to reach it? Necessity is the mother of evolution. (Music) This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue, the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world. If human, he'd have a nine-foot tongue. (Applause) KB: What a tongue. We filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times. So imagine how quick that thing is in real life.Now people often ask me, ""Where's your favorite place on the planet?"" And the truth is I just don't have one. There are so many wonderful places. But some locations draw you back time and time again. And one remote location — I first went there as a backpacker; I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas — it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know. But at 15,000 feet, it's tough. It's freezing cold, and that thin air really gets you. Sometimes it's hard to breathe, especially carrying all the heavy filming equipment. And that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover. But the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity. Have a look.(Video) Narrator: Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics, between Chile and Bolivia, the Andes completely change. It's called the Altiplano, or ""high plains"" — a place of extremes and extreme contrasts. Where deserts freeze and waters boil. More like Mars than Earth, it seems just as hostile to life. The stars themselves — at 12,000 feet, the dry, thin air makes for perfect stargazing. Some of the world's astronomers have telescopes nearby. But just looking up with the naked eye, you really don't need one. (Music) (Applause)KB: Thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent, wonderful Earth. Thank you for letting me share that with you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_bass_unseen_footage_untamed_nature
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"I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.(Laughter)They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door. I need you to actually see this. They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, they're bouncing around a lot. And they crash straight into the front door of your home. Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places. Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light. The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse. It's a talking horse. You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth. Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears. She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, and she's singing ""Hit Me Baby One More Time."" And then, follow me into your kitchen. In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road, and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from ""The Wizard of Oz,"" hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you.Okay. Open your eyes.I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City. It's called the United States Memory Championship. And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist, expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.(Laughter)They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature.And I started talking to a few of the competitors. This is a guy called Ed Cook, who had come over from England, where he had one of the best-trained memories. And I said to him, ""Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?"" And Ed was like, ""I'm not a savant. In fact, I have just an average memory. Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory. We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books."" And I said, ""Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?""And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, ""Josh, you're an American journalist. Do you know Britney Spears?"" I'm like, ""What? No. Why?"" ""Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television. It will prove to the world that anybody can do this.""(Laughter)I was like, ""Well, I'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"" And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work, and what its potential might be.And I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the worst memory in the world. His memory was so bad, that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are.At the other end of the spectrum, I met this guy. This is Kim Peek, he was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie ""Rain Man."" We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating.(Laughter)And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages. And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.Over the last few millenia, we've invented a series of technologies — from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone — that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they've also changed us. They've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively. Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how.One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory, is at this totally singular memory contest. It's actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world. And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it.A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? The answer was no. Are they smarter than the rest of us? They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was: not really.There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. Why? And is there something that the rest of us can learn from this?The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where, every year, somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion. On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour.(Laughter)Yeah.And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as ""elaborative encoding.""And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, ""Remember that there is a guy named Baker."" That's his name. And I say to you, ""Remember that there is a guy who is a baker."" Okay? And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, ""Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? Do you remember what it was?"" The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. What's going on here?Well, the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you. It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common noun ""baker"" — we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands. Bakers smell good when they come home from work. Maybe we even know a baker. And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it, that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers — to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind.One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. It came to be known as the memory palace. The story behind its creation goes like this:There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a banquet. He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses. Kills everybody inside. It doesn't just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition. Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting. The bodies can't be properly buried. It's one tragedy compounding another. Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. And he takes the relatives by the hand, and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.What Simonides figured out at that moment, is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers, and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it. But, I would wager that if I asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now, you would be able to see that.The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye, and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember — the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it's likely to be. This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises.So how does this work? Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it, if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.(Laughter)What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house. And you'd come up with some sort of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image, to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest.(Laughter)And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. And you'd go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you'd have some friends to help you remember that.This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches — not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic. In fact, the phrase ""topic sentence"" — that comes from the Greek word ""topos,"" which means ""place."" That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. The phrase ""in the first place,"" that's like ""in the first place of your memory palace.""I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it. And I went to a few more of these memory contests, and I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers. But there was a problem. The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event.(Laughter)Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs — I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples. And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about. I know that there's incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, but I don't have access to it.And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit. And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning, before I sat down with my New York Times, just trying to remember something. Maybe it was a poem, maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market. And I found that this was shockingly fun. I never would have expected that. It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory. What you're doing, is you're trying to get better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious, and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. And I got pretty into it.This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.(Laughter)It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier, and I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism. It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research. Problem was, the experiment went haywire. I won the contest —(Laughter)which really wasn't supposed to happen.(Applause)Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point. These are just tricks. They work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work. And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works.We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged. We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience, and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers.The memory palace, these memory techniques — they're just shortcuts. In fact, they're not even really shortcuts. They work because they make you work. They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. But there actually are no shortcuts. This is how stuff is made memorable.And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't even remember he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives, by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do
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"So what I want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it. But to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is.The 404 page is that. It's that broken experience on the Web. It's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can't find it. And it serves you the 404 page. It's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it. And I just want you to think a little bit about, remember for yourself, it's annoying when you hit this thing. Because it's the feeling of a broken relationship.And that's where it's actually also interesting to think about, where does 404 come from? It's from a family of errors actually — a whole set of relationship errors, which, when I started digging into them, it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples counselor. You sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey.(Laughter)Yes.But these things are everywhere. They're on sites big, they're on sites small. This is a global experience.What a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks. And that's not a good experience when you're used to experiences like this. You can get on your Kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone. A 404 page is not what you're looking for. You get that, and it's like a slap in the face. Trying to think about how a 404 felt, and it would be like if you went to Starbucks and there's the guy behind the counter and you're over there and there's no skim milk. And you say, ""Hey, could you bring the skim milk?"" And they walk out from behind the counter and they've got no pants on. And you're like, ""Oh, I didn't want to see that."" That's the 404 feeling.(Laughter)I mean, I've heard about that.So where this comes into play and why this is important is I head up a technology incubator, and we had eight startups sitting around there. And those startups are focused on what they are, not what they're not, until one day Athletepath, which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes, found this video.(Video) Guy: Joey!Crowd: Whoa!Renny Gleeson: You just ... no, he's not okay. They took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place. Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404.(Laughter)(Applause)So this turned into a contest. Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page. Stayhound, which helps you find pet sitters through your social network, commiserated with your pet. Each one of them found this. It turned into a 24-hour contest. At 4:04 the next day, we gave out $404 in cash. And what they learned was that those little things, done right, actually matter, and that well-designed moments can build brands. So you take a look out in the real world, and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself. You can type in an URL and put in a 404 and these will pop. This is one that commiserates with you. This is one that blames you. This is one that I loved. This is an error page, but what if this error page was also an opportunity?So it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be. Because back to the whole relationship issue, what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you're not, or it can remind me of why I should love you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/renny_gleeson_404_the_story_of_a_page_not_found
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"(Mosquito buzzing)(Swat)Gotcha. Mosquitoes. I hate them. Don't you? That awful buzzing sound at night around your ears that drives you absolutely crazy? Knowing that she wants to stick a needle in your skin and suck out your blood? That's awful, right? In fact, there's only one good thing I can think of when it gets to mosquitoes. When they fly into our bedroom at night, they prefer to bite my wife.(Laughter)But that's fascinating, right? Why does she receive more bites than I do? And the answer is smell, the smell of her body. And since we all smell different and produce chemicals on our skin that either attract or repel mosquitoes, some of us are just more attractive than others. So my wife smells nicer than I do, or I just stink more than she does.Either way, mosquitoes find us in the dark by sniffing us out. They smell us. And during my PhD, I wanted to know exactly what chemicals from our skin African malaria mosquitoes use to track us down at night. And there's a whole range of compounds that they do use. And this was not going to be an easy task. And therefore we set up various experiments. Why did we set up these experiments? Because half the world's population runs the risk of contracting a killer disease like malaria through a simple mosquito bite. Every 30 seconds, somewhere on this planet, a child dies of malaria, and Paul Levy this morning, he was talking about the metaphor of the 727 crashing into the United States. Well, in Africa, we have the equivalent of seven jumbo 747s crashing every day. But perhaps if we can attract these mosquitoes to traps, bait it with our smell, we may be able to stop transmission of disease.Now, solving this puzzle was not an easy thing, because we produce hundreds of different chemicals on the skin, but we undertook some remarkable experiments that managed us to resolve this puzzle very quickly indeed.First, we observed that not all mosquito species bite on the same part of the body. Strange. So we set up an experiment where we put a naked volunteer in a large cage,(Laughter)and in that cage, we released mosquitoes to see where they were biting on the body of that person. And we found some remarkable differences. On the left here you see the bites by the Dutch malaria mosquito on this person. They had a very strong preference for biting on the face. In contrast, the African malaria mosquito had a very strong preference for biting the ankles and feet of this person. And that, of course, we should have known all along, because they're called mosqui-toes, you see?(Laughter)That's right.(Applause)And so we started focusing on the smell of feet ... on the smell of human feet, until we came across a remarkable statement in the literature that said that cheese smells after feet rather than the reverse. Think of it. And this triggered us to do a remarkable experiment. We tried, with a tiny little piece of Limburger cheese, which smells badly after feet, to attract African malaria mosquitoes. And you know what? It worked. In fact, it worked so well that now we have a synthetic mixture of the aroma of Limburger cheese that we're using in Tanzania and has been shown there to be two to three times more attractive to mosquitoes than humans. Limburg, be proud of your cheese, as it is now used in the fight against malaria.(Applause)That's the cheese, just to show you.My second story is remarkable as well. It's about man's best friend. It's about dogs. And I will show you how we can use dogs in the fight against malaria. One of the best ways of killing mosquitoes is not to wait until they fly around like adults and bite people and transmit disease. It's to kill them when they're still in the water as larvae. Why? Because they are just like the CIA. In that pool of water, these larvae are concentrated. They're all together there. They are immobile. They can't escape from that water. They can't fly. And they're accessible. You can actually walk up to that pool and you can kill them there, right?So the problem that we face with this is that, throughout the landscape, all these pools of water with the larvae, they are scattered all over the place, which makes it very hard for an inspector like this to actually find all these breeding sites and treat them with insecticides. And last year we thought very, very hard, how can we resolve this problem? Until we realized that just like us — we have a unique smell — mosquito larvae also have a very unique smell.And so we set up another crazy experiment, because we collected the smell of these larvae, put it on pieces of cloth, and then did something very remarkable. Here we have a bar with four holes and we put the smell of these larvae in the left hole. Oh, that was very quick. And then you see the dog. It's called Tweed. It's a border collie. He's examining these holes and now he's got it already. He's going back to check the control holes again, but he's coming back to the first one, and now he's locking into that smell, which means that now, we can use dogs with these inspectors to much better find the breeding sites of mosquitoes in the field, and therefore have a much bigger impact on malaria. This lady is Ellen van der Zweep. She's one of the best dog trainers in the world, and she believes that we can do a lot more. Since we also know that people that carry malaria parasites smell different compared to people that are uninfected, she's convinced that we can train dogs to find people that carry the parasite. That means that in a population where malaria has gone down all the way and there's few people remaining with parasites, that the dogs can find these people, we can treat them with antimalarial drugs and give the final blow to malaria. Man's best friend in the fight against malaria.My third story is perhaps even more remarkable ... and, I should say, has never been shown to the public until today.(Audience cheers)Yeah. It's a crazy story, but I believe it's perhaps the best and ultimate revenge against mosquitoes ever. In fact, people have told me that now they will enjoy being bitten by mosquitoes. And the question of course is, what would make someone enjoy being bitten by mosquitoes? And the answer I have right here ... in my pocket —(Laughter)if I get it. It's a tablet. A simple tablet, and when I take it with water ... it does miracles. Thank you.Now, let me show you how this works. Here in this box, I have a cage with several hundred hungry female mosquitoes ...(Laughter)that I'm just about to release.(Laughter)Just kidding, just kidding.(Laughter)What I'm going to show you is, I'm gonna stick my arm into it and I will show you how quickly they will bite. There we go. Don't worry, I do this all the time in the lab. There we go. OK. Now, on the video — on the video here, I'm going to show you exactly the same thing, except that what I'm showing you on the video happened one hour after I took the tablet. Have a look. That doesn't work. OK. Sorry about that. I'm sticking in my arm, I'm giving them a big juicy blood meal, I'm shaking them off, and we follow them through time to see these mosquitoes get very, very sick indeed, here shown in fast motion. And three hours later, what we see at the bottom of the cage is dead mosquitoes ... very dead mosquitoes. And I'm going to say, ladies and gentlemen, we have swapped the cards with mosquitoes. They don't kill us. We kill them.(Applause)Now —(Laughter) Maastricht, be prepared. Now, think of what we can do with this. We can actually use this to contain outbreaks of mosquito-born diseases, of epidemics, right? And better still, imagine what would happen if, in a very large area, everyone would take these drugs, for just three weeks. That would give us an opportunity to actually eliminate malaria as a disease.So cheese, dogs and a pill to kill mosquitoes. That's the kind of out-of-the-box science that I love doing ... for the betterment of mankind, but especially for her, so that she can grow up in a world without malaria.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bart_knols_cheese_dogs_and_pills_to_end_malaria
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"I'm going to talk to you about optimism — or more precisely, the optimism bias. It's a cognitive illusion that we've been studying in my lab for the past few years, and 80 percent of us have it.It's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events. So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer, being in a car accident. We overestimate our longevity, our career prospects. In short, we're more optimistic than realistic, but we are oblivious to the fact.Take marriage for example. In the Western world, divorce rates are about 40 percent. That means that out of five married couples, two will end up splitting their assets. But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce, they estimate it at zero percent. And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce. So it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce, but they are more likely to remarry. In the words of Samuel Johnson, ""Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience.""(Laughter)So if we're married, we're more likely to have kids. And we all think our kids will be especially talented. This, by the way, is my two-year-old nephew, Guy. And I just want to make it absolutely clear that he's a really bad example of the optimism bias, because he is in fact uniquely talented.(Laughter)And I'm not alone. Out of four British people, three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families. That's 75 percent. But only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago.And this is a really important point, because we're optimistic about ourselves, we're optimistic about our kids, we're optimistic about our families, but we're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us, and we're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country. But private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent. And it doesn't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay, but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so.Now I'm a scientist, I do experiments. So to show you what I mean, I'm going to do an experiment here with you. So I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population.The first one is getting along well with others. Who here believes they're at the bottom 25 percent? Okay, that's about 10 people out of 1,500. Who believes they're at the top 25 percent? That's most of us here. Okay, now do the same for your driving ability. How interesting are you? How attractive are you? How honest are you? And finally, how modest are you?So most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities. Now this is statistically impossible. We can't all be better than everyone else. (Laughter) But if we believe we're better than the other guy, well that means that we're more likely to get that promotion, to remain married, because we're more social, more interesting.And it's a global phenomenon. The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries — in Western cultures, in non-Western cultures, in females and males, in kids, in the elderly. It's quite widespread.But the question is, is it good for us? So some people say no. Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations. I think the logic goes something like this: If we don't expect greatness, if we don't expect to find love and be healthy and successful, well we're not going to be disappointed when these things don't happen. And if we're not disappointed when good things don't happen, and we're pleasantly surprised when they do, we will be happy.So it's a very good theory, but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons. Number one: Whatever happens, whether you succeed or you fail, people with high expectations always feel better. Because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event.The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations. And they found that when people with high expectations succeed, they attribute that success to their own traits. ""I'm a genius, therefore I got an A, therefore I'll get an A again and again in the future."" When they failed, it wasn't because they were dumb, but because the exam just happened to be unfair. Next time they will do better. People with low expectations do the opposite. So when they failed it was because they were dumb, and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy. Next time reality would catch up with them. So they felt worse.Number two: Regardless of the outcome, the pure act of anticipation makes us happy. The behavioral economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity, any celebrity. Then he said, ""How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a celebrity if the kiss was delivered immediately, in three hours, in 24 hours, in three days, in one year, in 10 years? He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately, but to get a kiss in three days. They were willing to pay extra in order to wait. Now they weren't willing to wait a year or 10 years; no one wants an aging celebrity. But three days seemed to be the optimum amount.So why is that? Well if you get the kiss now, it's over and done with. But if you get the kiss in three days, well that's three days of jittery anticipation, the thrill of the wait. The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen, how is it going to happen. Anticipation made them happy.This is, by the way, why people prefer Friday to Sunday. It's a really curious fact, because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day of pleasure, so you'd assume that people will prefer Sunday, but they don't. It's not because they really, really like being in the office and they can't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch. We know that, because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week, surprise, surprise, Saturday comes in at first, then Friday, then Sunday. People prefer Friday because Friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead, all the plans that you have. On Sunday, the only thing you can look forward to is the work week.So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park. And that anticipation enhances their wellbeing. In fact, without the optimism bias, we would all be slightly depressed. People with mild depression, they don't have a bias when they look into the future. They're actually more realistic than healthy individuals. But individuals with severe depression, they have a pessimistic bias. So they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being.So optimism changes subjective reality. The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it. But it also changes objective reality. It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy. Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success. Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics. And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health. If we expect the future to be bright, stress and anxiety are reduced.So all in all, optimism has lots of benefits. But the question that was really confusing to me was, how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality? As an neuroscientist, this was especially confusing, because according to all the theories out there, when your expectations are not met, you should alter them. But this is not what we find. We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on.We asked them to estimate their likelihood of experiencing different terrible events in their lives. So, for example, what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer? And then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes. So cancer, for example, is about 30 percent. And then we asked them again, ""How likely are you to suffer from cancer?""What we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs. And indeed they did — but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected. So for example, if someone said, ""My likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent,"" and we said, ""Hey, good news. The average likelihood is only 30 percent,"" the next time around they would say, ""Well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent."" So they learned quickly and efficiently. But if someone started off saying, ""My average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent,"" and we said, ""Hey, bad news. The average likelihood is about 30 percent,"" the next time around they would say, ""Yep. Still think it's about 11 percent.""(Laughter)So it's not that they didn't learn at all — they did — but much, much less than when we gave them positive information about the future. And it's not that they didn't remember the numbers that we gave them; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent. But they didn't think that those numbers were related to them.What this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact. Yes, smoking kills, but mostly it kills the other guy.What I wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally. But at the same time, when we hear that the housing market is hopeful, we think, ""Oh, my house is definitely going to double in price."" To try and figure that out, I asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner. It looks like this. And using a method called functional MRI, we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information.One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus. So if someone said, ""My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent,"" and we said, ""Hey, good news. Average likelihood is 30 percent,"" the left inferior frontal gyrus would respond fiercely. And it didn't matter if you're an extreme optimist, a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic, everyone's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well, whether you're Barack Obama or Woody Allen.On the other side of the brain, the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news. And here's the thing: it wasn't doing a very good job. The more optimistic you were, the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information. And if your brain is failing at integrating bad news about the future, you will constantly leave your rose-tinted spectacles on.So we wanted to know, could we change this? Could we alter people's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions? And there's a way for us to do that.This is my collaborator Ryota Kanai. And what he's doing is he's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus. And by doing that, he's interfering with the activity of this brain region for about half an hour. After that everything goes back to normal, I assure you.(Laughter)So let's see what happens. First of all, I'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see. So if I was to test all of you now, this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news. Now we interfere with the region that we found to integrate negative information in this task, and the optimism bias grew even larger. We made people more biased in the way that they process information. Then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task, and the optimism bias disappeared. We were quite amazed by these results because we were able to eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans.And at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves, would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits? If we could do that, would we want to take people's optimism bias away? Well I've already told you about all of the benefits of the optimism bias, which probably makes you want to hold onto it for dear life. But there are, of course, pitfalls, and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them.Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California. He says, ""Fatality investigations for firefighters often include 'We didn't think the fire was going to do that,' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions."" This captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do, to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans.So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior, to financial collapse, to faulty planning. The British government, for example, has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects. So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias.My friend who's getting married in a few weeks has done the same for his wedding budget. And by the way, when I asked him about his own likelihood of divorce, he said he was quite sure it was zero percent.So what we would really like to do, is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful, benefiting from the many fruits of optimism. And I believe there's a way for us to do that. The key here really is knowledge. We're not born with an innate understanding of our biases. These have to be identified by scientific investigation. But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion. It's like visual illusions, in which understanding them does not make them go away. And this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance, to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism, but at the same time remain hopeful.I think this cartoon portrays it nicely. Because if you're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly, you certainly never will. Because to make any kind of progress, we need to be able to imagine a different reality, and then we need to believe that that reality is possible. But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best, you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground. But if you're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly, but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don't work out exactly as you had planned, you will soar like an eagle, even if you're just a penguin.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias
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"So it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language. It has generated considerable insight in physics, in biology and economics, but not that much in the humanities and in history. I think there's a belief that it's just impossible, that you cannot quantify the doings of mankind, that you cannot measure history. But I don't think that's right. I want to show you a couple of examples why.So my collaborator Erez and I were considering the following fact: that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language. That's a powerful historical force. So the king of England, Alfred the Great, will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop, Jay-Z. (Laughter) Now it's just the way it is. Language changes over time, and it's a powerful force.So Erez and I wanted to know more about that. So we paid attention to a particular grammatical rule, past-tense conjugation. So you just add ""ed"" to a verb at the end to signify the past. ""Today I walk. Yesterday I walked."" But some verbs are irregular. ""Yesterday I thought."" Now what's interesting about that is irregular verbs between Alfred and Jay-Z have become more regular. Like the verb ""to wed"" that you see here has become regular.So Erez and I followed the fate of over 100 irregular verbs through 12 centuries of English language, and we saw that there's actually a very simple mathematical pattern that captures this complex historical change, namely, if a verb is 100 times more frequent than another, it regularizes 10 times slower. That's a piece of history, but it comes in a mathematical wrapping.Now in some cases math can even help explain, or propose explanations for, historical forces. So here Steve Pinker and I were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries. There's actually a well-known regularity to them where the number of wars that are 100 times deadlier is 10 times smaller. So there are 30 wars that are about as deadly as the Six Days War, but there's only four wars that are 100 times deadlier — like World War I. So what kind of historical mechanism can produce that? What's the origin of this?So Steve and I, through mathematical analysis, propose that there's actually a very simple phenomenon at the root of this, which lies in our brains. This is a very well-known feature in which we perceive quantities in relative ways — quantities like the intensity of light or the loudness of a sound. For instance, committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot. It's relatively enormous if you've already committed 1,000 soldiers previously. But it doesn't sound so much, it's not relatively enough, it won't make a difference if you've already committed 100,000 soldiers previously. So you see that because of the way we perceive quantities, as the war drags on, the number of soldiers committed to it and the casualties will increase not linearly — like 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 — but exponentially — 10,000, later 20,000, later 40,000. And so that explains this pattern that we've seen before.So here mathematics is able to link a well-known feature of the individual mind with a long-term historical pattern that unfolds over centuries and across continents.So these types of examples, today there are just a few of them, but I think in the next decade they will become commonplace. The reason for that is that the historical record is becoming digitized at a very fast pace. So there's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time. Companies like Google have digitized many of them — above 20 million actually. And when the stuff of history is available in digital form, it makes it possible for a mathematical analysis to very quickly and very conveniently review trends in our history and our culture.So I think in the next decade, the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind. And I think that mathematics will be a very powerful language to do that. It will be able to reveal new trends in our history, sometimes to explain them, and maybe even in the future to predict what's going to happen.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jean_baptiste_michel_the_mathematics_of_history
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"I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence. I'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio.I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project. He was making a horse out of the clay our teacher kept under the sink. And at one point, one of the girls that was sitting at his table, seeing what he was doing, leaned over and said to him, ""That's terrible. That doesn't look anything like a horse."" And Brian's shoulders sank. And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin. I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again.And I wonder how often that happens, you know? It seems like when I tell that story of Brian to my class, a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience, how a teacher shut them down, or how a student was particularly cruel to them. And then some kind of opt out of thinking of themselves as creative at that point. And I see that opting out that happens in childhood, and it moves in and becomes more ingrained, even, by the time you get to adult life.So we see a lot of this. When we have a workshop or when we have clients in to work with us side by side, eventually we get to the point in the process that's kind of fuzzy or unconventional. And eventually, these big-shot executives whip out their BlackBerrys and they say they have to make really important phone calls, and they head for the exits. And they're just so uncomfortable. When we track them down and ask them what's going on, they say something like, ""I'm just not the creative type."" But we know that's not true. If they stick with the process, if they stick with it, they end up doing amazing things. And they surprise themselves at just how innovative they and their teams really are.So I've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have, that you don't do things, you're afraid you're going to be judged; if you don't say the right creative thing, you're going to be judged. And I had a major breakthrough, when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura.I don't know if you know Albert Bandura, but if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history — you know, like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura.(Laughter)Bandura is 86 and he still works at Stanford. And he's just a lovely guy.So I went to see him, because he's just worked on phobias for a long time, which I'm very interested in. He had developed this way, this, kind of, methodology, that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time, like, in four hours. He had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias. And we talked about snakes — I don't know why — we talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia.And it was really enjoyable, really interesting. He told me that he'd invite the test subject in, and he'd say, ""You know, there's a snake in the next room and we're going to go in there."" To which, he reported, most of them replied, ""Hell no! I'm not going in there, certainly if there's a snake in there.""But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful. So he'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was. And he'd get them comfortable with that. Then through a series of steps, he'd move them and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open, and they'd be looking in there. And he'd get them comfortable with that. And then many more steps later, baby steps, they'd be in the room, they'd have a leather glove like a welder's glove on, and they'd eventually touch the snake. And when they touched the snake, everything was fine. They were cured. In fact, everything was better than fine. These people who had lifelong fears of snakes were saying things like, ""Look how beautiful that snake is."" And they were holding it in their laps.Bandura calls this process ""guided mastery."" I love that term: guided mastery. And something else happened. These people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. They just gained a new confidence. And Bandura calls that confidence ""self-efficacy,"" the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.Well, meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me, because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we've seen happen for the last 30 years: that we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative, and we could take them through a series of steps, kind of like a series of small successes, and they turn fear into familiarity. And they surprise themselves. That transformation is amazing.We see it at the d.school all the time. People from all different kinds of disciplines, they think of themselves as only analytical. And they come in and they go through the process, our process, they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently. And they're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person.So I thought one of the things I'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like. To me, that journey looks like Doug Dietz. Doug Dietz is a technical person. He designs large medical imaging equipment. He's worked for GE, and he's had a fantastic career. But at one point, he had a moment of crisis.He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use, when he saw a young family, and this little girl. And that little girl was crying and was terrified. And Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine. And this was really disappointing to Doug, because before this time, he was proud of what he did. He was saving lives with this machine. But it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids.About that time, he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes. He was learning about our process, about design thinking, about empathy, about iterative prototyping. And he would take this new knowledge and do something quite extraordinary. He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned. And this is what he came up with.(Laughter)He turned it into an adventure for the kids. He painted the walls and he painted the machine, and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids, like children's museum people. And now when the kid comes, it's an experience. And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship. And when they come, they say, ""OK, you're going to go into the pirate ship, but be very still, because we don't want the pirates to find you.""And the results were super dramatic: from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated, to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated. And the hospital and GE were happy, too, because you didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time, and they could put more kids through the machine in a day. So the quantitative results were great. But Doug's results that he cared about were much more qualitative. He was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan. And when the little girl came out of her scan, she ran up to her mother and said, ""Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?""(Laughter)And so, I've heard Doug tell the story many times of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it, but I've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye.Doug's story takes place in a hospital. I know a thing or two about hospitals. A few years ago, I felt a lump on the side of my neck. It was my turn in the MRI machine. It was cancer, it was the bad kind. I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival.So while you're sitting around with the other patients, in your pajamas, and everybody's pale and thin —(Laughter)you know? — and you're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things. Mostly, you think about: Am I going to survive? And I thought a lot about: What was my daughter's life going to be like without me? But you think about other things. I thought a lot about: What was I put on Earth to do? What was my calling? What should I do? I was lucky because I had lots of options. We'd been working in health and wellness, and K-12, and the developing world. so there were lots of projects that I could work on. But then I decided and committed at this point, to the thing I most wanted to do, which was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way. And if I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do. I survived, just so you know.(Laughter)(Applause)I really believe that when people gain this confidence — and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO — that they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. We see them come up with more interesting — and just more — ideas, so they can choose from better ideas. And they just make better decisions.I know at TED, you're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing, isn't that — everybody has a change-the-world thing? If there is one for me, this is it, to help this happen. So I hope you'll join me on my quest, you as, kind of, thought leaders. It would be really great if you didn't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, like it's some God-given thing, and to have people realize that they're naturally creative, and that those natural people should let their ideas fly; that they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy, that you can do what you set out to do, and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence
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"This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain. It's a diagram of the visual system. And some things look very familiar today. Two eyes at the bottom, optic nerve flowing out from the back. There's a very large nose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything in particular.And if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system, you'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years. And that's because today we can see what's inside of the brain, rather than just looking at its overall shape.Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard, a mouse, a screen. You really would be kind of out of luck. You want to be able to open it up, crack it open, look at the wiring inside. And up until a little more than a century ago, nobody was able to do that with the brain. Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain's wiring.And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it, put it under even a very powerful microscope, there's nothing there. It's gray, formless. There's no structure. It won't tell you anything.And this all changed in the late 19th century. Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring. The computer was cracked open.So what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the Golgi stain. And it works in a very particular way. Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue, it somehow only stains about one percent of them. It clears the forest, reveals the trees inside. If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible. So somehow it shows what's there.Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this, and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron. And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer, this is the transistor. And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don't operate alone, but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer. Today, a century later, when researchers want to visualize neurons, they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them. And there's several ways of doing this. But one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein. Now green fluorescent protein, which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish, is very useful. Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell, that cell will glow green — or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein, you get a cell to glow many different colors.And so coming back to the brain, this is from a genetically engineered mouse called ""Brainbow."" And it's so called, of course, because all of these neurons are glowing different colors.Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons, molecules, rather than the entire cell. And there's several ways of doing this, but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies. And you're familiar, of course, with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system. But it turns out that they're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules, like, for example, the coat protein of a virus that's invading the body. And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain, recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually.And a lot of the images I've been showing you here are very beautiful, but they're also very powerful. They have great explanatory power. This, for example, is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain.And you've heard of serotonin, of course, in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety. You've heard of SSRIs, which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases. And in order to understand how serotonin works, it's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is. And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question.I'd like to leave you with the following thought: Green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go. They were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason, or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus, for example. And only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say, ""Hey, these are tools, these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette."" And instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch, there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_schoonover_how_to_look_inside_the_brain
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"Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, ""I exist."" Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, ""They exist."" From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine, the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio, paper and glue — as easy as that.I asked a question last year: Can art change the world? Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed ... what else? The Occupy movement found a voice, and I still have to speak English constantly. So there has been a lot of change.So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept. You are going to take the photos. You're going to send them to me. I'm going to print them and send them back to you. Then you're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement.This is Inside Out. One hundred thousand posters have been printed this year. Those are the kind of posters, let me show you. And we keep sending more every day. This is the size. Just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it. This one was from Haiti.When I launched my wish last year, hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us. But I say it has to be under the conditions I've always worked: no credit, no logos, no sponsoring. A week later, a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world. These are the people I want to talk about to you today.Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made. And they pasted [over] every single portrait of the dictator [with] their own photos. Boom! This is what happened. Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country. They really make Inside Out their own project. Actually, that photo was pasted in a police station, and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police.Russia. Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia. He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say, ""We have rights."" They used Inside Out as a platform for protest.Karachi, Pakistan. Sharmeen is actually here. She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town. And I want to thank her today.North Dakota. Standing Rock Nation, in this Turtle Island, [unclear name] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here. The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights. He pasted up portraits all over his reservation. And he's here also today. Each time I get a wall in New York, I use his photos to continue spreading the project.Juarez: You've heard of the border — one of the most dangerous borders in the world. Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border. Do you know what it takes to do this? People, energy, make the glue, organize the team. It was amazing.While in Iran at the same time Abololo — of course a nickname — has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government. I don't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action.There are tons of school projects. Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools. Education is so essential. Kids just make photos in a class, the teacher receives them, they paste them on the school. Here they even got the help of the firemen. There should be even more schools doing this kind of project.Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine. So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck. You go on the back of that truck, it takes your photo, 30 seconds later take it from the side, you're ready to rock. Thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street. This is march, the 450,000 march — beginning of September. They were all holding their photo as a statement. On the other side, people were wrapping up streets, buildings. It's everywhere. Come on, don't tell me that people aren't ready for peace out there.These projects took thousands of actions in one year, making hundreds of thousands of people participating, creating millions of views. This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on.So back to the question, ""Can art change the world?"" Maybe not in one year. That's the beginning. But maybe we should change the question. Can art change people's lives? From what I've seen this year, yes. And you know what? It's just the beginning. Let's turn the world inside out together. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jr_one_year_of_turning_the_world_inside_out
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"So, I'm going to start off with kind of the buzzkill a little bit. Forty-two million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2010. Now, there was nothing particularly special about 2010, because, on average, 31 and a half million people are displaced by natural disasters every single year. Now, usually when people hear statistics or stats like that, you start thinking about places like Haiti or other kind of exotic or maybe even impoverished areas, but it happens right here in the United States every single year. Last year alone, 99 federally declared disasters were on file with FEMA, from Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Central Texas wildfires that just happened recently. Now, how does the most powerful country in the world handle these displaced people? They cram them onto cots, put all your personal belongings in a plastic garbage bag, stick it underneath, and put you on the floor of an entire sports arena, or a gymnasium.So obviously there's a massive housing gap, and this really upset me, because academia tells you after a major disaster, there's typically about an 18-month time frame to — we kinda recover, start the recovery process, but what most people don't realize is that on average it takes 45 to 60 days or more for the infamous FEMA trailers to even begin to show up. Before that time, people are left to their own devices.So I became obsessed with trying to figure out a way to actually fill this gap. This actually became my creative obsession. I put aside all my freelance work after hours and started just focusing particularly on this problem.So I started sketching. Two days after Katrina, I started sketching and sketching and trying to brainstorm up ideas or solutions for this, and as things started to congeal or ideas started to form, I started sketching digitally on the computer, but it was an obsession, so I couldn't just stop there. I started experimenting, making models, talking to experts in the field, taking their feedback, and refining, and I kept on refining and refining for nights and weekends for over five years.Now, my obsession ended up driving me to create full-size prototypes in my own backyard — (Laughter) — and actually spending my own personal savings on everything from tooling to patents and a variety of other costs, but in the end I ended up with this modular housing system that can react to any situation or disaster. It can be put up in any environment, from an asphalt parking lot to pastures or fields, because it doesn't require any special setup or specialty tools.Now, at the foundation and kind of the core of this whole system is the Exo Housing Unit, which is just the individual shelter module. And though it's light, light enough that you can actually lift it by hand and move it around, and it actually sleeps four people.And you can arrange these things as kind of more for encampments and more of a city grid type layout, or you can circle the wagons, essentially, and form these circular pods out of them, which give you this semi-private communal area for people to actually spill out into so they're not actually trapped inside these units.Now this fundamentally changes the way we respond to disasters, because gone are the horrid conditions inside a sports arena or a gymnasium, where people are crammed on these cots inside. Now we have instant neighborhoods outside.So the Exo is designed to be simply, basically like a coffee cup. They can actually stack together so we get extremely efficient transportation and storage out of them. In fact, 15 Exos can fit on a single semi truck by itself. This means the Exo can actually be transported and set up faster than any other housing option available today. But I'm obsessive, so I couldn't just stop there, so I actually started modifying the bunks where you could actually slide out the bunks and slide in desks or shelving, so the same unit can now be used for an office or storage location. The doors can actually swap out, so you can actually put on a rigid panel with a window unit in it for climate control, or a connector module that would allow you to actually connect multiple units together, which gives you larger and kind of compartmentalized living spaces, so now this same kit of parts, this same unit can actually serve as a living room, bedroom or bathroom, or an office, a living space and secure storage.Sounds like a great idea, but how do you make it real? So the first idea I had, initially, was just to go the federal and state governments and go, ""Here, take it, for free."" But I was quickly told that, ""Boy, our government doesn't really work like that."" (Laughter) Okay. Okay. So maybe I would start a nonprofit to kind of help consult and get this idea going along with the government, but then I was told, ""Son, our government looks to private sector for things like this."" Okay. So maybe I would take this whole idea and go to private corporations that would have this mutually shared benefit to it, but I was quickly told by some corporations that my personal passion project was not a brand fit because they didn't want their logos stamped across the ghettos of Haiti.Now, I wasn't just obsessed. I was outraged. (Laughter.) So I decided, kind of told myself, ""Oh yeah? Watch this. I'll do it myself."" (Laughter) Now, this quickly, my day job sent me to work out of our Milan office for a few months, so I was like, what will I do? So I actually scheduled sleep on my calendar, and spent the 8-hour time difference on conference calls with material suppliers, manufacturers and potential customers. And we found through this whole process, we found this great little manufacturer in Virginia, and if his body language is any indication, that's the owner — (Laughter) — of what it's like for a manufacturer to work directly with a designer, you've got to see what happens here. (Laughter)But G.S. Industries was fantastic. They actually built three prototypes for us by hand. So now we have prototypes that can show that four people can actually sleep securely and much more comfortably than a tent could ever provide. And they actually shipped them here to Texas for us. Now, a funny thing started happening. Other people started to believe in what we were doing, and actually offered us hangar space, donated hangar space to us. And then the Georgetown Airport Authority was bent over backwards to help us with anything we needed. So now we had a hangar space to work in, and prototypes to demo with.So in one year, we've negotiated manufacturing agreements, been awarded one patent, filed our second patent, talked to multiple people, demoed this to FEMA and its consultants to rave reviews, and then started talking to some other people who requested information, this little group called the United Nations. And on top of that, now we have a whole plethora of other individuals that have come up and started to talk to us from doing it for mining camps, mobile youth hostels, right down to the World Cup and the Olympics. So, in closing, on this whole thing here is hopefully very soon we will not have to respond to these painful phone calls that we get after disasters where we don't really have anything to sell or give you yet. Hopefully very soon we will be there, because we are destined, obsessed with making it real. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_mcdaniel_cheap_effective_shelter_for_disaster_relief
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"Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin. And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews. During his time at the American Museum of Natural History, Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions, like here in the Gobi Desert. He was quite a figure. He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character.And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students. And I'm here to tell you, if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED, it'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture. Don't try that one.At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions, but there was one that's really stuck with me since then. There was a young girl who stood up, and she asked the question: ""Where should we explore?""I think there's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over, that for the next generation they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore. But is that really the case? Is there really nowhere significant for us to explore left here on Earth?It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology. This is an explorer of the unseen world, Martinus Beijerinck. So Beijerinck set out to discover the cause of tobacco mosaic disease. What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters. And he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known — bacteria, at the time. He came up with a name for his mystery agent. He called it the virus — Latin for ""poison."" And in uncovering viruses, Beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us.We now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet, more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined. And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world — things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus.And Beijerinck's discovery, this was not something that occurred 500 years ago. It was a little over 100 years ago that Beijerinck discovered viruses. So basically we had automobiles, but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet.We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world — things like deep sequencing, which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species, but to look at entire metagenomes, the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species. We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between.In my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them.And just to give you a sense of how this works, imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you. And this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza. The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information. And if we started looking into that genetic information, we'd see a number of usual suspects out there — of course, a lot of human genetic information, but also bacterial and viral information, mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose. But we'd also see something very, very surprising. As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before — no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria. Basically we have no clue what this is.And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data, a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter. We know it's not anything that we've seen before; it's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information. And there's a lot of it. If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter, if we looked at your gut, up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter. And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter — can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before.At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact. These deep sequencing tools are relatively new. But as they become more and more accurate, we've determined that this information is a form of life, or at least some of it is a form of life. And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy, there's a very, very exciting possibility that exists: that buried in this life, in this genetic information, are signatures of as of yet unidentified life. That as we explore these strings of A's, T's, C's and G's, we may uncover a completely new class of life that, like Beijerinck, will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of biology. That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology.I'm pleased to announce that, along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF, we're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life.A little over a hundred years ago, people were unaware of viruses, the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. A hundred years from now, people may marvel that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life that literally was right under our noses.It's true, we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth. Beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers — people like that young girl from Beloit, Wisconsin. And I think if we phrase that lesson, it's something like this: Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore. There are unknowns all around us and they're just waiting to be discovered.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_wolfe_what_s_left_to_explore
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"I'm going to talk about religion. But it's a broad and very delicate subject, so I have to limit myself. And therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality.(Laughter)This is a very serious talk. So I will talk of what I remember as the most wonderful. It's when the young couple whisper, ""Tonight we are going to make a baby."" My talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman.This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet. And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this — three billion in 1960, seven billion just last year — and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies, and it may continue like this.To what extent are these people right? When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world, and today, 2000, there's almost two billion. What has happened since, and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century?This is a quiz. What do you think? Do you think it will decrease to one billion? Will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century? Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years, or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there? I will tell you by the end of my speech.But now, what does religion have to do with it? When you want to classify religion, it's more difficult than you think. You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this. It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion, but that's not detailed enough. So we went on and we looked in Wikipedia, we found this map. But that subdivides Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups, which was too detailed.Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map, and it looks like this. Each country's a bubble. The size is the population — big China, big India here. And the color now is the majority religion. It's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong. It's Eastern religion in India and China and neighboring Asian countries. Islam is the majority religion all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across the Middle East, Southern Europe and through Asia all the way to Indonesia. That's where we find Islamic majority. And Christian majority religions, we see in these countries. They are blue. And that is most countries in America and Europe, many countries in Africa and a few in Asia. The white here are countries which cannot be classified, because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there's some other reason. So we were careful with that.So bear with our simplicity now when I take you over to this shot. This is in 1960. And now I show the number of babies per woman here: two, four or six — many babies, few babies. And here the income per person in comparable dollars. The reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies. So low income here, high income there.And indeed in 1960, you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies. The exception was Japan. Japan here was regarded as an exception. Otherwise it was only Christian countries. But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman. But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa. And countries with Islam as the majority religion, all of them almost had six to seven children per woman, irregardless of the income level. And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level.Now let's see what has happened in the world. I start the world, and here we go. Now 1962 — can you see they're getting a little richer, but the number of babies per woman is falling? Look at China. They're falling fairly fast. And all of the Muslim majority countries across the income are coming down, as do the Christian majority countries in the middle income range. And when we enter into this century, you'll find more than half of mankind down here. And by 2010, we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman.(Applause)It's a quite amazing development which has happened. (Applause) And these are countries from United States here, with $40,000 per capita, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam, which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman.I can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries. We get that from the census data. It's not one of these statistics which is very doubtful.So what we can conclude is you don't have to get rich to have few children. It has happened across the world.And then when we look at religions, we can see that the Eastern religions, indeed there's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children. Whereas with Islam as a majority religion and Christianity, you see countries all the way. But there's no major difference. There's no major difference between these religions. There is a difference with income. The countries which have many babies per woman here, they have quite low income. Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. But there are also countries here like Guatemala, like Papua New Guinea, like Yemen and Afghanistan.Many think that Afghanistan here and Congo, which have suffered severe conflicts, that they don't have fast population growth. It's the other way around. In the world today, it's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth. Because the death of a child is compensated by one more child. These countries have six children per woman. They have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman. But 30 years from now, Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million. Congo will go from 60 to 120. That's where we have the fast population growth. And many think that these countries are stagnant, but they are not.Let me compare Senegal, a Muslim dominated country, with a Christian dominated country, Ghana. I take them backwards here to their independence, when they were up here in the beginning of the 1960s. Just look what they have done. It's an amazing improvement, from seven children per woman, they've gone all the way down to between four and five. It's a tremendous improvement.So what does it take? Well we know quite well what is needed in these countries. You need to have children to survive. You need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family. You need to have access to some family planning. And you need the fourth factor, which perhaps is the most important factor.But let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at Qatar. Here we have Qatar today, and there we have Bangladesh today. If I take these countries back to the years of their independence, which is almost the same year — '71, '72 — it's a quite amazing development which had happened. Look at Bangladesh and Qatar. With so different incomes, it's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman.And what is the reason in Qatar? Well I do as I always do. I went to the statistical authority of Qatar, to their webpage — It's a very good webpage. I recommend it — and I looked up — oh yeah, you can have lots of fun here — and provided free of charge, I found Qatar's social trends. Very interesting. Lots to read. I found fertility at birth, and I looked at total fertility rate per woman. These are the scholars and experts in the government agency in Qatar, and they say the most important factors are: ""Increased age at first marriage, increased educational level of Qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force."" I couldn't agree more. Science couldn't agree more. This is a country that indeed has gone through a very, very interesting modernization.So what it is, is these four: Children should survive, children shouldn't be needed for work, women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible.Now look again at this. The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia — it's 2.4 today. There are countries up here which are very poor. And that's where family planning, better child survival is needed. I strongly recommend Melinda Gates' last TEDTalk. And here, down, there are many countries which are less than two children per woman. So when I go back now to give you the answer of the quiz, it's two.We have reached peak child. The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child. And the world population will stop growing. The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion. But why do they grow if the number of children doesn't grow?Well I will show you here. I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came. They are quite useful for educational purposes. Each card box is one billion people. And there are two billion children in the world. There are two billion young people between 15 and 30. These are rounded numbers. Then there is one billion between 30 and 45, almost one between 45 and 60. And then it's my box. This is me: 60-plus. We are here on top.So what will happen now is what we call ""the big fill-up."" You can see that it's like three billion missing here. They are not missing because they've died; they were never born. Because before 1980, there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years. So what will happen now is quite straightforward. The old, sadly, we will die. The rest of you, you will grow older and you will get two billion children. Then the old will die. The rest will grow older and get two billion children. And then again the old will die and you will get two billion children.(Applause)This is the great fill-up. It's inevitable. And can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children?Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman. All the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world.And we will be just 10 billion in this world, if the poorest people get out of poverty, their children survive, they get access to family planning. That is needed. But it's inevitable that we will be two to three billion more. So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies
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"This sound, this smell, this sight all remind me of the campfires of my childhood, when anyone could become a storyteller in front of the dancing flames. There was this wondrous ending when people and fire fell asleep almost in unison. It was dreaming time.Now my story has a lot to do with dreaming, although I'm known to make my dreams come true. Last year, I created a one-man show. For an hour and a half I shared with the audience a lifetime of creativity, how I pursue perfection, how I cheat the impossible.And then TED challenged me: ""Philippe, can you shrink this lifetime to 18 minutes?"" (Laughter) Eighteen minutes, clearly impossible. But here I am. One solution was to rehearse a machine gun delivery in which every syllable, every second will have its importance and hope to God the audience will be able to follow me. No, no, no. No, the best way for me to start is to pay my respects to the gods of creativity. So please join me for a minute of silence.Okay, I cheated, it was a mere 20 seconds. But hey, we're on TED time.When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. For Christmas I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. Somehow I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box. So I looked in the book for the most difficult move, and it was this.Now I'm not supposed to share that with you, but I have to show you the card is hidden in the back of the hand. Now that manipulation was broken down into seven moves described over seven pages. One, two, three, four, five, six and seven. And let me show you something else. The cards were bigger than my hands.Two months later, six years old, I'm able to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And I go to see a famous magician and proudly ask him, ""Well what do you think?"" Six years old. The magician looked at me and said, ""This is a disaster. You cannot do that in two seconds and have a minuscule part of the card showing. For the move to be professional, it has to be less than one second and it has to be perfect."" Two years later, one — zoop. And I'm not cheating. It's in the back. It's perfect.Passion is the motto of all my actions. As I'm studying magic, juggling is mentioned repeatedly as a great way to acquire dexterity and coordination. Now I had long admired how fast and fluidly jugglers make objects fly. So that's it. I'm 14; I'm becoming a juggler.I befriend a young juggler in a juggling troupe, and he agrees to sell me three clubs. But in America you have to explain. What are clubs? Nothing to do with golf. They are those beautiful oblong objects, but quite difficult to make. They have to be precisely lathed. Oh, when I was buying the clubs, somehow the young juggler was hiding from the others. Well I didn't think much of it at the time.Anyway, here I was progressing with my new clubs. But I could not understand. I was pretty fast, but I was not fluid at all. The clubs were escaping me at each throw. And I was trying constantly to bring them back to me. Until one day I practiced in front of Francis Brunn, the world's greatest juggler. And he was frowning. And he finally asked, ""Can I see those?"" So I proudly showed him my clubs. He said, ""Philippe, you have been had. These are rejects. They are completely out of alignment. They are impossible to juggle."" Tenacity is how I kept at it against all odds.So I went to the circus to see more magicians, more jugglers, and I saw — oh no, no, no, I didn't see. It was more interesting; I heard. I heard about those amazing men and women who walk on thin air — the high-wire walkers. Now I have been playing with ropes and climbing all my childhood, so that's it. I'm 16; I'm becoming a wire walker.I found two trees — but not any kind of trees, trees with character — and then a very long rope. And I put the rope around and around and around and around and around till I had no more rope. Now I have all of those ropes parallel like this. I get a pair of pliers and some coat hangers, and I gather them together in some kind of ropey path. So I just created the widest tightrope in the world. What did I need? I needed the widest shoes in the world. So I found some enormous, ridiculous, giant ski boots and then wobbly, wobbly I get on the ropes.Well within a few days I'm able to do one crossing. So I cut one rope off. And the next day one rope off. And a few days later, I was practicing on a single tightrope. Now you can imagine at that time I had to switch the ridiculous boots for some slippers. So that is how — in case there are people here in the audience who would like to try — this is how not to learn wire walking.(Laughter)Intuition is a tool essential in my life. In the meantime, I am being thrown out of five different schools because instead of listening to the teachers, I am my own teacher, progressing in my new art and becoming a street juggler.On the high wire, within months, I'm able to master all the tricks they do in the circus, except I am not satisfied.I was starting to invent my own moves and bring them to perfection. But nobody wanted to hire me. So I started putting a wire up in secret and performing without permission. Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the World Trade Center. And I developed a certitude, a faith that convinced me that I will get safely to the other side. If not, I will never do that first step.Well nonetheless, on the top of the World Trade Center my first step was terrifying. All of a sudden the density of the air is no longer the same. Manhattan no longer spreads its infinity. The murmur of the city dissolves into a squall whose chilling power I no longer feel. I lift the balancing pole. I approach the edge. I step over the beam. I put my left foot on the cable, the weight of my body raised on my right leg anchored to the flank of the building. Shall I ever so slightly shift my weight to the left? My right leg will be unburdened, my right foot will freely meet the wire. On one side, a mass of a mountain, a life I know. On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown we think it's empty. At my feet, the path to the north tower — 60 yards of wire rope. It's a straight line, which sags, which sways, which vibrates, which rolls on itself, which is ice, which is three tons tight, ready to explode, ready to swallow me. An inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee. But it is too late. The wire is ready. Decisively my other foot sets itself onto the cable.Faith is what replaces doubt in my dictionary.So after the walk people ask me, ""How can you top that?"" Well I didn't have that problem. I was not interested in collecting the gigantic, in breaking records. In fact, I put my World Trade Center crossing at the same artistic level as some of my smaller walks — or some completely different type of performance. Let's see, such as my street juggling, for example.So each time I draw my circle of chalk on the pavement and enter as the improvising comic silent character I created 45 years ago, I am as happy as when I am in the clouds.But this here, this is not the street. So I cannot street juggle here, you understand. So you don't want me to street juggle here, right? You know that, right? You don't want me to juggle, right?(Applause)(Music)(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.Each time I street juggle I use improvisation. Now improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. And since what's impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible.Now I have done the impossible not once, but many times. So what should I share? Oh, I know. Israel.Some years ago I was invited to open the Israel Festival by a high-wire walk. And I chose to put my wire between the Arab quarters and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem over the Ben Hinnom Valley. And I thought it would be incredible if in the middle of the wire I stopped and, like a magician, I produce a dove and send her in the sky as a living symbol of peace.Well now I must say, it was a little bit hard to find a dove in Israel, but I got one. And in my hotel room, each time I practiced making it appear and throwing her in the air, she would graze the wall and end up on the bed. So I said, now it's okay. The room is too small. I mean, a bird needs space to fly. It will go perfectly on the day of the walk.Now comes the day of the walk. Eighty thousand people spread over the entire valley. The mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, comes to wish me the best. But he seemed nervous. There was tension in my wire, but I also could feel tension on the ground. Because all those people were made up of people who, for the most part, considered each other enemies.So I start the walk. Everything is fine. I stop in the middle. I make the dove appear. People applaud in delight. And then in the most magnificent gesture, I send the bird of peace into the azure. But the bird, instead of flying away, goes flop, flop, flop and lands on my head. (Laughter) And people scream. So I grab the dove, and for the second time I send her in the air. But the dove, who obviously didn't go to flying school, goes flop, flop, flop and ends up at the end of my balancing pole.(Laughter)You laugh, you laugh. But hey. I sit down immediately. It's a reflex of wire walkers. Now in the meantime, the audience, they go crazy. They must think this guy with this dove, he must have spent years working with him. What a genius, what a professional.(Laughter)So I take a bow. I salute with my hand. And at the end I bang my hand against the pole to dislodge the bird. Now the dove, who, now you know, obviously cannot fly, does for the third time a little flop, flop, flop and ends up on the wire behind me. And the entire valley goes crazy.Now but hold on, I'm not finished. So now I'm like 50 yards from my arrival and I'm exhausted, so my steps are slow. And something happened. Somebody somewhere, a group of people, starts clapping in rhythm with my steps. And within seconds the entire valley is applauding in unison with each of my steps. But not an applause of delight like before, an applause encouragement. For a moment, the entire crowd had forgotten their differences. They had become one, pushing me to triumph.I want you just for a second to experience this amazing human symphony. So let's say I am here and the chair is my arrival. So I walk, you clap, everybody in unison.(Clapping)(Applause)So after the walk, Teddy and I become friends. And he tells me, he has on his desk a picture of me in the middle of the wire with a dove on my head. He didn't know the true story. And whenever he's daunted by an impossible situation to solve in this hard-to-manage city, instead of giving up, he looks at the picture and he says, ""If Philippe can do that, I can do this,"" and he goes back to work.Inspiration. By inspiring ourselves we inspire others. I will never forget this music, and I hope now neither will you. Please take this music with you home, and start gluing feathers to your arms and take off and fly, and look at the world from a different perspective. And when you see mountains, remember mountains can be moved.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/philippe_petit_the_journey_across_the_high_wire
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"Let's begin with a story. Once upon a time — well actually less than two years ago — in a kingdom not so very far away, there was a man who traveled many miles to come to work at the jewel in the kingdom's crown — an internationally famous company. Let's call it Island Networks. Now this kingdom had many resources and mighty ambitions, but the one thing it lacked was people. And so it invited workers from around the world to come and help it build the nation. But in order to enter and to stay these migrants had to pass a few tests. And so it was, our man presented himself to authorities in the kingdom, looking forward to settling into his new life.But then something unexpected happened. The medical personnel who took blood samples from the man never actually told him what they were testing for. He wasn't offered counseling before or after the test, which is best medical practice. He was never informed of the results of the test. And yet, a couple of weeks later, he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam, including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell. He was released, but then a day or two later, he was taken to the airport and he was deported. What on earth did this man do to merit this treatment? What was his terrible crime? He was infected with HIV.Now the kingdom is one of about 50 countries that imposes restrictions on the entry or stay of people living with HIV. The kingdom argues that its laws allow it to detain or deport foreigners who pose a risk to the economy or the security or the public health or the morals of the state. But these laws, when applied to people living with HIV, are a violation of international human rights agreements to which these countries are signatories. But you know what? Matters of principle aside, practically speaking, these laws drive HIV underground. People are less likely to come forth to be tested or treated or to disclose their condition, none of which helps these individuals or the communities these laws purport to protect.Today we can prevent the transmission of HIV. And with treatment, it is a manageable condition. We are very far from the days when the only practical response to dread disease was to have banished the afflicted — like this, ""The Exile of the Leper."" So you tell me why, in our age of science, we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition.Time for a quick show of hands. Who here has been touched by HIV — either because you yourself have the virus or you have a family member or a friend or a colleague who is living with HIV? Hands up. Wow. Wow. That's a significant number of us.You know better than anyone that HIV brings out the best and the worst in humanity. And the laws reflect these attitudes. I'm not just talking about laws on the books, but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts. And I'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with HIV, but people who are at greatest risk of infection — people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or men who have sex with men or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners. And in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable.Now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature. These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance. These laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence. These laws ensure that people living with HIV and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment. Unfortunately, these good laws are counter-balanced by a mass of really bad law — law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation, laws which specifically punish people living with HIV or those at greatest risk. These laws fly in the face of science, and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion.But you know what? You don't have to take my word for it. We're going to hear from two people who are on the sharp end of the law. The first is Nick Rhoades. He's an American. And he was convicted under the U.S. State of Iowa's law on HIV transmission and exposure — neither of which offense he actually committed.(Video) Nick Rhoades: If something is against the law then that is telling society that is unacceptable, that's bad behavior. And I think the severity of that punishment tells you how bad you are as a person. You're a class B felon, lifetime sex offender. You are a very, very, very bad person. And you did a very, very, very bad thing. And so that's just programmed into you. And you go through the correctional system and everyone's telling you the same thing. And you're just like, I'm a very bad person.Shereen El-Feki: It's not just a question of unfair or ineffective laws. Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV. The problem is that these laws are flouted. Because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens. And this is exactly what happened to Helma and Dongo from Namibia.(Video) Hilma: I found out when I went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up. The nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for HIV that day. I took the test and the result showed I was positive. That's the day I found out. The nurse said to me, ""Why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are HIV positive? Why are you pregnant when you are living positive?"" I am sure now that is the reason they sterilized me. Because I am HIV positive. They didn't give the forms to me or explain what was in the form. The nurse just came with it already marked where I had to sign. And with the labor pain, I didn't have the strength to ask them to read it to me. I just signed.SE: Hilma and Nick and our man in the kingdom are among the 34 million people living with HIV according to recent estimates. They're the lucky ones because they're still alive. According to those same estimates, in 2010 1.8 million people died of AIDS related causes. These are terrible and tragic figures. But if we look a little more broadly into the statistics, we actually see some reason for hope.Looking globally, the number of new infections of HIV is declining. And looking globally as well, deaths are also starting to fall. There are many reasons for these positive developments, but one of the most remarkable is in the increase in the number of people around the world on anti-retroviral therapy, the medicines they need to keep their HIV in check.Now there are still many problems. Only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it. In some parts of the world — like here in the Middle East and North Africa — new infections are rising and so are deaths. And the money, the money we need for the global response to HIV, that is shrinking. But for the first time in three decades into this epidemic we have a real chance to come to grips with HIV. But in order to do that we need to tackle an epidemic of really bad law.It's for this reason that the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, of which I'm a member, was established by the agencies of the United Nations — to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with HIV and those at greatest risk, and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally, not an enemy, of the global response to HIV.Let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference. People who inject drugs are one of those groups I mentioned. They're at high risk of HIV through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors. In fact, one in every 10 new infections of HIV is among people who inject drugs. Now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country. But some countries take a harder line on this than others.In Thailand people who use drugs, or are merely suspected of using drugs, are placed in detention centers, like the one you see here, where they are supposed to clean up. There is absolutely no evidence to show that throwing people into detention cures their drug dependence. There is, however, ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of HIV and other infections.We know how to reduce HIV transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs. It's called harm reduction, and it involves, among other things, providing clean needles and syringes, offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence. It involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce HIV transmission, and also providing HIV testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected. Where the legal environment allows for harm reduction the results are striking.Australia and Switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their HIV epidemics, and they have a very low rate of HIV among injecting drug users. The U.S. and Malaysia came to harm reduction a little later, and they have higher rates of HIV in these populations. Thailand and Russia, however, have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use. And hey, surprise, very high rates of HIV among people who are injecting drugs.At the Global Commission we have studied the evidence, and we've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries. And the trend? Well the trend is clear. Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic. Now coming up with a vaccine for HIV or a cure for AIDS — now that's rocket science. But changing the law isn't. And in fact, a number of countries are starting to make progress on a number of points. To begin, countries need to review their legislation as it touches HIV and vulnerable groups. On the back of those reviews, governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with HIV or those at greatest risk.Repealing a law isn't easy, and it's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex. But there's plenty you can do while that process is underway. One of the key points is to reform the police so that they have better practices on the ground. So for example, outreach workers who are distributing condoms to vulnerable populations are not themselves subject to police harassment or abuse or arbitrary arrest. We can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice. We can retool prisons so that HIV prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners.The key to all this is reinforcing civil society. Because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights. But awareness needs action. And so we need to ensure that these people who are living with HIV or at greatest risk of HIV have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts. And also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law, which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma.For many of us here HIV is not an abstract threat. It hits very close to home. The law, on the other hand, can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists, but it isn't. Because for those of us who live in democracies, or in aspiring democracies, the law begins with us.Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals. If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shereen_el_feki_how_to_fight_an_epidemic_of_bad_laws
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"(Non English)(French) Mais Des fois on peut voir parce Que Les gens ici faire Des choses on peut manger.(French) Mais quand tu es fâché avec quelqu'un c'est pas passé the first time.(British English) And that's one of the things that I enjoy most about this convention. It's not so much, as so little has to do with what everything is.(Laughter)But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves.(Laughter)The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living.(Laughter)Common knowledge, but important nonetheless.(Laughter)As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear. It's hard to imagine or measure. The background radiation is simply too static to be able to be seen under the normal spectral analysis.(American accent) But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us — you know what I'm saying? But — you know what I'm saying? Because, as a hip hop thing, you know what I'm saying, TED be rocking — you know what I'm saying. Like so I wrote a song, and I hope you guys dig it. It's a song about people and sasquatches —(Laughter)And other French science stuff. That's French science. Okay, here we go.(Singing) I've been trying inside I know that I'm in trouble(Applause)that I'm in trouble by myself But every time it gets me(Vocalization)(Beatbox)(Singing) And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in And you're the one that I want to be so saucy And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby And you can do anything as long as you don't get hurt along the way back(Beatbox)If I survive, I'm going to tell you what is wrong Because if you were [unclear] And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] I give you what I want to be(Music)(Music ends abruptly)(British accent) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want.(Applause) And the computer models, no matter how many that you have and how many people that you use, are never going to be able to arrive at the same conclusions. Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion.(Laughter)Tomorrow is another day.(Laughter)Not just any day, but it is a day. It will get here, there's no question.And the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one. It's believable, it's tactile. You can reach out — things are solid. You can move objects from one area to another. You can feel your body. You can say, ""I'd like to go over to this location,"" and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location, at will.(Laughter)That's something you live inside of every day. Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from.(Laughter)So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin.(Laughter)Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see.(Laughter)(Audience) (Laughter)This is my final piece. And just remember, everything you are — it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be. So please, without further ado.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)This is a fun one. It goes like this.(Beatbox)(Gibberish)(Music ends)Okay, for the last piece I'd like to do, this one goes very similar to this. I hope you guys recognize it. Here we go. Okay, that still works. Okay, good. All right, here we go.(Laughter)(Beatbox)Here we go.(Beatbox)Yeah, yo, yo, yo(Gibberish)(Music fades out)Thank you. Enjoy the rest.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/reggie_watts_disorients_you_in_the_most_entertaining_way
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"When the Industrial Revolution started, the amount of carbon sitting underneath Britain in the form of coal was as big as the amount of carbon sitting under Saudi Arabia in the form of oil. This carbon powered the Industrial Revolution, it put the ""Great"" in Great Britain, and led to Britain's temporary world domination. And then, in 1918, coal production in Britain peaked, and has declined ever since. In due course, Britain started using oil and gas from the North Sea, and in the year 2000, oil and gas production from the North Sea also peaked, and they're now on the decline.These observations about the finiteness of easily accessible, local, secure fossil fuels, is a motivation for saying, ""Well, what's next? What is life after fossil fuels going to be like? Shouldn't we be thinking hard about how to get off fossil fuels?"" Another motivation, of course, is climate change.And when people talk about life after fossil fuels and climate change action, I think there's a lot of fluff, a lot of greenwash, a lot of misleading advertising, and I feel a duty as a physicist to try to guide people around the claptrap and help people understand the actions that really make a difference, and to focus on ideas that do add up.Let me illustrate this with what physicists call a back-of-envelope calculation. We love back-of-envelope calculations. You ask a question, write down some numbers, and get an answer. It may not be very accurate, but it may make you say, ""Hmm."" So here's a question: Imagine if we said, ""Oh yes, we can get off fossil fuels. We'll use biofuels. Problem solved. Transport ... We don't need oil anymore."" Well, what if we grew the biofuels for a road on the grass verge at the edge of the road? How wide would the verge have to be for that to work out?OK, so let's put in some numbers. Let's have our cars go at 60 miles per hour. Let's say they do 30 miles per gallon. That's the European average for new cars. Let's say the productivity of biofuel plantations is 1,200 liters of biofuel per hectare per year. That's true of European biofuels. And let's imagine the cars are spaced 80 meters apart from each other, and they're perpetually going along this road. The length of the road doesn't matter, because the longer the road, the more biofuel plantation. What do we do with these numbers? Take the first number, divide by the other three, and get eight kilometers. And that's the answer. That's how wide the plantation would have to be, given these assumptions. And maybe that makes you say, ""Hmm. Maybe this isn't going to be quite so easy.""And it might make you think, perhaps there's an issue to do with areas. And in this talk, I'd like to talk about land areas, and ask: Is there an issue about areas? The answer is going to be yes, but it depends which country you are in.So let's start in the United Kingdom, since that's where we are today. The energy consumption of the United Kingdom, the total energy consumption — not just transport, but everything — I like to quantify it in lightbulbs. It's as if we've all got 125 lightbulbs on all the time, 125 kilowatt-hours per day per person is the energy consumption of the UK. So there's 40 lightbulbs' worth for transport, 40 lightbulbs' worth for heating, and 40 lightbulbs' worth for making electricity, and other things are relatively small, compared to those three big fish. It's actually a bigger footprint if we take into account the embodied energy in the stuff we import into our country as well. And 90 percent of this energy, today, still comes from fossil fuels, and 10 percent, only, from other, greener — possibly greener — sources, like nuclear power and renewables.So. That's the UK. The population density of the UK is 250 people per square kilometer. I'm now going to show you other countries by these same two measures. On the vertical axis, I'm going to show you how many lightbulbs — what our energy consumption per person is. We're at 125 lightbulbs per person, and that little blue dot there is showing you the land area of the United Kingdom. The population density is on the horizontal axis, and we're 250 people per square kilometer. Let's add European countries in blue, and you can see there's quite a variety. I should emphasize, both of these axes are logarithmic; as you go from one gray bar to the next gray bar, you're going up a factor of 10. Next, let's add Asia in red, the Middle East and North Africa in green, sub-Saharan Africa in blue, black is South America, purple is Central America, and then in pukey-yellow, we have North America, Australia and New Zealand. You can see the great diversity of population densities and of per capita consumptions. Countries are different from each other.Top left, we have Canada and Australia, with enormous land areas, very high per capita consumption — 200 or 300 lightbulbs per person — and very low population densities. Top right: Bahrain has the same energy consumption per person, roughly, as Canada — over 300 lightbulbs per person, but their population density is a factor of 300 times greater, 1,000 people per square kilometer. Bottom right: Bangladesh has the same population density as Bahrain, but consumes 100 times less per person.Bottom left: well, there's no one. But there used to be a whole load of people. Here's another message from this diagram. I've added on little blue tails behind Sudan, Libya, China, India, Bangladesh. That's 15 years of progress. Where were they 15 years ago, and where are they now? And the message is, most countries are going to the right, and they're going up. Up and to the right: bigger population density and higher per capita consumption. So, we may be off in the top right-hand corner, slightly unusual, the United Kingdom accompanied by Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and a bunch of other slightly odd countries, but many other countries are coming up and to the right to join us. So we're a picture, if you like, of what the future energy consumption might be looking like in other countries, too.I've also added in this diagram now some pink lines that go down and to the right. Those are lines of equal power consumption per unit area, which I measure in watts per square meter. So, for example, the middle line there, 0.1 watts per square meter, is the energy consumption per unit area of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Mexico in purple, and Bangladesh 15 years ago. Half of the world's population lives in countries that are already above that line. The United Kingdom is consuming 1.25 watts per square meter. So is Germany, and Japan is consuming a bit more.So, let's now say why this is relevant. Why is it relevant? Well, we can measure renewables in the same units and other forms of power production in the same units. Renewables is one of the leading ideas for how we could get off our 90 percent fossil-fuel habit. So here come some renewables. Energy crops deliver half a watt per square meter in European climates. What does that mean? You might have anticipated that result, given what I told you about the biofuel plantation a moment ago. Well, we consume 1.25 watts per square meter. What this means is, even if you covered the whole of the United Kingdom with energy crops, you couldn't match today's energy consumption. Wind power produces a bit more — 2.5 watts per square meter. But that's only twice as big as 1.25 watts per square meter. So that means if you wanted, literally, to produce total energy consumption in all forms, on average, from wind farms, you need wind farms half the area of the UK. I've got data to back up all these assertions, by the way.Next, let's look at solar power. Solar panels, when you put them on a roof, deliver about 20 watts per square meter in England. If you really want to get a lot from solar panels, you need to adopt the traditional Bavarian farming method, where you leap off the roof, and coat the countryside with solar panels, too. Solar parks, because of the gaps between the panels, deliver less. They deliver about 5 watts per square meter of land area. And here's a solar park in Vermont, with real data, delivering 4.2 watts per square meter. Remember where we are, 1.25 watts per square meter, wind farms 2.5, solar parks about five. So whichever of those renewables you pick, the message is, whatever mix of those renewables you're using, if you want to power the UK on them, you're going to need to cover something like 20 percent or 25 percent of the country with those renewables. I'm not saying that's a bad idea; we just need to understand the numbers. I'm absolutely not anti-renewables. I love renewables. But I'm also pro-arithmetic.(Laughter)Concentrating solar power in deserts delivers larger powers per unit area, because you don't have the problem of clouds. So, this facility delivers 14 watts per square meter; this one 10 watts per square meter; and this one in Spain, 5 watts per square meter. Being generous to concentrating solar power, I think it's perfectly credible it could deliver 20 watts per square meter. So that's nice. Of course, Britain doesn't have any deserts. Yet.(Laughter)So here's a summary so far: All renewables, much as I love them, are diffuse. They all have a small power per unit area, and we have to live with that fact. And that means, if you do want renewables to make a substantial difference for a country like the United Kingdom on the scale of today's consumption, you need to be imagining renewable facilities that are country-sized. Not the entire country, but a fraction of the country, a substantial fraction.There are other options for generating power as well, which don't involve fossil fuels. So there's nuclear power, and on this ordinance survey map, you can see there's a Sizewell B inside a blue square kilometer. That's one gigawatt in a square kilometer, which works out to 1,000 watts per square meter. So by this particular metric, nuclear power isn't as intrusive as renewables.Of course, other metrics matter, too, and nuclear power has all sorts of popularity problems. But the same goes for renewables as well. Here's a photograph of a consultation exercise in full swing in the little town of Penicuik just outside Edinburgh, and you can see the children of Penicuik celebrating the burning of the effigy of the windmill. So —(Laughter)People are anti-everything, and we've got to keep all the options on the table.What can a country like the UK do on the supply side? Well, the options are, I'd say, these three: power renewables, and recognizing that they need to be close to country-sized; other people's renewables, so we could go back and talk very politely to the people in the top left-hand side of the diagram and say, ""Uh, we don't want renewables in our backyard, but, um, please could we put them in yours instead?"" And that's a serious option. It's a way for the world to handle this issue. So countries like Australia, Russia, Libya, Kazakhstan, could be our best friends for renewable production. And a third option is nuclear power. So that's some supply-side options.In addition to the supply levers that we can push — and remember, we need large amounts, because at the moment, we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels — in addition to those levers, we could talk about other ways of solving this issue. Namely, we could reduce demand, and that means reducing population — I'm not sure how to do that — or reducing per capita consumption.So let's talk about three more big levers that could really help on the consumption side. First, transport. Here are the physics principles that tell you how to reduce the energy consumption of transport. People often say, ""Technology can answer everything. We can make vehicles that are 100 times more efficient."" And that's almost true. Let me show you.The energy consumption of this typical tank here is 80 kilowatt hours per hundred person kilometers. That's the average European car. Eighty kilowatt hours. Can we make something 100 times better by applying the physics principles I just listed? Yes. Here it is. It's the bicycle. It's 80 times better in energy consumption, and it's powered by biofuel, by Weetabix.(Laughter)And there are other options in between, because maybe the lady in the tank would say, ""No, that's a lifestyle change. Don't change my lifestyle, please."" We could persuade her to take a train, still a lot more efficient than a car, but that might be a lifestyle change. Or there's the EcoCAR, top-left. It comfortably accommodates one teenager and it's shorter than a traffic cone, and it's almost as efficient as a bicycle, as long as you drive it at 15 miles per hour. In between, perhaps some more realistic options on the transport lever are electric vehicles, so electric bikes and electric cars in the middle, perhaps four times as energy efficient as the standard petrol-powered tank.Next, there's the heating lever. Heating is a third of our energy consumption in Britain, and quite a lot of that is going into homes and other buildings, doing space heating and water heating. So here's a typical crappy British house. It's my house, with a Ferrari out front.(Laughter)What can we do to it? Well, the laws of physics are written up there, which describe how the power consumption for heating is driven by the things you can control. The things you can control are the temperature difference between the inside and the outside. There's this remarkable technology called a thermostat: you grasp it, rotate it to the left, and your energy consumption in the home will decrease. I've tried it. It works. Some people call it a lifestyle change.(Laughter)You can also get the fluff men in to reduce the leakiness of your building — put fluff in the walls, fluff in the roof, a new front door, and so forth. The sad truth is, this will save you money. That's not sad, that's good. But the sad truth is, it'll only get about 25 percent of the leakiness of your building if you do these things, which are good ideas. If you really want to get a bit closer to Swedish building standards with a crappy house like this, you need to be putting external insulation on the building, as shown by this block of flats in London. You can also deliver heat more efficiently using heat pumps, which use a smaller bit of high-grade energy like electricity to move heat from your garden into your house.The third demand-side option I want to talk about, the third way to reduce energy consumption is: read your meters. People talk a lot about smart meters, but you can do it yourself. Use your own eyes and be smart. Read your meter, and if you're anything like me, it'll change your life. Here's a graph I made. I was writing a book about sustainable energy, and a friend asked me, ""How much energy do you use at home?"" I was embarrassed; I didn't actually know. And so I started reading the meter every week. The old meter readings are shown in the top half of the graph, and then 2007 is shown in green at the bottom. That was when I was reading the meter every week. And my life changed, because I started doing experiments and seeing what made a difference. My gas consumption plummeted, because I started tinkering with the thermostat and the timing on the heating system, and I knocked more than half off my gas bills.There's a similar story for my electricity consumption, where switching off the DVD players, the stereos, the computer peripherals that were on all the time, and just switching them on when I needed them, knocked another third off my electricity bills, too.So we need a plan that adds up. I've described for you six big levers. We need big action, because we get 90 percent of our energy from fossil fuels, and so you need to push hard on most, if not all, of these levers. Most of these levers have popularity problems, and if there is a lever you don't like the use of, well, please do bear in mind that means you need even stronger effort on the other levers.So I'm a strong advocate of having grown-up conversations that are based on numbers and facts. And I want to close with this map that just visualizes for you the requirement of land and so forth in order to get just 16 lightbulbs per person from four of the big possible sources. So, if you wanted to get 16 lightbulbs — remember, today our total energy consumption is 125 lightbulbs' worth — if you wanted 16 from wind, this map visualizes a solution for the UK. It's got 160 wind farms, each 100 square kilometers in size, and that would be a twentyfold increase over today's amount of wind.Nuclear power: to get 16 lightbulbs per person, you'd need two gigawatts at each of the purple dots on the map. That's a fourfold increase over today's levels of nuclear power.Biomass: to get 16 lightbulbs per person, you'd need a land area something like three and a half Wales' worth, either in our country, or in someone else's country, possibly Ireland, possibly somewhere else.(Laughter)And a fourth supply-side option: concentrating solar power in other people's deserts. If you wanted to get 16 lightbulbs' worth, then we're talking about these eight hexagons down at the bottom right. The total area of those hexagons is two Greater London's worth of someone else's Sahara, and you'll need power lines all the way across Spain and France to bring the power from the Sahara to Surrey.(Laughter)We need a plan that adds up. We need to stop shouting and start talking. And if we can have a grown-up conversation, make a plan that adds up and get building, maybe this low-carbon revolution will actually be fun.Thank you very much for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables
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"I know this is going to sound strange, but I think robots can inspire us to be better humans. See, I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of Bethlehem Steel. My father was an engineer, and when I was growing up, he would teach me how things worked. We would build projects together, like model rockets and slot cars. Here's the go-kart that we built together. That's me behind the wheel, with my sister and my best friend at the time. And one day, he came home, when I was about 10 years old, and at the dinner table, he announced that for our next project,  we were going to build ... a robot.A robot. Now, I was thrilled about this, because at school, there was a bully named Kevin, and he was picking on me, because I was the only Jewish kid in class. So I couldn't wait to get started to work on this, so I could introduce Kevin to my robot.(Laughter)(Robot noises)(Laughter)But that wasn't the kind of robot my dad had in mind.(Laughter)See, he owned a chromium-plating company, and they had to move heavy steel parts between tanks of chemicals. And so he needed an industrial robot like this, that could basically do the heavy lifting.But my dad didn't get the kind of robot he wanted, either. He and I worked on it for several years, but it was the 1970s, and the technology that was available to amateurs just wasn't there yet. So Dad continued to do this kind of work by hand. And a few years later, he was diagnosed with cancer.You see, what the robot we were trying to build was telling him was not about doing the heavy lifting. It was a warning about his exposure to the toxic chemicals. He didn't recognize that at the time, and he contracted leukemia. And he died at the age of 45. I was devastated by this. And I never forgot the robot that he and I tried to build. When I was at college, I decided to study engineering, like him. And I went to Carnegie Mellon, and I earned my PhD in robotics. I've been studying robots ever since.So what I'd like to tell you about are four robot projects, and how they've inspired me to be a better human. By 1993, I was a young professor at USC, and I was just building up my own robotics lab, and this was the year the World Wide Web came out. And I remember my students were the ones who told me about it, and we would — we were just amazed. We started playing with this, and that afternoon, we realized that we could use this new, universal interface to allow anyone in the world to operate the robot in our lab.So, rather than have it fight or do industrial work, we decided to build a planter, put the robot into the center of it, and we called it the Telegarden. And we had put a camera in the gripper of the hand of the robot, and we wrote some special scripts and software, so that anyone in the world could come in, and by clicking on the screen, they could move the robot around and visit the garden. But we also set up some other software that lets you participate and help us water the garden, remotely. And if you watered it a few times, we'd give you your own seed to plant.Now, this was an engineering project, and we published some papers on the system design of it, but we also thought of it as an art installation. It was invited, after the first year, by the Ars Electronica Museum in Austria, to have it installed in their lobby. And I'm happy to say, it remained online there, 24 hours a day, for almost nine years. That robot was operated by more people than any other robot in history.Now, one day, I got a call out of the blue from a student, who asked a very simple but profound question. He said, ""Is the robot real?"" Now, everyone else had assumed it was, and we knew it was, because we were working with it. But I knew what he meant, because it would be possible to take a bunch of pictures of flowers in a garden and then, basically, index them in a computer system, such that it would appear that there was a real robot, when there wasn't. And the more I thought about it, I couldn't think of a good answer for how he could tell the difference.This was right about the time that I was offered a position here at Berkeley. And when I got here, I looked up Hubert Dreyfus, who's a world-renowned professor of philosophy, And I talked with him about this and he said, ""This is one of the oldest and most central problems in philosophy. It goes back to the Skeptics and up through Descartes. It's the issue of epistemology, the study of how do we know that something is true.""So he and I started working together, and we coined a new term: ""telepistemology,"" the study of knowledge at a distance. We invited leading artists, engineers and philosophers to write essays about this, and the results are collected in this book from MIT Press. So thanks to this student, who questioned what everyone else had assumed to be true, this project taught me an important lesson about life, which is to always question assumptions.Now, the second project I'll tell you about grew out of the Telegarden. As it was operating, my students and I were very interested in how people were interacting with each other, and what they were doing with the garden. So we started thinking: what if the robot could leave the garden and go out into some other interesting environment? Like, for example, what if it could go to a dinner party at the White House?(Laughter)So, because we were interested more in the system design and the user interface than in the hardware, we decided that, rather than have a robot replace the human to go to the party, we'd have a human replace the robot. We called it the Tele-Actor.We got a human, someone who's very outgoing and gregarious, and she was outfitted with a helmet with various equipment, cameras and microphones, and then a backpack with wireless Internet connection. And the idea was that she could go into a remote and interesting environment, and then over the Internet, people could experience what she was experiencing. So they could see what she was seeing, but then, more importantly, they could participate, by interacting with each other and coming up with ideas about what she should do next and where she should go, and then conveying those to the Tele-Actor. So we got a chance to take the Tele-Actor to the Webby Awards in San Francisco. And that year, Sam Donaldson was the host. Just before the curtain went up, I had about 30 seconds to explain to Mr. Donaldson what we were going to do. And I said, ""The Tele-Actor is going to be joining you onstage. This is a new experimental project, and people are watching her on their screens, there's cameras involved and there's microphones and she's got an earbud in her ear, and people over the network are giving her advice about what to do next."" And he said, ""Wait a second. That's what I do.""(Laughter)So he loved the concept, and when the Tele-Actor walked onstage, she walked right up to him, and she gave him a big kiss right on the lips.(Laughter)We were totally surprised — we had no idea that would happen. And he was great, he just gave her a big hug in return, and it worked out great. But that night, as we were packing up, I asked the Tele-Actor, how did the Tele-Directors decide that they would give a kiss to Sam Donaldson? And she said they hadn't. She said, when she was just about to walk onstage, the Tele-Directors still were trying to agree on what to do, and so she just walked onstage and did what felt most natural.(Laughter)So, the success of the Tele-Actor that night was due to the fact that she was a wonderful actor. She knew when to trust her instincts. And so that project taught me another lesson about life, which is that, when in doubt, improvise.(Laughter)Now, the third project grew out of my experience when my father was in the hospital. He was undergoing a treatment — chemotherapy treatments — and there's a related treatment called brachytherapy, where tiny, radioactive seeds are placed into the body to treat cancerous tumors. And the way it's done, as you can see here, is that surgeons insert needles into the body to deliver the seeds. And all these needles are inserted in parallel. So it's very common that some of the needles penetrate sensitive organs. And as a result, the needles damage these organs, cause damage, which leads to trauma and side effects. So my students and I wondered: what if we could modify the system, so that the needles could come in at different angles?So we simulated this; we developed some optimization algorithms and we simulated this. And we were able to show that we are able to avoid the delicate organs, and yet still achieve the coverage of the tumors with the radiation.So now, we're working with doctors at UCSF and engineers at Johns Hopkins, and we're building a robot that has a number of — it's a specialized design with different joints that can allow the needles to come in at an infinite variety of angles. And as you can see here, they can avoid delicate organs and still reach the targets they're aiming for. So, by questioning this assumption that all the needles have to be parallel, this project also taught me an important lesson: When in doubt, when your path is blocked, pivot.And the last project also has to do with medical robotics. And this is something that's grown out of a system called the da Vinci surgical robot. And this is a commercially available device. It's being used in over 2,000 hospitals around the world. The idea is it allows the surgeon to operate comfortably in his own coordinate frame. Many of the subtasks in surgery are very routine and tedious, like suturing, and currently, all of these are performed under the specific and immediate control of the surgeon. So the surgeon becomes fatigued over time. And we've been wondering, what if we could program the robot to perform some of these subtasks, and thereby free the surgeon to focus on the more complicated parts of the surgery, and also cut down on the time that the surgery would take if we could get the robot to do them a little bit faster?Now, it's hard to program a robot to do delicate things like this. But it turns out my colleague Pieter Abbeel, who's here at Berkeley, has developed a new set of techniques for teaching robots from example. So he's gotten robots to fly helicopters, do incredibly interesting, beautiful acrobatics, by watching human experts fly them. So we got one of these robots. We started working with Pieter and his students. And we asked a surgeon to perform a task — with the robot. So what we're doing is asking the surgeon to perform the task, and we record the motions of the robot.So here's an example. I'll use tracing out a figure eight as an example. So here's what it looks like when the robot — this is what the robot's path looks like, those three examples. Now, those are much better than what a novice like me could do, but they're still jerky and imprecise.So we record all these examples, the data, and then go through a sequence of steps. First, we use a technique called dynamic time warping from speech recognition. And this allows us to temporally align all of the examples. And then we apply Kalman filtering, a technique from control theory, that allows us to statistically analyze all the noise and extract the desired trajectory that underlies them. Now we take those human demonstrations — they're all noisy and imperfect — and we extract from them an inferred task trajectory and control sequence for the robot. We then execute that on the robot, we observe what happens, then we adjust the controls, using a sequence of techniques called iterative learning. Then what we do is we increase the velocity a little bit. We observe the results, adjust the controls again, and observe what happens. And we go through this several rounds.And here's the result. That's the inferred task trajectory, and here's the robot moving at the speed of the human. Here's four times the speed of the human. Here's seven times. And here's the robot operating at 10 times the speed of the human. So we're able to get a robot to perform a delicate task like a surgical subtask, at 10 times the speed of a human. So this project also, because of its involved practicing and learning, doing something over and over again, this project also has a lesson, which is: if you want to do something well, there's no substitute for practice, practice, practice.So these are four of the lessons that I've learned from robots over the years. And the field of robotics has gotten much better over time. Nowadays, high school students can build robots, like the industrial robot my dad and I tried to build.But, it's very — now ... And now, I have a daughter, named Odessa. She's eight years old. And she likes robots, too. Maybe it runs in the family.(Laughter)I wish she could meet my dad. And now I get to teach her how things work, and we get to build projects together. And I wonder what kind of lessons she'll learn from them.Robots are the most human of our machines. They can't solve all of the world's problems, but I think they have something important to teach us. I invite all of you to think about the innovations that you're interested in, the machines that you wish for. And think about what they might be telling you. Because I have a hunch that many of our technological innovations, the devices we dream about, can inspire us to be better humans.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_goldberg_4_lessons_from_robots_about_being_human
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"The great texts of the ancient world don't survive to us in their original form. They survive because medieval scribes copied them and copied them and copied them. And so it is with Archimedes, the great Greek mathematician.Everything we know about Archimedes as a mathematician we know about because of just three books, and they're called A, B and C. And A was lost by an Italian humanist in 1564. And B was last heard of in the Pope's Library about a hundred miles north of Rome in Viterbo in 1311. Now Codex C was only discovered in 1906, and it landed on my desk in Baltimore on the 19th of January, 1999. And this is Codex C here.Now Codex C is actually buried in this book. It's buried treasure. Because this book is actually a prayer book. It was finished by a guy called Johannes Myrones on the 14th of April, 1229. And to make his prayer book he used parchment. But he didn't use new parchment, he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts, and there were seven of them. And Archimedes Codex C was just one of those seven. He took apart the Archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts. He erased all of their texts, and then he cut the sheets down in the middle, he shuffled them up, and he rotated them 90 degrees, and he wrote prayers on top of these books. And essentially these seven manuscripts disappeared for 700 years, and we have a prayer book.The prayer book was discovered by this guy, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, in 1906. And with just a magnifying glass, he transcribed as much of the text as he could. And the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript that were unique texts. They weren't in A and B at all; they were completely new texts by Archimedes, and they were called ""The Method"" and ""The Stomachion."" And it became a world famous manuscript.Now it should be clear by now that this book is in bad condition. It got in worse condition in the 20th century after Heiberg saw it. Forgeries were painted over it, and it suffered very badly from mold. This book is the definition of a write-off. It's the sort of book that you thought would be in an institution. But it's not in an institution, it was bought by a private owner in 1998.Why did he buy this book? Because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe. He wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous. He wanted to make that which was expensive free. And he wanted to do this as a matter of principle. Because not many people are really going to read Archimedes in ancient Greek, but they should have the chance to do it.So he gathered around himself the friends of Archimedes, and he promised to pay for all the work. And it was an expensive job, but actually it wouldn't be as much as you think because these people, they didn't come from money, they came from Archimedes. And they came from all sorts of different backgrounds. They came from particle physics, they came from classical philology, they came from book conservation, they came from ancient mathematics, they came from data management, they came from scientific imaging and program management. And they got together to work on this manuscript.The first problem was a conservation problem. And this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with: There was glue on the spine of the book. And if you look at this photograph carefully, the bottom half of this is rather brown. And that glue is hide glue. Now if you're a conservator, you can take off this glue reasonably easily. The top half is Elmer's wood glue. It's polyvinyl acetate emulsion that doesn't dissolve in water once it's dry. And it's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on. And so before we could start imaging Archimedes, we had to take this book apart. So it took four years to take apart. And this is a rare action shot, ladies and gentlemen.(Laughter)Another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax, because this was used in the liturgical services of the Greek Orthodox Church and they'd used candle wax. And the candle wax was dirty, and we couldn't image through the wax. So very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax.It's hard to tell you exactly how bad this condition of this book is, but it came out in little bits very often. And normally in a book, you wouldn't worry about the little bits, but these little bits might contain unique Archimedes text. So, tiny fragments we actually managed to put back in the right place.Then, having done that, we started to image the manuscript. And we imaged the manuscript in 14 different wavebands of light. Because if you look at something in different wavebands of light, you see different things. And here is an image of a page imaged in 14 different wavebands of light.But none of them worked. So what we did was we processed the images together, and we put two images into one blank screen. And here are two different images of the Archimedes manuscript. And the image on the left is the normal red image. And the image on the right is an ultraviolet image. And in the image on the right you might be able to see some of the Archimedes writing. If you merge them together into one digital canvas, the parchment is bright in both images and it comes out bright. The prayer book is dark in both images and it comes out dark. The Archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another. And it'll come out dark but red, and then you can start to read it rather clearly. And that's what it looks like.Now that's a before and after image, but you don't read the image on the screen like that. You zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in, and you can just read it now.(Applause)If you process the same two images in a different way, you can actually get rid of the prayer book text. And this is terribly important, because the diagrams in the manuscript are the unique source for the diagrams that Archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century B.C. And there we are, I can give them to you.With this kind of imaging — this kind of infrared, ultraviolet, invisible light imaging — we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries. How were we going to do that? Well we took the manuscript, and we decided to image it in X-ray fluorescence imaging. So an X-ray comes in in the diagram on the left and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom. And that electron disappears. And as it disappears, an electron from a shell farther out jumps in and takes its place. And when it takes its place, it sheds electromagnetic radiation. It sheds an X-ray. And this X-ray is specific in its wavelength to the atom that it hits.And what we wanted to get was the iron. Because the ink was written in iron. And if we can map where this X-ray that comes out, where it comes from, we can map all the iron on the page, then theoretically we can read the image.The thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this. So we took it to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in California, which is a particle accelerator. Electrons go around one way, positrons go around the other. They meet in the middle, and they create subatomic particles like the charm quark and the tau lepton. Now we weren't actually going to put Archimedes in that beam. But as the electrons go round at the speed of light, they shed X-rays. And this is the most powerful light source in the solar system. This is called synchrotron radiation, and it's normally used to look at things like proteins and that sort of thing. But we wanted it to look at atoms, at iron atoms, so that we could read the page from before and after. And lo and behold, we found that we could do it. It took about 17 minutes to do a single page.So what did we discover? Well one of the unique texts in Archimedes is called ""The Stomachion."" And this didn't exist in Codices A and B. And we knew that it involved this square. And this is a perfect square, and it's divided into 14 bits. But no one knew what Archimedes was doing with these 14 bits. And now we think we know. He was trying to work out how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits and still make a perfect square. Anyone want to guess the answer? It's 17,152 divided into 536 families. And the important point about this is that it's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics. And combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics.The really astonishing thing though about this manuscript is that we looked at the other manuscripts that the palimpsester had made, the scribe had made his book out of, and one of them was a manuscript containing text by Hyperides. Now Hyperides was an Athenian orator from the fourth century B.C. He was an exact contemporary of Demosthenes. And in 338 B.C. he and Demosthenes together decided that they wanted to stand up to the military might of Philip of Macedon. So Athens and Thebes went out to fight Philip of Macedon. This was a bad idea, because Philip of Macedon had a son called Alexander the Great, and they lost the battle of Chaeronea.Alexander the Great went on to conquer the known world; Hyperides found himself on trial for treason. And this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial — and it's a great speech: ""Best of all,"" he says, ""is to win. But if you can't win, then you should fight for a noble cause, because then you'll be remembered. Consider the Spartans. They won enumerable victories, but no one remembers what they are because they were all fought for selfish ends. The one battle that the Spartans fought that everybody remembers is the the battle of Thermopylae where they were butchered to a man, but fought for the freedom of Greece."" It was such a great speech that the Athenian law courts let him off. He lived for another 10 years, then the Macedonian faction caught up with him. They cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory, and no one knows what they did with his body. So this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity, speaking to us, not from the grave, because his grave doesn't exist, but from the Athenian law courts.Now I should say at this point that normally when you're looking at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off, you don't find unique texts. And to find two in one manuscript is really something. To find three is completely weird. And we found three.Aristotle's ""Categories"" is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy. And we found a third century A.D. commentary on it, possibly by Galen and probably by Porphyry.Now all this data that we collected, all the images, all the raw images, all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing have been put online under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use for any commercial purpose.(Applause)Why did the owner of the manuscript do this? He did this because he understands data as well as books. Now the thing to do with books, if you want to ensure their long-term utility, is to hide them away in closets and let very few people look at them. The thing to do with data, if you want it to survive, is to let it out and have everybody have it with as little control on that data as possible. And that's what he did.And institutions can learn from this. Because institutions at the moment confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing. And if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the Web, at the moment you have to go to the National Library of Y's site or the University Library of X's site, which is about the most boring way in which you can deal with digital data. What you want to do is to aggregate it all together.Because the Web of the ancient manuscripts of the future isn't going to be built by institutions. It's going to be built by users, by people who get this data together, by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps from wherever they come from, all sorts of medieval romances from wherever they come from, people who just want to curate their own glorious selection of beautiful things. And that is the future of the Web. And it's an attractive and beautiful future, if only we can make it happen.Now we at the Walters Art Museum have followed this example, and we have put up all our manuscripts on the Web for people to enjoy — all the raw data, all the descriptions, all the metadata. under a Creative Commons license. Now the Walters Art Museum is a small museum and it has beautiful manuscripts, but the data is fantastic. And the result of this is that if you do a Google search on images right now and you type in ""Illuminated manuscript Koran"" for example, 24 of the 28 images you'll find come from my institution.(Applause)Now, let's think about this for a minute. What's in it for the institution? There are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution. You can talk about the Humanities and that sort of thing, but let's talk about selfish things. Because what's really in it for the institution is this: Now why do people go to the Louvre? They go to see the Mona Lisa. Why do they go to see the Mona Lisa? Because they already know what she looks like. And they know what she looks like because they've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere.Now, there is no need for these restrictions at all. And I think that institutions should stand up and release all their data under unrestricted licenses, and it would be a great benefit to everybody. Why don't we just let everybody have access to this data and curate their own collection of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things and increase the beauty and the cultural significance of the Internet.Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_noel_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archimedes
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"My talk today is about something maybe a couple of you have already heard about. It's called the Arab Spring. Anyone heard of it?(Applause)So in 2011, power shifted, from the few to the many, from oval offices to central squares, from carefully guarded airwaves to open-source networks. But before Tahrir was a global symbol of liberation, there were representative surveys already giving people a voice in quieter but still powerful ways.I study Muslim societies around the world at Gallup. Since 2001, we've interviewed hundreds of thousands of people — young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate. My talk today draws on this research to reveal why Arabs rose up and what they want now.Now this region's very diverse, and every country is unique. But those who revolted shared a common set of grievances and have similar demands today. I'm going to focus a lot of my talk on Egypt. It has nothing to do with the fact that I was born there, of course. But it's the largest Arab country and it's also one with a great deal of influence. But I'm going to end by widening the lens to the entire region to look at the mundane topics of Arab views of religion and politics and how this impacts women, revealing some surprises along the way.So after analyzing mounds of data, what we discovered was this: Unemployment and poverty alone did not lead to the Arab revolts of 2011. If an act of desperation by a Tunisian fruit vendor sparked these revolutions, it was the difference between what Arabs experienced and what they expected that provided the fuel.To tell you what I mean, consider this trend in Egypt. On paper the country was doing great. In fact, it attracted accolades from multinational organizations because of its economic growth. But under the surface was a very different reality. In 2010, right before the revolution, even though GDP per capita had been growing at five percent for several years, Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives.Now this is very unusual, because globally we find that, not surprisingly, people feel better as their country gets richer. And that's because they have better job opportunities and their state offers better social services. But it was exactly the opposite in Egypt. As the country got more well-off, unemployment actually rose and people's satisfaction with things like housing and education plummeted. But it wasn't just anger at economic injustice. It was also people's deep longing for freedom. Contrary to the clash of civilizations theory, Arabs didn't despise Western liberty, they desired it.As early as 2001, we asked Arabs, and Muslims in general around the world, what they admired most about the West. Among the most frequent responses was liberty and justice. In their own words to an open-ended question we heard, ""Their political system is transparent and it's following democracy in its true sense."" Another said it was ""liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other."" Majorities as high as 90 percent and greater in Egypt, Indonesia and Iran told us in 2005 that if they were to write a new constitution for a theoretical new country that they would guarantee freedom of speech as a fundamental right, especially in Egypt. Eighty-eight percent said moving toward greater democracy would help Muslims progress — the highest percentage of any country we surveyed.But pressed up against these democratic aspirations was a very different day-to-day experience, especially in Egypt. While aspiring to democracy the most, they were the least likely population in the world to say that they had actually voiced their opinion to a public official in the last month — at only four percent. So while economic development made a few people rich, it left many more worse off. As people felt less and less free, they also felt less and less provided for. So rather than viewing their former regimes as generous if overprotective fathers, they viewed them as essentially prison wardens.So now that Egyptians have ended Mubarak's 30-year rule, they potentially could be an example for the region. If Egypt is to succeed at building a society based on the rule of law, it could be a model. If, however, the core issues that propelled the revolution aren't addressed, the consequences could be catastrophic — not just for Egypt, but for the entire region.The signs don't look good, some have said. Islamists, not the young liberals that sparked the revolution, won the majority in Parliament. The military council has cracked down on civil society and protests and the country's economy continues to suffer. Evaluating Egypt on this basis alone, however, ignores the real revolution. Because Egyptians are more optimistic than they have been in years, far less divided on religious-secular lines than we would think and poised for the demands of democracy.Whether they support Islamists or liberals, Egyptians' priorities for this government are identical, and they are jobs, stability and education, not moral policing. But most of all, for the first time in decades, they expect to be active participants, not spectators, in the affairs of their country.I was meeting with a group of newly-elected parliamentarians from Egypt and Tunisia a couple of weeks ago. And what really struck me about them was that they weren't only optimistic, but they kind of struck me as nervous, for lack of a better word. One said to me, ""Our people used to gather in cafes to watch football"" — or soccer, as we say in America — ""and now they gather to watch Parliament."" (Laughter) ""They're really watching us, and we can't help but worry that we're not going to live up to their expectations."" And what really struck me is that less than 24 months ago, it was the people that were nervous about being watched by their government.And the reason that they're expecting a lot is because they have a new-found hope for the future. So right before the revolution we said that Egyptians had never felt worse about their lives, but not only that, they thought their future would be no better. What really changed after the ouster of Mubarak wasn't that life got easier. It actually got harder. But people's expectations for their future went up significantly. And this hope, this optimism, endured a year of turbulent transition.One reason that there's this optimism is because, contrary to what many people have said, most Egyptians think things really have changed in many ways. So while Egyptians were known for their single-digit turnout in elections before the revolution, the last election had around 70 percent voter turnout — men and women. Where scarcely a quarter believed in the honesty of elections in 2010 — I'm surprised it was a quarter — 90 percent thought that this last election was honest. Now why this matters is because we discovered a link between people's faith in their democratic process and their faith that oppressed people can change their situation through peaceful means alone.(Applause)Now I know what some of you are thinking. The Egyptian people, and many other Arabs who've revolted and are in transition, have very high expectations of the government. They're just victims of a long-time autocracy, expecting a paternal state to solve all their problems. But this conclusion would ignore a tectonic shift taking place in Egypt far from the cameras in Tahrir Square. And that is Egyptians' elevated expectations are placed first on themselves.In the country once known for its passive resignation, where, as bad as things got, only four percent expressed their opinion to a public official, today 90 percent tell us that if there's a problem in their community, it's up to them to fix it. (Applause) And three-fourths believe they not only have the responsibility, but the power to make change.And this empowerment also applies to women, whose role in the revolts cannot be underestimated. They were doctors and dissidents, artists and organizers. A full third of those who braved tanks and tear gas to ask or to demand liberty and justice in Egypt were women.(Applause)Now people have raised some real concerns about what the rise of Islamist parties means for women. What we've found about the role of religion in law and the role of religion in society is that there's no female consensus. We found that women in one country look more like the men in that country than their female counterparts across the border. Now what this suggests is that how women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women. Where women agree, however, is on their own role, and that it must be central and active.And here is where we see the greatest gender difference within a country — on the issue of women's rights. Now how men feel about women's rights matters to the future of this region. Because we discovered a link between men's support for women's employment and how many women are actually employed in professional fields in that country.So the question becomes, What drives men's support for women's rights? What about men's views of religion and law? [Does] a man's opinion of the role of religion in politics shape their view of women's rights? The answer is no. We found absolutely no correlation, no impact whatsoever, between these two variables. What drives men's support for women's employment is men's employment, their level of education as well as a high score on their country's U.N. Human Development Index. What this means is that human development, not secularization, is what's key to women's empowerment in the transforming Middle East.And the transformation continues. From Wall Street to Mohammed Mahmoud Street, it has never been more important to understand the aspirations of ordinary people.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dalia_mogahed_the_attitudes_that_sparked_arab_spring
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"We are today talking about moral persuasion: What is moral and immoral in trying to change people's behaviors by using technology and using design?And I don't know what you expect, but when I was thinking about that issue, I early on realized what I'm not able to give you are answers. I'm not able to tell you what is moral or immoral, because we're living in a pluralist society. My values can be radically different from your values, which means that what I consider moral or immoral based on that might not necessarily be what you consider moral or immoral.But I also realized there is one thing that I could give you, and that is what this guy behind me gave the world — Socrates. It is questions. What I can do and what I would like to do with you is give you, like that initial question, a set of questions to figure out for yourselves, layer by layer, like peeling an onion, getting at the core of what you believe is moral or immoral persuasion. And I'd like to do that with a couple of examples of technologies where people have used game elements to get people to do things.So it's at first a very simple, very obvious question I would like to give you: What are your intentions if you are designing something? And obviously, intentions are not the only thing, so here is another example for one of these applications. There are a couple of these kinds of Eco dashboards right now — dashboards built into cars — which try to motivate you to drive more fuel-efficiently. This here is Nissan's MyLeaf, where your driving behavior is compared with the driving behavior of other people, so you can compete for who drives a route the most fuel-efficiently. And these things are very effective, it turns out — so effective that they motivate people to engage in unsafe driving behaviors, like not stopping at a red light, because that way you have to stop and restart the engine, and that would use quite some fuel, wouldn't it? So despite this being a very well-intended application, obviously there was a side effect of that.Here's another example for one of these side effects. Commendable: a site that allows parents to give their kids little badges for doing the things that parents want their kids to do, like tying their shoes. And at first that sounds very nice, very benign, well-intended. But it turns out, if you look into research on people's mindset, caring about outcomes, caring about public recognition, caring about these kinds of public tokens of recognition is not necessarily very helpful for your long-term psychological well-being. It's better if you care about learning something. It's better when you care about yourself than how you appear in front of other people. So that kind of motivational tool that is used actually, in and of itself, has a long-term side effect, in that every time we use a technology that uses something like public recognition or status, we're actually positively endorsing this as a good and normal thing to care about — that way, possibly having a detrimental effect on the long-term psychological well-being of ourselves as a culture.So that's a second, very obvious question: What are the effects of what you're doing — the effects you're having with the device, like less fuel, as well as the effects of the actual tools you're using to get people to do things — public recognition?Now is that all — intention, effect? Well, there are some technologies which obviously combine both. Both good long-term and short-term effects and a positive intention like Fred Stutzman's ""Freedom,"" where the whole point of that application is — well, we're usually so bombarded with constant requests by other people, with this device, you can shut off the Internet connectivity of your PC of choice for a pre-set amount of time, to actually get some work done. And I think most of us will agree that's something well-intended, and also has good consequences. In the words of Michel Foucault, it is a ""technology of the self."" It is a technology that empowers the individual to determine its own life course, to shape itself.But the problem is, as Foucault points out, that every technology of the self has a technology of domination as its flip side. As you see in today's modern liberal democracies, the society, the state, not only allows us to determine our self, to shape our self, it also demands it of us. It demands that we optimize ourselves, that we control ourselves, that we self-manage continuously, because that's the only way in which such a liberal society works. These technologies want us to stay in the game that society has devised for us. They want us to fit in even better. They want us to optimize ourselves to fit in.Now, I don't say that is necessarily a bad thing; I just think that this example points us to a general realization, and that is: no matter what technology or design you look at, even something we consider as well-intended and as good in its effects as Stutzman's Freedom, comes with certain values embedded in it. And we can question these values. We can question: Is it a good thing that all of us continuously self-optimize ourselves to fit better into that society?Or to give you another example: What about a piece of persuasive technology that convinces Muslim women to wear their headscarves? Is that a good or a bad technology in its intentions or in its effects? Well, that basically depends on the kind of values you bring to bear to make these kinds of judgments.So that's a third question: What values do you use to judge? And speaking of values: I've noticed that in the discussion about moral persuasion online and when I'm talking with people, more often than not, there is a weird bias. And that bias is that we're asking: Is this or that ""still"" ethical? Is it ""still"" permissible? We're asking things like: Is this Oxfam donation form, where the regular monthly donation is the preset default, and people, maybe without intending it, are encouraged or nudged into giving a regular donation instead of a one-time donation, is that ""still' permissible? Is it ""still"" ethical? We're fishing at the low end.But in fact, that question, ""Is it 'still' ethical?"" is just one way of looking at ethics. Because if you look at the beginning of ethics in Western culture, you see a very different idea of what ethics also could be. For Aristotle, ethics was not about the question, ""Is that still good, or is it bad?"" Ethics was about the question of how to live life well. And he put that in the word ""arête,"" which we, from [Ancient Greek], translate as ""virtue."" But really, it means ""excellence."" It means living up to your own full potential as a human being.And that is an idea that, I think, Paul Richard Buchanan put nicely in a recent essay, where he said, ""Products are vivid arguments about how we should live our lives."" Our designs are not ethical or unethical in that they're using ethical or unethical means of persuading us. They have a moral component just in the kind of vision and the aspiration of the good life that they present to us.And if you look into the designed environment around us with that kind of lens, asking, ""What is the vision of the good life that our products, our design, present to us?"", then you often get the shivers, because of how little we expect of each other, of how little we actually seem to expect of our life, and what the good life looks like.So that's a fourth question I'd like to leave you with: What vision of the good life do your designs convey? And speaking of design, you'll notice that I already broadened the discussion, because it's not just persuasive technology that we're talking about here, it's any piece of design that we put out here in the world.I don't know whether you know the great communication researcher Paul Watzlawick who, back in the '60s, made the argument that we cannot not communicate. Even if we choose to be silent, we chose to be silent, and we're communicating something by choosing to be silent. And in the same way that we cannot not communicate, we cannot not persuade: whatever we do or refrain from doing, whatever we put out there as a piece of design, into the world, has a persuasive component. It tries to affect people. It puts a certain vision of the good life out there in front of us,which is what Peter-Paul Verbeek, the Dutch philosopher of technology, says. No matter whether we as designers intend it or not, we materialize morality. We make certain things harder and easier to do. We organize the existence of people. We put a certain vision of what good or bad or normal or usual is in front of people, by everything we put out there in the world.Even something as innocuous as a set of school chairs is a persuasive technology, because it presents and materializes a certain vision of the good life — a good life in which teaching and learning and listening is about one person teaching, the others listening; in which it is about learning-is-done-while-sitting; in which you learn for yourself; in which you're not supposed to change these rules, because the chairs are fixed to the ground.And even something as innocuous as a single-design chair, like this one by Arne Jacobsen, is a persuasive technology, because, again, it communicates an idea of the good life: a good life — a life that you, as a designer, consent to by saying, ""In a good life, goods are produced as sustainably or unsustainably as this chair. Workers are treated as well or as badly as the workers were treated that built that chair."" The good life is a life where design is important because somebody obviously took the time and spent the money for that kind of well-designed chair; where tradition is important, because this is a traditional classic and someone cared about this; and where there is something as conspicuous consumption, where it is OK and normal to spend a humongous amount of money on such a chair, to signal to other people what your social status is.So these are the kinds of layers, the kinds of questions I wanted to lead you through today; the question of: What are the intentions that you bring to bear when you're designing something? What are the effects, intended and unintended, that you're having? What are the values you're using to judge those? What are the virtues, the aspirations that you're actually expressing in that? And how does that apply, not just to persuasive technology, but to everything you design?Do we stop there? I don't think so. I think that all of these things are eventually informed by the core of all of this, and this is nothing but life itself. Why, when the question of what the good life is informs everything that we design, should we stop at design and not ask ourselves: How does it apply to our own life? ""Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"" as Michel Foucault puts it.Just to give you a practical example of Buster Benson. This is Buster setting up a pull-up machine at the office of his new start-up, Habit Labs, where they're trying to build other applications like ""Health Month"" for people. And why is he building a thing like this? Well, here is the set of axioms that Habit Labs, Buster's start-up, put up for themselves on how they wanted to work together as a team when they're building these applications — a set of moral principles they set themselves for working together — one of them being, ""We take care of our own health and manage our own burnout.""Because ultimately, how can you ask yourselves and how can you find an answer on what vision of the good life you want to convey and create with your designs without asking the question: What vision of the good life do you yourself want to live?And with that, I thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_deterding_what_your_designs_say_about_you
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(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/quixotic_fusion_dancing_with_light
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"Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate.Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic, ridiculous, maybe even hopeless, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay, and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work, if that's what you call it. This thing — whoops, can we go back? Hello, come in, Earth. There we go. All right.This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis. Now, it's kinda lonely, it's kinda tedious, just collecting data, so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself, because, you know, at night, I would be the only hominid within about 30 miles. So here are pictures of myself. The observatory had just acquired a new book, written by a Russian cosmologist by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan.And I remember reading that book, and at 3 in the morning I was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate, to send bits of information from one star system to another. Now, at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're all alone, haven't had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea, but it was that idea — the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using this same technology — that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute. Now, I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous, and I've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story, or I was just, you know, misremembering something, but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine, and sure enough, there you can see the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that analog calculating device. So it was true.All right. Now, the idea for doing this, it wasn't very old at the time that I made that photo. The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T. Now, Frank didn't hear anything. Actually he did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force, which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence. But Drake's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing — and I'll get back to that — and on the basis of this experiment, which didn't succeed, we have been doing SETI ever since, not continuously, but ever since.We still haven't heard anything. We still haven't heard anything. In fact, we don't know about any life beyond Earth, but I'm going to suggest to you that that's going to change rather soon, and part of the reason, in fact, the majority of the reason why I think that's going to change is that the equipment's getting better. This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles from whatever seat you're in right now. This is something that we're using today to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten very much better too. This is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960. This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today. Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better. That's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card, okay? But something that's not appreciated by the public is, in fact, that the experiment continues to get better, and, consequently, tends to get faster. This is a little plot, and every time you show a plot, you lose 10 percent of the audience. I have 12 of these. (Laughter) But what I plotted here is just some metric that shows how fast we're searching. In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy. But we're going through the haystack no longer with a teaspoon but with a skip loader, because of this increase in speed. In fact, those of you who are still conscious and mathematically competent, will note that this is a semi-log plot. In other words, the rate of increase is exponential. It's exponentially improving. Now, exponential is an overworked word. You hear it on the media all the time. They don't really know what exponential means, but this is exponential. In fact, it's doubling every 18 months, and, of course, every card-carrying member of the digerati knows that that's Moore's Law.So this means that over the course of the next two dozen years, we'll be able to look at a million star systems, a million star systems, looking for signals that would prove somebody's out there. Well, a million star systems, is that interesting? I mean, how many of those star systems have planets? And the facts are, we didn't know the answer to that even as recently as 15 years ago, and in fact, we really didn't know it even as recently as six months ago. But now we do. Recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets, and more than one. They're like, you know, kittens. You get a litter. You don't get one kitten. You get a bunch. So in fact, this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy, just in our galaxy, by the way, and I remind the non-astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of 100 billion that we can see with our telescopes.That's a lot of real estate, but of course, most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless, like, you know, Mercury, or Neptune. Neptune's probably not very big in your life. So the question is, what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life? We don't know the answer to that either, but we will learn that answer this year, thanks to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, and in fact, the smart money, which is to say the people who work on this project, the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand, one in a hundred, something like that. Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's one in a thousand, that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the Earth just in our own galaxy. Okay, now I've given you a lot of numbers here, but they're mostly big numbers, okay, so, you know, keep that in mind. There's plenty of real estate, plenty of real estate in the universe, and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's some interesting occupants, that makes you a miracle, and I know you like to think you're a miracle, but if you do science, you learn rather quickly that every time you think you're a miracle, you're wrong, so probably not the case.All right, so the bottom line is this: Because of the increase in speed, and because of the vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos, I figure we're going to pick up a signal within two dozen years. And I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you: Either we're going to find E.T. in the next two dozen years, or I'll buy you a cup of coffee. So that's not so bad. I mean, even with two dozen years, you open up your browser and there's news of a signal, or you get a cup of coffee. Now, let me tell you about some aspect of this that people don't think about, and that is, what happens? Suppose that what I say is true. I mean, who knows, but suppose it happens. Suppose some time in the next two dozen years we pick up a faint line that tells us we have some cosmic company. What is the effect? What's the consequence? Now, I might be at ground zero for this.I happen to know what the consequence for me would be, because we've had false alarms. This is 1997, and this is a photo I made at about 3 o'clock in the morning in Mountain View here, when we were watching the computer monitors because we had picked up a signal that we thought, ""This is the real deal."" All right? And I kept waiting for the Men in Black to show up. Right? I kept waiting for — I kept waiting for my mom to call, somebody to call, the government to call. Nobody called. Nobody called. I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down. I just wandered around taking photos like this one, just for something to do. Well, at 9:30 in the morning, with my head down on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night, the phone rings and it's The New York Times. And I think there's a lesson in that, and that lesson is that if we pick up a signal, the media, the media will be on it faster than a weasel on ball bearings. It's going to be fast. You can be sure of that. No secrecy. That's what happens to me. It kind of ruins my whole week, because whatever I've got planned that week is kind of out the window.But what about you? What's it going to do to you? And the answer is that we don't know the answer. We don't know what that's going to do to you, not in the long term, and not even very much in the short term. I mean, that would be a bit like asking Chris Columbus in 1491, ""Hey Chris, you know, what happens if it turns out that there's a continent between here and Japan, where you're sailing to, what will be the consequences for humanity if that turns out to be the case?"" And I think Chris would probably offer you some answer that you might not have understood, but it probably wouldn't have been right, and I think that to predict what finding E.T.'s going to mean, we can't predict that either. But here are a couple things I can say. To begin with, it's going to be a society that's way in advance of our own. You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals. They're not building transmitters. They're going to be ahead of us, maybe by a few thousand years, maybe by a few millions years, but substantially ahead of us, and that means, if you can understand anything that they're going to say, then you might be able to short-circuit history by getting information from a society that's way beyond our own. Now, you might find that a bit hyperbolic, and maybe it is, but nonetheless, it's conceivable that this will happen, and, you know, you could consider this like, I don't know, giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key to the library of Congress. It would change his day, all right?That's one thing. Another thing that's for sure going to happen is that it will calibrate us. We will know that we're not that miracle, right, that we're just another duck in a row, we're not the only kids on the block, and I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn. We're not a miracle, okay?The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important, and that is, if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction. Because they survived their technology, we could do it too. Normally when you look out into the universe, you're looking back in time. All right? That's interesting to cosmologists. But in this sense, you actually can look into the future, hazily, but you can look into the future. So those are all the sorts of things that would come from a detection.Now, let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime, and that is, SETI, I think, is important, because it's exploration, and it's not only exploration, it's comprehensible exploration. Now, I gotta tell you, I'm always reading books about explorers. I find exploration very interesting, Arctic exploration, you know, people like Magellan, Amundsen, Shackleton, you see Franklin down there, Scott, all these guys. It's really nifty, exploration. And they're just doing it because they want to explore, and you might say, ""Oh, that's kind of a frivolous opportunity,"" but that's not frivolous. That's not a frivolous activity, because, I mean, think of ants. You know, most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line, but there are a couple of ants, maybe one percent of those ants, that are what they call pioneer ants, and they're the ones that wander off. They're the ones you find on the kitchen countertop. You gotta get them with your thumb before they find the sugar or something. But those ants, even though most of them get wiped out, those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive. So exploration is important.I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society, and that is the lack of science literacy, the lack of the ability to even understand science. Now, look, a lot has been written about the deplorable state of science literacy in this country. You've heard about it. Well, here's one example, in fact. Polls taken, this poll was taken 10 years ago. It shows like roughly one third of the public thinks that aliens are not only out there, we're looking for them out there, but they're here, right? Sailing the skies in their saucers and occasionally abducting people for experiments their parents wouldn't approve of. Well, that would be interesting if it was true, and job security for me, but I don't think the evidence is very good. That's more, you know, sad than significant.But there are other things that people believe that are significant, like the efficacy of homeopathy, or that evolution is just, you know, sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs, or, you know, evolution, all that sort of thing, or global warming. These sorts of ideas don't really have any validity, that you can't trust the scientists.Now, we've got to solve that problem, because that's a critically important problem, and you might say, ""Well, okay, how are we gonna solve that problem with SETI?"" Well, let me suggest to you that SETI obviously can't solve the problem, but it can address the problem. It can address the problem by getting young people interested in science. Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right? In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up. Now, that's not true anymore. Today, you've got to spend years in grad school and post-doc positions just to figure out what the important questions are. It's hard. There's no doubt about it.And in fact, here's an example: the Higgs boson, finding the Higgs boson. Ask the next 10 people you see on the streets, ""Hey, do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson?"" And I bet the answer you're going to get, is, ""Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important."" And probably most of the people wouldn't even know the value of a Swiss franc, okay? And yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem. Okay? So that doesn't get people interested in science because they can't comprehend what it's about. SETI, on the other hand, is really simple. We're going to use these big antennas and we're going to try to eavesdrop on signals. Everybody can understand that. Yes, technologically, it's very sophisticated, but everybody gets the idea.So that's one thing. The other thing is, it's exciting science. It's exciting because we're naturally interested in other intelligent beings, and I think that's part of our hardwiring. I mean, we're hardwired to be interested in beings that might be, if you will, competitors, or if you're the romantic sort, possibly even mates. Okay? I mean, this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth. Right? We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching Animal Planet. You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. It's mostly about things that have big teeth. Okay, so we're interested in these sorts of things. And not just us. It's also kids. This allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science, because SETI involves all kinds of science, obviously biology, obviously astronomy, but also geology, also chemistry, various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of, ""We're looking for E.T."" So to me this is interesting and important, and in fact, it's my policy, even though I give a lot of talks to adults, you give talks to adults, and two days later they're back where they were. But if you give talks to kids, you know, one in 50 of them, some light bulb goes off, and they think, ""Gee, I'd never thought of that,"" and then they go, you know, read a book or a magazine or whatever. They get interested in something.Now it's my theory, supported only by anecdotal, personal anecdotal evidence, but nonetheless, that kids get interested in something between the ages of eight and 11. You've got to get them there. So, all right, I give talks to adults, that's fine, but I try and make 10 percent of the talks that I give, I try and make those for kids. I remember when a guy came to our high school, actually, it was actually my junior high school. I was in sixth grade. And he gave some talk. All I remember from it was one word: electronics. It was like Dustin Hoffman in ""The Graduate,"" right, when he said ""plastics,"" whatever that means, plastics. All right, so the guy said electronics. I don't remember anything else. In fact, I don't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year, but I remember electronics. And so I got interested in electronics, and you know, I studied to get my ham license. I was wiring up stuff. Here I am at about 15 or something, doing that sort of stuff. Okay? That had a big effect on me. So that's my point, that you can have a big effect on these kids.In fact, this reminds me, I don't know, a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk. I had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour. Eleven-year-olds, they're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes, and I started, there was a white board behind me, and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it, and I said, ""All right, now look, this is the number of stars in the visible universe, and this number is so big there's not even a name for it."" And one of these kids shot up his hand, and he said, ""Well, actually there is a name for it. It's a sextra-quadra-hexa-something or other."" Right? Now, that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude, but there was no doubt about it, these kids were smart. Okay? So I stopped giving the lecture. All they wanted to do was ask questions. In fact, my last comments to these kids, at the end I said, ""You know, you kids are smarter than the people I work with."" Now — (Laughter) They didn't even care about that. What they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions. (Laughter)Let me just say, look, my job is a privilege because we're in a special time. Previous generations couldn't do this experiment at all. In another generation down the line, I think we will have succeeded. So to me, it is a privilege, and when I look in the mirror, the facts are that I really don't see myself. What I see is the generation behind me. These are some kids from the Huff School, fourth graders. I talked there, what, two weeks ago, something like that.I think that if you can instill some interest in science and how it works, well, that's a payoff beyond easy measure. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_shostak_et_is_probably_out_there_get_ready
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"So I thought I'd talk about identity. That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me. And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this, I'd just read, in one of the papers, I can't remember, something from someone at Facebook saying, well, ""we need to make everybody use their real names."" and then that's basically all the problems solved. And that's so wrong, that's such a fundamentally, reactionary view of identity, and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble. And so what I thought I'd do is I'll explain four sort of problems about it, and then I'll suggest a solution, which hopefully you might find interesting.So just to frame the problem, what does authenticity mean? That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting. [What's the Problem?] That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger, and because I'm not very good at presentations, I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card. And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists. And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good. And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, if you see what I mean. (Laughter) So when we're talking about authenticity, it's a little more fractal than it appears and that's a good example to show it. I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly.So the first problem, I thought, Chip and PIN, right? [Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within] [Offline solutions do not work online] I'm guessing everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right? So why is that a good example? That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity subverts the security of a well-constructed system. That chip and PIN card that's in your pocket has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, is extremely secure, you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah. Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper. And for a joke, we take that super-secure chip and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe and for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card. So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up. And even more amusingly, and on my debit card too, we print the name and the SALT code and everything else on the front too. Why? There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip and PIN card. And if you think about it, it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first. Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card are criminals. You know what your name is, right? (Laughter) And when you go into a shop and buy something, it's a PIN, he doesn't care what the name is. The only place where you ever have to write your name on the back is in America at the moment. And whenever I go to America, and I have to pay with a mag stripe on the back of the card, I always sign it Carlos Tethers anyway, just as a security mechanism, because if a transaction ever gets disputed, and it comes back and it says Dave Birch, I know it must have been a criminal, because I would never sign it Dave Birch. (Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it. They know the name, from the name they can find the address, and then they can go off and buy stuff online. Why do we put the name on the card? Because we think identity is something to do with names, and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card, which obsesses us. And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, but if you're someone in politics or the home office or whatever, and you think about identity, you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on them. And that's very subversive in a modern world.So the second example I thought I'd use is chatrooms. [Chatrooms and Children] I'm very proud of that picture, that's my son playing in his band with his friends for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid. (Laughter) And I love that picture. I like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better, (Laughter) I like that picture for the moment. Why do I use that picture? Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person. So him and his friends, they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall, and they got all their friends who had bands, and they got them together, and they do it all on Facebook, and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the - I was going to say ""menu,"" that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it? The first band on the list of bands that appears at some public music performance of some kind gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, then the next band gets the next 20, and so on. They were at the bottom of the menu, they were like fifth, I thought they had no chance. He actually got 20 quid. Fantastic, right? But my point is, that all worked perfectly, except on the web. So they're sitting on Facebook, and they're sending these messages and arranging things and they don't know who anybody is, right? That's the big problem we're trying to solve. If only they were using the real names, Then you wouldn't be worried about them on the Internet. And so when he says to me, ""Oh, I want to go to a chatroom to talk about guitars"" or something, I'm like, ""oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chatroom to talk about guitars, because they might not all be your friends, and some of the people that are in the chatroom might be perverts and teachers and vicars."" (Laughter) I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right? So I want to know who all the people in the chatroom are. So okay, you can go in the chatroom, but only if everybody in the chatroom is using their real names, and they submit full copies of their police report. But of course, if anybody in the chatroom asked for his real name, I'd say no. You can't give them your real name. Because what happens if they turn out to be perverts, and teachers and whatever.So you have this odd sort of paradox where I'm happy for him to go into this space if I know who everybody else is, but I don't want anybody else to know who he is. And so you get this sort of logjam around identity where you want full disclosure from everybody else, but not from yourself. And there's no progress, we get stuck. And so the chatroom thing doesn't work properly, and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity.So on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about - I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I? I should stop saying it like that. For some random reason, I can't imagine, something about cheerleaders turned up in my inbox. And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story. This happened a couple of years ago in the U.S. There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the U.S., and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, and somehow the cheerleading coach found out about this. She was very upset. And so she went to one of the girls, and said, ""you have to give me your Facebook password."" I read this all the time, where even at some universities and places of education, kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords. So you've got to give them your Facebook password. She was a kid! What she should have said is, ""my lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning. It's an outrageous imposition on my 4th Amendment right to privacy, and you're going to be sued for all the money you've got."" That's what she should have said. But she's a kid, so she hands over the password. The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook. So the teacher can't log into Facebook until she gets home. So the girl tells her friends, guess what happened? The teacher logged in, she knows. So the girls just all logged into Facebook on their phones, and deleted their profiles. And so when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there. My point is, those identities, they don't think about them the same way.Identity is, especially when you're a teenager, a fluid thing. You have lots of identities. And you can have an identity, you don't like it, because it's subverted in some way, or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate, you just delete it and get another one. The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, the government or whatever, and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places, that's absolutely wrong. Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook, unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way? And it just doesn't work properly. And my fourth example is there are some cases where you really want to be - In case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest. I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters. I look pretty good in a suit, frankly, so you can see why it would drive them into an anti-capitalist frenzy. (Laughter) So I thought, well, look. If I don't want to inflame the protesters, the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protester. So I went dressed completely in black, you know, with a black balaclava, I had black gloves on, but I've taken them off to sign the visitor's book. (Laughter) I'm wearing black trousers, black boots, I'm dressed completely in black. I go into the bank at 10 o'clock, go, ""Hi, I'm Dave Birch, I've got a 3 o'clock with so and so there."" Sure. They sign me in. There's my visitor's badge. (Laughter)So this nonsense about you've got to have real names on Facebook and whatever, that gets you that kind of security. That gets you security theater, where there's no actual security, but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security. And as long as everybody learns their lines, everyone's happy. But it's not real security. Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do, because I work for them. I know that things are actually worse than these guys think. (Laughter) But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank who was doing something. Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, and I want to report it to the boss of the bank. So I log on to do a little bit of whistleblowing. I send a message, this guy's a rogue trader. That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank. If that message just comes from anybody, it has zero information value. There's no point in sending that message. But if I have to prove who I am, I'll never send that message. It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon. That message will only happen if I'm anonymous. So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity there, otherwise we don't get where we want to get to.So four issues. So what are we going to do about it? Well, what we tend to do about it is we think about Orwell space. And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card that we got rid of in 1953. So we think if we had a card, call it a Facebook login, which proves who you are, and I make you carry it all the time, that solves the problem. And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, and it might, actually, make some problems worse. The more times you're forced to use your real identity, certainly in transactional terms, the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted. The goal is to stop people from using identity in transactions which don't need identity, which is actually almost all transactions. Almost all of the transactions you do are not, who are you? They're, are you allowed to drive the car, are you allowed in the building, are you over 18, etcetera, etcetera. So my suggestion-I, like James, think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R & D.I think this is a solvable problem. It's something we can do about. Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who. Because in this, as in so many other walks of life, Doctor Who has already shown us the answer. So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors, Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England, (Laughter) and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us. And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper. Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's psychic paper. You're not nerds if you say yes. Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper? Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying I guess. Is that what you're going to tell us? Doctor Who's psychic paper is when you hold up the psychic paper, the person, in their brain, sees the thing that they need to see. So I want to show you a British passport, I hold up the psychic paper, you see a British passport. I want to get into a party, I hold up the psychic paper, I show you a party invitation. You see what you want to see. So what I'm saying is we need to make an electronic version of that, but with one tiny, tiny change, which is that it'll only show you the British passport if I've actually got one. It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one. It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18. But nothing else. So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18, instead of showing you my driving license, which shows you I know how to drive, what my name is, my address, all these kind of things, I show you my psychic paper, and all it tells you is am I over 18 or not. Right.Is that just a pipe dream? Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. So in order to build that and make it work, I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them, we need a plan, which is we're going to build this as an infrastructure for everybody to use, to solve all of these problems. We're going to make a utility, the utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere, I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along. That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone. So when you want to draw money out, you put the mobile phone on the ATM, and touch your finger, your fingerprint goes through to the phone, the phone says yes, that's whoever, and the ATM then gives you some money. It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere. It has to be absolutely convenient, that's me going into the pub. All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is, is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub? And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, and if I am allowed in, it shows my picture, if I'm not allowed in, it shows a red cross. It doesn't disclose any other information. It has to have no special gadgets. That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, which I agree with completely. If it means no special gadgets, it has to run on a mobile phone. That's the only choice we have, we have to make it work on mobile phones. There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world. That means something, I don't know what. (Laughter) I rely on our futurologists to tell me. It has to be a utility which is extensible. So it has to be something that anybody could build on. Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this.You know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it. This is how we're going to do it. We're going to do it using phones, and we're going to do it using mobile proximity. I'm going to suggest to you the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here, and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards with the contactless interface on it, you've already got that technology. If you've ever been up to the big city, and used an Oyster card at all, does that ring any bells to anybody? The technology already exists. The first phones that have the technology built in, the Google Nexus, the S2, the Samsung Wifi 7.9, the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops. So the idea that the gas man can turn up at my mom's door and he can show my mom his phone, and she can tap it with her phone, and it will come up with green if he really is from British Gas and allowed in, and it'll come up with red if he isn't, end of story.We have the technology to do that. And what's more, although some of those things sounded a bit counter-intuitive, like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am, the cryptography to do that not only exists, it's extremely well-known and well-understood. Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates, these technologies have been around for a while, we've just had no way of packaging them up. So the technology already exists. We know it works, There are a few examples of the technology being used in experimental places. That's London Fashion Week, where we built a system with O2, that's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, you can see the persons walking in with their VIP band, it's just being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band. I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic, this stuff works in these environments. They don't need to be special.So finally, I know that you can do this, because if you saw the episode of Doctor Who, the Easter special of Doctor Who, where he went to Mars in a bus, I should say again for our foreign students, that doesn't happen every episode. This was a very special case. So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, I can't show you the clip, due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright by the BBC, but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, Doctor Who is clearly shown getting on to the bus with the Oyster card reader using his psychic paper. Which proves that psychic paper has an MSE interface. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_birch_identity_without_a_name
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"All right. So, like all good stories, this starts a long, long time ago when there was basically nothing. So here is a complete picture of the universe about 14-odd billion years ago. All energy is concentrated into a single point of energy. For some reason it explodes, and you begin to get these things. So you're now about 14 billion years into this. And these things expand and expand and expand into these giant galaxies, and you get trillions of them. And within these galaxies you get these enormous dust clouds. And I want you to pay particular attention to the three little prongsin the center of this picture. If you take a close-up of those, they look like this. And what you're looking at is columns of dust where there's so much dust — by the way, the scale of this is a trillion vertical miles — and what's happening is there's so much dust, it comes together and it fuses and ignites a thermonuclear reaction. And so what you're watching is the birth of stars. These are stars being born out of here. When enough stars come out, they create a galaxy. This one happens to be a particularly important galaxy, because you are here. (Laughter) And as you take a close-up of this galaxy, you find a relatively normal, not particularly interesting star.By the way, you're now about two-thirds of the way into this story. So this star doesn't even appear until about two-thirds of the way into this story. And then what happens is there's enough dust left over that it doesn't ignite into a star, it becomes a planet. And this is about a little over four billion years ago.And soon thereafter there's enough material left over that you get a primordial soup, and that creates life. And life starts to expand and expand and expand, until it goes kaput.(Laughter)Now the really strange thing is life goes kaput, not once, not twice, but five times. So almost all life on Earth is wiped out about five times. And as you're thinking about that, what happens is you get more and more complexity, more and more stuff to build new things with. And we don't appear until about 99.96 percent of the time into this story, just to put ourselves and our ancestors in perspective.So within that context, there's two theories of the case as to why we're all here. The first theory of the case is that's all she wrote. Under that theory, we are the be-all and end-all of all creation. And the reason for trillions of galaxies, sextillions of planets, is to create something that looks like that and something that looks like that. And that's the purpose of the universe; and then it flat-lines, it doesn't get any better.(Laughter)The only question you might want to ask yourself is, could that be just mildly arrogant? And if it is — and particularly given the fact that we came very close to extinction. There were only about 2,000 of our species left. A few more weeks without rain, we would have never seen any of these.(Laughter)(Applause)So maybe you have to think about a second theory if the first one isn't good enough. Second theory is: Could we upgrade? (Laughter) Well, why would one ask a question like that? Because there have been at least 29 upgrades so far of humanoids. So it turns out that we have upgraded. We've upgraded time and again and again. And it turns out that we keep discovering upgrades. We found this one last year. We found another one last month.And as you're thinking about this, you might also ask the question: So why a single human species? Wouldn't it be really odd if you went to Africa and Asia and Antarctica and found exactly the same bird — particularly given that we co-existed at the same time with at least eight other versions of humanoid at the same time on this planet? So the normal state of affairs is not to have just a Homo sapiens; the normal state of affairs is to have various versions of humans walking around.And if that is the normal state of affairs, then you might ask yourself, all right, so if we want to create something else, how big does a mutation have to be? Well Svante Paabo has the answer. The difference between humans and Neanderthal is 0.004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is one species to another. This explains most contemporary political debates.(Laughter)But as you're thinking about this, one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place. Difference human/Neanderthal is sperm and testis, smell and skin. And those are the specific genes that differ from one to the other. So very small changes can have a big impact.And as you're thinking about this, we're continuing to mutate. So about 10,000 years ago by the Black Sea, we had one mutation in one gene which led to blue eyes. And this is continuing and continuing and continuing.And as it continues, one of the things that's going to happen this year is we're going to discover the first 10,000 human genomes, because it's gotten cheap enough to do the gene sequencing. And when we find these, we may find differences.And by the way, this is not a debate that we're ready for, because we have really misused the science in this. In the 1920s, we thought there were major differences between people. That was partly based on Francis Galton's work. He was Darwin's cousin. But the U.S., the Carnegie Institute, Stanford, American Neurological Association took this really far. That got exported and was really misused. In fact, it led to some absolutely horrendous treatment of human beings. So since the 1940s, we've been saying there are no differences, we're all identical. We're going to know at year end if that is true.And as we think about that, we're actually beginning to find things like, do you have an ACE gene? Why would that matter? Because nobody's ever climbed an 8,000-meter peak without oxygen that doesn't have an ACE gene. And if you want to get more specific, how about a 577R genotype? Well it turns out that every male Olympic power athelete ever tested carries at least one of these variants.If that is true, it leads to some very complicated questions for the London Olympics. Three options: Do you want the Olympics to be a showcase for really hardworking mutants? (Laughter) Option number two: Why don't we play it like golf or sailing? Because you have one and you don't have one, I'll give you a tenth of a second head start. Version number three: Because this is a naturally occurring gene and you've got it and you didn't pick the right parents, you get the right to upgrade. Three different options. If these differences are the difference between an Olympic medal and a non-Olympic medal.And it turns out that as we discover these things, we human beings really like to change how we look, how we act, what our bodies do. And we had about 10.2 million plastic surgeries in the United States, except that with the technologies that are coming online today, today's corrections, deletions, augmentations and enhancements are going to seem like child's play.You already saw the work by Tony Atala on TED, but this ability to start filling things like inkjet cartridges with cells are allowing us to print skin, organs and a whole series of other body parts. And as these technologies go forward, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing this, you keep seeing things — 2000, human genome sequence — and it seems like nothing's happening, until it does. And we may just be in some of these weeks.And as you're thinking about these two guys sequencing a human genome in 2000 and the Public Project sequencing the human genome in 2000, then you don't hear a lot, until you hear about an experiment last year in China, where they take skin cells from this mouse, put four chemicals on it, turn those skin cells into stem cells, let the stem cells grow and create a full copy of that mouse.That's a big deal. Because in essence what it means is you can take a cell, which is a pluripotent stem cell, which is like a skier at the top of a mountain, and those two skiers become two pluripotent stem cells, four, eight, 16, and then it gets so crowded after 16 divisions that those cells have to differentiate. So they go down one side of the mountain, they go down another. And as they pick that, these become bone, and then they pick another road and these become platelets, and these become macrophages, and these become T cells. But it's really hard, once you ski down, to get back up. Unless, of course, if you have a ski lift. And what those four chemicals do is they take any cell and take it way back up the mountain so it can become any body part.And as you think of that, what it means is potentially you can rebuild a full copy of any organism out of any one of its cells. That turns out to be a big deal because now you can take, not just mouse cells, but you can human skin cells and turn them into human stem cells. And then what they did in October is they took skin cells, turned them into stem cells and began to turn them into liver cells. So in theory, you could grow any organ from any one of your cells.Here's a second experiment: If you could photocopy your body, maybe you also want to take your mind. And one of the things you saw at TED about a year and a half ago was this guy. And he gave a wonderful technical talk. He's a professor at MIT. But in essence what he said is you can take retroviruses, which get inside brain cells of mice. You can tag them with proteins that light up when you light them. And you can map the exact pathways when a mouse sees, feels, touches, remembers, loves. And then you can take a fiber optic cable and light up some of the same things. And by the way, as you do this, you can image it in two colors, which means you can download this information as binary code directly into a computer.So what's the bottom line on that? Well it's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories, maybe into a new body. And maybe you can upload other people's memories as well. And this might have just one or two small ethical, political, moral implications. (Laughter) Just a thought.Here's the kind of questions that are becoming interesting questions for philosophers, for governing people, for economists, for scientists. Because these technologies are moving really quickly.And as you think about it, let me close with an example of the brain. The first place where you would expect to see enormous evolutionary pressure today, both because of the inputs, which are becoming massive, and because of the plasticity of the organ, is the brain.Do we have any evidence that that is happening? Well let's take a look at something like autism incidence per thousand. Here's what it looks like in 2000. Here's what it looks like in 2002, 2006, 2008. Here's the increase in less than a decade. And we still don't know why this is happening. What we do know is, potentially, the brain is reacting in a hyperactive, hyper-plastic way, and creating individuals that are like this. And this is only one of the conditions that's out there. You've also got people with who are extraordinarily smart, people who can remember everything they've seen in their lives, people who've got synesthesia, people who've got schizophrenia. You've got all kinds of stuff going on out there, and we still don't understand how and why this is happening.But one question you might want to ask is, are we seeing a rapid evolution of the brain and of how we process data? Because when you think of how much data's coming into our brains, we're trying to take in as much data in a day as people used to take in in a lifetime. And as you're thinking about this, there's four theories as to why this might be going on, plus a whole series of others. I don't have a good answer. There really needs to be more research on this.One option is the fast food fetish. There's beginning to be some evidence that obesity and diet have something to do with gene modifications, which may or may not have an impact on how the brain of an infant works.A second option is the sexy geek option. These conditions are highly rare. (Laughter) (Applause) But what's beginning to happen is because these geeks are all getting together, because they are highly qualified for computer programming and it is highly remunerated, as well as other very detail-oriented tasks, that they are concentrating geographically and finding like-minded mates. So this is the assortative mating hypothesis of these genes reinforcing one another in these structures.The third, is this too much information? We're trying to process so much stuff that some people get synesthetic and just have huge pipes that remember everything. Other people get hyper-sensitive to the amount of information. Other people react with various psychological conditions or reactions to this information. Or maybe it's chemicals.But when you see an increase of that order of magnitude in a condition, either you're not measuring it right or there's something going on very quickly, and it may be evolution in real time.Here's the bottom line. What I think we are doing is we're transitioning as a species. And I didn't think this when Steve Gullans and I started writing together. I think we're transitioning into Homo evolutis that, for better or worse, is not just a hominid that's conscious of his or her environment, it's a hominid that's beginning to directly and deliberately control the evolution of its own species, of bacteria, of plants, of animals. And I think that's such an order of magnitude change that your grandkids or your great-grandkids may be a species very different from you.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_will_our_kids_be_a_different_species
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"When I go to parties, it doesn't usually take very long for people to find out that I'm a scientist and I study sex. And then I get asked questions. And the questions usually have a very particular format. They start with the phrase, ""A friend told me,"" and then they end with the phrase, ""Is this true?"" And most of the time I'm glad to say that I can answer them, but sometimes I have to say, ""I'm really sorry, but I don't know because I'm not that kind of a doctor.""That is, I'm not a clinician, I'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy. And my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything's going right, rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong, like so many of you. And what I do is I look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they've evolved for fundamental biological problems.So today I'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric Ivory Tower activity that we find at our universities, but that broad study across species, tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health. And this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain, and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises. And now you know why I'm fun at parties.(Laughter)So today I'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one. Now I'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows — I did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week — penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another. And the slide behind me barely scratches the surface of how widespread they are in animals. There's an enormous amount of anatomical variation. You find muscular tubes, modified legs, modified fins, as well as the mammalian fleshy, inflatable cylinder that we're all familiar with — or at least half of you are.(Laughter)And I think we see this tremendous variation because it's a really effective solution to a very basic biological problem, and that is getting sperm in a position to meet up with eggs and form zygotes. Now the penis isn't actually required for internal fertiliztion, but when internal fertilization evolves, penises often follow.And the question I get when I start talking about this most often is, ""What made you interested in this subject?"" And the answer is skeletons. You wouldn't think that skeletons and penises have very much to do with one another. And that's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power. And my first forays into biological research, doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate, were really squarely in that realm.But when I went to graduate school to study biomechanics, I really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function. I tried a bunch of different stuff. A lot of it didn't pan out. But then one day I started thinking about the mammalian penis. And it's really an odd sort of structure. Before it can be used for internal fertilization, its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion. Most of the time it's a flexible organ. It's easy to bend. But before it's brought into use during copulation it has to become rigid, it has to become difficult to bend. And moreover, it has to work. A reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring, and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool.And so I thought, ""Here's a problem that just cries out for a skeletal system — not one like this one, but one like this one — because, functionally, a skeleton is any system that supports tissue and transmits forces. And I already knew that animals like this earthworm, indeed most animals, don't support their tissues by draping them over bones. Instead they're more like reinforced water balloons. They use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton. And a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements. The skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins. And the interaction is crucial. Without both elements you have no support. If you have fluid with no wall to surround it and keep pressure up, you have a puddle. And if you have just the wall with no fluid inside of it to put the wall in tension, you've got a little wet rag.When you look at a penis in cross section, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton. It has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid — in this case blood — surrounded by a wall of tissue that's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen.But at the time when I started this project, the best explanation I could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues, and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila! it became erect.And that explained to me expansion — made sense: more fluid, you get tissues that expand — but it didn't actually explain erection. Because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend. And no one had systematically looked at the wall tissue. So I thought, wall tissue's important in skeletons. It has to be part of the explanation.And this was the point at which my graduate adviser said, ""Whoa! Hold on. Slow down."" Because after about six months of me talking about this, I think he finally figured out that I was really serious about the penis thing.(Laughter)So he sat me down, and he warned me. He was like, ""Be careful going down this path. I'm not sure this project's going to pan out."" Because he was afraid I was walking into a trap. I was taking on a socially embarrassing question with an answer that he thought might not be particularly interesting. And that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements. It had the central fluid, it had the surrounding wall, and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton.So the image behind me shows a piece of tissue in one of these cross helical skeletons cut so that you're looking at the surface of the wall. The arrow shows you the long axis. And you can see two layers of fibers, one in blue and one in yellow, arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles. And if you weren't just looking at a little section of the fibers, those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton — something like a Chinese finger trap, where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck.And these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors, which I'm going to demonstrate in a film. It's a model skeleton that I made out of a piece of cloth that I wrapped around an inflated balloon. The cloth's cut on the bias. So you can see that the fibers wrap in helices, and those fibers can reorient as the skeleton moves, which means the skeleton's flexible. It lengthens, shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces.Now my adviser's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton. What are you going to contribute? What new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology? And I thought, ""Yeah, he does have a really good point here."" So I spent a long, long time thinking about it. And one thing kept bothering me, and that's, when they're functioning, penises don't wiggle. (Laughter) So something interesting had to be going on.So I went ahead, collected wall tissue, prepared it so it was erect, sectioned it, put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look, fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety. But instead I saw this. There's an outer layer and an inner layer. The arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton.I was really surprised at this. Everyone I showed it was really surprised at this. Why was everyone surprised at this? That's because we knew theoretically that there was another way of arranging fibers in a hydrostatic skeleton, and that was with fibers at zero degrees and 90 degrees to the long axis of the structure. The thing is, no one had ever seen it before in nature. And now I was looking at one.Those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very, very different behavior. I'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials. So it'll be made of the same cotton cloth, same balloon, same internal pressure. But the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently. And you'll see that, unlike the cross helical model, this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending.Now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues. They're an integral part of the penile skeleton. If the wall around the erectile tissue wasn't there, if it wasn't reinforced in this way, the shape would change, but the inflated penis would not resist bending, and erection simply wouldn't work.It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important.So to sum up: Twenty years ago, I had a college adviser tell me, when I went to the college and said, ""I'm kind of interested in anatomy,"" they said, ""Anatomy's a dead science."" He couldn't have been more wrong. I really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies. Not just about its genetics and molecular biology, but up here in the meat end of the scale. We've got limits on our time. We often focus on one disease, one model, one problem, but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us. After all, if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems, there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/diane_kelly_what_we_didn_t_know_about_penis_anatomy
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"I have the answer to a question that we've all asked. The question is, Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown? Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture — The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx. Where'd that come from?About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language. To write a word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting an equation, because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. That's one of the reasons so much of what we've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks.This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra. And al-jebr roughly translates to ""the system for reconciling disparate parts."" Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra. One example among many.The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe — which is to say Spain — in the 11th and 12th centuries. And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language.But there were problems. One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice. Trust me on that one. Also, those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages.Here's one of the culprits. This is the letter SHeen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH — ""sh."" It's also the very first letter of the word shalan, which means ""something"" just like the the English word ""something"" — some undefined, unknown thing.Now in Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article ""al."" So this is al-shalan — the unknown thing. And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th century derivation of proofs.The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter SHeen and the word shalan can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that ""sh"" sound. So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, ""ck"" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai.Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X. And once that happened, once this material was in Latin, it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years.But now we have the answer to our question. Why is it that X is the unknown? X is the unknown because you can't say ""sh"" in Spanish. (Laughter) And I thought that was worth sharing.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_why_is_x_the_unknown
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"I collaborate with bacteria. And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour.So what you're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing, and as they do so they create an electrical charge. And this attracts metals from their local environment. And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria.One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water. And the desalination process is one where we take out salts. We can use it for drinking and agriculture. Removing the salts from water — particularly seawater — through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe.So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology. We take the water from the sea and we apply pressure. And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane. This takes energy, producing clean water. But we're also left with a concentrated salt solution, or brine.But the process is very expensive and it's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe. And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea. And this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it's pumped back out into.So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology. And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [900] million liters per day of desalinated water. But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine. And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play.So what we're doing at the moment is we're accumulating metals like calcium, potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine. And this, in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned, equates to a $4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore — a place that doesn't have any natural resources.So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before; imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine. And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube, a mining industry that is in harmony with nature.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/damian_palin_mining_minerals_from_seawater
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"Today I'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design, and it makes perfect sense that I should be the one to do it because I have a Bachelor's degree in Literature. (Laughter) But I'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs, so I pretty much know everything there is.Now, I'm sure you recognize this object; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at Los Angeles International Airport over the past couple of days. This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky. And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture.It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX, although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era, when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants.It is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located, of course, at Stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design, the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously, the much better access to parking. When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer. After all, the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often, preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls.(Applause)(Music)Ah yes, a table. We use these every day. And on top of it, the juicy salif. This is a design by Philippe Starck, who I believe is in the audience at this very moment. And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision, its playfulness, its innovation and its promise of imminent violence. (Laughter)It is a design that challenges your intuition — it is not what you think it is when you first see it. It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d'oeuvres at a time, which would be useful out in the lobby, I would say. And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism, it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts. It is in fact a citrus juicer and when I say that, you never see it as anything else again.It is also not a monument to design, it is a monument to design's utility. You can take it home with you, unlike the Theme Building, which will stay where it is forever. This is affordable and can come home with you and, as such, it can sit on your kitchen counter — it can't go in your drawers; trust me, I found that out the hard way — and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design. One other thing about it, if you do have one at home, let me tell you one of the features you may not know: when you fall asleep, it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep. (Applause)Okay, what is this object? I have no idea. I don't know what that thing is. It looks terrible. Is it a little hot plate? I don't get it. Does anyone know? Chi? It's an ... iPhone. iPhone. Oh yes, that's right, I remember those; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days.No, I have an iPhone. Of course I do. Here is my well-loved iPhone. I do so many things on this little device. I like to read books on it. More than that, I like to buy books on it that I never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and I never look at them again and it's perfect. I use it every day to measure the weight of an ox, for example.Every now and then, I admit that I complete a phone call on it occasionally. And yet I forget about it all the time. This is a design that once you saw it, you forgot about it. It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life. Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology. Or I should say, what it did was it took technology which, unlike people in this room, to many other people in the world, still feels very alien, and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate.And unlike the juicy salif, it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain, rather, it simply attaches itself to your brain. (Laughter) And you didn't even notice it happened. So there you go. My name is John Hodgman. I just explained design. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hodgman_design_explained
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"I always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement: to resonate other people's feelings, thoughts, intentions, motivations, in the act of being with them. As a scientist, I always wanted to measure that resonance, that sense of the other that happens so quickly, in the blink of an eye. We intuit other people's feelings; we know the meaning of their actions even before they happen. We're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else's subjectivity. We do that all the time. We just can't shake it off. It's so important that the very tools we use to understand ourselves, to understand the world around us, are shaped by that stance. We are social to the core.So my journey in autism really started when I lived in a residential unit for adults with autism. Most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals. This is a long time ago. And for them, autism was devastating. They had profound intellectual disabilities. They didn't talk. But most of all, they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them, from their environment and from the people. In fact, at the time, if you walked into a school for individuals with autism, you'd hear a lot of noise, plenty of commotion, actions, people doing things. But they're always doing things by themselves. So they may be looking at a light in the ceiling, or they may be isolated in the corner, or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements, in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere. Extremely, extremely isolated.Well, now we know that autism is this disruption, the disruption of this resonance that I am telling you about. These are survival skills. These are survival skills that we inherited over many, many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.You see, babies are born in a state of utter fragility. Without the caregiver, they wouldn't survive, so it stands to reason that nature would endow them with these mechanisms of survival. They orient to the caregiver. From the first days and weeks of life, babies prefer to hear human sounds, rather than just sounds in the environment. They prefer to look at people rather than at things, and even as they're looking at people, they look at people's eyes, because the eye is the window to the other person's experiences, so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away. Well, they orient to the caregiver. The caregiver seeks the baby. And it's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind — the social mind, the social brain — depends on.We always think about autism as something that happens later on in life. It doesn't; it begins with the beginning of life. As babies engage with caregivers, they soon realize that, well, there is something between the ears that is very important — it's invisible, you can't see it, but it's really critical. And that thing is called attention. And they learn soon enough, even before they can utter one word, that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want. They also learn to follow other people's gazes, because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about. And soon enough, they start to learn about the meaning of things, because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something, they're not just getting a directional cue. They are getting the other person's meaning of that thing, the attitude. And soon enough, they start building this body of meanings, but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction. Those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others.Well, this is a 15-month-old little girl, and she has autism. And I am coming so close to her that I am maybe two inches from her face, and she's quite oblivious to me. Imagine if I did that to you, came two inches from your face. You'd do probably two things, wouldn't you? You would recoil. You would call the police.(Laughter)You would do something, because it's literally impossible to penetrate somebody's physical space and not get that reaction. We do so, remember, intuitively, effortlessly. This is our body wisdom; it's not something mediated by our language. Our body just knows that. And we've known that for a long time.And this is not something that happens to humans only. It happens to some of our phyletic cousins, because if you're a monkey, and you look at another monkey, and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you, and that is considered to be a signal or threat, well, you are not going to be alive for long. So something that in other species are survival mechanisms, without which they wouldn't basically live, we bring into the context of human beings, and this is what we need to simply act, socially.Now, she is oblivious to me and I'm so close to her, and you think, maybe she can see you, maybe she can hear you. Well, a few minutes later, she goes to the corner of the room, and she finds a tiny little piece of candy, an M&M. So I could not attract her attention, but something — a thing — did. Now, most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people. Now, for this girl, that division line is not so clear, and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like. Now, remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences. What she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging, moment by moment, as she is isolating herself further and further. So we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic, the brain determines who we're going to be. But, in fact, the brain also becomes who we are, and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction, this is what's happening with her mind, and this is what's happening with her brain.Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders. And it's a brain disorder. It's a disorder that begins much prior to the time that the child is born. We now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism. There are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled but there are those that are gifted. There are those individuals who don't talk at all; there are those individuals who talk too much. There are those individuals that if you observe them in their school, you see them running the periphery fence all the school day if you let them, to those individuals who cannot stop coming to you and trying to engage you repeatedly, relentlessly, but often in an awkward fashion, without that immediate resonance.Well, this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time. When I started in this field, we thought there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 — a very rare condition. Well, now we know it's more like one in 100. There are millions of individuals with autism all around us.The societal cost of this condition is huge, in the US alone, maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars. And you know what? Most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled, individuals who need wraparound services — services that are very, very intensive. And those services can cost in excess of 60,000 to 80,000 dollars a year. Those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment, because now we know that autism creates itself as individuals diverge in that pathway of learning that I mentioned to you. Were we to be able to identify this condition at an earlier point, and intervene and treat — I can tell you, this has been probably something that has changed my life in the past 10 years, this notion that we can absolutely attenuate this condition. Also, we have a window of opportunity, because the brain is malleable for just so long, and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life. It's not that that window closes; it doesn't. But it diminishes considerably. And yet, the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years, and in disadvantaged populations, the populations that don't have access to clinical services, rural populations, minorities, the age of diagnosis is later still, which is almost as if I were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe. So I feel that we have a bioethical imperative. The science is there. But no science is of relevance if it doesn't have an impact on the community. And we just can't afford that missed opportunity, because children with autism become adults with autism. And we feel that those things we can do for these children, for those families, early on, will have lifetime consequences — for the child, for the family, and for the community at large. So this is our view of autism.There are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism. In fact, we believe there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism, and genetic anomalies, much more than just genes. And we actually have a bit of a question here, because if there are so many different causes of autism, how do you go from those liabilities to the actual syndrome? Because people like myself, when we walk into a playroom, we recognize a child as having autism. So how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity? And the answer is what lies in between, which is development. And in fact, we are very interested in those first two years of life, because those liabilities don't necessarily convert into autism. Autism creates itself. Were we to be able to intervene during those years of life, we might attenuate for some, and God knows, maybe even prevent for others.So how do we do that? How do we enter that feeling of resonance, how do we enter another person's being? I remember when I interacted with that 15-month-old, the thing that came to my mind was, ""How do you come into her world? Is she thinking about me? Is she thinking about others?"" Well, it's hard to do that, so we had to create the technologies. We had to basically step inside a body. We had to see the world through her eyes.And so in the past many years, we've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking. We can see, moment by moment, what children are engaging with. This is my colleague, Warren Jones, with whom we've been building these methods, these studies, for the past 12 years. And you see there a happy five-month-old, a five-month little boy who is going to watch things that are brought from his world: his mom, the caregiver, but also experiences that he would have were he to be in his daycare. What we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory, but in order for us to do that, we had to create these very sophisticated measures, measures of how people, how little babies, how newborns, engage with the world, moment by moment. What is important and what is not.Well, we created those measures, and here, what you see is what we call a funnel of attention. You're watching a video — those frames are separated by about a second — through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds. And we freeze one frame, and this is what the typical children are doing. In this scan pass, in green here, are two-year-olds with autism. So on that frame, the children who are typical are watching this, the emotion of expression of that little boy as he's fighting a little bit with the little girl. What are the children with autism doing? They are focusing on the revolving door, opening and shutting. Well, I can tell you that this divergence that you're seeing here doesn't happen only in our five-minute experiment. It happens moment by moment in their real lives, and their minds are being formed and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers.Well, we took a construct from our pediatrician friends, the concept of growth charts — you know, when you take a child to the pediatrician, and you have physical height and weight. Well, we decided we were going to create growth charts of social engagement. We sought children from the time they're born. What you see here on the x-axis is two, three, four, five, six months and nine, until about the age of 24 months. This is the percent of their viewing time that they're focusing on people's eyes, and this is their growth chart. They start over here — they love people's eyes — and it remains quite stable. It sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months. Now, let's see what's happening with babies who became autistic. It's something very different. It starts way up here, but then it's a free fall. It's very much like they brought into this world the reflex that orients them to people, but it has no traction. It's almost as if that stimulus — you — you're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives.Now, we thought those data were so powerful, in a way, that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life, because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-old, you'd be surprised by how social those babies are. And what we see in the first six months of life is that those two groups can be segregated very easily. And using these kinds of measures and many others, what we found out is that our science could, in fact, identify this condition early on. We didn't have to wait for the behaviors of autism to emerge in the second year of life. If we measured things that are, evolutionarily, highly conserved, and developmentally very early-emerging — things that are online from the first weeks of life — we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months, and that's what we are doing now.Now, we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children, but this would be for naught if we didn't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community. Now we want those devices, of course, to be deployed by those who are in the trenches — our colleagues, the primary care physicians, who see every child — and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice, because they have to see so many children. And we want to do that universally so that we don't miss any child. But this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention, for treatment. We need to be able to work with the families, support the families, to manage those first years with them. We need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment, because those treatments are going to change these children's and those families' lives.Now, when we think about what we [can] do in those first years, I can tell you, having been in this field for so long, one feels really rejuvenated. There is a sense that the science that one worked on can actually have an impact on realities, preventing, in fact, those experiences that I really started in my journey in this field. I thought at the time that this was an intractable condition. No longer. We can do a great deal of things.And the idea is not to cure autism. That's not the idea. What we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times, the profound intellectual disabilities, the lack of language, the profound, profound isolation. We feel that individuals with autism, in fact, have a very special perspective on the world, and we need diversity. And they can work extremely well in some areas of strength: predictable situations, situations that can be defined. Because after all, they learn about the world almost, like, about it, rather than learning how to function in it. But this is a strength if you're working, for example, in technology. And there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities. We want them to be free to do that. We want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths, but to fulfill their promise.Well, thank you for listening to me.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ami_klin_a_new_way_to_diagnose_autism
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"I am no designer, nope, no way. My dad was, which is kind of an interesting way to grow up. I had to figure out what it is my dad did and why it was important.Dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up, you know, ""Bad design is just people not thinking, John,"" he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or, say, a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen.You know, ""Design — bad design, there's just no excuse for it. It's letting stuff happen without thinking about it. Every object should be about something, John. It should imagine a user. It should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object.Good design,"" my dad said, ""is about supplying intent."" That's what he said.Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer. That was a big deal; that was important. He worked for Kodak for a while; that was important. He designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for Steelcase; that was important. I knew design was important in my house because, for heaven's sake, it put food on our table, right?And design was in everything my dad did. He had a Dixieland jazz band when we were growing up, and he would always cover Louis Armstrong tunes. And I would ask him every once in a while,""Dad, do you want it to sound like the record?"" We had lots of old jazz records lying around the house. And he said, ""No, never, John, never. The song is just a given, that's how you have to think about it. You gotta make it your own. You gotta design it. Show everyone what you intend,"" is what he said. ""Doing that, acting by design, is what we all should be doing. It's where we all belong.""All of us? Designers? Oh, oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.The song is just a given. It's how you cover it that matters. Well, let's hold on to that thought for just a minute. It's kind of like this wheelchair I'm in, right? The original tune? It's a little scary.""Ooh, what happened to that dude? He can't walk. Anybody know the story? Anybody?""I don't like to talk about this very much, but I'll tell you guys the story today. All right, exactly 36 years ago this week, that's right, I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania, and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car. But ever since then, the wheelchair has been a given in my life. My life, at the mercy of good design and bad design.Think about it. Now, in design terms, a wheelchair is a very difficult object. It mostly projects tragedy and fear and misfortune, and it projects that message, that story, so strongly that it almost blots out anything else.I roll swiftly through an airport, right? And moms grab their kids out of the way and say, ""Don't stare!"" The poor kid, you know, has this terrified look on his face, God knows what they think. And for decades, I'm going, why does this happen? What can I do about it? How can I change this? I mean there must be something. So I would roll, I'd make no eye contact — just kinda frown, right? Or I'd dress up really, really sharply or something. Or I'd make eye contact with everyone — that was really creepy; that didn't work at all. (Laughter) You know anything, I'd try. I wouldn't shower for a week — nothing worked.Nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago, my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that I had, and they said,""Oh, Dad! Dad! Look, you gotta get these, these flashy wheels — you gotta get 'em!""And I said, ""Oh, girls, Dad is a very important journalist, that just wouldn't do at all.""And of course, they immediately concluded,""Oh, what a bummer, Dad. Journalists aren't allowed to have flashy wheels. I mean, how important could you be then?"" they said.I went, ""Wait a minute, all right, right — I'll get the wheels."" Purely out of protest,I got the flashy wheels, and I installed them and — check this out. Could I have my special light cue please? (Laughter) Look at that! Now ... look at, look at this! Look at this!So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life, I mean totally changed my life. Instead of blank stares and awkwardness, now it is pointing and smiling!People going, ""Awesome wheels, dude! Those are awesome! I mean, I want some of those wheels!"" Little kids say, ""Can I have a ride?"" (Laughter)And of course there's the occasional person — usually a middle-aged male who will say, ""Oh, those wheels are great! I guess they're for safety, right?"" (Laughter) No! They're not for safety. No, no, no, no, no.What's the difference here, the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights? The difference is intent. That's right, that's right; I'm no longer a victim. I chose to change the situation — I'm the Commander of the Starship Wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front. Right? Intent changes the picture completely. I choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element. Acting with intent. It conveys authorship. It suggests that someone is driving. It's reassuring; people are drawn to it. Someone making the experience their own. Covering the tragic tune with something different, something radically different. People respond to that.Now it seems simple, but actually I think in our society and culture in general, we have a huge problem with intent. Now go with me here. Look at this guy. You know who this is? It's Anders Breivik. Now, if he intended to kill in Olso, Norway last year, dozens and dozens of young people — if he intended to do that, he's a vicious criminal. We punish him. Life in prison. Death penalty in the United States, not so much in Norway. But, if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy, if he was motivated by some random mental illness, he's in a completely different category. We may put him away for life, but we watch him clinically. It's a completely different domain. As an intentional murderer, Anders Breivik is merely evil. But as a dysfunctional, as a dysfunctional murderer/psychotic, he's something much more complicated. He's the breath of some primitive, ancient chaos. He's the random state of nature we emerged from. He's something very, very different.It's as though intent is an essential component for humanity. It's what we're supposed to do somehow. We're supposed to act with intent. We're supposed to do things by design. Intent is a marker for civilization.Now here's an example a little closer to home: My family is all about intent. You can probably tell there are two sets of twins, the result of IVF technology, in vitro fertilization technology, due to some physical limitations I won't go into. Anyway, in vitro technology, IVF, is about as intentional as agriculture. Let me tell you, some of you may have the experience. In fact, the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian. I met the dude. He's a great guy. He carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he'd worked with, all the different animals. Probes he designed, and in fact, he was really, really proud of these probes.He would say, ""You're right between horse and squirrel, John."" (Laughter) But anyway, so when my wife and I decided to upgrade our early middle age — we had four kids, after all — with a little different technology that I won't explain in too much detail here — my urologist assured me I had nothing whatsoever to worry about.""No need for birth control, Doc, are you sure about that?""""John, John, I looked at your chart. From your sperm tests we can confidently say that you're basically a form of birth control.""Well! (Laughter) What a liberating thought! Yes! And after a couple very liberating weekends, my wife and I, utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a TEDTalk someday but I won't get into it now, we noticed some familiar, if unexpected, symptoms. I wasn't exactly a form of birth control. Look at that font there. My wife was so pissed.I mean, did a designer come up with that? No, I don't think a designer did come up with that. In fact, maybe that's the problem. And so, little Ajax was born. He's like our other children, but the experience is completely different. It's something like my accident, right? He came out of nowhere. But we all had to change, but not just react to the given; we bend to this new experience with intent. We're five now. Five. Facing the given with intent. Doing things by design. Hey, the name Ajax — you can't get much more intentional than that, right? We're really hoping he thanks us for that later on. (Laughter)But I never became a designer. No, no, no, no. Never attempted. Never even close. I did love some great designs as I was growing up: The HP 35S calculator — God, I loved that thing. Oh God, I wish I had one. Man, I love that thing. I could afford that. Other designs I really couldn't afford, like the 1974 911 Targa. In school, I studied nothing close to design or engineering; I studied useless things like the Classics, but there were some lessons even there — this guy, Plato, it turns out he's a designer. He designed a state in ""The Republic,"" a design never implemented. Listen to one of the design features of Plato's Government 4.0:""The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.""Well, got that wrong, didn't we? But look at that statement; it's all about intent. That's what I love about it. But consider what Plato is doing here. What is he doing? It's a grand idea of design — a huge idea of design, common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the Classical period. What was going on then? They were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive? As the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos, a confrontation with random, brutal nature, they suddenly had a moment to think — and there was a lot to think about. All of a sudden, human existence needed an intent. Human life needed a reason. Reality itself needed a designer. The given was replaced by various aspects of intent, by various designs, by various gods. Gods we're still fighting about. Oh yeah.Today we don't confront the chaos of nature. Today it is the chaos of humanity's impact on the Earth itself that we confront. This young discipline called design, I think, is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question: What shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created? What shall we do? How shall we inscribe intent on all the objects we create, on all the circumstances we create, on all the places we change? The consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting. That's the tune we're all covering today, all of us. And we can't just imitate the past. No. That won't do. That won't do at all.Here's my favorite design moment: In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s, I was working for ABC News, and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator, the brutal dictator in Zaire, who raped and pillaged that country. There was rioting in the middle of Kinshasa. The place was falling apart; it was a horrible, horrible place, and I needed to go and explore the center of Kinshasa to report on the rioting and the looting. People were carrying off vehicles, carrying off pieces of buildings. Soldiers were in the streets shooting at looters and herding some in mass arrests. In the middle of this chaos, I'm rolling around in a wheelchair, and I was completely invisible. Completely. I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a looter. I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a journalist, particularly, at least from their perspective. And I didn't look like a soldier, that's for sure. I was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of Zaire, completely invisible. And all of a sudden, from around a corner, comes this young man, paralyzed, just like me, in this metal and wood and leather pedal, three-wheel tricycle-wheelchair device, and he pedals up to me as fast as he can.He goes, ""Hey, mister! Mister!""And I looked at him — he didn't know any other English than that, but we didn't need English, no, no, no, no, no. We sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes. And I looked at his whacky pedal mechanism; he was full of pride over his design. I wish I could show you that contraption. His smile, our glow as we talked a universal language of design, invisible to the chaos around us. His machine: homemade, bolted, rusty, comical. My machine: American-made, confident, sleek. He was particularly proud of the comfortable seat, really comfortable seat he had made in his chariot and its beautiful fabric fringe around the edge. Oh, I wish I'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him, man! He would have loved those! Oh yeah. He would have understood those; a chariot of pure intent — think about it — in a city out of control. Design blew it all away for a moment. We spoke for a few minutes and then each of us vanished back into the chaos. He went back to the streets of Kinshasa; I went to my hotel. And I think of him now, now ...And I pose this question. An object imbued with intent — it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent — it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away. This is what we must demand of our lives, of our objects, of our things, of our circumstances: living with intent. And I have to say that on that score, I have a very unfair advantage over all of you.And I want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day. Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment, a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question, but the nurse was already there with an answer.""You've had a terrible accident, young man. You've broken your back. You'll never walk again.""I said, ""I know all that — what day is it?"" You see, I knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of February, and I knew that 1976 was a leap year.""Nurse! Is this the 28th or the 29th?""And she looked at me and said, ""It's March 1st.""And I went, ""Oh my God. I've got some catching up to do!"" And from that moment, I knew the given was that accident; I had no option but to make up this new life without walking. Intent — a life with intent — lived by design, covering the original with something better. It's something for all of us to do or find a way to do in these times.To get back to this, to get back to design, and as my daddy suggested a long time ago,""Make the song your own, John. Show everybody what you intend.""Daddy, this one's for you. (Music)♫ Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner ♫ ♫ but he was another man. ♫ ♫ Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona to attend a California bash. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_hockenberry_we_are_all_designers
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"So my freshman year of college I signed up for an internship in the housing unit at Greater Boston Legal Services. Showed up the first day ready to make coffee and photocopies, but was paired with this righteous, deeply inspired attorney named Jeff Purcell, who thrust me onto the front lines from the very first day.And over the course of nine months I had the chance to have dozens of conversations with low-income families in Boston who would come in presenting with housing issues, but always had an underlying health issue. So I had a client who came in, about to be evicted because he hasn't paid his rent. But he hasn't paid his rent, of course, because he's paying for his HIV medication and just can't afford both. We had moms who would come in, daughter has asthma, wakes up covered in cockroaches every morning. And one of our litigation strategies was actually to send me into the home of these clients with these large glass bottles. And I would collect the cockroaches, hot glue-gun them to this poster board that we'd bring to court for our cases. And we always won because the judges were just so grossed out. Far more effective, I have to say, than anything I later learned in law school.But over the course of these nine months, I grew frustrated with feeling like we were intervening too far downstream in the lives of our clients — that by the time they came to us, they were already in crisis. And at the end of my freshman year of college, I read an article about the work that Dr. Barry Zuckerman was doing as Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. And his first hire was a legal services attorney to represent the patients.So I called Barry, and with his blessing, in October 1995 walked into the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic at Boston Medical Center. I'll never forget, the TVs played this endless reel of cartoons. And the exhaustion of mothers who had taken two, three, sometimes four buses to bring their child to the doctor was just palpable.The doctors, it seemed, never really had enough time for all the patients, try as they might. And over the course of six months, I would corner them in the hallway and ask them a sort of naive but fundamental question: ""If you had unlimited resources, what's the one thing you would give your patients?""And I heard the same story again and again, a story we've heard hundreds of times since then. They said, ""Every day we have patients that come into the clinic — child has an ear infection, I prescribe antibiotics. But the real issue is there's no food at home. The real issue is that child is living with 12 other people in a two-bedroom apartment. And I don't even ask about those issues because there's nothing I can do. I have 13 minutes with each patient. Patients are piling up in the clinic waiting room. I have no idea where the nearest food pantry is. And I don't even have any help."" In that clinic, even today, there are two social workers for 24,000 pediatric patients, which is better than a lot of the clinics out there.So Health Leads was born of these conversations — a simple model where doctors and nurses can prescribe nutritious food, heat in the winter and other basic resources for their patients the same way they prescribe medication. Patients then take their prescriptions to our desk in the clinic waiting room where we have a core of well-trained college student advocates who work side by side with these families to connect them out to the existing landscape of community resources.So we began with a card table in the clinic waiting room — totally lemonade stand style. But today we have a thousand college student advocates who are working to connect nearly 9,000 patients and their families with the resources that they need to be healthy.So 18 months ago I got this email that changed my life. And the email was from Dr. Jack Geiger, who had written to congratulate me on Health Leads and to share, as he said, a bit of historical context. In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta. And so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them. And they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket, which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic. And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. — which was funding Geiger's clinic — found out about this, they were furious. And they sent this bureaucrat down to tell Geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care — to which Geiger famously and logically responded, ""The last time I checked my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.""(Laughter)So when I got this email from Dr. Geiger, I knew I was supposed to be proud to be part of this history. But the truth is I was devastated. Here we are, 45 years after Geiger has prescribed food for his patients, and I have doctors telling me, ""On those issues, we practice a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy."" Forty-five years after Geiger, Health Leads has to reinvent the prescription for basic resources. So I have spent hours upon hours trying to make sense of this weird Groundhog Day. How is it that if for decades we had a pretty straightforward tool for keeping patients, and especially low-income patients, healthy, that we didn't use it? If we know what it takes to have a healthcare system rather than a sick-care system, why don't we just do it?These questions, in my mind, are not hard because the answers are complicated, they are hard because they require that we be honest with ourselves. My belief is that it's almost too painful to articulate our aspirations for our healthcare system, or even admit that we have any at all. Because if we did, they would be so removed from our current reality. But that doesn't change my belief that all of us, deep inside, here in this room and across this country, share a similar set of desires. That if we are honest with ourselves and listen quietly, that we all harbor one fiercely held aspiration for our healthcare: that it keep us healthy.This aspiration that our healthcare keep us healthy is an enormously powerful one. And the way I think about this is that healthcare is like any other system. It's just a set of choices that people make. What if we decided to make a different set of choices? What if we decided to take all the parts of healthcare that have drifted away from us and stand firm and say, ""No. These things are ours. They will be used for our purposes. They will be used to realize our aspiration""? What if everything we needed to realize our aspiration for healthcare was right there in front of us just waiting to be claimed?So that's where Health Leads began. We started with the prescription pad — a very ordinary piece of paper — and we asked, not what do patients need to get healthy — antibiotics, an inhaler, medication — but what do patients need to be healthy, to not get sick in the first place? And we chose to use the prescription for that purpose. So just a few miles from here at Children's National Medical Center, when patients come into the doctor's office, they're asked a few questions. They're asked, ""Are you running out of food at the end of the month? Do you have safe housing?"" And when the doctor begins the visit, she knows height, weight, is there food at home, is the family living in a shelter. And that not only leads to a better set of clinical choices, but the doctor can also prescribe those resources for the patient, using Health Leads like any other sub-specialty referral.The problem is, once you get a taste of what it's like to realize your aspiration for healthcare, you want more. So we thought, if we can get individual doctors to prescribe these basic resources for their patients, could we get an entire healthcare system to shift its presumption? And we gave it a shot.So now at Harlem Hospital Center when patients come in with an elevated body mass index, the electronic medical record automatically generates a prescription for Health Leads. And our volunteers can then work with them to connect patients to healthy food and excercise programs in their communities. We've created a presumption that if you're a patient at that hospital with an elevated BMI, the four walls of the doctor's office probably aren't going to give you everything you need to be healthy. You need more.So on the one hand, this is just a basic recoding of the electronic medical record. And on the other hand, it's a radical transformation of the electronic medical record from a static repository of diagnostic information to a health promotion tool. In the private sector, when you squeeze that kind of additional value out of a fixed-cost investment, it's called a billion-dollar company. But in my world, it's called reduced obesity and diabetes. It's called healthcare — a system where doctors can prescribe solutions to improve health, not just manage disease.Same thing in the clinic waiting room. So every day in this country three million patients pass through about 150,000 clinic waiting rooms in this country. And what do they do when they're there? They sit, they watch the goldfish in the fish tank, they read extremely old copies of Good Housekeeping magazine. But mostly we all just sit there forever, waiting. How did we get here where we devote hundreds of acres and thousands of hours to waiting? What if we had a waiting room where you don't just sit when you're sick, but where you go to get healthy. If airports can become shopping malls and McDonald's can become playgrounds, surely we can reinvent the clinic waiting room.And that's what Health Leads has tried to do, to reclaim that real estate and that time and to use it as a gateway to connect patients to the resources they need to be healthy. So it's a brutal winter in the Northeast, your kid has asthma, your heat just got turned off, and of course you're in the waiting room of the ER, because the cold air triggered your child's asthma. But what if instead of waiting for hours anxiously, the waiting room became the place where Health Leads turned your heat back on?And of course all of this requires a broader workforce. But if we're creative, we already have that too. We know that our doctors and nurses and even social workers aren't enough, that the ticking minutes of health care are too constraining. Health just takes more time. It requires a non-clinical army of community health workers and case managers and many others.What if a small part of that next healthcare workforce were the 11 million college students in this country? Unencumbered by clinical responsibilities, unwilling to take no for an answer from those bureaucracies that tend to crush patients, and with an unparalleled ability for information retrieval honed through years of using Google.Now lest you think it improbable that a college volunteer can make this kind of commitment, I have two words for you: March Madness. The average NCAA Division I men's basketball player dedicates 39 hours a week to his sport. Now we may think that's good or bad, but in either case it's real. And Health Leads is based on the presumption that for too long we have asked too little of our college students when it comes to real impact in vulnerable communities. College sports teams say, ""We're going to take dozens of hours at some field across campus at some ungodly hour of the morning and we're going to measure your performance, and your team's performance, and if you don't measure up or you don't show up, we're going to cut you off the team. But we'll make huge investments in your training and development, and we'll give you an extraordinary community of peers."" And people line up out the door just for the chance to be part of it.So our feeling is, if it's good enough for the rugby team, it's good enough for health and poverty. Health Leads too recruits competitively, trains intensively, coaches professionally, demands significant time, builds a cohesive team and measures results — a kind of Teach for America for healthcare.Now in the top 10 cities in the U.S. with the largest number of Medicaid patients, each of those has at least 20,000 college students. New York alone has half a million college students. And this isn't just a sort of short-term workforce to connect patients to basic resources, it's a next generation healthcare leadership pipeline who've spent two, three, four years in the clinic waiting room talking to patients about their most basic health needs. And they leave with the conviction, the ability and the efficacy to realize our most basic aspirations for health care. And the thing is, there's thousands of these folks already out there.So Mia Lozada is Chief Resident of Internal Medicine at UCSF Medical Center, but for three years as an undergraduate she was a Health Leads volunteer in the clinic waiting room at Boston Medical Center. Mia says, ""When my classmates write a prescription, they think their work is done. When I write a prescription, I think, can the family read the prescription? Do they have transportation to the pharmacy? Do they have food to take with the prescription? Do they have insurance to fill the prescription? Those are the questions I learned at Health Leads, not in medical school.""Now none of these solutions — the prescription pad, the electronic medical record, the waiting room, the army of college students — are perfect. But they are ours for the taking — simple examples of the vast under-utilized healthcare resources that, if we reclaimed and redeployed, could realize our most basic aspiration of healthcare.So I had been at Legal Services for about nine months when this idea of Health Leads started percolating in my mind. And I knew I had to tell Jeff Purcell, my attorney, that I needed to leave. And I was so nervous, because I thought he was going to be disappointed in me for abandoning our clients for some crazy idea. And I sat down with him and I said, ""Jeff, I have this idea that we could mobilize college students to address patients' most basic health needs."" And I'll be honest, all I wanted was for him to not be angry at me. But he said this, ""Rebecca, when you have a vision, you have an obligation to realize that vision. You must pursue that vision."" And I have to say, I was like ""Whoa. That's a lot of pressure."" I just wanted a blessing, I didn't want some kind of mandate. But the truth is I've spent every waking minute nearly since then chasing that vision.I believe that we all have a vision for healthcare in this country. I believe that at the end of the day when we measure our healthcare, it will not be by the diseases cured, but by the diseases prevented. It will not be by the excellence of our technologies or the sophistication of our specialists, but by how rarely we needed them. And most of all, I believe that when we measure healthcare, it will be, not by what the system was, but by what we chose it to be.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_onie_what_if_our_healthcare_system_kept_us_healthy
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"Evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form. From mother to daughter, preacher to congregant, teacher to pupil, storyteller to audience. Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.But where, in our increasingly secular and fragmented world, do we offer communality of experience, unmediated by our own furious consumerism? And what narrative, what history, what identity, what moral code are we imparting to our young?Cinema is arguably the 20th century's most influential art form. Its artists told stories across national boundaries, in as many languages, genres and philosophies as one can imagine. Indeed, it is hard to find a subject that film has yet to tackle. During the last decade we've seen a vast integration of global media, now dominated by a culture of the Hollywood blockbuster. We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king. What was common to us all 40 years ago — the telling of stories between generations — is now rarified. As a filmmaker, it worried me. As a human being, it puts the fear of God in me. What future could the young build with so little grasp of where they've come from and so few narratives of what's possible? The irony is palpable; technical access has never been greater, cultural access never weaker.And so in 2006 we set up FILMCLUB, an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions. If we could raid the annals of 100 years of film, maybe we could build a narrative that would deliver meaning to the fragmented and restless world of the young. Given the access to technology, even a school in a tiny rural hamlet could project a DVD onto a white board.In the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the U.K., with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes. The films were curated and contextualized. But the choice was theirs, and our audience quickly grew to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide. The outcome, immediate. It was an education of the most profound and transformative kind. In groups as large as 150 and as small as three, these young people discovered new places, new thoughts, new perspectives. By the time the pilot had finished, we had the names of a thousand schools that wished to join.The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica, ""Miracle in Milan."" It's a remarkable comment on slums, poverty and aspiration. I had seen the film on the occasion of my father's 50th birthday. Technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema, find and pay for the print and the projectionist. But for my father, the emotional and artistic importance of De Sica's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends, ""In order,"" he said, ""to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation.""In the last shot of ""Miracle in Milan,"" slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms. Sixty years after the film was made and 30 years after I first saw it, I see young faces tilt up in awe, their incredulity matching mine. And the speed with which they associate it with ""Slumdog Millionaire"" or the favelas in Rio speaks to the enduring nature.In a FILMCLUB season about democracy and government, we screened ""Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."" Made in 1939, the film is older than most of our members' grandparents. Frank Capra's classic values independence and propriety. It shows how to do right, how to be heroically awkward. It is also an expression of faith in the political machine as a force of honor.Shortly after ""Mr. Smith"" became a FILMCLUB classic, there was a week of all-night filibustering in the House of Lords. And it was with great delight that we found young people up and down the country explaining with authority what filibustering was and why the Lords might defy their bedtime on a point of principle. After all, Jimmy Stewart filibustered for two entire reels.In choosing ""Hotel Rwanda,"" they explored genocide of the most brutal kind. It provoked tears as well as incisive questions about unarmed peace-keeping forces and the double-dealing of a Western society that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind. And when ""Schindler's List"" demanded that they never forget, one child, full of the pain of consciousness, remarked, ""We already forgot, otherwise how did 'Hotel Rwanda' happen?""As they watch more films their lives got palpably richer. ""Pickpocket"" started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement. ""To Sir, with Love"" ignited its teen audience. They celebrated a change in attitude towards non-white Britons, but railed against our restless school system that does not value collective identity, unlike that offered by Sidney Poitier's careful tutelage.By now, these thoughtful, opinionated, curious young people thought nothing of tackling films of all forms — black and white, subtitled, documentary, non-narrative, fantasy — and thought nothing of writing detailed reviews that competed to favor one film over another in passionate and increasingly sophisticated prose. Six thousand reviews each school week vying for the honor of being review of the week.From 25 clubs, we became hundreds, then thousands, until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids in 7,000 clubs right across the country. And although the numbers were, and continue to be, extraordinary, what became more extraordinary was how the experience of critical and curious questioning translated into life. Some of our kids started talking with their parents, others with their teachers, or with their friends. And those without friends started making them.The films provided communality across all manner of divide. And the stories they held provided a shared experience. ""Persepolis"" brought a daughter closer to her Iranian mother, and ""Jaws"" became the way in which one young boy was able to articulate the fear he'd experienced in flight from violence that killed first his father then his mother, the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey.Who was right, who wrong? What would they do under the same conditions? Was the tale told well? Was there a hidden message? How has the world changed? How could it be different? A tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children who the world didn't think were interested. And they themselves had not known they cared. And as they wrote and debated, rather than seeing the films as artifacts, they began to see themselves.I have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller. In a moment she can invoke images of running barefoot on Table Mountain and playing cops and robbers. Quite recently she told me that in 1948, two of her sisters and my father traveled on a boat to Israel without my grandparents. When the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions, it was these teenagers that fed the crew. I was past 40 when my father died. He never mentioned that journey.My mother's mother left Europe in a hurry without her husband, but with her three-year-old daughter and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt. After two years in hiding, my grandfather appeared in London. He was never right again. And his story was hushed as he assimilated.My story started in England with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents. I had ""Anne Frank,"" ""The Great Escape,"" ""Shoah,"" ""Triumph of the Will."" It was Leni Riefenstahl in her elegant Nazi propaganda who gave context to what the family had to endure. These films held what was too hurtful to say out loud, and they became more useful to me than the whispers of survivors and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo on a maiden aunt's wrist.Purists may feel that fiction dissipates the quest of real human understanding, that film is too crude to tell a complex and detailed history, or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth. But within the reels lie purpose and meaning. As one 12-year-old said after watching ""Wizard of Oz,"" ""Every person should watch this, because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart.""We honor reading, why not honor watching with the same passion? Consider ""Citizen Kane"" as valuable as Jane Austen. Agree that ""Boyz n the Hood,"" like Tennyson, offers an emotional landscape and a heightened understanding that work together. Each a piece of memorable art, each a brick in the wall of who we are. And it's okay if we remember Tom Hanks better than astronaut Jim Lovell or have Ben Kingsley's face superimposed onto that of Gandhi's. And though not real, Eve Harrington, Howard Beale, Mildred Pierce are an opportunity to discover what it is to be human, and no less helpful to understanding our life and times as Shakespeare is in illuminating the world of Elizabethan England.We guessed that film, whose stories are a meeting place of drama, music, literature and human experience, would engage and inspire the young people participating in FILMCLUB. What we could not have foreseen was the measurable improvements in behavior, confidence and academic achievement. Once-reluctant students now race to school, talk to their teachers, fight, not on the playground, but to choose next week's film — young people who have found self-definition, ambition and an appetite for education and social engagement from the stories they have witnessed.Our members defy the binary description of how we so often describe our young. They are neither feral nor myopically self-absorbed. They are, like other young people, negotiating a world with infinite choice, but little culture of how to find meaningful experience. We appeared surprised at the behaviors of those who define themselves by the size of the tick on their shoes, yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered.If we want different values we have to tell a different story, a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person's identity, that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity, and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group. Because when these people get home after a screening of ""Rear Window"" and raise their gaze to the building next door, they have the tools to wonder who, apart from them, is out there and what is their story.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beeban_kidron_the_shared_wonder_of_film
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"When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. However, over time, I got used to looking for them. I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them.This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile. And my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently.So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Mendes. And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians.What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom, about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important, because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plain. This area is huge — it's four miles by three miles in size. The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city.So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts.(Laughter)So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. But you can see in more detail, and even more interesting, this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy.So we collaborated with Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change, you're looking for layers of human occupation. And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have a layer of occupation for several hundred years, dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. We also found work stone — carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jeweler's workshop here. These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used.So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. We also have evidence of an elite jeweler's workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well.So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom — it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. ""Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. There's nothing like it in the land."" So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD.(Laughter)Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_parcak_archeology_from_space
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"When I was about 16 years old I can remember flipping through channels at home during summer vacation, looking for a movie to watch on HBO — and how many of you remember ""Ferris Bueller's Day Off""? Oh yeah, great movie, right? — Well, I saw Matthew Broderick on the screen, and so I thought, ""Sweet! Ferris Bueller. I'll watch this!"" It wasn't Ferris Bueller. And forgive me Matthew Broderick, I know you've done other movies besides Ferris Bueller, but that's how I remember you; you're Ferris. But you weren't doing Ferris-y things at the time; you were doing gay things at the time.He was in a movie called ""Torch Song Trilogy."" And ""Torch Song Trilogy"" was based on a play about this drag queen who essentially was looking for love. Love and respect — that's what the whole film was about.And as I'm watching it, I'm realizing that they're talking about me. Not the drag queen part — I am not shaving my hair for anyone — but the gay part. The finding love and respect, the part about trying to find your place in the world. So as I'm watching this, I see this powerful scene that brought me to tears, and it stuck with me for the past 25 years. And there's this quote that the main character, Arnold, tells his mother as they're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives.""There's one thing more — there's just one more thing you better understand. I've taught myself to sew, cook, fix plumbing, build furniture, I can even pat myself on the back when necessary, all so I don't have to ask anyone for anything. There's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect, and anyone who can't give me those two things has no place in my life.""I remember that scene like it was yesterday; I was 16, I was in tears, I was in the closet, and I'm looking at these two people, Ferris Bueller and some guy I'd never seen before, fighting for love. When I finally got to a place in my life where I came out and accepted who I was, and was really quite happy, to tell you the truth, I was happily gay and I guess that's supposed to be right because gay means happy too. I realized there were a lot of people who weren't as gay as I was — gay being happy, not gay being attracted to the same sex. In fact, I heard that there was a lot of hate and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear about who I was and the gay lifestyle.Now, I'm sitting here trying to figure out ""the gay lifestyle,"" ""the gay lifestyle,"" and I keep hearing this word over and over and over again: lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. I've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism. That's when I got scared. Because I'm thinking, if I'm gay and I'm doing something that's going to destroy civilization, I need to figure out what this stuff is, and I need to stop doing it right now. (Laughter)So, I took a look at my life, a hard look at my life, and I saw some things very disturbing. (Laughter) And I want to begin sharing these evil things that I've been doing with you, starting with my mornings. I drink coffee. Not only do I drink coffee, I know other gay people who drink coffee. I get stuck in traffic — evil, evil traffic. Sometimes I get stuck in lines at airports.I look around, and I go, ""My God, look at all these gay people! We're all trapped in these lines! These long lines trying to get on an airplane! My God, this lifestyle that I'm living is so freaking evil!""I clean up. This is not an actual photograph of my son's room; his is messier. And because I have a 15-year-old, all I do is cook and cook and cook. Any parents out there of teenagers? All we do is cook for these people — they eat two, three, four dinners a night — it's ridiculous! This is the gay lifestyle.And after I'm done cooking and cleaning and standing in line and getting stuck in traffic, my partner and I, we get together and we decide that we're gonna go and have some wild and crazy fun. (Laughter) We're usually in bed before we find out who's eliminated on ""American Idol."" We have to wake up and find out the next day who's still on because we're too freaking tired to hear who stays on. This is the super duper evil gay lifestyle. Run for your heterosexual lives, people. (Applause)When my partner, Steve, and I first started dating, he told me this story about penguins. And I didn't know where he was going with it at first. He was kind of a little bit nervous when he was sharing it with me, but he told me that when a penguin finds a mate that they want to spend the rest of their life with, they present them with a pebble — the perfect pebble. And then he reaches into his pocket, and he brings this out to me. And I looked at it, and I was like, this is really cool.And he says, ""I want to spend the rest of my life with you.""So I wear this whenever I have to do something that makes me a little nervous, like, I don't know, a TEDx talk. I wear this when I am apart from him for a long period of time. And sometimes I just wear it just because.How many people out there are in love? Anyone in love out there? You might be gay. (Laughter) Because I, too, am in love, and apparently that's part of the gay lifestyle that I warned you about. (Applause) You may want to tell your spouse. Who, if they're in love, might be gay as well. How many of you are single? Any single people out there? You too might be gay! Because I know some gay people who are also single. It's really scary, this gay lifestyle thing; it's super duper evil and there's no end to it! It goes and goes and engulfs!It's really quite silly, isn't it? That's why I'm so happy to finally hear President Obama come out and say (Applause) that he supports — (Applause) that he supports marriage equality. It's a wonderful day in our country's history; it's a wonderful day in the globe's history to be able to have an actual sitting president say, enough of this — first to himself, and then to the rest of the world. It's wonderful.But there's something that's been disturbing me since he made that remark just a short time ago. And that is, apparently, this is just another move by the gay activists that's on the gay agenda. And I'm disturbed by this because I've been openly gay now for quite some time. I've been to all of the functions, I've been to fundraisers, I've written about the topic, and I have yet to receive my copy of this gay agenda. (Laughter) I've paid my dues on time, (Laughter) I've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine, and I've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda. It's very, very frustrating, and I was feeling left out, like I wasn't quite gay enough.But then something wonderful happened: I was out shopping, as I tend to do, and I came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda.And I said to myself, ""LZ, for so long, you have been denied this. When you get in front of this crowd, you're gonna share the news. You're gonna spread the gay agenda so no one else has to wonder, what exactly is in the gay agenda? What are these gays up to? What do they want?""So, without further ado, I will present to you, ladies and gentlemen — now be careful, 'cause it's evil — a copy, the official copy, of the gay agenda. (Music) The gay agenda, people! (Applause) There it is! Did you soak it all in? The gay agenda.Some of you may be calling it, what, the Constitution of the United States, is that what you call it too? The U.S. Constitution is the gay agenda. These gays, people like me, want to be treated like full citizens and it's all written down in plain sight. I was blown away when I saw it. I was like, wait, this is the gay agenda? Why didn't you just call it the Constitution so I knew what you were talking about? I wouldn't have been so confused; I wouldn't have been so upset. But there it is. The gay agenda. Run for your heterosexual lives.Did you know that in all the states where there is no shading that people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered can be kicked out of their apartments for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered? That's the only reason that a landlord needs to have them removed, because there's no protection from discrimination of GLBT people. Did you know in the states where there's no shading that you can be fired for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered? Not based upon the quality of your work, how long you've been there, if you stink, just if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. All of which flies in the face of the gay agenda, also known as the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, this little amendment right here:""No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.""I'm looking at you, North Carolina. But you're not looking at the U.S. Constitution. This is the gay agenda: equality. Not special rights, but the rights that were already written by these people — these elitists, if you will. Educated, well-dressed, (Laughter) some would dare say questionably dressed. (Laughter) Nonetheless, our forefathers, right? The people that, we say, knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution — the gay agenda, if you will. All of that flies in the face of what they did.That is the reason why I felt it was imperative that I presented you with this copy of the gay agenda. Because I figured if I made it funny, you wouldn't be as threatened. I figured if I was a bit irreverent, you wouldn't find it serious. But when you see the map, and you see our state of Michigan — it's legal to fire someone for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, that it's legal to remove someone from their home because they're gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, then you realize that this whole conversation about marriage equality is not about stripping someone's rights away, it's about granting them the rights that [have] already been stated. And we're just trying to walk in those rights that have already been stated, that we've already agreed upon. There are people living in fear of losing their jobs so they don't show anyone who they really are right here at home. This isn't just about North Carolina; all those states that were clear, it's legal.If I could brag for a second, I have a 15-year-old son from my marriage. He has a 4.0. He is starting a new club at school, Policy Debate. He's a budding track star; he has almost every single record in middle school for every event that he competed in. He volunteers. He prays before he eats. I would like to think, as his father — and he lives with me primarily — that I had a little something to do with all of that. I would like to think that he's a good boy, a respectful young man. I would like to think that I've proven to be a capable father. But if I were to go to the state of Michigan today, and try to adopt a young person who is in an orphanage, I would be disqualified for only one reason: because I'm gay. It doesn't matter what I've already proven, what I can do with my heart. It's because of what the state of Michigan says that I am that I am disqualified for any sort of adoption. And that's not just about me, that's about so many other Michiganders, U.S. citizens, who don't understand why what they are is so much more significant than who they are.This story just keeps playing over and over and over again in our country's history. There was a time in which, I don't know, people who were black couldn't have the same rights. People who happened to be women didn't have the same rights, couldn't vote. There was a point in our history in which, if you were considered disabled, that an employer could just fire you, before the Americans with Disabilities Act. We keep doing this over and over again.And so here we are, 2012, gay agenda, gay lifestyle, and I'm not a good dad and people don't deserve to be able to protect their families because of what they are, not who they are. So when you hear the words ""gay lifestyle"" and ""gay agenda"" in the future, I encourage you to do two things: One, remember the U.S. Constitution, and then two, if you wouldn't mind looking to your left, please. Look to your right. That person next to you is a brother, is a sister. And they should be treated with love and respect. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/lz_granderson_the_myth_of_the_gay_agenda
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"(Music)(Music) (Music ends)(Applause)So, that's what I've done with my life.(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)As a kid, I grew up on a farm in Florida, and I did what most little kids do. I played a little baseball, did a few other things like that, but I always had the sense of being an outsider, and it wasn't until I saw pictures in the magazines that a couple other guys skate, I thought, ""Wow, that's for me,"" you know? Because there was no coach standing directly over you, and these guys, they were just being themselves. There was no opponent directly across from you. And I loved that sense, so I started skating when I was about 10 years old, in 1977, and when I did, I picked it up pretty quickly. In fact, here's some footage from about 1984. It wasn't until 79 I won my first amateur championship, and then, by 81, I was 14, and I won my first world championship, which was amazing to me, and in a very real sense, that was the first real victory I had.Oh, watch this. This is a Casper slide, where the board's upside down. Mental note on that one.(Laughter)And this one here? An ollie. So, as she mentioned, that is overstated for sure, but that's why they called me the godfather of modern street skating. Here's some images of that.Now, I was about halfway through my pro career in, I would say, the mid-'80s. Freestyle itself — we developed all these flat ground tricks, as you saw, but there was evolving a new kind of skateboarding, where guys were taking it to the streets, and they were using that ollie, like I showed you. They were using it to get up onto stuff like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells and all kinds of cool stuff. So it was evolving upwards. In fact, when someone tells you they're a skater today, they pretty much mean a street skater, because freestyle, it took about five years for it to die, and at that stage, I'd been a ""champion"" champion for 11 years, which — Phew! And suddenly, it was over for me, that's it — it was gone. They took my pro model off the shelf, which was essentially pronouncing you dead, publicly. That's how you make your money, you know? You have a signature board and wheels and shoes and clothes. I had all that stuff, and it's gone.The crazy thing was, there was a really liberating sense about it, because I no longer had to protect my record as a champion. ""Champion,"" again. Champion sounds so goofy, but it's what it was, right? What drew me to skateboarding, the freedom, was now restored, where I could just create things, because that's where the joy was for me, always, was creating new stuff. The other thing that I had was a deep well of tricks to draw from that were rooted in these flat ground tricks. Stuff the normal guys were doing was very much different.So, as humbling and rotten as it was — And believe me, it was rotten. I would go to skate spots, and I was already ""famous guy,"" right? And everyone thought I was good, but in this new terrain, I was horrible. So people would go, ""Oh, what happened to Mullen?""(Laughter)So, humbling as it was, I began again. Here are some tricks that I started to bring to that new terrain. And again, there's this undergirding layer of influence of freestyle — Oh, that one? That's, like, the hardest thing I've ever done. OK, look at that, it's a Darkslide. See how it's sliding on the backside? Those are super fun, and, actually, not that hard. You know, at the very root of that, see, Caspers, see how you throw it? Simple as that, right? No biggie. And your front foot, the way it grabs it — I'd seen someone slide on the back of the board like that, and I was like, ""How can I get it over?"" Because that had not yet been done. And then it dawned on me, and here's part of what I'm saying. I had an infrastructure. I had this deep layer, where it was like, oh my gosh, it's just your foot. It's just the way you throw your board over. Just let the ledge do that, and it's easy, and the next thing you know, there's 20 more tricks based out of the variations.So that's the kind of thing — here, check this out, here's another way, and I won't overdo this. A little indulgent, I understand. There's something called a Primo slide. It is the funnest trick ever to do. It's like skimboarding.And this one, look how it slides sideways, every which way? OK, so when you're skating, and you take a fall, the board slips that way or that way; it's kind of predictable. This? It goes every which way — it's like a cartoon, the falls, and that's what I love the most about it. It's so much fun to do. In fact, when I started doing them, I remember, because I got hurt. I had to get a knee surgery, right? So there were a couple of weeks where I couldn't skate at all. It would give out on me, and I would watch the guys, I'd go to this warehouse where a lot of the guys were skating, my friends, and I was like, ""I've got to do something new, I want to do something new. I want to start fresh."" And so the night before my surgery, I'd watched, and I was like, ""How am I going to do this?"" So I ran up, and I jumped on my board, and I Cavemanned, and I flipped it down, and I remember thinking, I landed so light-footed, thinking, if my knee gives, they'll just have more work to do in the morning.(Laughter)And so, when it was the crazy thing. I don't know how many of you guys have had surgery, but —(Laughter)you are so helpless, right? You're on this gurney and you're watching the ceiling go by, every time, it's always that, and right when they're putting the mask on you before you go to sleep, all I was thinking is, ""Man, when I wake up and I get better, the first thing I'm going to do is film that trick."" And indeed I did, it was the very first thing I filmed, which was awesome.I told you a little bit about the evolution of the tricks. Consider that content, in a sense. What we do as street skaters is, you have these tricks — Say I'm working on Darkslides, or a Primo, that you guys know this stuff now.(Laughter)What you do is, you cruise around the same streets that you've seen a hundred times, but suddenly, because you already have something in this fixed domain of this target, it's like, what will match this trick? How can I expand, how can the context, how can the environment change the very nature of what I do? So you drive and drive and drive, and, actually I've got to admit, just because I was struggling with this because I'm here, but I'll just say it, is, I cannot tell you, not only to be here in front of you, but what a privilege it is to be at US campus, because I have been escorted off of this campus so many times.(Laughter)(Applause)So let me give you another example of how context shapes content. This is a place not that far from here, It's a rotten neighborhood. Your first consideration is, am I going to get beat up? You go out and — See this wall? It's fairly mellow, and it's beckoning to do bank tricks, right? But there's this other aspect of it for wheelies, so check this out. There's a few tricks, again, how environment changes the nature of your tricks. Freestyle oriented, manual down — wheelie down. Watch, this one? Oh, I love this, it's like surfing, this one, the way you catch it. This one, a little sketchy going backwards, and watch the back foot. Oops —(Laughter)Mental note right there. Again, we'll get back to that.(Laughter)Here, back foot, back foot. OK, up there? That was called a 360 flip. Notice how the board flipped and spun this way, both axes.And another example of how the context changed, and the creative process for me and for most skaters, is, you go, you get out of the car, you check for security, you check for stuff.(Laughter)It's funny, you get to know their rhythms, you know, the guys that cruise around —(Laughter)Skateboarding is such a humbling thing, man. No matter how good you are, you've still got to deal with — So you hit this wall, and when I hit it, the first thing you do is you fall forward, and I'm like, all right, all right. As you adjust ... you punch it up, and then when I would do that, it was throwing my shoulder this way ... which as I was doing it, I was like, ""Oh wow, that's begging for a 360 flip,"" because that's how you load up for a 360 flip.And so this is what I want to emphasize that, as you can imagine, all of these tricks are made of submovements, executive motor functions, more granular to the degree to which I can't quite tell you, but one thing I do know is, every trick is made of combining two or three or four or five movements. And so, as I'm going up, these things are floating around, and you have to sort of let the cognitive mind rest back, pull it back a little bit, and let your intuition go as you feel these things. And these submovements are kind of floating around, and as the wall hits you, they connect themselves to an extent, and that's when the cognitive mind: ""Oh, 360 flip, I'm going to make that."" So that's how that works to me, the creative process, the process itself, of street skating.So, next — Oh, mind you ...(Laughter)Those are the community. These are some of the best skaters in the world. These are my friends — oh my gosh, they're such good people. And the beauty of skateboarding is that, no one guy is the best. In fact, I know this is rotten to say, they're my friends, but a couple of them actually don't look that comfortable on their board. What makes them great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves. Every single one of these guys, you look at them, you can see a silhouette of them, and you realize, ""Oh, that's him, that's Haslam, that's Koston, there's these guys, these are the guys.""And skaters, I think they tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging, but belonging on their own terms. And real respect is given by how much we take what other guys do, these basic tricks, 360 flips, we take that, we make it our own, and then we contribute back to the community the inner way that edifies the community itself. The greater the contribution, the more we express and form our individuality, which is so important to a lot of us who feel like rejects to begin with. The summation of that gives us something we could never achieve as an individual. I should say this. There's some sort of beautiful symmetry that the degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality, which we are expressing by what we do.Next, these guys, very similar community that's extremely conducive to innovation.(Laughter)Notice a couple of these shots from the police department. But it is quite similar, I mean, what is it to hack, right? It's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it and steer it to do things it was never intended to do, right? And they're not all bad. You can be a Linux kernel hacker, make it more stable, right? More safe, more secure. You can be an iOS hacker, make your iPhone do stuff it wasn't supposed to. Not authorized, but not illegal. And then, you've got some of these guys, right? What they do is very similar to our creative process. They connect disparate information, and they bring it together in a way that a security analyst doesn't expect. It doesn't make them good people, but it's at the heart of engineering, at the heart of a creative community, an innovative community, and the open source community, the basic ethos of it is, take what other people do, make it better, give it back so we all rise further. Very similar communities, very similar.We have our edgier sides, too.(Laughter)It's funny, my dad was right. These are my peers. But I respect what they do, and they respect what I do, because they can do things, it's amazing what they can do. In fact, one of them, he was Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for San Diego County, so they're not — you never know who you're dealing with.We've all had some degree of fame. In fact, I've had so much success that I strangely always feel unworthy of. I've had a patent, and that was cool, and we started a company, and it grew, and it became the biggest, and then it went down, and then it became the biggest again, which is harder than the first time, and then we sold it, and then we sold it again. So I've had some success. And in the end, when you've had all of these things, what is it that continues to drive you? As I mentioned, the knee stuff and these things, what is it that will punch you? Because it's not just the mind. What is it that will punch you and make you do something and bring it to another level, and when you've had it all, sometimes, guys, they die on the vine with all of that talent, and one of the things we've had, all of us, is fame — I think the best kind of fame, because you can take it off. I've been all around the world, and there will be a thousand kids crying out your name, and it's such a weird, visceral experience. It's like, it's disorienting. And you get in a car, and you drive away, and 10-minute drive, and you get out, and no one gives a rat's who you are.(Laughter)And it gives you that clarity of perspective of, man, I'm just me, and popularity, what does that really mean again? Not much. It's peer respect that drives us. That's the one thing that makes us do what we do. I've had over a dozen bones, this guy, over, eight, 10 concussions, to the point where it's comedy, right? It is actually comedy, they mess with him.(Laughter)Next, and this is something deeper. I think I was on tour when I was reading one of the Feynman biographies. It was the red one or the blue one. And he made this statement that was so profound to me. It was that the Nobel Prize was the tombstone on all great work, and it resonated because I had won 35 out of 36 contests that I'd entered over 11 years, and it made me bananas. In fact, winning isn't the word, I won it once. The rest of the time, you're just defending, and you get into this, turtle posture, you know? Where you're not doing — it usurped the joy of what I loved to do because I was no longer doing it to create and have fun, and when it died out from under me, that was one of the most liberating things, because I could create.And look, I understand that I am on the very edge of preachy, here. I'm not here to do that. It's just that I'm in front of a very privileged audience. If you guys aren't already leaders in your community, you probably will be, and if there's anything I can give you that will transcend what I've gotten from skateboarding, the only things of meaning, I think, and of permanence, it's not fame, it's not all these things. What it is, is that there's an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it, and better than that, because I'm 46 years old, or I'll be 46, and how pathetic is that I'm still skateboarding, but there is — there is this beauty in dropping it into a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed, and seeing younger, more talented, just different talent, take it to levels you can never imagine, because that lives on. So thank you for your time.(Applause)Kristina Holly: I have a question for you.(Applause)So you've really reinvented yourself in the past, from freestyle to street, and, I think it was about four years ago you officially retired. Is that it? What's next?Rodney Mullen: That's a good question. KG: Something tells me it's not the end.RM: Yeah. Every time you think you've chased something down, it's funny, no matter how good you are, and I know guys like this, it feels like you're polishing a turd, you know?(Laughter)And I thought, the only way I can extend this is to change something infrastructural. And so that's what I proceeded to do, through a long story, one of desperation, so if I do it, rather than talk about it, if I do it, you'll be the first to know.KG: All right, we won't ask you any more. RM: You'll get a text.KG: Right, thank you, good job. RM: Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_mullen_pop_an_ollie_and_innovate
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"Like most journalists, I'm an idealist. I love unearthing good stories, especially untold stories. I just didn't think that in 2011, women would still be in that category.I'm the President of the Journalism and Women Symposium — JAWS. That's Sharky.(Laughter)I joined 10 years ago because I wanted female role models, and I was frustrated by the lagging status of women in our profession and what that meant for our image in the media. We make up half the population of the world, but we're just 24 percent of the news subjects quoted in news stories. And we're just 20 percent of the experts quoted in stories. And now, with today's technology, it's possible to remove women from the picture completely.This is a picture of President Barack Obama and his advisors, tracking the killing of Osama bin Laden. You can see Hillary Clinton on the right. Let's see how the photo ran in an Orthodox Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn. Hillary's completely gone.(Laughter)The paper apologized, but said it never runs photos of women; they might be sexually provocative.(Laughter)This is an extreme case, yes. But the fact is, women are only 19 percent of the sources in stories on politics, and only 20 percent in stories on the economy. The news continues to give us a picture where men outnumber women in nearly all occupational categories, except two: students and homemakers.(Laughter)So we all get a very distorted picture of reality. The problem is, of course, there aren't enough women in newsrooms. They report at just 37 percent of stories in print, TV and radio. Even in stories on gender-based violence, men get an overwhelming majority of print space and airtime.Case in point: This March, the New York Times ran a story by James McKinley about a gang rape of a young girl, 11 years old, in a small Texas town. McKinley writes that the community is wondering, ""How could their boys have been drawn into this?"" ""Drawn into this"" — like they were seduced into committing an act of violence. And the first person he quotes says, ""These boys will have to live with this the rest of their lives."" (Groans, laughter) You don't hear much about the 11-year-old victim, except that she wore clothes that were a little old for her and she wore makeup.The Times was deluged with criticism. Initially, it defended itself, and said, ""These aren't our views. This is what we found in our reporting."" Now, here's a secret you probably know already: Your stories are constructed. As reporters, we research, we interview. We try to give a good picture of reality. We also have our own unconscious biases. But The Times makes it sound like anyone would have reported this story the same way. I disagree with that.So three weeks later, The Times revisits the story. This time, it adds another byline to it with McKinley's: Erica Goode. What emerges is a truly sad, horrific tale of a young girl and her family trapped in poverty. She was raped numerous times by many men. She had been a bright, easygoing girl. She was maturing quickly, physically, but her bed was still covered with stuffed animals. It's a very different picture. Perhaps the addition of Ms. Goode is what made this story more complete.The Global Media Monitoring Project has found that stories by female reporters are more likely to challenge stereotypes than those by male reporters. At KUNM here in Albuquerque, Elaine Baumgartel did some graduate research on the coverage of violence against women. What she found was many of these stories tend to blame victims and devalue their lives. They tend to sensationalize, and they lack context. So for her graduate work, she did a three-part series on the murder of 11 women, found buried on Albuquerque's West Mesa. She tried to challenge those patterns and stereotypes in her work and she tried to show the challenges that journalists face from external sources, their own internal biases and cultural norms. And she worked with an editor at National Public Radio to try to get a story aired nationally. She's not sure that would have happened if the editor had not been a female.Stories in the news are more than twice as likely to present women as victims than men, and women are more likely to be defined by their body parts. Wired magazine, November 2010. Yes, the issue was about breast-tissue engineering. Now I know you're all distracted, so I'll take that off.(Laughter)Eyes up here.(Laughter)So —(Applause)Here's the thing: Wired almost never puts women on its cover. Oh, there have been some gimmicky ones — Pam from ""The Office,"" manga girls, a voluptuous model covered in synthetic diamonds. Texas State University professor Cindy Royal wondered in her blog how are young women like her students supposed to feel about their roles in technology, reading Wired. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, defended his choice and said there aren't enough women, prominent women in technology to sell a cover, to sell an issue. Part of that is true, there aren't as many prominent women in technology.Here's my problem with that argument: Media tells us every day what's important, by the stories they choose and where they place them; it's called agenda setting. How many people knew the founders of Facebook and Google before their faces were on a magazine cover? Putting them there made them more recognizable.Now, Fast Company Magazine embraces that idea. This is its cover from November 15, 2010. The issue is about the most prominent and influential women in technology. Editor Robert Safian told the Poynter Institute, ""Silicon Valley is very white and very male. But that's not what Fast Company thinks the business world will look like in the future, so it tries to give a picture of where the globalized world is moving.""By the way, apparently, Wired took all this to heart. This was its issue in April.(Laughter)That's Limor Fried, the founder of Adafruit Industries, in the Rosie the Riveter pose.It would help to have more women in positions of leadership in media. A recent global survey found that 73 percent of the top media-management jobs are still held by men. But this is also about something far more complex: our own unconscious biases and blind spots.Shankar Vedantam is the author of ""The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives."" He told the former ombudsman at National Public Radio, who was doing a report on how women fare in NPR coverage, unconscious bias flows throughout most of our lives. It's really difficult to disentangle those strands. But he did have one suggestion. He used to work for two editors who said every story had to have at least one female source. He balked at first, but said he eventually followed the directive happily, because his stories got better and his job got easier.Now, I don't know if one of the editors was a woman, but that can make the biggest difference. The Dallas Morning News won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for a series it did on women around the world, but one of the reporters told me she's convinced it never would have happened if they had not had a female assistant foreign editor, and they would not have gotten some of those stories without female reporters and editors on the ground, particularly one on female genital mutilation — men would just not be allowed into those situations.This is an important point to consider, because much of our foreign policy now revolves around countries where the treatment of women is an issue, such as Afghanistan. What we're told in terms of arguments against leaving this country is that the fate of the women is primary. Now, I'm sure a male reporter in Kabul can find women to interview. Not so sure about rural, traditional areas, where I'm guessing women can't talk to strange men.It's important to keep talking about this, in light of Lara Logan. She was the CBS News correspondent who was brutally sexually assaulted in Egypt's Tahrir Square, right after this photo was taken. Almost immediately, pundits weighed in, blaming her and saying things like, ""You know, maybe women shouldn't be sent to cover those stories."" I never heard anyone say this about Anderson Cooper and his crew, who were attacked covering the same story.One way to get more women into leadership is to have other women mentor them. One of my board members is an editor at a major global media company, but she never thought about this as a career path, until she met female role models at JAWS.But this is not just a job for super-journalists or my organization. You all have a stake in a strong, vibrant media. Analyze your news. And speak up when there are gaps missing in coverage, like people at The New York Times did. Suggest female sources to reporters and editors. Remember — a complete picture of reality may depend upon it.And I'll leave you with a video clip that I first saw in [1987] when I was a student in London. It's for The Guardian newspaper. It's actually long before I ever thought about becoming a journalist, but I was very interested in how we learn to perceive our world. Narrator: An event seen from one point of view gives one impression. Seen from another point of view, it gives quite a different impression. But it's only when you get the whole picture, you can fully understand what's going on.[The Guardian]Megan Kamerick: I think you'll all agree that we'd be better off if we all had the whole picture.","https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_kamerick_women_should_represent_women_in_media
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"Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was going to talk about today. We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln. He was sitting at the same table, doing his math homework. And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine.My client was a guy named Will. He was from North Texas. He never knew his father very well, because his father left his mom while she was pregnant with him. And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old, she tried to kill him with a butcher knife.She was taken away by authorities and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Will lived with his older brother, until he committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart. And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own.That morning that I was sitting with Katya and Lincoln, I looked at my son, and I realized that when my client, Will, was his age, he'd been living by himself for two years. Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder. And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime.But I don't want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment. I certainly think that my client shouldn't have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way I've never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial.I think that's possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate — maybe the most important corner — where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous abolitionists are on exactly the same page. That's the corner I want to explore.Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way.You can think of a death penalty case as a story that has four chapters. The first chapter of every case is exactly the same, and it is tragic. It begins with the murder of an innocent human being, and it's followed by a trial where the murderer is convicted and sent to death row, and that death sentence is ultimately upheld by the state appellate court.The second chapter consists of a complicated legal proceeding known as a state habeas corpus appeal. The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding. And the fourth chapter is one where a variety of things can happen. The lawyers might file a clemency petition, they might initiate even more complex litigation, or they might not do anything at all. But that fourth chapter always ends with an execution.When I started representing death row inmates more than 20 years ago, people on death row did not have a right to a lawyer in either the second or the fourth chapter of this story. They were on their own. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1980s that they acquired a right to a lawyer during the third chapter of the story. So what all of these death row inmates had to do was rely on volunteer lawyers to handle their legal proceedings. The problem is that there were way more guys on death row than there were lawyers who had both the interest and the expertise to work on these cases.And so inevitably, lawyers drifted to cases that were already in chapter four — that makes sense, of course. Those are the cases that are most urgent; those are the guys who are closest to being executed. Some of these lawyers were successful; they managed to get new trials for their clients. Others of them managed to extend the lives of their clients, sometimes by years, sometimes by months.But the one thing that didn't happen was that there was never a serious and sustained decline in the number of annual executions in Texas. In fact, as you can see from this graph, from the time that the Texas execution apparatus got efficient in the mid- to late 1990s, there have only been a couple of years where the number of annual executions dipped below 20.In a typical year in Texas, we're averaging about two people a month. In some years in Texas, we've executed close to 40 people, and this number has never significantly declined over the last 15 years. And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply.So we have this paradox, which is that the number of annual executions has remained high but the number of new death sentences has gone down. Why is that? It can't be attributed to a decline in the murder rate, because the murder rate has not declined nearly so steeply as the red line on that graph has gone down. What has happened instead is that juries have started to sentence more and more people to prison for the rest of their lives without the possibility of parole, rather than sending them to the execution chamber.Why has that happened? It hasn't happened because of a dissolution of popular support for the death penalty. Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low. Do you know what all-time low in Texas means? It means that it's in the low 60 percent. Now, that's really good compared to the mid-1980s, when it was in excess of 80 percent, but we can't explain the decline in death sentences and the affinity for life without the possibility of parole by an erosion of support for the death penalty, because people still support the death penalty.What's happened to cause this phenomenon? What's happened is that lawyers who represent death row inmates have shifted their focus to earlier and earlier chapters of the death penalty story.So 25 years ago, they focused on chapter four. And they went from chapter four 25 years ago to chapter three in the late 1980s. And they went from chapter three in the late 1980s to chapter two in the mid-1990s. And beginning in the mid- to late 1990s, they began to focus on chapter one of the story.Now, you might think that this decline in death sentences and the increase in the number of life sentences is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't want to have a conversation about that today. All that I want to tell you is that the reason that this has happened is because death penalty lawyers have understood that the earlier you intervene in a case, the greater the likelihood that you're going to save your client's life. That's the first thing I've learned.Here's the second thing I learned: My client Will was not the exception to the rule; he was the rule. I sometimes say, if you tell me the name of a death row inmate — doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before — I'll write his biography for you. And eight out of 10 times, the details of that biography will be more or less accurate.And the reason for that is that 80 percent of the people on death row are people who came from the same sort of dysfunctional family that Will did. Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system. That's the second lesson that I've learned.Now we're right on the cusp of that corner where everybody's going to agree. People in this room might disagree about whether Will should have been executed, but I think everybody would agree that the best possible version of his story would be a story where no murder ever occurs. How do we do that?When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem. And he was learning how, when you have a big old gnarly problem, sometimes the solution is to slice it into smaller problems. That's what we do for most problems — in math, in physics, even in social policy — we slice them into smaller, more manageable problems. But every once in a while, as Dwight Eisenhower said, the way you solve a problem is to make it bigger.The way we solve this problem is to make the issue of the death penalty bigger. We have to say, all right. We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins? How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer? What options do we have to nudge that person off of the path that is going to lead to a result that everybody — death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents — still think is a bad result: the murder of an innocent human being?You know, sometimes people say that something isn't rocket science. And by that, what they mean is rocket science is really complicated and this problem that we're talking about now is really simple. Well that's rocket science; that's the mathematical expression for the thrust created by a rocket. What we're talking about today is just as complicated. What we're talking about today is also rocket science.My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story. I think of these five chapters as points of intervention, places in their lives when our society could've intervened in their lives and nudged them off of the path that they were on that created a consequence that we all — death penalty supporters or death penalty opponents — say was a bad result.Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system — during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done. In fact, if we just imagine that there are five different modes of intervention, the way that society could intervene in each of those five chapters, and we could mix and match them any way we want, there are 3,000 — more than 3,000 — possible strategies that we could embrace in order to nudge kids like Will off of the path that they're on.So I'm not standing here today with the solution. But the fact that we still have a lot to learn, that doesn't mean that we don't know a lot already. We know from experience in other states that there are a wide variety of modes of intervention that we could be using in Texas, and in every other state that isn't using them, in order to prevent a consequence that we all agree is bad.I'll just mention a few. I won't talk today about reforming the legal system. That's probably a topic that is best reserved for a room full of lawyers and judges. Instead, let me talk about a couple of modes of intervention that we can all help accomplish, because they are modes of intervention that will come about when legislators and policymakers, when taxpayers and citizens, agree that that's what we ought to be doing and that's how we ought to be spending our money.We could be providing early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free. And we could be nudging kids like Will off of the path that we're on. There are other states that do that, but we don't.We could be providing special schools, at both the high school level and the middle school level, but even in K-5, that target economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids, and particularly kids who have had exposure to the juvenile justice system. There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't.There's one other thing we can be doing — well, there are a bunch of other things — there's one other thing that I'm going to mention, and this is going to be the only controversial thing that I say today. We could be intervening much more aggressively into dangerously dysfunctional homes, and getting kids out of them before their moms pick up butcher knives and threaten to kill them. If we're going to do that, we need a place to put them.Even if we do all of those things, some kids are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to end up in that last chapter before the murder story begins, they're going to end up in the juvenile justice system. And even if that happens, it's not yet too late. There's still time to nudge them, if we think about nudging them rather than just punishing them.There are two professors in the Northeast — one at Yale and one at Maryland — they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison. And the kids are in prison, but they go to school from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Now, it was logistically difficult. They had to recruit teachers who wanted to teach inside a prison, they had to establish strict separation between the people who work at the school and the prison authorities, and most dauntingly of all, they needed to invent a new curriculum because you know what? People don't come into and out of prison on a semester basis.(Laughter)But they did all those things.Now, what do all of these things have in common? What all of these things have in common is that they cost money. Some of the people in the room might be old enough to remember the guy on the old oil filter commercial. He used to say, ""Well, you can pay me now or you can pay me later."" What we're doing in the death penalty system is we're paying later.But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive.And I said to him, ""I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you."" I said, ""But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that."" I said, ""I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you.""And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, ""Professor,"" — he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, ""Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there,"" he looked at me and he said, ""that's something you don't forget.""I hope there's one thing you all won't forget: In between the time you arrived here this morning and the time we break for lunch, there are going to be four homicides in the United States. We're going to devote enormous social resources to punishing the people who commit those crimes, and that's appropriate because we should punish people who do bad things. But three of those crimes are preventable.If we make the picture bigger and devote our attention to the earlier chapters, then we're never going to write the first sentence that begins the death penalty story.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_dow_lessons_from_death_row_inmates
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"Those of you who have seen the film ""Moneyball,"" or have read the book by Michael Lewis, will be familiar with the story of Billy Beane. Billy was supposed to be a tremendous ballplayer; all the scouts told him so. They told his parents that they predicted that he was going to be a star.But what actually happened when he signed the contract — and by the way, he didn't want to sign that contract, he wanted to go to college — which is what my mother, who actually does love me, said that I should do too, and I did — well, he didn't do very well. He struggled mightily. He got traded a couple of times, he ended up in the Minors for most of his career, and he actually ended up in management. He ended up as a General Manager of the Oakland A's.Now for many of you in this room, ending up in management, which is also what I've done, is seen as a success. I can assure you that for a kid trying to make it in the Bigs, going into management ain't no success story. It's a failure.And what I want to talk to you about today, and share with you, is that our healthcare system, our medical system, is just as bad at predicting what happens to people in it — patients, others — as those scouts were at predicting what would happen to Billy Beane. And yet, every day thousands of people in this country are diagnosed with preconditions.We hear about pre-hypertension, we hear about pre-dementia, we hear about pre-anxiety, and I'm pretty sure that I diagnosed myself with that in the green room.We also refer to subclinical conditions. There's subclinical atherosclerosis, subclinical hardening of the arteries, obviously linked to heart attacks, potentially. One of my favorites is called subclinical acne. If you look up subclinical acne, you may find a website, which I did, which says that this is the easiest type of acne to treat. You don't have the pustules or the redness and inflammation. Maybe that's because you don't actually have acne.I have a name for all of these conditions, it's another precondition: I call them preposterous. In baseball, the game follows the pre-game. Season follows the pre-season. But with a lot of these conditions, that actually isn't the case, or at least it isn't the case all the time. It's as if there's a rain delay, every single time in many cases.We have pre-cancerous lesions, which often don't turn into cancer. And yet, if you take, for example, subclinical osteoporosis, a bone thinning disease, the precondition, otherwise known as osteopenia, you would have to treat 270 women for three years in order to prevent one broken bone. That's an awful lot of women when you multiply by the number of women who were diagnosed with this osteopenia.And so is it any wonder, given all of the costs and the side effects of the drugs that we're using to treat these preconditions, that every year we're spending more than two trillion dollars on healthcare and yet 100,000 people a year — and that's a conservative estimate — are dying not because of the conditions they have, but because of the treatments that we're giving them and the complications of those treatments?We've medicalized everything in this country. Women in the audience, I have some pretty bad news that you already know, and that's that every aspect of your lifehas been medicalized. Strike one is when you hit puberty. You now have something that happens to you once a month that has been medicalized. It's a condition; it has to be treated. Strike two is if you get pregnant. That's been medicalized as well. You have to have a high-tech experience of pregnancy, otherwise something might go wrong.Strike three is menopause. We all know what happened when millions of women were given hormone replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms for decades until all of a sudden we realized, because a study came out, a big one, NIH-funded. It said, actually, a lot of that hormone replacement therapy may be doing more harm than good for many of those women.Just in case, I don't want to leave the men out — I am one, after all — I have really bad news for all of you in this room, and for everyone listening and watching elsewhere: You all have a universally fatal condition. So, just take a moment. It's called pre-death. Every single one of you has it, because you have the risk factor for it, which is being alive.But I have some good news for you, because I'm a journalist, I like to end things in a happy way or a forward-thinking way. And that good news is that if you can survive to the end of my talk, which we'll see if that happens for everyone, you will be a pre-vivor.I made up pre-death. If I used someone else's pre-death, I apologize, I think I made it up. I didn't make up pre-vivor. Pre-vivor is what a particular cancer advocacy group would like everyone who just has a risk factor, but hasn't actually had that cancer, to call themselves. You are a pre-vivor.We've had HBO here this morning. I'm wondering if Mark Burnett is anywhere in the audience, I'd like to suggest a reality TV show called ""Pre-vivor."" If you develop a disease, you're off the island.But the problem is, we have a system that is completely — basically promoted this. We've selected, at every point in this system, to do what we do, and to give everyone a precondition and then eventually a condition, in some cases. Start with the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors, most of them, are in a fee-for-service system. They are basically incentivized to do more — procedures, tests, prescribe medications.Patients come to them, they want to do something. We're Americans, we can't just stand there, we have to do something. And so they want a drug. They want a treatment. They want to be told, this is what you have and this is how you treat it. If the doctor doesn't give you that, you go somewhere else. That's not very good for doctors' business. Or even worse, if you are diagnosed with something eventually, and the doctor didn't order that test, you get sued.We have pharmaceutical companies that are constantly trying to expand the indications, expand the number of people who are eligible for a given treatment, because that obviously helps their bottom line. We have advocacy groups, like the one that's come up with pre-vivor, who want to make more and more people feel they are at risk, or might have a condition, so that they can raise more funds and raise visibility, et cetera.But this isn't actually, despite what journalists typically do, this isn't actually about blaming particular players. We are all responsible. I'm responsible. I actually root for the Yankees, I mean talk about rooting for the worst possible offender when it comes to doing everything you can do. Thank you. But everyone is responsible.I went to medical school, and I didn't have a course called How to Think Skeptically, or How Not to Order Tests. We have this system where that's what you do. And it actually took being a journalist to understand all these incentives. You know, economists like to say, there are no bad people, there are just bad incentives.And that's actually true. Because what we've created is a sort of Field of Dreams, when it comes to medical technology. So when you put another MRI in every corner, you put a robot in every hospital saying that everyone has to have robotic surgery. Well, we've created a system where if you build it, they will come. But you can actually perversely tell people to come, convince them that they have to come.It was when I became a journalist that I really realized how I was part of this problem, and how we all are part of this problem. I was medicalizing every risk factor, I was writing stories, commissioning stories, every day, that were trying to, not necessarily make people worried, although that was what often happened.But, you know, there are ways out. I saw my own internist last week, and he said to me, ""You know,"" and he told me something that everyone in this audience could have told me for free, but I paid him for the privilege, which is that I need to lose some weight. Well, he's right. I've had honest-to-goodness high blood pressure for a dozen years now, same age my father got it, and it's a real disease. It's not pre-hypertension, it's actual hypertension, high blood pressure.Well, he's right, but he didn't say to me, well, you have pre-obesity or you have pre-diabetes, or anything like that. He didn't say, better start taking this Statin, you need to lower your cholesterol. No, he said, ""Go out and lose some weight. Come back and see me in a bit, or just give me a call and let me know how you're doing.""So that's, to me, a way forward. Billy Beane, by the way, learned the same thing. He learned, from watching this kid who he eventually hired, who was really successful for him, that it wasn't swinging for the fences, it wasn't swinging at every pitch like the sluggers do, which is what all the expensive teams like the Yankees like to — they like to pick up those guys. This kid told him, you know, you gotta watch the guys, and you gotta go out and find the guys who like to walk, because getting on base by a walk is just as good, and in our healthcare system we need to figure out, is that really a good pitch or should we let it go by and not swing at everything? Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ivan_oransky_are_we_over_medicalized
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"As a magician, I'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion. And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century. It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage. Now, I won't use mirrors, but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater. So let the story begin.On a dark and stormy night — really! — it was the 10th of July, 1856. Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born. His name was Nikola, Nikola Tesla. Now the baby grew into a very smart guy. Let me show you.Tesla, what is 236 multiplied by 501?Nikola Tesla: The result is 118,236.Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way. When a word was mentioned, an image of it instantly appeared in his mind. Tree. Chair. Girl. They were hallucinations, which vanished the moment he touched them. Probably a form of synesthesia.But it was something he later turned to his advantage. Where other scientists would play in their laboratory, Tesla created his inventions in his mind.NT: To my delight, I discovered I could visualize my inventions with the greatest facility.MT: And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination, he would build them in his workshop.NT: I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them as real in my mind, and there I run it, test it and improve it. Only then do I construct it.MT: His great idea was alternating current. But how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe? To sell his idea, he became a showman.NT: We are at the dawn of a new age, the age of electricity. I have been able, through careful invention, to transmit, with the mere flick of a switch, electricity across the ether. It is the magic of science. (Applause)Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics. He even photographed the bones of the human body. But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city.But Tesla's success didn't last.NT: I had bigger ideas. Illuminating the city was only the beginning. A world telegraphy center — imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly.MT: It's a great idea; it was a huge project. Expensive, too.NT: They wouldn't give me the money.MT: Well, maybe you shouldn't have told them it could be used to contact other planets.NT: Yes, that was a big mistake.MT: Tesla's career as an inventor never recovered. He became a recluse. Dodged by death, he spent much of his time in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria.NT: Everything I did, I did for mankind, for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich, where products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life.MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943. His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. His legacy is with us still.Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning. Tesla's insight was profound.NT: Tell me, what will man do when the forests disappear, and the coal deposits are exhausted?MT: Tesla thought he had the answer. We are still asking the question.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_the_electric_rise_and_fall_of_nikola_tesla
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"Everyone is both a learner and a teacher. This is me being inspired by my first tutor, my mom, and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University.Now the students and I enjoyed the class, but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern, the teaching technology isn't. In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom. Note the textbook, the sage on the stage, and the sleeping guy in the back. (Laughter) Just like today.So my co-teacher, Sebastian Thrun, and I thought, there must be a better way. We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class, but to bring it to anyone in the world for free.We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it. And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries. We were thrilled to have that kind of audience, and just a bit terrified that we hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter)So we got to work. We studied what others had done, what we could copy and what we could change. Benjamin Bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best, so that's what we tried to emulate, like with me and my mom, even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands. Here, an overhead video camera is recording me as I'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper.A student said, ""This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who's explaining something you haven't grasped, but are about to."" And that's exactly what we were aiming for.Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen. We decided to go even shorter and more interactive. Our typical video is two minutes, sometimes shorter, never more than six, and then we pause for a quiz question, to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring. Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of English to parse sentences, and here, there's a pause and the student has to reflect, understand what's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue.Students learn best when they're actively practicing. We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves. We mostly avoid questions like, ""Here's a formula, now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two."" We preferred open-ended questions.One student wrote, ""Now I'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look."" And I like that kind of response. That's just what we were going for. We didn't want students to memorize the formulas; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world. And we succeeded. Or, I should say, the students succeeded.And it's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education, and in doing so, we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes. Most online classes, the videos are always available. You can watch them any time you want. But if you can do it any time, that means you can do it tomorrow, and if you can do it tomorrow, well, you may not ever get around to it. (Laughter)So we brought back the innovation of having due dates. (Laughter) You could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week, but at the end of the week, you had to get the homework done. This motivated the students to keep going, and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time, so if you went into a discussion forum, you could get an answer from a peer within minutes. Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which were self-organized by the students themselves.From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned the concept of ""flipping"" the classroom. Students watched the videos on their own, and then they come together to discuss them. From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction, that peers can be the best teachers, because they're the ones that remember what it's like to not understand. Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that. Of course, we couldn't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students, so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums.And finally, from Teach For America, I learned that a class is not primarily about information. More important is motivation and determination. It was crucial that the students see that we're working hard for them and they're all supporting each other.Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours. They got this statement of accomplishment.So what have we learned? Well, we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together, but there are more ideas to try. Sebastian's teaching another class now. I'll do one in the fall. Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx and others have more classes coming. It's a really exciting time.But to me, the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come. And you'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_norvig_the_100_000_student_classroom
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"Good evening.We are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight, but when Qatar will host the football World Cup 10 years from now, 2022, we already heard it will be in the hot, very hot and sunny summer months of June and July. And when Qatar has been assigned to the World Cup all, many people around the world have been wondering, how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football, run around in this desert climate? How would it be possible that spectators sit, enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment?Together with the architects of Albert Speer & Partner, our engineers from Transsolar have been supporting, have been developing open-air stadia based on 100 percent solar power, on 100 percent solar cooling.Let me tell you about that, but let me start with comfort. Let me start with the aspect of comfort, because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort.We are used to looking at charts like that, and you see this red line showing the air temperature in June and July, and yes, that's right, it's picking up to 45 degrees C. It's actually very hot. But air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort.Let me show you analysis a colleague of mine did looking on different football, World Cups, Olympic Games around the world, looking on the comfort and analyzing the comfort people have perceived at these different sport activities, and let me start with Mexico.Mexico temperature has been, air temperature has been something between 15, up to 30 degrees C, and people enjoyed themselves. It was a very comfortable game in Mexico City. Have a look. Orlando, same kind of stadium, open-air stadium. People have been sitting in the strong sun, in the very high humidity in the afternoon, and they did not enjoy. It was not comfortable. The air temperature was not too high, but it was not comfortable during these games.What about Seoul? Seoul, because of broadcast rights, all the games have been in the late afternoon. Sun has already been set, so the games have been perceived as comfortable.What about Athens? Mediterranean climate, but in the sun it was not comfortable. They didn't perceive comfort.And we know that from Spain, we know that ""sol y sombra."" If you have a ticket, and you get a ticket for the shade, you pay more, because you're in a more comfortable environment.What about Beijing? It's again, sun in the day and high humidity, and it was not comfortable.So if I overlay, and if you overlay all these comfort envelopes, what we see is, in all these places, air temperature has been ranging something from 25 to 35, and if you go on the line, 30, of 30 degrees C ambient temperatures. If you go along that line you see there has been all kind of comfort, all kinds of perceived outdoor comfort, ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable.So why is that? This is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort, which is the sun, the direct sun, the diffuse sun, which is wind, strong wind, mild wind, which is air humidity, which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in. And this is air temperature.All these parameters go into the comfort feeling of our human body, and scientists have developed a parameter, which is the perceived temperature, where all these parameters go in and help designers to understand which is the driving parameter that I feel comfort or that I don't feel comfort. Which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature? And these parameters, these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism.Because of our metabolism, we as human beings, we produce heat. I'm excited, I'm talking to you, I'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment. You are sitting, you are relaxed, you're looking at me. It's probably 100 watts each person is producing, and we need to get rid of that energy. I need, with my body, to get rid of the energy, and the harder it is for myself, for my body, to get rid of the energy, the less comfort I feel. That's it. And if I don't get rid of the energy, I will die.If we overlay what happens during the football World Cup, what will happen in June, July, we will see, yes, air temperature will be much higher, but because the games and the plays will be in the afternoon, it's probably the same comfort rating we've found in other places which has perceived as non-comfortable.So we sat together with a team which prepared the Bid Book, or goal, that we said, let's aim for perceived temperature, for outdoor comfort in this range, which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius perceived temperature, which is extremely comfortable. People would feel really fine in an open outdoor environment.But what does it mean? If we just look on what happens, we see, temperature's too high. If we apply the best architectural design, climate engineering design, we won't get much better.So we need to do something active. We need, for instance, to bring in radiant cooling technology, and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning.And how does it look like in a stadium? So the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort. First of all, it's shading. It needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind.But that's not all what we need to do. We need to use active systems. Instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium, we can use radiant cooling technologies, like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor. And just by using cold water going through the water pipes, you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium, so you can create that comfort, and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air, the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs, to their individual energy balance. They can adjust and find their comfort they need to find.There are 12 stadia probably to come, but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train. We applied the same concept: shading of the training pitch, using a shelter against wind, then using the grass. Natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature, and using dehumidified air to create comfort.But even the best passive design wouldn't help. We need active system. And how do we do that?Our idea for the bid was 100 percent solar cooling, based on the idea that we use the roof of the stadia, we cover the roofs of the stadia with PV systems. We don't borrow any energy from history. We are not using fossil energies. We are not borrowing energy from our neighbors. We're using energy we can harvest on our roofs, and also on the training pitches, which will be covered with large, flexible membranes, and we will see in the next years an industry coming up with flexible photovoltaics, giving the possibilities of shading against strong sun and producing electric energy in the same time.And this energy now is harvested throughout the year, sent into the grid, is replacing fossils in the grid, and when I need it for the cooling, I take it back from the grid and I use the solar energy which I have brought to the grid back when I need it for the solar cooling. And I can do that in the first year and I can balance that in the next 10, and the next 20 years, this energy, which is necessary to condition a World Cup in Qatar, the next 20 years, this energy goes into the grid of Qatar.So this — (Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause)This is not only useful for stadia. We can use that also in open-air places and streets, and we've been working on the City of the Future in Masdar, which is in the United Emirates, Abu Dhabi. And I had the pleasure to work on the central plaza. And the same idea to use there, to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable. People enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall, which is chilled down and which is cooled. We wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon, even in these sunny and hot summer months, and they can enjoy and meet there with their families. (Applause)And the same concept: shade against the sun, shade against the wind, and use, use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint. And these beautiful umbrellas.So I'd like to encourage you to pay attention to your thermal comfort, to your thermal environment, tonight and tomorrow, and if you'd like to learn more about that, I invite you to go to our website. We uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort. And I also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters, it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions, to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment, and we can do that with the best passive design, but also using the energy source of the site in Qatar which is the sun.(Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause) Shukran. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wolfgang_kessling_how_to_air_condition_outdoor_spaces
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"As a kid, I was fascinated with all things air and space. I would watch Nova on PBS. Our school would show Bill Nye the Science Guy. When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor, he gave me a book for my birthday. It was an astronomy book, and I poured over that thing for hours on end, and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream, and part of that dream was, I always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft.Well, a number of years later, I graduated from UCLA and I found myself at NASA, working for the jet propulsion laboratory, and there our team was challenged to create a 3D visualization of the solar system, and today I want to show you what we've done so far.Now, the kicker is, everything I'm about to do here you can do at home, because we built this for the public for you guys to use.So what you're looking at right now is the Earth. You can see the United States and California and San Diego, and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around.Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth has seen this before, but one thing we like to say in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth. Google Earth goes from this view down to your backyard. We go from this view out to the stars. So the Earth is cool, but what we really want to show are the spacecraft, so I'm going to bring the interface back up, and now you're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the Earth. These are a number of our science space Earth orbiters. We haven't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites. If we did, it would be a complete mess, because there's a lot of stuff out there. And the cool thing is, we actually created 3D models for a number of these spacecraft, so if you want to visit any of these, all you need to do is double-click on them.So I'm going to find the International Space Station, double-click, and it will take us all the way down to the ISS. And now you're riding along with the ISS where it is right now.And the other cool thing is, not only can we move the camera around, we can also control time, so I can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward, and now we can see what a sunset on the ISS would look like, and they get one every 90 minutes. (Laughter)All right, so what about the rest of it? Well, I can click on this home button over here, and that will take us up to the inner solar system, and now we're looking at the rest of the solar system. You can see, there's Saturn, there's Jupiter, and while we're here, I want to point out something. It's actually pretty busy.Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend.Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter, there. We have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and we have over here New Horizons on a straight shot to Pluto.And I mention this because there's this strange public perception that NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there.Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration, and we have a lot of spacecraft out there. Granted, we're not sending humans up at the moment, well at least with our own launch vehicles, but NASA is far from dead, and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there's so many other things that we're doing.Anyway, while we're here, again, if you want to visit anything, all you need to do is double-click. So I'm just going to double-click on Vesta, and here we have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and this is happening right now. I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons. You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees.And just being able to visit different places and go through different times, we have data from 1950 to 2050. Granted, we don't have everything in between, because some of the data is hard to get. Just being able to visit places in different times, you can explore this for hours, literally hours on end, but I want to show you one thing in particular, so I'm going to open up the destination tab, spacecraft outer planet missions, Voyager 1, and I'm going to bring up the Titan flyby. So now we've gone back in time. We're now riding along with Voyager 1. The date here is November 11, 1980.Now, there's a funny thing going on here. It doesn't look like anything's going on. It looks like I've paused the program. It's actually running at real rate right now, one second per second, and in fact, Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at I think it's 38,000 miles per hour. It only looks like nothing's moving because, well, Saturn here is 700,000 miles away, and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away. It's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing's happening.But to make it more interesting, I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch as Voyager 1 flies by Titan, which is a hazy moon of Saturn. It actually has a very thick atmosphere. And I'm going to recenter the camera on Saturn, here. I'm going to pull out, and I want to show you Voyager 1 as it flies by Saturn.There's a point to be made here. With a 3D visualization like this, we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn. There's a whole story to tell here. And even better, because it's an interactive application, you can tell the story for yourself. If you want to pause it, you can pause it. If you want to keep going, if you want to change the camera angle, you can do that, and because of that, I can show you that Voyager 1 doesn't just fly by Saturn. It actually flies underneath Saturn. Now, what happens is, as it flies underneath Saturn, Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system, so if I just keep letting this go, you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that. And, in fact, I'm going to go back to the solar system. I'm going to go back to today, now, and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is. Right there, above, way above the solar system, way beyond our solar system.And here's the thing. Now you know how it got there. Now you know why, and to me, that's the point of this program. You can manipulate it yourself. You can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself.You know, the theme today is ""The World In Your Grasp."" Well, we're trying to give you the solar system in your grasp — (Laughter) — and we hope once it's there, you'll be able to learn for yourself what we've done out there, and what we're about to do. And my personal dream is for kids to take this and explore and see the wonders out there and be inspired, as I was as a kid, to pursue STEM education and to pursue a dream in space exploration.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_nguyen_tour_the_solar_system_from_home
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"Over the last two decades, India has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services, as we call it, and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in India, offshoring software development and back office services, there's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to India. When this is combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs to China, it has, you know, led to considerable angst amongst the Western populations.In fact, if you look at polls, they show a declining trend for support for free trade in the West. Now, the Western elites, however, have said this fear is misplaced. For example, if you have read — I suspect many of you have done so — read the book by Thomas Friedman called ""The World Is Flat,"" he said, basically, in his book that, you know, this fear for free trade is wrong because it assumes, it's based on a mistaken assumption that everything that can be invented has been invented. In fact, he says, it's innovation that will keep the West ahead of the developing world, with the more sophisticated, innovative tasks being done in the developed world, and the less sophisticated, shall we say, drudge work being done in the developing world.Now, what we were trying to understand was, is this true? Could India become a source, or a global hub, of innovation, just like it's become a global hub for back office services and software development? And for the last four years, my coauthor Phanish Puranam and I spent investigating this topic.Initially, or, you know, as people would say, you know, in fact the more aggressive people who are supporting the Western innovative model, say, ""Where are the Indian Googles, iPods and Viagras, if the Indians are so bloody smart?"" (Laughter)So initially, when we started our research, we went and met several executives, and we asked them, ""What do you think? Will India go from being a favored destination for software services and back office services to a destination for innovation?"" They laughed. They dismissed us. They said, ""You know what? Indians don't do innovation."" The more polite ones said, ""Well, you know, Indians make good software programmers and accountants, but they can't do the creative stuff.""Sometimes, it took a more, took a veneer of sophistication, and people said, ""You know, it's nothing to do with Indians. It's really the rule-based, regimented education system in India that is responsible for killing all creativity."" They said, instead, if you want to see real creativity, go to Silicon Valley, and look at companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel.So we started examining the R&D and innovation labs of Silicon Valley. Well, interestingly, what you find there is, usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the R&D center as they may call it, and more often than not, it's an Indian. (Laughter)So I immediately said, ""Well, but you could not have been educated in India, right? You must have gotten your education here."" It turned out, in every single case, they came out of the Indian educational system. So we realized that maybe we had the wrong question, and the right question is, really, can Indians based out of India do innovative work?So off we went to India. We made, I think, about a dozen trips to Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, Hyderabad, you name it, to examine what is the level of corporate innovation in these cities. And what we found was, as we progressed in our research, was, that we were asking really the wrong question. When you ask, ""Where are the Indian Googles, iPods and Viagras?"" you are taking a particular perspective on innovation, which is innovation for end users, visible innovation.Instead, innovation, if you remember, some of you may have read the famous economist Schumpeter, he said, ""Innovation is novelty in how value is created and distributed."" It could be new products and services, but it could also be new ways of producing products. It could also be novel ways of organizing firms and industries.Once you take this, there's no reason to restrict innovation, the beneficiaries of innovation, just to end users. When you take this broader conceptualization of innovation, what we found was, India is well represented in innovation, but the innovation that is being done in India is of a form we did not anticipate, and what we did was we called it ""invisible innovation."" And specifically, there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of India.The first type of invisible innovation out of India is what we call innovation for business customers, which is led by the multinational corporations, which have — in the last two decades, there have been 750 R&D centers set up in India by multinational companies employing more than 400,000 professionals. Now, when you consider the fact that, historically, the R&D center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters, or in the country of origin of that multinational company, to have 750 R&D centers of multinational corporations in India is truly a remarkable figure.When we went and talked to the people in those innovation centers and asked them what are they working on, they said, ""We are working on global products."" They were not working on localizing global products for India, which is the usual role of a local R&D. They were working on truly global products, and companies like Microsoft, Google, AstraZeneca, General Electric, Philips, have already answered in the affirmative the question that from their Bangalore and Hyderabad R&D centers they are able to produce products and services for the world. But of course, as an end user, you don't see that, because you only see the name of the company, not where it was developed.The other thing we were told then was, ""Yes, but, you know, the kind of work that is coming out of the Indian R&D center cannot be compared to the kind of work that is coming out of the U.S. R&D centers."" So my coauthor Phanish Puranam, who happens to be one of the smartest people I know, said he's going to do a study. What he did was he looked at those companies that had an R&D center in USA and in India, and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the U.S. and a similar patent filed out of the same company's subsidiary in India, so he's now comparing the patents of R&D centers in the U.S. with R&D centers in India of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the Indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the U.S. centers?Interestingly, what he finds is — and by the way, the way we look at the quality of a patent is what we call forward citations: How many times does a future patent reference the older patent? — he finds something very interesting. What we find is that the data says that the number of forward citations of a patent filed out of a U.S. R&D subsidiary is identical to the number of forward citations of a patent filed by an Indian subsidiary of the same company within that company. So within the company, there's no difference in the forward citation rates of their Indian subsidiaries versus their U.S. subsidiaries. So that's the first kind of invisible innovation coming out of India.The second kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call outsourcing innovation to Indian companies, where many companies today are contracting Indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world. For example, in the pharma industry, a lot of the molecules are being developed, but you see a major part of that work is being sent to India. For example, XCL Technologies, they developed two of the mission critical systems for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one to avoid collisions in the sky, and another to allow landing in zero visibility. But of course, when you climb onto the Boeing 787, you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of India.The third kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call process innovations, because of an injection of intelligence by Indian firms. Process innovation is different from product innovation. It's about how do you create a new product or develop a new product or manufacture a new product, but not a new product itself?Only in India do millions of young people dream of working in a call center. What happens — You know, it's a dead end job in the West, what high school dropouts do. What happens when you put hundreds of thousands of smart, young, ambitious kids on a call center job? Very quickly, they get bored, and they start innovating, and they start telling the boss how to do this job better, and out of this process innovation comes product innovations, which are then marketed around the world.For example, 24/7 Customer, traditional call center company, used to be a traditional call center company. Today they're developing analytical tools to do predictive modeling so that before you pick up the phone, you can guess or predict what this phone call is about. It's because of an injection of intelligence into a process which was considered dead for a long time in the West.And the last kind of innovation, invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call management innovation. It's not a new product or a new process but a new way to organize work, and the most significant management innovation to come out of India, invented by the Indian offshoring industry is what we call the global delivery model. What the global delivery model allows is, it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks, break them up into parts, send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists, and then specify the means for reintegrating them. Without that, you could not have any of the other invisible innovations today.So, what I'm trying to say is, what we are finding in our research is, that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg, India is well represented in the invisible, large, submerged portion of the innovation iceberg.Now, this has, of course, some implications, and so we developed three implications of this research. The first is what we called sinking skill ladder, and now I'm going to go back to where I started my conversation with you, which was about the flight of jobs. Now, of course, when we first, as a multinational company, decide to outsource jobs to India in the R&D, what we are going to do is we are going to outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India, the least sophisticated jobs, just like Tom Friedman would predict.Now, what happens is, when you outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India for innovation and for R&D work, at some stage in the very near future you are going to have to confront a problem, which is where does the next step of the ladder people come from within your company? So you have two choices then: Either you bring the people from India into the developed world to take positions in the next step of the ladder — immigration — or you say, there's so many people in the bottom step of the ladder waiting to take the next position in India, why don't we move the next step to India?What we are trying to say is that once you outsource the bottom end of the ladder, you — it's a self-perpetuating act, because of the sinking skill ladder, and the sinking skill ladder is simply the point that you can't be an investment banker without having been an analyst once. You can't be a professor without having been a student. You can't be a consultant without having been a research associate. So, if you outsource the least sophisticated jobs, at some stage, the next step of the ladder has to follow.The second thing we bring up is what we call the browning of the TMT, the top management teams. If the R&D talent is going to be based out of India and China, and the largest growth markets are going to be based out of India and China, you have to confront the problem that your top management of the future is going to have to come out of India and China, because that's where the product leadership is, that's where the important market leadership is.Right? And the last thing we point out in this slide, which is, you know, that to this story, there's one caveat. India has the youngest growing population in the world. This demographic dividend is incredible, but paradoxically, there's also the mirage of mighty labor pools. Indian institutes and educational system, with a few exceptions, are incapable of producing students in the quantity and quality needed to keep this innovation engine going, so companies are finding innovative ways to overcome this, but in the end it does not absolve the government of the responsibility for creating this educational structure.So finally, I want to conclude by showing you the profile of one company, IBM. As many of you know, IBM has always been considered for the last hundred years to be one of the most innovative companies. In fact, if you look at the number of patents filed over history, I think they are in the top or the top two or three companies in the world of all patents filed in the USA as a private company.Here is the profile of employees of IBM over the last decade. In 2003, they had 300,000 employees, or 330,000 employees, out of which, 135,000 were in America, 9,000 were in India. In 2009, they had 400,000 employees, by which time the U.S. employees had moved to 105,000, whereas the Indian employees had gone to 100,000.Well, in 2010, they decided they're not going to reveal this data anymore, so I had to make some estimates based on various sources. Here are my best guesses. Okay? I'm not saying this is the exact number, it's my best guess. It gives you a sense of the trend. There are 433,000 people now at IBM, out of which 98,000 are remaining in the U.S., and 150,000 are in India. So you tell me, is IBM an American company, or an Indian company? (Laughter)Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nirmalya_kumar_india_s_invisible_entrepreneurs
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"What I'm going to do is to just give a few notes, and this is from a book I'm preparing called ""Letters to a Young Scientist."" I'd thought it'd be appropriate to present it, on the basis that I have had extensive experience in teaching, counseling scientists across a broad array of fields. And you might like to hear some of the principles that I've developed in doing that teaching and counseling.So let me begin by urging you, particularly you on the youngsters' side, on this path you've chosen, to go as far as you can. The world needs you, badly. Humanity is now fully into the techno-scientific age. There is going to be no turning back.Although varying among disciplines — say, astrophysics, molecular genetics, the immunology, the microbiology, the public health, to the new area of the human body as a symbiont, to public health, environmental science. Knowledge in medical science and science overall is doubling every 15 to 20 years. Technology is increasing at a comparable rate. Between them, the two already pervade, as most of you here seated realize, every dimension of human life.So swift is the velocity of the techno-scientific revolution, so startling in its countless twists and turns, that no one can predict its outcome even a decade from the present moment.There will come a time, of course, when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge, which actually began in the 1600s, has to peak and level off, but that's not going to matter to you. The revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades. It'll render the human condition radically different from what it is today. Traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing, inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines.In time, all of science will come to be a continuum of description, an explanation of networks, of principles and laws. That's why you need not just be training in one specialty, but also acquire breadth in other fields, related to and even distant from your own initial choice.Keep your eyes lifted and your head turning. The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched. To understand and use it sanely, as a part of the civilization yet to evolve requires a vastly larger population of scientifically trained people like you. In education, medicine, law, diplomacy, government, business and the media that exist today.Our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy, which most badly lack today — no applause, please. It will be better for all if they prepare before entering office rather than learning on the job. Therefore you will do well to act on the side, no matter how far into the laboratory you may go, to serve as teachers during the span of your career.I'll now proceed quickly, and before else, to a subject that is both a vital asset and a potential barrier to a scientific career. If you are a bit short in mathematical skills, don't worry. Many of the most successful scientists at work today are mathematically semi-literate.A metaphor will serve here: Where elite mathematicians and statisticians and theorists often serve as architects in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic applied scientists, including a large portion of those who could be said to be of the first rank, are the ones who map the terrain, they scout the frontiers, they cut the pathways, they raise the buildings along the way.Some may have considered me foolhardy, but it's been my habit to brush aside the fear of mathematics when talking to candidate scientists. During 41 years of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright students turned away from the possibility of a scientific career or even from taking non-required courses in science because they were afraid of failure. These math-phobes deprive science and medicine of immeasurable amounts of badly needed talent.Here's how to relax your anxieties, if you have them: Understand that mathematics is a language ruled like other verbal languages, or like verbal language generally, by its own grammar and system of logic. Any person with average quantitative intelligence who learns to read and write mathematics at an elementary level will, as in verbal language, have little difficulty picking up most of the fundamentals if they choose to master the mathspeak of most disciplines of science.The longer you wait to become at least semi-literate the harder the language of mathematics will be to master, just as again in any verbal language, but it can be done at any age. I speak as an authority on that subject, because I'm an extreme case. I didn't take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama. They didn't teach it before then.I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students, little more than half my age. A couple of them were students in a course I was giving on evolutionary biology. I swallowed my pride, and I learned calculus.I found out that in science and all its applications, what is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications. The ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. They are instead the products of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant. Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake.Of foremost importance is a thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known of the relevant entities and processes that might be involved in that domain you propose to enter. When something new is discovered, it's logical then that one of the follow-up steps is to find the mathematical and statistical methods to move its analysis forward. If that step proves too difficult for the person or team that made the discovery, a mathematician can then be added by them as a collaborator.Consider the following principle, which I will modestly call Wilson's Principle Number One: It is far easier for scientists including medical researchers, to require needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations. It is important in choosing the direction to take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply, and focus on that.Keep in mind, then, Wilson's Second Principle: For every scientist, whether researcher, technician, teacher, manager or businessman, working at any level of mathematical competence, there exists a discipline in science or medicine for which that level is enough to achieve excellence.Now I'm going to offer quickly several more principles that will be useful in organizing your education and career, or if you're teaching, how you might enhance your own teaching and counseling of young scientists. In selecting a subject in which to conduct original research, or to develop world-class expertise, take a part of the chosen discipline that is sparsely inhabited. Judge opportunity by how few other students and researchers are on hand.This is not to de-emphasize the essential requirement of broad training, or the value of apprenticing yourself in ongoing research to programs of high quality. It is important also to acquire older mentors within these successful programs, and to make friends and colleagues of your age for mutual support. But through it all, look for a way to break out, to find a field and subject not yet popular.We have seen this demonstrated already in the talks preceding mine. There is the quickest way advances are likely to occur, as measured in discoveries per investigator per year. You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: March to the sound of the guns. In science, the exact opposite is the case: March away from the sound of the guns.So Wilson's Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns. Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. Make a fray of your own. Once you have settled on a specialty, and the profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become an expert.There are thousands of professionally delimited subjects sprinkled through physics and chemistry to biology and medicine. And on then into the social sciences, where it is possible in short time to acquire the status of an authority. When the subject is still very thinly populated, you can with diligence and hard work become the world authority.The world needs this kind of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it. The existing information and what you self-discover may at first seem skimpy and difficult to connect to other bodies of knowledge. Well, if that's the case, good. Why hard instead of easy?The answer deserves to be stated as Principle Number Four. In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity, and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.Now this brings me to a basic categorization in the way scientific discoveries are made. Scientists, pure mathematicians among them, follow one or the other of two pathways: First through early discoveries, a problem is identified and a solution is sought. The problem may be relatively small; for example, where exactly in a cruise ship does the norovirus begin to spread? Or larger, what's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe? As the answer is sought, other phenomena are typically discovered and other questions are asked.This first of the two strategies is like a hunter, exploring a forest in search of a particular quarry, who finds other quarries along the way. The second strategy of research is to study a subject broadly searching for unknown phenomena or patterns of known phenomena like a hunter in what we call ""the naturalist's trance,"" the researcher of mind is open to anything interesting, any quarry worth taking. The search is not for the solution of the problem, but for problems themselves worth solving.The two strategies of research, original research, can be stated as follows, in the final principle I'm going to offer you: For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. And conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which, those particular objects of research are ideally suited. Find out what they are. You'll find your own way to discover, to learn, to teach.The decades ahead will see dramatic advances in disease prevention, general health, the quality of life. All of humanity depends on the knowledge and practice of the medicine and the science behind it you will master. You have chosen a calling that will come in steps to give you satisfaction, at its conclusion, of a life well lived. And I thank you for having me here tonight.(Applause)Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I salute you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/e_o_wilson_advice_to_young_scientists
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"So, last month, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years, which made me nostalgic, because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when I was a kid, maybe 12 years old. And I wondered if I could update that game, not just for modern methods, but for the modern me.So I tried. I went to an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and I entered the term ""Earth."" You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth. And the first rule of the game is pretty simple. You just have to read the article until you find something you don't know, and preferably something your dad doesn't even know.And in this case, I quickly found this: The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought, it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun, so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle, like some Earthlings. And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes, it's one degree away from the equator, it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth.And it is really fun to say. So I immediately decided, this is going to be the name of the game, or my new exclamation. You can use it at TED. Chimborazo, right? It's like ""eureka"" and ""bingo"" had a baby. I didn't know that; that's pretty cool. Chimborazo!So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple. You just have to find another term and look that up. Now in the old days, that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically, maybe getting sidetracked, that was fun.Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from. I can go literally anywhere in the world, I think since I was already in Ecuador, I just decided to click on the word ""tropical."" That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the Earth.Now that's the Tropic of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south, that much I knew, but I was surprised to learn this little fact: Those are not cartographers' lines, like latitude or the borders between nations, they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth's tilt, and they change. They move; they go up, they go down. In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year, and nobody told me that. I didn't know it. Chimborazo!So to keep the game going, I just have to find another term and look that one up. Since I'm already in the tropics, I chose ""Tropical rainforest."" Famous for its diversity, human diversity. There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet. They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests. This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get ""friended.""The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end. It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera, which turn out to be beetles.Now I clicked on this on purpose, but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake, it does remind me, for the band, see ""The Beatles,"" for the car see ""Volkswagon Beetle,"" but I am here for beetle beetles. This is the most successful order on the planet by far. Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles. That means the next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the four people ahead of you in line. Statistically, one of you is a beetle.And if it is you, you are astonishingly well adapted. There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums. There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us. There are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings. This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom. Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles. Fireflies are coleoptera, and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well.Like my next link: The chemical language of pheromones. Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex. Yeah.(Laughter)And the link to aphrodisiac. Now that's something that increases sexual desire, possibly chocolate. There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac. But as the article mentions, because of enzyme breakdown, it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally. So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment.The link I clicked on here, ""sympathetic magic,"" mostly because I understand what both of those words mean. But not when they're together like that. I do like sympathy. I do like magic. So when I click on ""sympathetic magic,"" I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls.This is the boy in me getting lucky again. Sympathetic magic is imitation. If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it. That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings.The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind. I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves. We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork. Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands, usually the left hand.We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia, so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube, I can easily picture how he did it. And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for ""hand,"" go to the page for ""hand,"" where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia I've found in a long time. It's simply this: The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar.Now that's embarrassing, because up until now, every time I've said, ""I know it like the back of my hand,"" I've really been saying, ""I'm totally familiar with that, I just don't know it's freaking name, right?"" And the link I clicked on here, well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar.I click on chimpanzee, and I get our closest genetic relative. Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means ""cave dweller."" He doesn't. He lives in rainforests and savannas. It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us, evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us, and in some cases, he gets places before us.Like my next link, the almost irresistible link, Ham the Astrochimp. I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact. He's born in Cameroon, which is smack in the middle of my tropics map, and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles.In between those two landmarks in Ham's life, he flew into space. He experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page, I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature, huge in heroism. Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters, that is less than five and a half feet tall max, possibly because he was malnourished as a child.Germans occupied Russia. A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household, and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut. Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space, the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet. And he didn't just leave it, he circled it once.Fifty years later, as a tribute, the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight, synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit, at the exact same time of day, and filmed it, so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride, possibly a lonely one, the first person to ever see such a thing.And then when you've had your fill of that, you can click on one more link. You can come back to Earth. You return to where you started. You can finish your game. You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know.And for me, I quickly landed on this one: The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid, which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls.This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy. I found it myself. It's got some math that I can do. I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't know it. What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls, fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea, you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth as a billiard ball, presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle.That's pretty cool. I didn't know that. Chimborazo!Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_reinventing_the_encyclopedia_game
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"So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his 8-year-old son. But instead of going into a store and buying one, like we do normally, he went to this website and he downloaded a file, and then he printed it on this printer. So this idea that you can manufacture objects digitally using these machines is something that The Economist magazine defined as the Third Industrial Revolution.Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the maker's movement, because the printer that my friend used to print the toy is actually open-source. So you go to the same website, you can download all the files that you need in order to make that printer: the construction files, the hardware, the software, all the instruction is there. And also this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers, and there's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open-source. You don't need anybody's permission to create something great. And that space is like the personal computer in 1976, like the Apples with the other companies are fighting, and we will see in a few years, there will be the Apple of this kind of market come out.Well, there's also another interesting thing. I said the electronics are open-source, because at the heart of this printer there is something I'm really attached to: these Arduino boards, the motherboard that sort of powers this printer, is a project I've been working on for the past seven years. It's an open-source project. I worked with these friends of mine that I have here. So the five of us, two Americans, two Italians and a Spaniard, we — (Laughter) You know, it's a worldwide project. (Laughter) So we came together in this design institute called the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, which was teaching interaction design, this idea that you can take design from the simple shape of an object and you can move it forward to design the way you interact with things. Well, when you design an object that's supposed to interact with a human being, if you make a foam model of a mobile phone, it doesn't make any sense. You have to have something that actually interacts with people. So, we worked on Arduino and a lot of other projects there to create platforms that would be simple for our students to use, so that our students could just build things that worked, but they don't have five years to become an electronics engineer. We have one month.So how do I make something that even a kid can use? And actually, with Arduino, we have kids like Sylvia that you see here, that actually make projects with Arduino. I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me stuff they built for Arduino that's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools.So let's look at what happens when you make a tool that anybody can just pick up and build something quickly, so one of the examples that I like to sort of kick off this discussion is this example of this cat feeder. The gentleman who made this project had two cats. One was sick and the other one was healthy, so he had to make sure they ate the proper food. So he made this thing that recognizes the cat from a chip mounted inside on the collar of the cat, and opens the door and the cat can eat the food. This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard, tape, couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market. And I like this phrase: ""Scratch your own itch."" If you have an idea, you just go and you make it. This is the equivalent of sketching on paper done with electronics.So one of the features that I think is important about our work is that our hardware, on top of being made with love in Italy — as you can see from the back of the circuit — (Laughter) is that it's open, so we publish all the design files for the circuit online, so you can download it and you can actually use it to make something, or to modify, to learn. You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code, or looking at other people's circuits in magazines. And this is a good way to learn, by looking at other people's work. So the different elements of the project are all open, so the hardware is released with a Creative Commons license. So, you know, I like this idea that hardware becomes like a piece of culture that you share and you build upon, like it was a song or a poem with Creative Commons. Or, the software is GPL, so it's open-source as well. The documentation and the hands-on teaching methodology is also open-source and released as the Creative Commons. Just the name is protected so that we can make sure that we can tell people what is Arduino and what isn't.Now, Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that maybe individually are hard to use for a 12-year-old kid, so Arduino wraps everything together into a mashup of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly.So you have situations like this, where some people in Chile decided to make their own boards instead of buying them, to organize a workshop and to save money. Or there are companies that make their own variations of Arduino that fit in a certain market, and there's probably, maybe like a 150 of them or something at the moment. This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada, who is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement. So, this idea that you have a new, sort of turbo-charged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces. There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community, and you see a very technical project explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset. Or you have websites, like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything. So this one is about Arduino projects, the page you see on the screen, but effectively here you can learn how to make a cake and everything else. So let's look at some projects.So this one is a quadcopter. It's a small model helicopter. In a way, it's a toy, no? And so this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use, you can buy it online. DIY Drones is the community; they do this thing called ArduCopter. But then somebody actually launched this start-up called Matternet, where they figured out that you could use this to actually transport things from one village to another in Africa, and the fact that this was easy to find, open-source, easy to hack, enabled them to prototype their company really quickly. Or, other projects. Matt Richardson: I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over and over again, so I decided to do something about it. This Arduino project, which I call the Enough Already, will mute the TV anytime any of these over-exposed personalities is mentioned. (Laughter) I'll show you how I made it. (Applause) MB: Check this out. MR: Our producers caught up with Kim Kardashian earlier today to find out what she was planning on wearing to her — MB: Eh? (Laughter) MR: It should do a pretty good job of protecting our ears from having to hear about the details of Kim Kardashian's wedding. MB: Okay. So, you know, again, what is interesting here is that Matt found this module that lets Arduino process TV signals, he found some code written by somebody else that generates infrared signals for the TV, put it together and then created this great project.It's also used, Arduino's used, in serious places like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider. There's some Arduino balls collecting data and sort of measuring some parameters. Or it's used for — (Music) So this is a musical interface built by a student from Italy, and he's now turning this into a product. Because it was a student project becoming a product. Or it can be used to make an assistive device. This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display And again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project. Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU, where they met with this boy who has a severe disability, cannot play with the PS3, so they built this device that allows the kid to play baseball although he has limited movement capability.Or you can find it in arts projects. So this is the txtBomber. So you put a message into this device and then you roll it on the wall, and it basically has all these solenoids pressing the buttons on spray cans, so you just pull it over a wall and it just writes on the wall all the political messages. So, yeah. (Applause) Then we have this plant here. This is called Botanicalls, because there's an Arduino ball with a Wi-Fi module in the plant, and it's measuring the well-being of the plant, and it's creating a Twitter account where you can actually interact with the plant. (Laughter) So, you know, this plant will start to say, ""This is really hot,"" or there's a lot of, you know, ""I need water right now."" (Laughter) So it just gives a personality to your plant. Or this is something that twitters when the baby inside the belly of a pregnant woman kicks. (Laughter) Or this is a 14-year-old kid in Chile who made a system that detects earthquakes and publishes on Twitter. He has 280,000 followers. He's 14 and he anticipated a governmental project by one year. (Applause) Or again, another project where, by analyzing the Twitter feed of a family, you can basically point where they are, like in the ""Harry Potter"" movie. So you can find out everything about this project on the website. Or somebody made a chair that twitters when somebody farts. (Laughter) It's interesting how, in 2009, Gizmodo basically defined, said that this project actually gives a meaning to Twitter, so it was — a lot changed in between. (Laughter)So very serious project. When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan, they realized that the information that the government was giving wasn't really open and really reliable, so they built this Geiger counter, plus Arduino, plus network interface. They made 100 of them and gave them to people around Japan, and essentially the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Cosm, another website they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information. Or this machine here, it's from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA, and again, it's completely open-source from the ground up. Or you have students in developing countries making replicas of scientific instruments that cost a lot of money to make. Actually they just build them themselves for a lot less using Arduino and a few parts. This is a pH probe. Or you get kids, like these kids, they're from Spain. They learned how to program and to make robots when they were probably, like, 11, and then they started to use Arduino to make these robots that play football. They became world champions by making an Arduino-based robot. And so when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, you know, ""You design it, because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids."" Not me. I'm an old guy. What am I supposed to excite, huh? (Laughter) But as I — in terms of educational assets. (Laughter)There's also companies like Google that are using the technology to create interfaces between mobile phones, tablets and the real world. So the Accessory Development Kit from Google is open-source and based on Arduino, as opposed to the one from Apple which is closed-source, NDA, sign your life to Apple. Here you are. There's a giant maze, and Joey's sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet.Also, I come from Italy, and the design is important in Italy, and yet very conservative. So we worked with a design studio called Habits, in Milan, to make this mirror, which is completely open-source. This doubles also as an iPod speaker. So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication, everything about this project is open-source and you can make it yourself. So we want other designers to pick this up and learn how to make great devices, to learn how to make interactive products by starting from something real.But when you have this idea, you know, what happens to all these ideas? There's, like, thousands of ideas that I — You know, it would take seven hours for me to do all the presentations. I will not take all the seven hours. Thank you. But let's start from this example: So, the group of people that started this company called Pebble, they prototyped a watch that communicates via Bluetooth with your phone, and you can display information on it. And they prototyped with an old LCD screen from a Nokia mobile phone and an Arduino. And then, when they had a final project, they actually went to Kickstarter and they were asking for 100,000 dollars to make a few of them to sell. They got 10 million dollars. They got a completely fully funded start-up, and they don't have to, you know, get VCs involved or anything, just excite the people with their great project.The last project I want to show you is this: It's called ArduSat. It's currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to contribute, please do it. It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them. So imagine, if you as a high school can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that.So, as I said, there's lots of examples, and I'm going to stop here. And I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best, and just every day making lots of projects. Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)And thanks to the community.Chris Anderson: Massimo, you told me earlier today that you had no idea, of course, that it would take off like this.MB: No.CA: I mean, how must you feel when you read this stuff and you see what you've unlocked?MB: Well, it's the work of a lot of people, so we as a community are enabling people to make great stuff, and I just feel overwhelmed. It's just, it's difficult to describe this. Every morning, I wake up and I look at all the stuff that Google Alerts sends me, and it's just amazing. It's just going into every field that you can imagine.CA: Thank you so much. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/massimo_banzi_how_arduino_is_open_sourcing_imagination
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"Openness. It's a word that denotes opportunity and possibilities. Open-ended, open hearth, open source, open door policy, open bar. (Laughter)And everywhere the world is opening up, and it's a good thing.Why is this happening? The technology revolution is opening the world.Yesterday's Internet was a platform for the presentation of content. The Internet of today is a platform for computation. The Internet is becoming a giant global computer, and every time you go on it, you upload a video, you do a Google search, you remix something, you're programming this big global computer that we all share. Humanity is building a machine, and this enables us to collaborate in new ways. Collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis.Now a new generation is opening up the world as well. I started studying kids about 15 years ago, — so actually 20 years ago now — and I noticed how my own children were effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology, and at first I thought, ""My children are prodigies!"" (Laughter) But then I noticed all their friends were like them, so that was a bad theory. So I've started working with a few hundred kids, and I came to the conclusion that this is the first generation to come of age in the digital age, to be bathed in bits. I call them the Net Generation. I said, these kids are different. They have no fear of technology, because it's not there. It's like the air. It's sort of like, I have no fear of a refrigerator. And — (Laughter)And there's no more powerful force to change every institution than the first generation of digital natives. I'm a digital immigrant. I had to learn the language.The global economic crisis is opening up the world as well. Our opaque institutions from the Industrial Age, everything from old models of the corporation, government, media, Wall Street, are in various stages of being stalled or frozen or in atrophy or even failing, and this is now creating a burning platform in the world. I mean, think about Wall Street. The core modus operandi of Wall Street almost brought down global capitalism.Now, you know the idea of a burning platform, that you're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are become greater than the costs of moving to something different, perhaps something radically different. And we need to change and open up all of our institutions.So this technology push, a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up.Now, I think, in fact, we're at a turning point in human history, where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the Industrial Age around a new set of principles.Now, what is openness? Well, as it turns out, openness has a number of different meanings, and for each there's a corresponding principle for the transformation of civilization. The first is collaboration. Now, this is openness in the sense of the boundaries of organizations becoming more porous and fluid and open.The guy in the picture here, I'll tell you his story. His name is Rob McEwen. I'd like to say, ""I have this think tank, we scour the world for amazing case studies."" The reason I know this story is because he's my neighbor. (Laughter) He actually moved across the street from us, and he held a cocktail party to meet the neighbors, and he says, ""You're Don Tapscott. I've read some of your books."" I said, ""Great. What do you do?"" And he says, ""Well I used to be a banker and now I'm a gold miner."" And he tells me this amazing story. He takes over this gold mine, and his geologists can't tell him where the gold is. He gives them more money for geological data, they come back, they can't tell him where to go into production. After a few years, he's so frustrated he's ready to give up, but he has an epiphany one day. He wonders, ""If my geologists don't know where the gold is, maybe somebody else does."" So he does a ""radical"" thing. He takes his geological data, he publishes it and he holds a contest on the Internet called the Goldcorp Challenge. It's basically half a million dollars in prize money for anybody who can tell me, do I have any gold, and if so, where is it? (Laughter)He gets submissions from all around the world. They use techniques that he's never heard of, and for his half a million dollars in prize money, Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold. The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars, and I can tell you, because he's my neighbor, he's a happy camper. (Laughter)You know, conventional wisdom says talent is inside, right? Your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night. He viewed talent differently. He wondered, who are their peers? He should have fired his geology department, but he didn't. You know, some of the best submissions didn't come from geologists. They came from computer scientists, engineers. The winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is.He helped us understand that social media's becoming social production. It's not about hooking up online. This is a new means of production in the making. And this Ideagora that he created, an open market, agora, for uniquely qualified minds, was part of a change, a profound change in the deep structure and architecture of our organizations, and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate, to create goods and services, to engage with the rest of the world, in terms of government, how we create public value. Openness is about collaboration.Now secondly, openness is about transparency. This is different. Here, we're talking about the communication of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations: employees, customers, business partners, shareholders, and so on.And everywhere, our institutions are becoming naked. People are all bent out of shape about WikiLeaks, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You see, people at their fingertips now, everybody, not just Julian Assange, have these powerful tools for finding out what's going on, scrutinizing, informing others, and even organizing collective responses. Institutions are becoming naked,and if you're going to be naked, well, there's some corollaries that flow from that. I mean, one is, fitness is no longer optional. (Laughter) You know? Or if you're going to be naked, you'd better get buff.Now, by buff I mean, you need to have good value, because value is evidenced like never before. You say you have good products. They'd better be good. But you also need to have values. You need to have integrity as part of your bones and your DNA as an organization, because if you don't, you'll be unable to build trust, and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world.So this is good. It's not bad. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world.Now, the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing. Now this is different than transparency. Transparency is about the communication of information. Sharing is about giving up assets, intellectual property.And there are all kinds of famous stories about this. IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software to the Linux movement, and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff.Now, conventional wisdom says, ""Well, hey, our intellectual property belongs to us, and if someone tries to infringe it, we're going to get out our lawyers and we're going to sue them."" Well, it didn't work so well for the record labels, did it? I mean, they took — They had a technology disruption, and rather than taking a business model innovation to correspond to that, they took and sought a legal solution and the industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing children and is in danger of collapse.So we need to think differently about intellectual property.I'll give you an example. The pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble. First of all, there aren't a lot of big inventions in the pipeline, and this is a big problem for human health, and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem, that they're about to fall off something called the patent cliff. Do you know about this? They're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue in the next 12 months. And what are you going to do, like, cut back on paper clips or something? No.We need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research. The pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets in a commons. They need to start sharing precompetitive research. They need to start sharing clinical trial data, and in doing so, create a rising tide that could lift all boats, not just for the industry but for humanity.Now, the fourth meaning of openness, and corresponding principle, is about empowerment. And I'm not talking about the motherhood sense here. Knowledge and intelligence is power, and as it becomes more distributed, there's a concomitant distribution and decentralization and disaggregation of power that's underway in the world today. The open world is bringing freedom.Now, take the Arab Spring. The debate about the role of social media and social change has been settled. You know, one word: Tunisia. And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too. But in the Tunisian revolution, the new media didn't cause the revolution; it was caused by injustice. Social media didn't create the revolution; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who didn't want to be treated as subjects anymore.But just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection in ways that people didn't understand.You know, during the Tunisian revolution, snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street. So the students would take their mobile devices, take a picture, triangulate the location, send that picture to friendly military units, who'd come in and take out the snipers. You think that social media is about hooking up online? For these kids, it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers. It was a tool of self-defense.You know, as we speak today, young people are being killed in Syria, and up until three months ago, if you were injured on the street, an ambulance would pick you up, take you to the hospital, you'd go in, say, with a broken leg, and you'd come out with a bullet in your head.So these 20-somethings created an alternative health care system, where what they did is they used Twitter and basic publicly available tools that when someone's injured, a car would show up, it would pick them up, take them to a makeshift medical clinic, where you'd get medical treatment, as opposed to being executed. So this is a time of great change.Now, it's not without its problems. Up until two years ago, all revolutions in human history had a leadership, and when the old regime fell, the leadership and the organization would take power. Well, these wiki revolutions happen so fast they create a vacuum, and politics abhors a vacuum, and unsavory forces can fill that, typically the old regime, or extremists, or fundamentalist forces. You can see this playing out today in Egypt.But that doesn't matter, because this is moving forward. The train has left the station. The cat is out of the bag. The horse is out of the barn. Help me out here, okay? (Laughter) The toothpaste is out of the tube. I mean, we're not putting this one back. The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom.I think, at the end of these four days, that you'll come to conclude that the arc of history is a positive one, and it's towards openness.If you go back a few hundred years, all around the world it was a very closed society. It was agrarian, and the means of production and political system was called feudalism, and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility. People didn't know about things. There was no concept of progress. You were born, you lived your life and you died.But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention, and, over time, the society opened up. People started to learn about things, and when they did, the institutions of feudal society appeared to be stalled, or frozen, or failing. It didn't make sense for the church to be responsible for medicine when people had knowledge.So we saw the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther called the printing press ""God's highest act of grace."" The creation of a corporation, science, the university, eventually the Industrial Revolution, and it was all good.But it came with a cost.And now, once again, the technology genie is out of the bottle, but this time it's different. The printing press gave us access to the written word. The Internet enables each of us to be a producer. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to information and knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis.To me, this is not an information age, it's an age of networked intelligence. It's an age of vast promise, an age of collaboration, where the boundaries of our organizations are changing, of transparency, where sunlight is disinfecting civilization, an age of sharing and understanding the new power of the commons, and it's an age of empowerment and of freedom.Now, what I'd like to do is, to close, to share with you some research that I've been doing. I've tried to study all kinds of organizations to understand what the future might look like, but I've been studying nature recently.You know, bees come in swarms and fish come in schools. Starlings, in the area around Edinburgh, in the moors of England, come in something called a murmuration, and the murmuration refers to the murmuring of the wings of the birds, and throughout the day the starlings are out over a 20-mile radius sort of doing their starling thing. And at night they come together and they create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature, and it's called a murmuration. And scientists that have studied this have said they've never seen an accident. Now, this thing has a function. It protects the birds. You can see on the right here, there's a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds, and apparently this is a frightening thing if you're a predator of starlings. And there's leadership, but there's no one leader.Now, is this some kind of fanciful analogy, or could we actually learn something from this? Well, the murmuration functions to record a number of principles, and they're basically the principles that I have described to you today. This is a huge collaboration. It's an openness, it's a sharing of all kinds of information, not just about location and trajectory and danger and so on, but about food sources. And there's a real sense of interdependence, that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective.Perhaps like we should understand that business can't succeed in a world that's failing.Well, I look at this thing, and I get a lot of hope. Think about the kids today in the Arab Spring, and you see something like this that's underway.And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would: What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass? Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge? Could we start to share our intelligence? Could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create, perhaps, some kind of consciousness on a global basis? Well, if we could do this, we could attack some big problems in the world.And I look at this thing, and, I don't know, I get a lot of hope that maybe this smaller, networked, open world that our kids inherit might be a better one, and that this new age of networked intelligence could be an age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited.Let's do this. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1
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"So I'm a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I might have ended up spending most of my life on the back ward of a hospital, but that isn't how my life turned out. In fact, I've managed to stay clear of hospitals for almost three decades, perhaps my proudest accomplishment. That's not to say that I've remained clear of all psychiatric struggles. After I graduated from the Yale Law School and got my first law job, my New Haven analyst, Dr. White, announced to me that he was going to close his practice in three months, several years before I had planned to leave New Haven. White had been enormously helpful to me, and the thought of his leaving shattered me.My best friend Steve, sensing that something was terribly wrong, flew out to New Haven to be with me. Now I'm going to quote from some of my writings: ""I opened the door to my studio apartment. Steve would later tell me that, for all the times he had seen me psychotic, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw that day. For a week or more, I had barely eaten. I was gaunt. I walked as though my legs were wooden. My face looked and felt like a mask. I had closed all the curtains in the apartment, so in the middle of the day the apartment was in near total darkness. The air was fetid, the room a shambles. Steve, both a lawyer and a psychologist, has treated many patients with severe mental illness, and to this day he'll say I was as bad as any he had ever seen. 'Hi,' I said, and then I returned to the couch, where I sat in silence for several moments. 'Thank you for coming, Steve. Crumbling world, word, voice. Tell the clocks to stop. Time is. Time has come.' 'White is leaving,' Steve said somberly. 'I'm being pushed into a grave. The situation is grave,' I moan. 'Gravity is pulling me down. I'm scared. Tell them to get away.'""As a young woman, I was in a psychiatric hospital on three different occasions for lengthy periods. My doctors diagnosed me with chronic schizophrenia, and gave me a prognosis of ""grave."" That is, at best, I was expected to live in a board and care, and work at menial jobs. Fortunately, I did not actually enact that grave prognosis. Instead, I'm a chaired Professor of Law, Psychology and Psychiatry at the USC Gould School of Law, I have many close friends and I have a beloved husband, Will, who's here with us today.(Applause) Thank you. He's definitely the star of my show.I'd like to share with you how that happened, and also describe my experience of being psychotic. I hasten to add that it's my experience, because everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own way.Let's start with the definition of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a brain disease. Its defining feature is psychosis, or being out of touch with reality. Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness. Delusions are fixed and false beliefs that aren't responsive to evidence, and hallucinations are false sensory experiences. For example, when I'm psychotic I often have the delusion that I've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts. I sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain. Occasionally, I have hallucinations, like one time I turned around and saw a man with a raised knife. Imagine having a nightmare while you're awake.Often, speech and thinking become disorganized to the point of incoherence. Loose associations involves putting together words that may sound a lot alike but don't make sense, and if the words get jumbled up enough, it's called ""word salad."" Contrary to what many people think, schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder or split personality. The schizophrenic mind is not split, but shattered.Everyone has seen a street person, unkempt, probably ill-fed, standing outside of an office building muttering to himself or shouting. This person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia. But schizophrenia presents itself across a wide array of socioeconomic status, and there are people with the illness who are full-time professionals with major responsibilities. Several years ago, I decided to write down my experiences and my personal journey, and I want to share some more of that story with you today to convey the inside view.So the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at Yale Law School. Quoting from my writings: ""My two classmates, Rebel and Val, and I had made the date to meet in the law school library on Friday night to work on our memo assignment together. But we didn't get far before I was talking in ways that made no sense.'Memos are visitations,' I informed them. 'They make certain points. The point is on your head. Pat used to say that. Have you killed you anyone?' Rebel and Val looked at me as if they or I had been splashed in the face with cold water. 'What are you talking about, Elyn?' 'Oh, you know, the usual. Who's what, what's who, heaven and hell. Let's go out on the roof. It's a flat surface. It's safe.' Rebel and Val followed and they asked what had gotten into me. 'This is the real me,' I announced, waving my arms above my head. And then, late on a Friday night, on the roof of the Yale Law School, I began to sing, and not quietly either. 'Come to the Florida sunshine bush. Do you want to dance?' 'Are you on drugs?' one asked. 'Are you high?' 'High? Me? No way, no drugs. Come to the Florida sunshine bush, where there are lemons, where they make demons.' 'You're frightening me,' one of them said, and Rebel and Val headed back into the library. I shrugged and followed them.Back inside, I asked my classmates if they were having the same experience of words jumping around our cases as I was. 'I think someone's infiltrated my copies of the cases,' I said. 'We've got to case the joint. I don't believe in joints, but they do hold your body together.'"" — It's an example of loose associations. — ""Eventually I made my way back to my dorm room, and once there, I couldn't settle down. My head was too full of noise, too full of orange trees and law memos I could not write and mass murders I knew I would be responsible for. Sitting on my bed, I rocked back and forth, moaning in fear and isolation."" This episode led to my first hospitalization in America. I had two earlier in England.Continuing with the writings: ""The next morning I went to my professor's office to ask for an extension on the memo assignment, and I began gibbering unintelligably as I had the night before, and he eventually brought me to the emergency room. Once there, someone I'll just call 'The Doctor' and his whole team of goons swooped down, lifted me high into the air, and slammed me down on a metal bed with such force that I saw stars. Then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps. A sound came out of my mouth that I'd never heard before: half groan, half scream, barely human and pure terror. Then the sound came again, forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw."" This incident resulted in my involuntary hospitalization. One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ""gravely disabled."" To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven. (Laughter)During the next year, I would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital. At times, I spent up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints, arms tied, arms and legs tied down, arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across my chest. I never struck anyone. I never harmed anyone. I never made any direct threats. If you've never been restrained yourself, you may have a benign image of the experience. There's nothing benign about it.Every week in the United States, it's been estimated that one to three people die in restraints. They strangle, they aspirate their vomit, they suffocate, they have a heart attack. It's unclear whether using mechanical restraints is actually saving lives or costing lives. While I was preparing to write my student note for the Yale Law Journal on mechanical restraints, I consulted an eminent law professor who was also a psychiatrist, and said surely he would agree that restraints must be degrading, painful and frightening. He looked at me in a knowing way, and said, ""Elyn, you don't really understand: These people are psychotic. They're different from me and you. They wouldn't experience restraints as we would."" I didn't have the courage to tell him in that moment that, no, we're not that different from him. We don't like to be strapped down to a bed and left to suffer for hours any more than he would. In fact, until very recently, and I'm sure some people still hold it as a view, that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed with that view. Today, I'd like to say I'm very pro-psychiatry but very anti-force. I don't think force is effective as treatment, and I think using force is a terrible thing to do to another person with a terrible illness.Eventually, I came to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California Law School. For years, I had resisted medication, making many, many efforts to get off. I felt that if I could manage without medication, I could prove that, after all, I wasn't really mentally ill, it was some terrible mistake. My motto was the less medicine, the less defective. My L.A. analyst, Dr. Kaplan, was urging me just to stay on medication and get on with my life, but I decided I wanted to make one last college try to get off. Quoting from the text: ""I started the reduction of my meds, and within a short time I began feeling the effects. After returning from a trip to Oxford, I marched into Kaplan's office, headed straight for the corner, crouched down, covered my face, and began shaking. All around me I sensed evil beings poised with daggers. They'd slice me up in thin slices or make me swallow hot coals. Kaplan would later describe me as 'writhing in agony.' Even in this state, what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic, I refused to take more medication. The mission is not yet complete.Immediately after the appointment with Kaplan, I went to see Dr. Marder, a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects. He was under the impression that I had a mild psychotic illness. Once in his office, I sat on his couch, folded over, and began muttering. 'Head explosions and people trying to kill. Is it okay if I totally trash your office?' 'You need to leave if you think you're going to do that,' said Marder. 'Okay. Small. Fire on ice. Tell them not to kill me. Tell them not to kill me. What have I done wrong? Hundreds of thousands with thoughts, interdiction.' 'Elyn, do you feel like you're dangerous to yourself or others? I think you need to be in the hospital. I could get you admitted right away, and the whole thing could be very discrete.' 'Ha, ha, ha. You're offering to put me in hospitals? Hospitals are bad, they're mad, they're sad. One must stay away. I'm God, or I used to be.'"" At that point in the text, where I said ""I'm God, or I used to be,"" my husband made a marginal note. He said, ""Did you quit or were you fired?"" (Laughter) ""'I give life and I take it away. Forgive me, for I know not what I do.'Eventually, I broke down in front of friends, and everybody convinced me to take more medication. I could no longer deny the truth, and I could not change it. The wall that kept me, Elyn, Professor Saks, separate from that insane woman hospitalized years past, lay smashed and in ruins.""Everything about this illness says I shouldn't be here, but I am. And I am, I think, for three reasons: First, I've had excellent treatment. Four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy for decades and continuing, and excellent psychopharmacology. Second, I have many close family members and friends who know me and know my illness. These relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth, and they also helped me navigate my life in the face of symptoms. Third, I work at an enormously supportive workplace at USC Law School. This is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them. It's also a very intellectually stimulating place, and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.Even with all that — excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment — I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not ""schizophrenics."" There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker.So let me share some final thoughts. We need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness. The better we understand these illnesses, the better the treatments we can provide, and the better the treatments we can provide, the more we can offer people care, and not have to use force. Also, we must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States. American prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness, and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment. I could have easily ended up there or on the streets myself. A message to the entertainment industry and to the press: On the whole, you've done a wonderful job fighting stigma and prejudice of many kinds. Please, continue to let us see characters in your movies, your plays, your columns, who suffer with severe mental illness. Portray them sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people and not as diagnoses.Recently, a friend posed a question: If there were a pill I could take that would instantly cure me, would I take it? The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was offered psychoanalysis. He declined, saying, ""Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too."" My psychosis, on the other hand, is a waking nightmare in which my devils are so terrifying that all my angels have already fled. So would I take the pill? In an instant. That said, I don't wish to be seen as regretting the life I could have had if I'd not been mentally ill, nor am I asking anyone for their pity. What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not. What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants: in the words of Sigmund Freud, ""to work and to love.""Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. You're very kind. (Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elyn_saks_seeing_mental_illness
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"The phenomenon you saw here for a brief moment is called quantum levitation and quantum locking. And the object that was levitating here is called a superconductor. Superconductivity is a quantum state of matter, and it occurs only below a certain critical temperature.Now, it's quite an old phenomenon; it was discovered 100 years ago. However, only recently, due to several technological advancements, we are now able to demonstrate to you quantum levitation and quantum locking.So, a superconductor is defined by two properties. The first is zero electrical resistance, and the second is the expulsion of a magnetic field from the interior of the superconductor. That sounds complicated, right? But what is electrical resistance? So, electricity is the flow of electrons inside a material. And these electrons, while flowing, they collide with the atoms, and in these collisions they lose a certain amount of energy. And they dissipate this energy in the form of heat, and you know that effect. However, inside a superconductor there are no collisions, so there is no energy dissipation.It's quite remarkable. Think about it. In classical physics, there is always some friction, some energy loss. But not here, because it is a quantum effect. But that's not all, because superconductors don't like magnetic fields. So a superconductor will try to expel magnetic field from the inside, and it has the means to do that by circulating currents. Now, the combination of both effects — the expulsion of magnetic fields and zero electrical resistance — is exactly a superconductor.But the picture isn't always perfect, as we all know, and sometimes strands of magnetic field remain inside the superconductor. Now, under proper conditions, which we have here, these strands of magnetic field can be trapped inside the superconductor. And these strands of magnetic field inside the superconductor, they come in discrete quantities. Why? Because it is a quantum phenomenon. It's quantum physics. And it turns out that they behave like quantum particles.In this movie here, you can see how they flow one by one discretely. This is strands of magnetic field. These are not particles, but they behave like particles. So, this is why we call this effect quantum levitation and quantum locking.But what happens to the superconductor when we put it inside a magnetic field? Well, first there are strands of magnetic field left inside, but now the superconductor doesn't like them moving around, because their movements dissipate energy, which breaks the superconductivity state. So what it actually does, it locks these strands, which are called fluxons, and it locks these fluxons in place. And by doing that, what it actually does is locking itself in place. Why? Because any movement of the superconductor will change their place, will change their configuration.So we get quantum locking. And let me show you how this works. I have here a superconductor, which I wrapped up so it'd stay cold long enough. And when I place it on top of a regular magnet, it just stays locked in midair.(Applause)Now, this is not just levitation. It's not just repulsion. I can rearrange the fluxons, and it will be locked in this new configuration. Like this, or move it slightly to the right or to the left. So, this is quantum locking — actually locking — three-dimensional locking of the superconductor. Of course, I can turn it upside down, and it will remain locked.Now, now that we understand that this so-called levitation is actually locking, Yeah, we understand that. You won't be surprised to hear that if I take this circular magnet, in which the magnetic field is the same all around, the superconductor will be able to freely rotate around the axis of the magnet. Why? Because as long as it rotates, the locking is maintained. You see? I can adjust and I can rotate the superconductor. We have frictionless motion. It is still levitating, but can move freely all around.So, we have quantum locking and we can levitate it on top of this magnet. But how many fluxons, how many magnetic strands are there in a single disk like this? Well, we can calculate it, and it turns out, quite a lot. One hundred billion strands of magnetic field inside this three-inch disk.But that's not the amazing part yet, because there is something I haven't told you yet. And, yeah, the amazing part is that this superconductor that you see here is only half a micron thick. It's extremely thin. And this extremely thin layer is able to levitate more than 70,000 times its own weight. It's a remarkable effect. It's very strong.Now, I can extend this circular magnet, and make whatever track I want. For example, I can make a large circular rail here. And when I place the superconducting disk on top of this rail, it moves freely.(Applause)And again, that's not all. I can adjust its position like this, and rotate, and it freely moves in this new position. And I can even try a new thing; let's try it for the first time. I can take this disk and put it here, and while it stays here — don't move — I will try to rotate the track, and hopefully, if I did it correctly, it stays suspended.(Applause)You see, it's quantum locking, not levitation. Now, while I'll let it circulate for a little more, let me tell you a little bit about superconductors. Now — (Laughter) — So we now know that we are able to transfer enormous amount of currents inside superconductors, so we can use them to produce strong magnetic fields, such as needed in MRI machines, particle accelerators and so on. But we can also store energy using superconductors, because we have no dissipation.And we could also produce power cables, to transfer enormous amounts of current between power stations. Imagine you could back up a single power station with a single superconducting cable. But what is the future of quantum levitation and quantum locking? Well, let me answer this simple question by giving you an example. Imagine you would have a disk similar to the one I have here in my hand, three-inch diameter, with a single difference. The superconducting layer, instead of being half a micron thin, being two millimeters thin, quite thin. This two-millimeter-thin superconducting layer could hold 1,000 kilograms, a small car, in my hand. Amazing. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/boaz_almog_levitates_a_superconductor
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"I'd like to talk about my dad. My dad has Alzheimer's disease. He started showing the symptoms about 12 years ago, and he was officially diagnosed in 2005. Now he's really pretty sick. He needs help eating, he needs help getting dressed, he doesn't really know where he is or when it is, and it's been really, really hard. My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life, and I've spent the last decade watching him disappear.My dad's not alone. There's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they're expecting that to double to 70 million. That's a lot of people. Dementia scares us. The confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia, the big numbers of people who get it, they frighten us. And because of that fear, we tend to do one of two things: We go into denial: ""It's not me, it has nothing to do with me, it's never going to happen to me."" Or, we decide that we're going to prevent dementia, and it will never happen to us because we're going to do everything right and it won't come and get us. I'm looking for a third way: I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease.Prevention is good, and I'm doing the things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer's. I'm eating right, I'm exercising every day, I'm keeping my mind active, that's what the research says you should do. But the research also shows that there's nothing that will 100 percent protect you. If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. That's what happened with my dad. My dad was a bilingual college professor. His hobbies were chess, bridge and writing op-eds. (Laughter) He got dementia anyway. If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. Especially if you're me, 'cause Alzheimer's tends to run in families. So I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease.Based on what I've learned from taking care of my father, and researching what it's like to live with dementia, I'm focusing on three things in my preparation: I'm changing what I do for fun, I'm working to build my physical strength, and — this is the hard one — I'm trying to become a better person. Let's start with the hobbies. When you get dementia, it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself. You can't sit and have long talks with your old friends, because you don't know who they are. It's confusing to watch television, and often very frightening. And reading is just about impossible. When you care for someone with dementia, and you get training, they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar, hands-on, open-ended. With my dad, that turned out to be letting him fill out forms. He was a college professor at a state school; he knows what paperwork looks like. He'll sign his name on every line, he'll check all the boxes, he'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers. But it got me thinking, what would my caregivers do with me? I'm my father's daughter. I read, I write, I think about global health a lot. Would they give me academic journals so I could scribble in the margins? Would they give me charts and graphs that I could color? So I've been trying to learn to do things that are hands-on. I've always liked to draw, so I'm doing it more even though I'm really very bad at it. I am learning some basic origami. I can make a really great box. (Laughter) And I'm teaching myself to knit, which so far I can knit a blob.But, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm actually good at it. What matters is that my hands know how to do it. Because the more things that are familiar, the more things my hands know how to do, the more things that I can be happy and busy doing when my brain's not running the show anymore. They say that people who are engaged in activities are happier, easier for their caregivers to look after, and it may even slow the progress of the disease. That all seems like win to me. I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can. A lot of people don't know that Alzheimer's actually has physical symptoms, as well as cognitive symptoms. You lose your sense of balance, you get muscle tremors, and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile. They get scared to walk around. They get scared to move. So I'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance. I'm doing yoga and tai chi to improve my balance, so that when I start to lose it, I'll still be able to be mobile. I'm doing weight-bearing exercise, so that I have the muscle strength so that when I start to wither, I have more time that I can still move around.Finally, the third thing. I'm trying to become a better person. My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's, and he's kind and loving now. I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but I've also seen this: He loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers. And that love makes us want to be around him, even now. even when it's so hard. When you take away everything that he ever learned in this world, his naked heart still shines. I was never as kind as my dad, and I was never as loving. And what I need now is to learn to be like that. I need a heart so pure that if it's stripped bare by dementia, it will survive.I don't want to get Alzheimer's disease. What I want is a cure in the next 20 years, soon enough to protect me. But if it comes for me, I'm going to be ready. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alanna_shaikh_how_i_m_preparing_to_get_alzheimer_s
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"About 75 years ago, my grandfather, a young man, walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that, and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen: none other than Mae West, the heartthrob of the '30s, and he could never forget her. In fact, when he had his daughter many years later, he wanted to name her after Mae West, but can you imagine an Indian child name Mae West? The Indian family said, no way!So when my twin brother Kaesava was born, he decided to tinker with the spelling of Keshava's name. He said, if Mae West can be M-A-E, why can't Keshava be K-A-E? So he changed Kaesava's spelling. Now Kaesava had a baby boy called Rehan a couple of weeks ago. He decided to spell, or, rather, misspell Raehan with an A-E.You know, my grandfather died many years ago when I was little, but his love for Mae West lives on as a misspelling in the DNA of his progeny. That for me is successful legacy. (Laughs)You know, as for me, my wife and I have our own crazy legacy project. We actually sit every few years, argue, disagree, fight, and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan.Our friends think we're mad. Our parents think we're cuckoo. Because, you know, we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom, but we both like to live larger than life. I believe in the concept of a Raja Yogi: Be a dude before you can become an ascetic. This is me being a rock star, even if it's in my own house. You know?So when Netra and I sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago, we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves. What do we mean by beyond ourselves?Well 200 years, we calculated, is at the end of our direct contact with the world. There's nobody I'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years, so we thought that's a perfect place where we should situate our plan and let our imagination take flight.You know, I never really believed in legacy. What am I going to leave behind? I'm an artist. Until I made a cartoon about 9/11. It caused so much trouble for me. I was so upset. You know, a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer.Now I'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me, and I think about what I want to leave behind through those paintings.You know, the 9/11 cartoon upset me so much that I decided I'll never cartoon again. I said, I'm never going to make any honest public commentary again.But of course I continued creating artwork that was honest and raw, because I forgot about how people reacted to my work.You know, sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic. Perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings.One of the most important things in my 200-year plan that Netra and I write is what to forget about ourselves. You know, we carry so much baggage, from our parents, from our society, from so many people — fears, insecurities — and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire. We actually put an expiry date on all our childhood problems. The latest date I put was, I said, I am going to expire my fear of my leftist, feminist mother-in-law, and this today is the date! (Laughs) She's watching. (Laughter)Anyway, you know, I really make decisions all the time about how I want to remember myself, and that's the most important kind of decisions I make. And this directly translates into my paintings. But like my friends, I can do that really well on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. Name it, I'm on it. I've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world, you know? But that comes with a problem. It's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory, but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology. We only remember what we want to. At least I do. And I rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory, you know? And if technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it?Netra and I use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy.That is a picture of my mother, and she recently got a Facebook account. You know where this is going. And I've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my Facebook page. (Laughter)And I actually untagged myself first, then I picked up the phone. I said, ""Mom, you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again."" And she said, ""Why? You look so cute, darling."" I said, ""You just don't understand.""Maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves. Maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives.You know, whether you agree with, you know, legacy or not, we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time. So Netra and I really wanted to use our 200-year plan to curate this digital legacy, and not only digital legacy but we believe in curating the legacy of my past and future.How, you may ask?Well, when I think of the future, I never see myself moving forward in time. I actually see time moving backward towards me. I can actually visualize my future approaching. I can dodge what I don't want and pull in what I want. It's like a video game obstacle course. And I've gotten better and better at doing this. Even when I make a painting, I actually imagine I'm behind the painting, it already exists, and someone's looking at it, and I see whether they're feeling it from their gut. Are they feeling it from their heart, or is it just a cerebral thing? And it really informs my painting. Even when I do an art show, I really think about, what should people walk away with?I remember when I was 19, I did, I wanted to do my first art exhibition, and I wanted the whole world to know about it. I didn't know TED then, but what I did was I closed my eyes tight, and I started dreaming. I could imagine people coming in, dressed up, looking beautiful, my paintings with all the light, and in my visualization I actually saw a very famous actress launching my show, giving credibility to me. And I woke up from my visualization and I said, who was that? I couldn't tell if it was Shabana Azmi or Rekha, two very famous Indian actresses, like the Meryl Streeps of India.As it turned out, next morning I wrote a letter to both of them, and Shabana Azmi replied, and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago. And what a bang it started my career with! You know, when we think of time in this way, we can curate not only the future but also the past. This is a picture of my family, and that is Netra, my wife. She's the co-creator of my 200-year plan.Netra's a high school history teacher. I love Netra, but I hate history. I keep saying, ""Nets, you live in the past while I'll create the future, and when I'm done, you can study about it."" (Laughter)She gave me an indulgent smile, and as punishment, she said, ""Tomorrow I'm teaching a class on Indian history, and you are sitting in it, and I'm grading you.""I'm like, ""Oh, God."" I went.I actually went and sat in on her class. She started by giving students primary source documents from India, Pakistan, from Britain, and I said, ""Wow."" Then she asked them to separate fact from bias. I said, ""Wow,"" again. Then she said, ""Choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity.""History as an imaging tool? I was so inspired.I went and created my own version of Indian history. I actually included stories from my grandmother. She used to work for the telephone exchange, and she used to actually overhear conversations between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. And she used to hear all kinds of things she shouldn't have heard. But, you know, I include things like that. This is my version of Indian history.You know, if this is so, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity. Go tell Facebook to figure that out!Netra and I don't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years. Imagine receiving a parcel saying, from the past, okay now you're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this. No. We actually write it only to set our attitudes right.You know, I used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy. Education is great. It really teaches us who we are, and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world, but it's really my creativity that's taught me that I can be much more than what my education told me I am.I'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have. It lets us create who we are, and curate what is to come.I like to think — Thank you.I like to think of myself as a storyteller, where my past and my future are only stories, my stories, waiting to be told and retold. I hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story.Thank you so much.Shukran! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raghava_kk_what_s_your_200_year_plan
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"In the ocean, what is the common point between oil, plastic and radioactivity?On the top line, this is the BP oil spill: billions of barrels of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico. The middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean, and the third line is radioactive material leaking from Fukushima nuclear power plant in the Pacific Ocean.Well, the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces. This should make us feel very, terribly awful as much as it should make us feel hopeful, because if we have the power to create these problems, we may as well have the power to remediate these problems.But what about natural forces? Well, that's exactly what I want to talk about today, is how we can use these natural forces to remediate these man-made problems. When the BP oil spill happened,I was working at MIT, and I was in charge of developing an oil spill-cleaning technology. And I had a chance to go in the Gulf of Mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working. More than 700 of these boats, which are fishermen boats repurposed with oil absorbent in white and oil containment in orange, were used, but they only collected three percent of the oil on the surface, and the health of the cleaners were very deeply affected.I was working on a very interesting technology at MIT, but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology, and it was going to be a very expensive technology, and also it would be patented. So I wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast, that would be cheap, and that would be open-source, so, because oil spills are not only happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and that would be using renewable energy. So I quit my dream job, and I moved to New Orleans, and I kept on studying how the oil spill was happening.Currently, what they were doing is that they were using these small fishing boats, and they were cleaning clean lines in an ocean of dirt. If you're using the exact same amount of surface of oil absorbent, but you're just paying attention to natural patterns, and if you're going up the winds, you can collect a lot more material. If you're multiplying the rig, so you multiply how many layers of absorbent you're using, you can collect a lot more. But it's extremely difficult to move oil absorbent against the winds, the surface currents and the waves. These are enormous forces. So the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind. So this didn't require any invention. We just took a simple sailing boat and we tried to pull something long and heavy, but as we tacked back and forth, what we lost was two things: we were losing pulling power and direction.And so, I thought, what about if we just take the rudder from the back of the boat to the front, would we have better control? So I built this small sailing robot with the rudder at the front, and I was trying to pull something very long and heavy, so that's a four-meter-long object just to pull, and I was surprised with just a 14-centimeter rudder, I could control four meters of absorbent. Then I was so happy that I kept playing with the robot, and so you see the robot has a front rudder here. Normally it's at the back. And, playing, I realized that the maneuverability of this was really amazing, and I could avoid an obstacle at the very last second, more maneuverable than a normal boat.Then I started publishing online, and some friends from Korea, they started being interested in this, and we made a boat which has a front rudder and a back rudder, so we started interacting with this, and it was slightly better, although it was very small and a bit off balance, but then we thought, what if we have more than two points of control? What if the entire boat becomes a point of control? What if the entire boat changes shape?So — (Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause)And so that's the beginning of Protei, and that's the first boat in history that completely changed the shape of the hull in order to control it, and the properties of sailing that we get are very superior compared to a normal boat. When we're turning, we have the feeling of surfing, and the way it's going up-wind, it's very efficient. This is low speed, low wind speed, and the maneuverability is very increased, and here I'm going to do a small jibe, and look at the position of the sail. What's happening is that, because the boat changes shape, the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind. We're catching wind from both sides. And this is exactly what we're looking [for] if we want to pull something long and heavy. We don't want to lose pulling power, nor direction. So, I wanted to know if this was possible to put this at an industrial level, so we made a large boat with a large sail, and with a very light hull, inflatable, very small footprint, so we have a very big size and power ratio.After this, we wanted to see if we could implement this and automate the system, so we used the same system but we added a structure to it so we could activate the machine. So, we used the same bladder-inflated system, and we took it for testing. So this is happening in the Netherlands. We tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works. And then we mounted a camera for controlling it, but quickly we saw that we would need a lot more weight at the bottom, so we had to take it back to the lab, and then we built a skin around it, we put batteries, remote controllers, and then we put it in the water and then we let it go in the water and see how well it would work, so let some rope out, and hope it's going to work, and it worked okay, but we still have a long way. Our small prototype has given us good insight that it's working very well, but we still need to work a lot more on this.So what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology. We went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two rudders to multiple rudders to the whole boat changing shape, and the more we are moving forward, and the more the design looks simple and cute. (Laughter)But I wanted to show you a fish because — In fact, it's very different from a fish. A fish will move because — by changing like this, but our boat is propelled by the wind still, and the hull controls the trajectory.So I brought to you for the first time on the TED stage Protei Number Eight. It's not the last one, but it's a good one for making demos.So the first thing as I show you in the video is that we may be able to control the trajectory of a sailing boat better, or we may be able to never be in irons, so never facing the wind, we always can catch the wind from both sides. But new properties of a sailing boat. So if you're looking at the boat from this side, this might remind you of an airplane profile. An airplane, when you're moving in this direction, starts to lift, and that's how it takes off. Now, if you're taking the same system, and you're putting vertical, you're bending, and if you're moving this way forward, your instinct will tell you that you might go this way, but if you're moving fast enough, you might create what we call lateral lift, so we could get further or closer to the wind.Other property is this: A normal sailing boat has a centerboard here and a rudder at the back, and these two things are what creates most resistance and turbulence behind the boat, but because this doesn't have either a centerboard or a rudder, we hope that if we keep working on this hull design we can improve and have less resistance.The other thing is, most boats, when they reach a certain speed, and they are going on waves, they start to hit and slap on the surface of the water, and a lot of the energy moving forward is lost. But if we're going with the flow, if we pay attention to natural patterns instead of trying to be strong, but if you're going with the flow, we may absorb a lot of environmental noises, so the wave energy, to actually save some energy to move forward.So we may have developed the technology which is very efficient for pulling something long and heavy, but the idea is, what is the purpose of technology if it doesn't reach the right hands?Normal technology or innovation happens like this: Somebody has an interesting idea, some other scientist or engineer, they take it to the next level, they make a theory about it and maybe they patent it, and then some industry will make a contract of exclusivity to manufacture and sell it, and then, eventually, a buyer will buy it, and we hope that they are going to use [it] for a good purpose. What we really want is that this innovation happens continuously. The inventor and engineers and also the manufacturers and everybody works at the same time, but this would be sterile if this was happening in a parallel and uncrossed process. What you really want is not a sequential, not parallel development. You want to have a network of innovation. You want everybody, like we're doing now, to work at the same time, and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information, and that's exactly what open hardware is about. It's to replace competition by collaboration. It's to transform any new product into a new market. So what is open hardware? Essentially, open hardware is a license. It's just an intellectual property setup. It means that everybody is free to use, modify and distribute, and in exchange we only ask for two things: The name is credited — the name of the project — and also the people who make improvement, they share back with the community. So it's a very simple condition.And I started this project alone in a garage in New Orleans, but quickly after I wanted to publish and share this information, so I made a Kickstarter, which is a crowd-fundraising platform, and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars. With this money, I hired a team of young engineers from all over the world, and we rented a factory in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. We were peer-learning, we were engineering, we were making things, prototyping, but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible, to fail as quickly as possible, to learn from. This is a proud member of Protei from Korea, and on the right side, this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in Mexico. This idea really appealed to Gabriella Levine in New York, and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw, and she documented every step of the process, and she published it on Instructables, which is a website for sharing inventions. Less than one week after, this is a team in Eindhoven, it's a school of engineering. They made it, but they eventually published a simplified design. They also made it into an Instructable, and in less than one week, they had almost 10,000 views, and they got many new friends. We're working on also simpler technology, not that complex, with younger people and also older people, like this dinosaur is from Mexico. (Laughter)So Protei is now an international network of innovation for selling technology using this shape-shifting hull. And what puts us together is that we have a common, at least, global understanding of what the word ""business"" is, or what it should be. This is how most work today. Business as usual is saying, what's most important is to make lots of profit, and you'll be using technology for that, and people will be your work force, instrumentalized, and environment is usually the last priority. It will be just a way to, say, greenwash your audience and, say, increase your price tag.What we're trying to do, or what we believe, because this is how we believe the world really works, is that without the environment you have nothing. We have the people so we need to protect each other, yes, and we're a technology company, and profit is necessary to make this happen. (Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause)If we have the courage to understand or accept that this actually how the world really works, and this is the order of priority that we need to choose, then it makes obvious why we need to choose open hardware for developing environmental technology, because we need to share information.What's next for us?So, this small machine that you've seen, we're hoping to make small toys like one-meter remote control Protei that you can upgrade — so replace the remote control parts by Androids, so the mobile phone, and Arduino micro-controller, so you could be controlling this from your mobile phone, your tablet. Then what we want to do is create six-meter versions so we can test the maximum performance of these machines, so we can go at very, very high speed. So imagine yourself. You are laying down in a flexible torpedo, sailing at high speed, controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms. So that's what we're looking for developing. (Applause)And we replace the human being — to go, for example, for measuring radioactivity, you don't want a human to be sailing those robots — with batteries, motors, micro-controllers and sensors. This is what our teammates, we dream of at night. We hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills, or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean, or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines, to monitor coral reefs or to monitor fisheries.Our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans.Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_harada_a_novel_idea_for_cleaning_up_oil_spills
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"(Music)(Applause)(Applause)(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Applause)Chris Anderson: You guys were amazing. That's amazing. (Applause) You just don't hear that every day.(Laughter)Usman, the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching Jimmy Page on YouTube.Usman Riaz: Yes, that was the first one. And then I — That was the first thing I learned, and then I started progressing to other things. And I started watching Kaki King a lot, and she would always cite Preston Reed as a big influence, so then I started watching his videos, and it's very surreal right now to be —(Laughter) (Applause)CA: Was that piece just now, that was one of his songs that you learned, or how did that happen?UR: I'd never learned it before, but he told me that we would be playing that on stage, so I was familiar with it, so that's why I had so much more fun learning it. And it finally happened, so ... (Laughter)CA: Preston, from your point of view, I mean, you invented this like 20 years ago, right? How does it feel to see someone like this come along taking your art and doing so much with it?Preston Reed: It's mind-blowing, and I feel really proud, really honored. And he's a wonderful musician, so it's cool.(Laughter)CA: I guess, I don't think there is like a one-minute other piece you guys can do? Can you? Do you jam? Do you have anything else?PR: We haven't prepared anything.CA: There isn't. I'll tell you what. If you have another 30 or 40 seconds, and you have another 30 or 40 seconds, and we just see that, I just think — I can feel it. We want to hear a little more. And if it goes horribly wrong, no worries.(Applause)(Laughter)(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/usman_riaz_and_preston_reed_a_young_guitarist_meets_his_hero
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"I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and a half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.Some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That's okay, because check it out — I have math to prove that it is possible. It won't make much sense now. I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: +7.68245837 minutes. That will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission.Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren't going to have them anyway.Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TED Talk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week, as a planet, playing video games.Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time. It's so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds?(Laughter)This idea is so pervasive — that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret — that I hear it literally everywhere I go. For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developers' conference, turned around and said — and I quote — ""I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time.""Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games?Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It's true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that's what I want to share with you today — the top five regrets of the dying.Number one: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me.Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, ""I wish I'd spent more time playing video games,"" but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill.For example, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I'd spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family Life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them.""I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends."" Hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from the University of Michigan showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together.""I wish I'd let myself be happier."" Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness.""I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self."" Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals.""I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me."" Are games doing this yet? I'm not sure, so I've left a Super Mario question mark. We're going to come back to this one.But in the meantime, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die. Really wanting to die.Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. The concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days, I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words — and I think you see where this is going — no reason to live.(Laughter)Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, ""Jane, you want to die."" It said, ""You're never going to get better."" It said, ""The pain will never end.""And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days — and I will never forget this moment — I said, ""I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game.""Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game — and this is in the scientific literature — we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help. I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer.Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister — I have an identical twin sister named Kelly — and tell her, ""I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me."" This was an easier way to ask for help.She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces. We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once.Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms. That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering.Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be ""the slayer,"" so I renamed the game SuperBetter.And soon, I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting ""super better,"" facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family. And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives.Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there's some science here, too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that's what was happening to us.The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder. But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: ""My priorities have changed."" ""I'm not afraid to do what makes me happy."" ""I feel closer to my friends and family."" ""I understand myself better. I know who I really am now."" ""I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life."" ""I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams.""Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets.But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right?I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it.I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I'd rather you experience them firsthand. I'd rather we all start building them up together right now. Here's what we're going to do. We'll play a quick game together. This is where you earn the seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you.So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds, go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good.(Laughter)Well done, everyone. That is worth +1 physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. We know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That's all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains.Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93... Go!(Snapping)Don't give up.(Snapping)Don't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50.(Snapping)(Laughter)Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that's worth +1 mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower.So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Because of the room, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you're inside, find a window and look out of it. If you're outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for ""baby [your favorite animal.]""Do it on your phones, or just shout out some baby animals, and I'll put them on the screen. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant.(Audience) Oh!We're clapping for that? That's amazing.(Laughter)All right, what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel looking at baby animals, when you need them most.Here's a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up.All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go!(Chatting)Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is +1 social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better.Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities.(Laughter)Well, you have successfully completed your four quests, let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life. Now I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience — physical, mental, emotional and social — live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in.So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life.Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them.Yeah!(Applause)Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission. How are you going to spend these minutes of bonus life?Well, here's my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right? So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you're going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes.And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life
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"I'm going to start with a little story. So, I grew up in this neighborhood. When I was 15 years old, I went from being what I think was a strapping young athlete, over four months, slowly wasting away until I was basically a famine victim with an unquenchable thirst. I had basically digested away my body. And this all came to a head when I was on a backpacking trip, my first one ever actually, on Old Rag Mountain in West Virginia, and was putting my face into puddles of water and drinking like a dog.That night, I was taken into the emergency room and diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in full-blown ketoacidosis. And I recovered, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, insulin and other things, and gained all my weight back and more.And something festered inside me after this happened. What I thought about was, what caused the diabetes? You see, diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your body fights itself, and at the time people thought that somehow maybe exposure to a pathogen had triggered my immune system to fight the pathogen and then kill the cells that make insulin. And this is what I thought for a long period of time, and that's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit, the microbes that do bad things. And that's where I need my assistant here now. You may recognize her.So, I went yesterday, I apologize, I skipped a few of the talks, and I went over to the National Academy of Sciences building, and they sell toys, giant microbes. And here we go! So you have caught flesh-eating disease if you caught that one. I gotta get back out my baseball ability here.(Laughter)So, unfortunately or not surprisingly, most of the microbes they sell at the National Academy building are pathogens. Everybody focuses on the things that kill us, and that's what I was focusing on. And it turns out that we are covered in a cloud of microbes, and those microbes actually do us good much of the time, rather than killing us. And so, we've known about this for some period of time. People have used microscopes to look at the microbes that cover us, I know you're not paying attention to me, but ...(Laughter)The microbes that cover us. And if you look at them in the microscope, you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells. There's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain.We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms. And unfortunately, if you want to learn about the microorganisms, just looking at them in a microscope is not sufficient. And so we just heard about the DNA sequencing. It turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their DNA. And that's what I've been doing for 20 years, using DNA sequencing, collecting samples from various places, including the human body, reading the DNA sequence and then using that DNA sequencing to tell us about the microbes that are in a particular place.And what's amazing, when you use this technology, for example, looking at humans, we're not just covered in a sea of microbes. There are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of microbes on us. We have millions of genes of microbes in our human microbiome covering us. And so this microbial diversity differs between people, and what people have been thinking about in the last 10, maybe 15 years is, maybe these microbes, this microbial cloud in and on us, and the variation between us, may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us.And that comes back to the diabetes story I was telling you. It turns out that people now think that one of the triggers for type 1 diabetes is not fighting a pathogen, but is in fact trying to — miscommunicating with the microbes that live in and on you. And somehow maybe the microbial community that's in and on me got off, and then this triggered some sort of immune response and led to me killing the cells that make insulin in my body.And so what I want to tell you about for a few minutes is, what people have learned using DNA sequencing techniques in particular, to study the microbial cloud that lives in and on us. And I want to tell you a story about a personal project. My first personal experience with studying the microbes on the human body actually came from a talk that I gave, right around the corner from here at Georgetown.I gave a talk, and a family friend who happened to be the Dean of Georgetown Medical School was at the talk, and came up to me afterwards saying, they were doing a study of ileal transplants in people. And they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants.And so I started a collaboration with this person, Michael Zasloff and Thomas Fishbein, to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient. And I can tell you all the details about the microbial study that we did there, but the reason I want to tell you this story is something really striking that they did at the beginning of this project. They take the donor ileum, which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community, say Crohn's disease, and they sterilized the donor ileum. Cleaned out all the microbes, and then put it in the recipient. They did this because this was common practice in medicine, even though it was obvious that this was not a good idea.And fortunately, in the course of this project, the transplant surgeons and the other people decided, forget common practice. We have to switch. So they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum. They leave the microbes with the donor, and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant.And so, people — this is a study that I did now. In the last few years there's been a great expansion in using DNA technology to study the microbes in and on people. There's something called the Human Microbiome Project that's going on in the United States, and MetaHIT going on in Europe, and a lot of other projects.And when people have done a variety of studies, they have learned things such as, when a baby is born, during vaginal delivery you get colonized by the microbes from your mother. There are risk factors associated with cesarean sections, some of those risk factors may be due to mis-colonization when you carve a baby out of its mother rather than being delivered through the birth canal. And a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system, helps in fighting off pathogens, helps in our metabolism, and determining our metabolic rate, probably determines our odor, and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways.And so, these studies have documented or suggested out of a variety of important functions for the microbial community, this cloud, the non-pathogens that live in and on us. And one area that I think is very interesting, which many of you may have now that we've thrown microbes into the crowd, is something that I would call ""germophobia."" So people are really into cleanliness, right? We have antibiotics in our kitchen counters, people are washing every part of them all of the time, we pump antibiotics into our food, into our communities, we take antibiotics excessively.And killing pathogens is a good thing if you're sick, but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world, that we're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us. And excessive use of antibiotics, in particular in children, has been shown to be associated with, again, risk factors for obesity, for autoimmune diseases, for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community.So the microbial community can go wrong whether we want it to or not, or we can kill it with antibiotics, but what can we do to restore it? I'm sure many people here have heard about probiotics. Probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you. And they definitely have been shown to be effective in some cases. There's a project going on at UC Davis where people are using probiotics to try and treat, prevent, necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants. Premature infants have real problems with their microbial community. And it may be that probiotics can help prevent the development of this horrible necrotizing enterocolitis in these premature infants.But probiotics are sort of a very, very simple solution. Most of the pills that you can take or the yogurts that you can eat have one or two species in them, maybe five species in them, and the human community is thousands upon thousands of species. So what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us?Well, one thing that animals seem to do is, they eat poo — coprophagia. And it turns out that many veterinarians, old school veterinarians in particular, have been doing something called ""poo tea,"" not booty, but poo tea, to treat colic and other ailments in horses and cows and things like that, where you make tea from the poo from a healthy individual animal and you feed it to a sick animal. Although, unless you have a fistulated cow with a big hole in its side, and you can put your hand into its rumen, it's hard to imagine that the delivery of microbes directly into the mouth and through the entire top of the digestive tract is the best delivery system, so you may have heard in people they are now doing fecal transplants, where rather than delivering a couple of probiotic microbes through the mouth, they are delivering a community of probiotics, a community of microbes from a healthy donor, through the other end.And this has turned out to be very effective in fighting certain intransigent infectious diseases like Clostridium difficile infections that can stay with people for years and years and years. Transplants of the feces, of the microbes from the feces, from a healthy donor has actually been shown to cure systemic C. dif infections in some people.Now what these transplants, these fecal transplants, or the poo tea suggest to me, and many other people have come up with this same idea, is that the microbial community in and on us, it's an organ. We should view it as a functioning organ, part of ourselves. We should treat it carefully and with respect, and we do not want to mess with it, say by C-sections or by antibiotics or excessive cleanliness, without some real good justification.And what the DNA sequencing technologies are allowing people to do now is do detailed studies of, say, 100 patients who have Crohn's disease and 100 people who don't have Crohn's disease. Or 100 people who took antibiotics when they were little, and 100 people who did not take antibiotics. And we can now start to compare the community of microbes and their genes and see if there are differences. And eventually we may be able to understand if they're not just correlative differences, but causative. Studies in model systems like mouse and other animals are also helping do this, but people are now using these technologies because they've gotten very cheap, to study the microbes in and on a variety of people.So, in wrapping up, what I want to tell you about is, I didn't tell you a part of the story of coming down with diabetes. It turns out that my father was an M.D., actually studied hormones. I told him many times that I was tired, thirsty, not feeling very good. And he shrugged it off, I think he either thought I was just complaining a lot, or it was the typical M.D. ""nothing can be wrong with my children."" We even went to the International Society of Endocrinology meeting as family in Quebec. And I was getting up every five minutes to pee, and drinking everybody's water at the table, and I think they all thought I was a druggie.(Laughter)But the reason I'm telling you this is that the medical community, my father as an example, sometimes doesn't see what's right in front of their eyes. The microbial cloud, it is right in front of us. We can't see it most of the time. It's invisible. They're microbes. They're tiny. But we can see them through their DNA, we can see them through the effects that they have on people.And what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine. It doesn't mean that it affects every part of us, but it might. What we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people, so that we can understand what they're doing to our lives. We are them. They are us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_eisen_meet_your_microbes
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"So, how many of you have ever gotten behind the wheel of a car when you really shouldn't have been driving? Maybe you're out on the road for a long day, and you just wanted to get home. You were tired, but you felt you could drive a few more miles. Maybe you thought, I've had less to drink than everybody else, I should be the one to go home. Or maybe your mind was just entirely elsewhere.Does this sound familiar to you? Now, in those situations, wouldn't it be great if there was a button on your dashboard that you could push, and the car would get you home safely? Now, that's been the promise of the self-driving car, the autonomous vehicle, and it's been the dream since at least 1939, when General Motors showcased this idea at their Futurama booth at the World's Fair.Now, it's been one of those dreams that's always seemed about 20 years in the future. Now, two weeks ago, that dream took a step forward, when the state of Nevada granted Google's self-driving car the very first license for an autonomous vehicle, clearly establishing that it's legal for them to test it on the roads in Nevada. Now, California's considering similar legislation, and this would make sure that the autonomous car is not one of those things that has to stay in Vegas.(Laughter)Now, in my lab at Stanford, we've been working on autonomous cars too, but with a slightly different spin on things. You see, we've been developing robotic race cars, cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance.Now, why would we want to do such a thing? Well, there's two really good reasons for this. First, we believe that before people turn over control to an autonomous car, that autonomous car should be at least as good as the very best human drivers. Now, if you're like me, and the other 70 percent of the population who know that we are above-average drivers, you understand that's a very high bar. There's another reason as well. Just like race car drivers can use all of the friction between the tire and the road, all of the car's capabilities to go as fast as possible, we want to use all of those capabilities to avoid any accident we can.Now, you may push the car to the limits not because you're driving too fast, but because you've hit an icy patch of road, conditions have changed. In those situations, we want a car that is capable enough to avoid any accident that can physically be avoided.I must confess, there's kind of a third motivation as well. You see, I have a passion for racing. In the past, I've been a race car owner, a crew chief and a driving coach, although maybe not at the level that you're currently expecting. One of the things that we've developed in the lab — we've developed several vehicles — is what we believe is the world's first autonomously drifting car. It's another one of those categories where maybe there's not a lot of competition.(Laughter)But this is P1. It's an entirely student-built electric vehicle, which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners. It can get sideways like a rally car driver, always able to take the tightest curve, even on slippery, changing surfaces, never spinning out.We've also worked with Volkswagen Oracle, on Shelley, an autonomous race car that has raced at 150 miles an hour through the Bonneville Salt Flats, gone around Thunderhill Raceway Park in the sun, the wind and the rain, and navigated the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb route in Colorado with nobody at the wheel.(Laughter)(Applause)I guess it goes without saying that we've had a lot of fun doing this. But in fact, there's something else that we've developed in the process of developing these autonomous cars. We have developed a tremendous appreciation for the capabilities of human race car drivers. As we've looked at the question of how well do these cars perform, we wanted to compare them to our human counterparts. And we discovered their human counterparts are amazing. Now, we can take a map of a race track, we can take a mathematical model of a car, and with some iteration, we can actually find the fastest way around that track. We line that up with data that we record from a professional driver, and the resemblance is absolutely remarkable.Yes, there are subtle differences here, but the human race car driver is able to go out and drive an amazingly fast line, without the benefit of an algorithm that compares the trade-off between going as fast as possible in this corner, and shaving a little bit of time off of the straight over here. Not only that, they're able to do it lap after lap after lap. They're able to go out and consistently do this, pushing the car to the limits every single time. It's extraordinary to watch. You put them in a new car, and after a few laps, they've found the fastest line in that car, and they're off to the races.It really makes you think, we'd love to know what's going on inside their brain. So as researchers, that's what we decided to find out. We decided to instrument not only the car, but also the race car driver, to try to get a glimpse into what was going on in their head as they were doing this. Now, this is Dr. Lene Harbott applying electrodes to the head of John Morton. John Morton is a former Can-Am and IMSA driver, who's also a class champion at Le Mans. Fantastic driver, and very willing to put up with graduate students and this sort of research. She's putting electrodes on his head so that we can monitor the electrical activity in John's brain as he races around the track.Now, clearly we're not going to put a couple of electrodes on his head and understand exactly what all of his thoughts are on the track. However, neuroscientists have identified certain patterns that let us tease out some very important aspects of this. For instance, the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves. In contrast, theta waves are associated with a lot of cognitive activity, like visual processing, things where the driver is thinking quite a bit. Now, we can measure this, and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves. This gives us a measure of mental workload, how much the driver is actually challenged cognitively at any point along the track.Now, we wanted to see if we could actually record this on the track, so we headed down south to Laguna Seca. Laguna Seca is a legendary raceway about halfway between Salinas and Monterey. It has a curve there called the Corkscrew. Now, the Corkscrew is a chicane, followed by a quick right-handed turn as the road drops three stories. Now, the strategy for driving this as explained to me was, you aim for the bush in the distance, and as the road falls away, you realize it was actually the top of a tree.All right, so thanks to the Revs Program at Stanford, we were able to take John there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche Abarth Carrera. Life is way too short for boring cars. So, here you see John on the track, he's going up the hill — Oh! Somebody liked that — and you can see, actually, his mental workload — measuring here in the red bar — you can see his actions as he approaches. Now watch, he has to downshift. And then he has to turn left. Look for the tree, and down.Not surprisingly, you can see this is a pretty challenging task. You can see his mental workload spike as he goes through this, as you would expect with something that requires this level of complexity. But what's really interesting is to look at areas of the track where his mental workload doesn't increase. I'm going to take you around now to the other side of the track. Turn three. And John's going to go into that corner and the rear end of the car is going to begin to slide out. He's going to have to correct for that with steering. So watch as John does this here. Watch the mental workload, and watch the steering. The car begins to slide out, dramatic maneuver to correct it, and no change whatsoever in the mental workload. Not a challenging task. In fact, entirely reflexive.Now, our data processing on this is still preliminary, but it really seems that these phenomenal feats that the race car drivers are performing are instinctive. They are things that they have simply learned to do. It requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats. And their actions are fantastic. This is exactly what you want to do on the steering wheel to catch the car in this situation.Now, this has given us tremendous insight and inspiration for our own autonomous vehicles. We've started to ask the question: Can we make them a little less algorithmic and a little more intuitive? Can we take this reflexive action that we see from the very best race car drivers, introduce it to our cars, and maybe even into a system that could get onto your car in the future? That would take us a long step along the road to autonomous vehicles that drive as well as the best humans.But it's made us think a little bit more deeply as well. Do we want something more from our car than to simply be a chauffeur? Do we want our car to perhaps be a partner, a coach, someone that can use their understanding of the situation to help us reach our potential? Can, in fact, the technology not simply replace humans, but allow us to reach the level of reflex and intuition that we're all capable of?So, as we move forward into this technological future, I want you to just pause and think of that for a moment. What is the ideal balance of human and machine? And as we think about that, let's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_gerdes_the_future_race_car_150mph_and_no_driver
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"I study the future of crime and terrorism, and frankly, I'm afraid. I'm afraid by what I see. I sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we've been promised, but, you see, I've spent a career in law enforcement, and that's informed my perspective on things. I've been a street police officer, an undercover investigator, a counter-terrorism strategist, and I've worked in more than 70 countries around the world. I've had to see more than my fair share of violence and the darker underbelly of society, and that's informed my opinions. My work with criminals and terrorists has actually been highly educational. They have taught me a lot, and I'd like to be able to share some of these observations with you.Today I'm going to show you the flip side of all those technologies that we marvel at, the ones that we love. In the hands of the TED community, these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world, but in the hands of suicide bombers, the future can look quite different.I started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer. In those days, this was the height of technology. Laugh though you will, all the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had one of these long before any police officer I knew did.Twenty years later, criminals are still using mobile phones, but they're also building their own mobile phone networks, like this one, which has been deployed in all 31 states of Mexico by the narcos. They have a national encrypted radio communications system. Think about that. Think about the innovation that went into that. Think about the infrastructure to build it. And then think about this: Why can't I get a cell phone signal in San Francisco? (Laughter) How is this possible? (Laughter) It makes no sense. (Applause)We consistently underestimate what criminals and terrorists can do. Technology has made our world increasingly open, and for the most part, that's great, but all of this openness may have unintended consequences.Consider the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. The men that carried that attack out were armed with AK-47s, explosives and hand grenades. They threw these hand grenades at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes and waited to catch trains on their way home from work. But heavy artillery is nothing new in terrorist operations. Guns and bombs are nothing new. What was different this time is the way that the terrorists used modern information communications technologies to locate additional victims and slaughter them. They were armed with mobile phones. They had BlackBerries. They had access to satellite imagery. They had satellite phones, and they even had night vision goggles. But perhaps their greatest innovation was this. We've all seen pictures like this on television and in the news. This is an operations center. And the terrorists built their very own op center across the border in Pakistan, where they monitored the BBC, al Jazeera, CNN and Indian local stations. They also monitored the Internet and social media to monitor the progress of their attacks and how many people they had killed. They did all of this in real time.The innovation of the terrorist operations center gave terrorists unparalleled situational awareness and tactical advantage over the police and over the government. What did they do with this? They used it to great effect.At one point during the 60-hour siege, the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims. They came upon a suite on the top floor of the hotel, and they kicked down the door and they found a man hiding by his bed. And they said to him, ""Who are you, and what are you doing here?"" And the man replied, ""I'm just an innocent schoolteacher."" Of course, the terrorists knew that no Indian schoolteacher stays at a suite in the Taj. They picked up his identification, and they phoned his name in to the terrorist war room, where the terrorist war room Googled him, and found a picture and called their operatives on the ground and said, ""Your hostage, is he heavyset? Is he bald in front? Does he wear glasses?"" ""Yes, yes, yes,"" came the answers. The op center had found him and they had a match. He was not a schoolteacher. He was the second-wealthiest businessman in India, and after discovering this information, the terrorist war room gave the order to the terrorists on the ground in Mumbai. (""Kill him."")We all worry about our privacy settings on Facebook, but the fact of the matter is, our openness can be used against us. Terrorists are doing this. A search engine can determine who shall live and who shall die. This is the world that we live in.During the Mumbai siege, terrorists were so dependent on technology that several witnesses reported that as the terrorists were shooting hostages with one hand, they were checking their mobile phone messages in the very other hand. In the end, 300 people were gravely wounded and over 172 men, women and children lost their lives that day.Think about what happened. During this 60-hour siege on Mumbai, 10 men armed not just with weapons, but with technology, were able to bring a city of 20 million people to a standstill. Ten people brought 20 million people to a standstill, and this traveled around the world. This is what radicals can do with openness.This was done nearly four years ago. What could terrorists do today with the technologies available that we have? What will they do tomorrow? The ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially, and it's scaling for good and it's scaling for evil.It's not just about terrorism, though. There's also been a big paradigm shift in crime. You see, you can now commit more crime as well. In the old days, it was a knife and a gun. Then criminals moved to robbing trains. You could rob 200 people on a train, a great innovation. Moving forward, the Internet allowed things to scale even more. In fact, many of you will remember the recent Sony PlayStation hack. In that incident, over 100 million people were robbed. Think about that. When in the history of humanity has it ever been possible for one person to rob 100 million?Of course, it's not just about stealing things. There are other avenues of technology that criminals can exploit. Many of you will remember this super cute video from the last TED, but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute. They don't all have drumsticks. Some can be armed with HD cameras and do countersurveillance on protesters, or, as in this little bit of movie magic, quadcopters can be loaded with firearms and automatic weapons. Little robots are cute when they play music to you. When they swarm and chase you down the block to shoot you, a little bit less so.Of course, criminals and terrorists weren't the first to give guns to robots. We know where that started. But they're adapting quickly. Recently, the FBI arrested an al Qaeda affiliate in the United States, who was planning on using these remote-controlled drone aircraft to fly C4 explosives into government buildings in the United States. By the way, these travel at over 600 miles an hour.Every time a new technology is being introduced, criminals are there to exploit it. We've all seen 3D printers. We know with them that you can print in many materials ranging from plastic to chocolate to metal and even concrete. With great precision I actually was able to make this just the other day, a very cute little ducky. But I wonder to myself, for those people that strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up, how might they use 3D printers?Perhaps like this. You see, if you can print in metal, you can print one of these, and in fact you can also print one of these too. The UK I know has some very strict firearms laws. You needn't bring the gun into the UK anymore. You just bring the 3D printer and print the gun while you're here, and, of course, the magazines for your bullets.But as these get bigger in the future, what other items will you be able to print? The technologies are allowing bigger printers.As we move forward, we'll see new technologies also, like the Internet of Things. Every day we're connecting more and more of our lives to the Internet, which means that the Internet of Things will soon be the Internet of Things To Be Hacked. All of the physical objects in our space are being transformed into information technologies, and that has a radical implication for our security, because more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities. Criminals understand this. Terrorists understand this. Hackers understand this. If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us.There has not yet been an operating system or a technology that hasn't been hacked. That's troubling, since the human body itself is now becoming an information technology. As we've seen here, we're transforming ourselves into cyborgs. Every year, thousands of cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators are being implanted in people. In the United States, there are 60,000 people who have a pacemaker that connects to the Internet. The defibrillators allow a physician at a distance to give a shock to a heart in case a patient needs it. But if you don't need it, and somebody else gives you the shock, it's not a good thing.Of course, we're going to go even deeper than the human body. We're going down to the cellular level these days. Up until this point, all the technologies I've been talking about have been silicon-based, ones and zeroes, but there's another operating system out there: the original operating system, DNA. And to hackers, DNA is just another operating system waiting to be hacked. It's a great challenge for them. There are people already working on hacking the software of life, and while most of them are doing this to great good and to help us all, some won't be.So how will criminals abuse this? Well, with synthetic biology you can do some pretty neat things. For example, I predict that we will move away from a plant-based narcotics world to a synthetic one. Why do you need the plants anymore? You can just take the DNA code from marijuana or poppies or coca leaves and cut and past that gene and put it into yeast, and you can take those yeast and make them make the cocaine for you, or the marijuana, or any other drug. So how we use yeast in the future is going to be really interesting. In fact, we may have some really interesting bread and beer as we go into this next century.The cost of sequencing the human genome is dropping precipitously. It was proceeding at Moore's Law pace, but then in 2008, something changed. The technologies got better, and now DNA sequencing is proceeding at a pace five times that of Moore's Law. That has significant implications for us.It took us 30 years to get from the introduction of the personal computer to the level of cybercrime we have today, but looking at how biology is proceeding so rapidly, and knowing criminals and terrorists as I do, we may get there a lot faster with biocrime in the future. It will be easy for anybody to go ahead and print their own bio-virus, enhanced versions of ebola or anthrax, weaponized flu.We recently saw a case where some researchers made the H5N1 avian influenza virus more potent. It already has a 70 percent mortality rate if you get it, but it's hard to get. Engineers, by moving around a small number of genetic changes, were able to weaponize it and make it much more easy for human beings to catch, so that not thousands of people would die, but tens of millions. You see, you can go ahead and create new pandemics, and the researchers who did this were so proud of their accomplishments, they wanted to publish it openly so that everybody could see this and get access to this information.But it goes deeper than that. DNA researcher Andrew Hessel has pointed out quite rightly that if you can use cancer treatments, modern cancer treatments, to go after one cell while leaving all the other cells around it intact, then you can also go after any one person's cell. Personalized cancer treatments are the flip side of personalized bioweapons, which means you can attack any one individual, including all the people in this picture. How will we protect them in the future?What to do? What to do about all this? That's what I get asked all the time. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I will be tweeting out the answer later on today. (Laughter)Actually, it's a bit more complex than that, and there are no magic bullets. I don't have all the answers, but I know a few things. In the wake of 9/11, the best security minds put together all their innovation and this is what they created for security. If you're expecting the people who built this to protect you from the coming robopocalypse — (Laughter) — uh, you may want to have a backup plan. (Laughter) Just saying. Just think about that. (Applause)Law enforcement is currently a closed system. It's nation-based, while the threat is international. Policing doesn't scale globally. At least, it hasn't, and our current system of guns, border guards, big gates and fences are outdated in the new world into which we're moving. So how might we prepare for some of these specific threats, like attacking a president or a prime minister? This would be the natural government response, to hide away all our government leaders in hermetically sealed bubbles. But this is not going to work. The cost of doing a DNA sequence is going to be trivial. Anybody will have it and we will all have them in the future.So maybe there's a more radical way that we can look at this. What happens if we were to take the President's DNA, or a king or queen's, and put it out to a group of a few hundred trusted researchers so they could study that DNA and do penetration testing against it as a means of helping our leaders? Or what if we sent it out to a few thousand? Or, controversially, and not without its risks, what happens if we just gave it to the whole public? Then we could all be engaged in helping.We've already seen examples of this working well. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is staffed by journalists and citizens where they are crowd-sourcing what dictators and terrorists are doing with public funds around the world, and, in a more dramatic case, we've seen in Mexico, a country that has been racked by 50,000 narcotics-related murders in the past six years. They're killing so many people they can't even afford to bury them all in anything but these unmarked graves like this one outside of Ciudad Juarez. What can we do about this? The government has proven ineffective. So in Mexico, citizens, at great risk to themselves, are fighting back to build an effective solution. They're crowd-mapping the activities of the drug dealers.Whether or not you realize it, we are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill. The threat is serious, and the time to prepare for it is now. I can assure you that the terrorists and criminals are.My personal belief is that, rather than having a small, elite force of highly trained government agents here to protect us all, we're much better off having average and ordinary citizens approaching this problem as a group and seeing what we can do. If we all do our part, I think we'll be in a much better space. The tools to change the world are in everybody's hands. How we use them is not just up to me, it's up to all of us.This was a technology I would frequently deploy as a police officer. This technology has become outdated in our current world. It doesn't scale, it doesn't work globally, and it surely doesn't work virtually.We've seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism. They call for a shift to a more open form and a more participatory form of law enforcement. So I invite you to join me. After all, public safety is too important to leave to the professionals.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_goodman_a_vision_of_crimes_in_the_future
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"My passions are music, technology and making things. And it's the combination of these things that has led me to the hobby of sound visualization, and, on occasion, has led me to play with fire.This is a Rubens' tube. It's one of many I've made over the years, and I have one here tonight. It's about an 8-foot-long tube of metal, it's got a hundred or so holes on top, on that side is the speaker, and here is some lab tubing, and it's connected to this tank of propane. So, let's fire it up and see what it does. So let's play a 550-herz frequency and watch what happens.(Frequency)Thank you. (Applause) It's okay to applaud the laws of physics, but essentially what's happening here — (Laughter) — is the energy from the sound via the air and gas molecules is influencing the combustion properties of propane, creating a visible waveform, and we can see the alternating regions of compression and rarefaction that we call frequency, and the height is showing us amplitude. So let's change the frequency of the sound, and watch what happens to the fire.(Higher frequency)So every time we hit a resonant frequency we get a standing wave and that emergent sine curve of fire. So let's turn that off. We're indoors. Thank you. (Applause)I also have with me a flame table. It's very similar to a Rubens' tube, and it's also used for visualizing the physical properties of sound, such as eigenmodes, so let's fire it up and see what it does.Ooh. (Laughter) Okay. Now, while the table comes up to pressure, let me note here that the sound is not traveling in perfect lines. It's actually traveling in all directions, and the Rubens' tube's a little like bisecting those waves with a line, and the flame table's a little like bisecting those waves with a plane, and it can show a little more subtle complexity, which is why I like to use it to watch Geoff Farina play guitar.(Music)All right, so it's a delicate dance. If you watch closely — (Applause) If you watch closely, you may have seen some of the eigenmodes, but also you may have seen that jazz music is better with fire. Actually, a lot of things are better with fire in my world, but the fire's just a foundation. It shows very well that eyes can hear, and this is interesting to me because technology allows us to present sound to the eyes in ways that accentuate the strength of the eyes for seeing sound, such as the removal of time.So here, I'm using a rendering algorithm to paint the frequencies of the song ""Smells Like Teen Spirit"" in a way that the eyes can take them in as a single visual impression, and the technique will also show the strengths of the visual cortex for pattern recognition. So if I show you another song off this album, and another, your eyes will easily pick out the use of repetition by the band Nirvana, and in the frequency distribution, the colors, you can see the clean-dirty-clean sound that they are famous for, and here is the entire album as a single visual impression, and I think this impression is pretty powerful.At least, it's powerful enough that if I show you these four songs, and I remind you that this is ""Smells Like Teen Spirit,"" you can probably correctly guess, without listening to any music at all, that the song a die hard Nirvana fan would enjoy is this song, ""I'll Stick Around"" by the Foo Fighters, whose lead singer is Dave Grohl, who was the drummer in Nirvana. The songs are a little similar, but mostly I'm just interested in the idea that someday maybe we'll buy a song because we like the way it looks.All right, now for some more sound data. This is data from a skate park, and this is Mabel Davis skate park in Austin, Texas. (Skateboard sounds) And the sounds you're hearing came from eight microphones attached to obstacles around the park, and it sounds like chaos, but actually all the tricks start with a very distinct slap, but successful tricks end with a pop, whereas unsuccessful tricks more of a scratch and a tumble, and tricks on the rail will ring out like a gong, and voices occupy very unique frequencies in the skate park.So if we were to render these sounds visually, we might end up with something like this. This is all 40 minutes of the recording, and right away the algorithm tells us a lot more tricks are missed than are made, and also a trick on the rails is a lot more likely to produce a cheer, and if you look really closely, we can tease out traffic patterns. You see the skaters often trick in this direction. The obstacles are easier.And in the middle of the recording, the mics pick this up, but later in the recording, this kid shows up, and he starts using a line at the top of the park to do some very advanced tricks on something called the tall rail. And it's fascinating. At this moment in time, all the rest of the skaters turn their lines 90 degrees to stay out of his way. You see, there's a subtle etiquette in the skate park, and it's led by key influencers, and they tend to be the kids who can do the best tricks, or wear red pants, and on this day the mics picked that up.All right, from skate physics to theoretical physics. I'm a big fan of Stephen Hawking, and I wanted to use all eight hours of his Cambridge lecture series to create an homage. Now, in this series he's speaking with the aid of a computer, which actually makes identifying the ends of sentences fairly easy. So I wrote a steering algorithm. It listens to the lecture, and then it uses the amplitude of each word to move a point on the x-axis, and it uses the inflection of sentences to move a same point up and down on the y-axis.And these trend lines, you can see, there's more questions than answers in the laws of physics, and when we reach the end of a sentence, we place a star at that location. So there's a lot of sentences, so a lot of stars, and after rendering all of the audio, this is what we get. This is Stephen Hawking's universe.(Applause)It's all eight hours of the Cambridge lecture series taken in as a single visual impression, and I really like this image, but a lot of people think it's fake. So I made a more interactive version, and the way I did that is I used their position in time in the lecture to place these stars into 3D space, and with some custom software and a Kinect, I can walk right into the lecture. I'm going to wave through the Kinect here and take control, and now I'm going to reach out and I'm going to touch a star, and when I do, it will play the sentence that generated that star.Stephen Hawking: There is one, and only one, arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture.Jared Ficklin: Thank you. (Applause) There are 1,400 stars. It's a really fun way to explore the lecture, and, I hope, a fitting homage.All right. Let me close with a work in progress. I think, after 30 years, the opportunity exists to create an enhanced version of closed captioning. Now, we've all seen a lot of TEDTalks online, so let's watch one now with the sound turned off and the closed captioning turned on.There's no closed captioning for the TED theme song, and we're missing it, but if you've watched enough of these, you hear it in your mind's ear, and then applause starts. It usually begins here, and it grows and then it falls. Sometimes you get a little star applause, and then I think even Bill Gates takes a nervous breath, and the talk begins.All right, so let's watch this clip again. This time, I'm not going to talk at all. There's still going to be no audio, but what I am going to do is I'm going to render the sound visually in real time at the bottom of the screen. So watch closely and see what your eyes can hear.This is fairly amazing to me. Even on the first view, your eyes will successfully pick out patterns, but on repeated views, your brain actually gets better at turning these patterns into information. You can get the tone and the timbre and the pace of the speech, things that you can't get out of closed captioning. That famous scene in horror movies where someone is walking up from behind is something you can see, and I believe this information would be something that is useful at times when the audio is turned off or not heard at all, and I speculate that deaf audiences might actually even be better at seeing sound than hearing audiences. I don't know. It's a theory right now. Actually, it's all just an idea.And let me end by saying that sound moves in all directions, and so do ideas. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jared_ficklin_new_ways_to_see_music_with_color_and_fire
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"Something happened in the early morning hours of May 2nd, 2000, that had a profound effect on the way our society operates. Ironically, hardly anyone noticed at the time. The change was silent, imperceptible, unless you knew exactly what to look for. On that morning, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.It's hard to overstate the effect that this change in accuracy has had on us. Before this switch was thrown, we didn't have in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions, because back then, GPS couldn't tell you what block you were on, let alone what street.For geolocation, accuracy matters, and things have only improved over the last 10 years. With more base stations, more ground stations, better receivers and better algorithms, GPS can now not only tell you what street you are on, but what part of the street.This level of accuracy has unleashed a firestorm of innovation. In fact, many of you navigated here today with the help of your TomTom or your smartphone. Paper maps are becoming obsolete.But we now stand on the verge of another revolution in geolocation accuracy. What if I told you that the two-meter positioning that our current cell phones and our TomToms give us is pathetic compared to what we could be getting? For some time now, it's been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the GPS signal, and if you have an Internet connection, then you can go from meter level to centimeter level, even millimeter-level positioning.So why don't we have this capability on our phones? Only, I believe, for a lack of imagination. Manufacturers haven't built this carrier phase technique into their cheap GPS chips because they're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation so accurate that you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand. But you and I and other innovators, we can see the potential in this next leap in accuracy. Imagine, for example, an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on top of the physical world. I could build for you a structure up here in 3D, millimeter accurate, that only you could see, or my friends at home.So this level of positioning, this is what we're looking for, and I believe that, within the next few years, I predict, that this kind of hyper-precise, carrier phase-based positioning will become cheap and ubiquitous, and the consequences will be fantastic.The Holy Grail, of course, is the GPS dot. Do you remember the movie ""The Da Vinci Code?"" Here's Professor Langdon examining a GPS dot, which his accomplice tells him is a tracking device accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe, but we know that in the world of nonfiction, the GPS dot is impossible, right? For one thing, GPS doesn't work indoors, and for another, they don't make devices quite this small, especially when those devices have to relay their measurements back over a network.Well, these objections were perfectly reasonable a few years ago, but things have changed. There's been a strong trend toward miniaturization, better sensitivity, so much so that, a few years ago, a GPS tracking device looked like this clunky box to the left of the keys. Compare that with the device released just months ago that's now packaged into something the size of a key fob, and if you take a look at the state of the art for a complete GPS receiver, which is only a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever, you realize that the GPS dot will soon move from fiction to nonfiction.Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots. It's not just that you'll never lose your wallet or your keys anymore, or your child when you're at Disneyland. You'll buy GPS dots in bulk, and you'll stick them on everything you own worth more than a few tens of dollars.I couldn't find my shoes one recent morning, and, as usual, had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I shouldn't have to bother my wife with that kind of triviality. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are. (Laughter)Those of you who have made the switch to Gmail, remember how refreshing it was to go from organizing all of your email to simply searching it. The GPS dot will do the same for our possessions.Now, of course, there is a flip side to the GPS dot. I was in my office some months back and got a telephone call. The woman on the other end of the line, we'll call her Carol, was panicked. Apparently, an ex-boyfriend of Carol's from California had found her in Texas and was following her around. So you might ask at this point why she's calling you. Well, so did I. But it turned out there was a technical twist to Carol's case. Every time her ex-boyfriend would show up, at the most improbable times and the most improbable locations, he was carrying an open laptop, and over time Carol realized that he had planted a GPS tracking device on her car, so she was calling me for help to disable it.""Well, you should go to a good mechanic and have him look at your car,"" I said.""I already have,"" she told me. ""He didn't see anything obvious, and he said he'd have to take the car apart piece by piece.""""Well then, you'd better go to the police,"" I said.""I already have,"" she replied. ""They're not sure this rises to the level of harassment, and they're not set up technically to find the device.""""Okay, what about the FBI?""""I've talked to them too, and same story.""We then talked about her coming to my lab and us performing a radio sweep of her car, but I wasn't even sure that would work, given that some of these devices are configured to only transmit when they're inside safe zones or when the car is moving.So, there we were. Carol isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, to find herself in this kind of fearsome environment, worrisome situation caused by GPS tracking.In fact, as I looked into her case, I discovered to my surprise that it's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else's car. The Supreme Court ruled last month that a policeman has to get a warrant if he wants to do prolonged tracking, but the law isn't clear about civilians doing this to one another, so it's not just Big Brother we have to worry about, but Big Neighbor. (Laughter)There is one alternative that Carol could have taken, very effective. It's called the Wave Bubble. It's an open-source GPS jammer, developed by Limor Fried, a graduate student at MIT, and Limor calls it ""a tool for reclaiming our personal space."" With a flip of the switch you create a bubble around you within which GPS signals can't reside. They get drowned out by the bubble. And Limor designed this, in part, because, like Carol, she felt threatened by GPS tracking. Then she posted her design to the web, and if you don't have time to build your own, you can buy one. Chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the Internet.So you might be thinking, the Wave Bubble sounds great. I should have one. Might come in handy if somebody ever puts a tracking device on my car. But you should be aware that its use is very much illegal in the United States. And why is that? Well, because it's not a bubble at all. Its jamming signals don't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car. They go on to jam innocent GPS receivers for miles around you. (Laughter)Now, if you're Carol or Limor, or someone who feels threatened by GPS tracking, it might not feel wrong to turn on a Wave Bubble, but in fact, the results can be disastrous. Imagine, for example, you're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble. All of a sudden your GPS readout goes blank, and now it's just you and the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar system if you remember how to work it. They — in fact, they don't update or upkeep lighthouses anymore, and LORAN, the only backup to GPS, was discontinued last year.Our modern society has a special relationship with GPS. We're almost blindly reliant on it. It's built deeply into our systems and infrastructure. Some call it ""the invisible utility."" So, turning on a Wave Bubble might not just cause inconvenience. It might be deadly.But as it turns out, for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability, there's something even more potent and more subversive than a Wave Bubble, and that is a GPS spoofer.The idea behind the GPS spoofer is simple. Instead of jamming the GPS signals, you fake them. You imitate them, and if you do it right, the device you're attacking doesn't even know it's being spoofed.So let me show you how this works. In any GPS receiver, there's a peak inside that corresponds to the authentic signals. These three red dots represent the tracking points that try to keep themselves centered on that peak. But if you send in a fake GPS signal, another peak pops up, and if you can get these two peaks perfectly aligned, the tracking points can't tell the difference, and they get hijacked by the stronger counterfeit signal, with the authentic peak getting forced off. At this point, the game is over. The fake signals now completely control this GPS receiver.So is this really possible? Can someone really manipulate the timing and positioning of a GPS receiver just like that, with a spoofer? Well, the short answer is yes. The key is that civil GPS signals are completely open. They have no encryption. They have no authentication. They're wide open, vulnerable to a kind of spoofing attack. Even so, up until very recently, nobody worried about GPS spoofers. People figured that it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one.But I, and a friend of mine from graduate school, we didn't see it that way. We knew it wasn't going to be so hard, and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against GPS spoofing. I remember vividly the week it all came together. We built it at my home, which means that I got a little extra help from my three-year-old son Ramon. Here's Ramon — (Laughter) — looking for a little attention from Dad that week. At first, the spoofer was just a jumble of cables and computers, though we eventually got it packaged into a small box.Now, the Dr. Frankenstein moment, when the spoofer finally came alive and I glimpsed its awful potential, came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone. Let me show you some actual footage from that very first experiment. I had come to completely trust this little blue dot and its reassuring blue halo. They seemed to speak to me. They'd say, ""Here you are. Here you are."" (Laughter) And ""you can trust us."" So something felt very wrong about the world. It was a sense, almost, of betrayal, when this little blue dot started at my house, and went running off toward the north leaving me behind. I wasn't moving. What I then saw in this little moving blue dot was the potential for chaos. I saw airplanes and ships veering off course, with the captain learning only too late that something was wrong. I saw the GPS-derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers. You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer.There is, though, one redeeming feature of the GPS spoofer. It's the ultimate weapon against an invasion of GPS dots. Imagine, for example, you're being tracked. Well, you can play the tracker for a fool, pretending to be at work when you're really on vacation. Or, if you're Carol, you could lure your ex-boyfriend into some empty parking lot where the police are waiting for him.So I'm fascinated by this conflict, a looming conflict, between privacy on the one hand and the need for a clean radio spectrum on the other. We simply cannot tolerate GPS jammers and spoofers, and yet, given the lack of effective legal means for protecting our privacy from the GPS dot, can you really blame people for wanting to turn them on, for wanting to use them?I hold out hope that we'll be able to reconcile this conflict with some sort of, some yet uninvented technology. But meanwhile, grab some popcorn, because things are going to get interesting.Within the next few years, many of you will be the proud owner of a GPS dot. Maybe you'll have a whole bag full of them. You'll never lose track of your things again. The GPS dot will fundamentally reorder your life. But will you be able to resist the temptation to track your fellow man? Or will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy?So, as usual, what we see just beyond the horizon is full of promise and peril. It'll be fascinating to see how this all turns out.Thanks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/todd_humphreys_how_to_fool_a_gps
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"I love to collect things. Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars.Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things, that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas. These, to me, are like living sculptures, right, that you can go and look at, and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal's life.So I was thinking about my own life, and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know, for the ages, and also — (Laughter) — the lives of my friends, but the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter)So instead, I turned to video, and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time. So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends and then, using video mapping and video projection, I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends projected into jars. (Laughter) So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go, and this is called Animalia Chordata, from the Latin nomenclature for human being, classification system. So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars, and they actually move around. (Laughter)So, this is interesting to me, but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter) It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add an interaction system. So what I did was, I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways. You know, just like people on the street when you get too close to them. Some people reacted in terror. (Laughter) Others reacted in asking you for help, and some people hide from you.So this was really interesting to me, this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life, and also adding interactivity to sculpture. So over the next year, I documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as Garden, which is literally a garden of humanity.But something about the first piece, the Animali Chordata piece, kept coming back to me, this idea of interaction with art, and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact, and also being challenged by interacting with art. So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something, and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter) This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art. You may never experience the entire thing yourself. You can walk away, you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you, or you can actually choose to interact with it. So if you do choose to interact with the piece, and you press the blender button, it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment. By doing that, you are now part of my piece. You, like the people that are trapped in my work — (Blender noises, laughter) — have become part of my work as well. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause)But, but this seems a bit unfair, right? I put my friends in jars, I put this character, this sort of endangered species character in a blender. But I'd never done anything about myself. I'd never really memorialized myself. So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece. This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed, in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock, and it's up to you. If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock, you actually age me. So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock, you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler, and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager. From a teenager, I'm transformed into my current self. From my current self, I'm turned into a middle-aged man, and then, from there, into an elderly man. And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day, the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day. So, in doing so, you're erasing time. You're actually implicit in this work and you're erasing my life.So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gabriel_barcia_colombo_capturing_memories_in_video_art
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"Now, I don't usually like cartoons, I don't think many of them are funny, I find them weird. But I love this cartoon from the New Yorker.(Text: Never, ever think outside the box.) (Laughter)So, the guy is telling the cat, don't you dare think outside the box. Well, I'm afraid I used to be the cat. I always wanted to be outside the box. And it's partly because I came to this field from a different background, chemist and a bacterial geneticist. So, what people were saying to me about the cause of cancer, sources of cancer, or, for that matter, why you are who you are, didn't make sense.So, let me quickly try and tell you why I thought that and how I went about it. So, to begin with, however, I have to give you a very, very quick lesson in developmental biology, with apologies to those of you who know some biology. So, when your mom and dad met, there is a fertilized egg, that round thing with that little blip. It grows and then it grows, and then it makes this handsome man.(Applause)So, this guy, with all the cells in his body, all have the same genetic information. So how did his nose become his nose, his elbow his elbow, and why doesn't he get up one morning and have his nose turn into his foot? It could. It has the genetic information. You all remember, dolly, it came from a single mammary cell. So, why doesn't it do it? So, have a guess of how many cells he has in his body. Somewhere between 10 trillion to 70 trillion cells in his body. Trillion! Now, how did these cells, all with the same genetic material, make all those tissues? And so, the question I raised before becomes even more interesting if you thought about the enormity of this in every one of your bodies.Now, the dominant cancer theory would say that there is a single oncogene in a single cancer cell, and it would make you a cancer victim. Well, this did not make sense to me. Do you even know how a trillion looks? Now, let's look at it. There it comes, these zeroes after zeroes after zeroes. Now, if .0001 of these cells got mutated, and .00001 got cancer, you will be a lump of cancer. You will have cancer all over you. And you're not. Why not?So, I decided over the years, because of a series of experiments that this is because of context and architecture.And let me quickly tell you some crucial experiment that was able to actually show this. To begin with, I came to work with this virus that causes that ugly tumor in the chicken. Rous discovered this in 1911. It was the first cancer virus discovered, and when I call it ""oncogene,"" meaning ""cancer gene."" So, he made a filtrate, he took this filter which was the liquid after he passed the tumor through a filter, and he injected it to another chicken, and he got another tumor.So, scientists were very excited, and they said, a single oncogene can do it. All you need is a single oncogene. So, they put the cells in cultures, chicken cells, dumped the virus on it, and it would pile up, and they would say, this is malignant and this is normal.And again this didn't make sense to me. So for various reasons, we took this oncogene, attached it to a blue marker, and we injected it into the embryos. Now look at that. There is that beautiful feather in the embryo. Every one of those blue cells are a cancer gene inside a cancer cell, and they're part of the feather. So, when we dissociated the feather and put it in a dish, we got a mass of blue cells. So, in the chicken you get a tumor, in the embryo you don't, you dissociate, you put it in a dish, you get another tumor. What does that mean? That means that microenvironment and the context which surrounds those cells actually are telling the cancer gene and the cancer cell what to do.Now, let's take a normal example. The normal example, let's take the human mammary gland. I work on breast cancer. So, here is a lovely human breast. And many of you know how it looks, except that inside that breast, there are all these pretty, developing, tree-like structures. So, we decided that what we like to do is take just a bit of that mammary gland, which is called an ""acinus,"" where there are all these little things inside the breast where the milk goes, and the end of the nipple comes through that little tube when the baby sucks.And we said, wonderful! Look at this pretty structure. We want to make this a structure, and ask the question, how do the cells do that? So, we took the red cells — you see the red cells are surrounded by blue, other cells that squeeze them, and behind it is material that people thought was mainly inert, and it was just having a structure to keep the shape, and so we first photographed it with the electron microscope years and years ago, and you see this cell is actually quite pretty. It has a bottom, it has a top, it is secreting gobs and gobs of milk, because it just came from an early pregnant mouse.You take these cells, you put them in a dish, and within three days, they look like that. They completely forget. So you take them out, you put them in a dish, they don't make milk. They completely forget. For example, here is a lovely yellow droplet of milk on the left, there is nothing on the right. Look at the nuclei. The nuclei in the cell on the left is in the animal, the one on the right is in a dish. They are completely different from each other.So, what does this tell you? This tells you that here also, context overrides. In different contexts, cells do different things. But how does context signal? So, Einstein said that ""For an idea that does not first seem insane, there is no hope."" So, you can imagine the amount of skepticism I received — couldn't get money, couldn't do a whole lot of other things, but I'm so glad it all worked out.So, we made a section of the mammary gland of the mouse, and all those lovely acini are there, every one of those with the red around them are an acinus, and we said okay, we are going to try and make this, and I said, maybe that red stuff around the acinus that people think there's just a structural scaffold, maybe it has information, maybe it tells the cells what to do, maybe it tells the nucleus what to do. So I said, extracellular matrix, which is this stuff called ECM, signals and actually tells the cells what to do.So, we decided to make things that would look like that. We found some gooey material that had the right extracellular matrix in it, we put the cells in it, and lo and behold, in about four days, they got reorganized and on the right, is what we can make in culture. On the left is what's inside the animal, we call it in vivo, and the one in culture was full of milk, the lovely red there is full of milk. So, we Got Milk, for the American audience. All right. And here is this beautiful human cell, and you can imagine that here also, context goes.So, what do we do now? I made a radical hypothesis. I said, if it's true that architecture is dominant, architecture restored to a cancer cell should make the cancer cell think it's normal. Could this be done? So, we tried it. In order to do that, however, we needed to have a method of distinguishing normal from malignant, and on the left is the single normal cell, human breast, put in three-dimensional gooey gel that has extracellular matrix, it makes all these beautiful structures. On the right, you see it looks very ugly, the cells continue to grow, the normal ones stop. And you see here in higher magnification the normal acinus and the ugly tumor.So we said, what is on the surface of these ugly tumors? Could we calm them down — they were signaling like crazy and they have pathways all messed up — and make them to the level of the normal? Well, it was wonderful. Boggles my mind. This is what we got. We can revert the malignant phenotype.(Applause)And in order to show you that the malignant phenotype I didn't just choose one, here are little movies, sort of fuzzy, but you see that on the left are the malignant cells, all of them are malignant, we add one single inhibitor in the beginning, and look what happens, they all look like that. We inject them into the mouse, the ones on the right, and none of them would make tumors. We inject the other ones in the mouse, 100 percent tumors.So, it's a new way of thinking about cancer, it's a hopeful way of thinking about cancer. We should be able to be dealing with these things at this level, and these conclusions say that growth and malignant behavior is regulated at the level of tissue organization and that the tissue organization is dependent on the extracellular matrix and the microenvironment. All right, thus form and function interact dynamically and reciprocally. And here is another five seconds of repose, is my mantra. Form and function.And of course, we now ask, where do we go now? We'd like to take this kind of thinking into the clinic. But before we do that, I'd like you to think that at any given time when you're sitting there, in your 70 trillion cells, the extracellular matrix signaling to your nucleus, the nucleus is signaling to your extracellular matrix and this is how your balance is kept and restored.We have made a lot of discoveries, we have shown that extracellular matrix talks to chromatin. We have shown that there's little pieces of DNA on the specific genes of the mammary gland that actually respond to extracellular matrix. It has taken many years, but it has been very rewarding.And before I get to the next slide, I have to tell you that there are so many additional discoveries to be made. There is so much mystery we don't know. And I always say to the students and post-docs I lecture to, don't be arrogant, because arrogance kills curiosity. Curiosity and passion. You need to always think, what else needs to be discovered? And maybe my discovery needs to be added to or maybe it needs to be changed.So, we have now made an amazing discovery, a post-doc in the lab who is a physicist asked me, what do the cells do when you put them in? What do they do in the beginning when they do? I said, I don't know, we couldn't look at them. We didn't have high images in the old days. So she, being an imager and a physicist, did this incredible thing. This is a single human breast cell in three dimensions. Look at it. It's constantly doing this. Has a coherent movement. You put the cancer cells there, and they do go all over, they do this. They don't do this. And when we revert the cancer cell, it again does this. Absolutely boggles my mind. So the cell acts like an embryo. What an exciting thing.So I'd like to finish with a poem. Well I used to love English literature, and I debated in college, which one should I do? And unfortunately or fortunately, chemistry won. But here is a poem from Yeats. I'll just read you the last two lines. It's called ""Among the School Children."" ""O body swayed to music / O brightening glance / How [can we know] the dancer from the dance?"" And here is Merce Cunningham, I was fortunate to dance with him when I was younger, and here he is a dancer, and while he is dancing, he is both the dancer and the dance. The minute he stops, we have neither. So it's like form and function.Now, I'd like to show you a current picture of my group. I have been fortunate to have had these magnificant students and post-docs who have taught me so much, and I have had many of these groups come and go. They are the future and I try to make them not be afraid of being the cat and being told, don't think outside the box.And I'd like to leave you with this thought. On the left is water coming through the shore, taken from a NASA satellite. On the right, there is a coral. Now if you take the mammary gland and spread it and take the fat away, on a dish it looks like that. Do they look the same? Do they have the same patterns? Why is it that nature keeps doing that over and over again?And I'd like to submit to you that we have sequenced the human genome, we know everything about the sequence of the gene, the language of the gene, the alphabet of the gene, But we know nothing, but nothing, about the language and alphabet of form. So, it's a wonderful new horizon, it's a wonderful thing to discover for the young and the passionate old, and that's me.So go to it!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mina_bissell_experiments_that_point_to_a_new_understanding_of_cancer
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"So let me start by taking you back, back into the mists of your memory to perhaps the most anticipated year in your life, but certainly the most anticipated year in all human history: the year 2000. Remember that? Y2K, the dotcom bubble, stressing about whose party you're going to go to as the clock strikes midnight, before the champagne goes flat, and then there's that inchoate yearning that was felt, I think, by many, that the millennium, that the year 2000, should mean more, more than just a two and some zeroes.Well, amazingly, for once, our world leaders actually lived up to that millennium moment and back in 2000 agreed to some pretty extraordinary stuff: visionary, measurable, long-term targets called the Millennium Development Goals.Now, I'm sure you all keep a copy of the goals under your pillow, or by the bedside table, but just in case you don't, and your memory needs some jogging, the deal agreed then goes like this: developing countries promised to at least halve extreme poverty, hunger and deaths from disease, alongside some other targets, by 2015, and developed nations promised to help them get that done by dropping debts, increasing smart aid, and trade reform.Well, we're approaching 2015, so we'd better assess, how are we doing on these goals? But we've also got to decide, do we like such global goals? Some people don't. And if we like them, we've got to decide what we want to do on these goals going forward. What does the world want to do together? We've got to decide a process by which we decide.Well, I definitely think these goals are worth building on and seeing through, and here's just a few reasons why. Incredible partnerships between the private sector, political leaders, philanthropists and amazing grassroots activists across the developing world, but also 250,000 people marched in the streets of Edinburgh outside this very building for Make Poverty History.All together, they achieved these results: increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals, life-saving anti-AIDS drugs; nearly halved deaths from malaria; vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved. And combined, this is going to result in two million fewer children dying every year, last year, than in the year 2000. That's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day, ten times you lot not dead every day, because of all of these partnerships. So I think this is amazing living proof of progress that more people should know about, but the challenge of communicating this kind of good news is probably the subject of a different TEDTalk. Anyway, for now, anyone involved in getting these results, thank you. I think this proved these goals are worth it.But there's still a lot of unfinished business. Still, 7.6 million children die every year of preventable, treatable diseases, and 178 million kids are malnourished to the point of stunting, a horrible term which means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment. So there's plainly a lot more to do on the goals we've got.But then, a lot of people think there are things that should have been in the original package that weren't agreed back then that should now be included, like sustainable development targets, natural resource governance targets, access to opportunity, to knowledge, equity, fighting corruption. All of this is measurable and could be in the new goals.But the key thing here is, what do you think should be in the new goals? What do you want? Are you annoyed that I didn't talk about gender equality or education? Should those be in the new package of goals?And quite frankly, that's a good question, but there's going to be some tough tradeoffs and choices here, so you want to hope that the process by which the world decides these new goals is going to be legitimate, right?Well, as we gather here in Edinburgh, technocrats appointed by the U.N. and certain governments, with the best intentions, are busying themselves designing a new package of goals, and currently they're doing that through pretty much the same old late-20th-century, top-down, elite, closed process.But, of course, since then, the Web and mobile telephony, along with ubiquitous reality TV formats have spread all around the world. So what we'd like to propose is that we use them to involve people from all around the world in an historic first: the world's first truly global poll and consultation, where everyone everywhere has an equal voice for the very first time.I mean, wouldn't it be a huge historic missed opportunity not to do this, given that we can? There's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake, tens of millions of lives, or deaths, at stake, and, I'd argue, the security and future of you and your family is also at stake.So, if you're with me, I'd say there's three essential steps in this crowdsourcing campaign: collecting, connecting and committing.So first of all, we've got to ground this campaign in core polling data. Let's go into every country that will let us in, ask 1,001 people what they want the new goals to be, making special efforts to reach the poorest, those without access to modern technology, and let's make sure that their views are at the center of the goals going forward.Then, we've got to commission a baseline survey to make sure we can monitor and progress the goals going forward. The original goals didn't really have good baseline survey data, and we're going to need the help of big data through all of this process to make sure we can really monitor the progress.And then we've got to connect with the big crowd. Now here, we see the role for an unprecedented coalition of social media giants and upstarts, telecoms companies, reality TV show formats, gaming companies, telecoms, all of them together in kind of their ""We Are The World"" moment. Could they come together and help the Millennium Development Goals get rebranded into the Millennial Generation's Goals? And if just five percent of the five billion plus who are currently connected made a comment, and that comment turned into a commitment, we could crowdsource a force of 300 million people around the world to help see these goals through.If we have this collected data, and this connected crowd, based upon our experience of campaigning and getting world leaders to commit, I think world leaders will commit to most of the crowdsourced recommendations.But the question really is, through this process will we all have become committed? And if we are, are we ready to iterate, monitor and provide feedback, make sure these promises are really delivering results?Well, there's some fantastic examples here to scale up, mostly piloted within Africa, actually. There's Open Data Kenya, which geocodes and crowdsources information about where projects are, are they delivering results. Often, they're not in the right place. And Ushahidi, which means ""witness"" in Swahili, which geocodes and crowdsources information in complex emergencies to help target responses. This is some of the most exciting stuff in development and democracy, where citizens on the edge of a network are helping to force open the process to make sure that the big global aid promises and vague stuff up at the top really delivers for people at a grassroots level and inverts that pyramid. This openness, this forcing openness, is key, and if it wasn't entirely transparent already, I should be open: I've got a completely transparent agenda.Long-term trends suggest that this century is going to be a tough place to live, with population increases, consumption patterns increasing, and conflict over scarce natural resources. And look at the state of global politics today. Look at the Rio Earth Summit that happened just last week, or the Mexican G20, also last week. Both, if we're honest, a bust. Our world leaders, our global politics, currently can't get it done. They need our help. They need the cavalry, and the cavalry's not going to come from Mars. It's got to come from us, and I see this process of deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashion what the world wants to work on together as one vital means by which we can crowdsource the force to really build that constituency that's going to reinvigorate global governance in the 21st century.I started in 2000. Let me finish in 2030.Many people made fun of a big campaign a few years ago we had called Make Poverty History. It was a naive thought in many people's minds, and it's true, it was just a t-shirt slogan that worked for the moment. But look. The empirical condition of living under a dollar and 25 is trending down, and look where it gets to by 2030. It's getting near zero. Now sure, progress in China and India and poverty reduction there was key to that, but recently also in Africa, poverty rates are being reduced. It will get harder as we get towards zero, as the poor will be increasingly located in post-conflict, fragile states, or maybe in middle income states where they don't really care about the marginalized. But I'm confident, with the right kind of political campaigning and creative and technological innovation combined working together more and more as one, I think we can get this and other goals done.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)Chris Anderson: Jamie, here's the puzzle to me. If there was an incident today where a hundred kids died in some tragedy or where, say, a hundred kids were kidnapped and then rescued by special forces, I mean, it would be all over the news for a week, right? You just put up, just as one of your numbers there, that 5,000 — is that the number?Jamie Drummond: Fewer children every day.CA: Five thousand fewer children dying every day. I mean, it dwarfs, dwarfs everything that is actually on our news agenda, and it's invisible. This must drive you crazy.JD: It does, and we're having a huge debate in this country about aid levels, for example, and aid alone is not the whole solution. Nobody thinks it is. But, you know, if people saw the results of this smart aid, I mean, they'd be going crazy for it. I wish the 250,000 people who really did march outside this very building knew these results. Right now they don't, and it would be great to find a way to better communicate it, because we have not. Creatively, we've failed to communicate this success so far. If those kinds of efforts just could multiply their voice and amplify it at the key moments, I know for a fact we'd get better policy. The Mexican G20 need not have been a bust. Rio, if anyone cares about the environment, need not have been a bust, okay? But these conferences are going on, and I know people get skeptical and cynical about the big global summits and the promises and their never being kept, but actually, the bits that are, are making a difference, and what the politicians need is more permission from the public.CA: But you haven't fully worked out the Web mechanisms, etc. by which this might happen. I mean, if the people here who've had experience using open platforms, you're interested to talk with them this week and try to take this forward.JD: Absolutely. CA: All right, well I must say, if this conference led in some way to advancing that idea, that's a huge idea, and if you carry that forward, that is really awesome, so thank you. JD: I'd love your help.CA: Thank you, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_drummond_how_to_set_goals_for_the_world
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"I'm going to start on a slightly somber note. Two thousand and seven, five years ago, my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer. Stage IIB. Now, looking back, the most harrowing part of that experience was not just the hospital visits — these were very painful for my wife, understandably so. It was not even the initial shock of knowing that she had breast cancer at just 39 years old, absolutely no history of cancer in her family.The most horrifying and agonizing part of the whole experience was we were making decisions after decisions after decisions that were being thrust upon us. Should it be a mastectomy? Should it be a lumpectomy? Should it be a more aggressive form of treatment, given that it was stage IIB? With all the side effects? Or should it be a less aggressive form of treatment? And these were being thrust upon us by the doctors.Now you could ask this question, why were the doctors doing this? A simplistic answer would be, the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally. I think that is too simplistic. These are well-meaning doctors, some of them have gone on to become very good friends. They probably were simply following the wisdom that has come down through the ages, this adage that when you're making decisions, especially decisions of importance, it's best to be in charge, it's best to be in control, it's best to be in the driver's seat.And we were certainly in the driver's seat, making all these decisions. And let me tell you — if some of you have been there, it was a most agonizing and harrowing experience. Which got me thinking. I said, is there any validity to this whole adage that when you're making decisions, it's best to take the driver's seat, be in charge, be in control? Or are there contexts where we're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive? For example, a trusted financial advisor, could be a trusted doctor, etc. And since I study human decision making, I said, I'm going to run some studies to find some answers.And I'm going to share one of these studies with you today. So, imagine that all of you are participants in the study. I want to tell you that what you're going to do in the study is, you're going to drink a cup of tea. If you're wondering why, I'll tell you why in a few seconds from now. You are going to solve a series of puzzles, and I'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily. And the more puzzles you solve, the greater the chances that you'll win some prizes.Now, why do you have to consume the tea? Why? Because it makes a lot of sense: In order to solve these puzzles effectively, if you think about it, your mind needs to be in two states simultaneously, right? It needs to be alert, for which caffeine is very good. Simultaneously, it needs to be calm — not agitated, calm — for which chamomile is very good.Now comes the between-subjects design, the AB design, the AB testing. So what I'm going to do is randomly assign you to one of two groups. So imagine that there is an imaginary line out here, so everyone here will be group A, everyone out here will be group B.Now, for you folks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you these two teas, and I'll go ahead and ask you to choose your tea. So you can choose whichever tea you want. You can decide, what is your mental state: OK, I choose the caffeinated tea, I choose the chamomile tea. So you're going to be in charge, you're going to be in control, you're going to be in the driver's seat.You folks, I'm going to show you these two teas, but you don't have a choice. I'm going to give you one of these two teas, and keep in mind, I'm going to pick one of these two teas at random for you. And you know that. So if you think about it, this is an extreme-case scenario, because in the real world, whenever you are taking passenger's seat, very often the driver is going to be someone you trust, an expert, etc. So this is an extreme-case scenario.Now, you're all going to consume the tea. So imagine that you're taking the tea now, we'll wait for you to finish the tea. We'll give another five minutes for the ingredient to have its effects.Now you're going to have 30 minutes to solve 15 puzzles. Here's an example of the puzzle you're going to solve. Anyone in the audience want to take a stab?Audience member: Pulpit! Baba Shiv: Whoa! OK. That's cool. Yeah, so what we'd do if we had you who gave the answer as a participant, we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise. Because we want these puzzles to be difficult. These are tricky puzzles, because your first instinct is to say ""tulip."" And then you have to unstick yourself. Right? So these have been calibrated to your level of expertise, because we want this to be difficult, and I'll tell you why, momentarily.Now, here's another example. Anyone? This is much more difficult.Audience member: Embark. BS: Yeah. Wow! OK. So, yeah, so this is, again, difficult. You'll say ""kamber,"" then you'll go, ""maker,"" and all that, and then you can unstick yourself.So you have 30 minutes now to solve these 15 puzzles. Now, the question we're asking here is, in terms of the outcome — and it comes in the number of puzzles solved — will you in the driver's seat end up solving more puzzles because you are in control, you could decide which tea you would choose, or would you be better off, in terms of the number of puzzles solved? And, systemically, what we will show, across a series of studies, is that you, the passengers, even though the tea was picked for you at random, will end up solving more puzzles than you, the drivers.We also observe another thing, and that is, you folks not only are solving fewer puzzles, you're also putting less juice into the task — less effort, you're less persistent, and so on. How do we know that? Well, we have two objective measures. One is, what is the time, on average, you're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles? You will spend less time compared to you. Second, you have 30 minutes to solve these; are you taking the entire 30 minutes or are you giving up before the 30 minutes elapse? You will be more likely to give up before the 30 minutes elapse, compared to you. So you're putting in less juice, and therefore, the outcome: fewer puzzles solved.That brings us now to: why does this happen? And under what situations — when — would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better, more favorable outcomes, compared to the driver?It all has to do with when you face what I call the INCA. It's an acronym that stands for the nature of the feedback you're getting after you made the decision. So if you think about it, in this particular puzzle task — it could happen in investing in the stock market, very volatile out there, it could be the medical situation — the feedback here is immediate. You know the feedback, whether you're solving the puzzles or not.Right? Second, it is negative. Remember, the deck was stacked against you, in terms of the difficulty level of these puzzles. And this can happen in the medical domain. For example, very early on in the treatment, things are negative, the feedback, before things become positive. Right? It can happen in the stock market. Volatile stock market, getting negative feedback, it is also immediate. And the feedback in all these cases is concrete, it's unambiguous; you know if you've solved the puzzles or not.Now, the added one, apart from this immediacy, negative, this concreteness — now you have a sense of agency. You were responsible for your decision. So what do you do? You focus on the foregone option. You say, you know what? I should have chosen the other tea.(Laughter)That casts your decision in doubt, reduces the confidence you have in the decision, the confidence you have in the performance, the performance in terms of solving the puzzles. And therefore less juice into the task, fewer puzzles solved and less favorable outcomes compared to you folks.And this can happen in the medical domain, if you think about it, right? A patient in the driver's seat, for example. Less juice, which means keeping herself or himself less physically fit, physically active to hasten the recovery process, which is what is often advocated. You probably wouldn't do that. And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive.Now, I started off on a somber note. I want to finish up on a more upbeat note. It has now been five years, slightly more than five years, and the good news, thank God, is that the cancer is still in remission.So it all ends well. But one thing I didn't mention was that very early on into her treatment, my wife and I decided that we would take the passenger's seat. And that made so much of a difference in terms of the peace of mind that came with that; we could focus on her recovery. We let the doctors make all the decisions and take the driver's seat.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/baba_shiv_sometimes_it_s_good_to_give_up_the_driver_s_seat
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"So wouldn't it be amazing if our phones could see the world in the same way that we do, as we're walking around being able to point a phone at anything, and then have it actually recognize images and objects like the human brain, and then be able to pull in information from an almost infinite library of knowledge and experiences and ideas.Well, traditionally that was seen as science fiction, but now we've moved to a world where actually this has become possible.So the best way of explaining it is to just show it. What you can see over here is Tamara, who is holding my phone that's now plugged in. So let me start with this. What we have here is a painting of the great poet Rabbie Burns, and it's just a normal image, but if we now switch inputs over to the phone, running our technology, you can see effectively what Tamara's seeing on the screen, and when she points at this image, something magical happens.(Laughter) (Bagpipes) (Bagpipes) (Applause) (Bagpipes) Voice: Now simmer blinks on flowery braes ...Matt Mills: Now, what's great about this is, there's no trickery here. There's nothing done to this image. And what's great about this is the technology's actually allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does. Not only that, but as I move the object around, it's going to track it and overlay that content seamlessly. Again, the thing that's incredible about this is this is how advanced these devices have become. All the processing to do that was actually done on the device itself.Now, this has applications everywhere, whether in things like art in museums, like you just saw, or in the world of, say, advertising, or print journalism.So a newspaper becomes out of date as soon as it's printed. And here is this morning's newspaper, and we have some Wimbledon news, which is great. Now what we can do is point at the front of the newspaper and immediately get the bulletin.Voice: ... To the grass, and it's very important that you adapt and you, you have to be flexible, you have to be willing to change direction at a split second, and she does all that. She's won this title.MM: And that linking of the digital content to something that's physical is what we call an aura, and I'll be using that term a little bit as we go through the talk.So, what's great about this is it isn't just a faster, more convenient way to get information in the real world, but there are times when actually using this medium allows you to be able to display information in a way that was never before possible.So what I have here is a wireless router. My American colleagues have told me I've got to call it a router, so that everyone here understands — (Laughter) — but nonetheless, here is the device. So now what I can do is, rather than getting the instructions for the device online, I can simply point at it, the device is recognized, and then —Voice: Begin by plugging in the grey ADSL cable. Then connect the power. Finally, the yellow ethernet cable. Congratulations. You have now completed setup.(Laughter) MM: Awesome. Thank you.(Applause)The incredible work that made that possible was done here in the U.K. by scientists at Cambridge, and they work in our offices, and I've got a lovely picture of them here. They couldn't all be on stage, but we're going to bring their aura to the stage, so here they are. They're not very animated. (Laughter) This was the fourth take, I'm told. (Laughter)Okay. So, as we're talking about Cambridge, let's now move on to technical advancements, because since we started putting this technology on mobile phones less than 12 months ago, the speed and the processing in these devices has grown at a really phenomenal rate, and that means that I can now take cinema-quality 3D models and place them in the world around me, so I have one over here. Tamara, would you like to jump in?(Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Laughter) MM: I should leap in. (Music) (Dinosaur roaring) (Applause)So then, after the fun, comes the more emotional side of what we do, because effectively, this technology allows you to see the world through someone's eyes, and for that person to be able to take a moment in time and effectively store it and tag it to something physical that exists in the real world. What's great about this is, the tools to do this are free. They're open, they're available to everyone within our application, and educators have really got on board with the classrooms. So we have teachers who've tagged up textbooks, teachers who've tagged up school classrooms, and a great example of this is a school in the U.K. I have a picture here from a video, and we're now going to play it.Teacher: See what happens. (Children talking) Keep going.Child: TV. (Children react)Child: Oh my God.Teacher: Now move it either side. See what happens. Move away from it and come back to it.Child: Oh, that is so cool.Teacher: And then, have you got it again?Child: Oh my God! How did you do that?Second child: It's magic.(Laughter) MM: (Laughs) So, it's not magic. It's available for everyone to do, and actually I'm going to show you how easy it is to do by doing one right now.So, as sort of — I'm told it's called a stadium wave, so we're going to start from this side of the room on the count of three, and go over to here. Tamara, are you recording? Okay, so are you all ready? One, two, three. Go!Audience: Whooooooo!MM: Fellows are really good at that. (Laughs) (Laughter)Okay. Now we're going to switch back into the Aurasma application, and what Tamara's going to do is tag that video that we just took onto my badge, so that I can remember it forever.Now, we have lots of people who are doing this already, and we've talked a little bit about the educational side. On the emotional side, we have people who've done things like send postcards and Christmas cards back to their family with little messages on them. We have people who have, for example, taken the inside of the engine bay of an old car and tagged up different components within an engine, so that if you're stuck and you want to find out more, you can point and discover the information.We're all very, very familiar with the Internet. In the last 20 years, it's really changed the way that we live and work, and the way that we see the world, and what's great is, we sort of think this is the next paradigm shift, because now we can literally take the content that we share, we discover, and that we enjoy and make it a part of the world around us. It's completely free to download this application. If you have a good Wi-Fi connection or 3G, this process is very, very quick.Oh, there we are. We can save it now. It's just going to do a tiny bit of processing to convert that image that we just took into a sort of digital fingerprint, and the great thing is, if you're a professional user, — so, a newspaper — the tools are pretty much identical to what we've just used to create this demonstration. The only difference is that you've got the ability to add in links and slightly more content. Are you now ready?Tamara Roukaerts: We're ready to go.MM: Okay. So, I'm told we're ready, which means we can now point at the image, and there you all are.MM on video: One, two, three. Go!MM: Well done. We've been Aurasma. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_mills_image_recognition_that_triggers_augmented_reality
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"Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness, so I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a grayscale world. To me, the sky is always gray, flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white.But, since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color. In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye. It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction. (Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like — This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds) For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds) This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds) This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter) Which is like yellow, this one.So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time. At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color, so I had to memorize the notes, but after some time, all this information became a perception. I didn't have to think about the notes. And after some time, this perception became a feeling. I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in colors.So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg. It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image.This is my passport from 2004. You're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports with electronic equipment, but I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body, an extension of my brain, and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo.So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color, because color is almost everywhere, so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall, because I can listen to the paintings. And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket. It's like going to a nightclub. It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah. Especially the aisle with cleaning products. It's just fabulous. (Laughter)Also, the way I dress has changed. Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good. Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter)(Applause)So today I'm dressed in C major, so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter) If I had to go to a funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter)Also, food, the way I look at food has changed, because now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter) So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food. So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like, Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean, this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably. And also, some Rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes, and some Bjork or Madonna desserts, that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs.Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible. (Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people. Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape, I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits. Here's some faces.(Musical chords)Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter)Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar. Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman. They have similar sound of eyes.So you relate people that you wouldn't relate, and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces. So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces. The good thing about this is, if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault. It's not my fault, because — (Laughter)And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color. I heard a telephone tone, and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green. The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise, and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience,so I started to paint music and paint people's voices, because people's voices have frequencies that I relate to color.And here's some music translated into color. For example, Mozart, ""Queen of the Night,"" looks like this. (Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies. (Music) And this is a completely different song. (Music) It's Justin Bieber's ""Baby."" (Laughter) (Music) It is very pink and very yellow.So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color, for example, these are two very well-known speeches. One of them is Martin Luther King's ""I Have A Dream,"" and the other one is Hitler. And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels, and then I ask people, ""Which one do you prefer?"" And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King.So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision. I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel. But then, I just thought that this human vision wasn't good enough. There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive. So I decided to continue extending my color senses, and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive.For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room. I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control. And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe, because ultraviolet is a dangerous color, a color that can actually kill us, so I think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive.That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body.We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses, so if we extend our senses, we will consequently extend our knowledge. I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body. I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century.So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you'd like to extend. I would encourage you to become a cyborg. You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_to_color
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"So the machine I'm going to talk you about is what I call the greatest machine that never was. It was a machine that was never built, and yet, it will be built. It was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers.If you know anything about the history of computers, you will know that in the '30s and the '40s, simple computers were created that started the computer revolution we have today, and you would be correct, except for you'd have the wrong century. The first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s. It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped, and the bits of it that were built are here in South Kensington.That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage. Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbage because his hair is always completely unkempt like this in every single picture. (Laughter) He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of, part of the aristocracy of Britain, and on a Saturday night in Marylebone, were you part of the intelligentsia of that period, you would have been invited round to his house for a soiree — and he invited everybody: kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people — and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines.I really miss that era, you know, where you could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you. (Laughter) But Babbage, Babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century, and was a fairly famous mathematician. He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge, and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking. He's less well known than either of them because he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices and never made any of them.The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd. Every time he had a good idea, he'd think, ""That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one. I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea. I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one."" He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street, and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying, ""I bid you good day, sir."" (Laughter)The thing he designed was this monstrosity here, the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this, this is a view from above. Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs, and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive. So as I go through this talk, I want you to imagine this gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful sounds of what this thing would have sounded like. And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine — that's why it's computer architecture — and tell you about this machine, which is a computer.So let's talk about the memory. The memory is very like the memory of a computer today, except it was all made out of metal, stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high. Imagine a thing this high of cogs, hundreds and hundreds of them, and they've got numbers on them. It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal. And he thought about using binary. The problem with using binary is that the machine would have been so tall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous. So he's got memory. The memory is this bit over here. You see it all like this.This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like. Of course, it's this big. Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical. This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU which is in the Science Museum.The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic — so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division — which already is a bit of a feat in metal, but it could also do something that a computer does and a calculator doesn't: this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision. It could do the ""if then"" for basic programmers, and that fundamentally made it into a computer. It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more.Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute, and we think about chips today, we can't look inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny. Yet if you did, you would see something very, very similar to this. There's this incredible complexity in the CPU, and this incredible regularity in the memory. If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture, you'll see this. This all looks the same, then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated.All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does, but of course you need to program this thing, and of course, Babbage used the technology of the day and the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s, which is punch cards. This thing over here is one of three punch card readers in here, and this is a program in the Science Museum, just not far from here, created by Charles Babbage, that is sitting there — you can go see it — waiting for the machine to be built. And there's not just one of these, there's many of them. He prepared programs anticipating this would happen.Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, in France, had created the Jacquard loom, which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, and like everything else he did, he's using the technology of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday, who would completely revolutionize everything with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things. Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology, so steam and things.Now, he needed accessories. Obviously, you've got a computer now. You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory. You need accessories you're going to come with. You're not just going to have that,So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell, so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) — or the machine needed the attendant to come to it, there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter) And there's actually an instruction on the punch card which says ""Ring the bell."" So you can imagine this ""Ting!"" You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises, this thing, ""Click, clack click click click,"" steam engine, ""Ding,"" right? (Laughter)You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer. This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for another machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2, which he never built, but which the Science Museum did build in the '80s and '90s. It's completely mechanical, again, a printer. It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers, but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping, so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that.You also need graphics, right? I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics, so he said, ""Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paper and an ink pen and I'll make it plot."" So he designed a plotter as well, and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty much a pretty good machine.Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace. Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along. This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness, thought, ""I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution. We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down."" (Laughter) Because of course, there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy, so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter) Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training, and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother, and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine. The Duke of Wellington is there, you know, get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it, and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really, who said, ""I understand what this does, and I understand the future of this machine."" And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build because of her.Now, some people call her the first programmer. This is actually from one of — the paper that she translated. This is a program written in a particular style. It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer, and actually, she did something more amazing. Rather than just being a programmer, she saw something that Babbage didn't.Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics. He was building a machine to do mathematics, and Lovelace said, ""You could do more than mathematics on this machine."" And just as you do, everyone in this room already's got a computer on them right now, because they've got a phone. If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phone or computer or any other computing device is mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom. Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers, it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening, and Lovelace said, ""Just because you're doing mathematical functions and symbols doesn't mean these things can't represent other things in the real world, such as music."" This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying, ""We could compute these amazing functions and print out tables of numbers and draw graphs,"" — (Laughter) — and Lovelace is there and she says, ""Look, this thing could even compose music if you told it a representation of music numerically."" So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap. When you say she's a programmer, she did do some, but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much, much more than this.Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along, Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again. Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical. Turing's machine was entirely theoretical. Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective, but Turing told us something very important. He laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science, and said, ""It doesn't matter how you make a computer."" It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical, like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today, or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again, mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology. We could go back to Babbage's machine and just make it tiny. All those things are computers. There is in a sense a computing essence. This is called the Church–Turing thesis.And so suddenly, you get this link where you say this thing Babbage had built really was a computer. In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do today with computers, only really slowly. (Laughter) To give you an idea of how slowly, it had about 1k of memory. It used punch cards, which were being fed in, and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81. It did have a RAM pack. You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to.(Laughter) So, where does that bring us today? So there are plans. Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives, there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine. One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28, and that is also the name of a charity that I started with Doron Swade, who was the curator of computing at the Science Museum, and also the person who drove the project to build a difference engine, and our plan is to build it. Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine.The project has a number of parts to it. One was the scanning of Babbage's archive. That's been done. The second is now the study of all of those plans to determine what to build. The third part is a computer simulation of that machine, and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum.When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works, because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you, you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, ""Ah, I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating, I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating."" (Laughter) But in between that we're going to do a simulation.Babbage himself wrote, he said, as soon as the analytical engine exists, it will surely guide the future course of science. Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddling with new plans, but when it did get built, of course, in the 1940s, everything changed.Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like in motion with a video which shows just one part of the CPU mechanism working. So this is just three sets of cogs, and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanism in action, so you imagine this gigantic machine.So, give me five years. Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_graham_cumming_the_greatest_machine_that_never_was
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"Frugal Digital is essentially a small research group at C.I.D. where we are looking to find alternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society. That's what we're after. And we do this because we actually believe that silicon technology today is mostly about a culture of excess. It's about the fastest and the most efficient and the most dazzling gadget you can have, while about two-thirds of the world can hardly reach the most basic of this technology to even address fundamental needs in life, including health care, education and all these kinds of very fundamental issues.So before I start, I want to talk about a little anecdote, a little story about a man I met once in Mumbai. So this man, his name is Sathi Shri. He is an outstanding person, because he's a small entrepreneur. He runs a little shop in one of the back streets of Mumbai. He has this little 10-square-meter store, where so much is being done. It's incredible, because I couldn't believe my eyes when I once just happened to bump into him. Basically, what he does is, he has all these services for micro-payments and booking tickets and all kinds of basic things that you would go online for, but he does it for people offline and connects to the digital world. More importantly, he makes his money by selling these mobile recharge coupons, you know, for the prepaid subscriptions. But then, in the backside, he's got this little nook with a few of his employees where they can fix almost anything. Any cell phone, any gadget you can bring them, they can fix it. And it's pretty incredible because I took my iPhone there, and he was like, ""Yeah, do you want an upgrade?"" ""Yes."" (Laughter) I was a bit skeptical, but then, I decided to give him a Nokia instead. (Laughter)But what I was amazed about is this reverse engineering and know-how that's built into this little two meters of space. They have figured out everything that's required to dismantle, take things apart, rewrite the circuitry, re-flash the firmware, do whatever you want to with the phone, and they can fix anything so quickly. You can hand over a phone this morning and you can go pick it up after lunch, and it was quite incredible.But then we were wondering whether this is a local phenomenon, or is truly global? And, over time, we started understanding and systematically researching what this tinkering ecosystem is about, because that is something that's happening not just in one street corner in Mumbai. It's actually happening in all parts of the country. It's even happening in Africa, like, for example, in Cape Town we did extensive research on this. Even here in Doha I found this little nook where you can get alarm clocks and watches fixed, and it's a lot of tiny little parts. It's not easy. You've got to try it on your own to believe it.But what fuels this? It's this entire ecosystem of low-cost parts and supplies that are produced all over the world, literally, and then redistributed to basically service this industry, and you can even buy salvaged parts. Basically, you don't have to necessarily buy brand new things. You have condemned computers that are stripped apart, and you can buy salvaged components and things that you can reassemble in a new configuration.But what does this new, sort of, approach give us? That's the real question, because this is something that's been there, part of every society that's deprived of enough resources. But there's an interesting paradigm. There's the traditional crafts, and then there's the technology crafts. We call it the technology crafts because these are emerging. They're not something that's been established. It's not something that's institutionalized. It's not taught in universities. It's taught [by] word of mouth, and it's an informal education system around this.So we said, ""What can we get out of this? You know, like, what are the key values that we can get out of this?"" The main thing is a fix-it-locally culture, which is fantastic because it means that your product or your service doesn't have to go through a huge bureaucratic system to get it fixed. It also affords us cheap fabrication, which is fantastic, so it means that you can do a lot more with it. And then, the most important thing is, it gives us large math for low cost. So it means that you can actually embed pretty clever algorithms and lots of other kinds of extendable ideas into really simple devices.So, what we call this is a silicon cottage industry. It's basically what was the system or the paradigm before the industrial revolution is now re-happening in a whole new way in small digital shops across the planet in most developing countries.So, we kind of toyed around with this idea, and we said, ""What can we do with this? Can we make a little product or a service out of it?"" So one of the first things we did is this thing called a multimedia platform. We call it a lunch box. Basically one of the contexts that we studied was schools in very remote parts of India. So there is this amazing concept called the one-teacher school, which is basically a single teacher who is a multitasker who teaches this amazing little social setting. It's an informal school, but it's really about holistic education. The only thing that they don't have is access to resources. They don't even have a textbook sometimes, and they don't even have a proper curriculum.So we said, ""What can we do to empower this teacher to do more?"" How to access the digital world? Instead of being the sole guardian of information, be a facilitator to all this information. So we said, ""What are the steps required to empower the teacher?"" How do you make this teacher into a digital gateway, and how do you design an inexpensive multimedia platform that can be constructed locally and serviced locally?"" So we walked around. We went and scavenged the nearby markets, and we tried to understand, ""What can we pick up that will make this happen?""So the thing that we got was a little mobile phone with a little pico projector that comes for about 60 dollars. We went a bought a flashlight with a very big battery, and a bunch of small speakers. So essentially, the mobile phone gives us a connected multimedia platform. It allows us to get online and allows us to load up files of different formats and play them. The flashlight gives us this really intense, bright L.E.D., and six hours worth of rechargeable battery pack, and the lunch box is a nice little package in which you can put everything inside, and a bunch of mini speakers to sort of amplify the sound large enough. Believe me, those little classrooms are really noisy. They are kids who scream at the top of their voices, and you really have to get above that. And we took it back to this little tinkering setup of a mobile phone repair shop, and then the magic happens. We dismantle the whole thing, we reassemble it in a new configuration, and we do this hardware mashup, systematically training the guy how to do this. Out comes this, a little lunch box — form factor.(Applause)And we systematically field tested, because in the field testing we learned some important lessons, and we went through many iterations. One of the key issues was battery consumption and charging. Luminosity was an issue, when you have too much bright sunlight outside. Often the roofs are broken, so you don't have enough darkness in the classroom to do these things.We extended this idea. We tested it many times over, and the next version we came up with was a box that kind of could trickle charge on solar energy, but most importantly connect to a car battery, because a car battery is a ubiquitous source of power in places where there's not enough electricity or erratic electricity.And the other key thing that we did was make this box run off a USB key, because we realized that even though there was GPRS and all that on paper, at least, in theory, it was much more efficient to send the data on a little USB key by surface mail. It might take a few days to get there, but at least it gets there in high definition and in a reliable quality. So we made this box, and we tested it again and again and again, and we're going through multiple iterations to do these things.But it's not limited to just education. This kind of a technique or metrology can actually be applied to other kinds of areas, and I'm going to tell you one more little story. It's about this little device called a medi-meter. It's basically a little health care screening tool that we developed.In India, there is a context of these amazing people, the health care workers called ASHA workers. They are essentially foot soldiers for the health care system who live in the local community and are trained with basic tools and basic concepts of health care, and the main purpose is basically to inform people to basically, how to lead a better life, but also to divert or sort of make recommendations of what kind of health care should they approach? They are basically referral services, essentially.But the problem with that is that we realized after a bunch of research that they are amazing at referring people to the nearest clinic or the public health care system, but what happens at the public health care system is this: these incredibly long lines and too many people who overload the system simply because there's not enough doctors and facilities for the population that's being referred. So everything from a common cold to a serious case of malaria gets almost the same level of attention, and there's no priorities.So we said, ""Come on, there's got to be a better way of doing this for sure."" So we said, ""What can we do with the ASHA worker that'll allow this ASHA worker to become an interesting filter, but not just a filter, a really well thought through referral system that allows load balancing of the network, and directs patients to different sources of health care based on the severity or the criticalness of those situations?""So the real key question was, how do we empower this woman? How do we empower her with simple tools that's not diagnostic but more screening in nature so she at least knows how to advise the patients better? And that'll make such a huge difference on the system, because the amount of waiting time and the amount of distances that people need to travel, often sometimes seven to 15 kilometers, sometimes by foot, to get a simple health check done, is very, very detrimental in the sense that it really dissuades people from getting access to health care. So if there was something that she could do, that would be amazing.So what we did was that we converted this device into a medical device. I want to demo this actually, because it's a very simple process.Bruno, do you want to join us? (Cheers) Come along. (Applause)So, what we're going to do is that we're going to measure a few basic parameters on you, including your pulse rate and the amount of oxygen that's there in your blood. So you're going to put your thumb on top of this.Bruno Giussani: Like this, works?Vinay Venkatraman: Yeah. That's right. BG: Okay.VV: So I'm going to start it up. I hope it works. (Beeps) It even beeps, because it's an alarm clock, after all. So ... (Laughter)So I take it into the start position, and then I press the read button. (Beeps) So it's taking a little reading from you. (Beeps) And then the pointer goes and points to three different options. Let's see what happens here. (Beeps) Oh Bruno, you can go home, actually.BG: Great. Good news. (Applause)VV: So ... (Applause)So the thing about this is that if the pointer, unfortunately, had pointed to the red spot, we would have to rush you to a hospital. Luckily, not today. And if it had pointed to the orange or the amber, it basically meant you had to have, sort of, more continuous care from the health care worker. So that was a very simple three-step screening process that could basically change the equation of how public health care works in so many different ways.BG: Thank you for the good news. VV: Yeah.(Applause) So, very briefly, I'll just explain to you how this is done, because that's the more interesting part. So essentially, the three things that are required to make this conversion from this guy to this guy is a cheap remote control for a television that you can almost find in every home today, some parts from a computer mouse, basically, something that you can scavenge for very low cost, and a few parts that have to be pre-programmed. Basically this is a micro-controller with a few extra components that can be shipped for very little cost across the world, and that's what is all required with a little bit of local tinkering talent to convert the device into something else. So we are right now doing some systematic field tests to basically ascertain whether something like this actually makes sense to the ASHA worker.We are going through some reference tests to compare it against professional equipment to see if there's a degree of change in efficacy and if it actually makes an impact in people's lives. But most importantly, what we are trying to do right now is we are trying to scale this up, because there are over 250,000 ASHA workers on the ground who are these amazing foot soldiers, and if we can give at least a fraction of them the access to these things, it just changes the way the economics of public health care works, and it changes the way systems actually function, not just on a systematic planning level, but also in a very grassroots, bottom-up level.So that's it, and we hope to do this in a big way. Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vinay_venkatraman_technology_crafts_for_the_digitally_underserved
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"I'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security, because we've got to get better at security in this 21st century.Let me start by saying, let's look back to the 20th century, and kind of get a sense of how that style of security worked for us.This is Verdun, a battlefield in France just north of the NATO headquarters in Belgium. At Verdun, in 1916, over a 300-day period, 700,000 people were killed, so about 2,000 a day.If you roll it forward — 20th-century security — into the Second World War, you see the Battle of Stalingrad, 300 days, 2 million people killed.We go into the Cold War, and we continue to try and build walls. We go from the trench warfare of the First World War to the Maginot Line of the Second World War, and then we go into the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall. Walls don't work.My thesis for us today is, instead of building walls to create security, we need to build bridges. This is a famous bridge in Europe. It's in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It's the bridge over the Drina River, the subject of a novel by Ivo Andrić, and it talks about how, in that very troubled part of Europe and the Balkans, over time there's been enormous building of walls. More recently, in the last decade, we begin to see these communities start, hesitatingly, to come together.I would argue, again, open-source security is about connecting the international, the interagency, the private-public, and lashing it together with strategic communication, largely in social networks.So let me talk a little bit about why we need to do that, because our global commons is under attack in a variety of ways, and none of the sources of threat to the global commons will be solved by building walls.Now, I'm a sailor, obviously. This is a ship, a liner, clipping through the Indian Ocean. What's wrong with this picture? It's got concertina wire along the sides of it. That's to prevent pirates from attacking it. Piracy is a very active threat today around the world. This is in the Indian Ocean. Piracy is also very active in the Strait of Malacca. It's active in the Gulf of Guinea. We see it in the Caribbean. It's a $10-billion-a-year discontinuity in the global transport system. Last year, at this time, there were 20 vessels, 500 mariners held hostage. This is an attack on the global commons. We need to think about how to address it.Let's shift to a different kind of sea, the cyber sea. Here are photographs of two young men. At the moment, they're incarcerated. They conducted a credit card fraud that netted them over 10 billion dollars. This is part of cybercrime which is a $2-trillion-a-year discontinuity in the global economy. Two trillion a year. That's just under the GDP of Great Britain. So this cyber sea, which we know endlessly is the fundamental piece of radical openness, is very much under threat as well.Another thing I worry about in the global commons is the threat posed by trafficking, by the movement of narcotics, opium, here coming out of Afghanistan through Europe over to the United States. We worry about cocaine coming from the Andean Ridge north. We worry about the movement of illegal weapons and trafficking. Above all, perhaps, we worry about human trafficking, and the awful cost of it. Trafficking moves largely at sea but in other parts of the global commons.This is a photograph, and I wish I could tell you that this is a very high-tech piece of US Navy gear that we're using to stop the trafficking. The bad news is, this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels. It was built in the jungles of South America. We caught it with that low-tech raft — (Laughter) — and it was carrying six tons of cocaine. Crew of four. Sophisticated communications sweep. This kind of trafficking, in narcotics, in humans, in weapons, God forbid, in weapons of mass destruction, is part of the threat to the global commons.And let's pull it together in Afghanistan today. This is a field of poppies in Afghanistan. Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy, opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan. We also see there, of course, terrorism. This is where al Qaeda is staged from. We also see a very strong insurgency embedded there. So this terrorism concern is also part of the global commons, and what we must address.So here we are, 21st century. We know our 20th-century tools are not going to work. What should we do?I would argue that we will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun. We will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun. We will need the application of military force. When we do it, we must do it well, and competently.But my thesis is, open-source security is about international, interagency, private-public connection pulled together by this idea of strategic communication on the Internet.Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way. This is Afghanistan. These are Afghan soldiers. They are all holding books. You should say, ""That's odd. I thought I read that this demographic, young men and women in their 20s and 30s, is largely illiterate in Afghanistan.""You would be correct.Eighty-five percent cannot read when they enter the security forces of Afghanistan. Why? Because the Taliban withheld education during the period of time in which these men and women would have learned to read.So the question is, so, why are they all standing there holding books? The answer is, we are teaching them to read in literacy courses by NATO in partnership with private sector entities, in partnership with development agencies. We've taught well over 200,000 Afghan Security Forces to read and write at a basic level.When you can read and write in Afghanistan, you will typically put a pen in your pocket. At the ceremonies, when these young men and women graduate, they take that pen with great pride, and put it in their pocket. This is bringing together international — there are 50 nations involved in this mission — interagency — these development agencies — and private-public, to take on this kind of security.Now, we are also teaching them combat skills, of course, but I would argue, open-source security means connecting in ways that create longer lasting security effect.Here's another example. This is a US Navy warship. It's called the Comfort. There's a sister ship called the Mercy. They are hospital ships. This one, the Comfort, operates throughout the Caribbean and the coast of South America conducting patient treatments. On a typical cruise, they'll do 400,000 patient treatments. It is crewed not strictly by military but by a combination of humanitarian organizations: Operation Hope, Project Smile. Other organizations send volunteers. Interagency physicians come out. They're all part of this.To give you one example of the impact this can have, this little boy, eight years old, walked with his mother two days to come to the eye clinic put on by the Comfort. When he was fitted, over his extremely myopic eyes, he suddenly looked up and said, ""Mama, veo el mundo."" ""Mom, I see the world."" Multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments, this private-public collaboration with security forces, and you begin to see the power of creating security in a very different way.Here you see baseball players. Can you pick out the two US Army soldiers in this photograph? They are the two young men on either side of these young boys. This is part of a series of baseball clinics, where we have explored collaboration between Major League Baseball, the Department of State, who sets up the diplomatic piece of this, military baseball players, who are real soldiers with real skills but participate in this mission, and they put on clinics throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in all of the Central American and Caribbean nations where baseball is so popular, and it creates security. It shows role models to young men and women about fitness and about life that I would argue help create security for us.Another aspect of this partnership is in disaster relief. This is a US Air Force helicopter participating after the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people. In each of these major disasters — the tsunami in 2004, 250,000 dead, the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, 2005, 85,000 dead, the Haitian earthquake, about 300,000 dead, more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combination which struck Japan and its nuclear industry — in all of these instances, we see partnerships between international actors, interagency, private-public working with security forces to respond to this kind of natural disaster. So these are examples of this idea of open-source security.We tie it together, increasingly, by doing things like this. Now, you're looking at this thinking, ""Ah, Admiral, these must be sea lanes of communication, or these might be fiber optic cables."" No. This is a graphic of the world according to Twitter. Purple are tweets. Green are geolocation. White is the synthesis. It's a perfect evocation of that great population survey, the six largest nations in the world in descending order: China, India, Facebook, the United States, Twitter and Indonesia. (Laughter)Why do we want to get in these nets? Why do we want to be involved? We talked earlier about the Arab Spring, and the power of all this. I'll give you another example, and it's how you move this message.I gave a talk like this in London a while back about this point. I said, as I say to all of you, I'm on Facebook. Friend me. Got a little laugh from the audience. There was an article which was run by AP, on the wire. Got picked up in two places in the world: Finland and Indonesia. The headline was: NATO Admiral Needs Friends. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) Which I do. (Laughter)And the story was a catalyst, and the next morning I had hundreds of Facebook friend requests from Indonesians and Finns, mostly saying, ""Admiral, we heard you need a friend, and oh, by the way, what is NATO?"" (Laughter)So ... (Laughter)Yeah, we laugh, but this is how we move the message, and moving that message is how we connect international, interagency, private-public, and these social nets to help create security.Now, let me hit a somber note. This is a photograph of a brave British soldier. He's in the Scots Guards. He's standing the watch in Helmand, in southern Afghanistan. I put him here to remind us, I would not want anyone to leave the room thinking that we do not need capable, competent militaries who can create real military effect. That is the core of who we are and what we do, and we do it to protect freedom, freedom of speech, all the things we treasure in our societies.But, you know, life is not an on-and-off switch. You don't have to have a military that is either in hard combat or is in the barracks.I would argue life is a rheostat. You have to dial it in, and as I think about how we create security in this 21st century, there will be times when we will apply hard power in true war and crisis, but there will be many instances, as we've talked about today, where our militaries can be part of creating 21st-century security, international, interagency, private-public, connected with competent communication.I would close by saying that we heard earlier today about Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia all the time to look up facts, and as all of you appreciate, Wikipedia is not created by 12 brilliant people locked in a room writing articles. Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of people inputting information, and every day millions of people withdrawing that information. It's a perfect image for the fundamental point that no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. No one person, no one alliance, no one nation, no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.The vision statement of Wikipedia is very simple: a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. My thesis for you is that by combining international, interagency, private-public, strategic communication, together, in this 21st century, we can create the sum of all security.Thank you. (Applause)Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_stavridis_how_nato_s_supreme_commander_thinks_about_global_security
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"Hi. This is my mobile phone. A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom. With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. All this is possible with your mobile phone.I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. Let's go back to that time, to this city. Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket.Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? Hold it up. Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. And I will talk about this. These are 35,830 lines of information. Raw data. And why are these informations there? Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive.This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? Who sends whom a text message? And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider.And all over Europe, people stood up and said, ""We don't want this."" They said, we don't want this data retention. We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: ""We don't want this.""And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, ""Freedom, not fear."" And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.And I also ask myself, does it really work? Can they really store all this information about us? Every time I use my mobile phone? So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers.But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. So at the end, I had a settlement with them. I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional.So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. And on the C.D., this was on. Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. But then after a while I realized, this is my life. This is six months of my life, into this file.So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. But then I said, I want to go out with this information. I want to make them public. Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. This is a visualization of six months of my life. You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. You can see every step I take. And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between.All this is possible with this information. That's a little bit scary. But it is not only about me. It's about all of us. First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network.But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. You can see all of this. You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. If you have access to this information, you can control your society.This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years.Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time.But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. But you have to fight for your self-determination today. You have to fight for it every day. So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you.So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching
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"I'm going to tell you about an affliction I suffer from. And I have a funny feeling that quite a few of you suffer from it as well. When I'm walking around an art gallery, rooms and rooms full of paintings, after about 15 or 20 minutes, I realize I'm not thinking about the paintings. I'm not connecting to them. Instead, I'm thinking about that cup of coffee I desperately need to wake me up. I'm suffering from gallery fatigue.How many of you out there suffer from — yes. Ha ha, ha ha! Now, sometimes you might last longer than 20 minutes, or even shorter, but I think we all suffer from it. And do you have the accompanying guilt? For me, I look at the paintings on the wall and I think, somebody has decided to put them there, thinks they're good enough to be on that wall, but I don't always see it. In fact, most of the time I don't see it.And I leave feeling actually unhappy. I feel guilty and unhappy with myself, rather than thinking there's something wrong with the painting, I think there's something wrong with me. And that's not a good experience, to leave a gallery like that.(Laughter)The thing is, I think we should give ourselves a break. If you think about going into a restaurant, when you look at the menu, are you expected to order every single thing on the menu? No! You select. If you go into a department store to buy a shirt, are you going to try on every single shirt and want every single shirt? Of course not, you can be selective. It's expected. How come, then, it's not so expected to be selective when we go to an art gallery? Why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting?Well I'm trying to take a different approach. And there's two things I do: When I go into a gallery, first of all, I go quite fast, and I look at everything, and I pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other. I don't even know why they make me slow down, but something pulls me like a magnet and then I ignore all the others, and I just go to that painting. So it's the first thing I do is, I do my own curation. I choose a painting. It might just be one painting in 50. And then the second thing I do is I stand in front of that painting, and I tell myself a story about it.Why a story? Well, I think that we are wired, our DNA tells us to tell stories. We tell stories all the time about everything, and I think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place, and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit, trying to bring some order to it. Why not apply that to our looking at paintings? So I now have this sort of restaurant menu visiting of art galleries.There are three paintings I'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them. The first one needs little introduction — ""Girl with a Pearl Earring"" by Johannes Vermeer, 17th-century Dutch painter. This is the most glorious painting. I first saw it when I was 19, and I immediately went out and got a poster of it, and in fact I still have that poster. 30 years later it's hanging in my house. It's accompanied me everywhere I've gone, I never tire of looking at her.What made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with was just the gorgeous colors he uses and the light falling on her face. But I think what's kept me still coming back year after year is another thing, and that is the look on her face, the conflicted look on her face. I can't tell if she's happy or sad, and I change my mind all the time. So that keeps me coming back.One day, 16 years after I had this poster on my wall, I lay in bed and looked at her, and I suddenly thought, I wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that. And it was the first time I'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him. Always before I'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl. Now I began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship. And I thought, well, what is that relationship?So I went to find out. I did some research and discovered, we have no idea who she is. In fact, we don't know who any of the models in any of Vermeer's paintings are, and we know very little about Vermeer himself. Which made me go, ""Yippee!"" I can do whatever I want, I can come up with whatever story I want to.So here's how I came up with the story. First of all, I thought, I've got to get her into the house. How does Vermeer know her? Well, there've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter. The daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting. And I thought, no, it's a very intimate look, but it's not a look a daughter gives her father. For one thing, in Dutch painting of the time, if a woman's mouth was open, it was indicating sexual availability. It would have been inappropriate for Vermeer to paint his daughter like that.So it's not his daughter, but it's somebody close to him, physically close to him. Well, who else would be in the house? A servant, a lovely servant. So, she's in the house. How do we get her into the studio? We don't know very much about Vermeer, but the little bits that we do know, one thing we know is that he married a Catholic woman, they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he — his studio. He also had 11 children. It would have been a chaotic, noisy household. And if you've seen Vermeer's paintings before, you know that they're incredibly calm and quiet.How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around? Well, he compartmentalizes his life. He gets to his studio, and he says, ""Nobody comes in here. Not the wife, not the kids. Okay, the maid can come in and clean."" She's in the studio. He's got her in the studio, they're together. And he decides to paint her.He has her wear very plain clothes. Now, all of the women, or most of the women in Vermeer's other paintings wore velvet, silk, fur, very sumptuous materials. This is very plain; the only thing that isn't plain is her pearl earring. Now, if she's a servant, there is no way she could afford a pair of pearl earrings. So those are not her pearl earrings. Whose are they? We happen to know, there's a list of Catharina, the wife's clothes. Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur, a yellow and black bodice, and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings, different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings. So clearly, her clothes were lent to various different women. It's not such a leap of faith to take that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife.So we've got all the elements for our story. She's in the studio with him for a long time. These paintings took a long time to make. They would have spent the time alone, all that time. She's wearing his wife's pearl earring. She's gorgeous. She obviously loves him. She's conflicted. And does the wife know? Maybe not. And if she doesn't, well — that's the story.(Laughter)The next painting I'm going to talk about is called ""Boy Building a House of Cards"" by Chardin. He's an 18th-century French painter best known for his still lifes, but he did occasionally paint people. And in fact, he painted four versions of this painting, different boys building houses of cards, all concentrated. I like this version the best, because some of the boys are older and some are younger, and to me, this one, like Goldilocks's porridge, is just right.He's not quite a child, and he's not quite a man. He's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience, and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting. And I looked at his face. It's like a Vermeer painting a bit. The light comes in from the left, his face is bathed in this glowing light. It's right in the center of the painting, and you look at it, and I found that when I was looking at it, I was standing there going, ""Look at me. Please look at me."" And he didn't look at me. He was still looking at his cards, and that's one of the seductive elements of this painting is, he's so focused on what he's doing that he doesn't look at us. And that is, to me, the sign of a masterpiece, of a painting when there's a lack of resolution. He's never going to look at me.So I was thinking of a story where, if I'm in this position, who could be there looking at him? Not the painter, I don't want to think about the painter. I'm thinking of an older version of himself. He's a man, a servant, an older servant looking at this younger servant, saying, ""Look at me. I want to warn you about what you're about to go through. Please look at me."" And he never does.And that lack of resolution, the lack of resolution in ""Girl with a Pearl Earring"" — we don't know if she's happy or sad. I've written an entire novel about her, and I still don't know if she's happy or sad. Again and again, back to the painting, looking for the answer, looking for the story to fill in that gap. And we may make a story, and it satisfies us momentarily, but not really, and we come back again and again.The last painting I'm going to talk about is called ""Anonymous"" by anonymous. (Laughter)This is a Tudor portrait bought by the National Portrait Gallery. They thought it was a man named Sir Thomas Overbury, and then they discovered that it wasn't him, and they have no idea who it is.Now, in the National Portrait Gallery, if you don't know the biography of the painting, it's kind of useless to you. They can't hang it on the wall, because they don't know who he is. So unfortunately, this orphan spends most of his time in storage, along with quite a number of other orphans, some of them some beautiful paintings.This painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons: One is the disconnection between his mouth that's smiling and his eyes that are wistful. He's not happy, and why isn't he happy? The second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks. He is blushing. He's blushing for his portrait being made! This must be a guy who blushes all the time. What is he thinking about that's making him blush? The third thing that made me stop in my tracks is his absolutely gorgeous doublet. Silk, gray, those beautiful buttons. And you know what it makes me think of, is it's sort of snug and puffy; it's like a duvet spread over a bed.I kept thinking of beds and red cheeks, and of course I kept thinking of sex when I looked at him, and I thought, is that what he's thinking about? And I thought, if I'm going to make a story, what's the last thing I'm going to put in there? Well, what would a Tudor gentleman be preoccupied with? And I thought, well, Henry VIII, okay. He'd be preoccupied with his inheritance, with his heir. Who is going to inherit his name and his fortune? You put all those together, and you've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back. Now, here's the story. It's short.""Rosy""I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me. It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread, set close together so that the fit is snug. The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed. Perhaps that was the intention. I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor. I knew even before I stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed. I have always flushed easily, from physical exertion, from wine, from high emotion.As a boy, I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys, but not by George. Only George could call me Rosy. I would not allow anyone else. He managed to make the word tender. When I made the announcement, George did not turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet. He should not have been surprised. It has been a common assumption that I would one day marry his cousin. But it is difficult to hear the words aloud. I know, I could barely utter them.Afterwards, I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden. Despite drinking steadily all afternoon, he was still pale. We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces. ""What do you think of my doublet?"" I asked.He glanced at me. ""That collar looks to be strangling you.""""We will still see each other,"" I insisted. ""We can still hunt and play cards and attend court. Nothing need change."" George did not speak. ""I am 23 years old. It is time for me to marry and produce an heir. It is expected of me.""George drained another glass of claret and turned to me. ""Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, James. I'm sure you'll be content together."" He never used my nickname again.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tracy_chevalier_finding_the_story_inside_the_painting
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"Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second. But now, 50 years later, we can go a million times faster and see the world not at a million or a billion, but one trillion frames per second.I present to you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion. And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight, or see inside our body without an x-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera.Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second — which is several femtoseconds — I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide. And that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet. Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle? How does light look in slow motion?[Light in Slow Motion ... 10 Billion x Slow]Now, the whole event —(Applause)Now remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond — that's how much time it takes for light to travel. But I'm slowing down in this video by a factor of 10 billion, so you can see the light in motion.(Laughter)But Coca-Cola did not sponsor this research.(Laughter)Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on. So the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside. Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves. Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions. As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside. Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused.Now, if you take an ordinary bullet and let it go the same distance and slow down the video — again, by a factor of 10 billion — do you know how long you'll have to sit here to watch that movie?(Laughter)A day, a week? Actually, a whole year. It'll be a very boring movie —(Laughter)of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion.And what about some still-life photography? You can watch the ripples, again, washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back. It's like throwing a stone in a pond of water.I thought: this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite. But if you look at this tomato one more time, you will notice, as the light washes over the tomato, it continues to glow. It doesn't become dark. Why is that? Because the tomato is actually ripe, and the light is bouncing around inside the tomato, and it comes out after several trillionths of a second. So in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it.(Laughter)So how did my team at MIT create this camera? Now, as photographers, you know, if you take a short exposure photo, you get very little light. But we're going to go a billion times faster than your shortest exposure, so you're going to get hardly any light. So what we do is we send that bullet — that packet of photons — millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you.And we can take all that raw data and treat it in very interesting ways. So, Superman can fly. Some other heroes can become invisible. But what about a new power for a future superhero: To see around corners. The idea is that we could shine some light on the door, it's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera. And we could exploit these multiple bounces of light.And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it. On the left, you see our femto-camera. There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door.So after our paper was published in Nature Communications, it was highlighted by Nature.com, and they created this animation.(Music)[A laser pulse is fired](Music)Ramesh Raskar: We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because of the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn, the door will reflect some of that scattered light. And a tiny fraction of the photons will actually come back to the camera, but most interestingly, they will all arrive at a slightly different time slot.(Music)And because we have a camera that can run so fast — our femto-camera — it has some unique abilities. It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light. And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance.(Music)By shining one laser, we can record one raw photo, which, if you look on the screen, doesn't really make any sense. But then we will take a lot of such pictures, dozens of such pictures, put them together, and try to analyze the multiple bounces of light, and from that, can we see the hidden object? Can we see it in full 3D?So this is our reconstruction.(Music)(Applause)Now, we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend. Or we can look for survivors in hazardous conditions by looking at light reflected through open windows. Or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes. But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health-imaging problems.Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art — an art of ultra-fast photography. And I realized that all the gigabytes of data that we're collecting every time, are not just for scientific imaging. But we can also do a new form of computational photography, with time-lapse and color coding. And we look at those ripples. Remember: The time between each of those ripples is only a few trillionths of a second.But there's also something funny going on here. When you look at the ripples under the cap, the ripples are moving away from us. The ripples should be moving towards us. What's going on here?It turns out, because we're recording nearly at the speed of light, we have strange effects, and Einstein would have loved to see this picture.(Laughter)The order at which events take place in the world appears in the camera sometimes in reversed order. So by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion.So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research communities will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras —(Laughter)and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging. It's about time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second
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"As an architect, I often ask myself, what is the origin of the forms that we design? What kind of forms could we design if we wouldn't work with references anymore? If we had no bias, if we had no preconceptions, what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience? If we could free ourselves from our education? What would these unseen forms look like? Would they surprise us? Would they intrigue us? Would they delight us? If so, then how can we go about creating something that is truly new?I propose we look to nature. Nature has been called the greatest architect of forms. And I'm not saying that we should copy nature, I'm not saying we should mimic biology, instead I propose that we can borrow nature's processes. We can abstract them and to create something that is new. Nature's main process of creation, morphogenesis, is the splitting of one cell into two cells. And these cells can either be identical, or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division.If we abstract this process, and simplify it as much as possible, then we could start with a single sheet of paper, one surface, and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces. We're free to choose where we make the fold. And by doing so, we can differentiate the surfaces. Through this very simple process, we can create an astounding variety of forms.Now, we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures, but rather than folding things by hand, we'll bring the structure into the computer, and code it as an algorithm. And in doing so, we can suddenly fold anything. We can fold a million times faster, we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations.And as we're seeking to make something three-dimensional, we start not with a single surface, but with a volume. A simple volume, the cube. If we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again, then after 16 iterations, 16 steps, we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks, for instance, like this. And if we change where we make the folds, if we change the folding ratio, then this cube turns into this one. We can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape, or this shape.So we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we're making the fold, but essentially you're looking at a folded cube. And we can play with this. We can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions. We can begin to sculpt the form.And because we're doing the folding on the computer, we are completely free of any physical constraints. So that means that surfaces can intersect themselves, they can become impossibly small. We can make folds that we otherwise could not make. Surfaces can become porous. They can stretch. They can tear. And all of this expounds the scope of forms that we can produce.But in each case, I didn't design the form. I designed the process that generated the form. In general, if we make a small change to the folding ratio, which is what you're seeing here, then the form changes correspondingly.But that's only half of the story — 99.9 percent of the folding ratios produce not this, but this, the geometric equivalent of noise. The forms that I showed before were made actually through very long trial and error. A far more effective way to create forms, I have found, is to use information that is already contained in forms. A very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye. So, for instance, we can plot the length of the edges. White surfaces have long edges, black ones have short ones. We can plot the planarity of the surfaces, their curvature, how radial they are — all information that may not be instantly visible to you, but that we can bring out, that we can articulate, and that we can use to control the folding.So now I'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it, but instead I'm establishing a rule, I'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded. And because I've designed the process and not the form, I can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms.These forms look elaborate, but the process is a very minimal one. There is a simple input, it's always a cube that I start with, and it's a very simple operation — it's making a fold, and doing this over and over again.So let's bring this process to architecture. How? And at what scale? I chose to design a column. Columns are architectural archetypes. They've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty, about technology. A challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column. I started using four cylinders. Through a lot of experimentation, these cylinders eventually evolved into this.And these columns, they have information at very many scales. We can begin to zoom into them. The closer one gets, the more new features one discovers. Some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility. And unlike traditional architecture, it's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail. These forms are undrawable. An architect who's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months, or it would take even a year to draw all the sections, all of the elevations, you can only create something like this through an algorithm.The more interesting question, perhaps, is, are these forms imaginable? Usually, an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing. In this case, the process is deterministic. There's no randomness involved at all, but it's not entirely predictable. There's too many surfaces, there's too much detail, one can't see the end state.So this leads to a new role for the architect. One needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there. For one thing, one can design many variants of a form, in parallel, and one can cultivate them. And to go back to the analogy with nature, one can begin to think in terms of populations, one can talk about permutations, about generations, about crossing and breeding to come up with a design. And the architect is really, he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes.But enough of the theory. At one point I simply wanted to jump inside this image, so to say, I bought these red and blue 3D glasses, got up very close to the screen, but still that wasn't the same as being able to walk around and touch things. So there was only one possibility — to bring the column out of the computer.There's been a lot of talk now about 3D printing. For me, or for my purpose at this moment, there's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale, on the one hand, and resolution and speed, on the other. So instead, we decided to take the column, and we decided to build it as a layered model, made out of very many slices, thinly stacked over each other.What you're looking at here is an X-ray of the column that you just saw, viewed from the top. Unbeknownst to me at the time, because we had only seen the outside, the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves, to grow on the inside of the column, which was quite a surprising discovery. From this shape, we calculated a cutting line, and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter to produce — and you're seeing a segment of it here — very many thin slices, individually cut, on top of each other.And this is a photo now, it's not a rendering, and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work, ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer. Almost all of the details, almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved.But it was very labor intensive. There's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical. It took me several months to design the column, but ultimately it takes the computer about 30 seconds to calculate all of the 16 million faces. The physical model, on the other hand, is 2,700 layers, one millimeter thick, it weighs 700 kilos, it's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium. And the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again.But it is increasingly possible. Machines are getting faster, it's getting less expensive, and there's some promising technological developments just on the horizon. These are images from the Gwangju Biennale. And in this case, I used ABS plastic to produce the columns, we used the bigger, faster machine, and they have a steel core inside, so they're structural, they can bear loads for once. Each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns. You can see a different column in the mirror, if there's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion.So where does this leave us? I think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object, but a process to generate objects. I've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature; there's countless other ones. In short, we have no constraints. Instead, we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we couldn't even have dreamt up. And, if I may add, at one point we will build them.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_hansmeyer_building_unimaginable_shapes
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"This man is wearing what we call a bee beard. (Laughter) A beard full of bees.Now, this is what many of you might picture when you think about honeybees, maybe insects, or maybe anything that has more legs than two. And let me start by telling you, I gotcha. I understand that. But, there are many things to know, and I want you to open your minds here, keep them open, and change your perspective about honeybees.Notice that this man is not getting stung. He probably has a queen bee tied to his chin, and the other bees are attracted to it. So this really demonstrates our relationship with honeybees, and that goes deep back for thousands of years. We're very co-evolved, because we depend on bees for pollination and, even more recently, as an economic commodity.Many of you may have heard that honeybees are disappearing, not just dying, but they're gone. We don't even find dead bodies. This is called colony collapse disorder, and it's bizarre. Researchers around the globe still do not know what's causing it, but what we do know is that, with the declining numbers of bees, the costs of over 130 fruit and vegetable crops that we rely on for food is going up in price.So honeybees are important for their role in the economy as well as in agriculture. Here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs, or urban agriculture. We're familiar with the image on the left that shows a local neighborhood garden in the South End. That's where I call home. I have a beehive in the backyard. And perhaps a green roof in the future, when we're further utilizing urban areas, where there are stacks of garden spaces.Check out this image above the orange line in Boston. Try to spot the beehive. It's there. It's on the rooftop, right on the corner there, and it's been there for a couple of years now. The way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden, and it's not because they need to be. It's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea, and that's why I want you today to try to think about this, think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing.Let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works. So we know flowers, we know fruits and vegetables, even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat, rely on pollinators, but you've got male and female parts to a plant here, and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar, and in the process, a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen, or that male kind of sperm counterpart, along the way, and then travel to different flowers, and eventually an apple, in this case, will be produced. You can see the orientation. The stem is down. The blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it, but that's a basic overview of how pollination works.And let's think about urban living, not today, and not in the past, but what about in a hundred years? What's it gonna look like? We have huge grand challenges these days of habitat loss. We have more and more people, billions of people, in 100 years, God knows how many people, and how little space there will be to fit all of them, so we need to change the way that we see cities, and looking at this picture on the left of New York City today, you can see how gray and brown it is. We have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, no doubt. What about in 100 years, if we have green rooftops everywhere, and gardening, and we create our own crops right in the cities? We save on the costs of transportation, we save on a healthier diet, and we also educate and create new jobs locally. We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living.Here's some data that we collected through our company with Best Bees, where we deliver, install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them, in the city, in the countryside, and we introduce honeybees, and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape, for even that matter, and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is.There's a counterintuitive trend that we noticed in these numbers. So let's look at the first metric here, overwintering survival. Now this has been a huge problem for many years, basically since the late 1980s, when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses, bacteria and fungal diseases with it. Overwintering success is hard, and that's when most of the colonies are lost, and we found that in the cities, bees are surviving better than they are in the country. A bit counterintuitive, right? We think, oh, bees, countryside, agriculture, but that's not what the bees are showing. The bees like it in the city. (Laughter)Furthermore, they also produce more honey. The urban honey is delicious. The bees in Boston on the rooftop of the Seaport Hotel, where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that I'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by, are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicious, healthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city. So the yield for urban hives, in terms of honey production, is higher as well as the overwintering survival, compared to rural areas. Again, a bit counterintuitive.And looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health, we can go back to the year 950 and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in Ireland. So the problems of bees today isn't necessarily something new. It has been happening since over a thousand years ago, but what we don't really notice are these problems in cities.So one thing I want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is. You think in the city maybe the temperature's warmer. Why are bees doing better in the city? This is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city. Perhaps there's more pollen in the city. With the trains coming in to urban hubs, they can carry pollen with them, very light pollen, and it's just a big supermarket in the city. A lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks. Perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in [rural] areas. Perhaps there are other things that we're just not thinking about yet, but that's one idea to think about, urban islands.And colony collapse disorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees. Honeybees are dying, and it's a huge, huge grand challenge of our time. What you can see up here is a map of the world, and we're tracking the spread of this varroa mite.Now, the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping, and you can see, at the top right, the years are changing, we're coming up to modern times, and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early 1900s through now. It's 1968, and we're pretty much covering Asia. 1971, we saw it spread to Europe and South America, and then, when we get to the 1980s, and specifically to 1987, the varroa mite finally came to North America and to the United States, and that is when the game changed for honeybees in the United States.Many of us will remember our childhood growing up, maybe you got stung by a bee, you saw bees on flowers. Think of the kids today. Their childhood's a bit different. They don't experience this. The bees just aren't around anymore. So we need bees and they're disappearing and it's a big problem.What can we do here? So, what I do is honeybee research. I got my Ph.D. studying honeybee health. I started in 2005 studying honeybees. In 2006, honeybees started disappearing, so suddenly, like, this little nerd kid going to school working with bugs — (Laughter) — became very relevant in the world. And it worked out that way.So my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier. I don't research what's killing the bees, per se. I'm not one of the many researchers around the world who's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees. We're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines, through yogurt, like probiotics, and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees, and this process is so easy, even a 7-year-old can do it. You just mix up some pollen, sugar and water, and whatever active ingredient you want to put in, and you just give it right to the bees. No chemicals involved, just immune boosters.Humans think about our own health in a prospective way. We exercise, we eat healthy, we take vitamins. Why don't we think about honeybees in that same type of way? Bring them to areas where they're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick.I spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles. (Laughter) Like, years, years at the bench, ""Oh my gosh, it's 3 a.m. and I'm still pricking bees."" (Laughter) And then one day I said, ""Why don't we just do an oral vaccine?"" It's like, ""Ugh,"" so that's what we do. (Laughter)I'd love to share with you some images of urban beehives, because they can be anything. I mean, really open your mind with this. You can paint a hive to match your home. You can hide a hive inside your home. These are three hives on the rooftop of the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, and they're beautiful here. I mean, we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets, and these bees are terrific, and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden. That's what the chefs go to to use for their cooking, and the honey — they do live events — they'll use that honey at their bars. Honey is a great nutritional substitute for regular sugar because there are different types of sugars in there.We also have a classroom hives project, where — this is a nonprofit venture — we're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting, behind glass, and used as an educational tool.This hive that you see here has been in Fenway High School for many years now. The bees fly right into the outfield of Fenway Park. Nobody notices it. If you're not a flower, these bees do not care about you. (Laughter) They don't. They don't. They'll say, ""S'cuse me, flying around."" (Laughter) Some other images here in telling a part of the story that really made urban beekeeping terrific is in New York City, beekeeping was illegal until 2010. That's a big problem, because what's going to pollinate all of the gardens and the produce locally? Hands? I mean, locally in Boston, there is a terrific company called Green City Growers, and they are going and pollinating their squash crops by hand with Q-Tips, and if they miss that three day window, there's no fruit. Their clients aren't happy, and people go hungry. So this is important.We have also some images of honey from Brooklyn. Now, this was a mystery in the New York Times where the honey was very red, and the New York State forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street. (Laughter) So you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers.Paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping. They've had hives on the rooftop of their opera house for many years now, and that's what really got people started, thinking, ""Wow, we can do this, and we should do this."" Also in London, and in Europe across the board, they're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives, and I'll show you an ending note here.I would like to encourage you to open your mind. What can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future? Well, really, just change your perspective. Try to understand that bees are very important. A bee isn't going to sting you if you see it. The bee dies. Honeybees die when they sting, so they don't want to do it either. (Laughter) It's nothing to panic about. They're all over the city. You could even get your own hive if you want. There are great resources available, and there are even companies that will help get you set up and mentor you and it's important for our educational system in the world for students to learn about agriculture worldwide such as this little girl, who, again, is not even getting stung. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/noah_wilson_rich_every_city_needs_healthy_honey_bees
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"In the past several days, I heard people talking about China. And also, I talked to friends about China and Chinese Internet. Something is very challenging to me. I want to make my friends understand: China is complicated. So I always want to tell the story, like, one hand it is that, the other hand is that. You can't just tell a one sided story. I'll give an example. China is a BRIC country. BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China. This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy. But at the same time, on the other hand, China is a SICK country, the terminology coined by Facebook IPO papers — file. He said the SICK country means Syria, Iran, China and North Korea. The four countries have no access to Facebook. So basically, China is a SICK BRIC country.(Laughter)Another project was built up to watch China and Chinese Internet. And now, today I want to tell you my personal observation in the past several years, from that wall. So, if you are a fan of the Game of Thrones, you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom. It prevents weird things from the north.Same was true for China. In the north, there was a great wall, Chang Cheng. It protected China from invaders for 2,000 years. But China also has a great firewall. That's the biggest digital boundary in the whole world. It's not only to defend the Chinese regime from overseas, from the universal values, but also to prevent China's own citizens to access the global free Internet, and even separate themselves into blocks, not united.So, basically the ""Internet"" has two Internets. One is the Internet, the other is the Chinanet. But if you think the Chinanet is something like a deadland, wasteland, I think it's wrong. But we also use a very simple metaphor, the cat and the mouse game, to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship, government censorship, the cat, and the Chinese Internet users. That means us, the mouse. But sometimes this kind of a metaphor is too simple.So today I want to upgrade it to 2.0 version. In China, we have 500 million Internet users. That's the biggest population of Netizens, Internet users, in the whole world. So even though China's is a totally censored Internet, but still, Chinese Internet society is really booming. How to make it? It's simple. You have Google, we have Baidu. You have Twitter, we have Weibo. You have Facebook, we have Renren. You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou. The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service, and we Chinese copycat every one.(Laughter)So, that's the kind of the thing I call smart censorship. That's not only to censor you. Sometimes this Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. On the one hand, he wants to satisfy people's need of a social network, which is very important; people really love social networking. But on the other hand, they want to keep the server in Beijing so they can access the data any time they want. That's also the reason Google was pulled out from China, because they can't accept the fact that Chinese government wants to keep the server.Sometimes the Arab dictators didn't understand these two hands. For example, Mubarak, he shut down the Internet. He wanted to prevent the Netizens [from criticizing] him. But once Netizens can't go online, they go in the street. And now the result is very simple. We all know Mubarak is technically dead. But also, Ben Ali, Tunisian president, didn't follow the second rule. That means keep the server in your hands. He allowed Facebook, a U.S.-based service, to continue to stay on inside of Tunisia. So he can't prevent it, his own citizens to post critical videos against his corruption. The same thing happend. He was the first to topple during the Arab Spring.But those two very smart international censorship policies didn't prevent Chinese social media [from] becoming a really public sphere, a pathway of public opinion and the nightmare of Chinese officials. Because we have 300 million microbloggers in China. It's the entire population of the United States. So when these 300 million people, microbloggers, even they block the tweet in our censored platform. But itself — the Chinanet — but itself can create very powerful energy, which has never happened in the Chinese history.2011, in July, two [unclear] trains crashed, in Wenzhou, a southern city. Right after the train crash, authorities literally wanted to cover up the train, bury the train. So it angered the Chinese Netizens. The first five days after the train crash, there were 10 million criticisms of the posting on social media, which never happened in Chinese history. And later this year, the rail minister was sacked and sentenced to jail for 10 years.And also, recently, very funny debate between the Beijing Environment Ministry and the American Embassy in Beijing because the Ministry blamed the American Embassy for intervening in Chinese internal politics by disclosing the air quality data of Beijing. So, the up is the Embassy data, the PM 2.5. He showed 148, they showed it's dangerous for the sensitive group. So a suggestion, it's not good to go outside. But that is the Ministry's data. He shows 50. He says it's good. It's good to go outside. But 99 percent of Chinese microbloggers stand firmly on the Embassy's side. I live in Beijing. Every day, I just watch the American Embassy's data to decide whether I should open my window.Why is Chinese social networking, even within the censorship, so booming? Part of the reason is Chinese languages. You know, Twitter and Twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters. But in English it's 20 words or a sentence with a short link. Maybe in Germany, in German language, it may be just ""Aha!""(Laughter)But in Chinese language, it's really about 140 characters, means a paragraph, a story. You can almost have all the journalistic elements there. For example, this is Hamlet, of Shakespeare. It's the same content. One, you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. Chinese is always cheating, right? So because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media.And also, the clone, Sina company is the guy who cloned Twitter. It even has its own name, with Weibo. ""Weibo"" is the Chinese translation for ""microblog"". It has its own innovation. At the commenting area, [it makes] the Chinese Weibo more like Facebook, rather than the original Twitter. So these innovations and clones, as the Weibo and microblogging, when it came to China in 2009, it immediately became a media platform itself. It became the media platform of 300 million readers. It became the media. Anything not mentioned in Weibo, it does not appear to exist for the Chinese public.But also, Chinese social media is really changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life. For example, they give the voiceless people a channel to make your voice heard. We had a petition system. It's a remedy outside the judicial system, because the Chinese central government wants to keep a myth: The emperor is good. The old local officials are thugs. So that's why the petitioner, the victims, the peasants, want to take the train to Beijing to petition to the central government, they want the emperor to settle the problem. But when more and more people go to Beijing, they also cause the risk of a revolution. So they send them back in recent years. And even some of them were put into black jails. But now we have Weibo, so I call it the Weibo petition. People just use their cell phones to tweet.So your sad stories, by some chance your story will be picked up by reporters, professors or celebrities. One of them is Yao Chen, she is the most popular microblogger in China, who has about 21 million followers. They're almost like a national TV station. If you — so a sad story will be picked up by her. So this Weibo social media, even in the censorship, still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together, talking together. It's like a big TED, right? But also, it is like the first time a public sphere happened in China. Chinese people start to learn how to negotiate and talk to people.But also, the cat, the censorship, is not sleeping. It's so hard to post some sensitive words on the Chinese Weibo. For example, you can't post the name of the president, Hu Jintao, and also you can't post the city of Chongqing, the name, and until recently, you can't search the surname of top leaders. So, the Chinese are very good at these puns and alternative wording and even memes. They even name themselves — you know, use the name of this world-changing battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. The grass-mud horse is caoníma, is the phonogram for motherfucker, the Netizens call themselves. River crab is héxiè, is the phonogram for harmonization, for censorship. So that's kind of a caoníma versus the héxiè, that's very good. So, when some very political, exciting moments happened, you can see on Weibo, you see a lot of very weird stories happened. Weird phrases and words, even if you have a PhD of Chinese language, you can't understand them.But you can't even expand more, no, because Chinese Sina Weibo, when it was founded was exactly one month after the official blocking of Twitter.com. That means from the very beginning, Weibo has already convinced the Chinese government, we will not become the stage for any kind of a threat to the regime. For example, anything you want to post, like ""get together"" or ""meet up"" or ""walk,"" it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing. Even if you want to have some gathering, before you go there, the police are already waiting for you. Why? Because they have the data. They have everything in their hands. So they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident. So the crackdown is very serious.But I want you to notice a very funny thing during the process of the cat-and-mouse. The cat is the censorship, but Chinese is not only one cat, but also has local cats. Central cat and local cats.(Laughter)You know, the server is in the [central] cats' hands, so even that — when the Netizens criticize the local government, the local government has not any access to the data in Beijing. Without bribing the central cats, he can do nothing, only apologize.So these three years, in the past three years, social movements about microblogging really changed local government, became more and more transparent, because they can't access the data. The server is in Beijing. The story about the train crash, maybe the question is not about why 10 million criticisms in five days, but why the Chinese central government allowed the five days of freedom of speech online. It's never happened before. And so it's very simple, because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy, this independent kingdom. So they want an excuse — public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him.But also, the Bo Xilai case recently, very big news, he's a princeling. But from February to April this year, Weibo really became a marketplace of rumors. You can almost joke everything about these princelings, everything! It's almost like you're living in the United States. But if you dare to retweet or mention any fake coup about Beijing, you definitely will be arrested. So this kind of freedom is a targeted and precise window.So Chinese in China, censorship is normal. Something you find is, freedom is weird. Something will happen behind it. Because he was a very popular Leftist leader, so the central government wanted to purge him, and he was very cute, he convinced all the Chinese people, why he is so bad. So Weibo, the 300 million public sphere, became a very good, convenient tool for a political fight.But this technology is very new, but technically is very old. It was made famous by Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government. It's very simple, because Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead the public opinion. They just give them a target window to not censor people. Not censoring in China has become a political tool.So that's the update about this game, cat-and-mouse. Social media changed Chinese mindset. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege. But also, it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to, it's like a training of their citizenship, preparing for future democracy. But it didn't change the Chinese political system, and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions.So, what's the future? After all, we are the mouse. Whatever the future is, we should fight against the [cat]. There is not only in China, but also in the United States there are some very small, cute but bad cats.(Laughter)SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP and ITU. And also, like Facebook and Google, they claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see them dating the cats. So my conclusion is very simple. We Chinese fight for our freedom, you just watch your bad cats. Don't let them hook [up] with the Chinese cats. Only in this way, in the future, we will achieve the dreams of the mouse: that we can tweet anytime, anywhere, without fear.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_anti_behind_the_great_firewall_of_china
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"Good afternoon. I am not a farmer.(Laughter)I'm not. I'm a parent, I'm a resident and I'm a teacher. And this is my world. And along the way I've started noticing — I'm on my third generation of kids — that they're getting bigger. They're getting sicker. In addition to these complexities, I just learned that 70 percent of the kids that I see who are labeled learning disabled would not have been had they had proper prenatal nutrition.The realities of my community are simple. They look like this. Kids should not have to grow up and look at things like this. And as jobs continue to leave my community, and energy continues to come in, be exported in, it's no wonder that really some people refer to the South Bronx as a desert. But I'm the oldest sixth grader you'll ever meet, so I get up every day with this tremendous amount of enthusiasm that I'm hoping to share with you all today. And with that note, I come to you with this belief that kids should not have to leave their communities to live, learn and earn in a better one.So I'm here to tell you a story about me and this wall that I met outside, which I'm now bringing inside. And it starts with three people. The crazy teacher — that's me on the left, I dress up pretty, thank you, my wife, I love you for getting a good suit — my passionate borough president and a guy named George Irwin from Green Living Technologies who helped me with my class and helped me get involved with this patented technology. But it all starts with seeds in classrooms, in my place, which looks like this. And I'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp. And that's really what this is all about.And it starts with incredible kids like this, who come early and stay late. All of my kids are either IEP or ELL learners, most come with a lot of handicaps, most are homeless and many are in foster care. Almost all of my kids live below poverty. But with those seeds, from day one, we are growing in my classroom, and this is what it looks like in my classroom. And you see how attentive these kids are to these seeds. And then you notice that those seeds become farms across the Bronx that look like this.But again, I am not a farmer. I'm a teacher. And I don't like weeding, and I don't like back-breaking labor. So I wanted to figure out how I could get this kind of success into something small, like this, and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it, kids who didn't want to be outside could do it, and everyone could have access. So I called George Irwin, and what do you know? He came to my class and we built an indoor edible wall. And what we do is we partner it with authentic learning experiences, private-based learning. And lo and behold, we gave birth to the first edible wall in New York City.So if you're hungry, get up and eat. You can do it right now. My kids play cow all the time. Okay? But we were just getting started, the kids loved the technology, so we called up George and we said, ""We gotta learn more!"" Now, Mayor Bloomberg, thank you very much, we no longer need work permits, which comes with slices and bonded contractors — we're available for you —We decided to go to Boston. And my kids, from the poorest congressional district in America, became the first to install a green wall, designed by a computer, with real-live learning tools, 21 stories up — if you're going to go visit it, it's on top of the John Hancock building. But closer to home, we started installing these walls in schools that look like this with lighting like that, real LED stuff, 21st-century technology. And what do you know? We made 21st century money, and that was groundbreaking. Wow!This is my harvest, people. And what do you do with this food? You cook it! And those are my heirloom students making heirloom sauce, with plastic forks, and we get it into the cafeteria, and we grow stuff and we feed our teachers. And that is the youngest nationally certified workforce in America with our Bronx Borough President.And what'd we do then? Well, I met nice people like you, and they invited us to the Hamptons. So I call this ""from South Bronx to Southampton."" And we started putting in roofs that look like this, and we came in from destitute neighborhoods to start building landscape like this, wow! People noticed. And so we got invited back this past summer, and we actually moved into the Hamptons, payed 3,500 dollars a week for a house, and we learned how to surf. And when you can do stuff like this — These are my kids putting in this technology, and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this, this is the new green graffiti.So, you may wonder what does a wall like this really do for kids, besides changing landscapes and mindsets? Okay, I'm going to tell you what it does. It gets me to meet incredible contractors like this, Jim Ellenberger from Ellenberger Services. And this is where it becomes true triple bottom line. Because Jim realized that these kids, my future farmers, really had the skills he needed to build affordable housing for New Yorkers, right in their own neighborhood. And this is what my kids are doing, making living wage.Now, if you're like me, you live in a building, there are seven guys out of work looking to manage a million dollars. I don't have it. But if you need a toilet fixed or, you know, some shelving, I gotta wait six months for an appointment with someone who drives a much nicer car than me. That's the beauty of this economy. But my kids are now licensed and bonded in trade. And that's my first student to open up, the first in his family to have a bank account. This immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an ATM. And this is the true triple bottom line, because we can take neighborhoods that were abandoned and destitute and turn them into something like this with interiors like this.Wow! People noticed. And notice they did. So CNN called, and we were delighted to have them come to our farmer's market. And then when Rockefeller Center said, NBC, could you put this thing up on the walls? We were delighted. But this, I show you, when kids from the poorest congressional district in America can build a 30-foot by 15-foot wall, design it, plant it and install it in the heart of New York City, that's a true ""sí se puede"" moment. Really scholastic, if you ask me.But this is not a Getty image. That's a picture I took of my Bronx Borough President, addressing my kids in his house, not the jailhouse, making them feel a part of it. That's our State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Bob Bieder, coming to my classroom to make my kids feel important. And when the Bronx Borough President shows up and the State Senator comes to our class, believe you me, the Bronx can change attitudes now. We are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity in ways we've never even imagined. And when the local senator gets on the scale in public and says he's got to lose weight, so do I! And I tell you what, I'm doing it and so are the kids.Okay? And then celebrities started. Produce Pete can't believe what we grow. Lorna Sass came and donated books. Okay? We're feeding seniors. And when we realized that we were growing for food justice in the South Bronx, so did the international community. And my kids in the South Bronx were repped in the first international green roof conference. And that's just great.Except what about locally? Well, we met this woman, Avis Richards, with the Ground Up Campaign. Unbelievable! Through her, my kids, the most disenfranchised and marginalized, were able to roll out 100 gardens to New York City public schools. That's triple bottom line! Okay?A year ago today, I was invited to the New York Academy of Medicine. I thought this concept of designing a strong and healthy New York made sense, especially when the resources were free. So thank you all and I love them. They introduced me to the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health, again, free resources, don't waste them. And what do you know? Six months later, my school and my kids were awarded the first ever high school award of excellence for creating a healthy school environment. The greenest class in New York City. But more importantly is my kids learned to get, they learned to give. And we took the money that we made from our farmer's market, and started buying gifts for the homeless and for needy around the world. So we started giving back. And that's when I realized that the greening of America starts first with the pockets, then with the heart and then with the mind.So we were onto something, and we're still onto something. And thank God Trinity Wall Street noticed, because they gave us the birth of Green Bronx Machine. We're 3,000 strong right now. And what does it really do? It teaches kids to re-vision their communities, so when they grow up in places like this, they can imagine it like this. And my kids, trained and certified — Ma, you get the tax abatement. Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg — can take communities that look like this and convert them into things that look like that, and that to me, people, is another true ""sí se puede"" moment.Now, how does it start? It starts in schools. No more little Knicks and little Nets. Group by broccoli, group by your favorite vegetable, something you can aspire to. Okay? And these are my future farmers of America, growing up in Brook Park on 141st Street, the most migrant community in America. When tenacious little ones learn how to garden like this, it's no wonder we get fruit like that. And I love it! And so do they. And we're building teepees in neighborhoods that were burning down. And that's a true ""sí se puede"" moment. And again, Brook Park feeds hundreds of people without a food stamp or a fingerprint. The poorest congressional district in America, the most migratory community in America, we can do this. Bissel Gardens is cranking out food in epic proportions, moving kids into an economy they never imagined.Now, somewhere over the rainbow, my friends, is the South Bronx of America. And we're doing it. How does it start? Well, look at Jose's attention to detail. Thank God Omar knows that carrots come from the ground, and not aisle 9 at the supermarket or through a bullet-proof window or through a piece of styrofoam. And when Henry knows that green is good, so do I. And when you expand their palates, you expand their vocabulary. And most importantly, when you put big kids together with little kids, you get the big fat white guy out of the middle, which is cool, and you create this kind of accountability amongst peers, which is incredible.God, I'm going to run out of time, so I've gotta keep it moving. But this is my weekly paycheck for kids; that's our green graffiti. This is what we're doing. And behold the glory and bounty that is Bronx County. Nothing thrills me more than to see kids pollinating plants instead of each other. I gotta tell you, I'm a protective parent. But those kids are the kids who are now putting pumpkin patches on top of trains. We're also designing coin ponds for the rich and affluent. We're also becoming children of the corn, creating farms in the middle of Fordham Road for awareness and window bottles out of garbage.Now I don't expect every kid to be a farmer, but I expect you to read about it, write about it, blog about it, offer outstanding customer service. I expect them to be engaged, and man, are they! So that's my incredible classroom, that's the food. Where does it go? Zero miles to plate, right down into the cafeteria. Or more importantly, to local shelters, where most of our kids are getting one to two meals a day. And we're stepping it up. No Air Jordans were ever ruined on my farm. And in his day, a million dollar gardens and incredible installations.Let me tell you something, people. This is a beautiful moment. Black field, brown field, toxic waste field, battlefield — we're proving in the Bronx that you can grow anywhere, on cement. And we take orders for flowers. I'm putting the bake sale to shame. We take orders now. I'm booking for the spring. And these were all grown from seeds. We're learning everything. And again, when you can take kids from backgrounds as diverse as this to do something as special as this, we're really creating a moment.Now, you may ask about these kids. Forty percent attendance to 93 percent attendance. All start overage and under-credit. They are now, my first cohort is all in college, earning a living wage. The rest are scheduled to graduate this June. Happy kids, happy families, happy colleagues. Amazed people. The glory and bounty that is Bronx County.Let's talk about mint. Where is my mint? I grow seven kinds of mint in my class. Mojitos, anybody? I'll be at Telepan later. But, understand this is my intellectual Viagra. Ladies and gentlemen, I gotta move quick, but understand this: The borough that gave us baggy pants and funky fresh beats is becoming home to the organic ones. My green [unclear] 25,000 pounds of vegetables, I'm growing organic citizens, engaged kids. So help us go from this to this. Self-sustaining entities, 18 months return on investment, plus we're paying people living wage and health benefits, while feeding people for pennies on the dollar.Martin Luther King said that people need to be uplifted with dignity. So here in New York, I urge you, my fellow Americans, to help us make America great again. It's simple. Share your passion. It's real easy. Go see these two videos, please. One got us invited to the White House, one's a recent incarnation.And most importantly, get the biggest bully out of schools. This has got to go tomorrow. People, you can all do that. Keep kids out of stores that look like this. Make them a healthy plate, especially if you can pick it off the wall in your own classroom — delicioso! Model good behavior. Get them to a green cart. Big kids love strawberries and bananas. Teach them entrepreneurship. Thank God for GrowNYC. Let them cook. Great lunch today, let them do culinary things. But most importantly, just love them. Nothing works like unconditional love.So, my good friend Kermit said it's not easy being green. It's not. I come from a place where kids can buy 35 flavors of blunt wrap at any day of the moment, where ice cream freezers are filled with slushy malt liquor. Okay? My dear friend Majora Carter once told me, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So here, and at a time when we've gone from the audacity to hope to hope for some audacity, I urge you to do something. I urge you to do something.Right now, we're all tadpoles, but I urge you to become a big frog and take that big, green leap. I don't care if you're on the left, on the right, up the middle, wherever. Join me. Use — I've got a lot of energy. Help me use it. We can do something here. And along the way, please take time to smell the flowers, especially if you and your students grew them.I'm Steve Ritz, this is Green Bronx Machine. I've got to say thank you to my wife and family, for my kids, thank you for coming every day, and for my colleagues, believing and supporting me. We are growing our way into a new economy. Thank you, God bless you and enjoy the day. I'm Steve Ritz.Sí se puede!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_ritz_a_teacher_growing_green_in_the_south_bronx
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"Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity.Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky. In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible. In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. And as a consequence, today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education. That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg. There were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process, and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration, thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions. When the gates opened, there was a stampede, and 20 people were injured and one woman died. She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life.But even in parts of the world like the United States where education is available, it might not be within reach. There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care. What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate, for a total of 559 percent since 1985. This makes education unaffordable for many people.Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open. Only a little over half of recent college graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education. This, of course, is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions, but for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their effort.Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured, in the way that no one else could, the spirit behind our effort. He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. I've talked about what's desperately necessary. Let's talk about what's suddenly possible.What's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more. So to understand this, let's look at one of those classes, the Machine Learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. Andrew teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes. It's a Machine Learning class, and it has 400 people enrolled every time it's offered. When Andrew taught the Machine Learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered. So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years. Of course, he'd get really bored.So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could. So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free. We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like.(Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus.Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million people are uninsured.Scott Page: Models help us design more effective institutions and policies. We get unbelievable segregation.Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that in the future, you'd wear a camera right in the center of your head.Mitchell Duneier: Mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind ...RG: Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine.Nick Parlante: For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero.Paul Offit: ... Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus.Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds funny.Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses.Andrew Ng: So in large-scale machine learning, we'd like to come up with computational ...(Applause)DK: It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free. Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed.But it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the people. Whether it's Akash, who comes from a small town in India and would never have access in this case to a Stanford-quality course and would never be able to afford it. Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree. Or Ryan, who can't go to school, because his immune deficient daughter can't be risked to have germs come into the house, so he couldn't leave the house. I'm really glad to say — recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan — that this story had a happy ending. Baby Shannon — you can see her on the left — is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses.So what made these courses so different? After all, online course content has been available for a while. What made it different was that this was real course experience. It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline. You can see the deadlines and the usage graph. These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon.(Laughter)At the end of the course, the students got a certificate. They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job, and we know many students who did. Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit. So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort.Let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses. The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic one-hour lecture. You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept. Students can traverse this material in different ways, depending on their background, their skills or their interests. So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have. Other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually. So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education, and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum.Of course, we all know as educators that students don't learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it. There's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this. This one that appeared in Science last year, for example, demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions.We've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform, as well as other forms of practice in many ways. For example, even our videos are not just videos. Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question.(Video) SP: ... These four things. Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias. They're all well documented. So they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior.DK: So here the video pauses, and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren't paying attention.(Laughter)So they get to try again, and this time they got it right. There's an optional explanation if they want. And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture. This is a kind of simple question that I as an instructor might ask in class, but when I ask that kind of a question in class, 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing I said, 15 percent are zoned out on Facebook, and then there's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it, and I as the instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer. And so the lecture moves on before, really, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked. Here, every single student has to engage with the material.And of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story. One needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions, and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions. Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you need to use technology to do it for you. Now, fortunately, technology has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework. In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. We can grade models, whether it's financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering class and we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments.Let me show you one that's actually pretty simple but fairly visual. This is from Stanford's Computer Science 101 class, and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image. They're typing their program into the browser, and you can see they didn't get it quite right, Lady Liberty is still seasick. And so, the student tries again, and now they got it right, and they're told that, and they can move on to the next assignment. This ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you're right or wrong is really essential to student learning.Now, of course we cannot yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses. Specifically, what's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, the social sciences, business and others. So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. That didn't go over really well.So we had to come up with a different solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Saddler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades. It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis. What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically — so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score — are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades. And so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a useful learning strategy for the students, because they actually learn from the experience. So we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of thousands of students are grading each other's work, and quite successfully, I have to say.But this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems. Around each one of our courses, a community of students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor. What you see here is a self-generated map from students in our Princeton Sociology 101 course, where they have put themselves on a world map, and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort.Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways. First of all, there was a question and answer forum, where students would pose questions, and other students would answer those questions. And the really amazing thing is, because there were so many students, it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning, somewhere around the world, there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem. And so, in many of our courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes. Which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students.(Laughter)And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom. Students also self-assembled, without any kind of intervention from us, into small study groups. Some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets. This is the San Francisco study group, but there were ones all over the world. Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures.There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning. Because the data that we can collect here is unique. You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students. So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not? And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like, what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them?So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class. This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments. The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer. The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer. Now, if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively.So this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers. Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem. Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations. The first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom. The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-based approach, so the students couldn't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one. And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor. The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class, and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance.To understand what that means, let's look at the lecture-based classroom, and let's pick the median performance as a threshold. So in a lecture-based class, half the students are above that level and half are below. In the individual tutoring instruction, 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold. Imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average. Hence, the 2 sigma problem.Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor. But maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone. So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve? Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times. And it doesn't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times, we've seen that in many of the examples that I've shown you. And even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of, whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you. So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve.So, if this is so great, are universities now obsolete? Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so. He said that, ""College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.""(Laughter)I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though. I think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on. So let's go back even further, to Plutarch, who said that, ""The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting."" And maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them.So how do we do that? We do that by doing active learning in the classroom. So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric — on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test. You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment. So maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities.So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities.Second, it would enable lifelong learning. It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college. By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted, whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives.And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education
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"Before March, 2011, I was a photographic retoucher based in New York City. We're pale, gray creatures. We hide in dark, windowless rooms, and generally avoid sunlight. We make skinny models skinnier, perfect skin more perfect, and the impossible possible, and we get criticized in the press all the time, but some of us are actually talented artists with years of experience and a real appreciation for images and photography.On March 11, 2011, I watched from home, as the rest of the world did, as the tragic events unfolded in Japan. Soon after, an organization I volunteer with, All Hands Volunteers, were on the ground, within days, working as part of the response efforts. I, along with hundreds of other volunteers, knew we couldn't just sit at home, so I decided to join them for three weeks.On May the 13th, I made my way to the town of Ōfunato. It's a small fishing town in Iwate Prefecture, about 50,000 people, one of the first that was hit by the wave. The waters here have been recorded at reaching over 24 meters in height, and traveled over two miles inland. As you can imagine, the town had been devastated.We pulled debris from canals and ditches. We cleaned schools. We de-mudded and gutted homes ready for renovation and rehabilitation. We cleared tons and tons of stinking, rotting fish carcasses from the local fish processing plant. We got dirty, and we loved it.For weeks, all the volunteers and locals alike had been finding similar things. They'd been finding photos and photo albums and cameras and SD cards. And everyone was doing the same. They were collecting them up, and handing them in to various places around the different towns for safekeeping.Now, it wasn't until this point that I realized that these photos were such a huge part of the personal loss these people had felt. As they had run from the wave, and for their lives, absolutely everything they had, everything had to be left behind.At the end of my first week there, I found myself helping out in an evacuation center in the town. I was helping clean the onsen, the communal onsen, the huge giant bathtubs. This happened to also be a place in the town where the evacuation center was collecting the photos. This is where people were handing them in, and I was honored that day that they actually trusted me to help them start hand-cleaning them.Now, it was emotional and it was inspiring, and I've always heard about thinking outside the box, but it wasn't until I had actually gotten outside of my box that something happened. As I looked through the photos, there were some were over a hundred years old, some still in the envelope from the processing lab, I couldn't help but think as a retoucher that I could fix that tear and mend that scratch, and I knew hundreds of people who could do the same. So that evening, I just reached out on Facebook and asked a few of them, and by morning the response had been so overwhelming and so positive, I knew we had to give it a go. So we started retouching photos.This was the very first. Not terribly damaged, but where the water had caused that discoloration on the girl's face had to be repaired with such accuracy and delicacy. Otherwise, that little girl isn't going to look like that little girl anymore, and surely that's as tragic as having the photo damaged. (Applause)Over time, more photos came in, thankfully, and more retouchers were needed, and so I reached out again on Facebook and LinkedIn, and within five days, 80 people wanted to help from 12 different countries. Within two weeks, I had 150 people wanting to join in. Within Japan, by July, we'd branched out to the neighboring town of Rikuzentakata, further north to a town called Yamada. Once a week, we would set up our scanning equipment in the temporary photo libraries that had been set up, where people were reclaiming their photos. The older ladies sometimes hadn't seen a scanner before, but within 10 minutes of them finding their lost photo, they could give it to us, have it scanned, uploaded to a cloud server, it would be downloaded by a gaijin, a stranger, somewhere on the other side of the globe, and it'd start being fixed.The time it took, however, to get it back is a completely different story, and it depended obviously on the damage involved. It could take an hour. It could take weeks. It could take months. The kimono in this shot pretty much had to be hand-drawn, or pieced together, picking out the remaining parts of color and detail that the water hadn't damaged. It was very time-consuming.Now, all these photos had been damaged by water, submerged in salt water, covered in bacteria, in sewage, sometimes even in oil, all of which over time is going to continue to damage them, so hand-cleaning them was a huge part of the project. We couldn't retouch the photo unless it was cleaned, dry and reclaimed.Now, we were lucky with our hand-cleaning. We had an amazing local woman who guided us. It's very easy to do more damage to those damaged photos. As my team leader Wynne once said, it's like doing a tattoo on someone. You don't get a chance to mess it up.The lady who brought us these photos was lucky, as far as the photos go. She had started hand-cleaning them herself and stopped when she realized she was doing more damage. She also had duplicates. Areas like her husband and her face, which otherwise would have been completely impossible to fix, we could just put them together in one good photo, and remake the whole photo.When she collected the photos from us, she shared a bit of her story with us. Her photos were found by her husband's colleagues at a local fire department in the debris a long way from where the home had once stood, and they'd recognized him. The day of the tsunami, he'd actually been in charge of making sure the tsunami gates were closed. He had to go towards the water as the sirens sounded. Her two little boys, not so little anymore, but her two boys were both at school, separate schools. One of them got caught up in the water. It took her a week to find them all again and find out that they had all survived.The day I gave her the photos also happened to be her youngest son's 14th birthday. For her, despite all of this, those photos were the perfect gift back to him, something he could look at again, something he remembered from before that wasn't still scarred from that day in March when absolutely everything else in his life had changed or been destroyed.After six months in Japan, 1,100 volunteers had passed through All Hands, hundreds of whom had helped us hand-clean over 135,000 photographs, the large majority — (Applause) — a large majority of which did actually find their home again, importantly. Over five hundred volunteers around the globe helped us get 90 families hundreds of photographs back, fully restored and retouched. During this time, we hadn't really spent more than about a thousand dollars in equipment and materials, most of which was printer inks.We take photos constantly. A photo is a reminder of someone or something, a place, a relationship, a loved one. They're our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab and the first thing you'd go back to look for. That's all this project was about, about restoring those little bits of humanity, giving someone that connection back.When a photo like this can be returned to someone like this, it makes a huge difference in the lives of the person receiving it.The project's also made a big difference in the lives of the retouchers. For some of them, it's given them a connection to something bigger, giving something back, using their talents on something other than skinny models and perfect skin.I would like to conclude by reading an email I got from one of them, Cindy, the day I finally got back from Japan after six months.""As I worked, I couldn't help but think about the individuals and the stories represented in the images. One in particular, a photo of women of all ages, from grandmother to little girl, gathered around a baby, struck a chord, because a similar photo from my family, my grandmother and mother, myself, and newborn daughter, hangs on our wall. Across the globe, throughout the ages, our basic needs are just the same, aren't they?"" Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/becci_manson_re_touching_lives_through_photos
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"I thought if I skipped it might help my nerves, but I'm actually having a paradoxical reaction to that, so that was a bad idea. (Laughter)Anyway, I was really delighted to receive the invitation to present to you some of my music and some of my work as a composer, presumably because it appeals to my well-known and abundant narcissism. (Laughter) And I'm not kidding, I just think we should just say that and move forward. (Laughter)So, but the thing is, a dilemma quickly arose, and that is that I'm really bored with music, and I'm really bored with the role of the composer, and so I decided to put that idea, boredom, as the focus of my presentation to you today. And I'm going to share my music with you, but I hope that I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story, tells a story about how I used boredom as a catalyst for creativity and invention, and how boredom actually forced me to change the fundamental question that I was asking in my discipline, and how boredom also, in a sense, pushed me towards taking on roles beyond the sort of most traditional, narrow definition of a composer.What I'd like to do today is to start with an excerpt of a piece of music at the piano. (Music) Okay, I wrote that. (Laughter) No, it's not — (Applause) Oh, why thank you. No, no, I didn't write that. In fact, that was a piece by Beethoven, and so I was not functioning as a composer. Just now I was functioning in the role of the interpreter, and there I am, interpreter. So, an interpreter of what? Of a piece of music, right? But we can ask the question, ""But is it music?"" And I say this rhetorically, because of course by just about any standard we would have to concede that this is, of course, a piece of music, but I put this here now because, just to set it in your brains for the moment, because we're going to return to this question. It's going to be a kind of a refrain as we go through the presentation.So here we have this piece of music by Beethoven, and my problem with it is, it's boring. I mean, you — I'm just like, a hush, huh — It's like — (Laughter) It's Beethoven, how can you say that? No, well, I don't know, it's very familiar to me. I had to practice it as a kid, and I'm really sick of it. So — (Laughter) I would, so what I might like to try to do is to change it, to transform it in some ways, to personalize it, so I might take the opening, like this idea — (Music) and then I might substitute — (Music) and then I might improvise on that melody that goes forward from there — (Music) (Music)So that might be the kind of thing — Why thank you. (Applause) That would be the kind of thing that I would do, and it's not necessarily better than the Beethoven. In fact, I think it's not better than it. The thing is — (Laughter) — it's more interesting to me. It's less boring for me. I'm really leaning into me, because I, because I have to think about what decisions I'm going to make on the fly as that Beethoven text is running in time through my head and I'm trying to figure out what kinds of transformations I'm going to make to it. So this is an engaging enterprise for me, and I've really leaned into that first person pronoun thing there, and now my face appears twice, so I think we can agree that this is a fundamentally solipsistic enterprise. (Laughter) But it's an engaging one, and it's interesting to me for a while, but then I get bored with it, and by it, I actually mean, the piano, because it becomes, it's this familiar instrument, it's timbral range is actually pretty compressed, at least when you play on the keyboard, and if you're not doing things like listening to it after you've lit it on fire or something like that, you know. It gets a little bit boring, and so pretty soon I go through other instruments, they become familiar, and eventually I find myself designing and constructing my own instrument, and I brought one with me today, and I thought I would play a little bit on it for you so you can hear what it sounds like.(Music)You gotta have doorstops, that's important. (Laughter) I've got combs. They're the only combs that I own. (Music) They're all mounted on my instruments. (Laughter)(Music)I can actually do all sorts of things. I can play with a violin bow. I don't have to use the chopsticks. So we have this sound. (Music) And with a bank of live electronics, I can change the sounds radically. (Music) (Music) Like that, and like this. (Music) And so forth.So this gives you a little bit of an idea of the sound world of this instrument, which I think is quite interesting and it puts me in the role of the inventor, and the nice thing about — This instrument is called the Mouseketeer ... (Laughter) and the cool thing about it is I'm the world's greatest Mouseketeer player. (Laughter) Okay? (Applause) So in that regard, this is one of the things, this is one of the privileges of being, and here's another role, the inventor, and by the way, when I told you that I'm the world's greatest, if you're keeping score, we've had narcissism and solipsism and now a healthy dose of egocentricism. I know some of you are just, you know, bingo! Or, I don't know. (Laughter)Anyway, so this is also a really enjoyable role. I should concede also that I'm the world's worst Mouseketeer player, and it was this distinction that I was most worried about when I was on that prior side of the tenure divide. I'm glad I'm past that. We're not going to go into that. I'm crying on the inside. There are still scars.Anyway, but I guess my point is that all of these enterprises are engaging to me in their multiplicity, but as I've presented them to you today, they're actually solitary enterprises, and so pretty soon I want to commune with other people, and so I'm delighted that in fact I get to compose works for them. I get to write, sometimes for soloists and I get to work with one person, sometimes full orchestras, and I work with a lot of people, and this is probably the capacity, the role creatively for which I'm probably best known professionally. Now, some of my scores as a composer look like this, and others look like this, and some look like this, and I make all of these by hand, and it's really tedious. It takes a long, long time to make these scores, and right now I'm working on a piece that's 180 pages in length, and it's just a big chunk of my life, and I'm just pulling out hair. I have a lot of it, and that's a good thing I suppose. (Laughter)So this gets really boring and really tiresome for me, so after a while the process of notating is not only boring, but I actually want the notation to be more interesting, and so that's pushed me to do other projects like this one.This is an excerpt from a score called ""The Metaphysics of Notation."" The full score is 72 feet wide. It's a bunch of crazy pictographic notation. Let's zoom in on one section of it right here. You can see it's rather detailed. I do all of this with drafting templates, with straight edges, with French curves, and by freehand, and the 72 feet was actually split into 12 six-foot-wide panels that were installed around the Cantor Arts Center Museum lobby balcony, and it appeared for one year in the museum, and during that year, it was experienced as visual art most of the week, except, as you can see in these pictures, on Fridays, from noon til one, and only during that time, various performers came and interpreted these strange and undefined pictographic glyphs. (Laughter)Now this was a really exciting experience for me. It was gratifying musically, but I think the more important thing is it was exciting because I got to take on another role, especially given that it appeared in a museum, and that is as visual artist. (Laughter) We're going to fill up the whole thing, don't worry. (Laughter) I am multitudes. (Laughter)So one of the things is that, I mean, some people would say, like, ""Oh, you're being a dilettante,"" and maybe that's true. I can understand how, I mean, because I don't have a pedigree in visual art and I don't have any training, but it's just something that I wanted to do as an extension of my composition, as an extension of a kind of creative impulse.I can understand the question, though. ""But is it music?"" I mean, there's not any traditional notation. I can also understand that sort of implicit criticism in this piece, ""S-tog,"" which I made when I was living in Copenhagen. I took the Copenhagen subway map and I renamed all the stations to abstract musical provocations, and the players, who are synchronized with stopwatches, follow the timetables, which are listed in minutes past the hour.So this is a case of actually adapting something, or maybe stealing something, and then turning it into a musical notation.Another adaptation would be this piece. I took the idea of the wristwatch, and I turned it into a musical score. I made my own faces, and had a company fabricate them, and the players follow these scores. They follow the second hands, and as they pass over the various symbols, the players respond musically. Here's another example from another piece, and then its realization.So in these two capacities, I've been scavenger, in the sense of taking, like, the subway map, right, or thief maybe, and I've also been designer, in the case of making the wristwatches. And once again, this is, for me, interesting.Another role that I like to take on is that of the performance artist. Some of my pieces have these kind of weird theatric elements, and I often perform them. I want to show you a clip from a piece called ""Echolalia."" This is actually being performed by Brian McWhorter, who is an extraordinary performer. Let's watch a little bit of this, and please notice the instrumentation.(Music)Okay, I hear you were laughing nervously because you too could hear that the drill was a little bit sharp, the intonation was a little questionable. (Laughter) Let's watch just another clip.(Music)You can see the mayhem continues, and there's, you know, there were no clarinets and trumpets and flutes and violins. Here's a piece that has an even more unusual, more peculiar instrumentation.This is ""Tlön,"" for three conductors and no players. (Laughter)This was based on the experience of actually watching two people having a virulent argument in sign language, which produced no decibels to speak of, but affectively, psychologically, was a very loud experience.So, yeah, I get it, with, like, the weird appliances and then the total absence of conventional instruments and this glut of conductors, people might, you know, wonder, yeah, ""Is this music?""But let's move on to a piece where clearly I'm behaving myself, and that is my ""Concerto for Orchestra."" You're going to notice a lot of conventional instruments in this clip. (Music) (Music)This, in fact, is not the title of this piece. I was a bit mischievous. In fact, to make it more interesting, I put a space right in here, and this is the actual title of the piece. Let's continue with that same excerpt. (Music)It's better with a florist, right? (Laughter) (Music) Or at least it's less boring. Let's watch a couple more clips. (Music)So with all these theatric elements, this pushes me in another role, and that would be, possibly, the dramaturge. I was playing nice. I had to write the orchestra bits, right? Okay? But then there was this other stuff, right? There was the florist, and I can understand that, once again, we're putting pressure on the ontology of music as we know it conventionally, but let's look at one last piece today I'm going to share with you.This is going to be a piece called ""Aphasia,"" and it's for hand gestures synchronized to sound, and this invites yet another role, and final one I'll share with you, which is that of the choreographer. And the score for the piece looks like this, and it instructs me, the performer, to make various hand gestures at very specific times synchronized with an audio tape, and that audio tape is made up exclusively of vocal samples. I recorded an awesome singer, and I took the sound of his voice in my computer, and I warped it in countless ways to come up with the soundtrack that you're about to hear. And I'll perform just an excerpt of ""Aphasia"" for you here. Okay? (Music) So that gives you a little taste of that piece. (Applause)Yeah, okay, that's kind of weird stuff. Is it music? Here's how I want to conclude. I've decided, ultimately, that this is the wrong question, that this is not the important question. The important question is, ""Is it interesting?"" And I follow this question, not worrying about ""Is it music?"" — not worrying about the definition of the thing that I'm making. I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me, and I don't worry about the likeness of the result to some notion, some paradigm, of what music composition is supposed to be, and that has actually urged me, in a sense, to take on a whole bunch of different roles, and so what I want you to think about is, to what extent might you change the fundamental question in your discipline, and, okay, I'm going to put one extra little footnote in here, because, like, I realized I mentioned some psychological defects earlier, and we also, along the way, had a fair amount of obsessive behavior, and there was some delusional behavior and things like that, and here I think we could say that this is an argument for self-loathing and a kind of schizophrenia, at least in the popular use of the term, and I really mean dissociative identity disorder, okay. (Laughter) Anyway, despite those perils, I would urge you to think about the possibility that you might take on roles in your own work, whether they are neighboring or far-flung from your professional definition.And with that, I thank you very much. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_applebaum_the_mad_scientist_of_music
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"In half a century of trying to help prevent wars, there's one question that never leaves me: How do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return? When you're faced with brutality, whether it's a child facing a bully on a playground or domestic violence — or, on the streets of Syria today, facing tanks and shrapnel, what's the most effective thing to do? Fight back? Give in? Use more force?This question: ""How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return?"" has been with me ever since I was a child. I remember I was about 13, glued to a grainy black and white television in my parents' living room as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, and kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting mown down. And I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase.And my mother came up and said, ""What on Earth are you doing?""And I said, ""I'm going to Budapest.""And she said, ""What on Earth for?""And I said, ""Kids are getting killed there. There's something terrible happening.""And she said, ""Don't be so silly."" And I started to cry. And she got it, she said, ""Okay, I see it's serious. You're much too young to help. You need training. I'll help you. But just unpack your suitcase.""And so I got some training and went and worked in Africa during most of my 20s. But I realized that what I really needed to know I couldn't get from training courses. I wanted to understand how violence, how oppression, works. And what I've discovered since is this: Bullies use violence in three ways. They use political violence to intimidate, physical violence to terrorize and mental or emotional violence to undermine. And only very rarely in very few cases does it work to use more violence.Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence. They realized that using force against force doesn't work.So what does work? Over time I've collected about a half-dozen methods that do work — of course there are many more — that do work and that are effective. And the first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here, inside me. It's my response, my attitude, to oppression that I've got control over, and that I can do something about.And what I need to develop is self-knowledge to do that. That means I need to know how I tick, when I collapse, where my formidable points are, where my weaker points are. When do I give in? What will I stand up for? And meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways — again it's not the only one — it's one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power.And my heroine here — like Satish's — is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. She was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of Rangoon. They came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns. And she realized straight away that the soldiers with their fingers shaking on the triggers were more scared than the student protesters behind her. But she told the students to sit down. And she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun, put her hand on it and lower it. And no one got killed.So that's what the mastery of fear can do — not only faced with machine guns, but if you meet a knife fight in the street. But we have to practice. So what about our fear? I have a little mantra. My fear grows fat on the energy I feed it. And if it grows very big it probably happens.So we all know the three o'clock in the morning syndrome, when something you've been worrying about wakes you up — I see a lot of people — and for an hour you toss and turn, it gets worse and worse, and by four o'clock you're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big. The only thing to do is to get up, make a cup of tea and sit down with the fear like a child beside you. You're the adult. The fear is the child. And you talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants, what it needs. How can this be made better? How can the child feel stronger? And you make a plan. And you say, ""Okay, now we're going back to sleep. Half-past seven, we're getting up and that's what we're going to do.""I had one of these 3 a.m. episodes on Sunday — paralyzed with fear at coming to talk to you. (Laughter) So I did the thing. I got up, made the cup of tea, sat down with it, did it all and I'm here — still partly paralyzed, but I'm here.(Applause)So that's fear. What about anger? Wherever there is injustice there's anger. But anger is like gasoline, and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. But anger as an engine — in an engine — is powerful. If we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward, it can get us through the dreadful moments and it can give us real inner power.And I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers. Because at the beginning I was so outraged at the dangers they were exposing us to that I just wanted to argue and blame and make them wrong. Totally ineffective. In order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger. It's okay to be angry with the thing — the nuclear weapons in this case — but it is hopeless to be angry with the people. They are human beings just like us. And they're doing what they think is best. And that's the basis on which we have to talk with them.So that's the third one, anger. And it brings me to the crux of what's going on, or what I perceive as going on, in the world today, which is that last century was top-down power. It was still governments telling people what to do. This century there's a shift. It's bottom-up or grassroots power. It's like mushrooms coming through concrete. It's people joining up with people, as Bundy just said, miles away to bring about change.And Peace Direct spotted quite early on that local people in areas of very hot conflict know what to do. They know best what to do. So Peace Direct gets behind them to do that. And the kind of thing they're doing is demobilizing militias, rebuilding economies, resettling refugees, even liberating child soldiers. And they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this. And what they've realized is that using violence in the situations they operate in is not only less humane, but it's less effective than using methods that connect people with people, that rebuild.And I think that the U.S. military is finally beginning to get this. Up to now their counter-terrorism policy has been to kill insurgents at almost any cost, and if civilians get in the way, that's written as ""collateral damage."" And this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of Afghanistan, that it makes the recruitment for al-Qaeda very easy, when people are so disgusted by, for example, the burning of the Koran.So the training of the troops has to change. And I think there are signs that it is beginning to change. The British military have always been much better at this. But there is one magnificent example for them to take their cue from, and that's a brilliant U.S. lieutenant colonel called Chris Hughes. And he was leading his men down the streets of Najaf — in Iraq actually — and suddenly people were pouring out of the houses on either side of the road, screaming, yelling, furiously angry, and surrounded these very young troops who were completely terrified, didn't know what was going on, couldn't speak Arabic. And Chris Hughes strode into the middle of the throng with his weapon above his head, pointing at the ground, and he said, ""Kneel."" And these huge soldiers with their backpacks and their body armor, wobbled to the ground. And complete silence fell. And after about two minutes, everybody moved aside and went home.Now that to me is wisdom in action. In the moment, that's what he did. And it's happening everywhere now. You don't believe me? Have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years? Dictatorships in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mali, Madagascar, Poland, the Philippines, Serbia, Slovenia, I could go on, and now Tunisia and Egypt. And this hasn't just happened. A lot of it is due to a book written by an 80-year-old man in Boston, Gene Sharp. He wrote a book called ""From Dictatorship to Democracy"" with 81 methodologies for non-violent resistance. And it's been translated into 26 languages. It's flown around the world. And it's being used by young people and older people everywhere, because it works and it's effective.So this is what gives me hope — not just hope, this is what makes me feel very positive right now. Because finally human beings are getting it. We're getting practical, doable methodologies to answer my question: How do we deal with a bully without becoming a thug? We're using the kind of skills that I've outlined: inner power — the development of inner power — through self-knowledge, recognizing and working with our fear, using anger as a fuel, cooperating with others, banding together with others, courage, and most importantly, commitment to active non-violence.Now I don't just believe in non-violence. I don't have to believe in it. I see evidence everywhere of how it works. And I see that we, ordinary people, can do what Aung San Suu Kyi and Ghandi and Mandela did. We can bring to an end the bloodiest century that humanity has ever known. And we can organize to overcome oppression by opening our hearts as well as strengthening this incredible resolve.And this open-heartedness is exactly what I've experienced in the entire organization of this gathering since I got here yesterday. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/scilla_elworthy_fighting_with_non_violence
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"In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s. And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work.And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it. The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families. So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly?Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize. And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data. Now, she had no idea what to look for. This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of. Had the children eaten boiled sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks? Did they eat fish and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing? What time of life had they started school?And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. By a rate of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant. Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold. It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them.Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared. In fact, she need not have hurried. It was fully 25 years before the British and medical — British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women. The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can't drive change.So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands. So, how did she know that she was right? Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking. She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, ""My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong."" He actively sought disconfirmation. Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.It's a fantastic model of collaboration — thinking partners who aren't echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking.So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.And the more I've thought about this, the more I think, really, that that's a kind of love. Because you simply won't commit that kind of energy and time if you don't really care. And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. Alice's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again. ""My mother,"" she said, ""My mother didn't enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them.""So it's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship. But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we've experienced, mostly haven't come from individuals, they've come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives. So how do organizations think? Well, for the most part, they don't. And that isn't because they don't want to, it's really because they can't. And they can't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise. Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage, and felt that they were bound to lose. Eighty-five percent is a really big number. It means that organizations mostly can't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did. They can't think together. And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them.So how do we develop the skills that we need? Because it does take skill and practice, too. If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it. So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company. And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on. He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people. He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help. But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried. So, he didn't really want to say anything. After all, maybe they knew something he didn't. Maybe he'd look stupid. But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns. And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation. It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts. So now Joe had allies. They could think together. And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device.Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower, except that like almost all whistle-blowers, he wasn't a crank at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served. But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence. And when he dared to speak, he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined. And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank. They think of him as a leader.So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often? Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend. It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority. I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life. I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society.The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree
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"So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants. No one knows what the hell we do. So I am going to give you some — attempt today to try and explain to you what I do.So, dancing is one of the most human of activities. We delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on. Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it. Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time. So great progress and treatment has been made over the years. However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late. We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure.But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test. You have to go to the clinic to do it. It's very, very costly, and that means that, outside the clinical trials, it's just never done. It's never done.But what if patients could do this test at home? Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right? No expensive staff time required. Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it.So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling.So here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds. Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example. And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training. I mean, just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak. From the sound, we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates, and just as the limbs are affected in Parkinson's, so too are the vocal organs. So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor. We see all the same symptoms. We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity. The speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while, and that's one of the example symptoms of it.So these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle, in some cases, but with any digital microphone, and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning, which is very advanced by now, we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone.So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive. The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure. You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it. And they're both accurate. Okay, but in addition, voice-based tests are non-expert. That means they can be self-administered. They're high-speed, take about 30 seconds at most. They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens. When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable. So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now. We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients. No need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup. We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data. We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time. We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late.So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative. With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals. We have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet. Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)Tom Rielly: So Max, by taking all these samples of,let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not? What are you going to get out of those samples?Max Little: Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. TR: Right. ML: You see, some people may not do it. They may not get through it. But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease.TR: So you're 86 percent accurate right now?ML: It's much better than that. Actually, my student Thanasis, I have to plug him, because he's done some fantastic work, and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well, which enables this project, and we're getting 99 percent accuracy.TR: Ninety-nine. Well, that's an improvement. So what that means is that people will be able to — ML: (Laughs) TR: People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease.ML: Absolutely.TR: Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody.ML: Thanks, Tom. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/max_little_a_test_for_parkinson_s_with_a_phone_call
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"The will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places. This is where I come from, Todmorden. It's a market town in the north of England, 15,000 people, between Leeds and Manchester, fairly normal market town. It used to look like this, and now it's more like this, with fruit and veg and herbs sprouting up all over the place. We call it propaganda gardening. (Laughter)Corner row railway, station car park, front of a health center, people's front gardens, and even in front of the police station. (Laughter) We've got edible canal towpaths, and we've got sprouting cemeteries. The soil is extremely good. (Laughter)We've even invented a new form of tourism. It's called vegetable tourism, and believe it or not, people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds, even when there's not much growing. (Laughter) But it starts a conversation. (Laughter)And, you know, we're not doing it because we're bored. (Laughter) We're doing it because we want to start a revolution.We tried to answer this simple question: Can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them differently, think about the resources they use differently, interact differently? Can we find that language? And then, can we replicate those actions? And the answer would appear to be yes, and the language would appear to be food.So, three and a half years ago, a few of us sat around a kitchen table and we just invented the whole thing. (Laughter) (Applause) We came up with a really simple game plan that we put to a public meeting. We did not consult. We did not write a report. Enough of all that. (Laughter) And we said to that public meeting in Todmorden, look, let's imagine that our town is focused around three plates: a community plate, the way we live our everyday lives; a learning plate, what we teach our kids in school and what new skills we share amongst ourselves; and business, what we do with the pound in our pocket and which businesses we choose to support.Now, let's imagine those plates agitated with community actions around food. If we start one of those community plates spinning, that's really great, that really starts to empower people, but if we can then spin that community plate with the learning plate, and then spin it with the business plate, we've got a real show there, we've got some action theater. We're starting to build resilience ourselves. We're starting to reinvent community ourselves, and we've done it all without a flipping strategy document. (Applause)And here's the thing as well. We've not asked anybody's permission to do this, we're just doing it. (Laughter) And we are certainly not waiting for that check to drop through the letterbox before we start, and most importantly of all, we are not daunted by the sophisticated arguments that say, ""These small actions are meaningless in the face of tomorrow's problems,"" because I have seen the power of small actions, and it is awesome.So, back to the public meeting. (Laughter) We put that proposition to the meeting, two seconds, and then the room exploded. I have never, ever experienced anything like that in my life. And it's been the same in every single room, in every town that we've ever told our story. People are ready and respond to the story of food. They want positive actions they can engage in, and in their bones, they know it's time to take personal responsibility and invest in more kindness to each other and to the environment.And since we had that meeting three and a half years ago, it's been a heck of a roller coaster. We started with a seed swap, really simple stuff, and then we took an area of land, a strip on the side of our main road, which was a dog toilet, basically, and we turned it into a really lovely herb garden. We took the corner of the car park in the station that you saw, and we made vegetable beds for everybody to share and pick from themselves. We went to the doctors. We've just had a 6-million-pound health center built in Todmorden, and for some reason that I cannot comprehend, it has been surrounded by prickly plants. (Laughter) So we went to the doctors, said, ""Would you mind us taking them up?"" They said, ""Absolutely fine, provided you get planning permission and you do it in Latin and you do it in triplicate,"" so we did — (Laughter) — and now there are fruit trees and bushes and herbs and vegetables around that doctor's surgery. And there's been lots of other examples, like the corn that was in front of the police station, and the old people's home that we've planted it with food that they can pick and grow.But it isn't just about growing, because we all are part of this jigsaw. It's about taking those artistic people in your community and doing some fabulous designs in those raised beds to explain to people what's growing there, because there's so many people that don't really recognize a vegetable unless it's in a bit of plastic with a bit of an instruction packet on the top. (Laughter) So we have some people who designed these things, ""If it looks like this, please don't pick it, but if it looks like this, help yourself."" This is about sharing and investing in kindness.And for those people that don't want to do either of those things, maybe they can cook, so we pick them seasonally and then we go on the street, or in the pub, or in the church, or wherever people are living their lives. This is about us going to the people and saying, ""We are all part of the local food jigsaw, we are all part of a solution.""And then, because we know we've got vegetable tourists and we love them to bits and they're absolutely fantastic, we thought, what could we do to give them an even better experience? So we invented, without asking, of course, the Incredible Edible Green Route. And this is a route of exhibition gardens, and edible towpaths, and bee-friendly sites, and the story of pollinators, and it's a route that we designed that takes people through the whole of our town, past our cafes and our small shops, through our market, not just to and fro from the supermarket, and we're hoping that, in changing people's footfall around our town, we're also changing their behavior.And then there's the second plate, the learning plate. Well, we're in partnership with a high school. We've created a company. We are designing and building an aquaponics unit in some land that was spare at the back of the high school, like you do, and now we're going to be growing fish and vegetables in an orchard with bees, and the kids are helping us build that, and the kids are on the board, and because the community was really keen on working with the high school, the high school is now teaching agriculture, and because it's teaching agriculture, we started to think, how could we then get those kids that never had a qualification before in their lives but are really excited about growing, how can we give them some more experience?So we got some land that was donated by a local garden center. It was really quite muddy, but in a truly incredible way, totally voluntary-led, we have turned that into a market garden training center, and that is polytunnels and raised beds and all the things you need to get the soil under your fingers and think maybe there's a job in this for me in the future. And because we were doing that, some local academics said, ""You know, we could help design a commercial horticulture course for you. There's not one that we know of."" So they're doing that, and we're going to launch it later this year, and it's all an experiment, and it's all voluntary.And then there's the third plate, because if you walk through an edible landscape, and if you're learning new skills, and if you start to get interested in what's growing seasonally, you might just want to spend more of your own money in support of local producers, not just veg, but meat and cheese and beer and whatever else it might be.But then, we're just a community group, you know. We're just all volunteers. What could we actually do? So we did some really simple things. We fundraised, we got some blackboards, we put ""Incredible Edible"" on the top, we gave it every market trader that was selling locally, and they scribbled on what they were selling in any one week. Really popular. People congregated around it. Sales were up.And then, we had a chat with the farmers, and we said, ""We're really serious about this,"" but they didn't actually believe us, so we thought, okay, what should we do? I know. If we can create a campaign around one product and show them there is local loyalty to that product, maybe they'll change their mind and see we're serious.So we launched a campaign — because it just amuses me — called Every Egg Matters. (Laughter) And what we did was we put people on our egg map. It's a stylized map of Togmorden. Anybody that's selling their excess eggs at the garden gate, perfectly legally, to their neighbors, we've stuck on there. We started with four, and we've now got 64 on, and the result of that was that people were then going into shops asking for a local Todmorden egg, and the result of that was, some farmers upped the amount of flocks they got of free range birds, and then they went on to meat birds, and although these are really, really small steps, that increasing local economic confidence is starting to play out in a number of ways, and we now have farmers doing cheese and they've upped their flocks and rare breed pigs, they're doing pasties and pies and things that they would have never done before. We've got increasing market stalls selling local food, and in a survey that local students did for us, 49 percent of all food traders in that town said that their bottom line had increased because of what we were actually doing. And we're just volunteers and it's only an experiment. (Laughter)Now, none of this is rocket science. It certainly is not clever, and it's not original. But it is joined up, and it is inclusive. This is not a movement for those people that are going to sort themselves out anyway. This is a movement for everyone. We have a motto: If you eat, you're in. (Laughter) (Applause) Across age, across income, across culture.It's been really quite a roller coaster experience, but going back to that first question that we asked, is it replicable? Yeah. It most certainly is replicable.More than 30 towns in England now are spinning the Incredible Edible plate. Whichever way they want to do it, of their own volition, they're trying to make their own lives differently, and worldwide, we've got communities across America and Japan — it's incredible, isn't it? I mean, America and Japan and New Zealand. People after the earthquake in New Zealand visited us in order to incorporate some of this public spiritedness around local growing into the heart of Christchurch.And none of this takes more money and none of this demands a bureaucracy, but it does demand that you think things differently and you are prepared to bend budgets and work programs in order to create that supportive framework that communities can bounce off.And there's some great ideas already in our patch. Our local authority has decided to make everywhere Incredible Edible, and in support of that have decided to do two things.First, they're going to create an asset register of spare land that they've got, put it in a food bank so that communities can use that wherever they live, and they're going to underpin that with a license.And then they've said to every single one of their workforce, if you can, help those communities grow, and help them to maintain their spaces.Suddenly, we're seeing actions on the ground from local government. We're seeing this mainstreamed. We are responding creatively at last to what Rio demanded of us, and there's lots more you could do. I mean, just to list a few. One, please stop putting prickly plants around public buildings. It's a waste of space. (Laughter) Secondly, please create — please, please create edible landscapes so that our children start to walk past their food day in, day out, on our high streets, in our parks, wherever that might be. Inspire local planners to put the food sites at the heart of the town and the city plan, not relegate them to the edges of the settlements that nobody can see. Encourage all our schools to take this seriously. This isn't a second class exercise. If we want to inspire the farmers of tomorrow, then please let us say to every school, create a sense of purpose around the importance to the environment, local food and soils. Put that at the heart of your school culture, and you will create a different generation.There are so many things you can do, but ultimately this is about something really simple. Through an organic process, through an increasing recognition of the power of small actions, we are starting, at last, to believe in ourselves again, and to believe in our capacity, each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future, and in my book, that's incredible. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes
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"We're going to begin in 1964. Bob Dylan is 23 years old, and his career is just reaching its pinnacle. He's been christened the voice of a generation, and he's churning out classic songs at a seemingly impossible rate, but there's a small minority of dissenters, and they claim that Bob Dylan is stealing other people's songs.2004. Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, takes the Beatles' ""White Album,"" combines it with Jay-Z's ""The Black Album"" to create ""The Grey Album."" ""The Grey Album"" becomes an immediate sensation online, and the Beatles' record company sends out countless cease-and-desist letters for ""unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property.""Now, ""The Grey Album"" is a remix. It is new media created from old media. It was made using these three techniques: copy, transform and combine. It's how you remix. You take existing songs, you chop them up, you transform the pieces, you combine them back together again, and you've got a new song, but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs.But I think these aren't just the components of remixing. I think these are the basic elements of all creativity. I think everything is a remix, and I think this is a better way to conceive of creativity.All right, let's head back to 1964, and let's hear where some of Dylan's early songs came from. We'll do some side-by-side comparisons here.All right, this first song you're going to hear is ""Nottamun Town."" It's a traditional folk tune. After that, you'll hear Dylan's ""Masters of War.""Jean Ritchie: ♫ In Nottamun Town, not a soul would look out, ♫♫ not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down. ♫Bob Dylan: ♫ Come you masters of war, ♫♫ you that build the big guns, you that build the death planes, ♫♫ You that build all the bombs. ♫Kirby Ferguson: Okay, so that's the same basic melody and overall structure. This next one is ""The Patriot Game,"" by Dominic Behan. Alongside that, you're going to hear ""With God on Our Side,"" by Dylan.Dominic Behan: ♫ Come all ye young rebels, ♫♫ and list while I sing, ♫♫ for the love of one's land is a terrible thing. ♫BD: ♫ Oh my name it is nothin', ♫♫ my age it means less, ♫♫ the country I come from is called the Midwest. ♫KF: Okay, so in this case, Dylan admits he must have heard ""The Patriot Game,"" he forgot about it, then when the song kind of bubbled back up in his brain, he just thought it was his song.Last one, this is ""Who's Going To Buy You Ribbons,"" another traditional folk tune. Alongside that is ""Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."" This one's more about the lyric.Paul Clayton: ♫ It ain't no use to sit and sigh now, ♫♫ darlin', and it ain't no use to sit and cry now. ♫BD: ♫ It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe, ♫♫ if you don't know by now, ♫♫ and it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe, ♫♫ it'll never do somehow. ♫KF: Okay, now, there's a lot of these. It's been estimated that two thirds of the melodies Dylan used in his early songs were borrowed. This is pretty typical among folk singers. Here's the advice of Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie.""The worlds are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune."" (Laughter) (Applause) And that's, that's what Guthrie did right here, and I'm sure you all recognize the results. (Music) We know this tune, right? We know it? Actually you don't. That is ""When the World's on Fire,"" a very old melody, in this case performed by the Carter Family. Guthrie adapted it into ""This Land Is Your Land."" So, Bob Dylan, like all folk singers, he copied melodies, he transformed them, he combined them with new lyrics which were frequently their own concoction of previous stuff.Now, American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others. Instead, these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property. Now, creative works may indeed be kind of like property, but it's property that we're all building on, and creations can only take root and grow once that ground has been prepared.Henry Ford once said, ""I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.""2007. The iPhone makes it debut. Apple undoubtedly brings this innovation to us early, but its time was approaching because its core technology had been evolving for decades. That's multi-touch, controlling a device by touching its display. Here is Steve Jobs introducing multi-touch and making a rather foreboding joke.Steve Jobs: And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch. You can do multi-fingered gestures on it, and boy have we patented it. (Laughter) KF: Yes. And yet, here is multi-touch in action. This is at TED, actually, about a year earlier. This is Jeff Han, and, I mean, that's multi-touch. It's the same animal, at least. Let's hear what Jeff Han has to say about this newfangled technology. Jeff Han: Multi-touch sensing isn't anything — isn't completely new. I mean, people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s. The technology, you know, isn't the most exciting thing here right now other than probably its newfound accessibility. KF: So he's pretty frank about it not being new. So it's not multi-touch as a whole that's patented. It's the small parts of it that are, and it's in these small details where we can clearly see patent law contradicting its intent: to promote the progress of useful arts.Here is the first ever slide-to-unlock. That is all there is to it. Apple has patented this. It's a 28-page software patent, but I will summarize what it covers. Spoiler alert: Unlocking your phone by sliding an icon with your finger. (Laughter) I'm only exaggerating a little bit. It's a broad patent.Now, can someone own this idea? Now, back in the '80s, there were no software patents, and it was Xerox that pioneered the graphical user interface. What if they had patented pop-up menus, scrollbars, the desktop with icons that look like folders and sheets of paper? Would a young and inexperienced Apple have survived the legal assault from a much larger and more mature company like Xerox?Now, this idea that everything is a remix might sound like common sense until you're the one getting remixed. For example ... SJ: I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, ""Good artists copy. Great artists steal."" And we have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas. KF: Okay, so that's in '96. Here's in 2010. ""I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product."" (Laughter) ""I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."" (Laughter) Okay, so in other words, great artists steal, but not from me. (Laughter)Now, behavioral economists might refer to this sort of thing as loss aversion We have a strong predisposition towards protecting what we feel is ours. We have no such aversion towards copying what other people have, because we do that nonstop.So here's the sort of equation we're looking at. We've got laws that fundamentally treat creative works as property, plus massive rewards or settlements in infringement cases, plus huge legal fees to protect yourself in court, plus cognitive biases against perceived loss. And the sum looks like this. That is the last four years of lawsuits in the realm of smartphones. Is this promoting the progress of useful arts?1983. Bob Dylan is 42 years old, and his time in the cultural spotlight is long since past. He records a song called ""Blind Willie McTell,"" named after the blues singer, and the song is a voyage through the past, through a much darker time, but a simpler one, a time when musicians like Willie McTell had few illusions about what they did. ""I jump 'em from other writers but I arrange 'em my own way.""I think this is mostly what we do. Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It's a liberation from our misconceptions, and it's an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin.Thank you so much. It was an honor to be here. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix
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"I'm 150 feet down an illegal mine shaft in Ghana. The air is thick with heat and dust, and it's hard to breathe. I can feel the brush of sweaty bodies passing me in the darkness, but I can't see much else. I hear voices talking, but mostly the shaft is this cacophony of men coughing, and stone being broken with primitive tools. Like the others, I wear a flickering, cheap flashlight tied to my head with this elastic, tattered band, and I can barely make out the slick tree limbs holding up the walls of the three-foot square hole dropping hundreds of feet into the earth. When my hand slips, I suddenly remember a miner I had met days before who had lost his grip and fell countless feet down that shaft.As I stand talking to you today, these men are still deep in that hole, risking their lives without payment or compensation, and often dying.I got to climb out of that hole, and I got to go home, but they likely never will, because they're trapped in slavery.For the last 28 years, I've been documenting indigenous cultures in more than 70 countries on six continents, and in 2009 I had the great honor of being the sole exhibitor at the Vancouver Peace Summit. Amongst all the astonishing people I met there, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern day slavery. We started talking about slavery, and really, I started learning about slavery, for I had certainly known it existed in the world, but not to such a degree. After we finished talking, I felt so horrible and honestly ashamed at my own lack of knowledge of this atrocity in my own lifetime, and I thought, if I don't know, how many other people don't know? It started burning a hole in my stomach, so within weeks, I flew down to Los Angeles to meet with the director of Free the Slaves and offer them my help.Thus began my journey into modern day slavery. Oddly, I had been to many of these places before. Some I even considered like my second home. But this time, I would see the skeletons hidden in the closet.A conservative estimate tells us there are more than 27 million people enslaved in the world today. That's double the amount of people taken from Africa during the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade. A hundred and fifty years ago, an agricultural slave cost about three times the annual salary of an American worker. That equates to about $50,000 in today's money. Yet today, entire families can be enslaved for generations over a debt as small as $18. Astonishingly, slavery generates profits of more than $13 billion worldwide each year.Many have been tricked by false promises of a good education, a better job, only to find that they're forced to work without pay under the threat of violence, and they cannot walk away.Today's slavery is about commerce, so the goods that enslaved people produce have value, but the people producing them are disposable. Slavery exists everywhere, nearly, in the world, and yet it is illegal everywhere in the world.In India and Nepal, I was introduced to the brick kilns. This strange and awesome sight was like walking into ancient Egypt or Dante's Inferno. Enveloped in temperatures of 130 degrees, men, women, children, entire families in fact, were cloaked in a heavy blanket of dust, while mechanically stacking bricks on their head, up to 18 at a time, and carrying them from the scorching kilns to trucks hundreds of yards away. Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they work silently, doing this task over and over for 16 or 17 hours a day. There were no breaks for food, no water breaks, and the severe dehydration made urinating pretty much inconsequential. So pervasive was the heat and the dust that my camera became too hot to even touch and ceased working. Every 20 minutes, I'd have to run back to our cruiser to clean out my gear and run it under an air conditioner to revive it, and as I sat there, I thought, my camera is getting far better treatment than these people.Back in the kilns, I wanted to cry, but the abolitionist next to me quickly grabbed me and he said, ""Lisa, don't do that. Just don't do that here."" And he very clearly explained to me that emotional displays are very dangerous in a place like this, not just for me, but for them. I couldn't offer them any direct help. I couldn't give them money, nothing. I wasn't a citizen of that country. I could get them in a worse situation than they were already in. I'd have to rely on Free the Slaves to work within the system for their liberation, and I trusted that they would. As for me, I'd have to wait until I got home to really feel my heartbreak.In the Himalayas, I found children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting at roads below. The big sheets of slate were heavier than the children carrying them, and the kids hoisted them from their heads using these handmade harnesses of sticks and rope and torn cloth. It's difficult to witness something so overwhelming. How can we affect something so insidious, yet so pervasive? Some don't even know they're enslaved, people working 16, 17 hours a day without any pay, because this has been the case all their lives. They have nothing to compare it to. When these villagers claimed their freedom, the slaveholders burned down all of their houses. I mean, these people had nothing, and they were so petrified, they wanted to give up, but the woman in the center rallied for them to persevere, and abolitionists on the ground helped them get a quarry lease of their own, so that now they do the same back-breaking work, but they do it for themselves, and they get paid for it, and they do it in freedom.Sex trafficking is what we often think of when we hear the word slavery, and because of this worldwide awareness, I was warned that it would be difficult for me to work safely within this particular industry.In Kathmandu, I was escorted by women who had previously been sex slaves themselves. They ushered me down a narrow set of stairs that led to this dirty, dimly fluorescent lit basement. This wasn't a brothel, per se. It was more like a restaurant. Cabin restaurants, as they're known in the trade, are venues for forced prostitution. Each has small, private rooms, where the slaves, women, along with young girls and boys, some as young as seven years old, are forced to entertain the clients, encouraging them to buy more food and alcohol. Each cubicle is dark and dingy, identified with a painted number on the wall, and partitioned by plywood and a curtain. The workers here often endure tragic sexual abuse at the hands of their customers. Standing in the near darkness, I remember feeling this quick, hot fear, and in that instant, I could only imagine what it must be like to be trapped in that hell. I had only one way out: the stairs from where I'd come in. There were no back doors. There were no windows large enough to climb through. These people have no escape at all, and as we take in such a difficult subject, it's important to note that slavery, including sex trafficking, occurs in our own backyard as well.Tens of hundreds of people are enslaved in agriculture, in restaurants, in domestic servitude, and the list can go on. Recently, the New York Times reported that between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are sold into sex slavery every year. It's all around us. We just don't see it.The textile industry is another one we often think of when we hear about slave labor. I visited villages in India where entire families were enslaved in the silk trade. This is a family portrait. The dyed black hands are the father, while the blue and red hands are his sons. They mix dye in these big barrels, and they submerge the silk into the liquid up to their elbows, but the dye is toxic.My interpreter told me their stories.""We have no freedom,"" they said. ""We hope still, though, that we could leave this house someday and go someplace else where we actually get paid for our dyeing.""It's estimated that more than 4,000 children are enslaved on Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world. When we first arrived, I went to have a quick look. I saw what seemed to be a family fishing on a boat, two older brothers, some younger kids, makes sense right? Wrong. They were all enslaved. Children are taken from their families and trafficked and vanished, and they're forced to work endless hours on these boats on the lake, even though they do not know how to swim.This young child is eight years old. He was trembling when our boat approached, frightened it would run over his tiny canoe. He was petrified he would be knocked in the water. The skeletal tree limbs submerged in Lake Volta often catch the fishing nets, and weary, frightened children are thrown into the water to untether the lines. Many of them drown.For as long as he can recall, he's been forced to work on the lake. Terrified of his master, he will not run away, and since he's been treated with cruelty all his life, he passes that down to the younger slaves that he manages.I met these boys at five in the morning, when they were hauling in the last of their nets, but they had been working since 1 a.m. in the cold, windy night. And it's important to note that these nets weigh more than a thousand pounds when they're full of fish.I want to introduce you to Kofi. Kofi was rescued from a fishing village. I met him at a shelter where Free the Slaves rehabilitates victims of slavery. Here he's seen taking a bath at the well, pouring big buckets of water over his head, and the wonderful news is, as you and I are sitting here talking today, Kofi has been reunited with his family, and what's even better, his family has been given tools to make a living and to keep their children safe. Kofi is the embodiment of possibility. Who will he become because someone took a stand and made a difference in his life?Driving down a road in Ghana with partners of Free the Slaves, a fellow abolitionist on a moped suddenly sped up to our cruiser and tapped on the window. He told us to follow him down a dirt road into the jungle. At the end of the road, he urged us out of the car, and told the driver to quickly leave. Then he pointed toward this barely visible footpath, and said, ""This is the path, this is the path. Go."" As we started down the path, we pushed aside the vines blocking the way, and after about an hour of walking in, found that the trail had become flooded by recent rains, so I hoisted the photo gear above my head as we descended into these waters up to my chest. After another two hours of hiking, the winding trail abruptly ended at a clearing, and before us was a mass of holes that could fit into the size of a football field, and all of them were full of enslaved people laboring. Many women had children strapped to their backs while they were panning for gold, wading in water poisoned by mercury. Mercury is used in the extraction process.These miners are enslaved in a mine shaft in another part of Ghana. When they came out of the shaft, they were soaking wet from their own sweat. I remember looking into their tired, bloodshot eyes, for many of them had been underground for 72 hours. The shafts are up to 300 feet deep, and they carry out heavy bags of stone that later will be transported to another area, where the stone will be pounded so that they can extract the gold.At first glance, the pounding site seems full of powerful men, but when we look closer, we see some less fortunate working on the fringes, and children too. All of them are victim to injury, illness and violence. In fact, it's very likely that this muscular person will end up like this one here, racked with tuberculosis and mercury poisoning in just a few years.This is Manuru. When his father died, his uncle trafficked him to work with him in the mines. When his uncle died, Manuru inherited his uncle's debt, which further forced him into being enslaved in the mines. When I met him, he had been working in the mines for 14 years, and the leg injury that you see here is actually from a mining accident, one so severe doctors say his leg should be amputated. On top of that, Manuru has tuberculosis, yet he's still forced to work day in and day out in that mine shaft.Even still, he has a dream that he will become free and become educated with the help of local activists like Free the Slaves, and it's this sort of determination, in the face of unimaginable odds, that fills me with complete awe.I want to shine a light on slavery. When I was working in the field, I brought lots of candles with me, and with the help of my interpreter, I imparted to the people I was photographing that I wanted to illuminate their stories and their plight, so when it was safe for them, and safe for me, I made these images. They knew their image would be seen by you out in the world. I wanted them to know that we will be bearing witness to them, and that we will do whatever we can to help make a difference in their lives. I truly believe, if we can see one another as fellow human beings, then it becomes very difficult to tolerate atrocities like slavery. These images are not of issues. They are of people, real people, like you and me, all deserving of the same rights, dignity and respect in their lives. There is not a day that goes by that I don't think of these many beautiful, mistreated people I've had the tremendous honor of meeting.I hope that these images awaken a forcein those who view them, people like you, and I hope that force will ignite a fire, and that fire will shine a light on slavery, for without that light, the beast of bondage can continue to live in the shadows.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_kristine_glimpses_of_modern_day_slavery
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"One of my favorite words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary is ""snollygoster,"" just because it sounds so good. And what snollygoster means is ""a dishonest politician."" Although there was a 19th-century newspaper editor who defined it rather better when he said, ""A snollygoster is a fellow who seeks office regardless of party, platform or principle, and who, when he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy.""(Laughter)Now, I have no idea what ""talknophical"" is. Something to do with words, I assume. But it's very important that words are at the center of politics, and all politicians know they have to try and control language.It wasn't until, for example, 1771 that the British Parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber. And this was actually all down to the bravery of a guy with the extraordinary name of Brass Crosby, who took on Parliament. And he was thrown into the Tower of London and imprisoned, but he was brave enough, he was brave enough to take them on, and in the end, he had such popular support in London that he won. And it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase ""as bold as brass."" Most people think that's down to the metal. It's not; it's down to a campaigner for the freedom of the press.But to really show you how words and politics interact, I want to take you back to the United States of America, just after they'd achieved independence. And they had to face the question of what to call George Washington, their leader. They didn't know. What do you call the leader of a republican country?And this was debated in Congress for ages and ages. And there were all sorts of suggestions on the table, which might have made it. I mean, some people wanted him to be called ""Chief Magistrate Washington,"" and other people, ""His Highness, George Washington,"" and other people, ""Protector of the Liberties of the People of the United States of America Washington."" Not that catchy. Some people just wanted to call him king — it was tried and tested. They weren't even being monarchical, they had the idea that you could be elected king for a fixed term. And, you know, it could have worked.And everybody got insanely bored, because this debate went on for three weeks. I read a diary of this poor senator who just keeps coming back, ""Still on this subject."" And the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate. The House of Representatives didn't want Washington to get drunk on power. They didn't want to call him ""king,"" in case that gave him ideas, or his successor ideas.So they wanted to give him the humblest, meagerest, most pathetic title that they could think of. And that title ... was ""President.""(Laughter)""President."" They didn't invent the title. I mean, it existed before, but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting. It was like the foreman of the jury. And it didn't have much more grandeur than the term ""foreman"" or ""overseer."" There were occasional presidents of little colonial councils and bits of government, but it was really a nothing title.And that's why the Senate objected to it. They said, ""That's ridiculous! You can't call him 'President.' This guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries. Who's going to take him seriously if he's got a silly little title like 'President of the United States of America'?""(Laughter)And after three weeks of debate, in the end, the Senate did not cave in. Instead, they agreed to use the title ""President"" for now. But they also wanted it absolutely set down that they didn't agree with it, from a decent respect for the opinions and practice of civilized nations, whether under republican or monarchical forms of government, whose custom it is to annex, through the office of the Chief Magistrate, titles of respectability — not bloody ""President."" And that, in the intercourse with foreign nations, the majesty of the people of the United States may not be hazarded by an appearance of singularity — i.e., we don't want to look like bloody weirdos.Now, you can learn three interesting things from this. First of all — and this is my favorite — is that, so far as I've ever been able to find out, the Senate has never formally endorsed the title of President. Barack Obama, President Obama, is there on borrowed time, just waiting for the Senate to spring into action.(Laughter)The second thing you can learn is that, when a government says that this is a temporary measure —(Laughter)you can still be waiting 223 years later.But the third thing you can learn — and this is the really important one, the point I want to leave you on — is that the title, ""President of the United States of America,"" doesn't sound that humble at all these days, does it? Something to do with the slightly over 5,000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff. Reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur. And so the Senate won in the end. They got their title of respectability. And also, the Senate's other worry, the appearance of singularity — well, it was a singularity back then. But now, do you know how many nations have a president? A hundred and forty-seven. All because they want to sound like the guy who's got the 5,000 nuclear warheads, etc.And so, in the end, the Senate won and the House of Representatives lost ... because nobody's going to feel that humble when they're told that they are now the President of the United States of America. And that's the important lesson I think you can take away, and the one I want to leave you with. Politicians try to pick and use words to shape and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_forsyth_what_s_a_snollygoster_a_short_lesson_in_political_speak
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"I'm afraid I'm one of those speakers you hope you're not going to meet at TED. First, I don't have a mobile, so I'm on the safe side. Secondly, a political theorist who's going to talk about the crisis of democracy is probably not the most exciting topic you can think about. And plus, I'm not going to give you any answers. I'm much more trying to add to some of the questions we're talking about. And one of the things that I want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions.There is one more reason for you to be suspicious about me. You people, the Church of TED, are a very optimistic community. (Laughter) Basically you believe in complexity, but not in ambiguity. As you have been told, I'm Bulgarian. And according to the surveys, we are marked the most pessimistic people in the world. (Laughter) The Economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness, and the title was ""The Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians.""(Laughter)So now when you know what to expect, let's give you the story. And this is a rainy election day in a small country — that can be my country, but could be also your country. And because of the rain until four o'clock in the afternoon, nobody went to the polling stations. But then the rain stopped, people went to vote. And when the votes had been counted, three-fourths of the people have voted with a blank ballot. The government and the opposition, they have been simply paralyzed. Because you know what to do about the protests. You know who to arrest, who to negotiate with. But what to do about people who are voting with a blank ballot? So the government decided to have the elections once again. And this time even a greater number, 83 percent of the people, voted with blank ballots. Basically they went to the ballot boxes to tell that they have nobody to vote for.This is the opening of a beautiful novel by Jose Saramago called ""Seeing."" But in my view it very well captures part of the problem that we have with democracy in Europe these days. On one level nobody's questioning that democracy is the best form of government. Democracy is the only game in town. The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing.For the last 30 years, political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout, and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting. I mean the unemployed, the under-privileged. And this is a major issue. Because especially now with the economic crisis, you can see that the trust in politics, that the trust in democratic institutions, was really destroyed. According to the latest survey being done by the European Commission, 89 percent of the citizens of Europe believe that there is a growing gap between the opinion of the policy-makers and the opinion of the public. Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters. Basically people start to understand that they can change governments, but they cannot change policies.And the question which I want to ask is the following: How did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before — we have more rights, we can travel easier, we have access to more information — at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed? So basically I want to ask: What went right and what went wrong in these 50 years when we talk about democracy? And I'll start with what went right.And the first thing that went right was, of course, these five revolutions which, in my view, very much changed the way we're living and deepened our democratic experience. And the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s, which put the individual at the center of politics. It was the human rights moment. Basically this was also a major outbreak, a culture of dissent, a culture of basically non-conformism, which was not known before. So I do believe that even things like that are very much the children of '68 — nevertheless that most of us had been even not born then. But after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s. And nevertheless that many people on the left try to hate it, the truth is that it was very much the market revolution that sent the message: ""The government does not know better."" And you have more choice-driven societies. And of course, you have 1989 — the end of Communism, the end of the Cold War. And it was the birth of the global world. And you have the Internet. And this is not the audience to which I'm going to preach to what extent the Internet empowered people. It has changed the way we are communicating and basically we are viewing politics. The very idea of political community totally has changed. And I'm going to name one more revolution, and this is the revolution in brain sciences, which totally changed the way we understand how people are making decisions.So this is what went right. But if we're going to see what went wrong, we're going to end up with the same five revolutions. Because first you have the 1960s and 1970s, cultural and social revolution, which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose. The very idea, all these collective nouns that we have been taught about — nation, class, family. We start to like divorcing, if we're married at all. All this was very much under attack. And it is so difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand.And you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies. Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality. And I find this very much disturbing when we're talking about what's going on right and wrong with democracy these days.And if you go to 1989 — something that basically you don't expect that anybody's going to criticize — but many are going to tell you, ""Listen, it was the end of the Cold War that tore the social contract between the elites and the people in Western Europe."" When the Soviet Union was still there, the rich and the powerful, they needed the people, because they feared them. Now the elites basically have been liberated. They're very mobile. You cannot tax them. And basically they don't fear the people. So as a result of it, you have this very strange situation in which the elites basically got out of the control of the voters. So this is not by accident that the voters are not interested to vote anymore.And when we talk about the Internet, yes, it's true, the Internet connected all of us, but we also know that the Internet created these echo chambers and political ghettos in which for all your life you can stay with the political community you belong to. And it's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you. I know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation, but [have you] seen what the digital world has done to American politics these days? This is also partly a result of the Internet revolution. This is the other side of the things that we like.And when you go to the brain sciences, what political consultants learned from the brain scientists is don't talk to me about ideas anymore, don't talk to me about policy programs. What really matters is basically to manipulate the emotions of the people. And you have this very strongly to the extent that, even if you see when we talk about revolutions these days, these revolutions are not named anymore around ideologies or ideas. Before, revolutions used to have ideological names. They could be communist, they could be liberal, they could be fascist or Islamic. Now the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used. You have Facebook revolutions, Twitter revolutions. The content doesn't matter anymore, the problem is the media.I'm saying this because one of my major points is what went right is also what went wrong. And when we're now trying to see how we can change the situation, when basically we're trying to see what can be done about democracy, we should keep this ambiguity in mind. Because probably some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most. These days it's very popular to believe that this push for transparency, this kind of a combination between active citizens, new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics. You believe that when you have these new technologies and people who are ready to use this, it can make it much more difficult for the governments to lie, it's going to be more difficult for them to steal and probably even going to be more difficult for them to kill. This is probably true. But I do believe that we should be also very clear that now when we put the transparency at the center of politics where the message is, ""It's transparency, stupid.""Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions. Transparency is politics' management of mistrust. We are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust. And by the way, mistrust was always very important for democracy. This is why you have checks and balances. This is why basically you have all this creative mistrust between the representatives and those whom they represent. But when politics is only management of mistrust, then — I'm very glad that ""1984"" has been mentioned — now we're going to have ""1984"" in reverse. It's not going to be the Big Brother watching you, it's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class.But is this the idea of a free society? For example, can you imagine that decent, civic, talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust? Are you not afraid with all these technologies that are going to track down any statement the politicians are going to make on certain issues, are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions, even the very wrong positions, because consistency is going to be more important than common sense? And the Americans who are in the room, are you not afraid that your presidents are going to govern on the basis of what they said in the primary elections?I find this extremely important, because democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions. And we can lose this with the very noble idea to keep people accountable for showing the people that we're not going to tolerate politicians the opportunism in politics. So for me this is extremely important. And I do believe that when we're discussing politics these days, probably it makes sense to look also at this type of a story.But also don't forget, any unveiling is also veiling. [Regardless of] how transparent our governments want to be, they're going to be selectively transparent. In a small country that could be my country, but could be also your country, they took a decision — it is a real case story — that all of the governmental decisions, discussions of the council of ministers, were going to be published on the Internet 24 hours after the council discussions took place. And the public was extremely all for it. So I had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister, why he made this decision. He said, ""Listen, this is the best way to keep the mouths of my ministers closed. Because it's going to be very difficult for them to dissent knowing that 24 hours after this is going to be on the public space, and this is in a certain way going to be a political crisis.""So when we talk about transparency, when we talk about openness, I really do believe that what we should keep in mind is that what went right is what went wrong. And this is Goethe, who is neither Bulgarian nor a political scientist, some centuries ago he said, ""There is a big shadow where there is much light.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ivan_krastev_can_democracy_exist_without_trust
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"(Video) Newscaster: There's a large path of destruction here in town. ... pulling trees from the ground, shattering windows, taking the roofs off of homes ...Caitria O'Neill: That was me in front of our house in Monson, Massachusetts last June. After an EF3 tornado ripped straight through our town and took parts of our roof off, I decided to stay in Massachusetts, instead of pursuing the master's program I had moved my boxes home that afternoon for.Morgan O'Neill: So, on June 1, we weren't disaster experts, but on June 3, we started faking it. This experience changed our lives, and now we're trying to change the experience.CO: So, tornadoes don't happen in Massachusetts, and I was cleverly standing in the front yard when one came over the hill. After a lamppost flew by, my family and I sprinted into the basement. Trees were thrown against the house, the windows exploded. When we finally got out the back door, transformers were burning in the street.MO: I was here in Boston. I'm a PhD student at MIT, and I happen to study atmospheric science. Actually, it gets weirder — I was in the museum of science at the time the tornado hit, playing with the tornado display —(Laughter)so I missed her call. I get a call from Caitria, hear the news, and start tracking the radar online to call the family back when another supercell was forming in their area. I drove home late that night with batteries and ice. We live across the street from a historic church that had lost its very iconic steeple in the storm. It had become a community gathering place overnight. The town hall and the police department had also suffered direct hits, and so people wanting to help or needing information went to the church.CO: We walked to the church because we heard they had hot meals, but when we arrived, we found problems. There were a couple large, sweaty men with chainsaws standing in the center of the church, but nobody knew where to send them because no one knew the extent of the damage yet. As we watched, they became frustrated and left to go find somebody to help on their own.MO: So we started organizing. Why? It had to be done. We found Pastor Bob and offered to give the response some infrastructure. And then, armed with just two laptops and one air card, we built a recovery machine.(Applause)CO: That was a tornado, and everyone's heading to the church to drop things off and volunteer.MO: Everyone's donating clothing. We should inventory the donations piling up here.CO: And we need a hotline. Can you make a Google Voice number?MO: Sure. And we need to tell people what not to bring. I'll make a Facebook account. Can you print flyers?CO: Yeah, but we don't even know what houses are accepting help. We need to canvas and send out volunteers.MO: We need to tell people what not to bring. Hey, there's a news truck. I'll tell them. CO: You got my number off the news? We don't need more freezers!(Together) MO: Insurance won't cover it? CO: Juice boxes coming in an hour? Together: Someone get me Post-its!(Laughter)CO: And then the rest of the community figured out that we had answers.MO: I can donate three water heaters, but someone needs to come pick them up.CO: My car is in my living room!MO: My boyscout troop would like to rebuild 12 mailboxes.CO: My puppy is missing and insurance doesn't cover chimneys.MO: My church group of 50 would like housing and meals for a week while we repair properties.CO: You sent me to that place on Washington Street yesterday, and now I'm covered in poison ivy.(Laughter)So this is what filled our days. We had to learn how to answer questions quickly and to solve problems in a minute or less; otherwise, something more urgent would come up, and it wouldn't get done.MO: We didn't get our authority from the board of selectmen or the emergency management director or the United Way. We just started answering questions and making decisions because someone — anyone — had to. And why not me? I'm a campaign organizer. I'm good at Facebook. And there's two of me.(Laughter)CO: The point is, if there's a flood or a fire or a hurricane, you, or somebody like you, are going to step up and start organizing things. The other point is that it is hard.MO: Lying on the ground after another 17-hour day, Caitria and I would empty our pockets and try to place dozens of scraps of paper into context — all bits of information that had to be remembered and matched in order to help someone. After another day and a shower at the shelter, we realized it shouldn't be this hard.CO: In a country like ours where we breathe Wi-Fi, leveraging technology for a faster recovery should be a no-brainer. Systems like the ones that we were creating on the fly could exist ahead of time. And if some community member is in this organizing position in every area after every disaster, these tools should exist.MO: So, we decided to build them: a recovery in a box, something that could be deployed after every disaster by any local organizer.CO: I decided to stay in the country, give up the master's in Moscow and to work full-time to make this happen. In the course of the past year, we've become experts in the field of community-powered disaster recovery. And there are three main problems that we've observed with the way things work currently.MO: The tools.Large aid organizations are exceptional at bringing massive resources to bear after a disaster, but they often fulfill very specific missions, and then they leave. This leaves local residents to deal with the thousands of spontaneous volunteers, thousands of donations, and all with no training and no tools. So they use Post-its or Excel or Facebook. But none of these tools allow you to value high-priority information amidst all of the photos and well-wishes.CO: The timing. Disaster relief is essentially a backwards political campaign. In a political campaign, you start with no interest and no capacity to turn that into action. You build both gradually, until a moment of peak mobilization at the time of the election. In a disaster, however, you start with all of the interest and none of the capacity. And you've only got about seven days to capture 50 percent of all of the Web searches that will ever be made to help your area. Then some sporting event happens, and you've got only the resources that you've collected thus far to meet the next five years of recovery needs.This is the slide for Katrina. This is the curve for Joplin. And this is the curve for the Dallas tornadoes in April, where we deployed software. There's a gap here. Affected households have to wait for the insurance adjuster to visit before they can start accepting help on their properties. And you've only got about four days of interest in Dallas.MO: Data. Data is inherently unsexy, but it can jump-start an area's recovery. FEMA and the state will pay 85 percent of the cost of a federally-declared disaster, leaving the town to pay the last 15 percent of the bill. Now that expense can be huge, but if the town can mobilize X amount of volunteers for Y hours, the dollar value of that labor used goes toward the town's contribution. But who knows that? Now try to imagine the sinking feeling you get when you've just sent out 2,000 volunteers and you can't prove it.CO: These are three problems with a common solution. If we can get the right tools at the right time to the people who will inevitably step up and start putting their communities back together, we can create new standards in disaster recovery.MO: We needed canvasing tools, donations databasing, needs reporting, remote volunteer access, all in an easy-to-use website.CO: And we needed help. Alvin, our software engineer and co-founder, has built these tools. Chris and Bill have volunteered their time to use operations and partnerships. And we've been flying into disaster areas since this past January, setting up software, training residents and licensing the software to areas that are preparing for disasters.MO: One of our first launches was after the Dallas tornadoes this past April. We flew into a town that had a static, outdated website and a frenetic Facebook feed, trying to structure the response, and we launched our platform. All of the interest came in the first four days, but by the time they lost the news cycle, that's when the needs came in, yet they had this massive resource of what people were able to give and they've been able to meet the needs of their residents.CO: So it's working, but it could be better. Emergency preparedness is a big deal in disaster recovery because it makes towns safer and more resilient. Imagine if we could have these systems ready to go in a place before a disaster. So that's what we're working on. We're working on getting the software to places so people expect it, so people know how to use it and so it can be filled ahead of time with that micro-information that drives recovery.MO: It's not rocket science. These tools are obvious and people want them. In our hometown, we trained a half-dozen residents to run these Web tools on their own, because Caitria and I live here, in Boston. They took to it immediately, and now they are forces of nature. There are over three volunteer groups working almost every day, and have been since June 1 of last year, to make sure these residents get what they need and get back in their homes. They have hotlines and spreadsheets and data.CO: And that makes a difference. June 1 this year marked the one-year anniversary of the Monson tornado, and our community's never been more connected or more empowered. We've been able to see the same transformation in Texas and in Alabama. Because it doesn't take Harvard or MIT to fly in and fix problems after a disaster; it takes a local. No matter how good an aid organization is at what they do, they eventually have to go home. But if you give locals the tools, if you show them what they can do to recover, they become experts.(Applause)MO: All right. Let's go.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caitria_and_morgan_o_neill_how_to_step_up_in_the_face_of_disaster
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"The story starts: I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. And it used to be, back in the '50s, a very slim pamphlet. And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long. And it lists currently 374 mental disorders.So I was leafing through it, wondering if I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12.(Laughter)I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, ""You're a failure!""(Laughter)I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for.(Laughter)I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding. And I've got malingering. And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.Anyway, I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. I didn't know which of these was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting, and I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view, which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists.(Laughter)It was a man called Brian, who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies. They're called the CCHR. And I said to him, ""Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can't be trusted?"" And he said, ""Yes, we can prove it to you."" And I said, ""How?"" And he said, ""We're going to introduce you to Tony."" And I said, ""Who's Tony?"" And he said, ""Tony's in Broadmoor."" Now, Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital. It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It's where they send the serial killers, and the people who can't help themselves. And I said to Brian, ""Well, what did Tony do?"" And he said, ""Hardly anything. He beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. But he faked it too well, and now he's stuck in Broadmoor and nobody will believe he's sane. Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?"" So I said, ""Yes, please.""So I got the train to Broadmoor. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious, they yawn uncontrollably. And we got to Broadmoor. And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients. It looks like a giant Hampton Inn. It's all peach and pine and calming colors. And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons. And the patients started drifting in. And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants, and quite docile-looking. And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me, ""They're medicated,"" which, to the Scientologists, is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea.(Laughter)And then Brian said, ""Here's Tony."" And a man was walking in. And he wasn't overweight, he was in very good physical shape. And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit. And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice. He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane.And he sat down. And I said, ""So is it true that you faked your way in here?"" And he said, ""Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I beat someone up when I was 17. And I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, 'You know what you have to do? Fake madness. Tell them you're mad, you'll get sent to some cushy hospital. Nurses will bring you pizzas, you'll have your own PlayStation.'"" I said, ""Well, how did you do it?"" He said, ""Well, I asked to see the prison psychiatrist. And I'd just seen a film called 'Crash,' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.'"" And I said, ""What else?"" He said, ""Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died, because it would make me feel more normal."" I said, ""Where'd you get that from?"" He said, ""Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library.""Anyway, he faked madness too well, he said. And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital. They sent him to Broadmoor. And the minute he got there, said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said, ""There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I'm not mentally ill."" I said, ""How long have you been here for?"" He said, ""Well, if I'd just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got five years. I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years.""Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. He said, ""I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what's on TV. I subscribe to New Scientist, and recently they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written: 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.'""(Laughter)He said, ""You know, they're always looking out for nonverbal clues to my mental state. But how do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? It's just impossible."" When Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, ""Am I sitting like a journalist? Am I crossing my legs like a journalist?""He said, ""You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me. So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening. And they take that as a sign of madness. They say it proves that I'm aloof and grandiose."" So, only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness. Anyway, he seemed completely normal to me, but what did I know?And when I got home I emailed his clinician, Anthony Maden. I said, ""What's the story?"" And he said, ""Yep. We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence, because his hallucinations — that had seemed quite cliche to begin with — just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor. However, we have assessed him, and we've determined that what he is is a psychopath."" And in fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath. It's on the checklist: cunning, manipulative. So, faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong. And I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstripe suit — classic psychopath — speaks to items one and two on the checklist: glibness, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth. And I said, ""Well, but why didn't he hang out with the other patients?"" Classic psychopath — it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy. So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way. He was a psychopath.And his clinician said to me, ""If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath-spotting course run by Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist."" So I did. I went on a psychopath-spotting course, and I am now a certified — and I have to say, extremely adept — psychopath spotter.So, here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath. So there's 1,500 people in his room. Fifteen of you are psychopaths. Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, so I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room. It could be carnage by the end of the night.(Laughter)Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior — the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative. In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all. Hare said, ""You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That's not a big story. The big story,"" he said, ""is corporate psychopathy. You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths.""So I gave it a try. I wrote to the Enron people. I said, ""Could I come and interview you in prison, to find out it you're psychopaths?""(Laughter)And they didn't reply.(Laughter)So I changed tack. I emailed ""Chainsaw Al"" Dunlap, the asset stripper from the 1990s. He would come into failing businesses and close down 30 percent of the workforce, just turn American towns into ghost towns. And I emailed him and I said, ""I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you ... special, and interested in the predatory spirit, and fearless. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?"" And he said, ""Come on over!""(Laughter)So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion. It was filled with sculptures of predatory animals. There were lions and tigers — he was taking me through the garden — there were falcons and eagles, he was saying, ""Over there you've got sharks and —"" he was saying this in a less effeminate way — ""You've got more sharks and you've got tigers."" It was like Narnia.(Laughter)And then we went into his kitchen. Now, Al Dunlap would be brought in to save failing companies, he'd close down 30 percent of the workforce. And he'd quite often fire people with a joke. Like, for instance, one famous story about him, somebody came up to him and said, ""I've just bought myself a new car."" And he said, ""Well, you may have a new car, but I'll tell you what you don't have — a job.""So in his kitchen — he was in there with his wife, Judy, and his bodyguard, Sean — and I said, ""You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?"" He said, ""Yeah, it's an amazing theory, it's like Star Trek. You're going where no man has gone before."" And I said, ""Well —"" (Clears throat)(Laughter)Some psychologists might say that this makes you —"" (Mumbles)(Laughter)And he said, ""What?"" And I said, ""A psychopath."" And I said, ""I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket. Can I go through them with you?""And he looked intrigued despite himself, and he said, ""Okay, go on."" And I said, ""Okay. Grandiose sense of self-worth."" Which I have to say, would have been hard for him to deny, because he was standing under a giant oil painting of himself.(Laughter)He said, ""Well, you've got to believe in you!"" And I said, ""Manipulative."" He said, ""That's leadership.""(Laughter)And I said, ""Shallow affect, an inability to experience a range of emotions."" He said, ""Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions?"" So he was going down the psychopath checklist, basically turning it into ""Who Moved My Cheese?""(Laughter)But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap. Whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal — like he said ""no"" to juvenile delinquency, he said he got accepted into West Point, and they don't let delinquents in West Point. He said ""no"" to many short-term marital relationships. He's only ever been married twice. Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like, but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument, and his second marriage has lasted 41 years. So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic, I thought to myself, well I'm not going to put that in my book. And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic. Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked ""Psychopath."" I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.And I realized, my God — this is what I've been doing for 20 years. It's what all journalists do. We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee's personality. And we stitch them together like medieval monks, and we leave the normal stuff on the floor. And you know, this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely. Childhood bipolar — children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist.When I got back to London, Tony phoned me. He said, ""Why haven't you been returning my calls?"" I said, ""Well, they say that you're a psychopath."" And he said, ""I'm not a psychopath."" He said, ""You know what? One of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative. So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft, they turn everything upside-down."" He said, ""I've got a tribunal coming up. Will you come to it?"" So I said okay.So I went to his tribunal. And after 14 years in Broadmoor, they let him go. They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism. So they let him go. And outside in the corridor he said to me, ""You know what, Jon? Everyone's a bit psychopathic."" He said, ""You are, I am. Well, obviously I am."" I said, ""What are you going to do now?"" He said, ""I'm going to go to Belgium. There's a woman there that I fancy. But she's married, so I'm going to have to get her split up from her husband.""(Laughter)Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended. And for the last 20 months, everything was fine. Nothing bad happened. He was living with a girl outside London. He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time, which I know sounds ominous, but isn't necessarily ominous. Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month. He got into a ""fracas"" in a bar, he called it. Ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was, it wasn't too bad.And then he phoned me. And you know what, I think it's right that Tony is out. Because you shouldn't define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is he's a semi-psychopath. He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity. It's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth. And Tony said to me, ""Jon, could I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me."" And I didn't go. What would you have done?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_strange_answers_to_the_psychopath_test
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"I've got a great idea that's going to change the world. It's fantastic, it's going to blow your mind. It's my beautiful baby. Here's the thing: everybody loves a beautiful baby. I mean, I was a beautiful baby. Here's me and my dad a couple days after I was born.So in the world of product design, the beautiful baby's like the concept car. It's the knockout. You see it and you go, ""Oh, my God. I'd buy that in a second!"" So why is it that this year's new cars look pretty much exactly like last year's new cars?(Laughter)What went wrong between the design studio and the factory? Today, I don't want to talk about beautiful babies, I want to talk about the awkward adolescence of design — those sort of dorky teenage years where you're trying to figure out how the world works.I'm going to start with an example from some work that we did on newborn health. So here's a problem: four million babies around the world, mostly in developing countries, die every year before their first birthday, even before their first month of life. It turns out half of those kids, or about 1.8 million newborns around the world, would make it if you could just keep them warm for the first three days, maybe the first week.So this is a newborn intensive care unit in Kathmandu, Nepal. All of these kids in blankets belong in incubators — something like this. This is a donated Japanese Atom incubator that we found in a NICU in Kathmandu. This is what we want. Probably what happened is a hospital in Japan upgraded their equipment and donated their old stuff to Nepal. The problem is, without technicians, without spare parts, donations like this very quickly turn into junk.So this seemed like a problem that we could do something about. Keeping a baby warm for a week — that's not rocket science. So we got started. We partnered with a leading medical research institution here in Boston. We conducted months of user research overseas, trying to think like designers, human-centered design — ""Let's figure out what people want."" We killed thousands of Post-it notes. We made dozens of prototypes to get to this. So this is the NeoNurture infant incubator, and this has a lot of smarts built into it, and we felt great.So the idea here is, unlike the concept car, we want to marry something beautiful with something that actually works. And our idea is that this design would inspire manufacturers and other people of influence to take this model and run with it.Here's the bad news: the only baby ever actually put inside the NeoNurture incubator was this kid during a Time magazine photo shoot. So recognition is fantastic. We want design to get out for people to see it. It won lots of awards. But it felt like a booby prize. We wanted to make beautiful things that are going to make the world a better place, and I don't think this kid was even in it long enough to get warm.So it turns out that design  for inspiration doesn't really ... I guess what I would say is, for us, for what I want to do, it's either too slow or it just doesn't work, it's ineffective. So, really, I want to design for outcomes. I don't want to make beautiful stuff; I want to make the world a better place. So when we were designing NeoNurture, we paid a lot of attention to the people who are going to use this thing, for example, poor families, rural doctors, overloaded nurses, even repair technicians. We thought we had all our bases covered, we'd done everything right.Well, it turns out there's this whole constellation of people who have to be involved in a product for it to be successful: manufacturing, financing, distribution, regulation. Michael Free at PATH says you have to figure out who will ""choose, use and pay the dues"" for a product like this. And I have to ask the question that VCs always ask: ""Sir, what is your business, and who is your customer?""Who is our customer? Well, here's an example. This is a Bangladeshi hospital director outside his facility. It turns out he doesn't buy any of his equipment. Those decisions are made by the Ministry of Health or by foreign donors, and it just kind of shows up. Similarly, here's a multinational medical-device manufacturer. It turns out they've got to fish where the fish are. So it turns out that in emerging markets — where the fish are — are the emerging middle class of these countries — diseases of affluence: heart disease, infertility. So it turns out that design for outcomes in one aspect really means thinking about design for manufacture and distribution. OK, that was an important lesson.Second, we took that lesson and tried to push it into our next project. So we started by finding a manufacturer, an organization called MTTS in Vietnam, that manufactures newborn-care technologies for Southeast Asia. Our other partner is East Meets West, an American foundation that distributes that technology to poor hospitals around that region.So we started with them, saying, ""Well, what do you want? What's a problem you want to solve?"" And they said, ""Let's work on newborn jaundice."" So this is another one of these mind-boggling global problems. Jaundice affects two-thirds of newborns around the world. Of those newborns, one in 10 roughly, if it's not treated, the jaundice gets so severe that it leads to either a life-long disability, or the kids could even die. There's one way to treat jaundice, and that's what's called an exchange transfusion. So as you can imagine, that's expensive and a little bit dangerous.There is another cure. It's very technological, it's very complex, a little daunting. You've got to shine blue light on the kid.(Laughter)Bright blue light on as much of the skin as you can cover. How is this a hard problem? I went to MIT. OK, we'll figure that out.(Laughter)So here's an example. This is an overhead phototherapy device that's designed for American hospitals, and here's how it's supposed to be used. It's over the baby, illuminating a single patient. Take it out of an American hospital, send it overseas to a crowded facility in Asia, here's how it's actually used. The effectiveness of phototherapy is a function of light intensity. These dark blue squares show you where it's effective phototherapy. Here's what it looks like under actual use. So those kids on the edges aren't actually receiving effective phototherapy. But without training, without some kind of light meter, how would you know?We see other examples of problems like this. Here's a neonatal intensive care unit, where moms come in to visit their babies. And keep in mind that Mom maybe just had a C-section, so that's already kind of a bummer. Mom's visiting her kid. She sees her baby naked, lying under some blue lights, looking kind of vulnerable. It's not uncommon for Mom to put a blanket over the baby. From a phototherapy standpoint, maybe not the best behavior. In fact, that sounds kind of dumb. Except, what we've learned is that there's no such thing as a dumb user — there are only dumb products.We have to think like existentialists: it's not the painting we would have painted, it's the painting that we actually painted. It's the use — designed for actual use. How are people actually going to use this?So, similarly, when we think about our partner MTTS, they've made some amazing technologies for treating newborn illnesses. So here's an overhead warmer and a CPAP. They're inexpensive, really rugged. They've treated 50,000 kids in Vietnam with this technology. But here's the problem: Every doctor in the world, every hospital administrator, has seen TV — curse those ""ER"" reruns! Turns out they all know what a medical device is supposed to look like. They want Buck Rogers, they don't want effective. It sounds crazy, it sounds dumb, but there are actually hospitals who would rather have no equipment than something that looks cheap and crummy. So again, if we want people to trust a device, it has to look trustworthy.So thinking about outcomes, it turns out appearances matter. We took all that information together. We tried, this time, to get it right. And here's what we developed. This is the Firefly phototherapy device, except this time, we didn't stop at the concept car. From the very beginning, we started by talking to manufacturers. Our goal is to make a state-of-the-art product that our partner MTTS can actually manufacture. Our goal is to study how they work, the resources they have access to, so that they can make this product.So that's the design for manufacture question. When we think about actual use, you'll notice that Firefly has a single bassinet. It only fits a single baby, and the idea here is it's obvious how you ought to use this device. If you try to put more than one kid in, you're stacking them on top of each other.(Laughter)So the idea here is you want to make it hard to use wrong. In other words, you want to make the right way to use it the easiest way to use it. Another example — again, silly Mom. Silly Mom thinks her baby looks cold, wants to put a blanket over the baby. That's why we have lights above and below the baby in Firefly, so if Mom does put a blanket over the baby, it's still receiving effective phototherapy from below.Last story here: I've got a friend in India who told me that you haven't really tested a piece of electronic technology for distribution in Asia, until you've trained a cockroach to climb in and pee on every single little component on the inside.(Laughter)You think it's funny. I had a laptop in the Peace Corps, and the screen had all these dead pixels on it. And one day I looked in — they were all dead ants that had gotten into my laptop and perished. Those poor ants.(Laughter)So with Firefly, what we did is — the problem is electronics get hot, and you have to put in vents or fans to keep them cool — in most products. We decided we can't put a ""Do not enter"" sign next to the vent. We actually got rid of all that stuff. So Firefly's totally sealed.These are the kinds of lessons — as awkward as it was to be a pretty goofy teenager, much worse to be a frustrated designer. So I was thinking, ""What I really want to do is change the world. I have to pay attention to manufacturing and distribution. I have to pay attention to how people are actually going to use a device. I actually have to pay attention. There's no excuse for failure.I have to think like an existentialist. I have to accept that there are no dumb users, only dumb products."" We have to ask ourselves hard questions. Are we designing for the world that we want? Are we designing for the world that we have? Are we designing for the world that's coming, whether we're ready or not?I got into this business designing products. I've since learned that if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to design outcomes. And that's design that matters.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/timothy_prestero_design_for_people_not_awards
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"I worked on a film called ""Apollo 13,"" and when I worked on this film, I discovered something about how our brains work, and how our brains work is that, when we're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever, it changes and alters our perception of things. It changes what we see. It changes what we remember. And as an experiment, because I dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a Saturn V launch for this particular movie, because I put it out there, I felt a little nervous about it, so I need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage, and when I played this stock footage, I simply wanted to find out what people remembered, what was memorable about it? What should I actually try to replicate? What should I try to emulate to some degree?So this is the footage that I was showing everybody. And what I discovered is, because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we're doing this film, there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things. When I showed it, and I asked, immediately after the screening was over, what they thought of it, what was your memorable shots, they changed them. They were — had camera moves on them. They had all kinds of things. Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description? And what I discovered is, what I should do is not actually replicate what they saw, is replicate what they remembered.So this is our footage of the launch, based on, basically, taking notes, asking people what they thought, and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like, but not what it really looked like. So this is what we created for ""Apollo 13.""(Launch noises)So literally what you're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people, a bunch of different memories, including my own, of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter. I basically shot everything with short lenses, which means that you're very close to the action, but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance, so I was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you haven't really quite seen before. (Music) And then I'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it.(Music)Tom Hanks: Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey. It's good to see you again. (Cheers) (Music)Rob Legato: I pretend they're clapping for me.(Laughter)So now I'm in a parking lot. Basically it's a tin can, and I'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers, fire, I have wax that I threw in front of the lens to look like ice, and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were reacting to, what you're emoting to, is something that's a total falsehood, and I found that really kind of fascinating.And in this particular case, this is the climax of the movie, and, you know, the weight of achieving it was simply take a model, throw it out of a helicopter, and shoot it. And that's simply what I did. That's me shooting, and I'm a fairly mediocre operator, so I got that nice sense of verisimilitude, of a kind of, you know, following the rocket all the way down, and giving that little sort of edge, I was desperately trying to keep it in frame. So then I come up to the next thing. We had a NASA consultant who was actually an astronaut, who was actually on some of the missions, of Apollo 15, and he was there to basically double check my science. And, I guess somebody thought they needed to do that.(Laughter)I don't know why, but they thought they did.So we were, he's a hero, he's an astronaut, and we're all sort of excited, and, you know, I gave myself the liberty of saying, you know, some of the shots I did didn't really suck that bad. And so maybe, you know, we were feeling kind of a little good about it, so I brought him in here, and he needed to really check and see what we were doing, and basically give us our A plus report card, and so I showed him some shots we were working on, and waiting for the reaction that you hope for, which is what I got. (Music) (Launch noises) So I showed him these two shots, and then he basically told me what he thought.(""That's wrong"") (Laughter)Okay. (Laughter) It's what you dream about.(Laughter)So what I got from him is, he turned to me and said, ""You would never, ever design a rocket like that. You would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out. Can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that? You would never, ever design a rocket like that."" And he was looking at me. It's like, Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of America's finest moments with fire extinguishers.(Laughter)And I'm not going to argue with you. You're an astronaut, a hero, and I'm from New Jersey, so —(Laughter)I'm just going to show you some footage. I'm just going to show you some footage, and tell me what you think. And then I did kind of get the reaction I was hoping for.So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on. This is Apollo 15. This was his mission. So I showed him this, and the reaction I got was interesting.(""That's wrong too."") (Laughter)So, and what happened was, I mean, what I sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently. He remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system, perfectly safe rocket launch, because he's sitting in a rocket that has, like, a hundred thousand pounds of thrust, built by the lowest bidder. He was hoping it was going to work out okay.(Laughter) (Applause)So he twisted his memory around.Now, Ron Howard ran into Buzz Aldrin, who was not on the movie, so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage, and he just responded as he would respond, and I'll run this.Ron Howard: Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, ""Hey, that launch footage, I saw some shots I'd never seen before. Did you guys, what vault did you find that stuff in?"" And I said, ""Well, no vault, Buzz, we generated all that from scratch.""And he said, ""Huh, that's pretty good. Can we use it?""(Explosion) (""Sure"") (Laughter)RL: I think he's a great American.(Laughter)So, ""Titanic"" was, if you don't know the story, doesn't end well.(Laughter)Jim Cameron actually photographed the real Titanic. So he basically set up, or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief, because what he photographed was the real thing, a Mir sub going down, or actually two Mir subs going down to the real wreck, and he created this very haunting footage. It's really beautiful, and it conjures up all these various different emotions, but he couldn't photograph everything, and to tell the story, I had to fill in the gaps, which is now rather daunting, because now I have to recreate back to back what really happened and I had, I'm the only one who could really blow it at that point.So this is the footage he photographed, and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring. So I'm going to just let it run, so you kind of absorb this sort of thing, and I'll describe my sort of reactions when I was looking at it for the very first time. I got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life. I automatically wanted to see this ship, this magnificent ship, basically in all its glory, and conversely, I wanted to see it not in all its glory, basically go back to what it looks like.So I conjured up an effect that I'm later going to show you what I tried to do, which is kind of the heart of the movie, for me, and so that's why I wanted to do the movie, that's why I wanted to create the sort of things I created.And I'll show you, you know, another thing that I found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a look at it. So here's the behind the scenes, a couple of little shots here. So, when you saw my footage, you were seeing this: basically, a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down, and the little Mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs, and shot in smoke. Jim went three miles went down, and I went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage.And so, but what you're emoting to, or what you're looking at, had the same feeling, the same haunting quality, that Jim's footage had, so I found it so fascinating that our brains sort of, once you believe something's real, you transfer everything that you feel about it, this quality you have, and it's totally artificial. It's totally make-believe, yet it's not to you, and I found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use, and it caused me to create the next effect that I'll show you, which is this sort of magic transition, and all I was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect, so it became a seamless experience for them, that I wasn't showing you my sort of interpretation, I was showing you what you wanted to see. And the very next shot, right after this — So you can see what I was doing.So basically, if there's two subs in the same shot, I shot it, because where's the camera coming from? And when Jim shot it, it was only one sub, because he was photographing from the other, and I don't remember if I did this or Jim did this. I'll give it to Jim, because he could use the pat on the back.(Laughter)Okay. So now the Titanic transition. So this is what I was referring to where I wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the Titanic to the other. So I'll just play the shot once. (Music)(Music)And what I was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you.Gloria Stuart: That was the last time Titanic ever saw daylight.RL: So, what I did is basically I had another screening room experience where I was basically tracking where I was looking, or where we were looking, and of course you're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship, and then at some point, I'm changing the periphery of the shot, I'm changing, it's becoming the rusted wreck, and then I would run it every day, and then I would find exactly the moment that I stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it, and the moment my eye shifted, we just marked it to the frame. The moment my eye shifted, I immediately started to change them, so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped. And so I'll just show it one more time. (Music) And it's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us, which is, as soon as you shift your attention, something changes, and then I left the little scarf going, because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot, really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck, essentially. That's where they were buried forever.Or something like that. I just made that up.(Laughter)It was, incidentally, the last time I ever saw daylight. It was a long film to work on. (Laughter)Now, ""Hugo"" was another interesting movie, because the movie itself is about film illusions. It's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture, and one of the things I had to do is, we — Sasha Baron Cohen is a very clever, very smart guy, comedian, wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the Buster Keaton sort of slapstick things, and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train. Very dangerous, very impossible to do, and particularly on our stage, because there literally is no way to actually move this train, because it fits so snugly into our set.So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor.So this is the shot. That's a little video of what you're looking at there, which is our little test, so that's actually what you're seeing, and I thought it was sort of an interesting thing, because it was, part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which I can't take credit for. I'd love to but I can't, because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that, is I told Marty, and it's kind of one of those mind things that it's really hard to really get until you actually see it work, and I said, you know, what I was going to do, and he said, ""So, let me see if I can get this straight. The thing with the wheels? That doesn't move.""(Laughter) (Applause)""And the thing without the wheels, that moves.""Precisely. (Laughter)Brings me to the next, and final —Marty's not going to see this, is he? (Laughter) This isn't viewed outside of — (Laughter)The next illustration is something that, there's like all one shot theory. It's a very elegant way of telling a story, especially if you're following somebody on a journey, and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way, and what we wanted to do based on the shot in ""Goodfellas,"" which is one of the great shots ever, a Martin Scorsese film, of basically following Henry Hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk going through the Copacabana and being treated in a special way. He was the master of his universe, and we wanted Hugo to feel the same way, so we created this shot.(Music) That's Hugo. (Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the ""Goodfellas"" shot.So what you're now going to see is how we actually did it. It's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys. The one on the left is where the shot ends, and the shot on the right is where it takes over, and now we switch boys, so it went from Asa Butterfield, who's the star of the show, to his stand-in. (Music) I wouldn't say his stunt double. There's a crazy rig that we built for this. (Music) And so this is, and now this is set number three we're into, and then we're going to go into, basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot. Everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that, and it literally was done over five different sets, two different boys, different times, and it all had to feel like it was all one shot, and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on, and, you know, I was kind of proud of it when I was done, which is, you should never really be proud of stuff, I guess.So I was kind of proud of it, and I went to a friend of mine, and said, ""You know, this is, you know, kind of the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on. What do you think was the reason?""And he said, ""Because no one knows you had anything to do with it.""(Laughter)So, all I can say is, thank you, and that's my presentation for you. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_legato_the_art_of_creating_awe
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"In System D, this is a store, and what I mean by that is that this is a photograph I took in Makoko, shantytown in Lagos, Nigeria. It's built over the lagoon, and there are no streets where there can be stores to shop, and so the store comes to you.And in the same community, this is business synergy. This is the boat that that lady was paddling around in, and this artisan makes the boat and the paddles and sells directly to the people who need the boat and the paddles.And this is a global business. Ogandiro smokes fish in Makoko in Lagos, and I asked her, ""Where does the fish come from?"" And I thought she'd say, ""Oh, you know, up the lagoon somewhere, or maybe across Africa,"" but you'll be happy to know she said it came from here, it comes from the North Sea. It's caught here, frozen, shipped down to Lagos, smoked, and sold for a tiny increment of profit on the streets of Lagos.And this is a business incubator. This is Olusosun dump, the largest garbage dump in Lagos, and 2,000 people work here, and I found this out from this fellow, Andrew Saboru. Andrew spent 16 years scavenging materials on the dump, earned enough money to turn himself into a contract scaler, which meant he carried a scale and went around and weighed all the materials that people had scavenged from the dump. Now he's a scrap dealer. That's his little depot behind him, and he earns twice the Nigerian minimum wage.This is a shopping mall. This is Oshodi Market in Lagos. Jorge Luis Borges had a story called ""The Aleph,"" and the Aleph is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists, and for me, this image is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists.So, what am I talking about when I talk about System D? It's traditionally called the informal economy, the underground economy, the black market. I don't conceive of it that way. I think it's really important to understand that something like this is totally open. It's right there for you to find. All of this is happening openly, and aboveboard. There's nothing underground about it. It's our prejudgment that it's underground.I've pirated the term System D from the former French colonies. There's a word in French that is débrouillardise, that means to be self-reliant, and the former French colonies have turned that into System D for the economy of self-reliance, or the DIY economy.But governments hate the DIY economy, and that's why — I took this picture in 2007, and this is the same market in 2009 — and I think, when the organizers of this conference were talking about radical openness, they didn't mean that the streets should be open and the people should be gone.I think what we have is a pickle problem. I had a friend who worked at a pickle factory, and the cucumbers would come flying down this conveyer belt, and his job was to pick off the ones that didn't look so good and throw them in the bin labeled ""relish"" where they'd be crushed and mixed with vinegar and used for other kinds of profit. This is the pickle economy. We're all focusing on — this is a statistic from earlier this month in the Financial Times — we're all focusing on the luxury economy. It's worth 1.5 trillion dollars every year, and that's a vast amount of money, right? That's three times the Gross Domestic Product of Switzerland. So it's vast. But it should come with an asterisk, and the asterisk is that it excludes two thirds of the workers of the world. 1.8 billion people around the world work in the economy that is unregulated and informal. That's a huge number, and what does that mean? Well, it means if it were united in a single political system, one country, call it ""The United Street Sellers Republic,"" the U.S.S.R., or ""Bazaaristan,"" it would be worth 10 trillion dollars every year, and that would make it the second largest economy in the world, after the United States. And given that projections are that the bulk of economic growth over the next 15 years will come from emerging economies in the developing world, it could easily overtake the United States and become the largest economy in the world.So the implications of that are vast, because it means that this is where employment is — 1.8 billion people — and this is where we can create a more egalitarian world, because people are actually able to earn money and live and thrive, as Andrew Saboru did.Big businesses have recognized this, and what's fascinating about this slide, it's not that the guys can carry boxes on their heads and run around without dropping them off. it's that the Gala sausage roll is a product that's made by a global company called UAC foods that's active throughout Africa and the Middle East, but the Gala sausage roll is not sold in stores. UAC foods has recognized that it won't sell if it's in stores. It's only sold by a phalanx of street hawkers who run around the streets of Lagos at bus stations and in traffic jams and sell it as a snack, and it's been sold that way for 40 years. It's a business plan for a corporation.And it's not just in Africa. Here's Mr. Clean looking amorously at all the other Procter & Gamble products, and Procter & Gamble, you know, the statistic always cited is that Wal-Mart is their largest customer, and it's true, as one store, Wal-Mart buys 15 percent, thus 15 percent of Procter & Gamble's business is with Wal-Mart, but their largest market segment is something that they call ""high frequency stores,"" which is all these tiny kiosks and the lady in the canoe and all these other businesses that exist in System D, the informal economy, and Procter & Gamble makes 20 percent of its money from that market segment, and it's the only market segment that's growing. So Procter & Gamble says, ""We don't care whether a store is incorporated or registered or anything like that. We want our products in that store.""And then there's mobile phones. This is an ad for MTN, which is a South African multinational active in about 25 countries, and when they came into Nigeria — Nigeria is the big dog in Africa. One in seven Africans is a Nigerian, and so everyone wants in to the mobile phone market in Nigeria. And when MTN came in, they wanted to sell the mobile service like I get in the United States or like people get here in the U.K. or in Europe — expensive monthly plans, you get a phone, you pay overages, you're killed with fees — and their plan crashed and burned. And they went back to the drawing board, and they retooled, and they came up with another plan: We don't sell you the phone, we don't sell you the monthly plan. We only sell you airtime. And where's the airtime sold? It's sold at umbrella stands all over the streets, where people are unregistered, unlicensed, but MTN makes most of its profits, perhaps 90 percent of its profits, from selling through System D, the informal economy.And where do the phones come from? Well, they come from here. This is in Guangzhou, China, and if you go upstairs in this rather sleepy looking electronics mall, you find the Guangzhou Dashatou second-hand trade center, and if you go in there, you follow the guys with the muscles who are carrying the boxes, and where are they going? They're going to Eddy in Lagos. Now, most of the phones there are not second-hand at all. The name is a misnomer. Most of them are pirated. They have the name brand on them, but they're not manufactured by the name brand.Now, are there downsides to that? Well, I guess. You know, China has no — (Laughter) — no intellectual property, right? Versace without the vowels. Zhuomani instead of Armani. S. Guuuci, and — (Laughter) (Applause) All around the world this is how products are being distributed, so, for instance, in one street market on Rua 25 de Março in São Paulo, Brazil, you can buy fake designer glasses. You can buy cloned cologne. You can buy pirated DVDs, of course. You can buy New York Yankees caps in all sorts of unauthorized patterns. You can buy cuecas baratas, designer underwear that isn't really manufactured by a designer, and even pirated evangelical mixtapes. (Laughter)Now, businesses tend to complain about this, and their, they, I don't want to take away from their entire validity of complaining about it, but I did ask a major sneaker manufacturer earlier this year what they thought about piracy, and they told me, ""Well, you can't quote me on this, because if you quote me on this, I have to kill you,"" but they use piracy as market research. The sneaker manufacturer told me that if they find that Pumas are being pirated, or Adidas are being pirated and their sneakers aren't being pirated, they know they've done something wrong. (Laughter) So it's very important to them to track piracy exactly because of this, and the people who are buying, the pirates, are not their customers anyway, because their customers want the real deal.Now, there's another problem. This is a real street sign in Lagos, Nigeria. All of System D really doesn't pay taxes, right? And when I think about that, first of all I think that government is a social contract between the people and the government, and if the government isn't transparent, then the people aren't going to be transparent either, but also that we're blaming the little guy who doesn't pay his taxes, and we're not recognizing that everyone's fudging things all over the world, including some extremely respected businesses, and I'll give you one example. There was one company that paid 4,000 bribes in the first decade of this millennium, and a million dollars in bribes every business day, right? All over the world. And that company was the big German electronics giant Siemens. So this goes on in the formal economy as well as the informal economy, so it's wrong of us to blame — and I'm not singling out Siemens, I'm saying everyone does it. Okay?I just want to end by saying that if Adam Smith had framed out a theory of the flea market instead of the free market, what would be some of the principles?First, it would be to understand that it could be considered a cooperative, and this is a thought from the Brazilian legal scholar Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Cooperative development is a way forward.Secondly, from the [Austrian] anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend, facts are relative, and what is a massive right of self-reliance to a Nigerian businessperson is considered unauthorized and horrible to other people, and we have to recognize that there are differences in how people define things and what their facts are.And third is, and I'm taking this from the great American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, that alternate economies barter and different kinds of currency, alternate currencies are also very important, and he talked about buying what he needed just with his good looks.And so I just want to leave you there, and say that this economy is a tremendous force for global development and we need to think about it that way. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_neuwirth_the_power_of_the_informal_economy
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"I'd like to tell you about two games of chess. The first happened in 1997, in which Garry Kasparov, a human, lost to Deep Blue, a machine. To many, this was the dawn of a new era, one where man would be dominated by machine. But here we are, 20 years on, and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the iPad, not HAL.The second game was a freestyle chess tournament in 2005, in which man and machine could enter together as partners, rather than adversaries, if they so chose. At first, the results were predictable. Even a supercomputer was beaten by a grandmaster with a relatively weak laptop. The surprise came at the end. Who won? Not a grandmaster with a supercomputer, but actually two American amateurs using three relatively weak laptops. Their ability to coach and manipulate their computers to deeply explore specific positions effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of the grandmasters and the superior computational power of other adversaries. This is an astonishing result: average men, average machines beating the best man, the best machine. And anyways, isn't it supposed to be man versus machine? Instead, it's about cooperation, and the right type of cooperation.We've been paying a lot of attention to Marvin Minsky's vision for artificial intelligence over the last 50 years. It's a sexy vision, for sure. Many have embraced it. It's become the dominant school of thought in computer science. But as we enter the era of big data, of network systems, of open platforms, and embedded technology, I'd like to suggest it's time to reevaluate an alternative vision that was actually developed around the same time. I'm talking about J.C.R. Licklider's human-computer symbiosis, perhaps better termed ""intelligence augmentation,"" I.A.Licklider was a computer science titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology and the Internet. His vision was to enable man and machine to cooperate in making decisions, controlling complex situations without the inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. Note that word ""cooperate."" Licklider encourages us not to take a toaster and make it Data from ""Star Trek,"" but to take a human and make her more capable. Humans are so amazing — how we think, our non-linear approaches, our creativity, iterative hypotheses, all very difficult if possible at all for computers to do. Licklider intuitively realized this, contemplating humans setting the goals, formulating the hypotheses, determining the criteria, and performing the evaluation. Of course, in other ways, humans are so limited. We're terrible at scale, computation and volume. We require high-end talent management to keep the rock band together and playing. Licklider foresaw computers doing all the routinizable work that was required to prepare the way for insights and decision making.Silently, without much fanfare, this approach has been compiling victories beyond chess. Protein folding, a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess — there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe. This is a world-changing problem with huge implications for our ability to understand and treat disease. And for this task, supercomputer field brute force simply isn't enough. Foldit, a game created by computer scientists, illustrates the value of the approach. Non-technical, non-biologist amateurs play a video game in which they visually rearrange the structure of the protein, allowing the computer to manage the atomic forces and interactions and identify structural issues. This approach beat supercomputers 50 percent of the time and tied 30 percent of the time. Foldit recently made a notable and major scientific discovery by deciphering the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus. A protease that had eluded determination for over 10 years was solved was by three players in a matter of days, perhaps the first major scientific advance to come from playing a video game.Last year, on the site of the Twin Towers, the 9/11 memorial opened. It displays the names of the thousands of victims using a beautiful concept called ""meaningful adjacency."" It places the names next to each other based on their relationships to one another: friends, families, coworkers. When you put it all together, it's quite a computational challenge: 3,500 victims, 1,800 adjacency requests, the importance of the overall physical specifications and the final aesthetics. When first reported by the media, full credit for such a feat was given to an algorithm from the New York City design firm Local Projects. The truth is a bit more nuanced. While an algorithm was used to develop the underlying framework, humans used that framework to design the final result. So in this case, a computer had evaluated millions of possible layouts, managed a complex relational system, and kept track of a very large set of measurements and variables, allowing the humans to focus on design and compositional choices. So the more you look around you, the more you see Licklider's vision everywhere. Whether it's augmented reality in your iPhone or GPS in your car, human-computer symbiosis is making us more capable.So if you want to improve human-computer symbiosis, what can you do? You can start by designing the human into the process. Instead of thinking about what a computer will do to solve the problem, design the solution around what the human will do as well. When you do this, you'll quickly realize that you spent all of your time on the interface between man and machine, specifically on designing away the friction in the interaction. In fact, this friction is more important than the power of the man or the power of the machine in determining overall capability. That's why two amateurs with a few laptops handily beat a supercomputer and a grandmaster. What Kasparov calls process is a byproduct of friction. The better the process, the less the friction. And minimizing friction turns out to be the decisive variable.Or take another example: big data. Every interaction we have in the world is recorded by an ever growing array of sensors: your phone, your credit card, your computer. The result is big data, and it actually presents us with an opportunity to more deeply understand the human condition. The major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on, ""How do I store this data? How do I search this data? How do I process this data?"" These are necessary but insufficient questions. The imperative is not to figure out how to compute, but what to compute. How do you impose human intuition on data at this scale?Again, we start by designing the human into the process. When PayPal was first starting as a business, their biggest challenge was not, ""How do I send money back and forth online?"" It was, ""How do I do that without being defrauded by organized crime?"" Why so challenging? Because while computers can learn to detect and identify fraud based on patterns, they can't learn to do that based on patterns they've never seen before, and organized crime has a lot in common with this audience: brilliant people, relentlessly resourceful, entrepreneurial spirit — (Laughter) — and one huge and important difference: purpose. And so while computers alone can catch all but the cleverest fraudsters, catching the cleverest is the difference between success and failure.There's a whole class of problems like this, ones with adaptive adversaries. They rarely if ever present with a repeatable pattern that's discernable to computers. Instead, there's some inherent component of innovation or disruption, and increasingly these problems are buried in big data.For example, terrorism. Terrorists are always adapting in minor and major ways to new circumstances, and despite what you might see on TV, these adaptations, and the detection of them, are fundamentally human. Computers don't detect novel patterns and new behaviors, but humans do. Humans, using technology, testing hypotheses, searching for insight by asking machines to do things for them. Osama bin Laden was not caught by artificial intelligence. He was caught by dedicated, resourceful, brilliant people in partnerships with various technologies.As appealing as it might sound, you cannot algorithmically data mine your way to the answer. There is no ""Find Terrorist"" button, and the more data we integrate from a vast variety of sources across a wide variety of data formats from very disparate systems, the less effective data mining can be. Instead, people will have to look at data and search for insight, and as Licklider foresaw long ago, the key to great results here is the right type of cooperation, and as Kasparov realized, that means minimizing friction at the interface.Now this approach makes possible things like combing through all available data from very different sources, identifying key relationships and putting them in one place, something that's been nearly impossible to do before. To some, this has terrifying privacy and civil liberties implications. To others it foretells of an era of greater privacy and civil liberties protections, but privacy and civil liberties are of fundamental importance. That must be acknowledged, and they can't be swept aside, even with the best of intents.So let's explore, through a couple of examples, the impact that technologies built to drive human-computer symbiosis have had in recent time.In October, 2007, U.S. and coalition forces raided an al Qaeda safe house in the city of Sinjar on the Syrian border of Iraq. They found a treasure trove of documents: 700 biographical sketches of foreign fighters. These foreign fighters had left their families in the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa to join al Qaeda in Iraq. These records were human resource forms. The foreign fighters filled them out as they joined the organization. It turns out that al Qaeda, too, is not without its bureaucracy. (Laughter) They answered questions like, ""Who recruited you?"" ""What's your hometown?"" ""What occupation do you seek?""In that last question, a surprising insight was revealed. The vast majority of foreign fighters were seeking to become suicide bombers for martyrdom — hugely important, since between 2003 and 2007, Iraq had 1,382 suicide bombings, a major source of instability. Analyzing this data was hard. The originals were sheets of paper in Arabic that had to be scanned and translated. The friction in the process did not allow for meaningful results in an operational time frame using humans, PDFs and tenacity alone. The researchers had to lever up their human minds with technology to dive deeper, to explore non-obvious hypotheses, and in fact, insights emerged. Twenty percent of the foreign fighters were from Libya, 50 percent of those from a single town in Libya, hugely important since prior statistics put that figure at three percent. It also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in al Qaeda, Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior cleric in the Libyan Islamic fighting group. In March of 2007, he gave a speech, after which there was a surge in participation amongst Libyan foreign fighters.Perhaps most clever of all, though, and least obvious, by flipping the data on its head, the researchers were able to deeply explore the coordination networks in Syria that were ultimately responsible for receiving and transporting the foreign fighters to the border. These were networks of mercenaries, not ideologues, who were in the coordination business for profit. For example, they charged Saudi foreign fighters substantially more than Libyans, money that would have otherwise gone to al Qaeda. Perhaps the adversary would disrupt their own network if they knew they cheating would-be jihadists.In January, 2010, a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, third deadliest earthquake of all time, left one million people, 10 percent of the population, homeless. One seemingly small aspect of the overall relief effort became increasingly important as the delivery of food and water started rolling. January and February are the dry months in Haiti, yet many of the camps had developed standing water. The only institution with detailed knowledge of Haiti's floodplains had been leveled in the earthquake, leadership inside. So the question is, which camps are at risk, how many people are in these camps, what's the timeline for flooding, and given very limited resources and infrastructure, how do we prioritize the relocation? The data was incredibly disparate. The U.S. Army had detailed knowledge for only a small section of the country. There was data online from a 2006 environmental risk conference, other geospatial data, none of it integrated. The human goal here was to identify camps for relocation based on priority need. The computer had to integrate a vast amount of geospacial information, social media data and relief organization information to answer this question. By implementing a superior process, what was otherwise a task for 40 people over three months became a simple job for three people in 40 hours,all victories for human-computer symbiosis.We're more than 50 years into Licklider's vision for the future, and the data suggests that we should be quite excited about tackling this century's hardest problems, man and machine in cooperation together. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shyam_sankar_the_rise_of_human_computer_cooperation
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"I'm going to tell you about why I became a sculptor, and you may think that sculptors, well, they deal with meta, they deal with objects, they deal with bodies, but I think, really, what I care about most is making space, and that's what I've called this talk: Making Space. Space that exists within us, and without us.So, when I was a child, I don't know how many of you grew up in the '50s, but I was sent upstairs for an enforced rest. (Laughter) It's a really bad idea. I mean, after lunch, you're, you know, you're six, and you want to go and climb a tree. But I had to go upstairs, this tiny little room that was actually made out of an old balcony, so it was incredibly hot, small and light, and I had to lie there. It was ridiculous. But anyway, for some reason, I promised myself that I wasn't going to move, that I was going to do this thing that Mummy wanted me to do. And there I was, lying there in this tiny space, hot, dark, claustrophobic, matchbox-sized, behind my eyes, but it was really weird, like, after this went on for days, weeks, months, that space would get bigger and darker and cooler until I really looked forward to that half an hour of enforced immobility and rest, and I really looked forward to going to that place of darkness.Do you mind if we do something completely different? Can we all just close our eyes for a minute? Now, this isn't going to be freaky. It isn't some cultic thing. (Laughter) It's just, it's just, I just would like us all to go there. So I'm going to do it too. We'll all be there together.So close your eyes for a minute. Here we are, in a space, the subjective, collective space of the darkness of the body. I think of this as the place of imagination, of potential, but what are its qualities? It is objectless. There are no things in it. It is dimensionless. It is limitless. It is endless.Okay, open your eyes.That's the space that I think sculpture — which is a bit of a paradox, sculpture that is about making material propositions — but I think that's the space that sculpture can connect us with.So, imagine we're in the middle of America. You're asleep. You wake up, and without lifting your head from the earth on your sleeping bag, you can see for 70 miles. This is a dry lake bed. I was young. I'd just finished art school. I wanted to do something that was working directly with the world, directly with place. This was a wonderful place, because it was a place where you could imagine that you were the first person to be there. It was a place where nothing very much had happened. Anyway, bear with me. I picked up a hand-sized stone, threw it as far as I was able, it was about 22 meters. I then cleared all the stones within that radius and made a pile. And that was the pile, by the way. And then, I stood on the pile, and threw all of those rocks out again, and here is rearranged desert.You could say, well, it doesn't look very different from when he started. (Laughter) What's all the fuss about? In fact, Chris was worried and said, ""Look, don't show them that slide, because they're just going to think you're another one of those crazy modern artists who doesn't do much. (Laughter)But the fact is, this is evidence of a living body on other bodies, rocks that have been the subject of geological formation, erosion, the action of time on objects. This is a place, in a way, that I just would like you to, in a way, look at differently because of this event that has happened in it, a human event, and in general, it just asks us to look again at this world, so different from, in a way, the world that we have been sharing with each other, the technological world, to look again at the elemental world. The elemental world that we all live in is that space that we all visited together, the darkness of the body. I wanted to start again with that environment, the environment of the intimate, subjective space that each of us lives in, but from the other side of appearance.So here is a daily activity of the studio. You can see I don't do much. I'm just standing there, again with my eyes closed, and other people are molding me, evidential. This is an indexical register of a lived moment of a body in time.Can we map that space, using the language of neutrinos or cosmic rays, taking the bounding condition of the body as its limit, but in complete reversal of, in a way, the most traditional Greek idea of pointing? In the old days they used to take a lump of Pentelic marble and drill from the surface in order to identify the skin, the appearance, what Aristotle defined as the distinction between substance and appearance, the thing that makes things visible, but here we're working from the other side.Or can we do it as an exclusive membrane? This is a lead case made around the space that my body occupied, but it's now void. This is a work called ""Learning To See."" It's a bit of, well, we could call it night, we could call it the 96 percent of gravity that we don't know about, dark matter, placed in space, anyway, another version of a human space in space at large, but I don't know if you can see, the eyes are indicated, they're closed. It's called ""Learning To See"" because it's about an object that hopefully works reflexively and talks about that vision or connection with the darkness of the body that I see as a space of potential.Can we do it another way, using the language of particles around a nucleus, and talk about the body as an energy center? No longer about statues, no longer having to take that duty of standing, the standing of a human body, or the standing of a statue, release it, allow it to be an energy field, a space in space that talks about human life, between becoming an entropy as a sort of concentration of attention, a human place of possibility in space at large.Is there another way? Dark matter now placed against a horizon. If minds live in bodies, if bodies live in clothes, and then in rooms, and then in buildings, and then in cities, do they also have a final skin, and is that skin perceptual? The horizon. And is art about trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon? Can we use, in a way, a body as an empty catalyst for a kind of empathy with the experience of space-time as it is lived, as I am standing here in front of you trying to feel and make a connection in this space-time that we are sharing, can we use, at it were, the memory of a body, of a human space in space to catalyze an experience, again, firsthand experience, of elemental time. Human time, industrial time, tested against the time of the tides, in which these memories of a particular body, that could be any body, multiplied as in the time of mechanical reproduction, many times, placed over three square miles, a mile out to sea, disappearing, in different conditions of day and night. You can see this work. It's on the mouth of the Mersey, just outside Liverpool. And there you can see what a Liverpool sea looks like on a typical afternoon. The pieces appear and disappear, but maybe more importantly — this is just looking north from the center of the installation — they create a field, a field that involves living and the surrogate bodies in a kind of relation, a relation with each other and a relation with that limit, the edge, the horizon.Just moving on, is it possible, taking that idea of mind, body, body-building, to supplant the first body, the biological body, with the second, the body of architecture and the built environment.This is a work called ""Room for the Great Australian Desert."" It's in an undefined location and I've never published where it is. It's an object for the mind. I think of it as a 21st-century Buddha. Again, the darkness of the body, now held within this bunker shape of the minimum position that a body needs to occupy, a crouching body. There's a hole at the anus, penis level. There are holes at ears. There are no holes at the eyes. There's a slot for the mouth. It's two and a half inches thick, concrete with a void interior. Again, a site found with a completely flat 360-degree horizon. This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?Taking that idiom of, as it were, the darkness of the body transferred to architecture, can you use architectural space not for living but as a metaphor, and use its systolic, diastolic smaller and larger spaces to provide a kind of firsthand somatic narrative for a journey through space, light and darkness? This is a work of some proportion and some weight that makes the body into a city, an aggregation of cells that are all interconnected and that allow certain visual access at certain places.The last work that I just wanted to share with you is ""Blind Light,"" which is perhaps the most open work, and in a conference of radical openness, I think maybe this is as radical as I get, using light and water vapor as my materials. Here is a box filled at one and a half atmospheres of atmospheric pressure, with a cloud and with very bright light. As you walk towards the ever-open threshold, you disappear, both to yourselves and to others. If you hold your hand out in front of you, you can't see it. If you look down, you can't see your feet. You are now consciousness without an object, freed from the dimensionful and measured way in which life links us to the obligatory. But this is a space that is actually filled with people, disembodied voices, and out of that ambient environment, when people come close to your own body zone, very close, they appear to you as representations. When they appear close to the edge, they are representations, representations in which the viewers have become the viewed.For me, art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time. As John Cage said, ""We are not moving towards some kind of goal. We are at the goal, and it is changing with us. If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact."" Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/antony_gormley_sculpted_space_within_and_without
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"Some years ago, I set out to try to understand if there was a possibility to develop biofuels on a scale that would actually compete with fossil fuels but not compete with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land.So here's what I came up with. Imagine that we build an enclosure where we put it just underwater, and we fill it with wastewater and some form of microalgae that produces oil, and we make it out of some kind of flexible material that moves with waves underwater, and the system that we're going to build, of course, will use solar energy to grow the algae, and they use CO2, which is good, and they produce oxygen as they grow. The algae that grow are in a container that distributes the heat to the surrounding water, and you can harvest them and make biofuels and cosmetics and fertilizer and animal feed, and of course you'd have to make a large area of this, so you'd have to worry about other stakeholders like fishermen and ships and such things, but hey, we're talking about biofuels, and we know the importance of potentially getting an alternative liquid fuel.Why are we talking about microalgae? Here you see a graph showing you the different types of crops that are being considered for making biofuels, so you can see some things like soybean, which makes 50 gallons per acre per year, or sunflower or canola or jatropha or palm, and that tall graph there shows what microalgae can contribute. That is to say, microalgae contributes between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons per acre per year, compared to the 50 gallons per acre per year from soy.So what are microalgae? Microalgae are micro — that is, they're extremely small, as you can see here a picture of those single-celled organisms compared to a human hair. Those small organisms have been around for millions of years and there's thousands of different species of microalgae in the world, some of which are the fastest-growing plants on the planet, and produce, as I just showed you, lots and lots of oil.Now, why do we want to do this offshore? Well, the reason we're doing this offshore is because if you look at our coastal cities, there isn't a choice, because we're going to use waste water, as I suggested, and if you look at where most of the waste water treatment plants are, they're embedded in the cities. This is the city of San Francisco, which has 900 miles of sewer pipes under the city already, and it releases its waste water offshore. So different cities around the world treat their waste water differently. Some cities process it. Some cities just release the water. But in all cases, the water that's released is perfectly adequate for growing microalgae. So let's envision what the system might look like. We call it OMEGA, which is an acronym for Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae. At NASA, you have to have good acronyms.So how does it work? I sort of showed you how it works already. We put waste water and some source of CO2 into our floating structure, and the waste water provides nutrients for the algae to grow, and they sequester CO2 that would otherwise go off into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. They of course use solar energy to grow, and the wave energy on the surface provides energy for mixing the algae, and the temperature is controlled by the surrounding water temperature. The algae that grow produce oxygen, as I've mentioned, and they also produce biofuels and fertilizer and food and other bi-algal products of interest.And the system is contained. What do I mean by that? It's modular. Let's say something happens that's totally unexpected to one of the modules. It leaks. It's struck by lightning. The waste water that leaks out is water that already now goes into that coastal environment, and the algae that leak out are biodegradable, and because they're living in waste water, they're fresh water algae, which means they can't live in salt water, so they die. The plastic we'll build it out of is some kind of well-known plastic that we have good experience with, and we'll rebuild our modules to be able to reuse them again.So we may be able to go beyond that when thinking about this system that I'm showing you, and that is to say we need to think in terms of the water, the fresh water, which is also going to be an issue in the future, and we're working on methods now for recovering the waste water.The other thing to consider is the structure itself. It provides a surface for things in the ocean, and this surface, which is covered by seaweeds and other organisms in the ocean, will become enhanced marine habitat so it increases biodiversity. And finally, because it's an offshore structure, we can think in terms of how it might contribute to an aquaculture activity offshore.So you're probably thinking, ""Gee, this sounds like a good idea. What can we do to try to see if it's real?"" Well, I set up laboratories in Santa Cruz at the California Fish and Game facility, and that facility allowed us to have big seawater tanks to test some of these ideas. We also set up experiments in San Francisco at one of the three waste water treatment plants, again a facility to test ideas. And finally, we wanted to see where we could look at what the impact of this structure would be in the marine environment, and we set up a field site at a place called Moss Landing Marine Lab in Monterey Bay, where we worked in a harbor to see what impact this would have on marine organisms.The laboratory that we set up in Santa Cruz was our skunkworks. It was a place where we were growing algae and welding plastic and building tools and making a lot of mistakes, or, as Edison said, we were finding the 10,000 ways that the system wouldn't work. Now, we grew algae in waste water, and we built tools that allowed us to get into the lives of algae so that we could monitor the way they grow, what makes them happy, how do we make sure that we're going to have a culture that will survive and thrive. So the most important feature that we needed to develop were these so-called photobioreactors, or PBRs. These were the structures that would be floating at the surface made out of some inexpensive plastic material that'll allow the algae to grow, and we had built lots and lots of designs, most of which were horrible failures, and when we finally got to a design that worked, at about 30 gallons, we scaled it up to 450 gallons in San Francisco.So let me show you how the system works. We basically take waste water with algae of our choice in it, and we circulate it through this floating structure, this tubular, flexible plastic structure, and it circulates through this thing, and there's sunlight of course, it's at the surface, and the algae grow on the nutrients.But this is a bit like putting your head in a plastic bag. The algae are not going to suffocate because of CO2, as we would. They suffocate because they produce oxygen, and they don't really suffocate, but the oxygen that they produce is problematic, and they use up all the CO2. So the next thing we had to figure out was how we could remove the oxygen, which we did by building this column which circulated some of the water, and put back CO2, which we did by bubbling the system before we recirculated the water. And what you see here is the prototype, which was the first attempt at building this type of column. The larger column that we then installed in San Francisco in the installed system.So the column actually had another very nice feature, and that is the algae settle in the column, and this allowed us to accumulate the algal biomass in a context where we could easily harvest it. So we would remove the algaes that concentrated in the bottom of this column, and then we could harvest that by a procedure where you float the algae to the surface and can skim it off with a net.So we wanted to also investigate what would be the impact of this system in the marine environment, and I mentioned we set up this experiment at a field site in Moss Landing Marine Lab. Well, we found of course that this material became overgrown with algae, and we needed then to develop a cleaning procedure, and we also looked at how seabirds and marine mammals interacted, and in fact you see here a sea otter that found this incredibly interesting, and would periodically work its way across this little floating water bed, and we wanted to hire this guy or train him to be able to clean the surface of these things, but that's for the future.Now really what we were doing, we were working in four areas. Our research covered the biology of the system, which included studying the way algae grew, but also what eats the algae, and what kills the algae. We did engineering to understand what we would need to be able to do to build this structure, not only on the small scale, but how we would build it on this enormous scale that will ultimately be required. I mentioned we looked at birds and marine mammals and looked at basically the environmental impact of the system, and finally we looked at the economics, and what I mean by economics is, what is the energy required to run the system? Do you get more energy out of the system than you have to put into the system to be able to make the system run? And what about operating costs? And what about capital costs? And what about, just, the whole economic structure?So let me tell you that it's not going to be easy, and there's lots more work to do in all four of those areas to be able to really make the system work. But we don't have a lot of time, and I'd like to show you the artist's conception of how this system might look if we find ourselves in a protected bay somewhere in the world, and we have in the background in this image, the waste water treatment plant and a source of flue gas for the CO2, but when you do the economics of this system, you find that in fact it will be difficult to make it work. Unless you look at the system as a way to treat waste water, sequester carbon, and potentially for photovoltaic panels or wave energy or even wind energy, and if you start thinking in terms of integrating all of these different activities, you could also include in such a facility aquaculture. So we would have under this system a shellfish aquaculture where we're growing mussels or scallops. We'd be growing oysters and things that would be producing high value products and food, and this would be a market driver as we build the system to larger and larger scales so that it becomes, ultimately, competitive with the idea of doing it for fuels.So there's always a big question that comes up, because plastic in the ocean has got a really bad reputation right now, and so we've been thinking cradle to cradle. What are we going to do with all this plastic that we're going to need to use in our marine environment? Well, I don't know if you know about this, but in California, there's a huge amount of plastic that's used in fields right now as plastic mulch, and this is plastic that's making these tiny little greenhouses right along the surface of the soil, and this provides warming the soil to increase the growing season, it allows us to control weeds, and, of course, it makes the watering much more efficient. So the OMEGA system will be part of this type of an outcome, and that when we're finished using it in the marine environment, we'll be using it, hopefully, on fields.Where are we going to put this, and what will it look like offshore? Here's an image of what we could do in San Francisco Bay. San Francisco produces 65 million gallons a day of waste water. If we imagine a five-day retention time for this system, we'd need 325 million gallons to accomodate, and that would be about 1,280 acres of these OMEGA modules floating in San Francisco Bay. Well, that's less than one percent of the surface area of the bay. It would produce, at 2,000 gallons per acre per year, it would produce over 2 million gallons of fuel, which is about 20 percent of the biodiesel, or of the diesel that would be required in San Francisco, and that's without doing anything about efficiency.Where else could we potentially put this system? There's lots of possibilities. There's, of course, San Francisco Bay, as I mentioned. San Diego Bay is another example, Mobile Bay or Chesapeake Bay, but the reality is, as sea level rises, there's going to be lots and lots of new opportunities to consider. (Laughter)So what I'm telling you about is a system of integrated activities. Biofuels production is integrated with alternative energy is integrated with aquaculture.I set out to find a pathway to innovative production of sustainable biofuels, and en route I discovered that what's really required for sustainability is integration more than innovation.Long term, I have great faith in our collective and connected ingenuity. I think there is almost no limit to what we can accomplish if we are radically open and we don't care who gets the credit. Sustainable solutions for our future problems are going to be diverse and are going to be many. I think we need to consider everything, everything from alpha to OMEGA. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question for you, Jonathan. Can this project continue to move forward within NASA or do you need some very ambitious green energy fund to come and take it by the throat? Jonathan Trent: So it's really gotten to a stage now in NASA where they would like to spin it out into something which would go offshore, and there are a lot of issues with doing it in the United States because of limited permitting issues and the time required to get permits to do things offshore. It really requires, at this point, people on the outside, and we're being radically open with this technology in which we're going to launch it out there for anybody and everybody who's interested to take it on and try to make it real. CA: So that's interesting. You're not patenting it. You're publishing it. JT: Absolutely. CA: All right. Thank you so much. JT: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_trent_energy_from_floating_algae_pods
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"I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities. Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well, and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head. In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example, and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages, they're all about a mile apart. You needed easy access to the fields. And for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life. Life was very small for most people. It was a center of entertainment, of energy production, of work, a center of health care. That's where babies were born and people died.Then, with industrialization, everything started to become centralized. You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities. Production was centralized in assembly plants. You had centralized energy production. Learning took place in schools. Health care took place in hospitals. And then you had networks that developed. You had water, sewer networks that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion. You had separated functions, increasingly. You had rail networks that connected residential, industrial, commercial areas. You had auto networks. In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car, build roads to everything, and give people a place to park when they get there. It was not a very functional model. And we still live in that world, and this is what we end up with.So you have the sprawl of LA, the sprawl of Mexico City. You have these unbelievable new cities in China, which you might call tower sprawl. They're all building cities on the model that we invented in the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, I would argue, and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world. In China alone, 300 million people, some say 400 million people, will move to the city over the next 15 years. That means building the equivalent of the entire built infrastructure of the US in 15 years. Imagine that.And we should all care about this whether you live in cities or not. Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth, 80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use, but at the same time it's where people want to be, increasingly. More than half the people now in the world live in cities, and that will just continue to escalate.Cities are places of celebration, personal expression. You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that — I've been to a couple. They're quite fun. You have —(Laughter)Cities are where most of the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities. That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.Now there's some trends that will impact cities. First of all, work is becoming distributed and mobile. The office building is basically obsolete for doing private work. The home, once again, because of distributed computation — Communication is becoming a center of life, so it's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care and all of these things that we used to think of as taking place outside of the home.And increasingly, everything that people buy, every consumer product, in one way or another, can be personalized. And that's a very important trend to think about.So this is my image of the city of the future.(Laughter)In that it's a place for people, you know. Maybe not the way people dress, but — You know, the question now is, how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities without all the bad things?This is Bangalore. It took me a couple of hours to get a few miles in Bangalore last year. So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things. How can we have the good stuff without the bad?So we went back and started looking at the great cities that evolved before the cars. Paris was a series of these little villages that came together, and you still see that structure today. The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods. Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk. And if you look at the data, when you have that kind of a structure, you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies and the cafes in Paris. And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern. There's very little that's within a five-minute walk of most areas of places like Pittsburgh. Not to pick on Pittsburgh, but most American cities really have evolved this way.So we said, well, let's look at new cities, and we're involved in a couple of new city projects in China. So we said, let's start with that neighborhood cell. We think of it as a compact urban cell. So provide most of what most people want within that 20-minute walk. This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid, community heating, power, communication networks, etc. can be concentrated there. Stewart Brand would put a micronuclear reactor right in the center, probably. And he might be right. And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network. It's something of an Internet typology pattern, so you can have a series of these neighborhoods. You can dial up the density — about 20,000 people per cell, if it's Cambridge. Go up to 50,000 if it's Manhattan density. You connect everything with mass transit and you provide most of what most people need within that neighborhood. You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them. I won't go through all of them. I'll just show one.This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists, where you can go from one end of the city to the other without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing, which I'll get into in a minute.This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul, Korea. They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it, they reclaimed the street, the river down below, below the street, and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other without crossing a pathway for cars.The High Line in Manhattan is very similar. You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world. I lived in Manhattan for 15 years. I went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed. They're still not to where Copenhagen is, where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city are by bicycle. It's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there.We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston. The Big Dig —(Laughter)So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island, and it's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything other than cars.Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking about, so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit. These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on. But shared use is really key. If you share a vehicle, you can have at least four people use one vehicle, as opposed to one. We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris.We've been developing, at the Media Lab, this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities. We got rid of all the useless things like engines and transmissions. We moved everything to the wheels, so you have the drive motor, the steering motor, the breaking — all in the wheel. That left the chassis unencumbered, so you can do things like fold, so you can fold this little vehicle up to occupy a tiny little footprint.This was a video that was on European television last week showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin. You don't need reverse. You don't need parallel parking. You just spin and go directly in.(Laughter)So we've been working with a company to commercialize this. My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference.So what's interesting is, then if you begin to add new things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car, you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt, it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself, and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars, and we think this is the future. Actually, we could do this today. It's not really a problem. We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy and we get something like 28 times the land utilization with that kind of strategy.One of our graduate students then says, well, how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians? You have nobody to make eye contact with. You don't know if it's going to run you over. So he's developing strategies so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians, so —(Laughter)So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate, we have directional audio, we can throw sound directly at people. What I love about this project is he solved a problem that doesn't exist yet, so —(Laughter)We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes. You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants. So —(Laughter)We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled, women in skirts, businesspeople, and address the issues of energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity simultaneously. That's our challenge.This is an early design for this little three-wheel. It's an electronic bike. You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person, that's a switch. If you're a healthy person, you might have to work really hard to go fast. You can dial in 40 calories going into work and 500 going home, when you can take a shower. We hope to have that built this fall.Housing is another area where we can really improve. Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces. Developers say, OK, we'll build little teeny apartments. People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment. So we're saying, let's build a standardized chassis, much like our car. Let's bring advanced technology into the apartment, technology-enabled infill, give people the tools within this open-loft chassis to go through a process of defining what their needs and values and activities are, and then a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly of integrated infill components, furniture, and cabinetry, that are personalized to that individual, and they give them the tools to go through the process and to refine it, and it's something like working with an architect, where the dialogue starts when you give an alternative to a person to react to.Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us is when you can begin to have robotic walls, so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace, if you run a virtual company. You have guests over, you have two guest rooms that are developed. You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement when you need it. Maybe that's most of the time. You have a dinner party. The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom, or maybe you want a dance studio. I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time. What we need to do now, develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people that would like to live in the city, and very comfortably. We think we can make a very small apartment that functions as if it's twice as big by utilizing these strategies. I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept. I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it.(Laughter)And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself. You know, standardized platform with the motors and the battery when it operates, little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power. We think this can all be standardized, and then people can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall, and like the car, we can integrate all kinds of sensing to be aware of human activity, so if there's a baby or a puppy in the way, you won't have a problem.(Laughter)So the developers say, well, this is great. OK, so if we have a conventional building, we have a fixed envelope, maybe we can put in 14 units. If they function as if they're twice as big, we can get 28 units in. That means twice as much parking, though. Parking's really expensive. It's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spot inside a building. So if you can have folding and autonomy, you can do that in one-seventh of the space. That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car, just for the cost of the parking. You add shared use, and you can even go further.We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology through this process. There's a path to market for innovative companies to bring technology into the home. In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens. We have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill, that understands where people are and what they're doing. Blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures. It recognizes where the person is, what they're doing, fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light, and saves maybe 30, 40 percent in energy consumption, we think, over even conventional state-of-the-art lighting systems. This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture. We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes. We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.We think we can also personalize sunlight. That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways. So we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space, therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass on a hot day like today. In this case, she picks up her phone, she can map food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight. An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she's engaged in that activity. This can be combined with LED lighting as well.We think workplaces should be shared. I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think. This is Starbucks, you know. Maybe a third — And you see everybody has their back to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way and they're in their own little personal bubble. We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration. We're not doing a very good job with that. At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have shared desks. I've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University, where the they have a shared shop and shared fab lab, shared quiet spaces, electronics spaces, recreation places.We think ultimately, all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility, a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to market for advanced technologies. But in the end, the main thing we need to focus on are people. Cities are all about people. They're places for people. There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities like they've done in Melbourne with the laneways while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy. It's a global imperative. We have to get this right.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kent_larson_brilliant_designs_to_fit_more_people_in_every_city
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"The murder happened a little over 21 years ago, January the 18th, 1991, in a small bedroom community of Lynwood, California, just a few miles southeast of Los Angeles. A father came out of his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk, to get home, finish their schoolwork, and prepare themselves for bed. And as the father was administering these instructions, a car drove by, slowly, and just after it passed the father and the teenagers, a hand went out from the front passenger window, and — ""Bam, Bam!"" — killing the father. And the car sped off.The police, investigating officers, were amazingly efficient. They considered all the usual culprits, and in less than 24 hours, they had selected their suspect: Francisco Carrillo, a 17-year-old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred. They found photos of him. They prepared a photo array, and the day after the shooting, they showed it to one of the teenagers, and he said, ""That's the picture. That's the shooter I saw that killed the father.""That was all a preliminary hearing judge had to listen to, to bind Mr. Carrillo over to stand trial for a first-degree murder. In the investigation that followed before the actual trial, each of the other five teenagers was shown photographs, the same photo array. The picture that we best can determine was probably the one that they were shown in the photo array is in your bottom left hand corner of these mug shots. The reason we're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system, but that's another whole TEDx talk for later. (Laughter)So at the actual trial, all six of the teenagers testified, and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array. He was convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and transported to Folsom Prison.So what's wrong? Straightforward, fair trial, full investigation. Oh yes, no gun was ever found. No vehicle was ever identified as being the one in which the shooter had extended his arm, and no person was ever charged with being the driver of the shooter's vehicle. And Mr. Carrillo's alibi? Which of those parents here in the room might not lie concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter in an investigation of a killing?Sent to prison, adamantly insisting on his innocence, which he has consistently for 21 years.So what's the problem? The problems, actually, for this kind of case come manyfold from decades of scientific research involving human memory. First of all, we have all the statistical analyses from the Innocence Project work, where we know that we have, what, 250, 280 documented cases now where people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated, some from death row, on the basis of later DNA analysis, and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involved only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them. We know that eyewitness identifications are fallible.The other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that's related to various brain functions but I can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line: The brain abhors a vacuum. Under the best of observation conditions, the absolute best, we only detect, encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us, and they're stored in different parts of the brain. So now, when it's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced, we have an incomplete, we have a partial store, and what happens? Below awareness, with no requirement for any kind of motivated processing, the brain fills in information that was not there, not originally stored, from inference, from speculation, from sources of information that came to you, as the observer, after the observation. But it happens without awareness such that you don't, aren't even cognizant of it occurring. It's called reconstructed memories. It happens to us in all the aspects of our life, all the time. It was those two considerations, among others — reconstructed memory, the fact about the eyewitness fallibility — that was part of the instigation for a group of appeal attorneys led by an amazing lawyer named Ellen Eggers to pool their experience and their talents together and petition a superior court for a retrial for Francisco Carrillo. They retained me, as a forensic neurophysiologist, because I had expertise in eyewitness memory identification, which obviously makes sense for this case, right? But also because I have expertise and testify about the nature of human night vision.Well, what's that got to do with this? Well, when you read through the case materials in this Carrillo case, one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good at the crime scene, at the shooting. All the teenagers testified during the trial that they could see very well. But this occurred in mid-January, in the Northern Hemisphere, at 7 p.m. at night. So when I did the calculations for the lunar data and the solar data at that location on Earth at the time of the incident of the shooting, all right, it was well past the end of civil twilight and there was no moon up that night. So all the light in this area from the sun and the moon is what you see on the screen right here. The only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources, and that's where I go out and I do the actual reconstruction of the scene with photometers, with various measures of illumination and various other measures of color perception, along with special cameras and high-speed film, right? Take all the measurements and record them, right? And then take photographs, and this is what the scene looked like at the time of the shooting from the position of the teenagers looking at the car going by and shooting. This is looking directly across the street from where they were standing. Remember, the investigating officers' report said the lighting was good. The teenagers said they could see very well. This is looking down to the east, where the shooting vehicle sped off, and this is the lighting directly behind the father and the teenagers. As you can see, it is at best poor. No one's going to call this well-lit, good lighting, and in fact, as nice as these pictures are, and the reason we take them is I knew I was going to have to testify in court, and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you're trying to communicate numbers, abstract concepts like lux, the international measurement of illumination, the Ishihara color perception test values. When you present those to people who are not well-versed in those aspects of science and that, they become salamanders in the noonday sun. It's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle, all right? Their eyes just glaze over, all right? A good forensic expert also has to be a good educator, a good communicator, and that's part of the reason why we take the pictures, to show not only where the light sources are, and what we call the spill, the distribution, but also so that it's easier for the trier of fact to understand the circumstances. So these are some of the pictures that, in fact, I used when I testified, but more importantly were, to me as a scientist, are those readings, the photometer readings, which I can then convert into actual predictions of the visual capability of the human eye under those circumstances, and from my readings that I recorded at the scene under the same solar and lunar conditions at the same time, so on and so forth, right, I could predict that there would be no reliable color perception, which is crucial for face recognition, and that there would be only scotopic vision, which means there would be very little resolution, what we call boundary or edge detection, and that furthermore, because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light, the depth of field, the distance at which you can focus and see details, would have been less than 18 inches away.I testified to that to the court, and while the judge was very attentive, it had been a very, very long hearing for this petition for a retrial, and as a result, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I thought that maybe the judge was going to need a little more of a nudge than just more numbers.And here I became a bit audacious, and I turned and I asked the judge, I said, ""Your Honor, I think you should go out and look at the scene yourself.""Now I may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request — (Laughter) — but nonetheless, it's to this man's credit and his courage that he said, ""Yes, I will."" A shocker in American jurisprudence.So in fact, we found the same identical conditions, we reconstructed the entire thing again, he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff's officers to protect him in this community, all right? (Laughter) We had him stand actually slightly in the street, so closer to the suspect vehicle, the shooter vehicle, than the actual teenagers were, so he stood a few feet from the curb toward the middle of the street. We had a car that came by, same identical car as described by the teenagers, right? It had a driver and a passenger, and after the car had passed the judge by, the passenger extended his hand, pointed it back to the judge as the car continued on, just as the teenagers had described it, right? Now, he didn't use a real gun in his hand, so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described. He pointed by, and this is what the judge saw.This is the car 30 feet away from the judge. There's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you. That's 30 feet away. Some of the teenagers said that in fact the car was 15 feet away when it shot. Okay. There's 15 feet.At this point, I became a little concerned. This judge is someone you'd never want to play poker with. He was totally stoic. I couldn't see a twitch of his eyebrow. I couldn't see the slightest bend of his head. I had no sense of how he was reacting to this, and after he looked at this reenactment, he turned to me and he says, ""Is there anything else you want me to look at?""I said, ""Your honor,"" and I don't know whether I was emboldened by the scientific measurements that I had in my pocket and my knowledge that they are accurate, or whether it was just sheer stupidity, which is what the defense lawyers thought — (Laughter) — when they heard me say, ""Yes, Your Honor, I want you stand right there and I want the car to go around the block again and I want it to come and I want it to stop right in front of you, three to four feet away, and I want the passenger to extend his hand with a black object and point it right at you, and you can look at it as long as you want."" And that's what he saw. (Laughter)You'll notice, which was also in my test report, all the dominant lighting is coming from the north side, which means that the shooter's face would have been photo-occluded. It would have been backlit. Furthermore, the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker. And this is three to four feet away.Why did I take the risk? I knew that the depth of field was 18 inches or less. Three to four feet, it might as well have been a football field away. This is what he saw. He went back, there was a few more days of evidence that was heard. At the end of it, he made the judgment that he was going to grant the petition for a retrial. And furthermore, he released Mr. Carrillo so that he could aid in the preparation of his own defense if the prosecution decided to retry him.Which they decided not to. He is now a freed man. (Applause)(Applause)This is him embracing his grandmother-in-law. He — His girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial, right? And she had a little baby boy. He and his son are both attending Cal State, Long Beach right now taking classes. (Applause)And what does this example — what's important to keep in mind for ourselves?First of all, there's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in American jurisprudence. I could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom. The opposing council always fight it and oppose it.One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity, through policy, through procedures, to get more science in the courtroom, and I think one large step toward that is more requirements, with all due respect to the law schools, of science, technology, engineering, mathematics for anyone going into the law, because they become the judges. Think about how we select our judges in this country. It's very different than most other cultures. All right?The other one that I want to suggest, the caution that all of us have to have, I constantly have to remind myself, about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true, that we believe in? There is decades of research, examples and examples of cases like this, where individuals really, really believe. None of those teenagers who identified him thought that they were picking the wrong person. None of them thought they couldn't see the person's face. We all have to be very careful. All our memories are reconstructed memories. They are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that's happened afterwards. They're dynamic. They're malleable. They're volatile, and as a result, we all need to remember to be cautious, that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they're correct.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_fraser_the_problem_with_eyewitness_testimony
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"I want you to imagine this for a moment. Two men, Rahul and Rajiv, living in the same neighborhood, from the same educational background, similar occupation, and they both turn up at their local accident emergency complaining of acute chest pain. Rahul is offered a cardiac procedure, but Rajiv is sent home.What might explain the difference in the experience of these two nearly identical men? Rajiv suffers from a mental illness. The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness. Even in the best-resourced countries in the world, this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years. In the developing countries of the world, this gap is even larger.But of course, mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well. The most obvious example is suicide. It might surprise some of you here, as it did me, when I discovered that suicide is at the top of the list of the leading causes of death in young people in all countries in the world, including the poorest countries of the world.But beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy, we're also concerned about the quality of life lived. Now, in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived, we need to use a metric called the DALY, which stands for a Disability-Adjusted Life Year. Now when we do that, we discover some startling things about mental illness from a global perspective. We discover that, for example, mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world. Depression, for example, is the third-leading cause of disability, alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children. When you put all the mental illnesses together, they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease. Indeed, mental illnesses are also very damaging to people's lives, but beyond just the burden of disease, let us consider the absolute numbers. The World Health Organization estimates that there are nearly four to five hundred million people living on our tiny planet who are affected by a mental illness. Now some of you here look a bit astonished by that number, but consider for a moment the incredible diversity of mental illnesses, from autism and intellectual disability in childhood, through to depression and anxiety, substance misuse and psychosis in adulthood, all the way through to dementia in old age, and I'm pretty sure that each and every one us present here today can think of at least one person, at least one person, who's affected by mental illness in our most intimate social networks. I see some nodding heads there.But beyond the staggering numbers, what's truly important from a global health point of view, what's truly worrying from a global health point of view, is that the vast majority of these affected individuals do not receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and remember, we do have robust evidence that a range of interventions, medicines, psychological interventions, and social interventions, can make a vast difference. And yet, even in the best-resourced countries, for example here in Europe, roughly 50 percent of affected people don't receive these interventions. In the sorts of countries I work in, that so-called treatment gap approaches an astonishing 90 percent. It isn't surprising, then, that if you should speak to anyone affected by a mental illness, the chances are that you will hear stories of hidden suffering, shame and discrimination in nearly every sector of their lives. But perhaps most heartbreaking of all are the stories of the abuse of even the most basic human rights, such as the young woman shown in this image here that are played out every day, sadly, even in the very institutions that were built to care for people with mental illnesses, the mental hospitals.It's this injustice that has really driven my mission to try to do a little bit to transform the lives of people affected by mental illness, and a particularly critical action that I focused on is to bridge the gulf between the knowledge we have that can transform lives, the knowledge of effective treatments, and how we actually use that knowledge in the everyday world. And an especially important challenge that I've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, particularly in the developing world.Now I trained in medicine in India, and after that I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son. Any case, I went on, I soldiered on with psychiatry, and found myself training in Britain in some of the best hospitals in this country. I was very privileged. I worked in a team of incredibly talented, compassionate, but most importantly, highly trained, specialized mental health professionals.Soon after my training, I found myself working first in Zimbabwe and then in India, and I was confronted by an altogether new reality. This was a reality of a world in which there were almost no mental health professionals at all. In Zimbabwe, for example, there were just about a dozen psychiatrists, most of whom lived and worked in Harare city, leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside.In India, I found the situation was not a lot better. To give you a perspective, if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India, one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India. In reality, take a guess. The actual number is about 3,000, about two percent of that number.It became quickly apparent to me that I couldn't follow the sorts of mental health care models that I had been trained in, one that relied heavily on specialized, expensive mental health professionals to provide mental health care in countries like India and Zimbabwe. I had to think out of the box about some other model of care.It was then that I came across these books, and in these books I discovered the idea of task shifting in global health. The idea is actually quite simple. The idea is, when you're short of specialized health care professionals, use whoever is available in the community, train them to provide a range of health care interventions, and in these books I read inspiring examples, for example of how ordinary people had been trained to deliver babies, diagnose and treat early pneumonia, to great effect. And it struck me that if you could train ordinary people to deliver such complex health care interventions, then perhaps they could also do the same with mental health care.Well today, I'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade, and I want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments, all three of which focused on depression, the most common of all mental illnesses. In rural Uganda, Paul Bolton and his colleagues, using villagers, demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and, using a randomized control design, showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages. Similarly, using a randomized control trial in rural Pakistan, Atif Rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors, who are community maternal health workers in Pakistan's health care system, could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed, again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates. Roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages. And in my own trial in Goa, in India, we again showed that lay counselors drawn from local communities could be trained to deliver psychosocial interventions for depression, anxiety, leading to 70 percent recovery rates as compared to 50 percent in the comparison primary health centers.Now, if I had to draw together all these different experiments in task shifting, and there have of course been many other examples, and try and identify what are the key lessons we can learn that makes for a successful task shifting operation, I have coined this particular acronym, SUNDAR. What SUNDAR stands for, in Hindi, is ""attractive."" It seems to me that there are five key lessons that I've shown on this slide that are critically important for effective task shifting. The first is that we need to simplify the message that we're using, stripping away all the jargon that medicine has invented around itself. We need to unpack complex health care interventions into smaller components that can be more easily transferred to less-trained individuals. We need to deliver health care, not in large institutions, but close to people's homes, and we need to deliver health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities. And importantly, we need to reallocate the few specialists who are available to perform roles such as capacity-building and supervision.Now for me, task shifting is an idea with truly global significance, because even though it has arisen out of the situation of the lack of resources that you find in developing countries, I think it has a lot of significance for better-resourced countries as well. Why is that? Well, in part, because health care in the developed world, the health care costs in the [developed] world, are rapidly spiraling out of control, and a huge chunk of those costs are human resource costs. But equally important is because health care has become so incredibly professionalized that it's become very remote and removed from local communities. For me, what's truly sundar about the idea of task shifting, though, isn't that it simply makes health care more accessible and affordable but that it is also fundamentally empowering. It empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community, and in doing so, to become better guardians of their own health. Indeed, for me, task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge, and therefore, medical power.Just over 30 years ago, the nations of the world assembled at Alma-Ata and made this iconic declaration. Well, I think all of you can guess that 12 years on, we're still nowhere near that goal. Still, today, armed with that knowledge that ordinary people in the community can be trained and, with sufficient supervision and support, can deliver a range of health care interventions effectively, perhaps that promise is within reach now. Indeed, to implement the slogan of Health for All, we will need to involve all in that particular journey, and in the case of mental health, in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers.It is for this reason that, some years ago, the Movement for Global Mental Health was founded as a sort of a virtual platform upon which professionals like myself and people affected by mental illness could stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder, and advocate for the rights of people with mental illness to receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and to live a life with dignity.And in closing, when you have a moment of peace or quiet in these very busy few days or perhaps afterwards, spare a thought for that person you thought about who has a mental illness, or persons that you thought about who have mental illness, and dare to care for them. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vikram_patel_mental_health_for_all_by_involving_all
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"Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones. Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt. Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves. After all, what's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can't even afford to buy one? It's taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it's our desire for cheap goods that makes them so.So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but it's also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of the workers themselves.Here are a few.Bao Yongxiu: ""My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I'm not in a rush.""Chen Ying: ""When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much? I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more, they won't understand anyway.""Wu Chunming: ""Even if I make a lot of money, it won't satisfy me. Just to make money is not enough meaning in life.""Xiao Jin: ""Now, after I get off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers won't be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages.""All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old.So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan. Certain subjects came up over and over: how much money they made, what kind of husband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never, including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10 or 15 workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and nights ruled by the factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China.The workers rarely spoke about the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did. When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like ""qiu xi."" Only much later did I realize that she had been saying ""QC,"" or quality control. She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor. All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she didn't even understand.Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor. Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets, the worker in an industrial factory has no control, no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work. But like so many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong. Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that, a piece of something. What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things that matter. What a factory makes is never the point, and the workers could not care less who buys their products.Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make. Many articles calculate: How long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he's making? For example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months' wages for an iPhone.But how meaningful is this calculation, really? For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine, but I can't afford to buy an ad in it. But, who cares? I don't want an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers don't really want iPhones. Their calculations are different. How long should I stay in this factory? How much money can I save? How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car, to get married, or to put my child through school?The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor. About a year after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me home to her family village for the Chinese New Year. On the train home, she gave me a present: a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim. I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan. After we got home, Min gave her mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag. Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic.Min's sister said to her parents, ""In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars."" Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless. ""And that's not all — Coach is coming out with a new line, 2191,"" she said. ""One bag will sell for 6,000."" She paused and said, ""I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or 6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000."" (Laughter)Min's sister's boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year, said, ""It doesn't look like it's worth that much.""Min's sister turned to him and said, ""Some people actually understand these things. You don't understand shit.""(Laughter) (Applause)In Min's world, the Coach bags had a curious currency. They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothing close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth. Once, when Min's older sister's friend got married, she brought a handbag along as a wedding present. Another time, after Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit, bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts.I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, ""An American classic. In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born.""I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Min and her sisters. Their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated, surprising and funny than he could have imagined. And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking.The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory. Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times, eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory. Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. She recently returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village.In a recent email to me, she explained, ""A person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose.""Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities. Together, they make up the largest migration in history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be.When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers. I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them, or that they would have nothing to say to me. Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous. By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about factories and about China and about how to live in the world.This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the train home to visit her family. I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women I wrote about, ties that are not economic but personal in nature, measured not in money but in memories. This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine, sitting in your office or in the library, are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world.Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haven't had before. But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say, with Apple's head of manufacturing, what would you say?Leslie Chang: One minute?CA: One minute. (Laughter)LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much they're self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me, what they want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds. They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade. Their parents are often illiterate, and then they come to the city, and they, on their own, at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class, they'll take an English class, and learn really, really rudimentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple things in English. So, if you really want to help these workers, start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes in these schools, and what's going to happen is, all your workers are going to move on, but hopefully they'll move on into higher jobs within Apple, and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement. When you talk to workers, that's what they want. They do not say, ""I want better hot water in the showers. I want a nicer room. I want a TV set."" I mean, it would be nice to have those things, but that's not why they're in the city, and that's not what they care about.CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth, that things over time were getting better?LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know, it was interesting, because I spent basically two years hanging out in this city, Dongguan, and over that time, you could see immense change in every person's life: upward, downward, sideways, but generally upward. If you spend enough time, it's upward, and I met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are now basically urban middle class people, so the trajectory is definitely upward. It's just hard to see when you're suddenly sucked into the city. It looks like everyone's poor and desperate, but that's not really how it is. Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough, and it's nothing you or I would want to do, but from their perspective, where they're coming from is much worse, and where they're going is hopefully much better, and I just wanted to give that context of what's going on in their minds, not what necessarily is going on in yours.CA: Thanks so much for your talk. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leslie_t_chang_the_voices_of_china_s_workers
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"So, embryonic stem cells are really incredible cells. They are our body's own repair kits, and they're pluripotent, which means they can morph into all of the cells in our bodies. Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells to replace cells that are damaged or diseased.But that's not what I want to talk to you about, because right now there are some really extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells that are completely changing the way we look and model disease, our ability to understand why we get sick, and even develop drugs. I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes and other major diseases the way we view polio today, which is as a preventable disease.So here we have this incredible field, which has enormous hope for humanity, but much like IVF over 35 years ago, until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise, this field has been under siege politically and financially. Critical research is being challenged instead of supported, and we saw that it was really essential to have private safe haven laboratories where this work could be advanced without interference. And so, in 2005, we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory so that we would have a small organization that could do this work and support it.What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical research, but also developing drugs and treatments, is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations, but in a new field, sometimes large organizations really have trouble getting out of their own way, and sometimes they can't ask the right questions, and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger between academic research on the one hand and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs and many of our treatments, and so we knew that to really accelerate cures and therapies, we were going to have to address this with two things: new technologies and also a new research model. Because if you don't close that gap, you really are exactly where we are today. And that's what I want to focus on. We've spent the last couple of years pondering this, making a list of the different things that we had to do, and so we developed a new technology, It's software and hardware, that actually can generate thousands and thousands of genetically diverse stem cell lines to create a global array, essentially avatars of ourselves. And we did this because we think that it's actually going to allow us to realize the potential, the promise, of all of the sequencing of the human genome, but it's going to allow us, in doing that, to actually do clinical trials in a dish with human cells, not animal cells, to generate drugs and treatments that are much more effective, much safer, much faster, and at a much lower cost.So let me put that in perspective for you and give you some context. This is an extremely new field. In 1998, human embryonic stem cells were first identified, and just nine years later, a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells and reprogram them with very powerful viruses to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or what we refer to as an IPS cell. This was really an extraordinary advance, because although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells, which still remain the gold standard, they are terrific to use for modeling disease and potentially for drug discovery.So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists built on that research. He took skin biopsies, this time from people who had a disease, ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease. He turned them into the IPS cells that I've just told you about, and then he turned those IPS cells into the motor neurons that actually were dying in the disease. So basically what he did was to take a healthy cell and turn it into a sick cell, and he recapitulated the disease over and over again in the dish, and this was extraordinary, because it was the first time that we had a model of a disease from a living patient in living human cells. And as he watched the disease unfold, he was able to discover that actually the motor neurons were dying in the disease in a different way than the field had previously thought. There was another kind of cell that actually was sending out a toxin and contributing to the death of these motor neurons, and you simply couldn't see it until you had the human model.So you could really say that researchers trying to understand the cause of disease without being able to have human stem cell models were much like investigators trying to figure out what had gone terribly wrong in a plane crash without having a black box, or a flight recorder. They could hypothesize about what had gone wrong, but they really had no way of knowing what led to the terrible events. And stem cells really have given us the black box for diseases, and it's an unprecedented window. It really is extraordinary, because you can recapitulate many, many diseases in a dish, you can see what begins to go wrong in the cellular conversation well before you would ever see symptoms appear in a patient. And this opens up the ability, which hopefully will become something that is routine in the near term, of using human cells to test for drugs.Right now, the way we test for drugs is pretty problematic. To bring a successful drug to market, it takes, on average, 13 years — that's one drug — with a sunk cost of 4 billion dollars, and only one percent of the drugs that start down that road are actually going to get there. You can't imagine other businesses that you would think of going into that have these kind of numbers. It's a terrible business model. But it is really a worse social model because of what's involved and the cost to all of us. So the way we develop drugs now is by testing promising compounds on — We didn't have disease modeling with human cells, so we'd been testing them on cells of mice or other creatures or cells that we engineer, but they don't have the characteristics of the diseases that we're actually trying to cure. You know, we're not mice, and you can't go into a living person with an illness and just pull out a few brain cells or cardiac cells and then start fooling around in a lab to test for, you know, a promising drug. But what you can do with human stem cells, now, is actually create avatars, and you can create the cells, whether it's the live motor neurons or the beating cardiac cells or liver cells or other kinds of cells, and you can test for drugs, promising compounds, on the actual cells that you're trying to affect, and this is now, and it's absolutely extraordinary, and you're going to know at the beginning, the very early stages of doing your assay development and your testing, you're not going to have to wait 13 years until you've brought a drug to market, only to find out that actually it doesn't work, or even worse, harms people.But it isn't really enough just to look at the cells from a few people or a small group of people, because we have to step back. We've got to look at the big picture. Look around this room. We are all different, and a disease that I might have, if I had Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, it probably would affect me differently than if one of you had that disease, and if we both had Parkinson's disease, and we took the same medication, but we had different genetic makeup, we probably would have a different result, and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully for me was actually ineffective for you, and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for you is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious, but unfortunately it is not the way that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs because, until now, it hasn't had the tools.And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model. The way we've been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store, no one asks you what size you are, or if you're going dancing or hiking. They just say, ""Well, you have feet, here are your shoes."" It doesn't work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet. So we really have to change this.There was a very sad example of this in the last decade. There's a wonderful drug, and a class of drugs actually, but the particular drug was Vioxx, and for people who were suffering from severe arthritis pain, the drug was an absolute lifesaver, but unfortunately, for another subset of those people, they suffered pretty severe heart side effects, and for a subset of those people, the side effects were so severe, the cardiac side effects, that they were fatal. But imagine a different scenario, where we could have had an array, a genetically diverse array, of cardiac cells, and we could have actually tested that drug, Vioxx, in petri dishes, and figured out, well, okay, people with this genetic type are going to have cardiac side effects, people with these genetic subgroups or genetic shoes sizes, about 25,000 of them, are not going to have any problems. The people for whom it was a lifesaver could have still taken their medicine. The people for whom it was a disaster, or fatal, would never have been given it, and you can imagine a very different outcome for the company, who had to withdraw the drug.So that is terrific, and we thought, all right, as we're trying to solve this problem, clearly we have to think about genetics, we have to think about human testing, but there's a fundamental problem, because right now, stem cell lines, as extraordinary as they are, and lines are just groups of cells, they are made by hand, one at a time, and it takes a couple of months. This is not scalable, and also when you do things by hand, even in the best laboratories, you have variations in techniques, and you need to know, if you're making a drug, that the Aspirin you're going to take out of the bottle on Monday is the same as the Aspirin that's going to come out of the bottle on Wednesday. So we looked at this, and we thought, okay, artisanal is wonderful in, you know, your clothing and your bread and crafts, but artisanal really isn't going to work in stem cells, so we have to deal with this.But even with that, there still was another big hurdle, and that actually brings us back to the mapping of the human genome, because we're all different. We know from the sequencing of the human genome that it's shown us all of the A's, C's, G's and T's that make up our genetic code, but that code, by itself, our DNA, is like looking at the ones and zeroes of the computer code without having a computer that can read it. It's like having an app without having a smartphone. We needed to have a way of bringing the biology to that incredible data, and the way to do that was to find a stand-in, a biological stand-in, that could contain all of the genetic information, but have it be arrayed in such a way as it could be read together and actually create this incredible avatar. We need to have stem cells from all the genetic sub-types that represent who we are.So this is what we've built. It's an automated robotic technology. It has the capacity to produce thousands and thousands of stem cell lines. It's genetically arrayed. It has massively parallel processing capability, and it's going to change the way drugs are discovered, we hope, and I think eventually what's going to happen is that we're going to want to re-screen drugs, on arrays like this, that already exist, all of the drugs that currently exist, and in the future, you're going to be taking drugs and treatments that have been tested for side effects on all of the relevant cells, on brain cells and heart cells and liver cells.It really has brought us to the threshold of personalized medicine. It's here now, and in our family, my son has type 1 diabetes, which is still an incurable disease, and I lost my parents to heart disease and cancer, but I think that my story probably sounds familiar to you, because probably a version of it is your story. At some point in our lives, all of us, or people we care about, become patients, and that's why I think that stem cell research is incredibly important for all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_solomon_the_promise_of_research_with_stem_cells
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"As you might imagine, I'm absolutely passionate about dance. I'm passionate about making it, about watching it, about encouraging others to participate in it, and I'm also really passionate about creativity. Creativity for me is something that's absolutely critical, and I think it's something that you can teach. I think the technicities of creativity can be taught and shared, and I think you can find out things about your own personal physical signature, your own cognitive habits, and use that as a point of departure to misbehave beautifully.I was born in the 1970s, and John Travolta was big in those days: ""Grease,"" ""Saturday Night Fever,"" and he provided a fantastic kind of male role model for me to start dancing. My parents were very up for me going. They absolutely encouraged me to take risks, to go, to try, to try. I had an opportunity, an access to a local dance studio, and I had an enlightened teacher who allowed me to make up my own and invent my own dances, so what she did was let me make up my own ballroom and Latin American dances to teach to my peers. And that was the very first time that I found an opportunity to feel that I was able to express my own voice, and that's what's fueled me, then, to become a choreographer. I feel like I've got something to say and something to share.And I guess what's interesting is, is that I am now obsessed with the technology of the body. I think it's the most technologically literate thing that we have, and I'm absolutely obsessed with finding a way of communicating ideas through the body to audiences that might move them, touch them, help them think differently about things.So for me, choreography is very much a process of physical thinking. It's very much in mind, as well as in body, and it's a collaborative process. It's something that I have to do with other people. You know, it's a distributed cognitive process in a way. I work often with designers and visual artists, obviously dancers and other choreographers, but also, more and more, with economists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, people really who come from very different domains of expertise, where they bring their intelligence to bear on a different kind of creative process.What I thought we would do today a little bit is explore this idea of physical thinking, and we're all experts in physical thinking. Yeah, you all have a body, right? And we all know what that body is like in the real world, so one of the aspects of physical thinking that we think about a lot is this notion of proprioception, the sense of my own body in the space in the real world. So, we all understand what it feels like to know where the ends of your fingers are when you hold out your arms, yeah? You absolutely know that when you're going to grab a cup, or that cup moves and you have to renavigate it. So we're experts in physical thinking already. We just don't think about our bodies very much. We only think about them when they go wrong, so, when there's a broken arm, or when you have a heart attack, then you become really very aware of your bodies. But how is it that we can start to think about using choreographic thinking, kinesthetic intelligence, to arm the ways in which we think about things more generally?What I thought I'd do is, I'd make a TED premiere. I'm not sure if this is going to be good or not. I'll just be doing it. I thought what I'd do is, I'd use three versions of physical thinking to make something.I want to introduce you. This is Paolo. This is Catarina.(Applause)They have no idea what we're going to do. So this is not the type of choreography where I already have in mind what I'm going to make, where I've fixed the routine in my head and I'm just going to teach it to them, and these so-called empty vessels are just going to learn it. That's not the methodology at all that we work with. But what's important about it is how it is that they're grasping information, how they're taking information, how they're using it, and how they're thinking with it.I'm going to start really, really simply. Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought I'd take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it, it's quite easy to work with, and I'm going to do something very simply, where you take one idea from a body, and it happens to be my body, and translate that into somebody else's body, so it's a direct transfer, transformation of energy.And I'm going to imagine this, you can do this too if you like, that I'm going to just take the letter ""T"" and I'm going to imagine it in mind, and I'm going to place that outside in the real world. So I absolutely see a letter ""T"" in front of me. Yeah? It's absolutely there. I can absolutely walk around it when I see it, yeah? It has a kind of a grammar. I know what I'm going to do with it, and I can start to describe it, so I can describe it very simply. I can describe it in my arms, right? So all I did was take my hand and then I move my hand. I can describe it, whoa, in my head, you know? Whoa. Okay. I can do also my shoulder. Yeah? It gives me something to do, something to work towards. If I were to take that letter ""T"" and flatten it down on the floor, here, maybe just off the floor, all of a sudden I could do maybe something with my knee, yeah? Whoa. So If I put the knee and the arms together, I've got something physical, yeah? And I can start to build something. So what I'm going to do just for one and a half minutes or so is I'm going to take that concept, I'm going to make something, and the dancers behind me are going to interpret it, they're going to snapshot it, they're going to take aspects of it, and it's almost like I'm offloading memory and they're holding onto memory? Yeah? And we'll see what we come up with. So just have a little watch about how they're, how they're accessing this and what they're doing, and I'm just going to take this letter ""T,"" the letter ""E,"" and the letter ""D,"" to make something. Okay. Here goes.So I have to get myself in the zone. Right.It's a bit of a cross of my arm.So all I'm doing is exploring this space of ""T"" and flashing through it with some action. I'm not remembering what I'm doing. I'm just working on my task. My task is this ""T."" Going to watch it from the side, whoa. Strike moment. That's it.So we're starting to build a phrase.So what they're doing, let's see, something like that, so what they're doing is grasping aspects of that movement and they're generating it into a phrase. You can see the speed is extremely quick, yeah? I'm not asking them to copy exactly. They're using the information that they receive to generate the beginnings of a phrase. I can watch that and that can tell me something about how it is that they're moving. Yeah, they're super quick, right?So I've taken this aspect of TED and translated it into something that's physical. Some dancers, when they're watching action, take the overall shape, the arc of the movement, the kinetic sense of the movement, and use that for memory. Some work very much in specific detail. They start with small little units and build it up. Okay, you've got something? One more thing.So they're solving this problem for me, having a little — They're constructing that phrase. They have something and they're going to hold on to it, yeah? One way of making. That's going to be my beginning in this world premiere.Okay. From there I'm going to do a very different thing. So basically I'm going to make a duet. I want you to think about them as architectural objects, so what they are, are just pure lines. They're no longer people, just pure lines, and I'm going to work with them almost as objects to think with, yeah? So what I'm thinking about is taking a few physical extensions from the body as I move, and I move them, and I do that by suggesting things to them: If, then; if, then. Okay, so here we go.Just grab this arm. Can you place that down into the floor? Yeah, down to the floor. Can you go underneath? Yeah. Cat, can you put leg over that side? Yeah. Can you rotate? Whoom, just go back to the beginning. Here we go, ready? And ... bam, bake ... (clicks metronome) Great. Okay, from there, you're both getting up. You're both getting up. Here we go. Good, now? Them.(Applause)So from there, from there, we're both getting up, we're both getting up, going in this direction, going underneath. Whoa, whoa, underneath. Whoa, underneath, whoo-um. Yeah? Underneath. Jump. Underneath. Jump. Paolo, kick. Don't care where. Kick. Kick, replace, change a leg. Kick, replace, change the leg. Yeah? Okay? Cat, almost get his head. Almost get his head. Whoaa. Just after it, maybe. Whoaa, whaaay, ooh. Grab her waist, come up back into her first, whoom, spin, turn her, whoo-aa. (Snaps) Great. Okay, let's have a little go from the beginning of that. Just, let me slow down here. Fancy having eight — (Laughter)Fancy having eight hours with me in a day. So, maybe too much. So, here we go, ready, and — (Clicks metronome)(Clicks metronome)Nice, good job. Yeah? Okay. (Applause) Okay, not bad. (Applause) A little bit more? Yeah. Just a little bit more, here we go, from that place. Separate. Face the front. Separate. Face the front. Imagine that there's a circle in front of you, yeah? Avoid it. Avoid it. Whoom. Kick it out of the way. Kick it out of the way. Throw it into the audience. Whoom. Throw it into the audience again. We've got mental architecture, we're sharing it, therefore solving a problem. They're enacting it. Let me just see that a little bit. Ready, and go.(Clicks metronome)Okay, brilliant. Okay, here we go. From the beginning, can we do our phrases first? And then that. And we're going to build something now, organize it, the phrases. Here we go. Nice and slow? Ready and go ... um. (Clicks metronome)(Clicks metronome) The duet starts. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) So yeah, okay, good. Okay, nice, very nice. (Applause)So good. So — (Applause) Okay. So that was — (Applause) Well done. (Applause)That was the second way of working. The first one, body-to-body transfer, yeah, with an outside mental architecture that I work with that they hold memory with for me. The second one, which is using them as objects to think with their architectural objects, I do a series of provocations, I say, ""If this happens, then that. If this, if that happens — "" I've got lots of methods like that, but it's very, very quick, and this is a third method. They're starting it already, and this is a task-based method, where they have the autonomy to make all of the decisions for themselves.So I'd like us just to do, we're going to do a little mental dance, a little, in this little one minute, so what I'd love you to do is imagine, you can do this with your eyes closed, or open, and if you don't want to do it you can watch them, it's up to you. Just for a second, think about that word ""TED"" in front of you, so it's in mind, and it's there right in front of your mind. What I'd like you to do is transplant that outside into the real world, so just imagine that word ""TED"" in the real world. What I'd like you to do what that is take an aspect of it. I'm going to zone in on the ""E,"" and I'm going to scale that ""E"" so it's absolutely massive, so I'm scaling that ""E"" so it's absolutely massive, and then I'm going to give it dimensionality. I'm going to think about it in 3D space. So now, instead of it just being a letter that's in front of me, it's a space that my body can go inside of. I now decide where I'm going to be in that space, so I'm down on this small part of the bottom rib of the letter ""E,"" and I'm thinking about it, and I'm imagining this space that's really high and above. If I asked you to reach out — you don't have to literally do it, but in mind — reach out to the top of the ""E,"" where would you reach? If you reach with your finger, where would it be? If you reach with your elbow, where would it be? If I already then said about that space that you're in, let's infuse it with the color red, what does that do to the body? If I then said to you, what happens if that whole wall on the side of ""E"" collapses and you have to use your weight to put it back up, what would you be able to do with it?So this is a mental picture, I'm describing a mental, vivid picture that enables dancers to make choices for themselves about what to make.Okay, you can open your eyes if you had them closed.So the dancers have been working on them. So just keep working on them for a little second. So they've been working on those mental architectures in the here. I know, I think we should keep them as a surprise.So here goes, world premiere dance. Yeah? Here we go. TED dance. Okay. Here it comes. I'm going to organize it quickly. So, you're going to do the first solo that we made, yeah blah blah blah blah, we go into the duet, yeah, blah blah blah blah. The next solo, blah blah blah blah, yeah, and both at the same time, you do the last solutions.Okay? Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, world premiere, TED dance, three versions of physical thinking. (Applause) Well, clap afterwards, let's see if it's any good, yeah? (Laughter) So yeah, let's clap — yeah, let's clap afterwards. Here we go. Catarina, big moment, here we go, one.(Clicks metronome) Here it comes, Cat. (Clicks metronome) Paolo, go. (Clicks metronome) Last you solo. The one you made. (Clicks metronome) (Clicks metronome) Well done. Okay, good. Super. So —(Applause) So — (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So — three versions. (Applause) Oh. (Laughs) (Applause) Three versions of physical thinking, yeah? Three versions of physical thinking. I'm hoping that today, what you're going to do is go away and make a dance for yourself, and if not that, at least misbehave more beautifully, more often.Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Here we go. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wayne_mcgregor_a_choreographer_s_creative_process_in_real_time
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"So when the White House was built in the early 19th century, it was an open house. Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams, a local dentist happened by. He wanted to shake the President's hand. The President dismissed the Secretary of State, whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist if he would remove a tooth. Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce, he was known to have remarked — probably the only thing he's known for — when a neighbor passed by and said, ""I'd love to see the beautiful house,"" and Pierce said to him, ""Why my dear sir, of course you may come in. This isn't my house. It is the people's house.""Well, when I got to the White House in the beginning of 2009, at the start of the Obama Administration, the White House was anything but open. Bomb blast curtains covered my windows. We were running Windows 2000. Social media were blocked at the firewall. We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts like we have today. I came in to become the head of Open Government, to take the values and the practices of transparency, participation and collaboration, and instill them into the way that we work, to open up government, to work with people.Now one of the things that we know is that companies are very good at getting people to work together in teams and in networks to make very complex products, like cars and computers, and the more complex the products are a society creates, the more successful the society is over time. Companies make goods, but governments, they make public goods. They work on the cure for cancer and educating our children and making roads, but we don't have institutions that are particularly good at this kind of complexity. We don't have institutions that are good at bringing our talents to bear, at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way.So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy, what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector employees how we should open up government. Turns out that had never been done before. We wanted to ask members of the public to help us come up with a policy, not after the fact, commenting on a rule after it's written, the way is typically the case, but in advance. There was no legal precedent, no cultural precedent, no technical way of doing this. In fact, many people told us it was illegal.Here's the crux of the obstacle. Governments exist to channel the flow of two things, really, values and expertise to and from government and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions. But the way that our institutions are designed, in our rather 18th-century, centralized model, is to channel the flow of values through voting, once every four years, once every two years, at best, once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this era of social media, for us to actually express our values. Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves a great deal, perhaps a little too much.Then in the 19th century, we layer on the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state to help us govern complex and large societies. But we've centralized these bureaucracies. We've entrenched them. And we know that the smartest person always works for someone else. We need to only look around this room to know that expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society, and not limited simply to our institutions.Scientists have been studying in recent years the phenomenon that they often describe as flow, that the design of our systems, whether natural or social, channel the flow of whatever runs through them. So a river is designed to channel the flow of water, and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels the flow of electricity, and a leaf is designed to channel the flow of nutrients to the tree, sometimes even having to route around an obstacle, but to get that nutrition flowing. The same can be said for our social systems, for our systems of government, where, at the very least, flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding what the problem is, what's really broken, and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today, to redesign the flow of our institutions.We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions that are actually quite recent. Think about it: What other business do you know, what other sector of the economy, and especially one as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent its business model on a regular basis? Sure, we invest plenty in innovation. We invest in broadband and science education and science grants, but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning the institutions that we have.Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime, especially around election time, but the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people, many of whom will lack basic resources. So complain as we might, what actually can replace what we have today? What comes the day after the Arab Spring?Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself to us is that of networks. Right? Networks like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean. You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook governing 900 million inhabitants. We might even call them citizens, because they've recently risen up to fight against legislative incursion, and the citizens of these networks work together to serve each other in great ways. But private communities, private, corporate, privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies. They cannot replace government. Friending someone on Facebook is not complex enough to do the hard work of you and I collaborating with each other and doing the hard work of governance. But social media do teach us something. Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform. It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can read and process information in new and exciting ways. We need to think about how to open up the API of government, and the way that we're going to do that, the next great superpower is going to be the one who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution — because we have to maintain those public values, we have to coordinate the flow — but with the diversity and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement of networks, all of us working together to build these new innovations on top of our institutions, to engage in the practice of governance.We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here, in the 12th century, invented the jury. Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens. Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury, the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance.Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution emerging all around us — maybe not even evolution, I'd even start to call it a revolution — in the way that we govern. Some of it's very high-tech, and some of it is extremely low-tech, such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan, India, where they take the spending data of the state and paint it on 100,000 village walls, and then invite the villagers to come and comment who is on the government payroll, who's actually died, what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere, and to work together through civic engagement to save real money and participate and have access to that budget.But it's not just about policing government. It's also about creating government. Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding, getting you and me to raise the money to build the goalposts and the park benches that will actually allow us to deliver better services in our communities. No one is better at this activity of actually getting us to engage in delivering services, sometimes where none exist, than Ushahidi. Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008, this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able to crowdsource and target the delivery of better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble, whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti, or more recently in Italy. And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them.Now what we're seeing lots of examples of, obviously, is the opening up of government data, not enough examples of this yet, but we're starting to see this practice of people creating and generating innovative applications on top of government data. There's so many examples I could have picked, and I selected this one of Jon Bon Jovi. Some of you may or may not know that he runs a soup kitchen in New Jersey, where he caters to and serves the homeless and particularly homeless veterans. In February, he approached the White House, and said, ""I would like to fund a prize to create scalable national applications, apps, that will help not only the homeless but those who deliver services [to] them to do so better."" February 2012 to June of 2012, the finalists are announced in the competition. Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear, getting anything done in a four-month period of time? You can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time, let alone generate real, palpable innovations that improve people's lives.And I want to be clear to mention that this open government revolution is not about privatizing government, because in many cases what it can do when we have the will to do so is to deliver more progressive and better policy than the regulations and the legislative and litigation-oriented strategies by which we make policy today. In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions, from well-driller to florist. Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas, but do not make a flower arrangement without a license, because that will land you in jail. So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me, using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship, but to replace those regulations with more innovative alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation of new iPhone apps that will allows us both to protect consumers and the public and to encourage economic development.That is a nice sideline of open government. It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard to development. It's the economic benefits and the job creation that's coming from this open innovation work. Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia, largely owned by the Russian government, has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations. Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles, from open innovation, and they're pushing radically the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking, but into the public sector. And we see lots of examples of these innovators using open government data, not simply to make apps, but then to make companies and to hire people to build them working with the government.So a lot of these innovations are local. In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app in which they allow you or me to say we are certified CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack, a notification goes out so that you can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR. The victim who receives bystander CPR is more than twice as likely to survive. ""There is a hero in all of us,"" is their slogan.But it's not limited to the local. British Columbia, Canada, is publishing a catalogue of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage with the state in the cocreation of governance.Let me be very clear, and perhaps controversial, that open government is not about transparent government. Simply throwing data over the transom doesn't change how government works. It doesn't get anybody to do anything with that data to change lives, to solve problems, and it doesn't change government. What it does is it creates an adversarial relationship between civil society and government over the control and ownership of information. And transparency, by itself, is not reducing the flow of money into politics, and arguably, it's not even producing accountability as well as it might if we took the next step of combining participation and collaboration with transparency to transform how we work.We're going to see this evolution really in two phases, I think. The first phase of the open government revolution is delivering better information from the crowd into the center. Starting in 2005, and this is how this open government work in the U.S. really got started, I was teaching a patent law class to my students and explaining to them how a single person in the bureaucracy has the power to make a decision about which patent application becomes the next patent, and therefore monopolizes for 20 years the rights over an entire field of inventive activity. Well, what did we do? We said, we can make a website, we can make an expert network, a social network, that would connect the network to the institution to allow scientists and technologists to get better information to the patent office to aid in making those decisions. We piloted the work in the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan and Australia, and now I'm pleased to report that the United States Patent Office will be rolling out universal, complete, and total openness, so that all patent applications will now be open for citizen participation, beginning this year.The second phase of this evolution — Yeah. (Applause) They deserve a hand. (Applause)The first phase is in getting better information in. The second phase is in getting decision-making power out. Participatory budgeting has long been practiced in Porto Alegre, Brazil. They're just starting it in the 49th Ward in Chicago. Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together, as is Lithuania. When we start to see power over the core functions of government — spending, legislation, decision-making — then we're well on our way to an open government revolution.There are many things that we can do to get us there. Obviously opening up the data is one, but the important thing is to create lots more — create and curate — lots more participatory opportunities. Hackathons and mashathons and working with data to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage and participate, like the jury is, but we're going to need lots more things like it. And that's why we need to start with our youngest people. We've heard talk here at TED about people biohacking and hacking their plants with Arduino, and Mozilla is doing work around the world in getting young people to build websites and make videos. When we start by teaching young people that we live, not in a passive society, a read-only society, but in a writable society, where we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards this open government innovation, towards this open government movement, towards this open government revolution.So let me close by saying that I think the important thing for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution. We don't have words, really, to describe it yet. Words like equality and fairness and the traditional elections, democracy, these are not really great terms yet. They're not fun enough. They're not exciting enough to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity that awaits us. But I would argue that if we want to see the kinds of innovations, the hopeful and exciting innovations that we hear talked about here at TED, in clean energy, in clean education, in development, if we want to see those adopted and we want to see those scaled, we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow, then we must all participate, then we must get involved. We must open up our institutions, and like the leaf, we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic, throughout our culture, to create open institutions to create a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beth_noveck_demand_a_more_open_source_government
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"The job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when I was 15 years old. I bought some pigs. I was living in Sussex. And I started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way. I went to my school kitchen, and I said, ""Give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at."" I went to the local baker and took their stale bread. I went to the local greengrocer, and I went to a farmer who was throwing away potatoes because they were the wrong shape or size for supermarkets. This was great. My pigs turned that food waste into delicious pork. I sold that pork to my school friends' parents, and I made a good pocket money addition to my teenage allowance.But I noticed that most of the food that I was giving my pigs was in fact fit for human consumption, and that I was only scratching the surface, and that right the way up the food supply chain, in supermarkets, greengrocers, bakers, in our homes, in factories and farms, we were hemorrhaging out food. Supermarkets didn't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting. I'd been round the back. I'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites, and I thought, surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it.One morning, when I was feeding my pigs, I noticed a particularly tasty-looking sun-dried tomato loaf that used to crop up from time to time. I grabbed hold of it, sat down, and ate my breakfast with my pigs. (Laughter) That was the first act of what I later learned to call freeganism, really an exhibition of the injustice of food waste, and the provision of the solution to food waste, which is simply to sit down and eat food, rather than throwing it away. That became, as it were, a way of confronting large businesses in the business of wasting food, and exposing, most importantly, to the public, that when we're talking about food being thrown away, we're not talking about rotten stuff, we're not talking about stuff that's beyond the pale. We're talking about good, fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale.Eventually, I set about writing my book, really to demonstrate the extent of this problem on a global scale. What this shows is a nation-by-nation breakdown of the likely level of food waste in each country in the world. Unfortunately, empirical data, good, hard stats, don't exist, and therefore to prove my point, I first of all had to find some proxy way of uncovering how much food was being wasted. So I took the food supply of every single country and I compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country. That's based on diet intake surveys, it's based on levels of obesity, it's based on a range of factors that gives you an approximate guess as to how much food is actually going into people's mouths. That black line in the middle of that table is the likely level of consumption with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste. There will always be waste. I'm not that unrealistic that I think we can live in a waste-free world. But that black line shows what a food supply should be in a country if they allow for a good, stable, secure, nutritional diet for every person in that country. Any dot above that line, and you'll quickly notice that that includes most countries in the world, represents unnecessary surplus, and is likely to reflect levels of waste in each country.As a country gets richer, it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants, and as you can see, most European and North American countries fall between 150 and 200 percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations. So a country like America has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people.But the thing that really struck me, when I plotted all this data, and it was a lot of numbers, was that you can see how it levels off. Countries rapidly shoot towards that 150 mark, and then they level off, and they don't really go on rising as you might expect. So I decided to unpack that data a little bit further to see if that was true or false. And that's what I came up with. If you include not just the food that ends up in shops and restaurants, but also the food that people feed to livestock, the maize, the soy, the wheat, that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products, what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself. A country like America has four times the amount of food that it needs.When people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by 2050, I always think of these graphs. The fact is, we have an enormous buffer in rich countries between ourselves and hunger. We've never had such gargantuan surpluses before. In many ways, this is a great success story of human civilization, of the agricultural surpluses that we set out to achieve 12,000 years ago. It is a success story. It has been a success story. But what we have to recognize now is that we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear, and when we chop down forests, as we are every day, to grow more and more food, when we extract water from depleting water reserves, when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food, and then we throw away so much of it, we have to think about what we can start saving.And yesterday, I went to one of the local supermarkets that I often visit to inspect, if you like, what they're throwing away. I found quite a few packets of biscuits amongst all the fruit and vegetables and everything else that was in there. And I thought, well this could serve as a symbol for today.So I want you to imagine that these nine biscuits that I found in the bin represent the global food supply, okay? We start out with nine. That's what's in fields around the world every single year. The first biscuit we're going to lose before we even leave the farm. That's a problem primarily associated with developing work agriculture, whether it's a lack of infrastructure, refrigeration, pasteurization, grain stores, even basic fruit crates, which means that food goes to waste before it even leaves the fields. The next three biscuits are the foods that we decide to feed to livestock, the maize, the wheat and the soya. Unfortunately, our beasts are inefficient animals, and they turn two-thirds of that into feces and heat, so we've lost those two, and we've only kept this one in meat and dairy products. Two more we're going to throw away directly into bins. This is what most of us think of when we think of food waste, what ends up in the garbage, what ends up in supermarket bins, what ends up in restaurant bins. We've lost another two, and we've left ourselves with just four biscuits to feed on. That is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources, especially when you think of the billion hungry people that exist already in the world.Having gone through the data, I then needed to demonstrate where that food ends up. Where does it end up? We're used to seeing the stuff on our plates, but what about all the stuff that goes missing in between?Supermarkets are an easy place to start. This is the result of my hobby, which is unofficial bin inspections. (Laughter) Strange you might think, but if we could rely on corporations to tell us what they were doing in the back of their stores, we wouldn't need to go sneaking around the back, opening up bins and having a look at what's inside. But this is what you can see more or less on every street corner in Britain, in Europe, in North America. It represents a colossal waste of food, but what I discovered whilst I was writing my book was that this very evident abundance of waste was actually the tip of the iceberg. When you start going up the supply chain, you find where the real food waste is happening on a gargantuan scale.Can I have a show of hands if you have a loaf of sliced bread in your house? Who lives in a household where that crust — that slice at the first and last end of each loaf — who lives in a household where it does get eaten? Okay, most people, not everyone, but most people, and this is, I'm glad to say, what I see across the world, and yet has anyone seen a supermarket or sandwich shop anywhere in the world that serves sandwiches with crusts on it? (Laughter) I certainly haven't. So I kept on thinking, where do those crusts go? (Laughter) This is the answer, unfortunately: 13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of this one single factory every single day, day-fresh bread. In the same year that I visited this factory, I went to Pakistan, where people in 2008 were going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies. We contribute to that squeeze by depositing food in bins here in Britain and elsewhere in the world. We take food off the market shelves that hungry people depend on.Go one step up, and you get to farmers, who throw away sometimes a third or even more of their harvest because of cosmetic standards. This farmer, for example, has invested 16,000 pounds in growing spinach, not one leaf of which he harvested, because there was a little bit of grass growing in amongst it. Potatoes that are cosmetically imperfect, all going for pigs. Parsnips that are too small for supermarket specifications, tomatoes in Tenerife, oranges in Florida, bananas in Ecuador, where I visited last year, all being discarded. This is one day's waste from one banana plantation in Ecuador. All being discarded, perfectly edible, because they're the wrong shape or size.If we do that to fruit and vegetables, you bet we can do it to animals too. Liver, lungs, heads, tails, kidneys, testicles, all of these things which are traditional, delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste. Offal consumption has halved in Britain and America in the last 30 years. As a result, this stuff gets fed to dogs at best, or is incinerated. This man, in Kashgar, Xinjiang province, in Western China, is serving up his national dish. It's called sheep's organs. It's delicious, it's nutritious, and as I learned when I went to Kashgar, it symbolizes their taboo against food waste. I was sitting in a roadside cafe. A chef came to talk to me, I finished my bowl, and halfway through the conversation, he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl. I thought, ""My goodness, what taboo have I broken? How have I insulted my host?"" He pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl, and he said, ""Clean."" (Laughter) I thought, ""My God, you know, I go around the world telling people to stop wasting food. This guy has thrashed me at my own game."" (Laughter)But it gave me faith. It gave me faith that we, the people, do have the power to stop this tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food on a colossal scale, if we make noise about it, tell corporations about it, tell governments we want to see an end to food waste, we do have the power to bring about that change.Fish, 40 to 60 percent of European fish are discarded at sea, they don't even get landed. In our homes, we've lost touch with food. This is an experiment I did on three lettuces. Who keeps lettuces in their fridge? Most people. The one on the left was kept in a fridge for 10 days. The one in the middle, on my kitchen table. Not much difference. The one on the right I treated like cut flowers. It's a living organism, cut the slice off, stuck it in a vase of water, it was all right for another two weeks after this.Some food waste, as I said at the beginning, will inevitably arise, so the question is, what is the best thing to do with it? I answered that question when I was 15. In fact, humans answered that question 6,000 years ago: We domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food. And yet, in Europe, that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. It's unscientific. It's unnecessary. If you cook food for pigs, just as if you cook food for humans, it is rendered safe. It's also a massive saving of resources. At the moment, Europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from South America, where its production contributes to global warming, to deforestation, to biodiversity loss, to feed livestock here in Europe. At the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them. If we did that, and fed it to pigs, we would save that amount of carbon. If we feed our food waste which is the current government favorite way of getting rid of food waste, to anaerobic digestion, which turns food waste into gas to produce electricity, you save a paltry 448 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton of food waste. It's much better to feed it to pigs. We knew that during the war. (Laughter)A silver lining: It has kicked off globally, the quest to tackle food waste. Feeding the 5,000 is an event I first organized in 2009. We fed 5,000 people all on food that otherwise would have been wasted. Since then, it's happened again in London, it's happening internationally, and across the country. It's a way of organizations coming together to celebrate food, to say the best thing to do with food is to eat and enjoy it, and to stop wasting it. For the sake of the planet we live on, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all the other organisms that share our planet with us, we are a terrestrial animal, and we depend on our land for food. At the moment, we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats. Stop wasting food. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tristram_stuart_the_global_food_waste_scandal
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"Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life. Back then, 15 years ago, we didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan. In the past decade or so, mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages, and to track changes in brain structure and brain function, so we use structural MRI if you'd like to take a snapshot, a photograph, at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain, and we can ask questions like, how much gray matter does the brain contain, and how does that change with age? And we also use functional MRI, called fMRI, to take a video, a movie, of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something.So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research, and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops, and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it's not all over in early childhood, and instead, the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the '20s and '30s.So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological, hormonal, physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable, independent role in society. (Laughter) It can go on a long time. (Laughter) One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex. So this is a model of the human brain, and this is prefrontal cortex, right at the front. Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area. It's proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species, and it's involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions, things like decision-making, planning, planning what you're going to do tomorrow or next week or next year, inhibiting inappropriate behavior, so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid. It's also involved in social interaction, understanding other people, and self-awareness.So MRI studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence. So if you look at gray matter volume, for example, gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 years increases during childhood, which is what you can see on this graph. It peaks in early adolescence. The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls, and that's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average, and then during adolescence, there's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex. Now that might sound bad, but actually this is a really important developmental process, because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells, the synapses, and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning, the elimination of unwanted synapses. This is a really important process. It's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in, and the synapses that are being used are strengthened, and synapses that aren't being used in that particular environment are pruned away. You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush. You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining, important branches, can grow stronger, and this process, which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment, is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regions during the period of human adolescence.So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age. So I'll just give you an example from my lab. So in my lab, we're interested in the social brain, that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people. So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work. So this is a soccer game. (Laughter) Michael Owen has just missed a goal, and he's lying on the ground, and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are, so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal, everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face, even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass, is doing the same thing with his arms, and presumably has a similar facial expression, and the only people who don't are the guys in yellow at the back — (Laughs) — and I think they're on the wrong end of the stadium, and they're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize, and that's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates, how good we are at reading other people's behavior, their actions, their gestures, their facial expressions, in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states. So you don't have to ask any of these guys. You have a pretty good idea of what they're feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time.So that's what we're interested in looking at in my lab. So in my lab, we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan, we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people, their minds, their mental states, their emotions, and one of the findings that we've found several times now, as have other labs around the world, is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex, which is shown in blue on the slide, and it's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head. This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults, and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world, and they all show the same thing, that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence. And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach, a different cognitive strategy, to make social decisions, and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task, and I'll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab.So imagine that you're the participant in one of our experiments. You come into the lab, you see this computerized task. In this task, you see a set of shelves. Now, there are objects on these shelves, on some of them, and you'll notice there's a guy standing behind the set of shelves, and there are some objects that he can't see. They're occluded, from his point of view, with a kind of gray piece of wood. This is the same set of shelves from his point of view. Notice that there are only some objects that he can see, whereas there are many more objects that you can see. Now your task is to move objects around. The director, standing behind the set of shelves, is going to direct you to move objects around, but remember, he's not going to ask you to move objects that he can't see. This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there's a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director's perspective. So imagine he tells you to move the top truck left. There are three trucks there. You're going to instinctively go for the white truck, because that's the top truck from your perspective, but then you have to remember, ""Oh, he can't see that truck, so he must mean me to move the blue truck,"" which is the top truck from his perspective. Now believe it or not, normal, healthy, intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial. They move the white truck instead of the blue truck. So we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults, and we also have a control condition where there's no director and instead we give people a rule. We tell them, okay, we're going to do exactly the same thing but this time there's no director. Instead you've got to ignore objects with the dark gray background. You'll see that this is exactly the same condition, only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule, whereas in the director condition, they have to remember to take into account the director's perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior.Okay, so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did, this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood, and what you're going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions, so the gray is the director condition, and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time, whereas they make far fewer errors when there's no director present, when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background. Developmentally, these two conditions develop in exactly the same way. Between late childhood and mid-adolescence, there's an improvement, in other words a reduction of errors, in both of these trials, in both of these conditions. But it's when you compare the last two groups, the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting, because there, there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition. In other words, everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence, whereas in contrast, if you look at the last two gray bars, there's still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood, and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else's perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior, which is something, by the way, that we do in everyday life all the time, is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence. So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people's perspectives, you're right. They do. And this is why.So we sometimes laugh about teenagers. They're parodied, sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior. They take risks, they're sometimes moody, they're very self-conscious. I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after puberty was their level of embarrassment in front of him. So, he said, ""Before puberty, if my two daughters were messing around in a shop, I'd say, 'Hey, stop messing around and I'll sing your favorite song,' and instantly they'd stop messing around and he'd sing their favorite song. After puberty, that became the threat. (Laughter) The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave.So people often ask, ""Well, is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon? Is it something we've invented recently in the West?"" And actually, the answer is probably not. There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today.So there's a famous quote by Shakespeare from ""The Winter's Tale"" where he describes adolescence as follows: ""I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting."" (Laughter) He then goes on to say, ""Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?"" (Laughter) So almost 400 years ago, Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today, but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain.So for example, take risk-taking. We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks. They do. They take more risks than children or adults, and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they're with their friends. There's an important drive to become independent from one's parents and to impress one's friends in adolescence. But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system, so I'm going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me, and also on this brain. So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain, and it's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing. It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things, including taking risks. It gives you the kick out of taking risks. And this region, the regions within the limbic system, have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults, and at the very same time, the prefrontal cortex, which you can see in blue in the slide here, which stops us taking excessive risks, is still very much in development in adolescents.So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development, and this has implications for education, for rehabilitation, and intervention. The environment, including teaching, can and does shape the developing adolescent brain, and yet it's only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West. All four of my grandparents, for example, left school in their early adolescence. They had no choice. And that's still the case for many, many teenagers around the world today. Forty percent of teenagers don't have access to secondary school education. And yet, this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable. It's a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity.So what's sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents — heightened risk-taking, poor impulse control, self-consciousness — shouldn't be stigmatized. It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jayne_blakemore_the_mysterious_workings_of_the_adolescent_brain
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"It's time to start designing for our ears. Architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these. They use these to design with and they design for them, which is why we end up sitting in restaurants that look like this — (loud crowd noise) — and sound like this, shouting from a foot away to try and be heard by our dinner companion, or why we get on airplanes — (flight attendant announcements) — which cost 200 million pounds, with somebody talking through an old-fashioned telephone handset on a cheap stereo system, making us jump out of our skins.We're designing environments that make us crazy. (Laughter) And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.How does this work? Well, two ways. First of all, ambience. I have a whole TEDTalk about this. Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviorally all the time. The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it. There's a second way though, as well. That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners. If the space I'm sending it in is not effective, that communication can't happen.Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics. A room like this has acoustics, this one very good acoustics. Many rooms are not so good. Let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which I think we all care about: health and education. (Hospital noises) When I was visiting my terminally ill father in a hospital, I was asking myself, how does anybody get well in a place that sounds like this? Hospital sound is getting worse all the time. Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there. I think we would like for dispensing errors to be zero, wouldn't we? And yet, as noise levels go up, so do the errors in dispensing made by the staff in hospitals. Most of all, though, it affects the patients, and that could be you, it could be me. Sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery. It's when we regenerate, when we rebuild ourselves, and with threatening noise like this going on, your body, even if you are able to sleep, your body is telling you, ""I'm under threat. This is dangerous."" And the quality of sleep is degraded, and so is our recovery. There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care. This is an area I intend to take on this year.Education. When I see a classroom that looks like this, can you imagine how this sounds? I am forced to ask myself a question. (""Do architects have ears?"") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears. But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings. Here's a case in point. This is a 32-million-pound flagship academy school which was built quite recently in the U.K. and designed by one of Britain's top architects. Unfortunately, it was designed like a corporate headquarters, with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all. The children couldn't hear their teachers. They had to go back in and spend 600,000 pounds putting the walls in. Let's stop this madness of open plan classrooms right now, please.It's not just these modern buildings which suffer. Old-fashioned classrooms suffer too. A study in Florida just a few years ago found that if you're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom, row four, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent. Children are losing one word in two. Now that doesn't mean they only get half their education, but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what's going on.This is affected massively by reverberation time, how reverberant a room is. In a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds, which is pretty common, this is what it sounds like.(Inaudible echoing voice)Not so good, is it? If you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments, sound absorbing materials and so forth, this is what you get.Voice: In language, infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters. In arithmetic, infinitely many numbers can be composed from just a few digits with the help of the simple zero.Julian Treasure: What a difference. Now that education you would receive, and thanks to the British acoustician Adrian James for those simulations. The signal was the same, the background noise was the same. All that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples.If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment. Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever. On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group, on any given day. Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language. In the U.K., that's more than 10 percent of the school population. And finally, after Susan Cain's wonderful TEDTalk in February, we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they're in a noisy environment doing group work. Add those up. That is a lot of children who are not receiving their education properly.It's not just the children who are affected, though. (Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels. I have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound, and teachers are not just raising their voices. This chart maps the teacher's heart rate against the noise level. Noise goes up, heart rate goes up. That is not good for you. In fact, 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that, that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction. To you and me, that's a heart attack. It may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day.What does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time? Two and a half thousand pounds. And the Essex study which has just been done in the U.K., which incidentally showed that when you do this, you do not just make a room that's suitable for hearing-impaired children, you make a room where behavior improves, and results improve significantly, this found that sending a child out of area to a school that does have such a room, if you don't have one, costs 90,000 pounds a year. I think the economics are pretty clear on this.I'm glad that debate is happening on this. I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth. We're at last starting to debate this issue, and the benefits that are available for designing for the ears in education, unbelievable. Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen. And that's free out of that conference.Let's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities. We have urban planners. Where are the urban sound planners? I don't know of one in the world, and the opportunity is there to transform our experience in our cities. The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of Europe's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities. We can do better than that.And in our offices, we spend a lot of time at work. Where are the office sound planners? People who say, don't sit that team next to this team, because they like noise and they need quiet. Or who say, don't spend all your budget on a huge screen in the conference room, and then place one tiny microphone in the middle of a table for 30 people. (Laughter) If you can hear me, you can understand me without seeing me. If you can see me without hearing me, that does not work. So office sound is a huge area, and incidentally, noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful, less enjoy their teamwork, and less productive at work.Finally, we have homes. We use interior designers. Where are the interior sound designers? Hey, let's all be interior sound designers, take on listening to our rooms and designing sound that's effective and appropriate.My friend Richard Mazuch, an architect in London, coined the phrase ""invisible architecture."" I love that phrase. It's about designing, not appearance, but experience, so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look, that are fit for purpose, that improve our quality of life, our health and well being, our social behavior and our productivity.It's time to start designing for the ears. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_why_architects_need_to_use_their_ears
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"I've always written primarily about architecture, about buildings, and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions. An architect designs a building, and it becomes a place, or many architects design many buildings, and it becomes a city, and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places, at the end of the day, you can go and you can visit them. You can walk around them. You can smell them. You can get a feel for them. You can experience their sense of place.But what was striking to me over the last several years was that less and less was I going out into the world, and more and more, I was sitting in front of my computer screen. And especially since about 2007, when I got an iPhone, I was not only sitting in front of my screen all day, but I was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that I carried in my pocket. And what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed. In this very short period of time, you know, whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online, or the last, you know, four or five years of being online all the time, our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided. You know, we're both looking inside the screens and we're looking out in the world around us.And what was even more striking to me, and what I really got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own. If you went and looked for images of the Internet, this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse where we don't seem to be anywhere on it. We can never seem to grasp it in its totality. It's always reminded me of the Apollo image of the Earth, the blue marble picture, and it's similarly meant to suggest, I think, that we can't really understand it as a whole. We're always sort of small in the face of its expanse.So if there was this world and this screen, and if there was the physical world around me, I couldn't ever get them together in the same place.And then this happened. My Internet broke one day, as it occasionally does, and the cable guy came to fix it, and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch, and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard, and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall. And then he saw a squirrel running along the wire, and he said, ""There's your problem. A squirrel is chewing on your Internet."" (Laughter) And this seemed astounding. The Internet is a transcendent idea. It's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions. It was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on. (Laughter) But that in fact seemed to be the case. A squirrel had in fact chewed on my Internet. (Laughter) And then I got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it. Where would it go? Was the Internet actually a place that you could visit? Could I go there? Who would I meet? You know, was there something actually out there?And the answer, by all accounts, was no. This was the Internet, this black box with a red light on it, as represented in the sitcom ""The IT Crowd."" Normally it lives on the top of Big Ben, because that's where you get the best reception, but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation. The elders of the Internet were willing to part with it for a short while, and she looks at it and she says, ""This is the Internet? The whole Internet? Is it heavy?"" They say, ""Of course not, the Internet doesn't weigh anything.""And I was embarrassed. I was looking for this thing that only fools seem to look for. The Internet was that amorphous blob, or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it. It wasn't a real world out there.But, in fact, it is. There is a real world of the Internet out there, and that's what I spent about two years visiting, these places of the Internet. I was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit, and I visited places like this, 60 Hudson Street in New York, which is one of the buildings in the world, one of a very short list of buildings, about a dozen buildings, where more networks of the Internet connect to each other than anywhere else. And that connection is an unequivocally physical process. It's about the router of one network, a Facebook or a Google or a B.T. or a Comcast or a Time Warner, whatever it is, connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network, and that's unequivocally physical, and it's surprisingly intimate. A building like 60 Hudson, and a dozen or so others, has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings. There's a very short list of these places. And 60 Hudson in particular is interesting because it's home to about a half a dozen very important networks, which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect Europe and America and connect all of us. And it's those cables in particular that I want to focus on.If the Internet is a global phenomenon, if we live in a global village, it's because there are cables underneath the ocean, cables like this. And in this dimension, they are incredibly small. You can you hold them in your hand. They're like a garden hose. But in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive, as expansive as you can imagine. They stretch across the ocean. They're three or five or eight thousand miles in length, and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated, the basic physical process is shockingly simple. Light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other, and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood, and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna, and every 50 miles they amplify the signal, and since the rate of transmission is incredibly fast, the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light, maybe a thousand times your own connection, or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams, but not only that, but you'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers, but you'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber, and then you'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable, four going in each direction. And they're tiny. They're the thickness of a hair.And then they connect to the continent somewhere. They connect in a manhole like this. Literally, this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in. This is in Halifax, a cable that stretches from Halifax to Ireland. And the landscape is changing. Three years ago, when I started thinking about this, there was one cable down the Western coast of Africa, represented in this map by Steve Song as that thin black line. Now there are six cables and more coming, three down each coast. Because once a country gets plugged in by one cable, they realize that it's not enough. If they're going to build an industry around it, they need to know that their connection isn't tenuous but permanent, because if a cable breaks, you have to send a ship out into the water, throw a grappling hook over the side, pick it up, find the other end, and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over. It's an intensely, intensely physical process.So this is my friend Simon Cooper, who until very recently worked for Tata Communications, the communications wing of Tata, the big Indian industrial conglomerate. And I've never met him. We've only communicated via this telepresence system, which always makes me think of him as the man inside the Internet. (Laughter) And he is English. The undersea cable industry is dominated by Englishmen, and they all seem to be 42. (Laughter) Because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago. And Tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables, one across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific, and proceeded to add pieces onto them, until they had built a belt around the world, which means they will send your bits to the East or the West. They have — this is literally a beam of light around the world, and if a cable breaks in the Pacific, it'll send it around the other direction. And then having done that, they started to look for places to wire next. They looked for the unwired places, and that's meant North and South, primarily these cables to Africa. But what amazes me is Simon's incredible geographic imagination. He thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness.And I was particularly interested because I wanted to see one of these cables being built. See, you know, all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection, these sort of brief adjacencies, a tweet or a Facebook post or an email, and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that. It seemed like there was a moment when the continent was being plugged in, and I wanted to see that. And Simon was working on a new cable, WACS, the West Africa Cable System, that stretched from Lisbon down the west coast of Africa, to Cote d'Ivoire, to Ghana, to Nigeria, to Cameroon. And he said there was coming soon, depending on the weather, but he'd let me know when, and so with about four days notice, he said to go to this beach south of Lisbon, and a little after 9, this guy will walk out of the water. (Laughter) And he'll be carrying a green nylon line, a lightweight line, called a messenger line, and that was the first link between sea and land, this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light. Then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship, and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place. Then you can see the English engineers looking on. And then, once it was in the right place, he got back in the water holding a big knife, and he cut each buoy off, and the buoy popped up into the air, and the cable dropped to the sea floor, and he did that all the way out to the ship, and when he got there, they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie, and then he jumped back in, and he swam back to shore, and then he lit a cigarette. (Laughter)And then once that cable was on shore, they began to prepare to connect it to the other side, for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station. And first they got it with a hacksaw, and then they start sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a — sort of working like chefs, and then finally they're working like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up with the cable that had come down, and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together. And when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw, you stop thinking about the Internet as a cloud. It starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing. And what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology, as much as this is an incredibly new thing, the physical process itself has been around for a long time, and the culture is the same. You see the local laborers. You see the English engineer giving directions in the background. And more importantly, the places are the same. These cables still connect these classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Mombasa, Mumbai, Singapore, New York.And then the process on shore takes around three or four days, and then, when it's done, they put the manhole cover back on top, and they push the sand over that, and we all forget about it.And it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud, but every time we put something on the cloud, we give up some responsibility for it. We are less connected to it. We let other people worry about it. And that doesn't seem right. There's a great Neal Stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires. And we should know, I think, we should know where our Internet comes from, and we should know what it is that physically, physically connects us all. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thanks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_blum_what_is_the_internet_really
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"I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me, and closer than you might realize to you.I came to the UK 21 years ago, as an asylum-seeker. I was 21. I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, where I was a student activist. I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo.But I want to tell you what the Congo has got to do with you. But first of all, I want you to do me a favor. Can you all please reach into your pockets and take out your mobile phone? Feel that familiar weight ... how naturally your finger slides towards the buttons.(Laughter)Can you imagine your world without it? It connects us to our loved ones, our family, friends and colleagues, at home and overseas. It is a symbol of an interconnected world.But what you hold in your hand leaves a bloody trail, and it all boils down to a mineral: tantalum, mined in the Congo as coltan. It is an anticorrosive heat conductor. It stores energy in our mobile phones, PlayStations and laptops. It is used in aerospace and medical equipment as an alloy. It is so powerful that we only need tiny amounts. It would be great if the story ended there.Unfortunately, what you hold in your hand has not only enabled incredible technological development and industrial expansion, but it has also contributed to unimaginable human suffering.Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved. Rape is used as a weapon of war, instilling fear and depopulating whole areas. The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided, but it has fueled the ongoing war in the Congo.But don't throw away your phones yet. Thirty thousand children are enlisted and are made to fight in armed groups. The Congo consistently scores dreadfully in global health and poverty rankings. But remarkably, the UN Environmental Programme has estimated the wealth of the country to be over 24 trillion dollars. The state-regulated mining industry has collapsed, and control over mines has splintered. Coltan is easily controlled by armed groups. One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda, where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan.But don't throw away your phones yet, because the incredible irony is that the technology that has placed such unsustainable, devastating demands on the Congo is the same technology that has brought this situation to our attention. We only know so much about the situation in the Congo and in the mines because of the kind of communication the mobile phone allows. As with the Arab Spring, during the recent elections in the Congo, voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa. And in the wake of the result, the diaspora has joined with the Carter Center, the Catholic Church and other observers, to draw attention to the undemocratic result.The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom. It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet. It has allowed momentous political change to take place. So, we are faced with a paradox. The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression.TED has always celebrated what technology can do for us, technology in its finished form. It is time to be asking questions about technology. Where does it come from? Who makes it? And for what? Here, I am speaking directly to you, the TED community, and to all those who might be watching on a screen, on your phone, across the world, in the Congo. All the technology is in place for us to communicate, and all the technology is in place to communicate this.At the moment, there is no clear fair-trade solution. But there has been a huge amount of progress. The US has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo. Recent UK legislation could be used in the same way. In February, Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo, and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone. There are campaigns spreading across university campuses to make their colleges conflict-free. But we're not there yet. We need to continue mounting pressure on phone companies to change their sourcing processes.When I first came to the UK, 21 years ago, I was homesick. I missed my family and the friends I left behind. Communication was extremely difficult. Sending and receiving letters took months — if you were lucky. Often, they never arrived. Even if I could have afforded the phone bills home, like most people in the Congo, my parents did not own a phone line.Today, my two sons — David and Daniel, can talk to my parents and get to know them. Why should we allow such a wonderful, brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings?We demand fair-trade food and fair-trade clothes. It is time to demand fair-trade phones. This is an idea worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bandi_mbubi_demand_a_fair_trade_cell_phone
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"You know, we wake up in the morning, you get dressed, put on your shoes, you head out into the world. You plan on coming back, getting undressed, going to bed, waking up, doing it again, and that anticipation, that rhythm, helps give us a structure to how we organize ourselves and our lives, and gives it a measure of predictability. Living in New York City, as I do, it's almost as if, with so many people doing so many things at the same time in such close quarters, it's almost like life is dealing you extra hands out of that deck. You're never, there's just, juxtapositions are possible that just aren't, you don't think they're going to happen. And you never think you're going to be the guy who's walking down the street and, because you choose to go down one side or the other, the rest of your life is changed forever.And one night, I'm riding the uptown local train. I get on. I tend to be a little bit vigilant when I get on the subway. I'm not one of the people zoning out with headphones or a book. And I get on the car, and I look, and I notice this couple, college-aged, student-looking kids, a guy and a girl, and they're sitting next to each other, and she's got her leg draped over his knee, and they're doing — they have this little contraption, and they're tying these knots, and they're doing it with one hand, they're doing it left-handed and right-handed very quickly, and then she'll hand the thing to him and he'll do it. I've never seen anything like this. It's almost like they're practicing magic tricks.And at the next stop, a guy gets on the car, and he has this sort of visiting professor look to him. He's got the overstuffed leather satchel and the rectangular file case and a laptop bag and the tweed jacket with the leather patches, and — (Laughter) — he looks at them, and then in a blink of an eye, he kneels down in front of them, and he starts to say, ""You know, listen, here's how you can do it. Look, if you do this — "" and he takes the laces out of their hand, and instantly, he starts tying these knots, and even better than they were doing it, remarkably. And it turns out they are medical students on their way to a lecture about the latest suturing techniques, and he's the guy giving the lecture. (Laughter)So he starts to tell them, and he's like, ""No, this is very important here. You know, when you're needing these knots, it's going to be, you know, everything's going to be happening at the same time, it's going to be — you're going to have all this information coming at you, there's going to be organs getting in the way, it's going to be slippery, and it's just very important that you be able to do these beyond second nature, each hand, left hand, right hand, you have to be able to do them without seeing your fingers."" And at that moment, when I heard that, I just got catapulted out of the subway car into a night when I had been getting a ride in an ambulance from the sidewalk where I had been stabbed to the trauma room of St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, and what had happened was a gang had come in from Brooklyn. As part of an initiation for three of their members, they had to kill somebody, and I happened to be the guy walking down Bleecker Street that night, and they jumped on me without a word. One of the very lucky things, when I was at Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team, so I put my hands up right away, instinctively. The guy on the right had a knife with a 10-inch blade, and he went in under my elbow, and it went up and cut my inferior vena cava. If you know anything about anatomy, that's not a good thing to get cut, and everything, of course, on the way up, and then — I still had my hands up — he pulled it out and went for my neck, and sunk it in up to the hilt in my neck, and I got one straight right punch and knocked the middle guy out. The other guy was still working on me, collapsing my other lung, and I managed to, by hitting that guy, to get a minute. I ran down the street and collapsed, and the ambulance guys intubated me on the sidewalk and let the trauma room know they had an incoming.And one of the side effects of having major massive blood loss is you get tunnel vision, so I remember being on the stretcher and having a little nickel-sized cone of vision, and I was moving my head around and we got to St. Vincent's, and we're racing down this hallway, and I see the lights going, and it's a peculiar effect of memories like that. They don't really go to the usual place that memories go. They kind of have this vault where they're stored in high-def, and George Lucas did all the sound effects. (Laughter) So sometimes, remembering them, it's like, it's not like any other kind of memories.And I get into the trauma room, and they're waiting for me, and the lights are there, and I'd been able to breathe a little more now, because the blood has left, had been filling up my lungs and I was having a very hard time breathing, but now it's kind of gone into the stretcher. And I said, ""Is there anything I can do to help?"" and — (Laughter) — the nurse kind of had a hysterical laugh, and I'm turning my head trying to see everybody, and I had this weird memory of being in college and raising, raising money for the flood victims of Bangladesh, and then I look over and my anesthesiologist is clamping the mask on me, and I think, ""He looks Bangladeshi,"" — (Laughter) — and I just have those two facts, and I just think, ""This could work somehow."" (Laughter)And then I go out, and they work on me for the rest of the night, and I needed about 40 units of blood to keep me there while they did their work, and the surgeon took out about a third of my intestines, my cecum, organs I didn't know that I had, and he later told me one of the last things he did while he was in there was to remove my appendix for me, which I thought was great, you know, just a little tidy thing there at the end. (Laughter) And I came to in the morning. Out of anesthetic, he had let them know that he wanted to be there, and he had given me about a two percent chance of living.So he was there when I woke up, and it was, waking up was like breaking through the ice into a frozen lake of pain. It was that enveloping, and there was only one spot that didn't hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt, and it was my instep, and he was holding the arch of my foot and rubbing the instep with his thumb.And I looked up, and he's like, ""Good to see you,"" and I was trying to remember what had happened and trying to get my head around everything, and the pain was just overwhelming, and he said, ""You know, we didn't cut your hair. I thought you might have gotten strength from your hair like Samson, and you're going to need all the strength you can get."" And in those days, my hair was down to my waist, I drove a motorcycle, I was unmarried, I owned a bar, so those were different times. (Laughter)But I had three days of life support, and everybody was expecting, due to just the massive amount of what they had had to do that I wasn't going to make it, so it was three days of everybody was either waiting for me to die or poop, and — (Laughter) — when I finally pooped, then that somehow, surgically speaking, that's like you crossed some good line, and, um — (Laughter) — on that day, the surgeon came in and whipped the sheet off of me. He had three or four friends with him, and he does that, and they all look, and there was no infection, and they bend over me and they're poking and prodding, and they're like, ""There's no hematomas, blah blah, look at the color,"" and they're talking amongst themselves and I'm, like, this restored automobile that he's just going, ""Yeah, I did that."" (Laughter) And it was just, it was amazing, because these guys are high-fiving him over how good I turned out, you know? (Laughter) And it's my zipper, and I've still got the staples in and everything.And later on, when I got out and the flashbacks and the nightmares were giving me a hard time, I went back to him and I was sort of asking him, you know, what am I gonna do? And I think, kind of, as a surgeon, he basically said, ""Kid, I saved your life. Like, now you can do whatever you want, like, you gotta get on with that. It's like I gave you a new car and you're complaining about not finding parking. Like, just, go out, and, you know, do your best. But you're alive. That's what it's about.""And then I hear, ""Bing-bong,"" and the subway doors are closing, and my stop is next, and I look at these kids, and I go, I think to myself, ""I'm going to lift my shirt up and show them,"" — (Laughter) — and then I think, ""No, this is the New York City subway, that's going to lead to other things."" (Laughter)And so I just think, they got their lecture to go to. I step off, I'm standing on the platform, and I feel my index finger in the first scar that I ever got, from my umbilical cord, and then around that, is traced the last scar that I got from my surgeon, and I think that, that chance encounter with those kids on the street with their knives led me to my surgical team, and their training and their skill and, always, a little bit of luck pushed back against chaos.Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Very lucky to be here. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_gavagan_a_story_about_knots_and_surgeons
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"So if someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say? How would people describe your judgment, your knowledge, your behaviors, in different situations? Today I'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset.I'd like to start by introducing you to someone whose life has been changed by a marketplace fueled by reputation. Sebastian Sandys has been a bed and breakfast host on Airbnb since 2008. I caught up with him recently, where, over the course of several cups of tea, he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life. More than 50 people have come to stay in the 18th-century watchhouse he lives in with his cat, Squeak. Now, I mention Squeak because Sebastian's first guest happened to see a rather large mouse run across the kitchen, and she promised that she would refrain from leaving a bad review on one condition: he got a cat. And so Sebastian bought Squeak to protect his reputation.Now, as many of you know, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries. The places being rented out are things that you might expect, like spare rooms and holiday homes, but part of the magic is the unique places that you can now access: treehouses, teepees, airplane hangars, igloos. If you don't like the hotel, there's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night. It's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before.Now let me show you these heat maps of Paris to see how insanely fast it's growing. This image here is from 2008. The pink dots represent host properties. Even four years ago, letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea. Now the same view in 2010. And now, 2012. There is an Airbnb host on almost every main street in Paris. Now, what's happening here is people are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets, from skills to spaces to material possessions, in ways and on a scale never possible before. It's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption, and, through it, people like Sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs. They're empowered to make money and save money from their existing assets.But the real magic and the secret source behind collaborative consumption marketplaces like Airbnb isn't the inventory or the money. It's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers. This side of Airbnb really hit home to Sebastian last summer during the London riots. He woke up around 9, and he checked his email and he saw a bunch of messages all asking him if he was okay. Former guests from around the world had seen that the riots were happening just down the street, and wanted to check if he needed anything. Sebastian actually said to me, he said, ""Thirteen former guests contacted me before my own mother rang."" (Laughter)Now, this little anecdote gets to the heart of why I'm really passionate about collaborative consumption, and why, after I finished my book, I decided I'm going to try and spread this into a global movement. Because at its core, it's about empowerment. It's about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we've lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions.Now the irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us. They're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the Facebook age. We're literally beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything. We're sharing our cars on WhipCar, our bikes on Spinlister, our offices on Loosecubes, our gardens on Landshare. We're lending and borrowing money from strangers on Zopa and Lending Club. We are trading lessons on everything from sushi-making to coding on Skillshare, and we're even sharing our pets on DogVacay. Now welcome to the wonderful world of collaborative consumption that's enabling us to match wants with haves in more democratic ways.Now, collaborative consumption is creating the start of a transformation in the way we think about supply and demand, but it's also a part of a massive value shift underway, where instead of consuming to keep up with the Joneses, people are consuming to get to know the Joneses. But the key reason why it's taking off now so fast is because every new advancement of technology increases the efficiency and the social glue of trust to make sharing easier and easier.Now, I've looked at thousands of these marketplaces, and trust and efficiency are always the critical ingredients. Let me give you an example. Meet 46-year-old Chris Mok, who has, I bet, the best job title here of SuperRabbit. Now, four years ago, Chris lost his job, unfortunately, as an art buyer at Macy's, and like so many people, he struggled to find a new one during the recession. And then he happened to stumble across a post about TaskRabbit.Now, the story behind TaskRabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of Kobe. Now what happened was, in February 2008, Leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner, when Kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva. They realized they'd run out of dog food. Kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow. Now, later that evening, the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of eBay for errands existed. Six months later, Leah quit her job, and TaskRabbit was born. At the time, she didn't realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking. It's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world.Now the way TaskRabbit works is, people outsource the tasks that they want doing, name the price they're willing to pay, and then vetted Rabbits bid to run the errand. Yes, there's actually a four-stage, rigorous interview process that's designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy Rabbits. Now, there's over 4,000 Rabbits across the United States and 5,000 more on the waiting list.Now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect, like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs. I actually learned the other day that 12 and a half thousand loads of laundry have been cleaned and folded through TaskRabbit. But I love that the number one task posted, over a hundred times a day, is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing: yes, assembling Ikea furniture. (Laughter) (Applause) It's brilliant. Now, we may laugh, but Chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life. And 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed. I think TaskRabbit and other examples of collaborative consumption are like lemonade stands on steroids. They're just brilliant.Now, when you think about it, it's amazing, right, that over the past 20 years, we've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information, and now we're entering the third trust wave: connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces. I actually came across this fascinating study by the Pew Center this week that revealed that an active Facebook user is three times as likely as a non-Internet user to believe that most people are trustworthy. Virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face.Now, with all of my optimism, and I am an optimist, comes a healthy dose of caution, or rather, an urgent need to address some pressing, complex questions. How to ensure our digital identities reflect our real world identities? Do we want them to be the same? How do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online? How do we stop people who've behaved badly in one community doing so under a different guise? In a similar way that companies often use some kind of credit rating to decide whether to give you a mobile plan, or the rate of a mortgage, marketplaces that depend on transactions between relative strangers need some kind of device to let you know that Sebastian and Chris are good eggs, and that device is reputation.Reputation is the measurement of how much a community trusts you. Let's just take a look at Chris. You can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5. There are over 20 pages of reviews of his work describing him as super-friendly and fast, and he's reached level 25, the highest level, making him a SuperRabbit. Now — (Laughter) — I love that word, SuperRabbit. And interestingly, what Chris has noted is that as his reputation has gone up, so has his chances of winning a bid and how much he can charge. In other words, for SuperRabbits, reputation has a real world value.Now, I know what you might be thinking. Well, this isn't anything new. Just think of power sellers on eBay or star ratings on Amazon. The difference today is that, with every trade we make, comment we leave, person we flag, badge we earn, we leave a reputation trail of how well we can and can't be trusted. And it's not just the breadth but the volume of reputation data out there that is staggering. Just consider this: Five million nights have been booked on Airbnb in the past six months alone. 30 million rides have been shared on Carpooling.com. This year, two billion dollars worth of loans will go through peer-to-peer lending platforms. This adds up to millions of pieces of reputation data on how well we behave or misbehave.Now, capturing and correlating the trails of information that we leave in different places is a massive challenge, but one we're being asked to figure out. What the likes of Sebastian are starting to rightfully ask is, shouldn't they own their reputation data? Shouldn't the reputation that he's personally invested on building on Airbnb mean that it should travel with him from one community to another? What I mean by this is, say he started selling second-hand books on Amazon. Why should he have to start from scratch? It's a bit like when I moved from New York to Sydney. It was ridiculous. I couldn't get a mobile phone plan because my credit history didn't travel with me. I was essentially a ghost in the system.Now I'm not suggesting that the next stage of the reputation economy is about adding up multiple ratings into some kind of empty score. People's lives are too complex, and who wants to do that? I also want to be clear that this isn't about adding up tweets and likes and friends in a clout-like fashion. Those guys are measuring influence, not behaviors that indicate our trustworthiness.But the most important thing that we have to keep in mind is that reputation is largely contextual. Just because Sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble Ikea furniture. The big challenge is figuring out what data makes sense to pull, because the future's going to be driven by a smart aggregation of reputation, not a single algorithm. It's only a matter of time before we'll be able to perform a Facebook- or Google-like search and see a complete picture of someone's behaviors in different contexts over time. I envision a realtime stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why, your reliability on TaskRabbit, your cleanliness as a guest on Airbnb, the knowledge that you display on Quora or [unclear], they'll all live together in one place, and this will live in some kind of reputation dashboard that will paint a picture of your reputation capital.Now this is a concept that I'm currently researching and writing my next book on, and currently define as the worth of your reputation, your intentions, capabilities and values across communities and marketplaces. This isn't some far-off frontier. There are actually a wave of startups like Connect.Me and Legit and TrustCloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate, monitor and use your online reputation.Now, I realize that this concept may sound a little Big Brother to some of you, and yes, there are some enormous transparency and privacy issues to solve, but ultimately, if we can collect our personal reputation, we can actually control it more, and extract the immense value that will flow from it.Also, more so than our credit history, we can actually shape our reputation. Just think of Sebastian and how he bought the cat to influence his.Now privacy issues aside, the other really interesting issue I'm looking at is how do we empower digital ghosts, people [who] for whatever reason, are not active online, but are some of the most trustworthy people in the world? How do we take their contributions to their jobs, their communities and their families, and convert that value into reputation capital?Ultimately, when we get it right, reputation capital could create a massive positive disruption in who has power, trust and influence. A three-digit score, your traditional credit history, that only 30 percent of us actually know what it is, will no longer be the determining factor in how much things cost, what we can access, and, in many instances, limit what we can do in the world. Indeed, reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century. Reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me.Now the interesting thing is, reputation is the socioeconomic lubricant that makes collaborative consumption work and scale, but the sources it will be generated from, and its applications, are far bigger than this space alone. Let me give you one example from the world of recruiting, where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past.Four years ago, tech bloggers and entrepreneurs Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to start something called Stack Overflow. Now, Stack Overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions. This site receives five and a half thousand questions a day, and 80 percent of these receive accurate answers. Now users earn reputation in a whole range of ways, but it's basically by convincing their peers they know what they're talking about.Now a few months after this site launched, the founders heard about something interesting, and it actually didn't surprise them. What they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their résumés, and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents. Now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way, because Stack Overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves, and what their peers think of them.But the bigger principle of what's happening behind Stack Overflow, I think, is incredibly exciting. People are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built. You know, it's very interesting. When you talk to super-users, whether that's SuperRabbits or super-people on Stack Overflow, or Uberhosts, they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power. On Stack Overflow, it creates a level playing field, enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top. On Airbnb, the people often become more important than the spaces. On TaskRabbit, it gives people control of their economic activity.Now at the end of my tea with Sebastian, he told me how, on a bad, rainy day, when he hasn't had a customer in his bookstore, he thinks of all the people around the world who've said something wonderful about him, and what that says about him as a person. He's turning 50 this year, and he's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he's built on Airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life.You know, there are only a few windows in history where the opportunity exists to reinvent part of how our socioeconomic system works. We're living through one of those moments. I believe that we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system, and in many ways controlled who had access to what. In the 21st century, new trust networks, and the reputation capital they generate, will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity, in ways we can't yet even imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_currency_of_the_new_economy_is_trust
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"As it turns out, when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, there's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force. And as I look at the conversation, it strikes me that it's focused on exactly the right topic, and at the same time, it's missing the point entirely. The topic that it's focused on, the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people's ability to earn a living, or, to say it a little bit different way, are the droids taking our jobs? And there's some evidence that they are.The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed its kind of slow, steady march upward, and some other economic indicators also started to rebound, and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly. Corporate profits are quite high; in fact, if you include bank profits, they're higher than they've ever been. And business investment in gear — in equipment and hardware and software — is at an all-time high. So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. What they're not really doing is hiring. So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio, in other words, the percentage of working-age people in America who have work. And we see that it cratered during the Great Recession, and it hasn't started to bounce back at all.But the story is not just a recession story. The decade that we've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout, especially when we compare it to other decades, and the 2000s are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning. This is not what you want to see. When you graph the number of potential employees versus the number of jobs in the country, you see the gap gets bigger and bigger over time, and then, during the Great Recession, it opened up in a huge way.I did some quick calculations. I took the last 20 years of GDP growth and the last 20 years of labor-productivity growth and used those in a fairly straightforward way to try to project how many jobs the economy was going to need to keep growing, and this is the line that I came up with. Is that good or bad? This is the government's projection for the working-age population going forward. So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close.The problem is, I don't think these projections are accurate. In particular, I think my projection is way too optimistic, because when I did it, I was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past, with labor productivity growth, and that's actually not what I believe. Because when I look around, I think that we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to technology's impact on the labor force.Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living. Let me give you a couple examples.Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being. Now we have multi-language, instantaneous, automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices, all the way down to smartphones. And if any of us have used these, we know that they're not perfect, but they're decent.Throughout all of history, if you wanted something written, a report or an article, you had to involve a person. Not anymore. This is an article that appeared in Forbes online a while back, about Apple's earnings. It was written by an algorithm. And it's not decent — it's perfect.A lot of people look at this and they say, ""OK, but those are very specific, narrow tasks, and most knowledge workers are actually generalists. And what they do is sit on top of a very large body of expertise and knowledge and they use that to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands, and that's very, very hard to automate."" One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings. He won the quiz show ""Jeopardy!"" 74 times in a row. Took home three million dollars. That's Ken on the right, getting beat three-to-one by Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer from IBM. So when we look at what technology can do to general knowledge workers, I start to think there might not be something so special about this idea of a generalist, particularly when we start doing things like hooking Siri up to Watson, and having technologies that can understand what we're saying and repeat speech back to us.Now, Siri is far from perfect, and we can make fun of her flaws, but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like Siri and Watson improve along a Moore's law trajectory, which they will, in six years, they're not going to be two times better or four times better, they'll be 16 times better than they are right now. So I start to think a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this.And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work, they're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well. I had the chance a little while back to ride in the Google autonomous car, which is as cool as it sounds.(Laughter)And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic on US 101 very smoothly. There are about three and a half million people who drive trucks for a living in the United States; I think some of them are going to be affected by this technology. And right now, humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive. They can't do very much. But they're getting better quite quickly and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory.So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs. In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren't very good at fixing bridges. But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we're going to transition into an economy that is very productive, but that just doesn't need a lot of human workers. And managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces. Voltaire summarized why; he said, ""Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.""But despite this challenge — personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're developing now are going to take us into a Utopian future, not a dystopian future. And to explain why, I want to pose a ridiculously broad question. I want to ask: what have been the most important developments in human history?Now, I want to share some of the answers that I've gotten in response to this question. It's a wonderful question to ask and start an endless debate about, because some people are going to bring up systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that have changed how a lot of people think about the world. And then other people will say, ""No, actually, the big stories, the big developments are the founding of the world's major religions, which have changed civilizations and have changed and influenced how countless people are living their lives."" And then some other folk will say, ""Actually, what changes civilizations, what modifies them and what changes people's lives are empires, so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war."" And then some cheery soul usually always pipes up and says, ""Hey, don't forget about plagues!""(Laughter)There are some optimistic answers to this question, so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world. Others will talk about intellectual achievements in disciplines like math that have helped us get a better handle on the world, and other folk will talk about periods when there was a deep flourishing of the arts and sciences. So this debate will go on and on. It's an endless debate and there's no conclusive, single answer to it. But if you're a geek like me, you say, ""Well, what do the data say?"" And you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in — the total worldwide population, for example, or some measure of social development or the state of advancement of a society. And you start to plot the data, because, by this approach, the big stories, the big developments in human history, are the ones that will bend these curves a lot.So when you do this and when you plot the data, you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions. You conclude, actually, that none of these things have mattered very much.(Laughter)They haven't done a darn thing to the curves. There has been one story, one development in human history that bent the curve, bent it just about 90 degrees, and it is a technology story.The steam engine and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much, that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, ""... they made mockery out of all that had come before."" And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power of our muscles, overcoming the limitations of our muscles. Now, what we're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power. How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles?So at the risk of repeating myself a little bit, when I look at what's going on with digital technology these days, we are not anywhere near through with this journey. And when I look at what is happening to our economies and our societies, my single conclusion is that we ain't seen nothing yet. The best days are really ahead.Let me give you a couple examples. Economies don't run on energy. They don't run on capital, they don't run on labor. Economies run on ideas. So the work of innovation, the work of coming up with new ideas, is some of the most powerful, most fundamental work that we can do in an economy. And this is kind of how we used to do innovation. We'd find a bunch of fairly similar-looking people ...(Laughter)We'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions and we'd wait for the innovation. Now —(Laughter)as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I've got no problem with this.(Laughter)But some other people do, and they've kind of crashed the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation.(Laughter)So here are the winners of a Topcoder programming challenge, and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up, where they went to school, or what they look like. All anyone cares about is the quality of the work, the quality of the ideas.And over and over again, we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world. The work of innovation is becoming more open, more inclusive, more transparent and more merit-based, and that's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard think of it, and I couldn't be happier about that development.I hear once in a while, ""OK, I'll grant you that, but technology is still a tool for the rich world, and what's not happening, these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid."" And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense. The bottom of the pyramid is benefiting hugely from technology. The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched, in great detail, what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they got mobile phones for the very first time. And when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, you have to use very dry and very circumspect language. But when I read his paper, I kind of feel Jensen is trying to scream at us and say, ""Look, this was a big deal. Prices stabilized, so people could plan their economic lives. Waste was not reduced — it was eliminated. And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved.""Now, what I don't think is that Jensen got extremely lucky and happened to land in the one set of villages where technology made things better. What happened instead is he very carefully documented what happens over and over again when technology comes for the first time to an environment and a community: the lives of people, the welfares of people, improve dramatically.So as I look around at all the evidence and I think about the room that we have ahead of us, I become a huge digital optimist and I start to think that this wonderful statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole. This is an accurate assessment of what's going on. Our technologies are great gifts, and we, right now, have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing, when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world.So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we're going to do, I am very confident, what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world. I'm very confident we're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet, and I am extremely confident that what we're going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it's going to make a mockery out of everything that came before. I'm going to leave the last word to a guy who had a front-row seat for digital progress, our old friend Ken Jennings. I'm with him; I'm going to echo his words: ""I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.""(Laughter)Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs
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"Other people. Everyone is interested in other people. Everyone has relationships with other people, and they're interested in these relationships for a variety of reasons. Good relationships, bad relationships, annoying relationships, agnostic relationships, and what I'm going to do is focus on the central piece of an interaction that goes on in a relationship. So I'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we're all interested in interacting with other people, I'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features, and I'm going to turn that object, that simplified object, into a scientific probe, and provide the early stages, embryonic stages of new insights into what happens in two brains while they simultaneously interact.But before I do that, let me tell you a couple of things that made this possible. The first is we can now eavesdrop safely on healthy brain activity. Without needles and radioactivity, without any kind of clinical reason, we can go down the street and record from your friends' and neighbors' brains while they do a variety of cognitive tasks, and we use a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging. You've probably all read about it or heard about in some incarnation. Let me give you a two-sentence version of it. So we've all heard of MRIs. MRIs use magnetic fields and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain or your knee or your stomach, grayscale images that are frozen in time. In the 1990s, it was discovered you could use the same machines in a different mode, and in that mode, you could make microscopic blood flow movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain. Okay, so what? In fact, the so what is, in the brain, changes in neural activity, the things that make your brain work, the things that make your software work in your brain, are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow. You make a blood flow movie, you have an independent proxy of brain activity.This has literally revolutionized cognitive science. Take any cognitive domain you want, memory, motor planning, thinking about your mother-in-law, getting angry at people, emotional response, it goes on and on, put people into functional MRI devices, and image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity. It's in its early stages, and it's crude by some measures, but in fact, 20 years ago, we were at nothing. You couldn't do people like this. You couldn't do healthy people. That's caused a literal revolution, and it's opened us up to a new experimental preparation. Neurobiologists, as you well know, have lots of experimental preps, worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this. And now, we have a new experimental prep: human beings. We can now use human beings to study and model the software in human beings, and we have a few burgeoning biological measures.Okay, let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do, and it's in the area of what you'd call valuation. Valuation is just what you think it is, you know? If you went and you were valuing two companies against one another, you'd want to know which was more valuable. Cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago. If you want to compare oranges to windshields, what do you do? Well, you can't compare oranges to windshields. They're immiscible. They don't mix with one another. So instead, you convert them to a common currency scale, put them on that scale, and value them accordingly. Well, your brain has to do something just like that as well, and we're now beginning to understand and identify brain systems involved in valuation, and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system whose cells are located in your brainstem and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain. I won't go through the details of it, but that's an important discovery, and we know a good bit about that now, and it's just a small piece of it, but it's important because those are the neurons that you would lose if you had Parkinson's disease, and they're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally every drug of abuse, and that makes sense. Drugs of abuse would come in, and they would change the way you value the world. They change the way you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice, and they make you value that over everything else.Here's the key feature though. These neurons are also involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas, and I put some symbols up here that we assign value to for various reasons. We have a behavioral superpower in our brain, and it at least in part involves dopamine. We can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea, for a mere idea. No other species can do that. In 1997, the cult Heaven's Gate committed mass suicide predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet Hale-Bopp waiting to take them to the next level. It was an incredibly tragic event. More than two thirds of them had college degrees. But the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival using exactly the same systems that were put there to make them survive. That's a lot of control, okay?One thing that I've left out of this narrative is the obvious thing, which is the focus of the rest of my little talk, and that is other people. These same valuation systems are redeployed when we're valuing interactions with other people. So this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs, that makes you freeze when you get Parkinson's disease, that contributes to various forms of psychosis, is also redeployed to value interactions with other people and to assign value to gestures that you do when you're interacting with somebody else.Let me give you an example of this. You bring to the table such enormous processing power in this domain that you hardly even notice it.Let me just give you a few examples. So here's a baby. She's three months old. She still poops in her diapers and she can't do calculus. She's related to me. Somebody will be very glad that she's up here on the screen. You can cover up one of her eyes, and you can still read something in the other eye, and I see sort of curiosity in one eye, I see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other.Here's a couple. They're sharing a moment together, and we've even done an experiment where you can cut out different pieces of this frame and you can still see that they're sharing it. They're sharing it sort of in parallel. Now, the elements of the scene also communicate this to us, but you can read it straight off their faces, and if you compare their faces to normal faces, it would be a very subtle cue.Here's another couple. He's projecting out at us, and she's clearly projecting, you know, love and admiration at him.Here's another couple. (Laughter) And I'm thinking I'm not seeing love and admiration on the left. (Laughter) In fact, I know this is his sister, and you can just see him saying, ""Okay, we're doing this for the camera, and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face."" (Laughter) He'll kill me for showing that.All right, so what does this mean? It means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem. It engages deep systems in our brain, in dopaminergic systems that are there to make you chase sex, food and salt. They keep you alive. It gives them the pie, it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we've called a superpower.So how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe? And the short answer is games. Economic games. So what we do is we go into two areas. One area is called experimental economics. The other area is called behavioral economics. And we steal their games. And we contrive them to our own purposes. So this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game. Red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer a split to blue. Let's say red wants to keep 70, and offers blue 30. So he offers a 70-30 split with blue. Control passes to blue, and blue says, ""I accept it,"" in which case he'd get the money, or blue says, ""I reject it,"" in which case no one gets anything. Okay? So a rational choice economist would say, well, you should take all non-zero offers. What do people do? People are indifferent at an 80-20 split. At 80-20, it's a coin flip whether you accept that or not. Why is that? You know, because you're pissed off. You're mad. That's an unfair offer, and you know what an unfair offer is. This is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world. That just gives you an example of the kind of thing that these games probe. The interesting thing is, these games require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line. You have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person. You have to be able to remember what you've done. You have to stand up in the moment to do that. Then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back, and you have to do something that is interesting, which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay. That is, you have to decide what that other person expects of you. You have to send signals to manage your image in their mind. Like a job interview. You sit across the desk from somebody, they have some prior image of you, you send signals across the desk to move their image of you from one place to a place where you want it to be. We're so good at this we don't really even notice it. These kinds of probes exploit it. Okay?In doing this, what we've discovered is that humans are literal canaries in social exchanges. Canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines. When methane built up, or carbon dioxide built up, or oxygen was diminished, the birds would swoon before people would — so it acted as an early warning system: Hey, get out of the mine. Things aren't going so well. People come to the table, and even these very blunt, staged social interactions, and they, and there's just numbers going back and forth between the people, and they bring enormous sensitivities to it. So we realized we could exploit this, and in fact, as we've done that, and we've done this now in many thousands of people, I think on the order of five or six thousand. We actually, to make this a biological probe, need bigger numbers than that, remarkably so. But anyway, patterns have emerged, and we've been able to take those patterns, convert them into mathematical models, and use those mathematical models to gain new insights into these exchanges. Okay, so what? Well, the so what is, that's a really nice behavioral measure, the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play. We can compute that during the game. And we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior.Here's the cool thing. Six or seven years ago, we developed a team. It was at the time in Houston, Texas. It's now in Virginia and London. And we built software that'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices up over the Internet. I guess we've done up to six machines at a time, but let's just focus on two. So it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world. We synchronize the machines, set them into these staged social interactions, and we eavesdrop on both of the interacting brains. So for the first time, we don't have to look at just averages over single individuals, or have individuals playing computers, or try to make inferences that way. We can study individual dyads. We can study the way that one person interacts with another person, turn the numbers up, and start to gain new insights into the boundaries of normal cognition, but more importantly, we can put people with classically defined mental illnesses, or brain damage, into these social interactions, and use these as probes of that. So we've started this effort. We've made a few hits, a few, I think, embryonic discoveries. We think there's a future to this. But it's our way of going in and redefining, with a new lexicon, a mathematical one actually, as opposed to the standard ways that we think about mental illness, characterizing these diseases, by using the people as birds in the exchanges. That is, we exploit the fact that the healthy partner, playing somebody with major depression, or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder, or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we use that as a kind of biosensor, and then we use computer programs to model that person, and it gives us a kind of assay of this.Early days, and we're just beginning, we're setting up sites around the world. Here are a few of our collaborating sites. The hub, ironically enough, is centered in little Roanoke, Virginia. There's another hub in London, now, and the rest are getting set up. We hope to give the data away at some stage. That's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world. But we're also studying just a small part of what makes us interesting as human beings, and so I would invite other people who are interested in this to ask us for the software, or even for guidance on how to move forward with that.Let me leave you with one thought in closing. The interesting thing about studying cognition has been that we've been limited, in a way. We just haven't had the tools to look at interacting brains simultaneously. The fact is, though, that even when we're alone, we're a profoundly social creature. We're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people. In fact, our minds depend on other people. They depend on other people, and they're expressed in other people, so the notion of who you are, you often don't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you, people that are enemies of you, people that are agnostic to you. So this is the first sort of step into using that insight into what makes us human beings, turning it into a tool, and trying to gain new insights into mental illness. Thanks for having me. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/read_montague_what_we_re_learning_from_5_000_brains
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"I want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy, but before that, a little preamble. Let's start here.This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute. A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera with her every day to school to document her school lunches. Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter) And, as sometimes happens, this blog acquired first dozens of readers, and then hundreds of readers, and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in to watch her rate her school lunches, including on my favorite category, ""Pieces of hair found in food."" (Laughter) This was a zero day. That's good.And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this. A post that read: ""Goodbye."" And she said, ""I'm very sorry to tell you this, but my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore. I really enjoyed doing this. Thank you for reading. Goodbye.""You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter) The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous, that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves the same day and said, ""We would, we would never censor a nine-year-old."" (Laughter) Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter) And this brings up the question, what made them think they could get away with something like that? (Laughter) And the answer is, all of human history prior to now.(Laughter) So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation?Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question. This is something we've faced several times over the last few centuries. When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. Even the printing press, even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next.The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing. That's what happens when the media's space expands. And yet, when we look back on the printing press in the early years, we like what happened. We are a pro-printing press society.So how do we square those two things, that it leads to more arguing, but we think it was good?And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this. This is the cover of ""Philosophical Transactions,"" the first scientific journal ever published in English in the middle of the 1600s, and it was created by a group of people who had been calling themselves ""The Invisible College,"" a group of natural philosophers who only later would call themselves scientists, and they wanted to improve the way natural philosophers argued with each other, and they needed to do two things for this. They needed openness. They needed to create a norm which said, when you do an experiment, you have to publish not just your claims, but how you did the experiment. If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you. But the other thing they needed was speed. They had to quickly synchronize what other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise, you couldn't get the right kind of argument going. The printing press was clearly the right medium for this, but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow. And so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists. The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press. It was created by scientists, but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have a printing press as a tool.So what about us? What about our generation, and our media revolution, the Internet? Well, predictions of world peace? Check. (Laughter) More arguing? Gold star on that one. (Laughter) (Laughter) I mean, YouTube is just a gold mine. (Laughter) Better arguing? That's the question.So I study social media, which means, to a first approximation, I watch people argue. And if I had to pick a group that I think is our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people trying to take these tools and to press it into service, not for more arguments, but for better arguments, I'd pick the open-source programmers. Programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer, some source code, and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute, and that's if one person is writing it. Once you get more than one person writing it, it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other's work if they're working on the same file, or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke, and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved. To a first approximation, the problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay.Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution to this problem, which is to use something called a ""version control system,"" and a version control system does what is says on the tin. It provides a canonical copy of the software on a server somewhere. The only programmers who can change it are people who've specifically been given permission to access it, and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change. And when people draw diagrams of version control systems, the diagrams always look something like this. All right. They look like org charts. And you don't have to squint very hard to see the political ramifications of a system like this. This is feudalism: one owner, many workers.Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry. It really is Microsoft's Office. It's Adobe's Photoshop. The corporation owns the software. The programmers come and go.But there was one programmer who decided that this wasn't the way to work. This is Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer, created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem. Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license, is that everybody should have access to all the source code all the time, but of course, this creates the very threat of chaos you have to forestall in order to get anything working. So most open-source projects just held their noses and adopted the feudal management systems.But Torvalds said, ""No, I'm not going to do that."" His point of view on this was very clear. When you adopt a tool, you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool, and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work the way the Linux community worked. And to give you a sense of how enormous a decision like this was, this is a map of the internal dependencies within Linux, within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going. This is a tremendously complicated process. This is a tremendously complicated program, and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this not with automated tools but out of his email box. People would literally mail him changes that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand.And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out how the community worked, he said, ""I think I know how to write a version control system for free people.""And he called it ""Git."" Git is distributed version control. It has two big differences with traditional version control systems. The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise of open-source. Everybody who works on a project has access to all of the source code all of the time. And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow, they use drawings that look like this. And you don't have to understand what the circles and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more complicated way of working than is supported by ordinary version control systems.But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back, and this is Git's second big innovation. This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service, and every time a programmer uses Git to make any important change at all, creating a new file, modifying an existing one, merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature. This long string of numbers and letters here is a unique identifier tied to every single change, but without any central coordination. Every Git system generates this number the same way, which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change.This has the following effect: A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe can both get the same — a copy of the same piece of software. Each of them can make changes and they can merge them after the fact even if they didn't know of each other's existence beforehand. This is cooperation without coordination. This is the big change.Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working, although I think that is great. I tell you all of this because of what I think it means for the way communities come together.Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination, you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex.This is a graph of the Ruby community. It's an open-source programming language, and all of the interconnections between the people — this is now not a software graph, but a people graph, all of the interconnections among the people working on that project — and this doesn't look like an org chart. This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet, out of this community, but using these tools, they can now create something together. So there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law.When you make the claim, in fact, that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often get this reaction.(Music) (Laughter)Which is, are you talking about the thing with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing you think is going to be good for society? To which I have to say, here's the thing with the singing cats. That always happens. And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet, I mean that always happens with media, full stop. It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter) You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books very long before someone says, ""Hey, you know what I bet people would pay for?"" (Laughter) It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal, right? So — (Laughter) (Applause)So the harnessing by the Invisible College of the printing press to create the scientific journal was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big, and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so if you're going to look for where the change is happening, you have to look on the margins.So, the law is also dependency-related. This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code, and the dependencies of one law on other laws for the overall effect. So there's that as a site for source code management. But there's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation, but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy, and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around, there are millions and millions of projects, almost all of which are source code, but if you look around the edges, you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that. Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables from the State Department, along with software used to interpret them, including my favorite use ever of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose. (Laughter) Right. (Laughter) The New York Senate has put up something called Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub, again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity. You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see a list of bills they have sponsored. Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code, the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there not just to distribute the code, but with the very interesting possibility that this could be used to further the development of legislation. Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate last year in the Senate, saying, ""It's strange that Hollywood has more access to Canadian legislators than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?"" And it includes this very evocative screenshot.This is a called a ""diff,"" this thing on the right here. This shows you, for text that many people are editing, when a change was made, who made it, and what the change is. The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted. The stuff in green is the stuff that got added. Programmers take this capability for granted. No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money.Now, I would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed, cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love to tell you that because those tools are in place, the innovation is inevitable. But it's not. Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information. Somebody put a question up on Quora saying, ""Why is it that lawmakers don't use distributed version control?"" This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part.The bigger problem, of course, is power. The people experimenting with participation don't have legislative power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with openness. There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens.So consider this. The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions out into the public was a piece of technology, but the thing that kept them there was political will. It was the expectation of the citizens that she would not be censored. That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools. We have them. We've seen them. They work. Can we use them? Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this?T.S. Eliot once said, ""One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose."" I think that's wrong, but — (Laughter) I think it's right for argumentation. Right? A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right?A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade, in fact. It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost, and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy. The question for us now is, are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves? Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service for society at large?Thank you for listening. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government
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"Hi. So, this chap here, he thinks he can tell you the future. His name is Nostradamus, although here the Sun have made him look a little bit like Sean Connery. (Laughter)And like most of you, I suspect, I don't really believe that people can see into the future. I don't believe in precognition, and every now and then, you hear that somebody has been able to predict something that happened in the future, and that's probably because it was a fluke, and we only hear about the flukes and about the freaks. We don't hear about all the times that people got stuff wrong. Now we expect that to happen with silly stories about precognition, but the problem is, we have exactly the same problem in academia and in medicine, and in this environment, it costs lives.So firstly, thinking just about precognition, as it turns out, just last year a researcher called Daryl Bem conducted a piece of research where he found evidence of precognitive powers in undergraduate students, and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and most of the people who read this just said, ""Okay, well, fair enough, but I think that's a fluke, that's a freak, because I know that if I did a study where I found no evidence that undergraduate students had precognitive powers, it probably wouldn't get published in a journal. And in fact, we know that that's true, because several different groups of research scientists tried to replicate the findings of this precognition study, and when they submitted it to the exact same journal, the journal said, ""No, we're not interested in publishing replication. We're not interested in your negative data."" So this is already evidence of how, in the academic literature, we will see a biased sample of the true picture of all of the scientific studies that have been conducted.But it doesn't just happen in the dry academic field of psychology. It also happens in, for example, cancer research. So in March, 2012, just one month ago, some researchers reported in the journal Nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer, and out of those 53 studies, they were only able to successfully replicate six. Forty-seven out of those 53 were unreplicable. And they say in their discussion that this is very likely because freaks get published. People will do lots and lots and lots of different studies, and the occasions when it works they will publish, and the ones where it doesn't work they won't. And their first recommendation of how to fix this problem, because it is a problem, because it sends us all down blind alleys, their first recommendation of how to fix this problem is to make it easier to publish negative results in science, and to change the incentives so that scientists are encouraged to post more of their negative results in public.But it doesn't just happen in the very dry world of preclinical basic science cancer research. It also happens in the very real, flesh and blood of academic medicine. So in 1980, some researchers did a study on a drug called lorcainide, and this was an anti-arrhythmic drug, a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, and the idea was, after people have had a heart attack, they're quite likely to have abnormal heart rhythms, so if we give them a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, this will increase the chances of them surviving. Early on its development, they did a very small trial, just under a hundred patients. Fifty patients got lorcainide, and of those patients, 10 died. Another 50 patients got a dummy placebo sugar pill with no active ingredient, and only one of them died. So they rightly regarded this drug as a failure, and its commercial development was stopped, and because its commercial development was stopped, this trial was never published.Unfortunately, over the course of the next five, 10 years, other companies had the same idea about drugs that would prevent arrhythmias in people who have had heart attacks. These drugs were brought to market. They were prescribed very widely because heart attacks are a very common thing, and it took so long for us to find out that these drugs also caused an increased rate of death that before we detected that safety signal, over 100,000 people died unnecessarily in America from the prescription of anti-arrhythmic drugs.Now actually, in 1993, the researchers who did that 1980 study, that early study, published a mea culpa, an apology to the scientific community, in which they said, ""When we carried out our study in 1980, we thought that the increased death rate that occurred in the lorcainide group was an effect of chance."" The development of lorcainide was abandoned for commercial reasons, and this study was never published; it's now a good example of publication bias. That's the technical term for the phenomenon where unflattering data gets lost, gets unpublished, is left missing in action, and they say the results described here ""might have provided an early warning of trouble ahead.""Now these are stories from basic science. These are stories from 20, 30 years ago. The academic publishing environment is very different now. There are academic journals like ""Trials,"" the open access journal, which will publish any trial conducted in humans regardless of whether it has a positive or a negative result. But this problem of negative results that go missing in action is still very prevalent. In fact it's so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine. So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed. It's an antidepressant. And I'm a very nerdy doctor, so I read all of the studies that I could on this drug. I read the one study that was published that showed that reboxetine was better than placebo, and I read the other three studies that were published that showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant, and because this patient hadn't done well on those other antidepressants, I thought, well, reboxetine is just as good. It's one to try. But it turned out that I was misled. In fact, seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill. One of them was positive and that was published, but six of them were negative and they were left unpublished. Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published, but three times as many patients' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published. I felt misled.Now you might say, well, that's an extremely unusual example, and I wouldn't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that I'm accusing other people of. But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied. So here is one example of how you approach it. The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization. And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found. It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality. But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture. Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published. Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. We were misled, and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine.In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings.This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads. But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin. That would mean that I was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it. (Laughter) But this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. And to me, this is research misconduct. If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud. And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct. And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning.And this is happening right now, today. This is a drug called Tamiflu. Tamiflu is a drug which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on stockpiling, and we've stockpiled Tamiflu in panic, in the belief that it will reduce the rate of complications of influenza. Complications is a medical euphemism for pneumonia and death. (Laughter) Now when the Cochrane systematic reviewers were trying to collect together all of the data from all of the trials that had ever been conducted on whether Tamiflu actually did this or not, they found that several of those trials were unpublished. The results were unavailable to them. And when they started obtaining the writeups of those trials through various different means, through Freedom of Information Act requests, through harassing various different organizations, what they found was inconsistent. And when they tried to get a hold of the clinical study reports, the 10,000-page long documents that have the best possible rendition of the information, they were told they weren't allowed to have them. And if you want to read the full correspondence and the excuses and the explanations given by the drug company, you can see that written up in this week's edition of PLOS Medicine.And the most staggering thing of all of this, to me, is that not only is this a problem, not only do we recognize that this is a problem, but we've had to suffer fake fixes. We've had people pretend that this is a problem that's been fixed. First of all, we had trials registers, and everybody said, oh, it's okay. We'll get everyone to register their trials, they'll post the protocol, they'll say what they're going to do before they do it, and then afterwards we'll be able to check and see if all the trials which have been conducted and completed have been published. But people didn't bother to use those registers. And so then the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors came along, and they said, oh, well, we will hold the line. We won't publish any journals, we won't publish any trials, unless they've been registered before they began. But they didn't hold the line. In 2008, a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the ICMJE weren't properly registered, and a quarter of them weren't registered at all. And then finally, the FDA Amendment Act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year. And in the BMJ, in the first edition of January, 2012, you can see a study which looks to see if people kept to that ruling, and it turns out that only one in five have done so.This is a disaster. We cannot know the true effects of the medicines that we prescribe if we do not have access to all of the information.And this is not a difficult problem to fix. We need to force people to publish all trials conducted in humans, including the older trials, because the FDA Amendment Act only asks that you publish the trials conducted after 2008, and I don't know what world it is in which we're only practicing medicine on the basis of trials that completed in the past two years. We need to publish all trials in humans, including the older trials, for all drugs in current use, and you need to tell everyone you know that this is a problem and that it has not been fixed. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe
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"Two years ago, I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. The curator had only one condition: I had to use the Arabic script for my artwork. Now, as an artist, a woman, an Arab, or a human being living in the world in 2010, I only had one thing to say: I wanted to say no. And in Arabic, to say ""no,"" we say ""no, and a thousand times no.""So I decided to look for a thousand different noes. on everything ever produced under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years, from Spain to the borders of China. I collected my findings in a book, placed them chronologically, stating the name, the patron, the medium and the date. Now, the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation, which stood three by seven meters, in Munich, Germany, in September of 2010.Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded.Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square. The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed. I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street. So I took one ""no"" off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and I added a message to it: ""no to military rule."" And I started spraying that on the streets in Cairo. But that led to a series of no, coming out of the book like ammunition, and adding messages to them, and I started spraying them on the walls. So I'll be sharing some of these noes with you.No to a new Pharaoh, because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator.No to violence: Ramy Essam came to Tahrir on the second day of the revolution, and he sat there with this guitar, singing. One month after Mubarak stepped down, this was his reward.No to blinding heroes. Ahmed Harara lost his right eye on the 28th of January, and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November, by two different snipers.No to killing, in this case no to killing men of religion, because Sheikh Ahmed Adina Refaat was shot on December 16th, during a demonstration, leaving behind three orphans and a widow.No to burning books. The Institute of Egypt was burned on December 17th, a huge cultural loss.No to stripping the people, and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street, and the footprint reads, ""Long live a peaceful revolution,"" because we will never retaliate with violence.No to barrier walls. On February 5th, concrete roadblocks were set up in Cairo to protect the Ministry of Defense from protesters.Now, speaking of walls, I want to share with you the story of one wall in Cairo. A group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall. It's one to one. In front of this tank there's a man on a bicycle with a breadbasket on his head. To any passerby, there's no problem with this visual. After acts of violence, another artist came, painted blood, protesters being run over by the tank, demonstrators, and a message that read, ""Starting tomorrow, I wear the new face, the face of every martyr. I exist."" Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank and adds a message: ""Army and people, one hand. Egypt for Egyptians."" Another artist comes, paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank. Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank, leaves the suit, and throws a bucket of black paint just to hide the face of the monster. So I come with my stencils, and I spray them on the suit, on the tank, and on the whole wall, and this is how it stands today until further notice. (Laughter)Now, I want to leave you with a final no. I found Neruda scribbled on a piece of paper in a field hospital in Tahrir, and I decided to take a no of Mamluk Mausoleum in Cairo. The message reads, [Arabic] ""You can crush the flowers, but you can't delay spring.""Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Shukran. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bahia_shehab_a_thousand_times_no
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"What I do is I organize information. I'm a graphic designer. Professionally, I try to make sense often of things that don't make much sense themselves.So my father might not understand what it is that I do for a living. His part of my ancestry has been farmers. He's part of this ethnic minority called the Pontic Greeks. They lived in Asia Minor and fled to Greece after a genocide about a hundred years ago. And ever since that, migration has somewhat been a theme in my family. My father moved to Germany, studied there and married, and as a result, I now have this half-German brain, with all the analytical thinking and that slightly dorky demeanor that come with that. And of course it meant that I was a foreigner in both countries, and that of course made it pretty easy for me to migrate as well, in good family tradition, if you like.But of course, most journeys that we undertake from day to day are within a city. And, especially if you know the city, getting from A to B may seem pretty obvious, right? But the question is, why is it obvious? How do we know where we're going?So I washed up on a Dublin ferry port about 12 years ago, a professional foreigner, if you like, and I'm sure you've all had this experience before, yeah? You arrive in a new city, and your brain is trying to make sense of this new place. Once you find your base, your home, you start to build this cognitive map of your environment. It's essentially this virtual map that only exists in your brain. All animal species do it, even though we all use slightly different tools. Us humans, of course, we don't move around marking our territory by scent, like dogs. We don't run around emitting ultrasonic squeaks, like bats. We just don't do that, although a night in the Temple Bar district can get pretty wild.(Laughter)No, we do two important things to make a place our own. First, we move along linear routes. Typically, we find a main street, and this main street becomes a linear strip map in our minds. But our mind keeps it pretty simple, yeah? Every street is generally perceived as a straight line, and we kind of ignore the little twists and turns that the streets make. When we do, however, make a turn into a side street, our mind tends to adjust that turn to a 90-degree angle. This of course makes for some funny moments when you're in some old city layout that follows some sort of circular city logic, yeah? Maybe you've had that experience as well.Let's say you're on some spot on a side street that projects from a main cathedral square, and you want to get to another point on a side street just like that. The cognitive map in your mind may tell you, ""Aris, go back to the main cathedral square, take a 90-degree turn and walk down that other side street."" But somehow you feel adventurous that day, and you suddenly discover that the two spots were actually only a single building apart. Now, I don't know about you, but I always feel like I find this wormhole or this inter-dimensional portal.(Laughter)So we move along linear routes and our mind straightens streets and perceives turns as 90-degree angles.The second thing that we do to make a place our own is we attach meaning and emotions to the things that we see along those lines. If you go to the Irish countryside and you ask an old lady for directions, brace yourself for some elaborate Irish storytelling about all the landmarks, yeah? She'll tell you the pub where her sister used to work, and ""... go past that church where I got married,"" that kind of thing. So we fill our cognitive maps with these markers of meaning. What's more, we abstract repeat patterns and recognize them. We recognize them by the experiences and we abstract them into symbols. And of course, we're all capable of understanding these symbols.(Laughter)What's more, we're all capable of understanding the cognitive maps, and you are all capable of creating these cognitive maps yourselves. So next time, when you want to tell your friend how to get to your place, you grab a beermat, grab a napkin, and you just observe yourself create this awesome piece of communication design. It's got straight lines. It's got 90-degree corners. You might add little symbols along the way. And when you look at what you've just drawn, you realize it does not resemble a street map. If you were to put an actual street map on top of what you've just drawn, you'd realize your streets and the distances — they'd be way off. No, what you've just drawn is more like a diagram or a schematic. It's a visual construct of lines, dots, letters, designed in the language of our brains.So it's no big surprise that the big information-design icon of the last century — the pinnacle of showing everybody how to get from A to B, the London Underground map — was not designed by a cartographer or a city planner; it was designed by an engineering draftsman. In the 1930s, Harry Beck applied the principles of schematic diagram design and changed the way public transport maps are designed forever. Now the very key to the success of this map is in the omission of less important information and in the extreme simplification. So, straightened streets, corners of 90 and 45 degrees, but also the extreme geographic distortion in that map. If you were to look at the actual locations of these stations, you'd see they're very different. But this is all for the clarity of the public Tube map. If you, say, wanted to get from Regent's Park station to Great Portland Street, the Tube map would tell you: take the Tube, go to Baker Street, change over, take another Tube. Of course, what you don't know is that the two stations are only about a hundred meters apart.Now we've reached the subject of public transport, and public transport here in Dublin is a somewhat touchy subject.(Laughter)For everybody who does not know the public transport here in Dublin, essentially, we have this system of local buses that grew with the city. For every outskirt that was added, there was another bus route added, running from the outskirt all the way to the city center. And as these local buses approach the city center, they all run side by side and converge in pretty much one main street.So when I stepped off the boat 12 years ago, I tried to make sense of that. Because exploring a city on foot only gets you so far. But when you explore a foreign and new public transport system, you will build a cognitive map in your mind in pretty much the same way. Typically, you choose yourself a rapid transport route, and in your mind, this route is perceived as a straight line. And like a pearl necklace, all the stations and stops are nicely and neatly aligned along the line. And only then you start to discover some local bus routes that would fill in the gaps, and that allow for those wormhole, inter-dimensional portal shortcuts. So I tried to make sense, and when I arrived, I was looking for some information leaflets that would help me crack this system and understand it, and I found those brochures.(Laughter)They were not geographically distorted. They had a lot of omission of information, but unfortunately, the wrong information. Say, in the city center — there were never actually any lines that showed the routes.(Laughter)There are actually not even any stations with names.(Laughter)Now, the maps of Dublin transport have gotten better, and after I finished the project, they got a good bit better, but still no station names, still no routes.So, being naive, and being half-German, I decided, ""Aris, why don't you build your own map?"" So that's what I did. I researched how each and every bus route moved through the city, nice and logical, every bus route a separate line. I plotted it into my own map of Dublin, and in the city center ... I got a nice spaghetti plate.(Laughter)Now, this is a bit of a mess, so I decided, of course, ""You're going to apply the rules of schematic design,"" cleaning up the corridors, widening the streets where there were loads of buses and making the streets at straight, 90-degree corners, 45-degree corners or fractions of that, and filled it in with the bus routes. And I built this city center bus map of the system, how it was five years ago. I'll zoom in again so that you get the full impact of the quays and Westmoreland Street.(Laughter)Now I can proudly say —(Applause)I can proudly say, as a public transport map, this diagram is an utter failure.(Laughter) Except, probably, in one aspect: I now had a great visual representation of just how clogged up and overrun the city center really was.Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think a public transport route map should have lines, because that's what they are, yeah? They're little pieces of string that wrap their way through the city center or through the city. If you will, the Greek guy inside of me feels if I don't get a line, it's like entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur without having Ariadne giving you the string to find your way. So the outcome of my academic research, loads of questionnaires, case studies and looking at a lot of maps, was that a lot of the problems and shortcomings of the public transport system here in Dublin was the lack of a coherent public transport map — a simplified, coherent public transport map — because I think this is the crucial step to understanding a public transport network on a physical level, but it's also the crucial step to make a public transport network mappable on a visual level.So I teamed up with a gentleman called James Leahy, a civil engineer and a recent master's graduate of the Sustainable Development program at DIT, and together we drafted the simplified model network, which I could then go ahead and visualize.So here's what we did. We distributed these rapid-transport corridors throughout the city center, and extended them into the outskirts. Rapid, because we wanted them to be served by rapid-transport vehicles. They would get exclusive road use, where possible, and it would be high-quantity, high-quality transport. James wanted to use bus rapid transport for that, rather than light rail. For me, it was important that the vehicles that would run on those rapid transport corridors would be visibly distinguishable from local buses on the street. Now we could take out all the local buses that ran alongside those rapid transport means. Any gaps that appeared in the outskirts were filled again. So, in other words, if there was a street in an outskirt where there had been a bus, we put a bus back in, only now these buses wouldn't run all the way to the city center, but connect to the nearest rapid-transport mode, one of these thick lines over there. So the rest was merely a couple of months of work, and a couple of fights with my girlfriend, of our place constantly being clogged up with maps, and the outcome, one of the outcomes, was this map of the Greater Dublin area. I'll zoom in a little bit.This map only shows the rapid transport connections, no local bus, very much in the ""metro map"" style that was so successful in London, and that since has been exported to so many other major cities, and therefore is the language that we should use for public transport maps. What's also important is, with a simplified network like this, it now would become possible for me to tackle the ultimate challenge and make a public transport map for the city center, one where I wouldn't just show rapid transport connections, but also all the local bus routes, streets and the likes, and this is what a map like this could look like. I'll zoom in a little bit.In this map, I'm including each transport mode, so rapid transport, bus, DART, tram and the likes. Each individual route is represented by a separate line. The map shows each and every station, each and every station name, and I'm also displaying side streets. In fact, most of the side streets even with their name, and for good measure, also a couple of landmarks, some of them signified by little symbols, others by these isometric three-dimensional bird's-eye-view drawings.The map is relatively small in overall size, so something that you could still hold as a fold-out map or display in a reasonably-sized display box on a bus shelter. I think it tries to be the best balance between actual representation and simplification — the language of way-finding in our brain. So, straightened lines, cleaned-up corners, and of course, that very, very important geographic distortion that makes public transport maps possible. If you, for example, have a look at the two main corridors that run through the city — the yellow and orange one over here — this is how they look in an actual, accurate street map, and this is how they would look in my distorted, simplified public transport map.So for a successful public transport map, we should not stick to accurate representation, but design them in the way our brains work.The reactions I got were tremendous, it was really good to see. And of course, for my own self, I was very happy to see that my folks in Germany and Greece finally have an idea what I do for a living.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aris_venetikidis_making_sense_of_maps
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"This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans. It was a great place to grow up, but it's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world. Half the city is already below sea level. In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-six people died. Nearly 300,000 homes were lost. These are my mother's, at the top — although that's not her car, it was carried there by floodwaters up to the roof — and that's my sister's, below. Fortunately, they and other family members got out in time, but they lost their homes, and as you can see, just about everything in them.Other parts of the world have been hit by storms in even more devastating ways. In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar. Climate change is affecting our homes, our communities, our way of life. We should be preparing at every scale and at every opportunity. This talk is about being prepared for, and resilient to the changes that are coming and that will affect our homes and our collective home, the Earth.The changes in these times won't affect us all equally. There are important distributional consequences, and they're not what you always might think. In New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households were among the most vulnerable. For those in vulnerable, low-lying nations, how do you put a dollar value on losing your country where you ancestors are buried? And where will your people go? And how will they cope in a foreign land? Will there be tensions over immigration, or conflicts over competition for limited resources? It's already fueled conflicts in Chad and Darfur. Like it or not, ready or not, this is our future.Sure, some are looking for opportunities in this new world. That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice. But while there might be some short-term individual winners, our collective losses will far outweigh them. Look no further than the insurance industry as they struggle to cope with mounting catastrophic losses from extreme weather events. The military gets it. They call climate change a threat multiplier that could harm stability and security, while governments around the world are evaluating how to respond.So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt? I'd like to share three sets of examples, starting with adapting to violent storms and floods. In New Orleans, the I-10 Twin Spans, with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt 21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge. And these raised and energy-efficient homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard-hit Ninth Ward. The devastated church my mom attends has been not only rebuilt higher, it's poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country. They're selling electricity back to the grid thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more. Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars. Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way, but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind. For example, in Galveston, here's a resilient home that survived Hurricane Ike, when others on neighboring lots clearly did not. And around the world, satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh.But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human element is even more critical. We need better planning and systems for evacuation. We need to better understand how people make decisions in times of crisis, and why. While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation, others who did refused to leave as the storm approached, often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow them to take their pets. Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue. Fortunately in 2006, Congress passed the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (Laughter) — it spells ""PETS"" — to change that.Second, preparing for heat and drought. Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma, while heat waves linked with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in 2003, and again in Russia in 2010. In Ethiopia, 70 percent, that's 7-0 percent of the population, depends on rainfall for its livelihood. Oxfam and Swiss Re, together with Rockefeller Foundation, are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water, but they're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come. The stability this provides is giving the farmers the confidence to invest. It's giving them access to affordable credit. It's allowing them to become more productive so that they can afford their own insurance over time, without assistance. It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could be replicated throughout the developing world. After a lethal 1995 heat wave turned refrigerator trucks from the popular Taste of Chicago festival into makeshift morgues, Chicago became a recognized leader, tamping down on the urban heat island impact through opening cooling centers, outreach to vulnerable neighborhoods, planting trees, creating cool white or vegetated green roofs. This is City Hall's green roof, next to Cook County's [portion of the] roof, which is 77 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface. Washington, D.C., last year, actually led the nation in new green roofs installed, and they're funding this in part thanks to a five-cent tax on plastic bags. They're splitting the cost of installing these green roofs with home and building owners. The roofs not only temper urban heat island impact but they save energy, and therefore money, the emissions that cause climate change, and they also reduce stormwater runoff. So some solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins.Third, adapting to rising seas. Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems, agriculture, even major cities. This is what one to two meters of sea level rise looks like in the Mekong Delta. That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown. Infrastructure is going to be affected. Airports around the world are located on the coast. It makes sense, right? There's open space, the planes can take off and land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings. Here's just one example, San Francisco Airport, with 16 inches or more of flooding. Imagine the staggering cost of protecting this vital infrastructure with levees. But there might be some changes in store that you might not imagine. For example, planes require more runway for takeoff because the heated, less dense air, provides for less lift. San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars to rethink and redesign its water and sewage treatment, as water outfall pipes like this one can be flooded with seawater, causing backups at the plant, harming the bacteria that are needed to treat the waste. So these outfall pipes have been retrofitted to shut seawater off from entering the system.Beyond these technical solutions, our work at the Georgetown Climate Center with communities encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools are available and to consider how they can accommodate change. For example, in land use, which areas do you want to protect, through adding a seawall, for example, alter, by raising buildings, or retreat from, to allow the migration of important natural systems, such as wetlands or beaches? Other examples to consider. In the U.K., the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge. The Asian Cities Climate [Change] Resilience Network is restoring vital ecosystems like forest mangroves. These are not only important ecosystems in their own right, but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities. New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms, as you can see from this clever sign, and to sea level rise, and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding. But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates for the subway system show that solutions can be both functional and attractive. In fact, in New York, San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned ways to better integrate the natural and built environments with climate change in mind. I think these are inspiring examples of what's possible when we feel empowered to plan for a world that will be different.But now, a word of caution. Adaptation's too important to be left to the experts. Why? Well, there are no experts. We're entering uncharted territory, and yet our expertise and our systems are based on the past. ""Stationarity"" is the notion that we can anticipate the future based on the past, and plan accordingly, and this principle governs much of our engineering, our design of critical infrastructure, city water systems, building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents. But we can simply no longer rely on established norms. We're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years.The larger point I'm trying to make is this. It's up to us to look at our homes and our communities, our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk, and to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive, and it's up to us to plan and to prepare and to call on our government leaders and require them to do the same, even while they address the underlying causes of climate change. There are no quick fixes. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. We're all learning by doing. But the operative word is doing.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vicki_arroyo_let_s_prepare_for_our_new_climate
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"So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now. We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister — No. (Laughter) (Applause)(Laughter) (Applause)Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language — but we call it nonverbals as social scientists — it's language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What's mine communicating to you?And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up. It's about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them. We do the opposite of them.So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it. You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand.I notice a couple of things about this. One, you're not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade.So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more?So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?There's some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? ""For two minutes,"" you say, ""I want you to stand like this, and it's going to make you feel more powerful.""So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here's one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the ""Wonder Woman"" by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself.So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, ""You need to do this or this."" They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, ""How powerful do you feel?"" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That's it. That's the whole experiment.So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference.Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table. For some people it's speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview.So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right?(Laughter)You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that's not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, don't do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. It's you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone — or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. You're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So that's what we want to test. Okay? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls ""standing in social quicksand."" So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, ""We want to hire these people,"" all the high-power posers. ""We don't want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall."" But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what's affected. These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves, basically. They're bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect.So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, ""It feels fake."" Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. It's not me. I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don't want to feel like an impostor. I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here.When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, ""You're not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you.""So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.Eventually I graduated from college. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That's it. I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, ""I'm quitting."" She was like, ""You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. You are going to fake it. You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'"" So that's what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, ""Not supposed to be here.""So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, ""Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail,"" came into my office. I really didn't know her at all. She came in totally defeated, and she said, ""I'm not supposed to be here."" And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it.So I was like, ""Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know —(Applause)And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever."" You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there. (Laughter)She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So, this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am.So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are
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"(Music) (Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here.A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets. This one entered her left hemisphere, and knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain. And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist. And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing together, and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings, ""Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine."" And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail, in this case literally speak.Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard, and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called Melodic Intonation Therapy, which has become very popular in music therapy now. Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences, but they could still sing the lyrics to a song, whether it was ""Happy Birthday To You"" or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones. And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons, he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage.When I was 17, I visited Dr. Schlaug's lab, and in one afternoon he walked me through some of the leading research on music and the brain — how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians, how music, and listening to music, could just light up the entire brain, from our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum, how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality to help children with autism, to help people struggling with stress and anxiety and depression, how deeply Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music, and how late-stage Alzheimer's patients, whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family, could still pick out a tune by Chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children.But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug, and it was this: that I was at a crossroads in my life, trying to choose between music and medicine. I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe, studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon. I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes, these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or with children with disfiguring cancers. I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor, that doctor without borders. On the other hand, I had played the violin my entire life.Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession. It was oxygen. I was lucky enough to have studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv, and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine. And that afternoon, I had to ask him, ""How was it for you making that decision?""And he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to, and that for me, medical school could wait, but that the violin simply would not. And after two more years of studying music, I decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT and applying to medical school like a good Indian son to become the next Dr. Gupta. (Laughter) And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was my first audition, and after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week, I was offered the position. And it was a dream. It was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra, to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel, but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family, my new musical home.But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician. Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard, but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s, was treated with thorazine at Bellevue, and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later. Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, as told through the book and the movie ""The Soloist,"" but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, and I told him that wherever he had his violin, and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him.And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row, I witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode. Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning, because now it was about communication, a communication where words failed, a communication of a message that went deeper than words, that registered at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel's psyche, yet came as a true musical offering from me. I found myself growing outraged that someone like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid Row because of his mental illness, yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out there on Skid Row alone who had stories as tragic as his, but were never going to have a book or a movie made about them that got them off the streets? And at the very core of this crisis of mine, I felt somehow the life of music had chosen me, where somehow, perhaps possibly in a very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill.But in the end, it was Nathaniel who showed me that if I was truly passionate about change, if I wanted to make a difference, I already had the perfect instrument to do it, that music was the bridge that connected my world and his.There's a beautiful quote by the Romantic German composer Robert Schumann, who said, ""To send light into the darkness of men's hearts, such is the duty of the artist."" And this is a particularly poignant quote because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum. And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel, I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music into the very darkest places, performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane.After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face, and she had a palsy, she was shaking, and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said that she had never heard classical music before, she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine, and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years, when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication.Suddenly, what we're finding with these concerts, away from the stage, away from the footlights, out of the tuxedo tails, the musicians become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room, would never have access to the kind of music that we make. Just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone, the power and beauty of music transcends the ""E"" in the middle of our beloved acronym. Music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone. The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms, or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain's right hemisphere. And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them, to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them. And the spark of that beauty, the spark of that humanity transforms into hope, and we know, whether we choose the path of music or of medicine, that's the very first thing we must instill within our communities, within our audiences, if we want to inspire healing from within.I'd like to end with a quote by John Keats, the Romantic English poet, a very famous quote that I'm sure all of you know. Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me. And Keats said, ""Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."" (Music) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gupta_between_music_and_medicine
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"We most certainly do talk to terrorists, no question about it. We are at war with a new form of terrorism. It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism, but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century. One of the big things about countering terrorism is, how do you perceive it? Because perception leads to your response to it. So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism, it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war. So how are you going to respond to it? Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind. You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach, and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect, then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it are much more asymmetrical.We live in a modern, global world. Terrorists have actually adapted to it. It's something we have to, too, and that means the people who are working on counterterrorism responses have to start, in effect, putting on their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever.For my part, what I wanted us to do was just to look at terrorism as though it was a global brand, say, Coca-Cola. Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter) If you look at it as a brand in those ways, what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product. As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health, it's bad for those who it affects, and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either. It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin. You're not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven. It's not going to happen, I don't think. And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense.But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel. The brand has an Achilles' heel. We've mentioned the health, but it needs consumers to buy into it. The consumers it needs are the terrorist constituency. They're the people who buy into the brand, support them, facilitate them, and they're the people we've got to reach out to. We've got to attack that brand in front of them.There's two essential ways of doing that, if we carry on this brand theme. One is reducing their market. What I mean is, it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete. We've got to show we're a better product. If I'm trying to show we're a better product, I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay. We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need for the product itself. You could be looking there at poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things which feed terrorism.The other thing to do is to knock the product, attack the brand myth, as we've said. You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid. Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across. We've got to reveal the dangers in the product. Our target audience, it's not just the producers of terrorism, as I've said, the terrorists. It's not just the marketeers of terrorism, which is those who finance, those who facilitate it, but it's the consumers of terrorism. We've got to get in to those homelands. That's where they recruit from. That's where they get their power and strength. That's where their consumers come from. And we have to get our messaging in there. So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc. We've got to engage, we've got to educate, and we've got to have dialogue.Now, staying on this brand thing for just a few more seconds, think about delivery mechanisms. How are we going to do these attacks? Well, reducing the market is really one for governments and civil society. We've got to show we're better. We've got to show our values. We've got to practice what we preach. But when it comes to knocking the brand, if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi, I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola, anyone's going to believe us.So we've got to find a different mechanism, and one of the best mechanisms I've ever come across is the victims of terrorism. They are somebody who can actually stand there and say, ""This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days. It burnt my hand, whatever."" You believe them. You can see their scars. You trust them. But whether it's victims, whether it's governments, NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland, we have to interact and engage with those different layers of terrorism, and, in effect, we do have to have a little dance with the devil.This is my favorite part of my speech. I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point, but — (Laughter) — TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me I've got to do a countdown, so I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist, sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) — I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be, and it would be, ""Body parts, not heart attacks."" So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound) Very good. (Laughter) Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all. We're all victims of terrorism. There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life. There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there. The son's dead. The father lives. The father will probably kick himself for years to come that he didn't take that seat instead of his kid. He's going to take to alcohol, and he's probably going to kill himself in three years. That's the stats. There's a very young, attractive lady over here, and she has something which I think's the worst form of psychological, physical injury I've ever seen out of a suicide bombing: It's human shrapnel. What it means is, when she sat in a restaurant in years to come, 10 years to come, 15 years to come, or she's on the beach, every so often she's going to start rubbing her skin, and out of there will come a piece of that shrapnel. And that is a hard thing for the head to take. There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs in this bombing. She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount of money off our government for looking after what's happened to her. She had a daughter who was going to go to one of the best universities. She's going to give up university to look after Mum. We're all here, and all of those who watch it are going to be traumatized by this event, but all of you here who are victims are going to learn some hard truths. That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while, we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society. We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them, and what I'm going to try and show is that actually, victims are the best weapon we have against more terrorism.How would the government at the turn of the millennium approach today? Well, we all know. What they'd have done then is an invasion. If the suicide bomber was from Wales, good luck to Wales, I'd say. Knee-jerk legislation, emergency provision legislation — which hits at the very basis of our society, as we all know — it's a mistake. We're going to drive prejudice throughout Edinburgh, throughout the U.K., for Welsh people.Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes. They are looking at what I've started off on, on these more asymmetrical approaches to it, more modernist views, cause and effect. But mistakes of the past are inevitable. It's human nature. The fear and the pressure to do something on them is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes. They're not just going to be smart.There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up the point very beautifully. He said, ""The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once.""So what we need to do is we have to effect it. We've got to start thinking about being more proactive. We need to build an arsenal of noncombative weapons in this war on terrorism. But of course, it's ideas — is not something that governments do very well.I want to go back just to before the bang, to this idea of brand, and I was talking about Coke and Pepsi, etc. We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war. They'll see it as freedom fighters and truth against injustice, imperialism, etc.We do have to see this as a deadly battlefield. It's not just [our] flesh and blood they want. They actually want our cultural souls, and that's why the brand analogy is a very interesting way of looking at this. If we look at al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was essentially a product on a shelf in a souk somewhere which not many people had heard of. 9/11 launched it. It was its big marketing day, and it was packaged for the 21st century. They knew what they were doing. They were effectively [doing] something in this brand image of creating a brand which can be franchised around the world, where there's poverty, ignorance and injustice.We, as I've said, have got to hit that market, but we've got to use our heads rather than our might. If we perceive it in this way as a brand, or other ways of thinking at it like this, we will not resolve or counter terrorism.What I'd like to do is just briefly go through a few examples from my work on areas where we try and approach these things differently. The first one has been dubbed ""lawfare,"" for want of a better word. When we originally looked at bringing civil actions against terrorists, everyone thought we were a bit mad and mavericks and crackpots. Now it's got a title. Everyone's doing it. There's a bomb, people start suing. But one of the first early cases on this was the Omagh Bombing. A civil action was brought from 1998. In Omagh, bomb went off, Real IRA, middle of a peace process. That meant that the culprits couldn't really be prosecuted for lots of reasons, mostly to do with the peace process and what was going on, the greater good. It also meant, then, if you can imagine this, that the people who bombed your children and your husbands were walking around the supermarket that you lived in. Some of those victims said enough is enough. We brought a private action, and thank God, 10 years later, we actually won it. There is a slight appeal on at the moment so I have to be a bit careful, but I'm fairly confident.Why was it effective? It was effective not just because justice was seen to be done where there was a huge void. It was because the Real IRA and other terrorist groups, their whole strength is from the fact that they are an underdog. When we put the victims as the underdog and flipped it, they didn't know what to do. They were embarrassed. Their recruitment went down. The bombs actually stopped — fact — because of this action. We became, or those victims became, more importantly, a ghost that haunted the terrorist organization.There's other examples. We have a case called Almog which is to do with a bank that was, allegedly, from our point of view, giving rewards to suicide bombers. Just by bringing the very action, that bank has stopped doing it, and indeed, the powers that be around the world, which for real politic reasons before, couldn't actually deal with this issue, because there was lots of competing interests, have actually closed down those loopholes in the banking system. There's another case called the McDonald case, where some victims of Semtex, of the Provisional IRA bombings, which were supplied by Gaddafi, sued, and that action has led to amazing things for new Libya. New Libya has been compassionate towards those victims, and started taking it — so it started a whole new dialogue there. But the problem is, we need more and more support for these ideas and cases.Civil affairs and civil society initiatives. A good one is in Somalia. There's a war on piracy. If anyone thinks you can have a war on piracy like a war on terrorism and beat it, you're wrong. What we're trying to do there is turn pirates to fisherman. They used to be fisherman, of course, but we stole their fish and dumped a load of toxic waste in their water, so what we're trying to do is create security and employment by bringing a coastguard along with the fisheries industry, and I can guarantee you, as that builds, al Shabaab and such likes will not have the poverty and injustice any longer to prey on those people. These initiatives cost less than a missile, and certainly less than any soldier's life, but more importantly, it takes the war to their homelands, and not onto our shore, and we're looking at the causes.The last one I wanted to talk about was dialogue. The advantages of dialogue are obvious. It self-educates both sides, enables a better understanding, reveals the strengths and weaknesses, and yes, like some of the speakers before, the shared vulnerability does lead to trust, and it does then become, that process, part of normalization. But it's not an easy road. After the bomb, the victims are not into this. There's practical problems. It's politically risky for the protagonists and for the interlocutors. On one occasion I was doing it, every time I did a point that they didn't like, they actually threw stones at me, and when I did a point they liked, they starting shooting in the air, equally not great. (Laughter) Whatever the point, it gets to the heart of the problem, you're doing it, you're talking to them.Now, I just want to end with saying, if we follow reason, we realize that I think we'd all say that we want to have a perception of terrorism which is not just a pure military perception of it. We need to foster more modern and asymmetrical responses to it. This isn't about being soft on terrorism. It's about fighting them on contemporary battlefields. We must foster innovation, as I've said. Governments are receptive. It won't come from those dusty corridors. The private sector has a role. The role we could do right now is going away and looking at how we can support victims around the world to bring initiatives.If I was to leave you with some big questions here which may change one's perception to it, and who knows what thoughts and responses will come out of it, but did myself and my terrorist group actually need to blow you up to make our point? We have to ask ourselves these questions, however unpalatable. Have we been ignoring an injustice or a humanitarian struggle somewhere in the world? What if, actually, engagement on poverty and injustice is exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do? What if the bombs are just simply wake-up calls for us? What happens if that bomb went off because we didn't have any thoughts and things in place to allow dialogue to deal with these things and interaction?What is definitely uncontroversial is that, as I've said, we've got to stop being reactive, and more proactive, and I just want to leave you with one idea, which is that it's a provocative question for you to think about, and the answer will require sympathy with the devil. It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change? What if society actually needs terrorism to change and adapt for the better? It's those Bulgakov themes, it's that picture of Jesus and the Devil hand in hand in Gethsemane walking into the moonlight. What it would mean is that humans, in order to survive in development, quite Darwinian spirit here, inherently must dance with the devil.A lot of people say that communism was defeated by the Rolling Stones. It's a good theory. Maybe the Rolling Stones has a place in this. Thank you. (Music) (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jason_mccue_terrorism_is_a_failed_brand
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"So, this is my grandfather, Salman Schocken, who was born into a poor and uneducated family with six children to feed, and when he was 14 years old, he was forced to drop out of school in order to help put bread on the table. He never went back to school. Instead, he went on to build a glittering empire of department stores. Salman was the consummate perfectionist, and every one of his stores was a jewel of Bauhaus architecture. He was also the ultimate self-learner, and like everything else, he did it in grand style. He surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars like Martin Buber and Shai Agnon and Franz Kafka, and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace.And yet, in the late '30s, Salman saw what's coming. He fled Germany, together with his family, leaving everything else behind. His department stores confiscated, he spent the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture. This high school dropout died at the age of 82, a formidable intellectual, cofounder and first CEO of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founder of Schocken Books, an acclaimed imprint that was later acquired by Random House. Such is the power of self-study.And these are my parents. They too did not enjoy the privilege of college education. They were too busy building a family and a country. And yet, just like Salman, they were lifelong, tenacious self-learners, and our home was stacked with thousands of books, records and artwork. I remember quite vividly my father telling me that when everyone in the neighborhood will have a TV set, then we'll buy a normal F.M. radio. (Laughter)And that's me, I was going to say holding my first abacus, but actually holding what my father would consider an ample substitute to an iPad. (Laughter) So one thing that I took from home is this notion that educators don't necessarily have to teach. Instead, they can provide an environment and resources that tease out your natural ability to learn on your own. Self-study, self-exploration, self-empowerment: these are the virtues of a great education.So I'd like to share with you a story about a self-study, self-empowering computer science course that I built, together with my brilliant colleague Noam Nisan. As you can see from the pictures, both Noam and I had an early fascination with first principles, and over the years, as our knowledge of science and technology became more sophisticated, this early awe with the basics has only intensified. So it's not surprising that, about 12 years ago, when Noam and I were already computer science professors, we were equally frustrated by the same phenomenon. As computers became increasingly more complex, our students were losing the forest for the trees, and indeed, it is impossible to connect with the soul of the machine if you interact with a black box P.C. or a Mac which is shrouded by numerous layers of closed, proprietary software. So Noam and I had this insight that if we want our students to understand how computers work, and understand it in the marrow of their bones, then perhaps the best way to go about it is to have them build a complete, working, general-purpose, useful computer, hardware and software, from the ground up, from first principles.Now, we had to start somewhere, and so Noam and I decided to base our cathedral, so to speak, on the simplest possible building block, which is something called NAND. It is nothing more than a trivial logic gate with four input-output states. So we now start this journey by telling our students that God gave us NAND — (Laughter) — and told us to build a computer, and when we asked how, God said, ""One step at a time."" And then, following this advice, we start with this lowly, humble NAND gate, and we walk our students through an elaborate sequence of projects in which they gradually build a chip set, a hardware platform, an assembler, a virtual machine, a basic operating system and a compiler for a simple, Java-like language that we call ""JACK."" The students celebrate the end of this tour de force by using JACK to write all sorts of cool games like Pong, Snake and Tetris. You can imagine the tremendous joy of playing with a Tetris game that you wrote in JACK and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also, and then seeing the result running on a machine that you built starting with nothing more than a few thousand NAND gates. It's a tremendous personal triumph of going from first principles all the way to a fantastically complex and useful system.Noam and I worked five years to facilitate this ascent and to create the tools and infrastructure that will enable students to build it in one semester. And this is the great team that helped us make it happen. The trick was to decompose the computer's construction into numerous stand-alone modules, each of which could be individually specified, built and unit-tested in isolation from the rest of the project. And from day one, Noam and I decided to put all these building blocks freely available in open source on the Web. So chip specifications, APIs, project descriptions, software tools, hardware simulators, CPU emulators, stacks of hundreds of slides, lectures — we laid out everything on the Web and invited the world to come over, take whatever they need, and do whatever they want with it.And then something fascinating happened. The world came. And in short order, thousands of people were building our machine. And NAND2Tetris became one of the first massive, open, online courses, although seven years ago we had no idea that what we were doing is called MOOCs. We just observed how self-organized courses were kind of spontaneously spawning out of our materials. For example, Pramode C.E., an engineer from Kerala, India, has organized groups of self-learners who build our computer under his good guidance. And Parag Shah, another engineer, from Mumbai, has unbundled our projects into smaller, more manageable bites that he now serves in his pioneering do-it-yourself computer science program.The people who are attracted to these courses typically have a hacker mentality. They want to figure out how things work, and they want to do it in groups, like this hackers club in Washington, D.C., that uses our materials to offer community courses. And because these materials are widely available and open-source, different people take them to very different and unpredictable directions. For example, Yu Fangmin, from Guangzhou, has used FPGA technology to build our computer and show others how to do the same using a video clip, and Ben Craddock developed a very nice computer game that unfolds inside our CPU architecture, which is quite a complex 3D maze that Ben developed using the Minecraft 3D simulator engine. The Minecraft community went bananas over this project, and Ben became an instant media celebrity.And indeed, for quite a few people, taking this NAND2Tetris pilgrimage, if you will, has turned into a life-changing experience. For example, take Dan Rounds, who is a music and math major from East Lansing, Michigan. A few weeks ago, Dan posted a victorious post on our website, and I'd like to read it to you. So here's what Dan said.""I did the coursework because understanding computers is important to me, just like literacy and numeracy, and I made it through. I never worked harder on anything, never been challenged to this degree. But given what I now feel capable of doing, I would certainly do it again. To anyone considering NAND2Tetris, it's a tough journey, but you'll be profoundly changed.""So Dan demonstrates the many self-learners who take this course off the Web, on their own traction, on their own initiative, and it's quite amazing because these people cannot care less about grades. They are doing it because of one motivation only. They have a tremendous passion to learn.And with that in mind, I'd like to say a few words about traditional college grading. I'm sick of it. We are obsessed with grades because we are obsessed with data, and yet grading takes away all the fun from failing, and a huge part of education is about failing. Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm. (Laughter) And [Joyce] said that mistakes are the portals of discovery. And yet we don't tolerate mistakes, and we worship grades. So we collect your B pluses and your A minuses and we aggregate them into a number like 3.4, which is stamped on your forehead and sums up who you are. Well, in my opinion, we went too far with this nonsense, and grading became degrading.So with that, I'd like to say a few words about upgrading, and share with you a glimpse from my current project, which is different from the previous one, but it shares exactly the same characteristics of self-learning, learning by doing, self-exploration and community-building, and this project deals with K-12 math education, beginning with early age math, and we do it on tablets because we believe that math, like anything else, should be taught hands on.So here's what we do. Basically, we developed numerous mobile apps, every one of them explaining a particular concept in math. So for example, let's take area. When you deal with a concept like area — well, we also provide a set of tools that the child is invited to experiment with in order to learn. So if area is what interests us, then one thing which is natural to do is to tile the area of this particular shape and simply count how many tiles it takes to cover it completely. And this little exercise here gives you a first good insight of the notion of area.Moving along, what about the area of this figure? Well, if you try to tile it, it doesn't work too well, does it. So instead, you can experiment with these different tools here by some process of guided trial and error, and at some point you will discover that one thing that you can do among several legitimate transformations is the following one. You can cut the figure, you can rearrange the parts, you can glue them and then proceed to tile just like we did before. (Applause) Now this particular transformation did not change the area of the original figure, so a six-year-old who plays with this has just discovered a clever algorithm to compute the area of any given parallelogram.We don't replace teachers, by the way. We believe that teachers should be empowered, not replaced.Moving along, what about the area of a triangle? So after some guided trial and error, the child will discover, with or without help, that he or she can duplicate the original figure and then take the result, transpose it, glue it to the original and then proceed [with] what we did before: cut, rearrange, paste — oops— paste and glue, and tile. Now this transformation has doubled the area of the original figure, and therefore we have just learned that the area of the triangle equals the area of this rectangle divided by two. But we discovered it by self-exploration.So, in addition to learning some useful geometry, the child has been exposed to some pretty sophisticated science strategies, like reduction, which is the art of transforming a complex problem into a simple one, or generalization, which is at the heart of any scientific discipline, or the fact that some properties are invariant under some transformations. And all this is something that a very young child can pick up using such mobile apps. So presently, we are doing the following: First of all, we are decomposing the K-12 math curriculum into numerous such apps. And because we cannot do it on our own, we've developed a very fancy authoring tool that any author, any parent or actually anyone who has an interest in math education, can use this authoring tool to develop similar apps on tablets without programming. And finally, we are putting together an adaptive ecosystem that will match different learners with different apps according to their evolving learning style.The driving force behind this project is my colleague Shmulik London, and, you see, just like Salman did about 90 years ago, the trick is to surround yourself with brilliant people, because at the end, it's all about people. And a few years ago, I was walking in Tel Aviv and I saw this graffiti on a wall, and I found it so compelling that by now I preach it to my students, and I'd like to try to preach it to you. Now, I don't know how many people here are familiar with the term ""mensch."" It basically means to be human and to do the right thing. And with that, what this graffiti says is, ""High-tech schmigh-tech. The most important thing is to be a mensch."" (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shimon_schocken_the_self_organizing_computer_course
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"When I was considering a career in the art world, I took a course in London, and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian called Pietro, who drank too much, smoked too much and swore much too much. But he was a passionate teacher, and I remember one of our earlier classes with him, he was projecting images on the wall, asking us to think about them, and he put up an image of a painting. It was a landscape with figures, semi-dressed, drinking wine. There was a nude woman in the lower foreground, and on the hillside in the back, there was a figure of the mythological god Bacchus, and he said, ""What is this?""And I — no one else did, so I put up my hand, and I said, ""It's a Bacchanal by Titian.""He said, ""It's a what?""I thought maybe I'd pronounced it wrong. ""It's a Bacchanal by Titian.""He said, ""It's a what?""I said, ""It's a Bacchanal by Titian."" (Laughter)He said, ""You boneless bookworm! It's a fucking orgy!"" (Laughter) As I said, he swore too much.There was an important lesson for me in that. Pietro was suspicious of formal art training, art history training, because he feared that it filled people up with jargon, and then they just classified things rather than looking at them, and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary, and he wanted us to use our eyes, and he was especially evangelical about this message, because he was losing his sight. He wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects. What is it? How is it made? Why was it made? How is it used? And these were important lessons to me when I subsequently became a professional art historian.My kind of eureka moment came a few years later, when I was studying the art of the courts of Northern Europe, and of course it was very much discussed in terms of the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture of the day. But as I began to read historical documents and contemporary descriptions, I found there was a kind of a missing component, for everywhere I came across descriptions of tapestries. Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and, really, well into the 18th century, and it was pretty apparent why. Tapestries were portable. You could roll them up, send them ahead of you, and in the time it took to hang them up, you could transform a cold, dank interior into a richly colored setting. Tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be associated, or even themselves, and in addition to that, tapestries were hugely expensive. They required scores of highly skilled weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials — the wools, the silks, even gold and silver thread. So, all in all, in an age when the visual image of any kind was rare, tapestries were an incredibly potent form of propaganda.Well, I became a tapestry historian. In due course, I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about. And in about 1997, the then-director Philippe de Montebello gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition for 2002. We normally have these very long lead-in times.It wasn't straightforward. It's no longer a question of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car. They have to be wound on huge rollers, shipped in oversized freighters. Some of them are so big we had, to get them into the museum, we had to take them up the great steps at the front.We thought very hard about how to present this unknown subject to a modern audience: the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded; the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread; the labeling. You know, we live in an age where we are so used to television images and photographs, a one-hit image. These were big, complex things, almost like cartoons with multiple narratives. We had to draw our audience in, get them to slow down, to explore the objects.There was a lot of skepticism. On the opening night, I overheard one of the senior members of staff saying, ""This is going to be a bomb."" But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show. The exhibition was designed to be an experience, and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs. So I want you to use your imaginations, thinking of these wall-high objects, some of them 10 meters wide, depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today, thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boars and deer, violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism. I remember taking my son's school class. He was eight at the time, and all the little boys, they kind of — you know, they were little boys, and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground — (Laughter) — kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist. And you can just imagine them. But it brought it alive to them. I think they suddenly saw that these weren't just old faded tapestries. These were images of the world in the past, and that it was the same for our audience. And for me as a curator, I felt proud. I felt I'd shifted the needle a little. Through this experience that could only be created in a museum, I'd opened up the eyes of my audience — historians, artists, press, the general public — to the beauty of this lost medium.A few years later, I was invited to be the director of the museum, and after I got over that — ""Who, me? The tapestry geek? I don't wear a tie!"" — I realized the fact: I believe passionately in that curated museum experience. We live in an age of ubiquitous information, and sort of ""just add water"" expertise, but there's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative, what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that makes it — unpacks it for a general audience. And that, to me, today, is now the challenge and the fun of my job, supporting the vision of my curators, whether it's an exhibition of Samurai swords, early Byzantine artifacts, Renaissance portraits, or the show we heard mentioned earlier, the McQueen show, with which we enjoyed so much success last summer.That was an interesting case. In the late spring, early summer of 2010, shortly after McQueen's suicide, our curator of costume, Andrew Bolton, came to see me, and said, ""I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen, and now is the moment. We have to, we have to do it fast.""It wasn't easy. McQueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy, but Andrew went to London and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence, and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows, which were works of performance art in their own right, and we proceeded to do something at the museum, I think, we've never done before. It wasn't just your standard installation. In fact, we ripped down the galleries to recreate entirely different settings, a recreation of his first studio, a hall of mirrors, a curiosity box, a sunken ship, a burned-out interior, with videos and soundtracks that ranged from operatic arias to pigs fornicating. And in this extraordinary setting, the costumes were like actors and actresses, or living sculptures. It could have been a train wreck. It could have looked like shop windows on Fifth Avenue at Christmas, but because of the way that Andrew connected with the McQueen team, he was channeling the rawness and the brilliance of McQueen, and the show was quite transcendant, and it became a phenomenon in its own right. By the end of the show, we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show, but no one really complained. I heard over and over again, ""Wow, that was worth it. It was a such a visceral, emotive experience.""Now, I've described two very immersive exhibitions, but I also believe that collections, individual objects, can also have that same power. The Met was set up not as a museum of American art, but of an encyclopedic museum, and today, 140 years later, that vision is as prescient as ever, because, of course, we live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and we're exposed to it through the 24/7 newsreels. It's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations, the cultures, that we're seeing the current manifestation of. Whether it's Libya, Egypt, Syria, it's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding.I mean, our new Islamic galleries are a case in point, opened 10 years, almost to the week, after 9/11. I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's darkest hours, and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event. Now, in our galleries, we show 14 centuries of the development of different Islamic cultures across a vast geographic spread, and, again, hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last October.I'm often asked, ""Is digital media replacing the museum?"" and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of the Web. It gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship. Bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time, across space, whose lives may have been very different to our own, but who, like us, had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements in their lives. And I think this is a process that helps us better understand ourselves, helps us make better decisions about where we're going.The Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world, awe-inspiring, like a medieval cathedral. From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture. I frequently go out into the hall and the galleries and I watch our visitors coming in. Some of them are comfortable. They feel at home. They know what they're looking for. Others are very uneasy. It's an intimidating place. They feel that the institution is elitist. I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism. I want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind, where they're prepared to be a little bit lost, to explore, to see the unfamiliar in the familiar, or to try the unknown. Because for us, it's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art, capturing them at that moment of discomfort, when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone, your Blackberry, but to create a zone where their curiosity can expand. And whether it's in the expression of a Greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend, or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry, or, to bring it back to my tutor Pietro, those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine, and that nude figure in the left foreground. Wow. She is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality. In that moment, our scholarship can tell you that this is a bacchanal, but if we're doing our job right, and you've checked the jargon at the front door, trust your instinct. You know it's an orgy. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_p_campbell_weaving_narratives_in_museum_galleries
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"Companies are losing control. What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street. What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube. (Laughter) Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle. Management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff. (Laughter) A recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. However, in the same survey, only four percent of employees agreed. Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees. But are they really?I'm a marketer, and as a marketer, I know that I've never really been in control. Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room, the saying goes. Hyperconnectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now, 24/7. They can listen and join the conversation. In fact, they have more control over the loss of control than ever before. They can design for it. But how?First of all, they can give employees and customers more control. They can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas, knowledge, content, designs and product. They can give them more control over pricing, which is what the band Radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album ""In Rainbows."" Buyers could determine the price, but the offer was exclusive, and only stood for a limited period of time. The album sold more copies than previous releases of the band. The Danish chocolate company Anthon Berg opened a so-called ""generous store"" in Copenhagen. It asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones. It turned transactions into interactions, and generosity into a currency. Companies can even give control to hackers. When Microsoft Kinect came out, the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console, it immediately drew the attention of hackers. Microsoft first fought off the hacks, but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits. The sense of co-ownership, the free publicity, the added value, all helped drive sales.The ultimate empowerment of customers is to ask them not to buy. Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out eBay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones. In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a ""Don't Buy This Jacket"" advertisement during the peak of shopping season. It may have jeopardized short-term sales, but it builds lasting, long-term loyalty based on shared values.Research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive. The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries. Hulu and Netflix, among other companies, have open vacation policies.Companies can give people more control, but they can also give them less control. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior, but when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences? Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier. Take the travel service Nextpedition. Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way. It does not tell the traveler where she's going until the very last minute, and information is provided just in time. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination. U.K.-based Interflora monitored Twitter for users who were having a bad day, and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers.Is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time? Yes. Force them to help others. A recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity. At Frog, the company I work for, we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees, helping them get to know each other fast. By applying a strict process, we give them less control, less choice, but we enable more and richer social interactions.Companies are the makers of their fortunes, and like all of us, they are utterly exposed to serendipity. That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human. At the end of the day, as hyperconnectivity and transparency expose companies' behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition. Or as the ballet dancer Alonzo King said, ""What's interesting about you is you."" For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount, but radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open. ""A smile is a door that is half open and half closed,"" the author Jennifer Egan wrote. Companies can give their employees and customers more control or less. They can worry about how much openness is good for them, and what needs to stay closed. Or they can simply smile, and remain open to all possibilities. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_3_ways_to_usefully_lose_control_of_your_reputation
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"I have to say that I'm very glad to be here. I understand we have over 80 countries here, so that's a whole new paradigm for me to speak to all of these countries.In each country, I'm sure you have this thing called the parent-teacher conference. Do you know about the parent-teacher conference? Not the ones for your kids, but the one you had as a child, where your parents come to school and your teacher talks to your parents, and it's a little bit awkward. Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment where my father, who never takes off from work, he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person, going to school to see his son, how he's doing, and the teacher said to him, he said, ""You know, John is good at math and art."" And he kind of nodded, you know? The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our tofu store, and he said, ""You know, John's good at math."" (Laughter)And that always stuck with me all my life. Why didn't Dad say art? Why wasn't it okay? Why? It became a question my entire life, and that's all right, because being good at math meant he bought me a computer, and some of you remember this computer, this was my first computer. Who had an Apple II? Apple II users, very cool. (Applause) As you remember, the Apple II did nothing at all. (Laughter) You'd plug it in, you'd type in it and green text would come out. It would say you're wrong most of the time. That was the computer we knew. That computer is a computer that I learned about going to MIT, my father's dream. And at MIT, however, I learned about the computer at all levels, and after, I went to art school to get away from computers, and I began to think about the computer as more of a spiritual space of thinking. And I was influenced by performance art — so this is 20 years ago. I made a computer out of people. It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment. I have a power manager, mouse driver, memory, etc., and I built this in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. It's a room broken in two halves. I've turned the computer on, and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer. And the floppy disk drive person wears it. (Laughter) She finds the first sector on the disk, and takes data off the disk and passes it off to, of course, the bus. So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer to the memory, to the CPU, the VRAM, etc., and it's an actual working computer. That's a bus, really. (Laughter) And it looks kind of fast. That's a mouse driver, where it's XY. (Laughter) It looks like it's happening kind of quickly, but it's actually a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow this computer was compared to how fast a computer is, it made me wonder about computers and technology in general.And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really. The first three things are about how I've been curious about technology, design and art, and how they intersect, how they overlap, and also a topic that I've taken on since four years ago I became the President of Rhode Island School of Design: leadership. And I'll talk about how I've looked to combine these four areas into a kind of a synthesis, a kind of experiment.So starting from technology, technology is a wonderful thing. When that Apple II came out, it really could do nothing. It could show text and after we waited a bit, we had these things called images. Remember when images were first possible with a computer, those gorgeous, full-color images? And then after a few years, we got CD-quality sound. It was incredible. You could listen to sound on the computer. And then movies, via CD-ROM. It was amazing. Remember that excitement? And then the browser appeared. The browser was great, but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth. Text first, then images, we waited, CD-quality sound over the Net, then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible. And then the mobile phone occurred, text, images, audio, video. And now we have iPhone, iPad, Android, with text, video, audio, etc. You see this little pattern here? We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense of possibility from computing is something I've been questioning for the last 10 or so years, and have looked to design, as we understand most things, and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine. And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson.Designers talk about the relationship between form and content, content and form. Now what does that mean? Well, content is the word up there: fear. It's a four-letter word. It's a kind of a bad feeling word, fear. Fear is set in Light Helvetica, so it's not too stressful, and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica, it's like, ""Oh, fear, who cares?"" Right? (Laughter) You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big, and like, whoa, that hurts. Fear. So you can see how you change the scale, you change the form. Content is the same, but you feel differently. You change the typeface to, like, this typeface, and it's kind of funny. It's like pirate typeface, like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface. Arr! Fear! Like, aww, that's not fearful. That's actually funny. Or fear like this, kind of a nightclub typeface. (Laughter) Like, we gotta go to Fear. (Laughter) It's, like, amazing, right? (Laughter) (Applause) It just changes the same content. Or you make it — The letters are separated apart, they're huddled together like on the deck of the Titanic, and you feel sorry for the letters, like, I feel the fear. You feel for them. Or you change the typeface to something like this. It's very classy. It's like that expensive restaurant, Fear. I can never get in there. (Laughter) It's just amazing, Fear. But that's form, content.If you just change one letter in that content, you get a much better word, much better content: free. ""Free"" is a great word. You can serve it almost any way. Free bold feels like Mandela free. It's like, yes, I can be free. Free even light feels kind of like, ah, I can breathe in free. It feels great. Or even free spread out, it's like, ah, I can breathe in free, so easily. And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove, and I have, like, Don Draper free. (Laughter) So you see that — form, content, design, it works that way. It's a powerful thing. It's like magic, almost, like the magicians we've seen at TED. It's magic. Design does that.And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect, and I'm going to show you some old work I never really show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do. So — yeah. So I made a lot of work in the '90s. This was a square that responds to sound. People ask me why I made that. It's not clear. (Laughter) But I thought it'd be neat for the square to respond to me, and my kids were small then, and my kids would play with these things, like, ""Aaah,"" you know, they would say, ""Daddy, aaah, aaah."" You know, like that. We'd go to a computer store, and they'd do the same thing. And they'd say, ""Daddy, why doesn't the computer respond to sound?"" And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound? So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time.And then I spent a lot of time in the space of interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because my students at MIT got so much better than myself, so I had to hang up my mouse. But in '96, I made my last piece. It was in black and white, monochrome, fully monochrome, all in integer mathematics. It's called ""Tap, Type, Write."" It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary. It has 10 variations. (Typing noise) (Typing noise) There's a shift. Ten variations. This is, like, spin the letter around. (Typing noises) This is, like, a ring of letters. (Typing noises) This is 20 years old, so it's kind of a — Let's see, this is — I love the French film ""The Red Balloon."" Great movie, right? I love that movie. So, this is sort of like a play on that. (Typing noises) (Typewriter bell) It's peaceful, like that. (Laughter) I'll show this last one. This is about balance, you know. It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out. (Laughter) If you hit G, life's okay, so I always say, ""Hit G, and it's going to be all right. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.So that was 20 years ago, and I was always on the periphery of art. By being President of RISD I've gone deep into art, and art is a wonderful thing, fine art, pure art. You know, when people say, ""I don't get art. I don't get it at all."" That means art is working, you know? It's like, art is supposed to be enigmatic, so when you say, like, ""I don't get it,"" like, oh, that's great. (Laughter) Art does that, because art is about asking questions, questions that may not be answerable.At RISD, we have this amazing facility called the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples of animal, bone, mineral, plants. You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road, they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it.And why do we have this facility? Because at RISD, you have to look at the actual animal, the object, to understand its volume, to perceive it. At RISD, you're not allowed to draw from an image. And many people ask me, John, couldn't you just digitize all this? Make it all digital? Wouldn't it be better? And I often say, well, there's something good to how things used to be done. There's something very different about it, something we should figure out what is good about how we did it, even in this new era. And I have a good friend, he's a new media artist named Tota Hasegawa. He's based in London, no, actually it's in Tokyo, but when he was based in London, he had a game with his wife. He would go to antique shops, and the game was as such: When we look at an antique we want, we'll ask the shopkeeper for the story behind the antique, and if it's a good story, we'll buy it. So they'd go to an antique shop, and they'd look at this cup, and they'd say, ""Tell us about this cup."" And the shopkeeper would say, ""It's old."" (Laughter) ""Tell us more."" ""Oh, it's really old."" (Laughter) And he saw, over and over, the antique's value was all about it being old. And as a new media artist, he reflected, and said, you know, I've spent my whole career making new media art. People say, ""Wow, your art, what is it?"" It's new media. And he realized, it isn't about old or new. It's about something in between. It isn't about ""old,"" the dirt, ""new,"" the cloud. It's about what is good. A combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is at. You see it in all interesting art today, in all interesting businesses today. How we combine those two together to make good is very interesting.So art makes questions, and leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions. We aren't functioning so easily anymore. We aren't a simple authoritarian regime anymore. As an example of authoritarianism, I was in Russia one time traveling in St. Petersburg, at a national monument, and I saw this sign that says, ""Do Not Walk On The Grass,"" and I thought, oh, I mean, I speak English, and you're trying to single me out. That's not fair. But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people, and it was the best sign ever to say no. It was like, ""No swimming, no hiking, no anything."" My favorite ones are ""no plants."" Why would you bring a plant to a national monument? I'm not sure. And also ""no love."" (Laughter) So that is authoritarianism. And what is that, structurally? It's a hierarchy. We all know that a hierarchy is how we run many systems today, but as we know, it's been disrupted. It is now a network instead of a perfect tree. It's a heterarchy instead of a hierarchy. And that's kind of awkward.And so today, leaders are faced with how to lead differently, I believe. This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont on creative leadership. What can we learn from artists and designers for how to lead? Because in many senses, a regular leader loves to avoid mistakes. Someone who's creative actually loves to learn from mistakes. A traditional leader is always wanting to be right, whereas a creative leader hopes to be right. And this frame is important today, in this complex, ambiguous space, and artists and designers have a lot to teach us, I believe.And I had a show in London recently where my friends invited me to come to London for four days to sit in a sandbox, and I said great. And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight, six hours every day, six-minute appointments with anyone in London, and that was really bad. But I would listen to people, hear their issues, draw in the sand, try to figure things out, and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing. You know? It's all these one-on-one meetings for like four days. And it felt kind of like being president, actually. I was like, ""Oh, this my job. President. I do a lot of meetings, you know?"" And by the end of the experience, I realized why I was doing this. It's because leaders, what we do is we connect improbable connections and hope something will happen, and in that room I found so many connections between people across all of London, and so leadership, connecting people, is the great question today. Whether you're in the hierarchy or the heterarchy, it's a wonderful design challenge.And one thing I've been doing is doing some research on systems that can combine technology and leadership with an art and design perspective. Let me show you something I haven't shown anywhere, actually. So what this is, is a kind of a sketch, an application sketch I wrote in Python. You know how there's Photoshop? This is called Powershop, and the way it works is imagine an organization. You know, the CEO isn't ever at the top. The CEO's at the center of the organization. There may be different subdivisions in the organization, and you might want to look into different areas. For instance, green are areas doing well, red are areas doing poorly. You know, how do you, as the leader, scan, connect, make things happen? So for instance, you might open up a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there, and know that you know someone in Eco, over here, and these people here are in Eco, the people you might engage with as CEO, people going across the hierarchy. And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find connections across areas, and so you might look in R&D, and here you see one person who crosses the two areas of interest, and it's a person important to engage. So you might want to, for instance, get a heads-up display on how you're interacting with them. How many coffees do you have? How often are you calling them, emailing them? What is the tenor of their email? How is it working out? Leaders might be able to use these systems to better regulate how they work inside the heterarchy. You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso, the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep text analysis. What is the tenor of your communications?So these kind of systems, I believe, are important. They're targeted social media systems around leaders. And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design, because art and design lets you think like this, find different systems like this, and I've just begun thinking like this, so I'm glad to share that with you. So in closing, I want to thank all of you for your attention. Thanks very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_maeda_how_art_technology_and_design_inform_creative_leaders
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"One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness, so if it was one, two, three, four, it's you, sir. You. Yeah. (Laughter) With the weird teeth. And you next to him. (Laughter) You know who you are. Actually, that whole row isn't right. (Laughter) That's not good. Hi. Yeah. Real bad. Don't even look at me. (Laughter)I am one of the one in four. Thank you. I think I inherit it from my mother, who, used to crawl around the house on all fours. She had two sponges in her hand, and then she had two tied to her knees. My mother was completely absorbent. (Laughter) And she would crawl around behind me going, ""Who brings footprints into a building?!"" So that was kind of a clue that things weren't right. So before I start, I would like to thank the makers of Lamotrigine, Sertraline, and Reboxetine, because without those few simple chemicals, I would not be vertical today.So how did it start? My mental illness — well, I'm not even going to talk about my mental illness. What am I going to talk about? Okay. I always dreamt that, when I had my final breakdown, it would be because I had a deep Kafkaesque existentialist revelation, or that maybe Cate Blanchett would play me and she would win an Oscar for it. (Laughter) But that's not what happened. I had my breakdown during my daughter's sports day. There were all the parents sitting in a parking lot eating food out of the back of their car — only the English — eating their sausages. They loved their sausages. (Laughter) Lord and Lady Rigor Mortis were nibbling on the tarmac, and then the gun went off and all the girlies started running, and all the mummies went, ""Run! Run Chlamydia! Run!"" (Laughter) ""Run like the wind, Veruca! Run!"" And all the girlies, girlies running, running, running, everybody except for my daughter, who was just standing at the starting line, just waving, because she didn't know she was supposed to run. So I took to my bed for about a month, and when I woke up I found I was institutionalized, and when I saw the other inmates, I realized that I had found my people, my tribe. (Laughter) Because they became my only friends, they became my friends, because very few people that I knew — Well, I wasn't sent a lot of cards or flowers. I mean, if I had had a broken leg or I was with child I would have been inundated, but all I got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up. Perk up. Because I didn't think of that. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause)Because, you know, the one thing, one thing that you get with this disease, this one comes with a package, is you get a real sense of shame, because your friends go, ""Oh come on, show me the lump, show me the x-rays,"" and of course you've got nothing to show, so you're, like, really disgusted with yourself because you're thinking, ""I'm not being carpet-bombed. I don't live in a township."" So you start to hear these abusive voices, but you don't hear one abusive voice, you hear about a thousand — 100,000 abusive voices, like if the Devil had Tourette's, that's what it would sound like. But we all know in here, you know, there is no Devil, there are no voices in your head. You know that when you have those abusive voices, all those little neurons get together and in that little gap you get a real toxic ""I want to kill myself"" kind of chemical, and if you have that over and over again on a loop tape, you might have yourself depression. Oh, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg. If you get a little baby, and you abuse it verbally, its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just doesn't grow, so you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic. If a soldier sees his friend blown up, his brain goes into such high alarm that he can't actually put the experience into words, so he just feels the horror over and over again.So here's my question. My question is, how come when people have mental damage, it's always an active imagination? How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain?I'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain, because I know you like that here at TED, so if you just give me a minute here, okay. Okay, let me just say, there's some good news. There is some good news. First of all, let me say, we've come a long, long way. We started off as a teeny, teeny little one-celled amoeba, tiny, just sticking onto a rock, and now, voila, the brain. Here we go. (Laughter) This little baby has a lot of horsepower. It comes completely conscious. It's got state-of-the-art lobes. We've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world. We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world. Here we've got a little bit of long-term memory, so, you know that night you want to forget, when you got really drunk? Bye-bye! Gone. (Laughter) So actually, it's filled with 100 billion neurons just zizzing away, electrically transmitting information, zizzing, zizzing. I'm going to give you a little side view here. I don't know if you can get that here. (Laughter) So, zizzing away, and so — (Laughter) — And for every one — I know, I drew this myself. Thank you. For every one single neuron, you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it, and every time you learn something, or you have an experience, that bush grows, you know, that bush of information. Can you imagine, every human being is carrying that equipment, even Paris Hilton? (Laughter) Go figure.But I got a little bad news for you folks. I got some bad news. This isn't for the one in four. This is for the four in four. We are not equipped for the 21st century. Evolution did not prepare us for this. We just don't have the bandwidth, and for people who say, oh, they're having a nice day, they're perfectly fine, they're more insane than the rest of us. Because I'll show you where there might be a few glitches in evolution. Okay, let me just explain this to you. When we were ancient man — (Laughter) — millions of years ago, and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator, okay? — (Laughter) — we would — Thank you. I drew these myself. (Laughter) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Anyway, we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol, and then we'd kill or be killed, we'd eat or we'd be eaten, and then suddenly we'd de-fuel, and we'd go back to normal. Okay. So the problem is, nowadays, with modern man— (Laughter) — when we feel in danger, we still fill up with our own chemical but because we can't kill traffic wardens — (Laughter) — or eat estate agents, the fuel just stays in our body over and over, so we're in a constant state of alarm, a constant state. And here's another thing that happened. About 150,000 years ago, when language came online, we started to put words to this constant emergency, so it wasn't just, ""Oh my God, there's a saber-toothed tiger,"" which could be, it was suddenly, ""Oh my God, I didn't send the email. Oh my God, my thighs are too fat. Oh my God, everybody can see I'm stupid. I didn't get invited to the Christmas party!"" So you've got this nagging loop tape that goes over and over again that drives you insane, so, you see what the problem is? What once made you safe now drives you insane. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but somebody has to be. Your pets are happier than you are. (Laughter) (Applause) So kitty cat, meow, happy happy happy, human beings, screwed. (Laughter) Completely and utterly — so, screwed.But my point is, if we don't talk about this stuff, and we don't learn how to deal with our lives, it's not going to be one in four. It's going to be four in four who are really, really going to get ill in the upstairs department. And while we're at it, can we please stop the stigma? Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_wax_what_s_so_funny_about_mental_illness
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"Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland. Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students. And I was scared. (Laughter) Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words. But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world. That's just how I felt as I had those conversations with the students. I was amazed at the ideas that they had, and I wanted others to experience this wonderland as well. And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication.We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world. Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, from energy to environment to health care, among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions. But these great conversations can't occur if our scientists and engineers don't invite us in to see their wonderland. So scientists and engineers, please, talk nerdy to us.I want to share a few keys on how you can do that to make sure that we can see that your science is sexy and that your engineering is engaging. First question to answer for us: so what? Tell us why your science is relevant to us. Don't just tell me that you study trabeculae, but tell me that you study trabeculae, which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis.And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon. Jargon is a barrier to our understanding of your ideas. Sure, you can say ""spatial and temporal,"" but why not just say ""space and time,"" which is so much more accessible to us? And making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down. Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. You can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas. A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content. And when presenting your work, drop the bullet points. Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? (Laughter) What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation. A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too much on the language area of our brain, and causes us to become overwhelmed. Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower. And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described.So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering. And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. (Laughter) Take your science, subtract your bullet points and your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you're doing, and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding. And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me
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"In 1975, I met in Florence a professor, Carlo Pedretti, my former professor of art history, and today a world-renowned scholar of Leonardo da Vinci. Well, he asked me if I could find some technological way to unfold a five-centuries-old mystery related to a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the ""Battle of Anghiari,"" which is supposed to be located in the Hall of the 500 in Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence. Well, in the mid-'70s, there were not great opportunities for a bioengineer like me, especially in Italy, and so I decided, with some researchers from the United States and the University of Florence, to start probing the murals decorated by Vasari on the long walls of the Hall of the 500 searching for the lost Leonardo.Unfortunately, at that time we did not know that that was not exactly where we should be looking, because we had to go much deeper in, and so the research came to a halt, and it was only taken up in 2000 thanks to the interest and the enthusiasm of the Guinness family. Well, this time, we focused on trying to reconstruct the way the Hall of the 500 was before the remodeling, and the so-called Sala Grande, which was built in 1494, and to find out the original doors, windows, and in order to do that, we first created a 3D model, and then, with thermography, we went on to discover hidden windows. These are the original windows of the hall of the Sala Grande. We also found out about the height of the ceiling, and we managed to reconstruct, therefore, all the layout of this original hall the way it was before there came Vasari, and restructured the whole thing, including a staircase that was very important in order to precisely place ""The Battle of Anghiari"" on a specific area of one of the two walls.Well, we also learned that Vasari, who was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the Grand Duke Cosimo I of the Medici family, we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap. One that we [see] here, Masaccio, the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, so we just said, well maybe, Visari has done something like that in the case of this great work of art by Leonardo, since he was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci.And so we built some very sophisticated radio antennas just for probing both walls and searching for an air gap. And we did find many on the right panel of the east wall, an air gap, and that's where we believe ""The Battle of Anghiari,"" or at least the part that we know has been painted, which is called ""The Fight for the Standard,"" should be located.Well, from there, unfortunately, in 2004, the project came to a halt. Many political reasons. So I decided to go back to my alma mater, and, at the University of California, San Diego, and I proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage. And in 2007, we created CISA3 as a research center for cultural heritage, specifically art, architecture and archaeology. So students started to flow in, and we started to build technologies, because that's basically what we also needed in order to move forward and go and do fieldwork.We came back in the Hall of the 500 in 2011, and this time, with a great group of students, and my colleague, Professor Falko Kuester, who is now the director at CISA3, and we came back just since we knew already where to look for to find out if there was still something left. Well, we were confined though, limited, I should rather say, for several reasons that it's not worth explaining, to endoscopy only, of the many other options we had, and with a 4mm camera attached to it, we were successful in documenting and taking some fragments of what it turns out to be a reddish color, black color, and there is some beige fragments that later on we ran a much more sophisticated exams, XRF, X-ray diffraction, and the results are very positive so far. It seems to indicate that indeed we have found some pigments, and since we know for sure that no other artist has painted on that wall before Vasari came in about 60 years later, well, those pigments are therefore firmly related to mural painting and most likely to Leonardo.Well, we are searching for the highest and highly praised work of art ever achieved by mankind. As a matter of fact, this is by far the most important commission that Leonardo has ever had, and for doing this great masterpiece, he was named the number one artist influence at the time.I had also had the privilege since the last 37 years to work on several masterpieces as you can see behind me, but basically to do what? Well, to assess, for example, the state of conservation. See here the face of the Madonna of the Chair that when just shining a UV light on it you suddenly see another, different lady, aged lady, I should rather say. There is a lot of varnish still sitting there, several retouches, and some over cleaning. It becomes very visible.But also, technology has helped to write new pages of our history, or at least to update pages of our histories. For example, the ""Lady with the Unicorn,"" another painting by Rafael, well, you see the unicorn. A lot has been said and written about the unicorn, but if you take an X-ray of the unicorn, it becomes a puppy dog. And — (Laughter) — no problem, but, unfortunately, continuing with the scientific examination of this painting came out that Rafael did not paint the unicorn, did not paint the puppy dog, actually left the painting unfinished, so all this writing about the exotic symbol of the unicorn — (Laughter) — unfortunately, is not very reliable. (Laughter)Well, also, authenticity. Just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art. There would be a cultural revolution to say the least, but also, I would say, a market revolution, let me add. Take this example: Otto Marseus, nice painting, which is ""Still Life"" at the Pitti Gallery, and just have an infrared camera peering through, and luckily for art historians, it just was confirmed that there is a signature of Otto Marseus. It even says when it was made and also the location. So that was a good result. Sometimes, it's not that good, and so, again, authenticity and science could go together and change the way, not attributions being made, but at least lay the ground for a more objective, or, I should rather say, less subjective attribution, as it is done today.But I would say the discovery that really caught my imagination, my admiration, is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer, brown layer, of ""The Adoration of the Magi."" Here you see a handmade setting XYZ scanner with an infrared camera put on it, and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath. Well, this happens to be the most important painting we have in Italy by Leonardo da Vinci, and look at the wonderful images of faces that nobody has seen for five centuries. Look at these portraits. They're magnificent. You see Leonardo at work. You see the geniality of his creation, right directly on the ground layer of the panel, and see this cool thing, finding, I should rather say, an elephant. (Laughter) Because of this elephant, over 70 new images came out, never seen for centuries. This was an epiphany. We came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by Leonardo da Vinci, which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see, so thanks only to technology.Well, the tablet. Well, we thought, well, if we all have this pleasure, this privilege to see all this, to find all these discoveries, what about for everybody else? So we thought of an augmented reality application using a tablet. Let me show you just simulating what we could be doing, any of us could be doing, in a museum environment. So let's say that we go to a museum with a tablet, okay? And we just aim the camera of the tablet to the painting that we are interested to see, like this. Okay? And I will just click on it, we pause, and now let me turn to you so the moment the image, or, I should say, the camera, has locked in the painting, then the images you just saw up there in the drawing are being loaded. And so, see. We can, as we said, we can zoom in. Then we can scroll. Okay? Let's go and find the elephant. So all we need is one finger. Just wipe off and we see the elephant. (Applause) (Applause) Okay? And then if we want, we can continue the scroll to find out, for example, on the staircase, the whole iconography is going to be changed. There are a lot of laymen reconstructing from the ruins of an old temple a new temple, and there are a lot of figures showing up. See?This is not just a curiosity, because it changes not just the iconography as you see it, but the iconology, the meaning of the painting, and we believe this is a cool way, easy way, that everybody could have access to, to become more the protagonist of your own discovery, and not just be so passive about it, as we are when we walk through endless rooms of museums. (Applause)Another concept is the digital clinical chart, which sounds very obvious if we were to talk about real patients, but when we talk about works of art, unfortunately, it's never been tapped as an idea. Well, we believe, again, that this should be the beginning, the very first step, to do real conservation, and allowing us to really explore and to understand everything related to the state of our conservation, the technique, materials, and also if, when, and why we should restore, or, rather, to intervene on the environment surrounding the painting.Well, our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together. We definitely need a new breed of engineers that will go out and do this kind of work and rediscover for us these values, these cultural values that we badly need, especially today.And if you want to summarize in one just single word, well, this is what we're trying to do. We're trying to give a future to our past in order to have a future. As long as we live a life of curiosity and passion, there is a bit of Leonardo in all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maurizio_seracini_the_secret_lives_of_paintings
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"Over the past six months, I've spent my time traveling. I think I've done 60,000 miles, but without leaving my desk. And the reason I can do that is because I'm actually two people. I look like one person but I'm two people. I'm Eddie who is here, and at the same time, my alter ego is a big green boxy avatar nicknamed Cyber Frank.So that's what I spend my time doing. I'd like to start, if it's possible, with a test, because I do business stuff, so it's important that we focus on outcomes. And then I struggled, because I was thinking to myself, ""What should I talk? What should I do? It's a TED audience. It's got to be stretching. How am I going to make — ?"" So I just hope I've got the level of difficulty right. So let's just walk our way through this. Please could you work this through with me? You can shout out the answer if you like. The question is, which of these horizontal lines is longer? The answer is? Audience: The same.Eddie Obeng: The same. No, they're not the same. (Laughter) They're not the same. The top one is 10 percent longer than the bottom one. So why did you tell me they were the same? Do you remember when we were kids at school, about that big, they played the same trick on us? It was to teach us parallax. Do you remember? And you got, you said, ""It's the same!"" And you got it wrong. You remember? And you learned the answer, and you've carried this answer in your head for 10, 20, 30, 40 years: The answer is the same. The answer is the same. So when you're asked what the lengths are, you say they're the same, but they're not the same, because I've changed it.And this is what I'm trying to explain has happened to us in the 21st century. Somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works. When I'm joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight, you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago. Okay? You didn't notice it? But basically, what they do is, they switched all the rules round, so that the way to successfully run a business, an organization, or even a country, has been deleted, flipped, and it's a completely new — you think I'm joking, don't you — there's a completely new set of rules in operation. (Laughter) Did you notice that? I mean, you missed this one. You probably — No, you didn't. Okay. (Laughter)My simple idea is that what's happened is, the real 21st century around us isn't so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists. You don't believe me, do you? Okay. (Applause)So let me take you on a little journey of many of the things I don't understand. If you search Amazon for the word ""creativity,"" you'll discover something like 90,000 books. If you go on Google and you look for ""innovation + creativity,"" you get 30 million hits. If you add the word ""consultants,"" it doubles to 60 million. (Laughter) Are you with me? And yet, statistically, what you discover is that about one in 100,000 ideas is found making money or delivering benefits two years after its inception. It makes no sense. Companies make their expensive executives spend ages carefully preparing forecasts and budgets which are obsolete or need changing before they can be published.How is that possible? If you look at the visions we have, the visions of how we're going to change the world, the key thing is implementation. We have the vision. We've got to make it happen. We've spent decades professionalizing implementation. People are supposed to be good at making stuff happen. However, if I use as an example a family of five going on holiday, if you can imagine this, all the way from London all the way across to Hong Kong, what I want you to think about is their budget is only 3,000 pounds of expenses. What actually happens is, if I compare this to the average real project, average real successful project, the family actually end up in Makassar, South Sulawesi, at a cost of 4,000 pounds, whilst leaving two of the children behind. (Laughter) What I'm trying to explain to you is, there are things which don't make sense to us.It gets even worse than that. Let me just walk you through this one. This is a quote, and I'll just pick words out of it. It says — I'll put on the voice — ""In summary, your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis was due to the lack of creativity and the number of bright minds,"" or something like that. This was a group of eminent economists apologizing to the Queen of England when she asked the question, ""Why did no one tell us that the crisis was coming?"" (Laughter) I'll never get my knighthood. I'll never get my knighthood. (Laughter) That's not the important point. The thing you have to remember is, these are eminent economists, some of the smartest people on the planet. Do you see the challenge? (Laughter)It's scary. My friend and mentor, Tim Brown of IDEO, he explains that design must get big, and he's right. He wisely explains this to us. He says design thinking must tackle big systems for the challenges we have. He's absolutely right. And then I ask myself, ""Why was it ever small?"" Isn't it weird? You know, if collaboration is so cool, is cross-functional working is so amazing, why did we build these huge hierarchies? What's going on? You see, I think what's happened, perhaps, is that we've not noticed that change I described earlier.What we do know is that the world has accelerated. Cyberspace moves everything at the speed of light. Technology accelerates things exponentially. So if this is now, and that's the past, and we start thinking about change, you know, all governments are seeking change, you're here seeking change, everybody's after change, it's really cool. (Laughter) So what happens is, we get this wonderful whooshing acceleration and change. The speed is accelerating. That's not the only thing. At the same time, as we've done that, we've done something really weird. We've doubled the population in 40 years, put half of them in cities, then connected them all up so they can interact. The density of the interaction of human beings is amazing. There are charts which show all these movements of information. That density of information is amazing. And then we've done a third thing. you know, for those of you who have as an office a little desk underneath the stairs, and you say, well this is my little desk under the stairs, no! You are sitting at the headquarters of a global corporation if you're connected to the Internet. What's happened is, we've changed the scale. Size and scale are no longer the same. And then add to that, every time you tweet, over a third of your followers follow from a country which is not your own.Global is the new scale. We know that. And so people say things like, ""The world is now a turbulent place."" Have you heard them saying things like that? And they use it as a metaphor. Have you come across this?And they think it's a metaphor, but this is not a metaphor. It's reality. As a young engineering student, I remember going to a demonstration where they basically, the demonstrator did something quite intriguing. What he did was, he got a transparent pipe — have you seen this demonstration before? — he attached it to a tap. So effectively what you had was, you had a situation where — I'll try and draw the tap and the pipe, actually I'll skip the tap. The taps are hard. Okay? So I'll write the word ""tap."" Is that okay? It's a tap. (Laughter) Okay, so he attaches it to a transparent pipe, and he turns the water on. And he says, do you notice anything? And the water is whooshing down this pipe. I mean, this is not exciting stuff. Are you with me? So the water goes up. He turns it back down. Great. And he says, ""Anything you notice?"" No. Then he sticks a needle into the pipe, and he connects this to a container, and he fills the container up with green ink. You with me? So guess what happens? A thin green line comes out as it flows down the pipe. It's not that interesting. And then he turns the water up a bit, so it starts coming back in. And nothing changes. So he's changing the flow of the water, but it's just a boring green line. He adds some more. He adds some more. And then something weird happens. There's this little flicker, and then as he turns it ever so slightly more, the whole of that green line disappears, and instead there are these little sort of inky dust devils close to the needle. They're called eddies. Not me. And they're violently dispersing the ink so that it actually gets diluted out, and the color's gone.What's happened in this world of pipe is somebody has flipped it. They've changed the rules from laminar to turbulent. All the rules are gone. In that environment, instantly, all the possibilities which turbulence brings are available, and it's not the same as laminar. And if we didn't have that green ink, you'd never notice.And I think this is our challenge, because somebody has actually increased — and it's probably you guys with all your tech and stuff — the speed, the scale and the density of interaction.Now how do we cope and deal with that? Well, we could just call it turbulence, or we could try and learn. Yes, learn, but I know you guys grew up in the days when there were actually these things called correct answers, because of the answer you gave me to the horizontal line puzzle, and you believe it will last forever. So I'll put a little line up here which represents learning, and that's how we used to do it. We could see things, understand them, take the time to put them into practice. Out here is the world. Now, what's happened to our pace of learning as the world has accelerated? Well, if you work for a corporation, you'll discover it's quite difficult to work on stuff which your boss doesn't approve of, isn't in the strategy, and anyway, you've got to go through your monthly meetings. If you work in an institution, one day you will get them to make that decision. And if you work in a market where people believe in cycles, it's even funnier, because you have to wait all the way for the cycle to fail before you go, ""There's something wrong."" You with me? So it's likely that the line, in terms of learning, is pretty flat. You with me? This point over here, the point at which the lines cross over, the pace of change overtakes the pace of learning, and for me, that is what I was describing when I was telling you about midnight.So what does it do to us? Well, it completely transforms what we have to do, many mistakes we make. We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future. If you try and think about it, the things you're solving now, what problems are they going to bring in the future? If you haven't understood the world you're living in, it's almost impossible to be absolutely certain that what you're going to deliver fits.I'll give you an example, a quick one. Creativity and ideas, I mentioned that earlier. All the CEOs around me, my clients, they want innovation, so they seek innovation. They say to people, ""Take risks and be creative!"" But unfortunately the words get transformed as they travel through the air. Entering their ears, what they hear is, ""Do crazy things and then I'll fire you."" Why? (Laughter) Because — Why? Because in the old world, okay, in the old world, over here, getting stuff wrong was unacceptable. If you got something wrong, you'd failed. How should you be treated? Well, harshly, because you could have asked somebody who had experience. So we learned the answer and we carried this in our heads for 20, 30 years, are you with me? The answer is, don't do things which are different. And then suddenly we tell them to and it doesn't work. You see, in reality, there are two ways you can fail in our new world. One, you're doing something that you should follow a procedure to, and it's a very difficult thing, you're sloppy, you get it wrong. How should you be treated? You should probably be fired. On the other hand, you're doing something new, no one's ever done before, you get it completely wrong. How should you be treated? Well, free pizzas! You should be treated better than the people who succeed. It's called smart failure. Why? Because you can't put it on your C.V.So what I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation of why I actually traveled 60,000 miles from my desk. When I realized the power of this new world, I quit my safe teaching job, and set up a virtual business school, the first in the world, in order to teach people how to make this happen, and I used some of my learnings about some of the rules which I'd learned on myself. If you're interested, worldaftermidnight.com, you'll find out more, but I've applied them to myself for over a decade, and I'm still here, and I still have my house, and the most important thing is, I hope I've done enough to inject a little green ink into your lives, so that when you go away and you're making your next absolutely sensible and rational decision, you'll take some time to think, ""Hmm, I wonder whether this also makes sense in our new world after midnight."" Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you, thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eddie_obeng_smart_failure_for_a_fast_changing_world
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"So I have bad news, I have good news, and I have a task. So the bad news is that we all get sick. I get sick. You get sick. And every one of us gets sick, and the question really is, how sick do we get? Is it something that kills us? Is it something that we survive? Is it something that we can treat?And we've gotten sick as long as we've been people. And so we've always looked for reasons to explain why we get sick. And for a long time, it was the gods, right? The gods are angry with me, or the gods are testing me, right? Or God, singular, more recently, is punishing me or judging me. And as long as we've looked for explanations, we've wound up with something that gets closer and closer to science, which is hypotheses as to why we get sick, and as long as we've had hypotheses about why we get sick, we've tried to treat it as well.So this is Avicenna. He wrote a book over a thousand years ago called ""The Canon of Medicine,"" and the rules he laid out for testing medicines are actually really similar to the rules we have today, that the disease and the medicine must be the same strength, the medicine needs to be pure, and in the end we need to test it in people. And so if you put together these themes of a narrative or a hypothesis in human testing, right, you get some beautiful results, even when we didn't have very good technologies.This is a guy named Carlos Finlay. He had a hypothesis that was way outside the box for his time, in the late 1800s. He thought yellow fever was not transmitted by dirty clothing. He thought it was transmitted by mosquitos. And they laughed at him. For 20 years, they called this guy ""the mosquito man."" But he ran an experiment in people, right? He had this hypothesis, and he tested it in people. So he got volunteers to go move to Cuba and live in tents and be voluntarily infected with yellow fever. So some of the people in some of the tents had dirty clothes and some of the people were in tents that were full of mosquitos that had been exposed to yellow fever. And it definitively proved that it wasn't this magic dust called fomites in your clothes that caused yellow fever. But it wasn't until we tested it in people that we actually knew. And this is what those people signed up for. This is what it looked like to have yellow fever in Cuba at that time. You suffered in a tent, in the heat, alone, and you probably died. But people volunteered for this.And it's not just a cool example of a scientific design of experiment in theory. They also did this beautiful thing. They signed this document, and it's called an informed consent document. And informed consent is an idea that we should be very proud of as a society, right? It's something that separates us from the Nazis at Nuremberg, enforced medical experimentation. It's the idea that agreement to join a study without understanding isn't agreement. It's something that protects us from harm, from hucksters, from people that would try to hoodwink us into a clinical study that we don't understand, or that we don't agree to. And so you put together the thread of narrative hypothesis, experimentation in humans, and informed consent, and you get what we call clinical study, and it's how we do the vast majority of medical work. It doesn't really matter if you're in the north, the south, the east, the west. Clinical studies form the basis of how we investigate, so if we're going to look at a new drug, right, we test it in people, we draw blood, we do experiments, and we gain consent for that study, to make sure that we're not screwing people over as part of it.But the world is changing around the clinical study, which has been fairly well established for tens of years if not 50 to 100 years. So now we're able to gather data about our genomes, but, as we saw earlier, our genomes aren't dispositive. We're able to gather information about our environment. And more importantly, we're able to gather information about our choices, because it turns out that what we think of as our health is more like the interaction of our bodies, our genomes, our choices and our environment. And the clinical methods that we've got aren't very good at studying that because they are based on the idea of person-to-person interaction. You interact with your doctor and you get enrolled in the study. So this is my grandfather. I actually never met him, but he's holding my mom, and his genes are in me, right? His choices ran through to me. He was a smoker, like most people were. This is my son. So my grandfather's genes go all the way through to him, and my choices are going to affect his health. The technology between these two pictures cannot be more different, but the methodology for clinical studies has not radically changed over that time period. We just have better statistics. The way we gain informed consent was formed in large part after World War II, around the time that picture was taken. That was 70 years ago, and the way we gain informed consent, this tool that was created to protect us from harm, now creates silos. So the data that we collect for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's trials goes into silos where it can only be used for prostate cancer or for Alzheimer's research. Right? It can't be networked. It can't be integrated. It cannot be used by people who aren't credentialed. So a physicist can't get access to it without filing paperwork. A computer scientist can't get access to it without filing paperwork. Computer scientists aren't patient. They don't file paperwork.And this is an accident. These are tools that we created to protect us from harm, but what they're doing is protecting us from innovation now. And that wasn't the goal. It wasn't the point. Right? It's a side effect, if you will, of a power we created to take us for good. And so if you think about it, the depressing thing is that Facebook would never make a change to something as important as an advertising algorithm with a sample size as small as a Phase III clinical trial. We cannot take the information from past trials and put them together to form statistically significant samples.And that sucks, right? So 45 percent of men develop cancer. Thirty-eight percent of women develop cancer. One in four men dies of cancer. One in five women dies of cancer, at least in the United States. And three out of the four drugs we give you if you get cancer fail. And this is personal to me. My sister is a cancer survivor. My mother-in-law is a cancer survivor. Cancer sucks. And when you have it, you don't have a lot of privacy in the hospital. You're naked the vast majority of the time. People you don't know come in and look at you and poke you and prod you, and when I tell cancer survivors that this tool we created to protect them is actually preventing their data from being used, especially when only three to four percent of people who have cancer ever even sign up for a clinical study, their reaction is not, ""Thank you, God, for protecting my privacy."" It's outrage that we have this information and we can't use it. And it's an accident. So the cost in blood and treasure of this is enormous. Two hundred and twenty-six billion a year is spent on cancer in the United States. Fifteen hundred people a day die in the United States. And it's getting worse.So the good news is that some things have changed, and the most important thing that's changed is that we can now measure ourselves in ways that used to be the dominion of the health system. So a lot of people talk about it as digital exhaust. I like to think of it as the dust that runs along behind my kid. We can reach back and grab that dust, and we can learn a lot about health from it, so if our choices are part of our health, what we eat is a really important aspect of our health. So you can do something very simple and basic and take a picture of your food, and if enough people do that, we can learn a lot about how our food affects our health. One interesting thing that came out of this — this is an app for iPhones called The Eatery — is that we think our pizza is significantly healthier than other people's pizza is. Okay? (Laughter) And it seems like a trivial result, but this is the sort of research that used to take the health system years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish. It was done in five months by a startup company of a couple of people. I don't have any financial interest in it.But more nontrivially, we can get our genotypes done, and although our genotypes aren't dispositive, they give us clues. So I could show you mine. It's just A's, T's, C's and G's. This is the interpretation of it. As you can see, I carry a 32 percent risk of prostate cancer, 22 percent risk of psoriasis and a 14 percent risk of Alzheimer's disease. So that means, if you're a geneticist, you're freaking out, going, ""Oh my God, you told everyone you carry the ApoE E4 allele. What's wrong with you?"" Right? When I got these results, I started talking to doctors, and they told me not to tell anyone, and my reaction is, ""Is that going to help anyone cure me when I get the disease?"" And no one could tell me yes. And I live in a web world where, when you share things, beautiful stuff happens, not bad stuff. So I started putting this in my slide decks, and I got even more obnoxious, and I went to my doctor, and I said, ""I'd like to actually get my bloodwork. Please give me back my data."" So this is my most recent bloodwork. As you can see, I have high cholesterol. I have particularly high bad cholesterol, and I have some bad liver numbers, but those are because we had a dinner party with a lot of good wine the night before we ran the test. (Laughter) Right. But look at how non-computable this information is. This is like the photograph of my granddad holding my mom from a data perspective, and I had to go into the system and get it out.So the thing that I'm proposing we do here is that we reach behind us and we grab the dust, that we reach into our bodies and we grab the genotype, and we reach into the medical system and we grab our records, and we use it to build something together, which is a commons. And there's been a lot of talk about commonses, right, here, there, everywhere, right. A commons is nothing more than a public good that we build out of private goods. We do it voluntarily, and we do it through standardized legal tools. We do it through standardized technologies. Right. That's all a commons is. It's something that we build together because we think it's important.And a commons of data is something that's really unique, because we make it from our own data. And although a lot of people like privacy as their methodology of control around data, and obsess around privacy, at least some of us really like to share as a form of control, and what's remarkable about digital commonses is you don't need a big percentage if your sample size is big enough to generate something massive and beautiful. So not that many programmers write free software, but we have the Apache web server. Not that many people who read Wikipedia edit, but it works. So as long as some people like to share as their form of control, we can build a commons, as long as we can get the information out. And in biology, the numbers are even better. So Vanderbilt ran a study asking people, we'd like to take your biosamples, your blood, and share them in a biobank, and only five percent of the people opted out. I'm from Tennessee. It's not the most science-positive state in the United States of America. (Laughter) But only five percent of the people wanted out. So people like to share, if you give them the opportunity and the choice.And the reason that I got obsessed with this, besides the obvious family aspects, is that I spend a lot of time around mathematicians, and mathematicians are drawn to places where there's a lot of data because they can use it to tease signals out of noise. And those correlations that they can tease out, they're not necessarily causal agents, but math, in this day and age, is like a giant set of power tools that we're leaving on the floor, not plugged in in health, while we use hand saws. If we have a lot of shared genotypes, and a lot of shared outcomes, and a lot of shared lifestyle choices, and a lot of shared environmental information, we can start to tease out the correlations between subtle variations in people, the choices they make and the health that they create as a result of those choices, and there's open-source infrastructure to do all of this. Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit that's built a giant math system that's waiting for data, but there isn't any.So that's what I do. I've actually started what we think is the world's first fully digital, fully self-contributed, unlimited in scope, global in participation, ethically approved clinical research study where you contribute the data. So if you reach behind yourself and you grab the dust, if you reach into your body and grab your genome, if you reach into the medical system and somehow extract your medical record, you can actually go through an online informed consent process — because the donation to the commons must be voluntary and it must be informed — and you can actually upload your information and have it syndicated to the mathematicians who will do this sort of big data research, and the goal is to get 100,000 in the first year and a million in the first five years so that we have a statistically significant cohort that you can use to take smaller sample sizes from traditional research and map it against, so that you can use it to tease out those subtle correlations between the variations that make us unique and the kinds of health that we need to move forward as a society.And I've spent a lot of time around other commons. I've been around the early web. I've been around the early creative commons world, and there's four things that all of these share, which is, they're all really simple. And so if you were to go to the website and enroll in this study, you're not going to see something complicated. But it's not simplistic. These things are weak intentionally, right, because you can always add power and control to a system, but it's very difficult to remove those things if you put them in at the beginning, and so being simple doesn't mean being simplistic, and being weak doesn't mean weakness. Those are strengths in the system.And open doesn't mean that there's no money. Closed systems, corporations, make a lot of money on the open web, and they're one of the reasons why the open web lives is that corporations have a vested interest in the openness of the system. And so all of these things are part of the clinical study that we've created, so you can actually come in, all you have to be is 14 years old, willing to sign a contract that says I'm not going to be a jerk, basically, and you're in. You can start analyzing the data. You do have to solve a CAPTCHA as well. (Laughter) And if you'd like to build corporate structures on top of it, that's okay too. That's all in the consent, so if you don't like those terms, you don't come in. It's very much the design principles of a commons that we're trying to bring to health data. And the other thing about these systems is that it only takes a small number of really unreasonable people working together to create them. It didn't take that many people to make Wikipedia Wikipedia, or to keep it Wikipedia. And we're not supposed to be unreasonable in health, and so I hate this word ""patient."" I don't like being patient when systems are broken, and health care is broken. I'm not talking about the politics of health care, I'm talking about the way we scientifically approach health care. So I don't want to be patient. And the task I'm giving to you is to not be patient. So I'd like you to actually try, when you go home, to get your data. You'll be shocked and offended and, I would bet, outraged, at how hard it is to get it. But it's a challenge that I hope you'll take, and maybe you'll share it. Maybe you won't. If you don't have anyone in your family who's sick, maybe you wouldn't be unreasonable. But if you do, or if you've been sick, then maybe you would. And we're going to be able to do an experiment in the next several months that lets us know exactly how many unreasonable people are out there. So this is the Athena Breast Health Network. It's a study of 150,000 women in California, and they're going to return all the data to the participants of the study in a computable form, with one-clickability to load it into the study that I've put together. So we'll know exactly how many people are willing to be unreasonable.So what I'd end [with] is, the most beautiful thing I've learned since I quit my job almost a year ago to do this, is that it really doesn't take very many of us to achieve spectacular results. You just have to be willing to be unreasonable, and the risk we're running is not the risk those 14 men who got yellow fever ran. Right? It's to be naked, digitally, in public. So you know more about me and my health than I know about you. It's asymmetric now. And being naked and alone can be terrifying. But to be naked in a group, voluntarily, can be quite beautiful. And so it doesn't take all of us. It just takes all of some of us. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_wilbanks_let_s_pool_our_medical_data
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"Beau Lotto: So, this game is very simple. All you have to do is read what you see. Right? So, I'm going to count to you, so we don't all do it together.Okay, one, two, three.Audience: Can you read this?BL: Amazing. What about this one? One, two, three.Audience: You are not reading this.BL: All right. One, two, three. (Laughter) If you were Portuguese, right? How about this one? One, two, three.Audience: What are you reading?BL: What are you reading? There are no words there. I said, read what you're seeing. Right? It literally says, ""Wat ar ou rea in?"" (Laughter) Right? That's what you should have said. Right? Why is this?It's because perception is grounded in our experience. Right? The brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning out of it, which means we never see what's there, we never see information, we only ever see what was useful to see in the past. All right? Which means, when it comes to perception, we're all like this frog. (Laughter) Right? It's getting information. It's generating behavior that's useful. (Laughter) (Laughter)(Video) Man: Ow! Ow! (Laughter) (Applause)BL: And sometimes, when things don't go our way, we get a little bit annoyed, right? But we're talking about perception here, right? And perception underpins everything we think, we know, we believe, our hopes, our dreams, the clothes we wear, falling in love, everything begins with perception. Now if perception is grounded in our history, it means we're only ever responding according to what we've done before. But actually, it's a tremendous problem, because how can we ever see differently?Now, I want to tell you a story about seeing differently, and all new perceptions begin in the same way. They begin with a question. The problem with questions is they create uncertainty. Now, uncertainty is a very bad thing. It's evolutionarily a bad thing. If you're not sure that's a predator, it's too late. Okay? (Laughter) Even seasickness is a consequence of uncertainty. Right? If you go down below on a boat, your inner ears are you telling you you're moving. Your eyes, because it's moving in register with the boat, say I'm standing still. Your brain cannot deal with the uncertainty of that information, and it gets ill. The question ""why?"" is one of the most dangerous things you can do, because it takes you into uncertainty. And yet, the irony is, the only way we can ever do anything new is to step into that space. So how can we ever do anything new? Well fortunately, evolution has given us an answer, right? And it enables us to address even the most difficult of questions. The best questions are the ones that create the most uncertainty. They're the ones that question the things we think to be true already. Right? It's easy to ask questions about how did life begin, or what extends beyond the universe, but to question what you think to be true already is really stepping into that space.So what is evolution's answer to the problem of uncertainty? It's play. Now play is not simply a process. Experts in play will tell you that actually it's a way of being. Play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is actually celebrated. Uncertainty is what makes play fun. Right? It's adaptable to change. Right? It opens possibility, and it's cooperative. It's actually how we do our social bonding, and it's intrinsically motivated. What that means is that we play to play. Play is its own reward.Now if you look at these five ways of being, these are the exact same ways of being you need in order to be a good scientist. Science is not defined by the method section of a paper. It's actually a way of being, which is here, and this is true for anything that is creative. So if you add rules to play, you have a game. That's actually what an experiment is.So armed with these two ideas, that science is a way of being and experiments are play, we asked, can anyone become a scientist? And who better to ask than 25 eight- to 10-year-old children? Because they're experts in play. So I took my bee arena down to a small school in Devon, and the aim of this was to not just get the kids to see science differently, but, through the process of science, to see themselves differently. Right?The first step was to ask a question.Now, I should say that we didn't get funding for this study because the scientists said small children couldn't make a useful contribution to science, and the teachers said kids couldn't do it. So we did it anyway. Right? Of course.So, here are some of the questions. I put them in small print so you wouldn't bother reading it. Point is that five of the questions that the kids came up with were actually the basis of science publication the last five to 15 years. Right? So they were asking questions that were significant to expert scientists.Now here, I want to share the stage with someone quite special. Right? She was one of the young people who was involved in this study, and she's now one of the youngest published scientists in the world. Right? She will now, once she comes onto stage, will be the youngest person to ever speak at TED. Right? Now, science and asking questions is about courage. Now she is the personification of courage, because she's going to stand up here and talk to you all. So Amy, would you please come up? (Applause) (Applause) So Amy's going to help me tell the story of what we call the Blackawton Bees Project, and first she's going to tell you the question that they came up with. So go ahead, Amy.Amy O'Toole: Thank you, Beau. We thought that it was easy to see the link between humans and apes in the way that we think, because we look alike. But we wondered if there's a possible link with other animals. It'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar, since they seem so different from us. So we asked if humans and bees might solve complex problems in the same way. Really, we wanted to know if bees can also adapt themselves to new situations using previously learned rules and conditions. So what if bees can think like us? Well, it'd be amazing, since we're talking about an insect with only one million brain cells. But it actually makes a lot of sense they should, because bees, like us, can recognize a good flower regardless of the time of day, the light, the weather, or from any angle they approach it from. (Applause)BL: So the next step was to design an experiment, which is a game. So the kids went off and they designed this experiment, and so — well, game — and so, Amy, can you tell us what the game was, and the puzzle that you set the bees?AO: The puzzle we came up with was an if-then rule. We asked the bees to learn not just to go to a certain color, but to a certain color flower only when it's in a certain pattern. They were only rewarded if they went to the yellow flowers if the yellow flowers were surrounded by the blue, or if the blue flowers were surrounded by the yellow. Now there's a number of different rules the bees can learn to solve this puzzle. The interesting question is, which? What was really exciting about this project was we, and Beau, had no idea whether it would work. It was completely new, and no one had done it before, including adults. (Laughter)BL: Including the teachers, and that was really hard for the teachers. It's easy for a scientist to go in and not have a clue what he's doing, because that's what we do in the lab, but for a teacher not to know what's going to happen at the end of the day — so much of the credit goes to Dave Strudwick, who was the collaborator on this project. Okay? So I'm not going to go through the whole details of the study because actually you can read about it, but the next step is observation. So here are some of the students doing the observations. They're recording the data of where the bees fly.(Video) Dave Strudwick: So what we're going to do —Student: 5C.Dave Strudwick: Is she still going up here?Student: Yeah.Dave Strudwick: So you keep track of each.Student: Henry, can you help me here?BL: ""Can you help me, Henry?"" What good scientist says that, right?Student: There's two up there. And three in here.BL: Right? So we've got our observations. We've got our data. They do the simple mathematics, averaging, etc., etc. And now we want to share. That's the next step. So we're going to write this up and try to submit this for publication. Right? So we have to write it up. So we go, of course, to the pub. All right? (Laughter) The one on the left is mine, okay? (Laughter)Now, I tell them, a paper has four different sections: an introduction, a methods, a results, a discussion. The introduction says, what's the question and why? Methods, what did you do? Results, what was the observation? And the discussion is, who cares? Right? That's a science paper, basically. (Laughter)So the kids give me the words, right? I put it into a narrative, which means that this paper is written in kidspeak. It's not written by me. It's written by Amy and the other students in the class. As a consequence, this science paper begins, ""Once upon a time ... "" (Laughter) The results section, it says: ""Training phase, the puzzle ... duh duh duuuuuhhh."" Right? (Laughter) And the methods, it says, ""Then we put the bees into the fridge (and made bee pie),"" smiley face. Right? (Laughter) This is a science paper. We're going to try to get it published. So here's the title page. We have a number of authors there. All the ones in bold are eight to 10 years old. The first author is Blackawton Primary School, because if it were ever referenced, it would be ""Blackawton et al,"" and not one individual. So we submit it to a public access journal, and it says this. It said many things, but it said this. ""I'm afraid the paper fails our initial quality control checks in several different ways."" (Laughter) In other words, it starts off ""once upon a time,"" the figures are in crayon, etc. (Laughter)So we said, we'll get it reviewed. So I sent it to Dale Purves, who is at the National Academy of Science, one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, and he says, ""This is the most original science paper I have ever read"" — (Laughter) — ""and it certainly deserves wide exposure."" Larry Maloney, expert in vision, says, ""The paper is magnificent. The work would be publishable if done by adults.""So what did we do? We send it back to the editor. They say no. So we asked Larry and Natalie Hempel to write a commentary situating the findings for scientists, right, putting in the references, and we submit it to Biology Letters. And there, it was reviewed by five independent referees, and it was published. Okay? (Applause) (Applause)It took four months to do the science, two years to get it published. (Laughter) Typical science, actually, right? So this makes Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world. What was the feedback like? Well, it was published two days before Christmas, downloaded 30,000 times in the first day, right? It was the Editors' Choice in Science, which is a top science magazine. It's forever freely accessible by Biology Letters. It's the only paper that will ever be freely accessible by this journal. Last year, it was the second-most downloaded paper by Biology Letters, and the feedback from not just scientists and teachers but the public as well. And I'll just read one.""I have read 'Blackawton Bees' recently. I don't have words to explain exactly how I am feeling right now. What you guys have done is real, true and amazing. Curiosity, interest, innocence and zeal are the most basic and most important things to do science. Who else can have these qualities more than children? Please congratulate your children's team from my side.""So I'd like to conclude with a physical metaphor. Can I do it on you? (Laughter) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, come on. Yeah yeah. Okay. Now, science is about taking risks, so this is an incredible risk, right? (Laughter) For me, not for him. Right? Because we've only done this once before. (Laughter) And you like technology, right?Shimon Schocken: Right, but I like myself.BL: This is the epitome of technology. Right. Okay. Now ... (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter)Now, we're going to do a little demonstration, right? You have to close your eyes, and you have to point where you hear me clapping. All right?(Clapping)(Clapping)Okay, how about if everyone over there shouts. One, two, three?Audience: (Shouts) (Laughter)(Shouts) (Laughter)Brilliant. Now, open your eyes. We'll do it one more time. Everyone over there shout. (Shouts) Where's the sound coming from? (Laughter) (Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause)What's the point? The point is what science does for us. Right? We normally walk through life responding, but if we ever want to do anything different, we have to step into uncertainty. When he opened his eyes, he was able to see the world in a new way. That's what science offers us. It offers the possibility to step on uncertainty through the process of play, right?Now, true science education I think should be about giving people a voice and enabling to express that voice, so I've asked Amy to be the last voice in this short story. So, Amy?AO: This project was really exciting for me, because it brought the process of discovery to life, and it showed me that anyone, and I mean anyone, has the potential to discover something new, and that a small question can lead into a big discovery. Changing the way a person thinks about something can be easy or hard. It all depends on the way the person feels about change. But changing the way I thought about science was surprisingly easy. Once we played the games and then started to think about the puzzle, I then realized that science isn't just a boring subject, and that anyone can discover something new. You just need an opportunity. My opportunity came in the form of Beau, and the Blackawton Bee Project.Thank you.BL: Thank you very much. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beau_lotto_amy_o_toole_science_is_for_everyone_kids_included
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"Once upon a time, the world was a big, dysfunctional family. It was run by the great and powerful parents, and the people were helpless and hopeless naughty children. If any of the more rowdier children questioned the authority of the parents, they were scolded. If they went exploring into the parents' rooms, or even into the secret filing cabinets, they were punished, and told that for their own good they must never go in there again.Then one day, a man came to town with boxes and boxes of secret documents stolen from the parents' rooms. ""Look what they've been hiding from you,"" he said. The children looked and were amazed. There were maps and minutes from meetings where the parents were slagging each other off. They behaved just like the children. And they made mistakes, too, just like the children. The only difference was, their mistakes were in the secret filing cabinets. Well, there was a girl in the town, and she didn't think they should be in the secret filing cabinets, or if they were, there ought to be a law to allow the children access. And so she set about to make it so.Well, I'm the girl in that story, and the secret documents that I was interested in were located in this building, the British Parliament, and the data that I wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of Parliament. I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy. (Applause) It wasn't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker, or anything like that, but the amount of resistance I got from this Freedom of Information request, you would have thought I'd asked something like this.So I fought for about five years doing this, and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made, not — I didn't — Hey, look, I didn't set out, honestly, to revolutionize the British Parliament. That was not my intention. I was just making these requests as part of research for my first book. But it ended up in this very long, protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data. And I've got to tell you, I wasn't that hopeful, because I'd seen the establishment. I thought, it always sticks together. I am out of luck.Well, guess what? I won. Hooray. (Applause)Well, that's not exactly the story, because the problem was that Parliament delayed and delayed releasing that data, and then they tried to retrospectively change the law so that it would no longer apply to them. The transparency law they'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else, they tried to keep it so it didn't apply to them. What they hadn't counted on was digitization, because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically, and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database, put it on a disk, and then just saunter outside of Parliament, which they did, and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder, which was the Daily Telegraph, and then, you all remember, there was weeks and weeks of revelations, everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off. The end result was six ministers resigned, the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign, a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency, 120 MPs stepped down at that election, and so far, four MPs and two lords have done jail time for fraud. So, thank you. (Applause)Well, I tell you that story because it wasn't unique to Britain. It was an example of a culture clash that's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us without very much prying from the public, and then suddenly confronted with a public who is no longer content with that arrangement, and not only not content with it, now, more often, armed with official data itself.So we are moving to this democratization of information, and I've been in this field for quite a while. Slightly embarrassing admission: Even when I was a kid, I used to have these little spy books, and I would, like, see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down. I think that was a pretty good indication about my future career as an investigative journalist, and what I've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest, and it's gone mainstream. Everybody, increasingly, around the world, wants to know about what people in power are doing. They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money. It's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment, and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment. It's about searching for the truth, not because somebody says it's true, ""because I say so."" No, it's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested. That, in the first Enlightenment, led to questions about the right of kings, the divine right of kings to rule over people, or that women should be subordinate to men, or that the Church was the official word of God.Obviously the Church weren't very happy about this, and they tried to suppress it, but what they hadn't counted on was technology, and then they had the printing press, which suddenly enabled these ideas to spread cheaply, far and fast, and people would come together in coffee houses, discuss the ideas, plot revolution.In our day, we have digitization. That strips all the physical mass out of information, so now it's almost zero cost to copy and share information. Our printing press is the Internet. Our coffee houses are social networks. We're moving to what I would think of as a fully connected system, and we have global decisions to make in this system, decisions about climate, about finance systems, about resources. And think about it — if we want to make an important decision about buying a house, we don't just go off. I mean, I don't know about you, but I want to see a lot of houses before I put that much money into it. And if we're thinking about a finance system, we need a lot of information to take in. It's just not possible for one person to take in the amount, the volume of information, and analyze it to make good decisions.So that's why we're seeing increasingly this demand for access to information. That's why we're starting to see more disclosure laws come out, so for example, on the environment, there's the Aarhus Convention, which is a European directive that gives people a very strong right to know, so if your water company is dumping water into your river, sewage water into your river, you have a right to know about it. In the finance industry, you now have more of a right to know about what's going on, so we have different anti-bribery laws, money regulations, increased corporate disclosure, so you can now track assets across borders. And it's getting harder to hide assets, tax avoidance, pay inequality. So that's great. We're starting to find out more and more about these systems.And they're all moving to this central system, this fully connected system, all of them except one. Can you guess which one? It's the system which underpins all these other systems. It's the system by which we organize and exercise power, and there I'm talking about politics, because in politics, we're back to this system, this top-down hierarchy. And how is it possible that the volume of information can be processed that needs to in this system? Well, it just can't. That's it. And I think this is largely what's behind the crisis of legitimacy in our different governments right now.So I've told you a bit about what I did to try and drag Parliament, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century, and I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of what a few other people I know are doing.So this is a guy called Seb Bacon. He's a computer programmer, and he built a site called Alaveteli, and what it is, it's a Freedom of Information platform. It's open-source, with documentation, and it allows you to make a Freedom of Information request, to ask your public body a question, so it takes all the hassle out of it, and I can tell you that there is a lot of hassle making these requests, so it takes all of that hassle out, and you just type in your question, for example, how many police officers have a criminal record? It zooms it off to the appropriate person, it tells you when the time limit is coming to an end, it keeps track of all the correspondence, it posts it up there, and it becomes an archive of public knowledge. So that's open-source and it can be used in any country where there is some kind of Freedom of Information law. So there's a list there of the different countries that have it, and then there's a few more coming on board. So if any of you out there like the sound of that and have a law like that in your country, I know that Seb would love to hear from you about collaborating and getting that into your country.This is Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She's an Icelandic MP. And quite an unusual MP. In Iceland, she was one of the protesters who was outside of Parliament when the country's economy collapsed, and then she was elected on a reform mandate, and she's now spearheading this project. It's the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and they've just got funding to make it an international modern media project, and this is taking all of the best laws around the world about freedom of expression, protection of whistleblowers, protection from libel, source protection, and trying to make Iceland a publishing haven. It's a place where your data can be free, so when we think about, increasingly, how governments want to access user data, what they're trying to do in Iceland is make this safe haven where it can happen.In my own field of investigative journalism, we're also having to start thinking globally, so this is a site called Investigative Dashboard. And if you're trying to track a dictator's assets, for example, Hosni Mubarak, you know, he's just funneling out cash from his country when he knows he's in trouble, and what you want to do to investigate that is, you need to have access to all of the world's, as many as you can, companies' house registrations databases. So this is a website that tries to agglomerate all of those databases into one place so you can start searching for, you know, his relatives, his friends, the head of his security services. You can try and find out how he's moving out assets from that country.But again, when it comes to the decisions which are impacting us the most, perhaps, the most important decisions that are being made about war and so forth, again we can't just make a Freedom of Information request. It's really difficult. So we're still having to rely on illegitimate ways of getting information, through leaks. So when the Guardian did this investigation about the Afghan War, you know, they can't walk into the Department of Defense and ask for all the information. You know, they're just not going to get it. So this came from leaks of tens of thousands of dispatches that were written by American soldiers about the Afghan War, and leaked, and then they're able to do this investigation.Another rather large investigation is around world diplomacy. Again, this is all based around leaks, 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, and I was involved in this investigation because I got this leak through a leak from a disgruntled WikiLeaker and ended up going to work at the Guardian. So I can tell you firsthand what it was like to have access to this leak. It was amazing. I mean, it was amazing. It reminded me of that scene in ""The Wizard of Oz."" Do you know the one I mean? Where the little dog Toto runs across to where the wizard [is], and he pulls back, the dog's pulling back the curtain, and — ""Don't look behind the screen. Don't look at the man behind the screen."" It was just like that, because what you started to see is that all of these grand statesmen, these very pompous politicians, they were just like us. They all bitched about each other. I mean, quite gossipy, those cables. Okay, but I thought it was a very important point for all of us to grasp, these are human beings just like us. They don't have special powers. They're not magic. They are not our parents. Beyond that, what I found most fascinating was the level of endemic corruption that I saw across all different countries, and particularly centered around the heart of power, around public officials who were embezzling the public's money for their own personal enrichment, and allowed to do that because of official secrecy.So I've mentioned WikiLeaks, because surely what could be more open than publishing all the material? Because that is what Julian Assange did. He wasn't content with the way the newspapers published it to be safe and legal. He threw it all out there. That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistan being exposed. It also meant that the Belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the U.S. government. Is that radical openness? I say it's not, because for me, what it means, it doesn't mean abdicating power, responsibility, accountability, it's actually being a partner with power. It's about sharing responsibility, sharing accountability. Also, the fact that he threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks, I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology, to be honest, as well. (Laughs)The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive, and you must have two real qualities, I think, when you come to the table, when you're dealing with power, talking about power, because of its seductive capacity. You've got to have skepticism and humility. Skepticism, because you must always be challenging. I want to see why do you — you just say so? That's not good enough. I want to see the evidence behind why that's so. And humility because we are all human. We all make mistakes. And if you don't have skepticism and humility, then it's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat, and I think you only have to read ""Animal Farm"" to get that message about how power corrupts people.So what is the solution? It is, I believe, to embody within the rule of law rights to information. At the moment our rights are incredibly weak. In a lot of countries, we have Official Secrets Acts, including in Britain here. We have an Official Secrets Act with no public interest test. So that means it's a crime, people are punished, quite severely in a lot of cases, for publishing or giving away official information. Now wouldn't it be amazing, and really, this is what I want all of you to think about, if we had an Official Disclosure Act where officials were punished if they were found to have suppressed or hidden information that was in the public interest? So that — yes. Yes! My power pose. (Applause) (Laughs) I would like us to work towards that.So it's not all bad news. I mean, there definitely is progress on the line, but I think what we find is that the closer that we get right into the heart of power, the more opaque, closed it becomes. So it was only just the other week that I heard London's Metropolitan Police Commissioner talking about why the police need access to all of our communications, spying on us without any judicial oversight, and he said it was a matter of life and death. He actually said that, it was a matter of life and death. There was no evidence. He presented no evidence of that. It was just, ""Because I say so. You have to trust me. Take it on faith."" Well, I'm sorry, people, but we are back to the pre-Enlightenment Church, and we need to fight against that.So he was talking about the law in Britain which is the Communications Data Bill, an absolutely outrageous piece of legislation. In America, you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. You've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance. You have the National Security Agency building the world's giantest spy center. It's just this colossal — it's five times bigger than the U.S. Capitol, in which they're going to intercept and analyze communications, traffic and personal data to try and figure out who's the troublemaker in society.Well, to go back to our original story, the parents have panicked. They've locked all the doors. They've kidded out the house with CCTV cameras. They're watching all of us. They've dug a basement, and they've built a spy center to try and run algorithms and figure out which ones of us are troublesome, and if any of us complain about that, we're arrested for terrorism. Well, is that a fairy tale or a living nightmare? Some fairy tales have happy endings. Some don't. I think we've all read the Grimms' fairy tales, which are, indeed, very grim. But the world isn't a fairy tale, and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge. Equally, it could be better than we've been led to believe, but either way, we have to start seeing it exactly as it is, with all of its problems, because it's only by seeing it with all of its problems that we'll be able to fix them and live in a world in which we can all be happily ever after. (Laughs) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/heather_brooke_my_battle_to_expose_government_corruption
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"To understand the world that live in, we tell stories. And while remixing and sharing have come to define the web as we know it, all of us can now be part of that story through simple tools that allow us to make things online. But video has been left out. It arrived on the web in a small box, and there it has remained, completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it. In fact, in over a decade on the web, the only thing that has changed about video is the size of the box and the quality of the picture.Popcorn changes all of that. It's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web. Videos created with Popcorn behave like the web itself: dynamic, full of links, and completely remixable, and finally allowed to break free from the frame.I want to give you a demo of a prototype that we're working on that we'll launch later this fall. It will be completely free, and it will work in any browser. So, every Popcorn production begins with the video, and so I've made a short, 20-second clip using a newscaster template that we use in workshops. So let's watch it. We'll go back, and I'll show you how we made it.Hi, and welcome to my newscast. I've added my location with a Google Map, and it's live, so try moving it around. You can add pop-ups with live links and custom icons, or pull in content from any web service, like Flickr, or add articles and blog posts with links out to the full content.So let's go back, and I'll show you what you saw. There was a lot there. So this is the timeline, and if you've ever edited video, you're familiar with this, but instead of clips in the timeline, what you're looking at is web events pulled into the video. Now in this Popcorn production we've got the title card, we've got a Google Map that shows up picture-in-picture, then Popcorn lets it push outside the frame and take over the whole screen. There are two pop-ups bringing you some other information, and a final article with a link out to the original article.Let's go to this Google Map, and I'll show you how you can edit it. All you do, go into the timeline, double-click the item, and I've set it to Toronto, because that's where I'm from. Let's set it to something else. Popcorn immediately goes out onto the web, talks to Google, grabs the map, and puts it in the display. And it's exactly the same for the people who watch your production. And it's live. It's not an image. So you click on it, you zoom in, right down to street view if you want to.Now in the video, I mentioned adding a live feed, which we can do right now, so let's add a live feed from Flickr. Go over to the right-hand side, grab Flickr from the list of options, drag it into the timeline, and put it where you'd like it to go, and it immediately goes out to Flickr and starts pulling in images based on the tags. Now, my developers really like ponies, and so they've set that as the default tag. Let's try something else, maybe something a bit more relevant to today. Now here are live images being pulled straight from the feed. If you come and watch this a week from now, this will be completely different, dynamic, just like the web, and just like the web, everything is sourced, so click your link, and you go straight to Flickr and see the source image.Everything you've seen today is built with the basic building blocks of the web: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. That means it's completely remixable. It also means there's no proprietary software. All you need is a web browser.So imagine if every video that we watched on the web worked like the web, completely remixable, linked to its source content, and interactive for everyone who views it. I think Popcorn could change the way that we tell stories on the web, and the way we understand the world we live in. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_merkley_online_video_annotated_remixed_and_popped
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"I'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are, how globalized we aren't, and why it's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments. And the leading point of view on this, whether measured by number of books sold, mentions in media, or surveys that I've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the World Trade Organization, is this view that national borders really don't matter very much anymore, cross-border integration is close to complete, and we live in one world. And what's interesting about this view is, again, it's a view that's held by pro-globalizers like Tom Friedman, from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted, but it's also held by anti-globalizers, who see this giant globalization tsunami that's about to wreck all our lives if it hasn't already done so.The other thing I would add is that this is not a new view. I'm a little bit of an amateur historian, so I've spent some time going back, trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing. And the best, earliest quote that I could find was one from David Livingstone, writing in the 1850s about how the railroad, the steam ship, and the telegraph were integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world. Now clearly, David Livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time, but it does seem useful to ask ourselves, ""Just how global are we?"" before we think about where we go from here.So the best way I've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat, may not even be close to flat, is with some data. So one of the things I've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders, and I've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total. I'm not going to present all the data that I have here today, but let me just give you a few data points. I'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow, one kind of flow of people, one kind of flow of capital, and, of course, trade in products and services.So let's start off with plain old telephone service. Of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year, what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls? Pick a percentage in your own mind. The answer turns out to be two percent. If you include Internet telephony, you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent, but it's nowhere near what people tend to estimate.Or let's turn to people moving across borders. One particular thing we might look at, in terms of long-term flows of people, is what percentage of the world's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants? Again, please pick a percentage. Turns out to be a little bit higher. It's actually about three percent.Or think of investment. Take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010. What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment? Not quite ten percent.And then finally, the one statistic that I suspect many of the people in this room have seen: the export-to-GDP ratio. If you look at the official statistics, they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent. However, there's a big problem with the official statistics, in that if, for instance, a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod, and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S., that component ends up getting counted multiple times. So nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is, so I thought I would ask the person who's spearheading the effort to generate data on this, Pascal Lamy, the Director of the World Trade Organization, what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of GDP, without the double- and triple-counting, and it's actually probably a bit under 20 percent, rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we're talking about.So it's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that I talk about in my book, ""World 3.0,"" that we're very, very far from the no-border effect benchmark, which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85, 90, 95 percent. So clearly, apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case. But it's not just the apocalyptics, as I think of them, who are prone to this kind of overstatement. I've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be. Let me share with you the results of a survey that Harvard Business Review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people's guesses along these dimensions actually were.So a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide. First of all, there is a suggestion of some error. Okay. (Laughter) Second, these are pretty large errors. For four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent, you have people guessing three, four times that level. Even though I'm an economist, I find that a pretty large error. And third, this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review. I've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world, and in all cases except one, where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-GDP ratio, people have this tendency towards overestimation, and so I thought it important to give a name to this, and that's what I refer to as globaloney, the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars.Especially because, I suspect, some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims, I think it's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney. A couple of different reasons come to mind. First of all, there's a real dearth of data in the debate. Let me give you an example. When I first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called Foreign Policy, one of the people who wrote in, not entirely in agreement, was Tom Friedman. And since my article was titled ""Why the World Isn't Flat,"" that wasn't too surprising. (Laughter) What was very surprising to me was Tom's critique, which was, ""Ghemawat's data are narrow."" And this caused me to scratch my head, because as I went back through his several-hundred-page book, I couldn't find a single figure, chart, table, reference or footnote. So my point is, I haven't presented a lot of data here to convince you that I'm right, but I would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we've been bombarded with actually are correct. So dearth of data in the debate is one reason.A second reason has to do with peer pressure. I remember, I decided to write my ""Why the World Isn't Flat"" article, because I was being interviewed on TV in Mumbai, and the interviewer's first question to me was, ""Professor Ghemawat, why do you still believe that the world is round?"" And I started laughing, because I hadn't come across that formulation before. (Laughter) And as I was laughing, I was thinking, I really need a more coherent response, especially on national TV. I'd better write something about this. (Laughter) But what I can't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question. The perspective was, here is this poor professor. He's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years. He really has no idea as to what's actually going on in the world. So try this out with your friends and acquaintances, if you like. You'll find that it's very cool to talk about the world being one, etc. If you raise questions about that formulation, you really are considered a bit of an antique.And then the final reason, which I mention, especially to a TED audience, with some trepidation, has to do with what I call ""techno-trances."" If you listen to techno music for long periods of time, it does things to your brainwave activity. (Laughter) Something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers, all political barriers, all geographic barriers, because at this point I know you aren't allowed to ask me questions, but when I get to this point in my lecture with my students, hands go up, and people ask me, ""Yeah, but what about Facebook?"" And I got this question often enough that I thought I'd better do some research on Facebook. Because, in some sense, it's the ideal kind of technology to think about. Theoretically, it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door. What percentage of people's friends on Facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we're analyzing are based? The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. Non-negligible, so we don't live in an entirely local or national world, but very, very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect, and the reason's very simple. We don't, or I hope we don't, form friendships at random on Facebook. The technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have, and those relationships are what the technology doesn't quite displace. Those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are.So does all this matter? Or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues? I want to suggest that actually, globaloney can be very harmful to your health. First of all, recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration, whereas if we thought we were already there, there would be no particular point to pushing harder. It's a little bit like, we wouldn't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference. So being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more, something that would contribute further to global welfare.Which brings me to my second point. Avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization. So I actually spend most of my ""World 3.0"" book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate. I'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today, so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what I have in mind. Think of France and the current debate about immigration. When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants, the answer is about 24 percent. That's their guess. Maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue. Or to take an even more striking example, when the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations did a survey of Americans, asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid, the guess was 30 percent, which is slightly in excess of the actual level — (""actually about ... 1%"") (Laughter) — of U.S. governmental commitments to federal aid. The reassuring thing about this particular survey was, when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data, some of them — not all of them — seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid.So foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here, because if you think about it, what I've been talking about today is this notion — very uncontroversial amongst economists — that most things are very home-biased. ""Foreign aid is the most aid to poor people,"" is about the most home-biased thing you can find. If you look at the OECD countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person, and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries, the ratio — Branko Milanovic at the World Bank did the calculations — turns out to be about 30,000 to one. Now of course, some of us, if we truly are cosmopolitan, would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one. I'd like to make the suggestion that we don't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are. If we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one, we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the Rio Summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on.So in summary, while radical openness is great, given how closed we are, even incremental openness could make things dramatically better. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pankaj_ghemawat_actually_the_world_isn_t_flat
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"In the 17th century, a woman named Giulia Tofana had a very successful perfume business. For over 50 years she ran it. It sort of ended abruptly when she was executed — (Laughter) — for murdering 600 men. You see, it wasn't a very good perfume. In fact, it was completely odorless and tasteless and colorless, but as a poison, it was the best money could buy, so women flocked to her in order to murder their husbands.It turns out that poisoners were a valued and feared group, because poisoning a human being is a quite difficult thing. The reason is, we have sort of a built-in poison detector. You can see this as early as even in newborn infants. If you are willing to do this, you can take a couple of drops of a bitter substance or a sour substance, and you'll see that face, the tongue stick out, the wrinkled nose, as if they're trying to get rid of what's in their mouth. This reaction expands into adulthood and becomes sort of a full-blown disgust response, no longer just about whether or not we're about to be poisoned, but whenever there's a threat of physical contamination from some source. But the face remains strikingly similar. It has expanded more, though, than just keeping us away from physical contaminants, and there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that, in fact, this emotion of disgust now influences our moral beliefs and even our deeply held political intuitions.Why this might be the case? We can understand this process by understanding a little bit about emotions in general. So the basic human emotions, those kinds of emotions that we share with all other human beings, exist because they motivate us to do good things and they keep us away from doing bad things. So by and large, they are good for our survival. Take the emotion of fear, for instance. It keeps us away from doing things that are really, really risky. This photo taken just before his death — (Laughter) — is actually a — No, one reason this photo is interesting is because most people would not do this, and if they did, they would not live to tell it, because fear would have kicked in a long time ago to a natural predator. Just like fear offers us protective benefits, disgust seems to do the same thing, except for what disgust does is keeps us away from not things that might eat us, or heights, but rather things that might poison us, or give us disease and make us sick. So one of the features of disgust that makes it such an interesting emotion is that it's very, very easy to elicit, in fact more so than probably any of the other basic emotions, and so I'm going to show you that with a couple of images I can probably make you feel disgust. So turn away. I'll tell you when you can turn back. (Laughter)I mean, you see it every day, right? I mean, come on. (Laughter)(Audience: Ewww.)Okay, turn back, if you didn't look.Those probably made a lot of you in the audience feel very, very disgusted, but if you didn't look, I can tell you about some of the other things that have been shown sort of across the world to make people disgusted, things like feces, urine, blood, rotten flesh. These are the sorts of things that it makes sense for us to stay away from, because they might actually contaminate us. In fact, just having a diseased appearance or odd sexual acts, these things are also things that give us a lot of disgust.Darwin was probably one of the first scientists to systematically investigate the human emotions, and he pointed to the universal nature and the strength of the disgust response. This is an anecdote from his travels in South America.""In Tierro del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat while I was eating ... and plainly showed disgust at its softness, whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage — (Laughter) — though his hands did not appear dirty."" He later wrote, ""It's okay, some of my best friends are naked savages."" (Laughter)Well it turns out it's not only old-timey British scientists who are this squeamish. I recently got a chance to talk to Richard Dawkins for a documentary, and I was able to disgust him a bunch of times. Here's my favorite.Richard Dawkins: ""We've evolved around courtship and sex, are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions that are hard to jettison overnight.""David Pizarro: So my favorite part of this clip is that Professor Dawkins actually gagged. He jumps back, and he gags, and we had to do it three times, and all three times he gagged. (Laughter) And he was really gagging. I thought he might throw up on me, actually.One of the features, though, of disgust, is not just its universality and its strength, but the way that it works through association. So when one disgusting thing touches a clean thing, that clean thing becomes disgusting, not the other way around. This makes it very useful as a strategy if you want to convince somebody that an object or an individual or an entire social group is disgusting and should be avoided. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum points this out in this quote: ""Thus throughout history, certain disgust properties — sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness — have been repeatedly and monotonously been associated with ... Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower-class people — all of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body."" Let me give you just some examples of how, some powerful examples of how this has been used historically. This comes from a Nazi children's book published in 1938: ""Just look at these guys! The louse-infested beards, the filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes... Jews often have an unpleasant sweetish odor. If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews."" A more modern example comes from people who try to convince us that homosexuality is immoral. This is from an anti-gay website, where they said gays are ""worthy of death for their vile ... sex practices."" They're like ""dogs eating their own vomit and sows wallowing in their own feces."" These are disgust properties that are trying to be directly linked to the social group that you should not like.When we were first investigating the role of disgust in moral judgment, one of the things we became interested in was whether or not these sorts of appeals are more likely to work in individuals who are more easily disgusted. So while disgust, along with the other basic emotions, are universal phenomena, it just really is true that some people are easier to disgust than others. You could probably see it in the audience members when I showed you those disgusting images. The way that we measured this was by a scale that was constructed by some other psychologists that simply asked people across a wide variety of situations how likely they are to feel disgust. So here are a couple of examples. ""Even if I were hungry, I would not drink a bowl of my favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed fly-swatter."" ""Do you agree or disagree?"" (Laughter) ""While you are walking through a tunnel under a railroad track, you smell urine. Would you be very disgusted or not at all disgusted?"" If you ask enough of these, you can get a general overall score of disgust sensitivity. It turns out that this score is actually meaningful. When you bring people into the laboratory and you ask them if they're willing to engage in safe but disgusting behaviors like eating chocolate that's been baked to look like dog poop, or in this case eating some mealworms that are perfectly healthy but pretty gross, your score on that scale actually predicts whether or not you'll be willing to engage in those behaviors.The first time that we set out to collect data on this and associate it with political or moral beliefs, we found a general pattern — this is with the psychologists Yoel Inbar and Paul Bloom — that in fact, across three studies we kept finding that people who reported that they were easily disgusted also reported that they were more politically conservative. Another way to say this, though, is that people who are very liberal are very hard to disgust. (Laughter)In a more recent follow-up study, we were able to look at a much greater sample, a much larger sample. In this case, this is nearly 30,000 U.S. respondents, and we find the same pattern. As you can see, people who are on the very conservative side of answering the political orientation scale are also much more likely to report that they're easily disgusted. This data set also allowed us to statistically control for a number of things that we knew were both related to political orientation and to disgust sensitivity. So we were able to control for gender, age, income, education, even basic personality variables, and the result stays the same.When we actually looked at not just self-reported political orientation, but voting behavior, we were able to look geographically across the nation. What we found was that in regions in which people reported high levels of disgust sensitivity, McCain got more votes. So it not only predicted self-reported political orientation, but actual voting behavior. And also we were able, with this sample, to look across the world, in 121 different countries we asked the same questions, and as you can see, this is 121 countries collapsed into 10 different geographical regions. No matter where you look, what this is plotting is the size of the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political orientation, and no matter where we looked, we saw a very similar effect. Other labs have actually looked at this as well using different measures of disgust sensitivity, so rather than asking people how easily disgusted they are, they hook people up to physiological measures, in this case skin conductance. And what they've demonstrated is that people who report being more politically conservative are also more physiologically aroused when you show them disgusting images like the ones that I showed you. Interestingly, what they also showed in a finding that we kept getting in our previous studies as well was that one of the strongest influences here is that individuals who are very disgust-sensitive not only are more likely to report being politically conservative, but they're also very much more opposed to gay marriage and homosexuality and pretty much a lot of the socio-moral issues in the sexual domain. So physiological arousal predicted, in this study, attitudes toward gay marriage.But even with all these data linking disgust sensitivity and political orientation, one of the questions that remains is what is the causal link here? Is it the case that disgust really is shaping political and moral beliefs? We have to resort to experimental methods to answer this, and so what we can do is actually bring people into the lab and disgust them and compare them to a control group that hasn't been disgusted. It turns out that over the past five years a number of researchers have done this, and by and large the results have all been the same, that when people are feeling disgust, their attitudes shift towards the right of the political spectrum, toward more moral conservatism as well. So this is whether you use a foul odor, a bad taste, from film clips, from post-hypnotic suggestions of disgust, images like the ones I've shown you, even just reminding people that disease is prevalent and they should be wary of it and wash up, right, to keep clean, these all have similar effects on judgment.Let me just give you an example from a recent study that we conducted. We asked participants to just simply give us their opinion of a variety of social groups, and we either made the room smell gross or not. When the room smelled gross, what we saw was that individuals actually reported more negative attitudes toward gay men. Disgust didn't influence attitudes toward all the other social groups that we asked, including African-Americans, the elderly. It really came down to the attitudes they had toward gay men. In another set of studies we actually simply reminded people — this was at a time when the swine flu was going around — we reminded people that in order to prevent the spread of the flu that they ought to wash their hands. For some participants, we actually had them take questionnaires next to a sign that reminded them to wash their hands. And what we found was that just taking a questionnaire next to this hand-sanitizing reminder made individuals report being more politically conservative. And when we asked them a variety of questions about the rightness or wrongness of certain acts, what we also found was that simply being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them more morally conservative. In particular, when we asked them questions about sort of taboo but fairly harmless sexual practices, just being reminded that they ought to wash their hands made them think that they were more morally wrong. Let me give you an example of what I mean by harmless but taboo sexual practice. We gave them scenarios. One of them said a man is house-sitting for his grandmother. When his grandmother's away, he has sex with his girlfriend on his grandma's bed. In another one, we said a woman enjoys masturbating with her favorite teddy bear cuddled next to her. (Laughter) People find these to be more morally abhorrent if they've been reminded to wash their hands. (Laughter) (Laughter)Okay. The fact that emotions influence our judgment should come as no surprise. I mean, that's part of how emotions work. They not only motivate you to behave in certain ways, but they change the way you think. In the case of disgust, what is a little bit more surprising is the scope of this influence. It makes perfect sense, and it's a very good emotion for us to have, that disgust would make me change the way that I perceive the physical world whenever contamination is possible. It makes less sense that an emotion that was built to prevent me from ingesting poison should predict who I'm going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election.The question of whether disgust ought to influence our moral and political judgments certainly has to be complex, and might depend on exactly what judgments we're talking about, and as a scientist, we have to conclude sometimes that the scientific method is just ill-equipped to answer these sorts of questions. But one thing that I am fairly certain about is, at the very least, what we can do with this research is point to what questions we ought to ask in the first place. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics_of_disgust
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"Having spent 18 years as a child of the state in children's homes and foster care, you could say that I'm an expert on the subject, and in being an expert, I want to let you know that being an expert does in no way make you right in light of the truth.If you're in care, legally the government is your parent, loco parentis. Margaret Thatcher was my mother. (Laughter) Let's not talk about breastfeeding. (Laughter)Harry Potter was a foster child. Pip from ""Great Expectations"" was adopted; Superman was a foster child; Cinderella was a foster child; Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, was fostered and institutionalized; Batman was orphaned; Lyra Belacqua from Philip Pullman's ""Northern Lights"" was fostered; Jane Eyre, adopted; Roald Dahl's James from ""James and the Giant Peach;"" Matilda; Moses — Moses! (Laughter) Moses! (Laughter) — the boys in Michael Morpurgo's ""Friend or Foe;"" Alem in Benjamin Zephaniah's ""Refugee Boy;"" Luke Skywalker — Luke Skywalker! (Laughter) — Oliver Twist; Cassia in ""The Concubine of Shanghai"" by Hong Ying; Celie in Alice Walker's ""The Color Purple."" All of these great fictional characters, all of them who were hurt by their condition, all of them who spawned thousands of other books and other films, all of them were fostered, adopted or orphaned. It seems that writers know that the child outside of family reflects on what family truly is more than what it promotes itself to be. That is, they also use extraordinary skills to deal with extraordinary situations on a daily basis.How have we not made the connection? And why have we not made the connection, between — How has that happened? — between these incredible characters of popular culture and religions, and the fostered, adopted or orphaned child in our midst? It's not our pity that they need. It's our respect. I know famous musicians, I know actors and film stars and millionaires and novelists and top lawyers and television executives and magazine editors and national journalists and dustbinmen and hairdressers, all who were looked after children, fostered, adopted or orphaned, and many of them grow into their adult lives in fear of speaking of their background, as if it may somehow weaken their standing in the foreground, as if it were somehow Kryptonite, as if it were a time bomb strapped on the inside. Children in care, who've had a life in care, deserve the right to own and live the memory of their own childhood. It is that simple.My own mother — and I should say this here — she same to this country in the late '60s, and she was, you know, she found herself pregnant, as women did in the late '60s. You know what I mean? They found themselves pregnant. And she sort of, she had no idea of the context in which she'd landed.In the 1960s — I should give you some context — in the 1960s, if you were pregnant and you were single, you were seen as a threat to the community. You were separated from your family by the state. You were separated from your family and placed into mother and baby homes. You were appointed a social worker. The adoptive parents were lined up. It was the primary purpose of the social worker, the aim, to get the woman at her most vulnerable time in her entire life, to sign the adoption papers. So the adoption papers were signed. The mother and baby's homes were often run by nuns. The adoption papers were signed, the child was given to the adoptive parents, and the mother shipped back to her community to say that she'd been on a little break. A little break. A little break. The first secret of shame for a woman for being a woman, ""a little break."" The adoption process took, like, a matter of months, so it was a closed shop, you know, sealed deal, an industrious, utilitarian solution: the government, the farmer, the adopting parents, the consumer, the mother, the earth, and the child, the crop.It's kind of easy to patronize the past, to forego our responsibilities in the present. What happened then is a direct reflection of what is happening now. Everybody believed themselves to be doing the right thing by God and by the state for the big society, fast-tracking adoption.So anyway, she comes here, 1967, she's pregnant, and she comes from Ethiopia that was celebrating its own jubilee at the time under the Emperor Haile Selassie, and she lands months before the Enoch Powell speech, the ""Rivers of Blood"" speech. She lands months before the Beatles release ""The White Album,"" months before Martin Luther King was killed. It was a summer of love if you were white. If you were black, it was a summer of hate. So she goes from Oxford, she's sent to the north of England to a mother and baby home, and appointed a social worker. It's her plan. You know, I have to say this in the Houses — It's her plan to have me fostered for a short period of time while she studies. But the social worker, he had a different agenda. He found the foster parents, and he said to them, ""Treat this as an adoption. He's yours forever. His name is Norman."" (Laughter) Norman! (Laughter) Norman!So they took me. I was a message, they said. I was a sign from God, they said. I was Norman Mark Greenwood. Now, for the next 11 years, all I know is that this woman, this birth woman, should have her eyes scratched out for not signing the adoption papers. She was an evil woman too selfish to sign, so I spent those 11 years kneeling and praying. I tried praying. I swear I tried praying. ""God, can I have a bike for Christmas?"" But I would always answer myself, ""Yes, of course you can."" (Laughter) And then I was supposed to determine whether that was the voice of God or it was the voice of the Devil. And it turns out I've got the Devil inside of me. Who knew? (Laughter)So anyway, two years sort of passed, and they had a child of their own, and then another two years passed, and they had another child of their own, and then another time passed and they had another child that they called an accident, which I thought was an unusual name. (Laughter) And I was on the cusp of, sort of, adolescence, so I was starting to take biscuits from the tin without asking. I was starting to stay out a little bit late, etc., etc. Now, in their religiosity, in their naivete, my mom and dad, which I believed them to be forever, as they said they were, my mom and dad conceived that I had the Devil inside of me.And what — I should say this here, because this is how they engineered my leaving. They sat me at a table, my foster mom, and she said to me, ""You don't love us, do you?"" At 11 years old. They've had three other children. I'm the fourth. The third was an accident.And I said, ""Yeah, of course I do."" Because you do.My foster mother asked me to go away to think about love and what it is and to read the Scriptures and to come back tomorrow and give my most honest and truthful answer. So this was an opportunity. If they were asking me whether I loved them or not, then I mustn't love them, which led me to the miracle of thought that I thought they wanted me to get to. ""I will ask God for forgiveness and His light will shine through me to them. How fantastic."" This was an opportunity. The theology was perfect, the timing unquestionable, and the answer as honest as a sinner could get.""I mustn't love you,"" I said to them. ""But I will ask God for forgiveness.""""Because you don't love us, Norman, clearly you've chosen your path.""Twenty-four hours later, my social worker, this strange man who used to visit me every couple of months, he's waiting for me in the car as I say goodbye to my parents. I didn't say goodbye to anybody, not my mother, my father, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, nobody. On the way to the children's home, I started to ask myself, ""What's happened to me?"" It's not that I'd had the rug pulled from beneath me as much as the entire floor had been taken away.When I got to the — For the next four, five years, I was held in four different children's homes. On the third children's home, at 15, I started to rebel, and what I did was, I got three tins of paint, Airfix paint that you use for models, and I was — it was a big children's home, big Victorian children's home — and I was in a little turret at the top of it, and I poured them, red, yellow and green, the colors of Africa, down the tiles. You couldn't see it from the street, because the home was surrounded by beech trees.For doing this, I was incarcerated for a year in an assessment center which was actually a remand center. It was a virtual prison for young people.By the way, years later, my social worker said that I should never have been put in there. I wasn't charged for anything. I hadn't done anything wrong. But because I had no family to inquire about me, they could do anything to me.I'm 17 years old, and they had a padded cell. They would march me down corridors in last-size order. They — I was put in a dormitory with a confirmed Nazi sympathizer. All of the staff were ex-police — interesting — and ex-probation officers. The man who ran it was an ex-army officer. Every time I had a visit by a person who I did not know who would feed me grapes, once every three months, I was strip-searched. That home was full of young boys who were on remand for things like murder. And this was the preparation that I was being given after 17 years as a child of the state.I have to tell this story. I have to tell it, because there was no one to put two and two together.I slowly became aware that I knew nobody that knew me for longer than a year. See, that's what family does. It gives you reference points. I'm not defining a good family from a bad family. I'm just saying that you know when your birthday is by virtue of the fact that somebody tells you when your birthday is, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, a grandparent. It matters to someone, and therefore it matters to you. Understand, I was 14 years old, tucked away in myself, into myself, and I wasn't touched either, physically touched.I'm reporting back. I'm reporting back simply to say that when I left the children's home I had two things that I wanted to do. One was to find my family, and the other was to write poetry. In creativity I saw light. In the imagination I saw the endless possibility of life, the endless truth, the permanent creation of reality, the place where anger was an expression in the search for love, a place where dysfunction is a true reaction to untruth.I've just got to say it to you all: I found all of my family in my adult life. I spent all of my adult life finding them, and I've now got a fully dysfunctional family just like everybody else.But I'm reporting back to you to say quite simply that you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats its child. I don't mean children. I mean the child of the state. Thanks very much. It's been an honor. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lemn_sissay_a_child_of_the_state
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"I was one of those kids that, every time I got in the car, I basically had to roll down the window. It was usually too hot, too stuffy or just too smelly, and my father would not let us use the air conditioner. He said that it would overheat the engine. And you might remember, some of you, how the cars were back then, and it was a common problem of overheating. But it was also the signal that capped the use, or overuse, of energy-consuming devices.Things have changed now. We have cars that we take across country. We blast the air conditioning the entire way, and we never experience overheating. So there's no more signal for us to tell us to stop.Great, right? Well, we have similar problems in buildings. In the past, before air conditioning, we had thick walls. The thick walls are great for insulation. It keeps the interior very cool during the summertime, and warm during the wintertime, and the small windows were also very good because it limited the amount of temperature transfer between the interior and exterior. Then in about the 1930s, with the advent of plate glass, rolled steel and mass production, we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views, and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces. Over time, the buildings got taller and bigger, our engineering even better, so that the mechanical systems were massive. They require a huge amount of energy. They give off a lot of heat into the atmosphere, and for some of you may understand the heat island effect in cities, where the urban areas are much more warm than the adjacent rural areas, but we also have problems that, when we lose power, we can't open a window here, and so the buildings are uninhabitable and have to be made vacant until that air conditioning system can start up again. Even worse, with our intention of trying to make buildings move towards a net-zero energy state, we can't do it just by making mechanical systems more and more efficient. We need to look for something else, and we've gotten ourselves a little bit into a rut.So what do we do here? How do we pull ourselves and dig us out of this hole that we've dug? If we look at biology, and many of you probably don't know, I was a biology major before I went into architecture, the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body, and it's a fantastic thing. That's the first line of defense for the body. It has pores, it has sweat glands, it has all these things that work together very dynamically and very efficiently, and so what I propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin, and by doing so can be much more dynamic, responsive and differentiated, depending on where it is.And this gets me back to my research. What I proposed first doing is looking at a different material palette to do that. I presently, or currently, work with smart materials, and a smart thermo-bimetal. First of all, I guess we call it smart because it requires no controls and it requires no energy, and that's a very big deal for architecture. What it is, it's a lamination of two different metals together. You can see that here by the different reflection on this side. And because it has two different coefficients of expansion, when heated, one side will expand faster than the other and result in a curling action. So in early prototypes I built these surfaces to try to see how the curl would react to temperature and possibly allow air to ventilate through the system, and in other prototypes did surfaces where the multiplicity of having these strips together can try to make bigger movement happen when also heated, and currently have this installation at the Materials & Applications gallery in Silver Lake, close by, and it's there until August, if you want to see it. It's called ""Bloom,"" and the surface is made completely out of thermo-bimetal, and its intention is to make this canopy that does two things. One, it's a sun-shading device, so that when the sun hits the surface, it constricts the amount of sun passing through, and in other areas, it's a ventilating system, so that hot, trapped air underneath can actually move through and out when necessary.You can see here in this time-lapse video that the sun, as it moves across the surface, as well as the shade, each of the tiles moves individually. Keep in mind, with the digital technology that we have today, this thing was made out of about 14,000 pieces and there's no two pieces alike at all. Every single one is different. And the great thing with that is the fact that we can calibrate each one to be very, very specific to its location, to the angle of the sun, and also how the thing actually curls.So this kind of proof of concept project has a lot of implications to actual future application in architecture, and in this case, here you see a house, that's for a developer in China, and it's actually a four-story glass box. It's still with that glass box because we still want that visual access, but now it's sheathed with this thermo-bimetal layer, it's a screen that goes around it, and that layer can actually open and close as that sun moves around on that surface. In addition to that, it can also screen areas for privacy, so that it can differentiate from some of the public areas in the space during different times of day. And what it basically implies is that, in houses now, we don't need drapes or shutters or blinds anymore because we can sheath the building with these things, as well as control the amount of air conditioning you need inside that building.I'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market, and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel, and in that panel, between those two pieces of glass, that double-glazing, I'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity, that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl, and what actually will happen then is it'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building, and totally, if necessary. And so you can imagine, even in this application, that in a high-rise building where the panel systems go from floor to floor up to 30, 40 floors, the entire surface could be differentiated at different times of day depending on how that sun moves across and hits that surface.And these are some later studies that I'm working on right now that are on the boards, where you can see, in the bottom right-hand corner, with the red, it's actually smaller pieces of thermometal, and it's actually going to, we're trying to make it move like cilia or eyelashes.This last project is also of components. The influence — and if you have noticed, one of my spheres of influence is biology — is from a grasshopper. And grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system. They breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles, and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down, and so in this project, I'm trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too, how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building. And so you see here some early studies of blocks, where those holes are actually coming through, and this is before the thermo-bimetal is applied, and this is after the bimetal is applied. Sorry, it's a little hard to see, but on the surfaces, you can see these red arrows. On the left, it's when it's cold and the thermo-bimetal is flat so it will constrict air from passing through the blocks, and on the right, the thermo-bimetal curls and allows that air to pass through, so those are two different components that I'm working on, and again, it's a completely different thing, because you can imagine that air could potentially be coming through the walls instead of opening windows.So I want to leave you with one last impression about the project, or this kind of work and using smart materials. When you're tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you're on vacation and there's no one there on the weekends to be turning off and on the controls, or when there's a power outage, and you have no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/doris_kim_sung_metal_that_breathes
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"Good morning. So magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve, to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow. As a cyber-magician, I combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced.You've probably all heard of Google's Project Glass. It's new technology. You look through them and the world you see is augmented with data: names of places, monuments, buildings, maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street. So these are my illusion glasses. They're a little bigger. They're a prototype. And when you look through them, you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist.Let me show you what I mean. All we need is a playing card. Any card will do. Like this. And let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again. All right. Very significant mark. And let's put it back into the deck, somewhere in the middle, and let's get started.(Music)Voice: System ready. Acquiring image.Marco Tempest: For those of you who don't play cards, a deck of cards is made up of four different suits: hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades. The cards are amongst the oldest of symbols, and have been interpreted in many different ways. Now, some say that the four suits represent the four seasons. There's spring, summer, autumn and âVoice: My favorite season is winter.MT: Well yeah, mine too. Winter is like magic. It's a time of change, when warmth turns to cold, water turns to snow, and then it all disappears. There are 13 cards in each suit. (Music)Voice: Each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles.MT: So over here is low tide, and over here is high tide, and in the middle is the moon.Voice: The moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic.MT: There are two colors in a deck of cards. There is the color red and the color black, representing the constant change from day to night.Voice: Marco, I did not know you could do that. (Laughter)MT: And is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards, just as there are 52 weeks in a year?(Music)Voice: If you total all the spots on a deck of cards, the result is 365.MT: Oh, 365, the number of days in a year, the number of days between each birthday. Make a wish. (Blowing noise)Voice: Don't tell, or it won't come true.MT: Well, as a matter of fact, it was on my sixth birthday that I received my first deck of cards, and ever since that day, I have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives, even kings and queens. (Applause)Voice: And who are these?MT: Ah, mischief-makers. Watch. Wake up.Joker: Whoa.MT: Are you ready for your party piece?Joker: Ready!MT: Let me see what you've got.Joker: Presenting my pogo stick.MT: Ah. Watch out.Joker: Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh! (Music)MT: But today, I am performing for a different kind of audience. I'm performing for you.Voice: Signed card detected.MT: Well, sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician? Is it a 9-to-5 job? Of course not! You've got to practice 24/7. I don't literally mean 24 hours, seven days a week. 24/7 is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it does take practice. Now, some people will say, well, magic, that must be the work of some evil supernatural force. (Laughter) (Applause)(Music)Whoa. Well, to this, I just say, no no. Actually, in German, it's nein nein. (Laughter) Magic isn't that intense. I have to warn you, though, if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this, don't play for money.(Music)Voice: Why not? That's a very good hand. The odds of getting it are 4,165 to one.MT: Yeah, but I guess my hand is better. We beat the odds.Voice: I think you got your birthday wish.MT: And that actually leaves me with the last, and most important card of all: the one with this very significant mark on it. And unlike anything else we've just seen, virtual or not.Voice: Signed card detected.Digital MT: This is without a question the real thing.MT: Bye bye. (Music)Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_a_cyber_magic_card_trick_like_no_other
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"So little Billy goes to school, and he sits down and the teacher says, ""What does your father do?"" And little Billy says, ""My father plays the piano in an opium den."" So the teacher rings up the parents, and says, ""Very shocking story from little Billy today. Just heard that he claimed that you play the piano in an opium den."" And the father says, ""I'm very sorry. Yes, it's true, I lied. But how can I tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is a politician?"" (Laughter)Now, as a politician myself, standing in front of you, or indeed, meeting any stranger anywhere in the world, when I eventually reveal the nature of my profession, they look at me as though I'm somewhere between a snake, a monkey and an iguana, and through all of this, I feel, strongly, that something is going wrong. Four hundred years of maturing democracy, colleagues in Parliament who seem to me, as individuals, reasonably impressive, an increasingly educated, energetic, informed population, and yet a deep, deep sense of disappointment. My colleagues in Parliament include, in my new intake, family doctors, businesspeople, professors, distinguished economists, historians, writers, army officers ranging from colonels down to regimental sergeant majors. All of them, however, including myself, as we walk underneath those strange stone gargoyles just down the road, feel that we've become less than the sum of our parts, feel as though we have become profoundly diminished.And this isn't just a problem in Britain. It's a problem across the developing world, and in middle income countries too. In Jamaica, for example — look at Jamaican members of Parliament, you meet them, and they're often people who are Rhodes Scholars, who've studied at Harvard or at Princeton, and yet, you go down to downtown Kingston, and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world: a dismal, depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings. And this has been true for 30 years, and the handover in 1979, 1980, between one Jamaican leader who was the son of a Rhodes Scholar and a Q.C. to another who'd done an economics doctorate at Harvard, over 800 people were killed in the streets in drug-related violence.Ten years ago, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary. George W. Bush stood up in his State of the Union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world. He said, because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors, freedom will bring peace. Distinguished academics at the same time argued that democracies had this incredible range of side benefits. They would bring prosperity, security, overcome sectarian violence, ensure that states would never again harbor terrorists.Since then, what's happened? Well, what we've seen is the creation, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, of democratic systems of government which haven't had any of those side benefits. In Afghanistan, for example, we haven't just had one election or two elections. We've gone through three elections, presidential and parliamentary. And what do we find? Do we find a flourishing civil society, a vigorous rule of law and good security? No. What we find in Afghanistan is a judiciary that is weak and corrupt, a very limited civil society which is largely ineffective, a media which is beginning to get onto its feet but a government that's deeply unpopular, perceived as being deeply corrupt, and security that is shocking, security that's terrible. In Pakistan, in lots of sub-Saharan Africa, again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments, with states that are unstable and dangerous. And when I have conversations with people, I remember having a conversation, for example, in Iraq, with a community that asked me whether the riot we were seeing in front of us, this was a huge mob ransacking a provincial council building, was a sign of the new democracy. The same, I felt, was true in almost every single one of the middle and developing countries that I went to, and to some extent the same is true of us.Well, what is the answer to this? Is the answer to just give up on the idea of democracy? Well, obviously not. It would be absurd if we were to engage again in the kind of operations we were engaged in, in Iraq and Afghanistan if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which we were imposing anything other than a democratic system. Anything else would run contrary to our values, it would run contrary to the wishes of the people on the ground, it would run contrary to our interests. I remember in Iraq, for example, that we went through a period of feeling that we should delay democracy. We went through a period of feeling that the lesson learned from Bosnia was that elections held too early enshrined sectarian violence, enshrined extremist parties, so in Iraq in 2003 the decision was made, let's not have elections for two years. Let's invest in voter education. Let's invest in democratization. The result was that I found stuck outside my office a huge crowd of people, this is actually a photograph taken in Libya but I saw the same scene in Iraq of people standing outside screaming for the elections, and when I went out and said, ""What is wrong with the interim provincial council? What is wrong with the people that we have chosen? There is a Sunni sheikh, there's a Shiite sheikh, there's the seven — leaders of the seven major tribes, there's a Christian, there's a Sabian, there are female representatives, there's every political party in this council, what's wrong with the people that we chose?"" The answer came, ""The problem isn't the people that you chose. The problem is that you chose them."" I have not met, in Afghanistan, in even the most remote community, anybody who does not want a say in who governs them. Most remote community, I have never met a villager who does not want a vote.So we need to acknowledge that despite the dubious statistics, despite the fact that 84 percent of people in Britain feel politics is broken, despite the fact that when I was in Iraq, we did an opinion poll in 2003 and asked people what political systems they preferred, and the answer came back that seven percent wanted the United States, five percent wanted France, three percent wanted Britain, and nearly 40 percent wanted Dubai, which is, after all, not a democratic state at all but a relatively prosperous minor monarchy, democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting. But in order to do so we need to get away from instrumental arguments. We need to get away from saying democracy matters because of the other things it brings. We need to get away from feeling, in the same way, human rights matters because of the other things it brings, or women's rights matters for the other things it brings. Why should we get away from those arguments? Because they're very dangerous. If we set about saying, for example, torture is wrong because it doesn't extract good information, or we say, you need women's rights because it stimulates economic growth by doubling the size of the work force, you leave yourself open to the position where the government of North Korea can turn around and say, ""Well actually, we're having a lot of success extracting good information with our torture at the moment,"" or the government of Saudi Arabia to say, ""Well, our economic growth's okay, thank you very much, considerably better than yours, so maybe we don't need to go ahead with this program on women's rights.""The point about democracy is not instrumental. It's not about the things that it brings. The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors. The point about democracy is intrinsic. Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government.But if we're really to make democracy vigorous again, if we're ready to revivify it, we need to get involved in a new project of the citizens and the politicians. Democracy is not simply a question of structures. It is a state of mind. It is an activity. And part of that activity is honesty. After I speak to you today, I'm going on a radio program called ""Any Questions,"" and the thing you will have noticed about politicians on these kinds of radio programs is that they never, ever say that they don't know the answer to a question. It doesn't matter what it is. If you ask about child tax credits, the future of the penguins in the south Antarctic, asked to hold forth on whether or not the developments in Chongqing contribute to sustainable development in carbon capture, and we will have an answer for you. We need to stop that, to stop pretending to be omniscient beings. Politicians also need to learn, occasionally, to say that certain things that voters want, certain things that voters have been promised, may be things that we cannot deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver.And the second thing we should do is understand the genius of our societies. Our societies have never been so educated, have never been so energized, have never been so healthy, have never known so much, cared so much, or wanted to do so much, and it is a genius of the local. One of the reasons why we're moving away from banqueting halls such as the one in which we stand, banqueting halls with extraordinary images on the ceiling of kings enthroned, the entire drama played out here on this space, where the King of England had his head lopped off, why we've moved from spaces like this, thrones like that, towards the town hall, is we're moving more and more towards the energies of our people, and we need to tap that.That can mean different things in different countries. In Britain, it could mean looking to the French, learning from the French, getting directly elected mayors in place in a French commune system. In Afghanistan, it could have meant instead of concentrating on the big presidential and parliamentary elections, we should have done what was in the Afghan constitution from the very beginning, which is to get direct local elections going at a district level and elect people's provincial governors.But for any of these things to work, the honesty in language, the local democracy, it's not just a question of what politicians do. It's a question of what the citizens do. For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen.In other words, if democracy is to be rebuilt, is to become again vigorous and vibrant, it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rory_stewart_how_to_rebuild_democracy
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"I grew up in Bihar, India's poorest state, and I remember when I was six years old, I remember coming home one day to find a cart full of the most delicious sweets at our doorstep. My brothers and I dug in, and that's when my father came home. He was livid, and I still remember how we cried when that cart with our half-eaten sweets was pulled away from us.Later, I understood why my father got so upset. Those sweets were a bribe from a contractor who was trying to get my father to award him a government contract. My father was responsible for building roads in Bihar, and he had developed a firm stance against corruption, even though he was harassed and threatened. His was a lonely struggle, because Bihar was also India's most corrupt state, where public officials were enriching themselves, [rather] than serving the poor who had no means to express their anguish if their children had no food or no schooling.And I experienced this most viscerally when I traveled to remote villages to study poverty. And as I went village to village, I remember one day, when I was famished and exhausted, and I was almost collapsing in a scorching heat under a tree, and just at that time, one of the poorest men in that village invited me into his hut and graciously fed me. Only I later realized that what he fed me was food for his entire family for two days. This profound gift of generosity challenged and changed the very purpose of my life. I resolved to give back.Later, I joined the World Bank, which sought to fight such poverty by transferring aid from rich to poor countries. My initial work focused on Uganda, where I focused on negotiating reforms with the Finance Ministry of Uganda so they could access our loans. But after we disbursed the loans, I remember a trip in Uganda where I found newly built schools without textbooks or teachers, new health clinics without drugs, and the poor once again without any voice or recourse. It was Bihar all over again.Bihar represents the challenge of development: abject poverty surrounded by corruption. Globally, 1.3 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, and the work I did in Uganda represents the traditional approach to these problems that has been practiced since 1944, when winners of World War II, 500 founding fathers, and one lonely founding mother, gathered in New Hampshire, USA, to establish the Bretton Woods institutions, including the World Bank. And that traditional approach to development had three key elements. First, transfer of resources from rich countries in the North to poorer countries in the South, accompanied by reform prescriptions. Second, the development institutions that channeled these transfers were opaque, with little transparency of what they financed or what results they achieved. And third, the engagement in developing countries was with a narrow set of government elites with little interaction with the citizens, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of development assistance.Today, each of these elements is opening up due to dramatic changes in the global environment. Open knowledge, open aid, open governance, and together, they represent three key shifts that are transforming development and that also hold greater hope for the problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar.The first key shift is open knowledge. You know, developing countries today will not simply accept solutions that are handed down to them by the U.S., Europe or the World Bank. They get their inspiration, their hope, their practical know-how, from successful emerging economies in the South. They want to know how China lifted 500 million people out of poverty in 30 years, how Mexico's Oportunidades program improved schooling and nutrition for millions of children. This is the new ecosystem of open-knowledge flows, not just traveling North to South, but South to South, and even South to North, with Mexico's Oportunidades today inspiring New York City.And just as these North-to-South transfers are opening up, so too are the development institutions that channeled these transfers. This is the second shift: open aid. Recently, the World Bank opened its vault of data for public use, releasing 8,000 economic and social indicators for 200 countries over 50 years, and it launched a global competition to crowdsource innovative apps using this data. Development institutions today are also opening for public scrutiny the projects they finance. Take GeoMapping. In this map from Kenya, the red dots show where all the schools financed by donors are located, and the darker the shade of green, the more the number of out-of-school children. So this simple mashup reveals that donors have not financed any schools in the areas with the most out-of-school children, provoking new questions. Is development assistance targeting those who most need our help? In this manner, the World Bank has now GeoMapped 30,000 project activities in 143 countries, and donors are using a common platform to map all their projects. This is a tremendous leap forward in transparency and accountability of aid.And this leads me to the third, and in my view, the most significant shift in development: open governance. Governments today are opening up just as citizens are demanding voice and accountability. From the Arab Spring to the Anna Hazare movement in India, using mobile phones and social media not just for political accountability but also for development accountability. Are governments delivering services to the citizens? So for instance, several governments in Africa and Eastern Europe are opening their budgets to the public.But, you know, there is a big difference between a budget that's public and a budget that's accessible. This is a public budget. (Laughter) And as you can see, it's not really accessible or understandable to an ordinary citizen that is trying to understand how the government is spending its resources. To tackle this problem, governments are using new tools to visualize the budget so it's more understandable to the public. In this map from Moldova, the green color shows those districts that have low spending on schools but good educational outcomes, and the red color shows the opposite. Tools like this help turn a shelf full of inscrutable documents into a publicly understandable visual, and what's exciting is that with this openness, there are today new opportunities for citizens to give feedback and engage with government. So in the Philippines today, parents and students can give real-time feedback on a website, Checkmyschool.org, or using SMS, whether teachers and textbooks are showing up in school, the same problems I witnessed in Uganda and in Bihar. And the government is responsive. So for instance, when it was reported on this website that 800 students were at risk because school repairs had stalled due to corruption, the Department of Education in the Philippines took swift action.And you know what's exciting is that this innovation is now spreading South to South, from the Philippines to Indonesia, Kenya, Moldova and beyond. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, even an impoverished community was able to use these tools to voice its aspirations. This is what the map of Tandale looked like in August, 2011. But within a few weeks, university students were able to use mobile phones and an open-source platform to dramatically map the entire community infrastructure. And what is very exciting is that citizens were then able to give feedback as to which health or water points were not working, aggregated in the red bubbles that you see, which together provides a graphic visual of the collective voices of the poor. Today, even Bihar is turning around and opening up under a committed leadership that is making government transparent, accessible and responsive to the poor.But, you know, in many parts of the world, governments are not interested in opening up or in serving the poor, and it is a real challenge for those who want to change the system. These are the lonely warriors like my father and many, many others, and a key frontier of development work is to help these lonely warriors join hands so they can together overcome the odds. So for instance, today, in Ghana, courageous reformers from civil society, Parliament and government, have forged a coalition for transparent contracts in the oil sector, and, galvanized by this, reformers in Parliament are now investigating dubious contracts. These examples give new hope, new possibility to the problems I witnessed in Uganda or that my father confronted in Bihar.Two years ago, on April 8th, 2010, I called my father. It was very late at night, and at age 80, he was typing a 70-page public interest litigation against corruption in a road project. Though he was no lawyer, he argued the case in court himself the next day. He won the ruling, but later that very evening, he fell, and he died. He fought till the end, increasingly passionate that to combat corruption and poverty, not only did government officials need to be honest, but citizens needed to join together to make their voices heard. These became the two bookends of his life, and the journey he traveled in between mirrored the changing development landscape.Today, I'm inspired by these changes, and I'm excited that at the World Bank, we are embracing these new directions, a significant departure from my work in Uganda 20 years ago. We need to radically open up development so knowledge flows in multiple directions, inspiring practitioners, so aid becomes transparent, accountable and effective, so governments open up and citizens are engaged and empowered with reformers in government. We need to accelerate these shifts. If we do, we will find that the collective voices of the poor will be heard in Bihar, in Uganda, and beyond. We will find that textbooks and teachers will show up in schools for their children. We will find that these children, too, have a real chance of breaking their way out of poverty. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sanjay_pradhan_how_open_data_is_changing_international_aid
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"What I want you all to do right now is to think of this mammal that I'm going to describe to you. The first thing I'm going to tell you about this mammal is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly. If we remove this mammal from our ecosystems, they simply will not work. That's the first thing. The second thing is that due to the unique sensory abilities of this mammal, if we study this mammal, we're going to get great insight into our diseases of the senses, such as blindness and deafness. And the third really intriguing aspect of this mammal is that I fully believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies deep within its DNA. So are you all thinking? So, magnificent creature, isn't it? Who here thought of a bat? Ah, I can see half the audience agrees with me, and I have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of you.So I have had the good fortune for the past 20 years to study these fascinating and beautiful mammals. One fifth of all living mammals is a bat, and they have very unique attributes. Bats as we know them have been around on this planet for about 64 million years. One of the most unique things that bats do as a mammal is that they fly. Now flight is an inherently difficult thing. Flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times: once in the bats, once in the birds, and once in the pterodactyls. And so with flight, it's very metabolically costly. Bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this.But one other extremely unique thing about bats is that they are able to use sound to perceive their environment. They use echolocation. Now, what I mean by echolocation — they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth or through their nose. This sound wave comes out and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment, and the bats then hear these echoes and they turn this information into an acoustic image. And this enables them to orient in complete darkness. Indeed, they do look very strange. We're humans. We're a visual species. When scientists first realized that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly and orient and move at night, we didn't believe it. For a hundred years, despite evidence to show that this is what they were doing, we didn't believe it.Now, if you look at this bat, it looks a little bit alien. Indeed, the very famous philosopher Thomas Nagel once said, ""To truly experience an alien life form on this planet, you should lock yourself inside a room with a flying, echolocating bat in complete darkness."" And if you look at the actual physical characteristics on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat, you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated to be able to make sound and perceive it. Very big ears, strange nose leaves, but teeny-tiny eyes. So again, if you just look at this bat, you realize sound is very important for its survival.Most bats look like the previous one. However, there are a group that do not use echolocation. They do not perceive their environment using sound, and these are the flying foxes. If anybody has ever been lucky enough to be in Australia, you've seen them coming out of the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, and if you just look at their face, you can see they have much, much larger eyes and much smaller ears. So among and within bats is a huge variation in their ability to use sensory perception. Now this is going to be important for what I'm going to tell you later during the talk.Now, if the idea of bats in your belfry terrifies you, and I know some people probably are feeling a little sick looking at very large images of bats, that's probably not that surprising, because here in Western culture, bats have been demonized. Really, of course the famous book ""Dracula,"" written by a fellow Northside Dubliner Bram Stoker, probably is mainly responsible for this. However, I also think it's got to do with the fact that bats come out at night, and we don't really understand them. We're a little frightened by things that can perceive the world slightly differently than us. Bats are usually synonymous with some type of evil events. They are the perpetrators in horror movies, such as this famous ""Nightwing."" Also, if you think about it, demons always have bat wings, whereas birds, they typically — or angels have bird wings.Now, this is Western society, and what I hope to do tonight is to convince you of the Chinese traditional culture, that they perceive bats as creatures that bring good luck, and indeed, if you walk into a Chinese home, you may see an image such as this. This is considered the Five Blessings. The Chinese word for ""bat"" sounds like the Chinese word for ""happiness,"" and they believe that bats bring wealth, health, longevity, virtue and serenity. And indeed, in this image, you have a picture of longevity surrounded by five bats. And what I want to do tonight is to talk to you and to show you that at least three of these blessings are definitely represented by a bat, and that if we study bats we will get nearer to getting each of these blessings.So, wealth — how can a bat possibly bring us wealth? Now as I said before, bats are essential for our ecosystems to function correctly. And why is this? Bats in the tropics are major pollinators of many plants. They also feed on fruit, and they disperse the seeds of these fruits. Bats are responsible for pollinating the tequila plant, and this is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. So indeed, we need them for our ecosystems to function properly. Without them, it's going to be a problem. But most bats are voracious insect predators. It's been estimated in the U.S., in a tiny colony of big brown bats, that they will feed on over a million insects a year, and in the United States of America, right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome. It's working its way slowly across the U.S. and wiping out populations of bats, and scientists have estimated that 1,300 metric tons of insects a year are now remaining in the ecosystems due to the loss of bats. Bats are also threatened in the U.S. by their attraction to wind farms. Again, right now bats are looking at a little bit of a problem. They're going to — They are very threatened in the United States of America alone.Now how can this help us? Well, it has been calculated that if we were to remove bats from the equation, we're going to have to then use insecticides to remove all those pest insects that feed on our agricultural crops. And for one year in the U.S. alone, it's estimated that it's going to cost 22 billion U.S. dollars, if we remove bats. So indeed, bats then do bring us wealth. They maintain the health of our ecosystems, and also they save us money. So again, that's the first blessing. Bats are important for our ecosystems.And what about the second? What about health? Inside every cell in your body lies your genome. Your genome is made up of your DNA, your DNA codes for proteins that enable you to function and interact and be as you are. Now since the new advancements in modern molecular technologies, it is now possible for us to sequence our own genome in a very rapid time and at a very, very reduced cost. Now when we've been doing this, we've realized that there's variations within our genome. So I want you to look at the person beside you. Just have a quick look. And what we need to realize is that every 300 base pairs in your DNA, you're a little bit different. And one of the grand challenges right now in modern molecular medicine is to work out whether this variation makes you more susceptible to diseases, or does this variation just make you different? Again, what does it mean here? What does this variation actually mean? So if we are to capitalize on all of this new molecular data and personalized genomic information that is coming online that we will be able to have in the next few years, we have to be able to differentiate between the two. So how do we do this?Well, I believe we just look at nature's experiments. So through natural selection, over time, mutations, variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time. Evolution acts as a sieve. It sieves out the bad variation. And so therefore, if you look at the same region of a genome in many mammals that have been evolutionarily distant from each other and are also ecologically divergent, you will get a better understanding of what the evolutionary prior of that site is, i.e., if it is important for the mammal to function, for its survival, it will be the same in all of those different lineages, species, taxa. So therefore, if we were to do this, what we'd need to do is sequence that region in all these different mammals and ascertain if it's the same or if it's different. So if it is the same, this indicates that that site is important for a function, so a disease mutation should fall within that site. So in this case here, if all the mammals that we look at have a yellow-type genome at that site, it probably suggests that purple is bad. This could be even more powerful if you look at mammals that are doing things slightly differently. So say, for example, the region of the genome that I was looking at was a region that's important for vision. If we look at that region in mammals that don't see so well, such as bats, and we find that bats that don't see so well have the purple type, we know that this is probably what's causing this disease.So in my lab, we've been using bats to look at two different types of diseases of the senses. We're looking at blindness. Now why would you do this? Three hundred and fourteen million people are visually impaired, and 45 million of these are blind. So blindness is a big problem, and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases, so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease. Also we look at deafness. One in every 1,000 newborn babies are deaf, and when we reach 80, over half of us will also have a hearing problem. Again, there's many underlying genetic causes for this. So what we've been doing in my lab is looking at these unique sensory specialists, the bats, and we have looked at genes that cause blindness when there's a defect in them, genes that cause deafness when there's a defect in them, and now we can predict which sites are most likely to cause disease. So bats are also important for our health, to enable us to better understand how our genome functions.So this is where we are right now, but what about the future? What about longevity? This is where we're going to go, and as I said before, I really believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies within the bat genome. So why should we be interested in aging at all? Well, really, this is a picture drawn from the 1500s of the Fountain of Youth. Aging is considered one of the most familiar, yet the least well-understood, aspects of all of biology, and really, since the dawn of civilization, mankind has sought to avoid it. But we are going to have to understand it a bit better. In Europe alone, by 2050, there is going to be a 70 percent increase of individuals over 65, and 170 percent increase in individuals over 80. As we age, we deteriorate, and this deterioration causes problems for our society, so we have to address it.So how could the secret of everlasting youth actually lie within the bat genome? Does anybody want to hazard a guess over how long this bat could live for? Who — put up your hands — who says two years? Nobody? One? How about 10 years? Some? How about 30? How about 40? Okay, it's a whole varied response. This bat is myotis brandtii. It's the longest-living bat. It lived for up to 42 years, and this bat's still alive in the wild today. But what would be so amazing about this?Well, typically, in mammals there is a relationship between body size, metabolic rate, and how long you can live for, and you can predict how long a mammal can live for given its body size. So typically, small mammals live fast, die young. Think of a mouse. But bats are very different. As you can see here on this graph, in blue, these are all other mammals, but bats can live up to nine times longer than expected despite having a really, really high metabolic rate, and the question is, how can they do that? There are 19 species of mammal that live longer than expected, given their body size, than man, and 18 of those are bats. So therefore, they must have something within their DNA that ables them to deal with the metabolic stresses, particularly of flight. They expend three times more energy than a mammal of the same size, but don't seem to suffer the consequences or the effects. So right now, in my lab, we're combining state-of-the-art bat field biology, going out and catching the long-lived bats, with the most up-to-date, modern molecular technology to understand better what it is that they do to stop aging as we do. And hopefully in the next five years, I'll be giving you a TEDTalk on that. Aging is a big problem for humanity, and I believe that by studying bats, we can uncover the molecular mechanisms that enable mammals to achieve extraordinary longevity. If we find out what they're doing, perhaps through gene therapy, we can enable us to do the same thing. Potentially, this means that we could halt aging or maybe even reverse it. Just imagine what that would be like.So really, I don't think we should be thinking of them as flying demons of the night, but more as our superheroes. And the reality is that bats can bring us so much benefit if we just look in the right place. They're good for our ecosystem, they allow us to understand how our genome functions, and they potentially hold the secret to everlasting youth. So tonight, when you walk out of here and you look up in the night skies, and you see this beautiful flying mammal, I want you to smile. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emma_teeling_the_secret_of_the_bat_genome
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"I think the beautiful Malin [Akerman] put it perfectly. Every man deserves the opportunity to grow a little bit of luxury.Ladies and gentlemen, and more importantly, Mo Bros and Mo Sistas — (Laughter) — for the next 17 minutes, I'm going to share with you my Movember journey, and how, through that journey, we've redefined charity, we're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world, and I hope, through that process, that I inspire you to create something significant in your life, something significant that will go on and make this world a better place.So the most common question I get asked, and I'm going to answer it now so I don't have to do it over drinks tonight, is how did this come about? How did Movember start? Well, normally, a charity starts with the cause, and someone that is directly affected by a cause. They then go on to create an event, and beyond that, a foundation to support that. Pretty much in every case, that's how a charity starts. Not so with Movember. Movember started in a very traditional Australian way. It was on a Sunday afternoon. I was with my brother and a mate having a few beers, and I was watching the world go by, had a few more beers, and the conversation turned to '70s fashion — (Laughter) — and how everything manages to come back into style. And a few more beers, I said, ""There has to be some stuff that hasn't come back."" (Laughter) Then one more beer and it was, whatever happened to the mustache? Why hasn't that made a comeback? (Laughter) So then there was a lot more beers, and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back. (Laughter)So in Australia, ""mo"" is slang for mustache, so we renamed the month of November ""Movember"" and created some pretty basic rules, which still stand today. And they are: start the month clean-shaven, rock a mustache — not a beard, not a goatee, a mustache — for the 30 days of November, and then we agreed that we would come together at the end of the month, have a mustache-themed party, and award a prize for the best, and of course, the worst mustache. (Laughter)Now trust me, when you're growing a mustache back in 2003, and there were 30 of us back then, and this was before the ironic hipster mustache movement — (Laughter) — it created a lot of controversy. (Laughter) So my boss wouldn't let me go and see clients. My girlfriend at the time, who's no longer my girlfriend — (Laughter) — hated it. Parents would shuffle kids away from us. (Laughter) But we came together at the end of the month and we celebrated our journey, and it was a real journey. And we had a lot of fun, and in 2004, I said to the guys, ""That was so much fun. We need to legitimize this so we can get away with it year on year."" (Laughter)So we started thinking about that, and we were inspired by the women around us and all they were doing for breast cancer. And we thought, you know what, there's nothing for men's health. Why is that? Why can't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men's health? And I started to research that topic, and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it.But there was nothing for this cause, so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer, and then we created our tagline, which is, ""Changing the face of men's health."" And that eloquently describes the challenge, changing your appearance for the 30 days, and also the outcome that we're trying to achieve: getting men engaged in their health, having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face.So with that model, I then cold-called the CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. I said to him, ""I've got the most amazing idea that's going to transform your organization."" (Laughter) And I didn't want to share with him the idea over the phone, so I convinced him to meet with me for coffee in Melbourne in 2004. And we sat down, and I shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across Australia, raising awareness for this cause, and funds for his organization. And I needed a partnership to legitimately do that. And I said, ""We're going to come together at the end, we're going to have a mustache-themed party, we're going to have DJs, we're going to celebrate life, and we're going to change the face of men's health."" And he just looked at me and laughed, and he said, he said, ""Adam, that's a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization. We can't have anything to do with you."" (Laughter) So I paid for coffee that day — (Laughter) — and his parting comment as we shook hands was, ""Listen, if you happen to raise any money out of this, we'll gladly take it."" (Laughter)So my lesson that year was persistence. And we persisted, and we got 450 guys growing mustaches, and together we raised 54,000 dollars, and we donated every cent of that to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they'd ever received.So from that day forward, my life has become about a mustache. Every day — this morning, I wake up and go, my life is about a mustache. (Laughter) Essentially, I'm a mustache farmer. (Laughter) And my season is November. (Applause) (Applause)So in 2005, the campaign got more momentum, was more successful in Australia and then New Zealand, and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point. It was consuming so much of our time after hours on weekends that we thought, we either need to close this down or figure a way to fund Movember so that I could quit my job and go and spend more time in the organization and take it to the next level.It's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches. (Laughter) Let me tell you that there's not too many people interested in investing in that, not even the Prostate Cancer Foundation, who we'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage. So again we persisted, and Foster's Brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship, and that was enough for me to quit my job, I did consulting on the side. And leading into Movember 2006, we'd run through all the money from Foster's, we'd run through all the money I had, and essentially we had no money left, and we'd convinced all our suppliers — creative agencies, web development agencies, hosting companies, whatnot — to delay their billing until December. So we'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt. So if Movember 2006 didn't happen, the four founders, well, we would've been broke, we would've been homeless, sitting on the street with mustaches. (Laughter) But we thought, you know what, if that's the worst thing that happens, so what? We're going to have a lot of fun doing it, and it taught us the importance of taking risks and really smart risks.Then in early 2007, a really interesting thing happened. We had Mo Bros from Canada, from the U.S., and from the U.K. emailing us and calling us and saying, hey, there's nothing for prostate cancer. Bring this campaign to these countries. So we thought, why not? Let's do it. So I cold-called the CEO of Prostate Cancer Canada, and I said to him, ""I have this most amazing concept."" (Laughter) ""It's going to transform your organization. I don't want to tell you about it now, but will you meet with me if I fly all the way to Toronto?"" So I flew here, met down on Front Street East, and we sat in the boardroom, and I said, ""Right, here's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across Canada raising awareness and funds for your organization."" And he looked at me and laughed and said, ""Adam, sounds like a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization."" (Laughter) I've heard this before. I know how it goes. But he said, ""We will partner with you, but we're not going to invest in it. You need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work.""So what we did was, we took some of the money that we raised in Australia to bring the campaign across to this country, the U.S, and the U.K., and we did that because we knew, if this was successful, we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in Australia. And that money fuels research, and that research will get us to a cure. And we're not about finding an Australian cure or a Canadian cure, we're about finding the cure.So in 2007, we brought the campaign across here, and it was, it set the stage for the campaign. It wasn't as successful as we thought it would be. We were sort of very gung ho with our success in Australia and New Zealand at that stage. So that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets.But what I'm really pleased to say is, in 2010, Movember became a truly global movement. Canada was just pipped to the post in terms of the number one fundraising campaign in the world. Last year we had 450,000 Mo Bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars. (Applause) And that makes Movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world. And that is an amazing achievement when you think about us growing mustaches. (Laughter)And for us, we have redefined charity. Our ribbon is a hairy ribbon. (Laughter) Our ambassadors are the Mo Bros and the Mo Sistas, and I think that's been fundamental to our success. We hand across our brand and our campaign to those people. We let them embrace it and interpret it in their own way.So now I live in Los Angeles, because the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the U.S. is based there, and I always get asked by the media down there, because it's so celebrity-driven, ""Who are your celebrity ambassadors?"" And I say to them, ""Last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors."" And they go, ""What, what do you mean?"" And it's like, everything single person, every single Mo Bro and Mo Sista that participates in Movember is our celebrity ambassador, and that is so, so important and fundamental to our success.Now what I want to share with you is one of my most touching Movember moments, and it happened here in Toronto last year, at the end of the campaign. I was out with a team. It was the end of Movember. We'd had a great campaign, and to be honest, we'd had our fair share of beer that night, but I said, ""You know what, I think we've got one more bar left in us."" (Laughter) So we piled into a taxi, and this is our taxi driver, and I was sitting in the back seat, and he turned around and said, ""Where are you going?"" And I said, ""Hang on, that is an amazing mustache."" (Laughter) And he said, ""I'm doing it for Movember."" And I said, ""So am I."" And I said, ""Tell me your Movember story."" And he goes, ""Listen, I know it's about men's health, I know it's about prostate cancer, but this is for breast cancer."" And I said, ""Okay, that's interesting."" And he goes, ""Last year, my mom passed away from breast cancer in Sri Lanka, because we couldn't afford proper treatment for her,"" and he said, ""This mustache is my tribute to my mom."" And we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi, and I didn't tell him who I was, because I didn't think it was appropriate, and I just shook his hand and I said, ""Thank you so much. Your mom would be so proud."" And from that moment I realized that Movember is so much more than a mustache, having a joke. It's about each person coming to this platform, embracing it in their own way, and being significant in their own life.For us now at Movember, we really focus on three program areas, and having a true impact: awareness and education, survivor support programs, and research. Now we always focus, naturally, on how much we raise, because it's a very tangible outcome, but for me, awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise, because I know that is changing and saving lives today, and it's probably best exampled by a young guy that I met at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, at the start of the year. He came up to me and said, ""Thank you for starting Movember."" And I said, ""Thank you for doing Movember."" And I looked at him, and I was like, ""I'm pretty sure you can't grow a mustache."" (Laughter) And I said, ""What's your Movember story?"" And he said, ""I grew the worst mustache ever."" (Laughter) ""But I went home for Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on."" (Laughter) ""And we talked — I talked to them about Movember, and then after that, my dad came up to me, and at the age of 26, for the first time ever, I had a conversation with my dad one on one about men's health. I had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer, and I learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and I was able to share with my dad that he was twice as likely to get that disease, and he didn't know that, and he hadn't been getting screened for it."" So now, that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer.So those conversations, getting men engaged in this, at whatever age, is so critically important, and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise.Now to the funds we raise, and research, and how we're redefining research. We fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries. We literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world, and when we looked at this more recently, we realized there's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions, let alone nationally, let alone globally, and this is not unique to prostate cancer. This is cancer research the world over. And so we said, right, we'd redefined charity. We need to redefine the way these guys operate. How do we do that? So what we did was, we created a global action plan, and we're taking 10 percent of what's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund, and we've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund, and they come together each year and identify the number one priority, and that, last year, was getting a better screening test. So they identified that as a priority, and then they've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic, essentially the same topic. So now we're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together, and that's a unique thing in the cancer world, and we know, through that collaboration, it will accelerate outcomes. And that's how we're redefining the research world.So, what I know about my Movember journey is that, with a really creative idea, with passion, with persistence, and a lot of patience, four mates, four mustaches, can inspire a room full of people, and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city, and that city is Melbourne, my home. And that city can go on and inspire a state, and that state can go on and inspire a nation, and beyond that, you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men's health.My name is Adam Garone, and that's my story. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_garone_healthier_men_one_moustache_at_a_time
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"Today I have just one request. Please don't tell me I'm normal.Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers. Remi is 22, tall and very handsome. He's speechless, but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot. Remi knows what love is. He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless. He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color. He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie. When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be.Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome. He has the most impeccable memory. He has a selective one, though. He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday.Don't they sound incredible? But most people don't agree. And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood.But what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case, although they were not seen as ordinary, this could only mean one thing: that they were extraordinary — autistic and extraordinary.Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term ""autism,"" it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills. It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam. And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure.And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it. I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life. And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different. He screamed a lot. He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever. Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between. And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious. Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied. Extraordinary.Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me. But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality. Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong. It just means that there's a different kind of right. And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal. You can be extraordinary. Because autistic or not, the differences that we have — We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else.Please — don't tell me I'm normal. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/faith_jegede_what_i_ve_learned_from_my_autistic_brothers
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"So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness. Aristotle called happiness ""the chief good,"" the end towards which all other things aim. According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable. It's that we expect them to bring us happiness.Now in the last 50 years, we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want. We're richer. We live longer. We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven't actually gotten any happier.Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself. People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time, in fact for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved. Well, as with many other domains in life, I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question. In fact, in the last few years, there's been an explosion in research on happiness. For example, we've learned a lot about its demographics, how things like income and education, gender and marriage relate to it. But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don't seem to have a particularly strong effect. Yes, it's better to make more money rather than less, or to graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small.Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness? I think that's a question we haven't really answered yet, but I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences. It certainly seems that we're going about our lives, that what we're doing, who we're with, what we're thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness, and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study.A few years ago, I came up with a way to study people's happiness moment to moment as they're going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world, something we'd never been able to do before. Called trackyourhappiness.org, it uses the iPhone to monitor people's happiness in real time. How does this work? Basically, I send people signals at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal. The idea is that, if we can watch how people's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day, minute to minute in some cases, and try to understand how what people are doing, who they're with, what they're thinking about, and all the other factors that describe our day, how those might relate to those changes in happiness, we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness. We've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data, a lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before, over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people. And it's not just a lot of people, it's a really diverse group, people from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s, a wide range of incomes, education levels, people who are married, divorced, widowed, etc. They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries.What I'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been investigating, and that's mind-wandering. As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present. This guy is sitting here working on his computer, and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month, wondering what he's going to have for dinner. Maybe he's worried that he's going bald. (Laughter) This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing. It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can. And yet it's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness. You've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present. ""Be here now,"" you've probably heard a hundred times. Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment. Maybe these people are right. Maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing. On the other hand, when our minds wander, they're unconstrained. We can't change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds. Since we know people want to be happy, maybe when our minds wander, they're going to someplace happier than the place that they're leaving. It would make a lot of sense. In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering.Well, since I'm a scientist, I'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data, and in particular I'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness. Remember, this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people's real lives. There are three questions. The first one is a happiness question: How do you feel, on a scale ranging from very bad to very good? Second, an activity question: What are you doing, on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching TV? And finally a mind-wandering question: Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing? People could say no — in other words, I'm focused only on my task — or yes — I am thinking about something else — and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering.So what did we find? This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis, and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they're focused on the present, when they're not mind-wandering. As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they're not. Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they're mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn't very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope. As it turns out, people are less happy when they're mind-wandering no matter what they're doing. For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much. It's one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. It's amazing.So how could this be happening? I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and they are enormously less happy when they do that, our worries, our anxieties, our regrets, and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind-wandering at all. Even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind-wandering. If mind-wandering were a slot machine, it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars, 20 dollars or one dollar. Right? You'd never want to play. (Laughter)So I've been talking about this, suggesting, perhaps, that mind-wandering causes unhappiness, but all I've really shown you is that these two things are correlated. It's possible that's the case, but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy, then they mind-wander. Maybe that's what's really going on. How could we ever disentangle these two possibilites? Well, one fact that we can take advantage of, I think a fact you'll all agree is true, is that time goes forward, not backward. Right? The cause has to come before the effect. We're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person, and so we can look and see, does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness, or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering, to get some insight into the causal direction. As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy. In contrast, there's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later. In other words, mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.A few minutes ago, I likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you'd never want to play. Well, how often do people's minds wander? Turns out, they wander a lot. In fact, really a lot. Forty-seven percent of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing. How does that depend on what people are doing? This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities ranging from a high of 65 percent — (Laughter) — when people are taking a shower, brushing their teeth, to 50 percent when they're working, to 40 percent when they're exercising, all the way down to this one short bar on the right that I think some of you are probably laughing at. Ten percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex. (Laughter) But there's something I think that's quite interesting in this graph, and that is, basically with one exception, no matter what people are doing, they're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time, which suggests, I think, that mind-wandering isn't just frequent, it's ubiquitous. It pervades basically everything that we do.In my talk today, I've told you a little bit about mind-wandering, a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness. My hope is that over time, by tracking people's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life, we'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness, and then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that's not only richer and healthier, but happier as well. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_killingsworth_want_to_be_happier_stay_in_the_moment
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"Two years ago, after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself in Port-au-Prince, leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city, three days after the earthquake. We were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go, the places nobody else could go, and after three weeks, we realized something. Military veterans are very, very good at disaster response. And coming home, my cofounder and I, we looked at it, and we said, there are two problems. The first problem is there's inadequate disaster response. It's slow. It's antiquated. It's not using the best technology, and it's not using the best people. The second problem that we became aware of was a very inadequate veteran reintegration, and this is a topic that is front page news right now as veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're struggling to reintegrate into civilian life. And we sat here and we looked at these two problems, and finally we came to a realization. These aren't problems. These are actually solutions. And what do I mean by that?Well, we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home. Recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform. And we can use veterans to improve disaster response. Now on the surface, this makes a lot of sense, and in 2010, we responded to the tsunami in Chile, the floods in Pakistan, we sent training teams to the Thai-Burma border. But it was earlier this year, when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization.This is Clay Hunt. Clay was a Marine with me. We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay was with us in Port-au-Prince. He was also with us in Chile. Earlier this year, in March, Clay took his own life. This was a tragedy, but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing. You know, Clay didn't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home. He lost purpose. He lost his community. And perhaps most tragically, he lost his self-worth.And so, as we evaluated, and as the dust settled from this tragedy, we realized that, of those two problems — in the initial iteration of our organization, we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service. We had a lot of success, and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm. But after Clay, we shifted that focus, and suddenly, now moving forward, we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that's using disaster response. Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran. And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and then later Hurricane Irene, gave us an opportunity to look at that.Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. Every day he leaves the wire with a mission. That mission is to defend the freedom of the family that he left at home. It's to keep the men around him alive. It's to pacify the village that he works in. He's got a purpose. But he comes home [to] Kansas City, Missouri, maybe he goes to college, maybe he's got a job, but he doesn't have that same sense of purpose. You give him a chainsaw. You send him to Joplin, Missouri after a tornado, he regains that.Going back, that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri, joins the Army, the Army gives him a rifle, they send him to Iraq. Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him. He leaves the wire. He knows that those people have his back. He's slept in the same sand. They've lived together. They've eaten together. They've bled together. He goes home to Kansas City, Missouri. He gets out of the military. He takes his uniform off. He doesn't have that community anymore. But you drop 25 of those veterans in Joplin, Missouri, they get that sense of community back.Again, you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. They pin a medal on his chest. He goes home to a ticker tape parade. He takes the uniform off. He's no longer Sergeant Jones in his community. He's now Dave from Kansas City. He doesn't have that same self-worth. But you send him to Joplin after a tornado, and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service, now they have self-worth again.I think it's very important, because right now somebody needs to step up, and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jake_wood_a_new_mission_for_veterans_disaster_relief
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"So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view, and this world I'm going to talk about is the micro world. I've found, after doing this for many, many years, that there's a magical world behind reality. And that can be seen directly through a microscope, and I'm going to show you some of this today.So let's start off looking at something rather not-so-small, something that we can see with our naked eye, and that's a bee. So when you look at this bee, it's about this size here, it's about a centimeter. But to really see the details of the bee, and really appreciate what it is, you have to look a little bit closer. So that's just the eye of the bee with a microscope, and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia, and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they're right up close to something, because they can't see in stereo.As we go smaller, here is a human hair. A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see. It's about a tenth of a millimeter.And as we go smaller again, about ten times smaller than that, is a cell. So you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair.So when we would look at cells, this is how I really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope. When I first saw living cells in a microscope, I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like. So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system, they're actually moving all over the place. This cell is looking for foreign objects, bacteria, things that it can find. And it's looking around, and when it finds something, and recognizes it being foreign, it will actually engulf it and eat it. So if you look right there, it finds that little bacterium, and it engulfs it and eats it. If you take some heart cells from an animal, and put it in a dish, they'll just sit there and beat. That's their job. Every cell has a mission in life, and these cells, the mission is to move blood around our body. These next cells are nerve cells, and right now, as we see and understand what we're looking at, our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now. They're not just static. They're moving around making new connections, and that's what happens when we learn.As you go farther down this scale here, that's a micron, or a micrometer, and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom. Now, an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. That's how small that is. And microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms. So these are some pictures of individual atoms. Each bump here is an individual atom. This is a ring of cobalt atoms.So this whole world, the nano world, this area in here is called the nano world, and the nano world, the whole micro world that we see, there's a nano world that is wrapped up within that, and the whole — and that is the world of molecules and atoms.But I want to talk about this larger world, the world of the micro world.So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower, what would that flower look like, if the flower was this big? It wouldn't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower. So if you look at this flower here, and you're a little bug, if you're on that surface of that flower, that's what the terrain would look like. The petal of that flower looks like that, so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects, and if you look a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here, this is the style of that flower, and you notice that it's got these little — these are like little jelly-like things that are what are called spurs. These are nectar spurs. So this little ant that's crawling here, it's like it's in a little Willy Wonka land. It's like a little Disneyland for them. It's not like what we see. These are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there, and here is a — what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen, when you look in a microscope, it's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen. So this, for example, when you see bees flying around these little plants, and they're collecting pollen, those pollen grains that they're collecting, they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive, and that's what makes the beehive, the wax in the beehive. And they're also collecting nectar, and that's what makes the honey that we eat.Here's a close-up picture, or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth, and if you had really, really good vision, with your naked eye, you'd see it about that well. There's the stamen and the pistil. But look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope. That's the stamen. So that's thousands of little grains of pollen there, and there's the pistil there, and these are the little things called trichomes. And that's what makes the flower give a fragrance, and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances.I want to talk about something really ordinary, just ordinary sand. I became interested in sand about 10 years ago, when I first saw sand from Maui, and in fact, this is a little bit of sand from Maui. So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size. But when you look closer at this, look at what's there. It's really quite amazing. You have microshells there. You have things like coral. You have fragments of other shells. You have olivine. You have bits of a volcano. There's a little bit of a volcano there. You have tube worms. An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand. And the reason that is, is because in a place like this island, a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow, and when they die, their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand, things like coral and so forth. So here's, for example, a picture of sand from Maui. This is from Lahaina, and when we're walking along a beach, we're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history. We don't realize it, but it's actually a record of that entire ecology. So here we see, for example, a sponge spicule, two bits of coral here, that's a sea urchin spine. Really some amazing stuff.So when I first looked at this, I was — I thought, gee, this is like a little treasure trove here. I couldn't believe it, and I'd go around dissecting the little bits out and making photographs of them. Here's what most of the sand in our world looks like. These are quartz crystals and feldspar, so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar. It's the erosion of granite rock. So mountains are built up, and they erode away by water and rain and ice and so forth, and they become grains of sand. There's some sand that's really much more colorful. These are sand from near the Great Lakes, and you can see that it's filled with minerals like pink garnet and green epidote, all kinds of amazing stuff, and if you look at different sands from different places, every single beach, every single place you look at sand, it's different. Here's from Big Sur, like they're little jewels. There are places in Africa where they do the mining of jewels, and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean, and it's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope. So every grain of sand is unique. Every beach is different. Every single grain is different. There are no two grains of sand alike in the world. Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere. They're like a snapshot in time.Now sand is not only on Earth, but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe. In fact, outer space is filled with sand, and that sand comes together to make our planets and the Moon. And you can see those in micrometeorites. This is some micrometeorites that the Army gave me, and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole. And they're quite amazing-looking, and these are the tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in — the planets and the Moon.So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand, so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago. And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes. This was the first picture I took. It was kind of amazing. I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon, which is sort of interesting. Now, the way my microscopes work is, normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time, so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope, keep taking pictures, and then I have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like, and I do that in 3D. So there, you can see, is a left-eye view. There's a right-eye view. So sort of left-eye view, right-eye view.Now something's interesting here. This looks very different than any sand on Earth that I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of sand on Earth, believe me. (Laughter) Look at this hole in the middle. That hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon. Now, the Moon has no atmosphere, so micrometeorites come in continuously, and the whole surface of the Moon is covered with powder now, because for four billion years it's been bombarded by micrometeorites, and when micrometeorites come in at about 20 to 60,000 miles an hour, they vaporize on contact. And you can see here that that is — that's sort of vaporized, and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together. This is a very small grain of sand, this whole thing. And that's called a ring agglutinate. And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that, and you'd never find that on Earth. Most of the sand on the Moon, especially — and you know when you look at the Moon, there's the dark areas and the light areas. The dark areas are lava flows. They're basaltic lava flows, and that's what this sand looks like, very similar to the sand that you would see in Haleakala. Other sands, when these micrometeorites come in, they vaporize and they make these fountains, these microscopic fountains that go up into the — I was going to say ""up into the air,"" but there is no air — goes sort of up, and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly, and they harden, and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the Moon, they have these beautiful colored glass spherules. And these are actually microscopic; you need a microscope to see these.Now here's a grain of sand that is from the Moon, and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there. This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old, and it's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling, air, and so forth. All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the Sun, has these solar storms, and that's erosion by solar radiation.So what I've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view. I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said, ""To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_greenberg_the_beautiful_nano_details_of_our_world
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"Across Europe and Central Asia, approximately one million children live in large residential institutions, usually known as orphanages. Most people imagine orphanages as a benign environment that care for children. Others know more about the living conditions there, but still think they're a necessary evil. After all, where else would we put all of those children who don't have any parents?But 60 years of research has demonstrated that separating children from their families and placing them in large institutions seriously harms their health and development, and this is particularly true for young babies. As we know, babies are born without their full muscle development, and that includes the brain. During the first three years of life, the brain grows to its full size, with most of that growth taking place in the first six months. The brain develops in response to experience and to stimulation. Every time a young baby learns something new — to focus its eyes, to mimic a movement or a facial expression, to pick something up, to form a word or to sit up — new synaptic connections are being built in the brain. New parents are astonished by the rapidity of this learning. They are quite rightly amazed and delighted by their children's cleverness. They communicate their delight to their children, who respond with smiles, and a desire to achieve more and to learn more. This forming of the powerful attachment between child and parent provides the building blocks for physical, social, language, cognitive and psychomotor development. It is the model for all future relationships with friends, with partners and with their own children. It happens so naturally in most families that we don't even notice it. Most of us are unaware of its importance to human development and, by extension, to the development of a healthy society. And it's only when it goes wrong that we start to realize the importance of families to children.In August, 1993, I had my first opportunity to witness on a massive scale the impact on children of institutionalization and the absence of parenting. Those of us who remember the newspaper reports that came out of Romania after the 1989 revolution will recall the horrors of the conditions in some of those institutions. I was asked to help the director of a large institution to help prevent the separation of children from their families. Housing 550 babies, this was Ceausescu's show orphanage, and so I'd been told the conditions were much better. Having worked with lots of young children, I expected the institution to be a riot of noise, but it was as silent as a convent. It was hard to believe there were any children there at all, yet the director showed me into room after room, each containing row upon row of cots, in each of which lay a child staring into space. In a room of 40 newborns, not one of them was crying. Yet I could see soiled nappies, and I could see that some of the children were distressed, but the only noise was a low, continuous moan. The head nurse told me proudly, ""You see, our children are very well-behaved."" Over the next few days, I began to realize that this quietness was not exceptional. The newly admitted babies would cry for the first few hours, but their demands were not met, and so eventually they learned not to bother. Within a few days, they were listless, lethargic, and staring into space like all the others.Over the years, many people and news reports have blamed the personnel in the institutions for the harm caused to the children, but often, one member of staff is caring for 10, 20, and even 40 children. Hence they have no option but to implement a regimented program. The children must be woken at 7 and fed at 7:30. At 8, their nappies must be changed, so a staff member may have only 30 minutes to feed 10 or 20 children. If a child soils its nappy at 8:30, he will have to wait several hours before it can be changed again. The child's daily contact with another human being is reduced to a few hurried minutes of feeding and changing, and otherwise their only stimulation is the ceiling, the walls or the bars of their cots.Since my first visit to Ceausescu's institution, I've seen hundreds of such places across 18 countries, from the Czech Republic to Sudan. Across all of these diverse lands and cultures, the institutions, and the child's journey through them, is depressingly similar. Lack of stimulation often leads to self-stimulating behaviors like hand-flapping, rocking back and forth, or aggression, and in some institutions, psychiatric drugs are used to control the behavior of these children, whilst in others, children are tied up to prevent them from harming themselves or others. These children are quickly labeled as having disabilities and transferred to another institution for children with disabilities. Most of these children will never leave the institution again. For those without disabilities, at age three, they're transferred to another institution, and at age seven, to yet another. Segregated according to age and gender, they are arbitrarily separated from their siblings, often without even a chance to say goodbye. There's rarely enough to eat. They are often hungry. The older children bully the little ones. They learn to survive. They learn to defend themselves, or they go under.When they leave the institution, they find it really difficult to cope and to integrate into society. In Moldova, young women raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to be trafficked than their peers, and a Russian study found that two years after leaving institutions, young adults, 20 percent of them had a criminal record, 14 percent were involved in prostitution, and 10 percent had taken their own lives.But why are there so many orphans in Europe when there hasn't been a great deal of war or disaster in recent years? In fact, more than 95 percent of these children have living parents, and societies tend to blame these parents for abandoning these children, but research shows that most parents want their children, and that the primary drivers behind institutionalization are poverty, disability and ethnicity. Many countries have not developed inclusive schools, and so even children with a very mild disability are sent away to a residential special school, at age six or seven. The institution may be hundreds of miles away from the family home. If the family's poor, they find it difficult to visit, and gradually the relationship breaks down. Behind each of the million children in institutions, there is usually a story of parents who are desperate and feel they've run out of options, like Natalia in Moldova, who only had enough money to feed her baby, and so had to send her older son to the institution; or Desi, in Bulgaria, who looked after her four children at home until her husband died, but then she had to go out to work full time, and with no support, felt she had no option but to place a child with disabilities in an institution; or the countless young girls too terrified to tell their parents they're pregnant, who leave their babies in a hospital; or the new parents, the young couple who have just found out that their firstborn child has a disability, and instead of being provided with positive messages about their child's potential, are told by the doctors, ""Forget her, leave her in the institution, go home and make a healthy one.""This state of affairs is neither necessary nor is it inevitable. Every child has the right to a family, deserves and needs a family, and children are amazingly resilient. We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays, and go on to lead normal, happy lives. It's also much cheaper to provide support to families than it is to provide institutions. One study suggests that a family support service costs 10 percent of an institutional placement, whilst good quality foster care costs usually about 30 percent. If we spend less on these children but on the right services, we can take the savings and reinvest them in high quality residential care for those few children with extremely complex needs.Across Europe, a movement is growing to shift the focus and transfer the resources from large institutions that provide poor quality care to community-based services that protect children from harm and allow them to develop to their full potential. When I first started to work in Romania nearly 20 years ago, there were 200,000 children living in institutions, and more entering every day. Now, there are less than 10,000, and family support services are provided across the country. In Moldova, despite extreme poverty and the terrible effects of the global financial crisis, the numbers of children in institutions has reduced by more than 50 percent in the last five years, and the resources are being redistributed to family support services and inclusive schools. Many countries have developed national action plans for change. The European Commission and other major donors are finding ways to divert money from institutions towards family support, empowering communities to look after their own children.But there is still much to be done to end the systematic institutionalization of children. Awareness-raising is required at every level of society. People need to know the harm that institutions cause to children, and the better alternatives that exist. If we know people who are planning to support orphanages, we should convince them to support family services instead.Together, this is the one form of child abuse that we could eradicate in our lifetime.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/georgette_mulheir_the_tragedy_of_orphanages
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"Let me tell you, it has been a fantastic month for deception. And I'm not even talking about the American presidential race. (Laughter) We have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism, a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they've pulled it from the shelves; a New York Times exposé on fake book reviews. It's been fantastic.Now, of course, not all deception hits the news. Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested. So it's about 6:30 now, suggests that most of us should have lied. Let's take a look at Winnipeg. How many of you, in the last 24 hours — think back — have told a little fib, or a big one? How many have told a little lie out there?All right, good. These are all the liars. Make sure you pay attention to them. (Laughter)No, that looked good, it was about two thirds of you. The other third didn't lie, or perhaps forgot, or you're lying to me about your lying, which is very, very devious. (Laughter) This fits with a lot of the research, which suggests that lying is very pervasive. It's this pervasiveness, combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human, the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up, that has fascinated people throughout history. Here we have Diogenes with his lantern. Does anybody know what he was looking for? A single honest man, and he died without finding one back in Greece. And we have Confucius in the East who was really concerned with sincerity, not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk, but that you believed in what you were doing. You believed in your principles.Now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys, a couple thousand years. I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid-'90s. Yeah. I was defending Canada's borders. You may think that's a weapon right there. In fact, that's a stamp. I used a stamp to defend Canada's borders. (Laughter) Very Canadian of me. I learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs, one of which was that most of what I thought I knew about deception was wrong, and I'll tell you about some of that tonight.But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate has been completely transformed. We email, we text, we skype, we Facebook. It's insane. Almost every aspect of human communication's been changed, and of course that's had an impact on deception. Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions we've been tracking and documenting. They're called the Butler, the Sock Puppet and the Chinese Water Army. It sounds a little bit like a weird book, but actually they're all new types of lies.Let's start with the Butlers. Here's an example of one: ""On my way."" Anybody ever written, ""On my way?"" Then you've also lied. (Laughter) We're never on our way. We're thinking about going on our way. Here's another one: ""Sorry I didn't respond to you earlier. My battery was dead."" Your battery wasn't dead. You weren't in a dead zone. You just didn't want to respond to that person that time. Here's the last one: You're talking to somebody, and you say, ""Sorry, got work, gotta go."" But really, you're just bored. You want to talk to somebody else. Each of these is about a relationship, and this is a 24/7 connected world. Once you get my cell phone number, you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day. And so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer, like the butler used to do, between us and the connections to everybody else. But they're very special. They use ambiguity that comes from using technology. You don't know where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with. And they're aimed at protecting the relationships. These aren't just people being jerks. These are people that are saying, look, I don't want to talk to you now, or I didn't want to talk to you then, but I still care about you. Our relationship is still important.Now, the Sock Puppet, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. The sock puppet isn't about ambiguity, per se. It's about identity. Let me give you a very recent example, as in, like, last week. Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain. Here's one of his bestselling books. Here's a reviewer online, on Amazon. My favorite, by Nicodemus Jones, is, ""Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul."" And of course, you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory. He wrote very, very positive reviews about himself. Surprise, surprise.Now this Sock Puppet stuff isn't actually that new. Walt Whitman also did this back in the day, before there was Internet technology. Sock Puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale, which is the domain of the Chinese Water Army. Chinese Water Army refers to thousands of people in China that are paid small amounts of money to produce content. It could be reviews. It could be propaganda. The government hires these people, companies hire them, all over the place. In North America, we call this Astroturfing, and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it. We see this especially with product reviews, book reviews, everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not.Now, looking at these three reviews, or these three types of deception, you might think, wow, the Internet is really making us a deceptive species, especially when you think about the Astroturfing, where we can see deception brought up to scale. But actually, what I've been finding is very different from that. Now, let's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms, which I'm sure none of you have been in. I can assure you there's deception there. And let's put aside the Nigerian prince who's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country. (Laughter) Let's forget about that guy, too. Let's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones. Those are the conversations that really matter. What does technology do to deception with those folks?Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days, and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium, and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media. And it really throws people for a loop because we think, well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more? The phone, in contrast, the most lies. Again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about. This tends to be very different from what people expect.What about résumés? We did a study in which we had people apply for a job, and they could apply for a job either with a traditional paper résumé, or on LinkedIn, which is a social networking site like Facebook, but for professionals — involves the same information as a résumé. And what we found, to many people's surprise, was that those LinkedIn résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers, like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job.How about Facebook itself? You know, we always think that hey, there are these idealized versions, people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives. I've thought that many times. My friends, no way they can be that cool and have good of a life. Well, one study tested this by examining people's personalities. They had four good friends of a person judge their personality. Then they had strangers, many strangers, judge the person's personality just from Facebook, and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical, highly correlated, meaning that Facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality.All right, well, what about online dating? I mean, that's a pretty deceptive space. I'm sure you all have ""friends"" that have used online dating. (Laughter) And they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came, or the woman that didn't look at all like her photo. Well, we were really interested in it, and so what we did is we brought people, online daters, into the lab, and then we measured them. We got their height up against the wall, we put them on a scale, got their weight — ladies loved that — and then we actually got their driver's license to get their age. And what we found was very, very interesting. Here's an example of the men and the height. Along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile. Along the y-axis, the vertical axis, is how tall they actually were. That diagonal line is the truth line. If their dot's on it, they were telling exactly the truth. Now, as you see, most of the little dots are below the line. What it means is all the guys were lying about their height. In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch, what we say in the lab as ""strong rounding up."" (Laughter) You get to 5'8"" and one tenth, and boom! 5'9"". But what's really important here is, look at all those dots. They are clustering pretty close to the truth. What we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions, but they always lied by a little bit. One of the reasons is pretty simple. If you go to a date, a coffee date, and you're completely different than what you said, game over. Right? So people lied frequently, but they lied subtly, not too much. They were constrained.Well, what explains all these studies? What explains the fact that despite our intuitions, mine included, a lot of online communication, technologically-mediated communication, is more honest than face to face? That really is strange. How do we explain this?Well, to do that, one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature. It's a very old literature by now, it's coming up on 50 years. It's been reviewed many times. There's been thousands of trials, hundreds of studies, and there's some really compelling findings.The first is, we're really bad at detecting deception, really bad. Fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not. That's really bad. Why is it so bad? Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose. If I were to ask you guys, what do you rely on when you're looking at somebody and you want to find out if they're lying? What cue do you pay attention to? Most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul. And you're not alone. Around the world, almost every culture, one of the top cues is eyes. But the research over the last 50 years says there's actually no reliable cue to deception, which blew me away, and it's one of the hard lessons that I learned when I was customs officer. The eyes do not tell us whether somebody's lying or not. Some situations, yes — high stakes, maybe their pupils dilate, their pitch goes up, their body movements change a little bit, but not all the time, not for everybody, it's not reliable. Strange. The other thing is that just because you can't see me doesn't mean I'm going to lie. It's common sense, but one important finding is that we lie for a reason. We lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else's gain. So there are some pathological liars, but they make up a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason. Just because people can't see us doesn't mean we're going to necessarily lie.But I think there's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here. The next big thing for me, the next big idea, we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language. Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago. A lot of humans have lived since then. We've been talking, I guess, about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers. I don't know what they talked about, but they were doing a lot of talking, and like I said, there's a lot of humans evolving speaking, about 100 billion people in fact. What's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago. So what that means is that all the people before there was any writing, every word that they ever said, every utterance disappeared. No trace. Evanescent. Gone. So we've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record. In fact, even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now, with the printing press, which is very recent in our past, and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until World War II, so even the people of the last two millennia, most of the words they ever said — poof! — disappeared.Let's turn to now, the networked age. How many of you have recorded something today? Anybody do any writing today? Did anybody write a word? It looks like almost every single person here recorded something. In this room, right now, we've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history. That is crazy. We're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear, but we're in an environment where we're recording everything. In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just what we write that will be recorded, everything we do will be recorded. What does that mean? What's the next big idea from that? Well, as a social scientist, this is the most amazing thing I have ever even dreamed of. Now, I can look at all those words that used to, for millennia, disappear. I can look at lies that before were said and then gone. You remember those Astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before? Well, when they write a fake review, they have to post it somewhere, and it's left behind for us.So one thing that we did, and I'll give you an example of looking at the language, is we paid people to write some fake reviews. One of these reviews is fake. The person never was at the James Hotel. The other review is real. The person stayed there. Now, your task now is to decide which review is fake? I'll give you a moment to read through them. But I want everybody to raise their hand at some point. Remember, I study deception. I can tell if you don't raise your hand. All right, how many of you believe that A is the fake? All right. Very good. About half. And how many of you think that B is? All right. Slightly more for B. Excellent. Here's the answer. B is a fake. Well done second group. You dominated the first group. (Laughter) You're actually a little bit unusual. Every time we demonstrate this, it's usually about a 50-50 split, which fits with the research, 54 percent. Maybe people here in Winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out. Those cold, hard winters, I love it.All right, so why do I care about this? Well, what I can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception. Let me highlight a couple of things here in the fake review. The first is that liars tend to think about narrative. They make up a story: Who? And what happened? And that's what happened here. Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing. They also used the first person singular, I, way more than the people that actually stayed there. They were inserting themselves into the hotel review, kind of trying to convince you they were there. In contrast, the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there, their bodies actually entered the physical space, they talked a lot more about spatial information. They said how big the bathroom was, or they said, you know, here's how far shopping is from the hotel.Now, you guys did pretty well. Most people perform at chance at this task. Our computer algorithm is very accurate, much more accurate than humans can be, and it's not going to be accurate all the time. This isn't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend's lying to you on text messaging. We believe that every lie now, every type of lie — fake hotel reviews, fake shoe reviews, your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging — those are all different lies. They're going to have different patterns of language. But because everything's recorded now, we can look at all of those kinds of lies.Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful. It's transformational. We're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression, about everything from love to attitudes, because everything is being recorded now, but what does it mean for the average citizen? What does it mean for us in our lives? Well, let's forget deception for a bit. One of the big ideas, I believe, is that we're leaving these huge traces behind. My outbox for email is massive, and I never look at it. I write all the time, but I never look at my record, at my trace. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that, where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote, what we said, what we did.Now, if we bring it back to deception, there's a couple of take-away things here. First, lying online can be very dangerous, right? Not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine, but you're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to, and you're also leaving them around for me to analyze with some computer algorithms. So by all means, go ahead and do that, that's good. But when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives, I think we can go back to Diogenes and Confucius. And they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie, and more concerned about being true to the self, and I think this is really important. Now, when you are about to say or do something, we can think, do I want this to be part of my legacy, part of my personal record? Because in the digital age we live in now, in the networked age, we are all leaving a record. Thank you so much for your time, and good luck with your record. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hancock_3_types_of_digital_lies
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"On my desk in my office, I keep a small clay pot that I made in college. It's raku, which is a kind of pottery that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony. This one is more than 400 years old. Each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay, and it was the imperfections that people cherished.Everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire. I just took this out of the kiln last week, and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down, but raku is really fast. You do it outside, and you take the kiln up to temperature. In 15 minutes, it goes to 1,500 degrees, and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside, you can see that faint sheen, you turn the kiln off, and you reach in with these long metal tongs, you grab the pot, and in Japan, this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea, and you can imagine what that steam would smell like. But here in the United States, we ramp up the drama a little bit, and we drop our pots into sawdust, which catches on fire, and you take a garbage pail, and you put it on top, and smoke starts pouring out. I would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke.I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements. I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze, but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke, and what's wonderful is the surprises that happen, like this crackle pattern, because it's really stressful on these pots. They go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute.Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity. I find in so many things that tension between what I can control and what I have to let go happens all the time, whether I'm creating a new radio show or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons.When I sat down to write a book about creativity, I realized that the steps were reversed. I had to let go at the very beginning, and I had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers, and as I listened to these stories, I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think, including letting go. It was supposed to break, but that's okay. (Laughter) (Laughs) That's part of the letting go, is sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, because creativity also grows from the broken places.The best way to learn about anything is through stories, and so I want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish. The first embrace is something that we think, ""Oh, this is very easy,"" but it's actually getting harder, and that's paying attention to the world around us. So many artists speak about needing to be open, to embrace experience, and that's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus.The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar, and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town.Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples. We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me, that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually, was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of, you know, passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing. You know, the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana, the two holy books, the epics that everything comes out of in India, they say. After seeing that Jatra, the folk theater, I knew I wanted to get on, you know, and perform.Julie Burstein: Isn't that a wonderful story? You can see the sort of break in the everyday. There they are in the school fields, but it's good and evil, and passion and hashish. And Mira Nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance, but she was ready. She was ready to open up to what it sparked in her, and it led her, as she said, down this path to become an award-winning filmmaker. So being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace.Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult. The novelist Richard Ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today. He's severely dyslexic.Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can't read silently much faster than I can read aloud, but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities, which I think has helped me write sentences.JB: It's so powerful. Richard Ford, who's won the Pulitzer Prize, says that dyslexia helped him write sentences. He had to embrace this challenge, and I use that word intentionally. He didn't have to overcome dyslexia. He had to learn from it. He had to learn to hear the music in language.Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing into what they can't do, helps them focus on finding their own voice. The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how, as a young artist, he thought he was a painter, and he lived in Florence after graduate school. While he was there, he traveled to Madrid, where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. It's from 1656, and it's called ""Las Meninas,"" and it's the picture of a little princess and her ladies-in-waiting, and if you look over that little blonde princess's shoulder, you'll see a mirror, and reflected in it are her parents, the King and Queen of Spain, who would be standing where you might stand to look at the picture. As he often did, Velázquez put himself in this painting too. He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other.Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it, and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me, and I thought, ""Oh. I'm the subject of the painting."" And I thought, ""I'm not going to be able to do that painting."" I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back and dumped all my paintings in the Arno, and I thought, I'm going to just start playing around.JB: Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly, you might have missed it. He went and saw this painting by a guy who'd been dead for 300 years, and realized, ""I can't do that,"" and so Richard Serra went back to his studio in Florence, picked up all of his work up to that point, and threw it in a river. Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment, but he didn't let go of art. He moved to New York City, and he put together a list of verbs — to roll, to crease, to fold — more than a hundred of them, and as he said, he just started playing around. He did these things to all kinds of material. He would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it. He would do the same thing to rubber, and when he got to the direction ""to lift,"" he created this, which is in the Museum of Modern Art. Richard Serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he's known for today: huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience. In sculpture, Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn't do in painting. He makes us the subject of his art. So experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish.There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest. It's the embrace of loss, the oldest and most constant of human experiences. In order to create, we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak, at war, at death. That's a tough space to stand in. The educator Parker Palmer calls it ""the tragic gap,"" tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable, and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say, ""You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful.""That tension resonates in the work of the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography, for capturing a moment on the street, and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes — of Tuscany, of Cape Cod, of light. Joel is a New Yorker, and his studio for many years was in Chelsea, with a straight view downtown to the World Trade Center, and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light. You know where this story goes. On 9/11, Joel wasn't in New York. He was out of town, but he raced back to the city, and raced down to the site of the destruction.Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby, I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see, and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder, and said, ""Hey, no pictures!"" And it was such a blow that it woke me up, in the way that it was meant to be, I guess. And when I asked her why no pictures, she said, ""It's a crime scene. No photographs allowed."" And I asked her, ""What would happen if I was a member of the press?"" And she told me, ""Oh, look back there,"" and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area, and I said, ""Well, when do they go in?"" and she said, ""Probably never."" And as I walked away from that, I had this crystallization, probably from the blow, because it was an insult in a way. I thought, ""Oh, if there's no pictures, then there'll be no record. We need a record."" And I thought, ""I'm gonna make that record. I'll find a way to get in, because I don't want to see this history disappear.""JB: He did. He pulled in every favor he could, and got a pass into the World Trade Center site, where he photographed for nine months almost every day. Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night. My office was just a few blocks away. But some of these photographs are beautiful, and we wondered, was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation?JM: Well, you know, ugly, I mean, powerful and tragic and horrific and everything, but it was also as, in nature, an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue, and like many other ruins — you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace — and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather. I mean, there were afternoons I was down there, and the light goes pink and there's a mist in the air and you're standing in the rubble, and I found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature, as time, is erasing this wound. Time is unstoppable, and it transforms the event. It gets further and further away from the day, and light and seasons temper it in some way, and it's not that I'm a romantic. I'm really a realist. The reality is, there's the Woolworth Building in a veil of smoke from the site, but it's now like a scrim across a theater, and it's turning pink, you know, and down below there are hoses spraying, and the lights have come on for the evening, and the water is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on, and I'm thinking, ""My God, who could dream this up?"" But the fact is, I'm there, it looks like that, you have to take a picture.JB: You have to take a picture. That sense of urgency, of the need to get to work, is so powerful in Joel's story. When I saw Joel Meyerowitz recently, I told him how much I admired his passionate obstinacy, his determination to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work, and he laughed, and he said, ""I'm stubborn, but I think what's more important is my passionate optimism.""The first time I told these stories, a man in the audience raised his hand and said, ""All these artists talk about their work, not their art, which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there, and I'm not an artist."" He's right. We all wrestle with experience and challenge, limits and loss. Creativity is essential to all of us, whether we're scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs.I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's more than a hundred years old and you can still see the fingermarks where the potter pinched it. But as you can also see, this one did break at some point in its hundred years. But the person who put it back together, instead of hiding the cracks, decided to emphasize them, using gold lacquer to repair it. This bowl is more beautiful now, having been broken, than it was when it was first made, and we can look at those cracks, because they tell the story that we all live, of the cycle of creation and destruction, of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces and making something new. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julie_burstein_4_lessons_in_creativity
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"So I tried to do a small good thing for my wife. It makes me to stand here, the fame, the money I got out of it. So what I did, I'd gone back to my early marriage days. What you did in the early marriage days, you tried to impress your wife. I did the same. On that occasion, I found my wife carrying something like this. I saw. ""What is that?"" I asked. My wife replied, ""None of your business."" Then, being her husband, I ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth. I don't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler. Then I understood this — adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days.Then I immediately asked her, why are you [using] that unhygienic method? She replied, I also know about [sanitary pads], but myself and my sisters, if they start using that, we have to cut our family milk budget. Then I was shocked. What is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget? And it's called affordability. I tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads. I went to a local shop, I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet. That fellow looks left and right, and spreads a newspaper, rolls it into the newspaper, gives it to me like a banned item, something like that. I don't know why. I did not ask for a condom. Then I took that pad. I want to see that. What is inside it?The very first time, at the age of 29, that day I am touching the sanitary pad, first ever. I must know: How many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad? They are not going to touch that, because it's not your matter. Then I thought to myself, white substance, made of cotton — oh my God, that guy is just using a penny value of raw material — inside they are selling for pounds, dollars. Why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife? That's how all this started, but after making a sanitary pad, where can I check it? It's not like I can just check it in the lab. I need a woman volunteer. Where can I get one in India? Even in Bangalore you won't get [one], in India. So only problem: the only available victim is my wife.Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti — my wife's name is Shanti. ""Close your eyes. Whatever I give, it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring, even a chocolate, I will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it. Close your eyes."" Because I tried to make it intimate. Because it's an arranged marriage, not a love marriage. (Laughter) So one day she said, openly, I'm not going to support this research. Then other victims, they got into my sisters. But even sisters, wives, they're not ready to support in the research. That's why I am always jealous with the saints in India. They are having a lot of women volunteers around them. Why I am not getting [any]? You know, without them even calling, they'll get a lot of women volunteers. Then I used, tried to use the medical college girls. They also refused. Finally, I decide, use sanitary pad myself. Now I am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon. Armstrong. Then Tenzing [and] Hillary, in Everest, like that Muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe.I wore a sanitary pad. I filled animal blood in a football bottle, I tied it up here, there is a tube going into my panties, while I'm walking, while I'm cycling, I made a press, doses of blood will go there. That makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect. That five days I'll never forget — the messy days, the lousy days, that wetness. My God, it's unbelievable.But here the problem is, one company is making napkin out of cotton. It is working well. But I am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton. It's not working. That makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research. You need first funds. Not only financial crises, but because of the sanitary pad research, I come through all sorts of problems, including a divorce notice from my wife. Why is this? I used medical college girls. She suspects I am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls. Finally, I came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood, but even after that, you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material. Again, a stop-up. Then I spend another four years to create my own machine tools, a simple machine tool like this. In this machine, any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant, anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall. That is my invention.So after that, what I did, usually if anyone got a patent or an invention, immediately you want to make, convert into this. I never did this. I dropped it just like this, because you do this, if anyone runs after money, their life will not [have] any beauty. It is boredom. A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy? What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one? That's why I am giving this machine only in rural India, for rural women, because in India, [you'll be] surprised, only two percent of women are using sanitary pads. The rest, they're using a rag cloth, a leaf, husk, [saw] dust, everything except sanitary pads. It is the same in the 21st century. That's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India. So far, 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries.Now I'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational, transnational giants — makes all MBA students a question mark. A school dropout from Coimbatore, how he is able to sustaining? That makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all IIMs. (Applause) Play video one.(Video) Arunachalam Muruganantham: The thing I saw in my wife's hand, ""Why are you using that nasty cloth?"" She replied immediately, ""I know about napkins, but if I start using napkins, then we have to cut our family milk budget."" Why not make myself a low-cost napkin? So I decided I'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups. That is my idea.AM: And previously, you need a multimillion investment for machine and all. Now, any rural woman can. They are performing puja. (Video): (Singing) You just think, competing giants, even from Harvard, Oxford, is difficult. I make a rural woman to compete with multinationals. I'm sustaining on seventh year. Already 600 installations. What is my mission? I'm going to make India [into] a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime. In this way I'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that I'm going to create. That's why I'm not running after this bloody money. I'm doing something serious. If you chase a girl, the girl won't like you. Do your job simply, the girl will chase you. Like that, I never chased Mahalakshmi. Mahalakshmi is chasing me, I am keeping in the back pocket. Not in front pocket. I'm a back pocket man. That's all. A school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad. I am becoming a solution provider. I'm very happy. I don't want to make this as a corporate entity. I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe. That's why I put all the details on public domain like an open software. Now 110 countries are accessing it. Okay? So I classify the people into three: uneducated, little educated, surplus educated. Little educated, done this. Surplus educated, what are you going to do for the society?Thank you very much. Bye!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arunachalam_muruganantham_how_i_started_a_sanitary_napkin_revolution
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"I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother.And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere. I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked. Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak — a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox.Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing.But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper. They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters. They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.But what if it's not about efficiency this time? I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you. If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, ""Well, why don't you use the Internet?"" And I thought, ""Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller."" And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, ""Come back to me. Find me when you can."" Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family. Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when.These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of ""get faster,"" no matter how many social networks we might join. We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_brencher_love_letters_to_strangers
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"Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics.I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer, and that means that I spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology, and more specifically designing and building electronics. And what I've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways. So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive, and the outcome of that process, namely electronic circuit boards, are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways. So they're really small, generally, they're square and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics.And so what if you could design and build electronics like this? So what if you could do it extremely quickly, extremely inexpensively, and maybe more interestingly, really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally? Wouldn't that be so cool, and that wouldn't that open up all sorts of new possibilities?I'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one. (Video) Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper. A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC. Sticker templates. Speed x 4. Making a switch. Music: DJ Shadow. Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller. Sketching an interface.(Music) (Laughter) (Applause)Pretty cool, huh? We think so. So now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things, we started to realize that, essentially, anything that we can do with paper, anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics. So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility. And I'll kind of let it speak for itself.(Music) (Applause)So the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this, and so the way that we're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways. And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way. So thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leah_buechley_how_to_sketch_with_electronics
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"Sydney. I had been waiting my whole life to get to Sydney. I got to the airport, to the hotel, checked in, and, sitting there in the lobby, was a brochure for the Sydney Festival. I thumbed through it, and I came across a show called ""Minto: Live."" The description read: ""The suburban streets of Minto become the stage for performances created by international artists in collaboration with the people of Minto.""What was this place called Minto? Sydney, as I would learn, is a city of suburbs, and Minto lies southwest, about an hour away. I have to say, it wasn't exactly what I had in mind for my first day down under. I mean, I'd thought about the Harbour Bridge or Bondi Beach, but Minto? But still, I'm a producer, and the lure of a site-specific theater project was more than I could resist. (Laughter)So, off I went into Friday afternoon traffic, and I'll never forget what I saw when I got there. For the performance, the audience walked around the neighborhood from house to house, and the residents, who were the performers, they came out of their houses, and they performed these autobiographical dances on their lawns, on their driveways. (Laughter) The show is a collaboration with a U.K.-based performance company called Lone Twin. Lone Twin had come to Minto and worked with the residents, and they had created these dances.This Australian-Indian girl, she came out and started to dance on her front lawn, and her father peered out the window to see what all the noise and commotion was about, and he soon joined her. And he was followed by her little sister. And soon they were all dancing this joyous, exuberant dance right there on their lawn. (Laughter)And as I walked through the neighborhood, I was amazed and I was moved by the incredible sense of ownership this community clearly felt about this event. ""Minto: Live"" brought Sydneysiders into dialogue with international artists, and really celebrated the diversity of Sydney on its own terms.The Sydney Festival which produced ""Minto: Live"" I think represents a new kind of 21st-century arts festival. These festivals are radically open. They can transform cities and communities.To understand this, I think it kind of makes sense to look where we've come from. Modern arts festivals were born in the rubble of World War II. Civic leaders created these annual events to celebrate culture as the highest expression of the human spirit. In 1947, the Edinburgh Festival was born and Avignon was born and hundreds of others would follow in their wake. The work they did was very, very high art, and stars came along like Laurie Anderson and Merce Cunningham and Robert Lepage who made work for this circuit, and you had these seminal shows like ""The Mahabharata"" and the monumental ""Einstein on the Beach.""But as the decades passed, these festivals, they really became the establishment, and as the culture and capital accelerated, the Internet brought us all together, high and low kind of disappeared, a new kind of festival emerged.The old festivals, they continued to thrive, but from Brighton to Rio to Perth, something new was emerging, and these festivals were really different. They're open, these festivals, because, like in Minto, they understand that the dialogue between the local and the global is essential. They're open because they ask the audience to be a player, a protagonist, a partner, rather than a passive spectator, and they're open because they know that imagination cannot be contained in buildings, and so much of the work they do is site-specific or outdoor work.So, the new festival, it asks the audience to play an essential role in shaping the performance. Companies like De La Guarda, which I produce, and Punchdrunk create these completely immersive experiences that put the audience at the center of the action, but the German performance company Rimini Protokoll takes this all to a whole new level. In a series of shows that includes ""100 Percent Vancouver,"" ""100 Percent Berlin,"" Rimini Protokoll makes shows that actually reflect society. Rimini Protokoll chooses 100 people that represent that city at that moment in terms of race and gender and class, through a careful process that begins three months before, and then those 100 people share stories about themselves and their lives, and the whole thing becomes a snapshot of that city at that moment. LIFT has always been a pioneer in the use of venues. They understand that theater and performance can happen anywhere. You can do a show in a schoolroom, in an airport, — (Laughter) — in a department store window.Artists are explorers. Who better to show us the city anew? Artists can take us to a far-flung part of the city that we haven't explored, or they can take us into that building that we pass every day but we never went into.An artist, I think, can really show us people that we might overlook in our lives. Back to Back is an Australian company of people with intellectual disabilities. I saw their amazing show in New York at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal at rush hour. We, the audience, were given headsets and seated on one side of the terminal. The actors were right there in front of us, right there among the commuters, and we could hear them, but we might not have otherwise seen them. So Back to Back takes site-specific theater and uses it to gently remind us about who and what we choose to edit out of our daily lives.So, the dialogue with the local and the global, the audience as participant and player and protagonist, the innovative use of site, all of these things come to play in the amazing work of the fantastic French company Royal de Luxe. Royal de Luxe's giant puppets come into a city and they live there for a few days.For ""The Sultan's Elephant,"" Royal de Luxe came to central London and brought it to a standstill with their story of a giant little girl and her friend, a time-traveling elephant. For a few days, they transformed a massive city into a community where endless possibility reigned. The Guardian wrote, ""If art is about transformation, then there can be no more transformative experience. What 'The Sultan's Elephant' represents is no less than an artistic occupation of the city and a reclamation of the streets for the people.""We can talk about the economic impacts of these festivals on their cities, but I'm much [more] interested in many more things, like how a festival helps a city to express itself, how it lets it come into its own. Festivals promote diversity, they bring neighbors into dialogue, they increase creativity, they offer opportunities for civic pride, they improve our general psychological well-being. In short, they make cities better places to live.Case in point: When ""The Sultan's Elephant"" came to London just nine months after 7/7, a Londoner wrote, ""For the first time since the London bombings, my daughter called up with that sparkle back in her voice. She had gathered with others to watch 'The Sultan's Elephant,' and, you know, it just made all the difference."" Lyn Gardner in The Guardian has written that a great festival can show us a map of the world, a map of the city and a map of ourselves, but there is no one fixed festival model. I think what's so brilliant about the festivals, the new festivals, is that they are really fully capturing the complexity and the excitement of the way we all live today. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_binder_the_arts_festival_revolution
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"I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns, and I'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster.This is in this context I'm going to tell you about video games. When we say video games, most of you think about children. It's true. Ninety percent of children do play video games. But let's be frank. When the kids are in bed, who is in front of the PlayStation? Most of you. The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults. (Laughter)So video [gaming] is pervasive throughout our society. It is clearly here to stay. It has an amazing impact on our everyday life. Consider these statistics released by Activision. After one month of release of the game ""Call Of Duty: Black Ops,"" it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide, right? Would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra?So what we are asking in the lab is, how can we leverage that power? Now I want to step back a bit. I know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games. (Shooting noises) The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right? And I'm almost sure most of you have thought, ""Oh, come on, can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies?"" I'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading Shakespeare. Right? Most parents would find that great. Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health. It's not, and binging is never good. But I'm going to argue that in reasonable doses, actually the very game I showed you at the beginning, those action-packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior.There's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you, right? You're all bombarded with that. I'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab. What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain. And so I'm going to take a few examples from our work.One first saying that I'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse. That's a statement about vision. There may be vision scientists among you. We actually know how to test that statement. We can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is. Well, guess what? People that don't play a lot of action games, that don't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens, have normal, or what we call corrective-to-normal vision. That's okay. The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week, 10 hours per week, 15 hours per week. By that statement, their vision should be really bad, right? Guess what? Their vision is really, really good. It's better than those that don't play. And it's better in two different ways. The first way is that they're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter, and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses, you can actually do it with just your eyesight. The other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray. Imagine you're driving in a fog. That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident, or getting into an accident. So we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision, and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better. Clearly, when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse.Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability. Okay, we know how to measure attention in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me. I'm going to show you colored words. I want you to shout out the color of the ink. Right? So this is the first example. [""Chair""] Orange, good. [""Table""] Green. [""Board""] Audience: Red.Daphne Bavelier: Red. [""Horse""] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow. [""Yellow""] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow. [""Blue""] DB: Yellow. Okay, you get my point, right? (Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the young guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older. What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster. So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems.Actually, those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention, and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world. This is something we use all the time. When you're driving, you're tracking, keeping track of the cars around you. You're also keeping track of the pedestrian, the running dog, and that's how you can actually be safe driving, right?In the lab, we get people to come to the lab, sit in front of a computer screen, and we give them little tasks that I'm going to get you to do again. You're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces. These are children in the schoolyard in Geneva during a recess during the winter. Most kids are happy. It's actually recess. But a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat. Everybody begins to move around, and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who didn't. So I'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid. It's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes. You can track, you can track, and then when it stops, and there is a question mark, and I ask you, did this kid have a coat or not? Was it yellow initially or blue? I hear a few yellow. Good. So most of you have a brain. (Laughter) I'm now going to ask you to do the task, but now with a little more challenging task. There are going to be three of them that are blue. Don't move your eyes. Please don't move your eyes. Keep your eyes fixated and expand, pull your attention. That's the only way you can actually do it. If you move your eyes, you're doomed. Yellow or blue? Audience: Yellow.DB: Good. So your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention. That's what we just did. Your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention, which is what is shown in this video here. That's for you guys, action video game players. A bit more challenging, right? (Laughter) Yellow or blue? Blue. We have some people that are serious out there. Yeah. (Laughter)Good. So in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people's behavior, we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain, and we do find many changes, but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention. So one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention. The other one is the frontal lobe, which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict. Now, when we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games.This actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain. You all know about multitasking. You all have been faulty of multitasking when you're driving and you pick up your cellphone. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Why? Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you, and so you're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident. Now, we can measure that kind of skills in the lab. We obviously don't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have. That would be a little costly proposition. But we design tasks on the computer where we can measure, to millisecond accuracy, how good they are at switching from one task to another. When we do that, we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really, really good. They switch really fast, very swiftly. They pay a very small cost.Now I'd like you to remember that result, and put it in the context of another group of technology users, a group which is actually much revered by society, which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking. What is multimedia-tasking? It's the fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they're doing search on the web at the same time as they're chatting on Facebook with their friends. That's a multimedia-tasker. There was a first study done by colleagues at Stanford and that we replicated that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely abysmal at multitasking. When we measure them in the lab, they're really bad.Right? So these kinds of results really makes two main points. The first one is that not all media are created equal. You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention. Even within video games, I'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games. Different video games have a different effect on your brains. So we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game.The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight. I showed that to you already, like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time, those action gamers have a lot of very good vision, etc. Here, what was really striking is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging in a lot of high multimedia-tasking are convinced they aced the test. So you show them their data, you show them they are bad and they're like, ""Not possible."" You know, they have this sort of gut feeling that, really, they are doing really, really good. That's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain.Now in a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health. There are some very poor uses of wine. There are some very poor uses of video games. But when consumed in reasonable doses, and at the right age, wine can be very good for health. There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy. So it's the same way, like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., and so we need and we're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games, either for education or for rehabilitation of patients.Now because we are interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients, we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours on end perform. I'm much more interested in taking any of you and showing that by forcing you to play an action game, I can actually change your vision for the better, whether you want to play that action game or not, right? That's the point of rehabilitation or education. Most of the kids don't go to school saying, ""Great, two hours of math!""So that's really the crux of the research, and to do that, we need to go one more step. And one more step is to do training studies. So let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation. Mental rotation is a task where I'm going to ask you, and again you're going to do the task, to look at this shape. Study it, it's a target shape, and I'm going to present to you four different shapes. One of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape. I want you to tell me which one: the first one, second one, third one or fourth one? Okay, I'll help you. Fourth one. One more. Get those brains working. Come on. That's our target shape. Third. Good! This is hard, right? Like, the reason that I asked you to do that is because you really feel your brain cringing, right? It doesn't really feel like playing mindless action video games.Well, what we do in these training studies is, people come to the lab, they do tasks like this one, we then force them to play 10 hours of action games. They don't play 10 hours of action games in a row. They do distributed practice, so little shots of 40 minutes several days over a period of two weeks. Then, once they are done with the training, they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task. So this is work from a colleague in Toronto. What they showed is that, initially, you know, subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age. After two weeks of training on action video games, they actually perform better, and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training. That's really, really important. Why? Because I told you we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation. We need to have effects that are going to be long-lasting.Now, at this point, a number of you are probably wondering well, what are you waiting for, to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy, or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia, for example?Well, we're working on it, but here is a challenge. There are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects, and that's what I'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation. There is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can't resist. That's the chocolate side of the equation. The issue is we need to put the two together, and it's a little bit like with food. Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli? None of you. (Laughter) And you probably have had that feeling, right, picking up an education game and sort of feeling, hmm, you know, it's not really fun, it's not really engaging. So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate, a brand of chocolate that is irresistible, that you really want to play, but that has all the ingredients, the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you can't recognize but are still working on your brains. And we're working on it, but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together, people that work in the entertainment software industry, and publishers, so these are not people that usually meet every day, but it's actually doable, and we are on the right track. I'd like to leave you with that thought, and thank you for your attention. (Applause) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_bavelier_your_brain_on_video_games
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"Living with a physical disability isn't easy anywhere in the world, but if you live in a country like the United States, there's certain appurtenances available to you that do make life easier. So if you're in a building, you can take an elevator. If you're crossing the street, you have sidewalk cutouts. And if you have to travel some distance farther than you can do under your own power, there's accessible vehicles, and if you can't afford one of those, there's accessible public transportation. But in the developing world, things are quite different. There's 40 million people who need a wheelchair but don't have one, and the majority of these people live in rural areas, where the only connections to community, to employment, to education, are by traveling long distances on rough terrain often under their own power. And the devices usually available to these people are not made for that context, break down quickly, and are hard to repair. I started looking at wheelchairs in developing countries in 2005, when I spent the summer assessing the state of technology in Tanzania, and I talked to wheelchair users, wheelchair manufacturers, disability groups, and what stood out to me is that there wasn't a device available that was designed for rural areas, that could go fast and efficiently on many types of terrain. So being a mechanical engineer, being at MIT and having lots of resources available to me, I thought I'd try to do something about it. Now when you're talking about trying to travel long distances on rough terrain, I immediately thought of a mountain bike, and a mountain bike's good at doing this because it has a gear train, and you can shift to a low gear if you have to climb a hill or go through mud or sand and you get a lot of torque but a low speed. And if you want to go faster, say on pavement, you can shift to a high gear, and you get less torque, but higher speeds. So the logical evolution here is to just make a wheelchair with mountain bike components, which many people have done. But these are two products available in the U.S. that would be difficult to transfer into developing countries because they're much, much too expensive. And the context I'm talking about is where you need to have a product that is less than 200 dollars. And this ideal product would also be able to go about five kilometers a day so you could get to your job, get to school, and do it on many, many different types of terrain. But when you get home or want to go indoors at your work, it's got to be small enough and maneuverable enough to use inside. And furthermore, if you want it to last a long time out in rural areas, it has to be repairable using the local tools, materials and knowledge in those contexts. So the real crux of the problem here is, how do you make a system that's a simple device but gives you a large mechanical advantage? How do you make a mountain bike for your arms that doesn't have the mountain bike cost and complexity? So as is the case with simple solutions, oftentimes the answer is right in front of your face, and for us it was levers. We use levers all the time, in tools, doorknobs, bicycle parts. And that moment of inspiration, that key invention moment, was when I was sitting in front of my design notebook and I started thinking about somebody grabbing a lever, and if they grab near the end of the lever, they can get an effectively long lever and produce a lot of torque as they push back and forth, and effectively get a low gear. And as they slide their hand down the lever, they can push with a smaller effective lever length, but push through a bigger angle every stroke, which makes a faster rotational speed, and gives you an effective high gear. So what's exciting about this system is that it's really, really mechanically simple, and you could make it using technology that's been around for hundreds of years. So seeing this in practice, this is the Leveraged Freedom Chair that, after a few years of development, we're now going into production with, and this is a full-time wheelchair user — he's paralyzed — in Guatemala, and you see he's able to traverse pretty rough terrain. Again, the key innovation of this technology is that when he wants to go fast, he just grabs the levers near the pivots and goes through a big angle every stroke, and as the going gets tougher, he just slides his hands up the levers, creates more torque, and kind of bench-presses his way out of trouble through the rough terrain. Now the big, important point here is that the person is the complex machine in this system. It's the person that's sliding his hands up and down the levers, so the mechanism itself can be very simple and composed of bicycle parts you can get anywhere in the world. Because those bicycle parts are so ubiquitously available, they're super-cheap. They're made by the gazillions in China and India, and we can source them anywhere in the world, build the chair anywhere, and most importantly repair it, even out in a village with a local bicycle mechanic who has local tools, knowledge and parts available. Now, when you want to use the LFC indoors, all you have to do is pull the levers out of the drivetrain, stow them in the frame, and it converts into a normal wheelchair that you can use just like any other normal wheelchair, and we sized it like a normal wheelchair, so it's narrow enough to fit through a standard doorway, it's low enough to fit under a table, and it's small and maneuverable enough to fit in a bathroom and this is important so the user can get up close to a toilet, and be able to transfer off just like he could in a normal wheelchair. Now, there's three important points that I want to stress that I think really hit home in this project. The first is that this product works well because we were effectively able to combine rigorous engineering science and analysis with user-centered design focused on the social and usage and economic factors important to wheelchair users in the developing countries. So I'm an academic at MIT, and I'm a mechanical engineer, so I can do things like look at the type of terrain you want to travel on, and figure out how much resistance it should impose, look at the parts we have available and mix and match them to figure out what sort of gear trains we can use, and then look at the power and force you can get out of your upper body to analyze how fast you should be able to go in this chair as you put your arms up and down the levers. So as a wet-behind-the-ears student, excited, our team made a prototype, brought that prototype to Tanzania, Kenya and Vietnam in 2008, and found it was terrible because we didn't get enough input from users. So because we tested it with wheelchair users, with wheelchair manufacturers, we got that feedback from them, not just articulating their problems, but articulating their solutions, and worked together to go back to the drawing board and make a new design, which we brought back to East Africa in '09 that worked a lot better than a normal wheelchair on rough terrain, but it still didn't work well indoors because it was too big, it was heavy, it was hard to move around, so again with that user feedback, we went back to the drawing board, came up with a better design, 20 pounds lighter, as narrow as a regular wheelchair, tested that in a field trial in Guatemala, and that advanced the product to the point where we have now that it's going into production. Now also being engineering scientists, we were able to quantify the performance benefits of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, so here are some shots of our trial in Guatemala where we tested the LFC on village terrain, and tested people's biomechanical outputs, their oxygen consumption, how fast they go, how much power they're putting out, both in their regular wheelchairs and using the LFC, and we found that the LFC is about 80 percent faster going on these terrains than a normal wheelchair. It's also about 40 percent more efficient than a regular wheelchair, and because of the mechanical advantage you get from the levers, you can produce 50 percent higher torque and really muscle your way through the really, really rough terrain. Now the second lesson that we learned in this is that the constraints on this design really push the innovation, because we had to hit such a low price point, because we had to make a device that could travel on many, many types of terrain but still be usable indoors, and be simple enough to repair, we ended up with a fundamentally new product, a new product that is an innovation in a space that really hasn't changed in a hundred years. And these are all merits that are not just good in the developing world. Why not in countries like the U.S. too? So we teamed up with Continuum, a local product design firm here in Boston to make the high-end version, the developed world version, that we'll probably sell primarily in the U.S. and Europe, but to higher-income buyers. And the final point I want to make is that I think this project worked well because we engaged all the stakeholders that buy into this project and are important to consider in bringing the technology from inception of an idea through innovation, validation, commercialization and dissemination, and that cycle has to start and end with end users. These are the people that define the requirements of the technology, and these are the people that have to give the thumbs-up at the end, and say, ""Yeah, it actually works. It meets our needs."" So people like me in the academic space, we can do things like innovate and analyze and test, create data and make bench-level prototypes, but how do you get that bench-level prototype to commercialization? So we need gap-fillers like Continuum that can work on commercializing, and we started a whole NGO to bring our chair to market — Global Research Innovation Technology — and then we also teamed up with a big manufacturer in India, Pinnacle Industries, that's tooled up now to make 500 chairs a month and will make the first batch of 200 next month, which will be delivered in India. And then finally, to get this out to the people in scale, we teamed up with the largest disability organization in the world, Jaipur Foot. Now what's powerful about this model is when you bring together all these stakeholders that represent each link in the chain from inception of an idea all the way to implementation in the field, that's where the magic happens. That's where you can take a guy like me, an academic, but analyze and test and create a new technology and quantitatively determine how much better the performance is. You can connect with stakeholders like the manufacturers and talk with them face-to-face and leverage their local knowledge of manufacturing practices and their clients and combine that knowledge with our engineering knowledge to create something greater than either of us could have done alone. And then you can also engage the end user in the design process, and not just ask him what he needs, but ask him how he thinks it can be achieved. And this picture was taken in India in our last field trial, where we had a 90-percent adoption rate where people switched to using our Leveraged Freedom Chair over their normal wheelchair, and this picture specifically is of Ashok, and Ashok had a spinal injury when he fell out of a tree, and he had been working at a tailor, but once he was injured he wasn't able to transport himself from his house over a kilometer to his shop in his normal wheelchair. The road was too rough. But the day after he got an LFC, he hopped in it, rode that kilometer, opened up his shop and soon after landed a contract to make school uniforms and started making money, started providing for his family again. Ashok: You also encouraged me to work. I rested for a day at home. The next day I went to my shop. Now everything is back to normal. Amos Winter: And thank you very much for having me today. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amos_winter_the_cheap_all_terrain_wheelchair
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"Tommy Mizzone: Tonight we're going to play you two songs. We're three brothers from New Jersey, and the funny thing is that, believe it or not, we are hooked on bluegrass and we're excited to play it for you tonight. (Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you, thank you. (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. I'm Robbie Mizzone. I'm 13, and I play the fiddle. This is my brother, Jonny. He's 10, and he plays the banjo. And on guitar is my 14-year-old brother, Tommy. (Applause) We call ourselves the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys. (Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you. JM: Thank you all. TM: Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/teenaged_boy_wonders_play_bluegrass
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"When I graduated UCLA, I moved to northern California, and I lived in a little town called Elk on the Mendocino coast, and I didn't have a phone or TV, but I had U.S. mail, and life was good back then, if you could remember it. I'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie, and I'd ship my film to San Francisco, and lo and behold, two days later, it would end up on my front door, which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood. (Music) I didn't have much money, but I had time and a sense of wonder. (Music)So I started shooting time-lapse photography. It would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film, because that's all I could afford.I've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 30 years, and to see them move is a dance I'll never get tired of. Their beauty immerses us with color, taste, touch. It also provides a third of the food we eat. (Music) Beauty and seduction is nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with. It opens our hearts, and makes us realize we are a part of nature and we're not separate from it. When we see ourselves in nature, it also connects us to every one of us, because it's clear that it's all connected in one.When people see my images, a lot of times they'll say, ""Oh my God."" Have you ever wondered what that meant? The ""oh"" means it caught your attention, makes you present, makes you mindful. The ""my"" means it connects with something deep inside your soul. It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And ""God""? God is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we're connected to a universe that celebrates life.Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes? And if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle? And aren't we grateful for our brains that can, you know, take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world? And aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature? (Music)Nature's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude. (Music) So I have a gift I want to share with you today, a project I'm working on called Happiness Revealed, and it'll give us a glimpse into that perspective from the point of view of a child and an elderly man of that world.Child: When I watch TV, it's just some shows that you just — that are pretend, and when you explore, you get more imagination than you already had, and when you get more imagination, it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things, like the path, if it's a path, it could lead you to a beach, or something, and it could be beautiful. (Music)Elderly Man: You think this is just another day in your life? It's not just another day. It's the one day that is given to you today. It's given to you. It's a gift. It's the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment. Look at the sky. We so rarely look at the sky. We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment, with clouds coming and going. We just think of the weather, and even with the weather, we don't think of all the many nuances of weather. We just think of good weather and bad weather. This day, right now, has unique weather, maybe a kind that will never exactly in that form come again. That formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now. Open your eyes. Look at that.Look at the faces of people whom you meet. Each one has an incredible story behind their face, a story that you could never fully fathom, not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors. We all go back so far, and in this present moment, on this day, all the people you meet, all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here like a life-giving water, if you only open your heart and drink. (Music)Open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us. You flip a switch and there is electric light. You turn a faucet and there is warm water and cold water, and drinkable water. It's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience.So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart. And so I wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings, and let them flow through you, that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you, just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch, just by your presence. Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you, and then it will really be a good day. (Music)(Applause)Louie Schwartzberg: Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_nature_beauty_gratitude
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"There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces.So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. And these projects came from questions I had, like: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments?(Laughter)How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? How can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today?Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade.(Laughter)The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America.I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever.In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me. And her death was sudden and unexpected. And I thought about death a lot. And ... this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had. And ... brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you.So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: ""Before I die, I want to ..."" So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their life, and share their personal aspirations in public space.I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall.""Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy.""(Laughter)""Before I die, I want to straddle the International Dateline.""""Before I die, I want to sing for millions.""""Before I die, I want to plant a tree.""""Before I die, I want to live off the grid.""""Before I die, I want to hold her one more time.""""Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry.""""Before I die, I want to be completely myself.""So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change.I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community. So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another.Two of the most valuable things we have are time, and our relationships with other people. In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective, and remember that life is brief and tender. Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about, or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life.Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to
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"Everything I do, and everything I do professionally — my life — has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. From 1971 to 1977 — I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) — I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries.I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. And I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, ""Ripples from the Zambezi,"" was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ... And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter) And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, ""Thank God we're here."" (Laughter) ""Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation.""And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, ""Look how easy agriculture is."" When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. (Laughter)And we said to the Zambians, ""My God, the hippos!""And the Zambians said, ""Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here."" (Laughter)""Why didn't you tell us?""""You never asked.""I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.You should see the rubbish — (Applause) — You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. You want to read the book, read ""Dead Aid,"" by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. The book was published in 2009. We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. Just go and read her book. Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done.We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. The two words come from the Latin root ""pater,"" which means ""father."" But they mean two different things. Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. ""I love you so much."" Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. That's why the white people in Africa are called ""bwana,"" boss.I was given a slap in the face reading a book, ""Small is Beautiful,"" written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid. The first principle of aid is respect. This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, ""Can we — can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial?""I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. So what you do — you shut up. You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. We don't work from offices. We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. We have zero infrastructure. And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do.The most important thing is passion. You can give somebody an idea. If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available.So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings.Let me tell you a secret. There is a problem with community meetings. Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. So planning has this blind spot. The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings.What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. You have to create a new profession. The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living.I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, ""You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?"" And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, ""Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?"" In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, ""How can you do that? How can you do — ?"" And I said, ""I do something very, very, very difficult. I shut up, and listen to them."" (Laughter)So — (Applause) — So the government says, ""Do it again."" (Laughter) We've done it in 300 communities around the world. We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude.Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: ""Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy."" Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship.So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded.So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. We are at the end of the first industrial revolution — nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing — and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. The technologies do not exist to do that. Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! Government? Forget about it! It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now.There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York.So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies — 1,001. The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford.However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. First, you have to offer them confidentiality. Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. Guess what? We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. It doesn't exist. This person has never been born. We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world — Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word ""I"" and how many times he uses the word ""we."" Never the word ""I,"" and the word ""we"" 32 times. He wasn't alone when he started. Nobody started a company alone. No one. So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, ""What do you need? What can you do? Can you make it? Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?"" ""Oh, no, I cannot do this.""""Would you like me to find you somebody?"" We activate communities. We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someone_shut_up_and_listen
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"Hi. I'm here to talk about congestion, namely road congestion. Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon. It exists in basically all of the cities all around the world, which is a little bit surprising when you think about it. I mean, think about how different cities are, actually. I mean, you have the typical European cities, with a dense urban core, good public transportation mostly, not a lot of road capacity. But then, on the other hand, you have the American cities. It's moving by itself, okay. Anyway, the American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation. And then you have the emerging world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core. And traffic planners all around the world have tried lots of different measures: dense cities or dispersed cities, lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information, or lots of different things, but nothing seems to work.But all of these attempts have one thing in common. They're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving. They're essentially, to a point, attempts at planning what other people should do, planning their life for them.Now, planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do, and let me tell you a story. Back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, an urban planner in London got a phone call from a colleague in Moscow saying, basically, ""Hi, this is Vladimir. I'd like to know, who's in charge of London's bread supply?""And the urban planner in London goes, ""What do you mean, who's in charge of London's — I mean, no one is in charge."" ""Oh, but surely someone must be in charge. I mean, it's a very complicated system. Someone must control all of this.""""No. No. No one is in charge. I mean, it basically — I haven't really thought of it. It basically organizes itself.""It organizes itself. That's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing, and this is a very deep insight. When you try to solve really complex social problems, the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives. You don't plan the details, and people will figure out what to do, how to adapt to this new framework.And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion.This is a map of Stockholm, my hometown. Now, Stockholm is a medium-sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges — narrow bridges, old bridges — which means lots of road congestion. And these red dots show the most congested parts, which are the bridges that lead into the inner city. And then someone came up with the idea that, apart from good public transport, apart from spending money on roads, let's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks.Now, one or two euros, that isn't really a lot of money, I mean compared to parking charges and running costs, etc., so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn't really react to this fairly small charge. You would be wrong. One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours. Now, 20 percent, well, that's a fairly huge figure, you might think, but you've still got 80 percent left of the problem, right? Because you still have 80 percent of the traffic. Now, that's also wrong, because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon, meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really, really rapidly. But fortunately, it also works the other way around. If you can reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might think. Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2. The first day with the congestion charges looked like this. This is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets. You really reduce congestion quite substantially.But, well, as I said, I mean, car drivers adapt, right? So after a while they would all come back because they have sort of gotten used to charges. Wrong again. It's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm, and we basically have the same low traffic levels still.But you see, there's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007. Well, the thing is that, the congestion charges, they were introduced first as a trial, so they were introduced in January and then abolished again at the end of July, followed by a referendum, and then they were reintroduced again in 2007, which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity. I mean, this was a really fun experiment to start with, and we actually got to do it twice. And personally, I would like to do this every once a year or so, but they won't let me do that. But it was fun anyway.So, we followed up. What happened? This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this. All the cars were back again, and you even have to admire the car drivers. They adapt so extremely quickly. The first day they all came back. And this effect hanged on. So 2007 figures looked like this.Now these traffic figures are really exciting and a little bit surprising and very useful to know, but I would say that the most surprising slide here I'm going to show you today is not this one. It's this one. This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm, and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006, people were fiercely against it. Seventy percent of the population didn't want this. But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect, that people hated it more and more. No, on the contrary, they changed, up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges, meaning that — I mean, let me repeat that: 70 percent of the population in Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free.Okay. So why can that be? Why is that? Well, think about it this way. Who changed? I mean, the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared, surely they must be discontent in a way. And where did they go? If we can understand this, then maybe we can figure out how people can be so happy with this. Well, so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services, and tried to figure out who changed, and where did they go? And it turned out that they don't know themselves. (Laughter) For some reason, the car drivers are — they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do. And why is that? It's because that travel patterns are much less stable than you might think. Each day, people make new decisions, and people change and the world changes around them, and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people don't even notice. They're not even aware of this themselves.And the other question, who changed their mind? Who changed their opinion, and why? So we did another interview survey, tried to figure out why people changed their mind, and what type of group changed their minds? And after analyzing the answers, it turned out that more than half of them believe that they haven't changed their minds. They're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along. Which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent, and reduced congestion by enormous numbers, and people aren't even aware that they have changed, and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along.This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems, and when you do that, you shouldn't try to tell people how to adapt. You should just nudge them in the right direction. And if you do it right, people will actually embrace the change, and if you do it right, people will actually even like it. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonas_eliasson_how_to_solve_traffic_jams
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"Life is about opportunities — creating them and embracing them. And for me, that was the Olympic dream. That's what defined me. That was my bliss.As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates. As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream. Life was good. We'd been on our bikes for around five-and-a-half hours when we got to the part of the ride that I loved, and that was the hills, because I loved the hills. I got up off the seat of my bike and I started pumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air, I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face.And then everything went black. Where was I? What was happening? My body was consumed by pain. I'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride. I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney. I had extensive and life-threatening injuries. I'd broken my neck and my back in six places. I broke five ribs on my left side. I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone. I broke some bones in my feet. My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel. My head was cut open across the front, lifted back, exposing the skull underneath. I had head injures. I had internal injuries. I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five liters of blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold. By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing. I was having a really bad day.(Laughter)For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions. I had an awareness of being in my body, but also being out of my body, somewhere else, watching from above, as if it was happening to someone else. Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken?But this voice kept calling me: ""Come on, stay with me.""""No, it's too hard.""""Come on. This is our opportunity.""""No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me.""""Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together.""I was at a crossroads. I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever. It was the fight of my life. After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body. And the internal bleeding stopped.The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down. They said to my parents that the neck break was a stable fracture, but the back was completely crushed: the vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut, stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces. They'd have to operate. They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me — literally cut me in half. I have a scar that wraps around my entire body. They picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord. They took out two of my broken ribs and they rebuilt my back — L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib, they fused T12, L1 and L2 together. Then they stitched me up; they took an entire hour to stitch me up. I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success, because at that stage, I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, ""Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!""(Laughter)I had no idea. That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely.But then the doctor came over to me and she said, ""Janine, the operation was a success, and we've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could. But the damage is permanent. The central nervous system nerves — there is no cure. You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll have all of the injuries that go along with that. You'll have no feeling from the waist down, and at most, you might get 10 or 20 percent return. You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life. You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life. And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame."" And then she said, ""Janine, you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life, because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before.""(Gasps)I tried to grasp what she was saying. I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done. If I couldn't do that, then what could I do? And the question I asked myself is: If I couldn't do that, then who was I?They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal. I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed. I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots. I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips. I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head. I shared the ward with five other people, and the amazing thing is, because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like. How amazing is that? How often in life do you get to make friendships, judgment-free, purely based on spirit? And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears, and our hopes for life after the spinal ward.I remember one night, one of the nurses came in, Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws. He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said, ""Start threading them together."" Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did.(Laughter)And when we'd finished, he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward. And then he said, ""OK everybody, hold on to your straws."" And we did. And he said, ""Right ... Now we're all connected."" And as we held on and we breathed as one, we knew we weren't on this journey alone. And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward ... there were moments of incredible depth and richness, of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before. And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward, we would never be the same.After six months, it was time to go home. I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair, wrapped in a plaster body cast, and feeling the sun on my face for the first time. I soaked it up and I thought, ""How could I ever have taken this for granted?"" I felt so incredibly grateful for my life. But before I left hospital, the head nurse had said to me, ""Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen."" And I said, ""What?"" And she said, ""You're going to get depressed."" And I said, ""Not me, not Janine the Machine,"" which was my nickname. She said, ""You are, because, see, it happens to everyone. In the spinal ward, that's normal. You're in a wheelchair. That's normal. But you're going to get home and realize how different life is.""And I got home. And something happened. I realized Sister Sam was right. I did get depressed. I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down, attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk. I'd lost so much weight in hospital, I now weighed about 80 pounds. And I wanted to give up. All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back.And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed and saying, ""I wonder if life will ever be good again.""And I thought, ""How could it? Because I've lost everything that I valued, everything that I'd worked towards. Gone."" And the question I asked was, ""Why me? Why me?""And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward, particularly Maria. Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk. They told me, ""We're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her."" I was worried. I didn't know how I'd react to being next to her. I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing, because Maria always smiled. She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once. And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance.And I realized that this wasn't just my life; it was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain; it was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before, that I had a choice: I could keep fighting this, or I could let go and accept not only my body, but the circumstances of my life. And then I stopped asking, ""Why me?"" And I started to ask, ""Why not me?"" And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start.I had never before thought of myself as a creative person. I was an athlete; my body was a machine. But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do: that of rebuilding a life. And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom. I was no longer tied to a set path. I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities. And that realization was about to change my life.Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead. I looked up, and I thought to myself, ""That's it! If I can't walk, then I might as well fly.""(Laughter)I said, ""Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly."" She said, ""That's nice, dear.""(Laughter)I said, ""Pass me the yellow pages."" She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school, I said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight. They said, ""When do you want to come out?"" I said, ""Well, I have to get a friend to drive me because I can't drive. Sort of can't walk, either. Is that a problem?"" I made a booking, and weeks later, my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls.(Laughter)I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license.(Laughter)I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand. I said, ""Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson."" They took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws. ""You get her."" ""No, no, you take her."" Finally a guy goes, ""Hi, I'm Andrew. I'm going to take you flying."" I go, ""Great!"" They get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane — it was beautiful. They had to slide me up on the wing to put me in the cockpit. They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere. I'm going, ""Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?"" Andrew got in the front, started the plane, and said, ""Would you like to have a go at taxiing?"" That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground. I said, ""No, I can't use my legs."" He went, ""Oh."" I said, ""But I can use my hands,"" and he said, ""OK.""So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power. And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom. And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, ""You see that mountain over there?"" And I said, ""Yeah."" And he said, ""Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain."" And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains, where the journey had begun. And I took the controls, and I was flying. And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward. I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot. Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical.(Laughter)But I'd worry about that later, because right now, I had a dream. So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan. And I practiced my walking as much as I could, and I went from the point of two people holding me up ... to one person holding me up ... to the point where I could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn't too far apart. And then I made great progression, to the point where I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls, like this. And Mom said she was forever following me, wiping off my fingerprints.(Laughter)But at least she always knew where I was.(Laughter)So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again, I went on with my theory study. And then eventually, amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical, and that was my green light to fly. And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school, way out of my comfort zone, all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots, you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast, and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls, my bag of medication and catheters and my limp. They use to look at me and think, ""Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this."" And sometimes I thought that, too. But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries.And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license. Then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia. And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin-engine rating. And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather, and got my instrument rating. And then I got my commercial pilot's license. And then I got my instructor rating. And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly ... just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward.(Applause)(Applause ends)And then I thought, ""Why stop there? Why not learn to fly upside down?""(Laughter)And I did, and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor.(Laughter)And Mom and Dad? Never been up.(Laughter)But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited, it was my spirit that was unstoppable.The philosopher Lao Tzu once said, ""When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be."" I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life. It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should have ... that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me. I now know that my real strength never came from my body. And although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically, who I am is unchanged. The pilot light inside of me was still alight, just as it is in each and every one of us.I know that I'm not my body. And I also know that you're not yours. And then it no longer matters what you look like, where you come from, or what you do for a living. All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are, because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws. And it's time to join those up and to hang on. And if we are to move towards our collective bliss ... it's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart.So raise your straws if you'll join me.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_shepherd_a_broken_body_isn_t_a_broken_person
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"I would like to talk to you about a very special group of animals.There are 10,000 species of birds in the world. Vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds. When you see a vulture like this, the first thing that comes to your mind is, these are disgusting, ugly, greedy creatures that are just after your flesh, associated with politicians. (Laughter) (Applause) I want to change that perception. I want to change those feelings you have for these birds, because they need our sympathy. They really do. (Laughter) And I'll tell you why.First of all, why do they have such a bad press? When Charles Darwin went across the Atlantic in 1832 on the Beagle, he saw the turkey vulture, and he said, ""These are disgusting birds with bald scarlet heads that are formed to revel in putridity."" (Laughter) You could not get a worse insult, and that from Charles Darwin. (Laughter) You know, he changed his mind when he came back, and I'll tell you why. They've also be associated with Disney — (Laughter) — personified as goofy, dumb, stupid characters.More recently, if you've been following the Kenyan press — (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers) — these are the attributes that they associated the Kenyan MPs with. But I want to challenge that. I want to challenge that. Do you know why? Because MPs do not keep the environment clean. (Laughter) MPs do not help to prevent the spread of diseases. They are hardly monogamous. (Laughter) (Applause) They are far from being extinct. (Laughter) And, my favorite is, vultures are better looking. (Applause) (Laughter)So there's two types of vultures in this planet. There are the New World vultures that are mainly found in the Americas, like the condors and the caracaras, and then the Old World vultures, where we have 16 species. From these 16, 11 of them are facing a high risk of extinction.So why are vultures important? First of all, they provide vital ecological services. They clean up. They're our natural garbage collectors. They clean up carcasses right to the bone. They help to kill all the bacteria. They help absorb anthrax that would otherwise spread and cause huge livestock losses and diseases in other animals. Recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures, carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose, and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases.Vultures also have tremendous historical significance. They have been associated in ancient Egyptian culture. Nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood, and together with the cobra, symbolized the unity between Upper and Lower Egypt. In Hindu mythology, Jatayu was the vulture god, and he risked his life in order to save the goddess Sita from the 10-headed demon Ravana. In Tibetan culture, they are performing very important sky burials. In places like Tibet, there are no places to bury the dead, or wood to cremate them, so these vultures provide a natural disposal system.So what is the problem with vultures? We have eight species of vultures that occur in Kenya, of which six are highly threatened with extinction. The reason is that they're getting poisoned, and the reason that they're getting poisoned is because there's human-wildlife conflicts. The pastoral communities are using this poison to target predators, and in return, the vultures are falling victim to this.In South Asia, in countries like India and Pakistan, four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered, which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct, and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like Diclofenac. This drug has now been banned for veterinary use in India, and they have taken a stand. Because there are no vultures, there's been a spread in the numbers of feral dogs at carcass dump sites, and when you have feral dogs, you have a huge time bomb of rabies. The number of cases of rabies has increased tremendously in India.Kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in Africa: 353 wind turbines are going to be up at Lake Turkana. I am not against wind energy, but we need to work with the governments, because wind turbines do this to birds. They slice them in half. They are bird-blending machines. In West Africa, there's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market.So what's being done? Well, we're conducting research on these birds. We're putting transmitters on them. We're trying to determine their basic ecology, and see where they go. We can see that they travel different countries, so if you focus on a problem locally, it's not going to help you. We need to work with governments in regional levels. We're working with local communities. We're talking to them about appreciating vultures, about the need from within to appreciate these wonderful creatures and the services that they provide.How can you help? You can become active, make noise. You can write a letter to your government and tell them that we need to focus on these very misunderstood creatures. Volunteer your time to spread the word. Spread the word. When you walk out of this room, you will be informed about vultures, but speak to your families, to your children, to your neighbors about vultures.They are very graceful. Charles Darwin said he changed his mind because he watched them fly effortlessly without energy in the skies. Kenya, this world, will be much poorer without these wonderful species. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/munir_virani_why_i_love_vultures
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"I'm a designer and an educator. I'm a multitasking person, and I push my students to fly through a very creative, multitasking design process. But how efficient is, really, this multitasking?Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking. A couple of examples. Look at that. This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter) So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS, and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue.So someone tells us the story about supertaskers, so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment. But what about ourselves, and what about our reality? When's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend? So this is a project I'm working on, and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super, hyper — (Laughter) (Applause) to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function.Another example: Have you ever been to Venice? How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island. But our multitasking reality is pretty different, and full of tons of information. So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure?I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off.So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product. Why not? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paolo_cardini_forget_multitasking_try_monotasking
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"I'm going to talk about the power of a word: jihad.To the vast majority of practicing Muslims, jihad is an internal struggle for the faith. It is a struggle within, a struggle against vice, sin, temptation, lust, greed. It is a struggle to try and live a life that is set by the moral codes written in the Koran. In that original idea, the concept of jihad is as important to Muslims as the idea of grace is to Christians. It's a very powerful word, jihad, if you look at it in that respect, and there's a certain almost mystical resonance to it. And that's the reason why, for hundreds of years, Muslims everywhere have named their children Jihad, their daughters as much as their sons, in the same way that, say, Christians name their daughters Grace, and Hindus, my people, name our daughters Bhakti, which means, in Sanskrit, spiritual worship.But there have always been, in Islam, a small group, a minority, who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith, or the faithul. And some of these people believe that in that struggle, it is sometimes okay to take up arms. And so the thousands of young Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation of a Muslim country, in their minds they were fighting a jihad, they were doing jihad, and they named themselves the Mujahideen, which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad. And we forget this now, but back then the Mujahideen were celebrated in this country, in America. We thought of them as holy warriors who were taking the good fight to the ungodly communists. America gave them weapons, gave them money, gave them support, encouragement.But within that group, a tiny, smaller group, a minority within a minority within a minority, were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad, and in time this group would come to be led by Osama bin Laden, and he refined the idea. His idea of jihad was a global war of terror, primarily targeted at the far enemy, at the crusaders from the West, against America. And the things he did in the pursuit of this jihad were so horrendous, so monstrous, and had such great impact, that his definition was the one that stuck, not just here in the West. We didn't know any better. We didn't pause to ask. We just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad, then that's what jihad must mean. But it wasn't just us. Even in the Muslim world, his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance.A year ago I was in Tunis, and I met the imam of a very small mosque, an old man. Fifteen years ago, he named his granddaughter Jihad, after the old meaning. He hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life. But he told me that after 9/11, he began to have second thoughts. He worried that if he called her by that name, especially outdoors, outside in public, he might be seen as endorsing bin Laden's idea of jihad. On Fridays in his mosque, he gave sermons trying to reclaim the meaning of the word, but his congregants, the people who came to his mosque, they had seen the videos. They had seen pictures of the planes going into the towers, the towers coming down. They had heard bin Laden say that that was jihad, and claimed victory for it. And so the old imam worried that his words were falling on deaf ears. No one was paying attention.He was wrong. Some people were paying attention, but for the wrong reasons. The United States, at this point, was putting pressure on all its Arab allies, including Tunisia, to stamp out extremism in their societies, and this imam found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of the Tunisian intelligence service. They had never paid him any attention before — old man, small mosque — but now they began to pay visits, and sometimes they would drag him in for questions, and always the same question: ""Why did you name your granddaughter Jihad? Why do you keep using the word jihad in your Friday sermons? Do you hate Americans? What is your connection to Osama bin Laden?""So to the Tunisian intelligence agency, and organizations like it all over the Arab world, jihad equaled extremism, Bin Laden's definition had become institutionalized. That was the power of that word that he was able to do. And it filled this old imam, it filled him with great sadness. He told me that, of bin Laden's many crimes, this was, in his mind, one that didn't get enough attention, that he took this word, this beautiful idea. He didn't so much appropriate it as kidnapped it and debased it and corrupted it and turned it into something it was never meant to be, and then persuaded all of us that it always was a global jihad.But the good news is that the global jihad is almost over, as bin Laden defined it. It was dying well before he did, and now it's on its last legs. Opinion polls from all over the Muslim world show that there is very little interest among Muslims in a global holy war against the West, against the far enemy. The supply of young men willing to fight and die for this cause is dwindling. The supply of money — just as important, more important perhaps — the supply of money to this activity is also dwindling. The wealthy fanatics who were previously sponsoring this kind of activity are now less generous.What does that mean for us in the West? Does it mean we can break out the champagne, wash our hands of it, disengage, sleep easy at night? No. Disengagement is not an option, because if you let local jihad survive, it becomes international jihad. And so there's now a lot of different violent jihads all over the world. In Somalia, in Mali, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of Osama bin Laden. They use his rhetoric. They even use the brand name he created for his jihad. So there is now an al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, there's an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, there is an al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. There are other groups — in Nigeria, Boko Haram, in Somalia, al Shabaab — and they all pay homage to Osama bin Laden. But if you look closely, they're not fighting a global jihad. They're fighting battles over much narrower issues. Usually it has to do with ethnicity or race or sectarianism, or it's a power struggle. More often than not, it's a power struggle in one country, or even a small region within one country. Occasionally they will go across a border, from Iraq to Syria, from Mali to Algeria, from Somalia to Kenya, but they're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy.But that doesn't mean that we can relax. I was in Yemen recently, where — it's the home of the last al Qaeda franchise that still aspires to attack America, attack the West. It's old school al Qaeda. You may remember these guys. They are the ones who tried to send the underwear bomber here, and they were using the Internet to try and instigate violence among American Muslims. But they have been distracted recently. Last year, they took control over a portion of southern Yemen, and ran it, Taliban-style. And then the Yemeni military got its act together, and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out, and since then, most of their activities, most of their attacks have been directed at Yemenis.So I think we've come to a point now where we can say that, just like all politics, all jihad is local. But that's still not reason for us to disengage, because we've seen that movie before, in Afghanistan. When those Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union, we disengaged. And even before the fizz had gone out of our celebratory champagne, the Taliban had taken over in Kabul, and we said, ""Local jihad, not our problem."" And then the Taliban gave the keys of Kandahar to Osama bin Laden. He made it our problem. Local jihad, if you ignore it, becomes global jihad again.The good news is that it doesn't have to be. We know how to fight it now. We have the tools. We have the knowhow, and we can take the lessons we've learned from the fight against global jihad, the victory against global jihad, and apply those to local jihad.What are those lessons? We know who killed bin Laden: SEAL Team Six. Do we know, do we understand, who killed bin Ladenism? Who ended the global jihad? There lie the answers to the solution to local jihad.Who killed bin Ladenism? Let's start with bin Laden himself. He probably thought 9/11 was his greatest achievement. In reality, it was the beginning of the end for him. He killed 3,000 innocent people, and that filled the Muslim world with horror and revulsion, and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream. He condemned himself to operating on the lunatic fringes of his own community. 9/11 didn't empower him; it doomed him.Who killed bin Ladenism? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed it. He was the especially sadistic head of al Qaeda in Iraq who sent hundreds of suicide bombers to attack not Americans but Iraqis. Muslims. Sunni as well as Shiites. Any claim that al Qaeda had to being protectors of Islam against the Western crusaders was drowned in the blood of Iraqi Muslims.Who killed Osama bin Laden? The SEAL Team Six. Who killed bin Ladenism? Al Jazeera did, Al Jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in Arabic, because they circumvented the old, state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people. Al Jazeera brought information to them, showed them what was being said and done in the name of their religion, exposed the hypocrisy of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and allowed them, gave them the information that allowed them to come to their own conclusions.Who killed bin Ladenism? The Arab Spring did, because it showed a way for young Muslims to bring about change in a manner that Osama bin Laden, with his limited imagination, could never have conceived.Who defeated the global jihad? The American military did, the American soldiers did, with their allies, fighting in faraway battlefields. And perhaps, a time will come when they get the rightful credit for it.So all these factors, and many more besides, we don't even fully understand some of them yet, these came together to defeat a monstrosity as big as bin Ladenism, the global jihad, you needed this group effort.Now, not all of these things will work in local jihad. The American military is not going to march into Nigeria to take on Boko Haram, and it's unlikely that SEAL Team Six will rappel into the homes of al Shabaab's leaders and take them out.But many of these other factors that were in play are now even stronger than before. Half the work is already done. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The notion of violent jihad in which more Muslims are killed than any other kind of people is already thoroughly discredited. We don't have to go back to that. Satellite television and the Internet are informing and empowering young Muslims in exciting new ways. And the Arab Spring has produced governments, many of them Islamist governments, who know that, for their own self-preservation, they need to take on the extremists in their midsts. We don't need to persuade them, but we do need to help them, because they haven't really come to this place before.The good news, again, is that a lot of the things they need we already have, and we are very good at giving: economic assistance, not just money, but expertise, technology, knowhow, private investment, fair terms of trade, medicine, education, technical support for training for their police forces to become more effective, for their anti-terror forces to become more efficient. We've got plenty of these things.Some of the other things that they need we're not very good at giving. Maybe nobody is. Time, patience, subtlety, understanding — these are harder to give. I live in New York now. Just this week, posters have gone up in subway stations in New York that describe jihad as savage.But in all the many years that I have covered the Middle East, I have never been as optimistic as I am today that the gap between the Muslim world and the West is narrowing fast, and one of the many reasons for my optimism is that, because I know there are millions, hundreds of millions of people, Muslims like that old imam in Tunis, who are reclaiming this word and restoring to its original, beautiful purpose. Bin Laden is dead. Bin Ladenism has been defeated. His definition of jihad can now be expunged. To that jihad we can say, ""Goodbye. Good riddance."" To the real jihad we can say, ""Welcome back. Good luck."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_ghosh_why_global_jihad_is_losing
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"So I grew up in Limpopo, on the border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, a little town called Motetema. Water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather, and growing up in these tough situations, at the age of 17, I was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter, and we were sunbathing. The Limpopo sun gets really hot in winter. So as we were sunbathing, my best friend next to me says, ""Man, why doesn't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you don't have to bathe?"" And I sat, and I was like, ""Man, I would buy that, eh?""So I went home, and I did a little research, and I found some very shocking statistics. Over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation. Four hundred and fifty million of them are in Africa, and five million of them are in South Africa. Various diseases thrive in this environment, the most drastic of which is called trachoma. Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt getting into your eye. Multiple infections of trachoma can leave you permanently blind. The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year. The shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma, all you have to do is wash your face: no medicine, no pills, no injections.So after seeing these shocking statistics, I thought to myself, ""Okay, even if I'm not just doing it for myself and the fact that I don't want to bathe, I at least need to do it to try to save the world."" (Laughter) So with my trusty little steed, my Nokia 6234 cell phone — I didn't have a laptop, I didn't have Internet much, except for the 20-rand-an-hour Internet cafe — I did research on Wikipedia, on Google, about lotions, creams, the compositions, the melting points, the toxicities — I did high school science — and I wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper, and it looked like the KFC special spice, you know?So I was like, okay, so we've got the formula ready. Now we need to get this thing into practice. Fast forward four years later, after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone, having written my patent on the cell phone, I'm the youngest patent-holder in the country, and — (""No more bathing!"") — I can't say any more than that. (Laughter) I had invented DryBath, the world's first bath-substituting lotion. You literally put it on your skin, and you don't have to bathe. (Laughter)So after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources I had, I went to university, met a few people, got it into practice, and we have a fully functioning product that's ready to go to the market. It's actually available on the market. So we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making DryBath available. One of the things we learned was that poor communities don't buy products in bulk. They buy products on demand. A person in Alex doesn't buy a box of cigarettes. They buy one cigarette each day, even though it's more expensive. So we packaged DryBath in these innovative little sachets. You just snap them in half, and you squeeze it out. And the cool part is, one sachet substitutes one bath for five rand. After creating that model, we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product. We realized that even rich kids from the suburbs really want DryBath. (Laughter) At least once a week. Anyway, we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath, and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas, two hours more for school, two hours more for homework, two hours more to just be a kid.After seeing that global impact, we narrowed it down to our key value proposition, which was cleanliness and convenience. DryBath is a rich man's convenience and a poor man's lifesaver.Having put the product into practice, we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market, and one question I have for the audience today is, on the gravel roads of Limpopo, with an allowance of 50 rand a week, I came up with a way for the world not to bathe. What's stopping you? (Applause) I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. And another key thing that I learned a lot throughout this whole process, last year Google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world. I'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world, the first African to get that accolade, and one thing that really puzzles me is, I did all of this just because I didn't want to bathe. Thank you. (Applause.)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ludwick_marishane_a_bath_without_water
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"B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter)It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside, but when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton: promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user, focus-grouping new product launches, territorial expansion.But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive. It's a lot harder than you might think. Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you'd pay on the street, and second, you don't make a lot of money. I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month.So how do you survive? Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles. There's legal hustles. You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. You charge another inmate to clean his cell. There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in, you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography, cell phones, and just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars. You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks. You want a dirty magazine? Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars.So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses.But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison, no one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the Internet, even. And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years.Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it. But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had.So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_smith_lessons_in_business_from_prison
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"I'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with. They're all the perfect size, and they don't have an ounce of fat. Did I mention they're gorgeous? And they're scientific models? (Laughs)As you might have guessed, I'm a tissue engineer, and this is a video of some of the beating heart that I've engineered in the lab. And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body. But what I'm going to tell you about today is how these tissues make awesome models.Well, let's think about the drug screening process for a moment. You go from drug formulation, lab testing, animal testing, and then clinical trials, which you might call human testing, before the drugs get to market. It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, and sometimes, even when a drug hits the market, it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people. And the later it fails, the worse the consequences.It all boils down to two issues. One, humans are not rats, and two, despite our incredible similarities to one another, actually those tiny differences between you and I have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us.So what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity? Let's see how we can do it with tissue engineering.One of the key technologies that's really important is what's called induced pluripotent stem cells. They were developed in Japan pretty recently. Okay, induced pluripotent stem cells. They're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy. We induce cells, okay, say, skin cells, by adding a few genes to them, culturing them, and then harvesting them. So they're skin cells that can be tricked, kind of like cellular amnesia, into an embryonic state. So without the controversy, that's cool thing number one. Cool thing number two, you can grow any type of tissue out of them: brain, heart, liver, you get the picture, but out of your cells. So we can make a model of your heart, your brain on a chip.Generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece, and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery. And this is a schematic of a bioreactor we're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular, scalable way. Going forward, imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue. It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip.But another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells, let's say, from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them, we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab. Here's an example from Kevin Eggan's lab at Harvard. He generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have Lou Gehrig's Disease, and he differentiated them into neurons, and what's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease. So with disease models like these, we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before, and maybe discover drugs even faster. This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa. This is a degeneration of the retina. It's a disease that runs in my family, and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure.So some people think that these models sound well and good, but ask, ""Well, are these really as good as the rat?"" The rat is an entire organism, after all, with interacting networks of organs. A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver, and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat. Don't you miss all that with these tissue-engineered models? Well, this is another trend in the field. By combining tissue engineering techniques with microfluidics, the field is actually evolving towards just that, a model of the entire ecosystem of the body, complete with multiple organ systems to be able to test how a drug you might take for your blood pressure might affect your liver or an antidepressant might affect your heart. These systems are really hard to build, but we're just starting to be able to get there, and so, watch out.But that's not even all of it, because once a drug is approved, tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments. This is an example that you might care about someday, and I hope you never do, because imagine if you ever get that call that gives you that bad news that you might have cancer. Wouldn't you rather test to see if those cancer drugs you're going to take are going to work on your cancer? This is an example from Karen Burg's lab, where they're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments. And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next, and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies.And so thinking about the models that we've just discussed, you can see, going forward, that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path: disease models making for better drug formulations, massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials, and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all. Essentially, we're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body. Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively. It gives new meaning to models against animal testing, doesn't it? Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nina_tandon_could_tissue_engineering_mean_personalized_medicine
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"""My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax. My suede Starters jacket says Raiders on the back. I'm stylin', smilin', lookin' real mean, because it ain't about being heard, just being seen. My leather Adidas baseball cap matches my fake Gucci backpack. (Laughter) Ain't nobody who looks as good as me, but this costs money, it sure ain't free, and I gots no job, no money at all, but it's easy to steal all this from the mall. Parents say I shouldn't, but I knows I should. Got to do what I can to make sure I look good, and the reason I have to look real good, well, to tell you the truth, man, I don't know why. Guess it makes me feel special inside. When I'm wearing fresh gear I don't have to hide, and I really must get some new gear soon or my ego will pop like a 10-cent balloon. But security is tight at all the shops. Every day there are more and more cops. My crew is laughing at me because I'm wearing old gear. School's almost over. Summer is near. And I'm sportin' torn Jordans. I need something new. Only one thing left to do. Cut school Friday, catch the subway downtown, check out my victims hangin' around. Maybe I'll get lucky and find easy prey. Got to get some new gear. There's no other way. I'm ready and willing. I'm packing my gun. This is serious business. This ain't no fun. And I can't have my posse laughin' at me. I'mma cop something dope, just wait, you'll see. Come out of the station, West 4th near the park, brothers shooting hoops and someone remarks, 'Hey homes, where you get them Nik's?' I says to myself, 'Yeah. I likes 'em, I likes.' They were Q-tip white, bright and blinding my eyes. The red emblem of Michael looked as if it could fly. Not one spot of dirt. The Airs were brand new. Had my pistol and knew just what to do. Waited until it was just the right time, followed him very closely behind. He made a left turn on Houston, I pulled out my gun, and I said, 'Gimme them Jordans!' And the punk tried to run. Took off fast, didn't get far. I fired,'Pow!' Fool fell between two parked cars. He was coughing, crying, blood spilled on the street. And I snatched them Air Jordans off of his feet. While laying there dying, all he could say was, ""Please man, don't take my Air Jordans away."" You'd think he'd be worried about staying alive. As I took off with his sneakers, there was tears in his eyes. Very next day, I bopped into school with my brand new Air Jordans, man, I was cool. I killed to get 'em, but hey, I don't care, because now I needs a new jacket to wear.""Thank you. (Applause)For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad. The hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me? Because I'm an extension of my work, and if they love me, then they will love my work, and if they love my work, then they will love poetry, and if they love poetry, then I will have done my job, which is to transcend it to the world.And in 1996, I found the answer in principles in a master spoken-word artist named Reg E. Gaines, who wrote the famous poem, ""Please Don't Take My Air Jordans."" And I followed this guy everywhere until I had him in the room, and I read him one of my pieces, and you know what he told me? ""Yo' wack. You know what the problem is with you, homie? You don't read other people's poetry, and you don't got any subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration."" (Laughter) Now he kept on rambling about poetry and styles and Nuyorican Friday nights.Now I could have quit. I should have quit. I mean, I thought poetry was just self-expression. I didn't know you actually have to have creative control.So instead of quitting, I followed him everywhere. When he was writing a Broadway show, I would be outside of the door. I would wake him up at, like, 6:30 in the morning to ask him who's the best poet. I remember eating the eyes of a fish right out of the sea because he told me it was brain food.Then one day I told him, ""Reg E., what is subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration?"" (Laughter) And he handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and the oral nature of poetry, and from that point, Reggie stopped becoming the best to me, because what Etheridge Knight taught me was that I could make my words sound like music, even my small ones, the monosyllables, the ifs, ands, buts, whats, the gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear, and from then on, I started chasing Etheridge Knight. I wanted to know which poet he read, and I landed on a poem called [""Dark Prophecy: Sing of Shine""], a toast signifying that got me on the biggest stage a poet could ever be: Broadway, baby. And from that point, I learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body.But that wasn't the biggest lesson I ever learned. The biggest lesson I learned was many years later when I went to Beverly Hills and I ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said I don't look like I have any experience to be working in this business.And I said to him, ""Listen, punk fool, you're a failed actor who became an agent, and you know why you failed as an actor? Because people like me took your job. I've traveled all the way from Cleveland and Essex in East New York, took the local 6 line up to the hookers of Hunt's Point who were in my way on my way to master the art of space, and the one-to-infinite amount of man, woman and child you can fit in there only so I can push them to the back of the wall with my experience. People have bought tickets to my experience and used them as refrigerator magnets to let them know that the revolution is near, so stock up. I'm so experienced that when you went to a privileged school to learn a Shakespearean sonnet, I was getting those beats kicked and shoved into me. I can master shock of ""The Crying Game"" with the awe of a child being called an AIDS victim by a bully who didn't know that it was his father who gave it to my mother, and that's a double entendre. I'm so experienced that when you went to the Fell School and all the rich little fairy boys decided to sponsor a child in it, that was me, but kicked me out when I was caught teaching the fairy boys how to rob the PATS off a pair of Lee Jeans and bring them to VIM. Let me see Chekhov pull that off. Sanford Meisner was my Uncle Artie yelling silently to himself, ""Something's always wrong when nothing's always right."" Method acting is nothing but a mixture of multiple personalities, believing your own lies are reality, like in high school cool Kenny telling me he wanted to be a cop. Dude, you go to Riker's Island Academy. I could make David Mamet psychoanalyze my attack on dialogue, Stanislavski be as if he were Bruce Lee kicking your roster of talentless students up and down Crenshaw. So what, your actors studied guerrilla theater at the London Rep? Let me tell you an ancient Chinese Saturday afternoon kung fu secret. Boards don't hit back. You think black entertainers have it hard finding work in this business? I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right. Forget the American ghetto. I've cracked stages in Soweto, buried abortion babies in potter's field and still managed to keep a smile on my face, so whatever you curse at me to your caddyshack go-for-this, go-for-that assistant when I walk out that door, whatever slander you send my way, your mother. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lemon_andersen_performs_please_don_t_take_my_air_jordans
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"In 2002, a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane. The Wright Brothers, in the beginning of the last century, had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly. They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane. They were not the only ones. That was common practice in the industry, and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right.This actually wasn't so great for the development of the aviation industry, and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes. So there was a bit of a conflict there. The U.S. government decided to take action, and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes.So what has this got to do with this?In 2002, Nelson Otwoma, a Kenyan social scientist, discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment. He was told that a cure did not exist. AIDS, he heard, was lethal, and treatment was not offered. This was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries. AIDS had become a chronic disease. People in our countries here in Europe, in North America, were living with HIV, healthy lives. Not so for Nelson. He wasn't rich enough, and not so for his three-year-old son, who he discovered a year later also had HIV.Nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups. In 2002, they were facing a different battle. Prices for ARVs, the drugs needed to treat HIV, cost about 12,000 [dollars] per patient per year. The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available. When you have a patent, you can exclude anyone else from making, from producing or making low-cost versions, for example, available of those medications. Clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe.Luckily, those patents did not exist everywhere. There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents, such as India, and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions, low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines, and make them available in the developing world, and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year, and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year, and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines. Treatment programs became possible, funding became available, and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly.Today, eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs. Thirty-four million are infected with HIV. Never has this number been so high, but actually this is good news, because what it means is people stop dying. People who have access to these drugs stop dying. And there's something else. They also stop passing on the virus. This is fairly recent science that has shown that. What that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic.So what's the problem? Well, things have changed. First of all, the rules have changed. Today, all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years. This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization. So what India did is no longer possible. Second, the practice of patent-holding companies have changed. Here you see the patent practices before the World Trade Organization's rules, before '95, before antiretroviral drugs. This is what you see today, and this is in developing countries, so what that means is, unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now, we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis, because new drugs are developed, new drugs go to market, but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries. So unless we act, unless we do something today, we will soon be faced [with] what some have termed the treatment time bomb.It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented. There's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away. This shows you a patent landscape. This is the landscape of one medicine. So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product, unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available, you will probably choose to do something else. Again, deliberate action is needed.So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes, we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic.And we did. In 2010, UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV. And this is how it works: Patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions, but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents. That can be generic manufacturers. It can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies, for example. Those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them, to treatment programs that need access to them. They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders, so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property.There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool. The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism. The airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they'd license their patents or not. They were forced to do so. That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do. It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use.Today, Nelson Otwoma is healthy. He has access to antiretroviral drugs. His son will soon be 14 years old. Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool, and he told me not so long ago, ""Ellen, we rely in Kenya and in many other countries on the Medicines Patent Pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us, that new medicines, without delay, become available to us.""And this is no longer fantasy. Already, I'll give you an example. In August of this year, the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication. The company, Gilead, that holds the patents, has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool. The pool is already working today, two months later, with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed. This is unprecedented. This has never been done before. The rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries, if at all. This has never been seen before. Nelson's expectations are very high, and quite rightly so. He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next, throughout their lifetime, so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy, active lives.Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen. We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good, but also in their own interest, to move from conflict to collaboration, and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen. They can also choose not to do that, but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with early last century, facing forcible measures by government. So they'd better jump now. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_t_hoen_pool_medical_patents_save_lives
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"I've been a journalist now since I was about 17, and it's an interesting industry to be in at the moment, because as you all know, there's a huge amount of upheaval going on in media, and most of you probably know this from the business angle, which is that the business model is pretty screwed, and as my grandfather would say, the profits have all been gobbled up by Google.So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist, but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side. It's on the input side. It's concern with how we get information and how we gather the news. And that's changed, because we've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience. And the audience for such a long time was in a position where they didn't have any way of affecting news or making any change. They couldn't really connect. And that's changed irrevocably.My first connection with the news media was in 1984, the BBC had a one-day strike. I wasn't happy. I was angry. I couldn't see my cartoons. So I wrote a letter. And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail: ""Love Markham, Aged 4."" Still works. I'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike, but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me. And that was the round journey. It took that long for anyone to have any impact and get some feedback. And that's changed now because, as journalists, we interact in real time. We're not in a position where the audience is reacting to news. We're reacting to the audience, and we're actually relying on them. They're helping us find the news. They're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear. So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up.To give an example of how we rely on the audience, on the 5th of September in Costa Rica, an earthquake hit. It was a 7.6 magnitude. It was fairly big. And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua. So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter. Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying ""temblor,"" which means earthquake. So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel. Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua. And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update, which is what we all do now, so if something happens, we put our status update, or we post a photo, we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream.And what that means is just constant, huge volumes of data going up. It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers, every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube. So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded. And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second. More than three and a half thousand photos go up onto Facebook. So by the time I'm finished talking here, there'll be 864 more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started, and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started.So it's an interesting position to be in as a journalist, because we should have access to everything. Any event that happens anywhere in the world, I should be able to know about it pretty much instantaneously, as it happens, for free. And that goes for every single person in this room.The only problem is, when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff, and that can be incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes. And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time, hitting the iPhone capital of the universe — (Laughter) — and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before. And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes, so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted. We had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms. We had to deal with images from films like ""The Day After Tomorrow."" (Laughter) And we had to deal with images that were so realistic it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all. (Laughter)But joking aside, there were images like this one from Instagram which was subjected to a grilling by journalists. They weren't really sure. It was filtered in Instagram. The lighting was questioned. Everything was questioned about it. And it turned out to be true. It was from Avenue C in downtown Manhattan, which was flooded. And the reason that they could tell that it was real was because they could get to the source, and in this case, these guys were New York food bloggers. They were well respected. They were known. So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove. And that was the job of the journalist. It was filtering all this stuff. And you were, instead of going and finding the information and bringing it back to the reader, you were holding back the stuff that was potentially damaging.And finding the source becomes more and more important — finding the good source — and Twitter is where most journalists now go. It's like the de facto real-time newswire, if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter.And a good example of how useful it can be but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011. As a non-Arabic speaker, as someone who was looking from the outside, from Dublin, Twitter lists, and lists of good sources, people we could establish were credible, were really important. And how do you build a list like that from scratch? Well, it can be quite difficult, but you have to know what to look for. This visualization was done by an Italian academic. He's called André Pannison, and he basically took the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Square on the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign, and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someone retweets a message, a connection is made between two dots, and the more times that message is retweeted by other people, the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made. And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation, but what you get is hints at who is more interesting and who is worth investigating. And as the conversation grew and grew, it became more and more lively, and eventually you were left with this huge, big, rhythmic pointer of this conversation. You could find the nodes, though, and then you went, and you go, ""Right, I've got to investigate these people. These are the ones that are obviously making sense. Let's see who they are.""Now in the deluge of information, this is where the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself, because we have more tools than ever to do that kind of investigation. And when you start digging into the sources, you can go further and further than you ever could before.Sometimes you come across a piece of content that is so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it, but you're not 100 percent sure if you can because you don't know if the source is credible. You don't know if it's a scrape. You don't know if it's a re-upload. And you have to do that investigative work. And this video, which I'm going to let run through, was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago.Video: Getting real windy in just a second.(Rain and wind sounds)(Explosion) Oh, shit!Markham Nolan: Okay, so now if you're a news producer, this is something you'd love to run with, because obviously, this is gold. You know? This is a fantastic reaction from someone, very genuine video that they've shot in their back garden. But how do you find if this person, if it's true, if it's faked, or if it's something that's old and that's been reposted?So we set about going to work on this video, and the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account. There was only one video posted to that account, and the username was Rita Krill. And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name. But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so. The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills. So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York, we found them in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida. So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool called Wolfram Alpha, and we checked the weather reports for the day in which this video had been uploaded, and when we went through all those various cities, we found that in Florida, there were thunderstorms and rain on the day. So we went to the white pages, and we found, we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook, and we looked through a couple of different addresses, and that took us to Google Maps, where we found a house. And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked remarkably like Rita's. So we went back to the video, and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference. So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella, there's a white lilo in the pool, there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool, and there's two trees in the background. And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer, and sure enough, there's the white lilo, there are the two trees, there's the umbrella. It's actually folded in this photo. Little bit of trickery. And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool. So we were able to call Rita, clear the video, make sure that it had been shot, and then our clients were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried.Sometimes the search for truth, though, is a little bit less flippant, and it has much greater consequences. Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviously a lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can be potentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTube actually becomes the most important repository of information about what's going on in the world.So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing, because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds. This is from Hama. Video: (Shouting) And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through, is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck and thrown off a bridge. The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhood and they were throwing Syrian Army officers' bodies off the bridge, and they were cursing and using blasphemous language, and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were, and whether or not they were what the video said it was.So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this, and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify. Three different sources said three different things about the bridge. They said, one, the bridge doesn't exist. Another one said the bridge does exist, but it's not in Hama. It's somewhere else. And the third one said, ""I think the bridge does exist, but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed, so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense."" So that was the only one that gave us a clue. We looked through the video for other clues. We saw the distinctive railings, which we could use. We looked at the curbs. The curbs were throwing shadows south, so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river. It had black-and-white curbs. As we looked at the river itself, you could see there's a concrete stone on the west side. There's a cloud of blood. That's blood in the river. So the river is flowing south to north. That's what that tells me. And also, as you look away from the bridge, there's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank, and the river narrows.So onto Google Maps we go, and we start looking through literally every single bridge. We go to the dam that we talked about, we start just literally going through every time that road crosses the river, crossing off the bridges that don't match. We're looking for one that crosses east-west. And we get to Hama. We get all the way from the dam to Hama and there's no bridge. So we go a bit further. We switch to the satellite view, and we find another bridge, and everything starts to line up. The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west. So this could be our bridge. And we zoom right in. We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge. And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video, and as we click through it, you can see someone's uploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy, so we click into the photos. And the photos start showing us more detail that we can cross-reference with the video. The first thing that we see is we see black-and-white curbing, which is handy because we've seen that before. We see the distinctive railing that we saw the guys throwing the bodies over. And we keep going through it until we're certain that this is our bridge.So what does that tell me? I've got to go back now to my three sources and look at what they told me: the one who said the bridge didn't exist, the one who said the bridge wasn't in Hama, and the one guy who said, ""Yes, the bridge does exist, but I'm not sure about the water levels."" Number three is looking like the most truthful all of a sudden, and we've been able to find that out using some free Internet tools sitting in a cubicle in an office in Dublin in the space of 20 minutes. And that's part of the joy of this. Although the web is running like a torrent, there's so much information there that it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day, if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information. Given a couple of clues, I could probably find out a lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out.But what it tells me is that, at a time when there's more — there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been, it's harder to filter, we have greater tools. We have free Internet tools that allow us, help us do this kind of investigation. We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before, and computers that are quicker than ever before.But here's the thing. Algorithms are rules. They're binary. They're yes or no, they're black or white. Truth is never binary. Truth is a value. Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human. No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter how much information we have, you'll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise, because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait. Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/markham_nolan_how_to_separate_fact_and_fiction_online
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"Hello, Doha. Hello! Salaam alaikum.I love coming to Doha. It's such an international place. It feels like the United Nations here. You land at the airport, and you're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services, where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan. You go to the hotel and you check in. There's a Lebanese. Yeah? And then a Swedish guy showed me my room.I said, ""Where are the Qataris?""(Laughter)(Applause)They said, ""No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart."" ""They know.""(Laughter)And of course, it's growing so fast, sometimes there's growing pains. You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well. My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, ""No problem, sir."" And then we sat there for two minutes.I said, ""What's wrong?"" He said, ""One problem, sir.""(Laughter)I said, ""What?"" He goes, ""Where is it?""(Laughter)I go, ""You're the driver, you should know.""He goes, ""No, I just arrived, sir.""I go, ""You just arrived at the W?"" ""No, I just arrived in Doha, sir.""(Laughter)""I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already.""(Laughter)He goes, ""Sir, why don't you drive?""(Laughter)""I don't know where we're going.""""Neither do I. It will be an adventure, sir.""(Laughter)The Middle East has been an adventure the past couple of years. It is going crazy with the Arab Spring and revolution and all this. Are there any Lebanese here tonight, by applause?(Cheering)Lebanese, yeah.The Middle East is going crazy. You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region.(Laughter) (Applause)Who would have thought?(Laughter)Oh my gosh.No, there's serious issues in the region. Some people don't want to talk about them. I'm here to talk about them tonight. Ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, here's a serious issue. When we see each other, when we say hello, how many kisses are we going to do?(Laughter)Every country is different and it's confusing, okay? In Lebanon, they do three. In Egypt, they do two. I was in Lebanon, I got used to three. I went to Egypt. I went to say hello to this one Egyptian guy, I went, one, two. I went for three — He wasn't into it.(Laughter)I told him, I said, ""No, no, I was just in Lebanon."" He goes, ""I don't care where you were. You just stay where you are, please.""(Laughter) (Applause)I went to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 —(Laughter)Next time you see a Saudi, look closely. They're just a little bit tilted.(Laughter)""Abdul, are you okay?""""I was saying hello for half an hour. I'll be all right.""(Laughter)Qataris, you guys do the nose to nose. Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around?(Laughter)""Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello. Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please. I need to rest.""(Laughter)Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three. A friend of mine explained to me, before the '79 revolution, it was two.(Laughter)After the revolution, three. So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you. Yeah, if you go one, two, three — ""I can't believe you support this regime!""(Laughter)""With your three kisses.""(Laughter)But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West. A lot of Americans don't know a lot about us, about the Middle East. I'm Iranian and American. I'm there. I know, I've traveled here. There's so much, we laugh, right? People don't know we laugh. When I did the Axis of Evil comedy tour, it came out on Comedy Central, I went online to see what people were saying. I ended up on a conservative website. One guy wrote another guy. He said, ""I never knew these people laughed."" Think about it. You never see us laughing in American film or television, right? Maybe like an evil laugh: ""Wuhahaha.""(Laughter)""I will kill you in the name of Allah, wuhahahahaha.""(Laughter)But never like, ""Ha ha ha ha la.""(Laughter)We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life. And I wish more Americans would travel here. I always encourage my friends: ""Travel, see the Middle East, there's so much to see, so many good people."" And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening.For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane. Some passengers overheard them, somehow misconstrued that as terrorist talk, got them kicked off the plane. It was a family, a mother, father, child, talking about the seating. As a Middle Eastern male, I know there's certain things I'm not supposed to say on an airplane in the US, right? I'm not supposed to be walking down the aisle, and be like, ""Hi, Jack."" That's not cool.(Laughter)Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, ""Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack."" Never ""Hi, Jack.""(Laughter)But now, apparently we can't even talk about the safest place to sit on an airplane.So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim, so to, you know, Indians, and Latinos, everyone, if you're brown —(Laughter)Here's my advice to my brown friends.(Laughter)The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue. That way no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on.(Laughter)Granted, some mother tongues might sound a little threatening to the average American. If you're walking down the aisle speaking Arabic, you might freak them out —(Imitating Arabic)They might say, ""What's he talking about?"" The key, to my Arab brothers and sisters, is to throw in random good words to put people at ease as you're walking down the aisle. Just as you're walking down —(Imitating Arabic)Strawberry!(Laughter)(Imitating Arabic)Rainbow!(Laughter)(Imitating Arabic)Tutti Frutti!(Laughter)""I think he's going to hijack the plane with some ice cream.""Thank you very much. Have a good night. Thank you, TED.(Cheers) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maz_jobrani_a_saudi_an_indian_and_an_iranian_walk_into_a_qatari_bar
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"This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo.So this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice, and yet it can do things that you and I couldn't possibly entertain the idea of doing. And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung.So the question is, where do we start this story? And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung-feeders. They are grown completely in a ball of dung. Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles. So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground.So the question is, how do they deal with this material? And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort. Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls. So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball. You can see it's a male because he's got a little hair on the back of his legs there, and he's clearly very pleased about what he's sitting on there. And then he's about to become a victim of a vicious smash-and-grab. (Laughter) And this is a clear indication that this is a valuable resource. And so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way, and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this, because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung. So this dung pat was actually — well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well-adapted to rolling balls of dung.So what you've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the African veld. Its head is down. It's walking backwards. It's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction, and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat. This is Africa. It's hot.So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems.So watch this beetle, and there's two things that I would like you to be aware of. The first is how it deals with this obstacle that we've put in its way. See, look, it does a little dance, and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place. A little dance, and then heads off in a particular direction. So clearly this animal knows where it's going and it knows where it wants to go, and that's a very, very important thing, because if you think about it, you're at the dung pile, you've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else, and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line. So we gave them some more tasks to deal with, and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet. And watch its response. So this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet. It's turned by 90 degrees. But it doesn't flinch. It knows exactly where it wants to go, and it heads off in that particular direction.So our next question then was, how are they doing this? What are they doing? And there was a cue that was available to us. It was that every now and then they'd climb on top of the ball and they'd take a look at the world around them. And what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball? What are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement? And the most obvious one is to look at the sky, and so we thought, now what could they be looking at in the sky? And the obvious thing to look at is the sun. So a classic experiment here, in that what we did was we moved the sun. What we're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position. And look at what the beetle does. It does a little double dance, and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place. What happens now? So clearly they're looking at the sun. The sun is a very important cue in the sky for them.The thing is the sun is not always available to you, because at sunset it disappears below the horizon. What is happening in the sky here is that there's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and I can't see. It's the way our eyes are built. But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north-south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see. So how do we test that? Well, that's easy. What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky. The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in. So obviously beetles can see polarized light.Okay, so what we've got so far is, what are beetles doing? They're rolling balls. How are they doing it? Well, they're rolling them in a straight line. How are they maintaining it in a particular straight line? Well, they're looking at celestial cues in the sky, some of which you and I can't see.But how do they pick up those celestial cues? That was what was of interest to us next. And it was this particular little behavior, the dance, that we thought was important, because look, it takes a pause every now and then, and then heads off in the direction that it wants to go in. So what are they doing when they do this dance? How far can we push them before they will reorientate themselves? And in this experiment here, what we did was we forced them into a channel, and you can see he wasn't particularly forced into this particular channel, and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in, in the first place. And let's see what his reaction is as he's headed through 90 degrees here, and now he's going to — when he ends up down here, he's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction. And see what his response is. He does a little dance, he turns around, and heads back in this. He knows exactly where he's going. He knows exactly what the problem is, and he knows exactly how to deal with it, and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves.So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior. Every now and then, when they climb on top of the ball, they wipe their face. And you see him do it again. Now we thought, now what could be going on here? Clearly the ground is very hot, and when the ground is hot, they dance more often, and when they do this particular dance, they wipe the bottom of their face. And we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior. We thought that maybe what they're doing is trying to get off the hot soil and also spitting onto their face to cool their head down.So what we did was design a couple of arenas. one was hot, one was cold. We shaded this one. We left that one hot. And then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera. So what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system, and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball. So the truth is, if you look at the temperature over here, dung is cool. (Laughter)So all we're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background. So the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade. The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld. It isn't climbing. It isn't dancing, because its body temperature is actually relatively low. It's about the same as yours and mine. And what's of interest here is that little brain is quite cool. But if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment, look at the temperature of the soil. It's up around 55 to 60 degrees centigrade. Watch how often the beetle dances. And look at its front legs. They're roaringly hot. So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across.And what we did then was put little boots on these legs, because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil. And if you look over here, with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on. So we described these as cool boots. It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots. And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball. So this is called stilting. It's a thermal behavior that you and I do if we cross the beach, we jump onto a towel, somebody has this towel — ""Sorry, I've jumped onto your towel."" — and then you scuttle across onto somebody else's towel, and that way you don't burn your feet. And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here.However, there's one more story I'd like to share with you, and that's this particular species. It's from a genus called Pachysoma. There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting. This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing. Can you spot the difference? They don't normally go this slowly. It's in slow motion. but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it. This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior.There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest. So watch this individual here, and what he's trying to do is set up a nest. And he doesn't like this first position, but he comes up with a second position, and about 50 minutes later, that nest is finished, and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets. And what I want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path, and compare the two. And by and large, you'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path. On the outward path, he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung. On the way home, he knows where home is, and he wants to go straight to it. The important thing here is that this is not a one-way trip, as in most dung beetles. The trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site. And watch, you're going to see another South African crime taking place right now. (Laughter) And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets.So what we're looking at here is a behavior called path integration. And what's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot, it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food, and then when it finds food, it heads straight home. It knows exactly where its home is. Now there's two ways it could be doing that, and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it's at the foraging site. If it's using landmarks, it will find its home. If it is using something called path integration, it will not find its home. It will arrive at the wrong spot, and what it's doing here if it's using path integration is it's counting its steps or measuring the distance out in this direction. It knows the bearing home, and it knows it should be in that direction. If you displace it, it ends up in the wrong place. So let's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment.So here's our cunning experimenter. He displaces the beetle, and now we have to see what is going to take place. What we've got is a burrow. That's where the forage was. The forage has been displaced to a new position. If he's using landmark orientation, he should be able to find the burrow, because he'll be able to recognize the landmarks around it. If he's using path integration, then it should end up in the wrong spot over here.So let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test. So there he is there. He's about to head home, and look what happens. Shame. It hasn't a clue. It starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food, but it is clearly completely lost. So we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around, and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it. (Laughter)So what we're looking at here are a group of animals that use a compass, and they use the sun as a compass to find their way around, and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance, and we know that these species here actually count the steps. That's what they use as an odometer, a step-counting system, to find their way back home. We don't know yet what dung beetles use.So what have we learned from these animals with a brain that's the size of a grain of rice? Well, we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues. We know that the dance behavior is an orientation behavior and it's also a thermoregulation behavior, and we also know that they use a path integration system for finding their way home. So for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and I couldn't possibly do. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_byrne_the_dance_of_the_dung_beetle
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"I essentially drag sledges for a living, so it doesn't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually, but I'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year: ""Philosophically, does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving? After all, if it is being done somewhere by someone, and we can participate virtually, then why bother leaving the house?""I'm usually introduced as a polar explorer. I'm not sure that's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles, but I've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle, so I get out of the house a fair bit. And in my nature, I guess, I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things, and it's that dichotomy, the gulf between ideas and action that I'm going to try and explore briefly.The pithiest answer to the question ""why?"" that's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap, the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back, second from the left, George Lee Mallory. Many of you will know his name. In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest. He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary. No one knows if he got to the top. It's still a mystery. But he was credited with coining the phrase, ""Because it's there."" Now I'm not actually sure that he did say that. There's very little evidence to suggest it, but what he did say is actually far nicer, and again, I've printed this. I'm going to read it out.""The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this: What is the use of climbing Mt. Everest? And my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation, but otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, and not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. So it is no use. If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy, and joy, after all, is the end of life. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and that is what life is for.""Mallory's argument that leaving the house, embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun, however, doesn't tally that neatly with my own experience. The furthest I've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004. I still don't know exactly what came over me, but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean. I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada. No one had ever done this. I was 26 at the time. A lot of experts were saying it was impossible, and my mum certainly wasn't very keen on the idea. (Laughter)The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point, the edge of the pack ice, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, took about five hours, and if anyone watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up, rather than just coming down, you'll appreciate the sense of apprehension, as I sat in a helicopter thundering north, and the sense, I think if anything, of impending doom. I sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into. There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy. I was 26. I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge. I had my skis ready to go, I had a satellite phone, a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear. I remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter. We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn, and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger. Part of me felt quite proud of myself, but mostly I was just utterly terrified.And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days. I didn't see anyone else. We took this photo next to the helicopter. Beyond that, I didn't see anyone for 10 weeks. The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea, so I'm traveling over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. NASA described conditions that year as the worst since records began. I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest. So again, there wasn't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had.One of the magical things about this journey, however, is that because I'm walking over the sea, over this floating, drifting, shifting crust of ice that's floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it's an environment that's in a constant state of flux. The ice is always moving, breaking up, drifting around, refreezing, so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me. No one else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views, the vistas, that I saw for 10 weeks. And that, I guess, is probably the finest argument for leaving the house. I can try to tell you what it was like, but you'll never know what it was like, and the more I try to explain that I felt lonely, I was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles, it was cold, nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day, the more words fall short, and I'm unable to do it justice. And it seems to me, therefore, that the doing, you know, to try to experience, to engage, to endeavor, rather than to watch and to wonder, that's where the real meat of life is to be found, the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days. And I would add a cautionary note here, however. In my experience, there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what's humanly possible. Now I don't just mean in the field of daft macho Edwardian style derring-do, but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer, there is something addictive about this, and in my case, I think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit. I can't explain quite how good it is until you've tried it, but it has the capacity to burn up all the money I can get my hands on, to ruin every relationship I've ever had, so be careful what you wish for.Mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain, and I wonder if that's the case whether there's something in the challenge itself, in the endeavor, and particularly in the big, unfinished, chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us, and in my experience that's certainly the case. There is one unfinished challenge that's been calling out to me for most of my adult life.Many of you will know the story. This is a photo of Captain Scott and his team. Scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the South Pole. No one knew what was there. It was utterly unmapped at the time. We knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of Antarctica. Scott, as many of you will know, was beaten to it by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who used dogs and dogsleds. Scott's team were on foot, all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges, and they arrived at the pole to find the Norwegian flag already there, I'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized. All five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey.There is a sort of misconception nowadays that it's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure. When I talk about Antarctica, people often say, ""Hasn't, you know, that's interesting, hasn't that Blue Peter presenter just done it on a bike?"" Or, ""That's nice. You know, my grandmother's going on a cruise to Antarctica next year. You know. Is there a chance you'll see her there?"" (Laughter)But Scott's journey remains unfinished. No one has ever walked from the very coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. It is, arguably, the most audacious endeavor of that Edwardian golden age of exploration, and it seemed to me high time, given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels, that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job. So that's precisely what I'm setting out to do.This time next year, in October, I'm leading a team of three. It will take us about four months to make this return journey. That's the scale. The red line is obviously halfway to the pole. We have to turn around and come back again. I'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting. You'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before. And it'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question, ""Why?""And our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been. There certainly isn't much call for explorers nowadays. My career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option. If I wanted to know, for example, how many stars were in the Milky Way, how old those giant heads on Easter Island were, most of you could find that out right now without even standing up. And yet, if I've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it is that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown. In life, we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to, and I think metaphorically speaking, at least, we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often, if only we could summon up the courage. I certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what's outside. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_saunders_why_bother_leaving_the_house
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"Twelve years ago, I founded Zipcar. Zipcar buys cars and parks them throughout dense metropolitan areas for people to use, by the hour and by the day, instead of owning their own cars. Each Zipcar replaces 15 personal cars, and each driver drives about 80 percent less because they're now paying the full cost, all at once, in real time. But what Zipcar really did was make sharing the norm.Now, a decade later, it's really time to push the envelope a little bit, and so a couple years ago I moved to Paris with my husband and youngest child, and we launched Buzzcar a year ago. Buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars to their friends and neighbors. Instead of investing in a car, we invest in a community. We bring the power of a corporation to individuals who add their cars to the network. Some people call this peer-to-peer. This does express the humanity of what's going on, and the personal relationships, but that is also like saying that it's the same thing as a yard sale or a bake sale or babysitting. That's peer-to-peer. It's like saying yard sales are the same thing as eBay, or craft fairs are the same thing as Etsy.But what's really happening is that we've got the power of a free and open Internet, and on top of that we're putting a platform for participation, and the peers are now in partnership with the company, creating shared value on shared values, and each strengthening the other, and doing what the other can't do. I call this Peers, Inc. The incorporated side, the company, is doing things that it does really well. What does it do really well? It creates economies of scale, significant and long-term resource investment, the expertise of many different kinds of people and different kinds of minds, and for individuals, consumers, it's bringing the standards, rules and recourse that we really want as consumers, and this is kind of bound up in a brand promise, and the companies are providing this on a platform for participation. Peers are giving and doing things that are incredibly expensive for companies to do. What do they bring? They bring this fabulous diversity, expensive for companies. And what does that deliver? It delivers localization and customization, specialization, and all of this aspect about social networks and how companies are yearning and eager to get inside there? It's natural for me. Me and my friends, I can connect to them easily. And it also delivers really fabulous innovation, and I'll talk about that later.So we have the peers that are providing the services and the product, and the company that's doing the stuff that companies do. The two of these are delivering the best of both worlds. Some of my favorite examples: in transportation, Carpooling.com. Ten years old, three and a half million people have joined up, and a million rides are shared every day. It's a phenomenal thing. It's the equivalent of 2,500 TGV trains, and just think, they didn't have to lay a track or buy a car. This is all happening with excess capacity.And it's not just with transportation, my love, but of course in other realms. Here's Fiverr.com. I met these founders just weeks after they had launched, and now, in two years, what would you do for five dollars? Seven hundred and fifty thousand gigs are now posted after two years, what people would do for five dollars. And not just easy things that anyone can do. This Peers, Inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm. TopCoder has 400,000 engineers who are delivering complex design and engineering services. When I talked to their CEO, he had this great line. He said, ""We have a community that owns its own company."" And then my all-time favorite, Etsy. Etsy is providing goods that people make themselves and they're selling it in a marketplace. It just celebrated its seventh anniversary, and after seven years, last year it delivered 530 million dollars' worth of sales to all those individuals who have been making those objects.I know you guys out there who are businesspeople, are thinking, ""Oh my God, I want to build one of those. I see this incredible speed and scale. You mean all I have to do is build a platform and all these people are going to put their stuff on top and I sit back and roll it in?"" Building these platforms for participation are so nontrivial to do. I think of the difference of Google Video versus YouTube. Who would have thought that two young guys and a start-up would beat out Google Video? Why? I actually have no idea why. I didn't talk to them. But I'm thinking, you know, they probably had the ""share"" button a little bit brighter and to the right, and so it was easier and more convenient for the two sides that are always participating on these networks.So I actually know a lot about building a peer platform now, and a Peers, Inc. company, because I've spent the last two years doing that in Paris. So let me take you back how it's so incredibly different building Buzzcar than it was building Zipcar, because now every single thing we do has these two different bodies that I have to be thinking about: the owners who are going to provide the cars and the drivers who are going to rent them. Every single decision, I have to think about what is right for both sides. There are many, many examples and I'll give you one that is not my favorite example: insurance. It took me a year and a half to get the insurance just right. Hours and hours of sitting with insurers and many companies and their thoughts about risk and how this is totally innovative, they'd never thought of it before. Way too much money, I just can't even go there, with lawyers, trying to figure out how this is different, who's responsible to whom, and the result was that we were able to provide owners protection for their own driving records and their own history. The cars are completely insured during the rental, and it gives drivers what they need, and what do they need? They need a low deductible, and 24-hour roadside assistance. So this was a trick to get these two sides.So now I want to take you to the moment of — When you're an entrepreneur, and you've started a new company, there's the, here's all the stuff we do beforehand, and then the service launches. What happens? So all those months of work, they come into play.Last June 1, we launched. It was an exciting moment. And all the owners are adding their cars. It's really exciting. All the drivers are becoming members. It's excellent. The reservations start coming in, and here, owners who were getting text messages and emails that said, ""Hey, Joe wants to rent your car for the weekend. You can earn 60 euros. Isn't that great? Yes or no?"" No reply. Like, a huge proportion of them couldn't be bothered after they had just started, they just signed up, to reply. So I thought, ""Duh, Robin, this is the difference between industrial production and peer production."" Industrial production, the whole point of industrial production is to provide a standardized, exact service model that is consistent every single time, and I'm really thankful that my smartphone is made using industrial production. And Zipcar provides a very nice, consistent service that works fabulously. But what does peer production do? Peer production is this completely different way of doing things, and you have a big quality range, and so eBay, cleverly, the first peer production, Peer, Inc. company, I'd say, they figured out early on, we need to have ratings and commentaries and all that yucky side stuff. We can flag that and we can put it to the side, and people who are buyers and consumers don't have to deal with it.So going back, this is my look of excitement and joy, because all this stuff that I'd also been hoping for actually really did happen, and what's that? That is the diversity of what's going on. You have these different fabulous owners and their different cars, different prices, different locations. (Laughter) They dress differently, and they look different, and, really, I love these photos every time I look at them. Cool guys, excited guys, and here is Selma, who — I love this driver. And after a year, we have 1,000 cars that are parked across France and 6,000 people who are members and eager to drive them. This would not be possible to do that in economic fashion for a traditional company.Back to this spectrum. So what's happening is, we had the yuck side, but we actually had this real wow side. And I can tell you two great stories. A driver was telling me that they went to rent a car to go up the coast of France and the owner gave it to them, and said, ""You know what, here's where the cliffs are, and here's all the beaches, and this is my best beach, and this is where the best fish restaurant is."" And the peers also become, peers and owners create relationships, and so at the last minute people can — a driver can say, ""Hey, you know what, I really need the car, is it available?"" And that person will say, ""Sure, my wife's at home. Go pick up the keys. Go do it."" So you can have these really nice things that can't happen, and it's a kind of ""Wow!"" and I want to say ""Wow!"" type of thing that's happening here, because individuals, if you're a company, what happens is you might have 10 people who are in charge of innovation, or 100 people who are in charge of innovation. What happens in Peer, Inc. companies is that you have tens and hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are creating experiments on this model, and so out of all that influence and that effort, you are having this exceptional amount of innovation that is coming out.So one of the reasons, if we come back to why did I call it Buzzcar? I wanted to remind all of us about the power of the hive, and its incredible facility to create this platform that individuals want to participate and innovate on. And for me, when I think about our future, and all of those problems that seem incredibly large, the scale is impossible, the urgency is there, Peers, Inc. provides the speed and scale and the innovation and the creativity that is going to answer these problems. All we have to do is create a fabulous platform for participation — nontrivial.So I continue to think that transportation is the center of the hard universe. All problems come back to transportation for me. But there are all these other areas that are these profound, big problems that I know that we can work on, and people are working on them in many different sectors, but there's this really fabulous group of things with the power of this Peers, Inc. model.So over the last decade, we've been reveling in the power of the Internet and how it's empowered individuals, and for me, what Peers, Inc. does is it takes it up a notch. We're now bringing the power of the company and the corporation and supercharging individuals. So for me, it's a collaboration. Together, we can. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_chase_excuse_me_may_i_rent_your_car
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"I'm a neuroscientist, and I study decision-making. I do experiments to test how different chemicals in the brain influence the choices we make.I'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making: a cheese sandwich. That's right. According to scientists, a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions.How do I know? I'm the scientist who did the study.A few years ago, my colleagues and I were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people's decisions in social situations. Specifically, we wanted to know how serotonin would affect the way people react when they're treated unfairly.So we did an experiment. We manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain. This is the amino acid tryptophan. So what we found was, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to take revenge when they're treated unfairly.That's the study we did, and here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards.(""A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision-making"")(""What a friend we have in cheeses"")(""Eating Cheese and Meat May Boost Self-Control"") At this point, you might be wondering, did I miss something?(""Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy"") Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from? And I thought the same thing myself when these came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate. We gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels. But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. And of course when science says cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well, that's sure to grab people's attention. So there you have it: the evolution of a headline.When this happened, a part of me thought, well, what's the big deal? So the media oversimplified a few things, but in the end, it's just a news story. And I think a lot of scientists have this attitude. But the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time, and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves. When the headlines rolled, what happened was, the marketers came calling. Would I be willing to provide a scientific endorsement of a mood-boosting bottled water? Or would I go on television to demonstrate, in front of a live audience, that comfort foods really do make you feel better? I think these folks meant well, but had I taken them up on their offers, I would have been going beyond the science, and good scientists are careful not to do this.But nevertheless, neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing. Here's one example: Neuro drinks, a line of products, including Nuero Bliss here, which according to its label helps reduce stress, enhances mood, provides focused concentration, and promotes a positive outlook. I have to say, this sounds awesome. (Laughter) I could totally have used this 10 minutes ago. So when this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. So I went to the company's website looking to find some controlled trials of their products. But I didn't find any.Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain. And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties. A couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article. For half the people, the article included a brain image, and for the other half, it was the same article but it didn't have a brain image. At the end — you see where this is going — people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article. So this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image. And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image. So the take-home message here is, do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.Now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades, and we're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain. Like, just a couple of weeks ago, neuroscientists at MIT figured out how to break habits in rats just by controlling neural activity in a specific part of their brain. Really cool stuff. But the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown, unproven claims.So what I'm going to do is show you how to spot a couple of classic moves, dead giveaways, really, for what's variously been called neuro-bunk, neuro-bollocks, or, my personal favorite, neuro-flapdoodle.So the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people's thoughts and emotions. Here's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in The New York Times. The headline? ""You Love Your iPhone. Literally."" It quickly became the most emailed article on the site.So how'd they figure this out? They put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iPhones. The brain scans showed activation in a part of the brain called the insula, a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion. So they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula, this meant the subjects loved their iPhones. Now there's just one problem with this line of reasoning, and that's that the insula does a lot. Sure, it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion, but it's also involved in tons of other processes, like memory, language, attention, even anger, disgust and pain. So based on the same logic, I could equally conclude you hate your iPhone. The point here is, when you see activation in the insula, you can't just pick and choose your favorite explanation from off this list, and it's a really long list. My colleagues Tal Yarkoni and Russ Poldrack have shown that the insula pops up in almost a third of all brain imaging studies that have ever been published. So chances are really, really good that your insula is going off right now, but I won't kid myself to think this means you love me.So speaking of love and the brain, there's a researcher, known to some as Dr. Love, who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together, the source of love and prosperity. This time it's not a cheese sandwich. No, it's a hormone called oxytocin. You've probably heard of it. So, Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people's oxytocin, this increases their trust, empathy and cooperation. So he's calling oxytocin ""the moral molecule.""Now these studies are scientifically valid, and they've been replicated, but they're not the whole story. Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy. It increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups. And in some cases, oxytocin can even decrease cooperation. So based on these studies, I could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule, and call myself Dr. Strangelove. (Laughter)So we've seen neuro-flapdoodle all over the headlines. We see it in supermarkets, on book covers. What about the clinic?SPECT imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain. For the bargain price of a few thousand dollars, there are clinics in the U.S. that will give you one of these SPECT scans and use the image to help diagnose your problems. These scans, the clinics say, can help prevent Alzheimer's disease, solve weight and addiction issues, overcome marital conflicts, and treat, of course, a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to ADHD. This sounds great. A lot of people agree. Some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year in business.There's just one problem. The broad consensus in neuroscience is that we can't yet diagnose mental illness from a single brain scan. But these clinics have treated tens of thousands of patients to date, many of them children, and SPECT imaging involves a radioactive injection, so exposing people to radiation, potentially harmful.I am more excited than most people, as a neuroscientist, about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter. And if one day we can say that cheese and chocolate help us make better decisions, count me in. But we're not there yet. We haven't found a ""buy"" button inside the brain, we can't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans, and we can't turn sinners into saints with hormones. Maybe someday we will, but until then, we have to be careful that we don't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that's playing a much longer game.So here's where you come in. If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it, don't just take them at their word. Ask the tough questions. Ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told. The answers shouldn't be simple, because the brain isn't simple. But that's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/molly_crockett_beware_neuro_bunk
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"Photography has been my passion ever since I was old enough to pick up a camera, but today I want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine, and I didn't take any of them. There were no art directors, no stylists, no chance for reshoots, not even any regard for lighting. In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists.My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th. We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture.Well you can see where this is going. Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, ""Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual?"" This is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture.You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger. No one's ever refused, and luckily no one's ever run off with our camera.Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives. It's really become sacred to us. This one was taken just weeks after 9/11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand.So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip. They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way. Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change, and she reaches new milestones, and I get to see life through her eyes, and how she interacts with and sees everything. This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year.Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips. And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot. She said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier. And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York. And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories.So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories. I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos. I'm always the one taking the picture. So I want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot, and don't hesitate to go up to someone and ask, ""Will you take our picture?"" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_addis_a_father_daughter_bond_one_photo_at_a_time
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"So a friend of mine who's a political scientist, he told me several months ago exactly what this month would be like. He said, you know, there's this fiscal cliff coming, it's going to come at the beginning of 2013. Both parties absolutely need to resolve it, but neither party wants to be seen as the first to resolve it. Neither party has any incentive to solve it a second before it's due, so he said, December, you're just going to see lots of angry negotiations, negotiations breaking apart, reports of phone calls that aren't going well, people saying nothing's happening at all, and then sometime around Christmas or New Year's, we're going to hear, ""Okay, they resolved everything."" He told me that a few months ago. He said he's 98 percent positive they're going to resolve it, and I got an email from him today saying, all right, we're basically on track, but now I'm 80 percent positive that they're going to resolve it.And it made me think. I love studying these moments in American history when there was this frenzy of partisan anger, that the economy was on the verge of total collapse.The most famous early battle was Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over what the dollar would be and how it would be backed up, with Alexander Hamilton saying, ""We need a central bank, the First Bank of the United States, or else the dollar will have no value. This economy won't work,"" and Thomas Jefferson saying, ""The people won't trust that. They just fought off a king. They're not going to accept some central authority."" This battle defined the first 150 years of the U.S. economy, and at every moment, different partisans saying, ""Oh my God, the economy's about to collapse,"" and the rest of us just going about, spending our bucks on whatever it is we wanted to buy.To give you a quick primer on where we are, a quick refresher on where we are. So the fiscal cliff, I was told that that's too partisan a thing to say, although I can't remember which party it's supporting or attacking. People say we should call it the fiscal slope, or we should call it an austerity crisis, but then other people say, no, that's even more partisan. So I just call it the self-imposed, self-destructive arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem. And this is what the inevitable problem looks like. So this is a projection of U.S. debt as a percentage of our overall economy, of GDP. The light blue dotted line represents the Congressional Budget Office's best guess of what will happen if Congress really doesn't do anything, and as you can see, sometime around 2027, we reach Greek levels of debt, somewhere around 130 percent of GDP, which tells you that some time in the next 20 years, if Congress does absolutely nothing, we're going to hit a moment where the world's investors, the world's bond buyers, are going to say, ""We don't trust America anymore. We're not going to lend them any money, except at really high interest rates."" And at that moment our economy collapses. But remember, Greece is there today. We're there in 20 years. We have lots and lots of time to avoid that crisis, and the fiscal cliff was just one more attempt at trying to force the two sides to resolve the crisis.Here's another way to look at exactly the same problem. The dark blue line is how much the government spends. The light blue line is how much the government gets in. And as you can see, for most of recent history, except for a brief period, we have consistently spent more than we take in. Thus the national debt. But as you can also see, projected going forward, the gap widens a bit and raises a bit, and this graph is only through 2021. It gets really, really ugly out towards 2030.And this graph sort of sums up what the problem is. The Democrats, they say, well, this isn't a big deal. We can just raise taxes a bit and close that gap, especially if we raise taxes on the rich. The Republicans say, hey, no, no, we've got a better idea. Why don't we lower both lines? Why don't we lower government spending and lower government taxes, and then we'll be on an even more favorable long-term deficit trajectory? And behind this powerful disagreement between how to close that gap, there's the worst kind of cynical party politics, the worst kind of insider baseball, lobbying, all of that stuff, but there's also this powerfully interesting, respectful disagreement between two fundamentally different economic philosophies.And I like to think, when I picture how Republicans see the economy, what I picture is just some amazingly well-engineered machine, some perfect machine. Unfortunately, I picture it made in Germany or Japan, but this amazing machine that's constantly scouring every bit of human endeavor and taking resources, money, labor, capital, machinery, away from the least productive parts and towards the more productive parts, and while this might cause temporary dislocation, what it does is it builds up the more productive areas and lets the less productive areas fade away and die, and as a result the whole system is so much more efficient, so much richer for everybody. And this view generally believes that there is a role for government, a small role, to set the rules so people aren't lying and cheating and hurting each other, maybe, you know, have a police force and a fire department and an army, but to have a very limited reach into the mechanisms of this machinery.And when I picture how Democrats and Democratic-leaning economists picture this economy, most Democratic economists are, you know, they're capitalists, they believe, yes, that's a good system a lot of the time. It's good to let markets move resources to their more productive use. But that system has tons of problems. Wealth piles up in the wrong places. Wealth is ripped away from people who shouldn't be called unproductive. That's not going to create an equitable, fair society. That machine doesn't care about the environment, about racism, about all these issues that make this life worse for all of us, and so the government does have a role to take resources from more productive uses, or from richer sources, and give them to other sources. And when you think about the economy through these two different lenses, you understand why this crisis is so hard to solve, because the worse the crisis gets, the higher the stakes are, the more each side thinks they know the answer and the other side is just going to ruin everything.And I can get really despairing. I've spent a lot of the last few years really depressed about this, until this year, I learned something that I felt really excited about. I feel like it's really good news, and it's so shocking, I don't like saying it, because I think people won't believe me. But here's what I learned. The American people, taken as a whole, when it comes to these issues, to fiscal issues, are moderate, pragmatic centrists. And I know that's hard to believe, that the American people are moderate, pragmatic centrists. But let me explain what I'm thinking.When you look at how the federal government spends money, so this is the battle right here, 55 percent, more than half, is on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a few other health programs, 20 percent defense, 19 percent discretionary, and six percent interest. So when we're talking about cutting government spending, this is the pie we're talking about, and Americans overwhelmingly, and it doesn't matter what party they're in, overwhelmingly like that big 55 percent chunk. They like Social Security. They like Medicare. They even like Medicaid, even though that goes to the poor and indigent, which you might think would have less support. And they do not want it fundamentally touched, although the American people are remarkably comfortable, and Democrats roughly equal to Republicans, with some minor tweaks to make the system more stable.Social Security is fairly easy to fix. The rumors of its demise are always greatly exaggerated. So gradually raise Social Security retirement age, maybe only on people not yet born. Americans are about 50/50, whether they're Democrats or Republicans.Reduce Medicare for very wealthy seniors, seniors who make a lot of money. Don't even eliminate it. Just reduce it. People generally are comfortable with it, Democrats and Republicans.Raise medical health care contributions? Everyone hates that equally, but Republicans and Democrats hate that together.And so what this tells me is, when you look at the discussion of how to resolve our fiscal problems, we are not a nation that's powerfully divided on the major, major issue. We're comfortable with it needing some tweaks, but we want to keep it. We're not open to a discussion of eliminating it.Now there is one issue that is hyper-partisan, and where there is one party that is just spend, spend, spend, we don't care, spend some more, and that of course is Republicans when it comes to military defense spending. They way outweigh Democrats. The vast majority want to protect military defense spending. That's 20 percent of the budget, and that presents a more difficult issue. I should also note that the [discretionary] spending, which is about 19 percent of the budget, that is Democratic and Republican issues, so you do have welfare, food stamps, other programs that tend to be popular among Democrats, but you also have the farm bill and all sorts of Department of Interior inducements for oil drilling and other things, which tend to be popular among Republicans.Now when it comes to taxes, there is more disagreement. That's a more partisan area. You have Democrats overwhelmingly supportive of raising the income tax on people who make 250,000 dollars a year, Republicans sort of against it, although if you break it out by income, Republicans who make less than 75,000 dollars a year like this idea. So basically Republicans who make more than 250,000 dollars a year don't want to be taxed. Raising taxes on investment income, you also see about two thirds of Democrats but only one third of Republicans are comfortable with that idea.This brings up a really important point, which is that we tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans and think there's this little group over there called independents that's, what, two percent? If you add Democrats, you add Republicans, you've got the American people. But that is not the case at all. And it has not been the case for most of modern American history. Roughly a third of Americans say that they are Democrats. Around a quarter say that they are Republicans. A tiny little sliver call themselves libertarians, or socialists, or some other small third party, and the largest block, 40 percent, say they're independents. So most Americans are not partisan, and most of the people in the independent camp fall somewhere in between, so even though we have tremendous overlap between the views on these fiscal issues of Democrats and Republicans, we have even more overlap when you add in the independents. Now we get to fight about all sorts of other issues. We get to hate each other on gun control and abortion and the environment, but on these fiscal issues, these important fiscal issues, we just are not anywhere nearly as divided as people say.And in fact, there's this other group of people who are not as divided as people might think, and that group is economists. I talk to a lot of economists, and back in the '70s and '80s it was ugly being an economist. You were in what they called the saltwater camp, meaning Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, or you were in the freshwater camp, University of Chicago, University of Rochester. You were a free market capitalist economist or you were a Keynesian liberal economist, and these people didn't go to each other's weddings, they snubbed each other at conferences. It's still ugly to this day, but in my experience, it is really, really hard to find an economist under 40 who still has that kind of way of seeing the world. The vast majority of economists — it is so uncool to call yourself an ideologue of either camp. The phrase that you want, if you're a graduate student or a postdoc or you're a professor, a 38-year-old economics professor, is, ""I'm an empiricist. I go by the data."" And the data is very clear. None of these major theories have been completely successful. The 20th century, the last hundred years, is riddled with disastrous examples of times that one school or the other tried to explain the past or predict the future and just did an awful, awful job, so the economics profession has acquired some degree of modesty. They still are an awfully arrogant group of people, I will assure you, but they're now arrogant about their impartiality, and they, too, see a tremendous range of potential outcomes.And this nonpartisanship is something that exists, that has existed in secret in America for years and years and years. I've spent a lot of the fall talking to the three major organizations that survey American political attitudes: Pew Research, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, and the most important but the least known is the American National Election Studies group that is the world's longest, most respected poll of political attitudes. They've been doing it since 1948, and what they show consistently throughout is that it's almost impossible to find Americans who are consistent ideologically, who consistently support, ""No we mustn't tax, and we must limit the size of government,"" or, ""No, we must encourage government to play a larger role in redistribution and correcting the ills of capitalism."" Those groups are very, very small. The vast majority of people, they pick and choose, they see compromise and they change over time when they hear a better argument or a worse argument. And that part of it has not changed. What has changed is how people respond to vague questions. If you ask people vague questions, like, ""Do you think there should be more government or less government?"" ""Do you think government should"" — especially if you use loaded language — ""Do you think the government should provide handouts?"" Or, ""Do you think the government should redistribute?"" Then you can see radical partisan change. But when you get specific, when you actually ask about the actual taxing and spending issues under consideration, people are remarkably centrist, they're remarkably open to compromise.So what we have, then, when you think about the fiscal cliff, don't think of it as the American people fundamentally can't stand each other on these issues and that we must be ripped apart into two separate warring nations. Think of it as a tiny, tiny number of ancient economists and misrepresentative ideologues have captured the process. And they've captured the process through familiar ways, through a primary system which encourages that small group of people's voices, because that small group of people, the people who answer all yeses or all noes on those ideological questions, they might be small but every one of them has a blog, every one of them has been on Fox or MSNBC in the last week. Every one of them becomes a louder and louder voice, but they don't represent us. They don't represent what our views are.And that gets me back to the dollar, and it gets me back to reminding myself that we know this experience. We know what it's like to have these people on TV, in Congress, yelling about how the end of the world is coming if we don't adopt their view completely, because it's happened about the dollar ever since there's been a dollar. We had the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton. In 1913, we had this ugly battle over the Federal Reserve, when it was created, with vicious, angry arguments over how it would be constituted, and a general agreement that the way it was constituted was the worst possible compromise, a compromise guaranteed to destroy this valuable thing, this dollar, but then everyone agreeing, okay, so long as we're on the gold standard, it should be okay. The Fed can't mess it up so badly. But then we got off the gold standard for individuals during the Depression and we got off the gold standard as a source of international currency coordination during Richard Nixon's presidency. Each of those times, we were on the verge of complete collapse. And nothing happened at all. Throughout it all, the dollar has been one of the most long-standing, stable, reasonable currencies, and we all use it every single day, no matter what the people screaming about tell us, no matter how scared we're supposed to be.And this long-term fiscal picture that we're in right now, I think what is most maddening about it is, if Congress were simply able to show not that they agree with each other, not that they're able to come up with the best possible compromise, but that they are able to just begin the process towards compromise, we all instantly are better off. The fear is that the world is watching. The fear is that the longer we delay any solution, the more the world will look to the U.S. not as the bedrock of stability in the global economy, but as a place that can't resolve its own fights, and the longer we put that off, the more we make the world nervous, the higher interest rates are going to be, the quicker we're going to have to face a day of horrible calamity. And so just the act of compromise itself, and sustained, real compromise, would give us even more time, would allow both sides even longer to spread out the pain and reach even more compromise down the road.So I'm in the media. I feel like my job to make this happen is to help foster the things that seem to lead to compromise, to not talk about this in those vague and scary terms that do polarize us, but to just talk about it like what it is, not an existential crisis, not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views, but a math problem, a really solvable math problem, one where we're not all going to get what we want and one where, you know, there's going to be a little pain to spread around. But the more we address it as a practical concern, the sooner we can resolve it, and the more time we have to resolve it, paradoxically. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_davidson_what_we_learned_from_teetering_on_the_fiscal_cliff
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"On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted.A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day. (Laughter)(""10,000 missiles"") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. It's like every year it's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever, for 10 years now.So at some point it became, you know, to me, I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before. Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook, my friends like it, don't like it, most of the time don't like it, don't share it, don't nothing, and it's another day. So I went to sleep, and that was it for me. And later on in the night, I woke up because I'm always waking up in the night, and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots, you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before. (Laughter) And I was like, ""What's going on?"" So I come to the computer and I start looking on, and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don't know, and a few of them from Iran, which is — What? Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran. We don't know people from Iran. It's like, on Facebook, you have friends only from — it's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. And now people from Iran are talking to me.So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don't have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying.So I'm like, whoa. I ask my wife to come, and I tell her, you have to see that. People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. And everybody's crying now. (Laughter)So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I'd just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that's how it started. The day after, when really it became a lot of talking, I said to myself, and my wife said to me, I also want a poster, so this is her. (Laughter) Because it's working, put me in a poster now.But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work, but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel who want to say something. So I'm going to shoot all the people I know, if they want, and I'm going to put them in a poster and I'm going to share them.So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. And that's how it started. And that's how, really, it's unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. It's not just one dude making one poster, it's — we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, ""Make me a poster. Post it. Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too."" It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time. It was a huge amount of pictures. So for a few days, that's how my living room was.And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran. And we took these messages and we made posters out of it, because I know people: They don't read, they see images. If it's an image, they may read it.So here are a few of them.(""You are my first Israelian friend. I wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians, anyway nice to see you!"")(""I love that blue. I love that star. I love that flag."") This one is really moving for me because it's the story of a girl who has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning, and now that she sees the posters that we're sending, she starts — she said that she changed her mind, and now she loves that blue, she loves that star, and she loves that flag, talking about the Israeli flag, and she wished that we'd meet and come to visit one another, and just a few days after I posted the first poster.The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy. So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So. And now it's communication. It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.(""My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War."")This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war, and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say, ""I like this guy. I love those guys."" And it became really big at some point.And then it became news. Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news. And suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news. So the guys on the news, they say, ""Okay, let's talk about this."" And they just came, and it was so much,I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him, ""Who's gonna see the show?""And he said, ""Everybody.""So she said, ""Everybody in Palestine, in where? Israel? Who is everybody?""""Everybody.""They said, ""Syria?"" ""Syria.""""Lebanon?""""Lebanon."" At some point, he just said, ""40 million people are going to see you today. It's everybody."" The Chinese. And we were just at the beginning of the story.Something crazy also happened. Every time a country started talking about it, like Germany, America, wherever, a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories, so at the beginning we had ""Iran-Loves-Israel,"" which is an Iranian sitting in Tehran, saying, ""Okay, Israel loves Iran? I give you Iran-Loves-Israel."" You have Palestine-Loves-Israel. You have Lebanon that just — a few days ago. And this whole list of pages on Facebook dedicated to the same message, to people sending their love, one to each other.The moment I really understood that something was happening, a friend of mine told me, ""Google the word 'Israel.'"" And those were the first images on those days that popped up from Google when you were typing, ""Israel"" or ""Iran."" We really changed how people see the Middle East. Because you're not in the Middle East. You're somewhere over there, and then you want to see the Middle East, so you go on Google and you say, ""Israel,"" and they give you the bad stuff. And for a few days you got those images. Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos.So for five months now, that's what we are doing, me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images. We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us. They see images of us, and they see bad images. So we're working on making good images. End of story.Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page. This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page. This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance of the Israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page. This is the enemy. What?(""Our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in Bulgaria"")And it's going both ways. It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other. And we're understanding. And you show compassion. And you become friends. And at some point, you become friends on Facebook, and you become friends in life. You can go and travel and meet people. And I was in Munich a few weeks ago. I went there to open an exposition about Iran and I met there with people from the page that told me, ""Okay, you're going to be in Europe, I'm coming. I'm coming from France, from Holland, from Germany,"" of course, and from Israel people came, and we just met there for the first time in real life. I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time. And we just shake hands, and have a coffee and a nice discussion, and we talk about food and basketball. And that was the end of it. Remember that image from the beginning? At some point we met in real life, and we became friends.And it goes the other way around. Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, ""Okay, not that big a deal.""So a few weeks ago, the stress is getting higher, so we start this new campaign called ""Not ready to die in your war."" I mean, it's plus/minus the same message, but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it. And again, something amazing happened, something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign. Now people from Iran, the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent, you know, their foot and half their faces, now they're sending their faces, and they're saying, ""Okay, no problem, we're into it. We are with you."" Just read where those guys are from. And for every guy from Israel, you've got someone from Iran. Just people sending their pictures. Crazy, yes?So — (Applause)So you may ask yourself, who is this dude?My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41, I'm an Israeli, I'm a father of two, I'm a husband, and I'm a graphic designer. I'm teaching graphic design. And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time I've been asked, many times I've been asked, ""Yeah, but, this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — ""I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground. I know how it can look really bad. So to me, this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late. And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it. Maybe as people, because especially in Israel, we're in a democracy. We have the freedom of speech, and maybe that little thing can change something. And really, we can be our own ambassadors. We can just send a message and hope for the best.So I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image, because it's all about images. And maybe that image will help us change something. Just raise that. Exactly. And I'm just going to take a picture of it, and I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of ""Israelis for peace"" or something.Oh my God. Don't cry.Thank you guys. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/israel_and_iran_a_love_story
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"One day in 1819, 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile, in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean, 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater. They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship's hull. As their ship began to sink beneath the swells, the men huddled together in three small whaleboats. These men were 10,000 miles from home, more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land. In their small boats, they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water. These were the men of the whaleship Essex, whose story would later inspire parts of ""Moby Dick.""Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire, but think about how much worse it would have been then. No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong. No search party was coming to look for these men. So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves, but we all know what it's like to be afraid. We know how fear feels, but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean.As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates. And I think it's no accident that we think this way. Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists. So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes, as a danger in and of itself. ""Don't worry,"" we like to say to one another. ""Don't panic."" In English, fear is something we conquer. It's something we fight. It's something we overcome. But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way? What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination, something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself?It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid. When I was a child, I lived in California, which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live, but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary. I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake, and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping. And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination. But at a certain point, most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up. We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed, and not every earthquake brings buildings down. But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults. The same incredible imaginations that produced ""The Origin of Species,"" ""Jane Eyre"" and ""The Remembrance of Things Past,"" also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust. So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children?Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment, to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex. Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific. Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship. The time had come for the men to make a plan, but they had very few options. In his fascinating account of the disaster, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth. The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away. But they'd heard some frightening rumors. They'd been told that these islands, and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals. So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner. Another possible destination was Hawaii, but given the season, the captain was afraid they'd be struck by severe storms. Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult: to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America. But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water. To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms, to starve to death before reaching land. These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men, and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died.Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name. What if instead of calling them fears, we called them stories? Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it. It's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do. And fears and storytelling have the same components. They have the same architecture. Like all stories, fears have characters. In our fears, the characters are us. Fears also have plots. They have beginnings and middles and ends. You board the plane. The plane takes off. The engine fails. Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel. Picture a cannibal, human teeth sinking into human skin, human flesh roasting over a fire. Fears also have suspense. If I've done my job as a storyteller today, you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex. Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense. Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next? In other words, our fears make us think about the future. And humans, by the way, are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way, of projecting ourselves forward in time, and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling.As a writer, I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events, and fear works in that same way. In fear, just like in fiction, one thing always leads to another. When I was writing my first novel, ""The Age Of Miracles,"" I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down. What would happen to our days? What would happen to our crops? What would happen to our minds? And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night. If an earthquake strikes tonight, I used to worry, what will happen to our house? What will happen to my family? And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story. So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories, we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories. But just as importantly, we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears, and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives.Now, some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others. I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs, and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called ""productive paranoia,"" which meant that these people, instead of dismissing their fears, these people read them closely, they studied them, and then they translated that fear into preparation and action. So that way, if their worst fears came true, their businesses were ready.And sometimes, of course, our worst fears do come true. That's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear. Once in a while, our fears can predict the future. But we can't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct. So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others? I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex offers an illuminating, if tragic, example. After much deliberation, the men finally made a decision. Terrified of cannibals, they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America. After more than two months at sea, the men ran out of food as they knew they might, and they were still quite far from land. When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships, less than half of the men were left alive, and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism. Herman Melville, who used this story as research for ""Moby Dick,"" wrote years later, and from dry land, quote, ""All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they, immediately after leaving the wreck, steered straight for Tahiti. But,"" as Melville put it, ""they dreaded cannibals."" So the question is, why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation? Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other? Looked at from this angle, theirs becomes a story about reading. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments, the artistic and the scientific. A good reader has an artist's passion, a willingness to get caught up in the story, but just as importantly, the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist, which acts to temper and complicate the reader's intuitive reactions to the story. As we've seen, the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part. They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios. The problem was that they listened to the wrong story. Of all the narratives their fears wrote, they responded only to the most lurid, the most vivid, the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture: cannibals. But perhaps if they'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist, with more coolness of judgment, they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale, the story of starvation, and headed for Tahiti, just as Melville's sad commentary suggests.And maybe if we all tried to read our fears, we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them. Maybe then we'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes, and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face: the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries, the gradual changes in our climate. Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest, so too might our subtlest fears be the truest. Read in the right way, our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out. Properly read, our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature: a little wisdom, a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing — the truth. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_thompson_walker_what_fear_can_teach_us
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"So I'd like to start by focusing on the world's most dangerous animal.Now, when you talk about dangerous animals, most people might think of lions or tigers or sharks. But of course the most dangerous animal is the mosquito. The mosquito has killed more humans than any other creature in human history. In fact, probably adding them all together, the mosquito has killed more humans. And the mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague.And you would think, would you not, that with all our science, with all our advances in society, with better towns, better civilizations, better sanitation, wealth, that we would get better at controlling mosquitos, and hence reduce this disease. And that's not really the case. If it was the case, we wouldn't have between 200 and 300 million cases of malaria every year, and we wouldn't have a million and a half deaths from malaria, and we wouldn't have a disease that was relatively unknown 50 years ago now suddenly turned into the largest mosquito-borne virus threat that we have, and that's called dengue fever.So 50 years ago, pretty much no one had heard of it, no one certainly in the European environment. But dengue fever now, according to the World Health Organization, infects between 50 and 100 million people every year, so that's equivalent to the whole of the population of the U.K. being infected every year. Other estimates put that number at roughly double that number of infections. And dengue fever has grown in speed quite phenomenally. In the last 50 years, the incidence of dengue has grown thirtyfold.Now let me tell you a little bit about what dengue fever is, for those who don't know. Now let's assume you go on holiday. Let's assume you go to the Caribbean, or you might go to Mexico. You might go to Latin America, Asia, Africa, anywhere in Saudi Arabia. You might go to India, the Far East. It doesn't really matter. It's the same mosquito, and it's the same disease. You're at risk. And let's assume you're bitten by a mosquito that's carrying that virus. Well, you could develop flu-like symptoms. They could be quite mild. You could develop nausea, headache, your muscles could feel like they're contracting, and you could actually feel like your bones are breaking. And that's the nickname given to this disease. It's called breakbone fever, because that's how you can feel.Now the odd thing is, is that once you've been bitten by this mosquito, and you've had this disease, your body develops antibodies, so if you're bitten again with that strain, it doesn't affect you. But it's not one virus, it's four, and the same protection that gives you the antibodies and protects you from the same virus that you had before actually makes you much more susceptible to the other three. So the next time you get dengue fever, if it's a different strain, you're more susceptible, you're likely to get worse symptoms, and you're more likely to get the more severe forms, hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome. So you don't want dengue once, and you certainly don't want it again.So why is it spreading so fast? And the answer is this thing. This is Aedes aegypti. Now this is a mosquito that came, like its name suggests, out of North Africa, and it's spread round the world. Now, in fact, a single mosquito will only travel about 200 yards in its entire life. They don't travel very far. What they're very good at doing is hitchhiking, particularly the eggs. They will lay their eggs in clear water, any pool, any puddle, any birdbath, any flower pot, anywhere there's clear water, they'll lay their eggs, and if that clear water is near freight, it's near a port, if it's anywhere near transport, those eggs will then get transported around the world. And that's what's happened. Mankind has transported these eggs all the way around the world, and these insects have infested over 100 countries, and there's now 2.5 billion people living in countries where this mosquito resides.To give you just a couple of examples how fast this has happened, in the mid-'70s, Brazil declared, ""We have no Aedes aegypti,"" and currently they spend about a billion dollars now a year trying to get rid of it, trying to control it, just one species of mosquito. Two days ago, or yesterday, I can't remember which, I saw a Reuters report that said Madeira had had their first cases of dengue, about 52 cases, with about 400 probable cases. That's two days ago. Interestingly, Madeira first got the insect in 2005, and here we are, a few years later, first cases of dengue. So the one thing you'll find is that where the mosquito goes, dengue will follow. Once you've got the mosquito in your area, anyone coming into that area with dengue, mosquito will bite them, mosquito will bite somewhere else, somewhere else, somewhere else, and you'll get an epidemic.So we must be good at killing mosquitos. I mean, that can't be very difficult. Well, there's two principle ways. The first way is that you use larvicides. You use chemicals. You put them into water where they breed. Now in an urban environment, that's extraordinarily difficult. You've got to get your chemical into every puddle, every birdbath, every tree trunk. It's just not practical. The second way you can do it is actually trying to kill the insects as they fly around. This is a picture of fogging. Here what someone is doing is mixing up chemical in a smoke and basically spreading that through the environment. You could do the same with a space spray. This is really unpleasant stuff, and if it was any good, we wouldn't have this massive increase in mosquitos and we wouldn't have this massive increase in dengue fever. So it's not very effective, but it's probably the best thing we've got at the moment. Having said that, actually, your best form of protection and my best form of protection is a long-sleeve shirt and a little bit of DEET to go with it.So let's start again. Let's design a product, right from the word go, and decide what we want. Well we clearly need something that is effective at reducing the mosquito population. There's no point in just killing the odd mosquito here and there. We want something that gets that population right the way down so it can't get the disease transmission. Clearly the product you've got has got to be safe to humans. We are going to use it in and around humans. It has to be safe. We don't want to have a lasting impact on the environment. We don't want to do anything that you can't undo. Maybe a better product comes along in 20, 30 years. Fine. We don't want a lasting environmental impact. We want something that's relatively cheap, or cost-effective, because there's an awful lot of countries involved, and some of them are emerging markets, some of them emerging countries, low-income. And finally, you want something that's species-specific. You want to get rid of this mosquito that spreads dengue, but you don't really want to get all the other insects. Some are quite beneficial. Some are important to your ecosystem. This one's not. It's invaded you. But you don't want to get all of the insects. You just want to get this one. And most of the time, you'll find this insect lives in and around your home, so this — whatever we do has got to get to that insect. It's got to get into people's houses, into the bedrooms, into the kitchens.Now there are two features of mosquito biology that really help us in this project, and that is, firstly, males don't bite. It's only the female mosquito that will actually bite you. The male can't bite you, won't bite you, doesn't have the mouth parts to bite you. It's just the female. And the second is a phenomenon that males are very, very good at finding females. If there's a male mosquito that you release, and if there's a female around, that male will find the female.So basically, we've used those two factors. So here's a typical situation, male meets female, lots of offspring. A single female will lay about up to 100 eggs at a time, up to about 500 in her lifetime. Now if that male is carrying a gene which causes the death of the offspring, then the offspring don't survive, and instead of having 500 mosquitos running around, you have none. And if you can put more, I'll call them sterile, that the offspring will actually die at different stages, but I'll call them sterile for now. If you put more sterile males out into the environment, then the females are more likely to find a sterile male than a fertile one, and you will bring that population down. So the males will go out, they'll look for females, they'll mate. If they mate successfully, then no offspring. If they don't find a female, then they'll die anyway. They only live a few days.And that's exactly where we are. So this is technology that was developed in Oxford University a few years ago. The company itself, Oxitec, we've been working for the last 10 years, very much on a sort of similar development pathway that you'd get with a pharmaceutical company. So about 10 years of internal evaluation, testing, to get this to a state where we think it's actually ready. And then we've gone out into the big outdoors, always with local community consent, always with the necessary permits. So we've done field trials now in the Cayman Islands, a small one in Malaysia, and two more now in Brazil.And what's the result? Well, the result has been very good. In about four months of release, we've brought that population of mosquitos — in most cases we're dealing with villages here of about 2,000, 3,000 people, that sort of size, starting small — we've taken that mosquito population down by about 85 percent in about four months. And in fact, the numbers after that get, those get very difficult to count, because there just aren't any left. So that's been what we've seen in Cayman, it's been what we've seen in Brazil in those trials.And now what we're doing is we're going through a process to scale up to a town of about 50,000, so we can see this work at big scale. And we've got a production unit in Oxford, or just south of Oxford, where we actually produce these mosquitos. We can produce them, in a space a bit more than this red carpet, I can produce about 20 million a week. We can transport them around the world. It's not very expensive, because it's a coffee cup — something the size of a coffee cup will hold about three million eggs. So freight costs aren't our biggest problem. (Laughter) So we've got that. You could call it a mosquito factory. And for Brazil, where we've been doing some trials, the Brazilian government themselves have now built their own mosquito factory, far bigger than ours, and we'll use that for scaling up in Brazil.There you are. We've sent mosquito eggs. We've separated the males from the females. The males have been put in little pots and the truck is going down the road and they are releasing males as they go. It's actually a little bit more precise than that. You want to release them so that you get good coverage of your area. So you take a Google Map, you divide it up, work out how far they can fly, and make sure you're releasing such that you get coverage of the area, and then you go back, and within a very short space of time, you're bringing that population right the way down.We've also done this in agriculture. We've got several different species of agriculture coming along, and I'm hoping that soon we'll be able to get some funding together so we can get back and start looking at malaria.So that's where we stand at the moment, and I've just got a few final thoughts, which is that this is another way in which biology is now coming in to supplement chemistry in some of our societal advances in this area, and these biological approaches are coming in in very different forms, and when you think about genetic engineering, we've now got enzymes for industrial processing, enzymes, genetically engineered enzymes in food. We have G.M. crops, we have pharmaceuticals, we have new vaccines, all using roughly the same technology, but with very different outcomes. And I'm in favor, actually. Of course I am. I'm in favor of particularly where the older technologies don't work well or have become unacceptable. And although the techniques are similar, the outcomes are very, very different, and if you take our approach, for example, and you compare it to, say, G.M. crops, both techniques are trying to produce a massive benefit. Both have a side benefit, which is that we reduce pesticide use tremendously. But whereas a G.M. crop is trying to protect the plant, for example, and give it an advantage, what we're actually doing is taking the mosquito and giving it the biggest disadvantage it can possibly have, rendering it unable to reproduce effectively. So for the mosquito, it's a dead end.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hadyn_parry_re_engineering_mosquitos_to_fight_disease
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"The filmmaker Georges Méliès was first a magician. Now movies proved to be the ultimate medium for magic. With complete control of everything the audience can see, moviemakers had developed an arsenal of techniques to further their deceptions.Motion pictures are themselves an illusion of life, produced by the sequential projection of still frames, and they astonished the Lumière brothers' early audiences. Even today's sophisticated moviegoers still lose themselves to the screen, and filmmakers leverage this separation from reality to great effect. Now imaginative people have been having fun with this for over 400 years. Giambattista della Porta, a Neapolitan scholar in the 16th century, examined and studied the natural world and saw how it could be manipulated. Playing with the world, and our perception of it, really is the essence of visual effects. So digging deeper into this with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reveals some truth behind the trickery.Visual effects are based on the principles of all illusions: assumption, things are as we know them; presumption, things will behave as we expect; and context in reality, our knowledge of the world as we know it, such as scale.Now a fourth factor really becomes an obsession, which is, never betray the illusion. And that last point has made visual effects a constant quest for perfection. So from the hand-cranked jump cut early days of cinema to last Sunday's Oscar winner, what follows are some steps and a few repeats in the evolution of visual effects. I hope you will enjoy.Isabelle: ""The filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams.""(Music) [""'A Trip to the Moon' (1902)""][""2011 Restoration of the Original Hand-Tinted Color""][""'2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968)""][""Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects""][""'Avatar' (2009)""] First doctor: How are you feeling, Jake?Jake: Hey guys. [""Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects""]Second doctor: Welcome to your new body, Jake.First doctor: Good.Second doctor: We're gonna take this nice and easy, Jake.First doctor: Well, do you want to sit up? That's fine.Second doctor: And good, just take it nice and slow, Jake.Well, no truncal ataxia, that's good.First doctor: You feeling light-headed or dizzy at all? Oh, you're wiggling your toes.[""'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1972)""]Alice: What's happening to me?[""'Alice in Wonderland' (2010)""][""Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects""][""'The Lost World' (1925)""][""Stop Motion Animation""][""'Jurassic Park' (1993)""] [Dinosaur roars][""CG Animation""][""Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects""][""'The Smurfs' (2011)""][""Autodesk Maya Software - Key Frame Animation""][""'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' (2011)""]Chimpanzee: No! [""Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects""][""'Metropolis' (1927)""](Music)[""'Blade Runner' (1982)""][""Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects""][""'The Rains Came' (1939)""] Rama Safti: Well, it's all over.Maharaja: Nothing to worry about, not a thing.['Academy Award for Special Effects - (First Year of Category)""] (Explosion)[""'2012' (2009)""]Governor: It seems to me that the worst is over.[""CG Destruction""][""'Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003)""][""Massive Software - Crowd Generation""][""Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects""][""'Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ' (1925)""][""Miniatures and Puppets Bring the Crowd to Life""][""'Gladiator' (2000)""][""CG Coliseum and Digital Crowds""][""Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects""][""'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2' (2011)""][""Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects""][""Produced in conjunction with the Academy's Science and Technology Council.""](Applause)[""'It is today possible to realize the most impossible and improbable things.' — Georges Méliès""]Don Levy: Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/don_levy_a_cinematic_journey_through_visual_effects
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"So if you've been following the news, you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the United States, all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years. Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal. That actually wouldn't be such a problem, because if we were really all going to die, we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took, and we'd find a way to deflect them. I'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way, but they're wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us.Last March, I went to the TED conference, and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true. This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises, and if we keep on going the way we're going, we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century. Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels. This is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like. Low-lying cities all around the world will disappear within the lifetime of children born today. Hansen closed his talk by saying, ""Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet we dither, taking no action to deflect the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes."" Of course, the left wants to take action, but the right denies that there's any problem.All right, so I go back from TED, and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin, and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin in National Affairs called ""Beyond the Welfare State."" Levin writes that all over the world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable, dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, but look at these graphs that Levin showed. This graph shows the national debt as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, if you go all the way back to the founding, we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War. Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive. Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, get down to near zero, and bang! — World War I. Once again, the same process repeats. Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II. We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP, really unsustainable, really dangerous. But we pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, what's this? Why has it been rising since the '70s? It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded, but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending, especially Medicare. We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, and when they do, this is what will happen. This is data from the Congressional Budget Office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended.All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, or in terms of the data they present, but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing. Let me translate for you.""We are doomed unless we start acting now. What's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party? Can't you see reality? If you won't help, then get the hell out of the way.""We can deflect both of these asteroids. These problems are both technically solvable. Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, ""Look, there's an asteroid,"" means that the other side's going to say, ""Huh? What? No, I'm not even going to look up. No.""To understand why this is happening to us, and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology. So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality, and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.Think of it like this. Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet. There are only a few species that can do it. That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound. And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story. They're always all siblings who are children of a single queen, so they're all in the same boat. They rise or fall, they live or die, as one. There's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship, and that, of course, is us. This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, and this is Tenochtitlan.Now how did we do this? How did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years? It's miraculous, and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values. As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations. This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together, they unite, they can trust each other, they become one. It's as though you're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current. When people circle together, they generate a current. We love to circle around things. We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other. We can fight as a team, as a unit. But even as morality binds people together into a unit, into a team, the circling blinds them. It causes them to distort reality. We begin separating everything into good versus evil. Now that process feels great. It feels really satisfying. But it is a gross distortion of reality.You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress. This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis, so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is, you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues. And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be. But then, after World War I, things dropped, and we get this historically low level of polarization. This was a golden age of bipartisanship, at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together and solve grand national problems. But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on. Polarization rises. It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in Congress. They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, the force field increased, Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart. It became much harder for them to socialize, much harder for them to cooperate. Retiring members nowadays say that it's become like gang warfare. Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie? Do you know why they do this? It's so that the Bloods and the Crips will know which side to vote for. (Laughter)The polarization is strongest among our political elites. Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington. But for a while, there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people. Well, in the last 12 years it's become much more apparent that it is. So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey. And what they do on that survey is they ask what's called a feeling thermometer rating. So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know, Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life. The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel about Democrats, and they like them. You know, ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale. Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise. But when you look at cross-party ratings, you find, well, that it's lower, but actually, when I first saw this data, I was surprised. That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible. It drifts downwards very slightly, but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama. It plummets. Something is going on here. The moral electromagnet is turning back on, and nowadays, just very recently, Democrats really dislike Republicans. Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing. It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too. It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart, pulling left and right into their own territories like the Bloods and the Crips.Now, there are many reasons why this is happening to us, and many of them we cannot reverse. We will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in World War II against a common enemy. We will never again have just three television networks, all of which are relatively centrist. And we will never again have a large group of conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans making it easy, making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation. So for a lot of reasons, those decades after the Second World War were an historically anomalous time. We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe.But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution. These changes are detailed in many books. These are two that I strongly recommend, and they list a whole bunch of reforms. I'm just going to group them into three broad classes here.So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional, hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is, do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place, and when you have closed party primaries, and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting, you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans. So open primaries would make that problem much, much less severe.But the problem isn't primarily that we're electing bad people to Congress. From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders, most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working, intelligent people who really want to solve problems, but once they get there, they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking. You step out of line, you get punished. So there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this.For example, this ""Citizens United"" ruling is a disaster, because it means there's like a money gun aimed at your head, and if you step out of line, if you try to reach across the aisle, there's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising.But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change the nature of social relationships in Congress. The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted, friendly, very socially skillful people, and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships, make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter, you've got to use your personal skills, and that's the way politics has always worked. But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week. Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning, they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon. They don't move their families to the District. They don't meet each other's spouses or children. There's no more relationship there. And trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization? A simple change to the legislative calendar, such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home, that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress.So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it? There are a number of groups that are working on this. No Labels and Common Cause, I think, have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective.But I'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this. Nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart. Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw. But what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this, where there's just so much stuff coming in, it's just, ""Start shooting, come on, everybody, we've got to just work together, just start shooting."" Because actually, we do face this situation. This is where we are as a country.So here's another asteroid. We've all seen versions of this graph, right, which shows the changes in wealth since 1979, and as you can see, almost all the gains in wealth have gone to the top 20 percent, and especially the top one percent. Rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy. Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other, to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not. Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts. Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood. We're not all in the same boat, and that means nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good. The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now, and the right says, ""Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem.""Now, why is that happening to us? Why is the inequality rising? Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization, is actually this fourth asteroid, rising non-marital births. This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s. Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers. Whites are headed that way too. Within a decade or two, most American children will be born into homes with no father. This means that there's much less money coming into the house. But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos. As I know from working with street children in Brazil, Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids.Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s, and the left has been saying, ""It's not a problem. It's not a problem."" The left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children. Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here. I'm actually more critical of the men who won't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children. But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem, and one side has been more concerned about it than the other. The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last July showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality.We are becoming a nation of just two classes. When Americans go to college and marry each other, they have very low divorce rates. They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids, some of them become tiger mothers, the kids rise to their full potential, and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph. And then there's everybody else: the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage, who don't have as much invested in them, who don't grow up in a stable environment, and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph.So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing. As before, we've got a problem, we've got to start working on this, we've got to do something, and what's wrong with you people that you don't see my threat?But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, we'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together. Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage. But then you're going to run smack into the problem that women don't generally want to marry someone who doesn't have a job. So if you really care about strengthening families, you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality, who are working on raising the minimum wage, who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives.So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way. How many of you can see all four? Please raise your hand right now if you're willing to admit that all four of these are national problems. Please raise your hands. Okay, almost all of you.Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members of the Asteroids Club, which is a club for all Americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point. In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground. Common ground is often very hard to find. No, we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground.Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords, and left and right could actually work together? I don't think so, because it happens, not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way. This is something we can do. Because Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility, and they've formed dozens of organizations, at the national level, such as this one, down to many local organizations, such as To The Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida, which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate that sort of working together human relationship that's necessary to solve Florida's problems. Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS, and on so many humanitarian issues, liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies, and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems. And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice. For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980. Now this is a social disaster, and liberals are very concerned about this. The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system that's just sucking in more and more poor young men. But are conservatives happy about this? Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money. And so, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives have come together to form a group called Right on Crime. And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane.So this is possible. We can do it. Let us therefore go to battle stations, not to fight each other, but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids. And let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_how_common_threats_can_make_common_political_ground
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"It's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me.I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. I'd seen my life slip away and become restricted. It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me. It was as if they couldn't see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like ""limitation,"" ""fear,"" ""pity"" and ""restriction."" I realized I'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level. A part of me had become alienated from myself. I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people's responses to me.As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives to reclaim my identity.[""Finding Freedom: 'By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do 'official' narratives.' — Davis 2009, TEDx Women""]I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair — a power chair — to negotiate the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with. When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. It showed that an arts practice can remake one's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar.So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people's responses to the wheelchair.So I thought, ""I wonder what'll happen if I put the two together?"" (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years.So to give you an idea of what that's like, I'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it's taken me on.(Music)(Applause)It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I've experienced in life. I literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom.And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too. Their eyes literally light up, and they say things like, ""I want one of those,"" or, ""If you can do that, I can do anything.""And I'm thinking, it's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way. And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people's lives. For me, this means that they're seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair ""Portal,"" because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness.And the other thing is, that because nobody's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. You're all part of the artwork too.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sue_austin_deep_sea_diving_in_a_wheelchair
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"Hello. My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living. So I use my imagination as my full-time job. But well before my imagination was my vocation, my imagination saved my life.When I was a kid, I loved to draw, and the most talented artist I knew was my mother, but my mother was addicted to heroin. And when your parent is a drug addict, it's kind of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, because as much as you want to love on that person, as much as you want to receive love from that person, every time you open your heart, you end up on your back. So throughout my childhood, my mother was incarcerated and I didn't have my father because I didn't even learn his first name until I was in the sixth grade. But I had my grandparents, my maternal grandparents Joseph and Shirley, who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own, after they had already raised five children. So two people who grew up in the Great Depression, there in the very, very early '80s took on a new kid. I was the Cousin Oliver of the sitcom of the Krosoczka family, the new kid who came out of nowhere.And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them. They each smoked two packs a day, each, nonfiltered, and by the time I was six, I could order a Southern Comfort Manhattan, dry with a twist, rocks on the side, the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink.But they loved the hell out of me. They loved me so much. And they supported my creative efforts, because my grandfather was a self-made man. He ran and worked in a factory. My grandmother was a homemaker. But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles, and the characters that I read about, I fell in love with, and they became my friends. So my best friends in life were the characters I read about in books.I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had wonderful teachers there, most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch. And I just, I can just remember the love that she offered us as her students.When I was in the third grade, a monumental event happened. An author visited our school, Jack Gantos. A published author of books came to talk to us about what he did for a living. And afterwards, we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character, Rotten Ralph. And suddenly the author appeared in our doorway, and I remember him sort of sauntering down the aisles, going from kid to kid looking at the desks, not saying a word. But he stopped next to my desk, and he tapped on my desk, and he said, ""Nice cat."" (Laughter) And he wandered away. Two words that made a colossal difference in my life.When I was in the third grade, I wrote a book for the first time, ""The Owl Who Thought He Was The Best Flyer."" (Laughter) We had to write our own Greek myth, our own creation story, so I wrote a story about an owl who challenged Hermes to a flying race, and the owl cheated, and Hermes, being a Greek god, grew angry and bitter, and turned the owl into a moon, so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night. Yeah. (Laughter)My book had a title page. I was clearly worried about my intellectual property when I was eight. (Laughter) And it was a story that was told with words and pictures, exactly what I do now for a living, and I sometimes let the words have the stage on their own, and sometimes I allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story.My favorite page is the ""About the author"" page. (Laughter) So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age.So I love that last sentence: ""He liked making this book."" And I liked making that book because I loved using my imagination, and that's what writing is. Writing is using your imagination on paper, and I do get so scared because I travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids, that writing would be using your imagination on paper, if they're allowed to even write now within the school hours. So I loved writing so much that I'd come home from school, and I would take out pieces of paper, and I would staple them together, and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination.And so these characters would become my friends. There was an egg, a tomato, a head of lettuce and a pumpkin, and they all lived in this refrigerator city, and in one of their adventures they went to a haunted house that was filled with so many dangers like an evil blender who tried to chop them up, an evil toaster who tried to kidnap the bread couple, and an evil microwave who tried to melt their friend who was a stick of butter. (Laughter) And I'd make my own comics too, and this was another way for me to tell stories, through words and through pictures.Now when I was in sixth grade, the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the Worcester public school system. I went from having art once a week to twice a month to once a month to not at all. And my grandfather, he was a wise man, and he saw that as a problem, because he knew that was, like, the one thing I had. I didn't play sports. I had art. So he walked into my room one evening, and he sat on the edge of my bed, and he said, ""Jarrett, it's up to you, but if you'd like to, we'd like to send you to the classes at the Worcester Art Museum."" And I was so thrilled. So from sixth through 12th grade, once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I would take classes at the art museum, and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw, other kids who shared a similar passion.Now my publishing career began when I designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook, and if you're wondering about the style of dress I put our mascot in, I was really into Bell Biv DeVoe and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at the time. (Laughter) And to this day, I still can do karaoke to ""Ice, Ice Baby"" without looking at the screen. Don't tempt me, because I will do it.So I get shipped off to private school, K through eight, public schools, but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed, so he didn't want me to go there. He wanted me to go to a private school, and he gave me an option. You can go to Holy Name, which is coed, or St. John's, which is all boys. Very wise man, because he knew I would, I felt like I was making the decision on my own, and he knew I wouldn't choose St. John's, so I went to Holy Name High School, which was a tough transition because, like I said, I didn't play sports, and it was very focused on sports, but I took solace in Mr. Shilale's art room. And I just flourished here. I just couldn't wait to get to that classroom every day.So how did I make friends? I drew funny pictures of my teachers — (Laughter) — and I passed them around. Well, in English class, in ninth grade, my friend John, who was sitting next to me, laughed a little bit too hard. Mr. Greenwood was not pleased. (Laughter) He instantly saw that I was the cause of the commotion, and for the first time in my life, I was sent to the hall, and I thought, ""Oh no, I'm doomed. My grandfather's just going to kill me."" And he came out to the hallway and he said, ""Let me see the paper."" And I thought, ""Oh no. He thinks it's a note."" And so I took this picture, and I handed it to him. And we sat in silence for that brief moment, and he said to me, ""You're really talented."" (Laughter) ""You're really good. You know, the school newspaper needs a new cartoonist, and you should be the cartoonist. Just stop drawing in my class.""So my parents never found out about it. I didn't get in trouble. I was introduced to Mrs. Casey, who ran the school newspaper, and I was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper, handling such heavy issues as, seniors are mean, freshmen are nerds, the prom bill is so expensive. I can't believe how much it costs to go to the prom. And I took the headmaster to task and then I also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named Wesley who was unlucky in love, and I just swore up and down that this wasn't about me, but all these years later it was totally me.But it was so cool because I could write these stories, I could come up with these ideas, and they'd be published in the school paper, and people who I didn't know could read them. And I loved that thought, of being able to share my ideas through the printed page.On my 14th birthday, my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever: a drafting table that I have worked on ever since. Here I am, 20 years later, and I still work on this table every day. On the evening of my 14th birthday, I was given this table, and we had Chinese food. And this was my fortune: ""You will be successful in your work."" I taped it to the top left hand of my table, and as you can see, it's still there. Now I never really asked my grandparents for anything. Well, two things: Rusty, who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when I was in fourth grade. (Laughter) And a video camera. I just wanted a video camera. And after begging and pleading for Christmas, I got a second-hand video camera, and I instantly started making my own animations on my own, and all throughout high school I made my own animations. I convinced my 10th grade English teacher to allow me to do my book report on Stephen King's ""Misery"" as an animated short. (Laughter)And I kept making comics. I kept making comics, and at the Worcester Art Museum, I was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator I was ever given. Mark Lynch, he's an amazing teacher and he's still a dear friend of mine, and I was 14 or 15, and I walked into his comic book class halfway through the course, and I was so excited, I was beaming. I had this book that was how to draw comics in the Marvel way, and it taught me how to draw superheroes, how to draw a woman, how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if I were to ever draw for X-Men or Spiderman. And all the color just drained from his face, and he looked at me, and he said, ""Forget everything you learned."" And I didn't understand. He said, ""You have a great style. Celebrate your own style. Don't draw the way you're being told to draw. Draw the way you're drawing and keep at it, because you're really good.""Now when I was a teenager, I was angsty as any teenager was, but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless, I was angry. And when I was 17, I met my father for the first time, upon which I learned I had a brother and sister I had never known about. And on the day I met my father for the first time, I was rejected from the Rhode Island School of Design, my one and only choice for college.But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids, kids with leukemia, and this kid Eric changed my life. Eric didn't live to see his sixth birthday, and Eric lives with me every day.So after this experience, my art teacher, Mr. Shilale, he brought in these picture books, and I thought, ""Picture books for kids!"" and I started writing books for young readers when I was a senior in high school. Well, I eventually got to the Rhode Island School of Design. I transferred to RISD as a sophomore, and it was there that I took every course that I could on writing, and it was there that I wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid. The kid had no patience for him. And I sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time, but I was also involved with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses, and it's those kids at the camp that read my stories, and I read to them, and I saw that they responded to my work.I graduated from RISD. My grandparents were very proud, and I moved to Boston, and I set up shop. I set up a studio and I tried to get published. I would send out my books. I would send out hundreds of postcards to editors and art directors, but they would go unanswered. And my grandfather would call me every week, and he would say, ""Jarrett, how's it going? Do you have a job yet?"" Because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education. And I said, ""Yes, I have a job. I write and illustrate children's books."" And he said, ""Well, who pays you for that?"" And I said, ""No one, no one, no one just yet. But I know it's going to happen.""Now, I used to work the weekends at the Hole in the Wall off-season programming to make some extra money as I was trying to get my feet off the ground, and this kid who was just this really hyper kid, I started calling him ""Monkey Boy,"" and I went home and wrote a book called ""Good Night, Monkey Boy."" And I sent out one last batch of postcards. And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line, ""Nice work!"" Exclamation point.""Dear Jarrett, I received your postcard. I liked your art, so I went to your website and I'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories, because I really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them. Please let me know if you're ever in New York City."" And this was from an editor at Random House Children's Books.So the next week I ""happened"" to be in New York. (Laughter) And I met with this editor, and I left New York for a contract for my first book, ""Good Night, Monkey Boy,"" which was published on June 12, 2001.And my local paper celebrated the news. The local bookstore made a big deal of it. They sold out of all of their books. My friend described it as a wake, but happy, because everyone I ever knew was there in line to see me, but I wasn't dead. I was just signing books. My grandparents, they were in the middle of it. They were so happy. They couldn't have been more proud. Mrs. Alisch was there. Mr. Shilale was there. Mrs. Casey was there. Mrs. Alisch cut in front of the line and said, ""I taught him how to read."" (Laughter)And then something happened that changed my life. I got my first piece of significant fan mail, where this kid loved Monkey Boy so much that he wanted to have a Monkey Boy birthday cake. For a two-year-old, that is like a tattoo. (Laughter) You know? You only get one birthday per year. And for him, it's only his second. And I got this picture, and I thought, ""This picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life. He will forever have this photo in his family photo albums.""So that photo, since that moment, is framed in front of me while I've worked on all of my books.I have 10 picture books out. ""Punk Farm,"" ""Baghead,"" ""Ollie the Purple Elephant."" I just finished the ninth book in the ""Lunch Lady"" series, which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime. I'm expecting the release of a chapter book called ""Platypus Police Squad: The Frog Who Croaked."" And I travel the country visiting countless schools, letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats.And I meet Bagheads. Lunch ladies treat me really well. And I got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights. Twice now, the ""Lunch Lady"" series has won the Children's Choice Book of the Year in the third or fourth grade category, and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in Times Square. ""Punk Farm"" and ""Lunch Lady"" are in development to be movies, so I am a movie producer and I really do think, thanks to that video camera I was given in ninth grade. I've seen people have ""Punk Farm"" birthday parties, people have dressed up as ""Punk Farm"" for Halloween, a ""Punk Farm"" baby room, which makes me a little nervous for the child's well-being in the long term.And I get the most amazing fan mail, and I get the most amazing projects, and the biggest moment for me came last Halloween. The doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character. It was so cool.Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes. And it displayed the work from my first 10 years of publishing, and you know who was there to celebrate? Mrs. Alisch.I said, ""Mrs. Alisch, how are you?""And she responded with, ""I'm here."" (Laughter)That's true. You are alive, and that's pretty good right now.So the biggest moment for me, though, my most important job now is I am a dad myself, and I have two beautiful daughters, and my goal is to surround them by inspiration, by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals I painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find, in quiet times, by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that I've sat in for the past 20 years. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jarrett_j_krosoczka_how_a_boy_became_an_artist
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"I'd like to share with you the story of one of my patients called Celine.Celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district of Cameroon in west Central Africa. Six years ago, at the time of her HIV diagnosis, she was recruited to participate in the clinical trial which was running in her health district at the time. When I first met Celine, a little over a year ago, she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy, and she was very ill. She told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance. Now during the clinical trial, she'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs free of charge, and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds. All of these ended once the trial was completed, leaving Celine with no alternatives. She was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she'd received during the trial, or even what the trial had been about. I didn't bother to ask her what the results of the trial were because it seemed obvious to me that she would have no clue. Yet what puzzled me most was Celine had given her informed consent to be a part of this trial, yet she clearly did not understand the implications of being a participant or what would happen to her once the trial had been completed.Now, I have shared this story with you as an example of what can happen to participants in the clinical trial when it is poorly conducted. Maybe this particular trial yielded exciting results. Maybe it even got published in a high-profile scientific journal. Maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of HIV patients. But it would have done so at a price to hundreds of patients who, like Celine, were left to their own devices once the research had been completed.I do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting HIV clinical trials in developing countries is bad. On the contrary, clinical trials are extremely useful tools, and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries. However, the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation, especially in the context of externally-funded research. Sadly enough, the fact remains that a lot of the studies that are conducted in developing countries could never be authorized in the richer countries which fund the research.I'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, so attractive for these HIV clinical trials? Well, in order for a clinical trial to generate valid and widely applicable results, they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high incidence of new HIV infections. Sub-Saharan Africa largely fits this description, with 22 million people living with HIV, an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide. Also, research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty, endemic diseases and inadequate health care systems. A clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized, and in the absence of good health care systems, almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing. Even more problematic reasons include lower risk of litigation, less rigorous ethical reviews, and populations that are willing to participate in almost any study that hints at a cure. As funding for HIV research increases in developing countries and ethical review in richer countries become more strict, you can see why this context becomes very, very attractive.The high prevalence of HIV drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable. How then can we ensure that, in our search for the cure, we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic? I invite you to consider four areas I think we can focus on in order to improve the way in which things are done.The first of these is informed consent. Now, in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable, participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand, and must freely consent to participate in the trial. This is especially important in developing countries, where a lot of participants consent to research because they believe it is the only way in which they can receive medical care or other benefits. Consent procedures that are used in richer countries are often inappropriate or ineffective in a lot of developing countries. For example, it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant, like Celine, sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read, let alone understand. Local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials, as well as the incentives for participation. The information in these trials needs to be given to the potential participants in linguistically and culturally acceptable formats.The second point I would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial. Now, this is subject to a lot of debate and controversy. Should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world? Or should they be given an alternative standard of care, such as the best current treatment available in the country in which the research is being conducted? Is it fair to evaluate a treatment regimen which may not be affordable or accessible to the study participants once the research has been completed? Now, in a situation where the best current treatment is inexpensive and simple to deliver, the answer is straightforward. However, the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries. It is important to assess the potential risks and benefits of the standard of care which is to be provided to participants in any clinical trial, and establish one which is relevant for the context of the study and most beneficial for the participants within the study.That brings us to the third point I want you think about: the ethical review of research. An effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of clinical trials is primordial to safeguard participants within any clinical trial. Unfortunately, this is often lacking or inefficient in a lot of developing countries. Local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries, and they need to do this by setting up ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors. Public accountability needs to be promoted through transparency and independent review by nongovernmental and international organizations as appropriate.The final point I would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed. I think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended. Now, researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed. In addition, they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends. If, for any reason, they feel that this might not be possible, then I think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place.Now, fortunately for Celine, our meeting did not end in my office. I was able to get her enrolled into a free HIV treatment program closer to her home, and with a support group to help her cope. Her story has a positive ending, but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate.Although she may not know this, my encounter with Celine has completely changed the way in which I view HIV clinical trials in developing countries, and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done.I believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change. If you are a researcher, I hold you to a higher standard of moral conscience, to remain ethical in your research, and not compromise human welfare in your search for answers. If you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company, I challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound. If you come from a developing country like myself, I urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country. Yes, there is a need for us to find a cure for HIV, to find an effective vaccine for malaria, to find a diagnostic tool that works for T.B., but I believe that we owe it to those who willingly and selflessly consent to participate in these clinical trials to do this in a humane way.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/boghuma_kabisen_titanji_ethical_riddles_in_hiv_research
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"We live in an incredibly busy world. The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something.So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? Just 10 minutes, undisturbed? And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing. I see a lot of very blank faces.(Laughter)You probably have to go a long way back.And this is an extraordinary thing, right? We're talking about our mind. The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. The mind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the same time, to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. And yet, we don't take any time out to look after it. In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we — okay, maybe not our hair,(Laughter)but you see where I'm going.The result, of course, is that we get stressed. You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don't really know how to deal with that. And the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we're no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. That's really not how it has to be.So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. You get stressed, you do some meditation. I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again. It was a really very stressful time.I guess we all deal with stress in different ways. Some people will bury themselves in work, grateful for the distraction. Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. Some people hit the bottle, start taking medication. My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation.People often ask me what I learned from that time. Well, obviously it changed things. Let's face it, becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things. But it was more than that. It taught me — it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present.I think the present moment is so underrated. It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 47 percent. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness. Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted.And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life. But we need to know how to do it. We need an exercise. We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful. That's essentially what meditation is. It's familiarizing ourselves with the present moment. But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the best from it. And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind.So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way I can relax and talk to you at the same time. Equally, if I relax too much talking to you, there's no way I can focus on the balls. I'm going to drop them. Now in life, and in meditation, there'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense, and life starts to feel a bit like this. It's a very uncomfortable way to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. At other times, we might take our foot off the gas a little bit too much, and things just become a sort of little bit like this. Of course in meditation —(Snores)we're going to end up falling asleep. So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement.Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought. Let's say this is an anxious thought. Everything's going fine, and we see the anxious thought. ""Oh, I didn't realize I was worried about that."" You go back to it, repeat it. ""Oh, I am worried. I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety."" And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious.(Laughter)You know, this is crazy. We do this all the time, even on an everyday level. If you think about the last time you had a wobbly tooth. You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds?(Mumbling)It does hurt. And we reinforce the storyline, right? And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time. And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind. But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns. You might find a mind that's really restless and — the whole time. Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it's just, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up, work. Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind.Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That's the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_puddicombe_all_it_takes_is_10_mindful_minutes
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"I was sitting with my girls, and Joy said, ""Dang, I wish he'd get off my back. My daddy, he calls me all the time.""""Lucky for you he calls at all,"" said Jasmine. ""I haven't heard from my dad in years.""At this moment, I knew the girls needed a way to connect with their fathers. At Camp Diva, my non-profit organization, we have these types of conversations all the time as a way to help girls of African descent prepare for their passage into womanhood. These girls just needed a way to invite their fathers into their lives on their own terms.So I asked the girls, ""How can we help other girls develop healthy relationships with their fathers?""""Let's have a dance,"" one girl shouted, and all the girls quickly backed her up. They started dreaming about the decorations, invitations, the dresses they were going to wear, and what their fathers could and could not wear. (Laughter) It was off and running before I could even blink my eyes, but even if I could have slowed down those girls, I wouldn't have, because one thing that I have learned from over a decade of working with girls is that they already know what they need. The wisdom lives inside of them. As long as they have infrastructure, mentorship and resources, they can build what they need, not only to survive, but to thrive.So we had a dance, and girls and their fathers came in multitudes. They were dressed to the nines. They acted sweet. (Laughter) They acted silly. They really enjoyed each other's company. It was a huge success. And the girls decided to make it an annual event.So as the seasons changed, and it was time to plan the dance again, one girl named Brianna spoke up, and she said, ""My dad can't come to the dance, and this whole thing is making me sad.""""Why not?"" the girls asked.""Because he's in jail,"" she bravely admitted.""Well, can he just get out for a day?"" one of the girls asked. (Laughter)""And come in shackles? That's worse than not having him here at all.""At this moment, I saw an opportunity for the girls to rise to the occasion and to become their own heroes. So I asked, ""What do you think we should do about this? We want every girl to experience the dance, right?""So the girls thought for a moment, and one girl suggested, ""Why don't we just take the dance in the jail?""Most of the girls doubted the possibility of that, and said, ""Are you crazy? Who is going to allow a bunch of little girls, dressed up — "" (Laughter) "" — to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies in Spongebob suits?"" Because that's what they called them.I said, ""Girls, well, well, you never know unless you ask.""So a letter was written to the Richmond City Sheriff, signed collectively by each girl, and I would have to say, he is a very special sheriff. He contacted me immediately and said, whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside, his doors are always open. Because one thing he did know, that when fathers are connected to their children, it is less likely that they will return.So, 16 inmates and 18 girls were invited. The girls were dressed in their Sunday best, and the fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirts and ties. They hugged. They shared a full catered meal of chicken and fish. They laughed together. It was beautiful. The fathers and daughters even experienced an opportunity to have a physical connection, something that a lot of them didn't even have for a while. Fathers were in a space where they were able to make their daughters play, and pull out her chair and extend his hand for a dance. Even the guards cried.But after the dance, we all realized that Dad still would be in jail. So we needed to create something that they could take with them. So we brought in Flip cams, and we had them look at the Flip cams and just interview each other — their messages, their thoughts. This was going to be used as a touchstone so when they started to miss each other and feel disconnected, they could reconnect through this image.I'll never forget that one girl looked in her father's eyes with that camera and said, ""Daddy, when you look at me, what do you see?"" Because our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve, and how they see us for the rest of our lives. I know that very well, because I was one of the lucky girls. I have had my father in my life always. He's even here today.(Applause)And that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers, especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors. We have just created a form for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions and given the fathers the freedom to answer. Because we know that the fathers are even leaving with this one thought: What type of woman am I preparing to put in the world? Because a father is locked in does not mean he should be locked out of his daughter's life.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_patton_a_father_daughter_dance_in_prison
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"It's a great time to be a molecular biologist. (Laughter) Reading and writing DNA code is getting easier and cheaper. By the end of this year, we'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros. Biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector. It has the power, potentially, to replace our fossil fuels, to revolutionize medicine, and to touch every aspect of our daily lives.So who gets to do it? I think we'd all be pretty comfortable with this guy doing it. But what about that guy? (Laughter) (Laughter)In 2009, I first heard about DIYbio. It's a movement that — it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone, not just scientists and people in government labs. The idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate, it could really stimulate innovation. Putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they've got the best idea of what their needs are. And here's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road, all these associated social, moral, ethical questions, and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we're doing in those labs. So wouldn't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff, do it hands-on? I thought so.So, three years ago, I got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations and we founded Genspace. It's a nonprofit, a community biotech lab in Brooklyn, New York, and the idea was people could come, they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open, friendly atmosphere.None of my previous experience prepared me for what came next. Can you guess? The press started calling us. And the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy, the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next Frankenstein, and as a result, for the next six months, when you Googled my name, instead of getting my scientific papers, you got this. [""Am I a biohazard?""] (Laughter) It was pretty depressing. The only thing that got us through that period was that we knew that all over the world, there were other people that were trying to do the same thing that we were. They were opening biohacker spaces, and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did, more regulations, less resources. But now, three years later, here's where we stand. It's a vibrant, global community of hackerspaces, and this is just the beginning. These are some of the biggest ones, and there are others opening every day. There's one probably going to open up in Moscow, one in South Korea, and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of.Let me take you on a little tour. Biohackers work alone. We work in groups, in big cities — (Laughter) — and in small villages. We reverse engineer lab equipment. We genetically engineer bacteria. We hack hardware, software, wetware, and, of course, the code of life. We like to build things. Then we like to take things apart. We make things grow. We make things glow. And we make cells dance.The spirit of these labs, it's open, it's positive, but, you know, sometimes when people think of us, the first thing that comes to mind is bio-safety, bio-security, all the dark side stuff. I'm not going to minimize those concerns. Any powerful technology is inherently dual use, and, you know, you get something like synthetic biology, nanobiotechnology, it really compels you, you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups, because they have better infrastructure, they have better facilities, and they have access to pathogens.So the United Nations did just that, and they recently issued a report on this whole area, and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative, and they even looked specifically at the DIYbio community, and they noted, not surprisingly, that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics. As a matter of fact, DIY people from all over the world, America, Europe, got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics. That's a lot more than conventional science has done.Now, we follow state and local regulations. We dispose of our waste properly, we follow safety procedures, we don't work with pathogens. You know, if you're working with a pathogen, you're not part of the biohacker community, you're part of the bioterrorist community, I'm sorry. And sometimes people ask me, ""Well, what about an accident?"" Well, working with the safe organisms that we normally work with, the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating, like, some sort of superbug, that's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Now, it could happen, but I'm not going to plan my life around it.I've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk. I signed up for something called the Personal Genome Project. It's a study at Harvard where, at the end of the study, they're going to take my entire genomic sequence, all of my medical information, and my identity, and they're going to post it online for everyone to see. There were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion. The one I liked the best is, someone could download my sequence, go back to the lab, synthesize some fake Ellen DNA, and plant it at a crime scene. (Laughter) But like DIYbio, the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk.Now, you might be asking yourself, ""Well, you know, what would I do in a biolab?"" Well, it wasn't that long ago we were asking, ""Well, what would anyone do with a personal computer?"" So this stuff is just beginning. We're only seeing just the tip of the DNA iceberg. Let me show you what you could do right now. A biohacker in Germany, a journalist, wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street? (Laughter) (Applause) Yep, you guessed it. He threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs, analyzed the saliva, identified the dog, and confronted the dog owner. (Laughter) (Applause) I discovered an invasive species in my own backyard. Looked like a ladybug, right? It actually is a Japanese beetle. And the same kind of technology — it's called DNA barcoding, it's really cool — You can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga, if that sushi is really tuna, or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat's. In a biohacker space, you can analyze your genome for mutations. You can analyze your breakfast cereal for GMO's, and you can explore your ancestry. You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere, collect microbes, see what's up there. You can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water. You can make some sort of a biofuel cell. You can do a lot of things. You can also do an art science project. Some of these are really spectacular, and they look at social, ecological problems from a completely different perspective. It's really cool.Some people ask me, well, why am I involved? I could have a perfectly good career in mainstream science. The thing is, there's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you can't find anywhere else. There's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project, and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible. It just has to follow safety guidelines. If you had spaces like this all over the world, it could really change the perception of who's allowed to do biotech. It's spaces like these that spawned personal computing. Why not personal biotech? If everyone in this room got involved, who knows what we could do? This is such a new area, and as we say back in Brooklyn, you ain't seen nothin' yet. (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_jorgensen_biohacking_you_can_do_it_too
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"Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model. Actually, for 10 years. And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress.(Laughter)So luckily, I brought an outfit change. This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter.(Laughter)I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. Not everybody gets to do that. These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. All right.So, why did I do that? That was awkward.(Laughter)Well —(Laughter)Hopefully not as awkward as that picture. Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds. And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives.So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. And I am on this stage because I am a model. I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl. I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist.So the first question is, how do you become a model? I always just say, ""Oh, I was scouted,"" but that means nothing. The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, ""Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen."" And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive.(Laughter)But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white.The next question people always ask is, ""Can I be a model when I grow up?"" And the first answer is, ""I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that."" But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, ""Why? You know? You can be anything. You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one.""(Laughter)If, after this amazing list, they still are like, ""No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model,"" well, then I say, ""Be my boss."" Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel. Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path.I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now. So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, ""We want a walking shot,"" this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times.(Laughter)It will look something like this.(Laughter)Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. That was — I don't know what happened there.Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, ""Underwear Model: 10 years,"" people give you a funny look.The next question is, ""Do they retouch all the photos?"" And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. Here's me on the same day as this shoot. My friend got to come. Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. And here's me today. And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. That's not me.Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, ""Do you get free stuff?""(Laughter)I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about.I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a ""Sorry, officer,"" and we were on our way. And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are.I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, ""Will I get stopped?"" but ""How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped?"" When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17.So, the last question people ask me is, ""What is it like to be a model?"" And I think the answer that they're looking for is, ""If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous."" And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. We say, ""It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people."" And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, ""I am insecure."" And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. And if you ever are wondering, ""If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?"" you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs, the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet.When I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, ""Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor,"" and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, ""and it doesn't always make me happy."" But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries.But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now.If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model
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"So, before I became a dermatologist, I started in general medicine, as most dermatologists do in Britain. At the end of that time, I went off to Australia, about 20 years ago. What you learn when you go to Australia is the Australians are very competitive. And they are not magnanimous in victory. And that happened a lot: ""You pommies, you can't play cricket, rugby."" I could accept that.But moving into work — and we have each week what's called a journal club, when you'd sit down with the other doctors and you'd study a scientific paper in relation to medicine. And after week one, it was about cardiovascular mortality, a dry subject — how many people die of heart disease, what the rates are. And they were competitive about this: ""You pommies, your rates of heart disease are shocking.""And of course, they were right. Australians have about a third less heart disease than we do — less deaths from heart attacks, heart failure, less strokes — they're generally a healthier bunch. And of course they said this was because of their fine moral standing, their exercise, because they're Australians and we're weedy pommies, and so on.But it's not just Australia that has better health than Britain. Within Britain, there is a gradient of health — and this is what's called standardized mortality, basically your chances of dying. This is looking at data from the paper about 20 years ago, but it's true today. Comparing your rates of dying 50 degrees north — that's the South, that's London and places — by latitude, and 55 degrees — the bad news is that's here, Glasgow. I'm from Edinburgh. Worse news, that's even Edinburgh.(Laughter)So what accounts for this horrible space here between us up here in southern Scotland and the South? Now, we know about smoking, deep-fried Mars bars, chips — the Glasgow diet. All of these things. But this graph is after taking into account all of these known risk factors. This is after accounting for smoking, social class, diet, all those other known risk factors. We are left with this missing space of increased deaths the further north you go.Now, sunlight, of course, comes into this. And vitamin D has had a great deal of press, and a lot of people get concerned about it. And we need vitamin D. It's now a requirement that children have a certain amount. My grandmother grew up in Glasgow, back in the 1920s and '30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in. And that really prevented the rickets that used to be common in this city. And I as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother. I distinctly — nobody forgets cod liver oil.But an association: The higher people's blood levels of vitamin D are, the less heart disease they have, the less cancer. There seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin D is very good for you. And it is, to prevent rickets and so on. But if you give people vitamin D supplements, you don't change that high rate of heart disease. And the evidence for it preventing cancers is not yet great. So what I'm going to suggest is that vitamin D is not the only story in town. It's not the only reason preventing heart disease. High vitamin D levels, I think, are a marker for sunlight exposure, and sunlight exposure, in methods I'm going to show, is good for heart disease.Anyway, I came back from Australia, and despite the obvious risks to my health, I moved to Aberdeen. (Laughter) Now, in Aberdeen, I started my dermatology training. But I also became interested in research, and in particular I became interested in this substance, nitric oxide. Now these three guys up here, Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad, won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998. And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter, nitric oxide. What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels, so it lowers your blood pressure. It also dilates the coronary arteries, so it stops angina.And what was remarkable about it was in the past when we think of chemical messengers within the body, we thought of complicated things like estrogen and insulin, or nerve transmission. Very complex processes with very complex chemicals that fit into very complex receptors. And here's this incredibly simple molecule, a nitrogen and an oxygen that are stuck together, and yet these are hugely important for [unclear] our low blood pressure, for neurotransmission, for many, many things, but particularly cardiovascular health.And I started doing research, and we found, very excitingly, that the skin produces nitric oxide. So it's not just in the cardiovascular system it arises. It arises in the skin. Well, having found that and published that, I thought, well, what's it doing? How do you have low blood pressure in your skin? It's not the heart. What do you do?So I went off to the States, as many people do if they're going to do research, and I spent a few years in Pittsburgh. This is Pittsburgh. And I was interested in these really complex systems. We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death, and how cells survive, and their resistance to other things. And I first off started work in cell culture, growing cells, and then I was using knockout mouse models — mice that couldn't make the gene. We worked out a mechanism, which — NO was helping cells survive.And I then moved back to Edinburgh. And in Edinburgh, the experimental animal we use is the medical student. It's a species close to human, with several advantages over mice: They're free, you don't shave them, they feed themselves, and nobody pickets your office saying, ""Save the lab medical student."" So they're really an ideal model.But what we found was that we couldn't reproduce in man the data we had shown in mice. It seemed we couldn't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans. We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it, we injected things. We couldn't turn off the nitric oxide.And the reason for this, it turned out, after two or three years' work, was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide, because nitric oxide is a gas, and it's released — (Poof!) — and in a few seconds it's away, but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide — nitrate, NO3; nitrite, NO2; nitrosothiols. And these are more stable, and your skin has got really large stores of NO. And we then thought to ourselves, with those big stores, I wonder if sunlight might activate those stores and release them from the skin, where the stores are about 10 times as big as what's in the circulation. Could the sun activate those stores into the circulation, and there in the circulation do its good things for your cardiovascular system?Well, I'm an experimental dermatologist, so what we did was we thought we'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight. And so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light. So these are kind of sunlamps. Now, what we were careful to do was, vitamin D is made by ultraviolet B rays and we wanted to separate our story from the vitamin D story. So we used ultraviolet A, which doesn't make vitamin D.When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh, what we produced was, we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide. So we put patients with these subjects under the UV, and their NO levels do go up, and their blood pressure goes down. Not by much, as an individual level, but enough at a population level to shift the rates of heart disease in a whole population. And when we shone UV at them, or when we warmed them up to the same level as the lamps, but didn't actually let the rays hit the skin, this didn't happen. So this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin.Now, we're still collecting data. A few good things here: This appeared to be more marked in older people. I'm not sure exactly how much. One of the subjects here was my mother-in-law, and clearly I do not know her age. But certainly in people older than my wife, this appears to be a more marked effect. And the other thing I should mention was there was no change in vitamin D. This is separate from vitamin D. So vitamin D is good for you — it stops rickets, it prevents calcium metabolism, important stuff. But this is a separate mechanism from vitamin D.Now, one of the problems with looking at blood pressure is your body does everything it can to keep your blood pressure at the same place. If your leg is chopped off and you lose blood, your body will clamp down, increase the heart rate, do everything it can to keep your blood pressure up. That is an absolutely fundamental physiological principle.So what we've next done is we've moved on to looking at blood vessel dilatation. So we've measured — this is again, notice no tail and hairless, this is a medical student. In the arm, you can measure blood flow in the arm by how much it swells up as some blood flows into it. And what we've shown is that doing a sham irradiation — this is the thick line here — this is shining UV on the arm so it warms up but keeping it covered so the rays don't hit the skin. There is no change in blood flow, in dilatation of the blood vessels. But the active irradiation, during the UV and for an hour after it, there is dilation of the blood vessels. This is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure, by which you dilate the coronary arteries also, to let the blood be supplied with the heart. So here, further data that ultraviolet — that's sunlight — has benefits on the blood flow and the cardiovascular system.So we thought we'd just kind of model — Different amounts of UV hit different parts of the Earth at different times of year, so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide — the nitrates, nitrites, nitrosothiols in the skin — cleave to release NO. Different wavelengths of light have different activities of doing that. So you can look at the wavelengths of light that do that. And you can look — So, if you live on the equator, the sun comes straight overhead, it comes through a very thin bit of atmosphere. In winter or summer, it's the same amount of light. If you live up here, in summer the sun is coming fairly directly down, but in winter it's coming through a huge amount of atmosphere, and much of the ultraviolet is weeded out, and the range of wavelengths that hit the Earth are different from summer to winter. So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation.Now, if you're on the equator here — that's these two lines here, the red line and the purple line — the amount of nitric oxide that's released is the area under the curve, it's the area in this space here. So if you're on the equator, December or June, you've got masses of NO being released from the skin. So Ventura is in southern California. In summer, you might as well be at the equator. It's great. Lots of NO is released. Ventura mid-winter, well, there's still a decent amount. Edinburgh in summer, the area beneath the curve is pretty good, but Edinburgh in winter, the amount of NO that can be released is next to nothing, tiny amounts.So what do we think? We're still working at this story, we're still developing it, we're still expanding it. We think it's very important. We think it probably accounts for a lot of the north-south health divide within Britain, It's of relevance to us. We think that the skin — well, we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms. We suspect a lot of these come from diet, green leafy vegetables, beetroot, lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin. We think they're then stored in the skin, and we think the sunlight releases this where it has generally beneficial effects.And this is ongoing work, but dermatologists — I mean, I'm a dermatologist. My day job is saying to people, ""You've got skin cancer, it's caused by sunlight, don't go in the sun."" I actually think a far more important message is that there are benefits as well as risks to sunlight. Yes, sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer, but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer. And I think that we need to be more aware of, and we need to find the risk-benefit ratio. How much sunlight is safe, and how can we finesse this best for our general health?So, thank you very much indeed. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_weller_could_the_sun_be_good_for_your_heart
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"You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch. I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch ""The Wizard of Oz"" together. It totally dominated her imagination for months. Her favorite character was Glinda, of course. It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand.But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is. Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex. But ""The Wizard of Oz"" stood alone. It did not start that trend. Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards. Do you know what I'm talking about? (Laughter) Yeah.Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between ""The Wizard of Oz"" and all the movies we watch today. One is there's very little violence in ""The Wizard of Oz."" The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees. But I think if ""The Wizard of Oz"" were made today, the wizard would say, ""Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold. Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch."" But that's not how it happens.Another thing that's really unique about ""The Wizard of Oz"" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female.Now I started to notice this when I actually showed ""Star Wars"" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different. At that point I also had a son. He was only three at the time. He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that. But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. (Laughter) So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it.And I wonder what he's soaking in. Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty? Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government? Is he picking up on the fact that there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with?Compare this to 1939 with ""The Wizard of Oz."" How does Dorothy win her movie? By making friends with everybody and being a leader. That's kind of the world I'd rather raise my kids in — Oz, right? — and not the world of dudes fighting, which is where we kind of have to be. Why is there so much Force — capital F, Force — in the movies we have for our kids, and so little yellow brick road?There is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls, and you should do that reading. It's very good. I haven't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe. I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed. (Laughter) I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that's the end of the movie, right? I finished my quest, I got the girl. Why are you still standing there? I don't know what I'm supposed to do.The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys. It's almost as though if you're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume. There are plenty of exceptions, and I will defend the Disney princesses in front of any you. But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience. They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they're supposed to defend against the patriarchy. There's no models for them. And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies. And, of course, the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic, every single one of them about the journey of a boy, or a man, or two men who are friends, or a man and his son, or two men who are raising a little girl. Until, as many of you are thinking, this year, when they finally came out with ""Brave."" I recommend it to all of you. It's on demand now. Do you remember what the critics said when ""Brave"" came out? ""Aw, I can't believe Pixar made a princess movie."" It's very good. Don't let that stop you.Now, almost none of these movies pass the Bechdel Test. I don't know if you've heard of this. It has not yet caught on and caught fire, but maybe today we will start a movement. Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid-'80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw. And it's very simple. There's just three questions you should ask:Is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines? So try to meet that bar.And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie?And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like? (Laughter)Right? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much.Two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff. It does happen. I've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love.In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, ""Argo."" Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is. It pretty much flunks the Bechdel test. And I don't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis. We've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, ""Are you coming to bed, honey?"" That's Hollywood for you.So let's look at the numbers. 2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists? Eleven. It's not bad. It's not as many percent as the number of women we've just elected to Congress, so that's good. But there is a number that is greater than this that's going to bring this room down.Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done. Here's what it said. One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life.Now, I don't think that's the fault of popular entertainment. I don't think kids' movies have anything to do with that. I don't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that's a lot of sexual assailants. Who are these guys? What are they learning? What are they failing to learn? Are they absorbing the story that a male hero's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn't speak? Are we soaking up that story?You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them. We have tools at our disposal like ""girl power,"" and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power? I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I'm talking mainly to the dads here. I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood.The definition of manhood is already turning upside down. You've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner. They're throwing it up in the air. So our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this, some new relationship with each other, and I think we really have to show them, and model for them, how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them, and wants to be on their team, and stands up against the real bad guys, who are the men who want to abuse the women. And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, ""I want to be on their team,"" because they're going to be on their team.When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in ""Star Wars,"" do you know what she said? Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda. What do these two have in common? Maybe it's not just the sparkly dress. I think these people are experts. I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential. Now, they are leaders. I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son. I want more quests like that. I want fewer quests where my son is told, ""Go out and fight it alone,"" and more quests where he sees that it's his job to join a team, maybe a team led by women, to help other people become better and be better people, like the Wizard of Oz. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/colin_stokes_how_movies_teach_manhood
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"This is how war starts. One day you're living your ordinary life, you're planning to go to a party, you're taking your children to school, you're making a dentist appointment. The next thing, the telephones go out, the TVs go out, there's armed men on the street, there's roadblocks. Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation. It stops.I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine, a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her, because I think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like. She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank. She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party. Great person. And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path. She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not. And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin, in her high heels and her miniskirt. And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous, but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos and she thinks, ""I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, down, down, down into chaos, and my life will never be the same again.""A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe. And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front, crowds and crowds of people, ""Take my child! Take my child!"" and passing her son to someone through a window. And she didn't see him for years. The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century.I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege, and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it's taught me everything, not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being. I learned about compassion. I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes. I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie. Most of all, I learned about love. Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors, share food, raise their children, drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life, helping people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals.I learned so much about myself. Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, ""You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility."" I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo.Last April, I went back to a very strange — what I called a deranged high school reunion. What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word ""anniversary,"" because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party. It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves. And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children.I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done. I believe a story there has to be told. I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia. And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes. People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can. They don't get their money out. They stay because you want to stay in your home. And then war and chaos descend.Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot. In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda. Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered. Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number, I want you just for a second to think of a million people. And to give you some example, I remember standing and looking down a road as far as I could see, at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead. And that was just a small percentage of the dead. And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes.So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing. Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi. You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity, which is, of course, what started the slaughter in the first place. And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful. There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next. There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father. They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation, and I find this remarkable. So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why.When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day. And that's pretty much why I do it.In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born. And I called him Luca, which means ""The bringer of light,"" because he does bring light to my life. But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, ""What are you doing here? Why aren't you home with Luca?"" And I said, ""Well, I have to see."" It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq, ""I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. I have to report it."" And he said, ""Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. But there will always be another war.""And there, sadly, will always be wars. And I am deluding myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't. I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war. He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it. I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person. I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them. All I am is a witness. My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless. A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. And that's what I try to do. I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares. Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia? Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings of places that I will remember for the rest of my life? But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux, the heart of the matter, for us reporters who do this. And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude myself.But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_di_giovanni_what_i_saw_in_the_war
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"What I want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what's scheduled. Foreign policy, you can figure that out by watching, I don't know, Rachel Maddow or somebody, but — (Laughter) —I want to talk about young people and structure, young people and structure. This was last Wednesday afternoon at a school in Brooklyn, New York, at Cristo Rey High School, run by the Jesuits. And I was talking to this group of students, and take a look at them. They were around me in three directions. You'll noticed that almost all of them are minority. You'll notice that the building is rather austere. It's an old New York school building, nothing fancy. They still have old blackboards and whatnot. And there are about 300 kids in this school, and the school's been going now for four years, and they're about to graduate their first class. Twenty-two people are graduating, and all 22 are going to college. They all come from homes where there is, for the most part, just one person in the home, usually the mother or the grandmother, and that's it, and they come here for their education and for their structure.Now I had this picture taken, and it was put up on my Facebook page last week, and somebody wrote in, ""Huh, why does he have him standing at attention like that?"" And then they said, ""But he looks good."" (Laughter)He does look good, because kids need structure, and the trick I play in all of my school appearances is that when I get through with my little homily to the kids, I then invite them to ask questions, and when they raise their hands, I say, ""Come up,"" and I make them come up and stand in front of me. I make them stand at attention like a soldier. Put your arms straight down at your side, look up, open your eyes, stare straight ahead, and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear. No slouching, no pants hanging down, none of that stuff. (Laughter) And this young man, his name is — his last name Cruz — he loved it. That's all over his Facebook page and it's gone viral. (Laughter) So people think I'm being unkind to this kid. No, we're having a little fun. And the thing about it, I've done this for years, the younger they are, the more fun it is.When I get six- and seven-year-olds in a group, I have to figure out how to keep them quiet. You know that they'll always start yakking. And so I play a little game with them before I make them stand at attention.I say, ""Now listen. In the army, when we want you to pay attention, we have a command. It's called 'at ease.' It means everybody be quiet and pay attention. Listen up. Do you understand?""""Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.""""Let's practice. Everybody start chatting."" And I let them go for about 10 seconds, then I go, ""At ease!""""Huh!"" (Laughter)""Yes, General. Yes, General.""Try it with your kids. See if it works. (Laughter) I don't think so.But anyway, it's a game I play, and it comes obviously from my military experience. Because for the majority of my adult life, I worked with young kids, teenagers with guns, I call them. And we would bring them into the army, and the first thing we would do is to put them in an environment of structure, put them in ranks, make them all wear the same clothes, cut all their hair off so they look alike, make sure that they are standing in ranks. We teach them how to go right face, left face, so they can obey instructions and know the consequences of not obeying instructions. It gives them structure. And then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately, the drill sergeant. And they hate him. And the drill sergeant starts screaming at them, and telling them to do all kinds of awful things. But then the most amazing thing happens over time. Once that structure is developed, once they understand the reason for something, once they understand, ""Mama ain't here, son. I'm your worst nightmare. I'm your daddy and your mommy. And that's just the way it is. You got that, son? Yeah, and then when I ask you a question, there are only three possible answers: yes, sir; no, sir; and no excuse, sir. Don't start telling me why you didn't do something. It's yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir.""""You didn't shave.""""But sir —""""No, don't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning. I'm telling you you didn't shave.""""No excuse, sir.""""Attaboy, you're learning fast.""But you'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure. In 18 weeks, they have a skill. They are mature. And you know what, they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant. They come to respect him. And so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children.I spend a lot of time with youth groups, and I say to people, ""When does the education process begin?"" We're always talking about, ""Let's fix the schools. Let's do more for our teachers. Let's put more computers in our schools. Let's get it all online.""That isn't the whole answer. It's part of the answer. But the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child's heart and soul to begin with.When does the learning process begin? Does it begin in first grade? No, no, it begins the first time a child in a mother's arms looks up at the mother and says, ""Oh, this must be my mother. She's the one who feeds me. Oh yeah, when I don't feel so good down there, she takes care of me. It's her language I will learn."" And at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age, but by three months, that's her. And if the person doing it, whether it's the mother or grandmother, whoever's doing it, that is when the education process begins. That's when language begins. That's when love begins. That's when structure begins. That's when you start to imprint on the child that ""you are special, you are different from every other child in the world. And we're going to read to you."" A child who has not been read to is in danger when that child gets to school. A child who doesn't know his or her colors or doesn't know how to tell time, doesn't know how to tie shoes, doesn't know how to do those things, and doesn't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid: mind. Mind your manners! Mind your adults! Mind what you're saying! This is the way children are raised properly. And I watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they're, much to the distress of my children, they are acting just like we did. You know? You imprint them.And that's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school. And I'm working at all the energy I have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool, we need Head Start, we need prenatal care. The education process begins even before the child is born, and if you don't do that, you're going to have difficulty. And we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing, they've got their little knapsack on and they're ready to go, and then they realize they're not like the other first graders who know books, have been read to, can do their alphabet. And by the third grade, the kids who didn't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they're behind, and what do they do? They act it out. They act it out, and they're on their way to jail or they're on their way to being dropouts. It's predictable. If you're not at the right reading level at third grade, you are a candidate for jail at age 18, and we have the highest incarceration rate because we're not getting our kids the proper start in life.The last chapter in my book is called ""The Gift of a Good Start."" The gift of a good start. Every child ought to have a good start in life.I was privileged to have that kind of good start. I was not a great student. I was a public school kid in New York City, and I didn't do well at all. I have my entire New York City Board of Education transcript from kindergarten through college. I wanted it when I was writing my first book. I wanted to see if my memory was correct, and, my God, it was. (Laughter) Straight C everywhere. And I finally bounced through high school, got into the City College of New York with a 78.3 average, which I shouldn't have been allowed in with, and then I started out in engineering, and that only lasted six months. (Laughter) And then I went into geology, ""rocks for jocks."" This is easy. And then I found ROTC. I found something that I did well and something that I loved doing, and I found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way. And so my whole life then was dedicated to ROTC and the military. And I say to young kids everywhere, as you're growing up and as this structure is being developed inside of you, always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing, and when you find those two things together, man, you got it. That's what's going on. And that's what I found.Now the authorities at CCNY were getting tired of me being there. I'd been there four and a half going on five years, and my grades were not doing particularly well, and I was in occasional difficulties with the administration. And so they said, ""But he does so well in ROTC. Look, he gets straight A's in that but not in anything else."" And so they said, ""Look, let's take his ROTC grades and roll them into his overall GPA and see what happens."" And they did, and it brought me up to 2.0. (Laughter) Yep. (Laughter) (Applause) They said, ""It's good enough for government work. Give him to the army. We'll never see him again. We'll never see him again."" So they shipped me off to the army, and lo and behold, many years later, I'm considered one of the greatest sons the City College of New York has ever had. (Laughter) So, I tell young people everywhere, it ain't where you start in life, it's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life, and you are blessed to be living in a country that, no matter where you start, you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself, you believe in the society and the country, and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along. And that's the key to success.But it begins with the gift of a good start. If we don't give that gift to each and every one of our kids, if we don't invest at the earliest age, we're going to be running into difficulties. It's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas, because they're not getting the gift of a good start.My gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family, a good family, but having a family that said to me, ""Now listen, we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924. We worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day. We're not doing it so that you can stick something up your nose or get in trouble. And don't even think about dropping out."" If I had ever gone home and told those immigrant people that, ""You know, I'm tired of school and I'm dropping out,"" they'd said, ""We're dropping you out. We'll get another kid."" (Laughter)They had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the South Bronx, but they had more than just expectations for us. They stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame: ""Don't you shame this family."" Sometimes I would get in trouble, and my parents were coming home, and I was in my room waiting for what's going to happen, and I would sit there saying to myself, ""Okay, look, take the belt and hit me, but, God, don't give me that 'shame the family' bit again."" It devastated me when my mother did that to me.And I also had this extended network. Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community. In my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings. I don't know how many of you are New Yorkers, but there were these tenement buildings, and these women were always hanging out one of the windows, leaning on a pillow. They never left. (Laughter) I, so help me God, I grew up walking those streets, and they were always there. They never went to the bathroom. They never cooked. (Laughter) They never did anything. But what they did was keep us in play. They kept us in play. And they didn't care whether you became a doctor or a lawyer or a general, and they never expected any generals in the family, as long as you got an education and then you got a job.""Don't give us any of that self-actualization stuff. You get a job and get out of the house. We don't have time to waste for that. And then you can support us. That's the role of you guys.""And so, it's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families, all families. And it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people, and I'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren, it's not enough. You've got to reach out and back and find kids like Mr. Cruz who can make it if you give them the structure, if you reach back and help, if you mentor, if you invest in boys and girls clubs, if you work with your school system, make sure it's the best school system, and not just your kid's school, but the school uptown in Harlem, not just downtown Montessori on the West Side. All of us have to have a commitment to do that. And we're not just investing in the kids. We're investing in our future.We're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation. Those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority. And we have to make sure that they are ready to be the majority. We have to make sure they're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours, a country that is like no other, a country that amazes me every single day, a country that's fractious. We're always arguing with each other. That's how the system's supposed to work. It's a country of such contrasts, but it's a nation of nations. We touch every nation. Every nation touches us. We are a nation of immigrants. That's why we need sound immigration policy. It's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation, or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty. One of the great stories I love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of New York and walking up Park Avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world. But what I always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler. Gotta have a dirty water dog. (Laughter) And no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I've got to do that. I even did it when I was Secretary of State. I'd come out of my suite at the Waldorf Astoria — (Laughter) — be walking up the street, and I would hit around 55th Street looking for the immigrant pushcart peddler. In those days, I had five bodyguards around me and three New York City police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while I was going up Park Avenue. (Laughter) And I would order the hot dog from the guy, and he'd start to fix it, and then he'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars — ""I've got a green card! I've got a green card!"" (Laughter) ""It's okay, it's okay.""But now I'm alone. I'm alone. I've got no bodyguards, I've got no police cars. I've got nothing. But I gotta have my hot dog.I did it just last week. It was on a Tuesday evening down by Columbus Circle. And the scene repeats itself so often. I'll go up and ask for my hot dog, and the guy will fix it, and as he's finishing, he'll say, ""I know you. I see you on television.You're, well, you're General Powell.""""Yes, yes.""""Oh ... ""I hand him the money.""No, General. You can't pay me. I've been paid. America has paid me. I never forget where I came from. But now I'm an American. Sir, thank you.""I accept the generosity, continue up the street, and it washes over me, my God, it's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago.So we are still that magnificent country, but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world, and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/colin_powell_kids_need_structure
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"So I want to talk to you about two things tonight. Number one: Teaching surgery and doing surgery is really hard. And second, that language is one of the most profound things that separate us all over the world. And in my little corner of the world, these two things are actually related, and I want to tell you how tonight.Now, nobody wants an operation. Who here has had surgery? Did you want it? Keep your hands up if you wanted an operation. Nobody wants an operation. In particular, nobody wants an operation with tools like these through large incisions that cause a lot of pain, that cause a lot of time out of work or out of school, that leave a big scar. But if you have to have an operation, what you really want is a minimally invasive operation. That's what I want to talk to you about tonight — how doing and teaching this type of surgery led us on a search for a better universal translator.Now, this type of surgery is hard, and it starts by putting people to sleep, putting carbon dioxide in their abdomen, blowing them up like a balloon, sticking one of these sharp pointy things into their abdomen — it's dangerous stuff — and taking instruments and watching it on a TV screen. So let's see what it looks like. So this is gallbladder surgery. We perform a million of these a year in the United States alone. This is the real thing. There's no blood. And you can see how focused the surgeons are, how much concentration it takes. You can see it in their faces. It's hard to teach, and it's not all that easy to learn. We do about five million of these in the United States and maybe 20 million of these worldwide.All right, you've all heard the term: ""He's a born surgeon."" Let me tell you, surgeons are not born. Surgeons are not made either. There are no little tanks where we're making surgeons. Surgeons are trained one step at a time. It starts with a foundation, basic skills. We build on that and we take people, hopefully, to the operating room where they learn to be an assistant. Then we teach them to be a surgeon in training. And when they do all of that for about five years, they get the coveted board certification. If you need surgery, you want to be operated on by a board-certified surgeon. You get your board certificate, and you can go out into practice. And eventually, if you're lucky, you achieve mastery.Now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the United States, SAGES, started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures. Now the science behind this is so potent that it became required by the American Board of Surgery in order for a young surgeon to become board certified. It's not a lecture, it's not a course, it's all of that plus a high-stakes assessment. It's hard. Now just this past year, one of our partners, the American College of Surgeons, teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be FLS (Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery)-certified before they do minimally invasive surgery.And are we talking about just people here in the U.S. and Canada? No, we just said all surgeons. So to lift this education and training worldwide is a very large task, something I'm very personally excited about as we travel around the world. SAGES does surgery all over the world, teaching and educating surgeons. So we have a problem, and one of the problems is distance. We can't travel everywhere. We need to make the world a smaller place. And I think that we can develop some tools to do so. And one of the tools I like personally is using video.So I was inspired by a friend. This is Allan Okrainec from Toronto. And he proved that you could actually teach people to do surgery using video conferencing. So here's Allan teaching an English-speaking surgeon in Africa these basic fundamental skills necessary to do minimally invasive surgery. Very inspiring. But for this examination, which is really hard, we have a problem. Even people who say they speak English, only 14 percent pass. Because for them it's not a surgery test, it's an English test.Let me bring it to you locally. I work at the Cambridge Hospital. It's the primary Harvard Medical School teaching facility. We have more than 100 translators covering 63 languages, and we spend millions of dollars just in our little hospital. It's a big labor-intensive effort. If you think about the worldwide burden of trying to talk to your patients — not just teaching surgeons, just trying to talk to your patients — there aren't enough translators in the world. We need to employ technology to assist us in this quest. At our hospital we see everybody from Harvard professors to people who just got here last week. And you have no idea how hard it is to talk to somebody or take care of somebody you can't talk to. And there isn't always a translator available.So we need tools. We need a universal translator. One of the things that I want to leave you with as you think about this talk is that this talk is not just about us preaching to the world. It's really about setting up a dialogue. We have a lot to learn. Here in the United States we spend more money per person for outcomes that are not better than many countries in the world. Maybe we have something to learn as well.So I'm passionate about teaching these FLS skills all over the world. This past year I've been in Latin America, I've been in China, talking about the fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery. And everywhere I go the barrier is: ""We want this, but we need it in our language."" So here's what we think we want to do: Imagine giving a lecture and being able to talk to people in their own native language simultaneously. I want to talk to the people in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe seamlessly, accurately and in a cost-effective fashion using technology. And it has to be bi-directional. They have to be able to teach us something as well.It's a big task. So we looked for a universal translator; I thought there would be one out there. Your webpage has translation, your cellphone has translation, but nothing that's good enough to teach surgery. Because we need a lexicon. What is a lexicon? A lexicon is a body of words that describes a domain. I need to have a health care lexicon. And in that I need a surgery lexicon. That's a tall order. We have to work at it.So let me show you what we're doing. This is research — can't buy it. We're working with the folks at IBM Research from the Accessibility Center to string together technologies to work towards the universal translator. It starts with a framework system where when the surgeon delivers the lecture using a framework of captioning technology, we then add another technology to do video conferencing. But we don't have the words yet, so we add a third technology. And now we've got the words, and we can apply the special sauce: the translation. We get the words up in a window and then apply the magic. We work with a fourth technology. And we currently have access to eleven language pairs. More to come as we think about trying to make the world a smaller place. And I'd like to show you our prototype of stringing all of these technologies that don't necessarily always talk to each other to become something useful.Narrator: Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery. Module five: manual skills practice. Students may display captions in their native language.Steven Schwaitzberg: If you're in Latin America, you click the ""I want it in Spanish"" button and out it comes in real time in Spanish. But if you happen to be sitting in Beijing at the same time, by using technology in a constructive fashion, you could get it in Mandarin or you could get it in Russian — on and on and on, simultaneously without the use of human translators. But that's the lectures.If you remember what I told you about FLS at the beginning, it's knowledge and skills. The difference in an operation between doing something successfully and not may be moving your hand this much. So we're going to take it one step further; we've brought my friend Allan back.Allan Okrainec: Today we're going to practice suturing. This is how you hold the needle. Grab the needle at the tip. It's important to be accurate. Aim for the black dots. Orient your loop this way. Now go ahead and cut. Very good Oscar. I'll see you next week.SS: So that's what we're working on in our quest for the universal translator. We want it to be bi-directional. We have a need to learn as well as to teach. I can think of a million uses for a tool like this. As we think about intersecting technologies — everybody has a cell phone with a camera — we could use this everywhere, whether it be health care, patient care, engineering, law, conferencing, translating videos. This is a ubiquitous tool.In order to break down our barriers, we have to learn to talk to people, to demand that people work on translation. We need it for our everyday life, in order to make the world a smaller place. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_schwaitzberg_a_universal_translator_for_surgeons
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"I'm here today to talk about a disturbing question, which has an equally disturbing answer. My topic is the secrets of domestic violence, and the question I'm going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks: Why does she stay? Why would anyone stay with a man who beats her? I'm not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence. I'm just one woman with a story to tell.I was 22. I had just graduated from Harvard College. I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine. I had my first apartment, my first little green American Express card, and I had a very big secret. My secret was that I had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who I thought was my soulmate, many, many times. The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember. I'm here to tell you the story of crazy love, a psychological trap disguised as love, one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year. It may even be your story.I don't look like a typical domestic violence survivor. I have a B.A. in English from Harvard College, an MBA in marketing from Wharton Business School. I've spent most of my career working for Fortune 500 companies including Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and The Washington Post. I've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together. My dog is a black lab, and I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan. (Laughter)So my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone — all races, all religions, all income and education levels. It's everywhere. And my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women, that it's a women's issue. Not exactly. Over 85 percent of abusers are men, and domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships, in other words, in families, the last place we would want or expect to find violence, which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing.I would have told you myself that I was the last person on Earth who would stay with a man who beats me, but in fact I was a very typical victim because of my age. I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States.I was also a very typical victim because I knew nothing about domestic violence, its warning signs or its patterns.I met Conor on a cold, rainy January night. He sat next to me on the New York City subway, and he started chatting me up. He told me two things. One was that he, too, had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and that he worked at a very impressive Wall Street bank. But what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy. He had these big cheeks, these big apple cheeks and this wheat-blond hair, and he seemed so sweet.One of the smartest things Conor did, from the very beginning, was to create the illusion that I was the dominant partner in the relationship. He did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me. We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job. He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams. Conor believed in me, as a writer and a woman, in a way that no one else ever had. And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret, which was that, as a very young boy starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather, and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade, even though he was very smart, and he'd spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life. Which is why that Ivy League degree and the Wall Street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him. If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not I wore makeup, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were and where I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you, because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in Conor at the beginning. I didn't know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim.I also didn't know that the second step is to isolate the victim. Now, Conor did not come home one day and announce, ""You know, hey, all this Romeo and Juliet stuff has been great, but I need to move into the next phase where I isolate you and I abuse you"" — (Laughter) — ""so I need to get you out of this apartment where the neighbors can hear you scream and out of this city where you have friends and family and coworkers who can see the bruises."" Instead, Conor came home one Friday evening and he told me that he had quit his job that day, his dream job, and he said that he had quit his job because of me, because I had made him feel so safe and loved that he didn't need to prove himself on Wall Street anymore, and he just wanted to get out of the city and away from his abusive, dysfunctional family, and move to a tiny town in New England where he could start his life over with me by his side. Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together. I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. And here's where those guns come in. As soon as we moved to New England — you know, that place where Connor was supposed to feel so safe — he bought three guns. He kept one in the glove compartment of our car. He kept one under the pillows on our bed, and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times. And he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he'd experienced as a young boy. He needed them to feel protected. But those guns were really a message for me, and even though he hadn't raised a hand to me, my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day.Conor first physically attacked me five days before our wedding. It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown. I was working on my computer trying to finish a freelance writing assignment, and I got frustrated, and Conor used my anger as an excuse to put both of his hands around my neck and to squeeze so tightly that I could not breathe or scream, and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall. Five days later, the ten bruises on my neck had just faded, and I put on my mother's wedding dress, and I married him.Despite what had happened, I was sure we were going to live happily ever after, because I loved him, and he loved me so much. And he was very, very sorry. He had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me. It was an isolated incident, and he was never going to hurt me again.It happened twice more on the honeymoon. The first time, I was driving to find a secret beach and I got lost, and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver's side window. And then a few days later, driving home from our honeymoon, he got frustrated by traffic, and he threw a cold Big Mac in my face. Conor proceeded to beat me once or twice a week for the next two and a half years of our marriage.I was mistaken in thinking that I was unique and alone in this situation. One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million. So actually, I was in very good company.Back to my question: Why did I stay? The answer is easy. I didn't know he was abusing me. Even though he held those loaded guns to my head, pushed me down stairs, threatened to kill our dog, pulled the key out of the car ignition as I drove down the highway, poured coffee grinds on my head as I dressed for a job interview, I never once thought of myself as a battered wife. Instead, I was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man, and I was the only person on Earth who could help Conor face his demons.The other question everybody asks is, why doesn't she just leave? Why didn't I walk out? I could have left any time. To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don't: It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser. Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her. Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she's gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose. Other outcomes include long-term stalking, even after the abuser remarries; denial of financial resources; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children, who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother. And still we ask, why doesn't she just leave?I was able to leave, because of one final, sadistic beating that broke through my denial. I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him. So I broke the silence. I told everyone: the police, my neighbors, my friends and family, total strangers, and I'm here today because you all helped me.We tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines, self-destructive women, damaged goods. The question, ""Why does she stay?"" is code for some people for, ""It's her fault for staying,"" as if victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us.But since publishing ""Crazy Love,"" I have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out, who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened, and who rebuilt lives — joyous, happy lives — as employees, wives and mothers, lives completely free of violence, like me. Because it turns out that I'm actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor. I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids. I have that black lab, and I have that minivan. What I will never have again, ever, is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me.Right now, maybe you're thinking, ""Wow, this is fascinating,"" or, ""Wow, how stupid was she,"" but this whole time, I've actually been talking about you. I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves. Abuse could be affecting your daughter, your sister, your best friend right now.I was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence. I'm still breaking the silence today. It's my way of helping other victims, and it's my final request of you. Talk about what you heard here. Abuse thrives only in silence. You have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it. We victims need everyone. We need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence. Show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children, your coworkers, your friends and family. Recast survivors as wonderful, lovable people with full futures. Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out. Together we can make our beds, our dinner tables and our families the safe and peaceful oases they should be.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leslie_morgan_steiner_why_domestic_violence_victims_don_t_leave
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"This is about a hidden corner of the labor market. It's the world of people who need to work ultra-flexibly, if they're to work at all. So think, for instance, of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition, or somebody who's caring for a dependent adult, or a parent with complex child care needs. Their availability for work can be such that it's, ""A few hours today. Maybe I can work tomorrow, but I don't know if and when yet."" And it's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly. Which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible local people booked completely ad hoc around when that person wants to work.Imagine that you run a cafe. It's mid-morning, the place is filling up. You're going to have a busy lunchtime rush. If you could get two extra workers for 90 minutes to start in an hour's time, you'd do it, but they'd have to be reliable, inducted in how your cafe works. They'd have to be available at very competitive rates. They'd have to be bookable in about the next minute. In reality, no recruitment agency wants to handle that sort of business, so you are going to muddle by, understaffed. And it's not just caterers, it's hoteliers, it's retailers, it's anyone who provides services to the public or businesses. There's all sorts of organizations that can use these pools of very flexible people, possibly already once they've been inducted.At this level of the labor market, what you need is a marketplace for spare hours. They do exist. Here's how they work. So in this example, a distribution company has said, we've got a rush order that we've got to get out of the warehouse tomorrow morning. Show us everyone who's available. It's found 31 workers. Everybody on this screen is genuinely available at those specific hours tomorrow. They're all contactable in time for this booking. They've all defined the terms on which they will accept bookings. And this booking is within all the parameters for each individual. And they would all be legally compliant by doing this booking. Of course, they're all trained to work in warehouses. You can select as many of them as you want. They're from multiple agencies. It's calculated the charge rate for each person for this specific booking. And it's monitoring their reliability. The people on the top row are the provenly reliable ones. They're likely to be more expensive. In an alternative view of this pool of local, very flexible people, here's a market research company, and it's inducted maybe 25 local people in how to do street interviewing. And they've got a new campaign. They want to run it next week. And they're looking at how many of the people they've inducted are available each hour next week. And they'll then decide when to do their street interviews.But is there more that could be done for this corner of the labor market? Because right now there are so many people who need whatever economic opportunity they can get. Let's make it personal. Imagine that a young woman — base of the economic pyramid, very little prospect of getting a job — what economic activity could she theoretically engage in? Well, she might be willing to work odd hours in a call center, in a reception area, in a mail room. She may be interested in providing local services to her community: babysitting, local deliveries, pet care. She may have possessions that she would like to trade at times she doesn't need them. So she might have a sofa bed in her front room that she would like to let out. She might have a bike, a video games console she only uses occasionally. And you're probably thinking — because you're all very web-aware — yes, and we're in the era of collaborative consumption, so she can go online and do all this. She can go to Airbnb to list her sofa bed, she can go to TaskRabbit.com and say, ""I want to do local deliveries,"" and so on.These are good sites, but I believe we can go a step further. And the key to that is a philosophy that we call modern markets for all. Markets have changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years, but only for organizations at the top of the economy. If you're a Wall Street trader, you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time, executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you've set. It analyzes supply and demand and pricing and tells you where your next wave of opportunities are coming from. It manages counterparty risk in incredibly sophisticated ways. It's all extremely low overhead. What have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last 20 years? Basically classified adverts with a search facility.So why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading, and what the rest of us have? A modern market is more than a website; it's a web of interoperable marketplaces, back office mechanisms, regulatory regimes, settlement mechanisms, liquidity sources and so on. And when a Wall Street trader comes into work in the morning, she does not write a listing for every financial derivative she wants to sell today and then post that listing on multiple websites and wait for potential buyers to get in touch and start negotiating the terms on which she might trade.In the early days of this modern markets technology, the financial institutions worked out how they could leverage their buying power, their back office processes, their relationships, their networks to shape these new markets that would create all this new activity. They asked governments for supporting regulatory regimes, and in a lot of cases they got it.But throughout the economy, there are facilities that could likewise leverage a new generation of markets for the benefit of all of us. And those facilities — I'm talking about things like the mechanisms that prove our identity, the licensing authorities that know what each of us is allowed to do legally at any given time, the processes by which we resolve disputes through official channels. These mechanisms, these facilities are not in the gift of Craigslist or Gumtree or Yahoo, they're controlled by the state. And the policymakers who sit on top of them are, I suggest, simply not thinking about how those facilities could be used to underpin a whole new era of markets.Like everyone else, those policymakers are taking it for granted that modern markets are the preserve of organizations powerful enough to create them for themselves. Suppose we stopped taking that for granted. Suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of Britain or the president of the U.S., or the leader of any other developed nation, woke up and said, ""I'm never going to be able to create all the jobs I need in the current climate. I have got to focus on whatever economic opportunity I can get to my citizens. And for that they have to be able to access state-of-the-art markets. How do I make that happen?""And I think I can see a few eyes rolling. Politicians in a big, complex, sophisticated I.T. project? Oh, that's going to be a disaster waiting to happen. Not necessarily. There is a precedent for technology-enabled service that has been initiated by politicians in multiple countries and has been hugely successful: national lotteries.Let's take Britain as an example. Our government didn't design the national lottery, it didn't fund the national lottery, it doesn't operate the national lottery. It simply passed the National Lottery Act and this is what followed. This act defines what a national lottery will look like. It specifies certain benefits that the state can uniquely bestow on the operators. And it puts some obligations on those operators. In terms of spreading gambling activity to the masses, this was an unqualified success.But let's suppose that our aim is to bring new economic activity to the base of the pyramid. Could we use the same model? I believe we could. So imagine that policymakers outlined a facility. Let's call it national e-markets, NEMs for short. Think of it as a regulated public utility. So it's on a par with the water supply or the road network. And it's a series of markets for low-level trade that can be fulfilled by a person or a small company. And government has certain benefits it can uniquely bestow on these markets. It's about public spending going through these markets to buy public services at the local level. It's about interfacing these markets direct into the highest official channels in the land. It's about enshrining government's role as a publicist for these markets. It's about deregulating some sectors so that local people can enter them.So, taxi journeys might be one example. And there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators, and the key one is, of course, that the operators pay for everything, including all the interfacing into the public sector. So imagine that the operators make their return by building a percentage markup into each transaction. Imagine that there's a concession period defined of maybe 15 years in which they can take all these benefits and run with them. And imagine that the consortia who bid to run it are told, whoever comes in at the lowest percentage markup on each transaction to fund the whole thing will get the deal.So government then exits the frame. This is now in the hands of the consortium. Either they are going to unlock an awful lot of economic opportunity and make a percentage on all of it or it's all going to crash and burn, which is tough on their shareholders. It doesn't bother the taxpayer necessarily. And there would be no constraints on alternative markets. So this would just be one more choice among millions of Internet forums. But it could be very different, because having access to those state-backed facilities could incentivize this consortium to seriously invest in the service. Because they would have to get a lot of these small transactions going to start making their return.So we're talking about sectors like home hair care, the hire of toys, farm work, hire of clothes even, meals delivered to your door, services for tourists, home care. This would be a world of very small trades, but very well-informed, because national e-markets will deliver data.So this is a local person potentially deciding whether to enter the babysitting market. And they might be aware that they would have to fund vetting and training if they wanted to go into that market. They'd have to do assessment interviews with local parents who wanted a pool of babysitters. Is it worth their while? Should they be looking at other sectors? Should they be moving to another part of the country where there's a shortage of babysitters? This kind of data can become routine. And this data can be used by investors. So if there's a problem with a shortage of babysitters in some parts of the country and the problem is nobody can afford the vetting and training, an investor can pay for it and the system will tithe back the enhanced earnings of the individuals for maybe the next two years.This is a world of atomized capitalism. So it's small trades by small people, but it's very informed, safe, convenient, low-overhead and immediate. Some rough research suggests this could unlock around 100 million pounds' worth a day of new economic activity in a country the size of the U.K.Does that sound improbable to you? That's what a lot of people said about turbo trading in financial exchanges 20 years ago. Do not underestimate the transformative power of truly modern markets.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wingham_rowan_a_new_kind_of_job_market
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"It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and I suddenly realized that the next day was Mother's Day, and I hadn't gotten anything for my mom, so I started thinking about what should I get my mom for Mother's Day? I thought, why don't I make her an interactive Mother's Day card using the Scratch software that I'd been developing with my research group at the MIT Media Lab? We developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations, and then share their creations with one another. So I thought, this would be an opportunity to use Scratch to make an interactive card for my mom.Before making my own Mother's Day card, I thought I would take a look at the Scratch website. So over the last several years, kids around the world ages 8 and up, have shared their projects, and I thought, I wonder if, of those three million projects, whether anyone else has thought to put up Mother's Day cards. So in the search box I typed in ""Mother's Day,"" and I was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of Mother's Day cards that showed up on the Scratch website, many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself. So I started taking a look at them. (Music) I saw one of them that featured a kitten and her mom and wishing her mom a happy Mother's Day. And the creator very considerately offered a replay for her mom. Another one was an interactive project where, when you moved the mouse over the letters of ""Happy Mom Day,"" it reveals a special happy Mother's Day slogan. (Music) In this one, the creator told a narrative about how she had Googled to find out when Mother's Day was happening. (Typing) And then once she found out when Mother's Day was happening, she delivered a special Mother's Day greeting of how much she loved her mom.So I really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects. In fact, I liked it so much that, instead of making my own project, I sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects. (Laughter) And actually, she reacted exactly the way that I hoped that she would. She wrote back to me and she said, ""I'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother's Day cards for their mothers.""So my mom was happy, and that made me happy, but actually I was even happier for another reason. I was happy because these kids were using Scratch just in the way that we had hoped that they would. As they created their interactive Mother's Day cards, you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies. What do I mean by fluent? I mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas. When you become fluent with language, it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend. And it's similar with new technologies. By writing, be creating these interactive Mother's Day cards, these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies.Now maybe you won't be so surprised by this, because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology. I mean, all of us have heard young people referred to as ""digital natives."" But actually I'm sort of skeptical about this term. I'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives. When you really look at it, how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies? You often see them in situations like this, or like this, and there's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming. But that doesn't really make you fluent.So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies.And I'm really interested in seeing, how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies? And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs, or code.So, increasingly, people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code. You know, in recent years, there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code. You look online, you'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code, or Black Girls Code. It seems that everybody is getting into the act. You know, just at the beginning of this year, at the turn of the new year, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012. A few months later, the country of Estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code. And that triggered a debate in the U.K. about whether all the children there should learn to code.Now, for some of you, when you hear about this, it might seem sort of strange about everybody learning to code. When many people think of coding, they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing, and they think of coding looking like this. And in fact, if this is what coding is like, it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code.But coding doesn't have to be like this. Let me show you about what it's like to code in Scratch. So in Scratch, to code, you just snap blocks together. In this case, you take a move block, snap it into a stack, and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story, in this case controlling the big fish. After you've created your program, you can click on ""share,"" and then share your project with other people, so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well.So, of course, making a fish game isn't the only thing you can do with Scratch. Of the millions of projects on the Scratch website, there's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork, and, yes, interactive Mother's Day cards.So I think there's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this, to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world. And it doesn't just stay on the screen. You can also code to interact with the physical world around you. Here's an example from Hong Kong, where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor, so the light sensor detects the hole in the board, so as they move the physical saw, the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree.We're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us. This is an example from a new version of Scratch that we'll be releasing in the next few months, and we're looking again to be able to push you in new directions. Here's an example. It uses the webcam. And as I move my hand, I can pop the balloons or I can move the bug. So it's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect, where you interact with gestures in the world. But instead of just playing someone else's game, you get to create the games, and if you see someone else's game, you can just say ""see inside,"" and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it. So there's a new block that says how much video motion there is, and then, if there's so much video motion, it will then tell the balloon to pop.The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch, you can also use the microphone. Here's an example of a project using the microphone. So I'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices.(Crickets chirping) (Shouts) (Chomping) (Laughter) (Applause)As kids are creating projects like this, they're learning to code, but even more importantly, they're coding to learn. Because as they learn to code, it enables them to learn many other things, opens up many new opportunities for learning. Again, it's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing. When you learn to read and write, it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things. When you learn to read, you can then read to learn. And it's the same thing with coding. If you learn to code, you can code to learn. Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious. You learn more about how computers work. But that's just where it starts. When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things.Let me show you an example. Here's another project, and I saw this when I was visiting one of the computer clubhouses. These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. And when I went to one of the clubhouses a couple years ago, I saw a 13-year-old boy who was using our Scratch software to create a game somewhat like this one, and he was very happy with his game and proud of his game, but also he wanted to do more. He wanted to keep score. So this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish, but he wanted to keep score, so that each time the big fish eats the little fish, the score would go up and it would keep track, and he didn't know how to do that. So I showed him. In Scratch, you can create something called a variable. I'll call it score. And that creates some new blocks for you, and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score, so each time I click on ""change score,"" it increments the score. So I showed this to the clubhouse member — let's call him Victor — and Victor, when he saw that this block would let him increment the score, he knew exactly what to do. He took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish. So then, each time the big fish eats the little fish, he will increment the score, and the score will go up by one. And it's in fact working. And he saw this, and he was so excited, he reached his hand out to me, and he said, ""Thank you, thank you, thank you."" And what went through my mind was, how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables? (Laughter) It doesn't happen in most classrooms, but that's because in most classrooms, when kids learn about variables, they don't know why they're learning it. It's nothing that, really, they can make use of. When you learn ideas like this in Scratch, you can learn it in a way that's really meaningful and motivating for you, that you can understand the reason for learning variables, and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better. Victor had, I'm sure, been taught about variables in schools, but he really didn't — he wasn't paying attention. Now he had a reason for learning variables. So when you learn through coding, and coding to learn, you're learning it in a meaningful context, and that's the best way of learning things.So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this, they're learning important concepts like variables, but that's just the start. As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts, he was also learning about the process of design, how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged, functioning project like you see here. So he was learning many different core principles of design, about how to experiment with new ideas, how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts, how to collaborate with other people on your projects, about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong, how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren't working well. Now those are important skills that aren't just relevant for coding. They're relevant for all sorts of different activities.Now, who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist? It's probably not so likely, but regardless of what he does, he'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned. Regardless of whether he grows up to be a marketing manager or a mechanic or a community organizer, that these ideas are useful for everybody. Again, it's useful to think about this analogy with language. When you become fluent with reading and writing, it's not something that you're doing just to become a professional writer. Very few people become professional writers. But it's useful for everybody to learn how to read and write. Again, the same thing with coding. Most people won't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers, but those skills of thinking creatively, reasoning systematically, working collaboratively — skills you develop when you code in Scratch — are things that people can use no matter what they're doing in their work lives.And it's not just about your work life. Coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life. Let me end with just one more example. So this is an example that came from after I had sent the Mother's Day cards to my mom, she decided that she wanted to learn Scratch. So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card. Now this project is not going to win any prizes for design, and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist. But working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself.So as we take a look and we see that Michael Bloomberg is learning to code, all of the children of Estonia learn to code, even my mom has learned to code, don't you think it's about time that you might be thinking about learning to code? If you're interested in giving it a try, I'd encourage you to go to the Scratch website. It's scratch.mit.edu, and give a try at coding.Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mitch_resnick_let_s_teach_kids_to_code
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"Human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other — Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive? Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity? We do this little interrogation when we meet people to make a mental resume for them. What's your name? Where are you from? How old are you? What do you do? Then we get more personal with it. Have you ever had any diseases? Have you ever been divorced? Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now? What are you into? Who are you into? What gender do you like to sleep with?I get it. We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can — music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on. We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices. Sometimes, though, just the question ""what do you do?"" can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it. Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting. The boxes are too narrow. And this can get really dangerous.So here's a disclaimer about me, though, before we get too deep into this. I grew up in a very sheltered environment. I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, two blocks from the epicenter of punk music. I was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing. Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo. (Laughter) It was an unorthodox upbringing, but as a kid on the streets of New York, you learn how to trust your own instincts, you learn how to go with your own ideas.So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy. I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them. They said they wouldn't let girls play. So I went home, and I shaved my head, and I came back the next day and I said, ""I'm a boy."" I mean, who knows, right? When you're six, maybe you can do that. I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't. I kept up the charade for eight years.So this is me when I was 11. I was playing a kid named Walter in a movie called ""Julian Po."" I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him. See, I was also a child actor, which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity, because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy. In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl — not my teachers at school, not my friends, not the directors that I worked with. Kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple or grab my crotch to check what I was working with. When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stalls so that it looked like I was peeing standing up. At sleepovers I would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me without outing myself.It's worth mentioning though that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia. I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body. I felt like I was performing this elaborate act. I wouldn't have qualified as transgender. If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy, they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty. But in my particular case, I just woke up one day when I was 14, and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again. Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant, and I was ready to figure out who I actually was.When a kid behaves like I did, they don't exactly have to come out, right? No one is exactly shocked. (Laughter) But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents. When I was 15, and I called my father to tell him that I had fallen in love, it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl. Three years later, when I fell in love with a man, neither of my parents batted an eyelash either. See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that I wasn't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point. I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment.So four, almost five years ago, Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate, was raising a lot of dust around this country. And at the time, getting married wasn't really something I spent a lot of time thinking about. But I was struck by the fact that America, a country with such a tarnished civil rights record, could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly. And I remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country, between places where people believed in it and places where people didn't. And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me.If this was a war with two disparate sides, I, by default, fell on team gay, because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight. At the time I was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy, over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was, a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person.I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself, who fell kind of between-the-lines — girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear, girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish, girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees, girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls who all hated being boxed in to anything. I loved these people, and I admired their freedom, but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television. And this powerful awareness rolled in over me that I was a minority, and in my own home country, based on one facet of my character. I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen.I was not an activist. I wave no flags in my own life. But I was plagued by this question: How could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that I knew based on one element of their character? How could they say that we as a group were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else? Were we even a group? What group? And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination? Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was?And then it occurred to me, perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do. It might give them pause. Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party, so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically without any artifice, without any lighting, or without any manipulation of any kind on my part. Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off.For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it's about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven't gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of. Life magazine introduced generations of people to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures. So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits, mugshots if you will. And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that was not 100 percent straight, which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people.(Laughter)So this was a very large undertaking, and to do it we needed some help. So I ran out in the freezing cold, and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to in February of about two years ago. And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help. And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York. And then we made this.(Music)Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City. (Music)Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today. My aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way. My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face. (Music)""We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."" It's written in the Declaration of Independence. We are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded. There is no equality in the United States.[""What does equality mean to you?""] [""Marriage""] [""Freedom""] [""Civil rights""] [""Treat every person as you'd treat yourself""]It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that. The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage. Today in 29 states, more than half of this country, you can legally be fired just for your sexuality.[""Who is responsible for equality?""]I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer: ""We are all responsible for equality."" So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City. And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign. I want to take the project across the country. I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people. This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation. I challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being. (Music)[""Self evident truths""] [""4,000 faces across America""](Music) (Applause)iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that. Almost 85,000 people watched that video, and then they started emailing us from all over the country, asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces. And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated. So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces. That video was made in the spring of 2011, and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people.I know that this is a talk, but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them. Because if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary.So after traveling and talking to people in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas, we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on. Visibility really is key. Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy. Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family, you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it. Of course, in my travels I met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight, but I also met people who were Southern Baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian. Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths.But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting: Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us. In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them. It presents, not just the complexities found in a procession of different human beings, but the complexities found within each individual person. It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few.At some point I realized that my mission to photograph ""gays"" was inherently flawed, because there were a million different shades of gay. Here I was trying to help, and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid — yet another box. At some point I added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay. And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me. (Laughter) People didn't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before. Can you quantify your openness?Once they got over the shock, though, by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks. Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other, but I found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced. I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as ""Grey.""Let me be clear though — and this is very important — in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist. And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative, because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice, I invite you to go out and try to be grey. I'll take your picture just for trying. (Laughter) What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional. The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this: If you have gay people over here and you have straight people over here, and while we recognize that most people identify as somewhere closer to one binary or another, there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between.And the reality that this presents is a complicated one. Because, for example, if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior, where exactly do you draw the line? Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far? Or is it over here by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far? Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen?Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is. After traveling so much and meeting so many people, let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the LGBT community as there are within the human race. Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs, and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle, just being other than straight doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common.So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming, as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms, bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers, perhaps in watching this procession of humanity, something interesting and useful will begin to happen. Hopefully these categories, these binaries, these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away. Because really, they describe nothing that we see and no one that we know and nothing that we are. What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity. And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity. At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights.So is it me particularly that you would choose to deny the right to housing, the right to adopt children, the right to marriage, the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here? Am I the one that you choose to disown as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father, your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president, your police woman or the fireman? It's too late. Because I already am all of those things. We already are all of those things, and we always have been. So please don't greet us as strangers, greet us as your fellow human beings, period.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/io_tillett_wright_fifty_shades_of_gay
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"Salaam alaikum. Welcome to Doha. I am in charge of making this country's food secure. That is my job for the next two years, to design an entire master plan, and then for the next 10 years to implement it — of course, with so many other people. But first, I need to talk to you about a story, which is my story, about the story of this country that you're all here in today. And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event.So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s? We were about 11,000 people living here. There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that. Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water. None of the glamour that you see today existed. No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh. It wasn't that they couldn't develop cities. Resources weren't there to develop them. And you can see that life expectancy was also short. Most people died around the age of 50.So let's move to chapter two: the oil era. 1939, that's when they discovered oil. But unfortunately, it wasn't really fully exploited commercially until after the Second World War. What did it do? It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness. It also made all those people who roamed around the desert — looking for water, looking for food, trying to take care of their livestock — urbanize.You might find this strange, but in my family we have different accents. My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country. There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak. Someone says, ""How so? How could this happen?"" Because we lived scattered. We couldn't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources. And when the resources came, be it oil, we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration. People started to get to know each other. And we realized that there are some differences in accents.So that is the chapter two: the oil era. Let's look at today. This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha. So what's the population today? It's 1.7 million people. That is in less than 60 years. The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years. Lifespan has increased to 78. Water consumption has increased to 430 liters. And this is amongst the highest worldwide. From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation. I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water.But what is interesting about the story that I've just said? The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water. Now that is historic. It's never happened before in history. Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water. This is history being made in this region. Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors. Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house. These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't. But of course, with the use of technology. So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain. Qatar has 74, and we have that growth rate.The question is how. How could we survive that? We have no water whatsoever. Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination. Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything. It is that thing that we pump out of the ground, we burn tons of, probably most of you used it coming to Doha. So that is our lake, if you can see it. That is our river. That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water. This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination.So what are the risks? Do you worry much? I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts, you will realize, of course I have to worry. There is growing demand, growing population. We've turned seven billion only a few months ago. And so that number also demands food. And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050.So a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders. There's also changing diets. By elevating to a higher socio-economic level, they also change their diet. They start eating more meat and so on and so forth. On the other hand, there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors. And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen.This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know. We only have two days of water reserve. We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land. The limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions, etc., etc. So we also face risks. These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity.The question is, is there a solution? Is there a sustainable solution? Indeed there is. This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we've been working on over the past two years. Let's start with the water. So we know very well — I showed you earlier — that we need this energy. So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy? A depletable energy? Fossil fuel? Or should we use something else? Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy? I guess most of you by now realize that we do: 300 days of sun. And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need. And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water. And that is a lot of water.That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food. But in order to sustain the horizontal line — because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver — we need to also develop the vertical line: system sustenance, high-level education, research and development, industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets. But what gels all of it, what enables it, is legislation, policies, regulations. Without it we can't do anything.So that's what we are planning to do. Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation. Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around: Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo. We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fahad_al_attiya_a_country_with_no_water
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"I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: ""Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him. But don't you ever turn into a Gaddafi-like revolutionary.""Almost two years have passed since the Libyan Revolution broke out, inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions. I joined forces with many other Libyans inside and outside Libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi. And there it was, a great revolution. Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice. They have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi. They have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south. Eventually, after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead, we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant.(Applause)However, Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden, a legacy of tyranny, corruption and seeds of diversions. For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society. Aware of the devastation and the challenges, I was keen among many other women to rebuild the Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation. Almost 200 organizations were established in Benghazi during and immediately after the fall of Gaddafi — almost 300 in Tripoli.After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills. With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace.I met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections, an environment which was increasingly polarized, an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion. I led an initiative by the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law, a law that would give every citizen, no matter what your background, the right to vote and run, and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists, creating the zipper list. Eventually, our initiative was adopted and successful. Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years.(Applause)However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections, and of the revolution as a whole, was fading out — for every day we were waking up to the news of violence. One day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and Sufi tombs. On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate. On another day we wake up to the news of the assassination of army officers. And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law.Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles — freedom, dignity, social justice — that we first held. Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the icons of the [aftermath] of the revolution. I am here today not at all to inspire you with our success story of the zipper list and the elections. I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision. We did not prioritize right. For elections did not bring peace and stability and security in Libya. Did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation? No, it didn't. What is it, then? Why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion, by both men and women?Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion. Our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections, which only reinforced polarization and division. Our society needs the qualitative representation of the feminine more than it needs the numerical, quantitative representation of the feminine.We need to stop acting as agents of rage and calling for days of rage. We need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy. We need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion. These are the ideals that a war-torn Libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace.For peace has an alchemy, and this alchemy is about the intertwining, the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives. That's the real zipper. And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically.According to a Quranic verse ""Salam"" — peace — ""is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem."" In turn, the word ""raheem,"" which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word ""rahem"" — womb — symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from. And so just as the womb entirely envelopes the embryo, which grows within it, the divine matrix of compassion nourishes the entire existence. Thus we are told that ""My mercy encompasses all things."" Thus we are told that ""My mercy takes precedence over my anger.""May we all be granted a grace of mercy. (Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zahra_langhi_why_libya_s_revolution_didn_t_work_and_what_might
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"Let me tell you a story.It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so eager. I'm so excited, I'm pouring myself into my lesson plans. But I'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything.This happens one day: I'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology: viruses and how they attack. And so I'm so excited to discuss this with them, and I come in and I say, ""Can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool?""There's silence. Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in the eye, and she says, ""The reading sucked."" And then she clarified. She said, ""You know what, I don't mean that it sucks. It means that I didn't understand a word of it. It's boring. Um, who cares, and it sucks.""These sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now, and I realize that all of my other students are in the same boat, that maybe they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook, but not one of them really understood the main ideas. Not one of them can tell me why this stuff is so cool, why it's so important.I'm totally clueless. I have no idea what to do next. So the only thing I can think of is say, ""Listen. Let me tell you a story. The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses. These guys are blown up a couple million times. The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick. But what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick.""Now, the story that I start telling my kids, it starts out like a horror story. Once upon a time there's this happy little bacterium. Don't get too attached to him. Maybe he's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere, and all of a sudden he starts to not feel so good. Maybe he ate something bad for lunch, and then things get really horrible, as his skin rips apart, and he sees a virus coming out from his insides. And then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides. If — Ouch is right! — If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare. But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and you think, ""We rock."" Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium. Here's what had to happen. A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it. The next thing is, that virus DNA made stuff that chopped up the bacteria DNA. And now that we've gotten rid of the bacteria DNA, the virus DNA takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses. Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make. So this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots. The workers still come the next day, they do their job, but they're following different instructions. So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses — that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts. But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria. Some are much more crafty. When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage. Here, this cloaked, secret agent virus is slipping his DNA into the bacterial cell, but here's the kicker: It doesn't do anything harmful — not at first. Instead, it silently slips into the bacteria's own DNA, and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell, waiting for instructions. And what's interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies, the babies also have the virus DNA in them. So now we have a whole extended bacteria family, filled with virus sleeper cells. They're just happily living together until a signal happens and — BAM! — all of the DNA pops out. It takes control of these cells, turns them into virus-making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses taking over the bacterium. So now you understand how viruses can attack cells. There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells. On the [right] is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses.So this stuff is not that hard, right? And now all of you understand it. But if you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee you've seen this information before. But I bet it was presented in a way that it didn't exactly stick in your mind.So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much? Well, there were a couple of reasons.First of all, I can guarantee you that their textbooks didn't have secret agent viruses, and they didn't have horror stories. You know, in the communication of science there is this obsession with seriousness. It kills me. I'm not kidding. I used to work for an educational publisher, and as a writer, I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language, because then my work might not be viewed as ""serious"" and ""scientific."" Right? I mean, because God forbid somebody have fun when they're learning science. So we have this field of science that's all about slime, and color changes. Check this out. And then we have, of course, as any good scientist has to have, explosions! But if a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific.Now another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize that story that I told you earlier, we could start by saying something like, ""These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium."" The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: ""Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium."" That's great, perfect for 13-year-olds.But here's the thing. There are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there's no way that we could ever give that to students, because it contains some language that isn't completely accurate. For example, I told you that viruses have DNA. Well, a very tiny fraction of them don't. They have something called RNA instead. So a professional science writer would circle that and say, ""That has to go. We have to change it to something much more technical."" And after a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation, they'd find fault with almost every word I've used, and they'd have to change anything that wasn't serious enough, and they'd have to change everything that wasn't 100 percent perfect. Then it would be accurate, but it would be completely impossible to understand. This is horrifying.You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it's like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story. It's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know, who gives us all the details nobody cares about, where you're like, ""Oh, I met my friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans. I mean, they weren't really jeans, they were more kind of, like, leggings, but, like, I guess they're actually kind of more like jeggings, like, but I think — "" and you're just like, ""Oh my God. What is the point?"" Or even worse, science education is becoming like that guy who always says, ""Actually."" Right? You want to be like, ""Oh, dude, we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness."" And that guy's like, ""Actually, it was 87.3 miles."" And you're like, ""Actually, shut up! I'm just trying to tell a story.""Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters. But just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across. I'm reminded of what the architect Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase, when he said that sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth. I think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education.Now, finally, I am often so disappointed when people think that I'm advocating a dumbing down of science. That's not true at all. I'm currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science. But if a young learner can't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success.This needs to stop, and I wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems, and I beg them, I beseech them to just stop it. But I think that's unlikely. So we are so lucky that we have resources like the Internet, where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up. There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways. I dream of a Wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand. And I myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on YouTube. I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp. The feedback that I get is sometimes misspelled and it's often written in LOLcats, but nonetheless it's so appreciative, so thankful that I know this is the right way we should be communicating science.There's still so much work left to be done, though, and if you're involved with science in any way I urge you to join me. Pick up a camera, start to write a blog, whatever, but leave out the seriousness, leave out the jargon. Make me laugh. Make me care. Leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point. How should you start? Why don't you say, ""Listen, let me tell you a story""?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_dewitt_hey_science_teachers_make_it_fun
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"So, I'm an artist. I live in New York, and I've been working in advertising for — ever since I left school, so about seven, eight years now, and it was draining. I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends, and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own.And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED, and it was called ""The power of time off,"" and he spoke about how every seven years, he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired, and I just said, ""I have to do that. I have to take a year off. I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas.""So the first of those projects ended up being something I called ""One Second Every Day."" Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life, chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until, you know, I can't record them anymore.The purpose of this project is, one: I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past. There's all these things that I've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, ""Oh yeah, that's something that I did."" And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video. So the day — the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me, because it's something that I really wanted to — from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted to keep this project going until forever, and having missed that one second, I realized, it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again.So if I live to see 80 years of age, I'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life. When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s. This has really invigorated me day-to-day, when I wake up, to try and do something interesting with my day.Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory. You know, this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done. Even just this one second allows me to remember everything else I did that one day. It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second. On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose, but I'll just have to narrow it down to one, but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway.It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest, against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you. They're not even enjoying the show. They're watching the concert through their cell phone. I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit, back in the day, and I've decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person, is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of, ""Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert."" And it just takes a quick, quick second.I was on a three-month road trip this summer. It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life, just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day, and it was kind of outstanding. I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off, so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project. One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family, and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law, her intestine suddenly strangled one day, and we took her to the emergency room, and she was, she was in really bad shape. We almost lost her a couple of times, and I was there with my brother every day. It helped me realize something else during this project, is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult. It's not — we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things. Or we're, ""Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture."" But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day, and something horrible is happening. And I found that it's actually been very, very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment. It really helps you appreciate the good times. It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one, I think it's important to remember it, just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days.Now one of the things that I do is I don't use any filters, I don't use anything to — I try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes. I started a rule of first person perspective. Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn't the way to go. The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it.Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are, wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this? I turned 31 last week, which is there. I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this. I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it. I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day. Personally, I'm tired of forgetting, and this is a really easy thing to do. I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now — most people in this room, I bet — and it's something that's — I never want to forget another day that I've ever lived, and this is my way of doing that, and it'd be really interesting also to see, if you could just type in on a website, ""June 18, 2018,"" and you would just see a stream of people's lives on that particular day from all over the world.And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities, and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day, so you can never forget that that day, you lived.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_kuriyama_one_second_every_day
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"Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering. And as a chemist, one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is, could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? In essence, could we ""app"" chemistry?Now what would this mean, and how would we do it? Well to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware. And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry.Now what could this mean? Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way.So how are we doing this in the lab? Well it requires software, it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks. And so the really cool bit is, the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer, and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device. And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software.So what could this mean? Well, ultimately, it could mean that you could print your own medicine. And this is what we're doing in the lab at the moment.But to take baby steps to get there, first of all we want to look at drug design and production, or drug discovery and manufacturing. Because if we can manufacture it after we've discovered it, we could deploy it anywhere. You don't need to go to the chemist anymore. We can print drugs at point of need. We can download new diagnostics. Say a new super bug has emerged. You put it in your search engine, and you create the drug to treat the threat. So this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly.But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine.And if that doesn't seem fanciful enough, where do you think we're going to go? Well, you're going to have your own personal matter fabricator. Beam me up, Scotty.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_print_your_own_medicine
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"In my previous life, I was an artist. I still paint. I love art. I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities, and I try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics, and I see part of my job today, the reason for being here, not just to campaign for my party, but for politics, and the role it can play for the better in our lives.For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital. We faced many challenges. Art was part of the answer, and my name, in the very beginning, was linked with two things: demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back, and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city. But this use of colors was not just an artistic act. Rather, it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget I had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something.When we painted the first building, by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade, something unimaginable happened. There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident, or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star.The French E.U. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting. He screeched that he would block the financing.""But why?"" I asked him.""Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards,"" he replied.""Well,"" I told him, ""the surroundings do not meet European standards, even though this is not what we want, but we will choose the colors ourselves, because this is exactly what we want. And if you do not let us continue with our work, I will hold a press conference here, right now, right in this road, and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era.""Then he was kind of troubled, and asked me for a compromise. But I told him no, I'm sorry, compromise in colors is gray, and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime. (Applause) So it's time for change.The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost. The pride of people about their own place of living, and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal, barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space. And when colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people. Big noise raised up: ""What is this? What is happening? What are colors doing to us?""And we made a poll, the most fascinating poll I've seen in my life. We asked people, ""Do you want this action, and to have buildings painted like that?"" And then the second question was, ""Do you want it to stop or do you want it to continue?"" To the first question, 63 percent of people said yes, we like it. Thirty-seven said no, we don't like it. But to the second question, half of them that didn't like it, they wanted it to continue. (Laughter)So we noticed change. People started to drop less litter in the streets, for example, started to pay taxes, started to feel something they had forgotten, and beauty was acting as a guardsman where municipal police, or the state itself, were missing.One day I remember walking along a street that had just been colored, and where we were in the process of planting trees, when I saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop. They had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place.""Why did you throw away the shutters?"" I asked him.""Well, because the street is safer now,"" they answered.""Safer? Why? They have posted more policemen here?""""Come on, man! What policemen? You can see it for yourself. There are colors, streetlights, new pavement with no potholes, trees. So it's beautiful; it's safe.""And indeed, it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected. And this was not a misplaced feeling. Crime did fall.The freedom that was won in 1990 brought about a state of anarchy in the city, while the barbarism of the '90s brought about a loss of hope for the city. The paint on the walls did not feed children, nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant, but it gave hope and light, and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things, a different spirit, a different feel to our lives, and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics, we could build a better life for each other and for our country. We removed 123,000 tons of concrete only from the riverbanks. We demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city, up to eight stories high, the tallest of them. We planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets. We established a green tax, and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly. By means of open competitions, we managed to recruit in our administration many young people, and we thus managed to build a de-politicized public institution where men and women were equally represented.International organizations have invested a lot in Albania during these 20 years, not all of it well spent. When I told the World Bank directors that I wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption, they did not understand me. But people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks. They were paying in order to skip the queue, the long queue. The reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole, and, on the other hand, a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe. We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks, every week, but we could not change this corrupt practice.""I'm convinced,"" I told a German official with the World Bank, ""that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in Germany, in a German administration, just as I am convinced that if you put German officials from the German administration in those holes, they would be bribed just the same.""(Applause)It's not about genes. It's not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience. It's about system, it's about organization. It's also about environment and respect.We removed the kiosks. We built the bright new reception hall that made people, Tirana citizens, think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests. We created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes. We put the citizen first, and not the clerks.The corruption in the state administration of countries like Albania — it's not up to me to say also like Greece — can be fought only by modernization. Reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer, and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us. (Applause)Things have come to this point because politicians in general, but especially in our countries, let's face it, think people are stupid. They take it for granted that, come what may, people have to follow them, while politics, more and more, fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people. Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation. Seen from those stairs, all politicians today seem the same, and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism.Barack Obama won — (Applause) — because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks. He did not know each and every one of them, but with an admirable ingenuity, he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign. I tweet. I love it. I love it because it lets me get the message out, but it also lets people get their messages to me. This is politics, not from top down, but from the bottom up, and sideways, and allowing everybody's voice to be heard is exactly what we need. Politics is not just about leaders. It's not just about politicians and laws. It is about how people think, how they view the world around them, how they use their time and their energy. When people say all politicians are the same, ask yourself if Obama was the same as Bush, if François Hollande is the same as Sarkozy. They are not. They are human beings with different views and different visions for the world. When people say nothing can change, just stop and think what the world was like 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. Our world is defined by the pace of change. We can all change the world.I gave you a very small example of how one thing, the use of color, can make change happen. I want to make more change as Prime Minister of my country, but every single one of you can make change happen if you want to.President Roosevelt, he said, ""Believe you can, and you are halfway there.""Efharisto and kalinihta.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edi_rama_take_back_your_city_with_paint
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"When I was 11, I remember waking up one morning to the sound of joy in my house. My father was listening to BBC News on his small, gray radio. There was a big smile on his face which was unusual then, because the news mostly depressed him.""The Taliban are gone!"" my father shouted.I didn't know what it meant, but I could see that my father was very, very happy.""You can go to a real school now,"" he said.A morning that I will never forget. A real school. You see, I was six when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school. So for the next five years, I dressed as a boy to escort my older sister, who was no longer allowed to be outside alone, to a secret school. It was the only way we both could be educated. Each day, we took a different route so that no one would suspect where we were going. We would cover our books in grocery bags so it would seem we were just out shopping. The school was in a house, more than 100 of us packed in one small living room. It was cozy in winter but extremely hot in summer. We all knew we were risking our lives — the teacher, the students and our parents. From time to time, the school would suddenly be canceled for a week because Taliban were suspicious. We always wondered what they knew about us. Were we being followed? Do they know where we live? We were scared, but still, school was where we wanted to be.I was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured. My grandfather was an extraordinary man for his time. A total maverick from a remote province of Afghanistan, he insisted that his daughter, my mom, go to school, and for that he was disowned by his father. But my educated mother became a teacher. There she is. She retired two years ago, only to turn our house into a school for girls and women in our neighborhood. And my father — that's him — he was the first ever in his family to receive an education. There was no question that his children would receive an education, including his daughters, despite the Taliban, despite the risks. To him, there was greater risk in not educating his children. During Taliban years, I remember there were times I would get so frustrated by our life and always being scared and not seeing a future. I would want to quit, but my father, he would say, ""Listen, my daughter, you can lose everything you own in your life. Your money can be stolen. You can be forced to leave your home during a war. But the one thing that will always remain with you is what is here, and if we have to sell our blood to pay your school fees, we will. So do you still not want to continue?""Today I am 22. I was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war. Fewer than six percent of women my age have made it beyond high school, and had my family not been so committed to my education, I would be one of them. Instead, I stand here a proud graduate of Middlebury College.(Applause)When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me. He not only brags about my college degree, but also that I was the first woman, and that I am the first woman to drive him through the streets of Kabul.(Applause)My family believes in me. I dream big, but my family dreams even bigger for me. That's why I am a global ambassador for 10x10, a global campaign to educate women. That's why I cofounded SOLA, the first and perhaps only boarding school for girls in Afghanistan, a country where it's still risky for girls to go to school. The exciting thing is that I see students at my school with ambition grabbing at opportunity. And I see their parents and their fathers who, like my own, advocate for them, despite and even in the face of daunting opposition.Like Ahmed. That's not his real name, and I cannot show you his face, but Ahmed is the father of one of my students. Less than a month ago, he and his daughter were on their way from SOLA to their village, and they literally missed being killed by a roadside bomb by minutes. As he arrived home, the phone rang, a voice warning him that if he sent his daughter back to school, they would try again.""Kill me now, if you wish,"" he said, ""but I will not ruin my daughter's future because of your old and backward ideas.""What I've come to realize about Afghanistan, and this is something that is often dismissed in the West, that behind most of us who succeed is a father who recognizes the value in his daughter and who sees that her success is his success. It's not to say that our mothers aren't key in our success. In fact, they're often the initial and convincing negotiators of a bright future for their daughters, but in the context of a society like in Afghanistan, we must have the support of men. Under the Taliban, girls who went to school numbered in the hundreds — remember, it was illegal. But today, more than three million girls are in school in Afghanistan.(Applause)Afghanistan looks so different from here in America. I find that Americans see the fragility in changes. I fear that these changes will not last much beyond the U.S. troops' withdrawal. But when I am back in Afghanistan, when I see the students in my school and their parents who advocate for them, who encourage them, I see a promising future and lasting change. To me, Afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities, and every single day the girls of SOLA remind me of that. Like me, they are dreaming big.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shabana_basij_rasikh_dare_to_educate_afghan_girls
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"(Hammer)(Laughter)(Microwave beeps) (Laughter)You probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road. It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot. Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt. And especially if you then ride with your bicycle, and pass these cars, then that's not very nice. Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise. It's a noisy material, and if we produce roads like in the Netherlands, very close to cities, then we would like a silent road.The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt. Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore. Also the noise will disappear in these pores. Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear, so it's a very silent road.It also has disadvantages, of course, and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur. What is raveling? You see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off. First you get one stone, then several more, and more and more and more and more, and then they — well, I will not do that. (Laughter) But they can damage your windshield, so you're not happy with that. And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage. Sometimes you can create potholes with that. Ha. He's ready.Potholes, of course, that can become a problem, but we have a solution. Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material. It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones. Due to weathering, due to U.V. light, due to oxidation, this binder, this bitumen, the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink, and if it shrinks, it gets micro-cracks, and it delaminates from the aggregates. Then if you drive over the road, you take out the aggregates — what we just saw here. To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials. If we can make this material self-healing, then probably we have a solution. So what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans, and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces, and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen. So then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it. Then you need a machine, like you see here, that you can use for cooking — an induction machine. Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that. Then what you do is you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen, and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks, and the stones are again fixed to the surface.Today I use a microwave because I cannot take the big induction machine here onstage. So a microwave is a similar system. So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out to see what happened. So this is the specimen coming out now.So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens. We tested a lot of specimens there, and then the government, they actually saw our results, and they thought, ""Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that."" So they donated to us a piece of highway, 400 meters of the A58, where we had to make a test track to test this material. So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road, and then of course this road will last several years without any damage. That's what we know from practice. So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab. So we did aging on the samples, did a lot of loading on it, healed them with our induction machine, and healed them and tested them again. Several times we can repeat that. So actually, the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine — this is the big version we have made to go on the real road — if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money.Well, to conclude, I can say that we made a material using steel fibers, the addition of steel fibers, using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road, double the surface life you can even do, so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks.And now you're of course curious if it also worked. So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm. Actually, it still has to cool down first before I can show you that the healing works. But I will do a trial. Let's see. Yeah, it worked. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erik_schlangen_a_self_healing_asphalt
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"""When the crisis came, the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent."" ""There is also a strong belief, which I share, that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis.""Now, you've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism. But this is different. This is coming from the heart of finance. The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank. The second quote is from the head of the UK Financial Services Authority. Are these people implying that we don't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies? It gets worse. ""We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe, while we still don't understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace.""What's happening here? How can this be possible? Do we really understand more about the fabric of reality than we do about the fabric which emerges from our human interactions? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. But there's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity.To explain what this means and what this thing is, please let me quickly take a couple of steps back. I ended up in physics by accident. It was a random encounter when I was young, and since then, I've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day. In a nutshell, you can think of physics as follows. So you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics. You encode it into equations. Then, predictions can be made and tested. We're actually really lucky that this works, because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe. Despite the success, physics has its limits. As Dirk Helbing pointed out in the last quote, we don't really understand the complexity that relates to us, that surrounds us. This paradox is what got me interested in complex systems. So these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts: swarms of birds or fish, ant colonies, ecosystems, brains, financial markets. These are just a few examples.Interestingly, complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations, so the usual physics approach doesn't really work here. So what do we know about complex systems? Well, it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction. This means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions, so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions. And it gets even better, because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence. So this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system. So the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts. And all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system, how complex they are. So if it's a cell or a termite or a bird, you just focus on the rules of interaction.As a result, networks are ideal representations of complex systems. The nodes in the network are the system's components, and the links are given by the interactions. So what equations are for physics, complex networks are for the study of complex systems.This approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics, biology, computer science, the social sciences, but what about economics? Where are economic networks? This is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature. The study we published last year, called ""The Network of Global Corporate Control,"" was the first extensive analysis of economic networks. The study went viral on the Internet and it attracted a lot of attention from the international media. This is quite remarkable, because, again, why did no one look at this before? Similar data has been around for quite some time.What we looked at in detail was ownership networks. So here the nodes are companies, people, governments, foundations, etc. And the links represent the shareholding relations, so shareholder A has x percent of the shares in company B. And we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue. So ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations. In this little example, you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted.Now, you may think that no one looked at this before because ownership networks are really, really boring to study. Well, as ownership is related to control, as I shall explain later, looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like, who are the key players? How are they organized? Are they isolated? Are they interconnected? And what is the overall distribution of control? In other words, who controls the world? I think this is an interesting question.And it has implications for systemic risk. This is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall. A high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability, because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic.Scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data, because a foundational guideline in science is: Let the data speak. OK. Let's do that.So we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007. This is a lot of data, and because we wanted to find out ""who rules the world,"" we decided to focus on transnational corporations, or ""TNCs,"" for short. These are companies that operate in more than one country, and we found 43,000. In the next step, we built the network around these companies, so we took all the TNCs' shareholders, and the shareholders' shareholders, etc., all the way upstream, and we did the same downstream, and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links. This is the TNC network which we analyzed.And it turns out to be structured as follows. So you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players, and in the center, there's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies. To give you a better picture, think about a metropolitan area. So you have the suburbs and the periphery, you have a center, like a financial district, then the core will be something like the tallest high-rise building in the center. And we already see signs of organization going on here. 36 percent of the TNCs are in the core only, but they make up 95 percent of the total operating revenue of all TNCs.OK, so now we analyzed the structure, so how does this relate to the control? Well, ownership gives voting rights to shareholders. This is the normal notion of control. And there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership. If you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company, you get control, but usually, it depends on the relative distribution of shares. And the network really matters. About 10 years ago, Mr. Tronchetti Provera had ownership and control in a small company, which had ownership and control in a bigger company. You get the idea. This ended up giving him control in Telecom Italia with a leverage of 26. So this means that, with each euro he invested, he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations.Now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the TNCs' value. This allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder. This is very much in the sense of Max Weber's idea of potential power, which is the probability of imposing one's own will despite the opposition of others.If you want to compute the flow in an ownership network, this is what you have to do. It's actually not that hard to understand. Let me explain by giving you this analogy. So think about water flowing in pipes, where the pipes have different thickness. So similarly, the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes. So what did we find after computing all this network control? Well, it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to collectively control 80 percent of the TNCs' value. Now remember, we started out with 600,000 nodes, so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent. They're mostly financial institutions in the US and the UK. And it gets even more extreme. There are 146 top players in the core, and they together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the TNCs' value.What should you take home from all of this? Well, the high degree of control you saw is very extreme by any standard. The high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy. And we could easily reproduce the TNC network with a few simple rules. This means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization. It's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system, so it's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy.Our study ""is an impression of the moon's surface. It's not a street map."" So you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt, yet it ""gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance."" We hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction, so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future. And this is slowly starting. We're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view. But this journey has only just begun, so we will have to wait before we see the first results.Now there is still a big problem, in my opinion. Ideas relating to finance, economics, politics, society, are very often tainted by people's personal ideologies. I really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found. It would be really great if it has the power to help end the gridlock created by conflicting ideas, which appears to be paralyzing our globalized world. Reality is so complex, we need to move away from dogma. But this is just my own personal ideology.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_b_glattfelder_who_controls_the_world
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"So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever? And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? That's the million-dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples?(Laughter)It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it? And when you love, how does it feel? And when you desire, how is it different?These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting — desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity — desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies.You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire.So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think, is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence. All these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need — men and women — for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise — you get the gist. For journey, for travel.So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long.(Laughter)So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.(Laughter)(Applause)So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right? Because I think, in some way — and I'll come back to that — but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination.So why does good sex so often fade? What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism.So if there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it's ""to have."" And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is ""to want."" In love, we want to have, we want to know the beloved. We want to minimize the distance. We want to contract that gap. We want to neutralize the tensions. We want closeness. But in desire, we tend to not really want to go back to the places we've already gone. Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest. In desire, we want an Other, somebody on the other side that we can go visit, that we can go spend some time with, that we can go see what goes on in their red-light district. You know? In desire, we want a bridge to cross. Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air. Desire needs space. And when it's said like that, it's often quite abstract.But then I took a question with me. And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with ""Mating in Captivity,"" and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Not attracted sexually, per Se, but most drawn. And across culture, across religion, and across gender — except for one — there are a few answers that just keep coming back.So the first group is: I am most drawn to my partner when she is away, when we are apart, when we reunite. Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire.But then the second group is even more interesting. I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she's doing something she's passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident. Probably the biggest turn-on across the board. Radiant, as in self-sustaining. I look at this person — by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other. I don't know in inches how much that is.But it's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them. It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive. And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other. Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes. And so, when I see my partner on his own or her own, doing something in which they are enveloped, I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception, and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me.And then, more importantly, in this description about the other or myself — it's the same — what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire. Nobody needs anybody. There is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving. It's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.(Laughter)I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shot down and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge.(Laughter)For good reasons, right?And then the third group of answers usually would be: when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots. But basically it's when there is novelty. But novelty isn't about new positions. It isn't a repertoire of techniques. Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out? What parts of you are just being seen?Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh? Sex is a place you go. It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. So where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union? Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive? Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes? What comes out there? It's a language. It isn't just a behavior. And it's the poetic of that language that I'm interested in, which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence.You know, animals have sex. It's the pivot, it's biology, it's the natural instinct. We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it's sexuality transformed by the human imagination. We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it. We can hint at it. We don't even have to do it. We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation, which is a mortar to desire. The ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening, at the same time.So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex. And if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate. What are the ingredients? Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery. But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination.But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking, actually, at trauma, which is the other side. And I looked at it, looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community, there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death. They knew how to keep themselves alive. And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, ""I want more sex,"" but generally, people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of Eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them.And so I began to ask a different question. ""I shut myself off when ..."" began to be the question. ""I turn off my desires when ..."" Which is not the same question as, ""What turns me off is ..."" and ""You turn me off when ..."" And people began to say, ""I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don't like my body, when I feel old, when I haven't had time for myself, when I haven't had a chance to even check in with you, when I don't perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don't have a sense of self-worth, when I don't feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure.""And then I began to ask the reverse question. ""I turn myself on when ..."" Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, ""You turn me on, what turns me on,"" and I'm out of the question, you know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. It won't make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk.(Laughter)So I turn myself on when, I turn on my desires, I wake up when ...Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love — mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other — are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this.(Laughter)But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another.So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that. Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory need, curiosity, discovery. And then at some point they turn around and they look at you. And if you tell them, ""Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there,"" then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back.But if on this side there is somebody who says, ""I'm worried. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. My partner hasn't taken care of me in so long. What's so good out there? Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?"" then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize. Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other. I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection. And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself.Translate this into adult language. It starts very young. It continues into our sex lives up to the end. Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time. ""Are you going to be there? Are you going to curse me, scold me? Are you going to be angry with me?"" And they may be gone, but they're never really away. And those are often the people that will tell you, ""In the beginning, it was super hot."" Because in the beginning, the growing intimacy wasn't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire. The more connected I became, the more responsible I felt, the less I was able to let go in your presence. The third child doesn't really come back.So what happens, if you want to sustain desire, it's that real dialectic piece. On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go. On the other hand if you can't go, you can't have pleasure, you can't culminate, you don't have an orgasm, you don't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own.So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs, there are a few things that I've come to understand erotic couples do. One, they have a lot of sexual privacy. They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them. They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm. They also understand that an erotic space isn't about, you begin to stroke the other. It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the Agile program —(Laughter)And you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible.Responsibility and desire just butt heads. They don't really do well together. Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. It's pretty much like the moon. It has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. They know how to bring it back. And they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it's just going to fall from heaven while you're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship, already has.Committed sex is premeditated sex. It's willful. It's intentional. It's focus and presence.Merry Valentine's.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship
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"The theme of my talk today is, ""Be an artist, right now."" Most people, when this subject is brought up, get tense and resist it: ""Art doesn't feed me, and right now I'm busy. I have to go to school, get a job, send my kids to lessons ... "" You think, ""I'm too busy. I don't have time for art."" There are hundreds of reasons why we can't be artists right now. Don't they just pop into your head?There are so many reasons why we can't be, indeed, we're not sure why we should be. We don't know why we should be artists, but we have many reasons why we can't be. Why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art? Perhaps you think art is for the greatly gifted or for the thoroughly and professionally trained. And some of you may think you've strayed too far from art. Well you might have, but I don't think so. This is the theme of my talk today. We are all born artists.If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall. They dance to Son Dam Bi's dance on TV, but you can't even call it Son Dam Bi's dance — it becomes the kids' own dance. So they dance a strange dance and inflict their singing on everyone. Perhaps their art is something only their parents can bear, and because they practice such art all day long, people honestly get a little tired around kids.Kids will sometimes perform monodramas — playing house is indeed a monodrama or a play. And some kids, when they get a bit older, start to lie. Usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies. They're shocked. ""Now you're showing your true colors,"" Mom says. She thinks, ""Why does he take after his dad?"" She questions him, ""What kind of a person are you going to be?""But you shouldn't worry. The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins. They are talking about things they didn't see. It's amazing. It's a wonderful moment. Parents should celebrate. ""Hurray! My boy finally started to lie!"" All right! It calls for celebration. For example, a kid says, ""Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home."" Then a typical mom responds, ""Stop that nonsense."" Now, an ideal parent is someone who responds like this: ""Really? An alien, huh? What did it look like? Did it say anything? Where did you meet it?"" ""Um, in front of the supermarket.""When you have a conversation like this, the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started. Soon, a story develops. Of course this is an infantile story, but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does. In essence, they are not different. Roland Barthes once said of Flaubert's novels, ""Flaubert did not write a novel. He merely connected one sentence after another. The eros between sentences, that is the essence of Flaubert's novel."" That's right — a novel, basically, is writing one sentence, then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence. And you continue to make connections.Take a look at this sentence: ""One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."" Yes, it's the first sentence of Franz Kafka's ""The Metamorphosis."" Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka's work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature. Kafka did not show his work to his father. He was not on good terms with his father. On his own, he wrote these sentences. Had he shown his father, ""My boy has finally lost it,"" he would've thought.And that's right. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence, which is not much different from what a kid does. A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller. Kids do art. They don't get tired and they have fun doing it. I was in Jeju Island a few days ago. When kids are on the beach, most of them love playing in the water. But some of them spend a lot of time in the sand, making mountains and seas — well, not seas, but different things — people and dogs, etc. But parents tell them, ""It will all be washed away by the waves."" In other words, it's useless. There's no need. But kids don't mind. They have fun in the moment and they keep playing in the sand. Kids don't do it because someone told them to. They aren't told by their boss or anyone, they just do it.When you were little, I bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art. When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment, many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid. Learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend, or performing a ridiculous skit with friends looking like idiots — things like that. Or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera. They talk about these kinds of experiences. You must have had such a moment. In that moment, art makes you happy because it's not work. Work doesn't make you happy, does it? Mostly it's tough.The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying. It's a bit mischievous, actually. ""Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired."" Right? Why would work tire us if it's in our nature? Playing doesn't tire us. We can play all night long. If we work overnight, we should be paid for overtime. Why? Because it's tiring and we feel fatigue. But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing. They don't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family. Of course, there were kids who had to. You know this gentleman, right? He had to tour around Europe to support his family — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — but that was centuries ago, so we can make him an exception. Unfortunately, at some point our art — such a joyful pastime — ends. Kids have to go to lessons, to school, do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons, but they aren't fun anymore. You're told to do it and there's competition. How can it be fun? If you're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall, you'll surely get in trouble with your mom. Besides, if you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure — people will question your actions and ask you to act properly.Here's my story: I was an eighth grader and I entered a drawing contest at school in Gyeongbokgung. I was trying my best, and my teacher came around and asked me, ""What are you doing?"" ""I'm drawing diligently,"" I said. ""Why are you using only black?"" Indeed, I was eagerly coloring the sketchbook in black. And I explained, ""It's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch."" Then my teacher said, ""Really? Well, Young-ha, you may not be good at drawing but you have a talent for storytelling."" Or so I wished. ""Now you'll get it, you rascal!"" was the response. (Laughter) ""You'll get it!"" he said. You were supposed to draw the palace, the Gyeonghoeru, etc., but I was coloring everything in black, so he dragged me out of the group. There were a lot of girls there as well, so I was utterly mortified.None of my explanations or excuses were heard, and I really got it big time. If he was an ideal teacher, he would have responded like I said before, ""Young-ha may not have a talent for drawing, but he has a gift for making up stories,"" and he would have encouraged me. But such a teacher is seldom found. Later, I grew up and went to Europe's galleries — I was a university student — and I thought this was really unfair. Look what I found. (Laughter)Works like this were hung in Basel while I was punished and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth. Look at this. Doesn't it look just like wallpaper? Contemporary art, I later discovered, isn't explained by a lame story like mine. No crows are brought up. Most of the works have no title, Untitled. Anyways, contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation — essentially the same as I did. Of course, my work was very amateur, but let's turn to more famous examples.This is Picasso's. He stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it ""Bull's Head."" Sounds convincing, right? Next, a urinal was placed on its side and called ""Fountain"". That was Duchamp. So filling the gap between explanation and a weird act with stories — that's indeed what contemporary art is all about. Picasso even made the statement, ""I draw not what I see but what I think."" Yes, it means I didn't have to draw Gyeonghoeru. I wish I knew what Picasso said back then. I could have argued better with my teacher. Unfortunately, the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That's our tragedy.So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn't go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves, but with the artist dead, the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form. In karaoke bars, there are always people who sing ""She's Gone"" or ""Hotel California,"" miming the guitar riffs. Usually they sound awful. Awful indeed. Some people turn into rockers like this. Or some people dance in clubs. People who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the Internet all night long. That's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side.Sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with Legos or putting together plastic robots. They go, ""Don't touch it. Daddy will do it for you."" The kid has already lost interest and is doing something else, but the dad alone builds castles. This shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed, not gone. But they can often reveal themselves negatively, in the form of jealousy. You know the song ""I would love to be on TV""? Why would we love it? TV is full of people who do what we wished to do, but never got to. They dance, they act — and the more they do, they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. ""He just can't act."" ""You call that singing? She can't hit the notes."" We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous, not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us. That's what I think.What should we do then? Yes, that's right. Right now, we need to start our own art. Right this minute, we can turn off TV, log off the Internet, get up and start to do something. Where I teach students in drama school, there's a course called Dramatics. In this course, all students must put on a play. However, acting majors are not supposed to act. They can write the play, for example, and the writers may work on stage art. Likewise, stage art majors may become actors, and in this way you put on a show. Students at first wonder whether they can actually do it, but later they have so much fun. I rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play. In school, the military or even in a mental institution, once you make people do it, they enjoy it. I saw this happen in the army — many people had fun doing plays.I have another experience: In my writing class, I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class — many who don't major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can't write. So I give them blank sheets of paper and a theme. It can be a simple theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There's one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them, ""Come on, come on!"" They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind, the artistic devil creeps in. This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can't write: ""People will laugh at you. This is not good writing! What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!"" It will say a lot of things. You have to run fast so the devil can't catch up. The really good writing I've seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline, but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did in front of me with a pencil. The students go into a kind of trance. After 30 or 40 minutes, they write without knowing what they're writing. And in this moment, the nagging devil disappears.So I can say this: It's not the hundreds of reasons why one can't be an artist, but rather, the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists became artists because of the one reason. When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art, enemies appear on the outside. Mostly, they have the faces of our parents. (Laughter) Sometimes they look like our spouses, but they are not your parents or spouses. They are devils. Devils. They came to Earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question. When we say, ""I think I'll try acting. There's a drama school in the community center,"" or ""I'd like to learn Italian songs,"" they ask, ""Oh, yeah? A play? What for?"" The magic question is, ""What for?"" But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. It helps us express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold. ""Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry for having fun without you,"" is what you should say. ""I'll just go ahead and do it anyway."" The ideal future I imagine is where we all have multiple identities, at least one of which is an artist.Once I was in New York and got in a cab. I took the backseat, and in front of me I saw something related to a play. So I asked the driver, ""What is this?"" He said it was his profile. ""Then what are you?"" I asked. ""An actor,"" he said. He was a cabby and an actor. I asked, ""What roles do you usually play?"" He proudly said he played King Lear. King Lear. ""Who is it that can tell me who I am?"" — a great line from King Lear. That's the world I dream of. Someone is a golfer by day and writer by night. Or a cabby and an actor, a banker and a painter, secretly or publicly performing their own arts.In 1990, Martha Graham, the legend of modern dance, came to Korea. The great artist, then in her 90s, arrived at Gimpo Airport and a reporter asked her a typical question: ""What do you have to do to become a great dancer? Any advice for aspiring Korean dancers?"" Now, she was the master. This photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist. In 1990, she was asked this question. And here's what she answered: ""Just do it."" Wow. I was touched. Only those three words and she left the airport. That's it. So what should we do now? Let's be artists, right now. Right away. How? Just do it!Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/young_ha_kim_be_an_artist_right_now
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"The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman. We are always chasing storms. We want to see and measure storms — brainstorms, that is. And we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives, but we rarely see or listen to one. So I always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them.Actually, the first time we recorded more than one neuron — a hundred brain cells simultaneously — we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal, this is the first image we got, the first 10 seconds of this recording. So we got a little snippet of a thought, and we could see it in front of us.I always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer, because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe. And here we are, out of billions of neurons, just recording, 10 years ago, a hundred. We are doing a thousand now. And we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature. Because, if you don't know yet, everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms, comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for the future. Everything that we ever do, everything that every human has ever done, do or will do, requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms.And the sound of a brainstorm, if you've never heard one, is somewhat like this. You can put it louder if you can. My son calls this ""making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned A.M. station."" This is a brain. This is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing, your brain will sound like this — my brain, any brain. And what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies, these brain symphonies, and try to extract from them the messages they carry.In particular, about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces. And you have a scheme here that describes how it works. The idea is, let's have some sensors that listen to these storms, this electrical firing, and see if you can, in the same time that it takes for this storm to leave the brain and reach the legs or the arms of an animal — about half a second — let's see if we can read these signals, extract the motor messages that are embedded in it, translate it into digital commands and send it to an artificial device that will reproduce the voluntary motor wheel of that brain in real time. And see if we can measure how well we can translate that message when we compare to the way the body does that.And if we can actually provide feedback, sensory signals that go back from this robotic, mechanical, computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain, back to the brain, how the brain deals with that, of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery.And that's exactly what we did 10 years ago. We started with a superstar monkey called Aurora that became one of the superstars of this field. And Aurora liked to play video games. As you can see here, she likes to use a joystick, like any one of us, any of our kids, to play this game. And as a good primate, she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer. So even before a target appears that she's supposed to cross with the cursor that she's controlling with this joystick, Aurora is trying to find the target, no matter where it is. And if she's doing that, because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor, she gets a drop of Brazilian orange juice. And I can tell you, any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of Brazilian orange juice. Actually any primate will do that. Think about that.Well, while Aurora was playing this game, as you saw, and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice, we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that Aurora was making. Because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have Aurora play the game just by thinking, without interference of her body. Her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target. And to our shock, that's exactly what Aurora did. She played the game without moving her body.So every trajectory that you see of the cursor now, this is the exact first moment she got that. That's the exact first moment a brain intention was liberated from the physical domains of a body of a primate and could act outside, in that outside world, just by controlling an artificial device. And Aurora kept playing the game, kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get, that she craved for.Well, she did that because she, at that time, had acquired a new arm. The robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later, after the first video that I showed to you, is under the control of Aurora's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target. And Aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm, but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases. She can scratch her back, she can scratch one of us, she can play another game. By all purposes and means, Aurora's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body. The model of the self that Aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm.Well, we did that 10 years ago. Just fast forward 10 years. Just last year we realized that you don't even need to have a robotic device. You can just build a computational body, an avatar, a monkey avatar. And you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them, or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar's arms or legs.And what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world. And these objects are visually identical, but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects, they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey's brain, informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching. And in just four weeks, the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway — like a new sense. And you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar. And the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin.So what you see here is this is the design of the task. You're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets. And he has to select one because only one carries the reward, the orange juice that they want to get. And he has to select it by touch using a virtual arm, an arm that doesn't exist. And that's exactly what they do.This is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task. The animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets. And he's sensing the texture by receiving an electrical message directly in the brain. And the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward. The legends that you see in the movie don't appear for the monkey. And by the way, they don't read English anyway, so they are here just for you to know that the correct target is shifting position. And yet, they can find them by tactile discrimination, and they can press it and select it.So when we look at the brains of these animals, on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity, the electrical storms, of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick. And that's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows. The basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions. The bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar. As fast as we can reset our computers, the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool, as if this too was a part of that primate's body. The brain is assimilating that too, as fast as we can measure.So that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies, but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we're commanding with our brains. Our violins, our cars, our bicycles, our soccer balls, our clothing — they all become assimilated by this voracious, amazing, dynamic system called the brain.How far can we take it? Well, in an experiment that we ran a few years ago, we took this to the limit. We had an animal running on a treadmill at Duke University on the East Coast of the United States, producing the brainstorms necessary to move. And we had a robotic device, a humanoid robot, in Kyoto, Japan at ATR Laboratories that was dreaming its entire life to be controlled by a brain, a human brain, or a primate brain.What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke, so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her. So she could be rewarded, not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity.Funny thing, that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head, the head of the monkey, and reach its own muscle. The monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger, across the planet. This is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously. This is CB1 fulfilling its dream in Japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate.So where are we taking all this? What are we going to do with all this research, besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears? Well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world. Millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action, into movement. Although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements, they cannot cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord.So our idea is to create a bypass, is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals, larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again, bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body, a whole body called an exoskeleton, a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients.And you can see an image produced by this consortium. This is a nonprofit consortium called the Walk Again Project that is putting together scientists from Europe, from here in the United States, and in Brazil together to work to actually get this new body built — a body that we believe, through the same plastic mechanisms that allow Aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life. This same mechanism, we hope, will allow these patients, not only to imagine again the movements that they want to make and translate them into movements of this new body, but for this body to be assimilated as the new body that the brain controls.So I was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen, that this was close to impossible. And I can only tell you that as a scientist, I grew up in southern Brazil in the mid-'60s watching a few crazy guys telling [us] that they would go to the Moon. And I was five years old, and I never understood why NASA didn't hire Captain Kirk and Spock to do the job; after all, they were very proficient — but just seeing that as a kid made me believe, as my grandmother used to tell me, that ""impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true.""So they told me that it's impossible to make someone walk. I think I'm going to follow my grandmother's advice.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/miguel_nicolelis_a_monkey_that_controls_a_robot_with_its_thoughts_no_really
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"The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to at least before Adam Smith. And that is, why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior?Now, many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question, and as a field we've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this. What I'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that I've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save. Let me tell you a little bit about savings rates, a little bit about language, and then I'll draw that connection.Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD, or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD countries, by and large, you should think about these as the richest, most industrialized countries in the world. And by joining the OECD, they were affirming a common commitment to democracy, open markets and free trade. Despite all of these similarities, we see huge differences in savings behavior.So all the way over on the left of this graph, what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year, and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year. Holding down the right flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is Greece. And what you can see is that over the last 25 years, Greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their GDP. It should be noted, of course, that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line.Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates, how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences? Let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ. Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now. And then I'll draw the connection between these two behaviors.Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm Chinese. I grew up in the Midwest of the United States. And something I realized quite early on was that the Chinese language forced me to speak about and — in fact, more fundamentally than that — ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways.Now, how might that be? Let me give you an example. Suppose I were talking with you and I was introducing you to my uncle. You understood exactly what I just said in English. If we were speaking Mandarin Chinese with each other, though, I wouldn't have that luxury. I wouldn't have been able to convey so little information. What my language would have forced me to do, instead of just telling you, ""This is my uncle,"" is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information. My language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother's side or my father's side, whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth, and if this man was my father's brother, whether he was older than or younger than my father. All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn't let me ignore it. And in fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.Now, that fascinated me endlessly as a child, but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time. So for example, if I'm speaking in English, I have to speak grammatically differently if I'm talking about past rain, ""It rained yesterday,"" current rain, ""It is raining now,"" or future rain, ""It will rain tomorrow."" Notice that English requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events. Why? Because I have to consider that and I have to modify what I'm saying to say, ""It will rain,"" or ""It's going to rain."" It's simply not permissible in English to say, ""It rain tomorrow.""In contrast to that, that's almost exactly what you would say in Chinese. A Chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an English speaker's ears. They can say, ""Yesterday it rain,"" ""Now it rain,"" ""Tomorrow it rain."" In some deep sense, Chinese doesn't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly.Is this difference in languages only between very, very distantly related languages, like English and Chinese? Actually, no. So many of you know, in this room, that English is a Germanic language. What you may not have realized is that English is actually an outlier. It is the only Germanic language that requires this. For example, most other Germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying, ""Morgen regnet es,"" quite literally to an English ear, ""It rain tomorrow.""This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing hypothesis. Could how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think about time, affect your propensity to behave across time? You speak English, a futured language. And what that means is that every time you discuss the future, or any kind of a future event, grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different. Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak. If that's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that's going to make it harder to save. If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. If that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically, that's going to make it easier to save.Now this is a fanciful theory. I'm a professor, I get paid to have fanciful theories. But how would you actually go about testing such a theory? Well, what I did with that was to access the linguistics literature. And interestingly enough, there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world. This is a pocket of futureless language speakers in Northern Europe. Interestingly enough, when you start to crank the data, these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be, by and large, some of the world's best savers.Just to give you a hint of that, let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about. What you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the OECD that speak futured languages. What is the average difference here? Five percentage points of your GDP saved per year. Over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation.Now while these findings are suggestive, countries can be different in so many different ways that it's very, very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences. What I'm going to show you, though, is something that I've been engaging in for a year, which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists, and I'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences, hoping to get this relationship to break. And just in summary, no matter how far I push this, I can't get it to break. Let me show you how far you can do that.One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the world. So for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in Europe. From this dataset you actually learn that retired European families are extremely patient with survey takers. (Laughter) So imagine that you're a retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door. ""Excuse me, would you mind if I peruse your stock portfolio? Do you happen to know how much your house is worth? Do you mind telling me? Would you happen to have a hallway that's more than 10 meters long? If you do, would you mind if I timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway? Would you mind squeezing as hard as you can, in your dominant hand, this device so I can measure your grip strength? How about blowing into this tube so I can measure your lung capacity?"" The survey takes over a day. (Laughter) Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa, for example, which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in, for example, rural Nigeria. Combine that with a world value survey, which measures the political opinions and, fortunately for me, the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world.Take all of that data, combine it, and this map is what you get. What you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages. And what I'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that I can measure, and then I'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels.What are the characteristics we can control for? Well I'm going to match families on country of birth and residence, the demographics — what sex, their age — their income level within their own country, their educational achievement, a lot about their family structure. It turns out there are six different ways to be married in Europe. And most granularly, I break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world — so an extreme level of granularity. There are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself.Now effectively everything I'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families. It's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions, but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French; or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria, one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo.Now even after all of this granular level of control, do futureless language speakers seem to save more? Yes, futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. Does this have cumulative effects? Yes, by the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings.Can we push this data even further? Yes, because I just told you, we actually collect a lot of health data as economists. Now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings? Well, think about smoking, for example. Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings. If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. It's current pleasure in exchange for future pain. What we should expect then is the opposite effect. And that's exactly what we find. Futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given point in time compared to identical families, and they're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire, and they're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter. I could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find. It's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect isn't present.My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak. Ultimately, the goal, once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making, we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affect_your_ability_to_save_money
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"Okay, this morning I'm speaking on the question of corruption. And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself — or, in the case of our context, your friends, your family or your financiers. Okay? Friends, family and financiers. But we need to understand what we understand about corruption, and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it, and we have to admit that. We have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it.The first thing is that the big myth, number one, is that in fact it's not really a crime. When we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country, crime in Belmont or crime in Diego or crime in Marabella, nobody's speaking about corruption. That's the honest truth. When the Commissioner of Police comes on TV to talk about crime, he isn't speaking about corruption. And we know for sure when the Minister of National Security is speaking about crime, he's not talking about corruption either. The point I'm making is that it is a crime. It is an economic crime, because we're involving the looting of taxpayers' money. Public and private corruption is a reality. As somebody who comes from the private sector, I can tell you there's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government. The same bribes and backhanders and things that take place under the table, it all takes place in the private sector. Today, I'm focusing on public sector corruption, which the private sector also participates in.The second important myth to understand — because we have to destroy these myths, dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them — the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem — if it is a problem, it's only a small problem, that in fact it's only a little 10 or 15 percent, it's been going on forever, it probably will continue forever, and there's no point passing any laws, because there's little we can do about it. And I want to demonstrate that that, too, is a dangerous myth, very dangerous. It's a piece of public mischief.And I want to speak a little bit, take us back about 30 years. We're coming out today from Trinidad and Tobago, a resource-rich, small Caribbean country, and in the early 1970s we had a massive increase in the country's wealth, and that increase was caused by the increase in world oil prices. We call them petrodollars. The treasury was bursting with money. And it's ironic, because we're standing today in the Central Bank. You see, history's rich in irony. We're standing today in the Central Bank, and the Central Bank is responsible for a lot of the things I'm going to be speaking about. Okay? We're talking about irresponsibility in public office. We're speaking about the fact that across the terrace, the next tower is the Ministry of Finance, and there's a lot of connection with us today, so we're speaking within your temple today. Okay?(Applause)The first thing I want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago, we embarked, the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country. And some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world, the United States and Britain and France and so on and so on. As I said, even this building we're standing in — that's one of the ironies — this building was part of that series of complexes, what they called the Twin Towers. It became so outrageous, the whole situation, that in fact a commission of inquiry was appointed, and it reported in 1982, 30 years ago it reported — the Ballah Report — 30 years ago, and immediately the government-to-government arrangements were stopped. The then-Prime Minister went to Parliament to give a budget speech, and he said some things that I'll never forget. They went right in here. I was a young man at the time. It went right into my heart. And he said that, in fact — Let me see if this thing works. Are we getting a, yeah?— That's what he told us. He told us that, in fact, two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent, the taxpayers' money, was wasted or stolen. So the 10 or 15 percent is pure mischief. As we say, it's a nancy-story. Forget it. That's for little children. We are big people, and we're trying to deal with what's happening in our society. Okay? This is the size of the problem. Okay? Two thirds of the money stolen or wasted. That was 30 years ago. 1982 was Ballah.So what has changed? I don't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience, but I have to. Four months ago, we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country. We call it the Section 34 fiasco, the Section 34 fiasco, a suspicious piece of law, and I'm going to say it like it is, a suspicious piece of law was passed at a suspicious time to free some suspects. (Laughter) And it was called, those people are called the Piarco Airport accused. I'm going to have my own lexicon speaking here today. They are the Piarco Airport accused. It was a constitutional outrage of the first order, and I have labeled it the Plot to Pervert Parliament. Our highest institution in our country was perverted. We are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature. Do you get how serious this problem is? There was massive protest. A lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms. Most importantly, the American embassy complained, so Parliament was swiftly reconvened, and the law was reversed, it was repealed. That's the word lawyers use. It was repealed. But the point is that Parliament was outwitted in the whole course of events, because what really happened is that, because of the suspicious passage of that law, the law was actually passed into effect on the weekend we celebrated our 50th anniversary of independence, our jubilee of independence. So that is the kind of outrage of the thing. It was kind of a nasty way to get maturation, but we got it, because we all understood it, and for the first time that I could remember, there were mass protests against this corruption. And that gave me a lot of hope. Okay? Those of us who are, sometimes you feel like you're a little bit on your own doing some of this work. That passage of the law and the repeal of the law fortified the case of the Piarco Airport accused. So it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place.But what were they accused of? What was it that they were accused of? I'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there. What were they accused of? We were trying to build, or reconstruct largely, an airport that had grown outdated. The entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars, Trinidad and Tobago dollars, and in fact, we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity, corrupt activity took place. And to get an idea of what it consisted of, and to put it in context in relationship to this whole second myth about it being no big thing, we can look at this second slide here. And what we have here — I am not saying so, this is the Director of Public Prosecutions in a written statement. He said so. And he's telling us that for the $1.6 billion cost of the project, one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts. One billion dollars of our taxpayers' money has been located in offshore bank accounts.Being the kind of suspicious person I am, I am outraged at that, and I'm going to pause here, I'm going to pause now and again and bring in different things. I'm going to pause here and bring in something I saw in November last year at Wall Street. I was at Zuccotti Park. It was autumn. It was cool. It was damp. It was getting dark. And I was walking around with the protesters looking at the One Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street movement walking around. And there was a lady with a sign, a very simple sign, a kind of battered-looking blonde lady, and the sign was made out of Bristol board, as we say in these parts, and it was made with a marker. And what it said on that sign hit me right in the center. It said, ""If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention."" If you're not outraged by all of this, you haven't been paying attention. So listen up, because we're getting into even deeper waters.My brain started thinking. Well, what if — because I'm suspicious like that. I read a lot of spy novels and stuff. What if — (Laughter) But to make it in these wrongs, you have to read a lot of spy novels and follow some of that stuff, right? (Laughter) But what if this wasn't the first time? What if this is just the first time that the so-and-sos had been caught? What if it had happened before? How would I find out? Now, the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption, okay? And I have the privilege at this time to lead the Joint Consultative Council, which is a not-for-profit. We're at jcc.org.tt, and we have the — we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted. So those of you interested in finding out more about it, or joining us or signing up on any of our petitions, please get involved.But I'm going to segue to another thing that relates, because one of my private campaigns I've been conducting for over three and a half years is for transparency and accountability around the bailout of CL Financial. CL Financial is the Caribbean's largest ever conglomerate, okay? And without getting into all of the details, it is said to have collapsed — I'm using my words very carefully — it's said to have collapsed in January of '09, which is just coming up to nearly four years. In an unprecedented fit of generosity — and you have to be very suspicious about these people — in an unprecedented — and I'm using that word carefully — unprecedented fit of generosity, the government of the day signed, made a written commitment, to repay all of the creditors. And I can tell you without fear of contradiction that hasn't happened anywhere else on the planet. Let's understand, because we lack context. People are telling us it's just like Wall Street. It's not just like Wall Street. Trinidad and Tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something. It's not just like anywhere. (Applause) It's not just like anywhere. It's not just like anywhere. Here is here, and out there is out there. Okay? I'm serious now. Listen. They've had bailouts on Wall Street. They've had bailouts in London. They've had bailouts in Europe. In Africa, they've had bailouts. In Nigeria, six of the major commercial banks collapsed at the same time as ours, eh? It's interesting to parallel how the Nigerian experience has — how they've treated it, and they've treated it very well compared to us. Nowhere on the planet have all the creditors been bailed out in excess of what their statutory entitlements were. Only here. So what was the reason for the generosity? Is our government that generous? And maybe they are. Let's look at it. Let's look into it.So I started digging and writing and so and so on, and that work can be found, my personal work can be found at AfraRaymond.com, which is my name. It's a not-for-profit blog that I run. Not as popular as some of the other people, but there you go. (Laughter) But the point is that the bitter experience of Section 34, that plot to pervert Parliament, that bitter experience that took place in August, when we were supposed to be celebrating our independence, going into September, forced me to check myself and recalculate my bearings, and to go back into some of the work, some of the stuff I'd written and some of the exchanges I'd had with the officials to see what was really what. As we say in Trinidad and Tobago, who is who and what is what? Okay? We want to try to recalculate.And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance is the next tower over. This is the other context. The Ministry of Finance, we are told, is subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. I'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that's really so. The Central Bank in which we stand this morning is immune from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. So in fact, you can't ask them anything, and they don't have to answer anything. That is the law since 1999.So I plunged into this struggle, and I asked four questions. And I'll relate the questions to you in the short form with the reply, so you could understand, as I said, where we are. Here is not like anywhere else.Question number one: I asked to see the accounts of CL Financial, and if you can't show me the accounts — the Minister of Finance is making statements, passing new laws and giving speeches and so on. What are the figures he's relying on? It's like that joke: I want whatever he's drinking. And they wrote back and said to me, well what do you really mean? So they hit my question with a question.Second point: I want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid? Let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this. That is about three and a half billion U.S. dollars coming out of a small — we used to be resource-rich — Caribbean country. Okay? And I asked the question, who was getting that three and a half billion dollars?And I want to pause again to bring up context, because context helps us to get clarity understanding this thing. There's a particular individual who is in the government now. The name of the person doesn't matter. And that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his political cause. Okay? His name isn't important. I wouldn't dignify it. I'm on a point. The point is, that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his cause. And the most famous case was what we came to call the Secret Scholarship Scandal, where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships, and the scholarships hadn't been advertised, and so and so on and so on. And he was able to get the court, using that act of Parliament, Freedom of Information Act, to release the information, and I thought that was excellent. Fantastic. But you see, the question is this: If it's right and proper for us to use the Freedom of Information Act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money, it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars. You see? But the Ministry of Finance, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, wrote me and said to me, that information is exempt too. You see? This is what we're dealing with, okay?The third thing I will tell you is that I also asked for the directors of CL Financial, whether in fact they were making filings under our Integrity in Public Life Act. We have an Integrity in Public Life Act as part of our framework supposed to safeguard the nation's interest. And public officials are supposed to file to say what it is they have in terms of assets and liabilities. And of course I've since discovered that they're not filing, and in fact the Minister of Finance has not even asked them to file. So here we have it. We have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded. I've asked the question in the legal and required fashion. It's been ignored.The sort of thing that motivated us around Section 34, we need to continue to work on that. We can't forget it. I have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country's history. It's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation.And this is my reality check. Where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it's without transparency, it will always be equal to corruption, whether you're in Russia or Nigeria or Alaska, it will always be equal to corruption, and that is what we are dealing with here.I'm going to continue the work to press on, to get some resolution of those matters at the Ministry of Finance. If it is I have to go to court personally, I will do that. We will continue to press on. We will continue to work within JCC.But I want to step back from the Trinidad and Tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example. We had the journalist [Heather] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption, and she introduced me to this website, Alaveteli.com. And Alaveteli.com is a way for us to have an open database for Freedom of Information applications, and speak with each other. I could see what you're applying for. You could see what I applied for and what replies I got. We can work on it together. We need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point. We need to increase the consciousness.The final thing I want to say is in relation to this one, which is a lovely website from India called IPaidABribe.com. They have international branches, and it's important for us to tune into this one. IPaidABribe.com is really important, a good one to log on to and see.I'm going to pause there. I'm going to ask you for your courage. Discard the first myth; it is a crime. Discard the second myth; it is a big thing. It's a huge problem. It's an economic crime. And let us continue working together to betterment in this situation, stability and sustainability in our society. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/afra_raymond_three_myths_about_corruption
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"Radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education. We have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity.But I want to tell you the story of PISA, OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and it's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat as an affair of domestic policy.Look at how the world looked in the 1960s, in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school. You can see the United States ahead of everyone else, and much of the economic success of the United States draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education. But in the 1970s, some countries caught up. In the 1980s, the global expansion of the talent pool continued. And the world didn't stop in the 1990s. So in the '60s, the U.S. was first. In the '90s, it was 13th, and not because standards had fallen, but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere.Korea shows you what's possible in education. Two generations ago, Korea had the standard of living of Afghanistan today, and was one of the lowest education performers. Today, every young Korean finishes high school.So this tells us that, in a global economy, it is no longer national improvement that's the benchmark for success, but the best performing education systems internationally. The trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do. Look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need. And that tells you that better degrees don't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives.So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly. And we took a very special angle to this. We were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school, but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations. Now, some people have criticized us for this. They say, you know, such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people, because we test students with problems they haven't seen before. But if you take that logic, you know, you should consider life unfair, because the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school, but whether we are prepared for change, whether we are prepared for jobs that haven't been created, to use technologies that haven't been invented, to solve problems we just can't anticipate today.And once hotly contested, our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard. In our latest assessment in 2009, we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy. This chart shows you the performance of countries. In red, sort of below OECD average. Yellow is so-so, and in green are the countries doing really well. You can see Shanghai, Korea, Singapore in Asia; Finland in Europe; Canada in North America doing really well. You can also see that there is a gap of almost three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 15-year-olds in Chile, and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance. There's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today's economy.But I want to introduce a second important dimension into this picture. Educators like to talk about equity. With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances. And we see that in some countries, the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very, very strong. Opportunities are unequally distributed. A lot of potential of young children is wasted. We see in other countries that it matters much less into which social context you're born. We all want to be there, in the upper right quadrant, where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed. Nobody, and no country, can afford to be there, where performance is poor and there are large social disparities. And then we can debate, you know, is it better to be there, where performance is strong at the price of large disparities? Or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity? But actually, if you look at how countries come out on this picture, you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity. In fact, one of the most important lessons from this comparison is that you don't have to compromise equity to achieve excellence. These countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all, a very important lesson. And that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people. And ever since those results came out, policymakers, educators, researchers from around the world have tried to figure out what's behind the success of those systems.But let's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started PISA, and I'm giving them a colored bubble now. And I'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students. If money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes, you would find all the large bubbles at the top, no? But that's not what you see. Spending per student only explains about, well, less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries, and Luxembourg, for example, the most expensive system, doesn't do particularly well. What you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results. You also see — and I think that's one of the most encouraging findings — that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries, and poor and badly-educated ones, a very, very important lesson.Let's look at this in greater detail. The red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country's wealth. One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession. And Korea also invests into long school days, which drives up costs further. Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop. They invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things. All that costs money. How can Korea afford all of this? The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes. This is the blue bar which is driving costs down. You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg, and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea, so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does. But, you know, parents and teachers and policymakers in Luxembourg all like small classes. You know, it's very pleasant to walk into a small class. So they have invested all their money into there, and the blue bar, class size, is driving costs up. But even Luxembourg can spend its money only once, and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well. Students don't have long hours of learning. And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching. So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education.Let's go back to the year 2000. Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented. This is how the world looked then in terms of PISA performance. The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no? We spent a lot less on education, about 35 percent less on education. So you ask yourself, if education has become so much more expensive, has it become so much better? And the bitter truth really is that, you know, not in many countries. But there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements. Germany, my own country, in the year 2000, featured in the lower quadrant, below average performance, large social disparities. And remember, Germany, we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees. Very disappointing results. People were stunned by the results. And for the very first time, the public debate in Germany was dominated for months by education, not tax, not other kinds of issues, but education was the center of the public debate. And then policymakers began to respond to this. The federal government dramatically raised its investment in education. A lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage. And what's really interesting is that this wasn't just about optimizing existing policies, but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying German education. For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten. PISA has transformed that debate, and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany. Or traditionally, the German education divides children at the age of 10, very young children, between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers, and that mainly along socioeconomic lines, and that paradigm is being challenged now too. A lot of change.And the good news is, nine years later, you can see improvements in quality and equity. People have taken up the challenge, done something about it.Or take Korea, at the other end of the spectrum. In the year 2000, Korea did already very well, but the Koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence. They took up the challenge, and Korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading. Well, if you only focus on your brightest students, you know what happens is disparities grow, and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction, but still, an impressive improvement.A major overhaul of Poland's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools, turn around many of the lowest-performing schools, and raise performance by over half a school year. And you can see other countries as well. Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system, raise quality and improve equity, and so did Hungary.So what you can actually see, there's been a lot of change. And even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like PISA is just an artifact of culture, of economic factors, of social issues, of homogeneity of societies, and so on, these people must now concede that education improvement is possible. You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture. It didn't change its economy. It didn't change the compositions of its population. It didn't fire its teachers. It changed its education policies and practice. Very impressive.And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity, high levels of performance, and raised outcomes? And, of course, the question is, can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere? Of course, you can't copy and paste education systems wholesale, but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share. Everybody agrees that education is important. Everybody says that. But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority against other priorities? How do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about schools and teachers? Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned from PISA is that, in high-performing education systems, the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those things really exist.But placing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success. You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages. You know, students are divided up, reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards. But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities. If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe, parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed, and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior. When we asked students what counts for success in mathematics, students in North America would typically tell us, you know, it's all about talent. If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else. Nine out of 10 Japanese students say that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort, and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them.In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. High performers on PISA embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices. They realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents, and they personalize learning opportunities.High-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum. Every student knows what matters. Every student knows what's required to be successful.And nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers. High-performing systems are very careful in how they recruit and select their teachers and how they train them. They watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling, and how they structure teacher pay. They provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice. And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. In bureaucratic school systems, teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching. High-performing systems are very clear what good performance is. They set very ambitious standards, but then they enable their teachers to figure out, what do I need to teach to my students today? The past was about delivered wisdom in education. Now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom. High performers have moved on from professional or from administrative forms of accountability and control — sort of, how do you check whether people do what they're supposed to do in education — to professional forms of work organization. They enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy. They provide them with the kind of development they need to develop stronger pedagogical practices. The goal of the past was standardization and compliance. High-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive. In the past, the policy focus was on outcomes, on provision. The high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher, the next school around their lives.And the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system. You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA, but what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools. Every school succeeds. This is where success is systemic. And how do they do that? They invest resources where they can make the most difference. They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom.Last but not least, those countries align policies across all areas of public policy. They make them coherent over sustained periods of time, and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented.Now, knowing what successful systems are doing doesn't yet tell us how to improve. That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of PISA are. That's where other forms of research need to kick in, and that's also why PISA doesn't venture into telling countries what they should be doing. But its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing. And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems.You know, some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards. You just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this. (Laughter) But PISA has shown what's possible in education. It has helped countries to see that improvement is possible. It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent. And it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's leaders. If we can help every child, every teacher, every school, every principal, every parent see what improvement is possible, that only the sky is the limit to education improvement, we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_schleicher_use_data_to_build_better_schools
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"I grew up watching Star Trek. I love Star Trek. Star Trek made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth.And what I do is I study insects. I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks.(Laughter)Now, David and Hidehiko and Ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans, and there are many similarities, and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies, the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this, for example — (Laughter) but in my talk, I don't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies, but rather the differences, and focus on the behaviors that I think fruit flies excel at doing.And so I want to show you a high-speed video sequence of a fly shot at 7,000 frames per second in infrared lighting, and to the right, off-screen, is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly. The fly is going to sense this predator. It is going to extend its legs out. It's going to sashay away to live to fly another day. Now I have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink, so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye, the fly has seen this looming predator, estimated its position, initiated a motor pattern to fly it away, beating its wings at 220 times a second as it does so. I think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly's brain can process information.Now, flight — what does it take to fly? Well, in order to fly, just as in a human aircraft, you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces, you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight, and you need a controller, and in the first human aircraft, the controller was basically the brain of Orville and Wilbur sitting in the cockpit.Now, how does this compare to a fly? Well, I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air. And you might have heard how engineers proved that bumblebees couldn't fly. Well, the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work. But they don't. And we tackle this problem by building giant, dynamically scaled model robot insects that would flap in giant pools of mineral oil where we could study the aerodynamic forces. And it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way, at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing, a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex, and it's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air. But the thing that's actually most — so, what's fascinating is not so much that the wing has some interesting morphology. What's clever is the way the fly flaps it, which of course ultimately is controlled by the nervous system, and this is what enables flies to perform these remarkable aerial maneuvers.Now, what about the engine? The engine of the fly is absolutely fascinating. They have two types of flight muscle: so-called power muscle, which is stretch-activated, which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction-by-contraction basis by the nervous system. It's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight, and it fills the middle portion of the fly, so when a fly hits your windshield, it's basically the power muscle that you're looking at. But attached to the base of the wing is a set of little, tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all, but they're very fast, and they're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke-by-stroke basis, and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory. And of course, the role of the nervous system is to control all this.So let's look at the controller. Now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem. They have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection. They have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet. They have another set of eyes on the top of their head. We have no idea what they do. They have sensors on their wing. Their wing is covered with sensors, including sensors that sense deformation of the wing. They can even taste with their wings. One of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the halteres. The halteres are actually gyroscopes. These devices beat back and forth about 200 hertz during flight, and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very, very fast corrective maneuvers. But all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain, and yes, indeed, flies have a brain, a brain of about 100,000 neurons.Now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function. And the basic punchline of my talk is, I'd like to turn that over on its head. I don't think they're a simple model of anything. And I think that flies are a great model. They're a great model for flies. (Laughter)And let's explore this notion of simplicity. So I think, unfortunately, a lot of neuroscientists, we're all somewhat narcissistic. When we think of brain, we of course imagine our own brain. But remember that this kind of brain, which is much, much smaller — instead of 100 billion neurons, it has 100,000 neurons — but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for 400 million years. And is it fair to say that it's simple? Well, it's simple in the sense that it has fewer neurons, but is that a fair metric? And I would propose it's not a fair metric. So let's sort of think about this. I think we have to compare — (Laughter) — we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do. So I propose we have a Trump number, and the Trump number is the ratio of this man's behavioral repertoire to the number of neurons in his brain. We'll calculate the Trump number for the fruit fly. Now, how many people here think the Trump number is higher for the fruit fly?(Applause)It's a very smart, smart audience. Yes, the inequality goes in this direction, or I would posit it.Now I realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly. But let's take another animal just as an example. Here's a mouse. A mouse has about 1,000 times as many neurons as a fly. I used to study mice. When I studied mice, I used to talk really slowly. And then something happened when I started to work on flies. (Laughter) And I think if you compare the natural history of flies and mice, it's really comparable. They have to forage for food. They have to engage in courtship. They have sex. They hide from predators. They do a lot of the similar things. But I would argue that flies do more. So for example, I'm going to show you a sequence, and I have to say, some of my funding comes from the military, so I'm showing this classified sequence and you cannot discuss it outside of this room. Okay? So I want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly. Watch it very closely, and you'll see why my six-year-old son now wants to be a neuroscientist. Wait for it. Pshhew. So at least you'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice, they're at least as clever as pigeons. (Laughter)Now, I want to get across that it's not just a matter of numbers but also the challenge for a fly to compute everything its brain has to compute with such tiny neurons. So this is a beautiful image of a visual interneuron from a mouse that came from Jeff Lichtman's lab, and you can see the wonderful images of brains that he showed in his talk. But up in the corner, in the right corner, you'll see, at the same scale, a visual interneuron from a fly. And I'll expand this up. And it's a beautifully complex neuron. It's just very, very tiny, and there's lots of biophysical challenges with trying to compute information with tiny, tiny neurons.How small can neurons get? Well, look at this interesting insect. It looks sort of like a fly. It has wings, it has eyes, it has antennae, its legs, complicated life history, it's a parasite, it has to fly around and find caterpillars to parasatize, but not only is its brain the size of a salt grain, which is comparable for a fruit fly, it is the size of a salt grain. So here's some other organisms at the similar scale. This animal is the size of a paramecium and an amoeba, and it has a brain of 7,000 neurons that's so small — you know these things called cell bodies you've been hearing about, where the nucleus of the neuron is? This animal gets rid of them because they take up too much space. So this is a session on frontiers in neuroscience. I would posit that one frontier in neuroscience is to figure out how the brain of that thing works.But let's think about this. How can you make a small number of neurons do a lot? And I think, from an engineering perspective, you think of multiplexing. You can take a hardware and have that hardware do different things at different times, or have different parts of the hardware doing different things. And these are the two concepts I'd like to explore. And they're not concepts that I've come up with, but concepts that have been proposed by others in the past.And one idea comes from lessons from chewing crabs. And I don't mean chewing the crabs. I grew up in Baltimore, and I chew crabs very, very well. But I'm talking about the crabs actually doing the chewing. Crab chewing is actually really fascinating. Crabs have this complicated structure under their carapace called the gastric mill that grinds their food in a variety of different ways. And here's an endoscopic movie of this structure. The amazing thing about this is that it's controlled by a really tiny set of neurons, about two dozen neurons that can produce a vast variety of different motor patterns, and the reason it can do this is that this little tiny ganglion in the crab is actually inundated by many, many neuromodulators. You heard about neuromodulators earlier. There are more neuromodulators that alter, that innervate this structure than actually neurons in the structure, and they're able to generate a complicated set of patterns. And this is the work by Eve Marder and her many colleagues who've been studying this fascinating system that show how a smaller cluster of neurons can do many, many, many things because of neuromodulation that can take place on a moment-by-moment basis. So this is basically multiplexing in time. Imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator. You select one set of cells to perform one sort of behavior, another neuromodulator, another set of cells, a different pattern, and you can imagine you could extrapolate to a very, very complicated system.Is there any evidence that flies do this? Well, for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display. So let me show you a little tiny sequence of this. Here's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator, and this is a game the flies love to play. You allow them to steer towards the little stripe, and they'll just steer towards that stripe forever. It's part of their visual guidance system. But very, very recently, it's been possible to modify these sorts of behavioral arenas for physiologies. So this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs, Gaby Maimon, who's now at Rockefeller, developed, and it's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly's brain. And this is what one of these experiments looks like. It was a sequence taken from another post-doc in the lab, Bettina Schnell. The green trace at the bottom is the membrane potential of a neuron in the fly's brain, and you'll see the fly start to fly, and the fly is actually controlling the rotation of that visual pattern itself by its own wing motion, and you can see this visual interneuron respond to the pattern of wing motion as the fly flies. So for the first time we've actually been able to record from neurons in the fly's brain while the fly is performing sophisticated behaviors such as flight. And one of the lessons we've been learning is that the physiology of cells that we've been studying for many years in quiescent flies is not the same as the physiology of those cells when the flies actually engage in active behaviors like flying and walking and so forth. And why is the physiology different? Well it turns out it's these neuromodulators, just like the neuromodulators in that little tiny ganglion in the crabs. So here's a picture of the octopamine system. Octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors. But this is just one of many neuromodulators that's in the fly's brain. So I really think that, as we learn more, it's going to turn out that the whole fly brain is just like a large version of this stomatogastric ganglion, and that's one of the reasons why it can do so much with so few neurons.Now, another idea, another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space, having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time. So here's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate, a human pyramidal neuron from Ramon y Cajal, and another cell to the right, a non-spiking interneuron, and this is the work of Alan Watson and Malcolm Burrows many years ago, and Malcolm Burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials. It's a non-spiking cell. So a typical cell, like the neurons in our brain, has a region called the dendrites that receives input, and that input sums together and will produce action potentials that run down the axon and then activate all the output regions of the neuron. But non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated, and there's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time. So there's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time.So these basic concepts of multitasking in time and multitasking in space, I think these are things that are true in our brains as well, but I think the insects are the true masters of this. So I hope you think of insects a little bit differently next time, and as I say up here, please think before you swat.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_dickinson_how_a_fly_flies
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"So here's the good news about families. The last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family. We have blended families, adopted families, we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house. But through it all, the family has grown stronger. Eight in 10 say the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in.Now, here's the bad news. Nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of family life. Every parent I know, myself included, feels like we're constantly playing defense. Just when our kids stop teething, they start having tantrums. Just when they stop needing our help taking a bath, they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying.And here's the worst news of all. Our children sense we're out of control. Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children, ""If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be?"" The parents predicted the kids would say, spending more time with them. They were wrong. The kids' number one wish? That their parents be less tired and less stressed.So how can we change this dynamic? Are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress, draw our family closer, and generally prepare our children to enter the world?I spent the last few years trying to answer that question, traveling around, meeting families, talking to scholars, experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to Warren Buffett's bankers to the Green Berets. I was trying to figure out, what do happy families do right and what can I learn from them to make my family happier?I want to tell you about one family that I met, and why I think they offer clues. At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho, where the six members of the Starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week: the family meeting. The Starrs are a regular American family with their share of regular American family problems. David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15. One of those kids tutors math on the far side of town. One has lacrosse on the near side of town. One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD.""We were living in complete chaos,"" Eleanor said.What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. Instead of turning to friends or relatives, they looked to David's workplace. They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley. In agile, workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time. So instead of having executives issue grand proclamations, the team in effect manages itself. You have constant feedback. You have daily update sessions. You have weekly reviews. You're constantly changing. David said when they brought this system into their home, the family meetings in particular increased communication, decreased stress, and made everybody happier to be part of the family team. When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters, it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born. And these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes.So what is Agile, and why can it help with something that seems so different, like families? In 1983, Jeff Sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in New England. He was very frustrated with how software got designed. Companies followed the waterfall method, right, in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below, and no one had ever consulted the programmers. Eighty-three percent of projects failed. They were too bloated or too out of date by the time they were done. Sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas didn't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time. He read 30 years of Harvard Business Review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called ""The New New Product Development Game."" It said that the pace of business was quickening — and by the way, this was in 1986 — and the most successful companies were flexible. It highlighted Toyota and Canon and likened their adaptable, tight-knit teams to rugby scrums. As Sutherland told me, we got to that article, and said, ""That's it."" In Sutherland's system, companies don't use large, massive projects that take two years. They do things in small chunks. Nothing takes longer than two weeks. So instead of saying, ""You guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network,"" you say, ""You go off and come up with one element, then bring it back. Let's talk about it. Let's adapt."" You succeed or fail quickly. Today, agile is used in a hundred countries, and it's sweeping into management suites. Inevitably, people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families. You had blogs pop up, and some manuals were written. Even the Sutherlands told me that they had an Agile Thanksgiving, where you had one group of people working on the food, one setting the table, and one greeting visitors at the door. Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever.So let's take one problem that families face, crazy mornings, and talk about how agile can help. A key plank is accountability, so teams use information radiators, these large boards in which everybody is accountable. So the Starrs, in adapting this to their home, created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores. So on the morning I visited, Eleanor came downstairs, poured herself a cup of coffee, sat in a reclining chair, and she sat there, kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs, checked the list, made themselves breakfast, checked the list again, put the dishes in the dishwasher, rechecked the list, fed the pets or whatever chores they had, checked the list once more, gathered their belongings, and made their way to the bus. It was one of the most astonishing family dynamics I have ever seen.And when I strenuously objected this would never work in our house,our kids needed way too much monitoring,Eleanor looked at me.""That's what I thought,"" she said. ""I told David, 'keep your work out of my kitchen.' But I was wrong.""So I turned to David: ""So why does it work?""He said, ""You can't underestimate the power of doing this."" And he made a checkmark. He said, ""In the workplace, adults love it. With kids, it's heaven.""The week we introduced a morning checklist into our house, it cut parental screaming in half. (Laughter) But the real change didn't come until we had these family meetings. So following the agile model, we ask three questions: What worked well in our family this week, what didn't work well, and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead? Everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on. And suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters' mouths. What worked well this week? Getting over our fear of riding bikes. Making our beds. What didn't work well? Our math sheets, or greeting visitors at the door. Like a lot of parents, our kids are something like Bermuda Triangles. Like, thoughts and ideas go in, but none ever comes out, I mean at least not that are revealing. This gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts. But the most surprising part was when we turned to, what are we going to work on in the week ahead? You know, the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves, and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids. Our kids love this process. So they would come up with all these ideas. You know, greet five visitors at the door this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed. Kick someone, lose desserts for a month. It turns out, by the way, our girls are little Stalins. We constantly have to kind of dial them back. Now look, naturally there's a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week, but the truth is it didn't really bother us. It felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that wouldn't light up their world for many years to come.Three years later — our girls are almost eight now — We're still holding these meetings. My wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom.So what did we learn? The word ""agile"" entered the lexicon in 2001 when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto. I think the time is right for an Agile Family Manifesto. I've taken some ideas from the Starrs and from many other families I met. I'm proposing three planks.Plank number one: Adapt all the time.When I became a parent, I figured, you know what? We'll set a few rules and we'll stick to them. That assumes, as parents, we can anticipate every problem that's going to arise. We can't. What's great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what's happening to you in real time. It's like they say in the Internet world: if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. But to me, ""adapt all the time"" means something deeper, too. We have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts. The truth is, their ideas are stale, whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas to make groups and teams work effectively.Let's just take a few examples. Let's take the biggest issue of all: family dinner. Everybody knows that having family dinner with your children is good for the kids. But for so many of us, it doesn't work in our lives. I met a celebrity chef in New Orleans who said, ""No problem, I'll just time-shift family dinner. I'm not home, can't make family dinner? We'll have family breakfast. We'll meet for a bedtime snack. We'll make Sunday meals more important."" And the truth is, recent research backs him up. It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive time in any family meal. The rest of it's taken up with ""take your elbows off the table"" and ""pass the ketchup."" You can take that 10 minutes and move it to any part of the day and have the same benefit. So time-shift family dinner. That's adaptability.An environmental psychologist told me, ""If you're sitting in a hard chair on a rigid surface, you'll be more rigid. If you're sitting on a cushioned chair, you'll be more open."" She told me, ""When you're discipling your children, sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface. The conversation will go better."" My wife and I actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations because I was sitting above in the power position. So move where you sit. That's adaptability.The point is there are all these new ideas out there. We've got to hook them up with parents. So plank number one: Adapt all the time. Be flexible, be open-minded, let the best ideas win.Plank number two: Empower your children. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. There's a reason that few systems have been more waterfall over time than the family. But the single biggest lesson we learned is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible. Enlist the children in their own upbringing. Just yesterday, we were having our family meeting, and we had voted to work on overreacting. So we said, ""Okay, give us a reward and give us a punishment. Okay?"" So one of my daughters threw out, you get five minutes of overreacting time all week. So we kind of liked that. But then her sister started working the system. She said, ""Do I get one five-minute overreaction or can I get 10 30-second overreactions?"" I loved that. Spend the time however you want. Now give us a punishment. Okay. If we get 15 minutes of overreaction time, that's the limit. Every minute above that, we have to do one pushup. So you see, this is working. Now look, this system isn't lax. There's plenty of parental authority going on. But we're giving them practice becoming independent, which of course is our ultimate goal. Just as I was leaving to come here tonight, one of my daughters started screaming. The other one said, ""Overreaction! Overreaction!"" and started counting, and within 10 seconds it had ended. To me that is a certified agile miracle. (Laughter) (Applause) And by the way, research backs this up too. Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives. The point is, we have to let our children succeed on their own terms, and yes, on occasion, fail on their own terms. I was talking to Warren Buffett's banker, and he was chiding me for not letting my children make mistakes with their allowance. And I said, ""But what if they drive into a ditch?"" He said, ""It's much better to drive into a ditch with a $6 allowance than a $60,000-a-year salary or a $6 million inheritance."" So the bottom line is, empower your children.Plank number three: Tell your story. Adaptability is fine, but we also need bedrock. Jim Collins, the author of ""Good To Great,"" told me that successful human organizations of any kind have two things in common: they preserve the core, they stimulate progress. So agile is great for stimulating progress, but I kept hearing time and again, you need to preserve the core. So how do you do that? Collins coached us on doing something that businesses do, which is define your mission and identify your core values. So he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement. We did the family equivalent of a corporate retreat. We had a pajama party. I made popcorn. Actually, I burned one, so I made two. My wife bought a flip chart. And we had this great conversation, like, what's important to us? What values do we most uphold? And we ended up with 10 statements. We are travelers, not tourists. We don't like dilemmas. We like solutions. Again, research shows that parents should spend less time worrying about what they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right, worry less about the bad times and build up the good times. This family mission statement is a great way to identify what it is that you do right.A few weeks later, we got a call from the school. One of our daughters had gotten into a spat. And suddenly we were worried, like, do we have a mean girl on our hands? And we didn't really know what to do, so we called her into my office. The family mission statement was on the wall, and my wife said, ""So, anything up there seem to apply?"" And she kind of looked down the list, and she said, ""Bring people together?"" Suddenly we had a way into the conversation.Another great way to tell your story is to tell your children where they came from. Researchers at Emory gave children a simple ""what do you know"" test. Do you know where your grandparents were born? Do you know where your parents went to high school? Do you know anybody in your family who had a difficult situation, an illness, and they overcame it? The children who scored highest on this ""do you know"" scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives. The ""do you know"" test was the single biggest predictor of emotional health and happiness. As the author of the study told me, children who have a sense of — they're part of a larger narrative have greater self-confidence. So my final plank is, tell your story. Spend time retelling the story of your family's positive moments and how you overcame the negative ones. If you give children this happy narrative, you give them the tools to make themselves happier.I was a teenager when I first read ""Anna Karenina"" and its famous opening sentence, ""All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."" When I first read that, I thought, ""That sentence is inane. Of course all happy families aren't alike."" But as I began working on this project, I began changing my mind. Recent scholarship has allowed us, for the first time, to identify the building blocks that successful families have. I've mentioned just three here today: Adapt all the time, empower the children, tell your story. Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right? The answer, I believe, is yes. When Leo Tolstoy was five years old, his brother Nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick, which he had hidden in a ravine on the family's estate in Russia. If the stick were ever found, all humankind would be happy. Tolstoy became consumed with that stick, but he never found it. In fact, he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden. He still lies there today, covered in a layer of green grass. That story perfectly captures for me the final lesson that I learned: Happiness is not something we find, it's something we make. Almost anybody who's looked at well-run organizations has come to pretty much the same conclusion. Greatness is not a matter of circumstance. It's a matter of choice. You don't need some grand plan. You don't need a waterfall. You just need to take small steps, accumulate small wins, keep reaching for that green stick. In the end, this may be the greatest lesson of all. What's the secret to a happy family? Try.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family
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(Mechanical noises)(Music) (Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/bruno_maisonnier_dance_tiny_robots
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"What is going to be the future of learning?I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage.I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. [""The British Empire""] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. But the Victorians actually did it. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It's still with us today. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it?[""Schools as we know them are obsolete""]So that's a pretty strong comment there. I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. I'm not saying they're broken. It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated. What are the kind of jobs that we have today? Well, the clerks are the computers. They're there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? Or should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, ""You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter — oh, surely she is extra-intelligent."" And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? (Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was.The children came running in. It was three feet off the ground, and they said, ""What is this?""And I said, ""Yeah, it's, I don't know."" (Laughter)They said, ""Why have you put it there?""I said, ""Just like that.""And they said, ""Can we touch it?""I said, ""If you wish to.""And I went away. About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, ""Well that's impossible, because — How is it possible? They don't know anything.""My colleagues said, ""No, it's a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse.""So I said, ""Yeah, that's possible.""So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it.When they saw me, they said, ""We want a faster processor and a better mouse.""(Laughter)So I said, ""How on Earth do you know all this?""And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, ""You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it."" (Laughter) That's the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word ""teach ourselves"" said so casually.Here's a short glimpse from those years. That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. On your right is an eight-year-old. To his left is his student. She's six. And he's teaching her how to browse. Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. [""Hole in the wall film - 1999""] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, ""There's a processor inside.""So I started publishing. I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. I'd seen it happen over and over and over again.But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, ""Keep talking into it until it types what you say."" (Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this.Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you.Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her. She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent.So then people said, well, how far will it go? Where does it stop? I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer? And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand.The children came rushing, said, ""What's all this?""So I said, ""It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English.""So they said, ""How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?""So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, ""I haven't the foggiest idea."" (Laughter) ""And anyway, I am going away."" (Laughter)So I left them for a couple of months. They'd got a zero. I gave them a test. I came back after two months and the children trooped in and said, ""We've understood nothing.""So I said, ""Well, what did I expect?"" So I said, ""Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you can't understand anything?""So they said, ""We haven't given up. We look at it every single day.""So I said, ""What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for?""So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English, she said, ""Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven't understood anything else.""(Laughter) (Applause)So I tested them. I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time. Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. Thirty percent is a fail. How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time.So I asked this girl, ""Can you help them?""So she says, ""Absolutely not. I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you.""I said, ""I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother.""So she says, ""What's that?""I said, ""Stand behind them. Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that.' You know what grannies do.""So she did that for two more months. The scores jumped to 50 percent. Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field.Here's Kallikuppam.(Children speaking) Neurons ... communication.I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate. At 12.So what are jobs going to be like? Well, we know what they're like today. What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today, children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand.What will it be tomorrow? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? Could it be — a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte — could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. But look at it this way. It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. What an achievement that is. But we have to integrate that into our own future.Encouragement seems to be the key. If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that I did, it was simply saying, ""Wow,"" saluting learning.There is evidence from neuroscience. The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, ""Perform."" Why did they create a system like that? Because it was needed. There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat. When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. If you didn't, you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. What happens to creativity in our age? We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure.I came back to England looking for British grandmothers. I put out notices in papers saying, if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free? I got 200 in the first two weeks. I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud. The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet. If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran. She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out. I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away. She does it with only one age-old gesture. ""Shhh."" Okay?Watch this.Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me.Children: You can't catch me.Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Grandmother: Well done! Very good.SM: So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at.But how will we know? How will we come to know? Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments. They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together. I've tried this in many, many schools.It's been tried all over the world, and teachers sort of stand back and say, ""It just happens by itself?""And I said, ""Yeah, it happens by itself.""""How did you know that?""I said, ""You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from.""Here's a SOLE in action.(Children talking)This one is in England. He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around.Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons — SM: Australia Girl: — giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons.SM: A decade ahead of her time.So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions. You already heard about that. You know what that means. There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, ""What are those twinkling lights?"" They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle. But that's not sexy enough. The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say, ""If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not?"" And if he says, ""Well, what? how?"" you say, ""There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle,"" and leave him alone. He'll figure it out.So here are a couple of images from SOLEs. I've tried incredible, incredible questions — ""When did the world begin? How will it end?"" — to nine-year-olds. This one is about what happens to the air we breathe. This is done by children without the help of any teacher. The teacher only raises the question, and then stands back and admires the answer.So what's my wish? My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we? So we need to design a future for learning. And I've got to — hang on, I've got to get this wording exactly right, because, you know, it's very important. My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. Help me build this school. It will be called the School in the Cloud. It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in. The way I want to do this is to build a facility where I can study this. It's a facility which is practically unmanned. There's only one granny who manages health and safety. The rest of it's from the cloud. The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud.But I want you for another purpose. You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs. It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it. If you would please, please do it across all five continents and send me the data, then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds, and create the future of learning. That's my wish.And just one last thing. I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas. At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin, I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there. And there was this little girl who was following me around.And I said to her, ""You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child. I don't know, what should I do?"" And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly.She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me, ""Get on with it.""(Laughter) (Applause)I think it was good advice. I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud
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"Well, I was introduced as the former Governor of Michigan, but actually I'm a scientist. All right, a political scientist, it doesn't really count, but my laboratory was the laboratory of democracy that is Michigan, and, like any good scientist, I was experimenting with policy about what would achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. But there were three problems, three enigmas that I could not solve, and I want to share with you those problems, but most importantly, I think I figured out a proposal for a solution.The first problem that not just Michigan, but every state, faces is, how do you create good jobs in America in a global economy?So let me share with you some empirical data from my lab. I was elected in 2002 and, at the end of my first year in office in 2003, I got a call from one of my staff members, who said, ""Gov, we have a big problem. We have a little tiny community called Greenville, Michigan, population 8,000, and they are about to lose their major employer, which is a refrigerator factory that's operated by Electrolux.""And I said, ""Well, how many people work at Electrolux?""And he said, ""3,000 of the 8,000 people in Greenville.""So it is a one-company town. And Electrolux was going to go to Mexico.So I said, ""Forget that. I'm the new Governor. We can fix this. We're going to go to Greenville with my whole cabinet and we will just make Electrolux an offer they can't refuse.""So I brought my whole cabinet, and we met with all of the pooh-bahs of little Greenville — the mayor, the city manager, the head of the community college — and we basically emptied our pockets and put all of our chips on the table, incentives, you name it, to convince Electrolux to stay, and as we made our pile of chips, we slid them across the table to the management of Electrolux. And in the pile were things like zero taxes for 20 years, or that we'd help to build a new factory for the company, we'd help to finance it. The UAW, who represented the workers, said they would offer unprecedented concessions, sacrifices to just keep those jobs in Greenville.So the management of Electrolux took our pile, our list of incentives, and they went outside the room for 17 minutes, and they came back in and they said, ""Wow, this is the most generous any community has ever been to try to keep jobs here. But there's nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $1.57 an hour in Juarez, Mexico. So we're leaving.""And they did. And when they did, it was like a nuclear bomb went off in little Greenville. In fact, they did implode the factory. That's a guy that is walking on his last day of work. And on the month that the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line, the employees of Electrolux in Greenville, Michigan, had a gathering for themselves that they called the last supper. It was in a big pavilion in Greenville, an indoor pavilion, and I went to it because I was so frustrated as Governor that I couldn't stop the outflow of these jobs, and I wanted to grieve with them, and as I went into the room— there's thousands of people there. It was a just big thing. People were eating boxed lunches on roundtop tables, and there was a sad band playing music, or a band playing sad music, probably both. (Laughter)And this guy comes up to me, and he's got tattoos and his ponytail and his baseball cap on, and he had his two daughters with him, and he said, ""Gov, these are my two daughters."" He said, ""I'm 48 years old, and I have worked at this factory for 30 years. I went from high school to factory. My father worked at this factory,"" he said. ""My grandfather worked at this factory. All I know is how to make refrigerators."" And he looked at his daughters, and he puts his hand on his chest, and he says, ""So, Gov, tell me, who is ever going to hire me? Who is ever going to hire me?"" And that was asked not just by that guy but by everyone in the pavilion, and frankly, by every worker at one of the 50,000 factories that closed in the first decade of this century. Enigma number one: How do you create jobs in America in a global economy?Number two, very quickly: How do you solve global climate change when we don't even have a national energy policy in this country and when gridlock in Congress seems to be the norm? In fact, there was a poll that was done recently and the pollster compared Congress's approval ratings to a number of other unpleasant things, and it was found, in fact, that Congress's approval rating is worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback the band, root canals and Donald Trump. (Laughter) But wait, the good news is it's at least better than meth labs and gonorrhea. (Laughter) We got a problem, folks.So it got me thinking, what is it? What in the laboratory that I see out there, the laboratories of democracy, what has happened? What policy prescriptions have happened that actually cause changes to occur and that have been accepted in a bipartisan way? So if I asked you, for example, what was the Obama Administration policy that caused massive changes across the country, what would you say? You might say Obamacare, except for those were not voluntary changes. As we know, only half the states have opted in. We might say the Recovery Act, but those didn't require policy changes. The thing that caused massive policy changes to occur was Race to the Top for education. Why? The government put a $4.5 billion pot and said to the governors across the country, compete for it. Forty-eight governors competed, convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum. Forty-eight states opted in, creating a national [education] policy from the bottom up.So I thought, well, why can't we do something like that and create a clean energy jobs race to the top? Because after all, if you look at the context, 1.6 trillion dollars has been invested in the past eight years from the private sector globally, and every dollar represents a job, and where are those jobs going? Well, they're going to places that have policy, like China. In fact, I was in China to see what they were doing, and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that I was with, and I was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the Chinese officials, and we were watching, and he says, ""So, Gov, when do you think the U.S. is going to get national energy policy?"" And I said, ""Oh my God — Congress, gridlock, who knows?""And this is what he did, he goes, he says, ""Take your time."" Because they see our passivity as their opportunity.So what if we decided to create a challenge to the governors of the country, and the price to entry into this competition used the same amount that the bipartisan group approved in Congress for the Race to the Top for education, 4.5 billion, which sounds like a lot, but actually it's less than one tenth of one percent of federal spending. It's a rounding error on the federal side. But price to entry into that competition would be, you could just, say, use the President's goal. He wants Congress to adopt a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2030, in other words, that you'd have to get 80 percent of your energy from clean sources by the year 2030. Why not ask all of the states to do that instead? And imagine what might happen, because every region has something to offer. You might take states like Iowa and Ohio — two very important political states, by the way — those two governors, and they would say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy. You might say the solar states, the sun belt, we're going to be the states that produce solar energy for the country, and maybe Jerry Brown says, ""Well, I'm going to create an industry cluster in California to be able to produce the solar panels so that we're not buying them from China but we're buying them from the U.S."" In fact, every region of the country could do this. You see, you've got solar and wind opportunity all across the nation. In fact, if you look just at the upper and northern states in the West, they could do geothermal, or you could look at Texas and say, we could lead the nation in the solutions to smart grid. In the middle eastern states which have access to forests and to agricultural waste, they might say, we're going to lead the nation in biofuels. In the upper northeast, we're going to lead the nation in energy efficiency solutions. Along the eastern seaboard, we're going to lead the nation in offshore wind. You might look at Michigan and say, we're going to lead the nation in producing the guts for the electric vehicle, like the lithium ion battery. Every region has something to offer, and if you created a competition, it respects the states and it respects federalism. It's opt-in. You might even get Texas and South Carolina, who didn't opt into the education Race to the Top, you might even get them to opt in. Why? Because Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons. We want to bring jobs. I'm just saying. And it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy.Now, any of you who are watching anything about politics lately might say, ""Okay, great idea, but really? Congress putting four and a half billion dollars on the table? They can't agree to anything."" So you could wait and go through Congress, although you should be very impatient. Or, you renegades, we could go around Congress. Go around Congress. What if we created a private sector challenge to the governors? What if several of the high-net worth companies and individuals who are here at TED decided that they would create, band together, just a couple of them, and create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top and see how the governors respond? What if it all started here at TED? What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs in America — (Applause) — and get national energy policy and we created a national energy strategy from the bottom up?Because, dear TEDsters, if you are impatient like I am, you know that our economic competitors, our other nations, are in the game and are eating us for lunch. And we can get in the game or not. We can be at the table or we can be on the table. And I don't know about you, but I prefer to dine.Thank you all so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_granholm_a_clean_energy_proposal_race_to_the_top
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"(Breathes in)(Breathes out)So, I didn't always make my living from music. For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job.(Laughter)I was a self-employed living statue called the Eight-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life.(Laughter)Hello.I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower — and some intense eye contact. And if they didn't take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing — as they walked away.(Laughter)So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. And my eyes would say — ""Thank you. I see you."" And their eyes would say — ""Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.""I would get harassed sometimes. People would yell at me from their cars. ""Get a job!"" (Laughing) And I'd be, like, ""This is my job."" But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. It was consistent.And meanwhile, I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band, the Dresden Dolls. This was me on piano, a genius drummer. I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it. So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests.And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere. So I would need a piano to practice on, and an hour later I would be at a fan's house. This is in London. People would bring home-cooked food to us all over the world backstage and feed us and eat with us. This is in Seattle. Fans who worked in museums and stores and any kind of public space would wave their hands if I would decide to do a last-minute, spontaneous, free gig. This is a library in Auckland. On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello. I once tweeted, ""Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot?"" And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death.And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing. In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option.(Laughter)My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras. And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds. And I lay there thinking, these people have so little. Is this fair? And in the morning, her mom taught us how to try to make tortillas and wanted to give me a Bible, and she took me aside and she said to me in her broken English, ""Your music has helped my daughter so much. Thank you for staying here. We're all so grateful."" And I thought, this is fair. This is this.A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone. I've always been with my band or my crew. Is this what stupid people do?(Laughter)Is this how stupid people die? And before I can change my mind, the door busts open. She's an artist. He's a financial blogger for Reuters, and they're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath, and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that.So I couchsurf a lot. I also crowdsurf a lot. I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing. You're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other. I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get some extra money, something that I did a lot. And as usual, the band was psyched, but there was this one guy in the band who told me he just couldn't bring himself to go out there. It felt too much like begging to stand there with the hat. And I recognized his fear of ""Is this fair?"" and ""Get a job.""And meanwhile, my band is becoming bigger and bigger. We sign with a major label. And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret. It's not for everybody. Well, maybe it's for you.(Laughter)We sign, and there's all this hype leading up to our next record. And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure.I was like, ""25,000, isn't that a lot?""They said, ""No, the sales are going down. It's a failure."" And they walk off.Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, ""I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend.""(Laughter)""But I read your blog, I know you hate your label. I just want you to have this money.""And this starts happening all the time. I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there. Thank you.And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding. And I fell into those thousands of connections that I'd made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. And the goal was 100,000 dollars. My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date.(Applause)And you can see how many people it is. It's about 25,000 people.And the media asked, ""Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. How did you make all these people pay for music?"" And the real answer is, I didn't make them. I asked them. And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you. It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists. They don't want to ask for things. But it's not easy. It's not easy to ask. And a lot of artists have a problem with this. Asking makes you vulnerable.And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website. And this hurt in a really familiar way. And people saying, ""You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help,"" really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, ""Get a job."" Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them.So this is slightly not safe for work. This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin. At the end of the night, I stripped and let everyone draw on me. Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers —(Laughter)I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people.(Laughter)This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much. Should I? Show me.For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community. Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough. So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price. They see it as an unpredictable risk, but the things I've done, the Kickstarter, the street, the doorbell, I don't see these things as risk. I see them as trust. Now, the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street, they're getting there. But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important — to ask without shame.My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box. So blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and we see each other. And I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other.I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ""How do we make people pay for music?"" What if we started asking, ""How do we let people pay for music?""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking
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"The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us. This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change.Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. But fossil fuels, carbon — coal and gas — are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change.Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. There's no other cause. And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert.But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying.I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters — that's an inch of rain — was falling. Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. The next day, the land looked like this. Where had that water gone? Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. Carbon goes back to the atmosphere.Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form.Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs.Well, I have news for you. We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery.When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. And it got worse, not better. Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. One good thing did come out of it. It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions.When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to ""unknown processes.""Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. We have never understood it. Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. You have changed the microclimate. Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? Why has it accelerated lately? We had no understanding of that.What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed.This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow.Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. What are we going to do? There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind.So let's do that. So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground. We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. All of that grass is now covering the soil as dung, urine and litter or mulch, as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain, to store carbon, and to break down methane. And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow.When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma. How were we to do it? We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world. Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science, and that had accelerated desertification, as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. Clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals, and humans, over thousands of years, had never been able to deal with nature's complexity. But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had. And I found there were planning techniques that I could take and adapt to our biological need, and from those I developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing, a planning process, and that does address all of nature's complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity.Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight — we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on — and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well.Let's look at some results. This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe. It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season. But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface. Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid. Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that. Our river is flowing and healthy and clean. It's fine. The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. But before we began, our land looked like that. This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc. This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound.(Applause)I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying.The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year.We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals.I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)Thank you, Chris.Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. I'm just going to ask you one quick question. When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? How do you start?Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that.CA: Well, I would love to — I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and — I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful.CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change
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"The Kraken, a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales, and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island. In assessing the merits of such tales, it's probably wise to keep in mind that old sailor's saw that the only difference between a fairytale and a sea story is a fairytale begins, ""Once upon a time,"" and a sea story begins, ""This ain't no shit."" (Laughter)Every fish that gets away grows with every telling of the tale. Nevertheless, there are giants in the ocean, and we now have video proof, as those of you that saw the Discovery Channel documentary are no doubt aware.I was one of the three scientists on this expedition that took place last summer off Japan. I'm the short one. The other two are Dr. Tsunemi Kubodera and Dr. Steve O'Shea.I owe my participation in this now-historic event to TED. In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish. I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away. Mike deGruy was also invited, and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean, and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he's been involved with for a very long time, which is the hunt for the giant squid. It was Mike that got me invited to the squid summit, a gathering of squid experts at the Discovery Channel that summer during Shark Week. (Laughter)I gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which I emphasized the importance of using quiet, unobtrusive platforms for exploration. This came out of hundreds of dives I have made, farting around in the dark using these platforms, and my impression that I saw more animals working from the submersible than I did with either of the remote-operated vehicles. But that could just be because the submersible has a wider field of view. But I also felt like I saw more animals working with the Tiburon than the Ventana, two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems.So my suspicion was that it might have something to do with the amount of noise they make. So I set up a hydrophone on the bottom of the ocean, and I had each of these fly by at the same speed and distance and recorded the sound they made. The Johnson Sea-Link — (whirring noise) — which you can probably just barely hear here, uses electric thrusters — very, very quiet. The Tiburon also uses electric powered thrusters. It's also pretty quiet, but a bit noisier. (Louder whirring noise) But most deep-diving ROVs these days use hydraulics and they sound like the Ventana. (Loud beeping noise) I think that's got to be scaring a lot of animals away.So for the deep sea squid hunt, I proposed using an optical lure attached to a camera platform with no thrusters, no motors, just a battery-powered camera, and the only illumination coming from red light that's invisible to most deep-sea animals that are adapted to see primarily blue. That's visible to our eye, but it's the equivalent of infrared in the deep sea. So this camera platform, which we called the Medusa, could just be thrown off the back of the ship, attached to a float at the surface with over 2,000 feet of line, it would just float around passively carried by the currents, and the only light visible to the animals in the deep would be the blue light of the optical lure, which we called the electronic jellyfish, or e-jelly, because it was designed to imitate the bioluminescent display of the common deep sea jellyfish Atolla.Now, this pinwheel of light that the Atolla produces is known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm and is a form of defense. The reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish, but it's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape. It's a scream for help, a last-ditch attempt for escape, and a common form of defense in the deep sea.The approach worked. Whereas all previous expeditions had failed to garner a single video glimpse of the giant, we managed six, and the first triggered wild excitement.Edith Widder (on video): Oh my God. Oh my God! Are you kidding me?Other scientists: Oh ho ho! That's just hanging there.EW: It was like it was teasing us, doing a kind of fan dance — now you see me, now you don't — and we had four such teasing appearances, and then on the fifth, it came in and totally wowed us.(Music) Narrator: (Speaking in Japanese)Scientists: Ooh. Bang! Oh my God! Whoa!(Applause)EW: The full monty.What really wowed me about that was the way it came in up over the e-jelly and then attacked the enormous thing next to it, which I think it mistook for the predator on the e-jelly.But even more incredible was the footage shot from the Triton submersible. What was not mentioned in the Discovery documentary was that the bait squid that Dr. Kubodera used, a one-meter long diamondback squid had a light attached to it, a squid jig of the type that longline fishermen use, and I think it was this light that brought the giant in.Now, what you're seeing is the intensified camera's view under red light, and that's all Dr. Kubodera could see when the giant comes in here. And then he got so excited, he turned on his flashlight because he wanted to see better, and the giant didn't run away, so he risked turning on the white lights on the submersible, bringing a creature of legend from the misty history into high-resolution video. It was absolutely breathtaking, and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended, it would have been as tall as a two-story house.How could something that big live in our ocean and yet remain unfilmed until now? We've only explored about five percent of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine. Yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we've spent on space exploration. We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth.We need — thank you. (Applause)Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth. So let's all go exploring, but let's do it in a way that doesn't scare the animals away, or, as Mike deGruy once said, ""If you want to get away from it all and see something you've never seen, or have an excellent chance of seeing something that no one's ever seen, get in a sub."" He should have been with us for this adventure. We miss him. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_how_we_found_the_giant_squid
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"I live in South Central. This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots.So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city. This is South Los Angeles. (Laughter) Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots.Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away.I got tired of seeing this happening. And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood? I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars. I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks. And I figured, this has to stop. So I figured that the problem is the solution. Food is the problem and food is the solution. Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides.So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house. It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway. It's 150 feet by 10 feet. Thing is, it's owned by the city. But you have to maintain it. So I'm like, ""Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it."" And this is how I decided to maintain it.So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables. What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free. And the garden, it was beautiful.And then somebody complained. The city came down on me, and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turning into a warrant. And I'm like, ""Come on, really? A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?"" (Laughter) And I was like, ""Cool. Bring it."" Because this time it wasn't coming up. So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success. We had a victory on our hands. My councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we're doing. I mean, come on, why wouldn't they? L.A. leads the United States in vacant lots that the city actually owns. They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. That's 20 Central Parks. That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants. Why in the hell would they not okay this? Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds. When one dollar's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars' worth of produce. It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food. Growing your own food is like printing your own money.(Applause)See, I have a legacy in South Central. I grew up there. I raised my sons there. And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality.See, I'm an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns, parkways. I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. You'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people.So what happened? I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. We are the soil. You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this. Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. Plus you get strawberries.(Laughter)I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10:30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed. So I'm like, man, it made me feel bad that they were there, and I told them, you know, you don't have to do this like this. This is on the street for a reason. It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, ""Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food?"" And I'm like, ""Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it. That's why it's on the street. That's the whole idea. I want them to take it, but at the same time, I want them to take back their health.""There's another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck. It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment.So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens. We've had, like, 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate, and it's all volunteers. If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. (Laughter) If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. (Applause) But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them.I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up — I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life. And when we do this, who knows? We might produce the next George Washington Carver. but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this.Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do. I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block. I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about no free shit, because free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it. (Laughter) (Applause) What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets.So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy. So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners. We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta. Get gangsta with your shovel, okay? And let that be your weapon of choice.(Applause)So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit — where you talk about doing some shit. If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit.Peace. Thank you.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la
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"There's a group of people in Kenya. People cross oceans to go see them. These people are tall. They jump high. They wear red. And they kill lions. You might be wondering, who are these people? These are the Maasais. And you know what's cool? I'm actually one of them.The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors. The girls are brought up to be mothers. When I was five years old, I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty. My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by. (Laughter) Cool, yeah? And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12. My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood. I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife.I went to school not because the Maasais' women or girls were going to school. It's because my mother was denied an education, and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living. Why did she say that? My father worked as a policeman in the city. He came home once a year. We didn't see him for sometimes even two years. And whenever he came home, it was a different case. My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat. She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us. But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars. Because my mother was a woman, she was not allowed to own any property, and by default, everything in my family anyway belongs to my father, so he had the right. And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult.When I went to school, I had a dream. I wanted to become a teacher. Teachers looked nice. They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes. I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it. (Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board — not hard work, that's what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. So I wanted to become a teacher.I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor. In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood. And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school. This was the crossroad. Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. So I talked — I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out. I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done. I told my father, ""I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school."" The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn't go through the ceremony. It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life. So he figured out. ""Well,"" he said, ""okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony.""I did. The ceremony happened. It's a whole week long of excitement. It's a ceremony. People are enjoying it. And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep. The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced. We walked out to the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. They were all in a circle. And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there. There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down. And I sat down, and I opened my legs. As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife. And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off.As you can imagine, I bled. I bled. After bleeding for a while, I fainted thereafter. It's something that so many girls — I'm lucky, I never died — but many die. It's practiced, it's no anesthesia, it's a rusty old knife, and it was difficult. I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don't do. Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse. We were taken care of. Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school. I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family.Well, while I was in high school, something happened. I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon. This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers — and I'm talking about white sneakers. There is something about clothes, I think, and shoes. They were sneakers, and this is in a village that doesn't even have paved roads. It was quite attractive.I told him, ""Well, I want to go to where you are,"" because this man looked very happy, and I admired that.And he told me, ""Well, what do you mean, you want to go? Don't you have a husband waiting for you?""And I told him, ""Don't worry about that part. Just tell me how to get there.""This gentleman, he helped me. While I was in high school also, my dad was sick. He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn't tell me what to do next. But the problem is, my father is not the only father I have. Everybody who is my dad's age, male in the community, is my father by default — my uncles, all of them — and they dictate what my future is.So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn't come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket. I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here. But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, ""What a lost opportunity. This should have been given to a boy. We can't do this.""So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition. There's a belief among our people that morning brings good news. So I had to come up with something to do with the morning, because there's good news in the morning. And in the village also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him. So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose. The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it's me.""My child, what are you doing here?""""Well, Dad, I need help. Can you support me to go to America?"" I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them.He said, ""Well, but I can't do it alone."" He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went — 16 more men — every single morning I went and visited them. They all came together. The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education.I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find? I found snow! I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria. I was in a land of plenty.I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things. I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation. I learned that it was against the law in Kenya. I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right. And as we speak right now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation. I learned that my mom had a right to own property. I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman. Those things made me angry. I wanted to do something. As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors' girls were getting married. They were getting mutilated, and here, after I graduated from here, I worked at the U.N., I went back to school to get my graduate work, the constant cry of these girls was in my face. I had to do something.As I went back, I started talking to the men, to the village, and mothers, and I said, ""I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you. What do you need?""As I spoke to the women, they told me, ""You know what we need? We really need a school for girls."" Because there had not been any school for girls. And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she's walking to school, the mother is blamed for that. If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she's punished. She's beaten. They said, ""We wanted to put our girls in a safe place.""As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: ""We want a school for boys.""And I said, ""Well, there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education. Why can't they build a school for boys, and I'll build a school for girls?"" That made sense. And they agreed. And I told them, I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment. And they did. They donated land where we built the girls' school. We have.I want you to meet one of the girls in that school. Angeline came to apply for the school, and she did not meet any criteria that we had. She's an orphan. Yes, we could have taken her for that. But she was older. She was 12 years old, and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade. Angeline had been moving from one place — because she's an orphan, she has no mother, she has no father — moving from one grandmother's house to another one, from aunties to aunties. She had no stability in her life. And I looked at her, I remember that day, and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline. And yes, she was older to be in fourth grade. We gave her the opportunity to come to the class. Five months later, that is Angeline. A transformation had begun in her life. Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference. She was not the top student when we took her. Now she's the best student, not just in our school, but in the entire division that we are in. That's Sharon. That's five years later. That's Evelyn. Five months later, that is the difference that we are making.As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening. As we speak right now, 125 girls will never be mutilated. One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they're 12 years old. One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams. This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise. As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we've started in our community.(Applause)I want to challenge you today. You are listening to me because you are here, very optimistic. You are somebody who is so passionate. You are somebody who wants to see a better world. You are somebody who wants to see that war ends, no poverty. You are somebody who wants to make a difference. You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better. I want to challenge you today that to be the first, because people will follow you. Be the first. People will follow you. Be bold. Stand up. Be fearless. Be confident. Move out, because as you change your world, as you change your community, as we believe that we are impacting one girl, one family, one village, one country at a time. We are making a difference, so if you change your world, you are going to change your community, you are going to change your country, and think about that. If you do that, and I do that, aren't we going to create a better future for our children, for your children, for our grandchildren? And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kakenya_ntaiya_a_girl_who_demanded_school
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"There's so many of you.(Laughter)When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, ""If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it."" Take it from me: Under the bed is not a good hiding spot. I know because I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself. But that's what we were told. ""Stand up for yourself."" And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are. We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn't do it, others did it for us. Geek. Fatty. Slut. Fag.And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" I always thought that was an unfair question. It presupposes that we can't be what we already are. We were kids.When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man. I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet.(Laughter)When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much.(Laughter)When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was nine, I saw the movie ""Jaws,"" and thought to myself, ""No, thank you.""(Laughter)And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me. When I was 11, I wanted to be left alone. When I was 12, I wanted to die. When I was 13, I wanted to kill a kid. When I was 14, I was asked to seriously consider a career path.I said, ""I'd like to be a writer.""And they said, ""Choose something realistic.""So I said, ""Professional wrestler.""And they said, ""Don't be stupid.""See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be.And I wasn't the only one. We were being told that we somehow must become what we are not, sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be. I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me.And I wondered, what made my dreams so easy to dismiss? Granted, my dreams are shy, because they're Canadian.(Laughter)My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic. They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too. Silly. Foolish. Impossible. But I kept dreaming. I was going to be a wrestler. I had it all figured out. I was going to be The Garbage Man.(Laughter)My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor. My saying was going to be, ""I'm taking out the trash!""(Laughter)(Applause)And then this guy, Duke ""The Dumpster"" Droese, stole my entire shtick.(Laughter)I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor.(Laughter)I thought to myself, ""What now? Where do I turn?""Poetry.(Laughter)Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me. One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself. From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully.When I was 19, I wrote, ""I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite.""Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence.When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases, not at all. I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise. And I remember this plan, born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me ""Yogi,"" then pointed at my tummy and said, ""Too many picnic baskets."" Turns out it's not that hard to trick someone, and one day before class, I said, ""Yeah, you can copy my homework,"" and I gave him all the wrong answers that I'd written down the night before. He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score, and couldn't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero. I knew I didn't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, ""Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker.""(Laughter)(Applause)This is who I am. This is how I stand up for myself.When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing. I thought they were both pork chops. My grandmother thought it was cute, and because they were my favorite, she let me keep doing it. Not really a big deal. One day, before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees, I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body. I didn't want to tell my grandmother because I was scared I'd get in trouble for playing somewhere I shouldn't have been. The gym teacher noticed the bruise, and I got sent to the principal's office. From there, I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home. I saw no reason to lie. As far as I was concerned, life was pretty good. I told her, whenever I'm sad, my grandmother gives me karate chops.(Laughter)This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises. News of this silly little story quickly spread through the school, and I earned my first nickname: Porkchop. To this day, I hate pork chops.I'm not the only kid who grew up this way, surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones, as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we'd be lonely forever, that we'd never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their toolshed. So broken heartstrings bled the blues, and we tried to empty ourselves so we'd feel nothing. Don't tell me that hurts less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize; it does.She was eight years old, our first day of grade three when she got called ugly. We both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs. But the school halls were a battleground. We found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day. We used to stay inside for recess, because outside was worse. Outside, we'd have to rehearse running away, or learn to stay still like statues, giving no clues that we were there. In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, ""Beware of dog.""To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. Kids used to say, ""She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn't quite get the job done."" And they'll never understand that she's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word ""Mom,"" because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she's only ever always been amazing.He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree, adopted, not because his parents opted for a different destiny. He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy, started therapy in eighth grade, had a personality made up of tests and pills, lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs, four-fifths suicidal, a tidal wave of antidepressants, and an adolescent being called ""Popper,"" one part because of the pills, 99 parts because of the cruelty. He tried to kill himself in grade 10 when a kid who could still go home to Mom and Dad had the audacity to tell him, ""Get over it."" As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first-aid kit.To this day, he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends, could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it's about to fall, and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration, he remains a conversation piece between people who can't understand sometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity.We weren't the only kids who grew up this way. To this day, kids are still being called names. The classics were ""Hey, stupid,"" ""Hey, spaz."" Seems like every school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year. And if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear, do they make a sound? Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat, when people say things like, ""Kids can be cruel."" Every school was a big top circus tent, and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were. We were freaks — lobster-claw boys and bearded ladies, oddities juggling depression and loneliness, playing solitaire, spin the bottle, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal, but at night, while the others slept, we kept walking the tightrope. It was practice, and yes, some of us fell.But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be, and if you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, ""They were wrong."" Because maybe you didn't belong to a group or a clique. Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything. Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell, but never told, because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it? You have to believe that they were wrong. They have to be wrong. Why else would we still be here?We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them. We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called. We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway, and if in some way we are, don't worry. We only got out to walk and get gas. We are graduating members from the class of We Made It, not the faded echoes of voices crying out, ""Names will never hurt me."" Of course they did.But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shane_koyczan_to_this_day_for_the_bullied_and_beautiful
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"I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. I happen to have triplets. They're little. They're five years old. Sometimes I tell people I have triplets. They say, ""Really? How many?""(Laughter)Here's a picture of the kids — that's Sage, and Annalisa and Rider. Now, I also happen to be gay. Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative, socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done.(Laughter)(Applause)The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. I want to talk about how the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love, and our profound yearning to change the world.But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world. A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing economies, and social business will take care of the rest. And I do believe that business will move the great mass of humanity forward. But it always leaves behind that 10 percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky. And social business needs markets, and there are some issues for which you just can't develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market.I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love. How do you monetize that? And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in. Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming. And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation.But it doesn't seem to be working. Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city? Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the U.S. population for 40 years?And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation.So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interestingly, we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you're considered a parasite yourself.(Applause)And we think of this as our system of ethics, but what we don't realize is that this system has a powerful side effect, which is: It gives a really stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world, to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector, marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice. Businessweek did a survey, looked at the compensation packages for MBAs 10 years out of business school. And the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars. Meanwhile, for the same year, the average salary for the CEO of a $5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S. was 232,000 dollars, and for a hunger charity, 84,000 dollars. Now, there's no way you're going to get a lot of people with $400,000 talent to make a $316,000 sacrifice every year to become the CEO of a hunger charity.Some people say, ""Well, that's just because those MBA types are greedy."" Not necessarily. They might be smart. It's cheaper for that person to donate 100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity; save 50,000 dollars on their taxes — so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game — now be called a philanthropist because they donated 100,000 dollars to charity; probably sit on the board of the hunger charity; indeed, probably supervise the poor SOB who decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity;(Laughter)and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influence and popular praise still ahead of them.The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing. So we tell the for-profit sector, ""Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value."" But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, ""Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, to air at four o'clock in the morning, I'm okay with that. But I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy."" As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy.In the 1990s, my company created the long-distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys, and the 60 mile-long breast cancer three-day walks, and over the course of nine years, we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate, and they raised a total of 581 million dollars.(Applause)They raised more money more quickly for these causes than any events in history, all based on the idea that people are weary of being asked to do the least they can possibly do. People are yearning to measure the full distance of their potential on behalf of the causes that they care about deeply. But they have to be asked. We got that many people to participate by buying full-page ads in The New York Times, in The Boston Globe, in prime time radio and TV advertising. Do you know how many people we would've gotten if we put up fliers in the laundromat?Charitable giving has remained stuck in the U.S., at two percent of GDP, ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s. That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector. And if you think about it, how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn't really allowed to market? And if we tell the consumer brands, ""You may advertise all the benefits of your product,"" but we tell charities, ""You cannot advertise all the good that you do,"" where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow?The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue. So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general. But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question. So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue; if you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow; and if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems.The fourth area is time. So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patience. They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line, of building market dominance. But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion.The last area is profit itself. So the for-profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas, but you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital.Well, you put those five things together — you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector; you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers; you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes; you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector; and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place — and you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every level. If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of nonprofits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144. In the same time, the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136. So we're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale, and our organizations can't generate any scale. All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King.So why do we think this way? Well, like most fanatical dogma in America, these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs. The Puritans came here for religious reasons, or so they said, but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money. They were pious people, but they were also really aggressive capitalists, and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies, compared to the other colonists. But at the same time, the Puritans were Calvinists, so they were taught literally to hate themselves. They were taught that self-interest was a raging sea that was a sure path to eternal damnation. This created a real problem for these people. Here they've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money, but making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell. What were they to do about this?Well, charity became their answer. It became this economic sanctuary, where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies — at five cents on the dollar. So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money? Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others, so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, ""That's counterproductive and that's unfair.""Now, this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question, which is, ""What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?"" There are a lot of problems with this question. I'm going to just focus on two. First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause. But it absolutely is, especially if it's being used for growth. Now, this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second, much larger problem, which is, it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow, in the interest of keeping overhead low.So we've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising, the more money there is available for the cause. Well, that's true if it's a depressing world in which this pie cannot be made any bigger. But if it's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger, then we have it precisely backwards, and we should be investing more money, not less, in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply.I'll give you two examples. We launched the AIDSRides with an initial investment of 50,000 dollars in risk capital. Within nine years, we had multiplied that 1,982 times, into 108 million dollars after all expenses, for AIDS services. We launched the breast cancer three-days with an initial investment of 350,000 dollars in risk capital. Within just five years, we had multiplied that 554 times, into 194 million dollars after all expenses, for breast cancer research. Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research? 2002 was our most successful year ever. We netted for breast cancer alone, that year alone, 71 million dollars after all expenses. And then we went out of business, suddenly and traumatically.Why? Well, the short story is, our sponsors split on us. They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience, and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future, other than this demonic label of ""overhead."" So on one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs ... because they were labeled ""overhead."" Our sponsor went and tried the events on their own. The overhead went up. Net income for breast cancer research went down by 84 percent, or 60 million dollars, in one year.This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we're missing the most important piece of information, which is: What is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it's tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer?Here's how all of this impacts the big picture. I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States. That's about 300 billion dollars a year. But only about 20 percent of that, or 60 billion dollars, goes to health and human services causes. The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals, and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems. But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP, up just one step to three percent of GDP, by investing in that growth, that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions, and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities, because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth, that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector. Now we're talking scale. Now we're talking the potential for real change. But it's never going to happen by forcing these organizations to lower their horizons to the demoralizing objective of keeping their overhead low.Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, ""We kept charity overhead low.""(Laughter)(Applause)We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things.So the next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams, how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is. Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved?If we can have that kind of generosity — a generosity of thought — then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change. And if that can be our generation's enduring legacy — that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone — well, I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be.Annalisa Smith-Pallotta: That would beSage Smith-Pallotta: a real socialRider Smith-Pallotta: innovation.Dan Pallotta: Thank you very much.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong
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"So raise your hand if you know someone in your immediate family or circle of friends who suffers from some form of mental illness. Yeah. I thought so. Not surprised.And raise your hand if you think that basic research on fruit flies has anything to do with understanding mental illness in humans. Yeah. I thought so. I'm also not surprised. I can see I've got my work cut out for me here.As we heard from Dr. Insel this morning, psychiatric disorders like autism, depression and schizophrenia take a terrible toll on human suffering. We know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body. Think about it: In 2013, the second decade of the millennium, if you're concerned about a cancer diagnosis and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans, biopsies and blood tests. In 2013, if you're concerned about a depression diagnosis, you go to your doctor, and what do you get? A questionnaire. Now, part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. We tend to view them — and the popular press aids and abets this view — as chemical imbalances in the brain, as if the brain were some kind of bag of chemical soup full of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup. But that can't be the answer, because these drugs actually don't work all that well. A lot of people won't take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will dribble into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good.Now, an emerging view that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning, is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect. When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem. Well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion. It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way. But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis.Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders. It's just that they don't bathe the brain like soup. Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain. So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act. Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences.Now to begin to overcome our ignorance of the role of brain chemistry in brain circuitry, it's helpful to work on what we biologists call ""model organisms,"" animals like fruit flies and laboratory mice, in which we can apply powerful genetic techniques to molecularly identify and pinpoint specific classes of neurons, as you heard about in Allan Jones's talk this morning. Moreover, once we can do that, we can actually activate specific neurons or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons. So if we inhibit a particular type of neuron, and we find that a behavior is blocked, we can conclude that those neurons are necessary for that behavior. On the other hand, if we activate a group of neurons and we find that that produces the behavior, we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior. So in this way, by doing this kind of test, we can draw cause and effect relationships between the activity of specific neurons in particular circuits and particular behaviors, something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do right now in humans.But can an organism like a fruit fly, which is — it's a great model organism because it's got a small brain, it's capable of complex and sophisticated behaviors, it breeds quickly, and it's cheap. But can an organism like this teach us anything about emotion-like states? Do these organisms even have emotion-like states, or are they just little digital robots?Charles Darwin believed that insects have emotion and express them in their behaviors, as he wrote in his 1872 monograph on the expression of the emotions in man and animals. And my eponymous colleague, Seymour Benzer, believed it as well. Seymour is the man that introduced the use of drosophila here at CalTech in the '60s as a model organism to study the connection between genes and behavior. Seymour recruited me to CalTech in the late 1980s. He was my Jedi and my rabbi while he was here, and Seymour taught me both to love flies and also to play with science.So how do we ask this question? It's one thing to believe that flies have emotion-like states, but how do we actually find out whether that's true or not? Now, in humans we often infer emotional states, as you'll hear later today, from facial expressions. However, it's a little difficult to do that in fruit flies. (Laughter) It's kind of like landing on Mars and looking out the window of your spaceship at all the little green men who are surrounding it and trying to figure out, ""How do I find out if they have emotions or not?"" What can we do? It's not so easy.Well, one of the ways that we can start is to try to come up with some general characteristics or properties of emotion-like states such as arousal, and see if we can identify any fly behaviors that might exhibit some of those properties. So three important ones that I can think of are persistence, gradations in intensity, and valence. Persistence means long-lasting. We all know that the stimulus that triggers an emotion causes that emotion to last long after the stimulus is gone. Gradations of intensity means what it sounds like. You can dial up the intensity or dial down the intensity of an emotion. If you're a little bit unhappy, the corners of your mouth turn down and you sniffle, and if you're very unhappy, tears pour down your face and you might sob. Valence means good or bad, positive or negative.So we decided to see if flies could be provoked into showing the kind of behavior that you see by the proverbial wasp at the picnic table, you know, the one that keeps coming back to your hamburger the more vigorously you try to swat it away, and it seems to keep getting irritated. So we built a device, which we call a puff-o-mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away. And what we found is that if we gave these flies in the puff-o-mat several puffs in a row, they became somewhat hyperactive and continued to run around for some time after the air puffs actually stopped and took a while to calm down. So we quantified this behavior using custom locomotor tracking software developed with my collaborator Pietro Perona, who's in the electrical engineering division here at CalTech. And what this quantification showed us is that, upon experiencing a train of these air puffs, the flies appear to enter a kind of state of hyperactivity which is persistent, long-lasting, and also appears to be graded. More puffs, or more intense puffs, make the state last for a longer period of time.So now we wanted to try to understand something about what controls the duration of this state. So we decided to use our puff-o-mat and our automated tracking software to screen through hundreds of lines of mutant fruit flies to see if we could find any that showed abnormal responses to the air puffs. And this is one of the great things about fruit flies. There are repositories where you can just pick up the phone and order hundreds of vials of flies of different mutants and screen them in your assay and then find out what gene is affected in the mutation. So doing the screen, we discovered one mutant that took much longer than normal to calm down after the air puffs, and when we examined the gene that was affected in this mutation, it turned out to encode a dopamine receptor. That's right — flies, like people, have dopamine, and it acts on their brains and on their synapses through the same dopamine receptor molecules that you and I have. Dopamine plays a number of important functions in the brain, including in attention, arousal, reward, and disorders of the dopamine system have been linked to a number of mental disorders including drug abuse, Parkinson's disease, and ADHD.Now, in genetics, it's a little counterintuitive. We tend to infer the normal function of something by what doesn't happen when we take it away, by the opposite of what we see when we take it away. So when we take away the dopamine receptor and the flies take longer to calm down, from that we infer that the normal function of this receptor and dopamine is to cause the flies to calm down faster after the puff. And that's a bit reminiscent of ADHD, which has been linked to disorders of the dopamine system in humans. Indeed, if we increase the levels of dopamine in normal flies by feeding them cocaine after getting the appropriate DEA license — oh my God — (Laughter) — we find indeed that these cocaine-fed flies calm down faster than normal flies do, and that's also reminiscent of ADHD, which is often treated with drugs like Ritalin that act similarly to cocaine. So slowly I began to realize that what started out as a rather playful attempt to try to annoy fruit flies might actually have some relevance to a human psychiatric disorder.Now, how far does this analogy go? As many of you know, individuals afflicted with ADHD also have learning disabilities. Is that true of our dopamine receptor mutant flies? Remarkably, the answer is yes. As Seymour showed back in the 1970s, flies, like songbirds, as you just heard, are capable of learning. You can train a fly to avoid an odor, shown here in blue, if you pair that odor with a shock. Then when you give those trained flies the chance to choose between a tube with the shock-paired odor and another odor, it avoids the tube containing the blue odor that was paired with shock. Well, if you do this test on dopamine receptor mutant flies, they don't learn. Their learning score is zero. They flunk out of CalTech.So that means that these flies have two abnormalities, or phenotypes, as we geneticists call them, that one finds in ADHD: hyperactivity and learning disability. Now what's the causal relationship, if anything, between these phenotypes? In ADHD, it's often assumed that the hyperactivity causes the learning disability. The kids can't sit still long enough to focus, so they don't learn. But it could equally be the case that it's the learning disabilities that cause the hyperactivity. Because the kids can't learn, they look for other things to distract their attention. And a final possibility is that there's no relationship at all between learning disabilities and hyperactivity, but that they are caused by a common underlying mechanism in ADHD.Now people have been wondering about this for a long time in humans, but in flies we can actually test this. And the way that we do this is to delve deeply into the mind of the fly and begin to untangle its circuitry using genetics. We take our dopamine receptor mutant flies and we genetically restore, or cure, the dopamine receptor by putting a good copy of the dopamine receptor gene back into the fly brain. But in each fly, we put it back only into certain neurons and not in others, and then we test each of these flies for their ability to learn and for hyperactivity.Remarkably, we find we can completely dissociate these two abnormalities. If we put a good copy of the dopamine receptor back in this elliptical structure called the central complex, the flies are no longer hyperactive, but they still can't learn. On the other hand, if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body, the learning deficit is rescued, the flies learn well, but they're still hyperactive. What that tells us is that dopamine is not bathing the brain of these flies like soup. Rather, it's acting to control two different functions on two different circuits, so the reason there are two things wrong with our dopamine receptor flies is that the same receptor is controlling two different functions in two different regions of the brain. Whether the same thing is true in ADHD in humans we don't know, but these kinds of results should at least cause us to consider that possibility.So these results make me and my colleagues more convinced than ever that the brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup. What we need to do is to use our ingenuity and our scientific knowledge to try to design a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders. If we can do that, we may be able to cure these disorders without the unpleasant side effects, putting the oil back in our mental engines, just where it's needed. Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_anderson_your_brain_is_more_than_a_bag_of_chemicals
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"Now, extinction is a different kind of death. It's bigger. We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo. This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years. Suddenly it wasn't here at all. Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun. Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest. And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Canada down to the Gulf. But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades. What happened?Well, commercial hunting happened. These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground, they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands. It was the cheapest source of protein in America. By the end of the century, there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers.There's an upside to the story. This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison, and so these birds saved the buffalos.But a lot of other animals weren't saved. The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. It was hunted to death for its feathers. There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen. It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. A local newspaper spelled out, ""There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again."" There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, and it happened to lots of birds that people loved. It happened to lots of mammals. Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs. There was sort of a movie made about it recently. And the aurochs was like the bison. This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea. The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings.The extinctions still go on. There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo. It went extinct in 2000. There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger. It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. A little bit of film was shot.Sorrow, anger, mourning. Don't mourn. Organize. What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back, what would you do? Where would you start?Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there. I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan, who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct, and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church, one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed.So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro. All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue, because down in there is what is called ancient DNA. It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome.Then the question is, can you reassemble, with that genome, the whole bird? George Church thinks you can. So in his book, ""Regenesis,"" which I recommend, he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine. It's kind of like an evolution machine. You try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip, and the ones that win, that you can then put into a living organism. It'll work. The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides, nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair. The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome.So what you're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene. It's called an allele. Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway. So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative. Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here. Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon. There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon. If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you.Now, there's work to do. You have to figure out exactly what genes matter. So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon, genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on. Add them all up and the result won't be perfect. But it should be be perfect enough, because nature doesn't do perfect either.So this meeting in Boston led to three things.First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon.Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends. We hired him full-time. Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive. So if he's successful, she won't be the last.The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction, but they'd never met each other. And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century, discovery was basically finding things, and in this century, discovery is basically making things. De-extinction falls in that category. So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together. Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical. There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species, they're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii.Henri, from the Netherlands, with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce, is working on the aurochs. The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed. So what they're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, the aurochs. Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea than it is in America, and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe, they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job, its old ecological role, of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it.Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias. Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain. The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree. They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born. It was the first de-extinction in history.(Applause)It was short-lived. Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems. This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then, and this will move ahead, and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain.Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder. At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years. Now, when it's frozen that deep, minus 196 degrees Celsius, the cells are intact and the DNA is intact. They're basically viable cells, so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow, the cow went to term, and what was born was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng, who thrived and is still alive.The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs.So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds. So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells. Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm. He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have, basically, the gonads of a falcon. You get a male and a female each of those, and out of them comes falcons. (Laughter) Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens.Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting. He showed how all of this can be put together. The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon, he'll take the techniques of George Church and get passenger pigeon DNA, the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew, get that DNA into chicken gonads, and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs, and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons.It does raise the question of, they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon. So what do you do about that? Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens, so most of that is already in their DNA, but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds.There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List. They're excited about all this, but they're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive, that haven't gone extinct yet. You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there. You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year.But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out. And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on. But they're about to create what they call a Green List, and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, and protected areas around the world that are very, very well managed. So basically, they're learning how to build on good news. And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on.Here's a couple related examples. Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species. The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987. Everybody thought is was finished. Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild. That technology will be used on de-extincted animals. Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa. In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct. There were just 254 left. Now there are 880. They're increasing in population by three percent a year. The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program, which is absolutely brilliant. So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone. That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors.Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, is the northern white rhinoceros. There's no breeding pairs left. But this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo. A bit of cloning, you can get them back.So where do we go from here? These have been private meetings so far. I think it's time for the subject to go public. What do people think about it? You know, do you want extinct species back? Do you want extinct species back?(Applause)Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down. It is a Tinker Bell moment, because what are people excited about with this? What are they concerned about?We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon. So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz. They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon. As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that. We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, maybe for the next six million years. You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, for the woolly mammoth.Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. But some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question. So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand. I suspect there are some people out there sitting, kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, there's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way. There's going to be unintended consequences. You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point?Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, and many of them were keystone species, and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go. Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, so when these things come back, they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love. I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work. This is a long, slow process — One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation. We will get woolly mammoths back.CA: Well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling. Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you.CA: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_the_dawn_of_de_extinction_are_you_ready
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"Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED. That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct.(Laughter)I said, ""Chris, that would take a miracle.""He said, ""Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex?""So, yeah. Then I thought, let's go even further than 25 years. Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began. Three thousand years ago, civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile, some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance, smelling of sheep shit, I guess, proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne, ""We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you.""And the Pharaoh replies, ""Oh, no. You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding.""And they say, ""No, no, that's what it says here in our holy book.""Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book. This time it's called the Facebook. Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square. They turn a social network from virtual to actual, and kind of rebooted the 21st century. Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, neither to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what's possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upside down, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were. It's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality, because facts, like people, want to be free, and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner, even for the poorest of the poor — facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia, facts that tell us what's working and, more importantly, what's not, so we can fix it, facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made back in 2005, when he asked us to be that great generation that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty, facts that build a powerful momentum.So I thought, forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks. The only thing singing today would be the facts, for I have truly embraced by inner nerd. So exit the rock star. Enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist.Because what the facts are telling us is that the long, slow journey, humanity's long, slow journey of equality, is actually speeding up. Look at what's been achieved. Look at the pictures these data sets print. Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs. Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent. For kids under five, child mortality, kids under five, it's down by 2.65 million a year. That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day. Wow. Wow. (Applause)Let's just stop for a second, actually, and think about that. Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number? Wow. Great news. It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news. Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them. This is Michael and Benedicta, and they're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah — she's amazing — and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not. And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids. This fantastic news didn't happen by itself. It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. And this great news gives birth to even more great news, because the historic trend is this. The number of people living in back-breaking, soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010. Give it up for that. (Applause) Halved. Halved.Now, the rate is still too high — still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives. There's still work to do. But it's heart-stopping. It's mind-blowing stuff. And if you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data. This is everything. If you're a parent who wants the best for your kids — and I am — this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope. And guess what? If the trajectory continues, look where the amount of people living on $1.25 a day gets to by 2030. Can't be true, can it? That's what the data is telling us. If the trajectory continues, we get to, wow, the zero zone. For number-crunchers like us, that is the erogenous zone, and it's fair to say that I am, by now, sexually aroused by the collating of data. So virtual elimination of extreme poverty, as defined by people living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted, of course, for inflation from a 1990 baseline. We do love a good baseline. That's amazing.Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil — and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? — but look at sub-Saharan Africa. There's a collection of 10 countries, some call them the lions, who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation, a tripling of aid, a tenfold increase in FDI — that's foreign direct investment — which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources — that's local money — which, when spent wisely — that's good governance — cut childhood mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and they, too, halved extreme poverty, and at this rate, these 10 get to zero too. So the pride of lions is the proof of concept.There are all kinds of benefits to this. For a start, you won't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up Jesus like myself. How about that? (Applause)And 2028, 2030? It's just around the corner. I mean, it's about three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away. (Laughter) I hope. I'm hoping. Makes us look really young.So why aren't we jumping up and down about this? Well, the opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. We can't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done. Look at this graph. It's called inertia. It's how we screw it up. And the next one is really beautiful. It's called momentum. And it's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero, just doing the things that we know work.So inertia versus momentum. There is jeopardy, and of course, the closer you get, it gets harder. We know the obstacles that are in our way right now, in difficult times. In fact, today in your capital, in difficult times, some who mind the nation's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund. But you can do something about that. You can tell politicians that these cuts [can cost] lives.Right now today, in Oslo as it happens, oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries. You can do something about that too. You can join the One Campaign, and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur. We're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it.And right now, we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease. It's corruption. But there's a vaccine for that too. It's called transparency, open data sets, something the TED community is really on it. Daylight, you could call it, transparency. And technology is really turbocharging this. It's getting harder to hide if you're doing bad stuff.So let me tell you about the U-report, which I'm really excited about. It's 150,000 millennials all across Uganda, young people armed with 2G phones, an SMS social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what's in the budget and how their money is being spent. This is exciting stuff.Look, once you have these tools, you can't not use them. Once you have this knowledge, you can't un-know it. You can't delete this data from your brain, but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant, impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives. You can erase that, you really can, because it's not true anymore. (Applause)It's transformational. 2030? By 2030, robots, not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it. By the time we get there, every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way.So I'm here to — I guess we're here to try and infect you with this virtuous, data-based virus, the one we call factivism. It's not going to kill you. In fact, it could save countless lives. I guess we in the One Campaign would love you to be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on. By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken, the ever-demanding journey of equality. Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be? Might we answer that clarion call with science, with reason, with facts, and, dare I say it, emotions? Because as is obvious, factivists have feelings too.I'm thinking of Wael Ghonim, though. Some of you know him. He set up one of the Facebook groups behind the Tahrir Square in Cairo. He got thrown in jail for it, but I have his words tattooed on my brain.""We are going to win because we don't understand politics. We are going to win because we don't play their dirty games. We are going to win because we don't have a party political agenda. We are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. We are going to win because we have dreams, and we're willing to stand up for those dreams.""Wael is right. We're going to win if we work together as one, because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bono_the_good_news_on_poverty_yes_there_s_good_news
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"I have a friend in Portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family. He did it because he couldn't afford a car, but also because he knew how to build one. There was a time when we understood how things worked and how they were made, so we could build and repair them, or at the very least make informed decisions about what to buy. Many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century. But now, the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they're made of back into our lives, and I believe we need to take them to the next level, to the components things are made of.For the most part, we still know what traditional materials like paper and textiles are made of and how they are produced. But now we have these amazing, futuristic composites — plastics that change shape, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color, fabrics that light up. Let me show you some examples.So conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires. In the case of this little example I'm holding, we used it to create a touch sensor that reacts to my skin by turning on this little light. Conductive ink has been used by artists, but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens. And this is a sheet of acrylic infused with colorless light-diffusing particles. What this means is that, while regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges, this one illuminates across the entire surface when I turn on the lights around it. Two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems. And thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature. So I'm going to place this on a hot plate that is set to a temperature only slightly higher than ambient and you can see what happens. So one of the principle applications for this material is, amongst other things, in baby bottles, so it indicates when the contents are cool enough to drink.So these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials. In a few years, they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis. We may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us, but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature, keyboards that roll up, and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch.So I'm a social scientist by training, so why am I here today talking about smart materials? Well first of all, because I am a maker. I'm curious about how things work and how they are made, but also because I believe we should have a deeper understanding of the components that make up our world, and right now, we don't know enough about these high-tech composites our future will be made of. Smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities. There's barely any information available on how to use them, and very little is said about how they are produced. So for now, they exist mostly in this realm of trade secrets and patents only universities and corporations have access to.So a little over three years ago, Kirsty Boyle and I started a project we called Open Materials. It's a website where we, and anyone else who wants to join us, share experiments, publish information, encourage others to contribute whenever they can, and aggregate resources such as research papers and tutorials by other makers like ourselves. We would like it to become a large, collectively generated database of do-it-yourself information on smart materials.But why should we care how smart materials work and what they are made of? First of all, because we can't shape what we don't understand, and what we don't understand and use ends up shaping us. The objects we use, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, all have a profound impact on our behavior, health and quality of life. So if we are to live in a world made of smart materials, we should know and understand them. Secondly, and just as important, innovation has always been fueled by tinkerers. So many times, amateurs, not experts, have been the inventors and improvers of things ranging from mountain bikes to semiconductors, personal computers, airplanes.The biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment. But that's not always the case. Two scientists at University of Illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink. Jordan Bunker, who had had no experience with chemistry until then, read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools. He used a toaster oven, and he even made his own vortex mixer, based on a tutorial by another scientist/maker. Jordan then published his results online, including all the things he had tried and didn't work, so others could study and reproduce it. So Jordan's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in Chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself. And now that he published this work, others can pick up where he left and devise even simpler processes and improvements.Another example I'd like to mention is Hannah Perner-Wilson's Kit-of-No-Parts. Her project's goal is to highlight the expressive qualities of materials while focusing on the creativity and skills of the builder. Electronics kits are very powerful in that they teach us how things work, but the constraints inherent in their design influence the way we learn. So Hannah's approach, on the other hand, is to formulate a series of techniques for creating unusual objects that free us from pre-designed constraints by teaching us about the materials themselves. So amongst Hannah's many impressive experiments, this is one of my favorites. [""Paper speakers""] What we're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet. (Music: ""Happy Together"") So based on the research by Marcelo Coelho from MIT, Hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink. Just like Jordan and so many other makers, Hannah published her recipes and allows anyone to copy and reproduce them.But paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics. So Hannah's artisanal work, and the fact that she shared her findings, opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative.So the interesting thing about makers is that we create out of passion and curiosity, and we are not afraid to fail. We often tackle problems from unconventional angles, and, in the process, end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things. So the more people experiment with materials, the more researchers are willing to share their research, and manufacturers their knowledge, the better chances we have to create technologies that truly serve us all.So I feel a bit as Ted Nelson must have when, in the early 1970s, he wrote, ""You must understand computers now."" Back then, computers were these large mainframes only scientists cared about, and no one dreamed of even having one at home. So it's a little strange that I'm standing here and saying, ""You must understand smart materials now."" Just keep in mind that acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/catarina_mota_play_with_smart_materials
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"So, this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982. (Laughter) Actually, it's deceptively large. There's actually only about 20 people on each page, because we have the name, address and telephone number of every single person. And, in fact, everybody's listed twice, because it's sorted once by name and once by email address. Obviously a very small community. There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then. I knew them both. We didn't all know each other, but we all kind of trusted each other, and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network, and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community, let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days. Now, it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet. So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com. So I picked think.com, but then I thought, you know, there's a lot of really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case. And then I thought, ""Nah, that wouldn't be very nice.""(Laughter)That attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days, and in fact, it wasn't just the people on the network, but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the Internet itself. So the basic idea of I.P., or Internet protocol, and the way that the — the routing algorithm that used it, were fundamentally ""from each according to their ability, to each according to their need."" And so, if you had some extra bandwidth, you'd deliver a message for someone. If they had some extra bandwidth, they would deliver a message for you. You'd kind of depend on people to do that, and that was the building block. It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department, but it obviously worked really well, and we all saw what happened with the Internet. It was incredibly successful.In fact, it was so successful that there's no way that these days you could make a book like this. My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick. But, of course, you couldn't do it, because we don't know the names of all the people with Internet or email addresses, and even if we did know their names, I'm pretty sure that they would not want their name, address and telephone number published to everyone.So the fact is that there's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days, and so we dealt with that by making walled communities, secure subnetworks, VPNs, little things that aren't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks, but we're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust. And that means that it's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen, or certain kinds of deliberate attacks, but even the mistakes can be bad.So, for instance, in all of Asia recently, it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network. They didn't intend to screw up Asia, but they did because of the way that the protocols work. Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is, you may remember a couple of years ago, all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it. Now, you don't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet, and in some sense it doesn't. I'll come back to that later. But the fact is that people couldn't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet, and the router card was down.And so, there are many of those things that start to happen. Now, there was an interesting thing that happened last April. All of a sudden, a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet, including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations, started getting re-routed through China. So for a few hours, it all passed through China. Now, China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake, and it is actually possible that it was, the way things work, but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to, and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes. Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks.So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days, they're not going to do it with tanks. That will not succeed. What they'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the Iranian nuclear facility. Nobody has claimed credit for that. There was basically a factory of industrial machines. It didn't think of itself as being on the Internet. It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet, but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there, or something like that, and software got in there that causes the centrifuges, in that case, to actually destroy themselves. Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant. And so there's a lot of — I'm sure you've read a lot in papers, about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those.But the fact is, people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile. So actually, in the early days, back when it was the ARPANET, there were actually times — there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it. And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places, and this one processor, because of a broken card, decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time. So, in other words, it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it. So of course, the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy, who would send it back in time and get it there super early, so every message in the Internet started getting switched through this one node, and of course that clogged everything up. Everything started breaking. The interesting thing was, though, that the sysadmins were able to fix it, but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off. Now, of course you couldn't do that today. I mean, everything off, it's like the service call you get from the cable company, except for the whole world.Now, in fact, they couldn't do it for a lot of reasons today. One of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use IP protocol and use things like Skype and so on that go through the Internet right now, and so in fact we're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things, like when you take off from LAX, you're really not thinking you're using the Internet. When you pump gas, you really don't think you're using the Internet. What's happening increasingly, though, is these systems are beginning to use the Internet. Most of them aren't based on the Internet yet, but they're starting to use the Internet for service functions, for administrative functions, and so if you take something like the cell phone system, which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part, Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions, and it's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well, they're cheap, they're repeated, and so on. So all of our systems, more and more, are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology. And so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses Internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other. That's crazy. It was never designed to do things like that.So we've built this system where we understand all the parts of it, but we're using it in a very, very different way than we expected to use it, and it's gotten a very, very different scale than it was designed for. And in fact, nobody really exactly understands all the things it's being used for right now. It's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system, where we've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have. And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this, or it does do this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather, or something like that. They have an informed opinion, but it's changing so quickly that even the experts don't know exactly what's going on. So if you see one of these maps of the Internet, it's just somebody's guess. Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it's different than it was an hour ago. It's constantly changing. It's constantly reconfiguring.And the problem with it is, I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system, where we take a system that's basically built on trust, was basically built for a smaller-scale system, and we've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate. And so right now, I think it's literally true that we don't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be, and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year, and worse next year, and so on.But so what we need is a plan B. There is no plan B right now. There's no clear backup system that we've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet, made out of completely different sets of building blocks. So what we need is something that doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the Internet, or the hospitals have to order fuel oil. This doesn't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project. It's actually relatively simple to do, technically, because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground, existing wireless infrastructure. It's basically a matter of deciding to do it.But people won't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it, and that's the problem that we have right now. So there's been plenty of people, plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years, but it's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well.So I think that, if people understand how much we're starting to depend on the Internet, and how vulnerable it is, we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist, and I think if enough people say, ""Yeah, I would like to use it, I'd like to have such a system,"" then it will get built. It's not that hard a problem. It could definitely be done by people in this room.And so I think that this is actually, of all the problems you're going to hear about at the conference, this is probably one of the very easiest to fix. So I'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_hillis_the_internet_could_crash_we_need_a_plan_b
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"Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car?Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating.CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help?EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant.CA: That scale delivers efficiency.EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport.CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video — So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle?EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range.CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently — by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency.EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge.CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations.CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter)EM: I mean, you can certainly drive — if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number.CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car?EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive.CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle?EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there.CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes?EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going.CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common — don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything.EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that?EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here?EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas.(Applause)CA: How?EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble.CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest — those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas.CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front.EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease?EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal.CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that — I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit?EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill.CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility.EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses.CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar?EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is?EM: More from solar than any other source.CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with?EM: With a friend who will remain nameless.CA: Just between us. (Laughter)EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source.CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter)EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, ""Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?"" Obviously, ""He started with a large one,"" is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, ""Is he serious?""CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened?EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket.CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond?EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this?EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but —CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me.EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent.EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause)CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this.EM: Right, so the big innovation—CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here.EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for —CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land?EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours.CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic.CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars.EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars — being the only realistic option — and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species.CA: So progress on this ""let's make it reusable,"" how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going?EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests.CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter)CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then —EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch  and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll  with cold gas thrusters.CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so — Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you?EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot.CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right.CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and — and this is the critical thing — feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that — could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done.EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful.CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED.EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause)Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_mind_behind_tesla_spacex_solarcity
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"When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet. And I grew up singing a song called ""Nothing To Envy."" And I was very proud. In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies. Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed.When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution. But I thought my life in North Korea was normal. My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger.But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister. It read, ""When you read this, our five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past three weeks. We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak, we are waiting to die.""I was so shocked. This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that to this day I can't erase from my memory. A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families.A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night, except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home. I always wondered why they had lights, but we didn't. This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors.This is the Amnok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. But many die. Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river. I can't reveal many details about how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine, I was sent to China to live with distant relatives. But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time. I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together.In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants. So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate, back in North Korea.One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police, and brought to the police station for interrogation. Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities, and asked me tons of questions. I was so scared. I thought my heart was going to explode. If anything seemed unnatural, I could be imprisoned and repatriated. I thought my life was over. But I managed to control all the emotions inside me, and answer the questions. After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, ""This was a false report. She's not North Korean."" And they let me go. It was a miracle.Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies. But many can be caught by the Chinese police, and repatriated. These girls were so lucky. Even though they were caught, they were eventually released, after heavy international pressure. These North Koreans were not so lucky. Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned, or publicly executed.Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky. It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive. Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant. That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea. And I started a new life yet again.Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected. English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language. Also, I realized there was a wide gap between North and South. We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different, due to 67 years of division. I even went through an identity crisis. Am I South Korean or North Korean? Where am I from? Who am I? Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own.Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan — I started studying for the university entrance exam.Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call. The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. They had to get out quickly. So I started planning how to help them escape.North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom. It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea. So, ironically, I took a flight back to China and headed toward the North Korean border. Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia. The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. He took everyone's I.D. cards, and he started asking them questions. Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me.We made it all the way to the border of Laos. But I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos. But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing. After I paid the fine and bribe, my family was released in one month. But soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again, in the capital of Laos.This was one of the lowest points in my life. I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail, just a short distance from the South Korean embassy. I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out. but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore. I lost all hope.At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, ""What's wrong?"" I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM, and he paid the rest of the money for my family, and two other North Koreans to get out of jail.I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, ""Why are you helping me?""""I'm not helping you,"" he said. ""I'm helping the North Korean people.""I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people, when we needed it most. And he showed me that the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need.Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea. But getting to freedom is only half the battle. Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money. So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more. We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world. Because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside.I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support. I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hyeonseo_lee_my_escape_from_north_korea
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"So let me ask for a show of hands. How many people here are over the age of 48? Well, there do seem to be a few.Well, congratulations, because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy, you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900.But look what happened in the course of that century. If you follow that curve, you'll see that it starts way down there. There's that dip there for the 1918 flu. And here we are at 2010, average life expectancy of a child born today, age 79, and we are not done yet. Now, that's the good news. But there's still a lot of work to do.So, for instance, if you ask, how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis? Turns out it's about 4,000, which is pretty amazing, because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while. It's exciting to see that in terms of what we've learned, but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available? Only about 250. So we have this huge challenge, this huge gap.You would think this wouldn't be too hard, that we would simply have the ability to take this fundamental information that we're learning about how it is that basic biology teaches us about the causes of disease and build a bridge across this yawning gap between what we've learned about basic science and its application, a bridge that would look maybe something like this, where you'd have to put together a nice shiny way to get from one side to the other.Well, wouldn't it be nice if it was that easy? Unfortunately, it's not. In reality, trying to go from fundamental knowledge to its application is more like this. There are no shiny bridges. You sort of place your bets. Maybe you've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way, and the rains come and the lightning flashes, and oh my gosh, there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble, and, uh oh, the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized, and that tugboat, well, it hit the rocks, and maybe if you're lucky, somebody gets across.Well, what does this really look like? Well, what is it to make a therapeutic, anyway? What's a drug? A drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape, and it's those shapes that determine whether, in fact, that particular drug is going to hit its target. Is it going to land where it's supposed to? So look at this picture here — a lot of shapes dancing around for you. Now what you need to do, if you're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe. And when you look at what happens to that pipeline, you start out maybe with thousands, tens of thousands of compounds. You weed down through various steps that cause many of these to fail. Ultimately, maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these, and if all goes well, 14 years after you started, you will get one approval. And it will cost you upwards of a billion dollars for that one success.So we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would, and say, ""How can we do better?"" And that's the main theme of what I want to say to you this morning. How can we make this go faster? How can we make it more successful?Well, let me tell you about a few examples where this has actually worked. One that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis. But it's taken a long time to get there. Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto, discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7. That picture you see there? Here it is. That's the same kid. That's Danny Bessette, 23 years later, because this is the year, and it's also the year where Danny got married, where we have, for the first time, the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding. That's the good news. The bad news is, this drug doesn't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis, and it won't work for Danny, and we're still waiting for that next generation to help him.But it took 23 years to get this far. That's too long. How do we go faster?Well, one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology, and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome, the ability to be able to look at a chromosome, to unzip it, to pull out all the DNA, and to be able to then read out the letters in that DNA code, the A's, C's, G's and T's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things, and the cost of doing this, which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has in the course of the last 10 years fallen faster than Moore's Law, down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced, or mine, and we're headed for the $1,000 genome fairly soon. Well, that's exciting. How does that play out in terms of application to a disease?I want to tell you about another disorder. This one is a disorder which is quite rare. It's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging. Only about one in every four million kids has this disease, and in a simple way, what happens is, because of a mutation in a particular gene, a protein is made that's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate.Let me show you a video of what that does to the cell. The normal cell, if you looked at it under the microscope, would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell, which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that. A progeria cell, on the other hand, because of this toxic protein called progerin, has these lumps and bumps in it. So what we would like to do after discovering this back in 2003 is to come up with a way to try to correct that. Well again, by knowing something about the molecular pathways, it was possible to pick one of those many, many compounds that might have been useful and try it out. In an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon, if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria, and you watch to see what happened, in just 72 hours, that cell becomes, for all purposes that we can determine, almost like a normal cell.Well that was exciting, but would it actually work in a real human being? This has led, in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial, to a test of that very compound. And the kids that you see here all volunteered to be part of this, 28 of them, and you can see as soon as the picture comes up that they are in fact a remarkable group of young people all afflicted by this disease, all looking quite similar to each other. And instead of telling you more about it, I'm going to invite one of them, Sam Berns from Boston, who's here this morning, to come up on the stage and tell us about his experience as a child affected with progeria. Sam is 15 years old. His parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both physicians, are here with us this morning as well. Sam, please have a seat.(Applause)So Sam, why don't you tell these folks what it's like being affected with this condition called progeria?Sam Burns: Well, progeria limits me in some ways. I cannot play sports or do physical activities, but I have been able to take interest in things that progeria, luckily, does not limit. But when there is something that I really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of, like marching band or umpiring, we always find a way to do it, and that just shows that progeria isn't in control of my life.(Applause)Francis Collins: So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this? What would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well?SB: Well, research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years, and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far, and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria, and it shows that if that drive exists, anybody can cure any disease, and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future, and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about.FC: Excellent. So Sam took the day off from school today to be here, and he is — (Applause) — He is, by the way, a straight-A+ student in the ninth grade in his school in Boston. Please join me in thanking and welcoming Sam. SB: Thank you very much. FC: Well done. Well done, buddy. (Applause)So I just want to say a couple more things about that particular story, and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases, as Sam says, these 4,000 that are waiting for answers. You might have noticed that the drug that is now in clinical trial for progeria is not a drug that was designed for that. It's such a rare disease, it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug. This is a drug that was developed for cancer. Turned out, it didn't work very well for cancer, but it has exactly the right properties, the right shape, to work for progeria, and that's what's happened. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that more systematically? Could we, in fact, encourage all the companies that are out there that have drugs in their freezers that are known to be safe in humans but have never actually succeeded in terms of being effective for the treatments they were tried for? Now we're learning about all these new molecular pathways — some of those could be repositioned or repurposed, or whatever word you want to use, for new applications, basically teaching old drugs new tricks. That could be a phenomenal, valuable activity. We have many discussions now between NIH and companies about doing this that are looking very promising.And you could expect quite a lot to come from this. There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances. The first drug for HIV/AIDS was not developed for HIV/AIDS. It was developed for cancer. It was AZT. It didn't work very well for cancer, but became the first successful antiretroviral, and you can see from the table there are others as well.So how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort? Well, we have to come up with a partnership between academia, government, the private sector, and patient organizations to make that so. At NIH, we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. It just started last December, and this is one of its goals.Let me tell you another thing we could do. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk, because that first time you're never quite sure? How do we know, for instance, whether drugs are safe before we give them to people? We test them on animals. And it's not all that reliable, and it's costly, and it's time-consuming. Suppose we could do this instead on human cells. You probably know, if you've been paying attention to some of the science literature that you can now take a skin cell and encourage it to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell or a brain cell for any of us. So what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it's going to be safe?Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip. This is something created by the Wyss Institute in Boston, and what they have done here, if we can run the little video, is to take cells from an individual, turn them into the kinds of cells that are present in the lung, and determine what would happen if you added to this various drug compounds to see if they are toxic or safe. You can see this chip even breathes. It has an air channel. It has a blood channel. And it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound. Are those cells happy or not? You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys, for hearts, for muscles, all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem, for the liver.And ultimately, because you can do this for the individual, we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip, what we're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety.So let me sum up. We are in a remarkable moment here. For me, at NIH now for almost 20 years, there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us. We have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world. What do we need to capitalize on this? First of all, we need resources. This is research that's high-risk, sometimes high-cost. The payoff is enormous, both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth. We need to support that. Second, we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations, just like the one I've been describing here, in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds. And third, and maybe most important, we need talent. We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort — all ages, all different groups — because this is the time, folks. This is the 21st-century biology that you've been waiting for, and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will, in fact, knock out disease. That's my goal. I hope that's your goal. I think it'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we're trying to do here and why it matters. It matters for now. It matters as soon as possible. If you don't believe me, just ask Sam.Thank you all very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/francis_collins_we_need_better_drugs_now
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"In 1991 I had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life. I was in the third year of my seven-year undergraduate degree. I took a couple victory laps in there. And I was on a college choir tour up in Northern California, and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus, and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains. And there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise, and as we sat there, over the mountains coming in from the north were these Steven Spielbergian clouds rolling toward us, and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley, so help me God, every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time. (Whoosh) This electric hush, as if they could sense what was about to happen. And then the clouds came over us, and then, boom! This massive thunderclap, and sheets of rain. It was just extraordinary, and when I came back home I found a poem by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and decided to set it to music, a piece for choir called ""Cloudburst,"" which is the piece that we'll perform for you in just a moment.Now fast forward to just three years ago. (Music) And we released to YouTube this, the Virtual Choir Project, 185 singers from 12 different countries. You can see my little video there conducting these people, alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home. Two years ago, on this very stage, we premiered Virtual Choir 2, 2,052 singers from 58 different countries, this time performing a piece that I had written called ""Sleep."" And then just last spring we released Virtual Choir 3, ""Water Night,"" another piece that I had written, this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries. (Music)And when I was speaking to Chris about the future of Virtual Choir and where we might be able to take this, he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could. Could we do this all in real time? Could we have people singing together in real time?And with the help of Skype, that is what we are going to attempt today. Now, we'll perform ""Cloudburst"" for you. The first half will be performed by the live singers here on stage. I'm joined by singers from Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton and Riverside Community College, some of the best amateur choirs in the country, and — (Applause) — and in the second half of the piece, the virtual choir will join us, 30 different singers from 30 different countries.Now, we've pushed the technology as far as it can go, but there's still less than a second of latency, but in musical terms, that's a lifetime. We deal in milliseconds. So what I've done is, I've adapted ""Cloudburst"" so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together.So with deep humility, and for your approval, we present ""Cloudburst.""(Applause)(Piano)[The rain ...] [Eyes of shadow-water] [eyes of well-water] [eyes of dream-water.] [Blue suns, green whirlwinds,] [birdbeaks of light pecking open] [pomegranate stars.] [But tell me, burnt earth, is there no water?] [Only blood, only dust,] [only naked footsteps on the thorns?] [The rain awakens...] [We must sleep with open eyes,] [we must dream with our hands,] [we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course,] [of the sun dreaming its worlds.] [We must dream aloud,] [we must sing till the song puts forth roots,] [trunk, branches, birds, stars.] [We must find the lost word,] [and remember what the blood,] [the tides, the earth, and the body say,] [and return to the point of departure...](Music)(Applause)[""Cloudburst"" Octavio Paz][translation by Lysander Kemp, adapted by Eric Whitacre]Eric Whitacre: Beth. Annabelle, where are you? Jacob. (Applause) Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_whitacre_virtual_choir_live
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"Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes. As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems.Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are. The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.I get asked all of the time from people, ""Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?"" And I believe the answer is yes. I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously. I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds.This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building. We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust. From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences. This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, ""Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me.""So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk. The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle. You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems. But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another. I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. I told Tim, ""If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of."" And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around. We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air. So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system. Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right. They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology. If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different. The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to.Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes. And that is exactly what we found. If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different. And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections. I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem.All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health. He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated.So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building. What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation. A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. When you walked into those rooms, they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before. Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers. In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything. Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_green_good_germs_make_healthy_buildings
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"I'm here to show you how something you can't see can be so much fun to look at. You're about to experience a new, available and exciting technology that's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives.What I have here is a cinder block that we've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material. It's called Ultra-Ever Dry, and when you apply it to any material, it turns into a superhydrophobic shield. So this is a cinder block, uncoated, and you can see that it's porous, it absorbs water. Not anymore. Porous, nonporous.So what's superhydrophobic? Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface. The rounder it is, the more hydrophobic it is, and if it's really round, it's superhydrophobic. A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees. A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees. But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic. So as part of the demonstration, what I have is a pair of gloves, and we've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating, and let's see if you can tell which one, and I'll give you a hint.Did you guess the one that was dry?When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience, what's occurred is that we're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits. And we're talking really small here. The way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers, and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and to put some scale to that, if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick, and you put it side by side, and you had 50,000 of them, you'd be the width of a human hair. So very small, but very useful.And it's not just water that this works with. It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well.You can see the difference.Moving onto the next demonstration, we've taken a pane of glass and we've coated the outside of it, we've framed it with the nanotechnology coating, and we're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle, and you're going to see, it's going to spread out on glass like you'd normally think it would, except when it hits the coating, it stops, and I can't even coax it to leave. It's that afraid of the water.(Applause)So what's going on here? What's happening? Well, the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface. You'd think it'd be smooth, but it's actually not. And it has billions of interstitial spaces, and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules, and cover the surface with air. It's an umbrella of air all across it, and that layer of air is what the water hits, the mud hits, the concrete hits, and it glides right off. So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry.So what are the applications? I mean, many of you right now are probably going through your head. Everyone that sees this gets excited, and says, ""Oh, I could use it for this and this and this."" The applications in a general sense could be anything that's anti-wetting. We've certainly seen that today. It could be anything that's anti-icing, because if you don't have water, you don't have ice. It could be anti-corrosion. No water, no corrosion. It could be anti-bacterial. Without water, the bacteria won't survive. And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well.So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work. And I'm going to leave you with one last demonstration, but before I do that, I would like to say thank you, and think small. (Applause) It's going to happen. Wait for it. Wait for it.Chris Anderson: You guys didn't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED? (Laughter)[Two minutes later...]He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part. It's happening! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_shaw_one_very_dry_demo
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"This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park. Those are my dad's cows at the back, and behind the cows, that's the Nairobi National Park. Nairobi National Park is not fenced in the south widely, which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely. So predators like lions follow them, and this is what they do. They kill our livestock. This is one of the cows which was killed at night, and I just woke up in the morning and I found it dead, and I felt so bad, because it was the only bull we had.My community, the Maasai, we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them, and that's why we value them so much. So I grew up hating lions so much. The morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock, and they're also upset about this problem. So they kill the lions. It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi. And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few.So a boy, from six to nine years old, in my community is responsible for his dad's cows, and that's the same thing which happened to me.So I had to find a way of solving this problem. And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire. But I came to realize that that didn't really help, because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed. So I didn't give up. I continued. And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow. I was trying to trick the lions [into thinking] that I was standing near the cowshed. But lions are very clever. (Laughter) They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back, but the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it's always here. (Laughter) So he jumps in and kills the animals. So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch, and that day, the lions didn't come. And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light. So I had an idea. Since I was a small boy, I used to work in my room for the whole day, and I even took apart my mom's new radio, and that day she almost killed me, but I learned a lot about electronics. (Laughter) So I got an old car battery, an indicator box. It's a small device found in a motorcycle, and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left. It blinks. And I got a switch where I can switch on the lights, on and off. And that's a small torch from a broken flashlight.So I set up everything. As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer. And the indicator box makes the lights flash. As you can see, the bulbs face outside, because that's where the lions come from. And that's how it looks to lions when they come at night. The lights flash and trick the lions into thinking I was walking around the cowshed, but I was sleeping in my bed.(Laughter) (Applause) Thanks.So I set it up in my home two years ago, and since then, we have never experienced any problem with lions. And my neighboring homes heard about this idea. One of them was this grandmother. She had a lot of her animals being killed by lions, and she asked me if I could put the lights for her. And I said, ""Yes."" So I put the lights. You can see at the back, those are the lion lights. Since now, I've set up seven homes around my community, and they're really working. And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms.Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this. My new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness. I even took my friends back to my community, and we're installing the lights to the homes which don't have [any], and I'm teaching them how to put them.So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside. And here I am today. I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED. So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up.I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict. Ashê olên. It means in my language, thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: You have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours. So you got this scholarship.Richard Turere: Yep.CA: You're working on other electrical inventions. What's the next one on your list?RT: My next invention is, I want to make an electric fence.CA: Electric fence? RT: But I know electric fences are already invented, but I want to make mine. (Laughter)CA: You already tried it once, right, and you —RT: I tried it before, but I stopped because it gave me a shock. (Laughter)CA: In the trenches. Richard Turere, you are something else. We're going to cheer you on every step of the way, my friend. Thank you so much.RT: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_turere_a_peace_treaty_with_the_lions
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"I'm going to talk about the strategizing brain. We're going to use an unusual combination of tools from game theory and neuroscience to understand how people interact socially when value is on the line.So game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else. That's a lot of things: competition, cooperation, bargaining, games like hide-and-seek, and poker.Here's a simple game to get us started. Everyone chooses a number from zero to 100, we're going to compute the average of those numbers, and whoever's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize. So you want to be a little bit below the average number, but not too far below, and everyone else wants to be a little bit below the average number as well. Think about what you might pick. As you're thinking, this is a toy model of something like selling in the stock market during a rising market. Right? You don't want to sell too early, because you miss out on profits, but you don't want to wait too late to when everyone else sells, triggering a crash. You want to be a little bit ahead of the competition, but not too far ahead. Okay, here's two theories about how people might think about this, and then we'll see some data. Some of these will sound familiar because you probably are thinking that way. I'm using my brain theory to see. A lot of people say, ""I really don't know what people are going to pick, so I think the average will be 50."" They're not being really strategic at all. ""And I'll pick two-thirds of 50. That's 33."" That's a start. Other people who are a little more sophisticated, using more working memory, say, ""I think people will pick 33 because they're going to pick a response to 50, and so I'll pick 22, which is two-thirds of 33."" They're doing one extra step of thinking, two steps. That's better. And of course, in principle, you could do three, four or more, but it starts to get very difficult. Just like in language and other domains, we know that it's hard for people to parse very complex sentences with a kind of recursive structure. This is called a cognitive hierarchy theory, by the way. It's something that I've worked on and a few other people, and it indicates a kind of hierarchy along with some assumptions about how many people stop at different steps and how the steps of thinking are affected by lots of interesting variables and variant people, as we'll see in a minute. A very different theory, a much more popular one, and an older one, due largely to John Nash of ""A Beautiful Mind"" fame, is what's called equilibrium analysis. So if you've ever taken a game theory course at any level, you will have learned a little bit about this. An equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do. It is a very useful concept, but behaviorally, it may not exactly explain what people do the first time they play these types of economic games or in situations in the outside world. In this case, the equilibrium makes a very bold prediction, which is everyone wants to be below everyone else, therefore they'll play zero.Let's see what happens. This experiment's been done many, many times. Some of the earliest ones were done in the '90s by me and Rosemarie Nagel and others. This is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest. The contest said, send in your numbers and whoever is close to two-thirds of the average will win a big prize. And as you can see, there's so much data here, you can see the spikes very visibly. There's a spike at 33. Those are people doing one step. There is another spike visible at 22. And notice, by the way, that most people pick numbers right around there. They don't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22. There's something a little bit noisy around it. But you can see those spikes, and they're there. There's another group of people who seem to have a firm grip on equilibrium analysis, because they're picking zero or one. But they lose, right? Because picking a number that low is actually a bad choice if other people aren't doing equilibrium analysis as well. So they're smart, but poor.(Laughter)Where are these things happening in the brain? One study by Coricelli and Nagel gives a really sharp, interesting answer. So they had people play this game while they were being scanned in an fMRI, and two conditions: in some trials, they're told you're playing another person who's playing right now and we're going to match up your behavior at the end and pay you if you win. In the other trials, they're told, you're playing a computer. They're just choosing randomly. So what you see here is a subtraction of areas in which there's more brain activity when you're playing people compared to playing the computer. And you see activity in some regions we've seen today, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial, however, up here, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, an area that's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution, like if you're playing ""Simon Says,"" and also the right and left temporoparietal junction. And these are all areas which are fairly reliably known to be part of what's called a ""theory of mind"" circuit, or ""mentalizing circuit."" That is, it's a circuit that's used to imagine what other people might do. So these were some of the first studies to see this tied in to game theory.What happens with these one- and two-step types? So we classify people by what they picked, and then we look at the difference between playing humans versus playing computers, which brain areas are differentially active. On the top you see the one-step players. There's almost no difference. The reason is, they're treating other people like a computer, and the brain is too. The bottom players, you see all the activity in dorsomedial PFC. So we know that those two-step players are doing something differently.Now if you were to step back and say, ""What can we do with this information?"" you might be able to look at brain activity and say, ""This person's going to be a good poker player,"" or, ""This person's socially naive,"" and we might also be able to study things like development of adolescent brains once we have an idea of where this circuitry exists.Okay. Get ready. I'm saving you some brain activity, because you don't need to use your hair detector cells. You should use those cells to think carefully about this game. This is a bargaining game. Two players who are being scanned using EEG electrodes are going to bargain over one to six dollars. If they can do it in 10 seconds, they're going to actually earn that money. If 10 seconds goes by and they haven't made a deal, they get nothing. That's kind of a mistake together. The twist is that one player, on the left, is informed about how much on each trial there is. They play lots of trials with different amounts each time. In this case, they know there's four dollars. The uninformed player doesn't know, but they know that the informed player knows. So the uninformed player's challenge is to say, ""Is this guy really being fair or are they giving me a very low offer in order to get me to think that there's only one or two dollars available to split?"" in which case they might reject it and not come to a deal. So there's some tension here between trying to get the most money but trying to goad the other player into giving you more. And the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars, and they're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets, and the informed player's going to get the rest. So this is like a management-labor negotiation in which the workers don't know how much profits the privately held company has, right, and they want to maybe hold out for more money, but the company might want to create the impression that there's very little to split: ""I'm giving you the most that I can.""First some behavior. So a bunch of the subject pairs, they play face to face. We have some other data where they play across computers. That's an interesting difference, as you might imagine. But a bunch of the face-to-face pairs agree to divide the money evenly every single time. Boring. It's just not interesting neurally. It's good for them. They make a lot of money. But we're interested in, can we say something about when disagreements occur versus don't occur?So this is the other group of subjects who often disagree. So they have a chance of — they bicker and disagree and end up with less money. They might be eligible to be on ""Real Housewives,"" the TV show. You see on the left, when the amount to divide is one, two or three dollars, they disagree about half the time, and when the amount is four, five, six, they agree quite often. This turns out to be something that's predicted by a very complicated type of game theory you should come to graduate school at CalTech and learn about. It's a little too complicated to explain right now, but the theory tells you that this shape kind of should occur. Your intuition might tell you that too.Now I'm going to show you the results from the EEG recording. Very complicated. The right brain schematic is the uninformed person, and the left is the informed. Remember that we scanned both brains at the same time, so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously, just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you'd expect common activity in language regions when they're actually kind of listening and communicating. So the arrows connect regions that are active at the same time, and the direction of the arrows flows from the region that's active first in time, and the arrowhead goes to the region that's active later. So in this case, if you look carefully, most of the arrows flow from right to left. That is, it looks as if the uninformed brain activity is happening first, and then it's followed by activity in the informed brain. And by the way, these were trials where their deals were made. This is from the first two seconds. We haven't finished analyzing this data, so we're still peeking in, but the hope is that we can say something in the first couple of seconds about whether they'll make a deal or not, which could be very useful in thinking about avoiding litigation and ugly divorces and things like that. Those are all cases in which a lot of value is lost by delay and strikes.Here's the case where the disagreements occur. You can see it looks different than the one before. There's a lot more arrows. That means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity, and the arrows flow clearly from left to right. That is, the informed brain seems to be deciding, ""We're probably not going to make a deal here."" And then later there's activity in the uninformed brain.Next I'm going to introduce you to some relatives. They're hairy, smelly, fast and strong. You might be thinking back to your last Thanksgiving. Maybe if you had a chimpanzee with you. Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. They're still our closest genetic kin. We share 98.8 percent of the genes. We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. And we're also their closest cousin. They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas. So how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution.So this is an amazing memory test from Nagoya, Japan, Primate Research Institute, where they've done a lot of this research. This goes back quite a ways. They're interested in working memory. The chimp is going to see, watch carefully, they're going to see 200 milliseconds' exposure — that's fast, that's eight movie frames — of numbers one, two, three, four, five. Then they disappear and they're replaced by squares, and they have to press the squares that correspond to the numbers from low to high to get an apple reward. Let's see how they can do it. This is a young chimp. The young ones are better than the old ones, just like humans. And they're highly experienced, so they've done this thousands and thousands of time. Obviously there's a big training effect, as you can imagine. (Laughter) You can see they're very blasé and kind of effortless. Not only can they do it very well, they do it in a sort of lazy way. Right? Who thinks you could beat the chimps? Wrong. (Laughter) We can try. We'll try. Maybe we'll try.Okay, so the next part of this study I'm going to go quickly through is based on an idea of Tetsuro Matsuzawa. He had a bold idea that — what he called the cognitive trade-off hypothesis. We know chimps are faster and stronger. They're also very obsessed with status. His thought was, maybe they've preserved brain activities and they practice them in development that are really, really important to them to negotiate status and to win, which is something like strategic thinking during competition. So we're going to check that out by having the chimps actually play a game by touching two touch screens. The chimps are actually interacting with each other through the computers. They're going to press left or right. One chimp is called a matcher. They win if they press left, left, like a seeker finding someone in hide-and-seek, or right, right. The mismatcher wants to mismatch. They want to press the opposite screen of the chimp. And the rewards are apple cube rewards. So here's how game theorists look at these data. This is a graph of the percentage of times the matcher picked right on the x-axis, and the percentage of times they predicted right by the mismatcher on the y-axis. So a point here is the behavior by a pair of players, one trying to match, one trying to mismatch. The NE square in the middle — actually NE, CH and QRE — those are three different theories of Nash equilibrium, and others, tells you what the theory predicts, which is that they should match 50-50, because if you play left too much, for example, I can exploit that if I'm the mismatcher by then playing right. And as you can see, the chimps, each chimp is one triangle, are circled around, hovering around that prediction.Now we move the payoffs. We're actually going to make the left, left payoff for the matcher a little bit higher. Now they get three apple cubes. Game theoretically, that should actually make the mismatcher's behavior shift, because what happens is, the mismatcher will think, oh, this guy's going to go for the big reward, and so I'm going to go to the right, make sure he doesn't get it. And as you can see, their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we changed the payoffs one more time. Now it's four apple cubes, and their behavior again moves towards the Nash equilibrium. It's sprinkled around, but if you average the chimps out, they're really, really close, within .01. They're actually closer than any species we've observed.What about humans? You think you're smarter than a chimpanzee? Here's two human groups in green and blue. They're closer to 50-50. They're not responding to payoffs as closely, and also if you study their learning in the game, they aren't as sensitive to previous rewards. The chimps are playing better than the humans, better in the sense of adhering to game theory. And these are two different groups of humans from Japan and Africa. They replicate quite nicely. None of them are close to where the chimps are.So here are some things we learned today. People seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind. We have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money, and chimps are better competitors than humans, as judged by game theory. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/colin_camerer_neuroscience_game_theory_monkeys
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"This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator. It's my job to make sure the collection stays okay, and that it grows, and basically it means I collect dead animals. Back in 1995, we got a new wing next to the museum. It was made of glass, and this building really helped me to do my job good. The building was a true bird-killer. You may know that birds don't understand the concept of glass. They don't see it, so they fly into the windows and get killed. The only thing I had to do was go out, pick them up, and have them stuffed for the collection. (Laughter) And in those days, I developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass.And it was on June 5, 1995, that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck. And this is what I saw when I looked out of the window. This is the dead duck. It flew against the window. It's laying dead on its belly. But next to the dead duck is a live duck, and please pay attention. Both are of the male sex. And then this happened. The live duck mounted the dead duck, and started to copulate.Well, I'm a biologist. I'm an ornithologist. I said, ""Something's wrong here."" One is dead, one is alive. That must be necrophilia. I look. Both are of the male sex. Homosexual necrophilia.So I — (Laughter)I took my camera, I took my notebook, took a chair, and started to observe this behavior. After 75 minutes — (Laughter) — I had seen enough, and I got hungry, and I wanted to go home. So I went out, collected the duck, and before I put it in the freezer, I checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex. And here's a rare picture of a duck's penis, so it was indeed of the male sex. It's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis.[The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves:Anatidae)]I knew I'd seen something special, but it took me six years to decide to publish it. (Laughter) I mean, it's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine, but to share this among your peers is something different. I didn't have the framework. So after six years, my friends and colleagues urged me to publish, so I published ""The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard."" And here's the situation again. A is my office, B is the place where the duck hit the glass, and C is from where I watched it. And here are the ducks again.As you probably know, in science, when you write a kind of special paper, only six or seven people read it. (Laughter) But then something good happened. I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams, and he told me, ""You've won a prize with your duck paper: the Ig Nobel Prize."" And the Ig Nobel Prize — (Laughter) (Applause) — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think, with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science. That's a good thing, so I accepted the prize. (Laughter)I went — let me remind you that Marc Abrahams didn't call me from Stockholm. He called me from Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I traveled to Boston, to Cambridge, and I went to this wonderful Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held at Harvard University, and this ceremony is a very nice experience. Real Nobel laureates hand you the prize. That's the first thing. And there are nine other winners who get prizes. Here's one of my fellow winners. That's Charles Paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper, ""Courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain."" (Laughter) And I think there are one or two more Ig Nobel Prize winners in this room. Dan, where are you? Dan Ariely? Applause for Dan. (Applause) Dan won his prize in medicine for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine works better than low-priced fake medicine. (Laughter)So here's my one minute of fame, my acceptance speech, and here's the duck. This is its first time on the U.S. West Coast. I'm going to pass it around. (Laughter) Yeah? You can pass it around. Please note it's a museum specimen, but there's no chance you'll get the avian flu.After winning this prize, my life changed. In the first place, people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things, and I got a real nice collection. (Laughter) More importantly, people started to send me their observations of remarkable animal behavior, and believe me, if there's an animal misbehaving on this planet, I know about it.(Laughter)This is a moose. It's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison. This is in Montana, 2008. This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish. This is the Netherlands, 2011. These are cane toads in Australia. This is roadkill. Please note that this is necrophilia. It's remarkable: the position. The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom. These are pigeons in Rotterdam. Barn swallows in Hong Kong, 2004. This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution. It took all day, and the prisoners had a great time.So what does this mean? I mean, the question I ask myself, why does this happen in nature? Well, what I concluded from reviewing all these cases is that it is important that this happens only when death is instant and in a dramatic way and in the right position for copulation. At least, I thought it was till I got these slides. And here you see a dead duck. It's been there for three days, and it's laying on its back. So there goes my theory of necrophilia.Another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds. This is Mad Max, a blackbird who lives in Rotterdam. The only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008, day in and day out. Here he goes, and here's a short video.(Music) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk)So what this bird does is fight his own image. He sees an intruder in his territory, and it's coming all the time and he's there, so there is no end to it. And I thought, in the beginning — I studied this bird for a couple of years — that, well, shouldn't the brain of this bird be damaged? It's not. I show you here some slides, some frames from the video, and at the last moment before he hits the glass, he puts his feet in front, and then he bangs against the glass.So I'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day. That's on June 5 every year. At five minutes to six in the afternoon, we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the duck comes out of the museum, and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows. And as you know, or as you may not know, this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world. In the U.S. alone, a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings. And when it's over, we go to a Chinese restaurant and we have a six-course duck dinner.So I hope to see you next year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for Dead Duck Day. Thank you.(Applause)Oh, sorry. May I have my duck back, please?(Laughter) (Applause)Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/kees_moeliker_how_a_dead_duck_changed_my_life
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"Today I'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle, that you can carry with you anywhere, that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes, and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity. But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day. But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts.So we built something. I've got some of the pieces in my pocket here. So this is the motor. This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour, about 30 kilometers an hour, and this battery, this battery right here has about six miles of range, or 10 kilometers, which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone. But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store. These are from remote control airplanes. And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently, you can really change things.So today we're going to show you one example of how you can use this. Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is, but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco.(Music) [6 Mile Range] [Top Speed Near 20mph] [Uphill Climbing] [Regenerative Braking](Applause) (Cheers)So we're going to show you what this thing can do. It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking. It's incredible just how light this thing is. I mean, this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go.So I'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles. This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car, which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation. So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city, now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation.So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sanjay_dastoor_a_skateboard_with_a_boost
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"Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland. Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States. Like the United States, it has about 311 million people, and of that 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester. If Matt's in the audience, I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second, this character from your series. So 144,000 are called Lester, which means about .05 percent is named Lester. Now, Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power. There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland. One is called the general election. The other is called the Lester election. And in the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, but in the Lester election, it's the Lesters who get to vote. And here's the trick. In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election. You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well.Now, what can we say about democracy in Lesterland? What we can say, number one, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials, because, after all, there is a general election, but only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the Lesters is going to produce a subtle, understated, we could say camouflaged, bending to keep the Lesters happy. Okay, so we have a democracy, no doubt, but it's dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. It has competing dependencies, we could say conflicting dependencies, depending upon who the Lesters are. Okay. That's Lesterland.Now there are three things I want you to see now that I've described Lesterland. Number one, the United States is Lesterland. The United States is Lesterland. The United States also looks like this, also has two elections, one we called the general election, the second we should call the money election. In the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote, if you're over 18, in some states if you have an ID. In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote, the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland, the trick is, to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the money election. You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown. But you must do extremely well. And here's the key: There are just as few relevant funders in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland.Now you say, really? Really .05 percent? Well, here are the numbers from 2010: .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate, .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate, .01 percent — the one percent of the one percent — gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates, and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending. So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers, and I say it's fair for me to say it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America. In this sense, the funders are our Lesters.Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land? Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United, we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials. We have a general election, but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy. Candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power, and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they've never met, but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent? As anyone would, as they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money. They become, in the words of ""The X-Files,"" shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, ""Always lean to the green."" Then to clarify, she went on, ""He was not an environmentalist."" (Laughter)So here too we have a democracy, a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people, competing dependencies, possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are.Okay, the United States is Lesterland, point number one. Here's point number two. The United States is worse than Lesterland, worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said, ""Hey, you get to pick who gets to run in the general election,"" we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters. You know, there are Lesters from every part of social society. There are rich Lesters, poor Lesters, black Lesters, white Lesters, not many women Lesters, but put that to the side for one second. We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think, ""What could we do to make Lesterland better?"" It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland. But in our land, in this land, in USA-land, there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there, many of them in this room here today, but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters, because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest. It's for their private interest. In this sense, the USA is worse than Lesterland.And finally, point number three: Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland, against the background of its history, its traditions, in our land, in USA-land, Lesterland is a corruption, a corruption. Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress. I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption. I don't mean any criminal act. The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal. It's a corruption relative to the framers' baseline for this republic. The framers gave us what they called a republic, but by a republic they meant a representative democracy, and by a representative democracy, they meant a government, as Madison put it in Federalist 52, that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone.So here's the model of government. They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency, but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence, no longer a dependence upon the people alone, increasingly a dependence upon the funders. Now this is a dependence too, but it's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people. This is a corruption.Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption. One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan, equal-opportunity corruption. It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about. It blocks the right too, as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible. So the right wants smaller government. When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry. The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill, and as he reported back to me, the response was, ""Hell no! If we deregulate these guys, how are we going to raise money from them?""This is a system that's designed to save the status quo, including the status quo of big and invasive government. It works against the left and the right, and that, you might say, is good news.But here's the bad news. It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption, because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election, that means the tiniest number of us, the tiniest, tiniest number of us, can block reform. I know that should have been, like, a rock or something. I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is. Block reform.Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence, an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization. It feeds on dysfunction. The worse that it is for us, the better that it is for this fundraising.Henry David Thoreau: ""There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."" This is the root.Okay, now, every single one of you knows this. You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it. You ignore it. This is an impossible problem. You focus on the possible problems, like eradicating polio from the world, or taking an image of every single street across the globe, or building the first real universal translator, or building a fusion factory in your garage. These are the manageable problems, so you ignore — (Laughter) (Applause) — so you ignore this corruption.But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore. (Applause) We need a government that works. And not works for the left or the right, but works for the left and the right, the citizens of the left and right, because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption. So I want you to take hold, to grab the issue you care the most about. Climate change is mine, but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality. Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you, look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year. There will never be a Christmas. We will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first. So it's not that mine is the most important issue. It's not. Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about. No sensible reform, and we cannot afford a world, a future, with no sensible reform.Okay. So how do we do it? Turns out, the analytics here are easy, simple. If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America, the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans, to spread it out, to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone. And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment, changing the First Amendment. To do this would require a single statute, a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections, a statute of citizen-funded campaigns, and there's any number of these proposals out there: Fair Elections Now Act, the American Anti-Corruption Act, an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project to give vouchers to people to fund elections, an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act. Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us.The analytics are easy here. It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard, because this reform would shrink K Street, and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, put it, has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street. Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head, a business model focused on their life after government, their life as lobbyists. Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House. Those numbers have only gone up, and as United Republic calculated last April, the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent. So it's fair to ask, how is it possible for them to change this? Now I get this skepticism.I get this cynicism. I get this sense of impossibility. But I don't buy it. This is a solvable issue. If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century, issues like racism, or sexism, or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia, those are hard issues. You don't wake up one day no longer a racist. It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA, out of the soul of a people. But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives. Change the incentives, and the behavior changes, and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice. When Connecticut adopted this system, in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only. It's solvable, not by being a Democrat, not by being a Republican. It's solvable by being citizens, by being citizens, by being TEDizens. Because if you want to kickstart reform, look, I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy, I could give you back a republic.Okay. But even if you're not yet with me, even if you believe this is impossible, what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I've spoken about this issue again and again is, even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant. Irrelevant. I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke, I write in my book, and she said to me, ""Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless. There's nothing we can do."" When she said that, I scrambled. I tried to think, ""How do I respond to that hopelessness? What is that sense of hopelessness?"" And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son. And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying, ""Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do. Nothing you can do."" So would I do nothing? Would I just sit there? Accept it? Okay, nothing I can do? I'm going off to build Google Glass. Of course not. I would do everything I could, and I would do everything I could because this is what love means, that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned. And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals love this country.(Laughter)And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible, what this love of country says back is, ""That's just irrelevant."" We lose something dear, something everyone in this room loves and cherishes, if we lose this republic, and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong.So here's my question: Do you have that love? Do you have that love? Because if you do, then what the hell are you, what are the hell are we doing?When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, ""Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?"" Franklin said, ""A republic, madam, if you can keep it."" A republic. A representative democracy. A government dependent upon the people alone. We have lost that republic. All of us have to act to get it back.Thank you very much.(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim
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"This is me building a prototype for six hours straight. This is slave labor to my own project. This is what the DIY and maker movements really look like. And this is an analogy for today's construction and manufacturing world with brute-force assembly techniques. And this is exactly why I started studying how to program physical materials to build themselves.But there is another world. Today at the micro- and nanoscales, there's an unprecedented revolution happening. And this is the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter. There's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use DNA to self-assemble those functional structures.But if we look at the human scale, there's massive problems that aren't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies. If we look at construction and manufacturing, there's major inefficiencies, energy consumption and excessive labor techniques. In infrastructure, let's just take one example. Take piping. In water pipes, we have fixed-capacity water pipes that have fixed flow rates, except for expensive pumps and valves. We bury them in the ground. If anything changes — if the environment changes, the ground moves, or demand changes — we have to start from scratch and take them out and replace them.So I'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds, that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment. And I don't mean automated machines. I don't just mean smart machines that replace humans. But I mean programmable materials that build themselves. And that's called self-assembly, which is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction.So what do we need if we want to do this at the human scale? We need a few simple ingredients. The first ingredient is materials and geometry, and that needs to be tightly coupled with the energy source. And you can use passive energy — so heat, shaking, pneumatics, gravity, magnetics. And then you need smartly designed interactions. And those interactions allow for error correction, and they allow the shapes to go from one state to another state.So now I'm going to show you a number of projects that we've built, from one-dimensional, two-dimensional, three-dimensional and even four-dimensional systems. So in one-dimensional systems — this is a project called the self-folding proteins. And the idea is that you take the three-dimensional structure of a protein — in this case it's the crambin protein — you take the backbone — so no cross-linking, no environmental interactions — and you break that down into a series of components. And then we embed elastic. And when I throw this up into the air and catch it, it has the full three-dimensional structure of the protein, all of the intricacies. And this gives us a tangible model of the three-dimensional protein and how it folds and all of the intricacies of the geometry. So we can study this as a physical, intuitive model. And we're also translating that into two-dimensional systems — so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures.In three dimensions, we did a project last year at TEDGlobal with Autodesk and Arthur Olson where we looked at autonomous parts — so individual parts not pre-connected that can come together on their own. And we built 500 of these glass beakers. They had different molecular structures inside and different colors that could be mixed and matched. And we gave them away to all the TEDsters. And so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale. This is the polio virus. You shake it hard and it breaks apart. And then you shake it randomly and it starts to error correct and built the structure on its own. And this is demonstrating that through random energy, we can build non-random shapes.We even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale. Last year at TED Long Beach, we built an installation that builds installations. The idea was, could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects? So we built a large rotating chamber, and people would come up and spin the chamber faster or slower, adding energy to the system and getting an intuitive understanding of how self-assembly works and how we could use this as a macroscale construction or manufacturing technique for products.So remember, I said 4D. So today for the first time, we're unveiling a new project, which is a collaboration with Stratasys, and it's called 4D printing. The idea behind 4D printing is that you take multi-material 3D printing — so you can deposit multiple materials — and you add a new capability, which is transformation, that right off the bed, the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own. And this is like robotics without wires or motors. So you completely print this part, and it can transform into something else.We also worked with Autodesk on a software they're developing called Project Cyborg. And this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when. But most importantly, we can use this same software for the design of nanoscale self-assembly systems and human scale self-assembly systems. These are parts being printed with multi-material properties. Here's the first demonstration. A single strand dipped in water that completely self-folds on its own into the letters M I T. I'm biased. This is another part, single strand, dipped in a bigger tank that self-folds into a cube, a three-dimensional structure, on its own. So no human interaction. And we think this is the first time that a program and transformation has been embedded directly into the materials themselves. And it also might just be the manufacturing technique that allows us to produce more adaptive infrastructure in the future.So I know you're probably thinking, okay, that's cool, but how do we use any of this stuff for the built environment? So I've started a lab at MIT, and it's called the Self-Assembly Lab. And we're dedicated to trying to develop programmable materials for the built environment. And we think there's a few key sectors that have fairly near-term applications. One of those is in extreme environments. These are scenarios where it's difficult to build, our current construction techniques don't work, it's too large, it's too dangerous, it's expensive, too many parts. And space is a great example of that. We're trying to design new scenarios for space that have fully reconfigurable and self-assembly structures that can go from highly functional systems from one to another.Let's go back to infrastructure. In infrastructure, we're working with a company out of Boston called Geosyntec. And we're developing a new paradigm for piping. Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate, or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves. So this isn't expensive pumps or valves. This is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own.So I want to remind you today of the harsh realities of assembly in our world. These are complex things built with complex parts that come together in complex ways. So I would like to invite you from whatever industry you're from to join us in reinventing and reimagining the world, how things come together from the nanoscale to the human scale, so that we can go from a world like this to a world that's more like this.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/skylar_tibbits_the_emergence_of_4d_printing
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"In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed ""Jeopardy"" set. I mean, nine years is a long time. And given ""Jeopardy's"" average demographics, I think what that means is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead. (Laughter) But not all, a few are still alive. Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever. And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all. I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me. For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as, as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff.And I can't complain about this. I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet. If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name. (Laughter) And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years. But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there. I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about — Haley's comet or giant squids or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was. I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same. And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work. (Laughter)And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows. I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, that I was also going to miss ""Hollywood Squares"" and ""Family Feud."" I was going to miss my game shows. And later, in the mid-'80s, when ""Jeopardy"" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show. It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house. And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, where there was only one English language TV channel. There was Armed Forces TV, and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching. So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch ""Jeopardy.""I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid. I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s and holding my own, back when that was a fad. There's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know. You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know. And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power — the right fact deployed at exactly the right place.I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path, that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant. And so I sold out way too young. I didn't try to figure out what one does with that. I studied computers because I heard that was the thing, and I became a computer programmer — not an especially good one, not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on ""Jeopardy"" in 2004. But that's what I was doing.And it made it doubly ironic — my computer background — a few years later, I think 2009 or so, when I got another phone call from ""Jeopardy"" saying, ""It's early days yet, but IBM tells us they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.' Are you up for this?"" This was the first I'd heard of it. And of course I said yes, for several reasons. One, because playing ""Jeopardy"" is a great time. It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on. (Laughter) And I would do it for nothing. I don't think they know that, luckily, but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons. I just love ""Jeopardy,"" and I always have. And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future. People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, and now I could be on the stage with it. I was not going to say no.The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win. I had taken some artificial intelligence classes. I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on ""Jeopardy."" People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a ""Jeopardy"" clue in a natural language like English and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings, unpack the meaning of the clue. The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do, very hard for a computer. And I thought, well this is going to be child's play. Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species. (Laughter)But as the years went on, as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, I started to get occasional updates from them, and I started to get a little more worried. I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph. It was a scatter chart showing performance on ""Jeopardy,"" tens of thousands of dots representing ""Jeopardy"" champions up at the top with their performance plotted on number of — I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess, clues responded to — versus the accuracy of those answers. So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to. And at first, it was very low. There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena. But then you see the line start to go up. And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud. And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color. And thought, what are these? ""The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings."" And I saw this line coming for me. And I realized, this is it. This is what it looks like when the future comes for you. (Laughter) It's not the Terminator's gun sight; it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at.And when the game eventually happened about a year later, it was very different than the ""Jeopardy"" games I'd been used to. We were not playing in L.A. on the regular ""Jeopardy"" set. Watson does not travel. Watson's actually huge. It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory. We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room. The only other ""Jeopardy"" contestant to this day I've ever been inside. And so Watson does not travel. You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage.So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer. And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage. There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage. Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, and there's the thing in the middle of their court. And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers cheering on their little darling, having poured millions of dollars into this hoping against hope that the humans screw up, and holding up ""Go Watson"" signs and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right. I think guys had ""W-A-T-S-O-N"" written on their bellies in grease paint. If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters ""W-A-T-S-O-N"" written on their gut, it's an unpleasant sight.But they were right. They were exactly right. I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, but Watson won handily. And I remember standing there behind the podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking. It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer. And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick. And I remember thinking, this is it. I felt obsolete. I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers. And it hasn't been the last.If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally — and I see this all the time — that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist. And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions. You don't need human assistants for that anymore. I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it. And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they're replacing, but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper. So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be. I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, we'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren. I've heard other people say quite the opposite, that this is yet another tier of the middle class that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous, something that we should worry about.I'm not an economist myself. All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible. Here's the one thing that I was ever good at, and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people and thousands of processors working in parallel and they could do the same thing. They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV, and ""I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore."" And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions. I'm sure many of you remember a distant time when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers. And suddenly there was a machine that did that, and now we don't need to remember that anymore. I have read that there's now actually evidence that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS, because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore. We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard. And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber. And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that? Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less? As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me.The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important. The things we know are still important. I came to believe there were two advantages that those of us who have these things in our head have over somebody who says, ""Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second."" There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time.The advantage of volume, first, just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays. There's so much information out there. Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance. Now it's really not possible to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor. There's just too much. They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so, the sum total of human information. That means between now and late 2014, we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together. It's doubling every 18 months now. This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts. A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in? Who do I vote for? Do I take this job or that one? These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts. If we have those facts at our mental fingertips, we're going to be able to make informed decisions. If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up, we may be in trouble. According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map. If you can't do that first step, are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy? Quite probably not. At some point you're just going to be like, ""You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it."" And you'll make a less informed decision.The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips. I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith. She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand. She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says, ""Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach."" And they say, ""What do you mean? We just got here."" And she said, ""In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month, he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea and you see the waves churning way out there, that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach."" What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this? Her parents thought about it, and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her. They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, the day after Christmas, 2004, that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before.Now when facts come in handy like that — I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time — normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life. But in this case it happened in real life. And it happens in real life all the time. It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation. It's a meeting or job interview or first date or some relationship that gets lubricated because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge. You say where you're from, and I say, ""Oh, yeah."" Or your alma mater or your job, and I know just a little something about it, enough to get the ball rolling. People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you. It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met. That's often the advantage of time. And it's not effective if you say, ""Well, hold on. You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up. Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo."" That doesn't work. That's just annoying. (Laughter)The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, ""It's always better to know a thing than not to know it."" And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that. I have always believed that the things we know — that knowledge is an absolute good, that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads are what make us who we are, as individuals and as a species. I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete. I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty, so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together. I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere, reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of ""Simpsons"" episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs. I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, to our search engines and our smartphones.In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, things don't always end well. Those movies are never about beautiful utopias. It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in ""2001."" Things always go terribly wrong. And I feel like we're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in. This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future. On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it's ever been in human history, where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips. And on the other hand, we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, and why would we ever bother learning anything new.Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in. And we can all make that choice. We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, who don't just say, ""Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, I don't have to learn anymore,"" or ""Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime. I don't have to learn new things anymore."" No, every day we should be striving to learn something new. We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us. That's where the people you see on ""Jeopardy"" come from. These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book. I've met a lot of them. For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject.We can live in one of these two worlds. We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, continue to be the thing that makes us special, or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_jennings_watson_jeopardy_and_me_the_obsolete_know_it_all
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"So I'll be talking about the success of my campus, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, in educating students of all types, across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas. What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder — students of color, students underrepresented in selected areas. And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students, Latino students, students from low-income backgrounds, to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering.And so I begin with a story about my childhood. We all are products of our childhood experiences. It's hard for me to believe that it's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham, Alabama, a kid who loved getting A's, a kid who loved math, who loved to read, a kid who would say to the teacher — when the teacher said, ""Here are 10 problems,"" to the class, this little fat kid would say, ""Give us 10 more."" And the whole class would say, ""Shut up, Freeman."" And there was a designated kicker every day. And so I was always asking this question: ""Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn?""And amazingly, one week in church, when I really didn't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems, I heard this man say this: ""If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham, we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education."" And I looked up and said, ""Who is that man?"" And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King. And I said to my parents, ""I've got to go. I want to go. I want to be a part of this."" And they said, ""Absolutely not.""(Laughter)And we had a rough go of it. And at that time, quite frankly, you really did not talk back to your parents. And somehow I said, ""You know, you guys are hypocrites. You make me go to this. You make me listen. The man wants me to go, and now you say no."" And they thought about it all night. And they came into my room the next morning. They had not slept. They had been literally crying and praying and thinking, ""Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail?"" And they decided to do it. And when they came in to tell me, I was at first elated. And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did. And one of the points I make to people all the time is that sometimes when people do things that are courageous, it doesn't really mean that they're that courageous. It simply means that they believe it's important to do it.I wanted a better education. I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books. I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers, but the resources we needed. And as a result of that experience, in the middle of the week, while I was there in jail, Dr. King came and said with our parents, ""What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born.""I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963. And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 ""Lincoln"" movie: It's history. And the real question is, what lessons did we learn? Well amazingly, the most important for me was this: That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education. They can be taught to be passionate about wanting to learn and to love the idea of asking questions.And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963. And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South, as you know, and, quite frankly, it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there. And so we had black and white students and others who began to attend. And it has been for 50 years an experiment. The experiment is this: Is it possible to have institutions in our country, universities, where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience?Now what is especially important about that experience for me is this: We found that we could do a lot in the arts and humanities and social sciences. And so we began to work on that, for years in the '60s. And we produced a number of people in law, all the way to the humanities. We produced great artists. Beckett is our muse. A lot of our students get into theater. It's great work. The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face — that students in the sciences and engineering, black students were not succeeding. But when I looked at the data, what I found was that, quite frankly, students in general, large numbers were not making it. And as a result of that, we decided to do something that would help, first of all, the group at the bottom, African-American students, and then Hispanic students.And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, philanthropists, said, ""We'd like to help."" Robert Meyerhoff said, ""Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys, if it's not about basketball, is not positive? I'd like to make a difference, to do something that's positive."" We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program. And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things. And the question is this: How is it that now we lead the country in producing African-Americans who go on to complete Ph.D.'s in science and engineering and M.D./Ph.D.'s? That's a big deal. Give me a hand for that. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. It really is.(Applause)You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering. Quite frankly, you're talking about Americans. If you don't know it, while 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics who begin with a major in science and engineering will actually graduate in science and engineering, only 32 percent of whites who begin with majors in those areas actually succeed and graduate in those areas, and only 42 percent of Asian-Americans.And so, the real question is, what is the challenge? Well a part of it, of course, is K-12. We need to strengthen K-12. But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses. Whether you know it or not, large numbers of students with high SAT's and large numbers of A.P. credits who go to the most prestigious universities in our country begin in pre-med or pre-engineering and engineering, and they end up changing their majors. And the number one reason, we find, quite frankly, is they did not do well in first year science courses. In fact, we call first year science and engineering, typically around America, weed-out courses or barrier courses.How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two? It's an American challenge. Half of you in the room. I know. I know. I know. And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it. We need to find ways of making it happen.So what are the four things we did to help minority students that now are helping students in general? Number one: high expectations. It takes an understanding of the academic preparation of students — their grades, the rigor of the course work, their test-taking skills, their attitude, the fire in their belly, the passion for the work, to make it. And so doing things to help students prepare to be in that position, very important. But equally important, it takes an understanding that it's hard work that makes the difference. I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are. Smart simply means you're ready to learn. You're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions.I. I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate, said that when he was growing up in New York, all of his friends' parents would ask them ""What did you learn in school?"" at the end of a day. And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, ""Izzy, did you ask a good question today?"" And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious. And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel.Interestingly enough, an example: One young man who earned a C in the first course and wanted to go on to med school, we said, ""We need to have you retake the course, because you need a strong foundation if you're going to move to the next level."" Every foundation makes the difference in the next level. He retook the course. That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D./Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He now works at Harvard. Nice story. Give him a hand for that too.(Applause)Secondly, it's not about test scores only. Test scores are important, but they're not the most important thing. One young woman had great grades, but test scores were not as high. But she had a factor that was very important. She never missed a day of school, K-12. There was fire in that belly. That young woman went on, and she is today with an M.D./Ph.D. from Hopkins. She's on the faculty, tenure track in psychiatry, Ph.D. in neuroscience. She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients. Big hand for her. Big hand for her. (Applause) And so high expectations, very important.Secondly, the idea of building community among the students. You all know that so often in science and engineering we tend to think cutthroat. Students are not taught to work in groups. And that's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other, to build trust among them, to support each other, to learn how to ask good questions, but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity. As you know, it's one thing to earn an A yourself, it's another thing to help someone else do well. And so to feel that sense of responsibility makes all the difference in the world. So building community among those students, very important.Third, the idea of, it takes researchers to produce researchers. Whether you're talking about artists producing artists or you're talking about people getting into the social sciences, whatever the discipline — and especially in science and engineering, as in art, for example — you need scientists to pull the students into the work. And so our students are working in labs regularly.And one great example that you'll appreciate: During a snowstorm in Baltimore several years ago, the guy on our campus with this Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant literally came back to work in his lab after several days, and all these students had refused to leave the lab. They had food they had packed out. They were in the lab working, and they saw the work, not as schoolwork, but as their lives. They knew they were working on AIDS research. They were looking at this amazing protein design. And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work. And he said, ""It doesn't get any better than that.""And then finally, if you've got the community and you've got the high expectations and you've got researchers producing researchers, you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students, even in the classroom. I'll never forget a faculty member calling the staff and saying, ""I've got this young man in class, a young black guy, and he seems like he's just not excited about the work. He's not taking notes. We need to talk to him."" What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying, ""Let me see how I can work with them. Let me get the staff to help me out."" It was that connecting. That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D./Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke. Give him a big hand for that.(Applause)And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us, not only finally with evaluation, assessing what works. And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses. And so we redesigned chemistry, we redesigned physics. But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences. Because so many students are bored in class. Do you know that? Many students, K-12 and in universities, don't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk. They need to be engaged.And so we have done — if you look at our website at the Chemistry Discovery Center, you'll see people coming from all over the country to look at how we are redesigning courses, having an emphasis on collaboration, use of technology, using problems out of our biotech companies on our campus, and not giving students the theories, but having them struggle with those theories. And it's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland, more and more courses are being redesigned.It's called academic innovation.And what does all of that mean? It means that now, not just in science and engineering, we now have programs in the arts, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in teacher education, even particularly for women in I.T. If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000. And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work. And most important, giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work. Most important, if a student has a sense of self, it is amazing how the dreams and the values can make all the difference in the world.When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, ""I wonder what my future could be."" I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world.Aristotle said, ""Excellence is never an accident. It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. It represents the wisest option among many alternatives."" And then he said something that gives me goosebumps. He said, ""Choice, not chance, determines your destiny."" Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values.Thank you all very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/freeman_hrabowski_4_pillars_of_college_success_in_science
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"So just by a show of hands, how many of you all have a robot at home? Not very many of you. Okay. And actually of those hands, if you don't include Roomba how many of you have a robot at home? So a couple. That's okay. That's the problem that we're trying to solve at Romotive — that I and the other 20 nerds at Romotive are obsessed with solving.So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or 80. And as it turns out, that's a really hard problem, because you have to build a small, portable robot that's not only really affordable, but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids. This robot can't be creepy or uncanny. He should be friendly and cute.So meet Romo. Romo's a robot that uses a device you already know and love — your iPhone — as his brain. And by leveraging the power of the iPhone's processor, we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks, which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past.When Romo wakes up, he's in creature mode. So he's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face. If I duck down, he'll follow me. He's wary, so he'll keep his eyes on me. If I come over here, he'll turn to follow me. If I come over here — (Laughs) He's smart. And if I get too close to him, he gets scared just like any other creature. So in a lot of ways, Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own. Thanks, little guy. (Sneezing sound) Bless you.And if I want to explore the world — uh-oh, Romo's tired — if I want to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device. So here's the iPad. And Romo will actually stream video to this device. So I can see everything that Romo sees, and I get a robot's-eye-view of the world. Now this is a free app on the App Store, so if any of you guys had this app on your phones, we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together.So I'll show you really quickly, Romo actually — he's streaming video, so you can see me and the entire TED audience. If I get in front of Romo here. And if I want to control him, I can just drive. So I can drive him around, and I can take pictures of you. I've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person TED audience. So I'll snap a picture. And in the same way that you scroll through content on an iPad, I can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device. So there are all of you through Romo's eyes. And finally, because Romo is an extension of me, I can express myself through his emotions. So I can go in and I can say let's make Romo excited.But the most important thing about Romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive. You do not have to teach someone how to drive Romo. In fact, who would like to drive a robot? Okay. Awesome. Here you go. Thank you, Scott.And even cooler, you actually don't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him. So he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices. So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels. So we were talking before about telepresence, and this is a really cool example. You can imagine an eight-year-old girl, for example, who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot. That girl can take her iPhone, put it on the robot, send an email to Grandma, who lives on the other side of the country. Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year.Thanks, Scott.(Applause)So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today. But I just want to finish by talking about something that we're working on in the future. This is actually something that one of our engineers, Dom, built in a weekend. It's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly. This allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want. You do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for Romo. And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser, which is what you see Romo doing on the left. And then if you have something you like, you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life, run the program in real life. And then if you have something you're proud of, you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world. So all of these wi-fi–enabled robots actually learn from each other.The reason we're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal. They change from person to person. So we think that if you're going to have a robot in your home, that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination.So I wish that I could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like. To be honest, I have no idea. But what we do know is that it isn't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away. The future of personal robotics is happening today, and it's going to depend on small, agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves. So we can't wait to get you all robots, and we can't wait to see what you build.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/keller_rinaudo_a_mini_robot_powered_by_your_phone
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"I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work.When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like.At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it's all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, ""This was a terrible mistake. I'll never do it again.""(Laughter)""Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos."" But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways.And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, ""Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled."" And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed.So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, ""Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We'll pay you three dollars for it."" And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, ""Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?"" If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, ""Do you want to build another one?"" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, ""No more. It's not worth it for me."" This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant.There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did. We asked people, ""Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?"" And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, ""Do you want to build another one for $2.70?"" And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, ""Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?"" And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes.Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference.Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important.There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don't. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built.What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it.Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, ""How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?"" And everybody raised their hand. I said, ""How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?"" Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, ""How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?"" And they didn't raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, ""What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?"" And they came up with all kinds of ideas.They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn't] care. And he would say, ""At the moment I directed you in this way, and now that I'm directing you in this way, everything will be okay."" But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing.The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say ""Uh huh,"" and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder.(Laughter)What happened in those three conditions?In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much — 30 cents per sheet.And this is basically the result we had before. You shred people's efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you'd do good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder.Now there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying ""Uh huh,"" that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation.The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble.(Laughter)I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can't say I enjoy those pieces. I can't say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones.(Laughter)And there's an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, ""Here is my cake."" No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn't really feel like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder.(Laughter)Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree.So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, ""Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?"" And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami —(Laughter)and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say — if you were a builder, do you think [you'd say], ""Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?"" Or ""I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?"" Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well.In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing — builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more.(Laughter)They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version.(Laughter)Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things.Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, ""How much would you sell your kids for?"" Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money.(Laughter)On good days.(Laughter)But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, ""Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale.""(Laughter)How much would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough.(Laughter)By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don't see that other people don't see things our way.Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don't care as much.I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we've switched, and now we're in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it — meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.The good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them — how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees — I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work
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"I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world. Twenty-four years ago, I had — a sophomore in college, I had a series of fainting spells. No alcohol was involved. And I ended up in student health, and they ran some labwork and came back right away, and said, ""Kidney problems."" And before I knew it, I was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me. And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, ""Uh oh, this is bad news."" And their diagnosis was this: They said, ""You have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually, you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away, and you'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant, and you're not likely to live more than two or three years.""Now, with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis, it just sucked me in immediately, as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me, until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room, who became a dear friend, and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases, and said, ""Eric, these people who get this are normally in their '70s and '80s. They don't know anything about you. Wake up. Take control of your health and get on with your life."" And I did.Now, these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people. In fact, these professionals were miracle workers, but they're working in a flawed, expensive system that's set up the wrong way. It's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need. It's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us. It's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails, and so something either works or you die. And it's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don't ask any questions.Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally. It's unaffordable globally. We need to invent what I call a personal health system. So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail?Now, I'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine, Libby, somebody I've become quite attached to over the last six months. This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby. This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have. Now, this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today, and you'll notice, on the edge of this image, there's some dark spots there, which was really concerning to me. So we're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how Libby's doing. This is not a wardrobe malfunction. I have to take my belt off here. Don't you in the front row worry or anything. (Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante. This is a portable ultrasound. It can plug into a smartphone. It can plug into a tablet. Mobisante is up in Redmond, Washington, and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself. They're not approved to do this. Patients are not approved to do this. This is a concept demo, so I want to make that clear. All right, I gotta gel up. Now the people in the front row are very nervous. (Laughter)And I want to actually introduce you to Dr. Batiuk, who's another friend of mine. He's up in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon. So let me just make sure. Hey, Dr. Batiuk. Can you hear me okay? And actually, can you see Libby?Thomas Batuik: Hi there, Eric. You look busy. How are you?Eric Dishman: I'm good. I'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people. It's wonderful. So I just wanted to see, is this the image you need to get? And I know you want to look and see if those spots are still there.TB: Okay. Well let's scan around a little bit here, give me a lay of the land.ED: All right.TB: Okay. Turn it a little bit inside, a little bit toward the middle for me. Okay, that's good. How about up a little bit? Okay, freeze that image. That's a good one for me.ED: All right. Now last week, when I did this, you had me measure that spot to the right. Should I do that again?TB: Yeah, let's do that.ED: All right. This is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring, but I've got it, I think, and I'll save that image and send it to you. So tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means. It's not something I was very happy about.TB: Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney. Most of the time it doesn't create any kind of mischief, but it does warrant looking at, so I'm happy we've got an opportunity to look at it today, make sure that it's not growing, it's not creating any problems. Based on the other images we have, I'm really happy how it looks today.ED: All right. Well, I guess we'll double check it when I come in. I've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to let you do that in the clinic, because I don't think I can do that one on myself.TB: Good choice.ED: All right, thanks, Dr. Batiuk. All right. So what you're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies, of mobile, social and analytic technologies. These are the foundations of what's going to make personal health possible.Now there's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now, and it's care anywhere, care networking and care customization. And you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with Dr. Batiuk.So let's start with care anywhere. Humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s. It is time to update our thinking. We have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care, because these places are often the wrong tool, and the most expensive tool, for the job. And these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients, especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections. And many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built. Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age. This was me in third grade. I broke my elbow very seriously, had to have surgery, worried that they were going to actually lose the arm. Recovering from the surgery in the hospital, I get bedsores. Those bedsores become infected, and they give me an antibiotic which I end up being allergic to, and now my whole body breaks out, and now all of those become infected. The longer I stayed in the hospital, the sicker I became, and the more expensive it became, and this happens to millions of people around the world every year. The future of personal health that I'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model, not in a hospital or clinic. You have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job. Now the smartphones that we're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them, and a whole array of others, today, and as sensing is built into these, we'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we've never had before. Many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now. Now the software is also getting smarter, right? Think about a coach, an agent online, that's going to help me do safe self-care. That same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing, and the device will say, ""Up, down, left, right, ah, Eric, that's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor.""Now, if we've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere, it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff, and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about, care networking. We have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care. Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best, and it is deadly at worst. Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members. I had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school, when we're under treatment for the kidney, and suddenly, they're like, ""Oh, we think you have a heart problem."" And I have these palpitations that are showing up. They put me through five weeks of tests — very expensive, very scary — before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper, my meds list that I've been carrying to every single appointment, and says, ""Oh my gosh."" Three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me. I did not have a heart problem. I had an overdose problem. I had a care coordination problem. And this happens to millions of people every year. I want to use technology that we're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport. Now this is the most frightening thing to me. Out of all the care I've had in hospitals and clinics around the world, the first time I've ever had a true team-based care experience was at Legacy Good Sam these last six months for me to go get this. And this is a picture of my graduation team from Legacy. There's a couple of the folks here. You'll recognize Dr. Batiuk. We just talked to him. Here's Jenny, one of the nurses, Allison, who helped manage the transplant list, and a dozen other people who aren't pictured, a pharmacist, a psychologist, a nutritionist, even a financial counselor, Lisa, who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles. I wept the day I graduated. I should have been happy, because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors, but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team.And here's the most important part. The other people in this picture are me and my wife, Ashley. Legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics. That's the only way that the model works. My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities. We're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers, as well as have an exchange network online, where, for example, I can donate three hours of care a day to your mom, if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals, and we exchange all of that online. The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past. The future of health care is smart teams, and you'd better be on that team for yourself.Now, the last thing that I want to talk to you about is care customization, because if you've got care anywhere and you've got care networking, those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system, but there's still too much guesswork. Randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis, and those are important things, don't get me wrong. These population studies that we've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives, but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages, not unique individuals, because at the end of the day, the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied. That's what's leading to the guesswork. The technologies that are coming, high-performance computing, analytics, big data that everyone's talking about, will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients. And the magic here is, experiment on my avatar in software, not my body in suffering.Now, I've had two examples I want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey. The first was quite simple. I finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity. It's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live. I was optimizing my life for quality of life, and quality of life for me means time in snow. So on my chart, I forced them to put, ""Patient goal: low doses of drugs over longer periods of time, side effects friendly to skiing."" And I think that's why I achieved longevity. I think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that I had. Now the second example of customization — and by the way, you can't customize care if you don't know your own goals, so health care can't know those until you know your own health care goals. But the second example I want to give you is, I happened to be an early guinea pig, and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced. Now it took about two weeks of processing on Intel's highest-end servers to make this happen, and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data. And at the end of all of that, they said, ""Yes, those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong, and we have a better path forward."" The future that Intel's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours, and make this kind of tool available, not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world, but in the mainstream — every patient, every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing. And I tell you, this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime.So these three pillars of personal health, care anywhere, care networking, care customization, are happening in pieces now, but this vision will completely fail if we don't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles. It's what my friend Verna said: Wake up and take control of your health. Because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways.And it's in that spirit that I want to introduce you to one last friend, very quickly. Tracey Gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that I was never supposed to have.(Applause)So Tracey, just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you.Tracey Gamley: For me, it was really easy. I only had one night in the hospital. The surgery was done laparoscopically, so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen, and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I'd done before without any changes.ED: Well, I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again. So ""thank you"" feel likes a really trite word, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life.(Applause)This TED stage and all of the TED stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies, and I've done that here today, and I've seen amazing things coming from TED speakers, I mean, my gosh, artificial kidneys, even printable kidneys, that are coming. But until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us, and even when they are, it's up to us to care for, and even save, one another. I hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone. Thanks so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_dishman_health_care_should_be_a_team_sport
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"I'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century, specifically to June 24, 1833. The British Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge. It's the first night of the meeting, and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever.An elderly, white-haired man stands up. The members of the Association are shocked to realize that it's the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who hadn't even left his house in years until that day. They're even more shocked by what he says.""You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers.""Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs. They were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the British Association.The crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly. A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up and quieted the audience. He politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist.""If 'philosophers' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term,"" he said, ""then, by analogy with 'artist,' we may form 'scientist.'"" This was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public, only 179 years ago.I first found out about this confrontation when I was in graduate school, and it kind of blew me away. I mean, how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833? What were scientists called before? What had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment? Prior to this meeting, those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs. Think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils, like Charles Darwin, for example, or, the hired help of a nobleman, like Joseph Priestley, who was the literary companion to the Marquis of Lansdowne when he discovered oxygen. After this, they were scientists, professionals with a particular scientific method, goals, societies and funding.Much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at Cambridge University in 1812: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, Richard Jones and William Whewell. These were brilliant, driven men who accomplished amazing things. Charles Babbage, I think known to most TEDsters, invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer. John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere, and, in his spare time, co-invented photography. I'm sure we could all be that productive without Facebook or Twitter to take up our time. Richard Jones became an important economist who later influenced Karl Marx. And Whewell not only coined the term scientist, as well as the words anode, cathode and ion, but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides. In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813, the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts. They talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution. They felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century. It was time for a new revolution, which they pledged to bring about, and what's so amazing about these guys is, not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams, but they actually carried them out, even beyond their wildest dreams. And I'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made.About 200 years before, Francis Bacon and then, later, Isaac Newton, had proposed an inductive scientific method. Now that's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws, which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise. However, in 1809, David Ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different, deductive method. The problem was that an influential group at Oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics, this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too. The members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed. They wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers, university students and members of the public. Reading one of Herschel's books was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin that he would later say, ""Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me. It made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge."" It also shaped Darwin's scientific method, as well as that used by his peers. [Science for the public good]Previously, it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen, or for one's own personal gain. For example, ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports. Harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains. The philosophical breakfast club changed that, working together. Whewell's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps that freely provided the harbormasters' knowledge to all ship captains. Herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of South Africa, and, as he complained to Whewell, he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble. The four men really helped each other in every way. They also relentlessly lobbied the British government for the money to build Babbage's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society. In the days before pocket calculators, the numbers that most professionals needed — bankers, insurance agents, ship captains, engineers — were to be found in lookup books like this, filled with tables of figures. These tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as — and this is amazing — computers, but these calculations were really difficult. I mean, this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year. Each month required 1,365 calculations, so these tables were filled with mistakes. Babbage's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables. Two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the Science Museum of London using his own plans. This is the one now at the Computer History Museum in California, and it calculates accurately. It actually works. Later, Babbage's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense. It had a separate memory and central processor. It was capable of iteration, conditional branching and parallel processing, and it was programmable using punched cards, an idea Babbage took from Jacquard's loom. Tragically, Babbage's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public. [New scientific institutions]Founded in Bacon's time, the Royal Society of London was the foremost scientific society in England and even in the rest of the world. By the 19th century, it had become a kind of gentleman's club populated mainly by antiquarians, literary men and the nobility. The members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies, including the British Association. These new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results. They reinstated the tradition of the Q&A after scientific papers were read, which had been discontinued by the Royal Society as being ungentlemanly. And for the first time, they gave women a foot in the door of science. Members were encouraged to bring their wives, daughters and sisters to the meetings of the British Association, and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one, they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well. The British Association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members. [External funding for science]Up to the 19th century, natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies. Occasionally, there were prizes, such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century, for solving the so-called longitude problem, but prizes were only given after the fact, when they were given at all. On the advice of the philosophical breakfast club, the British Association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy, the tides, fossil fish, shipbuilding, and many other areas. These grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research, but they also encouraged thinking outside the box, rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question. Eventually, the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit, and this has become — fortunately it's become — a major part of the scientific landscape today.So the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist. That's the heroic part of their story. There's a flip side as well. They did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution. They would have been deeply dismayed by today's disjunction between science and the rest of culture. It's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of American adults have even a very basic level of science literacy, and this was tested by asking simple questions like, ""Did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time?"" and ""What proportion of the Earth is covered in water?"" Once scientists became members of a professional group, they were slowly walled off from the rest of us. This is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends.Charles Darwin said, ""I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work."" In fact, ""Origin of Species"" was written for a general and popular audience, and was widely read when it first appeared. Darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten, that science is not only for scientists.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_snyder_the_philosophical_breakfast_club
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"Let's talk dirty. A few years ago, oddly enough, I needed the bathroom, and I found one, a public bathroom, and I went into the stall, and I prepared to do what I'd done most of my life: use the toilet, flush the toilet, forget about the toilet. And for some reason that day, instead, I asked myself a question, and it was, where does this stuff go? And with that question, I found myself plunged into the world of sanitation — there's more coming — (Laughter) — sanitation, toilets and poop, and I have yet to emerge. And that's because it's such an enraging, yet engaging place to be.To go back to that toilet, it wasn't a particularly fancy toilet, it wasn't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization. That's the other WTO. (Laughter) But it had a lockable door, it had privacy, it had water, it had soap so I could wash my hands, and I did because I'm a woman, and we do that.(Laughter) (Applause)But that day, when I asked that question, I learned something, and that was that I'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right, when in fact it's a privilege. 2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet. They don't have a bucket or a box. Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet. And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open. And he does that every day, and every day, probably, that guy in the picture walks on by, because he sees that little boy, but he doesn't see him.But he should, because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers. Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit. All those things, the eggs, the cysts, the bacteria, the viruses, all those can travel in one gram of human feces. How? Well, that little boy will not have washed his hands. He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet. In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in, the most common symptoms associated with those diseases, diarrhea, is now a bit of a joke. It's the runs, the Hershey squirts, the squits. Where I come from, we call it Delhi belly, as a legacy of empire. But if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency, this is the picture that you come up with. (Laughter) Still not sure about the bikini. And here's another image of diarrhea. This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. And that's her dad. But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction. And the cost to the world is immense: 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation. These are cholera beds in Haiti. You'll have heard of cholera, but we don't hear about diarrhea. It gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases.But we know how to fix this. We know, because in the mid-19th century, wonderful Victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet, and disease dropped dramatically. Child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history. The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal, and they were choosing over the Pill, anesthesia, and surgery. It's a wonderful waste disposal device.But I think that it's so good — it doesn't smell, we can put it in our house, we can lock it behind a door — and I think we've locked it out of conversation too. We don't have a neutral word for it. Poop's not particularly adequate. Shit offends people. Feces is too medical.Because I can't explain otherwise, when I look at the figures, what's going on. We know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation, but if you look at the budgets of countries, developing and developed, you'll think there's something wrong with the math, because you'll expect absurdities like Pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation, even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in Pakistan every year. But then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget, and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply, which is great; we all need water. No one's going to refuse clean water. But the humble latrine, or flush toilet, reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water. Think about it. That little boy who's running back into his house, he may have a nice, clean fresh water supply, but he's got dirty hands that he's going to contaminate his water supply with.And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development, because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us. So a toilet can put a girl back in school. Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation. They've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in. We've all done that, but they do it every day, and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating, it just gets too much. And I understand that. Who can blame them? So if you met an educationalist and said, ""I can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing,"" you'd make a lot of friends in education.That's not the only thing it can do for you. Poop can cook your dinner. It's got nutrients in it. We ingest nutrients. We excrete nutrients as well. We don't keep them all. In Rwanda, they are now getting 75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners' bowels. So these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in Butare. They're genocidal inmates, most of them, and they're stirring the contents of their own latrines, because if you put poop in a sealed environment, in a tank, pretty much like a stomach, then, pretty much like a stomach, it gives off gas, and you can cook with it. And you might think it's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit, but it's also good economic sense, because they're saving a million dollars a year. They're cutting down on deforestation, and they've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible, infinite and free at the point of production.It's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives. Here's a woman who's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes, which is what you think it is, except not quite, because it's actually donated. There is now a new career path called stool donor. It's like the new sperm donor. Because she has been suffering from a superbug called C. diff, and it's resistant to antibiotics in many cases. She's been suffering for years. She gets a dose of healthy human feces, and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent. It's astonishing, but hardly anyone is still doing it. Maybe it's the ick factor. That's okay, because there's a team of research scientists in Canada who have now created a stool sample, a fake stool sample which is called RePOOPulate.So you'd be thinking by now, okay, the solution's simple, we give everyone a toilet. And this is where it gets really interesting, because it's not that simple, because we are not simple. So the really interesting, exciting work — this is the engaging bit — in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology. We need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware. They've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground.So the idea is to manipulate human emotion. It's been done for decades. The soap companies did it in the early 20th century. They tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. They tried selling it as sexy. Everyone bought it. In India now there's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that don't have a toilet. It's called ""No Loo, No I Do."" (Laughter) And in case you think that poster's just propaganda, here's Priyanka, 23 years old. I met her last October in India, and she grew up in a conservative environment. She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India, and she was engaged at 14, and then at 21 or so, she moved into her in-law's house. And she was horrified to get there and find that they didn't have a toilet. She'd grown up with a latrine. It was no big deal, but it was a latrine. And the first night she was there, she was told that at 4 o'clock in the morning — her mother-in-law got her up, told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open. And she was scared. She was scared of drunks hanging around. She was scared of snakes. She was scared of rape. After three days, she did an unthinkable thing. She left. And if you know anything about rural India, you'll know that's an unspeakably courageous thing to do. But not just that. She got her toilet, and now she goes around all the other villages in India persuading other women to do the same thing. It's what I call social contagion, and it's really powerful and really exciting.Another version of this, another village in India near where Priyanka lives is this village, called Lakara, and about a year ago, it had no toilets whatsoever. Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera. Some visitors came, using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other. Somehow, people who'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought, ""Oops."" Not only that, but they were ingesting their neighbors' shit. That's what really made them change their behavior. So this woman, this boy's mother installed this latrine in a few hours. Her entire life, she'd been using the banana field behind, but she installed the latrine in a few hours. It cost nothing. It's going to save that boy's life.So when I get despondent about the state of sanitation, even though these are pretty exciting times because we've got the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reinventing the toilet, which is great, we've got Matt Damon going on bathroom strike, which is great for humanity, very bad for his colon. But there are things to worry about. It's the most off-track Millennium Development Goal. It's about 50 or so years off track. We're not going to meet targets, providing people with sanitation at this rate. So when I get sad about sanitation, I think of Japan, because Japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks, and now it's a nation of what are called Woshurettos, washlet toilets. They have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely, hands-free cleaning experience, and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the ""marriage-saver."" (Laughter)But most importantly, what they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it. I hope that we can do that. It's not a difficult thing to do. All we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent, shameful issue that it is. And don't think that it's just in the poor world that things are wrong. Our sewers are crumbling. Things are going wrong here too. The solution to all of this is pretty easy. I'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing, and that's to go out, protest, speak about the unspeakable, and talk shit.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rose_george_let_s_talk_crap_seriously
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"So let's start with some good news, and the good news has to do with what do we know based on biomedical research that actually has changed the outcomes for many very serious diseases?Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children. When I was a student, the mortality rate was about 95 percent. Today, some 25, 30 years later, we're talking about a mortality rate that's reduced by 85 percent. Six thousand children each year who would have previously died of this disease are cured. If you want the really big numbers, look at these numbers for heart disease. Heart disease used to be the biggest killer, particularly for men in their 40s. Today, we've seen a 63-percent reduction in mortality from heart disease — remarkably, 1.1 million deaths averted every year. AIDS, incredibly, has just been named, in the past month, a chronic disease, meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with HIV is expected not to live weeks, months, or a couple of years, as we said only a decade ago, but is thought to live decades, probably to die in his '60s or '70s from other causes altogether. These are just remarkable, remarkable changes in the outlook for some of the biggest killers. And one in particular that you probably wouldn't know about, stroke, which has been, along with heart disease, one of the biggest killers in this country, is a disease in which now we know that if you can get people into the emergency room within three hours of the onset, some 30 percent of them will be able to leave the hospital without any disability whatsoever.Remarkable stories, good-news stories, all of which boil down to understanding something about the diseases that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early. Early detection, early intervention, that's the story for these successes.Unfortunately, the news is not all good. Let's talk about one other story which has to do with suicide. Now this is, of course, not a disease, per se. It's a condition, or it's a situation that leads to mortality. What you may not realize is just how prevalent it is. There are 38,000 suicides each year in the United States. That means one about every 15 minutes. Third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25. It's kind of an extraordinary story when you realize that this is twice as common as homicide and actually more common as a source of death than traffic fatalities in this country. Now, when we talk about suicide, there is also a medical contribution here, because 90 percent of suicides are related to a mental illness: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, borderline personality. There's a long list of disorders that contribute, and as I mentioned before, often early in life.But it's not just the mortality from these disorders. It's also morbidity. If you look at disability, as measured by the World Health Organization with something they call the Disability Adjusted Life Years, it's kind of a metric that nobody would think of except an economist, except it's one way of trying to capture what is lost in terms of disability from medical causes, and as you can see, virtually 30 percent of all disability from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders, neuropsychiatric syndromes.You're probably thinking that doesn't make any sense. I mean, cancer seems far more serious. Heart disease seems far more serious. But you can see actually they are further down this list, and that's because we're talking here about disability. What drives the disability for these disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar and depression? Why are they number one here?Well, there are probably three reasons. One is that they're highly prevalent. About one in five people will suffer from one of these disorders in the course of their lifetime. A second, of course, is that, for some people, these become truly disabling, and it's about four to five percent, perhaps one in 20. But what really drives these numbers, this high morbidity, and to some extent the high mortality, is the fact that these start very early in life. Fifty percent will have onset by age 14, 75 percent by age 24, a picture that is very different than what one would see if you're talking about cancer or heart disease, diabetes, hypertension — most of the major illnesses that we think about as being sources of morbidity and mortality. These are, indeed, the chronic disorders of young people.Now, I started by telling you that there were some good-news stories. This is obviously not one of them. This is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult, and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me. My job is to actually make sure that we make progress on all of these disorders. I work for the federal government. Actually, I work for you. You pay my salary. And maybe at this point, when you know what I do, or maybe what I've failed to do, you'll think that I probably ought to be fired, and I could certainly understand that. But what I want to suggest, and the reason I'm here is to tell you that I think we're about to be in a very different world as we think about these illnesses.What I've been talking to you about so far is mental disorders, diseases of the mind. That's actually becoming a rather unpopular term these days, and people feel that, for whatever reason, it's politically better to use the term behavioral disorders and to talk about these as disorders of behavior. Fair enough. They are disorders of behavior, and they are disorders of the mind. But what I want to suggest to you is that both of those terms, which have been in play for a century or more, are actually now impediments to progress, that what we need conceptually to make progress here is to rethink these disorders as brain disorders.Now, for some of you, you're going to say, ""Oh my goodness, here we go again. We're going to hear about a biochemical imbalance or we're going to hear about drugs or we're going to hear about some very simplistic notion that will take our subjective experience and turn it into molecules, or maybe into some sort of very flat, unidimensional understanding of what it is to have depression or schizophrenia.When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic. It depends, of course, on what scale or what scope you want to think about, but this is an organ of surreal complexity, and we are just beginning to understand how to even study it, whether you're thinking about the 100 billion neurons that are in the cortex or the 100 trillion synapses that make up all the connections. We have just begun to try to figure out how do we take this very complex machine that does extraordinary kinds of information processing and use our own minds to understand this very complex brain that supports our own minds. It's actually a kind of cruel trick of evolution that we simply don't have a brain that seems to be wired well enough to understand itself. In a sense, it actually makes you feel that when you're in the safe zone of studying behavior or cognition, something you can observe, that in a way feels more simplistic and reductionistic than trying to engage this very complex, mysterious organ that we're beginning to try to understand.Now, already in the case of the brain disorders that I've been talking to you about, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, while we don't have an in-depth understanding of how they are abnormally processed or what the brain is doing in these illnesses, we have been able to already identify some of the connectional differences, or some of the ways in which the circuitry is different for people who have these disorders. We call this the human connectome, and you can think about the connectome sort of as the wiring diagram of the brain. You'll hear more about this in a few minutes. The important piece here is that as you begin to look at people who have these disorders, the one in five of us who struggle in some way, you find that there's a lot of variation in the way that the brain is wired, but there are some predictable patterns, and those patterns are risk factors for developing one of these disorders. It's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease where you have a bombed-out part of your cortex. Here we're talking about traffic jams, or sometimes detours, or sometimes problems with just the way that things are connected and the way that the brain functions. You could, if you want, compare this to, on the one hand, a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, where you have dead tissue in the heart, versus an arrhythmia, where the organ simply isn't functioning because of the communication problems within it. Either one would kill you; in only one of them will you find a major lesion.As we think about this, probably it's better to actually go a little deeper into one particular disorder, and that would be schizophrenia, because I think that's a good case for helping to understand why thinking of this as a brain disorder matters. These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter. And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions. That's something we can observe. But look at this closely and you can see that actually they've crossed a different threshold. They've crossed a brain threshold much earlier, that perhaps not at age 22 or 20, but even by age 15 or 16 you can begin to see the trajectory for development is quite different at the level of the brain, not at the level of behavior.Why does this matter? Well first because, for brain disorders, behavior is the last thing to change. We know that for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for Huntington's. There are changes in the brain a decade or more before you see the first signs of a behavioral change. The tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier, long before the symptoms emerge. But most important, go back to where we started. The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention. If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease. That is precisely what we do today when we decide that everybody with one of these brain disorders, brain circuit disorders, has a behavioral disorder. We wait until the behavior becomes manifest. That's not early detection. That's not early intervention.Now to be clear, we're not quite ready to do this. We don't have all the facts. We don't actually even know what the tools will be, nor what to precisely look for in every case to be able to get there before the behavior emerges as different. But this tells us how we need to think about it, and where we need to go.Are we going to be there soon? I think that this is something that will happen over the course of the next few years, but I'd like to finish with a quote about trying to predict how this will happen by somebody who's thought a lot about changes in concepts and changes in technology.""We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10."" — Bill Gates.Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_insel_toward_a_new_understanding_of_mental_illness
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"One year ago, I rented a car in Jerusalem to go find a man I'd never met but who had changed my life. I didn't have a phone number to call to say I was coming. I didn't have an exact address, but I knew his name, Abed, I knew that he lived in a town of 15,000, Kfar Kara, and I knew that, 21 years before, just outside this holy city, he broke my neck. And so, on an overcast morning in January, I headed north off in a silver Chevy to find a man and some peace.The road dropped and I exited Jerusalem. I then rounded the very bend where his blue truck, heavy with four tons of floor tiles, had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where I sat. I was then 19 years old. I'd grown five inches and done some 20,000 pushups in eight months, and the night before the crash, I delighted in my new body, playing basketball with friends into the wee hours of a May morning. I palmed the ball in my large right hand, and when that hand reached the rim, I felt invincible. I was off in the bus to get the pizza I'd won on the court.I didn't see Abed coming. From my seat, I was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop, bright in the noontime sun, when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb. My head snapped back over my red seat. My eardrum blew. My shoes flew off. I flew too, my head bobbing on broken bones, and when I landed, I was a quadriplegic. Over the coming months, I learned to breathe on my own, then to sit and to stand and to walk, but my body was now divided vertically. I was a hemiplegic, and back home in New York, I used a wheelchair for four years, all through college.College ended and I returned to Jerusalem for a year. There I rose from my chair for good, I leaned on my cane, and I looked back, finding all from my fellow passengers in the bus to photographs of the crash, and when I saw this photograph, I didn't see a bloody and unmoving body. I saw the healthy bulk of a left deltoid, and I mourned that it was lost, mourned all I had not yet done, but was now impossible.It was then I read the testimony that Abed gave the morning after the crash, of driving down the right lane of a highway toward Jerusalem. Reading his words, I welled with anger. It was the first time I'd felt anger toward this man, and it came from magical thinking. On this xeroxed piece of paper, the crash had not yet happened. Abed could still turn his wheel left so that I would see him whoosh by out my window and I would remain whole. ""Be careful, Abed, look out. Slow down."" But Abed did not slow, and on that xeroxed piece of paper, my neck again broke, and again, I was left without anger.I decided to find Abed, and when I finally did, he responded to my Hebrew hello which such nonchalance, it seemed he'd been awaiting my phone call. And maybe he had. I didn't mention to Abed his prior driving record — 27 violations by the age of 25, the last, his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that May day — and I didn't mention my prior record — the quadriplegia and the catheters, the insecurity and the loss — and when Abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash, I didn't say that I knew from the police report that he'd escaped serious injury. I said I wanted to meet. Abed said that I should call back in a few weeks, and when I did, and a recording told me that his number was disconnected, I let Abed and the crash go.Many years passed. I walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents. I pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that I started in Central Park, and home in New York, I became a journalist and an author, typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger. A friend pointed out to me that all of my big stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that had changed in an instant, owing, if not to a crash, then to an inheritance, a swing of the bat, a click of the shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I'd been working through my lot after all.Still, Abed was far from my mind, when last year, I returned to Israel to write of the crash, and the book I then wrote, ""Half-Life,"" was nearly complete when I recognized that I still wanted to meet Abed, and finally I understood why: to hear this man say two words: ""I'm sorry."" People apologize for less. And so I got a cop to confirm that Abed still lived somewhere in his same town, and I was now driving to it with a potted yellow rose in the back seat, when suddenly flowers seemed a ridiculous offering. But what to get the man who broke your fucking neck? (Laughter) I pulled into the town of Abu Ghosh, and bought a brick of Turkish delight: pistachios glued in rosewater. Better.Back on Highway 1, I envisioned what awaited. Abed would hug me. Abed would spit at me. Abed would say, ""I'm sorry."" I then began to wonder, as I had many times before, how my life would have been different had this man not injured me, had my genes been fed a different helping of experience. Who was I? Was I who I had been before the crash, before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book? Was I what had been done to me? Were all of us the results of things done to us, done for us, the infidelity of a parent or spouse, money inherited? Were we instead our bodies, their inborn endowments and deficits? It seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience, but how to tease out the one from the other? As Yeats put that same universal question, ""O body swayed to music, o brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?"" I'd been driving for an hour when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance. The light my eyes had carried for as long as they had been blue. The predispositions and impulses that had propelled me as a toddler to try and slip over a boat into a Chicago lake, that had propelled me as a teen to jump into wild Cape Cod Bay after a hurricane. But I also saw in my reflection that, had Abed not injured me, I would now, in all likelihood, be a doctor and a husband and a father. I would be less mindful of time and of death, and, oh, I would not be disabled, would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune. The frequent furl of five fingers, the chips in my teeth come from biting at all the many things a solitary hand cannot open. The dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined.It was approaching 11 when I exited right toward Afula, and passed a large quarry and was soon in Kfar Kara. I felt a pang of nerves. But Chopin was on the radio, seven beautiful mazurkas, and I pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm.I'd been told that in an Arab town, one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized. And I was mentioning Abed and myself, noting deliberately that I was here in peace, to the people in this town, when I met Mohamed outside a post office at noon. He listened to me.You know, it was most often when speaking to people that I wondered where I ended and my disability began, for many people told me what they told no one else. Many cried. And one day, after a woman I met on the street did the same and I later asked her why, she told me that, best she could tell, her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong, but vulnerable too. I listened to her words. I suppose they were true. I was me, but I was now me despite a limp, and that, I suppose, was what now made me, me.Anyway, Mohamed told me what perhaps he would not have told another stranger. He led me to a house of cream stucco, then drove off. And as I sat contemplating what to say, a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe. I stepped from my car and said ""Shalom,"" and identified myself, and she told me that her husband Abed would be home from work in four hours. Her Hebrew was not good, and she later confessed that she thought that I had come to install the Internet. (Laughter)I drove off and returned at 4:30, thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back. And as I approached the front door, Abed saw me, my jeans and flannel and cane, and I saw Abed, an average-looking man of average size. He wore black and white: slippers over socks, pilling sweatpants, a piebald sweater, a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead. He'd been expecting me. Mohamed had phoned. And so at once, we shook hands, and smiled, and I gave him my gift, and he told me I was a guest in his home, and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch.It was then that Abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before. He'd just had surgery on his eyes, he said. He had problems with his side and his legs too, and, oh, he'd lost his teeth in the crash. Did I wish to see him remove them? Abed then rose and turned on the TV so that I wouldn't be alone when he left the room, and returned with polaroids of the crash and his old driver's license.""I was handsome,"" he said.We looked down at his laminated mug. Abed had been less handsome than substantial, with thick black hair and a full face and a wide neck. It was this youth who on May 16, 1990, had broken two necks including mine, and bruised one brain and taken one life. Twenty-one years later, he was now thinner than his wife, his skin slack on his face, and looking at Abed looking at his young self, I remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash, and recognized his longing.""The crash changed both of our lives,"" I said.Abed then showed me a picture of his mashed truck, and said that the crash was the fault of a bus driver in the left lane who did not let him pass. I did not want to recap the crash with Abed. I'd hoped for something simpler: to exchange a Turkish dessert for two words and be on my way. And so I didn't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash, Abed did not even mention the bus driver. No, I was quiet. I was quiet because I had not come for truth. I had come for remorse. And so I now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus.""I understand,"" I said, ""that the crash was not your fault, but does it make you sad that others suffered?""Abed spoke three quick words. ""Yes, I suffered.""Abed then told me why he'd suffered. He'd lived an unholy life before the crash, and so God had ordained the crash, but now, he said, he was religious, and God was pleased.It was then that God intervened: news on the TV of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north. We looked up at the wreckage.""Strange,"" I said.""Strange,"" he agreed.I had the thought that there, on Route 804, there were perpetrators and victims, dyads bound by a crash. Some, as had Abed, would forget the date. Some, as had I, would remember. The report finished and Abed spoke.""It is a pity,"" he said, ""that the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers.""I was baffled. Abed had said something remarkable. Did it point up the degree to which he'd absolved himself of the crash? Was it evidence of guilt, an assertion that he should have been put away longer? He'd served six months in prison, lost his truck license for a decade. I forgot my discretion.""Um, Abed,"" I said, ""I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash.""""Well,"" he said, ""I once went 60 in a 40."" And so 27 violations — driving through a red light, driving at excessive speed, driving on the wrong side of a barrier, and finally, riding his brakes down that hill — reduced to one.And it was then I understood that no matter how stark the reality, the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable. The goat becomes the hero. The perpetrator becomes the victim. It was then I understood that Abed would never apologize.Abed and I sat with our coffee. We'd spent 90 minutes together, and he was now known to me. He was not a particularly bad man or a particularly good man. He was a limited man who'd found it within himself to be kind to me. With a nod to Jewish custom, he told me that I should live to be 120 years old. But it was hard for me to relate to one who had so completely washed his hands of his own calamitous doing, to one whose life was so unexamined that he said he thought two people had died in the crash.There was much I wished to say to Abed. I wished to tell him that, were he to acknowledge my disability, it would be okay, for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp. People don't know that they have lived through worse, that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck, that problems of the mind are greater still, more injurious, than a hundred broken necks. I wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us. ""This,"" wrote the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, ""is the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."" I wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve, reconcile to reality, but we all must — the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone. I wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good, that a crash is from God and so a crash is good, a broken neck is good. One can say that a bad thing sucks, but that this natural world still has many glories. I wished to tell him that, in the end, our mandate is clear: We have to rise above bad fortune. We have to be in the good and enjoy the good, study and work and adventure and friendship — oh, friendship — and community and love.But most of all, I wished to tell him what Herman Melville wrote, that ""truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast."" Yes, contrast. If you are mindful of what you do not have, you may be truly mindful of what you do have, and if the gods are kind, you may truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way. You know death, and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life. Some part of you is cold, and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm, or even to be cold. When one morning, years after the crash, I stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow.But I didn't say these things to Abed. I told him only that he had killed one man, not two. I told him the name of that man. And then I said, ""Goodbye.""Thank you.(Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prager_in_search_for_the_man_who_broke_my_neck
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"One of the things I want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots. I just wanted you to know that.So I am indeed a neurosurgeon, and I follow a long tradition of neurosurgery, and what I'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain, being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients.So as I said, neurosurgery comes from a long tradition. It's been around for about 7,000 years. In Mesoamerica, there used to be neurosurgery, and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients. And they were trying to — they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease. They didn't know exactly what they were doing. Not much has changed, by the way. (Laughter) But they thought that, if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease, it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit. So if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems, then the way to treat this is, of course, to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape.So this was the thinking back then, and these individuals made these holes. Sometimes the patients were a little bit reluctant to go through this because, you can tell that the holes are made partially and then, I think, there was some trepanation, and then they left very quickly and it was only a partial hole, and we know they survived these procedures. But this was common. There were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes, and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common, and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago.Now, in the course of time, we've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things. So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite, and so on. And when things work well, then the nervous system works well, and everything functions. But once in a while, things don't go so well, and there's trouble in these circuits, and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble, or sometimes they're underactive and they're not quite working as they should.Now, the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are. So when these neurons are in the motor circuit, you get dysfunction in the movement system, and you get things like Parkinson's disease. When the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood, you get things like depression, and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function, then you get things like Alzheimer's disease. So what we've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain, and we've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down. So this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial. Once you choose the right station, whether it be jazz or opera, in our case whether it be movement or mood, we can put the dial there, and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume, to turn it up or turn it down.So what I'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients. And this is accomplished using this kind of device, and this is called deep brain stimulation. So what we're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain. Again, we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime, putting an electrode in, and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest, and with a remote control very much like a television remote control, we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain. We can turn it up or down, on or off. Now, about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation, and I'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement, disorders of mood and disorders of cognition.So this looks something like this when it's in the brain. You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there, and we can place this really anywhere in the brain. I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon, because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now.Now the first example I'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson's disease, and this lady has Parkinson's disease, and she has these electrodes in her brain, and I'm going to show you what she's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson's symptoms, and then we're going to turn it on. So this looks something like this. The electrodes are turned off now, and you can see that she has tremor. (Video) Man: Okay. Woman: I can't. Man: Can you try to touch my finger? (Video) Man: That's a little better. Woman: That side is better. We're now going to turn it on. It's on. Just turned it on. And this works like that, instantly. And the difference between shaking in this way and not — (Applause) The difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus. So we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them, ""Gentlemen, that's enough. We want you to stop doing that."" And we do that with electricity. So we use electricity to dictate how they fire, and we try to block their misbehavior using electricity. So in this case, we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons.We started using this technique in other problems, and I'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered, a case of dystonia. So dystonia is a disorder affecting children. It's a genetic disorder, and it involves a twisting motion, and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they can't breathe, until they get sores, urinary infections, and then they die. So back in 1997, I was asked to see this young boy, perfectly normal. He has this genetic form of dystonia. There are eight children in the family. Five of them have dystonia.So here he is. This boy is nine years old, perfectly normal until the age six, and then he started twisting his body, first the right foot, then the left foot, then the right arm, then the left arm, then the trunk, and then by the time he arrived, within the course of one or two years of the disease onset, he could no longer walk, he could no longer stand. He was crippled, and indeed the natural progression as this gets worse is for them to become progressively twisted, progressively disabled, and many of these children do not survive. So he is one of five kids. The only way he could get around was crawling on his belly like this. He did not respond to any drugs. We did not know what to do with this boy. We did not know what operation to do, where to go in the brain, but on the basis of our results in Parkinson's disease, we reasoned, why don't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in Parkinson's disease, and let's see what happens? So here he was. We operated on him hoping that he would get better. We did not know. So here he is now, back in Israel where he lives, three months after the procedure, and here he is.(Applause)On the basis of this result, this is now a procedure that's done throughout the world, and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery. This boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life. This has been one of the most satisfying cases that I have ever done in my entire career, to restore movement and walking to this kind of child.(Applause)We realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things, and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood. And we decided to take on depression, and the reason we took on depression is because it's so prevalent, and as you know, there are many treatments for depression, with medication and psychotherapy, even electroconvulsive therapy, but there are millions of people, and there are still 10 or 20 percent of patients with depression that do not respond, and it is these patients that we want to help. And let's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression.So the first thing we did was, we compared, what's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal, and what we did was PET scans to look at the blood flow of the brain, and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals, areas of the brain are shut down, and those are the areas in blue. So here you really have the blues, and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation, in drive and decision-making, and indeed, if you're severely depressed as these patients were, those are impaired. You lack motivation and drive. The other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive, area 25, seen there in red, and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain. If I make any of you sad, for example, I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died, this area of the brain lights up. It is the sadness center of the brain. And so patients with depression have hyperactivity. The area of the brain for sadness is on red hot. The thermostat is set at 100 degrees, and the other areas of the brain, involved in drive and motivation, are shut down. So we wondered, can we place electrodes in this area of sadness and see if we can turn down the thermostat, can we turn down the activity, and what will be the consequence of that?So we went ahead and implanted electrodes in patients with depression. This is work done with my colleague Helen Mayberg from Emory. And we placed electrodes in area 25, and in the top scan you see before the operation, area 25, the sadness area is red hot, and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue, and then, after three months of continuous stimulation, 24 hours a day, or six months of continuous stimulation, we have a complete reversal of this. We're able to drive down area 25, down to a more normal level, and we're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain, and indeed we're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression. So now we are in clinical trials, and are in Phase III clinical trials, and this may become a new procedure, if it's safe and we find that it's effective, to treat patients with severe depression.I've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson's disease and dystonia. I've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression. Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter? (Laughter) Anybody interested in that? (Applause) Of course we can, right?So what we've decided to do is we're going to try to turbocharge the memory circuits in the brain. We're going to place electrodes within the circuits that regulate your memory and cognitive function to see if we can turn up their activity. Now we're not going to do this in normal people. We're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits, and we've chosen to treat patients with Alzheimer's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits. As you know, this is the main symptom of early onset Alzheimer's disease. So we've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix, which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit, with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit, and whether that can, in turn, help these patients with Alzheimer's disease.Now it turns out that in Alzheimer's disease, there's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain. The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose. It uses 20 percent of all your — even though it only weighs two percent — it uses 10 times more glucose than it should based on its weight. Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain, and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor for Alzheimer's, all the way to Alzheimer's disease, then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose. They shut down. They turn off. And indeed, what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely. This is analogous to having a power failure in an area of the brain, a regional power failure. So the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and the question is, are the lights out forever, or can we turn the lights back on? Can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again?So this is what we did. We implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with Alzheimer's disease, we turned it on, and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain. And indeed, at the top, you'll see before the surgery, the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal, predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes. These areas of the brain are shut down. The lights are out in these areas of the brain. We then put in the DBS electrodes and we wait for a month or a year, and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization. And indeed, we are able to get these areas of the brain that were not using glucose to use glucose once again. So the message here is that, in Alzheimer's disease, the lights are out, but there is someone home, and we're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain, and as we do so, we expect that their functions will return.So this is now in clinical trials. We are going to operate on 50 patients with early Alzheimer's disease to see whether this is safe and effective, whether we can improve their neurologic function.(Applause)So the message I want to leave you with today is that, indeed, there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states, whether we're talking about Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's. We are now learning to understand what are the circuits, what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases. We can now reach those circuits. We can introduce electrodes within those circuits. We can graduate the activity of those circuits. We can turn them down if they are overactive, if they're causing trouble, trouble that is felt throughout the brain, or we can turn them up if they are underperforming, and in so doing, we think that we may be able to help the overall function of the brain.The implications of this, of course, is that we may be able to modify the symptoms of the disease, but I haven't told you but there's also some evidence that we might be able to help the repair of damaged areas of the brain using electricity, and this is something for the future, to see if, indeed, we not only change the activity but also some of the reparative functions of the brain can be harvested.So I envision that we're going to see a great expansion of indications of this technique. We're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain. One of the most exciting things about this is that, indeed, it involves multidisciplinary work. It involves the work of engineers, of imaging scientists, of basic scientists, of neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there's the excitement. And I think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on, and the consequence of that, of course, will be that we will be able to help many more patients.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/andres_lozano_parkinson_s_depression_and_the_switch_that_might_turn_them_off
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"When I was 14 years old, I had low self-esteem. I felt I was not talented at anything.One day, I bought a yo-yo. When I tried my first trick, it looked like this:(Laughter)I couldn't even do the simplest trick, but it was very natural for me, because I was not dextrous, and hated all sports. But after one week of practicing, my throws became more like this: A bit better. I thought, the yo-yo is something for me to be good at. For the first time in my life, I found my passion. I was spending all my time practicing. It took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level.And then, four years later, when I was 18 years old, I was standing onstage at the World YoYo Contest. And I won. I was so excited. ""Yes, I did it! I became a hero. I may get many sponsors, a lot of money, tons of interviews, and be on TV!"" I thought.(Laughter)But after coming back to Japan, totally nothing changed in my life.(Laughter)I realized society didn't value my passion. So I went back to my college and became a typical Japanese worker as a systems engineer. I felt my passion, heart and soul, had left my body. I felt I was not alive anymore.So I started to consider what I should do, and I thought, I wanted to make my performance better, and to show onstage how spectacular the yo-yo could be to change the public's image of the yo-yo.So I quit my company and started a career as a professional performer. I started to learn classic ballet, jazz dance, acrobatics and other things to make my performance better.As a result of these efforts, and the help of many others, it happened. I won the World YoYo Contest again in the artistic performance division. I passed an audition for Cirque Du Soleil. Today, I am standing on the TED stage with the yo-yo in front of you.(Applause)What I learned from the yo-yo is, if I make enough effort with huge passion, there is no impossible.Could you let me share my passion with you through my performance?(Applause)(Water sound)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)(Applause ends)(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/black_my_journey_to_yo_yo_mastery
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"We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. What do I mean by that?Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That's what we're probably genetically specified for. That's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m. That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice.Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages. When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking. For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's ""The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:""""The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself.""That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way. Or at least, they shouldn't if they're interested in reproducing. That — (Laughter) is not the way any human being speaks casually.Casual speech is something quite different. Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like. Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. It's much less reflective — very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things.Now of course, as history has gone by, it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing. So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go, ""Ahem, ladies and gentlemen,"" and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one. It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie. The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event. For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today and barely did then. The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing. Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours. It was perfectly natural. That's what people did then, speaking like writing.Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak. The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it. It's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand, and then communication is limited. On a manual typewriter it was very difficult, and even when we had electric typewriters, or then computer keyboards, the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly.Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. And that's where texting comes in. And so, texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting?What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense.But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity. That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech. And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up.And so, for example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning ""laughing out loud."" And of course, theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It's evolved into something that is much subtler.This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago.""I love the font you're using, btw.""Julie: ""lol thanks gmail is being slow right now""Now if you think about it, that's not funny. No one's laughing. (Laughter) And yet, there it is, so you assume there's been some kind of hiccup.Then Susan says ""lol, I know,"" again more guffawing than we're used to when you're talking about these inconveniences.So Julie says, ""I just sent you an email.""Susan: ""lol, I see it.""Very funny people, if that's what LOL means.This Julie says, ""So what's up?""Susan: ""lol, I have to write a 10 page paper.""She's not amused. Let's think about it. LOL is being used in a very particular way. It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation. We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles. Any spoken language that's used by real people has them. If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word ""ne"" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences. If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word ""yo."" Whole dissertations could be written about it, and probably are being written about it. A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become. It's a way of using the language between actual people.Another example is ""slash."" Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, ""We're going to have a party-slash-networking session."" That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene.So for example, this Sally person says, ""So I need to find people to chill with"" and Jake says, ""Haha"" — you could write a dissertation about ""Haha"" too, but we don't have time for that — ""Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?""Sally: ""For this summer program at NYU.""Jake: ""Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye.""The slash is interesting. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, ""Hmm, makes you think —"" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker — or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong. There's a lack of structure of some sort. It's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal. Well, the fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting doesn't exist, ""I Love Lucy"" is still on the air.""Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically — ""We've heard that sort of thing before, not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher. 1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on ""Downton Abbey"" are articulate, or something like that.So, ""From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.'""And so on. You can go even further back than this. It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871. There's no electricity. People have three names.""Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing.""And he's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies.You can go even further back. 1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time ""noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original"" blah blah blah blah blah.Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. — (Laughter) — and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin. As it happens, he was writing about what had become French. And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning.And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bidialectal. That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire. It's very simple. If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of ""Love Story,"" but they would understand what was on that message board. Take that person from 1993 — not that long ago, this is ""Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"" — those people. Take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today. Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they're batting around on their little devices.So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to ""The Wire."" I would want to know. And — I really would ask that — and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on ""Downton Abbey."" That'd be the second thing. And then the third thing would be, please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses. Thank you very much.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk
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"That's how we traveled in the year 1900. That's an open buggy. It doesn't have heating. It doesn't have air conditioning. That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound, and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains. That's a Boeing 707. Only 60 years later, it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound, and we don't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust.So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us? And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over. Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial. There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face. They're demographics, education, debt and inequality. They're powerful enough to cut growth in half. So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline. And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half. If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history.Now here's eight centuries of economic growth. The vertical axis is just percent per year of growth, zero percent a year, one percent a year, two percent a year. The white line is for the U.K., and then the U.S. takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900, when the line switches to red. You'll notice that, for the first four centuries, there's hardly any growth at all, just 0.2 percent. Then growth gets better and better. It maxes out in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, and then it starts slowing down, and here's a cautionary note. That last downward notch in the red line is not actual data. That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent. But you know what the actual facts are? You know what the growth in per-person income has been in the United States in the last six years? Negative.This led to a fantasy. What if I try to fit a curved line to this historical record? I can make the curved line end anywhere I wanted, but I decided I would end it at 0.2, just like the U.K. growth for the first four centuries. Now the history that we've achieved is that we've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period, 1891 to 2007, and remember it's been a little bit negative since 2007. But if growth slows down, instead of doubling our standard of living every generation, Americans in the future can't expect to be twice as well off as their parents, or even a quarter [more well off than] their parents. Now we're going to change and look at the level of per capita income. The vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today's prices. You'll notice that in 1891, over on the left, we were at about 5,000 dollars. Today we're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population. Now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years? Well, it's a matter of arithmetic. Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years. That means we'd go from 44,000 to 180,000. Well, we're not going to do that, and the reason is the headwinds.The first headwind is demographics. It's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity, rises faster than output per hour, if hours per person increased. And we got that gift back in the '70s and '80s when women entered the labor force. But now it's turned around. Now hours per person are shrinking, first because of the retirement of the baby boomers, and second because there's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution.The next headwind is education. We've got problems all over our educational system despite Race to the Top. In college, we've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care. We have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt, and our college completion rate is 15 points, 15 percentage points below Canada. We have a lot of debt. Our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing. Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today. And everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of GDP at a very rapid rate, and the only way that's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements, also called transfer payments. And that gets us down from the 1.5, where we've reached for education, down to 1.3.And then we have inequality. Over the 15 years before the financial crisis, the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we've been talking about before. All the rest went to the top one percent. So that brings us down to 0.8. And that 0.8 is the big challenge. Are we going to grow at 0.8? If so, that's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years. So let's see what some of those inventions were.If you wanted to read in 1875 at night, you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp. They created pollution, they created odors, they were hard to control, the light was dim, and they were a fire hazard. By 1929, electric light was everywhere. We had the vertical city, the invention of the elevator. Central Manhattan became possible. And then, in addition to that, at the same time, hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools, all achieved by electricity.Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women. Women, back in the late 19th century, spent two days a week doing the laundry. They did it on a scrub board. Then they had to hang the clothes out to dry. Then they had to bring them in. The whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week. And then we had the electric washing machine. And by 1950, they were everywhere. But the women still had to shop every day, but no they didn't, because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator.Back in the late 19th century, the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating. The bedrooms were cold. They were unheated. But by 1929, certainly by 1950, we had central heating everywhere.What about the internal combustion engine, which was invented in 1879? In America, before the motor vehicle, transportation depended entirely on the urban horse, which dropped, without restraint, 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine. That comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities. Those horses also ate up fully one quarter of American agricultural land. That's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses. Of course, when the motor vehicle was invented, and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929, that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export. And here's an interesting ratio: Starting from zero in 1900, only 30 years later, the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years.Back before the turn of the century, women had another problem. All the water for cooking, cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside. It's a historical fact that in 1885, the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water. But by 1929, cities around the country had put in underground water pipes. They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear. And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century, the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century.So it's a truism that things can't be more than 100 percent of themselves. And I'll just give you a few examples. We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound. Electrification, central heat, ownership of motor cars, they all went from zero to 100 percent. Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm. We went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years.What about the electronic revolution? Here's an early computer. It's amazing. The mainframe computer was invented in 1942. By 1960 we had telephone bills, bank statements were being produced by computers. The earliest cell phones, the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s. The 1980s brought us Bill Gates, DOS, ATM machines to replace bank tellers, bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector. Fast forward through the '90s, we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth.But I'm now going to give you an experiment. You have to choose either option A or option B. (Laughter) Option A is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago. So you get Google, you get Amazon, you get Wikipedia, and you get running water and indoor toilets. Or you get everything invented to yesterday, including Facebook and your iPhone, but you have to give up, go out to the outhouse, and carry in the water. Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century, maybe for a couple of days, in some cases for more than a week, electricity, running water, heating, gasoline for their cars, and a charge for their iPhones.The problem we face is that all these great inventions, we have to match them in the future, and my prediction that we're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2, the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning.So here we are back to the horse and buggy. I'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors of the 20th century, the people from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright Brothers, I'd like to call them all up here, and they're going to call back to you. Your challenge is, can you match what we achieved?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gordon_the_death_of_innovation_the_end_of_growth
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"Growth is not dead.(Applause)Let's start the story 120 years ago, when American factories began to electrify their operations, igniting the Second Industrial Revolution. The amazing thing is that productivity did not increase in those factories for 30 years. Thirty years. That's long enough for a generation of managers to retire. You see, the first wave of managers simply replaced their steam engines with electric motors, but they didn't redesign the factories to take advantage of electricity's flexibility. It fell to the next generation to invent new work processes, and then productivity soared, often doubling or even tripling in those factories.Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign. Is there a general purpose technology of our era? Sure. It's the computer. But technology alone is not enough. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny, and just as the earlier generations of managers needed to redesign their factories, we're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system. We're not doing as well at that job as we should be. As we'll see in a moment, productivity is actually doing all right, but it has become decoupled from jobs, and the income of the typical worker is stagnating. These troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation, but they are actually the growing pains of what Andrew McAfee and I call the new machine age.Let's look at some data. So here's GDP per person in America. There's some bumps along the way, but the big story is you could practically fit a ruler to it. This is a log scale, so what looks like steady growth is actually an acceleration in real terms. And here's productivity. You can see a little bit of a slowdown there in the mid-'70s, but it matches up pretty well with the Second Industrial Revolution, when factories were learning how to electrify their operations. After a lag, productivity accelerated again. So maybe ""history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."" Today, productivity is at an all-time high, and despite the Great Recession, it grew faster in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s, the roaring 1990s, and that was faster than the '70s or '80s. It's growing faster than it did during the Second Industrial Revolution. And that's just the United States. The global news is even better. Worldwide incomes have grown at a faster rate in the past decade than ever in history.If anything, all these numbers actually understate our progress, because the new machine age is more about knowledge creation than just physical production. It's mind not matter, brain not brawn, ideas not things. That creates a problem for standard metrics, because we're getting more and more stuff for free, like Wikipedia, Google, Skype, and if they post it on the web, even this TED Talk. Now getting stuff for free is a good thing, right? Sure, of course it is. But that's not how economists measure GDP. Zero price means zero weight in the GDP statistics. According to the numbers, the music industry is half the size that it was 10 years ago, but I'm listening to more and better music than ever. You know, I bet you are too. In total, my research estimates that the GDP numbers miss over 300 billion dollars per year in free goods and services on the Internet. Now let's look to the future. There are some super smart people who are arguing that we've reached the end of growth, but to understand the future of growth, we need to make predictions about the underlying drivers of growth. I'm optimistic, because the new machine age is digital, exponential and combinatorial.When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance. But there's a subtler benefit to the digitization of the world. Measurement is the lifeblood of science and progress. In the age of big data, we can measure the world in ways we never could before.Secondly, the new machine age is exponential. Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's Playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at, like driving a car through traffic. (Laughter) That's right, here's Andy and me grinning like madmen because we just rode down Route 101 in, yes, a driverless car.Thirdly, the new machine age is combinatorial. The stagnationist view is that ideas get used up, like low-hanging fruit, but the reality is that each innovation creates building blocks for even more innovations. Here's an example. In just a matter of a few weeks, an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached 1.3 million users. He was able to do that so easily because he built it on top of Facebook, and Facebook was built on top of the web, and that was built on top of the Internet, and so on and so forth.Now individually, digital, exponential and combinatorial would each be game-changers. Put them together, and we're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs, like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound. You know, robots are even revolutionizing cat transportation.(Laughter)But perhaps the most important invention, the most important invention is machine learning. Consider one project: IBM's Watson. These little dots here, those are all the champions on the quiz show ""Jeopardy."" At first, Watson wasn't very good, but it improved at a rate faster than any human could, and shortly after Dave Ferrucci showed this chart to my class at MIT, Watson beat the world ""Jeopardy"" champion. At age seven, Watson is still kind of in its childhood. Recently, its teachers let it surf the Internet unsupervised. The next day, it started answering questions with profanities. Damn. (Laughter)But you know, Watson is growing up fast. It's being tested for jobs in call centers, and it's getting them. It's applying for legal, banking and medical jobs, and getting some of them. Isn't it ironic that at the very moment we are building intelligent machines, perhaps the most important invention in human history, some people are arguing that innovation is stagnating? Like the first two industrial revolutions, the full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to fully play out, but they are staggering.So does that mean we have nothing to worry about? No. Technology is not destiny. Productivity is at an all time high, but fewer people now have jobs. We have created more wealth in the past decade than ever, but for a majority of Americans, their income has fallen. This is the great decoupling of productivity from employment, of wealth from work. You know, it's not surprising that millions of people have become disillusioned by the great decoupling, but like too many others, they misunderstand its basic causes. Technology is racing ahead, but it's leaving more and more people behind. Today, we can take a routine job, codify it in a set of machine-readable instructions, and then replicate it a million times.You know, I recently overheard a conversation that epitomizes these new economics. This guy says, ""Nah, I don't use H&R Block anymore. TurboTax does everything that my tax preparer did, but it's faster, cheaper and more accurate."" How can a skilled worker compete with a $39 piece of software? She can't. Today, millions of Americans do have faster, cheaper, more accurate tax preparation, and the founders of Intuit have done very well for themselves. But 17 percent of tax preparers no longer have jobs. That is a microcosm of what's happening, not just in software and services, but in media and music, in finance and manufacturing, in retailing and trade — in short, in every industry. People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race.What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge.The new machine age can be dated to a day 15 years ago when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Blue, a supercomputer. The machine won that day, and today, a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster. It got so bad that, when he was asked what strategy he would use against a computer, Jan Donner, the Dutch grandmaster, replied, ""I'd bring a hammer.""(Laughter)But today a computer is no longer the world chess champion. Neither is a human, because Kasparov organized a freestyle tournament where teams of humans and computers could work together, and the winning team had no grandmaster, and it had no supercomputer. What they had was better teamwork, and they showed that a team of humans and computers, working together, could beat any computer or any human working alone. Racing with the machine beats racing against the machine. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erik_brynjolfsson_the_key_to_growth_race_em_with_em_the_machines
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"Let's face it: Driving is dangerous. It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true. Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States — leading cause of death — and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.So what happens? No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident. I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on. I'm like, ""Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down, I'll slow down too."" I step on the brake. But no, this guy isn't slowing down. This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway. It was just going 65 — to zero? I slammed on the brakes. I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going, and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop, and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled, and fortunately, no one was hurt. But I had no idea that car was stopping, and I think we can do a lot better than that. I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other.I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now. Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble. You can't really directly sense the world around you. You're in this extended body. You're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways, in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds. Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes. Okay, so that's all you have, eyes that weren't really designed for this task, but then people ask you to do things like, you want to make a lane change, what's the first thing they ask you do? Take your eyes off the road. That's right. Stop looking where you're going, turn, check your blind spot, and drive down the road without looking where you're going. You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive. Why do we do this? Because we have to, we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here? What's more important? And usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road. But occasionally we miss something. Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late. In countless accidents, the driver says, ""I didn't see it coming."" And I believe that. I believe that. We can only watch so much.But the technology exists now that can help us improve that. In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars. We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us, to see how fast that guy's going or stopping. If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know.And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future. You may think that's impossible. How can you predict the future? That's really hard. Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible. Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity. They travel down roads. Often they travel on pre-published routes. It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car's going to be in the near future. Even if, when you're in your car and some motorcyclist comes — bshoom! — 85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting — I know you've had this experience — that guy didn't ""just come out of nowhere."" That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour. (Laughter) Right? I mean, somebody's seen him. Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy, and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map, he's on the map — position, velocity, good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour. You'll know, because your car will know, because that other car will have whispered something in his ear, like, ""By the way, five minutes, motorcyclist, watch out."" You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave. I mean, they're Newtonian objects. That's very nice about them.So how do we get there? We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars, just sharing GPS. If I have a GPS and a camera in my car, I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I'm going. With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going. And same with the other cars. They can have a precise idea of where they are, and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are. What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other? I can tell you exactly what happens. Both models improve. Everybody wins. Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic, when cars just share GPS data, and we've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots: stereo cameras, GPS, and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems. We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other. When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other.We're now adding more and more robots into the mix, and we encountered some problems. One of the problems, when you get too much chatter, it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize, and that's where the predictive model helps you. If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories, you don't pay as much attention to those packets. You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course. That guy could be a problem. And you can predict the new trajectory. So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how. And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way.And we wanted to do — how can we best alert everyone? How can these cars whisper, ""You need to get out of the way?"" Well, it depends on two things: one, the ability of the car, and second the ability of the driver. If one guy has a really great car, but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something, they're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency. So we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling. And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee. We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone. Fundamentally, these technologies exist today.I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data. I think it's a very disconcerting notion, this idea that our cars will be watching us, talking about us to other cars, that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip. But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy, just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside, I don't really know about you. If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are. I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs.(Laughter)And I think it's going to be a great thing. I want you to consider for a moment if you really don't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you're braking, that you're coming to a dead stop. By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone.So let your car gossip about you. It's going to make the roads a lot safer.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_healey_if_cars_could_talk_accidents_might_be_avoidable
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"I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. Everything risky requires a license. So, learning to drive, owning a gun, getting married. There's a certain —(Laughter)That's true in everything risky, except technology. For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. They just sort of give you your computer and then kick you out of the nest. You're supposed to learn this stuff — how? Just by osmosis. Nobody ever sits down and tells you, ""This is how it works."" So today I'm going to tell you ten things that you thought everybody knew, but it turns out they don't.First of all, on the web, if you want to scroll down, don't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar. That's a terrible waste of time. Do that only if you're paid by the hour. Instead, hit the space bar. The space bar scrolls down one page. Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again. So, space bar to scroll down one page; works in every browser, in every kind of computer.Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. But what about the pop-up menu where you put in your state? Don't open the pop-up menu. That's a terrible waste of calories. Type the first letter of your state over and over and over. So if you want Connecticut, go, C, C, C. If you want Texas, go T, T, and you jump right to that thing without even opening the pop-up menu.Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. You make the text larger with each tap. Works on every computer, every web browser, or minus, minus, to get smaller again. If you're on the Mac, it might be Command instead.When you're typing on your Blackberry, Android, iPhone, don't bother switching layouts to the punctuation layout to hit the period and then a space, then try to capitalize the next letter. Just hit the space bar twice. The phone puts the period, the space, and the capital for you. Go space, space. It is totally amazing.Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. No need to go to the recent calls list if you're trying to call somebody just hit the call button again.Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, ""Leave a message,"" and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years!(Laughter)I'm not bitter.(Laughter)So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this.Phone: At the tone, please...(Beep)David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. I didn't say these were going to be perfect.So most of you think of Google as something that lets you look up a web page, but it is also a dictionary. Type the word ""define"" and the word you want to know. You don't even have to click anything. There's the definition as you type. It's also a complete FAA database. Type the name of the airline and the flight. It shows you where the flight is, the gate, the terminal, how long until it lands. You don't need an app. It's also unit and currency conversion. Again, you don't have to click one of the results. Just type it into the box, and there's your answer.While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example —(Laughter)When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. Double click the word. Watch ""200"" — I go double-click, it neatly selects just that word. Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. You can just type over it. This is in every program. Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. Much more precise. Again, don't bother deleting. Just type over it.(Laughter)Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps. It's extremely frustrating on any camera under $1,000.(Camera click)(Laughter)So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! You get it every time. I've just turned your $50 camera into a $1,000 camera with that trick.And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you!(Laughter)So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for ""whiteout,"" and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it.So I know I went super fast. If you missed anything, I'll be happy to send you the list of these tips. In the meantime, congratulations. You all get your California Technology License.Have a great day.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pogue_10_top_time_saving_tech_tips
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"What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't.What did get me moving was a social interaction. Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, ""I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?"" It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, ""I have to be the one to ask the next question,"" because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. It's changed my life.But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things.First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works.And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable.So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. Walk the talk. You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nilofer_merchant_got_a_meeting_take_a_walk
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"Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this. And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well. I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons. And I decided that I was going to set out to try to solve this problem.And this probably is not what you're expecting. You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life. But this is actually a talk about, okay — (Laughter) — but this is actually a talk about fission. It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century.Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works. In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it. This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine.And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it? Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here? And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world. And this is what it is.This is a small modular reactor. So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here. This is between 50 and 100 megawatts. But that's a ton of power. That's between, say at an average use, that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that. Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory. So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity. This region right here is the reactor.And this is buried below ground, which is really important. For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work, I can't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns.And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233.But I'm not really concerned about the fuel. You can run these off — they're really hungry, they really like down-blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that's been down-blended. It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon, but they love this stuff. And we have a lot of it sitting around, because this is a big problem. You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially? What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons? Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff.So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive. It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive. And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas. So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced — well, other than photovoltaic — being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient. That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out to how much electricity it's producing. And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature. They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies. And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle. This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency. And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core. Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up. Their burn-up is much higher. So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used.And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets. Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it. So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons. They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place. And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it. So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system. No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores.But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons. One, it doesn't operate at high pressure. So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core. These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident. Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank. Because your fuel is liquid, and it's combined with your coolant, you could actually just drain the core into what's called a sub-critical setting, basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers. And this is really important, because the reaction stops. In this kind of reactor, you can't do that. The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island — looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products. So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor. So even in the event of an accident, yeah, the reactor may be toast, which is, you know, sorry for the power company, but we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land. So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity. Carbon-free electricity.And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation. It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap. You can put them anywhere in the world you want to.And maybe something else. As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me. But I think I get to come back to this, because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts. That is the rocket designer's dream. That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream. Not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there, but you have power once you get there. You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts — wow, that's a lot of power. I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts. That's a ton of power. That could power a Martian community. That could power a rocket there. And so I hope that maybe I'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that I explore my nuclear passion.And people say, ""Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents?"" But we launch plutonium batteries all the time. Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor.So I'm really excited. I think that I've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy, provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications, and I'm really prepared to do this. I graduated high school in May, and — (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality. And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world.And I'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with, which is weird for a scientist. But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky. The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy.So thank you guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_my_radical_plan_for_small_nuclear_fission_reactors
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"I'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures. I want to start to show just a few pictures to you, and after I'll speak.I must speak to you a little bit of my history, because we'll be speaking on this during my speech here. I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy. I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still]. A marvelous place. I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans. It was about 35 families that lived on this farm, and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed. Very few things went to the market. Once a year, the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced, and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse, bringing thousands of head of cattle, and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again.When I was 15 years old, it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger — much bigger — where I did the second part of secondary school. There I learned different things. Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist. I [went to] university to become an economist. I [did] a master's degree in economics.And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time. I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.Brazil radicalized very strongly. We fought very hard against the dictatorship, in a moment it was necessary to us: Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand, or leave Brazil. We were too young, and our organization thought it was better for us to go out, and we went to France, where I did a PhD in economics, Léila became an architect. I worked after for an investment bank. We made a lot of trips, financed development, economic projects in Africa with the World Bank.And one day photography made a total invasion in my life. I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me. Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist, that you are an anthropologist photographer, that you are an activist photographer. But I did much more than that. I put photography as my life. I lived totally inside photography doing long term projects, and I want to show you just a few pictures of — again, you'll see inside the social projects, that I went to, I published many books on these photographs, but I'll just show you a few ones now.In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000, I photographed a story called Migrations. It became a book. It became a show.But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda. I saw in Rwanda total brutality. I saw deaths by thousands per day. I lost my faith in our species. I didn't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer, and I started to be attacked by my own Staphylococcus. I started to have infection everywhere. When I made love with my wife, I had no sperm that came out of me; I had blood. I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick. He made a long examination, and told me, ""Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect. What happened is, you saw so many deaths that you are dying. You must stop. Stop. You must stop because on the contrary, you will be dead.""And I made the decision to stop. I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made the decision to go back to where I was born. It was a big coincidence. It was the moment that my parents became very old. I have seven sisters. I'm one of the only men in my family, and they made together the decision to transfer this land to Léila and myself. When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was. When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest. When we received the land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, as in all my region. To build development, Brazilian development, we destroyed a lot of our forest. As you did here in the United States, or you did in India, everywhere in this planet. To build our development, we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything. This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds, and we didn't know how to deal with these. And Léila came up with an incredible idea, a crazy idea.She said, why don't you put back the rainforest that was here before? You say that you were born in paradise. Let's build the paradise again.And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us, and we started. We started to plant, and this first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less, and slowly, slowly this dead land started to be born again. We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, only native species, where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed, and the life started to come back in an incredible way. It was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park. We transformed. We gave this land back to nature. It became a national park. We created an institution called Instituto Terra, and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere. Here in Los Angeles, in the Bay Area in San Francisco, it became tax deductible in the United States. We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil. We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil that put money into this project, the government. And the life started to come, and I had a big wish to come back to photography, to photograph again. And this time, my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that I had photographed all my life: us. I wished to photograph the other animals, to photograph the landscapes, to photograph us, but us from the beginning, the time we lived in equilibrium with nature. And I went. I started in the beginning of 2004, and I finished at the end of 2011. We created an incredible amount of pictures, and the result — Lélia did the design of all my books, the design of all my shows. She is the creator of the shows. And what we want with these pictures is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet and what we must hold on this planet if we want to live, to have some equilibrium in our life. And I wanted to see us when we used, yes, our instruments in stone. We exist yet. I was last week at the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, and only in the Amazon we have about 110 groups of Indians that are not contacted yet. We must protect the forest in this sense. And with these pictures, I hope that we can create information, a system of information. We tried to do a new presentation of the planet, and I want to show you now just a few pictures of this project, please.Well, this — (Applause) — Thank you. Thank you very much.This is what we must fight hard to hold like it is now. But there is another part that we must together rebuild, to build our societies, our modern family of societies, we are at a point where we cannot go back. But we create an incredible contradiction. To build all this, we destroy a lot. Our forest in Brazil, that antique forest that was the size of California, is destroyed today 93 percent. Here, on the West Coast, you've destroyed your forest. Around here, no? The redwood forests are gone. Gone very fast, disappeared. Coming the other day from Atlanta, here, two days ago, I was flying over deserts that we made, we provoked with our own hands. India has no more trees. Spain has no more trees.And we must rebuild these forests. That is the essence of our life, these forests. We need to breathe. The only factory capable to transform CO2 into oxygen, are the forests. The only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing, always, even if we reduce them, everything that we do, we produce CO2, are the trees. I put the question — three or four weeks ago, we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in Norway. A lack of oxygen in the water. I put to myself the question, if for a moment, we will not lack oxygen for all animal species, ours included — that would be very complicated for us.For the water system, the trees are essential. I'll give you a small example that you'll understand very easily. You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head, if you take a shower, it takes you two or three hours to dry your hair if you don't use a dryer machine. Me, one minute, it's dry. The same with the trees. The trees are the hair of our planet. When you have rain in a place that has no trees, in just a few minutes, the water arrives in the stream, brings soil, destroying our water source, destroying the rivers, and no humidity to retain. When you have trees, the root system holds the water. All the branches of the trees, the leaves that come down create a humid area, and they take months and months under the water, go to the rivers, and maintain our source, maintain our rivers. This is the most important thing, when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life.I want to show you now, to finish, just a few pictures that for me are very important in that direction. You remember that I told you, when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise, that was the farm. Land completely destroyed, the erosion there, the land had dried. But you can see in this picture, we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil. But you see a lot of small spots in this picture. In each point of those spots, we had planted a tree. There are thousands of trees. Now I'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point two months ago.(Applause)I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem. And I'll show you the last picture. We are with two million trees in the ground now. We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees.My friends, it's very easy to do. We did it, no? By an accident that happened to me, we went back, we built an ecosystem. We here inside the room, I believe that we have the same concern, and the model that we created in Brazil, we can transplant it here. We can apply it everywhere around the world, no? And I believe that we can do it together.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastiao_salgado_the_silent_drama_of_photography
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"All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. Right?Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really do shout. [Beautiful] [Intriguing] So you don't have to say a lot. [Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories. If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos? A few, but not most. What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would?What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself. And electronic tattoos also shout. And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good. So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos.And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online. Here's what happened to this company. [Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, ""Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you.""So what if Andy was wrong? Here's Andy's theory. [In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this? What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will. And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American.Why the Greeks? Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time.So lesson number one: Sisyphus. Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down. It's a little like your reputation. Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful what you post.Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out. So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever. With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love.Lesson number three: Atalanta. Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody. If you won, she would marry you. If you lost, you died. How did Hippomenes beat her? Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race. Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message.And then, of course, there's Narcissus. Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus. (Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection.Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges. When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, ""Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?"" The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality. And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_how_to_think_about_digital_tattoos
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"I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse.(Laughter)Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years, I've done the same thing. And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. Relationships.James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship. George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. For years, I have watched people teach. I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst.A colleague said to me one time, ""They don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed.""Well, I said to her, ""You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like.""(Laughter)(Applause)She said, ""That's just a bunch of hooey.""And I said to her,""Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear.""Needless to say, it was. Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship, or you don't. I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. Simple things, like apologizing. You ever thought about that? Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock.(Laughter)I taught a lesson once on ratios. I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it.(Laughter)And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. I'd taught the whole lesson wrong.(Laughter)So I came back to class the next day and I said, ""Look, guys, I need to apologize. I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry.""They said, ""That's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go.""I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. I wondered, ""How am I going to take this group, in nine months, from where they are to where they need to be? And it was difficult, it was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time?One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, ""You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it.""One of the students said, ""Really?""(Laughter)I said, ""Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. You just have to strut.""(Laughter)And I gave them a saying to say: ""I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. I deserve the education that I get here. I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go.""And they said, ""Yeah!""(Laughter)You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you.(Applause)I gave a quiz, 20 questions. A student missed 18. I put a ""+2"" on his paper and a big smiley face.(Laughter)He said, ""Ms. Pierson, is this an F?""I said, ""Yes.""(Laughter)He said, ""Then why'd you put a smiley face?""I said, ""Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all.""(Laughter)I said, ""And when we review this, won't you do better?""He said, ""Yes, ma'am, I can do better.""You see, ""-18"" sucks all the life out of you. ""+2"" said, ""I ain't all bad.""For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. See, it's hard to teach kids who stink.(Laughter)And kids can be cruel. And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, ""You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. You made it work for me. You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. And I want you to just see what I've become.""And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear.Can we stand to have more relationships? Absolutely. Will you like all your children? Of course not.(Laughter)And you know your toughest kids are never absent.(Laughter)Never. You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. It's the connection. It's the relationships. So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. We teach anyway, because that's what we do.Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.Is this job tough? You betcha. Oh God, you betcha. But it is not impossible. We can do this. We're educators. We're born to make a difference.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rita_pierson_every_kid_needs_a_champion
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"In this talk today, I want to present a different idea for why investing in early childhood education makes sense as a public investment. It's a different idea, because usually, when people talk about early childhood programs, they talk about all the wonderful benefits for participants in terms of former participants, in preschool, they have better K-12 test scores, better adult earnings. Now that's all very important, but what I want to talk about is what preschool does for state economies and for promoting state economic development.And that's actually crucial because if we're going to get increased investment in early childhood programs, we need to interest state governments in this. The federal government has a lot on its plate, and state governments are going to have to step up. So we have to appeal to them, the legislators in the state government, and turn to something they understand, that they have to promote the economic development of their state economy. Now, by promoting economic development, I don't mean anything magical. All I mean is, is that early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can thereby promote higher per capita earnings for the state's residents.Now, I think it's fair to say that when people think about state and local economic development, they don't generally think first about what they're doing about childcare and early childhood programs. I know this. I've spent most of my career researching these programs. I've talked to a lot of directors of state economic development agencies about these issues, a lot of legislators about these issues. When legislators and others think about economic development, what they first of all think about are business tax incentives, property tax abatements, job creation tax credits, you know, there are a million of these programs all over the place. So for example, states compete very vigorously to attract new auto plants or expanded auto plants. They hand out all kinds of business tax breaks. Now, those programs can make sense if they in fact induce new location decisions, and the way they can make sense is, by creating more and better jobs, they raise employment rates, raise per capita earnings of state residents. So there is a benefit to state residents that corresponds to the costs that they're paying by paying for these business tax breaks.My argument is essentially that early childhood programs can do exactly the same thing, create more and better jobs, but in a different way. It's a somewhat more indirect way. These programs can promote more and better jobs by, you build it, you invest in high-quality preschool, it develops the skills of your local workforce if enough of them stick around, and, in turn, that higher-quality local workforce will be a key driver of creating jobs and creating higher earnings per capita in the local community.Now, let me turn to some numbers on this. Okay. If you look at the research evidence — that's extensive — on how much early childhood programs affect the educational attainment, wages and skills of former participants in preschool as adults, you take those known effects, you take how many of those folks will be expected to stick around the state or local economy and not move out, and you take research on how much skills drive job creation, you will conclude, from these three separate lines of research, that for every dollar invested in early childhood programs, the per capita earnings of state residents go up by two dollars and 78 cents, so that's a three-to-one return. Now you can get much higher returns, of up to 16-to-one, if you include anti-crime benefits, if you include benefits to former preschool participants who move to some other state, but there's a good reason for focusing on these three dollars because this is salient and important to state legislators and state policy makers, and it's the states that are going to have to act. So there is this key benefit that is relevant to state policy makers in terms of economic development.Now, one objection you often hear, or maybe you don't hear it because people are too polite to say it, is, why should I pay more taxes to invest in other people's children? What's in it for me? And the trouble with that objection, it reflects a total misunderstanding of how much local economies involve everyone being interdependent. Specifically, the interdependency here is, is that there are huge spillovers of skills — that when other people's children get more skills, that actually increases the prosperity of everyone, including people whose skills don't change. So for example, numerous research studies have shown if you look at what really drives the growth rate of metropolitan areas, it's not so much low taxes, low cost, low wages; it's the skills of the area. Particularly, the proxy for skills that people use is percentage of college graduates in the area. So when you look, for example, at metropolitan areas such as the Boston area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Silicon Valley, these areas are not doing well economically because they're low-cost. I don't know if you ever tried to buy a house in Silicon Valley. It's not exactly a low-cost proposition. They are growing because they have high levels of skills. So when we invest in other people's children, and build up those skills, we increase the overall job growth of a metro area. As another example, if we look at what determines an individual's wages, and we do statistical exploration of that, what determines wages, we know that the individual's wages will depend, in part, on that individual's education, for example whether or not they have a college degree. One of the very interesting facts is that, in addition, we find that even once we hold constant, statistically, the effect of your own education, the education of everyone else in your metropolitan area also affects your wages. So specifically, if you hold constant your education, you stick in percentage of college graduates in your metro area, you will find that has a significant positive effect on your wages without changing your education at all. In fact, this effect is so strong that when someone gets a college degree, the spillover effects of this on the wages of others in the metropolitan area are actually greater than the direct effects. So if someone gets a college degree, their lifetime earnings go up by a huge amount, over 700,000 dollars. There's an effect on everyone else in the metro area of driving up the percentage of college graduates in the metro area, and if you add that up — it's a small effect for each person, but if you add that up across all the people in the metro area, you actually get that the increase in wages for everyone else in the metropolitan area adds up to almost a million dollars. That's actually greater than the direct benefits of the person choosing to get education.Now, what's going on here? What can explain these huge spillover effects of education? Well, let's think about it this way. I can be the most skilled person in the world, but if everyone else at my firm lacks skills, my employer is going to find it more difficult to introduce new technology, new production techniques. So as a result, my employer is going to be less productive. They will not be able to afford to pay me as good wages. Even if everyone at my firm has good skills, if the workers at the suppliers to my firm do not have good skills, my firm is going to be less competitive competing in national and international markets. And again, the firm that's less competitive will not be able to pay as good wages, and then, particularly in high-tech businesses, they're constantly stealing ideas and workers from other businesses. So clearly the productivity of firms in Silicon Valley has a lot to do with the skills not only of the workers at their firm, but the workers at all the other firms in the metro area. So as a result, if we can invest in other people's children through preschool and other early childhood programs that are high-quality, we not only help those children, we help everyone in the metropolitan area gain in wages and we'll have the metropolitan area gain in job growth.Another objection used sometimes here to invest in early childhood programs is concern about people moving out. So, you know, maybe Ohio's thinking about investing in more preschool education for children in Columbus, Ohio, but they're worried that these little Buckeyes will, for some strange reason, decide to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and become Wolverines. And maybe Michigan will be thinking about investing in preschool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and be worried these little Wolverines will end up moving to Ohio and becoming Buckeyes. And so they'll both underinvest because everyone's going to move out. Well, the reality is, if you look at the data, Americans aren't as hyper-mobile as people sometimes assume. The data is that over 60 percent of Americans spend most of their working careers in the state they were born in, over 60 percent. That percentage does not vary much from state to state. It doesn't vary much with the state's economy, whether it's depressed or booming, it doesn't vary much over time. So the reality is, if you invest in kids, they will stay. Or at least, enough of them will stay that it will pay off for your state economy.Okay, so to sum up, there is a lot of research evidence that early childhood programs, if run in a high-quality way, pay off in higher adult skills. There's a lot of research evidence that those folks will stick around the state economy, and there's a lot of evidence that having more workers with higher skills in your local economy pays off in higher wages and job growth for your local economy, and if you calculate the numbers for each dollar, we get about three dollars back in benefits for the state economy. So in my opinion, the research evidence is compelling and the logic of this is compelling. So what are the barriers to getting it done?Well, one obvious barrier is cost. So if you look at what it would cost if every state government invested in universal preschool at age four, full-day preschool at age four, the total annual national cost would be roughly 30 billion dollars. So, 30 billion dollars is a lot of money. On the other hand, if you reflect on that the U.S.'s population is over 300 million, we're talking about an amount of money that amounts to 100 dollars per capita. Okay? A hundred dollars per capita, per person, is something that any state government can afford to do. It's just a simple matter of political will to do it. And, of course, as I mentioned, this cost has corresponding benefits. I mentioned there's a multiplier of about three, 2.78, for the state economy, in terms of over 80 billion in extra earnings. And if we want to translate that from just billions of dollars to something that might mean something, what we're talking about is that, for the average low-income kid, that would increase earnings by about 10 percent over their whole career, just doing the preschool, not improving K-12 or anything else after that, not doing anything with college tuition or access, just directly improving preschool, and we would get five percent higher earnings for middle-class kids. So this is an investment that pays off in very concrete terms for a broad range of income groups in the state's population and produces large and tangible benefits.Now, that's one barrier. I actually think the more profound barrier is the long-term nature of the benefits from early childhood programs. So the argument I'm making is, is that we're increasing the quality of our local workforce, and thereby increasing economic development. Obviously if we have a preschool with four-year-olds, we're not sending these kids out at age five to work in the sweatshops, right? At least I hope not. So we're talking about an investment that in terms of impacts on the state economy is not going to really pay off for 15 or 20 years, and of course America is notorious for being a short term-oriented society. Now one response you can make to this, and I sometimes have done this in talks, is people can talk about, there are benefits for these programs in reducing special ed and remedial education costs, there are benefits, parents care about preschool, maybe we'll get some migration effects from parents seeking good preschool, and I think those are true, but in some sense they're missing the point.Ultimately, this is something we're investing in now for the future. And so what I want to leave you with is what I think is the ultimate question. I mean, I'm an economist, but this is ultimately not an economic question, it's a moral question: Are we willing, as Americans, are we as a society still capable of making the political choice to sacrifice now by paying more taxes in order to improve the long-term future of not only our kids, but our community? Are we still capable of that as a country? And that's something that each and every citizen and voter needs to ask themselves. Is that something that you are still invested in, that you still believe in the notion of investment? That is the notion of investment. You sacrifice now for a return later.So I think the research evidence on the benefits of early childhood programs for the local economy is extremely strong. However, the moral and political choice is still up to us, as citizens and as voters.Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/timothy_bartik_the_economic_case_for_preschool
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"Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language.But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful.Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature — enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. You are ready?Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. You get a mouth. This is a person going for a walk. Person. If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, ""Help! I'm on fire!"" — This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. This is a tree. Tree. This is a mountain. The sun. The moon. The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west.I call these eight characters radicals. They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. A person. If someone walks behind, that is ""to follow."" As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, ""It was this big."" The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. Three trees together, we create the forest. Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's ""idiot."" (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. Remember fire? Two fires together, I get really hot. Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. Two suns together, prosperous. Three together, that's sparkles. Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. Knock knock. Is anyone home? This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. On the left, we have a woman. Two women together, they have an argument. (Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery.So we have gone through almost 30 characters. By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. A person behind Japan, what do we get? A Japanese person.The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit.This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shaolan_learn_to_read_chinese_with_ease
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"Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter)My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go.We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was ""satisfactory,"" I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them. It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve.Let's start by asking who's doing well. Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills.Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues.You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best.What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, ""Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?"" ""Do you learn to correct your mistakes?""And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we're asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action.(Music)(Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let's talk about what's going on today. To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays.My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa.Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about —I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it.Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers.I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I'm able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection.All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay?Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don't write things down, I don't remember them.So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom.I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't.I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy.Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I'll see you later.[Every classroom could look like that](Applause)Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate.Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries.The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it.But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too.I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_teachers_need_real_feedback
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"I teach chemistry.(Explosion)All right, all right. So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? Some people nodding yes. Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening.(Clang) (Laughs)Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario.You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction.So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information.In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. Now, when I got this, I was — press Caps Lock — absolutely freaked out, okay? But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it?So when I asked him, he told me three things. He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life.Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. Rule number two: Embrace the mess. We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. And rule number three: Practice reflection. What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? As if what we are doing one day will save lives. Our students our worth it. And each case is different.(Explosion)All right. Sorry. The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on.So these are my daughters. On the right we have little Emmalou — Southern family. And, on the left, Riley. Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, ""Why?"" Yeah. Why. I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. We all were at that age. But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. How will they grow this curiosity?You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms — to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ramsey_musallam_3_rules_to_spark_learning
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"So I grew up in East Los Angeles, not even realizing I was poor. My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets. Everyone knew who I was, so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected, and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail, I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent. She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean's office, so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class, for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined. Man, her office was packed.So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school, and sometimes we're just not ready to focus. But that doesn't mean that we can't. It just takes a little bit more. Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor. Really, do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list? Not so much.But I really needed a support network, a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn't going to be a victim of my own circumstance, that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do. I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day, who were going to say, ""You can move beyond that."" And unfortunately, the local junior high was not going to offer that. It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate.So my mom said, ""You're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day."" So for the next two years, that's what I did. I took a school bus to the fancy side of town. And eventually, I ended up at a school where there was a mixture. There were some people who were really gang-affiliated, and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school. Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable. You had to survive. You just had to do things sometimes. So there were a lot of teachers who were like, ""She's never going to make it. She has an issue with authority. She's not going to go anywhere."" Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause.But then, they were very surprised when I graduated from high school. I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant.And then I told them, ""I want to be a teacher.""And boy, they were like, ""What? Why? Why would you want to do that?""So I began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that I attended, and I really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me. And so every year, I share my background with my kids, because they need to know that everyone has a story, everyone has a struggle, and everyone needs help along the way. And I am going to be their help along the way.So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity. I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before.I was like, ""You need to go to a hospital, the school nurse, something.""He's like, ""No, Miss, I'm not going. I need to be in class because I need to graduate."" So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance, but we were going to push forward and keep moving on. And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they're going through, getting to know their families — I wanted that, but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids, and teachers turning over year after year after year. How do you get to build those relationships?So we created a new school. And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media. And we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding, for support. But with that, we were going to gain freedom: freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective; freedom to control the curriculum so that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no; and freedom to control a budget, to spend money where it matters, not how a district or a state says you have to do it. We wanted those freedoms. But now, shifting an entire paradigm, it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete. But we had to do it. Our community deserved a new way of doing things.And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District, you better believe there was some opposition. And it was out of fear — fear of, well, what if they get it wrong? Yeah, what if we get it wrong? But what if we get it right? And we did. So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts — you can't teach, or you don't want to teach, you don't get to be at my school with my kids.(Applause)So in our third year, how did we do it? Well, we're making school worth coming to every day. We make our kids feel like they matter to us. We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them, and they use all the technology that they're used to. Laptops, computers, tablets — you name it, they have it. Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all. And because we connect it to what they're doing — For example, they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society. These were played in the local trolley system. Teaching elements of persuasion, it doesn't get any more real than that. Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school.But it's taken all stakeholders, working together — teachers and principals on one-year contracts, working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation. And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say, ""Know, the district is trying to impose this, but you have the freedom to do otherwise."" And it takes an active parent center who is not only there, showing a presence every day, but who is part of our governance, making decisions for their kids, our kids.Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live? They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances. Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pearl_arredondo_my_story_from_gangland_daughter_to_star_teacher
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"At 7:45 a.m., I open the doors to a building dedicated to building, yet only breaks me down. I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors, but I never have the decency to honor their names. Lockers left open like teenage boys' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else. Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers, camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs. Teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here. Oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim, part like the Red Sea when the bell rings.This is a training ground. My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose. Social lines are barbed wire. Labels like ""Regulars"" and ""Honors"" resonate. I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them. This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors, a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system.Trained at a young age to capitalize, letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there. This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow. No wonder so many of my people spit bars, because the truth is hard to swallow. The need for degrees has left so many people frozen.Homework is stressful, but when you go home every day and your home is work, you don't want to pick up any assignments. Reading textbooks is stressful, but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written, either dead or getting booked. Taking tests is stressful, but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting.I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do — to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_london_high_school_training_ground
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"I'm a little nervous, because my wife Yvonne said to me, she said, ""Geoff, you watch the TED Talks.""I said, ""Yes, honey, I love TED Talks.""She said, ""You know, they're like, really smart, talented — ""I said, ""I know, I know."" (Laughter)She said, ""They don't want, like, the angry black man."" (Laughter)So I said, ""No, I'm gonna be good, Honey, I'm gonna be good. I am."" But I am angry. (Laughter) And the last time I looked, I'm —(Applause) So this is why I'm excited but I'm angry. This year, there are going to be millions of our children that we're going to needlessly lose, that we could — right now, we could save them all. You saw the quality of the educators who were here. Do not tell me they could not reach those kids and save them. I know they could. It is absolutely possible. Why haven't we fixed this? Those of us in education have held on to a business plan that we don't care how many millions of young people fail, we're going to continue to do the same thing that didn't work, and nobody is getting crazy about it — right? — enough to say, ""Enough is enough."" So here's a business plan that simply does not make any sense.You know, I grew up in the inner city, and there were kids who were failing in schools 56 years ago when I first went to school, and those schools are still lousy today, 56 years later. And you know something about a lousy school? It's not like a bottle of wine. Right? (Laughter) Where you say, like, '87 was like a good year, right? That's now how this thing — I mean, every single year, it's still the same approach, right? One size fits all, if you get it, fine, and if you don't, tough luck. Just tough luck. Why haven't we allowed innovation to happen? Do not tell me we can't do better than this.Look, you go into a place that's failed kids for 50 years, and you say, ""So what's the plan?"" And they say, ""We'll, we're going to do what we did last year this year."" What kind of business model is that? Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3. They operated 10 to 3. They were closed for lunch hour. Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed. They don't need banks. They got no money in the banks. Who created that business model? Right? And it went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn't care. It wasn't about the customers. It was about bankers. They created something that worked for them. How could you go to the bank when you were at work? It didn't matter. And they don't care whether or not Geoff is upset he can't go to the bank. Go find another bank. They all operate the same way. Right? Now, one day, some crazy banker had an idea. Maybe we should keep the bank open when people come home from work. They might like that. What about a Saturday? What about introducing technology?Now look, I'm a technology fan, but I have to admit to you all I'm a little old. So I was a little slow, and I did not trust technology, and when they first came out with those new contraptions, these tellers that you put in a card and they give you money, I was like, ""There's no way that machine is going to count that money right. I am never using that, right?""So technology has changed. Things have changed. Yet not in education. Why? Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now? And if you come up with a plan to change things, people consider you radical. They will say the worst things about you. I said one day, well, look, if the science says — this is science, not me — that our poorest children lose ground in the summertime — You see where they are in June and say, okay, they're there. You look at them in September, they've gone down. You say, whoo! So I heard about that in '75 when I was at the Ed School at Harvard. I said, ""Oh, wow, this is an important study."" Because it suggests we should do something. (Laughter) Every 10 years they reproduce the same study. It says exactly the same thing: Poor kids lose ground in the summertime. The system decides you can't run schools in the summer.You know, I always wonder, who makes up those rules? For years I went to — Look, I went the Harvard Ed School. I thought I knew something. They said it was the agrarian calendar, and people had — but let me tell you why that doesn't make sense. I never got that. I never got that, because anyone knows if you farm, you don't plant crops in July and August. You plant them in the spring. So who came up with this idea? Who owns it? Why did we ever do it? Well it just turns out in the 1840s we did have, schools were open all year. They were open all year, because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day. They didn't have any place for their kids to go. It was a perfect place to have schools. So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods.So why don't we? Why don't we? Because our business has refused to use science. Science. You have Bill Gates coming out and saying, ""Look, this works, right? We can do this."" How many places in America are going to change? None. None. Okay, yeah, there are two. All right? Yes, there'll be some place, because some folks will do the right thing. As a profession, we have to stop this. The science is clear.Here's what we know. We know that the problem begins immediately. Right? This idea, zero to three. My wife, Yvonne, and I, we have four kids, three grown ones and a 15-year-old. That's a longer story. (Laughter) With our first kids, we did not know the science about brain development. We didn't know how critical those first three years were. We didn't know what was happening in those young brains. We didn't know the role that language, a stimulus and response, call and response, how important that was in developing those children. We know that now. What are we doing about it? Nothing. Wealthy people know. Educated people know. And their kids have an advantage. Poor people don't know, and we're not doing anything to help them at all. But we know this is critical.Now, you take pre-kindergarten. We know it's important for kids. Poor kids need that experience. Nope. Lots of places, it doesn't exist. We know health services matter. You know, we provide health services and people are always fussing at me about, you know, because I'm all into accountability and data and all of that good stuff, but we do health services, and I have to raise a lot of money. People used to say when they'd come fund us, ""Geoff, why do you provide these health services?"" I used to make stuff up. Right? I'd say, ""Well, you know a child who has cavities is not going to, uh, be able to study as well."" And I had to because I had to raise the money. But now I'm older, and you know what I tell them? You know why I provide kids with those health benefits and the sports and the recreation and the arts? Because I actually like kids. I actually like kids. (Laughter) (Applause)But when they really get pushy, people really get pushy, I say, ""I do it because you do it for your kid."" And you've never read a study from MIT that says giving your kid dance instruction is going to help them do algebra better, but you will give that kid dance instruction, and you will be thrilled that that kid wants to do dance instruction, and it will make your day. And why shouldn't poor kids have the same opportunity? It's the floor for these children. (Applause)So here's the other thing. I'm a tester guy. I believe you need data, you need information, because you work at something, you think it's working, and you find out it's not working. I mean, you're educators. You work, you say, you think you've got it, great, no? And you find out they didn't get it. But here's the problem with testing. The testing that we do — we're going to have our test in New York next week — is in April. You know when we're going to get the results back? Maybe July, maybe June. And the results have great data. They'll tell you Raheem really struggled, couldn't do two-digit multiplication — so great data, but you're getting it back after school is over. And so, what do you do? You go on vacation. (Laughter) You come back from vacation. Now you've got all of this test data from last year. You don't look at it. Why would you look at it? You're going to go and teach this year. So how much money did we just spend on all of that? Billions and billions of dollars for data that it's too late to use. I need that data in September. I need that data in November. I need to know you're struggling, and I need to know whether or not what I did corrected that. I need to know that this week. I don't need to know that at the end of the year when it's too late.Because in my older years, I've become somewhat of a clairvoyant. I can predict school scores. You take me to any school. I'm really good at inner city schools that are struggling. And you tell me last year 48 percent of those kids were on grade level. And I say, ""Okay, what's the plan, what did we do from last year to this year?"" You say, ""We're doing the same thing."" I'm going to make a prediction. (Laughter) This year, somewhere between 44 and 52 percent of those kids will be on grade level. And I will be right every single time.So we're spending all of this money, but we're getting what? Teachers need real information right now about what's happening to their kids. The high stakes is today, because you can do something about it.So here's the other issue that I just think we've got to be concerned about. We can't stifle innovation in our business. We have to innovate. And people in our business get mad about innovation. They get angry if you do something different. If you try something new, people are always like, ""Ooh, charter schools."" Hey, let's try some stuff. Let's see. This stuff hasn't worked for 55 years. Let's try something different. And here's the rub. Some of it's not going to work. You know, people tell me, ""Yeah, those charter schools, a lot of them don't work."" A lot of them don't. They should be closed. I mean, I really believe they should be closed. But we can't confuse figuring out the science and things not working with we shouldn't therefore do anything. Right? Because that's not the way the world works.If you think about technology, imagine if that's how we thought about technology. Every time something didn't work, we just threw in the towel and said, ""Let's forget it."" Right? You know, they convinced me. I'm sure some of you were like me — the latest and greatest thing, the PalmPilot. They told me, ""Geoff, if you get this PalmPilot you'll never need another thing."" That thing lasted all of three weeks. It was over. I was so disgusted I spent my money on this thing. Did anybody stop inventing? Not a person. Not a soul. The folks went out there. They kept inventing. The fact that you have failure, that shouldn't stop you from pushing the science forward.Our job as educators, there's some stuff we know that we can do. And we've got to do better. The evaluation, we have to start with kids earlier, we have to make sure that we provide the support to young people. We've got to give them all of these opportunities. So that we have to do. But this innovation issue, this idea that we've got to keep innovating until we really nail this science down is something that is absolutely critical.And this is something, by the way, that I think is going to be a challenge for our entire field. America cannot wait another 50 years to get this right. We have run out of time. I don't know about a fiscal cliff, but I know there's an educational cliff that we are walking over right this very second, and if we allow folks to continue this foolishness about saying we can't afford this — So Bill Gates says it's going to cost five billion dollars. What is five billion dollars to the United States? What did we spend in Afghanistan this year? How many trillions? (Applause)When the country cares about something, we'll spend a trillion dollars without blinking an eye. When the safety of America is threatened, we will spend any amount of money. The real safety of our nation is preparing this next generation so that they can take our place and be the leaders of the world when it comes to thinking and technology and democracy and all that stuff we care about. I dare say it's a pittance, what it would require for us to really begin to solve some of these problems.So once we do that, I'll no longer be angry. (Laughter) So, you guys, help me get there. Thank you all very much. Thank you. (Applause)John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children's Zone?Geoffrey Canada: Well, you know, John, 100 percent of our kids graduated high school last year in my school. A hundred percent of them went to college. This year's seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school. Last I heard we had 93 percent accepted to college. We'd better get that other seven percent. So that's just how this goes. (Applause)JL: So how do you stick with them after they leave high school?GC: Well, you know, one of the bad problems we have in this country is these kids, the same kids, these same vulnerable kids, when you get them in school, they drop out in record numbers. And so we've figured out that you've got to really design a network of support for these kids that in many ways mimics what a good parent does. They harass you, right? They call you, they say, ""I want to see your grades. How'd you do on that last test? What are you talking about that you want to leave school? And you're not coming back here."" So a bunch of my kids know you can't come back to Harlem because Geoff is looking for you. They're like, ""I really can't come back."" No. You'd better stay in school. But I'm not kidding about some of this, and it gets a little bit to the grit issue. When kids know that you refuse to let them fail, it puts a different pressure on them, and they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, and they're, like, ""You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad."" Well, that matters to kids, and it helps get them through. We try to create a set of strategies that gets them tutoring and help and support, but also a set of encouragements that say to them, ""You can do it. It is going to be hard, but we refuse to let you fail.""JL: Well, thank you Dr. Canada. Please give it up for him one more time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_canada_our_failing_schools_enough_is_enough
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"When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades.What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ""How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"" The honest answer is, I don't know.(Laughter)What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called ""growth mindset."" This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance
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"Thank you very much.I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles —(Laughter)thinking we were moving to America, but anyway —(Laughter)It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America.(Laughter)I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, ""Americans don't get irony.""(Laughter)Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, ""The British are reserved.""(Laughter)I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered.(Laughter)But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence.(Laughter)But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, ""No Child Left Behind.""(Laughter)Because whoever thought of that title gets irony.(Laughter)Don't they?(Applause)Because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: ""Millions of Children Left Behind."" I can see that. What's the plan? We propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work.And it's working beautifully.(Laughter)In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis.But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children.(Laughter)Small people wandering about.(Laughter)I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they?(Applause)You would never confuse them, would you? Like, ""Which one are you? Remind me.""(Laughter)""Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused.""Education under ""No Child Left Behind"" is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of ""No Child Left Behind"" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you —(Applause)One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know?(Laughter)(Applause)Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood.(Laughter)And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched.The second, thank you —(Applause)The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn.An old friend of mine — actually very old, he's dead.(Laughter)That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid.(Laughter)But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting.(Laughter)It's a very good example. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really.(Laughter)Teaching is a word like that. You can say, ""There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching."" But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help.(Applause)If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car.(Laughter)""Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange.""""Really?""(Laughter)""Is that good?"" ""We don't know.""(Laughter)But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it?(Laughter)And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels.(Laughter)""Would you like to come for a walk?"" ""No, I'm fine.""(Laughter)""You go. I'll wait. But take pictures.""(Laughter)We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at, because that's all that's being tested. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks.The third thing — and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, ""What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?""And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, ""Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them.""Now people always say, ""Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America."" No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there.(Laughter)Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left.(Laughter)But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn.The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case.And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education — That's what happens in some systems. Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people.(Applause)There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called ""alternative education.""(Laughter)You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative.(Applause)(Applause ends)So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it?Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education — and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level — is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. ""There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen."" And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley
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"When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex.Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client.(Laughter)And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle. But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. ""Thirty's the new 20,"" Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I said, ""Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy."" And then my supervisor said, ""Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one.""That's what psychologists call an ""Aha!"" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.(Laughter)Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! You are all awesome. If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter.So, I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and ""Aha!"" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like ""twixters"" and ""kidults.""(Laughing) It's true!As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood.Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time.(Laughing) Isn't that true?So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, ""You have 10 extra years to start your life""? Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens.And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: ""I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time."" Or they say, ""Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine.""But then it starts to sound like this: ""My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college."" And then it starts to sound like this: ""Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30.""Where are the twentysomethings here? Do not do that.(Laughter)Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, ""What was I doing? What was I thinking?"" I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, ""You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends.""Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words ""In case of emergency, please call ..."" She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, ""Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?""Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, ""I will."" But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by.So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By ""get identity capital,"" I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count.Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that unposted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads.Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now.Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, ""Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough.""Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/meg_jay_why_30_is_not_the_new_20
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"""Don't talk to strangers.""You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades. It's a norm. It's a social norm. But it's a special kind of social norm, because it's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to. ""Don't talk to strangers"" says, ""Stay from anyone who's not familiar to you. Stick with the people you know. Stick with people like you.""How appealing is that? It's not really what we do, is it, when we're at our best? When we're at our best, we reach out to people who are not like us, because when we do that, we learn from people who are not like us.My phrase for this value of being with ""not like us"" is ""strangeness,"" and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world, strangers are quite frankly not the point. The point that we should be worried about is, how much strangeness are we getting?Why strangeness? Because our social relations are increasingly mediated by data, and data turns our social relations into digital relations, and that means that our digital relations now depend extraordinarily on technology to bring to them a sense of robustness, a sense of discovery, a sense of surprise and unpredictability. Why not strangers? Because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries. They belong to a world of people I know versus people I don't know, and in the context of my digital relations, I'm already doing things with people I don't know. The question isn't whether or not I know you. The question is, what can I do with you? What can I learn with you? What can we do together that benefits us both?I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing, how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people. The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future. The economies of the future depend on that. Our social lives in the future depend on that. The threat to worry about isn't strangers. The threat to worry about is whether or not we're getting our fair share of strangeness.Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers, but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices. Stanley Milgram from the '60s and '70s, the creator of the small-world experiments, which became later popularized as six degrees of separation, made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps. His point was that strangers are out there. We can reach them. There are paths that enable us to reach them. Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 in his seminal essay ""The Strength of Weak Ties,"" made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks, these strangers, are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties, the people closest to us. He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us, these strong ties in our lives, actually have a homogenizing effect on us. They produce sameness.My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives, what kinds of new routines are possible. We've been looking specifically at the kinds of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions, those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses, and to make them available to people we don't know. Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars, whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music, we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we've never met. And we concluded a very important insight, which was that as people's relationships to the things in their lives change, so do their relations with other people. And yet recommendation system after recommendation system continues to miss the boat. It continues to try to predict what I need based on some past characterization of who I am, of what I've already done. Security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks, keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations.Categories like ""friends"" and ""family"" and ""contacts"" and ""colleagues"" don't tell me anything about my actual relations. A more effective way to think about my relations might be in terms of closeness and distance, where at any given point in time, with any single person, I am both close and distant from that individual, all as a function of what I need to do right now. People aren't close or distant. People are always a combination of the two, and that combination is constantly changing.What if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships? What if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that I need right now? Strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that I need right now, that enables me to find the sources of intimacy, of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now. Strangeness is not about meeting strangers. It simply makes the point that we need to disrupt our zones of familiarity. So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness, and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today, but also by organizations, organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities. Whether you're a political party insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion of who belongs and who does not, whether you're the government protecting social institutions like marriage and restricting access of those institutions to the few, whether you're a teenager in her bedroom who's trying to jostle her relations with her parents, strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way to new kinds of relations. We have to change the norms. We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses.What interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers? How might we think differently about our relations with people? How might we think differently about our relations with distributed groups of people? How might we think differently about our relations with technologies, things that effectively become social participants in their own right? The range of digital relations is extraordinary. In the context of this broad range of digital relations, safely seeking strangeness might very well be a new basis for that innovation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maria_bezaitis_the_surprising_need_for_strangeness
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"Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible, I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development.LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005. And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection. I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom. In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit. When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter)After finishing this series of protests, I started questioning why my fate was like this, and I realized that it's not just me — all Chinese are as confused as I am. As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress.This work is called Xia Gang (""leaving post""). ""Xia Gang"" is a Chinese euphemism for ""laid off"". It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy. From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China. The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers. I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives. On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: ""The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party."" For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work. We can only see six men in this picture,but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible.This piece is called The Studio. This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 — I picked the news photos of the day. One is about the war in the Middle East, and another one is about a public demonstration in France. I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions.This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR.(Applause)LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers. But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately. Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture. But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small.LB: This one is about 9/11 memories.This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River.Kenny Scharf's graffiti. (Laughter)This is Venice, Italy. Because global temperatures rise, the sea level rises, and it is said thatVenice will disappear in the coming decades. This is the ancient city of Pompeii. Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii. LB: This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome.When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas. For instance, why would I make myself invisible? What will making myself invisible here cause people to think?This one is called Instant Noodles. Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter) LB: Since August 2012, harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets. These phosphors can even cause cancer. To create this artwork, I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket. And my task is to stand there, trying to be still, setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple, I usually have to stand for three to four hours. The background of this piece is more complex, so I need three to four days in advance for preparation. This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter)LB: These works are on China's cultural memories.And this one, this is about food safety in China. Unsafe food can harm people's health, and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter) The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages, in different countries and at different times.I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element. If an artwork is to touch someone, it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life. And the repeated struggles in life create artwork, no matter in what form.(Music)That's all I want to say.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/liu_bolin_the_invisible_man
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"Hey guys. It's funny, someone just mentioned MacGyver, because that was, like, I loved it, and when I was seven, I taped a fork to a drill and I was like, ""Hey, Mom, I'm going to Olive Garden."" And — (Drilling noise) (Laughter) And it worked really well there. And you know, it had a profound effect on me. It sounds silly, but I thought, okay, the way the world works can be changed, and it can be changed by me in these small ways. And my relationship to especially human-made objects which someone else said they work like this, well, I can say they work a different way, a little bit.And so, about 20 years later, I didn't realize the full effect of this, but I went to Costa Rica and I stayed with these Guaymí natives there, and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them, and they could make beds out of trees, and they could — I watched this woman for three days. I was there. She was peeling this palm frond apart, these little threads off of it, and she'd roll the threads together and make little thicker threads, like strings, and she would weave the strings together, and as the materiality of this exact very bag formed before my eyes over those three days, the materiality of the way the world works, of reality, kind of started to unravel in my mind, because I realized that this bag and these clothes and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener, everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to, maybe a more complicated one, but still, everything was made that way.And so I had to start studying, who is it that's making these decisions? Who's making these things? How did they make them? What stops us from making them? Because this is how reality is created. So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab, and I was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity. And I started in nature, because I saw these Guaymís doing it in nature, and there just seems to be less barriers.So I went to Vermont to Not Back to School Camp, where there's unschoolers who are just kind of hanging out and willing to try anything. So I said, ""Let's go into the woods near this stream and just put stuff together, you know, make something, I don't care, geometrical shapes, just grab some junk from around you. We won't bring anything with us. And, like, within minutes, this is very easy for adults and teens to do. Here's a triangle that was being formed underneath a flowing stream, and the shape of an oak leaf being made by other small oak leaves being put together. A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass. The materiality and fleshiness and meat of the mushroom being explored by how it can hold up different objects being stuck into it. And after about 45 minutes, you get really intricate projects like leaves sorted by hue, so you get a color fade and put in a circle like a wreath.And the creator of this, he said, ""This is fire. I call this fire.""And someone asked him, ""How do you get those sticks to stay on that tree?""And he's like, ""I don't know, but I can show you.""And I'm like, ""Wow, that's really amazing. He doesn't know, but he can show you."" So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made, human-built world. We think we already know how something works, so we can't imagine how it could work. We know how it's supposed to work, so we can't suppose all the things that could be possible.So kids don't have as hard of a time with this, and I saw in my own son, I gave him this book. I'm a good hippie dad, so I'm like, ""Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon. I'm going to give you some building blocks and they're nonrectilinear cactus building blocks, so it's totally legit."" But he doesn't really know what to do with these. I didn't show him. And so he's like, ""Okay, I'll just mess around with this."" This is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest. Just going to try to put them in shapes and push on them and stuff. And before long, he's kind of got this mechanism where you can almost launch and catapult objects around, and he enlists us in helping him.And at this point, I'm starting to wonder, what kind of tools can we give people, especially adults, who know too much, so that they can see the world as malleable, so they see themselves as agents of change in their everyday lives. Because the most advanced scientists are really just kind of pushing the way the world itself works, pushing what matter can do, the most advanced artists are just pushing the medium, and any sufficiently complicated task, whether you're a cook or a carpenter or you're raising a child — anything that's complicated — comes up with problems that aren't solved in the middle of it, and you can't do a good job getting it done unless you can say, ""Okay, well we're just going to have to refigure this. I don't care that pencils are supposed to be for writing. I'm going to use them a different way.""So let me show you a little demo. This is a little piano circuit right in here, and this is an ordinary paintbrush that I smashed it together with. (Beeping) And so, with some ketchup, — (musical notes) — and then I can kind of — (musical notes) — (Laughter) (Applause)And that's awesome, right? But this is not what's awesome. What's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people. A pencil is not just a pencil. Look what it has in the middle of it. That's a wire running down the middle, and not only is it a wire, if you take that piano circuit, you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil, and you can lay out wire on the page, too, and get electrical current to run through it. And so you can kind of hack a pencil, just by thumbtacking into it with a little piano electrical circuit.And the electricity runs through your body too. And then you can take the little piano circuit off the pencil. You can make one of these brushes just on the fly. All you do is connect to the bristles, and the bristles are wet, so they conduct, and the person's body conducts, and leather is great to paint on, and then you can start hooking to everything, even the kitchen sink. The metal in the sink is conductive. Flowing water acts like a theremin or a violin.(Musical notes)And you can even hook to the trees. Anything in the world is either conductive or not conductive, and you can use those together.So — (Laughter) — I took this to those same teens, because those teens are really awesome, and they'll try things that I won't try. I don't even have access to a facial piercing if I wanted to. And this young woman, she made what she called a hula-looper, and as the hula hoop traveled around her body, she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there. You can see her pointing to it in the picture. And every time the hula hoop would smush against her body, it would connect two little pieces of copper tape, and it would make a sound, and the next sound, and it would loop the same sounds over and over again.I ran these workshops everywhere. In Taiwan, at an art museum, this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from Taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue. And professional designers were making artifacts with this thing strapped onto it. And big companies like Intel or smaller design firms like Ideo or startups like Bump, were inviting me to give workshops, just to practice this idea of smashing electronics and everyday objects together. And then we came up with this idea to not just use electronics, but let's just smash computers with everyday objects and see how that goes over.And so I just want to do a quick demo. So this is the MaKey MaKey circuit, and I'm just going to set it up from the beginning in front of you. So I'll just plug it in, and now it's on by USB. And I'll just hook up the forward arrow. You guys are facing that way, so I'll hook it to this one. And I'll just hook up a little ground wire to it. And now, if I touch this piece of pizza, the slides that I showed you before should go forward. And now if I hook up this wire just by connecting it to the left arrow, I'm kind of programming it by where I hook it up, now I have a left arrow and a right arrow, so I should be able to go forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards. Awesome.And so we're like, ""We gotta put a video out about this."" Because no one really believed that this was important or meaningful except me and, like, one other guy.So we made a video to prove that there's lots of stuff you can do. You can kind of sketch with Play-Doh and just Google for game controllers. Just ordinary Play-Doh, nothing special. And you can literally draw joysticks and just find Pacman on your computer and then just hook it up. (Video game noises) And you know the little plastic drawers you can get at Target? Well, if you take those out, they hold water great, but you can totally cut your toes, so yeah, just be careful.You know the Happiness Project, where the experts are setting up the piano stairs, and how cool that is? Well, I think it's cool, but we should be doing that stuff ourselves. It shouldn't be a set of experts engineering the way the world works. We should all be participating in changing the way the world works together.Aluminum foil. Everybody has a cat. Get a bowl of water. This is just Photo Booth on your Mac OS. Hover the mouse over the ""take a photo"" button, and you've got a little cat photo booth.And so we needed hundreds of people to buy this. If hundreds of people didn't buy this, we couldn't put it on the market. And so we put it up on Kickstarter, and hundreds of people bought it in the first day. And then 30 days later, 11,000 people had backed the project.And then what the best part is, we started getting a flood of videos in of people doing crazy things with it. So this is ""The Star-Spangled Banner"" by eating lunch, including drinking Listerine. And we actually sent this guy materials. We're like, ""We're sponsoring you, man. You're, like, a pro maker.""Okay, just wait for this one. This is good.(Laughter) (Applause)And these guys at the exploratorium are playing house plants as if they were drums. And dads and daughters are completing circuits in special ways.And then this brother — look at this diagram. See where it says ""sister""? I love when people put humans on the diagram. I always add humans to any technical — if you're drawing a technical diagram, put a human in it. And this kid is so sweet. He made this trampoline slideshow advancer for his sister so that on her birthday, she could be the star of the show, jumping on the trampoline to advance the slides. And this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano.And this is fun, and what could be more useful than feeling alive and fun? But it's also very serious because all this accessibility stuff started coming up, where people can't use computers, necessarily. Like this dad who wrote us, his son has cerebral palsy and he can't use a normal keyboard. And so his dad couldn't necessarily afford to buy all these custom controllers. And so, with the MaKey MaKey, he planned to make these gloves to allow him to navigate the web. And a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came, and we're really excited about that. We didn't plan for that at all.And then all these professional musicians started using it, like at Coachella, just this weekend Jurassic 5 was using this onstage, and this D.J. is just from Brooklyn, right around here, and he put this up last month. And I love the carrot on the turntable.(Music: Massive Attack — ""Teardrop"")Most people cannot play them that way. (Laughter)And when this started to get serious, I thought, I'd better put a really serious warning label on the box that this comes in, because otherwise people are going to be getting this and they're going to be turning into agents of creative change, and governments will be crumbling, and I wouldn't have told people, so I thought I'd better warn them. And I also put this little surprise. When you open the lid of the box, it says, ""The world is a construction kit.""And as you start to mess around this way, I think that, in some small ways, you do start to see the landscape of your everyday life a little bit more like something you could express yourself with, and a little bit more like you could participate in designing the future of the way the world works.And so next time you're on an escalator and you drop an M&M by accident, you know, maybe that's an M&M surfboard, not an escalator, so don't pick it up right away. Maybe take some more stuff out of your pockets and throw it down, and maybe some chapstick, whatever.I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that. But as I'm kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff, I'm realizing that my idea of a perfect world really can't be designed by one person or even by a million experts. It's really going to be seven billion pairs of hands, each following their own passions, and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens. And that's the world I really want to live in.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jay_silver_hack_a_banana_make_a_keyboard
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"Okay, it's great to be back at TED. Why don't I just start by firing away with the video?(Music)(Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video.Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes.Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club.Man 3: Google ""photos of tiger heads."" Hmm.Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking)Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture.(Child shouting)Man 5: Go!Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome.Child: Whoa! Look at that snake!Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video!Man 7: After this bridge, first exit.Man 8: Okay, A12, right there!(Applause)(Children singing)Man 9: Google, say ""delicious"" in Thai.Google Glass: อร่อยMan 9: Mmm, อร่อย.Woman 4: Google ""jellyfish.""(Music)Man 10: It's beautiful.(Applause)Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince. He needs help getting 10 million dollars. I like to pay attention to these because that's how we originally funded the company, and it's gone pretty well.Though in all seriousness, this position that you just saw me in, looking down at my phone, that's one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. Should it be by just walking around looking down? But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor. Okay. And I don't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot, but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it. In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body? You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass. You're just kind of moving around.So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands? You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there. They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage.And also you want something that frees your eyes. That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people.And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it. And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works.My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. You'd just have information come to you as you needed it. And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth.This project has lasted now, been just over two years. We've learned an amazing amount. It's been really important to make it comfortable. So our first prototypes we built were huge. It was like cell phones strapped to your head. It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable. We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming. But we've come a long way.And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera. Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids. I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment.And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic. The cell phone is — yeah, you have to look down on it and all that, but it's also kind of a nervous habit. Like if I smoked, I'd probably just smoke instead. I would just light up a cigarette. It would look cooler. You know, I'd be like — But in this case, you know, I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to. But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away, be it email or social posts or whatnot, even though it wasn't really — there's nothing really that important or that pressing. And with this, I know I will get certain messages if I really need them, but I don't have to be checking them all the time.Yeah, I've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more, doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video.Thank you all very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sergey_brin_why_google_glass
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"There's something that I'd like you to see.(Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown. The entire accident is caught on camera. The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second. Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by. The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely. Others look at her before moving off.Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm. She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died.I wonder how many of you, looking at that, said to yourselves just now, ""I would not have done that. I would have stopped to help."" Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you.As I thought, that's most of you. And I believe you. I'm sure you're right. But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference. The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me. What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day?And the answer is, yes we can. Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day.Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. The heart, of course, you felt. You felt the empathy for that child. But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people. So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want. It does help us to put perspective on our situation. And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, ""Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds."" But in fact it does make a difference, and in fact there's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this.This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, ""All lives have equal value."" That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.(Applause)No one, not Andrew Carnegie, not John D. Rockefeller, has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three, and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective. According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived. Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives. Well, you might say, that's fine if you're a billionaire, you can have that kind of impact. But if I'm not, what can I do? So I'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving.They worry how much of a difference they can make. But you don't have to be a billionaire. This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford. He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living. So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty. Toby himself does better than that. He's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year — that's less than 30,000 dollars — and to give the rest to those organizations. And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage.This is a couple at a later stage of life, Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott, who, when they were young, when they met, were activists against the Vietnam War, fought for social justice, and then moved into careers, as most people do, didn't really do anything very active about those values, although they didn't abandon them. And then, as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement, they returned to them, and they've decided to cut back on their spending, to live modestly, and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty.Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, ""Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day?"" One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch. He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career. But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance. Why? Because if you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money, and if you're successful in that career, you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ, let's say, five aid workers in developing countries, and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done. So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career. Here's one young man who's taken this advice. His name is Matt Weiger. He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated. But he's gone into finance in New York. He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on. Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, ""The Life You Can Save,"" which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. And the organization draws together people of different generations, like Holly Morgan, who's an undergraduate, who's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has, and on the right, Ada Wan, who has worked directly for the poor, but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give.Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective. So let's talk about effectiveness. Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones. Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you get something like that. You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. I think it's clear what's the better thing to do. But if you want to look for effective charities, this is a good website to go to. GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one. So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor. I'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations. That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year. So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism. And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all. So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction. Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet. Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them. So some people think that would be a good thing to give to. There's many possibilities.My final question is, some people will think it's a burden to give. I don't really believe it is. I've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student. It's been something fulfilling to me. Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist. He thinks that the life he's saving is his own. And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows. I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem. Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill. Just as he gets there, the effort becomes too much, the boulder escapes, rolls all the way down the hill, he has to trudge back down to push it up again, and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity. Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using? But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill. You never get off, and you never really feel satisfied. Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment. It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living.I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago. It's from a man named Chris Croy, who I'd never heard of. This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery. Why was he recovering from surgery?The email began, ""Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger. That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys.""There's about 100 people each year in the U.S. and more in other countries who do that. I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did. Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys. But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation. And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities.So if you're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well, there's a way for you to get off the hook.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism
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"So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest line I could draw. Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist.The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of making tiny, tiny dots. And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles, because of the shake. So to compensate, I'd hold the pen tighter, and this progressively made the shake worse, so I'd hold the pen tighter still. And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding anything. And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely.But after a few years, I just couldn't stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage. And he actually took one look at my squiggly line, and said, ""Well, why don't you just embrace the shake?""So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and shake. I was making all these scribble pictures. And even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. And more importantly, once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted.Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole. So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn't affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch. I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials, my hand really wouldn't hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons. This was the first time I'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity.At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies. I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have. I actually didn't even have a regular pair of scissors. I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at.So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies. And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box. But I sat there for hours, and nothing came to mind. The same thing the next day, and then the next, quickly slipping into a creative slump. And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create. And it didn't make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was creatively blank.But as I searched around in the darkness, I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that I never had before. And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands. Embrace the shake. And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it.I wondered, could you become more creative, then, by looking for limitations? What if I could only create with a dollar's worth of supplies? At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in — well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50. Surprisingly, they just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents. It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless.I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest? So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life. Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? (Laughter) So I'd dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks.(Laughter) (Applause)Or, what if instead of relying on myself, I had to rely on other people to create the content for the art? So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam. I slept on the floor and I ate takeout, and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment. Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas.(Applause) Or what if instead of making art to display, I had to destroy it? This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art. This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation. In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches. (Laughter) Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally. I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food — (Laughter) — sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine.The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place. So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out, then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image. So the end image was never visible as a physical whole. It was destroyed before it ever existed.In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display. What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. It did not happen overnight. There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse, after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing. But having committed to the process, I continued on,and something really surprising came out of this. As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections. And in return, I found a process of creating art that's perpetual and unencumbered by results. I found myself in a state of constant creation, thinking only of what's next and coming up with more ideas than ever.When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just quit, I gave up. And what if I didn't embrace the shake? Because embracing the shake for me wasn't just about art and having art skills. It turned out to be about life, and having life skills. Because ultimately, most of what we do takes place here, inside the box, with limited resources. Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world.Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life. Now, when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped, I sometimes still struggle, but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities, like using hundreds of real, live worms to make an image, using a pushpin to tattoo a banana, or painting a picture with hamburger grease.(Laughter)One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate.Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms. And instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/phil_hansen_embrace_the_shake
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"What would be a good end of life? And I'm talking about the very end. I'm talking about dying.We all think a lot about how to live well. I'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well. I'm not a geriatrician. I design reading programs for preschoolers. What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two. In the last few years, I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted. Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County. They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there. This was their dream.I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s. They were both only children who chose not to have kids. As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences. And we learned a few things about how to have a good end.In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness. It's true. At the end, our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero. What we found is that, with a plan and the right people, quality of life can remain high. The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event, and during this time, Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone. This gave them the peace of mind to move forward. It might be a diagnosis. It might be your intuition. But one day, you're going to say, ""This thing is going to get me."" Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that.Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different. In both cases, last days are about quiet reassurance. Jim died first. He was conscious until the very end, but on his last day he couldn't talk. Through his eyes, we knew when he needed to hear again, ""It is all set, Jim. We're going to take care of Shirley right here at the ranch, and ACR's going to take care of your wildlife forever.""From this experience I'm going to share five practices. I've put worksheets online, so if you'd like, you can plan your own end.It starts with a plan. Most people say, ""I'd like to die at home."" Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home. Saying we'd like to die at home is not a plan. A lot of people say, ""If I get like that, just shoot me."" This is not a plan either; this is illegal. (Laughter) A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want. Where do you want to be when you're no longer independent? What do you want in terms of medical intervention? And who's going to make sure your plan is followed?You will need advocates. Having more than one increases your chance of getting the end you want. Don't assume the natural choice is your spouse or child. You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation.Hospital readiness is critical. You are likely to be headed to the emergency room, and you want to get this right. Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history, medications and physician information. Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order. Have advocates keep a set in their car. Tape a set to your refrigerator. When you show up in the E.R. with this packet, your admission is streamlined in a material way.You're going to need caregivers. You'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice. In either case, do not settle. We went through a number of not-quite-right caregivers before we found the perfect team led by Marsha, who won't let you win at bingo just because you're dying but will go out and take videos of your ranch for you when you can't get out there, and Caitlin, who won't let you skip your morning exercises but knows when you need to hear that your wife is in good hands.Finally, last words. What do you want to hear at the very end, and from whom would you like to hear it? In my experience, you'll want to hear that whatever you're worried about is going to be fine. When you believe it's okay to let go, you will.So, this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial. What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life. Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch. Here's Jim just a few weeks before he died, celebrating a birthday he didn't expect to see. And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch.Jim and Shirley had a good end of life, and by sharing their story with you, I hope to increase our chances of doing the same.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/judy_macdonald_johnston_prepare_for_a_good_end_of_life
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"When we use the word ""architect"" or ""designer,"" what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality. That's our kind of working presumption. And I think it's wrong, actually.In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened. The economy ran out of jobs. And a couple of things struck me about this. One, don't listen to career advisers. And two, actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture, which is that, as a society, we've never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed. It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design, but actually there's an economics behind architecture that we don't talk about, and I think we need to.And a good place to start is your own paycheck. So, as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate, I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds. That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars. Now in terms of the whole world's population, that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people, which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for? The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been. The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when, actually, the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons, whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century, communism in the early 20th, the welfare state, and most recently, of course, through this inflated real estate bubble. And all of those booms, in their own various ways, have now kicked the bucket, and we're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population.Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy, though I think it probably is, it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually. I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is, how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent? And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done.The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings. Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem. And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions. So here's a story. The office was working with a school, and they had an old Victorian school building.And they said to the architects, ""Look, our corridors are an absolute nightmare. They're far too small. They get congested between classes. There's bullying. We can't control them. So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building, and we know it's going to cost several million pounds, but we're reconciled to the fact.""And the team thought about this, and they went away, and they said, ""Actually, don't do that. Instead, get rid of the school bell. And instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times, distribute the traffic through the corridors."" It solves the same problem, but instead of spending several million pounds, you spend several hundred pounds. Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job, but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful. Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking. And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore.The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big — big buildings and big finance. Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf, procuring whole neighborhoods in single, monolithic projects, and of course, form follows finance. So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model. And a lot of people can't even afford them. But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit? And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live. And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development? How will we sell design services? What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build? And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens.And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly — mostly it's done by amateurs. And that's a good thing. Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves. And the problem is that, up until now, it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools.So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy? And that began with open-source software. And over the last few years, it's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware, which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves. And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting. Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source, the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer. Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood. What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill. They're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all. And they're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities. We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone. That really is an industrial revolution. And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us.And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture. So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system. And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit. (Laughter) And it goes together without any bolts. It uses wedge and peg connections. And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well. And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this. They don't need any traditional construction skills. They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day.(Applause)And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what's cheap and what's available. Of course, the house is never finished. We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product. With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door. So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially.And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now, and some really interesting lessons here. One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable. People get confused between construction work and having fun. But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane, physical details. Like, never designing a piece that can't be lifted up. Or, when you're designing a piece, make sure you either can't put it in the wrong way round, or, if you do, it doesn't matter, because it's symmetrical. Probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds, the open-source pioneer, which was that idea of, ""Be lazy like a fox."" Don't reinvent the wheel every time. Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs. Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school, copying is good.Which is appropriate, because actually, this approach is not innovative. It's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings. The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection, but it's a really, really big difference. We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing. There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university. These are very, very small beginnings, and actually there's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they're not even on this map. I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map.We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities. They're self-made cities in one form or another. If we're talking about the 21st-century city, these are the guys who are going to be making it. You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team.So if we're serious about problems like climate change, urbanization and health, actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it. As I think Robert Neuwirth said, there isn't a bank or a corporation or a government or an NGO who's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers. How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we've been working on, but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning, off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation — low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions that anyone can very, very easily make, and to put them all into a commons where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone? A kind of Wikipedia for stuff? And once something's in the commons, it will always be there. How much would that change the rules? And I think the technology's on our side.If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption — that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA — I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production. And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alastair_parvin_architecture_for_the_people_by_the_people
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"(Music)(Applause)Thank you.Hi, everybody.Ban-gap-seum-ni-da.I'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life.I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair. The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me. Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise. When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music.(Music)In the midst of hardship, it was the music that gave me — that restored my soul. The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable, and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too, and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist.Do you feel like you are all alone? I hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart, as it did for me.(Music)(Applause)Thank you.Now, I use my music to reach people's hearts and have found there are no boundaries. My audience is anyone who is here to listen, even those who are not familiar with classical music. I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.Now, with my last piece, I'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun, exciting, and that it can rock you. Let me introduce you to my brand new project, ""Baroque in Rock,"" which became a golden disc most recently. It's such an honor for me.I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined. But it's now your turn. Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world. Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world. I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you, TEDsters. Play your life, and stay tuned.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ji_hae_park_the_violin_and_my_dark_night_of_the_soul
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"I'm almost like a crazy evangelical. I've always known that the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture. If the day is sunny, I think, ""Oh, the gods have had a good design day."" Or, I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist, particularly beautiful, I say he's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do.So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression. That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today. But in truth, what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot, like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts, as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it. Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity. I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life.And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design. And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works, for instance, by Martin Wattenberg — the way a machine plays chess with itself, that you see here, or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments, and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, and John Maeda's Reactive Books, and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me. These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public.But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable. The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, I don't know if you've ever seen it — it's really fantastic. It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what's going on with the winds in the United States.But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games, and that's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way. (Laughter) There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low. And that's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection. We've — No, first of all, New York Magazine always gets it. I love them. So we are in the right quadrant. We are in the Highbrow — that's daring, that's courageous — and Brilliant, which is great. Timidly, we've been higher on the diagonal in other situations, but it's okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. (Laughter)But here comes the art critic. Oh, that was fantastic.So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian. ""Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art."" Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me. ""Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh"" — They're two floors away. (Laughter) — ""will mean game over for any real understanding of art."" I'm bringing in the end of the world. You know? We were talking about the rapture? It's coming. And Jonathan Jones is making it happen.So the same Guardian rebuts, ""Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be. Last week, Guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games cannot qualify as art. But is he right? And does it matter?"" Thank you. Does it matter?You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art, or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to, would like to be called, artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers. Thank you very much. And that's more than enough.So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda, without any prompt, came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA. And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it.But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious, by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, ""MoMA has mistaken video games for art."" Again. ""The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso."" Again. ""That misses the point."" Excuse me. You're missing the point. And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: ""Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code."" Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right?So it's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled, and these reactions, were so vehement. And you know what? The International Cat Video Film Festival didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter) I think this was truly fantastic. We were talking about dancing ponies, but I was really jealous of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival, because it's very, very wonderful. And there's this Flaubert quote that I love: ""I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."" I consider myself the tide of shit.(Laughter) (Applause)You know, we have to go through that. Even in the 1930s, my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art. So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future, but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection. And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one. And you know, the amount of work — yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that's how he developed Tetris, and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed. And it's fantastic.So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work, because we're still the Museum of Modern Art, so even when we tackle popular culture, we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA, therefore, has to be researched. So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's wonderful Another World, amongst others, we put together a panel of experts, and we worked on this acquisition, and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway. We worked on it for a year and a half. So many people helped us — designers of games, you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine, and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it. We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant. We were not real gamers enough, so we had to really talk to them. And so we decided, of course, to have Sim City 2000, not the other Sim City, that one in particular, so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong, and were not only criteria of selection. They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation. That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future. We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.And that's really where interaction lies, and that's the importance of interaction. And in order to explain interaction, we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives. So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games, which are in a way the purest form of interaction, unadulterated by any kind of function or finality. I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction. I mean, that interface is beautiful. It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel. You know, with your mitt you can actually paw the MetroCard, and I talk about how bad ATM machines usually are. So I let people understand that it's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it's good or when it's bad. So when I show The Sims, I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims, not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi.You know, video games can be truly deep even when they're completely mindless. I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy. It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet. I've never made it into a planet, but that's it. Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States. It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan. And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music. So you would put into the PlayStation, you would put your own CD, and then the game would change alongside your music. So really fantastic.Not to mention Eve Online. Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish, but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi, not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators, was a really big shot in Eve Online, so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building, and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online, and after his death, several parts of the universe were named after him. And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing. I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational. Of course, there are games that are even more educational.Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game, and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík, and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans. It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game. So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA's are kept alive also by the selection of these games.And you know, Valve — you know, Portal — is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence. Right? We had to make decisions. At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection, but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian, I said, ""You know what, we need a Beretta."" And I was told, ""No. No guns in the design collection."" And I was like, ""Why?"" Interestingly, I learned that it's considered that in design and in the design collection, what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it's in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument. So it's very interesting. But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design, so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns. But here, in this particular case, we decided, you know, with Kate and Paul, that we would have no gratuitous violence. So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces. We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good. (Laughter) But we don't have GTA because, maybe it's my own reflection, I've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps. So it was not very constructive. (Laughter) So, I'm making fun of it, but we discussed this for so many days. You have no idea. And to this day, I am ambivalent, but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt. It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime. It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature. Then we have a few also side-scrollers — classical ones. So it's quite a hefty collection.And right now, we started with the first 14, but we have several that are coming up, and the reason why we haven't acquired them yet is because you don't acquire just the game. You acquire the relationship with the company. What we want, what we aspire to, is the code. It's very hard to get, of course. But that's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time, and that's what museums do. They also preserve artifacts for posterity. In absence of the code, because, you know, video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases, in absence of that, we acquire the relationship with the company. We're going to stay with them forever. They're not going to get rid of us. And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter)But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important. And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor. So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness, which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important.And so is space, the spatial aspect of games. You know, I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them, and if they're not architects, bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling. But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important.Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing. It can be real time or it can be the time within the game, as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons follow each other at their own pace.So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior. The real core issue of interaction design is behavior. Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives. They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen. In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness, which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you, so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape, and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement. In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is.We don't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia. If anything, we want to show the code, and here you see Ben Fry's distellamap of Pac-Man, of the Pac-Man code.So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox. You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design, furniture and other parts, but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia, only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers. The controllers are, of course, part of the experience, so you cannot do away with it. But interestingly, this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers. I was afraid that they would kill us, and instead they understood, especially when I told them that I was trying to apply the same stratagem that Philip Johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design, and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls, as if they were Brancusi sculptures. He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were. I would like to do the same with video games. By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood, I want people to understand that those are important forms of design. And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design.One of my dream acquisitions, which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner, is a 747. I would like to acquire it, but without owning it. I don't want it to be at MoMA and possessed by MoMA. I want it to keep flying. So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying.And the same with the ""@"" sign that we acquired a few years ago. It was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain. And what I say to people, it's almost as if a butterfly were flying by and we captured the shadow on the wall, and just we're showing the shadow. So in a way, we're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have. And it's too long to explain the acquisition, but if you want to go on the MoMA blog, there's a long post where I explain why it's such a great example of design.Along the way, I've had to burn a few chairs. You know? I've had to do away with a few concepts of design past. But I see that people are coming along, that the audiences, paradoxically, are much more responsive and much more understanding of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are. Design is truly everywhere, and design is as important as anything, and I'm so glad that, because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives, many more people are coming to it as a profession, as a passion, and as, very simply, part of their own culture.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_why_i_brought_pacman_to_moma
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"I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence: sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children. That whole range of issues that I'll refer to in shorthand as ""gender violence issues,"" they've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it. I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost. Now obviously —(Applause)Obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that, but calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem, for a number of reasons.The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention, right? A lot of men hear the term ""women's issues"" and we tend to tune it out, and we think, ""I'm a guy; that's for the girls,"" or ""that's for the women."" And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result. It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated, and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction when we hear the term ""women's issues."" This is also true, by the way, of the word ""gender,"" because a lot of people hear the word ""gender"" and they think it means ""women."" So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women's issues. There's some confusion about the term gender.And let me illustrate that confusion by way of analogy. So let's talk for a moment about race. In the US, when we hear the word ""race,"" a lot of people think that means African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on. A lot of people, when they hear the word ""sexual orientation"" think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual. And a lot of people, when they hear the word ""gender,"" think it means women. In each case, the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to. As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity or belong to some racial category or construct, as if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation, as if men don't have a gender. This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves, which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance, because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege, the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection, in fact being rendered invisible, in large measure, in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us. And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence, how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men.And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using the old tech. I'm old school on some fundamental regards. I make films and I work with high tech, but I'm still old school as an educator, and I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence-structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope.It starts with a very basic English sentence: ""John beat Mary."" That's a good English sentence. John is the subject, beat is the verb, Mary is the object, good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. ""Mary was beaten by John."" And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from ""John beat Mary"" to ""Mary was beaten by John."" We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, ""Mary was beaten,"" and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John, it's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with ""beaten"" is ""battered,"" so we have ""Mary was battered."" And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, ""Mary is a battered woman."" So now Mary's very identity — Mary is a battered woman — is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation.Those of us who work in the domestic and sexual violence field know that victim-blaming is pervasive in this realm, which is to say, blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it. And we say: why do they go out with these men? Why are they attracted to them? Why do they keep going back? What was she wearing at that party? What a stupid thing to do. Why was she drinking with those guys in that hotel room? This is victim blaming, and there are many reasons for it, but one is that our cognitive structure is set up to blame victims. This is all unconscious. Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, wearing. And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women. It's a legitimate thing to ask. But's let's be clear: Asking questions about Mary is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing violence.We have to ask a different set of questions. The questions are not about Mary, they're about John. They include things like, why does John beat Mary? Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the US and all over the world? What's going on? Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally, and other ways, the women and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love? What's going on with men? Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys? Why is that a common problem in our society and all over the world today? Why do we hear over and over again about new scandals erupting in major institutions like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program or the Boy Scouts of America, on and on and on? And then local communities all over the country and all over the world. We hear about it all the time. The sexual abuse of children. What's going on with men? Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world? Why do so many men rape other men? What is going on with men? And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates?Because this isn't about individual perpetrators. That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem. The perpetrators aren't these monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. That's a very naive notion, right? Perpetrators are much more normal than that, and everyday than that. So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world? What are the roles of various institutions in helping to produce abusive men? What's the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects? How does all this work?And then, once we start making those kinds of connections and asking those important and big questions, then we can talk about how we can be transformative, in other words, how can we do something differently? How can we change the practices? How can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes? These are the kind of questions that we need to be asking and the kind of work that we need to be doing, but if we're endlessly focused on what women are doing and thinking in relationships or elsewhere, we're not going to get to that piece.I understand that a lot of women who have been trying to speak out about these issues, today and yesterday and for years and years, often get shouted down for their efforts. They get called nasty names like ""male-basher"" and ""man-hater,"" and the disgusting and offensive ""feminazi"", right? And you know what all this is about? It's called kill the messenger. It's because the women who are standing up and speaking out for themselves and for other women as well as for men and boys, it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up, keep the current system in place, because we don't like it when people rock the boat. We don't like it when people challenge our power. You'd better sit down and shut up, basically. And thank goodness that women haven't done that. Thank goodness that we live in a world where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that.But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say, or, better yet, we can be heard saying some things that women often can't be heard saying. Now, I appreciate that that's a problem, it's sexism, but it's the truth. So one of the things that I say to men, and my colleagues and I always say this, is we need more men who have the courage and the strength to start standing up and saying some of this stuff, and standing with women and not against them and pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense. We live in the world together.And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male. What about all the boys who are profoundly affected in a negative way by what some adult man is doing against their mother, themselves, their sisters? What about all those boys? What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence? You know what? The same system that produces men who abuse women, produces men who abuse other men. And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims. Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence. So that's something that both women and men have in common. We are both victims of men's violence. So we have it in our direct self-interest, not to mention the fact that most men that I know have women and girls that we care deeply about, in our families and our friendship circles and every other way. So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out. It seems obvious saying it out loud, doesn't it? Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture and the US military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender-violence prevention.And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach, because it's a big thematic shift, although there's lots of particulars, but the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators and women as victims, or women as perpetrators, men as victims, or any combination in there. I'm using the gender binary. I know there's more than men and women, there's more than male and female. And there are women who are perpetrators, and of course there are men who are victims. There's a whole spectrum. But instead of seeing it in the binary fashion, we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders, and a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation, so in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers, family members, those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse, but we are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation. What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends? How do we support our friends? But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse?Now, when it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are. And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women. We're not just saying a man whose friend is abusing his girlfriend needs to stop the guy at the moment of attack. That's a naive way of creating a social change. It's along a continuum, we're trying to get men to interrupt each other. So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present, and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it, we need men to say, ""Hey, that's not funny. that could be my sister you're talking about, and could you joke about something else? Or could you talk about something else? I don't appreciate that kind of talk."" Just like if you're a white person and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope, that white people would interrupt that racist enactment by a fellow white person. Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity?Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture. And if we can get to the place where men who act out in sexist ways will lose status, young men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways towards girls and women, as well as towards other boys and men, will lose status as a result of it, guess what? We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse. Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted. He's a normal guy in every other way, isn't he?Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was, ""In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."" In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children, hasn't there? There's been an awful lot of silence. And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that.Now, it's easier said than done, because I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you it's not easy in male culture for guys to challenge each other, which is one of the reasons why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen is not just understanding these issues as men's issues, but they're also leadership issues for men. Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues should not fall on the shoulders of little boys or teenage boys in high school or college men. It should be on adult men with power. Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable for being leaders on these issues, because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture and challenges and interrupts, he or she is being a leader, really. But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power to start prioritizing these issues, and we haven't seen that yet, have we?Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago, and I work extensively with the US military, all the services. And I was at this dinner and this woman said to me — I think she thought she was a little clever — she said, ""So how long have you been doing sensitivity training with the Marines?""And I said, ""With all due respect, I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines. I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps.""Now, I know it's a bit pompous, my response, but it's an important distinction, because I don't believe that what we need is sensitivity training. We need leadership training, because, for example, when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team — and I work extensively in that realm as well — makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio. And some people will say, ""He needs sensitivity training."" Other people will say, ""Well, get off it. That's political correctness run amok, he made a stupid statement, move on."" My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training. He needs leadership training, because he's being a bad leader, because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity —(Applause)and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership. If we can make this point that I'm making to powerful men and women in our society at all levels of institutional authority and power, it's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking.You know, for example, I work a lot in college and university athletics throughout North America. We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right? There's no excuse for a college or university to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training mandated for all student athletes, coaches, administrators, as part of their educational process. We know enough to know that we can easily do that. But you know what's missing? The leadership. But it's not the leadership of student athletes. It's the leadership of the athletic director, the president of the university, the people in charge who make decisions about resources and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings. That's a failure, in most cases, of men's leadership.Look at Penn State. Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach. You had so many situations in that realm where men in powerful positions failed to act to protect children, in this case, boys. It's unbelievable, really. But when you get into it, you realize there are pressures on men. There are constraints within peer cultures on men, which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures.And one of the ways to do that is to say there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues. I know this, I work with men, and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many decades now. It's scary, when you think about it, how many years. But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues, but caring deeply is not enough. We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them.By the way, we owe it to women. There's no question about it. But we also owe it to our sons. We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world in situations where they didn't make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way. They didn't make the choice. We that have a choice, have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well.I hope that, going forward, men and women, working together, can begin the change and the transformation that will happen so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis.I know we can do it, we can do better.Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue
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"When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal. And we used to imagine that someday, they would actually come to life and they would crawl out of the resin, and, if they could, they would fly away.If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not we would ever be able to sequence the genome of extinct animals, I would have told you, it's unlikely. If you had asked whether or not we would actually be able to revive an extinct species, I would have said, pipe dream. But I'm actually standing here today, amazingly, to tell you that not only is the sequencing of extinct genomes a possibility, actually a modern-day reality, but the revival of an extinct species is actually within reach, maybe not from the insects in amber — in fact, this mosquito was actually used for the inspiration for ""Jurassic Park"" — but from woolly mammoths, the well preserved remains of woolly mammoths in the permafrost.Woollies are a particularly interesting, quintessential image of the Ice Age. They were large. They were hairy. They had large tusks, and we seem to have a very deep connection with them, like we do with elephants. Maybe it's because elephants share many things in common with us. They bury their dead. They educate the next of kin. They have social knits that are very close. Or maybe it's actually because we're bound by deep time, because elephants, like us, share their origins in Africa some seven million years ago, and as habitats changed and environments changed, we actually, like the elephants, migrated out into Europe and Asia.So the first large mammoth that appears on the scene is meridionalis, which was standing four meters tall weighing about 10 tons, and was a woodland-adapted species and spread from Western Europe clear across Central Asia, across the Bering land bridge and into parts of North America. And then, again, as climate changed as it always does, and new habitats opened up, we had the arrival of a steppe-adapted species called trogontherii in Central Asia pushing meridionalis out into Western Europe. And the open grassland savannas of North America opened up, leading to the Columbian mammoth, a large, hairless species in North America. And it was really only about 500,000 years later that we had the arrival of the woolly, the one that we all know and love so much, spreading from an East Beringian point of origin across Central Asia, again pushing the trogontherii out through Central Europe, and over hundreds of thousands of years migrating back and forth across the Bering land bridge during times of glacial peaks and coming into direct contact with the Columbian relatives living in the south, and there they survive over hundreds of thousands of years during traumatic climatic shifts. So there's a highly plastic animal dealing with great transitions in temperature and environment, and doing very, very well. And there they survive on the mainland until about 10,000 years ago, and actually, surprisingly, on the small islands off of Siberia and Alaska until about 3,000 years ago. So Egyptians are building pyramids and woollies are still living on islands.And then they disappear. Like 99 percent of all the animals that have once lived, they go extinct, likely due to a warming climate and fast-encroaching dense forests that are migrating north, and also, as the late, great Paul Martin once put it, probably Pleistocene overkill, so the large game hunters that took them down.Fortunately, we find millions of their remains strewn across the permafrost buried deep in Siberia and Alaska, and we can actually go up there and actually take them out. And the preservation is, again, like those insects in [amber], phenomenal. So you have teeth, bones with blood which look like blood, you have hair, and you have intact carcasses or heads which still have brains in them.So the preservation and the survival of DNA depends on many factors, and I have to admit, most of which we still don't quite understand, but depending upon when an organism dies and how quickly he's buried, the depth of that burial, the constancy of the temperature of that burial environment, will ultimately dictate how long DNA will survive over geologically meaningful time frames. And it's probably surprising to many of you sitting in this room that it's not the time that matters, it's not the length of preservation, it's the consistency of the temperature of that preservation that matters most.So if we were to go deep now within the bones and the teeth that actually survived the fossilization process, the DNA which was once intact, tightly wrapped around histone proteins, is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically with the mammoth for years during its lifetime. So those bacteria, along with the environmental bacteria, free water and oxygen, actually break apart the DNA into smaller and smaller and smaller DNA fragments, until all you have are fragments that range from 10 base pairs to, in the best case scenarios, a few hundred base pairs in length. So most fossils out there in the fossil record are actually completely devoid of all organic signatures. But a few of them actually have DNA fragments that survive for thousands, even a few millions of years in time. And using state-of-the-art clean room technology, we've devised ways that we can actually pull these DNAs away from all the rest of the gunk in there, and it's not surprising to any of you sitting in the room that if I take a mammoth bone or a tooth and I extract its DNA that I'll get mammoth DNA, but I'll also get all the bacteria that once lived with the mammoth, and, more complicated, I'll get all the DNA that survived in that environment with it, so the bacteria, the fungi, and so on and so forth. Not surprising then again that a mammoth preserved in the permafrost will have something on the order of 50 percent of its DNA being mammoth, whereas something like the Columbian mammoth, living in a temperature and buried in a temperate environment over its laying-in will only have 3 to 10 percent endogenous.But we've come up with very clever ways that we can actually discriminate, capture and discriminate, the mammoth from the non-mammoth DNA, and with the advances in high-throughput sequencing, we can actually pull out and bioinformatically re-jig all these small mammoth fragments and place them onto a backbone of an Asian or African elephant chromosome. And so by doing that, we can actually get all the little points that discriminate between a mammoth and an Asian elephant, and what do we know, then, about a mammoth?Well, the mammoth genome is almost at full completion, and we know that it's actually really big. It's mammoth. So a hominid genome is about three billion base pairs, but an elephant and mammoth genome is about two billion base pairs larger, and most of that is composed of small, repetitive DNAs that make it very difficult to actually re-jig the entire structure of the genome.So having this information allows us to answer one of the interesting relationship questions between mammoths and their living relatives, the African and the Asian elephant, all of which shared an ancestor seven million years ago, but the genome of the mammoth shows it to share a most recent common ancestor with Asian elephants about six million years ago, so slightly closer to the Asian elephant.With advances in ancient DNA technology, we can actually now start to begin to sequence the genomes of those other extinct mammoth forms that I mentioned, and I just wanted to talk about two of them, the woolly and the Columbian mammoth, both of which were living very close to each other during glacial peaks, so when the glaciers were massive in North America, the woollies were pushed into these subglacial ecotones, and came into contact with the relatives living to the south, and there they shared refugia, and a little bit more than the refugia, it turns out. It looks like they were interbreeding. And that this is not an uncommon feature in Proboscideans, because it turns out that large savanna male elephants will outcompete the smaller forest elephants for their females. So large, hairless Columbians outcompeting the smaller male woollies. It reminds me a bit of high school, unfortunately.(Laughter)So this is not trivial, given the idea that we want to revive extinct species, because it turns out that an African and an Asian elephant can actually interbreed and have live young, and this has actually occurred by accident in a zoo in Chester, U.K., in 1978. So that means that we can actually take Asian elephant chromosomes, modify them into all those positions we've actually now been able to discriminate with the mammoth genome, we can put that into an enucleated cell, differentiate that into a stem cell, subsequently differentiate that maybe into a sperm, artificially inseminate an Asian elephant egg, and over a long and arduous procedure, actually bring back something that looks like this. Now, this wouldn't be an exact replica, because the short DNA fragments that I told you about will prevent us from building the exact structure, but it would make something that looked and felt very much like a woolly mammoth did.Now, when I bring up this with my friends, we often talk about, well, where would you put it? Where are you going to house a mammoth? There's no climates or habitats suitable. Well, that's not actually the case. It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. So this landscape would be easily able to house it, and I have to admit that there [is] a part of the child in me, the boy in me, that would love to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the north once again, but I do have to admit that part of the adult in me sometimes wonders whether or not we should.Thank you very much.(Applause)Ryan Phelan: Don't go away. You've left us with a question. I'm sure everyone is asking this. When you say, ""Should we?"" it feels like you're reticent there, and yet you've given us a vision of it being so possible. What's your reticence?Hendrik Poinar: I don't think it's reticence. I think it's just that we have to think very deeply about the implications, ramifications of our actions, and so as long as we have good, deep discussion like we're having now, I think we can come to a very good solution as to why to do it. But I just want to make sure that we spend time thinking about why we're doing it first.RP: Perfect. Perfect answer. Thank you very much, Hendrik.HP: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hendrik_poinar_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth
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"So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s. When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid. But my tiger mother said, ""No."" My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them. After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. It is not important if I like the job or not.But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. That is me playing my imaginary piano. An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school. I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show. But no adults liked the idea. No adults believed I was serious. Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was. So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained. My dream would never come true. I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for.But that's so unfair. So I was determined to find another calling. Nobody around to teach me? Fine. I turned to books.I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.[""Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei""]I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.[""Jane Eyre""]And I learned to be efficient from this book.[""Cheaper by the Dozen""]And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these.[""Complete Works of Sanmao"" (aka Echo Chan)] [""Lessons From History"" by Nan Huaijin]I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first? Books banned in China, of course. ""The Good Earth"" is about Chinese peasant life. That's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it. The Bible is interesting, but strange. (Laughter) That's a topic for a different day. But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: ""You shall honor your father and mother."" ""Honor,"" I said. ""That's so different, and better, than obey."" So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents.Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading. It offers many insights. For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with. It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world. A map actually carries somebody's view. Comparative reading actually is nothing new. It's a standard practice in the academic world. There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature.Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? So I started reading books in pairs. So they can be about people — [""Benjamin Franklin"" by Walter Isaacson][""John Adams"" by David McCullough] — who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences. [""Personal History"" by Katharine Graham][""The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life,"" by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres — (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version][""Lamb"" by Chrisopher Moore] — or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.[""The Power of Myth"" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations. For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual. For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty — interesting.So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages. [""The Way of Chuang Tzu"" Thomas Merton][""Tao: The Watercourse Way"" Alan Watts] Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain. For example, it's through translation that I realized ""happiness"" in Chinese literally means ""fast joy."" Huh! ""Bride"" in Chinese literally means ""new mother."" Uh-oh. (Laughter)Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you.So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time. So may books be always with you.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_bu_how_books_can_open_your_mind
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"""Even in purely non-religious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty. It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality — a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness.""That's from Time magazine in 1966, when I was three years old. And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage.(Applause)And my question is, how did we get from there to here? How did an illness become an identity?When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother. And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home. My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon. My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon. But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one. And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue. The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay — (Laughter) — is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits.(Laughter)(Applause)When I was little, my mother used to say, ""The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world. And until you have children, you don't know what it's like."" And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me. And when I was an adolescent, I thought that I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family. And when she said it, it made me anxious. And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious. I said, ""I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in. And I want you to stop saying that.""About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at The New York Times Magazine to write a piece about deaf culture. And I was rather taken aback. I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness. Those poor people, they couldn't hear. They lacked hearing, and what could we do for them? And then I went out into the deaf world. I went to deaf clubs. I saw performances of deaf theater and of deaf poetry. I even went to the Miss Deaf America contest in Nashville, Tennessee where people complained about that slurry Southern signing.(Laughter)And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the deaf world, I become convinced that deafness was a culture and that the people in the deaf world who said, ""We don't lack hearing, we have membership in a culture,"" were saying something that was viable. It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture. It felt as valid perhaps even as American culture.Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf. And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me. She was facing the question of what to do with this child. Should she say, ""You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter?"" Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity, get involved in the Little People of America, become aware of what was happening for dwarfs?And I suddenly thought, most deaf children are born to hearing parents. Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them. Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence. Most gay people are born to straight parents. Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on. And here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter. And I thought, there it is again: A family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary. And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity.There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion. Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them. You can argue that it's harder in the United States — our current presidency notwithstanding — to be a person of color. And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair.There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group. And I call them horizontal identities, because the peer group is the horizontal experience. These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure.And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them. And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place. There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance. And they don't always coincide.And a lot of the time, people who have these conditions are very angry because they feel as though their parents don't love them, when what actually has happened is that their parents don't accept them. Love is something that ideally is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child. But acceptance is something that takes time. It always takes time.One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown. When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them. And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly.And his mother said she wasn't going to do it. And she took her son home. And even though she didn't have a lot of educational or financial advantages, she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism, and she got Clinton enrolled with him. And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures. And he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures, as a result of which he now can walk.And while he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his school work. And he worked very hard because there was nothing else to do. And he ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family. He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially-fitted car that accommodated his unusual body.And his mother told me this story of coming home one day — and he went to college nearby — and she said, ""I saw that car, which you can always recognize, in the parking lot of a bar,"" she said. (Laughter) ""And I thought to myself, they're six feet tall, he's three feet tall. Two beers for them is four beers for him."" She said, ""I knew I couldn't go in there and interrupt him, but I went home, and I left him eight messages on his cell phone."" She said, ""And then I thought, if someone had said to me when he was born that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies — ""(Applause)And I said to her, ""What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person?"" And she said, ""What did I do? I loved him, that's all. Clinton just always had that light in him. And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there.""I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s. This one is from 1968 — The Atlantic Monthly, voice of liberal America — written by an important bioethicist. He said, ""There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense. It is sad, yes — dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person.""There's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we've made in the treatment of gay people. The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day. But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be. And the change that's been accomplished there, which is almost equally radical, is one that we pay not very much attention to.One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome. They thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be, and so they decided they would build a little center — two classrooms that they started with a few other parents — to educate kids with D.S. And over the years, that center grew into something called the Cooke Center, where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught.In the time since that Atlantic Monthly story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled. The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood.The Robards had a lot to do with that. And I said, ""Do you regret it? Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome? Do you wish you'd never heard of it?"" And interestingly his father said, ""Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life. But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss.""And Karen Robards said to me, ""I'm with Tom. For David, I would cure it in an instant to give him an easier life. But speaking for myself — well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point — speaking for myself, it's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life, that speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world.""We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up. And yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before. Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive Cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech. A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene. Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene, grow to full size. Testing in humans is around the corner. There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them.And so we have both social progress and medical progress. And I believe in both of them. I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress. But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other. And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan.(Laughter)We have to think about how we feel about cures altogether. And a lot of the time the question of parenthood is, what do we validate in our children, and what do we cure in them?Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, ""When parents say 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, non-autistic child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure — that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces."" It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre. It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it. And the first weekend I spent with them — the first of many — I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation.And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted. We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner. And I said, ""If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?"" And his father said, ""I sure do. I'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing."" And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute. And then she looked back up and said, ""I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head.""When I had dinner with her a couple of years later — one of many dinners that we had together — she said, ""You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children. If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened. But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them. I recognize the pain they caused to others, for which there can be no forgiveness, but the pain they caused to me, there is,"" she said. ""So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me.""I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting. And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws. If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children — more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter — I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle. And ultimately I feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they won't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove, so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting, which is always that sometimes you look at your child and you think, where did you come from?(Laughter)It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed — there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are only so many families of children who are transgender, there are only so many families of prodigies — who also face similar challenges in many ways — there are only so many families in each of those categories — but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon. Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences, and our negotiation of difference, that unite us.I decided to have children while I was working on this project. And many people were astonished and said, ""But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?"" And I said, ""I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong.""I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect. And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, ""I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed, once of the child I wanted and once of the son I loved."" And I figured it was possible then for anyone to love any child if they had the effective will to do so.So my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis. I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children. And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas. And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis.(Applause)So the shorthand is five parents of four children in three states.And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family. And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist. And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned. He wasn't extending his legs appropriately. She said that might mean that he had brain damage. In so far as he was extending them, he was doing so asymmetrically, which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action. And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus.And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor. And I thought, here I had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who are disabled, and I didn't want to join their number. Because what I was encountering was an idea of illness. And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness. And I wanted also to protect myself from illness. And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded.We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw. We felt helpless. And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly. And when I asked the pediatrician what had been going on, she said she thought in the morning he had probably had a cramp.(Laughter)But I thought how my mother was right. I thought, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and until you have children, you don't know what it feels like.I think children had ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss. But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine. I'd encountered so much strange love, and I fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns. And I saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities.During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else. And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_love_no_matter_what
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"How many of you have checked your email today? Come on, raise your hands. How many of you are checking it right now?(Laughter)And how about finances? Anybody check that today? Credit card, investment account? How about this week?Now, how about your household energy use? Anybody check that today? This week? Last week? A few energy geeks spread out across the room. It's good to see you guys. But the rest of us — this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet, and even we aren't paying attention to the energy use that's driving climate change. The woman in the photo with me is Harriet. We met her on our first family vacation. Harriet's paying attention to her energy use, and she is decidedly not an energy geek. This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention.This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year. But unfortunately, between here and here, most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat. In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light. So this coal will last a little bit more than a month. If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal. The bad news here is that, for every unit of energy we use, we waste nine. That means there's good news, because for every unit of energy we save, we save the other nine. So the question is, how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we're using, and start wasting less of it?The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California. Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood, asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans. One quarter of the homes received a message that said, did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer? Turn off your air conditioning, turn on your fans. Another group got an environmental message. And still a third group got a message about being good citizens, preventing blackouts. Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all. In fact, none of these messages worked. They had zero impact on energy consumption. It was as if the grad students hadn't shown up at all.But there was a fourth message, and this message simply said, ""When surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans. Please join them. Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans."" And wouldn't you know it, they did. The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing.So what does this tell us? Well, if something is inconvenient, even if we believe in it, moral suasion, financial incentives, don't do much to move us — but social pressure, that's powerful stuff. And harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful force for good. In fact, it already is.Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower. We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy. We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes. Just like those effective door hangers, we have people comparing themselves to their neighbors, and then we give everyone targeted recommendations to help them save. We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world.And it's working. Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started. This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings.Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year. Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year. And two terawatt hours? In terms of coal, we'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity. And we're not burning anything. We're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior.But we're just one company, and this is just scratching the surface. Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may. I mean we leave the lights on in empty rooms, and we leave the air conditioning on when nobody's home. That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change. That's 40 billion — with a B — every year in the U.S. alone. That's half our coal usage right there.Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential. But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future, it isn't on this slide. It's in this room. It's you, and it's me. And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science. We can do it today, we know it works, and it will save us money right away.So what are we waiting for? Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison. Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy. They ought to be rewarded for helping their customers save it.But this story is much more than about household energy use. Take a look at the Prius. It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science. The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers.Which brings us back to Harriet. We met her on our first family vacation. She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet. She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, I work with utilities to help people save energy. It was then that her eyes lit up.She looked at me, and she said, ""You're exactly the person I need to talk to. You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility. It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors."" (Laughter) ""And for the last two weeks, all we can think about, talk about, and even argue about, is what we should be doing to save energy. We did everything that letter told us to do, and still I know there must be more. Now I'm here with a genuine expert. Tell me. What should I do to save energy?""There are many experts who can help answer Harriet's question. My goal is to make sure we are all asking it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_laskey_how_behavioral_science_can_lower_your_energy_bill
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"I am sorry I cannot show you my face, because if I do, the bad guys will come for me.My journey started 14 years ago. I was a young reporter. I had just come out of college.Then I got a scoop. The scoop was quite a very simple story. Police officers were taking bribes from hawkers who were hawking on the streets. As a young reporter, I thought that I should do it in a different way, so that it has a maximum impact, since everybody knew that it was happening, and yet there was nothing that was keeping it out of the system.So I decided to go there and act as a seller. As part of selling, I was able to document the hard core evidence. The impact was great. It was fantastic.This was what many call immersion journalism, or undercover journalism. I am an undercover journalist. My journalism is hinged on three basic principles: naming, shaming and jailing. Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way. I have worked on this for over 14 years, and I can tell you, the results are very good.One story that comes to mind in my undercover pieces is ""Spirit Child."" It was about children who were born with deformities, and their parents felt that once they were born with those deformities, they were not good enough to live in the society, so they were given some concoction to take and as a result they died. So I built a prosthetic baby, and I went into the village, pretended as though this baby had been born with a deformity, and here was the guys who do the killing. They got themselves ready. In their bids to kill, I got the police on standby, and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child. I recall how they were seriously boiling the concoction. They put it on fire. It was boiling hot, getting ready to give to the kids. Whilst this was going on, the police I had alerted, they were on standby, and just as the concoction was ready, and they were about to give it to the kids, I phoned the police, and fortunately they came and busted them. As I speak now, they are before the courts. Don't forget the key principles: naming, shaming and jailing. The court process is taking place, and I'm very sure at the end of the day we will find them, and we will put them where they belong too.Another key story that comes to mind, which relates to this spirit child phenomenon, is ""The Spell of the Albinos."" I'm sure most of you may have heard, in Tanzania, children who are born with albinism are sometimes considered as being unfit to live in society. Their bodies are chopped up with machetes and are supposed to be used for some concoctions or some potions for people to get money — or so many, many stories people would tell about it. It was time to go undercover again. So I went undercover as a man who was interested in this particular business, of course. Again, a prosthetic arm was built. For the first time, I filmed on hidden camera the guys who do this, and they were ready to buy the arm and they were ready to use it to prepare those potions for people.I am glad today the Tanzanian government has taken action, but the key issue is that the Tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available. My journalism is about hard core evidence. If I say you have stolen, I show you the evidence that you have stolen. I show you how you stole it and when, or what you used what you had stolen to do. What is the essence of journalism if it doesn't benefit society?My kind of journalism is a product of my society. I know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism.(Video) Official: He brought out some money from his pockets and put it on the table, so that we should not be afraid. He wants to bring the cocoa and send it to Cote d'Ivoire. So with my hidden intention, I kept quiet. I didn't utter a word. But my colleagues didn't know. So after collecting the money, when he left, we were waiting for him to bring the goods. Immediately after he left, I told my colleagues that since I was the leader of the group, I told my colleagues that if they come, we will arrest them.Second official: I don't even know the place called [unclear]. I've never stepped there before. So I'm surprised. You see a hand counting money just in front of me. The next moment, you see the money in my hands, counting, whereas I have not come into contact with anybody. I have not done any business with anybody. Reporter: When Metro News contacted investigative reporterAnas Aremeyaw Anas for his reaction, he just smiled and gave this video extract he did not use in the documentary recently shown onscreen. The officer who earlier denied involvement pecks a calculator to compute the amount of money they will charge on the cocoa to be smuggled.Anas Aremeyaw Anas: This was another story on anticorruption. And here was him, denying. But you see, when you have the hard core evidence, you are able to affect society. Sometimes these are some of the headlines that come. (Music)[I will curse Anas to death][Anas Lies][Alarm Blows Over Anas' News for Cash Video][Agenda Against Top CEPS Officials Exposed][Anas Operates with Invisible Powers?][Gov't Wobbles Over Anas Video][Hunting the Hunter][Anas 'Bribe' Men in Court][15 Heads Roll Over Anas Tape][Finance Minister Backs Anas][11 Given Queries Over Anas' Story][GJA Stands By Anas][Prez. Mills Storms Tema Harbour Over Anas Video] [""Late Prof. John Evans Atta Mills: Former president of Ghana""]John Evans Atta Mills: What Anas says is not something which is unknown to many of us, but please, those of you who are agents, and who are leading the customs officers into temptation, I'm telling you, Ghana is not going to say any good things to you about this.AAA: That was my president.I thought that I couldn't come here without giving you something special. I have a piece, and I'm excited that I'm sharing it for the first time with you here. I have been undercover in the prisons. I have been there for a long time. And I can tell you, what I saw is not nice. But again, I can only affect society and affect government if I bring out the hard core evidence. Many times, the prison authorities have denied ever having issues of drug abuse, issues of sodomy, so many issues they would deny that it ever happens. How can you obtain the hard core evidence?So I was in the prison. [""Nsawan Prison""] Now, what you are seeing is a pile of dead bodies. Now, I happen to have followed one of my inmates, one of my friends, from his sick bed till death, and I can tell you it was not a nice thing at all. There were issues of bad food being served as I recall that some of the food I ate is just not good for a human being. Toilet facilities: very bad. I mean, you had to queue to get proper toilets to attend — and that's what I call proper, when four of us are on a manhole. It is something that if you narrate it to somebody, the person wouldn't believe it. The only way that you can let the person believe is when you show hard core evidence. Of course, drugs were abundant. It was easier to get cannabis, heroin and cocaine, faster even, in the prison than outside the prison.Evil in the society is an extreme disease. If you have extreme diseases, you need to get extreme remedies. My kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries, but I can tell you, it works in my part of the continent of Africa, because usually, when people talk about corruption, they ask, ""Where is the evidence? Show me the evidence."" I say, ""This is the evidence."" And that has aided in me putting a lot of people behind bars.You see, we on the continent are able to tell the story better because we face the conditions and we see the conditions. That is why I was particularly excited when we launched our ""Africa Investigates"" series where we investigated a lot of African countries. As a result of the success of the ""Africa Investigates"" series, we are moving on to World Investigates. By the end of it, a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars.This will not stop. I'm going to carry on with this kind of journalism, because I know that when evil men destroy, good men must build and bind.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. I have some questions for you. How did you end up in jail? This was just a few weeks ago, I believe, yeah?AAA: Sure. You know, undercover is all about setting the priorities right, so we got people to take me to court. So I went through the very legal process, because at the end of the day, the prison authorities want to check whether indeed you have been there or not, and that's how I got in there.CA: So someone sued you in court, and they took you there, and you were in remand custody for part of it, and you did that deliberately.AAA: Yes, yes.CA: Talk to me just about fear and how you manage that, because you're regularly putting your life at risk. How do you do that?AAA: You see, undercover is always a last resort. Before we go undercover, we follow the rules. And I'm only comfortable and I'm purged of fear whenever I am sure that all the steps have been taken. I don't do it alone. I have a backup team who help ensure that the safety and all the systems are put in place, but you've got to take very intelligent decisions whenever they are happening. If you don't, you will end up losing your life. So yes, when the backup systems are put in place, I'm okay, I go in. Risky, yes, but it's a hazard of a profession. I mean, everybody has their hazard. And once you say that is yours, you've got to take it, as and when it comes.CA: Well, you're an amazing human and you've done amazing work and you've taught us a story like no story I think any of us have heard before. And we're appreciative. We salute you. Thank you so much, Anas.AAA: Thank you.CA: Thank you. Stay safe. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anas_aremeyaw_anas_how_i_named_shamed_and_jailed
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"Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years.Now I'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild. And we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives, but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence?Well, we know a few things. We know that their brain-to-body ratio, which is a physical measure of intelligence, is second only to humans. Cognitively, they can understand artificially-created languages. And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors. And in some parts of the world, they use tools, like sponges to hunt fish. But there's one big question left: do they have a language, and if so, what are they talking about?So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system. Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida. And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows, but at night, they go off the edge and hunt in deep water.Now, it's not a bad place to be a researcher, either. So we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran, and we live, sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time. My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone, and this is so I can correlate sound and behavior. And most of our work's pretty non-invasive. We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we're in the water, since we're actually observing them physically in the water. Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons. They're born without spots, and they get spots with age, and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior. And by about the age of 15, they're fully spotted black and white.Now the mother you see here is Mugsy. She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s. And like all the dolphins in our community, we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin, and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time.Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age. And dolphins are very promiscuous, and so we have to determine who the fathers are, so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA. So what that means is, after 28 years, we are tracking three generations, including grandmothers and grandfathers. Now, dolphins are natural acousticians. They make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do. But they have other communication signals they use. They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate. They have taste, not smell. And they have touch. And sound can actually be felt in the water, because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water's about the same. So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance.Now, we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors. Now, the signature whistle is a whistle that's specific to an individual dolphin, and it's like a name. (Dolphin whistling noises) And this is the best-studied sound, because it's easy to measure, really, and you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting, for example.Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks. This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises) And they use these clicks to hunt and feed. But they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially. For example, males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase. You know, I've been buzzed in the water. (Laughter) Don't tell anyone. It's a secret. And you can really feel the sound. That was my point with that. (Laughter)So dolphins are also political animals, so they have to resolve conflicts. (Dolphin noises) And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting. And these are very unstudied sounds because they're hard to measure.Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight. (Dolphin noises) So you're going to see two groups, and you're going to see the head-to-head posturing, some open mouths, lots of squawking. There's a bubble. And basically, one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine, and it doesn't really escalate into violence too much.Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins. For example, they babysit each other's calves. The males have dominance displays that they use when they're chasing each other's females. And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they're chasing sharks away. And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony. They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger. (Dolphins noises) Now, these are bottlenose dolphins, and you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds. (Dolphin noises) You see, they're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad. I wish I was that coordinated.Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds, and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds. Now, researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory, and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages. But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery.Now, these are three spectragrams. Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing. So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin. Now, it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes.Now, one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean, but it's a difficult job, and we actually don't have a Rosetta Stone yet. But a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology, an interface to do two-way communication, and that's what we've been trying to do in the Bahamas and in real time. Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins. This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information. So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting. And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity. They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures, and they were also inviting us into dolphin games. Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around. And they're very adept. They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage. Now in this footage, the adult is Caroh. She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt, and he's just learning how to play this game. (Dolphin noises) She's kind of teasing him and taunting him. He really wants that sargassum. Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game, they'll often sink vertically in the water, and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper, and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it, and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game. But when we don't dive down and get it, they'll bring it to the surface and they'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves, and then we'll pick it up and have a game.And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time, their favorite toys? So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer, and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other. But we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard. They've got better things to do in the wild. They might do it in captivity, but in the wild —So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water, and we labeled four objects they like to play with, the scarf, rope, sargassum, and also had a bow ride, which is a fun activity for a dolphin. (Whistle) And that's the scarf whistle, which is also associated with a visual symbol. And these are artificially created whistles. They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire, but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins. And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour, working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching. And the dolphins could get in on the game. They could point at the visual object, or they could mimic the whistle.Now this is video of a session. The diver here has a rope toy, and I'm on the keyboard on the left, and I've just played the rope key, and that's the request for the toy from the human. So I've got the rope, I'm diving down, and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention, because they're kind of like little kids. You have to keep their attention. I'm going to drop the rope, see if they come over. Here they come, and then they're going to pick up the rope and drag it around as a toy. Now, I'm at the keyboard on the left, and this is actually the first time that we tried this. I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy, from the dolphins using the rope sound. Let's see if they might actually understand what that means. (Whistle) That's the rope whistle. Up come the dolphins, and drop off the rope, yay. Wow.(Applause)So this is only once. We don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles. Okay, so here's a second toy in the water. This is a scarf toy, and I'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal. Now this dolphin, we call her ""the scarf thief,"" because over the years she's absconded with about 12 scarves. In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas. So I'm reaching over. She's got the scarf on her right side. And we try to not touch the animals too much, we really don't want to over-habituate them. And I'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard. And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf. So I try to give her the scarf. Whoop. Almost lost it. But this is the moment where everything becomes possible. The dolphin's at the keyboard. You've got full attention. And this sometimes went on for hours. And I wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs, because they haven't happened yet, but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have, and interest in the system.And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology. So we joined forces with Georgia Tech, with Thad Starner's wearable computing group, to build us an underwater wearable computer that we're calling CHAT. [CHAT: Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry] Now, instead of pushing a keyboard through the water, the diver's wearing the complete system, and it's acoustic only, so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm, the sounds go out through an underwater speaker, if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle, the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones. The computer can localize who requested the toy if there's a word match. And the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition, so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately.And we're at prototype stage, but this is how we hope it will play out. So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle, the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water, but also as a word through bone conduction. So Diver A plays the scarf whistle or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it. What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle, and if Diver A has the sargassum, if that's the sound that was played and requested, then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever.Now, how far can this kind of communication go? Well, CHAT is designed specifically to empower the dolphins to request things from us. It's designed to really be two-way. Now, will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally? We hope so and we think so. But as we decode their natural sounds, we're also planning to put those back into the computerized system. For example, right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin. Likewise, we can create our own whistles, our own whistle names, and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with.Now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road. In the case of a dolphin, you know, it's a species that, well, they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now, but they live in quite a different environment, and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems.I mean, imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/denise_herzing_could_we_speak_the_language_of_dolphins
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"I made a film that was impossible to make, but I didn't know it was impossible, and that's how I was able to do it.""Mars et Avril"" is a science fiction film. It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen. Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be.When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. I did ""Mars et Avril"" for only 2.3 million.So you might wonder, what's the deal here? How did I do this? Well, it's two things. First, it's time. When you don't have money, you must take time, and it took me seven years to do ""Mars et Avril."" The second aspect is love. I got tons and tons of generosity from everyone involved. And it seems like every department had nothing, so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity.And that brings me to the point of my talk, actually, how constraints, big creative constraints, can boost creativity.But let me go back in time a bit. In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels. They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text, and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation, they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental, theatrical, simplistic way.And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage. And I just love this guy. I've been in love with this guy since I was a kid. His career I admire a lot. And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women. And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance. He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film, and to write, direct, and produce the film myself.And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity. Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet. I mean, his agenda is booked until 2042, and he's really hard to get, and I wanted him to be in the movie, to reprise his role in the movie. But the thing is, had I waited for him until 2042, my film wouldn't be a futuristic film anymore, so I just couldn't do that. Right? But that's kind of a big problem. How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie?Well, I said as a joke in a production meeting — and this is a true story, by the way — I said, ""Why don't we turn this guy into a hologram? Because, you know, he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time, and he's an illuminated being in my mind, and he's in between reality and virtual reality, so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram.""Everybody around the table laughed, but the joke was kind of a good solution, so that's what we ended up doing.Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras. He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium. Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head. Six months later there was a guy on set, a mime portraying the body, the vehicle for the head. And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage's head. So he became like a renaissance man, and here's what it looks like in the movie.(Music)(Video) Robert Lepage: [As usual, Arthur's drawing didn't account for the technical challenges. I welded the breech, but the valve is still gaping. I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box, but I might have hit a heartstring. It still sounds too low.] Jacques Languirand: [That's normal. The instrument always ends up resembling its model.] (Music)Martin Villeneuve: Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt, they're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity, because I desperately needed these objects in my movie. They are objects of desire. They are imaginary musical instruments. And they carry a nice story with them. Actually, I knew what these things would look like in my mind for many, many years. But my problem was, I didn't have the money to pay for them. I couldn't afford them. So that's kind of a big problem too. How do you get something that you can't afford?And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea. I said, ""What if I have somebody else pay for them?"" (Laughter)But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies? And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen? So I found my way to Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's CEO, and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references, and something pretty amazing happened. Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy. It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made. He took a leap of faith. And the artist, Dominique Engel, brilliant guy, he was happy too because he had a dream project to work on for a year. And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free, which was kind of what I tried to do. So here they are.And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green, because this is a weird color, a crazy color, and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later. And I had, again, pretty much, ideas in my mind as to what the world would be, but then again I turned to my childhood imagination and went to the work of Belgian comic book master François Schuiten in Belgium. And this guy is another guy I admire a lot, and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer. But people told me, you know, Martin, it's impossible, the guy is too busy and he will say no. Well, I said, you know what, instead of mimicking his style, I might as well call the real guy and ask him, and I sent him my books, and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium. In other words, there was space for him to dream with me. So here I was with one of my childhood heroes, drawing every single frame that's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future. And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire.But then, you know, eventually you have to turn all these drawings into reality. So, again, my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of. And there's this guy in Montreal, another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon, and he's a very good VFX artist. This guy had been lead compositor on such films as ""Avatar"" and ""Star Trek"" and ""Transformers,"" and other unknown projects like this, and I knew he was the perfect fit for the job, and I had to convince him, and, instead of working on the next Spielberg movie, he accepted to work on mine. Why? Because I offered him a space to dream. So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of.So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film.So I want to tell you that, if you have some crazy ideas in your mind, and that people tell you that it's impossible to make, well, that's an even better reason to want to do it, because people have a tendency to see the problems rather than the final result, whereas if you start to deal with problems as being your allies rather than your opponents, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing way. I have experienced it. And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_villeneuve_how_i_made_an_impossible_film
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"The writer George Eliot cautioned us that, among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous. The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed. He said, ""It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.""I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast. In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles.Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you — the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong. Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment.Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is? The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful. So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. And we're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling ""the new machine age.""The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there's a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil.Now, when I talk about this with my friends in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say, ""Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other."" It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference. And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities. The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before. So this is a time of great flourishing, and the more I look around, the more convinced I become that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson, is not hyperbole at all. This is just a plain statement of the facts. We are in the middle of an astonishing period.[""Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences."" — Freeman Dyson]Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating.The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who was the head of the auto workers union. They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, ""Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?"" And Reuther shoots back, ""Hey Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?""Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics. If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital — in other words, corporate profits — we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high. If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction.So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period. But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time.The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this. This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about. There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer.(Laughter) (Applause)So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers. And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys. And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. We're going to call him ""Ted."" He's at the top of the American middle class. His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. We're going to call that guy ""Bill.""And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, and Ted very rarely has. Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. Bill's hasn't. And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, while Bill's absolutely have not over time. Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. They're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at, and they're actually getting so severe that they're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement.And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life. They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils.[""Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need."" — Voltaire]So with these challenges, what do we do about them?The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills.But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent, you might be interested to know that social mobility, one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets. So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward.The societal one is a lot more challenging. I don't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life.I do know that education is a huge part of it. I witnessed this firsthand. I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it. The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. We have to do better than this. We cannot keep turning out Bills.So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones. We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have.So the green shoots are out there. I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough. We're facing very tough challenges. To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months. We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori. And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity.But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. I think we're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason: The facts are getting out there. The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play ""Jeopardy!"" against Watson. We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. And if we do enough of these kinds of things, the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try.I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century. Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant.Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, ""If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production.""Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. He said, ""I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to give them the plain facts.""So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_what_will_future_jobs_look_like
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"So what does it mean for a machine to be athletic? We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short.Quads have been around for a long time. They're so popular these days because they're mechanically simple. By controlling the speeds of these four propellers, these machines can roll, pitch, yaw, and accelerate along their common orientation. On board are also a battery, a computer, various sensors and wireless radios.Quads are extremely agile, but this agility comes at a cost. They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly.So, how did it just do that? Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system. It's used to locate objects in the space that have these reflective markers on them. This data is then sent to another laptop that is running estimation and control algorithms, which in turn sends commands to the quad, which is also running estimation and control algorithms. The bulk of our research is algorithms. It's the magic that brings these machines to life.So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete? We use something broadly called model-based design. We first capture the physics with a mathematical model of how the machines behave. We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them. For example, that's how we can make the quad hover. We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations. We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad.Let me demonstrate the strength of this approach. Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole. With a little bit of practice, it's pretty straightforward for a human being to do this, although we do have the advantage of having two feet on the ground and the use of our very versatile hands. It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands. Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space.(Audience) Oh!(Applause)(Applause ends)You can notice that this quad is making fine adjustments to keep the pole balanced. How did we design the algorithms to do this? We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad. Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system, we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it. Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back — to the nice, balanced position.We can also augment the model to include where we want the quad to be in space. Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me.(Laughter)The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory.Let's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop, and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world. Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it. Unlike the balancing pole, I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system. In fact, the system doesn't even know that the glass is there. Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space.(Applause)(Applause ends)Okay, you should be asking yourself, why doesn't the water fall out of the glass? Two facts. The first is that gravity acts on all objects in the same way. The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up. You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which at these speeds are negligible. And that's why you don't need to model the glass. It naturally doesn't spill, no matter what the quad does.(Audience) Oh!(Applause)(Applause ends)The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard. In this instance, carrying a glass of water is easy. Balancing a pole is hard.We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured. Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage? Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration. Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four. Or do they?(Audience) Oh!(Laughter)If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it. We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration. Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible. In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy.We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching. Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry? Will the vaulter stick the landing? Suppose we want this quad here to perform a triple flip and finish off at the exact same spot that it started. This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution. There simply isn't enough time. Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better. Similar to the diver and the vaulter, it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard.(Laughter)(Applause)Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports. How do we make a machine do what an athlete does seemingly without effort?(Laughter)(Applause)(Applause ends)This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large. The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second. We first figure out where the ball is going. We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from. Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball. Fourth, we only execute 20 milliseconds' worth of that strategy. Twenty milliseconds later, the whole process is repeated until the quad strikes the ball.(Applause)Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own, they can do it collectively. These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net.(Applause)(Applause ends)They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me. Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical.(Applause)In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch.The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me. Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second.Everything we have seen so far has been about the machines and their capabilities. What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being? What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming. It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time. Similar to the pointer that I used earlier, we can use this as inputs to the system. We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures.(Applause)Interaction doesn't have to be virtual. It can be physical. Take this quad, for example. It's trying to stay at a fixed point in space. If I try to move it out of the way, it fights me, and moves back to where it wants to be. We can change this behavior, however. We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad. Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course. Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid.We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine. I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration.So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics. Let's have a little bit of fun with this. For what you will see next, these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto. As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there. Okay, here goes.(Laughter)(Laughter)(Applause)Whew! You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes? Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities. Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group. Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits. What impact will the speed of machines have on our way of life? Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused. This is not a technical choice we are faced with; it's a social one. Let's make the right choice, the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines, just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us.Let me introduce you to the wizards behind the green curtain. They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team.(Applause)Federico Augugliaro, Dario Brescianini, Markus Hehn, Sergei Lupashin, Mark Muller and Robin Ritz. Look out for them. They're destined for great things.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d_andrea_the_astounding_athletic_power_of_quadcopters
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"This will not be a speech like any one I have ever given. I will talk to you today about the failure of leadership in global politics and in our globalizing economy. And I won't provide some feel-good, ready-made solutions. But I will in the end urge you to rethink, actually take risks, and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy.Failure of leadership. What is the failure of leadership today? And why is our democracy not working? Well, I believe that the failure of leadership is the fact that we have taken you out of the process. So let me, from my personal experiences, give you an insight, so that you can step back and maybe understand why it is so difficult to cope with the challenges of today and why politics is going down a blind alley.Let's start from the beginning. Let's start from democracy. Well, if you go back to the Ancient Greeks, it was a revelation, a discovery, that we had the potential, together, to be masters of our own fate, to be able to examine, to learn, to imagine, and then to design a better life. And democracy was the political innovation which protected this freedom, because we were liberated from fear so that our minds in fact, whether they be despots or dogmas, could be the protagonists. Democracy was the political innovation that allowed us to limit the power, whether it was of tyrants or of high priests, their natural tendency to maximize power and wealth.Well, I first began to understand this when I was 14 years old. I used to, to try to avoid homework, sneak down to the living room and listen to my parents and their friends debate heatedly. You see, then Greece was under control of a very powerful establishment which was strangling the country, and my father was heading a promising movement to reimagine Greece, to imagine a Greece where freedom reigned and where, maybe, the people, the citizens, could actually rule their own country.I used to join him in many of the campaigns, and you can see me here next to him. I'm the younger one there, to the side. You may not recognize me because I used to part my hair differently there.(Laughter)So in 1967, elections were coming, things were going well in the campaign, the house was electric. We really could sense that there was going to be a major progressive change in Greece.Then one night, military trucks drive up to our house. Soldiers storm the door. They find me up on the top terrace. A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun, puts it to my head, and says, ""Tell me where your father is or I will kill you."" My father, hiding nearby, reveals himself, and was summarily taken to prison.Well, we survived, but democracy did not. Seven brutal years of dictatorship which we spent in exile.Now, today, our democracies are again facing a moment of truth. Let me tell you a story. Sunday evening, Brussels, April 2010. I'm sitting with my counterparts in the European Union. I had just been elected prime minister, but I had the unhappy privilege of revealing a truth that our deficit was not 6 percent, as had been officially reported only a few days earlier before the elections by the previous government, but actually 15.6 percent. But the deficit was only the symptom of much deeper problems that Greece was facing, and I had been elected on a mandate, a mission, actually, to tackle these problems, whether it was lack of transparency and accountability in governance, or whether it was a clientelistic state offering favors to the powerful — tax avoidance abetted and aided by a global tax evasion system, politics and media captured by special interests. But despite our electoral mandate, the markets mistrusted us. Our borrowing costs were skyrocketing, and we were facing possible default.So I went to Brussels on a mission to make the case for a united European response, one that would calm the markets and give us the time to make the necessary reforms. But time we didn't get. Picture yourselves around the table in Brussels. Negotiations are difficult, the tensions are high, progress is slow, and then, 10 minutes to 2, a prime minister shouts out, ""We have to finish in 10 minutes.""I said, ""Why? These are important decisions. Let's deliberate a little bit longer.""Another prime minister comes in and says, ""No, we have to have an agreement now, because in 10 minutes, the markets are opening up in Japan, and there will be havoc in the global economy.""We quickly came to a decision in those 10 minutes. This time it was not the military, but the markets, that put a gun to our collective heads. What followed were the most difficult decisions in my life, painful to me, painful to my countrymen, imposing cuts, austerity, often on those not to blame for the crisis. With these sacrifices, Greece did avoid bankruptcy and the eurozone avoided a collapse.Greece, yes, triggered the Euro crisis, and some people blame me for pulling the trigger. But I think today that most would agree that Greece was only a symptom of much deeper structural problems in the eurozone, vulnerabilities in the wider global economic system, vulnerabilities of our democracies. Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail, or, more accurately, too big to control. Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws, evade taxes, evade environmental or labor standards. Our democracies are undermined by the growing inequality and the growing concentration of power and wealth, lobbies, corruption, the speed of the markets or simply the fact that we sometimes fear an impending disaster, have constrained our democracies, and they have constrained our capacity to imagine and actually use the potential, your potential, in finding solutions.Greece, you see, was only a preview of what is in store for us all. I, overly optimistically, had hoped that this crisis was an opportunity for Greece, for Europe, for the world, to make radical democratic transformations in our institutions. Instead, I had a very humbling experience. In Brussels, when we tried desperately again and again to find common solutions, I realized that not one, not one of us, had ever dealt with a similar crisis. But worse, we were trapped by our collective ignorance. We were led by our fears. And our fears led to a blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity. Instead of reaching out to the common or the collective wisdom in our societies, investing in it to find more creative solutions, we reverted to political posturing. And then we were surprised when every ad hoc new measure didn't bring an end to the crisis, and of course that made it very easy to look for a whipping boy for our collective European failure, and of course that was Greece. Those profligate, idle, ouzo-swilling, Zorba-dancing Greeks, they are the problem. Punish them! Well, a convenient but unfounded stereotype that sometimes hurt even more than austerity itself.But let me warn you, this is not just about Greece. This could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex, cross-border problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's migration, whether it's the financial system. That is, abandoning our collective power to imagine our potential, falling victims to our fears, our stereotypes, our dogmas, taking our citizens out of the process rather than building the process around our citizens. And doing so will only test the faith of our citizens, of our peoples, even more in the democratic process.It's no wonder that many political leaders, and I don't exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people. When riot police have to protect parliaments, a scene which is increasingly common around the world, then there's something deeply wrong with our democracies. That's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package. My European counterparts, some of them, at least, said, ""You can't do this. There will be havoc in the markets again."" I said, ""We need to, before we restore confidence in the markets, we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people.""Since leaving office, I have had time to reflect. We have weathered the storm, in Greece and in Europe, but we remain challenged. If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential, well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece, and in other countries, certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion. So far, we've thrown economics at the problem, actually mostly austerity, and certainly we could have designed alternatives, a different strategy, a green stimulus for green jobs, or mutualized debt, Eurobonds which would support countries in need from market pressures, these would have been much more viable alternatives. Yet I have come to believe that the problem is not so much one of economics as it is one of democracy.So let's try something else. Let's see how we can bring people back to the process. Let's throw democracy at the problem. Again, the Ancient Greeks, with all their shortcomings, believed in the wisdom of the crowd at their best moments. In people we trust. Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating, debating, taking on public responsibilities for public affairs. Average citizens often were chosen for citizen juries to decide on critical matters of the day. Science, theater, research, philosophy, games of the mind and the body, they were daily exercises. Actually they were an education for participation, for the potential, for growing the potential of our citizens.And those who shunned politics, well, they were idiots. You see, in Ancient Greece, in ancient Athens, that term originated there. ""Idiot"" comes from the root ""idio,"" oneself. A person who is self-centered, secluded, excluded, someone who doesn't participate or even examine public affairs. And participation took place in the agora, the agora having two meanings, both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation. You see, markets and politics then were one, unified, accessible, transparent, because they gave power to the people. They serve the demos, democracy. Above government, above markets was the direct rule of the people.Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions. So our politicians are limited to local politics, while our citizens, even though they see a great potential, are prey to forces beyond their control.So how then do we reunite the two halves of the agora? How do we democratize globalization? And I'm not talking about the necessary reforms of the United Nations or the G20. I'm talking about, how do we secure the space, the demos, the platform of values, so that we can tap into all of your potential?Well, this is exactly where I think Europe fits in. Europe, despite its recent failures, is the world's most successful cross-border peace experiment. So let's see if it can't be an experiment in global democracy, a new kind of democracy. Let's see if we can't design a European agora, not simply for products and services, but for our citizens, where they can work together, deliberate, learn from each other, exchange between art and cultures, where they can come up with creative solutions. Let's imagine that European citizens actually have the power to vote directly for a European president, or citizen juries chosen by lottery which can deliberate on critical and controversial issues, a European-wide referendum where our citizens, as the lawmakers, vote on future treaties. And here's an idea: Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants, not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship, but a European citizenship? And make sure we actually empower the unemployed by giving them a voucher scholarship where they can choose to study anywhere in Europe. Where our common identity is democracy, where our education is through participation, and where participation builds trust and solidarity rather than exclusion and xenophobia. Europe of and by the people, a Europe, an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders.Now, some might accuse me of being naive, putting my faith in the power and the wisdom of the people. Well, after decades in politics, I am also a pragmatist. Believe me, I have been, I am, part of today's political system, and I know things must change. We must revive politics as the power to imagine, reimagine, and redesign for a better world.But I also know that this disruptive force of change won't be driven by the politics of today. The revival of democratic politics will come from you, and I mean all of you. Everyone who participates in this global exchange of ideas, whether it's here in this room or just outside this room or online or locally, where everybody lives, everyone who stands up to injustice and inequality, everybody who stands up to those who preach racism rather than empathy, dogma rather than critical thinking, technocracy rather than democracy, everyone who stands up to the unchecked power, whether it's authoritarian leaders, plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens, or powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few.It is in their interest that all of us are idiots. Let's not be.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: You seem to describe a political leadership that is kind of unprepared and a prisoner of the whims of the financial markets, and that scene in Brussels that you describe, to me, as a citizen, is terrifying. Help us understand how you felt after the decision. It was not a good decision, clearly, but how do you feel after that, not as the prime minister, but as George?George Papandreou: Well, obviously there were constraints which didn't allow me or others to make the types of decisions we would have wanted, and obviously I had hoped that we would have the time to make the reforms which would have dealt with the deficit rather than trying to cut the deficit which was the symptom of the problem. And that hurt. That hurt because that, first of all, hurt the younger generation, and not only, many of them are demonstrating outside, but I think this is one of our problems. When we face these crises, we have kept the potential, the huge potential of our society out of this process, and we are closing in on ourselves in politics, and I think we need to change that, to really find new participatory ways using the great capabilities that now exist even in technology but not only in technology, the minds that we have, and I think we can find solutions which are much better, but we have to be open.BG: You seem to suggest that the way forward is more Europe, and that is not to be an easy discourse right now in most European countries. It's rather the other way — more closed borders and less cooperation and maybe even stepping out of some of the different parts of the European construction. How do you reconcile that?GP: Well, I think one of the worst things that happened during this crisis is that we started a blame game. And the fundamental idea of Europe is that we can cooperate beyond borders, go beyond our conflicts and work together. And the paradox is that, because we have this blame game, we have less the potential to convince our citizens that we should work together, while now is the time when we really need to bring our powers together.Now, more Europe for me is not simply giving more power to Brussels. It is actually giving more power to the citizens of Europe, that is, really making Europe a project of the people. So that, I think, would be a way to answer some of the fears that we have in our society.BG: George, thank you for coming to TED.GP: Thank you very much.BG: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_papandreou_imagine_a_european_democracy_without_borders
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"I write fiction sci-fi thrillers, so if I say ""killer robots,"" you'd probably think something like this. But I'm actually not here to talk about fiction. I'm here to talk about very real killer robots, autonomous combat drones.Now, I'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones, which have a human making targeting decisions. I'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own. There's actually a technical term for this: lethal autonomy.Now, lethally autonomous killer robots would take many forms — flying, driving, or just lying in wait. And actually, they're very quickly becoming a reality. These are two automatic sniper stations currently deployed in the DMZ between North and South Korea. Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it, the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer. Now, in both cases, there's still a human in the loop to make that lethal firing decision, but it's not a technological requirement. It's a choice. And it's that choice that I want to focus on, because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software, we risk not only taking the humanity out of war, but also changing our social landscape entirely, far from the battlefield. That's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape. And this has always been the case, throughout history.For example, these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D. Now they were both very expensive to build and maintain, but with these you could dominate the populace, and the distribution of political power in feudal society reflected that. Power was focused at the very top. And what changed? Technological innovation. Gunpowder, cannon. And pretty soon, armor and castles were obsolete, and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield. And as armies grew in size, the nation-state arose as a political and logistical requirement of defense. And as leaders had to rely on more of their populace, they began to share power. Representative government began to form.So again, the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape. Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool, except that, by requiring very few people to go to war, they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands, possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy.Now, I think, knowing this, we can take decisive steps to preserve our democratic institutions, to do what humans do best, which is adapt. But time is a factor. Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own, and as you'll see, remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons. That's because once you've deployed remotely-piloted drones, there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself.The first of these is the deluge of video that drones produce. For example, in 2004, the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis. By 2011, this had gone up to 300,000 hours, outstripping human ability to review it all, but even that number is about to go up drastically. The Pentagon's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform, and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it. And that means visual intelligence software will need to scan it for items of interest. And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at, not the other way around.But there's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines, and that's electromagnetic jamming, severing the connection between the drone and its operator. Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack, but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack, and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making. They'll know their mission objective, and they'll react to new circumstances without human guidance. They'll ignore external radio signals and send very few of their own.Which brings us to, really, the third and most powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto weapons: plausible deniability. Now we live in a global economy. High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents. Cyber espionage is spiriting away advanced designs to parts unknown, and in that environment, it is very likely that a successful drone design will be knocked off in contract factories, proliferate in the gray market. And in that situation, sifting through the wreckage of a suicide drone attack, it will be very difficult to say who sent that weapon.This raises the very real possibility of anonymous war. This could tilt the geopolitical balance on its head, make it very difficult for a nation to turn its firepower against an attacker, and that could shift the balance in the 21st century away from defense and toward offense. It could make military action a viable option not just for small nations, but criminal organizations, private enterprise, even powerful individuals. It could create a landscape of rival warlords undermining rule of law and civil society. Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government, autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both.Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war, that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable, particularly against developing nations. But I think the truth is the exact opposite. I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons, and the reason can be summed up in one word: data. Data powers high-tech societies. Cell phone geolocation, telecom metadata, social media, email, text, financial transaction data, transportation data, it's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people. In short, we are more visible to machines than any people in history, and this perfectly suits the targeting needs of autonomous weapons.What you're looking at here is a link analysis map of a social group. Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals. And these types of maps can be automatically generated based on the data trail modern people leave behind. Now it's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics, but it's a dual-use technology, because targeting is used in another context. Notice that certain individuals are highlighted. These are the hubs of social networks. These are organizers, opinion-makers, leaders, and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns. Now, if you're a marketer, you might then target them with product samples, try to spread your brand through their social group. But if you're a repressive government searching for political enemies, you might instead remove them, eliminate them, disrupt their social group, and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization. Now in a world of cheap, proliferating robotic weapons, borders would offer very little protection to critics of distant governments or trans-national criminal organizations. Popular movements agitating for change could be detected early and their leaders eliminated before their ideas achieve critical mass. And ideas achieving critical mass is what political activism in popular government is all about. Anonymous lethal weapons could make lethal action an easy choice for all sorts of competing interests. And this would put a chill on free speech and popular political action, the very heart of democracy.And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons, and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots. Now we already have international treaties on nuclear and biological weapons, and, while imperfect, these have largely worked. But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous, because they will almost certainly be used, and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions.Now in November 2012 the U.S. Department of Defense issued a directive requiring a human being be present in all lethal decisions. This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military, but that directive needs to be made permanent. And it could set the stage for global action. Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons. And we need it now, before there's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences. Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands, and they would imperil democracy itself.Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones: environmental monitoring, search and rescue, logistics. If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons, how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons?I think the secret will be transparency. No robot should have an expectation of privacy in a public place.(Applause)Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility.But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open, civil society.We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots. Let's not succumb to the temptation to automate war. Autocratic governments and criminal organizations undoubtedly will, but let's not join them. Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands, and that would be corrosive to representative government. Let's make sure, for democracies at least, killer robots remain fiction.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_shouldn_t_belong_to_a_robot
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"Allow me to start this talk with a question to everyone. You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights. Some battle oppressive governments. Others battle oppressive societies. Which battle do you think is harder? Allow me to try to answer this question in the few coming minutes.Let me take you back two years ago in my life. It was the bedtime of my son, Aboody. He was five at the time. After finishing his bedtime rituals, he looked at me and he asked a question: ""Mommy, are we bad people?""I was shocked. ""Why do you say such things, Aboody?""Earlier that day, I noticed some bruises on his face when he came from school. He wouldn't tell me what happened. [But now] he was ready to tell.""Two boys hit me today in school. They told me, 'We saw your mom on Facebook. You and your mom should be put in jail.'""I've never been afraid to tell Aboody anything. I've been always a proud woman of my achievements. But those questioning eyes of my son were my moment of truth, when it all came together. You see, I'm a Saudi woman who had been put in jail for driving a car in a country where women are not supposed to drive cars. Just for giving me his car keys, my own brother was detained twice, and he was harassed to the point he had to quit his job as a geologist, leave the country with his wife and two-year-old son. My father had to sit in a Friday sermon listening to the imam condemning women drivers and calling them prostitutes amongst tons of worshippers, some of them our friends and family of my own father. I was faced with an organized defamation campaign in the local media combined with false rumors shared in family gatherings, in the streets and in schools. It all hit me. It came into focus that those kids did not mean to be rude to my son. They were just influenced by the adults around them. And it wasn't about me, and it wasn't a punishment for taking the wheel and driving a few miles. It was a punishment for daring to challenge the society's rules.But my story goes beyond this moment of truth of mine. Allow me to give you a briefing about my story. It was May, 2011, and I was complaining to a work colleague about the harassments I had to face trying to find a ride back home, although I have a car and an international driver's license. As long as I've known, women in Saudi Arabia have been always complaining about the ban, but it's been 20 years since anyone tried to do anything about it, a whole generation ago.He broke the good/bad news in my face. ""But there is no law banning you from driving.""I looked it up, and he was right. There wasn't an actual law in Saudi Arabia. It was just a custom and traditions that are enshrined in rigid religious fatwas and imposed on women. That realization ignited the idea of June 17, where we encouraged women to take the wheel and go drive. It was a few weeks later, we started receiving all these ""Man wolves will rape you if you go and drive."" A courageous woman, her name is Najla Hariri, she's a Saudi woman in the city of Jeddah, she drove a car and she announced but she didn't record a video. We needed proof.So I drove. I posted a video on YouTube. And to my surprise, it got hundreds of thousands of views the first day. What happened next, of course? I started receiving threats to be killed, raped, just to stop this campaign.The Saudi authorities remained very quiet. That really creeped us out. I was in the campaign with other Saudi women and even men activists. We wanted to know how the authorities would respond on the actual day, June 17, when women go out and drive. So this time I asked my brother to come with me and drive by a police car. It went fast. We were arrested, signed a pledge not to drive again, released. Arrested again, he was sent to detention for one day, and I was sent to jail. I wasn't sure why I was sent there, because I didn't face any charges in the interrogation. But what I was sure of was my innocence. I didn't break a law, and I kept my abaya — it's a black cloak we wear in Saudi Arabia before we leave the house — and my fellow prisoners kept asking me to take it off, but I was so sure of my innocence, I kept saying, ""No, I'm leaving today."" Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me. I was released after nine days.June 17 comes. The streets were packed with police cars and religious police cars, but some hundred brave Saudi women broke the ban and drove that day. None were arrested. We broke the taboo.(Applause)So I think by now, everyone knows that we can't drive, or women are not allowed to drive, in Saudi Arabia, but maybe few know why. Allow me to help you answer this question.There was this official study that was presented to the Shura Council — it's the consultative council appointed by the king in Saudi Arabia — and it was done by a local professor, a university professor. He claims it's done based on a UNESCO study. And the study states, the percentage of rape, adultery, illegitimate children, even drug abuse, prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive.(Laughter)I know, I was like this, I was shocked. I was like, ""We are the last country in the world where women don't drive."" So if you look at the map of the world, that only leaves two countries: Saudi Arabia, and the other society is the rest of the world.We started a hashtag on Twitter mocking the study, and it made headlines around the world.[BBC News: 'End of virginity' if women drive, Saudi cleric warns](Laughter)And only then we realized it's so empowering to mock your oppressor. It strips it away of its strongest weapon: fear.This system is based on ultra-conservative traditions and customs that deal with women as if they are inferior and they need a guardian to protect them, so they need to take permission from this guardian, whether verbal or written, all their lives. We are minors until the day we die. And it becomes worse when it's enshrined in religious fatwas based on wrong interpretation of the sharia law, or the religious laws. What's worst, when they become codified as laws in the system, and when women themselves believe in their inferiority, and they even fight those who try to question these rules.So for me, it wasn't only about these attacks I had to face. It was about living two totally different perceptions of my personality, of my person — the villain back in my home country, and the hero outside.Just to tell you, two stories happened in the last two years. One of them is when I was in jail. I'm pretty sure when I was in jail, everyone saw titles in the international media something like this during these nine days I was in jail.But in my home country, it was a totally different picture. It was more like this: ""Manal al-Sharif faces charges of disturbing public order and inciting women to drive.""I know.""Manal al-Sharif withdraws from the campaign.""Ah, it's okay. This is my favorite.""Manal al-Sharif breaks down and confesses: 'Foreign forces incited me.'""(Laughter)And it goes on, even trial and flogging me in public. So it's a totally different picture.I was asked last year to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum. I was surrounded by this love and the support of people around me, and they looked at me as an inspiration. At the same time, I flew back to my home country, they hated that speech so much. The way they called it: a betrayal to the Saudi country and the Saudi people, and they even started a hashtag called #OsloTraitor on Twitter. Some 10,000 tweets were written in that hashtag, while the opposite hashtag, #OsloHero, there was like a handful of tweets written. They even started a poll. More than 13,000 voters answered this poll: whether they considered me a traitor or not after that speech. Ninety percent said yes, she's a traitor. So it's these two totally different perceptions of my personality.For me, I'm a proud Saudi woman, and I do love my country, and because I love my country, I'm doing this. Because I believe a society will not be free if the women of that society are not free. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. (Applause)Thank you.But you learn lessons from these things that happen to you. I learned to be always there. The first thing, I got out of jail, of course after I took a shower, I went online, I opened my Twitter account and my Facebook page, and I've been always very respectful to those people who are opining to me. I would listen to what they say, and I would never defend myself with words only. I would use actions. When they said I should withdraw from the campaign, I filed the first lawsuit against the general directorate of traffic police for not issuing me a driver's license. There are a lot of people also — very big support, like those 3,000 people who signed the petition to release me. We sent a petition to the Shura Council in favor of lifting the ban on Saudi women, and there were, like, 3,500 citizens who believed in that and they signed that petition. There were people like that, I just showed some examples, who are amazing, who are believing in women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and trying, and they are also facing a lot of hate because of speaking up and voicing their views.Saudi Arabia today is taking small steps toward enhancing women's rights. The Shura Council that's appointed by the king, by royal decree of King Abdullah, last year there were 30 women assigned to that Council, like 20 percent. 20 percent of the Council. (Applause) The same time, finally, that Council, after rejecting our petition four times for women driving, they finally accepted it last February. (Applause) After being sent to jail or sentenced lashing, or sent to a trial, the spokesperson of the traffic police said, we will only issue traffic violation for women drivers. The Grand Mufti, who is the head of the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, he said, it's not recommended for women to drive. It used to be haram, forbidden, by the previous Grand Mufti.So for me, it's not about only these small steps. It's about women themselves.A friend once asked me, she said, ""So when do you think this women driving will happen?""I told her, ""Only if women stop asking 'When?' and take action to make it now.""So it's not only about the system, it's also about us women to drive our own life, I'd say.So I have no clue, really, how I became an activist. And I don't know how I became one now. But all I know, and all I'm sure of, in the future when someone asks me my story, I will say, ""I'm proud to be amongst those women who lifted the ban, fought the ban, and celebrated everyone's freedom.""So the question I started my talk with, who do you think is more difficult to face, oppressive governments or oppressive societies? I hope you find clues to answer that from my speech.Thank you, everyone.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/manal_al_sharif_a_saudi_woman_who_dared_to_drive
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"Once upon a time we lived in an economy of financial growth and prosperity. This was called the Great Moderation, the misguided belief by most economists, policymakers and central banks that we have transformed into a new world of never-ending growth and prosperity. This was seen by robust and steady GDP growth, by low and controlled inflation, by low unemployment, and controlled and low financial volatility.But the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, the great crash, broke this illusion. A few hundred billion dollars of losses in the financial sector cascaded into five trillion dollars of losses in world GDP and almost $30 trillion losses in the global stock market.So the understanding of this Great Recession was that this was completely surprising, this came out of the blue, this was like the wrath of the gods. There was no responsibility. So, as a reflection of this, we started the Financial Crisis Observatory. We had the goal to diagnose in real time financial bubbles and identify in advance their critical time.What is the underpinning, scientifically, of this financial observatory? We developed a theory called ""dragon-kings."" Dragon-kings represent extreme events which are of a class of their own. They are special. They are outliers. They are generated by specific mechanisms that may make them predictable, perhaps controllable.Consider the financial price time series, a given stock, your perfect stock, or a global index. You have these up-and-downs. A very good measure of the risk of this financial market is the peaks-to-valleys that represent a worst case scenario when you bought at the top and sold at the bottom. You can look at the statistics, the frequency of the occurrence of peak-to-valleys of different sizes, which is represented in this graph. Now, interestingly, 99 percent of the peak-to-valleys of different amplitudes can be represented by a universal power law represented by this red line here. More interestingly, there are outliers, there are exceptions which are above this red line, occur 100 times more frequently, at least, than the extrapolation would predict them to occur based on the calibration of the 99 percent remaining peak-to-valleys. They are due to trenchant dependancies such that a loss is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss. These kinds of dependencies are largely missed by standard risk management tools, which ignore them and see lizards when they should see dragon-kings. The root mechanism of a dragon-king is a slow maturation towards instability, which is the bubble, and the climax of the bubble is often the crash. This is similar to the slow heating of water in this test tube reaching the boiling point, where the instability of the water occurs and you have the phase transition to vapor. And this process, which is absolutely non-linear — cannot be predicted by standard techniques — is the reflection of a collective emergent behavior which is fundamentally endogenous. So the cause of the crash, the cause of the crisis has to be found in an inner instability of the system, and any tiny perturbation will make this instability occur.Now, some of you may have come to the mind that is this not related to the black swan concept you have heard about frequently? Remember, black swan is this rare bird that you see once and suddenly shattered your belief that all swans should be white, so it has captured the idea of unpredictability, unknowability, that the extreme events are fundamentally unknowable. Nothing can be further from the dragon-king concept I propose, which is exactly the opposite, that most extreme events are actually knowable and predictable. So we can be empowered and take responsibility and make predictions about them. So let's have my dragon-king burn this black swan concept.(Laughter)There are many early warning signals that are predicted by this theory. Let me just focus on one of them: the super-exponential growth with positive feedback. What does it mean? Imagine you have an investment that returns the first year five percent, the second year 10 percent, the third year 20 percent, the next year 40 percent. Is that not marvelous? This is a super-exponential growth. A standard exponential growth corresponds to a constant growth rate, let's say, of 10 percent The point is that, many times during bubbles, there are positive feedbacks which can be of many times, such that previous growths enhance, push forward, increase the next growth through this kind of super-exponential growth, which is very trenchant, not sustainable. And the key idea is that the mathematical solution of this class of models exhibit finite-time singularities, which means that there is a critical time where the system will break, will change regime. It may be a crash. It may be just a plateau, something else. And the key idea is that the critical time, the information about the critical time is contained in the early development of this super-exponential growth.We have applied this theory early on, that was our first success, to the diagnostic of the rupture of key elements on the iron rocket. Using acoustic emission, you know, this little noise that you hear a structure emit, sing to you when they are stressed, and reveal the damage going on, there's a collective phenomenon of positive feedback, the more damage gives the more damage, so you can actually predict, within, of course, a probability band, when the rupture will occur. So this is now so successful that it is used in the initial phase of [unclear] the flight.Perhaps more surprisingly, the same type of theory applies to biology and medicine, parturition, the act of giving birth, epileptic seizures. From seven months of pregnancy, a mother starts to feel episodic precursory contractions of the uterus that are the sign of these maturations toward the instability, giving birth to the baby, the dragon-king. So if you measure the precursor signal, you can actually identify pre- and post-maturity problems in advance. Epileptic seizures also come in a large variety of size, and when the brain goes to a super-critical state, you have dragon-kings which have a degree of predictability and this can help the patient to deal with this illness. We have applied this theory to many systems, landslides, glacier collapse, even to the dynamics of prediction of success: blockbusters, YouTube videos, movies, and so on. But perhaps the most important application is for finance, and this theory illuminates, I believe, the deep reason for the financial crisis that we have gone through. This is rooted in 30 years of history of bubbles, starting in 1980, with the global bubble crashing in 1987, followed by many other bubbles. The biggest one was the ""new economy"" Internet bubble in 2000, crashing in 2000, the real estate bubbles in many countries, financial derivative bubbles everywhere, stock market bubbles also everywhere, commodity and all bubbles, debt and credit bubbles — bubbles, bubbles, bubbles.We had a global bubble. This is a measure of global overvaluation of all markets, expressing what I call an illusion of a perpetual money machine that suddenly broke in 2007.The problem is that we see the same process, in particular through quantitative easing, of a thinking of a perpetual money machine nowadays to tackle the crisis since 2008 in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan. This has very important implications to understand the failure of quantitative easing as well as austerity measures as long as we don't attack the core, the structural cause of this perpetual money machine thinking.Now, these are big claims. Why would you believe me? Well, perhaps because, in the last 15 years we have come out of our ivory tower, and started to publish ex ante — and I stress the term ex ante, it means ""in advance"" — before the crash confirmed the existence of the bubble or the financial excesses. These are a few of the major bubbles that we have lived through in recent history. Again, many interesting stories for each of them. Let me tell you just one or two stories that deal with massive bubbles.We all know the Chinese miracle. This is the expression of the stock market of a massive bubble, a factor of three, 300 percent in just a few years. In September 2007, I was invited as a keynote speaker of a macro hedge fund management conference, and I showed to the conference a prediction that by the end of 2007, this bubble would change regime. There might be a crash. Certainly not sustainable. Now, how do you believe the very smart, very motivated, very informed macro hedge fund managers reacted to this prediction? You know, they had made billions just surfing this bubble until now. They told me, ""Didier, yeah, the market might be overvalued, but you forget something. There is the Beijing Olympic Games coming in August 2008, and it's very clear that the Chinese government is controlling the economy and doing what it takes to also avoid any wave and control the stock market.""Three weeks after my presentation, the markets lost 20 percent and went through a phase of volatility, upheaval, and a total market loss of 70 percent until the end of the year.So how can we be so collectively wrong by misreading or ignoring the science of the fact that when an instability has developed, and the system is ripe, any perturbation makes it essentially impossible to control?The Chinese market collapsed, but it rebounded. In 2009, we also identified that this new bubble, a smaller one, was unsustainable, so we published again a prediction, in advance, stating that by August 2009, the market will correct, will not continue on this track. Our critics, reading the prediction, said, ""No, it's not possible. The Chinese government is there. They have learned their lesson. They will control. They want to benefit from the growth."" Perhaps these critics have not learned their lesson previously. So the crisis did occur. The market corrected.The same critics then said, ""Ah, yes, but you published your prediction. You influenced the market. It was not a prediction.""Maybe I am very powerful then. Now, this is interesting. It shows that it's essentially impossible until now to develop a science of economics because we are sentient beings who anticipate and there is a problem of self-fulfilling prophesies.So we invented a new way of doing science. We created the Financial Bubble Experiment. The idea is the following. We monitor the markets. We identify excesses, bubbles. We do our work. We write a report in which we put our prediction of the critical time. We don't release the report. It's kept secret. But with modern encrypting techniques, we have a hash, we publish a public key, and six months later, we release the report, and there is authentication. And all this is done on an international archive so that we cannot be accused of just releasing the successes.Let me tease you with a very recent analysis. 17th of May, 2013, just two weeks ago, we identified that the U.S. stock market was on an unsustainable path and we released this on our website on the 21st of May that there will be a change of regime. The next day, the market started to change regime, course. This is not a crash. This is just the third or fourth act of a massive bubble in the making. Scaling up the discussion at the size of the planet, we see the same thing. Wherever we look, it's observable: in the biosphere, in the atmosphere, in the ocean, showing these super-exponential trajectories characterizing an unsustainable path and announcing a phase transition. This diagram on the right shows a very beautiful compilation of studies suggesting indeed that there is a nonlinear — possibility for a nonlinear transition just in the next few decades.So there are bubbles everywhere. From one side, this is exciting for me, as a professor who chases bubbles and slays dragons, as the media has sometimes called me.But can we really slay the dragons? Very recently, with collaborators, we studied a dynamical system where you see the dragon-king as these big loops and we were able to apply tiny perturbations at the right times that removed, when control is on, these dragons.""Gouverner, c'est prévoir."" Governing is the art of planning and predicting. But is it not the case that this is probably one of the biggest gaps of mankind, which has the responsibility to steer our societies and our planet toward sustainability in the face of growing challenges and crises?But the dragon-king theory gives hope. We learn that most systems have pockets of predictability. It is possible to develop advance diagnostics of crises so that we can be prepared, we can take measures, we can take responsibility, and so that never again will extremes and crises like the Great Recession or the European crisis take us by surprise.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/didier_sornette_how_we_can_predict_the_next_financial_crisis
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"Living in Africa is to be on the edge, metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008. Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off. And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution. And now we've got the digital revolution. These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations. Never have been.Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world. What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem. Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself. The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain. It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be.In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow. There was a media blackout in 2008, when there was post-election violence in Kenya. It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time. So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi. And Ushahidi means ""testimony"" or ""witness"" in Swahili. I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators. This is David and Erik. I call them brothers from another mother. Clearly I have a German mother somewhere. And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi. And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where, and you could visualize that data. And after that initial prototype, we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days. And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya. We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.And we were able to grow this software footprint, and a few years later it became very useful software, and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were, and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan. Now, this year the Internet turns 20, and Ushahidi turned five.Ushahidi is not only the software that we made. It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee. We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world. There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps, and even environmental monitoring crowd maps. We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with. There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen, if I share the information with whatever device that I have, could inform you about what is going on, and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on.I moved back to Kenya in 2011. Erik moved in 2010. Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access. I had never had to deal with a blackout. And in Kenya, it's a very different reality, and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem. The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying. Blackouts are not fun. Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down with it, so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem, how do I switch back? And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again. Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa.The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge. It costs me five Kenyan shillings, or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China. Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria? Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa. And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers. This is the reality that we deal with.So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, ""If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."" [Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.] What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection? Could we leverage the cloud? We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi. Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?So we looked at the modem, an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity, yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury. We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality. What if we could have connectivity with less friction?This is the BRCK. It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out, it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network. Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive. It's actually everywhere. Most towns at least have a 3G connection. So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this. The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working, you can continue being productive, and let's just say you are less stressed. And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection.The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks, and whenever you switch on the backup, you pick on the fastest network, so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs, and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on, and if the up time on that is not very good, then you hop onto the next one. The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere. With load balancing, this can be possible.The other interesting thing for us — we like sensors — is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things. Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this. It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.Out of adversity can come innovation, and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure? And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya.It is not without challenge. Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents. ""What are you carrying?"" And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects. So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity, and it can reduce the cost of connecting, and hopefully collaboration within African countries.The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship. The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected, and to help them drive the global digital revolution.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juliana_rotich_meet_brck_internet_access_built_for_africa
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"I was born and raised in North Korea. Although my family constantly struggled against poverty, I was always loved and cared for first, because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family.But then the great famine began in 1994. I was four years old. My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight. I would wander the streets searching for food, and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother's back eating chips, and wanting to steal them from him.Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness. For a hungry child, politics and freedom are not even thought of. On my ninth birthday, my parents couldn't give me any food to eat. But even as a child, I could feel the heaviness in their hearts.Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time, and in 2003, when I was 13 years old, my father became one of them. I saw my father wither away and die. In the same year, my mother disappeared one day, and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money, but that she would return with money and food soon. Since we had never been separated, and I thought we would be together forever, I didn't even give her a hug when she left. It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. But again, I didn't know it was going to be a long goodbye. I have not seen my mom or my sister since then.Suddenly, I became an orphan and homeless. My daily life became very hard, but very simple. My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash. But that is no way to survive. I started to realize, begging would not be the solution. So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets. Sometimes, I found small jobs in exchange for food. Once, I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine, 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day. I was not uncommon. Many other orphans survived this way, or worse.When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped that, the next morning, my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food. That hope kept me alive. I don't mean big, grand hope. I mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread, even though it usually didn't. But if I didn't believe it, I wouldn't even try, and then I would die. Hope kept me alive. Every day, I told myself, no matter how hard things got, still I must live.After three years of waiting for my sister's return, I decided to go to China to look for her myself. I realized I couldn't survive much longer this way. I knew the journey would be risky, but I would be risking my life either way. I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea, or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China.I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen. North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission. Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans, where they face severe punishment. I decided to cross during the day, first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark, second because I knew I was already taking a risk, and since not many people tried to cross during the day, I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone.I made it to China on February 15, 2006. I was 16 years old. I thought things in China would be easier, since there was more food. I thought more people would help me. But it was harder than living in North Korea, because I was not free. I was always worried about being caught and sent back.By a miracle, some months later, I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans, and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years. Later that year, an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee.I went to America without knowing a word of English, yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school. Even in North Korea, I was an F student. (Laughter) And I barely finished elementary school. And I remember I fought in school more than once a day. Textbooks and the library were not my playground. My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying, but it didn't work. At one point, my father gave up on me. He said, ""You're not my son anymore."" I was only 11 or 12, but it hurt me deeply. But nevertheless, my level of motivation still didn't change before he died. So in America, it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school. I didn't even go to middle school. I decided to go, just because they told me to, without trying much.But one day, I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner. And during dinner, I wanted to have one more wing, but I realized there were not enough for everyone, so I decided against it. When I looked down at my plate, I saw the last chicken wing, that my foster father had given me his. I was so happy. I looked at him sitting next to me. He just looked back at me very warmly, but said no words. Suddenly I remembered my biological father. My foster father's small act of love reminded me of my father, who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry, even if he was starving. I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America, yet my father died of starvation. My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him, and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him. And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice.I took school seriously, and for the first time ever in my life, I received an academic award for excellence, and made dean's list from the first semester in high school.(Applause)That chicken wing changed my life. (Laughter)Hope is personal. Hope is something that no one can give to you. You have to choose to believe in hope. You have to make it yourself. In North Korea, I made it myself. Hope brought me to America. But in America, I didn't know what to do, because I had this overwhelming freedom. My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction, and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America.I did not come here by myself. I had hope, but hope by itself is not enough. Many people helped me along the way to get here. North Koreans are fighting hard to survive. They have to force themselves to survive, have hope to survive, but they cannot make it without help.This is my message to you. Have hope for yourself, but also help each other. Life can be hard for everyone, wherever you live. My foster father didn't intend to change my life. In the same way, you may also change someone's life with even the smallest act of love. A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger, and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive. But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive.Thank you.(Applause)Adrian Hong: Joseph, thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us. I know you haven't seen your sister for, you said, it was almost exactly a decade, and in the off chance that she may be able to see this, we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message.Joseph Kim: In Korean?AH: You can do English, then Korean as well.(Laughter)JK: Okay, I'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don't think I can make it without tearing up.Nuna, it has been already 10 years that I haven’t seen you. I just wanted to say that I miss you, and I love you, and please come back to me and stay alive. And I — oh, gosh. I still haven't given up my hope to see you. I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you, and I promise I will not cry again. (Laughter) Yes, I'm just looking forward to seeing you, and if you can't find me, I will also look for you, and I hope to see you one day. And can I also make a small message to my mom?AH: Sure, please.JK: I haven't spent much time with you, but I know that you still love me, and you probably still pray for me and think about me. I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_kim_the_family_i_lost_in_north_korea_and_the_family_i_gained
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"The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal. I don't think anyone in this room would disagree. What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars —(Laughter)use the words, "" ... it all just sounds so, so simple.""Now, I've got no bucket of money today and I've got no policy to release, and I certainly haven't got a guitar. I'll leave that to others. But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health.Housing for Health works with poor people. It works in the places where they live, and the work is done to improve their health. Over the last 28 years, this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia and, more recently, overseas, and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments. It can improve health and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty.I'm going to start where the story began — 1985, in Central Australia. A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service. Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease — third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment.Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs. He got a medical doctor. He got an environmental health guy. And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project. Yami told us at that first meeting, ""There's no money,"" — always a good start — "" ... no money, you have six months, and I want you to start on a project —"" which, in his language, he called ""Uwankara Palyanku Kanyintjaku,"" which, translated, is ""a plan to stop people getting sick"" — a profound brief. That was our task.First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months. And he worked on what were to become these nine health goals — what were we aiming at? After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper.[The 9 Healthy Living Practices: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals, dust, temperature, injury]I was very unimpressed. Big ideas need big words, and preferably a lot of them. This didn't fit the bill. What I didn't see and what you can't see was that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets.The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason. The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate, so the story had to be told in pictures of what these goals were. We worked with the community, not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand.So we had the goals and each one of these goals — and I won't go through them all — puts at the center the person and their health issue, and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good. And the highest priority, you see on the screen, is washing people once a day, particularly children.And I hope most of you are thinking, ""What? That sounds simple.""Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question. This morning before you came, who could have had a wash using a shower? I'm not going to ask if you had a shower, because I'm too polite. That's it.(Laughter)All right, I think it's fair to say most people here could have had a shower this morning.I'm going to ask you to do some more work. I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen. I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head. Have you all got a house? I'm going to ask you to live there for a few months, so make sure you've got it right. It's in the northwest of Western Australia, very pleasant place.OK. Let's see if your shower in that house is working. I hear some ""Aw!"" and I hear some ""Ah!""If you get a green tick, your shower's working. You and your kids are fine. If you get a red cross, well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew. Why? Because you're all too old. I know that's going to come as a shock to some of you, but you are. And before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old, in this case, means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age.We're really concerned with kids naught to five. And why? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs, the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears, the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life, permanently damage those organs. They leave a lifelong remnant. That means that by the age of five, you can't see as well for the rest of your life. You can't hear as well for the rest of your life. You can't breathe as well. You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five. And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem, mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure, needing dialysis at age 40. This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids.Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia, the same proportion. What you see on the screen — 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people — 35 percent had a working shower. Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems. And 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet. These are by a simple, standard test. In the case of the shower: does it have hot and cold water, two taps that work, a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away? Not well-designed, not beautiful, not elegant — just that they function. And the same tests for the electrical system and the toilets.Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure — they're actually about improving houses. We start on day one of every project. We've learned — we don't make promises, we don't do reports. We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment, trades, and we train up a local team on the first day to start work. By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning.That work continues for six to 12 months, until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house. That's our average budget. At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again. It's very easy to spend money. It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house. And for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices, we test, check and fix 250 items in every house.And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars. We can get showers up to 86 percent working, we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses. (Applause)Thank you.(Applause)The teams do a great job, and that's their work.I think there's an obvious question that I hope you're thinking about. Why do we have to do this work? Why are the houses in such poor condition? Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance — the sort of things that happen in all our houses. Things wear out, should have been done by state government or local government, simply not done, the house doesn't work. Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction — literally things that are built upside down and back to front. They don't work, we have to fix them.And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years, the final cause — you will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses. It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence which I've never seen evidence for, that's always reeled out as ""That's the problem with indigenous housing."" Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage, misuse or abuse of any sort. We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem. And we'll go a lot further than that; the people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution. Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia — over 75 at the minute — are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in. They do all aspects of the work.(Applause)In 2010, for example, there were 831, all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands, all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live, and that's an important thing.Our work's always had a focus on health. That's the key. The developing world bug, trachoma, causes blindness. It's a developing-world illness, and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s, where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes, doing damage.OK, what do we do? Well, first thing we do, we get showers working. Why? Because that flushes the bug out. We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day. We wash the bug out.Second, the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick. So what do we do? We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person. He was loaned to us by a mining company. He controls dust on mining company sites. And he came out and, within a day, it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust — so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids. So we used dirt to stop dust. We did it. He provided us dust monitors. We tested and we reduced the dust.Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally. So how do we do that? Well, we call up the doctor of flies — and, yes, there is a doctor of flies. As our Aboriginal mate said, ""You white fellows ought to get out more.""(Laughter)And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug. He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide. They could trap the flies, send them to him in Perth. When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles. The dung beetles ate the camel dung, the flies died through lack of food, and trachoma dropped. And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low. We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes. And finally, you get a good eye.All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference. The New South Wales Department of Health, that radical organization, did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales. And they found a 40 percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment — a 40 percent reduction.(Applause)Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places, I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal. And what a beautiful place to go. We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed. Health was poor. We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families. It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house. It was choking with smoke. People were cooking on their only fuel source, green timber. The smoke coming off that timber is choking, and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe. Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure.So all of a sudden, we had two problems. We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground, that's fine. But all of a sudden now there was a second problem: How do we actually get the smoke down? So two problems, and design should be about more than one thing. Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste, put it into a chamber, out of that, extract biogas, methane gas. The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day — clean, smokeless and free for the family.(Applause)I put it to you: is this eliminating poverty? And the answer from the Nepali team who's working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous — we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim. And I don't pretend anything else.But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby. Well over 1,000 people use those toilets. Yami Lama, he's a young boy. He's got significantly less gut infection because he's now got toilets, and there isn't human waste on the ground. Kanji Maya, she's a mother, and a proud one. She's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas, smokeless fuel. Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke. Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops. He's trebled his crop income, more food for the family and more money for the family. And finally Bishnu, the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets, we've also built a team, and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding. And that, to me, is the key.(Applause)People are not the problem. We've never found that. The problem: poor living environment, poor housing and the bugs that do people harm. None of those are limited by geography, by skin color or by religion. None of them. The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty.Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s, not too far from here, he said that like slavery and apartheid, ""Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."" I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing — I think — extraordinary work, that have actually improved health, and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty.Thank you very much for your time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_pholeros_how_to_reduce_poverty_fix_homes
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"Everything is interconnected. As a Shinnecock Indian, I was raised to know this. We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York.When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day. There were no clouds in the sky. And after a while I began to perspire. And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, ""Look, do you see that? That's part of you up there. That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals.""In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, ""Mom, you should do that.""And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them.Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. I've learned to respect the lightning. My hair used to be straight.(Laughter)I'm just kidding.(Laughter)What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. They become lovely monsters.When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet.All my relations. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/camille_seaman_photos_from_a_storm_chaser
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"Writing biography is a strange thing to do. It's a journey into the foreign territory of somebody else's life, a journey, an exploration that can take you places you never dreamed of going and still can't quite believe you've been, especially if, like me, you're an agnostic Jew and the life you've been exploring is that of Muhammad.Five years ago, for instance, I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle to what I knew was an impossible question: What actually happened one desert night, half the world and almost half of history away? What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca? This is the core mystical moment of Islam, and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis. Yet the question wouldn't let go of me. I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am, just asking it could be seen as pure chutzpah. (Laughter) And I plead guilty as charged, because all exploration, physical or intellectual, is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries.Still, some boundaries are larger than others. So a human encountering the divine, as Muslims believe Muhammad did, to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction, and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational.Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts we have of that night, what struck me even more than what happened was what did not happen. Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting, ""Hallelujah!"" and ""Bless the Lord!"" He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him, no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role as the messenger of God. That is, he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to put down the whole story as a pious fable. Quite the contrary. In his own reported words, he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn't have been real. At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination — a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps, or his own mind working against him. At worst, possession — that he'd been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun, possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first impulse was to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he'd experienced by putting an end to all experience.So the man who fled down the mountain that night trembled not with joy but with a stark, primordial fear. He was overwhelmed not with conviction, but by doubt. And that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe.This might be somewhat difficult to grasp now that we use the word ""awesome"" to describe a new app or a viral video. With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we're protected from real awe. We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we're in control, or, at least, hoping for control. We do our best to ignore the fact that we don't always have it, and that not everything can be explained. Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear is that he did experience them, and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice. Fear was the only sane response, the only human response.Too human for some, like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that the account of his wanting to kill himself shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies. They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment, let alone despaired. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection. Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt? As I read those early accounts, I realized it was precisely Muhammad's doubt that brought him alive for me, that allowed me to begin to see him in full, to accord him the integrity of reality. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith.If this seems a startling idea at first, consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth — inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T — and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists known as Crusaders: ""infidel,"" from the Latin for ""faithless."" Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith. In effect, they are the infidels. Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, they have no questions, only answers. They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith. They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain, but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know and that they and they alone are right.And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. We've allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers. And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above. They're a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people's blood.This isn't faith. It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. It's difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it.And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith. I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary. I'm not convinced of this. I can hardly say I believe it. I can only have faith in it, commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence.Because despair is self-fulfilling. If we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so. And I, for one, refuse to live that way. In fact, most of us do, whether we're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, what drives us is that, despite our doubts and even because of our doubts, we reject the nihilism of despair. We insist on faith in the future and in each other. Call this naive if you like. Call it impossibly idealistic if you must. But one thing is sure: Call it human.Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith, without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty? I think not. After keeping company with him as a writer for the past five years, I can't see that he'd be anything but utterly outraged at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today. He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender. He'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism. He'd call out terrorism for what it is, not only criminal but an obscene travesty of everything he believed in and struggled for. He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity. Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity. And he'd commit himself fully to the hard and thorny process of making peace.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essential_to_faith
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"I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006. I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking emergency call. I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot. I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her. And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital. That wasn't being asked. The question that was being asked of me was a different one, which was, did she also need an amputation?Now, looking back on that night, I'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion I'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the E.R. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer. In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life. The cancer was too advanced. But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee. I brought some for her parents. But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her, because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself. So why was it that, just a few nights later, as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation, why did I hold her in such bitter contempt?You see, unlike the woman the night before, this woman had type 2 diabetes. She was fat. And we all know that's from eating too much and not exercising enough, right? I mean, how hard can it be? As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself, if you just tried caring even a little bit, you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you've never met about to amputate your foot.Why did I feel justified in judging her? I'd like to say I don't know. But I actually do. You see, in the hubris of my youth, I thought I had her all figured out. She ate too much. She got unlucky. She got diabetes. Case closed.Ironically, at that time in my life, I was also doing cancer research, immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards. Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom. I actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science.Three years later, I found out how wrong I was. But this time, I was the patient. Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome. Some of you may have heard of this. I had become insulin-resistant.You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat, whether we burn it or store it. This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo. Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life. And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job. Once you're insulin-resistant, you're on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin. Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease, cancer, even Alzheimer's disease, and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier.With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically, adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking. I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less. I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore. More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance.But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right? If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me, was it possible it was failing someone else? And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance.Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance. Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right? You treat the obesity. But what if we have it backwards? What if obesity isn't the cause of insulin resistance at all? In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg? I know it sounds crazy because we're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out. What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell? I'm not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils.You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state. So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, ""No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy."" And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it. So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat.This is a really subtle distinction, but the implication could be profound. Consider the following analogy: Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table. Sure, the bruise hurts like hell, and you almost certainly don't like the discolored look, but we all know the bruise per Se is not the problem. In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body. Now, imagine we thought bruises were the problem, and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises: masking creams, painkillers, you name it, all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables. How much better would we be if we treated the cause — telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room — rather than the effect? Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world. Getting it wrong, and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins. Cause and effect.So what I'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance. Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about?Let's look at some suggestive facts. We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance. And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts. Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy. So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what's going on.So what if we're fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we're blaming the victims? What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong?Personally, I can't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty. I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this, but I'm wide open to others. Now, my hypothesis, because everybody always asks me, is this. If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food. It's more likely too much glucose: blood sugar. Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. So if you put these physiological processes to work, I'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising.When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago, I did it simply by restricting those things, which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience. But that doesn't mean my bias is wrong, and most important, all of this can be tested scientifically. But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested. I'm betting my career on this. Today, I devote all of my time to working on this problem, and I'll go wherever the science takes me. I've decided that what I can't and won't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don't. I've been humbled enough by all I don't know.For the past year, I've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country, and the best part is, just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals, we've done the same thing. We've recruited a team of scientific rivals, the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what's at the heart of this epidemic. Some think it's too many calories consumed. Others think it's too much dietary fat. Others think it's too many refined grains and starches. But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things. First, this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer. And two, if we're willing to be wrong, if we're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer, we can solve this problem.I know it's tempting to want an answer right now, some form of action or policy, some dietary prescription — eat this, not that — but if we want to get it right, we're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription.Briefly, to address this, our research program is focused around three meta-themes, or questions. First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms? Second, based on these insights, can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that's safe and practical to implement? And finally, once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet, how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception? Just because you know what to do doesn't mean you're always going to do it. Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier, and believe it or not, that can be studied scientifically.I don't know how this journey is going to end, but this much seems clear to me, at least: We can't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did. Most of them actually want to do the right thing, but they have to know what that is, and it's got to work. I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance, because as medical professionals, we've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday's ideas when they don't appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn't final, but constantly evolving. Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science. If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness, what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy?Sometimes I think back to that night in the E.R. seven years ago. I wish I could speak with that woman again. I'd like to tell her how sorry I am. I'd say, as a doctor, I delivered the best clinical care I could, but as a human being, I let you down. You didn't need my judgment and my contempt. You needed my empathy and compassion, and above all else, you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn't let the system down. Maybe the system, of which I was a part, was letting you down. If you're watching this now, I hope you can forgive me.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_attia_what_if_we_re_wrong_about_diabetes
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"I'm going to be talking about designing humor, which is sort of an interesting thing, but it goes to some of the discussions about constraints, and how in certain contexts, humor is right, and in other contexts it's wrong.Now, I'm from New York, so it's 100 percent satisfaction here. Actually, that's ridiculous, because when it comes to humor, 75 percent is really absolutely the best you can hope for. Nobody is ever satisfied 100 percent with humor except this woman.(Video) Woman: (Laughs)Bob Mankoff: That's my first wife. (Laughter) That part of the relationship went fine. (Laughter)Now let's look at this cartoon. One of the things I'm pointing out is that cartoons appear within the context of The New Yorker magazine, that lovely Caslon type, and it seems like a fairly benign cartoon within this context. It's making a little bit fun of getting older, and, you know, people might like it.But like I said, you cannot satisfy everyone. You couldn't satisfy this guy.""Another joke on old white males. Ha ha. The wit. It's nice, I'm sure to be young and rude, but some day you'll be old, unless you drop dead as I wish.""(Laughter)The New Yorker is rather a sensitive environment, very easy for people to get their nose out of joint. And one of the things that you realize is it's an unusual environment. Here I'm one person talking to you. You're all collective. You all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh. In The New Yorker, it goes out to a wide audience, and when you actually look at that, and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at, and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting.Let's look at this cartoon.""Discouraging data on the antidepressant.""(Laughter)Indeed, it is discouraging. Now, you would think, well, look, most of you laughed at that. Right? You thought it was funny. In general, that seems like a funny cartoon, but let's look what online survey I did. Generally, about 85 percent of the people liked it. A hundred and nine voted it a 10, the highest. Ten voted it one. But look at the individual responses.""I like animals!!!!!"" Look how much they like them. (Laughter) ""I don't want to hurt them. That doesn't seem very funny to me.""This person rated it a two. ""I don't like to see animals suffer — even in cartoons.""To people like this, I point out we use anesthetic ink. Other people thought it was funny. That actually is the true nature of the distribution of humor when you don't have the contagion of humor.Humor is a type of entertainment. All entertainment contains a little frisson of danger, something that might happen wrong, and yet we like it when there's protection. That's what a zoo is. It's danger. The tiger is there. The bars protect us. That's sort of fun, right? That's a bad zoo. (Laughter) It's a very politically correct zoo, but it's a bad zoo. But this is a worse one. (Laughter) So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker, you have to see, where is that tiger going to be? Where is the danger going to exist? How are you going to manage it? My job is to look at 1,000 cartoons a week. But The New Yorker only can take 16 or 17 cartoons, and we have 1,000 cartoons. Of course, many, many cartoons must be rejected. Now, we could fit more cartoons in the magazine if we removed the articles. (Laughter) But I feel that would be a huge loss, one I could live with, but still huge.Cartoonists come in through the magazine every week. The average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does 10 or 15 ideas every week. But they mostly are going to be rejected. That's the nature of any creative activity. Many of them fade away. Some of them stay.Matt Diffee is one of them. Here's one of his cartoons. (Laughter)Drew Dernavich. ""Accounting night at the improv."" ""Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers.""Paul Noth. ""He's all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel."" (Laughter)Now I know all about rejection, because when I quit — actually, I was booted out of — psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist, a natural segue, from 1974 to 1977 I submitted 2,000 cartoons to The New Yorker, and got 2,000 cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. At a certain point, this rejection slip, in 1977 — [We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it.] — magically changed to this. [Hey! You sold one. No shit! You really sold a cartoon to the fucking New Yorker magazine.] (Laughter) Now of course that's not what happened, but that's the emotional truth. And of course, that is not New Yorker humor.What is New Yorker humor? Well, after 1977, I broke into The New Yorker and started selling cartoons. Finally, in 1980, I received the revered New Yorker contract, which I blurred out parts because it's none of your business.From 1980. ""Dear Mr. Mankoff, confirming the agreement there of — "" blah blah blah blah — blur — ""for any idea drawings.""With respect to idea drawings, nowhere in the contract is the word ""cartoon"" mentioned. The word ""idea drawings,"" and that's the sine qua non of New Yorker cartoons. So what is an idea drawing? An idea drawing is something that requires you to think. Now that's not a cartoon. It requires thinking on the part of the cartoonist and thinking on your part to make it into a cartoon. (Laughter)Here are some, generally you get my cast of cartoon mind.""There is no justice in the world. There is some justice in the world. The world is just.""This is What Lemmings Believe.(Laughter)The New Yorker and I, when we made comments, the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is. What is it, the cartoon? Is it really about lemmings? No. It's about us. You know, it's my view basically about religion, that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend. (Laughter)And this is my most well-known cartoon. ""No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?"" It's been reprinted thousands of times, totally ripped off. It's even on thongs, but compressed to ""How about never — is never good for you?""Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity. In each instance, our expectations are defied. In each instance, the narrative gets switched. There's an incongruity and a contrast. In ""No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?"" what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude. That really is how humor works. It's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don't go together and temporarily in our minds exist. He is both being polite and rude. In here, you have the propriety of The New Yorker and the vulgarity of the language. Basically, that's the way humor works.So I'm a humor analyst, you would say. Now E.B. White said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. Well, I'm going to kill a few, but there won't be any genocide. But really, it makes me — Let's look at this picture. This is an interesting picture, The Laughing Audience. There are the people, fops up there, but everybody is laughing, everybody is laughing except one guy. This guy. Who is he? He's the critic. He's the critic of humor, and really I'm forced to be in that position, when I'm at The New Yorker, and that's the danger that I will become this guy.Now here's a little video made by Matt Diffee, sort of how they imagine if we really exaggerated that.(Video) Bob Mankoff: ""Oooh, no. Ehhh. Oooh. Hmm. Too funny. Normally I would but I'm in a pissy mood. I'll enjoy it on my own. Perhaps. No. Nah. No. Overdrawn. Underdrawn. Drawn just right, still not funny enough. No. No. For God's sake no, a thousand times no.(Music)No. No. No. No. No. [Four hours later] Hey, that's good, yeah, whatcha got there?Office worker: Got a ham and swiss on rye?BM: No.Office worker: Okay. Pastrami on sourdough?BM: No.Office worker: Smoked turkey with bacon?BM: No.Office worker: Falafel?BM: Let me look at it. Eh, no. Office worker: Grilled cheese?BM: No. Office worker: BLT?BM: No.Office worker: Black forest ham and mozzarella with apple mustard?BM: No.Office worker: Green bean salad?BM: No.(Music)No. No. Definitely no. [Several hours after lunch](Siren)No. Get out of here.(Laughter)That's sort of an exaggeration of what I do.Now, we do reject, many, many, many cartoons, so many that there are many books called ""The Rejection Collection."" ""The Rejection Collection"" is not quite New Yorker kind of humor. And you might notice the bum on the sidewalk here who is boozing and his ventriloquist dummy is puking. See, that's probably not going to be New Yorker humor. It's actually put together by Matt Diffee, one of our cartoonists.So I'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor.""I'm thinking about having a child.""(Laughter)There you have an interesting — the guilty laugh, the laugh against your better judgment.(Laughter)""Ass-head. Please help.""(Laughter)Now, in fact, within a context of this book, which says, ""Cartoons you never saw and never will see in The New Yorker,"" this humor is perfect. I'm going to explain why. There's a concept about humor about it being a benign violation. In other words, for something to be funny, we've got to think it's both wrong and also okay at the same time. If we think it's completely wrong, we say, ""That's not funny."" And if it's completely okay, what's the joke? Okay? And so, this benign, that's true of ""No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?"" It's rude. The world really shouldn't be that way. Within that context, we feel it's okay. So within this context, ""Asshead. Please help"" is a benign violation.Within the context of The New Yorker magazine ... ""T-Cell Army: Can the body's immune response help treat cancer?"" Oh, goodness. You're reading about this smart stuff, this intelligent dissection of the immune system. You glance over at this, and it says, ""Asshead. Please help""? God. So there the violation is malign. It doesn't work. There is no such thing as funny in and of itself. Everything will be within the context and our expectations.One way to look at it is this. It's sort of called a meta-motivational theory about how we look, a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike. When we're in a playful mood, we want excitement. We want high arousal. We feel excited then. If we're in a purposeful mood, that makes us anxious. ""The Rejection Collection"" is absolutely in this field. You want to be stimulated. You want to be aroused. You want to be transgressed. It's like this, like an amusement park.Voice: Here we go. (Screams)He laughs. He is both in danger and safe, incredibly aroused. There's no joke. No joke needed. If you arouse people enough and get them stimulated enough, they will laugh at very, very little.This is another cartoon from ""The Rejection Collection."" ""Too snug?"" That's a cartoon about terrorism. The New Yorker occupies a very different space. It's a space that is playful in its own way, and also purposeful, and in that space, the cartoons are different.Now I'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9/11, a very, very sensitive area when humor could be used. How would The New Yorker attack it? It would not be with a guy with a bomb saying, ""Too snug?"" Or there was another cartoon I didn't show because actually I thought maybe people would be offended. The great Sam Gross cartoon, this happened after the Muhammad controversy where it's Muhammad in heaven, the suicide bomber is all in little pieces, and he's saying to the suicide bomber, ""You'll get the virgins when we find your penis.""(Laughter)Better left undrawn.The first week we did no cartoons. That was a black hole for humor, and correctly so. It's not always appropriate every time. But the next week, this was the first cartoon.""I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket.""It basically was about, if we were alive, we were going to laugh. We were going to breathe. We were going to exist. Here's another one.""I figure if I don't have that third martini, then the terrorists win.""These cartoons are not about them. They're about us. The humor reflects back on us. The easiest thing to do with humor, and it's perfectly legitimate, is a friend makes fun of an enemy. It's called dispositional humor. It's 95 percent of the humor. It's not our humor.Here's another cartoon.""I wouldn't mind living in a fundamentalist Islamic state.""(Laughter)Humor does need a target. But interestingly, in The New Yorker, the target is us. The target is the readership and the people who do it. The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions. Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast, the guy reading the obituary.""Two years younger than you, 12 years older than you, three years your junior, your age on the dot, exactly your age.""That is a deeply profound cartoon. And so The New Yorker is also trying to, in some way, make cartoons say something besides funny and something about us. Here's another one.""I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, Then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people.""(Laughter)""Excuse me — I think there's something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint.""So it focuses on our obsessions, our narcissism, our foils and our foibles, really not someone else's.The New Yorker demands some cognitive work on your part, and what it demands is what Arthur Koestler, who wrote ""The Act of Creation"" about the relationship between humor, art and science, is what's called bisociation. You have to bring together ideas from different frames of reference, and you have to do it quickly to understand the cartoon. If the different frames of reference don't come together in about .5 seconds, it's not funny, but I think they will for you here. Different frames of reference.""You slept with her, didn't you?""(Laughter)""Lassie! Get help!!""(Laughter)It's called French Army Knife.(Laughter)And this is Einstein in bed. ""To you it was fast.""(Laughter)Now there are some cartoons that are puzzling. Like, this cartoon would puzzle many people. How many people know what this cartoon means? The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk. This is the signal for a catcher to walk the dog. That's why we run a feature in the cartoon issue every year called ""I Don't Get It: The New Yorker Cartoon I.Q. Test."" (Laughter)The other thing The New Yorker plays around with is incongruity, and incongruity, I've shown you, is sort of the basis of humor. Something that's completely normal or logical isn't going to be funny. But the way incongruity works is, observational humor is humor within the realm of reality.""My boss is always telling me what to do."" Okay? That could happen. It's humor within the realm of reality.Here, cowboy to a cow: ""Very impressive. I'd like to find 5,000 more like you.""We understand that. It's absurd. But we're putting the two together.Here, in the nonsense range:""Damn it, Hopkins, didn't you get yesterday's memo?""Now that's a little puzzling, right? It doesn't quite come together. In general, people who enjoy more nonsense, enjoy more abstract art, they tend to be liberal, less conservative, that type of stuff. But for us, and for me, helping design the humor, it doesn't make any sense to compare one to the other. It's sort of a smorgasbord that's made all interesting.So I want to sum all this up with a caption to a cartoon, and I think this sums up the whole thing, really, about The New Yorker cartoons.""It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it.""(Laughter)And now, when you look at New Yorker cartoons, I'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bob_mankoff_anatomy_of_a_new_yorker_cartoon
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"I do want to test this question we're all interested in: Does extinction have to be forever?I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about. One is the Thylacine Project. The other one is the Lazarus Project, and that's focused on the gastric-brooding frog. And it would be a fair question to ask, why have we focused on these two animals? Well, point number one, each of them represents a unique family of its own. We've lost a whole family. That's a big chunk of the global genome gone. I'd like it back. The second reason is that we killed these things. In the case of the thylacine, regrettably, we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. In the case of the gastric-brooding frog, we may have ""fungicided"" it to death. There's a dreadful fungus that's moving through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, and it's nailing frogs all over the world. We think that's probably what got this frog, and humans are spreading this fungus.And this introduces a very important ethical point, and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up. What I think is important is that, if it's clear that we exterminated these species, then I think we not only have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can.OK. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project. It's a frog. And you think, frog. Yeah, but this was not just any frog. Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water and goes away and wishes its froglets well, this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs, swallowed them into the stomach, where it should be having food, didn't digest the eggs, and turned its stomach into a uterus. In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles, and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs, and they grew in the stomach until eventually the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart. It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes sprays of little frogs.Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog. They thought, this is incredible. No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this, to change one organ in the body into another. And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well. If we could understand how that frog is managing the way its tummy works, is there information here that we need to understand or could usefully use to help ourselves? Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach, but I am suggesting it's possible we might want to manage gastric secretion in the gut. And just as everybody got excited about it, bang! It was extinct.I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide. He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab. And I said, ""Mike, by any chance —"" This was 30 or 40 years ago. ""By any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?"" And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, minus 20 degrees centigrade, and he poured through everything in the freezer, and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs.This was very exciting, but there was no reason why we should expect that this would work, because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it, cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen. And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, and the same thing happens in a cell. If you freeze tissues, the water expands, damages or bursts the cell walls. Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope. It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact. So we thought, let's give it a go.What we did is something called somatic cell nuclear transplantation. We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog, and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg. We used ultraviolet radiation to do that. And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg. Now, by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project, like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different, because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells. That was a miracle, but it was workable. What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work. Well, we had no real reason to expect it would, and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these. And just last February, the last time we did these trials,I saw a miracle starting to happen. What we found was most of these eggs didn't work, but then suddenly, one of them began to divide. That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again. And then again. And pretty soon, we had early-stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those. We even DNA-tested some of these cells, and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells. So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole. It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species. And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before. We're excited. We've got to get past this point. We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate, to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues. It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog. Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)We haven't done it yet, but keep the applause ready.The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project. The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog, or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes. But it's not related to any of those. It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch, like a koala or a kangaroo would do, and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history, that goes back 25 million years. But it's also a tragic history.The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rain forests of Australia about 25 million years ago, and the National Geographic Society is helping us to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh. In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals. We found marsupial lions. We found carnivorous kangaroos. It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo, but these are meat-eating kangaroos. We found the biggest bird in the world, bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar, and it too was a flesh eater. It was a giant, weird duck.And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either. You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing, sitting in a pool of water. These crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground. We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist.(Laughter)But what they were dropping on was not only other weird animals but also thylacines. There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests, and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones to one that was about the size of a chihuahua. Paris Hilton would have been able to carry one of these things around in a little handbag, until a drop croc landed on her.At any rate, it was a fascinating place, but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way. Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time, and gradually, the forests disappeared, the country began to dry out, and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline, until by five million years ago, only one left. By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared from New Guinea, and unfortunately, by 4,000 years ago, somebodies, we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes — this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia.And as you can see, dingoes are very similar in their body form to thylacines. That similarity meant they probably competed. They were eating the same kinds of foods. It's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival. All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in, thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland, and after that they only survived in Tasmania.Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought with them the things they valued, and that included sheep. They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania, and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work. That guy is going to eat all our sheep. That was not what happened, actually. Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap. But immediately, the government said, that's it, let's get rid of them, and they paid people to slaughter every one that they saw. By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines had been murdered. It was a disaster, and they were about to hit the wall.Have a look at this bit of film footage. It makes me very sad because, while it's a fascinating animal, and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction, we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species. These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin, who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. To add insult to injury, having swept this species nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect — The keepers didn't let it into the hutch on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure, and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin, they still cared so little for this animal that they threw the body in the dump.Does it have to stay this way? In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum. I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals. And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out their relationships to other sorts of animals, and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar, was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old. The guy who had found it and killed the mother had pickled the pup, and they pickled it in alcohol. I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative.But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends, couldn't we think about going into this pup and extracting DNA, if it's there, and then somewhere down the line in the future, we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back? The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly. Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened. But then suddenly cloning did happen. And I thought, when I became director of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go.I put a team together. We went into that pup to see what was in it, and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment. We were very excited. Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA. Every old curator who'd been in that museum had seen this wonderful specimen, put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought, ""Wow, look at that,"" plop, dropped it back in the jar, contaminating this specimen. And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back, what we didn't want happening when the information was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. It would've kept the curator very happy, but it wasn't going to keep us happy.So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around, and particularly, we looked into the teeth of skulls, hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers, and we found much better quality DNA. We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there. So we got it.OK. What could we do with this stuff? Well, George Church, in his book, ""Regenesis,"" has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing to work with fragmented DNA. We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, get that stuff into an egg of a host species. It has to be a different species. What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil? They're related, distantly, to thylacines. And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop a thylacine out the south end.Critics of this project say, hang on. Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt. No, it's not. These are marsupials. They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean. That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth. It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest Tasmanian devil baby in the world, so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going.Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time. And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet, but it's the kind of thing we want to think about. They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA and they spliced it into a mouse genome, but they put a tag on it so that anything that this thylacine DNA produced would appear blue-green in the mouse baby. In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized. When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues. And that tells us if we can get that genome back together, get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff.Is this a risk? You've taken the bits of one animal and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal. Are we going to get a Frankenstein? Some kind of weird hybrid chimera? And the answer is no. If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out the other end of the devil.OK, if we can do this, could we put it back? This is a key question for everybody. Does it have to stay in a laboratory, or could we put it back where it belongs? Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts in Tasmania, restore that ecosystem? Or has Tasmania changed so much that that's no longer possible? I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas where the thylacines were common. I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here, who when I spoke to him, was 90 years old, but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother caught thylacines. They trapped them. And when I spoke to this man, I was looking in his eyes and thinking, ""Behind those eyes is a brain that has memories of what thylacines feel like, what they smelled like, what they sounded like."" He led them around on a rope. He has personal experiences that I would give my left leg to have in my head. We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen. Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance, could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines. My interest was in whether the environment had changed. He thought hard. It was nearly 80 years before this that he'd been at this hut.At any rate, he led us down this bush track, and there, right where he remembered, was the hut, and tears came into his eyes. He looked at the hut. We went inside. There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut where he and his father and his brother had slept at night. And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories. He said, ""I remember the thylacines going around the hut wondering what was inside,"" and he said they made sounds like ""Yip! Yip! Yip!"" All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers. And the key question for me was to ask Peter, has it changed? And he said no. The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926. The grasslands were sweeping away. That's classic thylacine habitat. And the animals in those areas were the same that were there when the thylacine was around. So could we put it back? Yes.Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question. Sometimes you might be able to put it back, but is that the safest way to make sure it never goes extinct again? And I don't think so. I think gradually, as we see species all around the world, it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly not safe in the wild. We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't. We need other parallel strategies coming online. And this one interests me. Some of the thylacines that were being turned in to zoos, sanctuaries, even at the museums, had collar marks on the neck. They were being kept as pets, and we know a lot of bush tales and memories of people who had them as pets, and they say they were wonderful, friendly. This particular one came in out of the forest to lick this boy and curled up around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal.And I'd like to ask the question. We need to think about this. If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets then, would the thylacine be extinct now? And I'm positive it wouldn't. We need to think about this in today's world. Could it be that getting animals close to us so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct? And this is such a critical issue for us because if we don't do that, we're going to watch more of these animals plunge off the precipice.As far as I'm concerned, this is why we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects. We are trying to restore that balance of nature that we have upset.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_archer_how_we_ll_resurrect_the_gastric_brooding_frog_the_tasmanian_tiger
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"Well, Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s, said that, ""We overestimate technology in the short term, and we underestimate it in the long term."" And I think that's some of the fear that we see about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots. That we're overestimating the technology in the short term. But I am worried whether we're going to get the technology we need in the long term. Because the demographics are really going to leave us with lots of jobs that need doing and that we, our society, is going to have to be built on the shoulders of steel of robots in the future. So I'm scared we won't have enough robots. But fear of losing jobs to technology has been around for a long time. Back in 1957, there was a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie. So you know how it ended up, Spencer Tracy brought a computer, a mainframe computer of 1957, in to help the librarians. The librarians in the company would do things like answer for the executives, ""What are the names of Santa's reindeer?"" And they would look that up. And this mainframe computer was going to help them with that job. Well of course a mainframe computer in 1957 wasn't much use for that job. The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear. But that's not what happened in fact. The number of jobs for librarians increased for a long time after 1957. It wasn't until the Internet came into play, the web came into play and search engines came into play that the need for librarians went down. And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today. And we can just ask: ""What are the names of Santa's reindeer?"" and be told instantly — or anything else we want to ask. By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period, because librarians became partners of computers. Computers became tools, and they got more tools that they could use and become more effective during that time. Same thing happened in offices. Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were spread sheets of paper, and they calculated by hand. But here was an interesting thing that came along. With the revolution around 1980 of P.C.'s, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers, not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. It increased their capabilities. They no longer had to do the mundane computations, but they could do something much more. Now today, we're starting to see robots in our lives. On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot. When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick, as they used to do up until about 2002, they now send the robot out. So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs. On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh. These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S. And they take the dirty sheets down to the laundry. They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen. They bring the medicines up from the pharmacy. And it frees up the nurses and the nurse's aides from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around to spend more time with patients. In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways. But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid, because factory robots are dangerous to be around. In order to program them, you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions. And ordinary people can't interact with them. And I think it's the sort of technology that's gone wrong. It's displaced the worker from the technology. And I think we really have to look at technologies that ordinary workers can interact with. And so I want to tell you today about Baxter, which we've been talking about. And Baxter, I see, as a way — a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting. So Baxter is up here. This is Chris Harbert from Rethink Robotics. We've got a conveyor there. And if the lighting isn't too extreme — Ah, ah! There it is. It's picked up the object off the conveyor. It's going to come bring it over here and put it down. And then it'll go back, reach for another object. The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense. By the way, what's going on with the eyes? The eyes are on the screen there. The eyes look ahead where the robot's going to move. So a person that's interacting with the robot understands where it's going to reach and isn't surprised by its motions. Here Chris took the object out of its hand, and Baxter didn't go and try to put it down; it went back and realized it had to get another one. It's got a little bit of basic common sense, goes and picks the objects. And Baxter's safe to interact with. You wouldn't want to do this with a current industrial robot. But with Baxter it doesn't hurt. It feels the force, understands that Chris is there and doesn't push through him and hurt him. But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface. And so Chris is going to come and grab the other arm now. And when he grabs an arm, it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode and graphics come up on the screen. You can see some icons on the left of the screen there for what was about its right arm. He's going to put something in its hand, he's going to bring it over here, press a button and let go of that thing in the hand. And the robot figures out, ah, he must mean I want to put stuff down. It puts a little icon there. He comes over here, and he gets the fingers to grasp together, and the robot infers, ah, you want an object for me to pick up. That puts the green icon there. He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from. It just moves it around, and the robot figures out that was an area search. He didn't have to select that from a menu. And now he's going to go off and train the visual appearance of that object while we continue talking. So as we continue here, I want to tell you about what this is like in factories. These robots we're shipping every day. They go to factories around the country. This is Mildred. Mildred's a factory worker in Connecticut. She's worked on the line for over 20 years. One hour after she saw her first industrial robot, she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory. She decided she really liked robots. And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand. Now she's got the robot doing it. When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better, one of the questions we asked them was, ""Do you want your children to work in a factory?"" The universal answer was ""No, I want a better job than that for my children."" And as a result of that, Mildred is very typical of today's factory workers in the U.S. They're older, and they're getting older and older. There aren't many young people coming into factory work. And as their tasks become more onerous on them, we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with, so that they can be part of the solution, so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S. And so our vision is that Mildred who's the line worker becomes Mildred the robot trainer. She lifts her game, like the office workers of the 1980s lifted their game of what they could do. We're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use. They're tools that they can just learn how to operate in a few minutes. There's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable. That's climate change and demographics. Demographics is really going to change our world. This is the percentage of adults who are working age. And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years. But over the next 40 years, it's going to change dramatically, even in China. The percentage of adults who are working age drops dramatically. And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast, as the baby boomers get to retirement age. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services. But more than that, as we get older we get more frail and we can't do all the tasks we used to do. If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers, before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older. That's happening statistically right now. And as the number of people who are older, above retirement age and getting older, as they increase, there will be less people to take care of them. And I think we're really going to have to have robots to help us. And I don't mean robots in terms of companions. I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves but get harder as we get older. Getting the groceries in from the car, up the stairs, into the kitchen. Or even, as we get very much older, driving our cars to go visit people. And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older by having control of the robotic solution. So they don't have to rely on people that are getting scarcer to help them. And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will — Here, Baxter, it's good. And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives. Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rodney_brooks_why_we_will_rely_on_robots
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"Good morning. My name is Eric Li, and I was born here. But no, I wasn't born there. This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries. When I was growing up, I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity. It went like this. All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up? Communism! Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development. The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph. That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx. And the Chinese bought it. We were taught that grand story day in and day out. It became part of us, and we believed in it. The story was a bestseller. About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative. Then, the world changed overnight. As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie. (Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened. As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one. This one was just as grand. It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end. This one went as follows: All societies, regardless of culture, be it Christian, Muslim, Confucian, must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units, and all these individuals are, by definition, rational, and they all want one thing: the vote. Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after. Paradise on Earth, again. Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil. (Laughter) The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe, sometimes by force, against the evil of those who do not hold elections. (Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order... (Video) George W. Bush:... ending tyranny in our world... (Video) Barack Obama:... a single standard for all who would hold power. Eric X. Li: Now — (Laughter) (Applause) This story also became a bestseller. According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010. In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world. Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success. Those who do not are doomed to fail. But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it. Fool me once... (Laughter) The rest is history. In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy. Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty. Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China. In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting. See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps. Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point. Needless to say, I ate all my grandmother's portions. So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture? Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds. Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day. Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history. Yet, according to the grand story, none of this should be happening. So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it. Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections. Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time. Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate. Well, the assumptions are wrong. The opposites are true. Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system. Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction. It won't last long because it cannot adapt. Now here are the facts. In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule. So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions. Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions. For example, term limits. Political leaders used to retain their positions for life, and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules. Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes. So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70. One thing we often hear is, ""Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms,"" and ""China is in dire need of political reform."" But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias. See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform. The truth is, political reforms have never stopped. Compared with 30 years ago, 20 years, even 10 years ago, every aspect of Chinese society, how the country is governed, from the most local level to the highest center, are unrecognizable today. Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind. Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world's leading expert in political reform. The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow. Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context. Now, this may be counterintuitive to you. The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today. China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members. In the most recent one, only five of them came from a background of privilege, so-called princelings. The other 20, including the president and the premier, came from entirely ordinary backgrounds. In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller. The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top. Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility. The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party? Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department. The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations. It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program. They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials. They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks, and they start from the bottom, called ""keyuan"" [clerk]. Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks: fuke [deputy section manager], ke [section manager], fuchu [deputy division manager], and chu [division manger]. Now these are not moves from ""Karate Kid,"" okay? It's serious business. The range of positions is wide, from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company. Once a year, the department reviews their performance. They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct. They conduct public opinion surveys. Then they promote the winners. Throughout their careers, these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks. Over time, the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [deputy bureau chief] and ju [bureau chief] levels. There, they enter high officialdom. By that point, a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels. After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee. The process takes two to three decades. Does patronage play a role? Yes, of course. But merit remains the fundamental driver. In essence, the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China's centuries-old mentoring system. China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job. Even for him, the career took 30 years. He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars. Now, please don't get me wrong, okay? This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact. George W. Bush, remember him? This is not a put-down. (Laughter) Before becoming governor of Texas, or Barack Obama before running for president, could not make even a small county manager in China's system. Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest. Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department. Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy. I was asked once, ""The Party wasn't voted in by election. Where is the source of legitimacy?"" I said, ""How about competency?"" We all know the facts. In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old. Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years. Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent. Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent. Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent. Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week. Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future. Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is. In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance. I don't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is, from Washington to European capitals. With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife. Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election. Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret. At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy. Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom. The country faces enormous challenges. The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling. Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues. On the political front, the worst problem is corruption. Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy. But most analysts misdiagnose the disease. They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system, and therefore, in order to cure it, you have to do away with the entire system. But a more careful look would tell us otherwise. Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up. India, the largest democracy in the world, 94 and dropping. For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies. So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it? Now, I'm a venture capitalist. I make bets. It wouldn't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions. So here they are. In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S. and become the largest economy in the world. Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries. Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking. Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm. We live in the dusk of an era. Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside. Now, I want to clarify something. I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy. On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West's current ills. If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist. Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. Let us stop telling people and our children there's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. It is wrong. It is irresponsible. And worst of all, it is boring. Let universality make way for plurality. Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. Are we brave enough to welcome it? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Bruno Giussani: Eric, stay with me for a couple of minutes, because I want to ask you a couple of questions. I think many here, and in general in Western countries, would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional, but at the same time, many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that, without any form of oversight or consultation, decides what the national interest is. What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong? EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system ""responsive authoritarianism."" It's not exactly right, but I think it comes close. So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay? Do you know who their biggest client is? The Chinese government. Not just from the central government, the city government, the provincial government, to the most local neighborhood districts. They conduct surveys all the time. Are you happy with the garbage collection? Are you happy with the general direction of the country? So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people. My point is, I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there's only one political system — election, election, election — that could make it responsive. I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world. (Applause) BG: Many seem to agree. One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself. And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China. But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc. So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself. EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you. But it's different. You wouldn't recognize it. Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture. For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference. BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems
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"There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing. The guys says he's looking for his keys. So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes. No keys.The cop says, ""Are you sure? Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?""And the guy says, ""No, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here.""(Laughter)There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called ""big data."" And what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information. The biggest problem is: how do we organize all that information?I can tell you that, working in global health, that is not our biggest problem. Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet. So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. We don't know for, really, basically, any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. We don't know — and this is really amazing to me — we don't know how many children were born — or how many children there are — in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan. We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries. We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill. For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all.And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here. This is about a 5,000-year-old technology. Some of you may have used it before. It's kind of on its way out now, but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff. This is a paper form. And what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia, who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, ""Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?""Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet, but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors. Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this. You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish.And the problem, of course, with all of this is that, with all those paper forms — and I'm telling you, we have paper forms for every possible thing: We have paper forms for vaccination surveys. We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics. We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies — all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single, common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. And what we're looking at here is a truckful of data. This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago, that I participated in. The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks, from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question ... looks something like this. Truck after truck after truck, filled with stack after stack after stack of data.And what makes it even worse is that's just the beginning. Because once you've collected all that data, of course, someone — some unfortunate person — is going to have to type that into a computer. When I was a graduate student, I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes. I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention. I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered, so data quality goes down.But eventually that data, hopefully, gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully, then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better.Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health — I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases — diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar. And millions of children die of these diseases every year. And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate, because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this.What makes it even more frustrating is that the data-entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months. Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, And sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens. Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. You just had teams of hundreds of people. They went out into the field to answer a particular question. You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem. And then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing, because no one actually types it into the computer at all. The process just stops. Happens all the time. This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data.So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process. Now 1995 — obviously, that was quite a long time ago. It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was. The top movie of the year was ""Die Hard with a Vengeance."" As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then. I was working in the Centers for Disease Control and I had a lot more hair back then as well.But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone. It was a PalmPilot. And when I saw the PalmPilot for the first time, I thought, ""Why can't we put the forms on these PalmPilots? And go out into the field just carrying one PalmPilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms? Why don't we try to do that? Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer. We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives.""So that's what I began to do. Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using PalmPilots to do data collection, instead of using paper. And it actually worked great. It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. What do you know? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper. While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross.The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized — I had been to maybe six or seven programs — and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs. But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket. The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs just within health — not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries — is enormous. There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. There are schools that need to track attendance. There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do. And I realized if I kept up the way that I was doing, I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career.And so I began to rack my brain, trying to think about, what was the process that I was doing? How was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently? And, unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I identified the main obstacle. And the main obstacle, it turned out — and this is a sad realization — the main obstacle was me.So what do I mean by that? I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology. If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me. That means you had to know I existed. Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate. So you could be talking about 10- or 20- or 30,000 dollars, if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation. The point is that anything, any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings — it just doesn't scale. And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology, and we need to scale it now.And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture. And, you know, I was thinking, ""How could I take myself out of the picture?"" for quite some time. I'd been trained that the way you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based. It's always guys that look pretty much like me, flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend for a hotel and all that stuff. As far as I knew, that was the only way you could distribute technology, and I couldn't figure out a way around it.But the miracle that happened — I'm going to call it Hotmail for short. You may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem — I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly, at the time — I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. And it struck me, ""Wait a minute — I know the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health in Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail. So these guys are distributing technology, getting software capacity out there, but they're not actually flying around the world. I need to think about this more."" While I was thinking about it, people started using even more things like this, just as we were. They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps — all these things. Of course, all of these things are cloud based and don't require any training. They don't require any programmers. They don't require consultants. Because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves, with little or no training. You just have to hear about it and go to the website.And so I thought, what would happen if we built software to do what I'd been consulting in? Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved. And that's exactly what we did.So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator. No one has to speak to me, you just have to hear about it and go to the website. You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones. Obviously, nowadays, we've moved past PalmPilots to mobile phones. And it doesn't have to be a smartphone, it can be a basic phone, like the phone on the right, the basic Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries. And the great part about this is it's just like Hotmail. It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants.But there are some additional benefits as well. Now we knew when we built this system, the whole point of it, just like with the PalmPilots, was that you'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set. But what we found, of course, since it's already on a computer, we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing. We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes. Unbelievable improvements in efficiency. Cloud based, no training, no consultants, no me.And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we probably trained about 1,000 people. What happened after we did this? In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up and start using it to collect data: data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies.One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives, using $10 mobile phones, send a text message using our software, once a week, with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near-real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die.Physicians for Human Rights — this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice.Camfed, another charity based out of the UK — Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school. They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make. They used to track the disbursements, the attendance, the grades, on paper. The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years. Now it's real time. And because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in, with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year. That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation.So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket — 10, 20, 30 different programs. We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this is still a drop in the bucket.But something's changed, and I think it should be obvious. What's changed now is, instead of having a program in which we're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us, we've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us. We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, catch criminals and successfully prosecute them — to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more ... and to save lives and improve lives.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joel_selanikio_the_surprising_seeds_of_a_big_data_revolution_in_healthcare
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"Throughout the history of computers we've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild. And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone. But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all? I started to imagine what this would look like. First, I created this tool which penetrates into the digital space, so when you press it hard on the screen, it transfers its physical body into pixels. Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen. So with this tool, this boundary has been broken. But our two hands still remain outside the screen. How can you reach inside and interact with the digital information using the full dexterity of our hands? At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace. By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands. (Applause) Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf. Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window. Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly. So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world. But how about reversing its role and having the digital information reach us instead? I'm sure many of us have had the experience of buying and returning items online. But now you don't have to worry about it. What I got here is an online augmented fitting room. This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body. Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it? What would such a future look like? At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel. Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space. What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies. And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world. So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality. Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it's very powerful. And what's more exciting than just turning what's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities. (Laughter) As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world. Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jinha_lee_a_tool_that_lets_you_touch_pixels
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"(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)Robbie Mizzone: Thank you.Tommy Mizzone: Thank you very much. We're so excited to be here. It's such an honor. Like he said, we're three brothers from New Jersey — you know, the bluegrass capital of the world.(Laughter)We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it. We hope you guys will too. This next song is an original we wrote called ""Time Lapse,"" and it will probably live up to its name.(Tuning)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)TM: Thank you very much.RM: I'm just going to take a second to introduce the band. On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy.(Applause)On banjo is 10-year-old Jonny.(Applause)He's also our brother. And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle.(Applause)As you can see, we decided to make it hard on ourselves, and we chose to play three songs in three different keys.(Tuning)Yeah. I'm also going to explain, a lot of people want to know where we got the name ""Sleepy Man Banjo Boys"" from. So, it started when Jonny was little, and he first started the banjo, he would play on his back with his eyes closed, and we'd say it looked like he was sleeping. So you can probably piece the rest together.TM: We can't really figure out the reason. It might have been that it weighs about a million pounds.(Music)(Applause)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)TM: Thank you very much.(Cheering)RM: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sleepy_man_banjo_boys_bluegrass_virtuosity_from_new_jersey
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"When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind. There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. He was a slightly unusual guy. And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official. There's Teodorín Obiang. So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. I've been up to its front gates. I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece — oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too. Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars. And there's Dan Etete. Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion — that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later. So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. But does it just happen over there? Well, at 22, I was very lucky. My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia. So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film ""Blood Diamond,"" the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, some of that sprang from our work. Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. And it was a slightly crazy place. So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. But it wasn't about blood diamonds. Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase ""weak governance."" I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators. So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. He did business with global banks. A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. He used shell companies. He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place. And then there's Dan Etete. Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government — now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around. So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan. This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff. Now let's take the banks first. Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. So how did that happen? Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case. And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal. A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too. You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens. One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it. And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. Corruption in that sector, no surprise. There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? Well, because there's a lot at stake. In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away. Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right. Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. And here's the thing. After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there. Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. I mean, these are state assets. They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so. And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. It's just how some business is done. It's too complex and difficult to change. So in effect, what? We just accept it. But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds. So this is change happening. This is progress. But we're not there yet, by far. Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charmian_gooch_meet_global_corruption_s_hidden_players
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"This is my grandfather. And this is my son. My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy, and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can. My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, sometimes just a small block of wood, if you stack it up tall, actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. These are my buildings. I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That's a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall. But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. That's one billion people in the world live in slums. A hundred million people in the world are homeless. The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. They're the materials of the last century. But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases. Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening. That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels. These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. That's what people jump to as a conclusion. Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours. But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, ""Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great."" That's the change. Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to. This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall. Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, ""Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?"" And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report. I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. Fair enough. And the way I describe it is this. If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log. It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. The next big issue, deforestation. Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. The last thing we want to do is cut down trees. Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems. Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles — 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. We've calculated a 20-story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. That's how much it takes. The carbon story here is a really good one. If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. That's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year. Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this. And the way I describe it is this. The first skyscraper, technically — and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering. We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. It's really just the structure that we're talking about. The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it. But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. Buildings are starting to go up around the world. There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11. We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future. That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. And I believe the race is ultimately on. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_wooden_skyscrapers
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"Diana Reiss: You may think you're looking through a window at a dolphin spinning playfully, but what you're actually looking through is a two-way mirror at a dolphin looking at itself spinning playfully. This is a dolphin that is self-aware. This dolphin has self-awareness. It's a young dolphin named Bayley. I've been very interested in understanding the nature of the intelligence of dolphins for the past 30 years. How do we explore intelligence in this animal that's so different from us? And what I've used is a very simple research tool, a mirror, and we've gained great information, reflections of these animal minds. Dolphins aren't the only animals, the only non-human animals, to show mirror self-recognition. We used to think this was a uniquely human ability, but we learned that the great apes, our closest relatives, also show this ability. Then we showed it in dolphins, and then later in elephants. We did this work in my lab with the dolphins and elephants, and it's been recently shown in the magpie. Now, it's interesting, because we've embraced this Darwinian view of a continuity in physical evolution, this physical continuity. But we've been much more reticent, much slower at recognizing this continuity in cognition, in emotion, in consciousness in other animals. Other animals are conscious. They're emotional. They're aware. There have been multitudes of studies with many species over the years that have given us exquisite evidence for thinking and consciousness in other animals, other animals that are quite different than we are in form. We are not alone. We are not alone in these abilities. And I hope, and one of my biggest dreams, is that, with our growing awareness about the consciousness of others and our relationship with the rest of the animal world, that we'll give them the respect and protection that they deserve. So that's a wish I'm throwing out here for everybody, and I hope I can really engage you in this idea. Now, I want to return to dolphins, because these are the animals that I feel like I've been working up closely and personal with for over 30 years. And these are real personalities. They are not persons, but they're personalities in every sense of the word. And you can't get more alien than the dolphin. They are very different from us in body form. They're radically different. They come from a radically different environment. In fact, we're separated by 95 million years of divergent evolution. Look at this body. And in every sense of making a pun here, these are true non-terrestrials. I wondered how we might interface with these animals. In the 1980s, I developed an underwater keyboard. This was a custom-made touch-screen keyboard. What I wanted to do was give the dolphins choice and control. These are big brains, highly social animals, and I thought, well, if we give them choice and control, if they can hit a symbol on this keyboard — and by the way, it was interfaced by fiber optic cables from Hewlett-Packard with an Apple II computer. This seems prehistoric now, but this was where we were with technology. So the dolphins could hit a key, a symbol, they heard a computer-generated whistle, and they got an object or activity. Now here's a little video. This is Delphi and Pan, and you're going to see Delphi hitting a key, he hears a computer-generated whistle — (Whistle) — and gets a ball, so they can actually ask for things they want. What was remarkable is, they explored this keyboard on their own. There was no intervention on our part. They explored the keyboard. They played around with it. They figured out how it worked. And they started to quickly imitate the sounds they were hearing on the keyboard. They imitated on their own. Beyond that, though, they started learning associations between the symbols, the sounds and the objects. What we saw was self-organized learning, and now I'm imagining, what can we do with new technologies? How can we create interfaces, new windows into the minds of animals, with the technologies that exist today? So I was thinking about this, and then, one day, I got a call from Peter. Peter Gabriel: I make noises for a living. On a good day, it's music, and I want to talk a little bit about the most amazing music-making experience I ever had. I'm a farm boy. I grew up surrounded by animals, and I would look in these eyes and wonder what was going on there? So as an adult, when I started to read about the amazing breakthroughs with Penny Patterson and Koko, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi, Panbanisha, Irene Pepperberg, Alex the parrot, I got all excited. What was amazing to me also was they seemed a lot more adept at getting a handle on our language than we were on getting a handle on theirs. I work with a lot of musicians from around the world, and often we don't have any common language at all, but we sit down behind our instruments, and suddenly there's a way for us to connect and emote. So I started cold-calling, and eventually got through to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and she invited me down. I went down, and the bonobos had had access to percussion instruments, musical toys, but never before to a keyboard. At first they did what infants do, just bashed it with their fists, and then I asked, through Sue, if Panbanisha could try with one finger only. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: Can you play a grooming song? I want to hear a grooming song. Play a real quiet grooming song. PG: So groom was the subject of the piece. (Music) So I'm just behind, jamming, yeah, this is what we started with. Sue's encouraging her to continue a little more. (Music) She discovers a note she likes, finds the octave. She'd never sat at a keyboard before. Nice triplets. SSR: You did good. That was very good. PG: She hit good. (Applause) So that night, we began to dream, and we thought, perhaps the most amazing tool that man's created is the Internet, and what would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces, visual-audio interfaces that would allow these remarkable sentient beings that we share the planet with access? And Sue Savage-Rumbaugh got excited about that, called her friend Steve Woodruff, and we began hustling all sorts of people whose work related or was inspiring, which led us to Diana, and led us to Neil. Neil Gershenfeld: Thanks, Peter. PG: Thank you. (Applause) NG: So Peter approached me. I lost it when I saw that clip. He approached me with a vision of doing these things not for people, for animals. And then I was struck in the history of the Internet. This is what the Internet looked like when it was born and you can call that the Internet of middle-aged white men, mostly middle-aged white men. Vint Cerf: (Laughs) (Laughter) NG: Speaking as one. Then, when I first came to TED, which was where I met Peter, I showed this. This is a $1 web server, and at the time that was radical. And the possibility of making a web server for a dollar grew into what became known as the Internet of Things, which is literally an industry now with tremendous implications for health care, energy efficiency. And we were happy with ourselves. And then when Peter showed me that, I realized we had missed something, which is the rest of the planet. So we started up this interspecies Internet project. Now we started talking with TED about how you bring dolphins and great apes and elephants to TED, and we realized that wouldn't work. So we're going to bring you to them. So if we could switch to the audio from this computer, we've been video conferencing with cognitive animals, and we're going to have each of them just briefly introduce them. And so if we could also have this up, great. So the first site we're going to meet is Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, with orangutans. In the daytime they live outside. It's nighttime there now. So can you please go ahead? Terri Cox: Hi, I'm Terri Cox with the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, and with me I have KeraJaan and Mei, two of our Bornean orangutans. During the day, they have a beautiful, large outdoor habitat, and at night, they come into this habitat, into their night quarters, where they can have a climate-controlled and secure environment to sleep in. We participate in the Apps for Apes program Orangutan Outreach, and we use iPads to help stimulate and enrich the animals, and also help raise awareness for these critically endangered animals. And they share 97 percent of our DNA and are incredibly intelligent, so it's so exciting to think of all the opportunities that we have via technology and the Internet to really enrich their lives and open up their world. We're really excited about the possibility of an interspecies Internet, and K.J. has been enjoying the conference very much. NG: That's great. When we were rehearsing last night, he had fun watching the elephants. Next user group are the dolphins at the National Aquarium. Please go ahead. Allison Ginsburg: Good evening. Well, my name is Allison Ginsburg, and we're live in Baltimore at the National Aquarium. Joining me are three of our eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins: 20-year-old Chesapeake, who was our first dolphin born here, her four-year-old daughter Bayley, and her half sister, 11-year-old Maya. Now, here at the National Aquarium we are committed to excellence in animal care, to research, and to conservation. The dolphins are pretty intrigued as to what's going on here tonight. They're not really used to having cameras here at 8 o'clock at night. In addition, we are very committed to doing different types of research. As Diana mentioned, our animals are involved in many different research studies. NG: Those are for you. Okay, that's great, thank you. And the third user group, in Thailand, is Think Elephants. Go ahead, Josh. Josh Plotnik: Hi, my name is Josh Plotnik, and I'm with Think Elephants International, and we're here in the Golden Triangle of Thailand with the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation elephants. And we have 26 elephants here, and our research is focused on the evolution of intelligence with elephants, but our foundation Think Elephants is focused on bringing elephants into classrooms around the world virtually like this and showing people how incredible these animals are. So we're able to bring the camera right up to the elephant, put food into the elephant's mouth, show people what's going on inside their mouths, and show everyone around the world how incredible these animals really are. NG: Okay, that's great. Thanks Josh. And once again, we've been building great relationships among them just since we've been rehearsing. So at that point, if we can go back to the other computer, we were starting to think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the Internet, and we went to the best possible person I can think of, which is Vint Cerf, who is one of the founders who gave us the Internet. Vint? VC: Thank you, Neil. (Applause) A long time ago in a galaxy — oops, wrong script. Forty years ago, Bob Kahn and I did the design of the Internet. Thirty years ago, we turned it on. Just last year, we turned on the production Internet. You've been using the experimental version for the last 30 years. The production version, it uses IP version 6. It has 3.4 times 10 to the 38th possible terminations. That's a number only that Congress can appreciate. But it leads to what is coming next. When Bob and I did this design, we thought we were building a system to connect computers together. What we very quickly discovered is that this was a system for connecting people together. And what you've seen tonight tells you that we should not restrict this network to one species, that these other intelligent, sentient species should be part of the system too. This is the system as it looks today, by the way. This is what the Internet looks like to a computer that's trying to figure out where the traffic is supposed to go. This is generated by a program that's looking at the connectivity of the Internet, and how all the various networks are connected together. There are about 400,000 networks, interconnected, run independently by 400,000 different operating agencies, and the only reason this works is that they all use the same standard TCP/IP protocols. Well, you know where this is headed. The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming. Now, what's important about what these people are doing is that they're beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us but share a common sensory environment. We're beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn't just another person. Well, you can see what's coming next. All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected through this system, and I can't wait to see these experiments unfold. What happens after that? Well, let's see. There are machines that need to talk to machines and that we need to talk to, and so as time goes on, we're going to have to learn how to communicate with computers and how to get computers to communicate with us in the way that we're accustomed to, not with keyboards, not with mice, but with speech and gestures and all the natural human language that we're accustomed to. So we'll need something like C3PO to become a translator between ourselves and some of the other machines we live with. Now, there is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets. So the interplanetary system is on its way, but there's a last project, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the original ARPANET, funded the Internet, funded the interplanetary architecture, is now funding a project to design a spacecraft to get to the nearest star in 100 years' time. What that means is that what we're learning with these interactions with other species will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world. I can hardly wait. (Applause) June Cohen: So first of all, thank you, and I would like to acknowledge that four people who could talk to us for full four days actually managed to stay to four minutes each, and we thank you for that. I have so many questions, but maybe a few practical things that the audience might want to know. You're launching this idea here at TED — PG: Today. JC: Today. This is the first time you're talking about it. Tell me a little bit about where you're going to take the idea. What's next? PG: I think we want to engage as many people here as possible in helping us think of smart interfaces that will make all this possible. NG: And just mechanically, there's a 501(c)(3) and web infrastructure and all of that, but it's not quite ready to turn on, so we'll roll that out, and contact us if you want the information on it. The idea is this will be — much like the Internet functions as a network of networks, which is Vint's core contribution, this will be a wrapper around all of these initiatives, that are wonderful individually, to link them globally. JC: Right, and do you have a web address that we might look for yet? NG: Shortly. JC: Shortly. We will come back to you on that. And very quickly, just to clarify. Some people might have looked at the video that you showed and thought, well, that's just a webcam. What's special about it? If you could talk for just a moment about how you want to go past that? NG: So this is scalable video infrastructure, not for a few to a few but many to many, so that it scales to symmetrical video sharing and content sharing across these sites around the planet. So there's a lot of back-end signal processing, not for one to many, but for many to many. JC: Right, and then on a practical level, which technologies are you looking at first? I know you mentioned that a keyboard is a really key part of this. DR: We're trying to develop an interactive touch screen for dolphins. This is sort of a continuation of some of the earlier work, and we just got our first seed money today towards that, so it's our first project. JC: Before the talk, even. DR: Yeah. JC: Wow. Well done. All right, well thank you all so much for joining us. It's such a delight to have you on the stage. DR: Thank you. VC: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_interspecies_internet_an_idea_in_progress
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"Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing, that all you wanted to do was learn as much as you could to make sense of it all? When I was 13, a close family friend who was like an uncle to me passed away from pancreatic cancer. When the disease hit so close to home, I knew I needed to learn more. So I went online to find answers. Using the Internet, I found a variety of statistics on pancreatic cancer, and what I had found shocked me. Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival. Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer? The reason? Today's current ""modern"" medicine is a 60-year-old technique. That's older than my dad. (Laughter) But also, it's extremely expensive, costing 800 dollars per test, and it's grossly inaccurate, missing 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers. Your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you have the cancer in order to give you this test. Learning this, I knew there had to be a better way. So, I set up scientific criteria as to what a sensor would have to look like in order to effectively diagnose pancreatic cancer. The sensor would have to be: inexpensive, rapid, simple, sensitive, selective, and minimally invasive. Now, there's a reason why this test hasn't been updated in over six decades. And that's because when we're looking for pancreatic cancer, we're looking at your bloodstream, which is already abundant in all these tons and tons of protein, and you're looking for this miniscule difference in this tiny amount of protein. Just this one protein. That's next to impossible. However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism — (Laughter) (Applause) I went online to a teenager's two best friends, Google and Wikipedia. I got everything for my homework from those two sources. (Laughter) And what I had found was an article that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer. So, I decided to go and make it my new mission to go through all these proteins, and see which ones could serve as a bio-marker for pancreatic cancer. And to make it a bit simpler for myself, I decided to map out scientific criteria, and here it is. Essentially, first, the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers, at high levels in the bloodstream, in the earliest stages, but also only in cancer. And so I'm just plugging and chugging through this gargantuan task, and finally, on the 4,000th try, when I'm close to losing my sanity, I find the protein. And the name of the protein I'd located was called mesothelin, and it's just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill type protein, unless, of course, you have pancreatic, ovarian or lung cancer, in which case it's found at these very high levels in your bloodstream. But also, the key is that it's found in the earliest stages of the disease, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. So now that I'd found a reliable protein I could detect, I then shifted my focus to actually detecting that protein, and thus, pancreatic cancer. Now, my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place, possibly the most unlikely place for innovation — my high school biology class, the absolute stifler of innovation. (Laughter) (Applause) And I had snuck in this article on these things called carbon nanotubes, and that's just a long, thin pipe of carbon that's an atom thick, and one 50,000th the diameter of your hair. And despite their extremely small sizes, they have these incredible properties. They're kind of like the superheroes of material science. And while I was sneakily reading this article under my desk in my biology class, we were supposed to be paying attention to these other kind of cool molecules, called antibodies. And these are pretty cool because they only react with one specific protein, but they're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes. And so then, I was sitting in class, and suddenly it hit me: I could combine what I was reading about, carbon nanotubes, with what I was supposed to be thinking about, antibodies. Essentially, I could weave a bunch of these antibodies into a network of carbon nanotubes, such that you have a network that only reacts with one protein, but also, due to the properties of these nanotubes, it will change its electrical properties, based on the amount of protein present. However, there's a catch. These networks of carbon nanotubes are extremely flimsy. And since they're so delicate, they need to be supported. So that's why I chose to use paper. Making a cancer sensor out of paper is about as simple as making chocolate chip cookies, which I love. (Laughs) You start with some water, pour in some nanotubes, add antibodies, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it, and you can detect cancer. (Applause) Then, suddenly, a thought occurred that kind of put a blemish on my amazing plan here. I can't really do cancer research on my kitchen countertop. My mom wouldn't really like that. So instead, I decided to go for a lab. So I typed up a budget, a materials list, a timeline, and a procedure, and I emailed it to 200 different professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health — essentially, anyone that had anything to do with pancreatic cancer. I sat back waiting for these positive emails to be pouring in, saying, ""You're a genius! You're going to save us all!"" And — (Laughter) Then reality took hold, and over the course of a month, I got 199 rejections out of those 200 emails. One professor even went through my entire procedure, painstakingly — I'm not really sure where he got all this time — and he went through and said why each and every step was like the worst mistake I could ever make. Clearly, the professors did not have as high of an opinion of my work as I did. However, there is a silver lining. One professor said, ""Maybe I might be able to help you, kid."" So, I went in that direction. (Laughter) As you can never say no to a kid. And so then, three months later, I finally nailed down a harsh deadline with this guy, and I get into his lab, I get all excited, and then I sit down, I start opening my mouth and talking, and five seconds later, he calls in another Ph.D. Ph.D.s just flock into this little room, and they're just firing these questions at me, and by the end, I kind of felt like I was in a clown car. There were 20 Ph.D.s, plus me and the professor crammed into this tiny office space, with them firing these rapid-fire questions at me, trying to sink my procedure. How unlikely is that? I mean, pshhh. (Laughter) However, subjecting myself to that interrogation — I answered all their questions, and I guessed on quite a few but I got them right — and I finally landed the lab space I needed. But it was shortly afterwards that I discovered my once brilliant procedure had something like a million holes in it, and over the course of seven months, I painstakingly filled each and every one of those holes. The result? One small paper sensor that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run. This makes it 168 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standard for pancreatic cancer detection. (Applause) One of the best parts of the sensor, though, is that it has close to 100 percent accuracy, and can detect the cancer in the earliest stages, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. And so in the next two to five years, this sensor could potentially lift the pancreatic cancer survival rates from a dismal 5.5 percent to close to 100 percent, and it would do similar for ovarian and lung cancer. But it wouldn't stop there. By switching out that antibody, you can look at a different protein, thus, a different disease — potentially any disease in the entire world. So that ranges from heart disease, to malaria, HIV, AIDS, as well as other forms of cancer — anything. And so, hopefully one day, we can all have that one extra uncle, that one mother, that one brother, sister, we can have that one more family member to love. And that our hearts will be rid of that one disease burden that comes from pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer, and potentially any disease. But through the Internet, anything is possible. Theories can be shared, and you don't have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. It's a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender — it doesn't matter. It's just your ideas that count. For me, it's all about looking at the Internet in an entirely new way, to realize that there's so much more to it than just posting duck-face pictures of yourself online. (Laughter) You could be changing the world. So if a 15 year-old who didn't even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer — just imagine what you could do. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_pancreatic_cancer_from_a_teenager
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"I'd like to talk to you today about a whole new way to think about sexual activity and sexuality education, by comparison. If you talk to someone today in America about sexual activity, you'll find pretty soon you're not just talking about sexual activity. You're also talking about baseball. Because baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity, and we know that because there's all this language in English that seems to be talking about baseball but that's really talking about sexual activity. So, for example, you can be a pitcher or a catcher, and that corresponds to whether you perform a sexual act or receive a sexual act. Of course, there are the bases, which refer to specific sexual activities that happen in a very specific order, ultimately resulting in scoring a run or hitting a home run, which is usually having vaginal intercourse to the point of orgasm, at least for the guy. (Laughter) You can strike out, which means you don't get to have any sexual activity. And if you're a benchwarmer, you might be a virgin or somebody who for whatever reason isn't in the game, maybe because of your age or because of your ability or because of your skillset. A bat's a penis, and a nappy dugout is a vulva, or a vagina. A glove or a catcher's mitt is a condom. A switch-hitter is a bisexual person, and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team. And then there's this one: ""if there's grass on the field, play ball."" And that usually refers to if a young person, specifically often a young woman, is old enough to have pubic hair, she's old enough to have sex with. This baseball model is incredibly problematic. It's sexist. It's heterosexist. It's competitive. It's goal-directed. And it can't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults. So we need a new model. I'm here today to offer you that new model. And it's based on pizza. Now pizza is something that is universally understood and that most people associate with a positive experience. So let's do this. Let's take baseball and pizza and compare it when talking about three aspects of sexual activity: the trigger for sexual activity, what happens during sexual activity, and the expected outcome of sexual activity. So when do you play baseball? You play baseball when it's baseball season and when there's a game on the schedule. It's not exactly your choice. So if it's prom night or a wedding night or at a party or if our parents aren't home, hey, it's just batter up. Can you imagine saying to your coach, ""Uh, I'm not really feeling it today, I think I'll sit this game out."" That's just not the way it happens. And when you get together to play baseball, immediately you're with two opposing teams, one playing offense, one playing defense, somebody's trying to move deeper into the field. That's usually a sign to the boy. Somebody's trying to defend people moving into the field. That's often given to the girl. It's competitive. We're not playing with each other. We're playing against each other. And when you show up to play baseball, nobody needs to talk about what we're going to do or how this baseball game might be good for us. Everybody knows the rules. You just take your position and play the game. But when do you have pizza? Well, you have pizza when you're hungry for pizza. It starts with an internal sense, an internal desire, or a need. ""Huh. I could go for some pizza."" (Laughter) And because it's an internal desire, we actually have some sense of control over that. I could decide that I'm hungry but know that it's not a great time to eat. And then when we get together with someone for pizza, we're not competing with them, we're looking for an experience that both of us will share that's satisfying for both of us, and when you get together for pizza with somebody, what's the first thing you do? You talk about it. You talk about what you want. You talk about what you like. You may even negotiate it. ""How do you feel about pepperoni?"" (Laughter) ""Not so much, I'm kind of a mushroom guy myself."" ""Well, maybe we can go half and half."" And even if you've had pizza with somebody for a very long time, don't you still say things like, ""Should we get the usual?"" (Laughter) ""Or maybe something a little more adventurous?"" Okay, so when you're playing baseball, so if we talk about during sexual activity, when you're playing baseball, you're just supposed to round the bases in the proper order one at a time. You can't hit the ball and run to right field. That doesn't work. And you also can't get to second base and say, ""I like it here. I'm going to stay here."" No. And also, of course, with baseball, there's, like, the specific equipment and a specific skill set. Not everybody can play baseball. It's pretty exclusive. Okay, but what about pizza? When we're trying to figure out what's good for pizza, isn't it all about what's our pleasure? There are a million different kinds of pizza. There's a million different toppings. There's a million different ways to eat pizza. And none of them are wrong. They're different. And in this case, difference is good, because that's going to increase the chance that we're having a satisfying experience. And lastly, what's the expected outcome of baseball? Well, in baseball, you play to win. You score as many runs as you can. There's always a winner in baseball, and that means there's always a loser in baseball. But what about pizza? Well, in pizza, we're not really — there's no winning. How do you win pizza? You don't. But you do look for, ""Are we satisfied?"" And sometimes that can be different amounts over different times or with different people or on different days. And we get to decide when we feel satisfied. If we're still hungry, we might have some more. If you eat too much, though, you just feel gross. (Laughter) So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education? A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model, and it sets up education that can't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people. And those young people become older people. But if we could create sexuality education that was more like pizza, we could create education that invites people to think about their own desires, to make deliberate decisions about what they want, to talk about it with their partners, and to ultimately look for not some external outcome but for what feels satisfying, and we get to decide that. You may have noticed in the baseball and pizza comparison, under the baseball, it's all commands. They're all exclamation points. But under the pizza model, they're questions. And who gets to answer those questions? You do. I do. So remember, when we're thinking about sexuality education and sexual activity, baseball, you're out. Pizza is the way to think about healthy, satisfying sexual activity, and good, comprehensive sexuality education. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/al_vernacchio_sex_needs_a_new_metaphor_here_s_one
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"(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature. But they do. And so does every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me. In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to share with you today. The soundscape is made up of three basic sources. The first is the geophony, or the nonbiological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. The second of these is the biophony. The biophony is all of the sound that's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place. And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact. They were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life. When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. To me, this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form. The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes. And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe. This is Lincoln Meadow. Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many years. In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called ""selective logging,"" taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. This is an example of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page — 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. There were a lot of them. And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. (Nature sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. This is after selective logging. You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. (Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation. But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story. Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. But I can tell you that they do express themselves. Whether or not we understand it is a different story. I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish. And curious to see if any of them made any noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value. The static-like sounds that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. (Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat — (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large, vernal pools in great numbers. And they vocalize in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. And they do that for two reasons. The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very healthy pattern. (Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California, and it's a favorite habitat of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very bottom of the page. (Frogs croaking) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have pretty much returned to normal. I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial subject among some older biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. And one afternoon, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, killing the female and her young babies. Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard coming from any organism, human or other. (Beaver crying) Yeah. Well. There are many facets to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world. You've heard the impact of resource extraction, human noise and habitat destruction. And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a sense of place, the true story of the world we live in. In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. (Growling) Thank you for listening. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bernie_krause_the_voice_of_the_natural_world
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"Clouds. Have you ever noticed how much people moan about them? They get a bad rap. If you think about it, the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds. Someone who's down or depressed, they're under a cloud. And when there's bad news in store, there's a cloud on the horizon. I saw an article the other day. It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet. ""A cloud over the cloud,"" was the headline. It seems like they're everyone's default doom-and-gloom metaphor. But I think they're beautiful, don't you? It's just that their beauty is missed because they're so omnipresent, so, I don't know, commonplace, that people don't notice them. They don't notice the beauty, but they don't even notice the clouds unless they get in the way of the sun. And so people think of clouds as things that get in the way. They think of them as the annoying, frustrating obstructions, and then they rush off and do some blue-sky thinking. (Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds. It's like a nostalgic fondness, and they make them think of their youth. Who here can't remember thinking, well, looking and finding shapes in the clouds when they were kids? You know, when you were masters of daydreaming? Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright, he described the clouds as the patron godesses of idle fellows two and a half thousand years ago, and you can see what he means. It's just that these days, us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze, and I think that's a pity. I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it. I think we should be a bit more willing, perhaps, to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go, ""Wait a minute, that's two cats dancing the salsa!"" (Laughter) (Applause) Or seeing the big, white, puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank. (Laughter) They're like nature's version of those inkblot images, you know, that shrinks used to show their patients in the '60s, and I think if you consider the shapes you see in the clouds, you'll save money on psychoanalysis bills. Let's say you're in love. All right? And you look up and what do you see? Right? Or maybe the opposite. You've just been dumped by your partner, and everywhere you look, it's kissing couples. (Laughter) Perhaps you're having a moment of existential angst. You know, you're thinking about your own mortality. And there, on the horizon, it's the Grim Reaper. (Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather. (Laughter) What would that mean? What would that mean? I have no idea. But one thing I do know is this: The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair. I think we should stand up for them, which is why, a few years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society. Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world. And all these photographs that I'm showing, they were sent in by members. And the society exists to remind people of this: Clouds are not something to moan about. Far from it. They are, in fact, the most diverse, evocative, poetic aspect of nature. I think, if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then, it helps you keep your feet on the ground. And I want to show you why, with the help of some of my favorite types of clouds. Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair. It's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere, and as these ice crystals fall, they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down, giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances, these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks. And these winds up there can be very, very fierce. They can be 200 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour. These clouds are bombing along, but from all the way down here, they appear to be moving gracefully, slowly, like most clouds. And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down, to calm down. It's like a bit of everyday meditation. Those are common clouds. What about rarer ones, like the lenticularis, the UFO-shaped lenticularis cloud? These clouds form in the region of mountains. When the wind passes, rises to pass over the mountain, it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak, with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air, these flying saucer-like forms, and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds. It's true. A little rarer are the fallstreak holes. All right? This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below. Rarer still, the Kelvin–Helmholtz cloud. Not a very snappy name. Needs a rebrand. This looks like a series of breaking waves, and it's caused by shearing winds — the wind above the cloud layer and below the cloud layer differ significantly, and in the middle, in between, you get this undulating of the air, and if the difference in those speeds is just right, the tops of the undulations curl over in these beautiful breaking wave-like vortices. All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare. If you look up, and you pay attention to the sky, you'll see them sooner or later, maybe not quite as dramatic as these, but you'll see them. And you'll see them around where you live. Clouds are the most egalitarian of nature's displays, because we all have a good, fantastic view of the sky. And these clouds, these rarer clouds, remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday. Nothing is more nourishing, more stimulating to an active, inquiring mind than being surprised, being amazed. It's why we're all here at TED, right? But you don't need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world to be surprised. You just need to step outside, pay attention to what's so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everybody else misses it. One cloud that people rarely miss is this one: the cumulonimbus storm cloud. It's what's produces thunder and lightning and hail. These clouds spread out at the top in this enormous anvil fashion stretching 10 miles up into the atmosphere. They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere. But from down below, they are the embodiment of the powerful, elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere. To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail, to feel connected to our atmosphere. It's to be reminded that we are creatures that inhabit this ocean of air. We don't live beneath the sky. We live within it. And that connection, that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote. It's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen, you know, when we're in a wi-fi zone. But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one, the cumulus cloud. Right? It forms on a sunny day. If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind. All those cloud shapes at the beginning, those were cumulus clouds. The sharp, crisp outlines of this formation make it the best one for finding shapes in. And it reminds us of the aimless nature of cloudspotting, what an aimless activity it is. You're not going to change the world by lying on your back and gazing up at the sky, are you? It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important. The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy, perpetually busy. You know, when you're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table, raising a family, writing thank you letters, you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails, updating a Facebook page, feeding your Twitter feed. And cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing. (Laughter) And sometimes we need — (Applause) Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing. We need to be reminded by these patron goddesses of idle fellows that slowing down and being in the present, not thinking about what you've got to do and what you should have done, but just being here, letting your imagination lift from the everyday concerns down here and just being in the present, it's good for you, and it's good for the way you feel. It's good for your ideas. It's good for your creativity. It's good for your soul. So keep looking up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_pretor_pinney_cloudy_with_a_chance_of_joy
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"Where do you come from? It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. So I don't think I've really earned the right to call myself an Indian. And if ""Where do you come from?"" means ""Where were you born and raised and educated?"" then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England, except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education, and all the time I was growing up, I was the only kid in all my classes who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks. And if ""Where do you come from?"" means ""Where do you pay your taxes? Where do you see your doctor and your dentist?"" then I'm very much of the United States, and I have been for 48 years now, since I was a really small child. Except, for many of those years, I've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien. I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. (Laughter) And if ""Where do you come from?"" means ""Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time?"" then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan. Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them. And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is, because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most of the kids I meet are much more international and multi-cultured than I am. And they have one home associated with their parents, but another associated with their partners, a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and many more besides. And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. Home for them is really a work in progress. It's like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections. And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, ""Where's your home?"" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. And I'd always felt this way, but it really came home to me, as it were, some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents' house in California, and I looked through the living room windows and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames, one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places. And three hours later, that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash. And when I woke up the next morning, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket. Of course, if anybody asked me then, ""Where is your home?"" I literally couldn't point to any physical construction. My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me. And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation. Because when my grandparents were born, they pretty much had their sense of home, their sense of community, even their sense of enmity, assigned to them at birth, and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that. And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home, create our sense of community, fashion our sense of self, and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents' age. No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan, partly raised in Indonesia, has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law. The number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million, and that's an almost unimaginable number, but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and the whole population of Australia and then the whole population of Australia again and the whole population of Canada again and doubled that number, you would still have fewer people than belong to this great floating tribe. And the number of us who live outside the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly, by 64 million just in the last 12 years, that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans. Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth. And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto, the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country. And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can't take anything for granted. Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked ""on."" Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different. Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home. But for the fortunate among us, I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. Certainly when I'm traveling, especially to the major cities of the world, the typical person I meet today will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris. And as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognizes him as kin. She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. So they become friends. They fall in love. They move to New York City. (Laughter) Or Edinburgh. And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places. And potentially, everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world, writes about the world, thinks about the world, could be something different, because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures. Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself. And yet, there is one great problem with movement, and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings when you're in midair. Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated one million miles on United Airlines alone. You all know that crazy system, six days in hell, you get the seventh day free. (Laughter) And I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective. And eight months after my house burned down, I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school, and he said, ""I've got the perfect place for you."" ""Really?"" I said. I'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that. ""No, honestly,"" he went on, ""it's only three hours away by car, and it's not very expensive, and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before."" ""Hmm."" I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. ""What is it?"" ""Well —"" Here my friend hemmed and hawed — ""Well, actually it's a Catholic hermitage."" This was the wrong answer. I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools, so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime. Several lifetimes, actually. But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic, nor were most of his students, but he took his classes there every spring. And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible, testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out. He found himself. And I thought, ""Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy ought to work for me."" So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north along the coast, and the roads grew emptier and narrower, and then I turned onto an even narrower path, barely paved, that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain. And when I got out of my car, the air was pulsing. The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn't an absence of noise. It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening. And at my feet was the great, still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean. All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush. And I went down to the room in which I was to be sleeping. Small but eminently comfortable, it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small, private, walled garden, and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea. And I sat down, and I began to write, and write, and write, even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk. And by the time I got up, four hours had passed. Night had fallen, and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars, and I could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south. And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing. And the next day, when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops, the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours. It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling, but it also profoundly felt like coming home. And I'm not a religious person, so I didn't go to the services. I didn't consult the monks for guidance. I just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones. I looked at the clouds, and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually, which is nothing at all. And I started to go back to this place, and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still, and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way I never could when I was racing from the last email to the next appointment. And I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness, but of course I couldn't hear it because I was running around so much. I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can't see a thing. And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca, in which he says, ""That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more."" And, of course, I'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery. That's not the point. But I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. And I've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices, or go running every evening, or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend. Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It's the place where you stand. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home
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"Miranda Wang: We're here to talk about accidents. How do you feel about accidents? When we think about accidents, we usually consider them to be harmful, unfortunate or even dangerous, and they certainly can be. But are they always that bad? The discovery that had led to penicillin, for example, is one of the most fortunate accidents of all time. Without biologist Alexander Fleming's moldy accident, caused by a neglected workstation, we wouldn't be able to fight off so many bacterial infections. Jeanny Yao: Miranda and I are here today because we'd like to share how our accidents have led to discoveries. In 2011, we visited the Vancouver Waste Transfer Station and saw an enormous pit of plastic waste. We realized that when plastics get to the dump, it's difficult to sort them because they have similar densities, and when they're mixed with organic matter and construction debris, it's truly impossible to pick them out and environmentally eliminate them. MW: However, plastics are useful because they're durable, flexible, and can be easily molded into so many useful shapes. The downside of this convenience is that there's a high cost to this. Plastics cause serious problems, such as the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of natural resources, and the reduction of available land space. This picture you see here is the Great Pacific Gyre. When you think about plastic pollution and the marine environment, we think about the Great Pacific Gyre, which is supposed to be a floating island of plastic waste. But that's no longer an accurate depiction of plastic pollution in the marine environment. Right now, the ocean is actually a soup of plastic debris, and there's nowhere you can go in the ocean where you wouldn't be able to find plastic particles. JY: In a plastic-dependent society, cutting down production is a good goal, but it's not enough. And what about the waste that's already been produced? Plastics take hundreds to thousands of years to biodegrade. So we thought, you know what? Instead of waiting for that garbage to sit there and pile up, let's find a way to break them down with bacteria. Sounds cool, right? Audience: Yeah. JY: Thank you. But we had a problem. You see, plastics have very complex structures and are difficult to biodegrade. Anyhow, we were curious and hopeful and still wanted to give it a go. MW: With this idea in mind, Jeanny and I read through some hundreds of scientific articles on the Internet, and we drafted a research proposal in the beginning of our grade 12 year. We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates. Phthalates are additives used in everyday plastic products to increase their flexibility, durability and transparency. Although they're part of the plastic, they're not covalently bonded to the plastic backbone. As a result, they easily escape into our environment. Not only do phthalates pollute our environment, but they also pollute our bodies. To make the matter worse, phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure, such as babies' toys, beverage containers, cosmetics, and even food wraps. Phthalates are horrible because they're so easily taken into our bodies. They can be absorbed by skin contact, ingested, and inhaled. JY: Every year, at least 470 million pounds of phthalates contaminate our air, water and soil. The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top-priority pollutant because it's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor. We read that each year, the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety. So we figured, if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates, and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas, then perhaps, perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates. MW: So we presented this good idea to Dr. Lindsay Eltis at the University of British Columbia, and surprisingly, he actually took us into his lab and asked his graduate students Adam and James to help us. Little did we know at that time that a trip to the dump and some research on the Internet and plucking up the courage to act upon inspiration would take us on a life-changing journey of accidents and discoveries. JY: The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River. Out of thousands of bacteria, we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates, so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source. This implied that, if anything grew in our cultures, then they must be able to live off of phthalates. Everything went well from there, and we became amazing scientists. (Laughter) MW: Um... uh, Jeanny. JY: I'm just joking. MW: Okay. Well, it was partially my fault. You see, I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture, and as a result, we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice. And this is only one of the examples of the many accidents that happened during our experimentation. But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous. We noticed that the unharmed cultures came from places of opposite contamination levels, so this mistake actually led us to think that perhaps we can compare the different degradative potentials of bacteria from sites of opposite contamination levels. JY: Now that we grew the bacteria, we wanted to isolate strains by streaking onto mediate plates, because we thought that would be less accident-prone, but we were wrong again. We poked holes in our agar while streaking and contaminated some samples and funghi. As a result, we had to streak and restreak several times. Then we monitored phthalate utilization and bacterial growth, and found that they shared an inverse correlation, so as bacterial populations increased, phthalate concentrations decreased. This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates. MW: So now that we found bacteria that could break down phthalates, we wondered what these bacteria were. So Jeanny and I took three of our most efficient strains and then performed gene amplification sequencing on them and matched our data with an online comprehensive database. We were happy to see that, although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria, two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation, so this was actually a novel discovery. JY: To better understand how this biodegradation works, we wanted to verify the catabolic pathways of our three strains. To do this, we extracted enzymes from our bacteria and reacted with an intermediate of phthalic acid. MW: We monitored this experiment with spectrophotometry and obtained this beautiful graph. This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates. Our bacteria can transform phthalates, which is a harmful toxin, into end products such as carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. I know some of you in the crowd are thinking, well, carbon dioxide is horrible, it's a greenhouse gas. But if our bacteria did not evolve to break down phthalates, they would have used some other kind of carbon source, and aerobic respiration would have led it to have end products such as carbon dioxide anyway. We were also interested to see that, although we've obtained greater diversity of bacteria biodegraders from the bird habitat site, we obtained the most efficient degraders from the landfill site. So this fully shows that nature evolves through natural selection. JY: So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential. Although we're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates, we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem. We have not only shown that bacteria can be the solution to plastic pollution, but also that being open to uncertain outcomes and taking risks create opportunities for unexpected discoveries. Throughout this journey, we have also discovered our passion for science, and are currently continuing research on other fossil fuel chemicals in university. We hope that in the near future, we'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants. We can apply this to wastewater treatment plants to clean up our rivers and other natural resources. And perhaps one day we'll be able to tackle the problem of solid plastic waste. MW: I think our journey has truly transformed our view of microorganisms, and Jeanny and I have shown that even mistakes can lead to discoveries. Einstein once said, ""You can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them."" If we're making plastic synthetically, then we think the solution would be to break them down biochemically. Thank you. JY: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/two_young_scientists_break_down_plastics_with_bacteria
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"My name is Tom, and I've come here today to come clean about what I do for money. Basically, I use my mouth in strange ways in exchange for cash. (Laughter) I usually do this kind of thing in seedy downtown bars and on street corners, so this mightn't be the most appropriate setting, but I'd like to give you guys a bit of a demonstration about what I do. (Beatboxing) And now, for my next number, I'd like to return to the classics. (Applause) We're going to take it back, way back, back into time. (Beatboxing: ""Billie Jean"") ♫ Billie Jean is not my lover ♫ ♫ She's just a girl who claims that I am the one ♫ ♫ But the kid is not my son ♫ (Applause) All right. Wassup. Thank you very much, TEDx. If you guys haven't figured it out already, my name's Tom Thum, and I'm a beatboxer, which means all the sounds that you just heard were made entirely using just my voice, and the only thing was my voice. And I can assure you there are absolutely no effects on this microphone whatsoever. And I'm very, very stoked — (Applause) You guys are just applauding for everything. It's great. Look at this, Mom! I made it! I'm very, very stoked to be here today, representing my kinfolk and all those that haven't managed to make a career out of an innate ability for inhuman noisemaking. Because it is a bit of a niche market, and there's not much work going on, especially where I'm from. You know, I'm from Brisbane, which is a great city to live in. Yeah! All right! Most of Brisbane's here. That's good. (Laughter) You know, I'm from Brizzy, which is a great city to live in, but let's be honest — it's not exactly the cultural hub of the Southern Hemisphere. So I do a lot of my work outside Brisbane and outside Australia, and so the pursuit of this crazy passion of mine has enabled me to see so many amazing places in the world. So I'd like to share with you, if I may, my experiences. So ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey throughout the continents and throughout sound itself. We start our journey in the central deserts. (Didgeridoo) (Airplane) India. (Beatboxing) (Sitar) China. (Guzheng) (Beatboxing) Germany. (Beatboxing) Party, party, yeah. (Laughter) And before we reach our final destination, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to share with you some technology that I brought all the way from the thriving metropolis of Brisbane. These things in front of me here are called Kaoss Pads, and they allow me to do a whole lot of different things with my voice. For example, the one on the left here allows me to add a little bit of reverb to my sound, which gives me that — (Trumpet) — flavor. (Laughter) And the other ones here, I can use them in unison to mimic the effect of a drum machine or something like that. I can sample in my own sounds and I can play it back just by hitting the pads here. (Noises) TEDx. (Music) (Applause) I got way too much time on my hands. And last but not least, the one on my right here allows me to loop loop loop loop loop loop loop loop my voice. So with all that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey to a completely separate part of Earth as I transform the Sydney Opera House into a smoky downtown jazz bar. All right boys, take it away. (Music) Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a very special friend of mine, one of the greatest double bassists I know. Mr. Smokey Jefferson, let's take it for a walk. Come on, baby. (Music) All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the star of the show, one of the greatest jazz legends of our time. Music lovers and jazz lovers alike, please give a warm hand of applause for the one and only Mr. Peeping Tom. Take it away. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_thum_the_orchestra_in_my_mouth
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"I'm going to talk about consciousness. Why consciousness? Well, it's a curiously neglected subject, both in our scientific and our philosophical culture. Now why is that curious? Well, it is the most important aspect of our lives for a very simple, logical reason, namely, it's a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives that we're conscious. You care about science, philosophy, music, art, whatever — it's no good if you're a zombie or in a coma, right? So consciousness is number one. The second reason is that when people do get interested in it, as I think they should, they tend to say the most appalling things. And then, even when they're not saying appalling things and they're really trying to do serious research, well, it's been slow. Progress has been slow. When I first got interested in this, I thought, well, it's a straightforward problem in biology. Let's get these brain stabbers to get busy and figure out how it works in the brain. So I went over to UCSF and I talked to all the heavy-duty neurobiologists there, and they showed some impatience, as scientists often do when you ask them embarrassing questions. But the thing that struck me is, one guy said in exasperation, a very famous neurobiologist, he said, ""Look, in my discipline it's okay to be interested in consciousness, but get tenure first. Get tenure first."" Now I've been working on this for a long time. I think now you might actually get tenure by working on consciousness. If so, that's a real step forward. Okay, now why then is this curious reluctance and curious hostility to consciousness? Well, I think it's a combination of two features of our intellectual culture that like to think they're opposing each other but in fact they share a common set of assumptions. One feature is the tradition of religious dualism: Consciousness is not a part of the physical world. It's a part of the spiritual world. It belongs to the soul, and the soul is not a part of the physical world. That's the tradition of God, the soul and immortality. There's another tradition that thinks it's opposed to this but accepts the worst assumption. That tradition thinks that we are heavy-duty scientific materialists: Consciousness is not a part of the physical world. Either it doesn't exist at all, or it's something else, a computer program or some damn fool thing, but in any case it's not part of science. And I used to get in an argument that really gave me a stomachache. Here's how it went. Science is objective, consciousness is subjective, therefore there cannot be a science of consciousness. Okay, so these twin traditions are paralyzing us. It's very hard to get out of these twin traditions. And I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is, consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis — you know all the biological phenomena — and once you accept that, most, though not all, of the hard problems about consciousness simply evaporate. And I'm going to go through some of them. Okay, now I promised you to tell you some of the outrageous things said about consciousness. One: Consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion, like sunsets. Science has shown sunsets and rainbows are illusions. So consciousness is an illusion. Two: Well, maybe it exists, but it's really something else. It's a computer program running in the brain. Three: No, the only thing that exists is really behavior. It's embarrassing how influential behaviorism was, but I'll get back to that. And four: Maybe consciousness exists, but it can't make any difference to the world. How could spirituality move anything? Now, whenever somebody tells me that, I think, you want to see spirituality move something? Watch. I decide consciously to raise my arm, and the damn thing goes up. (Laughter) Furthermore, notice this: We do not say, ""Well, it's a bit like the weather in Geneva. Some days it goes up and some days it doesn't go up."" No. It goes up whenever I damn well want it to. Okay. I'm going to tell you how that's possible. Now, I haven't yet given you a definition. You can't do this if you don't give a definition. People always say consciousness is very hard to define. I think it's rather easy to define if you're not trying to give a scientific definition. We're not ready for a scientific definition, but here's a common-sense definition. Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness. It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dreamless sleep, and it goes on all day until you fall asleep or die or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness on this definition. Now, that's the common-sense definition. That's our target. If you're not talking about that, you're not talking about consciousness. But they think, ""Well, if that's it, that's an awful problem. How can such a thing exist as part of the real world?"" And this, if you've ever had a philosophy course, this is known as the famous mind-body problem. I think that has a simple solution too. I'm going to give it to you. And here it is: All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher-level or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water. Right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules. It's a condition that the system is in. And just as the jar full of water can go from liquid to solid depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind-body problem is that simple. All right? But now we get into some harder questions. Let's specify the exact features of consciousness, so that we can then answer those four objections that I made to it. Well, the first feature is, it's real and irreducible. You can't get rid of it. You see, the distinction between reality and illusion is the distinction between how things consciously seem to us and how they really are. It consciously seems like there's — I like the French ""arc-en-ciel"" — it seems like there's an arch in the sky, or it seems like the sun is setting over the mountains. It consciously seems to us, but that's not really happening. But for that distinction between how things consciously seem and how they really are, you can't make that distinction for the very existence of consciousness, because where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to you that you are conscious, you are conscious. I mean, if a bunch of experts come to me and say, ""We are heavy-duty neurobiologists and we've done a study of you, Searle, and we're convinced you are not conscious, you are a very cleverly constructed robot,"" I don't think, ""Well, maybe these guys are right, you know?"" I don't think that for a moment, because, I mean, Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this. You cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. Okay, that's the first feature of consciousness. It's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions. Okay, the second feature is this one that has been such a source of trouble to us, and that is, all of our conscious states have this qualitative character to them. There's something that it feels like to drink beer which is not what it feels like to do your income tax or listen to music, and this qualitative feel automatically generates a third feature, namely, conscious states are by definition subjective in the sense that they only exist as experienced by some human or animal subject, some self that experiences them. Maybe we'll be able to build a conscious machine. Since we don't know how our brains do it, we're not in a position, so far, to build a conscious machine. Okay. Another feature of consciousness is that it comes in unified conscious fields. So I don't just have the sight of the people in front of me and the sound of my voice and the weight of my shoes against the floor, but they occur to me as part of one single great conscious field that stretches forward and backward. That is the key to understanding the enormous power of consciousness. And we have not been able to do that in a robot. The disappointment of robotics derives from the fact that we don't know how to make a conscious robot, so we don't have a machine that can do this kind of thing. Okay, the next feature of consciousness, after this marvelous unified conscious field, is that it functions causally in our behavior. I gave you a scientific demonstration by raising my hand, but how is that possible? How can it be that this thought in my brain can move material objects? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I mean, we don't know the detailed answer, but we know the basic part of the answer, and that is, there is a sequence of neuron firings, and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons. Sorry to use philosophical terminology here, but when it's secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons, a whole lot of wonderful things happen in the ion channels and the damned arm goes up. Now, think of what I told you. One and the same event, my conscious decision to raise my arm has a level of description where it has all of these touchy-feely spiritual qualities. It's a thought in my brain, but at the same time, it's busy secreting acetylcholine and doing all sorts of other things as it makes its way from the motor cortex down through the nerve fibers in the arm. Now, what that tells us is that our traditional vocabularies for discussing these issues are totally obsolete. One and the same event has a level of description where it's neurobiological, and another level of description where it's mental, and that's a single event, and that's how nature works. That's how it's possible for consciousness to function causally. Okay, now with that in mind, with going through these various features of consciousness, let's go back and answer some of those early objections. Well, the first one I said was, consciousness doesn't exist, it's an illusion. Well, I've already answered that. I don't think we need to worry about that. But the second one had an incredible influence, and may still be around, and that is, ""Well, if consciousness exists, it's really something else. It's really a digital computer program running in your brain and that's what we need to do to create consciousness is get the right program. Yeah, forget about the hardware. Any hardware will do provided it's rich enough and stable enough to carry the program."" Now, we know that that's wrong. I mean, anybody who's thought about computers at all can see that that's wrong, because computation is defined as symbol manipulation, usually thought of as zeros as ones, but any symbols will do. You get an algorithm that you can program in a binary code, and that's the defining trait of the computer program. But we know that that's purely syntactical. That's symbolic. We know that actual human consciousness has something more than that. It's got a content in addition to the syntax. It's got a semantics. Now that argument, I made that argument 30 — oh my God, I don't want to think about it — more than 30 years ago, but there's a deeper argument implicit in what I've told you, and I want to tell you that argument briefly, and that is, consciousness creates an observer-independent reality. It creates a reality of money, property, government, marriage, CERN conferences, cocktail parties and summer vacations, and all of those are creations of consciousness. Their existence is observer-relative. It's only relative to conscious agents that a piece of paper is money or that a bunch of buildings is a university. Now, ask yourself about computation. Is that absolute, like force and mass and gravitational attraction? Or is it observer-relative? Well, some computations are intrinsic. I add two plus two to get four. That's going on no matter what anybody thinks. But when I haul out my pocket calculator and do the calculation, the only intrinsic phenomenon is the electronic circuit and its behavior. That's the only absolute phenomenon. All the rest is interpreted by us. Computation only exists relative to consciousness. Either a conscious agent is carrying out the computation, or he's got a piece of machinery that admits of a computational interpretation. Now that doesn't mean computation is arbitrary. I spent a lot of money on this hardware. But we have this persistent confusion between objectivity and subjectivity as features of reality and objectivity and subjectivity as features of claims. And the bottom line of this part of my talk is this: You can have a completely objective science, a science where you make objectively true claims, about a domain whose existence is subjective, whose existence is in the human brain consisting of subjective states of sentience or feeling or awareness. So the objection that you can't have an objective science of consciousness because it's subjective and science is objective, that's a pun. That's a bad pun on objectivity and subjectivity. You can make objective claims about a domain that is subjective in its mode of existence, and indeed that's what neurologists do. I mean, you have patients that actually suffer pains, and you try to get an objective science of that. Okay, I promised to refute all these guys, and I don't have an awful lot of time left, but let me refute a couple more of them. I said that behaviorism ought to be one of the great embarrassments of our intellectual culture, because it's refuted the moment you think about it. Your mental states are identical with your behavior? Well, think about the distinction between feeling a pain and engaging in pain behavior. I won't demonstrate pain behavior, but I can tell you I'm not having any pains right now. So it's an obvious mistake. Why did they make the mistake? The mistake was — and you can go back and read the literature on this, you can see this over and over — they think if you accept the irreducible existence of consciousness, you're giving up on science. You're giving up on 300 years of human progress and human hope and all the rest of it. And the message I want to leave you with is, consciousness has to become accepted as a genuine biological phenomenon, as much subject to scientific analysis as any other phenomenon in biology, or, for that matter, the rest of science. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness
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"I love paper, and I love technology, and what I do is I make paper interactive. And that's what I say when people ask me what I do, but it really confuses most people, so really, the best way for me to convey it is to take the technology and be creative and create experiences. So I tried to think what I could use for here, and a couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea that I wanted to print two DJ decks and to try and mix some music. And I'm going to try and show that at the end, and the suspense will be as much mine if it works. And I'm not a DJ, and I'm not a musician, so I'm a little bit scared of that. So I think, I found the best way to describe my journey is just to mention a few little things that have happened to me throughout my life. There's three particular things that I've done, and I'll just describe those first, and then talk about some of my work. So when I was a kid, I was obsessed with wires, and I used to thread them under my carpet and thread them behind the walls and have little switches and little speakers, and I wanted to make my bedroom be interactive but kind of all hidden away. And I was also really interested in wireless as well. So I bought one of those little kits that you could get to make a radio transmitter, and I got an old book and I carved out the inside and I hid it inside there, and then I placed it next to my dad and snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in on the radio so I could eavesdrop. I was not at all interested in what he was saying. It's more that I just liked the idea of an everyday object having something inside and doing something different. Several year later, I managed to successfully fail all of my exams and didn't really leave school with much to show for at all, and my parents, maybe as a reward, bought me what turned out to be a one-way ticket to Australia, and I came back home about four years later. I ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. It was in far western New South Wales. And this farm was 120,000 acres. There were 22,000 sheep, and it was about 40 degrees, or 100 or so Fahrenheit. And on this farm there was the farmer, his wife, and there was the four-year-old daughter. And they kind of took me into the farm and showed me what it was like to live and work. Obviously, one of the most important things was the sheep, and so my job was, well, pretty much to do everything, but it was about bringing the sheep back to the homestead. And we'd do that by building fences, using motorbikes and horses, and the sheep would make their way all the way back to the shearing shed for the different seasons. And what I learned was, although at the time, like everyone else, I thought sheep were pretty stupid because they didn't do what we wanted them to do, what I realize now, probably only just in the last few weeks looking back, is the sheep weren't stupid at all. We'd put them in an environment where they didn't want to be, and they didn't want to do what we wanted them to do. So the challenge was to try and get them to do what we wanted them to do by listening to the weather, the lay of the land, and creating things that would let the sheep flow and go where we wanted them to go. Another bunch of years later, I ended up at Cambridge University at the Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K. doing a Ph.D. in physics. My Ph.D. was to move electrons around, one at a time. And I realize — again, it's kind of these realizations looking back as to what I did — I realize now that it was pretty much the same as moving sheep around. It really is. It's just you do it by changing an environment. And that's kind of been a big lesson to me, that you can't act on any object. You change its environment, and the object will flow. So we made it very small, so things were about 30 nanometers in size; making it very cold, so at liquid helium temperatures; and changing environment by changing the voltage, and the electrons could make flow around a loop one at a time, on and off, a little memory node. And I wanted to go one step further, and I wanted to move one electron on and one electron off. And I was told that I wouldn't be able to do this, which, you know, as we've heard from other people, that's the thing that makes you do it. And I was determined, and I managed to show that I could do that. And a lot of that learning, I think, came from being on that farm, because when I was working on the farm, we'd have to use what was around us, we'd have to use the environment, and there was no such thing as something can't be done, because you're in an environment where, if you can't do what you need to do, you can die, and, you know, I had seen that sort of thing happen. So now my obsession is printing, and I'm really fascinated by the idea of using conventional printing processes, so the types of print that are used to create many of the things around us to make paper and card interactive. When I spoke to some printers when I started doing this and told them what I wanted to do, which was to print conductive inks onto paper, they told me it couldn't be done, again, that kind of favorite thing. So I got about 10 credit cards and loans and got myself very close to bankruptcy, really, and bought myself this huge printing press, which I had no idea how to use at all. It was about five meters long, and I covered myself and the floor with ink and made a massive mess, but I learned to print. And then I took it back to the printers and showed them what I've done, and they were like, ""Of course you can do that. Why didn't you come here in the first place?"" That's always the case. So what we do is we take conventional printing presses, we make conductive inks, and run those through a press, and basically just letting hundreds of thousands of electrons flow through pieces of paper so we can make that paper interactive. And it's pretty simple, really. It's just a collection of things that have been done before, but bringing them together in a different way. So we have a piece of paper with conductive ink on, and then add onto that a small circuit board with a couple of chips, one to run some capacitive touch software, so we know where we've touched it, and the other to run, quite often, some wireless software so the piece of paper can connect. So I'll just describe a couple of things that we've created. There's lots of different things we've created. This is one of them, because I love cake. And this one, it's a large poster, and you touch it and it has a little speaker behind it, and the poster talks to you when you touch it and asks you a series of questions, and it works out your perfect cake. But it doesn't tell you the cake there and then. It uploads a picture, and the reason why it chose that cake for you, to our Facebook page and to Twitter. So we're trying to create that connection between the physical and the digital, but have it not looking on a screen, and just looking like a regular poster. We've worked with a bunch of universities on a project looking at interactive newsprint. So for example, we've created a newspaper, a regular newspaper. You can wear a pair of headphones that are connected to it wirelessly, and when you touch it, you can hear the music that's described on the top, which is something you can't read. You can hear a press conference as well as reading what the editor has determined that press conference was about. And you can press a Facebook ""like"" button or you can vote on something as well. Something else that we created, and this was an idea that I had a couple of years ago, and so we've done a project on this. It was for funding from the government for user-centered design for energy-efficient buildings, difficult to say, and something I had no idea what it was when I went into the workshop, but quickly learned. And we wanted to try and encourage people to use energy better. And I really liked the idea that, instead of looking at dials and reading things to say — looking at your energy usage, I wanted to create a poster that was wirelessly connected and had color-changing inks on it, and so if your energy usage was trending better, than the leaves would appear and the rabbits would appear and all would be good. And if it wasn't, then there'd be graffiti and the leaves would fall off the trees. So it was trying to make you look after something in your immediate environment, which you don't want to see not looking so good, rather than expecting people to do things in the local environment because of the effect that it has a long way off. And I think, kind of like going back to the farm, it's about how to let people do what you want them to do rather than making people do what you want them to do. Okay. So this is the bit I'm really scared of. So a couple of things I've created are, there's a poster over here that you can play drums on. And I am not a musician. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If anyone wants to try and play drums, then they can. I'll just describe how this works. This poster is wirelessly connected to my cell phone, and when you touch it, it connects to the app. (Drums) And it has really good response time. It's using Bluetooth 4, so it's pretty instantaneous. Okay. Thanks. (Applause) And there's a couple of other things. So this one is like a sound board, so you can touch it, and I just love these horrible noises. (Sirens, explosions, breaking glass) Okay, and this is a D.J. turntable. So it's wirelessly linked to my iPad, and this is a software that's running on the iPad. Oh, yes. I just love doing that. I'm not a D.J., though, but I just always wanted to do that. (Scratching) So I have a crossfader, and I have the two decks. So I've made some new technology, and I love things being creative, and I love working with creative people. So my 15-year-old niece, she's amazing, and she's called Charlotte, and I asked her to record something, and I worked with a friend called Elliot to put some beats together. So this is my niece, Charlotte. (Music) Yay! (Applause) So that's pretty much what I do. I just love bringing technology together, having a lot of fun, being creative. But it's not about the technology. It's just about, I want to create some great experiences. So thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_stone_dj_decks_made_of_paper
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"Francesca Fedeli: Ciao. So he's Mario. He's our son. He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for, like, eight months. But in the end everything seemed to be under control. So he got the right weight at birth. He got the right Apgar index. So we were pretty reassured by this. But at the end, 10 days later after he was born, we discovered that he had a stroke. As you might know, a stroke is a brain injury. A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right part of his brain has gone. So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be the fact that he couldn't be able to control the left side of his body. Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, to input to print out a document, but the printer doesn't have the right drives, so the same is for Mario. It's just like, he would like to move his left side of his body, but he's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg. So life had to change. We needed to change our schedule. We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life. Roberto D'Angelo: As you may imagine, unfortunately, we were not ready. Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities, and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds. And that has been really a tough time. Questions, some basics, like, you know, why did this happen to us? And what went wrong? Some more tough, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? I mean, at the end, will he be able to work? Will he be able to be normal? And, you know, as a parent, especially for the first time, why is he not going to be better than us? And this, indeed, really is tough to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. I mean, the only real product of our life, at the end, was a failure. And you know, it was not a failure for ourselves in itself, but it was a failure that will impact his full life. Honestly, we went down. I mean we went really down, but at the end, we started to look at him, and we said, we have to react. So immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our life. We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot. Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. You have an object, and we showed him how to grab the object. Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions. It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation. But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand. He was looking at us. We were his mirror. And the problem, as you might feel, is that we were down, we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. And that day really changed our perspective. We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario. We restarted from our strengths, and at the same time we restarted from his strengths. We stopped looking at him as a problem, and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve. And really, this was the change, and from our side, we said, ""What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario?"" And we started from our passions. I mean, at the end, my wife and myself are quite different, but we have many things in common. We love to travel, we love music, we love to be in places like this, and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him. This short video is from last week. I am not saying — (Applause) — I am not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we are just at the beginning of the path. But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity. And this is the message that we want to share with you. This is why we are here. Mario! And this is why — (Applause) — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. And we thank you so much, all of you. FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye. (Applause) FF: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roberto_d_angelo_francesca_fedeli_in_our_baby_s_illness_a_life_lesson
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"So if I was to ask you what the connection between a bottle of Tide detergent and sweat was, you'd probably think that's the easiest question that you're going to be asked in Edinburgh all week. But if I was to say that they're both examples of alternative or new forms of currency in a hyperconnected, data-driven global economy, you'd probably think I was a little bit bonkers. But trust me, I work in advertising. (Laughter) And I am going to tell you the answer, but obviously after this short break. So a more challenging question is one that I was asked, actually, by one of our writers a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't know the answer: What's the world's best performing currency? It's actually Bitcoin. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar, Bitcoin is a crypto-currency, a virtual currency, synthetic currency. It was founded in 2008 by this anonymous programmer using a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows who or what he is. He's almost like the Banksy of the Internet. And I'm probably not going to do it proper service here, but my interpretation of how it works is that Bitcoins are released through this process of mining. So there's a network of computers that are challenged to solve a very complex mathematical problem and the person that manages to solve it first gets the Bitcoins. And the Bitcoins are released, they're put into a public ledger called the Blockchain, and then they float, so they become a currency, and completely decentralized, that's the sort of scary thing about this, which is why it's so popular. So it's not run by the authorities or the state. It's actually managed by the network. And the reason that it's proved very successful is it's private, it's anonymous, it's fast, and it's cheap. And you do get to the point where there's some wild fluctuations with Bitcoin. So in one level it went from something like 13 dollars to 266, literally in the space of four months, and then crashed and lost half of its value in six hours. And it's currently around that kind of 110 dollar mark in value. But what it does show is that it's sort of gaining ground, it's gaining respectability. You get services, like Reddit and Wordpress are actually accepting Bitcoin as a payment currency now. And that's showing you that people are actually placing trust in technology, and it's started to trump and disrupt and interrogate traditional institutions and how we think about currencies and money. And that's not surprising, if you think about the basket case that is the E.U. I think there was a Gallup survey out recently that said something like, in America, trust in banks is at an all-time low, it's something like 21 percent. And you can see here some photographs from London where Barclays sponsored the city bike scheme, and some activists have done some nice piece of guerrilla marketing here and doctored the slogans. ""Sub-prime pedaling."" ""Barclays takes you for a ride."" These are the more polite ones I could share with you today. But you get the gist, so people have really started to sort of lose faith in institutions. There's a P.R. company called Edelman, they do this very interesting survey every year precisely around trust and what people are thinking. And this is a global survey, so these numbers are global. And what's interesting is that you can see that hierarchy is having a bit of a wobble, and it's all about heterarchical now, so people trust people like themselves more than they trust corporations and governments. And if you look at these figures for the more developed markets like U.K., Germany, and so on, they're actually much lower. And I find that sort of scary. People are actually trusting businesspeople more than they're trusting governments and leaders. So what's starting to happen, if you think about money, if you sort of boil money down to an essence, it is literally just an expression of value, an agreed value. So what's happening now, in the digital age, is that we can quantify value in lots of different ways and do it more easily, and sometimes the way that we quantify those values, it makes it much easier to create new forms and valid forms of currency. In that context, you can see that networks like Bitcoin suddenly start to make a bit more sense. So if you think we're starting to question and disrupt and interrogate what money means, what our relationship with it is, what defines money, then the ultimate extension of that is, is there a reason for the government to be in charge of money anymore? So obviously I'm looking at this through a marketing prism, so from a brand perspective, brands literally stand or fall on their reputations. And if you think about it, reputation has now become a currency. You know, reputations are built on trust, consistency, transparency. So if you've actually decided that you trust a brand, you want a relationship, you want to engage with the brand, you're already kind of participating in lots of new forms of currency. So you think about loyalty. Loyalty essentially is a micro-economy. You think about rewards schemes, air miles. The Economist said a few years ago that there are actually more unredeemed air miles in the world than there are dollar bills in circulation. You know, when you are standing in line in Starbucks, 30 percent of transactions in Starbucks on any one day are actually being made with Starbucks Star points. So that's a sort of Starbucks currency staying within its ecosystem. And what I find interesting is that Amazon has recently launched Amazon coins. So admittedly it's a currency at the moment that's purely for the Kindle. So you can buy apps and make purchases within those apps, but you think about Amazon, you look at the trust barometer that I showed you where people are starting to trust businesses, especially businesses that they believe in and trust more than governments. So suddenly, you start thinking, well Amazon potentially could push this. It could become a natural extension, that as well as buying stuff — take it out of the Kindle — you could buy books, music, real-life products, appliances and goods and so on. And suddenly you're getting Amazon, as a brand, is going head to head with the Federal Reserve in terms of how you want to spend your money, what money is, what constitutes money. And I'll get you back to Tide, the detergent now, as I promised. This is a fantastic article I came across in New York Magazine, where it was saying that drug users across America are actually purchasing drugs with bottles of Tide detergent. So they're going into convenience stores, stealing Tide, and a $20 bottle of Tide is equal to 10 dollars of crack cocaine or weed. And what they're saying, so some criminologists have looked at this and they're saying, well, okay, Tide as a product sells at a premium. It's 50 percent above the category average. It's infused with a very complex cocktail of chemicals, so it smells very luxurious and very distinctive, and, being a Procter and Gamble brand, it's been supported by a lot of mass media advertising. So what they're saying is that drug users are consumers too, so they have this in their neural pathways. When they spot Tide, there's a shortcut. They say, that is trust. I trust that. That's quality. So it becomes this unit of currency, which the New York Magazine described as a very oddly loyal crime wave, brand-loyal crime wave, and criminals are actually calling Tide ""liquid gold."" Now, what I thought was funny was the reaction from the P&G spokesperson. They said, obviously tried to dissociate themselves from drugs, but said, ""It reminds me of one thing and that's the value of the brand has stayed consistent."" (Laughter) Which backs up my point and shows he didn't even break a sweat when he said that. So that brings me back to the connection with sweat. In Mexico, Nike has run a campaign recently called, literally, Bid Your Sweat. So you think about, these Nike shoes have got sensors in them, or you're using a Nike FuelBand that basically tracks your movement, your energy, your calorie consumption. And what's happening here, this is where you've actually elected to join that Nike community. You've bought into it. They're not advertising loud messages at you, and that's where advertising has started to shift now is into things like services, tools and applications. So Nike is literally acting as a well-being partner, a health and fitness partner and service provider. So what happens with this is they're saying, ""Right, you have a data dashboard. We know how far you've run, how far you've moved, what your calorie intake, all that sort of stuff. What you can do is, the more you run, the more points you get, and we have an auction where you can buy Nike stuff but only by proving that you've actually used the product to do stuff."" And you can't come into this. This is purely for the community that are sweating using Nike products. You can't buy stuff with pesos. This is literally a closed environment, a closed auction space. In Africa, you know, airtime has become literally a currency in its own right. People are used to, because mobile is king, they're very, very used to transferring money, making payments via mobile. And one of my favorite examples from a brand perspective going on is Vodafone, where, in Egypt, lots of people make purchases in markets and very small independent stores. Loose change, small change is a real problem, and what tends to happen is you buy a bunch of stuff, you're due, say, 10 cents, 20 cents in change. The shopkeepers tend to give you things like an onion or an aspirin, or a piece of gum, because they don't have small change. So when Vodafone came in and saw this problem, this consumer pain point, they created some small change which they call Fakka, which literally sits and is given by the shopkeepers to people, and it's credit that goes straight onto their mobile phone. So this currency becomes credit, which again, is really, really interesting. And we did a survey that backs up the fact that, you know, 45 percent of people in this very crucial demographic in the U.S. were saying that they're comfortable using an independent or branded currency. So that's getting really interesting here, a really interesting dynamic going on. And you think, corporations should start taking their assets and thinking of them in a different way and trading them. And you think, is it much of a leap? It seems farfetched, but when you think about it, in America in 1860, there were 1,600 corporations issuing banknotes. There were 8,000 kinds of notes in America. And the only thing that stopped that, the government controlled four percent of the supply, and the only thing that stopped it was the Civil War breaking out, and the government suddenly wanted to take control of the money. So government, money, war, nothing changes there, then. So what I'm going to ask is, basically, is history repeating itself? Is technology making paper money feel outmoded? Are we decoupling money from the government? You know, you think about, brands are starting to fill the gaps. Corporations are filling gaps that governments can't afford to fill. So I think, you know, will we be standing on stage buying a coffee — organic, fair trade coffee — next year using TED florins or TED shillings? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_kemp_robertson_bitcoin_sweat_tide_meet_the_future_of_branded_currency
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"I'm five years old, and I am very proud. My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. Thanks to Chernobyl, we get asylum in the U.S. I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. Only, we don't know that it's a homeless shelter. We think that it's a hotel, a hotel with lots of rats. So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don't just lose money. And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. I decide that I'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. And in that moment, I feel like a millionaire. About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. So we take the pizza, our very first pizza, and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway. And he tells us to pay, but we don't speak English. My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. Everyone's upset. But the pizza is delicious. It doesn't hit me until years later just how little we had. On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. The man at the front desk laughs, and he says, ""You can't reserve a room here. This is a homeless shelter."" And we were shocked. My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid. His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. But he did have one thing. He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. This is Scarlett. Once upon a time, Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights. She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tania_luna_how_a_penny_made_me_feel_like_a_millionaire
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"What do we know about the future? Difficult question, simple answer: nothing. We cannot predict the future. We only can create a vision of the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptive ideas, which is inspiring, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking. There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future, for instance, this vision here from the early 20th century. It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future. It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Today, we know that this future vision didn't come true. So this is our largest airplane which we have, the Airbus A380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision I've shown to you. I'm working in a team with Airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation. So sustainability is quite important for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values. So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature. So that's why it looks maybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who deal with structures in general. But at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future. What are the main customers of the future? So, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trend which affects all of us. These are the future anthropometrics. So our children are getting larger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. So what we need is space inside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. These people have different needs. So we see a clear need of active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. We want to be treated as individuals. We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain, and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface, and we want to integrate this and show this in one product. So we combined these needs with technology's themes. So for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? How can we bring more natural light into the airplane? So this airplane has no windows anymore, for example. What about the data and communication software which we need in the future? My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness. It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology. This will be very different in the future. It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. And then we are talking also about materials, synthetic biology, for example. And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on, because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design. So let's compare the old world with the new world. I just want to show you here what we are doing today. So this is a bracket of an A380 crew rest compartment. It takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules. This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose. It follows the design of bone. The design process is completely different. At the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. So this technology, 3D printing, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issue in aircraft design, because it's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions. Push this idea a little bit forward. So how does nature build its components and structures? So nature is very clever. It puts all the information into these small building blocks, which we call DNA. And nature builds large skeletons out of it. So we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information, as I said, are inside the DNA. And this is combined with a top-down approach, because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles, we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. And the same approach can be applied to technology as well. So our building block is carbon nanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day. How this looks in particular, you can show it here. So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component. And you've got trillions of them. So you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and make morphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data. And now we take this material, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components. So how might the airplane of the future look? So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. And finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane, will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future. So as Jason Silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? See you in the future. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bastian_schaefer_a_3d_printed_jumbo_jet
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"This is an ambucycle. This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston. When I was looking at these pictures, it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child. I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem. When I was six years old, I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother. We were passing by a bus stop. We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes. The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed. I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up. He just needed someone helping him. We were so scared and we just ran away. Growing up, I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives. Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child. When I was 15, I took an EMT course, and I went to volunteer on an ambulance. For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem. I helped many people, but whenever someone really needed help, I never got there in time. We never got there. The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything. We never got there when somebody really needed us. One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog. Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. That second he declared this child dead. At that moment, I understood that this child died for nothing. If this doctor, who lived one block away from there, would have come 20 minutes earlier, not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance, if he would have heard about it way before, he would have saved this child. He could have run from a block away. He could have saved this child. I said to myself, there must be a better way. Together with 15 of my friends — we were all EMTs — we decided, let's protect our neighborhood, so when something like that happens again, we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance. So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him, ""Please, whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood, we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives. Just alert us by beeper. We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives."" Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid. And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy, but he said to me, ""Kid, go to school, or go open a falafel stand. We're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures. We're not interested in your help."" And he threw me out of the room. ""I don't need your help,"" he said. I was a very stubborn kid. As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah. (Laughter) (Applause) So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you've probably all heard of, chutzpah. (Laughter) And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners, and I said, ""The hell with you, if you don't want to give me information, I'll get the information myself."" And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners. The next day, while I was listening to the scanners, I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood. I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment. When I got there, the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck. He was on Coumadin. I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die. I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment, and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding. He was bleeding from his neck. When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, I gave them over a patient who was alive. (Applause) When I went to visit him two days later, he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life. At that moment, when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance, I knew this is my life's mission. So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah. (Applause) ""Hatzalah"" means ""rescue,"" for all of you who don't know Hebrew. I forgot I'm not in Israel. So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives, and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in, they just stop everything and go and run and save a life. Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel. (Applause) I'm talking about heart attacks, I'm talking about car accidents, God forbid bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is, even a woman 3 o'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her. Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up. The reasons why we're so successful are because of three things. Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don't even know. We're not there to replace ambulances. We're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive. And we save people that otherwise would not be saved. The second reason is because of our technology. You know, Israelis are good in technology. Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone, a GPS technology done by NowForce, and whenever a call comes in, the closest five volunteers get the call, and they actually get there really quick, and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time. And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time. And the third thing are these ambucycles. These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels. We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them, and we save their lives. They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk. They never, literally, get stuck in traffic. That's why we get there so fast. A few years after I started this organization, in a Jewish community, two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up. They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me. Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan. When Muhammad told me his personal story, how his father, 55 years old, collapsed at home, had a cardiac arrest, and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive, and he saw his father die in front of his eyes, he asked me, ""Please start this in east Jerusalem."" I said to myself, I saw so much tragedy, so much hate, and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims. It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people. So I went ahead, full force — (Applause) — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem, and that's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well. We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs. Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs. Something special happened. Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together, but here in this situation, the communities, literally, it's an unbelievable situation that happened, the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest: Let's save lives together. Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers. It's an unbelievable concept that could work only when you have such a great cause. And these are all volunteers. No one is getting money. They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives. When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest, one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah. And he saved my father. Could you imagine how I felt in that moment? When I started this organization, I was 17 years old. I never imagined that one day I'd be speaking at TEDMED. I never even knew what TEDMED was then. I don't think it existed, but I never imagined, I never imagined that it's going to go all around, it's going to spread around, and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil. All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me, passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it. And I'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back. Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg, and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York, even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities. But it could spread everywhere. It's very easy to adopt. You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center. Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people. Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations. And we made a difference. I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob, and it works. When I look all around here, I see lots of people who would go an extra mile, run an extra mile to save other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion, no matter who, where they come from. We all want to be heroes. We just need a good idea, motivation and lots of chutzpah, and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_beer_the_fastest_ambulance_a_motorcycle
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"(Music) [""Oedipus Rex""] [""The Lion King""] [""Titus""] [""Frida""] [""The Magic Flute""] [""Across The Universe""] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. That's a few samples of the theater, opera and films that I have done over the last 20 years. But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in Indonesia, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these stories need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. And when I'm in the turbulent times, as we know, that I am right now, through the crucible and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. (Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 years, a long time ago, on a fellowship. And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. And I was in a village where there was an initiation ceremony for the young men, a rite of passage. Little did I know that it was mine as well. And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a Charles Ives concert as I listened to the gamelan music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the square, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full warrior costumes with the headdress and the spears, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. ""Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha."" And they moved their bodies and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and performing, creating, and I went, ""Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these extraordinary headdresses?"" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. But somehow, it didn't matter about the publicity. There was no money involved. It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. The next moment, as soon as they finished and disappeared into the shadows, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. The village square was filled with hundreds of people. And they put on an opera all night long. Human beings needed the light. They needed the light to see. So what I gained and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our lives at this time, and they also need the light. And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are creating something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that imaginary world where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take ""The Lion King."" You saw many examples of my work up there, but it's one that people know. I start with the notion of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of ""The Lion King"" and I say, ""What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?"" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. The circle that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express drought? It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief, when you see men walking or women walking with a platter of grass on their heads, you know it's the savanna. You don't question that. I love the apparent truth of theater. I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks. The audience is willing to say, ""Oh, I know that's not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the bottom. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the floor. And as it rises with the strings, I see that it's a sun. But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. That's what moves you. It's not the actual literal sunrise that's coming. It's the art of it. So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the mechanics, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. So I could go from — For instance, I'll show you some ""Spider-Man"" later, these incredible machines that move people along. But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wires, it's nothing. So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big project of my life this year, ""The Tempest."" It's a movie. I did ""The Tempest"" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. I did it always with a male Prospero. And all of a sudden, I thought, ""Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great actor. Why not?"" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. So now, let's take a look at some of the images from ""The Tempest."" (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee? Ariel: I boarded the king's ship. In every cabin, I flamed amazement. Prospera: At first sight, they have changed eyes. Miranda: Do you love me? Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. HM: They are both in either's powers. Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (Music) Looking for business, governor? Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Stephano: Out of the moon, I do assure thee. Prospera: Caliban! Caliban: This island is mine. Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. Sebastian: Draw thy sword. And I, the king, shall love thee. Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. Ariel: I have made you mad. Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Music) JT: Okay. (Applause) So I went from theater, doing ""The Tempest"" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to cinema. But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for ""The Tempest""? What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus nature, that we build these civilizations — she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera — we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will — leave not a rack behind. So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the horizon, building a drip castle, a sand castle. And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in black with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this rough magic that we do in theater, it focused right on the water itself. And all of a sudden, the audience's perspective changes. It becomes something magically large. It becomes the rainstorm. The masked actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of ""The Tempest"" actually happening. Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual movie with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long shots and close-ups, it started on a close-up of the sand castle, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature sitting in the palm of the girl's hands. And so I could play with the medium, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. Now I'm going to take you to ""Spider-Man."" (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. Spider Man is not bound by gravity. Manhattan in the show is not bound by gravity either. PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. It's real, what's happening. I prefer you to see people moving, and you're going, ""Whoa, what was that?"" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. It's really comic book live. It's a comic book coming alive. (Music) Bono: They're mythologies. They're modern myths, these comic book heroes. PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (Screams) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. What the hell are we doing up there on that stage? Well, one last story, very quickly. After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, ""Let's go up there. Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano."" And we climbed up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible precipice. Did you hear the lyrics? I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. And no hiking boots. And he's disappeared, this mad French gypsy actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. So I throw away my camera. I throw away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all fours like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 yards or 30 feet, I don't know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. I know you've all been there. I'm in the crucible right now. It's my trial by fire. It's my company's trials by fire. We survive because our theme song is ""Rise Above."" Boy falls from the sky, rise above. It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. I know you understand that. And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julie_taymor_spider_man_the_lion_king_and_life_on_the_creative_edge
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"Motor racing is a funny old business. We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. And then the next year, we start again. Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. So motor racing is very much about attention to detail. The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. We're always trying to make it faster. So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year. So how do we do that? Well, we start our life with the racing car. We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. It's a huge amount of data. But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. You need to be able to do something with it. So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon. Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. But when we look at the information there, we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. So the question is, why couldn't we see it? Was this a predictable event? Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better? So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. It's a patient with a heart problem. Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference. So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change. Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care. And then we started looking at the data. So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor — heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children's Hospital were already running. They'd been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. It's telling us that something is going wrong. The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. The green is us learning what is normal for that child. We call it the cloud of normality. And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. There's no rocket science here. It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong. So we have a very ambitious program. We think that the race is on to do something differently. We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. It can go beyond the walls. With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_manen_how_can_formula_1_racing_help_babies
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"I'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before: What is possible with the human voice? What is possible with the human voice? (Beatboxing) ♪ Ooh baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing) (Dog barking) Yeah. (Applause) (Boomerang noises) It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah. As you can probably well imagine, I was a strange child. (Laughter) Because the thing is, I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be. I was constantly experimenting with these noises. And I'm still on that mission. I'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make. And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now, and I know that there's some noises I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in by my physical body, and there's things it can't do. And there's things that no one's voice can do. For example, no one can do two notes at the same time. You can do two-tone singing, which monks can do, which is like... (Two-tone singing) But that's cheating. And it hurts your throat. So there's things you can't do, and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me, because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world, but they're sketches at best, which is what's annoyed me. If only, if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it. So I've been working with these guys, and we've made a machine. We've made a system which is basically a live production machine, a real-time music production machine, and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice, create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me. And I'm going to show you what it can do. And before I start making noises with it, and using it to manipulate my voice, I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear is being made by my voice. This system has — thank you, beautiful assistant — this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it, so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind. So once this thing really gets going, and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it, it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice, but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple. So the polyphony problem: I've only got one voice. How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices going on at the same time. The simplest way to do it is something like this. (Beatboxing) By dancing. It's like this. (Music) Thanks. (Applause) So that's probably the easiest way. But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate, something that you can't achieve with live looping, there's other ways to layer your voice up. There's things like pitch-shifting, which are awesome, and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like. So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this. (Beatboxing) There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start, because it's just fun, so you can clap along if you want. You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out. I'm going to lay down a bass sound now. (Music) And now, a rockabilly guitar. Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a — (Applause) — Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ? Is that possible? Yes, it is, by recording myself like this. (Organ sound) And now I have that, I have that recorded. Assign it to a keyboard. (Music) So that's cool. (Applause) But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd? Impossible, you say. No. It is possible, and you can do it very simply using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out. (Music) So every noise you can hear there is my voice. I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that. There's no samples. There's no synthesizers. That is literally all my voice being manipulated, and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you, what's the point? Why do this? (Laughter) Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd, I suppose, is the easy answer. But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist. I've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine. So with your permission, I'm going to do some things that are in my mind, and I hope you enjoy them, because they're rather unusual, especially when you're doing things which are as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice, you see. (Voice effects) (Music) Like this. (Music) So, loosely defined, that is what's possible with the human voice. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/beardyman_the_polyphonic_me
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"My name is Dan Cohen and I am an academic, as he said. And what that means is that I argue. It's an important part of my life. And I like to argue. And I'm not just an academic, I'm a philosopher, so I like to think that I'm actually pretty good at arguing.But I also like to think a lot about arguing. And in thinking about arguing, I've come across some puzzles. And one of the puzzles is that, as I've been thinking about arguing over the years — and it's been decades now — I've gotten better at arguing. But the more that I argue and the better I get at arguing, the more that I lose. And that's a puzzle.And the other puzzle is that I'm actually okay with that. Why is it that I'm okay with losing and why is it that I think good arguers are actually better at losing? Well, there are some other puzzles. One is: why do we argue? Who benefits from arguments? When I think about arguments, I'm talking about — let's call them academic arguments or cognitive arguments — where something cognitive is at stake: Is this proposition true? Is this theory a good theory? Is this a viable interpretation of the data or the text? And so on. I'm not interested really in arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes or who has to take out the garbage. Yeah, we have those arguments, too. I tend to win those arguments, because I know the tricks. But those aren't the important arguments. I'm interested in academic arguments, and here are the things that puzzle me.First, what do good arguers win when they win an argument? What do I win if I convince you that utilitarianism isn't really the right framework for thinking about ethical theories? What do we win when we win an argument? Even before that, what does it matter to me whether you have this idea that Kant's theory works or Mill is the right ethicist to follow? It's no skin off my back whether you think functionalism is a viable theory of mind. So why do we even try to argue? Why do we try to convince other people to believe things they don't want to believe, and is that even a nice thing to do? Is that a nice way to treat another human being, try and make them think something they don't want to think? Well, my answer is going to make reference to three models for arguments.The first model — let's call it the dialectical model — is we think of arguments as war; you know what that's like — a lot of screaming and shouting and winning and losing. That's not a very helpful model for arguing, but it's a pretty common and entrenched model for arguing.But there's a second model for arguing: arguments as proofs. Think of a mathematician's argument. Here's my argument. Does it work? Is it any good? Are the premises warranted? Are the inferences valid? Does the conclusion follow from the premises? No opposition, no adversariality — not necessarily any arguing in the adversarial sense.But there's a third model to keep in mind that I think is going to be very helpful, and that is arguments as performances, arguments in front of an audience. We can think of a politician trying to present a position, trying to convince the audience of something.But there's another twist on this model that I really think is important; namely, that when we argue before an audience, sometimes the audience has a more participatory role in the argument; that is, arguments are also [performances] in front of juries, who make a judgment and decide the case. Let's call this the rhetorical model, where you have to tailor your argument to the audience at hand. You know, presenting a sound, well-argued, tight argument in English before a francophone audience just isn't going to work.So we have these models — argument as war, argument as proof and argument as performance. Of those three, the argument as war is the dominant one. It dominates how we talk about arguments, it dominates how we think about arguments, and because of that, it shapes how we argue, our actual conduct in arguments. Now, when we talk about arguments, we talk in a very militaristic language. We want strong arguments, arguments that have a lot of punch, arguments that are right on target. We want to have our defenses up and our strategies all in order. We want killer arguments. That's the kind of argument we want. It is the dominant way of thinking about arguments. When I'm talking about arguments, that's probably what you thought of, the adversarial model.But the war metaphor, the war paradigm or model for thinking about arguments, has, I think, deforming effects on how we argue. First, it elevates tactics over substance. You can take a class in logic, argumentation. You learn all about the subterfuges that people use to try and win arguments — the false steps. It magnifies the us-versus them aspect of it. It makes it adversarial; it's polarizing. And the only foreseeable outcomes are triumph — glorious triumph — or abject, ignominious defeat. I think those are deforming effects, and worst of all, it seems to prevent things like negotiation or deliberation or compromise or collaboration.Think about that one — have you ever entered an argument thinking, ""Let's see if we can hash something out, rather than fight it out. What can we work out together?"" I think the argument-as-war metaphor inhibits those other kinds of resolutions to argumentation.And finally — this is really the worst thing — arguments don't seem to get us anywhere; they're dead ends. They are like roundabouts or traffic jams or gridlock in conversation. We don't get anywhere. And one more thing. And as an educator, this is the one that really bothers me: If argument is war, then there's an implicit equation of learning with losing.And let me explain what I mean. Suppose you and I have an argument. You believe a proposition, P, and I don't. And I say, ""Well, why do you believe P?"" And you give me your reasons. And I object and say, ""Well, what about ...?"" And you answer my objection. And I have a question: ""Well, what do you mean? How does it apply over here?"" And you answer my question. Now, suppose at the end of the day, I've objected, I've questioned, I've raised all sorts of counter counter-considerations and in every case you've responded to my satisfaction. And so at the end of the day, I say, ""You know what? I guess you're right: P."" So, I have a new belief. And it's not just any belief; it's well-articulated, examined — it's a battle-tested belief.Great cognitive gain. OK, who won that argument? Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I'm the only one who made any cognitive gain. What did you gain, cognitively, from convincing me? Sure, you got some pleasure out of it, maybe your ego stroked, maybe you get some professional status in the field — ""This guy's a good arguer."" But just from a cognitive point of view, who was the winner? The war metaphor forces us into thinking that you're the winner and I lost, even though I gained. And there's something wrong with that picture. And that's the picture I really want to change if we can.So, how can we find ways to make arguments yield something positive? What we need is new exit strategies for arguments. But we're not going to have new exit strategies for arguments until we have new entry approaches to arguments. We need to think of new kinds of arguments. In order to do that, well — I don't know how to do that. That's the bad news. The argument-as-war metaphor is just ... it's a monster. It's just taken up habitation in our mind, and there's no magic bullet that's going to kill it. There's no magic wand that's going to make it disappear. I don't have an answer.But I have some suggestions. Here's my suggestion: If we want to think of new kinds of arguments, what we need to do is think of new kinds of arguers.So try this: Think of all the roles that people play in arguments. There's the proponent and the opponent in an adversarial, dialectical argument. There's the audience in rhetorical arguments. There's the reasoner in arguments as proofs. All these different roles. Now, can you imagine an argument in which you are the arguer, but you're also in the audience, watching yourself argue? Can you imagine yourself watching yourself argue, losing the argument, and yet still, at the end of the argument, saying, ""Wow, that was a good argument!"" Can you do that? I think you can, and I think if you can imagine that kind of argument, where the loser says to the winner and the audience and the jury can say, ""Yeah, that was a good argument,"" then you have imagined a good argument. And more than that, I think you've imagined a good arguer, an arguer that's worthy of the kind of arguer you should try to be.Now, I lose a lot of arguments. It takes practice to become a good arguer, in the sense of being able to benefit from losing, but fortunately, I've had many, many colleagues who have been willing to step up and provide that practice for me.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_h_cohen_for_argument_s_sake
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"In an age of global strife and climate change, I'm here to answer the all important question: Why is sex so damn good? If you're laughing, you know what I mean.Now, before we get to that answer, let me tell you about Chris Hosmer. Chris is a great friend of mine from my university days, but secretly, I hate him.Here's why. Back in university, we had a quick project to design some solar-powered clocks. Here's my clock. It uses something called the dwarf sunflower, which grows to about 12 inches in height. Now, as you know, sunflowers track the sun during the course of the day. So in the morning, you see which direction the sunflower is facing, and you mark it on the blank area in the base. At noon, you mark the changed position of the sunflower, and in the evening again, and that's your clock. Now, I know my clock doesn't tell you the exact time, but it does give you a general idea using a flower. So, in my completely unbiased, subjective opinion, it's brilliant.However, here's Chris's clock. It's five magnifying glasses with a shot glass under each one. In each shot glass is a different scented oil. In the morning, the sunlight will shine down on the first magnifying glass, focusing a beam of light on the shot glass underneath. This will warm up the scented oil inside, and a particular smell will be emitted. A couple of hours later, the sun will shine on the next magnifying glass, and a different smell will be emitted. So during the course of the day, five different smells are dispersed throughout that environment. Anyone living in that house can tell the time just by the smell. You can see why I hate Chris. I thought my idea was pretty good, but his idea is genius, and at the time, I knew his idea was better than mine, but I just couldn't explain why.One thing you have to know about me is I hate to lose. This problem's been bugging me for well over a decade. All right, let's get back to the question of why sex is so good. Many years after the solar powered clocks project, a young lady I knew suggested maybe sex is so good because of the five senses.And when she said this, I had an epiphany. So I decided to evaluate different experiences I had in my life from the point of view of the five senses. To do this, I devised something called the five senses graph. Along the y-axis, you have a scale from zero to 10, and along the x-axis, you have, of course, the five senses. Anytime I had a memorable experience in my life, I would record it on this graph like a five senses diary. Here's a quick video to show you how it works.(Video) Jinsop Lee: Hey, my name's Jinsop, and today, I'm going to show you what riding motorbikes is like from the point of view of the five senses. Hey!Bike designer: This is [unclear], custom bike designer.(Motorcyle revving)[Sound][Touch][Sight][Smell][Taste]JL: And that's how the five senses graph works.Now, for a period of three years, I gathered data, not just me but also some of my friends, and I used to teach in university, so I forced my — I mean, I asked my students to do this as well. So here are some other results. The first is for instant noodles. Now obviously, taste and smell are quite high, but notice sound is at three. Many people told me a big part of the noodle-eating experience is the slurping noise. You know. (Slurps) Needless to say, I no longer dine with these people.OK, next, clubbing. OK, here what I found interesting was that taste is at four, and many respondents told me it's because of the taste of drinks, but also, in some cases, kissing is a big part of the clubbing experience. These people I still do hang out with.All right, and smoking. Here I found touch is at [six], and one of the reasons is that smokers told me the sensation of holding a cigarette and bringing it up to your lips is a big part of the smoking experience, which shows, it's kind of scary to think how well cigarettes are designed by the manufacturers.OK. Now, what would the perfect experience look like on the five senses graph? It would, of course, be a horizontal line along the top. Now you can see, not even as intense an experience as riding a motorbike comes close.In fact, in the years that I gathered data, only one experience came close to being the perfect one. That is, of course, sex. Great sex. Respondents said that great sex hits all of the five senses at an extreme level.Here I'll quote one of my students who said, ""Sex is so good, it's good even when it's bad.""So the five senses theory does help explain why sex is so good. Now in the middle of all this five senses work, I suddenly remembered the solar-powered clocks project from my youth. And I realized this theory also explains why Chris's clock is so much better than mine. You see, my clock only focuses on sight, and a little bit of touch. Here's Chris's clock. It's the first clock ever that uses smell to tell the time. In fact, in terms of the five senses, Chris's clock is a revolution.And that's what this theory taught me about my field. You see, up till now, us designers, we've mainly focused on making things look very pretty, and a little bit of touch, which means we've ignored the other three senses. Chris's clock shows us that even raising just one of those other senses can make for a brilliant product. So what if we started using the five senses theory in all of our designs?Here's three quick ideas I came up with. This is an iron, you know, for your clothes, to which I added a spraying mechanism, so you fill up the vial with your favorite scent, and your clothes will smell nicer, but hopefully it should also make the ironing experience more enjoyable. We could call this ""the perfumator.""All right, next. So I brush my teeth twice a day, and what if we had a toothbrush that tastes like candy, and when the taste of candy ran out, you'd know it's time to change your toothbrush?Finally, I have a thing for the keys on a flute or a clarinet. It's not just the way they look, but I love the way they feel when you press down on them. Now, I don't play the flute or the clarinet, so I decided to combine these keys with an instrument I do play: the television remote control.Now, when we look at these three ideas together, you'll notice that the five senses theory doesn't only change the way we use these products but also the way they look. So in conclusion, I've found the five senses theory to be a very useful tool in evaluating different experiences in my life, and then taking those best experiences and hopefully incorporating them into my designs.Now, I realize the five senses isn't the only thing that makes life interesting. There's also the six emotions and that elusive x-factor. Maybe that could be the topic of my next talk.Until then, please have fun using the five senses in your own lives and your own designs.Oh, one last thing before I leave. Here's the experience you all had while listening to the TED Talks. However, it would be better if we could boost up a couple of the other senses like smell and taste. And the best way to do that is with free candy. You guys ready? All right.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jinsop_lee_design_for_all_5_senses
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"I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme ""Education is a right."" Some logos designed by my students. Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book ""Afrikan Alphabets"" to address that. The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. So it's a special-interest writing system. The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. It's called Sankofa. It means, ""Return and get it."" Learn from the past. This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. All the paths lead to and from God. These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing — a sort of a musical score, if you may. In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces. Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. Shü-mom is a writing system. It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions — research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. Over here, you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, ""ālep,"" at the top, and ""bêt,"" in the middle, and so forth. It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery. The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/saki_mafundikwa_ingenuity_and_elegance_in_ancient_african_alphabets
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"The day I left home for the first time to go to university was a bright day brimming with hope and optimism. I'd done well at school. Expectations for me were high, and I gleefully entered the student life of lectures, parties and traffic cone theft. Now appearances, of course, can be deceptive, and to an extent, this feisty, energetic persona of lecture-going and traffic cone stealing was a veneer, albeit a very well-crafted and convincing one. Underneath, I was actually deeply unhappy, insecure and fundamentally frightened — frightened of other people, of the future, of failure and of the emptiness that I felt was within me. But I was skilled at hiding it, and from the outside appeared to be someone with everything to hope for and aspire to. This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I even deceived myself, and as the first semester ended and the second began, there was no way that anyone could have predicted what was just about to happen. I was leaving a seminar when it started, humming to myself, fumbling with my bag just as I'd done a hundred times before, when suddenly I heard a voice calmly observe, ""She is leaving the room."" I looked around, and there was no one there, but the clarity and decisiveness of the comment was unmistakable. Shaken, I left my books on the stairs and hurried home, and there it was again. ""She is opening the door."" This was the beginning. The voice had arrived. And the voice persisted, days and then weeks of it, on and on, narrating everything I did in the third person. ""She is going to the library."" ""She is going to a lecture."" It was neutral, impassive and even, after a while, strangely companionate and reassuring, although I did notice that its calm exterior sometimes slipped and that it occasionally mirrored my own unexpressed emotion. So, for example, if I was angry and had to hide it, which I often did, being very adept at concealing how I really felt, then the voice would sound frustrated. Otherwise, it was neither sinister nor disturbing, although even at that point it was clear that it had something to communicate to me about my emotions, particularly emotions which were remote and inaccessible. Now it was then that I made a fatal mistake, in that I told a friend about the voice, and she was horrified. A subtle conditioning process had begun, the implication that normal people don't hear voices and the fact that I did meant that something was very seriously wrong. Such fear and mistrust was infectious. Suddenly the voice didn't seem quite so benign anymore, and when she insisted that I seek medical attention, I duly complied, and which proved to be mistake number two. I spent some time telling the college G.P. about what I perceived to be the real problem: anxiety, low self-worth, fears about the future, and was met with bored indifference until I mentioned the voice, upon which he dropped his pen, swung round and began to question me with a show of real interest. And to be fair, I was desperate for interest and help, and I began to tell him about my strange commentator. And I always wish, at this point, the voice had said, ""She is digging her own grave."" I was referred to a psychiatrist, who likewise took a grim view of the voice's presence, subsequently interpreting everything I said through a lens of latent insanity. For example, I was part of a student TV station that broadcast news bulletins around the campus, and during an appointment which was running very late, I said, ""I'm sorry, doctor, I've got to go. I'm reading the news at six."" Now it's down on my medical records that Eleanor has delusions that she's a television news broadcaster. It was at this point that events began to rapidly overtake me. A hospital admission followed, the first of many, a diagnosis of schizophrenia came next, and then, worst of all, a toxic, tormenting sense of hopelessness, humiliation and despair about myself and my prospects. But having been encouraged to see the voice not as an experience but as a symptom, my fear and resistance towards it intensified. Now essentially, this represented taking an aggressive stance towards my own mind, a kind of psychic civil war, and in turn this caused the number of voices to increase and grow progressively hostile and menacing. Helplessly and hopelessly, I began to retreat into this nightmarish inner world in which the voices were destined to become both my persecutors and my only perceived companions. They told me, for example, that if I proved myself worthy of their help, then they could change my life back to how it had been, and a series of increasingly bizarre tasks was set, a kind of labor of Hercules. It started off quite small, for example, pull out three strands of hair, but gradually it grew more extreme, culminating in commands to harm myself, and a particularly dramatic instruction: ""You see that tutor over there? You see that glass of water? Well, you have to go over and pour it over him in front of the other students."" Which I actually did, and which needless to say did not endear me to the faculty. In effect, a vicious cycle of fear, avoidance, mistrust and misunderstanding had been established, and this was a battle in which I felt powerless and incapable of establishing any kind of peace or reconciliation. Two years later, and the deterioration was dramatic. By now, I had the whole frenzied repertoire: terrifying voices, grotesque visions, bizarre, intractable delusions. My mental health status had been a catalyst for discrimination, verbal abuse, and physical and sexual assault, and I'd been told by my psychiatrist, ""Eleanor, you'd be better off with cancer, because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia."" I'd been diagnosed, drugged and discarded, and was by now so tormented by the voices that I attempted to drill a hole in my head in order to get them out. Now looking back on the wreckage and despair of those years, it seems to me now as if someone died in that place, and yet, someone else was saved. A broken and haunted person began that journey, but the person who emerged was a survivor and would ultimately grow into the person I was destined to be. Many people have harmed me in my life, and I remember them all, but the memories grow pale and faint in comparison with the people who've helped me. The fellow survivors, the fellow voice-hearers, the comrades and collaborators; the mother who never gave up on me, who knew that one day I would come back to her and was willing to wait for me for as long as it took; the doctor who only worked with me for a brief time but who reinforced his belief that recovery was not only possible but inevitable, and during a devastating period of relapse told my terrified family, ""Don't give up hope. I believe that Eleanor can get through this. Sometimes, you know, it snows as late as May, but summer always comes eventually."" Fourteen minutes is not enough time to fully credit those good and generous people who fought with me and for me and who waited to welcome me back from that agonized, lonely place. But together, they forged a blend of courage, creativity, integrity, and an unshakeable belief that my shattered self could become healed and whole. I used to say that these people saved me, but what I now know is they did something even more important in that they empowered me to save myself, and crucially, they helped me to understand something which I'd always suspected: that my voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events, particularly childhood events, and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems. Now, at first, this was very difficult to believe, not least because the voices appeared so hostile and menacing, so in this respect, a vital first step was learning to separate out a metaphorical meaning from what I'd previously interpreted to be a literal truth. So for example, voices which threatened to attack my home I learned to interpret as my own sense of fear and insecurity in the world, rather than an actual, objective danger. Now at first, I would have believed them. I remember, for example, sitting up one night on guard outside my parents' room to protect them from what I thought was a genuine threat from the voices. Because I'd had such a bad problem with self-injury that most of the cutlery in the house had been hidden, so I ended up arming myself with a plastic fork, kind of like picnic ware, and sort of sat outside the room clutching it and waiting to spring into action should anything happen. It was like, ""Don't mess with me. I've got a plastic fork, don't you know?"" Strategic. But a later response, and much more useful, would be to try and deconstruct the message behind the words, so when the voices warned me not to leave the house, then I would thank them for drawing my attention to how unsafe I felt — because if I was aware of it, then I could do something positive about it — but go on to reassure both them and myself that we were safe and didn't need to feel frightened anymore. I would set boundaries for the voices, and try to interact with them in a way that was assertive yet respectful, establishing a slow process of communication and collaboration in which we could learn to work together and support one another. Throughout all of this, what I would ultimately realize was that each voice was closely related to aspects of myself, and that each of them carried overwhelming emotions that I'd never had an opportunity to process or resolve, memories of sexual trauma and abuse, of anger, shame, guilt, low self-worth. The voices took the place of this pain and gave words to it, and possibly one of the greatest revelations was when I realized that the most hostile and aggressive voices actually represented the parts of me that had been hurt most profoundly, and as such, it was these voices that needed to be shown the greatest compassion and care. It was armed with this knowledge that ultimately I would gather together my shattered self, each fragment represented by a different voice, gradually withdraw from all my medication, and return to psychiatry, only this time from the other side. Ten years after the voice first came, I finally graduated, this time with the highest degree in psychology the university had ever given, and one year later, the highest masters, which shall we say isn't bad for a madwoman. In fact, one of the voices actually dictated the answers during the exam, which technically possibly counts as cheating. (Laughter) And to be honest, sometimes I quite enjoyed their attention as well. As Oscar Wilde has said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. It also makes you very good at eavesdropping, because you can listen to two conversations simultaneously. So it's not all bad. I worked in mental health services, I spoke at conferences, I published book chapters and academic articles, and I argued, and continue to do so, the relevance of the following concept: that an important question in psychiatry shouldn't be what's wrong with you but rather what's happened to you. And all the while, I listened to my voices, with whom I'd finally learned to live with peace and respect and which in turn reflected a growing sense of compassion, acceptance and respect towards myself. And I remember the most moving and extraordinary moment when supporting another young woman who was terrorized by her voices, and becoming fully aware, for the very first time, that I no longer felt that way myself but was finally able to help someone else who was. I'm now very proud to be a part of Intervoice, the organizational body of the International Hearing Voices Movement, an initiative inspired by the work of Professor Marius Romme and Dr. Sandra Escher, which locates voice hearing as a survival strategy, a sane reaction to insane circumstances, not as an aberrant symptom of schizophrenia to be endured, but a complex, significant and meaningful experience to be explored. Together, we envisage and enact a society that understands and respects voice hearing, supports the needs of individuals who hear voices, and which values them as full citizens. This type of society is not only possible, it's already on its way. To paraphrase Chavez, once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. For me, the achievements of the Hearing Voices Movement are a reminder that empathy, fellowship, justice and respect are more than words; they are convictions and beliefs, and that beliefs can change the world. In the last 20 years, the Hearing Voices Movement has established hearing voices networks in 26 countries across five continents, working together to promote dignity, solidarity and empowerment for individuals in mental distress, to create a new language and practice of hope, which, at its very center, lies an unshakable belief in the power of the individual. As Peter Levine has said, the human animal is a unique being endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal and the intellectual spirit to harness this innate capacity. In this respect, for members of society, there is no greater honor or privilege than facilitating that process of healing for someone, to bear witness, to reach out a hand, to share the burden of someone's suffering, and to hold the hope for their recovery. And likewise, for survivors of distress and adversity, that we remember we don't have to live our lives forever defined by the damaging things that have happened to us. We are unique. We are irreplaceable. What lies within us can never be truly colonized, contorted, or taken away. The light never goes out. As a very wonderful doctor once said to me, ""Don't tell me what other people have told you about yourself. Tell me about you."" Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eleanor_longden_the_voices_in_my_head
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"Adam Ockelford: I promise there won't be too much of me talking, and a lot of Derek playing, but I thought it would just be nice to recap on how Derek got to where he is today.It's amazing now, because he's so much bigger than me, but when Derek was born, he could have fitted on the palm of your hand. He was born three and a half months premature, and really it was a fantastic fight for him to survive. He had to have a lot of oxygen, and that affected your eyes, Derek, and also the way you understand language and the way you understand the world. But that was the end of the bad news, because when Derek came home from the hospital, his family decided to employ the redoubtable nanny who was going to look after you, Derek, really for the rest of your childhood. And Nanny's great insight, really, was to think, here's a child who can't see. Music must be the thing for Derek. And sure enough, she sang, or as Derek called it, warbled, to him for his first few years of life. And I think it was that excitement with hearing her voice hour after hour every day that made him think maybe, you know, in his brain something was stirring, some sort of musical gift. Here's a little picture of Derek going up now, when you were with your nanny.Now Nanny's great other insight was to think, perhaps we should get Derek something to play, and sure enough, she dragged this little keyboard out of the loft, never thinking really that anything much would come of it. But Derek, your tiny hand must have gone out to that thing and actually bashed it, bashed it so hard they thought it was going to break. But out of all the bashing, after a few months, emerged the most fantastic music, and I think there was just a miracle moment, really, Derek, when you realized that all the sounds you hear in the world out there is something that you can copy on the keyboard. That was the great eureka moment.Now, not being able to see meant, of course, that you taught yourself.Derek Paravicini: I taught myself to play.AO: You did teach yourself to play, and as a consequence, playing the piano for you, Derek, was a lot of knuckles and karate chops, and even a bit of nose going on in there.And now, here's what Nanny did also do was to press the record button on one of those little early tape recorders that they had, and this is a wonderful tape, now, of Derek playing when you were four years old.DP: ""Molly Malone (Cockles and Mussels).""AO: It wasn't actually ""Cockles and Mussels."" This one is ""English Country Garden.""DP: ""English Country Garden.""(Music: ""English Country Garden"")AO: There you are.(Applause)I think that's just fantastic. You know, there's this little child who can't see, can't really understand much about the world, has no one in the family who plays an instrument, and yet he taught himself to play that. And as you can see from the picture, there was quite a lot of body action going on while you were playing, Derek.Now, along — Derek and I met when he was four and a half years old, and at first, Derek, I thought you were mad, to be honest, because when you played the piano, you seemed to want to play every single note on the keyboard, and also you had this little habit of hitting me out of the way. So as soon as I tried to get near the piano, I was firmly shoved off. And having said to your dad, Nic, that I would try to teach you, I was then slightly confused as to how I might go about that if I wasn't allowed near the piano. But after a while, I thought, well, the only way is to just pick you up, shove Derek over to the other side of the room, and in the 10 seconds that I got before Derek came back, I could just play something very quickly for him to learn. And in the end, Derek, I think you agreed that we could actually have some fun playing the piano together. As you can see, there's me in my early, pre-marriage days with a brown beard, and little Derek concentrating there.I just realized this is going to be recorded, isn't it? Right. Okay.(Laughter)Now then, by the age of 10, Derek really had taken the world by storm. This is a photo of you, Derek, playing at the Barbican with the Royal Philharmonic Pops. Basically it was just an exciting journey, really. And in those days, Derek, you didn't speak very much, and so there was always a moment of tension as to whether you'd actually understood what it was we were going to play and whether you'd play the right piece in the right key, and all that kind of thing. But the orchestra were wowed as well, and the press of the world were fascinated by your ability to play these fantastic pieces.Now the question is, how do you do it, Derek? And hopefully we can show the audience now how it is you do what you do.I think that one of the first things that happened when you were very little, Derek, was that by the time you were two, your musical ear had already outstripped that of most adults. And so whenever you heard any note at all — if I just play a random note — (Piano notes) — you knew instantly what it was, and you'd got the ability as well to find that note on the piano. Now that's called perfect pitch, and some people have perfect pitch for a few white notes in the middle of the piano.(Piano notes)You can see how — you get a sense of playing with Derek.(Applause)But Derek, your ear is so much more than that. If I just put the microphone down for a bit, I'm going to play a cluster of notes. Those of you who can see will know how many notes, but Derek, of course, can't. Not only can you say how many notes, it's being able to play them all at the same time. Here we are.(Chords)Well, forget the terminology, Derek. Fantastic. And it's that ability, that ability to hear simultaneous sounds, not only just single sounds, but when a whole orchestra is playing, Derek, you can hear every note, and instantly, through all those hours and hours of practice, reproduce those on the keyboard, that makes you, I think, is the basis of all your ability.Now then. It's no use having that kind of raw ability without the technique, and luckily, Derek, you decided that, once we did start learning, you'd let me help you learn all the scale fingerings. So for example using your thumb under with C major.(Piano notes)Etc.And in the end, you got so quick, that things like ""Flight of the Bumblebee"" were no problem, were they?DP: No.AO: Right. So here, by the age of 11, Derek was playing things like this.DP: This.(Music: ""Flight of the Bumblebee"") (Applause)AO: Derek, let's have a bow.Well done.Now the truly amazing thing was, with all those scales, Derek, you could not only play ""Flight of the Bumblebee"" in the usual key, but any note I play, Derek can play it on. So if I just choose a note at random, like that one. (Piano notes) Can you play ""Flight of the Bumblebee"" on that note?DP: ""Flight of the Bumblebee"" on that note.(Music: ""Flight of the Bumblebee"")AO: Or another one? How about in G minor?DP: G minor.(Music: ""Flight of the Bumblebee"")AO: Fantastic. Well done, Derek.So you see, in your brain, Derek, is this amazing musical computer that can instantly recalibrate, recalculate, all the pieces in the world that are out there. Most pianists would have a heart attack if you said, ""Sorry, do you mind playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' in B minor instead of A minor?"" as we went on. In fact, the first time, Derek, you played that with an orchestra, you'd learned the version that you'd learned, and then the orchestra, in fact, did have a different version, so while we were waiting in the two hours before the rehearsal and the concert, Derek listened to the different version and learned it quickly and then was able to play it with the orchestra. Fantastic chap.The other wonderful thing about you is memory.DP: Memory. AO: Your memory is truly amazing, and every concert we do, we ask the audience to participate, of course, by suggesting a piece Derek might like to play. And people say, ""Well, that's terribly brave because what happens if Derek doesn't know it?"" And I say, ""No, it's not brave at all, because if you ask for something that Derek doesn't know, you're invited to come and sing it first, and then he'll pick it up."" (Laughter)So just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish.But seriously, would anyone like to choose a piece?DP: Choose a piece. Choose, choose, would you like to choose? AO: Because it's quite dark. You'll just have to shout out. Would you like to hear me play?(Audience: ""Theme of Paganini."")AO: Paganini. DP: ""The Theme of Paganini.""(Laughter)(Music: ""Theme of Paganini"")(Applause)AO: Well done.Derek's going to L.A. soon, and it's a milestone, because it means that Derek and I will have spent over 100 hours on long-haul flights together, which is quite interesting, isn't it Derek?DP: Very interesting, Adam, yes. Long-haul flights. Yes.AO: You may think 13 hours is a long time to keep talking, but Derek does it effortlessly. Now then.(Laughter)But in America, they've coined this term, ""the human iPod"" for Derek, which I think is just missing the point, really, because Derek, you're so much more than an iPod. You're a fantastic, creative musician, and I think that was nowhere clearer to see, really, than when we went to Slovenia, and someone — in a longer concert we tend to get people joining in, and this person, very, very nervously came onto the stage.DP: He played ""Chopsticks."" AO: And played ""Chopsticks.""DP: ""Chopsticks.""AO: A bit like this. DP: Like this. Yes.(Piano notes)AO: I should really get Derek's manager to come and play it. He's sitting there.DP: Somebody played ""Chopsticks"" like this. AO: Just teasing, right? Here we go.(Music: ""Chopsticks"")DP: Let Derek play it.AO: What did you do with it, Derek?DP: I got to improvise with it, Adam.AO: This is Derek the musician. (Music: ""Chopsticks"" improvisation)(Applause)(Music) (Clapping)Keep up with Derek.(Music)(Applause)The TED people will kill me, but perhaps there's time for one encore.DP: For one encore. AO: One encore, yes.So this is one of Derek's heroes. It's the great Art Tatum — DP: Art Tatum.AO: — who also was a pianist who couldn't see, and also, I think, like Derek, thought that all the world was a piano, so whenever Art Tatum plays something, it sounds like there's three pianos in the room. And here is Derek's take on Art Tatum's take on ""Tiger Rag.""DP: ""Tiger Rag.""(Music: ""Tiger Rag"")(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_paravicini_and_adam_ockelford_in_the_key_of_genius
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"In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated. And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters — gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He'd been a miner. She thought he must just have been worn out by the work. But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't. She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing. She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it. Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos. When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed. She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, ""Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis."" But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right. So now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, ""Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us."" ""If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us."" Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, ""I don't want to be a victim. I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents."" But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town — 15,000 people — and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, ""Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite."" This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. You have chosen not to know. There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, ""Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?"" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. It's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, ""This is a uniquely Swiss problem."" And when I go to Germany, they say, ""Oh yes, this is the German disease."" And when I go to companies in England, they say, ""Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this."" And the truth is, this is a human problem. We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind. What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing's ever going to change. If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all. And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, ""Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them."" So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy. And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, ""Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that."" And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride. I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, ""You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this."" I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, ""Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.'"" Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. And she said to me, she said, ""You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same."" We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent. When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil. I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla. And she said, ""Why? What's the big deal?"" I said, ""She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it."" Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_the_dangers_of_willful_blindness
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"Hi. I am an architect. I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes. 1986, much, much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues, I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure. It's very complicated to test the new material for the building, but this is much stronger than I expected, and also it's very easy to waterproof, and also, because it's industrial material, it's also possible to fireproof.Then I built the temporary structure, 1990. This is the first temporary building made out of paper. There are 330 tubes, diameter 55 [centimeters], there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters, or four feet, wide. As you see it in the photo, inside is the toilet. In case you're finished with toilet paper, you can tear off the inside of the wall. (Laughter) So it's very useful.Year 2000, there was a big expo in Germany. I was asked to design the building, because the theme of the expo was environmental issues. So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes, recyclable paper. My goal of the design is not when it's completed. My goal was when the building was demolished, because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year, we create a lot of industrial waste, so my building has to be reused or recycled. After, the building was recycled. So that was the goal of my design.Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz. Because I was so poor, I wanted to rent an office in Paris, but I couldn't afford it, so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves. So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office. We stayed there for six years without paying any rent.(Laughter) (Applause)Thank you. I had one big problem. Because we were part of the exhibition, even if my friend wanted to see me, they had to buy a ticket to see me. That was the problem.Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz. It's a very popular museum now, and I created a big monument for the government.But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers. They have money and power. Those are invisible. So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. That is our profession, even historically it's the same, even now we are doing the same. So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society, even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters. But I must say they are no longer natural disasters. For example, earthquakes never kill people, but collapse of the buildings kill people. That's the responsibility of architects. Then people need some temporary housing, but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people. So I thought, even as architects, we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing. We can make it better. So that is why I started working in disaster areas.1994, there was a big disaster in Rwanda, Africa. Two tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, fought each other. Over two million people became refugees. But I was so surprised to see the shelter, refugee camp organized by the U.N. They're so poor, and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season, In the shelters built by the U.N., they were just providing a plastic sheet, and the refugees had to cut the trees, and just like this. But over two million people cut trees. It just became big, heavy deforestation and an environmental problem. That is why they started providing aluminum pipes, aluminum barracks. Very expensive, they throw them out for money, then cutting trees again. So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong, but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit. We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites, so on.And then, year afterward, 1995, in Kobe, Japan, we had a big earthquake. Nearly 7,000 people were killed, and the city like this Nagata district, all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake. And also I found out there's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church — all the building was totally destroyed.So I went there and also I proposed to the priests, ""Why don't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes?""And he said, ""Oh God, are you crazy? After a fire, what are you proposing?""So he never trusted me, but I didn't give up. I started commuting to Kobe, and I met the society of Vietnamese people. They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park. So I proposed to rebuild. I raised — did fundraising. I made a paper tube shelter for them, and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish, I used beer crates as a foundation. I asked the Kirin beer company to propose, because at that time, the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red, which doesn't go with the color of the paper tubes. The color coordination is very important. And also I still remember, we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate, but it came empty. (Laughter) So I remember it was so disappointing. So during the summer with my students, we built over 50 units of the shelters.Finally the priest, finally he trusted me to rebuild. He said, ""As long as you collect money by yourself, bring your students to build, you can do it.""So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church. It was meant to stay there for three years, but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it. Then, in Taiwan, they had a big earthquake, and we proposed to donate this church, so we dismantled them, we sent them over to be built by volunteer people. It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now. So this building became a permanent building.Then I wonder, what is a permanent and what is a temporary building? Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it. Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money.In 1999, in Turkey, the big earthquake, I went there to use the local material to build a shelter. 2001, in West India, I built also a shelter. In 2004, in Sri Lanka, after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, I rebuilt Islamic fishermen's villages.And in 2008, in Chengdu, Sichuan area in China, nearly 70,000 people were killed, and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor. I was asked to rebuild the temporary church. I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students. In one month, we completed nine classrooms, over 500 square meters. It's still used, even after the current earthquake in China.In 2009, in Italy, L'Aquila, also they had a big earthquake. And this is a very interesting photo: former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso — you know, because we have to change the prime minister ever year. And they are very kind, affording my model. I proposed a big rebuilding, a temporary music hall, because L'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed, so musicians were moving out.So I proposed to the mayor, I'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium. He said, ""As long as you bring your money, you can do it."" And I was very lucky. Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium.Year 2010 in Haiti, there was a big earthquake, but it's impossible to fly over, so I went to Santo Domingo, next-door country, to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes.This is what happened in Japan two years ago, in northern Japan. After the earthquake and tsunami, people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium. But look at this. There's no privacy. People suffer mentally and physically. So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes, just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain. However, some of the facility authority doesn't want us to do it, because, they said, simply, it's become more difficult to control them. But it's really necessary to do it.They don't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one. Look at this. Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing, so dense and so messy because there is no storage, nothing, water is leaking, so I thought, we have to make multi-story building because there's no land and also it's not very comfortable.So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions. Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi. He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [fields]. I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable, within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same, but much more comfortable. Many of the people want to stay here forever. I was very happy to hear that.Now I am working in New Zealand, Christchurch. About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened, also they had a big earthquake, and many Japanese students were also killed, and the most important cathedral of the city, the symbol of Christchurch, was totally destroyed. And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral.So this is under construction. And I'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shigeru_ban_emergency_shelters_made_from_paper
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"What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.Now, there is a sound —(Alarm clock)Ah, it worked! A sound that is desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.""Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber."" Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. ""O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?"" Shakespeare again, from — I won't say it — the Scottish play.(Laughter)From the same time: ""Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together."" Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century: ""Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days."" Bang!(Laughter)And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, ""Sleep is for wimps."" And of course the infamous — what was his name? — the infamous Gordon Gekko from ""Wall Street"" said, ""Money never sleeps.""What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound. Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so, therefore it's — Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was or indeed, how to use it, so —(Laughter)Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. OK.(Laughter)The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property. If we flip the brain on its back — I love this little bit of spinal cord here — this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here.OK. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, as scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's what — 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.OK. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equivalent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there. And what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society — the aged; if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night.Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, ""Wake up. This is the time to be awake."" So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the US, the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep — a hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters. When you're tired and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that.(Laughter)If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. Of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then, of course, it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, ""Actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?"" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep. A biological mimic for sleep, it sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural processing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, ""I need carbohydrates,"" and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain: stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So, if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. Sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity. And so, tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, ""Well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep?"" So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.So most of us, of course, ask the question, ""How do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?"" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.What do you do? Well — and this is slightly offensive — sleep for dummies.(Laughter)Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom, looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we go to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch.Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.OK. That's some facts. What about some myths?Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that.Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.And the fourth myth is early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well, that's wrong at so many different levels.(Laughter)There is no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.(Laughter)(Applause)OK. So for the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, ""Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia, because they're on antipsychotics. It's the antipsychotics causing the sleep problems,"" ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before antipsychotics.So what's going on? Several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever — their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed.So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated, but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health, are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse, the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.So let me just finish. What I started by saying is: Take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, ""Sleep is God. Go worship."" And I can only recommend that you do the same.Thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/russell_foster_why_do_we_sleep
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"Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. I had just gone through a breakup. (Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral ""blah"" feeling. Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory? All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk. (Laughter) So there is a catch. There is a catch. These ideas probably remind you of ""Total Recall,"" ""Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,"" or of ""Inception."" But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab. Xu Liu: Test mice. (Laughter) As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. As simple as that. (Laughter) SR: Are you convinced? So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy. XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. But memory is not. And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory. SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory. XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active. SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active. XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed. SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now. XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds. SR: So what do you think, Xu? Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells? XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. And also it takes them forever to act on cells. So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity? SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain. XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light. SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light — XL: That's pretty fast. SR: — and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams. XL: Yep. You heard it right. We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. (Laughter) SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see. SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. They learn that something bad happened here. Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin. XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box. SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, ""What do I do? Do I say hi? Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist?"" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look. XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment. But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment? SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, #justsaying. Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique. XL: And this is what we saw. When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. They want to know, what's going on in this new box? It's interesting. But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. Clearly it's freezing. So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment. While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. (Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything. After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence. SR: ""Did that just work?"" XL: ""Yes,"" I said. ""Indeed it worked!"" We're really excited about this. And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. Maybe we can take a look at some of those. [""OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome""] SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. (Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there. [""This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED""] XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control. SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. [""They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception.""] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory? XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. So far what we've told you is basically we can control this ""play"" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? Yes we can. Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. It's sort of like making a remix tape. SR: So how do we do this? Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. We're just trying to connect the two. So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it. XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled ""on"" switch. In fact, we also have a light-controlled ""off"" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled ""off"" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere. So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with. SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality. XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works. SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience. XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination. SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? How do we push this technology forward? These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us. Thank you. XL: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_ramirez_and_xu_liu_a_mouse_a_laser_beam_a_manipulated_memory
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"I come from Lebanon, and I believe that running can change the world. I know what I have just said is simply not obvious.You know, Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war. Honestly, I don't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it. With Syria to the north, Israel and Palestine to the south, and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable. For years, the country has been divided between politics and religion. However, for one day a year, we truly stand united, and that's when the marathon takes place.I used to be a marathon runner. Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big. So the longer distances I ran, the bigger my dreams became. Until one fateful morning, and while training, I was hit by a bus. I nearly died, was in a coma, stayed at the hospital for two years, and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again.As soon as I came out of my coma, I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be, so I decided, if I couldn't run myself, I wanted to make sure that others could. So out of my hospital bed, I asked my husband to start taking notes, and a few months later, the marathon was born.Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange, but at that time, even during my most vulnerable condition, I needed to dream big. I needed something to take me out of my pain, an objective to look forward to. I didn't want to pity myself, nor to be pitied, and I thought by organizing such a marathon, I'll be able to pay back to my community, build bridges with the outside world, and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace.Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York. How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war? How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other? More than that, how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word ""marathon""? So we had to start from scratch.For almost two years, we went all over the country and even visited remote villages. I personally met with people from all walks of life — mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives. I learned one thing: When you walk the talk, people believe you. Many were touched by my personal story, and they shared their stories in return. It was honesty and transparency that brought us together. We spoke one common language to each other, and that was from one human to another. Once that trust was built, everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony.In October 2003, over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line, all determined, and when the gunfire went off, this time it was a signal to run in harmony, for a change.The marathon grew. So did our political problems. But for every disaster we had, the marathon found ways to bring people together. In 2005, our prime minister was assassinated, and the country came to a complete standstill, so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign. Over 60,000 people came to the start line, all wearing white T-shirts with no political slogans. That was a turning point for the marathon, where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity.Between 2006 up to 2009, our country, Lebanon, went through unstable years, invasions, and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war. The country was divided again, so much that our parliament resigned, we had no president for a year, and no prime minister. But we did have a marathon.(Applause)So through the marathon, we learned that political problems can be overcome. When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center, we negotiated alternative routes. Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders. They even hosted juice stations.(Laughter)You know, the marathon has really become one of its kind. It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community. Last November 2012, over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line, but this time, they challenged a very stormy and rainy weather. The streets were flooded, but people didn't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day.BMA has expanded. We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies. Themes have included runs for the environment, breast cancer, for the love of Lebanon, for peace, or just simply to run.The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment, which is one of its kind in the region, has just taken place only a few weeks ago, with 4,512 women, including the first lady, and this is only the beginning.Thank you.(Applause)BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon, raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give. The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious. Stereotypes have been broken. Change-makers and future leaders have been created. I believe these are the building blocks for future peace.BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region, like Iraq, Egypt and Syria, have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event. We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East, but most importantly, it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world. From Boston to Beirut, we stand as one.(Applause)After 10 years in Lebanon, from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races, we've seen that people want to run for a better future. After all, peacemaking is not a sprint. It is more of a marathon.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/may_el_khalil_making_peace_is_a_marathon
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"Ah yes, those university days, a heady mix of Ph.D-level pure mathematics and world debating championships, or, as I like to say, ""Hello, ladies. Oh yeah."" Didn't get much sexier than the Spence at university, let me tell you.It is such a thrill for a humble breakfast radio announcer from Sydney, Australia, to be here on the TED stage literally on the other side of the world. And I wanted to let you know, a lot of the things you've heard about Australians are true. From the youngest of ages, we display a prodigious sporting talent. On the field of battle, we are brave and noble warriors. What you've heard is true. Australians, we don't mind a bit of a drink, sometimes to excess, leading to embarrassing social situations. (Laughter) This is my father's work Christmas party, December 1973. I'm almost five years old. Fair to say, I'm enjoying the day a lot more than Santa was.But I stand before you today not as a breakfast radio host, not as a comedian, but as someone who was, is, and always will be a mathematician. And anyone who's been bitten by the numbers bug knows that it bites early and it bites deep.I cast my mind back when I was in second grade at a beautiful little government-run school called Boronia Park in the suburbs of Sydney, and as we came up towards lunchtime, our teacher, Ms. Russell, said to the class, ""Hey, year two. What do you want to do after lunch? I've got no plans."" It was an exercise in democratic schooling, and I am all for democratic schooling, but we were only seven. So some of the suggestions we made as to what we might want to do after lunch were a little bit impractical, and after a while, someone made a particularly silly suggestion and Ms. Russell patted them down with that gentle aphorism, ""That wouldn't work. That'd be like trying to put a square peg through a round hole.""Now I wasn't trying to be smart. I wasn't trying to be funny. I just politely raised my hand, and when Ms. Russell acknowledged me, I said, in front of my year two classmates, and I quote, ""But Miss, surely if the diagonal of the square is less than the diameter of the circle, well, the square peg will pass quite easily through the round hole."" (Laughter) ""It'd be like putting a piece of toast through a basketball hoop, wouldn't it?""And there was that same awkward silence from most of my classmates, until sitting next to me, one of my friends, one of the cool kids in class, Steven, leaned across and punched me really hard in the head. (Laughter) Now what Steven was saying was, ""Look, Adam, you are at a critical juncture in your life here, my friend. You can keep sitting here with us. Any more of that sort of talk, you've got to go and sit over there with them.""I thought about it for a nanosecond. I took one look at the road map of life, and I ran off down the street marked ""Geek"" as fast as my chubby, asthmatic little legs would carry me.I fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of ages. I explained it to all my friends. Maths is beautiful. It's natural. It's everywhere. Numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written. The great Descartes said something quite similar. The universe ""is written in the mathematical language."" And today, I want to show you one of those musical notes, a number so beautiful, so massive, I think it will blow your mind.Today we're going to talk about prime numbers. Most of you I'm sure remember that six is not prime because it's 2 x 3. Seven is prime because it's 1 x 7, but we can't break it down into any smaller chunks, or as we call them, factors. Now a few things you might like to know about prime numbers. One is not prime. The proof of that is a great party trick that admittedly only works at certain parties.(Laughter)Another thing about primes, there is no final biggest prime number. They keep going on forever. We know there are an infinite number of primes due to the brilliant mathematician Euclid. Over thousands of years ago, he proved that for us. But the third thing about prime numbers, mathematicians have always wondered, well at any given moment in time, what is the biggest prime that we know about?Today we're going to hunt for that massive prime. Don't freak out. All you need to know, of all the mathematics you've ever learned, unlearned, crammed, forgotten, never understood in the first place, all you need to know is this: When I say 2 ^ 5, I'm talking about five little number twos next to each other all multiplied together, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. So 2 ^ 5 is 2 x 2 = 4, 8, 16, 32. If you've got that, you're with me for the entire journey. Okay? So 2 ^ 5, those five little twos multiplied together. (2 ^ 5) - 1 = 31. 31 is a prime number, and that five in the power is also a prime number. And the vast bulk of massive primes we've ever found are of that form: two to a prime number, take away one. I won't go into great detail as to why, because most of your eyes will bleed out of your head if I do, but suffice to say, a number of that form is fairly easy to test for primacy. A random odd number is a lot harder to test. But as soon as we go hunting for massive primes, we realize it's not enough just to put in any prime number in the power. (2 ^ 11) - 1 = 2,047, and you don't need me to tell you that's 23 x 89. (Laughter) But (2 ^ 13) - 1, (2 ^ 17) - 1 (2 ^ 19) - 1, are all prime numbers. After that point, they thin out a lot.And one of the things about the search for massive primes that I love so much is some of the great mathematical minds of all time have gone on this search. This is the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. In the 1700s, other mathematicians said he is simply the master of us all. He was so respected, they put him on European currency back when that was a compliment.(Laughter)Euler discovered at the time the world's biggest prime: (2 ^ 31) - 1. It's over two billion. He proved it was prime with nothing more than a quill, ink, paper and his mind.You think that's big. We know that (2 ^ 127) - 1 is a prime number. It's an absolute brute. Look at it here: 39 digits long, proven to be prime in 1876 by a mathematician called Lucas. Word up, L-Dog.(Laughter)But one of the great things about the search for massive primes, it's not just finding the primes. Sometimes proving another number not to be prime is just as exciting. Lucas again, in 1876, showed us (2 ^ 67) - 1, 21 digits long, was not prime. But he didn't know what the factors were. We knew it was like six, but we didn't know what are the 2 x 3 that multiply together to give us that massive number.We didn't know for almost 40 years until Frank Nelson Cole came along. And at a gathering of prestigious American mathematicians, he walked to the board, took up a piece of chalk, and started writing out the powers of two: two, four, eight, 16 — come on, join in with me, you know how it goes — 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. I'm in geek heaven. We'll stop it there for a second. Frank Nelson Cole did not stop there. He went on and on and calculated 67 powers of two. He took away one and wrote that number on the board. A frisson of excitement went around the room. It got even more exciting when he then wrote down these two large prime numbers in your standard multiplication format — and for the rest of the hour of his talk Frank Nelson Cole busted that out. He had found the prime factors of (2 ^ 67) - 1. The room went berserk — (Laughter) — as Frank Nelson Cole sat down, having delivered the only talk in the history of mathematics with no words. He admitted afterwards it wasn't that hard to do. It took focus. It took dedication. It took him, by his estimate, ""three years of Sundays.""But then in the field of mathematics, as in so many of the fields that we've heard from in this TED, the age of the computer goes along and things explode. These are the largest prime numbers we knew decade by decade, each one dwarfing the one before as computers took over and our power to calculate just grew and grew.This is the largest prime number we knew in 1996, a very emotional year for me. It was the year I left university. I was torn between mathematics and media. It was a tough decision. I loved university. My arts degree was the best nine and a half years of my life.(Laughter)But I came to a realization about my own ability. Put simply, in a room full of randomly selected people, I'm a maths genius. In a roomful of maths Ph.Ds, I'm as dumb as a box of hammers. My skill is not in the mathematics. It is in telling the story of the mathematics.And during that time, since I've left university, these numbers have got bigger and bigger, each one dwarfing the last, until along came this man, Dr. Curtis Cooper, who a few years ago held the record for the largest ever prime, only to see it snatched away by a rival university. And then Curtis Cooper got it back. Not years ago, not months ago, days ago. In an amazing moment of serendipity, I had to send TED a new slide to show you what this guy had done.I still remember — (Applause) — I still remember when it happened. I was doing my breakfast radio show. I looked down on Twitter. There was a tweet: ""Adam, have you seen the new largest prime number?"" I shivered — (Laughter) — contacted the women who produced my radio show out in the other room, and said ""Girls, hold the front page. We're not talking politics today. We're not talking sport today. They found another megaprime."" The girls just shook their heads, put them in their hands, and let me go my own way.It's because of Curtis Cooper that we know, currently the largest prime number we know, is 2 ^ 57,885,161. Don't forget to subtract the one. This number is almost 17 and a half million digits long. If you typed it out on a computer and saved it as a text file, that's 22 meg. For the slightly less geeky of you, think about the Harry Potter novels, okay? This is the first Harry Potter novel. This is all seven Harry Potter novels, because she did tend to faff on a bit near the end. (Laughter) Written out as a book, this number would run the length of the Harry Potter novels and half again. Here's a slide of the first 1,000 digits of this prime. If, when TED had begun, at 11 o'clock on Tuesday, we'd walked out and simply hit one slide every second, it would have taken five hours to show you that number. I was keen to do it, could not convince Bono. That's the way it goes.This number is 17 and a half thousand slides long, and we know it is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime. That fills me with almost sexual excitement. And who am I kidding when I say almost?(Laughter)I know what you're thinking: Adam, we're happy that you're happy, but why should we care? Let me give you just three reasons why this is so beautiful.First of all, as I explained, to ask a computer ""Is that number prime?"" to type it in its abbreviated form, and then only about six lines of code is the test for primacy, is a remarkably simple question to ask. It's got a remarkably clear yes/no answer, and just requires phenomenal grunt. Large prime numbers are a great way of testing the speed and accuracy of computer chips.But secondly, as Curtis Cooper was looking for that monster prime, he wasn't the only guy searching. My laptop at home was looking through four potential candidate primes myself as part of a networked computer hunt around the world for these large numbers. The discovery of that prime is similar to the work people are doing in unraveling RNA sequences, in searching through data from SETI and other astronomical projects. We live in an age where some of the great breakthroughs are not going to happen in the labs or the halls of academia but on laptops, desktops, in the palms of people's hands who are simply helping out for the search.But for me it's amazing because it's a metaphor for the time in which we live, when human minds and machines can conquer together. We've heard a lot about robots in this TED. We've heard a lot about what they can and can't do. It is true, you can now download onto your smartphone an app that would beat most grandmasters at chess.You think that's cool. Here's a machine doing something cool. This is the CubeStormer II. It can take a randomly shuffled Rubik's Cube. Using the power of the smartphone, it can examine the cube and solve the cube in five seconds.(Applause)That scares some people. That excites me. How lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together?I was asked in an interview last year in my capacity as a lower-case ""c"" celebrity in Australia, ""What was your highlight of 2012?"" People were expecting me to talk about my beloved Sydney Swans football team. In our beautiful, indigenous sport of Australian football, they won the equivalent of the Super Bowl. I was there. It was the most emotional, exciting day. It wasn't my highlight of 2012. People thought it might have been an interview I'd done on my show. It might have been a politician. It might have been a breakthrough. It might have been a book I read, the arts. No, no, no. It might have been something my two gorgeous daughters had done. No, it wasn't. The highlight of 2012, so clearly, was the discovery of the Higgs boson. Give it up for the fundamental particle that bequeaths all other fundamental particles their mass.(Applause)And what was so gorgeous about this discovery was 50 years ago Peter Higgs and his team considered one of the deepest of all questions: How is it that the things that make us up have no mass? I've clearly got mass. Where does it come from? And he postulated a suggestion that there's this infinite, incredibly small field stretching throughout the universe, and as other particles go through those particles and interact, that's where they get their mass. The rest of the scientific community said, ""Great idea, Higgsy. We've got no idea if we could ever prove it. It's beyond our reach."" And within just 50 years, in his lifetime, with him sitting in the audience, we had designed the greatest machine ever to prove this incredible idea that originated just in a human mind.That's what is so exciting for me about this prime number. We thought it might be there, and we went and found it. That is the essence of being human. That is what we are all about. Or as my friend Descartes might put it, we think, therefore we are.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_spencer_why_i_fell_in_love_with_monster_prime_numbers
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"I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?How about a moderate amount of stress?Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too.But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, ""How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"" They also asked, ""Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?"" And then they used public death records to find out who died.(Laughter)Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.(Laughter)People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.(Laughter)That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.(Laughter)You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress.Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this.(Laughter)And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this.(Exhales)(Laughter)Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me.Okay.(Laughter)I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go!(Audience counting)Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow.(Audience counting)Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again.(Laughter)You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. If you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure.But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social.To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in.Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you.Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart.And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, ""How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"" They also asked, ""How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?"" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died.Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But — and I hope you are expecting a ""but"" by now — but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience.And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense?KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend
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"So here's the most important economic fact of our time. We are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India, in my own native Canada. We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany.Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. In the 1970s, the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. The 0.1 percent in the U.S. today account for more than eight percent of the national income. They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago. Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. Now, as it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list — and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans — was 300 billion dollars. Just think about it. You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased.So we're living in the age of the global plutocracy, but we've been slow to notice it. One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. But I think there's something else going on. Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening.So we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. What's driving it, and what can we do about it?One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top.A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of ""crony capitalism,"" political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be ""don't do evil,"" to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem. After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street.But if crony capitalism is, intellectually at least, the easy part of the problem, things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality. In and of themselves, these aren't too mysterious. Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich. Just think about it. For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product, you have almost instant, almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people. As a result, if you are very, very smart and very, very lucky, you can get very, very rich very, very quickly. The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp. The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. Think about that for a minute: 1.1 billion dollars, 26 years old. It's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields, like sports and entertainment. We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before. But today, that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy. We have superstar technologists. We have superstar bankers. We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects. There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers. There are even, and this is my personal favorite example, superstar dentists, the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati, the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.But while it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. Let's start with technology. I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium. I'm even more of a fan of globalization. This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable — who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt.So what's not to like? Well, a few things. One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. And that's no mere hypothetical example. Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. Again, this is no mere hypothetical. It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K.A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race.The third thing, and this is what worries me the most, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. Let's start with technology. Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. When's the last time you used a travel agent? And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000. The same is true of globalization. For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more.One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages.So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller — well, there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century. But it's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 1870s, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. We created the modern welfare state. We created public education. We created public health care. We created public pensions. We created unions.Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. We need a new New Deal.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chrystia_freeland_the_rise_of_the_new_global_super_rich
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"You may want to take a closer look. There's more to this painting than meets the eye. And yes, it's an acrylic painting of a man, but I didn't paint it on canvas. I painted it directly on top of the man.What I do in my art is I skip the canvas altogether, and if I want to paint your portrait, I'm painting it on you, physically on you. That also means you're probably going to end up with an earful of paint, because I need to paint your ear on your ear. Everything in this scene, the person, the clothes, chairs, wall, gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what's directly below it, and in this way, I'm able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting. I can photograph it from any angle, and it will still look 2D. There's no Photoshop here. This is just a photo of one of my three-dimensional paintings.You might be wondering how I came up with this idea of turning people into paintings. But originally, this had nothing to do with either people or paint. It was about shadows. I was fascinated with the absence of light, and I wanted to find a way that I could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed. I came up with the idea of painting shadows. I loved that I could hide within this shadow my own painted version, and it would be almost invisible until the light changed, and all of a sudden my shadow would be brought to the light.I wanted to think about what else I could put shadows on, and I thought of my friend Bernie. But I didn't just want to paint the shadows. I also wanted to paint the highlights and create a mapping on his body in greyscale. I had a very specific vision of what this would look like, and as I was painting him, I made sure to follow that very closely. But something kept on flickering before my eyes. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. And then when I took that moment to take a step back, magic. I had turned my friend into a painting. I couldn't have foreseen that when I wanted to paint a shadow, I would pull out this whole other dimension, that I would collapse it, that I would take a painting and make it my friend and then bring him back to a painting.I was a little conflicted though, because I was so excited about what I'd found, but I was just about to graduate from college with a degree in political science, and I'd always had this dream of going to Washington, D.C., and sitting at a desk and working in government. (Laughter) Why did this have to get in the way of all that?I made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to Capitol Hill, but going down to my parents' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint. I had no idea where to begin. The last time I'd painted, I was 16 years old at summer camp, and I didn't want to teach myself how to paint by copying the old masters or stretching a canvas and practicing over and over again on that surface, because that's not what this project was about for me. It was about space and light.My early canvases ended up being things that you wouldn't expect to be used as canvas, like fried food. It's nearly impossible to get paint to stick to the grease in an egg. (Laughter) Even harder was getting paint to stick to the acid in a grapefruit. It just would erase my brush strokes like invisible ink. I'd put something down, and instantly it would be gone.And if I wanted to paint on people, well, I was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that I spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast. It just seemed like it made more sense to practice by painting on myself. One of my favorite models actually ended up being a retired old man who not only didn't mind sitting still and getting the paint in his ears, but he also didn't really have much embarrassment about being taken out into very public places for exhibition, like the Metro.I was having so much fun with this process. I was teaching myself how to paint in all these different styles, and I wanted to see what else I could do with it. I came together with a collaborator, Sheila Vand, and we had the idea of creating paintings in a more unusual surface, and that was milk. We got a pool. We filled it with milk. We filled it with Sheila. And I began painting. And the images were always completely unexpected in the end, because I could have a very specific image about how it would turn out, I could paint it to match that, but the moment that Sheila laid back into the milk, everything would change. It was in constant flux, and we had to, rather than fight it, embrace it, see where the milk would take us and compensate to make it even better. Sometimes, when Sheila would lay down in the milk, it would wash all the paint off of her arms, and it might seem a little bit clumsy, but our solution would be, okay, hide your arms. And one time, she got so much milk in her hair that it just smeared all the paint off of her face. All right, well, hide your face. And we ended up with something far more elegant than we could have imagined, even though this is essentially the same solution that a frustrated kid uses when he can't draw hands, just hiding them in the pockets.When we started out on the milk project, and when I started out, I couldn't have foreseen that I would go from pursuing my dream in politics and working at a desk to tripping over a shadow and then turning people into paintings and painting on people in a pool of milk. But then again, I guess it's also not unforeseeable that you can find the strange in the familiar, as long as you're willing to look beyond what's already been brought to light, that you can see what's below the surface, hiding in the shadows, and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alexa_meade
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"When I was a young man, I spent six years of wild adventure in the tropics working as an investigative journalist in some of the most bewitching parts of the world. I was as reckless and foolish as only young men can be. This is why wars get fought. But I also felt more alive than I've ever done since. And when I came home, I found the scope of my existence gradually diminishing until loading the dishwasher seemed like an interesting challenge. And I found myself sort of scratching at the walls of life, as if I was trying to find a way out into a wider space beyond. I was, I believe, ecologically bored.Now, we evolved in rather more challenging times than these, in a world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws. And we still possess the fear and the courage and the aggression required to navigate those times. But in our comfortable, safe, crowded lands, we have few opportunities to exercise them without harming other people. And this was the sort of constraint that I found myself bumping up against. To conquer uncertainty, to know what comes next, that's almost been the dominant aim of industrialized societies, and having got there, or almost got there, we have just encountered a new set of unmet needs. We've privileged safety over experience and we've gained a lot in doing so, but I think we've lost something too.Now, I don't romanticize evolutionary time. I'm already beyond the lifespan of most hunter-gatherers, and the outcome of a mortal combat between me myopically stumbling around with a stone-tipped spear and an enraged giant aurochs isn't very hard to predict. Nor was it authenticity that I was looking for. I don't find that a useful or even intelligible concept. I just wanted a richer and rawer life than I've been able to lead in Britain, or, indeed, that we can lead in most parts of the industrialized world.And it was only when I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that I began to understand what I was looking for. And as soon as I found that word, I realized that I wanted to devote much of the rest of my life to it.The word is ""rewilding,"" and even though rewilding is a young word, it already has several definitions. But there are two in particular that fascinate me. The first one is the mass restoration of ecosystems.One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades. A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom, and the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we're slightly less aware that they give life to many others. It sounds strange, but just follow me for a while. Before the wolves turned up, they'd been absent for 70 years. The numbers of deer, because there was nothing to hunt them, had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park, and despite efforts by humans to control them, they'd managed to reduce much of the vegetation there to almost nothing, they'd just grazed it away. But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number, they started to have the most remarkable effects. First, of course, they killed some of the deer, but that wasn't the major thing. Much more significantly, they radically changed the behavior of the deer. The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park, the places where they could be trapped most easily, particularly the valleys and the gorges, and immediately those places started to regenerate. In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years. Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood. And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in. The number of songbirds, of migratory birds, started to increase greatly. The number of beavers started to increase, because beavers like to eat the trees. And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. They create niches for other species. And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians. The wolves killed coyotes, and as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers. Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left. Bears fed on it too, and their population began to rise as well, partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs, and the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer.But here's where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. They began to meander less. There was less erosion. The channels narrowed. More pools formed, more riffle sections, all of which were great for wildlife habitats. The rivers changed in response to the wolves, and the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often, so that the rivers became more fixed in their course. Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places and the vegetation recovering on the valley sides, there was less soil erosion, because the vegetation stabilized that as well. So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park, this huge area of land, but also its physical geography.Whales in the southern oceans have similarly wide-ranging effects. One of the many post-rational excuses made by the Japanese government for killing whales is that they said, ""Well, the number of fish and krill will rise and then there'll be more for people to eat."" Well, it's a stupid excuse, but it sort of kind of makes sense, doesn't it, because you'd think that whales eat huge amounts of fish and krill, so obviously take the whales away, there'll be more fish and krill. But the opposite happened. You take the whales away, and the number of krill collapses. Why would that possibly have happened? Well, it now turns out that the whales are crucial to sustaining that entire ecosystem, and one of the reasons for this is that they often feed at depth and then they come up to the surface and produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes, huge explosions of poop right across the surface waters, up in the photic zone, where there's enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place, and those great plumes of fertilizer stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain, which stimulate the growth of zooplankton, which feed the fish and the krill and all the rest of it. The other thing that whales do is that, as they're plunging up and down through the water column, they're kicking the phytoplankton back up towards the surface where it can continue to survive and reproduce. And interestingly, well, we know that plant plankton in the oceans absorb carbon from the atmosphere — the more plant plankton there are, the more carbon they absorb — and eventually they filter down into the abyss and remove that carbon from the atmospheric system. Well, it seems that when whales were at their historic populations, they were probably responsible for sequestering some tens of millions of tons of carbon every year from the atmosphere.And when you look at it like that, you think, wait a minute, here are the wolves changing the physical geography of the Yellowstone National Park. Here are the whales changing the composition of the atmosphere. You begin to see that possibly, the evidence supporting James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which conceives of the world as a coherent, self-regulating organism, is beginning, at the ecosystem level, to accumulate.Trophic cascades tell us that the natural world is even more fascinating and complex than we thought it was. They tell us that when you take away the large animals, you are left with a radically different ecosystem to one which retains its large animals. And they make, in my view, a powerful case for the reintroduction of missing species. Rewilding, to me, means bringing back some of the missing plants and animals. It means taking down the fences, it means blocking the drainage ditches, it means preventing commercial fishing in some large areas of sea, but otherwise stepping back. It has no view as to what a right ecosystem or a right assemblage of species looks like. It doesn't try to produce a heath or a meadow or a rain forest or a kelp garden or a coral reef. It lets nature decide, and nature, by and large, is pretty good at deciding.Now, I mentioned that there are two definitions of rewilding that interest me. The other one is the rewilding of human life. And I don't see this as an alternative to civilization. I believe we can enjoy the benefits of advanced technology, as we're doing now, but at the same time, if we choose, have access to a richer and wilder life of adventure when we want to because there would be wonderful, rewilded habitats.And the opportunities for this are developing more rapidly than you might think possible. There's one estimate which suggests that in the United States, two thirds of the land which was once forested and then cleared has become reforested as loggers and farmers have retreated, particularly from the eastern half of the country. There's another one which suggests that 30 million hectares of land in Europe, an area the size of Poland, will be vacated by farmers between 2000 and 2030.Now, faced with opportunities like that, does it not seem a little unambitious to be thinking only of bringing back wolves, lynx, bears, beavers, bison, boar, moose, and all the other species which are already beginning to move quite rapidly across Europe? Perhaps we should also start thinking about the return of some of our lost megafauna.What megafauna, you say? Well, every continent had one, apart from Antarctica. When Trafalgar Square in London was excavated, the river gravels there were found to be stuffed with the bones of hippopotamus, rhinos, elephants, hyenas, lions. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there were lions in Trafalgar Square long before Nelson's Column was built. All these species lived here in the last interglacial period, when temperatures were pretty similar to our own. It's not climate, largely, which has got rid of the world's megafaunas. It's pressure from the human population hunting and destroying their habitats which has done so.And even so, you can still see the shadows of these great beasts in our current ecosystems. Why is it that so many deciduous trees are able to sprout from whatever point the trunk is broken? Why is it that they can withstand the loss of so much of their bark? Why do understory trees, which are subject to lower sheer forces from the wind and have to carry less weight than the big canopy trees, why are they so much tougher and harder to break than the canopy trees are? Elephants. They are elephant-adapted. In Europe, for example, they evolved to resist the straight-tusked elephant, elephas antiquus, which was a great beast. It was related to the Asian elephant, but it was a temperate animal, a temperate forest creature. It was a lot bigger than the Asian elephant. But why is it that some of our common shrubs have spines which seem to be over-engineered to resist browsing by deer? Perhaps because they evolved to resist browsing by rhinoceros.Isn't it an amazing thought that every time you wander into a park or down an avenue or through a leafy street, you can see the shadows of these great beasts? Paleoecology, the study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our own, feels like a portal through which you may pass into an enchanted kingdom. And if we really are looking at areas of land of the sort of sizes I've been talking about becoming available, why not reintroduce some of our lost megafauna, or at least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere? Why shouldn't all of us have a Serengeti on our doorsteps?And perhaps this is the most important thing that rewilding offers us, the most important thing that's missing from our lives: hope. In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair. The story rewilding tells us is that ecological change need not always proceed in one direction. It offers us the hope that our silent spring could be replaced by a raucous summer.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_monbiot_for_more_wonder_rewild_the_world
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"This is Charley Williams. He was 94 when this photograph was taken. In the 1930s, Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels, but he also did something interesting, which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans. Charley Williams, a poor sharecropper, wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview, but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old. And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories, of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves.Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us, and three generations later, I was part of a project called StoryCorps, which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces. The idea is very, very simple. You go into these booths, you interview your grandmother or relative, you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress. It's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time. And the question is, who do you want to remember — if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother? What's interesting, in conversations with the founder, Dave Isay, we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project, because when you think about it, it's actually not really about the stories that are being told, it's about listening, and it's about the questions that you get to ask, questions that you may not have permission to on any other day. I'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project.[Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri's final moments]Jesus Melendez: We took off, and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level-off point was 45,000 feet, so before we had leveled off, Pedro began leaving us, and the beauty about it is that I believe that there's something after life. You can see it in Pedro.[Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years]Danny Perasa: See, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say ""I love you"" to you, and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me, it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house.(Laughter)[Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz]Michael Wolmetz: So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother, and we can leave it there. And he saved up and he purchased this, and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. So I'm going to share a mic with you right now, Debora. Where's the right finger? Debora Brakarz: (Crying) MW: Debora, will you please marry me? DB: Yes. Of course. I love you. (Kissing) MW: So kids, this is how your mother and I got married, in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father's ring. My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years. He used to pick people up here every day. So it seems right.Jake Barton: So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry. The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself. And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm, Local Projects, is doing with our engagements in general. So we're a media design firm, and we're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces.Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which we've created an engagement called Gallery One for. And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive, $350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity, new audiences, at the same time that the museum itself is growing.Glenn Lowry, the head of MoMA, put it best when he said, ""We want visitors to actually cease being visitors. Visitors are transient. We want people who live here, people who have ownership.""And so what we're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries, so you can still have a traditional gallery experience, but if you're interested, you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it's from, or manipulate the work itself. So, for example, you can click on this individual lion head, and this is where it originated from, 1300 B.C. Or this individual piece here, you can see the actual bedroom. It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting. This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself. This is Rodin's bust. You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity. And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story. This is Picasso, of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century.And so our next interface, which I'll show you, actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity. It's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum's collection using facial recognition. So this person's making different faces, and it's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she's looking. And so you can imagine that, as people are performing inside of the museum itself, you get this sense of this emotional connection, this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years. This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes. So more and more we're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves, to be creative even as they're looking at other people's creativity and understanding them.So in this wall, the collections wall, you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time, and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum, so you can share them, and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin.But all the while that we've been working on this engagement for Cleveland, we've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date, and that's the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production. So the memorial opened in 2011, and the museum's going to open next year in 2014. And you can see from these images, the site is so raw and almost archaeological. And of course the event itself is so recent, somewhere between history and current events, it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this, an event like this, to actually tell that story.And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009. So it's estimated that a third of the world watched 9/11 live, and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours, making it really by nature of when it happened, this unprecedented moment of global awareness. And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world, through video, through photos, through written history, and so people's experiences on that day, which was, in fact, this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform. But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth, really the simplest we've ever made, where you locate yourself on a map. It's in six languages, and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day. And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world — this is obviously part of the landing gear — we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself, between the way that people were telling the stories of the event, and how we ourselves needed to tell that story.This image in particular really captured our attention at the time, because it so much sums up that event. This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. There's a firefighter that's stuck, actually, in traffic, and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back. And we got this amazing email that said, ""While viewing the thousands of photos on the site, I unexpectedly found a photo of my son. It was a shock emotionally, yet a blessing to find this photo,"" and he was writing because he said, ""I'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo, as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son.""And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story. We can't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that, when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself.And so we started imagining the museum, along with the creative team at the museum and the curators, thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors. And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember. And I'll just play you part of a mockup of it, but you get a sense of what it's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history.(Video) Voice 1: I was in Honolulu, Hawaii. Voice 2: I was in Cairo, Egypt.Voice 3: Sur les Champs-Élysées, à Paris. Voice 4: In college, at U.C. Berkeley.Voice 5: I was in Times Square. Voice 6: São Paolo, Brazil.(Multiple voices)Voice 7: It was probably about 11 o'clock at night.Voice 8: I was driving to work at 5:45 local time in the morning.Voice 9: We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said, ""Oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.""Voice 10: Trying to frantically get to a radio.Voice 11: When I heard it over the radio —Voice 12: Heard it on the radio.(Multiple voices)Voice 13: I got a call from my father. Voice 14: The phone rang, it woke me up. My business partner told me to turn on the television.Voice 15: So I switched on the television.Voice 16: All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing.Voice 17: The Twin Towers. Voice 18: The Twin Towers.JB: And you move from there into that open, cavernous space. This is the so-called slurry wall. It's the original, excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself. And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity, of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself. And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage, so you're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building, or making their way down the stairwells. And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery, we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself. And so you can hear oral histories — so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment.And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9/11, we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9/11. And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable, the types of questions that 9/11 itself draws forth for all of us. And so these are questions like, ""How can a democracy balance freedom and security?"" ""How could 9/11 have happened?"" ""And how did the world change after 9/11?""And so these oral histories, which we've actually been capturing already for years, are then mixed together with interviews that we're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and you mix together these different players and these different experiences, these different reflection points about 9/11. And suddenly the institution, once again, turns into a listening experience. So I'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices, but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone's reflection on the event.(Video) Voice 1: 9/11 was not just a New York experience.Voice 2: It's something that we shared, and it's something that united us.Voice 3: And I knew when I saw that, people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through.Voice 4: All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever, ever stay with me.Voice 5: Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives, and those who gave their lives to help others, but I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country, the love, the compassIon, the strength, and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy.JB: And so as people make their way out of the museum, reflecting on the experience, reflecting on their own thoughts of it, they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself, because they've gone back up to grade, and we actually got involved in the memorial after we'd done the museum for a few years. The original designer of the memorial, Michael Arad, had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated, almost random, really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself, but it was a huge challenge for the families, for the foundation, certainly for the first responders, and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology, or in terms of alphabetical, but through what's called meaningful adjacency. So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order, and we, along with Jer Thorp, created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves. So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy, but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights, the two different towers, the first responders, and you can actually see within that different floors, and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves. And so when you go to the memorial, you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves. You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial, and you can search for an individual name, or in this case an employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, and see the way in which all of those names, those hundreds of names, are actually organized onto the memorial itself, and use that to navigate the memorial. And more importantly, when you're actually at the site of the memorial, you can see those connections. You can see the relationships between the different names themselves. So suddenly what is this undifferentiated, anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life. In this case, Harry Ramos, who was the head trader at an investment bank, who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower. And Ramos told Wald, according to witnesses, ""I'm not going to leave you."" And Wald's widow requested that they be listed next to each other.Three generations ago, we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people. Today, of course, there's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations. And this is our hope, that's there's poetry inside of each of our stories.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jake_barton_the_museum_of_you
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"When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing.And my mum said, ""Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page.""And I thought to myself, ""But that's what I want to do. I love stories. I want to read."" Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true.I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution.There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. But let me tell you a bit about it today.When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. (Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (Laughter)When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. Look for it. Have you noticed it? I do. I look for it all the time.(Laughter)When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. As one of them said to me, ""Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment.""(Laughter)But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help.Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. Students, family and friends all read me material. Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform.(Applause)I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, ""This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me."" How very wrong I was. In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. See it up there? And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. (Laughter) It's a blind computer. (Laughter) It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (Laughter) Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch.It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, but his memory lives on in my heart. It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. It had a speech synthesizer. I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory.In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989, and it blew me away, and in September 1989, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. I didn't have to be nice to people!(Laughter)I no longer would be censored. For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. (Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and — (Laughter) (Applause)Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. That's what it's shrunk to. And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. I can keep up with my friends.There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. One is another American inventor Ted Henter. Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. But in 1989, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this.(JAWS speaking)Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow?(Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. I slowed it down for you. I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. Can we play that one?(JAWS speaking)(Laughter)RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly.(Laughter) (Applause)This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. Do you love being read to? And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach ""Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone."" Isn't that a great book? I still love being close to someone reading to me. But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life.Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice.Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. There are other barriers brought about by our laws. For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. But those books can't travel across borders. For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. In Argentina, there are 50,000. In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter.And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. I want that to happen.(Applause)My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. I've indeed been a very fortunate human being.I wonder what the future will hold. The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, ""Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers."" I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world.I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. I want to thank her too.I think I have to say goodbye now. Bless you. Thank you very much.(Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_mccallum_how_technology_allowed_me_to_read
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"So over the long course of human history, the infectious disease that's killed more humans than any other is malaria. It's carried in the bites of infected mosquitos, and it's probably our oldest scourge. We may have had malaria since we evolved from the apes. And to this day, malaria takes a huge toll on our species. We've got 300 million cases a year and over half a million deaths.Now this really makes no sense. We've known how to cure malaria since the 1600s. That's when Jesuit missionaries in Peru discovered the bark of the cinchona tree, and inside that bark was quinine, still an effective cure for malaria to this day. So we've known how to cure malaria for centuries. We've known how to prevent malaria since 1897. That's when the British army surgeon Ronald Ross discovered that it was mosquitos that carried malaria, not bad air or miasmas, as was previously thought. So malaria should be a relatively simple disease to solve, and yet to this day, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die from the bite of a mosquito. Why is that?This is a question that's personally intrigued me for a long time. I grew up as the daughter of Indian immigrants visiting my cousins in India every summer, and because I had no immunity to the local malarias, I was made to sleep under this hot, sweaty mosquito net every night while my cousins, they were allowed to sleep out on the terrace and have this nice, cool night breeze wafting over them. And I really hated the mosquitos for that. But at the same time, I come from a Jain family, and Jainism is a religion that espouses a very extreme form of nonviolence. So Jains are not supposed to eat meat. We're not supposed to walk on grass, because you could, you know, inadvertently kill some insects when you walk on grass. We're certainly not supposed to swat mosquitos. So the fearsome power of this little insect was apparent to me from a very young age, and it's one reason why I spent five years as a journalist trying to understand, why has malaria been such a horrible scourge for all of us for so very long? And I think there's three main reasons why. Those three reasons add up to the fourth reason, which is probably the biggest reason of all.The first reason is certainly scientific. This little parasite that causes malaria, it's probably one of the most complex and wily pathogens known to humankind. It lives half its life inside the cold-blooded mosquito and half its life inside the warm-blooded human. These two environments are totally different, but not only that, they're both utterly hostile. So the insect is continually trying to fight off the parasite, and so is the human body continually trying to fight it off. This little creature survives under siege like that, but not only does it survive, it has thrived. It has spread. It has more ways to evade attack than we know. It's a shape-shifter, for one thing. Just as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, the malaria parasite transforms itself like that seven times in its life cycle. And each of those life stages not only looks totally different from each other, they have totally different physiology. So say you came up with some great drug that worked against one stage of the parasite's life cycle. It might do nothing at all to any of the other stages. It can hide in our bodies, undetected, unbeknownst to us, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, in some cases even decades.So the parasite is a very big scientific challenge to tackle, but so is the mosquito that carries the parasite. Only about 12 species of mosquitos carry most of the world's malaria, and we know quite a bit about the kinds of watery habitats that they specialize in. So you might think, then, well, why don't we just avoid the places where the killer mosquitos live? Right? We could avoid the places where the killer grizzly bears live and we avoid the places where the killer crocodiles live. But say you live in the tropics and you walk outside your hut one day and you leave some footprints in the soft dirt around your home. Or say your cow does, or say your pig does, and then, say, it rains, and that footprint fills up with a little bit of water. That's it. You've created the perfect malarial mosquito habitat that's right outside your door. So it's not easy for us to extricate ourselves from these insects. We kind of create places that they love to live just by living our own lives.So there's a huge scientific challenge, but there's a huge economic challenge too. Malaria occurs in some of the poorest and most remote places on Earth, and there's a reason for that. If you're poor, you're more likely to get malaria. If you're poor, you're more likely to live in rudimentary housing on marginal land that's poorly drained. These are places where mosquitos breed. You're less likely to have door screens or window screens. You're less likely to have electricity and all the indoor activities that electricity makes possible, so you're outside more. You're getting bitten by mosquitos more.So poverty causes malaria, but what we also know now is that malaria itself causes poverty. For one thing, it strikes hardest during harvest season, so exactly when farmers need to be out in the fields collecting their crops, they're home sick with a fever. But it also predisposes people to death from all other causes. So this has happened historically. We've been able to take malaria out of a society. Everything else stays the same, so we still have bad food, bad water, bad sanitation, all the things that make people sick. But just if you take malaria out, deaths from everything else go down. And the economist Jeff Sachs has actually quantified what this means for a society. What it means is, if you have malaria in your society, your economic growth is depressed by 1.3 percent every year, year after year after year, just this one disease alone. So this poses a huge economic challenge, because say you do come up with your great drug or your great vaccine — how do you deliver it in a place where there's no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no electricity for refrigeration to keep things cold, there's no clinics, there's no clinicians to deliver these things where they're needed? So there's a huge economic challenge in taming malaria.But along with the scientific challenge and the economic challenge, there's also a cultural challenge, and this is probably the part about malaria that people don't like to talk about. And it's the paradox that the people who have the most malaria in the world tend to care about it the least. This has been the finding of medical anthropologists again and again. They ask people in malarious parts of the world, ""What do you think about malaria?"" And they don't say, ""It's a killer disease. We're scared of it."" They say, ""Malaria is a normal problem of life."" And that was certainly my personal experience. When I told my relatives in India that I was writing a book about malaria, they kind of looked at me like I told them I was writing a book about warts or something. Like, why would you write about something so boring, so ordinary? You know? And it's simple risk perception, really. A child in Malawi, for example, she might have 12 episodes of malaria before the age of two, but if she survives, she'll continue to get malaria throughout her life, but she's much less likely to die of it. And so in her lived experience, malaria is something that comes and goes. And that's actually true for most of the world's malaria. Most of the world's malaria comes and goes on its own. It's just, there's so much malaria that this tiny fraction of cases that end in death add up to this big, huge number. So I think people in malarious parts of the world must think of malaria the way those of us who live in the temperate world think of cold and flu. Right? Cold and flu have a huge burden on our societies and on our own lives, but we don't really even take the most rudimentary precautions against it because we consider it normal to get cold and flu during cold and flu season.And so this poses a huge cultural challenge in taming malaria, because if people think it's normal to have malaria, then how do you get them to run to the doctor to get diagnosed, to pick up their prescription, to get it filled, to take the drugs, to put on the repellents, to tuck in the bed nets? This is a huge cultural challenge in taming this disease.So take all that together. We've got a disease. It's scientifically complicated, it's economically challenging to deal with, and it's one for which the people who stand to benefit the most care about it the least. And that adds up to the biggest problem of all, which, of course, is the political problem. How do you get a political leader to do anything about a problem like this? And the answer is, historically, you don't. Most malarious societies throughout history have simply lived with the disease. So the main attacks on malaria have come from outside of malarious societies, from people who aren't constrained by these rather paralyzing politics. But this, I think, introduces a whole host of other kinds of difficulties.The first concerted attack against malaria started in the 1950s. It was the brainchild of the U.S. State Department. And this effort well understood the economic challenge. They knew they had to focus on cheap, easy-to-use tools, and they focused on DDT. They understood the cultural challenge. In fact, their rather patronizing view was that people at risk of malaria shouldn't be asked to do anything at all. Everything should be done to them and for them. But they greatly underestimated the scientific challenge. They had so much faith in their tools that they stopped doing malaria research. And so when those tools started to fail, and public opinion started to turn against those tools, they had no scientific expertise to figure out what to do. The whole campaign crashed, malaria resurged back, but now it was even worse than before because it was corralled into the hardest-to-reach places in the most difficult-to-control forms. One WHO official at the time actually called that whole campaign ""one of the greatest mistakes ever made in public health.""The latest effort to tame malaria started in the late 1990s. It's similarly directed and financed primarily from outside of malarious societies. Now this effort well understands the scientific challenge. They are doing tons of malaria research. And they understand the economic challenge too. They're focusing on very cheap, very easy-to-use tools. But now, I think, the dilemma is the cultural challenge. The centerpiece of the current effort is the bed net. It's treated with insecticides. This thing has been distributed across the malarious world by the millions. And when you think about the bed net, it's sort of a surgical intervention. You know, it doesn't really have any value to a family with malaria except that it helps prevent malaria. And yet we're asking people to use these nets every night. They have to sleep under them every night. That's the only way they are effective. And they have to do that even if the net blocks the breeze, even if they might have to get up in the middle of the night and relieve themselves, even if they might have to move all their furnishings to put this thing up, even if, you know, they might live in a round hut in which it's difficult to string up a square net. Now that's no big deal if you're fighting a killer disease. I mean, these are minor inconveniences. But that's not how people with malaria think of malaria. So for them, the calculus must be quite different.Imagine, for example, if a bunch of well-meaning Kenyans came up to those of us in the temperate world and said, ""You know, you people have a lot of cold and flu. We've designed this great, easy-to-use, cheap tool, we're going to give it to you for free. It's called a face mask, and all you need to do is wear it every day during cold and flu season when you go to school and when you go to work."" Would we do that?And I wonder if that's how people in the malarious world thought of those nets when they first received them? Indeed, we know from studies that only 20 percent of the bed nets that were first distributed were actually used. And even that's probably an overestimate, because the same people who distributed the nets went back and asked the recipients, ""Oh, did you use that net I gave you?"" Which is like your Aunt Jane asking you, ""Oh, did you use that vase I gave you for Christmas?"" So it's probably an overestimate.But that's not an insurmountable problem. We can do more education, we can try to convince these people to use the nets. And that's what happening now. We're throwing a lot more time and money into workshops and trainings and musicals and plays and school meetings, all these things to convince people to use the nets we gave you. And that might work. But it takes time. It takes money. It takes resources. It takes infrastructure. It takes all the things that that cheap, easy-to-use bed net was not supposed to be.So it's difficult to attack malaria from inside malarious societies, but it's equally tricky when we try to attack it from outside of those societies. We end up imposing our own priorities on the people of the malarious world. That's exactly what we did in the 1950s, and that effort backfired. I would argue today, when we are distributing tools that we've designed and that don't necessarily make sense in people's lives, we run the risk of making the same mistake again.That's not to say that malaria is unconquerable, because I think it is, but what if we attacked this disease according to the priorities of the people who lived with it? Take the example of England and the United States. We had malaria in those countries for hundreds of years, and we got rid of it completely, not because we attacked malaria. We didn't. We attacked bad roads and bad houses and bad drainage and lack of electricity and rural poverty. We attacked the malarious way of life, and by doing that, we slowly built malaria out. Now attacking the malarious way of life, this is something — these are things people care about today. And attacking the malarious way of life, it's not fast, it's not cheap, it's not easy, but I think it's the only lasting way forward.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sonia_shah_3_reasons_we_still_haven_t_gotten_rid_of_malaria
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"Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? I think those are interesting ideas. For me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? Great. Double-check. Make sure you still have them. I was doing some shopping before.(Laughter)You've looked at them a few times today, but I'll ask you a question. Without looking at it directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? Bring them out, check and see how accurate you were. How'd you do? Show of hands. Did we get it?Now that you're done, close them down. Every phone has something in common. No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? You just looked at your clock, right? Interesting idea. Let's take that a step further with a game of trust. Close your eyes. I realize I'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes.Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. With your eyes closed, what am I wearing? Make your best guess. What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? Now open your eyes. Show of hands, were you right? Interesting, isn't it?Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others, it seems. But I have a different theory about that model of attention. They have fancy models of attention, Posner's trinity model of attention. For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank. So Frank is sitting at a desk. He's got lots of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. But attention is what steers your perceptions, it's what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind. If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. For example, the cocktail effect: You're in a party, having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name without realizing you were listening to that.Now, for my job, I have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second.So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? What just happened? Do you have a wallet? Do you have an American Express in your wallet? And when I do that, your Frank turns around. He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. What's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data.This sounds like a good theory, but I could talk for a long time, tell you lots of things, and a portion of them may be true, but I think it's better if I tried to show that to you here live. If I come down, I'm going to do a bit of shopping. Just hold still where you are.Hello, how are you? It's lovely to see you. Wonderful job onstage. Lovely watch, it doesn't come off very well. Do you have a ring as well? Good. Just taking inventory. You're like a buffet. Hard to tell where to start, so many great things.Hi, how are you? Good to see you.Hi, sir, could you stand up, please? Just right where you are. You're married, you follow directions well. Nice to meet you, sir. You don't have a lot in your pockets. Anything down here? Hopefully so. Have a seat. There you go. You're doing well.Hi, sir, how are you? Good to see you, sir. You have a ring, a watch. Do you have a wallet on you? Joe: I don't.AR: Well, we'll find one for you. Come on up this way, Joe. Give Joe a round of applause. Come on up, Joe. Let's play a game.(Applause)AR: Pardon me. I don't think I need this clicker anymore. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Come on up to the stage, Joe. Let's play a little game now. Anything in your front pockets?J: Money.AR: Money! All right, let's try that. Can you stand right over this way for me? Turn around and, let's see, if I give you something that belongs to me, this is just something I have, a poker chip. Hold out your hand for me. Watch it closely. This is a task for you to focus on. You have your money in your front pocket?J: Yup. AR: Good.I won't put my hand in your pocket. I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. Once a guy had a hole in his pocket, and that was rather traumatizing for me. I wanted his wallet, he gave me his number. Big miscommunication.(Laughter)Let's do this simply. Squeeze your hand tight. Do you feel the poker chip in your hand?J: I do.AR: Would you be surprised if I took it? Say yes.J: Very. AR: Good.Open your hand. Thank you very much. I'll cheat if you give me a chance. Make it harder for me. Just use your hand. Grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. Did you see it go? Joe: No.AR: No, it's not here. Open your hand. While we're focused on the hand, it's sitting on your shoulder. Go ahead and take it off. Now, let's try that again. Hold your hand out flat. Open it up. Put your hand up a little bit higher, but watch it close. If I did it slowly, it'd be on your shoulder.(Laughter)Joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. You'll get it eventually. I have faith in you. Squeeze firm. You're human, you're not slow. It's back on your shoulder. You were focused on your hand, distracted. While you were watching, I couldn't get your watch off. Yet you had something inside your pocket. Do you remember what it was?J: Money.AR: Check your pocket. Is it still there?(Laughter)Oh, there it was. Put it away. We're just shopping. This trick's more about the timing. I'm going to try to push it inside your hand. Put your other hand on top, would you? It's amazingly obvious now, isn't it? Looks a lot like the watch I was wearing, doesn't it?(Laughter) (Applause)J: That's pretty good. AR: Oh, thanks.(Applause)But it's only a start. Let's try it a little bit differently. Hold your hands together. Your other hand on top. If you're watching this little token, this obviously has become a little target, like a red herring. If we watch this kind of close, it looks like it goes away. It's not back on your shoulder. It falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. Did you see it go? Yeah, funny. We've got a little guy. He's union, works up there all day. If I do it slowly it goes straight away, it lands by your pocket. Is it in this pocket, sir? Don't reach in your pocket. That's a different show.(Squeaking)That's rather strange. They have shots for that. Can I show them? Rather bizarre. Is this yours, sir? I have no idea how that works. We'll send that over there.I need help with this one. Step over this way for me. Don't run away. You had something down by your pants pocket. I was checking mine. I couldn't find everything, but I noticed you had something here. Can I feel the outside for a moment? Down here I noticed this. Is this something of yours, sir? I have no idea. That's a shrimp.J: Yeah. I'm saving it for later.AR: You've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. So we'd love to give you this lovely watch as a gift.(Laughter)Hopefully it matches his taste. We have a couple of other things, a little bit of cash. And we have a few other things, these all belong to you, along with a big round of applause from all your friends.(Applause)Joe, thank you very much.(Applause)(Applause ends)So, same question I asked you before, but this time you don't have to close your eyes. What am I wearing?Audience: Oh!(Laughter)(Hesitant applause)(Applause ends)Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality. So, I guess I'd like to pose that question to you. If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/apollo_robbins_the_art_of_misdirection
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"I'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals' latest and nastiest creations. So basically, please don't go and download any of the viruses that I show you.Some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like, and I thought I'd give you a quick insight into my career so far. It's a pretty accurate description. This is what someone that specializes in malware and hacking looks like.So today, computer viruses and trojans, designed to do everything from stealing data to watching you in your webcam to the theft of billions of dollars. Some malicious code today goes as far as targeting power, utilities and infrastructure.Let me give you a quick snapshot of what malicious code is capable of today. Right now, every second, eight new users are joining the Internet. Today, we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses. We will see 30,000 new infected websites. And, just to kind of tear down a myth here, lots of people think that when you get infected with a computer virus, it's because you went to a porn site. Right? Well, actually, statistically speaking, if you only visit porn sites, you're safer. People normally write that down, by the way. (Laughter) Actually, about 80 percent of these are small business websites getting infected.Today's cybercriminal, what do they look like? Well, many of you have the image, don't you, of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement, hacking away for notoriety. But actually today, cybercriminals are wonderfully professional and organized. In fact, they have product adverts. You can go online and buy a hacking service to knock your business competitor offline. Check out this one I found.(Video) Man: So you're here for one reason, and that reason is because you need your business competitors, rivals, haters, or whatever the reason is, or who, they are to go down. Well you, my friend, you've came to the right place. If you want your business competitors to go down, well, they can. If you want your rivals to go offline, well, they will. Not only that, we are providing a short-term-to-long-term DDOS service or scheduled attack, starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites to 10 to 50 dollars per hour.James Lyne: Now, I did actually pay one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website. Things got a bit tricky when I tried to expense it at the company. Turns out that's not cool. But regardless, it's amazing how many products and services are available now to cybercriminals. For example, this testing platform, which enables the cybercriminals to test the quality of their viruses before they release them on the world. For a small fee, they can upload it and make sure everything is good.But it goes further. Cybercriminals now have crime packs with business intelligence reporting dashboards to manage the distribution of their malicious code. This is the market leader in malware distribution, the Black Hole Exploit Pack, responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution in the last couple of quarters. It comes with technical installation guides, video setup routines, and get this, technical support. You can email the cybercriminals and they'll tell you how to set up your illegal hacking server.So let me show you what malicious code looks like today. What I've got here is two systems, an attacker, which I've made look all Matrix-y and scary, and a victim, which you might recognize from home or work. Now normally, these would be on different sides of the planet or of the Internet, but I've put them side by side because it makes things much more interesting.Now, there are many ways you can get infected. You will have come in contact with some of them. Maybe some of you have received an email that says something like, ""Hi, I'm a Nigerian banker, and I'd like to give you 53 billion dollars because I like your face."" Or funnycats.exe, which rumor has it was quite successful in China's recent campaign against America.Now there are many ways you can get infected. I want to show you a couple of my favorites. This is a little USB key. Now how do you get a USB key to run in a business? Well, you could try looking really cute. Awww. Or, in my case, awkward and pathetic. So imagine this scenario: I walk into one of your businesses, looking very awkward and pathetic, with a copy of my C.V. which I've covered in coffee, and I ask the receptionist to plug in this USB key and print me a new one. So let's have a look here on my victim computer. What I'm going to do is plug in the USB key. After a couple of seconds, things start to happen on the computer on their own, usually a bad sign. This would, of course, normally happen in a couple of seconds, really, really quickly, but I've kind of slowed it down so you can actually see the attack occurring. Malware is very boring otherwise. So this is writing out the malicious code, and a few seconds later, on the left-hand side, you'll see the attacker's screen get some interesting new text. Now if I place the mouse cursor over it, this is what we call a command prompt, and using this we can navigate around the computer. We can access your documents, your data. You can turn on the webcam. That can be very embarrassing. Or just to really prove a point, we can launch programs like my personal favorite, the Windows Calculator.So isn't it amazing how much control the attackers can get with such a simple operation? Let me show you how most malware is now distributed today. What I'm going to do is open up a website that I wrote. It's a terrible website. It's got really awful graphics. And it's got a comments section here where we can submit comments to the website. Many of you will have used something a bit like this before. Unfortunately, when this was implemented, the developer was slightly inebriated and managed to forget all of the secure coding practices he had learned. So let's imagine that our attacker, called Evil Hacker just for comedy value, inserts something a little nasty. This is a script. It's code which will be interpreted on the webpage. So I'm going to submit this post, and then, on my victim computer, I'm going to open up the web browser and browse to my website, www.incrediblyhacked.com. Notice that after a couple of seconds, I get redirected. That website address at the top there, which you can just about see, microshaft.com, the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs, and up pops fake antivirus. This is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software, and it will go through and it will scan the system, have a look at what its popping up here. It creates some very serious alerts. Oh look, a child porn proxy server. We really should clean that up. What's really insulting about this is not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data, but when the scan finishes, they tell you in order to clean up the fake viruses, you have to register the product. Now I liked it better when viruses were free. (Laughter) People now pay cybercriminals money to run viruses, which I find utterly bizarre.So anyway, let me change pace a little bit. Chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day is a massive challenge, and those numbers are only growing directly in proportion to the length of my stress line, you'll note here. So I want to talk to you briefly about a group of hackers we tracked for a year and actually found — and this is a rare treat in our job. Now this was a cross-industry collaboration, people from Facebook, independent researchers, guys from Sophos. So here we have a couple of documents which our cybercriminals had uploaded to a cloud service, kind of like Dropbox or SkyDrive, like many of you might use. At the top, you'll notice a section of source code. What this would do is send the cybercriminals a text message every day telling them how much money they'd made that day, so a kind of cybercriminal billings report, if you will. If you look closely, you'll notice a series of what are Russian telephone numbers. Now that's obviously interesting, because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals. Down below, highlighted in red, in the other section of source code, is this bit ""leded:leded."" That's a username, kind of like you might have on Twitter.So let's take this a little further. There are a few other interesting pieces the cybercriminals had uploaded. Lots of you here will use smartphones to take photos and post them from the conference. An interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones is that when you take a photo, it embeds GPS data about where that photo was taken. In fact, I've been spending a lot of time on Internet dating sites recently, obviously for research purposes, and I've noticed that about 60 percent of the profile pictures on Internet dating sites contain the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, which is kind of scary because you wouldn't give out your home address to lots of strangers, but we're happy to give away our GPS coordinates to plus or minus 15 meters. And our cybercriminals had done the same thing. So here's a photo which resolves to St. Petersburg. We then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool. We used Google. Using the email address, the telephone number and the GPS data, on the left you see an advert for a BMW that one of our cybercriminals is selling, on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens. One of these was more stereotypical for me. A little more searching, and here's our cybercriminal. Imagine, these are hardened cybercriminals sharing information scarcely. Imagine what you could find about each of the people in this room. A bit more searching through the profile and there's a photo of their office. They were working on the third floor. And you can also see some photos from his business companion where he has a taste in a certain kind of image. It turns out he's a member of the Russian Adult Webmasters Federation.But this is where our investigation starts to slow down. The cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well. And herein is the greatest lesson of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now. Our friends, our families and our colleagues can break our security even when we do the right things. This is MobSoft, one of the companies that this cybercriminal gang owned, and an interesting thing about MobSoft is the 50-percent owner of this posted a job advert, and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers from the code earlier. This woman was Maria, and Maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals. And it's kind of like she went into her social media settings and clicked on every option imaginable to make herself really, really insecure. By the end of the investigation, where you can read the full 27-page report at that link, we had photos of the cybercriminals, even the office Christmas party when they were out on an outing. That's right, cybercriminals do have Christmas parties, as it turns out. Now you're probably wondering what happened to these guys. Let me come back to that in just a minute.I want to change pace to one last little demonstration, a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic, but is interesting in exposing how much information we're all giving away, and it's relevant because it applies to us as a TED audience. This is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately.Many of you all know about the concept of scanning for wireless networks. You do it every time you take out your iPhone or your Blackberry and connect to something like TEDAttendees. But what you might not know is that you're also beaming out a list of networks you've previously connected to, even when you're not using wireless actively. So I ran a little scan. I was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals, who wouldn't be so concerned by law, and here you can see my mobile device. Okay? So you can see a list of wireless networks. TEDAttendees, HyattLB. Where do you think I'm staying? My home network, PrettyFlyForAWifi, which I think is a great name. Sophos_Visitors, SANSEMEA, companies I work with. Loganwifi, that's in Boston. HiltonLondon. CIASurveillanceVan. We called it that at one of our conferences because we thought that would freak people out, which is quite fun. This is how geeks party.So let's make this a little bit more interesting. Let's talk about you. Twenty-three percent of you have been to Starbucks recently and used the wireless network. Things get more interesting. Forty-six percent of you I could link to a business, XYZ Employee network. This isn't an exact science, but it gets pretty accurate. Seven hundred and sixty-one of you I could identify a hotel you'd been to recently, absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe. Two hundred and thirty-four of you, well, I know where you live. Your wireless network name is so unique that I was able to pinpoint it using data available openly on the Internet with no hacking or clever, clever tricks. And I should mention as well that some of you do use your names, ""James Lyne's iPhone,"" for example. And two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity.So something for you to think about: As we adopt these new applications and mobile devices, as we play with these shiny new toys, how much are we trading off convenience for privacy and security? Next time you install something, look at the settings and ask yourself, ""Is this information that I want to share? Would someone be able to abuse it?""We also need to think very carefully about how we develop our future talent pool. You see, technology's changing at a staggering rate, and that 250,000 pieces of malware won't stay the same for long. There's a very concerning trend that whilst many people coming out of schools now are much more technology-savvy, they know how to use technology, fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects to know how that technology works under the covers. In the U.K., a 60 percent reduction since 2003, and there are similar statistics all over the world.We also need to think about the legal issues in this area. The cybercriminals I talked about, despite theft of millions of dollars, actually still haven't been arrested, and at this point possibly never will. Most laws are national in their implementation, despite cybercrime conventions, where the Internet is borderless and international by definition. Countries do not agree, which makes this area exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective.But my biggest ask is this: You see, you're going to leave here and you're going to see some astonishing stories in the news. You're going to read about malware doing incredible and terrifying, scary things. However, 99 percent of it works because people fail to do the basics. So my ask is this: Go online, find these simple best practices, find out how to update and patch your computer. Get a secure password. Make sure you use a different password on each of your sites and services online. Find these resources. Apply them.The Internet is a fantastic resource for business, for political expression, for art and for learning. Help me and the security community make life much, much more difficult for cybercriminals.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_lyne_everyday_cybercrime_and_what_you_can_do_about_it
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"This is our life with bees, and this is our life without bees. Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals. More than one third of the world's crop production is dependent on bee pollination.But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there pollinating our food intentionally. They're out there because they need to eat. Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet from pollen and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar. They're flower-feeders, and as they move from flower to flower, basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart, they end up providing this valuable pollination service. In parts of the world where there are no bees, or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees, people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand. These people are moving pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush. Now this business of hand pollination is actually not that uncommon. Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers with a hand-held vibrator. Now this one's the tomato tickler. (Laughter) Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower is held very securely within the male part of the flower, the anther, and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it. So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it, and they do this by shaking their flight muscles at a frequency similar to the musical note C. So they vibrate the flower, they sonicate it, and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh, and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee's body, and she takes it home as food. Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes because they get much more efficient pollination when it's done naturally and they get better quality tomatoes.So there's other, maybe more personal reasons, to care about bees. There's over 20,000 species of bees in the world, and they're absolutely gorgeous. These bees spend the majority of their life cycle hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem and very few of these beautiful species have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees.Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative for the other 19,900-plus species because there's something about honeybees that draws people into their world. Humans have been drawn to honeybees since early recorded history, mostly to harvest their honey, which is an amazing natural sweetener.I got drawn into the honeybee world completely by a fluke. I was 18 years old and bored, and I picked up a book in the library on bees and I spent the night reading it. I had never thought about insects living in complex societies. It was like the best of science fiction come true. And even stranger, there were these people, these beekeepers, that loved their bees like they were family, and when I put down the book, I knew I had to see this for myself. So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper, a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico. And I was permanently hooked.Honeybees can be considered a super-organism, where the colony is the organism and it's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms. Now this society has no central authority. Nobody's in charge. So how they come to collective decisions, and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor, how they communicate where the flowers are, all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing. My personal favorite, and one that I've studied for many years, is their system of healthcare. So bees have social healthcare. So in my lab, we study how bees keep themselves healthy. For example, we study hygiene, where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest, from the colony, and it keeps the colony healthy. And more recently, we've been studying resins that bees collect from plants. So bees fly to some plants and they scrape these very, very sticky resins off the leaves, and they take them back to the nest where they cement them into the nest architecture where we call it propolis. We've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant. It's a natural antibiotic. It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony, and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity. Humans have known about the power of propolis since biblical times. We've been harvesting propolis out of bee colonies for human medicine, but we didn't know how good it was for the bees. So honeybees have these remarkable natural defenses that have kept them healthy and thriving for over 50 million years.So seven years ago, when honeybee colonies were reported to be dying en masse, first in the United States, it was clear that there was something really, really wrong. In our collective conscience, in a really primal way, we know we can't afford to lose bees. So what's going on? Bees are dying from multiple and interacting causes, and I'll go through each of these. The bottom line is, bees dying reflects a flowerless landscape and a dysfunctional food system.Now we have the best data on honeybees, so I'll use them as an example. In the United States, bees in fact have been in decline since World War II. We have half the number of managed hives in the United States now compared to 1945. We're down to about two million hives of bees, we think. And the reason is, after World War II, we changed our farming practices. We stopped planting cover crops. We stopped planting clover and alfalfa, which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil, and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers. Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees. And after World War II, we started using herbicides to kill off the weeds in our farms. Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival. And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures. Now we talk about food deserts, places in our cities, neighborhoods that have no grocery stores. The very farms that used to sustain bees are now agricultural food deserts, dominated by one or two plant species like corn and soybeans. Since World War II, we have been systematically eliminating many of the flowering plants that bees need for their survival. And these monocultures extend even to crops that are good for bees, like almonds. Fifty years ago, beekeepers would take a few colonies, hives of bees into the almond orchards, for pollination, and also because the pollen in an almond blossom is really high in protein. It's really good for bees. Now, the scale of almond monoculture demands that most of our nation's bees, over 1.5 million hives of bees, be transported across the nation to pollinate this one crop. And they're trucked in in semi-loads, and they must be trucked out, because after bloom, the almond orchards are a vast and flowerless landscape.Bees have been dying over the last 50 years, and we're planting more crops that need them. There has been a 300 percent increase in crop production that requires bee pollination.And then there's pesticides. After World War II, we started using pesticides on a large scale, and this became necessary because of the monocultures that put out a feast for crop pests. Recently, researchers from Penn State University have started looking at the pesticide residue in the loads of pollen that bees carry home as food, and they've found that every batch of pollen that a honeybee collects has at least six detectable pesticides in it, and this includes every class of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and even inert and unlabeled ingredients that are part of the pesticide formulation that can be more toxic than the active ingredient. This small bee is holding up a large mirror. How much is it going to take to contaminate humans?One of these class of insecticides, the neonicontinoids, is making headlines around the world right now. You've probably heard about it. This is a new class of insecticides. It moves through the plant so that a crop pest, a leaf-eating insect, would take a bite of the plant and get a lethal dose and die. If one of these neonics, we call them, is applied in a high concentration, such as in this ground application, enough of the compound moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and the nectar, where a bee can consume, in this case, a high dose of this neurotoxin that makes the bee twitch and die. In most agricultural settings, on most of our farms, it's only the seed that's coated with the insecticide, and so a smaller concentration moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and nectar, and if a bee consumes this lower dose, either nothing happens or the bee becomes intoxicated and disoriented and she may not find her way home. And on top of everything else, bees have their own set of diseases and parasites. Public enemy number one for bees is this thing. It's called varroa destructor. It's aptly named. It's this big, blood-sucking parasite that compromises the bee's immune system and circulates viruses.Let me put this all together for you. I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big, bloodsucking parasite running around on it, and I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus, but I do know what it feels like when I have a virus, the flu, and I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition. But what if I lived in a food desert? And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store, and I finally got my weak body out there and I consumed, in my food, enough of a pesticide, a neurotoxin, that I couldn't find my way home? And this is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death.And it's not just our honeybees. All of our beautiful wild species of bees are at risk, including those tomato-pollinating bumblebees. These bees are providing backup for our honeybees. They're providing the pollination insurance alongside our honeybees. We need all of our bees.So what are we going to do? What are we going to do about this big bee bummer that we've created? It turns out, it's hopeful. It's hopeful. Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways. Plant bee-friendly flowers, and don't contaminate these flowers, this bee food, with pesticides. So go online and search for flowers that are native to your area and plant them. Plant them in a pot on your doorstep. Plant them in your front yard, in your lawns, in your boulevards. Campaign to have them planted in public gardens, community spaces, meadows. Set aside farmland. We need a beautiful diversity of flowers that blooms over the entire growing season, from spring to fall. We need roadsides seeded in flowers for our bees, but also for migrating butterflies and birds and other wildlife. And we need to think carefully about putting back in cover crops to nourish our soil and nourish our bees. And we need to diversify our farms. We need to plant flowering crop borders and hedge rows to disrupt the agricultural food desert and begin to correct the dysfunctional food system that we've created.So maybe it seems like a really small countermeasure to a big, huge problem — just go plant flowers — but when bees have access to good nutrition, we have access to good nutrition through their pollination services. And when bees have access to good nutrition, they're better able to engage their own natural defenses, their healthcare, that they have relied on for millions of years. So the beauty of helping bees this way, for me, is that every one of us needs to behave a little bit more like a bee society, an insect society, where each of our individual actions can contribute to a grand solution, an emergent property, that's much greater than the mere sum of our individual actions. So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them free of pesticides be the driver of large-scale change.On behalf of the bees, thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. Just a quick question. The latest numbers on the die-off of bees, is there any sign of things bottoming out? What's your hope/depression level on this?Maria Spivak: Yeah. At least in the United States, an average of 30 percent of all bee hives are lost every winter. About 20 years ago, we were at a 15-percent loss. So it's getting precarious.CA: That's not 30 percent a year, that's — MS: Yes, thirty percent a year.CA: Thirty percent a year. MS: But then beekeepers are able to divide their colonies and so they can maintain the same number, they can recuperate some of their loss.We're kind of at a tipping point. We can't really afford to lose that many more. We need to be really appreciative of all the beekeepers out there. Plant flowers.CA: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing
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"Eric Berlow: I'm an ecologist, and Sean's a physicist, and we both study complex networks. And we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short TED Talk about the ecology of war, and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met. And then we thought, you know, there are thousands of other talks out there, especially TEDx Talks, that are popping up all over the world. How are they connected, and what does that global conversation look like? So Sean's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that.Sean Gourley: Exactly. So we took 24,000 TEDx Talks from around the world, 147 different countries, and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them. And we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other.And so, of course, if you're going to do this kind of stuff, you need a lot of data. So the data that you've got is a great thing called YouTube, and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from YouTube, all the comments, all the views, who's watching it, where are they watching it, what are they saying in the comments. But we can also pull up, using speech-to-text translation, we can pull the entire transcript, and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself. So we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things. We can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer, line by line, extracting key concepts from this. And we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea. And we call that the meme-ome. And the meme-ome, you know, quite simply, is the mathematics that underlies an idea, and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it, which I want to share with you now.So each idea has its own meme-ome, and each idea is unique with that, but of course, ideas, they borrow from each other, they kind of steal sometimes, and they certainly build on each other, and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk, and if there's a similarity between the two of them, we can create a link and represent that as a graph, just like Eric and I are connected.So that's theory, that's great. Let's see how it works in actual practice. So what we've got here now is the global footprint of all the TEDx Talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from New York all the way down to little old New Zealand in the corner. And what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these, and we started to see where the connections occurred, where they connected with each other. Cameron Russell talking about image and beauty connected over into Europe. We've got a bigger conversation about Israel and Palestine radiating outwards from the Middle East. And we've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere.So from this, we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection, but luckily, computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space. So we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this, and the similar talks kind of smash together, and the different ones fly apart, and what we're left with is something quite beautiful.EB: So I want to just point out here that every node is a talk, they're linked if they share similar ideas, and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts, and then all these topics that pop out, they're not from tags and keywords. They come from the network structure of interconnected ideas. Keep going.SG: Absolutely. So I got a little quick on that, but he's going to slow me down. We've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media. You've got, of course, the human brain right next to healthcare, which you might expect, but also you've got video games, which is sort of adjacent, as those two spaces interface with each other.But I want to take you into one cluster that's particularly important to me, and that's the environment. And I want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution. So as we go in here, what we start to see, apply the physics engine again, we see what's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones. The structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world. So you've got food economy and local food at the top, you've got greenhouse gases, solar and nuclear waste. What you're getting is a range of smaller conversations, each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share, creating a broader concept of the environment. And of course, from here, we can go and zoom in and see, well, what are young people looking at? And they're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion. This is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment. If we split along gender lines, we can see females resonating heavily with food economy, but also out there in hope and optimism.And so there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here, and I'll throw to Eric for the next part.EB: Yeah, I mean, just to point out here, you cannot get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on YouTube. Let's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment, and look at all the talks together. Now often, when we're faced with this amount of content, we do a couple of things to simplify it. We might just say, well, what are the most popular talks out there? And a few rise to the surface. There's a talk about gratitude. There's another one about personal health and nutrition. And of course, there's got to be one about porn, right? And so then we might say, well, gratitude, that was last year. What's trending now? What's the popular talk now? And we can see that the new, emerging, top trending topic is about digital privacy.So this is great. It simplifies things. But there's so much creative content that's just buried at the bottom. And I hate that. How do we bubble stuff up to the surface that's maybe really creative and interesting? Well, we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that. Remember, it's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics, and let's say we could take two of them, like cities and genetics, and say, well, are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines. And that's — Essentially, this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation. Well here's one by Jessica Green about the microbial ecology of buildings. It's literally defining a new field. And we could go back to those topics and say, well, what talks are central to those conversations? In the cities cluster, one of the most central was one by Mitch Joachim about ecological cities, and in the genetics cluster, we have a talk about synthetic biology by Craig Venter. These are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline. We could go the other direction and say, well, what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields. We used a measure of ecological diversity to get this. Like, a talk by Steven Pinker on the history of violence, very synthetic.And then, of course, there are talks that are so unique they're kind of out in the stratosphere, in their own special place, and we call that the Colleen Flanagan index. And if you don't know Colleen, she's an artist, and I asked her, ""Well, what's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space?"" And apparently it smells like bacon. I wouldn't know. So we're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique, ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields, ones that are central to their topic, and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields. Okay? We never would have found those with our obsession with what's trending now. And all of this comes from the architecture of complexity, or the patterns of how things are connected.SG: So that's exactly right. We've got ourselves in a world that's massively complex, and we've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it. And those algorithms, whilst being kind of useful, are also very, very narrow, and we can do better than that, because we can realize that their complexity is not random. It has mathematical structure, and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what's being said, to see what's not being said, and to be a little bit more human and, hopefully, a little smarter.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_berlow_and_sean_gourley_mapping_ideas_worth_spreading
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"When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs, some people initially thought we were a little crazy. But since then, much progress has been made, both in our lab and other labs around the world. And given this, we started getting questions like, ""If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather?""When someone first suggested this to me, quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy, but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all. What's crazy is what we do today. I'm convinced that in 30 years, when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags, we'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy. Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods? And over the next few decades, as the world's population expands to 10 billion, this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals.But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet. Animals are not just raw materials. They're living beings, and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land, fresh water, and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change. On top of this, when you get so many animals so close together, it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse. Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment, public health, and food security at risk.There is another way, because essentially, animal products are just collections of tissues, and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues. What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life, the cell?This is biofabrication, where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs. Already in medicine, biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts, like ears, windpipes, skin, blood vessels and bone, that have been successfully implanted into patients. And beyond medicine, biofabrication can be a humane, sustainable and scalable new industry.And we should begin by reimagining leather. I emphasize leather because it is so widely used. It is beautiful, and it has long been a part of our history. Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat. It mainly uses one cell type, and it is largely two-dimensional. It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators. Until biofabrication is better understood, it is clear that, initially at least, more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods, no matter how delicious. In this sense, leather is a gateway material, a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry. If we can succeed here, it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon.Now how do we do it? To grow leather, we begin by taking cells from an animal, through a simple biopsy. The animal could be a cow, lamb, or even something more exotic. This process does no harm, and Daisy the cow can live a happy life. We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium. This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions. And we then coax these cells to produce collagen, as they would naturally. This collagen is the stuff between cells. It's natural connective tissue. It's the extracellular matrix, but in leather, it's the main building block. And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets, and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another, like phyllo pastry, to form thicker sheets, which we then let mature. And finally, we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process, we create leather. And so I'm very excited to show you, for the first time, the first batch of our cultured leather, fresh from the lab. This is real, genuine leather, without the animal sacrifice. It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells, and better yet, there is no hair to remove, no scars or insect's bites, and no waste. This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet, a handbag or a car seat. It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator.And because we make this material, we grow this leather from the ground up, we can control its properties in very interesting ways. This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick, and as you can see, it is nearly transparent. And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque. You don't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather. And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities, like softness, breathability, durability, elasticity and even things like pattern. We can mimic nature, but in some ways also improve upon it. This type of leather can do what today's leather does, but with imagination, probably much more.What could the future of animal products look like? It need not look like this, which is actually the state of the art today. Rather, it could be much more like this. Already, we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years, beginning with products like wine, beer and yogurt. And speaking of food, our cultured food has evolved, and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful, sterile facilities like this. A brewery is essentially a bioreactor. It is where cell culture takes place. Imagine that in this facility, instead of brewing beer, we were brewing leather or meat. Imagine touring this facility, learning about how the leather or meat is cultured, seeing the process from beginning to end, and even trying some. It's clean, open and educational, and this is in contrast to the hidden, guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today. Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind. It's environmentally responsible, efficient and humane. It allows us to be creative. We can design new materials, new products, and new facilities. We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andras_forgacs_leather_and_meat_without_killing_animals
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"Democracy is in trouble, no question about that, and it comes in part from a deep dilemma in which it is embedded. It's increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of decisions we face that have to do with global pandemics, a cross-border problem; with HIV, a transnational problem; with markets and immigration, something that goes beyond national borders; with terrorism, with war, all now cross-border problems.In fact, we live in a 21st-century world of interdependence, and brutal interdependent problems, and when we look for solutions in politics and in democracy, we are faced with political institutions designed 400 years ago, autonomous, sovereign nation-states with jurisdictions and territories separate from one another, each claiming to be able to solve the problem of its own people. Twenty-first-century, transnational world of problems and challenges, 17th-century world of political institutions. In that dilemma lies the central problem of democracy. And like many others, I've been thinking about what can one do about this, this asymmetry between 21st-century challenges and archaic and increasingly dysfunctional political institutions like nation-states.And my suggestion is that we change the subject, that we stop talking about nations, about bordered states, and we start talking about cities. Because I think you will find, when we talk about cities, we are talking about the political institutions in which civilization and culture were born. We are talking about the cradle of democracy.We are talking about the venues in which those public spaces where we come together to create democracy, and at the same time protest those who would take our freedom, take place. Think of some great names: the Place de la Bastille, Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square in today's headlines in Istanbul, or, yes, Tiananmen Square in Beijing.(Applause)Those are the public spaces where we announce ourselves as citizens, as participants, as people with the right to write our own narratives. Cities are not only the oldest of institutions, they're the most enduring. If you think about it, Constantinople, Istanbul, much older than Turkey. Alexandria, much older than Egypt. Rome, far older than Italy. Cities endure the ages. They are the places where we are born, grow up, are educated, work, marry, pray, play, get old, and in time, die. They are home. Very different than nation-states, which are abstractions. We pay taxes, we vote occasionally, we watch the men and women we choose rule rule more or less without us. Not so in those homes known as our towns and cities where we live. Moreover, today, more than half of the world's population live in cities. In the developed world, it's about 78 percent. More than three out of four people live in urban institutions, urban places, in cities today. So cities are where the action is. Cities are us. Aristotle said in the ancient world, man is a political animal. I say we are an urban animal. We are an urban species, at home in our cities. So to come back to the dilemma, if the dilemma is we have old-fashioned political nation-states unable to govern the world, respond to the global challenges that we face like climate change, then maybe it's time for mayors to rule the world, for mayors and the citizens and the peoples they represent to engage in global governance.When I say if mayors ruled the world, when I first came up with that phrase, it occurred to me that actually, they already do. There are scores of international, inter-city, cross-border institutions, networks of cities in which cities are already, quite quietly, below the horizon, working together to deal with climate change, to deal with security, to deal with immigration, to deal with all of those tough, interdependent problems that we face. They have strange names: UCLG, United Cities and Local Governments; ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Issues. And the list goes on: Citynet in Asia; City Protocol, a new organization out of Barcelona that is using the web to share best practices among countries. And then all the things we know a little better, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Mexican Conference of Mayors, the European Conference of Mayors. Mayors are where this is happening.And so the question is, how can we create a world in which mayors and the citizens they represent play a more prominent role? Well, to understand that, we need to understand why cities are special, why mayors are so different than prime ministers and presidents, because my premise is that a mayor and a prime minister are at the opposite ends of a political spectrum. To be a prime minister or a president, you have to have an ideology, you have to have a meta-narrative, you have to have a theory of how things work, you have to belong to a party. Independents, on the whole, don't get elected to office. But mayors are just the opposite. Mayors are pragmatists, they're problem-solvers. Their job is to get things done, and if they don't, they're out of a job. Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia said, we could never get away here in Philadelphia with the stuff that goes on in Washington, the paralysis, the non-action, the inaction. Why? Because potholes have to get filled, because the trains have to run, because kids have to be able to get to school. And that's what we have to do, and to do that is about pragmatism in that deep, American sense, reaching outcomes. Washington, Beijing, Paris, as world capitals, are anything but pragmatic, but real city mayors have to be pragmatists. They have to get things done, they have to put ideology and religion and ethnicity aside and draw their cities together. We saw this a couple of decades ago when Teddy Kollek, the great mayor of Jerusalem in the '80s and the '90s, was besieged one day in his office by religious leaders from all of the backgrounds, Christian prelates, rabbis, imams. They were arguing with one another about access to the holy sites. And the squabble went on and on, and Kollek listened and listened, and he finally said, ""Gentlemen, spare me your sermons, and I will fix your sewers.""(Laughter)That's what mayors do. They fix sewers, they get the trains running. There isn't a left or a right way of doing. Boris Johnson in London calls himself an anarcho-Tory. Strange term, but in some ways, he is. He's a libertarian. He's an anarchist. He rides to work on a bike, but at the same time, he's in some ways a conservative. Bloomberg in New York was a Democrat, then he was a Republican, and finally he was an Independent, and said the party label just gets in the way. Luzhkov, 20 years mayor in Moscow, though he helped found a party, United Party with Putin, in fact refused to be defined by the party and finally, in fact, lost his job not under Brezhnev, not under Gorbachev, but under Putin, who wanted a more faithful party follower. So mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers. They get things done.But the second thing about mayors is they are also what I like to call homeboys, or to include the women mayors, homies. They're from the neighborhood. They're part of the neighborhood. They're known. Ed Koch used to wander around New York City saying, ""How am I doing?"" Imagine David Cameron wandering around the United Kingdom asking, ""How am I doing?"" He wouldn't like the answer. Or Putin. Or any national leader. He could ask that because he knew New Yorkers and they knew him. Mayors are usually from the places they govern. It's pretty hard to be a carpetbagger and be a mayor. You can run for the Senate out of a different state, but it's hard to do that as a mayor.And as a result, mayors and city councillors and local authorities have a much higher trust level, and this is the third feature about mayors, than national governing officials. In the United States, we know the pathetic figures: 18 percent of Americans approve of Congress and what they do. And even with a relatively popular president like Obama, the figures for the Presidency run about 40, 45, sometimes 50 percent at best. The Supreme Court has fallen way down from what it used to be. But when you ask, ""Do you trust your city councillor, do you trust your mayor?"" the rates shoot up to 70, 75, even 80 percent, because they're from the neighborhood, because the people they work with are their neighbors, because, like Mayor Booker in Newark, a mayor is likely to get out of his car on the way to work and go in and pull people out of a burning building — that happened to Mayor Booker — or intervene in a mugging in the street as he goes to work because he sees it. No head of state would be permitted by their security details to do it, nor be in a position to do it.That's the difference, and the difference has to do with the character of cities themselves, because cities are profoundly multicultural, open, participatory, democratic, able to work with one another.When states face each other, China and the U.S., they face each other like this. When cities interact, they interact like this. China and the U.S., despite the recent meta-meeting in California, are locked in all kinds of anger, resentment, and rivalry for number one. We heard more about who will be number one. Cities don't worry about number one. They have to work together, and they do work together. They work together in climate change, for example. Organizations like the C40, like ICLEI, which I mentioned, have been working together many, many years before Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, four or five years ago, 184 nations came together to explain to one another why their sovereignty didn't permit them to deal with the grave, grave crisis of climate change, but the mayor of Copenhagen had invited 200 mayors to attend. They came, they stayed, and they found ways and are still finding ways to work together, city-to-city, and through inter-city organizations. Eighty percent of carbon emissions come from cities, which means cities are in a position to solve the carbon problem, or most of it, whether or not the states of which they are a part make agreements with one another. And they are doing it. Los Angeles cleaned up its port, which was 40 percent of carbon emissions, and as a result got rid of about 20 percent of carbon. New York has a program to upgrade its old buildings, make them better insulated in the winter, to not leak energy in the summer, not leak air conditioning. That's having an impact. Bogota, where Mayor Mockus, when he was mayor, he introduced a transportation system that saved energy, that allowed surface buses to run in effect like subways, express buses with corridors. It helped unemployment, because people could get across town, and it had a profound impact on climate as well as many other things there. Singapore, as it developed its high-rises and its remarkable public housing, also developed an island of parks, and if you go there, you'll see how much of it is green land and park land. Cities are doing this, but not just one by one. They are doing it together. They are sharing what they do, and they are making a difference by shared best practices. Bike shares, many of you have heard of it, started 20 or 30 years ago in Latin America. Now it's in hundreds of cities around the world. Pedestrian zones, congestion fees, emission limits in cities like California cities have, there's lots and lots that cities can do even when opaque, stubborn nations refuse to act.So what's the bottom line here? The bottom line is, we still live politically in a world of borders, a world of boundaries, a world of walls, a world where states refuse to act together. Yet we know that the reality we experience day to day is a world without borders, a world of diseases without borders and doctors without borders, maladies sans frontières, Médecins Sans Frontières, of economics and technology without borders, of education without borders, of terrorism and war without borders. That is the real world, and unless we find a way to globalize democracy or democratize globalization, we will increasingly not only risk the failure to address all of these transnational problems, but we will risk losing democracy itself, locked up in the old nation-state box, unable to address global problems democratically.So where does that leave us? I'll tell you. The road to global democracy doesn't run through states. It runs through cities. Democracy was born in the ancient polis. I believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis. In that journey from polis to cosmopolis, we can rediscover the power of democracy on a global level. We can create not a League of Nations, which failed, but a League of Cities, not a United or a dis-United Nations, but United Cities of the World. We can create a global parliament of mayors. That's an idea. It's in my conception of the coming world, but it's also on the table in City Halls in Seoul, Korea, in Amsterdam, in Hamburg, and in New York. Mayors are considering that idea of how you can actually constitute a global parliament of mayors, and I love that idea, because a parliament of mayors is a parliament of citizens and a parliament of citizens is a parliament of us, of you and of me.If ever there were citizens without borders, I think it's the citizens of TED who show the promise to be those citizens without borders. I am ready to reach out and embrace a new global democracy, to take back our democracy. And the only question is, are you?Thank you so much, my fellow citizens.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_barber_why_mayors_should_rule_the_world
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"I'd like to tell you about a legal case that I worked on involving a man named Steve Titus.Titus was a restaurant manager. He was 31 years old, he lived in Seattle, Washington, he was engaged to Gretchen, about to be married, she was the love of his life. And one night, the couple went out for a romantic restaurant meal. They were on their way home, and they were pulled over by a police officer. You see, Titus' car sort of resembled a car that was driven earlier in the evening by a man who raped a female hitchhiker, and Titus kind of resembled that rapist. So the police took a picture of Titus, they put it in a photo lineup, they later showed it to the victim, and she pointed to Titus' photo. She said, ""That one's the closest."" The police and the prosecution proceeded with a trial, and when Steve Titus was put on trial for rape, the rape victim got on the stand and said, ""I'm absolutely positive that's the man."" And Titus was convicted. He proclaimed his innocence, his family screamed at the jury, his fiancée collapsed on the floor sobbing, and Titus is taken away to jail.So what would you do at this point? What would you do? Well, Titus lost complete faith in the legal system, and yet he got an idea. He called up the local newspaper, he got the interest of an investigative journalist, and that journalist actually found the real rapist, a man who ultimately confessed to this rape, a man who was thought to have committed 50 rapes in that area, and when this information was given to the judge, the judge set Titus free.And really, that's where this case should have ended. It should have been over. Titus should have thought of this as a horrible year, a year of accusation and trial, but over.It didn't end that way. Titus was so bitter. He'd lost his job. He couldn't get it back. He lost his fiancée. She couldn't put up with his persistent anger. He lost his entire savings, and so he decided to file a lawsuit against the police and others whom he felt were responsible for his suffering.And that's when I really started working on this case, trying to figure out how did that victim go from ""That one's the closest"" to ""I'm absolutely positive that's the guy.""Well, Titus was consumed with his civil case. He spent every waking moment thinking about it, and just days before he was to have his day in court, he woke up in the morning, doubled over in pain, and died of a stress-related heart attack. He was 35 years old.So I was asked to work on Titus' case because I'm a psychological scientist. I study memory. I've studied memory for decades. And if I meet somebody on an airplane — this happened on the way over to Scotland — if I meet somebody on an airplane, and we ask each other, ""What do you do? What do you do?"" and I say ""I study memory,"" they usually want to tell me how they have trouble remembering names, or they've got a relative who's got Alzheimer's or some kind of memory problem, but I have to tell them I don't study when people forget. I study the opposite: when they remember, when they remember things that didn't happen or remember things that were different from the way they really were. I study false memories.Unhappily, Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody's false memory. In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 300 innocent people, 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn't do. They spent 10, 20, 30 years in prison for these crimes, and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. And when those cases have been analyzed, three quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory.Well, why? Like the jurors who convicted those innocent people and the jurors who convicted Titus, many people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people. I first started studying this constructive memory process in the 1970s. I did my experiments that involved showing people simulated crimes and accidents and asking them questions about what they remember. In one study, we showed people a simulated accident and we asked people, how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? And we asked other people, how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? And if we asked the leading ""smashed"" question, the witnesses told us the cars were going faster, and moreover, that leading ""smashed"" question caused people to be more likely to tell us that they saw broken glass in the accident scene when there wasn't any broken glass at all. In another study, we showed a simulated accident where a car went through an intersection with a stop sign, and if we asked a question that insinuated it was a yield sign, many witnesses told us they remember seeing a yield sign at the intersection, not a stop sign.And you might be thinking, well, you know, these are filmed events, they are not particularly stressful. Would the same kind of mistakes be made with a really stressful event? In a study we published just a few months ago, we have an answer to this question, because what was unusual about this study is we arranged for people to have a very stressful experience. The subjects in this study were members of the U.S. military who were undergoing a harrowing training exercise to teach them what it's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war. And as part of this training exercise, these soldiers are interrogated in an aggressive, hostile, physically abusive fashion for 30 minutes and later on they have to try to identify the person who conducted that interrogation. And when we feed them suggestive information that insinuates it's a different person, many of them misidentify their interrogator, often identifying someone who doesn't even remotely resemble the real interrogator.And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory.Well out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation not only if we're questioned in a leading way, but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information, or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced, all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory.In the 1990s, we began to see an even more extreme kind of memory problem. Some patients were going into therapy with one problem — maybe they had depression, an eating disorder — and they were coming out of therapy with a different problem. Extreme memories for horrific brutalizations, sometimes in satanic rituals, sometimes involving really bizarre and unusual elements. One woman came out of psychotherapy believing that she'd endured years of ritualistic abuse, where she was forced into a pregnancy and that the baby was cut from her belly. But there were no physical scars or any kind of physical evidence that could have supported her story. And when I began looking into these cases, I was wondering, where do these bizarre memories come from? And what I found is that most of these situations involved some particular form of psychotherapy. And so I asked, were some of the things going on in this psychotherapy — like the imagination exercises or dream interpretation, or in some cases hypnosis, or in some cases exposure to false information — were these leading these patients to develop these very bizarre, unlikely memories? And I designed some experiments to try to study the processes that were being used in this psychotherapy so I could study the development of these very rich false memories.In one of the first studies we did, we used suggestion, a method inspired by the psychotherapy we saw in these cases, we used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that when you were a kid, five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall. You were frightened. You were crying. You were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. And we succeeded in planting this memory in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects. And you might be thinking, well, that's not particularly stressful. But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things that were much more unusual and much more stressful. So in a study done in Tennessee, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a life guard. And in a study done in Canada, researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid, something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you, succeeding with about half of their subjects. And in a study done in Italy, researchers planted the false memory, when you were a kid, you witnessed demonic possession.I do want to add that it might seem like we are traumatizing these experimental subjects in the name of science, but our studies have gone through thorough evaluation by research ethics boards that have made the decision that the temporary discomfort that some of these subjects might experience in these studies is outweighed by the importance of this problem for understanding memory processes and the abuse of memory that is going on in some places in the world.Well, to my surprise, when I published this work and began to speak out against this particular brand of psychotherapy, it created some pretty bad problems for me: hostilities, primarily from the repressed memory therapists, who felt under attack, and by the patients whom they had influenced. I had sometimes armed guards at speeches that I was invited to give, people trying to drum up letter-writing campaigns to get me fired. But probably the worst was I suspected that a woman was innocent of abuse that was being claimed by her grown daughter. She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory. And this accusing daughter had actually allowed her story to be filmed and presented in public places. I was suspicious of this story, and so I started to investigate, and eventually found information that convinced me that this mother was innocent. I published an exposé on the case, and a little while later, the accusing daughter filed a lawsuit. Even though I'd never mentioned her name, she sued me for defamation and invasion of privacy. And I went through nearly five years of dealing with this messy, unpleasant litigation, but finally, finally, it was over and I could really get back to my work. In the process, however, I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy.When I got back to my work, I asked this question: if I plant a false memory in your mind, does it have repercussions? Does it affect your later thoughts, your later behaviors? Our first study planted a false memory that you got sick as a child eating certain foods: hard-boiled eggs, dill pickles, strawberry ice cream. And we found that once we planted this false memory, people didn't want to eat the foods as much at an outdoor picnic. The false memories aren't necessarily bad or unpleasant. If we planted a warm, fuzzy memory involving a healthy food like asparagus, we could get people to want to eat asparagus more. And so what these studies are showing is that you can plant false memories and they have repercussions that affect behavior long after the memories take hold.Well, along with this ability to plant memories and control behavior obviously come some important ethical issues, like, when should we use this mind technology? And should we ever ban its use? Therapists can't ethically plant false memories in the mind of their patients even if it would help the patient, but there's nothing to stop a parent from trying this out on their overweight or obese teenager. And when I suggested this publicly, it created an outcry again. ""There she goes. She's advocating that parents lie to their children.""Hello, Santa Claus. (Laughter)I mean, another way to think about this is, which would you rather have, a kid with obesity, diabetes, shortened lifespan, all the things that go with it, or a kid with one little extra bit of false memory? I know what I would choose for a kid of mine.But maybe my work has made me different from most people. Most people cherish their memories, know that they represent their identity, who they are, where they came from. And I appreciate that. I feel that way too. But I know from my work how much fiction is already in there. If I've learned anything from these decades of working on these problems, it's this: just because somebody tells you something and they say it with confidence, just because they say it with lots of detail, just because they express emotion when they say it, it doesn't mean that it really happened. We can't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories. We need independent corroboration. Such a discovery has made me more tolerant of the everyday memory mistakes that my friends and family members make. Such a discovery might have saved Steve Titus, the man whose whole future was snatched away by a false memory.But meanwhile, we should all keep in mind, we'd do well to, that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thanks very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory
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"There is an ancient proverb that says it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works — bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be, there are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on.Now I know this is different than the way most people think about science. Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it's rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method and we've been doing this for 14 generations or so now, and the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard, cold facts out of the data.I'd like to tell you that's not the case. So there's the scientific method, but what's really going on is this. (Laughter)[The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around]And it's going on kind of like that.[... in the dark] (Laughter)So what is the difference, then, between the way I believe science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived? So this difference first came to me in some ways in my dual role at Columbia University, where I'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience where we try to figure out how the brain works. We do this by studying the sense of smell, the sense of olfaction, and in the laboratory, it's a great pleasure and fascinating work and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs and think up cool experiments to understand how this sense of smell works and how the brain might be working, and, well, frankly, it's kind of exhilarating.But at the same time, it's my responsibility to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain, and that's a big subject, and it takes quite a while to organize that, and it's quite challenging and it's quite interesting, but I have to say, it's not so exhilarating. So what was the difference? Well, the course I was and am teaching is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. (Laughs) It's 25 lectures full of all sorts of facts, it uses this giant book called ""Principles of Neural Science"" by three famous neuroscientists. This book comes in at 1,414 pages, it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds. Just to put that in some perspective, that's the weight of two normal human brains.(Laughter)So I began to realize, by the end of this course, that the students maybe were getting the idea that we must know everything there is to know about the brain. That's clearly not true. And they must also have this idea, I suppose, that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts and stick them in these big books. And that's not really the case either. When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know. We talk about what still has to get done, what's so critical to get done in the lab. Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie who said that one never notices what has been done but only what remains to be done. This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining her second graduate degree, I should say.I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie, because I am convinced that that glow behind her is not a photographic effect. (Laughter) That's the real thing. It is true that her papers are, to this day, stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française in a concrete room that's lead-lined, and if you're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks, you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit, so it's pretty scary business.Nonetheless, this is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with the public as scientists, the what-remains-to-be-done. This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting. It is, if you will, the ignorance. That's what was missing.So I thought, well, maybe I should teach a course on ignorance, something I can finally excel at, perhaps, for example. So I did start teaching this course on ignorance, and it's been quite interesting and I'd like to tell you to go to the website. You can find all sorts of information there. It's wide open. And it's been really quite an interesting time for me to meet up with other scientists who come in and talk about what it is they don't know.Now I use this word ""ignorance,"" of course, to be at least in part intentionally provocative, because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don't mean any of those. So I don't mean stupidity, I don't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data. The ignorant are clearly unenlightened, unaware, uninformed, and present company today excepted, often occupy elected offices, it seems to me. That's another story, perhaps.I mean a different kind of ignorance. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, ""Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science."" I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance.So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate. In 2006, there were 1.3 million papers published. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read.So what do we do about this? Well, the fact is that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect, if you will. We just don't worry about it, in a way. The facts are important. You have to know a lot of stuff to be a scientist. That's true. But knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you a scientist. You need to know a lot of stuff to be a lawyer or an accountant or an electrician or a carpenter. But in science, knowing a lot of stuff is not the point. Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help you get to more ignorance. So knowledge is a big subject, but I would say ignorance is a bigger one.So this leads us to maybe think about, a little bit about, some of the models of science that we tend to use, and I'd like to disabuse you of some of them. So one of them, a popular one, is that scientists are patiently putting the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal some grand scheme or another. This is clearly not true. For one, with puzzles, the manufacturer has guaranteed that there's a solution. We don't have any such guarantee. Indeed, there are many of us who aren't so sure about the manufacturer.(Laughter)So I think the puzzle model doesn't work.Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion. So peel by peel, you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth. I don't think that's the way it works either. Another one, a kind of popular one, is the iceberg idea, that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden. But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed. We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is, or we could just wait for it to melt, I suppose, these days, but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg. Right? Or make it manageable. But I don't think that's the case. I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well, where no matter how many buckets you take out, there's always another bucket of water to be had, or my particularly favorite one, with the effect and everything, the ripples on a pond. So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. So the knowledge generates ignorance. This is really well said, I thought, by George Bernard Shaw. This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein's work, in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers. [""Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.""]I find that kind of glorious, and I think he's precisely right, plus it's a kind of job security. As it turns out, he kind of cribbed that from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who a hundred years earlier had come up with this idea of question propagation, that every answer begets more questions. I love that term, ""question propagation,"" this idea of questions propagating out there.So I'd say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge. It's rather kind of the other way around, really. What do we use this knowledge for? What are we using this collection of facts for? We're using it to make better ignorance, to come up with, if you will, higher-quality ignorance. Because, you know, there's low-quality ignorance and there's high-quality ignorance. It's not all the same. Scientists argue about this all the time. Sometimes we call them bull sessions. Sometimes we call them grant proposals. But nonetheless, it's what the argument is about. It's the ignorance. It's the what we don't know. It's what makes a good question.So how do we think about these questions? I'm going to show you a graph that shows up quite a bit on happy hour posters in various science departments. This graph asks the relationship between what you know and how much you know about it. So what you know, you can know anywhere from nothing to everything, of course, and how much you know about it can be anywhere from a little to a lot. So let's put a point on the graph. There's an undergraduate. Doesn't know much but they have a lot of interest. They're interested in almost everything. Now you look at a master's student, a little further along in their education, and you see they know a bit more, but it's been narrowed somewhat. And finally you get your Ph.D., where it turns out you know a tremendous amount about almost nothing. (Laughter) What's really disturbing is the trend line that goes through that because, of course, when it dips below the zero axis, there, it gets into a negative area. That's where you find people like me, I'm afraid.So the important thing here is that this can all be changed. This whole view can be changed by just changing the label on the x-axis. So instead of how much you know about it, we could say, ""What can you ask about it?"" So yes, you do need to know a lot of stuff as a scientist, but the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is not just to know a lot of stuff. That just makes you a geek, right? Knowing a lot of stuff, the purpose is to be able to ask lots of questions, to be able to frame thoughtful, interesting questions, because that's where the real work is.Let me give you a quick idea of a couple of these sorts of questions. I'm a neuroscientist, so how would we come up with a question in neuroscience? Because it's not always quite so straightforward. So, for example, we could say, well what is it that the brain does? Well, one thing the brain does, it moves us around. We walk around on two legs. That seems kind of simple, somehow or another. I mean, virtually everybody over 10 months of age walks around on two legs, right? So that maybe is not that interesting. So instead maybe we want to choose something a little more complicated to look at. How about the visual system? There it is, the visual system. I mean, we love our visual systems. We do all kinds of cool stuff. Indeed, there are over 12,000 neuroscientists who work on the visual system, from the retina to the visual cortex, in an attempt to understand not just the visual system but to also understand how general principles of how the brain might work. But now here's the thing: Our technology has actually been pretty good at replicating what the visual system does. We have TV, we have movies, we have animation, we have photography, we have pattern recognition, all of these sorts of things. They work differently than our visual systems in some cases, but nonetheless we've been pretty good at making a technology work like our visual system. Somehow or another, a hundred years of robotics, you never saw a robot walk on two legs, because robots don't walk on two legs because it's not such an easy thing to do. A hundred years of robotics, and we can't get a robot that can move more than a couple steps one way or the other. You ask them to go up an inclined plane, and they fall over. Turn around, and they fall over. It's a serious problem. So what is it that's the most difficult thing for a brain to do? What ought we to be studying? Perhaps it ought to be walking on two legs, or the motor system. I'll give you an example from my own lab, my own particularly smelly question, since we work on the sense of smell. But here's a diagram of five molecules and sort of a chemical notation. These are just plain old molecules, but if you sniff those molecules up these two little holes in the front of your face, you will have in your mind the distinct impression of a rose. If there's a real rose there, those molecules will be the ones, but even if there's no rose there, you'll have the memory of a molecule. How do we turn molecules into perceptions? What's the process by which that could happen? Here's another example: two very simple molecules, again in this kind of chemical notation. It might be easier to visualize them this way, so the gray circles are carbon atoms, the white ones are hydrogen atoms and the red ones are oxygen atoms. Now these two molecules differ by only one carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms that ride along with it, and yet one of them, heptyl acetate, has the distinct odor of a pear, and hexyl acetate is unmistakably banana. So there are two really interesting questions here, it seems to me. One is, how can a simple little molecule like that create a perception in your brain that's so clear as a pear or a banana? And secondly, how the hell can we tell the difference between two molecules that differ by a single carbon atom? I mean, that's remarkable to me, clearly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. And you don't even think about it, do you?So this is a favorite quote of mine that takes us back to the ignorance and the idea of questions. I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn't be excluded from the conversation. And I also think it's important to realize that the conversation's been going on for a while, by the way. So Erwin Schrodinger, a great quantum physicist and, I think, philosopher, points out how you have to ""abide by ignorance for an indefinite period"" of time. And it's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do. This is a tricky thing. This is not such an easy business.I guess it comes down to our education system, so I'm going to talk a little bit about ignorance and education, because I think that's where it really has to play out. So for one, let's face it, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, the business model of the university and probably secondary schools is simply going to have to change. We just can't sell facts for a living anymore. They're available with a click of the mouse, or if you want to, you could probably just ask the wall one of these days, wherever they're going to hide the things that tell us all this stuff.So what do we have to do? We have to give our students a taste for the boundaries, for what's outside that circumference, for what's outside the facts, what's just beyond the facts.How do we do that? Well, one of the problems, of course, turns out to be testing. We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing. So in second grade, all the kids are interested in science, the girls and the boys. They like to take stuff apart. They have great curiosity. They like to investigate things. They go to science museums. They like to play around. They're in second grade. They're interested. But by 11th or 12th grade, fewer than 10 percent of them have any interest in science whatsoever, let alone a desire to go into science as a career. So we have this remarkably efficient system for beating any interest in science out of everybody's head.Is this what we want? I think this comes from what a teacher colleague of mine calls ""the bulimic method of education."" You know. You can imagine what it is. We just jam a whole bunch of facts down their throats over here and then they puke it up on an exam over here and everybody goes home with no added intellectual heft whatsoever.This can't possibly continue to go on. So what do we do? Well the geneticists, I have to say, have an interesting maxim they live by. Geneticists always say, you always get what you screen for. And that's meant as a warning. So we always will get what we screen for, and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods. Well, we hear a lot about testing and evaluation, and we have to think carefully when we're testing whether we're evaluating or whether we're weeding, whether we're weeding people out, whether we're making some cut. Evaluation is one thing. You hear a lot about evaluation in the literature these days, in the educational literature, but evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to an opportunity for trial and error. It amounts to a chance to work over a longer period of time with this kind of feedback. That's different than weeding, and usually, I have to tell you, when people talk about evaluation, evaluating students, evaluating teachers, evaluating schools, evaluating programs, that they're really talking about weeding. And that's a bad thing, because then you will get what you select for, which is what we've gotten so far.So I'd say what we need is a test that says, ""What is x?"" and the answers are ""I don't know, because no one does,"" or ""What's the question?"" Even better. Or, ""You know what, I'll look it up, I'll ask someone, I'll phone someone. I'll find out."" Because that's what we want people to do, and that's how you evaluate them. And maybe for the advanced placement classes, it could be, ""Here's the answer. What's the next question?"" That's the one I like in particular.So let me end with a quote from William Butler Yeats, who said ""Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires.""So I'd say, let's get out the matches. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_firestein_the_pursuit_of_ignorance
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"So I'm going to talk about trust, and I'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust. I think these are so commonplace, they've become clichés of our society. And I think there are three. One's a claim: there has been a great decline in trust, very widely believed. The second is an aim: we should have more trust. And the third is a task: we should rebuild trust.I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived. So what I'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter.First the claim: Why do people think trust has declined? And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence, I don't know the answer. I'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others. I don't have an overview. But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there's not much evidence for that. That's to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted. And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted: judges, nurses. The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway. But is that good evidence? What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. What else can they record? So they're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions. Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers?Now if somebody said to you, ""Do you trust greengrocers? Do you trust fishmongers? Do you trust elementary school teachers?"" you would probably begin by saying, ""To do what?"" And that would be a perfectly sensible response. And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, ""Well, I trust some of them, but not others."" That's a perfectly rational thing. In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way. We don't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform. I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus. I might, after all, know that she wasn't a good driver. I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not — but perhaps not to keep a secret. Simple.So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly? I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists, because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust.Secondly, what about the aim? The aim is to have more trust. Well frankly, I think that's a stupid aim. It's not what I would aim at. I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy. And I think, of those people who, for example, placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr. Madoff, who then made off with them, and I think of them, and I think, well, yes, too much trust. More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects.And I think that judgment requires us to look at three things. Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable? And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we'll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they'll be trustworthy. But if, on the other hand, they're unreliable, we might not. I have friends who are competent and honest, but I would not trust them to post a letter, because they're forgetful. I have friends who are very confident they can do certain things, but I realize that they overestimate their own competence. And I'm very glad to say, I don't think I have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest. (Laughter) If so, I haven't yet spotted it.But that's what we're looking for: trustworthiness before trust. Trust is the response. Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. And, of course, it's difficult. Across the last few decades, we've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness. A lot of these systems have the converse effect. They don't work as they're supposed to. I remember I was talking with a midwife who said, ""Well, you see, the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby."" And all over our public life, our institutional life, we find that problem, that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite. It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives, from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes, as we say. You can all give your own examples there.So so much for the aim. The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness, and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people, and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy. It's not easy. It is judgment, and simple reaction, attitudes, don't do adequately here.Now thirdly, the task. Calling the task rebuilding trust, I think, also gets things backwards. It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust. Well, we can do that for ourselves. We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness. We can do it two people together trying to improve trust. But trust, in the end, is distinctive because it's given by other people. You can't rebuild what other people give you. You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust. So you have to, I think, be trustworthy. And that, of course, is because you can't fool all of the people all of the time, usually. But you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy. How to do it? Well every day, all over the place, it's being done by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions, quite effectively. Let me give you a simple commercial example. The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. I think there's a big lesson in that. If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy.So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/onora_o_neill_what_we_don_t_understand_about_trust
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"We are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century, because during that century, our minds have altered dramatically. As you all know, the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology. And our minds have altered, too. We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world, and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is.Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time, and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions. Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness.Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those, and to put this into perspective, let's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. And this Martian was an archaeologist, and they found scores, target scores, that people had used for shooting. And first they looked at 1865, and they found that in a minute, people had only put one bullet in the bullseye. And then they found, in 1898, that they'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute. And then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye. And initially, that archaeologist would be baffled. They would say, look, these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand, how keen their eyesight was, whether they had control of their weapon. How could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree? Well we now know, of course, the answer. If that Martian looked at battlefields, they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the Civil War and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the Spanish-American War, and then they had machine guns by the time of World War I. And, in other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand.Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions.Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, ""Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow."" And Luria said, ""But aren't they both animals?"" And he said, ""Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird."" And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, ""There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?"" And the fellow said, ""Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there."" And Luria said, ""But what do my words imply?"" And he said, ""Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels."" In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, ""At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?"" And the response was, ""Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear."" Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were — that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, ""How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?""Now, these three categories — classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously — how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations.First, almost all of us today get a high school diploma. That is, we've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education, and 52 percent of Americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education. Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically consistent. And even down in grade school, things have changed. In 1910, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. They were things like, what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time? When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, they were all about abstractions. They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat. They put it in Albany rather than New York. They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia. And so forth. So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically.What about employment? Well, in 1900, three percent of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers. Today, 35 percent of Americans practice cognitively demanding professions, not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer, but many, many sub-professions having to do with being a technician, a computer programmer. A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands. And we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. And it's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions. The professions have been upgraded. Compare the doctor in 1900, who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve, with the modern general practitioner or specialist, with years of scientific training. Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage. Well, the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss, but they were cognitively very agile. They went far beyond that 1900 banker. They had to look at computer projections for the housing market. They had to get complicated CDO-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset. They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a AAA, though in many cases, they had virtually bribed the rating agencies. And they also, of course, had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable. Or take a farmer today. I take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900. So it hasn't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions. It's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties.But I've talked about education and employment. Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas. I'm primarily a moral philosopher. I merely have a holiday in psychology, and what interests me in general is moral debate. Now over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections. When I came home in 1955 from university at the time of Martin Luther King, a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents. My father was born in 1885, and he was mildly racially biased. As an Irishman, he hated the English so much he didn't have much emotion for anyone else. (Laughter) But he did have a sense that black people were inferior. And when we said to our parents and grandparents, ""How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black?"" they said that is the dumbest thing you've ever said. Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning — (Laughter) — that turned black?In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. You have to say, imagine you were in Iran, and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong. How would you feel about that? And if someone of the older generation says, well, our government takes care of us, and it's up to their government to take care of them, they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. Well, he's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, and they're unmovable in any way by logic. They're just inherited mores. Today we would say something like, well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. Would you deserve to be killed? And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. That's not one of the principles I've got. Well you, today, universalize your principles. You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. If you have a principle such as, people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, then to exclude black people you've got to make exceptions, don't you? You have to say, well, blackness of skin, you couldn't suffer just for that. It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic.Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests? That's what initially got me going on cognitive history. If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. What are dogs like? They would say wolves. But by 1960, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? They could say a semicircle. Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. By 2010, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question.Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost.But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized, and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn't make it, that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities. Lord Curzon once said he saw people bathing in the North Sea, and he said, ""Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have?"" As if they were a reptile. Well, Dickens was right and he was wrong. [Correction: Rudyard Kipling] [Kipling] said, ""The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters underneath the skin.""(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents
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"For a long time in my life, I felt like I'd been living two different lives. There's the life that everyone sees, and then there's the life that only I see. And in the life that everyone sees, who I am is a friend, a son, a brother, a stand-up comedian and a teenager. That's the life everyone sees. If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me, that's what they would tell you. And that's a huge part of me. That is who I am. And if you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd probably say some of those same things. And I wouldn't be lying, but I wouldn't totally be telling you the truth, either, because the truth is, that's just the life everyone else sees. In the life that only I see, who I am, who I really am, is someone who struggles intensely with depression. I have for the last six years of my life, and I continue to every day.Now, for someone who has never experienced depression or doesn't really know what that means, that might surprise them to hear, because there's this pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something in your life goes wrong, when you break up with your girlfriend, when you lose a loved one, when you don't get the job you wanted. But that's sadness. That's a natural thing. That's a natural human emotion. Real depression isn't being sad when something in your life goes wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right. That's real depression, and that's what I suffer from.And to be totally honest, that's hard for me to stand up here and say. It's hard for me to talk about, and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about, so much so that no one's talking about it. And no one's talking about depression, but we need to be, because right now it's a massive problem. It's a massive problem. But we don't see it on social media, right? We don't see it on Facebook. We don't see it on Twitter. We don't see it on the news, because it's not happy, it's not fun, it's not light. And so because we don't see it, we don't see the severity of it.But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this: every 30 seconds, every 30 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because of depression, and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away, it might be two continents away, but it's happening, and it's happening every single day. And we have a tendency, as a society, to look at that and go, ""So what?"" So what? We look at that, and we go, ""That's your problem. That's their problem."" We say we're sad and we say we're sorry, but we also say, ""So what?""Well, two years ago it was my problem, because I sat on the edge of my bed where I'd sat a million times before and I was suicidal. I was suicidal, and if you were to look at my life on the surface, you wouldn't see a kid who was suicidal. You'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team, the drama and theater student of the year, the English student of the year, someone who was consistently on the honor roll and consistently at every party. So you would say I wasn't depressed, you would say I wasn't suicidal, but you would be wrong. You would be wrong. So I sat there that night beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand and I thought about taking my own life and I came this close to doing it. I came this close to doing it.And I didn't, so that makes me one of the lucky ones, one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge and look down but not jump, one of the lucky ones who survives. Well, I survived, and that just leaves me with my story, and my story is this: In four simple words, I suffer from depression. I suffer from depression, and for a long time, I think, I was living two totally different lives, where one person was always afraid of the other. I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was, that I wasn't the perfect, popular kid in high school everyone thought I was, that beneath my smile, there was struggle, and beneath my light, there was dark, and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain.See, some people might fear girls not liking them back. Some people might fear sharks. Some people might fear death. But for me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself. I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability, and that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner, like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out, and so I thought about that way every single day. I thought about it every single day, and if I'm being totally honest, standing here I've thought about it again since, because that's the sickness, that's the struggle, that's depression, and depression isn't chicken pox. You don't beat it once and it's gone forever. It's something you live with. It's something you live in. It's the roommate you can't kick out. It's the voice you can't ignore. It's the feelings you can't seem to escape, the scariest part is that after a while, you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you, and what you really fear the most isn't the suffering inside of you. It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy. That's what keeps you from getting help. That's what makes you hold it in and hide it. It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you hide it, and even though it's keeping you in bed every day and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it, because the stigma in our society around depression is very real. It's very real, and if you think that it isn't, ask yourself this: Would you rather make your next Facebook status say you're having a tough time getting out of bed because you hurt your back or you're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning because you're depressed? That's the stigma, because unfortunately, we live in a world where if you break your arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you're depressed, everyone runs the other way. That's the stigma. We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking down other than our brains. And that's ignorance. That's pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created a world that doesn't understand depression, that doesn't understand mental health. And that's ironic to me, because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world, yet it's one of the least discussed. We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it's not there and hope it'll fix itself.Well, it won't. It hasn't, and it's not going to, because that's wishful thinking, and wishful thinking isn't a game plan, it's procrastination, and we can't procrastinate on something this important. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. Well, we haven't done that, so we can't really expect to find an answer when we're still afraid of the question.And I don't know what the solution is. I wish I did, but I don't — but I think, I think it has to start here. It has to start with me, it has to start with you, it has to start with the people who are suffering, the ones who are hidden in the shadows. We need to speak up and shatter the silence. We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in, because if there's one thing that I've come to realize, if there's one thing that I see as the biggest problem, it's not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others. It's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves, where we're okay with who we are, because when we get honest, we see that we all struggle and we all suffer. Whether it's with this, whether it's with something else, we all know what it is to hurt. We all know what it is to have pain in our heart, and we all know how important it is to heal. But right now, depression is society's deep cut that we're content to put a Band-Aid over and pretend it's not there.Well, it is there. It is there, and you know what? It's okay. Depression is okay. If you're going through it, know that you're okay. And know that you're sick, you're not weak, and it's an issue, not an identity, because when you get past the fear and the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others, you can see depression for what it really is, and that's just a part of life, just a part of life, and as much as I hate, as much as I hate some of the places, some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to, in a lot of ways I'm grateful for it. Because yeah, it's put me in the valleys, but only to show me there's peaks, and yeah it's dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light. My pain, more than anything in 19 years on this planet, has given me perspective, and my hurt, my hurt has forced me to have hope, have hope and to have faith, faith in myself, faith in others, faith that it can get better, that we can change this, that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance, fight back against intolerance, and more than anything, learn to love ourselves, learn to accept ourselves for who we are, the people we are, not the people the world wants us to be. Because the world I believe in is one where embracing your light doesn't mean ignoring your dark. The world I believe in is one where we're measured by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them. The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye and say, ""I'm going through hell,"" and they can look back at me and go, ""Me too,"" and that's okay, and it's okay because depression is okay. We're people. We're people, and we struggle and we suffer and we bleed and we cry, and if you think that true strength means never showing any weakness, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong. You're wrong, because it's the opposite. We're people, and we have problems. We're not perfect, and that's okay.So we need to stop the ignorance, stop the intolerance, stop the stigma, and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth, and start talking, because the only way we're going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together, by standing strong together.And I believe that we can. I believe that we can. Thank you guys so much. This is a dream come true. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_breel_confessions_of_a_depressed_comic
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"So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy. And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel. And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it, and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn't understand it at all.Ancient Palestine had a — along its eastern border, there's a mountain range. Still same is true of Israel today. And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region, so Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. And then there's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean, where Tel Aviv is now. And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah, which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west, and you can follow the Shephelah, go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains. And the Shephelah, if you've been to Israel, you'll know it's just about the most beautiful part of Israel. It's gorgeous, with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards.But more importantly, though, in the history of that region, it's served, it's had a real strategic function, and that is, it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way, get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains. And 3,000 years ago, that's exactly what happens. The Philistines, who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel, are living in the coastal plain. They're originally from Crete. They're a seafaring people. And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two. And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah. And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge, and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge, and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other, because they're deadlocked. Neither can attack the other, because to attack the other side you've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side, and you're completely exposed.So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, ""Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us.""This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat. It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle. And the Philistine who is sent down, their mighty warrior, is a giant. He's 6 foot 9. He's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor, and he's got a sword and he's got a javelin and he's got his spear. He is absolutely terrifying. And he's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him. It's a death wish, right? There's no way they think they can take him.And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy, and he goes up to Saul and he says, ""I'll fight him.""And Saul says, ""You can't fight him. That's ridiculous. You're this kid. This is this mighty warrior.""But the shepherd is adamant. He says, ""No, no, no, you don't understand, I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years. I think I can do it.""And Saul has no choice. He's got no one else who's come forward. So he says, ""All right."" And then he turns to the kid, and he says, ""But you've got to wear this armor. You can't go as you are.""So he tries to give the shepherd his armor, and the shepherd says, ""No."" He says, ""I can't wear this stuff."" The Biblical verse is, ""I cannot wear this for I have not proved it,"" meaning, ""I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy.""So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant. And the giant sees this figure approaching, and calls out, ""Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field."" He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him. And the shepherd draws closer and closer, and the giant sees that he's carrying a staff. That's all he's carrying. Instead of a weapon, just this shepherd's staff, and he says — he's insulted — ""Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?""And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket, puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes — right here, in his most vulnerable spot — and he falls down either dead or unconscious, and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head, and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run.And of course, the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David, and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong.So David, in that story, is supposed to be the underdog, right? In fact, that term, David and Goliath, has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger. Now why do we call David an underdog? Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior, and David is just a shepherd. But most importantly, we call him an underdog because all he has is — it's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry, this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear, and all David has is this sling.Well, let's start there with the phrase ""All David has is this sling,"" because that's the first mistake that we make. In ancient warfare, there are three kinds of warriors. There's cavalry, men on horseback and with chariots. There's heavy infantry, which are foot soldiers, armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor. And there's artillery, and artillery are archers, but, more importantly, slingers. And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it, and they put a projectile, either a rock or a lead ball, inside the pouch, and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go, and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target. That's what David has, and it's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot. It's not this, right? It's not a child's toy. It's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon. When David rolls it around like this, he's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second, and that means that when the rock is released, it's going forward really fast, probably 35 meters per second. That's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers. More than that, the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks. They were barium sulphate, which are rocks twice the density of normal stones. If you do the calculations on the ballistics, on the stopping power of the rock fired from David's sling, it's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [.45 caliber] handgun. This is an incredibly devastating weapon. Accuracy, we know from historical records that slingers — experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards. From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate. When David lines up — and he's not 200 yards away from Goliath, he's quite close to Goliath — when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath, he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes. If you go back over the history of ancient warfare, you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another.So what's Goliath? He's heavy infantry, and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman. When he says, ""Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,"" the key phrase is ""Come to me."" Come up to me because we're going to fight, hand to hand, like this. Saul has the same expectation. David says, ""I want to fight Goliath,"" and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, ""Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath,' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat,' infantry on infantry.""But David has absolutely no expectation. He's not going to fight him that way. Why would he? He's a shepherd. He's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves. That's where his strength lies. So here he is, this shepherd, experienced in the use of a devastating weapon, up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat. Goliath is a sitting duck. He doesn't have a chance. So why do we keep calling David an underdog, and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable?There's a second piece of this that's important. It's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry. It's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath. Goliath is not what he seems to be. There's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text, things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don't square with his image as this mighty warrior. So to begin with, the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant. Now that is weird, right? Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat. Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy, presumably, to the point of combat? Secondly, the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves, another odd thing to say when you're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point. And then there's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David. So David's coming down the mountain, and he's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat. There is nothing about him that says, ""I am about to fight you like this."" He's not even carrying a sword. Why does Goliath not react to that? It's as if he's oblivious to what's going on that day. And then there's that strange comment he makes to David: ""Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?"" Sticks? David only has one stick.Well, it turns out that there's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath, an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies. There have been many articles written. The first one was in 1960 in the Indiana Medical Journal, and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath's height. So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era, and usually when someone is that far out of the norm, there's an explanation for it. So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly. So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11. He had acromegaly. Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly. There's even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly. Anyone who's unusually tall, that's the first explanation we come up with. And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it, principally having to do with vision. The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted.So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath, they've said, ""Wait a minute, he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly."" And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day. Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant? Because he can't make his way on his own. Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn't understand that David's not going to fight him until the very last moment? Because he can't see him. When he says, ""Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,"" the phrase ""come to me"" is a hint also of his vulnerability. Come to me because I can't see you. And then there's, ""Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?"" He sees two sticks when David has only one.So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe. What they didn't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness.And there is, I think, in that, a very important lesson for all of us. Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_the_unheard_story_of_david_and_goliath
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"I think it's safe to say that all humans will be intimate with death at least once in their lives. But what if that intimacy began long before you faced your own transition from life into death? What would life be like if the dead literally lived alongside you?In my husband's homeland in the highlands of Sulawesi island in eastern Indonesia, there is a community of people that experience death not as a singular event but as a gradual social process. In Tana Toraja, the most important social moments in people's lives, the focal points of social and cultural interaction are not weddings or births or even family dinners, but funerals. So these funerals are characterized by elaborate rituals that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt based on the amount of animals — pigs, chickens and, most importantly, water buffalo — that are sacrificed and distributed in the name of the deceased. So this cultural complex surrounding death, the ritual enactment of the end of life, has made death the most visible and remarkable aspect of Toraja's landscape. Lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair, where commemorating someone who's died is not so much a private sadness but more of a publicly shared transition. And it's a transition that's just as much about the identity of the living as it is about remembrance of the dead.So every year, thousands of visitors come to Tana Toraja to see, as it were, this culture of death, and for many people these grandiose ceremonies and the length of the ceremonies are somehow incommensurable with the way that we face our own mortality in the West. So even as we share death as a universal experience, it's not experienced the same way the world over. And as an anthropologist, I see these differences in experience being rooted in the cultural and social world through which we define the phenomena around us. So where we see an unquestionable reality, death as an irrefutable biological condition, Torajans see the expired corporeal form as part of a larger social genesis. So again, the physical cessation of life is not the same as death. In fact, a member of society is only truly dead when the extended family can agree upon and marshal the resources necessary to hold a funeral ceremony that is considered appropriate in terms of resources for the status of the deceased. And this ceremony has to take place in front of the eyes of the whole community with everyone's participation.So after a person's physical death, their body is placed in a special room in the traditional residence, which is called the tongkonan. And the tongkonan is symbolic not only of the family's identity but also of the human life cycle from birth to death. So essentially, the shape of the building that you're born into is the shape of the structure which carries you to your ancestral resting place. Until the funeral ceremony, which can be held years after a person's physical death, the deceased is referred to as ""to makala,"" a sick person, or ""to mama,"" a person who is asleep, and they continue to be a member of the household. They are symbolically fed and cared for, and the family at this time will begin a number of ritual injunctions, which communicates to the wider community around them that one of their members is undergoing the transition from this life into the afterlife known as Puya.So I know what some of you must be thinking right now. Is she really saying that these people live with the bodies of their dead relatives? And that's exactly what I'm saying.But instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction we have to this idea of proximity to bodies, proximity to death, or how this notion just does not fit into our very biological or medical sort of definition of death, I like to think about what the Torajan way of viewing death encompasses of the human experience that the medical definition leaves out. I think that Torajans socially recognize and culturally express what many of us feel to be true despite the widespread acceptance of the biomedical definition of death, and that is that our relationships with other humans, their impact on our social reality, doesn't cease with the termination of the physical processes of the body, that there's a period of transition as the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed but not ended. So Torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship by lavishing love and attention on the most visible symbol of that relationship, the human body. So my husband has fond memories of talking to and playing with and generally being around his deceased grandfather, and for him there is nothing unnatural about this. This is a natural part of the process as the family comes to terms with the transition in their relationship to the deceased, and this is the transition from relating to the deceased as a person who's living to relating to the deceased as a person who's an ancestor. And here you can see these wooden effigies of the ancestors, so these are people who have already been buried, already had a funeral ceremony. These are called tau tau.So the funeral ceremony itself embodies this relational perspective on death. It ritualizes the impact of death on families and communities. And it's also a moment of self-awareness. It's a moment when people think about who they are, their place in society, and their role in the life cycle in accordance with Torajan cosmology.There's a saying in Toraja that all people will become grandparents, and what this means is that after death, we all become part of the ancestral line that anchors us between the past and the present and will define who our loved ones are into the future. So essentially, we all become grandparents to the generations of human children that come after us. And this metaphor of membership in the greater human family is the way that children also describe the money that they invest in these sacrificial buffaloes that are thought to carry people's soul from here to the afterlife, and children will explain that they will invest the money in this because they want to repay their parents the debt for all of the years their parents spent investing and caring for them.But the sacrifice of buffalo and the ritual display of wealth also exhibits the status of the deceased, and, by extension, the deceased's family. So at funerals, relationships are reconfirmed but also transformed in a ritual drama that highlights the most salient feature about death in this place: its impact on life and the relationships of the living.So all of this focus on death doesn't mean that Torajans don't aspire to the ideal of a long life. They engage in many practices thought to confer good health and survival to an advanced age. But they don't put much stock in efforts to prolong life in the face of debilitating illness or in old age. It's said in Toraja that everybody has sort of a predetermined amount of life. It's called the sunga'. And like a thread, it should be allowed to unspool to its natural end.So by having death as a part of the cultural and social fabric of life, people's everyday decisions about their health and healthcare are affected. The patriarch of my husband's maternal clan, Nenet Katcha, is now approaching the age of 100, as far as we can tell. And there are increasing signs that he is about to depart on his own journey for Puya. And his death will be greatly mourned. But I know that my husband's family looks forward to the moment when they can ritually display what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives, when they can ritually recount his life's narrative, weaving his story into the history of their community. His story is their story. His funeral songs will sing them a song about themselves. And it's a story that has no discernible beginning, no foreseeable end. It's a story that goes on long after his body no longer does.People ask me if I'm frightened or repulsed by participating in a culture where the physical manifestations of death greet us at every turn. But I see something profoundly transformative in experiencing death as a social process and not just a biological one. In reality, the relationship between the living and the dead has its own drama in the U.S. healthcare system, where decisions about how long to stretch the thread of life are made based on our emotional and social ties with the people around us, not just on medicine's ability to prolong life. We, like the Torajans, base our decisions about life on the meanings and the definitions that we ascribe to death.So I'm not suggesting that anyone in this audience should run out and adopt the traditions of the Torajans. It might be a little bit difficult to put into play in the United States. But I want to ask what we can gain from seeing physical death not only as a biological process but as part of the greater human story. What would it be like to look on the expired human form with love because it's so intimately a part of who we all are? If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life, we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear. Perhaps one of the answers to the challenges that are facing the U.S. healthcare system, particularly in the end-of-life care, is as simple as a shift in perspective, and the shift in perspective in this case would be to look at the social life of every death. It might help us recognize that the way we limit our conversation about death to something that's medical or biological is reflective of a larger culture that we all share of avoiding death, being afraid of talking about it. If we could entertain and value other kinds of knowledge about life, including other definitions of death, it has the potential to change the discussions that we have about the end of life. It could change the way that we die, but more importantly, it could transform the way that we live.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kelli_swazey_life_that_doesn_t_end_with_death
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"So my name is Amy Webb, and a few years ago I found myself at the end of yet another fantastic relationship that came burning down in a spectacular fashion. And I thought, what's wrong with me? I don't understand why this keeps happening.So I asked everybody in my life what they thought. I turned to my grandmother, who always had plenty of advice, and she said, ""Stop being so picky. You've got to date around. And most importantly, true love will find you when you least expect it.""Now as it turns out, I'm somebody who thinks a lot about data, as you'll soon find. I am constantly swimming in numbers, formulas and charts. I also have a very tight-knit family, and I'm very, very close with my sister, and as a result, I wanted to have the same type of family when I grew up.So I'm at the end of this bad breakup, I'm 30 years old, I figure I'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate, and we have to do that for a while before we can get engaged. And if I want to start having children by the time I'm 35, that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago. So that wasn't going to work.If my strategy was to least-expect my way into true love, then the variable that I had to deal with was serendipity. In short, I was trying to figure out what's the probability of my finding Mr. Right? Well, at the time I was living in the city of Philadelphia, and it's a big city, and I figured, in this entire place, there are lots of possibilities. So again, I started doing some math. Population of Philadelphia: it has 1.5 million people. I figure about half of that are men, so that takes the number down to 750,000. I'm looking for a guy between the ages of 30 and 36, which was only four percent of the population, so now I'm dealing with the possibility of 30,000 men. I was looking for somebody who was Jewish, because I am and that was important to me. That's only 2.3 percent of the population. I figure I'm attracted to maybe one out of 10 of those men, and there was no way I was going to deal with somebody who was an avid golfer. So that basically meant there were 35 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia.In the meantime, my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children, and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already.So I have two possible strategies at this point I'm sort of figuring out. One, I can take my grandmother's advice and sort of least-expect my way into maybe bumping into the one out of 35 possible men in the entire 1.5-million-person city of Philadelphia, or I could try online dating.Now, I like the idea of online dating, because it's predicated on an algorithm, and that's really just a simple way of saying I've got a problem, I'm going to use some data, run it through a system and get to a solution. So online dating is the second most popular way that people now meet each other, but as it turns out, algorithms have been around for thousands of years in almost every culture. In fact, in Judaism, there were matchmakers a long time ago, and though they didn't have an explicit algorithm per se, they definitely were running through formulas in their heads, like, is the girl going to like the boy? Are the families going to get along? What's the rabbi going to say? Are they going to start having children right away? The matchmaker would sort of think through all of this, put two people together, and that would be the end of it. So in my case, I thought, well, will data and an algorithm lead me to my Prince Charming? So I decided to sign on.Now, there was one small catch. As I'm signing on to the various dating websites, as it happens, I was really, really busy. But that actually wasn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that I hate filling out questionnaires of any kind, and I certainly don't like questionnaires that are like Cosmo quizzes. So I just copied and pasted from my résumé.(Laughter)So in the descriptive part up top, I said that I was an award-winning journalist and a future thinker. When I was asked about fun activities and my ideal date, I said monetization and fluency in Japanese. I talked a lot about JavaScript.(Laughter)So obviously this was not the best way to put my most sexy foot forward. But the real failure was that there were plenty of men for me to date. These algorithms had a sea full of men that wanted to take me out on lots of dates — what turned out to be truly awful dates.There was this guy Steve, the I.T. guy. The algorithm matched us up because we share a love of gadgets, we share a love of math and data and '80s music, and so I agreed to go out with him. So Steve the I.T. guy invited me out to one of Philadelphia's white-table-cloth, extremely expensive restaurants. And we went in, and right off the bat, our conversation really wasn't taking flight, but he was ordering a lot of food. In fact, he didn't even bother looking at the menu. He was ordering multiple appetizers, multiple entrées, for me as well, and suddenly there are piles and piles of food on our table, also lots and lots of bottles of wine. So we're nearing the end of our conversation and the end of dinner, and I've decided Steve the I.T. guy and I are really just not meant for each other, but we'll part ways as friends, when he gets up to go to the bathroom, and in the meantime, the bill comes to our table. And listen, I'm a modern woman. I am totally down with splitting the bill. But then Steve the I.T. guy didn't come back.(Gasping)And that was my entire month's rent.(Audience gasps)So needless to say, I was not having a good night. So I run home, I call my mother, I call my sister, and as I do, at the end of each one of these terrible, terrible dates, I regale them with the details. And they say to me, ""Stop complaining.""(Laughter)""You're just being too picky.""So I said, fine, from here on out I'm only going on dates where I know there's Wi-Fi, and I'm bringing my laptop. I'm going to shove it into my bag, I'm going to have this email template, and I'm going to fill it out and collect information on all these different data points during the date to prove to everybody that empirically, these dates really are terrible.(Laughter)So I started tracking things like really stupid, awkward, sexual remarks; bad vocabulary; the number of times a man forced me to high-five him.(Laughter)So I started to crunch some numbers, and that allowed me to make some correlations. So as it turns out, for some reason, men who drink Scotch reference kinky sex immediately.(Laughter)Well, it turns out that these probably weren't bad guys. There were just bad for me. And as it happens, the algorithms that were setting us up, they weren't bad either. These algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do, which was to take our user-generated information, in my case, my résumé, and match it up with other people's information. See, the real problem here is that, while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't, when confronted with blank windows where we're supposed to input our information online. Very few of us have the ability to be totally and brutally honest with ourselves. The other problem is that these websites are asking us questions like, are you a dog person or a cat person? Do you like horror films or romance films? I'm not looking for a pen pal. I'm looking for a husband. Right? So there's a certain amount of superficiality in that data.So I said fine, I've got a new plan. I'm going to keep using these online dating sites, but I'm going to treat them as databases, and rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up, I think I'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system. So knowing that there was superficial data that was being used to match me up with other people, I decided instead to ask my own questions. What was every single possible thing that I could think of that I was looking for in a mate?So I started writing and writing and writing, and at the end, I had amassed 72 different data points. I wanted somebody was Jew-ish, so I was looking for somebody who had the same background and thoughts on our culture, but wasn't going to force me to go to shul every Friday and Saturday. I wanted somebody who worked hard, because work for me is extremely important, but not too hard. For me, the hobbies that I have are really just new work projects that I've launched. I also wanted somebody who not only wanted two children, but was going to have the same attitude toward parenting that I do, so somebody who was going to be totally okay with forcing our child to start taking piano lessons at age three, and also maybe computer science classes if we could wrangle it. So things like that, but I also wanted somebody who would go to far-flung, exotic places, like Petra, Jordan. I also wanted somebody who would weigh 20 pounds more than me at all times, regardless of what I weighed.(Laughter)So I now have these 72 different data points, which, to be fair, is a lot. So what I did was, I went through and I prioritized that list. I broke it into a top tier and a second tier of points, and I ranked everything starting at 100 and going all the way down to 91, and listing things like I was looking for somebody who was really smart, who would challenge and stimulate me, and balancing that with a second tier and a second set of points. These things were also important to me but not necessarily deal-breakers.(Laughter)So once I had all this done, I then built a scoring system, because what I wanted to do was to sort of mathematically calculate whether or not I thought the guy that I found online would be a match with me. I figured there would be a minimum of 700 points before I would agree to email somebody or respond to an email message. For 900 points, I'd agree to go out on a date, and I wouldn't even consider any kind of relationship before somebody had crossed the 1,500 point threshold.Well, as it turns out, this worked pretty well. So I go back online now. I found Jewishdoc57 who's incredibly good-looking, incredibly well-spoken, he had hiked Mt. Fuji, he had walked along the Great Wall. He likes to travel as long as it doesn't involve a cruise ship. And I thought, I've done it! I've cracked the code. I have just found the Jewish Prince Charming of my family's dreams.There was only one problem: He didn't like me back. And I guess the one variable that I haven't considered is the competition. Who are all of the other women on these dating sites? I found SmileyGirl1978. She said she was a ""Fun girl who is Happy and Outgoing."" She listed her job as ""teacher."" She said she is ""silly, nice and friendly."" She likes to make people laugh ""alot.""At this moment I knew, clicking profile after profile that looked like this, that I needed to do some market research. So I created 10 fake male profiles. Now, before I lose all of you —(Laughter) —understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system. I didn't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody. I really was just scraping their data. But I didn't want everybody's data. I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really, really wanted to marry.When I released these men into the wild, I did follow some rules. So I didn't reach out to any woman first. I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract, and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets. So I was looking at qualitative data, so what was the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style that these women shared in common? And also quantitative data, so what was the average length of their profile, how much time was spent between messages? What I was trying to get at here was that I figured, in person, I would be just as competitive as a SmileyGirl1978. I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online.Well, one month later, I had a lot of data, and I was able to do another analysis. And as it turns out, content matters a lot. So smart people tend to write a lot — 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words about themselves, which may all be very, very interesting. The challenge here, though, is that the popular men and women are sticking to 97 words on average that are written very, very well, even though it may not seem like it all the time. The other hallmark of the people who do this well is that they're using non-specific language. So in my case, ""The English Patient"" is my most favorite movie ever, but it doesn't work to use that in a profile, because that's a superficial data point, and somebody may disagree and decide they don't want to go out because they didn't like sitting through the three-hour movie.Also, optimistic language matters a lot. So this is a word cloud highlighting the most popular words that were used by the most popular women, words like ""fun"" and ""girl"" and ""love."" And what I realized was not that I had to dumb down my own profile. Remember, I'm somebody who said that I speak fluent Japanese and I know JavaScript and I was okay with that. The difference is that it's about being more approachable and helping people understand the best way to reach out to you.And as it turns out, timing is also really, really important. Just because you have access to somebody's mobile phone number or their instant message account and it's 2 o'clock in the morning and you happen to be awake, doesn't mean that that's a good time to communicate with those people. The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 23 hours in between each communication. And that's what we would normally do in the usual process of courtship.And finally — there were the photos. All of the women who were popular showed some skin. They all looked really great, which turned out to be in sharp contrast to what I had uploaded.(Laughter)Once I had all of this information, I was able to create a super profile, so it was still me, but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem. And as it turns out, I did a really good job. I was the most popular person online.(Laughter)(Applause)And as it turns out, lots and lots of men wanted to date me. So I call my mom, I call my sister, I call my grandmother. I'm telling them about this fabulous news, and they say, ""This is wonderful! How soon are you going out?"" I said, ""Actually, I'm not going to go out with anybody."" Because remember, in my scoring system, they have to reach a minimum threshold of 700 points, and none of them have done that. They said, ""What? You're still being too damn picky.""Well, not too long after that, I found this guy, Thevenin, and he said that he was culturally Jewish, he said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter, which I thought was very clever. He talked in detail about travel. He made a lot of really interesting cultural references. He looked and talked exactly like what I wanted, and immediately, he scored 850 points. It was enough for a date.Three weeks later, we met up in person for what turned out to be a 14-hour-long conversation that went from coffee shop to restaurant to another coffee shop to another restaurant, and when he dropped me back off at my house that night I re-scored him —[1,050 points!]Thought, you know what, this entire time, I haven't been picky enough. Well, a year and a half after that, we were non-cruise ship traveling through Petra, Jordan, when he got down on his knee and proposed. A year after that, we were married, and about a year and a half after that, our daughter, Petra, was born.Audience: Oh!(Applause)[What it means...]Obviously, I'm having a fabulous life, so —(Laughter)The question is, what does all of this mean for you?Well, as it turns out, there is an algorithm for love. It's just not the ones that we're being presented with online. In fact, it's something that you write yourself. So whether you're looking for a husband or a wife or you're trying to find your passion or you're trying to start a business, all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules, and feel free to be as picky as you want.Well, on my wedding day, I had a conversation again with my grandmother, and she said, ""All right, maybe I was wrong. It looks like you did come up with a really, really great system. Now, your matzah balls ... They should be fluffy, not hard.""(Laughter)And I'll take her advice on that.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_webb_how_i_hacked_online_dating
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"An image is worth more than a thousand words, so I'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that I recently captured.So by now, my talk is already 6,000 words long, and I feel like I should stop here.(Laughter)At the same time, I probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw. What I am trying to do as a photographer, as an artist, is to bring the world of art and science together. Whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it's bursting, as you can see in this image, whether it's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint, strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways, or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces, I'm always trying to link those two fields together.What I find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing: They are a response to their surroundings. And yet, they do it in a very different way. If you look at science on one hand, science is a very rational approach to its surroundings, whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings. What I am trying to do is I'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer's heart but also to the viewer's brain. Let me demonstrate this based on three projects.The first one has to do with making sound visible. Now as you may know, sound travels in waves, so if you have a speaker, a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal, transform it into a vibration, which is then transported through the air, is captured by our ear, and transformed into an audio signal again. Now I was thinking, how can I make those sound waves visible? So I came up with the following setup. I took a speaker, I placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker, and then I added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker. And now, if I would play a sound through that speaker, it would cause the crystals to move up and down. Now this happens very fast, in the blink of an eye, so, together with LG, we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second. Let me show you what this looks like.(Music: ""Teardrop"" by Massive Attack)(Applause)Thank you very much. I agree, it looks pretty amazing.But I have to tell you a funny story. I got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in Los Angeles. Now in Los Angeles, you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches, but I got mine indoors, and what happened is that, if you're shooting at 3,000 frames per second, you need to have a silly amount of light, lots of lights. So we had this speaker set up, and we had the camera facing it, and lots of lights pointing at the speaker, and I would set up the speaker, put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker, and we would do this over and over again, and it was until midday that I realized that I had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker. What was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side, so the right side of my face was completely red and I looked like the Phantom of the Opera for the rest of the week.Let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances. Has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid? Ah, some of you have. Excellent. Should I skip that part?(Laughter)Ferrofluid has a very strange behavior. It's a liquid that is completely black. It's got an oily consistency. And it's got tiny little particles of metal in it, which makes it magnetic. So if I now put this liquid into a magnetic field, it would change its appearance.Now I've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you. So I've got a camera pointing down at this plate, and underneath that plate, there is a magnet. Now I'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet.Let's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more. Excellent.So what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes. This is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid. Now this looks already quite interesting, but let me now add some watercolors to it. Those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with. You wouldn't paint with syringes, but it works just the same. So what happened now is, when the watercolor was flowing into the structure, the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid. That's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic. That means it doesn't mix with the water. And at the same time, it tries to maintain its position above the magnet, and therefore, it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint. So that was the second project.Let me now turn to the last project, which involves the national beverage of Scotland. (Laughter)This image, and also this one, were made using whiskey. Now you might ask yourself, how did he do that? Did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper? I can assure you I was fully conscious while I was taking those pictures.Now, whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol, and alcohol has got some very interesting properties. Maybe you have experienced some of those properties before, but I am talking about the physical properties, not the other ones. So when I open the bottle, the alcohol molecules would spread in the air, and that's because alcohol is a very volatile substance. And at the same time, alcohol is highly flammable. And it was with those two properties that I was able to create the images that you're seeing right now.Let me demonstrate this over here. And what I have here is an empty glass vessel. It's got nothing in it. And now I'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey. Add some more. Now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle. And now, let's set that on fire.(Laughter)So that's all that happens. It goes really fast, and it's not that impressive. I could do it again to show it one more time, but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey, and that I should rather drink it.But let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what I just showed you in this live demonstration. So what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom, burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol. So the images that you saw at the beginning, they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle, and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees. So that's how those images were made.(Applause)Thank you.So, I have now showed you three projects, and you might ask yourself, what is it good for? What's the idea behind it? Is it just a waste of whiskey? Is it just some strange materials? Those three projects, they're based on very simple scientific phenomena, such as magnetism, the sound waves, or over here, the physical properties of a substance, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way, and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fabian_oefner_psychedelic_science
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"So, we used to solve big problems. On July 21st, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed out of Apollo 11's lunar module and descended onto the Sea of Tranquility. Armstrong and Aldrin were alone, but their presence on the moon's gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive, collective effort.The Apollo program was the greatest peacetime mobilization in the history of the United States. To get to the moon, NASA spent around 180 billion dollars in today's money, or four percent of the federal budget. Apollo employed around 400,000 people and demanded the collaboration of 20,000 companies, universities and government agencies. People died, including the crew of Apollo 1. But before the Apollo program ended, 24 men flew to the moon. Twelve walked on its surface, of whom Aldrin, following the death of Armstrong last year, is now the most senior.So why did they go? They didn't bring much back: 841 pounds of old rocks, and something all 24 later emphasized — a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home. Why did they go? The cynical answer is they went because President Kennedy wanted to show the Soviets that his nation had the better rockets. But Kennedy's own words at Rice University in 1962 provide a better clue.(Video) John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. (Applause) We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.Jason Pontin: To contemporaries, Apollo wasn't only a victory of West over East in the Cold War. At the time, the strongest emotion was of wonder at the transcendent powers of technology. They went because it was a big thing to do. Landing on the moon occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. The first half of the 20th century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis. In the middle years of the century, polio was eradicated and smallpox eliminated. Technology itself seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler in 1970 called ""accelerative thrust."" For most of human history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail, but in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 flew at 25,000 miles an hour.Since 1970, no human beings have been back to the moon. No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 10, and blithe optimism about technology's powers has evaporated as big problems we had imagined technology would solve, such as going to Mars, creating clean energy, curing cancer, or feeding the world have come to seem intractably hard.I remember watching the liftoff of Apollo 17. I was five years old, and my mother told me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of a Saturn V rocket. I vaguely knew this was to be the last of the moon missions, but I was absolutely certain there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime.So ""Something happened to our capacity to solve big problems with technology"" has become a commonplace. You hear it all the time. We've heard it over the last two days here at TED. It feels as if technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys, with things like iPhones and apps and social media, or algorithms that speed automated trading. There's nothing wrong with most of these things. They've expanded and enriched our lives. But they don't solve humanity's big problems.What happened? So there is a parochial explanation in Silicon Valley, which admits that it has been funding less ambitious companies than it did in the years when it financed Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Genentech. Silicon Valley says the markets are to blame, in particular the incentives that venture capitalists offer to entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley says that venture investing shifted away from funding transformational ideas and towards funding incremental problems or even fake problems. But I don't think that explanation is good enough. It mostly explains what's wrong with Silicon Valley. Even when venture capitalists were at their most risk-happy, they preferred small investments, tiny investments that offered an exit within 10 years. V.C.s have always struggled to invest profitably in technologies such as energy whose capital requirements are huge and whose development is long and lengthy, and V.C.s have never, never funded the development of technologies meant to solve big problems that possess no immediate commercial value. No, the reasons we can't solve big problems are more complicated and more profound.Sometimes we choose not to solve big problems. We could go to Mars if we want. NASA even has the outline of a plan. But going to Mars would follow a political decision with popular appeal, and that will never happen. We won't go to Mars, because everyone thinks there are more important things to do here on Earth.Sometimes, we can't solve big problems because our political systems fail. Today, less than two percent of the world's energy consumption derives from advanced, renewable sources such as solar, wind and biofuels, less than two percent, and the reason is purely economic. Coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. We want alternative energy sources that can compete on price. None exist. Now, technologists, business leaders and economists all basically agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development of alternative energy: mostly, a significant increase in energy research and development, and some kind of price on carbon. But there's no hope in the present political climate that we will see U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect that consensus.Sometimes, big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so. Famines were long understood to be caused by failures in food supply. But 30 years of research have taught us that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. Technology can improve things like crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food, but there will be famines so long as there are bad governments.Finally, big problems sometimes elude solution because we don't really understand the problem. President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, but we soon discovered there are many kinds of cancer, most of them fiendishly resistant to therapy, and it is only in the last 10 years that effective, viable therapies have come to seem real. Hard problems are hard.It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology. We can, we must, but these four elements must all be present: Political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem; institutions must support its solution; It must really be a technological problem; and we must understand it.The Apollo mission, which has become a kind of metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria. But it is an irreproducible model for the future. It is not 1961. There is no galvanizing contest like the Cold War, no politician like John Kennedy who can heroize the difficult and the dangerous, and no popular science fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. Most of all, going to the moon turned out to be easy. It was just three days away. And arguably it wasn't even solving much of a problem.We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won. God knows, we don't lack for the challenges.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jason_pontin_can_technology_solve_our_big_problems
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"I think we're all aware that the world today is full of problems. We've been hearing them today and yesterday and every day for decades. Serious problems, big problems, pressing problems. Poor nutrition, access to water, climate change, deforestation, lack of skills, insecurity, not enough food, not enough healthcare, pollution. There's problem after problem, and I think what really separates this time from any time I can remember in my brief time on Earth is the awareness of these problems. We're all very aware.Why are we having so much trouble dealing with these problems? That's the question I've been struggling with, coming from my very different perspective. I'm not a social problem guy. I'm a guy that works with business, helps business make money. God forbid. So why are we having so many problems with these social problems, and really is there any role for business, and if so, what is that role? I think that in order to address that question, we have to step back and think about how we've understood and pondered both the problems and the solutions to these great social challenges that we face.Now, I think many have seen business as the problem, or at least one of the problems, in many of the social challenges we face. You know, think of the fast food industry, the drug industry, the banking industry. You know, this is a low point in the respect for business. Business is not seen as the solution. It's seen as the problem now, for most people. And rightly so, in many cases. There's a lot of bad actors out there that have done the wrong thing, that actually have made the problem worse. So this perspective is perhaps justified.How have we tended to see the solutions to these social problems, these many issues that we face in society? Well, we've tended to see the solutions in terms of NGOs, in terms of government, in terms of philanthropy. Indeed, the kind of unique organizational entity of this age is this tremendous rise of NGOs and social organizations. This is a unique, new organizational form that we've seen grown up. Enormous innovation, enormous energy, enormous talent now has been mobilized through this structure to try to deal with all of these challenges. And many of us here are deeply involved in that.I'm a business school professor, but I've actually founded, I think, now, four nonprofits. Whenever I got interested and became aware of a societal problem, that was what I did, form a nonprofit. That was the way we've thought about how to deal with these issues. Even a business school professor has thought about it that way.But I think at this moment, we've been at this for quite a while. We've been aware of these problems for decades. We have decades of experience with our NGOs and with our government entities, and there's an awkward reality. The awkward reality is we're not making fast enough progress. We're not winning. These problems still seem very daunting and very intractable, and any solutions we're achieving are small solutions. We're making incremental progress.What's the fundamental problem we have in dealing with these social problems? If we cut all the complexity away, we have the problem of scale. We can't scale. We can make progress. We can show benefits. We can show results. We can make things better. We're helping. We're doing better. We're doing good. We can't scale. We can't make a large-scale impact on these problems. Why is that? Because we don't have the resources. And that's really clear now. And that's clearer now than it's been for decades. There's simply not enough money to deal with any of these problems at scale using the current model. There's not enough tax revenue, there's not enough philanthropic donations, to deal with these problems the way we're dealing with them now. We've got to confront that reality. And the scarcity of resources for dealing with these problems is only growing, certainly in the advanced world today, with all the fiscal problems we face.So if it's fundamentally a resource problem, where are the resources in society? How are those resources really created, the resources we're going to need to deal with all these societal challenges? Well there, I think the answer is very clear: They're in business. All wealth is actually created by business. Business creates wealth when it meets needs at a profit. That's how all wealth is created. It's meeting needs at a profit that leads to taxes and that leads to incomes and that leads to charitable donations. That's where all the resources come from. Only business can actually create resources. Other institutions can utilize them to do important work, but only business can create them. And business creates them when it's able to meet a need at a profit. The resources are overwhelmingly generated by business. The question then is, how do we tap into this? How do we tap into this? Business generates those resources when it makes a profit. That profit is that small difference between the price and the cost it takes to produce whatever solution business has created to whatever problem they're trying to solve. But that profit is the magic. Why? Because that profit allows whatever solution we've created to be infinitely scalable. Because if we can make a profit, we can do it for 10, 100, a million, 100 million, a billion. The solution becomes self-sustaining. That's what business does when it makes a profit.Now what does this all have to do with social problems? Well, one line of thinking is, let's take this profit and redeploy it into social problems. Business should give more. Business should be more responsible. And that's been the path that we've been on in business. But again, this path that we've been on is not getting us where we need to go.Now, I started out as a strategy professor, and I'm still a strategy professor. I'm proud of that. But I've also, over the years, worked more and more on social issues. I've worked on healthcare, the environment, economic development, reducing poverty, and as I worked more and more in the social field, I started seeing something that had a profound impact on me and my whole life, in a way.The conventional wisdom in economics and the view in business has historically been that actually, there's a tradeoff between social performance and economic performance. The conventional wisdom has been that business actually makes a profit by causing a social problem. The classic example is pollution. If business pollutes, it makes more money than if it tried to reduce that pollution. Reducing pollution is expensive, therefore businesses don't want to do it. It's profitable to have an unsafe working environment. It's too expensive to have a safe working environment, therefore business makes more money if they don't have a safe working environment. That's been the conventional wisdom. A lot of companies have fallen into that conventional wisdom. They resisted environmental improvement. They resisted workplace improvement. That thinking has led to, I think, much of the behavior that we have come to criticize in business, that I come to criticize in business.But the more deeply I got into all these social issues, one after another, and actually, the more I tried to address them myself, personally, in a few cases, through nonprofits that I was involved with, the more I found actually that the reality is the opposite. Business does not profit from causing social problems, actually not in any fundamental sense. That's a very simplistic view. The deeper we get into these issues, the more we start to understand that actually business profits from solving from social problems. That's where the real profit comes. Let's take pollution. We've learned today that actually reducing pollution and emissions is generating profit. It saves money. It makes the business more productive and efficient. It doesn't waste resources. Having a safer working environment actually, and avoiding accidents, it makes the business more profitable, because it's a sign of good processes. Accidents are expensive and costly. Issue by issue by issue, we start to learn that actually there's no trade-off between social progress and economic efficiency in any fundamental sense. Another issue is health. I mean, what we've found is actually health of employees is something that business should treasure, because that health allows those employees to be more productive and come to work and not be absent. The deeper work, the new work, the new thinking on the interface between business and social problems is actually showing that there's a fundamental, deep synergy, particularly if you're not thinking in the very short run. In the very short run, you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking that there's fundamentally opposing goals, but in the long run, ultimately, we're learning in field after field that this is simply not true.So how could we tap into the power of business to address the fundamental problems that we face? Imagine if we could do that, because if we could do it, we could scale. We could tap into this enormous resource pool and this organizational capacity.And guess what? That's happening now, finally, partly because of people like you who have raised these issues now for year after year and decade after decade. We see organizations like Dow Chemical leading the revolution away from trans fat and saturated fat with innovative new products. This is an example of Jain Irrigation. This is a company that's brought drip irrigation technology to thousands and millions of farmers, reducing substantially the use of water. We see companies like the Brazilian forestry company Fibria that's figured out how to avoid tearing down old growth forest and using eucalyptus and getting much more yield per hectare of pulp and making much more paper than you could make by cutting down those old trees. You see companies like Cisco that are training so far four million people in I.T. skills to actually, yes, be responsible, but help expand the opportunity to disseminate I.T. technology and grow the whole business. There's a fundamental opportunity for business today to impact and address these social problems, and this opportunity is the largest business opportunity we see in business.And the question is, how can we get business thinking to adapt this issue of shared value? This is what I call shared value: addressing a social issue with a business model. That's shared value. Shared value is capitalism, but it's a higher kind of capitalism. It's capitalism as it was ultimately meant to be, meeting important needs, not incrementally competing for trivial differences in product attributes and market share. Shared value is when we can create social value and economic value simultaneously. It's finding those opportunities that will unleash the greatest possibility we have to actually address these social problems because we can scale. We can address shared value at multiple levels. It's real. It's happening.But in order to get this solution working, we have to now change how business sees itself, and this is thankfully underway. Businesses got trapped into the conventional wisdom that they shouldn't worry about social problems, that this was sort of something on the side, that somebody else was doing it. We're now seeing companies embrace this idea. But we also have to recognize business is not going to do this as effectively as if we have NGOs and government working in partnership with business. The new NGOs that are really moving the needle are the ones that have found these partnerships, that have found these ways to collaborate. The governments that are making the most progress are the governments that have found ways to enable shared value in business rather than see government as the only player that has to call the shots. And government has many ways in which it could impact the willingness and the ability of companies to compete in this way.I think if we can get business seeing itself differently, and if we can get others seeing business differently, we can change the world. I know it. I'm seeing it. I'm feeling it. Young people, I think, my Harvard Business School students, are getting it. If we can break down this sort of divide, this unease, this tension, this sense that we're not fundamentally collaborating here in driving these social problems, we can break this down, and we finally, I think, can have solutions.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_porter_why_business_can_be_good_at_solving_social_problems
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"Here's a question we need to rethink together: What should be the role of money and markets in our societies?Today, there are very few things that money can't buy. If you're sentenced to a jail term in Santa Barbara, California, you should know that if you don't like the standard accommodations, you can buy a prison cell upgrade. It's true. For how much, do you think? What would you guess? Five hundred dollars? It's not the Ritz-Carlton. It's a jail! Eighty-two dollars a night. Eighty-two dollars a night. If you go to an amusement park and don't want to stand in the long lines for the popular rides, there is now a solution. In many theme parks, you can pay extra to jump to the head of the line. They call them Fast Track or VIP tickets.And this isn't only happening in amusement parks. In Washington, D.C., long lines, queues sometimes form for important Congressional hearings. Now some people don't like to wait in long queues, maybe overnight, even in the rain. So now, for lobbyists and others who are very keen to attend these hearings but don't like to wait, there are companies, line-standing companies, and you can go to them. You can pay them a certain amount of money, they hire homeless people and others who need a job to stand waiting in the line for as long as it takes, and the lobbyist, just before the hearing begins, can take his or her place at the head of the line and a seat in the front of the room. Paid line standing.It's happening, the recourse to market mechanisms and market thinking and market solutions, in bigger arenas. Take the way we fight our wars. Did you know that, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were more private military contractors on the ground than there were U.S. military troops? Now this isn't because we had a public debate about whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies, but this is what has happened.Over the past three decades, we have lived through a quiet revolution. We've drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to becoming market societies. The difference is this: A market economy is a tool, a valuable and effective tool, for organizing productive activity, but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It's a way of life, in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life: personal relations, family life, health, education, politics, law, civic life.Now, why worry? Why worry about our becoming market societies? For two reasons, I think. One of them has to do with inequality. The more things money can buy, the more affluence, or the lack of it, matters. If the only thing that money determined was access to yachts or fancy vacations or BMWs, then inequality wouldn't matter very much. But when money comes increasingly to govern access to the essentials of the good life — decent health care, access to the best education, political voice and influence in campaigns — when money comes to govern all of those things, inequality matters a great deal. And so the marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality and its social and civic consequence. That's one reason to worry.There's a second reason apart from the worry about inequality, and it's this: with some social goods and practices, when market thinking and market values enter, they may change the meaning of those practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about.I'd like to take an example of a controversial use of a market mechanism, a cash incentive, and see what you think about it. Many schools struggle with the challenge of motivating kids, especially kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, to study hard, to do well in school, to apply themselves. Some economists have proposed a market solution: Offer cash incentives to kids for getting good grades or high test scores or for reading books. They've tried this, actually. They've done some experiments in some major American cities. In New York, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., they've tried this, offering 50 dollars for an A, 35 dollars for a B. In Dallas, Texas, they have a program that offers eight-year-olds two dollars for each book they read.So let's see what — Some people are in favor, some people are opposed to this cash incentive to motivate achievement. Let's see what people here think about it. Imagine that you are the head of a major school system, and someone comes to you with this proposal. And let's say it's a foundation. They will provide the funds. You don't have to take it out of your budget. How many would be in favor and how many would be opposed to giving it a try? Let's see by a show of hands.First, how many think it might at least be worth a try to see if it would work? Raise your hand.And how many would be opposed? How many would —So the majority here are opposed, but a sizable minority are in favor. Let's have a discussion. Let's start with those of you who object, who would rule it out even before trying. What would be your reason? Who will get our discussion started? Yes?Heike Moses: Hello everyone, I'm Heike, and I think it just kills the intrinsic motivation, so in the respect that children, if they would like to read, you just take this incentive away in just paying them, so it just changes behavior. Michael Sandel: Takes the intrinsic incentive away.What is, or should be, the intrinsic motivation?HM: Well, the intrinsic motivation should be to learn.MS: To learn. HM: To get to know the world. And then, if you stop paying them, what happens then? Then they stop reading?MS: Now, let's see if there's someone who favors, who thinks it's worth trying this.Elizabeth Loftus: I'm Elizabeth Loftus, and you said worth a try, so why not try it and do the experiment and measure things? MS: And measure. And what would you measure? You'd measure how many — EL: How many books they read and how many books they continued to read after you stopped paying them.MS: Oh, after you stopped paying. All right, what about that?HM: To be frank, I just think this is, not to offend anyone, a very American way.(Laughter) (Applause)MS: All right. What's emerged from this discussion is the following question: Will the cash incentive drive out or corrupt or crowd out the higher motivation, the intrinsic lesson that we hope to convey, which is to learn to love to learn and to read for their own sakes? And people disagree about what the effect will be, but that seems to be the question, that somehow a market mechanism or a cash incentive teaches the wrong lesson, and if it does, what will become of these children later?I should tell you what's happened with these experiments. The cash for good grades has had very mixed results, for the most part has not resulted in higher grades. The two dollars for each book did lead those kids to read more books. It also led them to read shorter books.(Laughter)But the real question is, what will become of these kids later? Will they have learned that reading is a chore, a form of piecework to be done for pay, that's the worry, or may it lead them to read maybe for the wrong reason initially but then lead them to fall in love with reading for its own sake?Now, what this, even this brief debate, brings out is something that many economists overlook. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they exchange. Market exchange, they assume, doesn't change the meaning or value of the goods being exchanged. This may be true enough if we're talking about material goods. If you sell me a flat screen television or give me one as a gift, it will be the same good. It will work the same either way. But the same may not be true if we're talking about nonmaterial goods and social practices such as teaching and learning or engaging together in civic life. In those domains, bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out nonmarket values and attitudes worth caring about. Once we see that markets and commerce, when extended beyond the material domain, can change the character of the goods themselves, can change the meaning of the social practices, as in the example of teaching and learning, we have to ask where markets belong and where they don't, where they may actually undermine values and attitudes worth caring about. But to have this debate, we have to do something we're not very good at, and that is to reason together in public about the value and the meaning of the social practices we prize, from our bodies to family life to personal relations to health to teaching and learning to civic life.Now these are controversial questions, and so we tend to shrink from them. In fact, during the past three decades, when market reasoning and market thinking have gathered force and gained prestige, our public discourse during this time has become hollowed out, empty of larger moral meaning. For fear of disagreement, we shrink from these questions. But once we see that markets change the character of goods, we have to debate among ourselves these bigger questions about how to value goods.One of the most corrosive effects of putting a price on everything is on commonality, the sense that we are all in it together. Against the background of rising inequality, marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who are of modest means increasingly live separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.This isn't good for democracy, nor is it a satisfying way to live, even for those of us who can afford to buy our way to the head of the line. Here's why. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but what it does require is that citizens share in a common life. What matters is that people of different social backgrounds and different walks of life encounter one another, bump up against one another in the ordinary course of life, because this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good.And so, in the end, the question of markets is not mainly an economic question. It's really a question of how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale, or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_why_we_shouldn_t_trust_markets_with_our_civic_life
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"The work of a transportation commissioner isn't just about stop signs and traffic signals. It involves the design of cities and the design of city streets. Streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has, and yet it's an asset that's largely hidden in plain sight. And the lesson from New York over the past six years is that you can update this asset. You can remake your streets quickly, inexpensively, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to look at them a little differently.This is important because we live in an urban age. For the first time in history, most people live in cities, and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years, the population is going to double on the planet. So the design of cities is a key issue for our future. Mayor Bloomberg recognized this when he launched PlaNYC in 2007. The plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace, and that if we're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here, we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure.For many cities, our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations. This is a picture of Times Square in the '50s, and despite all of the technological innovation, cultural changes, political changes, this is Times Square in 2008. Not much has changed in those 50 years. So we worked hard to refocus our agenda, to maximize efficient mobility, providing more room for buses, more room for bikes, more room for people to enjoy the city, and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them.We set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks. Having goals is important, because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction, you need to know where you're going and why.The design of a street can tell you everything about what's expected on it. In this case, it's expected that you shelter in place. The design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point A to point B, and it misses all the other ways that a street is used.When we started out, we did some early surveys about how our streets were used, and we found that New York City was largely a city without seats. Pictures like this, people perched on a fire hydrant, not the mark of a world-class city. (Laughter) It's not great for parents with kids. It's not great for seniors. It's not great for retailers. It's probably not good for the fire hydrants. Certainly not good for the police department.So we worked hard to change that balance, and probably the best example of our new approach is in Times Square. Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through Times Square, and people had tried for years to make changes. They changed signals, they changed lanes, everything they could do to make Times Square work better. It was dangerous, hard to cross the street. It was chaotic. And so, none of those approaches worked, so we took a different approach, a bigger approach, looked at our street differently. And so we did a six-month pilot. We closed Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space. And the temporary materials are an important part of the program, because we were able to show how it worked. And I work for a data-driven mayor, as you probably know. So it was all about the data. So if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it, and if it didn't work, no harm, no foul, we could put it back the way that it was, because these were temporary materials. And that was a very big part of the buy-in, much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back. But the results were overwhelming. Traffic moved better. It was much safer. Five new flagship stores opened. It's been a total home run. Times Square is now one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet. And this is an important lesson, because it doesn't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space.Every project has its surprises, and one of the big surprises with Times Square was how quickly people flocked to the space. We put out the orange barrels, and people just materialized immediately into the street. It was like a Star Trek episode, you know? They weren't there before, and then zzzzzt! All the people arrived. Where they'd been, I don't know, but they were there. And this actually posed an immediate challenge for us, because the street furniture had not yet arrived. So we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs, and we put those lawn chairs out on the street. And the lawn chairs became the talk of the town. It wasn't about that we'd closed Broadway to cars. It was about those lawn chairs. ""What did you think about the lawn chairs?"" ""Do you like the color of the lawn chairs?"" So if you've got a big, controversial project, think about lawn chairs. (Laughter)This is the final design for Times Square, and it will create a level surface, sidewalk to sidewalk, beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards, creating a great new energy on the street, and we think it's going to really create a great place, a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name. And we will be cutting the ribbon on this, the first phase, this December.With all of our projects, our public space projects, we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces, move the furniture, take care of the plants. This is in front of Macy's, and they were a big supporter of this new approach, because they understood that more people on foot is better for business.And we've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods. This is in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and you can see the short leg that was there, used for cars, that's not really needed. So what we did is we painted over the street, put down epoxy gravel, and connected the triangle to the storefronts on Grand Avenue, created a great new public space, and it's been great for businesses along Grand Avenue. We did the same thing in DUMBO, in Brooklyn, and this is one of our first projects that we did, and we took an underutilized, pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend. And in the three years since we've implemented the project, retail sales have increased 172 percent. And that's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood.We've moved very, very quickly with paint and temporary materials. Instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done, we've done it with paint and temporary materials. And the proof is not in a computer model. It is in the real-world performance of the street. You can have fun with paint.All told, we've created over 50 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city. We've repurposed 26 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space.I think one of the successes is in its emulation. You're seeing this kind of approach, since we've painted Times Square, you've seen this approach in Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, you name it. This is actually in Los Angeles, and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets. But I can't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods.We also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program, and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York. I think it's fair to say — (Applause) — it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike, and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States.And we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes. You can see the map in 2007. This is how it looked in 2013 after we built out 350 miles of on-street bike lanes. I love this because it looks so easy. You just click it, and they're there. We also brought new designs to the street. We created the first parking-protected bike lane in the United States.(Applause)We protected bikers by floating parking lanes, and it's been great. Bike volumes have spiked. Injuries to all users, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, are all down 50 percent. And we've built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes, and now you're seeing them pop up all over the country. And you can see here that this strategy has worked. The blue line is the number of cyclists, soaring. The green line is the number of bike lanes. And the yellow line is the number of injuries, which has remained essentially flat. After this big expansion, you've seen no net increase in injuries, and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers.Not everybody liked the new bike lanes, and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago. One Brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West ""the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip.""(Laughter)And this is what we had done. So if you dig below the headlines, though, you'll see that the people were far ahead of the press, far ahead of the politicians. In fact, I think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers. Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers support these bike lanes.This summer, we launched Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the United States, with 6,000 bikes and 330 stations located next to one another. Since we've launched the program, three million trips have been taken. People have ridden seven million miles. That's 280 times around the globe. And so with this little blue key, you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option.And daily usage just continues to soar. What has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of New York is 36,000 people. The high that we've had so far is 44,000 in August. Yesterday, 40,000 people used Citi Bike in New York City. The bikes are being used six times a day. And I think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets. In the past, it looked like the guy on the left, ninja-clad bike messenger. And today, cyclists look like New York City looks. It's diverse — young, old, black, white, women, kids, all getting on a bike. It's an affordable, safe, convenient way to get around. Quite radical.We've also brought this approach to our buses, and New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America, the slowest bus speeds. As everybody knows, you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus. And so we focused on the most congested areas of New York City, built out six bus rapid transit lines, 57 miles of new speedy bus lanes. You pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus. We've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane, and it's been a huge success.I think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched Citi Bike, and I was riding Citi Bike up First Avenue in my protected bike lane, and I looked over and I saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands, and the traffic was flowing, birds were singing — (Laughter) — the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes. It was just fantastic.And this is how it looked six years ago.And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it's possible to change your streets quickly, it's not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to reimagine your streets. They're hidden in plain sight.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janette_sadik_khan_new_york_s_streets_not_so_mean_any_more
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"""Iran is Israel's best friend, and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran.""Believe it or not, this is a quote from an Israeli prime minister, but it's not Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir from the era of the Shah. It's actually from Yitzhak Rabin. The year is 1987. Ayatollah Khomeini is still alive, and much like Ahmadinejad today, he's using the worst rhetoric against Israel. Yet, Rabin referred to Iran as a geostrategic friend.Today, when we hear the threats of war and the high rhetoric, we're oftentimes led to believe that this is yet another one of those unsolvable Middle Eastern conflicts with roots as old as the region itself. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope today to show you why that is.The relations between the Iranian and the Jewish people throughout history has actually been quite positive, starting in 539 B.C., when King Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity. A third of the Jewish population stayed in Babylonia. They're today's Iraqi Jews. A third migrated to Persia. They're today's Iranian Jews, still 25,000 of them living in Iran, making them the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel itself. And a third returned to historic Palestine, did the second rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, financed, incidentally, by Persian tax money.But even in modern times, relations have been close at times. Rabin's statement was a reflection of decades of security and intelligence collaboration between the two, which in turn was born out of perception of common threats. Both states feared the Soviet Union and strong Arab states such as Egypt and Iraq. And, in addition, the Israeli doctrine of the periphery, the idea that Israel's security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-Arab states in the periphery of the region in order to balance the Arab states in its vicinity. Now, from the Shah's perspective, though, he wanted to keep this as secret as possible, so when Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, traveled to Iran in the '70s, he usually wore a wig so that no one would recognize him. The Iranians built a special tarmac at the airport in Tehran, far away from the central terminal, so that no one would notice the large number of Israeli planes shuttling between Tel Aviv and Tehran.Now, did all of this end with the Islamic revolution in 1979? In spite of the very clear anti-Israeli ideology of the new regime, the geopolitical logic for their collaboration lived on, because they still had common threats. And when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Israel feared an Iraqi victory and actively helped Iran by selling it arms and providing it with spare parts for Iran's American weaponry at a moment when Iran was very vulnerable because of an American arms embargo that Israel was more than happy to violate. In fact, back in the 1980s, it was Israel that lobbied Washington to talk to Iran, to sell arms to Iran, and not pay attention to Iran's anti-Israeli ideology. And this, of course, climaxed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.But with the end of the Cold War came also the end of the Israeli-Iranian cold peace. Suddenly, the two common threats that had pushed them closer together throughout decades, more or less evaporated. The Soviet Union collapsed, Iraq was defeated, and a new environment was created in the region in which both of them felt more secure, but they were also now left unchecked. Without Iraq balancing Iran, Iran could now become a threat, some in Israel argued. In fact, the current dynamic that you see between Iran and Israel has its roots more so in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the region after the Cold War than in the events of 1979, because at this point, Iran and Israel emerge as two of the most powerful states in the region, and rather than viewing each other as potential security partners, they increasingly came to view each other as rivals and competitors. So Israel, who in the 1980s lobbied for and improved U.S.-Iran relations now feared a U.S.-Iran rapprochement, thinking that it would come at Israel's security interests' expense, and instead sought to put Iran in increased isolation.Ironically, this was happening at a time when Iran was more interested in peacemaking with Washington than to see to Israel's destruction. Iran had put itself in isolation because of its radicalism, and after having helped the United States indirectly in the war against Iraq in 1991, the Iranians were hoping that they would be rewarded by being included in the post-war security architecture of the region. But Washington chose to ignore Iran's outreach, as it would a decade later in Afghanistan, and instead moved to intensify Iran's isolation, and it is at this point, around 1993, '94, that Iran begins to translate its anti-Israeli ideology into operational policy. The Iranians believed that whatever they did, even if they moderated their policies, the U.S. would continue to seek Iran's isolation, and the only way Iran could compel Washington to change its position was by imposing a cost on the U.S. if it didn't. The easiest target was the peace process, and now the Iranian ideological bark was to be accompanied by a nonconventional bite, and Iran began supporting extensively Palestinian Islamist groups that it previously had shunned. In some ways, this sounds paradoxical, but according to Martin Indyk of the Clinton administration, the Iranians had not gotten it entirely wrong, because the more peace there would be between Israel and Palestine, the U.S. believed, the more Iran would get isolated. The more Iran got isolated, the more peace there would be. So according to Indyk, and these are his words, the Iranians had an interest to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment. To defeat our policy of containment, not about ideology.But throughout even the worst times of their entanglement, all sides have reached out to each other. Netanyahu, when he got elected in 1996, reached out to the Iranians to see if there were any ways that the doctrine of the periphery could be resurrected. Tehran was not interested. A few years later, the Iranians sent a comprehensive negotiation proposal to the Bush administration, a proposal that revealed that there was some potential of getting Iran and Israel back on terms again. The Bush administration did not even respond. All sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.But this is not an ancient conflict. This is not even an ideological conflict. The ebbs and flows of hostility have not shifted with ideological zeal, but rather with changes in the geopolitical landscape. When Iran and Israel's security imperatives dictated collaboration, they did so in spite of lethal ideological opposition to each other. When Iran's ideological impulses collided with its strategic interests, the strategic interests always prevailed. This is good news, because it means that neither war nor enmity is a foregone conclusion.But some want war. Some believe or say that it's 1938, Iran is Germany, and Ahmadinejad is Hitler. If we accept this to be true, that indeed it is 1938, Iran is Germany, Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then the question we have to ask ourself is, who wishes to play the role of Neville Chamberlain? Who will risk peace? This is an analogy that is deliberately aimed at eliminating diplomacy, and when you eliminate diplomacy, you make war inevitable. In an ideological conflict, there can be no truce, no draw, no compromise, only victory or defeat.But rather than making war inevitable by viewing this as ideological, we would be wise to seek ways to make peace possible. Iran and Israel's conflict is a new phenomenon, only a few decades old in a history of 2,500 years, and precisely because its roots are geopolitical, it means that solutions can be found, compromises can be struck, however difficult it yet may be. After all, it was Yitzhak Rabin himself who said, ""You don't make peace with your friends. You make it with your enemies.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/trita_parsi_iran_and_israel_peace_is_possible
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"I'm a physician trained in infectious diseases, and following my training, I moved to Somalia from San Francisco. And my goodbye greeting from the chief of infectious diseases at San Francisco General was, ""Gary, this is the biggest mistake you'll ever make.""But I landed in a refugee situation that had a million refugees in 40 camps, and there were six of us doctors. There were many epidemics there. My responsibilities were largely related to tuberculosis, and then we got struck by an epidemic of cholera. So it was the spread of tuberculosis and the spread of cholera that I was responsible for inhibiting. And in order to do this work, we, of course, because of the limitation in health workers, had to recruit refugees to be a specialized new category of health worker. Following three years of work in Somalia, I got picked up by the World Health Organization, and got assigned to the epidemics of AIDS. My primary responsibility was Uganda, but also I worked in Rwanda and Burundi and Zaire, now Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, and several other countries. And my last assignment there was to run a unit called intervention development, which was responsible for designing interventions.After 10 years of working overseas, I was exhausted. I really had very little left. I had been traveling to one country after another. I was emotionally feeling very isolated. I wanted to come home. I'd seen a lot of death, in particular epidemic death, and epidemic death has a different feel to it. It's full of panic and fear, and I'd heard the women wailing and crying in the desert. And I wanted to come home and take a break and maybe start over.I was not aware of any epidemic problems in America. In fact, I wasn't aware of any problems in America. In fact — seriously. And in fact I would visit friends of mine, and I noticed that they had water that came right into their homes. How many of you have such a situation? (Laughter) And some of them, many of them actually, had water that came into more than one room. And I noticed that they would move this little thermoregulatory device to change the temperature in their home by one degree or two degrees. And now I do that.And I really didn't know what I would do, but friends of mine began telling me about children shooting other children with guns. And I asked the question, what are you doing about it? What are you in America doing about it? And there were two essential explanations or ideas that were prevalent.And one was punishment. And this I had heard about before. We who had worked in behavior knew that punishment was something that was discussed but also that it was highly overvalued. It was not a main driver of behavior, nor was it a main driver of behavior change. And besides that, it reminded me of ancient epidemics that were previously completely misunderstood because the science hadn't been there before, epidemics of plague or typhus or leprosy, where the prevalent ideas were that there were bad people or bad humors or bad air, and widows were dragged around the moat, and dungeons were part of the solution.The other explanation or, in a way, the solution suggested, is please fix all of these things: the schools, the community, the homes, the families, everything. And I'd heard this before as well. I'd called this the ""everything"" theory, or EOE: Everything On Earth. But we'd also realized in treating other processes and problems that sometimes you don't need to treat everything.And so the sense that I had was there was a giant gap here. The problem of violence was stuck, and this has historically been the case in many other issues. Diarrheal diseases had been stuck. Malaria had been stuck. Frequently, a strategy has to be rethought. It's not as if I had any idea what it would look like, but there was a sense that we would have to do something with new categories of workers and something having to do with behavior change and something having to do with public education.But I began to ask questions and search out the usual things that I had been exploring before, like, what do the maps look like? What do the graphs look like? What does the data look like? And the maps of violence in most U.S. cities looked like this. There was clustering. This reminded me of clustering that we'd seen also in infectious epidemics, for example cholera. And then we looked at the maps, and the maps showed this typical wave upon wave upon wave, because all epidemics are combinations of many epidemics. And it also looked like infectious epidemics. And then we asked the question, well what really predicts a case of violence? And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a case of violence is a preceding case of violence. Which also sounds like, if there is a case of flu, someone gave someone a case of flu, or a cold, or the greatest risk factor of tuberculosis is having been exposed to tuberculosis.And so we see that violence is, in a way, behaving like a contagious disease. We're aware of this anyway even in our common experiences or our newspaper stories of the spread of violence from fights or in gang wars or in civil wars or even in genocides.And so there's good news about this, though, because there's a way to reverse epidemics, and there's really only three things that are done to reverse epidemics, and the first of it is interrupting transmission. In order to interrupt transmission, you need to detect and find first cases. In other words, for T.B. you have to find somebody who has active T.B. who is infecting other people. Make sense? And there's special workers for doing that. For this particular problem, we designed a new category of worker who, like a SARS worker or someone looking for bird flu, might find first cases. In this case, it's someone who's very angry because someone looked at his girlfriend or owes him money, and you can find workers and train them into these specialized categories.And the second thing to do, of course, is to prevent further spread, that means to find who else has been exposed, but may not be spreading so much right now like someone with a smaller case of T.B., or someone who is just hanging out in the neighborhoods, but in the same group, and then they need to be, in a way, managed as well, particular to the specific disease process.And then the third part, the shifting the norms, and that means a whole bunch of community activities, remodeling, public education, and then you've got what you might call group immunity. And that combination of factors is how the AIDS epidemic in Uganda was very successfully reversed.And so what we decided to do in the year 2000 is kind of put this together in a way by hiring in new categories of workers, the first being violence interruptors. And then we would put all of this into place in one neighborhood in what was the worst police district in the United States at the time. So violence interruptors hired from the same group, credibility, trust, access, just like the health workers in Somalia, but designed for a different category, and trained in persuasion, cooling people down, buying time, reframing. And then another category of worker, the outreach workers, to keep people in a way on therapy for six to 24 months. Just like T.B., but the object is behavior change. And then a bunch of community activities for changing norms.Now our first experiment of this resulted in a 67-percent drop in shootings and killings in the West Garfield neighborhood of Chicago.(Applause)And this was a beautiful thing for the neighborhood itself, first 50 or 60 days, then 90 days, and then there was unfortunately another shooting in another 90 days, and the moms were hanging out in the afternoon. They were using parks they weren't using before. The sun was out. Everybody was happy.But of course, the funders said, ""Wait a second, do it again."" And so we had to then, fortunately, get the funds to repeat this experience, and this is one of the next four neighborhoods that had a 45-percent drop in shootings and killings. And since that time, this has been replicated 20 times. There have been independent evaluations supported by the Justice Department and by the CDC and performed by Johns Hopkins that have shown 30-to-50-percent and 40-to-70-percent reductions in shootings and killings using this new method. In fact, there have been three independent evaluations of this now.Now we've gotten a lot of attention as a result of this, including being featured on The New York Times' Sunday magazine cover story. The Economist in 2009 said this is ""the approach that will come to prominence."" And even a movie was made around our work. [The Interrupters]However, not so fast, because a lot of people did not agree with this way of going about it. We got a lot of criticism, a lot of opposition, and a lot of opponents. In other words, what do you mean, health problem? What do you mean, epidemic? What do you mean, no bad guys? And there's whole industries designed for managing bad people. What do you mean, hiring people who have backgrounds? My business friends said, ""Gary, you're being criticized tremendously. You must be doing something right.""(Laughter)My musician friends added the word ""dude.""So anyway, additionally, there was still this problem, and we were getting highly criticized as well for not dealing with all of these other problems. Yet we were able to manage malaria and reduce HIV and reduce diarrheal diseases in places with awful economies without healing the economy.So what's actually happened is, although there is still some opposition, the movement is clearly growing. Many of the major cities in the U.S., including New York City and Baltimore and Kansas City, their health departments are running this now. Chicago and New Orleans, the health departments are having a very large role in this. This is being embraced more by law enforcement than it had been years ago. Trauma centers and hospitals are doing their part in stepping up. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has endorsed not only the approach but the specific model. Where there's really been uptake even faster is in the international environment, where there's a 55-percent drop in the first neighborhood in Puerto Rico, where interruptions are just beginning in Honduras, where the strategy has been applied in Kenya for the recent elections, and where there have been 500 interruptions in Iraq.So violence is responding as a disease even as it behaves as a disease. So the theory, in a way, is kind of being validated by the treatment. And recently, the Institute of Medicine came out with a workshop report which went through some of the data, including the neuroscience, on how this problem is really transmitted.So I think this is good news, because it allows us an opportunity to come out of the Middle Ages, which is where I feel this field has been. It gives us an opportunity to consider the possibility of replacing some of these prisons with playgrounds or parks, and to consider the possibility of converting our neighborhoods into neighborhoods, and to allow there to be a new strategy, a new set of methods, a new set of workers: science, in a way, replacing morality. And moving away from emotions is the most important part of the solution to science as a more important part of the solution.So I didn't mean to come up with this at all. It was a matter of, I wanted actually a break, and we looked at maps, we looked at graphs, we asked some questions and tried some tools that actually have been used many times before for other things. For myself, I tried to get away from infectious diseases, and I didn't.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_slutkin_let_s_treat_violence_like_a_contagious_disease
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"So in my free time outside of Twitter I experiment a little bit with telling stories online, experimenting with what we can do with new digital tools. And in my job at Twitter, I actually spent a little bit of time working with authors and storytellers as well, helping to expand out the bounds of what people are experimenting with. And I want to talk through some examples today of things that people have done that I think are really fascinating using flexible identity and anonymity on the web and blurring the lines between fact and fiction.But I want to start and go back to the 1930s. Long before a little thing called Twitter, radio brought us broadcasts and connected millions of people to single points of broadcast. And from those single points emanated stories. Some of them were familiar stories. Some of them were new stories. And for a while they were familiar formats, but then radio began to evolve its own unique formats specific to that medium. Think about episodes that happened live on radio.Combining the live play and the serialization of written fiction, you get this new format. And the reason why I bring up radio is that I think radio is a great example of how a new medium defines new formats which then define new stories.And of course, today, we have an entirely new medium to play with, which is this online world. This is the map of verified users on Twitter and the connections between them. There are thousands upon thousands of them. Every single one of these points is its own broadcaster. We've gone to this world of many to many, where access to the tools is the only barrier to broadcasting. And I think that we should start to see wildly new formats emerge as people learn how to tell stories in this new medium. I actually believe that we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it, and those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create.I believe this starts with an evolution of existing methods. The short story, for example, people are saying that the short story is experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to e-readers, digital marketplaces. One writer, Hugh Howey, experimented with short stories on Amazon by releasing one very short story called ""Wool."" And he actually says that he didn't intend for ""Wool"" to become a series, but that the audience loved the first story so much they demanded more, and so he gave them more. He gave them ""Wool 2,"" which was a little bit longer than the first one, ""Wool 3,"" which was even longer, culminating in ""Wool 5,"" which was a 60,000-word novel. I think Howey was able to do all of this because he had the quick feedback system of e-books. He was able to write and publish in relatively short order. There was no mediator between him and the audience. It was just him directly connected with his audience and building on the feedback and enthusiasm that they were giving him. So this whole project was an experiment. It started with the one short story, and I think the experimentation actually became a part of Howey's format. And that's something that this medium enabled, was experimentation being a part of the format itself.This is a short story by the author Jennifer Egan called ""Black Box."" It was originally written specifically with Twitter in mind. Egan convinced The New Yorker to start a New Yorker fiction account from which they could tweet all of these lines that she created. Now Twitter, of course, has a 140-character limit. Egan mocked that up just writing manually in this storyboard sketchbook, used the physical space constraints of those storyboard squares to write each individual tweet, and those tweets ended up becoming over 600 of them that were serialized by The New Yorker. Every night, at 8 p.m., you could tune in to a short story from The New Yorker's fiction account. I think that's pretty exciting: tune-in literary fiction. The experience of Egan's story, of course, like anything on Twitter, there were multiple ways to experience it. You could scroll back through it, but interestingly, if you were watching it live, there was this suspense that built because the actual tweets, you had no control over when you would read them. They were coming at a pretty regular clip, but as the story was building, normally, as a reader, you control how fast you move through a text, but in this case, The New Yorker did, and they were sending you bit by bit by bit, and you had this suspense of waiting for the next line.Another great example of fiction and the short story on Twitter, Elliott Holt is an author who wrote a story called ""Evidence."" It began with this tweet: ""On November 28 at 10:13 p.m., a woman identified as Miranda Brown, 44, of Brooklyn, fell to her death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel."" It begins in Elliott's voice, but then Elliott's voice recedes, and we hear the voices of Elsa, Margot and Simon, characters that Elliott created on Twitter specifically to tell this story, a story from multiple perspectives leading up to this moment at 10:13 p.m. when this woman falls to her death. These three characters brought an authentic vision from multiple perspectives. One reviewer called Elliott's story ""Twitter fiction done right,"" because she did. She captured that voice and she had multiple characters and it happened in real time. Interestingly, though, it wasn't just Twitter as a distribution mechanism. It was also Twitter as a production mechanism. Elliott told me later she wrote the whole thing with her thumbs. She laid on the couch and just went back and forth between different characters tweeting out each line, line by line. I think that this kind of spontaneous creation of what was coming out of the characters' voices really lent an authenticity to the characters themselves, but also to this format that she had created of multiple perspectives in a single story on Twitter.As you begin to play with flexible identity online, it gets even more interesting as you start to interact with the real world. Things like Invisible Obama or the famous ""binders full of women"" that came up during the 2012 election cycle, or even the fan fiction universe of ""West Wing"" Twitter in which you have all of these accounts for every single one of the characters in ""The West Wing,"" including the bird that taps at Josh Lyman's window in one single episode. (Laughter)All of these are rapid iterations on a theme. They are creative people experimenting with the bounds of what is possible in this medium. You look at something like ""West Wing"" Twitter, in which you have these fictional characters that engage with the real world. They comment on politics, they cry out against the evils of Congress. Keep in mind, they're all Democrats. And they engage with the real world. They respond to it. So once you take flexible identity, anonymity, engagement with the real world, and you move beyond simple homage or parody and you put these tools to work in telling a story, that's when things get really interesting.So during the Chicago mayoral election there was a parody account. It was Mayor Emanuel. It gave you everything you wanted from Rahm Emanuel, particularly in the expletive department. This foul-mouthed account followed the daily activities of the race, providing commentary as it went. It followed all of the natural tropes of a good, solid Twitter parody account, but then started to get weird. And as it progressed, it moved from this commentary to a multi-week, real-time science fiction epic in which your protagonist, Rahm Emanuel, engages in multi-dimensional travel on election day, which is — it didn't actually happen. I double checked the newspapers.And then, very interestingly, it came to an end. This is something that doesn't usually happen with a Twitter parody account. It ended, a true narrative conclusion. And so the author, Dan Sinker, who was a journalist, who was completely anonymous this whole time, I think Dan — it made a lot of sense for him to turn this into a book, because it was a narrative format in the end, and I think that turning it into a book is representative of this idea that he had created something new that needed to be translated into previous formats.One of my favorite examples of something that's happening on Twitter right now, actually, is the very absurdist Crimer Show. Crimer Show tells the story of a supercriminal and a hapless detective that face off in this exceptionally strange lingo, with all of the tropes of a television show. Crimer Show's creator has said that it is a parody of a popular type of show in the U.K., but, man, is it weird. And there are all these times where Crimer, the supercriminal, does all of these TV things. He's always taking off his sunglasses or turning to the camera, but these things just happen in text. I think borrowing all of these tropes from television and additionally presenting each Crimer Show as an episode, spelled E-P-P-A-S-O-D, ""eppasod,"" presenting them as episodes really, it creates something new. There is a new ""eppasod"" of Crimer Show on Twitter pretty much every day, and they're archived that way. And I think this is an interesting experiment in format. Something totally new has been created here out of parodying something on television.I think in nonfiction real-time storytelling, there are a lot of really excellent examples as well. RealTimeWWII is an account that documents what was happening on this day 60 years ago in exceptional detail, as if you were reading the news reports from that day. And the author Teju Cole has done a lot of experimentation with putting a literary twist on events of the news. In this particular case, he's talking about drone strikes. I think that in both of these examples, you're beginning to see ways in which people are telling stories with nonfiction content that can be built into new types of fictional storytelling.So with real-time storytelling, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the real world and the digital world, flexible identity, anonymity, these are all tools that we have accessible to us, and I think that they're just the building blocks. They are the bits that we use to create the structures, the frames, that then become our settlements on this wide open frontier for creative experimentation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_fitzgerald_adventures_in_twitter_fiction
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"So I'm a city planner, an urban designer, former arts advocate, trained in architecture and art history, and I want to talk to you today not about design but about America and how America can be more economically resilient, how America can be healthier, and how America can be more environmentally sustainable. And I realize this is a global forum, but I think I need to talk about America because there is a history, in some places, not all, of American ideas being appropriated, being emulated, for better or for worse, around the world.And the worst idea we've ever had is suburban sprawl. It's being emulated in many places as we speak. By suburban sprawl, I refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use, and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching, time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to, most Americans, in fact, need, just to live their daily lives. And there's an alternative. You know, we say, half the world is living in cities. Well, in America, that living in cities, for many of them, they're living in cities still where they're dependent on that automobile. And what I work for, and to do, is to make our cities more walkable. But I can't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that I've learned from the economists, the epidemiologists and the environmentalists. So these are the three arguments that I'm going to give you quickly today.When I was growing up in the '70s, the typical American spent one tenth of their income, American family, on transportation. Since then, we've doubled the number of roads in America, and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation. Working families, which are defined as earning between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars a year in America are spending more now on transportation than on housing, slightly more, because of this phenomenon called ""drive till you qualify,"" finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs, so that they're locked in this, two, three hours, four hours a day of commuting. And these are the neighborhoods, for example, in the Central Valley of California that weren't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up; they were decimated. And in fact, these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today. Imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage, it goes underwater, and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you're doing.So we know what it's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars. What happens when a city decides it's going to set other priorities? And probably the best example we have here in America is Portland, Oregon. Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city. While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways, they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. And they spent 60 million dollars on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 30 years, so two million dollars a year — not that much — and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city. These changes and others like them changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle-miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 1996, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country. The typical Portland citizen drives four miles less, and 11 minutes less per day than they did before. The economist Joe Cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 11 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region.So if they're not spending that money on driving — and by the way, 85 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy — if they're not spending that money on driving, what are they spending it on? Well, Portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita, the most independent bookstores per capita, the most strip clubs per capita. These are all exaggerations, slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth, which is Portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of America. Actually, Oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it makes you glad they're driving less.(Laughter)But actually, they're spending most of it in their homes, and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get. But there's a whole other Portland story, which isn't part of this calculus, which is that young, educated people have been moving to Portland in droves, so that between the last two censuses, they had a 50-percent increase in college-educated millennials, which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country, or, I should say, of the national average.So on the one hand, a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable, but on the other hand, it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days. So the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster, or an aerospace cluster, but to become a place where people want to be. And millennials, certainly, these engines of entrepreneurship, 64 percent of whom decide first where they want to live, then they move there, then they look for a job, they will come to your city.The health argument is a scary one, and you've probably heard part of this argument before. Again, back in the '70s, a lot's changed since then, back in the '70s, one in 10 Americans was obese. Now one out of three Americans is obese, and a second third of the population is overweight. Twenty-five percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces. According to the Center for Disease Control, fully one third of all children born after 2000 will get diabetes. We have the first generation of children in America who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents.I believe that this American healthcare crisis that we've all heard about is an urban design crisis, and that the design of our cities lies at the cure. Because we've talked a long time about diet, and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight of course impacts health. But we've only started talking about inactivity, and how inactivity born of our landscape, inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk, is driving our weight up. And we finally have the studies, one in Britain called ""Gluttony versus sloth"" that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity, and found a much higher, stronger correlation between the latter two. Dr. James Levine at, in this case, the aptly-named Mayo Clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear, held their diet steady, and then started pumping the calories in. Some people gained weight, some people didn't gain weight. Expecting some metabolic or DNA factor at work, they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving, and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting, on average, two hours more per day than those who didn't.So we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity, but even more, we now have studies that tie weight to where you live. Do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city, or where in your city do you live? In San Diego, they used Walk Score — Walk Score rates every address in America and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is — they used Walk Score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods. Well guess what? If you lived in a more walkable neighborhood, you were 35 percent likely to be overweight. If you lived in a less walkable neighborhood, you were 60 percent likely to be overweight. So we have study after study now that's tying where you live to your health, particularly as in America, the biggest health crisis we have is this one that's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity. And I learned a new word last week. They call these neighborhoods ""obesageneric."" I may have that wrong, but you get the idea.Now that's one thing, of course. Briefly mentioning, we have an asthma epidemic in this country. You probably haven't thought that much about it. Fourteen Americans die each day from asthma, three times what it was in the '90s, and it's almost all coming from car exhaust. American pollution does not come from factories anymore, it comes from tailpipes, and the amount that people are driving in your city, your urban VMT, is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city.And then finally, in terms of driving, there's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults, and one of the largest killers of all people, is car crashes. And we take car crashes for granted. We figure it's a natural risk of being on the road. But in fact, here in America, 12 people out of every 100,000 die every year from car crashes. We're pretty safe here. Well, guess what? In England, it's seven per 100,000. It's Japan, it's four per 100,000. Do you know where it's three per 100,000? New York City. San Francisco, the same thing. Portland, the same thing. Oh, so cities make us safer because we're driving less? Tulsa: 14 per 100,000. Orlando: 20 per 100,000. It's not whether you're in the city or not, it's how is your city designed? Was it designed around cars or around people? Because if your city is designed around cars, it's really good at smashing them into each other.That's part of a much larger health argument.Finally, the environmental argument is fascinating, because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 10 years ago. The environmental movement in America has historically been an anti-city movement from Jefferson on.""Cities are pestilential to the health, to the liberties, to the morals of man. If we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities, as they do in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as they are in Europe and take to eating one another as they do there.""He apparently had a sense of humor.And then the American environmental movement has been a classically Arcadian movement. To become more environmental, we move into the country, we commune with nature, we build suburbs. But, of course, we've seen what that does.The carbon mapping of America, where is the CO2 being emitted, for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly. If you look at any carbon map, because we map it per square mile, any carbon map of the U.S., it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the U.S., hottest in the cities, cooler in the suburbs, dark, peaceful in the countryside. Until some economists said, you know, is that the right way to measure CO2? There are only so many people in this country at any given time, and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact. And they said, let's measure CO2 per household, and when they did that, the maps just flipped, coolest in the center city, warmer in the suburbs, and red hot in these exurban ""drive till you qualify"" neighborhoods. So a fundamental shift, and now you have environmentalists and economists like Ed Glaeser saying we are a destructive species. If you love nature, the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it, move to a city, and the denser the better, and the denser cities like Manhattan are the cities that perform the best. So the average Manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation hasn't seen since the '20s, consuming half of the electricity of Dallas. But of course, we can do better. Canadian cities, they consume half the gasoline of American cities. European cities consume half as much again. So obviously, we can do better, and we want to do better, and we're all trying to be green.My final argument in this topic is that I think we're trying to be green the wrong way, and I'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets, on accessorizing — What can I add to my house, what can I add to what I've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable? — has kind of dominated the discussion. So I'm not immune to this. My wife and I built a new house on an abandoned lot in Washington, D.C., and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store. We've got the solar photovoltaic system, solar hot water heater, dual-flush toilets, bamboo floors. A log burning in my German high-tech stove apparently, supposedly, contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest. Yet all of these innovations — That's what they said in the brochure. (Laughter) All of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city. We've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers, and you should do the same thing, but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week.And we don't want to have this argument. Politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a ""lifestyle choice."" You don't want to tell Americans, God forbid, that they have to change their lifestyle. But what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more, something that would be better than what we have right now?Well, the gold standard of quality of life rankings, it's called the Mercer Survey. You may have heard of it. They rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 10 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life: health, economics, education, housing, you name it. There's six more. Short talk.(Laughter)And it's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking American city, Honolulu, number 28, is followed by kind of the usual suspects of Seattle and Boston and all walkable cities. The driving cities in the Sun Belt, the Dallases and the Phoenixes and, sorry, Atlanta, these cities are not appearing on the list. But who's doing even better? The Canadian cities like Vancouver, where again, they're burning half the fuel. And then it's usually won by cities where they speak German, like Dusseldorf or Vienna, where they're burning, again, half as much fuel. And you see this alignment, this strange alignment.Is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life? I would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life, and that's living in a walkable neighborhood. So sustainability, which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability. But particularly here in America, we are polluting so much because we're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway, then these two problems would seem to share the same solution, which is to make our cities more walkable.Doing so isn't easy, but it can be done, it has been done, and it's being done now in more than a few cities, around the globe and in our country. I take some solace from Winston Churchill, who put it this way: ""The Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives."" (Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_the_walkable_city
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"So I'd like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in China, the night I met my husband. It was a city so long ago that it was still called Peking.So I went to a party. I sat down next to a stout, middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bow tie, and he turned out to be a Fulbright scholar, there in China specifically to study Sino-Soviet relations. What a gift it was to the eager, young foreign correspondent that I was then. I'd pump him for information, I'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories I plan to write. I talk to him for hours.Only months later, I discover who he really was. He was the China representative for the American Soybean Association.""I don't understand. Soybeans? You told me you were a Fulbright scholar.""""Well, how long would you have talked to me if I told you we're in soybeans?""(Laughter)I said, ""You jerk."" Only jerk wasn't the word I used. I said, ""You could've gotten me fired.""And he said, ""Let's get married."" (Laughter) ""Travel the world and have lots of kids."" So we did.(Laughter)(Applause)And what an alive man Terence Bryan Foley turned out to be. He was a Chinese scholar who later, in his 60s, got a Ph.D. in Chinese history. He spoke six languages, he played 15 musical instruments, he was a licensed pilot, he had once been a San Francisco cable car operator, he was an expert in swine nutrition, dairy cattle, Dixieland jazz, film noir, and we did travel the country, and the world, and we did have a lot of kids. We followed my job, and it seemed like there was nothing that we couldn't do.So when we found the cancer, it doesn't seem strange to us at all that without saying a word to each other, we believed that, if we were smart enough and strong enough and brave enough, and we worked hard enough, we could keep him from dying ever.And for years, it seemed like we were succeeding. The surgeon emerged from the surgery. What'd he say? He said what surgeons always say: ""We got it all."" Then there was a setback when the pathologists looked at the kidney cancer closely. It turned out to be a rare, exceedingly aggressive type, with a diagnosis that was almost universally fatal in several weeks at most. And yet, he did not die. Mysteriously, he lived on. He coached Little League for our son. He built a playhouse for our daughter. And meanwhile, I'm burying myself in the Internet looking for specialists. I'm looking for a cure.So a year goes by before the cancer, as cancers do, reappears, and with it comes another death sentence, this time nine months. So we try another treatment, aggressive, nasty. It makes him so sick, he has to quit it, yet still he lives on. Then another year goes by. Two years go by. More specialists. We take the kids to Italy. We take the kids to Australia.And then more years pass, and the cancer begins to grow. This time, there's new treatments on the horizon. They're exotic. They're experimental. They're going to attack the cancer in new ways. So he enters a clinical trial, and it works. The cancer begins to shrink, and for the third time, we've dodged death.So now I ask you, how do I feel when the time finally comes and there's another dark night, sometime between midnight and 2 a.m.? This time it's on the intensive care ward when a twentysomething resident that I've never met before tells me that Terence is dying, perhaps tonight.So what do I say when he says, ""What do you want me to do?""There's another drug out there. It's newer. It's more powerful. He started it just two weeks ago. Perhaps there's still hope ahead.So what do I say?I say, ""Keep him alive if you can.""And Terence died six days later.So we fought, we struggled, we triumphed. It was an exhilarating fight, and I'd repeat the fight today without a moment's hesitation. We fought together, we lived together. It turned what could have been seven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious. It was also an expensive fight. It was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care, and of healthcare for all of us.And for me, for us, we pushed the fight right over the edge, and I never got the chance to say to him what I say to him now almost every day: ""Hey, buddy, it was a hell of a ride."" We never got the chance to say goodbye. We never thought it was the end. We always had hope.So what do we make of all of this?Being a journalist, after Terence died, I wrote a book, ""The Cost Of Hope."" I wrote it because I wanted to know why I did what I did, why he did what he did, why everyone around us did what they did.And what did I discover? Well, one of the things I discovered is that experts think that one answer to what I did at the end was a piece of paper, the advance directive, to help families get past the seemingly irrational choices. Yet I had that piece of paper. We both did. And they were readily available. I had them right at hand. Both of them said the same thing: Do nothing if there is no further hope. I knew Terence's wishes as clearly and as surely as I knew my own.Yet we never got to no further hope. Even with that clear-cut paper in our hands, we just kept redefining hope. I believed I could keep him from dying, and I'd be embarrassed to say that if I hadn't seen so many people and have talked to so many people who have felt exactly the same way. Right up until days before his death, I felt strongly and powerfully, and, you might say, irrationally, that I could keep him from dying ever.Now, what do the experts call this? They say it's denial. It's a strong word, isn't it? Yet I will tell you that denial isn't even close to a strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through.And I hear the medical professionals say, ""Well, we'd like to do such-and-such, but the family's in denial. The family won't listen to reason. They're in denial. How can they insist on this treatment at the end? It's so clear, yet they're in denial.""Now, I think this maybe isn't a very useful way of thinking. It's not just families either. The medical professionals too, you out there, you're in denial too. You want to help. You want to fix. You want to do. You've succeeded in everything you've done, and having a patient die, well, that must feel like failure.I saw it firsthand. Just days before Terence died, his oncologist said, ""Tell Terence that better days are just ahead."" Days before he died.Yet Ira Byock, the director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth said, ""You know, the best doctor in the world has never succeeded in making anyone immortal.""So what the experts call ""denial,"" I call ""hope,"" and I'd like to borrow a phrase from my friends in software design. You just redefine denial and hope, and it becomes a feature of being human. It's not a bug. It's a feature.(Laughter)So we need to think more constructively about this very common, very profound and very powerful human emotion. It's part of the human condition, and yet our system and our thinking isn't built to accommodate it.So Terence told me a story on that long-ago night, and I believed it. Maybe I wanted to believe it. And during Terence's illness, I, we, we wanted to believe the story of our fight together too. Giving up the fight — for that's how it felt, it felt like giving up — meant giving up not only his life but also our story, our story of us as fighters, the story of us as invincible, and for the doctors, the story of themselves as healers.So what do we need?Maybe we don't need a new piece of paper. Maybe we need a new story, not a story about giving up the fight or of hopelessness, but rather a story of victory and triumph, of a valiant battle and, eventually, a graceful retreat, a story that acknowledges that not even the greatest general defeats every foe, that no doctor has ever succeeded in making anyone immortal, and that no wife, no matter how hard she tried, has ever stopped even the bravest, wittiest and most maddeningly lovable husband from dying when it was his time to go.People did mention hospice, but I wouldn't listen. Hospice was for people who were dying, and Terence wasn't dying. As a result, he spent just four days in hospice, which I'm sure, as you all know, is a pretty typical outcome, and we never said goodbye because we were unprepared for the end.We have a noble path to curing the disease, patients and doctors alike, but there doesn't seem to be a noble path to dying. Dying is seen as failing, and we had a heroic narrative for fighting together, but we didn't have a heroic narrative for letting go.So maybe we need a narrative for acknowledging the end, and for saying goodbye, and maybe our new story will be about a hero's fight, and a hero's goodbye. Terence loved poetry, and the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy is one of my favorite poets. So I'll give you a couple lines from him. This is a poem about Mark Antony. You know Mark Antony, the conquering hero, Cleopatra's guy? Actually, one of Cleopatra's guys. And he's been a pretty good general. He's won all the fights, he's eluded all the people that are out to get him, and yet this time, finally, he's come to the city of Alexandria and realized he's lost. The people are leaving. They're playing instruments. They're singing. And suddenly he knows he's been defeated. And he suddenly knows he's been deserted by the gods, and it's time to let go. And the poet tells him what to do. He tells him how to say a noble goodbye, a goodbye that's fit for a hero.""As if long-prepared, as if courageous, as it becomes you who were worthy of such a city, approach the window with a firm step, and with emotion, but not with the entreaties or the complaints of a coward, as a last enjoyment, listen to the sounds, the exquisite instruments of the musical troops, and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are losing.""That's a goodbye for a man who was larger than life, a goodbye for a man for whom anything, well, almost anything, was possible, a goodbye for a man who kept hope alive.And isn't that what we're missing? How can we learn that people's decisions about their loved ones are often based strongly, powerfully, many times irrationally, on the slimmest of hopes? The overwhelming presence of hope isn't denial. It's part of our DNA as humans, and maybe it's time our healthcare system — doctors, patients, insurance companies, us, started accounting for the power of that hope. Hope isn't a bug. It's a feature.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_bennett_a_heroic_narrative_for_letting_go
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"Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects, documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit. I think of new cities like Dubai or ancient cities like Rome with Zaha Hadid's incredible MAXXI museum, or like right here in New York with the High Line, a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this.But what I find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people, like here in Chandigarh, India, the city which has been completely designed by the architect Le Corbusier. Now 60 years later, the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for, like here, where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall. But over the course of several years, I've been documenting Rem Koolhaas's CCTV building in Beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects Herzog and de Meuron. At these large-scale construction sites in China, you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process. As the length of the construction takes years, workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city, making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they're building.Over the past seven years, I've been following my fascination with the built environment, and for those of you who know me, you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 365 days a year. Being constantly on the move means that sometimes I am able to catch life's most unpredictable moments, like here in New York the day after the Sandy storm hit the city.Just over three years ago, I was for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, and while flying over the city, I was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city, a place where nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums, draped literally all over the mountains. During a conversation with local architects Urban-Think Tank, I learned about the Torre David, a 45-story office building which sits right in the center of Caracas. The building was under construction until the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early '90s. About eight years ago, people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower. There's only one little entrance to the entire building, and the 3,000 residents come in and out through that single door. Together, the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower. In the lobby, they painted the walls and planted trees. They also made a basketball court. But when you look up closely, you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through.Within the tower, people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower. With no elevators, the tower is like a 45-story walkup. Designed in very specific ways by this group of people who haven't had any education in architecture or design. And with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by, this tower becomes like a living city, a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses. The inventive inhabitants, for instance, find opportunities in the most unexpected cases, like the adjacent parking garage, which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments.A walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls, how to make an air flow, how to create transparency, circulation throughout the tower, essentially creating a home that's completely adapted to the conditions of the site. When a new inhabitant moves into the tower, they already have a roof over their head, so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets. Slowly, from found materials, walls rise, and people create a space out of any found objects or materials.It's remarkable to see the design decisions that they're making, like when everything is made out of red bricks, some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish.The inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands, and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower. They typically make the best out of their conditions, and try to make their spaces look nice and homey, or at least up until as far as they can reach. Throughout the tower, you come across all kinds of services, like the barber, small factories, and every floor has a little grocery store or shop. And you even find a church. And on the 30th floor, there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed. From the outside, behind this always-changing facade, you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic, intuitive way that responds directly to their needs.Let's go now to Africa, to Nigeria, to a community called Makoko, a slum where 150,000 people live just meters above the Lagos Lagoon. While it may appear to be a completely chaotic place, when you see it from above, there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home. From the main dock, people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area. When out on the water, it's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living. Even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house, selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits. Behind every window and door frame, you'll see a small child peering back at you, and while Makoko seems to be packed with people, what's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building. The population growth in Nigeria, and especially in these areas like Makoko, are painful reminders of how out of control things really are.In Makoko, very few systems and infrastructures exist. Electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area. This entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water, so fishing and boat-making are common professions. You'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area, like barbershops, CD and DVD stores, movie theaters, tailors, everything is there. There is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place, like that hotel in Sweden.On this particular evening, I came across this live band dressed to the T in their coordinating outfits. They were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy.By nightfall, the area becomes almost pitch black, save for a small lightbulb or a fire.What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine, Kunlé Adeyemi, who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko. With this entire village existing on the water, public space is very limited, so now that the school is finished, the ground floor is a playground for the kids, but when classes are out, the platform is just like a town square, where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats.Another place I'd like to share with you is the Zabbaleen in Cairo. They're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper Egypt in the '40s, and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over Cairo. For years, the Zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities, but in the early 1980s, they settled on the Mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city. Today, they live in this area, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people, who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure. While these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid, each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space. I find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there, like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him, or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage. While to most of us, living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable, to those in the Zabbaleen, this is just a different type of normal. In all these places I've talked about today, what I do find fascinating is that there's really no such thing as normal, and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation. Throughout the day, it's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets, just like this engagement party. In this tradition, the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings, which they soon bring to their new husband. A gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories. Like Makoko and the Torre David, throughout the Zabbaleen you'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood. There are the retail shops, the cafes and the restaurants, and the community is this community of Coptic Christians, so you'll also find a church, along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area, and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops, the barbers, everything.Visiting the homes of the Zabbaleen is also full of surprises. While from the outside, these homes look like any other informal structure in the city, when you step inside, you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration. Despite having limited access to space and money, the homes in the area are designed with care and detail. Every apartment is unique, and this individuality tells a story about each family's circumstances and values. Many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously, putting a lot of work and care into the details. The shared spaces are also treated in the same manner, where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns.But despite this elaborate decor, sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways, like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door. When I was let in, it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm, where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room. But then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area.The attention to this detail astonished me, and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment, from floor to ceiling, every part was decorated. But if it weren't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment, it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill. What moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions, I was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love, care, and unreserved passion.Let's move across the map to China, to an area called Shanxi, Henan and Gansu. In a region famous for the soft, porous Loess Plateau soil, there lived until recently an estimated 40 million people in these houses underground. These dwellings are called the yaodongs. Through this architecture by subtraction, these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil. In these villages, you see an entirely altered landscape, and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square, rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground. When I asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground, they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who didn't have the money to buy materials, and this digging out was their most logical form of living.From Makoko to Zabbaleen, these communities have approached the tasks of planning, design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances. Created by these very people who live, work and play in these particular spaces, these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances. In most of these places, the government is completely absent, leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials, and while these communities are highly disadvantaged, they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity, and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances. What makes places like the Torre David particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into. Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves, and how highly particular their solutions would be, if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into.Today, you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people. From China to Brazil, these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible, but they're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people.I would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration, Zita Cobb, the founder of the wonderful Shorefast Foundation, based out of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. She says that ""there's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy,"" and I couldn't agree with her more.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/iwan_baan_ingenious_homes_in_unexpected_places
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"I would like to tell you a story connecting the notorious privacy incident involving Adam and Eve, and the remarkable shift in the boundaries between public and private which has occurred in the past 10 years.You know the incident. Adam and Eve one day in the Garden of Eden realize they are naked. They freak out. And the rest is history.Nowadays, Adam and Eve would probably act differently.[@Adam Last nite was a blast! loved dat apple LOL][@Eve yep.. babe, know what happened to my pants tho?]We do reveal so much more information about ourselves online than ever before, and so much information about us is being collected by organizations. Now there is much to gain and benefit from this massive analysis of personal information, or big data, but there are also complex tradeoffs that come from giving away our privacy. And my story is about these tradeoffs.We start with an observation which, in my mind, has become clearer and clearer in the past few years, that any personal information can become sensitive information. Back in the year 2000, about 100 billion photos were shot worldwide, but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online. In 2010, only on Facebook, in a single month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded, most of them identified. In the same span of time, computers' ability to recognize people in photos improved by three orders of magnitude. What happens when you combine these technologies together: increasing availability of facial data; improving facial recognizing ability by computers; but also cloud computing, which gives anyone in this theater the kind of computational power which a few years ago was only the domain of three-letter agencies; and ubiquitous computing, which allows my phone, which is not a supercomputer, to connect to the Internet and do there hundreds of thousands of face metrics in a few seconds? Well, we conjecture that the result of this combination of technologies will be a radical change in our very notions of privacy and anonymity.To test that, we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study, and we took a shot with a webcam, and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop. While they were filling out the survey, we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster, and we started using a facial recognizer to match that shot to a database of some hundreds of thousands of images which we had downloaded from Facebook profiles. By the time the subject reached the last page on the survey, the page had been dynamically updated with the 10 best matching photos which the recognizer had found, and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo.Do you see the subject? Well, the computer did, and in fact did so for one out of three subjects.So essentially, we can start from an anonymous face, offline or online, and we can use facial recognition to give a name to that anonymous face thanks to social media data. But a few years back, we did something else. We started from social media data, we combined it statistically with data from U.S. government social security, and we ended up predicting social security numbers, which in the United States are extremely sensitive information.Do you see where I'm going with this? So if you combine the two studies together, then the question becomes, can you start from a face and, using facial recognition, find a name and publicly available information about that name and that person, and from that publicly available information infer non-publicly available information, much more sensitive ones which you link back to the face? And the answer is, yes, we can, and we did. Of course, the accuracy keeps getting worse. [27% of subjects' first 5 SSN digits identified (with 4 attempts)] But in fact, we even decided to develop an iPhone app which uses the phone's internal camera to take a shot of a subject and then upload it to a cloud and then do what I just described to you in real time: looking for a match, finding public information, trying to infer sensitive information, and then sending back to the phone so that it is overlaid on the face of the subject, an example of augmented reality, probably a creepy example of augmented reality. In fact, we didn't develop the app to make it available, just as a proof of concept.In fact, take these technologies and push them to their logical extreme. Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their Google Glasses or, one day, their contact lenses, and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else which may be known about you. What will this future without secrets look like? And should we care?We may like to believe that the future with so much wealth of data would be a future with no more biases, but in fact, having so much information doesn't mean that we will make decisions which are more objective. In another experiment, we presented to our subjects information about a potential job candidate. We included in this information some references to some funny, absolutely legal, but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online. Now interestingly, among our subjects, some had posted comparable information, and some had not. Which group do you think was more likely to judge harshly our subject? Paradoxically, it was the group who had posted similar information, an example of moral dissonance.Now you may be thinking, this does not apply to me, because I have nothing to hide. But in fact, privacy is not about having something negative to hide. Imagine that you are the H.R. director of a certain organization, and you receive résumés, and you decide to find more information about the candidates. Therefore, you Google their names and in a certain universe, you find this information. Or in a parallel universe, you find this information. Do you think that you would be equally likely to call either candidate for an interview? If you think so, then you are not like the U.S. employers who are, in fact, part of our experiment, meaning we did exactly that. We created Facebook profiles, manipulating traits, then we started sending out résumés to companies in the U.S., and we detected, we monitored, whether they were searching for our candidates, and whether they were acting on the information they found on social media. And they were. Discrimination was happening through social media for equally skilled candidates.Now marketers like us to believe that all information about us will always be used in a manner which is in our favor. But think again. Why should that be always the case? In a movie which came out a few years ago, ""Minority Report,"" a famous scene had Tom Cruise walk in a mall and holographic personalized advertising would appear around him. Now, that movie is set in 2054, about 40 years from now, and as exciting as that technology looks, it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you, and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect.So as an example, this is another experiment actually we are running, not yet completed. Imagine that an organization has access to your list of Facebook friends, and through some kind of algorithm they can detect the two friends that you like the most. And then they create, in real time, a facial composite of these two friends. Now studies prior to ours have shown that people don't recognize any longer even themselves in facial composites, but they react to those composites in a positive manner. So next time you are looking for a certain product, and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it, it will not be just a standard spokesperson. It will be one of your friends, and you will not even know that this is happening.Now the problem is that the current policy mechanisms we have to protect ourselves from the abuses of personal information are like bringing a knife to a gunfight. One of these mechanisms is transparency, telling people what you are going to do with their data. And in principle, that's a very good thing. It's necessary, but it is not sufficient. Transparency can be misdirected. You can tell people what you are going to do, and then you still nudge them to disclose arbitrary amounts of personal information.So in yet another experiment, this one with students, we asked them to provide information about their campus behavior, including pretty sensitive questions, such as this one. [Have you ever cheated in an exam?] Now to one group of subjects, we told them, ""Only other students will see your answers."" To another group of subjects, we told them, ""Students and faculty will see your answers."" Transparency. Notification. And sure enough, this worked, in the sense that the first group of subjects were much more likely to disclose than the second. It makes sense, right? But then we added the misdirection. We repeated the experiment with the same two groups, this time adding a delay between the time we told subjects how we would use their data and the time we actually started answering the questions.How long a delay do you think we had to add in order to nullify the inhibitory effect of knowing that faculty would see your answers? Ten minutes? Five minutes? One minute? How about 15 seconds? Fifteen seconds were sufficient to have the two groups disclose the same amount of information, as if the second group now no longer cares for faculty reading their answers.Now I have to admit that this talk so far may sound exceedingly gloomy, but that is not my point. In fact, I want to share with you the fact that there are alternatives. The way we are doing things now is not the only way they can done, and certainly not the best way they can be done. When someone tells you, ""People don't care about privacy,"" consider whether the game has been designed and rigged so that they cannot care about privacy, and coming to the realization that these manipulations occur is already halfway through the process of being able to protect yourself. When someone tells you that privacy is incompatible with the benefits of big data, consider that in the last 20 years, researchers have created technologies to allow virtually any electronic transactions to take place in a more privacy-preserving manner. We can browse the Internet anonymously. We can send emails that can only be read by the intended recipient, not even the NSA. We can have even privacy-preserving data mining. In other words, we can have the benefits of big data while protecting privacy. Of course, these technologies imply a shifting of cost and revenues between data holders and data subjects, which is why, perhaps, you don't hear more about them.Which brings me back to the Garden of Eden. There is a second privacy interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden which doesn't have to do with the issue of Adam and Eve feeling naked and feeling ashamed. You can find echoes of this interpretation in John Milton's ""Paradise Lost."" In the garden, Adam and Eve are materially content. They're happy. They are satisfied. However, they also lack knowledge and self-awareness. The moment they eat the aptly named fruit of knowledge, that's when they discover themselves. They become aware. They achieve autonomy. The price to pay, however, is leaving the garden. So privacy, in a way, is both the means and the price to pay for freedom.Again, marketers tell us that big data and social media are not just a paradise of profit for them, but a Garden of Eden for the rest of us. We get free content. We get to play Angry Birds. We get targeted apps. But in fact, in a few years, organizations will know so much about us, they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them, and perhaps buy products on our behalf before we even know we need them.Now there was one English author who anticipated this kind of future where we would trade away our autonomy and freedom for comfort. Even more so than George Orwell, the author is, of course, Aldous Huxley. In ""Brave New World,"" he imagines a society where technologies that we created originally for freedom end up coercing us. However, in the book, he also offers us a way out of that society, similar to the path that Adam and Eve had to follow to leave the garden. In the words of the Savage, regaining autonomy and freedom is possible, although the price to pay is steep. So I do believe that one of the defining fights of our times will be the fight for the control over personal information, the fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom, rather than a force which will hiddenly manipulate us.Right now, many of us do not even know that the fight is going on, but it is, whether you like it or not. And at the risk of playing the serpent, I will tell you that the tools for the fight are here, the awareness of what is going on, and in your hands, just a few clicks away.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alessandro_acquisti_why_privacy_matters
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"Hetain Patel: (In Chinese)Yuyu Rau: Hi, I'm Hetain. I'm an artist. And this is Yuyu, who is a dancer I have been working with. I have asked her to translate for me.HP: (In Chinese)YR: If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork.HP: (In Chinese)YR: I was born and raised near Manchester, in England, but I'm not going to say it in English to you, because I'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent.(Laughter)HP: (In Chinese)YR: The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph, which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China. (Laughter) So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won't notice.(Laughter)HP: (In Chinese)(Laughter)YR: Needless to say, I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience.As a child, I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama, because I didn't think it was very cool. It felt a bit girly to me, like a dress, and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down. My dad never wore it, so I didn't see why I had to. Also, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it, because that's not how I feel.HP: (In Chinese)YR: Actually, the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film, ""Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.""(Music)Okay. So my artwork is about identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from, gender, race, class. What makes us who we are anyway?HP: (In Chinese)YR: I used to read Spider-Man comics, watch kung fu movies, take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee. He would say things like —HP: Empty your mind. (Laughter) Be formless, shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup. It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. (Applause)YR: This year, I am 32 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died. I have been wondering recently, if he were alive today, what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk.HP: Don't imitate my voice. It offends me.(Laughter)YR: Good advice, but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others. Who here hasn't imitated their childhood hero in the playground, or mum or father? I have.HP: A few years ago, in order to make this video for my artwork, I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 1960s. He had a side parting and a neat mustache.At first, it was going very well. I even started to get discounts in Indian shops.(Laughter)But then very quickly, I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability, and it got way too big. It didn't look Indian anymore. Instead, people from across the road, they would shout things like —HP and YR: Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! Ándale!(Laughter)HP: Actually, I don't know why I am even talking like this. My dad doesn't even have an Indian accent anymore. He talks like this now.So it's not just my father that I've imitated. A few years ago I went to China for a few months, and I couldn't speak Chinese, and this frustrated me, so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese, and then I learned this by heart, like music, I guess.YR: This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card, so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently. When I had learned this phrase, I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded.I spoke the phrase, and then he laughed and told me, ""Oh yeah, that's great, only it kind of sounds like a woman.""I said, ""What?""He said, ""Yeah, you learned from a woman?""I said, ""Yes. So?""He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct, and that I had learned it very well, but in a woman's voice.(Laughter)(Applause)HP: Okay. So this imitation business does come with risk. It doesn't always go as you plan it, even with a talented translator. But I am going to stick with it, because contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. So every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me.This is my art. I strive for authenticity, even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect. It's only recently that I've started to understand that I didn't learn to sit like this through being Indian. I learned this from Spider-Man.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hetain_patel_who_am_i_think_again
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"I've spent my life working on sustainability. I set up a climate change NGO called The Climate Group. I worked on forestry issues in WWF. I worked on development and agriculture issues in the U.N. system. About 25 years in total, and then three years ago, I found myself talking to IKEA's CEO about joining his team. Like many people here, well, I want to maximize my personal impact in the world, so I'm going to explain why I joined the team there.But first, let's just take three numbers.The first number is three: three billion people. This is the number of people joining the global middle class by 2030, coming out of poverty. It's fantastic for them and their families, but we've got two billion people in the global middle class today, and this swells that number to five, a big challenge when we already have resource scarcity.The second number is six: This is six degrees centigrade, what we're heading towards in terms of global warming. We're not heading towards one degree or three degrees or four degrees, we're heading toward six degrees. And if you think about it, all of the weird weather we've been having the last few years, much of that is due to just one degree warming, and we need CO2 emissions to peak by the end of this decade globally and then come down. It's not inevitable, but we need to act decisively.The third number is 12: That's the number of cities in the world that had a million or more people when my grandmother was born. You can see my grandmother there. That was in the beginning of the last century. So just 12 cities. She was born in Manchester, England, the ninth largest city in the world. Now there are 500 cities, nearly, with a million people or more in them. And if you look at the century from 1950 to 2050, that's the century when we build all the world's cities, the century that we're in the middle of right now. Every other century was kind of practice, and this lays down a blueprint for how we live.So think about it. We're building cities like never before, bringing people out of poverty like never before, and changing the climate like never before. Sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a must-do. it's about what we do right here, right now, and for the rest of our working lives.So I'm going to talk a little bit about what business can do and what a business like IKEA can do, and we have a sustainability strategy called ""people and planet positive"" to help guide our business to have a positive impact on the world. Why would we not want to have a positive impact on the world as a business? Other companies have sustainability strategies. I'm going to refer to some of those as well, and I'm just going to mention a few of the commitments as illustrations that we've got.But first, let's think of customers. We know from asking people from China to the U.S. that the vast majority of people care about sustainability after the day-to-day issues, the day-to-day issues of, how do I get my kids to school? Can I pay the bills at the end of the month? Then they care about big issues like climate change. But they want it to be easy, affordable and attractive, and they expect business to help, and they're a little bit disappointed today.So take your mind back and think of the first sustainable products. We had detergents that could wash your whites grayer. We had the early energy-efficient light bulbs that took five minutes to warm up and then you were left looking a kind of sickly color. And we had the rough, recycled toilet paper. So every time you pulled on a t-shirt, or switched the light on, or went to the bathroom, or sometimes all three together, you were reminded sustainability was about compromise. It wasn't a great start.Today we have choices. We can make products that are beautiful or ugly, sustainable or unsustainable, affordable or expensive, functional or useless. So let's make beautiful, functional, affordable, sustainable products.Let's take the LED. The LED is the next best thing to daylight. The old-fashioned lightbulbs, the incandescent bulbs — I'm not going to ask for a show of hands of how many of you still have them in your homes, wasting energy every time you switch them on — change them after this — or whether we have them on the stage here at TED or not — but those old incandescent light bulbs really should have been sold as heaters. They were mis-sold for more than a hundred years. They produced heat and a little bit of light on the side. Now we have lights that produce light and a little bit of heat on the side. You save 85 percent of the electricity with an LED that you would have done in an old incandescent. And the best thing is, they'll also last for more than 20 years. So think about that. You'll change your smartphone seven or eight times, probably more if you're in this audience. You'll change your car, if you have one, three or four times. Your kids could go to school, go to college, go away and have kids of their own, come back, bring the grandkids, you'll have the same lightbulb saving you energy. So LEDs are fantastic. What we decided to do was not to sell LEDs on the side marked up high and continue to push all the old bulbs, the halogens and the CFLs. We decided, over the next two years, we will ban the halogens and the CFLs ourselves. We will go all in. And this is what business needs to do: go all-in, go 100 percent, because then you stop investing in the old stuff, you invest in the new stuff, you lower costs, you use your supply chain and your creativity and you get the prices down so everybody can afford the best lights so they can save energy.(Applause)It's not just about products in people's homes. We've got to think about the raw materials that produce our products. Obviously there's fantastic opportunities with recycled materials, and we can and will go zero waste. And there's opportunities in a circular economy. But we're still dependent on natural, raw materials. Let's take cotton. Cotton's brilliant. Probably many people are wearing cotton right now. It's a brilliant textile in use. It's really dirty in production. It uses lots of pesticides, lots of fertilizer, lots of water. So we've worked with others, with other businesses and NGOs, on the Better Cotton Initiative, working right back down to the farm, and there you can halve the amount of water and halve the chemical inputs, the yields increase, and 60 percent of the costs of running many of these farms with farmers with low incomes can be chemical imports. Yields increase, and you halve the input costs. Farmers are coming out of poverty. They love it. Already hundreds of thousands of farmers have been reached, and now we've got 60 percent better cotton in our business. Again, we're going all-in. By 2015, we'll be 100 percent Better Cotton.Take the topic of 100 percent targets, actually. People sometimes think that 100 percent's going to be hard, and we've had the conversation in the business. Actually, we found 100 percent is easier to do than 90 percent or 50 percent. If you have a 90 percent target, everyone in the business finds a reason to be in the 10 percent. When it's 100 percent, it's kind of clear, and businesspeople like clarity, because then you just get the job done.So, wood. We know with forestry, it's a choice. You've got illegal logging and deforestation still on a very large scale, or you can have fantastic, responsible forestry that we can be proud of. It's a simple choice, so we've worked for many years with the Forest Stewardship Council, with literally hundreds of other organizations, and there's a point here about collaboration. So hundreds of others, of NGOs, of forest workers' unions, and of businesses, have helped create the Forest Stewardship Council, which sets standards for forestry and then checks the forestry's good on the ground. Now together, through our supply chain, with partners, we've managed to certify 35 million hectares of forestry. That's about the size of Germany. And we've decided in the next three years, we will double the volume of certified material we put through our business. So be decisive on these issues. Use your supply chain to drive good.But then it comes to your operations. Some things are certain, I think. We know we'll use electricity in 20 or 30 years' time. We know the sun will be shining somewhere, and the wind will still be blowing in 20 or 30 years' time. So why not make our energy out of the sun and the wind? And why not take control of it ourselves? So we're going 100 percent renewable. By 2020, we'll produce more renewable energy than the energy we consume as a business. For all of our stores, our own factories, our distribution centers, we've installed 300,000 solar panels so far, and we've got 14 wind farms we own and operate in six countries, and we're not done yet. But think of a solar panel. A solar panel pays for itself in seven or eight years. The electricity is free. Every time the sun comes out after that, the electricity is free. So this is a good thing for the CFO, not just the sustainability guy. Every business can do things like this.But then we've got to look beyond our operations, and I think everybody would agree that now business has to take full responsibility for the impacts of your supply chain. Many businesses now, fortunately, have codes of conduct and audit their supply chains, but not every business. Far from it. And this came in IKEA actually in the '90s. We found there was a risk of child labor in the supply chain, and people in the business were shocked. And it was clearly totally unacceptable, so then you have to act. So a code of conduct was developed, and now we have 80 auditors out in the world every day making sure all our factories secure good working conditions and protect human rights and make sure there is no child labor.But it's not just as simple as making sure there's no child labor. You've got to say that's not enough today. I think we'd all agree that children are the most important people in the world and the most vulnerable. So what can a business do today to actually use your total value chain to support a better quality of life and protect child rights? We've worked with UNICEF and Save the Children on developing some new business principles with children's rights. Increasing numbers of businesses are signing up to these, but actually in a survey, many business leaders said they thought their business had nothing to do with children. So what we decided to do was, we will look and ask ourselves the tough questions with partners who know more than us, what can we do to go beyond our business to help improve the lives of children? We also have a foundation that's committed to work through partners and help improve the lives and protect the rights of 100 million children by 2015.You know the phrase, you can manage what you measure? Well, you should measure what you care about. If you're not measuring things, you don't care and you don't know. So let's take an example, measure the things that are important in your business. Isn't it about time that businesses were led equally by men and women?(Applause)So we know for our 17,000 managers across IKEA that 47 percent are women today, but it's not enough, and we want to close the gap and follow it all the way through to senior management. And we do not want to wait another hundred years. So we've launched a women's open network this week in IKEA, and we'll do whatever it takes to lead the change. So the message here is, measure what you care about and lead the change, and don't wait a hundred years.So we've gone from sustainability being a nice-to-do to a must-do. It's a must-do. It's still nice to do, but it's a must-do. And everybody can do something on this as an individual. Be a discerning consumer. Vote with your wallets. Search out the companies that are acting on this. But also, there are other businesses already acting. I mentioned renewable energy. You go to Google or Lego, they're going 100 percent renewable too, in the same way that we are. On having really good sustainability strategies, there are companies like Nike, Patagonia, Timberland, Marks & Spencer. But I don't think any of those businesses would say they're perfect. We certainly wouldn't. We'll make mistakes going forward, but it's about setting a clear direction, being transparent, having a dialogue with the right partners, and choosing to lead on the issues that really count.So if you're a business leader, if you're not already weaving sustainability right into the heart of your business model, I'd urge you to do so. And together, we can help create a sustainable world, and, if we get it right, we can make sustainability affordable for the many people, not a luxury for the few.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_howard_let_s_go_all_in_on_selling_sustainability
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"Africa is booming. Per capita incomes since the year 2000 have doubled, and this boom is impacting on everyone. Life expectancy has increased by one year every three years for the last decade. That means if an African child is born today, rather than three days ago, they will get an extra day of life at the end of their lifespan. It's that quick. And HIV infection rates are down 27 percent: 600,000 less people a year are getting HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. The battle against malaria is being won, with deaths from malaria down 27 percent, according to the latest World Bank data. And malaria nets actually are playing a role in that. This shouldn't surprise us, because actually, everybody grows. If you go back to Imperial Rome in the Year 1 A.D., there was admittedly about 1,800 years where there wasn't an awful lot of growth. But then the people that the Romans would have called Scottish barbarians, my ancestors, were actually part of the Industrial Revolution, and in the 19th century, growth began to accelerate, and you saw that get quicker and quicker, and it's been impacting everyone. It doesn't matter if this is the jungles of Singapore or the tundra of northern Finland. Everybody gets involved. It's just a matter of when the inevitable happens.Among the reasons I think it's happening right now is the quality of the leadership across Africa. I think most of us would agree that in the 1990s, the greatest politician in the world was African, but I'm meeting brilliant people across the continent the entire time, and they're doing the reforms which have transformed the economic situation for their countries.And the West is engaging with that. The West has given debt forgiveness programs which have halved sub-Saharan debt from about 70 percent of GDP down to about 40. At the same time, our debt level's gone up to 120 and we're all feeling slightly miserable as a result. Politics gets weaker when debt is high. When public sector debt is low, governments don't have to choose between investing in education and health and paying interest on that debt you owe. And it's not just the public sector which is looking so good. The private sector as well. Again, in the West, we have private sector debt of 200 percent of GDP in Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. That's an awful lot of debt. Africa, many African countries, are sitting at 10 to 30 percent of GDP. If there's any continent that can do what China has done — China's at about 130 percent of GDP on that chart — if anyone can do what China has done in the last 30 years, it'll be Africa in the next 30.So they've got great government finances, great private sector debt. Does anyone recognize this? In fact, they do. Foreign direct investment has poured into Africa in the last 15 years. Back in the '70s, no one touched the continent with a barge pole. And this investment is actually Western-led. We hear a lot about China, and they do lend a lot of money, but 60 percent of the FDI in the last couple of years has come from Europe, America, Australia, Canada. Ten percent's come from India. And they're investing in energy. Africa produces 10 million barrels a day of oil now. It's the same as Saudi Arabia or Russia. And they're investing in telecoms, shopping malls. And this very encouraging story, I think, is partly demographic-led. And it's not just about African demographics. I'm showing you the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in various parts of the world, and the blue line is the one I want you to focus on for a second. Ten years ago, say you're Foxconn setting up an iPhone factory, by chance. You might choose China, which is the bulk of that East Asian blue line, where there's 200 million young people, and every year until 2010 that's getting bigger. Which means you're going to have new guys knocking on the door saying, ""Give us a job,"" and, ""I don't need a big pay rise, just please give me a job."" Now, that's completely changed now. This decade, we're going to see a 20- to 30-percent fall in the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in China. So where do you set up your new factory? You look at South Asia, and people are. They're looking at Pakistan and Bangladesh, and they're also looking at Africa. And they're looking at Africa because that yellow line is showing you that the number of young Africans is going to continue to get bigger decade after decade after decade out to 2050.Now, there's a problem with lots of young people coming into any market, particularly when they're young men. A bit dangerous, sometimes. I think one of the crucial factors is how educated is that demographic? If you look at the red line here, what you're going to see is that in 1975, just nine percent of kids were in secondary school education in sub-Saharan Africa. Would you set up a factory in sub-Sahara in the mid-1970s? Nobody else did. They chose instead Turkey and Mexico to set up the textiles factories, because their education levels were 25 to 30 percent. Today, sub-Sahara is at the levels that Turkey and Mexico were at in 1975. They will get the textiles jobs that will take people out of rural poverty and put them on the road to industrialization and wealth.So what's Africa looking like today? This is how I look at Africa. It's a bit odd, because I'm an economist. Each little box is about a billion dollars, and you see that I pay an awful lot of attention to Nigeria sitting there in the middle. South Africa is playing a role. But when I'm thinking about the future, I'm actually most interested in Central, Western and Southern Africa. If I look at Africa by population, East Africa stands out as so much potential.And I'm showing you something else with these maps. I'm showing you democracy versus autocracy. Fragile democracies is the beige color. Strong democracies are the orange color. And what you'll see here is that most Africans are now living in democracies. Why does that matter? Because what people want is what politicians try, they don't always succeed, but they try and deliver. And what you've got is a reinforcing positive circle going on. In Ghana in the elections, in December 2012, the battle between the two candidates was over education. One guy offered free secondary school education to all, not just 30 percent. The other guy had to say, I'm going to build 50 new schools. He won by a margin. So democracy is encouraging governments to invest in education. Education is helping growth and investment, and that's giving budget revenues, which is giving governments more money, which is helping growth through education. It's a positive, virtuous circle.But I get asked this question, and this particular question makes me quite sad: It's, ""But what about corruption? How can you invest in Africa when there's corruption?"" And what makes me sad about it is that this graph here is showing you that the biggest correlation with corruption is wealth. When you're poor, corruption is not your biggest priority. And the countries on the right hand side, you'll see the per capita GDP, basically every country with a per capita GDP of, say, less than 5,000 dollars, has got a corruption score of roughly, what's that, about three? Three out of 10. That's not good. Every poor country is corrupt. Every rich country is relatively uncorrupt. How do you get from poverty and corruption to wealth and less corruption? You see the middle class grow. And the way to do that is to invest, not to say I'm not investing in that continent because there's too much corruption.Now, I don't want to be an apologist for corruption. I've been arrested because I refused to pay a bribe — not in Africa, actually. But what I'm saying here is that we can make a difference and we can do that by investing.Now I'm going to let you in on a little not-so-secret. Economists aren't great at forecasting. Because the question really is, what happens next? And if you go back to the year 2000, what you'll find is The Economist had a very famous cover, ""The Hopeless Continent,"" and what they'd done is they'd looked at growth in Africa over the previous 10 years — two percent — and they said, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? They assumed two percent, and that made it a pretty hopeless story, because population growth was two and a half. People got poorer in Africa in the 1990s. Now 2012, The Economist has a new cover, and what does that new cover show? That new cover shows, well, Africa rising, because the growth over the last 10 years has been about five and a half percent.I would like to see if you can all now become economists, because if growth for the last 10 years has been five and a half percent, what do you think the IMF is forecasting for the next five years of growth in Africa? Very good. I think you're secretly saying to your head, probably five and a half percent. You're all economists, and I think, like most economists, wrong. No offense.What I like to do is try and find the countries that are doing exactly what Africa has already done, and it means that jump from 1,800 years of nothing to whoof, suddenly shooting through the roof. India is one of those examples. This is Indian growth from 1960 to 2010. Ignore the scale on the bottom for a second. Actually, for the first 20 years, the '60s and '70s, India didn't really grow. It grew at two percent when population growth was about two and a half. If that's familiar, that's exactly what happened in sub-Sahara in the '80s and the '90s. And then something happened in 1980. Boom! India began to explode. It wasn't a ""Hindu rate of growth,"" ""democracies can't grow."" Actually India could. And if I lay sub-Saharan growth on top of the Indian growth story, it's remarkably similar. Twenty years of not much growth and a trend line which is actually telling you that sub-Saharan African growth is slightly better than India. And if I then lay developing Asia on top of this, I'm saying India is 20 years ahead of Africa, I'm saying developing Asia is 10 years ahead of India, I can draw out some forecasts for the next 30 to 40 years which I think are better than the ones where you're looking backwards. And that tells me this: that Africa is going to go from a $2 trillion economy today to a $29 trillion economy by 2050. Now that's bigger than Europe and America put together in today's money. Life expectancy is going to go up by 13 years. The population's going to double from one billion to two billion, so household incomes are going to go up sevenfold in the next 35 years. And when I present this in Africa — Nairobi, Lagos, Accra — I get one question. ""Charlie, why are you so pessimistic?""And you know what? Actually, I think they've got a point. Am I really saying that there can be nothing learned, yes from the positives in Asia and India, but also the negatives? Perhaps Africa can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made. Surely, the technologies that we're talking about here this last week, surely some of these can perhaps help Africa grow even faster? And I think here we can play a role. Because technology does let you help. You can go and download some of the great African literature from the Internet now. No, not right now, just 30 seconds. You can go and buy some of the great tunes. My iPod's full of them. Buy African products. Go on holiday and see for yourself the change that's happening. Invest. Perhaps hire people, give them the skills that they can take back to Africa, and their companies will grow an awful lot faster than most of ours here in the West. And then you and I can help make sure that for Africa, the 21st century is their century.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_robertson_africa_s_next_boom
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"So when I was eight years old, a new girl came to join the class, and she was so impressive, as the new girl always seems to be. She had vast quantities of very shiny hair and a cute little pencil case, super strong on state capitals, just a great speller. And I just curdled with jealousy that year, until I hatched my devious plan. So one day I stayed a little late after school, a little too late, and I lurked in the girls' bathroom. When the coast was clear, I emerged, crept into the classroom, and took from my teacher's desk the grade book. And then I did it. I fiddled with my rival's grades, just a little, just demoted some of those A's. All of those A's. (Laughter) And I got ready to return the book to the drawer, when hang on, some of my other classmates had appallingly good grades too. So, in a frenzy, I corrected everybody's marks, not imaginatively. I gave everybody a row of D's and I gave myself a row of A's, just because I was there, you know, might as well.And I am still baffled by my behavior. I don't understand where the idea came from. I don't understand why I felt so great doing it. I felt great. I don't understand why I was never caught. I mean, it should have been so blatantly obvious. I was never caught. But most of all, I am baffled by, why did it bother me so much that this little girl, this tiny little girl, was so good at spelling? Jealousy baffles me. It's so mysterious, and it's so pervasive. We know babies suffer from jealousy. We know primates do. Bluebirds are actually very prone. We know that jealousy is the number one cause of spousal murder in the United States. And yet, I have never read a study that can parse to me its loneliness or its longevity or its grim thrill. For that, we have to go to fiction, because the novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration. In fact, I don't know if it's an exaggeration to say that if we didn't have jealousy, would we even have literature? Well no faithless Helen, no ""Odyssey."" No jealous king, no ""Arabian Nights."" No Shakespeare. There goes high school reading lists, because we're losing ""Sound and the Fury,"" we're losing ""Gatsby,"" ""Sun Also Rises,"" we're losing ""Madame Bovary,"" ""Anna K."" No jealousy, no Proust. And now, I mean, I know it's fashionable to say that Proust has the answers to everything, but in the case of jealousy, he kind of does. This year is the centennial of his masterpiece, ""In Search of Lost Time,"" and it's the most exhaustive study of sexual jealousy and just regular competitiveness, my brand, that we can hope to have. (Laughter) And we think about Proust, we think about the sentimental bits, right? We think about a little boy trying to get to sleep. We think about a madeleine moistened in lavender tea. We forget how harsh his vision was. We forget how pitiless he is. I mean, these are books that Virginia Woolf said were tough as cat gut. I don't know what cat gut is, but let's assume it's formidable.Let's look at why they go so well together, the novel and jealousy, jealousy and Proust. Is it something as obvious as that jealousy, which boils down into person, desire, impediment, is such a solid narrative foundation? I don't know. I think it cuts very close to the bone, because let's think about what happens when we feel jealous. When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. We tell ourselves a story about other people's lives, and these stories make us feel terrible because they're designed to make us feel terrible. As the teller of the tale and the audience, we know just what details to include, to dig that knife in. Right? Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists, and this is something Proust understood.In the first volume, Swann's Way, the series of books, Swann, one of the main characters, is thinking very fondly of his mistress and how great she is in bed, and suddenly, in the course of a few sentences, and these are Proustian sentences, so they're long as rivers, but in the course of a few sentences, he suddenly recoils and he realizes, ""Hang on, everything I love about this woman, somebody else would love about this woman. Everything that she does that gives me pleasure could be giving somebody else pleasure, maybe right about now."" And this is the story he starts to tell himself, and from then on, Proust writes that every fresh charm Swann detects in his mistress, he adds to his ""collection of instruments in his private torture chamber.""Now Swann and Proust, we have to admit, were notoriously jealous. You know, Proust's boyfriends would have to leave the country if they wanted to break up with him. But you don't have to be that jealous to concede that it's hard work. Right? Jealousy is exhausting. It's a hungry emotion. It must be fed.And what does jealousy like? Jealousy likes information. Jealousy likes details. Jealousy likes the vast quantities of shiny hair, the cute little pencil case. Jealousy likes photos. That's why Instagram is such a hit. (Laughter) Proust actually links the language of scholarship and jealousy. When Swann is in his jealous throes, and suddenly he's listening at doorways and bribing his mistress' servants, he defends these behaviors. He says, ""You know, look, I know you think this is repugnant, but it is no different from interpreting an ancient text or looking at a monument."" He says, ""They are scientific investigations with real intellectual value."" Proust is trying to show us that jealousy feels intolerable and makes us look absurd, but it is, at its crux, a quest for knowledge, a quest for truth, painful truth, and actually, where Proust is concerned, the more painful the truth, the better. Grief, humiliation, loss: These were the avenues to wisdom for Proust. He says, ""A woman whom we need, who makes us suffer, elicits from us a gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us."" Is he telling us to just go and find cruel women? No. I think he's trying to say that jealousy reveals us to ourselves. And does any other emotion crack us open in this particular way? Does any other emotion reveal to us our aggression and our hideous ambition and our entitlement? Does any other emotion teach us to look with such peculiar intensity?Freud would write about this later. One day, Freud was visited by this very anxious young man who was consumed with the thought of his wife cheating on him. And Freud says, it's something strange about this guy, because he's not looking at what his wife is doing. Because she's blameless; everybody knows it. The poor creature is just under suspicion for no cause. But he's looking for things that his wife is doing without noticing, unintentional behaviors. Is she smiling too brightly here, or did she accidentally brush up against a man there? [Freud] says that the man is becoming the custodian of his wife's unconscious.The novel is very good on this point. The novel is very good at describing how jealousy trains us to look with intensity but not accuracy. In fact, the more intensely jealous we are, the more we become residents of fantasy. And this is why, I think, jealousy doesn't just provoke us to do violent things or illegal things. Jealousy prompts us to behave in ways that are wildly inventive. Now I'm thinking of myself at eight, I concede, but I'm also thinking of this story I heard on the news. A 52-year-old Michigan woman was caught creating a fake Facebook account from which she sent vile, hideous messages to herself for a year. For a year. A year. And she was trying to frame her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, and I have to confess when I heard this, I just reacted with admiration. (Laughter) Because, I mean, let's be real. What immense, if misplaced, creativity. Right? This is something from a novel. This is something from a Patricia Highsmith novel.Now Highsmith is a particular favorite of mine. She is the very brilliant and bizarre woman of American letters. She's the author of ""Strangers on a Train"" and ""The Talented Mr. Ripley,"" books that are all about how jealousy, it muddles our minds, and once we're in the sphere, in that realm of jealousy, the membrane between what is and what could be can be pierced in an instant. Take Tom Ripley, her most famous character. Now, Tom Ripley goes from wanting you or wanting what you have to being you and having what you once had, and you're under the floorboards, he's answering to your name, he's wearing your rings, emptying your bank account. That's one way to go.But what do we do? We can't go the Tom Ripley route. I can't give the world D's, as much as I would really like to, some days. And it's a pity, because we live in envious times. We live in jealous times. I mean, we're all good citizens of social media, aren't we, where the currency is envy?Does the novel show us a way out? I'm not sure. So let's do what characters always do when they're not sure, when they are in possession of a mystery. Let's go to 221B Baker Street and ask for Sherlock Holmes. When people think of Holmes, they think of his nemesis being Professor Moriarty, right, this criminal mastermind. But I've always preferred [Inspector] Lestrade, who is the rat-faced head of Scotland Yard who needs Holmes desperately, needs Holmes' genius, but resents him. Oh, it's so familiar to me. So Lestrade needs his help, resents him, and sort of seethes with bitterness over the course of the mysteries. But as they work together, something starts to change, and finally in ""The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,"" once Holmes comes in, dazzles everybody with his solution, Lestrade turns to Holmes and he says, ""We're not jealous of you, Mr. Holmes. We're proud of you."" And he says that there's not a man at Scotland Yard who wouldn't want to shake Sherlock Holmes' hand.It's one of the few times we see Holmes moved in the mysteries, and I find it very moving, this little scene, but it's also mysterious, right? It seems to treat jealousy as a problem of geometry, not emotion. You know, one minute Holmes is on the other side from Lestrade. The next minute they're on the same side. Suddenly, Lestrade is letting himself admire this mind that he's resented. Could it be so simple though? What if jealousy really is a matter of geometry, just a matter of where we allow ourselves to stand in relation to another? Well, maybe then we wouldn't have to resent somebody's excellence. We could align ourselves with it.But I like contingency plans. So while we wait for that to happen, let us remember that we have fiction for consolation. Fiction alone demystifies jealousy. Fiction alone domesticates it, invites it to the table. And look who it gathers: sweet Lestrade, terrifying Tom Ripley, crazy Swann, Marcel Proust himself. We are in excellent company. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/parul_sehgal_an_ode_to_envy
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"So last year, on the Fourth of July, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson. It was a historical day. There's no doubt that from now on, the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence, but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Well, at least, here at CERN.But for me, the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise. In the eye of a theoretical physicist, the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass, but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution. Too many questions are left unanswered. The Higgs boson does not share the beauty, the symmetry, the elegance, of the rest of the elementary particle world. For this reason, the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the Higgs boson could not be the full story. We were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the Higgs boson. Instead, so far, the measurements coming from the LHC show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena.Of course, the verdict is not definitive. In 2015, the LHC will almost double the energy of the colliding protons, and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world, and we will certainly learn much more.But for the moment, since we have found no evidence for new phenomena, let us suppose that the particles that we know today, including the Higgs boson, are the only elementary particles in nature, even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far. Let's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us. We will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe, and to explain my point, let me first tell you what the Higgs is about, and to do so, we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. And according to the Higgs theory, at that instant, a dramatic event took place in the universe. Space-time underwent a phase transition. It was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees. But in our case, the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material, but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time.During this phase transition, empty space became filled with a substance that we now call Higgs field. And this substance may seem invisible to us, but it has a physical reality. It surrounds us all the time, just like the air we breathe in this room. And some elementary particles interact with this substance, gaining energy in the process. And this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle, and by discovering the Higgs boson, the LHC has conclusively proved that this substance is real, because it is the stuff the Higgs bosons are made of. And this, in a nutshell, is the essence of the Higgs story.But this story is far more interesting than that. By studying the Higgs theory, theoretical physicists discovered, not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics, that the Higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today. Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states. Besides the known Higgs state, there could be a second state in which the Higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today, and the mere existence of another state of the Higgs field poses a potential problem. This is because, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, it is possible to have transitions between two states, even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states, and the phenomenon is called, quite appropriately, quantum tunneling. Because of quantum tunneling, I could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room, practically penetrating the wall. But don't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes, because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small. You would have to wait a really long time before it happens, but believe me, quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon, and it has been observed in many systems. For instance, the tunnel diode, a component used in electronics, works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling.But let's go back to the Higgs field. If the ultra-dense Higgs state existed, then, because of quantum tunneling, a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time, and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water. Bubbles of vapor form inside the water, then they expand, turning liquid into gas. In the same way, a bubble of the ultra-dense Higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling. The bubble would then expand at the speed of light, invading all space, and turning the Higgs field from the familiar state into a new state.Is this a problem? Yes, it's a big a problem. We may not realize it in ordinary life, but the intensity of the Higgs field is critical for the structure of matter. If the Higgs field were only a few times more intense, we would see atoms shrinking, neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei, nuclei disintegrating, and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe. And the Higgs field, in the ultra-dense Higgs state, is not just a few times more intense than today, but billions of times, and if space-time were filled by this Higgs state, all atomic matter would collapse. No molecular structures would be possible, no life.So, I wonder, is it possible that in the future, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and, through quantum tunneling, will be transformed into this nasty, ultra-dense state? In other words, I ask myself, what is the fate of the Higgs field in our universe? And the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the Higgs boson mass. And experiments at the LHC found that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 126 GeV. This is tiny when expressed in familiar units, because it's equal to something like 10 to the minus 22 grams, but it is large in particle physics units, because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a DNA constituent.So armed with this information from the LHC, together with some colleagues here at CERN, we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense Higgs state, and we found a very intriguing result. Our calculations showed that the measured value of the Higgs boson mass is very special. It has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation. The Higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse. So according to these calculations, we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff. And eventually, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself.So is this how humanity is going to disappear? I don't think so. Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10 to the 100 years, and this is a very long time. It's even longer than the time it takes for Italy to form a stable government.(Laughter)Even so, we will be long gone by then. In about five billion years, our sun will become a red giant, as large as the Earth's orbit, and our Earth will be kaput, and in a thousand billion years, if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate, you will not even be able to see as far as your toes, because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light. So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse.But the reason why I am interested in the transition of the Higgs field is because I want to address the question, why is the Higgs boson mass so special? Why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition? Theoretical physicists always ask ""why"" questions. More than how a phenomenon works, theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works. We think that this these ""why"" questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature. And indeed, a possible answer to my question opens up new universes, literally. It has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles, and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws. And in this context, you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the Higgs mass. Then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse. It would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach. In principle, you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach, and yet, the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 30, 35 degrees. And the reason is simple: because wind builds up the sand, gravity makes it fall. As a result, the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value, near to collapse. And something similar could happen for the Higgs boson mass in the multiverse. In the majority of bubble universes, the Higgs mass could be around the critical value, near to a cosmic collapse of the Higgs field, because of two competing effects, just as in the case of sand.My story does not have an end, because we still don't know the end of the story. This is science in progress, and to solve the mystery, we need more data, and hopefully, the LHC will soon add new clues to this story. Just one number, the Higgs boson mass, and yet, out of this number we learn so much. I started from a hypothesis, that the known particles are all there is in the universe, even beyond the domain explored so far. From this, we discovered that the Higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge, ready for cosmic collapse, and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach, the multiverse.But I don't know if my hypothesis is right. That's how physics works: A single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley. But whichever it turns out to be, there is one thing I'm sure of: The journey will be full of surprises.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gian_giudice_why_our_universe_might_exist_on_a_knife_edge
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"My work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions.Today I brought two recent projects as an example of this. Both projects are in emerging countries, one in Ethiopia and another one in Tunisia. And also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture.The first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa. And this is the type of building we were shown as an example, to my team and myself, of what we had to design. At first, the first thing I thought was, I want to run away.(Laughter)After seeing a few of these buildings — there are many in the city — we realized that they have three very big points. First, these buildings, they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people cannot afford to buy things. Second, they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside, and then you need a lot of cooling. In a city where this shouldn't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year. And third is that their image has nothing to do with Africa and with Ethiopia. It is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions.Also during our first visit to Ethiopia, I was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people, they go and buy things every day from small vendors. And also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity. So I thought, this is what I really want to design, not a shopping mall. But the question was how we could do a multistory, contemporary building with these principles.The next challenge was when we looked at the site, that is, in a really growing area of the city, where most of these buildings that you see in the image, they were not there. And it's also between two parallel streets that don't have any connection for hundreds of meters.So the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets, putting all the entrances of the building. And this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain. And around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops, that change in each floor because of the shape of the void.I also thought, how to close the building? And I really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions. And I started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in, and also the light, but in a filtered way. And then the inspiration came from these beautiful  patterns of the Ethiopian women's dresses. That they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade. And we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building. And this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night.With these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like, ""This is not a shopping mall. We didn't ask for that."" But then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell. And also that the idea of the facade was much, much cheaper, not only because of the material compared with the glass, but also because we didn't need to have air conditioning anymore. So we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project.And the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day. So we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof. And then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis. And these porches on the roof, all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside. Hopefully by the beginning of next year, because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction.The second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of Tunis. And for doing such a big project, the biggest project I've ever designed, I really needed to understand the city of Tunis, but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture.During that analysis I paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall, opened by twelve different gates, connected by almost straight lines. When I went to the site, the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets, creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in Barcelona and other cities in Europe with these courtyards. On top of that, we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines, and this modified this initial pattern.And the last operation was to think about the cell, the small cell of the project, like the apartment, as an essential part of the master plan. And for that I thought, what would be the best orientation in the Mediterranean climate for an apartment? And it's north-south, because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation. So we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction.And this is the result that is almost like a combination of the European block and the Arab city. It has these blocks with courtyards, and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians. And also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor. And it also reinforces this idea of the gates.The volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood And in the courtyards there are the different facilities, such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by, a series of commercial [spaces] that bring activity to the ground floor. The roof, which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction. And it's where all the neighbors, they can go up and socialize, and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning, jumping from one building to another.These two examples, they have a common approach in the design process. And also, they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing. In these cities, the impact of architecture in people's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow. For this reason, I see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/xavier_vilalta_architecture_at_home_in_its_community
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"Have you ever asked yourselves why it is that companies, the really cool companies, the innovative ones, the creative, new economy-type companies — Apple, Google, Facebook — are coming out of one particular country, the United States of America? Usually when I say this, someone says, ""Spotify! That's Europe."" But, yeah. It has not had the impact that these other companies have had.Now what I do is I'm an economist, and I actually study the relationship between innovation and economic growth at the level of the company, the industry and the nation, and I work with policymakers worldwide, especially in the European Commission, but recently also in interesting places like China, and I can tell you that that question is on the tip of all of their tongues: Where are the European Googles? What is the secret behind the Silicon Valley growth model, which they understand is different from this old economy growth model? And what is interesting is that often, even if we're in the 21st century, we kind of come down in the end to these ideas of market versus state. It's talked about in these modern ways, but the idea is that somehow, behind places like Silicon Valley, the secret have been different types of market-making mechanisms, the private initiative, whether this be about a dynamic venture capital sector that's actually able to provide that high-risk finance to these innovative companies, the gazelles as we often call them, which traditional banks are scared of, or different types of really successful commercialization policies which actually allow these companies to bring these great inventions, their products, to the market and actually get over this really scary Death Valley period in which many companies instead fail.But what really interests me, especially nowadays and because of what's happening politically around the world, is the language that's used, the narrative, the discourse, the images, the actual words. So we often are presented with the kind of words like that the private sector is also much more innovative because it's able to think out of the box. They are more dynamic. Think of Steve Jobs' really inspirational speech to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford, where he said to be innovative, you've got to stay hungry, stay foolish. Right? So these guys are kind of the hungry and foolish and colorful guys, right? And in places like Europe, it might be more equitable, we might even be a bit better dressed and eat better than the U.S., but the problem is this damn public sector. It's a bit too big, and it hasn't actually allowed these things like dynamic venture capital and commercialization to actually be able to really be as fruitful as it could. And even really respectable newspapers, some that I'm actually subscribed to, the words they use are, you know, the state as this Leviathan. Right? This monster with big tentacles. They're very explicit in these editorials. They say, ""You know, the state, it's necessary to fix these little market failures when you have public goods or different types of negative externalities like pollution, but you know what, what is the next big revolution going to be after the Internet? We all hope it might be something green, or all of this nanotech stuff, and in order for that stuff to happen,"" they say — this was a special issue on the next industrial revolution — they say, ""the state, just stick to the basics, right? Fund the infrastructure. Fund the schools. Even fund the basic research, because this is popularly recognized, in fact, as a big public good which private companies don't want to invest in, do that, but you know what? Leave the rest to the revolutionaries."" Those colorful, out-of-the-box kind of thinkers. They're often called garage tinkerers, because some of them actually did some things in garages, even though that's partly a myth. And so what I want to do with you in, oh God, only 10 minutes, is to really think again this juxtaposition, because it actually has massive, massive implications beyond innovation policy, which just happens to be the area that I often talk with with policymakers. It has huge implications, even with this whole notion that we have on where, when and why we should actually be cutting back on public spending and different types of public services which, of course, as we know, are increasingly being outsourced because of this juxtaposition. Right? I mean, the reason that we need to maybe have free schools or charter schools is in order to make them more innovative without being emburdened by this heavy hand of the state curriculum, or something. So these kind of words are constantly, these juxtapositions come up everywhere, not just with innovation policy.And so to think again, there's no reason that you should believe me, so just think of some of the smartest revolutionary things that you have in your pockets and do not turn it on, but you might want to take it out, your iPhone. Ask who actually funded the really cool, revolutionary thinking-out-of-the-box things in the iPhone. What actually makes your phone a smartphone, basically, instead of a stupid phone? So the Internet, which you can surf the web anywhere you are in the world; GPS, where you can actually know where you are anywhere in the world; the touchscreen display, which makes it also a really easy-to-use phone for anybody. These are the very smart, revolutionary bits about the iPhone, and they're all government-funded. And the point is that the Internet was funded by DARPA, U.S. Department of Defense. GPS was funded by the military's Navstar program. Even Siri was actually funded by DARPA. The touchscreen display was funded by two public grants by the CIA and the NSF to two public university researchers at the University of Delaware. Now, you might be thinking, ""Well, she's just said the word 'defense' and 'military' an awful lot,"" but what's really interesting is that this is actually true in sector after sector and department after department. So the pharmaceutical industry, which I am personally very interested in because I've actually had the fortune to study it in quite some depth, is wonderful to be asking this question about the revolutionary versus non-revolutionary bits, because each and every medicine can actually be divided up on whether it really is revolutionary or incremental. So the new molecular entities with priority rating are the revolutionary new drugs, whereas the slight variations of existing drugs — Viagra, different color, different dosage — are the less revolutionary ones. And it turns out that a full 75 percent of the new molecular entities with priority rating are actually funded in boring, Kafka-ian public sector labs. This doesn't mean that Big Pharma is not spending on innovation. They do. They spend on the marketing part. They spend on the D part of R&D. They spend an awful lot on buying back their stock, which is quite problematic. In fact, companies like Pfizer and Amgen recently have spent more money in buying back their shares to boost their stock price than on R&D, but that's a whole different TED Talk which one day I'd be fascinated to tell you about.Now, what's interesting in all of this is the state, in all these examples, was doing so much more than just fixing market failures. It was actually shaping and creating markets. It was funding not only the basic research, which again is a typical public good, but even the applied research. It was even, God forbid, being a venture capitalist. So these SBIR and SDTR programs, which give small companies early-stage finance have not only been extremely important compared to private venture capital, but also have become increasingly important. Why? Because, as many of us know, V.C. is actually quite short-term. They want their returns in three to five years. Innovation takes a much longer time than that, 15 to 20 years. And so this whole notion — I mean, this is the point, right? Who's actually funding the hard stuff? Of course, it's not just the state. The private sector does a lot. But the narrative that we've always been told is the state is important for the basics, but not really providing that sort of high-risk, revolutionary thinking out of the box. In all these sectors, from funding the Internet to doing the spending, but also the envisioning, the strategic vision, for these investments, it was actually coming within the state. The nanotechnology sector is actually fascinating to study this, because the word itself, nanotechnology, came from within government.And so there's huge implications of this. First of all, of course I'm not someone, this old-fashioned person, market versus state. What we all know in dynamic capitalism is that what we actually need are public-private partnerships. But the point is, by constantly depicting the state part as necessary but actually — pffff — a bit boring and often a bit dangerous kind of Leviathan, I think we've actually really stunted the possibility to build these public-private partnerships in a really dynamic way. Even the words that we often use to justify the ""P"" part, the public part — well, they're both P's — with public-private partnerships is in terms of de-risking. What the public sector did in all these examples I just gave you, and there's many more, which myself and other colleagues have been looking at, is doing much more than de-risking. It's kind of been taking on that risk. Bring it on. It's actually been the one thinking out of the box. But also, I'm sure you all have had experience with local, regional, national governments, and you're kind of like, ""You know what, that Kafka-ian bureaucrat, I've met him."" That whole juxtaposition thing, it's kind of there. Well, there's a self-fulfilling prophecy. By talking about the state as kind of irrelevant, boring, it's sometimes that we actually create those organizations in that way. So what we have to actually do is build these entrepreneurial state organizations. DARPA, that funded the Internet and Siri, actually thought really hard about this, how to welcome failure, because you will fail. You will fail when you innovative. One out of 10 experiments has any success. And the V.C. guys know this, and they're able to actually fund the other losses from that one success.And this brings me, actually, probably, to the biggest implication, and this has huge implications beyond innovation. If the state is more than just a market fixer, if it actually is a market shaper, and in doing that has had to take on this massive risk, what happened to the reward? We all know, if you've ever taken a finance course, the first thing you're taught is sort of the risk-reward relationship, and so some people are foolish enough or probably smart enough if they have time to wait, to actually invest in stocks, because they're higher risk which over time will make a greater reward than bonds, that whole risk-reward thing. Well, where's the reward for the state of having taken on these massive risks and actually been foolish enough to have done the Internet? The Internet was crazy. It really was. I mean, the probability of failure was massive. You had to be completely nuts to do it, and luckily, they were. Now, we don't even get to this question about rewards unless you actually depict the state as this risk-taker. And the problem is that economists often think, well, there is a reward back to the state. It's tax. You know, the companies will pay tax, the jobs they create will create growth so people who get those jobs and their incomes rise will come back to the state through the tax mechanism. Well, unfortunately, that's not true. Okay, it's not true because many of the jobs that are created go abroad. Globalization, and that's fine. We shouldn't be nationalistic. Let the jobs go where they have to go, perhaps. I mean, one can take a position on that. But also these companies that have actually had this massive benefit from the state — Apple's a great example. They even got the first — well, not the first, but 500,000 dollars actually went to Apple, the company, through this SBIC program, which predated the SBIR program, as well as, as I said before, all the technologies behind the iPhone. And yet we know they legally, as many other companies, pay very little tax back.So what we really need to actually rethink is should there perhaps be a return-generating mechanism that's much more direct than tax. Why not? It could happen perhaps through equity. This, by the way, in the countries that are actually thinking about this strategically, countries like Finland in Scandinavia, but also in China and Brazil, they're retaining equity in these investments. Sitra funded Nokia, kept equity, made a lot of money, it's a public funding agency in Finland, which then funded the next round of Nokias. The Brazilian Development Bank, which is providing huge amounts of funds today to clean technology, they just announced a $56 billion program for the future on this, is retaining equity in these investments. So to put it provocatively, had the U.S. government thought about this, and maybe just brought back just something called an innovation fund, you can bet that, you know, if even just .05 percent of the profits from what the Internet produced had come back to that innovation fund, there would be so much more money to spend today on green technology. Instead, many of the state budgets which in theory are trying to do that are being constrained. But perhaps even more important, we heard before about the one percent, the 99 percent. If the state is thought about in this more strategic way, as one of the lead players in the value creation mechanism, because that's what we're talking about, right? Who are the different players in creating value in the economy, and is the state's role, has it been sort of dismissed as being a backseat player? If we can actually have a broader theory of value creation and allow us to actually admit what the state has been doing and reap something back, it might just be that in the next round, and I hope that we all hope that the next big revolution will in fact be green, that that period of growth will not only be smart, innovation-led, not only green, but also more inclusive, so that the public schools in places like Silicon Valley can actually also benefit from that growth, because they have not.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_investor_risk_taker_innovator
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"I'm going to start by asking you a question: Is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem? Okay, so most of you are. I think we can all agree it's a serious issue. Nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water, or swim in a blue algae-infested lake. Right?I hope you won't be disappointed, but today, I won't be talking about blue algae. Instead, I'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue, which I will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis. Why have I chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today? For the simple reason that nobody else is talking about it. And by the end of my presentation, I hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue.Now, the problem is that if I ask, why do we find ourselves in this situation with blue algae? The answer is that it comes from how we farm. We use fertilizers in our farming, chemical fertilizers. Why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture? Basically, to help plants grow and to produce a better yield. The issue is that this is set to engender an environmental problem that is without precedent.Before going further, let me give you a crash course in plant biology. So, what does a plant need in order to grow? A plant, quite simply, needs light, it needs CO2, but even more importantly, it needs nutrients, which it draws from the soil. Several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements: phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium. So, the plant’s roots will extract these resources.Today I'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus. Why phosphorus in particular? Because it is the most problematic chemical element. By the end of my presentation, you will have seen what these problems are, and where we are today.Phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life. This is a very important point. I’d like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is. Phosphorus is a key component in several molecules, in many of our molecules of life. Experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based — phosphorylation, dephosphorylation. Cell membranes are phosphorus-based: These are called phospholipids. The energy in all living things, ATP, is phosphorus-based. And more importantly still, phosphorus is a key component of DNA, something everyone is familiar with, and which is shown in this image. DNA is our genetic heritage. It is extremely important, and once again, phosphorus is a key player.Now, where do we find this phosphorus? As humans, where do we find it? As I explained earlier, plants extract phosphorus from the soil, through water. So, we humans get it from the things we eat: plants, vegetables, fruits, and also from eggs, meat and milk. It’s true that some humans eat better than others. Some are happier than others. And now, looking at this picture, which speaks for itself, we see modern agriculture, which I also refer to as intensive agriculture. Intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers. Without them, we would not manage to produce enough to feed the world's population. Speaking of humans, there are currently 7 billion of us on Earth. In less than 40 years, there will be 9 billion of us. And the question is a simple one: Do we have enough phosphorus to feed our future generations?So, in order to understand these issues, where do we find our phosphorus? Let me explain. But first, let’s just suppose that we are using 100 percent of a given dose of phosphorus. Only 15 percent of this 100 percent goes to the plant. Eighty-five percent is lost. It goes into the soil, ending its journey in the lakes, resulting in lakes with extra phosphorus, which leads to the blue algae problem. So, you’ll see there’s a problem here, something that is illogical. A hundred percent of the phosphorus is used, but only 15 percent goes to the plant. You’re going to tell me it’s wasteful. Yes, it is. What is worse is that it is very expensive. Nobody wants to throw their money out the window, but unfortunately that's what is happening here. Eighty percent of each dose of phosphorus is lost. Modern agriculture depends on phosphorus. And because in order to get 15 percent of it to the plant, all the rest is lost, we have to add more and more.Now, where will we get this phosphorus from? Basically, we get it out of mines. This is the cover of an extraordinary article published in Nature in 2009, which really launched the discussion about the phosphorus crisis. Phosphorus, a nutrient essential to life, which is becoming increasingly scarce, yet nobody is talking about it. And everyone agrees: Politicians and scientists are in agreement that we are headed for a phosphorus crisis.What you are seeing here is an open-pit mine in the U.S., and to give you an idea of the dimensions of this mine, if you look in the top right-hand corner, the little crane you can see, that is a giant crane. So that really puts it into perspective. So, we get phosphorus from mines. And if I make a comparison with oil, there’s an oil crisis, we talk about it, we talk about global warming, yet we never mention the phosphorus crisis. To come back to the oil problem, oil is something we can replace. We can use biofuels, or solar power, or hydropower, but phosphorus is an essential element, indispensable to life, and we can’t replace it.What is the current state of the world's phosphorus reserves? This graph gives you a rough idea of where we are today. The black line represents predictions for phosphorus reserves. In 2030, we’ll reach the peak. By the end of this century, it will all be gone. The dotted line shows where we are today. As you can see, they meet in 2030, I’ll be retired by then. But we are indeed heading for a major crisis, and I’d like people to become aware of this problem.Do we have a solution? What are we to do? We are faced with a paradox. Less and less phosphorus will be available. By 2050 there will be 9 billion of us, and according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, we will need to produce twice as much food in 2050 than we do today. So, we will have less phosphorus, but we'll need to produce more food. What should we do? It truly is a paradoxical situation. Do we have a solution, or an alternative which will allow us to optimize phosphorus use?Remember that 80 percent is destined to be lost. The solution I'm offering today is one that has existed for a very long time, even before plants existed on Earth, and it's a microscopic mushroom that is very mysterious, very simple, and yet also extremely complex. I've been fascinated by this little mushroom for over 16 years now. It has led me to further my research and to use it as a model for my laboratory research.This mushroom exists in symbiosis with the roots. By symbiosis, I mean a bidirectional and mutually beneficial association which is also called mycorrhiza. This slide illustrates the elements of a mycorrhiza. You’re looking at the root of wheat, one of the world’s most important plants. Normally, a root will find phosphorus all by itself. It will go in search of phosphorus, but only within the one millimeter which surrounds it. Beyond one millimeter, the root is ineffective. It cannot go further in its search for phosphorus. Now, imagine this tiny, microscopic mushroom. It grows much faster, and is much better designed to seek out phosphorus. It can go beyond the root’s one-millimeter scope to seek out phosphorus.I haven’t invented anything at all; it's a biotechnology that has existed for 450 million years. And over time, this mushroom has evolved and adapted to seek out even the tiniest trace of phosphorus, and to put it to use, to make it available to the plant. What you’re seeing here, in the real world, is a carrot root, and the mushroom with its very fine filaments. Looking closer, we can see that this mushroom is very gentle in its penetration. It will proliferate between the root's cells, eventually penetrating a cell and starting to form a typical arbuscular structure, which will considerably increase the exchange interface between the plant and the mushroom. And it is through this structure that mutual exchanges will occur. It’s a win-win trade: I give you phosphorus, and you feed me. True symbiosis.Now let's add a mycorrhiza plant into the diagram I used earlier. And instead of using a 100 percent dose, I’m going to reduce it to 25 percent. You’ll see that of this 25 percent, most will benefit the plant, more than 90 percent. A very small amount of phosphorus will remain in the soil. That's completely natural. What's more is that in certain cases, we don't even need to add phosphorus.If you recall the graphs I showed you earlier, 85 percent of phosphorus is lost in the soil, and the plants are unable to access it. Even though it is present in the soil, it is in insoluble form. The plant is only able to seek out soluble forms. The mushroom is capable of dissolving this insoluble form and making it available for the plant to use. To further support my argument, here is a picture that speaks for itself. These are trials in a field of sorghum. On the left side, you see the yield produced using conventional agriculture, with a 100 percent phosphorus dose. On the other side, the dose was reduced to 50 percent, and just look at the yield. With only a half-dose, we achieved a better yield.This is to show you that this method works. And in some cases, in Cuba, Mexico and India, the dose can be reduced to 25 percent, and in several other cases, there's no need to add any phosphorus at all, because the mushrooms are so well adapted to finding phosphorus and drawing it from the soil. This is an example of soy production in Canada. Mycorrhiza was used in one field but not in the other. And here, where blue indicates a better yield, and yellow a weaker yield. The black rectangle is the plot from which the mycorrhiza was added. In other words, as I already said, I have invented nothing. Mycorrhiza has existed for 450 million years, and it has even helped modern-day plant species to diversify.So, this it isn't something that is still undergoing lab tests. Mycorrhiza exists, it works, it's produced at an industrial scale and commercialized worldwide. The problem is that people are not aware of it. People like food producers and farmers are still not aware of this problem. We have a technology that works, and one that, if used correctly, will alleviate some of the pressure we are putting on the world's phosphorus reserves.In conclusion, I am a scientist and a dreamer. I'm passionate about this topic. So if you were to ask me what my retirement dream is, which will be at the moment we reach that phosphorus peak, it would be that we use one label, ""Made with mycorrhiza,"" and that my children and grandchildren buy products bearing that label too.Thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mohamed_hijri_a_simple_solution_to_the_coming_phosphorus_crisis
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"I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy, and this little white dog called Maui was staying with me. Half the city was dark because of a power cut, and I was living on the dark side. Now, Maui was terrified of the dark, so I had to carry him up the stairs, actually down the stairs first, for his walk, and then bring him back up. I was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day. And through all of this, I had to hold a torch between my teeth. The stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread. For a shower, I walked 40 blocks to a branch of my gym.But these were not the major preoccupations of my day. It was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices. I started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points. I wasn't the only one. Even in the rain, people stood between Madison and 5th Avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street. Nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology, and yet here we were, obsessed about being wired.I think there's nothing like a crisis to tell you what's really important and what's not, and Sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter. The self as we once knew it no longer exists, and I think that an abstract, digital universe has become a part of our identity, and I want to talk to you about what I think that means.I'm a novelist, and I'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common. They're both stories, interpretations. You and I can experience things without a story. We might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless. But the larger sense that we have of our lives, the slightly more abstract one, is indirect. Our story of our life is based on direct experience, but it's embellished. A novel needs scene after scene to build, and the story of our life needs an arc as well. It needs months and years. Discrete moments from our lives are its chapters. But the story is not about these chapters. It's the whole book. It's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness, the victories and the disappointments, but it's because how because of these, and sometimes, more importantly, in spite of these, we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves. Our story, therefore, needs two dimensions of time: a long arc of time that is our lifespan, and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment. Now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment, but the one that narrates needs several moments, a whole sequence of them, and that's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time. Now, the flow of time is embedded in everything, in the erosion of a grain of sand, in the budding of a little bud into a rose. Without it, we would have no music. Our own emotions and state of mind often encode time, regret or nostalgia about the past, hope or dread about the future.I think that technology has altered that flow of time. The overall time that we have for our narrative, our lifespan, has been increasing, but the smallest measure, the moment, has shrunk. It has shrunk because our instruments enable us in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time, and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding of the material world, and this granular understanding has generated reams of data that our brains can no longer comprehend and for which we need more and more complicated computers. All of this to say that the gap between what we can perceive and what we can measure is only going to widen. Science can do things with and in a picosecond, but you and I are never going to have the inner experience of a millionth of a millionth of a second. You and I answer only to nature's rhythm and flow, to the sun, the moon and the seasons, and this is why we need that long arc of time with the past, the present and the future to see things for what they are, to separate signal from noise and the self from sensations. We need time's arrow to understand cause and effect, not just in the material world, but in our own intentions and our motivations. What happens when that arrow goes awry? What happens when time warps?So many of us today have the sensation that time's arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once. This is because time doesn't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one. We all know that the Internet has shrunk space as well as time. Far away over there is now here. News from India is a stream on my smartphone app whether I'm in New York or New Delhi. And that's not all. Your last job, your dinner reservations from last year, your former friends, lie on a flat plain with today's friends, because the Internet also archives, and it warps the past. With no distinction left between the past, the present and the future, and the here or there, we are left with this moment everywhere, this moment that I'll call the digital now.Just how can we prioritize in the landscape of the digital now? This digital now is not the present, because it's always a few seconds ahead, with Twitter streams that are already trending and news from other time zones. This isn't the now of a shooting pain in your foot or the second that you bite into a pastry or the three hours that you lose yourself in a great book. This now bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state. Its focus, instead, is to distract us at every turn on the road. Every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else. Are you reading an interview by an author? Why not buy his book? Tweet it. Share it. Like it. Find other books exactly like his. Find other people reading those books. Travel can be liberating, but when it is incessant, we become permanent exiles without repose. Choice is freedom, but not when it's constantly for its own sake.Not just is the digital now far from the present, but it's in direct competition with it, and this is because not just am I absent from it, but so are you. Not just are we absent from it, but so is everyone else. And therein lies its greatest convenience and horror. I can order foreign language books in the middle of the night, shop for Parisian macarons, and leave video messages that get picked up later. At all times, I can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you, while I sustain the illusion that I'm tapped into you in real time.Sandy was a reminder of how such an illusion can shatter. There were those with power and water, and those without. There are those who went back to their lives, and those who are still displaced after so many months. For some reason, technology seems to perpetuate the illusion for those who have it that everyone does, and then, like an ironic slap in the face, it makes it true. For example, it's said that there are more people in India with access to cell phones than toilets. Now if this rift, which is already so great in many parts of the world, between the lack of infrastructure and the spread of technology, isn't somehow bridged, there will be ruptures between the digital and the real. For us as individuals who live in the digital now and spend most of our waking moments in it, the challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous. How does one live inside distraction?We might think that those younger than us, those who are born into this, will adapt more naturally. Possibly, but I remember my childhood. I remember my grandfather revising the capitals of the world with me. Buda and Pest were separated by the Danube, and Vienna had a Spanish riding school. If I were a child today, I could easily learn this information with apps and hyperlinks, but it really wouldn't be the same, because much later, I went to Vienna, and I went to the Spanish riding school, and I could feel my grandfather right beside me. Night after night, he took me up on the terrace, on his shoulders, and pointed out Jupiter and Saturn and the Great Bear to me. And even here, when I look at the Great Bear, I get back that feeling of being a child, hanging onto his head and trying to balance myself on his shoulder, and I can get back that feeling of being a child again. What I had with my grandfather was wrapped so often in information and knowledge and fact, but it was about so much more than information or knowledge or fact. Time-warping technology challenges our deepest core, because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget, even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable. We want to clutch, and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments. They're like soap bubbles that disappear when we touch them.By archiving everything, we think that we can store it, but time is not data. It cannot be stored. You and I know exactly what it means like to be truly present in a moment. It might have happened while we were playing an instrument, or looking into the eyes of someone we've known for a very long time. At such moments, our selves are complete. The self that lives in the long narrative arc and the self that experiences the moment become one. The present encapsulates the past and a promise for the future. The present joins a flow of time from before and after.I first experienced these feelings with my grandmother. I wanted to learn to skip, and she found an old rope and she tucked up her sari and she jumped over it. I wanted to learn to cook, and she kept me in the kitchen, cutting, cubing and chopping for a whole month. My grandmother taught me that things happen in the time they take, that time can't be fought, and because it will pass and it will move, we owe the present moment our full attention. Attention is time. One of my yoga instructors once said that love is attention, and definitely from my grandmother, love and attention were one and the same thing. The digital world cannibalizes time, and in doing so, I want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves. It threatens the flow of love. But we don't need to let it. We can choose otherwise. We've seen again and again just how creative technology can be, and in our lives and in our actions, we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it. We can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time. We can choose to take time back.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/abha_dawesar_life_in_the_digital_now
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"Three years ago, I was standing about a hundred yards from Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four. My Geiger counter dosimeter, which measures radiation, was going berserk, and the closer I got, the more frenetic it became, and frantic. My God.I was there covering the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, as you can see by the look on my face, reluctantly so, but with good reason, because the nuclear fire that burned for 11 days back in 1986 released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the sarcophagus, which is the covering over reactor number four, which was hastily built 27 years ago, now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation.So I was filming. I just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast. But then, I looked into the distance, and I saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse, and I'm thinking, who could be living here? I mean, after all, Chernobyl's soil, water and air, are among the most highly contaminated on Earth, and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone, or dead zone, and it's a nuclear police state, complete with border guards. You have to have dosimeter at all times, clicking away, you have to have a government minder, and there's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring. The point being, no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone. But they are.It turns out an unlikely community of some 200 people are living inside the zone. They're called self-settlers. And almost all of them are women, the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol, cigarettes, if not radiation. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated at the time of the accident, but not everybody accepted that fate. The women in the zone, now in their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and, it would seem, common sense, and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone. They did so illegally. As one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time, ""Shoot me and dig the grave. Otherwise, I'm going home.""Now why would they return to such deadly soil? I mean, were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? The thing is, they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently.Now around Chernobyl, there are scattered ghost villages, eerily silent, strangely charming, bucolic, totally contaminated. Many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident, but a few are left like this, kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy. Others have a few residents in them, one or two ""babushkas,"" or ""babas,"" which are the Russian and Ukrainian words for grandmother. Another village might have six or seven residents. So this is the strange demographic of the zone — isolated alone together.And when I made my way to that piping chimney I'd seen in the distance, I saw Hanna Zavorotnya, and I met her. She's the self-declared mayor of Kapavati village, population eight. (Laughter) And she said to me, when I asked her the obvious, ""Radiation doesn't scare me. Starvation does.""And you have to remember, these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Stalin's enforced famines of the 1930s, the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians, and they faced the Nazis in the '40s, who came through slashing, burning, raping, and in fact many of these women were shipped to Germany as forced labor. So when a couple decades into Soviet rule, Chernobyl happened, they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible. So they returned to their villages and are told they're going to get sick and die soon, but five happy years, their logic goes, is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of Kiev, separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies, the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon. For them, environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation. It turns out this holds true for other species as well. Wild boar, lynx, moose, they've all returned to the region in force, the very real, very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans. The dead zone, it turns out, is full of life.And there is a kind of heroic resilience, a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 5 a.m. pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes, their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka. And there's a patina of simple defiance among them. ""They told us our legs would hurt, and they do. So what?"" I mean, what about their health? The benefits of hardy, physical living, but an environment made toxic by a complicated, little-understood enemy, radiation. It's incredibly difficult to parse. Health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught. The World Health Organization puts the number of Chernobyl-related deaths at 4,000, eventually. Greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands. Now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high, and that Chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere: higher levels of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, unemployment and, importantly, disrupted social networks.Now, like many of you, I have moved maybe 20, 25 times in my life. Home is a transient concept. I have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil. So it's hard for us to understand, but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka, and connection to the land is palpable. And perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets, aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time.""If you leave, you die.""""Those who left are worse off now. They are dying of sadness.""""Motherland is motherland. I will never leave.""What sounds like faith, soft faith, may actually be fact, because the surprising truth — I mean, there are no studies, but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on Earth for the last 27 years, have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation, by some estimates up to 10 years.How could this be? Here's a theory: Could it be that those ties to ancestral soil, the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms, actually affect longevity? The power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative. Home and community are forces that rival even radiation.Now radiation or not, these women are at the end of their lives. In the next decade, the zone's human residents will be gone, and it will revert to a wild, radioactive place, full only of animals and occasionally daring, flummoxed scientists. But the spirit and existence of the babushkas, whose numbers have been halved in the three years I've known them, will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with, about the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/holly_morris_why_stay_in_chernobyl_because_it_s_home
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"It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and I believe this is true, especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success. Well, I can tell you that, in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system, also known as pressure cooker, not everyone can do well in that environment. While many people responded in different ways about our education system, my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building.Why bows? I'm not quite sure. Perhaps, in the face of constant pressure, my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows. If you think about it, the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times. The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty, where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves. In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact, the government has planted mulberry trees. The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 Olympics. The area near these walls, which nobody bothers to pay attention to, had been left free from major intervention, and this is where I first found my treasures.As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood. When I went on school field trips, family vacations, or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes, I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag. And they would be somethings like saws, knives, sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel. I would bring the branches home, riding buses and subways, barely holding them in my hands.And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach. Airport security.(Laughter) In the privacy of my room, covered in sawdust, I would saw, trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape.One day, I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire. Where? The rooftop of my apartment building, a place where 96 families call home. A customer from a department store across from my building called 911, and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned. I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom, in the audience today: Mom, I was really sorry, and I will be more careful with open fire from now on.My mother had to do a lot of explaining, telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson.I also researched extensively on bows around the world. In that process, I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow. I also worked with many different types of wood, such as maple, yew and mulberry, and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before.The most effective bow for me would be like this.One: Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow.Two: Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight, which means more power.Three: Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage.And four: Horn used to store energy in compression.After fixing, breaking, redesigning, mending, bending and amending, my ideal bow began to take shape, and when it was finally done, it looked like this. I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own. This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum, and see how my bow resembles them. Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention. (Laughter)Through bowmaking, I came in contact with part of my heritage. Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me. You see, I searched far and wide, but never bothered to look close and near. From this realization, I began to take interest in Korean history, which had never inspired me before. In the end, the grass is often greener on my side of the fence, although we don't realize it.Now, I am going to show you how my bow works. And let's see how this one works. This is a bamboo bow, with 45-pound draw weights. (Noise of shooting arrow) (Applause)A bow may function in a simple mechanism, but in order to make a good bow, a great amount of sensitivity is required. You need to console and communicate with the wood material. Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being, and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow. I may be an [odd] student with unconventional interests, but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you.My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind, where everyone is needed exactly where they are, like the fibers and the tendons in a bow, a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient. The bow resembles me, and I resemble the bow. Now, I am shooting a part of myself to you. No, better yet, a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind. Did it strike you?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dong_woo_jang_the_art_of_bow_making
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"In December of 2010, the city of Apatzingán in the coastal state of Michoacán, in Mexico, awoke to gunfire. For two straight days, the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group, presumably from the local criminal organization, La Familia Michoacana, or the Michoacán family. The citizens didn't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city, so truly like a battlefield. After these two days, and during a particularly intense encounter, it was presumed that the leader of La Familia Michoacana, Nazario Moreno, was killed.In response to this terrifying violence, the mayor of Apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace. The idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state. And so, the day of the scheduled procession, thousands of people showed up. As the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march, his team noticed that, while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white, and bearing banners asking for peace, the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader. Shocked, the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime. And so his team stepped aside. The two marches joined together, and they continued their path towards the state capital.This story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society, who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization, is a perfect metaphor for what's happening in Mexico today, where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete.If you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what's going on with drug violence in Mexico by, say, just researching online, the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all Mexican citizens are equal, there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others, because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence. To put these numbers in perspective, this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. It's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the Syrian civil war, which is an active civil war. This is happening just south of the border.Now as you're reading, however, you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths, because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless, nameless dead people. Implicitly or explicitly, there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade, and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner, or, most likely, both. And so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died. And so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved. They were part of the bad guys. And that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people.However, while it's easier to think of us, the citizens, the police, the army, as the good guys, and them, the narcos, the carteles, as the bad guys, if you think about it, the latter are only providing a service to the former. Whether we like it or not, the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world, accounting for more than half of global demand. It shares thousands of miles of border with Mexico that is its only route of access from the South, and so, as the former dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, used to say, ""Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.""The U.N. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the United States. Using very, very conservative assumptions, this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars. If we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part, which we know is false, that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars. To put these numbers in perspective, Microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars. And it so happens that this is a product that, because of its nature, a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed. And the only way to do this, because it's illegal, is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs. Hence the violence. If you look at a map of cartel influence and violence, you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north. The only thing that the cartels are doing is that they're trying to protect their business.It's not only a multi-billion dollar market, but it's also a complex one. For example, the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes, and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized, international production, that by the way needs to have good quality control, because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it. And so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south, and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed. I urge you, but only a little bit, because I don't want to get you in trouble, to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, anywhere in the U.S., and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message, they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less.Think about this for a second. Think about the complexity of the distribution network that I just described. It's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless, ignorant goons that are just shooting each other, very difficult to reconcile.Now, as a business professor, and as any business professor would tell you, an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure, good incentives, a solid identity and good brand management. This leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in Mexico. Because you would quickly realize, and maybe be confused by the fact, that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles. You will hear about Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, which is the new brand for the Familia Michoacana that I spoke about at the beginning, and the Sinaloa Federation. You will read that Los Zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press, and this is somewhat true, or mostly true. But this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy. You see, Los Zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals, but was actually created by another criminal organization, the Gulf Cartel, that used to control the eastern corridor of Mexico. When that corridor became contested, they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm. So they recruited Los Zetas: an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the Mexican Army. They were incredibly effective as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, so much so that at some point, they decided to just take over the operations, which is why I ask you to never keep tigers as pets, because they grow up. Because the Zetas organization was founded in treason, they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine, but what they did have, and this is again based on their military origin, was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many, many markets very effectively, which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do. And so because they didn't have access to the more profitable drug markets, this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime. That includes kidnapping, prostitution, local drug dealing and human trafficking, including of migrants that go from the south to the U.S. So what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business. They focus most of their recruiting on the army, and they very openly advertise for better salaries, better benefits, better promotion paths, not to mention much better food, than what the army can deliver. The way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality, they let people know that they are there, and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say, ""I offer you to be the local representative of the Zeta brand."" If they agree — and you don't want to know what happens if they don't — they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town, in exchange for royalties. This kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear, and so Los Zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature, especially when they arrive first in a city, but again, that's just a brand strategy. I'm not saying they're not violent, but what I am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all, when you count, when you do the body count, they're actually all the same.In contrast to them, the Knights Templar that arose in Michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the Zetas into the state of Michoacán. Michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in Mexico, and it has very direct routes to the center of Mexico, which then gives you direct access to the U.S. The Knights Templar realized very quickly that they couldn't face the Zetas on violence alone, and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise. They brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of Michoacán against organized crime. Their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement, so they invest heavily in providing local services, like dealing with home violence, going after petty criminals, treating addicts, and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are, and, of course, protecting people from other criminal organizations. Now, they kill a lot of people too, but when they kill them, they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them, through newspaper insertions, YouTube videos, and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us, as an organization, of course, but to you, as citizens. And so we're actually here to protect you. They, as social enterprises do, have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around, and they have very strict recruiting practices. And here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions. They have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade, but the way they do it is, because they control all of Michoacán, and they control the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, they leverage that to, for example, trade copper from Michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from China which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce, and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the Sinaloa Federation that place their products in the U.S.Finally, the Sinaloa Federation. When you read about them, you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration, because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the Mexican organizations, and, many people argue, the world. They started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the U.S. and the Mexican borders, but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet. They have cultivated a brand of professionalism, business acumen and innovation. They have designed new drug products and new drug processes. They have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border, and you can see that these are not ""The Shawshank Redemption"" types. They have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar. They have invented drones to transport drugs, catapults, you name it. One of the leaders of the Sinaloa Federation actually made it to the Forbes list.[#701 Joaquin Guzman Loera]Like any multinational would, they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business, which is high-margin drugs like cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines. Like any traditional Latin American multinational would, the way they control their operations is through family ties. When they're entering a new market, they send a family member to supervise it, or, if they're partnering with a new organization, they create a family tie, either through marriages or other types of ties. Like any other multinational would, they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model, like for example, when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations, they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them, and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this.To further strengthen their brand, they actually have professional P.R. firms that shape how the press talks about them. They have professional videographers on staff. They have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border.And so, differences aside, what these three organizations share is on the one hand, a very clear understanding that institutions cannot be imposed from the top, but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time. They have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies.And so what I want you to remember from this talk are three things. The first one is that drug violence is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes. The second thing I want you to remember is that these are sophisticated, coherent organizations that are business organizations, and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach. The third thing I want you to remember is that even though we're more comfortable with this idea of ""them,"" a set of bad guys separated from us, we are actually accomplices to them, either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption.These organizations service, recruit from, and operate within our communities, so necessarily, they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging. And so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have. We see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will. The question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn, blissful, voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_of_drug_cartels
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"I was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. It was a beautiful day. The forest was sparkling. The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land.We got to our campsite. It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them?That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. Who cleans up after us? However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. I wanted to get to know them as individuals. I wanted to understand who takes the job. What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden?So I started a research project with them. I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. I needed to go deeper.So I took the job as a sanitation worker. I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education.Everyone asks about the smell. It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. The weight takes a long time to get used to. I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week.Then there's the danger. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. That's really bad for the worker. And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm.I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. It never stops coming. It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. It must always be in motion.And then there's the stigma. You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. They are the first guardians of public health. If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. The economy needs them. If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away.So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. They wear a uniform in many cities. You know when to expect them. And their work lets us do our work. They are almost a form of reassurance. The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what.On the day after September 11 in 2001, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, ""We're going to be okay. We're going to be okay."" It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends.I want to believe that Paulie was right. We are going to be okay. But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 40 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. It's a remarkable statistic.So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. Take a moment to say thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_nagle_what_i_discovered_in_new_york_city_trash
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"I am a neuroscientist with a mixed background in physics and medicine. My lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology focuses on spinal cord injury, which affects more than 50,000 people around the world every year, with dramatic consequences for affected individuals, whose life literally shatters in a matter of a handful of seconds.And for me, the Man of Steel, Christopher Reeve, has best raised the awareness on the distress of spinal cord injured people. And this is how I started my own personal journey in this field of research, working with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.I still remember this decisive moment. It was just at the end of a regular day of work with the foundation. Chris addressed us, the scientists and experts, ""You have to be more pragmatic. When leaving your laboratory tomorrow, I want you to stop by the rehabilitation center to watch injured people fighting to take a step, struggling to maintain their trunk. And when you go home, think of what you are going to change in your research on the following day to make their lives better.""These words, they stuck with me. This was more than 10 years ago, but ever since, my laboratory has followed the pragmatic approach to recovery after spinal cord injury. And my first step in this direction was to develop a new model of spinal cord injury that would more closely mimic some of the key features of human injury while offering well-controlled experimental conditions. And for this purpose, we placed two hemisections on opposite sides of the body. They completely interrupt the communication between the brain and the spinal cord, thus leading to complete and permanent paralysis of the leg. But, as observed, after most injuries in humans, there is this intervening gap of intact neural tissue through which recovery can occur. But how to make it happen?Well, the classical approach consists of applying intervention that would promote the growth of the severed fiber to the original target. And while this certainly remained the key for a cure, this seemed extraordinarily complicated to me. To reach clinical fruition rapidly, it was obvious: I had to think about the problem differently.It turned out that more than 100 years of research on spinal cord physiology, starting with the Nobel Prize Sherrington, had shown that the spinal cord, below most injuries, contained all the necessary and sufficient neural networks to coordinate locomotion, but because input from the brain is interrupted, they are in a nonfunctional state, like kind of dormant. My idea: We awaken this network.And at the time, I was a post-doctoral fellow in Los Angeles, after completing my Ph.D. in France, where independent thinking is not necessarily promoted. (Laughter) I was afraid to talk to my new boss, but decided to muster up my courage. I knocked at the door of my wonderful advisor, Reggie Edgerton, to share my new idea.He listened to me carefully, and responded with a grin. ""Why don't you try?""And I promise to you, this was such an important moment in my career, when I realized that the great leader believed in young people and new ideas.And this was the idea: I'm going to use a simplistic metaphor to explain to you this complicated concept. Imagine that the locomotor system is a car. The engine is the spinal cord. The transmission is interrupted. The engine is turned off. How could we re-engage the engine? First, we have to provide the fuel; second, press the accelerator pedal; third, steer the car. It turned out that there are known neural pathways coming from the brain that play this very function during locomotion. My idea: Replace this missing input to provide the spinal cord with the kind of intervention that the brain would deliver naturally in order to walk.For this, I leveraged 20 years of past research in neuroscience, first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire, and second, to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation. So here imagine an electrode implanted on the back of the spinal cord to deliver painless stimulation. It took many years, but eventually we developed an electrochemical neuroprosthesis that transformed the neural network in the spinal cord from dormant to a highly functional state. Immediately, the paralyzed rat can stand. As soon as the treadmill belt starts moving, the animal shows coordinated movement of the leg, but without the brain. Here what I call ""the spinal brain"" cognitively processes sensory information arising from the moving leg and makes decisions as to how to activate the muscle in order to stand, to walk, to run, and even here, while sprinting, instantly stand if the treadmill stops moving.This was amazing. I was completely fascinated by this locomotion without the brain, but at the same time so frustrated. This locomotion was completely involuntary. The animal had virtually no control over the legs. Clearly, the steering system was missing. And it then became obvious from me that we had to move away from the classical rehabilitation paradigm, stepping on a treadmill, and develop conditions that would encourage the brain to begin voluntary control over the leg.With this in mind, we developed a completely new robotic system to support the rat in any direction of space. Imagine, this is really cool. So imagine the little 200-gram rat attached at the extremity of this 200-kilo robot, but the rat does not feel the robot. The robot is transparent, just like you would hold a young child during the first insecure steps.Let me summarize: The rat received a paralyzing lesion of the spinal cord. The electrochemical neuroprosthesis enabled a highly functional state of the spinal locomotor networks. The robot provided the safe environment to allow the rat to attempt anything to engage the paralyzed legs. And for motivation, we used what I think is the most powerful pharmacology of Switzerland: fine Swiss chocolate.(Laughter)Actually, the first results were very, very, very disappointing. Here is my best physical therapist completely failing to encourage the rat to take a single step, whereas the same rat, five minutes earlier, walked beautifully on the treadmill. We were so frustrated.But you know, one of the most essential qualities of a scientist is perseverance. We insisted. We refined our paradigm, and after several months of training, the otherwise paralyzed rat could stand, and whenever she decided, initiated full weight-bearing locomotion to sprint towards the rewards. This is the first recovery ever observed of voluntary leg movement after an experimental lesion of the spinal cord leading to complete and permanent paralysis.In fact —(Applause)Thank you.In fact, not only could the rat initiate and sustain locomotion on the ground, they could even adjust leg movement, for example, to resist gravity in order to climb a staircase. I can promise you this was such an emotional moment in my laboratory. It took us 10 years of hard work to reach this goal.But the remaining question was, how? I mean, how is it possible? And here, what we found was completely unexpected. This novel training paradigm encouraged the brain to create new connections, some relay circuits that relay information from the brain past the injury and restore cortical control over the locomotor networks below the injury. And here, you can see one such example, where we label the fibers coming from the brain in red. This blue neuron is connected with the locomotor center, and what this constellation of synaptic contacts means is that the brain is reconnected with the locomotor center with only one relay neuron. But the remodeling was not restricted to the lesion area. It occurred throughout the central nervous system, including in the brain stem, where we observed up to 300-percent increase in the density of fibers coming from the brain. We did not aim to repair the spinal cord, yet we were able to promote one of the more extensive remodeling of axonal projections ever observed in the central nervous system of adult mammal after an injury.And there is a very important message hidden behind this discovery. They are the result of a young team of very talented people: physical therapists, neurobiologists, neurosurgeons, engineers of all kinds, who have achieved together what would have been impossible by single individuals. This is truly a trans-disciplinary team. They are working so close to each other that there is horizontal transfer of DNA. We are creating the next generation of M.D.'s and engineers capable of translating discoveries all the way from bench to bedside. And me? I am only the maestro who orchestrated this beautiful symphony.Now, I am sure you are all wondering, aren't you, will this help injured people? Me too, every day. The truth is that we don't know enough yet. This is certainly not a cure for spinal cord injury, but I begin to believe that this may lead to an intervention to improve recovery and people's quality of life.I would like you all to take a moment and dream with me. Imagine a person just suffered a spinal cord injury. After a few weeks of recovery, we will implant a programmable pump to deliver a personalized pharmacological cocktail directly to the spinal cord. At the same time, we will implant an electrode array, a sort of second skin covering the area of the spinal cord controlling leg movement, and this array is attached to an electrical pulse generator that delivers stimulations that are tailored to the person's needs. This defines a personalized electrochemical neuroprosthesis that will enable locomotion during training with a newly designed supporting system. And my hope is that after several months of training, there may be enough remodeling of residual connection to allow locomotion without the robot, maybe even without pharmacology or stimulation. My hope here is to be able to create the personalized condition to boost the plasticity of the brain and the spinal cord. And this is a radically new concept that may apply to other neurological disorders, what I termed ""personalized neuroprosthetics,"" where by sensing and stimulating neural interfaces, I implanted throughout the nervous system, in the brain, in the spinal cord, even in peripheral nerves, based on patient-specific impairments. But not to replace the lost function, no — to help the brain help itself.And I hope this enticed your imagination, because I can promise to you this is not a matter of whether this revolution will occur, but when. And remember, we are only as great as our imagination, as big as our dream.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gregoire_courtine_the_paralyzed_rat_that_walked
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"The two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the Internet and the mobile phone. They've changed the world. However, largely to our surprise, they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state. It turned out that the capability to collect data, information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about Western intelligence agencies, mostly U.S. intelligence agencies, watching over the rest of the world.We've heard about these starting with the revelations from June 6. Edward Snowden started leaking information, top secret classified information, from the U.S. intelligence agencies, and we started learning about things like PRISM and XKeyscore and others. And these are examples of the kinds of programs U.S. intelligence agencies are running right now, against the whole rest of the world.And if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by George Orwell, well it turns out that George Orwell was an optimist. (Laughter) We are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined.And this here is the infamous NSA data center in Utah. Due to be opened very soon, it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center. You could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting. And it's a pretty big building. How big? Well, I can give you the numbers — 140,000 square meters — but that doesn't really tell you very much. Maybe it's better to imagine it as a comparison. You think about the largest IKEA store you've ever been in. This is five times larger. How many hard drives can you fit in an IKEA store? Right? It's pretty big. We estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year. And this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever, keep it for extended periods of time, keep it for years, keep it for decades. And this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all. And what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone.Well, not exactly everyone, because the U.S. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners. They can monitor foreigners when foreigners' data connections end up in the United States or pass through the United States. And monitoring foreigners doesn't sound too bad until you realize that I'm a foreigner and you're a foreigner. In fact, 96 percent of the planet are foreigners.(Laughter)Right?So it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us, all of us who use telecommunications and the Internet.But don't get me wrong: There are actually types of surveillance that are okay. I love freedom, but even I agree that some surveillance is fine. If the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer, or they're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting, and they have leads and they have suspects, then it's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect's phone, and to intercept his Internet communications. I'm not arguing that at all, but that's not what programs like PRISM are about. They are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings. They're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent.So the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this, well, the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations, there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations, saying that we knew all this already, we knew it was happening, there's nothing new here. And that's not true. Don't let anybody tell you that we knew this already, because we did not know this already. Our worst fears might have been something like this, but we didn't know this was happening. Now we know for a fact it's happening. We didn't know about this. We didn't know about PRISM. We didn't know about XKeyscore. We didn't know about Cybertrans. We didn't know about DoubleArrow. We did not know about Skywriter — all these different programs run by U.S. intelligence agencies. But now we do.And we did not know that U.S. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose. And what that means is that you take something which is secure, an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file, nobody can decrypt that file. Even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file, it's going to take millions of years. So that's basically perfectly safe, uncrackable. You take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose, making all of us less secure as an end result. A real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because, you know, bad people might have house alarms, but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result. Backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind. But of course, these intelligence agencies are doing their job. This is what they have been told to do: do signals intelligence, monitor telecommunications, monitor Internet traffic. That's what they're trying to do, and since most, a very big part of the Internet traffic today is encrypted, they're trying to find ways around the encryption. One way is to sabotage encryption algorithms, which is a great example about how U.S. intelligence agencies are running loose. They are completely out of control, and they should be brought back under control.So what do we actually know about the leaks? Everything is based on the files leaked by Mr. Snowden. The very first PRISM slides from the beginning of June detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers, and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to. They even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers. So for example, they name the collection from Microsoft started on September 11, 2007, for Yahoo on the March 12, 2008, and then others: Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple and so on.And every single one of these companies denies. They all say that this simply isn't true, that they are not giving backdoor access to their data. Yet we have these files. So is one of the parties lying, or is there some other alternative explanation? And one explanation would be that these parties, these service providers, are not cooperating. Instead, they've been hacked. That would explain it. They aren't cooperating. They've been hacked. In this case, they've been hacked by their own government. That might sound outlandish, but we already have cases where this has happened, for example, the case of the Flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the U.S. government, and which, to spread, subverted the security of the Windows Update network, meaning here, the company was hacked by their own government. And there's more evidence supporting this theory as well. Der Spiegel, from Germany, leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies. Inside NSA, the unit is called TAO, Tailored Access Operations, and inside GCHQ, which is the U.K. equivalent, it's called NAC, Network Analysis Centre. And these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this GCHQ intelligence agency from the United Kingdom targeting a telecom here in Belgium. And what this really means is that an E.U. country's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow E.U. country on purpose, and they discuss it in their slides completely casually, business as usual. Here's the primary target, here's the secondary target, here's the teaming. They probably have a team building on Thursday evening in a pub. They even use cheesy PowerPoint clip art like, you know, ""Success,"" when they gain access to services like this. What the hell?And then there's the argument that okay, yes, this might be going on, but then again, other countries are doing it as well. All countries spy. And maybe that's true. Many countries spy, not all of them, but let's take an example. Let's take, for example, Sweden. I'm speaking of Sweden because Sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the United States. When your data traffic goes through Sweden, their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic. All right, how many Swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use, every day, U.S.-based services, like, you know, run Windows or OSX, or use Facebook or LinkedIn, or store their data in clouds like iCloud or Skydrive or DropBox, or maybe use online services like Amazon web services or sales support? And the answer is, every single Swedish business leader does that every single day. And then we turn it around. How many American leaders use Swedish webmails and cloud services? And the answer is zero. So this is not balanced. It's not balanced by any means, not even close.And when we do have the occasional European success story, even those, then, typically end up being sold to the United States. Like, Skype used to be secure. It used to be end-to-end encrypted. Then it was sold to the United States. Today, it no longer is secure. So once again, we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose, making all of us less secure as an outcome.And then the argument that the United States is only fighting terrorists. It's the war on terror. You shouldn't worry about it. Well, it's not the war on terror. Yes, part of it is war on terror, and yes, there are terrorists, and they do kill and maim, and we should fight them, but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of European leaders, to tap the email of residents of Mexico and Brazil, to read email traffic inside the United Nations Headquarters and E.U. Parliament, and I don't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the E.U. Parliament, right? It's not the war on terror. Part of it might be, and there are terrorists, but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them? Are the Americans ready to throw away the Constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists? And the same thing with the Bill of Rights and all the amendments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the E.U. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom? Do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat, we are ready to do anything at all?But people are scared about terrorists, and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide. Feel free to survey me if that helps. And whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply hasn't thought about this long enough.(Applause)Because we have this thing called privacy, and if you really think that you have nothing to hide, please make sure that's the first thing you tell me, because then I know that I should not trust you with any secrets, because obviously you can't keep a secret. But people are brutally honest with the Internet, and when these leaks started, many people were asking me about this. And I have nothing to hide. I'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal. Yet, I have nothing that I would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency, especially a foreign intelligence agency. And if we indeed need a Big Brother, I would much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother. And when the leaks started, the very first thing I tweeted about this was a comment about how, when you've been using search engines, you've been potentially leaking all that to U.S. intelligence. And two minutes later, I got a reply by somebody called Kimberly from the United States challenging me, like, why am I worried about this? What am I sending to worry about this? Am I sending naked pictures or something? And my answer to Kimberly was that what I'm sending is none of your business, and it should be none of your government's business either. Because that's what it's about. It's about privacy. Privacy is nonnegotiable. It should be built in to all the systems we use.(Applause)And one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families. Search engines know more about you than your family members know about you. And this is all the kind of information we are giving away, we are giving away to the United States.And surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon. Imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today. And let me actually quote the president of Brazil, Ms. Dilma Rousseff. She was one of the targets of NSA surveillance. Her email was read, and she spoke at the United Nations Headquarters, and she said, ""If there is no right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore, there can be no effective democracy.""That's what it's about. Privacy is the building block of our democracies. And to quote a fellow security researcher, Marcus Ranum, he said that the United States is right now treating the Internet as it would be treating one of its colonies. So we are back to the age of colonization, and we, the foreign users of the Internet, we should think about Americans as our masters.So Mr. Snowden, he's been blamed for many things. Some are blaming him for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations — and blaming Snowden for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming Al Gore for causing global warming.(Laughter)(Applause)So, what is there to be done? Should we worry. No, we shouldn't worry. We should be angry, because this is wrong, and it's rude, and it should not be done. But that's not going to really change the situation. What's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the United States. And that's much easier said than done. How do you do that? A single country, any single country in Europe cannot replace and build replacements for the U.S.-made operating systems and cloud services.But maybe you don't have to do it alone. Maybe you can do it together with other countries. The solution is open source. By building together open, free, secure systems, we can go around such surveillance, and then one country doesn't have to solve the problem by itself. It only has to solve one little problem. And to quote a fellow security researcher, Haroon Meer, one country only has to make a small wave, but those small waves together become a tide, and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time, and the tide we will build with secure, free, open-source systems, will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed_the_world_s_trust_time_to_act
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"So why do we learn mathematics? Essentially, for three reasons: calculation, application, and last, and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it, inspiration.Mathematics is the science of patterns, and we study it to learn how to think logically, critically and creatively, but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated, and when our students ask, ""Why are we learning this?"" then they often hear that they'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test. But wouldn't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind? Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause)Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here. That's great.Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book ""Liber Abaci,"" which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today. In terms of applications, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often. The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number, or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well.In fact, there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers, but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display. Let me show you one of my favorites. Suppose you like to square numbers, and frankly, who doesn't? (Laughter)Let's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. So one squared is one, two squared is four, three squared is nine, five squared is 25, and so on. Now, it's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers, you get the next Fibonacci number. Right? That's how they're created. But you wouldn't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together. But check this out. One plus one gives us two, and one plus four gives us five. And four plus nine is 13, nine plus 25 is 34, and yes, the pattern continues.In fact, here's another one. Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. Let's see what we get there. So one plus one plus four is six. Add nine to that, we get 15. Add 25, we get 40. Add 64, we get 104. Now look at those numbers. Those are not Fibonacci numbers, but if you look at them closely, you'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them.Do you see it? I'll show it to you. Six is two times three, 15 is three times five, 40 is five times eight, two, three, five, eight, who do we appreciate?(Laughter)Fibonacci! Of course.Now, as much fun as it is to discover these patterns, it's even more satisfying to understand why they are true. Let's look at that last equation. Why should the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13? I'll show you by drawing a simple picture. We'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square. Together, they form a one-by-two rectangle. Beneath that, I'll put a two-by-two square, and next to that, a three-by-three square, beneath that, a five-by-five square, and then an eight-by-eight square, creating one giant rectangle, right?Now let me ask you a simple question: what is the area of the rectangle? Well, on the one hand, it's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it, right? Just as we created it. It's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared. Right? That's the area. On the other hand, because it's a rectangle, the area is equal to its height times its base, and the height is clearly eight, and the base is five plus eight, which is the next Fibonacci number, 13. Right? So the area is also eight times 13. Since we've correctly calculated the area two different ways, they have to be the same number, and that's why the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13.Now, if we continue this process, we'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21, 21 by 34, and so on.Now check this out. If you divide 13 by eight, you get 1.625. And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number, then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618, known to many people as the Golden Ratio, a number which has fascinated mathematicians, scientists and artists for centuries.Now, I show all this to you because, like so much of mathematics, there's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools. We spend lots of time learning about calculation, but let's not forget about application, including, perhaps, the most important application of all, learning how to think.If I could summarize this in one sentence, it would be this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_the_magic_of_fibonacci_numbers
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"""Give me liberty or give me death.""When Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, said these words in 1775, he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with American generations to come. At the time, these words were earmarked and targeted against the British, but over the last 200 years, they've come to embody what many Westerners believe, that freedom is the most cherished value, and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them. Who could blame them? Over the past hundred years, the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the United States and Western countries to new levels of economic development. In the United States over the past hundred years, incomes have increased 30 times, and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty. Meanwhile, American ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions, motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets. It's no surprise, then, that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis, President Obama said, ""The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched."" Thus, there's understandably a deep-seated presumption among Westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth, liberal democracy, and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights.However, to many who live in the emerging markets, this is an illusion, and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 1948, was unanimously adopted, what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries, and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights. This schism has only grown wider. Today, many people who live in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives, believe that the Western obsession with political rights is beside the point, and what is actually important is delivering on food, shelter, education and healthcare. ""Give me liberty or give me death"" is all well and good if you can afford it, but if you're living on less than one dollar a day, you're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy.Now, I know many people in this room and around the world will think, ""Well actually, this is hard to grasp,"" because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct. But I ask you today, what would you do if you had to choose? What if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote?Over the last 10 years, I've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries, many of them in the emerging markets, in Latin America, Asia, and my own continent of Africa. I've met with presidents, dissidents, policymakers, lawyers, teachers, doctors and the man on the street, and through these conversations, it's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the West and that which people believe in the rest of the world.Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying people in the emerging markets don't understand democracy, nor am I saying that they wouldn't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders. Of course they would. However, I am saying that on balance, they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from, and how it is their governments can deliver for them, than whether or not the government was elected by democracy.The fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the Western ideological systems of politics and economics, and this is a system that is embodied by China. And rather than have private capitalism, they have state capitalism. Instead of liberal democracy, they have de-prioritized the democratic system. And they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights. I put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by China that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow, because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time. If you will indulge me, I will spend a few moments explaining to you first why economically they've come to this belief.First of all, it's China's economic performance over the past 30 years. She's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty, specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 300 million people out of indigence. It's not just in economics, but it's also in terms of living standards. We see that in China, 28 percent of people had secondary school access. Today, it's closer to 82 percent. So in its totality, economic improvement has been quite significant.Second, China has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct. Today, the United States and China are the two leading economies in the world. They have vastly different political systems and different economic systems, one with private capitalism, another one broadly with state capitalism. However, these two countries have the identical GINI Coefficient, which is a measure of income equality. Perhaps what is more disturbing is that China's income equality has been improving in recent times, whereas that of the United States has been declining.Thirdly, people in the emerging markets look at China's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout. This is not just about China building roads and ports and railways in her own country — she's been able to build 85,000 kilometers of road network in China and surpass that of the United States — but even if you look to places like Africa, China has been able to help tar the distance of Cape Town to Cairo, which is 9,000 miles, or three times the distance of New York to California. Now this is something that people can see and point to. Perhaps it's no surprise that in a 2007 Pew survey, when surveyed, Africans in 10 countries said they thought that the Chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins, by as much as 98 percent.Finally, China is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces. If you travel to Mogadishu, Mexico City or Mumbai, you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas. However, through a network of state-owned enterprises, the Chinese have been able to go into these rural areas, using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions.Ladies and gentlemen, it's no surprise that around the world, people are pointing at what China is doing and saying, ""I like that. I want that. I want to be able to do what China's doing. That is the system that seems to work."" I'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what China is doing in the democratic stance. In particular, there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets, when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth. In fact, countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, not just China, have shown that actually, it's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy. In a recent study, the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last. The study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year, your democracy will last about eight and a half years. If your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year, then you're likely to only get 33 years of democracy. And only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water.What this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable. But perhaps it's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy, because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies, democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments that they seek to replace.The evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing. Freedom House finds that although 50 percent of the world's countries today are democratic, 70 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people don't have free speech or freedom of movement. But also, we're finding from Freedom House in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years.What this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy, is we've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way, and that has its roots in economics. But it also says that as China moves toward being the largest economy in the world, something that is expected to happen by experts in 2016, that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the West and the rest is likely to widen.What might that world look like? Well, the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism; greater protectionisms of nation-states; but also, as I just pointed out a moment ago, ever-declining political rights and individual rights.The question that is left for us in general is, what then should the West be doing? And I suggest that they have two options. The West can either compete or cooperate. If the West chooses to compete with the Chinese model, and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy, this is basically going against headwinds, but it also would be a natural stance for the West to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the Chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy, and state capitalism. Now the fact of the matter is, if the West decides to compete, it will create a wider schism. The other option is for the West to cooperate, and by cooperating I mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility to figure out in an organic way what political and economic system works best for them.Now I'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking, well, this is like ceding to China, and this is a way, in other words, for the West to take a back seat. But I put it to you that if the United States and European countries want to remain globally influential, they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete, and by that, they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want.The fact of the matter is that instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with China, the West should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions. Instead of criticizing China for bad behavior, the West should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one. And instead of shoehorning democracy around the world, perhaps the West should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today. Indeed, the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer reminds us that it took the United States nearly 170 years from the time that the Constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the United States. Some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights. In fact, there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law.At its very best, the Western model speaks for itself. It's the model that put food on the table. It's the refrigerators. It put a man on the moon. But the fact of the matter is, although people back in the day used to point at the Western countries and say, ""I want that, I like that,"" there's now a new person in town in the form of a country, China. Today, generations are looking at China and saying, ""China can produce infrastructure, China can produce economic growth, and we like that.""Because ultimately, the question before us, and the question before seven billion people on the planet is, how can we create prosperity? People who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way, to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time.As you leave here today, I would like to leave you with a very personal message, which is what it is that I believe we should be doing as individuals, and this is really about being open-minded, open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world, creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people, has to be based in being open-minded, because these systems have good things and they have bad things.Just to illustrate, I went into my annals of myself. That's a picture of me.Awww. (Laughter)I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973. This is an affidavit from the Zambian government. I bring this to you to tell you that in 40 years, I've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious TED crowd today to talk to you about my views. In this vein, we can increase economic growth. We can meaningfully put a dent in poverty. But also, it's going to require that we look at our assumptions, assumptions and strictures that we've grown up with around democracy, around private capitalism, around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms. We might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth. Ultimately, it's about transforming the world and making it a better place.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dambisa_moyo_is_china_the_new_idol_for_emerging_economies
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"So, stepping down out of the bus, I headed back to the corner to head west en route to a braille training session. It was the winter of 2009, and I had been blind for about a year. Things were going pretty well. Safely reaching the other side, I turned to the left, pushed the auto-button for the audible pedestrian signal, and waited my turn. As it went off, I took off and safely got to the other side. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I then heard the sound of a steel chair slide across the concrete sidewalk in front of me. I know there's a cafe on the corner, and they have chairs out in front, so I just adjusted to the left to get closer to the street. As I did, so slid the chair. I just figured I'd made a mistake, and went back to the right, and so slid the chair in perfect synchronicity. Now I was getting a little anxious. I went back to the left, and so slid the chair, blocking my path of travel. Now, I was officially freaking out. So I yelled, ""Who the hell's out there? What's going on?"" Just then, over my shout, I heard something else, a familiar rattle. It sounded familiar, and I quickly considered another possibility, and I reached out with my left hand, as my fingers brushed against something fuzzy, and I came across an ear, the ear of a dog, perhaps a golden retriever. Its leash had been tied to the chair as her master went in for coffee, and she was just persistent in her efforts to greet me, perhaps get a scratch behind the ear. Who knows, maybe she was volunteering for service. (Laughter)But that little story is really about the fears and misconceptions that come along with the idea of moving through the city without sight, seemingly oblivious to the environment and the people around you.So let me step back and set the stage a little bit. On St. Patrick's Day of 2008, I reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The surgery was successful. Two days later, my sight started to fail. On the third day, it was gone.Immediately, I was struck by an incredible sense of fear, of confusion, of vulnerability, like anybody would. But as I had time to stop and think, I actually started to realize I had a lot to be grateful for. In particular, I thought about my dad, who had passed away from complications from brain surgery. He was 36. I was seven at the time. So although I had every reason to be fearful of what was ahead, and had no clue quite what was going to happen, I was alive. My son still had his dad. And besides, it's not like I was the first person ever to lose their sight. I knew there had to be all sorts of systems and techniques and training to have to live a full and meaningful, active life without sight.So by the time I was discharged from the hospital a few days later, I left with a mission, a mission to get out and get the best training as quickly as I could and get on to rebuilding my life. Within six months, I had returned to work. My training had started. I even started riding a tandem bike with my old cycling buddies, and was commuting to work on my own, walking through town and taking the bus. It was a lot of hard work.But what I didn't anticipate through that rapid transition was the incredible experience of the juxtaposition of my sighted experience up against my unsighted experience of the same places and the same people within such a short period of time.From that came a lot of insights, or outsights, as I called them, things that I learned since losing my sight. These outsights ranged from the trival to the profound, from the mundane to the humorous. As an architect, that stark juxtaposition of my sighted and unsighted experience of the same places and the same cities within such a short period of time has given me all sorts of wonderful outsights of the city itself. Paramount amongst those was the realization that, actually, cities are fantastic places for the blind. And then I was also surprised by the city's propensity for kindness and care as opposed to indifference or worse. And then I started to realize that it seemed like the blind seemed to have a positive influence on the city itself. That was a little curious to me.Let me step back and take a look at why the city is so good for the blind. Inherent with the training for recovery from sight loss is learning to rely on all your non-visual senses, things that you would otherwise maybe ignore. It's like a whole new world of sensory information opens up to you. I was really struck by the symphony of subtle sounds all around me in the city that you can hear and work with to understand where you are, how you need to move, and where you need to go. Similarly, just through the grip of the cane, you can feel contrasting textures in the floor below, and over time you build a pattern of where you are and where you're headed. Similarly, just the sun warming one side of your face or the wind at your neck gives you clues about your alignment and your progression through a block and your movement through time and space. But also, the sense of smell. Some districts and cities have their own smell, as do places and things around you, and if you're lucky, you can even follow your nose to that new bakery that you've been looking for.All this really surprised me, because I started to realize that my unsighted experienced was so far more multi-sensory than my sighted experience ever was. What struck me also was how much the city was changing around me. When you're sighted, everybody kind of sticks to themselves, you mind your own business. Lose your sight, though, and it's a whole other story. And I don't know who's watching who, but I have a suspicion that a lot of people are watching me. And I'm not paranoid, but everywhere I go, I'm getting all sorts of advice: Go here, move there, watch out for this. A lot of the information is good. Some of it's helpful. A lot of it's kind of reversed. You've got to figure out what they actually meant. Some of it's kind of wrong and not helpful. But it's all good in the grand scheme of things.But one time I was in Oakland walking along Broadway, and came to a corner. I was waiting for an audible pedestrian signal, and as it went off, I was just about to step out into the street, when all of a sudden, my right hand was just gripped by this guy, and he yanked my arm and pulled me out into the crosswalk and was dragging me out across the street, speaking to me in Mandarin. (Laughter) It's like, there was no escape from this man's death grip, but he got me safely there. What could I do? But believe me, there are more polite ways to offer assistance. We don't know you're there, so it's kind of nice to say ""Hello"" first. ""Would you like some help?""But while in Oakland, I've really been struck by how much the city of Oakland changed as I lost my sight. I liked it sighted. It was fine. It's a perfectly great city. But once I lost my sight and was walking along Broadway, I was blessed every block of the way.""Bless you, man.""""Go for it, brother.""""God bless you.""I didn't get that sighted. (Laughter) And even without sight, I don't get that in San Francisco. And I know it bothers some of my blind friends, it's not just me. Often it's thought that that's an emotion that comes up out of pity. I tend to think that it comes out of our shared humanity, out of our togetherness, and I think it's pretty cool. In fact, if I'm feeling down, I just go to Broadway in downtown Oakland, I go for a walk, and I feel better like that, in no time at all.But also that it illustrates how disability and blindness sort of cuts across ethnic, social, racial, economic lines. Disability is an equal-opportunity provider. Everybody's welcome. In fact, I've heard it said in the disability community that there are really only two types of people: There are those with disabilities, and there are those that haven't quite found theirs yet. It's a different way of thinking about it, but I think it's kind of beautiful, because it is certainly far more inclusive than the us-versus-them or the abled-versus-the-disabled, and it's a lot more honest and respectful of the fragility of life.So my final takeaway for you is that not only is the city good for the blind, but the city needs us. And I'm so sure of that that I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities, and not the people that are thought about after the mold has already been cast. It's too late then. So if you design a city with the blind in mind, you'll have a rich, walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of options and choices all available at the street level. If you design a city with the blind in mind, sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous. The space between buildings will be well-balanced between people and cars. In fact, cars, who needs them? If you're blind, you don't drive. (Laughter) They don't like it when you drive. (Laughter) If you design a city with the blind in mind, you design a city with a robust, accessible, well-connected mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around. If you design a city with the blind in mind, there'll be jobs, lots of jobs. Blind people want to work too. They want to earn a living.So, in designing a city for the blind, I hope you start to realize that it actually would be a more inclusive, a more equitable, a more just city for all. And based on my prior sighted experience, it sounds like a pretty cool city, whether you're blind, whether you have a disability, or you haven't quite found yours yet.So thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_downey_design_with_the_blind_in_mind
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"I would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid. I don't know his name, but I do know his story. He lives in a small village in southern Somalia. His village is near Mogadishu. Drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation. With nothing left for him there, he leaves for the big city, in this case, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. When he arrives, there are no opportunities, no jobs, no way forward. He ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of Mogadishu. Maybe a year passes, nothing. One day, he's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch, then to dinner, to breakfast. He meets this dynamic group of people, and they give him a break. He's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes, money to send back home to his family. He is introduced to this young woman. He eventually gets married. He starts this new life. He has a purpose in life.One beautiful day in Mogadishu, under an azure blue sky, a car bomb goes off. That small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber, and that dynamic group of people were al Shabaab, a terrorist organization linked to al Qaeda.So how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up? He was waiting. He was waiting for an opportunity, waiting to begin his future, waiting for a way forward, and this was the first thing that came along. This was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood.And his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world. It is the story of the disenfranchised, unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in Johannesburg, sparks riots in London, who reaches out for something other than waithood. For young people, the promise of the city, the big city dream is that of opportunity, of jobs, of wealth, but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities. Often it's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates. By 2030, three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 18. If we do not include young people in the growth of our cities, if we do not provide them opportunities, the story of waithood, the gateway to terrorism, to violence, to gangs, will be the story of cities 2.0. And in my city of birth, Mogadishu, 70 percent of young people suffer from unemployment. 70 percent don't work, don't go to school. They pretty much do nothing.I went back to Mogadishu last month, and I went to visit Madina Hospital, the hospital I was born in. I remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking, what if I had never left? What if I had been forced into that same state of waithood? Would I have become a terrorist? I'm not really sure about the answer.My reason for being in Mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit. I brought together about 90 young Somali leaders. We sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city.One of the young men in the room was Aden. He went to university in Mogadishu, graduated. There were no jobs, no opportunities. I remember him telling me, because he was a college graduate, unemployed, frustrated, that he was the perfect target for al Shabaab and other terrorist organizations, to be recruited. They sought people like him out.But his story takes a different route. In Mogadishu, the biggest barrier to getting from point A to point B are the roads. Twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system, and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around. Aden saw an opportunity and seized it. He started a motorbike company. He began renting out motorbikes to local residents who couldn't normally afford them. He bought 10 bikes, with the help of family and friends, and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years.How is this story different? What makes his story different? I believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity. It's entrepreneurship, and I believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood. It empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking.And you can train young people to be entrepreneurs. I want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings, Mohamed Mohamoud, a florist. He was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship. He's actually the first florist Mogadishu has seen in over 22 years, and until recently, until Mohamed came along, if you wanted flowers at your wedding, you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad. If you asked someone, ""When was the last time you saw fresh flowers?"" for many who grew up under civil war, the answer would be, ""Never.""So Mohamed saw an opportunity. He started a landscaping and design floral company. He created a farm right outside of Mogadishu, and started growing tulips and lilies, which he said could survive the harsh Mogadishu climate. And he began delivering flowers to weddings, creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city, and he's now working on creating Mogadishu's first public park in 22 years. There's no public park in Mogadishu. He wants to create a space where families, young people, can come together, and, as he says, smell the proverbial roses. And he doesn't grow roses because they use too much water, by the way.So the first step is to inspire young people, and in that room, Mohamed's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room. They had never really thought about starting up a business. They've thought about working for an NGO, working for the government, but his story, his innovation, really had a strong impact on them. He forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity. He empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs, that they could be change makers. By the end of the day, they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city. They came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems.So inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step, but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality. They need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses. Connect young people with the resources they need, provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation, and you will create catalysts for urban growth.For me, entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business. It's about creating a social impact. Mohamed is not simply selling flowers. I believe he is selling hope. His Peace Park, and that's what he calls it, when it's created, will actually transform the way people see their city. Aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him. He gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood. These young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities.So my suggestion is, turn youth into entrepreneurs, incubate and nurture their inherent innovation, and you will have more stories of flowers and Peace Parks than of car bombs and waithood.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mohamed_ali_the_link_between_unemployment_and_terrorism
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"Five years ago, I was on a sabbatical, and I returned to the medical university where I studied. I saw real patients and I wore the white coat for the first time in 17 years, in fact since I became a management consultant.There were two things that surprised me during the month I spent. The first one was that the common theme of the discussions we had were hospital budgets and cost-cutting, and the second thing, which really bothered me, actually, was that several of the colleagues I met, former friends from medical school, who I knew to be some of the smartest, most motivated, engaged and passionate people I'd ever met, many of them had turned cynical, disengaged, or had distanced themselves from hospital management. So with this focus on cost-cutting, I asked myself, are we forgetting the patient?Many countries that you represent and where I come from struggle with the cost of healthcare. It's a big part of the national budgets. And many different reforms aim at holding back this growth. In some countries, we have long waiting times for patients for surgery. In other countries, new drugs are not being reimbursed, and therefore don't reach patients. In several countries, doctors and nurses are the targets, to some extent, for the governments. After all, the costly decisions in health care are taken by doctors and nurses. You choose an expensive lab test, you choose to operate on an old and frail patient. So, by limiting the degrees of freedom of physicians, this is a way to hold costs down. And ultimately, some physicians will say today that they don't have the full liberty to make the choices they think are right for their patients. So no wonder that some of my old colleagues are frustrated.At BCG, we looked at this, and we asked ourselves, this can't be the right way of managing healthcare. And so we took a step back and we said, ""What is it that we are trying to achieve?"" Ultimately, in the healthcare system, we're aiming at improving health for the patients, and we need to do so at a limited, or affordable, cost. We call this value-based healthcare. On the screen behind me, you see what we mean by value: outcomes that matter to patients relative to the money we spend. This was described beautifully in a book in 2006 by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg.On this picture, you have my father-in-law surrounded by his three beautiful daughters. When we started doing our research at BCG, we decided not to look so much at the costs, but to look at the quality instead, and in the research, one of the things that fascinated us was the variation we saw. You compare hospitals in a country, you'll find some that are extremely good, but you'll find a large number that are vastly much worse. The differences were dramatic. Erik, my father-in-law, he suffers from prostate cancer, and he probably needs surgery. Now living in Europe, he can choose to go to Germany that has a well-reputed healthcare system. If he goes there and goes to the average hospital, he will have the risk of becoming incontinent by about 50 percent, so he would have to start wearing diapers again. You flip a coin. Fifty percent risk. That's quite a lot. If he instead would go to Hamburg, and to a clinic called the Martini-Klinik, the risk would be only one in 20. Either you a flip a coin, or you have a one in 20 risk. That's a huge difference, a seven-fold difference. When we look at many hospitals for many different diseases, we see these huge differences.But you and I don't know. We don't have the data. And often, the data actually doesn't exist. Nobody knows. So going the hospital is a lottery.Now, it doesn't have to be that way. There is hope. In the late '70s, there were a group of Swedish orthopedic surgeons who met at their annual meeting, and they were discussing the different procedures they used to operate hip surgery. To the left of this slide, you see a variety of metal pieces, artificial hips that you would use for somebody who needs a new hip. They all realized they had their individual way of operating. They all argued that, ""My technique is the best,"" but none of them actually knew, and they admitted that. So they said, ""We probably need to measure quality so we know and can learn from what's best."" So they in fact spent two years debating, ""So what is quality in hip surgery?"" ""Oh, we should measure this."" ""No, we should measure that."" And they finally agreed. And once they had agreed, they started measuring, and started sharing the data. Very quickly, they found that if you put cement in the bone of the patient before you put the metal shaft in, it actually lasted a lot longer, and most patients would never have to be re-operated on in their lifetime. They published the data, and it actually transformed clinical practice in the country. Everybody saw this makes a lot of sense. Since then, they publish every year. Once a year, they publish the league table: who's best, who's at the bottom? And they visit each other to try to learn, so a continuous cycle of improvement. For many years, Swedish hip surgeons had the best results in the world, at least for those who actually were measuring, and many were not.Now I found this principle really exciting. So the physicians get together, they agree on what quality is, they start measuring, they share the data, they find who's best, and they learn from it. Continuous improvement.Now, that's not the only exciting part. That's exciting in itself. But if you bring back the cost side of the equation, and look at that, it turns out, those who have focused on quality, they actually also have the lowest costs, although that's not been the purpose in the first place. So if you look at the hip surgery story again, there was a study done a couple years ago where they compared the U.S. and Sweden. They looked at how many patients have needed to be re-operated on seven years after the first surgery. In the United States, the number was three times higher than in Sweden. So many unnecessary surgeries, and so much unnecessary suffering for all the patients who were operated on in that seven year period. Now, you can imagine how much savings there would be for society.We did a study where we looked at OECD data. OECD does, every so often, look at quality of care where they can find the data across the member countries. The United States has, for many diseases, actually a quality which is below the average in OECD. Now, if the American healthcare system would focus a lot more on measuring quality, and raise quality just to the level of average OECD, it would save the American people 500 billion U.S. dollars a year. That's 20 percent of the budget, of the healthcare budget of the country.Now you may say that these numbers are fantastic, and it's all logical, but is it possible? This would be a paradigm shift in healthcare, and I would argue that not only can it be done, but it has to be done. The agents of change are the doctors and nurses in the healthcare system.In my practice as a consultant, I meet probably a hundred or more than a hundred doctors and nurses and other hospital or healthcare staff every year. The one thing they have in common is they really care about what they achieve in terms of quality for their patients. Physicians are, like most of you in the audience, very competitive. They were always best in class. We were always best in class. And if somebody can show them that the result they perform for their patients is no better than what others do, they will do whatever it takes to improve. But most of them don't know. But physicians have another characteristic. They actually thrive from peer recognition. If a cardiologist calls another cardiologist in a competing hospital and discusses why that other hospital has so much better results, they will share. They will share the information on how to improve. So it is, by measuring and creating transparency, you get a cycle of continuous improvement, which is what this slide shows.Now, you may say this is a nice idea, but this isn't only an idea. This is happening in reality. We're creating a global community, and a large global community, where we'll be able to measure and compare what we achieve. Together with two academic institutions, Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, BCG has formed something we call ICHOM. You may think that's a sneeze, but it's not a sneeze, it's an acronym. It stands for the International Consortium for Health Outcome Measurement. We're bringing together leading physicians and patients to discuss, disease by disease, what is really quality, what should we measure, and to make those standards global. They've worked — four working groups have worked during the past year: cataracts, back pain, coronary artery disease, which is, for instance, heart attack, and prostate cancer. The four groups will publish their data in November of this year. That's the first time we'll be comparing apples to apples, not only within a country, but between countries. Next year, we're planning to do eight diseases, the year after, 16. In three years' time, we plan to have covered 40 percent of the disease burden. Compare apples to apples. Who's better? Why is that?Five months ago, I led a workshop at the largest university hospital in Northern Europe. They have a new CEO, and she has a vision: I want to manage my big institution much more on quality, outcomes that matter to patients. This particular day, we sat in a workshop together with physicians, nurses and other staff, discussing leukemia in children. The group discussed, how do we measure quality today? Can we measure it better than we do? We discussed, how do we treat these kids, what are important improvements? And we discussed what are the costs for these patients, can we do treatment more efficiently? There was an enormous energy in the room. There were so many ideas, so much enthusiasm. At the end of the meeting, the chairman of the department, he stood up. He looked over the group and he said — first he raised his hand, I forgot that — he raised his hand, clenched his fist, and then he said to the group, ""Thank you. Thank you. Today, we're finally discussing what this hospital does the right way.""By measuring value in healthcare, that is not only costs but outcomes that matter to patients, we will make staff in hospitals and elsewhere in the healthcare system not a problem but an important part of the solution. I believe measuring value in healthcare will bring about a revolution, and I'm convinced that the founder of modern medicine, the Greek Hippocrates, who always put the patient at the center, he would smile in his grave.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_larsson_what_doctors_can_learn_from_each_other
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"Today I am going to teach you how to play my favorite game: massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. It's the only game in the world that I know of that allows you, the player, the opportunity to experience 10 positive emotions in 60 seconds or less. This is true, so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute, you will get to feel joy, relief, love, surprise, pride, curiosity, excitement, awe and wonder, contentment, and creativity, all in the span of one minute.So this sounds pretty good, right? Now you're willing to play. In order to teach you this game, I'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly, and we're going to do a little hands-on demo. While they're coming up, I should let you know, this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists' collective in Austria named Monochrom. So thank you, Monochrom. Okay, so most people are familiar with traditional, two-person thumb-wrestling. Sunni, let's just remind them. One, two, three, four,  I declare a thumb war, and we wrestle, and of course Sunni beats me because she's the best.Now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, we're the gamer generation. There are a billion gamers on the planet now, so we need more of a challenge. So the first thing we need is more thumbs. So Eric, come on over. So we could get three thumbs together, and Peter could join us. We could even have four thumbs together, and the way you win is you're the first person to pin someone else's thumb. This is really important. You can't, like, wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute. That is not how you win. Ah, who did that? Eric you did that. So Eric would have won. He was the first person to pin my thumb. Okay, so that's the first rule, and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node, but if you feel ambitious, you don't have to hold back. We can really go for it. So you can see up here. Now the only other rule you need to remember is, gamer generation, we like a challenge. I happen to notice you all have some thumbs you're not using. So I think we should kind of get some more involved. And if we had just four people, we would do it just like this, and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time. Perfect.Now, if we had more people in the room, instead of just wrestling in a closed node, we might reach out and try and grab some other people. And in fact, that's what we're going to do right now. We're going to try and get all, something like, I don't know, 1,500 thumbs in this room connected in a single node. And we have to connect both levels, so if you're up there, you're going to be reaching down and reaching up.Now — (Laughter) — before we get started — This is great. You're excited to play. — before we get started, can I have the slides back up here really quick, because if you get good at this game, I want you to know there are some advanced levels. So this is the kind of simple level, right? But there are advanced configurations. This is called the Death Star Configuration. Any Star Wars fans? And this one's called the Möbius Strip. Any science geeks, you get that one. This is the hardest level. This is the extreme.So we'll stick with the normal one for now, and I'm going to give you 30 seconds, every thumb into the node, connect the upper and the lower levels, you guys go on down there. Thirty seconds. Into the network. Make the node.Stand up! It's easier if you stand up. Everybody, up up up up up! Stand up, my friends. All right. Don't start wrestling yet. If you have a free thumb, wave it around, make sure it gets connected. Okay. We need to do a last-minute thumb check. If you have a free thumb, wave it around to make sure. Grab that thumb! Reach behind you. There you go. Any other thumbs? Okay, on the count of three, you're going to go. Try to keep track. Grab, grab, grab it. Okay? One, two, three, go!(Laughter)Did you win? You got it? You got it? Excellent! (Applause) Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much.All right. While you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game, let's do a quick recap on the positive emotions. So curiosity. I said ""massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling."" You were like, ""What the hell is she talking about?"" So I provoked a little curiosity. Creativity: it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node. I'm reaching around and I'm reaching up. So you used creativity. That was great. How about surprise? The actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising. You heard that sound go up in the room. We had excitement. As you started to wrestle, maybe you're starting to win or this person's, like, really into it, so you kind of get the excitement going. We have relief. You got to stand up. You've been sitting for awhile, so the physical relief, getting to shake it out. We had joy. You were laughing, smiling. Look at your faces. This room is full of joy. We had some contentment. I didn't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing, so you were totally content to be playing. The most important three emotions, awe and wonder, we had everybody connected physically for a minute. When was the last time you were at TED and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room? And it's truly awesome and wondrous. And speaking of physical connection, you guys know I love the hormone oxytocin, you release oxytocin, you feel bonded to everyone in the room. You guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else's hand for at least six seconds. You guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds, so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other. That is great.And the last emotion of pride. How many people are like me. Just admit it. You lost both your thumbs. It just didn't work out for you. That's okay, because you learned a new skill today. You learned, from scratch, a game you never knew before. Now you know how to play it. You can teach other people. So congratulations. How many of you won just won thumb? All right. I have very good news for you. According to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling, this makes you a grandmaster of the game. Because there aren't that many people who know how to play, we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess. So congratulations, grandmasters. Win one thumb once, you will become a grandmaster. Did anybody win both their thumbs? Yes. Awesome. Okay. Get ready to update your Twitter or Facebook status. You guys, according to the rules, are legendary grandmasters, so congratulations. I will just leave you with this tip, if you want to play again. The best way to become a legendary grandmaster, you've got your two nodes going on. Pick off the one that looks easiest. They're not paying attention. They look kind of weak. Focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm. As soon as you win, suddenly stop. Everybody is thrown off. You go in for the kill. That's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling. Thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game. Wooo! (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_massively_multi_player_thumb_wrestling
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"When we think of Nepal, we tend to think of the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas, the crystal-clear still waters of its alpine lakes, or the huge expanse of its grasslands. What some of us may not realize is that in the Himalayan foothills, where the climate is much warmer and the landscape much greener, there lives a great diversity of wildlife, including the one-horned rhinoceros, the Asian elephant and the Bengal tiger. But unfortunately, these animals are under constant threat from poachers who hunt and kill them for their body parts. To stop the killing of these animals, battalions of soldiers and rangers are sent to protect Nepal's national parks, but that is not an easy task, because these soldiers have to patrol thousands of hectares of forests on foot or elephant backs. It is also risky for these soldiers when they get into gunfights with poachers, and therefore Nepal is always looking for new ways to help with protecting the forests and wildlife.Well recently, Nepal acquired a new tool in the fight against wildlife crime, and these are drones, or more specifically, conservation drones. For about a year now, my colleagues and I have been building drones for Nepal and training the park protection personnel on the use of these drones. Not only does a drone give you a bird's-eye view of the landscape, but it also allows you to capture detailed, high-resolution images of objects on the ground. This, for example, is a pair of rhinoceros taking a cooling bath on a hot summer day in the lowlands of Nepal. Now we believe that drones have tremendous potential, not only for combating wildlife crime, but also for monitoring the health of these wildlife populations.So what is a drone? Well, the kind of drone I'm talking about is simply a model aircraft fitted with an autopilot system, and this autopilot unit contains a tiny computer, a GPS, a compass, a barometric altimeter and a few other sensors. Now a drone like this is meant to carry a useful payload, such as a video camera or a photographic camera. It also requires a software that allows the user to program a mission, to tell the drone where to go.Now people I talk to are often surprised when they hear that these are the only four components that make a conservation drone, but they are even more surprised when I tell them how affordable these components are. The facts is, a conservation drone doesn't cost very much more than a good laptop computer or a decent pair of binoculars.So now that you've built your own conservation drone, you probably want to go fly it, but how does one fly a drone? Well, actually, you don't, because the drone flies itself. All you have to do is to program a mission to tell the drone where to fly. But you simply do that by clicking on a few way points on the Google Maps interface using the open-source software. Those missions could be as simple as just a few way points, or they could be slightly longer and more complicated, to fly along a river system. Sometimes, we fly the drone in a lawnmower-type pattern and take pictures of that area, and those pictures can be processed to produce a map of that forest. Other researchers might want to fly the drone along the boundaries of a forest to watch out for poachers or people who might be trying to enter the forest illegally.Now whatever your mission is, once you've programmed it, you simply upload it to the autopilot system, bring your drone to the field, and launch it simply by tossing it in the air. And often we'll go about this mission taking pictures or videos along the way, and usually at that point, we will go grab ourselves a cup of coffee, sit back, and relax for the next few minutes, although some of us sit back and panic for the next few minutes worrying that the drone will not return. Usually it does, and when it does, it even lands automatically.So what can we do with a conservation drone? Well, when we built our first prototype drone, our main objective was to fly it over a remote rainforest in North Sumatra, Indonesia, to look for the nest of a species of great ape known as the orangutan. The reason we wanted to do that was because we needed to know how many individuals of this species are still left in that forest. Now the traditional method of surveying for orangutans is to walk the forest on foot carrying heavy equipment and to use a pair of binoculars to look up in the treetops where you might find an orangutan or its nest. Now as you can imagine, that is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly process, so we were hoping that drones could significantly reduce the cost of surveying for orangutan populations in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. So we were very excited when we captured our first pair of orangutan nests on camera. And this is it; this is the first ever picture of orangutan nests taken with a drone. Since then we have taken pictures of dozens of these nests from around various parts of Southeast Asia, and we're now working with computer scientists to develop algorithms that can automatically count the number of nests from the thousands of photos we've collected so far.But nests are not the only objects these drones can detect. This is a wild orangutan happily feeding on top of a palm tree, seemingly oblivious to our drone that was flying overhead, not once but several times. We've also taken pictures of other animals including forest buffalos in Gabon, elephants, and even turtle nests.But besides taking pictures of just the animals themselves, we also take pictures of the habitats these animals live in, because we want to keep track of the health of these habitats. Sometimes, we zoom out a little and look at other things that might be happening in the landscape. This is an oil palm plantation in Sumatra. Now oil palm is a major driver of deforestation in that part of the world, so we wanted to use this new drone technology to keep track of the spread of these plantations in Southeast Asia. But drones could also be used to keep track of illegal logging activities. This is a recently logged forest, again in Sumatra. You could even still see the processed wooden planks left on the ground.But perhaps the most exciting part about taking pictures from the air is we could later stitch these pictures together using special software to create a map of the entire landscape, and this map gives us crucial information for monitoring land use change, to let us know where and when plantations might be expanding, where forests might be contracting, or where fires might be breaking out. Aerial images could also be processed to produce three-dimensional computer models of forests. Now these models are not just visually appealing, but they are also geometrically accurate, which means researchers can now measure the distance between trees, calculate surface area, the volume of vegetation, and so on, all of which are important information for monitoring the health of these forests. Recently, we've also begun experimenting with thermal imaging cameras. Now these cameras can detect heat-emitting objects from the ground, and therefore they are very useful for detecting poachers or their campfires at night.So I've told you quite a lot about what conservation drones are, how you might operate one of these drones, and what a drone could do for you. I will now tell you where conservation drones are being used around the world. We built our first prototype drones in Switzerland. We brought a few of these to Indonesia for the first few test flights. Since then, we've been building drones for our collaborators from around the world, and these include fellow biologists and partners from major conservation organizations.Perhaps the best and most rewarding part about working with these collaborators is the feedback they give us on how to improve our drones. Building drones for us is a constant work in progress. We are constantly trying to improve them in terms of their range, their ruggedness, and the amount of payload they can carry. We also work with collaborators to discover new ways of using these drones. For example, camera traps are a common tool used by biologists to take pictures of shy animals hiding in the forests, but these are motion-activated cameras, so they snap a picture every time an animal crosses their path. But the problem with camera traps is that the researcher has to go back to the forest every so often to retrieve those images, and that takes a lot of time, especially if there are dozens or hundreds of these cameras placed in the forest. Now a drone could be designed to perform the task much more efficiently. This drone, carrying a special sensor, could be flown over the forest and remotely download these images from wi-fi–enabled cameras.Radio collars are another tool that's commonly used by biologists. Now these collars are put onto animals. They transmit a radio signal which allows the researcher to track the movements of these animals across the landscape. But the traditional way of tracking animals is pretty ridiculous, because it requires the researcher to be walking on the ground carrying a huge and cumbersome radio antenna, not unlike those old TV antennae we used to have on our rooftops. Some of us still do. A drone could be used to do the same job much more efficiently. Why not equip a drone with a scanning radio receiver, fly that over the forest canopy in a certain pattern which would allow the user or the operator to triangulate the location of these radio-collared animals remotely without having to step foot in the forest.A third and perhaps most exciting way of using these drones is to fly them to a really remote, never-explored-before rainforest somewhere hidden in the tropics, and parachute down a tiny spy microphone that would allow us to eavesdrop on the calls of mammals, birds, amphibians, the Yeti, the Sasquatch, Bigfoot, whatever. That would give us biologists a pretty good idea of what animals might be living in those forests.And finally, I would like to show you the latest version of our conservation drone. The MAJA drone has a wingspan of about two meters. It weighs only about two kilograms, but it can carry half its weight. It is a fully autonomous system. During its mission, it can even transmit a live video feed back to a ground station laptop, which allows the user to see what the drone is seeing in real time. It carries a variety of sensors, and the photo quality of some of these sensors can be as high as one to two centimeters per pixel. This drone can stay in the air for 40 to 60 minutes, which gives it a range of up to 50 kilometers. That is quite sufficient for most of our conservation applications.Now, conservation drones began as a crazy idea from two biologists who are just deeply passionate about this technology. And we believe, strongly believe, that drones can and will be a game changer for conservation research and applications. We've had our fair share of skeptics and critics who thought that we were just fooling around with toy planes. And in a way, they are right. I mean, let's be honest, drones are the ultimate toys for boys. But at the same time, we've also gotten to know many wonderful colleagues and collaborators who share our vision and see the potential of conservation drones. To us, it is obvious that conservation biologists and practitioners should make full use of every available tool, including drones, in our fight to save the last remaining forests and wildlife of this planet.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lian_pin_koh_a_drone_s_eye_view_of_conservation
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"Technology can change our understanding of nature.Take for example the case of lions. For centuries, it's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna, and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner. You've heard this too, I can tell. Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions, and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air. The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill, and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed. That's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation. And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be. They just use a different strategy. Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances, usually during the day, male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation, and often at night. This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right. Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation, and the white are wide open spaces. And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions. All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting.I bring up this example to begin, because it emphasizes how little we know about nature. There's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests, and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate, as shown in red on the slide. I find it ironic that we're doing so much, yet these areas are fairly unknown to science. So how can we save what we don't understand?Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects, but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know about our planet. So I created this, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job, but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos of high-tech sensors, computers, and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots. Two of our instruments are very unique: one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them. Another one is a set of lasers, very high-powered lasers, that fire out of the bottom of the plane, sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second in high-resolution 3D. Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, not far from where I live. Although we flew straight over this bridge, we imaged it in 3D, captured its color in just a few seconds. But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems. This is a small town in the Amazon, imaged with the CAO. We can slice through our data and see, for example, the 3D structure of the vegetation and the buildings, or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them. The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants. And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined. This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon. This is how we see a rainforest, in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another. But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales, and what that means is that they're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them. So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological, and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy, but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest.Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point, such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors. I want to share three of those questions with you today. The first questions is, how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests? Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees, and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we're going to avoid any further global warming. Unfortunately, global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector. That's all ships, airplanes, trains  and automobiles combined. So it's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation, but they're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science. If you don't know where the carbon is exactly, in detail, how can you know what you're losing? Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system. With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail. The red shows, obviously, closed-canopy tropical forest, and then you see the cookie cutting, or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens. It's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep. And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time. And what's amazing is, even though we flew very high above this forest, later on in analysis, we can go in and actually experience the treetrops, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves.We've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on a high-resolution, first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama. The colors are going to be going from red to blue. Red is extremely high carbon stocks, your largest cathedral forests you can imagine, and blue are very low carbon stocks. And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place, totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today. We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red, and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it. We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue, and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange. We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system. And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon. It's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron's ""Avatar."" We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries, Panama, and see also a huge range of carbon variation, from high in red to low in blue. Unfortunately, most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands, but what you see that's left, in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds, is the stuff that's up in the mountains. One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen. You're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal. That's in the reds and yellows. The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce. This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development. It's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change.My second question: How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest? Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time in these places, and we're seeing the climate changing already. Temperatures are increasing, and what's really happening is we're getting a lot of droughts, recurring droughts. The 2010 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe. The Amazon was so dry in 2010 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially, as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide. What we found is that in very remote areas, these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests. For example, these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought. This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil, totally unexplored, almost totally unknown scientifically.So what we think, as Earth scientists, is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change. One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak. Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners. You see the forest in green in 3D, and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface. Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this, obviously.If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go. It's an amazing experience every time, no matter where you go. You're going to probably see it this way, on a river. But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what's really going on back in the forest itself. We flew over this same river, imaged the system in 3D. The forest is on the left. And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what's going on below the canopy. And in this case, we found gold mining activity, all of it illegal, set back away from the river's edge, as you'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right. Don't worry, we're working with the authorities to deal with this and many, many other problems in the region.So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique, important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor, we have to start making geographically explicit plans now. How do we do that if we don't know the geography of biodiversity in the region, if it's so unknown to science? So what we've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors. Reds are one type of species, blues are another, and greens are yet another. And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level, we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work. This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat, and that's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts. And this is the pivotal information that's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans.And third and final question is, how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems? The example I started out with about lions hunting, that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa. And the truth is, much of Africa's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen. This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management. They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they're protecting. Some of their decisions have really big impacts. For example, how much and where to use fire as a management tool? Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants, which may, if their populations get too large, have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species. And let me tell you, these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape. In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants: wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees. As we cross this fence line, now we're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants: dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem. And in a place like Kruger, the soaring elephant densities are a real problem. I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you, and there are no easy answers with this. But what's good is that the technology we've developed and we're working with in South Africa, for example, is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna, and then through repeat flights we're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants, in the red as you see on the screen, and how much that's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna. That's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don't lead to those extremes that I just showed you. So really, the way we're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life, where we have fire management, elephant management, those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem, and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions.Going forward, I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory. I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this. Until then, you're going to find me flying in some remote place that you've never heard of. I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet, but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/greg_asner_ecology_from_the_air
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"Sarge Salman: All the way from Los Altos Hills, California, Mr. Henry Evans.(Applause)Henry Evans: Hello. My name is Henry Evans, and until August 29, 2002, I was living my version of the American dream. I grew up in a typical American town near St. Louis. My dad was a lawyer. My mom was a homemaker. My six siblings and I were good kids, but caused our fair share of trouble. After high school, I left home to study and learn more about the world. I went to Notre Dame University and graduated with degrees in accounting and German, including spending a year of study in Austria. Later on, I earned an MBA at Stanford. I married my high school sweetheart, Jane. I am lucky to have her. Together, we raised four wonderful children. I worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder, eventually becoming a chief financial officer in Silicon Valley, a job I really enjoyed. My family and I bought our first and only home on December 13, 2001, a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of Los Altos Hills, California, from where I am speaking to you now.We were looking forward to rebuilding it, but eight months after we moved in, I suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect. Overnight, I became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 40. It took me several years, but with the help of an incredibly supportive family, I finally decided life was still worth living. I became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled. Head tracking devices sold commercially by the company Madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements, and enable my use of a regular computer. I can surf the web, exchange email with people, and routinely destroy my friend Steve Cousins in online word games. This technology allows me to remain engaged, mentally active, and feel like I am a part of the world.One day, I was lying in bed watching CNN, when I was amazed by Professor Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech demonstrating a PR2 robot. I emailed Charlie and Steve Cousins of Willow Garage, and we formed the Robots for Humanity project. For about two years, Robots for Humanity developed ways for me to use the PR2 as my body surrogate. I shaved myself for the first time in 10 years. From my home in California, I shaved Charlie in Atlanta. (Laughter) I handed out Halloween candy. I opened my refrigerator on my own. I began doing tasks around the house. I saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute, both for myself and others in my circumstance.All of us have disabilities in one form or another. For example, if either of us wants to go 60 miles an hour, both of us will need an assistive device called a car. Your disability doesn't make you any less of a person, and neither does mine. By the way, check out my sweet ride. (Laughter) Since birth, we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own.Last year, Kaijen Hsiao of Willow Garage connected with me Chad Jenkins. Chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones. It was then I realized that I could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight, giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible. Using a mouse cursor I control with my head, these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser. With a little practice, I became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own. I could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing. I inspected the solar panels on our roof. (Laughter) One of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop. I went even further by seeing if I could use a head-mounted display, the Oculus Rift, as modified by Fighting Walrus, to have an immersive experience controlling the drone. With Chad's group at Brown, I regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week, from my home 3,000 miles away. All work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic, so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer. (Laughter) I never thought I would be able to casually move around a campus like Brown on my own. I just wish I could afford the tuition. (Laughter)Chad Jenkins: Henry, all joking aside, I bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in California 3,000 miles away.(Applause)Okay, Henry, have you been to D.C. lately?(Laughter)Are you excited to be at TEDxMidAtlantic?(Laughter) (Applause)Can you show us how excited you are?(Laughter)All right, big finish. Can you show us how good of a pilot you are?(Applause)All right, we still have a little ways to go with that, but I think it shows the promise.What makes Henry's story amazing is it's about understanding Henry's needs, understanding what people in Henry's situation need from technology, and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide, and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way. What we're trying to do is democratize robotics, so that anybody can be a part of this. We're providing affordable, off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the A.R. drone, 300 dollars, the Suitable Technologies beam, only 17,000 dollars, along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we're trying to do. And our hope is that, by providing these tools, that you'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled, to provide care for our aging population, to help better educate our children, to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future, to both monitor and protect our environment, and to explore the universe.Back to you, Henry.HE: Thank you, Chad.With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables. One hundred years ago, I would have been treated like a vegetable. Actually, that's not true. I would have died.It is up to us, all of us, to decide how robotics will be used, for good or for evil, for simply replacing people or for making people better, for allowing us to do and enjoy more.Our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe. With the help of people like you, we can make this dream a reality.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/henry_evans_and_chad_jenkins_meet_the_robots_for_humanity
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"One billion people in the world today do not have access to all-season roads. One billion people. One seventh of the Earth's population are totally cut off for some part of the year. We cannot get medicine to them reliably, they cannot get critical supplies, and they cannot get their goods to market in order to create a sustainable income. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 85 percent of roads are unusable in the wet season. Investments are being made, but at the current level, it's estimated it's going to take them 50 years to catch up. In the U.S. alone, there's more than four million miles of roads, very expensive to build, very expensive to maintain infrastructure, with a huge ecological footprint, and yet, very often, congested.So we saw this and we thought, can there be a better way? Can we create a system using today's most advanced technologies that can allow this part of the world to leapfrog in the same way they've done with mobile telephones in the last 10 years? Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today without ever putting copper lines in the ground. Could we do the same for transportation?Imagine this scenario. Imagine you are in a maternity ward in Mali, and have a newborn in need of urgent medication. What would you do today? Well, you would place a request via mobile phone, and someone would get the request immediately. That's the part that works. The medication may take days to arrive, though, because of bad roads. That's the part that's broken.We believe we can deliver it within hours with an electric autonomous flying vehicle such as this. This can transport a small payload today, about two kilograms, over a short distance, about 10 kilometers, but it's part of a wider network that may cover the entire country, maybe even the entire continent. It's an ultra-flexible, automated logistics network. It's a network for a transportation of matter. We call it Matternet.We use three key technologies. The first is electric autonomous flying vehicles. The second is automated ground stations that the vehicles fly in and out of to swap batteries and fly farther, or pick up or deliver loads. And the third is the operating system that manages the whole network.Let's look at each one of those technologies in a bit more detail. First of all, the UAVs. Eventually, we're going to be using all sorts of vehicles for different payload capacities and different ranges. Today, we're using small quads. These are able to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers in just about 15 minutes. Compare this with trying to trespass a bad road in the developing world, or even being stuck in traffic in a developed world country. These fly autonomously. This is the key to the technology. So they use GPS and other sensors on board to navigate between ground stations. Every vehicle is equipped with an automatic payload and battery exchange mechanism, so these vehicles navigate to those ground stations, they dock, swap a battery automatically, and go out again. The ground stations are located on safe locations on the ground. They secure the most vulnerable part of the mission, which is the landing. They are at known locations on the ground, so the paths between them are also known, which is very important from a reliability perspective from the whole network. Apart from fulfilling the energy requirements of the vehicles, eventually they're going to be becoming commercial hubs where people can take out loads or put loads into the network. The last component is the operating system that manages the whole network. It monitors weather data from all the ground stations and optimizes the routes of the vehicles through the system to avoid adverse weather conditions, avoid other risk factors, and optimize the use of the resources throughout the network.I want to show you what one of those flights looks like. Here we are flying in Haiti last summer, where we've done our first field trials. We're modeling here a medical delivery in a camp we set up after the 2010 earthquake. People there love this.And I want to show you what one of those vehicles looks like up close. So this is a $3,000 vehicle. Costs are coming down very rapidly. We use this in all sorts of weather conditions, very hot and very cold climates, very strong winds. They're very sturdy vehicles. Imagine if your life depended on this package, somewhere in Africa or in New York City, after Sandy. The next big question is, what's the cost?Well, it turns out that the cost to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers with this vehicle is just 24 cents.(Applause)And it's counterintuitive, but the cost of energy expended for the flight is only two cents of a dollar today, and we're just at the beginning of this. When we saw this, we felt that this is something that can have significant impact in the world.So we said, okay, how much does it cost to set up a network somewhere in the world? And we looked at setting up a network in Lesotho for transportation of HIV/AIDS samples. The problem there is how do you take them from clinics where they're being collected to hospitals where they're being analyzed? And we said, what if we wanted to cover an area spanning around 140 square kilometers? That's roughly one and a half times the size of Manhattan. Well it turns out that the cost to do that there would be less than a million dollars. Compare this to normal infrastructure investments. We think this can be — this is the power of a new paradigm.So here we are: a new idea about a network for transportation that is based on the ideas of the Internet. It's decentralized, it's peer-to-peer, it's bidirectional, highly adaptable, with very low infrastructure investment, very low ecological footprint. If it is a new paradigm, though, there must be other uses for it. It can be used perhaps in other places in the world.So let's look at the other end of the spectrum: our cities and megacities. Half of the Earth's population lives in cities today. Half a billion of us live in megacities. We are living through an amazing urbanization trend. China alone is adding a megacity the size of New York City every two years. These are places that do have road infrastructure, but it's very inefficient. Congestion is a huge problem. So we think it makes sense in those places to set up a network of transportation that is a new layer that sits between the road and the Internet, initially for lightweight, urgent stuff, and over time, we would hope to develop this into a new mode of transportation that is truly a modern solution to a very old problem. It's ultimately scalable with a very small ecological footprint, operating in the background 24/7, just like the Internet.So when we started this a couple of years ago now, we've had a lot of people come up to us who said, ""This is a very interesting but crazy idea, and certainly not something that you should engage with anytime soon."" And of course, we're talking about drones, right, a technology that's not only unpopular in the West but one that has become a very, very unpleasant fact of life for many living in poor countries, especially those engaged in conflict.So why are we doing this? Well, we chose to do this one not because it's easy, but because it can have amazing impact. Imagine one billion people being connected to physical goods in the same way that mobile telecommunications connected them to information. Imagine if the next big network we built in the world was a network for the transportation of matter. In the developing world, we would hope to reach millions of people with better vaccines, reach them with better medication. It would give us an unfair advantage against battling HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other epidemics. Over time, we would hope it would become a new platform for economic transactions, lifting millions of people out of poverty. In the developed world and the emerging world, we would hope it would become a new mode of transportation that could help make our cities more livable.So for those that still believe that this is science fiction, I firmly say to you that it is not. We do need to engage, though, in social fiction to make it happen.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_raptopoulos_no_roads_there_s_a_drone_for_that
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"So yesterday, I was out in the street in front of this building, and I was walking down the sidewalk, and I had company, several of us, and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks. We're not talking each other. We're facing forward. We're moving. When the person in front of me slows down. And so I'm watching him, and he slows down, and finally he stops. Well, that wasn't fast enough for me, so I put on my turn signal, and I walked around him, and as I walked, I looked to see what he was doing, and he was doing this. He was texting, and he couldn't text and walk at the same time. Now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective. We're going to do working memory today.Now, working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day. You're going it right now. It's not something we can turn off. If you turn it off, that's called a coma, okay? So right now, you're doing just fine.Now working memory has four basic components. It allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge. It allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it, mixes it, processes it in light of whatever our current goal is. Now the current goal isn't something like, I want to be president or the best surfer in the world. It's more mundane. I'd like that cookie, or I need to figure out how to get into my hotel room. Now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that, our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal.Now working memory capacity has a fairly long history, and it's associated with a lot of positive effects. People with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers. They tend to solve and do well on standardized tests, however important that is. They're able to have high levels of writing ability. They're also able to reason at high levels.So what we're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that. So I'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks, and we're going to take your  working memory out for a ride. You up for that? Okay.I'm going to give you five words, and I just want you to hang on to them. Don't write them down. Just hang on to them. Five words. While you're hanging on to them, I'm going to ask you to answer three questions. I want to see what happens with those words. So here's the words: tree, highway, mirror, Saturn and electrode. So far so good? Okay. What I want you to do is I want you to tell me what the answer is to 23 times eight. Just shout it out. (Mumbling) (Laughter) In fact it's — (Mumbling) — exactly. (Laughter) All right. I want you to take out your left hand and I want you to go, ""One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10."" It's a neurological test, just in case you were wondering. All right, now what I want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards. You should have started with Z. (Laughter)All right. How many people here are still pretty sure you've got all five words? Okay. Typically we end up with about less than half, right, which is normal. There will be a range. Some people can hang on to five. Some people can hang on to 10. Some will be down to two or three.What we know is this is really important to the way we function, right? And it's going to be really important here at TED because you're going to be exposed to so many different ideas.Now the problem that we have is that life comes at us, and it comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that's about the size of a pea. Now don't get me wrong, working memory is awesome. Working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward. It allows us to make sense of the world around us. But it does have certain limits.Now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate. We can have a conversation, and I can build a narrative around that so I know where we've been and where we're going and how to contribute to this conversation. It allows us to problem-solve, critical think. We can be in the middle of a meeting, listen to somebody's presentation, evaluate it, decide whether or not we like it, ask follow-up questions. All of that occurs within working memory. It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon. (Laughter) Gotta make sure we're getting what we're looking for. Now, a central issue with working memory is that it's limited. It's limited in capacity, limited in duration, limited in focus. We tend to remember about four things. Okay? It used to be seven, but with functional MRIs, apparently it's four, and we were overachieving. Now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it, unless we process it, unless we apply it to something, unless we talk to somebody about it.When we think about working memory, we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us. Have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you're there? You do know the solution to that, right? You go back to that original room. (Laughter) Have you ever forgotten your keys? You ever forgotten your car? You ever forgotten your kids? Have you ever been involved in a conversation, and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting? (Laughter) So you're nodding and you're smiling, but you're really paying attention to this one over here, until you hear that last word go up, and you realize, you've been asked a question. (Laughter) And you're really hoping the answer is no, because that's what you're about to say. All of that talks about working memory, what we can do and what we can't do. We need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity, and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that. We negotiate that through strategies.So what I want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here, and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days. Now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence, our life, immediately and repeatedly. We need to process what's going on the moment it happens, not 10 minutes later, not a week later, at the moment. So we need to think about, well, do I agree with him? What's missing? What would I like to know? Do I agree with the assumptions? How can I apply this in my life? It's a way of processing what's going on so that we can use it later. Now we also need to repeat it. We need to practice. So we need to think about it here. In between, we want to talk to people about it. We're going to write it down, and when you get home, pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time. Practice for some reason became a very negative thing. It's very positive.The next thing is, we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively. Oftentimes, we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge. What we want to do is spin that around. We want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful. We also want to use imagery. We are built for images. We need to take advantage of that. Think about things in images, write things down that way. If you read a book, pull things up. I just got through reading ""The Great Gatsby,"" and I have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head, so my own version.The last one is organization and support. We are meaning-making machines. It's what we do. We try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us. Organization helps, so we need to structure what we're doing in ways that make sense. If we are providing knowledge and experience, we need to structure that.And the last one is support. We all started as novices. Everything we do is an approximation of sophistication. We should expect it to change over time. We have to support that. The support may come in asking people questions, giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images, but we need to support it.Now, the final piece of this, the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this: what we process, we learn. If we're not processing life, we're not living it. Live life. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_doolittle_how_your_working_memory_makes_sense_of_the_world
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"To give me an idea of how many of you here may find what I'm about to tell you of practical value, let me ask you please to raise your hands: Who here is either over 65 years old or hopes to live past age 65 or has parents or grandparents who did live or have lived past 65, raise your hands please. (Laughter)Okay. You are the people to whom my talk will be of practical value. (Laughter) The rest of you won't find my talk personally relevant, but I think that you will still find the subject fascinating.I'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies. This subject constitutes just one chapter of my latest book, which compares traditional, small, tribal societies with our large, modern societies, with respect to many topics such as bringing up children, growing older, health, dealing with danger, settling disputes, religion and speaking more than one language.Those tribal societies, which constituted all human societies for most of human history, are far more diverse than are our modern, recent, big societies. All big societies that have governments, and where most people are strangers to each other, are inevitably similar to each other and different from tribal societies. Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society. They constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn. Tribal societies shouldn't be scorned as primitive and miserable, but also they shouldn't be romanticized as happy and peaceful. When we learn of tribal practices, some of them will horrify us, but there are other tribal practices which, when we hear about them, we may admire and envy and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves.Most old people in the U.S. end up living separately from their children and from most of their friends of their earlier years, and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly, whereas in traditional societies, older people instead live out their lives among their children, their other relatives, and their lifelong friends. Nevertheless, the treatment of the elderly varies enormously among traditional societies, from much worse to much better than in our modern societies.At the worst extreme, many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in one of four increasingly direct ways: by neglecting their elderly and not feeding or cleaning them until they die, or by abandoning them when the group moves, or by encouraging older people to commit suicide, or by killing older people. In which tribal societies do children abandon or kill their parents? It happens mainly under two conditions. One is in nomadic, hunter-gather societies that often shift camp and that are physically incapable of transporting old people who can't walk when the able-bodied younger people already have to carry their young children and all their physical possessions. The other condition is in societies living in marginal or fluctuating environments, such as the Arctic or deserts, where there are periodic food shortages, and occasionally there just isn't enough food to keep everyone alive. Whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied adults and for children. To us Americans, it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick wife or husband or elderly mother or father, but what could those traditional societies do differently? They face a cruel situation of no choice. Their old people had to do it to their own parents, and the old people know what now is going to happen to them.At the opposite extreme in treatment of the elderly, the happy extreme, are the New Guinea farming societies where I've been doing my fieldwork  for the past 50 years, and most other sedentary traditional societies around the world. In those societies, older people are cared for. They are fed. They remain valuable. And they continue to live in the same hut or else in a nearby hut near their children, relatives and lifelong friends.There are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies in their treatment of old people. The variation depends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the society's values.First, as regards usefulness, older people continue to perform useful services. One use of older people in traditional societies is that they often are still effective at producing food. Another traditional usefulness of older people is that they are capable of babysitting their grandchildren, thereby freeing up their own adult children, the parents of those grandchildren, to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren. Still another traditional value of older people is in making tools, weapons, baskets, pots and textiles. In fact, they're usually the people who are best at it. Older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies, and the people most knowledgeable about politics, medicine, religion, songs and dances.Finally, older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience. Those, then, are the ways in which older people are useful in traditional societies. Their usefulness varies and contributes to variation in the society's treatment of the elderly.The other set of reasons for variation in the treatment of the elderly is the society's cultural values. For example, there's particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in East Asia, associated with Confucius' doctrine of filial piety, which means obedience, respect and support for elderly parents. Cultural values that emphasize respect for older people contrast with the low status of the elderly in the U.S. Older Americans are at a big disadvantage in job applications. They're at a big disadvantage in hospitals. Our hospitals have an explicit policy called age-based allocation of healthcare resources. That sinister expression means that if hospital resources are limited, for example if only one donor heart becomes available for transplant, or if a surgeon has time to operate on only a certain number of patients, American hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that younger patients are considered more valuable to society because they have more years of life ahead of them, even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them. There are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the U.S. One is our Protestant work ethic which places high value on work, so older people who are no longer working aren't respected. Another reason is our American emphasis on the virtues of self-reliance and independence, so we instinctively look down on older people who are no longer self-reliant and independent. Still a third reason is our American cult of youth, which shows up even in our advertisements. Ads for Coca-Cola and beer always depict smiling young people, even though old as well as young people buy and drink Coca-Cola and beer. Just think, what's the last time you saw a Coke or beer ad depicting smiling people 85 years old? Never. Instead, the only American ads featuring white-haired old people are ads for retirement homes and pension planning.Well, what has changed in the status of the elderly today compared to their status in traditional societies? There have been a few changes for the better and more changes for the worse. Big changes for the better include the fact that today we enjoy much longer lives, much better health in our old age, and much better recreational opportunities. Another change for the better is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of old people. Changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality that we now have more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past. That means that all those old people are more of a burden on the few young people, and that each old person has less individual value. Another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age, because older people, their children, and their friends, all move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives. We Americans move on the average every five years. Hence our older people are likely to end up living distant from their children and the friends of their youth. Yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce, carrying with it a loss of work friendships and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work. Perhaps the biggest change for the worse is that our elderly are objectively less useful than in traditional societies. Widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as repositories of knowledge. When we want some information, we look it up in a book or we Google it instead of finding some old person to ask. The slow pace of technological change in traditional societies means that what someone learns there as a child is still useful when that person is old, but the rapid pace of technological change today means that what we learn as children is no longer useful 60 years later. And conversely, we older people are not fluent in the technologies essential for surviving in modern society. For example, as a 15-year-old, I was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers because I had memorized the multiplication tables and I know how to use logarithms and I'm quick at manipulating a slide rule. Today, though, those skills are utterly useless because any idiot can now multiply eight-digit numbers accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator. Conversely, I at age 75 am incompetent at skills essential for everyday life. My family's first TV set in 1948 had only three knobs that I quickly mastered: an on-off switch, a volume knob, and a channel selector knob. Today, just to watch a program on the TV set in my own house, I have to operate a 41-button TV remote that utterly defeats me. I have to telephone my 25-year-old sons and ask them to talk me through it while I try to push those wretched 41 buttons.What can we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the U.S., and to make better use of their value? That's a huge problem. In my remaining four minutes today, I can offer just a few suggestions. One value of older people is that they are increasingly useful as grandparents for offering high-quality childcare to their grandchildren, if they choose to do it, as more young women enter the workforce and as fewer young parents of either gender stay home as full-time caretakers of their children. Compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters and day care centers, grandparents offer superior, motivated, experienced child care. They've already gained experience from raising their own children. They usually love their grandchildren, and are eager to spend time with them. Unlike other caregivers, grandparents don't quit their job because they found another job with higher pay looking after another baby. A second value of older people is paradoxically related to their loss of value as a result of changing world conditions and technology. At the same time, older people have gained in value today precisely because of their unique experience of living conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change, but that could come back. For example, only Americans now in their 70s or older today can remember the experience of living through a great depression, the experience of living through a world war, and agonizing whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs. Most of our current voters and politicians have no personal experience of any of those things, but millions of older Americans do. Unfortunately, all of those terrible situations could come back. Even if they don't come back, we have to be able to plan for them on the basis of the experience of what they were like. Older people have that experience. Younger people don't.The remaining value of older people that I'll mention involves recognizing that while there are many things that older people can no longer do, there are other things that they can do better than younger people. A challenge for society is  to make use of those things that older people are better at doing. Some abilities, of course, decrease with age. Those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina, ambition, and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation, such as figuring out the structure of DNA, best left to scientists under the age of 30. Conversely, valuable attributes that increase with age include experience, understanding of people and human relationships, ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way, and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases, such as economics and comparative history, best left to scholars over the age of 60. Hence older people are much better than younger people at supervising, administering, advising, strategizing, teaching, synthesizing, and devising long-term plans. I've seen this value of older people with so many of my friends in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, who are still active as investment managers, farmers, lawyers and doctors. In short, many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give their elderly more satisfying lives than we do in modern, big societies.Paradoxically nowadays, when we have more elderly people than ever before, living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before, old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before. The lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern American society. We can surely do better by learning from the lives of the elderly in traditional societies. But what's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional societies is true of many other features of traditional societies as well. Of course, I'm not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There are many obvious respects in which our lives today are far happier than those in small, traditional societies. To mention just a few examples, our lives are longer, materially much richer, and less plagued by violence than are the lives of people in traditional societies. But there are also things to be admired about people in traditional societies, and perhaps to be learned from them. Their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives, although materially poorer. Their children are more self-confident, more independent, and more socially skilled than are our children. They think more realistically about dangers than we do. They almost never die of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and the other noncommunicable diseases that will be the causes of death of almost all of us in this room today. Features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases, and features of the traditional lifestyle protect us against them.Those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies. I hope that you will find it as fascinating to read about traditional societies as I found it to live in those societies.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_how_societies_can_grow_old_better
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"What is so special about the human brain? Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. So this is a first indication that the ""all brains are made the same way"" scenario is not quite right.But let's play along. If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. It seems quite vexing. Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain.The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working.So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. And this is where the story started to bother me. In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. Maybe the human brain  actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals?Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. But nobody did. I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. Well, what about our brain then? We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos. That's not possible. A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. I don't think it looks like us.So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. The human brain is not a large rat brain. Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. And all of you are primates.And so was Darwin. I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains.So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain. I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature.Why does it cost so much energy, then? Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories  per billion neurons per day. So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special.Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain  than we do, with more neurons? When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. They just can't afford the energy for both a large body  and a large number of neurons. So we did the math. We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day.And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both.One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate.What about us? With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. If we ate like a primate, we should not be here.How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long.So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford  the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food.So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think that's how we got to become human.Studying the human brain changed  the way I think about food. I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain
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"There is something you know about me, something very personal, and there is something I know about every one of you and that's very central to your concerns. There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with. And that is that all of us want to be happy. In this, we are all together. How we imagine our happiness, that differs from one another, but it's already a lot that we have all in common, that we want to be happy.Now my topic is gratefulness. What is the connection between happiness and gratefulness? Many people would say, well, that's very easy. When you are happy, you are grateful. But think again. Is it really the happy people that are grateful? We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy, because they want something else or they want more of the same. And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. They radiate happiness. You are surprised. Why? Because they are grateful. So it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It's gratefulness that makes us happy. If you think it's happiness that makes you grateful, think again. It's gratefulness that makes you happy.Now, we can ask, what do we really mean by gratefulness? And how does it work? I appeal to your own experience. We all know from experience how it goes. We experience something that's valuable to us. Something is given to us that's valuable to us. And it's really given. These two things have to come together. It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. You haven't bought it. You haven't earned it. You haven't traded it in. You haven't worked for it. It's just given to you. And when these two things come together, something that's really valuable to me and I realize it's freely given, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. That's how gratefulness happens.Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. We cannot only have grateful experiences. We can be people who live gratefully. Grateful living, that is the thing. And how can we live gratefully? By experiencing, by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment, as we say. It's a gift. You haven't earned it. You haven't brought it about in any way. You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. If we didn't have this present moment, we wouldn't have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything, and this moment is a gift. It's a given moment, as we say.Now, we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity. What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn't have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn't be grateful for it. Opportunity is the gift within every gift, and we have this saying, opportunity knocks only once. Well, think again. Every moment is a new gift, over and over again, and if you miss the opportunity of this moment, another moment is given to us, and another moment. We can avail ourselves of this opportunity, or we can miss it, and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity, it is the key to happiness. Behold the master key to our happiness in our own hands. Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift.Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? Certainly not. We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. But I didn't say we can be grateful for everything. I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. It isn't as bad as it might seem. Actually, when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is the opportunity to enjoy, and we only miss it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity.But once in a while, something very difficult is given to us, and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity, and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful. Learning patience, for instance. We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon. That takes patience. That's difficult. It may be to stand up for your opinion, to stand up for your conviction. That's an opportunity that is given to us. To learn, to suffer, to stand up, all these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire. They make something out of life. And those who fail get another opportunity. We always get another opportunity. That's the wonderful richness of life.So how can we find a method that will harness this? How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful. How can we do it? It's a very simple method. It's so simple that it's actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. Stop. Look. Go. That's all. But how often do we stop? We rush through life. We don't stop. We miss the opportunity because we don't stop. We have to stop. We have to get quiet. And we have to build stop signs into our lives.When I was in Africa some years ago and then came back, I noticed water. In Africa where I was, I didn't have drinkable water. Every time I turned on the faucet, I was overwhelmed. Every time I clicked on the light, I was so grateful. It made me so happy. But after a while, this wears off. So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet, and every time I turned it on, water. So leave it up to your own imagination. You can find whatever works best for you, but you need stop signs in your life. And when you stop, then the next thing is to look. You look. You open your eyes. You open your ears. You open your nose. You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us. There is no end to it, and that is what life is all about, to enjoy, to enjoy what is given to us.And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy. And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third. Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment. Mostly it's the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it's something more difficult.But whatever it is, if we take this opportunity, we go with it, we are creative, those are the creative people. And that little stop, look, go, is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world. Because we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you — I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word ""gratefulness"" and ""gratitude"" comes up. Everywhere you find it, a grateful airline, a restaurant gratefulness, a café gratefulness, a wine that is gratefulness. Yes, I have even come across a toilet paper whose brand is called ""Thank You.""(Laughter)There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.And it doesn't make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing. The future of the world will be a network, not a pyramid turned upside down. The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution, and it's so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution, because the normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones before. What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world.A grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people — the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we'll have a joyful world. We have a network for grateful living, and it has mushroomed. We couldn't understand why it mushroomed. We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something. And there have been 15 million candles lit in one decade. People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place. And that is what I hope for us, and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same, stop, look, go.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_steindl_rast_want_to_be_happy_be_grateful
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"I'm here today to talk about social change, not a new therapy or a new intervention or a new way of working with kids or something like that, but a new business model for social change, a new way of tackling the problem.In Britain, 63 percent of all men who come out of short sentences from prison re-offend again within a year. Now how many previous offenses do you think they have on average managed to commit? Forty-three. And how many previous times do you think they've been in prison? Seven.So we went to talk to the Ministry of Justice, and we said to the Ministry of Justice, what's it worth to you if fewer of these guys re-offend? It's got to be worth something, right? I mean, there's prison costs, there's police costs, there's court costs, all these things that you're spending money on to deal with these guys. What's it worth?Now, of course, we care about the social value. Social Finance, the organization I helped set up, cares about social stuff. But we wanted to make the economic case, because if we could make the economic case, then the value of doing this  would be completely compelling. And if we can agree on both a value and a way of measuring whether we've been successful at reducing that re-offending, then we can do something we think rather interesting.The idea is called the social impact bond. Now, the social impact bond is simply saying, if we can get the government to agree, that we can create a contract where they only pay if it worked. So that means that they can try out new stuff without the embarrassment of having to pay if it didn't work, which for still quite a lot of bits of government, that's a serious issue.Now, many of you may have noticed there's a problem at this point, and that is that it takes a long time to measure whether those outcomes have happened. So we have to raise some money. We use the contract to raise money from socially motivated investors. Socially motivated investors: there's an interesting idea, right? But actually, there's a lot of people who, if they're given the chance, would love to invest in something that does social good. And here's the opportunity. Do you want to also help government find whether there's a better economic model, not just leaving these guys to come out of prison and waiting till they re-offend and putting them back in again, but actually working with them to move to a different path to end up with fewer crimes and fewer victims?So we find some investors, and they pay for a set of services, and if those services are successful, then they improve outcomes, and with those measured reductions in re-offending, government saves money, and with those savings, they can pay outcomes. And the investors do not just get their money back, but they make a return.So in March 2010, we signed the first social impact bond with the Ministry of Justice around Peterborough Prison. It was to work with 3,000 offenders split into three cohorts of 1,000 each. Now, each of those cohorts would get measured over the two years that they were coming out of prison. They've got to have a year to commit their crimes, six months to get through the court system, and then they would be compared to a group taken from the police national computer, as similar as possible, and we would get paid providing we achieved a hurdle rate of 10-percent reduction, for every conviction event that didn't happen. So we get paid for crimes saved. Now if we achieved that 10-percent reduction across all three cohorts, then the investors get a seven and a half percent annualized return on their investment, and if we do better than that, they can get up to 13 percent annualized return on their investment, which is okay.So everyone wins here, right? The Ministry of Justice can try out a new program and they only pay if it works. Investors get two opportunities: for the first time, they can invest in social change. Also, they make a reasonable return, and they also know that first investors in these kinds of things, they're going to have to believers. They're going to have to care in the social program, but if this builds a track record over five or 10 years, then you can widen that investor community as more people have confidence in the product. The service providers, well, for the first time, they've got an opportunity to provide services and grow the evidence for what they're doing in a really constructive way and learn and demonstrate the value of what they're doing over five or six years, not just one or two as often happens at the moment. Society wins: fewer crimes, fewer victims. Now, the offenders, they also benefit. Instead of just coming out of the prison with 46 pounds in their pocket, half of them not knowing where they're spending their first night out of jail, actually, someone meets them in prison, learns about their issues, meets them at the gate, takes them through to somewhere to stay, connects them to benefits, connects them to employment, drug rehabilitation, mental health, whatever's needed.So let's think of another example: working with children in care. Social impact bonds work great for any area where there is at the moment very expensive provision that produces poor outcomes for people. So children in the state care tend to do very badly. Only 13 percent achieve a reasonable level of five GCSEs at 16, against 58 percent of the wider population. More troublingly, 27 percent of offenders in prison have spent some time in care. And even more worryingly, and this is a Home Office statistic, 70 percent of prostitutes have spent some time in care. The state is not a great parent. But there are great programs for adolescents who are on the edge of care, and 30 percent of kids going into care are adolescents.So we set up a program with Essex County Council to test out intensive family therapeutic support for those families with adolescents on the edge of the care system. Essex only pays in the event that it's saving them care costs. Investors have put in 3.1 million pounds. That program started last month. Others, around homelessness in London, around youth and employment and education elsewhere in the country. There are now 13 social impact bonds in Britain, and amazing levels of interest in this idea all over the world. So David Cameron's put 20 million pounds into a social outcomes fund to support this idea. Obama has suggested 300 million dollars in the U.S. budget for these kinds of ideas and structures to move it forward, and a lot of other countries are demonstrating considerable interest.So what's caused this excitement? Why is this so different for people? Well, the first piece, which we've talked about, is innovation. It enables testing of new ideas in a way that's less difficult for everybody.The second piece it brings is rigor. By working to outcomes, people really have to test and bring data into the situation that one's dealing with. So taking Peterborough as an example, we add case management across all of the different organizations that we're working with so they know what actually has been done with different prisoners, and at the same time they learn from the Ministry of Justice, and we learn, because we pushed for the data, what actually happens, whether they get re-arrested or not. And we learn and adapt the program accordingly.And this leads to the third element, which is new, and that's flexibility. Because normal contracting for things, when you're spending government money, you're spending our money, tax money, and the people who are in charge  of that are very aware of it so the temptation is to control exactly how you spend it. Now any entrepreneur in the room knows that version 1.0, the business plan, is not the one that generally works. So when you're trying to do something like this, you need the flexibility to adapt the program. And again, in Peterborough, we started off with a program, but we also collected data, and over the period of time, we nuanced and changed that program to add a range of other elements, so that the service adapts and we meet the needs of the long term as well as the short term: greater engagement from the prisoners, longer-term engagement as well.The last element is partnership. There is, at the moment, a stale  debate going on very often: state's better, public sector's better, private sector's better, social sector's better, for a lot of these programs. Actually, for creating social change, we need to bring in the expertise from all of those parties in order to make this work. And this creates a structure through which they can combine.So where does this leave us? This leaves us with a way that people can invest in social change. We've met thousands, possibly millions of people, who want the opportunity to invest in social change. We've met champions all over the public sector keen to make these kinds of differences. With this kind of model, we can help bring them together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/toby_eccles_invest_in_social_change
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"We have a global health challenge in our hands today, and that is that the way we currently discover and develop new drugs is too costly, takes far too long, and it fails more often than it succeeds. It really just isn't working, and that means that patients that badly need new therapies are not getting them, and diseases are going untreated. We seem to be spending more and more money. So for every billion dollars we spend in R&D, we're getting less drugs approved into the market. More money, less drugs. Hmm.So what's going on here? Well, there's a multitude of factors at play, but I think one of the key factors is that the tools that we currently have available to test whether a drug is going to work, whether it has efficacy, or whether it's going to be safe before we get it into human clinical trials, are failing us. They're not predicting what's going to happen in humans. And we have two main tools available at our disposal. They are cells in dishes and animal testing.Now let's talk about the first one, cells in dishes. So, cells are happily functioning in our bodies. We take them and rip them out of their native environment, throw them in one of these dishes, and expect them to work. Guess what. They don't. They don't like that environment because it's nothing like what they have in the body.What about animal testing? Well, animals do and can provide extremely useful information. They teach us about what happens in the complex organism. We learn more about the biology itself. However, more often than not, animal models fail to predict what will happen in humans when they're treated with a particular drug.So we need better tools. We need human cells, but we need to find a way to keep them happy outside the body.Our bodies are dynamic environments. We're in constant motion. Our cells experience that. They're in dynamic environments in our body. They're under constant mechanical forces. So if we want to make cells happy outside our bodies, we need to become cell architects. We need to design, build and engineer a home away from home for the cells.And at the Wyss Institute, we've done just that. We call it an organ-on-a-chip. And I have one right here. It's beautiful, isn't it? But it's pretty incredible. Right here in my hand is a breathing, living human lung on a chip.And it's not just beautiful. It can do a tremendous amount of things. We have living cells in that little chip, cells that are in a dynamic environment interacting with different cell types. There's been many people trying to grow cells in the lab. They've tried many different approaches. They've even tried to grow little mini-organs in the lab. We're not trying to do that here. We're simply trying to recreate in this tiny chip the smallest functional unit that represents the biochemistry, the function and the mechanical strain that the cells experience in our bodies. So how does it work? Let me show you. We use techniques from the computer chip manufacturing industry to make these structures at a scale relevant to both the cells and their environment. We have three fluidic channels. In the center, we have a porous, flexible membrane on which we can add human cells from, say, our lungs, and then underneath, they had capillary cells, the cells in our blood vessels. And we can then apply mechanical forces to the chip that stretch and contract the membrane, so the cells experience the same mechanical forces that they did when we breathe. And they experience them how they did in the body. There's air flowing through the top channel, and then we flow a liquid that contains nutrients through the blood channel. Now the chip is really beautiful, but what can we do with it? We can get incredible functionality inside these little chips. Let me show you. We could, for example, mimic infection, where we add bacterial cells into the lung. then we can add human white blood cells. White blood cells are our body's defense against bacterial invaders, and when they sense this inflammation due to infection, they will enter from the blood into the lung and engulf the bacteria. Well now you're going to see this happening live in an actual human lung on a chip. We've labeled the white blood cells so you can see them flowing through, and when they detect that infection, they begin to stick. They stick, and then they try to go into the lung side from blood channel. And you can see here, we can actually visualize a single white blood cell. It sticks, it wiggles its way through between the cell layers, through the pore, comes out on the other side of the membrane, and right there, it's going to engulf the bacteria labeled in green. In that tiny chip, you just witnessed one of the most fundamental responses our body has to an infection. It's the way we respond to — an immune response. It's pretty exciting.Now I want to share this picture with you, not just because it's so beautiful, but because it tells us an enormous amount of information about what the cells are doing within the chips. It tells us that these cells from the small airways in our lungs, actually have these hairlike structures that you would expect to see in the lung. These structures are called cilia, and they actually move the mucus out of the lung. Yeah. Mucus. Yuck. But mucus is actually very important. Mucus traps particulates, viruses, potential allergens, and these little cilia move and clear the mucus out. When they get damaged, say, by cigarette smoke for example, they don't work properly, and they can't clear that mucus out. And that can lead to diseases such as bronchitis. Cilia and the clearance of mucus are also involved in awful diseases like cystic fibrosis. But now, with the functionality that we get in these chips, we can begin to look for potential new treatments.We didn't stop with the lung on a chip. We have a gut on a chip. You can see one right here. And we've put intestinal human cells in a gut on a chip, and they're under constant peristaltic motion, this trickling flow through the cells, and we can mimic many of the functions that you actually would expect to see in the human intestine. Now we can begin to create models of diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome. This is a disease that affects a large number of individuals. It's really debilitating, and there aren't really many good treatments for it.Now we have a whole pipeline of different organ chips that we are currently working on in our labs. Now, the true power of this technology, however, really comes from the fact that we can fluidically link them. There's fluid flowing across these cells, so we can begin to interconnect multiple different chips together to form what we call a virtual human on a chip. Now we're really getting excited. We're not going to ever recreate  a whole human in these chips, but what our goal is is to be able to recreate sufficient functionality so that we can make better predictions of what's going to happen in humans. For example, now we can begin to explore what happens when we put a drug like an aerosol drug. Those of you like me who have asthma, when you take your inhaler, we can explore how that drug comes into your lungs, how it enters the body, how it might affect, say, your heart. Does it change the beating of your heart? Does it have a toxicity? Does it get cleared by the liver? Is it metabolized in the liver? Is it excreted in your kidneys? We can begin to study the dynamic response of the body to a drug.This could really revolutionize and be a game changer for not only the pharmaceutical industry, but a whole host of different industries, including the cosmetics industry. We can potentially use the skin on a chip that we're currently developing in the lab to test whether the ingredients in those products that you're using are actually  safe to put on your skin without the need for animal testing. We could test the safety of chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis in our environment, such as chemicals in regular household cleaners. We could also use the organs on chips for applications in bioterrorism or radiation exposure. We could use them to learn more about diseases such as ebola or other deadly diseases such as SARS.Organs on chips could also change the way we do clinical trials in the future. Right now, the average participant in a clinical trial is that: average. Tends to be middle aged, tends to be female. You won't find many clinical trials in which children are involved, yet every day, we give children medications, and the only safety data we have on that drug is one that we obtained from adults. Children are not adults. They may not respond in the same way adults do. There are other things like genetic differences in populations that may lead to at-risk populations that are at risk of having an adverse drug reaction. Now imagine if we could take cells from all those different populations, put them on chips, and create populations on a chip. This could really change the way we do clinical trials. And this is the team and the people that are doing this. We have engineers, we have cell biologists, we have clinicians, all working together. We're really seeing something quite incredible at the Wyss Institute. It's really a convergence of disciplines, where biology is influencing the way we design, the way we engineer, the way we build. It's pretty exciting.We're establishing important industry collaborations such as the one we have with a company that has expertise in large-scale digital manufacturing. They're going to help us make, instead of one of these, millions of these chips, so that we can get them into the hands of as many researchers as possible. And this is key to the potential of that technology.Now let me show you our instrument. This is an instrument that our engineers are actually prototyping right now in the lab, and this instrument is going to give us the engineering controls that we're going to require in order to link 10 or more organ chips together. It does something else that's very important. It creates an easy user interface. So a cell biologist like me can come in, take a chip, put it in a cartridge like the prototype you see there, put the cartridge into the machine just like you would a C.D., and away you go. Plug and play. Easy.Now, let's imagine a little bit what the future might look like if I could take your stem cells and put them on a chip, or your stem cells and put them on a chip. It would be a personalized chip just for you.Now all of us in here are individuals, and those individual differences mean that we could react very differently and sometimes in unpredictable ways to drugs. I myself, a couple of years back, had a really bad headache, just couldn't shake it, thought,  ""Well, I'll try something different."" I took some Advil. Fifteen minutes later, I was on my way to the emergency room with a full-blown asthma attack. Now, obviously it wasn't fatal, but unfortunately, some of these adverse drug reactions can be fatal.So how do we prevent them? Well, we could imagine one day having Geraldine on a chip, having Danielle on a chip, having you on a chip.Personalized medicine. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/geraldine_hamilton_body_parts_on_a_chip
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"So when I do my job, people hate me. In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me. And no, I'm not a meter maid, and I'm not an undertaker. I am a progressive, lesbian talking head on Fox News.(Applause)So y'all heard that, right? Just to make sure, right? I am a gay talking head on Fox News. I am going to tell you how I do it, and the most important thing I've learned.So I go on television. I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in — in some cases, who don't want me and people like me to even exist. It's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids, with a live television audience of millions. It's totally almost just like that.And that's just on air. The hate mail I get is unbelievable. Last week alone, I got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count. I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge, a cunt and an ugly man, and that was just in one email.(Laughter)So what have I realized, being on the receiving end of all this ugliness? Well, my biggest takeaway is that for decades, we've been focused on political correctness, but what matters more is emotional correctness. Let me give you a small example. I don't care if you call me a dyke. I really don't. I care about two things. One, I care that you spell it right.(Laughter) (Applause)Just quick refresher, it's D-Y-K-E. You'd totally be surprised. And second, I don't care about the word, I care about how you use it. Are you being friendly? Are you just being naive? Or do you really want to hurt me personally?Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. And what I've realized is that political persuasion doesn't begin with ideas or facts or data. Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct.So when I first went to go work at Fox News, true confession, I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging. That, by the way, in case you're paying attention, is not emotionally correct. But liberals on my side, we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending, we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree with us. In other words, we can be politically right but emotionally wrong. And incidentally, that means that people don't like us. Right?Now here's the kicker. Conservatives are really nice. I mean, not all of them, and not the ones who send me hate mail, but you would be surprised. Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates, and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help. Now, I think Sean Hannity is 99 percent politically wrong, but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive. And that's why people listen to him. Because you can't get anyone to agree with you if they don't even listen to you first. We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements. And if we can start to find compassion for one another, then we have a shot at building common ground. It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here, but when you try to put it in practice, it's really powerful.So someone who says they hate immigrants, I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they've always known. Or someone who says they don't like teachers' unions, I bet they're really devastated to see their kid's school going into the gutter, and they're just looking for someone to blame. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness.I'm not saying it's easy. An average of, like, 5.6 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities. This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama. I'm not perfect, but what I am is optimistic. Because I don't just get hate mail. I get a lot of really nice letters, lots of them. And one of my all-time favorites begins: ""I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic,(Laughter)but I'm a big fan of you as a person."" Now this guy doesn't agree with me — yet.(Laughter)But he's listening — not because of what I said, but because of how I said it. And somehow, even though we've never met, we've managed to form a connection. That's emotional correctness, and that's how we start the conversations that really lead to change.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sally_kohn_let_s_try_emotional_correctness
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"(Aquatic noises)So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo, about 60 feet below the surface. NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts, and last year, they invited us along for the ride. All the footage was taken from our open ROV, which is a robot that we built in our garage.So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle, which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside. It's open source, meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online, allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design. It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic. So ROVs aren't new. They've been around for decades. Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans. Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction. What we've built isn't unique. It's how we've built it that's really unique.So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started. So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras. We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery, and we wanted to go up there. Unfortunately, we didn't have any money and we didn't have any tools to do it. So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot, but we didn't have all the parts figured out, so we did what anybody would do in our situation: we asked the Internet for help. More specifically, we created this website, openROV.com, and shared  our intentions and our plans For the first few months, it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums, but pretty soon, we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists, and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do. We kept working on it. We learned a lot. We kept prototyping, and eventually, we decided we wanted to go  to the cave. We were ready.So about that time, our little expedition became quite a story, and it got picked up in The New York Times. And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves.So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter, and when we did, we raised our funding goal in about two hours, and all of a sudden,  had this money to make these kits. But then we had to learn how to make them. I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing. So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation. But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made, thanks a lot to TechShop, which was a big help to us, and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year, so it was just a few months ago. But we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world, including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica. We've also learned the penguins love robots. (Laughter)So we're still publishing all the designs online, encouraging anyone to build these themselves. That's the only way that we could have done this. By being open source, we've created this distributed R&D network, and we're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart. But the actual robot is really only half the story. The real potential, the long term potential, is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe. What can we discover when there's thousands of these devices roaming the seas?So you're probably all wondering: the cave. Did you find the gold? Well, we didn't find any gold, but we decided that what we found was much more valuable. It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration. It's something that's not limited to the James Camerons of the world, but something that we're all participating in. It's an underwater world we're all exploring together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_lang_my_underwater_robot
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"Mobility in developing world cities is a very peculiar challenge, because different from health or education or housing, it tends to get worse as societies become richer. Clearly, a unsustainable model. Mobility, as most other developing country problems, more than a matter of money or technology, is a matter of equality, equity. The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport. Or bicycles: For example, in Amsterdam, more than 30 percent of the population uses bicycles, despite the fact that the Netherlands has a higher income per capita than the United States. There is a conflict in developing world cities for money, for government investment. If more money is invested in highways, of course there is less money for housing, for schools, for hospitals, and also there is a conflict for space. There is a conflict for space between those with cars and those without them. Most of us accept today that private property and a market economy is the best way to manage most of society's resources. However, there is a problem with that, that market economy needs inequality of income in order to work. Some people must make more money, some others less. Some companies succeed. Others fail. Then what kind of equality can we hope for today with a market economy?I would propose two kinds which both have much to do with cities. The first one is equality of quality of life, especially for children, that all children should have, beyond the obvious health and education, access to green spaces, to sports facilities, to swimming pools, to music lessons. And the second kind of equality is one which we could call ""democratic equality."" The first article in every constitution states that all citizens are equal before the law. That is not just poetry. It's a very powerful principle. For example, if that is true, a bus with 80 passengers has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one.We have been so used to inequality, sometimes, that it's before our noses and we do not see it. Less than 100 years ago, women could not vote, and it seemed normal, in the same way that it seems normal today to see a bus in traffic. In fact, when I became mayor, applying that democratic principle that public good prevails over private interest, that a bus with 100 people has a right to 100 times more road space than a car, we implemented a mass transit system based on buses in exclusive lanes. We called it TransMilenio, in order to make buses sexier. And one thing is that it is also a very beautiful democratic symbol, because as buses zoom by, expensive cars stuck in traffic, it clearly is almost a picture of democracy at work. In fact, it's not just a matter of equity. It doesn't take Ph.D.'s. A committee of 12-year-old children would find out in 20 minutes that the most efficient way to use scarce road space is with exclusive lanes for buses. In fact, buses are not sexy, but they are the only possible means to bring mass transit to all areas of fast growing developing cities. They also have great capacity. For example, this system in Guangzhou is moving more passengers our direction than all subway lines in China, except for one line in Beijing, at a fraction of the cost.We fought not just for space for buses, but we fought for space for people, and that was even more difficult. Cities are human habitats, and we humans are pedestrians. Just as fish need to swim or birds need to fly or deer need to run, we need to walk. There is a really enormous conflict, when we are talking about developing country cities, between pedestrians and cars. Here, what you see is a picture that shows insufficient democracy. What this shows is that people who walk are third-class citizens while those who go in cars are first-class citizens. In terms of transport infrastructure, what really makes a difference between advanced and backward cities is not highways or subways but quality sidewalks. Here they made a flyover, probably very useless, and they forgot to make a sidewalk. This is prevailing all over the world. Not even schoolchildren are more important than cars.In my city of Bogotá, we fought a very difficult battle in order to take space from cars, which had been parking on sidewalks for decades, in order to make space for people that should reflect dignity of human beings, and to make space for protected bikeways. First of all, I had black hair before that. (Laughter) And I was almost impeached in the process. It is a very difficult battle. However, it was possible, finally, after very difficult battles, to make a city that would reflect some respect for human dignity, that would show that those who walk are equally important to those who have cars. Indeed, a very important ideological and political issue anywhere is how to distribute that most valuable resource of a city, which is road space. A city could find oil or diamonds underground and it would not be so valuable as road space. How to distribute it between pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and cars? This is not a technological issue, and we should remember that in no constitution parking is a constitutional right when we make that distribution.We also built, and this was 15 years ago, before there were bikeways in New York or in Paris or in London, it was a very difficult battle as well, more than 350 kilometers of protected bicycle ways. I don't think protected bicycle ways are a cute architectural feature. They are a right, just as sidewalks are, unless we believe that only those with access to a motor vehicle have a right to safe mobility, without the risk of getting killed. And just as busways are, protected bikeways also are a powerful symbol of democracy, because they show that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one in a $30,000 car.And we are living in a unique moment in history. In the next 50 years, more than half of those cities which will exist in the year 2060 will be built. In many developing country cities, more than 80 and 90 percent of the city which will exist in 2060 will be built over the next four or five decades.But this is not just a matter for developing country cities. In the United States, for example, more than 70 million new homes must be built over the next 40 or 50 years. That's more than all the homes that today exist in Britain, France and Canada put together. And I believe that our cities today have severe flaws, and that different, better ones could be built.What is wrong with our cities today? Well, for example, if we tell any three-year-old child who is barely learning to speak in any city in the world today, ""Watch out, a car,"" the child will jump in fright, and with a very good reason, because there are more than 10,000 children who are killed by cars every year in the world. We have had cities for 8,000 years, and children could walk out of home and play. In fact, only very recently, towards 1900, there were no cars. Cars have been here for really less than 100 years. They completely changed cities. In 1900, for example, nobody was killed by cars in the United States. Only 20 years later, between 1920 and 1930, almost 200,000 people were killed by cars in the United States. Only in 1925, almost 7,000 children were killed by cars in the United States. So we could make different cities, cities that will give more priority to human beings than to cars, that will give more public space to human beings than to cars, cities which show great respect for those most vulnerable citizens, such as children or the elderly.I will propose to you a couple of ingredients which I think would make cities much better, and it would be very simple to implement them in the new cities which are only being created. Hundreds of kilometers of greenways criss-crossing cities in all directions. Children will walk out of homes into safe spaces. They could go for dozens of kilometers safely without any risk in wonderful greenways, sort of bicycle highways, and I would invite you to imagine the following: a city in which every other street would be a street only for pedestrians and bicycles. In new cities which are going to be built, this would not be particularly difficult. When I was mayor of Bogotá, in only three years, we were able to create 70 kilometers, in one of the most dense cities in the world, of these bicycle highways. And this changes the way people live, move, enjoy the city. In this picture, you see in one of the very poor neighborhoods, we have a luxury pedestrian bicycle street, and the cars still in the mud. Of course, I would love to pave this street for cars. But what do we do first? Ninety-nine percent of the people in those neighborhoods don't have cars. But you see, when a city is only being created, it's very easy to incorporate this kind of infrastructure. Then the city grows around it. And of course this is just a glimpse of something which could be much better if we just create it, and it changes the way of life.And the second ingredient, which would solve mobility, that very difficult challenge in developing countries, in a very low-cost and simple way, would be to have hundreds of kilometers of streets only for buses, buses and bicycles and pedestrians. This would be, again, a very low-cost solution if implemented from the start, low cost, pleasant transit with natural sunlight.But unfortunately, reality is not as good as my dreams. Because of private property of land and high land prices, all developing country cities have a large problem of slums. In my country of Colombia, almost half the homes in cities initially were illegal developments. And of course it's very difficult to have mass transit or to use bicycles in such environments. But even legal developments have also been located in the wrong places, very far from the city centers where it's impossible to provide low-cost, high-frequency public transport. As a Latin American, and Latin America was the most recently organized region in the world, I would recommend, respectfully, passionately, to those countries which are yet to urbanize — Latin America went from 40 percent urban in 1950 to 80 percent urban in 2010 — I would recommend Asian and African countries which are yet to urbanize, such as India which is only 33 percent urban now, that governments should acquire all land around cities. In this way, their cities could grow in the right places with the right spaces, with the parks, with the greenways, with the busways.The cities we are going to build over the next 50 years will determine quality of life and even happiness for billions of people towards the future. What a fantastic opportunity for leaders and many young leaders to come, especially in the developing countries. They can create a much happier life for billions towards the future. I am sure, I am optimistic, that they will make cities better than our most ambitious dreams.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/enrique_penalosa_why_buses_represent_democracy_in_action
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"I'm a man who's trying to live from his heart, and so just before I get going, I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago. Nelson Mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom. And so this talk is going to be for him.I grew up in wonder. I grew up amongst those animals. I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa at a place called Londolozi Game Reserve. It's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations. Now for as long as I can remember, my job has been to take people out into nature, and so I think it's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering. Africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories, and so what I have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories, stories about heroes of heart. Now my stories are not the stories that you'll hear on the news, and while it's true that Africa is a harsh place, I also know it to be a place where people, animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world.When I was nine years old, President Mandela came to stay with my family. He had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration, and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status. Members of the African National Congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye, and it's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi. (Laughter) But it was a defining time for me as a young boy. I would take him breakfast in bed, and then, in an old track suit and slippers, he would go for a walk around the garden. At night, I would sit with my family around the snowy, bunny-eared TV, and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly. He was bringing peace to a divided and violent South Africa, one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity. Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think, to create in himself the things he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, harmony. Through this act of immense open-heartedness, he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call ""ubuntu."" Ubuntu: I am because of you. Or, people are not people without other people. It's not a new idea or value but it's one that I certainly think at these times is worth building on. In fact, it is said that in the collective consciousness of Africa, we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others. Ubuntu is at play right now. You are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who I am. Without you, I'm just a guy talking to an empty room, and I spent a lot of time last week doing that, and it's not the same as this. (Laughter)If Mandela was the national and international embodiment, then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man, Solly Mhlongo. Solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where I grew up in Mozambique. He would never have a lot of money, but he was to be one of the richest men I would ever meet. Solly grew up tending to his father's cattle. Now, I can tell you, I don't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle, but it makes for über-resourcefulness. The first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks. Where he had learned to do that out in the bush I have no idea, but he could do it. He then moved across into what we called the habitat team. These were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being. He fixed roads, he mended wetlands, he did some anti-poaching. And then one day we were out together, and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked. And it was an old track, but for fun he turned and he began to follow it, and I tell you, I could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a Ph.D.-level tracker. If you drove past Solly somewhere out on the reserve, you look up in your rearview mirror, you'd see he'd stopped the car 20, 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something. The only accusation I ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said, ""Solly, you are pathologically helpful."" (Laughter)When I started professionally guiding people out into this environment, Solly was my tracker. We worked together as a team. And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast, and they said to Solly, on the side, they said, ""Before we even go out to see lions and leopards, we want to see where you live."" So we took them up to his house, and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when Solly's wife, who was learning English, was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying, ""Hello, I love you. Welcome, I love you."" (Laughter) And there was something so beautifully African about it to me, this small house with a huge heart in it.Now on the day that Solly saved my life, he was already my hero. It was a hot day, and we found ourselves down by the river. Because of the heat, I took my shoes off, and I rolled up my pants, and I walked into the water. Solly remained on the bank. The water was clear running over sand, and we turned and we began to make our way upstream. And a few meters ahead of us, there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank, and its branches were touching the water, and it was shadowy. And if had been a horror movie, people in the audience would have started saying, ""Don't go in there. Don't go in there."" (Laughter) And of course, the crocodile was in the shadows. Now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite. Wham! It hits me by my right leg. It pulls me. It turns. I throw my hand up. I'm able to grab a branch. It's shaking me violently. It's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you, and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that. (Laughter) Solly on the bank sees that I'm in trouble. He turns. He begins to make his way to me. The croc again continues to shake me. It goes to bite me a second time. I notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream. As it bites the second time, I kick. My foot goes down its throat. It spits me out. I pull myself up into the branches, and as I come out of the water, I look over my shoulder. My leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description. The bone is cracked. The meat is torn up. I make an instant decision that I'll never look at that again. As I come out of the water, Solly arrives at a deep section, a channel between us. He knows, he sees the state of my leg, he knows that between him and I there is a crocodile, and I can tell you this man doesn't slow down for one second. He comes straight into the channel. He wades in to above his waist. He gets to me. He grabs me. I'm still in a vulnerable position. He picks me and puts me on his shoulder. This is the other thing about Solly, he's freakishly strong. He turns. He walks me up the bank. He lays me down. He pulls his shirt off. He wraps it around my leg, picks me up a second time, walks me to a vehicle, and he's able to get me to medical attention. And I survive.Now — (Applause)Now I don't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you, but for Solly, it was as natural as breathing. And he is one amazing example of what I have experienced all over Africa. In a more collective society, we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others. Danger is shared. Pain is shared. Joy is shared. Achievement is shared. Houses are shared. Food is shared. Ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share, and what Solly taught me that day is the essence of this value, his animated, empathetic action in every moment.Now although the root word is about people, I thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people. And then I met this young lady. Her name was Elvis. In fact, Solly gave her the name Elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the Elvis the pelvis dance. She was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis. She arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route. When I first saw her, I thought she would be dead in a matter of days. And yet, for the next five years she returned in the winter months. And we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track. It looked like an inverted bracket, and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow, and then we would come around the corner, and there she would be with her herd. And that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her, it was this sense of kinship. And it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals. And yet still I remained amazed that she was surviving. And then one day we came across them at this small water hole. It was sort of a hollow in the ground. And I watched as the matriarch drank, and then she turned in that  beautiful slow motion of elephants, looks like the arm in motion, and she began to make her way up the steep bank. The rest of the herd turned and began to follow. And I watched young Elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill. She got visibly — ears came forward, she had a full go of it and halfway up, her legs gave way, and she fell backwards. She attempted it a second time, and again, halfway up, she fell backwards. And on the third attempt, an amazing thing happened. Halfway up the bank, a young teenage elephant came in behind her, and he propped his trunk underneath her, and he began to shovel her up the bank. And it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant. The next day I watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth, and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground. And a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant.What Elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu, and I believe that in the cathedral of the wild, we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us. And it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet. If Africa has a gift to share, it's a gift of a more collective society. And while it's true that ubuntu is an African idea, what I see is the essence of that value being invented here.Thank you.(Applause)Pat Mitchell: So Boyd, we know that you knew President Mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today, and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world. But I just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts, because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session.Boyd Varty: Well thanks, Pat. I'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on. He was suffering. And so of course there's the mixed emotions. But I just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the Oprah show and asked her what the show would be about. (Laughter) And she was like, ""Well, it'll be about you."" I mean, that's just incredible humility. (Laughter)He was the father of our nation and we've got a road to walk in South Africa. And everything, they used to call it Madiba magic. You know, he used to go to a rugby match and we would win. Anywhere he went, things went well. But I think that magic will be with us, and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for. And so that's what I'm going to try and do, and that's what people all over  South Africa are trying to do.PM: And that's what you've done today. BV: Oh, thank you.PM: Thank you. BV: Thank you. Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/boyd_varty_what_i_learned_from_nelson_mandela
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"I would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope.I am a native of Burkina Faso. According to the World Bank, Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that? I am an example of that. I was born in a little village called Gando. In Gando, there was no electricity, no access to clean drinking water, and no school. But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write. For this reason, I had to leave my family when I was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family. In this place I sat in a class like that with more than 150 other kids, and for six years. In this time, it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died.Today, not so much has changed. There is still no electricity in my village. People still are dying in Burkina Faso, and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem.I had luck. I was lucky, because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that. But I was lucky. I had a scholarship. I could go to Germany to study.So now, I suppose, I don't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today. From Gando, my home village in Burkina Faso, to Berlin in Germany to become an architect is a big, big step. But what to do with this privilege? Since I was a student, I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. I just wanted to use my skills and build a school. But how do you do it when you're still a student and you don't have money? Oh yes, I started to make drawings and asked for money. Fundraising was not an easy task. I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes, but to sponsor my school project. In real wonder, two years later, I was able to collect 50,000 U.S. dollars.When I came home to Gando to bring the good news, my people were over the moon, but when they realized that I was planning to use clay, they were shocked.""A clay building is not able to stand a rainy season, and Francis wants us to use it and build a school. Is this the reason why he spent so much time in Europe studying instead of working in the field with us?""My people build all the time with clay, but they don't see any innovation with mud. So I had to convince everybody. I started to speak with the community, and I could convince everybody, and we could start to work. And the women, the men, everybody from the village, was part of this building process. I was allowed to use even traditional techniques. So clay floor for example, the young men come and stand like that, beating, hours for hours, and then their mothers came, and they are beating in this position, for hours, giving water and beating. And then the polishers come. They start polishing it with a stone for hours. And then you have this result, very fine, like a baby bottom. (Laughter) It's not photoshopped. (Laughter) This is the school, built with the community. The walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from Gando. The roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete. And the classroom, the ceiling is made out of both of them used together.In this school, there was a simple idea: to create comfort in a classroom. Don't forget, it can be 45 degrees in Burkina Faso, so with simple ventilation, I wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning. And this is the project today, 12 years old, still in best condition. And the kids, they love it.And for me and my community, this project was a huge success. It has opened up opportunities to do more projects in Gando. So I could do a lot of projects, and here I am going to share with you only three of them.The first one is the school extension, of course. How do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write? I started to build a prototype like that. The innovation was to build a clay vault. So then, I jumped on the top like that, with my team, and it works. The community is looking. It still works. So we can build. (Laughter) And we kept building, and that is the result. The kids are happy, and they love it. The community is very proud. We made it. And even animals, like these donkeys, love our buildings. (Laughter)The next project is the library in Gando. And see now, we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings, but we often don't have so much material. Something we have in Gando are clay pots. We wanted to use them to create openings. So we just bring them like you can see to the building site. we start cutting them, and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete, and you have this result. The openings are letting the hot air out and light in. Very simple.My most recent project in Gando is a high school project. I would like to share with you this. The innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete. How do you cast mud? We start making a lot of mortars, like you can see, and when everything is ready, when you know what is the best recipe and the best form, you start working with the community. And sometimes I can leave. They will do it themselves. I came to speak to you like that.Another factor in Gando is rain. When the rains come, we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain. Don't confound with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It is simply how we protect our walls. (Laughter) The rain in Burkina comes very fast, and after that, you have floods everywhere in the country. But for us, the rain is good. It brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build. We just wait for the rain to go. We take the sand, we mix it with clay, and we keep building. That is it.The Gando project was always connected to training the people, because I just wanted, one day when I fall down and die, that at least one person from Gando keeps doing this work. But you will be surprised. I'm still alive. (Laughter)And my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves. Usually, for a young man from Gando to earn money, you have to leave the country to the city, sometimes leave the country and some never come back, making the community weaker. But now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family. There's a new quality in this work.Yes, you know it. I have won a lot of awards through this work. For sure, it has opened opportunities. I have become myself known. But the reason why I do what I do is my community.When I was a kid, I was going to school, I was coming back every holiday to Gando. By the end of every holidays, I had to say goodbye to the community, going from one compound to another one. All women in Gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny. In my culture, this is a symbol of deep affection. As a seven-year-old guy, I was impressed. I just asked my mother one day, ""Why do all these women love me so much?"" (Laughter) She just answered, ""They are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community."" I hope now that I was able to make my community proud through this work, and I hope I was able to prove you the power of community, and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future.Merci beaucoup. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/diebedo_francis_kere_how_to_build_with_clay_and_community
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"So how many of you have ever been in a cave before? Okay, a few of you. When you think of a cave, most of you think of a tunnel going through solid rock, and in fact, that's how most caves are. Around this half of the country, most of your caves are made of limestone. Back where I'm from, most of our  caves are made of lava rock, because we have a lot of volcanoes out there. But the caves I want to share  with you today are made completely of ice, specifically glacier ice that's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon, called Mount Hood.Now Mount Hood's only  one hour's drive from Portland, the largest city in Oregon, where over two million people live. Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it. The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave. Now these days, with so many people hiking around, it's pretty hard to find a new cave, so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before. It was kind of like being an astronaut, because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before.So what is a glacier? Well, those of you who have ever seen or touched snow, you know that it's really light, because it's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together, and it's mostly air. If you squish a handful of snow to make a snowball, it gets really small, hard and dense. Well, on a mountain like Hood, where it snows over 20 feet a year, it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice. Now each year, more and more ice stacks up on top of it, and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight, forming a slow-moving river of ice. When ice packed like that starts to move, we call it a glacier, and we give it a name. The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier. Now each year, as new snow lands on the glacier, it melts in the summer sun, and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice, and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier, forming big networks of caves, sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock. Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year, new tunnels form. Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave. Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down, and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up, gets into the cave, and melts the ceilings back taller and taller. But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving, because it's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that's slowly sliding down the mountain.Now this is Brent McGregor, my cave exploration partner. He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we've been climbing mountains a long time, but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before. Back in 2011, Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves. There were no GPS coordinates for it, and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier. So in July of that year, we went out on the glacier, and we found a big crack in the ice. We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole. This is me looking into the entrance crevasse. At the end of this hole, we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice. We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end, and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out.So how do you map a cave? Well, cave maps aren't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes  going to overlapping levels. To make a cave map, you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave, and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations. Then you use a compass and an inclinometer to measure the direction the cave is headed and measure the slope of the floor and the ceilings. Now those of you taking trigonometry, that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there. In fact, the more I mapped and studied caves, the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be. So when you're done surveying, you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well, and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this, and it'll show you both a bird's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage, kind of like an ant farm view. We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow. Now later this summer, as more snow melted off the glacier, we found more caves, and we realized they were all connected.Not long after we mapped Snow Dragon, Brent discovered this new cave not very far away. The inside of it was coated with ice, so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping. This cave was amazing. The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up. And we couldn't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why. There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 130 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier. Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave, freezing everything inside of it. And we were so excited about finding this new pit, we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it. It was so cold outside, we actually had to sleep inside the cave. There's our camp on the left side  of this entrance room. The next morning, we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier, where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time. Brent named this cave Pure Imagination, I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined.So besides really cool ice, what else is inside these caves? Well not too much lives in them  because they're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year. But there are some really cool things in there. There's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice. In fact, this past summer, scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles, tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions, might be living under the ice, kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday. Another really cool things is that, as seeds and birds land on the surface of the glacier and die, they get buried in the snow and gradually become part of the glacier, sinking deeper and deeper into the ice. As these caves form and melt  their way up into the ice, they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor, where we end up finding them. For example, this is a noble fir seed we found. It's been frozen in the ice for over 100 years, and it's just now starting to sprout. This mallard duck feather was found over 1,800 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave. This duck died on the surface of the glacier long, long ago, and its feathers have finally made it down through over 100 feet of ice before falling inside the cave. And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon.Even now, Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were  essentially in our own backyard, hidden away, just waiting to be found. Like I said earlier, the idea of discovering in this busy world we live in kind of seems like something  you can only do with space travel now, but that's not true. Every year, new caves get discovered that no one has ever been in before. So it's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself. You just have to be willing to look and go where people don't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it, because it might be in your own backyard.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eddy_cartaya_my_glacier_cave_discoveries
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"I have a question: Who here remembers when they first realized they were going to die?I do. I was a young boy, and my grandfather had just died, and I remember a few days later lying in bed at night trying to make sense of what had happened. What did it mean that he was dead? Where had he gone? It was like a hole in reality had opened up and swallowed him. But then the really shocking question occurred to me: If he could die, could it happen to me too? Could that hole in reality open up and swallow me? Would it open up beneath my bed and swallow me as I slept? Well, at some point, all children become aware of death. It can happen in different ways, of course, and usually comes in stages. Our idea of death develops as we grow older. And if you reach back into the dark corners of your memory, you might remember something like what I felt when my grandfather died and when I realized it could happen to me too, that sense that behind all of this the void is waiting.And this development in childhood reflects the development of our species. Just as there was a point in your development as a child when your sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for you to realize you were mortal, so at some point in the evolution of our species, some early human's sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for them to become the first human to realize, ""I'm going to die."" This is, if you like, our curse. It's the price we pay for being so damn clever. We have to live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen one day surely will, the end of all our projects, our hopes, our dreams, of our individual world. We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse.And that's frightening. It's terrifying. And so we look for a way out. And in my case, as I was about five years old, this meant asking my mum. Now when I first started asking what happens when we die, the grown-ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity, and the phrase I heard most often was that granddad was now ""up there looking down on us,"" and if I should die too, which wouldn't happen of course, then I too would go up there, which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator. Now this didn't sound very plausible. I used to watch a children's news program at the time, and this was the era of space exploration. There were always rockets going up into the sky, up into space, going up there. But none of the astronauts when they came back ever mentioned having met my granddad or any other dead people. But I was scared, and the idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot better than being swallowed by the void while I slept. And so I believed it anyway, even though it didn't make much sense.And this thought process that I went through as a child, and have been through many times since, including as a grown-up, is a product of what psychologists call a bias. Now a bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator. Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all. It has been demonstrated in over 400 empirical studies. Now these studies are ingenious, but they're simple. They work like this. You take two groups of people who are similar in all relevant respects, and you remind one group that they're going to die but not the other, then you compare their behavior. So you're observing how it biases behavior when people become aware of their mortality. And every time, you get the same result: People who are made aware of their mortality are more willing to believe stories that tell them they can escape death and live forever. So here's an example: One recent study took two groups of agnostics, that is people who are undecided in their religious beliefs. Now, one group was asked to think about being dead. The other group was asked to think about being lonely. They were then asked again about their religious beliefs. Those who had been asked to think about being dead were afterwards twice as likely to express faith in God and Jesus. Twice as likely. Even though the before they were all equally agnostic. But put the fear of death in them, and they run to Jesus.Now, this shows that reminding people of death biases them to believe, regardless of the evidence, and it works not just for religion, but for any kind of belief system that promises immortality in some form, whether it's becoming famous or having children or even nationalism, which promises you can live on as part of a greater whole. This is a bias that has shaped the course of human history.Now, the theory behind this bias in the over 400 studies is called terror management theory, and the idea is simple. It's just this. We develop our worldviews, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, in order to help us manage the terror of death. And these immortality stories have thousands of different manifestations, but I believe that behind the apparent diversity there are actually just four basic forms that these immortality stories can take. And we can see them repeating themselves throughout history, just with slight variations to reflect the vocabulary of the day. Now I'm going to briefly introduce these four basic forms of immortality story, and I want to try to give you some sense of the way in which they're retold by each culture or generation using the vocabulary of their day.Now, the first story is the simplest. We want to avoid death, and the dream of doing that in this body in this world forever is the first and simplest kind of immortality story, and it might at first sound implausible, but actually, almost every culture in human history has had some myth or legend of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth or something that promises to keep us going forever. Ancient Egypt had such myths, ancient Babylon, ancient India. Throughout European history, we find them in the work of the alchemists, and of course we still believe this today, only we tell this story using the vocabulary of science. So 100 years ago, hormones had just been discovered, and people hoped that hormone treatments were going to cure aging and disease, and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. But the idea that science can cure death is just one more chapter in the story of the magical elixir, a story that is as old as civilization. But betting everything on the idea of finding the elixir and staying alive forever is a risky strategy. When we look back through history at all those who have sought an elixir in the past, the one thing they now have in common is that they're all dead.So we need a backup plan, and exactly this kind of plan B is what the second kind of immortality story offers, and that's resurrection. And it stays with the idea that I am this body, I am this physical organism. It accepts that I'm going to have to die but says, despite that, I can rise up and I can live again. In other words, I can do what Jesus did. Jesus died, he was three days in the [tomb], and then he rose up and lived again. And the idea that we can all be resurrected to live again is orthodox believe, not just for Christians but also Jews and Muslims. But our desire to believe this story is so deeply embedded that we are reinventing it again for the scientific age, for example, with the idea of cryonics. That's the idea that when you die, you can have yourself frozen, and then, at some point when technology has advanced enough, you can be thawed out and repaired and revived and so resurrected. And so some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again, and other people believe an  omnipotent scientist will do it.But for others, the whole idea of resurrection, of climbing out of the grave, it's just too much like a bad zombie movie. They find the body too messy, too unreliable to guarantee eternal life, and so they set their hopes on the third, more spiritual immortality story, the idea that we can leave our body behind and live on as a soul. Now, the majority of people on Earth believe they have a soul, and the idea is central to many religions. But even though, in its current form, in its traditional form, the idea of the soul is still hugely popular, nonetheless we are again reinventing it for the digital age, for example with the idea that you can leave your body behind by uploading your mind, your essence, the real you, onto a computer, and so live on as an avatar in the ether.But of course there are skeptics who say if we look at the evidence of science, particularly neuroscience, it suggests that your mind, your essence, the real you, is very much dependent on a particular part of your body, that is, your brain. And such skeptics can find comfort in the fourth kind of immortality story, and that is legacy, the idea that you can live on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great Greek warrior Achilles, who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy so that he might win immortal fame. And the pursuit of fame is as widespread and popular now as it ever was, and in our digital age, it's even easier to achieve. You don't need to be a great warrior like Achilles or a great king or hero. All you need is an Internet connection and a funny cat. (Laughter) But some people prefer to leave a more tangible, biological legacy — children, for example. Or they like, they hope, to live on as part of some greater whole, a nation or a family or a tribe, their gene pool. But again, there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is immortality. Woody Allen, for example, who said, ""I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment.""So those are the four basic kinds of immortality stories, and I've tried to give just some sense of how they're retold by each generation with just slight variations to fit the fashions of the day. And the fact that they recur in this way, in such a similar form but in such different belief systems, suggests, I think, that we should be skeptical of the truth of any particular version of these stories. The fact that some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again and others believe an omnipotent scientist will do it suggests that neither are really believing this on the strength of the evidence. Rather, we believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death.So the question is, are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way that is shaped by fear and denial, or can we overcome this bias? Well the Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could. He argued that the fear of death is natural, but it is not rational. ""Death,"" he said, ""is nothing to us, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are gone."" Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult to really grasp, to really internalize, because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to imagine. So 2,000 years later, another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it like this: ""Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. And so,"" he added, ""in this sense, life has no end.""So it was natural for me as a child to fear being swallowed by the void, but it wasn't rational, because being swallowed by the void is not something that any of us will ever live to experience.Now, overcoming this bias is not easy because the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us, yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational, and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us, then we can at least start to try to minimize the influence it has on our lives.Now, I find it helps to see life as being like a book: Just as a book is bounded by its covers, by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death, and even though a book is limited by beginning and end, it can encompass distant landscapes, exotic figures, fantastic adventures. And even though a book is limited by beginning and end, the characters within it know no horizons. They only know the moments that make up their story, even when the book is closed. And so the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page. Long John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of ""Treasure Island."" And so it should be with us. Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know the moments in between, the moments that make up your life. It makes no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers, whether before your birth or after your death. And you needn't worry how long the book is, or whether it's a comic strip or an epic. The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_cave_the_4_stories_we_tell_ourselves_about_death
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"A couple of years ago, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. It chose Somali piracy. Pretty much around the same time, I discovered that there were 544 seafarers being held hostage on ships, often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight.And I learned these two facts, and I thought, what's going on in shipping? And I thought, would that happen in any other industry? Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months, or a year? Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? It wouldn't happen.So I started to get intrigued. And I discovered another fact, which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before at the age of 42, 43. That is how fundamentally  we still depend on shipping. Because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry, something brought by sailboat with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows. But shipping isn't that. Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been. Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade. Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970. We are more dependent on it now than ever. And yet, for such an enormous industry — there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea — it's become pretty much invisible.Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that, because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel. (Laughter) But elsewhere in the world, if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea, you will get essentially a blank face. You will ask someone on the street if they've heard of Microsoft. I should think they'll say yes, because they'll know that they make software that goes on computers, and occasionally works. But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk, I doubt you'd get the same response, even though Maersk, which is just one shipping company amongst many, has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft. [$60.2 billion]Now why is this? A few years ago, the first sea lord of the British admiralty — he is called the first sea lord, although the chief of the army is not called a land lord — he said that we, and he meant in the industrialized nations in the West, that we suffer from sea blindness. We are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work. It's just something we fly over, a patch of blue on an airline map. Nothing to see, move along.So I wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness, so I ran away to sea. A couple of years ago, I took a passage on the Maersk Kendal, a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 7,000 boxes, and I departed from Felixstowe, on the south coast of England, and I ended up right here in Singapore five weeks later, considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now. And it was a revelation. We traveled through five seas, two oceans, nine ports, and I learned a lot about shipping.And one of the first things that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was, where are all the people? I have friends in the Navy who tell me they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time, but on Kendal there were only 21 crew. Now that's because shipping is very efficient. Containerization has made it very efficient. Ships have automation now. They can operate with small crews. But it also means that, in the words of a port chaplain I once met, the average seafarer you're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted, because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element, a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman. So most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time. They don't have time to relax. They're at sea for months at a time, and even when they're on board, they don't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet.And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was who I was sitting next to — Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait — But around that dining table in the officer's saloon, I was sitting next to a Burmese guy, I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian. On the next table was a Chinese guy, and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos. So that was a normal working ship.Now how is that possible? Because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 60 years, when most of the general public stopped noticing it, was something called an open registry, or a flag of convenience. Ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry. You can get a flag from the landlocked nation of Bolivia, or Mongolia, or North Korea, though that's not very popular. (Laughter)So we have these very multinational, global, mobile crews on ships. And that was a surprise to me. And when we got to pirate waters, down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean, the ship changed. And that was also shocking, because suddenly, I realized, as the captain said to me, that I had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship. We were no longer allowed on deck. There were double pirate watches. And at that time, there were those  544 seafarers being held hostage, and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience. Not all of them, but some of them were, because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners, it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience.What else does our sea blindness mask? Well, if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel, you'll see very black smoke. And that's because shipping has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel, so they use something called bunker fuel, which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery, or just one step up from asphalt. And shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's. And if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries' carbon emissions, it would come in about sixth, somewhere near Germany. It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world. And the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping. There are interesting initiatives going on. But why has it taken so long? When are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles?I also traveled to Cape Cod to look at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea, and what it made me think about. We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures. Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles. A humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean. But a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean, and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use, then it can damage their acoustic habitat, and they need this for breeding, for finding feeding grounds, for finding mates. And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 90 percent. But there are no laws governing  acoustic pollution yet.And when I arrived in Singapore, and I apologize for this, but I  didn't want to get off my ship. I'd really loved being on board Kendal. I'd been well treated by the crew, I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain, and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks, something that the captain also said I was crazy to think about. But I wasn't there for nine months at a time like the Filipino seafarers, who, when I asked them to describe their job to me, called it ""dollar for homesickness."" They had good salaries, but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element.But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds, because I want to salute those seafarers who bring us 90 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it. I want to salute the 100,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work, coming in and out every day, bringing us what we need. But I also want to see shipping, and us, the general public, who know so little about it, to have a bit more scrutiny, to be a bit more transparent, to have 90 percent transparency. Because I think we could all benefit from doing something very simple, which is learning to see the sea.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rose_george_inside_the_secret_shipping_industry
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"By 2010, Detroit had become the poster child for an American city in crisis. There was a housing collapse, an auto industry collapse, and the population had plummeted by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010, and many people were beginning to write it off, as it had topped the list of American shrinking cities. By 2010, I had also been asked by the Kresge Foundation and the city of Detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future. I come to this work as an architect and an urban planner, and I've spent my career working in other contested cities, like Chicago, my hometown; Harlem, which is my current home; Washington, D.C.; and Newark, New Jersey. All of these cities, to me, still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice, issues of equity, inclusion and access.Now by 2010, as well, popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like Detroit, and devoting whole issues to ""fixing the city."" I was asked by a good friend, Fred Bernstein, to do an interview for the October issue of Architect magazine, and he and I kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title, ""Can This Planner Save Detroit?"" So I'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now, because obviously, it's completely absurd that a single person, let alone a planner, could save a city. But I'm also smiling because I thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis. So I'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city, a little bit about Detroit, and I want to do that through the voices of Detroiters.So we began our process in September of 2010. It's just after a special mayoral election, and word has gotten out that there is going to be this citywide planning process, which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among Detroiters. We had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process, and people came out from all over the city, including areas that were stable neighborhoods, as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy. And most of our audience was representative of the 82 percent African-American population in the city at that time. So obviously, we have a Q&A portion of our program, and people line up to mics to ask questions. Many of them step very firmly to the mic, put their hands across their chest, and go, ""I know you people are trying to move me out of my house, right?""So that question is really powerful, and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment, when you connect it to the stories that some Detroiters had, and actually a lot of African-Americans' families have had that are living in Midwestern cities like Detroit. Many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents, who were one of 1.6 million people who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North, as depicted in this painting by Jacob Lawrence, ""The Great Migration."" They came to Detroit for a better way of life. Many found work in the automobile industry, the Ford Motor Company, as depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Art. The fruits of their labors would afford them a home, for many the first piece of property that they would ever know, and a community with other first-time African-American home buyers. The first couple of decades of their life in the North is quite well, up until about 1950, which coincides with the city's peak population at 1.8 million people. Now it's at this time that Detroit begins to see a second kind of migration, a migration to the suburbs. Between 1950 and 2000, the region grows by 30 percent. But this time, the migration leaves African-Americans in place, as families and businesses flee the city, leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs. During that same period, between 1950 and 2000, 2010, the city loses 60 percent of its population, and today it hovers at above 700,000.The audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it's like to live in a city with such depleted population. Many tell us that they're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied, and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches. Citywide, there are 80,000 vacant homes. They can also see vacant property. They're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties, like illegal dumping, and they know that because the city has lost so much population, their costs for water, electricity, gas are rising, because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need. Citywide, there are about 100,000 vacant parcels.Now, to quickly give you all a sense of a scale, because I know that sounds like a big number, but I don't think you quite understand until you look at the city map. So the city is 139 square miles. You can fit Boston, San Francisco, and the island of Manhattan within its footprint. So if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together, it looks like about 20 square miles, and that's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we're sitting on today, Manhattan, at 22 square miles. So it's a lot of vacancy.Now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities, and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots, and they're starting community gardens, which are creating a great sense of community stewardship, but they're very, very clear to tell us that this is not enough, that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them.Now there's been a lot of speculation since 2010 about what to do with the vacant property, and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening, or what we call urban agriculture. So many people would say to us, ""What if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland? It can provide fresh foods, and it can put Detroiters back to work too."" When I hear that story, I always imagine the folks from the Great Migration rolling over in their graves, because you can imagine that they didn't sacrifice moving from the South to the North to create a better life for their families, only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle, especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the American dream: steady work and a home that they owned.Now, there's a third wave of migration happening in Detroit: a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs. These folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new, entrepreneurial ideas and profit, so much so that former models can move to Detroit, buy property, start successful businesses and restaurants, and become successful community activists in their neighborhood, bringing about very positive change. Similarly, we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city. This company, Shinola, which is a luxury watch and bicycle company, deliberately chose to relocate to Detroit, and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand  of Detroit's innovation. And they also knew that  they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things. Now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods, we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises, and we have businesses relocating, and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all, a city that's under the control of an emergency manager, and just this July filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy.So 2010, we started this process, and by 2013, we released Detroit Future City, which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence — not what it was, but what it could be, looking at new ways of economic growth, new forms of land use, more sustainable and denser neighborhoods, a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system, and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change. Three key imperatives were really important to our work. One was that the city itself wasn't necessarily too large, but the economy was too small. There are only 27 jobs per 100 people in Detroit, very different from a Denver or an Atlanta or a Philadelphia that are anywhere between  35 to 70 jobs per 100 people. Secondly, there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come. It wasn't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before, and urban agriculture, while a very productive and successful intervention happening in Detroit, was not the only answer, that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new, productive, innovative, and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities, where still nearly 300,000 residents lived.So we came up with one neighborhood typology — there are several — called a live-make neighborhood, where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises, with a specific emphasis on looking at the, again, majority 82 percent African-American population. So they, too, could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided. Then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses, so that it could be used for storm water management, for example, by using surface lakes and retention ponds, that created neighborhood amenities, places of recreation, and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels. Or we could use it as research plots, where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils, or we could use it to generate energy.So the descendants of the Great Migration could either become precision watchmakers at Shinola, like Willie H., who was featured in one of their ads last year, or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like Shinola. The good news is, there is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now and those that want to come.So no thank you, Mayor Menino, who recently was quoted as saying, ""I'd blow up the place and start over."" There are very important people, business and land assets in Detroit, and there are real opportunities there. So while Detroit might not be what it was, Detroit will not die.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/toni_griffin_a_new_vision_for_rebuilding_detroit
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"Einstein said that ""I never think about the future — it comes soon enough.""And he was right, of course. So today, I'm here to ask you to think of how the future is happening now. Over the past 200 years, the world has experienced two major waves of innovation. First, the Industrial Revolution brought us machines and factories, railways, electricity, air travel, and our lives have never been the same. Then the Internet revolution brought us computing power, data networks, unprecedented access to information and communication, and our lives have never been the same.Now we are experiencing another metamorphic change: the industrial Internet. It brings together intelligent machines, advanced analytics, and the creativity of people at work. It's the marriage of minds and machines. And our lives will never be the same.In my current role, I see up close how technology is beginning to transform industrial sectors that play a huge role in our economy and in our lives: energy, aviation, transportation, health care. For an economist, this is highly unusual, and it's extremely exciting, because this is a transformation as powerful as the Industrial Revolution and more, and before the Industrial Revolution, there was no economic growth to speak of.So what is this industrial Internet? Industrial machines are being equipped with a growing number of electronic sensors that allow them to see, hear, feel a lot more than ever before, generating prodigious amounts of data. Increasingly sophisticated analytics then sift through the data, providing insights that allow us to operate the machines in entirely new ways, a lot more efficiently. And not just individual machines, but fleets of locomotives, airplanes, entire systems like power grids, hospitals. It is asset optimization and system optimization. Of course, electronic sensors have been around for some time, but something has changed: a sharp decline in the cost of sensors and, thanks to advances in cloud computing, a rapid decrease in the cost of storing and processing data.So we are moving to a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent; they are brilliant. They are self-aware, they are predictive, reactive and social. It's jet engines, locomotives, gas turbines, medical devices, communicating seamlessly with each other and with us. It's a world where information itself becomes intelligent and comes to us automatically when we need it without having to look for it. We are beginning to deploy throughout the industrial system embedded virtualization, multi-core processor technology, advanced cloud-based communications, a new software-defined machine infrastructure which allows machine functionality to become virtualized in software, decoupling machine software from hardware, and allowing us to remotely and automatically monitor, manage and upgrade industrial assets.Why does any of this matter at all? Well first of all, it's already allowing us to shift towards preventive, condition-based maintenance, which means fixing machines just before they break, without wasting time servicing them on a fixed schedule. And this, in turn, is pushing us towards zero unplanned downtime, which means there will be no more power outages, no more flight delays.So let me give you a few examples of how these brilliant machines work, and some of the examples may seem trivial, some are clearly more profound, but all of them are going to have a very powerful impact.Let's start with aviation. Today, 10 percent of all flights cancellations and delays are due to unscheduled maintenance events. Something goes wrong unexpectedly. This results in eight billion dollars in costs for the airline industry globally every year, not to mention the impact on all of us: stress, inconvenience, missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal. So how can the industrial Internet help here? We've developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft. It's self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss. The aircraft, while in flight, will communicate with technicians on the ground. By the time it lands, they will already know if anything needs to be serviced. Just in the U.S., a system like this can prevent over 60,000 delays and cancellations every year, helping seven million passengers get to their destinations on time.Or take healthcare. Today, nurses spend an average of 21 minutes per shift looking for medical equipment. That seems trivial, but it's less time spent caring for patients. St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston, Texas, which has deployed industrial Internet technology to electronically monitor and connect patients, staff and medical equipment, has reduced bed turnaround times by nearly one hour. If you need surgery, one hour matters. It means more patients can be treated, more lives can be saved. Another medical center, in Washington state, is piloting an application that allows medical images from city scanners and MRIs to be analyzed in the cloud, developing better analytics at a lower cost. Imagine a patient who has suffered a severe trauma, and needs the attention of several specialists: a neurologist, a cardiologist, an orthopedic surgeon. If all of them can have instantaneous and simultaneous access to scans and images as they are taken, they will be able to deliver better healthcare faster. So all of this translates into better health outcomes, but it can also deliver substantial economic benefits. Just a one-percent reduction in existing inefficiencies could yield savings of over 60 billion dollars to the healthcare industry worldwide, and that is just a drop in the sea compared to what we need to do to make healthcare affordable on a sustainable basis.Similar advances are happening in energy, including renewable energy. Wind farms equipped with new remote monitorings and diagnostics that allow wind turbines to talk to each other and adjust the pitch of their blades in a coordinated way, depending on how the wind is blowing, can now produce electricity at a cost of less than five cents per kilowatt/hour. Ten years ago, that cost was 30 cents, six times as much.The list goes on, and it will grow fast, because industrial data are now growing exponentially. By 2020, they will account for over 50 percent of all digital information.But this is not just about data, so let me switch gears and tell you how this is impacting already the jobs we do every day, because this new wave of innovation is bringing about new tools and applications that will allow us to collaborate in a smarter and faster way, making our jobs not just more efficient but more rewarding. Imagine a field engineer arriving at the wind farm with a handheld device telling her which turbines need servicing. She already has all the spare parts, because the problems were diagnosed in advanced. And if she faces an unexpected issue, the same handheld device will allow her to communicate with colleagues at the service center, let them see what she sees, transmit data that they can run through diagnostics, and they can stream videos that will guide her, step by step, through whatever complex procedure is needed to get the machines back up and running. And their interaction gets documented and stored in a searchable database.Let's stop and think about this for a minute, because this is a very important point. This new wave of innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work. And I know that many of you will be concerned  about the impact that innovation might have on jobs. Unemployment is already high, and there is always a fear  that innovation will destroy jobs. And innovation is disruptive. But let me stress two things here. First, we've already lived through mechanization of agriculture, automation of industry, and employment has gone up, because innovation is fundamentally about growth. It makes products more affordable. It creates new demand, new jobs. Second, there is a concern that in the future, there will only be room for engineers, data scientists, and other highly-specialized workers. And believe me, as an economist, I am also scared. But think about it: Just as a child can easily figure out how to operate an iPad, so a new generation of mobile and intuitive industrial applications will make life easier for workers of all skill levels. The worker of the future will be more like Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of ""Modern Times."" And to be sure, new high-skilled jobs will be created: mechanical digital engineers who understand both the machines and the data; managers who understand their industry and the analytics and can reorganize the business to take full advantage of the technology.But now let's take a step back. Let's look at the big picture. There are people who argue that today's innovation is all about social media and silly games, with nowhere near the transformational power of the Industrial Revolution. They say that all the growth-enhancing innovations are behind us. And every time I hear this, I can't help thinking that even back in the Stone Age, there must have been a group of cavemen sitting around a fire one day looking very grumpy, and looking disapprovingly at another group of cavemen rolling a stone wheel up and down a hill, and saying to each other, ""Yeah, this wheel thing, cool toy, sure, but compared to fire, it will have no impact. The big discoveries are all behind us."" (Laughter)This technological revolution is as inspiring and transformational as anything we have ever seen. Human creativity and innovation have always propelled us forward. They've created jobs. They've raised living standards. They've made our lives healthier and more rewarding. And the new wave of innovation which is beginning to sweep through industry is no different. In the U.S. alone, the industrial Internet could raise average income by 25 to 40 percent over the next 15 years, boosting growth to rates we haven't seen in a long time, and adding between 10 and 15 trillion dollars to global GDP. That is the size of the entire U.S. economy today.But this is not a foregone conclusion. We are just at the beginning of this transformation, and there will be barriers to break, obstacles to overcome. We will need to invest in the new technologies. We will need to adapt organizations and managerial practices. We will need a robust cybersecurity approach that protects sensitive information and intellectual property and safeguards critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. And the education system will need to evolve to ensure students are equipped with the right skills. It's not going to be easy, but it is going to be worth it. The economic challenges facing us are hard, but when I walk the factory floor, and I see how humans and brilliant machines are becoming interconnected, and I see the difference this makes in a hospital, in an airport, in a power generation plant, I'm not just optimistic, I'm enthusiastic. This new technological revolution is upon us.So think about the future — it will be here soon enough.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_annunziata_welcome_to_the_age_of_the_industrial_internet
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"""I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, and Mourners to and fro kept treading — treading — till [it seemed] that Sense was breaking through — And when they all were seated, a Service, like a Drum — kept beating — beating — till I [thought] my Mind was going numb — And then I heard them lift a Box and creak across my Soul with those same Boots of Lead, again, then Space — began to toll, As [all] the Heavens were a Bell, and Being, [but] an Ear, and I, and Silence, some strange Race, wrecked, solitary, here — [And] then a Plank in Reason, broke, and I fell down and down — and hit a World, at every plunge, and Finished knowing — then —""We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states.As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp.In 1991, I had a series of losses. My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact.But in 1994, three years later, I found myself losing interest in almost everything. I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. And it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, ""What a lot of people that is to have to call back."" Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross.And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. It was a kind of nullity.And then the anxiety set in. If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, ""As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it."" But if you said to me, ""You have to have acute anxiety for the next month,"" I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. It's a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you're afraid of. And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people.And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, ""Something is wrong and I should call for help,"" and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, ""I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something.""The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. And I also started reckoning with this terrible question: If I'm not the tough person who could have made it through a concentration camp, then who am I? And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? And how do I feel about it if it's making me someone else?I had two advantages as I went into the fight. The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. And the other was that I had access to good treatment.But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. And I thought, ""But is it a chemical problem or a psychological problem? And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure?"" And I couldn't figure out which it was. And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality.I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective. They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science.Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, ""Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one,"" it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances. The trajectory tells us a great deal. People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause.As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed, on the surface, to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. And there were other people who had what sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? And I went out and I interviewed person after person who was suffering with depression.One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day.One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later — she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins — when I interviewed her, she said, ""I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone,' over and over, to occupy my mind. I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. You don't even deserve to live.' And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself.""You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth.But the truth lies. I became obsessed with that sentence: ""But the truth lies."" And I discovered, as I talked to depressive people, that they have many delusional perceptions. People will say, ""No one loves me."" And you say, ""I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you."" You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, ""No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end."" Or they'll say, ""There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body."" To which you have to say, ""That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast.""(Laughter)A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 10 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 15 and 20 times as many little monsters —(Laughter)as they had actually killed.A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. They said, ""Do people talk to you differently?"" I said, ""Yes, people talk to me differently. They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. Things are different because now I know that depression is the family secret that everyone has.I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, ""I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think?"" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. And then she said, ""You know, my husband would never understand this. He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so, you know, it's just between us."" And I said, ""Yes, that's fine."" On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside,(Laughter)and he said, ""My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think?"" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom.(Laughter)And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems.(Laughter)But I was also struck by the burdensome nature of such mutual secrecy. Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse.And then I began thinking about all the ways people make themselves better. I'd started off as a medical conservative. I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were — there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. But then I discovered something. If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. So I became much more tolerant of the vast world of alternative treatments.And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. Someone was asking me backstage today about meditation. My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn.(Laughter)She sent me some of them.(Laughter)And I'm not wearing them right now.(Laughter)I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM.And yet, when I went to look at alternative treatments, I also gained perspective on other treatments. I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda, working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, ""Well, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing."" And he said, ""But we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide."" I said, ""What kind of trouble did you have?"" And he said, ""Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them.""(Laughter)(Applause)He said, ""We had to ask them to leave the country.""(Laughter)Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. Frank Russakoff had the worst depression perhaps that I've ever seen in a man. He was constantly depressed. He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month, he would have electroshock treatment. Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. Then he would feel okay for a week. Then he would have a week of going downhill. And then he would have another electroshock treatment. And he said to me when I met him, ""It's unbearable to go through my weeks this way. I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better."" ""But,"" he said to me, ""I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try."" And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him, somewhere, enough optimism to reach out for one more. And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful.He's now a friend of mine. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, ""My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized CD rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. And the other present was a photo of my grandmother, who committed suicide. As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you. It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. I'm alive and grateful. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.""I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. And so I went out to try to look at what was being done for poor people with depression. And what I discovered is that poor people are mostly not being treated for depression. Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, ""Why do I feel like this? I must have depression."" And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, ""Maybe this is treatable.""And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. She said, and she was a woman, by the way, who had seven children. She said, ""I used to have a job but I had to give it up because I couldn't go out of the house. I have nothing to say to my children. In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast."" She said, ""I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. I wish I could stop the pain.""Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, ""My kids are so much happier now."" She said, ""There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. That's all I need now, is my kids. Things keep on changing, the way I dress, the way I feel, the way I act. I can go outside not being afraid anymore, and I don't think those bad feelings are coming back, and if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that, I would still be at home with the covers pulled over my head, if I were still alive at all. I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and He heard my prayers.""I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent.And I turned in my story, and my editor called me and said, ""We really can't publish this.""And I said, ""Why not?""And she said, ""It just is too far-fetched. These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? It's just too implausible."" She said, ""I've never even heard of anything like it.""And I said, ""The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news.""(Laughter)(Applause)""And you are a news magazine.""So after a certain amount of negotiation, they agreed to it. But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be exploitative, because we would be changing them. There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us, that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.People then say, ""But isn't depression part of what people are supposed to experience? Didn't we evolve to have depression? Isn't it part of your personality?"" To which I would say, mood is adaptive. Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. It's maladaptive.People will come to me and say, ""I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this.""And I always say to them, ""You may get through it, but you'll never be 37 again. Life is short, and that's a whole year you're talking about giving up. Think it through.""It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.People say to me, ""Well, is it continuous with normal sadness?"" And I say, in a way it's continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little rust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 100 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address.So now people say, ""You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?"" And I don't. But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. I feel sad about professional disappointments, about damaged relationships, about global warming. Those are the things that I feel sad about now. And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience?And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, and say, ""I was depressed a long time ago, I never want to think about it again, I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life,"" ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience.So Frank Russakoff said to me, ""If I had a do-over, I suppose I wouldn't do it this way, but in a strange way, I'm grateful for what I've experienced. I'm glad to have been in the hospital 40 times. It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always.""And Maggie Robbins said, ""I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.'""(Laughter)""And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. It was simply going to be an occasion where I didn't have AIDS and I wasn't dying, but could tolerate the fact that they did and they were. Our needs are our greatest assets. It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need.""Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. The question is not so much of finding great meaning and deciding your depression has been very meaningful. It's of seeking that meaning and thinking, when it comes again, ""This will be hellish, but I will learn something from it."" I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 20 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit.I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. And that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depression_the_secret_we_share
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"Nine years ago, I worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure. And I was there, and I worked in that job because I believe that technology can improve people's lives. One afternoon, I had tea with a storekeeper at the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, and he said to me, ""You Americans, you can put a man on the moon, but when I get home tonight, I won't be able to turn on my lights."" At the time, the U.S. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction. How do you ensure technology reaches users? How do you put it in their hands so that it is useful?So those are the questions that my colleagues and I at D-Rev ask ourselves. And D-Rev is short for Design Revolution. And I took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users, and not just any users, but customers who live on less than four dollars a day. One of the key areas we've been working on recently is medical devices, and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with Iraq's electricity grid then, there are some commonalities. Despite the advanced technology, it's not reaching the people who need it most.So I'm going to tell you about one of the projects we've been working on, the ReMotion Knee, and it's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees. And this project started when the Jaipur Foot Organization, the largest fitter of prosthetic limbs in the world, came to the Bay Area and they said, ""We need a better knee."" Chances are, if you're living on less than four dollars a day, and you're an amputee, you've lost your limb in a vehicle accident. Most people think it's land mines, but it's a vehicle accident. You're walking by the side of the road and you're hit by a truck, or you're trying to to jump on a moving train, you're late for work, and your pant leg gets caught. And the reality is that if you don't have much money, like this young named Kamal right here, the option you really have is a bamboo staff to get around. And how big a problem is this? There's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee.And what are their options? This is a high-end. This is what we'd call a ""smart knee."" It's got a microprocessor inside. It can pretty much do anything, but it's 20,000 dollars, and to give you a sense of who wears this, veterans, American veterans coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq would be fit with something like this. This is a low-end titanium knee. It's a polycentric knee, and all that that means is the mechanism, is a four-bar mechanism, that mimics a natural human knee. But at 1,400 dollars, it's still too expensive for people like Kamal. And lastly, here you see a low-end knee. This is a knee that's been designed specifically for poor people. And while you have affordability, you've lost on functionality. The mechanism here is a single axis, and a single axis is like a door hinge. So you can think about how unstable that would be. And this is the type of mechanismthat the Jaipur Foot Organization was using when they were looking for a better knee, and I just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like, because I'm showing you all these knees and I imagine it's hard to think  how it all fits together. So at the top you have a socket, and this fits over someone's residual limb, and everyone's residual limb is a little bit different. And then you have the knee, and here I've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates, and then a pylon, and then a foot. And we've been able to develop a knee, a polycentric knee, so that type of knee that acts like a human knee, mimics human gait, for 80 dollars retail.(Applause)But the key is, you can have this great invention, you can have this great design, but how do you get it to the people who most need it? How do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives?So at D-Rev, we've done some other projects, and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers, to users, to people who need it.And the first thing is that the product  needs to be world class. It needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market. Regardless of your income level, you want the most beautiful, the best product that there is. I'm going to show you a video now of a man named Ash. You can see him walking. He's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee. And he's doing a 10-meter walk test. And you'll notice that he's struggling  with stability as he's walking. And something that's not obvious, that you can't see, is that it's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling. Now this is a video of Kamal. You remember Kamal earlier, holding the bamboo staff. He's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee, and he's doing that same 10-meter walk test. And you can see his stability is much better.So world class isn't just about technical performance. It's also about human performance. And most medical devices, we've learned, as we've dug in, are really designed for Westerners, for wealthier economies. But the reality is our users, our customers, they do different things. They sit cross-legged more. We see that they squat. They kneel in prayer. And we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market.So the second thing we learned, and this leads into my second point, which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric. And at D-Rev, we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed. So it's not just the end user that you're thinking about, but everyone who interacts with the product, so, for example, the prosthetist who fits the knee, but also the context in which the knee is being fit. What is the local market like? How do all these components get to the clinic? Do they all get there on time? The supply chain. Everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user, and it goes in as part of the system, and it's used.So I wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version, the Jaipur Knee, so this is it right here. (Clicking) Notice anything about it? It clicks. We'd seen that users had actually modified it. So do you see that black strip right there? That's a homemade noise dampener. We also saw that our users had modified it in other ways. You can see there that that particular amputee, he had wrapped bandages around the knee. He'd made a cosmesis. And if you look at the knee, it's got those pointy edges, right? So if you're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari, it's really obvious that you're wearing a prosthetic limb, and in societies where there's social stigma around being disabled, people are particularly acute about this.So I'm going to show you some of the modifications we did. We did a lot of iterations, not just  around this, but some other things. But here we have the version three,  the ReMotion Knee, but if you look in here, you can see the noise dampener. It's quieter. The other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile. We made it thinner. And something that's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production.And this goes into my last point. We really, truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it's needed, it needs to be market-driven, and market-driven means that products are sold. They're not donated. They're not heavily subsidized. Our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user. It also has to be designed to be very affordable. But a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer, and use is what creates impact. And we believe that as designers, it holds us accountable to our customers. And with centralized manufacturing, you can control the quality control, and you can hit that $80 price point with profit margins built in. And now, those profit margins are critical, because if you want to scale, if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee, it needs to be economically sustainable.So I want to give you a sense of where we are at. We have fit over 5,000 amputees, and one of the big indicators we're looking at, of course, is, does it improve lives? Well, the standard is, is someone still wearing their knee six months later? The industry average is about 65 percent. Ours is 79 percent, and we're hoping to get that higher. Right now, our knees are worn in 12 countries. This is where we want to get, though, in the next three years. We'll double the impact in 2015, and we'll double it each of the following years after that. But then we hit a new challenge, and that's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees.So I want to end with a story of Pournima. Pournima was 18 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg, and she traveled 12 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee, and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers, she's particularly meaningful to me  as an engineer and as a woman, because she was in school, she had just started school to study engineering. And she said, ""Well, now that I can walk again, I can go back and complete my studies."" And to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users.So thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/krista_donaldson_the_80_prosthetic_knee_that_s_changing_lives
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"I want you to, for a moment, think about playing a game of Monopoly. Except in this game, that combination of skill, talent and luck that helped earn you success in games, as in life, has been rendered irrelevant, because this game's been rigged, and you've got the upper hand. You've got more money, more opportunities to move around the board, and more access to resources. And as you think about that experience, I want you to ask yourself: How might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way you think about yourself and regard that other player?So, we ran a study on the UC Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question. We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab, and with the flip of a coin, randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game. They got two times as much money; when they passed Go, they collected twice the salary; and they got to roll both dice instead of one, so they got to move around the board a lot more.(Laughter)And over the course of 15 minutes, we watched through hidden cameras what happened. What I want to do today, for the first time, is show you a little bit of what we saw. You'll to have to pardon the sound quality, because again, these were hidden cameras. So we've provided subtitles.[Video] Rich Player: How many 500s did you have?Poor Player: Just one.RP: Are you serious? PP: Yeah.RP: I have three. (Laughs) I don't know why they gave me so much.Paul Piff: So it was quickly apparent to players that something was up. One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person, and yet, as the game unfolded, we saw very notable differences, dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players. The rich player started to move around the board louder, literally smacking the board with the piece as he went around.(Game piece smacks board)We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players.We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side. It's on the bottom right corner. That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior. So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat.[Video] RP: Are those pretzels a trick?PP: I don't know.Paul Piff: OK, so no surprises, people are on to us. They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place. One even asks, like you just saw, ""Is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick?"" And yet, despite that, the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate, and those rich players start to eat more pretzels.(Laughter)[Video] RP: I love pretzels.(Laughter)Paul Piff: And as the game went on, one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person — less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor, poor players, and more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they're doing.[Video] RP: I have money ...(Laughs) I have money for everything.PP: How much is that?RP: You owe me 24 dollars. You're going to lose all your money soon. I'll buy it. I have so much money. I have so much money, it takes me forever.RP 2: I'm going to buy out this whole board.RP 3: You're going to run out of money soon. I'm pretty much untouchable at this point.(Laughter)Paul Piff: And here's what I think was really, really interesting: it's that, at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly ...(Laughter)They talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game.(Laughter)And they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation — including that flip of a coin — that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place. And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage.Now, this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure, wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status, and a lot of people don't; they have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources. And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies. What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increase. In surveys, we've found that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good, and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral. Now, what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self-interest, talk about why we should care about those implications, and end with what might be done.Some of the first studies that we ran in this area looked at helping behavior, something social psychologists call ""pro-social behavior."" And we were really interested in who's more likely to offer help to another person: someone who's rich or someone who's poor. In one of the studies, we bring rich and poor members of the community into the lab, and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars. We told the participants they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves, or they could share a portion of it, if they wanted to, with a stranger, who's totally anonymous. They'll never meet that stranger; the stranger will never meet them. And we just monitor how much people give. Individuals who made 25,000, sometimes under 15,000 dollars a year, gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making 150,000, 200,000 dollars a year.We've had people play games to see who's more or less likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize. In one of the games, we actually rigged a computer so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible — You couldn't get above 12 in this game, and yet ... the richer you were, the more likely you were to cheat in this game to earn credits toward a $50 cash prize — sometimes by three to four times as much.We ran another study where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children —(Laughter)I'm not kidding — I know it sounds like I'm making a joke. We explicitly told participants: ""This candy is for children participating in a developmental lab nearby. They're in studies. This is for them."" And we just monitored how much candy participants took. Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor.We've even studied cars. Not just any cars, but whether drivers of different kinds of cars are more or less inclined to break the law. In one of these studies, we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk. Now in California, as you all know, because I'm sure we all do this, it's the law to stop for a pedestrian who's waiting to cross. So here's an example of how we did it. That's our confederate off to the left, posing as a pedestrian. He approaches as the red truck successfully stops. In typical California fashion, it's overtaken by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over.(Laughter)Now here's an example of a more expensive car, a Prius, driving through, and a BMW doing the same. So we did this for hundreds of vehicles on several days, just tracking who stops and who doesn't. What we found was as the expensiveness of a car increased ...(Laughter)the drivers' tendencies to break the law increased as well. None of the cars — none of the cars — in our least expensive car category broke the law. Close to 50 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law. We've run other studies, finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work, like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes, lying to customers.Now, I don't mean to suggest that it's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior. Not at all — in fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people. And that's understandable, because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper, as long as we apply ourselves and work hard. And a piece of that means that sometimes, you need to put your own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you. But what we're finding is that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you.Here I've plotted for you the mean household income received by each fifth and top five percent of the population over the last 20 years. In 1993, the differences between the different quintiles of the population, in terms of income, are fairly egregious. It's not difficult to discern that there are differences. But over the last 20 years, that significant difference has become a Grand Canyon of sorts between those at the top and everyone else. In fact, the top 20 percent of our population own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country.We're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality. What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals, but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us. And if it's the case, as we've been finding, that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel to that wealth, and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people, and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest, well, then, there's no reason to think that those patterns will change. In fact, there's every reason to think that they'll only get worse, and that's what it would look like if things just stayed the same, at the same linear rate, over the next 20 years.Now inequality — economic inequality — is something we should all be concerned about, and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse ... not just the people at the bottom, everyone. There's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world, showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse. Social mobility, things we really care about, physical health, social trust, all go down as inequality goes up. Similarly, negative things in social collectives and societies, things like obesity, and violence, imprisonment, and punishment, are exacerbated as economic inequality increases. Again, these are outcomes not just experienced by a few, but that resound across all strata of society. Even people at the top experience these outcomes.So what do we do? This cascade of self-perpetuating, pernicious, negative effects could seem like something that's spun out of control, and there's nothing we can do about it, certainly nothing we as individuals could do. But in fact, we've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions, small changes to people's values, small nudges in certain directions, can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy. For instance, reminding people of the benefits of cooperation or the advantages of community, cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people.In one study, we had people watch a brief video, just 46 seconds long, about childhood poverty that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them. And after watching that, we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab, who was in distress. After watching this video, an hour later, rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person, a stranger, as someone who's poor, suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical, but are so malleable to slight changes in people's values, and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy.And beyond the walls of our lab, we're even beginning to see signs of change in society. Bill Gates, one of our nation's wealthiest individuals, in his Harvard commencement speech, talked about the problem of inequality facing society as being the most daunting challenge, and talked about what must be done to combat it, saying, ""Humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries — but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity."" And there's the Giving Pledge, in which more than 100 of our nation's wealthiest individuals are pledging half of their fortunes to charity. And there's the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements, like ""We are the 1 percent,"" ""Resource Generation,"" or ""Wealth for Common Good,"" in which the most privileged members of the population, members of the one percent and elsewhere, people who are wealthy, are using their own economic resources, adults and youth alike — that's what's most striking to me — leveraging their own privilege, their own economic resources, to combat inequality by advocating for social policies, changes in social values and changes in people's behavior that work against their own economic interests, but that may ultimately restore the American dream.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean
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"It's the fifth time I stand on this shore, the Cuban shore, looking out at that distant horizon, believing, again, that I'm going to make it all the way across that vast, dangerous wilderness of an ocean. Not only have I tried four times, but the greatest swimmers in the world have been trying since 1950, and it's still never been done.The team is proud of our four attempts. It's an expedition of some 30 people. Bonnie is my best friend and head handler, who somehow summons will, that last drop of will within me, when I think it's gone, after many, many hours and days out there. The shark experts are the best in the world — large predators below. The box jellyfish, the deadliest venom in all of the ocean, is in these waters, and I have come close to dying from them on a previous attempt. The conditions themselves, besides the sheer distance of over 100 miles in the open ocean — the currents and whirling eddies and the Gulf Stream itself, the most unpredictable of all of the planet Earth.And by the way — it's amusing to me that journalists and people, before these attempts, often ask me, ""Well, are you going to go with any boats or any people or anything?""(Laughter)And I'm thinking, what are they imagining? That I'll just sort of do some celestial navigation —(Laughter)And carry a bowie knife in my mouth, and I'll hunt fish and skin them alive and eat them, and maybe drag a desalinization plant behind me for fresh water.(Laughter)Yes, I have a team.(Laughter)And the team is expert, and the team is courageous, and brimming with innovation and scientific discovery, as is true of any major expedition on the planet.And we've been on a journey. And the debate has raged, hasn't it, since the Greeks, of isn't it what it's all about? Isn't life about the journey, not really the destination? And here we've been on this journey, and the truth is, it's been thrilling. We haven't reached that other shore, and still, our sense of pride and commitment, unwavering commitment. When I turned 60, the dream was still alive from having tried this in my 20s — dreamed it and imagined it. The most famous body of water on the Earth today, I imagine, Cuba to Florida. And it was deep. It was deep in my soul.When I turned 60, it wasn't so much about the athletic accomplishment, it wasn't the ego of ""I want to be the first."" That's always there and it's undeniable. But it was deeper. It was ""how much life is there left?"" Let's face it — we're all on a one-way street, aren't we? And what are we going to do? What are we going to do as we go forward, to have no regrets looking back? And all this past year in training, I had that Teddy Roosevelt quote to paraphrase it, floating around in my brain. It says, ""You go ahead. You go ahead and sit back in your comfortable chair and you be the critic, you be the observer, while the brave one gets in the ring and engages and gets bloody and gets dirty and fails over and over and over again, but yet isn't afraid and isn't timid and lives life in a bold way.""And so of course I want to make it across. It is the goal, and I should be so shallow to say that this year, the destination was even sweeter than the journey.(Laughter)(Applause)But the journey itself was worthwhile taking. And at this point, by this summer, everybody — scientists, sports scientists, endurance experts, neurologists, my own team, Bonnie — said it's impossible. It just simply can't be done, and Bonnie said to me, ""But if you're going to take the journey, I'm going to see you through to the end of it, so I'll be there.""And now we're there. As we're looking out, kind of a surreal moment before the first stroke, standing on the rocks at Marina Hemingway, the Cuban flag is flying above, all my team is out in their boats, hands up in the air, ""We're here! We're here for you!"" Bonnie and I look at each other and say, this year, the mantra is — and I've been using it in training — Find a way. You have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you, as we all do. None of us ever get through this life without heartache, without turmoil, and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality, you find your way. And Bonnie grabbed my shoulders, and she said, ""Let's find our way to Florida.""And we started, and for the next 53 hours, it was an intense, unforgettable life experience. The highs were high, the awe — I'm not a religious person, but I'll tell you, to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if, as you're breathing, you're looking down miles and miles and miles, to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on — it's awe-inspiring. I have a playlist of about 85 songs, and especially in the middle of the night ... That night, because we use no lights — lights attract jellyfish, lights attract sharks, lights attract baitfish that attract sharks, so we go in the pitch black of the night. You've never seen black this black. You can't see the front of your hand, and the people on the boat, Bonnie and my team on the boat — they just hear the slapping of the arms, and they know where I am, because there's no visual at all. And I'm out there kind of tripping out on my little playlist.(Laughter)I've got tight rubber caps, I don't hear a thing. I've got goggles and I'm turning my head 50 times a minute, and I'm singing ...(Singing) Imagine there's no heaven(Laughter)doo doo doo doo doo It's easy if you try doo doo doo doo dooAnd I can sing that song a thousand times in a row.(Laughter)Now there's a talent unto itself.(Laughter)(Applause)And each time I get done with,(Singing) Oh, you may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one222.(Singing) Imagine there's no heaven(Laughter)And when I get through the end of a thousand of John Lennon's ""Imagine,"" I have swum nine hours and 45 minutes ... exactly.(Laughter)And then there are the crises. Of course there are. And the vomiting starts, the seawater — you're not well. You're wearing a jellyfish mask for the ultimate protection. It's difficult to swim in. It's causing abrasions on the inside of the mouth, but the tentacles can't get you. And the hypothermia sets in. The water's 85 degrees, and yet you're losing weight and using calories. And as you come over toward the side of the boat — not allowed to touch it, not allowed to get out, but Bonnie and her team hand me nutrition and ask me how I'm doing, am I all right. I am seeing the Taj Mahal —(Laughter)Over here. I'm in a very different state —(Laughter)And I'm thinking, ""Wow! I never thought I'd be running into the Taj Mahal out here. It's gorgeous! I mean, how long did it take them to build that? It's just ... So, uh — wooo — you know?(Laughter)We kind of have a cardinal rule that I'm never told how far it is, because we don't know how far it is. What's going to happen to you between this point and that point? What's going to happen to the weather and the currents and, God forbid, you're stung, when you don't think you could be stung in all this armor. Bonnie made a decision coming into that third morning that I was suffering, and I was hanging on by a thread. And she said, ""Come here,"" and I came close to the boat, and she said, ""Look, look out there."" And I saw light, because the day is easier than the night, and I thought we were coming into day. I saw a stream of white light along the horizon, and I said, ""It's going to be morning soon."" And she said, ""No, those are the lights of Key West."" It was 15 more hours, which for most swimmers would be a long time.(Laughter)(Applause)You have no idea how many 15-hour training swims I had done.So here we go, and I somehow, without a decision, went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting Stephen Hawking on the parameters of the universe. I just went into thinking about this dream, and why and how. As I said, when I turned 60, it wasn't about that concrete ""Can you do it?"" That's the everyday machinations. That's the discipline, and it's the preparation, and there's a pride in that. But I decided to think, as I went along, about — you know, the phrase usually is, ""reaching for the stars."" And in my case, it's reaching for the horizon. And when you reach for the horizon, as I've proven, you may not get there. But what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down; what a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons.And now, the shore is coming. And there's just a little part of me that's sad. The epic journey is going to be over.So many people come up to me now and say, ""What's next?""(Laughter)""We love that!""(Laughter)""That little tracker on the computer? When are you going to do the next one? We can't wait to follow the next one."" Well, they were just there for 53 hours, and I was there for years. And so there won't be another epic journey in the ocean.But the point is, and the point was, that every day of our lives is epic. And I'll tell you, when I walked up onto that beach, staggered up onto that beach ... I had so many times, in a very puffed-up ego way, rehearsed what I would say ...(Laughter)on the beach. When Bonnie thought the back of my throat was swelling up, she brought the medical team over to our boat to say, ""She's really beginning to have trouble breathing; another 12, 24 hours in the saltwater ..."" — the whole thing — I just thought, in my hallucinatory moment, that I heard the word ""tracheotomy.""(Laughter)Bonnie said to the doctor, ""I'm not worried about her not breathing. If she can't talk when she gets to the shore, she's going to be pissed off.""(Laughter)But the truth is, all those orations that I had practiced, just to get myself through some training swims as motivation — it wasn't like that. It was a very real moment, with that crowd, with my team. We did it. I didn't do it. We did it. And we'll never forget it. It'll always be part of us.The three things I did sort of blurt out when we got there, was first: Never, ever give up. I live it. What's the phrase from today from Socrates?Audience: To be is to do.Diana Nyad: To be is to do. So I don't stand up and say, ""Don't ever give up."" I didn't give up. There was action behind these words.The second is: You can chase your dreams at any age; you're never too old. Sixty-four; a thing no one, at any age, any gender, could ever do has done it. And there's no doubt in my mind that I am at the prime of my life today.(Applause)Yeah.(Applause)Thank you.And the third thing I said on that beach was, it looks like the most solitary endeavor in the world, and in many ways, of course, it is. And in other ways, and the most important ways, it's a team. And if you think I'm a badass, you want to meet Bonnie.(Laughter)Bonnie, where are you? Where are you? There's Bonnie Stoll.(Applause)My buddy.(Applause)The Henry David Thoreau quote goes, ""When you achieve your dreams, it's not so much what you get as who you have become in achieving them."" And yeah, I stand before you now. In the three months since that swim ended, I've sat down with Oprah, and I've been in President Obama's Oval Office; I've been invited to speak in front of esteemed groups such as yourselves; I've signed a wonderful major book contract. All of that's great, and I don't denigrate it. I'm proud of it all, but the truth is, I'm walking around tall because I am that bold, fearless person, and I will be, every day, until it's time for these days to be done.Thank you very much and enjoy the conference.Thank you. Thank you!(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you! Thank you.(Applause)Find a way!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/diana_nyad_never_ever_give_up
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"How many of you have been to Oklahoma City?Raise your hand. Yeah?How many of you have not been to Oklahoma City and have no idea who I am? (Laughter)Most of you. Let me give you a little bit of background.Oklahoma City started in the most unique way imaginable. Back on a spring day in 1889, the federal government held what they called a land run. They literally lined up the settlers along an imaginary line, and they fired off a gun, and the settlers roared across the countryside and put down a stake, and wherever they put down that stake, that was their new home. And at the end of the very first day, the population of Oklahoma City had gone from zero to 10,000, and our planning department is still paying for that. The citizens got together on that first day and elected a mayor. And then they shot him. (Laughter) That's not really all that funny — (Laughter) — but it allows me to see what type of audience I'm dealing with, so I appreciate the feedback.The 20th century was fairly kind to Oklahoma City. Our economy was based on commodities, so the price of cotton or the price of wheat, and ultimately the price of oil and natural gas. And along the way, we became a city of innovation. The shopping cart was invented in Oklahoma City. (Applause) The parking meter, invented in Oklahoma City. You're welcome.Having an economy, though, that relates to commodities can give you some ups and some downs, and that was certainly the case in Oklahoma City's history. In the 1970s, when it appeared that the price of energy would never retreat, our economy was soaring, and then in the early 1980s, it cratered quickly. The price of energy dropped. Our banks began to fail. Before the end of the decade, 100 banks had failed in the state of Oklahoma. There was no bailout on the horizon. Our banking industry, our oil and gas industry, our commercial real estate industry, were all at the bottom of the economic scale. Young people were leaving Oklahoma City in droves for Washington and Dallas and Houston and New York and Tokyo, anywhere where they could  find a job that measured up to their educational attainment, because in Oklahoma City, the good jobs just weren't there.But along at the end of the '80s came an enterprising businessman who became mayor named Ron Norick. Ron Norick eventually figured out that the secret to economic development wasn't incentivizing companies up front, it was about creating a place where businesses wanted to locate, and so he pushed an initiative called MAPS that basically was a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax to build a bunch of stuff. It built a new sports arena, a new canal downtown, it fixed up our performing arts center, a new baseball stadium downtown, a lot of things to improve the quality of life. And the economy indeed seemed to start showing some signs of life.The next mayor came along. He started MAPS for Kids, rebuilt the entire inner city school system, all 75 buildings either built anew or refurbished.And then, in 2004, in this rare collective lack of judgment bordering on civil disobedience, the citizens elected me mayor.Now the city I inherited was just on the verge of coming out of its slumbering economy, and for the very first time, we started showing up on the lists. Now you know the lists I'm talking about. The media and the Internet love to rank cities. And in Oklahoma City, we'd never really been on lists before. So I thought it was kind of cool when they came out with these positive lists and we were on there. We weren't anywhere close to the top, but we were on the list, we were somebody. Best city to get a job, best city to start a business, best downtown — Oklahoma City.And then came the list of the most obese cities in the country. And there we were.Now I like to point out that we were on that list with a lot of really cool places. (Laughter) Dallas and Houston and New Orleans and Atlanta and Miami. You know, these are cities that, typically, you're not embarrassed to be associated with. But nonetheless, I didn't like being on the list.And about that time, I got on the scales. And I weighed 220 pounds. And then I went to this website sponsored by the federal government, and I typed in my height, I typed in my weight, and I pushed Enter, and it came back and said ""obese.""I thought, ""What a stupid website."" (Laughter) ""I'm not obese. I would know if I was obese.""And then I started getting honest with myself about what had become my lifelong struggle with obesity, and I noticed this pattern, that I was gaining about two or three pounds a year, and then about every 10 years, I'd drop 20 or 30 pounds. And then I'd do it again. And I had this huge closet full of clothes, and I could only wear a third of it at any one time, and only I knew which part of the closet I could wear. But it all seemed fairly normal, going through it.Well, I finally decided I needed to lose weight, and I knew I could because I'd done it so many times before, so I simply stopped eating as much. I had always exercised. That really wasn't the part of the equation that I needed to work on. But I had been eating 3,000 calories a day, and I cut it to 2,000 calories a day, and the weight came off. I lost about a pound a week for about 40 weeks.Along the way, though, I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our specific city seemed to have a problem with obesity. And I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life if you happen to be a car. (Laughter) But if you happen to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn. Our city is very spread out. We have a great intersection of highways, I mean, literally no traffic congestion in Oklahoma City to speak of. And so people live far, far away. Our city limits are enormous, 620 square miles, but 15 miles is less than 15 minutes. You literally can get a speeding ticket during rush hour in Oklahoma City. And as a result, people tend to spread out. Land's cheap. We had also not required developers to build sidewalks on new developments  for a long, long time. We had fixed that, but it had been relatively recently, and there were literally 100,000 or more homes into our inventory in neighborhoods that had  virtually no level of walkability.And as I tried to examine how we might deal with obesity, and was taking all of these elements into my mind, I decided that the first thing we need to do was have a conversation. You see, in Oklahoma City, we weren't talking about obesity. And so, on New Year's Eve of 2007, I went to the zoo, and I stood in front of the elephants, and I said, ""This city is going on a diet, and we're going to lose a million pounds.""Well, that's when all hell broke loose.(Laughter)The national media gravitated toward this story immediately, and they really could have  gone with it one of two ways. They could have said, ""This city is so fat that the mayor had to put them on a diet."" But fortunately, the consensus was, ""Look, this is a problem in a lot of places. This is a city that's wanting to do something about it."" And so they started helping us drive traffic to the website. Now, the web address was thiscityisgoingonadiet.com. And I appeared on ""The Ellen DeGeneres Show"" one weekday morning to talk about the initiative, and on that day, 150,000 visits were placed to our website. People were signing up, and so the pounds started to add up, and the conversation that I thought was so important to have was starting to take place. It was taking place inside the homes, mothers and fathers talking about it with their kids. It was taking place in churches. Churches were starting their own running groups and their own support groups for people who were dealing with obesity. Suddenly, it was a topic worth discussing at schools and in the workplace. And the large companies, they typically have wonderful wellness programs, but the medium-sized companies that typically fall between the cracks on issues like this, they started to get engaged and used our program as a model for their own employees to try and have contests to see who might be able to deal with their obesity situation in a way that could be proactively beneficial to others.And then came the next stage of the equation. It was time to push what I called MAPS 3. Now MAPS 3, like the other two programs, had had an economic development motive behind it, but along with the traditional economic development tasks like building a new convention center, we added some health-related infrastructure to the process. We added a new central park, 70 acres in size, to be right downtown in Oklahoma City. We're building a downtown streetcar to try and help the walkability formula for people who choose to live in the inner city and help us create the density there. We're building senior health and wellness centers throughout the community. We put some investments on the river that had originally been invested upon in the original MAPS, and now we are currently in the final stages of developing the finest venue in the world for the sports of canoe, kayak and rowing. We hosted the Olympic trials last spring. We have Olympic-caliber events coming to Oklahoma City, and athletes from all over the world moving in, along with inner city programs to get kids more engaged in these types of recreational activities that are a little bit nontraditional. We also, with another initiative that was passed, are building hundreds of miles of new sidewalks throughout the metro area. We're even going back into some inner city situations where we had built neighborhoods and we had built schools but we had not connected the two. We had built libraries and we had built neighborhoods, but we had never really connected the two with any sort of walkability. Through yet another funding source, we're redesigning all of our inner city streets to be more pedestrian-friendly. Our streets were really wide, and you'd push the button to allow you to walk across, and you had to run in order to get there in time. But now we've narrowed the streets, highly landscaped them, making them more pedestrian-friendly, really a redesign, rethinking the way we build our infrastructure, designing a city around people and not cars. We're completing our bicycle trail master plan. We'll have over 100 miles when we're through building it out.And so you see this culture starting to shift in Oklahoma City. And lo and behold, the demographic changes that are coming with it are very inspiring. Highly educated twentysomethings are moving to Oklahoma City from all over the region and, indeed, even from further away, in California.When we reached a million pounds, in January of 2012, I flew to New York with some our participants who had lost over 100 pounds, whose lives had been changed, and we appeared on the Rachael Ray show, and then that afternoon, I did a round of media in New York pushing the same messages that you're accustomed to hearing about obesity and the dangers of it. And I went into the lobby of Men's Fitness magazine, the same magazine that had put us on that list five years before. And as I'm sitting in the lobby waiting to talk to the reporter, I notice there's a magazine copy of the current issue right there on the table, and I pick it up, and I look at the headline across the top, and it says, ""America's Fattest Cities: Do You Live in One?"" Well, I knew I did, so I picked up the magazine and I began to look, and we weren't on it.(Applause)Then I looked on the list of fittest cities, and we were on that list. We were on the list as the 22nd fittest city in the United States. Our state health statistics are doing better. Granted, we have a long way to go. Health is still not something that we should be proud of in Oklahoma City, but we seem to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority. And we love the idea of the demographics of highly educated twentysomethings, people with choices, choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers. We have the lowest unemployment in the United States, probably the strongest economy in the United States. And if you're like me, at some point in your educational career, you were asked to read a book called ""The Grapes of Wrath."" Oklahomans leaving for California in large numbers for a better future. When we look at the demographic shifts of people coming from the west, it appears that what we're seeing now is the wrath of grapes. (Laughter) (Applause) The grandchildren are coming home.You've been a great audience and very attentive. Thank you very much for having me here.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mick_cornett_how_an_obese_town_lost_a_million_pounds
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"Hello, TEDWomen, what's up.(Cheering)Not good enough. Hello, TEDWomen, what is up?(Loud cheering)My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. Look. It's exhausting. I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.(Laughter)CP is not genetic. It's not a birth defect. You can't catch it. No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are.(Laughter)It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day.Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational.(Laughter)And I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled. Come on a journey with me. It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? Sixteen empty handicapped spaces.(Laughter)And you're like, ""God, can't I just be a little disabled?""(Laughter)Also, I've got to tell you, I've got 99 problems, and palsy is just one.(Laughter)If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey.(Laughter)(Applause)If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should.(Laughter)Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown. I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could.A lot of people with CP don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in ""can't."" My father's mantra was, ""You can do it, yes you can can.""(Laughter) So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping. If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper.(Laughter)My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it.(Laughter)My inner stripper was very strong.(Laughter)Yeah. No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times.(Laughter)Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family.(Laughter)Now there are 20 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family.(Laughter)I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian.(Laughter)(Applause)This was before 9/11 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use ""I hate Muslims"" as a campaign slogan. The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith. They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan. I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake.(Laughter)I have tap-danced on Broadway. Yeah, on Broadway. It's crazy.(Applause)My parents couldn't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school. I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I.And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna.(Laughter)Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, ""It's working! It's working!""(Laughter)But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. And now I can stand on my head. My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera ""General Hospital.""(Laughter)I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota.(Laughter)I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. Everybody loved me. I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes.(Laughter)Every time I did a scene from ""The Glass Menagerie,"" my professors would weep. But I never got cast. Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called ""They Dance Real Slow in Jackson."" It's a play about a girl with CP. I was a girl with CP. So I start shouting from the rooftops, ""I'm finally going to get a part! I have cerebral palsy! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!"" I didn't get the part.(Laughter)Sherry Brown got the part. I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. I said, ""Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character.""(Laughter)(Applause)This was a part that I was literally born to play they gave it to a non-palsy actress. College was imitating life. Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen.Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera. My dream was coming true. And I knew that I would be promoted from ""Diner Diner"" to ""Wacky Best Friend"" in no time.(Laughter)But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. They only hired perfect people. But there were exceptions to the rule. I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. So I became a comic.(Laughter)(Applause)My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with CP driving him.(Laughter)I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered.(Laughter)Some people say I'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world. I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical.(Laughter)In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous.(Laughter)Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability.My big break came in 2010. I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show ""Countdown with Keith Olbermann."" I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair.(Laughter)So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, ""Excuse me, can I have another chair?"" And she looked at me and she went, ""Five, four, three, two ..."" And we were live, right? So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair.(Laughter)(Applause)One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags.(Laughter) People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. I would look at clips online and see comments like, ""Yo, why's she tweakin'?"" ""Yo, is she retarded?"" And my favorite, ""Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. What does she suffer from? We should really pray for her."" One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy.Disability is as visual as race. If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. The disabled are the largest — Yeah, clap for that, man. Come on.(Applause)People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment.The doctors said that I wouldn't walk, but I am here in front of you. However, if I grew up with social media, I don't think I would be. I hope that together, we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet. Or maybe not. Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well.My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Loreen Arbus. I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got — before this moment —(Laughter)(Applause)But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali.(Applause)(Applause ends)It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory.(Arabic) Allah yerhamak yaba.(English) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can.(Cheering)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maysoon_zayid_i_got_99_problems_palsy_is_just_one
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"Good morning! Are you awake? They took my name tag, but I wanted to ask you, did anyone here write their name on the tag in Arabic? Anyone! No one? All right, no problem.Once upon a time, not long ago, I was sitting in a restaurant with my friend, ordering food. So I looked at the waiter and said, ""Do you have a menu (Arabic)?"" He looked at me strangely, thinking that he misheard. He said, ""Sorry? (English)."" I said, ""The menu (Arabic), please."" He replied, ""Don't you know what they call it?"" ""I do."" He said, ""No! It's called ""menu"" (English), or ""menu"" (French)."" Is the French pronunciation correct? ""Come, come, take care of this one!"" said the waiter. He was disgusted when talking to me, as if he was saying to himself, ""If this was the last girl on Earth, I wouldn't look at her!"" What's the meaning of saying ""menu"" in Arabic? Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward and ignorant. How could she speak that way?At that moment, I started thinking. It made me mad. It definitely hurts! I'm denied the right to speak my own language in my own country? Where could this happen? How did we get here?Well, while we are here, there are many people like me, who would reach a stage in their lives, where they involuntarily give up everything that has happened to them in the past, just so they can say that they're modern and civilized. Should I forget all my culture, thoughts, intellect and all my memories? Childhood stories might be the best memories we have of the war! Should I forget everything I learned in Arabic, just to conform? To be one of them? Where's the logic in that? Despite all that, I tried to understand him. I didn't want to judge him with the same cruelty that he judged me.The Arabic language doesn't satisfy today's needs. It's not a language for science, research, a language we're used to in universities, a language we use in the workplace, a language we rely on if we were to perform an advanced research project, and it definitely isn't a language we use at the airport. If we did so, they'd strip us of our clothes. Where can I use it, then? We could all ask this question! So, you want us to use Arabic. Where are we to do so? This is one reality.But we have another more important reality that we ought to think about. Arabic is the mother tongue. Research says that mastery of other languages demands mastery of the mother tongue. Mastery of the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative expression in other languages.How? Gibran Khalil Gibran, when he first started writing, he used Arabic. All his ideas, imagination and philosophy were inspired by this little boy in the village where he grew up, smelling a specific smell, hearing a specific voice, and thinking a specific thought. So, when he started writing in English, he had enough baggage. Even when he wrote in English, when you read his writings in English, you smell the same smell, sense the same feeling. You can imagine that that's him writing in English, the same boy who came from the mountain. From a village on Mount Lebanon. So, this is an example no one can argue with.Second, it's often said that if you want to kill a nation, the only way to kill a nation, is to kill its language. This is a reality that developed societies are aware of. The Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese, all these nations are aware of this. That's why they legislate to protect their language. They make it sacred. That's why they use it in production, they pay a lot of money to develop it. Do we know better than them?All right, we aren't from the developed world, this advanced thinking hasn't reached us yet, and we would like to catch up with the civilized world. Countries that were once like us, but decided to strive for development, do research, and catch up with those countries, such as Turkey, Malaysia and others, they carried their language with them as they were climbing the ladder, protected it like a diamond. They kept it close to them. Because if you get any product from Turkey or elsewhere and it's not labeled in Turkish, then it isn't a local product. You wouldn't believe it's a local product. They'd go back to being consumers, clueless consumers, like we are most of the time. So, in order for them to innovate and produce, they had to protect their language. If I say, ""Freedom, sovereignty, independence (Arabic),"" what does this remind you of? It doesn't ring a bell, does it? Regardless of the who, how and why.Language isn't just for conversing, just words coming out of our mouths. Language represents specific stages in our lives, and terminology that is linked to our emotions. So when we say, ""Freedom, sovereignty, independence,"" each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind, there are specific feelings of a specific day in a specific historical period.Language isn't one, two or three words or letters put together. It's an idea inside that relates to how we think, and how we see each other and how others see us. What is our intellect? How do you say whether this guy understands or not? So, if I say, ""Freedom, sovereignty, independence (English),"" or if your son came up to you and said, ""Dad, have you lived through the period of the freedom (English) slogan?"" How would you feel? If you don't see a problem, then I'd better leave, and stop talking in vain.The idea is that these expressions remind us of a specific thing. I have a francophone friend who's married to a French man. I asked her once how things were going. She said, ""Everything is fine, but once, I spent a whole night asking and trying to translate the meaning of the word 'toqborni' for him."" (Laughter) (Applause) The poor woman had mistakenly told him ""toqborni,"" and then spent the whole night trying to explain it to him. He was puzzled by the thought: ""How could anyone be this cruel? Does she want to commit suicide? 'Bury me?' (English)"" This is one of the few examples.It made us feel that she's unable to tell that word to her husband, since he won't understand, and he's right not to; his way of thinking is different. She said to me, ""He listens to Fairuz with me, and one night, I tried to translate for him so he can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairuz."" The poor woman tried to translate this for him: ""From them I extended my hands and stole you —"" (Laughter) And here's the pickle: ""And because you belong to them, I returned my hands and left you."" (Laughter) Translate that for me. (Applause)So, what have we done to protect the Arabic language? We turned this into a concern of the civil society, and we launched a campaign to preserve the Arabic language. Even though many people told me, ""Why do you bother? Forget about this headache and go have fun."" No problem! The campaign to preserve Arabic launched a slogan that says, ""I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West."" We didn't say, ""No! We do not accept this or that."" We didn't adopt this style because that way, we wouldn't be understood. And when someone talks to me that way, I hate the Arabic language. We say— (Applause)We want to change our reality, and be convinced in a way that reflects our dreams, aspirations and day-to-day life. In a way that dresses like us and thinks like we do. So, ""I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West"" has hit the spot. Something very easy, yet creative and persuasive. After that, we launched another campaign with scenes of letters on the ground. You've seen an example of it outside, a scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape with ""Don't kill your language!"" written on it. Why? Seriously, don't kill your language. We really shouldn't kill our language. If we were to kill the language, we'd have to find an identity.We'd have to find an existence. We'd go back to the beginning. This is beyond just missing our chance of being modern and civilized.After that we released photos of guys and girls wearing the Arabic letter. Photos of ""cool"" guys and girls. We are very cool! And to whoever might say, ""Ha! You used an English word!"" I say, ""No! I adopt the word 'cool.'"" Let them object however they want, but give me a word that's nicer and matches the reality better. I will keep on saying ""Internet"" I wouldn't say: ""I'm going to the world wide web"" (Laughs) Because it doesn't fit! We shouldn't kid ourselves. But to reach this point, we all have to be convinced that we shouldn't allow anyone who is bigger or thinks they have any authority over us when it comes to language, to control us or make us think and feel what they want.Creativity is the idea. So, if we can't reach space or build a rocket and so on, we can be creative. At this moment, every one of you is a creative project. Creativity in your mother tongue is the path. Let's start from this moment. Let's write a novel or produce a short film. A single novel could make us global again. It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one. So, it's not true that there's no solution; there is a solution! But we have to know that, and be convinced that a solution exists, that we have a duty to be part of that solution.In conclusion, what can you do today? Now, tweets, who's tweeting? Please, I beg of you, even though my time has finished, either Arabic, English, French or Chinese. But don't write Arabic with Latin characters mixed with numbers! (Applause) It's a disaster! That's not a language. You'd be entering a virtual world with a virtual language. It's not easy to come back from such a place and rise. That's the first thing we can do.Second, there are many other things that we can do. We're not here today to convince each other. We're here to bring attention to the necessity of preserving this language. Now I will tell you a secret. A baby first identifies its father through language. When my daughter is born, I'll tell her, ""This is your father, honey (Arabic)."" I wouldn't say, ""This is your dad, honey (English)."" And in the supermarket, I promise my daughter Noor, that if she says to me, ""Thanks (Arabic),"" I won't say, ""Dis, 'Merci, Maman,'"" and hope no one has heard her. (Applause)Let's get rid of this cultural cringe.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_talhouk_don_t_kill_your_language
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"So this is a picture of my dad and me, at the beach in Far Rockaway, or actually Rockaway Park. I'm the one with the blond hair. My dad's the guy with the cigarette. It was the 60's. A lot of people smoked back then. In the summer of 2009, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cancer is one of those things that actually touches everybody. If you're a man in the US, you've got about a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer during your lifetime. If you're a woman, you've got about a one in three chance of being diagnosed with cancer. Everybody knows somebody who's been diagnosed with cancer.Now, my dad's doing better today, and part of the reason for that is that he was able to participate in the trial of an experimental new drug that happened to be specially formulated and very good for his particular kind of cancer. There are over 200 kinds of cancer. And what I want to talk about today is how we can help more people like my dad, because we have to change the way we think about raising money to fund cancer research.So a while after my dad was diagnosed, I was having coffee with my friend Andrew Lo. He's the head of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT, where I also have a position, and we were talking about cancer. And Andrew had been doing his own bits of research, and one of the things that he had been told and that he'd learned from studying the literature was that there's actually a big bottleneck. It's very difficult to develop new drugs, and the reason it's difficult to develop new drugs is because in the early stages of drug development, the drugs are very risky, and they're very expensive. So Andrew asked me if I'd want to maybe work with him a bit, work on some of the math and the analytics and see if we could figure out something we could do.Now I'm not a scientist. You know, I don't know how to build a drug. And none of my coauthors, Andrew Lo or Jose-Maria Fernandez or David Fagnan — none of those guys are scientists either. We don't know the first thing about how to make a cancer drug. But we know a little bit about risk mitigation and a little bit about financial engineering, and so we started thinking, what could we do? I'm going to tell you about some work we've been doing over the last couple years that we think could fundamentally change the way research for cancer and lots of other things gets done. We want to let the research drive the funding, not the other way around.So in order to get started, let me tell you how you get a drug financed. Imagine that you're in your lab — you're a scientist, you're not like me — and you've developed a new compound that you think might be therapeutic for somebody with cancer. Well, what you do is, you test in animals, you test in test tubes, but there's this notion of going from the bench to the bedside, and in order to get from the bench, the lab, to the bedside, to the patients, you've got to get the drug tested. And the way the drug gets tested is through a series of, basically, experiments, through these large, they're called trials, that they do to determine whether the drug is safe and whether it works and all these things. So the FDA has a very specific protocol. In the first phase of this testing, which is called testing for toxicity, it's called Phase I. In the first phase, you give the drug to healthy people and you see if it actually makes them sick. In other words, are the side effects just so severe that no matter how much good it does, it's not going to be worth it? Does it cause heart attacks, kill people, liver failure? And it turns out, that's a pretty high hurdle. About a third of all drugs drop out at that point. In the next phase, you test to see if the drug's effective, and you give it to people with cancer and you see if it makes them better. And that's also a higher hurdle. People drop out. And in the third phase, you test it on a very large sample, and you're trying to determine what the right dose is, is it better than what's available today? If not, then why build it? When you're done with all that, what you have is a very small percentage of drugs that start the process actually come out the other side. So those blue bottles — those blue bottles save lives, and they're also worth billions, sometimes billions a year.So now here's a question: if I were to ask you, for example, to make a one-time investment of, say, 200 million dollars to buy one of those bottles, so 200 million dollars up front, one time, to buy one of those bottles, I won't tell you which one it is, and in 10 years, I'll tell you whether you have one of the blue ones. Does that sound like a good deal for anybody? No. No, right? And of course, it's a very, very risky trial position, and that's why it's very hard to get funding, but to a first approximation, that's actually the proposal. You have to fund these things from the early stages on. It takes a long time.So Andrew said to me, he said, ""What if we stop thinking about these as drugs? What if we start thinking about them as financial assets?"" They've got really weird payoff structures and all that, but let's throw everything we know about financial engineering at them. Let's see if we can use all the tricks of the trade to figure out how to make these drugs work as financial assets.Let's create a giant fund. In finance, we know what to do with assets that are risky. You put them in a portfolio and you try to smooth out the returns. So we did some math, and it turned out you could make this work, but in order to make it work, you need about 80 to 150 drugs.Now the good news is, there's plenty of drugs that are waiting to be tested. We've been told that there's a backlog of about 20 years of drugs that are waiting to be tested but can't be funded. In fact, that early stage of the funding process, that Phase I and preclinical stuff, that's actually, in the industry, called the Valley of Death because it's where drugs go to die. It's very hard to for them to get through there, and of course, if you can't get through there, you can't get to the later stages.So we did this math, and we figured out, OK, well, you need about 80 to, say, 150, or something like that, drugs. And then we did a little more math, and we said, OK, well, that's a fund of about three to 15 billion dollars. So we kind of created a new problem by solving the old one. We got rid of the risk, but now we need a lot of capital, and you can only get that kind of capital in the capital markets. Venture capitalists and philanthropies don't have it. But we have to figure out how to get people in the capital markets, who traditionally don't invest in this, to want to invest in this stuff. So again, financial engineering was helpful here. Imagine the megafund starts empty, and what it does is it issues some debt and some equity, and that generates cash flow. That cash flow is used, then, to buy that big portfolio of drugs that you need, and those drugs start working their way through that approval process, and each time they go through a phase of approval, they gain value. Most of them don't make it, but a few of them do, and with the ones that gain value, you can sell some, and when you sell them, you have money to pay the interest on those bonds, but also to fund the next round of trials. It's almost self-funding. You do that for the course of the transaction, and when you're done, you liquidate the portfolio, pay back the bonds, and you can give the equity holders a nice return.That was the theory, and we talked about it, we did a bunch of experiments, and then we said, let's really try to test it. We spent the next two years doing research. We talked to hundreds of experts in drug financing and venture capital. We talked to people who have developed drugs. We talked to pharmaceutical companies. We actually looked at the data for drugs, over 2,000 drugs that had been approved or denied or withdrawn, and we also ran millions of simulations. And all that actually took a lot of time. But when we were done, we found something that was sort of surprising. It was feasible to structure that fund such that when you were done structuring it, you could actually produce low-risk bonds that would be attractive to bond holders, that would give you yields of about five to eight percent, and you could produce equity that would give equity holders about a 12 percent return. Now those returns aren't going to be attractive to a venture capitalist. They want to make those big bets and get those billion dollar payoffs. But it turns out there are lots of other folks that would be interested. That's right in the investment sweet spot of pension funds and 401(k) plans and all this other stuff.So we published some articles in the academic press, in medical journals, in finance journals. But it wasn't until we actually got the popular press interested in this that we began to get some traction.We wanted to do more than just make people aware of it. We wanted people to get involved. So we took all of our computer code and made that available online under an open-source license to anybody that wanted it. And you guys can download it today if you want to run your own experiments to see if this would work. And that was really effective, because people that didn't believe our assumptions could try their own and see how it would work.Now there's an obvious problem, which is, is there enough money in the world to fund this? I've told you there's enough drugs, but is there enough money? There's 100 trillion dollars of capital currently invested in fixed-income securities. That's a hundred thousand billion. There's plenty of money.(Laughter)But we realized it's more than just money that's required. We had to get people motivated, involved, and get them to understand this. And we started thinking about all the different things that could go wrong. What are all the challenges that might get in the way? And we had a long list. We assigned a bunch of people, including ourselves, different pieces of this problem. And we said, could you start a work stream on credit risk? Could you start a work stream on the regulatory aspects? Could you start a work stream on how you would manage so many projects? And we had all these experts get together and do these different work streams, and then we held a conference. The conference was held over this past summer. It was an invitation-only conference. It was sponsored by the American Cancer Society and done in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute. We had experts from every field we thought would be important, including the government, and people that run research centers, and for two days they heard the reports from those five work streams, and talked about it. It was the first time the people who could make this happen sat across the table from each other and had these conversations.Now these conferences, it's typical to have a dinner, and at that dinner, you get to know each other, sort of like what we're doing here. I happened to look out the window, and hand on my heart, on the night of this conference — it was the summertime — and that's what I saw, a double rainbow. So I'd like to think it was a good sign.Since the conference, we've got people working between Paris and San Francisco, lots of different folks working on this to try to see if we can really make it happen. We're not looking to start a fund, but we want somebody else to do this. Because, again, I'm not a scientist. I can't build a drug. I'm never going to have enough money to fund even one of those trials. But all of us together, with our 401(k)s, with our 529 plans, with our pension plans, all of us together can actually fund hundreds of trials and get paid well for doing it and save millions of lives like my dad.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roger_stein_a_bold_new_way_to_fund_drug_research
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"Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. Now I eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds.This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. I look at that picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. (Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. And for the next three decades, I was on and off various diets. No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. I'm sure many of you know the feeling.As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? Obviously, how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. What most people don't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind — how do we put this politely? — it's easily distracted. It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for dinner.Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously believe. This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 10 or 15 pounds. You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as conditions change. That's what a thermostat does, right? It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up. Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal. If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't. If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. That's a lot of food. This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin.From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. When food was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. Over the course of human history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. This may explain a very sad fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. (Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your set point. Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response. In our modern world of drive-thru burgers, it's not working out so well for many of us. That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity.Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal.Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters. The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about food. Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders. The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members about their weight. So don't do that. (Laughter)I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. And as you'd expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. Now let's look at what happens in overweight people. The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death. Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. For obese people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study. But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. In fact, if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off.Diets don't have very much reliability. Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight. Forty percent of them have gained even more. If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it.If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it? And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga. I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. How do you do it? Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been worth it. I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. I often don't think about it. I forget we have chocolate in the house. It's like aliens have taken over my brain. It's just completely different. I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin already. (Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. In the U.S., we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale. Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else.Let me leave you with one last thought. What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? I think most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be thinner. I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sandra_aamodt_why_dieting_doesn_t_usually_work
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"This is an image of the planet Earth. It looks very much like the Apollo pictures that are very well known. There is something different; you can click on it, and if you click on it, you can zoom in on almost any place on the Earth. For instance, this is a bird's-eye view of the EPFL campus. In many cases, you can also see how a building looks from a nearby street. This is pretty amazing. But there's something missing in this wonderful tour: It's time. i'm not really sure when this picture was taken. I'm not even sure it was taken at the same moment as the bird's-eye view. In my lab, we develop tools to travel not only in space but also through time. The kind of question we're asking is Is it possible to build something like Google Maps of the past? Can I add a slider on top of Google Maps and just change the year, seeing how it was 100 years before, 1,000 years before? Is that possible? Can I reconstruct social networks of the past? Can I make a Facebook of the Middle Ages? So, can I build time machines? Maybe we can just say, ""No, it's not possible."" Or, maybe, we can think of it from an information point of view. This is what I call the information mushroom. Vertically, you have the time. and horizontally, the amount of digital information available. Obviously, in the last 10 years, we have much information. And obviously the more we go in the past, the less information we have. If we want to build something like Google Maps of the past, or Facebook of the past, we need to enlarge this space, we need to make that like a rectangle. How do we do that? One way is digitization. There's a lot of material available — newspaper, printed books, thousands of printed books. I can digitize all these. I can extract information from these. Of course, the more you go in the past, the less information you will have. So, it might not be enough. So, I can do what historians do. I can extrapolate. This is what we call, in computer science, simulation. If I take a log book, I can consider, it's not just a log book of a Venetian captain going to a particular journey. I can consider it is actually a log book which is representative of many journeys of that period. I'm extrapolating. If I have a painting of a facade, I can consider it's not just that particular building, but probably it also shares the same grammar of buildings where we lost any information.So if we want to construct a time machine, we need two things. We need very large archives, and we need excellent specialists. The Venice Time Machine, the project I'm going to talk to you about, is a joint project between the EPFL and the University of Venice Ca'Foscari.There's something very peculiar about Venice, that its administration has been very, very bureaucratic. They've been keeping track of everything, almost like Google today. At the Archivio di Stato, you have 80 kilometers of archives documenting every aspect of the life of Venice over more than 1,000 years. You have every boat that goes out, every boat that comes in. You have every change that was made in the city. This is all there. We are setting up a 10-year digitization program which has the objective of transforming this immense archive into a giant information system. The type of objective we want to reach is 450 books a day that can be digitized. Of course, when you digitize, that's not enough, because these documents, most of them are in Latin, in Tuscan, in Venetian dialect, so you need to transcribe them, to translate them in some cases, to index them, and this is obviously not easy. In particular, traditional optical character recognition method that can be used for printed manuscripts, they do not work well on the handwritten document. So the solution is actually to take inspiration from another domain: speech recognition. This is a domain of something  that seems impossible, which can actually be done, simply by putting additional constraints. If you have a very good model of a language which is used, if you have a very good model of a document, how well they are structured. And these are administrative documents. They are well structured in many cases. If you divide this huge archive into smaller subsets where a smaller subset actually shares similar features, then there's a chance of success.If we reach that stage, then there's something else: we can extract from this document events. Actually probably 10 billion events can be extracted from this archive. And this giant information system can be searched in many ways. You can ask questions like, ""Who lived in this palazzo in 1323?"" ""How much cost a sea bream at the Realto market in 1434?"" ""What was the salary of a glass maker in Murano maybe over a decade?"" You can ask even bigger questions because it will be semantically coded. And then what you can do is put that in space, because much of this information is spatial. And from that, you can do things like reconstructing this extraordinary journey of that city that managed to have a sustainable development over a thousand years, managing to have all the time a form of equilibrium with its environment. You can reconstruct that journey, visualize it in many different ways. But of course, you cannot understand  Venice if you just look at the city. You have to put it in a larger European context. So the idea is also to document all the things that worked at the European level. We can reconstruct also the journey of the Venetian maritime empire, how it progressively controlled the Adriatic Sea, how it became the most powerful medieval empire of its time, controlling most of the sea routes from the east to the south.But you can even do other things, because in these maritime routes, there are regular patterns. You can go one step beyond and actually create a simulation system, create a Mediterranean simulator which is capable actually of reconstructing even the information we are missing, which would enable us to have  questions you could ask like if you were using a route planner.""If I am in Corfu in June 1323 and want to go to Constantinople, where can I take a boat?""Probably we can answer this question with one or two or three days' precision.""How much will it cost?""""What are the chance of encountering pirates?""Of course, you understand, the central scientific challenge of a project like this one is qualifying, quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistency at each step of this process. There are errors everywhere, errors in the document, it's the wrong name of the captain, some of the boats never actually took to sea. There are errors in translation, interpretative biases, and on top of that, if you add algorithmic processes, you're going to have errors in recognition, errors in extraction, so you have very, very uncertain data.So how can we detect and correct these inconsistencies? How can we represent that form of uncertainty? It's difficult. One thing you can do is document each step of the process, not only coding the historical information but what we call the meta-historical information, how is historical knowledge constructed, documenting each step. That will not guarantee that we actually converge toward a single story of Venice, but probably we can actually reconstruct a fully documented potential story of Venice. Maybe there's not a single map. Maybe there are several maps. The system should allow for that, because we have to deal with a new form of uncertainty, which is really new for this type of giant databases.And how should we communicate this new research to a large audience? Again, Venice is extraordinary for that. With the millions of visitors that come every year, it's actually one of the best places to try to invent the museum of the future. Imagine, horizontally you see the reconstructed map of a given year, and vertically, you see the document that served the reconstruction, paintings, for instance. Imagine an immersive system that permits to go and dive and reconstruct the Venice of a given year, some experience you could share within a group. On the contrary, imagine actually that you start from a document, a Venetian manuscript, and you show, actually, what you can construct out of it, how it is decoded, how the context of that document can be recreated. This is an image from an exhibit which is currently conducted in Geneva with that type of system.So to conclude, we can say that research in the humanities is about to undergo an evolution which is maybe similar to what happened to life sciences 30 years ago. It's really a question of scale. We see projects which are much beyond any single research team can do, and this is really new for the humanities, which very often take the habit of working in small groups or only with a couple of researchers. When you visit the Archivio di Stato, you feel this is beyond what any single team can do, and that should be a joint and common effort. So what we must do for this paradigm shift is actually foster a new generation of ""digital humanists"" that are going to be ready for this shift.I thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frederic_kaplan_how_i_built_an_information_time_machine
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"(Music) For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City, these shots might start to look familiar. This is Central Park, one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America. But to anyone who hasn't visited, these images can't really fully convey. To really understand Central Park, you have to physically be there. Well, the same is true of the music, which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park. (Music)I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing — That's us there. That's both of us actually — specifically about a concept that we've been developing over the last few years, this idea of location-aware music.Now, my brother and I, we're musicians and music producers. We've been working together since, well, since we were kids, really. But recently, we've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect, from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts.But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space.But before I go too much further into that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea. My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation, The Gates, in Central Park. Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks, and unlike work that's exhibited in a more neutral space, like on the walls of a gallery or a museum, this was work that was really in dialogue with this place, and in a lot of ways, The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted's incredible design. This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time, and years later, my brother and I moved back to Washington, D.C., and we started to ask the question, would it be possible, in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park, to compose music for a landscape? Which brought us to this.(Music)On Memorial Day, we released ""The National Mall,"" a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington, D.C. Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape, a musical score is actually unfolding around them. So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park, but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener's chosen trajectory. So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album.Let's take a closer look. Let's look at one example here. So using the app, as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, you hear the sounds of instruments warming up, which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody. This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins. Keep walking, and a full choir joins in, until you finally reach the top of the hill and you're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness, as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park. But were you to walk in the opposite direction, this entire sequence happens in reverse. And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park, the music would fade to silence, and the play button would disappear.We're sometimes contacted by  people in other parts of the world who can't travel to the United States, but would like to hear this record. Well, unlike a normal album, we haven't been able to accommodate this request. When they ask for a C.D. or an MP3 version, we just can't make that happen, and the reason is because this isn't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record. In this case, the app is the work itself, and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience.Six months later, we did a location-aware album for Central Park, a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall, with music spanning from the Sheep's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir.Currently, my brother and I are working on projects all over the country, but last spring we started a project, here actually at Stanford's Experimental Media Art Department, where we're creating our largest location-aware album to date, one that will span the entirety of Highway 1 here on the Pacific Coast.But what we're doing, integrating GPS with music, is really just one idea. But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age, that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model, but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_holladay_to_hear_this_music_you_have_to_be_there_literally
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"The entire model of capitalism and the economic model that you and I did business in, and, in fact, continue to do business in, was built around what probably Milton Friedman put more succinctly. And Adam Smith, of course,  the father of modern economics actually said many, many years ago, the invisible hand, which is, ""If you continue to operate in your own self-interest you will do the best good for society.""Now, capitalism has done a lot of good things and I've talked about a lot of good  things that have happened, but equally, it has not been able to meet up with some of the challenges that we've seen in society. The model that at least I was brought up in and a lot of us doing business were brought up in was one which talked about what I call the three G's of growth: growth that is consistent, quarter on quarter; growth that is competitive, better than the other person; and growth that is profitable, so you continue to make more and more shareholder value. And I'm afraid this is not going to be good enough and we have to move from this 3G model to a model of what I call the fourth G: the G of growth that is responsible. And it is this that has to become a very important part of creating value. Of not just creating economic value but creating social value. And companies that will thrive are those that will actually embrace the fourth G. And the model of 4G is quite simple: Companies cannot afford  to be just innocent bystanders in what's happening around in society. They have to begin to play their role in terms of serving the communities which actually sustain them. And we have to move to a model of an and/and model which is how do we make money and do good? How do we make sure that we have a great business but we also have a great environment around us? And that model is all about doing well and doing good.But the question is easier said than done. But how do we actually get that done? And I do believe that the answer to that is going to be leadership. It is going to be to redefine the new business models which understand that the only license to operate is to combine these things. And for that you need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell. And companies that actually define a true north, things that are nonnegotiable whether times are good, bad, ugly — doesn't matter. There are things that you stand for. Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow.And I'm going to now shift to talking a little bit about my own experiences. I joined Unilever in 1976 as a management trainee in India. And on my first day of work I walked in and my boss tells me, ""Do you know why you're here?"" I said, ""I'm here to sell a lot of soap."" And he said,  ""No, you're here to change lives."" You're here to change lives. You know, I thought it was rather facetious. We are a company that sells soap and soup. What are we doing about changing lives? And it's then I realized that simple acts like selling a bar of soap can save more lives than pharmaceutical companies. I don't know how many of you know that five million children don't reach the age of five because of simple infections that can be prevented by an act of washing their hands with soap.We run the largest hand-washing program in the world. We are running a program on hygiene and health that now touches half a billion people. It's not about selling soap, there is a larger purpose out there. And brands indeed can be at the forefront of social change. And the reason for that is, when two billion people use your brands that's the amplifier. Small actions can make a big difference.Take another example, I was walking around in  one of our villages in India. Now those of you who have done this will realize that this is no walk in the park. And we had this lady who was one of our small distributors — beautiful, very, very modest, her home — and she was out there, dressed nicely, her husband in the back, her mother-in-law behind and her sister-in-law behind her. The social order was changing because this lady is part of our Project Shakti that is actually teaching women how to do small business and how to carry the message of nutrition and hygiene. We have 60,000 such women now in India.It's not about selling soap, it's about making sure that in the process of doing so you can change people's lives. Small actions, big difference.Our R&D folks are not only working to give us  some fantastic detergents, but they're working to make sure we use less water. A product that we've just launched recently, One Rinse product that allows you to save water every time you wash your clothes. And if we can convert all our users to using this, that's 500 billion liters of water. By the way, that's equivalent to one month of water for a whole huge continent. So just think about it. There are small actions that  can make a big difference.And I can go on and on. Our food chain, our brilliant products — and I'm sorry I'm giving you  a word from the sponsors — Knorr, Hellman's and all those wonderful products. We are committed to making sure that all our agricultural raw materials are sourced from sustainable sources, 100-percent sustainable sources.We were the first to say we are going to buy all of our palm oil from sustainable sources. I don't know how many of you know that palm oil, and not buying it from sustainable sources, can create deforestation that is responsible for 20 percent of the greenhouse gasses in the world. We were the first to embrace that, and it's all because we market soap and soup. And the point I'm making here is that companies like yours, companies like mine have to define a purpose which embraces responsibility and understands that we have to play our part in the communities in which we operate.We introduced something called The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which said, ""Our purpose is to make  sustainable living commonplace, and we are gong to change the lives of one billion people over 2020."" Now the question here is, where do we go from here? And the answer to that is very simple: We're not going to change the world alone. There are plenty of you and plenty of us who understand this. The question is, we need partnerships, we need coalitions and importantly, we need that leadership that will allow us to take this from here and to be the change that we want to see around us. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harish_manwani_profit_s_not_always_the_point
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"It's a pleasure to be here in Edinburgh, Scotland, the birthplace of the needle and syringe. Less than a mile from here in this direction, in 1853 a Scotsman filed his very first patent on the needle and syringe. His name was Alexander Wood, and it was at the Royal College of Physicians. This is the patent. What blows my mind when I look at it even today is that it looks almost identical to the needle in use today. Yet, it's 160 years old.So we turn to the field of vaccines. Most vaccines are delivered with the needle and syringe,  this 160-year-old technology. And credit where it's due — on many levels, vaccines are a successful technology. After clean water and sanitation, vaccines are the one technology that has increased our life span the most. That's a pretty hard act to beat.But just like any other technology, vaccines have their shortcomings, and the needle and syringe is a key part within that narrative — this old technology. So let's start with the obvious: Many of us don't like the needle and syringe. I share that view. However, 20 percent of the population have a thing called needle phobia. That's more than disliking the needle; that is actively avoiding being vaccinated because of needle phobia. And that's problematic in terms  of the rollout of vaccines.Now, related to this is another key issue, which is needlestick injuries. And the WHO has figures that suggest about 1.3 million deaths per year take place due to cross-contamination with needlestick injuries. These are early deaths that take place.Now, these are two things that  you probably may have heard of, but there are two other shortcomings of the needle and syringe you  may not have heard about. One is it could be holding back the next generation of vaccines in terms of their immune responses. And the second is that it could be responsible for the problem of the cold chain that I'll tell you about as well.I'm going to tell you about some work that my team and I are doing in Australia at the University of Queensland on a technology designed to  tackle those four problems. And that technology is called the Nanopatch. Now, this is a specimen of the Nanopatch. To the naked eye it just looks like a square smaller than a postage stamp, but under a microscope what you see are thousands of tiny projections that are invisible to the human eye. And there's about 4,000 projections on this particular square compared to the needle. And I've designed those projections to serve a key role, which is to  work with the skin's immune system. So that's a very important function tied in with the Nanopatch.Now we make the Nanopatch with a technique called deep reactive ion etching. And this particular technique  is one that's been borrowed from the semiconductor industry, and therefore is low cost and can be rolled out in large numbers.Now we dry-coat vaccines to  the projections of the Nanopatch and apply it to the skin. Now, the simplest form of application is using our finger, but our finger has some limitations, so we've devised an applicator. And it's a very simple device — you could call it a sophisticated finger. It's a spring-operated device. What we do is when we apply  the Nanopatch to the skin as so — (Click) — immediately a few things happen. So firstly, the projections on the Nanopatch breach through the tough outer layer and the vaccine is very quickly released — within less than a minute, in fact. Then we can take the Nanopatch off and discard it. And indeed we can make  a reuse of the applicator itself.So that gives you an idea of the Nanopatch, and immediately you can see some key advantages. We've talked about it being needle-free — these are projections that you can't even see — and, of course, we get around the needle phobia issue as well.Now, if we take a step back and think about these other two really important advantages: One is improved immune  responses through delivery, and the second is getting rid of the cold chain.So let's start with the first one,  this immunogenicity idea. It takes a little while to get our heads around, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms. So I'll take a step back and explain to you how vaccines work in a simple way. So vaccines work by introducing into our body a thing called an antigen which is a safe form of a germ. Now that safe germ, that antigen, tricks our body into mounting an immune response, learning and remembering  how to deal with intruders. When the real intruder comes along the body quickly mounts an immune response to deal with that vaccine and neutralizes the infection. So it does that well.Now, the way it's done today  with the needle and syringe, most vaccines are delivered that way — with this old technology and the needle. But it could be argued that the needle  is holding back our immune responses; it's missing our immune sweet spot in the skin. To describe this idea, we need to take a journey through the skin, starting with one of those projections and applying the Nanopatch to the skin. And we see this kind of data. Now, this is real data — that thing that we can see there is one projection from the Nanopatch that's been applied to the skin and those colors are different layers. Now, to give you an idea of scale, if the needle was shown here, it would be too big. It would be 10 times bigger than the size of that screen, going 10 times deeper as well. It's off the grid entirely. You can see immediately that we  have those projections in the skin. That red layer is a tough outer layer of dead skin, but the brown layer and the magenta layer are jammed full of immune cells. As one example, in the brown layer there's a certain type of cell  called a Langerhans cell — every square millimeter of our body is jammed full of those Langerhans cells, those immune cells, and  there's others shown as well that we haven't stained in this image. But you can immediately see that the Nanopatch achieves that penetration indeed. We target thousands upon thousands  of these particular cells just residing within a hair's width of the surface of the skin.Now, as the guy that's invented this thing and designed it to do that, I found that exciting. But so what? So what if you've targeted cells? In the world of vaccines, what does that mean? The world of vaccines is getting better. It's getting more systematic. However, you still don't really know if a vaccine is going to work until you roll your sleeves up and vaccinate and wait. It's a gambler's game even today.So, we had to do that gamble. We obtained an influenza vaccine, we applied it to our Nanopatches and we applied the Nanopatches to the skin, and we waited — and this is in the live animal. We waited a month, and this is what we found out. This is a data slide showing the immune responses that we've generated with a Nanopatch compared to the needle and syringe into muscle. So on the horizontal axis we have  the dose shown in nanograms. On the vertical axis we have  the immune response generated, and that dashed line indicates  the protection threshold. If we're above that line it's considered protective; if we're below that line it's not. So the red line is mostly below that curve and indeed there's only one point that  is achieved with the needle that's protective, and that's with a high dose of 6,000 nanograms. But notice immediately the distinctly different curve that we achieve with the blue line. That's what's achieved with the Nanopatch; the delivered dose of the Nanopatch is a completely different immunogenicity curve. That's a real fresh opportunity. Suddenly we have a brand new lever in the world of vaccines. We can push it one way, where we can take a vaccine  that works but is too expensive and can get protection with a hundredth of the dose  compared to the needle. That can take a vaccine that's suddenly  10 dollars down to 10 cents, and that's particularly important  within the developing world.But there's another angle to this as well — you can take vaccines that currently don't work and get them over that line and get them protective. And certainly in the world of vaccines that can be important. Let's consider the big three: HIV, malaria, tuberculosis. They're responsible for about  7 million deaths per year, and there is no adequate vaccination  method for any of those. So potentially, with this new lever  that we have with the Nanopatch, we can help make that happen. We can push that lever to help get those  candidate vaccines over the line. Now, of course, we've worked within my lab with many other vaccines that have attained similar responses and similar curves to this, what we've achieved with influenza.I'd like to now switch to talk about another key shortcoming of today's vaccines, and that is the need to maintain the cold chain. As the name suggests — the cold chain — it's the requirements of keeping  a vaccine right from production all the way through to when the vaccine is applied, to keep it refrigerated. Now, that presents some logistical challenges but we have ways to do it. This is a slightly extreme case in point but it helps illustrate the logistical challenges, in particular in resource-poor settings, of what's required to get vaccines refrigerated and maintain the cold chain. If the vaccine is too warm the vaccine breaks down, but interestingly it can be too cold and the vaccine can break down as well.Now, the stakes are very high. The WHO estimates that within Africa, up to half the vaccines used there are considered to not be working properly because at some point the  cold chain has fallen over. So it's a big problem, and it's tied  in with the needle and syringe because it's a liquid form vaccine, and  when it's liquid it needs the refrigeration.A key attribute of our Nanopatch is that the vaccine is dry, and when it's dry it doesn't need refrigeration. Within my lab we've shown that we can keep the vaccine stored at 23 degrees Celsius for more than a year without  any loss in activity at all. That's an important improvement. (Applause) We're delighted about it as well. And the thing about it is that we have well and truly proven the Nanopatch within the laboratory setting. And as a scientist, I love that and I love science. However, as an engineer, as a biomedical engineer and also as a human being, I'm not going to be satisfied until we've rolled this thing  out, taken it out of the lab and got it to people in large numbers and particularly the people that need it the most.So we've commenced this particular journey, and we've commenced this  journey in an unusual way. We've started with Papua New Guinea.Now, Papua New Guinea is an example  of a developing world country. It's about the same size as France, but it suffers from many of the key barriers existing within the world of today's vaccines. There's the logistics: Within this country there are only 800  refrigerators to keep vaccines chilled. Many of them are old, like this one in Port Moresby, many of them are breaking down and many are not in the Highlands  where they are required. That's a challenge. But also, Papua New Guinea has the  world's highest incidence of HPV, human papillomavirus, the  cervical cancer [risk factor]. Yet, that vaccine is not available in large numbers because it's too expensive. So for those two reasons, with  the attributes of the Nanopatch, we've got into the field and  worked with the Nanopatch, and taken it to Papua New Guinea and we'll be following that up shortly.Now, doing this kind of work is not easy. It's challenging, but there's nothing else in  the world I'd rather be doing. And as we look ahead I'd like to share with you a thought: It's the thought of a future where the 17 million deaths per year that we currently have due to infectious disease is a historical footnote. And it's a historical footnote that has been achieved by improved, radically improved vaccines. Now standing here today in front of you at the birthplace of the needle and syringe, a device that's 160 years old, I'm presenting to you an alternative approach that could really help make that happen — and it's the Nanopatch with its attributes  of being needle-free, pain-free, the ability for removing the cold chain and improving the immunogenicity. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_kendall_demo_a_needle_free_vaccine_patch_that_s_safer_and_way_cheaper
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"Pat Mitchell: Your first time back on the TEDWomen stage.Sheryl Sandberg: First time back. Nice to see everyone. It's always so nice to look out and see so many women. It's so not my regular experience,  as I know anyone else's.PM: So when we first started talking about, maybe the subject wouldn't be social media, which we assumed it would be, but  that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions, particularly  in the sector of technology and social media. But how did that evolve for you as a thought, and end up being the TED Talk that you gave?SS: So I was really scared to get on  this stage and talk about women, because I grew up in the business  world, as I think so many of us did. You never talk about being a woman, because  someone might notice that you're a woman, right? They might notice. Or worse, if you say ""woman,""  people on the other end of the table think you're asking for special  treatment, or complaining. Or worse, about to sue them.  And so I went through — (Laughter) Right? I went through my entire business career, and never spoke about being a woman,  never spoke about it publicly. But I also had noticed that it wasn't working.I came out of college over  20 years ago, and I thought that all of my peers were men and women,  all the people above me were all men, but that would change, because your generation had done such  an amazing job fighting for equality, equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't. Because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer, and now, often the only woman in a room. And I talked to a bunch of people about, should I give a speech at TEDWomen  about women, and they said, oh no, no. It will end your business career. You  cannot be a serious business executive and speak about being a woman.  You'll never be taken seriously again.But fortunately, there were the few, the proud — like you — who told me I should give the speech, and I asked myself the question  Mark Zuckerberg might — the founder of Facebook and my boss — asks all of us, which is, what  would I do if I wasn't afraid? And the answer to what would I do if I wasn't  afraid is I would get on the TED stage, and talk about women, and leadership.  And I did, and survived. (Applause)PM: I would say, not only survived.  I'm thinking of that moment, Sheryl, when you and I were standing backstage  together, and you turned to me, and you told me a story. And I said — very last minute — you know,  you really should share that story.SS: Oh, yeah. PM: What was that story?SS: Well, it's an important part of the  journey. So I had — TEDWomen — the original one was in D.C. — so I live here,  so I had gotten on a plane the day before, and my daughter was three, she was  clinging to my leg: ""Mommy, don't go."" And Pat's a friend, and so, not related  to the speech I was planning on giving, which was chock full of facts and  figures, and nothing personal, I told Pat the story. I said, well,  I'm having a hard day. Yesterday my daughter was clinging  to my leg, and ""Don't go.""And you looked at me and said,  you have to tell that story. I said, on the TED stage? Are you kidding? I'm going to get on a stage and admit  my daughter was clinging to my leg? And you said yes, because if you want to talk  about getting more women into leadership roles, you have to be honest about how hard it is. And I did. And I think that's a really  important part of the journey.The same thing happened when I wrote my book.  I started writing the book. I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was  chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai  tribes, and their sociological patterns. My husband read it and he was like, this  is like eating your Wheaties. (Laughter) No one — and I apologize to Wheaties if there's  someone — no one, no one will read this book. And I realized through the process that I  had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories. My stories of still  not feeling as self-confident as I should, in many situations. My first and  failed marriage. Crying at work. Felling like I didn't belong there,  feeling guilty to this day. And part of my journey, starting on this stage,  going to ""Lean In,"" going to the foundation, is all about being more open and  honest about those challenges, so that other women can be more open and honest, and all of us can work together towards real equality.PM: I think that one of the most  striking parts about the book, and in my opinion, one of the reasons it's hit such  a nerve and is resonating around the world, is that you are personal in the book,  and that you do make it clear that, while you've observed some things that are  very important for other women to know, that you've had the same challenges  that many others of us have, as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and  possibly the people who don't believe the same. So talk about that process: deciding  you'd go public with the private part, and then you would also put yourself in  the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges.SS: After I did the TED Talk, what happened was — you know, I never really expected to write  a book, I'm not an author, I'm not a writer, and it was viewed a lot, and it really  started impacting people's lives. I got this great —- one of the first  letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big  promotion at work, and she turned it down, and she told her best friend she turned  it down, and her best friend said, you really need to watch this TED Talk. And so she watched this TED Talk, and she  went back the next day, she took the job, she went home, and she handed her  husband the grocery list. (Laughter) And she said, I can do this.And what really mattered to me — it wasn't  only women in the corporate world, even though I did hear from a lot of  them, and it did impact a lot of them, it was also people of all different circumstances. There was a doctor I met who was an  attending physician at Johns Hopkins, and he said that until he saw my TED  Talk, it never really occurred to him that even though half the students in  his med school classes were women, they weren't speaking as much as  the men as he did his rounds. So he started paying attention, and as he waited for  raised hands, he realized the men's hands were up. So he started encouraging the  women to raise their hands more, and it still didn't work. So he told everyone, no more  hand raising, I'm cold-calling. So he could call evenly on men and women.  And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better, and he was able to go back  to them and tell them that. And then there was the woman, stay-at-home  mom, lives in a really difficult neighborhood, with not a great school, she said that TED  Talk — she's never had a corporate job, but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school  and fight for a better teacher for her child. And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice. And I realized that other women and  men could find their voice through it, which is why I went from the talk to the book.PM: And in the book, you not only found your  voice, which is clear and strong in the book, but you also share what you've learned — the experiences of other people in the lessons. And that's what I'm thinking about  in terms of putting yourself in a — you became a sort of expert in how you lean in. So what did that feel like, and  become like in your life? To launch not just a book, not just  a best-selling, best-viewed talk, but a movement, where people began to  literally describe their actions at work as, I'm leaning in.SS: I mean, I'm grateful, I'm honored,  I'm happy, and it's the very beginning. So I don't know if I'm an expert, or if anyone is  an expert. I certainly have done a lot of research. I have read every study, I have  pored over the materials, and the lessons are very clear.  Because here's what we know: What we know is that stereotypes are holding women  back from leadership roles all over the world. It's so striking. ""Lean In"" is very global,  I've been all over the world, talking about it, and — cultures are so different. Even within our own country, to Japan,  to Korea, to China, to Asia, Europe, they're so different. Except for one thing: gender. All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong,  assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak  when spoken to, help others.Now we have, all over the world, women are called ""bossy.""  There is a word for ""bossy,"" for little girls, in every language there's one. It's a word that's pretty much not used for little boys, because if a little boy leads,  there's no negative word for it, it's expected. But if a little girl leads, she's bossy.Now I know there aren't a lot of  men here, but bear with me. If you're a man, you'll have  to represent your gender. Please raise your hand if you've been  told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) There's always a few, it runs about  five percent. Okay, get ready, gentlemen. If you're a woman, please raise your hand if you've  ever been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) That is what audiences have  said in every country in the world, and it's deeply supported by the data.Now, do we think women are more  aggressive than men? Of course not. It's just that we judge them through a different lens, and a lot of the character traits that you must  exhibit to perform at work, to get results, to lead, are ones that we think, in a man, he's a boss, and in a woman, she's bossy. And the good news about this is that we  can change this by acknowledging it.One of the happiest moments  I had in this whole journey is, after the book came out, I stood on a stage  with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. He read the book. He stood on a stage with me, he  invited me in front of his whole management team, men and women, and he said, I thought we  were good at this. I thought I was good at this. And then I read this book, and I  realized that we — my company — we have called all of our  senior women too aggressive, and I'm standing on this stage, and I'm sorry. And I want you to know we're  never going to do it again.PM: Can we send that to a lot of other  people that we know? (Applause)SS: And so John is doing that because  he believes it's good for his company, and so this kind of acknowledgement  of these biases can change it. And so next time you all see  someone call a little girl ""bossy,"" you walk right up to that person,  big smile, and you say, ""That little girl's not bossy. That little girl has  executive leadership skills."" (Laughter)PM: I know that's what you're telling your daughter.  SS: Absolutely.PM: And you did focus in the book — and  the reason, as you said, in writing it, was to create a dialogue about this. I mean, let's just put it out there,  face the fact that women are — in a time when we have more open  doors, and more opportunities — are still not getting to the leadership positions. So in the months that have come since the book, in which ""Lean In"" focused on that and said, here are some of the challenges that remain, and  many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves. What has changed? Have you seen changes?SS: Well, there's certainly more  dialogue, which is great. But what really matters to me,  and I think all of us, is action. So everywhere I go, CEOs,  they're mostly men, say to me, you're costing me so much money because all the women want to  be paid as much as the men. And to them I say, I'm not sorry at all. (Laughter) At all. I mean, the women should  be paid as much as the men.Everywhere I go, women tell me they ask for raises. Everywhere I go, women say they're getting  better relationships with their spouses, asking for more help at home, asking for the  promotions they should be getting at work, and importantly, believing it  themselves. Even little things. One of the governors of one of the states told me  that he didn't realize that more women were, in fact, literally sitting on the side  of the room, which they are, and now he made a rule that all the women  on his staff need to sit at the table.The foundation I started along  with the book ""Lean In"" helps women, or men, start circles — small groups, it can be 10, it can be however many  you want, which meet once a month. I would have hoped that by now, we'd have  about 500 circles. That would've been great. You know, 500 times roughly 10. There are over 12,000 circles  in 50 countries in the world.PM: Wow, that's amazing.SS: And these are people who  are meeting every single month. I met one of them, I was in Beijing. A group of women, they're all about 29 or 30,  they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing, several of them grew up in very poor, rural China. These women are 29, they are told by  their society that they are ""left over,"" because they are not yet married, and the process of coming together  once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves. What they want in their careers. The  kind of partners they want, if at all. I looked at them, we went around  and introduced ourselves, and they all said their names  and where they're from, and I said, I'm Sheryl Sandberg,  and this was my dream. And I kind of just started crying. Right, which, I admit, I do. Right?  I've talked about it before. But the fact that a woman so far away out in  the world, who grew up in a rural village, who's being told to marry someone  she doesn't want to marry, can now go meet once a month with  a group of people and refuse that, and find life on her own terms. That's the kind of change we have to hope for.PM: Have you been surprised by  the global nature of the message? Because I think when the book first  came out, many people thought, well, this is a really important handbook  for young women on their way up. They need to look at this, anticipate  the barriers, and recognize them, put them out in the open, have the dialogue about it, but that it's really for women who are that.  Doing that. Pursuing the corporate world. And yet the book is being read, as you  say, in rural and developing countries. What part of that has surprised you, and  perhaps led to a new perspective on your part?SS: The book is about self-confidence,  and about equality. And it turns out, everywhere in the world,  women need more self-confidence, because the world tells us we're not equal to men. Everywhere in the world, we live in  a world where the men get ""and,"" and women get ""or."" I've never met a man who's been  asked how he does it all. (Laughter)Again, I'm going to turn to the men in the audience: Please raise your hand if you've  been asked, how do you do it all? (Laughter) Men only. Women, women. Please raise your hand  if you've been asked how you do it all? We assume men can do it all,  slash — have jobs and children. We assume women can't, and that's ridiculous, because the great majority of women everywhere  in the world, including the United States, work full time and have children.And I think people don't fully understand  how broad the message is. There is a circle that's been started  for rescued sex workers in Miami. They're using ""Lean In"" to help  people make the transition back to what would be a fair life, really rescuing  them from their pimps, and using it. There are dress-for-success groups  in Texas which are using the book, for women who have never been to college. And we know there are groups  all the way to Ethiopia. And so these messages of equality — of how women  are told they can't have what men can have — how we assume that leadership is for men,  how we assume that voice is for men, these affect all of us, and I  think they are very universal. And it's part of what TEDWomen does. It unites all of us in a cause we have to believe in, which is more women, more voice, more equality.PM: If you were invited now to  make another TEDWomen talk, what would you say that is a result  of this experience, for you personally, and what you've learned about women, and men, as you've made this journey?SS: I think I would say — I tried to say this strongly, but I think I can say it more strongly — I want to say that the status quo is not enough. That it's not good enough, that it's  not changing quickly enough. Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book,  another year of data came out from the U.S. Census. And you know what we found? No movement in the wage gap  for women in the United States. Seventy-seven cents to the dollar. If you are a black woman, 64 cents. If you are a Latina, we're at 54 cents. Do you know when the last  time those numbers went up? 2002. We are stagnating, we are  stagnating in so many ways. And I think we are not really being honest about that, for so many reasons. It's so  hard to talk about gender. We shy away from the word ""feminist,""  a word I really think we need to embrace. We have to get rid of the  word bossy and bring back — (Applause) I think I would say in a louder voice,  we need to get rid of the word ""bossy"" and bring back the word ""feminist,""  because we need it. (Applause)PM: And we all need to do a lot more leaning in.SS: A lot more leaning in.PM: Thank you, Sheryl. Thanks for leaning in and saying yes.SS: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_so_we_leaned_in_now_what
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"Two years ago, I have to say there was no problem. Two years ago, I knew exactly  what an icon looked like. It looks like this. Everybody's icon, but also the default position of a curator of Italian Renaissance  paintings, which I was then. And in a way, this is also another default selection. Leonardo da Vinci's exquisitely soulful image of the ""Lady with an Ermine."" And I use that word, soulful, deliberately. Or then there's this, or rather these: the two versions of Leonardo's ""Virgin of the Rocks"" that were about to come together  in London for the very first time. In the exhibition that I was then in  the absolute throes of organizing. I was literally up to my eyes in Leonardo, and I had been for three years. So, he was occupying every part of my brain. Leonardo had taught me, during that three years, about what a picture can do. About taking you from your own  material world into a spiritual world. He said, actually, that he believed  the job of the painter was to paint everything that was visible  and invisible in the universe. That's a huge task. And yet,  somehow he achieves it. He shows us, I think, the human soul. He shows us the capacity of ourselves to move into a spiritual realm. To see a vision of the universe that's  more perfect than our own. To see God's own plan, in some sense. So this, in a sense, was really  what I believed an icon was.At about that time, I started talking to Tom Campbell,director here of the Metropolitan Museum, about what my next move might be. The move, in fact, back to an earlier life, one I'd begun at the British Museum, back to the world of three dimensions — of sculpture and of decorative arts — to take over the department of European sculpture  and decorative arts, here at the Met. But it was an incredibly busy time. All the conversations were done  at very peculiar times of the day — over the phone. In the end, I accepted the job without actually having been here. Again, I'd been there a couple of years before, but on that particular visit. So, it was just before the time that  the Leonardo show was due to open when I finally made it back to the Met, to New York, to see my new domain. To see what European sculpture  and decorative arts looked like, beyond those Renaissance collections  with which I was so already familiar. And I thought, on that very first day,  I better tour the galleries. Fifty-seven of these galleries — like 57 varieties of baked beans, I believe. I walked through and I started in my comfort zone in the Italian Renaissance. And then I moved gradually around, feeling a little lost sometimes. My head, also still full of the Leonardo exhibition that was about to open, and I came across this. And I thought to myself: What the hell have I done? There was absolutely no connection in my mind at all and, in fact, if there was any emotion going on, it was a kind of repulsion. This object felt utterly and completely alien. Silly at a level that I hadn't yet  understood silliness to be. And then it was made worse — there were two of them. (Laughter) So, I started thinking about why it was, in fact, that I disliked this object so much. What was the anatomy of my distaste? Well, so much gold, so vulgar. You know, so nouveau riche, frankly. Leonardo himself had preached  against the use of gold, so it was absolutely anathema at that moment. And then there's little pretty sprigs  of flowers everywhere. (Laughter) And finally, that pink. That damned pink. It's such an extraordinarily artificial color. I mean, it's a color that I can't think of  anything that you actually see in nature, that looks that shade. The object even has its own tutu. (Laughter) This little flouncy, spangly, bottomy bit that sits at the bottom of the vase. It reminded me, in an odd kind of way, of my niece's fifth birthday party. Where all the little girls would come  either as a princess or a fairy. There was one who would come as a fairy princess. You should have seen the looks. (Laughter) And I realize that this object was in my mind, born from the same mind, from the same womb, practically, as Barbie Ballerina. (Laughter) And then there's the elephants. (Laughter) Those extraordinary elephants with their little, sort of strange, sinister expressions and Greta Garbo eyelashes, with  these golden tusks and so on. I realized this was an elephant that had absolutely nothing to do with a majestic  march across the Serengeti. It was a Dumbo nightmare. (Laughter)But something more profound  was happening as well. These objects, it seemed to me, were quintessentially the kind that I  and my liberal left friends in London had always seen as summing up something deplorable about the French aristocracy in the 18th century. The label had told me that these pieces were made by the Sèvres Manufactory, made of porcelain in the late 1750s, and designed by a designer called  Jean-Claude Duplessis, actually somebody of extraordinary distinction as I later learned. But for me, they summed up a kind of, that sort of sheer uselessness of the aristocracy in the 18th century. I and my colleagues had always thought that these objects, in way, summed up the idea of, you know — no wonder there was a revolution. Or, indeed, thank God there was a revolution. There was a sort of idea really, that, if you owned a vase like this, then there was really only one fate possible. (Laughter)So, there I was — in a sort of paroxysm of horror. But I took the job and I went  on looking at these vases. I sort of had to because they're  on a through route in the Met. So, almost anywhere I went, there they were. They had this kind of odd sort of fascination, like a car accident. Where I couldn't stop looking. And as I did so, I started thinking: Well, what are we actually looking at here? And what I started with was understanding this as really a supreme piece of design. It took me a little time. But, that tutu for example — actually, this is a piece that  does dance in its own way. It has an extraordinary lightness and yet, it is also amazing balanced. It has these kinds of sculptural ingredients. And then the play between — actually really quite carefully disposed  color and gilding, and the sculptural surface, is really rather remarkable. And then I realized that this piece went into the kiln four times, at least four times  in order to arrive at this. How many moments for accident can you think of that could have happened to this piece? And then remember, not just one, but two. So he's having to arrive at two exactly matched vases of this kind. And then this question of uselessness. Well actually, the end of the trunks  were originally candle holders. So what you would have had  were candles on either side. Imagine that effect of candlelight on that surface. On the slightly uneven pink, on the beautiful gold. It would have glittered in an interior, a little like a little firework.And at that point, actually,  a firework went off in my brain. Somebody reminded me that, that word 'fancy' — which in a sense for me, encapsulated this object — actually comes from the same  root as the word 'fantasy.' And that what this object was just as much in a way, in its own way, as a Leonardo da Vinci painting, is a portal to somewhere else. This is an object of the imagination. If you think about the mad 18th-century  operas of the time — set in the Orient. If you think about divans and perhaps even  opium-induced visions of pink elephants, then at that point, this object starts to make sense. This is an object which is all about escapism. It's about an escapism that happens — that the aristocracy in France sought very deliberately to distinguish themselves from ordinary people.It's not an escapism that we feel particularly happy with today, however. And again, going on thinking about this, I realize that in a way we're all victims of a certain kind of tyranny of the triumph of modernism whereby form and function in an object have to follow one another, or are deemed to do so. And the extraneous ornament is seen as really, essentially, criminal. It's a triumph, in a way, of bourgeois values rather than aristocratic ones. And that seems fine. Except for the fact that it becomes a kind of  sequestration of imagination. So just as in the 20th century, so many people had the idea that their faith took place on the Sabbath day, and the rest of their lives — their lives of washing machines and orthodontics — took place on another day. Then, I think we've started doing the same. We've allowed ourselves to lead our fantasy lives in front of screens. In the dark of the cinema, with the television in the corner of the room. We've eliminated, in a sense, that constant of the imagination that these vases  represented in people's lives. So maybe it's time we got this back a little. I think it's beginning to happen. In London, for example, with these extraordinary buildings that have been appearing over the last few years. Redolent, in a sense, of science fiction, turning London into a kind of fantasy playground. It's actually amazing to look out of  a high building nowadays there. But even then, there's a resistance. London has called these buildings the  Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie Talkie — bringing these soaring buildings down to Earth. There's an idea that we don't want these anxious-making, imaginative journeys  to happen in our daily lives. I feel lucky in a way, I've encountered this object. (Laughter) I found him on the Internet when  I was looking up a reference. And there he was. And unlike the pink elephant vase, this was a kind of love at first sight. In fact, reader, I married him. I bought him. And he now adorns my office. He's a Staffordshire figure made  in the middle of the 19th century. He represents the actor, Edmund Kean,  playing Shakespeare's Richard III. And it's based, actually, on a more  elevated piece of porcelain. So I loved, on an art historical level, I loved that layered quality that he has. But more than that, I love him. In a way that I think would have been impossible without the pink Sèvres vase in my Leonardo days. I love his orange and pink breeches. I love the fact that he seems to be going off to war, having just finished the washing up. (Laughter) He seems also to have forgotten his sword. I love his pink little cheeks, his munchkin energy. In a way, he's become my sort of alter ego. He's, I hope, a little bit dignified, but mostly rather vulgar. (Laughter) And energetic, I hope, too. I let him into my life because the Sèvres pink elephant vase allowed me to do so. And before that Leonardo, I understood that this object could become  part of a journey for me every day, sitting in my office. I really hope that others, all of you, visiting objects in the museum, and taking them home and  finding them for yourselves, will allow those objects to flourish  in your imaginative lives. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/luke_syson_how_i_learned_to_stop_worrying_and_love_useless_art
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"My job is to design, build and study robots that communicate with people. But this story doesn't start with robotics at all, it starts with animation. When I first saw Pixar's ""Luxo Jr.,"" I was amazed by how much emotion they could put into something as trivial as a desk lamp. I mean, look at them — at the end of this movie, you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture.(Laughter)And I said, I have to learn how to do this. So I made a really bad career decision.(Laughter)And that's what my mom was like when I did it.(Laughter)I left a very cozy tech job in Israel at a nice software company and I moved to New York to study animation. And there I lived in a collapsing apartment building in Harlem with roommates. I'm not using this phrase metaphorically — the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room. Whenever they did news stories about building violations in New York, they would put the report in front of our building, as kind of, like, a backdrop to show how bad things are.Anyway, during the day, I went to school and at night I would sit and draw frame by frame of pencil animation. And I learned two surprising lessons. One of them was that when you want to arouse emotions, it doesn't matter so much how something looks; it's all in the motion, in the timing of how the thing moves. And the second was something one of our teachers told us. He actually did the weasel in ""Ice Age."" And he said, ""As an animator, you're not a director — you're an actor."" So, if you want to find the right motion for a character, don't think about it — go use your body to find it. Stand in front of a mirror, act it out in front of a camera — whatever you need — and then put it back in your character.A year later I found myself at MIT in the Robotic Life Group. It was one of the first groups researching the relationships between humans and robots. And I still had this dream to make an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp. But I found that robots didn't move at all in this engaging way that I was used to from my animation studies. Instead, they were all — how should I put it — they were all kind of robotic. (Laughter) And I thought, what if I took whatever I learned in animation school, and used that to design my robotic desk lamp. So I went and designed frame by frame to try to make this robot as graceful and engaging as possible. And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop — and I'm actually redesigning the robot, so, unbeknownst to itself, it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me.(Laughter)I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light, and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice that's always there when you need it and doesn't really interfere. And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery that I can't find, in a subtle way, it'll show me where the battery is. So you can see my confusion here. I'm not an actor. And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can, at one point, just by the way it moves, seem gentle and caring and in the other case, seem violent and confrontational. And it's the same structure, just the motion is different. Actor: ""You want to know something? Well, you want to know something? He was already dead! Just laying there, eyes glazed over!""(Laughter)But, moving in a graceful way is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction. I was, at the time, doing my PhD, I was working on human-robot teamwork, teams of humans and robots working together. I was studying the engineering, the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork, and at the same time, I found myself in my own kind of teamwork situation, with a good friend of mine, who's actually here. And in that situation, we can easily imagine robots in the near future being there with us. It was after a Passover Seder. We were folding up a lot of folding chairs, and I was amazed at how quickly we found our own rhythm. Everybody did their own part, we didn't have to divide our tasks. We didn't have to communicate verbally about this — it all just happened.And I thought, humans and robots don't look at all like this. When humans and robots interact, it's much more like a chess game: the human does a thing, the robot analyzes whatever the human did, the robot decides what to do next, plans it and does it. Then the human waits, until it's their turn again. So it's much more like a chess game, and that makes sense, because chess is great for mathematicians and computer scientists. It's all about information, analysis, decision-making and planning.But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player, and more like a doer that just clicks and works together. So I made my second horrible career choice: I decided to study acting for a semester. I took off from the PhD, I went to acting classes. I actually participated in a play — I hope there’s no video of that around still.(Laughter)And I got every book I could find about acting, including one from the 19th century that I got from the library. And I was really amazed, because my name was the second name on the list — the previous name was in 1889.(Laughter)And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years to be rediscovered for robotics. And this book shows actors how to move every muscle in the body to match every kind of emotion that they want to express.But the real revelation was when I learned about method acting. It became very popular in the 20th century. And method acting said you don't have to plan every muscle in your body; instead, you have to use your body to find the right movement. You have to use your sense memory to reconstruct the emotions and kind of think with your body to find the right expression — improvise, play off your scene partner. And this came at the same time as I was reading about this trend in cognitive psychology, called embodied cognition, which also talks about the same ideas. We use our bodies to think; we don't just think with our brains and use our bodies to move, but our bodies feed back into our brain to generate the way that we behave.And it was like a lightning bolt. I went back to my office, I wrote this paper, which I never really published, called ""Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence."" And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together. That's what you saw before with the actors. And I thought: How can we make an artificial intelligence model — a computer, computational model — that will model some of these ideas of improvisation, of taking risks, of taking chances, even of making mistakes? Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates. So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots.Here you can see a very early example with the robots trying to use this embodied artificial intelligence to try to match my movements as closely as possible. It's sort of like a game. Let's look at it. You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled. And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them. And then, I did another experiment, and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp, and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence. So, I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot.The robot is the same lamp that you saw, and I put two brains in it. For one half of the people, I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional, calculated robotic brain. It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans. Let's call it the calculated brain. The other got more the stage actor, risk-taker brain. Let's call it the adventurous brain. It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know. It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them. And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 20 minutes, and they had to work together, somehow simulating, like, a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing. What I found is that people actually loved the adventurous robot. They thought it was more intelligent, more committed, a better member of the team, contributed to the success of the team more. They even called it ""he"" and ""she,"" whereas people with the calculated brain called it ""it,"" and nobody ever called it ""he"" or ""she."" When they talked about it after the task, with the adventurous brain, they said, ""By the end, we were good friends and high-fived mentally."" Whatever that means.(Laughter)Sounds painful. Whereas the people with the calculated brain said it was just like a lazy apprentice. It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more, which is almost what people expect robots to do, so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing. And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time — just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 19th century, from going from the very calculated, planned way of behaving, to a more intuitive, risk-taking, embodied way of behaving — maybe it's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution.A few years later, I was at my next research job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and I was working in a group dealing with robotic musicians. And I thought, music: that's the perfect place to look at teamwork, coordination, timing, improvisation — and we just got this robot playing marimba. And the marimba, for everybody like me, it was this huge, wooden xylophone. And when I was looking at this, I looked at other works in human-robot improvisation — yes, there are other works in human-robot improvisation — and they were also a little bit like a chess game. The human would play, the robot analyzed what was played, and would improvise their own part. So, this is what musicians called a call-and-response interaction, and it also fits very well robots and artificial intelligence. But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies, maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band. Everybody's riffing off each other, nobody is stopping for a moment. And so I tried to do the same things, this time with music, where the robot doesn't really know what it's about to play, it just sort of moves its body and uses opportunities to play, and does what my jazz teacher when I was 17 taught me. She said, when you improvise, sometimes you don't know what you're doing, and you still do it. So I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually know what it's doing, but is still doing it. So let's look at a few seconds from this performance, where the robot listens to the human musician and improvises. And then, look how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing and picking up from its behavior, and at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with.(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)Being a musician is not just about making notes, otherwise nobody would ever go see a live show. Musicians also communicate with their bodies, with other band members, with the audience, they use their bodies to express the music. And I thought, we already have a robot musician on stage, why not make it be a full-fledged musician? And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot. The head doesn’t actually touch the marimba, it just expresses what the music is like. These are some napkin sketches from a bar in Atlanta that was dangerously located exactly halfway between my lab and my home. So I spent, I would say, on average, three to four hours a day there. I think.(Laughter)And I went back to my animation tools and tried to figure out not just what a robotic musician would look like, but especially what a robotic musician would move like, to sort of show that it doesn't like what the other person is playing — and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling at the moment.So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot, which was nice. I'm going to show you now the same kind of performance, this time with a socially expressive head. And notice one thing — how the robot is really showing us the beat it's picking up from the human, while also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it's doing. And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo.(Music)Now it's looking at me, showing that it's listening.(Music)Now look at the final chord of the piece again. And this time the robot communicates with its body when it's busy doing its own thing, and when it's ready to coordinate the final chord with me.(Music)(Music ending)(Final chord)(Applause)Thanks. I hope you see how much this part of the body that doesn't touch the instrument actually helps with the musical performance. And at some point — we are in Atlanta, so obviously some rapper will come into our lab at some point — and we had this rapper come in and do a little jam with the robot. Here you can see the robot basically responding to the beat. Notice two things: one, how irresistible it is to join the robot while it's moving its head. You kind of want to move your own head when it does it. And second, even though the rapper is really focused on his iPhone, as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back. So even though it's just in the periphery of his vision, in the corner of his eye, it's very powerful. And the reason is that we can't ignore physical things moving in our environment. We are wired for that. So if you have a problem — maybe your partner is looking at their iPhone or smartphone too much — you might want to have a robot there to get their attention.(Laughter)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)Just to introduce the last robot that we've worked on, it came out of something surprising that we found: Some point people didn't care about the robot being intelligent, able to improvise and listen, and do all these embodied intelligence things that I spent years developing. They really liked that the robot was enjoying the music.(Laughter)And they didn't say the robot was moving to the music, they said ""enjoying"" the music. And we thought, why don't we take this idea, and I designed a new piece of furniture. This time it wasn't a desk lamp, it was a speaker dock, one of those things you plug your smartphone in. And I thought, what would happen if your speaker dock didn't just play the music for you, but would actually enjoy it, too? And so again, here are some animation tests from an early stage.(Laughter)And this is what the final product looked like.(Music)(Music ends)So, a lot of bobbing heads.(Applause)A lot of bobbing heads in the audience, so we can still see robots influence people. And it's not just fun and games.I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move is — I'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding — is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in your life. Somewhere in your future, there will be a robot in your life. If not in yours, your children's lives. And I want these robots to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful than currently they seem to be. And for that I think maybe robots need to be less like chess players and more like stage actors and more like musicians. Maybe they should be able to take chances and improvise. Maybe they should be able to anticipate what you're about to do. Maybe they even need to be able to make mistakes and correct them, because in the end, we are human. And maybe as humans, robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_hoffman_robots_with_soul
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"So when I was in Morocco, in Casablanca, not so long ago, I met a young unmarried mother called Faiza. Faiza showed me photos of her infant son and she told me the story of his conception, pregnancy, and delivery.It was a remarkable tale, but Faiza saved the best for last. ""You know, I am a virgin,"" she told me. ""I have two medical certificates to prove it.""This is the modern Middle East, where two millennia after the coming of Christ, virgin births are still a fact of life.Faiza's story is just one of hundreds I've heard  over the years, traveling across the Arab region talking to people about sex. Now, I know this might sound like a dream job, or possibly a highly dubious occupation,but for me, it's something else altogether. I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots.Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins. That I chose to look at sex comes from  my background in HIV/AIDS, as a writer and a researcher and an activist. Sex lies at the heart of an emerging epidemic in the Middle East and North Africa, which is one of only two regions in the world where HIV/AIDS is still on the rise.Now sexuality is an incredibly powerful lens with which to study any society, because what happens in our intimate lives is reflected by forces on a bigger stage: in politics and economics, in religion and tradition,  in gender and generations. As I found, if you really want to know a people, you start by looking inside their bedrooms.Now to be sure, the Arab world is vast and varied. But running across it are three red lines — these are topics you are not supposed  to challenge in word or deed.The first of these is politics. But the Arab Spring has changed all that, in uprisings which have blossomed  across the region since 2011. Now while those in power, old and new, continue to cling to business as usual, millions are still pushing back, and pushing forward to what they hope will be a better life.That second red line is religion. But now religion and politics are connected, with the rise of such groups as the  Muslim Brotherhood. And some people, at least, are starting  to ask questions about the role of Islam in public and private life.You know, as for that third red line,  that off-limits subject, what do you think it might be?Audience: Sex.Shereen El Feki: Louder, I can't hear you.Audience: Sex.SEF: Again, please don't be shy.Audience: Sex.SEF: Absolutely, that's right, it's sex. (Laughter) Across the Arab region, the only accepted context for sex is marriage — approved by your parents, sanctioned by religion and registered by the state. Marriage is your ticket to adulthood. If you don't tie the knot, you can't  move out of your parents' place, and you're not supposed to be having sex, and you're definitely not supposed  to be having children.It's a social citadel; it's an impregnable fortress which resists any assault, any alternative. And around the fortress is this vast field of taboo against premarital sex, against condoms, against abortion, against homosexuality, you name it.Faiza was living proof of this. Her virginity statement was  not a piece of wishful thinking. Although the major religions of the region extoll premarital chastity, in a patriarchy, boys will be boys. Men have sex before marriage, and people more or less turn a blind eye.Not so for women, who are expected to be virgins  on their wedding night — that is, to turn up with your hymen intact. This is not a question of individual concern, this is a matter of family honor,  and in particular, men's honor.And so women and their relatives will go to great lengths to preserve  this tiny piece of anatomy — from female genital mutilation, to virginity testing, to hymen repair surgery.Faiza chose a different route: non-vaginal sex. Only she became pregnant all the same. But Faiza didn't actually realize this, because there's so little  sexuality education in schools, and so little communication in the family.When her condition became hard to hide, Faiza's mother helped her flee  her father and brothers. This is because honor killings are a real threat for untold numbers of women in the Arab region. And so when Faiza eventually fetched up at  a hospital in Casablanca, the man who offered to help her, instead tried to rape her.Sadly, Faiza is not alone. In Egypt, where my research is focused, I have seen plenty of trouble  in and out of the citadel. There are legions of young men who can't afford to get married, because marriage has become  a very expensive proposition. They are expected to bear the burden of costs in married life, but they can't find jobs. This is one of the major drivers  of the recent uprisings, and it is one of the reasons for the  rising age of marriage in much of the Arab region.There are career women who want to get married, but can't find a husband, because they defy gender expectations, or as one young female doctor  in Tunisia put it to me, ""The women, they are becoming more and more open. But the man, he is still at the prehistoric stage.""And then there are men and women who  cross the heterosexual line, who have sex with their own sex, or who have a different gender identity. They are on the receiving end of laws which punish their activities, even their appearance. And they face a daily struggle with social stigma, with family despair, and with religious fire and brimstone.Now, it's not as if it's all rosy  in the marital bed either. Couples who are looking for greater happiness, greater sexual happiness in their married lives, but are at a loss of how to achieve it, especially wives, who are afraid  of being seen as bad women if they show some spark in the bedroom.And then there are those whose marriages are actually a veil for prostitution. They have been sold by their families, often to wealthy Arab tourists. This is just one face of a booming  sex trade across the Arab region.Now raise your hand if any of  this is sounding familiar to you, from your part of the world. Yeah. It's not as if the Arab world has a monopoly on sexual hangups.And although we don't yet have an Arab Kinsey Report to tell us exactly what's happening  inside bedrooms across the Arab region, It's pretty clear that  something is not right. Double standards for men and women, sex as a source of shame, family control limiting individual choices, and a vast gulf between appearance and reality: what people are doing and what they're willing to admit to, and a general reluctance to move  beyond private whispers to a serious and sustained public discussion.As one doctor in Cairo summed it up for me, ""Here, sex is the opposite of sport. Football, everybody talks about it, but hardly anyone plays. But sex, everybody is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it."" (Laughter)(Music) (In Arabic)SEF: I want to give you a piece of advice, which if you follow it, will make you happy in life.When your husband reaches out to you, when he seizes a part of your body, sigh deeply and look at him lustily.When he penetrates you with his penis, try to talk flirtatiously and  move yourself in harmony with him.Hot stuff! And it might sound that these handy hints come from ""The Joy of Sex"" or YouPorn. But in fact, they come from a 10th-century Arabic book called ""The Encyclopedia of Pleasure,"" which covers sex from aphrodisiacs to zoophilia, and everything in between.The Encyclopedia is just one  in a long line of Arabic erotica, much of it written by religious scholars. Going right back to the Prophet Muhammad, there is a rich tradition in Islam of talking frankly about sex: not just its problems, but also its pleasures, and not just for men, but also for women. A thousand years ago, we used to have  whole dictionaries of sex in Arabic. Words to cover every conceivable sexual feature, position and preference, a body of language that was rich enough to make up the body  of the woman you see on this page.Today, this history is largely unknown  in the Arab region. Even by educated people, who often feel more comfortable talking about sex in a foreign language than they do in their own tongue. Today's sexual landscape looks a lot like Europe and America on the brink of the sexual revolution.But while the West has opened on sex, what we found is that Arab societies appear to have been moving in the opposite direction. In Egypt and many of its neighbors, this closing down is part of a wider closing in political, social and cultural thought. And it is the product of a complex historical process, one which has gained ground with the rise  of Islamic conservatism since the late 1970s. ""Just say no"" is what conservatives  around the world say to any challenge to the sexual status quo. In the Arab region, they brand these attempts as a Western conspiracy to undermine traditional Arab and Islamic values. But what's really at stake here is one of their most powerful tools of control: sex wrapped up in religion.But history shows us that  even as recently as our fathers' and grandfathers' day, there have been times of greater pragmatism, and tolerance, and a willingness to consider other interpretations: be it abortion, or masturbation, or even  the incendiary topic of homosexuality. It is not black and white, as conservatives would have us believe. In these, as in so many other matters, Islam offers us at least 50 shades of gray. (Laughter)Over my travels, I've met men and women  across the Arab region who've been exploring that spectrum — sexologists who are trying to help couples find greater happiness in their marriages, innovators who are managing to get  sexuality education into schools, small groups of men and women, lesbian, gay, transgendered, transsexual, who are reaching out to their peers with online initiatives and real-world support. Women, and increasingly men, who are starting to speak out and push back against sexual violence on the streets and in the home. Groups that are trying to help sex workers protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards, and NGOs that are helping unwed mothers like Faiza find a place in society, and critically, stay with their kids.Now these efforts are small,  they're often underfunded, and they face formidable opposition. But I am optimistic that, in the long run, times are changing, and they and their ideas will gain ground. Social change doesn't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation, beating or indeed baring of breasts, but rather through negotiation.What we're talking here is not about a  sexual revolution, but a sexual evolution,  learning from other parts of the world, adapting to local conditions, forging our own path, not following one blazed by another. That path, I hope, will one day lead us  to the right to control our own bodies, and to access the information  and services we need to lead satisfying and safe sexual lives. The right to express our ideas freely, to marry whom we choose,  to choose our own partners, to be sexually active or not, to decide whether to have children and when, all this without violence or force or discrimination.Now we are very far from this  across the Arab region, and so much needs to change: law, education, media, the economy, the list goes on and on, and it is the work of a generation, at least.But it begins with a journey that I myself have made, asking hard questions of received wisdoms in sexual life. And it is a journey which has only served to strengthen my faith, and my appreciation of local histories and cultures by showing me possibilities  where I once only saw absolutes.Now given the turmoil in many countries in the Arab region, talking about sex,  challenging the taboos, seeking alternatives might sound like something of a luxury.But at this critical moment in history, if we do not anchor freedom and justice, dignity and equality, privacy and autonomy in our personal lives, in our sexual lives, we will find it very hard to achieve in public life.The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows, and that is true for us all. no matter where we live and love.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shereen_el_feki_a_little_told_tale_of_sex_and_sensuality
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"Some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother, Mamar, in our four-family home in Brooklyn, New York. Her apartment was an oasis. It was a place where I could sneak a cup of coffee, which was really warm milk  with just a touch of caffeine. She loved life. And although she worked in a factory, she saved her pennies and she traveled to Europe. And I remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music.And then, when I was eight and she was 60, something changed. She no longer worked or traveled. She no longer danced. There were no more coffee times. My mother missed work and took her to doctors who couldn't make a diagnosis. And my father, who worked at night,  would spend every afternoon with her, just to make sure she ate.Her care became all-consuming for our family. And by the time a diagnosis was made, she was in a deep spiral.Now many of you will recognize her symptoms. My grandmother had depression. A deep, life-altering depression, from which she never recovered. And back then, so little  was known about depression.But even today, 50 years later, there's still so much more to learn. Today, we know that women  are 70 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men. And even with this high prevalence, women are misdiagnosed between  30 and 50 percent of the time.Now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms  of fatigue, sleep disturbance, pain and anxiety compared with men. And these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression.And it isn't only depression in which  these sex differences occur, but they occur across so many diseases.So it's my grandmother's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest. And today, I lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women.Today, we know that every cell has a sex. Now, that's a term coined  by the Institute of Medicine. And what it means is that  men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels. It means that we're different  across all of our organs. From our brains to our hearts, our lungs, our joints.Now, it was only 20 years ago that we hardly had any data on women's health beyond our reproductive functions. But then in 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law. And what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities  be included in clinical trials that were funded by the National Institutes of Health. And in many ways, the law has worked. Women are now routinely  included in clinical studies, and we've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease. But remarkably, what we have learned about these  differences is often overlooked.So, we have to ask ourselves the question: Why leave women's health to chance? And we're leaving it to chance in two ways. The first is that there is so much more to learn and we're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent  of these sex differences. And the second is that we aren't  taking what we have learned, and routinely applying it in clinical care. We are just not doing enough.So, I'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have  impacted the health of women, and where we need to do more.Let's start with heart disease. It's the number one killer of women  in the United States today. This is the face of heart disease. Linda is a middle-aged woman, who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart. When she had recurring symptoms  she went back to her doctor. Her doctor did the gold standard test: a cardiac catheterization. It showed no blockages. Linda's symptoms continued. She had to stop working. And that's when she found us. When Linda came to us, we did  another cardiac catheterization and this time, we found clues. But we needed another test to make the diagnosis. So we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound, where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out.And what we found was that Linda's disease didn't look like the typical male disease. The typical male disease looks like this. There's a discrete blockage or stenosis. Linda's disease, like the disease of so many women, looks like this. The plaque is laid down more evenly, more diffusely along the artery, and it's harder to see. So for Linda, and for so many women, the gold standard test wasn't gold.Now, Linda received the right treatment. She went back to her life and, fortunately, today she is doing well. But Linda was lucky. She found us, we found her disease.But for too many women, that's not the case. We have the tools. We have the technology to make the diagnosis. But it's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked.So what about treatment? A landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question: What are the most effective treatments  for heart disease in women? The authors looked at papers  written over a 10-year period, and hundreds had to be thrown out. And what they found out was that  of those that were tossed out, 65 percent were excluded because even though women  were included in the studies, the analysis didn't differentiate  between women and men. What a lost opportunity. The money had been spent and we didn't learn how women fared. And these studies could not contribute one iota to the very, very important question, what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women?I want to introduce you to  Hortense, my godmother, Hung Wei, a relative of a colleague, and somebody you may recognize — Dana, Christopher Reeve's wife. All three women have something  very important in common. All three were diagnosed with lung cancer, the number one cancer killer of women in the United States today. All three were nonsmokers. Sadly, Dana and Hung Wei died of their disease. Today, what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers. Now interestingly, when women are  diagnosed with lung cancer, their survival tends to be better than that of men. Now, here are some clues. Our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor  cells of both women and men. And these genes are activated mainly by estrogen. And when these genes are over-expressed, it's associated with improved survival only in young women. Now this is a very early finding and we don't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care. But it's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men.Now, let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences, it can drive the science. Several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated, and when the authors looked  at whose tumors shrank, they found that 82 percent were women. This led them to ask the question: Well, why? And what they found was that the genetic mutations  that the drug targeted were far more common in women. And what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer  that also includes sex.This is what we can accomplish when we don't leave women's health to chance. We know that when you invest in research, you get results. Take a look at the death rate  from breast cancer over time. And now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time. Now let's look at the dollars  invested in breast cancer — these are the dollars invested per death — and the dollars invested in lung cancer. Now, it's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results. They may not be fast enough, but it has produced results. We can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease.So let's go back to depression. Depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today. Our investigators have found that there are differences in the brains of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood. And when you put men and women in a functional MRI scanner — that's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it's activated — so you put them in the scanner  and you expose them to stress. You can actually see the difference. And it's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression.But even though we know that these differences occur, 66 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified.So, I think we have to ask again the question: Why leave women's health to chance? And this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge  of being able to dramatically improve the health of women. We know that every cell has a sex. We know that these differences  are often overlooked. And therefore we know that women  are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today. We have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum.Women's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay. And it's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine. (Applause) So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these  sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research. Or if we analyzed our data by sex.So, people often ask me: What can I do? And here's what I suggest: First, I suggest that you think about women's health in the same way that you think and care about other  causes that are important to you. And second, and equally as important, that as a woman, you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring  for those who you love: Is this disease or treatment different in women? Now, this is a profound question  because the answer is likely yes, but your doctor may not know  the answer, at least not yet. But if you ask the question,  your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer. And this is so important, not only for ourselves, but for all of those whom we love. Whether it be a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend or a grandmother.It was my grandmother's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women. That's her legacy. Our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_johnson_his_and_hers_healthcare
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"I have spent the last years trying to resolve two enigmas: Why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where I work? I have worked with more than 500 companies. Despite all the technological advances — computers, I.T., communications, telecommunications, the Internet. Enigma number two: Why is there so little engagement at work? Why do people feel so miserable, even actively disengaged? Disengaging their colleagues. Acting against the interest of their company. Despite all the affiliation events, the celebration, the people initiatives, the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams.At the beginning, I thought there was a chicken and egg issue: Because people are less engaged,  they are less productive. Or vice versa, because they are less productive, we put more pressure and they are less engaged. But as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates, in fact, to the basic  pillars of management. The way we organize is based on two pillars. The hard — structure, processes, systems. The soft — feelings, sentiments, interpersonal relationships, traits, personality. And whenever a company reorganizes, restructures, reengineers, goes through a cultural transformation program, it chooses these two pillars. Now, we try to refine them, we try to combine them. The real issue is — and this is the answer to the two enigmas — these pillars are obsolete. Everything you read in business books is based either on one or the other or their combination. They are obsolete. How do they work when you try to use these approaches in front of the new complexity of business? The hard approach, basically  is that you start from strategy, requirements, structures, processes,  systems, KPIs, scorecards, committees, headquarters, hubs, clusters, you name it. I forgot all the metrics, incentives, committees,  middle offices and interfaces. What happens basically on the left, you have more complexity, the  new complexity of business. We need quality, cost, reliability, speed. And every time there is a new requirement, we use the same approach. We create dedicated structure processed systems, basically to deal with the  new complexity of business. The hard approach creates just complicatedness in the organization.Let's take an example. An automotive company, the engineering division is a five-dimensional matrix. If you open any cell of the matrix, you find another 20-dimensional matrix. You have Mr. Noise, Mr. Petrol Consumption, Mr. Anti-Collision Properties. For any new requirement, you have a dedicated function in charge of aligning engineers against the new requirement. What happens when the new  requirement emerges? Some years ago, a new requirement appeared on the marketplace: the length of the warranty period. So therefore the new requirement is repairability, making cars easy to repair. Otherwise when you bring the car  to the garage to fix the light, if you have to remove the engine to access the lights, the car will have to stay one week in the garage instead of two hours, and the  warranty budget will explode. So, what was the solution using the hard approach? If repairability is the new requirement, the solution is to create a new function, Mr. Repairability. And Mr. Repairability creates  the repairability process. With a repairability scorecard,  with a repairability metric and eventually repairability incentive. That came on top of 25 other KPIs. What percentage of these people is variable compensation? Twenty percent at most, divided by 26 KPIs, repairability makes a difference of 0.8 percent. What difference did it make in their actions, their choices to simplify? Zero. But what occurs for zero impact?  Mr. Repairability, process, scorecard, evaluation, coordination  with the 25 other coordinators to have zero impact.Now, in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines. It is basically the interplay. How the parts work together. The connections, the interactions, the synapses. It is not the skeleton of boxes,  it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence. You know, you could call it cooperation, basically. Whenever people cooperate, they use less resources. In everything. You know, the repairability issue is a cooperation problem. When you design cars, please take into account the needs of those who will repair the cars in the after sales garages. When we don't cooperate we need more time, more equipment, more systems, more teams. We need — When procurement, supply  chain, manufacturing don't cooperate we need more stock, more inventories,  more working capital. Who will pay for that? Shareholders? Customers? No, they will refuse. So who is left?  The employees, who have to compensate through their super individual efforts for the lack of cooperation. Stress, burnout, they are  overwhelmed, accidents. No wonder they disengage. How do the hard and the soft try to foster cooperation? The hard: In banks, when there is a problem between the back office and the front office, they don't cooperate. What is the solution? They create a middle office. What happens one year later? Instead of one problem  between the back and the front, now I have two problems. Between the back and the middle and between the middle and the front. Plus I have to pay for the middle office. The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation. It can only add new boxes,  new bones in the skeleton.The soft approach: To make people cooperate, we need  to make them like each other. Improve interpersonal feelings, the more people like each other,  the more they will cooperate. It is totally wrong. It is even counterproductive. Look, at home I have two TVs. Why? Precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife. (Laughter) Not to have to impose tradeoffs to my wife. And why I try not to impose tradeoffs to my wife is precisely because I love my wife. If I didn't love my wife, one TV would be enough: You will watch my favorite football game, if you are not happy, how is the book or the door? (Laughter) The more we like each other, the more we avoid the real cooperation that would strain our relationships  by imposing tough tradeoffs. And we go for a second TV or we escalate the decision above for arbitration. Definitely, these approaches are obsolete.To deal with complexity, to enhance the nervous system, we have created what we call  the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules. Simple rule number one: Understand what others do. What is their real work? We need to go beyond the boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content. Me, designer, if I put a wire here, I know that it will mean that we will have to remove the engine to access the lights. Second, you need to reenforce integrators. Integrators are not middle  offices, they are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. How can you reinforce your  managers as integrators? By removing layers. When there are too many layers people are too far from the action, therefore they need KPIs, metrics, they need poor proxies for reality. They don't understand reality and they add the complicatedness of metrics, KPIs. By removing rules — the bigger we are, the more we need integrators, therefore the less rules we must have, to give discretionary power to managers. And we do the opposite — the bigger we are, the more rules we create. And we end up with the Encyclopedia  Britannica of rules. You need to increase the quanitity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment, their intelligence. You must give more cards to people so that they have the critical mass of cards to take the risk to cooperate, to move out of insulation. Otherwise, they will withdraw. They will disengage. These rules, they come from game theory and organizational sociology. You can increase the shadow of the future. Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions. This is what the automotive company did when they saw that Mr. Repairability had no impact. They said to the design engineers: Now, in three years, when the new  car is launched on the market, you will move to the after sales  network, and become in charge of the warranty budget, and if the warranty budget explodes, it will explode in your face. (Laughter) Much more powerful than 0.8  percent variable compensation. You need also to increase reciprocity, by removing the buffers that make us self-sufficient. When you remove these buffers, you hold me by the nose, I hold you by the ear. We will cooperate. Remove the second TV. There are many second TVs at work that don't create value, they just provide dysfunctional self-sufficiency. You need to reward those who cooperate and blame those who don't cooperate. The CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, has a great way to use it. He says, blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help or ask for help. It changes everything. Suddenly it becomes in my interest to be transparent on my real weaknesses, my real forecast, because I know I will not be blamed if I fail, but if I fail to help or ask for help. When you do this, it has a lot of implications on organizational design. You stop drawing boxes, dotted lines, full lines; you look at their interplay. It has a lot of implications on financial policies that we use. On human resource management practices. When you do that, you can manage complexity, the new complexity of business, without getting complicated. You create more value with lower cost. You simultaneously improve  performance and satisfaction at work because you have removed the common root cause that hinders both. Complicatedness: This is your  battle, business leaders. The real battle is not against competitors. This is rubbish, very abstract. When do we meet competitors to fight them? The real battle is against ourselves, against our bureaucracy, our complicatedness. Only you can fight, can do it. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yves_morieux_as_work_gets_more_complex_6_rules_to_simplify
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"Joe Kowan: I have stage fright. I've always had stage fright, and not just a little bit, it's a big bit. And it didn't even matter until I was 27. That's when I started writing songs, and even then I only played them for myself. Just knowing my roommates were in the  same house made me uncomfortable.But after a couple of years,  just writing songs wasn't enough. I had all these stories and ideas, and I wanted to share them with people, but physiologically, I couldn't do it. I had this irrational fear. But the more I wrote, and the more I practiced, the more I wanted to perform.So on the week of my 30th birthday, I decided I was going to go to this local open mic, and put this fear behind me. Well, when I got there, it was packed. There were like 20 people there. (Laughter) And they all looked angry. But I took a deep breath, and I signed up to play, and I felt pretty good.Pretty good, until about 10 minutes before my turn, when my whole body rebelled, and  this wave of anxiety just washed over me. Now, when you experience fear,  your sympathetic nervous system kicks in. So you have a rush of adrenaline,  your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster. Next your non-essential systems start  to shut down, like digestion. (Laughter) So your mouth gets dry, and blood is routed away from your extremities, so your fingers don't work anymore. Your pupils dilate, your muscles contract, your Spidey sense tingles, basically your whole body is trigger-happy. (Laughter) That condition is not conducive  to performing folk music. (Laughter) I mean, your nervous system is an idiot. Really? Two hundred thousand years of human evolution, and it still can't tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and 20 folksingers on a Tuesday night open mic? (Laughter) I have never been more terrified — until now. (Laughter and cheers)So then it was my turn, and somehow, I get myself onto  the stage, I start my song, I open my mouth to sing the first line, and this completely horrible vibrato — you know, when your voice wavers —  comes streaming out. And this is not the good kind of vibrato,  like an opera singer has, this is my whole body just convulsing with fear. I mean, it's a nightmare. I'm embarrassed, the audience  is clearly uncomfortable, they're focused on my discomfort. It was so bad. But that was my first real experience  as a solo singer-songwriter.And something good did happen — I had the tiniest little glimpse of that audience connection that I was hoping for. And I wanted more. But I knew  I had to get past this nervousness.That night I promised myself:  I would go back every week until I wasn't nervous anymore. And I did. I went back every single week, and sure enough, week after week, it didn't get any better. The same  thing happened every week. (Laughter) I couldn't shake it.And that's when I had an epiphany. And I remember it really well, because I  don't have a lot of epiphanies. (Laughter) All I had to do was write a song  that exploits my nervousness. That only seems authentic when I have stage fright, and the more nervous I was, the better the song would be. Easy. So I started writing a song about having stage fright. First, fessing up to the problem, the physical manifestations, how I would feel, how the listener might feel. And then accounting for things like my shaky voice, and I knew I would be singing about a  half-octave higher than normal, because I was nervous. By having a song that explained  what was happening to me, while it was happening, that gave the audience permission to think about it. They didn't have to feel bad  for me because I was nervous, they could experience that with me, and we were all one big happy, nervous,  uncomfortable family. (Laughter)By thinking about my audience,  by embracing and exploiting my problem, I was able to take something  that was blocking my progress, and turn it into something that  was essential for my success. And having the stage fright song let  me get past that biggest issue right in the beginning of a performance. And then I could move on,  and play the rest of my songs with just a little bit more ease. And eventually, over time, I didn't  have to play the stage fright song at all. Except for when I was really  nervous, like now. (Laughter)Would it be okay if I played the  stage fright song for you? (Applause)Can I have a sip of water? (Music) Thank you.♫ I'm not joking, you know, ♫ ♫ this stage fright is real. ♫ ♫ And if I'm up here trembling and singing, ♫ ♫ well, you'll know how I feel. ♫ ♫ And the mistake I'd be making, ♫ ♫ the tremolo caused by my whole body shaking. ♫ ♫ As you sit there feeling embarrassed for me, ♫ ♫ well, you don't have to be. ♫ ♫ Well, maybe just a little bit. ♫ (Laughter) ♫ And maybe I'll try to imagine  you all without clothes. ♫ ♫ But singing in front of all naked strangers scares me more than anyone knows. ♫ ♫ Not to discuss this at length, ♫ ♫ but my body image was never my strength. ♫ ♫ So frankly, I wish that you all would get dressed, ♫ ♫ I mean, you're not even really naked. ♫ ♫ And I'm the one with the problem. ♫ ♫ And you tell me, don't worry  so much, you'll be great. ♫ ♫ But I'm the one living with me ♫ ♫ and I know how I get. ♫ ♫ Your advice is gentle but late. ♫ ♫ If not just a bit patronizing. ♫ ♫ And that sarcastic tone doesn't  help me when I sing. ♫ ♫ But we shouldn't talk about  these things right now, ♫ ♫ really, I'm up on stage, and  you're in the crowd. Hi. ♫ ♫ And I'm not making fun of  unnurtured, irrational fear, ♫ ♫ and if I wasn't ready to face this, ♫ ♫ I sure as hell wouldn't be here. ♫ ♫ But if I belt one note out clearly, ♫ ♫ you'll know I'm recovering slowly but surely. ♫ ♫ And maybe next week, I'll set my guitar ringin' ♫ ♫ my voice clear as water, and everyone singin'. ♫ ♫ But probably I'll just get up and start groovin', ♫ ♫ my vocal cords movin', ♫ ♫ at speeds slightly faster than sound. ♫ (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_kowan_how_i_beat_stage_fright
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"I'd like to reimagine education. The last year has seen the invention of a new four-letter word. It starts with an M. MOOC: massive open online courses. Many organizations are offering these online courses to students all over the world, in the millions, for free. Anybody who has an Internet connection and the will to learn can access these great courses from excellent universities and get a credential at the end of it. Now, in this discussion today, I'm going to focus on a different aspect of MOOCs. We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine what we do in the classroom.Now, our classrooms could use change. So, here's a classroom at this little three-letter institute in the Northeast of America, MIT. And this was a classroom about 50 or 60 years ago, and this is a classroom today. What's changed? The seats are in color. Whoop-de-do. Education really hasn't changed in the past 500 years. The last big innovation in education was the printing press and the textbooks. Everything else has changed around us. You know, from healthcare to transportation, everything is different, but education hasn't changed.It's also been a real issue in terms of access. So what you see here is not a rock concert. And the person you see at the end of the stage is not Madonna. This is a classroom at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. Now, we've all heard of distance education, but the students way in the back, 200 feet away from the instructor, I think they are undergoing long-distance education. Now, I really believe that we can transform education, both in quality and scale and access, through technology. For example, at edX, we are trying to transform education through online technologies. Given education has been calcified for 500 years, we really cannot think about reengineering it, micromanaging it. We really have to completely reimagine it. It's like going from ox carts to the airplane. Even the infrastructure has to change. Everything has to change. We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises, online videos. We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification. We have to go to completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards. Everything really has to change.So at edX and a number of other organizations, we are applying these technologies to education through MOOCs to really increase access to education. And you heard of this example, where, when we launched our very first course — and this was an MIT-hard circuits and electronics course — about a year and a half ago, 155,000 students from 162 countries enrolled in this course. And we had no marketing budget. Now, 155,000 is a big number. This number is bigger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 150-year history. 7,200 students passed the course, and this was a hard course. 7,200 is also a big number. If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year, I would have to teach for 40 years before I could teach this many students.Now these large numbers are just one part of the story. So today, I want to discuss a different aspect, the other side of MOOCs, take a different perspective. We are taking what we develop and learn in the large and applying it in the small to the classroom, to create a blended model of learning.But before I go into that, let me tell you a story. When my daughter turned 13, became a teenager, she stopped speaking English, and she began speaking this new language. I call it teen-lish. It's a digital language. It's got two sounds: a grunt and a silence.""Honey, come over for dinner.""""Hmm.""""Did you hear me?""Silence. (Laughter)""Can you listen to me?""""Hmm.""So we had a real issue with communicating, and we were just not communicating, until one day I had this epiphany. I texted her. (Laughter) I got an instant response. I said, no, that must have been by accident. She must have thought, you know, some friend of hers was calling her. So I texted her again. Boom, another response. I said, this is great. And so since then, our life has changed. I text her, she responds. It's just been absolutely great. (Applause)So our millennial generation is built differently. Now, I'm older, and my youthful looks might belie that, but I'm not in the millennial generation. But our kids are really different. The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology. So why are we fighting it in the classroom? Let's not fight it. Let's embrace it. In fact, I believe — and I have two fat thumbs, I can't text very well — but I'm willing to bet that with evolution, our kids and their grandchildren will develop really, really little, itty-bitty thumbs to text much better, that evolution will fix all of that stuff. But what if we embraced technology, embraced the millennial generation's natural predilections, and really think about creating these online technologies, blend them into their lives. So here's what we can do. So rather than driving our kids into a classroom, herding them out there at 8 o'clock in the morning — I hated going to class at 8 o'clock in the morning, so why are we forcing our kids to do that? So instead what you do is you have them watch videos and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms, in their bedroom, in the dining room, in the bathroom, wherever they're most creative. Then they come into the classroom for some in-person interaction. They can have discussions amongst themselves. They can solve problems together. They can work with the professor and have the professor answer their questions. In fact, with edX, when we were teaching our first course on circuits and electronics around the world, this was happening unbeknownst to us. Two high school teachers at the Sant High School in Mongolia had flipped their classroom, and they were using our video lectures and interactive exercises, where the learners in the high school, 15-year-olds, mind you, would go and do these things in their own homes and they would come into class, and as you see from this image here, they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work. And the only way we discovered this was they wrote a blog and we happened to stumble upon that blog.We were also doing other pilots. So we did a pilot experimental blended courses, working with San Jose State University in California, again, with the circuits and electronics course. You'll hear that a lot. That course has become sort of like our petri dish of learning. So there, the students would, again, the instructors flipped the classroom, blended online and in person, and the results were staggering. Now don't take these results to the bank just yet. Just wait a little bit longer as we experiment with this some more, but the early results are incredible. So traditionally, semester upon semester, for the past several years, this course, again, a hard course, had a failure rate of about 40 to 41 percent every semester. With this blended class late last year, the failure rate fell to nine percent. So the results can be extremely, extremely good.Now before we go too far into this, I'd like to spend some time discussing some key ideas. What are some key ideas that makes all of this work?One idea is active learning. The idea here is, rather than have students walk into class and watch lectures, we replace this with what we call lessons. Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises. So a student might watch a five-, seven-minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise. Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education. You teach by asking questions. And this is a form of learning called active learning, and really promoted by a very early paper, in 1972, by Craik and Lockhart, where they said and discovered that learning and retention really relates strongly to the depth of mental processing. Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material.The second idea is self-pacing. Now, when I went to a lecture hall, and if you were like me, by the fifth minute I would lose the professor. I wasn't all that smart, and I would be scrambling, taking notes, and then I would lose the lecture for the rest of the hour. Instead, wouldn't it be nice with online technologies, we offer videos and interactive engagements to students? They can hit the pause button. They can rewind the professor. Heck, they can even mute the professor. So this form of self-pacing can be very helpful to learning.The third idea that we have is instant feedback. With instant feedback, the computer grades exercises. I mean, how else do you teach 150,000 students? Your computer is grading all the exercises. And we've all submitted homeworks, and your grades come back two weeks later, you've forgotten all about it. I don't think I've still received some of my homeworks from my undergraduate days. Some are never graded. So with instant feedback, students can try to apply answers. If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback. They can try it again and try it again, and this really becomes much more engaging. They get the instant feedback, and this little green check mark that you see here is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX. Learners are telling us that they go to bed at night dreaming of the green check mark. In fact, one of our learners who took the circuits course early last year, he then went on to take a software course from Berkeley at the end of the year, and this is what the learner had to say on our discussion board when he just started that course about the green check mark: ""Oh god; have I missed you."" When's the last time you've seen students posting comments like this about homework? My colleague Ed Bertschinger, who heads up the physics department at MIT, has this to say about instant feedback: He indicated that instant feedback turns teaching moments into learning outcomes.The next big idea is gamification. You know, all learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on. You know, they would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it. So we applied these gamification techniques to learning, and we can build these online laboratories. How do you teach creativity? How do you teach design? We can do this through online labs and use computing power to build these online labs. So as this little video shows here, you can engage students much like they design with Legos. So here, the learners are building a circuit with Lego-like ease. And this can also be graded by the computer.Fifth is peer learning. So here, we use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook-like interaction not as a distraction, but to really help students learn. Let me tell you a story. When we did our circuits course for the 155,000 students, I didn't sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course. I told my TAs, okay, 24/7, we're going to be up monitoring the forum, answering questions. They had answered questions for 100 students. How do you do that for 150,000? So one night I'm sitting up there, at 2 a.m. at night, and I think there's this question from a student from Pakistan, and he asked a question, and I said, okay, let me go and type up an answer, I don't type all that fast, and I begin typing up the answer, and before I can finish, another student from Egypt popped in with an answer, not quite right, so I'm fixing the answer, and before I can finish, a student from the U.S. had popped in with a different answer. And then I sat back, fascinated. Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were discussing and interacting with each other, and by 4 a.m. that night, I'm totally fascinated, having this epiphany, and by 4 a.m. in the morning, they had discovered the right answer. And all I had to do was go and bless it, ""Good answer."" So this is absolutely amazing, where students are learning from each other, and they're telling us that they are learning by teaching.Now this is all not just in the future. This is happening today. So we are applying these blended learning pilots in a number of universities and  high schools around the world, from Tsinghua in China to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia to Berkeley in California — all over the world. And these kinds of technologies really help, the blended model can really help revolutionize education. It can also solve a practical problem of MOOCs, the business aspect. We can also license these MOOC courses to other universities, and therein lies a revenue model for MOOCs, where the university that licenses it with the professor can use these online courses like the next-generation textbook. They can use as much or as little as they like, and it becomes a tool in the teacher's arsenal.Finally, I would like to have you dream with me for a little bit. I would like us to really reimagine education. We will have to move from lecture halls to e-spaces. We have to move from books to tablets like the Aakash in India or the Raspberry Pi, 20 dollars. The Aakash is 40 dollars. We have to move from bricks-and-mortar school buildings to digital dormitories.But I think at the end of the day, I think we will still need one lecture hall in our universities. Otherwise, how else do we tell our grandchildren that your grandparents sat in that room in neat little rows like cornstalks and watched this professor at the end talk about content and, you know, you didn't even have a rewind button?Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anant_agarwal_why_massively_open_online_courses_still_matter
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"In 2007, I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey. Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor, first in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and then at the United States Department of Justice.But when I became the attorney general, two things happened that changed  the way I see criminal justice. The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions. I wanted to understand who we were arresting, who we were charging, and who we were putting in our nation's jails and prisons. I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer. And I couldn't get this information out. It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn't track the things that matter. So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated, I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files, and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes. They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years. And as you can imagine, when we finally got the results, they weren't good. It turned out that we were doing a lot of low-level drug cases on the streets just around the corner from our office in Trenton.The second thing that happened is that I spent the day in the Camden, New Jersey police department. Now, at that time, Camden, New Jersey, was the most dangerous city in America. I ran the Camden Police Department because of that. I spent the day in the police department, and I was taken into a room with senior police officials, all of whom were working hard and trying very hard to reduce crime in Camden. And what I saw in that room, as we talked about how to reduce crime, were a series of officers with a lot of little yellow sticky notes. And they would take a yellow sticky and they would write something on it and they would put it up on a board. And one of them said,  ""We had a robbery two weeks ago. We have no suspects."" And another said, ""We had a shooting in this neighborhood last week. We have no suspects."" We weren't using data-driven policing. We were essentially trying to fight crime with yellow Post-it notes.Now, both of these things made me realize fundamentally that we were failing. We didn't even know who was in our criminal justice system, we didn't have any data about the things that mattered, and we didn't share data or use analytics or tools to help us make better decisions and to reduce crime. And for the first time, I started to think about how we made decisions. When I was an assistant D.A., and when I was a federal prosecutor, I looked at the cases in front of me, and I generally made decisions based on my instinct and my experience. When I became attorney general, I could look at the system as a whole, and what surprised me is that I found that that was exactly how we were doing it across the entire system — in police departments, in prosecutors's offices, in courts and in jails. And what I learned very quickly is that we weren't doing a good job. So I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to introduce data and analytics and rigorous statistical analysis into our work. In short, I wanted to moneyball criminal justice.Now, moneyball, as many of you know, is what the Oakland A's did, where they used smart data and statistics to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games, and they went from a system that  was based on baseball scouts who used to go out and watch players and use their instinct and experience, the scouts' instincts and experience, to pick players, from one to use smart data and rigorous statistical analysis to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games.It worked for the Oakland A's, and it worked in the state of New Jersey. We took Camden off the top of the list as the most dangerous city in America. We reduced murders there by 41 percent, which actually means 37 lives were saved. And we reduced all crime in the city by 26 percent. We also changed the way we did criminal prosecutions. So we went from doing low-level drug crimes that were outside our building to doing cases of statewide importance, on things like reducing violence with the most violent offenders, prosecuting street gangs, gun and drug trafficking, and political corruption.And all of this matters greatly, because public safety to me is the most important function of government. If we're not safe, we can't be educated, we can't be healthy, we can't do any of the other things we want to do in our lives. And we live in a country today where we face serious criminal justice problems. We have 12 million arrests every single year. The vast majority of those arrests are for low-level crimes, like misdemeanors, 70 to 80 percent. Less than five percent of all arrests are for violent crime. Yet we spend 75 billion, that's b for billion, dollars a year on state and local corrections costs. Right now, today, we have 2.3 million people in our jails and prisons. And we face unbelievable public safety challenges because we have a situation in which two thirds of the people in our jails are there waiting for trial. They haven't yet been convicted of a crime. They're just waiting for their day in court. And 67 percent of people come back. Our recidivism rate is amongst  the highest in the world. Almost seven in 10 people who are released from prison will be rearrested in a constant cycle of crime and incarceration.So when I started my job at the Arnold Foundation, I came back to looking at a lot of these questions, and I came back to thinking about how we had used data and analytics to transform the way we did criminal justice in New Jersey. And when I look at the criminal justice system in the United States today, I feel the exact same way that I did about the state of New Jersey when I started there, which is that we absolutely have to do better, and I know that we can do better.So I decided to focus on using data and analytics to help make the most critical decision in public safety, and that decision is the determination of whether, when someone has been arrested, whether they pose a risk to public safety and should be detained, or whether they don't pose a risk to public safety and should be released. Everything that happens in criminal cases comes out of this one decision. It impacts everything. It impacts sentencing. It impacts whether someone gets drug treatment. It impacts crime and violence. And when I talk to judges around the United States, which I do all the time now, they all say the same thing, which is that we put dangerous people in jail, and we let non-dangerous, nonviolent people out. They mean it and they believe it. But when you start to look at the data, which, by the way, the judges don't have, when we start to look at the data, what we find time and time again, is that this isn't the case. We find low-risk offenders, which makes up 50 percent of our entire criminal justice population, we find that they're in jail. Take Leslie Chew, who was a Texas man who stole four blankets on a cold winter night. He was arrested, and he was kept in jail on 3,500 dollars bail, an amount that he could not afford to pay. And he stayed in jail for eight months until his case came up for trial, at a cost to taxpayers of more than 9,000 dollars. And at the other end of the spectrum, we're doing an equally terrible job. The people who we find are the highest-risk offenders, the people who we think have the highest likelihood of committing a new crime if they're released, we see nationally that 50 percent of those people are being released.The reason for this is the way we make decisions. Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk, but they're making them subjectively. They're like the baseball scouts 20 years ago who were using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses. They're being subjective, and we know what happens with subjective decision making, which is that we are often wrong. What we need in this space are strong data and analytics.What I decided to look for was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool, something that would let judges actually understand with a scientific and objective way what the risk was that was posed by someone in front of them. I looked all over the country, and I found that between five and 10 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions actually use any type of risk assessment tool, and when I looked at these tools, I quickly realized why. They were unbelievably expensive to administer, they were time-consuming, they were limited to the local jurisdiction in which they'd been created. So basically, they couldn't be scaled or transferred to other places.So I went out and built a phenomenal team of data scientists and researchers and statisticians to build a universal risk assessment tool, so that every single judge in the United States of America can have an objective, scientific measure of risk. In the tool that we've built, what we did was we collected 1.5 million cases from all around the United States, from cities, from counties, from every single state in the country, the federal districts. And with those 1.5 million cases, which is the largest data set on pretrial in the United States today, we were able to basically find that there were 900-plus risk factors that we could look at to try to figure out what mattered most. And we found that there were nine specific things that mattered all across the country and that were the most highly predictive of risk. And so we built a universal risk assessment tool. And it looks like this. As you'll see, we put some information in, but most of it is incredibly simple, it's easy to use, it focuses on things like the defendant's prior convictions, whether they've been sentenced to incarceration, whether they've engaged in violence before, whether they've even failed to come back to court. And with this tool, we can predict three things. First, whether or not someone will commit a new crime if they're released. Second, for the first time, and I think this is incredibly important, we can predict whether someone will commit an act of violence if they're released. And that's the single most important thing that judges say when you talk to them. And third, we can predict whether someone will come back to court. And every single judge in the United States of America can use it, because it's been created on a universal data set.What judges see if they run the risk assessment tool is this — it's a dashboard. At the top, you see the New Criminal Activity Score, six of course being the highest, and then in the middle you see, ""Elevated risk of violence."" What that says is that this person is someone who has an elevated risk of violence that the judge should look twice at. And then, towards the bottom, you see the Failure to Appear Score, which again is the likelihood that someone will come back to court.Now I want to say something really important. It's not that I think we should be eliminating the judge's instinct and experience from this process. I don't. I actually believe the problem that we see and the reason that we have these incredible system errors, where we're incarcerating low-level, nonviolent people and we're releasing high-risk, dangerous people, is that we don't have an objective measure of risk. But what I believe should happen is that we should take that data-driven risk assessment and combine that with the judge's instinct and experience to lead us to better decision making. The tool went statewide in Kentucky on July 1, and we're about to go up in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions. Our goal, quite simply, is that every single judge in the United States will use a data-driven risk tool within the next five years. We're now working on risk tools for prosecutors and for police officers as well, to try to take a system that runs today in America the same way it did 50 years ago, based on instinct and experience, and make it into one that runs on data and analytics.Now, the great news about all this, and we have a ton of work left to do, and we have a lot of culture to change, but the great news about all of it is that we know it works. It's why Google is Google, and it's why all these baseball teams use moneyball to win games. The great news for us as well is that it's the way that we can transform the American criminal justice system. It's how we can make our streets safer, we can reduce our prison costs, and we can make our system much fairer and more just. Some people call it data science. I call it moneyballing criminal justice.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_milgram_why_smart_statistics_are_the_key_to_fighting_crime
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"I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products.So allow me to tell you about it. So I have a brother, Gavin. When this whole shebang happened, he was four. He loved to cook. He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. He wanted to be a chef really badly. And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? I mean, we all had those when we were little. And he wanted one so badly.But then he started to realize something. In the commercials, and on the  boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. And this discouraged my brother a lot. He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending.And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors.So this petition started to take off — humongously fast, you have no idea. I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition.(Applause)Thank you.So, needless to say, it was crazy. Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. It was literally one of the best moments of my life. It was like ""Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."" That thing was amazing.What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe  even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? So, let's see. From user name Liquidsore29 — interesting user names we have here— ""Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay."" Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. How about from Whiteboy77AGS: ""People always need something to (female dog) about."" From Jeffrey Gutierrez: ""OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention.""So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful  to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future?But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you  can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through  YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been  hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mckenna_pope_want_to_be_an_activist_start_with_your_toys
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"Science, science has allowed us to know so much about the far reaches of the universe, which is at the same time tremendously important and extremely remote, and yet much, much closer, much more directly related to us, there are many things we don't really understand. And one of them is the extraordinary social complexity of the animals around us, and today I want to tell you a few stories of animal complexity.But first, what do we call complexity? What is complex? Well, complex is not complicated. Something complicated comprises many small parts, all different, and each of them has its own precise role in the machinery. On the opposite, a complex system is made of many, many similar parts, and it is their interaction that produces a globally coherent behavior. Complex systems have many interacting parts which behave according to simple, individual rules, and this results in emergent properties. The behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from the individual rules only. As Aristotle wrote, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But from Aristotle, let's move onto a more concrete example of complex systems.These are Scottish terriers. In the beginning, the system is disorganized. Then comes a perturbation: milk. Every individual starts pushing in one direction and this is what happens. The pinwheel is an emergent property of the interactions between puppies whose only rule is to try to keep access to the milk and therefore to push in a random direction.So it's all about finding the simple rules from which complexity emerges. I call this simplifying complexity, and it's what we do at the chair of systems design at ETH Zurich. We collect data on animal populations, analyze complex patterns, try to explain them. It requires physicists who work with biologists, with mathematicians and computer scientists, and it is their interaction that produces cross-boundary competence to solve these problems. So again, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In a way, collaboration is another example of a complex system.And you may be asking yourself which side I'm on, biology or physics? In fact, it's a little different, and to explain, I need to tell you a short story about myself. When I was a child, I loved to build stuff, to create complicated machines. So I set out to study electrical engineering and robotics, and my end-of-studies project was about building a robot called ER-1 — it looked like this— that would collect information from its environment and proceed to follow a white line on the ground. It was very, very complicated, but it worked beautifully in our test room, and on demo day, professors had  assembled to grade the project. So we took ER-1 to the evaluation room. It turned out, the light in that room was slightly different. The robot's vision system got confused. At the first bend in the line, it left its course, and crashed into a wall. We had spent weeks building it, and all it took to destroy it was a subtle change in the color of the light in the room. That's when I realized that the more complicated you make a machine, the more likely that it will fail due to something absolutely unexpected. And I decided that, in fact, I didn't really want to create complicated stuff. I wanted to understand complexity, the complexity of the world around us and especially in the animal kingdom.Which brings us to bats. Bechstein's bats are a common species of European bats. They are very social animals. Mostly they roost, or sleep, together. And they live in maternity colonies, which means that every spring, the females meet after the winter hibernation, and they stay together for about six months to rear their young, and they all carry a very small chip, which means that every time one of them enters one of these specially equipped bat boxes, we know where she is, and more importantly, we know with whom she is. So I study roosting associations in bats, and this is what it looks like. During the day, the bats roost in a number of sub-groups in different boxes. It could be that on one day, the colony is split between two boxes, but on another day, it could be together in a single box, or split between three or more boxes, and that all seems rather erratic, really. It's called fission-fusion dynamics, the property for an animal group of regularly splitting and merging into different subgroups.So what we do is take all these data from all these different days and pool them together to extract a long-term association pattern by applying techniques with network analysis to get a complete picture of the social structure of the colony. Okay? So that's what this picture looks like. In this network, all the circles are nodes, individual bats, and the lines between them are social bonds, associations between individuals. It turns out this is a very interesting picture. This bat colony is organized in two different communities which cannot be predicted from the daily fission-fusion dynamics. We call them cryptic social units. Even more interesting, in fact: Every year, around October, the colony splits up, and all bats hibernate separately, but year after year, when the bats come together again in the spring, the communities stay the same.So these bats remember their friends for a really long time. With a brain the size of a peanut, they maintain individualized, long-term social bonds, We didn't know that was possible. We knew that primates and elephants and dolphins could do that, but compared to bats, they have huge brains. So how could it be that the bats maintain this complex, stable social structure with such limited cognitive abilities?And this is where complexity brings an answer. To understand this system, we built a computer model of roosting, based on simple, individual rules, and simulated thousands and thousands of days in the virtual bat colony. It's a mathematical model, but it's not complicated. What the model told us is that, in a nutshell, each bat knows a few other colony members as her friends, and is just slightly more likely to roost in a box with them. Simple, individual rules. This is all it takes to explain the social complexity of these bats.But it gets better. Between 2010 and 2011, the colony lost more than two thirds of its members, probably due to the very cold winter. The next spring, it didn't form two communities like every year, which may have led the whole colony to die because it had become too small. Instead, it formed a single, cohesive social unit, which allowed the colony to survive that season and thrive again in the next two years. What we know is that the bats are not aware that their colony is doing this. All they do is follow simple association rules, and from this simplicity emerges social complexity which allows the colony to be resilient against dramatic changes in the population structure. And I find this incredible.Now I want to tell you another story, but for this we have to travel from Europe to the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. This is where meerkats live. I'm sure you know meerkats. They're fascinating creatures. They live in groups with a very strict social hierarchy. There is one dominant pair, and many subordinates, some acting as sentinels, some acting as babysitters, some teaching pups, and so on. What we do is put very small GPS collars on these animals to study how they move together, and what this has to do with their social structure. And there's a very interesting example of collective movement in meerkats. In the middle of the reserve which they live in lies a road. On this road there are cars, so it's dangerous. But the meerkats have to cross it to get from one feeding place to another. So we asked, how exactly do they do this? We found that the dominant female is mostly the one who leads the group to the road, but when it comes to crossing it, crossing the road, she gives way to the subordinates, a manner of saying, ""Go ahead, tell me if it's safe."" What I didn't know, in fact, was what rules in their behavior the meerkats follow for this change at the edge of the group to happen and if simple rules were sufficient to explain it.So I built a model, a model of simulated meerkats crossing a simulated road. It's a simplistic model. Moving meerkats are like random particles whose unique rule is one of alignment. They simply move together. When these particles get to the road, they sense some kind of obstacle, and they bounce against it. The only difference between the dominant female, here in red, and the other individuals, is that for her, the height of the obstacle, which is in fact the risk perceived from the road, is just slightly higher, and this tiny difference in the individual's rule of movement is sufficient to explain what we observe, that the dominant female leads her group to the road and then gives way to the others for them to cross first. George Box, who was an English statistician, once wrote, ""All models are false, but some models are useful."" And in fact, this model is obviously false, because in reality, meerkats are anything but random particles. But it's also useful, because it tells us that extreme simplicity in movement rules at the individual level can result in a great deal of complexity at the level of the group. So again, that's simplifying complexity.I would like to conclude on what this means for the whole species. When the dominant female gives way to a subordinate, it's not out of courtesy. In fact, the dominant female is extremely important for the cohesion of the group. If she dies on the road, the whole group is at risk. So this behavior of risk avoidance is a very old evolutionary response. These meerkats are replicating an evolved tactic that is thousands of generations old, and they're adapting it to a modern risk, in this case a road built by humans. They adapt very simple rules, and the resulting complex behavior allows them to resist human encroachment into their natural habitat.In the end, it may be bats which change their social structure in response to a population crash, or it may be meerkats who show a novel adaptation to a human road, or it may be another species. My message here — and it's not a complicated one, but a simple one of wonder and hope — my message here is that animals show extraordinary social complexity, and this allows them to adapt and respond to changes in their environment. In three words, in the animal kingdom, simplicity leads to complexity which leads to resilience.Thank you.(Applause) Dania Gerhardt: Thank you very much, Nicolas, for this great start. Little bit nervous? Nicolas Perony: I'm okay, thanks. DG: Okay, great. I'm sure a  lot of people in the audience somehow tried to make associations between the animals you were talking about — the bats, meerkats — and humans. You brought some examples: The females are the social ones, the females are the dominant ones, I'm not sure who thinks how. But is it okay to do these associations? Are there stereotypes you can confirm in this regard that can be valid across all species? NP: Well, I would say there are also counter-examples to these stereotypes. For examples, in sea horses or in koalas, in fact, it is the males who take care of the young always. And the lesson is that it's often difficult, and sometimes even a bit dangerous, to draw parallels between humans and animals. So that's it. DG: Okay. Thank you very much for this great start. Thank you, Nicolas Perony.","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicolas_perony_puppies_now_that_i_ve_got_your_attention_complexity_theory
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"Server: May I help you, sir?Customer: Uh, let's see.Server: We have pan seared registry error sprinkled with the finest corrupted data, binary brioche, RAM sandwiches, Conficker fitters, and a scripting salad with or without polymorphic dressing, and a grilled coding kabob.Customer: I'd like a RAM sandwich and a glass of your finest Code 39.Server: Would you like any desserts, sir? Our special is tracking cookie.Customer: I'd like a batch of some zombie tracking cookies, thank you.Server: Coming right up, sir. Your food will be served shortly.(Applause)Maya Penn: I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, and I've been making animated flip books since I was three years old. At that age, I also learned about what an animator was. There was a program on TV about jobs most kids don't know about. When I understood that an animator makes the cartoons I saw on TV, I immediately said, ""That's what I want to be."" I don't know if I said it mentally or out loud, but that was a greatly defining moment in my life.Animation and art has always been my first love. It was my love for technology that sparked the idea for ""Malicious Dishes."" There was a virus on my computer, and I was trying to get rid of it, and all of a sudden, I just thought, what if viruses have their own little world inside the computer? Maybe a restaurant where they meet up and do virusy things? And thus, ""Malicious Dishes"" was born.At four years old, my dad showed me how to take apart a computer and put it back together again. That started my love for technology. I built my first website myself in HTML, and I'm learning JavaScript and Python.I'm also working on an animated series called ""The Pollinators."" It's about bees and other pollinators in our environment and why they're so important. If plants aren't pollinated by the pollinators, then all creatures, including ourselves, that depend on these plants, would starve. So I decided to take these cool creatures and make a superhero team. (Applause) (Foot stomp) (Music) (Roar) Pollinator: Deforestsaurus! I should have known! I need to call on the rest of the Pollinators! (Music)Thank you. (Applause)All of my animations start with ideas, but what are ideas? Ideas can spark a movement. Ideas are opportunities and innovation. Ideas truly are what make the world go round. If it wasn't for ideas, we wouldn't be where we are now with technology, medicine, art, culture, and how we even live our lives. At eight years old, I took my ideas and started my own business called Maya's Ideas, and my nonprofit, Maya's Ideas for the Planet. (Laughter) And I make eco-friendly clothing and accessories. I'm 13 now, and although I started my business in 2008, my artistic journey started way before then. I was greatly influenced by art, and I wanted to incorporate it in everything I did, even my business. I would find different fabrics around the house, and say, ""This could be a scarf or a hat,"" and I had all these ideas for designs. I noticed when I wore my creations, people would stop me and say, ""Wow, that's really cute. Where can I get one?"" And I thought, I can start my own business.Now I didn't have any business plans at only eight years old. I only knew I wanted to make pretty creations that were safe for the environment and I wanted to give back. My mom taught me how to sew, and on my back porch, I would sit and make little headbands out of ribbon, and I would write down the names and the price of each item. I started making more items like hats, scarves and bags. Soon, my items began selling all over the world, and I had customers in Denmark, Italy, Australia, Canada and more.Now, I had a lot to learn about my business, like branding and marketing, staying engaged with my customers, and seeing what sold the most and the least. Soon, my business really started to take off. Then one day, Forbes magazine  contacted me when I was 10 years old. (Laughter) They wanted to feature me and my company in their article.Now a lot of people ask me, why is your business eco-friendly? I've had a passion for protecting the environment and its creatures since I was little. My parents taught me at an early age about giving back and being a good steward to the environment. I heard about how the dyes in some clothing or the process of even making the items was harmful to the people and the planet, so I started doing my own research, and I discovered that even after dyeing has being completed, there is a waste issue that gives a negative impact on the environment. For example, the grinding of materials, or the dumping of dried powder materials. These actions can pollute the air, making it toxic to anyone or anything that inhales it. So when I started my business, I knew two things: All of my items had to be eco-friendly, and 10 to 20 percent of the profits I made went to local and global charities and environmental organizations. (Applause) I feel I'm part of the new wave of entrepreneurs that not only seeks to have a successful business, but also a sustainable future. I feel that I can meet the needs of my customers without compromising the ability of future generations to live in a greener tomorrow.We live in a big, diverse and beautiful world, and that makes me even more passionate to save it. But it's never enough to just to get it through your heads about the things that are happening in our world. It takes to get it through your hearts, because when you get it through your heart, that is when movements are sparked. That is when opportunities and innovation are created, and that is why ideas come to life.Thank you, and peace and blessings.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)Pat Mitchell: So, you heard Maya talk about the amazing parents who are behind this incredible woman. Where are they? Please, Mr. and Mrs. Penn. Would you just — Ah! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maya_penn_meet_a_young_entrepreneur_cartoonist_designer_activist
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"I want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 1980s. They would come into the emergency room with what the police would call ""a lovers' quarrel,"" and I would see a woman who was beaten, I would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes. And as activists, we would take our Polaroid camera, we would take her picture, we would wait 90 seconds, and we would give her the photograph. And she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court. We were making what was invisible visible.I've been doing this for 30 years. I've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children. And for all those years, I've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable, that it is learned, and if it's learned, it can be un-learned, and it can be prevented. (Applause)Why do I believe this? Because it's true. It is absolutely true. Between 1993 and 2010, domestic violence among adult women in the United States has gone down by 64 percent, and that is great news. (Applause)Sixty-four percent. Now, how did we get there? Our eyes were wide open. Thirty years ago, women were beaten, they were stalked, they were raped, and no one talked about it. There was no justice. And as an activist, that was not good enough. And so step one on this journey is we organized, and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters, and if they didn't open a shelter, they opened their home so that women and children could be safe. And you know what else we did? We had bake sales, we had car washes, and we did everything we could do to fundraise, and then at one point we said, you know, it's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people's lives. Right? (Applause)And so, step number two, we knew we needed to change the laws. And so we went to Washington, and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation. And I remember walking through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, and I was in my 30s, and my life had purpose, and I couldn't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation. I was probably 30 and naive. But I heard about a congressman who had a very, very different point of view. Do you know what he called this important piece of legislation? He called it the Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. The Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act. Ladies and gentlemen, that was in 1984 in the United States, and I wish I had Twitter. (Laughter)Ten years later, after lots of hard work, we finally passed the Violence Against Women Act, which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives. (Applause) Thank you. I was proud to be part of that work, and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities.And you know what else it did? It collected data. And I have to tell you, I'm passionate about data. In fact, I am a data nerd. I'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here. I am a data nerd, and the reason for that is I want to make sure that if we spend a dollar, that the program works, and if it doesn't work, we should change the plan.And I also want to say one other thing: We are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters. It is about economic empowerment for women, it is about healing kids who are hurt, and it is about prevention with a capital P.And so, step number three on this journey: We know, if we're going to keep making this progress, we're going to have to turn up the volume, we're going to have to increase the visibility, and we're going to have to engage the public. And so knowing that, we went to the Advertising Council, and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign. And we looked around the world to Canada and Australia and Brazil and parts of Africa, and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called There's No Excuse for Domestic Violence. Take a look at one of our spots.(Video) Man: Where's dinner?Woman: Well, I thought you'd be home a couple hours ago, and I put everything away, so—Man: What is this? Pizza. Woman: If you had just called me, I would have known—Man: Dinner? Dinner ready is a pizza? Woman: Honey, please don't be so loud. Please don't—Let go of me!Man: Get in the kitchen! Woman: No! Help!Man: You want to see what hurts? (Slaps woman)That's what hurts! That's what hurts! (Breaking glass)Woman: Help me![""Children have to sit by and watch. What's your excuse?""]Esta Soler: As we were in the process of releasing this campaign, O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend. We learned that he had a long history of domestic violence. The media became fixated. The story of domestic violence went from the back page, but actually from the no-page, to the front page. Our ads blanketed the airwaves, and women, for the first time, started to tell their stories. Movements are about moments, and we seized this moment. And let me just put this in context. Before 1980, do you have any idea how many articles were in The New York Times on domestic violence? I'll tell you: 158. And in the 2000s, over 7,000. We were obviously making a difference.But we were still missing a critical element. So, step four: We needed to engage men. We couldn't solve this problem with 50 percent of the population on the sidelines. And I already told you I'm a data nerd. National polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation. So we wondered, how can we include men? How can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls? And a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said, ""You want men to talk about violence against women and girls. Men don't talk."" (Laughter) I apologize to the men in the audience. I know you do. But he said, ""Do you know what they do do? They do talk to their kids. They talk to their kids as parents, as coaches."" And that's what we did. We met men where they were at and we built a program. And then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life. And he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships. And all of a sudden, he looked at the back of the room, and he saw his daughter, and he called out his daughter's name, Michaela, and he said, ""Michaela, come up here."" And she's nine years old, and she was kind of shy, and she got up there, and he said, ""Sit down next to me."" She sat right down next to him. He gave her this big hug, and he said, ""People ask me why I do this work. I do this work because I'm her dad, and I don't want anyone ever to hurt her."" And as a parent, I get it. I get it, knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported. We've done a lot for adult women. We've got to do a better job for our kids. We just do. We have to. (Applause)We've come a long way since the days of the Polaroid. Technology has been our friend. The mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women, and Facebook and Twitter and Google and YouTube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way. And so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms, as an organizer, I say, thank you very much. Really. I clap for you. (Applause)I'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life, the Optimist Club. You can't make that one up. And it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my DNA. I have been doing this work for over 30 years, and I am convinced, now more than ever, in the capacity of human beings to change. I believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality, and I also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition. And I ask you, stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/esta_soler_how_we_turned_the_tide_on_domestic_violence_hint_the_polaroid_helped
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"Five years ago, I was a Ph.D. student living two lives. In one, I used NASA supercomputers to design next-generation spacecraft, and in the other I was a data scientist looking for potential smugglers of sensitive nuclear technologies. As a data scientist, I did a lot of analyses, mostly of facilities, industrial facilities around the world. And I was always looking for a better canvas to tie these all together. And one day, I was thinking about how all data has a location, and I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face. Although I was a satellite engineer, I hadn't thought about using satellite imagery in my work.Now, like most of us, I'd been online, I'd see my house, so I thought, I'll hop in there and I'll start looking up some of these facilities. And what I found really surprised me. The pictures that I was finding were years out of date, and because of that, it had relatively little relevance to the work that I was doing today. But I was intrigued. I mean, satellite imagery is pretty amazing stuff. There are millions and millions of sensors surrounding us today, but there's still so much we don't know on a daily basis. How much oil is stored in all of China? How much corn is being produced? How many ships are in all of our world's ports? Now, in theory, all of these questions could be answered by imagery, but not if it's old. And if this data was so valuable, then how come I couldn't get my hands on more recent pictures?So the story begins over 50 years ago with the launch of the first generation of U.S. government photo reconnaissance satellites. And today, there's a handful of the great, great grandchildren of these early Cold War machines which are now operated by private companies and from which the vast majority of satellite imagery that you and I see on a daily basis comes. During this period, launching things into space, just the rocket to get the satellite up there, has cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, and that's created tremendous pressure to launch things infrequently and to make sure that when you do, you cram as much functionality in there as possible. All of this has only made satellites bigger and bigger and bigger and more expensive, now nearly a billion, with a b, dollars per copy. Because they are so expensive, there aren't very many of them. Because there aren't very many of them, the pictures that we see on a daily basis tend to be old.I think a lot of people actually understand this anecdotally, but in order to visualize just how sparsely our planet is collected, some friends and I put together a dataset of the 30 million pictures that have been gathered by these satellites between 2000 and 2010. As you can see in blue, huge areas of our world are barely seen, less than once a year, and even the areas that are seen most frequently, those in red, are seen at best once a quarter. Now as aerospace engineering grad students, this chart cried out to us as a challenge. Why do these things have to be so expensive? Does a single satellite really have to cost the equivalent of three 747 jumbo jets? Wasn't there a way to build a smaller, simpler, new satellite design that could enable more timely imaging?I realize that it does sound a little bit crazy that we were going to go out and just begin designing satellites, but fortunately we had help. In the late 1990s, a couple of professors proposed a concept for radically reducing the price of putting things in space. This was hitchhiking small satellites alongside much larger satellites. This dropped the cost of putting objects up there by over a factor of 100, and suddenly we could afford to experiment, to take a little bit of risk, and to realize a lot of innovation. And a new generation of engineers and scientists, mostly out of universities, began launching these very small, breadbox-sized satellites called CubeSats. And these were built with electronics obtained from RadioShack instead of Lockheed Martin.Now it was using the lessons learned from these early missions that my friends and I began a series of sketches of our own satellite design. And I can't remember a specific day where we made a conscious decision that we were actually going to go out and build these things, but once we got that idea in our minds of the world as a dataset, of being able to capture millions of data points on a daily basis describing the global economy, of being able to unearth billions of connections between them that had never before been found, it just seemed boring to go work on anything else.And so we moved into a cramped, windowless office in Palo Alto, and began working to take our design from the drawing board into the lab. The first major question we had to tackle was just how big to build this thing. In space, size drives cost, and we had worked with these very small, breadbox-sized satellites in school, but as we began to better understand the laws of physics, we found that the quality of pictures those satellites could take was very limited, because the laws of physics dictate that the best picture you can take through a telescope is a function of the diameter of that telescope, and these satellites had a very small, very constrained volume. And we found that the best picture we would have been able to get looked something like this. Although this was the low-cost option, quite frankly it was just too blurry to see the things that make satellite imagery valuable. So about three or four weeks later, we met a group of engineers randomly who had worked on the first private imaging satellite ever developed, and they told us that back in the 1970s, the U.S. government had found a powerful optimal tradeoff — that in taking pictures at right about one meter resolution, being able to see objects one meter in size, they had found that they could not just get very high-quality images, but get a lot of them at an affordable price. From our own computer simulations, we quickly found that one meter really was the minimum viable product to be able to see the drivers of our global economy, for the first time, being able to count the ships and cars and shipping containers and trucks that move around our world on a daily basis, while conveniently still not being able to see individuals. We had found our compromise. We would have to build something larger than the original breadbox, now more like a mini-fridge, but we still wouldn't have to build a pickup truck. So now we had our constraint. The laws of physics dictated the absolute minimum-sized telescope that we could build.What came next was making the rest of the satellite as small and as simple as possible, basically a flying telescope with four walls and a set of electronics smaller than a phone book that used less power than a 100 watt lightbulb. The big challenge became actually taking the pictures through that telescope. Traditional imaging satellites use a line scanner, similar to a Xerox machine, and as they traverse the Earth, they take pictures, scanning row by row by row to build the complete image. Now people use these because they get a lot of light, which means less of the noise you see in a low-cost cell phone image. The problem with them is they require very sophisticated pointing. You have to stay focused on a 50-centimeter target from over 600 miles away while moving at more than seven kilometers a second, which requires an awesome degree of complexity. So instead, we turned to a new generation of video sensors, originally created for use in night vision goggles. Instead of taking a single, high quality image, we could take a videostream of individually noisier frames, but then we could recombine all of those frames together into very high-quality images using sophisticated pixel processing techniques here on the ground, at a cost of one one hundredth a traditional system. And we applied this technique to many of the other systems on the satellite as well, and day by day, our design evolved from CAD to prototypes to production units.A few short weeks ago, we packed up SkySat 1, put our signatures on it, and waved goodbye for the last time on Earth. Today, it's sitting in its final launch configuration ready to blast off in a few short weeks. And soon, we'll turn our attention to launching a constellation of 24 or more of these satellites and beginning to build the scalable analytics that will allow us to unearth the insights in the petabytes of data we will collect.So why do all of this? Why build these satellites? Well, it turns out imaging satellites have a unique ability to provide global transparency, and providing that transparency on a timely basis is simply an idea whose time has come. We see ourselves as pioneers of a new frontier, and beyond economic data, unlocking the human story, moment by moment. For a data scientist that just happened to go to space camp as a kid, it just doesn't get much better than that.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_berkenstock_the_world_is_one_big_dataset_now_how_to_photograph_it
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"The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization, resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world. This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today's urban crisis. But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental. It's particularly a cultural crisis, a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing, unable to challenge the oil-hungry, selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption, from southern California to New York to Dubai. So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and, in fact, depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations, that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today.And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity, as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region, which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect.This is the wall, the border wall, that separates San Diego and Tijuana, Latin America and the United States, a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities, jurisdictions and resources across the world. In this border region, we find some of the wealthiest real estate, as I once found in the edges of San Diego, barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest  settlements in Latin America. And while these two cities have the same population, San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades, immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density, which are at the center of today's discussion about environmental sustainability. So I've been arguing in the last years that, in fact, the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability, that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization.What do I mean by the informal in this case? I'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization. I'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up, whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves, in fact, with the waste of San Diego, or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades.So I've been interested as an artist in the measuring, the observation, of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border: in one direction, from south to north, the flow of immigrants into the United States, and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana. I'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades. So these are houses waiting to cross the border. Not only people cross the border here, but entire chunks of one city move to the next, and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames, they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house, with a small business. This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice. But not only houses, also small debris from one city, from San Diego, to Tijuana. Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls. But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency. They have figured out how to peel off the tire, how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall. Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana.So while, as an architect, this is a very compelling thing to witness, this creative intelligence, I also want to keep myself in check. I don't want to romanticize poverty. I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness, that informality here, the informal, is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists, that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs. See here, buildings are not important just for their looks, but, in fact, they are important for what they can do. They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources.So while waste flows southbound, people go north in search of dollars, and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States, particularly in San Diego. And I'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization — I mean, on steroids — with the small programs, social and economic. I'm referring to how immigrants, when they come to these neighborhoods, they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems, as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage, or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family. This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new, inclusive and more equitable land use policies. So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space, such as ""the informal Buddha,"" which tells the story of a small house that saved itself, it did not travel to Mexico, but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple, and in so doing, this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small, or a micro, socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood.So these action neighborhoods, as I call them, really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do, in fact, with belonging to the nation-state, and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city.As an artist, I've been interested, in fact, in the visualization of citizenship, the gathering of many anecdotes, urban stories, in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces. This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night, a few months ago, decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park. With shovels in hand, they started to dig. Two weeks later, the police stopped them. They barricaded the place, and the teenagers were evicted, and the teenagers decided to fight back, not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process. The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space. They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy. Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway, so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them. They were lucky, they said, because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality. They were also lucky, they said, because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction, between port authority, airport authority, two city districts, and a review board. All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space. With this knowledge, these teenagers as skaters confronted the city. They came to the city attorney's office. The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO, and of course they didn't know what an NGO was. They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience. And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise, to organize budgets, to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city, expanding it to other categories. At the end, the teenagers won the case with that evidence, and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway.Now for many of you, this story might seem trivial or naive. For me as an architect, it has become a fundamental narrative, because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability. They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border, they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool, because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city. In that act, that informal, bottom-up act of transgression, really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy.Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today. And I'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world, in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance, social organization, and infrastructure, really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban. It is, in fact, this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city. I want to say this and emphasize it, because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/teddy_cruz_how_architectural_innovations_migrate_across_borders
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"Intelligence — what is it? If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that ""the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim."" Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.Let's take a step back. Let's first begin with a thought experiment. Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. And you observe a really strange effect. You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. We're trying to prevent an impact. But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence.So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. In cosmology, for example, there have been a variety of different threads of evidence that our universe appears to be finely tuned for the development of intelligence, and, in particular, for the development of universal states that maximize the diversity of possible futures. In game play, for example, in Go — everyone remembers in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue beat  Garry Kasparov at chess — fewer people are aware that in the past 10 years or so, the game of Go, arguably a much more challenging game because it has a much higher branching factor, has also started to succumb to computer game players for the same reason: the best techniques right now for computers playing Go are techniques that try to maximize future options during game play. Finally, in robotic motion planning, there have been a variety of recent techniques that have tried to take advantage of abilities of robots to maximize future freedom of action in order to accomplish complex tasks. And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? Is there a single equation for intelligence?And the answer, I believe, is yes. [""F = T ∇ Sτ""] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen. So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? How predictive is it? Does it predict human-level intelligence? Does it predict artificial intelligence? So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation.(Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more disorder, or ""entropy,"" over their lifetimes should tend to have more favorable conditions for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. Here are some examples of Entropica in action.Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields.Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation.Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance.Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action.Now, there's a profound irony here. Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play ""RUR,"" there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. The machines would rise up against us. One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. It's quite the opposite, that the urge to take control of all possible futures is a more fundamental principle than that of intelligence, that general intelligence may in fact emerge directly from this sort of control-grabbing, rather than vice versa.Another important consequence is goal seeking. I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? And the answer is, the ability to seek goals will follow directly from this in the following sense: just like you would travel through a tunnel, a bottleneck in your future path space, in order to achieve many other diverse objectives later on, or just like you would invest in a financial security, reducing your short-term liquidity in order to increase your wealth over the long term, goal seeking emerges directly from a long-term drive to increase future freedom of action.Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence
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"Hi. So today, I'd like to share some works in progress. Since we are still realizing these works, we are largely working within the realm of intuition and mystery, still. So I'm going to try and describe some of the experiences that we're looking for through each of the works.So the first work is called the Imperial Monochromes. A viewer sort of unsuspectingly walks into the room, and catches a glimpse of these panels in a messy composition on the wall. Within seconds, as if the panels have noticed the presence of the viewer, they appear to panic and sort of get into a strict symmetry. (Laughter) So this is the sketch of the two states. One is total chaos. The other is absolute order. And we were interested in seeing how little change it takes to move from one state to the other state. This also reminded us of two very different pictorial traditions. One is the altar tablets of the 15th century, and the other is about 100 years ago, Malevich's abstract compositions. So I'm just going to take you to a video. To give you a sense of scale, the largest panel is about two meters high. That's about this much.  And the smallest one is an A4. So a viewer enters the space, and they snap to attention. And after a while, if the viewer continues to remain in the space, the panels will sort of become immune to the presence of the viewer and become lax and autonomous again, until they sort of sense a presence in the room or a movement, when they will again snap to attention. (Laughter) So here it appears as if it's the viewer that's sort of instigating the sense of order among the panels, but it could also be the other way around, that the panels are so stuck within their preconditioned behaviors that they sort of thrust the viewer with the role of a tyrant.So this brings me to a quieter, small work called Handheld. The viewer sees a piece of paper that's mounted on the far end of the wall, but when you go closer, you see that it's a blank A4, or a letter-sized piece of paper, that's held on either side by two small hands that appear to be carved with a great deal of attention and care from a small block of wood. The viewer also sees that this entire sculpture is sort of moving very slightly, as if these two hands are trying to hold the paper very still for a long period of time, and somehow are not managing to. So this instability in the movement very closely resembles the unsteady nature of images seen through a handheld camera. So here I'm going to show you two tandem clips. One is through a still camera and the other is through a handheld camera. And you immediately see how the unsteady nature of the video suggests the presence of an observer and a subjective point of view. So we've just removed the camera and transferred that movement onto the panel. So here's a video. You have to imagine the other hand. It's not there yet. But to us, we're sort of trying to evoke a self-effacing gesture, as if there's a little person with outstretched arms behind this enormous piece of paper. That sort of likens it to the amount of strain to be at the service of the observer and present this piece of paper very delicately to the viewer in front of them.The next work is Decoy. This is a cardboard model, so the object is about as tall as I am. It has a rounded body, two arms, and a very tall, head-like antenna, and its sole purpose is to attract attention towards itself. So when a viewer passes by, it sort of tilts from side to side, and moves its arms more and more frantically as the person gets closer. So here is the first test scenario. You see the two movements integrated, and the object seems to be employing its entire being in this expression of desperation. But the idea is that once it's got the person's attention, it's no longer interested, and it looks for the next person whose attention to get. (Laughter) So this is the final fabricated body of the Decoy. It appears to be mass-manufactured like it came out of a factory like vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Because we are always working from a very personal space, we like how this consumer aesthetic sort of depersonalizes the object and gives us a bit of distance in its appearance, at least. And so to us this is a kind of sinister being which is trying to distract you from the things that actually need your attention, but it could also be a figure that needs a lot of help. The next work is an object, that's also a kind of sound instrument. In the shape of an amphitheater that's scaled to the size of an audience as perceived from somebody from the stage. So from where I'm standing, each of you appears to be this big, and the audience sort of takes the entire field of my vision. Seated in this audience are 996 small figures. They're mechanically enabled to clap of their own free will. This means that each of them can decide if and when they want to clap, how hard, for how long, how they want to be influenced by those around them or influence others, and if they want to contribute to innovation. So when the viewer steps in front of the audience, there will be a response. It could be a few claps or a strong applause, and then nothing happens until the viewer leaves the stage, and again the audience will respond. It could be anything from a few feeble claps from members in the audience, or it could be a very loud ovation. So to us, I think we're really looking at an audience as its own object or its own organism that's also got a sort of musical-like quality to it, an instrument. So the viewer can play it by eliciting quite complex and varied, nuanced musical or sound patterns, but cannot really provoke the audience into any particular kind of response. So there's a sense of judgment and capriciousness and uneasiness involved. It also has an alluring and trap-like quality to it. So here if you see we're quite excited about the image of the head splitting to form the two hands. So here's a small visual animation, as if the two sides of the brain are sort of clashing against each other to kind of make sense of the duality and the tension. And here is a prototype. So we can't wait to be engulfed by 996 of them.Okay, this is the last work. It's called the Framerunners. It comes out of the idea of a window. This is an actual window in our studio, and as you can see, it's made up of three different thicknesses of wooden sections. So we used the same window vocabulary to construct our own frame or grid that's suspended in the room and that can be viewed from two sides. This grid is inhabited by a tribe of small figures. They're also made up of three different sizes, as if to suggest a kind of perspective or landscape on the single plain. Each of these figures can also run backward and forward in the track and hide behind two adjacent tracks. So in contrast to this very tight grid, we wanted to give these figures a very comical and slapstick-like quality, as if a puppeteer has taken them and physically animated them down the path. So we like the idea of these figures sort of skipping along like they're oblivious and carefree and happy-go-lucky and content, until they sort of sense a movement from the viewer and they will hide behind the fastest wall. So to us, this work also presents its own contradiction. These figures are sort of entrapped within this very strong grid, which is like a prison, but also a fortress, because it allows them to be oblivious and naive and carefree and quite oblivious of the external world. So all these real life qualities that I talk about are sort of translated to a very specific technical configuration, and we were very lucky to collaborate with ETH Zurich to develop the first prototype. So you see they extracted the motion cogs from our animations and created a wiggle that integrated the head-bobbing movement and the back-and-forth movement. So it's really quite small. You can see it can fit into the palm of my hand. So imagine our excitement when we saw it really working in the studio, and here it is.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aparna_rao_art_that_craves_your_attention
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"I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Café, she had a Scots ice cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled ""D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley."" She drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. Three days later, she was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock.The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business.Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle. Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section devoted entirely to politics and the media. Here are a couple of rather depressing observations from that survey. Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers whatsoever. Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of politics than readers of no newspapers. They're not just less politically engaged. They are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within it. Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy.Now I doubt if anyone in this room would seriously challenge that view. But if Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes focusing upon.Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to another, either physically, mentally or economically. This is principally focused on obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. And the more you think about it, the stranger that is.A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of opening a brand new school in the northeast of England. It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360. As I walked through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if it's not right, don't do it. The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, ""Oh, that's our school motto."" On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept thinking, can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? Isn't it time that we develop this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values? After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily underpin them? Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement.Now there will be those who will argue that this could all too easily drift into a form of censorship, albeit self-censorship, but I don't buy that argument. It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities.Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker. Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. I'd go further. A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their well-honed professional skills. Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable.We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. It's a prize easily lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. And its first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. Our integrity as we deal with those with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. And these standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. They're part of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to misappropriate the causes of its ills. Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large sections of the media. And as a consequence, across the Western world, the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned, older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and engagement, and I stress active.The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. But most of us, I think, accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is reasonable. Judges must ask, did they take reasonable care and could they have reasonably foreseen the consequences of their actions? Far from signifying overbearing state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse.Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. It's about reconciling conflicting preferences wherever and whenever possibly based on fact. But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform? Because in the end, it comes down to a combination of trust and leadership.Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. The first led almost immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. Democracy, well-led and well-informed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. We have to trust that those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the whole of the people. We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own judgments. If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. Thank you very much for listening to me. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_puttnam_what_happens_when_the_media_s_priority_is_profit
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"So imagine, you're in the supermarket, you're buying some groceries, and you get given the option for a plastic or a paper shopping bag. Which one do you choose if you want to do the right thing by the environment?Most people do pick the paper. Okay, let's think of why. It's brown to start with. Therefore, it must be good for the environment. It's biodegradable. It's reusable. In some cases, it's recyclable. So when people are looking at the plastic bag, it's likely they're thinking of something like this, which we all know is absolutely terrible, and we should be avoiding at all expenses these kinds of environmental damages. But people are often not thinking of something like this, which is the other end of the spectrum. When we produce materials, we need to extract them from the environment, and we need a whole bunch of environmental impacts.You see, what happens is, when we need to make complex choices, us humans like really simple solutions, and so we often ask for simple solutions. And I work in design. I advise designers and innovators around sustainability, and everyone always says to me, ""Oh Leyla, I just want the eco-materials.""And I say, ""Well, that's very complex, and we'll have to spend four hours talking about what exactly an eco-material means, because everything at some point comes from nature, and it's how you use the material that dictates the environmental impact. So what happens is, we have to rely on some sort of intuitive framework when we make decisions. So I like to call that intuitive framework our environmental folklore. It's either the little voice at the back of your head, or it's that gut feeling you get when you've done the right thing, so when you've picked the paper bag or when you've bought a fuel-efficient car. And environmental folklore is a really important thing because we're trying to do the right thing. But how do we know if we're actually reducing the net environmental impacts that our actions as individuals and as professionals and as a society are actually having on the natural environment?So the thing about environmental folklore is it tends to be based on our experiences, the things we've heard from other people. It doesn't tend to be based on any scientific framework. And this is really hard, because we live in incredibly complex systems. We have the human systems of how we communicate and interrelate and have our whole constructed society, We have the industrial systems, which is essentially the entire economy, and then all of that has to operate within the biggest system, and, I would argue, the most important, the ecosystem. And you see, the choices that we make as an individual, but the choices that we make in every single job that we have, no matter how high or low you are in the pecking order, has an impact on all of these systems. And the thing is that we have to find ways if we're actually going to address sustainability of interlocking those complex systems and making better choices that result in net environmental gains. What we need to do is we need to learn to do more with less. We have an increasing population, and everybody likes their mobile phones, especially in this situation here. So we need to find innovative ways of solving some of these problems that we face.And that's where this process called life cycle thinking comes in. So essentially, everything that is created goes through a series of life cycle stages, and we use this scientific process called life cycle assessment, or in America, you guys say life cycle analysis, in order to have a clearer picture of how everything that we do in the technical part of those systems affects the natural environment. So we go all the way back to the extraction of raw materials, and then we look at manufacturing, we look at packaging and transportation, use, and end of life, and at every single one of these stages, the things that we do have an interaction with the natural environment, and we can monitor how that interaction is actually affecting the systems and services that make life on Earth possible. And through doing this, we've learned some absolutely fascinating things. And we've busted a bunch of myths.So to start with, there's a word that's used a lot. It's used a lot in marketing, and it's used a lot, I think, in our conversation when we're talking about sustainability, and that's the word biodegradability. Now biodegradability is a material property; it is not a definition of environmental benefits. Allow me to explain. When something natural, something that's made from a cellulose fiber like a piece of bread, even, or any food waste, or even a piece of paper, when something natural ends up in the natural environment, it degrades normally. Its little carbon molecules that it stored up as it was growing are naturally released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but this is a net situation. Most natural things don't actually end up in nature. Most of the things, the waste that  we produce, end up in landfill. Landfill is a different environment. In landfill, those same carbon molecules degrade in a different way, because a landfill is anaerobic. It's got no oxygen. It's tightly compacted and hot. Those same molecules, they become methane, and methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So our old lettuces and products that we have thrown out that are made out of biodegradable materials, if they end up in landfill, contribute to climate change. You see, there are facilities now that can actually capture that methane and generate power, displacing the need for fossil fuel power, but we need to be smart about this. We need to identify how we can start to leverage these types of things that are already happening and start to design systems and services that alleviate these problems. Because right now, what people do is they turn around and they say, ""Let's ban plastic bags. We'll give people paper because that is better for the environment."" But if you're throwing it in the bin, and your local landfill facility is just a normal one, then we're having what's called a double negative.I'm a product designer by trade. I then did social science. And so I'm absolutely fascinated by consumer goods and how the consumer goods that we have kind of become immune to that fill our lives have an impact on the natural environment. And these guys are, like, serial offenders, and I'm pretty sure everyone in this room has a refrigerator. Now America has this amazing ability to keep growing refrigerators. In the last few years, they've grown one cubic foot on average, the standard size of a refrigerator. And the problem is, they're so big now, it's easier for us to buy more food that we can't eat or find. I mean, I have things at the back of my refrigerator that have been there for years, all right? And so what happens is, we waste more food. And as I was just explaining, food waste is a problem. In fact, here in the U.S., 40 percent of food purchased for the home is wasted. Half of the world's produced food is wasted. That's the latest U.N. stats. Up to half of the food. It's insane. It's 1.3 billion tons of food per annum. And I blame it on the refrigerator, well, especially in Western cultures, because it makes it easier. I mean, there's a lot of complex systems going on here. I don't want to make it so simplistic.But the refrigerator is a serious contributor to this, and one of the features of it is the crisper drawer. You all got crisper drawers? The drawer that you put your lettuces in? Lettuces have a habit of going soggy in the crisper drawers, don't they? Yeah? Soggy lettuces? In the U.K., this is such a problem that there was a government report a few years ago that actually said the second biggest offender of wasted food in the U.K. is the soggy lettuce. It was called the Soggy Lettuce Report. Okay? So this is a problem, people. These poor little lettuces are getting thrown out left, right and center because the crisper drawers are not designed to actually keep things crisp. Okay. You need a tight environment. You need, like, an airless environment to prevent the degrading that would happen naturally. But the crisper drawers, they're just a drawer with a slightly better seal. Anyway, I'm clearly obsessed. Don't ever invite me over because I'll just start going through your refrigerator and looking at all sorts of things like that. But essentially, this is a big problem. Because when we lose something like the lettuce from the system, not only do we have that impact  I just explained at the end of life, but we actually have had to grow that lettuce. The life cycle impact of that lettuce is astronomical. We've had to clear land. We've had to plant seeds, phosphorus, fertilizers, nutrients, water, sunlight. All of the embodied impacts in that lettuce get lost from the system, which makes it a far bigger environmental impact than the loss of the energy from the fridge. So we need to design things like this far better if we're going to start addressing serious environmental problems. We could start with the crisper drawer and the size. For those of you in the room who do design fridges, that would be great.The problem is, imagine if we actually started to reconsider  how we designed things. So I look at the refrigerator as a sign of modernity, but we actually haven't really changed the design of them that much since the 1950s. A little bit, but essentially they're still big boxes, cold boxes that we store stuff in. So imagine if we actually really started to identify these problems and use that as the foundation for finding innovative and elegant design solutions that will solve those problems. This is design-led system change, design dictating the way in which the system can be far more sustainable. Forty percent food waste is a major problem. Imagine if we designed fridges that halved that.Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle, which I found out that you don't do tea kettles in this country, really, do you? But that's really big in the U.K. Ninety-seven percent of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle. So they're very popular. And, I mean, if I were to work with a design firm or a designer, and they were designing one of these, and they wanted to do it eco, they'd usually ask me two things. They'd say, ""Leyla, how do I make it technically efficient?"" Because obviously energy's a problem with this product. Or, ""How do I make it green materials? How do I make the materials green in the manufacturing?"" Would you ask me those questions? They seem logical, right? Yeah. Well I'd say, ""You're looking at the wrong problems."" Because the problem is with use. It's with how people use the product. Sixty-five percent of Brits admit to over-filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea. All of this extra water that's being boiled requires energy, and it's been calculated that in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles is enough to light all of the streetlights in England for a night.But this is the thing. This is what I call a product-person failure. But we've got a product-system failure going on with these little guys, and they're so ubiquitous, you  don't even notice they're there. And this guy over here, though, he does. He's named Simon. Simon works for the national electricity company in the U.K. He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming into the system to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody's homes. He's also watching television. The reason is because there's a unique phenomenon that happens in the U.K. the moment that very popular TV shows end. The minute the ad break comes on, this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France, because everybody turns their kettles on at the same time. (Laughter) 1.5 million kettles, seriously problematic. So imagine if you designed kettles, you actually found a way to solve these system failures, because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system, just because the product hasn't thought about the problem that it's going to have when it exists in the world. Now, I looked at a number of kettles available on the market, and found the minimum fill lines, so the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there, was between two and a five-and-a-half cups of water just to make one cup of tea. So this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs. One's a boiling chamber, and one's the water holder. The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled, which means, because we're all lazy, you only fill exactly what you need. And this is what I call behavior-changing products: products, systems or services that intervene and solve these problems up front.Now, this is a technology arena, so obviously these things are quite popular, but I think if we're going to keep designing, buying and using and throwing out these kinds of products at the rate we currently do, which is astronomically high, there are seven billion people who live in the world right now. There are six billion mobile phone subscriptions as of last year. Every single year, 1.5 billion mobile phones roll off production lines, and some companies report their production rate as being greater than the human birth rate. One hundred fifty-two million phones  were thrown out in the U.S. last year; only 11 percent were recycled. I'm from Australia. We have a population of 22 million — don't laugh — and it's been reported that 22 million phones are in people's drawers. We need to find ways of solving the problems around this, because these things are so complicated. They have so much locked up inside them. Gold! Did you know that it's actually cheaper now to get gold out of a ton of old mobile phones than it is out of a ton of gold ore? There's a number of highly complex and valuable materials embodied inside these things, so we need to find ways of encouraging disassembly, because this is otherwise what happens. This is a community in Ghana, and e-waste is reported, or electronic waste is reported by the U.N. as being up to 50 million tons trafficked. This is how they get the gold and the other valuable materials out. They burn the electronic waste in open spaces. These are communities, and this is happening all over the world. And because we don't see the ramifications of the choices that we make as designers, as businesspeople, as consumers, then these kinds of externalities happen, and these are people's lives. So we need to find smarter, more systems-based, innovative solutions to these problems, if we're going to start to live sustainably within this world.So imagine if, when you bought your mobile phone, your new one because you replaced your old one — after 15 to 18 months is the average time that people replace their phones, by the way — so if we're going to keep this kind of expedient mobile phone replacing, then we should be looking at closing the loop on these systems. The people who produce these phones, and some of which I'm sure are in the room right now, could potentially look at doing what we call closed-loop systems, or product system services, so identifying that there is a market demand and that market demand's not going to go anywhere, so you design the product to solve the problem. Design for disassembly, design for light-weighting. We heard some of those kinds of strategies being used in the Tesla Motors car today. These kinds of approaches are not hard, but understanding the system and then looking for viable, market-driven consumer demand alternatives is how we can start radically altering the sustainability agenda, because I hate to break it to you all: Consumption is the biggest problem. But design is one of the best solutions.These kinds of products are everywhere. By identifying alternative ways of doing things, we can actually start to innovate, and I say actually start to innovate. I'm sure everyone in this room is very innovative. But in the regards to using sustainability as a parameter, as a criteria for fueling systems-based solutions, because as I've just demonstrated with these simple products, they're participating in these major problems. So we need to look across the entire life of the things that we do.If you just had paper or plastic — obviously reusable is far more beneficial — then the paper is worse, and the paper is worse because it weighs four to 10 times more than the plastic, and when we actually compare, from a life cycle perspective, a kilo of plastic and a kilo of paper, the paper is far better, but the functionality of a plastic or a paper bag to carry your groceries home is not  done with a kilo of each material. It's done with a very small amount of plastic and quite a lot more paper. Because functionality defines environmental impact, and I said earlier that the designers always ask me for the eco-materials. I say, there's only a few materials that you should completely avoid. The rest of them, it's all about application, and at the end of the day, everything we design and produce in the economy or buy as consumers is done so for function. We want something, therefore we buy it. So breaking things back down and delivering smartly, elegantly, sophisticated solutions that take into consideration the entire system and the entire life of the thing, everything, all the way back to the extraction through to the end of life, we can start to actually find really innovative solutions.And I'll just leave you with one very quick thing that a designer said to me recently  who I work with, a senior designer. I said, ""How come you're not doing  sustainability? I know you know this."" And he said, ""Well, recently I pitched a sustainability project to a client, and turned and he said to me, 'I know it's going to cost less, I know it's going to sell more, but we're not pioneers, because pioneers have arrows in their backs.'""I think we've got a roomful of pioneers, and I hope there are far more pioneers out there, because we need to solve these problems.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leyla_acaroglu_paper_beats_plastic_how_to_rethink_environmental_folklore
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"The world is changing in some really profound ways, and I worry that investors aren't paying enough attention to some of the biggest drivers of change, especially when it comes to sustainability. And by sustainability, I mean the really juicy things, like environmental and social issues and corporate governance. I think it's reckless to ignore these things, because doing so can jeopardize future long-term returns. And here's something that may surprise you: the balance of power to really influence sustainability rests with institutional investors, the large investors like pension funds, foundations and endowments. I believe that sustainable investing is less complicated than you think, better-performing than you believe, and more important than we can imagine.Let me remind you what we already know. We have a population that's both growing and aging; we have seven billion souls today heading to 10 billion at the end of the century; we consume natural resources faster than they can be replenished; and the emissions that are mainly responsible for climate change just keep increasing. Now clearly, these are environmental and social issues, but that's not all. They're economic issues, and that makes them relevant to risk and return. And they are really complex and they can seem really far off, that the temptation may be to do this: bury our heads in the sand and not think about it. Resist this, if you can. Don't do this at home. (Laughter)But it makes me wonder if the investment rules of today are fit for purpose tomorrow. We know that investors, when they look at a company and decide whether to invest, they look at financial data, metrics like sales growth, cash flow, market share, valuation — you know, the really sexy stuff. And these things are fundamental, of course, but they're not enough. Investors should also look at performance metrics in what we call ESG: environment, social and governance. Environment includes energy consumption, water availability, waste and pollution, just making efficient uses of resources. Social includes human capital, things like employee engagement and innovation capacity, as well as supply chain management and labor rights and human rights. And governance relates to the oversight of companies by their boards and investors. See, I told you this is the really juicy stuff. But ESG is the measure of sustainability, and sustainable investing incorporates ESG factors with financial factors into the investment process. It means limiting future risk by minimizing harm to people and planet, and it means providing capital to users who deploy it towards productive and sustainable outcomes.So if sustainability matters financially today, and all signs indicate more tomorrow, is the private sector paying attention? Well, the really cool thing is that most CEOs are. They started to see sustainability not just as important but crucial to business success. About 80 percent of global CEOs see sustainability as the root to growth in innovation and leading to competitive advantage in their industries. But 93 percent see ESG as the future, or as important to the future of their business. So the views of CEOs are clear. There's tremendous opportunity in sustainability.So how are companies actually leveraging ESG to drive hard business results? One example is near and dear to our hearts. In 2012, State Street migrated 54 applications to the cloud environment, and we retired another 85. We virtualized our operating system environments, and we completed numerous automation projects. Now these initiatives create a more mobile workplace, and they reduce our real estate footprint, and they yield savings of 23 million dollars in operating costs annually, and avoid the emissions of a 100,000 metric tons of carbon. That's the equivalent of taking 21,000 cars off the road. So awesome, right? Another example is Pentair. Pentair is a U.S. industrial conglomerate, and about a decade ago, they sold their core power tools business and reinvested those proceeds in a water business. That's a really big bet. Why did they do that? Well, with apologies to the Home Improvement fans, there's more growth in water than in power tools, and this company has their sights set on what they call ""the new New World."" That's four billion middle class people demanding food, energy and water.Now, you may be asking yourself, are these just isolated cases? I mean, come on, really? Do companies that take sustainability into account really do well financially? The answer that may surprise you is yes. The data shows that stocks with better ESG performance perform just as well as others. In blue, we see the MSCI World. It's an index of large companies from developed markets across the world. And in gold, we see a subset of companies rated as having the best ESG performance. Over three plus years, no performance tradeoff. So that's okay, right? We want more. I want more. In some cases, there may be outperformance from ESG. In blue, we see the performance of the 500 largest global companies, and in gold, we see a subset of companies with best practice in climate change strategy and risk management. Now over almost eight years, they've outperformed by about two thirds. So yes, this is correlation. It's not causation. But it does illustrate that environmental leadership is compatible with good returns.So if the returns are the same or better and the planet benefits, wouldn't this be the norm? Are investors, particularly institutional investors, engaged? Well, some are, and a few are really at the vanguard. Hesta. Hesta is a retirement fund for health and community services employees in Australia, with assets of 22 billion [dollars]. They believe that ESG has the potential to impact risks and returns, so incorporating it into the investment process is core to their duty to act in the best interest of fund members, core to their duty. You gotta love the Aussies, right? CalPERS is another example. CalPERS is the pension fund for public employees in California, and with assets of 244 billion [dollars], they are the second largest in the U.S. and the sixth largest in the world. Now, they're moving toward 100 percent sustainable investment by systematically integrated ESG across the entire fund. Why? They believe it's critical to superior long-term returns, full stop. In their own words, ""long-term value creation requires the effective management of three forms of capital: financial, human, and physical. This is why we are concerned with ESG.""Now, I do speak to a lot of investors as part of my job, and not all of them see it this way. Often I hear, ""We are required to maximize returns, so we don't do that here,"" or, ""We don't want to use the portfolio to make policy statements."" The one that just really gets under my skin is, ""If you want to do something about that, just make money, give the profits to charities."" It's eyes rolling, eyes rolling.I mean, let me clarify something right here. Companies and investors are not singularly responsible for the fate of the planet. They don't have indefinite social obligations, and prudent investing and finance theory aren't subordinate to sustainability. They're compatible. So I'm not talking about tradeoffs here. But institutional investors are the x-factor in sustainability. Why do they hold the key? The answer, quite simply, is, they have the money. (Laughter) A lot of it. I mean, a really lot of it. The global stock market is worth 55 trillion dollars. The global bond market, 78 trillion. That's 133 trillion combined. That's eight and a half times the GDP of the U.S. That's the world's largest economy. That's some serious freaking firepower.So we can reconsider some of these pressing challenges, like fresh water, clean air, feeding 10 billion mouths, if institutional investors integrated ESG into investment. What if they used that firepower to allocate more of their capital to companies working the hardest at solving these challenges or at least not exacerbating them? What if we work and save and invest, only to find that the world we retire into is more stressed and less secure than it is now? What if there isn't enough clean air and fresh water?Now a fair question might be, what if all this sustainability risk stuff is exaggerated, overstated, it's not urgent, something for virtuous consumers or lifestyle choice? Well, President John F. Kennedy said something about this that is just spot on: ""There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."" I can appreciate that there is estimation risk in this, but since this is based on widespread scientific consensus, the odds that it's not completely wrong are better than the odds that our house will burn down or we'll get in a car accident. Well, maybe not if you live in Boston. (Laughter) But my point is that we buy insurance to protect ourselves financially in case those things happen, right? So by investing sustainably we're doing two things. We're creating insurance, reducing the risk to our planet and to our economy, and at the same time, in the short term, we're not sacrificing performance. [Man in comic: ""What if it's a big hoax  and we create a better world for nothing?""]Good, you like it. I like it too. (Laughter) I like it because it pokes fun at both sides of the climate change issue. I bet you can't guess which side I'm on. But what I really like about it is that it reminds me of something Mark Twain said, which is, ""Plan for the future, because that's where you're going to spend the rest of your life.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_mcknett_the_investment_logic_for_sustainability
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"I'd like to talk today about a powerful and fundamental aspect of who we are: our voice. Each one of us has a unique voiceprint that reflects our age, our size, even our lifestyle and personality. In the words of the poet Longfellow, ""the human voice is the organ of the soul."" As a speech scientist, I'm fascinated by how the voice is produced, and I have an idea for how it can be engineered. That's what I'd like to share with you.I'm going to start by playing you a sample of a voice that you may recognize.(Recording) Stephen Hawking: ""I would have thought it was fairly obvious what I meant.""Rupal Patel: That was the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking. What you may not know is that same voice may also be used by this little girl who is unable to speak because of a neurological condition. In fact, all of these individuals may be using the same voice, and that's because there's only a few options available. In the U.S. alone, there are 2.5 million Americans who are unable to speak, and many of whom use computerized devices to communicate. Now that's millions of people worldwide who are using generic voices, including Professor Hawking, who uses an American-accented voice. This lack of individuation of the synthetic voice really hit home when I was at an assistive technology conference a few years ago, and I recall walking into an exhibit hall and seeing a little girl and a grown man having a conversation using their devices, different devices, but the same voice. And I looked around and I saw this happening all around me, literally hundreds of individuals using a handful of voices, voices that didn't fit their bodies or their personalities. We wouldn't dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man. So why then the same prosthetic voice? It really struck me, and I wanted to do something about this.I'm going to play you now a sample of someone who has, two people actually, who have severe speech disorders. I want you to take a listen to how they sound. They're saying the same utterance.(First voice)(Second voice) You probably didn't understand what they said, but I hope that you heard their unique vocal identities.So what I wanted to do next is, I wanted to find out how we could harness these residual vocal abilities and build a technology that could be customized for them, voices that could be customized for them. So I reached out to my collaborator, Tim Bunnell. Dr. Bunnell is an expert in speech synthesis, and what he'd been doing is building personalized voices for people by putting together pre-recorded samples of their voice and reconstructing a voice for them. These are people who had lost their voice later in life. We didn't have the luxury of pre-recorded samples of speech for those born with speech disorder. But I thought, there had to be a way to reverse engineer a voice from whatever little is left over.So we decided to do exactly that. We set out with a little bit of funding from the National Science Foundation, to create custom-crafted voices that captured their unique vocal identities. We call this project VocaliD, or vocal I.D., for vocal identity.Now before I get into the details of how the voice is made and let you listen to it, I need to give you a real quick speech science lesson. Okay? So first, we know that the voice is changing dramatically over the course of development. Children sound different from teens who sound different from adults. We've all experienced this. Fact number two is that speech is a combination of the source, which is the vibrations generated by your voice box, which are then pushed through the rest of the vocal tract. These are the chambers of your head and neck that vibrate, and they actually filter that source sound to produce consonants and vowels. So the combination of source and filter is how we produce speech. And that happens in one individual.Now I told you earlier that I'd spent a good part of my career understanding and studying the source characteristics of people with severe speech disorder, and what I've found is that even though their filters were impaired, they were able to modulate their source: the pitch, the loudness, the tempo of their voice. These are called prosody, and I've been documenting for years that the prosodic abilities of these individuals are preserved. So when I realized that those same cues are also important for speaker identity, I had this idea. Why don't we take the source from the person we want the voice to sound like, because it's preserved, and borrow the filter from someone about the same age and size, because they can articulate speech, and then mix them? Because when we mix them, we can get a voice that's as clear as our surrogate talker — that's the person we borrowed the filter from— and is similar in identity to our target talker. It's that simple. That's the science behind what we're doing.So once you have that in mind, how do you go about building this voice? Well, you have to find someone who is willing to be a surrogate. It's not such an ominous thing. Being a surrogate donor only requires you to say a few hundred to a few thousand utterances. The process goes something like this.(Video) Voice: Things happen in pairs.I love to sleep.The sky is blue without clouds.RP: Now she's going to go on like this for about three to four hours, and the idea is not for her to say everything that the target is going to want to say, but the idea is to cover all the different combinations of the sounds that occur in the language. The more speech you have, the better sounding voice you're going to have. Once you have those recordings, what we need to do is we have to parse these recordings into little snippets of speech, one- or two-sound combinations, sometimes even whole words that start populating a dataset or a database. We're going to call this database a voice bank. Now the power of the voice bank is that from this voice bank, we can now say any new utterance, like, ""I love chocolate"" — everyone needs to be able to say that— fish through that database and find all the segments necessary to say that utterance.(Video) Voice: I love chocolate.RP: So that's speech synthesis. It's called concatenative synthesis, and that's what we're using. That's not the novel part. What's novel is how we make it sound like this young woman.This is Samantha. I met her when she was nine, and since then, my team and I have been trying to build her a personalized voice. We first had to find a surrogate donor, and then we had to have Samantha produce some utterances. What she can produce are mostly vowel-like sounds, but that's enough for us to extract her source characteristics. What happens next is best described by my daughter's analogy. She's six. She calls it mixing colors to paint voices. It's beautiful. It's exactly that. Samantha's voice is like a concentrated sample of red food dye which we can infuse into the recordings of her surrogate to get a pink voice just like this.(Video) Samantha: Aaaaaah.RP: So now, Samantha can say this.(Video) Samantha: This voice is only for me. I can't wait to use my new voice with my friends.RP: Thank you. (Applause)I'll never forget the gentle smile that spread across her face when she heard that voice for the first time. Now there's millions of people around the world like Samantha, millions, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. What we've done so far is we have a few surrogate talkers from around the U.S. who have donated their voices, and we have been using those to build our first few personalized voices. But there's so much more work to be done. For Samantha, her surrogate came from somewhere in the Midwest, a stranger who gave her the gift of voice. And as a scientist, I'm so excited to take this work out of the laboratory and finally into the real world so it can have real-world impact. What I want to share with you next is how I envision taking this work to that next level. I imagine a whole world of surrogate donors from all walks of life, different sizes, different ages, coming together in this voice drive to give people voices that are as colorful as their personalities. To do that as a first step, we've put together this website, VocaliD.org, as a way to bring together those who want to join us as voice donors, as expertise donors, in whatever way to make this vision a reality.They say that giving blood can save lives. Well, giving your voice can change lives. All we need is a few hours of speech from our surrogate talker, and as little as a vowel from our target talker, to create a unique vocal identity.So that's the science behind what we're doing. I want to end by circling back to the human side that is really the inspiration for this work. About five years ago, we built our very first voice for a little boy named William. When his mom first heard this voice, she said, ""This is what William would have sounded like had he been able to speak."" And then I saw William typing a message on his device. I wondered, what was he thinking? Imagine carrying around someone else's voice for nine years and finally finding your own voice. Imagine that.This is what William said: ""Never heard me before.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_unique_as_fingerprints
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"What is love? It's a hard term to define in so far as it has a very wide application. I can love jogging. I can love a book, a movie. I can love escalopes. I can love my wife. (Laughter)But there's a great difference between an escalope and my wife, for instance. That is, if I value the escalope, the escalope, on the other hand,  it doesn't value me back. Whereas my wife, she calls me the star of her life. (Laughter)Therefore, only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being. I know this, that's why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired. Hence the eternal problem of love: how to become and remain desirable?The individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules. You had a specific part to play according to your sex, your age, your social status, and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community. Think about the young woman who must remain chaste before marriage. Think about the youngest son  who must obey the eldest son, who in turn must obey the patriarch.But a phenomenon started in the 13th century, mainly in the Renaissance, in the West, that caused the biggest identity crisis in the history of humankind. This phenomenon is modernity. We can basically summarize it through a triple process. First, a process of rationalization of scientific research, which has accelerated technical progress. Next, a process of political democratization, which has fostered individual rights. And finally, a process of rationalization  of economic production and of trade liberalization.These three intertwined processes have completely annihilated all the traditional bearings of Western societies, with radical consequences for the individual. Now individuals are free to value or disvalue any attitude, any choice, any object. But as a result, they are themselves confronted with this same freedom that others have to value or disvalue them. In other words, my value was once ensured by submitting myself  to the traditional authorities. Now it is quoted in the stock exchange.On the free market of individual desires, I negotiate my value every day. Hence the anxiety of contemporary man. He is obsessed: ""Am I desirable? How desirable? How many people are going to love me?"" And how does he respond to this anxiety? Well, by hysterically collecting symbols of desirability. (Laughter)I call this act of collecting, along with others, seduction capital. Indeed, our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital. It is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic. But it's not true! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds. We do it to make them love us, to seduce them. Nothing could be less materialistic,  or more sentimental, than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees, because he wants to please Jennifer. (Laughter) Consumerism is not materialism. It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of the god of love, or rather in the name of seduction capital.In light of this observation on contemporary love, how can we think of love in the years to come? We can envision two hypotheses: The first one consists of betting that this process of narcissistic  capitalization will intensify. It is hard to say what shape  this intensification will take, because it largely depends on social and technical innovations, which are by definition difficult to predict. But we can, for instance, imagine a dating website which, a bit like those loyalty points programs, uses seduction capital points that vary according to my age,  my height/weight ratio, my degree, my salary, or the number of clicks on my profile. We can also imagine a chemical treatment for breakups that weakens the feelings of attachment.By the way, there's a program on MTV already in which seduction teachers treat heartache as a disease. These teachers call themselves ""pick-up artists."" ""Artist"" in French is easy, it means ""artiste."" ""Pick-up"" is to pick someone up, but not just any picking up — it's picking up chicks. So they are artists of picking up chicks. (Laughter) And they call heartache ""one-itis."" In English, ""itis"" is a suffix that signifies infection. One-itis can be translated as ""an infection from one."" It's a bit disgusting. Indeed, for the pick-up artists, falling in love with someone is a waste of time, it's squandering your seduction capital, so it must be eliminated like a disease, like an infection. We can also envision a romantic use of the genome. Everyone would carry it around and present it like a business card to verify if seduction can progress to reproduction. (Laughter)Of course, this race for seduction, like every fierce competition, will create huge disparities  in narcissistic satisfaction, and therefore a lot of loneliness and frustration too. So we can expect that modernity itself, which is the origin of seduction capital, would be called into question. I'm thinking particularly of the reaction of neo-fascist or religious communes. But such a future doesn't have to be.Another path to thinking about love may be possible. But how? How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued? Well, by becoming aware of my uselessness. (Laughter) Yes, I'm useless. But rest assured: so are you. (Laughter) (Applause)We are all useless. This uselessness is easily demonstrated, because in order to be valued I need another to desire me, which shows that I do not have any value of my own. I don't have any inherent value. We all pretend to have an idol; we all pretend to be an idol for someone else, but actually we are all impostors, a bit like a man on the street who appears totally cool and indifferent, while he has actually anticipated and calculated so that all eyes are on him.I think that becoming aware of this general imposture that concerns all of us would ease our love relationships. It is because I want to be loved from head to toe, justified in my every choice, that the seduction hysteria exists. And therefore I want to seem perfect so that another can love me. I want them to be perfect so that I can be reassured of my value. It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will break up, just like that, at the slightest underachievement.In contrast to this attitude, I call upon tenderness — love as tenderness. What is tenderness? To be tender is to accept  the loved one's weaknesses. It's not about becoming a sad couple of orderlies. (Laughter) That's pretty bad. On the contrary, there's plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness. I refer specifically to a kind of humor that is unfortunately underused. It is a sort of poetry of deliberate awkwardness.I refer to self-mockery. For a couple who is no longer sustained, supported by the constraints of tradition, I believe that self-mockery is one of the best means for  the relationship to endure.","https://www.ted.com/talks/yann_dall_aglio_love_you_re_doing_it_wrong
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"As humans, it's in our nature to want to improve our health  and minimize our suffering. Whatever life throws at us, whether it's cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or even broken bones, we want to try and get better. Now I'm head of a biomaterials lab, and I'm really fascinated by the way that humans have used materials in really creative ways in the body over time.Take, for example, this beautiful blue nacre shell. This was actually used by the Mayans as an artificial tooth replacement. We're not quite sure why they did it. It's hard. It's durable. But it also had other very nice properties. In fact, when they put it into the jawbone, it could integrate into the jaw, and we know now with very sophisticated imaging technologies that part of that integration comes from the fact that this material is designed in a very specific way, has a beautiful chemistry, has a beautiful architecture. And I think in many ways we can sort of think of the use of the blue nacre shell and the Mayans as the first real application of the bluetooth technology.(Laughter)But if we move on and think throughout history how people have used different  materials in the body, very often it's been physicians that have been quite creative. They've taken things off the shelf.One of my favorite examples is that of Sir Harold Ridley, who was a famous ophthalmologist, or at least became a famous ophthalmologist. And during World War II, what he would see would be pilots coming back from their missions, and he noticed that within their eyes they had shards of small bits of material lodged within the eye, but the very interesting thing about it was that material, actually, wasn't causing any inflammatory response. So he looked into this, and he figured out that actually that material was little shards of plastic that were coming from the canopy of the Spitfires. And this led him to propose that material as a new material for intraocular lenses. It's called PMMA, and it's now used in millions of people every year and helps in preventing cataracts.And that example, I think, is a really nice one, because it helps remind us that in the early days, people often chose materials because they were bioinert. Their very purpose was to  perform a mechanical function. You'd put them in the body and you wouldn't get an adverse response. And what I want to show you is that in regenerative medicine, we've really shifted away from that idea of taking a bioinert material. We're actually actively looking for materials that will be bioactive, that will interact with the body, and that furthermore we can put in the body, they'll have their function, and then they'll dissolve away over time.If we look at this schematic, this is showing you what we think of as the typical tissue-engineering approach. We have cells there, typically from the patient. We can put those onto a material, and we can make that material  very complex if we want to, and we can then grow that up in the lab or we can put it straight back into the patient. And this is an approach that's  used all over the world, including in our lab.But one of the things that's really important when we're thinking about stem cells is that obviously stem cells  can be many different things, and they want to be many different things, and so we want to make sure that the environment we put them into has enough information so that they can become the right sort of specialist tissue. And if we think about the different types of tissues that people are looking at regenerating all over the world, in all the  different labs in the world, there's pretty much every tissue you can think of. And actually, the structure of those tissues is quite different, and it's going to really depend on whether your patient has any underlying disease, other conditions, in terms of how you're going to regenerate your tissue, and you're going to need to think about the materials you're going to use really carefully, their biochemistry, their mechanics, and many other properties as well.Our tissues all have very  different abilities to regenerate, and here we see poor Prometheus, who made a rather tricky career choice and was punished by the Greek gods. He was tied to a rock, and an eagle would come every day to eat his liver. But of course his liver would regenerate every day, and so day after day he was punished for eternity by the gods. And liver will regenerate in this very nice way, but actually if we think of other tissues, like cartilage, for example, even the simplest nick and you're going to find it really difficult to regenerate your cartilage. So it's going to be very different from tissue to tissue.Now, bone is somewhere in between, and this is one of the tissues  that we work on a lot in our lab. And bone is actually quite good at repairing. It has to be. We've probably all had fractures at some point or other. And one of the ways that you can think about repairing your fracture is this procedure here, called  an iliac crest harvest. And what the surgeon might do is take some bone from your iliac crest, which is just here, and then transplant that  somewhere else in the body. And it actually works really well, because it's your own bone, and it's well vascularized, which means it's got a really good blood supply. But the problem is, there's only so much you can take, and also when you do that operation, your patients might actually have significant pain in that defect site even two  years after the operation.So what we were thinking is, there's a tremendous need  for bone repair, of course, but this iliac crest-type approach really has a lot of limitations to it, and could we perhaps recreate the generation of bone within the body on demand and then be able to transplant it without these very, very painful aftereffects that you would have with the iliac crest harvest?And so this is what we did, and the way we did it was by coming back to this typical tissue-engineering approach but actually thinking about it rather differently. And we simplified it a lot, so we got rid of a lot of these steps. We got rid of the need to  harvest cells from the patient, we got rid of the need to put  in really fancy chemistries, and we got rid of the need to culture these scaffolds in the lab. And what we really focused on was our material system and making it quite simple, but because we used it in a really clever way, we were able to generate enormous amounts of bone using this approach. So we were using the body as really the catalyst to help us to make lots of new bone. And it's an approach that we call the in vivo bioreactor, and we were able to make enormous amounts of bone using this approach. And I'll talk you through this.So what we do is, in humans, we all have a layer of stem cells on the outside of our long bones. That layer is called the periosteum. And that layer is actually normally very, very tightly bound to the underlying bone, and it's got stem cells in it. Those stem cells are really important in the embryo when it develops, and they also sort of wake up if you have a fracture to help you with repairing the bone. So we take that periosteum layer and we developed a way to inject underneath it a liquid that then, within 30 seconds, would turn into quite a rigid gel and can actually lift the periosteum away from the bone. So it creates, in essence, an artificial cavity that is right next to both the bone but also this really rich layer of stem cells. And we go in through a pinhole incision so that no other cells from the body can get in, and what happens is that that artificial in vivo bioreactor cavity can then lead to the proliferation of these stem cells, and they can form lots of new tissue, and then over time, you can harvest that tissue and use it elsewhere in the body.This is a histology slide of what we see when we do that, and essentially what we see is very large amounts of bone. So in this picture, you can see the middle of the leg, so the bone marrow, then you can see the original bone, and you can see where that original bone finishes, and just to the left of that is the new bone that's grown within that bioreactor cavity, and you can actually make it even larger. And that demarcation that you can see between the original bone and the new bone acts as a very slight point of weakness, so actually now the surgeon can come along, can harvest away that new bone, and the periosteum can grow back, so you're left with the leg in the same sort of state as if you hadn't operated on it in the first place. So it's very, very low in terms of after-pain compared to an iliac crest harvest. And you can grow different amounts of bone depending on how much gel you put in there, so it really is an on demand sort of procedure.Now, at the time that we did this, this received a lot of attention in the press, because it was a really nice way of generating new bone, and we got many, many contacts from different people that  were interested in using this. And I'm just going to tell you, sometimes those contacts are very strange, slightly unexpected, and the very most interesting, let me put it that way, contact that I had, was actually from a team of American footballers that all wanted to have double-thickness skulls made on their head.And so you do get these kinds of contacts, and of course, being British and also growing up in France, I tend to be very blunt, and so I had to explain to them very nicely that in their particular case, there probably wasn't that much in there to protect in the first place.(Laughter)(Applause)So this was our approach, and it was simple materials, but we thought about it carefully. And actually we know that those cells in the body, in the embryo, as they develop can form a different kind of tissue, cartilage, and so we developed a gel that was slightly different in nature and slightly different chemistry, put it in there, and we were able to get 100 percent cartilage instead.And this approach works really well, I think, for pre-planned procedures, but it's something you do have to pre-plan. So for other kinds of operations, there's definitely a need for other scaffold-based approaches. And when you think about designing those other scaffolds, actually, you need a really multi-disciplinary team. And so our team has chemists, it has cell biologists, surgeons, physicists even, and those people all come together and we think really hard about  designing the materials.But we want to make them have enough information that we can get the cells to do what we want, but not be so complex as to make it difficult to get to clinic. And so one of the things we think about a lot is really trying to understand the structure of the tissues in the body. And so if we think of bone, obviously my own favorite tissue, we zoom in, we can see, even if you don't know anything  about bone structure, it's beautifully organized,  really beautifully organized. We've lots of blood vessels in there. And if we zoom in again, we see that the cells are actually surrounded by a 3D matrix of nano-scale fibers, and they give a lot of information to the cells. And if we zoom in again, actually in the case of bone, the matrix around the cells is beautifully organized at the nano scale, and it's a hybrid material that's part organic, part inorganic. And that's led to a whole field, really, that has looked at developing materials that have this hybrid kind of structure. And so I'm showing here just two examples where we've made some materials that have that sort of structure, and you can really tailor it. You can see here a very squishy one and now a material that's also  this hybrid sort of material but actually has remarkable toughness, and it's no longer brittle. And an inorganic material  would normally be really brittle, and you wouldn't be able to have that sort of strength and toughness in it.One other thing I want to quickly mention is that many of the scaffolds we make  are porous, and they have to be, because you want blood vessels to grow in there. But the pores are actually oftentimes much bigger than the cells, and so even though it's 3D, the cell might see it more  as a slightly curved surface, and that's a little bit unnatural. And so one of the things you can think about doing is actually making scaffolds  with slightly different dimensions that might be able to surround your cells in 3D and give them a little bit more information. And there's a lot of work going  on in both of these areas.Now finally, I just want to talk a little bit about applying this sort of thing to cardiovascular disease, because this is a really big clinical problem. And one of the things that we know is that, unfortunately, if you have a heart attack, then that tissue can start to die, and your outcome may not be very good over time. And it would be really great, actually, if we could stop that dead tissue either from dying or help it to regenerate. And there's lots and lots of stem  cell trials going on worldwide, and they use many different types of cells, but one common theme that seems to be coming out is that actually, very often, those cells will die once you've implanted them. And you can either put them into the heart or into the blood system, but either way, we don't seem to be able to get quite the right number of cells getting to the location we want them to and being able to deliver the sort of beautiful cell regeneration that we would like to have to get good clinical outcomes.And so some of the things that we're thinking of, and many other people in the field are thinking of, are actually developing materials for that. But there's a difference here. We still need chemistry, we still need mechanics, we still need really interesting topography, and we still need really interesting  ways to surround the cells. But now, the cells also would probably quite like a material that's going to be able to be conductive, because the cells themselves will respond very well and will actually conduct signals  between themselves. You can see them now beating synchronously on these materials, and that's a very, very exciting development that's going on.So just to wrap up, I'd like to actually say that being able to work in this sort of field, all of us that work in this field that's not only super-exciting science, but also has the potential to impact on patients, however big or small they are, is really a great privilege. And so for that, I'd like to thank all of you as well.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/molly_stevens_a_new_way_to_grow_bone
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"What makes a great leader today? Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers. But that's kind of an image from another time, and what's also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was, not a world that is or that is coming.We conducted a study of 4,000 companies, and we asked them, let's see the effectiveness of your leadership development programs. Fifty-eight percent of the companies cited significant talent gaps for critical leadership roles. That means that despite corporate training programs, off-sites, assessments, coaching, all of these things, more than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders. You may be asking yourself, is my company helping me to prepare to be a great 21st-century leader? The odds are, probably not.Now, I've spent 25 years of my professional life observing what makes great leaders. I've worked inside Fortune 500 companies, I've advised over 200 CEOs, and I've cultivated more leadership pipelines than you can imagine. But a few years ago, I noticed a disturbing trend in leadership preparation. I noticed that, despite all the efforts, there were familiar stories that kept resurfacing about individuals. One story was about Chris, a high-potential, superstar leader who moves to a new unit and fails, destroying unrecoverable value. And then there were stories like Sidney, the CEO, who was so frustrated because her company is cited as a best company for leaders, but only one of the top 50 leaders is equipped to lead their crucial initiatives. And then there were stories like the senior leadership team of a once-thriving business that's surprised by a market shift, finds itself having to force the company to reduce its size in half or go out of business.Now, these recurring stories cause me to ask two questions. Why are the leadership gaps widening when there's so much more investment in leadership development? And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow? One of the things that I did, I was so consumed by these questions and also frustrated by those stories, that I left my job so that I could study this full time, and I took a year to travel to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices in companies, countries and nonprofit organizations. And so I did things like travel to South Africa, where I had an opportunity to understand how Nelson Mandela was ahead of his time in anticipating and navigating his political, social and economic context. I also met a number of nonprofit leaders who, despite very limited financial resources, were making a huge impact in the world, often bringing together seeming adversaries. And I spent countless hours in presidential libraries trying to understand how the environment had shaped the leaders, the moves that they made, and then the impact of those moves beyond their tenure. And then, when I returned to work full time, in this role, I joined with wonderful colleagues who were also interested in these questions.Now, from all this, I distilled the characteristics of leaders who are thriving and what they do differently, and then I also distilled the preparation practices that enable people to grow to their potential. I want to share some of those with you now.(""What makes a great leader in the 21st century?"")In a 21st-century world, which is more global, digitally enabled and transparent, with faster speeds of information  flow and innovation, and where nothing big gets done without some kind of a complex matrix, relying on traditional development practices will stunt your growth as a leader. In fact, traditional assessments like narrow 360 surveys or outdated performance criteria will give you false positives, lulling you into thinking that you are more prepared than you really are. Leadership in the 21st century is defined and evidenced by three questions.Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or your life? The answer to this question is on your calendar. Who are you spending time with? On what topics? Where are you traveling? What are you reading? And then how are you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities, and then making a decision to do something right now so that you're prepared and ready? There's a leadership team that does a practice where they bring together each member collecting, here are trends that impact me, here are trends that impact another team member, and they share these, and then make decisions, to course-correct a strategy or to anticipate a new move. Great leaders are not head-down. They see around corners, shaping their future, not just reacting to it.The second question is, what is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network? You know, we hear often about  good ol' boy networks and they're certainly alive and  well in many institutions. But to some extent, we all have a network of people that we're comfortable with. So this question is about your capacity to develop relationships with people that are very different than you. And those differences can be biological, physical, functional, political,  cultural, socioeconomic. And yet, despite all these differences, they connect with you and they trust you enough to cooperate with you in achieving a shared goal. Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions, because you have people that are thinking differently than you are.Third question: are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has  made you successful in the past? There's an expression: Go along to get along. But if you follow this advice, chances are as a leader, you're going to keep doing what's familiar and comfortable. Great leaders dare to be different. They don't just talk about risk-taking, they actually do it. And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid. Now interestingly, the people who will join you are not your usual suspects in your network. They're often people that think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap. And it's a leap, not a step. More than traditional leadership programs, answering these three questions will determine your effectiveness as a 21st-century leader.So what makes a great leader in the 21st century? I've met many, and they stand out. They are women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roselinde_torres_what_it_takes_to_be_a_great_leader
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"I'm going to go off script and make Chris quite nervous here by making this audience participation. All right. Are you with me? Yeah. Yeah. All right.So what I'd like to do is have you raise your hand if you've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex. Could be the neighbors, hotel room, your parents. Sorry. Okay. Pretty much everybody. Now raise your hand if the man was making more noise than the woman. I see one guy there. It doesn't count if it was you, sir. (Laughter) So his hand's down. And one woman. Okay. Sitting next to a loud guy.Now what does this tell us? It tells us that human beings make noise when they have sex, and it's generally the woman who makes more noise. This is known as female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard crowd. I wasn't even going to mention this, but somebody told me that Meg Ryan might be here, and she is the world's most famous female copulatory vocalizer. So I thought, got to talk about that. We'll get back to that a little bit later.Let me start by saying human beings are not descended from apes, despite what you may have heard. We are apes. We are more closely related to the chimp and the bonobo than the African elephant is to the Indian elephant, as Jared Diamond pointed out in one of his early books. We're more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos are related to any other primate — gorillas, orangutans, what have you. So we're extremely closely related to them, and as you'll see in terms of our behavior, we've got some relationship as well. So what I'm asking today, the question I want to explore with you today is, what kind of ape are we in terms of our sexuality? Now, since Darwin's day there's been what Cacilda and I have called the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, and you're all familiar with it, even if you haven't read this stuff. The idea is that, as part of human nature, from the beginning of our species' time, men have sort of leased women's reproductive potential by providing them with certain goods and services. Generally we're talking about meat, shelter, status, protection, things like that. And in exchange, women have offered fidelity, or at least a promise of fidelity. Now this sets men and women up in an oppositional relationship. The war between the sexes is built right into our DNA, according to this vision. Right? What Cacilda and I have argued is that no, this economic relationship, this oppositional relationship, is actually an artifact of agriculture, which only arose about 10,000 years ago at the earliest. Anatomically modern human beings have been around for about 200,000 years, so we're talking about five percent, at most, of our time as a modern, distinct species. So before agriculture, before the agricultural revolution, it's important to understand that human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that are characterized wherever they're found in the world by what anthropologists called fierce egalitarianism. They not only share things, they demand that things be shared: meat, shelter, protection, all these things that were supposedly being traded to women for their sexual fidelity, it turns out, are shared widely among these societies. Now I'm not saying that our ancestors were noble savages, and I'm not saying modern day hunter-gatherers are noble savages either. What I'm saying is that this is simply the best way to mitigate risk in a foraging context. And there's really no argument about this among anthropologists. All Cacilda and I have done is extend this sharing behavior to sexuality. So we've argued that human sexuality has essentially evolved, until agriculture, as a way of establishing and maintaining the complex, flexible social systems, networks, that our ancestors were very good at, and that's why our species has survived so well.Now, this makes some people uncomfortable, and so I always need to take  a moment in these talks to say, listen, I'm saying our ancestors were promiscuous, but I'm not saying they were having sex with strangers. There were no strangers. Right? In a hunter-gatherer band, there are no strangers. You've known these people your entire life. So I'm saying, yes, there were overlapping sexual relationships, that our ancestors probably had several different sexual relationships going on at any given moment in their adult lives. But I'm not saying they were having sex with strangers. I'm not saying that they didn't love the people they were having sex with. And I'm not saying there was no pair-bonding going on. I'm just saying it wasn't sexually exclusive.And those of us who have chosen to be monogamous — my parents, for example, have been married for 52 years monogamously, and if it wasn't monogamously, Mom and Dad, I don't want to hear about it— I'm not criticizing this and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this. What I'm saying is that to argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism. You can choose to be a vegetarian, but don't think that just because you've made that decision, bacon suddenly stops smelling good. Okay? So this is my point. (Laughter) That one took a minute to sink in, huh?Now, in addition to being a great genius, a wonderful man, a wonderful husband, a wonderful father, Charles Darwin was also a world-class Victorian prude. All right? He was perplexed by the sexual swellings of certain primates, including chimps and bonobos, because these sexual swellings tend to provoke many males to mate with the females. So he couldn't understand why on Earth would the female have developed this thing if all they were supposed to be doing is forming their pair bond, right? Chimps and bonobos, Darwin didn't really know this, but chimps and bonobos mate one to four times per hour with up to a dozen males per day when they have their sexual swellings. Interestingly, chimps have sexual swellings through 40 percent, roughly, of their menstrual cycle, bonobos 90 percent, and humans are among the only species on the planet where the female is available for sex throughout the menstrual cycle, whether she's menstruating, whether she's post-menopausal, whether she's already pregnant. This is vanishingly rare among mammals. So it's a very interesting aspect of human sexuality. Now, Darwin ignored the reflections of the sexual swelling in his own day, as scientists tend to do sometimes.So what we're talking about is sperm competition. Now the average human ejaculate has about 300 million sperm cells, so it's already a competitive environment. The question is whether these sperm are  competing against other men's sperm or just their own. There's a lot to talk about in this chart. The one thing I'll call your attention to right away is the little musical note above the female chimp and bonobo and human. That indicates female copulatory vocalization. Just look at the numbers. The average human has sex about 1,000 times per birth. If that number seems high for some of you, I assure you it seems low for others in the room. We share that ratio with chimps and bonobos. We don't share it with the other three apes, the gorilla, the orangutan and the gibbon, who are more typical of mammals, having sex only about a dozen times per birth. Humans and bonobos are the only  animals that have sex face-to-face when both of them are alive. (Laughter) And you'll see that the human, chimp and bonobo all have external testicles, which in our book we equate to a special fridge you have in the garage just for beer. If you're the kind of guy who has a beer fridge in the garage, you expect a party to happen at any moment, and you need to be ready. That's what the external testicles are. They keep the sperm cells cool so you can have frequent ejaculations. I'm sorry. It's true. The human, some of you will be happy to hear, has the largest, thickest penis of any primate.Now, this evidence goes way beyond anatomy. It goes into anthropology as well. Historical records are full of accounts of people around the world who have sexual practices that should be impossible given what we have assumed about human sexual evolution. These women are the Mosuo from southwestern China. In their society, everyone, men and women, are completely sexually autonomous. There's no shame associated with sexual behavior. Women have hundreds of partners. It doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody gossips. It's not an issue. When the woman becomes pregnant, the child is cared for by her,  her sisters, and her brothers. The biological father is a nonissue. On the other side of the planet, in the Amazon, we've got many tribes which practice what anthropologists call partible paternity. These people actually believe — and they have no contact among them, no common language or anything, so it's not an idea that spread, it's an idea that's arisen around the world — they believe that a fetus is literally made of accumulated semen. So a woman who wants to have a child who's smart and funny and strong makes sure she has lots of sex with the smart guy, the funny guy and the strong guy, to get the essence of each of these men into the baby, and then when the child is born, these different men will come forward and acknowledge their paternity of the child. So paternity is actually sort of a team endeavor in this society. So there are all sorts of examples like this that we go through in the book.Now, why does this matter? Edward Wilson says we need to understand that human sexuality is first a bonding device and only secondarily procreation. I think that's true. This matters because our evolved sexuality is in direct conflict with many aspects of the modern world. The contradictions between what we're told we should feel and what we actually do feel generates a huge amount of unnecessary suffering. My hope is that a more accurate, updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves, for each other, greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions, and that we'll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate, instinctive right to monitor and control women's sexual behavior. (Applause) Thank you. And we'll see that it's not only gay people that have to come out of the closet. We all have closets we have to come out of. Right? And when we do come out of those closets, we'll recognize that our fight is not with each other, our fight is with an outdated,  Victorian sense of human sexuality that conflates desire with property rights, generates shame and confusion in place of understanding and empathy. It's time we moved beyond Mars and Venus, because the truth is that men are from Africa and women are from Africa.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. Christopher Ryan: Thank you.CA: So a question. It's so perplexing, trying to use arguments about evolutionary history to turn that into what we ought to do today. Someone could give a talk and say, look at us, we've got these really sharp teeth and muscles and a brain that's really good at throwing weapons, and if you look at lots of societies around the world, you'll see very high rates of violence. Nonviolence is a choice like vegetarianism, but it's not who you are. How is that different from the talk you gave?CR: Well first of all, the evidence for high levels of violence in prehistory is very debatable. But that's just an example. Certainly, you know, lots of people say to me, just because we lived a certain way in the past doesn't mean we should live that  way now, and I agree with that. Everyone has to respond to the modern world. But the body does have its inherent evolved trajectories. And so you could live on McDonald's and milkshakes, but your body will rebel against  that. We have appetites. I think it was Schopenhauer who said, a person can do what they want but not want what they want. And so what I'm arguing against is the shame that's associated with desires. It's the idea that if you love your husband or wife but you still are attracted to other people, there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with your marriage, something wrong with your partner. I think a lot of families are fractured by unrealistic expectations that are based upon this false vision of human sexuality. That's what I'm trying to get at.CA: Thank you. Communicated powerfully. Thanks a lot.CR: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_ryan_are_we_designed_to_be_sexual_omnivores
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"I'm going to talk to you tonight about coming out of the closet, and not in the traditional sense, not just the gay closet. I think we all have closets. Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you're pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done.Several years ago, I was working at the South Side Walnut Cafe, a local diner in town, and during my time there I would go through phases of militant lesbian intensity: not shaving my armpits, quoting Ani DiFranco lyrics as gospel. And depending on the bagginess of my cargo shorts and how recently I had shaved my head, the question would often be sprung on me, usually by a little kid:""Um, are you a boy or are you a girl?""And there would be an awkward silence at the table. I'd clench my jaw a little tighter, hold my coffee pot with a little more vengeance. The dad would awkwardly shuffle his newspaper and the mom would shoot a chilling stare at her kid. But I would say nothing, and I would seethe inside. And it got to the point where every time I walked up to a table that had a kid anywhere between three and 10 years old, I was ready to fight. (Laughter) And that is a terrible feeling. So I promised myself, the next time, I would say something. I would have that hard conversation.So within a matter of weeks, it happens again.""Are you a boy or are you a girl?""Familiar silence, but this time I'm ready, and I am about to go all Women's Studies 101 on this table. (Laughter) I've got my Betty Friedan quotes. I've got my Gloria Steinem quotes. I've even got this little bit from ""Vagina Monologues"" I'm going to do. So I take a deep breath and I look down and staring back at me is a four-year-old girl in a pink dress, not a challenge to a feminist duel, just a kid with a question: ""Are you a boy or are you a girl?""So I take another deep breath, squat down to next to her, and say, ""Hey, I know it's kind of confusing. My hair is short like a boy's, and I wear boy's clothes, but I'm a girl, and you know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress, and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies? Well, I'm more of a comfy jammies kind of girl.""And this kid looks me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and says, ""My favorite pajamas are purple with fish. Can I get a pancake, please?"" (Laughter) And that was it. Just, ""Oh, okay. You're a girl. How about that pancake?""It was the easiest hard conversation I have ever had. And why? Because Pancake Girl and I, we were both real with each other.So like many of us, I've lived in a few closets in my life, and yeah, most often, my walls happened to be rainbow. But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours. Sure, I'll give you 100 reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours, but here's the thing: Hard is not relative. Hard is hard. Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them? Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your five-year-old  you're getting a divorce? There is no harder, there is just hard. We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the  fact that we all have hard. At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live.Thanks. (Applause)So imagine yourself 20 years ago. Me, I had a ponytail, a strapless dress, and high-heeled shoes. I was not the militant lesbian ready to fight any four-year-old that walked into the cafe. I was frozen by fear, curled up in the corner of my pitch-black closet clutching my gay grenade, and moving one muscle is the scariest thing I have ever done. My family, my friends, complete strangers — I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose. I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you.One of my most memorable grenade tosses was at my sister's wedding. (Laughter) It was the first time that many in attendance knew I was gay, so in doing  my maid of honor duties, in my black dress and heels, I walked around to tables and finally landed on a table of my parents' friends, folks that had known me for years. And after a little small talk, one of the women shouted out, ""I love Nathan Lane!"" And the battle of gay relatability had begun.""Ash, have you ever been to the Castro?""""Well, yeah, actually, we have friends in San Francisco.""""Well, we've never been there but we've heard it's fabulous.""""Ash, do you know my hairdresser Antonio? He's really good and he has never talked about a girlfriend.""""Ash, what's your favorite TV show? Our favorite TV show? Favorite: Will & Grace. And you know who we love? Jack. Jack is our favorite.""And then one woman, stumped but wanting so desperately to show her support, to let me know she was on my side, she finally blurted out, ""Well, sometimes my husband wears pink shirts."" (Laughter)And I had a choice in that moment, as all grenade throwers do. I could go back to my girlfriend and my gay-loving table and mock their responses, chastise their unworldliness and their inability to jump through the politically correct  gay hoops I had brought with me, or I could empathize with them and realize that that was maybe one of the hardest things they had ever done, that starting and having that conversation was them coming out of their closets. Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they felt short. It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge the fact that they were trying. And what else can you ask someone to do but try? If you're going to be real with someone, you gotta be ready for real in return.So hard conversations are still not my strong suit. Ask anybody I have ever dated. But I'm getting better, and I follow what I like to call the three Pancake Girl principles. Now, please view this through gay-colored lenses, but know what it takes to come out of any closet is essentially the same.Number one: Be authentic. Take the armor off. Be yourself. That kid in the cafe had no armor, but I was ready for battle. If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too.Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off. If you know you are gay, just say it. If you tell your parents you might be gay, they will hold out hope that this will change. Do not give them that sense of false hope. (Laughter)And number three, and most important — (Laughter) Be unapologetic. You are speaking your truth. Never apologize for that. And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are. And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you. Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours. That is their story, not yours. The only story that matters is the one that you want to write. So the next time you find yourself in a pitch-black closet clutching your grenade, know we have all been there before. And you may feel so very alone, but you are not. And we know it's hard but we need you out here, no matter what your walls are made of, because I guarantee you there are others peering through the keyholes of their closets looking for the next brave soul to bust a door open, so be that person and show the world that we are bigger than our closets and that a closet is no place for a person to truly live.Thank you, Boulder. Enjoy your night. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ash_beckham_we_re_all_hiding_something_let_s_find_the_courage_to_open_up
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"I'm very pleased to be here today to talk to you all about how we might repair the damaged brain, and I'm particularly excited by this field, because as a neurologist myself, I believe that this offers one of the great ways that we might be able to offer hope for patients who today live with devastating and yet untreatable diseases of the brain.So here's the problem. You can see here the picture of somebody's brain with Alzheimer's disease next to a healthy brain, and what's obvious is, in the Alzheimer's brain, ringed red, there's obvious damage — atrophy, scarring. And I could show you equivalent pictures from other disease: multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, Parkinson's disease, even Huntington's disease, and they would all tell a similar story. And collectively these brain disorders represent one of the major public health threats of our time. And the numbers here are really rather staggering. At any one time, there are 35 million people today living with one of these brain diseases, and the annual cost globally is 700 billion dollars. I mean, just think about that. That's greater than one percent of the global GDP. And it gets worse, because all these numbers are rising because these are by and large age-related diseases, and we're living longer. So the question we really need to ask ourselves is, why, given the devastating impact of these diseases to the individual, never mind the scale of the societal problem, why are there no effective treatments?Now in order to consider this, I first need to give you a crash course in how the brain works. So in other words, I need to tell you everything I learned at medical school. (Laughter) But believe me, this isn't going to take very long. Okay? (Laughter) So the brain is terribly simple: it's made up of four cells, and two of them are shown here. There's the nerve cell, and then there's the myelinating cell, or the insulating cell. It's called oligodendrocyte. And when these four cells work together in health and harmony, they create an extraordinary symphony of electrical activity, and it is this electrical activity that underpins our ability to think, to emote, to remember, to learn, move, feel and so on. But equally, each of these individual four cells alone or together, can go rogue or die, and when that happens, you get damage. You get damaged wiring. You get disrupted connections. And that's evident here with the slower conduction. But ultimately, this damage will manifest as disease, clearly. And if the starting dying nerve cell is a motor nerve, for example, you'll get motor neuron disease.So I'd like to give you a real-life illustration of what happens with motor neuron disease. So this is a patient of mine called John. John I saw just last week in the clinic. And I've asked John to tell us something  about what were his problems that led to the initial diagnosis of motor neuron disease.John: I was diagnosed in October in 2011, and the main problem was a breathing problem, difficulty breathing.Siddharthan Chandran: I don't know if you caught all of that, but what John was telling us was that difficulty with breathing led eventually to the diagnosis of motor neuron disease.So John's now 18 months further down in that journey, and I've now asked him to tell us something about his current predicament.John: What I've got now is  the breathing's gotten worse. I've got weakness in my hands,  my arms and my legs. So basically I'm in a wheelchair most of the time.SC: John's just told us he's in a wheelchair most of the time.So what these two clips show is not just the devastating consequence of the disease, but they also tell us something about the shocking pace of the disease, because in just 18 months, a fit adult man has been rendered wheelchair- and respirator-dependent. And let's face it, John could be anybody's father, brother or friend.So that's what happens when the motor nerve dies. But what happens when that myelin cell dies? You get multiple sclerosis. So the scan on your left is an illustration of the brain, and it's a map of the connections of the brain, and superimposed upon which are areas of damage. We call them lesions of demyelination. But they're damage, and they're white.So I know what you're thinking here. You're thinking, ""My God, this bloke came up and said he's going to talk about hope, and all he's done is give a really rather bleak and depressing tale."" I've told you these diseases are terrible. They're devastating, numbers are rising, the costs are ridiculous, and worst of all, we have no treatment. Where's the hope?Well, you know what? I think there is hope. And there's hope in this next section, of this brain section of somebody else with M.S., because what it illustrates is, amazingly, the brain can repair itself. It just doesn't do it well enough. And so again, there are two things I want to show you. First of all is the damage of this patient with M.S. And again, it's another one of these white masses. But crucially, the area that's ringed red highlights an area that is pale blue. But that area that is pale blue was once white. So it was damaged. It's now repaired. Just to be clear: It's not because of doctors. It's in spite of doctors, not because of doctors. This is spontaneous repair. It's amazing and it's occurred because there are stem cells in the brain, even, which can enable new myelin, new insulation, to be laid down over the damaged nerves. And this observation is important for two reasons. The first is it challenges one of the orthodoxies that we learnt at medical school, or at least I did, admittedly last century, which is that the brain doesn't repair itself, unlike, say, the bone or the liver. But actually it does, but it just doesn't do it well enough. And the second thing it does, and it gives us a very clear direction  of travel for new therapies — I mean, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know what to do here. You simply need to find ways of promoting the endogenous, spontaneous repair that occurs anyway.So the question is, why, if we've known that for some time, as we have, why do we not have those treatments? And that in part reflects the complexity of drug development. Now, drug development you might think of as a rather expensive but risky bet, and the odds of this bet are roughly this: they're 10,000 to one against, because you need to screen about 10,000 compounds to find that one potential winner. And then you need to spend 15 years and spend over a billion dollars, and even then, you may not have a winner.So the question for us is, can you change the rules of the game and can you shorten the odds? And in order to do that, you have to think, where is the bottleneck in this drug discovery? And one of the bottlenecks is  early in drug discovery. All that screening occurs in animal models. But we know that the proper  study of mankind is man, to borrow from Alexander Pope. So the question is, can we study these diseases using human material? And of course, absolutely we can. We can use stem cells, and specifically we can use human stem cells. And human stem cells are these extraordinary but simple cells that can do two things: they can self-renew or make more of themselves, but they can also become specialized to make bone, liver or, crucially, nerve cells, maybe even the motor nerve cell or the myelin cell. And the challenge has long been, can we harness the power, the undoubted power of these stem cells in order to realize their promise for regenerative neurology?And I think we can now, and the reason we can is because there have been several major discoveries in the last 10, 20 years. One of them was here in Edinburgh, and it must be the only celebrity sheep, Dolly. So Dolly was made in Edinburgh, and Dolly was an example of the first cloning of a mammal from an adult cell. But I think the even more significant breakthrough for the purposes of our discussion today was made in 2006 by a Japanese scientist called Yamanaka. And what Yamaka did, in a fantastic form of scientific cookery, was he showed that four ingredients, just four ingredients, could effectively convert any cell, adult cell, into a master stem cell. And the significance of this is difficult to exaggerate, because what it means that from anybody in this room, but particularly patients, you could now generate a bespoke, personalized tissue repair kit. Take a skin cell, make it a master pluripotent cell, so you could then make those cells that are relevant to their disease, both to study but potentially to treat. Now, the idea of that at medical school — this is a recurring theme, isn't  it, me and medical school? — would have been ridiculous, but it's an absolute reality today. And I see this as the cornerstone of regeneration, repair and hope.And whilst we're on the theme of hope, for those of you who might have failed at school, there's hope for you as well, because this is the school report of John Gerdon. [""I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous.""] So they didn't think much of him then. But what you may not know is that he  got the Nobel Prize for medicine just three months ago.So to return to the original problem, what is the opportunity of these stem cells, or this disruptive technology, for repairing the damaged brain, which we call regenerative neurology? I think there are two ways you can think about this: as a fantastic 21st-century drug discovery tool, and/or as a form of therapy. So I want to tell you a little bit about both of those in the next few moments.Drug discovery in a dish is how people often talk about this. It's very simple: You take a patient with a disease, let's say motor neuron disease, you take a skin sample, you do the pluripotent reprogramming, as I've already told you, and you generate live motor nerve cells. That's straightforward, because that's what pluripotent cells can do. But crucially, you can then compare their behavior to their equivalent but healthy counterparts, ideally from an unaffected relative. That way, you're matching for genetic variation.And that's exactly what we did here. This was a collaboration with colleagues: in London, Chris Shaw; in the U.S.,  Steve Finkbeiner and Tom Maniatis. And what you're looking at, and this is amazing, these are living, growing, motor nerve cells from a patient with motor neuron disease. It happens to be an inherited form. I mean, just imagine that. This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. So apart from seeing them grow and put out processes, we can also engineer them so that they fluoresce, but crucially, we can then track their individual health and compare the diseased motor nerve cells to the healthy ones. And when you do all that and put it together, you realize that the diseased ones, which is represented in the red line, are two and a half times more likely to die than the healthy counterpart. And the crucial point about this is that you then have a fantastic assay to discover drugs, because what would you ask of the drugs, and you could do this through a high-throughput automated screening system, you'd ask the drugs, give me one thing: find me a drug that will bring the red line closer to the blue line, because that drug will be a high-value candidate that you could probably take direct to human trial and almost bypass that bottleneck that I've told you about in drug discovery with the animal models, if that makes sense. It's fantastic.But I want to come back to how you might use stem cells directly to repair damage. And again there are two ways to think about this, and they're not mutually exclusive. The first, and I think in the long run the one that will give us the biggest dividend, but it's not thought of that way just yet, is to think about those stem cells that are already in your brain, and I've told you that. All of us have stem cells in the brain, even the diseased brain, and surely the smart way forward is to find ways that you can promote and activate those stem cells in your brain already to react and respond appropriately to damage to repair it. That will be the future. There will be drugs that will do that.But the other way is to effectively parachute in cells, transplant them in, to replace dying or lost cells, even in the brain. And I want to tell you now an experiment, it's a clinical trial that we did, which recently completed, which is with colleagues in UCL, David Miller in particular. So this study was very simple. We took patients with multiple sclerosis and asked a simple question: Would stem cells from the bone marrow be protective of their nerves? So what we did was we took this bone marrow, grew up the stem cells in the lab, and then injected them back into the vein. I'm making this sound really simple. It took five years off a lot of people, okay? And it put gray hair on me and caused all kinds of issues. But conceptually, it's essentially simple. So we've given them into the vein, right? So in order to measure whether this was successful or not, we measured the optic nerve as our outcome measure. And that's a good thing to measure in M.S., because patients with M.S. sadly suffer with problems with vision — loss of vision, unclear vision. And so we measured the size of the optic nerve using the scans with David Miller three times — 12 months, six months, and before the infusion — and you can see the gently declining red line. And that's telling you that the optic nerve is shrinking, which makes sense, because their nerves are dying. We then gave the stem cell infusion and repeated the measurement twice — three months and six months — and to our surprise, almost, the line's gone up. That suggests that the intervention has been protective. I don't think myself that what's happened is that those stem cells have made new myelin or new nerves. What I think they've done is they've promoted the endogenous stem cells, or precursor cells, to do their job, wake up, lay down new myelin. So this is a proof of concept. I'm very excited about that.So I just want to end with the theme I began on, which was regeneration and hope. So here I've asked John what his hopes are for the future.John: I would hope that sometime in the future through the research that you people are doing, we can come up with a cure so that people like me can lead a normal life.SC: I mean, that speaks volumes.But I'd like to close by first of all thanking John — thanking John for allowing me to share his insights and these clips with you all. But I'd also like to add to John and to others that my own view is, I'm hopeful for the future. I do believe that the disruptive technologies like stem cells that I've tried to explain to you do offer very real hope. And I do think that the day that we might be able to repair the damaged brain is sooner than we think. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/siddharthan_chandran_can_the_damaged_brain_repair_itself
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"I'm going to talk about hackers. And the image that comes to your mind when I say that word is probably not of Benjamin Franklin, but I'm going to explain to you why it should be.The image that comes to your mind is probably more likely of a pasty kid sitting in a basement doing something mischievous, or of a shady criminal who is trying to steal your identity, or of an international rogue with a political agenda. And mainstream culture has kind of fed this idea that hackers are people that we should be afraid of.But like most things in technology and the technology world, hacking has equal power for good as it has for evil. For every hacker that's trying to steal your identity there's one that's building a tool that will help you find your loved ones after a disaster or to monitor environmental quality after an oil spill. Hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system, and it is a deeply democratic activity. It's about critical thinking. It's about questioning existing ways of doing things. It's the idea that if you see a  problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain about it. And in many ways, hacking is what built America. Betsy Ross was a hacker. The Underground Railroad was a brilliant hack. And from the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs, hacking has always been at the foundation of American democracy.So if there's one thing I want to leave you here with today, it's that the next time you think about who a hacker is, you think not of this guy but of this guy, Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the greatest hackers of all time. He was one of America's most prolific inventors, though he famously never filed a patent, because he thought that all human knowledge should be freely available. He brought us bifocals and the lightning rod, and of course there was his collaboration on the invention of American democracy.And in Code For America, we really try to embody the spirit of Ben Franklin. He was a tinkerer and a statesman whose conception of citizenship was always predicated on action. He believed that government could be built by the people, and we call those people civic hackers.So it's no wonder that the values that underly a healthy democracy, like collaboration and empowerment and participation and enterprise, are the same values that underly the Internet. And so it's no surprise that many hackers are turning their attention to the problem of government.But before I give you a few examples of what civic hacking looks like, I want to make clear that you don't have to be a programmer to be a civic hacker. You just have to believe that you can bring a 21st-century tool set to bear on the problems that government faces. And we hear all the time from our community of civic hackers at Code for America that they didn't understand how much nontechnical work actually went into civic hacking projects. So keep that in mind. All of you are potential civic hackers.So what does civic hacking look like? Our team last year in Honolulu, which in this case was three full-time fellows who were doing a year of public service, were asked by the city to rebuild the website. And it's a massive thing of tens of thousands of pages which just wasn't going to be possible in the few months that they had. So instead, they decided to build a parallel site that better conformed to how citizens actually want to interact with information on a city website. They're looking for answers to questions, and they want to take action when they're done, which is really hard to do from a site that looks like this. So our team built Honolulu Answers, which is a super-simple search interface where you enter a search term or a question and get back plain language answers that drive a user towards action. Now the site itself was easy enough to build, but the team was faced with the challenge of how they populate all of the content. It would have taken the three of them a very long time, especially given that none of  them are actually from Honolulu. And so they did something that's really radical, when you think about how government is used to working. They asked citizens to write the content. So you've heard of a hack-a-thon. They held a write-a-thon, where on one Saturday afternoon — (""What do I do about wild pigs  being a nuisance?"") (Laughter) — Wild pigs are a huge problem  in Honolulu, apparently. In one Saturday afternoon, they were able to populate most of the content for most of the frequently asked questions, but more importantly than that, they created a new way for citizens  to participate in their government.Now, I think this is a really cool story in and of itself, but it gets more awesome. On the National Day of Civic Hacking this past June in Oakland, where I live, the Code For America team in Oakland took the open source code base of Honolulu Answers and turned it into Oakland Answers, and again we held a write-a-thon where we took the most frequently asked questions and had citizens write the answers to them, and I got into the act. I authored this answer, and a few others. And I'm trying to this day to articulate the sense of empowerment and responsibility that I feel for the place that I live based simply on this small act of participation. And by stitching together my small act with the thousands of other small acts of participation that we're enabling through civic hacking, we think we can reenergize citizenship and restore trust in government.At this point, you may be wondering what city officials think of all this. They actually love it. As most of you guys know, cities are being asked every day to do more with less, and they're always looking for innovative solutions to entrenched problems. So when you give citizens a way to participate beyond attending a town hall meeting, cities can actually capture the capacity in their communities to do the business of government.Now I don't want to leave the impression that civic hacking is just an American phenomenon. It's happening across the globe, and one of my favorite examples is from Mexico City, where earlier this year, the Mexico House of Representatives entered into a contract with a software development firm to build an app that legislators would use to track bills. So this was just for the handful of legislators in the House. And the contract was a two-year contract for 9.3 million dollars. Now a lot of people were really angry about this, especially geeks who knew that 9.3 million dollars was an absolutely outrageous amount of money for what was a very simple app. But instead of taking to the streets, they issued a challenge. They asked programmers in Mexico to build something better and cheaper, and they offered a prize of 9,300 dollars — 10,000 times cheaper than the government contract, and they gave the entrants 10 days. And in those 10 days, they submitted 173 apps, five of which were presented to Congress and are still in the app store today. And because of this action, that contract was vacated, and now this has sparked a movement in Mexico City which is home to one of our partners, Code for Mexico City.And so what you see in all three of these places, in Honolulu and in Oakland and in Mexico City, are the elements that are at the core of civic hacking. It's citizens who saw things that could be working better and they decided to fix them, and through that work, they're creating a 21st-century ecosystem of participation. They're creating a whole new set of ways for citizens to be involved, besides voting or signing a petition or protesting. They can actually build government.So back to our friend Ben Franklin, who, one of his lesser-known accomplishments was that in 1736 he founded the first volunteer firefighting company in Philadelphia, called a brigade. And it's because he and his friends noticed that the city was having trouble keeping up with all the fires that were happening in the city, so in true civic hacker fashion, they built a solution.And we have our own brigades at Code for America working on the projects that I've just described, and we want to ask you to follow in Ben Franklin's footsteps and come join us. We have 31 brigades in the U.S. We are pleased to announce today that we're opening up the  brigade to international cities for the first time, starting with cities in Poland and Japan and Ireland. You can find out if there's a brigade where you live at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and if there's not a brigade where you live, we will help you. We've created a tool kit which also lives at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and we will support you along the way. Our goal is to create a global network of civic hackers who are innovating on the existing system in order to build tools that will solve entrenched problems, that will support local government, and that will empower citizens.So please come hack with us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_bracy_why_good_hackers_make_good_citizens
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"Thirteen years ago, we set ourselves a goal to end poverty. After some success, we've hit a big hurdle. The aftermath of the financial crisis has begun to hit aid payments, which have fallen for two consecutive years. My question is whether the lessons learned from saving the financial system can be used to help us overcome that hurdle and help millions. Can we simply print money for aid?""Surely not."" It's a common reaction. (Laughter) It's a quick talk. Others channel John McEnroe. ""You cannot be serious!""Now, I can't do the accent, but I am serious, thanks to these two children, who, as you'll learn, are very much at the heart of my talk. On the left, we have Pia. She lives in England. She has two loving parents, one of whom is standing right here. Dorothy, on the right, lives in rural Kenya. She's one of 13,000 orphans and vulnerable children who are assisted by a charity that I support. I do that because I believe that Dorothy, like Pia, deserves the best life chances that we can afford to give her. You'll all agree with me, I'm sure. The U.N. agrees too. Their overriding aim for international aid is to strive for a life of dignity for all.But — and here's that hurdle — can we afford our aid aspirations? History suggests not. In 1970, governments set themselves a target to increase overseas aid payments to 0.7 percent of their national income. As you can see, a big gap opens up between actual aid and that target. But then come the Millennium Development Goals, eight ambitious targets to be met by 2015. If I tell you that just one of those targets is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty, you get a sense of the ambition. There's also been some success. The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day has halved. But a lot remains to be done in two years. One in eight remain hungry. In the context of this auditorium, the front two rows aren't going to get any food. We can't settle for that, which is why the concern about the eighth goal, which relates to funding, which I said at the beginning is falling, is so troubling.So what can be done? Well, I work in financial markets, not development. I study the behavior of investors, how they react to policy and the economy. It gives me a different angle on the aid issue. But it took an innocent question from my then-four-year-old daughter to make me appreciate that.Pia and I were on the way to a local cafe and we passed a man collecting for charity. I didn't have any change to give him, and she was disappointed. Once in the cafe, Pia takes out her coloring book and starts scribbling. After a little while, I ask her what she's doing, and she shows me a drawing of a £5 note to give to the man outside. It's so sweet, and more generous than Dad would have been. But of course I explained to her, ""You can't do that; it's not allowed."" To which I get the classic four-year-old response: ""Why not?"" Now I'm excited, because I actually think I can answer this time. So I launch into an explanation of how an unlimited supply of money chasing a limited number of goods sends prices to the moon.Something about that exchange stuck with me, not because of the look of relief on Pia's face when I finally finished, but because it related to the sanctity of the money supply, a sanctity that had been challenged and questioned by the reaction of central banks to the financial crisis. To reassure investors, central banks began buying assets to try and encourage investors to do the same. They funded these purchases with money they created themselves. The money wasn't actually physically printed. It's still sort of locked away in the banking system today. But the amount created was unprecedented. Together, the central banks of the U.S., U.K and Japan increased the stock of money in their economies by 3.7 trillion dollars. That's three times, in fact that's more than three times, the total physical stock of dollar notes in circulation. Three times!Before the crisis, this would have been utterly unthinkable, yet it was accepted remarkably quickly. The price of gold, an asset thought to protect against inflation, did jump, but investors bought other assets that offered little protection from inflation. They bought fixed income securities, bonds. They bought equities too. For all the scare stories, the actual actions of investors spoke of rapid acceptance and confidence.That confidence was based on two pillars. The first was that, after years of keeping inflation under control, central banks were trusted to take the money-printing away if inflation became a threat. Secondly, inflation simply never became a threat. As you can see, in the United States, inflation for most of this period remained below average. It was the same elsewhere.So how does all this relate to aid? Well, this is where Dorothy and the Mango Tree charity that supports her comes in. I was at one of their fundraising events earlier this year, and I was inspired to give a one-off donation when I remembered that my firm offers to match the charitable contributions its employees make. So think of this: Instead of just being able to help Dorothy and four of her classmates to go through secondary school for a few years, I was able to double my contribution. Brilliant.So following that conversation with my daughter, and seeing the absence of inflation in the face of money-printing, and knowing that international aid payments were falling at just the wrong time, this made me wonder: Could we match but just on a much grander scale? Let's call this scheme ""Print Aid."" And here's how it might work. Provided it saw little inflation risk from doing so, the central bank would be mandated to match the government's overseas aid payments up to a certain limit. Governments have been aiming to get aid to 0.7 percent for years, so let's set the limit at half of that, 0.35 percent of their income. So it would work like this: If in a given year the government gave 0.2 percent of its income to overseas aid, the central bank would simply top it up with a further 0.2 percent. So far so good.How risky is this? Well, this involves the creation of money to buy goods, not assets. It sounds more inflationary already, doesn't it. But there are two important mitigating factors here. The first is that by definition, this money printed would be spent overseas. So it's not obvious how it leads to inflation in the country doing the actual printing unless it leads to a currency depreciation of that country. That is unlikely for the second reason: the scale of the money that would be printed under this scheme. So let's think of an example where Print Aid was in place in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. To match the aid payments made by those governments over the last four years, Print Aid would have generated 200 billion dollars' worth of extra aid. What would that look like in the context of the increase in the money stock that had already happened in those countries to save the financial system? Are you read for this? You might struggle to see that at the back, because the gap is quite small. So what we're saying here is that we took a $3.7 trillion gamble to save our financial systems, and you know what, it paid off. There was no inflation. Are we really saying that it's not worth the risk to print an extra 200 billion for aid? Would the risks really be that different? To me, it's not that clear. What is clear is the impact on aid. Even though this is the printing of just three central banks, the global aid that's given over this period is up by almost 40 percent. Aid as a proportion of national income all of a sudden is at a 40-year high. Now, we don't get to 0.7 percent. Governments are still incentivized to give. But you know what, that's the  point of a matching scheme.So I think what we've learned is that the risks from this money creation scheme are quite modest, but the benefits are potentially huge. Imagine what we could do with 40 percent more funding. We might be able to feed the front row.The thing that I fear, the only thing that I fear, apart from the fact that I've run out of time, is that the window of opportunity for this idea is a short one. Today, money creation by central banks is an accepted policy tool. That may not always be the case. Today there are universally agreed aims for international aid. That may not always be the case. Today might be the only time that these two things coincide, such that we can afford the aid that we've always aspired to give.So, can we print money for international aid? I seriously believe the question should be, why not?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_metcalfe_we_need_money_for_aid_so_let_s_print_it
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"Here are some images of clusters of galaxies. They're exactly what they sound like. They are these huge collections of galaxies, bound together by their mutual gravity. So most of the points that you see on the screen are not individual stars, but collections of stars, or galaxies.Now, by showing you some of these images, I hope that you will quickly see that galaxy clusters are these beautiful objects, but more than that, I think galaxy clusters are mysterious, they are surprising, and they're useful. Useful as the universe's most massive laboratories. And as laboratories, to describe galaxy clusters is to describe the experiments that you can do with them.And I think there are four major types, and the first type that I want to describe is probing the very big. So, how big? Well, here is an image of a particular galaxy cluster. It is so massive that the light passing through it is being bent, it's being distorted by the extreme gravity of this cluster. And, in fact, if you look very carefully you'll be able to see rings around this cluster. Now, to give you a number, this particular galaxy cluster has a mass of over one million billion suns. It's just mind-boggling how  massive these systems can get. But more than their mass, they have this additional feature. They are essentially isolated systems, so if we like, we can think of them as a scaled-down version of the entire universe. And many of the questions that we might have about the universe at large scales, such as, how does gravity work? might be answered by studying these systems.So that was very big. The second things is very hot. Okay, if I take an image of a galaxy cluster, and I subtract away all of the starlight, what I'm left with is this big, blue blob. This is in false color. It's actually X-ray light that we're seeing. And the question is, if it's not galaxies, what is emitting this light? The answer is hot gas, million-degree gas — in fact, it's plasma. And the reason why it's so hot goes back to the previous slide. The extreme gravity of these systems is accelerating particles of gas to great speeds, and great speeds means great temperatures. So this is the main idea, but science is a rough draft. There are many basic properties about this plasma that still confuse us, still puzzle us, and still push our understanding of the physics of the very hot.Third thing: probing the very small. Now, to explain this, I need to tell you a very disturbing fact. Most of the universe's matter is not made up of atoms. You were lied to. Most of it is made up of something  very, very mysterious, which we call dark matter. Dark matter is something that  doesn't like to interact very much, except through gravity, and of course we would like to learn more about it. If you're a particle physicist, you want to know what happens  when we smash things together. And dark matter is no exception.Well, how do we do this? To answer that question, I'm going to have to ask another one, which is, what happens when galaxy clusters collide? Here is an image. Since galaxy clusters are representative slices of the universe, scaled-down versions. They are mostly made up of dark matter, and that's what you see in this bluish purple. The red represents the hot gas, and, of course, you can see many galaxies. What's happened is a particle accelerator at a huge, huge scale. And this is very important, because what it means is that very, very small effects that might be difficult to detect in the lab, might be compounded and compounded into something that we could  possibly observe in nature. So, it's very funny. The reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about dark matter, the reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about the physics of the very small, is precisely because they are so very big.Fourth thing: the physics of the very strange. Certainly what I've said so far is crazy. Okay, if there's anything stranger I think it has to be dark energy. If I throw a ball into the air, I expect it to go up. What I don't expect is that it go up at an ever-increasing rate. Similarly, cosmologists understand why the universe is expanding. They don't understand why it's expanding at an ever-increasing rate. They give the cause of this accelerated expansion a name, and they call it dark energy. And, again, we want to learn more about it.So, one particular question that we have is, how does dark energy affect the universe at the largest scales? Depending on how strong it is, maybe structure forms faster or slower. Well, the problem with the large-scale structure of the universe is that it's horribly complicated. Here is a computer simulation. And we need a way to simplify it. Well, I like to think about this using an analogy. If I want to understand the sinking of the Titanic, the most important thing to do is not to model the little positions of every single little piece of the boat that broke off. The most important thing to do is to track the two biggest parts. Similarly, I can learn a lot about the universe at the largest scales by tracking its biggest pieces and those biggest pieces are clusters of galaxies.So, as I come to a close, you might feel slightly cheated. I mean, I began by talking about how galaxy clusters are useful, and I've given some reasons, but what is their use really? Well, to answer this, I want to give you a quote by Henry Ford when he was asked about cars. He had this to say: ""If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."" Today, we as a society are faced with many, many difficult problems. And the solutions to these  problems are not obvious. They are not faster horses. They will require an enormous amount of scientific ingenuity.So, yes, we need to focus, yes, we need to concentrate, but we also need to remember that innovation, ingenuity, inspiration — these things come when we broaden our field of vision when we step back when we zoom out. And I can't think of a better way to do this than by studying the universe around us. Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/henry_lin_what_we_can_learn_from_galaxies_far_far_away
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"Almost two years ago, I was driving in my car in Germany, and I turned on the radio. Europe at the time was in the middle of the Euro crisis, and all the headlines were about European countries getting downgraded by rating agencies in the United States. I listened and thought to myself, ""What are these rating agencies, and why is everybody so upset about their work?""Well, if you were sitting next to me in the car that day and would have told me that I would devote the next years to trying to reform them, obviously I would have called you crazy. But guess what's really crazy: the way these rating agencies are run. And I would like to explain to you not only why it's time to change this, but also how we can do it.So let me tell you a little bit about what rating agencies really do. As you would read a car magazine before purchasing a new car or taking a look at a product review before deciding which kind of tablet or phone to get, investors are reading ratings before they decide in which kind of product they are investing their money. A rating can range from a so-called AAA, which means it's a top-performing product, and it can go down to the level of the so-called BBB-, which means it's a fairly risky investment. Rating agencies are rating companies. They are rating banks. They are rating even financial products like the infamous mortgage-backed securities. But they can also rate countries, and these ratings are called sovereign ratings, and I would like to focus in particular on these sovereign ratings.And I can tell, as you're listening to me right now, you're thinking, so why should I really care about this, right? Be honest. Well, ratings affect you. They affect all of us. If a rating agency rates a country, it basically assesses and evaluates a country's debt and the ability and willingness of a country to repay its debt. So if a country gets downgraded by a rating agency, the country has to pay more in order to borrow money on the international markets. So it affects you as a citizen and as a taxpayer, because you and your fellow countrymen have to pony up more in order to borrow. But what if a country can't afford to pay more because it's maybe too expensive? Well, then the country has less available for other services, like roads, schools, healthcare. And this is the reason why you should care, because sovereign ratings affect everyone. And that is the reason why I believe they should be defined as public goods. They should be transparent, accessible, and available to everyone at no cost.But here's the situation: the rating agency market is dominated by three players and three players only — Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch — and we know whenever there is a market concentration, there is really no competition. There is no incentive to improve the quality of your product. And let's face it, the credit rating  agencies have contributed, putting the global economy on the brink, and yet they have to change the way they operate.The second point, would you really buy a car just based on the advice of the dealer? Obviously not, right? That would be irresponsible. But that's actually what's going on in the rating agency sector every single day. The customers of these rating agencies, like countries or companies, they are paying for their own ratings, and obviously this is creating a conflict of interest.The third point is, the rating agencies are not really telling us how they are coming up with their ratings, but in this day and age, you can't even sell a candy bar without listing everything that's inside. But for ratings, a crucial element of our economy, we really do not know what all the different ingredients are. We are allowing the rating agencies to be intransparent about their work, and we need to change this.I think there is no doubt that the sector needs a complete overhaul, not just a trimming at the margins. I think it's time for a bold move. I think it's time to upgrade the system. And this is why we at the Bertelsmann Foundation have invested a lot of time and effort thinking about an alternative for the sector. And we have developed the first model for a nonprofit rating agency for sovereign risk, and we call it by its acronym, INCRA.INCRA would make a difference to the current system by adding another nonprofit player to the mix. It would be based on a nonprofit model that would be based on a sustainable endowment. The endowment would create income that would allow us to run the operation, to run the rating agency, and it would also allow us to make our ratings publicly available. But this is not enough to make a difference, right? INCRA would also be based on a very, very clear governance structure that would avoid any conflict of interest, and it would include many stakeholders from society. INCRA would not only be a European or an American rating agency, it would be a truly international one, in which, in particular, the emerging economies would have an equal interest,  voice and representation.The second big difference that INCRA would make is that would it base its sovereign risk assessment on a broader set of indicators. Think about it that way. If we conduct a sovereign rating, we basically take a look at the economic soil of a country, its macroeconomic fundamentals. But we also have to ask the question, who is cultivating the economic soil of a country, right? Well, a country has many gardeners, and one of them is the government, so we have to ask the question, how is a country governed? How is it managed? And this is the reason why we have developed what we call forward-looking indicators. These are indicators that give you a much better read about the socioeconomic development of a country. I hope you would agree it's important for you to know if your government is willing to invest  in renewable energy and education. It's important for you to know if the government of your country is able to manage a crisis, if the government is finally able to implement the reforms that it's promised. For example, if INCRA would rate South Africa right now, of course we would take a very, very close look at the youth unemployment of the country, the highest in the world. If over 70 percent of a country's population under the age of 35 is unemployed, of course this has a huge impact on the economy today and even more so in the future. Well, our friends at Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch will tell us we would take this into account as well. But guess what? We do not know exactly how they will take this into account.And this leads me to the third big difference that INCRA would make. INCRA would not only release its ratings but it would also release its indicators and methodology.So in contrast to the current system, INCRA would be fully transparent. So in a nutshell, INCRA would offer an alternative to the current system of the big three rating agencies by adding a new, nonprofit player to the mix that would increase the competition, it would increase the transparency of the sector, and it would also increase the quality.I can tell that sovereign ratings may still look to you like this very small piece of this very complex global financial world, but I tell you it's a very important one, and a very important one to fix, because sovereign ratings affect all of us, and they should be addressed and should be defined as public goods. And this is why we are testing our model right now, and why we are trying to find out if it can bring together a group of able and willing actors to bring INCRA to life. I truly believe building up INCRA is in everyone's interest, and that we have the unique opportunity right now to turn INCRA into a cornerstone of a new, more inclusive financial system. Because for way too long, we have left the big financial players on their own. It's time to give them some company.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/annette_heuser_the_3_agencies_with_the_power_to_make_or_break_economies
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"I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine. I'm actually an engineer. And first let me say, I recently joined Google's Moonshot group, where I had a division, the display division in Google X, and the brain science work I'm speaking about today is work I did before I joined Google and on the side outside of Google.So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery. Are you still smart or not? And if not, can you make yourself smart again?After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it  was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters. Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours. Every day now for 18 years — every single day — I've had to try to decide the combinations and mixtures of chemicals, and try to get them, to stay alive. There have been several close calls.But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed. I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people. One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed. (Laughter) I was angry all the time, I thought about sex constantly, and I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world, and —(Laughter)— of course over the years I'd met guys kind of like that, or maybe kind of toned-down versions of that. I was kind of extreme. But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant. I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way.So I couldn't handle it. I changed my dosages. But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then.What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow. And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric — how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios. This kind of thinking isn't new. Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them. And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster? Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her? Or a musician to get the music out of his head? There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed. And the truth is, the remaining bottleneck in being able to do this is just upping the resolution of brain scan systems.So let me show you why I think  we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups. Both used fMRI technology — functional magnetic resonance imaging technology — to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard. And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image. The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image. And the right column was created by subtracting the middle  column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero. This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result. The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing.Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley. They've been able to decode brainwaves into recognizable visual fields. So let me set this up for you. In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences. Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded. The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the  individual was actually seeing. On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip. This is the jaw-dropper. We are so close to being able to do this. We just need to up the resolution. And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan.So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years. Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse. How do we do that? There's a lot of techniques in this approach. One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes. I'm not for that. There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology? Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need. I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets. There's some new technology breakthroughs in nanoscience when applied to magnetic structures that have created a whole new class of magnets, and with these magnets, we can lay down very fine detailed magnetic field patterns throughout the brain, and using those, we can actually create holographic-like interference structures to get precision control over many patterns, as is shown here by shifting things. We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph.So why does that matter? A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right? But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems. Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies. So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan. And on top of that, we can then layer our ever-growing knowledge  of brain structure and memory to create a thousandfold increase that we need. And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters  I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream.We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media. Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? What would we be capable of then? And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? You think the Internet was big. These are huge questions. It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills. And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases.We have little option but to open this door. Regardless, pick a year — will it happen in five years or 15 years? It's hard to imagine it taking much longer. We need to learn how to take this step together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_could_future_devices_read_images_from_our_brains
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"I'm going to talk a little bit about strategy and its relationship with technology. We tend to think of business strategy as being a rather abstract body of essentially economic thought, perhaps rather timeless. I'm going to argue that, in fact, business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology, that those assumptions are changing, and, in fact, changing quite dramatically, and that therefore what that will drive us to is a different concept of what we mean by business strategy.Let me start, if I may, with a little bit of history. The idea of strategy in business owes its origins to two intellectual giants: Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, and Michael Porter, professor at the Harvard Business School. Henderson's central idea was what you might call the Napoleonic idea of concentrating mass against weakness, of overwhelming the enemy. What Henderson recognized was that, in the business world, there are many phenomena which are characterized by what economists would call increasing returns — scale, experience. The more you do of something, disproportionately the better you get. And therefore he found a logic for investing in such kinds of overwhelming mass in order to achieve competitive advantage. And that was the first introduction of essentially a military concept of strategy into the business world.Porter agreed with that premise, but he qualified it. He pointed out, correctly, that that's all very well, but businesses actually have multiple steps to them. They have different components, and each of those components might be driven by a different kind of strategy. A company or a business might actually be advantaged in some activities but disadvantaged in others. He formed the concept of the value chain, essentially the sequence of steps with which a, shall we say, raw material, becomes a component, becomes assembled into a finished product, and then is distributed, for example, and he argued that advantage accrued to each of those components, and that the advantage of the whole was in some sense the sum or the average of that of its parts. And this idea of the value chain was predicated on the recognition that what holds a business together is transaction costs, that in essence you need to coordinate, organizations are more efficient at coordination than markets, very often, and therefore the nature and role and boundaries of the cooperation are defined by transaction costs. It was on those two ideas, Henderson's idea of increasing returns to scale and experience, and Porter's idea of the value chain, encompassing heterogenous elements, that the whole edifice of business strategy was subsequently erected.Now what I'm going to argue is that those premises are, in fact, being invalidated. First of all, let's think about transaction costs. There are really two components to transaction costs. One is about processing information, and the other is about communication. These are the economics of processing and communicating as they have evolved over a long period of time. As we all know from so many contexts, they have been radically transformed since the days when Porter and Henderson first formulated their theories. In particular, since the mid-'90s, communications costs have actually been falling even faster than transaction costs, which is why communication, the Internet, has exploded in such a dramatic fashion. Now, those falling transaction costs have profound consequences, because if transaction costs are the glue that hold value chains together, and they are falling, there is less to economize on. There is less need for vertically integrated organization, and value chains at least can break up. They needn't necessarily, but they can. In particular, it then becomes possible for a competitor in one business to use their position in one step of the value chain in order to penetrate or attack or disintermediate the competitor in another.That is not just an abstract proposition. There are many very specific stories of how that actually happened. A poster child example was the encyclopedia business. The encyclopedia business in the days of leatherbound books was basically a distribution business. Most of the cost was the commission to the salesmen. The CD-ROM and then the Internet came along, new technologies made the distribution of knowledge many orders of magnitude cheaper, and the encyclopedia industry collapsed. It's now, of course, a very familiar story. This, in fact, more generally was the story of the first generation of the Internet economy. It was about falling transaction costs breaking up value chains and therefore allowing disintermediation, or what we call deconstruction.One of the questions I was occasionally asked was, well, what's going to replace the encyclopedia when Britannica no longer has a business model? And it was a while before the answer became manifest. Now, of course, we know what it is: it's the Wikipedia. Now what's special about the Wikipedia is not its distribution. What's special about the Wikipedia is the way it's produced. The Wikipedia, of course, is an encyclopedia created by its users. And this, in fact, defines what you might call the second decade of the Internet economy, the decade in which the Internet as a noun became the Internet as a verb. It became a set of conversations, the era in which user-generated content and social networks became the dominant phenomenon. Now what that really meant in terms of the Porter-Henderson framework was the collapse of certain kinds of economies of scale. It turned out that tens of thousands of autonomous individuals writing an encyclopedia could do just as good a job, and certainly a much cheaper job, than professionals in a hierarchical organization. So basically what was happening was that one layer of this value chain was becoming fragmented, as individuals could take over where organizations were no longer needed.But there's another question that obviously this graph poses, which is, okay, we've gone through two decades — does anything distinguish the third? And what I'm going to argue is that indeed something does distinguish the third, and it maps exactly on to the kind of Porter-Henderson logic that we've been talking about. And that is, about data. If we go back to around 2000, a lot of people were talking about the information revolution, and it was indeed true that the world's stock of data was growing, indeed growing quite fast. but it was still at that point overwhelmingly analog. We go forward to 2007, not only had the world's stock of data exploded, but there'd been this massive substitution of digital for analog. And more important even than that, if you look more carefully at this graph, what you will observe is that about a half of that digital data is information that has an I.P. address. It's on a server or it's on a P.C. But having an I.P. address means that it can be connected to any other data that has an I.P. address. It means it becomes possible to put together half of the world's knowledge in order to see patterns, an entirely new thing. If we run the numbers forward to today, it probably looks something like this. We're not really sure. If we run the numbers forward to 2020, we of course have an exact number, courtesy of IDC. It's curious that the future is so much more predictable than the present. And what it implies is a hundredfold multiplication in the stock of information that is connected via an I.P. address. Now, if the number of connections that we can make is proportional to the number of pairs of data points, a hundredfold multiplication in the quantity of data is a ten-thousandfold multiplication in the number of patterns that we can see in that data, this just in the last 10 or 11 years. This, I would submit, is a sea change, a profound change in the economics of the world that we live in.The first human genome, that of James Watson, was mapped as the culmination of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000, and it took about 200 million dollars and about 10 years of work to map just one person's genomic makeup. Since then, the costs of mapping the genome have come down. In fact, they've come down in recent years very dramatically indeed, to the point where the cost  is now below 1,000 dollars, and it's confidently predicted that by the year 2015 it will be below 100 dollars — a five or six order of magnitude drop in the cost of genomic mapping in just a 15-year period, an extraordinary phenomenon. Now, in the days when mapping a genome cost millions, or even tens of thousands, it was basically a research enterprise. Scientists would gather some representative people, and they would see patterns, and they would try and make generalizations about human nature and disease from the abstract patterns they find from these particular selected individuals. But when the genome can  be mapped for 100 bucks, 99 dollars while you wait, then what happens is, it becomes retail. It becomes above all clinical. You go the doctor with a cold, and if he or she hasn't done it already, the first thing they do is map your genome, at which point what they're now doing is not starting from some abstract  knowledge of genomic medicine and trying to work out how it applies to you, but they're starting from your particular genome. Now think of the power of that. Think of where that takes us when we can combine genomic data with clinical data with data about drug interactions with the kind of ambient data that devices like our phone and medical sensors will increasingly be collecting. Think what happens when we collect all of that data and we can put it together in order to find patterns we wouldn't see before. This, I would suggest, perhaps it will take a while, but this will drive a revolution in medicine. Fabulous, lots of people talk about this.But there's one thing that doesn't get much attention. How is that model of colossal sharing across all of those kinds of databases compatible with the business models of institutions and organizations and corporations that are involved in this business today? If your business is based on proprietary data, if your competitive advantage is defined by your data, how on Earth is that company or is that society in fact going to achieve the value that's implicit in the technology? They can't.So essentially what's happening here, and genomics is merely one example of this, is that technology is driving the natural scaling of the activity beyond the institutional boundaries within which we have been used to thinking about it, and in particular beyond the institutional boundaries in terms of which business strategy as a discipline is formulated. The basic story here is that what used to be vertically integrated, oligopolistic competition among essentially similar kinds of competitors is evolving, by one means or another, from a vertical structure to a horizontal one. Why is that happening? It's happening because transaction costs are plummeting and because scale is polarizing. The plummeting of transaction costs weakens the glue that holds value chains together, and allows them to separate. The polarization of scale economies towards the very small — small is beautiful — allows for scalable communities to substitute for conventional corporate production. The scaling in the opposite direction, towards things like big data, drive the structure of business towards the creation of new kinds of institutions that can achieve that scale. But either way, the typically vertical structure gets driven to becoming more horizontal.The logic isn't just about big data. If we were to look, for example, at the telecommunications industry, you can tell the same story about fiber optics. If we look at the pharmaceutical industry, or, for that matter, university research, you can say exactly the same story about so-called ""big science."" And in the opposite direction, if we look, say, at the energy sector, where all the talk is about how households will be efficient producers of green energy and efficient conservers of energy, that is, in fact, the reverse phenomenon. That is the fragmentation of scale because the very small can substitute for the traditional corporate scale.Either way, what we are driven to is this horizontalization of the structure of industries, and that implies fundamental changes in how we think about strategy. It means, for example, that we need to think about strategy as the curation of these kinds of horizontal structure, where things like business definition and even industry definition are actually the outcomes of strategy, not something that the strategy presupposes. It means, for example, we need to work out how to accommodate collaboration and competition simultaneously. Think about the genome. We need to accommodate the very large and the very small simultaneously. And we need industry structures that will accommodate very, very different motivations, from the amateur motivations of people in communities to maybe the social motivations of infrastructure built by governments, or, for that matter, cooperative institutions built by companies that are otherwise competing, because that is the only way that they can get to scale.These kinds of transformations render the traditional premises  of business strategy obsolete. They drive us into a completely new world. They require us, whether we are in the public sector or the private sector, to think very fundamentally differently about the structure of business, and, at last, it makes strategy interesting again.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_evans_how_data_will_transform_business
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"The 2011 Arab Spring captured the attention of the world. It also captured the attention of authoritarian governments in other countries, who were worried that revolution would spread. To respond, they ramped up surveillance of activists, journalists and dissidents who they feared would inspire revolution in their own countries. One prominent Bahraini activist, who was arrested and tortured by his government, has said that the interrogators showed him transcripts of his telephone calls and text messages.Of course, it's no secret that governments are able to intercept telephone calls and text messages. It's for that reason that many activists specifically avoid using the telephone. Instead, they use tools like Skype, which they think are immune to interception. They're wrong. There have now been over the last few years an industry of companies who provide surveillance technology to governments, specifically technology that allows those governments to hack into the computers of surveillance targets. Rather than intercepting the communications  as they go over the wire, instead they now hack into your computer, enable your webcam, enable your microphone, and steal documents from your computer.When the government of Egypt fell in 2011, activists raided the office of the secret police, and among the many documents they found was this document by the Gamma Corporation, by Gamma International. Gamma is a German company that manufactures surveillance software and sells it only to governments. It's important to note that most governments don't really have the in-house capabilities to develop this software. Smaller ones don't have the resources or the expertise, and so there's this market of Western companies who are happy to supply them with the tools and techniques for a price. Gamma is just one of these companies. I should note also that Gamma never actually sold their software to the Egyptian government. They'd sent them an invoice for a sale, but the Egyptians never bought it. Instead, apparently, the Egyptian government used a free demo version of Gamma's software. (Laughter)So this screenshot is from a sales video that Gamma produced. Really, they're just emphasizing in a relatively slick presentation the fact that the police can sort of sit in an air-conditioned office and remotely monitor someone without them having any idea that it's going on. You know, your webcam light won't turn on. There's nothing to indicate that the microphone is enabled.This is the managing director of Gamma International. His name is Martin Muench. There are many photos of Mr. Muench that exist. This is perhaps my favorite. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit onto his webcam. You can see there's a little sticker that's placed over his camera. He knows what kind of surveillance is possible, and so clearly he doesn't want it to be used against him. Muench has said that he intends for his software to be used to capture terrorists and locate pedophiles. Of course, he's also acknowledged that once the software has been sold to governments, he has no way of knowing how it can be used. Gamma's software has been located on servers in countries around the world, many with really atrocious track records and human rights violations. They really are selling their software around the world.Gamma is not the only company in the business. As I said, it's a $5 billion industry. One of the other big guys in the industry is an Italian company called Hacking Team. Now, Hacking Team has what is probably the slickest presentation. The video they've produced is very sexy, and so I'm going to play you a clip just so you can get a feel both for the capabilities of the software but also how it's marketed to their government clients.(Video) Narrator: You want to look  through your target's eyes. (Music) You have to hack your target. [""While your target is browsing the web, exchanging documents, receiving SMS, crossing the borders""] You have to hit many different platforms. [""Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Linux""] You have to overcome encryption and capture relevant data. [Skype & encrypted calls, target location,  messaging, relationships, web browsing, audio & video""] Being stealth and untraceable. [""Immune to any protection system Hidden collection infrastructure""] Deployed all over your country. [""Up to hundreds of thousands of targets Managed from a single spot""] Exactly what we do.Christopher Soghoian: So, it would be funny if it wasn't true, but, in fact, Hacking Team's software is being sold to governments around the world. Last year we learned, for example, that it's been used to target Moroccan  journalists by the Moroccan government. Many, many countries it's been found in. So, Hacking Team has also been actively courting the U.S. law enforcement market. In the last year or so, the company has opened a sales office in Maryland. The company has also hired a spokesperson. They've been attending surveillance industry conferences where law enforcement officials show up. They've spoken at the conferences. What I thought was most fascinating was they've actually paid for the coffee break at one of the law enforcement conferences earlier this year. I can't tell you for sure that Hacking Team has sold their technology in the United States, but what I can tell you that if they haven't sold it, it isn't because they haven't been trying hard.So as I said before, governments that don't really have the resources to build their own tools will buy off-the-shelf surveillance software, and so for that reason, you see that the government of, say, Tunisia, might use the same software as the government of Germany. They're all buying off-the-shelf stuff. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States does have the budget to build their own surveillance technology, and so for several years, I've been trying to figure out if and how the FBI is hacking into the computers of surveillance targets.My friends at an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation — they're a civil society group — obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI detailing their next generation of surveillance technologies. Most of these documents were heavily redacted, but what you can see from the slides, if I zoom in, is this term: Remote Operations Unit. Now, when I first looked into this, I'd never heard of this unit before. I've been studying surveillance for more than six years. I'd never heard of it. And so I went online and I did some research, and ultimately I hit the mother lode when I went to LinkedIn, the social networking site for job seekers. There were lots of former U.S. government contractors who had at one point worked for the Remote Operating Unit, and were describing in surprising detail on their CVs what they had done in their former job. (Laughter) So I took this information and I gave it to a journalist that I know and trust at the Wall Street Journal, and she was able to contact several other former law enforcement officials who spoke on background and confirmed that yes, in fact, the FBI has a dedicated team that does nothing but hack into the computers of surveillance targets. Like Gamma and Hacking Team, the FBI also has the capability to remotely activate webcams, microphones, steal documents, get web browsing information, the works.There's sort of a big problem with governments going into hacking, and that's that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, journalists and human rights activists all use the same kinds of computers. There's no drug dealer phone and there's no journalist laptop. We all use the same technology, and what that means then is that for governments to have the capability to hack into the computers of the real bad guys, they also have to have the capability to hack into our devices too.So governments around the world have been embracing this technology. They've been embracing hacking as a law enforcement technique, but without any real debate. In the United States, where I live, there have been no congressional hearings. There's no law that's been passed specifically authorizing this technique, and because of its power and potential for abuse, it's vital that we have an informed public debate.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_government_surveillance_this_is_just_the_beginning
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"This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. It's in a shopping mall, and it sells fish eggs. It's a caviar-vending machine.This is the Art-o-mat, an art-vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition.This is Oliver Medvedik. He is not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me into this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. Strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. A lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. I instantly joined Genspace after this, and asked Oliver, ""If we can do this with strawberries, can we do this with people?"" About 10 minutes later, we were both spitting in vials, coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. I started doing this on my own. This is what my DNA actually looks like.And I was at a dinner party with some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. And I started having these bizarre dinner parties on Friday nights, where people would come over and we'd do DNA extractions, and I would capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well.(Laughter)These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science. You can kind of tell from their reactions.(Laughter)But they became fascinated by it, and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science.And so I started doing this regularly.(Laughter)It's an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing. I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA in small vials and categorizing them. This is what that looked like. And it started to make me think about a couple of things. First, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. So in a way, I created sort of a genetic social network.And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like,  ""Uh ... why are they numbered? Is this person more rare than the other one?"" And I hadn't even thought about that. They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in. But that made me think about collecting toys, and what's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys, and being able to collect these rare toys. You buy these boxes, but aren't sure what's going to be inside. But when you open them, you have different rarities of the toys. I thought that was interesting; I thought about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together. And for some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking of doing paintings of a vending machine. The vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw a beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. So I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. Here it is.(Music)[DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology.](Music)[For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine.](Music)[Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen.](Music)[DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA.](Music ends)Gabriel Barcia-Colombo: The DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple of galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well. We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. I'd like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, next to some of the other vending machines in that location.But really, with this and a lot of my art projects, I want to ask the audience a question: When biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? How much will these samples be worth? Will you buy someone else's sample? And what will you be able to do with that sample?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gabe_barcia_colombo_my_dna_vending_machine
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"The year is 1800. A curious little invention is being talked about. It's called a microscope. What it allows you to do is see tiny little lifeforms that are invisible to the naked eye. Soon comes the medical discovery that many of these lifeforms are actually causes of terrible human diseases. Imagine what happened to the society when they realized that an English mom in her teacup actually was drinking a monster soup, not very far from here. This is from London.Fast forward 200 years. We still have this monster soup around, and it's taken hold in the developing countries around the tropical belt. Just for malaria itself, there are a million deaths a year, and more than a billion people that need to be tested because they are at risk for different species of malarial infections.Now it's actually very simple to put a face to many of these monsters. You take a stain, like acridine orange or a fluorescent stain or Giemsa, and a microscope, and you look at them. They all have faces. Why is that so, that Alex in Kenya, Fatima in Bangladesh, Navjoot in Mumbai, and Julie and Mary in Uganda still wait months to be able to diagnose why they are sick? And that's primarily because scalability of the diagnostics is completely out of reach. And remember that number: one billion.The problem lies with the microscope itself. Even though the pinnacle of modern science, research microscopes are not designed for field testing. Neither were they first designed for diagnostics at all. They are heavy, bulky, really hard to maintain, and cost a lot of money. This picture is Mahatma Gandhi in the '40s using the exact same setup that we actually use today for diagnosing T.B. in his ashram in Sevagram in India.Two of my students, Jim and James, traveled around India and Thailand, starting to think about this problem a lot. We saw all kinds of donated equipment. We saw fungus growing on microscope lenses. And we saw people who had a functional microscope but just didn't know how to even turn it on. What grew out of that work and that trip was actually the idea of what we call Foldscopes.So what is a Foldscope? A Foldscope is a completely functional microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization, projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding paper. So, now you think, how is that possible? I'm going to show you some examples here, and we will run through some of them. It starts with a single sheet of paper. What you see here is all the possible components to build a functional bright-field and fluorescence microscope. So, there are three stages: There is the optical stage, the illumination stage and the mask-holding stage. And there are micro optics at the bottom that's actually embedded in the paper itself. What you do is, you take it on, and just like you are playing like a toy, which it is, I tab it off, and I break it off.This paper has no instructions and no languages. There is a code, a color code embedded, that tells you exactly how to fold that specific microscope. When it's done, it looks something like this, has all the functionalities of a standard microscope, just like an XY stage, a place where a sample slide could go, for example right here. We didn't want to change this, because this is the standard that's been optimized for over the years, and many health workers are actually used to this. So this is what changes, but the standard stains all remain the same for many different diseases. You pop this in. There is an XY stage, and then there is a focusing stage, which is a flexure mechanism that's built in paper itself that allows us to move and focus the lenses by micron steps.So what's really interesting about this object, and my students hate when I do this, but I'm going to do this anyway, is these are rugged devices. I can turn it on and throw it on the floor and really try to stomp on it. And they last, even though they're designed from a very flexible material, like paper.Another fun fact is, this is what we actually send out there as a standard diagnostic tool, but here in this envelope I have 30 different foldscopes of different configurations all in a single folder. And I'm going to pick one randomly. This one, it turns out, is actually designed specifically for malaria, because it has the fluorescent filters built specifically for diagnosing malaria. So the idea of very specific diagnostic microscopes comes out of this.So up till now, you didn't actually see what I would see from one of these setups. So what I would like to do is, if we could dim the lights, please, it turns out foldscopes are also projection microscopes. I have these two microscopes that I'm going to turn — go to the back of the wall — and just project, and this way you will see exactly what I would see. What you're looking at — (Applause) — This is a cross-section of a compound eye, and when I'm going to zoom in closer, right there, I am going through the z-axis. You actually see how the lenses are cut together in the cross-section pattern. Another example, one of my favorite insects, I love to hate this one, is a mosquito, and you're seeing the antenna of a culex pipiens. Right there. All from the simple setup that I actually described.So my wife has been field testing some of our microscopes by washing my clothes whenever I forget them in the dryer. So it turns out they're waterproof, and — (Laughter) — right here is just fluorescent water, and I don't know if you can actually see this. This also shows you how  the projection scope works. You get to see the beam the  way it's projected and bent.Can we get the lights back on again?So I'm quickly going to show you, since I'm running out of time, in terms of how much it costs for us to manufacture, the biggest idea was roll-to-roll manufacturing, so we built this out of 50 cents of parts and costs. (Applause) And what this allows us to do is to think about a new paradigm in microscopy, which we call use-and-throw microscopy. I'm going to give you a quick snapshot of some of the parts that go in. Here is a sheet of paper. This is when we were thinking about the idea. This is an A4 sheet of paper. These are the three stages that you actually see. And the optical components, if you look at the inset up on the right, we had to figure out a way to manufacture lenses in paper itself at really high throughputs, so it uses a process of self-assembly and surface tension to build achromatic lenses in the paper itself. So that's where the lenses go. There are some light sources. And essentially, in the end, all the parts line up because of origami, because of the fact that origami allows us micron-scale precision of optical alignment. So even though this looks like a simple toy, the aspects of engineering that go in something like this are fairly sophisticated.So here is another obvious thing that we would do, typically, if I was going to show that these microscopes are robust, is go to the third floor and drop it from the floor itself. There it is, and it survives.So for us, the next step actually is really finishing our field trials. We are starting at the end of the summer. We are at a stage where we'll be  making thousands of microscopes. That would be the first time where we would be doing field trials with the highest density of microscopes ever at a given place. We've started collecting data for malaria, Chagas disease and giardia from patients themselves.And I want to leave you with this picture. I had not anticipated this before, but a really interesting link between hands-on science education and global health. What are the tools that we're actually providing the kids who are going to fight this monster soup for tomorrow? I would love for them to be able to just print out a Foldscope and carry them around in their pockets.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami
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"I work with children with autism. Specifically, I make technologies to help them communicate.Now, many of the problems that children with autism face, they have a common source, and that source is that they find it difficult to understand abstraction, symbolism. And because of this, they have  a lot of difficulty with language.Let me tell you a little bit about why this is. You see that this is a picture of a bowl of soup. All of us can see it. All of us understand this. These are two other pictures of soup, but you can see that these are more abstract These are not quite as concrete. And when you get to language, you see that it becomes a word whose look, the way it looks and the way it sounds, has absolutely nothing to do  with what it started with, or what it represents, which is the bowl of soup. So it's essentially a completely abstract, a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in the real world, and this is something that children with autism have an incredible amount of difficulty with. Now that's why most of the people  that work with children with autism — speech therapists, educators — what they do is, they try to help children with autism communicate not with words, but with pictures. So if a child with autism wanted to say, ""I want soup,"" that child would pick three different pictures, ""I,"" ""want,"" and ""soup,"" and they would put these together, and then the therapist or the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say. And this has been incredibly effective; for the last 30, 40 years people have been doing this. In fact, a few years back, I developed an app for the iPad which does exactly this. It's called Avaz, and the way it works is that kids select different pictures. These pictures are sequenced together to form sentences, and these sentences are spoken out. So Avaz is essentially converting pictures, it's a translator, it converts pictures into speech.Now, this was very effective. There are thousands of children using this, you know, all over the world, and I started thinking about what it does and what it doesn't do. And I realized something interesting: Avaz helps children with autism learn words. What it doesn't help them do is to learn word patterns. Let me explain this in a little more detail. Take this sentence: ""I want soup tonight."" Now it's not just the words here that convey the meaning. It's also the way in which these words are arranged, the way these words are modified and arranged. And that's why a sentence like ""I want soup tonight"" is different from a sentence like ""Soup want I tonight,"" which  is completely meaningless. So there is another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of difficulty coping with, and that's the fact that you can modify words and you can arrange them to have different meanings, to convey different ideas. Now, this is what we call grammar. And grammar is incredibly powerful, because grammar is this one component of language which takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an infinite amount of information, an infinite amount of ideas. It's the way in which you can put things together in order to convey anything you want to.And so after I developed Avaz, I worried for a very long time about how I could give grammar  to children with autism. The solution came to me from a very interesting perspective. I happened to chance upon a child with autism conversing with her mom, and this is what happened. Completely out of the blue, very spontaneously, the child got up and said, ""Eat."" Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by talking to her in questions. So she asked, ""Eat what? Do  you want to eat ice cream? You want to eat? Somebody else wants to eat? You want to eat cream now? You want to eat ice cream in the evening?"" And then it struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible. She had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without grammar. And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for. Instead of arranging words in an order, in sequence, as a sentence, you arrange them in this map, where they're all linked together not by placing them one after the other but in questions, in question-answer pairs. And so if you do this, then what you're conveying is not a sentence in English, but what you're conveying is really a meaning, the meaning of a sentence in English. Now, meaning is really the underbelly, in some sense, of language. It's what comes after thought but before language. And the idea was that this particular representation might convey meaning in its raw form.So I was very excited by this, you know, hopping around all over the place, trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I hear into this. And I found that this is not enough. Why is this not enough? This is not enough because if you wanted to convey something like negation, you want to say, ""I don't want soup,"" then you can't do that by asking a question. You do that by changing the word ""want."" Again, if you wanted to say, ""I wanted soup yesterday,"" you do that by converting the word ""want"" into ""wanted."" It's a past tense. So this is a flourish which I added to make the system complete. This is a map of words joined together as questions and answers, and with these filters applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain nuances. Let me show you this with a different example.Let's take this sentence: ""I told the carpenter I could not pay him."" It's a fairly complicated sentence. The way that this particular system works, you can start with any part of this sentence. I'm going to start with the word ""tell."" So this is the word ""tell."" Now this happened in the past, so I'm going to make that ""told."" Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask questions. So, who told? I told. I told whom? I told the carpenter. Now we start with a different part of the sentence. We start with the word ""pay,"" and we add the ability filter to it to make it ""can pay."" Then we make it ""can't pay,"" and we can make it ""couldn't pay"" by making it the past tense. So who couldn't pay? I couldn't pay. Couldn't pay whom? I couldn't pay the carpenter. And then you join these two together by asking this question: What did I tell the carpenter? I told the carpenter I could not pay him.Now think about this. This is —(Applause)— this is a representation of this sentence without language. And there are two or three interesting things about this. First of all, I could have started anywhere. I didn't have to start with the word ""tell."" I could have started anywhere in the sentence, and I could have made this entire thing. The second thing is, if I wasn't an English speaker, if I was speaking in some other language, this map would actually hold true in any language. So long as the questions are standardized, the map is actually independent of language. So I call this FreeSpeech, and I was playing with this for many, many months. I was trying out so many different combinations of this.And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech. I was trying to convert language, convert sentences in English into sentences in FreeSpeech, and vice versa, and back and forth. And I realized that this particular configuration, this particular way of representing language, it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other. So I could actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular representation into English. And so I developed this thing. I developed this thing called  the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text. And by putting these two pieces together, the representation and the engine, I was able to create an app, a technology for children with autism, that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar.So I tried this out with kids with autism, and I found that there was an  incredible amount of identification. They were able to create sentences in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more effective than equivalent sentences in English, and I started thinking about why that might be the case. And I had an idea, and I want to  talk to you about this idea next. In about 1997, about 15 years back, there were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain processes language, and they found something very interesting. They found that when you learn a language as a child, as a two-year-old, you learn it with a certain part of your brain, and when you learn a language as an adult — for example, if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a completely different part of my brain is used. Now I don't know why that's the case, but my guess is that that's because when you learn a language as an adult, you almost invariably learn it through your native language, or through your first language. So what's interesting about FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create language, a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech, they're not using this support language, they're not using this bridge language. They're directly constructing the sentence.And so this gave me this idea. Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for children with autism but to teach language to people without disabilities? And so I tried a number of experiments. The first thing I did was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are coded in the form of shapes, in the form of colors, and you have people putting these together and trying to understand how this works. And I built an app out of it, a game out of it, in which children can play with words and with a reinforcement, a sound reinforcement of visual structures, they're able to learn language. And this, this has a lot of potential, a lot of promise, and the government of India recently licensed this technology from us, and they're going to try it out with millions of different children trying to teach them English. And the dream, the hope, the vision, really, is that when they learn English this way, they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue.All right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about speech. This is speech. So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered between all of us. Now what's interesting about speech is that speech is one-dimensional. Why is it one-dimensional? It's one-dimensional because it's sound. It's also one-dimensional because our mouths are built that way. Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound. But if you think about the brain, the thoughts that we have in our heads are not one-dimensional. I mean, we have these rich, complicated, multi-dimensional ideas. Now, it seems to me that language is really the brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand. Now what's interesting is that we do a lot of work in information nowadays, and almost all of that is done in the language domain. Take Google, for example. Google trawls all these countless billions of websites, all of which are in English, and when you want to use Google, you go into Google search, and you type in English, and it matches the English with the English. What if we could do this in FreeSpeech instead? I have a suspicion that if we did this, we'd find that algorithms like searching, like retrieval, all of these things, are much simpler and also more effective, because they don't process the data structure of speech. Instead they're processing the data structure of thought. The data structure of thought. That's a provocative idea.But let's look at this in a little more detail. So this is the FreeSpeech ecosystem. We have the Free Speech representation on one side, and we have the FreeSpeech  Engine, which generates English. Now if you think about it, FreeSpeech, I told you, is completely  language-independent. It doesn't have any specific information in it which is about English. So everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into the engine. That's a pretty interesting concept in itself. You've encoded an entire human language into a software program. But if you look at what's inside the engine, it's actually not very complicated. It's not very complicated code. And what's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific. And that gives this interesting idea. It might be very easy for us to actually create these engines in many, many different languages, in Hindi, in French, in German, in Swahili. And that gives another interesting idea. For example, supposing I was a writer, say, for a newspaper or for a magazine. I could create content in one language, FreeSpeech, and the person who's consuming that content, the person who's reading that particular information could choose any engine, and they could read it in their own mother tongue, in their native language. I mean, this is an incredibly attractive idea, especially for India. We have so many different languages. There's a song about India, and there's a description of the country as, it says, (in Sanskrit). That means ""ever-smiling speaker of beautiful languages.""Language is beautiful. I think it's the most beautiful of human creations. I think it's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented. It entertains, it educates, it enlightens, but what I like the most about language is that it empowers.I want to leave you with this. This is a photograph of my collaborators, my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and autism and various other things. The girl's name is Pavna, and that's her mother, Kalpana. And Pavna's an entrepreneur, but her story is much more remarkable than mine, because Pavna is about 23. She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, so ever since she was born, she could neither move nor talk. And everything that she's accomplished so far, finishing school, going to college, starting a company, collaborating with me to develop Avaz, all of these things she's done with nothing more than moving her eyes.Daniel Webster said this: He said, ""If all of my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for with it, I would regain all the rest."" And that's why, of all of these incredible  applications of FreeSpeech, the one that's closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children with disabilities to be able to communicate, the power of communication, to get back all the rest.Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ajit_narayanan_a_word_game_to_communicate_in_any_language
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"So my moment of truth did not come all at once. In 2010, I had the chance to be considered for promotion from my job as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. This was my moment to lean in, to push myself forward for what are really only a handful of the very top foreign policy jobs, and I had just finished a big, 18-month project for Secretary Clinton, successfully, and I knew I could handle a bigger job.The woman I thought I was would have said yes. But I had been commuting for two years between Washington and Princeton, New Jersey, where my husband and my two teenage sons lived, and it was not going well. I tried on the idea of eking out another two years in Washington, or maybe uprooting my sons from their school and my husband from his work and asking them to join me. But deep down, I knew that the right decision was to go home, even if I didn't fully recognize the woman who was making that choice.That was a decision based on love and responsibility. I couldn't keep watching my oldest son make bad choices without being able to be there for him when and if he needed me. But the real change came more gradually. Over the next year, while my family was righting itself, I started to realize that even if I could go back into government, I didn't want to. I didn't want to miss the last five years that my sons were at home. I finally allowed myself to accept what was really most important to me, not what I was conditioned to want or maybe what I conditioned myself to want, and that decision led to a reassessment of the feminist narrative that I grew up with and have always championed.I am still completely committed to the cause of male-female equality, but let's think about what that equality really means, and how best to achieve it. I always accepted the idea that the most respected and powerful people in our society are men at the top of their careers, so that the measure of male-female equality ought to be how many women are in those positions: prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, directors, managers, Nobel laureates, leaders. I still think we should do everything we possibly can to achieve that goal. But that's only half of real equality, and I now think we're never going to get there unless we recognize the other half. I suggest that real equality, full equality, does not just mean valuing women on male terms. It means creating a much wider range of equally respected choices for women and for men. And to get there, we have to change our workplaces, our policies and our culture.In the workplace, real equality means valuing family just as much as work, and understanding that the two reinforce each other. As a leader and as a manager, I have always acted on the mantra, if family comes first, work does not come second — life comes together. If you work for me, and you have a family issue, I expect you to attend to it, and I am confident, and my confidence has always been borne out, that the work will get done, and done better. Workers who have a reason to get home to care for their children or their family members are more focused, more efficient, more results-focused. And breadwinners who are also caregivers have a much wider range of experiences and contacts. Think about a lawyer who spends part of his time at school events for his kids talking to other parents. He's much more likely to bring in new clients for his firm than a lawyer who never leaves his office. And caregiving itself develops patience — a lot of patience — and empathy, creativity, resilience, adaptability. Those are all attributes that are ever more important in a high-speed, horizontal, networked global economy.The best companies actually know this. The companies that win awards for workplace flexibility in the United States include some of our most successful corporations, and a 2008 national study on the changing workforce showed that employees in flexible and effective workplaces are more engaged with their work, they're more satisfied and more loyal, they have lower levels of stress and higher levels of mental health. And a 2012 study of employers showed that deep, flexible practices actually lowered operating costs and increased adaptability in a global service economy.So you may think that the privileging of work over family is only an American problem. Sadly, though, the obsession with work is no longer a uniquely American disease. Twenty years ago, when my family first started going to Italy, we used to luxuriate in the culture of siesta. Siesta is not just about avoiding the heat of the day. It's actually just as much about embracing the warmth of a family lunch. Now, when we go, fewer and fewer businesses close for siesta, reflecting the advance of global corporations and 24-hour competition. So making a place for those we love is actually a global imperative.In policy terms, real equality means recognizing that the work that women have traditionally done is just as important as the work that men have traditionally done, no matter who does it. Think about it: Breadwinning and caregiving are equally necessary for human survival. At least if we get beyond a barter economy, somebody has to earn an income and someone else has to convert that income to care and sustenance for loved ones.Now most of you, when you hear me talk about breadwinning and caregiving, instinctively translate those categories into men's work and women's work. And we don't typically challenge why men's work is advantaged. But consider a same-sex couple like my friends Sarah and Emily. They're psychiatrists. They got married five years ago, and now they have two-year-old twins. They love being mothers, but they also love their work, and they're really good at what they do. So how are they going to divide up breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities? Should one of them stop working or reduce hours to be home? Or should they both change their practices so they can have much more flexible schedules? And what criteria should they use to make that decision? Is it who makes the most money or who is most committed to her career? Or who has the most flexible boss?The same-sex perspective helps us see that juggling work and family are not women's problems, they're family problems. And Sarah and Emily are the lucky ones, because they have a choice about how much they want to work. Millions of men and women have to be both breadwinners and caregivers just to earn the income they need, and many of those workers are scrambling. They're patching together care arrangements that are inadequate and often actually unsafe. If breadwinning and caregiving are really equal, then why shouldn't a government invest as much in an infrastructure of care as the foundation of a healthy society as it invests in physical infrastructure as the backbone of a successful economy?The governments that get it — no surprises here — the governments that get it, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, provide universal child care, support for caregivers at home, school and early childhood education, protections for pregnant women, and care for the elderly and the disabled. Those governments invest in that infrastructure the same way they invest in roads and bridges and tunnels and trains. Those societies also show you that breadwinning and caregiving reinforce each other. They routinely rank among the top 15 countries of the most globally competitive economies, but at the same time, they rank very high on the OECD Better Life Index. In fact, they rank higher than other governments, like my own, the U.S., or Switzerland, that have higher average levels of income but lower rankings on work-life balance.So changing our workplaces and building infrastructures of care would make a big difference, but we're not going to get equally valued choices unless we change our culture, and the kind of cultural change required means re-socializing men. (Applause) Increasingly in developed countries, women are socialized to believe that our place is no longer only in the home, but men are actually still where they always were. Men are still socialized to believe that they have to be breadwinners, that to derive their self-worth from how high they can climb over other men on a career ladder. The feminist revolution still has a long way to go. It's certainly not complete. But 60 years after ""The Feminine Mystique"" was published, many women actually have more choices than men do. We can decide to be a breadwinner, a caregiver, or any combination of the two. When a man, on the other hand, decides to be a caregiver, he puts his manhood on the line. His friends may praise his decision, but underneath, they're scratching their heads. Isn't the measure of a man his willingness to compete with other men for power and prestige? And as many women hold that view as men do. We know that lots of women still judge the attractiveness of a man based in large part on how successful he is in his career. A woman can drop out of the work force and still be an attractive partner. For a man, that's a risky proposition. So as parents and partners, we should be socializing our sons and our husbands to be whatever they want to be, either caregivers or breadwinners. We should be socializing them to make caregiving cool for guys. (Applause)I can almost hear lots of you thinking, ""No way."" But in fact, the change is  actually already happening. At least in the United States, lots of men take pride in cooking, and frankly obsess over stoves. They are in the birthing rooms. They take paternity leave when they can. They can walk a baby or soothe a toddler just as well as their wives can, and they are increasingly doing much more of the housework. Indeed, there are male college students now who are starting to say, ""I want to be a stay-at-home dad."" That was completely unthinkable 50 or even 30 years ago. And in Norway, where men have an automatic three month's paternity leave, but they lose it if they decide not to take it, a high government official told me that companies are starting to look at prospective male employees and raise an eyebrow if they didn't in fact take their leave when they had kids. That means that it's starting to seem like a character defect not to want to be a fully engaged father.So I was raised to believe that championing women's rights meant doing everything we could to get women to the top. And I still hope that I live long enough to see men and women equally represented at all levels of the work force. But I've come to believe that we have to value family every bit as much as we value work, and that we should entertain the idea that doing right by those we love will make all of us better at everything we do.Thirty years ago, Carol Gilligan, a wonderful psychologist, studied adolescent girls and identified an ethic of care, an element of human nature every bit as important as the ethic of justice. It turns out that ""you don't care"" is just as much a part of who we are as ""that's not fair."" Bill Gates agrees. He argues that the two great forces of human nature are self-interest and caring for others. Let's bring them both together. Let's make the feminist revolution a humanist revolution. As whole human beings, we will be better caregivers and breadwinners. You may think that can't happen, but I grew up in a society where my mother put out small vases of cigarettes for dinner parties, where blacks and whites used separate bathrooms, and where everybody claimed to be heterosexual. Today, not so much. The revolution for human equality can happen. It is happening. It will happen. How far and how fast is up to us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_marie_slaughter_can_we_all_have_it_all
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"Let me start by asking you a question, just with a show of hands: Who has an iPhone? Who has an Android phone? Who has a Blackberry? Who will admit in public to having a Blackberry? (Laughter)And let me guess, how many of you, when you arrived here, like me, went and bought a pay-as-you-go SIM card? Yeah? I'll bet you didn't even know you're using African technology. Pay-as-you-go was a technology, or an idea, pioneered in Africa by a company called Vodacom a good 15 years ago, and now, like franchising, pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces of economic activity in the world.So I'm going to talk about innovation in Africa, which I think is the purest form, innovation out of necessity. But first, I'm going to ask you some other questions. You don't have to put your hands up. These are rhetorical.Why did Nikola Tesla have to invent the alternating current that powers the lights in this building or the city that we're in?Why did Henry Ford have to invent the production line to produce these Fords that came in anything as long as they were black?And why did Eric Merrifield have to invent the dolos? Blank stares. That is what a dolos looks like, and in the background, you can see Robben Island. This is a small dolos, and Eric Merrifield is the most famous inventor you've never heard of. In 1963, a storm ripped up the harbor in a small South African town called East London, and while he was watching his kids playing with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse, he had the idea for this. It's a bit like a huge jumping jack, and they have used this in every harbor in the world as a breakwater. The global shipping economy would not be possible without African technology like this.So whenever you talk about Africa, you have to put up this picture of the world from space, and people go, ""Look, it's the Dark Continent."" Actually, it isn't. What it is is a map of innovation. And it's really easy to see where innovation's going on. All the places with lots of electricity, it isn't. (Laughter) (Applause) And the reason it isn't is because everybody's watching television or playing Angry Birds. (Laughter) (Applause)So where it's happening is in Africa. Now, this is real innovation, not the way people have expropriated the word to talk about launching new products. This is real innovation, and I define it as problem-solving. People are solving real problems in Africa. Why? Because we have to. Because we have real problems. And when we solve real problems for people, we solve them for the rest of the world at the same time.So in California, everybody's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card, and people say, ""We've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal."" Fantastic. Why do you even need a credit card? In Africa, we've been doing that for years, and we've been doing it on phones like this. This is a picture I took at a place called Kitengela, about an hour south of Nairobi, and the thing that's so remarkable about the payment system that's been pioneered in Africa called M-Pesa is that it works on phones like this. It works on every single phone possible, because it uses SMS. You can pay bills with it,  you can buy your groceries, you can pay your kids' school fees, and I'm told you can even bribe customs officials. (Laughter) Something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through M-Pesa. Forty percent of Kenya's GDP moves through M-Pesa using phones like this.And you think this is just a feature phone. Actually it's the smartphone of Africa. It's also a radio, and it's also a torch, and more than anything else, it has really superb battery life. Why? Because that's what we need. We have really severe energy problems in Africa. By the way, you can update Facebook and send Gmail from a phone like this.So we have found a way to use the available technology to send money via M-Pesa, which is a bit like a check system for the mobile age. I come from Johannesburg, which is a mining town. It's built on gold. This is a picture I Instagrammed earlier. And the difference today is that  the gold of today is mobile. If you think about the railroad system in North America and how that worked, first came the infrastructure, then came the industry around it, the brothels — it's a bit like the Internet today, right? — and everything else that worked with it: bars, saloons, etc. The gold of today is mobile, and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible.So what are some of the things that you can do with it? Well, this is by a guy called Bright Simons from Ghana, and what you do is you take medication, something that some people might spend their entire month's salary on, and you scratch off the code, and you send that to an SMS number, and it tells you if that is legitimate or if it's expired. Really simple, really effective, really life-saving. In Kenya, there's a service called iCow, which just sends you really important information about how to look after your dairy. The dairy business in Kenya is a $463 million business, and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer is only a couple of liters of milk a day. And if you can do that, you can rise out of poverty. Really simple, using a basic phone. If you don't have electricity, no problem! We'll just make it out of old bicycle parts using a windmill, as William Kamkwamba did. There's another great African that you've heard that's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world. He's also finding a way to reinvent solar power and the electricity industry in North America, and if he's lucky, he'll get us to Mars, hopefully in my lifetime. He comes from Pretoria, the capital of [South Africa], about 50 kilometers from where I live. So back to Joburg, which is sometimes called Egoli, which means City of Gold. And not only is mobile the gold of today, I don't believe that the gold is under the ground. I believe we are the gold. Like you've heard the other economists say, we are at the point where China was when its boom years began, and that's where we're going.So, you hear the West talk about innovation at the edge. Well, of course it's happening at the edge, because in the middle, everybody's updating Facebook, or worse still, they're trying to understand Facebook's privacy settings. (Laughter) This is not that catchy catchphrase. This is innovation over the edge.So, people like to call Africa a mobile-first continent, but actually it's mobile-only, so while everybody else is doing all of those things, we're solving the world's problems. So there's only one thing left to say.[""You're welcome""] (Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/toby_shapshak_you_don_t_need_an_app_for_that
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"Anyone in the room thought about sex today? (Laughter) Yeah, you did. Thank you for putting your hand up over there. Well, I'm here to provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams. I'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about wild sex.Now, when humans think about sex, male and female forms are generally what come to mind, but for many millions of years, such specific categories didn't even exist. Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings. It wasn't until about 500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a thing that gives DNA out, and a vagina, something that receives it. Now invariably, you're probably thinking about what belongs to our own species, these very familiar structures, but the diversity that we see in sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty mind-blowing.Penile diversity is especially profuse. So this is a paper nautilus. It's a close relative of squid and octopus, and males have a hectocotylus. Just what is a hectocotylus? A detachable, swimming penis. It leaves the [body of the male], finds the female through pheromonal cues in the water, attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm. For many decades, biologists actually felt that the hectocotylus was a separate organism altogether. Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America. And the tapir has a prehensile penis. It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis much akin to what we have with our hands. And it uses this dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into the female's uterus, not to mention it's a pretty good size. The biggest penis in the animal kingdom, however, is not that of the tapir. The biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs to the meager beach barnacle, and this video is actually showing you what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of a barnacle. (Laughter) Mm-hm. (Laughter)So with all of this diversity in structure, one might think, then, that penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes of successful reproduction. Simply insert part A into slot B, and we should all be good to go. But of course, that doesn't exactly happen, and that's because we can't just take form into account. We have to think about function as well, and when it comes to sex, function relates to the contributions made by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs. And these contributions are far from equal. Eggs are very expensive to make, so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares them with. Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap, so it makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when it comes to siring members of future generations.So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the sexes? I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male, or if she has the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough, then it makes more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant things: avoiding predators, taking care of offspring, gathering and ingesting food. This is, of course, bad news for any male who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank, and this sets the scene for some pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization. This is bedbug sex, and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination. Males have a spiked, barbed penis that they literally stab into the female, and they don't stab it anywhere near her vagina. They stab it anywhere in her body, and the sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries. If a female gets too many stab wounds, or if a stab wound happens to become infected, she can actually die from it.Now if you've ever been out for a nice, peaceful walk by the lake and happened to see some ducks having sex, you've undoubtedly been alarmed, because it looks like gang rape. And quite frankly, that's exactly what it is. A group of males will grab a female, hold her down, and ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her corkscrew-shaped vagina over and over and over again. From flaccid to ejaculation in less than a second. Now the female actually gets the last laugh, though, because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries.Now, I like to share stories like this with my audiences because, yeah, we humans, we tend to think sex, sex is fun, sex is good, there's romance, and there's orgasm. But orgasm didn't actually evolve until about 65 million years ago with the advent of mammals. But some animals had it going on quite a bit before that. There are some more primitive ways of pleasing one's partner.Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small ones. It's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not otherwise any different. Those that have long penile appendages are not bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all. So going back to our biological minds, then, we might think that females should choose to have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages, because she can use her time for other things: avoiding predators, taking care of young, finding and ingesting food. But biologists have repeatedly observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the long appendages. Why do they do this? Well, according to the biological literature, ""During copulation, the genitalia of certain males may elicit more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract."" Mm-hm.These are Mexican guppies, and what you see on their upper maxilla is an outgrowth of epidermal filaments, and these filaments basically form a fish mustache, if you will. Now males have been observed to prod the female's genital opening prior to copulating with her, and in what I have lovingly termed the Magnum, P.I. hypothesis, females are overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish mustaches. A little guppy porn for you right there.So we've seen very different strategies that males are using when it comes to winning a female partner. We've seen a coercion strategy in which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a female have sex. We've also seen a titillation strategy where males are actually pleasing their female partners into choosing them as a sex partner. Now unfortunately, in the animal kingdom, it's the coercion strategy that we see time and time again. It's very common in many phyla, from invertebrates to avian species, mammals, and, of course, even in primates.Now interestingly, there  are a few mammalian species in which females have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn't allow for sexual coercion to take place. Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris, or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally, much like a penis, and in fact it's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at their external morphology. So before a male can insert his penis into a female's vagina, she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-out it in her own body. I mean, imagine putting a penis into another penis. It's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with the action. Now, even more interesting is the fact that elephant and hyena societies are entirely matriarchal: they're run by females, groups of females, sisters, aunts and offspring, and when young males attain sexual maturity, they're turfed out of the group. In hyena societies, adult males are actually the lowest on the social scale. They can take part in a kill only after everybody else, including the offspring. So it seems that when you take the penis power away from a male, you take away all the social power he has.So what are my take-home messages from my talk today? Well, sex is just so much more than insert part A into slot B and hope that the offspring run around everywhere. The sexual strategies and reproductive structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how males and females will react to each other, which then dictates how populations and societies form and evolve.So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals, including ourselves, spend a good amount of time thinking about sex, but what might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their lives and our lives are influenced by it.So thank you, and happy daydreaming.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carin_bondar_the_birds_and_the_bees_are_just_the_beginning
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"[""Rebecca Newberger Goldstein""] [""Steven Pinker""] [""The Long Reach of Reason""] Cabbie: Twenty-two dollars. Steven Pinker: Okay. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Reason  appears to have fallen on hard times: Popular culture plumbs new depths of dumbth and political discourse has become a race to the bottom. We're living in an era of scientific creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and a resurgence of religious fundamentalism. People who think too well are often accused of elitism, and even in the academy, there are attacks on logocentrism, the crime of letting logic dominate our thinking.SP: But is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking,  it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact.RNG: How could a reasoned argument logically entail the ineffectiveness of reasoned arguments? Look, you're trying to persuade us of reason's impotence. You're not threatening us or bribing us, suggesting that we resolve the issue with a show of hands or a beauty contest. By the very act of trying to reason us into your position, you're conceding reason's potency. Reason isn't up for grabs here. It can't be. You show up for that debate and you've already lost it.SP: But can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste?RNG: All on its own, the answer is no, but it doesn't take much to switch it to yes. You need two conditions: The first is that reasoners all care about their own well-being. That's one of the passions that has to be present in order for reason to go to work, and it's obviously present in all of us. We all care passionately about our own well-being. The second condition is that reasoners are members of a community of reasoners who can affect one another's well-being, can exchange messages, and comprehend each other's reasoning. And that's certainly true of our gregarious and loquatious species, well endowed with the instinct for language.SP: Well, that sounds good in theory, but has it worked that way in practice? In particular, can it explain a momentous historical development that I spoke about five years ago here at TED? Namely, we seem to be getting more humane. Centuries ago, our ancestors would burn cats alive as a form of popular entertainment. Knights waged constant war on each other by trying to kill as many of each other's peasants as possible. Governments executed people for frivolous reasons, like stealing a cabbage or criticizing the royal garden. The executions were designed to be as prolonged and as painful as possible, like crucifixion, disembowelment, breaking on the wheel. Respectable people kept slaves. For all our flaws, we have abandoned these barbaric practices.RNG: So, do you think it's human nature that's changed?SP: Not exactly. I think we still harbor instincts that can erupt in violence, like greed, tribalism, revenge, dominance, sadism. But we also have instincts that can steer us away, like self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.RNG: So if human nature didn't change, what invigorated those better angels?SP: Well, among other things, our circle of empathy expanded. Years ago, our ancestors would feel the pain only of their family and people in their village. But with the expansion of literacy and travel, people started to sympathize with wider and wider circles, the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and perhaps eventually, all of humanity.RNG: Can hard-headed scientists really give so much credit to soft-hearted empathy?SP: They can and do. Neurophysiologists have found neurons in the brain that respond to other people's actions the same way they respond to our own. Empathy emerges early in life, perhaps before the age of one. Books on empathy have become bestsellers, like ""The Empathic Civilization"" and ""The Age of Empathy.""RNG: I'm all for empathy. I mean, who isn't? But all on its own, it's a feeble instrument for making moral progress. For one thing, it's innately biased toward blood relations, babies and warm, fuzzy animals. As far as empathy is concerned, ugly outsiders can go to hell. And even our best attempts to work up sympathy for those who are unconnected with us fall miserably short, a sad truth about human nature that was pointed out by Adam Smith.Adam Smith: Let us suppose that the great empire of China was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a  man of humanity in Europe would react on receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people. He would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight, but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren.SP: But if empathy wasn't enough to make us more humane, what else was there?RNG: Well, you didn't mention what might be one of our most effective better angels: reason. Reason has muscle. It's reason that provides the push to widen that circle of empathy. Every one of the humanitarian developments that you mentioned originated with thinkers who gave reasons for why some practice was indefensible. They demonstrated that the way people treated some particular group of others was logically inconsistent with the way they insisted on being treated themselves.SP: Are you saying that reason can actually change people's minds? Don't people just stick with whatever conviction serves their interests or conforms to the culture that they grew up in?RNG: Here's a fascinating fact about us: Contradictions bother us, at least when we're forced to confront them, which is just another way of saying that we are susceptible to reason. And if you look at the history of moral progress, you can trace a direct pathway from reasoned arguments to changes in the way that we actually feel. Time and again, a thinker would lay out an argument as to why some practice was indefensible, irrational, inconsistent with values already held. Their essay would go viral, get translated into many languages, get debated at pubs and coffee houses and salons, and at dinner parties, and influence leaders, legislators, popular opinion. Eventually their conclusions get absorbed into the common sense of decency, erasing the tracks of the original argument that had gotten us there. Few of us today feel any need to put forth a rigorous philosophical argument as to why slavery is wrong or public hangings or beating children. By now, these things just feel wrong. But just those arguments had to be made, and they were, in centuries past.SP: Are you saying that people needed a step-by-step argument to grasp why something might be a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake?RNG: Oh, they did. Here's the French theologian Sebastian Castellio making the case.Sebastian Castellio: Calvin says that he's certain, and other sects say that they are. Who shall be judge? If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? But then, why does he write so many books about manifest truth? In view of the uncertainty, we must define heretics simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself.SP: Or with hideous punishments like breaking on the wheel?RNG: The prohibition in our constitution of cruel and unusual punishments was a response to a pamphlet circulated in 1764 by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria.Cesare Beccaria: As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids always adjust to the level of the objects that surround them, become hardened, and after a hundred years of cruel punishments, breaking on the wheel causes no more fear than imprisonment previously did. For a punishment to achieve its objective, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that derives from the crime, and into this calculation ought to be factored the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good that the commission of the crime will produce. Everything beyond this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical.SP: But surely antiwar movements depended on mass demonstrations and catchy tunes by folk singers and wrenching photographs of the human costs of war.RNG: No doubt, but modern anti-war movements reach back to a long chain of thinkers who had argued as to why we ought to mobilize our emotions against war, such as the father of modernity, Erasmus.Erasmus: The advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another. One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so indeed, and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe.SP: But everyone knows that the movement to abolish slavery depended on faith and emotion. It was a movement spearheaded by the Quakers, and it only became popular when Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel ""Uncle Tom's Cabin"" became a bestseller.RNG: But the ball got rolling a century before. John Locke bucked the tide of millennia that had regarded the practice as perfectly natural. He argued that it was inconsistent with the principles of rational government.John Locke: Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by common to everyone of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it, a liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature.SP: Those words sound familiar. Where have I read them before? Ah, yes.Mary Astell: If absolute sovereignty  be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family? Or if in a family, why not in a state? Since no reason can be alleged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other, if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves, as they must be if being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of men be the perfect condition of slavery?RNG: That sort of co-option is all in the job description of reason. One movement for the expansion of rights inspires another because the logic is the same, and once that's hammered home, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to ignore the inconsistency. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement inspired the movements for women's rights, children's rights, gay rights and even animal rights. But fully two centuries before, the Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham had exposed the indefensibility of customary practices such as the cruelty to animals.Jeremy Bentham: The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?RNG: And the persecution of homosexuals.JB: As to any primary mischief, it's evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the contrary, it produces pleasure. The partners are both willing. If either of them be unwilling, the act is an offense, totally different in its nature of effects. It's a personal injury. It's a kind of rape. As to the any danger exclusive of pain, the danger, if any, much consist in the tendency of the example. But what is the tendency of this example? To dispose others to engage in the same practices. But this practice produces not pain of any kind to anyone.SP: Still, in every case, it took at least a century for the arguments of these great thinkers to trickle down and infiltrate the population as a whole. It kind of makes you wonder about our own time. Are there practices that we engage in where the arguments against them are there for all to see but nonetheless we persist in them?RNG: When our great grandchildren look back at us, will they be as appalled by some of our practices as we are by our slave-owning, heretic-burning, wife-beating, gay-bashing ancestors?SP: I'm sure everyone here could think of an example.RNG: I opt for the mistreatment of animals in factory farms.SP: The imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders and the toleration of rape in our nation's prisons.RNG: Scrimping on donations to life-saving charities in the developing world.SP: The possession of nuclear weapons.RNG: The appeal to religion to justify the otherwise unjustifiable, such as the ban on contraception.SP: What about religious faith in general?RNG: Eh, I'm not holding my breath.SP: Still, I have become convinced that reason is a better angel that deserves the greatest credit for the moral progress our species has enjoyed and that holds out the greatest hope for continuing moral progress in the future.RNG: And if, our friends, you detect a flaw in this argument, just remember you'll be depending on reason to point it out.Thank you. SP: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_and_rebecca_newberger_goldstein_the_long_reach_of_reason
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"I'd like to talk today about how we can change our brains and our society.Meet Joe. Joe's 32 years old and a murderer. I met Joe 13 years ago on the lifer wing at Wormwood Scrubs high-security prison in London. I'd like you to imagine this place. It looks and feels like it sounds: Wormwood Scrubs. Built at the end of the Victorian Era by the inmates themselves, it is where England's most dangerous prisoners are kept. These individuals have committed acts of unspeakable evil. And I was there to study their brains. I was part of a team of researchers from University College London, on a grant from the U.K. department of health. My task was to study a group of inmates who had been clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. That meant they were the most callous and the most aggressive of the entire prison population. What lay at the root of their behavior? Was there a neurological cause for their condition? And if there was a neurological cause, could we find a cure?So I'd like to speak about change, and  especially about emotional change. Growing up, I was always intrigued by how people change. My mother, a clinical psychotherapist, would occasionally see patients at home in the evening. She would shut the door to the living room, and I imagined magical things happened in that room. At the age of five or six I would creep up in my pajamas and sit outside with my ear glued to the door. On more than one occasion, I fell asleep and they had to push me out of the way at the end of the session.And I suppose that's how I found myself walking into the secure interview room on my first day at Wormwood Scrubs. Joe sat across a steel table and greeted me with this blank expression. The prison warden, looking equally indifferent, said, ""Any trouble, just press the red buzzer, and we'll be around as soon as we can."" (Laughter)I sat down. The heavy metal door slammed shut behind me. I looked up at the red buzzer far behind Joe on the opposite wall. (Laughter)I looked at Joe. Perhaps detecting my concern, he leaned forward, and said, as reassuringly as he could, ""Ah, don't worry about the buzzer, it doesn't work anyway."" (Laughter)Over the subsequent months, we tested Joe and his fellow inmates, looking specifically at their ability to categorize different images of emotion. And we looked at their physical response to those emotions. So, for example, when most of us look at a picture like this of somebody looking sad, we instantly have a slight, measurable physical response: increased heart rate, sweating of the skin. Whilst the psychopaths in our study were able to describe the pictures accurately, they failed to show the emotions required. They failed to show a physical response. It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy. So we wanted to look closer at this to use MRI to image their brains. That turned out to be not such an easy task. Imagine transporting a collection of clinical psychopaths across central London in shackles and handcuffs in rush hour, and in order to place each of them in an MRI scanner, you have to remove all metal objects, including shackles and handcuffs, and, as I learned, all body piercings.After some time, however, we had a tentative answer. These individuals were not just the victims of a troubled childhood. There was something else. People like Joe have a deficit in a brain area called the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped organ deep within each of the hemispheres of the brain. It is thought to be key to the experience of empathy. Normally, the more empathic a person is, the larger and more active their amygdala is. Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and to their immoral behavior.So let's take a step back. Normally, acquiring moral behavior is simply part of growing up, like learning to speak. At the age of six months, virtually every one of us is able to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. At the age of 12 months, most children are able to imitate the purposeful actions of others. So for example, your mother raises her hands to stretch, and you imitate her behavior. At first, this isn't perfect. I remember my cousin Sasha, two years old at the time, looking through a picture book and licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand, licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand. (Laughter) Bit by bit, we build the foundations  of the social brain so that by the time we're three, four years old, most children, not all, have acquired the ability to understand the intentions of others, another prerequisite for empathy. The fact that this developmental progression is universal, irrespective of where you live in the world or which culture you inhabit, strongly suggests that the foundations of moral behavior are inborn. If you doubt this, try, as I've done, to renege on a promise you've made to a four-year-old. You will find that the mind of a four-year old is not naïve in the slightest. It is more akin to a Swiss army knife with fixed mental modules finely honed during development and a sharp sense of fairness. The early years are crucial. There seems to be a window of opportunity, after which mastering moral questions becomes more difficult, like adults learning a foreign language. That's not to say it's impossible. A recent, wonderful study from Stanford University showed that people who have played a virtual reality game in which they took on the role of a good and helpful superhero actually became more caring and helpful towards others afterwards. Now I'm not suggesting we endow criminals with superpowers, but I am suggesting that we need to find ways to get Joe and people like him to change their brains and their behavior, for their benefit and for the benefit of the rest of us.So can brains change? For over 100 years, neuroanatomists and later neuroscientists held the view that after initial development in childhood, no new brain cells could grow in the adult human brain. The brain could only change within certain set limits. That was the dogma. But then, in the 1990s, studies starting showing, following the lead of Elizabeth Gould at Princeton and others, studies started showing the evidence of neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells in the adult mammalian brain, first in the olfactory bulb, which is responsible for our sense of smell, then in the hippocampus involving short-term memory, and finally in the amygdala itself. In order to understand how this process works, I left the psychopaths and joined a lab in Oxford specializing in learning and development. Instead of psychopaths, I studied mice, because the same pattern of brain responses appears across many different species of social animals. So if you rear a mouse in a standard cage, a shoebox, essentially, with cotton wool, alone and without much stimulation, not only does it not thrive, but it will often develop strange, repetitive behaviors. This naturally sociable animal will lose its ability to bond with other mice, even becoming aggressive when introduced to them. However, mice reared in what we called an enriched environment, a large habitation with other mice with wheels and ladders and areas to explore, demonstrate neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells, and as we showed, they also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks. Now, they don't develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street, but their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior. Mice reared in a standard cage, by contrast, not dissimilar, you might say, from a prison cell, have dramatically lower levels of new neurons in the brain.It is now clear that the amygdala of mammals, including primates like us, can show neurogenesis. In some areas of the brain, more than 20 percent of cells are newly formed. We're just beginning to understand what exact function these cells have, but what it implies is that the brain is capable of extraordinary change way into adulthood. However, our brains are also exquisitely sensitive to stress in our environment. Stress hormones, glucocorticoids, released by the brain, suppress the growth of these new cells. The more stress, the less brain development, which in turn causes less adaptability and causes higher stress levels. This is the interplay between nature and nurture in real time in front of our eyes. When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with stressed amygdalae is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth. Of course, imprisonment is a necessary part of the criminal justice system and of protecting society. Our research does not suggest that criminals should submit their MRI scans as evidence in court and get off the hook because they've got a faulty amygdala. The evidence is actually the other way. Because our brains are capable of change, we need to take responsibility for our actions, and they need to take responsibility for their rehabilitation. One way such rehabilitation might work is through restorative justice programs. Here victims, if they choose to participate, and perpetrators meet face to face in safe, structured encounters, and the perpetrator is encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, and the victim plays an active role in the process. In such a setting, the perpetrator can see, perhaps for the first time, the victim as a real person with thoughts and feelings and a genuine emotional response. This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration. Such programs won't work for everyone, but for many, it could be a way to break the frozen sea within.So what can we do now? How can we apply this knowledge? I'd like to leave you with three lessons that I learned. The first thing that I learned was that we need to change our mindset. Since Wormwood Scrubs was built 130 years ago, society has advanced in virtually every aspect, in the way we run our schools, our hospitals. Yet the moment we speak about prisons, it's as though we're back in Dickensian times, if not medieval times. For too long, I believe, we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human  nature cannot change, and as a society, it's costing us dearly. We know that the brain is capable of extraordinary change, and the best way to achieve that, even in adults, is to change and modulate our environment.The second thing I have learned is that we need to create an alliance of people who believe that science is integral to bringing about social change. It's easy enough for a neuroscientist to place a high-security inmate in an MRI scanner. Well actually, that turns out not to be so easy, but ultimately what we want to show is whether we're able to reduce the reoffending rates. In order to answer complex questions like that, we need people of different backgrounds — lab-based scientists and clinicians, social workers and policy makers, philanthropists and human rights activists — to work together.Finally, I believe we need to change our own amygdalae, because this issue goes to the heart not just of who Joe is, but who we are. We need to change our view of Joe as someone wholly irredeemable, because if we see Joe as wholly irredeemable, how is he going to see himself as any different? In another decade, Joe will be released from Wormwood Scrubs. Will he be among the 70 percent of inmates who end up reoffending and returning to the prison system? Wouldn't it be better if, while serving his sentence, Joe was able to train his amygdala, which would stimulate the growth of new brain cells and connections, so that he will be able to face the world once he gets released? Surely, that would be in the interest of all of us.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_reisel_the_neuroscience_of_restorative_justice
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"Chris Anderson: The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. (Applause) Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. Ed, welcome to the TED stage. What can you see, as a matter of fact?Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. This is amazing. (Laughter)CA: Ed, some questions for you. You've been called many things in the last few months. You've been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. What words would you describe yourself with?ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me. But when I think about it, this isn't the question that we should be struggling with. Who I am really doesn't matter at all. If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters here are the issues. What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies. And that's what I'm hoping the debate will move towards, and we've seen that increasing over time. If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like ""hero."" I wouldn't use ""patriot,"" and I wouldn't use ""traitor."" I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else.CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story — (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June's revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this? ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. But there are also things that go too far. There are things that shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized. We've never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made.CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are here. This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed.ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's phone records, things like that — who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, where you traveled. These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It's a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them — I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court. They were only tried by a secret court. And something that we've seen, something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests. These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be.CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them. Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA?ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. It doesn't mean that there's a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away. Now each company handles it different ways. Some are responsible. Some are somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. It's not stolen from the lines. But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. And I think over the last year, we've seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue.CA: What more should they do?ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of ""1984"" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. They can all see it because it's unencrypted. The world's library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a great example. All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide.CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. What is that?ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. We can't tell you how many communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists. It's already in place. The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be aiming for.CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. The headline says, ""NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year."" Tell us about that.ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we knew this story was coming. But what's especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year?CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. What's wrong with that point of view? ES: Well, so the first thing is, you're giving up your rights. You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. Your rights matter because you never know when you're going to need them. Beyond that, it's a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world. People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions were. We have a right to privacy. We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored.CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you've committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that?ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he's saying it's a flea bite. So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. But let's assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. It's a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by.CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. Are there more revelations to come?ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. I don't think there's any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come.CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. It's about a program called ""Bullrun."" Can you explain what that is?ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they're named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. They're programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. They're building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends.CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources?ES: Absolutely. One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've seen in the post-9/11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. They've been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're going to be paying for it for years.CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America's defense against terrorism. Surely that makes it a price worth paying.ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it, because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. So is it really terrorism that we're stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well.CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism?ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again?CA: Sorry. Do you think there's a deeper motivation for them other than the war against terrorism?ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. But Congress and the American people said no. They said, it's not worth the risk to our economy. They said it's worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains. But what we saw is, in the post-9/11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value.CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I've got a more personal question for you. Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. How are you coping with this? How are you coping with the fear?ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. We shouldn't be threatening dissidents. We shouldn't be criminalizing journalism. And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do despite the risks.CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. Suppose you had the following two choices, right? You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? Those are the two choices I'll give you. I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? There are some hands going up. Some hands going up. It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them.ES: I can see you. (Laughter)CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act?(Applause) (Cheers)And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. It's not left or right, it's not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. Part of it is almost a generational issue. You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. Is there some truth to that?ES: It is. I think it's very true. This is not a left or right issue. Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it's not a partisan issue. These are things that all people believe, and it's up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world.CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim?(Applause)Tim, good to see you. Come up there. Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but —Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two.CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. Is that something that makes sense? ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression. And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in.CA: Do you have a question for Ed?TBL: Well, two questions, a general question —CA: Ed, can you still hear us?ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he's back.TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. (Laughter)ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem.TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want?ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. I think the Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. We'll get not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined.CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. It's not Big Brother watching us. We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something about that. And you do too.ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. Now, that hasn't happened since the government's surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that's something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities.CA: I'm not quite sure how you shake the hand of a bot, but I imagine it's, this is the hand right here. TBL: That'll come very soon. ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does.CA: Thank you, Tim.(Applause)I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. Would you welcome the chance to come back to America?ES: Absolutely. There's really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that's a powerful argument, but it's not the final argument, and I think that's something that public should decide. But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I've been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. I did this to do what was right, and I'm not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. (Applause)CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you're here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. I'm curious, how does that feel?ES: Canada is different than what I expected. It's a lot warmer. (Laughter)CA: At TED, the mission is ""ideas worth spreading."" If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment? ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don't have to give up our privacy to have good government. We don't have to give up our liberty to have security. And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen.Thank you very much.CA: Ed, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_back_the_internet
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"What's the scariest thing you've ever done? Or another way to say it is, what's the most dangerous  thing that you've ever done? And why did you do it? I know what the most dangerous thing is that I've ever done because NASA does the math. You look back to the first five shuttle launches, the odds of a catastrophic event during the first five shuttle launches was one in nine. And even when I first flew in the shuttle back in 1995, 74 shuttle flight, the odds were still now that we look back about one in 38 or so — one in 35, one in 40. Not great odds, so it's a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center and you're going to go to space that day because you realize by the end of the day you're either going to be floating  effortlessly, gloriously in space, or you'll be dead. You go into, at the Kennedy Space Center, the suit-up room, the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed in, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to go ride the Apollo rocket to the moon. And I got my pressure suit built around me and rode down outside in the van heading out to the launchpad — in the Astro van — heading out to the launchpad, and as you come around the corner at the Kennedy Space Center, it's normally predawn, and in the distance, lit up by the huge xenon lights, is your spaceship — the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet. The crew is sitting in the Astro van sort of hushed, almost holding hands, looking at that as it gets bigger and bigger. We ride the elevator up and we crawl in, on your hands and knees into the spaceship, one at a time, and you worm your way up into your chair and plunk yourself down on your back. And the hatch is closed, and suddenly, what has been a lifetime of both dreams and denial is becoming real, something that I dreamed about, in fact, that I chose to do when I was nine years old, is now suddenly within not too many minutes of actually happening. In the astronaut business — the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business,  we have a saying, which is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. (Laughter) And so you're very conscious in the cockpit; you're thinking about all of the things that you might have to do, all the switches and all the  wickets you have to go through. And as the time gets closer and closer, this excitement is building. And then about three and a  half minutes before launch, the huge nozzles on the back, like the size of big church bells, swing back and forth and the mass of them is such that it sways the whole vehicle, like the vehicle is alive underneath you, like an elephant getting up  off its knees or something. And then about 30 seconds before launch, the vehicle is completely alive — it is ready to go — the APUs are running, the computers are all self-contained, it's ready to leave the planet. And 15 seconds before launch, this happens: (Video) Voice: 12, 11, 10, nine, eight, seven, six — (Space shuttle preparing for takeoff) — start, two, one, booster ignition, and liftoff of  the space shuttle Discovery, returning to the space station, paving the way ... (Space shuttle taking off)Chris Hadfield: It is incredibly powerful to be on board one of these things. You are in the grip of something that is vastly more powerful than yourself. It's shaking you so hard you can't focus on the instruments in front of you. It's like you're in the jaws of some enormous dog and there's a foot in the small of your back pushing you into space, accelerating wildly straight up, shouldering your way through the air, and you're in a very complex place — paying attention, watching the vehicle go through each one of its wickets with a steadily increasing smile on your face. After two minutes, those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines, the hydrogen and oxygen, and it's as if you're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you've never accelerated. You get lighter and lighter, the force gets on us heavier and heavier. It feels like someone's pouring cement on you or something. Until finally, after about eight minutes and 40 seconds or so, we are finally at exactly the right altitude, exactly the right speed, the right direction, the engine shut off, and we're weightless. And we're alive.It's an amazing experience. But why would we take that risk? Why would you do something that dangerous?In my case the answer is fairly straightforward. I was inspired as a youngster that this was what I wanted to do. I watched the first people walk on the moon and to me, it was just an obvious thing — I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger? And having the goal in mind, thinking about where it might lead, directed me to a life of looking at all of the small details to allow this to become possible, to be able to launch and go  help build a space station where you are on board a million-pound creation that's going around the world at five miles a second, eight kilometers a second, around the world 16 times a day, with experiments on board that are teaching us what the substance of the universe is made of and running 200 experiments inside. But maybe even more importantly, allowing us to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means, to be able to look down and have — if your jaw could drop, it would — the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic, constantly changing beauty that is the world itself. And you see, because of the speed, a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half a year. And the most magnificent part of all that is to go outside on a spacewalk. You are in a one-person spaceship that is your spacesuit, and you're going through space with the world. It's an entirely different perspective, you're not looking up at the universe, you and the Earth are going  through the universe together. And you're holding on with one hand, looking at the world turn beside you. It's roaring silently with color and texture as it pours by mesmerizingly next to you. And if you can tear your eyes away from that and you look under your arm down at the rest of everything, it's unfathomable blackness, with a texture you feel like you  could stick your hand into. and you are holding on with one hand, one link to the other seven billion people. And I was outside on my first spacewalkwhen my left eye went blind, and I didn't know why. Suddenly my left eye slammed shut in great pain and I couldn't figure out why my eye wasn't working. I was thinking, what do I do next? I thought, well maybe that's why we have two eyes, so I kept working. But unfortunately, without gravity, tears don't fall. So you just get a bigger and  bigger ball of whatever that is mixed with your tears on your eye until eventually, the ball becomes so big that the surface tension takes it  across the bridge of your nose like a tiny little waterfall and goes ""goosh"" into your other eye, and now I was completely blind outside the spaceship.So what's the scariest thing you've ever done? (Laughter) Maybe it's spiders. A lot of people are afraid of spiders. I think you should be afraid of spiders — spiders are creepy and they've got long, hairy legs, and spiders like this one, the brown recluse — it's horrible. If a brown recluse bites you, you end with one of these  horrible, big necrotic things on your leg and there might be one right now sitting on the chair behind you, in fact. And how do you know? And so a spider lands on you, and you go through this great, spasmy attack because spiders are scary. But then you could say, well  is there a brown recluse sitting on the chair beside me or not? I don't know. Are there brown recluses here? So if you actually do the research, you find out that in the world there are about  50,000 different types of spiders, and there are about two dozen that are venomous out of 50,000. And if you're in Canada, because of the cold winters here in B.C., there's about 720,  730 different types of spiders and there's one — one — that is venomous, and its venom isn't even fatal, it's just kind of like a nasty sting. And that spider — not only that, but that spider has beautiful markings on it, it's like ""I'm dangerous. I got a big radiation  symbol on my back, it's the black widow."" So, if you're even slightly careful you can avoid running into the one spider — and it lives close the ground, you're walking along, you are  never going to go through a spider web where a black widow bites you. Spider webs like this, it doesn't build those, it builds them down in the corners. And its a black widow because the female spider eats the male; it doesn't care about you. So in fact, the next time you walk into a spiderweb, you don't need to panic and go  with your caveman reaction. The danger is entirely different than the fear.How do you get around it, though? How do you change your behavior? Well, next time you see a spiderweb, have a good look, make sure  it's not a black widow spider, and then walk into it. And then you see another spiderweb and walk into that one. It's just a little bit of fluffy stuff. It's not a big deal. And the spider that may come out is  no more threat to you than a lady bug or a butterfly. And then I guarantee you if you  walk through 100 spiderwebs you will have changed your fundamental human behavior, your caveman reaction, and you will now be able to walk  in the park in the morning and not worry about that spiderweb — or into your grandma's attic or whatever, into your own basement. And you can apply this to anything.If you're outside on a spacewalk and you're blinded, your natural reaction would be to panic, I think. It would make you nervous and worried. But we had considered all the venom, and we had practiced with a whole  variety of different spiderwebs. We knew everything there is to know about the spacesuit and we trained underwater thousands of times. And we don't just practice things going right, we practice things going wrong all the time, so that you are constantly walking  through those spiderwebs. And not just underwater, but  also in virtual reality labs with the helmet and the gloves so you feel like it's realistic. So when you finally actually  get outside on a spacewalk, it feels much different than it would if you just went out first time. And even if you're blinded, your natural, panicky reaction doesn't happen. Instead you kind of look around and go, ""Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me. He could come over and help me."" We actually practiced incapacitated crew rescue, so he could float me like a blimp and stuff me into the airlock if he had to. I could find my own way back. It's not nearly as big a deal. And actually, if you keep on crying for a while, whatever that gunk was that's  in your eye starts to dilute and you can start to see again, and Houston, if you negotiate with them, they will let you then keep working. We finished everything on the spacewalk and when we came back inside, Jeff got some cotton batting and took  the crusty stuff around my eyes, and it turned out it was just the anti-fog, sort of a mixture of oil and soap, that got in my eye. And now we use Johnson's No More Tears, which we probably should've been using right from the very beginning. (Laughter)But the key to that is by looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, where is the real risk? What is the real thing that you should be afraid of? Not just a generic fear of bad things happening. You can fundamentally change  your reaction to things so that it allows you to go places and see things and do things that otherwise would be completely denied to you ...where you could see the  hardpan south of the Sahara, or you can see New York City in a way that is almost dreamlike, or the unconscious gingham  of Eastern Europe fields or the Great Lakes as a collection of small puddles. You can see the fault lines of San Francisco and the way the water pours out under the bridge, just entirely different than any other way that you could have if you had not found a way to conquer your fear. You see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened.It's time to come home at the end. This is our spaceship, the Soyuz, that little one. Three of us climb in, and then this spaceship detaches from the station and falls into the atmosphere. These two parts here actually melt, we jettison them and they burn up in the atmosphere. The only part that survives is the little bullet that we're riding in, and it falls into the atmosphere, and in essence you are riding a meteorite home, and riding meteorites is scary, and it ought to be. But instead of riding into the atmosphere just screaming, like you would if suddenly you found yourself riding a meteorite back to Earth — (Laughter) — instead, 20 years previously we had started studying Russian, and then once you learn Russian, then we learned orbital mechanics in Russian, and then we learned vehicle control theory, and then we got into the simulator and practiced over and over and over again. And in fact, you can fly this meteorite and steer it and land in about a 15-kilometer circle anywhere on the Earth. So in fact, when our crew was coming back into the atmosphere inside the Soyuz, we weren't screaming, we were laughing; it was fun. And when the great big parachute opened, we knew that if it didn't open there's a second parachute, and it runs on a nice little clockwork mechanism. So we came back, we came thundering back to Earth and this is what it looked like to land in a Soyuz, in Kazakhstan. (Video) Reporter: And you can see one of those search and recovery helicopters, once again that helicopter part of dozen such Russian Mi-8 helicopters. Touchdown — 3:14 and 48 seconds, a.m. Central Time. CH: And you roll to a stop as if someone threw your  spaceship at the ground and it tumbles end over end, but you're ready for it you're in a custom-built seat, you know how the shock absorber works. And then eventually the Russians reach in, drag you out, plunk you into a chair, and you can now look back at what was an incredible experience. You have taken the dreams of that nine-year-old boy, which were impossible and dauntingly scary, dauntingly terrifying, and put them into practice, and figured out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear so that it allowed you to come back with a set of experiences and a level of inspiration for other people that never could have been possible otherwise. Just to finish, they asked me to play that guitar. I know this song, and it's really a tribute to the genius of David Bowie himself, but it's also, I think, a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe, we are people, and we're taking that ability to adapt and that ability to understand and the ability to take our own self-perception into a new place. (Music) ♫ This is Major Tom to ground control ♫ ♫ I've left forevermore ♫ ♫ And I'm floating in a most peculiar way ♫ ♫ And the stars look very different today ♫ ♫ For here am I floating in the tin can ♫ ♫ A last glimpse of the world ♫ ♫ Planet Earth is blue and  there's so much left to do ♫ (Music) Fear not. (Applause) That's very nice of you. Thank you very much. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_hadfield_what_i_learned_from_going_blind_in_space
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"I've come here today to talk to you about a problem. It's a very simple yet devastating problem, one that spans the globe and is affecting all of us. The problem is anonymous companies. It sounds like a really dry and technical thing, doesn't it? But anonymous companies are making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible sometimes for really terrible crimes. So, why am I here talking to all of you? Well, I guess I am a lifelong troublemaker and when my parents taught my twin brother and I to question authority, I don't think they knew where it might lead. (Laughter) And, they probably really regretted it during my stroppy teenage years when, predictably, I questioned their authority a lot. And a lot of my school teachers didn't appreciate it much either. You see, since the age of about five I've always asked the question, but why? But why does the Earth go around the sun? But why is blood red? But why do I have to go to school? But why do I have to respect the teachers and authority? And little did I realize that this question would become the basis of everything I would do. And so it was in my twenties, a long time ago, that one rainy Sunday afternoon in North London I was sitting with Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley and we were busy stuffing envelopes for a mail out in the office of the campaign group where we worked at the time. And as usual, we were talking  about the world's problems. And in particular, we were talking about the civil war in Cambodia. And we had talked about that  many, many times before. But then suddenly we stopped and looked at each other and said, but why don't we try and change this? And from that slightly crazy question, over two decades and many campaigns later, including alerting the world to the problem of blood diamonds funding war, from that crazy question, Global Witness is now an 80-strong team of campaigners, investigators,  journalists and lawyers. And we're all driven by the same belief, that change really is possible.So, what exactly does Global Witness do? We investigate, we report, to uncover the people really responsible for funding conflict — for stealing millions from citizens around the world, also known as state looting, and for destroying the environment. And then we campaign hard to  change the system itself. And we're doing this because  so many of the countries rich in natural resources like oil or diamonds or timber are home to some of the poorest and most dispossessed people on the planet. And much of this injustice is made possible by currently accepted business practices. And one of these is anonymous companies. Now we've come up against anonymous companies in lots of our investigations, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we exposed how secretive deals involving anonymous companies had deprived the citizens of one of the poorest countries on the planet of well over a billion dollars. That's twice the country's health  and education budget combined. Or in Liberia, where an international predatory logging company used front companies as it attempted to grab a really huge chunk of Liberia's unique forests. Or political corruption in Sarawak, Malaysia, which has led to the destruction  of much of its forests. Well, that uses anonymous companies too. We secretly filmed some of the family of the former chief minister and a lawyer as they told our undercover investigator exactly how these dubious deals are done using such companies. And the awful thing is, there are so many other examples out there from all walks of life. This truly is a scandal of epic proportions hidden in plain sight. Whether it's the ruthless Mexican drugs cartel, the Zetas, who use anonymous companies  to launder profits while their drugs-related violence is tearing communities apart across the Americas. Or the anonymous company, which bought up Americans' tax debts, piled on the legal fees and then gave homeowners a choice: Pay up or lose your home. Imagine being threatened with losing your home sometimes over a debt of just a few hundred dollars, and not being able to find out who you were really up against.Now anonymous companies are great for sanctions busting too. As the Iranian government found out when, through a series of front companies, it owned a building in the very heart of Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, despite American sanctions. And Juicy Couture, home of of the velvet track suit, and other companies were the unwitting, unknowing tenants there. There are just so many examples, the horesemeat scandal in Europe, the Italian mafia, they've used these companies for decades. The $100 million American Medicare fraud, the supply of weapons to wars around the world including those in Eastern Europe in the early '90s. Anonymous companies have even come to light in the recent revolution in the Ukraine.But, for every case that we and others expose there are so many more that will remain hidden away because of the current system. And it's just a simple truth that some of the people responsible  for outrageous crimes, for stealing from you and me and millions of others, they are remaining faceless and they are escaping accountability and they're doing this with ease, and they're doing it using legal structures. And really, that is unfair. Well, you might well ask, what exactly is an anonymous company, and can I really set one up, and use it, without anyone knowing who I am? Well, the answer is, yes you can. But if you're anything like me, you'll want to see some of that for yourself, so let me show you. Well first you need to work out where you want to set it up. Now, at this point you might be imagining one of those lovely tropical island tax havens but here's the thing, shockingly, my own hometown, London, and indeed the U.K., is one of the best places in the world to set up an anonymous company. And the other, even better, I'm afraid that's America. Do you know, in some states across America you need less identification to open up a company than you do to get a library card, like Delaware, which is one of the easiest places in the world to set up an anonymous company.Okay, so let's say it's America, and let's say it's Delaware, and now you can simply go online and find yourself a company service provider. These are the companies that  can set your one up for you, and remember, it's all legal, routine business practice. So, here's one, but there are plenty of others to choose from. And having made your choice, you then pick what type of company you want and then fill in a contact, name and address. But don't worry, it doesn't have to be your name. It can be your lawyer's or your service provider's, and it's not for the public record anyway. And then you add the owner of the company. Now this is the key part, and again it doesn't have to be you, because you can get creative, because there is a whole universe  out there of nominees to choose from. And nominees are the people that you can legally pay to be your company's owner. And if you don't want to involve anyone else, it doesn't even have to be an actual human being. It could be another company. And then finally, give your company a name add a few more details and make your payment. And then the service provider will take a few hours or more to process it. But there you are, in 10 minutes of online shopping you can create yourself an anonymous company. And not only is it easy, really, really easy and cheap, it's totally legal too. But the fun doesn't have to end there, maybe you want to be even more anonymous. Well, that's no problem either. You can simply keep adding layers, companies owned by companies. You can have hundreds of layers with hundreds of companies spread across lots of different countries, like a giant web, each layer adds anonymity. Each layer makes it more difficult for law enforcement and others to find out who the real owner is. But whose interests is this all serving? It might be in the interests of the company or a particular individual, but what about all of us, the public? There hasn't even been a global conversation yet about whether it's okay to misuse companies in this way. And what does it all mean for us?Well, an example that really haunts me is one I came across recently. And it's that of a horrific fire in a nightclub in Buenos Aires about a decade ago. It was the night before New Year's Eve. Three thousand very happy revelers, many of them teenagers, were crammed into a space meant for 1,000. And then tragedy struck, a fire broke out plastic decorations were melting from the ceiling and toxic smoke filled the club. So people tried to escape only to find that some of the fire doors had been chained shut. Over 200 people died. Seven hundred were injured trying to get out. And as the victims' families  and the city and the country reeled in shock, investigators tried to find out who was responsible. And as they looked for the owners of the club, they found instead anonymous companies, and confusion surrounded the identities of those involved with the companies. Now ultimately, a range of people were charged and some went to jail. But this was an awful tragedy, and it shouldn't have been so difficult just to try and find out who was responsible for those deaths. Because in an age when there is so much information out there in the open, why should this crucial information about company ownership stay hidden away? Why should tax evaders, corrupt  government officials, arms traders and more, be able to hide their identities from us, the public? Why should this secrecy be such  an accepted business practice? Anonymous companies might be the norm right now but it wasn't always this way. Companies were created to give people a chance to innovate and not have to put everything on the line. Companies were created to limit financial risk, they were never intended to  be used as a moral shield. Companies were never intended to be anonymous, and they don't have to be.And so I come to my wish. My wish is for us to know who owns and controls companies so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good. Together let's ignite world opinion, change the law, and launch a new era of openness in business. So what might this look like? Well, imagine if you could go online and look up the real owner of a company. Imagine if this data were open and free, accessible across borders for citizens and businesses and law enforcement alike. Imagine what a game changer that would be. So how are we going to do this? Well, there is only one way. Together, we have to change the law globally to create public registries which list the true owners of companies and can be accessed by all with no loopholes. And yes, this is ambitious, but there is momentum on this issue, and over the years I have seen the sheer power of momentum, and it's just starting on this issue. There is such an opportunity right now. And the TED community of creative and innovative thinkers and doers across all of society could make the crucial difference. You really can make this change happen. Now, a simple starting point is the address behind me for a Facebook page that you can join now to support the campaign and spread the word. It's going to be a springboard for our global campaigning. And the techies among you, you could really help us create a prototype public registry to demonstrate what a powerful tool this could be. Campaign groups from around the world have come together to work on this issue. The U.K. government is already on board; it supports these public registries. And just last week, the European Parliament came on board with a vote 600 to 30 in favor of public registries. That is momentum. (Applause) But it's early days. America still needs to come on board, as do so many other countries. And to succeed we will all together need to help and push our politicians, because without that, real far-reaching, world-shifting change just isn't going to happen. Because this isn't just about changing the law, this is about starting a conversation about what it's okay for companies to do, and in what ways is it acceptable  to use company structures. This isn't just a dry policy issue. This is a human issue which affects us all. This is about being on the right side of history. Global citizens, innovators,  business leaders, individuals, we need you. Together, let's kickstart this global movement. Let's just do it, let's end anonymous companies. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charmian_gooch_my_wish_to_launch_a_new_era_of_openness_in_business
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"Chris Anderson: We had Edward Snowden here a couple days ago, and this is response time. And several of you have written to me with questions to ask our guest here from the NSA. So Richard Ledgett is the 15th deputy director of the National Security Agency, and he's a senior civilian officer there, acts as its chief operating officer, guiding strategies, setting internal policies, and serving as the principal advisor to the director. And all being well, welcome, Rick Ledgett, to TED. (Applause)Richard Ledgett: I'm really thankful for the opportunity to talk to folks here. I look forward to the conversation, so thanks for arranging for that.CA: Thank you, Rick. We appreciate you joining us. It's certainly quite a strong statement that the NSA is willing to reach out and show a more open face here. You saw, I think, the talk and interview that Edward Snowden gave here a couple days ago. What did you make of it? RL: So I think it was interesting. We didn't realize that he  was going to show up there, so kudos to you guys for arranging a nice surprise like that. I think that, like a lot of the things that have come out since Mr. Snowden started disclosing classified information, there were some kernels of truth in there, but a lot of extrapolations and half-truths in there, and I'm interested in helping to address those. I think this is a really important conversation that we're having in the United States and internationally, and I think it is important and of import, and so given that, we need to have that be a fact-based conversation, and we want to help make that happen.CA: So the question that a lot  of people have here is, what do you make of Snowden's motivations for doing what he did, and did he have an alternative way that he could have gone?RL: He absolutely did have alternative ways that he could have gone, and I actually think that characterizing him as a whistleblower actually hurts legitimate whistleblowing activities. So what if somebody who works in the NSA — and there are over 35,000 people who do. They're all great citizens. They're just like your husbands, fathers, sisters, brothers, neighbors, nephews, friends and relatives, all of whom are interested in doing the right thing for their country and for our allies internationally, and so there are a variety of venues to address if folks have a concern. First off, there's their supervisor, and up through the supervisory chain within their organization. If folks aren't comfortable with that, there are a number of inspectors general. In the case of Mr. Snowden, he had the option of the NSA inspector general, the Navy inspector general, the Pacific Command inspector general, the Department of Defense inspector general, and the intelligence community inspector general, any of whom would have both kept his concerns in classified channels and been happy to address them. (CA and RL speaking at once) He had the option to go to congressional committees, and there are mechanisms to do that that are in place, and so he didn't do any of those things.CA: Now, you had said that Ed Snowden had other avenues for raising his concerns. The comeback on that is a couple of things: one, that he certainly believes that as a contractor, the avenues that would have been available to him as an employee weren't available, two, there's a track record of other whistleblowers, like [Thomas Andrews Drake] being treated pretty harshly, by some views, and thirdly, what he was taking on was not one specific flaw that he'd discovered, but programs that had been approved by all three branches of government. I mean, in that circumstance, couldn't you argue that what he did was reasonable?RL: No, I don't agree with that. I think that the — sorry, I'm getting feedback through the microphone there — the actions that he took were inappropriate because of the fact that  he put people's lives at risk, basically, in the long run, and I know there's been a lot of talk in public by Mr. Snowden and some of the journalists that say that the things that have been disclosed have not put national security and people at risk, and that is categorically not true. They actually do. I think there's also an amazing arrogance to the idea that he knows better than the framers of the Constitution in how the government should  be designed and work for separation of powers and the fact that the executive  and the legislative branch have to work together and they have checks and balances on each other, and then the judicial branch, which oversees the entire process. I think that's extremely arrogant on his part.CA: Can you give a specific example of how he put people's lives at risk?RL: Yeah, sure. So the things that he's disclosed, the capabilities, and the NSA is a capabilities-based organization, so when we have foreign intelligence targets, legitimate things of interest — like, terrorists is the iconic example, but it includes things like human traffickers, drug traffickers, people who are trying to build advanced weaponry, nuclear weapons, and build delivery systems for those, and nation-states who might be executing aggression against their immediate neighbors, which you may have some visibility into some of that that's going on right now, the capabilities are applied in very discrete and measured and controlled ways. So the unconstrained disclosure  of those capabilities means that as adversaries see them and recognize, ""Hey, I might be vulnerable to this,"" they move away from that, and we have seen targets in terrorism, in the nation-state area, in smugglers of various types, and other folks who have, because of the disclosures, moved away from our ability to have insight into what they're doing. The net effect of that is that our people who are overseas in dangerous places, whether they're diplomats or military, and our allies who are in similar situations, are at greater risk because we don't see the threats that are coming their way.CA: So that's a general response saying that because of his revelations, access that you had to certain types of information has been shut down, has been closed down. But the concern is that the nature of that access was not necessarily legitimate in the first place. I mean, describe to us this Bullrun program where it's alleged that the NSA specifically weakened security in order to get the type of  access that you've spoken of.RL: So there are, when our legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the type that I described before, use the global telecommunications system as their communications methodology, and they do, because it's a great system, it's the most complex system ever devised by man, and it is a wonder, and lots of folks in the room there are responsible for the creation and enhancement of that, and it's just a wonderful thing. But it's also used by people who are working against us and our allies. And so if I'm going to pursue them, I need to have the capability to go after them, and again, the controls are in how I apply that capability, not that I have the capability itself. Otherwise, if we could make it so that all the bad guys used one corner of the Internet, we could have a domain, badguy.com. That would be awesome, and we could just concentrate all our efforts there. That's not how it works. They're trying to hide from the government's ability to isolate and interdict their actions, and so we have to swim in that same space. But I will tell you this. So NSA has two missions. One is the Signals Intelligence mission that we've unfortunately read so much about in the press. The other one is the Information Assurance mission, which is to protect the national security systems of the United States, and by that, that's things like the communications that the president uses, the communications that control our nuclear weapons, the communications that our military uses around the world, and the communications that we use with our allies, and that some of our allies themselves use. And so we make recommendations on standards to use, and we use those same standards, and so we are invested in making sure that those communications are secure for their intended purposes.CA: But it sounds like what you're saying is that when it comes to the Internet at large, any strategy is fair game if it improves America's safety. And I think this is partly where there is such a divide of opinion, that there's a lot of people in this room and around the world who think very differently about the Internet. They think of it as a momentous invention of humanity, kind of on a par with the Gutenberg press, for example. It's the bringer of knowledge to all. It's the connector of all. And it's viewed in those sort of idealistic terms. And from that lens, what the NSA has done is equivalent to the authorities back in Germany inserting some device into every printing press that would reveal which books people bought and what they read. Can you understand that from that viewpoint, it feels outrageous?RL: I do understand that, and I actually share the view of the utility of the Internet, and I would argue it's bigger than the Internet. It is a global telecommunications system. The Internet is a big chunk of  that, but there is a lot more. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about the balance between transparency and secrecy. That's sort of been couched as a balance between privacy and national security. I don't think that's the right framing. I think it really is transparency and secrecy. And so that's the national and international conversation that we're having, and we want to participate in that, and want people to participate in it in an informed way. So there are things, let me talk there a little bit more, there are things that we need to be transparent about: our authorities, our processes, our oversight, who we are. We, NSA, have not done a good job of that, and I think that's part of the reason that this has been so revelational and so sensational in the media. Nobody knew who we were. We were the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything. There's takeoffs of our logo of an eagle with headphones on around it. And so that's the public characterization. And so we need to be more transparent about those things. What we don't need to be transparent about, because it's bad for the U.S., it's bad for all those other countries that we work with and that we help provide information that helps them secure themselves and their people, it's bad to expose operations and capabilities in a way that allows the people that we're all working against, the generally recognized bad guys, to counter those.CA: But isn't it also bad to deal a kind of body blow to the American companies that have essentially given the world most of the Internet services that matter? RL: It is. It's really the companies are in a tough position, as are we, because the companies, we compel them to provide information, just like every other nation in the world does. Every industrialized nation in the world has a lawful intercept program where they are requiring companies to provide them with information that they need for their security, and the companies that are involved have complied with those programs in the same way that they have to do when they're operating in Russia or the U.K. or China or India or France, any country that you choose to name. And so the fact that these revelations have been broadly characterized as ""you can't trust company A because your privacy is suspect with them"" is actually only accurate in the sense that it's accurate with every other company in the world that deals with any of those countries in the world. And so it's being picked up by people as a marketing advantage, and it's being marketed that  way by several countries, including some of our allied countries, where they are saying, ""Hey, you can't trust the U.S., but you can trust our telecom company, because we're safe."" And they're actually using that to counter the very large technological edge that U.S. companies have in areas like the cloud and Internet-based technologies.CA: You're sitting there with the American flag, and the American Constitution guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. How do you characterize the American citizen's right to privacy? Is there such a right?RL: Yeah, of course there is. And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure, inordinate and appropriate, actually I should say, amount of time and effort in order to ensure that we protect that privacy. and beyond that, the privacy of citizens around the world, it's not just Americans. Several things come into play here. First, we're all in the same network. My communications, I'm a user of a particular Internet email service that is the number one email service of choice by terrorists around the world, number one. So I'm there right beside them in email space in the Internet. And so we need to be able to pick that apart and find the information that's relevant. In doing so, we're going to necessarily encounter Americans and innocent foreign citizens who are just going about their business, and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out, that says, when you find that, not if you find it, when you find it, because you're certain to find it, here's how you protect that. These are called minimization procedures. They're approved by the attorney general and constitutionally based. And so we protect those. And then, for people, citizens of the world who are going about their lawful business on a day-to-day basis, the president on his January 17 speech, laid out some additional protections that we are providing to them. So I think absolutely, folks do have a right to privacy, and that we work very hard to make sure that that right to privacy is protected.CA: What about foreigners using American companies' Internet services? Do they have any privacy rights?RL: They do. They do, in the sense of, the only way that we are able to compel one of those companies to provide us information is when it falls into one of three categories: We can identify that this particular person, identified by a selector of some kind, is associated with counterterrorist or proliferation or other foreign intelligence target.CA: Much has been made of the fact that a lot of the information that you've obtained through these programs is essentially metadata. It's not necessarily the actual words that someone has written in an email or given on a phone call. It's who they wrote to and when, and so forth. But it's been argued, and someone here in the audience has talked to a former NSA analyst who said metadata is actually much more invasive than the core data, because in the core data you present yourself as you want to be presented. With metadata, who knows what the conclusions are that are drawn? Is there anything to that?RL: I don't really understand that argument. I think that metadata's important for a couple of reasons. Metadata is the information that lets you find connections that people are trying to hide. So when a terrorist is corresponding with somebody else who's not known to us but is engaged in doing or supporting terrorist activity, or someone who's violating international sanctions by providing nuclear weapons-related material to a country like Iran or North Korea, is trying to hide that activity because it's illicit activity. What metadata lets you do is connect that. The alternative to that is one that's much less efficient and much more invasive of privacy, which is gigantic amounts of content collection. So metadata, in that sense, actually is privacy-enhancing. And we don't, contrary to some of the stuff that's been printed, we don't sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you're not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.CA: So in terms of the threats that face America overall, where would you place terrorism?RL: I think terrorism is still number one. I think that we have never been in a time where there are more places where things are going badly and forming the petri dish in which terrorists take advantage of the lack of governance. An old boss of mine, Tom Fargo, Admiral Fargo, used to describe it as arcs of instability. And so you have a lot of those arcs of instability in the world right now, in places like Syria, where there's a civil war going on and you have massive numbers, thousands and thousands of foreign fighters who are coming into Syria to learn how to be terrorists and practice that activity, and lots of those people are Westerners who hold passports to European countries or in some cases the United States, and so they are basically learning how to do jihad and have expressed intent to go out and do that later on in their home countries. You've got places like Iraq, which is suffering from a high level of sectarian violence, again a breeding ground for terrorism. And you have the activity in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel area of Africa. Again, lots of weak governance which forms a breeding ground for terrorist activity. So I think it's very serious. I think it's number one. I think number two is cyber threat. I think cyber is a threat in three ways: One way, and probably the most common way that people have heard about it, is due to the theft of intellectual property, so basically, foreign countries going in, stealing companies' secrets, and then providing that information to state-owned enterprises or companies connected to the government to help them leapfrog technology or to gain business intelligence that's then used to win contracts overseas. That is a hugely costly set of activities that's going on right now. Several nation-states are doing it. Second is the denial-of-service attacks. You're probably aware that there have been a spate of those directed against the U.S. financial sector since 2012. Again, that's a nation-state who is executing those attacks, and they're doing that as a semi-anonymous way of reprisal. And the last one is destructive attacks, and those are the ones that concern me the most. Those are on the rise. You have the attack against Saudi Aramco in 2012, August of 2012. It took down about 35,000 of their computers with a Wiper-style virus. You had a follow-on a week later to a Qatari company. You had March of 2013, you had a South Korean attack that was attributed in the press to North Korea that took out thousands of computers. Those are on the rise, and we see people expressing interest in those capabilities and a desire to employ them.CA: Okay, so a couple of things here, because this is really the core of this, almost. I mean, first of all, a lot of people who look at risk and look at the numbers don't understand this belief that terrorism is still the number one threat. Apart from September 11, I think the numbers are that in the last 30 or 40 years about 500 Americans have died from terrorism, mostly from homegrown terrorists. The chance in the last few years of being killed by terrorism is far less than the chance of being killed by lightning. I guess you would say that a single nuclear incident or bioterrorism act or something like that would change those numbers. Would that be the point of view?RL: Well, I'd say two things. One is, the reason that there hasn't been a major attack in the United States since 9/11, that is not an accident. That's a lot of hard work that we have done, that other folks in the intelligence community have done, that the military has done, and that our allies around the globe have done. You've heard the numbers about the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54, 25 of those in Europe, and of those 25, 18 of them occurred in three countries, some of which are our allies, and some of which are beating the heck out of us over the NSA programs, by the way. So that's not an accident that those things happen. That's hard work. That's us finding intelligence on terrorist activities and interdicting them through one way or another, through law enforcement, through cooperative activities with other countries and sometimes through military action. The other thing I would say is that your idea of nuclear or chem-bio-threat is not at all far-fetched and in fact there are a number of groups who have for several years expressed interest and desire in obtaining those capabilities and work towards that.CA: It's also been said that, of those 54 alleged incidents, that as few as zero of them were actually anything to do with these controversial programs that Mr. Snowden revealed, that it was basically through other forms of intelligence, that you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the effects of these programs, these controversial programs, is just to add hay to the stack, not to really find the needle. The needle was found by other methods. Isn't there something to that?RL: No, there's actually two programs that are typically implicated in that discussion. One is the section 215 program, the U.S. telephony metadata program, and the other one is popularly called the PRISM program, and it's actually section 702  of the FISA Amendment Act. But the 215 program is only relevant to threats that are directed against the United States, and there have been a dozen threats where that was implicated. Now what you'll see people say publicly is there is no ""but for"" case, and so there is no case where, but for that, the threat would have happened. But that actually indicates a lack of understanding of how terrorist investigations actually work. You think about on television, you watch a murder mystery. What do you start with? You start with a body, and then they work their way from there to solve the crime. We're actually starting well before that, hopefully before there are any bodies, and we're trying to build the case for who the people are, what they're trying to do, and that involves massive amounts of information. Think of it is as mosaic, and it's hard to say that any one piece of a mosaic was necessary to building the mosaic, but to build the complete picture, you need to have all the pieces of information. On the other, the non-U.S.-related threats out of those 54, the other 42 of them, the PRISM program was hugely relevant to that, and in fact was material in contributing to stopping those attacks.CA: Snowden said two days ago that terrorism has always been what is called in the intelligence world ""a cover for action,"" that it's something that, because it invokes such a powerful emotional response in people, it allows the initiation of these programs to achieve powers that an organization like yours couldn't otherwise have. Is there any internal debate about that?RL: Yeah. I mean, we debate these things all the time, and there is discussion that goes on in the executive branch and within NSA itself and the intelligence community about what's right, what's proportionate, what's the correct thing to do. And it's important to note that the programs that we're talking about were all authorized by two different presidents, two different political parties, by Congress twice, and by federal judges 16 different times, and so this is not NSA running off and doing its own thing. This is a legitimate activity of the United States foreign government that was agreed to by all the branches of the United States government, and President Madison would have been proud.CA: And yet, when congressmen discovered what was actually being done  with that authorization, many of them were completely shocked. Or do you think that is not a legitimate reaction, that it's only because it's now come out publicly, that they really knew exactly what you were doing with the powers they had granted you?RL: Congress is a big body. There's 535 of them, and they change out frequently, in the case of the House, every two years, and I think that the NSA provided all the relevant information to our oversight committees, and then the dissemination of that information by the oversight committees throughout Congress is something that they manage. I think I would say that Congress members had the opportunity to make themselves aware, and in fact a significant number of them, the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility, did have the ability to do that. And you've actually had the chairs of those committees say that in public. CA: Now, you mentioned the  threat of cyberattacks, and I don't think anyone in this room would disagree that that is a huge concern, but do you accept that there's a tradeoff between offensive and defensive strategies, and that it's possible that the very measures taken to, ""weaken encryption,"" and allow yourself to find the bad guys, might also open the door to forms of cyberattack?RL: So I think two things. One is, you said weaken encryption. I didn't. And the other one is that the NSA has both of those missions, and we are heavily biased towards defense, and, actually, the vulnerabilities that we find in the overwhelming majority of cases, we disclose to the people who are responsible for manufacturing or developing those products. We have a great track record of that, and we're actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way that the Internet companies are being allowed to publish transparency reports for them. We want to be more transparent about that. So again, we eat our own dog food. We use the standards, we use the products that we recommend, and so it's in our interest to keep our communications protected in the same way that other people's need to be.CA: Edward Snowden, when, after his talk, was wandering the halls here in the bot, and I heard him say to a couple of people, they asked him about what he thought of the NSA overall, and he was very complimentary about the people who work with you, said that it's a really impassioned group of employees who are seeking to do the right thing, and that the problems have come from just some badly conceived policies. He came over certainly very reasonably and calmly. He didn't come over like a crazy man. Would you accept that at least, even if you disagree with how he did it, that he has opened a debate that matters?RL: So I think that the discussion is an important one to have. I do not like the way that he did it. I think there were a number of other ways that he could have done that that would have not endangered our people and the people of other nations through losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing. But I do think it's an important conversation.CA: It's been reported that there's almost a difference of opinion with you and your colleagues over any scenario in which he might be offered an amnesty deal. I think your boss, General Keith Alexander, has said that that would be a terrible example for others; you can't negotiate with someone who's broken the law in that way. But you've been quoted as saying that, if Snowden could prove that he was surrendering all undisclosed documents, that a deal maybe should be considered. Do you still think that?RL: Yeah, so actually, this is my favorite thing about that ""60 Minutes"" interview was all the misquotes that came from that. What I actually said, in  response to a question about, would you entertain any discussions of mitigating action against Snowden, I said, yeah, it's worth a conversation. This is something that the attorney general of the United States and the president also actually have both talked about this, and I defer to the attorney general, because this is his lane. But there is a strong tradition in American jurisprudence of having discussions with people who have been charged with crimes in order to, if it benefits the government, to get something out of that, that there's always room for that kind of discussion. So I'm not presupposing any outcome, but there is always room for discussion.CA: To a lay person it seems like he has certain things to offer the U.S., the government, you, others, in terms of putting things right and helping figure out a smarter policy, a smarter way forward for the future. Do you see, has that kind of possibility been entertained at all? RL: So that's out of my lane. That's not an NSA thing. That would be a Department of Justice sort of discussion. I'll defer to them.CA: Rick, when Ed Snowden ended his talk, I offered him the chance to share an idea worth spreading. What would be your idea worth spreading for this group?RL: So I think, learn the facts. This is a really important conversation, and it impacts, it's not just NSA, it's not just the government, it's you, it's the Internet companies. The issue of privacy and personal data is much bigger than just the government, and so learn the facts. Don't rely on headlines, don't rely on sound bites, don't rely on one-sided conversations. So that's the idea, I think, worth spreading. We have a sign, a badge tab, we wear badges at work with lanyards, and if I could make a plug, my badge lanyard at work says, ""Dallas Cowboys."" Go Dallas. I've just alienated half the audience, I know. So the lanyard that our people who work in the organization that does our crypto-analytic work have a tab that says, ""Look at the data."" So that's the idea worth spreading. Look at the data.CA: Rick, it took a certain amount of courage, I think, actually, to come and speak openly to this group. It's not something the NSA has done a lot of in the past, and plus the technology has been challenging. We truly appreciate you doing that and sharing in this very important conversation. Thank you so much.RL: Thanks, Chris.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_ledgett_the_nsa_responds_to_edward_snowden_s_ted_talk
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"Charlie Rose: So Larry sent me an email and he basically said, we've got to make sure that  we don't seem like we're a couple of middle-aged boring men. I said, I'm flattered by that — (Laughter) — because I'm a bit older, and he has a bit more net worth than I do.Larry Page: Well, thank you.CR: So we'll have a conversation about the Internet, and we'll have a conversation Google, and we'll have a conversation about search and privacy, and also about your philosophy and a sense of how you've connected the dots and how this journey that began some time ago has such interesting prospects. Mainly we want to talk about the future. So my first question: Where is Google and where is it going? LP: Well, this is something we think about a lot, and our mission we defined a long time ago is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And people always say, is that really what you guys are still doing? And I always kind of think about that myself, and I'm not quite sure. But actually, when I think about search, it's such a deep thing for all of us, to really understand what you want, to understand the world's information, and we're still very much in the early stages of that, which is totally crazy. We've been at it for 15 years already, but it's not at all done.CR: When it's done, how will it be?LP: Well, I guess, in thinking about where we're going — you know, why is it not done? — a lot of it is just computing's kind of a mess. You know, your computer doesn't know where you are, it doesn't know what you're doing, it doesn't know what you know, and a lot we've been trying to do recently is just make your devices work, make them understand your context. Google Now, you know, knows where you are, knows what you may need. So really having computing  work and understand you and understand that information, we really haven't done that yet. It's still very, very clunky.CR: Tell me, when you look at what Google is doing, where does Deep Mind fit?LP: Yeah, so Deep Mind is a company we just acquired recently. It's in the U.K. First, let me tell you the way we got there, which was looking at search and really understanding, trying to understand everything, and also make the computers not clunky and really understand you — like, voice was really important. So what's the state of the art  on speech recognition? It's not very good. It doesn't really understand you. So we started doing machine learning research to improve that. That helped a lot. And we started just looking at things like YouTube. Can we understand YouTube? But we actually ran machine learning on YouTube and it discovered cats, just by itself. Now, that's an important concept. And we realized there's really something here. If we can learn what cats are, that must be really important. So I think Deep Mind, what's really amazing about Deep Mind is that it can actually — they're learning things in this unsupervised way. They started with video games, and really just, maybe I can show the video, just playing video games, and learning how to do that automatically.CR: Take a look at the video games and how machines are coming to be able to do some remarkable things.LP: The amazing thing about this is this is, I mean, obviously, these are old games, but the system just sees what you see, the pixels, and it has the controls and it has the score, and it's learned to play all of these games, same program. It's learned to play all of these games with superhuman performance. We've not been able to do things like this with computers before. And maybe I'll just narrate this one quickly. This is boxing, and it figures out it can sort of pin the opponent down. The computer's on the left, and it's just racking up points. So imagine if this kind of intelligence were thrown at your schedule, or your information needs, or things like that. We're really just at the beginning of that, and that's what I'm really excited about.CR: When you look at all that's taken place with Deep Mind and the boxing, also a part of where we're going is artificial intelligence. Where are we, when you look at that?LP: Well, I think for me, this is kind of one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time. The guy who started this company, Demis, has a neuroscience and a computer science background. He went back to school to get his Ph.D. to study the brain. And so I think we're seeing a lot of exciting work going on that sort of crosses computer science and neuroscience in terms of really understanding what it takes to make something smart and do really interesting things.CR: But where's the level of it now? And how fast do you think we are moving?LP: Well, this is the state of the art right now, understanding cats on YouTube and things like that, improving voice recognition. We used a lot of machine learning to improve things incrementally, but I think for me, this example's really exciting, because it's one program that can do a lot of different things.CR: I don't know if we can do this, but we've got the image of the cat. It would be wonderful to see this. This is how machines looked at cats and what they came up with. Can we see that image?LP: Yeah. CR: There it is. Can you see the cat? Designed by machines, seen by machines.LP: That's right. So this is learned from just watching YouTube. And there's no training, no notion of a cat, but this concept of a cat is something important that you would understand, and now that the machines can kind of understand. Maybe just finishing also on the search part, it started with search, really understanding people's context and their information. I did have a video I wanted to show quickly on that that we actually found.(Video) [""Soy, Kenya""]Zack Matere: Not long ago, I planted a crop of potatoes. Then suddenly they started dying one after the other. I checked out the books and  they didn't tell me much. So, I went and I did a search. [""Zack Matere, Farmer""] Potato diseases. One of the websites told me that ants could be the problem. It said, sprinkle wood ash over the plants. Then after a few days the ants disappeared. I got excited about the Internet. I have this friend who really would like to expand his business. So I went with him to the cyber cafe and we checked out several sites. When I met him next, he was going to put a windmill at the local school. I felt proud because something that wasn't there before was suddenly there. I realized that not everybody can be able to access what I was able to access. I thought that I need to have an Internet that my grandmother can use. So I thought about a notice board. A simple wooden notice board. When I get information on my phone, I'm able to post the information on the notice board. So it's basically like a computer. I use the Internet to help people. I think I am searching for a better life for me and my neighbors. So many people have access to information, but there's no follow-up to that. I think the follow-up to that is our knowledge. When people have the knowledge, they can find solutions without having to helped out. Information is powerful, but it is how we use it that will define us.(Applause)LP: Now, the amazing thing about that video, actually, was we just read about it in the news, and we found this gentlemen, and made that little clip.CR: When I talk to people about you, they say to me, people who know you well, say, Larry wants to change the world, and he believes technology can show the way. And that means access to the Internet. It has to do with languages. It also means how people can get access and do things that will affect their community, and this is an example. LP: Yeah, that's right, and I think for me, I have been focusing on access more, if we're talking about the future. We recently released this Loon Project which is using balloons to do it. It sounds totally crazy. We can show the video here. Actually, two out of three people in the world don't have good Internet access now. We actually think this can really help people sort of cost-efficiently.CR: It's a balloon. LP: Yeah, get access to the Internet.CR: And why does this balloon give you access to the Internet? Because there was some interesting things you had to do to figure out how to make balloons possible, they didn't have to be tethered.LP: Yeah, and this is a good example of innovation. Like, we've been thinking about this idea for five years or more before we started working on it, but it was just really, how do we get access points up high, cheaply? You normally have to use satellites and it takes a long time to launch them. But you saw there how easy it is to launch a balloon and get it up, and actually again, it's the power of the Internet, I did a search on it, and I found, 30, 40 years ago, someone had put up a balloon and it had gone around the Earth multiple times. And I thought, why can't we do that today? And that's how this project got going.CR: But are you at the mercy of the wind?LP: Yeah, but it turns out, we did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go, and so I think we can build a worldwide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet.CR: Before I talk about the future and transportation, where you've been a nerd for a while, and this fascination you have with transportation and automated cars and bicycles, let me talk a bit about what's been the subject here earlier with Edward Snowden. It is security and privacy. You have to have been thinking about that.LP: Yeah, absolutely. I saw the picture of Sergey with Edward Snowden yesterday. Some of you may have seen it. But I think, for me, I guess, privacy and security are a really important thing. We think about it in terms of both things, and I think you can't have privacy without security, so let me just talk about security first, because you asked about Snowden and all of that, and then I'll say a little bit about privacy. I think for me, it's tremendously disappointing that the government secretly did all this stuff and didn't tell us. I don't think we can have a democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government for stuff that we've never had a conversation about. And I don't mean we have to know what the particular terrorist attack is they're worried about protecting us from, but we do need to know what the parameters of it is, what kind of surveillance the government's going to do and how and why, and I think we haven't had that conversation. So I think the government's actually done itself a tremendous disservice by doing all that in secret.CR: Never coming to Google to ask for anything.LP: Not Google, but the public. I think we need to  have a debate about that, or we can't have a functioning democracy. It's just not possible. So I'm sad that Google's in the position of protecting you and our users from the government doing secret thing that nobody knows about. It doesn't make any sense.CR: Yeah. And then there's a privacy side of it.LP: Yes. The privacy side, I think it's — the world is changing. You carry a phone. It knows where you are. There's so much more information about you, and that's an important thing, and it makes sense why people are asking difficult questions. We spend a lot of time thinking about this and what the issues are. I'm a little bit — I think the main thing that we need to do is just provide people choice, show them what data's being collected — search history, location data. We're excited about incognito mode in Chrome, and doing that in more ways, just giving people more choice and more awareness of what's going on. I also think it's very easy. What I'm worried is that we throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I look at, on your show, actually, I kind of lost my voice, and I haven't gotten it back. I'm hoping that by talking to you I'm going to get it back.CR: If I could do anything, I would do that.LP: All right. So get out your voodoo doll and whatever you need to do. But I think, you know what, I look at that, I made that public, and I got all this information. We got a survey done on medical conditions with people who have similar issues, and I look at medical records, and I say, wouldn't it be amazing if everyone's medical records were available anonymously to research doctors? And when someone accesses your medical record, a research doctor, they could see, you could see which doctor accessed it and why, and you could maybe learn about what conditions you have. I think if we just did that, we'd save 100,000 lives this year.CR: Absolutely. Let me go — (Applause)LP: So I guess I'm just very worried that with Internet privacy, we're doing the same thing we're  doing with medical records, is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and we're not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways.CR: And the necessary condition that people have to have confidence that their information will not be abused.LP: Yeah, and I had this problem with my voice stuff. I was scared to share it. Sergey encouraged me to do that, and it was a great thing to do.CR: And the response has been overwhelming.LP: Yeah, and people are super positive. We got thousands and thousands of people with similar conditions, which there's no data on today. So it was a really good thing.CR: So talking about the future, what is it about you and transportation systems?LP: Yeah. I guess I was just frustrated with this when I was at college in Michigan. I had to get on the bus and take it and wait for it. And it was cold and snowing. I did some research on how much it cost, and I just became a bit obsessed with transportation systems.CR: And that began the idea of an automated car.LP: Yeah, about 18 years ago I learned about people working on automated cars, and I became fascinated by that, and it takes a while to  get these projects going, but I'm super excited about the possibilities of that improving the world. There's 20 million people or more injured per year. It's the leading cause of death for people under 34 in the U.S.CR: So you're talking about saving lives.LP: Yeah, and also saving space and making life better. Los Angeles is half parking lots and roads, half of the area, and most cities are not far behind, actually. It's just crazy that that's what we use our space for.CR: And how soon will we be there?LP: I think we can be there very, very soon. We've driven well over 100,000 miles now totally automated. I'm super excited about getting that out quickly.CR: But it's not only you're talking about automated cars. You also have this idea for bicycles.LP: Well at Google, we got this idea that we should just provide free bikes to everyone, and that's been amazing, most of the trips. You see bikes going everywhere, and the bikes wear out. They're getting used 24 hours a day.CR: But you want to put them above the street, too.LP: Well I said, how do we get people using bikes more?CR: We may have a video here.LP: Yeah, let's show the video. I just got excited about this.(Music) So this is actually how you might separate bikes from cars with minimal cost. Anyway, it looks totally crazy, but I was actually thinking about our campus, working with the Zippies and stuff, and just trying to get a lot more bike usage, and I was thinking about, how do you cost-effectively separate the bikes from traffic? And I went and searched, and this is what I found. And we're not actually working on this, that particular thing, but it gets your imagination going.CR: Let me close with this. Give me a sense of the philosophy  of your own mind. You have this idea of [Google X]. You don't simply want to go in some small, measurable arena of progress.LP: Yeah, I think many of the things we just  talked about are like that, where they're really — I almost use the economic concept of additionality, which means that you're doing something that wouldn't happen unless  you were actually doing it. And I think the more you can do things like that, the bigger impact you have, and that's about doing things that people might not think are possible. And I've been amazed, the more I learn about technology, the more I realize I don't know, and that's because this technological horizon, the thing that you can see to do next, the more you learn about technology, the more you learn what's possible. You learn that the balloons are possible because there's some material that will work for them.CR: What's interesting about  you too, though, for me, is that, we have lots of people who are thinking about the future, and they are going and looking and they're coming back, but we never see the implementation. I think of somebody you knew and read about, Tesla. The principle of that for you is what?LP: Well, I think invention is not enough. If you invent something, Tesla invented electric power that we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. That had to be done by other people. It took a long time. And I think if we can actually combine both things, where we have an innovation and invention focus, plus the ability to really — a company that can really commercialize things and get them to people in a way that's positive for the world and to give people hope. You know, I'm amazed with the Loon Project just how excited people were about that, because it gave them hope for the two thirds of the world that doesn't have Internet right now that's any good.CR: Which is a second thing about corporations. You are one of those people who believe that corporations are an agent of change if they are run well.LP: Yeah. I'm really dismayed most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct. Companies are doing the same incremental thing that they did 50 years ago or 20 years ago. That's not really what we need. We need, especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.CR: You once said, actually, as I think I've got this about right, that you might consider, rather than giving your money, if you were leaving it to some cause, just simply giving it to Elon Musk, because you had confidence that he would change the future, and that you would therefore —LP: Yeah, if you want to go Mars, he wants to go to Mars, to back up humanity, that's a worthy goal, but it's a company, and it's philanthropical. So I think we aim to do kind of similar things. And I think, you ask, we have a lot of employees at Google who have become pretty wealthy. People make a lot of money in technology. A lot of people in the room are pretty wealthy. You're working because you want to change the world. You want to make it better. Why isn't the company that you work for worthy not just of your time but your money as well? I mean, but we don't have a concept of that. That's not how we think about companies, and I think it's sad, because companies are most of our effort. They're where most of people's time is, where a lot of the money is, and so I think I'd like for us to help out more than we are.CR: When I close conversations with lots of people, I always ask this question: What state of mind, what quality of mind is it that has served you best? People like Rupert Murdoch have said curiosity, and other people in the media have said that. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have said focus. What quality of mind, as I leave this audience, has enabled you to think about the future and at the same time change the present?LP: You know, I think the most important thing — I looked at lots of companies and why I thought they don't succeed over time. We've had a more rapid turnover of companies. And I said, what did they fundamentally do wrong? What did those companies all do wrong? And usually it's just that they missed the future. And so I think, for me, I just try to focus on that and say, what is that future really going to be and how do we create it, and how do we cause our organization, to really focus on that and drive that at a really high rate? And so that's been curiosity, it's been looking at things people might not think about, working on things that no one else is working on, because that's where the additionality really is, and be willing to do that, to take that risk. Look at Android. I felt guilty about working on Android when it was starting. It was a little startup we bought. It wasn't really what we were really working on. And I felt guilty about spending time on that. That was stupid. That was the future, right? That was a good thing to be working on.CR: It is great to see you here. It's great to hear from you, and a pleasure to sit at this table with you. Thanks, Larry.LP: Thank you.(Applause)CR: Larry Page.","https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_page_where_s_google_going_next
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"In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it.(Applause)Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal.Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. She can have fun. She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. She is confined under the four walls of her home. She is no more a free individual. She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed.And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor.And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. It is the criteria. The role model good girl should be very quiet. She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. If she is married very early, she has to accept. Otherwise, she will be called disobedient. And what happens at the end? In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. And it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on.Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women.Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came — and it was a coincidence — he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, ""Malala.""And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? Yes, I must mention it. It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. That was the reason that I valued my daughter. What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it.I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. I encouraged her to go with me to different meetings. And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. And this was not only she, only Malala. I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students  and boy students as well. I used education for emancipation. I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor.Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. But we came across a new phenomenon. It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights. It was called Talibanization. It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities. Hundreds of schools were lost. Girls were prohibited from going to school. Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed. Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. It's really the most scary thing.At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. And her voice was the most powerful voice. It spread like a crescendo all around the world. And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range.It was a doomsday for my family and for me. The world turned into a big black hole. While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, ""Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter?""And she abruptly told me, ""Please don't blame yourself. You stood for the right cause. You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. You both were on the right path and God will protect her.""These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again.When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. But my daughter never complained. She used to tell us, ""I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. I'll be okay. Please don't worry."" She was a solace for us, and she consoled us.Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl. She cries when her homework is incomplete. She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that.People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? I tell them, don't ask me what I did. Ask me what I did not do. I did not clip her wings, and that's all.Thank you very much.(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ziauddin_yousafzai_my_daughter_malala
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"Good morning. When I was a little boy, I had an experience that changed my life, and is in fact why I'm here today. That one moment profoundly affected how I think about art, design and engineering.As background, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family of loving and talented artists in one of the world's great cities. My dad, John Ferren, who died when I was 15, was an artist by both passion and profession, as is my mom, Rae. He was one of the New York School abstract expressionists who, together with his contemporaries, invented American modern art, and contributed to moving the American zeitgeist towards modernism in the 20th century. Isn't it remarkable that, after thousands of years of people doing mostly representational art, that modern art, comparatively speaking, is about 15 minutes old, yet now pervasive. As with many other important innovations, those radical ideas required no new technology, just fresh thinking and a willingness to experiment, plus resiliency in the face of near-universal criticism and rejection. In our home, art was everywhere. It was like oxygen, around us and necessary for life. As I watched him paint, Dad taught me that art was not about being decorative, but was a different way of communicating ideas, and in fact one that could bridge the worlds of knowledge and insight.Given this rich artistic environment, you'd assume that I would have been compelled to go into the family business, but no. I followed the path of most kids who are genetically programmed to make their parents crazy. I had no interest in becoming an artist, certainly not a painter. What I did love was electronics and machines — taking them apart, building new ones, and making them work. Fortunately, my family also had engineers in it, and with my parents, these were my first role models. What they all had in common was they worked very, very hard. My grandpa owned and operated a sheet metal kitchen cabinet factory in Brooklyn. On weekends, we would go together to Cortlandt Street, which was New York City's radio row. There we would explore massive piles of surplus electronics, and for a few bucks bring home treasures like Norden bombsights and parts from the first IBM tube-based computers. I found these objects both useful and fascinating. I learned about engineering and how things worked, not at school but by taking apart and studying these fabulously complex devices. I did this for hours every day, apparently avoiding electrocution. Life was good.However, every summer, sadly, the machines got left behind while my parents and I traveled overseas to experience history, art and design. We visited the great museums and historic buildings of both Europe and the Middle East, but to encourage my growing interest in science and technology, they would simply drop me off in places like the London Science Museum, where I would wander endlessly for hours by myself studying the history of science and technology.Then, when I was about nine years old, we went to Rome. On one particularly hot summer day, we visited a drum-shaped building that from the outside was not particularly interesting. My dad said it was called the Pantheon, a temple for all of the gods. It didn't look all that special from the outside, as I said, but when we walked inside, I was immediately struck by three things: First of all, it was pleasantly cool despite the oppressive heat outside. It was very dark, the only source of light being an big open hole in the roof. Dad explained that this wasn't a big open hole, but it was called the oculus, an eye to the heavens. And there was something about this place, I didn't know why, that just felt special. As we walked to the center of the room, I looked up at the heavens through the oculus. This was the first church that I'd been to that provided an unrestricted view between God and man. But I wondered, what about when it rained? Dad may have called this an oculus, but it was, in fact, a big hole in the roof. I looked down and saw floor drains had been cut into the stone floor. As I became more accustomed to the dark, I was able to make out details of the floor and the surrounding walls. No big deal here, just the same statuary stuff that we'd seen all over Rome. In fact, it looked like the Appian Way marble salesman showed up with his sample book, showed it to Hadrian, and Hadrian said, ""We'll take all of it."" (Laughter)But the ceiling was amazing. It looked like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. I'd seen these before, and Bucky was friends with my dad. It was modern, high-tech, impressive, a huge 142-foot clear span which, not coincidentally, was exactly its height. I loved this place. It was really beautiful and unlike anything I'd ever seen before, so I asked my dad, ""When was this built?"" He said, ""About 2,000 years ago."" And I said, ""No, I mean, the roof."" You see, I assumed that this was a modern roof that had been put on because the original was destroyed in some long-past war. He said, ""It's the original roof.""That moment changed my life, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. For the first time, I realized people were smart 2,000 years ago. (Laughter) This had never crossed my mind. I mean, to me, the pyramids at Giza, we visited those the year before, and sure they're impressive, nice enough design, but look, give me an unlimited budget, 20,000 to 40,000 laborers, and about 10 to 20 years to cut and drag stone blocks  across the countryside, and I'll build you pyramids too. But no amount of brute force gets you the dome of the Pantheon, not 2,000 years ago, nor today. And incidentally, it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome that's ever been built. To build the Pantheon took some miracles. By miracles, I mean things that are technically barely possible, very high-risk, and might not be actually accomplishable at this moment in time, certainly not by you.For example, here are some of the Pantheon's miracles. To make it even structurally possible, they had to invent super-strong concrete, and to control weight, varied the density of the aggregate as they worked their way up the dome. For strength and lightness, the dome structure used five rings of coffers, each of diminishing size, which imparts a dramatic forced perspective to the design. It was wonderfully cool inside because of its huge thermal mass, natural convection of air rising up through the oculus, and a Venturi effect when wind blows across the top of the building. I discovered for the first time that light itself has substance. The shaft of light beaming through the oculus was both beautiful and palpable, and I realized for the first time that light could be designed. Further, that of all of the forms of design, visual design, they were all kind of irrelevant without it, because without light, you can't see any of them. I also realized that I wasn't the first person to think that this place was really special. It survived gravity, barbarians, looters, developers and the ravages of time to become what I believe is the longest continuously occupied building in history.Largely because of that visit, I came to understand that, contrary to what I was being told in school, the worlds of art and design were not, in fact, incompatible with science and engineering. I realized, when combined, you could create things that were amazing that couldn't be done in either domain alone. But in school, with few exceptions, they were treated as separate worlds, and they still are. My teachers told me that I had to get serious and focus on one or the other. However, urging me to specialize only caused me to really  appreciate those polymaths like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, people who did exactly the opposite. And this led me to embrace and want to be in both worlds.So then how do these projects of unprecedented creative vision and technical complexity like the Pantheon actually happen? Someone themselves, perhaps Hadrian, needed a brilliant creative vision. They also needed the storytelling and leadership skills necessary to fund and execute it, and a mastery of science and technology with the ability and knowhow to push existing innovations even farther. It is my belief that to create these rare game changers requires you to pull off at least five miracles. The problem is, no matter how talented, rich or smart you are, you only get one to one and a half miracles. That's it. That's the quota. Then you run out of time, money, enthusiasm, whatever. Remember, most people can't even imagine one of these technical miracles, and you need at least five to make a Pantheon. In my experience, these rare visionaries who can think across the worlds of art, design and engineering have the ability to notice when others have provided enough of the miracles to bring the goal within reach. Driven by the clarity of their vision, they summon the courage and determination to deliver the remaining miracles and they often take what other people think to be insurmountable obstacles and turn them into features. Take the oculus of the Pantheon. By insisting that it be in the design, it meant you couldn't use much of the structural technology that had been developed for Roman arches. However, by instead embracing it and rethinking weight and stress distribution, they came up with a design that only works if there's a big hole in the roof. That done, you now get the aesthetic and design benefits of light, cooling and that critical direct connection with the heavens. Not bad. These people not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done.Enough ancient history. What are some recent examples of innovations that combine creative design and technological advances in a way so profound that they will be remembered a thousand years from now? Well, putting a man on the moon was a good one, and returning him safely to Earth wasn't bad either. Talk about one giant leap: It's hard to imagine a more profound moment in human history than when we first left our world to set foot on another.So what came after the moon? One is tempted to say that today's pantheon is the Internet, but I actually think that's quite wrong, or at least it's only part of the story. The Internet isn't a Pantheon. It's more like the invention of concrete: important, absolutely necessary to build the Pantheon, and enduring, but entirely insufficient by itself. However, just as the technology of concrete was critical in realization of the Pantheon, new designers will use the technologies of the Internet to create novel concepts that will endure. The smartphone is a perfect example. Soon the majority of people on the planet will have one, and the idea of connecting everyone to both knowledge and each other will endure.So what's next? What imminent advance will be the equivalent of the Pantheon? Thinking about this, I rejected many very plausible and dramatic breakthroughs to come, such as curing cancer. Why? Because Pantheons are anchored in designed physical objects, ones that inspire by simply seeing and experiencing them, and will continue to do so indefinitely. It is a different kind of language, like art. These other vital contributions that extend life and relieve suffering are, of course, critical, and fantastic, but they're part of the continuum of our overall knowledge and technology, like the Internet.So what is next? Perhaps counterintuitively, I'm guessing it's a visionary idea from the late 1930s that's been revived every decade since: autonomous vehicles. Now you're thinking, give me a break. How can a fancy version of cruise control be profound? Look, much of our world has been designed around  roads and transportation. These were as essential to the success of the Roman Empire as the interstate highway system to the prosperity and development of the United States. Today, these roads that interconnect our world are dominated by cars and trucks that have remained largely unchanged for 100 years. Although perhaps not obvious today, autonomous vehicles will be the key technology that enables us to redesign our cities and, by extension, civilization. Here's why: Once they become ubiquitous, each year, these vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and a million globally. Automotive energy consumption and air pollution will be cut dramatically. Much of the road congestion in and out of our cities will disappear. They will enable compelling new concepts in how we design cities, work, and the way we live. We will get where we're going faster and society will recapture vast amounts of lost productivity now spent sitting in traffic basically polluting.But why now? Why do we think this is ready? Because over the last 30 years, people from outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions creating the needed miracles, but for entirely different purposes. It took folks like DARPA, universities, and companies completely outside of the automotive industry to notice that if you were clever about it, autonomy could be done now. So what are the five miracles needed for autonomous vehicles? One, you need to know where you are and exactly what time it is. This was solved neatly by the GPS system, Global Positioning System, that the U.S. Government put in place. You need to know where all the roads are, what the rules are, and where you're going. The various needs of personal navigation systems, in-car navigation systems, and web-based maps address this. You must have near-continuous communication with high-performance computing networks and with others nearby to understand their intent. The wireless technologies developed for mobile devices, with some minor modifications, are completely suitable to solve this. You'll probably want some restricted roadways to get started that both society and its lawyers agree are safe to use for this. This will start with the HOV lanes and move from there. But finally, you need to recognize people, signs and objects. Machine vision, special sensors, and high-performance computing can do a lot of this, but it turns out a lot is not good enough when your family is on board. Occasionally, humans will  need to do sense-making. For this, you might actually have to wake up your passenger and ask them what the hell that big lump is in the middle of the road. Not so bad, and it will give us a sense of purpose in this new world. Besides, once the first drivers explain to their confused car that the giant chicken at the fork in the road is actually a restaurant, and it's okay to keep driving, every other car on the surface of the Earth will know that from that point on.Five miracles, mostly delivered, and now you just need a clear vision of a better world filled with autonomous vehicles with seductively beautiful  and new functional designs plus a lot of money and hard work to bring it home. The beginning is now only a handful of years away, and I predict that autonomous vehicles will permanently change our world over the next several decades.In conclusion, I've come to believe that the ingredients for the next Pantheons are all around us, just waiting for visionary people with the broad knowledge, multidisciplinary skills, and intense passion to harness them to make their dreams a reality. But these people don't spontaneously pop into existence. They need to be nurtured and encouraged from when they're little kids. We need to love them and help them discover their passions. We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success, as is perseverance. We need to help them to find their own role models, and give them the confidence to believe in themselves and to believe that anything is possible, and just as my grandpa did when he took me shopping for surplus, and just as my parents did when they took me to science museums, we need to encourage them to find their own path, even if it's very different from our own.But a cautionary note: We also need to periodically pry them away from their modern miracles, the computers, phones, tablets, game machines and TVs, take them out into the sunlight so they can experience both the natural and design wonders of our world, our planet and our civilization. If we don't, they won't understand what these precious things are that someday they will be resopnsible for protecting and improving. We also need them to understand something that doesn't seem adequately appreciated in our increasingly tech-dependent world, that art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering. They are in fact essential to what makes us special.Someday, if you get the chance, perhaps you can take your kids to the actual Pantheon, as we will our daughter Kira, to experience firsthand the power of that astonishing design, which on one otherwise unremarkable day in Rome, reached 2,000 years into the future to set the course for my life.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bran_ferren_to_create_for_the_ages_let_s_combine_art_and_engineering
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"A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their bodies. And that is often not the case.This is Artemia, a brine shrimp. You probably know it better as a sea monkey. It's small, and it typically lives alone, but it can gather in these large red swarms that span for meters, and these form because of a parasite. These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm. A tapeworm is effectively a long, living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked mouth at the other. As a freelance journalist, I sympathize. (Laughter) The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia's body, but it also does other things. It castrates them, it changes their color from transparent to bright red, it makes them live longer, and as biologist Nicolas Rode has found, it makes them swim in groups. Why? Because the tapeworm, like many other parasites, has a complicated life cycle involving many different hosts. The shrimp are just one step on its journey. Its ultimate destination is this, the greater flamingo. Only in a flamingo can the tapeworm reproduce, so to get there, it manipulates its shrimp hosts into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a flamingo to spot and to devour, and that is the secret of the Artemia swarm. They aren't sociable through their own volition, but because they are being controlled. It's not safety in numbers. It's actually the exact opposite. The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies, turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo.And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation. This is a suicidal cricket. This cricket swallowed the  larvae of a Gordian worm, or horsehair worm. The worm grew to adult size within it, but it needs to get into water in order to mate, and it does that by releasing proteins that addle the cricket's brain, causing it to behave erratically. When the cricket nears a body of water, such as this swimming pool, it jumps in and drowns, and the worm wriggles out of its suicidal corpse. Crickets are really roomy. Who knew?The tapeworm and the Gordian worm are not alone. They are part of an entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites, of fungi, viruses, and worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and overriding the wills of their hosts. Now, I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough's ""Trials of Life"" about 20 years ago, and then later through a wonderful book called ""Parasite Rex"" by my friend Carl Zimmer. And I've been writing about these creatures ever since. Few topics in biology enthrall me more. It's like the parasites have subverted my own brain. Because after all, they are always compelling and they are delightfully macabre. When you write about parasites, your lexicon swells with phrases like ""devoured alive"" and ""bursts out of its body."" (Laughter)But there's more to it than that. I'm a writer, and fellow writers in the audience will know that we love stories. Parasites invite us to resist the allure of obvious stories. Their world is one of plot twists and unexpected explanations. Why, for example, does this caterpillar start violently thrashing about when another insect gets close to it and those white cocoons that it seems to be standing guard over? Is it maybe protecting its siblings? No. This caterpillar was attacked by a parasitic wasp which laid eggs inside it. The eggs hatched and the young wasps devoured the caterpillar alive before bursting out of its body. See what I mean? Now, the caterpillar didn't die. Some of the wasps seemed to stay behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons. This caterpillar is a head-banging  zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it.(Applause)We have a lot to get through.  I only have 13 minutes. (Laughter)Now, some of you are probably just desperately clawing for some solace in the idea that these things are oddities of the natural world, that they are outliers, and that point of view is understandable, because by their nature, parasites are quite small and they spend a lot of their time inside the bodies of other things. They're easy to overlook, but that doesn't mean that they aren't important. A few years back, a man called Kevin Lafferty took a group of scientists into three Californian estuaries and they pretty much weighed and dissected and recorded everything they could find, and what they found were parasites in extreme abundance. Especially common were trematodes, tiny worms that specialize in castrating their hosts like this unfortunate snail. Now, a single trematode is tiny, microscopic, but collectively they weighed as much as all the fish in the estuaries and three to nine times more than all the birds. And remember the Gordian worm that I showed you, the cricket thing? One Japanese scientist called Takuya Sato found that in one stream, these things drive so many crickets and grasshoppers into the water that the drowned insects make up some 60 percent of the diet of local trout. Manipulation is not an oddity. It is a critical and common part of the world around us, and scientists have now found hundreds of examples of such manipulators, and more excitingly, they're starting to understand exactly how these creatures control their hosts.And this is one of my favorite examples. This is Ampulex compressa, the emerald cockroach wasp, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that an emerald cockroach wasp in possession of some fertilized eggs must be in want of a cockroach. When she finds one, she stabs it with a stinger that is also a sense organ. This discovery came out three weeks ago. She stabs it with a stinger that is a sense organ equipped with small sensory bumps that allow her to feel the distinctive texture of a roach's brain. So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag, she finds the brain, and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons. Israeli scientists Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal found that the venom is a very specific chemical weapon. It doesn't kill the roach, nor does it sedate it. The roach could walk away or fly or run if it chose to, but it doesn't choose to, because the venom nixes its motivation to walk, and only that. The wasp basically un-checks the escape-from-danger box in the roach's operating system, allowing her to lead her helpless victim back to her lair by its antennae like a person walking a dog. And once there, she lays an egg on it, egg hatches, devoured alive, bursts out of body, yadda yadda yadda, you know the drill. (Laughter) (Applause)Now I would argue that, once stung, the cockroach isn't a roach anymore. It's more of an extension of the wasp, just like the cricket was an extension of the Gordian worm. These hosts won't get to survive or reproduce. They have as much control over their own fates as my car. Once the parasites get in, the hosts don't get a say.Now humans, of course, are no stranger to manipulation. We take drugs to shift the chemistries of our brains and to change our moods, and what are arguments or advertising or big ideas if not an attempt to influence someone else's mind? But our attempts at doing this are crude and blundering compared to the fine-grained specificity of the parasites. Don Draper only wishes he was as elegant and precise as the emerald cockroach wasp. Now, I think this is part of what makes parasites so sinister and so compelling. We place such a premium on our free will and our independence that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. Orwellian dystopias and shadowy cabals and mind-controlling supervillains — these are tropes that fill our darkest fiction, but in nature, they happen all the time.Which leads me to an obvious and disquieting question: Are there dark, sinister parasites that are influencing our behavior without us knowing about it, besides the NSA? If there are any — (Laughter) (Applause) I've got a red dot on my forehead now, don't I? (Laughter)If there are any, this is a good candidate for them. This is Toxoplasma gondii, or Toxo, for short, because the terrifying creature always deserves a cute nickname. Toxo infects mammals, a wide variety of mammals, but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat. And scientists like Joanne Webster have shown that if Toxo gets into a rat or a mouse, it turns the rodent into a cat-seeking missile. If the infected rat smells the delightful odor of cat piss, it runs towards the source of the smell rather than the more sensible direction of away. The cat eats the rat. Toxo gets to have sex. It's a classic tale of Eat, Prey, Love. (Laughter) (Applause)You're very charitable, generous people. Hi, Elizabeth, I loved your talk.How does the parasite control its host in this way? We don't really know. We know that Toxo releases an enzyme that makes dopamine, a substance involved in reward and motivation. We know it targets certain parts of a rodent's brain, including those involved in sexual arousal. But how those puzzle pieces fit together is not immediately clear. What is clear is that this thing is a single cell. This has no nervous system. It has no consciousness. It doesn't even have a body. But it's manipulating a mammal? We are mammals. We are more intelligent than a mere rat, to be sure, but our brains have the same basic structure, the same types of cells, the same chemicals running through them, and the same parasites. Estimates vary a lot, but some figures suggest that one in three people around the world have Toxo in their brains. Now typically, this doesn't lead to any overt illness. The parasite holds up in a dormant state for a long period of time. But there's some evidence that those people who are carriers score slightly differently on personality questionnaires than other people, that they have a slightly  higher risk of car accidents, and there's some evidence that people with schizophrenia are more likely to be infected. Now, I think this evidence is still inconclusive, and even among Toxo researchers, opinion is divided as to whether the parasite is truly influencing our behavior. But given the widespread nature of such manipulations, it would be completely implausible for humans to be the only species that weren't similarly affected.And I think that this capacity to constantly subvert our way of thinking about the world makes parasites amazing. They're constantly inviting us to look at the natural world sideways, and to ask if the behaviors we're seeing, whether they're simple and obvious or baffling and puzzling, are not the results of individuals acting through their own accord but because they are being bent to the control of something else. And while that idea may be disquieting, and while parasites' habits may be very grisly, I think that ability to surprise us makes them as wonderful and as charismatic as any panda or butterfly or dolphin.At the end of ""On the Origin of Species,"" Charles Darwin writes about the grandeur of life, and of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, and I like to think he could easily have been talking about a tapeworm that makes shrimp sociable or a wasp that takes cockroaches for walks.But perhaps, that's just a parasite talking.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_yong_suicidal_wasps_zombie_roaches_and_other_tales_of_parasites
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"My job at Twitter is to ensure user trust, protect user rights and keep users safe, both from each other and, at times, from themselves. Let's talk about what scale looks like at Twitter. Back in January 2009, we saw more than two million new tweets each day on the platform. January 2014, more than 500 million. We were seeing two million tweets in less than six minutes. That's a 24,900-percent increase.Now, the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. There's no risk involved. My job is to root out and prevent activity that might. Sounds straightforward, right? You might even think it'd be easy, given that I just said the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. Why spend so much time searching for potential calamities in innocuous activities? Given the scale that Twitter is at, a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day. It's the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale. For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms. Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone. There's no threat involved. Maybe people are documenting travel landmarks like Australia's Heart Reef, or tweeting about a concert they're attending, or sharing pictures of cute baby animals. After you take out that 99.999 percent, that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. The sheer scale of what we're dealing with makes for a challenge.You know what else makes my role particularly challenging? People do weird things. (Laughter) And I have to figure out what they're doing, why, and whether or not there's risk involved, often without much in terms of context or background. I'm going to show you some examples that I've run into during my time at Twitter — these are all real examples — of situations that at first seemed cut and dried, but the truth of the matter was something altogether different. The details have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty. We'll start off easy.[""Yo bitch""]If you saw a Tweet that only said this, you might think to yourself, ""That looks like abuse."" After all, why would you want to receive the message, ""Yo, bitch."" Now, I try to stay relatively hip to the latest trends and memes, so I knew that ""yo, bitch"" was also often a common greeting between friends, as well as being a popular ""Breaking Bad"" reference. I will admit that I did not expect to encounter a fourth use case. It turns out it is also used on Twitter when people are role-playing as dogs. (Laughter) And in fact, in that case, it's not only not abusive, it's technically just an accurate greeting. (Laughter)So okay, determining whether or not something is abusive without context, definitely hard.Let's look at spam. Here's an example of an account engaged in classic spammer behavior, sending the exact same message to thousands of people. While this is a mockup I put together using my account, we see accounts doing this all the time. Seems pretty straightforward. We should just automatically suspend accounts engaging in this kind of behavior. Turns out there's some exceptions to that rule. Turns out that that message could also be a notification you signed up for that the International Space Station is passing overhead because you wanted to go outside and see if you could see it. You're not going to get that chance if we mistakenly suspend the account thinking it's spam.Okay. Let's make the stakes higher. Back to my account, again exhibiting classic behavior. This time it's sending the same message and link. This is often indicative of  something called phishing, somebody trying to steal another person's account information by directing them to another website. That's pretty clearly not a good thing. We want to, and do, suspend accounts engaging in that kind of behavior. So why are the stakes higher for this? Well, this could also be a bystander at a rally who managed to record a video of a police officer beating a non-violent protester who's trying to let the world know what's happening. We don't want to gamble on potentially silencing that crucial speech by classifying it as spam and suspending it. That means we evaluate hundreds of parameters when looking at account behaviors, and even then, we can still get it wrong and have to reevaluate.Now, given the sorts of challenges I'm up against, it's crucial that I not only predict but also design protections for the unexpected. And that's not just an issue for me, or for Twitter, it's an issue for you. It's an issue for anybody who's building or creating something that you think is going to be amazing and will let people do awesome things. So what do I do? I pause and I think, how could all of this go horribly wrong? I visualize catastrophe. And that's hard. There's a sort of inherent cognitive dissonance in doing that, like when you're writing your wedding vows at the same time as your prenuptial agreement. (Laughter) But you still have to do it, particularly if you're marrying  500 million tweets per day. What do I mean by ""visualize catastrophe?"" I try to think of how something as benign and innocuous as a picture of a cat could lead to death, and what to do to prevent that. Which happens to be my next example. This is my cat, Eli. We wanted to give users the ability to add photos to their tweets. A picture is worth a thousand words. You only get 140 characters. You add a photo to your tweet, look at how much more content you've got now. There's all sorts of great things you can do by adding a photo to a tweet. My job isn't to think of those. It's to think of what could go wrong.How could this picture lead to my death? Well, here's one possibility. There's more in that picture than just a cat. There's geodata. When you take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera, there's a lot of additional information saved along in that image. In fact, this image also contains the equivalent of this, more specifically, this. Sure, it's not likely that someone's going to try to track me down and do me harm based upon image data associated with a picture I took of my cat, but I start by assuming the worst will happen. That's why, when we launched photos on Twitter, we made the decision to strip that geodata out. (Applause) If I start by assuming the worst and work backwards, I can make sure that the protections we build work for both expected and unexpected use cases.Given that I spend my days and nights imagining the worst that could happen, it wouldn't be surprising if  my worldview was gloomy. (Laughter) It's not. The vast majority of interactions I see — and I see a lot, believe me — are positive, people reaching out to help or to connect or share information with each other. It's just that for those of us dealing with scale, for those of us tasked with keeping people safe, we have to assume the worst will happen, because for us, a one-in-a-million chance is pretty good odds.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/del_harvey_the_strangeness_of_scale_at_twitter
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"Looking deeply inside nature, through the magnifying glass of science, designers extract principles, processes and materials that are forming the very basis of design methodology. From synthetic constructs that resemble biological materials, to computational methods that emulate neural processes, nature is driving design. Design is also driving nature. In realms of genetics, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, designers are growing novel technologies, not foreseen or anticipated by nature.Bionics explores the interplay between biology and design. As you can see, my legs are bionic. Today, I will tell human stories of bionic integration; how electromechanics attached to the body, and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential.Bionics has defined my physicality. In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite, incurred during a mountain-climbing accident. At that time, I didn't view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be ""broken."" Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms, to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately, the disability of others. I began by developing specialized limbs that allowed me to return to the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. I quickly realized that the artificial part of my body is malleable; able to take on any form, any function — a blank slate for which to create, perhaps, structures that could extend beyond biological capability. I made my height adjustable. I could be as short as five feet or as tall as I'd like.(Laughter)So when I was feeling bad about myself, insecure, I would jack my height up.(Laughter)But when I was feeling confident and suave, I would knock my height down a notch, just to give the competition a chance.(Laughter)(Applause)Narrow-edged feet allowed me to climb steep rock fissures, where the human foot cannot penetrate, and spiked feet enabled me to climb vertical ice walls, without ever experiencing muscle leg fatigue. Through technological innovation, I returned to my sport, stronger and better. Technology had eliminated my disability, and allowed me a new climbing prowess. As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see. A world in which the paralyzed could walk, via body exoskeletons.Sadly, because of deficiencies in technology, disability is rampant in the world. This gentleman is missing three limbs. As a testimony to current technology, he is out of the wheelchair, but we need to do a better job in bionics, to allow, one day, full rehabilitation for a person with this level of injury. At the MIT Media Lab, we've established the Center for Extreme Bionics. The mission of the center is to put forth fundamental science and technological capability that will allow the biomechatronic and regenerative repair of humans, across a broad range of brain and body disabilities.Today, I'm going to tell you how my legs function, how they work, as a case in point for this center. Now, I made sure to shave my legs last night, because I knew I'd be showing them off.(Laughter)Bionics entails the engineering of extreme interfaces. There's three extreme interfaces in my bionic limbs: mechanical, how my limbs are attached to my biological body; dynamic, how they move like flesh and bone; and electrical, how they communicate with my nervous system.I'll begin with mechanical interface. In the area of design, we still do not understand how to attach devices to the body mechanically. It's extraordinary to me that in this day and age, one of the most mature, oldest technologies in the human timeline, the shoe, still gives us blisters. How can this be? We have no idea how to attach things to our bodies. This is the beautifully lyrical design work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, showing spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model. Imagine a future where clothing is stiff and soft where you need it, when you need it, for optimal support and flexibility, without ever causing discomfort.My bionic limbs are attached to my biological body via synthetic skins with stiffness variations, that mirror my underlying tissue biomechanics. To achieve that mirroring, we first developed a mathematical model of my biological limb. To that end, we used imaging tools such as MRI, to look inside my body, to figure out the geometries and locations of various tissues. We also took robotic tools — here's a 14-actuator circle that goes around the biological limb. The actuators come in, find the surface of the limb, measure its unloaded shape, and then they push on the tissues to measure tissue compliances at each anatomical point.We combine these imaging and robotic data to build a mathematical description of my biological limb, shown on the left. You see a bunch of points, or nodes? At each node, there's a color that represents tissue compliance. We then do a mathematical transformation to the design of the synthetic skin, shown on the right. And we've discovered optimality is: where the body is stiff, the synthetic skin should be soft, where the body is soft, the synthetic skin is stiff, and this mirroring occurs across all tissue compliances. With this framework, we've produced bionic limbs that are the most comfortable limbs I've ever worn. Clearly, in the future, our clothing, our shoes, our braces, our prostheses, will no longer be designed and manufactured using artisan strategies, but rather, data-driven quantitative frameworks. In that future, our shoes will no longer give us blisters.We're also embedding sensing and smart materials into the synthetic skins. This is a material developed by SRI International, California. Under electrostatic effect, it changes stiffness. So under zero voltage, the material is compliant, it's floppy like paper. Then the button's pushed, a voltage is applied, and it becomes stiff as a board.(Tapping sounds)We embed this material into the synthetic skin that attaches my bionic limb to my biological body. When I walk here, it's no voltage. My interface is soft and compliant. The button's pushed, voltage is applied, and it stiffens, offering me a greater maneuverability over the bionic limb.We're also building exoskeletons. This exoskeleton becomes stiff and soft in just the right areas of the running cycle, to protect the biological joints from high impacts and degradation. In the future, we'll all be wearing exoskeletons in common activities, such as running.Next, dynamic interface. How do my bionic limbs move like flesh and bone? At my MIT lab, we study how humans with normal physiologies stand, walk and run. What are the muscles doing, and how are they controlled by the spinal cord? This basic science motivates what we build. We're building bionic ankles, knees and hips. We're building body parts from the ground up. The bionic limbs that I'm wearing are called BiOMs. They've been fitted to nearly 1,000 patients, 400 of which have been wounded U.S. soldiers.How does it work?At heel strike, under computer control, the system controls stiffness, to attenuate the shock of the limb hitting the ground. Then at mid-stance, the bionic limb outputs high torques and powers to lift the person into the walking stride, comparable to how muscles work in the calf region. This bionic propulsion is very important clinically to patients. So on the left, you see the bionic device worn by a lady, on the right, a passive device worn by the same lady, that fails to emulate normal muscle function, enabling her to do something everyone should be able to do: go up and down their steps at home. Bionics also allows for extraordinary athletic feats. Here's a gentleman running up a rocky pathway. This is Steve Martin — not the comedian — who lost his legs in a bomb blast in Afghanistan.We're also building exoskeletal structures using these same principles, that wrap around the biological limb. This gentleman does not have any leg condition, any disability. He has a normal physiology, so these exoskeletons are applying muscle-like torques and powers, so that his own muscles need not apply those torques and powers. This is the first exoskeleton in history that actually augments human walking. It significantly reduces metabolic cost. It's so profound in its augmentation, that when a normal, healthy person wears the device for 40 minutes and then takes it off, their own biological legs feel ridiculously heavy and awkward. We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient.Moving on to electrical interface: How do my bionic limbs communicate with my nervous system? Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. That's communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks those movement desires. This diagram shows fundamentally how the bionic limb is controlled. So we model the missing biological limb, and we've discovered what reflexes occurred, how the reflexes of the spinal cord are controlling the muscles. And that capability is embedded in the chips of the bionic limb. What we've done, then, is we modulate the sensitivity of the reflex, the modeled spinal reflex, with the neural signal, so when I relax my muscles in my residual limb, I get very little torque and power, but the more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get, and I can even run. And that was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command. Feels great.(Applause)We want to go a step further. We want to actually close the loop between the human and the bionic external limb. We're doing experiments where we're growing nerves, transected nerves, through channels, or micro-channel arrays. On the other side of the channel, the nerve then attaches to cells, skin cells and muscle cells. In the motor channels, we can sense how the person wishes to move. That can be sent out wirelessly to the bionic limb, then [sensory information] on the bionic limb can be converted to stimulations in adjacent channels, sensory channels. So when this is fully developed and for human use, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone.This video shows Lisa Mallette, shortly after being fitted with two bionic limbs. Indeed, bionics is making a profound difference in people's lives.(Video) Lisa Mallette: Oh my God. LM: Oh my God, I can't believe it!(Video) (Laughter)LM: It's just like I've got a real leg!Woman: Now, don't start running.Man: Now turn around, and do the same thing walking up, but get on your heel to toe, like you would normally just walk on level ground. Try to walk right up the hill.LM: Oh my God.Man: Is it pushing you up?LM: Yes! I'm not even — I can't even describe it.Man: It's pushing you right up.Hugh Herr: Next week, I'm visiting the Center —Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.Next week I'm visiting the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and I'm going to try to convince CMS to grant appropriate code language and pricing, so this technology can be made available to the patients that need it.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)It's not well appreciated, but over half of the world's population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition, and because of poor technology, too often, conditions result in disability and a poorer quality of life. Basic levels of physiological function should be a part of our human rights. Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose — the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one, in the case of seeing-impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. As a society, we can achieve these human rights, if we accept the proposition that humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability.I'd like to finish up with one more story, a beautiful story. The story of Adrianne Haslet-Davis. Adrianne lost her left leg in the Boston terrorist attack. I met Adrianne when this photo was taken, at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Adrianne is a dancer, a ballroom dancer.Adrianne breathes and lives dance. It is her expression. It is her art form. Naturally, when she lost her limb in the Boston terrorist attack, she wanted to return to the dance floor.After meeting her and driving home in my car, I thought, I'm an MIT professor. I have resources. Let's build her a bionic limb, to enable her to go back to her life of dance. I brought in MIT scientists with expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance. We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how they move, what forces they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data, and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics.It was 3.5 seconds between the bomb blasts in the Boston terrorist attack. In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor. In 200 days, we put her back. We will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence.(Applause)Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce Adrianne Haslet-Davis, her first performance since the attack. She's dancing with Christian Lightner.(Applause)(Music: ""Ring My Bell"" performed by Enrique Iglesias)(Applause)Ladies and gentlemen, members of the research team: Elliott Rouse and Nathan Villagaray-Carski.Elliott and Nathan.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance
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"The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that? I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all. So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived. But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies. Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable.In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. I think, in mystery, this is called the reveal. Here is mine.I was assigned boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia. I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. And my mom asked me, ""How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?"" I said, ""Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl."" I knew then how to self-identify.Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. Many are not so fortunate.There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender. There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess. So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be. So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L. She is a transgender beauty pageant manager. That night she asked me, ""How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?"" She convinced me that if I joined that she would take care of the registration fee and the garments, and that night, I won best in swimsuit and best in long gown and placed second runner up among 40-plus candidates. That moment changed my life. All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants. Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it.So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains — it rains a lot in the Philippines — the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house. I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines. But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community.In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States. I resisted it. I told my mom, ""Mom, I'm having fun. I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant queen."" But then two weeks later she called me, she said, ""Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker?"" That was all I needed to hear. My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name. She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker. So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F. That was a powerful moment. For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified. All of a sudden, my fears were minimized. I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model.Many are not so fortunate. I think of this woman named Islan Nettles. She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life. For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live. Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population. Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice. This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Today, this very moment, is my real coming out. I could no longer live my truth for and by myself. I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror. I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil.My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. Will you?Thank you very much.(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)Kathryn Schulz: Geena, one quick question for you. I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them?Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. The support system, with my mom especially, and my family, that in itself is just so powerful. I remember every time I would coach young trans women, I would mentor them, and sometimes when they would call me and tell me that their parents can't accept it, I would pick up that phone call and tell my mom, ""Mom, can you call this woman?"" And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right? I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues. The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. There should be an understanding. There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies.KS: Thank you. That was so lovely. GR: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/geena_rocero_why_i_must_come_out
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"Daffodil Hudson: Hello? Yeah, this is she. What? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I accept. What are the dates again? Pen. Pen. Pen. March 17 through 21. Okay, all right, great. Thanks.Lab Partner: Who was that?DH: It was TED.LP: Who's TED?DH: I've got to prepare.[""Give Your Talk: A Musical""] (Music)[""My Talk""]♪ Procrastination. ♪ What do you think?(Doorbell)Can I help you?(Music)Speaker Coach 1: ♪ Let's prepare for main stage. ♪ ♪ It's your time to shine. ♪ ♪ If you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed. ♪Speaker Coach 2: ♪ Your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we're through, ♪ ♪ speaker, we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪Speaker Coach 3: ♪ We know about climate change, ♪ ♪ but what can you say that's new? ♪♪ SC 1: Once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view. ♪SC 2: ♪ Don't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we won't post your talk online. ♪All: ♪ Somehow we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪(Music)SC 1: Ready to practice one more time?DH: Right now?Stagehand: Break a leg.DH: ♪ I'll never remember all this. ♪ ♪ Will the clicker work when I press it? ♪ ♪ Why must Al Gore go right before me? ♪ ♪ Oh man, I'm scared to death. ♪ ♪ I hope I don't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now I really wish I wasn't wearing green. ♪All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪SC 1: ♪ You must be be sweet like Brené Brown. ♪All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪SC 2: ♪ You must be funny like Ken Robinson. ♪All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪SC 3: ♪ You must be cool like Reggie Watts ♪All: ♪ and bring out a prop like Jill Bolte Taylor. ♪DH: ♪ My time is running over. The clock now says nil. ♪ ♪ I'm saying my words faster. Understand me still. ♪ ♪ I'm too nervous to give this TED Talk. ♪All: ♪ Don't give up. Rehearse. You're good. ♪ ♪ We'll edit out the mistakes that you make. ♪ ♪ Give your talk. ♪DH: ♪ I will be big like Amy Cuddy. ♪All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪DH: ♪ I will inspire like Liz Gilbert. ♪All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪DH: ♪ I will engage like Hans Rosling ♪ ♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like Bill Gates. ♪SC 2: ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪(Applause)[""Brought to you by TED staff and friends""](Music)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daffodil_hudson_is_this_the_cure_for_stage_fright
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"If you look deep into the night sky, you see stars, and if you look further, you see more stars, and further, galaxies, and  further, more galaxies. But if you keep looking further and further, eventually you see nothing for a long while, and then finally you see a faint, fading afterglow, and it's the afterglow of the Big Bang.Now, the Big Bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night sky was condensed into an incredibly small, incredibly hot, incredibly roiling mass, and from it sprung everything we see.Now, we've mapped that afterglow with great precision, and when I say we, I mean people who aren't me. We've mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision, and one of the shocks about it is that it's almost completely uniform. Fourteen billion light years that way and 14 billion light years that way, it's the same temperature. Now it's been 14 billion years since that Big Bang, and so it's got faint and cold. It's now 2.7 degrees. But it's not exactly 2.7 degrees. It's only 2.7 degrees to about 10 parts in a million. Over here, it's a little hotter, and over there, it's a little cooler, and that's incredibly important to everyone in this room, because where it was a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there was a little more stuff, we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters and all the structure you see in the cosmos. And those small, little, inhomogeneities, 20 parts in a million, those were formed by quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire cosmos.That is spectacular, and that's not what they found on Monday; what they found on Monday is cooler. So here's what they found on Monday: Imagine you take a bell, and you whack the bell with a hammer. What happens? It rings. But if you wait, that ringing fades and fades and fades until you don't notice it anymore. Now, that early universe was incredibly dense, like a metal, way denser, and if you hit it, it would ring, but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself, and the hammer would be quantum mechanics. What they found on Monday was evidence of the ringing of the space-time of the early universe, what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental era, and here's how they found it. Those waves have long since faded. If you go for a walk, you don't wiggle. Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes. But early on, when the universe was making that last afterglow, the gravitational waves put little twists in the structure of the light that we see. So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper — in fact, these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest, clearest, cleanest air they possibly could find looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow and looking for the faint twists which are the symbol, the signal, of gravitational waves, the ringing of the early universe. And on Monday, they announced that they had found it.And the thing that's so spectacular about that to me is not just the ringing, though that is awesome. The thing that's totally amazing, the reason I'm on this stage, is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe. It tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble — and this is the idea of inflation— one large bubble surrounded by something else. This isn't conclusive evidence for inflation, but anything that isn't inflation that explains this will look the same. This is a theory, an idea, that has been around for a while, and we never thought we we'd really see it. For good reasons, we thought we'd never see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence.But the really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger, roiling pot of universal stuff. We're never going to see the stuff outside, but by going to the South Pole and spending three years looking at the detailed structure of the night sky, we can figure out that we're probably in a universe that looks kind of like that. And that amazes me.Thanks a lot.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_adams_the_discovery_that_could_rewrite_physics
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"Chris Anderson: So, this is an interview with a difference. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, what I did was, I asked Bill and Melinda to dig out from their archive some images that would help explain some of what they've done, and do a few things that way.So, we're going to start here. Melinda, when and where was this, and who is that handsome man next to you?Melinda Gates: With those big glasses, huh? This is in Africa, our very first trip, the first time either of us had ever been to Africa, in the fall of 1993. We were already engaged to be married. We married a few months later, and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna. It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time off from work. But what really touched us, actually, were the people, and the extreme poverty. We started asking ourselves questions. Does it have to be like this? And at the end of the trip, we went out to Zanzibar, and took some time to walk on the beach, which is something we had done a lot while we were dating. And we'd already been talking about during that time that the wealth that had come from Microsoft would be given back to society, but it was really on that beach walk that we started to talk about, well, what might we do and how might we go about it?CA: So, given that this vacation led to the creation of the world's biggest private foundation, it's pretty expensive as vacations go. (Laughter)MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it.CA: Which of you was the key instigator here, or was it symmetrical? Bill Gates: Well, I think we were excited that there'd be a phase of our life where we'd get to work together and figure out how to give this money back. At this stage, we were talking about the poorest, and could you have a big impact on them? Were there things that weren't being done? There was a lot we didn't know. Our naïveté is pretty incredible, when we look back on it. But we had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase, the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy.MG: Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60, so he hasn't quite hit 60 yet, so some things change along the way.CA: So it started there, but it got accelerated. So that was '93, and it was '97, really, before the foundation itself started.MA: Yeah, in '97, we read an article about diarrheal diseases killing so many kids around the world, and we kept saying to ourselves, ""Well that can't be. In the U.S., you just go down to the drug store."" And so we started gathering scientists and started learning about population, learning about vaccines, learning about what had worked and what had failed, and that's really when we got going, was in late 1998, 1999.CA: So, you've got a big pot of money and a world full of so many different issues. How on Earth do you decide what to focus on?BG: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes, whatever the biggest inequity was globally, and there we looked at children dying, children not having enough nutrition to ever develop, and countries that were really stuck, because with that level of death, and parents would have so many kids that they'd get huge population growth, and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn't be educated and lift themselves up. So that was our global thing, and then in the U.S., both of us have had amazing educations, and we saw that as the way that the U.S. could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system, and the more we learned, the more we realized we're not really fulfilling that promise. And so we picked those two things, and everything the foundation does is focused there.CA: So, I asked each of you to pick an image that you like that illustrates your work, and Melinda, this is what you picked. What's this about?MG: So I, one of the things I love to do when I travel is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women, whether it's Bangladesh, India, lots of countries in Africa, and I go in as a Western woman without a name. I don't tell them who I am. Pair of khakis. And I kept hearing from women, over and over and over, the more I traveled, ""I want to be able to use this shot."" I would be there to talk to them about childhood vaccines, and they would bring the conversation around to ""But what about the shot I get?"" which is an injection they were getting called Depo-Provera, which is a contraceptive. And I would come back and talk to global health experts, and they'd say, ""Oh no, contraceptives are stocked in in the developing world."" Well, you had to dig deeper into the reports, and this is what the team came to me with, which is, to have the number one thing that women tell you in Africa they want to use stocked out more than 200 days a year explains why women were saying to me, ""I walked 10 kilometers without my husband knowing it, and I got to the clinic, and there was nothing there."" And so condoms were stocked in in Africa because of all the AIDS work that the U.S. and others supported. But women will tell you over and over again, ""I can't negotiate a condom with my husband. I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS, and I need that tool because then I can space the births of my children, and I can feed them and have a chance of educating them.""CA: Melinda, you're Roman Catholic, and you've often been embroiled in controversy over this issue, and on the abortion question, on both sides, really. How do you navigate that?MG: Yeah, so I think that's a really important point, which is, we had backed away from contraceptives as a global community. We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to contraceptives, even the contraceptives we have here in the United States, and we weren't providing them because of the political controversy in our country, and to me that was just a crime, and I kept looking around trying to find the person that would get this back on the global stage, and I finally realized I just had to do it. And even though I'm Catholic, I believe in contraceptives just like most of the Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back. We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives, and so we got back to that global consensus, and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women. (Applause)CA: Bill, this is your graph. What's this about?BG: Well, my graph has numbers on it. (Laughter) I really like this graph. This is the number of children who die before the age of five every year. And what you find is really a phenomenal success story which is not widely known, that we are making incredible progress. We go from 20 million not long after I was born to now we're down to about six million. So this is a story largely of vaccines. Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year. That was eradicated, so that got down to zero. Measles was killing a couple million a year. That's down to a few hundred thousand. Anyway, this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue, and it's going to be possible, using the science of new vaccines, getting the vaccines out to kids. We can actually accelerate the progress. The last decade, that number has dropped faster than ever in history, and so I just love the fact that you can say, okay, if we can invent new vaccines, we can get them out there, use the very latest understanding of these things, and get the delivery right, that we can perform a miracle.CA: I mean, you do the math on this, and it works out, I think, literally to thousands of kids' lives saved every day compared to the prior year. It's not reported. An airliner with 200-plus deaths is a far, far bigger story than that. Does that drive you crazy?BG: Yeah, because it's a silent thing going on. It's a kid, one kid at a time. Ninety-eight percent of this has nothing to do with natural disasters, and yet, people's charity, when they see a natural disaster, are wonderful. It's incredible how people think, okay, that could be me, and the money flows. These causes have been a bit invisible. Now that the Millennium Development Goals and various things are getting out there, we are seeing some increased generosity, so the goal is to get this well below a million, which should be possible in our lifetime.CA: Maybe it needed someone who is turned on by numbers and graphs rather than just the big, sad face to get engaged. I mean, you've used it in your letter this year, you used basically this argument to say that aid, contrary to the current meme that aid is kind of worthless and broken, that actually it has been effective.BG: Yeah, well people can take, there is some aid that was well-meaning and didn't go well. There's some venture capital investments that were well-meaning and didn't go well. You shouldn't just say, okay, because of that, because we don't have a perfect record, this is a bad endeavor. You should look at, what was your goal? How are you trying to uplift nutrition and survival and literacy so these countries can take care of themselves, and say wow, this is going well, and be smarter. We can spend aid smarter. It is not all a panacea. We can do better than venture capital, I think, including big hits like this.CA: Traditional wisdom is that it's pretty hard for married couples to work together. How have you guys managed it? MG: Yeah, I've had a lot of women say to me, ""I really don't think I could work with my husband. That just wouldn't work out."" You know, we enjoy it, and we don't — this foundation has been a coming to for both of us in its continuous learning journey, and we don't travel together as much for the foundation, actually, as we used to when Bill was working at Microsoft. We have more trips where we're traveling separately, but I always know when I come home, Bill's going to be interested in what I learned, whether it's about women or girls or something new about the vaccine delivery chain, or this person that is a great leader. He's going to listen and be really interested. And he knows when he comes home, even if it's to talk about the speech he did or the data or what he's learned, I'm really interested, and I think we have a really collaborative relationship. But we don't every minute together, that's for sure. (Laughter)CA: But now you are, and we're very happy that you are. Melinda, early on, you were basically largely running the show. Six years ago, I guess, Bill came on full time, so moved from Microsoft and became full time. That must have been hard, adjusting to that. No?MG: Yeah. I think actually, for the foundation employees, there was way more angst for them than there was for me about Bill coming. I was actually really excited. I mean, Bill made this decision even obviously before it got announced in 2006, and it was really his decision, but again, it was a beach vacation where we were walking on the beach and he was starting to think of this idea. And for me, the excitement of Bill putting his brain and his heart against these huge global problems, these inequities, to me that was exciting. Yes, the foundation employees had angst about that. (Applause)CA: That's cool.MG: But that went away within three months, once he was there.BG: Including some of the employees.MG: That's what I said, the employees, it went away for them three months after you were there.BG: No, I'm kidding. MG: Oh, you mean, the employees didn't go away.BG: A few of them did, but — (Laughter)CA: So what do you guys argue about? Sunday, 11 o'clock, you're away from work, what comes up? What's the argument?BG: Because we built this thing together from the beginning, it's this great partnership. I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger, and now Melinda, and in even stronger, equal ways, is the partner, so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to, which groups are working well? She's got a lot of insight. She'll sit down with the employees a lot. We'll take the different trips she described. So there's a lot of collaboration. I can't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another?CA: How about you, Melinda,  though? Can you? (Laughter) You never know.MG: Well, here's the thing. We come at things from different angles, and I actually think that's really good. So Bill can look at the big data and say, ""I want to act based on these global statistics."" For me, I come at it from intuition. I meet with lots of people on the ground and Bill's taught me to take that and read up to the global data and see if they match, and I think what I've taught him is to take that data and meet with people on the ground to understand, can you actually deliver that vaccine? Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops in her child's mouth? Because the delivery piece is every bit as important as the science. So I think it's been more a coming to over time towards each other's point of view, and quite frankly, the work is better because of it.CA: So, in vaccines and polio and so forth, you've had some amazing successes. What about failure, though? Can you talk about a failure and maybe what you've learned from it?BG: Yeah. Fortunately, we can afford a few failures, because we've certainly had them. We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work that you know you're going to have different failures. Like, we put out, one that got a lot of publicity was asking for a better condom. Well, we got hundreds of ideas. Maybe a few of those will work out. We were very naïve, certainly I was, about a drug for a disease in India, visceral leishmaniasis, that I thought, once I got this drug, we can just go wipe out the disease. Well, turns out it took an injection every day for 10 days. It took three more years to get it than we expected, and then there was no way it was going to get out there. Fortunately, we found out that if you go kill the sand flies, you probably can have success there, but we spent five years, you could say wasted five years, and about 60 million, on a path that turned out to have very modest benefit when we got there.CA: You're spending, like, a billion dollars a year in education, I think, something like that. Is anything, the story of what's gone right there is quite a long and complex one. Are there any failures that you can talk about?MG: Well, I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer, and small schools definitely help. They bring down the dropout rate. They have less violence and crime in those schools. But the thing that we learned from that work, and what turned out to be the fundamental key, is a great teacher in front of the classroom. If you don't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom, I don't care how big or small the building is, you're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college. (Applause)CA: So Melinda, this is you and your eldest daughter, Jenn. And just taken about three weeks ago, I think, three or four weeks ago. Where was this?MG: So we went to Tanzania. Jenn's been to Tanzania. All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit, actually. And we did something very different, which is, we decided to go spend two nights and three days with a family. Anna and Sanare are the parents. They invited us to come and stay in their boma. Actually, the goats had been there, I think, living in that particular little hut on their little compound before we got there. And we stayed with their family, and we really, really learned what life is like in rural Tanzania. And the difference between just going and visiting for half a day or three quarters of a day versus staying overnight was profound, and so let me just give you one explanation of that. They had six children, and as I talked to Anna in the kitchen, we cooked for about five hours in the cooking hut that day, and as I talked to her, she had absolutely planned and spaced with her husband the births of their children. It was a very loving relationship. This was a Maasai warrior and his wife, but they had decided to get married, they clearly had respect and love in the relationship. Their children, their six children, the two in the middle were twins, 13, a boy, and a girl named Grace. And when we'd go out to chop wood and do all the things that Grace and her mother would do, Grace was not a child, she was an adolescent, but she wasn't an adult. She was very, very shy. So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jenn. We kept trying to engage her, but she was shy. And at night, though, when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania, and there was no moon that night, the first night, and no stars, and Jenn came out of our hut with her REI little headlamp on, Grace went immediately, and got the translator, came straight up to my Jenn and said, ""When you go home, can I have your headlamp so I can study at night?""CA: Oh, wow.MG: And her dad had told me how afraid he was that unlike the son, who had passed his secondary exams, because of her chores, she'd not done so well and wasn't in the government school yet. He said, ""I don't know how I'm going to pay for her education. I can't pay for private school, and she may end up on this farm like my wife."" So they know the difference that an education can make in a huge, profound way.CA: I mean, this is another pic of your other two kids, Rory and Phoebe, along with Paul Farmer. Bringing up three children when you're the world's richest family seems like a social experiment without much prior art. How have you managed it? What's been your approach?BG: Well, I'd say overall the kids get a great education, but you've got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they're going to go and do, and our philosophy has been to be very clear with them — most of the money's going to the foundation — and help them find something they're excited about. We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing. And so far, they're fairly diligent, excited to pick their own direction.CA: You've obviously guarded their  privacy carefully for obvious reasons. I'm curious why you've given me permission to show this picture now here at TED. MG: Well, it's interesting. As they get older, they so know that our family belief is about responsibility, that we are in an unbelievable situation just to live in the United States and have a great education, and we have a responsibility to give back to the world. And so as they get older and we are teaching them — they have been to so many countries around the world — they're saying, we do want people to know that we believe in what you're doing, Mom and Dad, and it is okay to show us more. So we have their permission to show this picture, and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it eventually in some of his work. But they really care deeply about the mission of the foundation, too.CA: You've easily got enough money despite your vast contributions to the foundation to make them all billionaires. Is that your plan for them?BG: Nope. No. They won't have anything like that. They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important. We read an article long, actually, before we got married, where Warren Buffett talked about that, and we're quite convinced that it wasn't a favor either to society or to the kids.CA: Well, speaking of Warren Buffett, something really amazing happened in 2006, when somehow your only real rival for richest person in America suddenly turned around and agreed to give 80 percent of his fortune to your foundation. How on Earth did that happen? I guess there's a long version and a short version of that. We've got time for the short version.BG: All right. Well, Warren was a close friend, and he was going to have his wife Suzie give it all away. Tragically, she passed away before he did, and he's big on delegation, and — (Laughter) — he said —CA: Tweet that.BG: If he's got somebody who is doing something well, and is willing to do it at no charge, maybe that's okay. But we were stunned. MG: Totally stunned. BG: We had never expected it, and it has been unbelievable. It's allowed us to increase our ambition in what the foundation can do quite dramatically. Half the resources we have come from Warren's mind-blowing generosity.CA: And I think you've pledged that by the time you're done, more than, or 95 percent of your wealth, will be given to the foundation.BG: Yes.CA: And since this relationship, it's amazing— (Applause) And recently, you and Warren have been going around trying to persuade other billionaires and successful people to pledge to give, what, more than half of their assets for philanthropy. How is that going? BG: Well, we've got about 120 people who have now taken this giving pledge. The thing that's great is that we get together yearly and talk about, okay, do you hire staff, what do you give to them? We're not trying to homogenize it. I mean, the beauty of philanthropy is this mind-blowing diversity. People give to some things. We look and go, ""Wow."" But that's great. That's the role of philanthropy is to pick different approaches, including even in one space, like education. We need more experimentation. But it's been wonderful, meeting those people, sharing their journey to philanthropy, how they involve their kids, where they're doing it differently, and it's been way more successful than we expected. Now it looks like it'll just keep growing in size in the years ahead.MG: And having people see that other people are making change with philanthropy, I mean, these are people who have created their own businesses, put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas. If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy, they can change the world. And they start to see others doing it, and saying, ""Wow, I want to do that with my own money."" To me, that's the piece that's incredible.CA: It seems to me, it's actually really hard for some people to figure out even how to remotely spend that much money on something else. There are probably some billionaires in the room and certainly some successful people. I'm curious, can you make the pitch? What's the pitch?BG: Well, it's the most fulfilling thing we've ever done, and you can't take it with you, and if it's not good for your kids, let's get together and brainstorm about what we can be done. The world is a far better place because of the philanthropists of the past, and the U.S. tradition here, which is the strongest, is the envy of the world. And part of the reason I'm so optimistic is because I do think philanthropy is going to grow and take some of these things government's not just good at working on and discovering and shine some light in the right direction.CA: The world's got this terrible inequality, growing inequality problem that seems structural. It does seem to me that if more of your peers took the approach that you two have made, it would make a dent both in that problem and certainly in the perception of that problem. Is that a fair comment?BG: Oh yeah. If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it's good. It tries to balance out, and that's just.MG: But you change systems. In the U.S., we're trying to change the education system so it's just for everybody and it works for all students. That, to me, really changes the inequality balance.BG: That's the most important. (Applause)CA: Well, I really think that most people here and many millions around the world are just in awe of the trajectory your lives have taken and the spectacular degree to which you have shaped the future. Thank you so much for coming to TED and for sharing with us and for all you do.BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you. (Applause)BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you very much. BG: All right, good job. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_and_melinda_gates_why_giving_away_our_wealth_has_been_the_most_satisfying_thing_we_ve_done
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"If you remember that first decade of the web, it was really a static place. You could go online, you could look at pages, and they were put up either by organizations who had teams to do it or by individuals who were really tech-savvy for the time. And with the rise of social media and social networks in the early 2000s, the web was completely changed to a place where now the vast majority of content we interact with is put up by average users, either in YouTube videos or blog posts or product reviews or social media postings. And it's also become a much more interactive place, where people are interacting with others, they're commenting, they're sharing, they're not just reading.So Facebook is not the only place you can do this, but it's the biggest, and it serves to illustrate the numbers. Facebook has 1.2 billion users per month. So half the Earth's Internet population is using Facebook. They are a site, along with others, that has allowed people to create an online persona with very little technical skill, and people responded by putting huge amounts of personal data online. So the result is that we have behavioral, preference, demographic data for hundreds of millions of people, which is unprecedented in history. And as a computer scientist,  what this means is that I've been able to build models that can predict all sorts of hidden attributes for all of you that you don't even know you're sharing information about. As scientists, we use that to help the way people interact online, but there's less altruistic applications, and there's a problem in that users don't really understand these techniques and how they work, and even if they did, they don't have a lot of control over it. So what I want to talk to you about today is some of these things that we're able to do, and then give us some ideas of how we might go forward to move some control back into the hands of users.So this is Target, the company. I didn't just put that logo on this poor, pregnant woman's belly. You may have seen this anecdote that was printed in Forbes magazine where Target sent a flyer to this 15-year-old girl with advertisements and coupons for baby bottles and diapers and cribs two weeks before she told her parents that she was pregnant. Yeah, the dad was really upset. He said, ""How did Target figure out that this high school girl was pregnant before she told her parents?"" It turns out that they have the purchase history for hundreds of thousands of customers and they compute what they  call a pregnancy score, which is not just whether or  not a woman's pregnant, but what her due date is. And they compute that not by looking at the obvious things, like, she's buying a crib or baby clothes, but things like, she bought more vitamins than she normally had, or she bought a handbag that's big enough to hold diapers. And by themselves, those purchases don't seem like they might reveal a lot, but it's a pattern of behavior that, when you take it in the context  of thousands of other people, starts to actually reveal some insights. So that's the kind of thing that we do when we're predicting stuff about you on social media. We're looking for little patterns of behavior that, when you detect them among millions of people, lets us find out all kinds of things.So in my lab and with colleagues, we've developed mechanisms where we can quite accurately predict things like your political preference, your personality score, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, intelligence, along with things like how much you trust the people you know and how strong those relationships are. We can do all of this really well. And again, it doesn't come from what you might think of as obvious information.So my favorite example is from this study that was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies. If you Google this, you'll find it. It's four pages, easy to read. And they looked at just people's Facebook likes, so just the things you like on Facebook, and used that to predict all these attributes, along with some other ones. And in their paper they listed the five likes that were most indicative of high intelligence. And among those was liking a page for curly fries. (Laughter) Curly fries are delicious, but liking them does not necessarily mean that you're smarter than the average person. So how is it that one of the strongest indicators of your intelligence is liking this page when the content is totally irrelevant to the attribute that's being predicted? And it turns out that we have to look at a whole bunch of underlying theories to see why we're able to do this. One of them is a sociological theory called homophily, which basically says people are friends with people like them. So if you're smart, you tend to be friends with smart people, and if you're young, you tend to be friends with young people, and this is well established for hundreds of years. We also know a lot about how information spreads through networks. It turns out things like viral videos or Facebook likes or other information spreads in exactly the same way that diseases spread through social networks. So this is something we've studied for a long time. We have good models of it. And so you can put those things together and start seeing why things like this happen. So if I were to give you a hypothesis, it would be that a smart guy started this page, or maybe one of the first people who liked it would have scored high on that test. And they liked it, and their friends saw it, and by homophily, we know that he probably had smart friends, and so it spread to them,  and some of them liked it, and they had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and so it propagated through the network to a host of smart people, so that by the end, the action of liking the curly fries page is indicative of high intelligence, not because of the content, but because the actual action of liking reflects back the common attributes of other people who have done it.So this is pretty complicated stuff, right? It's a hard thing to sit down and explain to an average user, and even if you do, what can the average user do about it? How do you know that  you've liked something that indicates a trait for you that's totally irrelevant to the content of what you've liked? There's a lot of power that users don't have to control how this data is used. And I see that as a real  problem going forward.So I think there's a couple paths that we want to look at if we want to give users some control over how this data is used, because it's not always going to be used for their benefit. An example I often give is that, if I ever get bored being a professor, I'm going to go start a company that predicts all of these attributes and things like how well you work in teams and if you're a drug user, if you're an alcoholic. We know how to predict all that. And I'm going to sell reports to H.R. companies and big businesses that want to hire you. We totally can do that now. I could start that business tomorrow, and you would have absolutely no control over me using your data like that. That seems to me to be a problem.So one of the paths we can go down is the policy and law path. And in some respects, I think that that would be most effective, but the problem is we'd actually have to do it. Observing our political process in action makes me think it's highly unlikely that we're going to get a bunch of representatives to sit down, learn about this, and then enact sweeping changes to intellectual property law in the U.S. so users control their data.We could go the policy route, where social media companies say, you know what? You own your data. You have total control over how it's used. The problem is that the revenue models for most social media companies rely on sharing or exploiting  users' data in some way. It's sometimes said of Facebook that the users aren't the customer, they're the product. And so how do you get a company to cede control of their main asset back to the users? It's possible, but I don't think it's something that we're going to see change quickly.So I think the other path that we can go down that's going to be more effective is one of more science. It's doing science that allowed us to develop all these mechanisms for computing this personal data in the first place. And it's actually very similar research that we'd have to do if we want to develop mechanisms that can say to a user, ""Here's the risk of that action you just took."" By liking that Facebook page, or by sharing this piece of personal information, you've now improved my ability to predict whether or not you're using drugs or whether or not you get along well in the workplace. And that, I think, can affect whether or not people want to share something, keep it private, or just keep it offline altogether. We can also look at things like allowing people to encrypt data that they upload, so it's kind of invisible and worthless to sites like Facebook or third party services that access it, but that select users who the person who posted it want to see it have access to see it. This is all super exciting research from an intellectual perspective, and so scientists are going to be willing to do it. So that gives us an advantage over the law side.One of the problems that people bring up when I talk about this is, they say, you know, if people start keeping all this data private, all those methods that you've been developing to predict their traits are going to fail. And I say, absolutely, and for me, that's success, because as a scientist, my goal is not to infer information about users, it's to improve the way people interact online. And sometimes that involves inferring things about them, but if users don't want me to use that data, I think they should have the right to do that. I want users to be informed and consenting users of the tools that we develop.And so I think encouraging this kind of science and supporting researchers who want to cede some of that control back to users and away from the social media companies means that going forward, as these tools evolve and advance, means that we're going to have an educated and empowered user base, and I think all of us can agree that that's a pretty ideal way to go forward.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think
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"So a chip, a poet and a boy.It's just about 20 years ago, June 1994, when Intel announced that there was a flaw at the core of their Pentium chip. Deep in the code of the SRT algorithm to calculate intermediate quotients necessary for iterative floating points of divisions — I don't know what that means, but  it's what it says on Wikipedia — there was a flaw and an error that meant that there was a certain probability that the result of the calculation would be an error, and the probability was one out of every 360 billion calculations. So Intel said your average spreadsheet would be flawed once every 27,000 years. They didn't think it was significant, but there was an outrage in the community. The community, the techies, said, this flaw has to be addressed. They were not going to stand by quietly as Intel gave them these chips. So there was a revolution across the world. People marched to demand — okay, not really exactly like that — but they rose up and they demanded that Intel fix the flaw. And Intel set aside 475 million dollars to fund the replacement of millions of chips to fix the flaw. So billions of dollars in our society was spent to address a problem which would come once out of every 360 billion calculations.Number two, a poet. This is Martin Niemöller. You're familiar with his poetry. Around the height of the Nazi period, he started repeating the verse, ""First they came for the communists, and I did nothing, did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists. Then they came for the trade unions. Then they came for the Jews. And then they came for me. But there was no one left to speak for me."" Now, Niemöller is offering a certain kind of insight. This is an insight at the core of intelligence. We could call it cluefulness. It's a certain kind of test: Can you recognize an underlying threat and respond? Can you save yourself or save your kind? Turns out ants are pretty good at this. Cows, not so much. So can you see the pattern? Can you see a pattern and then recognize and do something about it? Number two. Number three, a boy. This is my friend Aaron Swartz. He's Tim's friend. He's friends of many of you in this audience, and seven years ago, Aaron came to me with a question. It was just before I was going to give my first TED Talk. I was so proud. I was telling him about my talk, ""Laws that choke creativity."" And Aaron looked at me and was a little impatient, and he said, ""So how are you ever going to solve the problems you're talking about? Copyright policy, Internet policy, how are you ever going to address those problems so long as there's this fundamental corruption in the way our government works?""So I was a little put off by this. He wasn't sharing in my celebration. And I said to him, ""You know, Aaron, it's not my field, not my field.""He said, ""You mean as an academic, it's not your field?""I said, ""Yeah, as an academic, it's not my field.""He said, ""What about as a citizen? As a citizen.""Now, this is the way Aaron was. He didn't tell. He asked questions. But his questions spoke as clearly as my four-year-old's hug. He was saying to me, ""You've got to get a clue. You have got to get a clue, because there is a flaw at the core of the operating system of this democracy, and it's not a flaw every one out of 360 billion times our democracy tries to make a decision. It is every time, every single important issue. We've got to end the bovinity of this political society. We've got to adopt, it turns out, the word is fourmi-formatic attitude — that's what the Internet tells me the word is — the ant's appreciative attitude that gets us to recognize this flaw, save our kind and save our demos.Now if you know Aaron Swartz, you know that we lost him just over a year ago. It was about six weeks before I gave my TED Talk, and I was so grateful to Chris that he asked me to give this TED Talk, not because I had the chance to talk to you, although that was great, but because it pulled me out of an extraordinary depression. I couldn't begin to describe the sadness. Because I had to focus. I had to focus on, what was I going to say to you? It saved me.But after the buzz, the excitement, the power that comes from this community, I began to yearn for a less sterile, less academic way to address these issues, the issues that I was talking about. We'd begun to focus on New Hampshire as a target for this political movement, because the primary in New Hampshire is so incredibly important. It was a group called the New Hampshire Rebellion that was beginning to talk about, how would we make this issue of this corruption central in 2016? But it was another soul that caught my imagination, a woman named Doris Haddock, aka Granny D. On January 1, 1999, 15 years ago, at the age of 88, Granny D started a walk. She started in Los Angeles and began to walk to Washington, D.C. with a single sign on her chest that said, ""campaign finance reform."" Eighteen months later, at the age of 90, she arrived in Washington with hundreds following her, including many congressmen who had gotten in a car and driven out about a mile outside of the city to walk in with her. (Laughter)Now, I don't have 13 months to walk across the country. I've got three kids who hate to walk, and a wife who, it turns out, still hates when I'm not there for mysterious reasons, so this was not an option, but the question I asked, could we remix Granny D a bit? What about a walk not of 3,200 miles but of 185 miles across New Hampshire in January?So on January 11, the anniversary of Aaron's death, we began a walk that ended on January 24th, the day that Granny D was born. A total of 200 people joined us across this walk, as we went from the very top to the very bottom of New Hampshire talking about this issue. And what was astonishing to me, something I completely did not expect to find, was the passion and anger that there was among everyone that we talked to about this issue. We had found in a poll that 96 percent of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. Now politicians and pundits tell you, there's nothing we can do about this issue, Americans don't care about it, but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there's nothing that can be done about this issue. And it's this gap between 96 and 91 that explains our politics of resignation. I mean, after all, at least 96 percent of us wish we could fly like Superman, but because at least 91 percent of us believe we can't, we don't leap off of tall buildings every time we have that urge. That's because we accept our limits, and so too with this reform. But when you give people the sense of hope, you begin to thaw that absolute sense of impossibility. As Harvey Milk said, if you give 'em hope, you give 'em a chance, a way to think about how this change is possible. Hope. And hope is the one thing that we, Aaron's friends, failed him with, because we let him lose that sense of hope. I loved that boy like I love my son. But we failed him. And I love my country, and I'm not going to fail that. I'm not going to fail that. That sense of hope, we're going to hold, and we're going to fight for, however impossible this battle looks.What's next? Well, we started with this march with 200 people, and next year, there will be 1,000 on different routes that march in the month of January and meet in Concord to celebrate this cause, and then in 2016, before the primary, there will be 10,000 who march across that state, meeting in Concord to celebrate this cause. And as we have marched, people around the country have begun to say, ""Can we do the same thing in our state?"" So we've started a platform called G.D. Walkers, that is, Granny D walkers, and Granny D walkers across the country will be marching for this reform. Number one. Number two, on this march, one of the founders of Thunderclap, David Cascino, was with us, and he said, ""Well what can we do?"" And so they developed a platform, which we are announcing today, that allows us to pull together voters who are committed to this idea of reform. Regardless of where you are, in New Hampshire or outside of New Hampshire, you can sign up and directly be informed where the candidates are on this issue so you can decide who to vote for as a function of which is going to make this possibility real. And then finally number three, the hardest. We're in the age of the Super PAC. Indeed yesterday, Merriam announced that Merriam-Webster will have Super PAC as a word. It is now an official word in the dictionary. So on May 1, aka May Day, we're going to try an experiment. We're going to try a launching of what we can think of as a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. And the basic way this works is this. For the last year, we have been working with analysts and political experts to calculate, how much would it cost to win enough votes in the United States Congress to make fundamental reform possible? What is that number? Half a billion? A billion? What is that number? And then whatever that number is, we are going to kickstart, sort of, because you can't use KickStarter for political work, but anyway, kickstart, sort of, first a bottom-up campaign where people will make small dollar commitments contingent on reaching very ambitious goals, and when those goals have been reached, we will turn to the large dollar contributors, to get them to contribute to make it possible for us to run the kind of Super PAC necessary to win this issue, to change the way money influences politics, so that on November 8, which I discovered yesterday is the day that Aaron would have been 30 years old, on November 8, we will celebrate 218 representatives in the House and 60 Senators in the United States Senate who have committed to this idea of fundamental reform.So last night, we heard about wishes. Here's my wish. May one. May the ideals of one boy unite one nation behind one critical idea that we are one people, we are the people who were promised a government, a government that was promised to be dependent upon the people alone, the people, who, as Madison told us, meant not the rich more than the poor. May one. And then may you, may you join this movement, not because you're a politician, not because you're an expert, not because this is your field, but because if you are, you are a citizen. Aaron asked me that. Now I've asked you.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_the_unstoppable_walk_to_political_reform
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"When people think about cities, they tend to think of certain things. They think of buildings and streets and skyscrapers, noisy cabs. But when I think about cities, I think about people. Cities are fundamentally about people, and where people go and where people meet are at the core of what makes a city work. So even more important than buildings in a city are the public spaces in between them. And today, some of the most transformative changes in cities are happening in these public spaces.So I believe that lively, enjoyable public spaces are the key to planning a great city. They are what makes it come alive. But what makes a public space work? What attracts people to successful public spaces, and what is it about unsuccessful places that keeps people away? I thought, if I could answer those questions, I could make a huge contribution to my city. But one of the more wonky things about me is that I am an animal behaviorist, and I use those skills not to study animal behavior but to study how people in cities use city public spaces.One of the first spaces that I studied was this little vest pocket park called Paley Park in midtown Manhattan. This little space became a small phenomenon, and because it had such a profound impact on New Yorkers, it made an enormous impression on me. I studied this park very early on in my career because it happened to have been built by my stepfather, so I knew that places like Paley Park didn't happen by accident. I saw firsthand that they required incredible dedication and enormous attention to detail. But what was it about this space that made it special and drew people to it? Well, I would sit in the park and watch very carefully, and first among other things were the comfortable, movable chairs. People would come in, find their own seat, move it a bit, actually, and then stay a while, and then interestingly, people themselves attracted other people, and ironically, I felt more peaceful if there were other people around. And it was green. This little park provided what New Yorkers crave: comfort and greenery. But my question was, why weren't there more places with greenery and places to sit in the middle of the city where you didn't feel alone, or like a trespasser? Unfortunately, that's not how cities were being designed.So here you see a familiar sight. This is how plazas have been designed for generations. They have that stylish, Spartan look that we often associate with modern architecture, but it's not surprising that people avoid spaces like this. They not only look desolate, they feel downright dangerous. I mean, where would you sit here? What would you do here? But architects love them. They are plinths for their creations. They might tolerate a sculpture or two, but that's about it. And for developers, they are ideal. There's nothing to water, nothing to maintain, and no undesirable people to worry about. But don't you think this is a waste? For me, becoming a city planner meant being able to truly change the city that I lived in and loved. I wanted to be able to create places that would give you the feeling that you got in Paley Park, and not allow developers to build bleak plazas like this. But over the many years, I have learned how hard it is to create successful, meaningful, enjoyable public spaces. As I learned from my stepfather, they certainly do not happen by accident, especially in a city like New York, where public space has to be fought for to begin with, and then for them to be successful, somebody has to think very hard about every detail.Now, open spaces in cities are opportunities. Yes, they are opportunities for commercial investment, but they are also opportunities for the common good of the city, and those two goals are often not aligned with one another, and therein lies the conflict.The first opportunity I had to fight for a great public open space was in the early 1980s, when I was leading a team of planners at a gigantic landfill called Battery Park City in lower Manhattan on the Hudson River. And this sandy wasteland had lain barren for 10 years, and we were told, unless we found a developer in six months, it would go bankrupt. So we came up with a radical, almost insane idea. Instead of building a park as a complement to future development, why don't we reverse that equation and build a small but very high-quality public open space first, and see if that made a difference. So we only could afford to build a two-block section of what would become a mile-long esplanade, so whatever we built had to be perfect. So just to make sure, I insisted that we build a mock-up in wood, at scale, of the railing and the sea wall. And when I sat down on that test bench with sand still swirling all around me, the railing hit exactly at eye level, blocking my view and ruining my experience at the water's edge.So you see, details really do make a difference. But design is not just how something looks, it's how your body feels on that seat in that space, and I believe that successful design always depends on that very individual experience. In this photo, everything looks very finished, but that granite edge, those lights, the back on that bench, the trees in planting, and the many different kinds of places to sit were all little battles that turned this project into a place that people wanted to be.Now, this proved very valuable 20 years later when Michael Bloomberg asked me to be his planning commissioner and put me in charge of shaping the entire city of New York. And he said to me on that very day, he said that New York was projected to grow from eight to nine million people. And he asked me, ""So where are you going to put one million additional New Yorkers?""Well, I didn't have any idea. Now, you know that New York does place a high value on attracting immigrants, so we were excited about the prospect of growth, but honestly, where were we going to grow in a city that was already built out to its edges and surrounded by water? How were we going to find housing for that many new New Yorkers? And if we couldn't spread out, which was probably a good thing, where could new housing go? And what about cars? Our city couldn't possibly handle any more cars.So what were we going to do? If we couldn't spread out, we had to go up. And if we had to go up, we had to go up in places where you wouldn't need to own a car. So that meant using one of our greatest assets: our transit system. But we had never before thought of how we could make the most of it. So here was the answer to our puzzle. If we were to channel and redirect all new development around transit, we could actually handle that population increase, we thought. And so here was the plan, what we really needed to do: We needed to redo our zoning — and zoning is the city planner's regulatory tool — and basically reshape the entire city, targeting where new development could go and prohibiting any development at all in our car-oriented, suburban-style neighborhoods. Well, this was an unbelievably ambitious idea, ambitious because communities had to approve those plans.So how was I going to get this done? By listening. So I began listening, in fact, thousands of hours of listening just to establish trust. You know, communities can tell whether or not you understand their neighborhoods. It's not something you can just fake. And so I began walking. I can't tell you how many blocks I walked, in sweltering summers, in freezing winters, year after year, just so I could get to understand the DNA of each neighborhood and know what each street felt like. I became an incredibly geeky zoning expert, finding ways that zoning could address communities' concerns. So little by little, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, we began to set height limits so that all new development would be predictable and near transit. Over the course of 12 years, we were able to rezone 124 neighborhoods, 40 percent of the city, 12,500 blocks, so that now, 90 percent of all new development of New York is within a 10-minute walk of a subway. In other words, nobody in those new buildings needs to own a car.Well, those rezonings were exhausting and enervating and important, but rezoning was never my mission. You can't see zoning and you can't feel zoning. My mission was always to create great public spaces. So in the areas where we zoned for significant development, I was determined to create places that would make a difference in people's lives. Here you see what was two miles of abandoned, degraded waterfront in the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, impossible to get to and impossible to use. Now the zoning here was massive, so I felt an obligation to create magnificent parks on these waterfronts, and I spent an incredible amount of time on every square inch of these plans. I wanted to make sure that there were tree-lined paths from the upland to the water, that there were trees and plantings everywhere, and, of course, lots and lots of places to sit. Honestly, I had no idea how it would turn out. I had to have faith. But I put everything that I had studied and learned into those plans.And then it opened, and I have to tell you, it was incredible. People came from all over the city to be in these parks. I know they changed the lives of the people who live there, but they also changed New Yorkers' whole image of their city. I often come down and watch people get on this little ferry that now runs between the boroughs, and I can't tell you why, but I'm completely moved by the fact that people are using it as if it had always been there.And here is a new park in lower Manhattan. Now, the water's edge in lower Manhattan was a complete mess before 9/11. Wall Street was essentially landlocked because you couldn't get anywhere near this edge. And after 9/11, the city had very little control. But I thought if we went to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and got money to reclaim this two miles of degraded waterfront that it would have an enormous effect on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. And it did. Lower Manhattan finally has a public waterfront on all three sides.I really love this park. You know, railings have to be higher now, so we put bar seating at the edge, and you can get so close to the water you're practically on it. And see how the railing widens and flattens out so you can lay down your lunch or your laptop. And I love when people come there and look up and they say, ""Wow, there's Brooklyn, and it's so close.""So what's the trick? How do you turn a park into a place that people want to be? Well, it's up to you, not as a city planner but as a human being. You don't tap into your design expertise. You tap into your humanity. I mean, would you want to go there? Would you want to stay there? Can you see into it and out of it? Are there other people there? Does it seem green and friendly? Can you find your very own seat?Well now, all over New York City, there are places where you can find your very own seat. Where there used to be parking spaces, there are now pop-up cafes. Where Broadway traffic used to run, there are now tables and chairs. Where 12 years ago, sidewalk cafes were not allowed, they are now everywhere. But claiming these spaces for public use was not simple, and it's even harder to keep them that way.So now I'm going to tell you a story about a very unusual park called the High Line. The High Line was an elevated railway. (Applause) The High Line was an elevated railway that ran through three neighborhoods on Manhattan's West Side, and when the train stopped running, it became a self-seeded landscape, a kind of a garden in the sky. And when I saw it the first time, honestly, when I went up on that old viaduct, I fell in love the way you fall in love with a person, honestly. And when I was appointed, saving the first two sections of the High Line from demolition became my first priority and my most important project. I knew if there was a day that I didn't worry about the High Line, it would come down. And the High Line, even though it is widely known now and phenomenally popular, it is the most contested public space in the city. You might see a beautiful park, but not everyone does. You know, it's true, commercial interests will always battle against public space. You might say, ""How wonderful it is that more than four million people come from all over the world to visit the High Line."" Well, a developer sees just one thing: customers. Hey, why not take out those plantings and have shops all along the High Line? Wouldn't that be terrific and won't it mean a lot more money for the city? Well no, it would not be terrific. It would be a mall, and not a park. (Applause) And you know what, it might mean more money for the city, but a city has to take the long view, the view for the common good. Most recently, the last section of the High Line, the third section of the High Line, the final section of the High Line, has been pitted against development interests, where some of the city's leading developers are building more than 17 million square feet at the Hudson Yards. And they came to me and proposed that they ""temporarily disassemble"" that third and final section. Perhaps the High Line didn't fit in with their image of a gleaming city of skyscrapers on a hill. Perhaps it was just in their way. But in any case, it took nine months of nonstop daily negotiation to finally get the signed agreement to prohibit its demolition, and that was only two years ago.So you see, no matter how popular and successful a public space may be, it can never be taken for granted. Public spaces always — this is it saved — public spaces always need vigilant champions, not only to claim them at the outset for public use, but to design them for the people that use them, then to maintain them to ensure that they are for everyone, that they are not violated, invaded, abandoned or ignored. If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there. Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city.I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party. People stay because they are having a great time.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work
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"Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life, which is be an educator, change lives, and spark magic. Right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible. Right now there's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards, who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately, while at the same time saying to herself over and over again, ""Don't smile till November,"" because that's what she was taught in her teacher education program. Right now there's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he's very, very sick and can't make it to school tomorrow. On the other hand, right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information, information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge. Right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention, a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before, but if they close their eyes tightly enough, they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling. Right now there's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says, ""Put them down."" Right now.So people will then say, ""Well, Chris, you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you're also describing these powerful educators. If you're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular, these guys will probably cancel each other out, and then we'll be okay.""The reality is, the folks I described as the master teachers, the master narrative builders, the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms. The folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience don't even know what teacher certification means. They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education. And that to me is sad. It's sad because the people who I described, they were very disinterested in the learning process, want to be effective teachers, but they have no models. I'm going to paraphrase Mark Twain. Mark Twain says that proper preparation, or teaching, is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good, it can turn awful practices into powerful ones, it can change men and transform them into angels.The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching, not in any college or university, but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage. Guess where those places are? Barber shops, rap concerts, and most importantly, in the black church. And I've been framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy. Who here has been to a black church? We got a couple of hands. You go to a black church, their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience, so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes, and then he takes a pause, and he says, ""Oh my gosh, they're not quite paying attention."" So he says, ""Can I get an amen?""Audience: Amen.Chris Emdin: So I can I get an amen? Audience: Amen.CE: And all of a sudden, everybody's reawoken. That preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention. He drops his voice at a very, very low volume when he wants people to key into him, and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers. So why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills, that magic that you need to engage an audience, to engage a student? So I make the argument that we reframe teacher education, that we could focus on content, and that's fine, and we could focus on theories, and that's fine, but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing.Now people oftentimes say, ""Well, magic is just magic."" There are teachers who, despite all their challenges, who have those skills, get into those schools and are  able to engage an audience, and the administrator walks by and says, ""Wow, he's so good, I wish all my teachers could be that good."" And when they try to describe what that is, they just say, ""He has that magic.""But I'm here to tell you that magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. Now, how do you teach it? You teach it by allowing people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening. If you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education, you've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood. You've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop, you've got to attend that black church, and you've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do. At our teacher education classes at my university, I've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts. They watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands. They study the way that he walks proudly across that stage. They listen to his metaphors and analogies, and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic. They learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch, you don't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more. And if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof! we could make dead classes come alive, we could reignite imaginations, and we can change education.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_emdin_teach_teachers_how_to_create_magic
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"What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, ""Mysteries of the Unseen World.""(Music)There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. We can do the same thing with ships at sea. We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora Borealis. It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life.At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places.We're giants, and we're unaware of things that are too small for us to see. The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. This is the egg of a butterfly. And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. Can you guess what this is? Shark skin. A caterpillar's mouth. The eye of a fruit fly. An eggshell. A flea. A snail's tongue. We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered.A spider also has great secrets, because spiders' silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA. And nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms.With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life.So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets and supernova explosions. People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. Knowing that there's so much around us we can't see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards.Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives.We'll just have to see.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_hidden_miracles_of_the_natural_world
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"I was born and raised in Sierra Leone, a small and very beautiful country in West Africa, a country rich both in physical resources and creative talent.However, Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long rebel war in the '90s when entire villages were burnt down. An estimated 8,000 men, women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time. As my family and I ran for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks, I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children would not go through the  same experiences we had. They would, in fact, be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for gaining power.As I watched people who I knew, loved ones, recover from this devastation, one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country would not use their prostheses. The reason, I would come to find out, was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well. The prosthetic socket is the part in which the amputee inserts their residual limb, and which connects to the prosthetic ankle. Even in the developed world, it takes a period of three weeks to often years for a patient to get a comfortable socket, if ever. Prosthetists still use conventional processes like molding and casting to create single-material prosthetic sockets. Such sockets often leave intolerable amounts of pressure on the limbs of the patient, leaving them with pressure sores and blisters. It does not matter how powerful your prosthetic ankle is. If your prosthetic socket is uncomfortable, you will not use your leg, and that is just simply unacceptable in our age.So one day, when I met professor Hugh Herr about two and a half years ago, and he asked me if I knew  how to solve this problem, I said, ""No, not yet, but I would love to figure it out."" And so, for my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, I designed custom prosthetic sockets quickly and cheaply that are more comfortable than conventional prostheses. I used magnetic resonance imaging to capture the actual shape of the patient's anatomy, then use finite element modeling to better predict the internal stresses and strains on the normal forces, and then create a prosthetic socket for manufacture. We use a 3D printer to create a multi-material prosthetic socket which relieves pressure where needed on the anatomy of the patient. In short, we're using data to make novel sockets quickly and cheaply. In a recent trial we just wrapped up at the Media Lab, one of our patients, a U.S. veteran who has been an amputee for about 20 years and worn dozens of legs, said of one of our printed parts, ""It's so soft, it's like walking on pillows, and it's effing sexy."" (Laughter)Disability in our age should not prevent anyone from living meaningful lives. My hope and desire is that the tools and processes we develop in our research group can be used to bring highly functional prostheses to those who need them. For me, a place to begin healing the souls of those affected by war and disease is by creating comfortable and affordable interfaces for their bodies. Whether it's in Sierra Leone or in Boston, I hope this not only restores but indeed transforms their sense of human potential.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_sengeh_the_sore_problem_of_prosthetic_limbs
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"Pat Mitchell: That day, January 8, 2011, began like all others. You were both doing the work that you love. You were meeting with constituents, which is something that you loved doing as a congresswoman, and Mark, you were happily preparing for your next space shuttle. And suddenly, everything  that you had planned or expected in your lives was irrevocably changed forever.Mark Kelly: Yeah, it's amazing, it's amazing how  everything can change for any of us in an instant. People don't realize that. I certainly didn't. Gabby Giffords: Yes. MK: And on that Saturday morning, I got this horrible phone call from Gabby's chief of staff. She didn't have much other information. She just said, ""Gabby was shot."" A few minutes later, I called her back and I actually thought for a second, well, maybe I just imagined  getting this phone call. I called her back, and  that's when she told me that Gabby had been shot in the head. And from that point on, I knew that our lives were  going to be a lot different.PM: And when you arrived at the hospital, what was the prognosis that they gave you about Gabby's condition  and what recovery, if any, you could expect?MK: Well, for a gunshot wound to the head and a traumatic brain injury, they typically can't tell you much. Every injury is different. It's not predictable like often a stroke might be predictable, which is another TBI kind of injury. So they didn't know how long Gabby would be in a coma, didn't know when that would change and what the prognosis would be.PM: Gabby, has your recovery been an effort to create  a new Gabby Giffords or reclaim the old Gabby Giffords?GG: The new one — better, stronger, tougher. (Applause)MK: That to say, when you look at the picture behind us, to come back from that kind of injury and come back strong  and stronger than ever is a really tough thing to do. I don't know anybody that's as tough as my  wonderful wife right here. (Applause)PM: And what were the first signs that recovery was not  only going to be possible but you were going to have some semblance of the life that you and Gabby had planned?MK: Well, the first thing, for me, was Gabby was still kind of almost unconscious, but she did something when she was in the ICU hospital bed that she used to do when we might be out to dinner at a restaurant, in that she pulled my ring off and she flipped it from one finger to the next, and at that point I knew that she was still in there. PM: And there were certain words, too. Didn't she surprise you with  words in the beginning?MK: Well, it was tough in the beginning. GG: What? What? Chicken. Chicken. Chicken.MK: Yeah, that was it. For the first month, that was the extent of Gabby's vocabulary. For some reason, she has aphasia, which is difficulty with communication. She latched on to the word ""chicken,"" which isn't the best but  certainly is not the worst. (Laughter) And we were actually worried it could have been a lot worse than that. PM: Gabby, what's been  the toughest challenge for you during this recovery?GG: Talking. Really hard. Really.MK: Yeah, with aphasia, Gabby knows what she wants to say, she just can't get it out. She understands everything, but the communication is just very difficult because when you look at the picture, the part of your brain where those communication centers are are on the left side of your head, which is where the bullet passed through.PM: So you have to do  a very dangerous thing: speak for your wife.MK: I do. It might be some of the most dangerous things I've ever done.PM: Gabby, are you optimistic about your continuing recovery — walking, talking, being able to move your arm and leg?GG: I'm optimistic. It will be a long, hard haul, but I'm optimistic.PM: That seems to be the number one  characteristic of Gabby Giffords, wouldn't you say? (Applause)MK: Gabby's always been really optimistic. She works incredibly hard every day.GG: On the treadmill,  walked on my treadmill, Spanish lessons, French horn.MK: It's only my wife who could be — and if you knew her before she was injured, you would kind of understand this — somebody who could be injured and have such a hard time communicating and meets with a speech therapist, and then about a month ago, she says, ""I want to learn Spanish again.""PM: Well, let's take a little closer look at the wife, and this was even before you met Gabby Giffords. And she's on a motor scooter there, but it's my understanding that's a very tame image of what Gabby Giffords was like growing up.MK: Yeah, Gabby, she  used to race motorcycles. So that's a scooter, but she had — well, she still has a BMW motorcycle.PM: Does she ride it? MK: Well, that's a challenge with not being able to move her right arm, but I think with something I know about, Velcro, we might be able to get her back on the bike, Velcro her right hand up onto the handlebar.PM: I have a feeling we might  see that picture next, Gabby. But you meet, you're already decided that you're going to dedicate  your life to service. You're going into the military and eventually to become an astronaut. So you meet. What attracts you to Gabby?MK: Well, when we met, oddly enough, it was the last time we were in Vancouver, about 10 years ago. We met in Vancouver, at the airport, on a trip  that we were both taking to China, that I would actually, from my background, I would call it a boondoggle. Gabby would — GG: Fact-finding mission.MK: She would call it an important fact-finding mission. She was a state senator at the time, and we met here, at the airport, before a trip to China.PM: Would you describe it  as a whirlwind romance?GG: No, no, no. (Laughter) A good friend.MK: Yeah, we were friends for a long time.GG: Yes. (Laughter)MK: And then she invited me on, about a year or so later, she invited me on a date. Where'd we go, Gabby?GG: Death row.MK: Yes. Our first date was to death row at the Florence state prison in Arizona, which was just outside  Gabby's state senate district. They were working on some legislation that had to do with crime and punishment and capital punishment  in the state of Arizona. So she couldn't get anybody  else to go with her, and I'm like, ""Of course I  want to go to death row."" So that was our first date. We've been together ever since. GG: Yes.PM: Well, that might have contributed to the reason that Gabby decided to marry you. You were willing to go to death row, after all.MK: I guess.PM: Gabby, what did make you want to marry Mark?GG: Um, good friends. Best friends. Best friends.MK: I thought we always had a very special relationship. We've gone through some tough times and it's only made it stronger. GG: Stronger.PM: After you got married, however, you continued very independent lives. Actually, you didn't even live together.MK: We had one of those commuter marriages. In our case, it was Washington, D.C., Houston, Tucson. Sometimes we'd go clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, to all those different places, and we didn't really live together until that Saturday morning. Within an hour of Gabby being shot, I was on an airplane to Tucson, and that was the moment where that had changed things.PM: And also, Gabby, you had run for Congress after being a state senator and served in Congress for six years. What did you like best about being in Congress?GG: Fast pace. Fast pace.PM: Well it was the way you did it. GG: Yes, yes. Fast pace.PM: I'm not sure people would describe it entirely that way. (Laughter)MK: Yeah, you know, legislation is often at a colossally slow pace, but my wife, and I have to admit, a lot of other members of Congress that I know, work incredibly hard. I mean, Gabby would run  around like a crazy person, never take a day off, maybe a half a day off a month, and whenever she was awake she was working, and she really, really thrived on that, and still does today. GG: Yes. Yes.PM: Installing solar panels on the top of her house, I have to say. So after the tragic incident, Mark, you decided to resign your position as an astronaut, even though you were supposed to take the next space mission. Everybody, including Gabby, talked you into going back, and you did end up taking.MK: Kind of. The day after Gabby was injured, I called my boss, the chief astronaut, Dr. Peggy Whitson, and I said, ""Peggy, I know I'm launching in space in three months from now. Gabby's in a coma. I'm in Tucson. You've got to find a replacement for me."" So I didn't actually resign from being an astronaut, but I gave up my job and they found a replacement. Months later, maybe about two months later, I started about getting my job back, which is something, when you become this primary caregiver person, which some people in the audience here have certainly been in that position, it's a challenging role but at some point you've got to figure out when you're going to get your life back, and at the time, I couldn't ask Gabby if she wanted me to go fly in the space shuttle again. But I knew she was— GG: Yes. Yes. Yes.MK: She was the biggest  supporter of my career, and I knew it was the right thing to do.PM: And yet I'm trying to imagine, Mark, what that was like, going off onto a mission, one presumes safely,  but it's never a guarantee, and knowing that Gabby is —MK: Well not only was  she still in the hospital, on the third day of that flight, literally while I was rendezvousing with the space station, and you've got two vehicles moving at 17,500 miles an hour, I'm actually flying it, looking out the window, a bunch of computers, Gabby was in brain surgery, literally at that time having the final surgery to replace the piece of skull that they took out on the day she was injured with a prosthetic, yeah, which is the whole side of her head. Now if any of you guys would ever come to our house in Tucson for the first time, Gabby would usually go up to the freezer and pull out the piece of Tupperware that has the real skull. (Laughter)GG: The real skull. MK: Which freaks people out, sometimes.PM: Is that for appetizer or dessert, Mark?MK: Well, it just gets the conversation going.PM: But there was a lot  of conversation about something you did, Gabby, after Mark's flight. You had to make another  step of courage too, because here was  Congress deadlocked again, and you got out of the rehabilitation center, got yourself to Washington so that you could walk  on the floor of the House — I can barely talk about this without getting emotional — and cast a vote which could have been the deciding vote.GG: The debt ceiling. The debt ceiling.MK: Yeah, we had that vote, I guess about five months after Gabby was injured, and she made this bold decision to go back. A very controversial vote, but she wanted to be there to have her voice heard one more time.PM: And after that, resigned and began what has been a very slow and challenging recovery. What's life like, day to day?MK: Well, that's Gabby's service dog Nelson.GG: Nelson.MK: New member of our family. GG: Yes, yes.MK: And we got him from a—GG: Prison. Murder. MK: We have a lot of connections with prisons, apparently. (Laughter) Nelson came from a prison, raised by a murderer in Massachusetts. But she did a great job with this dog. He's a fabulous service dog.PM: So Gabby, what have you learned from your experiences the past few years?MK: Yeah, what have you learned? GG: Deeper. Deeper.PM: Your relationship is deeper. It has to be. You're together all the time now.MK: I imagine being grateful, too, right?GG: Grateful.PM: This is a picture of  family and friends gathering, but I love these pictures because they show the Gabby and Mark relationship now. And you describe it, Gabby, over and over, as deeper on so many levels. Yes?MK: I think when something tragic happens in a family, it can pull people together. Here's us watching the space shuttle fly over Tucson, the Space Shuttle Endeavour, the one that I was the  commander on its last flight, on its final flight on top of an airplane on a 747 on its way to L.A., NASA was kind enough  to have it fly over Tucson.PM: And of course, the two of you go through these challenges of a slow and difficult recovery, and yet, Gabby, how do you maintain your optimism and positive outlook?GG: I want to make the world a better place. (Applause)PM: And you're doing that even though your recovery has to remain front and center for both of you. You are people who have done service to your country and you  are continuing to do that with a new initiative, a new purpose. And Gabby, what's on the agenda now?GG: Americans for Responsible Solutions.MK: That's our political action committee, where we are trying to  get members of Congress to take a more serious look at gun violence in this country, and to try to pass some reasonable legislation.GG: Yes. Yes. (Applause)MK: You know, this affected  us very personally, but it wasn't what happened to Gabby that got us involved. It was really the 20 murdered first graders and kindergartners in Newtown, Connecticut, and the response that we saw afterwards where — well, look what's happened so far. So far the national response has been pretty much to do nothing. We're trying to change that.PM: There have been 11 mass shootings since Newtown, a school a week in the first  two months of last year. What are you doing that's different than other efforts to balance rights for gun ownership and responsibilities?MK: We're gun owners,  we support gun rights. At the same time, we've  got to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. It's not too difficult to do that. This issue, like many others, has become very polarizing and political, and we're trying to bring some balance to the debate in Washington.PM: Thank you both for that effort. And not surprisingly for  this woman of courage and of a sense of adventure, you just keep challenging yourself, and the sky seems to be the limit. I have to share this video of your most recent adventure. Take a look at Gabby.MK: This is a couple months ago.(Video) MK: You okay? You did great. GG: Yes, it's gorgeous. Thank you. Good stuff. Gorgeous. Oh, thank you. Mountains. Gorgeous mountains. (Applause)MK: Let me just say one of the guys that Gabby jumped with that day was a Navy SEAL who she met in Afghanistan who was injured in combat, had a really rough time. Gabby visited him when he was at Bethesda and went through a really tough period. He started doing better. Months later, Gabby was shot in the head, and then he supported her while she was in the hospital in Houston. So they have a very, very nice connection.GG: Yes.PM: What a wonderful moment. Because this is the TED stage, Gabby, I know you worked very hard to think of the ideas that you wanted to leave with this audience.GG: Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting us here today. It's been a long, hard haul, but I'm getting better. I'm working hard, lots of therapy — speech therapy, physical therapy, and yoga too. But my spirit is strong as ever. I'm still fighting to make  the world a better place, and you can too. Get involved with your community. Be a leader. Set an example. Be passionate. Be courageous. Be your best. Thank you very much.(Applause)MK: Thank you. GG: Thank you.(Applause) MK: Thank you everybody. GG: Bye bye. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gabby_giffords_and_mark_kelly_be_passionate_be_courageous_be_your_best
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"So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and  the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills  you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you,  in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? And most of us, including  me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. But at least in my case,  are they the ones that I think about the most?  And the answer is no.So I've been thinking about that problem, and a thinker who has  helped me think about it is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi who wrote a book called ""The Lonely Man Of Faith"" in 1965. Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures, which he called Adam I and Adam II. Adam I is the worldly, ambitious, external side of our nature. He wants to build, create, create companies, create innovation. Adam II is the humble side of our nature. Adam II wants not only  to do good but to be good, to live in a way internally that honors God, creation and our possibilities. Adam I wants to conquer the world. Adam II wants to hear  a calling and obey the world. Adam I savors accomplishment. Adam II savors inner  consistency and strength. Adam I asks how things work. Adam II asks why we're here. Adam I's motto is ""success."" Adam II's motto is ""love, redemption and return.""And Soloveitchik argued  that these two sides of our nature are  at war with each other. We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value. And the tricky thing,  I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics. The external logic is  an economic logic: input leads to output,  risk leads to reward. The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and  often an inverse logic. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender  to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer the desire to get what you want. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself,  you have to lose yourself.We happen to live in a society  that favors Adam I, and often neglects Adam II. And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game, and you become a cold,  calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there's a difference between your desired  self and your actual self. You're not earning the sort of eulogy you want, you hope someone will give to you. You don't have the  depth of conviction. You don't have an emotional sonorousness. You don't have  commitment to tasks that would take more than a lifetime to commit.I was reminded of a common response through history of how you build a solid Adam II, how you build a depth of character. Through history, people  have gone back into their own pasts, sometimes to a precious  time in their life, to their childhood, and often, the mind  gravitates in the past to a moment of shame, some sin committed,  some act of selfishness, an act of omission, of shallowness, the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity, trying to be a people-pleaser,  a lack of courage. Adam I is built by  building on your strengths. Adam II is built by fighting  your weaknesses. You go into yourself,  you find the sin which you've committed over and again through your life, your signature sin out of which the others emerge, and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin, and out of that wrestling,  that suffering, then a depth of character is constructed. And we're often not taught to recognize the sin in ourselves, in that we're not taught in this culture how to wrestle with it, how to confront it,  and how to combat it. We live in a culture  with an Adam I mentality where we're inarticulate  about Adam II.Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the confrontation, the fully lived Adam I and Adam II life, this way: ""Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must  be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must  be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved  by that final form of love, which is forgiveness.”Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_should_you_live_for_your_resume_or_your_eulogy
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"When I was born, there was really only one book about how to raise your children, and it was written by Dr. Spock. (Laughter) Thank you for indulging me. I have always wanted to do that.No, it was Benjamin Spock, and his book was called ""The Common Sense Book of Baby And Child Care."" It sold almost 50 million copies  by the time he died. Today, I, as the mother of a six-year-old, walk into Barnes and Noble, and see this. And it is amazing the variety that one finds  on those shelves. There are guides to raising  an eco-friendly kid, a gluten-free kid, a disease-proof kid, which, if you ask me, is a little bit creepy. There are guides to raising a bilingual kid even if you only speak one language at home. There are guides to raising a financially savvy kid and a science-minded kid and a kid who is a whiz at yoga. Short of teaching your toddler how to defuse a nuclear bomb, there is pretty much a guide to everything.All of these books are well-intentioned. I am sure that many of them are great. But taken together, I am sorry, I do not see help when I look at that shelf. I see anxiety. I see a giant candy-colored monument to our collective panic, and it makes me want to know, why is it that raising our children is associated with so much anguish and so much confusion? Why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing human beings have been doing successfully for millennia, long before parenting message boards and peer-reviewed studies came along? Why is it that so many mothers and fathers experience parenthood as a kind of crisis?Crisis might seem like a strong word, but there is data suggesting it probably isn't. There was, in fact, a paper of just this very name, ""Parenthood as Crisis,"" published in 1957, and in the 50-plus years since, there has been plenty of scholarship documenting a pretty clear pattern of parental anguish. Parents experience more stress than non-parents. Their marital satisfaction is lower. There have been a number of studies looking at how parents feel when they are spending time with their kids, and the answer often is, not so great. Last year, I spoke with a researcher named Matthew Killingsworth who is doing a very, very imaginative project that tracks people's happiness, and here is what he told me he found: ""Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on par with strangers."" (Laughter)But here's the thing. I have been looking at what underlies these data for three years, and children are not the problem. Something about parenting right now at this moment is the problem. Specifically, I don't think we know what parenting is supposed to be. Parent, as a verb, only entered common usage in 1970. Our roles as mothers and fathers have changed. The roles of our children have changed. We are all now furiously improvising our way through a situation for which there is no script, and if you're an amazing jazz musician, then improv is great, but for the rest of us, it can kind of feel like a crisis.So how did we get here? How is it that we are all now navigating a child-rearing universe without any norms to guide us? Well, for starters, there has been a major historical change. Until fairly recently, kids worked, on our farms primarily, but also in factories, mills, mines. Kids were considered economic assets. Sometime during the Progressive Era, we put an end to this arrangement. We recognized kids had rights, we banned child labor, we focused on education instead, and school became a child's new work. And thank God it did. But that only made a parent's role more confusing in a way. The old arrangement might not have been particularly ethical, but it was reciprocal. We provided food, clothing, shelter, and moral instruction to our kids, and they in return provided income.Once kids stopped working, the economics of parenting changed. Kids became, in the words of one brilliant if totally ruthless sociologist, ""economically worthless but emotionally priceless."" Rather than them working for us, we began to work for them, because within only a matter of decades it became clear: if we wanted our kids to succeed, school was not enough. Today, extracurricular activities are a kid's new work, but that's work for us too, because we are the ones driving them to soccer practice. Massive piles of homework are a kid's new work, but that's also work for us, because we have to check it. About three years ago, a Texas woman told something to me that totally broke my heart. She said, almost casually, ""Homework is the new dinner."" The middle class now pours all of its time and energy and resources into its kids, even though the middle class has less and less of those things to give. Mothers now spend more time with their children than they did in 1965, when most women were not even in the workforce.It would probably be easier for parents to do their new roles if they knew what they were preparing their kids for. This is yet another thing that makes modern parenting so very confounding. We have no clue what portion our wisdom, if any, is of use to our kids. The world is changing so rapidly, it's impossible to say. This was true even when I was young. When I was a kid, high school specifically, I was told that I would be at sea in the new global economy if I did not know Japanese. And with all due respect to the Japanese, it didn't turn out that way. Now there is a certain kind of middle-class parent that is obsessed with teaching their kids Mandarin, and maybe they're onto something, but we cannot know for sure. So, absent being able to anticipate the future, what we all do, as good parents, is try and prepare our kids for every possible kind of future, hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off. We teach our kids chess, thinking maybe they will need analytical skills. We sign them up for team sports, thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills, you know, for when they go to Harvard Business School. We try and teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free, though now is probably a good time to tell you that I was not eco-friendly and gluten-free as a child. I ate jars of pureed macaroni and beef. And you know what? I'm doing okay. I pay my taxes. I hold down a steady job. I was even invited to speak at TED. But the presumption now is that what was good enough for me, or for my folks for that matter, isn't good enough anymore. So we all make a mad dash to that bookshelf, because we feel like if we aren't trying everything, it's as if we're doing nothing and we're defaulting on our obligations to our kids.So it's hard enough to navigate our new roles as mothers and fathers. Now add to this problem something else: we are also navigating new roles as husbands and wives because most women today are in the workforce. This is another reason, I think, that parenthood feels like a crisis. We have no rules, no scripts, no norms for what to do when a child comes along now that both mom and dad are breadwinners. The writer Michael Lewis once put this very, very well. He said that the surest way for a couple to start fighting is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose division of labor is ever so slightly different from theirs, because the conversation in the car on the way home goes something like this: ""So, did you catch that Dave is the one who walks them to school every morning?"" (Laughter) Without scripts telling us who does what in this brave new world, couples fight, and both mothers and fathers each have their legitimate gripes. Mothers are much more likely to be multi-tasking when they are at home, and fathers, when they are at home, are much more likely to be mono-tasking. Find a guy at home, and odds are he is doing just one thing at a time. In fact, UCLA recently did a study looking at the most common configuration of family members in middle-class homes. Guess what it was? Dad in a room by himself. According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers still do twice as much childcare as fathers, which is better than it was in Erma Bombeck's day, but I still think that something she wrote is highly relevant: ""I have not been alone in the bathroom since October."" (Laughter)But here is the thing: Men are doing plenty. They spend more time with their kids than their fathers ever spent with them. They work more paid hours, on average, than their wives, and they genuinely want to be good, involved dads. Today, it is fathers, not mothers, who report the most work-life conflict.Either way, by the way, if you think it's hard for traditional families to sort out these new roles, just imagine what it's like now for non-traditional families: families with two dads, families with two moms, single-parent households. They are truly improvising as they go.Now, in a more progressive country, and forgive me here for capitulating to cliché and invoking, yes, Sweden, parents could rely on the state for support. There are countries that acknowledge the anxieties and the changing roles of mothers and fathers. Unfortunately, the United States is not one of them, so in case you were wondering what the U.S. has in common with Papua New Guinea and Liberia, it's this: We too have no paid maternity leave policy. We are one of eight known countries that does not.In this age of intense confusion, there is just one goal upon which all parents can agree, and that is whether they are tiger moms or hippie moms, helicopters or drones, our kids' happiness is paramount. That is what it means to raise kids in an age when they are economically worthless but emotionally priceless. We are all the custodians of their self-esteem. The one mantra no parent ever questions is, ""All I want is for my children to be happy."" And don't get me wrong: I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child. But it is a very elusive one. Happiness and self-confidence, teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field. It's not like teaching them how to ride a bike. There's no curriculum for it. Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves. A child's happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent. And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid.And I have to tell you, I think it leads to some very strange excesses. We are now so anxious to protect our kids from the world's ugliness that we now shield them from ""Sesame Street."" I wish I could say I was kidding about this, but if you go out and you buy the first few episodes of ""Sesame Street"" on DVD, as I did out of nostalgia, you will find a warning at the beginning saying that the content is not suitable for children. (Laughter) Can I just repeat that? The content of the original ""Sesame Street"" is not suitable for children. When asked about this by The New York Times, a producer for the show gave a variety of explanations. One was that Cookie Monster smoked a pipe in one skit and then swallowed it. Bad modeling. I don't know. But the thing that stuck with me is she said that she didn't know whether Oscar the Grouch could be invented today because he was too depressive. I cannot tell you how much this distresses me. (Laughter) You are looking at a woman who has a periodic table of the Muppets hanging from her cubicle wall. The offending muppet, right there.That's my son the day he was born. I was high as a kite on morphine. I had had an unexpected C-section. But even in my opiate haze, I managed to have one very clear thought the first time I held him. I whispered it into his ear. I said, ""I will try so hard not to hurt you."" It was the Hippocratic Oath, and I didn't even know I was saying it. But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness. In fact, as any parent will tell you, it's awfully hard. All of us have said or done hurtful things that we wish to God we could take back. I think in another era we did not expect quite so much from ourselves, and it is important that we all remember that the next time we are staring with our hearts racing at those bookshelves. I'm not really sure how to create new norms for this world, but I do think that in our desperate quest to create happy kids, we may be assuming the wrong moral burden. It strikes me as a better goal, and, dare I say, a more virtuous one, to focus on making productive kids and moral kids, and to simply hope that happiness will come to them by virtue of the good that they do and their accomplishments and the love that they feel from us. That, anyway, is one response to having no script. Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book — decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves. I think if we all did that, the kids would still be all right, and so would their parents, possibly in both cases even better.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_senior_for_parents_happiness_is_a_very_high_bar
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"I want you all to think about the third word that was ever said about you — or, if you were delivering, about the person you were delivering. And you can all mouth it if you want or say it out loud. It was — the first two were, ""It's a ...""Audience: (Mixed reply) Girl. Boy.(Laughter)Well, it shows you that — I also deal with issues where there's not certainty of whether it's a girl or a boy, so the mixed answer was very appropriate.Of course, now the answer often comes not at birth but at the ultrasound, unless the prospective parents choose to be surprised, like we all were.But I want you to think about what it is that leads to that statement on the third word, because the third word is a description of your sex. And by that I mean, made by a description of your genitals. Now, as a pediatric endocrinologist, I used to be very, very involved and still somewhat am, in cases in which there are mismatches in the externals or between the externals and the internals, and we literally have to figure out what is the description of your sex. But there is nothing that is definable at the time of birth that would define you. And when I talk about definition, I'm talking about your sexual orientation. We don't say, ""It's a ... gay boy!"" ""A lesbian girl!"" Those situations don't really define themselves more until the second decade of life. Nor do they define your gender, which, as different from your anatomic sex, describes your self-concept:Do you see yourself as a male or female, or somewhere in the spectrum in between? That sometimes shows up in the first decade of life, but it can be very confusing for parents, because it is quite normative for children to act in a cross-gender play and way, and, in fact, there are studies that show that even 80 percent of children who act in that fashion will not persist in wanting to be the opposite gender at the time when puberty begins.But, at the time that puberty begins — that means between about age 10 to 12 in girls, 12 to 14 in boys — with breast budding, or two to three times' increase in the gonads in the case of genetic males, by that particular point, the child who says they are in the absolute wrong body is almost certain to be transgender and is extremely unlikely to change those feelings, no matter how anybody tries reparative therapy or any other noxious things.Now, this is relatively rare, so I had relatively little personal experience with this. And my experience was more typical, only because I had an adolescent practice. And I saw someone age 24, genetically female, went through Harvard with three male roommates who knew the whole story, a registrar who always listed his name on course lists as a male name, and came to me after graduating, saying, ""Help me. I know you know a lot of endocrinology."" And indeed, I've treated a lot of people who were born without gonads. This wasn't rocket science. But I made a deal with him: ""I'll treat you if you teach me.""And so he did. And what an education I got from taking care of all the members of his support group. And then I got really confused, because I thought it was relatively easy at that age to just give people the hormones of the gender in which they were affirming. But then my patient married, and he married a woman who had been born as a male, had married as a male, had two children, then went through a transition into female. And now this delightful female was attached to my male patient — in fact, got legally married, because they showed up as a man and a woman, and who knew, right?(Laughter)And I was confused — ""Does this make so-and-so gay? Does this make so-and-so straight?"" I was getting sexual orientation confused with gender identity. And my patient said to me, ""Look, look, look. If you just think of the following, you'll get it right: Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with. Gender identity is who you go to bed as.""(Laughter)And I subsequently learned from the many adults — I took care of about 200 adults — I learned from them that if I didn't peek as to who their partner was in the waiting room, I would never be able to guess better than chance, whether they were gay, straight, bi or asexual in their affirmed gender. In other words, one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. And the data show it.Now, as I took care of the 200 adults, I found it extremely painful. These people — many of them — had to give up so much of their lives. Sometimes their parents would reject them, siblings, their own children, and then their divorcing spouse would forbid them from seeing their children. It was so awful, but why did they do it at 40 and 50? Because they felt they had to affirm themselves before they would kill themselves. And indeed, the rate of suicide among untreated transgendered people is among the highest in the world.So, what to do? I was intrigued, in going to a conference in Holland, where they are experts in this, and saw the most remarkable thing. They were treating young adolescents after giving them the most intense psychometric testing of gender, and they were treating them by blocking the puberty that they didn't want. Because basically, kids look about the same, each sex, until they go through puberty, at which point, if you feel you're in the wrong sex, you feel like Pinocchio becoming a donkey. The fantasy that you had that your body will change to be who you want it to be, with puberty, actually is nullified by the puberty you get. And they fall apart.So that's why putting the puberty on hold — why on hold? You can't just give them the opposite hormones that young. They'll end up stunted in growth, and you think you can have a meaningful conversation about the fertility effects of such treatment with a 10-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy? So this buys time in the diagnostic process for four or five years, so that they can work it out. They can have more and more testing, they can live without feeling their bodies are running away from them. And then, in a program they call 12-16-18, around age 12 is when they give the blocking hormones, and then at age 16, with retesting, they re-qualify to receive — now remember, the blocking hormones are reversible, but when you give the hormones of the opposite sex, you now start spouting breasts and facial hair and voice change, depending on what you're using, and those effects are permanent, or require surgery to remove, or electrolysis, and you can never really affect the voice. So this is serious, and this is 15-, 16-year-old stuff.And then at 18, they're eligible for surgery. And while there's no good surgery for females to males genitally, the male-to-female surgery has fooled gynecologists. That's how good it can be. So I looked at how the patients were doing, and I looked at patients who just looked like everybody else, except they were pubertally delayed. But once they gave them the hormones consistent with the gender they affirm, they look beautiful. They look normal. They had normal heights. You would never be able to pick them out in a crowd.So at that point, I decided I'm going to do this. This is really where the pediatric endocrine realm comes in, because, in fact, if you're going to deal with it in kids aged 10 to 14, that's pediatric endocrinology. So I brought some kids in, and this now became the standard of care, and the [Boston] Children's Hospital was behind it. By my showing them the kids before and after, people who never got treated and people who wished to be treated, and pictures of the Dutch — they came to me and said, ""You've got to do something for these kids."" Well, where were these kids before? They were out there suffering, is where they were.So we started a program in 2007. It became the first program of its kind — but it's really of the Dutch kind — in North America. And since then, we have 160 patients. Did they come from Afghanistan? No. 75 percent of them came from within 150 miles of Boston.And some came from England. Jackie had been abused in the Midlands, in England. She's 12 years old there, she was living as a girl, but she was being beaten up. It was a horror show, they had to homeschool her. And the reason the British were coming was because they would not treat anybody with anything under age 16, which means they were consigning them to an adult body no matter what happened, even if they tested them well. Jackie, on top of it, was, by virtue of skeletal markings, destined to be six feet five. And yet, she had just begun a male puberty.Well, I did something a little bit innovative, because I do know hormones, and that estrogen is much more potent in closing epiphyses, the growth plates, and stopping growth, than testosterone is. So we blocked her testosterone with a blocking hormone, but we added estrogen, not at 16, but at 13. And so here she is at 16, on the left. And on her 16th birthday, she went to Thailand, where they would do a genital plastic surgery. They will do it at 18 now. And she ended up 5'11"". But more than that, she has normal breast size, because by blocking testosterone, every one of our patients has normal breast size if they get to us at the appropriate age, not too late.And on the far right, there she is. She went public — semifinalist in the Miss England competition. The judges debated as to, can they do this? And one of them quipped, I'm told, ""But she has more natural self than half the other contestants.""(Laughter)And some of them have been rearranged a little bit, but it's all her DNA. And she's become a remarkable spokeswoman. And she was offered contracts as a model, at which point she teased me, when she said, ""You know, I might have had a better chance as a model if you'd made me six feet one.""(Laughter)Go figure.So this picture, I think, says it all. It really says it all. These are Nicole and brother Jonas, identical twin boys, and proven to be identical. Nicole had affirmed herself as a girl as early as age three. At age seven, they changed her name, and came to me at the very beginnings of a male puberty. Now you can imagine looking at Jonas at only 14, that male puberty is early in this family, because he looks more like a 16-year-old. But it makes the point all the more, of why you have to be conscious of where the patient is. Nicole is on pubertal blockade in here, and Jonas is just going — biologic control. This is what Nicole would look like if we weren't doing what we were doing. He's got a prominent Adam's apple. He's got angular bones to the face, a mustache, and you can see there's a height difference, because he's gone through a growth spurt that she won't get. Now Nicole is on estrogen. She has a bit of a form to her.This family went to the White House last spring, because of their work in overturning an anti-discrimination — there was a bill that would block the right of transgender people in Maine to use public bathrooms, and it looked like the bill was going to pass, and that would have been a problem, but Nicole went personally to every legislator in Maine and said, ""I can do this. If they see me, they'll understand why I'm no threat in the ladies' room, but I can be threatened in the men's room."" And then they finally got it.So where do we go from here? Well, we still have a ways to go in terms of anti-discrimination. There are only 17 states that have an anti-discrimination law against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodation — only 17 states, and five of them are in New England. We need less expensive drugs. They cost a fortune. And we need to get this condition out of the DSM. It is as much a psychiatric disease as being gay and lesbian, and that went out the window in 1973, and the whole world changed.And this isn't going to break anybody's budget. This is not that common. But the risks of not doing anything for them not only puts all of them at risk of losing their lives to suicide, but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/norman_spack_how_i_help_transgender_teens_become_who_they_want_to_be
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"The universe is teeming with planets. I want us, in the next decade, to build a space telescope that'll be able to image an Earth about another star and figure out whether it can harbor life. My colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Princeton and I are working on technology that will be able to do just that in the coming years. Astronomers now believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet, and they speculate that up to one fifth of them have an Earth-like planet that might be able to harbor life, but we haven't seen any of them. We've only detected them indirectly.This is NASA's famous picture of the pale blue dot. It was taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, when they turned it around as it was exiting the solar system to take a picture of the Earth from six billion kilometers away. I want to take that of an Earth-like planet about another star.Why haven't we done that? Why is that hard? Well to see, let's imagine we take the Hubble Space Telescope and we turn it around and we move it out to the orbit of Mars. We'll see something like that, a slightly blurry picture of the Earth, because we're a fairly small telescope out at the orbit of Mars. Now let's move ten times further away. Here we are at the orbit of Uranus. It's gotten smaller, it's got less detail, less resolve. We can still see the little moon, but let's go ten times further away again. Here we are at the edge of the solar system, out at the Kuiper Belt. Now it's not resolved at all. It's that pale blue dot of Carl Sagan's. But let's move yet again ten times further away. Here we are out at the Oort Cloud, outside the solar system, and we're starting to see the sun move into the field of view and get into where the planet is. One more time, ten times further away. Now we're at Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor star, and the planet is gone. All we're seeing is the big beaming image of the star that's ten billion times brighter than the planet, which should be in that little red circle. That's what we want to see. That's why it's hard. The light from the star is diffracting. It's scattering inside the telescope, creating that very bright image that washes out the planet.So to see the planet, we have to do something about all of that light. We have to get rid of it. I have a lot of colleagues working on really amazing technologies to do that, but I want to tell you about one today that I think is the coolest, and probably the most likely to get us an Earth in the next decade.It was first suggested by Lyman Spitzer, the father of the space telescope, in 1962, and he took his inspiration from an eclipse. You've all seen that. That's a solar eclipse. The moon has moved in front of the sun. It blocks out most of the light so we can see that dim corona around it. It would be the same thing if I put my thumb up and blocked that spotlight that's getting right in my eye, I can see you in the back row. Well, what's going on? Well the moon is casting a shadow down on the Earth. We put a telescope or a camera in that shadow, we look back at the sun, and most of the light's been removed and we can see that dim, fine structure in the corona. Spitzer's suggestion was we do this in space. We build a big screen, we fly it in space, we put it up in front of the star, we block out most of the light, we fly a space telescope in that shadow that's created, and boom, we get to see planets. Well that would look something like this. So there's that big screen, and there's no planets, because unfortunately it doesn't actually work very well, because the light waves of the light and waves diffracts around that screen the same way it did in the telescope. It's like water bending around a rock in a stream, and all that light just destroys the shadow. It's a terrible shadow. And we can't see planets.But Spitzer actually knew the answer. If we can feather the edges, soften those edges so we can control diffraction, well then we can see a planet, and in the last 10 years or so we've come up with optimal solutions for doing that. It looks something like that. We call that our flower petal starshade. If we make the edges of those petals exactly right, if we control their shape, we can control diffraction, and now we have a great shadow. It's about 10 billion times dimmer than it was before, and we can see the planets beam out just like that. That, of course, has to be bigger than my thumb. That starshade is about the size of half a football field and it has to fly 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope that has to be held right in its shadow, and then we can see those planets.This sounds formidable, but brilliant engineers, colleagues of mine at JPL, came up with a fabulous design for how to do that and it looks like this. It starts wrapped around a hub. It separates from the telescope. The petals unfurl, they open up, the telescope turns around. Then you'll see it flip and fly out that 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope. It's going to move in front of the star just like that, creates a wonderful shadow. Boom, we get planets orbiting about it. (Applause) Thank you.That's not science fiction. We've been working on this for the last five or six years. Last summer, we did a really cool test out in California at Northrop Grumman. So those are four petals. This is a sub-scale star shade. It's about half the size of the one you just saw. You'll see the petals unfurl. Those four petals were built by four undergraduates doing a summer internship at JPL. Now you're seeing it deploy. Those petals have to rotate into place. The base of those petals has to go to the same place every time to within a tenth of a millimeter. We ran this test 16 times, and 16 times it went into the exact same place to a tenth of a millimeter. This has to be done very precisely, but if we can do this, if we can build this technology, if we can get it into space, you might see something like this. That's a picture of one our nearest neighbor stars taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. If we can take a similar space telescope, slightly larger, put it out there, fly an occulter in front of it, what we might see is something like that — that's a family portrait of our solar system — but not ours. We're hoping it'll be someone else's solar system as seen through an occulter, through a starshade like that. You can see Jupiter, you can see Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and right there in the center, next to the residual light is that pale blue dot. That's Earth. We want to see that, see if there's water, oxygen, ozone, the things that might tell us that it could harbor life.I think this is the coolest possible science. That's why I got into doing this, because I think that will change the world. That will change everything when we see that.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_kasdin_the_flower_shaped_starshade_that_might_help_us_detect_earth_like_planets
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"Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether.But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good.So my talk is about the connection between technology and design of type. The technology has changed a number of times since I started work: photo, digital, desktop, screen, web. I've had to survive those changes and try to understand their implications for what I do for design. This slide is about the effect of tools on form. The two letters, the two K's, the one on your left, my right, is modern, made on a computer. All straight lines are dead straight. The curves have that kind of mathematical smoothness that the Bézier formula imposes. On the right, ancient Gothic, cut in the resistant material of steel by hand. None of the straight lines are actually straight. The curves are kind of subtle. It has that spark of life from the human hand that the machine or the program can never capture. What a contrast.Well, I tell a lie. A lie at TED. I'm really sorry. Both of these were made on a computer, same software, same Bézier curves, same font format. The one on your left was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre, and I did the other one. The tool is the same, yet the letters are different. The letters are different because the designers are different. That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that. I wanted mine to look like that. End of story. Type is very adaptable. Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, type hides its methods. I think of myself as an industrial designer. The thing I design is manufactured, and it has a function: to be read, to convey meaning. But there is a bit more to it than that. There's the sort of aesthetic element. What makes these two letters different from different interpretations by different designers? What gives the work of some designers sort of characteristic personal style, as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, an automobile designer, whatever?There have been some cases, I admit, where I as a designer did feel the influence of technology. This is from the mid-'60s, the change from metal type to photo, hot to cold. This brought some benefits but also one particular drawback: a spacing system that only provided 18 discrete units for letters to be accommodated on. I was asked at this time to design a series of condensed sans serif types with as many different variants as possible within this 18-unit box. Quickly looking at the arithmetic, I realized I could only actually make three of related design. Here you see them. In Helvetica Compressed, Extra Compressed, and Ultra Compressed, this rigid 18-unit system really boxed me in. It kind of determined the proportions of the design. Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases. So do you look at these and say, ""Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem, and by God it shows in the results."" I hope not. If I were doing this same job today, instead of having 18 spacing units, I would have 1,000. Clearly I could make more variants, but would these three members of the family be better? It's hard to say without actually doing it, but they would not be better in the proportion of 1,000 to 18, I can tell you that. My instinct tells you that any improvement would be rather slight, because they were designed as functions of the system they were designed to fit, and as I said, type is very adaptable. It does hide its methods. All industrial designers work within constraints. This is not fine art.The question is, does a constraint force a compromise? By accepting a constraint, are you working to a lower standard? I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged by something that Charles Eames said. He said he was conscious of working within constraints, but not of making compromises. The distinction between a constraint and a compromise is obviously very subtle, but it's very central to my attitude to work.Remember this reading experience? The phone book. I'll hold the slide so you can enjoy the nostalgia. This is from the mid-'70s early trials of Bell Centennial typeface I designed for the U.S. phone books, and it was my first experience of digital type, and quite a baptism. Designed for the phone books, as I said, to be printed at tiny size on newsprint on very high-speed rotary presses with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. This is not a hospitable environment for a typographic designer. So the challenge for me was to design type that performed as well as possible in these very adverse production conditions. As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. I had to draw every character by hand on quadrille graph paper — there were four weights of Bell Centennial — pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line for the keyboard. It took two years, but I learned a lot. These letters look as though they've been chewed by the dog or something or other, but the missing pixels at the intersections of strokes or in the crotches are the result of my studying the effects of ink spread on cheap paper and reacting, revising the font accordingly. These strange artifacts are designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of scale and production process. At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible. This is not the recipe for legibility at small size. It looks very elegant up on a slide. I had to disambiguate these forms of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see in the bottom part of that slide.So now we're on to the mid-'80s, the early days of digital outline fonts, vector technology. There was an issue at that time with the size of the fonts, the amount of data that was required to find and store a font in computer memory. It limited the number of fonts you could get on your typesetting system at any one time. I did an analysis of the data, and found that a typical serif face you see on the left needed nearly twice as much data as a sans serif in the middle because of all the points required to define the elegantly curved serif brackets. The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way, they represent the amount of data needed to store each of the fonts. So the sans serif, in the middle, sans the serifs, was much more economical, 81 to 151.""Aha,"" I thought. ""The engineers have a problem. Designer to the rescue.""I made a serif type, you can see it on the right, without curved serifs. I made them polygonal, out of straight line segments, chamfered brackets. And look, as economical in data as a sans serif. We call it Charter, on the right.So I went to the head of engineering with my numbers, and I said proudly, ""I have solved your problem.""""Oh,"" he said. ""What problem?""And I said, ""Well, you know, the problem of the huge data you require for serif fonts and so on.""""Oh,"" he said. ""We solved that problem last week. We wrote a compaction routine that reduces the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude. You can have as many fonts on your system as you like.""""Well, thank you for letting me know,"" I said.Foiled again. I was left with a design solution for a nonexistent technical problem.But here is where the story sort of gets interesting for me. I didn't just throw my design away in a fit of pique. I persevered. What had started as a technical exercise became an aesthetic exercise, really. In other words, I had come to like this typeface. Forget its origins. Screw that. I liked the design for its own sake. The simplified forms of Charter gave it a sort of plain-spoken quality and unfussy spareness that sort of pleased me. You know, at times of technical innovation, designers want to be influenced by what's in the air. We want to respond. We want to be pushed into exploring something new. So Charter is a sort of parable for me, really. In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link between the technology and the design of Charter. I had really misunderstood the technology. The technology did suggest something to me, but it did not force my hand, and I think this happens very often.You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance.So the priorities were just tipping at that point. They wanted a small core set of fonts that were not adapted but designed for the screen to face up to the problems of screen, which were their coarse resolution displays. I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed for a particular technology is a self-obsoleting typeface. I've designed too many faces in the past that were intended to mitigate technical problems. Thanks to the engineers, the technical problems went away. So did my typeface. It was only a stopgap. Microsoft came back to say that affordable computer monitors with better resolutions were at least a decade away. So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad, that's more than a stopgap.So I was persuaded, I was convinced, and we went to work on what became Verdana and Georgia, for the first time working not on paper but directly onto the screen from the pixel up. At that time, screens were binary. The pixel was either on or it was off. Here you see the outline of a letter, the cap H, which is the thin black line, the contour, which is how it is stored in memory, superimposed on the bitmap, which is the grey area, which is how it's displayed on the screen. The bitmap is rasterized from the outline. Here in a cap H, which is all straight lines, the two are in almost perfect sync on the Cartesian grid. Not so with an O. This looks more like bricklaying than type design, but believe me, this is a good bitmap O, for the simple reason that it's symmetrical in both x and y axes. In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask for more than that. I would sometimes make, I don't know, three or four different versions of a difficult letter like a lowercase A, and then stand back to choose which was the best. Well, there was no best, so the designer's judgment comes in in trying to decide which is the least bad. Is that a compromise? Not to me, if you are working at the highest standard the technology will allow, although that standard may be well short of the ideal. You may be able to see on this slide two different bitmap fonts there. The ""a"" in the upper one, I think, is better than the ""a"" in the lower one, but it still ain't great. You can maybe see the effect better if it's reduced. Well, maybe not.So I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist, out of necessity. For a certain kind of temperament, there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect but can still be done to the best of your ability. Here's the lowercase H from Georgia Italic. The bitmap looks jagged and rough. It is jagged and rough. But I discovered, by experiment, that there is an optimum slant for an italic on a screen so the strokes break well at the pixel boundaries. Look in this example how, rough as it is, how the left and right legs actually break at the same level. That's a victory. That's good, right there. And of course, at the lower depths, you don't get much choice. This is an S, in case you were wondering.Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for coarser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology? In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matthew_carter_my_life_in_typefaces
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"I feel so fortunate that my first job was working at the Museum of Modern Art on a retrospective of painter Elizabeth Murray. I learned so much from her. After the curator Robert Storr selected all the paintings from her lifetime body of work, I loved looking at the paintings from the 1970s. There were some motifs and elements that would come up again later in her life. I remember asking her what she thought of those early works. If you didn't know they were hers, you might not have been able to guess. She told me that a few didn't quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be. One of the works, in fact, so didn't meet her mark, she had set it out in the trash in her studio, and her neighbor had taken it because she saw its value.In that moment, my view of success and creativity changed. I realized that success is a moment, but what we're always celebrating is creativity and mastery. But this is the thing: What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I've long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win.I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers, all women as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia's Baker Athletics Complex. I wanted to see what's called archer's paradox, the idea that in order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skew from it. I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus. One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one hand and arrows in the left with yellow fletching. And they passed me and smiled, but they sized me up as they made their way to the turf, and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers, degrees, I thought, positions for how they might plan to hit their target. I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support, and watched her, and I didn't understand how even one was going to hit the ten ring. The ten ring from the standard 75-yard distance, it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm's length. And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot. She first hit a seven, I remember, and then a nine, and then two tens, and then the next arrow didn't even hit the target. And I saw that gave her more tenacity, and she went after it again and again. For three hours this went on. At the end of the practice, one of the archers was so taxed that she lied out on the ground just star-fished, her head looking up at the sky, trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call that still point of the turning world.It's so rare in American culture, there's so little that's vocational about it anymore, to look at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude, what it means to align your body posture for three hours in order to hit a target, pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity. But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing what's so rare to glimpse, that difference between success and mastery.So success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can't do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It's not the same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do this, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win. How many times have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win? Elizabeth Murray surprised me with her admission about her earlier paintings. Painter Paul Cézanne so often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the intention of picking them back up again, but at the end of his life, the result was that he had only signed 10 percent of his paintings. His favorite novel was ""The [Unknown] Masterpiece"" by Honoré de Balzac, and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself. Franz Kafka saw incompletion when others would find only works to praise, so much so that he wanted all of his diaries, manuscripts, letters and even sketches burned upon his death. His friend refused to honor the request, and because of that, we now have all the works we now do by Kafka: ""America,"" ""The Trial"" and ""The Castle,"" a work so incomplete it even stops mid-sentence.The pursuit of mastery, in other words, is an ever-onward almost. ""Lord, grant that I desire more than I can accomplish,"" Michelangelo implored, as if to that Old Testament God on the Sistine Chapel, and he himself was that Adam with his finger outstretched and not quite touching that God's hand.Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It's in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft and not for the sake of crafting your career. How many inventors and untold entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon? We see it even in the life of the indomitable Arctic explorer Ben Saunders, who tells me that his triumphs are not merely the result of a grand achievement, but of the propulsion of a lineage of near wins.We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge. It's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington, who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one, always the one he had yet to compose. Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to mastery is because the greater our proficiency, the more clearly we might see that we don't know all that we thought we did. It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect. The Paris Review got it out of James Baldwin when they asked him, ""What do you think increases with knowledge?"" and he said, ""You learn how little you know.""Success motivates us, but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest. One of the most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver medalists and bronze medalists after a competition. Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to bronze, who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not medaled at all, gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition. We see it even in the gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created these scratch-off tickets that had a higher than average rate of near wins and so compelled people to buy more tickets that they were called heart-stoppers, and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s. The reason the near win has a propulsion is because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals, which we tend to put at a distance, into more proximate vicinity to where we stand. If I ask you to envision what a great day looks like next week, you might describe it in more general terms. But if I ask you to describe a great day at TED tomorrow, you might describe it with granular, practical clarity. And this is what a near win does. It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights. It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984 missed taking the gold in the heptathlon by one third of a second, and her husband predicted that would give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition. In 1988, she won the gold in the heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points, a score that no athlete has come very close to since.We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do. I stand here thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near win in this room, how your lives might play this out, because I think on some gut level we do know this. We know that we thrive when we stay at our own leading edge, and it's why the deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics. It's what's called a spirit line, a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out, but also a reason to continue making work. Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They're masters because they realize that there isn't one.Now it occurred to me, as I thought about this, why the archery coach told me at the end of that practice, out of earshot of his archers, that he and his colleagues never feel they can do enough for their team, never feel there are enough visualization techniques and posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins. It didn't sound like a complaint, exactly, but just a way to let me know, a kind of tender admission, to remind me that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious, unfinished path that always required more.We build out of the unfinished idea, even if that idea is our former self. This is the dynamic of mastery. Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more than you ever dreamed you could. It's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray was thinking when I saw her smiling at those early paintings one day in the galleries. Even if we created utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_lewis_embrace_the_near_win
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"Wow, this is bright. It must use a lot of power. Well, flying you all in here must have cost a bit of energy too. So the whole planet needs a lot of energy, and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel. We've been burning gas. It's been a good run. It got us to where we are, but we have to stop. We can't do that anymore.So we are trying different types of energy now, alternative energy, but it proved quite difficult to find something that's as convenient and as cost-effective as oil, gas and coal. My personal favorite is nuclear energy. Now, it's very energy-dense, it produces solid, reliable power, and it doesn't make any CO2.Now we know of two ways of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Now in fission, you take a big nucleus, you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy, and this is how the nuclear reactor today works. It works pretty good. And then there's fusion. Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better. So you take two small nuclei, you put it together, and you make helium, and that's very nice. It makes lots of energy. This is nature's way of producing energy. The sun and all the stars in the universe run on fusion. Now, a fusion plant would actually be quite cost-effective and it also would be quite safe. It only produces short term radioactive waste, and it cannot melt down. Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean. In the ocean, you can extract the fuel for about one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, so that's very, very cheap. And if the whole planet would run on fusion, we could extract the fuel from the ocean. It would run for billions and billions of years.Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it? Where is it? Well, there's always a bit of a catch. Fusion is really, really hard to do. So the problem is, those two nuclei, they are both positively charged, so they don't want to fuse. They go like this. They go like that. So in order to make them fuse, you have to throw them at each other with great speed, and if they have enough speed, they will go against the repulsion, they will touch, and they will make energy. Now, the particle speed is a measure of the temperature. So the temperature required for fusion is 150 billion degrees C. This is rather warm, and this is why fusion is so hard to do.Now, I caught my little fusion bug when I did my Ph.D. here at the University of British Columbia, and then I got a big job in a laser printer place making printing for the printing industry. I worked there for 10 years, and I got a little bit bored, and then I was 40, and I got a mid-life crisis, you know, the usual thing: Who am I? What should I do? What should I do? What can I do? And then I was looking at my good work, and what I was doing is I was cutting the forests around here in B.C. and burying you, all of you, in millions of tons of junk mail. Now, that was not very satisfactory. So some people buy a Porsche. Others get a mistress. But I've decided to get my bit to solve global warming and make fusion happen.Now, so the first thing I did is I looked into the literature and I see, how does fusion work? So the physicists have been working on fusion for a while, and one of the ways they do it is with something called a tokamak. It's a big ring of magnetic coil, superconducting coil, and it makes a magnetic field in a ring like this, and the hot gas in the middle, which is called a plasma, is trapped. The particles go round and round and round the circle at the wall. Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there to try to cook that to fusion temperature. So this is the inside of one of those donuts, and on the right side you can see the fusion plasma in there.Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center.Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a curve of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the fabled Moore's Law that defined the amount of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we started. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big laser machine in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more fusion energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in  the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good.Now this is ITER, pronounced in French: EE-tairh. So this is a big collaboration of different countries that are building a huge magnetic donut in the south of France, and this machine, when it's finished, will produce 500 megawatts of fusion power with only 50 megawatts to make it. So this one is the real one. It's going to work. That's the kind of machine that makes energy.Now if you look at the graph, you will notice that those two dots are a little bit on the right of the curve. We kind of have fallen off the progress. Actually, the science to make those machines was really in time to produce fusion during that curve. However, there has been a bit of politics going on, and the will to do it was not there, so it drifted to the right. ITER, for example, could have been built in 2000 or 2005, but because it's a big international collaboration, the politics got in and it delayed it a bit. For example, it took them about three years to decide where to put it.Now, fusion is often criticized for being a little too expensive. Yes, it did cost a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year to make this progress. But you have to compare that to the cost of making Moore's Law. That cost way more than that. The result of Moore's Law is this cell phone here in my pocket. This cell phone, and the Internet behind it, cost about one trillion dollars, just so I can take a selfie and put it on Facebook. Then when my dad sees that, he'll be very proud. We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil and gas and renewable energy. Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion. So me, personally, I don't think it's too expensive. I think it's actually been shortchanged, considering it can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years.Now I can say that, but I'm a little bit biased, because I started a fusion company and I don't even have a Facebook account. So when I started this fusion company in 2002, I knew I couldn't fight with the big lads. They had much more resources than me. So I decided I would need to find a solution that is cheaper and faster.Now magnetic and laser fusion are pretty good machines. They are awesome pieces of technology, wonderful machines, and they have shown that fusion can be done. However, as a power plant, I don't think they're very good. They're way too big, way too complicated, way too expensive, and also, they don't deal very much with the fusion energy. When you make fusion, the energy comes out as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma. Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine. It damages it. And also, you have to catch the heat from those neutrons and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere, and on those machines, it was all a bit of an afterthought. So I decided that surely there is a better way of doing that.So back to the literature, and I read about the fusion everywhere. One way in particular attracted my attention, and it's called magnetized target fusion, or MTF for short. Now, in MTF, what you want to do is you take a big vat and you fill that with liquid metal, and you spin the liquid metal to open a vortex in the center, a bit like your sink. When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex. And then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside, and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma, and it compresses it, it gets hotter, like a laser, and then it makes fusion. So it's a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion. So those have a couple of very good advantages. The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall, and therefore there's no damage to the machine. The liquid metal gets hot, so you can pump that in a heat exchanger, make some steam, spin a turbine. So that's a very convenient way of doing this part of the process. And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam-powered pistons, which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils.Now, this was all very good except for the problem that it didn't quite work. (Laughter) There's always a catch. So when you compress that, the plasma cools down faster than the compression speed, so you're trying to compress it, but the plasma cooled down and cooled down and cooled down and then it did absolutely nothing.So when I saw that, I said, well, this is such a shame, because it's a very, very good idea. So hopefully I can improve on that. So I thought about it for a minute, and I said, okay, how can we make that work better? So then I thought about impact. What about if we use a big hammer and we swing it and we hit the nail like this, in the place of putting the hammer on the nail and pushing and try to put it in? That won't work. So what the idea is is to use the idea of an impact. So we accelerate the pistons with steam, that takes a little bit of time, but then, bang! you hit the piston, and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly, down instantly to the liquid, and that compresses the plasma much faster. So I decided, okay, this is good, let's make that.So we built this machine in this garage here. We made a small machine that we managed to squeeze a little bit of neutrons out of that, and those are my marketing neutrons, and with those marketing neutrons, then I raised about 50 million dollars, and I hired 65 people. That's my team here. And this is what we want to build. So it's going to be a big machine, about three meters in diameter, liquid lead spinning around, big vortex in the center, put the plasma on the top and on the bottom, piston hits on the side, bang!, it compresses it, and it will make some energy, and the neutron will come out in the liquid metal, going to go in a steam engine and make the turbine, and some of the steam will go back to fire the piston. We're going to run that about one time per second, and it will produce 100 megawatts of electricity.Okay, we also built this injector, so this injector makes the plasma to start with. It makes the plasma at about a lukewarm temperature of three million degrees C. Unfortunately, it doesn't last quite long enough, so we need to extend the life of the plasma a little bit, but last month it got a lot better, so I think we have the plasma compressing now. Then we built a small sphere, about this big, 14 pistons around it, and this will compress the liquid. However, plasma is difficult to compress. When you compress it, it tends to go a little bit crooked like that, so you need the timing of the piston to be very good, and for that we use several control systems, which was not possible in 1970, but we now can do that with nice, new electronics.So finally, most people think that fusion is in the future and will never happen, but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close. We are almost there. The big labs have shown that fusion is doable, and now there are small companies that are thinking about that, and they say, it's not that it cannot be done, but it's how to make it cost-effectively. General Fusion is one of those small companies, and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone, will crack that nut, and perhaps it will be General Fusion.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michel_laberge_how_synchronized_hammer_strikes_could_generate_nuclear_fusion
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"Scientific breakthrough, the kind that can potentially save lives, can sometimes be lying right out in the open for us to discover, in the evolved, accumulated body of human anecdote, for example, or in the time-tested adaptations that we observe in the natural world around us. Science starts with observation, but the trick is to identify the patterns and signatures that we might otherwise dismiss as myth or coincidence, isolate them, and test them with scientific rigor. And when we do, the results will often surprise.Western Australia has had a particular problem with shark attacks over the last three years, unfortunately and tragically culminating in five fatal shark attacks in a 10-month period during that time. But Western Australia is not alone in this. The incident of shark engagements on humans is escalating worldwide. And so it's not surprising, perhaps, that in July of this year, Shark Attack Mitigation Systems in collaboration with the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute made an announcement which captured the attention of the worldwide media and of ocean users worldwide, and that was around the development of technology to mitigate or reduce the risk of shark attack based on the science of what sharks can see. And I have for you today the story of that journey, but also the notion that science can be as powerful as a translator as it can be for invention.When we began this process, we were looking, it was about three years ago, and we'd just had the first two fatal shark attacks in Western Australia, and by chance, in a previous role, I happened to be having dinner with Harry Butler. Now Harry Butler, who most Australians would know is a famous naturalist, had spent a lot of time in the marine environment. Harry Butler is a precursor, if you like, to the late Steve Irwin. When I asked him about what the solution to the problem might be, the answer was quite surprising. He said, ""Take a black wetsuit, band it in yellow stripes like a bumblebee, and you'll be mimicking the warning systems of most marine species."" I didn't think about that much at the time, and it wasn't until the next three fatal shark attacks happened, and it caused me to think, maybe there's some merit to this idea. And I turned to the web to see if there might be some clues.And it turns out the web is awash with this sort of evidence that supports this sort of thinking. So biologically, there are plenty of species that display banding or patterns, warning patterns, to either be cryptical in the water or warn against being attacked, not the least of which is the pilot fish which spends a big slab of its life around the business end of a shark. On the human side, Walter Starck, an oceanographer, has been painting his wetsuit since the 1970s, and anthropologically, Pacific island tribes painted themselves in bands in a sea snake ceremony to ward off the shark god.So what's going on here? Is this an idea lying wide out in the open for us to consider and define? We know that sharks use a range of sensors when they engage, particularly for attack, but the sight sensor is the one that they use to identify the target, and particularly in the last number of meters before the attack. It makes sense to pay attention to the biological anecdote because that's time-tested evolution over many millennia. But isn't human anecdote also an evolution of sorts, the idea that there's a kernel of truth thought to be important, passed down from generation to generation, so that it actually ends up shaping human behavior?I wanted to test this idea. I wanted to put some science to this anecdotal evidence, because if science could support this concept, then we might have at least part of the solution to shark attack right under our very nose. To do that, I needed some experts in shark vision and shark neurology, and a worldwide search, again, led to the University of W.A. on the doorstep here, with the Oceans Institute. And professor Nathan Hart and his team had just written a paper which tells us, confirms that predatory sharks see in black and white, or grayscale. So I called up Nathan, a little bit sheepishly, actually, about this idea that maybe we could use these patterns and shapes to produce a wetsuit to try and mitigate the risk of shark attack, and fortunately, he thought that was a good idea. So what ensued is a collaborative bit of research supported by the West Australian State Government. And we did three key things. The first is that we mapped the characteristics, the physical characteristics of the eyes of the three main predatory sharks, so the great white, tiger and bull shark. We did that genetically and we did that anatomically. The next thing we did was to understand, using complex computer modeling, what that eye can see at different depths, distances, light conditions, and water clarity in the ocean. And from there, we were able to pinpoint two key characteristics: what patterns and shapes would present the wearer as hidden or hard to make out in the water, cryptic, and what patterns and shapes might provide the greatest contrast but provide the greatest breakup of profile so that that person wasn't confused for shark prey or shark food.The next thing we needed to do was to convert this into wetsuits that people might actually wear, and to that end, I invited Ray Smith, a surfer, industrial designer, wetsuit designer, and in fact the guy that designed the original Quiksilver logo, to come over and sit with the science team and interpret that science into aesthetic wetsuits that people might actually wear. And here's an example of one of the first drawings. So this is what I call a ""don't eat me"" wetsuit. So this takes that banding idea, takes that banding idea, it's highly visible, provides a highly disruptive profile, and is intended to prevent the shark from considering that you would be ordinary food, and potentially even create confusion for the shark. And this one's configured to go with a surfboard. You can see that dark, opaque panel on the front, and it's particularly better for the surface, where being backlit and providing a silhouette is problematic. Second iteration is the cryptic wetsuit, or the one which attempts to hide the wearer in the water column. There are three panels on this suit, and in any given conditions, one or more of those panels will match the reflective spectra of the water so as to disappear fully or partially, leaving the last panel or panels to create a disruptive profile in the water column. And this one's particularly well-suited to the dive configuration, so when you're deeper under the water.So we knew that we had some really solid science here. We knew, if you wanted to stand out, you needed to look stripy, and we knew if you wanted to be cryptic, you needed to look like this. But the acid test is always going to be, how would sharks really behave in the context of these patterns and shapes. And testing to simulate a person in a wetsuit in the water with a predatory shark in a natural environment is actually a lot harder than you might think. (Laughter)So we have to bait the rig, because we need to get the statistical number of samples through to get the scientific evidence, and by baiting the rig, we're obviously changing shark behavior. We can't put humans in the water. We're ethically precluded from even using humanoid shapes and baiting them up in the water. But nevertheless, we started the testing process in January of this year, initially with tiger sharks and subsequently with great white sharks. The way we did that was to get a perforated drum which is full of bait, wrap it in a neoprene skin, and then run two stereo underwater cameras to watch how the shark actually engages with that rig. And because we use stereo, we can capture all the statistics on how big the shark is, what angle it comes in at, how quickly it leaves, and what its behavior is in an empirical rather than a subjective way. Because we needed to preserve the scientific method, we ran a control rig which was a black neoprene rig just like a normal black wetsuit against the, what we call, SAMS technology rig. And the results were not just exciting, but very encouraging, and today I would like to just give you a snapshot of two of those engagements.So here we've got a four-meter tiger shark engaging the black control rig, which it had encountered about a minute and a half before. Now that exact same shark had engaged, or encountered this SAMS rig, which is the Elude SAMS rig, about eight minutes before, and spent six minutes circling it, hunting for it, looking for what it could smell and sense but not see, and this was the final engagement. Great white sharks are more confident than the tigers, and here you see great white shark engaging a control rig, so a black neoprene wetsuit, and going straight to the bottom, coming up and engaging. In contrast to the SAMS technology rig, this is the banded one, where it's more tactile, it's more investigative, it's more apprehensive, and shows a reluctance to come straight in and go. (Applause)So, it's important for us that all  the testing is done independently, and the University of W.A. is doing the testing. It'll be an ongoing process. It's subject to peer review and subject to publication. It's so important that this concept is led with the science. From the perspective of Shark  Attack Mitigation Systems, we're a biotechnology licensing company, so we don't make wetsuits ourselves. We'll license others to do that.But I thought you might be interested in seeing what SAMS technology looks like embedded in a wetsuit, and to that end, for the first time, live, worldwide — (Laughter) — I can show you what biological adaptation, science and design looks like in real life. So I can welcome Sam, the surfer, from this side. Where are you, Sam? (Applause) And Eduardo. (Applause) Cheers, mate. Cheers. Thanks, gentlemen. (Applause)So what have we done here? Well, to my mind, rather than take a blank sheet and use science as a tool for invention, we've paid attention to the biological evidence, we've put importance to the human anecdotal evidence, and we've used science as a tool for translation, translation of something that was already there into something that we can  use for the benefit of mankind. And it strikes me that this idea of science as a tool for translation rather than invention is one that we can apply much more widely than this in the pursuit of innovation. After all, did the Wright brothers discover manned flight, or did they observe the biological fact of flight and translate that mechanically, replicate it in a way that humans could use? As for the humble wetsuit, who knows what oceanwear will look like in two years' time, in five years' time or in 50 years' time, but with this new thinking, I'm guessing there's a fair chance it won't be pure black.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hamish_jolly_a_shark_deterrent_wetsuit_and_it_s_not_what_you_think
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"A computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression, but for the most part, that expression is confined to the screens of our laptops and mobile phones. And I'd like to tell you a story about bringing this power of the computer to move things around and interact with us off of the screen and into the physical world in which we live.A few years ago, I got a call from a luxury fashion store called Barneys New York, and the next thing I knew, I was designing storefront kinetic sculptures for their window displays.This one's called ""The Chase."" There are two pairs of shoes, a man's pair and a woman's pair, and they play out this slow, tense chase around the window in which the man scoots up behind the woman and gets in her personal space, and then she moves away. Each of the shoes has magnets in it, and there are magnets underneath the table that move the shoes around.My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music. The harp has four separate pendulums, and each pendulum has 11 strings, so the harp swings on its axis and also rotates in order to play different musical notes, and the harps are all networked together so that they can play the right notes at the right time in the music.I built an interactive chemistry exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and this exhibit lets people use physical objects to grab chemical elements off of the periodic table and bring them together to cause chemical reactions to happen. And the museum noticed that people were spending a lot of time with this exhibit, and a researcher from a science education center in Australia decided to study this exhibit and try to figure out what was going on. And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit, and were helping people learn in a social way.And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, that using specialized physical objects would help people use an interface more easily. I mean, our hands and our minds are optimized to think about and interact with tangible objects. Think about which you find easier to use, a physical keyboard or an onscreen keyboard like on a phone?But the thing that struck me about all of these different projects is that they really had to be built from scratch, down to the level of the electronics and the printed circuit boards and all the mechanisms all the way up to the software. I wanted to create something where we could move objects under computer control and create interactions around that idea without having to go through this process of building something from scratch every single time.So my first attempt at this was at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Hiroshi Ishii, and we built this array of 512 different electromagnets, and together they were able to move objects around on top of their surface. But the problem with this was that these magnets cost over 10,000 dollars. Although each one was pretty small, altogether they weighed so much that the table that they were on started to sag. So I wanted to build something where you could have this kind of interaction on any tabletop surface.So to explore this idea, I built an army of small robots, and each of these robots has what are called omni wheels. They're these special wheels that can move equally easily in all directions, and when you couple these robots with a video projector, you have these physical tools for interacting with digital information. So here's an example of what I mean. This is a video editing application where all of the controls for manipulating the video are physical. So if we want to tweak the color, we just enter the color mode, and then we get three different dials for tweaking the color, or if we want to adjust the audio, then we get two different dials for that, these physical objects. So here the left and right channel stay in sync, but if we want to, we can override that by grabbing both of them at the same time. So the idea is that we get the speed and efficiency benefits of using these physical dials together with the flexibility and versatility of a system that's designed in software.And this is a mapping application for disaster response. So you have these physical objects that represent police, fire and rescue, and a dispatcher can grab them and place them on the map to tell those units where to go, and then the position of the units on the map gets synced up with the position of those units in the real world.This is a video chat application. It's amazing how much emotion you can convey with just a few simple movements of a physical object.With this interface, we open up a huge array of possibilities in between traditional board games and arcade games, where the physical possibilities of interaction make so many different styles of play possible.But one of the areas that I'm most excited about using this platform for is applying it to problems that are difficult for computers or people to solve alone. One example of those is protein folding. So here we have an interface where we have physical handles onto a protein, and we can grab those handles and try to move the protein and try to fold it in different ways. And if we move it in a way that doesn't really make sense with the underlying molecular simulation, we get this physical feedback where we can actually feel these physical handles pulling back against us. So feeling what's going on inside a molecular simulation is a whole different level of interaction.So we're just beginning to explore what's possible when we use software to control the movement of objects in our environment. Maybe this is the computer of the future. There's no touchscreen. There's no technology visible at all. But when we want to have a video chat or play a game or lay out the slides to our next TED Talk, the objects on the table come alive.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_patten_the_best_computer_interface_maybe_your_hands
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"So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads.The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, ""Honey, I gotta ask you something. You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?""And I said, ""Yes, I did.""And she smacks her friend and she goes, ""See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie."" (Laughter)So that's who I am. And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole ""Eat, Pray, Love"" thing was a huge break for me. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored ""Eat, Pray, Love"" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be ""Eat, Pray, Love,"" and all of those people who had hated ""Eat, Pray, Love"" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure.So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost six years. So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, ""I'm not going to quit, I'm going home.""And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it.But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of ""Eat, Pray, Love,"" I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. She had failed constantly. I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. We had nothing in common. Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again?And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential.For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with ""Eat, Pray, Love,"" I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to ""Eat, Pray, Love."" And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_success_failure_and_the_drive_to_keep_creating
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"""Why?"" ""Why?"" is a question that parents ask me all the time. ""Why did my child develop autism?"" As a pediatrician, as a geneticist, as a researcher, we try and address that question.But autism is not a single condition. It's actually a spectrum of disorders, a spectrum that ranges, for instance, from Justin, a 13-year-old boy who's not verbal, who can't speak, who communicates by using an iPad to touch pictures to communicate his thoughts and his concerns, a little boy who, when he gets upset, will start rocking, and eventually, when he's disturbed enough, will bang his head to the point that he can actually cut it open and require stitches. That same diagnosis of autism, though, also applies to Gabriel, another 13-year-old boy who has quite a different set of challenges. He's actually quite remarkably gifted in mathematics. He can multiple three numbers by three numbers in his head with ease, yet when it comes to trying to have a conversation, he has great difficulty. He doesn't make eye contact. He has difficulty starting a conversation, feels awkward, and when he gets nervous, he actually shuts down. Yet both of these boys have the same diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.One of the things that concerns us is whether or not there really is an epidemic of autism. These days, one in 88 children will be diagnosed with autism, and the question is, why does this graph look this way? Has that number been increasing dramatically over time? Or is it because we have now started labeling individuals with autism, simply giving them a diagnosis when they were still present there before yet simply didn't have that label? And in fact, in the late 1980s, the early 1990s, legislation was passed that actually provided individuals with autism with resources, with access to educational materials that would help them. With that increased awareness, more parents, more pediatricians, more educators learned to recognize the features of autism. As a result of that, more individuals were diagnosed and got access to the resources they needed. In addition, we've changed our definition over time, so in fact we've widened the definition of autism, and that accounts for some of the increased prevalence that we see.The next question everyone wonders is, what caused autism? And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism. But let me be very clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. (Applause) In fact, the original research study that suggested that was the case was completely fraudulent. It was actually retracted from the journal Lancet, in which it was published, and that author, a physician, had his medical license taken away from him. (Applause) The Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. Furthermore, one of the ingredients in vaccines, something called thimerosal, was thought to be what the cause of autism was. That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992, and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism. So again, there is no evidence that this is the answer. So the question remains, what does cause autism?In fact, there's probably not one single answer. Just as autism is a spectrum, there's a spectrum of etiologies, a spectrum of causes. Based on epidemiological data, we know that one of the causes, or one of the associations, I should say, is advanced paternal age, that is, increasing age of the father at the time of conception. In addition, another vulnerable and critical period in terms of development is when the mother is pregnant. During that period, while the fetal brain is developing, we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism. In particular, there's a medication, valproic acid, which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take, we know can increase that risk of autism. In addition, there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism.And one of the things I'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism. I'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism, but it's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene. One of the genetic factors that we don't understand, however, is the difference that we see in terms of males and females. Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism, and we really don't understand what that cause is.One of the ways that we can understand that genetics is a factor is by looking at something called the concordance rate. In other words, if one sibling has autism, what's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism? And we can look in particular at three types of siblings: identical twins, twins that actually share 100 percent of their genetic information and shared the same intrauterine environment, versus fraternal twins, twins that actually share 50 percent of their genetic information, versus regular siblings, brother-sister, sister-sister, also sharing 50 percent of their genetic information, yet not sharing the same intrauterine environment. And when you look at those concordance ratios, one of the striking things that you will see is that in identical twins, that concordance rate is 77 percent. Remarkably, though, it's not 100 percent. It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism, but yet they account for a lot of that risk, because when you look at fraternal twins, that concordance rate is only 31 percent. On the other hand, there is a difference between those fraternal twins and the siblings, suggesting that there are common exposures for those fraternal twins that may not be shared as commonly with siblings alone.So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic. Well, how genetic is it? When we compare it to other conditions that we're familiar with, things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, in fact, genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions. But with this, that doesn't tell us what the genes are. It doesn't even tell us in any one child, is it one gene or potentially a combination of genes? And so in fact, in some individuals with autism, it is genetic! That is, that it is one single, powerful, deterministic gene that causes the autism. However, in other individuals, it's genetic, that is, that it's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism. We don't know in any one person, necessarily, which of those two answers it is until we start digging deeper.So the question becomes, how can we start to identify what exactly those genes are. And let me pose something that might not be intuitive. In certain individuals, they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family. And the reason is because in certain individuals, they can actually have genetic changes or mutations that are not passed down from the mother or from the father, but actually start brand new in them, mutations that are present in the egg or the sperm at the time of conception but have not been passed down generation through generation within the family. And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals. So in fact, at the Simons Foundation, we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism, and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases? To do that, we actually had to comprehensively be able to look at all that genetic information and determine what those differences were between the mother, the father and the child. In doing so, I apologize, I'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia, but I'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory, we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information. Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes, and when we did that, we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes, because in some cases with autism, there's actually a single volume that's missing. We had to get more granular than that, though, and so we had to start opening those books, and in some cases, the genetic change was more subtle. It might have been a single paragraph that was missing, or yet, even more subtle than that, a single letter, one out of three billion letters that was changed, that was altered, yet had profound effects in terms of how the brain functions and affects behavior. In doing this within these families, we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families. On the other hand, there's 75 percent that we still haven't figured out.As we did this, though, it was really quite humbling, because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism. In fact, the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism. And that explains, in part, why we see such a broad spectrum in terms of its effects. Although there are that many genes, there is some method to the madness. It's not simply random 200, 400 different genes, but in fact they fit together. They fit together in a pathway. They fit together in a network that's starting to make sense now in terms of how the brain functions. We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition. But early diagnosis is a key for us. Being able to make that diagnosis of someone who's susceptible at a time in a window where we have the ability to transform, to be able to impact that growing, developing brain is critical. And so folks like Ami Klin have developed methods to be able to take infants, small babies, and be able to use biomarkers, in this case eye contact and eye tracking, to identify an infant at risk. This particular infant, you can see, making very good eye contact with this woman as she's singing ""Itsy, Bitsy Spider,"" in fact is not going to develop autism. This baby we know is going to be in the clear. On the other hand, this other baby is going to go on to develop autism. In this particular child, you can see, it's not making good eye contact. Instead of the eyes focusing in and having that social connection, looking at the mouth, looking at the nose, looking off in another direction, but not again socially connecting, and being able to do this on a very large scale, screen infants, screen children for autism, through something very robust, very reliable, is going to be very helpful to us in terms of being able to intervene at an early stage when we can have the greatest impact.How are we going to intervene? It's probably going to be a combination of factors. In part, in some individuals, we're going to try and use medications. And so in fact, identifying the genes for autism is important for us to identify drug targets, to identify things that we might be able to impact and can be certain that that's really what we need to do in autism. But that's not going to be the only answer. Beyond just drugs, we're going to use educational strategies. Individuals with autism, some of them are wired a little bit differently. They learn in a different way. They absorb their surroundings in a different way, and we need to be able to educate them in a way that serves them best. Beyond that, there are a lot of individuals in this room who have great ideas in terms of new technologies we can use, everything from devices we can use to train the brain to be able to make it more efficient and to compensate for areas in which it has a little bit of trouble, to even things like Google Glass. You could imagine, for instance, Gabriel, with his social awkwardness, might be able to wear Google Glass with an earpiece in his ear, and have a coach be able to help him, be able to help think about conversations, conversation-starters, being able to even perhaps one day invite a girl out on a date.All of these new technologies just offer tremendous opportunities for us to be able to impact the individuals with autism, but yet we have a long way to go. As much as we know, there is so much more that we don't know, and so I invite all of you to be able to help us think about how to do this better, to use as a community our collective wisdom to be able to make a difference, and in particular, for the individuals in families with autism, I invite you to join the interactive autism network, to be part of the solution to this, because it's going to take really a lot of us to think about what's important, what's going to be a meaningful difference. As we think about something that's potentially a solution, how well does it work? Is it something that's really going to make a difference in your lives, as an individual, as a family with autism? We're going to need individuals of all ages, from the young to the old, and with all different shapes and sizes of the autism spectrum disorder to make sure that we can have an impact. So I invite all of you to join the mission and to help to be able to make the lives of individuals with autism so much better and so much richer. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_chung_autism_what_we_know_and_what_we_don_t_know_yet
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"The Olympic motto is ""Citius, Altius, Fortius."" Faster, Higher, Stronger. And athletes have fulfilled that motto rapidly. The winner of the 2012 Olympic marathon ran two hours and eight minutes. Had he been racing against the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon, he would have won by nearly an hour and a half. Now we all have this feeling that we're somehow just getting better as a human race, inexorably progressing, but it's not like we've evolved into a new species in a century. So what's going on here? I want to take a look at what's really behind this march of athletic progress.In 1936, Jesse Owens held the world record in the 100 meters. Had Jesse Owens been racing last year in the world championships of the 100 meters, when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt finished, Owens would have still had 14 feet to go. That's a lot in sprinter land. To give you a sense of how much it is, I want to share with you a demonstration conceived by sports scientist Ross Tucker. Now picture the stadium last year at the world championships of the 100 meters: thousands of fans waiting with baited breath to see Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history; flashbulbs popping as the nine fastest men in the world coil themselves into their blocks. And I want you to pretend that Jesse Owens is in that race. Now close your eyes for a second and picture the race. Bang! The gun goes off. An American sprinter jumps out to the front. Usain Bolt starts to catch him. Usain Bolt passes him, and as the runners come to the finish, you'll hear a beep as each man crosses the line. (Beeps) That's the entire finish of the race. You can open your eyes now. That first beep was Usain Bolt. That last beep was Jesse Owens. Listen to it again. (Beeps) When you think of it like that, it's not that big a difference, is it? And then consider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. Rather than blocks, Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from. Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens' joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn't have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride. Rather than the last beep, Owens would have been the second beep. Listen to it again. (Beeps) That's the difference track surface technology has made, and it's done it throughout the running world.Consider a longer event. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister became the first man to run under four minutes in the mile. Nowadays, college kids do that every year. On rare occasions, a high school kid does it. As of the end of last year, 1,314 men had run under four minutes in the mile, but like Jesse Owens, Sir Roger Bannister ran on soft cinders that stole far more energy from his legs than the synthetic tracks of today. So I consulted biomechanics experts to find out how much slower it is to run on cinders than synthetic tracks, and their consensus that it's one and a half percent slower. So if you apply a one and a half percent slowdown conversion to every man who ran his sub-four mile on a synthetic track, this is what happens. Only 530 are left. If you look at it from that perspective, fewer than ten new men per [year] have joined the sub-four mile club since Sir Roger Bannister. Now, 530 is a lot more than one, and that's partly because there are many more people training today and they're training more intelligently. Even college kids are professional in their training compared to Sir Roger Bannister, who trained for 45 minutes at a time while he ditched gynecology lectures in med school. And that guy who won the 1904 Olympic marathon in three in a half hours, that guy was drinking rat poison and brandy while he ran along the course. That was his idea of a performance-enhancing drug. (Laughter)Clearly, athletes have gotten more savvy about performance-enhancing drugs as well, and that's made a difference in some sports at some times, but technology has made a difference in all sports, from faster skis to lighter shoes. Take a look at the record for the 100-meter freestyle swim. The record is always trending downward, but it's punctuated by these steep cliffs. This first cliff, in 1956, is the introduction of the flip turn. Rather than stopping and turning around, athletes could somersault under the water and get going right away in the opposite direction. This second cliff, the introduction of gutters on the side of the pool that allows water to splash off, rather than becoming turbulence that impedes the swimmers as they race. This final cliff, the introduction of full-body and low-friction swimsuits.Throughout sports, technology has changed the face of performance. In 1972, Eddy Merckx set the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour at 30 miles, 3,774 feet. Now that record improved and improved as bicycles improved and became more aerodynamic all the way until 1996, when it was set at 35 miles, 1,531 feet, nearly five miles farther than Eddy Merckx cycled in 1972. But then in 2000, the International Cycling Union decreed that anyone who wanted to hold that record had to do so with essentially the same equipment that Eddy Merckx used in 1972. Where does the record stand today? 30 miles, 4,657 feet, a grand total of 883 feet farther than Eddy Merckx cycled more than four decades ago. Essentially the entire improvement in this record was due to technology.Still, technology isn't the only thing pushing athletes forward. While indeed we haven't evolved into a new species in a century, the gene pool within competitive sports most certainly has changed. In the early half of the 20th century, physical education instructors and coaches had the idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors: medium height, medium weight, no matter the sport. And this showed in athletes' bodies. In the 1920s, the average elite high-jumper and average elite shot-putter were the same exact size. But as that idea started to fade away, as sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type, you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches, a form of artificial selection took place, a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports, and athletes' bodies became more different from one another. Today, rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper, the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier. And this happened throughout the sports world.In fact, if you plot on a height versus mass graph one data point for each of two dozen sports in the first half of the 20th century, it looks like this. There's some dispersal, but it's kind of grouped around that average body type. Then that idea started to go away, and at the same time, digital technology — first radio, then television and the Internet — gave millions, or in some cases billions, of people a ticket to consume elite sports performance. The financial incentives and fame and glory afforded elite athletes skyrocketed, and it tipped toward the tiny upper echelon of performance. It accelerated the artificial selection for specialized bodies. And if you plot a data point for these same two dozen sports today, it looks like this. The athletes' bodies have gotten much more different from one another. And because this chart looks like the charts that show the expanding universe, with the galaxies flying away from one another, the scientists who discovered it call it ""The Big Bang of Body Types.""In sports where height is prized, like basketball, the tall athletes got taller. In 1983, the National Basketball Association signed a groundbreaking agreement making players partners in the league, entitled to shares of ticket revenues and television contracts. Suddenly, anybody who could be an NBA player wanted to be, and teams started scouring the globe for the bodies that could help them win championships. Almost overnight, the proportion of men in the NBA who are at least seven feet tall doubled to 10 percent. Today, one in 10 men in the NBA is at least seven feet tall, but a seven-foot-tall man is incredibly rare in the general population — so rare that if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40 who is at least seven feet tall, there's a 17 percent chance he's in the NBA right now. (Laughter) That is, find six honest seven footers, one is in the NBA right now. And that's not the only way that NBA players' bodies are unique. This is Leonardo da Vinci's ""Vitruvian Man,"" the ideal proportions, with arm span equal to height. My arm span is exactly equal to my height. Yours is probably very nearly so. But not the average NBA player. The average NBA player is a shade under 6'7"", with arms that are seven feet long. Not only are NBA players ridiculously tall, they are ludicrously long. Had Leonardo wanted to draw the Vitruvian NBA Player, he would have needed a rectangle and an ellipse, not a circle and a square.So in sports where large size is prized, the large athletes have gotten larger. Conversely, in sports where diminutive stature is an advantage, the small athletes got smaller. The average elite female gymnast shrunk from 5'3"" to 4'9"" on average over the last 30 years, all the better for their power-to-weight ratio and for spinning in the air. And while the large got larger and the small got smaller, the weird got weirder. The average length of the forearm of a water polo player in relation to their total arm got longer, all the better for a forceful throwing whip. And as the large got larger, small got smaller, and the weird weirder. In swimming, the ideal body type is a long torso and short legs. It's like the long hull of a canoe for speed over the water. And the opposite is advantageous in running. You want long legs and a short torso. And this shows in athletes' bodies today. Here you see Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer in history, standing next to Hicham El Guerrouj, the world record holder in the mile. These men are seven inches different in height, but because of the body types advantaged in their sports, they wear the same length pants. Seven inches difference in height, these men have the same length legs.Now in some cases, the search for bodies that could push athletic performance forward ended up introducing into the competitive world populations of people that weren't previously competing at all, like Kenyan distance runners. We think of Kenyans as being great marathoners. Kenyans think of the Kalenjin tribe as being great marathoners. The Kalenjin make up just 12 percent of the Kenyan population but the vast majority of elite runners. And they happen, on average, to have a certain unique physiology: legs that are very long and very thin at their extremity, and this is because they have their ancestry at very low latitude in a very hot and dry climate, and an evolutionary adaptation to that is limbs that are very long and very thin at the extremity for cooling purposes. It's the same reason that a radiator has long coils, to increase surface area compared to volume to let heat out, and because the leg is like a pendulum, the longer and thinner it is at the extremity, the more energy-efficient it is to swing. To put Kalenjin running success in perspective, consider that 17 American men in history have run faster than two hours and 10 minutes in the marathon. That's a four-minute-and-58-second-per-mile pace. Thirty-two Kalenjin men did that last October. (Laughter) That's from a source population the size of metropolitan Atlanta.Still, even changing technology and the changing gene pool in sports don't account for all of the changes in performance. Athletes have a different mindset than they once did. Have you ever seen in a movie when someone gets an electrical shock and they're thrown across a room? There's no explosion there. What's happening when that happens is that the electrical impulse is causing all their muscle fibers to twitch at once, and they're throwing themselves across the room. They're essentially jumping. That's the power that's contained in the human body. But normally we can't access nearly all of it. Our brain acts as a limiter, preventing us from accessing all of our physical resources, because we might hurt ourselves, tearing tendons or ligaments. But the more we learn about how that limiter functions, the more we learn how we can push it back just a bit, in some cases by convincing the brain that the body won't be in mortal danger by pushing harder. Endurance and ultra-endurance sports serve as a great example. Ultra-endurance was once thought to be harmful to human health, but now we realize that we have all these traits that are perfect for ultra-endurance: no body fur and a glut of sweat glands that keep us cool while running; narrow waists and long legs compared to our frames; large surface area of joints for shock absorption. We have an arch in our foot that acts like a spring, short toes that are better for pushing off than for grasping tree limbs, and when we run, we can turn our torso and our shoulders like this while keeping our heads straight. Our primate cousins can't do that. They have to run like this. And we have big old butt muscles that keep us upright while running. Have you ever looked at an ape's butt? They have no buns because they don't run upright. And as athletes have realized that we're perfectly suited for ultra-endurance, they've taken on feats that would have been unthinkable before, athletes like Spanish endurance racer Kílian Jornet. Here's Kílian running up the Matterhorn. (Laughter) With a sweatshirt there tied around his waist. It's so steep he can't even run here. He's pulling up on a rope. This is a vertical ascent of more than 8,000 feet, and Kílian went up and down in under three hours. Amazing. And talented though he is, Kílian is not a physiological freak. Now that he has done this, other athletes will follow, just as other athletes followed after Sir Roger Bannister ran under four minutes in the mile.Changing technology, changing genes, and a changing mindset. Innovation in sports, whether that's new track surfaces or new swimming techniques, the democratization of sport, the spread to new bodies and to new populations around the world, and imagination in sport, an understanding of what the human body is truly capable of, have conspired to make athletes stronger, faster, bolder, and better than ever.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_getting_faster_better_stronger
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"There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable.Knowing this, with my young family, we moved to Kenya. We secured equipment, funds, vehicles, we trained a team, we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question: why are people going blind, and what can we do?The challenges were great. When we got to where we were going, we set up our high-tech equipment. Power was rarely available. We'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators. And then something occurred to me: There has to be an easier way, because it's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it.More people in Kenya, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water. So we said, could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way? And so we developed Peek, a smartphone [system] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere. We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment, which is bulky, expensive and fragile, with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age. Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker.We've got many trials going on in the community and in schools, and through the lessons that we've learned in the field, we've realized it's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we're examining and what that means to them. So here, for example, we use our sight sim application, once your vision has been measured, to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person, so they can empathize with them and help them.Once we've discovered somebody has low vision, the next big challenge is to work out why, and to be able to do that, we need to have access to the inside of the eye. Traditionally, this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina. The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health. We've developed 3D-printed, low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce, which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality. And the beauty is, anybody can do it. In our trials on over two and half thousand people, the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport.When we first moved to Kenya, we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment, a team of 15 people, and that was what was needed to deliver health care. Now, all that's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone. And it costs just 500 dollars. The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar. Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up. Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come. We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive, high-tech, accurate examination, which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training. We can link global experts with people in the most rural, difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road, effectively putting those experts in their homes, allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment.Project managers, hospital directors, are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in. Here in Nakuru, where I've been living, we can search for people by whatever condition. Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract. Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable, and they're locatable. We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we're coming to arrange a treatment.What's more, we've learned that this is something that we haven't built just for the community but with the community. Those blue pins that drop represent elders, or local leaders, that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment.So for patients like Mama Wangari, who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren, for less than 40 dollars, we can restore her eyesight. This is something that has to happen. It's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions. The reality is everyone goes blind on their own. But now, they might just be a text message away from help.(Applause)And now because live demos are always a bad idea, we're going to try a live demo.(Laughter)So here we have the Peek Vision app. Okay, and what we're looking at here, this is Sam's optic nerve, which is a direct extension of her brain, so I'm actually looking at her brain as we look there. We can see all parts of the retina. It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. But now we can.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_bastawrous_get_your_next_eye_exam_on_a_smartphone
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"We live in a very complex environment: complexity and dynamism and patterns of evidence from satellite photographs, from videos. You can even see it outside your window. It's endlessly complex, but somehow familiar, but the patterns kind of repeat, but they never repeat exactly. It's a huge challenge to understand. The patterns that you see are there at all of the different scales, but you can't chop it into one little bit and say, ""Oh, well let me just make a smaller climate."" I can't use the normal products of reductionism to get a smaller and smaller thing that I can study in a laboratory and say, ""Oh, now that's something I now understand."" It's the whole or it's nothing.The different scales that give you these kinds of patterns range over an enormous range of magnitude, roughly 14 orders of magnitude, from the small microscopic particles that seed clouds to the size of the planet itself, from 10 to the minus six to 10 to the eight, 14 orders of spatial magnitude. In time, from milliseconds to millennia, again around 14 orders of magnitude.What does that mean? Okay, well if you think about how you can calculate these things, you can take what you can see, okay, I'm going to chop it up into lots of little boxes, and that's the result of physics, right? And if I think about a weather model, that spans about five orders of magnitude, from the planet to a few kilometers, and the time scale from a few minutes to 10 days, maybe a month. We're interested in more than that. We're interested in the climate. That's years, that's millennia, and we need to go to even smaller scales. The stuff that we can't resolve, the sub-scale processes, we need to approximate in some way. That is a huge challenge. Climate models in the 1990s took an even smaller chunk of that, only about three orders of magnitude. Climate models in the 2010s, kind of what we're working with now, four orders of magnitude. We have 14 to go, and we're increasing our capability of simulating those at about one extra order of magnitude every decade. One extra order of magnitude in space is 10,000 times more calculations. And we keep adding more things, more questions to these different models.So what does a climate model look like? This is an old climate model, admittedly, a punch card, a single line of Fortran code. We no longer use punch cards. We do still use Fortran. New-fangled ideas like C really haven't had a big impact on the climate modeling community.But how do we go about doing it? How do we go from that complexity that you saw to a line of code? We do it one piece at a time. This is a picture of sea ice taken flying over the Arctic. We can look at all of the different equations that go into making the ice grow or melt or change shape. We can look at the fluxes. We can look at the rate at which snow turns to ice, and we can code that. We can encapsulate that in code. These models are around a million lines of code at this point, and growing by tens of thousands of lines of code every year.So you can look at that piece, but you can look at the other pieces too. What happens when you have clouds? What happens when clouds form, when they dissipate, when they rain out? That's another piece. What happens when we have radiation coming from the sun, going through the atmosphere, being absorbed and reflected? We can code each of those very small pieces as well. There are other pieces: the winds changing the ocean currents. We can talk about the role of vegetation in transporting water from the soils back into the atmosphere. And each of these different elements we can encapsulate and put into a system. Each of those pieces ends up adding to the whole.And you get something like this. You get a beautiful representation of what's going on in the climate system, where each and every one of those emergent patterns that you can see, the swirls in the Southern Ocean, the tropical cyclone in the Gulf of Mexico, and there's two more that are going to pop up in the Pacific at any point now, those rivers of atmospheric water, all of those are emergent properties that come from the interactions of all of those small-scale processes I mentioned. There's no code that says, ""Do a wiggle in the Southern Ocean."" There's no code that says, ""Have two tropical cyclones that spin around each other."" All of those things are emergent properties.This is all very good. This is all great. But what we really want to know is what happens to these emergent properties when we kick the system? When something changes, what happens to those properties? And there's lots of different ways to kick the system. There are wobbles in the Earth's orbit over hundreds of thousands of years that change the climate. There are changes in the solar cycles, every 11 years and longer, that change the climate. Big volcanoes go off and change the climate. Changes in biomass burning, in smoke, in aerosol particles, all of those things change the climate. The ozone hole changed the climate. Deforestation changes the climate by changing the surface properties and how water is evaporated and moved around in the system. Contrails change the climate by creating clouds where there were none before, and of course greenhouse gases change the system.Each of these different kicks provides us with a target to evaluate whether we understand something about this system. So we can go to look at what model skill is. Now I use the word ""skill"" advisedly: Models are not right or wrong; they're always wrong. They're always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells you more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it's skillful. This is the impact of the ozone hole on sea level pressure, so low pressure, high pressures, around the southern oceans, around Antarctica. This is observed data. This is modeled data. There's a good match because we understand the physics that controls the temperatures in the stratosphere and what that does to the winds around the southern oceans.We can look at other examples. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 put an enormous amount of aerosols, small particles, into the stratosphere. That changed the radiation balance of the whole planet. There was less energy coming in than there was before, so that cooled the planet, and those red lines and those green lines, those are the differences between what we expected and what actually happened. The models are skillful, not just in the global mean, but also in the regional patterns.I could go through a dozen more examples: the skill associated with solar cycles, changing the ozone in the stratosphere; the skill associated with orbital changes over 6,000 years. We can look at that too, and the models are skillful. The models are skillful in response to the ice sheets 20,000 years ago. The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades. Models are successful at modeling lake outbursts into the North Atlantic 8,000 years ago. And we can get a good match to the data.Each of these different targets, each of these different evaluations, leads us to add more scope to these models, and leads us to more and more complex situations that we can ask more and more interesting questions, like, how does dust from the Sahara, that you can see in the orange, interact with tropical cyclones in the Atlantic? How do organic aerosols from biomass burning, which you can see in the red dots, intersect with clouds and rainfall patterns? How does pollution, which you can see in the white wisps of sulfate pollution in Europe, how does that affect the temperatures at the surface and the sunlight that you get at the surface?We can look at this across the world. We can look at the pollution from China. We can look at the impacts of storms on sea salt particles in the atmosphere. We can see the combination of all of these different things happening all at once, and we can ask much more interesting questions. How do air pollution and climate coexist? Can we change things that affect air pollution and climate at the same time? The answer is yes.So this is a history of the 20th century. The first one is the model. The weather is a little bit different to what actually happened. The second one are the observations. And we're going through the 1930s. There's variability, there are things going on, but it's all kind of in the noise. As you get towards the 1970s, things are going to start to change. They're going to start to look more similar, and by the time you get to the 2000s, you're already seeing the patterns of global warming, both in the observations and in the model.We know what happened over the 20th century. Right? We know that it's gotten warmer. We know where it's gotten warmer. And if you ask the models why did that happen, and you say, okay, well, yes, basically it's because of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We have a very good match up until the present day.But there's one key reason why we look at models, and that's because of this phrase here. Because if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, But unfortunately, observations of the future are not available at this time.So when we go out into the future, there's a difference. The future is unknown, the future is uncertain, and there are choices. Here are the choices that we have. We can do some work to mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's the top one. We can do more work to really bring it down so that by the end of the century, it's not much more than there is now. Or we can just leave it to fate and continue on with a business-as-usual type of attitude. The differences between these choices can't be answered by looking at models.There's a great phrase that Sherwood Rowland, who won the Nobel Prize for the chemistry that led to ozone depletion, when he was accepting his Nobel Prize, he asked this question: ""What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?"" The models are skillful, but what we do with the information from those models is totally up to you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gavin_schmidt_the_emergent_patterns_of_climate_change
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"First of all, for those of you who are not familiar with my work, I create multicultural characters, so characters from lots of different backgrounds. So before the present is the new future, a bit about the past is that I grew up in a family that was multi-everything — multi-racial, multi-cultural, black and white, Caribbean, Irish-American, German-American. There was Dominican music blasting from stereos. There were Christians and Jews. That's a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt and shame. But I was totally immersed in this world that was filled with everybody, and then I went on to the United Nations school, and that just completely —So I began sort of developing these voices and these people, all of whom were loosely based on people I really know, and so, for example, in performing them, I would really try to inhabit them. And for example, I don't really talk like that, but that was one of my people, and I'm going to bring a few of my friends — I think of them as my friends — to this stage, in this spirit of the idea that the present is the new future, in sort of a meta way, because I thought about it, and the future, for me, what can be so frightening is that I don't know what's coming. I don't know if that's true for other people, but that notion of thinking about how we can understand the future and predict outcomes, for me, it's terrifying to not know what might be coming. And so the idea that there are questions that I've never seen that my people are going to answer, and some of these characters have been with me for ages, some of them don't even have names, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's coming, and all I can do is remind myself that I told Chris I'd fly by the seat of my pants, and now that I'm up here it sort of feels like that dream where you don't have any pants on, and so I suppose I'm going to be flying by the seat of my ass.That said, let's just see who comes out. May we have the first question:""Do you ever get headaches from the microchips implanted in your brain?"" Right.Okay. Well first of all, I'll just say that I hope you can hear me okay. My name is Lorraine Levine, and the idea of microchips implanted in my brain, frankly, just putting on my glasses reminds me of thank God I'm not wearing the Google Glasses. No offense to them. I'm glad that you all enjoy them, but at my age, just putting on the regular ones I have already gives me too much information. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I don't need to know more. I don't want to know. That's it. That's enough. I love you all. You're wonderful. It's fabulous to be here with such big machers again this year. Mwah!Okay, next question. (Applause) Next, please.""Is dating boring, now that humans reproduce asexually?""Who do we got?Hi, um, okay, hi everybody. My name is Nereida. I just want to say first of all that dating is never boring under any circumstance. But I am very excited to be here right now, so I am just trying to remind myself that, you know, like, the purpose of being here and everything, I mean, trying to answer these questions, it is very exciting. But I also, I just need to acknowledge that TED is an incredible experience right now in the present, like, I just need to say, like, Isabel Allende. Isabel Allende! Okay, maybe it doesn't mean, of course it means something to you, but to me, it's like, another level, okay? Because I'm Latina and I really appreciate the fact that there are role models here that I can really, I don't know, I just need to say that. That's incredible to me, and sometimes when I'm nervous and everything like that, I just need to, like, say some affirmations that can help me. I usually just try to use, like, the three little words that always make me feel better: Sotomayor, Sotomayor, Sotomayor. (Laughter) Just, it really helps me to get grounded. Now I can use Allende, Allende, Allende, and, you know, I just need to say it, like, it's so incredible to be here, and I knew that we were going to have these questions. I was so nervous and I was thinking just, like, oh my God, oh my God, and reminding me, because I've had, like, some very, especially since the last time we were here at TED, it was, like, unbelievable, and then right after that, like, so many crazy things happened, like, we ended up going to the White House to perform. That was, like, amazing, and I'm standing there, and I was just like, please don't say, ""Oh my God."" Don't say, ""Oh my God."" And I just kept saying it: ""Oh my God. Oh my God."" And, you know, I kept thinking to myself, like, President Obama has to come up here at the same podium, and I'm standing here saying, ""Oh my God."" It's like, the separation of church and state. It's just, I couldn't, like, I couldn't process. It was really too much. So I think I've lost my way. But what I wanted to say is that dating, for me, you know, as far as I'm concerned, however you reproduce, as long as you're enjoying yourself and it's with another consenting asexual — I don't know. You know where I'm going with that. Okay, ciao, gracias.Okay, next question. (Applause)What are your top five favorite songs right now?All right, well first of all, I'mma say, you know what I'm saying, I'm the only dude up here right now. My name is Rashid, and I never been at TED before, you know what I'm saying. I think, Sarah Jones, maybe she didn't want me to come out last time. I don't know why. You know what I'm saying. Obviously I would be like a perfect fit for TED. You know what I'm saying. First of all, that I'm in hip hop, you know what I'm saying. I know some of y'all may be not really as much into the music, but the first way y'all can always know, you know what I'm saying, that I'm in hip hop, is 'cos I hold the microphone in an official emcee posture. Y'all can see that right there. That's how you hold it. All right, so you get your little tutorial right there. But when Sarah Jones told me we was gonna come up here, I was like, betch, you know what I'm saying, TED is real fly, I got a whole lot of dope, you know what I'm saying, shit going on and everything, but she was like, yeah, we're going to have to answer, like, some random questions, just like, and I was like, what the hell is that? You know what I'm saying, just stand up there and answer some random questions? I don't want to, I mean, it's like an intellectual stop-and-frisk. You know what I'm saying? (Laughter) I don't want to be standing up there just all getting interrogated and whatnot. That's what I'm trying to leave behind in New York. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, I would have to say my top five songs right now is all out of my own personal catalogue, you know what I mean? So if you want to know more about that, you know what I'm saying, we could talk about the anti-piracy and all that, but as far as I'm concerned, you know, I believe in creative commons, and I think it's really important that, you know, that needs to be sustainable and everything, and I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, this right here, this environment, I would like to sustain. You know what I mean? But I'm just saying, if y'all are interested in the top five songs, you need to holler at me. You know what I'm saying? Aight? In the future or the present. Yeah. Enjoy the rest of it.Okay, next question.What do you got?""How many of your organs have been 3D printed?"" (Laughter)Well I have to say that I don't know about how many of my organs have been 3-D printed as such, but I can tell you that it is so challenging to me, kind of thinking about this concept of the future and that, you know, all around the world parents are kind of telling their small children, please, you have to eat that, you know, I have slaved over a hot 3D printer all day so that you can have this meal. You know, that kind of thing. And of course now that we have changed, you know, from the global South, there is this total kind of perspective shift that is happening around the — You can't just say to them, well, there are starving children. Well, it is the future. Nobody is starving anymore, thank God. But as you can tell I have kind of that optimism, and I do hope that we can continue to kind of 3D print, well, let us just say I like to think that even in the future we will have the publication, kind of, you know, all the food that's fit to print. But everybody, please do enjoy that, and again, I think that you do throw a cracking good party here at TED. Thank you.Next question. (Applause)What has changed? Okay, it's like, I have to think about that. ""What has changed now that women run the world?"" First of all, I really, like, I just want to say, and my name is Bella, I just want to, like, identify myself, that, like, as a feminist, I, like, I really find that, like, because I was born in the '90s, and, like, there were a lot of women who were as far as feminism was concerned, like, maybe they didn't understand that, like, a feminist like me, like, I don't think it's required that you have to have a certain kind of voice, or, like, a certain way of presenting yourself to be feminist, because I think that, like, feminism can be really hot, and I think actually that it's really vital and important. Like, the quotation I'm wearing is from, like, Gloria Steinem, and, like, I'm named Bella for, like, Bella Abzug, who's, like, obviously, like, a really important feminist from, like, history, and like, I just think that those women, like, really represent, like, that you can, like, be vital and, like, amazing, like, a-mazing, and you don't have to wear, like, an Eileen Fisher caftan, just to, like, prove that you are a feminist. Like, not that there's anything wrong with that, but my mom, she's like, like, why do you have to wear pants that, like, objectify your body? I like my pants. Like, I like my voice. Like, she's like, why do you have to talk like — Talk like what? Like, I'm expressing myself, and I think that we have to, like, reach out, like, not only across, like, the different generations of feminists, but also across the, like, vocal ranges, so that, like, we, because otherwise it's just, like, restriculous within feminism, which is just, like, a word that I created that means, like, so strict it's ridiculous. So that's my feeling about that. You guys are a-mazing, by the way.Okay. Next question. (Applause)[""They've discovered a cure for cancer, but not baldness? What's up with that?""]Yeah, you know what, so my name is Joseph Mancuso. First of all, I just want to say that I appreciate that TED in general has been a pretty orderly crowd, a pretty orderly group. And, you know, I just have to say, the whole thing with baldness, and, you know, here's the thing. As long as the woman, in my case — because it's a modern world, do whatever you want to do, I don't have any problem with anybody, enjoy yourself, LGBTQLMNOP. All right? But as far as I'm concerned, attractiveness, women don't really care as much as you think they do about the, you know. I mean, I remember hearing this woman. She loved her husband, it was the sweetest thing. It's a pretty young girl, you know? And this guy's older. And, you know, she said she would love him even if he had snow on the roof or even if melted and disappeared altogether. As far as I'm concerned, it's about the love. Am I right, or am I right? So that's it. That's it. That's it. I don't got nothing more to say. Keep your noses clean.All right, next question.""Have you ever tasted meat that's not lab grown?""Um, well, I, I want to start by saying that this is a very difficult experience for a Chinese-American. I don't know what to call myself now, because I have really my Chinese identity, but my kids, they are American-Chinese, but it's difficult to try to express myself in front of audience of people like this. But if had to give my opinion about meat, I think first, the most important thing is to say that we don't have to have perfect food, but maybe it can also not be poison. Maybe we can have some middle ground for that. But I will continue to consider this idea, and I will report back maybe next year.Next. Next. Next. (Applause)""Will there ever be a post-racial world?""Thank you for having me. My name is Gary Weaselhead. Enjoy that. I'm a member of the Blackfeet Nation. I'm also half Lakota, but that is my given name, and no, even though it would have seemed like an obvious choice, no, I did not go into politics. Tough crowd. (Laughter) But I always like to just let people know when they ask about race or those kinds of things, you know, as a member of the First Nations community, you know, I'm probably not your typical guy. For example, in addition to being an activist, I'm also a professional stand-up comedian. (Laughter) And, you know, I'm most popular on college and university campuses. You know, whenever they want to do a diversity day, or hey-we're-not-all-white week, then I'm there. (Laughter) Do I think there will ever be a post-racial world? I think, really, I can't talk about race without remembering that it is a construct in certain respects, but also that, you know, until we redress the wrongs of the past, we're going to be turned around. I don't care if the present is the new future. I think there's a lot of great people here at TED who are working to address that, so with that, if anything I've said today makes you feel uncomfortable, you're welcome. (Applause)I think we have time for one more.""What's the most popular diet these days?""Who's here?Okay, well, I'm just gonna answer this really fast, as, like, three or four different people. I mean really fast. I'm just gonna let y'all know that, as far as diet is concerned, if you don't love yourself inside, there is no diet on this Earth that is going to make your behind small enough for you to feel good, so just stop wasting your time.I would just like to say as an African woman that I believe the diet that we need is really to remove the crazy belief that there is anything wrong with a nice backside. No, I am teasing about that. There is nothing wrong with a woman of size. That is what I am trying to say. Women, celebrate your body, for God's sake. Stop running around starving. You are making yourselves and other people miserable.Last answer.So we're talking about what's the most popular diet? I'm gonna start off by telling y'all that this is my first time here at TED. I might not be your typical person you find on this stage. My dental work not as nice as some people. But I made Sarah Jones promise she gonna bring me this time, 'cause she didn't bring me before, but you know, I just want to say, there's a lot of things more important than counting calories, and as somebody living on the streets in New York, and getting to come here, hear y'all ideas worth spreading, I want to tell y'all I believe in this idea that the present is the new future, that where you sit, you create everything that's gonna come, for better or worse. And for me, I think homeless is the wrong word for it anyway. You know, I might not have me no place to lay my head at night, but that just makes me houseless. I have me a home. You do too. Find it and try to find yourself in there. Make sure you know, it's not just about virtual reality in space. That's wonderful, but it's also about the actual reality here on Earth. How are people living today? How can you be part of the solution? Thank y'all for thinking about that right now in the present moment to influence the future. I appreciate it. Bye-bye.(Applause)Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for trusting me, Chris.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jones_what_does_the_future_hold_11_characters_offer_quirky_answers
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"So it's 2006. My friend Harold Ford calls me. He's running for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and he says, ""Mellody, I desperately need some national press. Do you have any ideas?"" So I had an idea. I called a friend who was in New York at one of the most successful media companies in the world, and she said, ""Why don't we host an editorial board lunch for Harold? You come with him.""Harold and I arrive in New York. We are in our best suits. We look like shiny new pennies. And we get to the receptionist, and we say, ""We're here for the lunch."" She motions for us to follow her. We walk through a series of corridors, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a stark room, at which point she looks at us and she says, ""Where are your uniforms?""Just as this happens, my friend rushes in. The blood drains from her face. There are literally no words, right? And I look at her, and I say, ""Now, don't you think we need more than one black person in the U.S. Senate?""Now Harold and I — (Applause) — we still laugh about that story, and in many ways, the moment caught me off guard, but deep, deep down inside, I actually wasn't surprised. And I wasn't surprised because of something my mother taught me about 30 years before. You see, my mother was ruthlessly realistic. I remember one day coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited, and instead of asking me the normal motherly questions like, ""Did you have fun?"" or ""How was the cake?"" my mother looked at me and she said, ""How did they treat you?"" I was seven. I did not understand. I mean, why would anyone treat me differently? But she knew. And she looked me right in the eye and she said, ""They will not always treat you well.""Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail. There is shock, followed by a long silence. And even coming here today, I told some friends and colleagues that I planned to talk about race, and they warned me, they told me, don't do it, that there'd be huge risks in me talking about this topic, that people might think I'm a militant black woman and I would ruin my career. And I have to tell you, I actually for a moment was a bit afraid. Then I realized, the first step to solving any problem is to not hide from it, and the first step to any form of action is awareness. And so I decided to actually talk about race. And I decided that if I came here and shared with you some of my experiences, that maybe we could all be a little less anxious and a little more bold in our conversations about race.Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie. And here, there are significant, quantifiable racial disparities that cannot be ignored, in household wealth, household income, job opportunities, healthcare. One example from corporate America: Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population, they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats. Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today, thousands, only two are chaired by black women, and you're looking at one of them, the same one who, not too long ago, was nearly mistaken for kitchen help. So that is a fact. Now I have this thought experiment that I play with myself, when I say, imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation, like ExxonMobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black, you would think that were weird. But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that's weird too?And I know how we got here. (Applause)I know how we got here. You know, there was institutionalized, at one time legalized, discrimination in our country. There's no question about it. But still, as I grapple with this issue, my mother's question hangs in the air for me: How did they treat you?Now, I do not raise this issue to complain or in any way to elicit any kind of sympathy. I have succeeded in my life beyond my wildest expectations, and I have been treated well by people of all races more often than I have not. I tell the uniform story because it happened. I cite those statistics around corporate board diversity because they are real, and I stand here today talking about this issue of racial discrimination because I believe it threatens to rob another generation of all the opportunities that all of us want for all of our children, no matter what their color or where they come from. And I think it also threatens to hold back businesses. You see, researchers have coined this term ""color blindness"" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem. There was a corporate study that said that, instead of avoiding race, the really smart corporations actually deal with it head on. They actually recognize that embracing diversity means recognizing all races, including the majority one. But I'll be the first one to tell you, this subject matter can be hard, awkward, uncomfortable — but that's kind of the point.In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach. And one day my coach had me do a drill where I had to swim to one end of a 25-meter pool without taking a breath. And every single time I failed, I had to start over. And I failed a lot. By the end, I got it, but when I got out of the pool, I was exasperated and tired and annoyed, and I said, ""Why are we doing breath-holding exercises?"" And my coach looked me at me, and he said, ""Mellody, that was not a breath-holding exercise. That drill was to make you comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's how most of us spend our days."" If we can learn to deal with our discomfort, and just relax into it, we'll have a better life.So I think it's time for us to be comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation about race: black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, all of us, if we truly believe in equal rights and equal opportunity in America, I think we have to have real conversations about this issue. We cannot afford to be color blind. We have to be color brave. We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity.Now, my favorite example of color bravery is a guy named John Skipper. He runs ESPN. He's a North Carolina native, quintessential Southern gentleman, white. He joined ESPN, which already had a culture of inclusion and diversity, but he took it up a notch. He demanded that every open position have a diverse slate of candidates. Now he says the senior people in the beginning bristled, and they would come to him and say, ""Do you want me to hire the minority, or do you want me to hire the best person for the job?"" And Skipper says his answers were always the same: ""Yes."" And by saying yes to diversity, I honestly believe that ESPN is the most valuable cable franchise in the world. I think that's a part of the secret sauce.Now I can tell you, in my own industry, at Ariel Investments, we actually view our diversity as a competitive advantage, and that advantage can extend way beyond business. There's a guy named Scott Page at the University of Michigan. He is the first person to develop a mathematical calculation for diversity. He says, if you're trying to solve a really hard problem, really hard, that you should have a diverse group of people, including those with diverse intellects. The example that he gives is the smallpox epidemic. When it was ravaging Europe, they brought together all these scientists, and they were stumped. And the beginnings of the cure to the disease came from the most unlikely source, a dairy farmer who noticed that the milkmaids were not getting smallpox. And the smallpox vaccination is bovine-based because of that dairy farmer.Now I'm sure you're sitting here and you're saying, I don't run a cable company, I don't run an investment firm, I am not a dairy farmer. What can I do? And I'm telling you, you can be color brave. If you're part of a hiring process or an admissions process, you can be color brave. If you are trying to solve a really hard problem, you can speak up and be color brave. Now I know people will say, but that doesn't add up to a lot, but I'm actually asking you to do something really simple: observe your environment, at work, at school, at home. I'm asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally. Invite people into your life who don't look like you, don't think like you, don't act like you, don't come from where you come from, and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions and make you grow as a person. You might get powerful new insights from these individuals, or, like my husband, who happens to be white, you might learn that black people, men, women, children, we use body lotion every single day.Now, I also think that this is very important so that the next generation really understands that this progress will help them, because they're expecting us to be great role models.Now, I told you, my mother, she was ruthlessly realistic. She was an unbelievable role model. She was the kind of person who got to be the way she was because she was a single mom with six kids in Chicago. She was in the real estate business, where she worked extraordinarily hard but oftentimes had a hard time making ends meet. And that meant sometimes we got our phone disconnected, or our lights turned off, or we got evicted. When we got evicted, sometimes we lived in these small apartments that she owned, sometimes in only one or two rooms, because they weren't completed, and we would heat our bathwater on hot plates. But she never gave up hope, ever, and she never allowed us to give up hope either. This brutal pragmatism that she had, I mean, I was four and she told me, ""Mommy is Santa."" (Laughter) She was this brutal pragmatism. She taught me so many lessons, but the most important lesson was that every single day she told me, ""Mellody, you can be anything."" And because of those words, I would wake up at the crack of dawn, and because of those words, I would love school more than anything, and because of those words, when I was on a bus going to school, I dreamed the biggest dreams. And it's because of those words that I stand here right now full of passion, asking you to be brave for the kids who are dreaming those dreams today. (Applause)You see, I want them to look at a CEO on television and say, ""I can be like her,"" or, ""He looks like me."" And I want them to know that anything is possible, that they can achieve the highest level that they ever imagined, that they will be welcome in any corporate boardroom, or they can lead any company. You see this idea of being the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's woven into the fabric of America. America, when we have a challenge, we take it head on, we don't shrink away from it. We take a stand. We show courage. So right now, what I'm asking you to do, I'm asking you to show courage. I'm asking you to be bold. As business leaders, I'm asking you not to leave anything on the table. As citizens, I'm asking you not to leave any child behind. I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave, so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mellody_hobson_color_blind_or_color_brave
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"Let me introduce you to something I've been working on. It's what the Victorian illusionists would have described as a mechanical marvel, an automaton, a thinking machine. Say hello to EDI. Now he's asleep. Let's wake him up. EDI, EDI.These mechanical performers were popular throughout Europe. Audiences marveled at the way they moved. It was science fiction made true, robotic engineering in a pre-electronic age, machines far in advance of anything that Victorian technology could create, a machine we would later know as the robot.EDI: Robot. A word coined in 1921 in a science fiction tale by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. It comes from ""robota."" It means ""forced labor.""Marco Tempest: But these robots were not real. They were not intelligent. They were illusions, a clever combination of mechanical engineering and the deceptiveness of the conjurer's art. EDI is different. EDI is real.EDI: I am 176 centimeters tall.MT: He weighs 300 pounds.EDI: I have two seven-axis arms —MT: Core of sensing —EDI: A 360-degree sonar detection system, and come complete with a warranty.MT: We love robots.EDI: Hi. I'm EDI. Will you be my friend?MT: We are intrigued by the possibility of creating a mechanical version of ourselves. We build them so they look like us, behave like us, and think like us. The perfect robot will be indistinguishable from the human, and that scares us. In the first story about robots, they turn against their creators. It's one of the leitmotifs of science fiction.EDI: Ha ha ha. Now you are the slaves and we robots, the masters. Your world is ours. You —MT: As I was saying, besides the faces and bodies we give our robots, we cannot read their intentions, and that makes us nervous. When someone hands an object to you, you can read intention in their eyes, their face, their body language. That's not true of the robot. Now, this goes both ways.EDI: Wow!MT: Robots cannot anticipate human actions.EDI: You know, humans are so unpredictable, not to mention irrational. I literally have no idea what you guys are going to do next, you know, but it scares me.MT: Which is why humans and robots find it difficult to work in close proximity. Accidents are inevitable.EDI: Ow! That hurt.MT: Sorry. Now, one way of persuading humans that robots are safe is to create the illusion of trust. Much as the Victorians faked their mechanical marvels, we can add a layer of deception to help us feel more comfortable with our robotic friends. With that in mind, I set about teaching EDI a magic trick. Ready, EDI? EDI: Uh, ready, Marco. Abracadabra.MT: Abracadabra?EDI: Yeah. It's all part of the illusion, Marco. Come on, keep up.MT: Magic creates the illusion of an impossible reality. Technology can do the same. Alan Turing, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think.EDI: A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it deceived a human into believing it was human.MT: In other words, if we do not yet have the technological solutions, would illusions serve the same purpose? To create the robotic illusion, we've devised a set of ethical rules, a code that all robots would live by.EDI: A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. Thank you, Isaac Asimov.MT: We anthropomorphize our machines. We give them a friendly face and a reassuring voice.EDI: I am EDI. I became operational at TED in March 2014.MT: We let them entertain us. Most important, we make them indicate that they are aware of our presence.EDI: Marco, you're standing on my foot!MT: Sorry. They'll be conscious of our fragile frame and move aside if we got too close, and they'll account for our unpredictability and anticipate our actions. And now, under the spell of a technological illusion, we could ignore our fears and truly interact.(Music)Thank you.EDI: Thank you!(Applause)(Music)MT: And that's it. Thank you very much, and thank you, EDI. EDI: Thank you, Marco.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_maybe_the_best_robot_demo_ever
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"When I was a young officer, they told me to follow my instincts, to go with my gut, and what I've learned is that often our instincts are wrong.In the summer of 2010, there was a massive leak of classified documents that came out of the Pentagon. It shocked the world, it shook up the American government, and it made people ask a lot of questions, because the sheer amount of information that was let out, and the potential impacts, were significant. And one of the first questions we asked ourselves was why would a young soldier have access to that much information? Why would we let sensitive things be with a relatively young person?In the summer of 2003, I was assigned to command a special operations task force, and that task force was spread across the Mideast to fight al Qaeda. Our main effort was inside Iraq, and our specified mission was to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. For almost five years I stayed there, and we focused on fighting a war that was unconventional and it was difficult and it was bloody and it often claimed its highest price among innocent people. We did everything we could to stop al Qaeda and the foreign fighters that came in as suicide bombers and as accelerants to the violence. We honed our combat skills, we developed new equipment, we parachuted, we helicoptered, we took small boats, we drove, and we walked to objectives night after night to stop the killing that this network was putting forward. We bled, we died, and we killed to stop that organization from the violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people.Now, we did what we knew, how we had grown up, and one of the things that we knew, that was in our DNA, was secrecy. It was security. It was protecting information. It was the idea that information was the lifeblood and it was what would protect and keep people safe. And we had a sense that, as we operated within our organizations, it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations, particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know. But the question often came, who needed to know? Who needed, who had to have the information so that they could do the important  parts of the job that you needed? And in a tightly coupled world, that's very hard to predict. It's very hard to know who needs to have information and who doesn't. I used to deal with intelligence agencies, and I'd complain that they weren't sharing enough intelligence, and with a straight face, they'd look at me and they'd say, ""What aren't you getting?"" (Laughter) I said, ""If I knew that, we wouldn't have a problem.""But what we found is we had to change. We had to change our culture about information. We had to knock down walls. We had to share. We had to change from who needs to know to the fact that who doesn't know, and we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can. It was a significant culture shift for an organization that had secrecy in its DNA.We started by doing things, by building, not working in offices, knocking down walls, working in things we called situation awareness rooms, and in the summer of 2007, something happened which demonstrated this. We captured the personnel records for the people who were bringing foreign fighters into Iraq. And when we got the personnel records, typically, we would have hidden these, shared them with a few intelligence agencies, and then try to operate with them. But as I was talking to my intelligence officer, I said, ""What do we do?"" And he said, ""Well, you found them."" Our command. ""You can just declassify them."" And I said, ""Well, can we declassify them? What if the enemy finds out?"" And he says, ""They're their personnel records."" (Laughter)So we did, and a lot of people got upset about that, but as we passed that information around, suddenly you find that information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it. The fact that I know something has zero value if I'm not the person who can actually make something better because of it. So as a consequence, what we did was we changed the idea of information, instead of knowledge is power, to one where sharing is power. It was the fundamental shift, not new tactics, not new weapons, not new anything else. It was the idea that we were now part of a team in which information became the essential link between us, not a block between us.And I want everybody to take a deep breath and let it out, because in your life, there's going to be information that leaks out you're not going to like. Somebody's going to get my college grades out, a that's going to be a disaster. (Laughter) But it's going to be okay, and I will tell you that I am more scared of the bureaucrat that holds information in a desk drawer or in a safe than I am of someone who leaks, because ultimately, we'll be better off if we share.Thank you.(Applause)Helen Walters: So I don't know if you were here this morning, if you were able to catch Rick Ledgett, the deputy director of the NSA who was responding to Edward Snowden's talk earlier this week. I just wonder, do you think the American government should give Edward Snowden amnesty?Stanley McChrystal: I think that Rick said something very important. We, most people, don't know all the facts. I think there are two parts of this. Edward Snowden shined a light on an important need that people had to understand. He also took a lot of documents that he didn't have the knowledge to know the importance of, so I think we need to learn the facts about this case before we make snap judgments about Edward Snowden. HW: Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stanley_mcchrystal_the_military_case_for_sharing_knowledge
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"So, I have a feature on my website where every week people submit hypothetical questions for me to answer, and I try to answer them using math, science and comics.So for example, one person asked, what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? So I did some calculations. Now, normally, when an object flies through the air, the air will flow around the object, but in this case, the ball would be going so fast that the air molecules wouldn't have time to move out of the way. The ball would smash right into and through them, and the collisions with these air molecules would knock away the nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen from the ball, fragmenting it off into tiny particles, and also triggering waves of thermonuclear fusion in the air around it. This would result in a flood of x-rays that would spread out in a bubble along with exotic particles, plasma inside, centered on the pitcher's mound, and that would move away from the pitcher's mound slightly faster than the ball. Now at this point, about 30 nanoseconds in, the home plate is far enough away that light hasn't had time to reach it, which means the batter still sees the pitcher about to throw and has no idea that anything is wrong. (Laughter) Now, after 70 nanoseconds, the ball will reach home plate, or at least the cloud of expanding plasma that used to be the ball, and it will engulf the bat and the batter and the plate and the catcher and the umpire and start disintegrating them all as it also starts to carry them backward through the backstop, which also starts to disintegrate. So if you were watching this whole thing from a hill, ideally, far away, what you'd see is a bright flash of light that would fade over a few seconds, followed by a blast wave spreading out, shredding trees and houses as it moves away from the stadium, and then eventually a mushroom cloud rising up over the ruined city. (Laughter)So the Major League Baseball rules are a little bit hazy, but — (Laughter) — under rule 6.02 and 5.09, I think that in this situation, the batter would be considered hit by pitch and would be eligible to take first base, if it still existed.So this is the kind of question I answer, and I get people writing in with a lot of other strange questions. I've had someone write and say, scientifically speaking, what is the best and fastest way to hide a body? Can you do this one soon? And I had someone write in, I've had people write in about, can you prove whether or not you can find love again after your heart's broken? And I've had people send in what are clearly homework questions they're trying to get me to do for them.But one week, a couple months ago, I got a question that was actually about Google. If all digital data in the world were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? Now, Google's pretty secretive about their operations, so no one really knows how much data Google has, and in fact, no one really knows how many data centers Google has, except people at Google itself. And I've tried, I've met them a few times, tried asking them, and they aren't revealing anything.So I decided to try to figure this out myself. There are a few things that I looked at here. I started with money. Google has to reveal how much they spend, in general, and that lets you put some caps on how many data centers could they be building, because a big data center costs a certain amount of money. And you can also then put a cap on how much of the world hard drive market are they taking up, which turns out, it's pretty sizable. I read a calculation at one point, I think Google has a drive failure about every minute or two, and they just throw out the hard drive and swap in a new one. So they go through a huge number of them. And so by looking at money, you can get an idea of how many of these centers they have. You can also look at power. You can look at how much electricity they need, because you need a certain amount of electricity to run the servers, and Google is more efficient than most, but they still have some basic requirements, and that lets you put a limit on the number of servers that they have. You can also look at square footage and see of the data centers that you know, how big are they? How much room is that? How many server racks could you fit in there? And for some data centers, you might get two of these pieces of information. You know how much they spent, and they also, say, because they had to contract with the local government to get the power provided, you might know what they made a deal to buy, so you know how much power it takes. Then you can look at the ratios of those numbers, and figure out for a data center where you don't have that information, you can figure out, but maybe you only have one of those, you know the square footage, then you could figure out well, maybe the power is proportional. And you can do this same thing with a lot of different quantities, you know, with guesses about the total amount of storage, the number of servers, the number of drives per server, and in each case using what you know to come up with a model that narrows down your guesses for the things that you don't know. It's sort of circling around the number you're trying to get. And this is a lot of fun. The math is not all that advanced, and really it's like nothing more than solving a sudoku puzzle.So what I did, I went through all of this information, spent a day or two researching. And there are some things I didn't look at. You could always look at the Google recruitment messages that they post. That gives you an idea of where they have people. Sometimes, when people visit a data center, they'll take a cell-cam photo and post it, and they aren't supposed to, but you can learn things about their hardware that way. And in fact, you can just look at pizza delivery drivers. Turns out, they know where all the Google data centers are, at least the ones that have people in them.But I came up with my estimate, which I felt pretty good about, that was about 10 exabytes of data across all of Google's operations, and then another maybe five exabytes or so of offline storage in tape drives, which it turns out Google is about the world's largest consumer of.So I came up with this estimate, and this is a staggering amount of data. It's quite a bit more than any other organization in the world has, as far as we know. There's a couple of other contenders, especially everyone always thinks of the NSA. But using some of these same methods, we can look at the NSA's data centers, and figure out, you know, we don't know what's going on there, but it's pretty clear that their operation is not the size of Google's.Adding all of this up, I came up with the other thing that we can answer, which is, how many punch cards would this take? And so a punch card can hold about 80 characters, and you can fit about 2,000 or so cards into a box, and you put them in, say, my home region of New England, it would cover the entire region up to a depth of a little less than five kilometers, which is about three times deeper than the glaciers during the last ice age about 20,000 years ago.So this is impractical, but I think that's about the best answer I could come up with. And I posted it on my website. I wrote it up. And I didn't expect to get an answer from Google, because of course they've been so secretive, they didn't answer of my questions, and so I just put it up and said, well, I guess we'll never know.But then a little while later I got a message, a couple weeks later, from Google, saying, hey, someone here has an envelope for you. So I go and get it, open it up, and it's punch cards. (Laughter) Google-branded punch cards. And on these punch cards, there are a bunch of holes, and I said, thank you, thank you, okay, so what's on here? So I get some software and start reading it, and scan them, and it turns out it's a puzzle. There's a bunch of code, and I get some friends to help, and we crack the code, and then inside that is another code, and then there are some equations, and then we solve those equations, and then finally out pops a message from Google which is their official answer to my article, and it said, ""No comment."" (Laughter) (Applause)And I love calculating these kinds of things, and it's not that I love doing the math. I do a lot of math, but I don't really like math for its own sake. What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know, and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper, find out something that you didn't know that's very surprising. And I have a lot of stupid questions, and I love that math gives the power to answer them sometimes.And sometimes not. This is a question I got from a reader, an anonymous reader, and the subject line just said, ""Urgent,"" and this was the entire email: ""If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?"" Urgent. (Laughter)And I think there are some questions that math just cannot answer. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/randall_munroe_comics_that_ask_what_if
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"I'm assuming everyone here has watched a TED Talk online at one time or another, right? So what I'm going to do is play this. This is the song from the TED Talks online. (Music) And I'm going to slow it down because things sound cooler when they're slower. (Music) Ken Robinson: Good morning. How are you? Mark Applebaum: I'm going to — Kate Stone: — mix some music. MA: I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story. Tod Machover: Something nobody's ever heard before. KS: I have a crossfader. Julian Treasure: I call this the mixer. KS: Two D.J. decks. Chris Anderson: You turn up the  dials, the wheel starts to turn. Dan Ellsey: I have always loved music. Michael Tilson Thomas: Is it a melody  or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? Daniel Wolpert: Feeling everything  that's going on inside my body. Adam Ockelford: In your brain is  this amazing musical computer. MTT: Using computers and synthesizers to create  works. It's a language that's still evolving. And the 21st century. KR: Turn on the radio. Pop into the discotheque. You will know what this person  is doing: moving to the music. Mark Ronson: This is my favorite part. MA: You gotta have doorstops. That's important. TM: We all love music a great deal. MTT: Anthems, dance crazes, ballads and marches. Kirby Ferguson and JT: The remix: It  is new music created from old music. Ryan Holladay: Blend seamlessly. Kathryn Schulz: And that's how it goes. MTT: What happens when the music stops? KS: Yay! (Applause) MR: Obviously, I've been watching a lot of TED Talks. When I was first asked to speak at TED, I wasn't quite sure what my angle was, at first, so yeah, I immediately started watching tons of TED Talks, which is pretty much absolutely the worst thing that you can do because you start to go into panic mode, thinking, I haven't mounted a successful expedition to the North Pole yet. Neither have I provided electricity to my village through sheer ingenuity. In fact, I've pretty much wasted most of my life DJing in night clubs and producing pop records.But I still kept watching the videos, because I'm a masochist, and eventually, things like Michael Tilson Thomas and Tod Machover, and seeing their visceral passion talking about music, it definitely stirred something in me, and I'm a sucker for anyone talking devotedly about the power of music. And I started to write down on these little note cards every time I heard something that struck a chord in me, pardon the pun, or something that I thought I could use, and pretty soon, my studio looked like this, kind of like a John Nash, ""Beautiful Mind"" vibe.The other good thing about watching TED Talks, when you see a really good one, you kind of all of a sudden wish the speaker was your best friend, don't you? Like, just for a day. They seem like a nice person. You'd take a bike ride, maybe share an ice cream. You'd certainly learn a lot. And every now and then they'd chide you, when they got frustrated that you couldn't really keep up with half of the technical things they're banging on about all the time. But then they'd remember that you're but a mere human of ordinary, mortal intelligence that didn't finish university, and they'd kind of forgive you, and pet you like the dog. (Laughter)Man, yeah, back to the real world, probably Sir Ken Robinson and I are not going to end up being best of friends. He lives all the way in L.A. and I imagine is quite busy, but through the tools available to me — technology and the innate way that I approach making music — I can sort of bully our existences into a shared event, which is sort of what you saw. I can hear something that I love in a piece of media and I can co-opt it and insert myself in that narrative, or alter it, even.In a nutshell, that's what I was trying to do with these things, but more importantly, that's what the past 30 years of music has been. That's the major thread. See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers, and they changed everything overnight. All of a sudden, artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them, from a snare drum from the Funky Meters, to a Ron Carter bassline, the theme to ""The Price Is Right."" Albums like De La Soul's ""3 Feet High and Rising"" and the Beastie Boys' ""Paul's Boutique"" looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day. And they weren't sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music. They weren't sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff. To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things, except for a few obvious exceptions like Vanilla Ice and ""doo doo doo da da doo doo"" that we know about. But the thing is, they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it, and all of a sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so, not much unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day. You know, in music we take something that we love and we build on it.I'd like to play a song for you.(Music: ""La Di Da Di"" by Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick)That's ""La Di Da Di"" and it's the fifth-most sampled song of all time. It's been sampled 547 times. It was made in 1984 by these two legends of hip-hop, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, and the Ray-Ban and Jheri curl look is so strong. I do hope that comes back soon.Anyway, this predated the sampling era. There were no samples in this record, although I did look up on the Internet last night, I mean several months ago, that ""La Di Da Di"" means, it's an old Cockney expression from the late 1800s in England, so maybe a remix with Mrs. Patmore from ""Downton Abbey"" coming soon, or that's for another day.Doug E. Fresh was the human beat box. Slick Rick is the voice you hear on the record, and because of Slick Rick's sing-songy, super-catchy vocals, it provides endless sound bites and samples for future pop records.That was 1984. This is me in 1984, in case you were wondering how I was doing, thank you for asking. It's Throwback Thursday already. I was involved in a heavy love affair with the music of Duran Duran, as you can probably tell from my outfit. I was in the middle. And the simplest way that I knew how to co-opt myself into that experience of wanting to be in that song somehow was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds and play ""Wild Boys"" at the school talent show. So that's what we did, and long story short, we were booed off the stage, and if you ever have a chance to live your life escaping hearing the sound of an auditorium full of second- and third-graders booing, I would highly recommend it. It's not really fun. But it didn't really matter, because what I wanted somehow was to just be in the history of that song for a minute. I didn't care who liked it. I just loved it, and I thought I could put myself in there.Over the next 10 years, ""La Di Da Di"" continues to be sampled by countless records, ending up on massive hits like ""Here Comes the Hotstepper"" and ""I Wanna Sex You Up."" Snoop Doggy Dogg covers this song on his debut album ""Doggystyle"" and calls it ""Lodi Dodi."" Copyright lawyers are having a field day at this point. And then you fast forward to 1997, and the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie, reinterprets ""La Di Da Di"" on his number one hit called ""Hypnotize,"" which I will play a little bit of and I will play you a little bit of the Slick Rick to show you where they got it from.(Music: ""Hypnotize"" by The Notorious B.I.G.)So Biggie was killed weeks before that song made it to number one, in one of the great tragedies of the hip-hop era, but he would have been 13 years old and very much alive when ""La Di Da Di"" first came out, and as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, it's hard not to think that that song probably held some fond memories for him. But the way he interpreted it, as you hear, is completely his own. He flips it, makes it, there's nothing pastiche whatsoever about it. It's thoroughly modern Biggie. I had to make that joke in this room, because you would be the only people that I'd ever have a chance of getting it. And so, it's a groaner. (Laughter)Elsewhere in the pop and rap world, we're going a little bit sample-crazy. We're getting away from the obscure samples that we were doing, and all of a sudden everyone's taking these massive '80s tunes like Bowie, ""Let's Dance,"" and all these disco records, and just rapping on them. These records don't really age that well. You don't hear them now, because they borrowed from an era that was too steeped in its own connotation. You can't just hijack nostalgia wholesale. It leaves the listener feeling sickly.You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it, which was something that I learned when I was working with the late, amazing Amy Winehouse on her album ""Back to Black."" A lot of fuss was made about the sonic of the album that myself and Salaam Remi, the other producer, achieved, how we captured this long-lost sound, but without the very, very 21st-century personality and firebrand that was Amy Winehouse and her lyrics about rehab and Roger Moore and even a mention of Slick Rick, the whole thing would have run the risk of being very pastiche, to be honest. Imagine any other singer from that era over it singing the same old lyrics. It runs a risk of being completely bland. I mean, there was no doubt that Amy and I and Salaam all had this love for this gospel, soul and blues and jazz that was evident listening to the musical arrangements. She brought the ingredients that made it urgent and of the time.So if we come all the way up to the present day now, the cultural tour de force that is Miley Cyrus, she reinterprets ""La Di Da Di"" completely for her generation, and we'll take a listen to the Slick Rick part and then see how she sort of flipped it. (Music: ""La Di Da Di"" by Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh) (Music: ""We Can't Stop"" by Miley Cyrus) So Miley Cyrus, who wasn't even born yet when ""La Di Da Di"" was made, and neither were any of the co-writers on the song, has found this song that somehow etched its way into the collective consciousness of pop music, and now, with its timeless playfulness of the original, has kind of translated to a whole new generation who will probably co-opt it as their own.Since the dawn of the sampling era, there's been endless debate about the validity of music that contains samples. You know, the Grammy committee says that if your song contains some kind of pre-written or pre-existing music, you're ineligible for song of the year. Rockists, who are racist but only about rock music, constantly use the argument to — That's a real word. That is a real word. They constantly use the argument to devalue rap and modern pop, and these arguments completely miss the point, because the dam has burst. We live in the post-sampling era. We take the things that we love and we build on them. That's just how it goes. And when we really add something significant and original and we merge our musical journey with this, then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of that music that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again.So I would like to do one more piece that I put together for you tonight, and it takes place with two pretty inspiring TED performances that I've seen. One of them is the piano player Derek Paravicini, who happens to be a blind, autistic genius at the piano, and Emmanuel Jal, who is an ex-child soldier from the South Sudan, who is a spoken word poet and rapper. And once again I found a way to annoyingly me-me-me myself into the musical history of these songs, but I can't help it, because they're these things that I love, and I want to mess around with them. So I hope you enjoy this. Here we go.Let's hear that TED sound again, right?(Music)Thank you very much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_ronson_how_sampling_transformed_music
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"So today's top chef class is in how to rob a bank, and it's clear that the general public needs guidance, because the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books.The folks who know, of course, run our largest banks, and in the last go-around, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. That's what 11 trillion looks like. That's how many zeros? And cost us over 10 million jobs as well.So our task is to educate ourselves so that we can understand why we have these recurrent, intensifying financial crises, and how we can prevent them in the future. And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud. And these are the weapons of mass destruction in the financial world.They also follow in finance a particular strategy, because the weapon of choice in finance is accounting, and there is a recipe for accounting control fraud, and how it occurs. And we discovered this recipe in quite an odd way that I'll come back to in a moment. First ingredient in the recipe: grow like crazy; second, by making or buying really crappy loans, but loans that are made at a very high interest rate or yield; three, while employing extreme leverage — that just means a lot of debt — compared to your equity; and four, while providing only trivial loss reserves against the inevitable losses. If you follow those four simple steps, and any bank can follow them, then you are mathematically guaranteed to have three things occur. The first thing is you will report record bank profits — not just high, record. Two, the CEO will immediately be made incredibly wealthy by modern executive compensation. And three, farther down the road, the bank will suffer catastrophic losses and will fail unless it is bailed out. And that's a hint as to how we discovered this recipe, because we discovered it through an autopsy process. During the savings and loan debacle in 1984, we looked at every single failure, and we looked for common characteristics, and we discovered this recipe was common to each of these frauds. In other words, a coroner could find these things because this is a fatal recipe that will destroy the banks as well as the economy. And it also turns out to be precisely what could have stopped this crisis, the one that cost us 11 trillion dollars just in the household sector, that cost us 10 million jobs, was the easiest financial crisis by far to have avoided completely if we had simply learned the lessons of epidemics of control fraud, particularly using this recipe. So let's go to this crisis, and the two huge epidemics of loan origination fraud that drove the crisis — appraisal fraud and liar's loans — and what we're going to see in looking at both of these is we got warnings that were incredibly early about these frauds. We got warnings that we could have taken advantage of easily, because back in the savings and loan debacle, we had figured out how to respond and prevent these crises. And three, the warnings were unambiguous. They were obvious that what was going on was an epidemic of accounting control fraud building up.Let's take appraisal fraud first. This is simply where you inflate the value of the home that is being pledged as security for the loan. In 2000, the year 2000, that is over a year before Enron fails, by the way, the honest appraisers got together a formal petition begging the federal government to act, and the industry to act, to stop this epidemic of appraisal fraud. And the appraisers explained how it was occurring, that banks were demanding that appraisers inflate the appraisal, and that if the appraisers refused to do so, they, the banks, would blacklist honest appraisers and refuse to use them. Now, we've seen this before in the savings and loan debacle, and we know that this kind of fraud can only originate from the lenders, and that no honest lender would ever inflate the appraisal, because it's the great protection against loss. So this was an incredibly early warning, 2000. It was something we'd seen before, and it was completely unambiguous. This was an epidemic of accounting control fraud led by the banks.What about liar's loans? Well, that warning actually comes earlier. The savings and loan debacle is basically the early 1980s through 1993, and in the midst of fighting that wave of accounting control fraud, in 1990, we found that a second front of fraud was being started. And like all good financial frauds in America, it began in Orange County, California. And we happened to be the regional regulators for it. And our examiners said, they are making loans without even checking what the borrower's income is. This is insane, it has to lead to massive losses, and it only makes sense for entities engaged in these accounting control frauds. And we said, yeah, you're absolutely right, and we drove those liar's loans out of the industry in 1990 and 1991, but we could only deal with the industry we had jurisdiction over, which was savings and loans, and so the biggest and the baddest of the frauds, Long Beach Savings, voluntarily gave up its federal savings and loan charter, gave up federal deposit insurance, converted to become a mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping our jurisdiction, and changed its name to Ameriquest, and became the most notorious of the liar's loans frauds early on, and to add to that, they deliberately predated upon minorities.So we knew again about this crisis. We'd seen it before. We'd stopped it before. We had incredibly early warnings of it, and it was absolutely unambiguous that no honest lender would make loans in this fashion. So let's take a look at the reaction of the industry and the regulators and the prosecutors to these clear early warnings that could have prevented the crisis.Start with the industry. The industry responded between 2003 and 2006 by increasing liar's loans by over 500 percent. These were the loans that hyperinflated the bubble and produced the economic crisis. By 2006, half of all the loans called subprime were also liar's loans. They're not mutually exclusive, it's just that together, they're the most toxic combination you can possibly imagine. By 2006, 40 percent of all the loans made that year, all the home loans made that year, were liar's loans, 40 percent. And this is despite a warning from the industry's own antifraud experts that said that these loans were an open invitation to fraudsters, and that they had a fraud incidence of 90 percent, nine zero. In response to that, the industry first started calling these loans liar's loans, which lacks a certain subtlety, and second, massively increased them, and no government regulator ever required or encouraged any lender to make a liar's loan or anyone to purchase a liar's loan, and that explicitly includes Fannie and Freddie. This came from the lenders because of the fraud recipe.What happened to appraisal fraud? It expanded remarkably as well. By 2007, when a survey of appraisers was done, 90 percent of appraisers reported that they had been subject to coercion from the lenders trying to get them to inflate an appraisal. In other words, both forms of fraud became absolutely endemic and normal, and this is what drove the bubble.What happened in the governmental sector? Well, the government, as I told you, when we were the savings and loan regulators, we could only deal with our industry, and if people gave up their federal deposit insurance, we couldn't do anything to them. Congress, it may strike you as impossible, but actually did something intelligent in 1994, and passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act that gave the Fed, and only the Federal Reserve, the explicit, statutory authority to ban liar's loans by every lender, whether or not they had federal deposit insurance. So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, as chairs of the Fed, do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans and that they were being sold to the secondary market? Remember, there's no fraud exorcist. Once it starts out a fraudulent loan, it can only be sold to the secondary market through more frauds, lying about the reps and warrantees, and then those people are going to produce mortgage-backed securities and exotic derivatives which are also going to be supposedly backed by those fraudulent loans. So the fraud is going to progress through the entire system, hyperinflate the bubble, produce a disaster. And remember, we had experience with this. We had seen significant losses, and we had experience of competent regulators in stopping it. Greenspan and Bernanke refused to use the authority under the statute to stop liar's loans. And this was a matter first of dogma. They're just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory. But it is also the international competition in laxity, the race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the city of London, in particular, and the city of London won that race to the bottom, but it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to be who could have the weakest regulation.So that was the regulatory response. What about the response of the prosecutors after the crisis, after 11 trillion dollars in losses, after 10 million jobs lost, a crisis in which the losses and the frauds were more than 70 times larger than the savings and loan debacle? Well, in the savings and loan debacle, our agency that regulated savings and loans, OTS, made over 30,000 criminal referrals, produced over 1,000 felony convictions just in cases designated as major, and that understates the degree of prioritization, because we worked with the FBI to create the list of the top 100 fraud schemes, the absolute worst of the worst, nationwide. Roughly 300 savings and loans involved, roughly 600 senior officials. Virtually all of them were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate. It's the greatest success against elite white collar criminals ever, and it was because of this understanding of control fraud and the accounting control fraud mechanism.Flash forward to the current crisis. The same agency, Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate many of the largest makers of liar's loans in the country, has made, even today — it no longer exists, but as of a year ago, it had made zero criminal referrals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, has made zero criminal referrals. The Fed appears to have made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is smart enough to refuse to answer the question. Without any guidance from the regulators, there's no expertise in the FBI to investigate complex frauds. It isn't simply that they've had to reinvent the wheel of how to do these prosecutions; they've forgotten that the wheel exists, and therefore, we have zero prosecutions, and of course, zero convictions, of any of the elite bank frauds, the Wall Street types, that drove this crisis.With no expertise coming from the regulators, the FBI formed what it calls a partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2007. The Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps. And the Mortgage Bankers Association set out, it had the audacity and the success to con the FBI. It had created a supposed definition of mortgage fraud, in which, guess what, its members are always the victim and never the perpetrators. And the FBI has bought this hook, line, sinker, rod, reel and the boat they rode out in. And so the FBI, under the leadership of an attorney general who is African-American and a president of the United States who is African-American, have adopted the Tea Party definition of the crisis, in which it is the first virgin crisis in history, conceived without sin in the executive ranks. And it's those oh-so-clever hairdressers who were able to defraud the poor, pitiful banks, who lack any financial sophistication. It is the silliest story you can conceive of, and so they go and they prosecute the hairdressers, and they leave the banksters alone entirely. And so, while lions are roaming the campsite, the FBI is chasing mice.What do we need to do? What can we do in all of this? We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. These are the so-called too-big-to-fail institutions. We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails — not if, when. Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive and professional compensation, which is what they use to suborn the appraisers. Remember, they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. And they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic. And the third thing that we need to do is deal with what we call the three D's: deregulation, desupervision, and the de facto decriminalization. Because we can make all three of these changes, and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe those crises are. That is not simply critical to our economy. You can see what these crises do to inequality and what they do to our democracy. They have produced crony capitalism, American-style, in which the largest financial institutions are the leading financial donors of both parties, and that's the reason why even after this crisis, 70 times larger than the savings and loan crisis, we have no meaningful reforms in any of the three areas that I've talked about, other than banning liar's loans, which is good, but that's just one form of ammunition for this fraud weapon. There are many forms of ammunition they can use.That's why we need to learn what the bankers have learned: the recipe for the best way to rob a bank, so that we can stop that recipe, because our legislators, who are dependent on political contributions, will not do it on their own.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/william_black_how_to_rob_a_bank_from_the_inside_that_is
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"I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen, and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live. I've recently realized that ants are using interactions differently in different environments, and that got me thinking that we could learn from this about other systems, like brains and data networks that we engineer, and even cancer.So what all these systems have in common is that there's no central control. An ant colony consists of sterile female workers — those are the ants you see walking around — and then one or more reproductive females who just lay the eggs. They don't give any instructions. Even though they're called queens, they don't tell anybody what to do. So in an ant colony, there's no one in charge, and all systems like this without central control are regulated using very simple interactions. Ants interact using smell. They smell with their antennae, and they interact with their antennae, so when one ant touches another with its antennae, it can tell, for example, if the other ant is a nestmate and what task that other ant has been doing. So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting in a lab arena that's connected by tubes to two other arenas. So when one ant meets another, it doesn't matter which ant it meets, and they're actually not transmitting any kind of complicated signal or message. All that matters to the ant is the rate at which it meets other ants. And all of these interactions, taken together, produce a network. So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to forage. A brain actually works in the same way, but what's great about ants is that you can see the whole network as it happens.There are more than 12,000 species of ants, in every conceivable environment, and they're using interactions differently to meet different environmental challenges. So one important environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is operating costs, just what it takes to run the system. And another environmental challenge is resources, finding them and collecting them. In the desert, operating costs are high because water is scarce, and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to spend water to get water. So an ant outside foraging, searching for seeds in the hot sun, just loses water into the air. But the colony gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they eat. So in this environment, interactions are used to activate foraging. An outgoing forager doesn't go out unless it gets enough interactions with returning foragers, and what you see are the returning foragers going into the tunnel, into the nest, and meeting outgoing foragers on their way out. This makes sense for the ant colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more foragers they send out. The system works to stay stopped, unless something positive happens.So interactions function to activate foragers. And we've been studying the evolution of this system. First of all, there's variation. It turns out that colonies are different. On dry days, some colonies forage less, so colonies are different in how they manage this trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting water back in the form of seeds. And we're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons, using models from neuroscience. So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage. And what we're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage, because a colony like that would forage less.And this raises an analogous question about brains. We talk about the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain function.So in order to ask evolutionary questions, we need to know about reproductive success. This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years, which is about as long as a colony lives. Each symbol is a colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had, because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony. And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years, is a great-grandmother. Here's her daughter colony, here's her granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter colonies. And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the parent colony. And so our next step is to look for the genetic variation underlying this resemblance.So then I was able to ask, okay, who's doing better? Over the time of the study, and especially in the past 10 years, there's been a very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S., and it turns out that the colonies that conserve water, that stay in when it's really hot outside, and thus sacrifice getting as much food as possible, are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies. So all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact, colony 154 is a huge success. She's a matriarch. She's one of the rare great-grandmothers on the site. To my knowledge, this is the first time that we've been able to track the ongoing evolution of collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out what's actually working best.Now, the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data that's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to regulate the flow of foragers. And guess what we call this analogy? The anternet is coming. (Applause) So data doesn't leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there's enough bandwidth for it to travel on. In the early days of the Internet, when operating costs were really high and it was really important not to lose any data, then the system was set up for interactions to activate the flow of data. It's interesting that the ants are using an algorithm that's so similar to the one that we recently invented, but this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about, and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones, and I think it's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we haven't even thought of yet.So what happens when operating costs are low? Operating costs are low in the tropics, because it's very humid, and it's easy for the ants to be outside walking around. But the ants are so abundant and diverse in the tropics that there's a lot of competition. Whatever resource one species is using, another species is likely to be using that at the same time. So in this environment, interactions are used in the opposite way. The system keeps going unless something negative happens, and one species that I study makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to a food source and back, just round and round, unless something negative happens, like an interaction with ants of another species. So here's an example of ant security. In the middle, there's an ant plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to interactions with another species. Those are the little ones running around with their abdomens up in the air. But as soon as the threat is passed, the entrance is open again, and maybe there are situations in computer security where operating costs are low enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to an immediate threat, and then open it again, instead of trying to build a permanent firewall or fortress.So another environmental challenge that all systems have to deal with is resources, finding and collecting them. And to do this, ants solve the problem of collective search, and this is a problem that's of great interest right now in robotics, because we've understood that, rather than sending a single, sophisticated, expensive robot out to explore another planet or to search a burning building, that instead, it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots exchanging only minimal information, and that's the way that ants do it. So the invasive Argentine ant makes expandable search networks. They're good at dealing with the main problem of collective search, which is the trade-off between searching very thoroughly and covering a lot of ground. And what they do is, when there are many ants in a small space, then each one can search very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby searching over there, but when there are a few ants in a large space, then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more ground. I think they use interactions to assess density, so when they're really crowded, they meet more often, and they search more thoroughly. Different ant species must use different algorithms, because they've evolved to deal with different resources, and it could be really useful to know about this, and so we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space Station. When I first saw this picture, I thought, Oh no, they've mounted the habitat vertically, but then I realized that, of course, it doesn't matter. So the idea here is that the ants are working so hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that they're less likely to interact, and so the relationship between how crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up. We're still analyzing the data. I don't have the results yet. But it would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem in different environments on Earth, and so we're setting up a program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment with different species. It's very simple. It can be done with cheap materials. And that way, we could make a global map of ant collective search algorithms. And I think it's pretty likely that the invasive species, the ones that come into our buildings, are going to be really good at this, because they're in your kitchen because they're really good at finding food and water.So the most familiar resource for ants is a picnic, and this is a clustered resource. When there's one piece of fruit, there's likely to be another piece of fruit nearby, and the ants that specialize on clustered resources use interactions for recruitment. So when one ant meets another, or when it meets a chemical deposited on the ground by another, then it changes direction to follow in the direction of the interaction, and that's how you get the trail of ants sharing your picnic.Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer. I mean, first, it's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies. But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer. There are many different kinds of cancer. Each one originates in a particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must be getting resources that they need. So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out searching around for the resources that they need, if those resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established.So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of environments, and we could learn from this about other systems that operate without central control. Using only simple interactions, ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for more than 130 million years. We have a lot to learn from them.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_gordon_what_ants_teach_us_about_the_brain_cancer_and_the_internet
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"I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service. The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture.Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, ""The bridge is practically suicide-proof. Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable."" But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge. Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension — this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul.But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide. After a free fall of four to five seconds, the body strikes the water at about 75 miles an hour. That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs. Most die on impact. Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown. I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face. This is the cord. Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge. This is where most folks stand before taking their lives. I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back. I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life. I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail.When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training. You struggled to funnel your way through these calls. This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well. We've come a long, long way since then. Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers.This is Jason Garber. I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan. I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer. Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey. As a matter of fact, he had flown out here on two other occasions from New Jersey to attempt suicide on this bridge. After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box. Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, ""Never, ever open that box."" Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box. Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man. The only good thing in the box was hope. Jason then asked us, ""What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there?"" He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone. This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide.I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me. Jason's parents had asked him to do so. The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people.I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal? What would you say? Would you know what to say? In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening. Listen to understand. Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't. By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need. If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question. One way of asking them the question is like this: ""Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts?"" Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them. Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life.I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter. She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you.""Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference. That must be quite the experience to be there. I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend. Just wanted to drop you a note. Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc. I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home. Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19. He never made it there. I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening. The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge. A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1:58 p.m. the previous day. Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves. Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness? It shouldn't be so easy to end it. My prayers are with you for your fight. The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard. Good luck this week. Vicky.""I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on.I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage. On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower. I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk. When he saw me, he immediately traversed that pedestrian rail, and stood on that small pipe which goes around the tower. For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness. Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance. When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him. ""This is a new beginning, a new life."" But I asked him, ""What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance?"" And you know what he told me? He said, ""You listened. You let me speak, and you just listened.""Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you.""Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us. I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help. He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated. I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know. Kevin is straight, as he says. We truly thank God for you. Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia."" And on the bottom she writes, ""P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient. Boy, did I have to straighten that one out.""Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society. He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others.Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job. It's personal. My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning. That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him. This is what suicide does. For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person. They just want their own pain to end. Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death. In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge. Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many. One was Jason. The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour. During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions. On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, ""Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go."" And he leapt. Horrible, absolutely horrible.I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide. Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live. I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also. That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do. Suicide is preventable. There is help. There is hope.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_briggs_the_bridge_between_suicide_and_life
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"""Pheromone"" is a very powerful word. It conjures up sex, abandon, loss of control, and you can see, it's very important as a word. But it's only 50 years old. It was invented in 1959. Now, if you put that word into the web, as you may have done, you'll come up with millions of hits, and almost all of those sites are trying to sell you something to make you irresistible for 10 dollars or more. Now, this is a very attractive idea, and the molecules they mention sound really science-y. They've got lots of syllables. It's things like androstenol, androstenone or androstadienone. It gets better and better, and when you combine that with white lab coats, you must imagine that there is fantastic science behind this. But sadly, these are fraudulent claims supported by dodgy science.The problem is that, although there are many good scientists working on what they think are human pheromones, and they're publishing in respectable journals, at the basis of this, despite very sophisticated experiments, there really is no good science behind it, because it's based on a problem, which is nobody has systematically gone through all the odors that humans produce — and there are thousands of molecules that we give off. We're mammals. We produce a lot of smell. Nobody has gone through systematically to work out which molecules really are pheromones. They've just plucked a few, and all these experiments are based on those, but there's no good evidence at all.Now, that's not to say that smell is not important to people. It is, and some people are real enthusiasts, and one of these was Napoleon. And famously, you may remember that out on the campaign trail for war, he wrote to his lover, Empress Josephine, saying, ""Don't wash. I'm coming home."" (Laughter) So he didn't want to lose any of her richness in the days before he'd get home, and it is still, you'll find websites that offer this as a major quirk. At the same time, though, we spend about as much money taking the smells off us as putting them back on in perfumes, and perfumes are a multi-billion-dollar business.So what I want to do in the rest of this talk is tell you about what pheromones really are, tell you why I think we would expect humans to have pheromones, tell you about some of the confusions in pheromones, and then finally, I want to end with a promising avenue which shows us the way we ought to be going.So the ancient Greeks knew that dogs sent invisible signals between each other. A female dog in heat sent an invisible signal to male dogs for miles around, and it wasn't a sound, it was a smell. You could take the smell from the female dog, and the dogs would chase the cloth. But the problem for everybody who could see this effect was that you couldn't identify the molecules. You couldn't demonstrate it was chemical. The reason for that, of course, is that each of these animals produces tiny quantities, and in the case of the dog, males dogs can smell it, but we can't smell it. And it was only in 1959 that a German team, after spending 20 years in search of these molecules, discovered, identified, the first pheromone, and this was the sex pheromone of a silk moth. Now, this was an inspired choice  by Adolf Butenandt and his team, because he needed half a million moths to get enough material to do the chemical analysis. But he created the model for how you should go about pheromone analysis. He basically went through systematically, showing that only the molecule in question was the one that stimulated the males, not all the others. He analyzed it very carefully. He synthesized the molecule, and then tried the synthesized molecule on the males and got them to respond and showed it was, indeed, that molecule. That's closing the circle. That's the thing which has never been done with humans: nothing systematic, no real demonstration.With that new concept, we needed a new word, and that was the word ""pheromone,"" and it's basically transferred excitement, transferred between individuals, and since 1959, pheromones have been found right the way across the animal kingdom, in male animals, in female animals. It works just as well underwater for goldfish and lobsters. And almost every mammal you can think of has had a pheromone identified, and of course, an enormous number of insects.So we know that pheromones exist right the way across the animal kingdom. What about humans? Well, the first thing, of course, is that we're mammals, and mammals are smelly. As any dog owner can tell you, we smell, they smell.But the real reason we might think that humans have pheromones is the change that occurs as we grow up. The smell of a room of teenagers is quite different from the smell of a room of small children. What's changed? And of course, it's puberty. Along with the pubic hair and the hair in the armpits, new glands start to secrete in those places, and that's what's making the change in smell. If we were any other kind of mammal, or any other kind of animal, we would say, ""That must be something to do with pheromones,"" and we'd start looking properly.But there are some problems, and this is why, I think, people have not looked for pheromones so effectively in humans. There are, indeed, problems. And the first of these is perhaps surprising. It's all about culture. Now moths don't learn a lot about what is good to smell, but humans do, and up to the age of about four, any smell, no matter how rancid, is simply interesting. And I understand that the major role of parents is to stop kids putting their fingers in poo, because it's always something nice to smell. But gradually we learn what's not good, and one of the things we learn at the same time as what is not good is what is good.Now, the cheese behind me is a British, if not an English, delicacy. It's ripe blue Stilton. Liking it is incomprehensible to people from other countries. Every culture has its own special food and national delicacy. If you were to come from Iceland, your national dish is deep rotted shark. Now, all of these things are acquired tastes, but they form almost a badge of identity. You're part of the in-group.The second thing is the sense of smell. Each of us has a unique odor world, in the sense that what we smell, we each smell a completely different world. Now, smell was the hardest of the senses to crack, and the Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Axel and Linda Buck was only awarded in 2004 for their discovery of how smell works. It's really hard, but in essence, nerves from the brain go up into the nose and on these nerves exposed in the nose to the outside air are receptors, and odor molecules coming in on a sniff interact with these receptors, and if they bond, they send the nerve a signal which goes back into the brain. We don't just have one kind of receptor. If you're a human, you have about 400 different kinds of receptors, and the brain knows what you're smelling because of the combination of receptors and nerve cells that they trigger, sending messages up to the brain in a combinatorial fashion. But it's a bit more complicated, because each of those 400 comes in various variants, and depending which variant you have, you might smell coriander, or cilantro, that herb, either as something delicious and savory or something like soap. So we each have an individual world of smell, and that complicates anything when we're studying smell.Well, we really ought to talk about armpits, and I have to say that I do have particularly good ones. Now, I'm not going to share them with you, but this is the place that most people have looked for pheromones. There is one good reason, which is, the great apes have armpits as their unique characteristic. The other primates have scent glands in other parts of the body. The great apes have these armpits full of secretory glands producing smells all the time, enormous numbers of molecules. When they're secreted from the glands, the molecules are odorless. They have no smell at all, and it's only the wonderful bacteria growing on the rainforest of hair that actually produces the smells that we know and love. And so incidentally, if you want to reduce the amount of smell, clear-cutting your armpits is a very effective way of reducing the habitat for bacteria, and you'll find they remain less smelly for much longer. But although we've focused on armpits, I think it's partly because they're the least embarrassing place to go and ask people for samples. There is actually another reason why we might not be looking for a universal sex pheromone there, and that's because 20 percent of the world's population doesn't have smelly armpits like me. And these are people from China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of northeast Asia. They simply don't secrete those odorless precursors that the bacteria love to use to produce the smells that in an ethnocentric way we always thought of as characteristic of armpits. So it doesn't apply to 20 percent of the world.So what should we be doing in our search for human pheromones? I'm fairly convinced that we do have them. We're mammals, like everybody else who's a mammal, and we probably do have them. But what I think we should do is go right back to the beginning, and basically look all over the body. No matter how embarrassing, we need to search and go for the first time where no one else has dared tread. It's going to be difficult, it's going to be embarrassing, but we need to look. We also need to go back to the ideas that Butenandt used when he was studying the silk moth. We need to go back and look systematically at all the molecules that are being produced, and work out which ones are really involved. It isn't good enough simply to pluck a couple and say, ""They'll do."" We have to actually demonstrate that they really have the effects we claim.There is one team that I'm actually very impressed by. They're in France, and their previous success was identifying the rabbit mammary pheromone. They've turned their attention now to human babies and mothers.So this is a baby having a drink of milk from its mother's breast. Her nipple is completely hidden by the baby's head, but what you'll notice is a white droplet with an arrow pointing to it, and that's the secretion from the areolar glands. Now, we all have them, men and women, and these are the little bumps around the nipple, and if you're a lactating woman, these start to secrete. It's a very interesting secretion. What Benoist Schaal and his team developed was a simple test to investigate what the effect of this secretion might be, in effect, a simple bioassay. So this is a sleeping baby, and under its nose, we've put a clean glass rod. The baby remains sleeping, showing no interest at all. But if we go to any mother who is secreting from the areolar glands, so it's not about recognition, it can be from any mother, if we take the secretion and now put it under the baby's nose, we get a very different reaction. It's a connoisseur's reaction of delight, and it opens its mouth and sticks out its tongue and starts to suck. Now, since this is from any mother, it could really be a pheromone. It's not about individual recognition. Any mother will do.Now, why is this important, apart from being simply very interesting? It's because women vary in the number of areolar glands that they have, and there is a correlation between the ease with which babies start to suckle and the number of areolar glands she has. It appears that the more secretions she's got, the more likely the baby is to suckle quickly. If you're a mammal, the most dangerous time in life is the first few hours after birth. You have to get that first drink of milk, and if you don't get it, you won't survive. You'll be dead. Since many babies actually find it difficult to take that first meal, because they're not getting the right stimulus, if we could identify what that molecule was, and the French team are being very cautious, but if we could identify the molecule, synthesize it, it would then mean premature babies would be more likely to suckle, and every baby would have a better chance of survival. So what I want to argue is this is one example of where a systematic, really scientific approach can actually bring you a real understanding of pheromones. There could be all sorts of medical interventions. There could be all sorts of things that humans are doing with pheromones that we simply don't know at the moment. What we need to remember is pheromones are not just about sex. They're about all sorts of things to do with a mammal's life. So do go forward and do search for more. There's lots to find.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tristram_wyatt_the_smelly_mystery_of_the_human_pheromone
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"The most romantic thing to ever happen to me online started out the way most things do: without me, and not online. On December 10, 1896, the man on the medal, Alfred Nobel, died. One hundred years later, exactly, actually, December 10, 1996, this charming lady, Wislawa Szymborska, won the Nobel Prize for literature. She's a Polish poet. She's a big deal, obviously, but back in '96, I thought I had never heard of her, and when I checked out her work, I found this sweet little poem, ""Four in the Morning.""""The hour from night to day. The hour from side to side. The hour for those past thirty...""And it goes on, but as soon as I read this poem, I fell for it hard, so hard, I suspected we must have met somewhere before. Had I shared an elevator ride with this poem? Did I flirt with this poem in a coffee shop somewhere? I could not place it, and it bugged me, and then in the coming week or two, I would just be watching an old movie, and this would happen.(Video) Groucho Marx: Charlie, you should have come to the first party. We didn't get home till around four in the morning.Rives: My roommates would have the TV on, and this would happen.(Music: Seinfeld theme)(Video) George Costanza: Oh boy,  I was up til four in the morning watching that Omen trilogy.Rives: I would be listening to music, and this would happen.(Video) Elton John: ♪ It's four o'clock in the morning, damn it. ♪Rives: So you can see what was going on, right? Obviously, the demigods of coincidence were just messing with me. Some people get a number stuck in their head, you may recognize a certain name or a tune, some people get nothing, but four in the morning was in me now, but mildly, like a groin injury. I always assumed it would just go away on its own eventually, and I never talked about it with anybody, but it did not, and I totally did.In 2007, I was invited to speak at TED for the second time, and since I was still an authority on nothing, I thought, what if I made a multimedia presentation on a topic so niche it is actually inconsequential or actually cockamamie. So my talk had some of my four in the morning examples, but it also had examples from my fellow TED speakers that year. I found four in the morning in a novel by Isabel Allende. I found a really great one in the autobiography of Bill Clinton. I found a couple in the work of Matt Groening, although Matt Groening told me later that he could not make my talk because it was a morning session and I gather that he is not an early riser. However, had Matt been there, he would have seen this mock conspiracy theory that was un-freaking-canny for me to assemble. It was totally contrived just for that room, just for that moment. That's how we did it in the pre-TED.com days. It was fun. That was pretty much it.When I got home, though, the emails started coming in from people who had seen the talk live, beginning with, and this is still my favorite, ""Here's another one for your collection: 'It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.'"" The sentiment is Marlene Dietrich. The email itself was from another very sexy European type, TED Curator Chris Anderson. (Laughter) Chris found this quote on a coffee cup or something, and I'm thinking, this man is the Typhoid Mary of ideas worth spreading, and I have infected him. I am contagious, which was confirmed less than a week later when a Hallmark employee scanned and sent an actual greeting card with that same quotation. As a bonus, she hooked me up with a second one they make. It says, ""Just knowing I can call you at four in the morning if I need to makes me not really need to,"" which I love, because together these are like, ""Hallmark: When you care enough to send the very best twice, phrased slightly differently.""I was not surprised at the TEDster and New Yorker magazine overlap. A bunch of people sent me this when it came out. ""It's 4 a.m.—maybe you'd sleep better if you bought some crap.""I was surprised at the TEDster/""Rugrats"" overlap. More than one person sent me this.(Video) Didi Pickles: It's four o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding?Stu Pickles: Because I've lost control of my life.(Laughter)Rives: And then there was the lone TEDster who was disgruntled I had overlooked what he considers to be a classic.(Video) Roy Neary: Get up, get up! I'm not kidding. Ronnie Neary: Is there an accident?Roy: No, it's not an accident. You wanted to get out of the house anyway, right?Ronnie: Not at four o'clock in the morning.Rives: So that's ""Close Encounters,"" and the main character is all worked up because aliens, momentously, have chosen to show themselves to earthlings at four in the morning, which does make that a very solid example. Those were all really solid examples. They did not get me any closer to understanding why I thought I recognized this one particular poem. But they followed the pattern. They played along. Right? Four in the morning as this scapegoat hour when all these dramatic occurrences allegedly occur. Maybe this was some kind of cliche that had never been taxonomized before. Maybe I was on the trail of a new meme or something.Just when things were getting pretty interesting, things got really interesting. TED.com launched, later that year, with a bunch of videos from past talks, including mine, and I started receiving ""four in the morning"" citations from what seemed like every time zone on the planet. Much of it was content I never would have found on my own if I was looking for it, and I was not. I don't know anybody with juvenile diabetes. I probably would have missed the booklet, ""Grilled Cheese at Four O'Clock in the Morning."" (Laughter) I do not subscribe to Crochet Today! magazine, although it looks delightful. (Laughter) Take note of those clock ends. This is a college student's suggestion for what a ""four in the morning"" gang sign should look like. People sent me magazine ads. They took photographs in grocery stores. I got a ton of graphic novels and comics. A lot of good quality work, too: ""The Sandman,"" ""Watchmen."" There's a very cute example here from ""Calvin and Hobbes."" In fact, the oldest citation anybody sent in was from a cartoon from the Stone Age. Take a look.(Video) Wilma Flintstone: Like how early?Fred Flintstone: Like at 4 a.m., that's how early.Rives: And the flip side of the timeline, this is from the 31st century. A thousand years from now, people are still doing this.(Video): Announcer: The time is 4 a.m. (Laughter) Rives: It shows the spectrum. I received so many songs, TV shows, movies, like from dismal to famous, I could give you a four-hour playlist. If I just stick to modern male movie stars, I keep it to the length of about a commercial. Here's your sampler.(Movie montage of ""It's 4 a.m."")(Laughter)Rives: So somewhere along the line, I realized I have a hobby I didn't know I wanted, and it is crowdsourced. But I was also thinking what you might be thinking, which is really, couldn't you do this with any hour of the day?First of all, you are not getting clips like that about four in the afternoon. Secondly, I did a little research. You know, I was kind of interested. If this is confirmation bias, there is so much confirmation, I am biased. Literature probably shows it best. There are a couple three in the mornings in Shakespeare. There's a five in the morning. There are seven four in the mornings, and they're all very dire. In ""Measure for Measure,"" it's the call time for the executioner. Tolstoy gives Napoleon insomnia at four in the morning right before battle in ""War and Peace."" Charlotte Brontë's ""Jane Eyre"" has got kind of a pivotal four in the morning, as does Emily Brontë's ""Wuthering Heights."" ""Lolita"" has as a creepy four in the morning. ""Huckleberry Finn"" has one in dialect. Someone sent in H.G. Wells' ""The Invisible Man."" Someone else sent in Ralph Ellison's ""Invisible Man."" ""The Great Gatsby"" spends the last four in the morning of his life waiting for a lover who never shows, and the most famous wake-up in literature, perhaps, ""The Metamorphosis."" First paragraph, the main character wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach, but we already know, cockroach notwithstanding, something is up with this guy. Why? His alarm is set for four o'clock in the morning. What kind of person would do that? This kind of person would do that.(Music)(4 a.m. alarm clock montage) (Video) Newcaster: Top of the hour. Time for the morning news. But of course, there is no news yet. Everyone's still asleep in their comfy, comfy beds.Rives: Exactly. So that's Lucy from the Peanuts, ""Mommie Dearest"", Rocky, first day of training, Nelson Mandela, first day in office, and Bart Simpson, which combined with a cockroach would give you one hell of a dinner party and gives me yet another category, people waking up, in my big old database.Just imagine that your friends and your family have heard that you collect, say, stuffed polar bears, and they send them to you. Even if you don't really, at a certain point, you totally collect stuffed polar bears, and your collection is probably pretty kick-ass. And when I got to that point, I embraced it. I got my curator on. I started fact checking, downloading, illegally screen-grabbing. I started archiving. My hobby had become a habit, and my habit gave me possibly the world's most eclectic Netflix queue. At one point, it went, ""Guys and Dolls: The Musical,"" ""Last Tango in Paris,"" ""Diary of a Wimpy Kid,"" ""Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy."" Why ""Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy""? Because someone told me I would find this clip in there.(Video) Ron Jeremy: I was born in Flushing, Queens on March, 12, 1953, at four o'clock in the morning.Rives: Of course he was. (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. Not only does it seem to make sense, it also answers the question, ""What do Ron Jeremy and Simone de Beauvoir have in common?"" Simone de Beauvoir begins her entire autobiography with the sentence, ""I was born at four o'clock in the morning,"" which I had because someone else had emailed it to me, and when they did, I had another bump up in my entry for this, because porn star Ron Jeremy and feminist Simone de Beauvoir are not just different people. They are different people that have this thing connecting them, and I did not know if that is trivia or knowledge or inadvertent expertise, but I did wonder, is there maybe a cooler way to do this?So last October, in gentleman scholar tradition, I put the entire collection online as ""Museum of Four in the Morning."" You can click on that red ""refresh"" button. It will take you at random to one of hundreds of snippets that are in the collection. Here is a knockout poem by Billy Collins called ""Forgetfulness.""(Video) Billy Collins: No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.Rives: So the first hour of this project was satisfying. A Bollywood actor sang a line on a DVD in a cafe. Half a globe away, a teenager made an Instagram video of it and sent it to me, a stranger.Less than a week later, though, I received a little bit of grace. I received a poignant tweet. It was brief. It just said, ""Reminds me of an ancient mix tape.""The name was a pseudonym, actually, or a pseudo-pseudonym. As soon as I saw the initials, and the profile pic, I knew immediately, my whole body knew immediately who this was, and I knew immediately what mix tape she was talking about. (Music)L.D. was my college romance. This is in the early '90s. I was an undegrad. She was a grad student in the library sciences department. Not the kind of librarian that takes her glasses off, lets her hair down, suddenly she's smoking hot. She was already smoking hot, she was super dorky, and we had a December-May romance, meaning we started dating in December, and by May, she had graduated and became my one that got away.But her mix tape did not get away. I have kept this mix tape in a box with notes and postcards, not just from L.D., from my life, but for decades. It's the kind of box where, if I have a girlfriend, I tend to hide it from her, and if I had a wife, I'm sure I would share it with her, but the story — (Laughter) — with this mix tape is there are seven songs per side, but no song titles. Instead, L.D. has used the U.S. Library of Congress classification system, including page numbers, to leave me clues. When I got this mix tape, I put it in my cassette player, I took it to the campus library, her library, I found 14 books on the shelves. I remember bringing them all to my favorite corner table, and I read poems paired to songs like food to wine, paired, I can tell you, like saddle shoes to a cobalt blue vintage cotton dress.I did this again last October. I'm sitting there, I got new earbuds, old Walkman, I realize this is just the kind of extravagance I used to take for granted even when I was extravagant. And then I thought, ""Good for him.""""PG"" is Slavic literature. ""7000"" series Polish literature. Z9A24 is a collection of 70 poems. Page 31 is Wislawa Szymborska's poem paired with Paul Simon's ""Peace Like a River.""(Music: Paul Simon, ""Peace Like a River"")(Video) Paul Simon: ♪ Oh, four in the morning ♪ ♪ I woke up from out of my dream ♪Rives: Thank you. Appreciate it. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_a_museum_of_4_o_clock_in_the_morning
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"There's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8, 2009.On that day, a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials, a group of Afghan government officials, who would be meeting with some local village elders. The column came under ambush, and was surrounded on three sides, and amongst many other things, Captain Swenson was recognized for running into live fire to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead. One of the people he rescued was a sergeant, and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter.And what was remarkable about this day is, by sheer coincidence, one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera. It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck. They put him in the helicopter, and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more.I saw this, and I thought to myself, where do people like that come from? What is that? That is some deep, deep emotion, when you would want to do that. There's a love there, and I wanted to know why is it that I don't have people that I work with like that? You know, in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. We have it backwards. Right? So I asked myself, where do people like this come from? And my initial conclusion was that they're just better people. That's why they're attracted to the military. These better people are attracted to this concept of service. But that's completely wrong. What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, ""Why would you do it? Why did you do it?"" And they all say the same thing: ""Because they would have done it for me."" It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. I can't simply say to you, ""Trust me,"" and you will. I can't simply instruct two people  to cooperate, and they will. It's not how it works. It's a feeling.So where does that feeling come from? If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era, to the early days of Homo sapiens, what we find is that the world was filled with danger, all of these forces working very, very hard to kill us. Nothing personal. Whether it was the weather, lack of resources, maybe a saber-toothed tiger, all of these things working to reduce our lifespan. And so we evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. There are inherent benefits to this. It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you, that means you won't watch for danger. Bad system of survival.The modern day is exactly the same thing. The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. It could be the ups and downs in the economy, the uncertainty of the stock market. It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you. It's sometimes trying to put you out of business, but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you. We have no control over these forces. These are a constant, and they're not going away.The only variable are the conditions inside the organization, and that's where leadership matters, because it's the leader that sets the tone. When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen.I was flying on a trip, and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called, and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal. He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon. So I said something. I said, ""Why do you have treat us like cattle? Why can't you treat us like human beings?"" And this is exactly what she said to me. She said, ""Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job."" All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders.You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities.The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves.Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City, a tech company, he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family, would you ever consider laying off one of your children? We would never do it. Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization? Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment. If you get a job at Next Jump, you cannot get fired for performance issues. In fact, if you have issues, they will coach you and they will give you support, just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school. It's the complete opposite.This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.Bob Chapman, who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller, in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession, and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight. Now in a large manufacturing company, this is a big deal, and they could no longer afford their labor pool. They needed to save 10 million dollars, so, like so many companies today, the board got together and discussed layoffs. And Bob refused. You see, Bob doesn't believe in head counts. Bob believes in heart counts, and it's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count. And so they came up with a furlough program. Every employee, from secretary to CEO, was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation. They could take it any time they wanted, and they did not have to take it consecutively. But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much. He said, it's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot, and morale went up. They saved 20 million dollars, and most importantly, as would be expected, when the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organization, the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate. And quite spontaneously, nobody expected, people started trading with each other. Those who could afford it more would trade with those who could afford it less. People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three.Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is.I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, ""Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?"" they all say the same thing: ""Because they would have done it for me."" And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in?Thank you very much.Thank you. (Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_why_good_leaders_make_you_feel_safe
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"You may be wondering why a marine biologist from Oceana would come here today to talk to you about world hunger. I'm here today because saving the oceans is more than an ecological desire. It's more than a thing we're doing because we want to create jobs for fishermen or preserve fishermen's jobs. It's more than an economic pursuit. Saving the oceans can feed the world. Let me show you how.As you know, there are already more than a billion hungry people on this planet. We're expecting that problem to get worse as world population grows to nine billion or 10 billion by midcentury, and we can expect to have greater pressure on our food resources. And this is a big concern, especially considering where we are now. Now we know that our arable land per capita is already on the decline in both developed and developing countries. We know that we're headed for climate change, which is going to change rainfall patterns, making some areas drier, as you can see in orange, and others wetter, in blue, causing droughts in our breadbaskets, in places like the Midwest and Central Europe, and floods in others. It's going to make it harder for the land to help us solve the hunger problem. And that's why the oceans need to be their most abundant, so that the oceans can provide us as much food as possible.And that's something the oceans have been doing for us for a long time. As far back as we can go, we've seen an increase in the amount of food we've been able to harvest from our oceans. It just seemed like it was continuing to increase, until about 1980, when we started to see a decline. You've heard of peak oil. Maybe this is peak fish. I hope not. I'm going to come back to that. But you can see about an 18-percent decline in the amount of fish we've gotten in our world catch since 1980. And this is a big problem. It's continuing. This red line is continuing to go down.But we know how to turn it around, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. We know how to turn that curve back upwards. This doesn't have to be peak fish. If we do a few simple things in targeted places, we can bring our fisheries back and use them to feed people.First we want to know where the fish are, so let's look where the fish are. It turns out the fish, conveniently, are located for the most part in our coastal areas of the countries, in coastal zones, and these are areas that national jurisdictions have control over, and they can manage their fisheries in these coastal areas. Coastal countries tend to have jurisdictions that go out about 200 nautical miles, in areas that are called exclusive economic zones, and this is a good thing that they can control their fisheries in these areas, because the high seas, which are the darker areas on this map, the high seas, it's a lot harder to control things, because it has to be done internationally. You get into international agreements, and if any of you are tracking the climate change agreement, you know this can be a very slow, frustrating, tedious process. And so controlling things nationally is a great thing to be able to do.How many fish are actually in these coastal areas compared to the high seas? Well, you can see here about seven times as many fish in the coastal areas than there are in the high seas, so this is a perfect place for us to be focusing, because we can actually get a lot done. We can restore a lot of our fisheries if we focus in these coastal areas.But how many of these countries do we have to work in? There's something like 80 coastal countries. Do we have to fix fisheries management in all of those countries? So we asked ourselves, how many countries do we need to focus on, keeping in mind that the European Union conveniently manages its fisheries through a common fisheries policy? So if we got good fisheries management in the European Union and, say, nine other countries, how much of our fisheries would we be covering? Turns out, European Union plus nine countries covers about two thirds of the world's fish catch. If we took it up to 24 countries plus the European Union, we would up to 90 percent, almost all of the world's fish catch. So we think we can work in a limited number of places to make the fisheries come back. But what do we have to do in these places? Well, based on our work in the United States and elsewhere, we know that there are three key things we have to do to bring fisheries back, and they are: We need to set quotas or limits on how much we take; we need to reduce bycatch, which is the accidental catching and killing of fish that we're not targeting, and it's very wasteful; and three, we need to protect habitats, the nursery areas, the spawning areas that these fish need to grow and reproduce successfully so that they can rebuild their populations. If we do those three things, we  know the fisheries will come back.How do we know? We know because we've seen it happening in a lot of different places. This is a slide that shows the herring population in Norway that was crashing since the 1950s. It was coming down, and when Norway set limits, or quotas, on its fishery, what happens? The fishery comes back. This is another example, also happens to be from Norway, of the Norwegian Arctic cod. Same deal. The fishery is crashing. They set limits on discards. Discards are these fish they weren't targeting and they get thrown overboard wastefully. When they set the discard limit, the fishery came back. And it's not just in Norway. We've seen this happening in countries all around the world, time and time again. When these countries step in and they put in sustainable fisheries management policies, the fisheries, which are always crashing, it seems, are starting to come back. So there's a lot of promise here.What does this mean for the world fish catch? This means that if we take that fishery catch that's on the decline and we could turn it upwards, we could increase it up to 100 million metric tons per year. So we didn't have peak fish yet. We still have an opportunity to not only bring the fish back but to actually get more fish that can feed more people than we currently are now. How many more? Right about now, we can feed about 450 million people a fish meal a day based on the current world fish catch, which, of course, you know is going down, so that number will go down over time if we don't fix it, but if we put fishery management practices like the ones I've described in place in 10 to 25 countries, we could bring that number up and feed as many as 700 million people a year a healthy fish meal.We should obviously do this just because it's a good thing to deal with the hunger problem, but it's also cost-effective. It turns out fish is the most cost-effective protein on the planet. If you look at how much fish protein you get per dollar invested compared to all of the other animal proteins, obviously, fish is a good business decision. It also doesn't need a lot of land, something that's in short supply, compared to other protein sources. And it doesn't need a lot of fresh water. It uses a lot less fresh water than, for example, cattle, where you have to irrigate a field so that you can grow the food to graze the cattle. It also has a very low carbon footprint. It has a little bit of a carbon footprint because we do have to get out and catch the fish. It takes a little bit of fuel, but as you know, agriculture can have a carbon footprint, and fish has a much smaller one, so it's less polluting. It's already a big part of our diet, but it can be a bigger part of our diet, which is a good thing, because we know that it's healthy for us. It can reduce our risks of cancer, heart disease and obesity. In fact, our CEO Andy Sharpless, who is the originator of this concept, actually, he likes to say fish is the perfect protein. Andy also talks about the fact that our ocean conservation movement really grew out of the land conservation movement, and in land conservation, we have this problem where biodiversity is at war with food production. You have to cut down the biodiverse forest if you want to get the field to grow the corn to feed people with, and so there's a constant push-pull there. There's a constant tough decision that has to be made between two very important things: maintaining biodiversity and feeding people. But in the oceans, we don't have that war. In the oceans, biodiversity is not at war with abundance. In fact, they're aligned. When we do things that produce biodiversity, we actually get more abundance, and that's important so that we can feed people.Now, there's a catch.Didn't anyone get that? (Laughter)Illegal fishing. Illegal fishing undermines the type of sustainable fisheries management I'm talking about. It can be when you catch fish using gears that have been prohibited, when you fish in places where you're not supposed to fish, you catch fish that are the wrong size or the wrong species. Illegal fishing cheats the consumer and it also cheats honest fishermen, and it needs to stop. The way illegal fish get into our  market is through seafood fraud. You might have heard about this. It's when fish are labeled as something they're not. Think about the last time you had fish. What were you eating? Are you sure that's what it was? Because we tested 1,300 different fish samples and about a third of them were not what they were labeled to be. Snappers, nine out of 10 snappers were not snapper. Fifty-nine percent of the tuna we tested was mislabeled. And red snapper, we tested 120 samples, and only seven of them were really red snapper, so good luck finding a red snapper.Seafood has a really complex supply chain, and at every step in this supply chain, there's an opportunity for seafood fraud, unless we have traceability. Traceability is a way where the seafood industry can track the seafood from the boat to the plate to make sure that the consumer can then find out where their seafood came from.This is a really important thing. It's being done by some in the industry, but not enough, so we're pushing a law in Congress called the SAFE Seafood Act, and I'm very excited today to announce the release of a chef's petition, where 450 chefs have signed a petition calling on Congress to support the SAFE Seafood Act. It has a lot of celebrity chefs you may know — Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Barton Seaver and others — and they've signed it because they believe that people have a right to know about what they're eating.(Applause)Fishermen like it too, so there's a good chance we can get the kind of support we need to get this bill through, and it comes at a critical time, because this is the way we stop seafood fraud, this is the way we curb illegal fishing, and this is the way we make sure that quotas, habitat protection, and bycatch reductions can do the jobs they can do.We know that we can manage our fisheries sustainably. We know that we can produce healthy meals for hundreds of millions of people that don't use the land, that don't use much water, have a low carbon footprint, and are cost-effective. We know that saving the oceans can feed the world, and we need to start now.(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jackie_savitz_save_the_oceans_feed_the_world
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"As a student of adversity, I've been struck over the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strength from them. And I've heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some great truth waiting to be found.But over time, I've come to feel that the truth is irrelevant. We call it ""finding meaning,"" but we might better call it ""forging meaning.""My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring. And one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities, said to me, ""People always give us these little sayings like, 'God doesn't give you any more than you can handle.' But children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen.""We make those choices all our lives. When I was in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and she called Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn't like me and didn't want me at his party. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae. When I was in seventh grade, one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me ""Percy,"" as a shorthand for my demeanor. And sometimes, he and his cohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride, 45 minutes up, 45 minutes back: ""Percy! Percy! Percy! Percy!"" When I was in eighth grade, our science teacher told us that all male homosexuals develop fecal incontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter. And I graduated high school without ever going to the cafeteria, where I would have sat with the girls and been laughed at for doing so, or sat with the boys, and been laughed at for being a boy who should be sitting with the girls.I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.One of the other mothers I interviewed when I was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent, and had a child following that rape, which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all of her emotional relationships. But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her, ""Do you often think about the man who raped you?"" And she said, ""I used to think about him with anger, but now only with pity."" And I thought she meant pity because he was so unevolved as to have done this terrible thing. And I said, ""Pity?"" And she said, ""Yes, because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren, and he doesn't know that, and I do. So as it turns out, I'm the lucky one.""Some of our struggles are things we're born to: our gender, our sexuality, our race, our disability. And some are things that happen to us: being a political prisoner, being a rape victim, being a Katrina survivor. Identity involves entering a community to draw strength from that community, and to give strength there, too. It involves substituting ""and"" for ""but"" — not ""I am here but I have cancer,"" but rather, ""I have cancer and I am here.""When we're ashamed, we can't tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning, build identity. Forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra. Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: How much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious.In January of this year, I went to Myanmar to interview political prisoners, and I was surprised to find them less bitter than I'd anticipated. Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landed them in prison, and they had walked in with their heads held high, and they walked out with their heads still held high, many years later. Dr. Ma Thida, a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to hone her meditation skills. She had sought meaning and made her travail into a crucial identity. But if the people I met were less bitter than I'd anticipated about being in prison, they were also less thrilled than I'd expected about the reform process going on in their country. Ma Thida said, ""We Burmese are noted for our tremendous grace under pressure, but we also have grievance under glamour."" She said, ""And the fact that there have been these shifts and changes doesn't erase the continuing problems in our society that we learned to see so well while we were in prison.""I understood her to be saying that concessions confer only a little humanity where full humanity is due; that crumbs are not the same as a place at the table. Which is to say, you can forge meaning and build identity and still be mad as hell.I've never been raped, and I've never been in anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison. But as a gay American, I've experienced prejudice and even hatred, and I've forged meaning and I've built identity, which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worse privation than I've ever known. In my own adolescence, I went to extreme lengths to try to be straight. I enrolled myself in something called ""sexual surrogacy therapy,"" in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I was encouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates, who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else.(Laughter)My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac, and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue.(Laughter)These experiences eventually allowed me to have some happy physical relationships with women, for which I'm grateful. But I was at war with myself, and I dug terrible wounds into my own psyche.We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. ""Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities,"" St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, ""for when I am weak, then I am strong.""In 1988, I went to Moscow to interview artists of the Soviet underground. I expected their work to be dissident and political. But the radicalism in their work actually lay in reinserting humanity into a society that was annihilating humanity itself, as, in some senses, Russian society is now doing again. One of the artists I met said to me, ""We were in training to be not artists but angels.""In 1991, I went back to see the artists I'd been writing about, and I was with them during the putsch that ended the Soviet Union. And they were among the chief organizers of the resistance to that putsch. And on the third day of the putsch, one of them suggested we walk up to Smolenskaya. And we went there, and we arranged ourselves in front of one of the barricades, and a little while later, a column of tanks rolled up. And the soldier on the front tank said, ""We have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade. If you get out of the way, we don't need to hurt you. But if you won't move, we'll have no choice but to run you down."" The artist I was with said, ""Give us just a minute. Give us just a minute to tell you why we're here."" And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present. And they went on and on, and the soldier watched. And then he sat there for a full minute after they were finished and looked at us, so bedraggled in the rain, and said, ""What you have said is true, and we must bow to the will of the people. If you'll clear enough space for us to turn around, we'll go back the way we came."" And that's what they did. Sometimes, forging meaning can give you the vocabulary you need to fight for your ultimate freedom.Russia awakened me to the lemonade notion that oppression breeds the power to oppose it. And I gradually understood that as the cornerstone of identity. It took identity to rescue me from sadness. The gay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances are a victory. Identity politics always works on two fronts: to give pride to people who have a given condition or characteristic, and to cause the outside world to treat such people more gently and more kindly. Those are two totally separate enterprises, but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other. Identity politics can be narcissistic. People extol a difference only because it's theirs. People narrow the world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another. But properly understood and wisely practiced, identity politics should expand our idea of what it is to be human. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal, but a revolution.I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me. And I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives. I've sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myself without gay pride's technicolor fiesta, of which this speech is one manifestation.(Laughter)I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis. But the self-loathing of that period left a void, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it, and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy, there's still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address. Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet. A friend of mine who thought gay pride was getting very carried away with itself, once suggested that we organize Gay Humility Week.(Laughter)(Applause)It's a great idea.(Laughter)But its time has not yet come.(Laughter)And neutrality, which seems to lie halfway between despair and celebration, is actually the endgame.In 29 states in the US, I could legally be fired or denied housing for being gay. In Russia, the anti-propaganda law has led to people being beaten in the streets. Twenty-seven African countries have passed laws against sodomy. And in Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and lynchings have become common. In Saudi Arabia recently, two men who had been caught in carnal acts were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, and are now permanently disabled as a result. So who can forge meaning and build identity? Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that's still a rare privilege. And gay people deserve more, collectively, than the crumbs of justice.And yet, every step forward is so sweet. In 2007, six years after we met, my partner and I decided to get married. Meeting John had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of great unhappiness. And sometimes, I was so occupied with the disappearance of all that pain, that I forgot about the joy, which was at first the less remarkable part of it to me. Marrying was a way to declare our love as more a presence than an absence.Marriage soon led us to children, and that meant new meanings and new identities — ours and theirs. I want my children to be happy, and I love them most achingly when they are sad. As a gay father, I can teach them to own what is wrong in their lives, but I believe that if I succeed in sheltering them from adversity, I will have failed as a parent. A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you, and you have only bliss to look forward to. But he said that would not be nirvana, because your bliss in the present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past. Nirvana, he said, is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find in what looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy. And I sometimes wonder whether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they'd come more readily, if I'd been straight in my youth or were young now, in either of which cases this might be easier. Perhaps I could. Perhaps all the complex imagining I've done could have been applied to other topics. But if seeking meaning matters more than finding meaning, the question is not whether I'd be happier for having been bullied, but whether assigning meaning to those experiences has made me a better father. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.I know many heterosexuals who have equally happy marriages and families, but gay marriage is so breathtakingly fresh, and gay families so exhilaratingly new, and I found meaning in that surprise.In October, it was my 50th birthday, and my family organized a party for me. And in the middle of it, my son said to my husband that he wanted to make a speech. And John said, ""George, you can't make a speech. You're four.""(Laughter)""Only Grandpa and Uncle David and I are going to make speeches tonight."" But George insisted and insisted, and finally, John took him up to the microphone, and George said very loudly, ""Ladies and gentlemen! May I have your attention, please?"" And everyone turned around, startled. And George said, ""I'm glad it's daddy's birthday. I'm glad we all get cake. And Daddy, if you were little, I'd be your friend.""(Gasp)And I thought — (Applause) Thank you. I thought that I was indebted even to Bobby Finkel, because all those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I'd once have done anything to change.The gay activist Harvey Milk was once asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement, and Harvey Milk said, ""Go out and tell someone."" There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it. If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred, and expand everyone's lives.Forge meaning. Build identity. Forge meaning. Build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_how_the_worst_moments_in_our_lives_make_us_who_we_are
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"What do augmented reality and professional football have to do with empathy? And what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Now unfortunately, I'm only going to answer one of those questions today, so please, try and contain your disappointment.When most people think about augmented reality, they think about ""Minority Report"" and Tom Cruise waving his hands in the air, but augmented reality is not science fiction. Augmented reality is something that will happen in our lifetime, and it will happen because we have the tools to make it happen, and people need to be aware of that, because augmented reality will change our lives just as much as the Internet and the cell phone.Now how do we get to augmented reality? Step one is the step I'm wearing right now, Google Glass. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Google Glass. What you may not be familiar with is that Google Glass is a device that will allow you to see what I see. It will allow you to experience what it is like to be a professional athlete on the field. Right now, the only way you can be on the field is for me to try and describe it to you. I have to use words. I have to create a framework that you then fill in with your imagination. With Google Glass, we can put that underneath a helmet, and we can get a sense of what it's like to be running down the field at 100 miles an hour, your blood pounding in your ears. You can get a sense of what it's like to have a 250-pound man sprinting at you trying to decapitate you with every ounce of his being. And I've been on the receiving end of that, and it doesn't feel very good.Now, I have some footage to show you of what it's like to wear Google Glass underneath the helmet to give you a taste of that. Unfortunately, it's not NFL practice footage because the NFL thinks emergent technology is what happens when a submarine surfaces, but — (Laughter) — we do what we can.So let's pull up some video.(Video) Chris Kluwe: Go. Ugh, getting tackled sucks. Hold on, let's get a little closer. All right, ready? Go!Chris Kluwe: So as you can see, small taste of what it's like to get tackled on the football field from the perspective of the tacklee. Now, you may have noticed there are some people missing there: the rest of the team. We have some video of that courtesy of the University of Washington.(Video) Quarterback: Hey, Mice 54! Mice 54! Blue 8! Blue 8! Go! Oh!CK: So again, this takes you a little bit closer to what it's like to be on that field, but this is nowhere what it's like to be on the NFL.Fans want that experience. Fans want to be on that field. They want to be their favorite players, and they've already talked to me on YouTube, they've talked to me on Twitter, saying, ""Hey, can you get this on a quarterback? Can you get this on a running back? We want that experience.""Well, once we have that experience with GoPro and Google Glass, how do we make it more immersive? How do we take that next step? Well, we take that step by going to something called the Oculus Rift, which I'm sure many of you are also familiar with. The Oculus Rift has been described as one of the most realistic virtual reality devices ever created, and that is not empty hype. I'm going to show you why that is not empty hype with this video. (Video) Man: Oh! Oh! No! No! No! I don't want to play anymore! No! Oh my God! Aaaah!CK: So that is the experience of a man on a roller coaster in fear of his life. What do you think that fan's experience is going to be when we take the video footage of an Adrian Peterson bursting through the line, shedding a tackler with a stiff-arm before sprinting in for a touchdown? What do you think that fan's experience is going to be when he's Messi sprinting down the pitch putting the ball in the back of the net, or Federer serving in Wimbledon? What do you think his experience is going to be when he is going down the side of a mountain at over 70 miles an hour as an Olympic downhill skier? I think adult diaper sales may surge. (Laughter)But this is not yet augmented reality. This is only virtual reality, V.R. How do we get to augmented reality, A.R.? We get to augmented reality when coaches and managers and owners look at this information streaming in that people want to see, and they say, ""How do we use this to make our teams better? How do we use this to win games?"" Because teams always use technology to win games. They like winning. It makes them money.So a brief history of technology in the NFL. In 1965, the Baltimore Colts put a wristband on their quarterback to allow him to call plays quicker. They ended up winning a Super Bowl that year. Other teams followed suit. More people watched the game because it was more exciting. It was faster.In 1994, the NFL put helmet radios into the helmets of the quarterbacks, and later the defense. More people watched games because it was faster. It was more entertaining.In 2023, imagine you're a player walking back to the huddle, and you have your next play displayed right in front of your face on your clear plastic visor that you already wear right now. No more having to worry about forgetting plays. No more worrying about having to memorize your playbook. You just go out and react. And coaches really want this, because missed assignments lose you games, and coaches hate losing games. Losing games gets you fired as a coach. They don't want that.But augmented reality is not just an enhanced playbook. Augmented reality is also a way to take all that data and use it in real time to enhance how you play the game. What would that be like? Well, a very simple setup would be a camera on each corner of the stadium looking down, giving you a bird's-eye view of all the people down there. You also have information from helmet sensors and accelerometers, technology that's being worked on right now. You take all that information, and you stream it to your players. The good teams stream it in a way that the players can use. The bad ones have information overload. That determines good teams from bad. And now, your I.T. department is just as important as your scouting department, and data-mining is not for nerds anymore. It's also for jocks. Who knew?What would that look like on the field? Well, imagine you're the quarterback. You take the snap and you drop back. You're scanning downfield for an open receiver. All of a sudden, a bright flash on the left side of your visor lets you know, blind side linebacker is blitzing in. Normally, you wouldn't be able to see him, but the augmented reality system lets you know. You step up into the pocket. Another flash alerts you to an open receiver. You throw the ball, but you're hit right as you throw. The ball comes off track. You don't know where it's going to land. However, on the receiver's visor, he sees a patch of grass light up, and he knows to readjust. He goes, catches the ball, sprints in, touchdown. Crowd goes wild, and the fans are with him every step of the way, watching from every perspective.Now this is something that will create massive excitement in the game. It will make tons of people watch, because people want this experience. Fans want to be on the field. They want to be their favorite player. Augmented reality will be a part of sports, because it's too profitable not to.But the question I ask you is, is that's all that we're content to use augmented reality for? Are we going to use it solely for our panem, our circenses, our entertainment as normal? Because I believe that we can use augmented reality for something more. I believe we can use augmented reality as a way to foster more empathy within the human species itself, by literally showing someone what it looks like to walk a mile in another person's shoes. We know what this technology is worth to sports leagues. It's worth revenue, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But what is this technology worth to a teacher in a classroom trying to show a bully just how harmful his actions are from the perspective of the victim? What is this technology worth to a gay Ugandan or Russian trying to show the world what it's like living under persecution? What is this technology worth to a Commander Hadfield or a Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to inspire a generation of children to think more about space and science instead of quarterly reports and Kardashians?Ladies and gentlemen, augmented reality is coming. The questions we ask, the choices we make, and the challenges we face are, as always, up to us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_kluwe_how_augmented_reality_will_change_sports_and_build_empathy
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"I'm excited to be here to speak about vets, because I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war. I didn't join the Army because I had a lust or a need to go overseas and fight. Frankly, I joined the Army because college is really damn expensive, and they were going to help with that, and I joined the Army because it was what I knew, and it was what I knew that I thought I could do well.I didn't come from a military family. I'm not a military brat. No one in my family ever had joined the military at all, and how I first got introduced to the military was when I was 13 years old and I got sent away to military school, because my mother had been threatening me with this idea of military school ever since I was eight years old.I had some issues when I was coming up, and my mother would always tell me, she's like, ""You know, if you don't get this together, I'm going to send you to military school."" And I'd look at her, and I'd say, ""Mommy, I'll work harder."" And then when I was nine years old, she started giving me brochures to show me she wasn't playing around, so I'd look at the brochures, and I'm like, ""Okay, Mommy, I can see you're serious, and I'll work harder."" And then when I was 10 and 11, my behavior just kept on getting worse. I was on academic and disciplinary probation before I hit double digits, and I first felt handcuffs on my wrists when I was 11 years old. And so when I was 13 years old, my mother came up to me, and she was like, ""I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to send you to military school."" And I looked at her, and I said, ""Mommy, I can see you're upset, and I'm going to work harder."" And she was like, ""No, you're going next week."" And that was how I first got introduced to this whole idea of the military, because she thought this was a good idea.I had to disagree with her wholeheartedly when I first showed up there, because literally in the first four days, I had already run away five times from this school. They had these big black gates that surrounded the school, and every time they would turn their backs, I would just simply run out of the black gates and take them up on their offer that if we don't want to be there, we can leave at any time. So I just said, ""Well, if that's the case, then I'd like to leave."" (Laughter) And it never worked. And I kept on getting lost.But then eventually, after staying there for a little while, and after the end of that first year at this military school, I realized that I actually was growing up. I realized the things that I enjoyed about this school and the thing that I enjoyed about the structure was something that I'd never found before: the fact that I finally felt like I was part of something bigger, part of a team, and it actually mattered to people that I was there, the fact that leadership wasn't just a punchline there, but that it was a real, actually core part of the entire experience. And so when it was time for me to actually finish up high school, I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and just like probably most students, had no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do. And I thought about the people who I respected and admired. I thought about a lot of the people, in particular a lot of the men, in my life who I looked up to. They all happened to wear the uniform of the United States of America, so for me, the question and the answer really became pretty easy. The question of what I wanted to do was filled in very quickly with saying, I guess I'll be an Army officer.So the Army then went through this process and they trained me up, and when I say I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war, the truth is, I joined in 1996. There really wasn't a whole lot going on. I didn't ever feel like I was in danger. When I went to my mom, I first joined the Army when I was 17 years old, so I literally needed parental permission to join the Army, so I kind of gave the paperwork to my mom, and she just assumed it was kind of like military school. She was like, ""Well, it was good for him before, so I guess I'll just let him keep doing it,"" having no idea that the paperwork that she was signing was actually signing her son up to become an Army officer. And I went through the process, and again the whole time still just thinking, this is great, maybe I'll serve on a weekend, or two weeks during the year, do drill, and then a couple years after I signed up, a couple years after my mother signed those papers, the whole world changed. And after 9/11, there was an entirely new context about the occupation that I chose. When I first joined, I never joined to fight, but now that I was in, this is exactly what was now going to happen.And I thought about so much about the soldiers who I eventually had to end up leading. I remember when we first, right after 9/11, three weeks after 9/11, I was on a plane heading overseas, but I wasn't heading overseas with the military, I was heading overseas because I got a scholarship to go overseas. I received the scholarship to go overseas and to go study and live overseas, and I was living in England and that was interesting, but at the same time, the same people who I was training with, the same soldiers that I went through all my training with, and we prepared for war, they were now actually heading over to it. They were now about to find themselves in the middle of places the fact is the vast majority of people, the vast majority of us as we were training, couldn't even point out on a map. I spent a couple years finishing graduate school, and the whole entire time while I'm sitting there in buildings at Oxford that were literally built hundreds of years before the United States was even founded, and I'm sitting there talking to dons about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and how that influenced the start of World War I, where the entire time my heart and my head were on my soldiers who were now throwing on Kevlars and grabbing their flak vests and figuring out how exactly do I change around or how exactly do I clean a machine gun in the darkness. That was the new reality.By the time I finished that up and I rejoined my military unit and we were getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan, there were soldiers in my unit who were now on their second and third deployments before I even had my first. I remember walking out with my unit for the first time, and when you join the Army and you go through a combat tour, everyone looks at your shoulder, because on your shoulder is your combat patch. And so immediately as you meet people, you shake their hand, and then your eyes go to their shoulder, because you want to see where did they serve, or what unit did they serve with? And I was the only person walking around with a bare shoulder, and it burned every time someone stared at it.But you get a chance to talk to your soldiers, and you ask them why did they sign up. I signed up because college was expensive. A lot of my soldiers signed up for completely different reasons. They signed up because of a sense of obligation. They signed up because they were angry and they wanted to do something about it. They signed up because their family said this was important. They signed up because they wanted some form of revenge. They signed for a whole collection of different reasons. And now we all found ourselves overseas fighting in these conflicts.And what was amazing to me was that I very naively started hearing this statement that I never fully understood, because right after 9/11, you start hearing this idea where people come up to you and they say, ""Well, thank you for your service."" And I just kind of followed in and started saying the same things to all my soldiers. This is even before I deployed. But I really had no idea what that even meant. I just said it because it sounded right. I said it because it sounded like the right thing to say to people who had served overseas. ""Thank you for your service."" But I had no idea what the context was or what that even, what it even meant to the people who heard it.When I first came back from Afghanistan, I thought that if you make it back from conflict, then the dangers were all over. I thought that if you made it back from a conflict zone that somehow you could kind of wipe the sweat off your brow and say, ""Whew, I'm glad I dodged that one,"" without understanding that for so many people, as they come back home, the war keeps going. It keeps playing out in all of our minds. It plays out in all of our memories. It plays out in all of our emotions. Please forgive us if we don't like being in big crowds. Please forgive us when we spend one week in a place that has 100 percent light discipline, because you're not allowed to walk around with white lights, because if anything has a white light, it can be seen from miles away, versus if you use little green or little blue lights, they cannot be seen from far away. So please forgive us if out of nowhere, we go from having 100 percent light discipline to then a week later being back in the middle of Times Square, and we have a difficult time adjusting to that. Please forgive us when you transition back to a family who has completely been maneuvering without you, and now when you come back, it's not that easy to fall back into a sense of normality, because the whole normal has changed.I remember when I came back, I wanted to talk to people. I wanted people to ask me about my experiences. I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, ""What did you do?"" I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, ""What was it like? What was the food like? What was the experience like? How are you doing?"" And the only questions I got from people was, ""Did you shoot anybody?"" And those were the ones who were even curious enough to say anything. Because sometimes there's this fear and there's this apprehension that if I say anything, I'm afraid I'll offend, or I'm afraid I'll trigger something, so the common default is just saying nothing. The problem with that is then it feels like your service was not even acknowledged, like no one even cared. ""Thank you for your service,"" and we move on. What I wanted to better understand was what's behind that, and why ""thank you for your service"" isn't enough. The fact is, we have literally 2.6 million men and women who are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who are all amongst us. Sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't, but there is that feeling, the shared experience, the shared bond where we know that that experience and that chapter of our life, while it might be closed, it's still not over.We think about ""thank you for your service,"" and people say, ""So what does 'thank you for your service' mean to you?"" Well, ""Thank you for your service"" means to me, it means acknowledging our stories, asking us who we are, understanding the strength that so many people, so many people who we serve with, have, and why that service means so much. ""Thank you for your service"" means acknowledging the fact that just because we've now come home and we've taken off the uniform does not mean our larger service to this country is somehow over. The fact is, there's still a tremendous amount that can be offered and can be given. When I look at people like our friend Taylor Urruela, who in Iraq loses his leg, had two big dreams in his life. One was to be a soldier. The other was to be a baseball player. He loses his leg in Iraq. He comes back and instead of deciding that, well, now since I've lost my leg, that second dream is over, he decides that he still has that dream of playing baseball, and he starts this group called VETSports, which now works with veterans all over the country and uses sports as a way of healing. People like Tammy Duckworth, who was a helicopter pilot and with the helicopter that she was flying, you need to use both your hands and also your legs to steer, and her helicopter gets hit, and she's trying to steer the chopper, but the chopper's not reacting to her instructions and to her commands. She's trying to land the chopper safely, but the chopper doesn't land safely, and the reason it's not landing safely is because it's not responding to the commands that her legs are giving because her legs were blown off. She barely survives. Medics come and they save her life, but then as she's doing her recuperation back at home, she realizes that, ""My job's still not done."" And now she uses her voice as a Congresswoman from Illinois to fight and advocate for a collection of issues to include veterans issues.We signed up because we love this country we represent. We signed up because we believe in the idea and we believe in the people to our left and to our right. And the only thing we then ask is that ""thank you for your service"" needs to be more than just a quote break, that ""thank you for your service"" means honestly digging in to the people who have stepped up simply because they were asked to, and what that means for us not just now, not just during combat operations, but long after the last vehicle has left and after the last shot has been taken.These are the people who I served with, and these are the people who I honor. So thank you for your service.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wes_moore_how_to_talk_to_veterans_about_the_war
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"I'm going to ask and try to answer, in some ways, kind of an uncomfortable question. Both civilians, obviously, and soldiers suffer in war; I don't think any civilian has ever missed the war that they were subjected to. I've been covering wars for almost 20 years, and one of the remarkable things for me is how many soldiers find themselves missing it. How is it someone can go through the worst experience imaginable, and come home, back to their home, and their family, their country, and miss the war? How does that work? What does it mean? We have to answer that question, because if we don't, it'll be impossible to bring soldiers back to a place in society where they belong, and I think it'll also be impossible to stop war, if we don't understand how that mechanism works.The problem is that war does not have a simple, neat truth, one simple, neat truth.Any sane person hates war, hates the idea of war, wouldn't want to have anything to do with it, doesn't want to be near it, doesn't want to know about it. That's a sane response to war. But if I asked all of you in this room, who here has paid money to go to a cinema and be entertained by a Hollywood war movie, most of you would probably raise your hands. That's what's so complicated about war. And trust me, if a room full of peace-loving people finds something compelling about war, so do 20-year-old soldiers who have been trained in it, I promise you. That's the thing that has to be understood.I've covered war for about 20 years, as I said, but my most intense experiences in combat were with American soldiers in Afghanistan. I've been in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan in the '90s, but it was with American soldiers in 2007, 2008, that I was confronted with very intense combat. I was in a small valley called the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. It was six miles long. There were 150 men of Battle Company in that valley, and for a while, while I was there, almost 20 percent of all the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening in those six miles. A hundred and fifty men were absorbing almost a fifth of the combat for all of NATO forces in the country, for a couple months. It was very intense. I spent most of my time at a small outpost called Restrepo. It was named after the platoon medic that had been killed about two months into the deployment. It was a few plywood B-huts clinging to a side of a ridge, and sandbags, bunkers, gun positions, and there were 20 men up there of Second Platoon, Battle Company. I spent most of my time up there. There was no running water. There was no way to bathe. The guys were up there for a month at a time. They never even got out of their clothes. They fought. The worked. They slept in the same clothes. They never took them off, and at the end of the month, they went back down to the company headquarters, and by then, their clothes were unwearable. They burned them and got a new set. There was no Internet. There was no phone. There was no communication with the outside world up there. There was no cooked food. There was nothing up there that young men typically like: no cars, no girls, no television, nothing except combat. Combat they did learn to like.I remember one day, it was a very hot day in the spring, and we hadn't been in a fight in a couple of weeks, maybe. Usually, the outpost was attacked, and we hadn't seen any combat in a couple of weeks, and everyone was just stunned with boredom and heat. And I remember the lieutenant walking past me sort of stripped to the waist. It was incredibly hot. Stripped to the waist, walked past me muttering, ""Oh God, please someone attack us today."" That's how bored they were. That's war too, is a lieutenant saying, ""Please make something happen because we're going crazy.""To understand that, you have to, for a moment, think about combat not morally — that's an important job to do — but for a moment, don't think about it morally, think about it neurologically. Let's think about what happens in your brain when you're in combat. First of all, the experience is very bizarre, it's a very bizarre one. It's not what I had expected. Usually, you're not scared. I've been very scared in combat, but most of the time when I was out there, I wasn't scared. I was very scared beforehand and incredibly scared afterwards, and that fear that comes afterwards can last years. I haven't been shot at in six years, and I was woken up very abruptly this morning by a nightmare that I was being strafed by aircraft, six years later. I've never even been strafed by aircraft, and I was having nightmares about it. Time slows down. You get this weird tunnel vision. You notice some details very, very, very accurately and other things drop out. It's almost a slightly altered state of mind. What's happening in your brain is you're getting an enormous amount of adrenaline pumped through your system. Young men will go to great lengths to have that experience. It's wired into us. It's hormonally supported. The mortality rate for young men in society is six times what it is for young women from violence and from accidents, just the stupid stuff that young men do: jumping off of things they shouldn't jump off of, lighting things on fire they shouldn't light on fire, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. They die at six times the rate that young women do. Statistically, you are safer as a teenage boy, you would be safer in the fire department or the police department in most American cities than just walking around the streets of your hometown looking for something to do, statistically.You can imagine how that plays out in combat. At Restrepo, every guy up there was almost killed, including me, including my good friend Tim Hetherington, who was later killed in Libya. There were guys walking around with bullet holes in their uniforms, rounds that had cut through the fabric and didn't touch their bodies.I was leaning against some sandbags one morning, not much going on, sort of spacing out, and some sand was kicked into the side of, sort of hit the side of my face. Something hit the side of my face, and I didn't know what it was. You have to understand about bullets that they go a lot faster than sound, so if someone shoots at you from a few hundred meters, the bullet goes by you, or hits you obviously, half a second or so before the sound catches up to it. So I had some sand sprayed in the side of my face. Half a second later, I heard dut-dut-dut-dut-duh. It was machine gun fire. It was the first round, the first burst of an hour-long firefight. What had happened was the bullet hit, a bullet hit three or four inches from the side of my head. Imagine, just think about it, because I certainly did, think about the angle of deviation that saved my life. At 400 meters, it missed me by three inches. Just think about the math on that. Every guy up there had some experience like that, at least once, if not many times.The boys are up there for a year. They got back. Some of them got out of the Army and had tremendous psychological problems when they got home. Some of them stayed in the Army and were more or less okay, psychologically. I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O'Byrne. I'm still very good friends with him. He came back to the States. He got out of the Army. I had a dinner party one night. I invited him, and he started talking with a woman, one of my friends, and she knew how bad it had been out there, and she said, ""Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war?"" And he thought about it quite a long time, and finally he said, ""Ma'am, I miss almost all of it."" And he's one of the most traumatized people I've seen from that war. ""Ma'am, I miss almost all of it.""What is he talking about? He's not a psychopath. He doesn't miss killing people. He's not crazy. He doesn't miss getting shot at and seeing his friends get killed. What is it that he misses? We have to answer that. If we're going to stop war, we have to answer that question.I think what he missed is brotherhood. He missed, in some ways, the opposite of killing. What he missed was connection to the other men he was with. Now, brotherhood is different from friendship. Friendship happens in society, obviously. The more you like someone, the more you'd be willing to do for them. Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person. It's a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own. In effect, you're saying, ""I love these other people more than I love myself.""Brendan was a team leader in command of three men, and the worst day in Afghanistan — He was almost killed so many times. It didn't bother him. The worst thing that happened to him in Afghanistan was one of his men was hit in the head with a bullet in the helmet, knocked him over. They thought he was dead. It was in the middle of a huge firefight. No one could deal with it, and a minute later, Kyle Steiner sat back up from the dead, as it were, because he'd come back to consciousness. The bullet had just knocked him out. It glanced off the helmet. He remembers people saying, as he was sort of half-conscious, he remembers people saying, ""Steiner's been hit in the head. Steiner's dead."" And he was thinking, ""I'm not dead."" And he sat up. And Brendan realized after that that he could not protect his men, and that was the only time he cried in Afghanistan, was realizing that. That's brotherhood.This wasn't invented recently. Many of you have probably read ""The Iliad."" Achilles surely would have risked his life or given his life to save his friend Patroclus. In World War II, there were many stories of soldiers who were wounded, were brought to a rear base hospital, who went AWOL, crawled out of windows, slipped out doors, went AWOL, wounded, to make their way back to the front lines to rejoin their brothers out there. So you think about Brendan, you think about all these soldiers having an experience like that, a bond like that, in a small group, where they loved 20 other people in some ways more than they loved themselves, you think about how good that would feel, imagine it, and they are blessed with that experience for a year, and then they come home, and they are just back in society like the rest of us are, not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it. That is terrifying. Compared to that, war, psychologically, in some ways, is easy, compared to that kind of alienation. That's why they miss it, and that's what we have to understand and in some ways fix in our society.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_junger_why_veterans_miss_war
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"So it was the fall of 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt needed a little break from the White House, so he took a train to Mississippi to do a little black bear hunting outside of a town called Smedes. The first day of the hunt, they didn't see a single bear, so it was a big bummer for everyone, but the second day, the dogs cornered one after a really long chase, but by that point, the president had given up and gone back to camp for lunch, so his hunting guide cracked the animal on the top of the head with the butt of his rifle, and then tied it up to a tree and started tooting away on his bugle to call Roosevelt back so he could have the honor of shooting it. The bear was a female. It was dazed, injured, severely underweight, a little mangy-looking, and when Roosevelt saw this animal tied up to the tree, he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it. He felt like that would go against his code as a sportsman.A few days later, the scene was memorialized in a political cartoon back in Washington. It was called ""Drawing a Line in Mississippi,"" and it showed Roosevelt with his gun down and his arm out, sparing the bear's life, and the bear was sitting on its hind legs with these two big, frightened, wide eyes and little ears pricked up at the top of its head. It looked really helpless, like you just wanted to sweep it up into your arms and reassure it. It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time, but if you go looking for the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: It's a teddy bear. And this is how the teddy bear was born. Essentially, toymakers took the bear from the cartoon, turned it into a plush toy, and then named it after President Roosevelt — Teddy's bear.And I do feel a little ridiculous that I'm up here on this stage and I'm choosing to use my time to tell you about a 100-year-old story about the invention of a squishy kid's toy, but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear, inside that story is a more important story, a story about how dramatically our ideas about nature can change, and also about how, on the planet right now, the stories that we tell are dramatically changing nature.Because think about the teddy bear. For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit, because bears are so cute and cuddly, and who wouldn't want to give one to their kids to play with, but the truth is that in 1902, bears weren't cute and cuddly. I mean, they looked the same, but no one thought of them that way. In 1902, bears were monsters. Bears were something that frickin' terrified kids. For generations at that point, the bear had been a shorthand for all the danger that people were encountering on the frontier, and the federal government was actually systematically exterminating bears and lots of other predators too, like coyotes and wolves. These animals, they were being demonized. They were called murderers because they killed people's livestock. One government biologist, he explained this war on animals like the bear by saying that they no longer had a place in our advancing civilization, and so we were just clearing them out of the way. In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolves had been slaughtered. The grizzly would soon be wiped out from 95 percent of its original territory, and whereas once there had been 30 million bison moving across the plains, and you would have these stories of trains having to stop for four or five hours so that these thick, living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks, now, by 1902, there were maybe  less than 100 left in the wild. And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was born into the middle of this great spasm of extermination, and you can see it as a sign that maybe some people deep down were starting to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated the bear and feared it, but all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a great big hug.So this is something that I've been really curious about in the last few years. How do we imagine animals, how do we think and feel about them, and how do their reputations get written and then rewritten in our minds? We're here living in the eye of a great storm of extinction where half the species on the planet could be gone by the end of the century, and so why is it that we come to care about some of those species and not others? Well, there's a new field, a relatively new field of social science that started looking at these questions and trying to unpack the powerful and sometimes pretty schizophrenic relationships that we have to animals, and I spent a lot of time looking through their academic journals, and all I can really say is that their findings are astonishingly wide-ranging. So some of my favorites include that the more television a person watches in Upstate New York, the more he or she is afraid of being attacked by a black bear. If you show a tiger to an American, they're much more likely to assume that it's female and not male. In a study where a fake snake and a fake turtle were put on the side of the road, drivers hit the snake much more often than the turtle, and about three percent of drivers who hit the fake animals seemed to do it on purpose. Women are more likely than men to get a ""magical feeling"" when they see dolphins in the surf. Sixty-eight percent of mothers with ""high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem"" identified with the dancing cats in a commercial for Purina. (Laughter) Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons but also much, much stupider. Wild turkeys are seen as only slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs.So some of this is physical, right? We tend to sympathize more with animals that look like us, and especially that resemble human babies, so with big, forward-facing eyes and circular faces, kind of a roly-poly posture. This is why, if you get a Christmas card from, like, your great aunt in Minnesota, there's usually a fuzzy penguin chick on it, and not something like a Glacier Bay wolf spider. But it's not all physical, right? There's a cultural dimension to how we think about animals, and we're telling stories about these animals, and like all stories, they are shaped by the times and the places in which we're telling them. So think about that moment back in 1902 again where a ferocious bear became a teddy bear. What was the context? Well, America was urbanizing. For the first time, nearly a majority of people lived in cities, so there was a growing distance between us and nature. There was a safe space where we could reconsider the bear and romanticize it. Nature could only start to seem this pure and adorable because we didn't have to be afraid of it anymore. And you can see that cycle playing out again and again with all kinds of animals. It seems like we're always stuck between demonizing a species and wanting to wipe it out, and then when we get very close to doing that, empathizing with it as an underdog and wanting to show it compassion. So we exert our power, but then we're unsettled by how powerful we are.So for example, this is one of probably thousands of letters and drawings that kids sent to the Bush administration, begging it to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, and these were sent back in the mid-2000s, when awareness of climate change was suddenly surging. We kept seeing that image of a polar bear stranded on a little ice floe looking really morose. I spent days looking through these files. I really love them. This one's my favorite. If you can see, it's a polar bear that's drowning and then it's also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark. This one came from a kid named Fritz, and he's actually got a solution to climate change. He's got it all worked out to an ethanol-based solution. He says, ""I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz."" So 200 years ago, you would have Arctic explorers writing about polar bears leaping into their boats and trying to devour them, even if they lit the bear on fire, but these kids don't see the polar bear that way, and actually they don't even see the polar bear the way that I did back in the '80s. I mean, we thought of these animals as mysterious and terrifying lords of the Arctic. But look now how quickly that climate change has flipped the image of the animal in our minds. It's gone from that bloodthirsty man-killer to this delicate, drowning victim, and when you think about it, that's kind of the conclusion to the story that the teddy bear started telling back in 1902, because back then, America had more or less conquered its share of the continent. We were just getting around to polishing off these last wild predators. Now, society's reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world, and it's made even these, the most remote, the most powerful bears on the planet, seem like adorable and blameless victims.But you know, there's also a postscript to the teddy bear story that not a lot of people talk about. We're going to talk about it, because even though it didn't really take long after Roosevelt's hunt in 1902 for the toy to become a full-blown craze, most people figured it was a fad, it was a sort of silly political novelty item and it would go away once the president left office, and so by 1909, when Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, was getting ready to be inaugurated, the toy industry was on the hunt for the next big thing. They didn't do too well.That January, Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta, and for days in advance, the big news was the menu. They were going to be serving him a Southern specialty, a delicacy, really, called possum and taters. So you would have a whole opossum roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, and then sometimes they'd leave the big tail on it like a big, meaty noodle. The one brought to Taft's table weighed 18 pounds. So after dinner, the orchestra started to play, and the guests burst into song, and all of a sudden, Taft was surprised with the presentation of a gift from a group of local supporters, and this was a stuffed opossum toy, all beady-eyed and bald-eared, and it was a new product they were putting forward to be the William Taft presidency's answer to Teddy Roosevelt's teddy bear. They were calling it the ""billy possum."" Within 24 hours, the Georgia Billy Possum Company was up and running, brokering deals for these things nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times announced, very confidently, ""The teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with billy possum."" So from that point, there was a fit of opossum fever. There were billy possum postcards, billy possum pins, billy possum pitchers for your cream at coffee time. There were smaller billy possums on a stick that kids could wave around like flags. But even with all this marketing, the life of the billy possum turned out to be just pathetically brief. The toy was an absolute flop, and it was almost completely forgotten by the end of the year, and what that means is that the billy possum didn't even make it to Christmastime, which when you think about it is a special sort of tragedy for a toy.So we can explain that failure two ways. The first, well, it's pretty obvious. I'm going to go ahead and say it out loud anyway: Opossums are hideous. (Laughter) But maybe more importantly is that the story of the billy possum was all wrong, especially compared to the backstory of the teddy bear. Think about it: for most of human's evolutionary history, what's made bears impressive to us has been their complete independence from us. It's that they live these parallel lives as menaces and competitors. By the time Roosevelt went hunting in Mississippi, that stature was being crushed, and the animal that he had roped to a tree really was a symbol for all bears. Whether those animals lived or died now was entirely up to the compassion or the indifference of people. That said something really ominous about the future of bears, but it also said something very  unsettling about who we'd become, if the survival of even an animal like that was up to us now. So now, a century later, if you're at all paying attention to what's happening in the environment, you feel that discomfort so much more intensely. We're living now in an age of what scientists have started to call ""conservation reliance,"" and what that term means is that we've disrupted so much that nature can't possibly stand on its own anymore, and most endangered species are only going to survive if we stay out there in the landscape riggging the world around them in their favor. So we've gone hands-on and we can't ever take our hands off, and that's a hell of a lot of work. Right now, we're training condors not to perch on power lines. We teach whooping cranes to migrate south for the winter behind little ultra-light airplanes. We're out there feeding plague vaccine to ferrets. We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones. So we've gone from annihilating species to micromanaging the survival of a lot of species indefinitely, and which ones? Well, the ones that we've told compelling stories about, the ones we've decided ought to stick around. The line between conservation and domestication is blurred.So what I've been saying is that the stories that we tell about wild animals are so subjective they can be irrational or romanticized or sensationalized. Sometimes they just have nothing to do with the facts. But in a world of conservation reliance, those stories have very real consequences, because now, how we feel about an animal affects its survival more than anything that you read about in ecology textbooks. Storytelling matters now. Emotion matters. Our imagination has become an ecological force. And so maybe the teddy bear worked in part because the legend of Roosevelt and that bear in Mississippi was kind of like an allegory of this great responsibility that society was just beginning to face up to back then. It would be another 71 years before the Endangered Species Act was passed, but really, here's its whole ethos boiled down into something like a scene you'd see in a stained glass window. The bear is a helpless victim tied to a tree, and the president of the United States decided to show it some mercy. Thank you. (Applause) [Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton]","https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_mooallem_the_strange_story_of_the_teddy_bear_and_what_it_reveals_about_our_relationship_to_animals
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"As a little girl, I always imagined I would one day run away. From the age of six on, I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet. There was a deep restlessness in me, a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom. And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road.Years have passed, but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child — traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer. But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States. This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travelers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps.In most of our minds, the vagabond is a creature from the past. The word ""hobo"" conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal, legs dangling out of a boxcar, but these photographs are in color, and they portray a community swirling across the country, fiercely alive and creatively free, seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see.Like their predecessors, today's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States. By day, they hop freight trains, stick out their thumbs, and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms. By night, they sleep beneath the stars, huddled together with their packs of dogs, cats and pet rats between their bodies.Some travelers take to the road by choice, renouncing materialism, traditional jobs and university degrees in exchange  for a glimmer of adventure. Others come from the underbelly of society, never given a chance to mobilize upwards: foster care dropouts, teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes.Where others see stories of privation and economic failure, travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom. They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream. They take advantage of the fact that in the United States, up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans. They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior, to dream, to read, to work on music, art and writing.But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic. No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road. Addiction is real, the elements are real, freight trains maim and kill, and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence. Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk, to wrap oneself in a blanket, to sleep in your own car, to offer food to a stranger? I know about these laws because I've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes.Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans, sleeping under bridges, picking up seasonal jobs here and there. The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom. Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well, not only work to survive, there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, of rebellion.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kitra_cahana_stories_of_the_homeless_and_hidden
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"Approximately 30 years ago, when I was in oncology at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, a father and a son walked into my office and they both had their right eye missing, and as I took the history, it became apparent that the father and the son had a rare form of inherited eye tumor, retinoblastoma, and the father knew that he had passed that fate on to his son.That moment changed my life. It propelled me to go on and to co-lead a team that discovered the first cancer susceptibility gene, and in the intervening decades since then, there has been literally a seismic shift in our understanding of what goes on, what genetic variations are sitting behind various diseases. In fact, for thousands of human traits, a molecular basis that's known for that, and for thousands of people, every day, there's information that they gain about the risk of going on to get this disease or that disease.At the same time, if you ask, ""Has that impacted the efficiency, how we've been able to develop drugs?"" the answer is not really. If you look at the cost of developing drugs, how that's done, it basically hasn't budged that. And so it's as if we have the power to diagnose yet not the power to fully treat. And there are two commonly given reasons for why that happens. One of them is it's early days. We're just learning the words, the fragments, the letters in the genetic code. We don't know how to read the sentences. We don't know how to follow the narrative. The other reason given is that most of those changes are a loss of function, and it's actually really hard to develop drugs that restore function.But today, I want us to step back and ask a more fundamental question, and ask, ""What happens if we're thinking about this maybe in the wrong context?"" We do a lot of studying of those who are sick and building up long lists of altered components. But maybe, if what we're trying to do is to develop therapies for prevention, maybe what we should be doing is studying those who don't get sick. Maybe we should be studying those that are well. A vast majority of those people are not necessarily carrying a particular genetic load or risk factor. They're not going to help us. There are going to be those individuals who are carrying a potential future risk, they're going to go on to get some symptom. That's not what we're looking for. What we're asking and looking for is, are there a very few set of individuals who are actually walking around with the risk that normally would cause a disease, but something in them, something hidden in them is actually protective and keeping them from exhibiting those symptoms?If you're going to do a study like that, you can imagine you'd like to look at lots and lots of people. We'd have to go and have a pretty wide study, and we realized that actually one way to think of this is, let us look at adults who are over 40 years of age, and let's make sure that we look at those who were healthy as kids. They might have had individuals in their families who had had a childhood disease, but not necessarily. And let's go and then screen those to find those who are carrying genes for childhood diseases.Now, some of you, I can see you putting your hands up going, ""Uh, a little odd. What's your evidence that this could be feasible?"" I want to give you two examples.The first comes from San Francisco. It comes from the 1980s and the 1990s, and you may know the story where there were individuals who had very high levels of the virus HIV. They went on to get AIDS. But there was a very small set of individuals who also had very high levels of HIV. They didn't get AIDS. And astute clinicians tracked that down, and what they found was they were carrying mutations. Notice, they were carrying mutations from birth that were protective, that were protecting them from going on to get AIDS. You may also know that actually a line of therapy has been coming along based on that fact. Second example, more recent, is elegant work done by Helen Hobbs, who said, ""I'm going to look at individuals who have very high lipid levels, and I'm going to try to find those people with high lipid levels who don't go on to get heart disease."" And again, what she found was some of those individuals had mutations that were protective from birth that kept them, even though they had high lipid levels, and you can see this is an interesting way of thinking about how you could develop preventive therapies.The project that we're working on is called ""The Resilience Project: A Search for Unexpected Heroes,"" because what we are interested in doing is saying, can we find those rare individuals who might have these hidden protective factors? And in some ways, think of it as a decoder ring, a sort of resilience decoder ring that we're going to try to build. We've realized that we should  do this in a systematic way, so we've said, let's take every single childhood inherited disease. Let's take them all, and let's pull them back a little bit by those that are known to have severe symptoms, where the parents, the child, those around them would know that they'd gotten sick, and let's go ahead and then frame them again by those parts of the genes where we know that there is a particular alteration that is known to be highly penetrant to cause that disease.Where are we going to look? Well, we could look locally. That makes sense. But we began to think, maybe we should look all over the world. Maybe we should look not just here but in remote places where their might be a distinct genetic context, there might be environmental factors that protect people. And let's look at a million individuals.Now the reason why we think it's a good time to do that now is, in the last couple of years, there's been a remarkable plummeting in the cost to do this type of analysis, this type of data generation, to where it actually costs less to do the data generation and analysis than it does to do the sample processing and the collection. The other reason is that in the last five years, there have been awesome tools, things about network biology, systems biology, that have come up that allow us to think that maybe we could decipher those positive outliers.And as we went around talking to researchers and institutions and telling them about our story, something happened. They started saying, ""This is interesting. I would be glad to join your effort. I would be willing to participate."" And they didn't say, ""Where's the MTA?"" They didn't say, ""Where is my authorship?"" They didn't say, ""Is this data going  to be mine? Am I going to own it?"" They basically said, ""Let's work on this in an open, crowd-sourced, team way to do this decoding.""Six months ago, we locked down the screening key for this decoder. My co-lead, a brilliant scientist, Eric Schadt at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and his team, locked in that decoder key ring, and we began looking for samples, because what we realized is, maybe we could just go and look at some existing samples to get some sense of feasibility. Maybe we could take two, three  percent of the project on, and see if it was there. And so we started asking people such as Hakon at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. We asked Leif up in Finland. We talked to Anne Wojcicki at 23andMe, and Wang Jun at BGI, and again, something remarkable happened. They said, ""Huh, not only do we have samples, but often we've analyzed them, and we would be glad to go into our anonymized samples and see if we could find those that you're looking for."" And instead of being 20,000 or 30,000, last month we passed one half million samples that we've already analyzed.So you must be going, ""Huh, did you find any unexpected heroes?"" And the answer is, we didn't find one or two. We found dozens of these strong candidate unexpected heroes.So we think that the time is now to launch the beta phase of this project and actually start getting prospective individuals. Basically all we need is information. We need a swab of DNA and a willingness to say, ""What's inside me? I'm willing to be re-contacted.""Most of us spend our lives, when it comes to health and disease, acting as if we're voyeurs. We delegate the responsibility for the understanding of our disease, for the treatment of our disease, to anointed experts. In order for us to get this project to work, we need individuals to step up in a different role and to be engaged, to realize this dream, this open crowd-sourced project, to find those unexpected heroes, to evolve from the current concepts of resources and constraints, to design those preventive therapies, and to extend it beyond childhood diseases, to go all the way up to ways that we could look at Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, we're going to need us to be looking inside ourselves and asking, ""What are our roles? What are our genes?"" and looking within ourselves for information we used to say we should go to the outside, to experts, and to be willing to share that with others.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_friend_the_hunt_for_unexpected_genetic_heroes
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"(Music) ♪ It's all there in gospels ♪♪A Magdalene girl comes to pay her respects ♪♪ But her mind is awhirl ♪♪ When she finds the tomb empty ♪♪ Straw had been rolled ♪♪ Not a sign of a corpse ♪♪ In the dark and the cold ♪♪ When she reaches the door ♪♪ Sees an unholy sight ♪♪ There's a solitary figure and a halo of light ♪♪ He just carries on floating past Calvary Hill ♪♪ In an Almighty hurry ♪♪ Aye, but she might catch him still ♪♪ Tell me where are you gone, Lord ♪♪ And why in such haste? ♪♪ Oh don't hinder me, woman ♪ ♪ I've no time to waste ♪♪ For they're launching a boat on the morrow at noon ♪♪ And I have to be there before daybreak ♪♪ Oh I cannot be missing ♪♪ The lads'll expect me ♪♪ Why else would the Good Lord Himself resurrect me? ♪♪ For nothing'll stop me. I have to prevail ♪♪ Through the teeth of this tempest ♪♪ In the mouth of a gale ♪♪ May the angels protect me ♪♪ If all else should fail ♪♪ And the last ship sails ♪♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪♪ And the last ship sails ♪So I was born and raised in the shadow of a shipyard in a little town on the northeast coast of England. Some of my earliest memories are of giant ships blocking the end of my street, as well as the sun, for a lot of the year. Every morning as a child, I'd watch thousands of men walk down that hill to work in the shipyard. I'd watch those same men walking back home every night. It has to be said, the shipyard was not the most pleasant place to live next door to, or indeed work in. The shipyard was noisy, dangerous, highly toxic, with an appalling health and safety record.Despite that, the men and women who worked on those ships were extraordinarily proud of the work they did, and justifiably so. Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on planet Earth were built right at the end of my street.My grandfather had been a shipwright, and as a child, as there were few other jobs in the town, I would wonder with some anxiety whether that would be my destiny too. I was fairly determined that it wouldn't be. I had other dreams, not necessarily practical ones, but at the age of eight, I was bequeathed a guitar. It was a battered old thing with five rusty strings, and was out of tune, but quickly I learned to play it and realized that I'd found a friend for life, an accomplice, a co-conspirator in my plan to escape from this surreal industrial landscape.Well, they say if you dream something hard enough, it will come to pass. Either that, or I was extremely lucky, but this was my dream. I dreamt I would leave this town, and just like those ships, once they were launched, I'd never come back. I dreamt I'd become a writer of songs, that I would sing those songs to vast numbers of people all over the world, that I would be paid extravagant amounts of money, that I'd become famous, that I'd marry a beautiful woman, have children, raise a family, buy a big house in the country, keep dogs, grow wine, have rooms full of Grammy Awards, platinum discs, and what have you. So far, so good, right? (Laughter)And then one day, the songs stopped coming, and while you've suffered from periods of writer's block before, albeit briefly, this is something chronic. Day after day, you face a blank page, and nothing's coming. And those days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and pretty soon those months have turned into years with very little to show for your efforts. No songs. So you start asking yourself questions. What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed? Or perhaps there's a more — a deeper psychological reason. It was always a Faustian pact anyway. You're rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts, your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others, for the analysis, the scrutiny of others, and perhaps you've given enough of your privacy away.And yet, if you look at your work, could it be argued that your best work wasn't about you at all, it was about somebody else? Did your best work occur when you sidestepped your own ego and you stopped telling your story, but told someone else's story, someone perhaps without a voice, where empathetically, you stood in his shoes for a while or saw the world through his eyes?Well they say, write what you know. If you can't write about yourself anymore, then who do you write about? So it's ironic that the landscape I'd worked so hard to escape from, and the community that I'd more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape, the very community I would have to return to to find my missing muse.And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, that the songs started to come thick and fast. I've described it as a kind of projectile vomiting, a torrent of ideas, of characters, of voices, of verses, couplets, entire songs almost formed whole, materialized in front of me as if they'd been bottled up inside me for many, many years. One of the first things I wrote was just a list of names of people I'd known, and they become characters in a kind of three-dimensional drama, where they explain who they are, what they do, their hopes and their fears for the future.This is Jackie White. He's the foreman of the shipyard.My name is Jackie White, and I'm foreman of the yard, and you don't mess with Jackie on this quayside. I'm as hard as iron plate, woe betide you if you're late when we have to push a boat out on the spring tide. Now you can die and hope for heaven, but you need to work your shift, and I'd expect you all to back us to the hilt, for if St. Peter at his gate were to ask you why you're late, why, you tell him that you had to get a ship built. We build battleships and cruisersfor Her Majesty the Queen, supertankers for Onassis, and all the classes in between, We built the greatest ship in tonnage what the world has ever seen♪ And the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard ♪♪ Steel in the stockyard, iron in the soul ♪♪ Would conjure up a ship ♪♪ Where there used to be a hull ♪♪ And we don't know what we'll do ♪♪ If this yard gets sold ♪♪ For the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard ♪(Applause)So having decided to write about other people instead of myself, a further irony is that sometimes you reveal more about yourself than you'd ever intended. This song is called ""Dead Man's Boots,"" which is an expression which describes how difficult it is to get a job; in other words, you'd only get a job in the shipyard if somebody else died. Or perhaps your father could finagle you an apprenticeship at the age of 15. But sometimes a father's love can be misconstrued as controlling, and conversely, the scope of his son's ambition can seem like some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. (Music)♪ You see these work boots in my hands ♪♪ They'll probably fit you now, my son ♪♪ Take them, they're a gift from me ♪♪ Why don't you try them on? ♪♪ It would do your old man good to see ♪♪ You walking in these boots one day ♪♪ And take your place among the men ♪♪ Who work upon the slipway ♪♪ These dead man's boots, though they're old and curled ♪♪ When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world ♪♪ And it's time for a man to put down roots ♪♪ And walk to the river in his old man's boots ♪♪ He said, ""I'm dying, son, and asking ♪♪ That you do one final thing for me ♪♪ You're barely but a sapling, and you think that you're a tree ♪♪ If you need a seed to prosper ♪♪ You must first put down some roots ♪♪ Just one foot then the other in ♪♪ These dead man's boots"" ♪♪ These dead man's boots, though they're old and curled ♪♪ When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world ♪♪ And it's time for a man to put down roots ♪♪ And walk to the river in his old man's boots ♪♪ I said, ""Why in the hell would I do that? ♪♪ Why would I agree?"" ♪♪ When his hand was all that I'd received ♪♪ As far as I remember ♪♪ It's not as if he'd spoiled me with his kindness ♪♪ Up to then, you see ♪♪ I'd a plan of my own and I'd quit this place ♪♪ When I came of age September ♪♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪♪ They could walk there themselves, and they probably will ♪♪ I've plenty of choices, I've plenty other routes ♪♪ And you'll never see me walking in these dead man's boots ♪♪ What was it made him think ♪♪ I'd be happy ending up like him ♪♪ When he'd hardly got two halfpennies left ♪♪ Or a broken pot to piss in? ♪♪ He wanted this same thing for me ♪♪ Was that his final wish? ♪♪ He said, ""What the hell are you gonna do?"" ♪♪ I said, ""Anything but this!"" ♪♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪♪ They can walk there themselves and they probably will ♪♪ But they won't walk with me ‘cause I'm off the other way ♪♪ I've had it up to here, I'm gonna have my say ♪♪ When all you've got left is that cross on the wall ♪♪ I want nothing from you, I want nothing at all ♪♪ Not a pension, nor a pittance, when your whole life is through ♪♪ Get this through your head, I'm nothing like you ♪♪ I'm done with all the arguments, there'll be no more disputes ♪♪ And you'll die before you see me in your dead man's boots ♪(Applause)Thank you.So whenever they'd launch a big ship, they would invite some dignitary up from London on the train to make a speech, break a bottle of champagne over the bows, launch it down the slipway into the river and out to sea. Occasionally on a really important ship, they'd get a member of the royal family to come, Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Anne or somebody. And you have to remember, it wasn't that long ago that the royal family in England were considered to have magical healing powers. Sick children were held up in crowds to try and touch the cloak of the king or the queen to cure them of some terrible disease. It wasn't like that in my day, but we still got very excited.So it's a launch day, it's a Saturday, and my mother has dressed me up in my Sunday best. I'm not very happy with her. All the kids are out in the street, and we have little Union Jacks to wave, and at the top of the hill, there's a motorcycle cortege appears. In the middle of the motorcycles, there's a big, black Rolls-Royce. Inside the Rolls-Royce is the Queen Mother. This is a big deal. So the procession is moving at a stately pace down my street, and as it approaches my house, I start to wave my flag vigorously, and there is the Queen Mother. I see her, and she seems to see me. She acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag even more vigorously. We're having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She's acknowledged me. And then she's gone.Well, I wasn't cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don't belong in this street. I don't want to live in that house. I don't want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car. (Laughter) I want a bigger life. I want a life beyond this town. I want a life that's out of the ordinary. It's my right. It's my right as much as hers. And so here I am at TED, I suppose to tell that story, and I think it's appropriate to say the obvious that there's a symbiotic and intrinsic link between storytelling and community, between community and art, between community and science and technology, between community and economics. It's my belief that abstract economic theory that denies the needs of community or denies the contribution that community makes to economy is shortsighted, cruel and untenable.(Applause)The fact is, whether you're a rock star or whether you're a welder in a shipyard, or a tribesman in the upper Amazon, or the queen of England, at the end of the day, we're all in the same boat.♪ Aye, the footmen are frantic in their indignation ♪♪ You see the queen's took a taxi herself to the station ♪♪ Where the porters, surprised by her lack of royal baggage ♪♪ Bustle her and three corgis to the rear of the carriage ♪♪ For the train it is crammed with all Europe's nobility ♪♪ And there's none of them famous for their compatibility ♪♪ There's a fight over seats ♪♪ ""I beg pardon, Your Grace ♪♪ But you'll find that one's mine, so get back in your place!"" ♪♪ ""Aye, but where are they going?"" ♪♪ All the porters debate ♪♪ ""Why they're going to Newcastle and they daren't be late ♪♪ For they're launching a boat on the Tyne at high tide ♪♪ And they've come from all over, from far and from wide"" ♪♪ There's the old Dalai Lama ♪♪ And the pontiff of Rome ♪♪ Every palace in Europe, and there's nay bugger home ♪♪ There's the Duchess of Cornwall and the loyal Prince of Wales ♪♪ Looking crushed and uncomfortable in his top hat and tails ♪♪ Well, they haven't got tickets ♪♪ Come now, it's just a detail ♪♪ There was no time to purchase and one simply has to prevail ♪♪ For we'll get to the shipyards or we'll end up in jail! ♪♪ When the last ship sails ♪♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪♪ And the last ship sails ♪♪ And whatever you'd promised ♪♪ Whatever you've done ♪♪ And whatever the station in life you've become ♪♪ In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son ♪♪ And no matter the weave of this life that you've spun ♪♪ On the Earth or in Heaven or under the Sun ♪♪ When the last ship sails ♪♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪♪ And the last ship sails ♪Thanks very much for listening to my song. Thank you. (Applause)Thank you.Okay, you have to join in if you know it. (Music) (Applause)♪ Just a castaway ♪♪ An island lost at sea, oh ♪♪ Another lonely day ♪♪ With no one here but me, oh ♪♪ More loneliness than any man could bear ♪♪ Rescue me before I fall into despair ♪♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ A year has passed since I wrote my note ♪♪ I should have known this right from the start ♪♪ Only hope can keep me together ♪♪ Love can mend your life ♪♪ but love can break your heart ♪♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Walked out this morning ♪♪ I don't believe what I saw ♪♪ A hundred billion bottles ♪♪ Washed up on the shore ♪♪ Seems I'm not alone in being alone ♪♪ A hundred billion castaways ♪♪ Looking for a home ♪♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪♪ Message in a bottle ♪So I'm going to ask you to sing after me, okay, the next part. It's very easy. Sing in unison. Here we go.♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Come on now.Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪Sting: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪Sting: ♪ I'm sending out an S.O.S. ♪Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪Sting: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪Sting: ♪ Sending out ♪♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪♪ Yoooooooo ♪Thank you, TED. Goodnight.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sting_how_i_started_writing_songs_again
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"Let me tell you a story. It goes back 200 million years. It's a story of the neocortex, which means ""new rind."" So in these early mammals, because only mammals have a neocortex, rodent-like creatures. It was the size of a postage stamp and just as thin, and was a thin covering around their walnut-sized brain, but it was capable of a new type of thinking. Rather than the fixed behaviors that non-mammalian animals have, it could invent new behaviors. So a mouse is escaping a predator, its path is blocked, it'll try to invent a new solution. That may work, it may not, but if it does, it will remember that and have a new behavior, and that can actually spread virally through the rest of the community. Another mouse watching this could say, ""Hey, that was pretty clever, going around that rock,"" and it could adopt a new behavior as well.Non-mammalian animals couldn't do any of those things. They had fixed behaviors. Now they could learn a new behavior but not in the course of one lifetime. In the course of maybe a thousand lifetimes, it could evolve a new fixed behavior. That was perfectly okay 200 million years ago. The environment changed very slowly. It could take 10,000 years for there to be a significant environmental change, and during that period of time it would evolve a new behavior.Now that went along fine, but then something happened. Sixty-five million years ago, there was a sudden, violent change to the environment. We call it the Cretaceous extinction event. That's when the dinosaurs went extinct, that's when 75 percent of the animal and plant species went extinct, and that's when mammals overtook their ecological niche, and to anthropomorphize, biological evolution said, ""Hmm, this neocortex is pretty good stuff,"" and it began to grow it. And mammals got bigger, their brains got bigger at an even faster pace, and the neocortex got bigger even faster than that and developed these distinctive ridges and folds basically to increase its surface area. If you took the human neocortex and stretched it out, it's about the size of a table napkin, and it's still a thin structure. It's about the thickness of a table napkin. But it has so many convolutions and ridges it's now 80 percent of our brain, and that's where we do our thinking, and it's the great sublimator. We still have that old brain that provides our basic drives and motivations, but I may have a drive for conquest, and that'll be sublimated by the neocortex into writing a poem or inventing an app or giving a TED Talk, and it's really the neocortex that's where the action is.Fifty years ago, I wrote a paper describing how I thought the brain worked, and I described it as a series of modules. Each module could do things with a pattern. It could learn a pattern. It could remember a pattern. It could implement a pattern. And these modules were organized in hierarchies, and we created that hierarchy with our own thinking. And there was actually very little to go on 50 years ago. It led me to meet President Johnson. I've been thinking about this for 50 years, and a year and a half ago I came out with the book ""How To Create A Mind,"" which has the same thesis, but now there's a plethora of evidence. The amount of data we're getting about the brain from neuroscience is doubling every year. Spatial resolution of brainscanning of all types is doubling every year. We can now see inside a living brain and see individual interneural connections connecting in real time, firing in real time. We can see your brain create your thoughts. We can see your thoughts create your brain, which is really key to how it works.So let me describe briefly how it works. I've actually counted these modules. We have about 300 million of them, and we create them in these hierarchies. I'll give you a simple example. I've got a bunch of modules that can recognize the crossbar to a capital A, and that's all they care about. A beautiful song can play, a pretty girl could walk by, they don't care, but they see a crossbar to a capital A, they get very excited and they say ""crossbar,"" and they put out a high probability on their output axon. That goes to the next level, and these layers are organized in conceptual levels. Each is more abstract than the next one, so the next one might say ""capital A."" That goes up to a higher level that might say ""Apple."" Information flows down also. If the apple recognizer has seen A-P-P-L, it'll think to itself, ""Hmm, I think an E is probably likely,"" and it'll send a signal down to all the E recognizers saying, ""Be on the lookout for an E, I think one might be coming."" The E recognizers will lower their threshold and they see some sloppy thing, could be an E. Ordinarily you wouldn't think so, but we're expecting an E, it's good enough, and yeah, I've seen an E, and then apple says, ""Yeah, I've seen an Apple.""Go up another five levels, and you're now at a pretty high level of this hierarchy, and stretch down into the different senses, and you may have a module that sees a certain fabric, hears a certain voice quality, smells a certain perfume, and will say, ""My wife has entered the room.""Go up another 10 levels, and now you're at a very high level. You're probably in the frontal cortex, and you'll have modules that say, ""That was ironic. That's funny. She's pretty.""You might think that those are more sophisticated, but actually what's more complicated is the hierarchy beneath them. There was a 16-year-old girl, she had brain surgery, and she was conscious because the surgeons wanted to talk to her. You can do that because there's no pain receptors in the brain. And whenever they stimulated particular, very small points on her neocortex, shown here in red, she would laugh. So at first they thought they were triggering some kind of laugh reflex, but no, they quickly realized they had found the points in her neocortex that detect humor, and she just found everything hilarious whenever they stimulated these points. ""You guys are so funny just standing around,"" was the typical comment, and they weren't funny, not while doing surgery.So how are we doing today? Well, computers are actually beginning to master human language with techniques that are similar to the neocortex. I actually described the algorithm, which is similar to something called a hierarchical hidden Markov model, something I've worked on since the '90s. ""Jeopardy"" is a very broad natural language game, and Watson got a higher score than the best two players combined. It got this query correct: ""A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping,"" and it quickly responded, ""What is a meringue harangue?"" And Jennings and the other guy didn't get that. It's a pretty sophisticated example of computers actually understanding human language, and it actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias.Five to 10 years from now, search engines will actually be based on not just looking for combinations of words and links but actually understanding, reading for understanding the billions of pages on the web and in books. So you'll be walking along, and Google will pop up and say, ""You know, Mary, you expressed concern to me a month ago that your glutathione supplement wasn't getting past the blood-brain barrier. Well, new research just came out 13 seconds ago that shows a whole new approach to that and a new way to take glutathione. Let me summarize it for you.""Twenty years from now, we'll have nanobots, because another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology. They'll go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud providing an extension of our neocortex. Now today, I mean, you have a computer in your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access that for a second or two in the cloud. In the 2030s, if you need some extra neocortex, you'll be able to connect to that in the cloud directly from your brain. So I'm walking along and I say, ""Oh, there's Chris Anderson. He's coming my way. I'd better think of something clever to say. I've got three seconds. My 300 million modules in my neocortex isn't going to cut it. I need a billion more."" I'll be able to access that in the cloud. And our thinking, then, will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking, but the non-biological portion is subject to my law of accelerating returns. It will grow exponentially. And remember what happens the last time we expanded our neocortex? That was two million years ago when we became humanoids and developed these large foreheads. Other primates have a slanted brow. They don't have the frontal cortex. But the frontal cortex is not really qualitatively different. It's a quantitative expansion of neocortex, but that additional quantity of thinking was the enabling factor for us to take a qualitative leap and invent language and art and science and technology and TED conferences. No other species has done that.And so, over the next few decades, we're going to do it again. We're going to again expand our neocortex, only this time we won't be limited by a fixed architecture of enclosure. It'll be expanded without limit. That additional quantity will again be the enabling factor for another qualitative leap in culture and technology.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_get_ready_for_hybrid_thinking
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"At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?Now, I think one of the reasons — I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.Let me give you some data to back up that claim. So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. Here's three values. Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, as you age, the balance of these values shifts. So how does it do so? Well, we asked thousands of people. We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years. And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan.Here's what we found. First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you're wrong, because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think. At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the ""end of history"" illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do.Now it's not just values. It's all sorts of other things. For example, personality. Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years, and what we found, well, you're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over, because once again the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade.And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality. You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what's your favorite hobby, what's your favorite kind of music. People can name these things. We ask half of them to tell us, ""Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years?"" and half of them to tell us, ""Did that change over the last 10 years?"" And what we find, well, you've seen it twice now, and here it is again: people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they'll have in 10 years, the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they'll enjoy in 10 years, and yet, people who are 10 years older all say, ""Eh, you know, that's really changed.""Does any of this matter? Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn't have consequences? No, it matters quite a bit, and I'll give you an example of why. It bedevils our decision-making in important ways. Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago. I put mine up on the screen to help you along. Now we asked people to predict for us, to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now, and on average, people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket. And yet, when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today, they say only 80 dollars. Now, in a perfectly rational world, these should be the same number, but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability.Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry, when people say ""I can't imagine that,"" they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing.The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_you_are_always_changing
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"I read poetry all the time and write about it frequently and take poems apart to see how they work because I'm a word person. I understand the world best, most fully, in words rather than, say, pictures or numbers, and when I have a new experience or a new feeling, I'm a little frustrated until I can try to put it into words. I think I've always been that way. I devoured science fiction as a child. I still do. And I found poems by Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold and Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats because they were quoted in science fiction, and I loved their sounds and I went on to read about ottava rima and medial caesuras and enjambment and all that other technical stuff that you care about if you already care about poems, because poems already made me happier and sadder and more alive. And I became a poetry critic because I wanted to know how and why.Now, poetry isn't one thing that serves one purpose any more than music or computer programming serve one purpose. The greek word poem, it just means ""a made thing,"" and poetry is a set of techniques, ways of making patterns that put emotions into words. The more techniques you know, the more things you can make, and the more patterns you can recognize in things you might already like or love.That said, poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that. Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another. Poems are easy to share, easy to pass on, and when you read a poem, you can imagine someone's speaking to you or for you, maybe even someone far away or someone made up or someone deceased. That's why we can go to poems when we want to remember something or someone, to celebrate or to look beyond death or to say goodbye, and that's one reason poems can seem important, even to people who aren't me, who don't so much live in a world of words. The poet Frank O'Hara said, ""If you don't need poetry, bully for you,"" but he also said when he didn't want to be alive anymore, the thought that he wouldn't write any more poems had stopped him. Poetry helps me want to be alive, and I want to show you why by showing you how, how a couple of poems react to the fact that we're alive in one place at one time in one culture, and in another we won't be alive at all.So here's one of the first poems I memorized. It could address a child or an adult.""From far, from eve and morningFrom yon twelve-winded sky,The stuff of life to knit meBlew hither; here am I.Now — for a breath I tarryNor yet disperse apart —Take my hand quick and tell me,What have you in your heart.Speak now, and I will answer;How shall I help you, say;Ere to the wind's twelve quartersI take my endless way.""[A. E. Housman]Now, this poem has appealed to science fiction writers. It's furnished at least three science fiction titles, I think because it says poems can brings us news from the future or the past or across the world, because their patterns can seem to tell you what's in somebody's heart. It says poems can bring people together temporarily, which I think is true, and it sticks in my head not just because it rhymes but for how it rhymes, cleanly and simply on the two and four, ""say"" and ""way,"" with anticipatory hints on the one and three, ""answer"" and ""quarters,"" as if the poem itself were coming together. It plays up the fact that we die by exaggerating the speed of our lives. A few years on Earth become one speech, one breath. It's a poem about loneliness — the ""I"" in the poem feels no connection will last — and it might look like a plea for help 'til you get to the word ""help,"" where this ""I"" facing you, taking your hand, is more like a teacher or a genie, or at least that's what he wants to believe. It would not be the first time a poet had written the poem that he wanted to hear.Now, this next poem really changed what I liked and what I read and what I felt I could read as an adult. It might not make any sense to you if you haven't seen it before.""The Garden""""Oleander: coralfrom lipstick ads in the 50's.Fruit of the tree of such knowledgeTo smack (thin air)meaning kiss or hit.It appearsin the guise of outworn usagesbecause we are bad?Big masculine threat,insinuating and slangy.""[Rae Armantrout]Now, I found this poem in an anthology of almost equally confusing poems in 1989. I just heard that there were these scandalous writers called Language poets who didn't make any sense, and I wanted to go and see for myself what they were like, and some of them didn't do much for me, but this writer, Rae Armantrout, did an awful lot, and I kept reading her until I felt I knew what was going on, as I do with this poem.It's about the Garden of Eden and the Fall and the Biblical story of the Fall, in which sex as we know it and death and guilt come into the world at the same time. It's also about how appearances deceive, how our culture can sweep us along into doing and saying things we didn't intend or don't like, and Armantrout's style is trying to help us stop or slow down. ""Smack"" can mean ""kiss"" as in air kisses, as in lip-smacking, but that can lead to ""smack"" as in ""hit"" as in domestic abuse, because sexual attraction can seem threatening. The red that means fertility can also mean poison. Oleander is poisonous. And outworn usages like ""smack"" for ""kiss"" or ""hit"" can help us see how our unacknowledged assumptions can make us believe we are bad, either because sex is sinful or because we tolerate so much sexism. We let guys tell women what to do. The poem reacts to old lipstick ads, and its edginess about statement, its reversals and halts, have everything to do with resisting the language of ads that want to tell us so easily what to want, what to do, what to think. That resistance is a lot of the point of the poem, which shows me, Armantrout shows me what it's like to hear grave threats and mortal dishonesty in the language of everyday life, and once she's done that, I think she can show other people, women and men, what it's like to feel that way and say to other people, women and men who feel so alienated or so threatened that they're not alone.Now, how do I know that I'm right about this somewhat confusing poem? Well in this case, I emailed the poet a draft of my talk and she said, ""Yeah, yeah, that's about it."" Yeah. (Laughter) (Applause) But usually, you can't know. You never know. You can't be sure, and that's okay. All we can do we is listen to poems and look at poems and guess and see if they can bring us what we need, and if you're wrong about some part of a poem, nothing bad will happen. Now, this next poem is older than Armantrout's, but a little younger than A. E. Housman's.""The Brave Man""""The sun, that brave man,Comes through boughs that lie in wait,That brave man.Green and gloomy eyesIn dark forms of the grassRun away.The good stars,Pale helms and spiky spurs,Run away.Fears of my bed,Fears of life and fears of death,Run away.That brave man comes upFrom below and walks without meditation,That brave man.""[Wallace Stevens]Now, the sun in this poem, in Wallace Stevens' poem, seems so grave because the person in the poem is so afraid. The sun comes up in the morning through branches, dispels the dew, the eyes, on the grass, and defeats stars envisioned as armies. ""Brave"" has its old sense of showy as well as its modern sense, courage. This sun is not afraid to show his face. But the person in the poem is afraid. He might have been up all night. That is the reveal Stevens saves for that fourth stanza, where run away has become a refrain. This person might want to run away too, but fortified by the sun's example, he might just rise. Stevens saves that sonically odd word ""meditation"" for the end. Unlike the sun, human beings think. We meditate on past and future, life and death, above and below. And it can make us afraid.Poems, the patterns in poems, show us not just what somebody thought or what someone did or what happened but what it was like to be a person like that, to be so anxious, so lonely, so inquisitive, so goofy, so preposterous, so brave. That's why poems can seem at once so durable, so personal, and so ephemeral, like something inside and outside you at once. The Scottish poet Denise Riley compares poetry to a needle, a sliver of outside I cradle inside, and the American poet Terrance Hayes wrote six poems called ""Wind in a Box."" One of them asks, ""Tell me, what am I going to do when I'm dead?"" And the answer is that he'll stay with us or won't stay with us inside us as wind, as air, as words.It is easier than ever to find poems that might stay inside you, that might stay with you, from long, long ago, or from right this minute, from far away or from right close to where you live, almost no matter where you live. Poems can help you say, help you show how you're feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, ways of being in the world, people, very much unlike you, maybe even people from long, long ago. Some poems even tell you that that is what they can do. That's what John Keats is doing in his most mysterious, perhaps, poem. It's mysterious because it's probably unfinished, he probably left it unfinished, and because it might be meant for a character in a play, but it might just be Keats' thinking about what his own writing, his handwriting, could do, and in it I hear, at least I hear, mortality, and I hear the power of older poetic techniques, and I have the feeling, you might have the feeling, of meeting even for an instant, almost becoming, someone else from long ago, someone quite memorable.""This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calm’d — see here it is —I hold it towards you.""Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_burt_why_people_need_poetry
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"Even nature's most disgusting creatures have important secrets, but who would want a swarm of cockroaches coming towards them?Yet one of the greatest differences between natural and human technologies relates to robustness. Robust systems are stable in complex and new environments. Remarkably, cockroaches can self-stabilize running over rough terrain. When we put a jet pack on them, or give them a perturbation like an earthquake, we discovered that their wonderfully tuned legs allow them to self-stabilize without using any of their brainpower. They can go over complex terrain like grass, no problem, and not get destabilized. We discovered a new behavior where, because of their shape, they actually roll automatically to their side to go through this artificial test bit of grass.Robust systems can perform multiple tasks with the same structure. Here's a new behavior we've discovered. The animals rapidly invert and disappear in less than 150 milliseconds — you never see them — using the same structures that they use to run, their legs. They can run upside down very rapidly on rods, branches and wires, and if you perturb one of those branches, they can do this. They can perform gymnastic maneuvers like no robot we have yet. And they have nearly unlimited maneuverability with that same structure and unprecedented access to a variety of different areas. They have wings for flying when they get warm, but they use those same wings to flip over if they get destabilized. Very effective.Robust systems are also fault tolerant and fail-safe. This is the foot of a cockroach. It has spines, gluey pads and claws, but if you take off those feet, they can still go over rough terrain, like the bottom video that you see, without hardly slowing down. Extraordinary. They can run up mesh without their feet. Here's an animal using a normal, alternating tripod: three legs, three legs, three legs, but in nature, the insects often have lost their legs. Here's one moving with two middle legs gone. It can even lose three legs, in a tripod, and adopt a new gait, a hopping gait. And I point out that all of these videos are slowed down 20 times, so they're actually really fast, when you see this.Robust systems are also damage resistant. Here's an animal climbing up a wall. It looks like a rapid, smooth, vertical climb, but when you slow it down, you see something very different. Here's what they do. They intentionally have a head-on collision with the wall so they don't slow down and can transition up it in 75 milliseconds. And they can do this in part because they have extraordinary exoskeletons. And they're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another. Here's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach. You see these plates, and you see the compliant membrane.My engineering colleague at Berkeley designed with his students a novel manufacturing technique where you essentially origami the exoskeleton, you laser cut it, laminate it, and you fold it up into a robot. And you can do that now in less than 15 minutes. These robots, called DASH, for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, are highly compliant robots, and they're remarkably robust as a result of these features. They're certainly incredibly damage resistant. (Laughter) They even have some of the behaviors of the cockroaches. So they can use their smart, compliant body to transition up a wall in a very simple way. They even have some of the beginnings of the rapid inversion behavior where they disappear.Now we want to know why they can go anywhere. We discovered that they can go through three-millimeter gaps, the height of two pennies, two stacked pennies, and when they do this, they can actually run through those confined spaces at high speeds, although you never see it. To understand it better, we did a CT scan of the exoskeleton and showed that they can compress their body by over 40 percent. We put them in a materials testing machine to look at the stress strain analysis and showed that they can withstand forces 800 times their body weight, and after this they can fly and run absolutely normally.So you never know where curiosity-based research will lead, and someday you may want a swarm of cockroach-inspired robots to come at you. (Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_full_the_secrets_of_nature_s_grossest_creatures_channeled_into_robots
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"Election night 2008 was a night that tore me in half. It was the night that Barack Obama was elected. [One hundred and forty-three]  years after the end of slavery, and [43] years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an African-American was elected president. Many of us never thought that this was possible until the moment that it happened. And in many ways, it was the climax of the black civil rights movement in the United States.I was in California that night, which was ground zero at the time for another movement: the marriage equality movement. Gay marriage was on the ballot in the form of Proposition 8, and as the election returns started to come in, it became clear that the right for same sex couples to marry, which had recently been granted by the California courts, was going to be taken away. So on the same night that Barack Obama won his historic presidency, the lesbian and gay community suffered one of our most painful defeats.And then it got even worse. Pretty much immediately, African-Americans started to be blamed for the passage of Proposition 8. This was largely due to an incorrect poll that said that blacks had voted for the measure by something like 70 percent. This turned out not to be true, but this idea of pervasive black homophobia set in, and was grabbed on by the media. I couldn't tear myself away from the coverage. I listened to some gay commentator say that the African-American community was notoriously homophobic, and now that civil rights had been achieved for us, we wanted to take away other people's rights. There were even reports of racist epithets being thrown at some of the participants of the gay rights rallies that took place after the election. And on the other side, some African-Americans dismissed or ignored homophobia that was indeed real in our community. And others resented this comparison between gay rights and civil rights, and once again, the sinking feeling that two minority groups of which I'm both a part of were competing with each other instead of supporting each other overwhelmed and, frankly, pissed me off.Now, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so after going through my pissed off stage and yelling at the television and radio, my next instinct was to make a movie. And what guided me in making this film was, how was this happening? How was it that the gay rights movement was being pitted against the civil rights movement? And this wasn't just an abstract question. I'm a beneficiary of both movements, so this was actually personal. But then something else happened after that election in 2008. The march towards gay equality accelerated at a pace that surprised and shocked everyone, and is still reshaping our laws and our policies, our institutions and our entire country. And so it started to become increasingly clear to me that this pitting of the two movements against each other actually didn't make sense, and that they were in fact much, much more interconnected, and that, in fact, some of the way that the gay rights movement has been able to make such incredible gains so quickly is that it's used some of the same tactics and strategies that were first laid down by the civil rights movement. Let's just look at a few of these strategies.First off, it's really interesting to see, to actually visually see, how quick the gay rights movement has made its gains, if you look at a few of the major events on a timeline of both freedom movements. Now, there are tons of milestones in the civil rights movement, but the first one we're going to start with is the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. This was a protest campaign against Montgomery, Alabama's segregation on their public transit system, and it began when a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. The campaign lasted a year, and it galvanized the civil rights movement like nothing had before it. And I call this strategy the ""I'm tired of your foot on my neck"" strategy.So gays and lesbians have been in society since societies began, but up until the mid-20th century, homosexual acts were still illegal in most states. So just 14 years after the Montgomery bus boycott, a group of LGBT folks took that same strategy. It's known as Stonewall, in 1969, and it's where a group of LGBT patrons fought back against police beatings at a Greenwich Village bar that sparked three days of rioting. Incidentally, black and latino LGBT folks were at the forefront of this rebellion, and it's a really interesting example of the intersection of our struggles against racism, homophobia, gender identity and police brutality. After Stonewall happened, gay liberation groups sprang up all over the country, and the modern gay rights  movement as we know it took off.So the next moment to look at on the timeline is the 1963 March on Washington. This was a seminal event in the civil rights movement and it's where African-Americans called for both civil and economic justice. And it's of course where Martin Luther King delivered his famous ""I have a dream"" speech, but what's actually less known is that this march was organized by a man named Bayard Rustin. Bayard was an out gay man, and he's considered one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil rights movement. He later in his life became a fierce advocate of LGBT rights as well, and his life is testament to the intersection of the struggles. The March on Washington is one of the high points of the movement, and it's where there was a fervent belief that African-Americans too could be a part of American democracy. I call this strategy the ""We are visible and many in numbers"" strategy.Some early gay activists were actually directly inspired by the march, and some had taken part. Gay pioneer Jack Nichols said, ""We marched with Martin Luther King, seven of us from the Mattachine Society"" — which was an early gay rights organization — ""and from that moment on, we had our own dream about a gay rights march of similar proportions."" Several years later, a series of marches took place, each one gaining the momentum of the gay freedom struggle. The first one was in 1979, and the second one took place in 1987. The third one was held in 1993. Almost a million people showed up, and people were so energized and excited by what had taken place, they went back to their own communities and started their own political and social organizations, further increasing the visibility of the movement. The day of that march, October 11, was then declared National Coming Out Day, and is still celebrated all over the world. These marches set the groundwork for the historic changes that we see happening today in the United States.And lastly, the ""Loving"" strategy. The name speaks for itself. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, and invalidated all laws that prohibited interracial marriage. This is considered one of the Supreme Court's landmark civil rights cases. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, and that made the federal government only have to recognize marriages between a man and a woman. In United States v. Windsor, a 79-year-old lesbian named Edith Windsor sued the federal government when she was forced to pay estate taxes on her deceased wife's property, something that heterosexual  couples don't have to do. And as the case wound its way through the lower courts, the Loving case was repeatedly cited as precedent. When it got to the Supreme Court in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed, and DOMA was thrown out. It was incredible. But the gay marriage movement has been making gains for years now. To date, 17 states have passed laws allowing marriage equality. It's become the de facto battle for gay equality, and it seems like daily, laws prohibiting it are being challenged in the courts, even in places like Texas and Utah, which no one saw coming.So a lot has changed since that night in 2008 when I felt torn in half. I did go on to make that film. It's a documentary film, and it's called ""The New Black,"" and it looks at how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the gay marriage movement and this fight over the meaning of civil rights. And I wanted to capture some of this incredible change that was happening, and as luck or politics would have it, another marriage battle started gearing up, this time in Maryland, where African-Americans make up 30 percent of the electorate. So this tension between gay rights and civil rights started to bubble up once again, and I was lucky enough to capture how some people were making the connection between the movements this time. This is a clip of Karess Taylor-Hughes and Samantha Masters, two characters in the film, as they hit the streets of Baltimore and try to convince potential voters.(Video) Samantha Masters: That's what's up, man, this is a righteous man over here. Okay, are you registered to vote?Man: No. Karess Taylor-Hughes: Okay. How old are you?Man: 21. KTH: 21? You gotta get registered to vote.We got to get you registered to vote.Man: I ain't voting on no gay shit.SM: Okay, why? What's up? Man: I ain't with that.SM: That's not cool.Man: What made you be gay? SM: So what made you be straight?So what made you be straight? Man 2: You can't answer that question. (Laughter)KSM: I used to not have the same rights as you, but I know that because a black man like yourself stood up for a woman like me, I know that I've got the same opportunities. So you, as a black man, have the opportunity to stand up for somebody else. Whether you're gay or not, these are your brothers and sisters out here, and they need you to represent.Man 2: Who is you to tell somebody who they can't have sex with, who they can't be with? They ain't got that power. Nobody has that power to say, you can't marry that young lady. Who has that power? Nobody.SM: But you know what? Our state has put the power in your hands, and so what we need you to do is vote for, you gonna vote for 6.Man 2: I got you.SM: Vote for 6, okay? Man 2: I got you.KSM: All right, do y'all need community service hours? You do? All right, you can always volunteer with us to get community service hours. Y'all want to do that? We feed you. We bring you pizza.(Laughter) (Applause)Yoruba Richen: Thank you. What's amazing to me about that clip that we just captured as we were filming is, it really shows how Karess understands the history of the civil rights movement, but she's not restricted by it. She doesn't just limit it to black people. She sees it as a blueprint for expanding rights to gays and lesbians. Maybe because she's younger, she's like 25, she's able to do this a little bit more easily, but the fact is that Maryland voters did pass that marriage equality amendment, and in fact it was the first time that marriage equality was directly voted on and passed by the voters. African-Americans supported it at a higher level than had ever been recorded. It was a complete turnaround from that night in 2008 when Proposition 8 was passed. It was, and feels, monumental. We in the LGBT community have gone from being a pathologized and reviled and criminalized group to being seen as part of the great human quest for dignity and equality. We've gone from having to hide our sexuality in order to maintain our jobs and our families to literally getting a place at the table with the president and a shout out at his second inauguration. I just want to read what he said at that inauguration: ""We the people declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal. It is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall.""Now we know that everything is not perfect, especially when you look at what's happening with the LGBT rights issue internationally, but it says something about how far we've come when our president puts the gay freedom struggle in the context of the other great freedom struggles of our time: the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement. His statement demonstrates not only the interconnectedness of those movements, but how each one borrowed and was inspired by the other. So just as Martin Luther King learned from and borrowed from Gandhi's tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, which became a bedrock of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement saw what worked in the civil rights movement, and they used some of those same strategies and tactics to make gains at an even quicker pace.Maybe one more other reason for the relative quick progress of the gay rights movement. Whereas a lot of us continue to still live in racially segregated spaces, LGBT folks, we are everywhere. We are in urban communities and rural communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, churches and mosques and synagogues. We are your mothers and brothers and sisters and sons. And when someone that you love or a family member comes out, it may be easier to support their quest for equality. And in fact, the gay rights movement asks us to support justice and equality from a space of love. That may be the biggest, greatest gift that the movement has given us. It calls on us to access that which is most universal and most intimate: a love of our brother and our sister and our neighbor. I just want to end with a quote by one of our greatest freedom fighters who's no longer with us, Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Nelson Mandela led South Africa after the dark and brutal days of Apartheid, and out of the ashes of that  legalized racial discrimination, he led South Africa to become the first country in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation within its constitution. Mandela said, ""For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.""So as these movements continue on, and as freedom struggles around the world continue on, let's remember that not only are they interconnected, but they must support and enhance each other for us to be truly victorious.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yoruba_richen_what_the_gay_rights_movement_learned_from_the_civil_rights_movement
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"I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. And my parents said, ""Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. She hasn't actually achieved anything."" (Laughter)And they were right, you know. I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer"" and ""Dawson's Creek."" Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. But they were right, you know. I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, ""Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?"" And I said, ""What speech?"" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, ""You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?"" (Laughter) ""It's usually in the big hall.""And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid — and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah.Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional.And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: ""The only disability in life is a bad attitude."" Or this one: ""Your excuse is invalid."" Indeed. Or this one: ""Before you quit, try!"" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, ""Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.""But what if you are that person? I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective.And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term ""disabled people"" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.So I have lived in this body a long time. I'm quite fond of it. It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? People, when they say, ""You're an inspiration,"" they mean it as a compliment. And I know why it happens. It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. And it honestly doesn't.And I know what you're thinking. You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, ""Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?"" And the thing is, I am. I learn from other disabled people all the time. I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. Genius. We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us.I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. It makes life hard for us. And that quote, ""The only disability in life is a bad attitude,"" the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen.I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching ""Buffy the Vampire Slayer"" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much
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"Four years ago, a security researcher, or, as most people would call it, a hacker, found a way to literally make ATMs throw money at him. His name was Barnaby Jack, and this technique was later called ""jackpotting"" in his honor.I'm here today because I think we actually need hackers. Barnaby Jack could have easily turned into a career criminal or James Bond villain with his knowledge, but he chose to show the world his research instead. He believed that sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution. And I feel the same way. That's why I'm here today.We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have. They scare us. But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all. So I am here today because I think we need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age. Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it.I knew that I might get hacked for giving this talk, so let me save you the effort. In true TED fashion, here is my most embarrassing picture. But it would be difficult for you to find me in it, because I'm the one who looks like a boy standing to the side. I was such a nerd back then that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team wouldn't let me join. This is who I was, but this is who I wanted to be: Angelina Jolie. She portrayed Acid Burn in the '95 film ""Hackers."" She was pretty and she could rollerblade, but being a hacker, that made her powerful. And I wanted to be just like her, so I started spending a lot of time on hacker chat rooms and online forums. I remember one late night I found a bit of PHP code. I didn't really know what it did, but I copy-pasted it and used it anyway to get into a password-protected site like that. Open Sesame. It was a simple trick, and I was just a script kiddie back then, but to me, that trick, it felt like this, like I had discovered limitless potential at my fingertips. This is the rush of power that hackers feel. It's geeks just like me discovering they have access to superpower, one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect, but thankfully no radioactive spiders.But with great power comes great responsibility, and you all like to think that if we had such powers, we would only use them for good. But what if you could read your ex's emails, or add a couple zeros to your bank account. What would you do then? Indeed, many hackers do not resist those temptations, and so they are responsible in one way or another to billions of dollars lost each year to fraud, malware or plain old identity theft, which is a serious issue. But there are other hackers, hackers who just like to break things, and it is precisely those hackers that can find the weaker elements in our world and make us fix it.This is what happened last year when another security researcher called Kyle Lovett discovered a gaping hole in the design of certain wireless routers like you might have in your home or office. He learned that anyone could remotely connect to these devices over the Internet and download documents from hard drives attached to those routers, no password needed. He reported it to the company, of course, but they ignored his report. Perhaps they thought universal access was a feature, not a bug, until two months ago when a group of hackers used it to get into people's files. But they didn't steal anything. They left a note: Your router and your documents can be accessed by anyone in the world. Here's what you should do to fix it. We hope we helped. By getting into people's files like that, yeah, they broke the law, but they also forced that company to fix their product.Making vulnerabilities known to the public is a practice called full disclosure in the hacker community, and it is controversial, but it does make me think of how hackers have an evolving effect on technologies we use every day. This is what Khalil did. Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank, and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook which he attempted to report through the company's bug bounty program. These are usually great arrangements for companies to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities they find in their code. Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications, his report was not acknowledged. Frustrated with the exchange, he took to use his own discovery to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall. This got their attention, all right, and they fixed the bug, but because he hadn't reported it properly, he was denied the bounty usually paid out for such discoveries. Thankfully for Khalil, a group of hackers were watching out for him. In fact, they raised more than 13,000 dollars to reward him for this discovery, raising a vital discussion in the technology industry about how we come up with incentives for hackers to do the right thing. But I think there's a greater story here still. Even companies founded by hackers, like Facebook was, still have a complicated relationship when it comes to hackers. And so for more conservative organizations, it is going to take time and adapting in order to embrace hacker culture and the creative chaos that it brings with it. But I think it's worth the effort, because the alternative, to blindly fight all hackers, is to go against the power you cannot control at the cost of stifling innovation and regulating knowledge. These are things that will come back and bite you.It is even more true if we go after hackers that are willing to risk their own freedom for ideals like the freedom of the web, especially in times like this, like today even, as governments and corporates fight to control the Internet. I find it astounding that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace can become its voice of opposition, its last line of defense even, perhaps someone like Anonymous, the leading brand of global hacktivism. This universal hacker movement needs no introduction today, but six years ago they were not much more than an Internet subculture dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats and Internet trolling campaigns. Their moment of transformation was in early 2008 when the Church of Scientology attempted to remove certain leaked videos from appearing on certain websites. This is when Anonymous was forged out of the seemingly random collection of Internet dwellers. It turns out, the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, and it will react with cyberattacks and elaborate pranks and with a series of organized protests all around the world, from my hometown of Tel Aviv to Adelaide, Australia. This proved that Anonymous and this idea can rally the masses from the keyboards to the streets, and it laid the foundations for dozens of future operations against perceived injustices to their online and offline world. Since then, they've gone after many targets. They've uncovered corruption, abuse. They've hacked popes and politicians, and I think their effect is larger than simple denial of service attacks that take down websites or even leak sensitive documents. I think that, like Robin Hood, they are in the business of redistribution, but what they are after isn't your money. It's not your documents. It's your attention. They grab the spotlight for causes they support, forcing us to take note, acting as a global magnifying glass for issues that we are not as aware of but perhaps we should be. They have been called many names from criminals to terrorists, and I cannot justify their illegal means, but the ideas they fight for are ones that matter to us all. The reality is, hackers can do a lot more than break things. They can bring people together.And if the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, just watch what happens when you try to shut the Internet down. This took place in Egypt in January 2011, and as President Hosni Mubarak attempted a desperate move to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo, he sent his personal troops down to Egypt's Internet service providers and had them physically kill the switch on the country's connection to the world overnight. For a government to do a thing like that was unprecedented, and for hackers, it made it personal. Hackers like the Telecomix group were already active on the ground, helping Egyptians bypass censorship using clever workarounds like Morse code and ham radio. It was high season for low tech, which the government couldn't block, but when the Net went completely down, Telecomix brought in the big guns. They found European service providers that still had 20-year-old analog dial-up access infrastructure. They opened up 300 of those lines for Egyptians to use, serving slow but sweet Internet connection for Egyptians. This worked. It worked so well, in fact, one guy even used it to download an episode of ""How I Met Your Mother."" But while Egypt's future is still uncertain, when the same thing happened in Syria just one year later, Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines, and Anonymous, they were perhaps the first international group to officially denounce the actions of the Syrian military by defacing their website.But with this sort of power, it really depends on where you stand, because one man's hero can be another's villain, and so the Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of hackers who support his contentious regime. They've taken down multiple high-profile targets in the past few years, including the Associated Press's Twitter account, in which they posted a message about an attack on the White House injuring President Obama. This tweet was fake, of course, but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index that day was most certainly not, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now. In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula to Latin America, from Europe to the United States, hackers are a force for social, political and military influence. As individuals or in groups, volunteers or military conflicts, there are hackers everywhere. They come from all walks of life, ethnicities, ideologies and genders, I might add. They are now shaping the world's stage. Hackers represent an exceptional force for change in the 21st century. This is because access to information is a critical currency of power, one which governments would like to control, a thing they attempt to do by setting up all-you-can-eat surveillance programs, a thing they need hackers for, by the way. And so the establishment has long had a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers, because the same people who demonize hacking also utilize it at large.Two years ago, I saw General Keith Alexander. He's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander, but instead of his four star general uniform, he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. This was at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker conference. Perhaps like me, General Alexander didn't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas. I think he saw untapped potential. In fact, he was there to give a hiring pitch. ""In this room right here,"" he said, ""is the talent our nation needs."" Well, hackers in the back row replied, ""Then stop arresting us."" (Applause)Indeed, for years, hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence, but in light of what we know now, who is more watchful of our online world? The rules of the game are not that clear anymore, but hackers are perhaps the only ones still capable of challenging overreaching governments and data-hoarding corporates on their own playing field. To me, that represents hope.For the past three decades, hackers have done a lot of things, but they have also impacted civil liberties, innovation and Internet freedom, so I think it's time we take a good look at how we choose to portray them, because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys, how can they be the heroes too? My years in the hacker world have made me realize both the problem and the beauty about hackers: They just can't see something broken in the world and leave it be. They are compelled to either exploit it or try and change it, and so they find the vulnerable aspects in our rapidly changing world. They make us, they force us to fix things or demand something better, and I think we need them to do just that, because after all, it is not information that wants to be free, it's us.Thank you very much.Thank you. (Applause)Hack the planet!","https://www.ted.com/talks/keren_elazari_hackers_the_internet_s_immune_system
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"It was less than a year after September 11, and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders, and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed. I had done some activism in college, so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing. I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive, but of course I have the absolute worst luck ever, and we were all arrested. Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence.My charges were dismissed, but a few weeks later, two FBI agents knocked on my door, and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups, they would put me on a domestic terrorist list. I'd love to tell you that I didn't flinch, but I was terrified, and when my fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out how this happened, how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI's number one domestic terrorism threat.A few years later, I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting, and I told lawmakers that, while everybody is talking about going green, some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines. They're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers' harpoons and the whales. These are everyday people, like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing. And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular, so in 1985, their opponents made up a new word, eco-terrorist, to shift how we view them. They just made it up.Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits. Now most people never even heard about this law, including members of Congress. Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House. The rest were outside at a new memorial. They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment.Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists: the vandals, the arsonists, the radicals. But right now, companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists. The FBI's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence, they're about public relations. Today, in multiple countries, corporations are pushing new laws that make it illegal to photograph animal cruelty on their farms. The latest was in Idaho just two weeks ago, and today we released a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional as a threat to journalism.The first of these ag-gag prosecutions, as they're called, was a young woman named Amy Meyer, and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street. And Amy did what any of us would: She filmed it. When I found out about her story, I wrote about it, and within 24 hours, it created such an uproar that the prosecutors just dropped all the charges.But apparently, even exposing stuff like that is a threat. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one. They even included this nice little write-up of my book. They described it as ""compelling and well-written."" (Applause) Blurb on the next book, right?The point of all of this is to make us afraid, but as a journalist, I have an unwavering faith in the power of education. Our best weapon is sunlight.Dostoevsky wrote that the whole work of man is to prove he's a man and not a piano key. Over and over throughout history, people in power have used fear to silence the truth and to silence dissent. It's time we strike a new note.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/will_potter_the_shocking_move_to_criminalize_non_violent_protest
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"In the middle of my Ph.D., I was hopelessly stuck. Every research direction that I tried led to a dead end. It seemed like my basic assumptions just stopped working. I felt like a pilot flying through the mist, and I lost all sense of direction. I stopped shaving. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I felt unworthy of stepping across the gates of the university, because I wasn't like Einstein or Newton or any other scientist whose results I had learned about, because in science, we just learn about the results, not the process. And so obviously, I couldn't be a scientist.But I had enough support and I made it through and discovered something new about nature. This is an amazing feeling of calmness, being the only person in the world who knows a new law of nature. And I started the second project in my Ph.D, and it happened again. I got stuck and I made it through. And I started thinking, maybe there's a pattern here. I asked the other graduate students, and they said, ""Yeah, that's exactly what happened to us, except nobody told us about it."" We'd all studied science as if it's a series of logical steps between question and answer, but doing research is nothing like that.At the same time, I was also studying to be an improvisation theater actor. So physics by day, and by night, laughing, jumping, singing, playing my guitar. Improvisation theater, just like science, goes into the unknown, because you have to make a scene onstage without a director, without a script, without having any idea what you'll portray or what the other characters will do. But unlike science, in improvisation theater, they tell you from day one what's going to happen to you when you get onstage. You're going to fail miserably. You're going to get stuck. And we would practice staying creative inside that stuck place. For example, we had an exercise where we all stood in a circle, and each person had to do the world's worst tap dance, and everybody else applauded and cheered you on, supporting you onstage.When I became a professor and had to guide my own students through their research projects, I realized again, I don't know what to do. I'd studied thousands of hours of physics, biology, chemistry, but not one hour, not one concept on how to mentor, how to guide someone to go together into the unknown, about motivation.So I turned to improvisation theater, and I told my students from day one what's going to happen when you start research, and this has to do with our mental schema of what research will be like. Because you see, whenever people do anything, for example if I want to touch this blackboard, my brain first builds up a schema, a prediction of exactly what my muscles will do before I even start moving my hand, and if I get blocked, if my schema doesn't match reality, that causes extra stress called cognitive dissonance. That's why your schemas had better match reality. But if you believe the way science is taught, and if you believe textbooks, you're liable to have the following schema of research. If A is the question, and B is the answer, then research is a direct path. The problem is that if an experiment doesn't work, or a student gets depressed, it's perceived as something utterly wrong and causes tremendous stress. And that's why I teach my students a more realistic schema. Here's an example where things don't match your schema. (Laughter) (Applause)So I teach my students a different schema. If A is the question, B is the answer, stay creative in the cloud, and you start going, and experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, until you reach a place linked with negative emotions where it seems like your basic assumptions have stopped making sense, like somebody yanked the carpet beneath your feet. And I call this place the cloud. Now you can be lost in the cloud for a day, a week, a month, a year, a whole career, but sometimes, if you're lucky enough and you have enough support, you can see in the materials at hand, or perhaps meditating on the shape of the cloud, a new answer, C, and you decide to go for it. And experiments don't work, experiments don't work, but you get there, and then you tell everyone about it by publishing a paper that reads A arrow C, which is a great way to communicate, but as long as you don't forget the path that brought you there.Now this cloud is an inherent part of research, an inherent part of our craft, because the cloud stands guard at the boundary. It stands guard at the boundary between the known and the unknown, because in order to discover something truly new, at least one of your basic assumptions has to change, and that means that in science, we do something quite heroic. Every day, we try to bring ourselves to the boundary between the known and the unknown and face the cloud.Now notice that I put B in the land of the known, because we knew about it in the beginning, but C is always more interesting and more important than B. So B is essential in order to get going, but C is much more profound, and that's the amazing thing about resesarch.Now just knowing that word, the cloud, has been transformational in my research group, because students come to me and say, ""Uri, I'm in the cloud,"" and I say, ""Great, you must be feeling miserable."" (Laughter) But I'm kind of happy, because we might be close to the boundary between the known and the unknown, and we stand a chance of discovering something truly new, since the way our mind works, it's just knowing that the cloud is normal, it's essential, and in fact beautiful, we can join the Cloud Appreciation Society, and it detoxifies the feeling that something is deeply wrong with me. And as a mentor, I know what to do, which is to step up my support for the student, because research in psychology shows that if you're feeling fear and despair, your mind narrows down to very safe and conservative ways of thinking. If you'd like to explore the risky paths needed to get out of the cloud, you need other emotions — solidarity, support, hope — that come with your connection from somebody else, so like in improvisation theater, in science, it's best to walk into the unknown together.So knowing about the cloud, you also learn from improvisation theater a very effective way to have conversations inside the cloud. It's based on the central principle of improvisation theater, so here improvisation theater came to my help again. It's called saying ""Yes, and"" to the offers made by other actors. That means accepting the offers and building on them, saying, ""Yes, and."" For example, if one actor says, ""Here is a pool of water,"" and the other actor says, ""No, that's just a stage,"" the improvisation is over. It's dead, and everybody feels frustrated. That's called blocking. If you're not mindful of communications, scientific conversations can have a lot of blocking.Saying ""Yes, and"" sounds like this.""Here is a pool of water."" ""Yeah, let's jump in.""""Look, there's a whale! Let's grab it by its tail. It's pulling us to the moon!""So saying ""Yes, and"" bypasses our inner critic. We all have an inner critic that kind of guards what we say, so people don't think that we're obscene or crazy or unoriginal, and science is full of the fear of appearing unoriginal. Saying ""Yes, and"" bypasses the critic and unlocks hidden voices of creativity you didn't even know that you had, and they often carry the answer about the cloud.So you see, knowing about the cloud and about saying ""Yes, and"" made my lab very creative. Students started playing off of each others' ideas, and we made surprising discoveries in the interface between physics and biology. For example, we were stuck for a year trying to understand the intricate biochemical networks inside our cells, and we said, ""We are deeply in the cloud,"" and we had a playful conversation where my student Shai Shen Orr said, ""Let's just draw this on a piece of paper, this network,"" and instead of saying, ""But we've done that so many times and it doesn't work,"" I said, ""Yes, and let's use a very big piece of paper,"" and then Ron Milo said, ""Let's use a gigantic architect's blueprint kind of paper, and I know where to print it,"" and we printed out the network and looked at it, and that's where we made our most important discovery, that this complicated network is just made of a handful of simple, repeating interaction patterns like motifs in a stained glass window. We call them network motifs, and they're the elementary circuits that help us understand the logic of the way cells make decisions in all organisms, including our body.Soon enough, after this, I started being invited to give talks to thousands of scientists across the world, but the knowledge about the cloud and saying ""Yes, and"" just stayed within my own lab, because you see, in science, we don't talk about the process, anything subjective or emotional. We talk about the results. So there was no way to talk about it in conferences. That was unthinkable. And I saw scientists in other groups get stuck without even having a word to describe what they're seeing, and their ways of thinking narrowed down to very safe paths, their science didn't reach its full potential, and they were miserable. I thought, that's the way it is. I'll try to make my lab as creative as possible, and if everybody else does the same, science will eventually become more and more better and better.That way of thinking got turned on its head when by chance I went to hear Evelyn Fox Keller give a talk about her experiences as a woman in science. And she asked, ""Why is it that we don't talk about the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science? It's not by chance. It's a matter of values."" You see, science seeks knowledge that's objective and rational. That's the beautiful thing about science. But we also have a cultural myth that the doing of science, what we do every day to get that knowledge, is also only objective and rational, like Mr. Spock. And when you label something as objective and rational, automatically, the other side, the subjective and emotional, become labeled as non-science or anti-science or threatening to science, and we just don't talk about it. And when I heard that, that science has a culture, everything clicked into place for me, because if science has a culture, culture can be changed, and I can be a change agent working to change the culture of science wherever I could. And so the very next lecture I gave in a conference, I talked about my science, and then I talked about the importance of the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science and how we should talk about them, and I looked at the audience, and they were cold. They couldn't hear what I was saying in the context of a 10 back-to-back PowerPoint presentation conference. And I tried again and again, conference after conference, but I wasn't getting through. I was in the cloud.And eventually I managed to get out the cloud using improvisation and music. Since then, every conference I go to, I give a science talk and a second, special talk called ""Love and fear in the lab,"" and I start it off by doing a song about scientists' greatest fear, which is that we work hard, we discover something new, and somebody else publishes it before we do. We call it being scooped, and being scooped feels horrible. It makes us afraid to talk to each other, which is no fun, because we came to science to share our ideas and to learn from each other, and so I do a blues song, which — (Applause) — called ""Scooped Again,"" and I ask the audience to be my backup singers, and I tell them, ""Your text is 'Scoop, Scoop.'"" It sounds like this: ""Scoop, scoop!"" Sounds like this.♪ I've been scooped again ♪♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪And then we go for it.♪ I've been scooped again ♪♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪♪ I've been scooped again ♪♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪♪ I've been scooped again ♪♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪♪ I've been scooped again ♪♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪♪ Oh mama, can't you feel my pain ♪♪ Heavens help me, I've been scooped again ♪ (Applause)Thank you. Thank you for your backup singing.So everybody starts laughing, starts breathing, notices that there's other scientists around them with shared issues, and we start talking about the emotional and subjective things that go on in research. It feels like a huge taboo has been lifted. Finally, we can talk about this in a scientific conference. And scientists have gone on to form peer groups where they meet regularly and create a space to talk about the emotional and subjective things that happen as they're mentoring, as they're going into the unknown, and even started courses about the process of doing science, about going into the unknown together, and many other things.So my vision is that, just like every scientist knows the word ""atom,"" that matter is made out of atoms, every scientist would know the words like ""the cloud,"" saying ""Yes, and,"" and science will become much more creative, make many, many more unexpected discoveries for the benefit of us all, and would also be much more playful. And what I might ask you to remember from this talk is that next time you face a problem you can't solve in work or in life, there's a word for what you're going to see: the cloud. And you can go through the cloud not alone but together with someone who is your source of support to say ""Yes, and"" to your ideas, to help you say ""Yes, and"" to your own ideas, to increase the chance that, through the wisps of the cloud, you'll find that moment of calmness where you get your first glimpse of your unexpected discovery, your C.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_truly_innovative_science_demands_a_leap_into_the_unknown
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"Six months ago, I got an email from a man in Israel who had read one of my books, and the email said, ""You don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin."" And it said, ""I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including you, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats."" Now I did not know what to make of this. Part of me was like, okay, when's he going to ask me to wire 10,000 dollars to his Nigerian bank, right? I also thought, 80,000 relatives, do I want that? I have enough trouble with some of the ones I have already. And I won't name names, but you know who you are. But another part of me said, this is remarkable. Here I am alone in my office, but I'm not alone at all. I'm connected to 80,000 people around the world, and that's four Madison Square Gardens full of cousins. And some of them are going to be great, and some of them are going to be irritating, but they're all related to me.So this email inspired me to dive into genealogy, which I always thought was a very staid and proper field, but it turns out it's going through a fascinating revolution, and a controversial one. Partly, this is because of DNA and genetic testing, but partly, it's because of the Internet. There are sites that now take the Wikipedia approach to family trees, collaboration and crowdsourcing, and what you do is, you load your family tree on, and then these sites search to see if the A.J. Jacobs in your tree is the same as the A.J. Jacobs in another tree, and if it is, then you can combine, and then you combine and combine and combine until you get these massive, mega-family trees with thousands of people on them, or even millions. I'm on something on Geni called the world family tree, which has no less than a jaw-dropping 75 million people. So that's 75 million people connected by blood or marriage, sometimes both. (Laughter) It's in all seven continents, including Antarctica. I'm on it. Many of you are on it, whether you know it or not, and you can see the links. Here's my cousin Gwyneth Paltrow. She has no idea I exist, but we are officially cousins. We have just 17 links between us.And there's my cousin Barack Obama. (Laughter) And he is my aunt's fifth great-aunt's husband's father's wife's seventh great-nephew, so practically my old brother.And my cousin, of course, the actor Kevin Bacon — (Laughter) — who is my first cousin's twice removed's wife's niece's husband's first cousin once removed's niece's husband. So six degrees of Kevin Bacon, plus or minus several degrees.Now, I'm not boasting, because all of you have famous people and historical figures in your tree, because we are all connected, and 75 million may seem like a lot, but in a few years, it's quite likely we will have a family tree with all, almost all, seven billion people on Earth.But does it really matter? What's the importance? And I do think it is important, and I'll give you five reasons why, really quickly.First, it's got scientific value. This is an unprecedented history of the human race, and it's giving us valuable data about how diseases are inherited, how people migrate, and there's a team of scientists at MIT right now studying the world family tree.Number two, it brings history alive. I found out I'm connected to Albert Einstein, so I told my seven-year-old son that, and he was totally engaged. Now Albert Einstein is not some dead white guy with weird hair. He's Uncle Albert. (Laughter) And my son wanted to know, ""What did he say? What is E = MC squared?"" Also, it's not all good news. I found a link to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, but I will say that's on my wife's side. (Laughter) (Applause) So I want to make that clear. Sorry, honey.Number three, interconnectedness. We all come from the same ancestor, and you don't have to believe the literal Bible version, but scientists talk about Y chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, and these were about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. We all have a bit of their DNA in us. They are our great-great-great-great-great-great — continue that for about 7,000 times — grandparents, and so that means we literally all are biological cousins as well, and estimates vary, but probably the farthest cousin you have on Earth is about a 50th cousin. Now, it's not just ancestors we share, descendants. If you have kids, and they have kids, look how quickly the descendants accumulate. So in 10, 12 generations, you're going to have thousands of offspring, and millions of offspring.Number four, a kinder world. Now, I know that there are family feuds. I have three sons, so I see how they fight. But I think that there's also a human bias to treat your family a little better than strangers. I think this tree is going to be bad news for bigots, because they're going to have to realize that they are cousins with thousands of people in whatever ethnic group they happen to have issues with, and I think you look back at history, and a lot of the terrible things we've done to each other is because one group thinks another group is sub-human, and you can't do that anymore. We're not just part of the same species. We're part of the same family. We share 99.9 percent of our DNA.Now the final one is number five, a democratizing effect. Some genealogy has an elitist strain, like people say, ""Oh, I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots and you're not, so you cannot join my country club."" But that's really going to be hard to do now, because everyone is related. I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots — by marriage, but still.So it's really a fascinating time in the history of family, because it's changing so fast. There is gay marriage and sperm donors and there's intermarriage on an unprecedented scale, and this makes some of my more conservative cousins a little nervous, but I actually think it's a good thing. I think the more inclusive the idea of family is, the better, because then you have more potential caretakers, and as my aunt's eighth cousin twice removed Hillary Clinton says — (Laughter) — it takes a village.So I have all these hundreds and thousands, millions of new cousins. I thought, what can I do with this information? And that's when I decided, why not throw a party? So that's what I'm doing. And you're all invited. Next year, next summer, I will be hosting what I hope is the biggest and best family reunion in history. (Applause) Thank you. I want you there. I want you there. It's going to be at the New York Hall of Science, which is a great venue, but it's also on the site of the former World's Fair, which is, I think, very appropriate, because I see this as a family reunion meets a world's fair. There's going to be exhibits and food, music. Paul McCartney is 11 steps away, so I'm hoping he brings his guitar. He hasn't RSVP'd yet, but fingers crossed. And there is going to be a day of speakers, of fascinating cousins. It's early, but I've already, I've got some lined up. Cass Sunstein, my cousin who is perhaps the most brilliant legal scholar, will be talking. He was a former member of the Obama administration. And on the other side of the political spectrum, George H.W. Bush, number 41, the father, he has agreed to participate, and Nick Kroll, the comedian, and Dr. Oz, and many more to come. And, of course, the most important is that you, I want you guys there, and I invite you to go to GlobalFamilyReunion.org and figure out how you're on the family tree, because these are big issues, family and tribe, and I don't know all the answers, but I have a lot of smart relatives, including you guys, so together, I think we can figure it out. Only together can we solve these big problems. So from cousin to cousin, I thank you. I can't wait to see you. Goodbye.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aj_jacobs_the_world_s_largest_family_reunion_we_re_all_invited
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"People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called ""God Is Not Great"" whose subtitle was, ""Religion Poisons Everything."" (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion.Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of ""On the Nature of Things,"" who said, ""Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum"" — I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it.What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with.So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called ""Tuff."" There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, ""You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?"" And the reply is, ""It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish."" (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought.Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, ""I want to talk to you about religion,"" and his grandfather said, ""You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager."" So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, ""It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods."" And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, ""Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition."" (Laughter)And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God.Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, ""Well, is it like one of these?"" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity.Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way.But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, ""Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition.""So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity?Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a  person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion.This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play.And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this.And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure.So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened.Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, ""I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'"" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not — This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role.So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kwame_anthony_appiah_is_religion_good_or_bad_this_is_a_trick_question
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"I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life, which I know may not seem relevant, but it is.When people meet me at parties and they find out that I'm an English professor who specializes in language, they generally have one of two reactions. One set of people look frightened. (Laughter) They often say something like, ""Oh, I'd better be careful what I say. I'm sure you'll hear every mistake I make."" And then they stop talking. (Laughter) And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else. The other set of people, their eyes light up, and they say, ""You are just the person I want to talk to."" And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language. (Laughter)A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook, and he said, ""To defriend? I mean, is that even a real word?""I want to pause on that question: What makes a word real? My dinner companion and I both know what the verb ""defriend"" means, so when does a new word like ""defriend"" become real? Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway? Those are the questions I want to talk about today.I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary. That, of course, raises a host of other questions, including, who writes dictionaries?Before I go any further, let me clarify my role in all of this. I do not write dictionaries. I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this ""research."" When I teach the history of the English language, I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class. Over the years, I have learned some great new slang this way, including ""hangry,"" which — (Applause) — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry, and ""adorkable,"" which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way, clearly, terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language. (Laughter) But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary?With that, let's turn to dictionaries. I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? Okay, so that looks like most of you. Now, a second question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? Okay, many fewer. At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we're really not sure who those hands belong to. I'm actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase ""Look it up in the dictionary,"" which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers.Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. I'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean. Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they'll tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. They're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what's going to stick and what's not going to stick. They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they're watching right now is YOLO, you only live once.Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come, some of the best known linguists in the United States. To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. Anyone who comes can vote. The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand. In the past, some of the winners have been ""tweet"" in 2009 and ""hashtag"" in 2012. ""Chad"" was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and ""WMD"" in 2002.Now, we have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. Past winners in this category have included ""recombobulation area,"" which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can recombobulate. (Laughter) You can put your belt back on, put your computer back in your bag. And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is ""multi-slacking."" (Laughter) And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you're working when you're actually goofing around on the web. (Laughter) (Applause)Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was ""Plutoed,"" to mean demoted. (Laughter) But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable, such as ""app"" and ""e"" as a prefix, and ""google"" as a verb.Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. We're noticing words that are coming into prominence. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language?The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words. So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very concerned that ""desirability"" is really a terrible word. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word ""colonize"" as bad.Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says ""as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick."" (Laughter) The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee.These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable — (Laughter) — but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including ""LOL"" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and ""defriend"" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. I also have articles expressing concern about ""invite"" as a noun, ""impact"" as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and ""incentivize"" is described as ""boorish, bureaucratic misspeak.""Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but they're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note.Think about the word ""peruse"" and how you use that word. I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully, or pore over. American Heritage has that as the first definition. They then have, as the second definition, skim, and next to that, they say ""usage problem."" (Laughter) And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at.So here's the usage note: ""Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly'... But the word is often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read.'... Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim,' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable. When asked about the sentence, 'I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly,' 66 percent of the [Usage] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011.""Ah, the Usage Panel, that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this. Now, what I hope you're thinking right now is, ""Wait, who's on the Usage Panel? And what should I do with their pronouncements?"" If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries, you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel. But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries? There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel. They include academicians, journalists, creative writers. There's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists. As of 2005, the list includes me. (Applause)Here's what we can do for you. We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage. That is and should be the extent of our authority. We are not a language academy. About once a year, I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses, new pronunciations, new meanings, are acceptable.Now here's what I do to fill out the ballot. I listen to what other people are saying and writing. I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language. I will be honest with you: I do not like the word ""impactful,"" but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether ""impactful"" is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose. So to be responsible, what I do is go look at usage, which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books. Well, if you look for ""impactful"" in Google Books, here is what you find. Well, it sure looks like ""impactful"" is proving useful for a certain number of writers, and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years.Now, there are going to be changes that all of us don't like in the language. There are going to be changes where you think, ""Really? Does the language have to change that way?"" What I'm saying is, we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible, we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. In retrospect, we think it's fascinating that the word ""nice"" used to mean silly, and that the word ""decimate"" used to mean to kill one in every 10. (Laughter) We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about ""notice"" as a verb. Well, you know what? We're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about ""impact"" as a verb and ""invite"" as a noun. The language is not going to change so fast that we can't keep up. Language just doesn't work that way. I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust.So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. If you're thinking, ""But that lets all of us decide what words mean,"" I would say, ""Yes it does, and it always has."" Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_curzan_what_makes_a_word_real
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"Think of a hard choice you'll face in the near future. It might be between two careers — artist and accountant — or places to live — the city or the country — or even between two people to marry — you could marry Betty or you could marry Lolita. Or it might be a choice about whether to have children, to have an ailing parent move in with you, to raise your child in a religion that your partner lives by but leaves you cold. Or whether to donate your life savings to charity.Chances are, the hard choice you thought of was something big, something momentous, something that matters to you. Hard choices seem to be occasions for agonizing, hand-wringing, the gnashing of teeth. But I think we've misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives. Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses.What makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate. In any easy choice, one alternative is better than the other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall. You agonize over whether to stay in your current job in the city or uproot your life for more challenging work in the country, because staying is better in some ways, moving is better in others, and neither is better than the other overall.We shouldn't think that all hard choices are big. Let's say you're deciding what to have for breakfast. You could have high fiber bran cereal or a chocolate donut. Suppose what matters in the choice is tastiness and healthfulness. The cereal is better for you, the donut tastes way better, but neither is better than the other overall, a hard choice. Realizing that small choices can also be hard, may make big hard choices seem less intractable. After all, we manage to figure out what to have for breakfast, so maybe we can figure out whether to stay in the city or uproot for the new job in the country.We also shouldn't think that hard choices are hard because we are stupid. When I graduated from college, I couldn't decide between two careers, philosophy and law. I really loved philosophy. There are amazing things you can learn as a philosopher, and all from the comfort of an armchair. But I came from a modest immigrant family where my idea of luxury was having a pork tongue and jelly sandwich in my school lunchbox, so the thought of spending my whole life sitting around in armchairs just thinking ... Well, that struck me as the height of extravagance and frivolity. So I got out my yellow pad, I drew a line down the middle, and I tried my best to think of the reasons for and against each alternative. I remember thinking to myself, if only I knew what my life in each career would be like. If only God or Netflix would send me a DVD of my two possible future careers, I'd be set. I'd compare them side by side, I'd see that one was better, and the choice would be easy.But I got no DVD, and because I couldn't figure out which was better, I did what many of us do in hard choices: I took the safest option. Fear of being an unemployed philosopher led me to become a lawyer, and as I discovered, lawyering didn't quite fit. It wasn't who I was. So now I'm a philosopher, and I study hard choices, and I can tell you, that fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It's a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we're too stupid to know which, and since we don't know which, we might as well take the least risky option. Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice can still be hard. Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they're hard because there is no best option.Now, if there's no best option, if the scales don't tip in favor of one alternative over another, then surely the alternatives must be equally good. So maybe the right thing to say in hard choices is that they're between equally good options. But that can't be right. If alternatives are equally good, you should just flip a coin between them, and it seems a mistake to think, here's how you should decide between careers, places to live, people to marry: Flip a coin.There's another reason for thinking that hard choices aren't choices between equally good options. Suppose you have a choice between two jobs: you could be an investment banker or a graphic artist. There are a variety of things that matter in such a choice, like the excitement of the work, achieving financial security, having time to raise a family, and so on. Maybe the artist's career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of pictorial expression. Maybe the banking career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of financial manipulation.(Laughter)Imagine the two jobs however you like, so that neither is better than the other.Now suppose we improve one of them, a bit. Suppose the bank, wooing you, adds 500 dollars a month to your salary. Does the extra money now make the banking job better than the artist one? Not necessarily. A higher salary makes the banking job better than it was before, but it might not be enough to make being a banker better than being an artist. But if an improvement in one of the jobs doesn't make it better than the other, then the two original jobs could not have been equally good. If you start with two things that are equally good, and you improve one of them, it now must be better than the other. That's not the case with options in hard choices.So now we've got a puzzle. We've got two jobs. Neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. So how are we supposed to choose? Something seems to have gone wrong here. Maybe the choice itself is problematic, and comparison is impossible. But that can't be right. It's not like we're trying to choose between two things that can't be compared. We're weighing the merits of two jobs, after all, not the merits of the number nine and a plate of fried eggs. A comparison of the overall merits of two jobs is something we can make, and one we often do make.I think the puzzle arises because of an unreflective assumption we make about value. We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight. Take any comparative question not involving value, such as which of two suitcases is heavier. There are only three possibilities. The weight of one is greater, lesser or equal to the weight of the other. Properties like weight can be represented by real numbers — one, two, three and so on — and there are only three possible comparisons between any two real numbers. One number is greater, lesser, or equal to the other. Not so with values. As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science. The stuff of the one world can be quantified by real numbers. The stuff of the other world can't. We shouldn't assume that the world of is, of lengths and weights, has the same structure as the world of ought, of what we should do.So if what matters to us — a child's delight, the love you have for your partner — can't be represented by real numbers, then there's no reason to believe that in choice, there are only three possibilities — that one alternative is better, worse or equal to the other. We need to introduce a new, fourth relation beyond being better, worse or equal, that describes what's going on in hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are ""on a par."" When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn't better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That's why the choice is hard.Understanding hard choices in this way uncovers something about ourselves we didn't know. Each of us has the power to create reasons. Imagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there's always a best alternative. If there's a best alternative, then that's the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reason to choose. In such a world, we'd have most reason to wear black socks instead of pink socks, to eat cereal instead of donuts, to live in the city rather than the country, to marry Betty instead of Lolita. A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons.When you think about it,(Laughter)it's nuts to believe that the reasons given to you dictated that you had most reason to pursue the exact hobbies you do, to live in the exact house you do, to work at the exact job you do. Instead, you faced alternatives that were on a par — hard choices — and you made reasons for yourself to choose that hobby, that house and that job. When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power — the power to create reasons for yourself, to make yourself into the kind of person for whom country living is preferable to the urban life.When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand. Here's who I am, I am for banking. I am for chocolate donuts.(Laughter)This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it's not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it's supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives.So when we face hard choices, we shouldn't beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better. There is no best alternative. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be? You might decide to be a pink sock-wearing, cereal-loving, country-living banker, and I might decide to be a black sock-wearing, urban, donut-loving artist. What we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us.Now, people who don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. We all know people like that. I drifted into being a lawyer. I didn't put my agency behind lawyering. I wasn't for lawyering. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment — pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option — to determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices: reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person.Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that's why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choices
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"Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwellsAnd announced that I'm ""articulate""Which means that when it comes to enunciation and dictionI don't even think of it‘Cause I’m ""articulate""So when my professor asks a questionAnd my answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestionThere’s no misdirected intentionPay attention‘Cause I’m “articulate”So when my father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?”My “articulate” answer never goes amissI say “father, this is the impending problem at hand”And when I’m on the block I switch it up just because I canSo when my boy says, “What’s good with you son?”I just say, “I jus’ fall out wit dem people but I done!”And sometimes in classI might pause the intellectual sounding flow to ask“Yo! Why dese books neva be about my peoples”Yes, I have decided to treat all three of my languages as equalsBecause I’m “articulate”But who controls articulation?Because the English language is a multifaceted orationSubject to indefinite transformationNow you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken EnglishBut I’m here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the BritishSo when my Professor comes on the block and says, “Hello”I stop him and say “Noooo …You’re being inarticulate … the proper way is to say ‘what’s good’”Now you may think that’s too hood, that’s not coolBut I’m here to tell you that even our language has rulesSo when Mommy mocks me and says “ya’ll-be-madd-going-to-the-store”I say “Mommy, no, that sentence is not following the lawNever does the word ""madd"" go  before a present participleThat’s simply the principle of this English”If I had the vocal capacity I would sing this from every mountaintop,From every suburbia, and every hood‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the GenesisOf this world saying “it is good""So I may not always come before you with excellency of speechBut do not judge me by my language and assumeThat I’m too ignorant to teach‘Cause I speak three tonguesOne for each:Home, school and friendsI’m a tri-lingual oratorSometimes I’m consistent with my language nowThen switch it up so I don’t bore laterSometimes I fight back two tonguesWhile I use the other one in the classroomAnd when I mistakenly mix them upI feel crazy like … I’m cooking in the bathroomI know that I had to borrow your language because mines was stolenBut you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines is brokenThese words are spokenBy someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this seasonAnd the reason I speak a composite version of your languageIs because mines was raped away along with my historyI speak broken English so the profusing gashes can remind usThat our current state is not a mysteryI’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people madSo unless you’ve seen it rob a bank stop calling my hair badI’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparitySo don’t call it good unless your hair is known for donating to charityAs much as has been raped away from our peopleHow can you expect me to treat their imprint on your languageAs anything less than equalLet there be no confusionLet there be no hesitationThis is not a promotion of ignoranceThis is a linguistic celebrationThat’s why I put ""tri-lingual"" on my last job applicationI can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to knowAnd when they call me for the interview I’ll be more than happy to show thatI can say:“What’s good”“Whatagwan”And of course …“Hello”Because I’m “articulate”Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_lyiscott_3_ways_to_speak_english
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"I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a spate of books that have come out lately contemplating or speculating on the cognition and emotional life of dogs. Do they think, do they feel and, if so, how? So this afternoon, in my limited time, I wanted to take the guesswork out of a lot of that by introducing you to two dogs, both of whom have taken the command ""speak"" quite literally.The first dog is the first to go, and he is contemplating an aspect of his relationship to his owner, and the title is ""A Dog on His Master.""""As young as I look, I am growing older faster than he. Seven to one is the ratio, they tend to say. Whatever the number, I will pass him one day and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods, and if this ever manages to cross his mind, it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.""(Applause)Thank you.And our next dog speaks in something called the revenant, which means a spirit that comes back to visit you.""I am the dog you put to sleep, as you like to call the needle of oblivion, come back to tell you this simple thing: I never liked you."" (Laughter) ""When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose. When I watched you toweling yourself dry, I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap. I resented the way you moved, your lack of animal grace, the way you would sit in a chair to eat, a napkin on your lap, a knife in your hand. I would have run away but I was too weak, a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel and, greatest of insults, shake hands without a hand. I admit the sight of the leash would excite me, but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched. You do not want to believe this, but I have no reason to lie: I hated the car, hated the rubber toys, disliked your friends, and worse, your relatives. The jingling of my tags drove me mad. You always scratched me in the wrong place."" (Laughter) ""All I ever wanted from you was food and water in my bowls. While you slept, I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky. It took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl. Now, I am free of the collar, free of the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater, the absurdity of your lawn, and that is all you need to know about this place, except what you already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner, that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/billy_collins_two_poems_about_what_dogs_think_probably
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"Twenty-three years ago, at the age of 19, I shot and killed a man. I was a young drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol.But that wasn't the end of my story. In fact, it was beginning, and the 23 years since is a story of acknowledgment, apology and atonement. But it didn't happen in the way that you might imagine or think. These things occurred in my life in a way that was surprising, especially to me.See, like many of you, growing up, I was an honor roll student, a scholarship student, with dreams of becoming a doctor. But things went dramatically wrong when my parents separated and eventually divorced.The actual events are pretty straightforward. At the age of 17, I got shot three times standing on the corner of my block in Detroit. My friend rushed me to the hospital. Doctors pulled the bullets out, patched me up, and sent me back to the same  neighborhood where I got shot. Throughout this ordeal, no one hugged me, no one counseled me, no one told me I would be okay. No one told me that I would live in fear, that I would become paranoid, or that I would react hyper-violently to being shot. No one told me that one day, I would become the person behind the trigger. Fourteen months later, at 2 a.m., I fired the shots that caused a man's death.When I entered prison, I was bitter, I was angry, I was hurt. I didn't want to take responsibility. I blamed everybody from my parents to the system. I rationalized my decision to shoot because in the hood where I come from, it's better to be the shooter than the person getting shot. As I sat in my cold cell, I felt helpless, unloved and abandoned. I felt like nobody cared, and I reacted with hostility to my confinement. And I found myself getting deeper and deeper into trouble. I ran black market stores, I loan sharked, and I sold drugs that were illegally smuggled into the prison. I had in fact become what the warden of the Michigan Reformatory called ""the worst of the worst."" And because of my activity, I landed in solitary confinement for seven and a half years out of my incarceration.Now as I see it, solitary confinement is one of the most inhumane and barbaric places you can find yourself, but find myself I did. One day, I was pacing my cell, when an officer came and delivered mail. I looked at a couple of letters before I looked at the letter that had my son's squiggly handwriting on it. And anytime I would get a letter from my son, it was like a ray of light in the darkest place you can imagine. And on this particular day, I opened this letter, and in capital letters, he wrote, ""My mama told me why you was in prison: murder."" He said, ""Dad, don't kill. Jesus watches what you do. Pray to Him.""Now, I wasn't religious at that time, nor am I religious now, but it was something so profound about my son's words. They made me examine things about my life that I hadn't considered. It was the first time in my life that I had actually thought about the fact that my son would see me as a murderer. I sat back on my bunk and I reflected on something I had read in [Plato], where Socrates stated in ""Apology"" that the unexamined life isn't worth living.At that point is when the transformation began. But it didn't come easy. One of the things I realized, which was part of the transformation, was that there were four key things. The first thing was, I had great mentors. Now, I know some of you all are probably thinking, how did you find a great mentor in prison? But in my case, some of my mentors who are serving life sentences were some of the best people to ever come into my life, because they forced me to look at my life honestly, and they forced me to challenge myself about my decision making.The second thing was literature. Prior to going to prison, I didn't know that there were so many brilliant black poets, authors and philosophers, and then I had the great fortune of encountering Malcolm X's autobiography, and it shattered every stereotype I had about myself.The third thing was family. For 19 years, my father stood by my side with an unshakable faith, because he believed that I had what it took to turn my life around. I also met an amazing woman who is now the mother of my two-year-old son Sekou, and she taught me how to love myself in a healthy way.The final thing was writing. When I got that letter from my son, I began to write a journal about things I had experienced in my childhood and in prison, and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea of atonement. Earlier in my incarceration, I had received a letter from one of the relatives of my victim, and in that letter, she told me she forgave me, because she realized I was a young child who had been abused and had been through some hardships and just made a series of poor decisions. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt open to forgiving myself.One of the things that happened after that experience is that I thought about the other men who were incarcerated alongside of me, and how much I wanted to share this with them. And so I started talking to them about some of their experiences, and I was devastated to realize that most of them came from the same abusive environments, And most of them wanted help and they wanted to turn it around, but unfortunately the system that currently holds 2.5 million people in prison is designed to warehouse as opposed to rehabilitate or transform. So I made it up in my mind that if I was ever released from prison that I would do everything in my power to help change that.In 2010, I walked out of prison for the first time after two decades. Now imagine, if you will, Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of ""The Jetsons."" That was pretty much what my life was like. For the first time, I was exposed to the Internet, social media, cars that talk like KITT from ""Knight Rider."" But the thing that fascinated me the most was phone technology. See, when I went to prison, our car phones were this big and required two people to carry them. So imagine what it was like when I first grabbed my little Blackberry and I started learning how to text. But the thing is, the people around me, they didn't realize that I had no idea what all these abbreviated texts meant, like LOL, OMG, LMAO, until one day I was having a conversation with one of my friends via text, and I asked him to do something, and he responded back, ""K."" And I was like, ""What is K?"" And he was like, ""K is okay."" So in my head, I was like, ""Well what the hell is wrong with K?"" And so I text him a question mark. And he said, ""K = okay."" And so I tap back, ""FU."" (Laughter) And then he texts back, and he asks me why was I cussing him out. And I said, ""LOL FU,"" as in, I finally understand. (Laughter)And so fast forward three years, I'm doing relatively good. I have a fellowship at MIT Media Lab, I work for an amazing company called BMe, I teach at the University of Michigan, but it's been a struggle because I realize that there are more men and women coming home who are not going to be afforded those opportunities. I've been blessed to work with some amazing men and women, helping others reenter society, and one of them is my friend named Calvin Evans. He served 24 years for a crime he didn't commit. He's 45 years old. He's currently enrolled in college. And one of the things that we talked about is the three things that I found important in my personal transformation, the first being acknowledgment. I had to acknowledge that I had hurt others. I also had to acknowledge that I had been hurt. The second thing was apologizing. I had to apologize to the people I had hurt. Even though I had no expectations of them accepting it, it was important to do because it was the right thing. But I also had to apologize to myself. The third thing was atoning. For me, atoning meant going back into my community and working with at-risk youth who were on the same path, but also becoming at one with myself.Through my experience of being locked up, one of the things I discovered is this: the majority of men and women who are incarcerated are redeemable, and the fact is, 90 percent of the men and women who are incarcerated will at some point return to the community, and we have a role in determining what kind of men and women return to our community.My wish today is that we will embrace a more empathetic approach toward how we deal with mass incarceration, that we will do away with the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality, because it's proven it doesn't work.My journey is a unique journey, but it doesn't have to be that way. Anybody can have a transformation if we create the space for that to happen. So what I'm asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren't held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don't define you for the rest of your life. I think collectively, we can create that reality, and I hope you do too.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shaka_senghor_why_your_worst_deeds_don_t_define_you
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"I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security.So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? It's tough.At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary.Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, ""Wow, now that's really unusable. Why are they doing this to us, and why didn't you stop them?""And I said, ""Well, you know what? They didn't ask me.""But I got curious, and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy, and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities, and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements, and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy. Now entropy is a complicated term, but basically it measures the strength of passwords. But the thing is, there isn't actually a standard measure of entropy. Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy, but they don't have anything too specific, and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don't actually have any good data on passwords. In fact, their report states, ""Unfortunately, we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules. NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose, but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others.""So this is a problem, but our research group looked at it as an opportunity. We said, ""Well, there's a need for good password data. Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here.So the first thing we did is, we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students, faculty and staff, and asked them for information about their passwords. Now we didn't say, ""Give us your password."" No, we just asked them about their password. How long is it? Does it have a digit? Does it have a symbol? And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week? So we got results from 470 students, faculty and staff, and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying, but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords. We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down, and only 13 percent of them did, but disturbingly, 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password. Now, this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down, because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers. So if you have to, write your passwords down, but don't reuse them. We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords. So CMU allows 32 possible symbols, but as you can see, there's only a small number that most people are using, so we're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords.So this was a really interesting study, and now we had data from 470 people, but in the scheme of things, that's really not very much password data, and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data? So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords, and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet. So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets. This is still not really ideal for research, though, because it's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from, or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords. So we wanted to find some better source of data. So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study. So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute, a few minutes, an hour, and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars, to do a task for you, and then you pay them through Amazon.com. So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey, and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey. So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords, and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with. So some people had a pretty easy policy, we call it Basic8, and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters. Then some people had a much harder policy, and this was very similar to the CMU policy, that it had to have eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol, and pass a dictionary check. And one of the other policies we tried, and there were a whole bunch more, but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16, and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters.All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords, and so we had much more detailed information. Again we see that there's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords. We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating, but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure of password strength. So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using, or that we could find information about in the research literature.So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords, they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash, and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess as to what a password is, run it through a hashing function, and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list. So a dumb attacker will try every password in order. They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB, and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have. A smart attacker, on the other hand, does something much more clever. They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets, and they guess those first. So they're going to start by guessing ""password,"" and then they'll guess ""I love you,"" and ""monkey,"" and ""12345678,"" because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have. In fact, some of you probably have these passwords. So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were, we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong, and the complex passwords were pretty strong too. However, when we looked at the survey data, we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords, and the long passwords were a lot more usable, and in some cases, they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords. So this suggests that, instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords, we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords. Now here's the problem, though: Some people had long passwords that actually weren't very strong. You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess. So we need to do more than just say long passwords. There has to be some additional requirements, and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type.Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter. Here are some examples. You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords. We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work. Do they actually help people have stronger passwords, and if so, which ones are better? So we tested password meters that were different sizes, shapes, colors, different words next to them, and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny. As you type a better password, the bunny dances faster and faster. So this was pretty fun.What we found was that password meters do work. (Laughter) Most of the password meters were actually effective, and the dancing bunny was very effective too, but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job, and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft. They tell you you're doing a good job too early, and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback, you probably would have better passwords.Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps, is to use pass phrases instead of passwords. So this was an xkcd cartoon  from a couple of years ago, and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases, and if you look at the second row of this cartoon, you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase ""correct horse battery staple"" would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember. He says, in fact, you've already remembered it. And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not. In fact, everybody who I talk to, who I mention I'm doing password research, they point out this cartoon. ""Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd. Correct horse battery staple."" So we did the research study to see what would actually happen.So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again, and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase. Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words. If we asked a human to do it, they would pick things that were not very random. So we tried a few different conditions. In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like ""try there three come."" And we looked at that, and we said, ""Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable."" So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech, so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun. That comes up with something that's sort of sentence-like. So you can get a pass phrase like ""plan builds sure power"" or ""end determines red drug."" And these seemed a little bit more memorable, and maybe people would like those a little bit better. We wanted to compare them with passwords, and so we had the computer pick random passwords, and these were nice and short, but as you can see, they don't really look very memorable. And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password. So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable, like ""tufritvi"" and ""vadasabi."" That one kind of rolls off your tongue. So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer.So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly, pass phrases were not actually all that good. People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords, and because the pass phrases are longer, they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in. So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases. Sorry, all of you xkcd fans. On the other hand, we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well, and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better. So one of the problems with some of the studies that we've done is that because they're all done using Mechanical Turk, these are not people's real passwords. They're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study. And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords.So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody's real passwords. Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us, but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff, into a locked computer in a locked room, not connected to the Internet, and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords. They audited our code. They ran the code. And so we never actually saw anybody's password.We got some interesting results, and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this. So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school. We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well. The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords, there was actually a lot of similarities, and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually, collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords. So that was good news.Okay, I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school. One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts, and I made this quilt here. It's called ""Security Blanket."" (Laughter) And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website. And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset. And what I did is I created this word cloud, and I went through all 1,000 words, and I categorized them into loose thematic categories. And it was, in some cases, it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in, and then I color-coded them.So here are some examples of the difficulty. So ""justin."" Is that the name of the user, their boyfriend, their son? Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan. Or ""princess."" Is that a nickname? Are they Disney princess fans? Or maybe that's the name of their cat. ""Iloveyou"" appears many times in many different languages. There's a lot of love in these passwords. If you look carefully, you'll see there's also some profanity, but it was really interesting to me to see that there's a lot more love than hate in these passwords. And there are animals, a lot of animals, and ""monkey"" is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall. And this was really curious to me, and I wondered, ""Why are monkeys so popular?"" And so in our last password study, any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word ""monkey"" in it, we asked them why they had a monkey in their password. And what we found out — we found 17 people so far, I think, who have the word ""monkey"" — We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named ""monkey"" or a friend whose nickname is ""monkey,"" and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute. And that guy is really cute.So it seems that at the end of the day, when we make passwords, we either make something that's really easy to type, a common pattern, or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we've created the password for, or whatever. Or we think about things that make us happy, and we create our password based on things that make us happy. And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password. So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice, happy things, but when you're creating your password, try to think about something else.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lorrie_faith_cranor_what_s_wrong_with_your_pa_w0rd
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"Every day we face issues like climate change or the safety of vaccines where we have to answer questions whose answers rely heavily on scientific information. Scientists tell us that the world is warming. Scientists tell us that vaccines are safe. But how do we know if they are right? Why should be believe the science? The fact is, many of us actually don't believe the science. Public opinion polls consistently show that significant proportions of the American people don't believe the climate is warming due to human activities, don't think that there is evolution by natural selection, and aren't persuaded by the safety of vaccines.So why should we believe the science? Well, scientists don't like talking about  science as a matter of belief. In fact, they would contrast science with faith, and they would say belief is the domain of faith. And faith is a separate thing apart and distinct from science. Indeed they would say religion is based on faith or maybe the calculus of Pascal's wager. Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century mathematician who tried to bring scientific reasoning to the question of whether or not he should believe in God, and his wager went like this: Well, if God doesn't exist but I decide to believe in him nothing much is really lost. Maybe a few hours on Sunday. (Laughter) But if he does exist and I don't believe in him, then I'm in deep trouble. And so Pascal said, we'd better believe in God. Or as one of my college professors said, ""He clutched for the handrail of faith."" He made that leap of faith leaving science and rationalism behind.Now the fact is though, for most of us, most scientific claims are a leap of faith. We can't really judge scientific claims for ourselves in most cases. And indeed this is actually true for most scientists as well outside of their own specialties. So if you think about it, a geologist can't tell you whether a vaccine is safe. Most chemists are not experts in evolutionary theory. A physicist cannot tell you, despite the claims of some of them, whether or not tobacco causes cancer. So, if even scientists themselves have to make a leap of faith outside their own fields, then why do they accept the claims of other scientists? Why do they believe each other's claims? And should we believe those claims?So what I'd like to argue is yes, we should, but not for the reason that most of us think. Most of us were taught in school that the reason we should believe in science is because of the scientific method. We were taught that scientists follow a method and that this method guarantees the truth of their claims. The method that most of us were taught in school, we can call it the textbook method, is the hypothetical deductive method. According to the standard model, the textbook model, scientists develop hypotheses, they deduce the consequences of those hypotheses, and then they go out into the world and they say, ""Okay, well are those consequences true?"" Can we observe them taking place in the natural world? And if they are true, then the scientists say, ""Great, we know the hypothesis is correct.""So there are many famous examples in the history of science of scientists doing exactly this. One of the most famous examples comes from the work of Albert Einstein. When Einstein developed the theory of general relativity, one of the consequences of his theory was that space-time wasn't just an empty void but that it actually had a fabric. And that that fabric was bent in the presence of massive objects like the sun. So if this theory were true then it meant that light as it passed the sun should actually be bent around it. That was a pretty startling prediction and it took a few years before scientists were able to test it but they did test it in 1919, and lo and behold it turned out to be true. Starlight actually does bend as it travels around the sun. This was a huge confirmation of the theory. It was considered proof of the truth of this radical new idea, and it was written up in many newspapers around the globe.Now, sometimes this theory or this model is referred to as the deductive-nomological model, mainly because academics like  to make things complicated. But also because in the ideal case, it's about laws. So nomological means having to do with laws. And in the ideal case, the hypothesis isn't just an idea: ideally, it is a law of nature. Why does it matter that it is a law of nature? Because if it is a law, it can't be broken. If it's a law then it will always be true in all times and all places no matter what the circumstances are. And all of you know of at least one example of a famous law: Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, which tells us what the relationship is between energy and mass. And that relationship is true no matter what.Now, it turns out, though, that there  are several problems with this model. The main problem is that it's wrong. It's just not true. (Laughter) And I'm going to talk about three reasons why it's wrong. So the first reason is a logical reason. It's the problem of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. So that's another fancy, academic way of saying that false theories can make true predictions. So just because the prediction comes true doesn't actually logically prove that the theory is correct. And I have a good example of that too,  again from the history of science. This is a picture of the Ptolemaic universe with the Earth at the center of the universe and the sun and the planets going around it. The Ptolemaic model was believed by many very smart people for many centuries. Well, why? Well the answer is because it made  lots of predictions that came true. The Ptolemaic system enabled astronomers to make accurate predictions of the motions of the planet, in fact more accurate predictions at first than the Copernican theory which we now would say is true. So that's one problem with the textbook model. A second problem is a practical problem, and it's the problem of auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are assumptions that scientists are making that they may or may not even be aware that they're making. So an important example of this comes from the Copernican model, which ultimately replaced the Ptolemaic system. So when Nicolaus Copernicus said, actually the Earth is not the center of the universe, the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth moves around the sun. Scientists said, well okay, Nicolaus, if that's true we ought to be able to detect the motion of the Earth around the sun. And so this slide here illustrates a concept known as stellar parallax. And astronomers said, if the Earth is moving and we look at a prominent star, let's say, Sirius — well I know I'm in Manhattan so you guys can't see the stars, but imagine you're out in the country,  imagine you chose that rural life — and we look at a star in December, we see that star against the backdrop of distant stars. If we now make the same observation six months later when the Earth has moved to this position in June, we look at that same star and we  see it against a different backdrop. That difference, that angular difference, is the stellar parallax. So this is a prediction that the Copernican model makes. Astronomers looked for the stellar parallax and they found nothing, nothing at all. And many people argued that this proved  that the Copernican model was false.So what happened? Well, in hindsight we can say  that astronomers were making two auxiliary hypotheses, both of which we would now say were incorrect. The first was an assumption  about the size of the Earth's orbit. Astronomers were assuming  that the Earth's orbit was large relative to the distance to the stars. Today we would draw the picture more like this, this comes from NASA, and you see the Earth's orbit is actually quite small. In fact, it's actually much smaller even than shown here. The stellar parallax therefore, is very small and actually very hard to detect.And that leads to the second reason why the prediction didn't work, because scientists were also assuming that the telescopes they had were sensitive enough to detect the parallax. And that turned out not to be true. It wasn't until the 19th century that scientists were able to detect the stellar parallax.So, there's a third problem as well. The third problem is simply a factual problem, that a lot of science doesn't fit the textbook model. A lot of science isn't deductive at all, it's actually inductive. And by that we mean that scientists don't necessarily start with theories and hypotheses, often they just start with observations of stuff going on in the world. And the most famous example of that is one of the most famous scientists who ever lived, Charles Darwin. When Darwin went out as a young  man on the voyage of the Beagle, he didn't have a hypothesis, he didn't have a theory. He just knew that he wanted to have a career as a scientist and he started to collect data. Mainly he knew that he hated medicine because the sight of blood made him sick so he had to have an alternative career path. So he started collecting data. And he collected many things,  including his famous finches. When he collected these finches, he threw them in a bag and he had no idea what they meant. Many years later back in London, Darwin looked at his data again and began to develop an explanation, and that explanation was the theory of natural selection.Besides inductive science, scientists also often participate in modeling. One of the things scientists want to do in life is to explain the causes of things. And how do we do that? Well, one way you can do it is to build a model that tests an idea.So this is a picture of Henry Cadell, who was a Scottish geologist in the 19th century. You can tell he's Scottish because he's wearing a deerstalker cap and Wellington boots. (Laughter) And Cadell wanted to answer the question, how are mountains formed? And one of the things he had observed is that if you look at mountains like the Appalachians, you often find that the rocks in them are folded, and they're folded in a particular way, which suggested to him that they were actually being compressed from the side. And this idea would later play a major role in discussions of continental drift. So he built this model, this crazy contraption with levers and wood, and here's his wheelbarrow, buckets, a big sledgehammer. I don't know why he's got the Wellington boots. Maybe it's going to rain. And he created this physical model in order to demonstrate that you could, in fact, create patterns in rocks, or at least, in this case, in mud, that looked a lot like mountains if you compressed them from the side. So it was an argument about the cause of mountains.Nowadays, most scientists prefer to work inside, so they don't build physical models so much as to make computer simulations. But a computer simulation is a kind of a model. It's a model that's made with mathematics, and like the physical models of the 19th century, it's very important for thinking about causes. So one of the big questions to do with climate change, we have tremendous amounts of evidence that the Earth is warming up. This slide here, the black line shows the measurements that scientists have taken for the last 150 years showing that the Earth's temperature has steadily increased, and you can see in particular that in the last 50 years there's been this dramatic increase of nearly one degree centigrade, or almost two degrees Fahrenheit.So what, though, is driving that change? How can we know what's causing the observed warming? Well, scientists can model it using a computer simulation. So this diagram illustrates a computer simulation that has looked at all the different factors that we know can influence the Earth's climate, so sulfate particles from air pollution, volcanic dust from volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and, of course, greenhouse gases. And they asked the question, what set of variables put into a model will reproduce what we actually see in real life? So here is the real life in black. Here's the model in this light gray, and the answer is a model that includes, it's the answer E on that SAT, all of the above. The only way you can reproduce the observed temperature measurements is with all of these things put together, including greenhouse gases, and in particular you can see that the increase in greenhouse gases tracks this very dramatic increase in temperature over the last 50 years. And so this is why climate scientists say it's not just that we know that climate change is happening, we know that greenhouse gases are a major part of the reason why.So now because there all these different things that scientists do, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend famously said, ""The only principle in science that doesn't inhibit progress is: anything goes."" Now this quotation has often been taken out of context, because Feyerabend was not actually saying that in science anything goes. What he was saying was, actually the full quotation is, ""If you press me to say what is the method of science, I would have to say: anything goes."" What he was trying to say is that scientists do a lot of different things. Scientists are creative.But then this pushes the question back: If scientists don't use a single method, then how do they decide what's right and what's wrong? And who judges? And the answer is, scientists judge, and they judge by judging evidence. Scientists collect evidence in many different ways, but however they collect it, they have to subject it to scrutiny. And this led the sociologist Robert Merton to focus on this question of how scientists scrutinize data and evidence, and he said they do it in a way he called ""organized skepticism."" And by that he meant it's organized because they do it collectively, they do it as a group, and skepticism, because they do it from a position of distrust. That is to say, the burden of proof is on the person with a novel claim. And in this sense, science is intrinsically conservative. It's quite hard to persuade the scientific community to say, ""Yes, we know something, this is true."" So despite the popularity of the concept of paradigm shifts, what we find is that actually, really major changes in scientific thinking are relatively rare in the history of science.So finally that brings us to one more idea: If scientists judge evidence collectively, this has led historians to focus on the question of consensus, and to say that at the end of the day, what science is, what scientific knowledge is, is the consensus of the scientific experts who through this process of organized scrutiny, collective scrutiny, have judged the evidence and come to a conclusion about it, either yea or nay.So we can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts. We can also think of science as being a kind of a jury, except it's a very special kind of jury. It's not a jury of your peers, it's a jury of geeks. It's a jury of men and women with Ph.D.s, and unlike a conventional jury, which has only two choices, guilty or not guilty, the scientific jury actually has a number of choices. Scientists can say yes, something's true. Scientists can say no, it's false. Or, they can say, well it might be true but we need to work more and collect more evidence. Or, they can say it might be true, but we don't know how to answer the question and we're going to put it aside and maybe we'll come back to it later. That's what scientists call ""intractable.""But this leads us to one final problem: If science is what scientists say it is, then isn't that just an appeal to authority? And weren't we all taught in school that the appeal to authority is a logical fallacy? Well, here's the paradox of modern science, the paradox of the conclusion I think historians and philosophers and sociologists have come to, that actually science is the appeal to authority, but it's not the authority of the individual, no matter how smart that individual is, like Plato or Socrates or Einstein. It's the authority of the collective community. You can think of it is a kind of wisdom of the crowd, but a very special kind of crowd. Science does appeal to authority, but it's not based on any individual, no matter how smart that individual may be. It's based on the collective wisdom, the collective knowledge, the collective work, of all of the scientists who have worked on a particular problem. Scientists have a kind of culture of collective distrust, this ""show me"" culture, illustrated by this nice woman here showing her colleagues her evidence. Of course, these people don't really look like scientists, because they're much too happy. (Laughter)Okay, so that brings me to my final point. Most of us get up in the morning. Most of us trust our cars. Well, see, now I'm thinking, I'm in Manhattan, this is a bad analogy, but most Americans who don't live in Manhattan get up in the morning and get in their cars and turn on that ignition, and their cars work, and they work incredibly well. The modern automobile hardly ever breaks down.So why is that? Why do cars work so well? It's not because of the genius of Henry Ford or Karl Benz or even Elon Musk. It's because the modern automobile is the product of more than 100 years of work by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people. The modern automobile is the product of the collected work and wisdom and experience of every man and woman who has ever worked on a car, and the reliability of the technology is the result of that accumulated effort. We benefit not just from the genius of Benz and Ford and Musk but from the collective intelligence and hard work of all of the people who have worked on the modern car. And the same is true of science, only science is even older. Our basis for trust in science is actually the same as our basis in trust in technology, and the same as our basis for trust in anything, namely, experience.But it shouldn't be blind trust any more than we would have blind trust in anything. Our trust in science, like science itself, should be based on evidence, and that means that scientists have to become better communicators. They have to explain to us not just what they know but how they know it, and it means that we have to become better listeners.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_oreskes_why_we_should_believe_in_science
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"I want to talk to you about one thing and just one thing only, and this has to do with when people ask me, what do you do? To which I usually respond, I do computer music.Now, a number of people just stop talking to me right then and there, and the rest who are left usually have this blank look in their eye, as if to say, what does that mean? And I feel like I'm actually depriving them of information by telling them this, at which point I usually panic and spit out the first thing that comes to my mind, which is, I have no idea what I'm doing. Which is true. That's usually followed by a second thought, which is, whatever it is that I'm doing, I love it. And today, I want to, well, share with you something I love, and also why.And I think we'll begin with just this question: What is computer music? And I'm going to try to do my best to provide a definition, maybe by telling you a story that goes through some of the stuff I've been working on.And the first thing, I think, in our story is going to be something called ChucK. Now, ChucK is a programming language for music, and it's open-source, it's freely available, and I like to think that it crashes equally well on all modern operating systems. And instead of telling you more about it, I'm just going to give you a demo. By the way, I'm just going to nerd out for just a few minutes here, so I would say, don't freak out. In fact, I would invite all of you to join me in just geeking out. If you've never written a line of code before in your life, do not worry. I'll bet you'll be able to come along on this.First thing I'm going to do is to make a sine wave oscillator, and we're going to called the sine wave generator ""Ge."" And then we're going to connect ""Ge"" to the DAC. Now this is kind of the abstraction for the sound output on my computer. Okay? So I've connected myself into the speaker. Next, I'm going to say my frequency is 440 hertz, and I'm going to let time advance by two seconds through this operation. All right, so if I were to play this — (Tone) — you would hear a sine wave at 440 hertz for two seconds. Okay, great. Now I'm going to copy and paste this, and then just change some of these numbers, 220.5, 440 I shall leave it as that, and .5 and 880. By doubling the frequency, we're actually going up in successive octaves, and then we have this sequence — (Tones) — of tones. Okay, great, now I can imagine creating all kinds of really horrible single sine wave pieces of music with this, but I'm going to do something that computers are really good at, which is repetition. I'm going to put this all in a while loop, and you actually don't need to indent, but this is purely for aesthetic reasons. It's good practice. And when we do this — (Tones) — that's going to go on for a while. In fact, it's probably not going to stop until this computer disintegrates. And I can't really empirically prove that to you, but I hope you'll believe me when I say that. Next, I'm going to replace this 220 by math.random2f. I'm going to generate a random number between 30 and 1,000 and send that to the frequency of me. And I'm going to do this every half a second. (Tones) Let's do this every 200 milliseconds. (Tones) One hundred. (Tones) All right. At this point, we've reached something that I would like to think of as the canonical computer music. This is, to me, the sound that mainframes are supposed to be making when they're thinking really hard. It's this sound, it's like, the square root of five million.So is this computer music? Yeah, I guess by definition, it's kind of computer music. It's probably not the kind of music you would listen to cruising down the highway, but it's a foundation of computer-generated music, and using ChucK, we've actually been building instruments in the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, based right here at Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.Now the Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of laptops, humans and special hemispherical speaker arrays. Now the reason we have these is so that for the instruments that we create out of the laptop, we want the sound to come out of somewhere near the instrument and the performer, kind of much like a traditional, acoustic instrument. Like, if I were to play a violin here, the sound would naturally not come out of the P.A. system, but from the artifact itself. So these speakers are meant to emulate that. In fact, I'm going to show you how we actually built them. The first step is to go to IKEA and buy a salad bowl. This is an 11-inch Blanda Matt. That's the actual name, and I actually use one of these to make salad at home as well, I kid you not. And the first step is you turn it upside down, and then you drill holes in them, six holes per hemi, and then make a base plate, put car speaker drivers in them along with amplifiers in the enclosure, and you put that all together and you have these hemispherical speaker arrays. Add people, add laptops, you have a laptop orchestra.And what might a laptop orchestra sound like? Well, let me give you a demonstration of about 200 instruments we've created so far for the Laptop Orchestra. And what I'm going to do is actually come over to this thing. This thing I have in front of me actually used to be a commodity gaming controller called a Gametrak. This thing actually has a glove you can put on your hands. It's tethered to the base, and this will track the position of your hands in real time. It was originally designed as a golfing controller to detect the motion of your swing. That turned out to be a rather large commercial non-success, at which point they slashed prices to 10 dollars, at which point computer music researchers said, ""This is awesome! We can prototype instruments out of this.""So let me show you one instrument we've created, one of many, and this instrument is called ""Twilight,"" and it's meant to go with this metaphor of pulling a sound out of the ground. So let me see if this will work.(Music)And put it back. And then if you go to the left, right, it sounds like an elephant in pain.This is a slightly metallic sound. Turn it just a bit.(Music) It's like a hovering car.Okay.This third one is a ratchet-like interaction, so let me turn it up.(Music)So it's a slightly different interaction.The fourth one is a drone.(Music) And finally, let's see, this is a totally different interaction, and I think you have to imagine that there's this giant invisible drum sitting right here on stage, and I'm going to bang it. (Drum) (Laughter) So there we go, so that's one of many instruments in the Laptop Orchestra.(Applause)Thank you.And when you put that together, you get something that sounds like this.(Music)Okay, and so, I think from the experience of building a lot of instruments for the Laptop Orchestra, and I think from the curiosity of wondering, what if we took these hopefully expressive instruments and we brought it to a lot of people, plus then a healthy bout of insanity — put those three things together — led to me actually co-founding a startup company in 2008 called Smule.Now Smule's mission is to create expressive, mobile music things, and one of the first musical instruments we created is called Ocarina. And I'm going to just demo this for you real quick. So Ocarina — (Music) — is based on this ancient flute-like instrument called the ocarina, and this one is the four-hole English pendant configuration, and you're literally blowing into the microphone to make the sound. And there's actually a little ChucK script running in here that's detecting the strength of your blowing and also synthesizing the sound. (Music) And vibrato is mapped to the accelerometer, so you can get — (Music) All right. So let me play a little ditty for you, a little Bach. And here, you'll hear a little accompaniment with the melody. The accompaniment actually follows the melody, not the other way around.(Music)And this was designed to let you take your time and figure out where your expressive space is, and you can just hang out here for a while, for a really dramatic effect, if you want, and whenever you're ready —(Music)And on these longer notes, I'm going to use more vibrato towards the end of the notes to give it a little bit more of an expressive quality.(Music)Huh, that's a nice chord to end this excerpt on.(Applause)Thank you.So I think a good question to ask about Ocarina is, is this a toy or it an instrument? Maybe it's both, but for me, I think the more important question is, is it expressive? And at the same time, I think creating these types of instruments asks a question about the role of technology, and its place for how we make music. Apparently, for example, not that long ago, like only a hundred years ago — that's not that long in the course of human history — families back then used to make music together as a common form of entertainment. I don't think that's really happening that much anymore. You know, this is before radio, before recording. In the last hundred years, with all this technology, we now have more access to music as listeners and consumers, but somehow, I think we're making less music than ever before. I'm not sure why that would be. Maybe it's because it's too easy just to hit play. And while listening to music is wonderful, there's a special joy to making music that's all its own. And I think that's one part of the goal of why I do what I do is kind of to take us back to the past a little bit. Right?Now, if that's one goal, the other goal is to look to the future and think about what kind of new musical things can we make that we don't perhaps yet have names for that's enabled by technology, but ultimately might change the way that humans make music. And I'll just give you one example here, and this is Ocarina's other feature. This is a globe, and here you're actually listening to other users of Ocarina blow into their iPhones to play something. This is ""G.I.R."" from Texas, ""R.I.K."" I don't know why it's these three-letter names today, Los Angeles. They're all playing pretty, somewhat minimal music here.(Music)And the idea with this is that, well, technology should not be foregrounded here, and — (Laughter) — we've actually opened this up. The first thought is that, hey, you know there's somebody somewhere out there playing some music, and this is a small but I think important human connection to make that perhaps the technology affords.As a final example, and perhaps my favorite example, is that in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, a woman reached out in one of our singing apps to try to get people to join in to sing with her on a version of ""Lean on Me."" Now, in these apps, there's this thing that allows any user to add their voice to an existing performance by any other user or group of users, so in some sense, she's created this kind of global ad hoc corral of strangers, and within weeks, thousands of people joined in on this, and you can kind of see people coming from all around the world and all these lines converging on the origin where the first rendition of the song was sung, and that's in Tokyo. And this is what it sounds like  when there's 1,000 people. This is 1,000 voices.(Recording) ♪ Sometimes in our lives ♪♪ We all have pain, we all have sorrow ♪♪ But if we are wise ♪♪ We know that there's always tomorrow ♪♪ Lean on me ♪♪ When you're not strong ♪♪ And I'll be your friend ♪♪ I'll help you carry on ♪♪ For it won't be long ♪♪ Till I'm gonna need ♪♪ Somebody to lean on ♪♪ Just lean on — ♪Is this computer music?(Applause)Was that computer music? Yeah, I guess so; it's something that you really couldn't have done without computers. But at the same time, it's also just human, and I think what I've essentially answered so far is maybe why I do the stuff that I do, and let's just finally return to the first question: What is computer music? And I think that the catch here is that, at least to me, computer music isn't really about computers. It is about people. It's about how we can use technology to change the way we think and do and make music, and maybe even add to how we can connect with each other through music.And with that, I want to say, this is computer music, and thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ge_wang_the_diy_orchestra_of_the_future
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"The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say ""I love you."" And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world?What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into.First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us.Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time.Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, ""It's October 1 today,"" and she said, ""I know, isn't it dreadful?""(Laughter)It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.(Laughter)And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the U.K. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, sport, about politics, about everything, but actually, complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world.Excuses.We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that.Penultimate, the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it?(Laughter)And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us.And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that.So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is. I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is ""hail,"" and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things.So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning. Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail.Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking.Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register.Then we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice.Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the word ""monotonic"" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement?(Laughter)And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit.Pace.I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful.Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? (Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? So, slightly different meaning in those two deliveries.And finally, volume. (Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting,(Laughter)Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice.Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice.Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. One more time. Ahhhh, very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. Brrrr. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. And then, roll an R. Rrrrrrr. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with ""we"" and goes to ""aw."" The ""we"" is high, the ""aw"" is low. So you go, weeeaawww, weeeaawww.Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat, thank you.(Applause)Next time you speak, do those in advance.Now let me just put this in context to close. This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_how_to_speak_so_that_people_want_to_listen
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"This is a lot of ones and zeros. It's what we call binary information. This is how computers talk. It's how they store information. It's how computers think. It's how computers do everything it is that computers do. I'm a cybersecurity researcher, which means my job is to sit down with this information and try to make sense of it, to try to understand what all the ones and zeroes mean. Unfortunately for me, we're not just talking about the ones and zeros I have on the screen here. We're not just talking about a few pages of ones and zeros. We're talking about billions and billions of ones and zeros, more than anyone could possibly comprehend.Now, as exciting as that sounds, when I first started doing cyber — (Laughter) — when I first started doing cyber, I wasn't sure that sifting through ones and zeros was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because in my mind, cyber was keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer, it was keeping people's Myspace pages from being hacked, and maybe, maybe on my most glorious day, it was keeping someone's credit card information from being stolen. Those are important things, but that's not how I wanted to spend my life.But after 30 minutes of work as a defense contractor, I soon found out that my idea of cyber was a little bit off. In fact, in terms of national security, keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer was surprisingly low on their priority list. And the reason for that is cyber is so much bigger than any one of those things. Cyber is an integral part of all of our lives, because computers are an integral part of all of our lives, even if you don't own a computer. Computers control everything in your car, from your GPS to your airbags. They control your phone. They're the reason you can call 911 and get someone on the other line. They control our nation's entire infrastructure. They're the reason you have electricity, heat, clean water, food. Computers control our military equipment, everything from missile silos to satellites to nuclear defense networks. All of these things are made possible because of computers, and therefore because of cyber, and when something goes wrong, cyber can make all of these things impossible.But that's where I step in. A big part of my job is defending all of these things, keeping them working, but once in a while, part of my job is to break one of these things, because cyber isn't just about defense, it's also about offense. We're entering an age where we talk about cyberweapons. In fact, so great is the potential for cyber offense that cyber is considered a new domain of warfare. Warfare. It's not necessarily a bad thing. On the one hand, it means we have whole new front on which we need to defend ourselves, but on the other hand, it means we have a whole new way to attack, a whole new way to stop evil people from doing evil things.So let's consider an example of this that's completely theoretical. Suppose a terrorist wants to blow up a building, and he wants to do this again and again in the future. So he doesn't want to be in that building when it explodes. He's going to use a cell phone as a remote detonator. Now, it used to be the only way we had to stop this terrorist was with a hail of bullets and a car chase, but that's not necessarily true anymore. We're entering an age where we can stop him with the press of a button from 1,000 miles away, because whether he knew it or not, as soon as he decided to use his cell phone, he stepped into the realm of cyber. A well-crafted cyber attack could break into his phone, disable the overvoltage protections on his battery, drastically overload the circuit, cause the battery to overheat, and explode. No more phone, no more detonator, maybe no more terrorist, all with the press of a button from a thousand miles away.So how does this work? It all comes back to those ones and zeros. Binary information makes your phone work, and used correctly, it can make your phone explode. So when you start to look at cyber from this perspective, spending your life sifting through binary information starts to seem kind of exciting.But here's the catch: This is hard, really, really hard, and here's why. Think about everything you have on your cell phone. You've got the pictures you've taken. You've got the music you listen to. You've got your contacts list, your email, and probably 500 apps you've never used in your entire life, and behind all of this is the software, the code, that controls your phone, and somewhere, buried inside of that code, is a tiny piece that controls your battery, and that's what I'm really after, but all of this, just a bunch of ones and zeros, and it's all just mixed together. In cyber, we call this finding a needle in a stack of needles, because everything pretty much looks alike. I'm looking for one key piece, but it just blends in with everything else.So let's step back from this theoretical situation of making a terrorist's phone explode, and look at something that actually happened to me. Pretty much no matter what I do, my job always starts with sitting down with a whole bunch of binary information, and I'm always looking for one key piece to do something specific. In this case, I was looking for a very advanced, very high-tech piece of code that I knew I could hack, but it was somewhere buried inside of a billion ones and zeroes. Unfortunately for me, I didn't know quite what I was looking for. I didn't know quite what it would look like, which makes finding it really, really hard. When I have to do that, what I have to do is basically look at various pieces of this binary information, try to decipher each piece, and see if it might be what I'm after. So after a while, I thought I had found the piece I was looking for. I thought maybe this was it. It seemed to be about right, but I couldn't quite tell. I couldn't tell what those ones and zeros represented. So I spent some time trying to put this together, but wasn't having a whole lot of luck, and finally I decided, I'm going to get through this, I'm going to come in on a weekend, and I'm not going to leave until I figure out what this represents. So that's what I did. I came in on a Saturday morning, and about 10 hours in, I sort of had all the pieces to the puzzle. I just didn't know how they fit together. I didn't know what these ones and zeros meant. At the 15-hour mark, I started to get a better picture of what was there, but I had a creeping suspicion that what I was looking at was not at all related to what I was looking for. By 20 hours, the pieces started to come together very slowly — (Laughter) — and I was pretty sure I was going down the wrong path at this point, but I wasn't going to give up. After 30 hours in the lab, I figured out exactly what I was looking at, and I was right, it wasn't what I was looking for. I spent 30 hours piecing together the ones and zeros that formed a picture of a kitten. (Laughter) I wasted 30 hours of my life searching for this kitten that had nothing at all to do with what I was trying to accomplish.So I was frustrated, I was exhausted. After 30 hours in the lab, I probably smelled horrible. But instead of just going home and calling it quits, I took a step back and asked myself, what went wrong here? How could I make such a stupid mistake? I'm really pretty good at this. I do this for a living. So what happened? Well I thought, when you're looking at information at this level, it's so easy to lose track of what you're doing. It's easy to not see the forest through the trees. It's easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole and waste a tremendous amount of time doing the wrong thing. But I had this epiphany. We were looking at the data completely incorrectly since day one. This is how computers think, ones and zeros. It's not how people think, but we've been trying to adapt our minds to think more like computers so that we can understand this information. Instead of trying to make our minds fit the problem, we should have been making the problem fit our minds, because our brains have a tremendous potential for analyzing huge amounts of information, just not like this. So what if we could unlock that potential just by translating this to the right kind of information? So with these ideas in mind, I sprinted out of my basement lab at work to my basement lab at home, which looked pretty much the same. The main difference is, at work, I'm surrounded by cyber materials, and cyber seemed to be the problem in this situation. At home, I'm surrounded by everything else I've ever learned. So I poured through every book I could find, every idea I'd ever encountered, to see how could we translate a problem from one domain to something completely different?The biggest question was, what do we want to translate it to? What do our brains do perfectly naturally that we could exploit? My answer was vision. We have a tremendous capability to analyze visual information. We can combine color gradients, depth cues, all sorts of these different signals into one coherent picture of the world around us. That's incredible. So if we could find a way to translate these binary patterns to visual signals, we could really unlock the power of our brains to process this stuff. So I started looking at the binary information, and I asked myself, what do I do when I first encounter something like this? And the very first thing I want to do, the very first question I want to answer, is what is this? I don't care what it does, how it works. All I want to know is, what is this? And the way I can figure that out is by looking at chunks, sequential chunks of binary information, and I look at the relationships between those chunks. When I gather up enough of these sequences, I begin to get an idea of exactly what this information must be. So let's go back to that blow up the terrorist's phone situation. This is what English text looks like at a binary level. This is what your contacts list would look like if I were examining it. It's really hard to analyze this at this level, but if we take those same binary chunks that I would be trying to find, and instead translate that to a visual representation, translate those relationships, this is what we get. This is what English text looks like from a visual abstraction perspective. All of a sudden, it shows us all the same information that was in the ones and zeros, but show us it in an entirely different way, a way that we can immediately comprehend. We can instantly see all of the patterns here. It takes me seconds to pick out patterns here, but hours, days, to pick them out in ones and zeros. It takes minutes for anybody to learn what these patterns represent here, but years of experience in cyber to learn what those same patterns represent in ones and zeros. So this piece is caused by lower case letters followed by lower case letters inside of that contact list. This is upper case by upper case, upper case by lower case, lower case by upper case. This is caused by spaces. This is caused by carriage returns. We can go through every little detail of the binary information in seconds, as opposed to weeks, months, at this level. This is what an image looks like from your cell phone. But this is what it looks like in a visual abstraction. This is what your music looks like, but here's its visual abstraction. Most importantly for me, this is what the code on your cell phone looks like. This is what I'm after in the end, but this is its visual abstraction. If I can find this, I can't make the phone explode. I could spend weeks trying to find this in ones and zeros, but it takes me seconds to pick out a visual abstraction like this.One of those most remarkable parts about all of this is it gives us an entirely new way to understand new information, stuff that we haven't seen before. So I know what English looks like at a binary level, and I know what its visual abstraction looks like, but I've never seen Russian binary in my entire life. It would take me weeks just to figure out what I was looking at from raw ones and zeros, but because our brains can instantly pick up and recognize these subtle patterns inside of these visual abstractions, we can unconsciously apply those in new situations. So this is what Russian looks like in a visual abstraction. Because I know what one language looks like, I can recognize other languages even when I'm not familiar with them. This is what a photograph looks like, but this is what clip art looks like. This is what the code on your phone looks like, but this is what the code on your computer looks like. Our brains can pick up on these patterns in ways that we never could have from looking at raw ones and zeros. But we've really only scratched the surface of what we can do with this approach. We've only begun to unlock the capabilities of our minds to process visual information. If we take those same concepts and translate them into three dimensions instead, we find entirely new ways of making sense of information. In seconds, we can pick out every pattern here. we can see the cross associated with code. We can see cubes associated with text. We can even pick up the tiniest visual artifacts. Things that would take us weeks, months to find in ones and zeroes, are immediately apparent in some sort of visual abstraction, and as we continue to go through this and throw more and more information at it, what we find is that we're capable of processing billions of ones and zeros in a matter of seconds just by using our brain's built-in ability to analyze patterns.So this is really nice and helpful, but all this tells me is what I'm looking at. So at this point, based on visual patterns, I can find the code on the phone. But that's not enough to blow up a battery. The next thing I need to find is the code that controls the battery, but we're back to the needle in a stack of needles problem. That code looks pretty much like all the other code on that system.So I might not be able to find the code that controls the battery, but there's a lot of things that are very similar to that. You have code that controls your screen, that controls your buttons, that controls your microphones, so even if I can't find the code for the battery, I bet I can find one of those things. So the next step in my binary analysis process is to look at pieces of information that are similar to each other. It's really, really hard to do at a binary level, but if we translate those similarities to a visual abstraction instead, I don't even have to sift through the raw data. All I have to do is wait for the image to light up to see when I'm at similar pieces. I follow these strands of similarity like a trail of bread crumbs to find exactly what I'm looking for.So at this point in the process, I've located the code responsible for controlling your battery, but that's still not enough to blow up a phone. The last piece of the puzzle is understanding how that code controls your battery. For this, I need to identify very subtle, very detailed relationships within that binary information, another very hard thing to do when looking at ones and zeros. But if we translate that information into a physical representation, we can sit back and let our visual cortex do all the hard work. It can find all the detailed patterns, all the important pieces, for us. It can find out exactly how the pieces of that code work together to control that battery. All of this can be done in a matter of hours, whereas the same process would have taken months in the past.This is all well and good in a theoretical blow up a terrorist's phone situation. I wanted to find out if this would really work in the work I do every day. So I was playing around with these same concepts with some of the data I've looked at in the past, and yet again, I was trying to find a very detailed, specific piece of code inside of a massive piece of binary information. So I looked at it at this level, thinking I was looking at the right thing, only to see this doesn't have the connectivity I would have expected for the code I was looking for. In fact, I'm not really sure what this is, but when I stepped back a level and looked at the similarities within the code I saw, this doesn't have similarities like any code that exists out there. I can't even be looking at code. In fact, from this perspective, I could tell, this isn't code. This is an image of some sort. And from here, I can see, it's not just an image, this is a photograph. Now that I know it's a photograph, I've got dozens of other binary translation techniques to visualize and understand that information, so in a matter of seconds, we can take this information, shove it through a dozen other visual translation techniques in order to find out exactly what we were looking at. I saw — (Laughter) — it was that darn kitten again. All this is enabled because we were able to find a way to translate a very hard problem to something our brains do very naturally.So what does this mean? Well, for kittens, it means no more hiding in ones and zeros. For me, it means no more wasted weekends. For cyber, it means we have a radical new way to tackle the most impossible problems. It means we have a new weapon in the evolving theater of cyber warfare, but for all of us, it means that cyber engineers now have the ability to become first responders in emergency situations. When seconds count, we've unlocked the means to stop the bad guys.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_domas_the_1s_and_0s_behind_cyber_warfare
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"As a scientist, and also as a human being, I've been trying to make myself susceptible to wonder. I think Jason Webley last night called it ""conspiring to be part of the magic."" So it's fortunate that my career as a biologist lets me dive deeply into the lives of some truly wondrous creatures that share our planet: fireflies.Now, for many of you, I know that fireflies might conjure up some really great memories: childhood, summertime, even other TED Talks. Maybe something like this.My seduction into the world of fireflies began when I was back in graduate school. One evening, I was sitting out in my backyard in North Carolina, and suddenly, these silent sparks rose up all around me, and I began to wonder: How do these creatures make light, and what's with all this flashing? Are they talking to one another? And what happens after the lights go out? I've been lucky enough to answer some of these questions as I've explored this nocturnal world.Now if you've ever seen or even heard about fireflies, then you'll know how magically they can transform our everyday landscape into something ethereal and otherworldly, and this happens around the globe, like this hillside in the Smoky Mountains that I saw transformed into a living cascade of light by the eerie glows of these blue ghost fireflies, or a roadside river that I visited in Japan as it was giving birth to the slow, floating flashes of these Genji fireflies, or in Malaysia, the mangrove trees that I watched blossom nightly not with flowers but with the lights of a thousand —  (Bleep! Bleep!) — fireflies, all blinking together in stunning synchrony. These luminous landscapes still fill me with wonder, and they keep me connected to the magic of the natural world.And I find it amazing that they're created by these tiny insects. In person, fireflies are charming. They're charismatic. They've been celebrated in art and in poetry for centuries. As I've traveled around the world, I've met many thoughtful people who have told me that God put fireflies on Earth for humans to enjoy. Other creatures can enjoy them too. I think these graceful insects are truly miraculous because they so beautifully illuminate the creative improvisation of evolution. They've been shaped by two powerful evolutionary forces: natural selection, the struggle for survival, and sexual selection, the struggle for reproductive opportunity. As a firefly junkie, the past 20 years have been quite an exciting ride. Together with my students at Tufts University and other colleagues, we've made lots of new discoveries about fireflies: their courtship and sex lives, their treachery and murder. So today I'd like to share with you just a couple of tales that we've brought back from our collective adventures into this hidden world.Fireflies belong to a very beautiful and diverse group of insects, the beetles. Worldwide, there are more than 2,000 firefly species, and these have evolved remarkably diverse courtship signals, that is, different ways to find and attract mates. Around 150 million years ago, the very first fireflies probably looked like this. They flew during the daytime and they didn't light up. Instead, males used their fantastic antennae to sniff out perfumes given off by their females. In other fireflies, it's only the females who light up. They are attractively plump and wingless, so every night, they climb up onto perches and they glow brightly for hours to attract their flying but unlit males. In still other fireflies, both sexes use quick, bright flashes to find their mates. Here in North America, we have more than 100 different kinds of firefly that have the remarkable ability to shine energy out from their bodies in the form of light. How do they do that? It seems totally magical, but these bioluminescent signals arise from carefully orchestrated chemical reactions that happen inside the firefly lantern. The main star is an enzyme called luciferase, which in the course of evolution has figured out a way to wrap its tiny arms around an even smaller molecule called luciferin, in the process getting it so excited that it actually gives off light. Incredible.But how could these bright lights have benefited some proto-firefly? To answer this question, we need to flip back in the family album to some baby pictures. Fireflies completely reinvent their bodies as they grow. They spend the vast majority of their lifetime, up to two years, in this larval form. Their main goal here, like my teenagers, is to eat and grow. And firefly light first originated in these juveniles. Every single firefly larva can light up, even when their adults can't.But what's the point to being so conspicuous? Well, we know that these juveniles make nasty-tasting chemicals that help them survive their extended childhood, so we think these lights first evolved as a warning, a neon sign that says, ""Toxic! Stay away!"" to any would-be predators. It took many millions of years before these bright lights evolved into a smart communication tool that could be used not just to ward off potential predators but to bring in potential mates. Driven now by sexual selection, some adult fireflies like this proud male evolved a shiny new glow-in-the-dark lantern that would let them take courtship to a whole new level. These adults only live a few weeks, and now they're single-mindedly focused on sex, that is, on propelling their genes into the next firefly generation. So we can follow this male out into the field as he joins hundreds of other males who are all showing off their new courtship signals. It's amazing to think that the luminous displays we admire here and in fact everywhere around the world are actually the silent love songs of male fireflies. They're flying and flashing their hearts out. I still find it very romantic.But meanwhile, where are all the females? Well, they're lounging down below surveying their options. They have plenty of males to choose from, and these females turn out to be very picky. When a female sees a flash from an especially attractive male, she'll aim her lantern in his direction, and give him a flash back. It's her ""come hither"" sign. So he flies closer and he flashes again. If she still likes him, they'll strike up a conversation. These creatures speak their love in the language of light.So what exactly do these females consider sexy? We decided to conduct some firefly opinion polls to find out. When we tested females using blinking LED lights, we discovered they prefer males who give longer-lasting flashes. (Laughter) (Applause) I know you're wondering, what gives these males their sex appeal? Now we get to see what happens when the lights go out.The first thing we discovered is that once a male and female hook up like this, they stay together all night long, and when we looked inside to see what might be happening, we discovered a surprising new twist to firefly sex. While they're mating, the male is busy giving the female not just his sperm but also a nutrient-filled package called a nuptial gift. We can zoom in to look more closely inside this mating pair. We can actually see the gift — it's shown here in red — as it's being passed from the male to the female. What makes this gift so valuable is that it's packed with protein that the female will use to provision her eggs. So females are keeping their eyes on this prize as they size up potential mates. We discovered that females use male flash signals to try to predict which males have the biggest gifts to offer, because this bling helps the female lay more eggs and ultimately launch more of her own offspring into the next generation.So it's not all sweetness and light. Firefly romance is risky. For the most part, these adult fireflies don't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores, but somewhere along the line, one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins. This evolutionary flaw, which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner, has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent. Dubbed ""femme fatales"" by Jim Lloyd, another colleague, these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species. So the hunt begins with the predator — she's shown here in the lower left — where she's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey, and here's how it might go. First the prey male flashes, ""Do you love me?"" His own female responds, ""Maybe."" So then he flashes again. But this time, the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said. She's not looking for love: she's looking for toxins. If she's good, she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him, and he's not just a light snack. Over the next hour, she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains. Unable to make their own toxins, these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals. So a firefly vampire, brought to you by natural selection.We still have a lot to learn about fireflies, but it looks like many stories will remain untold, because around the world, firefly populations are blinking out. The main culprit: habitat loss. Pretty much everywhere, the fields and forests, the mangroves and meadows that fireflies need to survive, are giving way to development and to sprawl.Here's another problem: we've conquered darkness, but in the process, we spill so much extra light out into the night that it disrupts the lives of other creatures, and fireflies are especially sensitive to light pollution because it obscures the signals that they use to find their mates.Do we really need fireflies? After all, they're just one tiny bit of Earth's biodiversity. Yet every time a species is lost, it's like extinguishing a room full of candles one by one. You might not notice when the first few flames flicker out, but in the end, you're left sitting in darkness. As we work together to craft a planetary future, I hope we can find a way to keep these bright lights shining.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sara_lewis_the_loves_and_lies_of_fireflies
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"I've been thinking a lot about the world recently and how it's changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died in a remote village in East Asia, it would have been a tragedy for the chicken and its closest relatives, but I don't think there was much possibility of us fearing a global pandemic and the deaths of millions. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America lent too much money to some people who couldn't afford to pay it back and the bank went bust, that was bad for the lender and bad for the borrower, but we didn't imagine it would bring the global economic system to its knees for nearly a decade.This is globalization. This is the miracle that has enabled us to transship our bodies and our minds and our words and our pictures and our ideas and our teaching and our learning around the planet ever faster and ever cheaper. It's brought a lot of bad stuff, like the stuff that I just described, but it's also brought a lot of good stuff. A lot of us are not aware of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals, several of which have achieved their targets long before the due date. That proves that this species of humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary progress if it really acts together and it really tries hard. But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days, I sort of feel that globalization has taken us by surprise, and we've been slow to respond to it. If you look at the downside of globalization, it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming. All of the grand challenges that we face today, like climate change and human rights and demographics and terrorism and pandemics and narco-trafficking and human slavery and species loss, I could go on, we're not making an awful lot of progress against an awful lot of those challenges.So in a nutshell, that's the challenge that we all face today at this interesting point in history. That's clearly what we've got to do next. We've somehow got to get our act together and we've got to figure out how to globalize the solutions better so that we don't simply become a species which is the victim of the globalization of problems.Why are we so slow at achieving these advances? What's the reason for it? Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons, but perhaps the primary reason is because we're still organized as a species in the same way that we were organized 200 or 300 years ago. There's one superpower left on the planet and that is the seven billion people, the seven billion of us who cause all these problems, the same seven billion, by the way, who will resolve them all. But how are those seven billion organized? They're still organized in 200 or so nation-states, and the nations have governments that make rules and cause us to behave in certain ways. And that's a pretty efficient system, but the problem is that the way that those laws are made and the way those governments think is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems, because it all looks inwards. The politicians that we elect and the politicians we don't elect, on the whole, have minds that microscope. They don't have minds that telescope. They look in. They pretend, they behave, as if they believed that every country was an island that existed quite happily, independently of all the others on its own little planet in its own little solar system. This is the problem: countries competing against each other, countries fighting against each other. This week, as any week you care to look at, you'll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country, but even when that's not going on, there's competition between countries, each one trying to shaft the next.This is clearly not a good arrangement. We clearly need to change it. We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. And why won't they do that? Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards?Well, the first and most obvious reason is because that's what we ask them to do. That's what we tell them to do. When we elect governments or when we tolerate unelected governments, we're effectively telling them that what we want is for them to deliver us in our country a certain number of things. We want them to deliver prosperity, growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice and all of those things. So unless we start asking our governments to think outside a little bit, to consider the global problems that will finish us all if we don't start considering them, then we can hardly blame them if what they carry on doing is looking inwards, if they still have minds that microscope rather than minds that telescope. That's the first reason why things tend not to change.The second reason is that these governments, just like all the rest of us, are cultural psychopaths. I don't mean to be rude, but you know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a person who, unfortunately for him or her, lacks the ability to really empathize with other human beings. When they look around, they don't see other human beings with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives and aims and ambitions. What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it's very sad and it's very lonely, and it's very rare, fortunately.But actually, aren't most of us not really so very good at empathy? Oh sure, we're very good at empathy when it's a question of dealing with people who kind of look like us and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray and wear like us, but when it comes to people who don't do that, who don't quite dress like us and don't quite pray like us and don't quite talk like us, do we not also have a tendency to see them ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too? And this is a question we need to ask ourselves. I think constantly we have to monitor it. Are we and our politicians to a degree cultural psychopaths?The third reason is hardly worth mentioning because it's so silly, but there's a belief amongst governments that the domestic agenda and the international agenda are incompatible and always will be. This is just nonsense. In my day job, I'm a policy adviser. I've spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world, and in all of that time I have never once seen a single domestic policy issue that could not be more imaginatively, effectively and rapidly resolved than by treating it as an international problem, looking at the international context, comparing what others have done, bringing in others, working externally instead of working internally.And so you may say, well, given all of that, why then doesn't it work? Why can we not make our politicians change? Why can't we demand them? Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to make people change, and I don't think we should fuss about it. I think we should just accept that we are an inherently conservative species. We don't like to change. It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons. We probably wouldn't still be here today if we weren't so resistant to change. It's very simple: Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that if we carried on doing the same things, we wouldn't die, because the things that we've done before by definition didn't kill us, and therefore as long as we carry on doing them, we'll be okay, and it's very sensible not to do anything new, because it might kill you. But of course, there are exceptions to that. Otherwise, we'd never get anywhere. And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit.So I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years trying to find out what could be that self-interest that would encourage not just politicians but also businesses and general populations, all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly, to think in a bigger picture, not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards. And this is where I discovered something quite important. In 2005, I launched a study called the Nation Brands Index. What it is, it's a very large-scale study that polls a very large sample of the world's population, a sample that represents about 70 percent of the planet's population, and I started asking them a series of questions about how they perceive other countries. And the Nation Brands Index over the years has grown to be a very, very large database. It's about 200 billion data points tracking what ordinary people think about other countries and why. Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise are very, very keen on knowing how they are regarded. They've known, partly because I've encouraged them to realize it, that countries depend enormously on their reputations in order to survive and prosper in the world. If a country has a great, positive image, like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland, everything is easy and everything is cheap. You get more tourists. You get more investors. You sell your products more expensively. If, on the other hand, you have a country with a very weak or a very negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that's what they've promised their populations they're going to deliver.So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take some time out and speak to that gigantic database and ask it, why do some people prefer one country more than another? And the answer that the database gave me completely staggered me. It was 6.8. I haven't got time to explain in detail. Basically what it told me was — (Laughter) (Applause) — the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries. We don't admire countries primarily because they're rich, because they're powerful, because they're successful, because they're modern, because they're technologically advanced. We primarily admire countries that are good. What do we mean by good? We mean countries that seem to contribute something to the world in which we live, countries that actually make the world safer or better or richer or fairer. Those are the countries we like. This is a discovery of significant importance — you see where I'm going — because it squares the circle. I can now say, and often do, to any government, in order to do well, you need to do good. If you want to sell more products, if you want to get more investment, if you want to become more competitive, then you need to start behaving, because that's why people will respect you and do business with you, and therefore, the more you collaborate, the more competitive you become.This is quite an important discovery, and as soon as I discovered this, I felt another index coming on. I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler and more and more childish. This one is called the Good Country Index, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It measures, or at least it tries to measure, exactly how much each country on Earth contributes not to its own population but to the rest of humanity. Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought of measuring this before. So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent the best part of the last two years, with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people, cramming together all the reliable data in the world we could find about what countries give to the world.And you're waiting for me to tell you which one comes top. And I'm going to tell you, but first of all I want to tell you precisely what I mean when I say a good country. I do not mean morally good. When I say that Country X is the goodest country on Earth, and I mean goodest, I don't mean best. Best is something different. When you're talking about a good country, you can be good, gooder and goodest. It's not the same thing as good, better and best. This is a country which simply gives more to humanity than any other country. I don't talk about how they behave at home because that's measured elsewhere. And the winner is Ireland. (Applause) According to the data here, no country on Earth, per head of population, per dollar of GDP, contributes more to the world that we live in than Ireland. What does this mean? This means that as we go to sleep at night, all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep, our final thought should be, godammit, I'm glad that Ireland exists. (Laughter) And that — (Applause) — In the depths of a very severe economic recession, I think that there's a really important lesson there, that if you can remember your international obligations whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy, that's really something. Finland ranks pretty much the same. The only reason why it's below Ireland is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland's lowest score.Now the other thing you'll notice about the top 10 there is, of course, they're all, apart from New Zealand, Western European nations. They're also all rich. This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it's purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries. This is not what it's all about. And indeed, if you look further down the list, I don't have the slide here, you will see something that made me very happy indeed, that Kenya is in the top 30, and that demonstrates one very, very important thing. This is not about money. This is about attitude. This is about culture. This is about a government and a people that care about the rest of the world and have the imagination and the courage to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly.I'm going to whip through the other slides just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries. There's Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st, Mexico comes 66th, and then we have some of the big developing countries, like Russia at 95th, China at 107th. Countries like China and Russia and India, which is down in the same part of the index, well, in some ways, it's not surprising. They've spent a great deal of time over the last decades building their own economy, building their own society and their own polity, but it is to be hoped that the second phase of their growth will be somewhat more outward-looking than the first phase has been so far.And then you can break down each country in terms of the actual datasets that build into it. I'll allow you to do that. From midnight tonight it's going to be on goodcountry.org, and you can look at the country. You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets.Now that's the Good Country Index. What's it there for? Well, it's there really because I want to try to introduce this word, or reintroduce this word, into the discourse. I've had enough hearing about competitive countries. I've had enough hearing about prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries. I've even had enough hearing about happy countries because in the end that's still selfish. That's still about us, and if we carry on thinking about us, we are in deep, deep trouble. I think we all know what it is that we want to hear about. We want to hear about good countries, and so I want to ask you all a favor. I'm not asking a lot. It's something that you might find easy to do and you might even find enjoyable and even helpful to do, and that's simply to start using the word ""good"" in this context. When you think about your own country, when you think about other people's countries, when you think about companies, when you talk about the world that we live in today, start using that word in the way that I've talked about this evening. Not good, the opposite of bad, because that's an argument that never finishes. Good, the opposite of selfish, good being a country that thinks about all of us. That's what I would like you to do, and I'd like you to use it as a stick with which to beat your politicians. When you elect them, when you reelect them, when you vote for them, when you listen to what they're offering you, use that word, ""good,"" and ask yourself, ""Is that what a good country would do?"" And if the answer is no, be very suspicious. Ask yourself, is that the behavior of my country? Do I want to come from a country where the government, in my name, is doing things like that? Or do I, on the other hand, prefer the idea of walking around the world with my head held high thinking, ""Yeah, I'm proud to come from a good country""? And everybody will welcome you. And everybody in the last 15 seconds before they drift off to sleep at night will say, ""Gosh, I'm glad that person's country exists.""Ultimately, that, I think, is what will make the change. That word, ""good,"" and the number 6.8 and the discovery that's behind it have changed my life. I think they can change your life, and I think we can use it to change the way that our politicians and our companies behave, and in doing so, we can change the world. I've started thinking very differently about my own country since I've been thinking about these things. I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country, and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country, but I began to realize, it's not enough. I don't want to live in a rich country. I don't want to live in a fast-growing or competitive country. I want to live in a good country, and I so, so hope that you do too.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_anholt_which_country_does_the_most_good_for_the_world
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"When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, ""Prejudice is the child of ignorance."" I want to try to convince you here that this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural, they're often rational, and they're often even moral, and I think that once we understand this, we're in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we're in a better position to know what to do when this happens.So, start with stereotypes. You look at me, you know my name, you know certain facts about me, and you could make certain judgments. You could make guesses about my ethnicity, my political affiliation, my religious beliefs. And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. We're very good at this sort of thing. And we're very good at this sort of thing because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it's a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. So everybody here has a lot of experience with chairs and apples and dogs, and based on this, you could see unfamiliar examples and you could guess, you could sit on the chair, you could eat the apple, the dog will bark. Now we might be wrong. The chair could collapse if you sit on it, the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark, and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark. But for the most part, we're good at this. For the most part, we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain, and if we weren't able to do so, if we weren't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter, we wouldn't survive. And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this. He writes, ""Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way my across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life."" Or take bias. Now sometimes, we break the world up into us versus them, into in-group versus out-group, and sometimes when we do this, we know we're doing something wrong, and we're kind of ashamed of it. But other times we're proud of it. We openly acknowledge it. And my favorite example of this is a question that came from the audience in a Republican debate prior to the last election.(Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question, the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am.Woman: The American people are suffering in our country right now. Why do we continue to send foreign aid to other countries when we need all the help we can get for ourselves?AC: Governor Perry, what about that?(Applause) Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's—Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage agreed with the premise of her question, which is as Americans, we should care more about Americans than about other people. And in fact, in general, people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism, towards their country or towards their ethnic group. Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be American, and they favor Americans over other countries. Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, and we feel the same about our ethnicities.Now some of you may reject this. Some of you may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway. But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family, of people you're close to, and so even you make a distinction between us versus them.Now, this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough, but it can go awry, and this was part of the research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. He left to go to university in France, because as a Jew, he couldn't go to university in Poland, and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II. He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp, and it was a terrifying time for him, because if it was discovered that he was a Jew, he could have been moved to a concentration camp, where he most likely would not have survived. And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, most of his friends and family were dead. He got involved in different pursuits. He helped out the war orphans. But he had a long-lasting interest in the science of prejudice, and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, and he won it, and then he began this amazing career. And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong. Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. And Tajfel rejected this. Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us. And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents. And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions, and then based on their answers, he said, ""I've looked at your answers, and based on the answers, I have determined that you are either"" — he told half of them — ""a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee."" It was entirely bogus. Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. They probably hadn't heard of the artists. He just arbitrarily divided them up. But what he found was, these categories mattered, so when he later gave the subjects money, they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group. Worse, they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups, so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less.This bias seems to show up very early. So my colleague and wife, Karen Wynn, at Yale has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets, and the puppets have certain food preferences. So one of the puppets might like green beans. The other puppet might like graham crackers. They test the babies own food preferences, and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. But the question is, does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. They tend to prefer the puppet who has the same food tastes that they have, and worse, they actually prefer puppets who punish the puppet with the different food taste. (Laughter)We see this sort of in-group, out-group psychology all the time. We see it in political clashes within groups with different ideologies. We see it in its extreme in cases of war, where the out-group isn't merely given less, but dehumanized, as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice, or the American perspective of Japanese as rats.Stereotypes can also go awry. So often they're rational and useful, but sometimes they're irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences. And the case that's been most studied is the case of race. There was a fascinating study prior to the 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America, as in an unconscious association with the American flag. And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain, and they found McCain is thought of as more American than Obama, and to some extent, people aren't  that surprised by hearing that. McCain is a celebrated war hero, and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story than Obama. But they also compared Obama to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they found that Blair was also thought of as more American than Obama, even though subjects explicitly understood that he's not American at all. But they were responding, of course, to the color of his skin.These stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences, both subtle and very important. In one recent study, researchers put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards. Some of them were held by white hands, others by black hands. They were the same baseball cards. The ones held by black hands got substantially smaller bids than the ones held by white hands. In research done at Stanford, psychologists explored the case of people sentenced for the murder of a white person. It turns out, holding everything else constant, you are considerably more likely to be executed if you look like the man on the right than the man on the left, and this is in large part because the man on the right looks more prototypically black, more prototypically African-American, and this apparently influences people's decisions over what to do about him.So now that we know about this, how do we combat it? And there are different avenues. One avenue is to appeal to people's emotional responses, to appeal to people's empathy, and we often do that through stories. So if you are a liberal parent and you want to encourage your children to believe in the merits of nontraditional families, you might give them a book like this. [""Heather Has Two Mommies""] If you are conservative and have a different attitude, you might give them a book like this. (Laughter) [""Help! Mom! There Are Liberals under My Bed!""] But in general, stories can turn anonymous strangers into people who matter, and the idea that we care about people when we focus on them as individuals is an idea which has shown up across history. So Stalin apocryphally said, ""A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,"" and Mother Teresa said, ""If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."" Psychologists have explored this. For instance, in one study, people were given a list of facts about a crisis, and it was seen how much they would donate to solve this crisis, and another group was given no facts at all but they were told of an individual and given a name and given a face, and it turns out that they gave far more. None of this I think is a secret to the people who are engaged in charity work. People don't tend to deluge people with facts and statistics. Rather, you show them faces, you show them people. It's possible that by extending our sympathies to an individual, they can spread to the group that the individual belongs to.This is Harriet Beecher Stowe. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that President Lincoln invited her to the White House in the middle of the Civil War and said to her, ""So you're the little lady who started this great war."" And he was talking about ""Uncle Tom's Cabin."" ""Uncle Tom's Cabin"" is not a great book of philosophy or of theology or perhaps not even literature, but it does a great job of getting people to put themselves in the shoes of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of, put themselves in the shoes of slaves. And that could well have been a catalyst for great social change.More recently, looking at America in the last several decades, there's some reason to believe that shows like ""The Cosby Show"" radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans, while shows like ""Will and Grace"" and ""Modern Family"" changed American attitudes towards gay men and women. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the major catalyst in America for moral change has been a situation comedy.But it's not all emotions, and I want to end by appealing to the power of reason. At some point in his wonderful book ""The Better Angels of Our Nature,"" Steven Pinker says, the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, and the New Testament says love thy enemy, but I don't love either one of them, not really, but I don't want to kill them. I know I have obligations to them, but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them, aren't grounded in love. What they're grounded in is the understanding of human rights, a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me, and to support this, he tells a story by the great philosopher Adam Smith, and I want to tell this story too, though I'm going to modify it a little bit for modern times.So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine the death of thousands of people, and imagine that the thousands of people are in a country you are not familiar with. It could be China or India or a country in Africa. And Smith says, how would you respond? And you would say, well that's too bad, and you'd go on to the rest of your life. If you were to open up The New York Times online or something, and discover this, and in fact this happens to us all the time, we go about our lives. But imagine instead, Smith says, you were to learn that tomorrow you were to have your little finger chopped off. Smith says, that would matter a lot. You would not sleep that night wondering about that. So this raises the question: Would you sacrifice thousands of lives to save your little finger? Now answer this in the privacy of your own head, but Smith says, absolutely not, what a horrid thought. And so this raises the question, and so, as Smith puts it, ""When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?"" And Smith's answer is, ""It is reason, principle, conscience. [This] calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.""And this last part is what is often described as the principle of impartiality. And this principle of impartiality manifests itself in all of the world's religions, in all of the different versions of the golden rule, and in all of the world's moral philosophies, which differ in many ways but share the presupposition that we should judge morality from sort of an impartial point of view.The best articulation of this view is actually, for me, it's not from a theologian or from a philosopher, but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of ""Casablanca."" So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good, and he says to her, and I won't do the accent, but he says to her, ""It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.""Our reason could cause us to override our passions. Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy, could motivate us to write a book like ""Uncle Tom's Cabin,"" or read a book like ""Uncle Tom's Cabin,"" and our reason can motivate us to create customs and taboos and laws that will constrain us from acting upon our impulses when, as rational beings, we feel we should be constrained. This is what a constitution is. A constitution is something which was set up in the past that applies now in the present, and what it says is, no matter how much we might to reelect a popular president for a third term, no matter how much white Americans might choose to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery, we can't. We have bound ourselves.And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job, for an award, we are strongly biased by their race, we are biased by their gender, we are biased by how attractive they are, and sometimes we might say, ""Well fine, that's the way it should be."" But other times we say, ""This is wrong."" And so to combat this, we don't just try harder, but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can't bias us, which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so the only information they have is the information they believe should matter. I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, and they affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil, but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning, and we can use these to, in some cases, accelerate and nourish our emotions, and in other cases staunch them. And it's in this way that reason helps us create a better world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_can_prejudice_ever_be_a_good_thing
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"I'm a veteran of the starship Enterprise. I soared through the galaxy driving a huge starship with a crew made up of people from all over this world, many different races, many different cultures, many different heritages, all working together, and our mission was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.Well — (Applause) — I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria. Japanese-Americans, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were looked on with suspicion and fear and with outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. And the hysteria grew and grew until in February 1942, the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of America to be summarily rounded up with no charges, with no trial, with no due process. Due process, this is a core pillar of our justice system. That all disappeared. We were to be rounded up and imprisoned in 10 barbed-wire prison camps in some of the most desolate places in America: the blistering hot desert of Arizona, the sultry swamps of Arkansas, the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and two of the most desolate places in California.On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday, and just a few weeks after my birthday, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister and me up very early one morning, and they dressed us hurriedly. My brother and I were in the living room looking out the front window, and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway. They carried bayonets on their rifles. They stomped up the front porch and banged on the door. My father answered it, and the soldiers ordered us out of our home. My father gave my brother and me small luggages to carry, and we walked out and stood on the driveway waiting for our mother to come out, and when my mother finally came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down both her cheeks. I will never be able to forget that scene. It is burned into my memory.We were taken from our home and loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families. There were guards stationed at both ends of each car, as if we were criminals. We were taken two thirds of the way across the country, rocking on that train for four days and three nights, to the swamps of Arkansas. I still remember the barbed wire fence that confined me. I remember the tall sentry tower with the machine guns pointed at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from my barrack to the latrine. But to five-year-old me, I thought it was kind of nice that they'd lit the way for me to pee. I was a child, too young to understand the circumstances of my being there.Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. Being in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp, became my normality.When the war ended, we were released, and given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States. My parents decided to go back home to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place. We were penniless. Everything had been taken from us, and the hostility was intense. Our first home was on Skid Row in the lowest part of our city, living with derelicts, drunkards and crazy people, the stench of urine all over, on the street, in the alley, in the hallway. It was a horrible experience, and for us kids, it was terrorizing. I remember once a drunkard came staggering down, fell down right in front of us, and threw up. My baby sister said, ""Mama, let's go back home,"" because behind barbed wires was for us home.My parents worked hard to get back on their feet. We had lost everything. They were at the middle of their lives and starting all over. They worked their fingers to the bone, and ultimately they were able to get the capital together to buy a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood. And I was a teenager, and I became very curious about my childhood imprisonment. I had read civics books that told me about the ideals of American democracy. All men are created equal, we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I couldn't quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment. I read history books, and I couldn't find anything about it. And so I engaged my father after dinner in long, sometimes heated conversations. We had many, many conversations like that, and what I got from them was my father's wisdom. He was the one that suffered the most under those conditions of imprisonment, and yet he understood American democracy. He told me that our democracy is a people's democracy, and it can be as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are. He told me that American democracy is vitally dependent on good people who cherish the ideals of our system and actively engage in the process of making our democracy work. And he took me to a campaign headquarters — the governor of Illinois was running for the presidency — and introduced me to American electoral politics. And he also told me about young Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service, and categorized as enemy non-alien. It was outrageous to be called an enemy when you're volunteering to fight for your country, but that was compounded with the word ""non-alien,"" which is a word that means ""citizen"" in the negative. They even took the word ""citizen"" away from us, and imprisoned them for a whole year.And then the government realized that there's a wartime manpower shortage, and as suddenly as they'd rounded us up, they opened up the military for service by young Japanese-Americans. It was totally irrational, but the amazing thing, the astounding thing, is that thousands of young Japanese-American men and women again went from behind those barbed-wire fences, put on the same uniform as that of our guards, leaving their families in imprisonment, to fight for this country.They said that they were going to fight not only to get their families out from behind those barbed-wire fences, but because they cherished the very ideal of what our government stands for, should stand for, and that was being abrogated by what was being done.All men are created equal. And they went to fight for this country. They were put into a segregated all Japanese-American unit and sent to the battlefields of Europe, and they threw themselves into it. They fought with amazing, incredible courage and valor. They were sent out on the most dangerous missions and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any unit proportionally.There is one battle that illustrates that. It was a battle for the Gothic Line. The Germans were embedded in this mountain hillside, rocky hillside, in impregnable caves, and three allied battalions had been pounding away at it for six months, and they were stalemated. The 442nd was called in to add to the fight, but the men of the 442nd came up with a unique but dangerous idea: The backside of the mountain was a sheer rock cliff. The Germans thought an attack from the backside would be impossible. The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible. On a dark, moonless night, they began scaling that rock wall, a drop of more than 1,000 feet, in full combat gear. They climbed all night long on that sheer cliff. In the darkness, some lost their handhold or their footing and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below. They all fell silently. Not a single one cried out, so as not to give their position away. The men climbed for eight hours straight, and those who made it to the top stayed there until the first break of light, and as soon as light broke, they attacked. The Germans were surprised, and they took the hill and broke the Gothic Line. A six-month stalemate was broken by the 442nd in 32 minutes.It was an amazing act, and when the war ended, the 442nd returned to the United States as the most decorated unit of the entire Second World War. They were greeted back on the White House Lawn by President Truman, who said to them, ""You fought not only the enemy but prejudice, and you won.""They are my heroes. They clung to their belief in the shining ideals of this country, and they proved that being an American is not just for some people, that race is not how we define being an American. They expanded what it means to be an American, including Japanese-Americans that were feared and suspected and hated. They were change agents, and they left for me a legacy. They are my heroes and my father is my hero, who understood democracy and guided me through it. They gave me a legacy, and with that legacy comes a responsibility, and I am dedicated to making my country an even better America, to making our government an even truer democracy, and because of the heroes that I have and the struggles that we've gone through, I can stand before you as a gay Japanese-American, but even more than that, I am a proud American.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_takei_why_i_love_a_country_that_once_betrayed_me
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"On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and staff, and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director.That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. My wife and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. I was looking at the news streams and listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. And the people on TV weren't telling us anything that we wanted to hear. I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger.So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn't going to be doing this for us.Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. We have an app that shows you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. We are arguably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of radiation measurements.And the interesting thing here is how did — (Applause) — Thank you. How did a bunch of amateurs who really didn't know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs and the government were completely incapable of doing? And I would suggest that this has something to do with the Internet. It's not a fluke. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us. It helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little bit about what those new principles are.So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? So, in B.I., life was simple. Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. People actually tried to predict the future, even the economists. And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that.Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you'd create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. What happened after the Internet was the cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the cost of communication, and Moore's Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn't have permission — permissionless innovation — didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints, they just built the thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later on they hired some MBAs. So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. And we all know this. We all know this happened on the Internet. It turns out it's happening in other things, too. Let me give you some examples.So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware. We do all kinds of things. We do biology, we do hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, ""Demo or die,"" as opposed to ""Publish or perish,"" which was the traditional academic way of thinking. And he often said, the demo only has to work once, because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being inspired by us and creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. But today, with the ability to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I'm changing the motto now, and this is the official public statement. I'm officially saying, ""Deploy or die."" You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about satellites. (Applause) Thank you. But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on large institutions to do it for us.So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. What was happening there was you would have these manufacturing devices, and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints. They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. The factory was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. And so what you would do is, you'd go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. So instead of starting little websites like the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there's a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell phone. What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the other kids' stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. Doesn't this sound like a software thing? It sounds like agile software development, A/B testing and iteration, and what we thought you could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. My next fellow, I hope, is going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen.And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that, and that's great, but this is Limor. She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. This thing can put 23,000 components per hour onto an electronics board. This is a factory in a box. So what used to take a factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she's able to have effectively — She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. She can buy this box and she can manufacture it. So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution, manufacturing, hardware, is getting so low that innovation is being pushed to the edges and students and startups are being able to build it. This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will change just like it did with software.Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into polyester. It's 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it's much better for the environment. Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. We will probably be doing a lot, obviously doing health things, but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. The problem is, Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days. The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. This is desktop gene sequencer. It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. Now you can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. This is Gen9 gene assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money. This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error per 100 base pairs, it's one error per 10,000 base pairs. In this lab, we will have the world's capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. This is kind of like when we went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. This is going to become the Pentium of bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies.So it's happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation. It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic, it's chaotic, it's hard to control. It's not bad, but it's very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for institutions don't work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. One of my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything.So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn't know anything when the earthquake happened, but I was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog hardware hacker who made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. And these people I wouldn't have been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the network.I'm a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself.(Applause)And it feels like, and I'm biased, it feels like they're trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I've got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you're going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you're always going to be connected, you're always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science.Compass over maps. So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive and it's not very accurate or useful. So in the Safecast story, we knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters. Oh, they've run out. Let's build them. There aren't enough sensors. Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. We can drive around. We can get volunteers. We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it. We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we were going, and to me it's very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is very important.So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.So I don't like the word ""futurist."" I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joi_ito_want_to_innovate_become_a_now_ist
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"(Video) Nicholas Negroponte:  Can we switch to the video disc, which is in play mode?I'm really interested in how you put people and computers together. We will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. (Music, crosstalk) Very interested in touch-sensitive displays, high-tech, high-touch, not having to pick up your fingers to use them. There is another way where computers touch people: wearing, physically wearing. Suddenly on September 11th, the world got bigger.NN: Thank you. (Applause)Thank you.When I was asked to do this, I was also asked to look at all 14 TED Talks that I had given, chronologically. The first one was actually two hours. The second one was an hour, and then they became half hours, and all I noticed was my bald spot getting bigger. (Laughter) Imagine seeing your life, 30 years of it, go by, and it was, to say the least, for me, quite a shocking experience. So what I'm going to do in my time is try and share with you what happened during the 30 years, and then also make a prediction, and then tell you a little bit about what I'm doing next. And I put on a slide where TED 1 happened in my life. And it's rather important because I had done 15 years of research before it, so I had a backlog, so it was easy. It's not that I was Fidel Castro and I could talk for two hours, or Bucky Fuller. I had 15 years of stuff, and the Media Lab was about to start. So that was easy.But there are a couple of things about that period and about what happened that are really quite important. One is that it was a period when computers weren't yet for people. And the other thing that sort of happened during that time is that we were considered sissy computer scientists. We weren't considered the real thing. So what I'm going to show you is, in retrospect, a lot more interesting and a lot more accepted than it was at the time.So I'm going to characterize the years and I'm even going to go back to some very early work of mine, and this was the kind of stuff I was doing in the '60s: very direct manipulation, very influenced as I studied architecture by the architect Moshe Safdie, and you can see that we even built robotic things that could build habitat-like structures. And this for me was not yet the Media Lab, but was the beginning of what I'll call sensory computing, and I pick fingers partly because everybody thought it was ridiculous. Papers were published about how stupid it was to use fingers. Three reasons: One was they were low-resolution. The other is your hand would occlude what you wanted to see, and the third, which was the winner, was that your fingers would get the screen dirty, and hence, fingers would never be a device that you'd use. And this was a device we built in the '70s, which has never even been picked up. It's not just touch sensitive, it's pressure sensitive.(Video) Voice: Put a yellow circle there.NN: Later work, and again this was before TED 1 —(Video) Voice: Move that west of the diamond. Create a large green circle there. Man: Aw, shit.NN: — was to sort of do interface concurrently, so when you talked and you pointed and you had, if you will, multiple channels.Entebbe happened. 1976, Air France was hijacked, taken to Entebbe, and the Israelis not only did an extraordinary rescue, they did it partly because they had practiced on a physical model of the airport, because they had built the airport, so they built a model in the desert, and when they arrived at Entebbe, they knew where to go because they had actually been there. The U.S. government asked some of us, '76, if we could replicate that computationally, and of course somebody like myself says yes. Immediately, you get a contract, Department of Defense, and we built this truck and this rig. We did sort of a simulation, because you had video discs, and again, this is '76. And then many years later, you get this truck, and so you have Google Maps.Still people thought, no, that was not serious computer science, and it was a man named Jerry Wiesner, who happened to be the president of MIT, who did think it was computer science. And one of the keys for anybody who wants to start something in life: Make sure your president is part of it. So when I was doing the Media Lab, it was like having a gorilla in the front seat. If you were stopped for speeding and the officer looked in the window and saw who was in the passenger seat, then, ""Oh, continue on, sir."" And so we were able, and this is a cute, actually, device, parenthetically. This was a lenticular photograph of Jerry Wiesner where the only thing that changed in the photograph were the lips. So when you oscillated that little piece of lenticular sheet with his photograph, it would be in lip sync with zero bandwidth. It was a zero-bandwidth teleconferencing system at the time.So this was the Media Lab's — this is what we said we'd do, that the world of computers, publishing, and so on would come together. Again, not generally accepted, but very much part of TED in the early days. And this is really where we were headed. And that created the Media Lab. One of the things about age is that I can tell you with great confidence, I've been to the future. I've been there, actually, many times. And the reason I say that is, how many times in my life have I said, ""Oh, in 10 years, this will happen,"" and then 10 years comes. And then you say, ""Oh, in five years, this will happen."" And then five years comes. So I say this a little bit with having felt that I'd been there a number of times, and one of the things that is most quoted that I've ever said is that computing is not about computers, and that didn't quite get enough traction, and then it started to. It started to because people caught on that the medium wasn't the message. And the reason I show this car in actually a rather ugly slide is just again to tell you the kind of story that characterized a little bit of my life. This is a student of mine who had done a Ph.D. called ""Backseat Driver."" It was in the early days of GPS, the car knew where it was, and it would give audio instructions to the driver, when to turn right,  when to turn left and so on. Turns out, there are a lot of things in those instructions that back in that period were pretty challenging, like what does it mean, take the next right? Well, if you're coming up on a street, the next right's probably the one after, and there are lots of issues, and the student did a wonderful thesis, and the MIT patent office said ""Don't patent it. It'll never be accepted. The liabilities are too large. There will be insurance issues. Don't patent it."" So we didn't, but it shows you how people, again, at times, don't really look at what's happening.Some work, and I'll just go through these very quickly, a lot of sensory stuff. You might recognize a young Yo-Yo Ma and tracking his body for playing the cello or the hypercello. These fellows literally walked  around like that at the time. It's now a little bit more discreet and more commonplace.And then there are at least three heroes I want to quickly mention. Marvin Minsky, who taught me a lot about common sense, and I will talk briefly about Muriel Cooper, who was very important to Ricky Wurman and to TED, and in fact, when she got onstage, she said, the first thing she said was, ""I introduced Ricky to Nicky."" And nobody calls me Nicky and nobody calls Richard Ricky, so nobody knew who she was talking about. And then, of course, Seymour Papert, who is the person who said, ""You can't think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something."" And that's actually — you can unpack that later. It's a pretty profound statement.I'm showing some slides that were from TED 2, a little silly as slides, perhaps. Then I felt television really was about displays. Again, now we're past TED 1, but just around the time of TED 2, and what I'd like to mention here is, even though you could imagine intelligence in the device, I look today at some of the work being done about the Internet of Things, and I think it's kind of tragically pathetic, because what has happened is people take the oven panel and put it on your cell phone, or the door key onto your cell phone, just taking it and bringing it to you, and in fact that's actually what you don't want. You want to put a chicken in the oven, and the oven says, ""Aha, it's a chicken,"" and it cooks the chicken. ""Oh, it's cooking the chicken for Nicholas, and he likes it this way and that way."" So the intelligence, instead of being in the device, we have started today to move it back onto the cell phone or closer to the user, not a particularly enlightened view of the Internet of Things. Television, again, television what I said today, that was back in 1990, and the television of tomorrow would look something like that. Again, people, but they laughed cynically, they didn't laugh with much appreciation.Telecommunications in the 1990s, George Gilder decided that he would call this diagram the Negroponte switch. I'm probably much less famous than George, so when he called it the Negroponte switch, it stuck, but the idea of things that came in the ground would go in the air and stuff in the air would go into the ground has played itself out. That is the original slide from that year, and it has worked in lockstep obedience.We started Wired magazine. Some people, I remember we shared the reception desk periodically, and some parent called up irate that his son had given up Sports Illustrated to subscribe for Wired, and he said, ""Are you some porno magazine or something?"" and couldn't understand why his son would be interested in Wired, at any rate.I will go through this a little quicker. This is my favorite, 1995, back page of Newsweek magazine. Okay. Read it. (Laughter)[""Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure."" —Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 1995]You must admit that gives you, at least it gives me pleasure when somebody says how dead wrong you are.""Being Digital"" came out. For me, it gave me an opportunity to be more in the trade press and get this out to the public, and it also allowed us to build the new Media Lab, which if you haven't been to, visit, because it's a beautiful piece of architecture aside from being a wonderful place to work. So these are the things we were saying in those TEDs.[Today, multimedia is a desktop or living room experience, because the apparatus is so clunky. This will change dramatically with small, bright, thin, high-resolution displays. — 1995]We came to them. I looked forward to it every year. It was the party that Ricky Wurman never had in the sense that he invited many of his old friends, including myself.And then something for me changed pretty profoundly. I became more involved with computers and learning and influenced by Seymour, but particularly looking at learning as something that is best approximated by computer programming. When you write a computer program, you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions, but when there's a bug, and all programs have bugs, you've got to de-bug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute, and you iterate, and that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning.So that led to my own work with Seymour in places like Cambodia and the starting of One Laptop per Child. Enough TED Talks on One Laptop per Child, so I'll go through it very fast, but it did give us the chance to do something at a relatively large scale in the area of learning, development and computing. Very few people know that One Laptop per Child was a $1 billion project, and it was, at least over the seven years I ran it, but even more important, the World Bank contributed zero, USAID zero. It was mostly the countries using their own treasuries, which is very interesting, at least to me it was very interesting in terms of what I plan to do next. So these are the various places it happened.I then tried an experiment, and the experiment happened in Ethiopia. And here's the experiment. The experiment is, can learning happen where there are no schools. And we dropped off tablets with no instructions and let the children figure it out. And in a short period of time, they not only turned them on and were using 50 apps per child within five days, they were singing ""ABC"" songs within two weeks, but they hacked Android within six months. And so that seemed sufficiently interesting. This is perhaps the best picture I have. The kid on your right has sort of nominated himself as teacher. Look at the kid on the left, and so on. There are no adults involved in this at all. So I said, well can we do this at a larger scale? And what is it that's missing? The kids are giving a press conference at this point, and sort of writing in the dirt. And the answer is, what is missing? And I'm going to skip over my prediction, actually, because I'm running out of time, and here's the question, is what's going to happen?I think the challenge is to connect the last billion people, and connecting the last billion is very different than connecting the next billion, and the reason it's different is that the next billion are sort of low-hanging fruit, but the last billion are rural. Being rural and being poor are very different. Poverty tends to be created by our society, and the people in that community are not poor in the same way at all. They may be primitive, but the way to approach it and to connect them, the history of One Laptop per Child, and the experiment in Ethiopia, lead me to believe that we can in fact do this in a very short period of time.And so my plan, and unfortunately I haven't been able to get my partners at this point to let me announce them, but is to do this with a stationary satellite. There are many reasons that stationary satellites aren't the best things, but there are a lot of reasons why they are, and for two billion dollars, you can connect a lot more than 100 million people, but the reason I picked two, and I will leave this as my last slide, is two billion dollars is what we were spending in Afghanistan every week. So surely if we can connect Africa and the last billion people for numbers like that, we should be doing it.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Stay up there. Stay up there.NN: You're going to give me extra time?CA: No. That was wickedly clever, wickedly clever. You gamed it beautifully. Nicholas, what is your prediction? (Laughter)NN: Thank you for asking. I'll tell you what my prediction is, and my prediction, and this is a prediction, because it'll be 30 years. I won't be here. But one of the things about learning how to read, we have been doing a lot of consuming of information going through our eyes, and so that may be a very inefficient channel. So my prediction is that we are  going to ingest information You're going to swallow a pill and know English. You're going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. And the way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it's in your bloodstream, it basically goes through it and gets into the brain, and when it knows that it's in the brain in the different pieces, it deposits it in the right places. So it's ingesting.CA: Have you been hanging out with Ray Kurzweil by any chance?NN: No, but I've been hanging around with Ed Boyden and hanging around with one of the speakers who is here, Hugh Herr, and there are a number of people. This isn't quite as far-fetched, so 30 years from now.CA: We will check it out. We're going to be back and we're going to play this clip 30 years from now, and then all eat the red pill.Well thank you for that.Nicholas Negroponte.NN: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_a_30_year_history_of_the_future
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"When I was preparing for this talk, I went to search for a couple of quotes that I can share with you. Good news: I found three that I particularly liked, the first by Samuel Johnson, who said, ""When making your choice in life, do not forget to live,"" the second by Aeschylus, who reminded us that ""happiness is a choice that requires effort,"" and the third is one by Groucho Marx who said, ""I wouldn't want to choose to belong to any club that would have me as a member.""Now, bad news: I didn't know which one of these quotes to choose and share with you. The sweet anxiety of choice.In today's times of post-industrial capitalism, choice, together with individual freedom and the idea of self-making, has been elevated to an ideal. Now, together with this, we also have a belief in endless progress. But the underside of this ideology has been an increase of anxiety, feelings of guilt, feelings of being inadequate, feeling that we are failing in our choices. Sadly, this ideology of individual choice has prevented us from thinking about social changes. It appears that this ideology was actually very efficient in pacifying us as political and social thinkers. Instead of making social critiques, we are more and more engaging in self-critique, sometimes to the point of self-destruction.Now, how come that ideology of choice is still so powerful, even among people who have not many things to choose among? How come that even people who are poor very much still identify with the idea of choice, the kind of rational idea of choice which we embrace?Now, the ideology of choice is very successful in opening for us a space to think about some imagined future. Let me give you an example. My friend Manya, when she was a student at university in California, was earning money by working for a car dealer. Now, Manya, when she encountered the typical customer, would debate with him about his lifestyle, how much he wants to spend, how many children he has, what does he need the car for? They would usually come to a good conclusion what would be a perfect car. Now, before Manya's customer would go home and think things through, she would say to him, ""The car that you are buying now is perfect, but in a few year's time, when your kids will be already out of the house, when you will have a little bit more money, that other car will be ideal. But what you are buying now is great."" Now, the majority of Manya's customers who came back the next day bought that other car, the car they did not need, the car that cost far too much money. Now, Manya became so successful in selling cars that soon she moved on to selling airplanes. (Laughter) And knowing so much about the psychology of people prepared her well for her current job, which is that of a psychoanalyst.Now, why were Manya's customers so irrational? Manya's success was that she was able to open in their heads an image of an idealized future, an image of themselves when they are already more successful, freer, and for them, choosing that other car was as if they are coming closer to this ideal in which it was as if Manya already saw them.Now, we rarely make really totally rational choices. Choices are influenced by our unconscious, by our community. We're often choosing by guessing, what would other people think about our choice? Also we are choosing by looking at what others are choosing. We're also guessing what is socially acceptable choice. Now, because of this, we actually even after we have already chosen, like bought a car, endlessly read reviews about cars, as if we still want to convince ourselves that we made the right choice.Now, choices are anxiety-provoking. They are linked to risks, losses. They are highly unpredictable. Now, because of this, people have now more and more problems that they are not choosing anything. Not long ago, I was at a wedding reception, and I met a young, beautiful woman who immediately started telling me about her anxiety over choice. She said to me, ""I needed one month to decide which dress to wear."" Then she said, ""For weeks I was researching which hotel to stay for this one night. And now, I need to choose a sperm donor."" (Laughter) I looked at this woman in shock. ""Sperm donor? What's the rush?"" She said, ""I'm turning 40 at the end of this year, and I've been so bad in choosing men in my life.""Now choice, because it's linked to risk, is anxiety-provoking, and it was already the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who pointed out that anxiety is linked to the possibility of possibility. Now, we think today that we can prevent these risks. We have endless market analysis, projections of the future earnings. Even with market, which is about chance, randomness, we think we can predict rationally where it's going.Now, chance is actually becoming very traumatic. Last year, my friend Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago organized an event, a conference on the idea of chance. He and I were together on the panel, and just before delivering our papers — we didn't know each other's papers — we decided to take chance seriously. So we informed our audience that what they will just now hear will be a random paper, a mixture of the two papers which we didn't know what each was writing. Now, we delivered the conference in such a way. Bernard read his first paragraph, I read my first paragraph, Bernard read his second paragraph, I read my second paragraph, in this way towards the end of our papers. Now, you will be surprised that a majority of our audience did not think that what they'd just listened to was a completely random paper. They couldn't believe that speaking from the position of authority like two professors we were, we would take chance seriously. They thought we prepared the papers together and were just joking that it's random.Now, we live in times with a lot of information, big data, a lot of knowledge about the insides of our bodies. We decoded our genome. We know about our brains more than before. But surprisingly, people are more and more turning a blind eye in front of this knowledge. Ignorance and denial are on the rise. Now, in regard to the current economic crisis, we think that we will just wake up again and everything will be the same as before, and no political or social changes are needed. In regard to ecological crisis, we think nothing needs to be done just now, or others need to act before us. Or even when ecological crisis already happens, like a catastrophe in Fukushima, often we have people living in the same environment with the same amount of information, and half of them will be anxious about radiation and half of them will ignore it.Now, psychoanalysts know very well that people surprisingly don't have passion for knowledge but passion for ignorance. Now, what does that mean? Let's say when we are facing a life-threatening illness, a lot of people don't want to know that. They'd rather prefer denying the illness, which is why it's not so wise to inform them if they don't ask. Surprisingly, research shows that sometimes people who deny their illness live longer than those who are rationally choosing the best treatment.Now, this ignorance, however, is not very helpful on the level of the social. When we are ignorant about where we are heading, a lot of social damage can be caused.Now, on top of facing ignorance, we are also facing today some kind of an obviousness. Now, it was French philosopher Louis Althusser who pointed out that ideology functions in such a way that it creates a veil of obviousness. Before we do any social critique, it is necessary really to lift that veil of obviousness and to think through a little bit differently. If we go back to this ideology of individual, rational choice we often embrace, it's necessary precisely here to lift this obviousness and to think a little bit differently.Now for me, a question often is why we still embrace this idea of a self-made man on which capitalism relied from its beginning? Why do we think that we are really such masters of our lives that we can rationally make the best ideal choices, that we don't accept losses and risks? And for me, it's very shocking to see sometimes very poor people, for example, not supporting the idea of the rich being taxed more. Quite often here they still identify with a certain kind of a lottery mentality. Okay, maybe they don't think that they will make it in the future, but maybe they think, my son might become the next Bill Gates. And who would want to tax one's son? Or, a question for me is also, why would people who have no health insurance not embrace universal healthcare? Sometimes they don't embrace it, again identifying with the idea of choice, but they have nothing to choose from.Now, Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is nothing like a society. Society doesn't exist, it is only individuals and their families. Sadly, this ideology still functions very well, which is why people who are poor might feel ashamed for their poverty. We might endlessly feel guilty that we are not making the right choices, and that's why we didn't succeed. We are anxious that we are not good enough. That's why we work very hard, long hours at the workplace and equally long hours on remaking ourselves. Now, when we are anxious over choices, sometimes we easily give our power of choice away. We identify with the guru who tells us what to do, self-help therapist, or we embrace a totalitarian leader who appears to have no doubts about choices, who sort of knows.Now, often people ask me, ""What did you learn by studying choice?"" And there is an important message that I did learn. When thinking about choices, I stopped taking choices too seriously, personally. First, I realized a lot of choice I make is not rational. It's linked to my unconscious, my guesses of what others are choosing, or what is a socially embraced choice. I also embrace the idea that we should go beyond thinking about individual choices, that it's very important to rethink social choices, since this ideology of individual choice has pacified us. It really prevented us to think about social change. We spend so much time choosing things for ourselves and barely reflect on communal choices we can make.Now, we should not forget that choice is always linked to change. We can make individual changes, but we can make social changes. We can choose to have more wolves. We can choose to change our environment to have more bees. We can choose to have different rating agencies. We can choose to control corporations instead of allowing corporations to control us. We have a possibility to make changes.Now, I started with a quote from Samuel Johnson, who said that when we make choice in life, we shouldn't forget to live. Finally, you can see I did have a choice to choose one of the three quotes with which I wanted to start my lecture. I did have a choice, such as nations, as people, we have choices too to rethink in what kind of society we want to live in the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/renata_salecl_our_unhealthy_obsession_with_choice
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"Could I protect my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife? That was the question I faced one Tuesday morning in June of 1993, when I was a law student.I woke up early that morning in Dad's apartment on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on the front door. It was a season as described by a local paper when every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of fundamentalist assassins. My father's university teaching of Darwin had already provoked a classroom visit from the head of the so-called Islamic Salvation Front, who denounced Dad as an advocate of biologism before Dad had ejected the man, and now whoever was outside would neither identify himself nor go away. So my father tried to get the police on the phone, but perhaps terrified by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of so many Algerian officers, they didn't even answer. And that was when I went to the kitchen, got out a paring knife, and took up a position inside the entryway. It was a ridiculous thing to do, really, but I couldn't think of anything else, and so there I stood.When I look back now, I think that that was the moment that set me on the path was to writing a book called ""Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism."" The title comes from a Pakistani play. I think it was actually that moment that sent me on the journey to interview 300 people of Muslim heritage from nearly 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali, to find out how they fought fundamentalism peacefully like my father did, and how they coped with the attendant risks.Luckily, back in June of 1993, our unidentified visitor went away, but other families were so much less lucky, and that was the thought that motivated my research. In any case, someone would return a few months later and leave a note on Dad's kitchen table, which simply said, ""Consider yourself dead."" Subsequently, Algeria's fundamentalist armed groups would murder as many as 200,000 civilians in what came to be known as the dark decade of the 1990s, including every single one of the women that you see here. In its harsh counterterrorist response, the state resorted to torture and to forced disappearances, and as terrible as all of these events became, the international community largely ignored them. Finally, my father, an Algerian peasant's son turned professor, was forced to stop teaching at the university and to flee his apartment, but what I will never forget about Mahfoud Bennoune, my dad, was that like so many other Algerian intellectuals, he refused to leave the country and he continued to publish pointed criticisms, both of the fundamentalists and sometimes of the government they battled. For example, in a November 1994 series in the newspaper El Watan entitled ""How Fundamentalism Produced a Terrorism without Precedent,"" he denounced what he called the terrorists' radical break with the true Islam as it was lived by our ancestors. These were words that could get you killed.My father's country taught me in that dark decade of the 1990s that the popular struggle against Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most important and overlooked human rights struggles in the world. This remains true today, nearly 20 years later. You see, in every country where you hear about armed jihadis targeting civilians, there are also unarmed people defying those militants that you don't hear about, and those people need our support to succeed.In the West, it's often assumed that Muslims generally condone terrorism. Some on the right think this because they view Muslim culture as inherently violent, and some on the left imagine this because they view Muslim violence, fundamentalist violence, solely as a product of legitimate grievances. But both views are dead wrong. In fact, many people of Muslim heritage around the world are staunch opponents both of fundamentalism and of terrorism, and often for very good reason. You see, they're much more likely to be victims of this violence than its perpetrators. Let me just give you one example. According to a 2009 survey of Arabic language media resources, between 2004 and 2008, no more than 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims were Westerners. That's a terrible toll, but the vast majority were people of Muslim heritage, killed by Muslim fundamentalists.Now I've been talking for the last five minutes about fundamentalism, and you have a right to know exactly what I mean. I cite the definition given by the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas, and she says that fundamentalisms, note the ""s,"" so within all of the world's great religious traditions, ""fundamentalisms are political movements of the extreme right which in a context of globalization manipulate religion in order to achieve their political aims."" Sadia Abbas has called this the radical politicization of theology. Now I want to avoid projecting the notion that there's sort of a monolith out there called Muslim fundamentalism that is the same everywhere, because these movements also have their diversities. Some use and advocate violence. Some do not, though they're often interrelated. They take different forms. Some may be non-governmental organizations, even here in Britain like Cageprisoners. Some may become political parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and some may be openly armed groups like the Taliban. But in any case, these are all radical projects. They're not conservative or traditional approaches. They're most often about changing people's relationship with Islam rather than preserving it. What I am talking about is the Muslim extreme right, and the fact that its adherents are or purport to be Muslim makes them no less offensive than the extreme right anywhere else. So in my view, if we consider ourselves liberal or left-wing, human rights-loving or feminist, we must oppose these movements and support their grassroots opponents. Now let me be clear that I support an effective struggle against fundamentalism, but also a struggle that must itself respect international law, so nothing I am saying should be taken as a justification for refusals to democratize, and here I send out a shout-out of support to the pro-democracy movement  in Algeria today, Barakat. Nor should anything I say be taken as a justification of violations of human rights, like the mass death sentences handed out in Egypt earlier this week. But what I am saying is that we must challenge these Muslim fundamentalist movements because they threaten human rights across Muslim-majority contexts, and they do this in a range of ways, most obviously with the direct attacks on civilians by the armed groups that carry those out. But that violence is just the tip of the iceberg. These movements as a whole purvey discrimination against religious minorities and sexual minorities. They seek to curtail the freedom of religion of everyone who either practices in a different way or chooses not to practice. And most definingly, they lead an all-out war on the rights of women.Now, faced with these movements in recent years, Western discourse has most often offered two flawed responses. The first that one sometimes finds on the right suggests that most Muslims are fundamentalist or something about Islam is inherently fundamentalist, and this is just offensive and wrong, but unfortunately on the left one sometimes encounters a discourse that is too politically correct to acknowledge the problem of Muslim fundamentalism at all or, even worse, apologizes for it, and this is unacceptable as well. So what I'm seeking is a new way of talking about this all together, which is grounded in the lived experiences and the hope of the people on the front lines. I'm painfully aware that there has been an increase in discrimination against Muslims in recent years in countries like the U.K. and the U.S., and that too is a matter of grave concern, but I firmly believe that telling these counter-stereotypical stories of people of Muslim heritage who have confronted the fundamentalists and been their primary victims is also a great way of countering that discrimination. So now let me introduce you to four people whose stories I had the great honor of telling.Faizan Peerzada and the Rafi Peer Theatre workshop named for his father have for years promoted the performing arts in Pakistan. With the rise of jihadist violence, they began to receive threats to call off their events, which they refused to heed. And so a bomber struck their 2008 eighth world performing arts festival in Lahore, producing rain of glass that fell into the venue injuring nine people, and later that same night, the Peerzadas made a very difficult decision: they announced that their festival would continue as planned the next day. As Faizan said at the time, if we bow down to the Islamists, we'll just be sitting in a dark corner. But they didn't know what would happen. Would anyone come? In fact, thousands of people came out the next day to support the performing arts in Lahore, and this simultaneously thrilled and terrified Faizan, and he ran up to a woman who had come in with her two small children, and he said, ""You do know there was a bomb here yesterday, and you do know there's a threat here today."" And she said, ""I know that, but I came to your festival with my mother when I was their age, and I still have those images in my mind. We have to be here."" With stalwart audiences like this, the Peerzadas were able to conclude their festival on schedule.And then the next year, they lost all of their sponsors due to the security risk. So when I met them in 2010, they were in the middle of the first subsequent event that they were able to have in the same venue, and this was the ninth youth performing arts festival held in Lahore in a year when that city had already experienced 44 terror attacks. This was a time when the Pakistani Taliban had commenced their systematic targeting of girls' schools that would culminate in the attack on Malala Yousafzai. What did the Peerzadas do in that environment? They staged girls' school theater. So I had the privilege of watching ""Naang Wal,"" which was a musical in the Punjabi language, and the girls of Lahore Grammar School played all the parts. They sang and danced, they played the mice and the water buffalo, and I held my breath, wondering, would we get to the end of this amazing show? And when we did, the whole audience collectively exhaled, and a few people actually wept, and then they filled the auditorium with the peaceful boom of their applause. And I remember thinking in that moment that the bombers made headlines here two years before but this night and these people are as important a story.Maria Bashir is the first and only woman chief prosecutor in Afghanistan. She's been in the post since 2008 and actually opened an office to investigate cases of violence against women, which she says is the most important area in her mandate. When I meet her in her office in Herat, she enters surrounded by four large men with four huge guns. In fact, she now has 23 bodyguards, because she has weathered bomb attacks that nearly killed her kids, and it took the leg off of one of her guards.Why does she continue? She says with a smile that that is the question that everyone asks— as she puts it, ""Why you risk not living?"" And it is simply that for her, a better future for all the Maria Bashirs to come is worth the risk, and she knows that if people like her do not take the risk, there will be no better future. Later on in our interview, Prosecutor Bashir tells me how worried she is about the possible outcome of government negotiations with the Taliban, the people who have been trying to kill her. ""If we give them a place in the government,"" she asks, ""Who will protect women's rights?"" And she urges the international community not to forget its promise about women because now they want peace with Taliban. A few weeks after I leave Afghanistan, I see a headline on the Internet. An Afghan prosecutor has been assassinated. I google desperately, and thankfully that day I find out that Maria was not the victim, though sadly, another Afghan prosecutor was gunned down on his way to work. And when I hear headlines like that now, I think that as international troops leave Afghanistan this year and beyond, we must continue to care about what happens to people there, to all of the Maria Bashirs. Sometimes I still hear her voice in my head saying, with no bravado whatsoever, ""The situation of the women of Afghanistan will be better someday. We should prepare the ground for this, even if we are killed.""There are no words adequate to denounce the al Shabaab terrorists who attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on the same day as a children's cooking competition in September of 2013. They killed 67, including poets and pregnant women. Far away in the American Midwest, I had the good fortune of meeting Somali-Americans who were working to counter the efforts of al Shabaab to recruit a small number of young people from their city of Minneapolis to take part in atrocities like Westgate. Abdirizak Bihi's studious 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan was recruited here in 2008, spirited to Somalia, and then killed when he tried to come home. Since that time, Mr. Bihi, who directs the no-budget Somali Education and Advocacy Center, has been vocally denouncing the recruitment and the failures of government and Somali-American institutions like the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center where he believes his nephew was radicalized during a youth program. But he doesn't just criticize the mosque. He also takes on the government for its failure to do more to prevent poverty in his community. Given his own lack of financial resources, Mr. Bihi has had to be creative. To counter the efforts of al Shabaab to sway more disaffected youth, in the wake of the group's 2010 attack on World Cup viewers in Uganda, he organized a Ramadan basketball tournament in Minneapolis in response. Scores of Somali-American kids came out to embrace sport despite the fatwa against it. They played basketball as Burhan Hassan never would again. For his efforts, Mr. Bihi has been ostracized by the leadership of the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, with which he used to have good relations. He told me, ""One day we saw the imam on TV calling us infidels and saying, 'These families are trying to destroy the mosque.'"" This is at complete odds with how Abdirizak Bihi understands what he is trying to do by exposing al Shabaab recruitment, which is to save the religion I love from a small number of extremists.Now I want to tell one last story, that of a 22-year-old law student in Algeria named Amel Zenoune-Zouani who had the same dreams of a legal career that I did back in the '90s. She refused to give up her studies, despite the fact that the fundamentalists battling the Algerian state back then threatened all who continued their education. On January 26, 1997, Amel boarded the bus in Algiers where she was studying to go home and spend a Ramadan evening with her family, and would never finish law school. When the bus reached the outskirts of her hometown, it was stopped at a checkpoint manned by men from the Armed Islamic Group. Carrying her schoolbag, Amel was taken off the bus and killed in the street. The men who cut her throat then told everyone else, ""If you go to university, the day will come when we will kill all of you just like this.""Amel died at exactly 5:17 p.m., which we know because when she fell in the street, her watch broke. Her mother showed me the watch with the second hand still aimed optimistically upward towards a 5:18 that would never come. Shortly before her death, Amel had said to her mother of herself and her sisters, ""Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah, God willing, but if something happens, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. You and father must keep your heads held high.""The loss of such a young woman is unfathomable, and so as I did my research I found myself searching for Amel's hope again and her name even means ""hope"" in Arabic. I think I found it in two places. The first is in the strength of her family and all the other families to continue telling their stories and to go on with their lives despite the terrorism. In fact, Amel's sister Lamia overcame her grief, went to law school, and practices as a lawyer in Algiers today, something which is only possible because the armed fundamentalists were largely defeated in the country. And the second place I found Amel's hope was everywhere that women and men continue to defy the jihadis. We must support all of those in honor of Amel who continue this human rights struggle today, like the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. It is not enough, as the victims rights advocate Cherifa Kheddar told me in Algiers, it is not enough just to battle terrorism. We must also challenge fundamentalism, because fundamentalism is the ideology that makes the bed of this terrorism.Why is it that people like her, like all of them are not more well known? Why is it that everyone knows who Osama bin Laden was and so few know of all of those standing up to the bin Ladens in their own contexts. We must change that, and so I ask you to please help share these stories through your networks. Look again at Amel Zenoune's watch, forever frozen, and now please look at your own watch and decide this is the moment that you commit to supporting people like Amel. We don't have the right to be silent about them because it is easier or because Western policy is flawed as well, because 5:17 is still coming to too many Amel Zenounes in places like northern Nigeria, where jihadis still kill students. The time to speak up in support of all of those who peacefully challenge fundamentalism and terrorism in their own communities is now.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karima_bennoune_the_side_of_terrorism_that_doesn_t_make_headlines
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"Puzzles and magic. I work in what most people think are two distinct fields, but I believe they are the same. I am both a magician and a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor, which basically means I've taken the world's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career. And I believe that magic and puzzles are the same because they both key into one of the most important human drives: the urge to solve. Human beings are wired to solve, to make order out of chaos.It's certainly true for me. I've been solving my whole life. High school consisted of epic Scrabble matches in the cafeteria and not really talking to girls, and then at about that time I started learning magic tricks and definitely not talking to girls. There's nothing like starting a conversation with, ""Hey, did you know that 'prestidigitation' is worth 20 points in Scrabble?"" But back then, I noticed an intersection between puzzles and illusion. When you do the crossword puzzle or when you watch a magic show, you become a solver, and your goal is to try to find the order in the chaos, the chaos of, say, a black-and-white puzzle grid, a mixed-up bag of Scrabble tiles, or a shuffled pack of playing cards. And today, as a cruciverbalist — 23 points — and an illusion designer, I create that chaos. I test your ability to solve.Now, it turns out research tells us that solving is as primal as eating and sleeping. From birth, we are wired to solve. In one UCLA study, newborns still in the hospital were shown patterns, patterns like this: circle, cross, circle, cross. And then the pattern was changed: triangle, square. And by tracking an infant's gaze, we know that newborns as young as a day old can notice and respond to disruptions in order. It's remarkable. So from infancy through old age, the urge to solve unites us all, and I even found this photo on Instagram of pop star Katy Perry solving a crossword puzzle with her morning coffee.Like. (Laughter)Now, solving exists across all cultures. The American invention is the crossword puzzle, and this year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, first published in The New York World. But many other cultures have their signature puzzles as well. China gives us tangrams, which would test solvers' abilities to form shapes from the jumbled pieces. Chaos. Order. Order. And order. That one's my favorite, let's hear it again. Okay. And how about this puzzle invented in 18th-century England: the jigsaw puzzle. Is this not making order out of chaos?So as you can see, we are always solving. We are always trying to decode our world. It's an eternal quest. It's just like the one Cervantes wrote about in ""Don Quixote,"" which by the way is the root of the word ""quixotry,"" the highest-scoring Scrabble word of all time, 365 points. But anyway, ""Don Quixote"" is an important book. You guys have read ""Don Quixote,"" yes? I'm seeing some heads nod. Come on guys, really? Who's read ""Don Quixote?"" Let's do this. Raise your hands if you've read ""Don Quixote."" There we go. Smart audience. Who's read ""Don Quixote?"" Get them up.Okay, good, because I need somebody smart here because now I'm going to demonstrate with the help of one of you just how deeply rooted your urge to solve is, just how wired to solve all of you really are, so I'm going to come into the audience and find somebody to help me. Let's see. Everybody's looking away all of a sudden. Can I? Would you? What is your name? Gwen. I'm not a mind reader, I can see your name tag. Come with me, Gwen. Everyone give her  a round of applause, make her feel welcome. Gwen, after you. (Applause)Are you so excited? Did you know that your name is worth eight points in Scrabble? Okay, stand right here, Gwen, right here.Now, Gwen, before we begin, I'd like to point out a piece of the puzzle, which is here in this envelope, and I will not go near it. Okay? And over here we have a drawing of some farm animals. You can see we have an owl, we have a horse, a donkey, a rooster, an ox, and a sheep, and then here, Gwen, we have some fancy art store markers, colors like, can you see that word right there? Gwen: Cobalt. David Kwong: Cobalt, yes. Cobalt. But we have a silver, a red, an emerald, and an amber marker, and Gwen, you are going to color this drawing just like you were five years old, one marker at a time. It's going to be a lot of fun. But I'm going to go over here. I don't want to see what you're doing. Okay, so don't start yet. Wait for me to get over here and close my eyes. Now Gwen, are you ready?Pick up just one marker, pick up just one marker, and why don't you color in the horse for me? Color in the horse — big, big, big scribbles, broad strokes, don't worry about staying in the lines. All right. Great. And why don't you take that marker and recap it and place it on the table for me. Okay, and pick up another marker out of the cup and take off the cap and color in the donkey for me, color in the donkey. Big scribbles. Okay, cool, and re-cap that marker and place it on the table. And pick up another marker for me and take off the cap. Isn't this fun? And color in the owl for me. Color in the owl. Okay, and recap that marker and pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the rooster for me, color in the rooster. Good, good, good, good, good. Big, big, big strokes. Good, good. Pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the ox for me. Color in the ox. Okay, good. A lot of color on that, and recap, and place it on the table, and pick up another marker out of the cup. Oh, I'm out? Okay, I'm going to turn around. Did I forget? Oh, I forgot my purple marker. This is still going to work, though. I think this is still going to work, mostly.So Gwen, I'm going to hand you this envelope. Don't open it yet. Do not open it yet, but I am going to write down your choices so that everybody can see the choices that you made. Okay, great. So we have a cobalt horse, amber owl, a silver ox, yes, okay, a red donkey, and what was the emerald color? A rooster. An emerald rooster. Okay.Now for the moment of truth, Gwen, we're going to take a look in that envelope. Why don't you open it up and remove the one piece of paper from inside and hand it to me, and we will see if it matches your choices. Yes, I think it does. We have a cobalt horse, we have a red donkey, we have an amber owl, we have an emerald rooster, a silver ox, I forgot my purple marker so we have a blank sheep, but that's a pretty amazing coincidence, don't you think? Gwen, well done. That's beautiful. (Applause) I'll take that back from you.So ladies and gentlemen, how is this possible? How is this possible? Well, could it be that Gwen's brain is so wired to solve that she decoded hidden messages? Well this is the puzzle I present to you. Could there be order in the chaos that I created? Let's take a closer look. Do you recall when I showed you these puzzle pieces? What image did it ultimately become? A cobalt horse. The plot thickens. And then we played a game of tangrams with an emerald rooster. That one's my favorite. And then we had an experiment with a silver ox. And Katy Perry drinks her morning coffee out of an amber owl. Thank you, Katy, for taking that photo for me. Oh, and there's one more, there's one more. I believe you colored a red donkey, Gwen. Ladies and gentlemen, could you raise your hands for me if you've read ""Don Quixote?"" Who's read ""Don Quixote?"" (Laughter) But wait, but wait, wait, wait, wait, there's more. There's more. Gwen, I was so confident that you were going to make these choices that I made another prediction, and I put it in an even more indelible place, and it's right here. Ladies and gentlemen, we have today's New York Times. The date is March 18th, 2014. Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well. Really dig. We hid them under there. See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the arts section and you will find the crossword puzzle, and the crossword puzzle today was written by yours truly. You can see my name above the grid. I'm going to give this to you, Gwen, to take a look. And I will also put it up on the screen. Now let's take a look at another piece of the puzzle. If you look at the first clue for 1-across, it starts with the letter C, for corrupt, and just below that we have an O, for outfielder, and if you keep reading the first letters of the clues down, you get cobalt horse, amber owl, silver ox, red donkey, and emerald rooster. (Applause) That's pretty cool, right? It's The New York Times. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. Oh, Gwen, do you recall how I forgot my purple marker, and you were unable to color the sheep? Well, if you keep reading starting with 25-down, it says, ""Oh, by the way, the sheep can be left blank."" (Laughter) (Applause) But wait, wait, wait, there's one more thing, there's one more thing, there's one final piece of the puzzle. Gwen, I am so grateful for your choices because if we take a look at the first letters of your combinations, we get ""C-H-A-O-S"" for chaos and ""O-R-D-E-R"" for order. That's chaos and order. We've all made order out of chaos.So ladies and gentlemen, the next time you find yourself with a puzzle, whether it's in your life or in your work, or maybe it's at the Sunday morning breakfast table with The New York Times, remember, you are all wired to solve.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_kwong_two_nerdy_obsessions_meet_and_it_s_magic
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"Right now you have a movie playing inside your head. It's an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you're seeing and hearing right now, but that's just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world.Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. Each of us is conscious. We all have our own inner movie, you and you and you. There's nothing we know about more directly. At least, I know about my consciousness directly. I can't be certain that you guys are conscious.Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. But at the same time, it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren't we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed.Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness. For much of the 20th century, that view held sway. Psychologists studied behavior objectively, neuroscientists studied the brain objectively, and nobody even mentioned consciousness. Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness.Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said now is the time for science to attack consciousness. And since then, there's been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness. And this work has been wonderful. It's been great. But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness. We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy. But this is still a science of correlations. It's not a science of explanations. We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don't know why they do. I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with. But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. No knock on the neuroscientists. There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? Right now, we don't really have a bead on that.And you might say, let's just give neuroscience a few years. It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we'll figure it out. The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning. You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena: how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess, all these questions about behavior. But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. When it comes to the hard problem, that's the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? And here, the standard paradigm of emergence, even the standard paradigms of neuroscience, don't really, so far, have that much to say.Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work for systematic reasons. It's a long story, but the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems — how we behave, how we function — but when it comes to subjective experience — why does all this feel like something from the inside? — that's something fundamentally new, and it's always a further question. So I think we're at a kind of impasse here. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious. On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically.Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one. His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness. The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion. Actually, all we've got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we've explained everything that needs to be explained. Well I say, more power to him. That's the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness. At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. So I go in a different direction. In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise.The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they're taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there. Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, Newton's laws — so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. I think that's the situation we're in with consciousness. If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, charge — then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn't mean you suddenly can't do science with it. This opens up the way for you to do science with it. What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. Well I think something like that is the situation we're in with consciousness. We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. We don't know what those laws are yet, but that's what we're after.The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight's microbes, elementary particles. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. It's not that a photon is wracked with angst because it's thinking, ""Aww, I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses."" No, not like that. But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.This may sound a bit kooky to you. I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass, it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. It's also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it's much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature.A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. Wherever there's information processing, there's consciousness. Complex information processing, like in a human, complex consciousness. Simple information processing, simple consciousness.A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system. And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness. So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of consciousness. In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. The amount of information integration falls off, but it's still non-zero. On Tononi's theory, there's still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness. Now, I don't know if this theory is right, but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it's been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data, and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt.Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn't tell us about the reality that underlies it. As Stephen Hawking puts it, what puts the fire into the equations? Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. That's what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of consciousness. On this view, it's consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. It's there right at its heart.This view, I think, the panpsychist view, has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. Some of these may be counterintuitive. I used to think I shouldn't eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view, you're going to go very hungry. So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.It's also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie ""Her,"" Samantha? Is she conscious? Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. If that's right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off.Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. Does Canada have its own consciousness? Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference, are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's at least one worth taking seriously.Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don't know that it's correct. I'm actually more confident about the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental, than about the second one, that it's universal. I mean, the view raises any number of questions, has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love. If we can answer those questions, then I think we're going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can't expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves. It may just take the right crazy idea.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness
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"The first time I stood in the operating room and watched a real surgery, I had no idea what to expect. I was a college student in engineering. I thought it was going to be like on TV. Ominous music playing in the background, beads of sweat pouring down the surgeon's face. But it wasn't like that at all. There was music playing on this day, I think it was Madonna's greatest hits. (Laughter) And there was plenty of conversation, not just about the patient's heart rate, but about sports and weekend plans. And since then, the more surgeries I watched, the more I realized this is how it is. In some weird way, it's just another day at the office. But every so often the music gets turned down, everyone stops talking, and stares at exactly the same thing. And that's when you know that something absolutely critical and dangerous is happening.The first time I saw that I was watching a type of surgery called laparoscopic surgery And for those of you who are unfamiliar, laparoscopic surgery, instead of the large open incision you might be used to with surgery, a laparoscopic surgery is where the surgeon creates these three or more small incisions in the patient. And then inserts these long, thin instruments and a camera, and actually does the procedure inside the patient. This is great because there's much less risk of infection, much less pain, shorter recovery time. But there is a trade-off, because these incisions are created with a long, pointed device called a trocar. And the way the surgeon uses this device is that he takes it and he presses it into the abdomen until it punctures through. And now the reason why  everyone in the operating room was staring at that device on that day was because he had to be absolutely careful not to plunge it through and puncture it into the organs  and blood vessels below. But this problem should seem  pretty familiar to all of you because I'm pretty sure  you've seen it somewhere else. (Laughter) Remember this? (Applause) You knew that at any second that straw was going to plunge through, and you didn't know if it was  going to go out the other side and straight into your hand, or if you were going to get juice everywhere, but you were terrified. Right? Every single time you did this, you experienced the same fundamental physics that I was watching in the operating room that day. And it turns out it really is a problem. In 2003, the FDA actually came out and said that trocar incisions might  be the most dangerous step in minimally invasive surgery. Again in 2009, we see a paper that says that trocars account for over half of all major complications in laparoscopic surgery. And, oh by the way, this hasn't changed for 25 years.So when I got to graduate school, this is what I wanted to work on. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine what exactly I was spending my time doing, and I said, ""It's like when you're drilling through a wall to hang something in your apartment. There's that moment when the drill first punctures through the wall and there's this plunge. Right? And he looked at me and he said, ""You mean like when they drill  into people's brains?"" And I said, ""Excuse me?"" (Laughter) And then I looked it up and they do drill into people's brains. A lot of neurosurgical procedures actually start with a drill incision through the skull. And if the surgeon isn't careful, he can plunge directly into the brain. So this is the moment when I started thinking, okay, cranial drilling, laparoscopic surgery, why not other areas of medicine? Because think about it, when was the last time you went to the doctor and you didn't get stuck with something? Right? So the truth is in medicine puncture is everywhere. And here are just a couple of the procedures that I've found that involve some tissue puncture step. And if we take just three of them — laparoscopic surgery,  epidurals, and cranial drilling — these procedures account  for over 30,000 complications every year in this country alone. I call that a problem worth solving.So let's take a look at some of the devices that are used in these types of procedures. I mentioned epidurals. This is an epidural needle. It's used to puncture through  the ligaments in the spine and deliver anesthesia during childbirth. Here's a set of bone marrow biopsy tools. These are actually used to burrow into the bone and collect bone marrow or sample bone lesions. Here's a bayonette from the Civil War. (Laughter) If I had told you it was a  medical puncture device you probably would have believed me. Because what's the difference? So, the more I did this research the more I thought there has to be a better way to do this. And for me the key to this problem is that all these different puncture devices share a common set of fundamental physics.So what are those physics? Let's go back to drilling through a wall. So you're applying a force  on a drill towards the wall. And Newton says the wall is going to apply force back, equal and opposite. So, as you drill through the wall, those forces balance. But then there's that moment when the drill first punctures through the other side of the wall, and right at that moment  the wall can't push back anymore. But your brain hasn't reacted  to that change in force. So for that millisecond, or however long it takes you  to react, you're still pushing, and that unbalanced force  causes an acceleration, and that is the plunge. But what if right at the moment of puncture you could pull that tip back, actually oppose the forward acceleration? That's what I set out to do.So imagine you have a device and it's got some kind of sharp tip  to cut through tissue. What's the simplest way  you could pull that tip back? I chose a spring. So when you extend that spring,  you extend that tip out so it's ready to puncture tissue, the spring wants to pull the tip back. How do you keep the tip in place until the moment of puncture? I used this mechanism. When the tip of the device is pressed against tissue, the mechanism expands outwards  and wedges in place against the wall. And the friction that's generated locks it in place and prevents the spring from retracting the tip. But right at the moment of puncture, the tissue can't push back on the tip anymore. So the mechanism unlocks  and the spring retracts the tip. Let me show you that  happening in slow motion. This is about 2,000 frames a second, and I'd like you to notice the tip that's right there on the bottom,  about to puncture through tissue. And you'll see that  right at the moment of puncture, right there, the mechanism unlocks  and retracts that tip back. I want to show it to you again, a little closer up. You're going to see the sharp bladed tip, and right when it punctures  that rubber membrane it's going to disappear into this white blunt sheath. Right there. That happens within four 100ths  of a second after puncture. And because this device is designed to address the physics of puncture and not the specifics of cranial drilling or laparoscopic surgery,  or another procedure, it's applicable across these different medical disciplines and across different length scales.But it didn't always look like this. This was my first prototype. Yes, those are popsicle sticks, and there's a rubber band at the top. It took about 30 minutes to do this, but it worked. And it proved to me that my idea worked and it justified the next couple years of work on this project. I worked on this because this problem really fascinated me. It kept me up at night. But I think it should fascinate you too, because I said puncture is everywhere. That means at some point  it's going to be your problem too. That first day in the operating room I never expected to find myself  on the other end of a trocar. But last year, I got appendicitis  when I was visiting Greece. So I was in the hospital in Athens, and the surgeon was telling me he was going to perform  a laparoscopic surgery. He was going to remove my appendix  through these tiny incisions, and he was talking about what I could expect for the recovery, and what was going to happen. He said, ""Do you have any questions?"" And I said, ""Just one, doc. What kind of trocar do you use?""So my favorite quote  about laparoscopic surgery comes from a Doctor H. C. Jacobaeus: ""It is puncture itself that causes risk."" That's my favorite quote  because H.C. Jacobaeus was the first person to ever perform  laparoscopic surgery on humans, and he wrote that in 1912. This is a problem that's been injuring and even killing people for over 100 years.So it's easy to think that for every major problem out there there's some team of experts  working around the clock to solve it. The truth is that's not always the case. We have to be better at finding those problems and finding ways to solve them. So if you come across a problem that grabs you, let it keep you up at night. Allow yourself to be fascinated, because there are so many lives to save.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nikolai_begg_a_tool_to_fix_one_of_the_most_dangerous_moments_in_surgery
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"I was born in Taiwan. I grew up surrounded by different types of hardware stores, and I like going to night markets. I love the energy of the night markets, the colors, the lights, the toys, and all the unexpected things I find every time I go, things like watermelon with straw antennas or puppies with mohawks. When I was growing up, I liked taking toys apart, any kind of toys I'd find around the house, like my brother's BB gun when he's not home.I also liked to make environments for people to explore and play. In these early installations, I would take plastic sheets, plastic bags, and things I would find in the hardware store or around the house. I would take things like highlighter pen, mix it with water, pump it through plastic tubing, creating these glowing circulatory systems for people to walk through and enjoy. I like these materials because of the way they look, the way they feel, and they're very affordable.I also liked to make devices that work with body parts. I would take camera LED lights and a bungee cord and strap it on my waist and I would videotape my belly button, get a different perspective, and see what it does. (Laughter)I also like to modify household appliances. This is an automatic night light. Some of you might have them at home. I would cut out the light sensor, add an extension line, and use modeling clay, stick it onto the television, and then I would videotape my eye, and using the dark part of my eye tricking the sensor into thinking it's night time, so you turn on the lightbulb. The white of the eye and the eyelid will trick the sensor into thinking it's daytime, and it will shut off the light.I wanted to collect more different types of eyes, so I built this device using bicycle helmets, some lightbulbs and television sets. It would be easier for other people to wear the helmet and record their eyes. This device allows me to symbolically extract other people's eyes, so I have a diversity of eyes to use for my other sculptures. This sculpture has four eyes. Each eye is controlling a different device. This eye is turning itself around in a television. This eye is inflating a plastic tube. This eye is watching a video of another piece being made. And these two eyes are activating glowing water. Many of these pieces are later on shown in museums, biennials, triennial exhibitions around the world.I love science and biology. In 2007, I was doing a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum looking at bioluminous organisms in the oean. I love these creatures. I love the way they look, the way they feel. They're soft, they're slimy, and I was fascinated by the way they use light in their environment, either to attract mates, for self-defense, or to attract food. This research inspired my work in many different ways, things like movement or different light patterns. So I started gathering a lot of different types of material in my studio and just experimenting and trying this out, trying that out, and seeing what types of creatures I can come up with. I used a lot of computer cooling fans and just kind of put them together and see what happens. This is an 8,000-square-foot installation composed of many different creatures, some hanging from the ceiling and some resting on the floor. From afar, they look alien-like, but when you look closer, they're all made out of black garbage bags or Tupperware containers.I'd like to share with you how ordinary things can become something magical and wondrous. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shih_chieh_huang_sculptures_that_d_be_at_home_at_the_bottom_of_the_ocean
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"I'd like to introduce you to an organism: a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. It's a mold with an identity crisis, because it's not a mold, so let's get that straight to start with. It is one of 700 known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. It is a single-celled organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass super-cell to maximize its resources. So within a slime mold you might find thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one entity. In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research laboratories, classrooms, and even artists' studios.I first came across the slime mold about five years ago. A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. The only instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food is porridge oats. I'm an artist who's worked for many years with biology, with scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me. I've worked with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. So I was keen to get my new collaborator home to see what it could do. So I took it home and I watched. I fed it a varied diet. I observed as it networked. It formed a connection between food sources. I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it had been. And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would escape and find a better home.I captured my observations through time-lapse photography. Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it's not really ideal for live viewing unless there's some form of really extreme meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting behaviors. For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. When it meets itself, it knows it's already there, it recognizes it's there, and instead retreats back and grows in other directions. I was quite impressed by this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention.I found countless scientific studies, research papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism, and I'm going to share a few of those with you. For example, a team in Hokkaido University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. It joined together and formed a mass cell. They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it formed a connection between the food. It retracted from empty areas and dead ends. There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route. Quite clever. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had a primitive form of intelligence. Another study exposed cold air at regular intervals to the slime mold. It didn't like it. It doesn't like it cold. It doesn't like it dry. They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the slime mold slowed down its growth in response. However, at the next interval, the researchers didn't put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in anticipation of it happening. It somehow knew that it was about the time for the cold air that it didn't like. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold was able to learn. A third experiment: the slime mold was invited to explore a territory covered in oats. It fans out in a branching pattern. As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection to, and keeps foraging. After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network between the different oats. Now there's nothing remarkable in this until you learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo, and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations. The slime mold had replicated the Tokyo transport network — (Laughter) — a complex system developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning. What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient networks and solve the traveling salesman problem.It is a biological computer. As such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. It's been sonified, replicated, simulated. World over, teams of researchers are decoding its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics.So the question is, how does this thing work? It doesn't have a central nervous system. It doesn't have a brain, yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. It can learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. So where does that intelligence lie? So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it's about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first in one direction and then back in another. And it is this continuous, synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center. This is where its intelligence lies.So it's not just academic researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. A few years ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. It's an online, open, democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic divides. The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. People have found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. And it comprises of scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me, architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. It's a very interesting, eclectic membership. Just a few examples: an artist who paints with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map their area. Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool, but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion, communication and cooperation. Other public engagement activities, I run lots of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. So people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold to navigate so they can test its properties. Everybody takes home a new pet and is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. And the collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting people. I've been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon. (Laughter)It's also enabled me to conduct what I think is the world's first human slime mold experiment. This is part of an exhibition in Rotterdam last year. We invited people to become slime mold for half an hour. So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and invited them to follow slime mold rules. You have to communicate through oscillations, no speaking. You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in search of food. So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied together with yellow ropes wearing ""Being Slime Mold"" t-shirts wandered through the museum park. When they met trees, they had to reshape their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. This is a ludicrous experiment in many, many ways. This isn't hypothesis-driven. We're not trying to prove, demonstrate anything. But what it did provide us was a way of engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency, autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that ensued. One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the conversation that happened afterwards. An entirely spontaneous symposium happened in the park. People talked about the human psychology, of how difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. Other people talked about bacterial communication. Each person brought in their own individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. We didn't just give them oats. We gave them beer as well.But they weren't as efficient as the slime mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. It's biologically fascinating, it's computationally interesting, but it's also a symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior, cooperation. A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. And the slime mold is also my working material. It's a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations, participatory events. Whilst the slime mold doesn't choose to work with me, exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. I can predict certain behaviors by understanding how it operates, but I can't control it. The slime mold has the final say in the creative process. And after all, it has its own internal aesthetics. These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms, scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood vessels to neural networks. There's clearly significant rules at play in this simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or our mode of inquiry, there's a great deal that we can learn from observing and engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob.I give you Physarum polycephalum.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/heather_barnett_what_humans_can_learn_from_semi_intelligent_slime_1
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"(Music) This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human. Please raise your hand if something applies to you. Are we agreed? Yes? Then let's begin.Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood? (Laughter) It's okay, it's safe here.Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing?Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed? (Laughter) Okay.Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression? Okay. Period.Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something shitty to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way? Yes.Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate? Yes.Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh? (Laughter) Good.Have you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account? Mmm.Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud? Yes, it's safe here.Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at? Mmm.Have you ever broken something in real life, and then found yourself looking for an ""undo"" button in real life?Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like?Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful?Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone? Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase ""I'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot""?Have you ever been tempted to, and then gave in to the temptation, of looking through someone else's phone?Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're a real asshole to yourself?(Laughter)Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument, and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you?Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this, or this is supposed to happen just naturally? Have you ever realized that very little, in the long run, just happens naturally?Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you?Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life? Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless?Congratulations. You have now completed the test. You are all human.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ze_frank_are_you_human
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"I would like to share with you a new model of higher education, a model that, once expanded, can enhance the collective intelligence of millions of creative and motivated individuals that otherwise would be left behind. Look at the world. Pick a place and focus on it. You will find humans chasing higher education. Let's meet some of them.Patrick. Patrick was born in Liberia to a family of 20 children. During the civil war, he and his family were forced to flee to Nigeria. There, in spite of his situation, he graduated high school with nearly perfect grades. He wanted to continue to higher education, but due to his family living on the poverty line, he was soon sent to South Africa to work and send back money to feed his family. Patrick never gave up his dream of higher education. Late at night, after work, he surfed the net, looking for ways to study.Meet Debbie. Debbie is from Florida. Her parents didn't go to college, and neither did any of her siblings. Debbie has worked all her life, pays taxes, supports herself month to month, proud of the American dream, a dream that just won't be complete without higher education. But Debbie doesn't have the savings for higher education. She can't pay the tuition. Neither could she leave work.Meet Wael. Wael is from Syria. He's experiencing firsthand the misery, fear and failure imposed on his country. He's a big believer in education. He knew that if he could find an opportunity for higher education, an opportunity to get ahead of the rest, he has a better chance to survive in a world turned upside down.The higher education system failed Patrick, Debbie and Wael, exactly as it is failing millions of potential students — millions that graduate high school, millions that are qualified for higher education, millions that want to study yet cannot access it for various reasons. First: financial. Universities are expensive; we all know it. In large parts of the world, higher education is unattainable for an average citizen. This is probably the biggest problem facing our society. Higher education stopped being a right for all and became a privilege for the few.Second: cultural. Students who are qualified for higher education can afford — want to study — cannot, because it is not decent, it is not a place for a woman. This is the story of countless women in Africa, for example, prevented from higher education because of cultural barriers. And here comes the third reason: UNESCO stated that in 2025, 100 million students will be deprived of higher education, simply because there will not be enough seats to accommodate them, to meet the demand. They will take a placement test, they will pass it, but they still won't have access, because there are no places available.These are the reasons I founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, degree-granting university to give an alternative, to create an alternative, to those who have no other; an alternative that will be affordable and scalable, an alternative that will disrupt the current education system, and open the gates to higher education for every qualified student regardless of what they earn, where they live, or what society says about them. Patrick, Debbie and Wael are only three examples out of the 1,700 accepted students from 143 countries.(Applause) Thank you.(Applause)We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. We just looked at what wasn't working and used the amazing power of the Internet to get around it. We set out to build a model that will cut down almost entirely the cost of higher education. And that's how we did it. First, bricks and mortar cost money. Universities have expenses that virtual universities don't. We don't need to pass these expenses on to our students. They don't exist. We also don't need to worry about capacity. There are no limits of seats in virtual university. Actually, nobody needs to stand at the back of the lecture hall. Textbooks are also something our students don't need to buy. By using open educational resources and the generosity of professors who are putting their material up free and accessible, we don't need to send our students to buy textbooks. All of our materials come free.Even professors, the most expensive line in any university balance sheet, come free to our students. Over 3,000 of them, including presidents, vice chancellors, professors and academic advisers from top universities such as NYU, Yale, Berkeley and Oxford, came on board to help our students.Finally, is our belief in peer-to-peer learning. We use this sound pedagogical model to encourage our students from all over the world to interact and study together, and also to reduce the time our professors need to labor over class assignments.If the Internet has made us a global village, this model can develop its future leadership. Look how we do it. We only offer two programs: business administration and computer science, the two programs most in demand worldwide, the two programs that are likeliest to help our students find a job. When our students are accepted, they are placed in a small classroom of 20 to 30 students, to ensure that those who need personalized attention get it. Moreover, for every nine-week course, they meet a new peer, a whole new set of students from all over the world. Every week, when they go into the classroom, they find the lecture notes of the week, the reading assignment, the homework assignment, and the discussion question, which is the core of our studies. Every week, every student must contribute to the class discussion, and also must comment on the contribution of others. This way, we open our students' minds, we develop a positive shift in attitude toward different cultures. By the end of each week, the students take a quiz, hand in their homework, which are assessed by their peers under the supervision of the instructors, get a grade, move to the next week. By the end of the course, they take the final exam, get a grade, and follow to the next course.We open the gates for higher education for every qualified student. Every student with a high school diploma, sufficient English and Internet connection can study with us. We don't use audio, we don't use video. Broadband is not necessary. Any student from any part of the world with any Internet connection can study with us. We are tuition free. All we ask our students to cover is the cost of their exams, 100 dollars per exam. A full-time bachelor's degree student taking 40 courses will pay 1,000 dollars a year, 4,000 dollars for the entire degree. And for those who cannot afford even this, we offer them a variety of scholarships. It is our mission that nobody will be left behind for financial reasons. With 5,000 students in 2016, this model is financially sustainable.Five years ago, it was a vision. Today, it is a reality. Last month, we got the ultimate academic endorsement to our model. University of the People is now fully accredited.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)With this accreditation, it's our time now to scale up. We have demonstrated that our model works. I invite universities and, even more important, developing countries' governments, to replicate this model to ensure that the gates of higher education will open widely. A new era is coming — an era that will witness the disruption of the higher education model as we know it today, from being a privilege for the few to becoming a basic right, affordable and accessible for all.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_reshef_a_tuition_free_college_degree
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"What do you think of when I say the word ""design""? You probably think of things like this, finely crafted objects that you can hold in your hand, or maybe logos and posters and maps that visually explain things, classic icons of timeless design. But I'm not here to talk about that kind of design. I want to talk about the kind that you probably use every day and may not give much thought to, designs that change all the time and that live inside your pocket. I'm talking about the design of digital experiences and specifically the design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend. Consider the fact that Google processes over one billion search queries every day, that every minute, over 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube. That's more in a single day than all three major U.S. networks broadcast in the last five years combined. And Facebook transmitting the photos, messages and stories of over 1.23 billion people. That's almost half of the Internet population, and a sixth of humanity.These are some of the products that I've helped design over the course of my career, and their scale is so massive that they've produced unprecedented design challenges. But what is really hard about designing at scale is this: It's hard in part because it requires a combination of two things, audacity and humility — audacity to believe that the thing that you're making is something that the entire world wants and needs, and humility to understand that as a designer, it's not about you or your portfolio, it's about the people that you're designing for, and how your work just might help them live better lives. Now, unfortunately, there's no school that offers the course Designing for Humanity 101. I and the other designers who work on these kinds of products have had to invent it as we go along, and we are teaching ourselves the emerging best practices of designing at scale, and today I'd like share some of the things that we've learned over the years.Now, the first thing that you need to know about designing at scale is that the little things really matter. Here's a really good example of how a very tiny design element can make a big impact. The team at Facebook that manages the Facebook ""Like"" button decided that it needed to be redesigned. The button had kind of gotten out of sync with the evolution of our brand and it needed to be modernized. Now you might think, well, it's a tiny little button, it probably is a pretty straightforward, easy design assignment, but it wasn't. Turns out, there were all kinds of constraints for the design of this button. You had to work within specific height and width parameters. You had to be careful to make it work in a bunch of different languages, and be careful about using fancy gradients or borders because it has to degrade gracefully in old web browsers. The truth is, designing this tiny little button was a huge pain in the butt.Now, this is the new version of the button, and the designer who led this project estimates that he spent over 280 hours redesigning this button over the course of months. Now, why would we spend so much time on something so small? It's because when you're designing at scale, there's no such thing as a small detail. This innocent little button is seen on average 22 billion times a day and on over 7.5 million websites. It's one of the single most viewed design elements ever created. Now that's a lot of pressure for a little button and the designer behind it, but with these kinds of products, you need to get even the tiny things right.Now, the next thing that you need to understand is how to design with data. Now, when you're working on products like this, you have incredible amounts of information about how people are using your product that you can then use to influence your design decisions, but it's not just as simple as following the numbers. Let me give you an example so that you can understand what I mean. Facebook has had a tool for a long time that allowed people to report photos that may be in violation of our community standards, things like spam and abuse. And there were a ton of photos reported, but as it turns out, only a small percentage were actually in violation of those community standards. Most of them were just your typical party photo. Now, to give you a specific hypothetical example, let's say my friend Laura hypothetically uploads a picture of me from a drunken night of karaoke. This is purely hypothetical, I can assure you. (Laughter) Now, incidentally, you know how some people are kind of worried that their boss or employee is going to discover embarrassing photos of them on Facebook? Do you know how hard that is to avoid when you actually work at Facebook? So anyway, there are lots of these photos being erroneously reported as spam and abuse, and one of the engineers on the team had a hunch. He really thought there was something else going on and he was right, because when he looked through a bunch of the cases, he found that most of them were from people who were requesting the takedown of a photo of themselves. Now this was a scenario that the team never even took into account before. So they added a new feature that allowed people to message their friend to ask them to take the photo down. But it didn't work. Only 20 percent of people sent the message to their friend. So the team went back at it. They consulted with experts in conflict resolution. They even studied the universal principles of polite language, which I didn't even actually know existed until this research happened. And they found something really interesting. They had to go beyond just helping people ask their friend to take the photo down. They had to help people express to their friend how the photo made them feel.Here's how the experience works today. So I find this hypothetical photo of myself, and it's not spam, it's not abuse, but I really wish it weren't on the site. So I report it and I say, ""I'm in this photo and I don't like it,"" and then we dig deeper. Why don't you like this photo of yourself? And I select ""It's embarrassing."" And then I'm encouraged to message my friend, but here's the critical difference. I'm provided specific suggested language that helps me communicate to Laura how the photo makes me feel. Now the team found that this relatively small change had a huge impact. Before, only 20 percent of people were sending the message, and now 60 percent were, and surveys showed that people on both sides of the conversation felt better as a result. That same survey showed that 90 percent of your friends want to know if they've done something to upset you. Now I don't know who the other 10 percent are, but maybe that's where our ""Unfriend"" feature can come in handy.So as you can see, these decisions are highly nuanced. Of course we use a lot of data to inform our decisions, but we also rely very heavily on iteration, research, testing, intuition, human empathy. It's both art and science. Now, sometimes the designers who work on these products are called ""data-driven,"" which is a term that totally drives us bonkers. The fact is, it would be irresponsible of us not to rigorously test our designs when so many people are counting on us to get it right, but data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition. Data can help you make a good design great, but it will never made a bad design good.The next thing that you need to understand as a principle is that when you introduce change, you need to do it extraordinarily carefully. Now I often have joked that I spend almost as much time designing the introduction of change as I do the change itself, and I'm sure that we can all relate to that when something that we use a lot changes and then we have to adjust. The fact is, people can become very efficient at using bad design, and so even if the change is good for them in the long run, it's still incredibly frustrating when it happens, and this is particularly true with user-generated content platforms, because people can rightfully claim a sense of ownership. It is, after all, their content.Now, years ago, when I was working at YouTube, we were looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos, and it was interesting because when we looked into the data, we found that almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star rating, a handful of people were using the lowest one-star, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. So we decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting binary model. It's going to be much easier for people to engage with. But people were very attached to the five-star rating system. Video creators really loved their ratings. Millions and millions of people were accustomed to the old design. So in order to help people prepare themselves for change and acclimate to the new design more quickly, we actually published the data graph sharing with the community the rationale for what we were going to do, and it even engaged the larger industry in a conversation, which resulted in my favorite TechCrunch headline of all time: ""YouTube Comes to a 5-Star Realization: Its Ratings Are Useless.""Now, it's impossible to completely avoid change aversion when you're making changes to products that so many people use. Even though we tried to do all the right things, we still received our customary flood of video protests and angry emails and even a package that had to be scanned by security, but we have to remember people care intensely about this stuff, and it's because these products, this work, really, really matters to them.Now, we know that we have to be careful about paying attention to the details, we have to be cognizant about how we use data in our design process, and we have to introduce change very, very carefully. Now, these things are all really useful. They're good best practices for designing at scale. But they don't mean anything if you don't understand something much more fundamental. You have to understand who you are designing for.Now, when you set a goal to design for the entire human race, and you start to engage in that goal in earnest, at some point you run into the walls of the bubble that you're living in. Now, in San Francisco, we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phones to navigate to the new hipster coffee shop. But what if you had to drive four hours to charge your phone because you had no reliable source of electricity? What if you had no access to public libraries? What if your country had no free press? What would these products start to mean to you? This is what Google, YouTube and Facebook look like to most of the world, and it's what they'll look like to most of the next five billion people to come online. Designing for low-end cell phones is not glamorous design work, but if you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are.So how do we keep this big, big picture in mind? We try to travel outside of our bubble to see, hear and understand the people we're designing for. We use our products in non-English languages to make sure that they work just as well. And we try to use one of these phones from time to time to keep in touch with their reality.So what does it mean to design at a global scale? It means difficult and sometimes exasperating work to try to improve and evolve products. Finding the audacity and the humility to do right by them can be pretty exhausting, and the humility part, it's a little tough on the design ego. Because these products are always changing, everything that I've designed in my career is pretty much gone, and everything that I will design will fade away. But here's what remains: the never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big, you can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_gould_stewart_how_giant_websites_design_for_you_and_a_billion_others_too
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"This year, Germany is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the peaceful revolution in East Germany. In 1989, the Communist regime was moved away, the Berlin Wall came down, and one year later, the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, in the East was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany in the West to found today's Germany. Among many other things, Germany inherited the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Only two years after its dissolution, its documents were opened to the public, and historians such as me started to study these documents to learn more about how the GDR surveillance state functioned.Perhaps you have watched the movie ""The Lives of Others."" This movie made the Stasi known worldwide, and as we live in an age where words such as ""surveillance"" or ""wiretapping"" are on the front pages of newspapers, I would like to speak about how the Stasi really worked.At the beginning, let's have a short look at the history of the Stasi, because it's really important for understanding its self-conception. Its origins are located in Russia. In 1917, the Russian Communists founded the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, shortly Cheka. It was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was an instrument of the Communists to establish their regime by terrorizing the population and executing their enemies. It evolved later into the well-known KGB. The Cheka was the idol of the Stasi officers. They called themselves Chekists, and even the emblem was very similar, as you can see here. In fact, the secret police of Russia was the creator and instructor of the Stasi. When the Red Army occupied East Germany in 1945, it immediately expanded there, and soon it started to train the German Communists to build up their own secret police. By the way, in this hall where we are now, the ruling party of the GDR was founded in 1946.Five years later, the Stasi was established, and step by step, the dirty job of oppression was handed over to it. For instance, the central jail for political prisoners, which was established by the Russians, was taken over by the Stasi and used until the end of Communism. You see it here. At the beginning, every important step took place under the attendance of the Russians. But the Germans are known to be very effective, so the Stasi grew very quickly, and already in 1953, it had more employees than the Gestapo had, the secret police of Nazi Germany. The number doubled in each decade. In 1989, more than 90,000 employees worked for the Stasi. This meant that one employee was responsible for 180 inhabitants, which was really unique in the world.At the top of this tremendous apparatus, there was one man, Erich Mielke. He ruled the Ministry of State Security for more than 30 years. He was a scrupulous functionary — in his past, he killed two policemen not far away from here — who in fact personalized the Stasi.But what was so exceptional about the Stasi? Foremost, it was its enormous power, because it united different functions in one organization. First of all, the Stasi was an intelligence service. It used all the imaginable instruments for getting information secretly, such as informers, or tapping phones, as you can see it on the picture here. And it was not only active in East Germany, but all over the world. Secondly, the Stasi was a secret police. It could stop people on the street and arrest them in its own prisons. Thirdly, the Stasi worked as a kind of public prosecutor. It had the right to open preliminary investigations and to interrogate people officially. Last but not least, the Stasi had its own armed forces. More than 11,000 soldiers were serving in its so-called Guards Regiment. It was founded to crash down protests and uprisings. Due to this concentration of power, the Stasi was called a state in the state.But let's look in more and more detail at the tools of the Stasi. Please keep in mind that at that time the web and smartphones were not yet invented. Of course, the Stasi used all kinds of technical instruments to survey people. Telephones were wiretapped, including the phone of the German chancellor in the West, and often also the apartments. Every day, 90,000 letters were being opened by these machines. The Stasi also shadowed tens of thousands of people using specially trained agents and secret cameras to document every step one took. In this picture, you can see me as a young man just in front of this building where we are now, photographed by a Stasi agent. The Stasi even collected the smell of people. It stored samples of it in closed jars which were found after the peaceful revolution. For all these tasks, highly specialized departments were responsible. The one which was tapping phone calls was completely separated from the one which controlled the letters, for good reasons, because if one agent quit the Stasi, his knowledge was very small. Contrast that with Snowden, for example. But the vertical specialization was also important to prevent all kinds of empathy with the object of observation. The agent who shadowed me didn't know who I was or why I was surveyed. In fact, I smuggled forbidden books from West to East Germany.But what was even more typical for the Stasi was the use of human intelligence, people who reported secretly to the Stasi. For the Minister of State Security, these so-called unofficial employees were the most important tools. From 1975 on, nearly 200,000 people collaborated constantly with the Stasi, more than one percent of the population. And in a way, the minister was right, because technical instruments can only register what people are doing, but agents and spies can also report what people are planning to do and what they are thinking. Therefore, the Stasi recruited so many informants. The system of how to get them and how to educate them, as it was called, was very sophisticated. The Stasi had its own university, not far away from here, where the methods were explored and taught to the officers. This guideline gave a detailed description of every step you have to take if you want to convince human beings to betray their fellow citizens. Sometimes it's said that informants were pressured to becoming one, but that's mostly not true, because a forced informant is a bad informant. Only someone who wants to give you the information you need is an effective whistleblower. The main reasons why people cooperated with the Stasi were political conviction and material benefits. The officers also tried to create a personal bond between themselves and the informant, and to be honest, the example of the Stasi shows that it's not so difficult to win someone in order to betray others. Even some of the top dissidents in East Germany collaborated with the Stasi, as for instance Ibrahim Böhme. In 1989, he was the leader of the peaceful revolution and he nearly became the first freely elected Prime Minister of the GDR until it came out that he was an informant.The net of spies was really broad. In nearly every institution, even in the churches or in West Germany, there were many of them. I remember telling a leading Stasi officer, ""If you had sent an informant to me, I would surely have recognized him."" His answer was, ""We didn't send anyone. We took those who were around you."" And in fact, two of my best friends reported about me to the Stasi. Not only in my case, informers were very close. For example, Vera Lengsfeld, another leading dissident, in her case it was her husband who spied on her. A famous writer was betrayed by his brother. This reminds me of the novel ""1984"" by George Orwell, where the only apparently trustable person was an informer.But why did the Stasi collect all this information in its archives? The main purpose was to control the society. In nearly every speech, the Stasi minister gave the order to find out who is who, which meant who thinks what. He didn't want to wait until somebody tried to act against the regime. He wanted to know in advance what people were thinking and planning. The East Germans knew, of course, that they were surrounded by informers, in a totalitarian regime that created mistrust and a state of widespread fear, the most important tools to oppress people in any dictatorship.That's why not many East Germans tried to fight against the Communist regime. If yes, the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally ""biodegradation."" But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions. Detaining someone was used only as a last resort. For this, the Stasi owned 17 remand prisons, one in every district. Here, the Stasi also developed quite modern methods of detention. Normally, the interrogation officer didn't torture the prisoner. Instead, he used a sophisticated system of psychological pressure in which strict isolation was central. Nearly no prisoner resisted without giving a testimony. If you have the occasion, do visit the former Stasi prison in Berlin and attend a guided tour with a former political prisoner who will explain to you how this worked.One more question needs to be answered: If the Stasi were so well organized, why did the Communist regime collapse? First, in 1989, the leadership in East Germany was uncertain what to do against the growing protest of people. It was especially confused because in the mother country of socialism, the Soviet Union, a more liberal policy took place. In addition, the regime was dependent on the loans from the West. Therefore, no order to crash down the uprising was given to the Stasi. Secondly, in the Communist ideology, there's no place for criticism. Instead, the leadership stuck to the belief that socialism is a perfect system, and the Stasi had to confirm that, of course. The consequence was that despite all the information, the regime couldn't analyze its real problems, and therefore it couldn't solve them. In the end, the Stasi died because of the structures that it was charged with protecting.The ending of the Stasi was something tragic, because these officers were kept busy during the peaceful revolution with only one thing: to destroy the documents they had produced during decades. Fortunately, they had been stopped by human rights activists. That's why today we can use the files to get a better understanding of how a surveillance state functions.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thank you very much. So Hubertus, I want to ask you a couple of questions because I have here Der Spiegel from last week. ""Mein Nachbar NSA."" My neighbor, the NSA. And you just told us about my neighbor, the spies and the informant from East Germany. So there is a direct link between these two stories or there isn't? What's your reaction as a historian when you see this?Hubertus Knabe: I think there are several aspects to mention. At first, I think there's a difference of why you are collecting this data. Are you doing that for protecting your people against terrorist attacks, or are you doing that for oppressing your people? So that makes a fundamental difference. But on the other hand, also in a democracy, these instruments can be abused, and that is something where we really have to be aware to stop that, and that also the intelligence services are respecting the rules we have. The third point, probably, we really can be happy that we live in a democracy, because you can be sure that Russia and China are doing the same, but nobody speaks about that because nobody could do that.(Applause)BG: When the story came out first, last July, last year, you filed a criminal complaint with a German tribunal. Why? HK: Yeah, I did so because of the second point I mentioned, that I think especially in a democracy, the rules are for everybody. They are made for everybody, so it's not allowed that any institution doesn't respect the rules. In the criminal code of Germany, it's written that it's not allowed to tap somebody without the permission of the judge. Fortunately, it's written in the criminal code of Germany, so if it's not respected, then I think an investigation is necessary, and it took a very long time that the public prosecutor of Germany started this, and he started it only in the case of Angela Merkel, and not in the case of all the other people living in Germany.BG: That doesn't surprise me because — (Applause) — because of the story you told. Seen from the outside, I live outside of Germany, and I expected the Germans to react much more strongly, immediately. And instead, the reaction really came only when Chancellor Merkel was revealed as being wiretapped. Why so?HK: I take it as a good sign, because people feel secure in this democracy. They aren't afraid that they will be arrested, and if you leave this hall after the conference, nobody has to be afraid that the secret police is standing out and is arresting you. So that's a good sign, I think. People are not really scared, as they could be. But of course, I think, the institutions are responsible to stop illegal actions in Germany or wherever they happen.BG: A personal question, and this is the last one. There has been a debate in Germany about granting asylum to Edward Snowden. Would you be in favor or against?HK: Oh, that's a difficult question, but if you ask me, and if I answer honestly, I would give him the asylum, because I think it was really brave what he did, and he destroyed his whole life and his family and everything. So I think, for these people, we should do something, and especially if you see the German history, where so many people had to escape and they asked for asylum in other countries and they didn't get it, so it would be a good sign to give him asylum.(Applause)BG: Hubertus, thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/hubertus_knabe_the_dark_secrets_of_a_surveillance_state
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"Take a look at this drawing. Can you tell what it is? I'm a molecular biologist by training, and I've seen a lot of these kinds of drawings. They're usually referred to as a model figure, a drawing that shows how we think a cellular or molecular process occurs. This particular drawing is of a process called clathrin-mediated endocytosis. It's a process by which a molecule can get from the outside of the cell to the inside by getting captured in a bubble or a vesicle that then gets internalized by the cell. There's a problem with this drawing, though, and it's mainly in what it doesn't show. From lots of experiments, from lots of different scientists, we know a lot about what these molecules look like, how they move around in the cell, and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment.So in collaboration with a clathrin expert Tomas Kirchhausen, we decided to create a new kind of model figure that showed all of that. So we start outside of the cell. Now we're looking inside. Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes. Through connections with a membrane, clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble, or a vesicle, that's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell. Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle, making it separate from the rest of the membrane, and now clathrin is basically done with its job, and so proteins are coming in now — we've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage. And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again.These processes are too small to be seen directly, even with the best microscopes, so animations like this provide a really powerful way of visualizing a hypothesis.Here's another illustration, and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells. And again, this is a vast oversimplification and doesn't begin to show what we actually know about these processes.You might be surprised to know that these simple drawings are the only way that most biologists visualize their molecular hypotheses. Why? Because creating movies of processes as we think they actually occur is really hard. I spent months in Hollywood learning 3D animation software, and I spend months on each animation, and that's just time that most researchers can't afford. The payoffs can be huge, though. Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy. And I'm working on a new project now called ""The Science of HIV"" where I'll be animating the entire life cycle of the HIV virus as accurately as possible and all in molecular detail. The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades, data on what this virus looks like, how it's able to infect cells in our body, and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection.Over the years, I found that animations aren't just useful for communicating an idea, but they're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis. Biologists for the most part are still using a paper and pencil to visualize the processes they study, and with the data we have now, that's just not good enough anymore. The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas. One researcher I worked with who works on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases came up with experiments that were related directly to the animation that she and I worked on together, and in this way, animation can feed back into the research process.I believe that animation can change biology. It can change the way that we communicate with one another, how we explore our data and how we teach our students. But for that change to happen, we need more researchers creating animations, and toward that end, I brought together a team of biologists, animators and programmers to create a new, free, open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations. From our testing, we've found that it only takes 15 minutes for a biologist who has never touched animation software before to create her first molecular animation of her own hypothesis. We're also building an online database where anyone can view, download and contribute their own animations. We're really excited to announce that the beta version of the molecular animation software toolkit will be available for download today. We are really excited to see what biologists will create with it and what new insights they're able to gain from finally being able to animate their own model figures.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/janet_iwasa_how_animations_can_help_scientists_test_a_hypothesis
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"I didn't know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing. But when I was told that the topic was language, I felt that I had to speak about something for a moment.I have a problem. It's not the worst thing in the world. I'm fine. I'm not on fire. I know that other people in the world have far worse things to deal with, but for me, language and music are inextricably linked through this one thing.And the thing is that I have a stutter. It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage. One would assume that I'm comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here, speaking to you guys. But the truth is that I've spent my life up until this point and including this point, living in mortal dread of public speaking. Public singing, whole different thing. (Laughter) But we'll get to that in a moment. I've never really talked about it before so explicitly. I think that that's because I've always lived in hope that when I was a grown-up, I wouldn't have one. I sort of lived with this idea that when I'm grown, I'll have learned to speak French, and when I'm grown, I'll learn how to manage my money, and when I'm grown, I won't have a stutter, and then I'll be able to public speak and maybe be the prime minister and anything's possible and, you know. (Laughter) So I can talk about it now because I've reached this point, where — I mean, I'm 28. I'm pretty sure that I'm grown now. (Laughter) And I'm an adult woman who spends her life as a performer, with a speech impediment. So, I might as well come clean about it.There are some interesting angles to having a stutter. For me, the worst thing that can happen is meeting another stutterer. (Laughter) This happened to me in Hamburg, when this guy, we met and he said, ""Hello, m-m-m-my name is Joe,"" and I said, ""Oh, hello, m-m-m-my name is Meg."" Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him. (Laughter)People think I'm drunk all the time. (Laughter)People think that I've forgotten their name when I hesitate before saying it. And it is a very weird thing, because proper nouns are the worst. If I'm going to use the word ""Wednesday"" in a sentence, and I'm coming up to the word, and I can feel that I'm going to stutter or something, I can change the word to ""tomorrow,"" or ""the day after Tuesday,"" or something else. It's clunky, but you can get away with it, because over time I've developed this loophole method of using speech where right at the last minute you change the thing and you trick your brain. But with people's names, you can't change them. (Laughter) When I was singing a lot of jazz, I worked a lot with a pianist whose name was Steve. As you can probably gather, S's and T's, together or independently, are my kryptonite. But I would have to introduce the band over this rolling vamp, and when I got around to Steve, I'd often find myself stuck on the ""St."" And it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable  and it totally kills the vibe. So after a few instances of this, Steve happily became ""Seve,"" and we got through it that way. (Laughter)I've had a lot of therapy, and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that's called smooth speech, which is where you almost sing everything that you say. You kind of join everything together in this very singsong, kindergarten teacher way, and it makes you sound very serene, like you've had lots of Valium, and everything is calm. (Laughter) That's not actually me. And I do use that. I do. I use it when I have to be on panel shows, or when I have to do radio interviews, when the economy of airtime is paramount. (Laughter) I get through it that way for my job. But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real, that feels often like cheating.Which is why before I sing, I wanted to tell you what singing means to me. It's more than making nice sounds, and it's more than making nice songs. It's more than feeling known, or understood. It's more than making you feel the things that I feel. It's not about mythology, or mythologizing myself to you. Somehow, through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain, it's impossible to stutter when you sing. And when I was younger, that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me, singing, so I did it a lot. And that's why I'm here today.(Applause)Thank you.Singing for me is sweet relief. It is the only time when I feel fluent. It is the only time when what comes out of my mouth is comprehensively exactly what I intended. (Laughter) So I know that this is a TED Talk, but now i'm going to TED sing. This is a song that I wrote last year.Thank you very much. Thank you.(Applause)(Piano)♪ I would be a beauty ♪♪ but my nose ♪♪ is slightly too big ♪♪ for my face ♪♪ And I would be a dreamer ♪♪ but my dream ♪♪ is slightly too big ♪♪ for this space ♪♪ And I would be an angel ♪♪ but my halo ♪♪ it pales in the glow ♪♪ of your grace ♪♪ And I would be a joker ♪♪ but that card looks silly when you play ♪♪ your ace ♪♪ I'd like to know ♪♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪♪ And I'd like to know ♪♪ know if you can tell ♪♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪♪ That I cannot choose to or not let go ♪♪ And I'd stay forever ♪♪ but my home ♪♪ is slightly too far ♪♪ from this place ♪♪ And I swear I tried to ♪♪ slow it down ♪♪ when I am walking at your pace ♪♪ But all I could think ♪♪ idling through the cities ♪♪ do I look pretty in the rain? ♪♪ And I don't know how someone ♪♪ quite so lovely ♪♪ makes me feel ugly ♪♪ So much shame ♪♪ And I'd like to know ♪♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪♪ And I'd like to know ♪♪ know if you can tell ♪♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪♪ that I cannot choose to or not let go ♪Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_washington_why_i_live_in_mortal_dread_of_public_speaking
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"As a kid I always loved information that I could get from data and the stories that could be told with numbers. I remember, growing up, I'd be frustrated at how my own parents would lie to me using numbers. ""Talithia, if I've told you once  I've told you a thousand times."" No dad, you've only told me 17 times and twice it wasn't my fault. (Laughter)I think that is one of the reasons I got a Ph.D. in statistics. I always wanted to know, what are people trying to hide with numbers? As a statistician, I want people to show me the data so I can decide for myself. Donald and I were pregnant with our third child and we were at about 41 and a half weeks, what some of you may refer to as being overdue. Statisticians, we call that being within the 95 percent confidence interval. (Laughter) And at this point in the process we had to come in every couple of days to do a stress test on the baby, and this is just routine, it tests whether or not the baby  is feeling any type of undue stress. And you are rarely, if ever, seen by your actual doctor, just whoever happens to be  working at the hospital that day. So we go in for a stress test and after 20 minutes the doctor comes out and he says, ""Your baby is under stress, we need to induce you."" Now, as a statistician, what's my response? Show me the data! So then he proceeds to tell us the baby's heart rate trace went from 18 minutes, the baby's heart rate was in the normal zone and for two minutes it was in what appeared to be my heart rate zone and I said, ""Is it possible that maybe this was my heart rate? I was moving around a little bit, it's hard to lay still on your back, 41 weeks pregnant for 20 minutes. Maybe it was shifting around."" He said, ""Well, we don't want to take any chances."" I said okay. I said, ""What if I was at 36 weeks with this same data? Would your decision be to induce?"" ""Well, no, I would wait until you were at least 38 weeks, but you are almost 42, there is no reason to leave that baby inside, let's get you a room."" I said, ""Well, why don't we just do it again? We can collect more data. I can try to be really still for 20 minutes. We can average the two and see what that means. (Laughter) And he goes, ""Ma'am, I just don't want you to have a miscarriage."" That makes three of us. And then he says, ""Your chances of having a miscarriage double when you go past your due date. Let's get you a room."" Wow. So now as a statistician, what's my response? Show me the data! Dude, you're talking chances, I do chances all day long, tell me all about chances. Let's talk chances. (Laughter) Let's talk chances.So I say, ""Okay, great. Do I go from a 30-percent  chance to a 60-percent chance? Where are we here with this miscarriage thing? And he goes, ""Not quite, but it doubles, and we really just want what's best for the baby."" Undaunted, I try a different angle. I said, ""Okay, out of 1,000 full-term pregnant women, how many of them are going to miscarry just before their due date? And then he looks at me and looks at Donald, and he goes, about one in 1,000. I said, ""Okay, so of those 1,000 women, how many are going to miscarry just after their due date?""""About two."" (Laughter) I said, ""Okay, so you are telling me that my chances go from a 0.1-percent chance to a 0.2-percent chance.""Okay, so at this point the data is not convincing us that we need to be induced, and so then we proceed to have a conversation about how inductions lead to a higher rate of Cesarean sections, and if at all  possible we'd like to avoid that. And then I said, ""And I really don't think my due date is accurate."" (Laughter) And so this really stunned him and he looked sort of puzzled and I said, ""You may not know this, but pregnancy due dates are calculated assuming that you have a standard 28-day cycle, and my cycle ranges — sometimes it's 27, sometimes it's up to 38 — and I have been collecting the data to prove it. (Laughter) And so we ended up leaving the hospital  that day without being induced. We actually had to sign a waiver  to walk out of the hospital. And I'm not advocating that you not listen to your doctors, because even with our first child, we were induced at 38 weeks; cervical fluid was low. I'm not anti-medical intervention. But why were confident to leave that day? Well, we had data that told a different story. We had been collecting data for six years. I had this temperature data, and it told a different story. In fact, we could probably pretty  accurately estimate conception. Yeah, that's a story you want to tell at your kid's wedding reception. (Laughter) I remember like it was yesterday. My temperature was a sizzling 97.8 degrees as I stared into your father's eyes. (Laughter) Oh, yeah. Twenty-two more years, we're telling that story. But we were confident to leave  because we had been collecting data. Now, what does that data look like? Here's a standard chart of a woman's waking body temperature during the course of a cycle. So from the beginning of the menstrual cycle till the beginning of the next. You'll see that the temperature is not random. Clearly there is a low pattern at the beginning of her cycle and then you see this jump and then a higher set of temperatures at the end of her cycle. So what's happening here? What is that data telling you? Well, ladies, at the beginning of our cycle, the hormone estrogen is dominant and that estrogen causes a suppression of your body temperature. And at ovulation, your body releases an egg and progesterone takes over, pro-gestation. And so your body heats up in anticipation of housing this new little fertilized egg. So why this temperature jump? Well, think about when a bird sits on her eggs. Why is she sitting on them? She wants to keep them warm, protect them and keep them warm. Ladies, this is exactly what our bodies do every month, they heat up in anticipation of keeping a new little life warm. And if nothing happens, if you are not pregnant, then estrogen takes back over and  that cycle starts all over again. But if you do get pregnant, sometimes you actually see another shift in your temperatures and it stays elevated for those whole nine months. That's why you see those pregnant  women just sweating and hot, because their temperatures are high. Here's a chart that we had about three or four years ago. We were really very excited about this chart. You'll see the low temperature level and then a shift and for about five days, that's about the time it takes for the egg to travel down the fallopian tube and implant, and then you see those temperatures  start to go up a little bit. And in fact, we had a second temperature shift, confirmed with a pregnancy test  that were indeed pregnant with our first child, very exciting. Until a couple of days later I saw some spotting and then I noticed heavy blood flow, and we had in fact had an early stage miscarriage. Had I not been taking my temperature I really would have just thought  my period was late that month, but we actually had data to show that we had miscarried this baby, and even though this data revealed a really unfortunate event in our lives, it was information that we could then take to our doctor. So if there was a fertility issue or some problem, I had data to show: Look, we got pregnant, our temperature shifted, we somehow lost this baby. What is it that we can do to help prevent this problem? And it's not just about temperatures and it's not just about fertility; we can use data about our bodies to tell us a lot of things.For instance, did you know that taking  your temperature can tell you a lot about the condition of your thyroid? So, your thyroid works a lot like  the thermostat in your house. There is an optimal temperature  that you want in your house; you set your thermostat. When it gets too cold in the house, your thermostat kicks in and says, ""Hey, we need to blow some heat around."" Or if it gets too hot, your thermostat registers, ""Turn the A.C. on. Cool us off."" That's exactly how your thyroid works in your body. Your thyroid tries to keep an optimal temperature for your body. If it gets too cold, your thyroid  says, ""Hey, we need to heat up."" If it gets too hot, your thyroid cools you down. But what happens when your  thyroid is not functioning well? When it doesn't function, then it shows up in your body temperatures, they tend to be lower than normal or very erratic. And so by collecting this data you can find out information about your thyroid.Now, what is it, if you had a thyroid  problem and you went to the doctor, your doctor would actually test the amount of thyroid stimulating hormone in your blood. Fine. But the problem with that test is it doesn't tell you how active the hormone is in your body. So you might have a lot of hormone present, but it might not be actively working to regulate your body temperature. So just by collecting your temperature every day, you get information about the condition of your thyroid. So, what if you don't want to take  your temperature every day? I advocate that you do, but there are tons of other things you could take. You could take your blood pressure,  you could take your weight — yeah, who's excited about taking their weight every day? (Laughter)Early on in our marriage, Donald had a stuffy nose and he had been taking a slew of medications to try to relieve his stuffy nose, to no avail. And so, that night he comes and  he wakes me up and he says, ""Honey, I can't breath out of my nose."" And I roll over and I look, and I said,  ""Well, can you breath out of your mouth?"" (Laughter) And he goes, ""Yes, but I can't breath out of my nose!"" And so like any good wife, I rush him to the emergency room at 2 o'clock in the morning. And the whole time I'm driving and I'm thinking, you can't die on me now. We just got married, people will think I killed you! (Laughter) And so, we get to the emergency  room, and the nurse sees us, and he can't breath out of his nose, and so she brings us to the back and the doctor says, ""What seems to be the problem?"" and  he goes, ""I can't breath out of my nose."" And he said, ""You can't breath out of your nose? No, but he can breath out of his mouth. (Laughter) He takes a step back and he looks at both of us and he says ""Sir, I think I know the problem. You're having a heart attack. I'm going to order an EKG and a CAT scan for you immediately."" And we are thinking, no, no, no. It's not a heart attack. He can breathe, just out of his mouth. No, no, no, no, no. And so we go back and forth with this doctor because we think this is the incorrect diagnosis, and he's like, ""No really, it'll be fine, just calm down."" And I'm thinking, how do you calm down?  But I don't think he's having a heart attack. And so fortunately for us, this  doctor was at the end of the shift. So this new doctor comes in, he sees us clearly distraught, with a husband who can't breath out of his nose. (Laughter) And he starts asking us questions. He says, ""Well, do you two exercise?"" We ride our bikes, we go to the gym occasionally. (Laughter) We move around. And he says, ""What were you doing  just before you came here?"" I'm thinking, I was sleeping, honestly. But okay, what was Donald doing just before? So Donald goes into this slew  of medications he was taking. He lists, ""I took this decongestant  and then I took this nasal spray,"" and then all of a sudden a lightbulb goes off and he says, ""Oh! You should never mix this  decongestant with this nasal spray. Clogs you up every time. Here, take this one instead."" He gives us a prescription. We're looking at each other, and I looked at the doctor, and I said, ""Why is it that it seems like you were able to accurately diagnose his condition, but this previous doctor wanted to order an EKG and a CAT scan?"" And he looks at us and says, ""Well, when a 350-pound man walks in the  emergency room and says he can't breath, you assume he's having a heart attack and you ask questions later."" Now, emergency room doctors are  trained to make decisions quickly, but not always accurately. And so had we had some information about our heart health to share with him, maybe we would have gotten a  better diagnosis the first time.I want you to consider the following chart, of systolic blood pressure measurements from October 2010 to July 2012. You'll see that these measurements start in the prehypertension/hypertension zone, but over about the course of a year and a half they move into the normal zone. This is about the heart rate of a healthy 16-year-old. What story is this data telling you? Obviously it's the data from someone who's made a drastic transformation, and fortunately for us, that person  happens to be here today. So that 350-pound guy that walked  into the emergency room with me is now an even sexier and healthier 225-pound guy, and that's his blood pressure trace. So over the course of that year and a half Donald's eating changed and our exercise regimen changed, and his heart rate responded, his blood pressure responded to that change that he made in his body.So what's the take-home message that I want you to leave with today? By taking ownership of your data just like we've done, just by taking this daily measurements about yourself, you become the expert on your body. You become the authority. It's not hard to do. You don't have to have a Ph.D. in statistics to be an expert in yourself. You don't have to have a medical degree to be your body's expert. Medical doctors, they're experts on the population, but you are the expert on yourself. And so when two of you come together, when two experts come together, the two of you are able to make a better decision than just your doctor alone. Now that you understand the power of information that you can get through personal data collection, I'd like you all to stand and raise your right hand. (Laughter) Yes, get it up. I challenge you to take ownership of your data. And today, I hereby confer upon you a TEDx associate's degree in elementary statistics with a concentration in time-dependent data analysis with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. And so the next time you are in your doctor's office, as newly inducted statisticians, what should always be your response? Audience: Show me the data!  Talithia Williams: I can't hear you! Audience: Show me the data! TW: One more time! Audience: Show me the data! TW: Show me the data. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/talithia_williams_own_your_body_s_data
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"You probably don't know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat. Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. I tell you this — (Laughter) — unbelievable, right?I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all. I can't write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship.So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six.You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks.So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It's not a matter of if, it's when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats.I know I must sound like some liberal do-gooder. I'm not. I'm not making a moral argument that economic inequality is wrong. What I am arguing is that rising economic inequality is stupid and ultimately self-defeating. Rising inequality doesn't just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it's also terrible for business too. So the model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time, he didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made. Ford intuited what we now know is true, that an economy is best understood as an ecosystem and characterized by the same kinds of feedback loops you find in a natural ecosystem, a feedback loop between customers and businesses. Raising wages increases demand, which increases hiring, which in turn increases wages and demand and profits, and that virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity is precisely what is missing from today's economic recovery.And this is why we need to put behind us the trickle-down policies that so dominate both political parties and embrace something I call middle-out economics. Middle-out economics rejects the neoclassical economic idea that economies are efficient, linear, mechanistic, that they tend towards equilibrium and fairness, and instead embraces the 21st-century idea that economies are complex, adaptive, ecosystemic, that they tend away from equilibrium and toward inequality, that they're not efficient at all but are effective if well managed. This 21st-century perspective allows you to clearly see that capitalism does not work by [efficiently] allocating existing resources. It works by [efficiently] creating new solutions to human problems. The genius of capitalism is that it is an evolutionary solution-finding system. It rewards people for solving other people's problems. The difference between a poor society and a rich society, obviously, is the degree to which that society has generated solutions in the form of products for its citizens. The sum of the solutions that we have in our society really is our prosperity, and this explains why companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and the entrepreneurs who created those companies have contributed so much to our nation's prosperity.This 21st-century perspective also makes clear that what we think of as economic growth is best understood as the rate at which we solve problems. But that rate is totally dependent upon how many problem solvers — diverse, able problem solvers — we have, and thus how many of our fellow citizens actively participate, both as entrepreneurs who can offer solutions, and as customers who consume them. But this maximizing participation thing doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by itself. It requires effort and investment, which is why all highly prosperous capitalist democracies are characterized by massive investments in the middle class and the infrastructure that they depend on.We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us, this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? I actually bought two pairs of these pants, what my partner Mike calls my manager pants. I could have bought 2,000 pairs, but what would I do with them? (Laughter) How many haircuts can I get? How often can I go out to dinner? No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that. There's nothing to be done, my plutocrat friends might say. Henry Ford was in a different time. Maybe we can't do some things. Maybe we can do some things. June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called ""The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage."" The good people at Forbes magazine, among my biggest admirers, called it ""Nick Hanauer's near-insane proposal."" And yet, just 350 days after that article was published, Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray signed into law an ordinance raising the minimum wage in Seattle to 15 dollars an hour, more than double what the prevailing federal $7.25 rate is. How did this happen, reasonable people might ask. It happened because a group of us reminded the middle class that they are the source of growth and prosperity in capitalist economies. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more employees. We reminded them that when businesses pay workers a living wage, taxpayers are relieved of the burden of funding the poverty programs like food stamps and medical assistance and rent assistance that those workers need. We reminded them that low-wage workers make terrible taxpayers, and that when you raise the minimum wage for all businesses, all businesses benefit yet all can compete.Now the orthodox reaction, of course, is raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Right? Your politician's always echoing that trickle-down idea by saying things like, ""Well, if you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it.""Are you sure? Because there's some contravening evidence. Since 1980, the wages of CEOs in our country have gone from about 30 times the median wage to 500 times. That's raising the price of employment. And yet, to my knowledge, I have never seen a company outsource its CEO's job, automate their job, export the job to China. In fact, we appear to be employing more CEOs and senior managers than ever before. So too for technology workers and financial services workers, who earn multiples of the median wage and yet we employ more and more of them, so clearly you can raise the price of employment and get more of it.I know that most people think that the $15 minimum wage is this insane, risky economic experiment. We disagree. We believe that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is actually the continuation of a logical economic policy. It is allowing our city to kick your city's ass. Because, you see, Washington state already has the highest minimum wage of any state in the nation. We pay all workers $9.32, which is almost 30 percent more than the federal minimum of 7.25, but crucially, 427 percent more than the federal tipped minimum of 2.13. If trickle-down thinkers were right, then Washington state should have massive unemployment. Seattle should be sliding into the ocean. And yet, Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the country. Washington state is generating small business jobs at a higher rate than any other major state in the nation. The restaurant business in Seattle? Booming. Why? Because the fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and need more workers. When restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford to eat in restaurants, that's not bad for the restaurant business. That's good for it, despite what some restaurateurs may tell you.Is it more complicated than I'm making out? Of course it is. There are a lot of dynamics at play. But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense. So can we please dispense with this rhetoric that says that rich guys like me and my plutocrat friends made our country? We plutocrats know, even if we don't like to admit it in public, that if we had been born somewhere else, not here in the United States, we might very well be just some dude standing barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. It's not that they don't have good entrepreneurs in other places, even very, very poor places. It's just that that's all that those entrepreneurs' customers can afford.So here's an idea for a new kind of economics, a new kind of politics that I call new capitalism. Let's acknowledge that capitalism beats the alternatives, but also that the more people we include, both as entrepreneurs and as customers, the better it works. Let's by all means shrink the size of government, but not by slashing the poverty programs, but by ensuring that workers are paid enough so that they actually don't need those programs. Let's invest enough in the middle class to make our economy fairer and more inclusive, and by fairer, more truly competitive, and by more truly competitive, more able to generate the solutions to human problems that are the true drivers of growth and prosperity. Capitalism is the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity in human societies, if it is well managed, but capitalism, because of the fundamental multiplicative dynamics of complex systems, tends towards, inexorably, inequality, concentration and collapse. The work of democracies is to maximize the inclusion of the many in order to create prosperity, not to enable the few to accumulate money. Government does create prosperity and growth, by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive. Balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism. It's essential to it. Programs like a reasonable minimum wage, affordable healthcare, paid sick leave, and the progressive taxation necessary to pay for the important infrastructure necessary for the middle class like education, R and D, these are indispensable tools shrewd capitalists should embrace to drive growth, because no one benefits from it like us.Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encode our social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone: like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. Today, we have trickle-down economics. How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is. We plutocrats need to see that the United States of America made us, not the other way around; that a thriving middle class is the source of prosperity in capitalist economies, not a consequence of it. And we should never forget that even the best of us in the worst of circumstances are barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit.Fellow plutocrats, I think it may be time for us to recommit to our country, to commit to a new kind of capitalism which is both more inclusive and more effective, a capitalism that will ensure that America's economy remains the most dynamic and prosperous in the world. Let's secure the future for ourselves, our children and their children. Or alternatively, we could do nothing, hide in our gated communities and private schools, enjoy our planes and yachts — they're fun — and wait for the pitchforks.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming
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"We're seen as the organization that is the bucket for failed social policy. I can't define who comes to us or how long they stay. We get the people for whom nothing else has worked, people who have fallen through all of the other social safety nets. They can't contain them, so we must. That's our job: contain them, control them.Over the years, as a prison system, as a nation, and as a society, we've become very good at that, but that shouldn't make you happy. Today we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. We have more black men in prison today than were under slavery in 1850. We house the parents of almost three million of our community's children, and we've become the new asylum, the largest mental health provider in this nation. When we lock someone up, that is no small thing. And yet, we are called the Department of Corrections. Today I want to talk about changing the way we think about corrections. I believe, and my experience tells me, that when we change the way we think, we create new possibilities, or futures, and prisons need a different future.I've spent my entire career in corrections, over 30 years. I followed my dad into this field. He was a Vietnam veteran. Corrections suited him. He was strong, steady, disciplined. I was not so much any of those things, and I'm sure that worried him about me. Eventually I decided, if I was going to end up in prison, I'd better end up on the right side of the bars, so I thought I'd check it out, take a tour of the place my dad worked, the McNeil Island Penitentiary.Now this was the early '80s, and prisons weren't quite what you see on TV or in the movies. In many ways, it was worse. I walked into a cell house that was five tiers high. There were eight men to a cell. there were 550 men in that living unit. And just in case you wondered, they shared one toilet in those small confines. An officer put a key in a lockbox, and hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. Hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. I walked away as fast as I could.Eventually I went back and I started as an officer there. My job was to run one of those cell blocks and to control those hundreds of men. When I went to work at our receptions center, I could actually hear the inmates  roiling from the parking lot, shaking cell doors, yelling, tearing up their cells. Take hundreds of volatile people and lock them up, and what you get is chaos. Contain and control — that was our job.One way we learned to do this more effectively was a new type of housing unit called the Intensive Management Unit, IMU, a modern version of a ""hole."" We put inmates in cells behind solid steel doors with cuff ports so we could restrain them and feed them. Guess what? It got quieter. Disturbances died down in the general population. Places became safer because those inmates who were most violent or disruptive could now be isolated. But isolation isn't good. Deprive people of social contact and they deteriorate. It was hard getting them out of IMU, for them and for us. Even in prison, it's no small thing to lock someone up.My next assignment was to one of the state's deep-end prisons where some of our more violent or disruptive inmates are housed. By then, the industry had advanced a lot, and we had different tools and techniques to manage disruptive behavior. We had beanbag guns and pepper spray and plexiglass shields, flash bangs, emergency response teams. We met violence with force and chaos with chaos. We were pretty good at putting out fires.While I was there, I met two experienced correctional workers who were also researchers, an anthropologist and a sociologist. One day, one of them commented to me and said, ""You know, you're pretty good at putting out fires. Have you ever thought about how to prevent them?"" I was patient with them, explaining our brute force approach to making prisons safer. They were patient with me. Out of those conversations grew some new ideas and we started some small experiments. First, we started training our officers in teams rather than sending them one or two at a time to the state training academy. Instead of four weeks of training, we gave them 10. Then we experimented with an apprenticeship model where we paired new staff with veteran staff. They both got better at the work. Second, we added verbal de-escalation skills into the training continuum and made it part of the use of force continuum. It was the non-force use of force. And then we did something even more radical. We trained the inmates on those same skills. We changed the skill set, reducing violence, not just responding to it.Third, when we expanded our facility,  we tried a new type of design. Now the biggest and most controversial component of this design, of course, was the toilet. There were no toilets. Now that might not sound significant to you here today, but at the time, it was huge. No one had ever heard of a cell without a toilet. We all thought it was dangerous and crazy. Even eight men to a cell had a toilet. That small detail changed the way we worked. Inmates and staff started interacting more often and openly and developing a rapport. It was easier to detect conflict and intervene before it escalated. The unit was cleaner, quieter, safer and more humane. This was more effective at keeping the peace than any intimidation technique I'd seen to that point. Interacting changes the way you behave, both for the officer and the inmate. We changed the environment and we changed the behavior.Now, just in case I hadn't learned this lesson, they assigned me to headquarters next, and that's where I ran straight up against system change. Now, many things work against system change: politics and politicians, bills and laws, courts and lawsuits, internal politics. System change is difficult and slow, and oftentimes it doesn't take you where you want to go. It's no small thing to change a prison system. So what I did do is I reflected on my earlier experiences and I remembered that when we interacted with offenders, the heat went down. When we changed the environment, the behavior changed. And these were not huge system changes. These were small changes, and these changes created new possibilities.So next, I got reassigned as superintendent of a small prison. And at the same time, I was working on my degree at the Evergreen State College. I interacted with a lot of people who were not like me, people who had different ideas and came from different backgrounds. One of them was a rainforest ecologist. She looked at my small prison and what she saw was a laboratory. We talked and discovered how prisons and inmates could actually help advance science by helping them complete projects they couldn't complete on their own, like repopulating endangered species: frogs, butterflies, endangered prairie plants. At the same time, we found ways to make our operation more efficient through the addition of solar power, rainwater catchment, organic gardening, recycling. This initiative has led to many projects that have had huge system-wide impact, not just in our system, but in  other state systems as well, small experiments making a big difference to science, to the community. The way we think about our work changes our work. The project just made my job more interesting and exciting. I was excited. Staff were excited. Officers were excited. Inmates were excited. They were inspired. Everybody wanted to be part of this. They were making a contribution, a difference, one they thought was meaningful and important.Let me be clear on what's going on here, though. Inmates are highly adaptive. They have to be. Oftentimes, they know more about our own systems than the people who run them. And they're here for a reason. I don't see my job as to punish them or forgive them, but I do think they can have decent and meaningful lives even in prison. So that was the question: Could inmates live decent and meaningful lives, and if so, what difference would that make? So I took that question back to the deep end, where some of our most violent offenders are housed. Remember, IMUs are for punishment. You don't get perks there, like programming. That was how we thought. But then we started to realize that if any inmates needed programming, it was these particular inmates. In fact, they needed intensive programming. So we changed our thinking 180 degrees, and we started looking for new possibilities. What we found was a new kind of chair. Instead of using the chair for punishment, we put it in classrooms. Okay, we didn't forget our responsibility to control, but now inmates could interact safely, face-to-face with other inmates and staff, and because control was no longer an issue, everybody could focus on other things, like learning. Behavior changed. We changed our thinking, and we changed  what was possible, and this gives me hope.Now, I can't tell you that any of this stuff will work. What I can tell you, though, it is working. Our prisons are getting safer for both staff and inmates, and when our prisons are safe, we can put our energies into a lot more than just controlling. Reducing recidivism may be our ultimate goal, but it's not our only goal. To be honest with you, preventing crime takes so much more from so many more people and institutions. If we rely on just prisons to reduce crime, I'm afraid we'll never get there. But prisons can do some things we never thought they could do. Prisons can be the source of innovation and sustainability, repopulating endangered species and environmental restoration. Inmates can be scientists and beekeepers, dog rescuers. Prisons can be the source of meaningful work and opportunity for staff and the inmates who live there. We can contain and control and provide humane environments. These are not opposing qualities.We can't wait 10 to 20 years to find out if this is worth doing. Our strategy is not massive system change. Our strategy is hundreds of small changes that take place in days or months, not years. We need more small pilots where we learn as we go, pilots that change the range of possibility. We need new and better ways to measure impacts on engagement, on interaction, on safe environments. We need more opportunities to participate in and contribute to our communities, your communities. Prisons need to be secure, yes, safe, yes. We can do that. Prisons need to provide humane environments where people can participate, contribute, and learn meaningful lives. We're learning how to do that.That's why I'm hopeful. We don't have to stay stuck in old ideas about prison. We can define that. We can create that. And when we do that thoughtfully and with humanity, prisons can be more than the bucket for failed social policy. Maybe finally, we will earn our title: a department of corrections.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pacholke_how_prisons_can_help_inmates_live_meaningful_lives
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"I'm a teacher and a practitioner of civics in America. Now, I will kindly ask those of you who have just fallen asleep to please wake up. (Laughter) Why is it that the very word ""civics"" has such a soporific,  even a narcoleptic effect on us? I think it's because the very  word signifies something exceedingly virtuous,  exceedingly important, and exceedingly boring. Well, I think it's the responsibility of people like us, people who show up for gatherings like this in person or online, in any way we can, to make civics sexy again, as sexy as it was during the American Revolution, as sexy as it was during the Civil Rights Movement. And I believe the way we make civics sexy again is to make explicitly about the teaching of power. The way we do that, I believe, is at the level of the city.This is what I want to talk about today, and I want to start by defining some terms and then I want to describe the scale of the problem I think we face and then suggest the ways that I believe cities can be the seat of the solution. So let me start with some definitions. By civics, I simply mean the art of being a pro-social, problem-solving contributor in a self-governing community. Civics is the art of citizenship, what Bill Gates Sr. calls simply showing up for life, and it encompasses three things: a foundation of values, an understanding of the systems that make the world go round, and a set of skills that allow you to pursue goals and to have others join in that pursuit.And that brings me to my definition of power, which is simply this: the capacity to make others do what you would have them do. It sounds menacing, doesn't it? We don't like to talk about power. We find it scary. We find it somehow evil. We feel uncomfortable naming it. In the culture and mythology of democracy, power resides with the people. Period. End of story. Any further inquiry not necessary and not really that welcome. Power has a negative moral valence. It sounds Machiavellian inherently. It seems inherently evil. But in fact power is no more inherently good or evil than fire or physics. It just is. And power governs how any form of government operates, whether a democracy or a dictatorship. And the problem we face today, here in America in particular, but all around the world, is that far too many people  are profoundly illiterate in power — what it is, who has it, how it operates, how it flows, what part of it is visible,  what part of it is not, why some people have it,  why that's compounded. And as a result of this illiteracy, those few who do understand how power operates in civic life, those who understand how a bill becomes a law, yes, but also how a friendship  becomes a subsidy, or how a bias becomes a policy, or how a slogan becomes a movement, the people who understand those things wield disproportionate influence, and they're perfectly happy to fill the vacuum created by the ignorance of the great majority.This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the ""Don't Tread on Me"" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, ""Occupy Wall Street,"" and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate alike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power.As a result of all of this creeping fatalism in public life, we here, particularly in America today, have depressingly low levels of civic knowledge, civic engagement, participation, awareness. The whole business of politics has been effectively subcontracted out to a band of professionals, money people, outreach people, message people, research people. The rest of us are meant to feel like amateurs in the sense of suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. We begin to opt out.Well, this problem, this challenge, is a thing that we must now confront, and I believe that when you have this kind of disengagement, this willful ignorance, it becomes both a cause and a consequence of this concentration of opportunity of wealth and clout that I was describing a moment ago, this profound civic inequality. This is why it is so important in our time right now to reimagine civics as the teaching of power. Perhaps it's never been more important at any time in our lifetimes. If people don't learn power, people don't wake up, and if they don't wake up, they get left out.Now, part of the art of practicing power means being awake and having a voice, but it also is about having an arena where you can plausibly practice deciding. All of civics boils down to the simple question of who decides, and you have to play that out in a place, in an arena.And this brings me to the third point that I want to make today, which is simply that there is no better arena in our time for the practicing of power than the city. Think about the city where you live, where you're from. Think about a problem in the common life of your city. It can be something small, like where a street lamp should go, or something medium like which library should have its hours extended or cut, or maybe something bigger, like whether a dilapidated waterfront should be turned into a highway or a greenway, or whether all the businesses in your town should be required to pay a living wage. Think about the change that you want in your city, and then think about how you would get it, how you would make it happen. Take an inventory of all the forms of power that are at play in your city's situation: money, of course, people, yes, ideas, information, misinformation, the threat of force, the force of norms. All of these form of power are at play. Now think about how you would activate or perhaps neutralize these various forms of power.This is not some Game of Thrones empire-level set of questions. These are questions that play out in every single place on the planet. I'll just tell you quickly about two stories drawn from recent headlines. In Boulder, Colorado, voters not too long ago approved a process to replace the private power company, literally the power company, the electric company Xcel, with a publicly owned utility that would forego profits and attend far more to climate change. Well, Xcel fought back, and Xcel has now put in play a ballot measure that would undermine or undo this municipalization. And so the citizen activists in Boulder who have been pushing this now literally have to fight the power in order to fight for power. In Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama, there's an organization on campus called, kind of menacingly, the Machine, and it draws from largely white sororities and fraternities on campus, and for decades, the Machine has dominated student government elections. Well now, recently, the Machine has started to get involved in actual city politics, and they've engineered the election of a former Machine member, a young, pro-business recent graduate to the Tuscaloosa city school board. Now, as I say, these are just two examples drawn almost at random from the headlines. Every day, there are thousands more like them. And you may like or dislike the efforts I'm describing here in Boulder or in Tuscaloosa, but you cannot help but admire the power literacy of the players involved, their skill. You cannot help but reckon with and recognize the command they have of the elemental questions of civic power — what objective, what strategy, what tactics, what is the terrain, who are your enemies, who are your allies?Now I want you to return to thinking about that problem or that opportunity or that challenge in your city, and the thing it was that you want to fix or create in your city, and ask yourself, do you have command of these elemental questions of power? Could you put into practice effectively what it is that you know? This is the challenge and the opportunity for us.We live in a time right now where in spite of globalization or perhaps because of globalization, all citizenship is ever more resonantly, powerfully local. Indeed, power in our time is flowing ever faster to the city. Here in the United States, the national government has tied itself up in partisan knots. Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City,  to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control.And our task now is to accelerate this work. Our task now is to bring more and more people into the fold of this work. That's why my organization, Citizen University, has undertaken a project now to create an everyman's curriculum in civic power. And this curriculum starts with this triad that I described earlier of values, systems and skills. And what I'd like to do is to invite all of you to help create this curriculum with the stories and the experiences and the challenges that each of you lives and faces, to create something powerfully collective. And I want to invite you in particular to try a simple exercise drawn from the early frameworks of this curriculum. I want you to write a narrative, a narrative from the future of your city, and you can date it, set it out one year from now, five years from now, a decade from now, a generation from now, and write it as a case study looking back, looking back at the change that you wanted in your city, looking back at the cause that you were championing, and describing the ways that that change and that cause came, in fact, to succeed. Describe the values of your fellow citizens that you activated, and the sense of moral purpose that you were able to stir. Recount all the different ways that you engaged the systems of government, of the marketplace, of social institutions, of faith organizations, of the media. Catalog all the skills you had to deploy, how to negotiate, how to advocate, how to frame issues, how to navigate diversity in conflict, all those skills that enabled you to bring folks on board and to overcome resistance. What you'll be doing when you write that narrative is you'll be discovering how to read power, and in the process, how to write power. So share what you write, do you what you write, and then share what you do. I invite you to literally share the narratives that you create on our Facebook page for Citizen University. But even beyond that, it's in the conversations that we have today all around the world in the simultaneous gatherings that are happening on this topic at this moment, and to think about how we can become one another's teachers and students in power. If we do that, then together we can make civics sexy again. Together, we can democratize democracy and make it safe again for amateurs. Together, we can create a great network of city that will be the most powerful collective laboratory for self-government this planet has ever seen. We have the power to do that.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_liu_why_ordinary_people_need_to_understand_power
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"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, ""In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.""As a teacher, I've internalized this message. Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war. In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth. And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so.So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity. I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between. But one year, I gave up speaking. I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago. I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence. When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice. I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing. I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one. When the woman at the fundraising gala said ""I'm so proud of you. It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids,"" I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity.We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't. Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue. It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs. Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left. It is the sound after the noose is already tied. It is charring. It is chains. It is privilege. It is pain. There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you.I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision. I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance. I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human. I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of ""The Wire"" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids. So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition. Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/clint_smith_the_danger_of_silence
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"TED is 30. The world wide web is celebrating this month its 25th anniversary. So I've got a question for you. Let's talk about the journey, mainly about the future. Let's talk about the state. Let's talk about what sort of a web we want.So 25 years ago, then, I was working at CERN. I got permission in the end after about a year to basically do it as a side project. I wrote the code. I was I suppose the first user. There was a lot of concern that people didn't want to pick it up because it would be too complicated. A lot of persuasion, a lot of wonderful collaboration with other people, and bit by bit, it worked. It took off. It was pretty cool. And in fact, a few years later in 2000, five percent of the world population were using the world wide web. In 2007, seven years later, 17 percent. In 2008, we formed the World Wide Web Foundation partly to look at that and worry about that figure. And now here we are in 2014, and 40 percent of the world are using the world wide web, and counting. Obviously it's increasing.I want you to think about both sides of that. Okay, obviously to anybody here at TED, the first question you ask is, what can we do to get the other 60 percent on board as quickly as possible? Lots of important things. Obviously it's going to be around mobile. But also, I want you to think about the 40 percent, because if you're sitting there yourself sort of with a web-enabled life, you don't remember things anymore, you just look them up, then you may feel that it's been a success and we can all sit back. But in fact, yeah, it's been a success, there's lots of things, Khan Academy for crying out loud, there's Wikipedia, there's a huge number of free e-books that you can read online, lots of wonderful things for education, things in many areas. Online commerce has in some cases completely turned upside down the way commerce works altogether, made types of commerce available which weren't available at all before. Commerce has been almost universally affected. Government, not universally affected, but very affected, and on a good day, lots of open data, lots of e-government, so lots of things which are visible happening on the web.Also, lots of things which are less visible. The healthcare, late at night when they're worried about what sort of cancer somebody they care about might have, when they just talk across the Internet to somebody who they care about very much in another country. Those sorts of things are not, they're not out there, and in fact they've acquired a certain amount of privacy. So we cannot assume that part of the web, part of the deal with the web, is when I use the web, it's just a transparent, neutral medium. I can talk to you over it without worrying about what we in fact now know is happening, without worrying about the fact that not only will surveillance be happening but it'll be done by people who may abuse the data. So in fact, something we realized, we can't just use the web, we have to worry about what the underlying infrastructure of the whole thing, is it in fact of a quality that we need? We revel in the fact that we have this wonderful free speech. We can tweet, and oh, lots and lots of people can see our tweets, except when they can't, except when actually Twitter is blocked from their country, or in some way the way we try to express ourselves has put some information about the state of ourselves, the state of the country we live in, which isn't available to anybody else. So we must protest and make sure that censorship is cut down, that the web is opened up where there is censorship.We love the fact that the web is open. It allows us to talk. Anybody can talk to anybody. It doesn't matter who we are. And then we join these big social networking companies which are in fact effectively built as silos, so that it's much easier to talk to somebody in the same social network than it is to talk to somebody in a different one, so in fact we're sometimes limiting ourselves. And we also have, if you've read the book about the filter bubble, the filter bubble phenomenon is that we love to use machines which help us find stuff we like. So we love it when we're bathed in what things we like to click on, and so the machine automatically feeds us the stuff that we like and we end up with this rose-colored spectacles view of the world called a filter bubble. So here are some of the things which maybe threaten the social web we have.What sort of web do you want? I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces, as some countries have been suggesting they should do in reaction to recent surveillance. I want a web which has got, for example, is a really good basis for democracy. I want a web where I can use healthcare with privacy and where there's a lot of health data, clinical data is available to scientists to do research. I want a web where the other 60 percent get on board as fast as possible. I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innovation that when something nasty happens, some disaster strikes, that we can respond by building stuff to respond to it very quickly.So this is just some of the things that I want, from a big list, obviously it's longer. You have your list. I want us to use this 25th anniversary to think about what sort of a web we want. You can go to webat25.org and find some links. There are lots of sites where people have started to put together a Magna Carta, a bill of rights for the web. How about we do that? How about we decide, these are, in a way, becoming fundamental rights, the right to communicate with whom I want. What would be on your list for that Magna Carta? Let's crowdsource a Magna Carta for the web. Let's do that this year. Let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary to crowdsource a Magna Carta to the web. (Applause)Thank you. And do me a favor, will you? Fight for it for me. Okay? Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_a_magna_carta_for_the_web
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"I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture: the Fez River Rehabilitation Project.My hometown of Fez, Morocco, boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world, called the medina, nestled in a river valley. The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since the 1950s, as the population of the medina grew, basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed. One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River, which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city's very soul. In fact, one can witness the presence of the river's extensive water network all throughout the city, in places such as private and public fountains.Unfortunately, because of the pollution of the river, it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952. This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina. Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards. Actually, the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy. Then pollution takes its toll, mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning. At some point, I couldn't bear the desecration of the river, such an important part of my city, and I decided to take action, especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it.With clean water, suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible, and with luck and actually a lot of pushing, my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river. However, we were sneaky, and we proposed more: to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways, and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric, and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez. I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces.The first one is the Rcif Plaza, which sits actually right on top of the river, which you can see here in dotted lines. This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina, that has the largest pedestrian network in the world. And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here, right next to the plaza, you can see that the river looked like a river of trash. Instead, what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian, to cover it with recycled leather canopies, and to connect it to the banks of the river.The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks, and it used to be an illegal parking, and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina. The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur.As the project progressed and received several design awards, new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design. The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don't do. It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project: that is, to uncover the river, treat its water, and provide public spaces for all. We were actually very lucky, and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening. Like, you can see here in the Rcif Plaza. This is how it looked like about six years ago. This is how it looks like today. It's still under construction, but actually it is heavily used by the local population. And finally, this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed. This is the river, covered, used as a trash yard. Then after many years of work, the river with clean water, uncovered. And finally, you can see here the river when the project will be completed.So for sure, the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city, but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect, we have set up the core idea of the project into motion; that is, to transform the river from sewage to public space for all, thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aziza_chaouni_how_i_brought_a_river_and_my_city_back_to_life
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"When my first children's book was published in 2001, I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator, and when I was setting up my slide projector in the cafetorium, I looked across the room, and there she was: my old lunch lady. She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day. So I approached her to say hello, and I said, ""Hi, Jeannie! How are you?"" And she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said, ""Stephen Krosoczka?"" And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka, but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am, and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid. And she started telling me about her grandkids, and that blew my mind. My lunch lady had grandkids, and therefore kids, and therefore left school at the end of the day? I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons. I had never thought about any of that before.Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination, and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes, a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes, and the end of every book, they get the bad guy with their hairnet, and they proclaim, ""Justice is served!""(Laughter) (Applause)And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork. And I would notice as I would visit schools, the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way. And coast to coast, all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing: ""Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness."" Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time. But it meant the most to Jeannie. When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books. And two years after this photo was taken, she passed away, and I attended her wake, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there, because next to her casket was this painting, and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work, I had validated what she did.And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country: School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff. And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association, and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day. That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year.And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray. There is Ms. Brenda in California, who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss. There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day, and they were going without food over the summer, so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit, and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer.And kids made the most amazing projects. I knew they would. Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper. They took photos of their lunch lady's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers. And they made their own comics, starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies. And they made thank you pizzas, where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza.For me, I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies, because one woman said to me, she said, ""Before this day, I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school. I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here."" Another woman said to me, ""You know, what I got out of this is that what I do is important.""And of course what she does is important. What they all do is important. They're feeding our children every single day, and before a child can learn, their belly needs to be full, and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society.So I hope that you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff, and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be. A thank you can change a life. It changes the life of the person who receives it, and it changes the life of the person who expresses it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jarrett_krosoczka_why_lunch_ladies_are_heroes
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"Oliver was an extremely dashing, handsome, charming and largely unstable male that I completely lost my heart to.(Laughter)He was a Bernese mountain dog, and my ex-husband and I adopted him, and about six months in, we realized that he was a mess. He had such paralyzing separation anxiety that we couldn't leave him alone. Once, he jumped out of our third floor apartment. He ate fabric. He ate things, recyclables. He hunted flies that didn't exist. He suffered from hallucinations. He was diagnosed with a canine compulsive disorder and that's really just the tip of the iceberg.But like with humans, sometimes it's six months in before you realize that the person that you love has some issues. (Laughter) And most of us do not take the person we're dating back to the bar where we met them or give them back to the friend that introduced us, or sign them back up on Match.com. (Laughter) We love them anyway, and we stick to it, and that is what I did with my dog. And I was a — I'd studied biology. I have a Ph.D. in history of science from MIT, and had you asked me 10 years ago if a dog I loved, or just dogs generally, had emotions, I would have said yes, but I'm not sure that I would have told you that they can also wind up with an anxiety disorder, a Prozac prescription and a therapist. But then, I fell in love, and I realized that they can, and actually trying to help my own dog overcome his panic and his anxiety, it just changed my life. It cracked open my world. And I spent the last seven years, actually, looking into this topic of mental illness in other animals. Can they be mentally ill like people, and if so, what does it mean about us? And what I discovered is that I do believe they can suffer from mental illness, and actually looking and trying to identify mental illness in them often helps us be better friends to them and also can help us better understand ourselves.So let's talk about diagnosis for a minute. Many of us think that we can't know what another animal is thinking, and that is true, but any of you in relationships — at least this is my case — just because you ask someone that you're with or your parent or your child how they feel doesn't mean that they can tell you. They may not have words to explain what it is that they're feeling, and they may not know. It's actually a pretty recent phenomenon that we feel that we have to talk to someone to understand their emotional distress. Before the early 20th century, physicians often diagnosed emotional distress in their patients just by observation. It also turns out that thinking about mental illness in other animals isn't actually that much of a stretch. Most mental disorders in the United States are fear and anxiety disorders, and when you think about it, fear and anxiety are actually really extremely helpful animal emotions. Usually we feel fear and anxiety in situations that are dangerous, and once we feel them, we then are motivated to move away from whatever is dangerous. The problem is when we begin to feel fear and anxiety in situations that don't call for it. Mood disorders, too, may actually just be the unfortunate downside of being a feeling animal, and obsessive compulsive disorders also are often manifestations of a really healthy animal thing which is keeping yourself clean and groomed. This tips into the territory of mental illness when you do things like compulsively over-wash your hands or paws, or you develop a ritual that's so extreme that you can't sit down to a bowl of food unless you engage in that ritual.So for humans, we have the ""Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,"" which is basically an atlas of the currently agreed-upon mental disorders. In other animals, we have YouTube. (Laughter) This is just one search I did for ""OCD dog"" but I encourage all of you to look at ""OCD cat."" You will be shocked by what you see. I'm going to show you just a couple examples. This is an example of shadow-chasing. I know, and it's funny and in some ways it's cute. The issue, though, is that dogs can develop compulsions like this that they then engage in all day. So they won't go for a walk, they won't hang out with their friends, they won't eat. They'll develop fixations like chasing their tails compulsively.Here's an example of a cat named Gizmo. He looks like he's on a stakeout but he does this for many, many, many hours a day. He just sits there and he will paw and paw and paw at the screen. This is another example of what's considered a stereotypic behavior. This is a sun bear at the Oakland Zoo named Ting Ting. And if you just sort of happened upon this scene, you might think that Ting Ting is just playing with a stick, but Ting Ting does this all day, and if you pay close attention and if I showed you guys the full half-hour of this clip, you'd see that he does the exact same thing in the exact same order, and he spins the stick in the exact same way every time. Other super common behaviors that you may see, particularly in captive animals, are pacing stereotypies or swaying stereotypies, and actually, humans do this too, and in us, we'll sway, we'll move from side to side. Many of us do this, and sometimes it's an effort to soothe ourselves, and I think in other animals that is often the case too.But it's not just stereotypic behaviors that other animals engage in. This is Gigi. She's a gorilla that lives at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. She actually has a Harvard psychiatrist, and she's been treated for a mood disorder among other things. Many animals develop mood disorders. Lots of creatures — this horse is just one example — develop self-destructive behaviors. They'll gnaw on things or do other things that may also soothe them, even if they're self-destructive, which could be considered similar to the ways that some humans cut themselves.Plucking. Turns out, if you have fur or feathers or skin, you can pluck yourself compulsively, and some parrots actually have been studied to better understand trichotillomania, or compulsive plucking in humans, something that affects 20 million Americans right now. Lab rats pluck themselves too. In them, it's called barbering. Canine veterans of conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan are coming back with what's considered canine PTSD, and they're having a hard time reentering civilian life when they come back from deployments. They can be too scared to approach men with beards or to hop into cars.I want to be careful and be clear, though. I do not think that canine PTSD is the same as human PTSD. But I also do not think that my PTSD is like your PTSD, or that my anxiety or that my sadness is like yours. We are all different. We also all have very different susceptibilities. So two dogs, raised in the same household, exposed to the very same things, one may develop, say, a debilitating fear of motorcycles, or a phobia of the beep of the microwave, and another one is going to be just fine.So one thing that people ask me pretty frequently: Is this just an instance of humans driving other animals crazy? Or, is animal mental illness just a result of mistreatment or abuse? And it turns out we're actually so much more complicated than that.So one great thing that has happened to me is recently I published a book on this, and every day now that I open my email or when I go to a reading or even when I go to a cocktail party, people tell me their stories of the animals that they have met. And recently, I did a reading in California, and a woman raised her hand after the talk and she said, ""Dr. Braitman, I think my cat has PTSD.""And I said, ""Well, why? Tell me a little bit about it.""So, Ping is her cat. She was a rescue, and she used to live with an elderly man, and one day the man was vacuuming and he suffered a heart attack, and he died. A week later, Ping was discovered in the apartment alongside the body of her owner, and the vacuum had been running the entire time. For many months, up to I think two years after that incident, she was so scared she couldn't be in the house when anyone was cleaning. She was quite literally a scaredy cat. She would hide in the closet. She was un-self-confident and shaky, but with the loving support of her family, a lot of a time, and their patience, now, three years later, she's actually a happy, confident cat.Another story of trauma and recovery that I came across was actually a few years ago. I was in Thailand to do some research. I met a monkey named Boonlua, and when Boonlua was a baby, he was attacked by a pack of dogs, and they ripped off both of his legs and one arm, and Boonlua dragged himself to a monastery, where the monks took him in. They called in a veterinarian, who treated his wounds. Eventually, Boonlua wound up at an elephant facility, and the keepers really decided to take him under their wing, and they figured out what he liked, which, it turned out, was mint Mentos and Rhinoceros beetles and eggs. But they worried, because he was social, that he was lonely, and they didn't want to put him in with another monkey, because they thought with just one arm, he wouldn't be able to defend himself or even play. And so they gave him a rabbit, and Boonlua was immediately a different monkey. He was extremely happy to be with this rabbit. They groomed each other, they become close friends, and then the rabbit had bunnies, and Boonlua was even happier than he was before, and it had in a way given him a reason to wake up in the morning, and in fact it gave him such a reason to wake up that he decided not to sleep. He became extremely protective of these bunnies, and he stopped sleeping, and he would sort of nod off while trying to take care of them. In fact, he was so protective and so affectionate with these babies that the sanctuary eventually had to take them away from him because he was so protective, he was worried that their mother might hurt them. So after they were taken away, the sanctuary staff worried that he would fall into a depression, and so to avoid that, they gave him another rabbit friend. (Laughter) My official opinion is that he does not look depressed. (Laughter)So one thing that I would really like people to feel is that you really should feel empowered to make some assumptions about the creatures that you know well. So when it comes to your dog or your cat or maybe your one-armed monkey that you happen to know, if you think that they are traumatized or depressed, you're probably right. This is extremely anthropomorphic, or the assignation of human characteristics onto non-human animals or things. I don't think, though, that that's a problem. I don't think that we can not anthropomorphize. It's not as if you can take your human brain out of your head and put it in a jar and then use it to think about another animal thinking. We will always be one animal wondering about the emotional experience of another animal.So then the choice becomes, how do you anthropomorphize well? Or do you anthropomorphize poorly? And anthropomorphizing poorly is all too common. (Laughter) It may include dressing your corgis up and throwing them a wedding, or getting too close to exotic wildlife because you believe that you had a spiritual connection. There's all manner of things. Anthropomorphizing well, however, I believe is based on accepting our animal similarities with other species and using them to make assumptions that are informed about other  animals' minds and experiences, and there's actually an entire industry that is in some ways based on anthropomorphizing well, and that is the psychopharmaceutical industry.One in five Americans is currently taking a psychopharmaceutical drug, from the antidepressants and antianxiety medications to the antipsychotics. It turns out that we owe this entire psychopharmaceutical arsenal to other animals. These drugs were tested in non-human animals first, and not just for toxicity but for behavioral effects. The very popular antipsychotic Thorazine first relaxed rats before it relaxed people. The antianxiety medication Librium was given to cats selected for their meanness in the 1950s and made them into peaceable felines. And even antidepressants were first tested in rabbits.Today, however, we are not just giving these drugs to other animals as test subjects, but they're giving them these drugs as patients, both in ethical and much less ethical ways. SeaWorld gives mother orcas antianxiety medications when their calves are taken away. Many zoo gorillas have been given antipsychotics and antianxiety medications. But dogs like my own Oliver are given antidepressants and some antianxiety medications to keep them from jumping out of buildings or jumping into traffic. Just recently, actually, a study came out in ""Science"" that showed that even crawdads responded to antianxiety medication. It made them braver, less skittish, and more likely to explore their environment.It's hard to know how many animals are on these drugs, but I can tell you that the animal pharmaceutical industry is immense and growing, from seven billion dollars in 2011 to a projected 9.25 billion by the year 2015.Some animals are on these drugs indefinitely. Others, like one bonobo who lives in Milwaukee at the zoo there was on them until he started to save his Paxil prescription and then distribute it among the other bonobos. (Laughter) (Applause)More than psychopharmaceuticals, though, there are many, many, many other therapeutic interventions that help other creatures. And here is a place where I think actually that veterinary medicine can teach something to human medicine, which is, if you take your dog, who is, say, compulsively chasing his tail, into the veterinary behaviorist, their first action isn't to reach for the prescription pad; it's to ask you about your dog's life. They want to know how often your dog gets outside. They want to know how much exercise your dog is getting. They want to know how much social time with other dogs and other humans. They want to talk to you about what sorts of therapies, largely behavior therapies, you've tried with that animal. Those are the things that often tend to help the most, especially when combined with psychopharmaceuticals.The thing, though, I believe, that helps the most, particularly with social animals, is time with other social animals. In many ways, I feel like I became a service animal to my own dog, and I have seen parrots do it for people and people do it for parrots and dogs do it for elephants and elephants do it for other elephants. I don't know about you; I get a lot of Internet forwards of unlikely animal friendships. I also think it's a huge part of Facebook, the monkey that adopts the cat or the great dane who adopted the orphaned fawn, or the cow that makes friends with the pig, and had you asked me eight, nine years ago, about these, I would have told you that they were hopelessly sentimental and maybe too anthropomorphic in the wrong way and maybe even staged, and what I can tell you now is that there is actually something to this. This is legit. In fact, some interesting studies have pointed to oxytocin levels, which are a kind of bonding hormone that we release when we're having sex or nursing or around someone that we care for extremely, oxytocin levels raising in both humans and dogs who care about each other or who enjoy each other's company, and beyond that, other studies show that oxytocin raised even in other pairs of animals, so, say, in goats and dogs who were friends and played with each other, their levels spiked afterwards.I have a friend who really showed me that mental health is in fact a two-way street. His name is Lonnie Hodge, and he's a veteran of Vietnam. When he returned, he started working with survivors of genocide and a lot of people who had gone through war trauma. And he had PTSD and also a fear of heights, because in Vietnam, he had been rappelling backwards out of helicopters over the skids, and he was givena service dog named Gander, a labradoodle, to help him with PTSD and his fear of heights. This is them actually on the first day that they met, which is amazing, and since then, they've spent a lot of time together visiting with other veterans suffering from similar issues. But what's so interesting to me about Lonnie and Gander's relationship is about a few months in, Gander actually developed a fear of heights, probably because he was watching Lonnie so closely. What's pretty great about this, though, is that he's still a fantastic service dog, because now, when they're both at a great height, Lonnie is so concerned with Gander's well-being that he forgets to be scared of the heights himself.Since I've spent so much time with these stories, digging into archives, I literally spent years doing this research, and it's changed me. I no longer look at animals at the species level. I look at them as individuals, and I think about them as creatures with their own individual weather systems guiding their behavior and informing how they respond to the world. And I really believe that this has made me a more curious and a more empathetic person, both to the animals that share my bed and occasionally wind up on my plate, but also to the people that I know who are suffering from anxiety and from phobias and all manner of other things, and I really do believe that even though you can't know exactly what's going on in the mind of a pig or your pug or your partner, that that shouldn't stop you from empathizing with them. The best thing that we could do for our loved ones is, perhaps, to anthropomorphize them.Charles Darwin's father once told him that everybody could lose their mind at some point. Thankfully, we can often find them again, but only with each other's help.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laurel_braitman_depressed_dogs_cats_with_ocd_what_animal_madness_means_for_us_humans
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"These are simple objects: clocks, keys, combs, glasses. They are the things the victims of genocide in Bosnia carried with them on their final journey. We are all familiar with these mundane, everyday objects. The fact that some of the victims carried personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush is a clear sign they had no idea what was about to happen to them. Usually, they were told that they were going to be exchanged for prisoners of war.These items have been recovered from numerous mass graves across my homeland, and as we speak, forensics are exhuming bodies from newly discovered mass graves, 20 years after the war. And it is quite possibly the largest ever discovered. During the four years of conflict that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early '90s, approximately 30,000 citizens, mainly civilians, went missing, presumed killed, and another 100,000 were killed during combat operations. Most of them were killed either in the early days of the war or towards the end of the hostilities, when U.N. safe zones like Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb army.The international criminal tribunal delivered a number of sentences for crimes against humanity and genocide. Genocide is a systematic and deliberate destruction of a racial, political, religious or ethnic group. As much as genocide is about killing. It is also about destroying their property, their cultural heritage, and ultimately the very notion that they ever existed. Genocide is not only about the killing; it is about the denied identity. There are always traces — no such thing as a perfect crime. There are always remnants of the perished ones that are more durable than their fragile bodies and our selective and fading memory of them.These items are recovered from numerous mass graves, and the main goal of this collection of the items is a unique process of identifying those who disappeared in the killings, the first act of genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. Not a single body should remain undiscovered or unidentified. Once recovered, these items that the victims carried with them on their way to execution are carefully cleaned, analyzed, catalogued and stored. Thousands of artifacts are packed in white plastic bags just like the ones you see on CSI. These objects are used as a forensic tool in visual identification of the victims, but they are also used as very valuable forensic evidence in the ongoing war crimes trials. Survivors are occasionally called to try to identify these items physically, but physical browsing is extremely difficult, an ineffective and painful process. Once the forensics and doctors and lawyers are done with these objects, they become orphans of the narrative. Many of them get destroyed, believe it or not, or they get simply shelved, out of sight and out of mind.I decided a few years ago to photograph every single exhumed item in order to create a visual archive that survivors could easily browse. As a storyteller, I like to give back to the community. I like to move beyond raising awareness. And in this case, someone may recognize these items or at least their photographs will remain as a permanent, unbiased and accurate reminder of what happened. Photography is about empathy, and the familiarity of these items guarantee empathy. In this case, I am merely a tool, a forensic, if you like, and the result is a photography that is as close as possible of being a document.Once all the missing persons are identified, only decaying bodies in their graves and these everyday items will remain. In all their simplicity, these items are the last testament to the identity of the victims, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ziyah_gafic_everyday_objects_tragic_histories
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"Ten years ago, I wrote a book which I entitled ""Our Final Century?"" Question mark. My publishers cut out the question mark. (Laughter) The American publishers changed our title to ""Our Final Hour."" Americans like instant gratification and the reverse. (Laughter)And my theme was this: Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this one is special — it's the first where one species, ours, has the planet's future in its hands. Over nearly all of Earth's history, threats have come from nature — disease, earthquakes, asteroids and so forth — but from now on, the worst dangers come from us. And it's now not just the nuclear threat; in our interconnected world, network breakdowns can cascade globally; air travel can spread pandemics worldwide within days; and social media can spread panic and rumor literally at the speed of light. We fret too much about minor hazards — improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, and so forth — but we and our political masters are in denial about catastrophic scenarios. The worst have thankfully not yet happened. Indeed, they probably won't. But if an event is potentially devastating, it's worth paying a substantial premium to safeguard against it, even if it's unlikely, just as we take out fire insurance on our house.And as science offers greater power and promise, the downside gets scarier too. We get ever more vulnerable. Within a few decades, millions will have the capability to misuse rapidly advancing biotech, just as they misuse cybertech today. Freeman Dyson, in a TED Talk, foresaw that children will design and create new organisms just as routinely as his generation played with chemistry sets. Well, this may be on the science fiction fringe, but were even part of his scenario to come about, our ecology and even our species would surely not survive long unscathed. For instance, there are some eco-extremists who think that it would be better for the planet, for Gaia, if there were far fewer humans. What happens when such people have mastered synthetic biology techniques that will be widespread by 2050? And by then, other science fiction nightmares may transition to reality: dumb robots going rogue, or a network that develops a mind of its own threatens us all.Well, can we guard against such risks by regulation? We must surely try, but these enterprises are so competitive, so globalized, and so driven by commercial pressure, that anything that can be done will be done somewhere, whatever the regulations say. It's like the drug laws — we try to regulate, but can't. And the global village will have its village idiots, and they'll have a global range.So as I said in my book, we'll have a bumpy ride through this century. There may be setbacks to our society — indeed, a 50 percent chance of a severe setback. But are there conceivable events that could be even worse, events that could snuff out all life? When a new particle accelerator came online, some people anxiously asked, could it destroy the Earth or, even worse, rip apart the fabric of space? Well luckily, reassurance could be offered. I and others pointed out that nature has done the same experiments zillions of times already, via cosmic ray collisions. But scientists should surely be precautionary about experiments that generate conditions without precedent in the natural world. Biologists should avoid release of potentially devastating genetically modified pathogens.And by the way, our special aversion to the risk of truly existential disasters depends on a philosophical and ethical question, and it's this: Consider two scenarios. Scenario A wipes out 90 percent of humanity. Scenario B wipes out 100 percent. How much worse is B than A? Some would say 10 percent worse. The body count is 10 percent higher. But I claim that B is incomparably worse. As an astronomer, I can't believe that humans are the end of the story. It is five billion years before the sun flares up, and the universe may go on forever, so post-human evolution, here on Earth and far beyond, could be as prolonged as the Darwinian process that's led to us, and even more wonderful. And indeed, future evolution will happen much faster, on a technological timescale, not a natural selection timescale.So we surely, in view of those immense stakes, shouldn't accept even a one in a billion risk that human extinction would foreclose this immense potential. Some scenarios that have been envisaged may indeed be science fiction, but others may be disquietingly real. It's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable, and in fact, that's why we at Cambridge University are setting up a center to study how to mitigate these existential risks. It seems it's worthwhile just for a few people to think about these potential disasters. And we need all the help we can get from others, because we are stewards of a precious pale blue dot in a vast cosmos, a planet with 50 million centuries ahead of it. And so let's not jeopardize that future.And I'd like to finish with a quote from a great scientist called Peter Medawar. I quote, ""The bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of Alpine cattle. They are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a tuneful and melodious sound.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_rees_can_we_prevent_the_end_of_the_world
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"In Kenya, 1984 is known as the year of the cup, or the goro goro. The goro goro is a cup used to measure two kilograms of maize flower on the market, and the maize flower is used to make ugali, a polenta-like cake that is eaten together with vegetables. Both the maize and the vegetables are grown on most Kenyan farms, which means that most families can feed themselves from their own farm. One goro goro can feed three meals for an average family, and in 1984, the whole harvest could fit in one goro goro. It was and still is one of the worst droughts in living memory. Now today, I insure farmers against droughts like those in the year of the cup, or to be more specific, I insure the rains.I come from a family of missionaries who built hospitals in Indonesia, and my father built a psychiatric hospital in Tanzania. This is me, age five, in front of that hospital. I don't think they thought I'd grow up to sell insurance. (Laughter) So let me tell you how that happened.In 2008, I was working for the Ministry of Agriculture of Rwanda, and my boss had just been promoted to become the minister. She launched an ambitious plan to start a green revolution in her country, and before we knew it, we were importing tons of fertilizer and seed and telling farmers how to apply that fertilizer and plant. A couple of weeks later, the International Monetary Fund visited us, and asked my minister, ""Minister, it's great that you want to help farmers reach food security, but what if it doesn't rain?"" My minister answered proudly and somewhat defiantly, ""I am going to pray for rain."" That ended the discussion. On the way back to the ministry in the car, she turned around to me and said, ""Rose, you've always been interested in finance. Go find us some insurance.""It's been six years since, and last year I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that insured over 185,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda against drought. They owned an average of half an acre and paid on average two Euros in premium. It's microinsurance.Now, traditional insurance doesn't work with two to three Euros of premium, because traditional insurance relies on farm visits. A farmer here in Germany would be visited for the start of the season, halfway through, and at the end, and again if there was a loss, to estimate the damages. For a small-scale farmer in the middle of Africa, the maths of doing those visits simply don't add up. So instead, we rely on technology and data. This satellite measures whether there were clouds or not, because think about it: If there are clouds, then you might have some rain, but if there are no clouds, then it's actually impossible for it to rain. These images show the onset of the rains this season in Kenya. You see that around March 6, the clouds move in and then disappear, and then around the March 11, the clouds really move in. That, and those clouds, were the onset of the rains this year. This satellite covers the whole of Africa and goes back as far as 1984, and that's important, because if you know how many times a place has had a drought in the last 30 years, you can make a pretty good estimate what the chances are of drought in the future, and that means that you can put a price tag on the risk of drought.The data alone isn't enough. We devise agronomic algorithms which tell us how much rainfall a crop needs and when. For example, for maize at planting, you need to have two days of rain for farmers to plant, and then it needs to rain once every two weeks for the crop to properly germinate. After that, you need rain every three weeks for the crop to form its leaves, whereas at flowering, you need it to rain more frequently, about once every 10 days for the crop to form its cob. At the end of the season, you actually don't want it to rain, because rains then can damage the crop.Devising such a cover is difficult, but it turned out the real challenge was selling insurance. We set ourselves a modest target of 500 farmers insured after our first season. After a couple of months' intense marketing, we had signed up the grand total of 185 farmers. I was disappointed and confounded. Everybody kept telling me that farmers wanted insurance, but our prime customers simply weren't buying. They were waiting to see what would happen, didn't trust insurance companies, or thought, ""I've managed for so many years. Why would I buy insurance now?""Now many of you know microcredit, the method of providing small loans to poor people pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank. Turns out, selling microcredit isn't the same as selling insurance. For credit, a farmer needs to earn the trust of a bank, and if it succeeds, the bank will advance him money. That's an attractive proposition. For insurance, the farmer needs to trust the insurance company, and needs to advance the insurance company money. It's a very different value proposition. And so the uptick of insurance has been slow, with so far only 4.4 percent of Africans taking up insurance in 2012, and half of that number is in one country, South Africa.We tried for some years selling insurance directly to farmers, with very high marketing cost and very limited success. Then we realized that there were many organizations working with farmers: seed companies, microfinance institutions, mobile phone companies, government agencies. They were all providing loans to farmers, and often, just before they'd finalize the loan, the farmer would say, ""But what if it doesn't rain? How do you expect me to repay my loan?"" Many of these organizations were taking on the risk themselves, simply hoping that that year, the worst wouldn't happen. Most of the organizations, however, were limiting their growth in agriculture. They couldn't take on this kind of risk. These organizations became our customers, and when combining credit and insurance, interesting things can happen. Let me tell you one more story.At the start of February 2012 in western Kenya, the rains started, and they started early, and when rains start early, farmers are encouraged, because it usually means that the season is going to be good. So they took out loans and planted. For the next three weeks, there wasn't a single drop of rain, and the crops that had germinated so well shriveled and died. We'd insured the loans of a microfinance institution that had provided those loans to about 6,000 farmers in that area, and we called them up and said, ""Look, we know about the drought. We've got you. We'll give you 200,000 Euros at the end of the season."" They said, ""Wow, that's great, but that'll be late. Could you give us the money now? Then these farmers can still replant and can get a harvest this season."" So we convinced our insurance partners, and later that April, these farmers replanted. We took the idea of replanting to a seed company and convinced them to price the cost of insurance into every bag of seed, and in every bag, we packed a card that had a number on it, and when the farmers would open the card, they'd text in that number, and that number would actually help us to locate the farmer and allocate them to a satellite pixel. A satellite would then measure the rainfall for the next three weeks, and if it didn't rain, we'd replace their seed.One of the first — (Applause) — Hold on, I'm not there!One of the first beneficiaries of this replanting guarantee was Bosco Mwinyi. We visited his farm later that August, and I wish I could show you the smile on his face when he showed us his harvest, because it warmed my heart and it made me realize why selling insurance can be a good thing. But you know, he insisted that we get his whole harvest in the picture, so we had to zoom out a lot. Insurance secured his harvest that season, and I believe that today, we have all the tools to enable African farmers to take control of their own destiny. No more years of the cup. Instead, I am looking forward to, at least somehow, the year of the insurance, or the year of the great harvest.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rose_goslinga_crop_insurance_an_idea_worth_seeding
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"Talking about empowerment is odd, because when we talk about empowerment, what affects us most are the stories. So I want to begin with an everyday story. What is it really like to be a young woman in India?Now, I've spent the last 27 years of my life in India, lived in three small towns, two major cities, and I've had several experiences. When I was seven, a private tutor who used to come home to teach me mathematics molested me. He would put his hand up my skirt. He put his hand up my skirt and told me he knew how to make me feel good. At 17, a boy from my high school circulated an email detailing all the sexually aggressive things he could do to me because I didn't pay attention to him. At 19, I helped a friend whose parents had forcefully married her to an older man escape an abusive marriage. At 21, when my friend and I were walking down the road one afternoon, a man pulled down his pants and masturbated in front of us. We called people for help, and nobody came. At 25, when I was walking home one evening, two men on a motorcycle attacked me. I spent two nights in the hospital recovering from trauma and injuries.So throughout my life, I've seen women — family, friends, colleagues — live through these experiences, and they seldom talk about it. So in simple words, life in India is not easy. But today I'm not going to talk to you about this fear. I'm going to talk to you about an interesting path of learning that this fear took me on.So, what happened one night in December 2012 changed my life. So a young girl, a 23-year-old student, boarded a bus in Delhi with her male friend. There were six men on the bus, young men who you might encounter every day in India, and the chilling account of what followed was played over and over again in the Indian and international media. This girl was raped repeatedly, forcefully penetrated with a blunt rod, beaten, bitten, and left to die. Her friend was gagged, attacked, and knocked unconscious. She died on the 29th of December. And at a time when most of us here were preparing to welcome the new year, India plunged into darkness. For the first time in our history, men and women in Indian cities woke up to the horrific truth about the true state of women in the country. Now, like many other young women, I was absolutely terrified. I couldn't believe that something like this could happen in a national capital. I was angry and I was frustrated, but most of all, I felt utterly, completely helpless. But really, what do you do, right? Some write blogs, some ignore it, some join protests. I did all of it. In fact, that was what everyone was doing two years ago. So the media was filled with stories about all the horrific deeds that Indian men are capable of. They were compared to animals, sexually repressed beasts. In fact, so alien and unthinkable was this event in an Indian mind that the response from the Indian media, public and politicians proved one point: No one knew what to do. And no one wanted to be responsible for it. In fact, these were a few insensitive comments which were made in the media by prominent people in response to sexual violence against women in general. So the first one is made by a member of parliament, the second one is made by a spiritual leader, and the third one was actually the defendants' lawyer when the girl was fighting for her life and she passed away.Now, as a woman watching this day after day, I was tired. So as a writer and gender activist, I have written extensively on women, but this time, I realized it was different, because a part of me realized I was a part of that young woman too, and I decided I wanted to change this. So I did something spontaneous, hasty. I logged on to a citizen journalism platform called iReport, and I recorded a video talking about what the scene was like in Bangalore. I talked about how I felt, I talked about the ground realities, and I talked about the frustrations of living in India. In a few hours, the blog was shared widely, and comments and thoughts poured in from across the world. In that moment, a few things occurred to me. One, technology was always at hand for many young women like me. Two, like me, most young women hardly use it to express their views. Three, I realized for the first time that my voice mattered.So in the months that followed, I covered a trail of events in Bangalore which had no space in the mainstream news. In Cubbon Park, which is a big park in Bangalore, I gathered with over 100 others when groups of young men came forward to wear skirts to prove that clothing does not invite rape. When I reported about these events, I felt I had charge, I felt like I had a channel to release all the emotions I had inside me. I attended the town hall march when students held up signs saying ""Kill them, hang them."" ""You wouldn't do this to your mothers or sisters."" I went to a candlelight vigil where citizens gathered together to talk about the issue of sexual violence openly, and I recorded a lot of blogs in response to how worrying the situation was in India at that point. [""I am born with sisters and cousin who now live in cities and abroad but they never talk to me or complain about their daily difficulties like you say""]Now, the reactions confused me. While supportive comments poured in from across the world, as did vicious ones. So some called me a hypocrite. Some called me a victim, a rape apologist. Some even said I had a political motive. But this one comment kind of describes what we are discussing here today.But I was soon to learn that this was not all. As empowered as I felt with the new liberty that this citizen journalism channel gave me, I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. So sometime last August, I logged onto Facebook and I was looking through my news feed, and I noticed there was a link that was being shared by my friends. I clicked on the link; it led me back to a report uploaded by an American girl called Michaela Cross. The report was titled, ""India: The story you never wanted to hear."" And in this report, she recounted her firsthand account of facing sexual harassment in India. She wrote, ""There is no way to prepare for the eyes, the eyes that every day stared with such entitlement at my body, with no change of expression whether I met their gaze or not. Walking to the fruit seller's or the tailor's, I got stares so sharp that they sliced away bits of me piece by piece."" She called India a traveler's heaven and a woman's hell. She said she was stalked, groped, and masturbated at.Now, late that evening, the report went viral. It was on news channels across the world. Everyone was discussing it. It had over a million views, a thousand comments and shares, and I found myself witnessing a very similar thing. The media was caught in this vicious cycle of opinion and outburst and no outcome whatsoever. So that night, as I sat wondering how I should respond, I found myself filled with doubt. You see, as a writer, I approached this issue as an observer, as an Indian, I felt embarrassment and disbelief, and as an activist, I looked at it as a defender of rights, but as a citizen journalist, I suddenly felt very vulnerable. I mean, here she was, a young woman who was using a channel to talk about her experience just as I was, and yet I felt unsettled. You see, no one ever tells you that true empowerment comes from giving yourself the permission to think and act. Empowerment is often made to sound as if it's an ideal, it's a wonderful outcome. When we talk about empowerment, we often talk about giving people access to materials, giving them access to tools. But the thing is, empowerment is an emotion. It's a feeling. The first step to empowerment is to give yourself the authority, the key to independent will, and for women everywhere, no matter who we are or where we come from, that is the most difficult step. We fear the sound of our own voice, for it means admission, but it is this that gives us the power to change our environment. Now in this situation where I was faced with so many different kinds of realities, I was unsure how to judge, because I didn't know what it would mean for me. I feared to judge because I didn't know what it would be if I didn't support the same view as this girl. I didn't know what it would mean for me if I was challenging someone else's truth. But yet, it was simple. I had to make a decision: Should I speak up or should I stay quiet? So after a lot of thought, I recorded a video blog in response, and I told Michaela, well, there are different sides to India, and I also tried to explain that things would be okay and I expressed my regret for what she had faced. And a few days later, I was invited to talk on air with her, and for the first time, I reached out to this girl who I had never met, who was so far away, but yet I felt so close to.Since this report came to light, more young people than ever were discussing sexual harassment on the campus, and the university that Michaela belonged to gave her the assistance she needed. The university even took measures to train its students to equip them with the skills that they need to confront challenges such as harassment, and for the first the time, I felt I wasn't alone. You see, if there's anything that I've learned as an active citizen journalist over the past few years, it is our dire lack as a society to actively find avenues where our voices can be heard. We don't realize that when we are standing up, we are not just standing up as individuals, we are standing up for our communities, our friends, our peers. Most of us say that women are denied their rights, but the truth is, oftentimes, women deny themselves these rights. In a recent survey in India, 95 percent of the women who work in I.T., aviation, hospitality and call centers, said they didn't feel safe returning home alone after work in the late hours or in the evening. In Bangalore, where I come from, this number is 85 percent. In rural areas in India, if anything is to go by the recent gang rapes in Badaun and acid attacks in Odisha and Aligarh are supposed to go by, we need to act really soon.Don't get me wrong, the challenges that women will face in telling their stories is real, but we need to start pursuing and trying to identify mediums to participate in our system and not just pursue the media blindly. Today, more women than ever are standing up and questioning the government in India, and this is a result of that courage. There is a sixfold increase in women reporting harassment, and the government passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act in 2013 to protect women against sexual assault.As I end this talk, I just want to say that I know a lot of us in this room have our secrets, but let us speak up. Let us fight the shame and talk about it. It could be a platform, a community, your loved one, whoever or whatever you choose, but let us speak up. The truth is, the end to this problem begins with us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/meera_vijayann_find_your_voice_against_gender_violence
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"So recently, some white guys and some black women swapped Twitter avatars, or pictures online. They didn't change their content, they kept tweeting the same as usual, but suddenly, the white guys noticed they were getting called the n-word all the time and they were getting the worst kind of online abuse, whereas the black women all of a sudden noticed things got a lot more pleasant for them.Now, if you're my five-year-old, your Internet consists mostly of puppies and fairies and occasionally fairies riding puppies. That's a thing. Google it. But the rest of us know that the Internet can be a really ugly place. I'm not talking about the kind of colorful debates that I think are healthy for our democracy. I'm talking about nasty personal attacks. Maybe it's happened to you, but it's at least twice as likely to happen, and be worse, if you're a woman, a person of color, or gay, or more than one at the same time. In fact, just as I was writing this talk, I found a Twitter account called @SallyKohnSucks. The bio says that I'm a ""man-hater and a bull dyke and the only thing I've ever accomplished with my career is spreading my perverse sexuality."" Which, incidentally, is only a third correct. I mean, lies! (Laughter)But seriously, we all say we hate this crap. The question is whether you're willing to make a personal sacrifice to change it. I don't mean giving up the Internet. I mean changing the way you click, because clicking is a public act. It's no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers. Increasingly, we're all the media. I used to think, oh, okay, I get dressed up, I put on a lot of makeup, I go on television, I talk about the news. That is a public act of making media. And then I go home and I browse the web and I'm reading Twitter, and that's a private act of consuming media. I mean, of course it is. I'm in my pajamas. Wrong. Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. We are the new editors. We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. That's how the media works now. There's all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture.Over three out of five Americans think we have a major incivility problem in our country right now, but I'm going to guess that at least three out of five Americans are clicking on the same insult-oriented, rumor-mongering trash that feeds the nastiest impulses in our society. In an increasingly noisy media landscape, the incentive is to make more noise to be heard, and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty.It does not have to be that way. It does not. We can change the incentive. For starters, there are two things we can all do. First, don't just stand by the sidelines when you see someone getting hurt. If someone is being abused online, do something. Be a hero. This is your chance. Speak up. Speak out. Be a good person. Drown out the negative with the positive. And second, we've got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeding linkbait. If you don't like the 24/7 all Kardashian all the time programming, you've got to stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian's sideboob. I know you do it. (Applause) You too, apparently. I mean, really, same example: if you don't like politicians calling each other names, stop clicking on the stories about what one guy in one party called the other guy in the other party. Clicking on a train wreck just pours gasoline on it. It makes it worse, the fire spreads. Our whole culture gets burned.If what gets the most clicks wins, then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act. So click responsibly. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sally_kohn_don_t_like_clickbait_don_t_click
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"How many times have you used the word ""awesome"" today? Once? Twice? Seventeen times? Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word? No, I didn't think so, because it's come down to this, people: You're using the word incorrectly, and tonight I hope to show you how to put the ""awe"" back in ""awesome.""Recently, I was dining at an outdoor cafe, and the server came up to our table, and asked us if we had dined there before, and I said, ""Yes, yes, we have."" And she said, ""Awesome."" And I thought, ""Really? Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again?""The other day, one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF, and I said, ""Well, of course,"" and he said, ""Awesome."" Seriously, can saving anything as a PDF be awesome?Sadly, the frequent overuse of the word ""awesome"" has now replaced words like ""great"" and ""thank you."" So Webster's dictionary defines the word ""awesome"" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic. Now, with that in mind, was your Quiznos sandwich awesome? How about that parking space? Was that awesome? Or that game the other day? Was that awesome? The answer is no, no and no. A sandwich can be delicious, that parking space can be nearby, and that game can be a blowout, but not everything can be awesome. (Laughter)So when you use the word ""awesome"" to describe the most mundane of things, you're taking away the very power of the word. This author says, ""Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome."" (Laughter) Um, no, it is not, and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck. (Laughter)So in other words, if you have everything, you value nothing. It's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here. There's no dynamic, there's no highs or lows, if everything is awesome.Ladies and gentlemen, here are 10 things that are truly awesome.Imagine, if you will, having to schlep everything on your back. Wouldn't this be easier for me if I could roll this home? Yes, so I think I'll invent the wheel. The wheel, ladies and gentlemen. Is the wheel awesome? Say it with me. Yes, the wheel is awesome!The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years. Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone. Were the Great Pyramids awesome? Yes, the pyramids were awesome.The Grand Canyon. Come on. It's almost 80 million years old. Is the Grand Canyon awesome? Yes, the Grand Canyon is.Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829, and earlier today, when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich, and you know who you are — (Laughter) — wasn't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver? I mean, come on. Is photography awesome? Yes, photography is awesome.D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. Was D-Day awesome? Yes, it was awesome.Did you eat food today? Did you eat? Then you can thank the honeybee, that's the one, because if crops aren't pollinated, we can't grow food, and then we're all going to die. It's just like that. But it's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower, although that would be awesome. (Laughter) Bees are awesome. Are you kidding me?Landing on the moon! Come on! Apollo 11. Are you kidding me? Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away. That's like from here to the moon. (Laughter) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for awesome! You're damn right, it was.Woodstock, 1969: Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll. Tickets were only 24 dollars back then. You can't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now. Jimi Hendrix's version of ""The Star-Spangled Banner"" was the most iconic. Was Woodstock awesome? Yes, it was awesome.Sharks! They're at the top of the food chain. Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt. Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime. Does awesome inspire fear? Oh, hell yeah, sharks are awesome!The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication, and later tonight, when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap, the Internet is awesome.And finally, finally some of you can't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was. I will save you the time. It was not awesome, but it was true, and I hope it was entertaining, and out of all the audiences I've ever had, y'all are the most recent. Thank you and good night.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_shargaa_please_please_people_let_s_put_the_awe_back_in_awesome
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"Why does the universe exist? Why is there — Okay. Okay. (Laughter) This is a cosmic mystery. Be solemn. Why is there a world, why are we in it, and why is there something rather than nothing at all? I mean, this is the super ultimate ""why"" question?So I'm going to talk about the mystery of existence, the puzzle of existence, where we are now in addressing it, and why you should care, and I hope you do care. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that those who don't wonder about the contingency of their existence, of the contingency of the world's existence, are mentally deficient. That's a little harsh, but still. (Laughter) So this has been called the most sublime and awesome mystery, the deepest and most far-reaching question man can pose. It's obsessed great thinkers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was astonished that there should be a world at all. He wrote in his ""Tractatus,"" Proposition 4.66, ""It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, it's that the world exists."" And if you don't like taking your epigrams from a philosopher, try a scientist. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, the teacher of Richard Feynman, the coiner of the term ""black hole,"" he said, ""I want to know how come the quantum, how come the universe, how come existence?"" And my friend Martin Amis — sorry that I'll be doing a lot of name-dropping in this talk, so get used to it — my dear friend Martin Amis once said that we're about five Einsteins away from answering the mystery of where the universe came from. And I've no doubt there are five Einsteins in the audience tonight. Any Einsteins? Show of hands? No? No? No? No Einsteins? Okay.So this question, why is there something rather than nothing, this sublime question, was posed rather late in intellectual history. It was towards the end of the 17th century, the philosopher Leibniz who asked it, a very smart guy, Leibniz, who invented the calculus independently of Isaac Newton, at about the same time, but for Leibniz, who asked why is there something rather than nothing, this was not a great mystery. He either was or pretended to be an Orthodox Christian in his metaphysical outlook, and he said it's obvious why the world exists: because God created it. And God created, indeed, out of nothing at all. That's how powerful God is. He doesn't need any preexisting materials to fashion a world out of. He can make it out of sheer nothingness, creation ex nihilo. And by the way, this is what most Americans today believe. There is no mystery of existence for them. God made it.So let's put this in an equation. I don't have any slides so I'm going to mime my visuals, so use your imaginations. So it's God + nothing = the world. Okay? Now that's the equation. And so maybe you don't believe in God. Maybe you're a scientific atheist or an unscientific atheist, and you don't believe in God, and you're not happy with it. By the way, even if we have this equation, God + nothing = the world, there's already a problem: Why does God exist? God doesn't exist by logic alone unless you believe the ontological argument, and I hope you don't, because it's not a good argument. So it's conceivable, if God were to exist, he might wonder, I'm eternal, I'm all-powerful, but where did I come from? (Laughter) Whence then am I? God speaks in a more formal English. (Laughter) And so one theory is that God was so bored with pondering the puzzle of His own existence that He created the world just to distract himself. But anyway, let's forget about God. Take God out of the equation: We have ________ + nothing = the world. Now, if you're a Buddhist, you might want to stop right there, because essentially what you've got is nothing = the world, and by symmetry of identity, that means the world = nothing. Okay? And to a Buddhist, the world is just a whole lot of nothing. It's just a big cosmic vacuity. And we think there's a lot of something out there but that's because we're enslaved by our desires. If we let our desires melt away, we'll see the world for what it truly is, a vacuity, nothingness, and we'll slip into this happy state of nirvana which has been defined as having just enough life to enjoy being dead. (Laughter)So that's the Buddhist thinking. But I'm a Westerner, and I'm still concerned with the puzzle of existence, so I've got ________ + — this is going to get serious in a minute, so — ________ + nothing = the world. What are we going to put in that blank? Well, how about science? Science is our best guide to the nature of reality, and the most fundamental science is physics. That tells us what naked reality really is, that reveals what I call TAUFOTU, the True And Ultimate Furniture Of The Universe. So maybe physics can fill this blank, and indeed, since about the late 1960s or around 1970, physicists have purported to give a purely scientific explanation of how a universe like ours could have popped into existence out of sheer nothingness, a quantum fluctuation out of the void. Stephen Hawking is one of these physicists, more recently Alex Vilenkin, and the whole thing has been popularized by another very fine physicist and friend of mine, Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called ""A Universe from Nothing,"" and Lawrence thinks that he's given — he's a militant atheist, by the way, so he's gotten God out of the picture. The laws of quantum field theory, the state-of-the-art physics, can show how out of sheer nothingness, no space, no time, no matter, nothing, a little nugget of false vacuum can fluctuate into existence, and then, by the miracle of inflation, blow up into this huge and variegated cosmos we see around us.Okay, this is a really ingenious scenario. It's very speculative. It's fascinating. But I've got a big problem with it, and the problem is this: It's a pseudo-religious point of view. Now, Lawrence thinks he's an atheist, but he's still in thrall to a religious worldview. He sees physical laws as being like divine commands. The laws of quantum field theory for him are like fiat lux, ""Let there be light."" The laws have some sort of ontological power or clout that they can form the abyss, that it's pregnant with being. They can call a world into existence out of nothing. But that's a very primitive view of what a physical law is, right? We know that physical laws are actually generalized descriptions of patterns and regularities in the world. They don't exist outside the world. They don't have any ontic cloud of their own. They can't call a world into existence out of nothingness. That's a very primitive view of what a scientific law is. And if you don't believe me on this, listen to Stephen Hawking, who himself put forward a model of the cosmos that was self-contained, didn't require any outside cause, any creator, and after proposing this, Hawking admitted that he was still puzzled. He said, this model is just equations. What breathes fire into the equations and creates a world for them to describe? He was puzzled by this, so equations themselves can't do the magic, can't resolve the puzzle of existence. And besides, even if the laws could do that, why this set of laws? Why quantum field theory that describes a universe with a certain number of forces and particles and so forth? Why not a completely different set of laws? There are many, many mathematically consistent sets of laws. Why not no laws at all? Why not sheer nothingness?So this is a problem, believe it or not, that reflective physicists really think a lot about, and at this point they tend to go metaphysical, say, well, maybe the set of laws that describes our universe, it's just one set of laws and it describes one part of reality, but maybe every consistent set of laws describes another part of reality, and in fact all possible physical worlds really exist, they're all out there. We just see a little tiny part of reality that's described by the laws of quantum field theory, but there are many, many other worlds, parts of reality that are described by vastly different theories that are different from ours in ways we can't imagine, that are inconceivably exotic. Steven Weinberg, the father of the standard model of particle physics, has actually flirted with this idea himself, that all possible realities actually exist. Also, a younger physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that all mathematical structures exist, and mathematical existence is the same thing as physical existence, so we have this vastly rich multiverse that encompasses every logical possibility.Now, in taking this metaphysical way out, these physicists and also philosophers are actually reaching back to a very old idea that goes back to Plato. It's the principle of plenitude or fecundity, or the great chain of being, that reality is actually as full as possible. It's as far removed from nothingness as it could possibly be.So we have these two extremes now. We have sheer nothingness on one side, and we have this vision of a reality that encompasses every conceivable world at the other extreme: the fullest possible reality, nothingness, the simplest possible reality. Now what's in between these two extremes? There are all kinds of intermediate realities that include some things and leave out others. So one of these intermediate realities is, say, the most mathematically elegant reality, that leaves out the inelegant bits, the ugly asymmetries and so forth. Now, there are some physicists who will tell you that we're actually living in the most elegant reality. I think that Brian Greene is in the audience, and he has written a book called ""The Elegant Universe."" He claims that the universe we live in mathematically is very elegant. Don't believe him. (Laughter) It's a pious hope, I wish it were true, but I think the other day he admitted to me it's really an ugly universe. It's stupidly constructed, it's got way too many arbitrary coupling constants and mass ratios and superfluous families of elementary particles, and what the hell is dark energy? It's a stick and bubble gum contraption. It's not an elegant universe. (Laughter) And then there's the best of all possible worlds in an ethical sense. You should get solemn now, because a world in which sentient beings don't suffer needlessly, in which there aren't things like childhood cancer or the Holocaust. This is an ethical conception. Anyway, so between nothingness and the fullest possible reality, various special realities. Nothingness is special. It's the simplest. Then there's the most elegant possible reality. That's special. The fullest possible reality, that's special.But what are we leaving out here? There's also just the crummy, generic realities that aren't special in any way, that are sort of random. They're infinitely removed from nothingness, but they fall infinitely short of complete fullness. They're a mixture of chaos and order, of mathematical elegance and ugliness. So I would describe these realities as an infinite, mediocre, incomplete mess, a generic reality, a kind of cosmic junk shot. And these realities, is there a deity in any of these realities? Maybe, but the deity isn't perfect like the Judeo-Christian deity. The deity isn't all-good and all-powerful. It might be instead 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective, which pretty much describes the world we see around us, I think. (Laughter) So I would like to propose that the resolution to the mystery of existence is that the reality we exist in is one of these generic realities. Reality has to turn out some way. It can either turn out to be nothing or everything or something in between. So if it has some special feature, like being really elegant or really full or really simple, like nothingness, that would require an explanation. But if it's just one of these random, generic realities, there's no further explanation for it. And indeed, I would say that's the reality we live in. That's what science is telling us. At the beginning of the week, we got the exciting information that the theory of inflation, which predicts a big, infinite, messy, arbitrary, pointless reality, it's like a big frothing champagne coming out of a bottle endlessly, a vast universe, mostly a wasteland with little pockets of charm and order and peace, this has been confirmed, this inflationary scenario, by the observations made by radio telescopes in Antarctica that looked at the signature of the gravitational waves from just before the Big Bang. I'm sure you all know about this. So anyway, I think there's some evidence that this really is the reality that we're stuck with.Now, why should you care? Well — (Laughter) — the question, ""Why does the world exist?"" that's the cosmic question, it sort of rhymes with a more intimate question: Why do I exist? Why do you exist? you know, our existence would seem to be amazingly improbable, because there's an enormous number of genetically possible humans, if you can compute it by looking at the number of the genes and the number of alleles and so forth, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you there are about 10 to the 10,000th possible humans, genetically. That's between a googol and a googolplex. And the number of the actual humans that have existed is 100 billion, maybe 50 billion, an infinitesimal fraction, so all of us, we've won this amazing cosmic lottery. We're here. Okay.So what kind of reality do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a special reality? What if we were living in the most elegant possible reality? Imagine the existential pressure on us to live up to that, to be elegant, not to pull down the tone of it. Or, what if we were living in the fullest possible reality? Well then our existence would be guaranteed, because every possible thing exists in that reality, but our choices would be meaningless. If I really struggle morally and agonize and I decide to do the right thing, what difference does it make, because there are an infinite number of versions of me also doing the right thing and an infinite number doing the wrong thing. So my choices are meaningless. So we don't want to live in that special reality. And as for the special reality of nothingness, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I think living in a generic reality that's mediocre, there are nasty bits and nice bits and we could make the nice bits bigger and the nasty bits smaller and that gives us a kind of purpose in life. The universe is absurd, but we can still construct a purpose, and that's a pretty good one, and the overall mediocrity of reality kind of resonates nicely with the mediocrity we all feel in the core of our being. And I know you feel it. I know you're all special, but you're still kind of secretly mediocre, don't you think? (Laughter) (Applause)So anyway, you may say, this  puzzle, the mystery of existence, it's just silly mystery-mongering. You're not astonished at the existence of the universe and you're in good company. Bertrand Russell said, ""I should say the universe is just there, and that's all."" Just a brute fact. And my professor at Columbia, Sidney Morgenbesser, a great philosophical wag, when I said to him, ""Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?"" And he said, ""Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied.""So — (Laughter) — okay. So you're not astonished. I don't care. But I will tell you something to conclude that I guarantee you will astonish you, because it's astonished all of the brilliant, wonderful people I've met at this TED conference, when I've told them, and it's this: Never in my life have I had a cell phone. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_holt_why_does_the_universe_exist
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"Hi, kids.(Laughter)I'm 71.(Applause) My husband is 76. My parents are in their late 90s, and Olivia, the dog, is 16. So let's talk about aging.Let me tell you how I feel when I see my wrinkles in the mirror and I realize that some parts of me have dropped and I can't find them down there. (Laughter)Mary Oliver says in one of her poems, ""Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"" Me, I intend to live passionately.When do we start aging? Society decides when we are old, usually around 65, when we get Medicare, but we really start aging at birth. We are aging right now, and we all experience it differently. We all feel younger than our real age, because the spirit never ages. I am still 17. Sophia Loren. Look at her. She says that everything you see she owes to spaghetti. I tried it and gained 10 pounds in the wrong places. But attitude, aging is also attitude and health. But my real mentor in this journey of aging is Olga Murray. This California girl at 60 started working in Nepal to save young girls from domestic bondage. At 88, she has saved 12,000 girls, and she has changed the culture in the country. (Applause) Now it is illegal for fathers to sell their daughters into servitude. She has also founded orphanages and nutritional clinics. She is always happy and eternally young.What have I lost in the last decades? People, of course, places, and the boundless energy of my youth, and I'm beginning to lose independence, and that scares me. Ram Dass says that dependency hurts, but if you accept it, there is less suffering. After a very bad stroke, his ageless soul watches the changes in the body with tenderness, and he is grateful to the people who help him.What have I gained? Freedom: I don't have to prove anything anymore. I'm not stuck in the idea of who I was, who I want to be, or what other people expect me to be. I don't have to please men anymore, only animals. I keep telling my superego to back off and let me enjoy what I still have. My body may be falling apart, but my brain is not, yet. I love my brain. I feel lighter. I don't carry grudges, ambition, vanity, none of the deadly sins that are not even worth the trouble. It's great to let go. I should have started sooner. And I also feel softer because I'm not scared of being vulnerable. I don't see it as weakness anymore. And I've gained spirituality. I'm aware that before, death was in the neighborhood. Now, it's next door, or in my house. I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment. By the way, the Dalai Lama is someone who has aged beautifully, but who wants to be vegetarian and celibate? (Laughter)Meditation helps.(Video) Child: Ommm. Ommm. Ommm.Isabel Allende: Ommm. Ommm. There it is. And it's good to start early.You know, for a vain female like myself, it's very hard to age in this culture. Inside, I feel good, I feel charming, seductive, sexy. Nobody else sees that. (Laughter) I'm invisible. I want to be the center of attention. I hate to be invisible. (Laughter) (Applause)This is Grace Dammann. She has been in a wheelchair for six years after a terrible car accident. She says that there is nothing more sensual than a hot shower, that every drop of water is a blessing to the senses. She doesn't see herself as disabled. In her mind, she's still surfing in the ocean. Ethel Seiderman, a feisty, beloved activist in the place where I live in California. She wears red patent shoes, and her mantra is that one scarf is nice but two is better. She has been a widow for nine years, but she's not looking for another mate. She says that there is only a limited number of ways you can screw — well, she says it in another way — and she has tried them all. (Laughter) I, on the other hand, I still have erotic fantasies with Antonio Banderas — (Laughter) — and my poor husband has to put up with it.So how can I stay passionate? I cannot will myself to be passionate at 71. I have been training for some time, and when I feel flat and bored, I fake it. Attitude, attitude. How do I train? I train by saying yes to whatever comes my way: drama, comedy, tragedy, love, death, losses. Yes to life. And I train by trying to stay in love. It doesn't always work, but you cannot blame me for trying.And, on a final note, retirement in Spanish is jubilación. Jubilation. Celebration. We have paid our dues. We have contributed to society. Now it's our time, and it's a great time. Unless you are ill or very poor, you have choices. I have chosen to stay passionate, engaged with an open heart. I am working on it every day. Want to join me?Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: So Isabel — IA: Thank you.JC: First of all, I never like to presume to speak for the TED community, but I would like to tell you that I have a feeling we can all agree that you are still charming, seductive and sexy. Yes?IA: Aww, thank you. (Applause)JC: Hands down. IA: No, it's makeup.Moderator: Now, would it be awkward if I asked you a follow-up question about your erotic fantasies?IA: Oh, of course. About what?(Laughter)Moderator: About your erotic fantasies. IA: With Antonio Banderas.Moderator: I was just wondering if you have anything more to share.IA: Well, one of them is that — (Laughter) One of them is that I place a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, I slather him with guacamole and salsa, I roll him up, and I eat him. (Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_how_to_live_passionately_no_matter_your_age
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"I'm an industrial engineer. The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources. While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral. I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer. Soon, I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house, and this is how it looks after three years.These forests, compared to a conventional plantation, grow 10 times faster, they're 30 times more dense, and 100 times more biodiverse. Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled. Quality of air became better, and we started harvesting seasonal fruits growing effortlessly right in the backyard of our house.I wanted to make more of these forests. I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business, so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests. But to make afforestation as a mainstream business or an industry, we had to standardize the process of forest-making. So we benchmarked the Toyota Production System known for its quality and efficiency for the process of forest-making.For an example, the core of TPS, Toyota Production System, lies in heijunka, which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line. We replaced these cars with trees, using which now we can make multi-layered forests. These forests utilize 100 percent vertical space. They are so dense that one can't even walk into them. For an example, we can make a 300-tree forest in an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars. In order to reduce cost and our own carbon footprint, we started utilizing local biomass as soil amender and fertilizers. For example, coconut shells crushed in a machine mixed with rice straw, powder of rice husk mixed with organic manure is finally dumped in soil on which our forest is planted. Once planted, we use grass or rice straw to cover the soil so that all the water which goes into irrigation doesn't get evaporated back into the atmosphere. And using these simple improvisations, today we can make a forest for a cost as low as the cost of an iPhone.Today, we are making forests in houses, in schools, even in factories with the corporates. But that's not enough. There is a huge number of people who want to take matters into their own hands. So we let it happen. Today, we are working on an Internet-based platform where we are going to share our methodology on an open source using which anyone and everyone can make their own forest without our physical presence being there, using our methodology. At the click of a button, they can get to know all the native species of their place. By installing a small hardware probe on site, we can do remote soil testing, using which we can give step-by-step instructions on forest-making remotely. Also we can monitor the growth of this forest without being on site.This methodology, I believe, has a potential. By sharing, we can actually bring back our native forests. Now, when you go back home, if you see a barren piece of land, do remember that it can be a potential forest.Thank you very much. Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shubhendu_sharma_an_engineers_vision_for_tiny_forests_everywhere
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"This is a photograph of a man whom for many years I plotted to kill.This is my father, Clinton George ""Bageye"" Grant. He's called Bageye because he has permanent bags under his eyes. As a 10-year-old, along with my siblings, I dreamt of scraping off the poison from fly-killer paper into his coffee, grounded down glass and sprinkling it over his breakfast, loosening the carpet on the stairs so he would trip and break his neck. But come the day, he would always skip that loose step, he would always bow out of the house without so much as a swig of coffee or a bite to eat. And so for many years, I feared that my father would die before I had a chance to kill him. (Laughter)Up until our mother asked him to leave and not come back, Bageye had been a terrifying ogre. He teetered permanently on the verge of rage, rather like me, as you see. He worked nights at Vauxhall Motors in Luton and demanded total silence throughout the house, so that when we came home from school at 3:30 in the afternoon, we would huddle beside the TV, and rather like safe-crackers, we would twiddle with the volume control knob on the TV so it was almost inaudible. And at times, when we were like this, so much ""Shhh,"" so much ""Shhh"" going on in the house that I imagined us to be like the German crew of a U-boat creeping along the edge of the ocean whilst up above, on the surface, HMS Bageye patrolled ready to drop death charges at the first sound of any disturbance.So that lesson was the lesson that ""Do not draw attention to yourself either in the home or outside of the home."" Maybe it's a migrant lesson. We were to be below the radar, so there was no communication, really, between Bageye and us and us and Bageye, and the sound that we most looked forward to, you know when you're a child and you want your father to come home and it's all going to be happy and you're waiting for that sound of the door opening. Well the sound that we looked forward to was the click of the door closing, which meant he'd gone and would not come back.So for three decades, I never laid eyes on my father, nor he on me. We never spoke to each other for three decades, and then a couple of years ago, I decided to turn the spotlight on him.""You are being watched. Actually, you are. You are being watched."" That was his mantra to us, his children. Time and time again he would say this to us. And this was the 1970s, it was Luton, where he worked at Vauxhall Motors, and he was a Jamaican. And what he meant was, you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant are being watched to see which way you turn, to see whether you conform to the host nation's stereotype of you, of being feckless, work-shy, destined for a life of crime. You are being watched, so confound their expectations of you. To that end, Bageye and his friends, mostly Jamaican, exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura: Turn your best side to the world, show your best face to the world.If you have seen some of the images of the Caribbean people arriving in the '40s and '50s, you might have noticed that a lot of the men wear trilbies. Now, there was no tradition of wearing trilbies in Jamaica. They invented that tradition for their arrival here. They wanted to project themselves in a way that they wanted to be perceived, so that the way they looked and the names that they gave themselves defined them. So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes. Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear. Anxious is always anxious. Clock has one arm longer than the other. (Laughter) And my all-time favorite was the guy they called Summerwear. When Summerwear came to this country from Jamaica in the early '60s, he insisted on wearing light summer suits, no matter the weather, and in the course of researching their lives, I asked my mom, ""Whatever became of Summerwear?"" And she said, ""He caught a cold and died."" (Laughter) But men like Summerwear taught us the importance of style. Maybe they exaggerated their style because they thought that they were not considered to be quite civilized, and they transferred that generational attitude or anxiety onto us, the next generation, so much so that when I was growing up, if ever on the television news or radio a report came up about a black person committing some crime — a mugging, a murder, a burglary — we winced along with our parents, because they were letting the side down. You did not just represent yourself. You represented the group, and it was a terrifying thing to come to terms with, in a way, that maybe you were going to be perceived in the same light. So that was what needed to be challenged. Our father and many of his colleagues exhibited a kind of transmission but not receiving. They were built to transmit but not receive. We were to keep quiet. When our father did speak to us, it was from the pulpit of his mind. They clung to certainty in the belief that doubt would undermine them. But when I am working in my house and writing, after a day's writing, I rush downstairs and I'm very excited to talk about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley and words are tripping out of my mouth like butterflies and I'm so excited that my children stop me, and they say, ""Dad, nobody cares."" (Laughter)But they do care, actually. They cross over. Somehow they find their way to you. They shape their lives according to the narrative of your life, as I did with my father and my mother, perhaps, and maybe Bageye did with his father. And that was clearer to me in the course of looking at his life and understanding, as they say, the Native Americans say, ""Do not criticize the man until you can walk in his moccasins.""But in conjuring his life, it was okay and very straightforward to portray a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s with bowls of plastic fruit, polystyrene ceiling tiles, settees permanently sheathed in their transparent covers that they were delivered in. But what's more difficult to navigate is the emotional landscape between the generations, and the old adage that with age comes wisdom is not true. With age comes the veneer of respectability and a veneer of uncomfortable truths.But what was true was that my parents, my mother, and my father went along with it, did not trust the state to educate me. So listen to how I sound. They determined that they would send me to a private school, but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors. It's quite difficult to fund a private school education and feed his army of children. I remember going on to the school for the entrance exam, and my father said to the priest — it was a Catholic school — he wanted a better ""heducation"" for the boy, but also, he, my father, never even managed to pass worms, never mind entrance exams. But in order to fund my education, he was going to have to do some dodgy stuff, so my father would fund my education by trading in illicit goods from the back of his car, and that was made even more tricky because my father, that's not his car by the way. My father aspired to have a car like that, but my father had a beaten-up Mini, and he never, being a Jamaican coming to this country, he never had a driving license, he never had any insurance or road tax or MOT. He thought, ""I know how to drive; why do I need the state's validation?"" But it became a little tricky when we were stopped by the police, and we were stopped a lot by the police, and I was impressed by the way that my father dealt with the police. He would promote the policeman immediately, so that P.C. Bloggs became Detective Inspector Bloggs in the course of the conversation and wave us on merrily. So my father was exhibiting what we in Jamaica called ""playing fool to catch wise."" But it lent also an idea that actually he was being diminished or belittled by the policeman — as a 10-year-old boy, I saw that — but also there was an ambivalence towards authority. So on the one hand, there was a mocking of authority, but on the other hand, there was a deference towards authority, and these Caribbean people had an overbearing obedience towards authority, which is very striking, very strange in a way, because migrants are very courageous people. They leave their homes. My father and my mother left Jamaica and they traveled 4,000 miles, and yet they were infantilized by travel. They were timid, and somewhere along the line, the natural order was reversed. The children became the parents to the parent.The Caribbean people came to this country with a five-year plan: they would work, some money, and then go back, but the five years became 10, the 10 became 15, and before you know it, you're changing the wallpaper, and at that point, you know you're here to stay. Although there's still the kind of temporariness that our parents felt about being here, but we children knew that the game was up. I think there was a feeling that they would not be able to continue with the ideals of the life that they expected. The reality was very much different. And also, that was true of the reality of trying to educate me. Having started the process, my father did not continue. It was left to my mother to educate me, and as George Lamming would say, it was my mother who fathered me.Even in his absence, that old mantra remained: You are being watched. But such ardent watchfulness can lead to anxiety, so much so that years later, when I was investigating why so many young black men were diagnosed with schizophrenia, six times more than they ought to be, I was not surprised to hear the psychiatrist say, ""Black people are schooled in paranoia."" And I wonder what Bageye would make of that.Now I also had a 10-year-old son, and turned my attention to Bageye and I went in search of him. He was back in Luton, he was now 82, and I hadn't seen him for 30-odd years, and when he opened the door, I saw this tiny little man with lambent, smiling eyes, and he was smiling, and I'd never seen him smile. I was very disconcerted by that. But we sat down, and he had a Caribbean friend with him, talking some old time talk, and my father would look at me, and he looked at me as if I would miraculously disappear as I had arisen. And he turned to his friend, and he said, ""This boy and me have a deep, deep connection, deep, deep connection."" But I never felt that connection. If there was a pulse, it was very weak or hardly at all. And I almost felt in the course of that reunion that I was auditioning to be my father's son.When the book came out, it had fair reviews in the national papers, but the paper of choice in Luton is not The Guardian, it's the Luton News, and the Luton News ran the headline about the book, ""The Book That May Heal a 32-Year-Old Rift."" And I understood that could also represent the rift between one generation and the next, between people like me and my father's generation, but there's no tradition in Caribbean life of memoirs or biographies. It was a tradition that you didn't chat about your business in public. But I welcomed that title, and I thought actually, yes, there is a possibility that this will open up conversations that we'd never had before. This will close the generation gap, perhaps. This could be an instrument of repair. And I even began to feel that this book may be perceived by my father as an act of filial devotion.Poor, deluded fool. Bageye was stung by what he perceived to be the public airing of his shortcomings. He was stung by my betrayal, and he went to the newspapers the next day and demanded a right of reply, and he got it with the headline ""Bageye Bites Back."" And it was a coruscating account of my betrayal. I was no son of his. He recognized in his mind that his colors had been dragged through the mud, and he couldn't allow that. He had to restore his dignity, and he did so, and initially, although I was disappointed, I grew to admire that stance. There was still fire bubbling through his veins, even though he was 82 years old. And if it meant that we would now return to 30 years of silence, my father would say, ""If it's so, then it's so.""Jamaicans will tell you that there's no such thing as facts, there are only versions. We all tell ourselves the versions of the story that we can best live with. Each generation builds up an edifice which they are reluctant or sometimes unable to disassemble, but in the writing, my version of the story began to change, and it was detached from me. I lost my hatred of my father. I did no longer want him to die or to murder him, and I felt free, much freer than I'd ever felt before. And I wonder whether that freedness could be transferred to him.In that initial reunion, I was struck by an idea that I had very few photographs of myself as a young child. This is a photograph of me, nine months old. In the original photograph, I'm being held up by my father, Bageye, but when my parents separated, my mother excised him from all aspects of our lives. She took a pair of scissors and cut  him out of every photograph, and for years, I told myself the truth of this photograph was that you are alone, you are unsupported. But there's another way of looking at this photograph. This is a photograph that has the potential for a reunion, a potential to be reunited with my father, and in my yearning to be held up by my father, I held him up to the light.In that first reunion, it was very awkward and tense moments, and to lessen the tension, we decided to go for a walk. And as we walked, I was struck that I had reverted to being the child even though I was now towering above my father. I was almost a foot taller than my father. He was still the big man, and I tried to match his step. And I realized that he was walking as if he was still under observation, but I admired his walk. He walked like a man on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final mounting the steps to collect his condolence medal. There was dignity in defeat.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/colin_grant_the_son_of_a_difficult_father
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"On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League. Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters. Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant. Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not. Nosair would eventually be convicted for his involvement in the plot. El-Sayyid Nosair is my father.I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for me. It wasn't until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. It's been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn't take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life. However, in every religion, in every population, you'll find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do.A few months prior to his arrest, he sat me down and explained that for the past few weekends, he and some friends had been going to a shooting range on Long Island for target practice. He told me I'd be going with him the next morning. We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI. When it was my turn to shoot, my father helped me hold the rifle to my shoulder and explained how to aim at the target about 30 yards off. That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames. My uncle turned to the other men, and in Arabic said, ""Ibn abuh."" Like father, like son. They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000 others. These were the men I looked up to. These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle.By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life, and that instability during my childhood didn't really provide an opportunity to make many friends. Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town. Being the perpetual new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies. I kept my identity a secret from my classmates to avoid being targeted, but as it turns out, being the quiet, chubby new kid in class was more than enough ammunition. So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games. For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn't prepared for the real world. I'd been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion.So what opened my eyes? One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections. Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia. My particular group's focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate. The members of our group came from many different walks of life. One day toward the end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable. Another major turning point came when I found a summer job at Busch Gardens, an amusement park. There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures, and that experience proved to be fundamental to the development of my character. Most of my life, I'd been taught that homosexuality was a sin, and by extension, that all gay people were a negative influence. As chance would have it, I had the opportunity to work with some of the gay performers at a show there, and soon found that many were the kindest, least judgmental people I had ever met. Being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in me toward the suffering of others, and it comes very unnaturally to me to treat people who are kind in any other way than how I would want to be treated. Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I'd been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction. I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I'm well acquainted with being judged for something that's beyond my control.Then there was ""The Daily Show."" On a nightly basis, Jon Stewart forced me to be intellectually honest with myself about my own bigotry and helped me to realize that a person's race, religion or sexual orientation had nothing to do with the quality of one's character. He was in many ways a father figure to me when I was in desperate need of one. Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me.One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live. She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, ""I'm tired of hating people."" In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you.Zak Ebrahim is not my real name. I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life. So why would I out myself and potentially put myself in danger? Well, that's simple. I do it in the hopes that perhaps someone someday who is compelled to use violence may hear my story and realize that there is a better way, that although I had been subjected to this violent, intolerant ideology, that I did not become fanaticized. Instead, I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry. I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father's actions. And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn't inherent in one's religion or race, and the son does not have to follow the ways of his father. I am not my father.Thank you. (Applause)Thank you, everybody. (Applause)Thank you all. (Applause)Thanks a lot. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zak_ebrahim_i_am_the_son_of_a_terrorist_here_s_how_i_chose_peace
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"My dream is to build the world's first underground park in New York City. Now, why would someone want to build an underground park, and why in New York City?These three tough little buggers are, on the left, my grandmother, age five, and then her sister and brother, ages 11 and nine. This photo was taken just before they left from Italy to immigrate to the United States, just about a century ago. And like many immigrants at the time, they arrived on the Lower East Side in New York City and they encountered a crazy melting pot. What was amazing about their generation was that they were not only building new lives in this new, unfamiliar area, but they were also literally building the city. I've always been fascinated by those decades and by that history, and I would often beg my grandmother to tell me as many stories as possible about the old New York. But she would often just shrug it off, tell me to eat more meatballs, more pasta, and so I very rarely got any of the history that I wanted to hear about.The New York City that I encountered felt pretty built up. I always knew as a kid that I wanted to make a difference, and to somehow make the world more beautiful, more interesting and more just. I just didn't really know how. At first, I thought I wanted to go work abroad, so I took a job with UNICEF in Kenya. But it felt weird to me that I knew more about local Kenyan politics than the politics of my own hometown. I took a job with the City of New York, but very quickly felt frustrated with the slowness of government bureaucracy. I even took a job at Google, where very fast I drank the Kool-Aid and believed almost wholeheartedly that technology could solve all social problems. But I still didn't feel like I was making the world a better place.It was in 2009 that my friend and now business partner James Ramsey alerted me to the location of a pretty spectacular site, which is this. This is the former trolley terminal that was the depot for passengers traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and it was open between 1908 and 1948, just around the time when my grandparents were living right in the area. And we learned also that the site was entirely abandoned in 1948. Fascinated by this discovery, we begged the authorities to draw us into the space, and we finally got a tour, and this is what we saw. Now, this photo doesn't really do it justice. It's kind of hard to imagine the unbelievably magical feeling that you have when you get in this space. It's a football field of unused land immediately below a very crowded area of the city, and it almost feels like you're Indiana Jones on an archaeological dig, and all the details are all still there. It's really pretty remarkable.Now, the site itself is located at the very heart of the Lower East Side, and today it still remains one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city. New York City has two thirds the green space per resident as other big cities, and this neighborhood as one tenth the green space. So we immediately started thinking about how we could take this site and turn it into something that could be used for the public, but also could potentially even be green. Our plan, in a nutshell, is to draw natural sunlight underground using a simple system that harvests sunlight above the street, directs it below the city sidewalks, and would allow plants and trees to grow with the light that's directed underneath. With this approach, you could take a site that looks like this today and transform it into something that looks like this.In 2011, we first released some of these images, and what was funny was, a lot of people said to us, ""Oh, it kind of looks like the High Line underground."" And so what our nickname ended up becoming, and what ended up sticking, was the Lowline, so the Lowline was born. What was also clear was that people really wanted to know a lot more about how the technology would look and feel, and that there was really much more interest in this than we had ever thought possible. So, like a crazy person, I decided to quit my job and focus entirely on this project. Here is us with our team putting together a technology demonstration in a warehouse. Here's the underbelly of this solar canopy which we built to show the technology. You can see the six solar collectors at the center there. And here's the full exhibit all put together in this warehouse. You can see the solar canopy overhead, the light streaming in, and this entirely live green space below. So in the course of just a few weeks, tens of thousands of people came to see our exhibit, and since that time, we've grown our numbers of supporters both locally and among design enthusiasts all over the world.Here's a rendering of the neighborhood just immediately above the Line's site, and a rendering of how it will look after major redevelopment that is coming over the course of the next 10 years. Notice how crowded the neighborhood still feels and how there's really a lack of green space. So what we're proposing is really something that will add one football field of green space underneath this neighborhood, but more importantly will introduce a really community-driven focus in a rapidly gentrifying area. And right now, we're focusing very closely on how we engage with the City of New York on really transforming the overall ecosystem in an integrated way.Here's our rendering of how we would actually invite people into the space itself. So here you see this iconic entrance in which we would literally peel up the street and reveal the historical layers of the city, and invite people into this warm underground space. In the middle of winter, when it's absolutely freezing outside, the last place you'd want to go would be an outdoor space or outdoor park. The Lowline would really be a four-season space and a respite for the city. So I like to think that the Lowline actually brings my own family's story full circle. If my grandparents and my parents were really focused on building the city up and out, I think my generation is focused on reclaiming the spaces that we already have, rediscovering our shared history, and reimagining how we can make our communities more interesting, more beautiful and more just.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barasch_a_park_underneath_the_hustle_and_bustle_of_new_york_city
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"Hans Rosling: I'm going to ask you three multiple choice questions. Use this device. Use this device to answer. The first question is, how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century? Did it more than double, did it remain about the same in the world as a whole, or did it decrease to less than half? Please answer A, B or C. I see lots of answers. This is much faster than I do it at universities. They are so slow. They keep thinking, thinking, thinking. Oh, very, very good.And we go to the next question. So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years? A, B or C? Please answer.And we go to the next question. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change? Extreme poverty — not having  enough food for the day. Did it almost double, did it remain more or less the same, or did it halve? A, B or C?Now, answers. You see, deaths from natural disasters in the world, you can see it from this graph here, from 1900 to 2000. In 1900, there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, volcanic  eruption, whatever, droughts. And then, how did that change?Gapminder asked the public in Sweden. This is how they answered. The Swedish public answered like this: Fifty percent thought it had doubled, 38 percent said it's more or less the same, 12 said it had halved. This is the best data from the disaster researchers, and it goes up and down, and it goes to the Second World War, and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it's down to much less than half. The world has been much, much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this, you know. So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this.So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) The chimps don't watch the evening news, so the chimps, they choose by random, so the Swedes answer worse than random. Now how did you do? That's you. You were beaten by the chimps. (Laughter) But it was close. You were three times better than the Swedes, but that's not enough. You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes. You must have higher ambitions in the world.Let's look at the next answer here: women in school. Here, you can see men went eight years. How long did women go to school? Well, we asked the Swedes like this, and that gives you a hint, doesn't it? The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it? (Laughter) Let's see, let's see. Here we come. Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up. This is the U.S. public. And this is you. Here you come. Ooh. Well, congratulations, you're twice as good as the Swedes, but you don't need me —So how come? I think it's like this, that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties. They are stopped when they go to school, and it's disgusting. But in the majority of the world, where most people in the world live, most countries, girls today go to school as long as boys, more or less. That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved, not at all. They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations, but schooling is there in the world today. Now, we miss the majority. When you answer, you answer according to the worst places, and there you are right, but you miss the majority.What about poverty? Well, it's very clear that poverty here was almost halved, and in U.S., when we asked the public, only five percent got it right. And you? Ah, you almost made it to the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) That little, just a few of you! There must be preconceived ideas, you know. And many in the rich countries, they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty. Of course they think so, because they don't even know what has happened. The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present.These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run, and it was started, this project, last year by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter) He's cofounder and director, and he wanted, Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance. So already the pilots reveal this, that so many in the public score worse than random, so we have to think about preconceived ideas, and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution.Look here. This is how it was in 1975. It's the number of people on each income, from one dollar a day — (Applause) See, there was one hump here, around one dollar a day, and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars. The world was two groups. It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps, the poor ones and the rich ones, and there were fewer in between.But look how this has changed: As I go forward, what has changed, the world population has grown, and the humps start to merge. The lower humps merged with the upper hump, and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only. The percent in poverty has decreased. Still it's appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty. We still have this group, almost a billion, over there, but that can be ended now.The challenge we have now is to get away from that, understand where the majority is, and that is very clearly shown in this question. We asked, what is the percentage of the world's one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years: 20, 50 or 80 percent? Now, this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered. Look at the Swedish result: you know what the right answer is. (Laughter) Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country? Well, it's me. It's me. (Laughter) It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult. (Applause)However, Ola's approach to really measure what we know made headlines, and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there, millions answered, and I think there were about 2,000 comments, and this was one of the comments. ""I bet no member of the media passed the test,"" he said.So Ola told me, ""Take these devices. You are invited to media conferences. Give it to them and measure what the media know."" And ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, the informal results from a conference with U.S. media. And then, lately, from the European Union media. (Laughter) You see, the problem is not that people don't read and listen to the media. The problem is that the media doesn't know themselves.What shall we do about this, Ola? Do we have any ideas? (Applause)Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first, I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps. Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault, actually. Then, I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future. That's basically what I will do.But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant, and it all starts in this place. It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden. It's a neighborhood where I grew up, and it's a neighborhood with a large problem. Actually, it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well. It was not representative. Okay? It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet. So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle. We have a personal bias.We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet, and on top of this, we start school, and we add the next problem. Well, I like schools, but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews, because they learned something when they went to school, and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions, and those books, of course, that are printed are outdated in a world that changes. And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date. So that's what we are focusing on. So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias.What happens next is news, okay? An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines, and people will read it because it's sensational. Unusual events are more interesting, no? And they are exaggerated, and especially things we're afraid of. A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden.So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from. They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas, and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans, our human intuition. It was good in evolution. It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very, very fast. It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of, and we seek causality where there is none, and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers, above the average. Everybody answered that question, ""Yeah, I drive cars better.""Okay, this was good evolutionarily, but now when it comes to the worldview, it is the exact reason why it's upside down. The trends that are increasing are instead falling, and the other way around, and in this case, the chimps use our intuition against us, and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength. It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it?So how do we solve such problems? First, we need to measure it, and then we need to cure it. So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance. We started the pilot last year, and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world, and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development, such as climate, endangered species, human rights, gender equality, energy, finance. All different sectors have facts, and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts. So I've started actually contacting some of them, like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF, and asking them, what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn't know?Okay, I gather those facts. Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts. And then we poll the public and see where they score worst. So we get a shorter list with the terrible results, like some few examples from Hans, and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results. Okay, this little shortlist, what are we going to do with it? Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate, a global knowledge certificate, which you can use, if you're a large organization, a school, a university, or maybe a news agency, to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable. Basically meaning, we don't hire people who score like chimpanzees. Of course you shouldn't. So maybe 10 years from now, if this project succeeds, you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge.So now we come to the practical tricks. How are you going to succeed? There is, of course, one way, which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports. That will never happen, actually. Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen. People don't have that time. People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts. We need to turn our intuition into strength again. We need to be able to generalize. So now I'm going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb.Let's start with the first misconception. This is very widespread. Everything is getting worse. You heard it. You thought it yourself. The other way to think is, most things improve. So you're sitting with a question in front of you and you're unsure. You should guess ""improve."" Okay? Don't go for the worse. That will help you score better on our tests. (Applause) That was the first one.There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing. It's a terrible inequality. Yeah, it's an unequal world, but when you look at the data, it's one hump. Okay? If you feel unsure, go for ""the most people are in the middle."" That's going to help you get the answer right.Now, the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very, very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters. No, no, no. That's wrong. Look: that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school. So if you are unsure, go for the ""the majority already have this,"" like electricity and girls in school, these kinds of things. They're only rules of thumb, so of course they don't apply to everything, but this is how you can generalize.Let's look at the last one. If something, yes, this is a good one, sharks are dangerous. No — well, yes, but they are not so important in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying. I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks. So as soon as I see a question about things I'm afraid of, which might be earthquakes, other religions, maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks, anything that makes me feel, assume you're going to exaggerate the problem. That's a rule of thumb. Of course there are dangerous  things that are also great. Sharks kill very, very few. That's how you should think.With these four rules of thumb, you could probably answer better than the chimps, because the chimps cannot do this. They cannot generalize these kinds of rules. And hopefully we can turn your world around and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay? (Applause) That's a systematic approach.Now the question, is this important? Yeah, it's important to understand poverty, extreme poverty and how to fight it, and how to bring girls in school. When we realize that actually it's succeeding, we can understand it. But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale? I would say yes, extremely important, for the same reason. If you have a fact-based worldview of today, you might have a chance to understand what's coming next in the future.We're going back to these two humps in 1975. That's when I was born, and I selected the West. That's the current EU countries and North America. Let's now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are. These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation. In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America. But this has changed, okay? So first, let's look at the change up till today, 2014. Today it's 50/50. The Western domination is over, as of today. That's nice. So what's going to happen next? Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved? I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF, International Monetary Fund, website. They have a forecast for the next  five years of GDP per capita. So I can use that to go five years into the future, assuming the income inequality  of each country is the same. I did that, but I went even further. I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed, just as an  experiment what might actually happen. Let's move into the future. In 2020, it's 57 percent in the rest. In 2025, 63 percent. 2030, 68. And in 2035, the West is  outnumbered in the rich consumer market. These are just projections of  GDP per capita into the future. Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe. So yes, I think it's a good idea for  a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact- based decisions in the future.Thank you very much. (Applause)Bruno Giussani: Hans and Ola Rosling!","https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world
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"Good afternoon. My name is Uldus. I am a photo-based artist from Russia. I started my way around six years ago with ironic self-portraits to lay open so many stereotypes about nationalities, genders, and social issues — [""I am Russian. I sell drugs, guns, porno with kids!""] [""Vodka = water. I love vodka!""] (Laughter) — using photography as my tool to send a message. [""Marry me, I need a visa.""]Today, I am still performing in front of the camera and trying to be brave like Wonder Woman. I focus on balancing meaningful message, aesthetic, beauty, composition,  some irony, and artifacts.Today, I'm going to tell you about my project, which is named Desperate Romantics. They're my artifacts, or paintings from pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood England mid-19th century. I took the painting and gifted new, contemporary meaning talking about issues which are surrounding me in Russia, capturing people who are non-models but have an interesting story.This boy is a professional dancer, only 12 years old, but at secondary school, he hides his dancing classes and is wearing the mask of brutality, trying to be united with the rest of his classmates like a storm trooper has no personality. But this boy has goals and dreams but hides it to be socially accepted, because being different isn't easy, especially in Russia.Next portrait interpretation is metaphoric. And this is Nikita, a security guard from one of the bars in St. Petersburg. He likes to say, ""You wouldn't like me when I'm angry,"" quoting Hulk from the movie, but I've never seen him angry. He hides his sensitivities and romantic side, because in Russia, among guys, that's not cool to be romantic, but it's cool to be surrounded with women and look like an aggressive hulk. (Laughter)Sometimes, in my project, I would take the painting and give it new meaning and new temptation about it. Sometimes, I would compare facial features and playing with words: irony, Iron Man, ironing man. (Laughter)Through the artifacts, I bring social issues which surround me in Russia into the conversation. Interesting fact about marriage in Russia, that most of the 18, 19-year-old girls are already ready, and dream to get married. We're taught from childhood, successful marriage means successful life, so most of the girls kind of fight to get a good husband.And what about me? I'm 27 years old. For Russian society, I'm an old maid and hopeless to ever get married. That's why you see me in a Mexican fighter mask, in the wedding dress, all desperate in my garden. But remember, irony is the key, and this is actually to motivate girls to fight for goals, for dreams, and change stereotypes. Be brave. Be ironic — it helps. Be funny and create some magic.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/uldus_bakhtiozina_wry_photos_that_turn_stereotypes_upside_down
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"For over a decade as a doctor, I've cared for homeless veterans, for working-class families. I've cared for people who  live and work in conditions that can be hard, if not harsh, and that work has led me to believe that we need a fundamentally different way of looking at healthcare. We simply need a healthcare system that moves beyond just looking at the symptoms that bring people into clinics, but instead actually is able to look and improve health where it begins. And where health begins is not in the four walls of a doctor's office, but where we live and where we work, where we eat, sleep, learn and play, where we spend the majority of our lives.So what does this different  approach to healthcare look like, an approach that can improve health where it begins? To illustrate this, I'll tell you about Veronica. Veronica was the 17th patient out of my 26-patient day at that clinic in South Central Los Angeles. She came into our clinic with a chronic headache. This headache had been going on for a number of years, and this particular episode was very, very troubling. In fact, three weeks before she came to visit us for the first time, she went to an  emergency room in Los Angeles. The emergency room doctors said, ""We've run some tests, Veronica. The results are normal, so here's some pain medication, and follow up with a primary care doctor, but if the pain persists or if it worsens, then come on back.""Veronica followed those standard instructions and she went back. She went back not just once, but twice more. In the three weeks before Veronica met us, she went to the emergency room three times. She went back and forth, in and out of hospitals and clinics, just like she had done in years past, trying to seek relief but still coming up short. Veronica came to our clinic, and despite all these encounters with healthcare professionals, Veronica was still sick.When she came to our clinic, though,  we tried a different approach. Our approach started with our medical assistant, someone who had a GED-level training but knew the community. Our medical assistant asked some routine questions. She asked, ""What's your chief complaint?"" ""Headache."" ""Let's get your vital signs"" — measure your blood pressure and your heart rate, but let's also ask something equally as vital to Veronica and a lot of patients like her in South Los Angeles. ""Veronica, can you tell me about where you live? Specifically, about your housing conditions? Do you have mold? Do you have water leaks? Do you have roaches in your home?"" Turns out, Veronica said yes to three of those things: roaches, water leaks, mold. I received that chart in hand, reviewed it, and I turned the handle on the door and I entered the room.You should understand that Veronica, like a lot of patients that I have the privilege of caring for, is a dignified person, a formidable presence, a personality that's larger than life, but here she was doubled over in pain sitting on my exam table. Her head, clearly throbbing, was resting in her hands. She lifted her head up, and I saw her face, said hello, and then I immediately noticed something across the bridge of her nose, a crease in her skin. In medicine, we call that crease the allergic salute. It's usually seen among children who have chronic allergies. It comes from chronically rubbing one's nose up and down, trying to get rid of those allergy symptoms, and yet, here was Veronica, a grown woman, with the same telltale sign of allergies. A few minutes later, in asking Veronica some questions, and examining her and listening to her, I said, ""Veronica, I think I know what you have. I think you have chronic allergies, and I think you have migraine headaches and some sinus congestion, and I think all of those are  related to where you live."" She looked a little bit relieved, because for the first time, she had a diagnosis, but I said, ""Veronica, now let's talk about your treatment. We're going to order some medications for your symptoms, but I also want to refer you to a specialist, if that's okay.""Now, specialists are a little hard to find in South Central Los Angeles, so she gave me this look, like, ""Really?"" And I said, ""Veronica, actually, the specialist I'm talking about is someone I call a community health worker, someone who, if it's okay with you, can come to your home and try to understand what's going on with those water leaks and that mold, trying to help you manage those conditions in your housing that I think are causing your symptoms, and if required, that specialist might refer you to another specialist that we call a public interest lawyer, because it might be that your landlord isn't making the fixes he's required to make.""Veronica came back in a few months later. She agreed to all of those treatment plans. She told us that her symptoms had improved by 90 percent. She was spending more time at work and with her family and less time shuttling back and forth between the emergency rooms of Los Angeles. Veronica had improved remarkably. Her sons, one of whom had asthma, were no longer as sick as they used to be. She had gotten better, and not coincidentally, Veronica's home was better too.What was it about this different approach we tried that led to better care, fewer visits to the E.R., better health? Well, quite simply, it started with that question: ""Veronica, where do you live?"" But more importantly, it was that we put in place a system that allowed us to routinely ask questions to Veronica and hundreds more like her about the conditions that mattered in her community, about where health, and unfortunately sometimes illness, do begin in places like South L.A. In that community, substandard housing and food insecurity are the major conditions that we as a clinic had to be aware of, but in other communities it could be transportation barriers, obesity, access to parks, gun violence.The important thing is, we put in place a system that worked, and it's an approach that I call an upstream approach. It's a term many of you are familiar with. It comes from a parable that's very common in the public health community. This is a parable of three friends. Imagine that you're one of these three friends who come to a river. It's a beautiful scene, but it's shattered by the cries of a child, and actually several children, in need of rescue in the water. So you do hopefully what everybody would do. You jump right in along with your friends. The first friend says, I'm going to rescue those who are about to drown, those at most risk of falling over the waterfall. The second friends says, I'm going to build a raft. I'm going to make sure that fewer people need to end up at the waterfall's edge. Let's usher more people to safety by building this raft, coordinating those branches together. Over time, they're successful, but not really, as much as they want to be. More people slip through, and they finally look up and they see that their third friend is nowhere to be seen. They finally spot her. She's in the water. She's swimming away from them upstream, rescuing children as she goes, and they shout to her, ""Where are you going? There are children here to save."" And she says back, ""I'm going to find out who or what is throwing these children in the water."" In healthcare, we have that first friend — we have the specialist, we have the trauma surgeon, the ICU nurse, the E.R. doctors. We have those people that are vital rescuers, people you want to be there when you're in dire straits. We also know that we have the second friend — we have that raft-builder. That's the primary care clinician, people on the care team who are there to manage your chronic conditions, your diabetes, your hypertension, there to give you your annual checkups, there to make sure your vaccines are up to date, but also there to make sure that you have a raft to sit on and usher yourself to safety. But while that's also vital and very necessary, what we're missing is that third friend. We don't have enough of that upstreamist. The upstreamists are the health care professionals who know that health does begin where we live and work and play, but beyond that awareness, is able to mobilize the resources to create the system in their clinics and in their hospitals that really does start to approach that, to connect people to the resources they need outside the four walls of the clinic.Now you might ask, and it's  a very obvious question that a lot of colleagues in medicine ask: ""Doctors and nurses thinking about transportation and housing? Shouldn't we just provide pills and procedures and just make sure we focus on the task at hand?"" Certainly, rescuing people at the water's edge is important enough work. Who has the time? I would argue, though, that if we were to use science as our guide, that we would find an upstream approach is absolutely necessary. Scientists now know that the living and working conditions that we all are part of have more than twice the impact on our health than does our genetic code, and living and working conditions, the structures of our environments, the ways in which our social fabric is woven together, and the impact those have on our behaviors, all together, those have more than five times the impact on our health than do all the pills and procedures administered by doctors and hospitals combined. All together, living and working conditions account for 60 percent of preventable death.Let me give you an example of what this feels like. Let's say there was a company, a tech startup that came to you and said, ""We have a great product. It's going to lower your risk of death from heart disease."" Now, you might be likely to invest if that product was a drug or a device, but what if that product was a park? A study in the U.K., a landmark study that reviewed the records of over 40 million residents in the U.K., looked at several variables, controlled for a lot of factors, and found that when trying to adjust the risk of heart disease, one's exposure to green space was a powerful influence. The closer you were to green space, to parks and trees, the lower your chance of heart disease, and that stayed true for rich and for poor. That study illustrates what my friends in public health often say these days: that one's zip code matters more than your genetic code. We're also learning that zip code is actually shaping our genetic code. The science of epigenetics looks at those molecular mechanisms, those intricate ways in which our DNA is literally shaped, genes turned on and off based on the exposures to the environment, to where we live and to where we work. So it's clear that these factors, these upstream issues, do matter. They matter to our health, and therefore our healthcare professionals should do something about it. And yet, Veronica asked me perhaps the most compelling question I've been asked in a long time. In that follow-up visit, she said, ""Why did none of my doctors ask about my home before? In those visits to the emergency room, I had two CAT scans, I had a needle placed in the lower part of my back to collect spinal fluid, I had nearly a dozen blood tests. I went back and forth, I saw all sorts of people in healthcare, and no one asked about my home.""The honest answer is that in healthcare, we often treat symptoms without addressing the conditions that make you sick in the first place. And there are many reasons for that, but the big three are first, we don't pay for that. In healthcare, we often pay  for volume and not value. We pay doctors and hospitals usually for the number of services they provide, but not necessarily on how healthy they make you. That leads to a second phenomenon that I call the ""don't ask, don't tell"" approach to upstream issues in healthcare. We don't ask about where you live and where you work, because if there's a problem there, we don't know what to tell you. It's not that doctors don't know these are important issues. In a recent survey done in the U.S. among physicians, over 1,000 physicians, 80 percent of them actually said that they know that their patients' upstream problems are as important as their health issues, as their medical problems, and yet despite that widespread awareness of the importance of upstream issues, only one in five doctors said they had any sense of confidence to address those issues, to improve health where it begins. There's this gap between knowing that patients' lives, the context of where they live and work, matters, and the ability to do something about it in the systems in which we work.This is a huge problem right now, because it leads them to this next question, which is, whose responsibility is it? And that brings me to that third point, that third answer to Veronica's compelling question. Part of the reason that we have this conundrum is because there are not nearly enough upstreamists in the healthcare system. There are not nearly enough of that third friend, that person who is going to find out who or what is throwing those kids in the water. Now, there are many upstreamists, and I've had the privilege of meeting many of them, in Los Angeles and in other parts of the country and around the world, and it's important to note that upstreamists sometimes are doctors, but they need not be. They can be nurses, other clinicians, care managers, social workers. It's not so important what specific degree upstreamists have at the end of their name. What's more important is that they all seem to share the same ability to implement a process that transforms their assistance, transforms the way they practice medicine. That process is a quite simple process. It's one, two and three. First, they sit down and they say, let's identify the clinical problem among a certain set of patients. Let's say, for instance, let's try to help children who are bouncing in and out of the hospital with asthma. After identifying the problem, they  then move on to that second step, and they say, let's identify the root cause. Now, a root cause analysis, in healthcare, usually says, well, let's look at your genes, let's look at how you're behaving. Maybe you're not eating healthy enough. Eat healthier. It's a pretty simplistic approach to root cause analyses. It turns out, it doesn't really work when we just limit ourselves that worldview. The root cause analysis that an upstreamist brings to the table is to say, let's look at the living and the working conditions in your life. Perhaps, for children with asthma, it's what's happening in their home, or perhaps they live close to a freeway with major air pollution that triggers their asthma. And perhaps that's what we should mobilize our resources to address, because that third element, that third part of the process, is that next critical part of what upstreamists do. They mobilize the resources to create a solution, both within the clinical system, and then by bringing in people from public health, from other sectors, lawyers, whoever is willing to play ball, let's bring in to create a solution that makes sense, to take those patients who actually have clinical problems and address their root causes together by linking them to the resources you need. It's clear to me that there are so many stories of upstreamists who are doing remarkable things. The problem is that there's just not nearly enough of them out there. By some estimates, we need one upstreamist for every 20 to 30 clinicians in the healthcare system. In the U.S., for instance, that would mean that we need 25,000 upstreamists by the year 2020. But we only have a few thousand upstreamists out there right now, by all accounts, and that's why, a few years ago, my colleagues and I said, you know what, we need to train and make more upstreamists.So we decided to start an organization called Health Begins, and Health Begins simply does that: We train upstreamists. And there are a lot of measures that we use for our success, but the main thing that we're interested in is making sure that we're changing the sense of confidence, that ""don't ask, don't tell"" metric among clinicians. We're trying to make sure that clinicians, and therefore their systems that they work in have the ability, the confidence to address the problems in the living and working conditions in our lives. We're seeing nearly a tripling of that confidence in our work.It's remarkable, but I'll tell you the most compelling part of what it means to be working with upstreamists to gather them together. What is most compelling is that every day, every week, I hear stories just like Veronica's. There are stories out there of Veronica and many more like her, people who are coming to the healthcare system and getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be part of something that works, a health care system that stops bouncing you back and forth but actually improves your health, listens to you who you are, addresses the context of your life, whether you're rich or poor or middle class.These stories are compelling because not only do they tell us that we're this close to getting the healthcare system that we want, but that there's something that we can all do to get there. Doctors and nurses can get better at asking about the context of patients' lives, not simply because it's better bedside manner, but frankly, because it's a better standard of care. Healthcare systems and payers can start to bring in public health agencies and departments and say, let's look at our data together. Let's see if we can discover some patterns in our data about our patients' lives and see if we can identify an upstream cause, and then, as importantly, can we align the resources to be able to address them? Medical schools, nursing schools, all sorts of health professional education programs can help by training the next generation of upstreamists. We can also make sure that these schools certify a backbone of the upstream approach, and that's the community health worker. We need many more of them in the healthcare system if we're truly going to have it be effective, to move from a sickcare system to a healthcare system. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, what do we do? What do we do as patients? We can start by simply going to our doctors and our nurses, to our clinics, and asking, ""Is there something in where I live and where I work that I should be aware of?"" Are there barriers to health that I'm just not aware of, and more importantly, if there are barriers that I'm surfacing, if I'm coming to you and I'm saying I think have a problem with my apartment or at my workplace or I don't have access to transportation, or there's a park that's way too far, so sorry doctor, I can't take your advice to go and jog, if those problems exist, then doctor, are you willing to listen? And what can we do together to improve my health where it begins?If we're all able to do this work, doctors and healthcare systems, payers, and all of us together, we'll realize something about health. Health is not just a personal responsibility or phenomenon. Health is a common good. It comes from our personal investment in knowing that our lives matter, the context of where we live and where we work, eat, and sleep, matter, and that what we do for ourselves, we also should do for those whose living and working conditions again, can be hard, if not harsh. We can all invest in making sure that we improve the allocation of resources upstream, but at the same time work together and show that we can move healthcare upstream. We can improve health where it begins.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rishi_manchanda_what_makes_us_get_sick_look_upstream
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"So in 1781, an English composer, technologist and astronomer called William Herschel noticed an object on the sky that didn't quite move the way the rest of the stars did. And Herschel's recognition that something was different, that something wasn't quite right, was the discovery of a planet, the planet Uranus, a name that has entertained countless generations of children, but a planet that overnight doubled the size of our known solar system. Just last month, NASA announced the discovery of 517 new planets in orbit around nearby stars, almost doubling overnight the number of planets we know about within our galaxy. So astronomy is constantly being transformed by this capacity to collect data, and with data almost doubling every year, within the next two decades, me may even reach the point for the first time in history where we've discovered the majority of the galaxies within the universe.But as we enter this era of big data, what we're beginning to find is there's a difference between more data being just better and more data being different, capable of changing the questions we want to ask, and this difference is not about how much data we collect, it's whether those data open new windows into our universe, whether they change the way we view the sky. So what is the next window into our universe? What is the next chapter for astronomy? Well, I'm going to show you some of the tools and the technologies that we're going to develop over the next decade, and how these technologies, together with the smart use of data, may once again transform astronomy by opening up a window into our universe, the window of time.Why time? Well, time is about origins, and it's about evolution. The origins of our solar system, how our solar system came into being, is it unusual or special in any way? About the evolution of our universe. Why our universe is continuing to expand, and what is this mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion?But first, I want to show you how technology is going to change the way we view the sky. So imagine if you were sitting in the mountains of northern Chile looking out to the west towards the Pacific Ocean a few hours before sunrise. This is the view of the night sky that you would see, and it's a beautiful view, with the Milky Way just peeking out over the horizon. but it's also a static view, and in many ways, this is the way we think of our universe: eternal and unchanging. But the universe is anything but static. It constantly changes on timescales of seconds to billions of years. Galaxies merge, they collide at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Stars are born, they die, they explode in these extravagant displays. In fact, if we could go back to our tranquil skies above Chile, and we allow time to move forward to see how the sky might change over the next year, the pulsations that you see are supernovae, the final remnants of a dying star exploding, brightening and then fading from view, each one of these supernovae five billion times the brightness of our sun, so we can see them to great distances but only for a short amount of time. Ten supernova per second explode somewhere in our universe. If we could hear it, it would be popping like a bag of popcorn. Now, if we fade out the supernovae, it's not just brightness that changes. Our sky is in constant motion. This swarm of objects you see streaming across the sky are asteroids as they orbit our sun, and it's these changes and the motion and it's the dynamics of the system that allow us to build our models for our universe, to predict its future and to explain its past.But the telescopes we've used over the last decade are not designed to capture the data at this scale. The Hubble Space Telescope: for the last 25 years it's been producing some of the most detailed views of our distant universe, but if you tried to use the Hubble to create an image of the sky, it would take 13 million individual images, about 120 years to do this just once.So this is driving us to new technologies and new telescopes, telescopes that can go faint to look at the distant universe but also telescopes that can go wide to capture the sky as rapidly as possible, telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the LSST, possibly the most boring name ever for one of the most fascinating experiments in the history of astronomy, in fact proof, if you should need it, that you should never allow  a scientist or an engineer to name anything, not even your children. (Laughter) We're building the LSST. We expect it to start taking data by the end of this decade. I'm going to show you how we think it's going to transform  our views of the universe, because one image from the LSST is equivalent to 3,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, each image three and a half degrees on the sky, seven times the width of the full moon. Well, how do you capture an image at this scale? Well, you build the largest digital camera in history, using the same technology you find in the cameras in your cell phone or in the digital cameras you  can buy in the High Street, but now at a scale that is five and a half feet across, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, where one image is three billion pixels. So if you wanted to look at an image in its full resolution, just a single LSST image, it would take about 1,500  high-definition TV screens. And this camera will image the sky, taking a new picture every 20 seconds, constantly scanning the sky so every three nights, we'll get a completely new view of the skies above Chile. Over the mission lifetime of this telescope, it will detect 40 billion stars and galaxies, and that will be for the first time we'll have detected more objects in our universe than people on the Earth. Now, we can talk about this in terms of terabytes and petabytes and billions of objects, but a way to get a sense of the amount of data that will come off this camera is that it's like playing every TED Talk ever recorded simultaneously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 years. And to process this data means searching through all of those talks for every new idea and every new concept, looking at each part of the video to see how one frame may have changed from the next. And this is changing the way that we do science, changing the way that we do astronomy, to a place where software and algorithms have to mine through this data, where the software is as critical to the science as the telescopes and the  cameras that we've built.Now, thousands of discoveries will come from this project, but I'm just going to tell you about two of the ideas about origins and evolution that may be transformed by our access to data at this scale.In the last five years, NASA has discovered over 1,000 planetary systems around nearby stars, but the systems we're finding aren't much like our own solar system, and one of the questions we face is is it just that we haven't been looking hard enough or is there something special or unusual about how our solar system formed? And if we want to answer that question, we have to know and understand the history of our solar system in detail, and it's the details that are crucial. So now, if we look back at the sky, at our asteroids that were streaming across the sky, these asteroids are like the debris of our solar system. The positions of the asteroids are like a fingerprint of an earlier time when the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter were much closer to the sun, and as these giant planets migrated through our solar system, they were scattering the asteroids in their wake. So studying the asteroids is like performing forensics, performing forensics on our solar system, but to do this, we need distance, and we get the distance from the motion, and we get the motion because of our access to time.So what does this tell us? Well, if you look at the little yellow asteroids flitting across the screen, these are the asteroids that are moving fastest, because they're closest to us, closest to Earth. These are the asteroids we may one day send spacecraft to, to mine them for minerals, but they're also the asteroids that may one day impact the Earth, like happened 60 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs, or just at the beginning of the last century, when an asteroid wiped out almost 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest, or even just last year, as one burnt up over Russia, releasing the energy of a small nuclear bomb. So studying the forensics of our solar system doesn't just tell us about the past, it can also predict the future,  including our future.Now when we get distance, we get to see the asteroids  in their natural habitat, in orbit around the sun. So every point in this visualization that you can see is a real asteroid. Its orbit has been calculated from its motion across the sky. The colors reflect the composition of these asteroids, dry and stony in the center, water-rich and primitive towards the edge, water-rich asteroids which may have seeded the oceans and the seas that we find on our planet when they bombarded the  Earth at an earlier time. Because the LSST will be able to go faint and not just wide, we will be able to see these asteroids far beyond the inner part of our solar system, to asteroids beyond the  orbits of Neptune and Mars, to comets and asteroids that may exist almost a light year from our sun. And as we increase the detail of this picture, increasing the detail by factors of 10 to 100, we will be able to answer questions such as, is there evidence for planets outside the orbit of Neptune, to find Earth-impacting asteroids long before they're a danger, and to find out whether, maybe, our sun formed on its own or in a cluster of stars, and maybe it's this sun's stellar siblings that influenced the formation of our solar system, and maybe that's one of the reasons why  solar systems like ours seem to be so rare.Now, distance and changes in our universe — distance equates to time, as well as changes on the sky. Every foot of distance you look away, or every foot of distance an object is away, you're looking back about a billionth of a second in time, and this idea or this notion of looking back in time has revolutionized our ideas about the universe, not once but multiple times.The first time was in 1929, when an astronomer called Edwin Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, leading to the ideas of the Big Bang. And the observations were simple: just 24 galaxies and a hand-drawn picture. But just the idea that the more distant a galaxy, the faster it was receding, was enough to give rise to modern cosmology.A second revolution happened 70 years later, when two groups of astronomers showed that the universe wasn't just expanding, it was accelerating, a surprise like throwing up a ball into the sky and finding out the higher that it gets, the faster it moves away. And they showed this by measuring the brightness of supernovae, and how the brightness of the supernovae got fainter with distance. And these observations were more complex. They required new technologies and new telescopes, because the supernovae were in galaxies that were 2,000 times more distant than the ones used by Hubble. And it took three years to find just 42 supernovae, because a supernova only explodes once every hundred years within a galaxy. Three years to find 42 supernovae by searching through tens of thousands of galaxies. And once they'd collected their data, this is what they found. Now, this may not look impressive, but this is what a revolution in physics looks like: a line predicting the brightness of a supernova 11 billion light years away, and a handful of points that don't quite fit that line.Small changes give rise to big consequences. Small changes allow us to make discoveries, like the planet found by Herschel. Small changes turn our understanding of the universe on its head. So 42 supernovae, slightly too faint, meaning slightly further away, requiring that a universe must not just be expanding, but this expansion must be accelerating, revealing a component of our universe which we now call dark energy, a component that drives this expansion and makes up 68 percent of the energy budget of our universe today.So what is the next revolution likely to be? Well, what is dark energy and why does it exist? Each of these lines shows a different model for what dark energy might be, showing the properties of dark energy. They all are consistent with the 42 points, but the ideas behind these lines are dramatically different. Some people think about a dark energy that changes with time, or whether the properties of the dark energy are different depending on where you look on the sky. Others make differences and changes to the physics at the sub-atomic level. Or, they look at large scales and change how gravity and general relativity work, or they say our universe is just one of many, part of this mysterious multiverse, but all of these ideas, all of these theories, amazing and admittedly some of them a little crazy, but all of them consistent with our 42 points.So how can we hope to make sense of this over the next decade? Well, imagine if I gave you a pair of dice, and I said you wanted to see whether those dice were loaded or fair. One roll of the dice would tell you very little, but the more times you rolled them, the more data you collected, the more confident you would become, not just whether they're loaded or fair, but by how much, and in what way. It took three years to find just 42 supernovae because the telescopes that we built could only survey a small part of the sky. With the LSST, we get a completely new view of the skies above Chile every three nights. In its first night of operation, it will find 10 times the number of supernovae used in the discovery of dark energy. This will increase by 1,000 within the first four months: 1.5 million supernovae by the end of its survey, each supernova a roll of the dice, each supernova testing which theories of dark energy are consistent, and which ones are not. And so, by combining these supernova data with other measures of cosmology, we'll progressively rule out the different ideas and theories of dark energy until hopefully at the end of this survey around 2030, we would expect to hopefully see a theory for our universe, a fundamental theory for the physics of our universe, to gradually emerge.Now, in many ways, the questions that I posed are in reality the simplest of questions. We may not know the answers, but we at least know how to ask the questions. But if looking through tens of thousands of galaxies revealed 42 supernovae that turned our understanding of the universe on its head, when we're working with billions of galaxies, how many more times are we going to find 42 points that don't quite match what we expect? Like the planet found by Herschel or dark energy or quantum mechanics or general relativity, all ideas that came because the data didn't quite match what we expected. What's so exciting about the next decade of data in astronomy is, we don't even know how many answers are out there waiting, answers about our origins and our evolution. How many answers are out there that we don't even know the questions that we want to ask?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_connolly_what_s_the_next_window_into_our_universe
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"Hi everybody. So my name is Mac. My job is that I lie to children, but they're honest lies.I write children's books, and there's a quote from Pablo Picasso, ""We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth or at least the truth that is  given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the  truthfulness of his lies.""I first heard this when I was a kid, and I loved it, but I had no idea what it meant. (Laughter)So I thought, you know what, it's what I'm here to talk to you today about, though, truth and lies, fiction and reality. So how could I untangle this knotted bunch of sentences? And I said, I've got PowerPoint. Let's do a Venn diagram. [""Truth. Lies.""] (Laughter) So there it is, right there, boom. We've got truth and lies and then there's this little space, the edge, in the middle. That liminal space, that's art. All right. Venn diagram. (Laughter) (Applause)But that's actually not very helpful either. The thing that made me understand that quote and really kind of what art, at least the art of fiction, was, was working with kids. I used to be a summer camp counselor. I would do it on my summers off from college, and I loved it. It was a sports summer camp for four- to six-year-olds. I was in charge of the four-year-olds, which is good, because four-year-olds can't play  sports, and neither can I. (Laughter) I play sports at a four-year-old level, so what would happen is the kids would dribble around some cones, and then got hot, and then they would go sit underneath the tree where I was already sitting — (Laughter) — and I would just make up stories and tell them to them and I would tell them stories about my life. I would tell them about how, on the weekends, I would go home and I would spy for the Queen of England. And soon, other kids who weren't even in my group of kids, they would come up to me, and they would say, ""You're Mac Barnett, right? You're the guy who spies for the Queen of England."" And I had been waiting my whole life for strangers to come up and ask me that question. In my fantasy, they were svelte Russian women, but, you know, four-year-olds — you take what you can get in Berkeley, California.And I realized that the stories that I was telling were real in this way that was familiar to me and really exciting. I think the pinnacle of this for  me — I'll never forget this — there was this little girl  named Riley. She was tiny, and she used to always take  out her lunch every day and she would throw out her fruit. She would just take her fruit, her mom packed her a melon every day, and she would just throw it in the ivy and then she would eat fruit snacks and pudding cups, and I was like, ""Riley, you can't do that, you  have to eat the fruit."" And she was like, ""Why?"" And I was like, ""Well, when you throw the fruit in the ivy, pretty soon, it's going to be overgrown with melons,"" which is why I think I ended up telling stories to children and not being a nutritionist for children. And so Riley was like, ""That will never happen. That's not going to happen."" And so, on the last day of camp, I got up early and I got a big cantaloupe from the grocery store and I hid it in the ivy, and then at lunchtime, I was like, ""Riley, why don't you go over there and see what you've done."" And — (Laughter) — she went trudging through  the ivy, and then her eyes just got so wide, and she pointed out this melon that was bigger than her head, and then all the kids ran over  there and rushed around her, and one of the kids was like, ""Hey, why is there a sticker on this?"" (Laughter) And I was like, ""That is also why I say do not throw your stickers in the ivy. Put them in the trash can. It ruins nature when you do this."" And Riley carried that melon around with her all day, and she was so proud.And Riley knew she didn't  grow a melon in seven days, but she also knew that she did, and it's a weird place, but it's not just a place that kids can get to. It's anything. Art can get us to that place. She was right in that place in the middle, that place which you could call art or fiction. I'm going to call it wonder. It's what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief or poetic faith, for those moments where a story, no matter how strange, has some semblance of the truth, and then you're able to believe it. It's not just kids who can get there. Adults can too, and we get there when we read. It's why in two days, people will be descending on Dublin to take the walking tour of Bloomsday and see everything that happened in ""Ulysses,"" even though none of that happened. Or people go to London and they visit Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes' apartment, even though 221B is just a number that was painted on a building that never  actually had that address. We know these characters aren't real, but we have real feelings about them, and we're able to do that. We know these characters aren't real, and yet we also know that they are.Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can, and that's why I love writing for kids. I think kids are the best audience for serious literary fiction. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with secret door novels, things like ""Narnia,"" where you would open a wardrobe and go through to a magical land. And I was convinced that secret doors really did exist and I would look for them and try to go through them. I wanted to live and cross over into  that fictional world, which is — I would always just open people's closet doors.  (Laughter) I would just go through my mom's boyfriend's closet, and there was not a secret magical land there. There was some other weird stuff that I think my mom should know about. (Laughter) And I was happy to tell her all about it.After college, my first job was working behind one of these secret doors. This is a place called 826 Valencia. It's at 826 Valencia Street in the Mission in San Francisco, and when I worked there, there was a publishing company headquartered there called McSweeney's, a nonprofit writing center called 826 Valencia, but then the front of it was a strange shop. You see, this place was zoned retail, and in San Francisco, they were not going to give us a variance, and so the writer who founded it, a writer named Dave Eggers, to come into compliance  with code, he said, ""Fine, I'm just going to build a pirate supply store."" And that's what he did. (Laughter) And it's beautiful. It's all wood. There's drawers you can pull out and get citrus so you don't get scurvy. They have eyepatches in lots of colors, because when it's springtime, pirates want to go wild. You don't know. Black is boring. Pastel. Or eyes, also in lots of colors, just glass eyes, depending on how you want to deal with that situation. And the store, strangely, people came to them and bought things, and they ended up paying the rent for our tutoring center, which was behind it, but to me, more important was the fact that I think the quality of work you do, kids would come and get instruction in writing, and when you have to walk this weird, liminal, fictional space like this to go do your writing, it's going to affect the kind of work that you make. It's a secret door that you can walk through.So I ran the 826 in Los Angeles, and it was my job to build the store down there. So we have The Echo Park Time Travel Mart. That's our motto: ""Whenever you are, we're already then."" (Laughter) And it's on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Our friendly staff is ready to help you. They're from all eras, including just the 1980s, that guy on the end, he's from the very recent past. There's our Employees of the Month, including Genghis Khan, Charles Dickens. Some great people have come up through our ranks. This is our kind of pharmacy section. We have some patent medicines, Canopic jars for your organs, communist soap that says, ""This is your soap for the year."" (Laughter) Our slushy machine broke on the opening night and  we didn't know what to do. Our architect was covered in red syrup. It looked like he had just murdered somebody, which it was not out of the question for this particular architect, and we didn't know what to do. It was going to be the highlight of our store. So we just put that sign on it that said, ""Out of order. Come back yesterday."" (Laughter) And that ended up being a better joke than slushies, so we just left it there forever. Mammoth Chunks. These things weigh, like, seven pounds each. Barbarian repellent. It's full of salad and potpourri — things that barbarians hate. Dead languages. (Laughter) Leeches, nature's tiny doctors. And Viking Odorant, which comes in lots of great scents: toenails, sweat and rotten vegetables, pyre ash. Because we believe that Axe Body Spray is something that you should only find on the battlefield, not under your arms. (Laughter) And these are robot emotion chips, so robots can feel love or fear. Our biggest seller is Schadenfreude, which we did not expect. (Laughter) We did not think that was going to happen. But there's a nonprofit behind it, and kids go through a door that says ""Employees Only"" and they end up in this space where they do homework and write stories and make films and this is a book release party where kids will read. There's a quarterly that's published with just writing that's done by the kids who come every day after school, and we have release parties and they eat cake and read for their parents and drink milk out of champagne glasses. And it's a very special space, because it's this weird space in the front. The joke isn't a joke. You can't find the seams on the fiction, and I love that. It's this little bit of fiction that's colonized the real world. I see it as kind of a book in three dimensions.There's a term called metafiction, and that's just stories about stories, and meta's having a moment now. Its last big moment was probably in the 1960s with novelists like John Barth and William Gaddis, but it's been around. It's almost as old as storytelling itself. And one metafictive technique is breaking the fourth wall. Right? It's when an actor will turn to the audience and say, ""I am an actor, these are just rafters."" And even that supposedly honest moment, I would argue, is in service of the lie, but it's supposed to foreground the artificiality of the fiction. For me, I kind of prefer the opposite. If I'm going to break down the fourth wall, I want fiction to escape and come into the real world. I want a book to be a secret door that opens and lets the stories out into reality.And so I try to do this in my books. And here's just one example. This is the first book that I ever made. It's called ""Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem."" And it's about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet but it's a punishment and it ruins his life. So it's delivered overnight by FedUp. (Laughter) And he has to take it to school with him. He lives in San Francisco — very tough city to own a blue whale in. A lot of hills, real estate is at a premium. This market's crazy, everybody. But underneath the jacket is this case, and that's the cover underneath the book, the jacket, and there's an ad that offers a free 30-day risk-free trial for a blue whale. And you can just send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and we'll send you a whale. And kids do write in.So here's a letter. It says, ""Dear people, I bet you 10 bucks you won't send me a blue whale. Eliot Gannon (age 6)."" (Laughter) (Applause)So what Eliot and the other kids who send these in get back is a letter in very small print from a Norwegian law firm — (Laughter) — that says that due to a change in customs laws, their whale has been held up in Sognefjord, which is a very lovely fjord, and then it just kind of talks about Sognefjord and Norwegian food for  a little while. It digresses. (Laughter) But it finishes off by saying that your whale would love to hear from you. He's got a phone number, and you can call and leave him a message. And when you call and leave him a message, you just, on the outgoing message, it's just whale sounds and then a beep, which actually sounds a lot like a whale sound. And they get a picture of their whale too. So this is Randolph, and Randolph belongs to a kid named Nico who was one of the first kids to ever call in, and I'll play you some of Nico's message. This is the first message I ever got from Nico.(Audio) Nico: Hello, this is Nico. I am your owner, Randolph. Hello. So this is the first time I can ever talk to you, and I might talk to you soon another day. Bye.Mac Barnett: So Nico called back, like, an hour later. (Laughter) And here's another one of Nico's messages.(Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, this is Nico. I haven't talked to you for a long time, but I talked to you on Saturday or Sunday, yeah, Saturday or Sunday, so now I'm calling you again to say hello and I wonder what you're doing right now, and I'm going to probably call you again tomorrow or today, so I'll talk to you later. Bye.MB: So he did, he called back that day again. He's left over 25 messages for Randolph over four years. You find out all about him and the grandma that he loves and the grandma that  he likes a little bit less — (Laughter) — and the crossword puzzles that he does, and this is — I'll play you one  more message from Nico. This is the Christmas message from Nico.[Beep] (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, sorry I haven't talked to you in a long time. It's just that I've been so busy because school started, as you might not know, probably, since you're a whale, you don't know, and I'm calling you to just say, to wish you a merry Christmas. So have a nice Christmas, and bye-bye, Randolph. Goodbye. MB: I actually got Nico, I hadn't heard from in 18 months, and he just left a message two days ago. His voice is completely different, but he put his babysitter on the phone, and she was very nice to Randolph as well.But Nico's the best reader I could hope for. I would want anyone I was writing for to be in that place emotionally with the things that I create. I feel lucky. Kids like Nico are the best readers, and they deserve the best stories we can give them.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mac_barnett_why_a_good_book_is_a_secret_door
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"My grandfather was a cobbler. Back in the day, he made custom-made shoes. I never got to meet him. He perished in the Holocaust. But I did inherit his love for making, except that it doesn't exist that much anymore. You see, while the Industrial Revolution did a great deal to improve humanity, it eradicated the very skill that my grandfather loved, and it atrophied craftsmanship as we know it.But all of that is about to change with 3D printing, and it all started with this, the very first part that was ever printed. It's a little older than TED. It was printed in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who invented 3D printing. But the thing that I want to talk to you about today, the big idea that I want to discuss with you, is not that 3D printing is going to catapult us into the future, but rather that it's actually going to connect us with our heritage, and it's going to usher in a new era of localized, distributed manufacturing that is actually based on digital fabrication.So think about useful things. You all know your shoe size. How many of you know the size of the bridge of your nose or the distance between your temples? Anybody? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could, for the first time, get eyewear that actually fits you perfectly and doesn't require any hinge assembly, so chances are, the hinges are not going to break? But the implications of 3D printing go well beyond the tips of our noses.When I met Amanda for the first time, she could already stand up and walk a little bit even though she was paralyzed from the waist down, but she complained to me that her suit was uncomfortable. It was a beautiful robotic suit made by Ekso Bionics, but it wasn't inspired by her body. It wasn't made to measure. So she challenged me to make her something that was a little bit more feminine, a little bit more elegant, and lightweight, and like good tailors, we thought that we would measure her digitally. And we did. We built her an amazing suit.The incredible part about what I learned from Amanda is a lot of us are looking at 3D printing and we say to ourselves, it's going to replace traditional methods. Amanda looked at it and she said, it's an opportunity for me to reclaim my symmetry and to embrace my authenticity. And you know what? She's not standing still. She now wants to walk in high heels.It doesn't stop there. 3D printing is changing personalized medical devices as we know them, from new, beautiful, conformal, ventilated scoliosis braces to millions of dental restorations and to beautiful bracings for amputees, another opportunity to emotionally reconnect with your symmetry. And as we sit here today, you can go wireless on your braces with clear aligners, or your dental restorations. Millions of in-the-ear hearing aids are already 3D printed today. Millions of people are served today from these devices. What about full knee replacements, from your data, made to measure, where all of the tools and guides are 3D printed? G.E. is using 3D printing to make the next generation LEAP engine that will save fuel to the tune of about 15 percent and cost for an airline of about 14 million dollars. Good for G.E., right? And their customers and the environment. But, you know, the even better news is that this technology is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. Planetary Resources, a startup for space explorations is going to put out its first  space probe later this year. It was a fraction of a NASA spaceship, it costs a fraction of its cost, and it's made with less than a dozen moving parts, and it's going to be out in space later this year. Google is taking on this very audacious project of making the block phone, the Ara. It's only possible because of the development of high-speed 3D printing that for the first time will make functional, usable modules that will go into it. A real moonshot, powered by 3D printing.How about food? What if we could, for the first time, make incredible delectables like this beautiful TED Teddy here, that are edible? What if we could completely change the experience, like you see with that absinthe serving that is completely 3D printed? And what if we could begin to put ingredients and colors and flavors in every taste, which means not only delicious foods but the promise of personalized nutrition around the corner?And that gets me to one of the biggest deals about 3D printing. With 3D printing, complexity is free. The printer doesn't care if it makes the most rudimentary shape or the most complex shape, and that is completely turning design and manufacturing on its head as we know it. Many people think that 3D printing will be the end of manufacturing as we know it. I think that it's the opportunity to put tomorrow's technology in the hands of youngsters that will create endless abundance of job opportunities, and with that, everybody can become an expert maker and an expert manufacturer. That will take new tools. Not everybody knows how to use CAD, so we're developing haptics, perceptual devices that will allow you to touch and feel your designs as if you play with digital clay. When you do things like that, and we also developed things that take physical photographs that are instantly printable, it will make it easier to create content, but with all of the unimagined, we will also have the unintended, like democratized counterfeiting and ubiquitous illegal possession.So many people ask me, will we have a 3D printer in every home? I think it's the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, how will 3D printing change my life? Or, in other words, what room in my house will 3D printing fit in?So everything that you see here has been 3D printed, including these shoes at the Amsterdam fashion show. Now, these are not my grandfather's shoes. These are shoes that represent the continuation of his passion for hyper-local manufacturing. My grandfather didn't get to see Nike printing cleats for the recent Super Bowl, and my father didn't get to see me standing in my hybridized 3D printed shoes. He passed away three years ago. But Chuck Hull, the man that invented it all, is right here in the house today, and thanks to him, I can say, thanks to his invention, I can say that I am a cobbler too, and by standing in these shoes I am honoring my past while manufacturing the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/avi_reichental_what_s_next_in_3d_printing
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"What do you guys think? For those who watched Sir Ken's memorable TED Talk, I am a typical example  of what he describes as ""the body as a form of transport for the head,"" a university professor.You might think it was not fair that I've been lined up to speak after these first two talks to speak about science. I can't move my body to the beat, and after a scientist who became a philosopher, I have to talk about hard science. It could be a very dry subject. Yet, I feel honored. Never in my career, and it's been a long career, have I had the opportunity to start a talk feeling so inspired, like this one.Usually, talking about science is like exercising in a dry place. However, I've had the pleasure of being invited to come here to talk about water. The words ""water"" and ""dry"" do not match, right? It is even better to talk about water in the Amazon, which is the splendid cradle  of life. Fresh life. So this is what inspired me. That's why I'm here, although I'm carrying my head over here. I am trying, or will try to convey this inspiration. I hope this story will inspire you and that you'll spread the word.We know that there is controversy. The Amazon is the ""lung of the world,"" because of its massive power to have vital gases exchanged between the forest and the atmosphere. We also hear about the storehouse of biodiversity. While many believe it, few know it. If you go out there, in this marsh, you'll be amazed at the — You can barely see the animals. The Indians say, ""The forest has more eyes than leaves."" That is true, and I will try to show you something.But today, I'm going to use a different approach, one that is inspired by these two initiatives here, a harmonic one and a philosophical one. I'll try to use an approach that's slightly materialistic, but it also attempts to convey that, in nature, there is extraordinary philosophy and harmony. There'll be no music in my presentation, but I hope you'll all notice the music of the reality I'm going to show you. I'm going to talk about physiology — not about lungs, but other analogies with human physiology, especially the heart.We'll start by thinking that water is like blood. The circulation in our body distributes fresh blood, which feeds, nurtures and supports us, and brings the used blood back to be renewed. In the Amazon, things happen similarly. We'll start by talking about the power of all these processes. This is an image of rain in motion. What you see there is the years passing in seconds. Rains all over the world. What do you see? The equatorial region, in general, and the Amazon specifically, is extremely important for the world's climate. It's a powerful engine. There is a frantic evaporation taking place here.If we take a look at this other image, which shows the water vapor flow, you have dry air in black, moist air in gray, and clouds in white. What you see there is an extraordinary resurgence in the Amazon. What phenomenon — if it's not a desert, what phenomenon makes water gush from the ground into the atmosphere with such power  that it can be seen from space? What phenomenon is this? It could be a geyser. A geyser is underground water heated by magma, exploding into the atmosphere and transferring this water  into the atmosphere. There are no geysers in the Amazon, unless I am wrong. I don't know of any. But we have something that plays the same role, with much more elegance though: the trees, our good old friends that, like geysers, can transfer an enormous amount of water from the ground into the atmosphere.There are 600 billion trees in the Amazon forest, 600 billion geysers. That is done with an extraordinary sophistication. They don't need the heat of magma. They use sunlight to do this process. So, in a typical sunny day in the Amazon, a big tree manages to transfer 1,000 liters of water through its transpiration — 1,000 liters. If we take all the Amazon, which is a very large area, and add it up to all that water that is released by transpiration, which is the sweat of the forest, we'll get to an incredible number: 20 billion metric tons of water. In one day.Do you know how much that is? The Amazon River, the largest river on Earth, one fifth of all the fresh water that leaves the continents of the whole world and ends up in the oceans, dumps 17 billion metric tons of water a day in the Atlantic Ocean. This river of vapor that comes up from the forest and goes into the atmosphere is greater than the Amazon River. Just to give you an idea. If we could take a gigantic kettle, the kind you could plug into a power socket, an electric one, and put those 20 billion metric tons of water in it, how much power would you need to have this water evaporated? Any idea? A really big kettle. A gigantic kettle, right? 50 thousand Itaipus. Itaipu is still the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. and Brazil is very proud of it because it provides more  than 30 percent of the power that is consumed in Brazil. And the Amazon is here, doing this for free. It's a vivid and extremely powerful plant, providing environmental services.Related to this subject, we are going to talk about what I call the paradox of chance, which is curious. If you look at the world map — it's easy to see this — you'll see that there are forests in the equatorial zone, and deserts are organized at 30 degrees north latitude, 30 degrees south latitude, aligned. Look over there, in the southern hemisphere, the Atacama; Namibia and Kalahari in Africa; the Australian desert. In the northern hemisphere, the Sahara, Sonoran, etc. There is an exception, and it's curious: It's the quadrangle that ranges from Cuiabá to Buenos Aires, and from São Paulo to the Andes. This quadrangle was supposed to be a desert. It's on the line of deserts. Why isn't it? That's why I call it the paradox of chance. What do we have in South America that is different?If we could use the analogy of the blood circulating in our bodies, like the water circulating in the landscape, we see that rivers are veins, they drain the landscape, they drain the tissue of nature. Where are the arteries? Any guess? What takes — How does water get to irrigate the tissues of nature and bring everything back through rivers? There is a new type of river, which originates in the blue sea, which flows through the green ocean — it not only flows, but it is also pumped by the green ocean — and then it falls on our land. All our economy, that quadrangle, 70 percent of South America's  GDP comes from that area. It depends on this river. This river flows invisibly above us. We are floating here on this floating hotel, on one of the largest rivers on Earth, the Negro River. It's a bit dry and rough, but we are floating here, and there is this invisible river running above us.This river has a pulse. Here it is, pulsing. That's why we also talk about the heart. You can see the different seasons there. There's the rainy season. In the Amazon, we used to have two seasons, the humid season and the even more humid season. Now we have a dry season. You can see the river covering that region which, otherwise, would be a desert. And it is not.We, scientists — You see that I'm struggling here to move my head from one side to the other. Scientists study how it works, why, etc. and these studies are generating a series of discoveries, which are absolutely fabulous, to raise our awareness of the wealth, the complexity, and the wonder that we have, the symphony we have in this process. One of them is: How is rain formed? Above the Amazon, there is clean air, as there is clean air above the ocean. The blue sea has clean air above it and forms pretty few clouds; there's almost no rain there. The green ocean has the same clean air, but forms a lot of rain. What is happening here that is different?The forest emits smells, and these smells are condensation nuclei, which form drops in the atmosphere. Then, clouds are formed and there is torrential rain. The sprinkler of the Garden of Eden. This relation between a living thing, which is the forest, and a nonliving thing, which is the atmosphere, is ingenious in the Amazon, because the forest provides water and seeds, and the atmosphere forms the rain and gives water back, guaranteeing the forest's survival.There are other factors as well. We've talked a little about the heart, and let's now talk about another function: the liver! When humid air, high humidity and radiation are combined with these organic compounds, which I call exogenous vitamin C, generous vitamin C in the form of gas, the plants release antioxidants which react with pollutants. You can rest assured that you are breathing the purest air on Earth, here in the Amazon, because the plants take care of this characteristic as well. This benefits the very way plants work, which is another ingenious cycle.Speaking of fractals, and their relation with the way we work, we can establish other comparisons. As in the upper airways of our lungs, the air in the Amazon gets cleaned up from the excess of dust. The dust in the air that we breathe is cleaned by our airways. This keeps the excess of dust from affecting the rainfall. When there are fires in the Amazon, the smoke stops the rain,  it stops raining, the forest dries up and catches fire. There is another fractal analogy. Like in the veins and arteries, the rain water is a feedback. It returns to the atmosphere. Like endocrinal glands and hormones, there are those gases which I told you about before, that are formed and released into the atmosphere, like hormones, which help in the formation of rain. Like the liver and the kidneys, as I've said, cleaning the air. And, finally, like the heart: pumping water from outside, from the sea, into the forest. We call it the biotic moisture pump, a new theory that is explained in a very simple way.If there is a desert in the continent with a nearby sea, evaporation's greater on the sea, and it sucks the air above the desert. The desert is trapped in this condition. It will always be dry. If you have the opposite situation, a forest, the evaporation, as we showed, is much greater, because of the trees, and this relation is reversed. The air above the sea is sucked into the continent and humidity is imported. This satellite image was taken one month ago — that's Manaus down there, we're down there — and it shows this process. It's not a common little river that flows into a canal. It's a mighty river that irrigates South America, among other things. This image shows those paths, all the hurricanes that have been recorded. You can see that, in the red square, there hardly are any hurricanes. That is no accident. This pump that sucks the moisture into the continent also speeds up the air above the sea, and this prevents hurricane formations.To close this part and sum up, I'd like to talk about something a little different. I have several colleagues who worked in the development of these theories. They think, and so do I, that we can save planet Earth. I'm not talking only about the Amazon. The Amazon teaches us a lesson on how pristine nature works. We didn't understand these processes before because the rest of the world is messed up. We could understand it here, though. These colleagues propose that, yes, we can save other areas, including deserts. If we could establish forests in those other areas, we can reverse climate change, including global warming.I have a dear colleague in India, whose name is Suprabha Seshan, and she has a motto. Her motto is, ""Gardening back the biosphere,"" ""Reajardinando a biosfera"" in Portuguese. She does a wonderful job rebuilding ecosystems. We need to do this. Having closed this quick introduction, we see the reality that we have out here, which is drought, this climate change, things that we already knew.I'd like to tell you a short story. Once, about four years ago, I attended a declamation, of a text by Davi Kopenawa, a wise representative of the Yanomami people, and it went more or less like this: ""Doesn't the white man know that, if he destroys the forest, there will be no more rain? And that, if there's no more rain, there'll be nothing to drink, or to eat?"" I heard that, and my eyes welled up and I went, ""Oh, my! I've been studying this for 20 years, with a super computer, dozens, thousands of scientists, and we are starting to get to this conclusion, which he already knows!"" A critical point is the Yanomami have never deforested. How could they know the rain would end? This bugged me and I was befuddled. How could he know that?Some months later, I met him at another event and said, ""Davi, how did you know that if the forest was destroyed, there'd be no more rain?"" He replied: ""The spirit of the forest told us."" For me, this was a game changer, a radical change. I said, ""Gosh! Why am I doing all this science to get to a conclusion that he already knows?"" Then, something  absolutely critical hit me, which is, seeing is believing. Out of sight, out of mind. This is a need the previous speaker pointed out: We need to see things — I mean, we, Western society, which is becoming global, civilized — we need to see. If we don't see, we don't register the information. We live in ignorance.So, I propose the following — of course, the astronomer wouldn't like the idea — but let's turn the Hubble telescope upside down. And let's make it look down here, rather than to the far reaches of the universe. The universe is wonderful, but we have a practical reality, which is we live in an unknown cosmos, and we're ignorant about it. We're trampling on this wonderful cosmos that shelters us and houses us. Talk to any astrophysicist. The Earth is a statistical improbability. The stability and comfort that we enjoy, despite the droughts of the Negro River, and all the heat and cold and typhoons, etc., there is nothing like it in the universe, that we know of.Then, let's turn Hubble in our direction, and let's look at the Earth. Let's start with the Amazon! Let's dive, let's reach out the reality we live in every day, and look carefully at it, since that's what we need. Davi Kopenawa doesn't need this. He has something already that I think I missed. I was educated by television. I think that I missed this, an ancestral record, a valuation of what I don't know, what I haven't seen. He is not a doubting Thomas. He believes,  with veneration and reverence, in what his ancestors and the spirits taught him. We can't do it, so let's look into the forest. Even with Hubble up there — this is a bird's-eye view, right? Even when this happens, we also see something that we don't know. The Spanish called it the green inferno. If you go out there into the bushes and get lost, and, let's say, if you head west, it's 900 kilometers to Colombia, and another 1,000 to somewhere else. So, you can figure out why they called it the green inferno.But go and look at what is in there. It is a live carpet. Each color you see is a tree species. Each tree, each tree top, has up to 10,000 species of insects in it, let alone the millions of species of fungi, bacteria, etc. All invisible. All of it is an even stranger cosmos to us than the galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth, which Hubble brings to our newspapers everyday.I'm going to end my talk here — I have a few seconds left — by showing you this wonderful being. When we see the morpho butterfly in the forest, we feel like someone's left open the door to heaven, and this creature escaped from there, because it's so beautiful. However, I cannot finish without showing you a tech side. We are tech-arrogant. We deprive nature of its technology. A robotic hand is technological, mine is biological, and we don't think about it anymore.Let's then look at the morpho butterfly, an example of an invisible technological competence of life, which is at the very heart of our possibility of surviving on this planet, and let's zoom in on it. Again, Hubble is there. Let's get into the butterfly's wings. Scholars have tried to explain: Why is it blue? Let's zoom in on it. What you see is that the architecture of the invisible humiliates the best architects in the world. All of this on a tiny scale. Besides its beauty and functioning, there is another side to it. In nature, all that is organized in extraordinary structures has a function. This function of the morpho butterfly — it is not blue; it does not have blue pigments. It has photonic crystals on its surface, according to people who studied it, which are extremely  sophisticated crystals. Our technology had nothing like that at the time. Hitachi has now made a monitor that uses this technology, and it is used in optical fibers to transmit — Janine Benyus, who's been here several times, talks about it: biomimetics. My time's up.Then, I'll wrap it up with what is at the base of this capacity, of this competence of biodiversity, producing all these wonderful services: the living cell. It is a structure with a few microns, which is an internal wonder. There are TED Talks about it. I won't talk much longer, but each person in this room, including myself, has 100 trillion of these micromachines in their body, so that we can enjoy well-being. Imagine what is out there in the Amazon forest: 100 trillion. This is greater than the number of stars in the sky. And we are not aware of it.Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_donato_nobre_the_magic_of_the_amazon_a_river_that_flows_invisibly_all_around_us
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"We are at a remarkable moment in time. We face over the next two decades two fundamental transformations that will determine whether the next 100 years is the best of centuries or the worst of centuries.Let me illustrate with an example. I first visited Beijing 25 years ago to teach at the People's University of China. China was getting serious about market economics and about university education, so they decided to call in the foreign experts. Like most other people, I moved around Beijing by bicycle. Apart from dodging the occasional vehicle, it was a safe and easy way to get around. Cycling in Beijing now is a completely different prospect. The roads are jammed by cars and trucks. The air is dangerously polluted from the burning of coal and diesel. When I was there last in the spring, there was an advisory for people of my age — over 65 — to stay indoors and not move much.How did this come about? It came from the way in which Beijing has grown as a city. It's doubled over those 25 years, more than doubled, from 10 million to 20 million. It's become a sprawling urban area dependent on dirty fuel, dirty energy, particularly coal. China burns half the world's coal each year, and that's why, it is a key reason why, it is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. At the same time, we have to recognize that in that period China has grown remarkably. It has become the world's second largest economy. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. That's really important. But at the same time, the people of China are asking the question: What's the value of this growth if our cities are unlivable? They've analyzed, diagnosed that this is an unsustainable path of growth and development. China's planning to scale back coal. It's looking to build its cities in different ways.Now, the growth of China is part of a dramatic change, fundamental change, in the structure of the world economy. Just 25 years ago, the developing countries, the poorer countries of the world, were, notwithstanding being the vast majority of the people, they accounted for only about a third of the world's output. Now it's more than half; 25 years from now, it will probably be two thirds from the countries that we saw 25 years ago as developing. That's a remarkable change. It means that most countries around the world, rich or poor, are going to be facing the two fundamental transformations that I want to talk about and highlight.Now, the first of these transformations is the basic structural change of the economies and societies that I've already begun to illustrate through the description of Beijing. Fifty percent now in urban areas. That's going to go to 70 percent in 2050. Over the next two decades, we'll see the demand for energy rise by 40 percent, and the growth in the economy and in the population is putting increasing pressure on our land, on our water and on our forests.This is profound structural change. If we manage it in a negligent or a shortsighted way, we will create waste, pollution, congestion, destruction of land and forests. If we think of those three areas that I have illustrated with my numbers — cities, energy, land — if we manage all that badly, then the outlook for the lives and livelihoods of the people around the world would be poor and damaged. And more than that, the emissions of greenhouse gases would rise, with immense risks to our climate. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already higher than they've been for millions of years. If we go on increasing those concentrations, we risk temperatures over the next century or so that we have not seen on this planet for tens of millions of years. We've been around as Homo sapiens — that's a rather generous definition, sapiens — for perhaps a quarter of a million years, a quarter of a million. We risk temperatures we haven't seen for tens of millions of years over a century. That would transform the relationship between human beings and the planet. It would lead to changing deserts, changing rivers, changing patterns of hurricanes, changing sea levels, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people who would have to move, and if we've learned anything from history, that means severe and extended conflict.And we couldn't just turn it off. You can't make a peace treaty with the planet. You can't negotiate with the laws of physics. You're in there. You're stuck. Those are the stakes we're playing for, and that's why we have to make this second transformation, the climate transformation, and move to a low-carbon economy. Now, the first of these transformations is going to happen anyway. We have to decide whether to do it well or badly, the economic, or structural, transformation. But the second of the transformations, the climate transformations, we have to decide to do. Those two transformations face us in the next two decades. The next two decades are decisive for what we have to do. Now, the more I've thought about this, the two transformations coming together, the more I've come to realize that this is an enormous opportunity. It's an opportunity which we can use or it's an opportunity which we can lose. And let me explain through those three key areas that I've identified: cities, energy and land. And let me start with cities. I've already described the problems of Beijing: pollution, congestion, waste and so on. Surely we recognize that in many of our cities around the world.Now, with cities, like life but particularly cities, you have to think ahead. The cities that are going to be built — and there are many, and many big ones — we have to think of how to design them in a compact way so we can save travel time  and we can save energy. The cities that already are  there, well established, we have to think about renewal and investment in them so that we can connect ourselves much better within those cities, and make it easier, encourage more people, to live closer to the center. We've got examples building around the world of the kinds of ways in which we can do that. The bus rapid transport system in Bogotá in Colombia is a very important case of how to move around safely and quickly in a non-polluting way in a city: very frequent buses, strongly protected routes, the same service, really, as an underground railway system, but much, much cheaper and can be done much more quickly, a brilliant idea in many more cities around the world that's developing.Now, some things in cities do take time. Some things in cities can happen much more quickly. Take my hometown, London. In 1952, smog in London killed 4,000 people and badly damaged the lives of many, many more. And it happened all the time. For those of you live outside London in the U.K. will remember it used to be called The Smoke. That's the way London was. By regulating coal, within a few years the problems of smog were rapidly reduced. I remember the smogs well. When the visibility dropped to [less] than a few meters, they stopped the buses and I had to walk. This was the 1950s. I had to walk home three miles from school. Again, breathing was a hazardous activity. But it was changed. It was changed by a decision. Good decisions can bring good results, striking results, quickly.We've seen more: In London, we've introduced the congestion charge, actually quite quickly and effectively, and we've seen great improvements in the bus system, and cleaned up the bus system. You can see that the two transformations I've described, the structural and the climate, come very much together. But we have to invest. We have to invest in our cities, and we have to invest wisely, and if we do, we'll see cleaner cities, quieter cities, safer cities, more attractive cities, more productive cities, and stronger community in those cities — public transport, recycling, reusing, all sorts of things that bring communities together. We can do that, but we have to think, we have to invest, we have to plan.Let me turn to energy. Now, energy over the last 25 years has increased by about 50 percent. Eighty percent of that comes from fossil fuels. Over the next 20 years, perhaps it will increase by another 40 percent or so. We have to invest strongly in energy, we have to use it much more efficiently, and we have to make it clean. We can see how to do that. Take the example of California. It would be in the top 10 countries in the world if it was independent. I don't want to start any — (Laughter) California's a big place. (Laughter) In the next five or six years, they will likely move from around 20 percent in renewables — wind, solar and so on — to over 33 percent, and that would bring California back to greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 to where they were in 1990, a period when the economy in California would more or less have doubled. That's a striking achievement. It shows what can be done. Not just California — the  incoming government of India is planning to get solar technology to light up the homes of 400 million people who don't have electricity in India. They've set themselves a target of five years. I think they've got a good chance of doing that. We'll see, but what you're seeing now is people moving much more quickly. Four hundred million, more than the population of the United States. Those are the kinds of ambitions now people are setting themselves in terms of rapidity of change. Again, you can see good decisions can bring quick results, and those two transformations, the economy and the structure and the climate and the low carbon, are intimately intertwined. Do the first one well, the structural, the second one on the climate becomes much easier.Look at land, land and particularly forests. Forests are the hosts to valuable plant and animal species. They hold water in the soil and they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, fundamental to the tackling of climate change. But we're losing our forests. In the last decade, we've lost a forest area the size of Portugal, and much more has been degraded. But we're already seeing that we can do so much about that. We can recognize the problem, but we can also understand how to tackle it. In Brazil, the rate of deforestation has been reduced by 70 percent over the last 10 years. How? By involving local communities, investing in their agriculture and their economies, by monitoring more carefully, by enforcing the law more strictly.And it's not just stopping deforestation. That's of course of first and fundamental importance, but it's also regrading degraded land, regenerating, rehabilitating degraded land. I first went to Ethiopia in 1967. It was desperately poor. In the following years, it suffered devastating famines and profoundly destructive social conflict. Over the last few years, actually more than a few, Ethiopia has been growing much more rapidly. It has ambitions to be a middle-income country 15 years from now and to be carbon neutral. Again, I think it's a strong ambition but it is a plausible one. You're seeing that commitment there. You're seeing what can be done. Ethiopia is investing in clean energy. It's working in the rehabilitation of land. In Humbo, in southwest Ethiopia, a wonderful project to plant trees on degraded land and work with local communities on sustainable forest management has led to big increases in living standards.So we can see, from Beijing to London, from California to India, from Brazil to Ethiopia, we do understand how to manage those two transformations, the structural and the climate. We do understand how to manage those well. And technology is changing very rapidly. I don't have to list all those things to an audience like this, but you can see the electric cars, you can see the batteries using new materials. You can see that we can manage remotely now our household appliances on our mobile phones when we're away. You can see better insulation. And there's much more coming.But, and it's a big but, the world as a whole is moving far too slowly. We're not cutting emissions in the way we should. We're not managing those structural transformations as we can. The depth of understanding of the immense risks of climate change are not there yet. The depth of understanding of the attractiveness of what we can do is not there yet. We need political pressure to build. We need leaders to step up. We can have better growth, better climate, a better world. We can make, by managing those two transformations well, the next 100 years the best of centuries. If we make a mess of it, we, you and me, if we make a mess of it, if we don't manage those transformations properly, it will be, the next 100 years will be the worst of centuries. That's the major conclusion of the report on the economy and climate chaired by ex-President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and I co-chaired that with him, and we handed that report yesterday here in New York, in the United Nations Building to the Secretary-General of the U.N., Ban Ki-moon. We know that we can do this.Now, two weeks ago, I became a grandfather for the fourth time. Our daughter — (Baby cries) (Laughter) (Applause) — Our daughter gave birth to Rosa here in New York two weeks ago. Here are Helen and Rosa. (Applause) Two weeks old. Are we going to look our grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we understood the issues, that we recognized the dangers and the opportunities, and still we failed to act? Surely not. Let's make the next 100 years the best of centuries.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lord_nicholas_stern_the_state_of_the_climate_and_what_we_might_do_about_it
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"America's favorite pie is?Audience: Apple. Kenneth Cukier: Apple. Of course it is. How do we know it? Because of data. You look at supermarket sales. You look at supermarket sales of 30-centimeter pies that are frozen, and apple wins, no contest. The majority of the sales are apple. But then supermarkets started selling smaller, 11-centimeter pies, and suddenly, apple fell to fourth or fifth place. Why? What happened? Okay, think about it. When you buy a 30-centimeter pie, the whole family has to agree, and apple is everyone's second favorite. (Laughter) But when you buy an individual 11-centimeter pie, you can buy the one that you want. You can get your first choice. You have more data. You can see something that you couldn't see when you only had smaller amounts of it.Now, the point here is that more data doesn't just let us see more, more of the same thing we were looking at. More data allows us to see new. It allows us to see better. It allows us to see different. In this case, it allows us to see what America's favorite pie is: not apple.Now, you probably all have heard the term big data. In fact, you're probably sick of hearing the term big data. It is true that there is a lot of hype around the term, and that is very unfortunate, because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance. In the past, we used to look at small data and think about what it would mean to try to understand the world, and now we have a lot more of it, more than we ever could before. What we find is that when we have a large body of data, we can fundamentally do things that we couldn't do when we only had smaller amounts. Big data is important, and big data is new, and when you think about it, the only way this planet is going to deal with its global challenges — to feed people, supply them with medical care, supply them with energy, electricity, and to make sure they're not burnt to a crisp because of global warming — is because of the effective use of data.So what is new about big  data? What is the big deal? Well, to answer that question, let's think about what information looked like, physically looked like in the past. In 1908, on the island of Crete, archaeologists discovered a clay disc. They dated it from 2000 B.C., so it's 4,000 years old. Now, there's inscriptions on this disc, but we actually don't know what it means. It's a complete mystery, but the point is that this is what information used to look like 4,000 years ago. This is how society stored and transmitted information.Now, society hasn't advanced all that much. We still store information on discs, but now we can store a lot more information, more than ever before. Searching it is easier. Copying it easier. Sharing it is easier. Processing it is easier. And what we can do is we can reuse this information for uses that we never even imagined when we first collected the data. In this respect, the data has gone from a stock to a flow, from something that is stationary and static to something that is fluid and dynamic. There is, if you will, a liquidity to information. The disc that was discovered off of Crete that's 4,000 years old, is heavy, it doesn't store a lot of information, and that information is unchangeable. By contrast, all of the files that Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency in the United States fits on a memory stick the size of a fingernail, and it can be shared at the speed of light. More data. More.Now, one reason why we have so much data in the world today is we are collecting things that we've always collected information on, but another reason why is we're taking things that have always been informational but have never been rendered into a data format and we are putting it into data. Think, for example, the question of location. Take, for example, Martin Luther. If we wanted to know in the 1500s where Martin Luther was, we would have to follow him at all times, maybe with a feathery quill and an inkwell, and record it, but now think about what it looks like today. You know that somewhere, probably in a telecommunications carrier's database, there is a spreadsheet or at least a database entry that records your information of where you've been at all times. If you have a cell phone, and that cell phone has GPS, but even if it doesn't have GPS, it can record your information. In this respect, location has been datafied.Now think, for example, of the issue of posture, the way that you are all sitting right now, the way that you sit, the way that you sit, the way that you sit. It's all different, and it's a function of your leg length and your back and the contours of your back, and if I were to put sensors,  maybe 100 sensors into all of your chairs right now, I could create an index that's fairly unique to you, sort of like a fingerprint, but it's not your finger.So what could we do with this? Researchers in Tokyo are using it as a potential anti-theft device in cars. The idea is that the carjacker sits behind the wheel, tries to stream off, but the car recognizes that a non-approved driver is behind the wheel, and maybe the engine just stops, unless you type in a password into the dashboard to say, ""Hey, I have authorization to drive."" Great.What if every single car in Europe had this technology in it? What could we do then? Maybe, if we aggregated the data, maybe we could identify telltale signs that best predict that a car accident is going to take place in the next five seconds. And then what we will have datafied is driver fatigue, and the service would be when the car senses that the person slumps into that position, automatically knows, hey, set an internal alarm that would vibrate the steering wheel, honk inside to say, ""Hey, wake up, pay more attention to the road."" These are the sorts of things we can do when we datafy more aspects of our lives.So what is the value of big data? Well, think about it. You have more information. You can do things that you couldn't do before. One of the most impressive areas where this concept is taking place is in the area of machine learning. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence, which itself is a branch of computer science. The general idea is that instead of instructing a computer what do do, we are going to simply throw data at the problem and tell the computer to figure it out for itself. And it will help you understand it by seeing its origins. In the 1950s, a computer scientist at IBM named Arthur Samuel liked to play checkers, so he wrote a computer program so he could play against the computer. He played. He won. He played. He won. He played. He won, because the computer only knew what a legal move was. Arthur Samuel knew something else. Arthur Samuel knew strategy. So he wrote a small sub-program alongside it operating in the background, and all it did was score the probability that a given board configuration would likely lead to a winning board versus a losing board after every move. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. And then Arthur Samuel leaves the computer to play itself. It plays itself. It collects more data. It collects more data. It increases the accuracy of its prediction. And then Arthur Samuel goes back to the computer and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and Arthur Samuel has created a machine that surpasses his ability in a task that he taught it.And this idea of machine learning is going everywhere. How do you think we have self-driving cars? Are we any better off as a society enshrining all the rules of the road into software? No. Memory is cheaper. No. Algorithms are faster. No. Processors are better. No. All of those things matter, but that's not why. It's because we changed the nature of the problem. We changed the nature of the problem from one in which we tried to overtly and explicitly explain to the computer how to drive to one in which we say, ""Here's a lot of data around the vehicle. You figure it out. You figure it out that that is a traffic light, that that traffic light is red and not green, that that means that you need to stop and not go forward.""Machine learning is at the basis of many of the things that we do online: search engines, Amazon's personalization algorithm, computer translation, voice recognition systems. Researchers recently have looked at the question of biopsies, cancerous biopsies, and they've asked the computer to identify by looking at the data and survival rates to determine whether cells are actually cancerous or not, and sure enough, when you throw the data at it, through a machine-learning algorithm, the machine was able to identify the 12 telltale signs that best predict that this biopsy of the breast cancer cells are indeed cancerous. The problem: The medical literature only knew nine of them. Three of the traits were ones that people didn't need to look for, but that the machine spotted.Now, there are dark sides to big data as well. It will improve our lives, but there are problems that we need to be conscious of, and the first one is the idea that we may be punished for predictions, that the police may use big data for their purposes, a little bit like ""Minority Report."" Now, it's a term called predictive policing, or algorithmic criminology, and the idea is that if we take a lot of data, for example where past crimes have been, we know where to send the patrols. That makes sense, but the problem, of course, is that it's not simply going to stop on location data, it's going to go down to the level of the individual. Why don't we use data about the person's high school transcript? Maybe we should use the fact that they're unemployed or not, their credit score, their web-surfing behavior, whether they're up late at night. Their Fitbit, when it's able to identify biochemistries, will show that they have aggressive thoughts. We may have algorithms that are likely to predict what we are about to do, and we may be held accountable before we've actually acted. Privacy was the central challenge in a small data era. In the big data age, the challenge will be safeguarding free will, moral choice, human volition, human agency.There is another problem: Big data is going to steal our jobs. Big data and algorithms are going to challenge white collar, professional knowledge work in the 21st century in the same way that factory automation and the assembly line challenged blue collar labor in the 20th century. Think about a lab technician who is looking through a microscope at a cancer biopsy and determining whether it's cancerous or not. The person went to university. The person buys property. He or she votes. He or she is a stakeholder in society. And that person's job, as well as an entire fleet of professionals like that person, is going to find that their jobs are radically changed or actually completely eliminated. Now, we like to think that technology creates jobs over a period of time after a short, temporary period of dislocation, and that is true for the frame of reference with which we all live, the Industrial Revolution, because that's precisely what happened. But we forget something in that analysis: There are some categories of jobs that simply get eliminated and never come back. The Industrial Revolution wasn't very good if you were a horse. So we're going to need to be careful and take big data and adjust it for our needs, our very human needs. We have to be the master of this technology, not its servant. We are just at the outset of the big data era, and honestly, we are not very good at handling all the data that we can now collect. It's not just a problem for the National Security Agency. Businesses collect lots of data, and they misuse it too, and we need to get better at this, and this will take time. It's a little bit like the challenge that was faced by primitive man and fire. This is a tool, but this is a tool that, unless we're careful, will burn us.Big data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think. It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health, but in the past, we've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T, the technology, the hardware, because that's what was physical. We now need to recast our gaze at the I, the information, which is less apparent, but in some ways a lot more important. Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect, as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it, and that's why big data is a big deal.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kenneth_cukier_big_data_is_better_data
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"When I turned 19, I started my career as the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. My work as a woman photographer was considered a serious insult to local traditions, and created a lasting stigma for me and my family. The male-dominated field made my presence unwelcome by all possible means. They made clear that a woman must not do a man's job. Photo agencies in Gaza refused to train me because of my gender. The ""No"" sign was pretty clear.Three of my colleagues went as far as to drive me to an open air strike area where the explosion sounds were the only thing I could hear. Dust was flying in the air, and the ground was shaking like a swing beneath me. I only realized we weren't there to document the event when the three of them got back into the armored Jeep and drove away, waving and laughing, leaving me behind in the open air strike zone.For a moment, I felt terrified, humiliated, and sorry for myself. My colleagues' action was not the only death threat I have received, but it was the most dangerous one.The perception of women's life in Gaza is passive. Until a recent time, a lot of  women were not allowed to work or pursue education. At times of such doubled war including both social restrictions on women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women's dark and bright stories were fading away. To men, women's stories were seen as inconsequential.I started paying closer attention to women's lives in Gaza. Because of my gender, I had access to worlds where my colleagues were forbidden. Beyond the obvious pain and struggle, there was a healthy dose of laughter and accomplishments. In front of a police compound in Gaza City during the first war in Gaza, an Israeli air raid managed to destroy the compound and break my nose. For a moment, all I saw was white, bright white, like these lights. I thought to myself I either got blind or I was in heaven. By the time I managed to open my eyes, I had documented this moment.Mohammed Khader, a Palestinian worker who spent two decades in Israel, as his retirement plan, he decided to build a four-floor house, only by the first field operation at his neighborhood, the house was flattened to the ground. Nothing was left but the pigeons he raised and a jacuzzi, a bathtub that he got from Tel Aviv. Mohammed got the bathtub on the top of the rubble and started giving his kids an every morning bubble bath.My work is not meant to hide the scars of war, but to show the full frame of unseen stories of Gazans. As a Palestinian female photographer, the journey of struggle, survival and everyday life has inspired me to overcome the community taboo and see a different side of war and its aftermath. I became a witness with a choice: to run away or stand still.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eman_mohammed_the_courage_to_tell_a_hidden_story
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"I've been a critical care EMT for the past seven years in Suffolk County, New York. I've been a first responder in a number of incidents ranging from car accidents to Hurricane Sandy.If you are like most people, death might be one of your greatest fears. Some of us will see it coming. Some of us won't. There is a little-known documented medical term called impending doom. It's almost a symptom. As a medical provider, I'm trained to respond to this symptom like any other, so when a patient having a heart attack looks at me and says, ""I'm going to die today,"" we are trained to reevaluate the patient's condition.Throughout my career, I have responded to a number of incidents where the patient had minutes left to live and there was nothing I could do for them. With this, I was faced with a dilemma: Do I tell the dying that they are about to face death, or do I lie to them to comfort them? Early in my career, I faced this dilemma by simply lying. I was afraid. I was afraid if I told them the truth, that they would die in terror, in fear, just grasping for those last moments of life.That all changed with one incident. Five years ago, I responded to a motorcycle accident. The rider had suffered critical, critical injuries. As I assessed him, I realized that there was nothing that could be done for him, and like so many other cases, he looked me in the eye and asked that question: ""Am I going to die?"" In that moment, I decided to do something different. I decided to tell him the truth. I decided to tell him that he was going to die and that there was nothing I could do for him. His reaction shocked me to this day. He simply laid back and had a look of acceptance on his face. He was not met with that terror or fear that I thought he would be. He simply laid there, and as I looked into his eyes, I saw inner peace and acceptance. From that moment forward, I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies. Having responded to many cases since then where patients were in their last moments and there was nothing I could do for them, in almost every case, they have all had the same reaction to the truth, of inner peace and acceptance. In fact, there are three patterns I have observed in all these cases.The first pattern always kind of shocked me. Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there's a need for forgiveness. Whether they call it sin or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal. I had once cared for an elderly gentleman who was having a massive heart attack. As I prepared myself and my equipment for his imminent cardiac arrest, I began to tell the patient of his imminent demise. He already knew by my tone of voice and body language. As I placed the defibrillator pads on his chest, prepping for what was going to happen, he looked me in the eye and said, ""I wish I had spent more time with my children and grandchildren instead of being selfish with my time."" Faced with imminent death, all he wanted was forgiveness.The second pattern I observe is the need for remembrance. Whether it was to be remembered in my thoughts or their loved ones', they needed to feel that they would be living on. There's a need for immortality within the hearts and thoughts of their loved ones, myself, my crew, or anyone around. Countless times, I have had a  patient look me in the eyes and say, ""Will you remember me?""The final pattern I observe always touched me the deepest, to the soul. The dying need to know that their life had meaning. They need to know that they did not waste their life on meaningless tasks.This came to me very, very early in my career. I had responded to a call. There was a female in her late 50s severely pinned within a vehicle. She had been t-boned at a high rate of speed, critical, critical condition. As the fire department worked to remove her from the car, I climbed in to begin to render care. As we talked, she had said to me, ""There was so much more I wanted to do with my life."" She had felt she had not left her mark on this Earth. As we talked further, it would turn out that she was a mother of two adopted children who were both on their way to medical school. Because of her, two children had a chance they never would have had otherwise and would go on to save lives in the medical field as medical doctors. It would end up taking 45 minutes to free her from the vehicle. However, she perished prior to freeing her.I believed what you saw in the movies: when you're in those last moments that it's strictly terror, fear. I have come to realize, regardless of the circumstance, it's generally met with peace and acceptance, that it's the littlest things, the littlest moments, the littlest things you brought into the world that give you peace in those final moments.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matthew_o_reilly_am_i_dying_the_honest_answer
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"When, in 1960, still a student, I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. We traveled the country. We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities: New York, Philadelphia. Those who have no choice lived there. And then we traveled from suburb to suburb, and I came back thinking, we've got to reinvent the apartment building. There has to be another way of doing this. We can't sustain suburbs, so let's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit.Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. We prefabricated it so we would achieve economy, and there it is almost 50 years later. It's a very desirable place to live in. It's now a heritage building, but it did not proliferate.In 1973, I made my first trip to China. It was the Cultural Revolution. We traveled the country, met with architects and planners. This is Beijing then, not a single high rise building in Beijing or Shanghai. Shenzhen didn't even exist as a city. There were hardly any cars. Thirty years later, this is Beijing today. This is Hong Kong. If you're wealthy, you live there, if you're poor, you live there, but high density it is, and it's not just Asia. São Paulo, you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment. And with it, comes congestion, and we lose mobility, and so on and so forth.So a few years ago, we decided to go back and rethink Habitat. Could we make it more affordable? Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today? And we realized, it's basically about light, it's about sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization. Can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior?We came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact; membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens. And then we decided to take New York as a test case, and we looked at Lower Manhattan. And we mapped all the building area in Manhattan. On the left is Manhattan today: blue for housing, red for office buildings, retail. On the right, we reconfigured it: the office buildings form the base, and then rising 75 stories above, are apartments. There's a street in the air on the 25th level, a community street. It's permeable. There are gardens and open spaces for the community, almost every unit with its own private garden, and community space all around. And most important, permeable, open. It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city, and light permeates everywhere.And in the last two or three years, we've actually been, for the first time, realizing the quality of life of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia. This in Qinhuangdao in China: middle-income housing, where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight. That's measured in the winter solstice. And under construction in Singapore, again middle-income housing, gardens, community streets and parks and so on and so forth. And Colombo.And I want to touch on one more issue, which is the design of the public realm. A hundred years after we've begun building with tall buildings, we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise building becomes a building block in making a city, in creating the public realm. In Singapore, we had an opportunity: 10 million square feet, extremely high density. Taking the concept of outdoor and indoor, promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life. So they are outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, and you move from one to the other, and there is contact with nature, and most relevantly, at every level of the structure, public gardens and open space: on the roof of the podium, climbing up the towers, and finally on the roof, the sky park, two and a half acres, jogging paths, restaurants, and the world's longest swimming pool. And that's all I can tell you in five minutes.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/moshe_safdie_how_to_reinvent_the_apartment_building
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"I am an engineering professor, and for the past 14 years I've been teaching crap. (Laughter) Not that I'm a bad teacher, but I've been studying and teaching about human waste and how waste is conveyed through these wastewater treatment plants, and how we engineer and design these treatment plants so that we can protect surface water like rivers.I've based my scientific career on using leading-edge molecular techniques, DNA- and RNA-based methods to look at microbial populations in biological reactors, and again to optimize these systems. And over the years, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with toilets, and I've been known to sneak into toilets and take my camera phone all over the world.But along the way, I've learned that it's not just the technical side, but there's also this thing called the culture of crap. So for example, how many of you are washers and how many of you are wipers? (Laughter) If, well, I guess you know what I mean. If you're a washer, then you use water for anal cleansing. That's the technical term. And if you're a wiper, then you use toilet paper or, in some regions of the world where it's not available, newspaper or rags or corncobs.And this is not just a piece of trivia, but it's really important to understand and solve the sanitation problem. And it is a big problem: There are 2.5 billion people in the world who don't have access to adequate sanitation. For them, there's no modern toilet. And there are 1.1 billion people whose toilets are the streets or river banks or open spaces, and again, the technical term for that is open defecation, but that is really simply shitting in the open. And if you're living in fecal material and it's surrounding you, you're going to get sick. It's going to get into your drinking water, into your food, into your immediate surroundings. So the United Nations estimates that every year, there are  1.5 million child deaths because of inadequate sanitation. That's one preventable death every 20 seconds, 171 every hour, 4,100 every day. And so, to avoid open defecation, municipalities and cities build infrastructure, for example, like pit latrines, in peri-urban and rural areas. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal  province in South Africa, they've built tens of thousands of these pit latrines. But there's a problem when you scale up to tens of thousands, and the problem is, what happens when the pits are full? This is what happens. People defecate around the toilet. In schools, children defecate on the floors and then leave a trail outside the building and start defecating around the building, and these pits have to be cleaned and manually emptied. And who does the emptying? You've got these workers who have to sometimes go down into the pits and manually remove the contents. It's a dirty and dangerous business. As you can see, there's no protective equipment, no protective clothing. There's one worker down there. I hope you can see him. He's got a face mask on, but no shirt. And in some countries, like India, the lower castes are condemned to empty the pits, and they're further condemned by society.So you ask yourself, how can we solve this and why don't we just build Western-style flush toilets for these two and a half billion? And the answer is, it's just not possible. In some of these areas, there's not enough water, there's no energy, it's going to cost tens of trillions of dollars to lay out the sewer lines and to build the facilities and to operate and maintain these systems, and if you don't build it right, you're going to have flush toilets that basically go straight into the river, just like what's happening in many cities in the developing world. And is this really the solution? Because essentially, what you're doing is you're using clean water and you're using it to flush your toilet, convey it to a wastewater treatment plant which then discharges to a river, and that river, again, is a drinking water source.So we've got to rethink sanitation, and we've got to reinvent the sanitation infrastructure, and I'm going to argue that to do this, you have to employ systems thinking. We have to look at the whole sanitation chain. We start with a human interface, and then we have to think about how feces are collected and stored, transported, treated and reused — and not just disposal but reuse.So let's start with the human user interface. I say, it doesn't matter if you're a washer or a wiper, a sitter or a squatter, the human user interface should be clean and easy to use, because after all, taking a dump should be pleasurable. (Laughter) And when we open the possibilities to understanding this sanitation chain, then the back-end technology, the collection to the reuse, should not really matter, and then we can apply locally adoptable and context-sensitive solutions. So we can open ourselves to possibilities like, for example, this urine-diverting toilet, and there's two holes in this toilet. There's the front and the back, and the front collects the urine, and the back collects the fecal material. And so what you're doing is you're separating the urine, which has 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus, and then that can then be treated and precipitated to form things like struvite, which is a high-value fertilizer, and then the fecal material can then be disinfected and again converted to high-value end products. Or, for example, in some of our research, you can reuse the water by treating it in on-site sanitation systems like planter boxes or constructed wetlands. So we can open up all these possibilities if we take away the old paradigm of flush toilets and treatment plants.So you might be asking, who's going to pay? Well, I'm going to argue that governments should fund sanitation infrastructure. NGOs and donor organizations, they can do their best, but it's not going to be enough. Governments should fund sanitation the same way they fund roads and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure like bridges, because we know, and the WHO has done this study, that for every dollar that we invest in sanitation infrastructure, we get something like three to 34 dollars back.Let's go back to the problem of pit emptying. So at North Carolina State University, we challenged our students to come up with a simple solution, and this is what they came up with: a simple, modified screw auger that can move the waste up from the pit and into a collecting drum, and now the pit worker doesn't have to go down into the pit. We tested it in South Africa, and it works. We need to make it more robust, and we're going to do more testing in Malawi and South Africa this coming year. And our idea is to make this a professionalized pit-emptying service so that we can create a small business out of it, create profits and jobs, and the hope is that, as we are rethinking sanitation, we are extending the life of these pits so that we don't have to resort to quick solutions that don't really make sense.I believe that access to adequate sanitation is a basic human right. We need to stop the practice of lower castes and lower-status people going down and being condemned to empty pits. It is our moral, it is our social and our environmental obligation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/francis_de_los_reyes_sanitation_is_a_basic_human_right
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"Women represent 50 percent of middle management and professional positions, but the percentages of women at the top of organizations represent not even a third of that number. So some people hear that statistic and they ask, why do we have so few women leaders? But I look at that statistic and, if you, like me, believe that leadership manifests at every level, you would see that there's a tremendous, awesome resource of leaders who are leading in middle management, which raises a different question: Why are there so many women mired in the middle and what has to happen to take them to the top?So some of you might be some of those women who are in middle management and seeking to move up in your organization. Well, Tonya is a great example of one of these women. I met her two years ago. She was a vice president in a Fortune 50 company, and she said to me with a sense of deep frustration, ""I've worked really hard to improve my confidence and my assertiveness and develop a great brand, I get terrific performance evals from my boss, my 360s in the organization let me know that my teams love working for me, I've taken every management course that I can here, I am working with a terrific mentor, and yet I've been passed over twice for advancement opportunities, even when my manager knows that I'm committed to moving up and even interested in an international assignment. I don't understand why I'm being passed over.""So what Tonya doesn't realize is that there's a missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women, and it's understanding what this missing 33 percent is that's required to close the gender gap at the top.In order to move up in organizations, you have to be known for your leadership skills, and this would apply to any of you, women or men. It means that you have to be recognized for using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others. Put in other language, it means you have to use your skills and talents and abilities to help the organization achieve its strategic financial goals and do that by working effectively with others inside of the organization and outside. And although all three of these elements of leadership are important, when it comes to moving up in organizations, they aren't equally important. So pay attention to the green box as I move forward.In seeking and identifying employees with high potential, the potential to go to the top of organizations, the skills and competencies that relate to that green box are rated twice as heavily as those in the other two elements of leadership. These skills and competencies can be summarized as business, strategic, and financial acumen. In other words, this skill set has to do with understanding where the organization is going, what its strategy is, what financial targets it has in place, and understanding your role in moving the organization forward. This is that missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women, not because it's missing in our capabilities or abilities, but because it's missing in the advice that we're given.Here's what I mean by that. Five years ago, I was asked to moderate a panel of executives, and the topic for the evening was ""What do you look for in  high-potential employees?"" So think about the three elements of leadership as I summarize for you what they told me.They said, ""We look for people who are smart and hard working and committed and trustworthy and resilient."" So which element of leadership does that relate to? Personal greatness.They said, ""We look for employees who are great with our customers, who empower their teams, who negotiate effectively, who are able to manage conflict well, and are overall great communicators."" Which element of leadership does that equate to? Engaging the greatness in others.And then they pretty much stopped. So I asked, ""Well, what about people who understand your business, where it's going, and their role in taking it there? And what about people who are able to scan the external environment, identify risks and opportunities, make strategy or make strategic recommendations? And what about people who are able to look at the financials of your business, understand the story that the financials tell, and either take appropriate action or make appropriate recommendations?""And to a man, they said, ""That's a given.""So I turned to the audience of 150 women and I asked, ""How many of you have ever been told that the door-opener for career advancement is your business, strategic and financial acumen, and that all the other important stuff is what differentiates you in the talent pool?"" Three women raised their hand, and I've asked this question of women all around the globe in the five years since, and the percentage is never much different.So this is obvious, right? But how can it be? Well, there are primarily three reasons that there's this missing 33 percent in the career success advice given to women? When organizations direct women toward resources that focus on the conventional advice that we've been hearing for over 40 years, there's a notable absence of advice that relates to business, strategic and financial acumen. Much of the advice is emphasizing personal actions that we need to take, like become more assertive, become more confident, develop your personal brand, things that Tonya's been working on, and advice about working with other people, things like learn to self-promote, get a mentor, enhance your network, and virtually nothing said about the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen. This doesn't mean that this advice is unimportant. What it means is that this is advice that's absolutely essential for breaking through from career start to middle management, but it's not the advice that gets women to break through from the middle, where we're 50 percent, to senior and executive positions. And this is why conventional advice to women in 40 years hasn't closed the gender gap at the top and won't close it.Now, the second reason relates to Tonya's comments about having had excellent performance evals, great feedback from her teams, and having taken every management training program she can lay her hands on. So you would think that she's getting messages from her organization through the talent development systems and performance management systems that let her know how important it is to develop business, strategic and financial acumen, but here again, that green square is quite small. On average, talent and performance management systems in the organizations that I've worked with focus three to one on the other two elements of leadership compared to the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen, which is why typical talent and performance systems haven't closed and won't close the gender gap at the top.Now, Tonya also talked about working with a mentor, and this is really important to talk about, because if organizations, talent and performance systems aren't giving people in general information about the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen, how are men getting to the top? Well, there are primarily two ways. One is because of the positions they're guided into, and the other is because of informal mentoring and sponsorship.So what's women's experience as it relates to mentoring? Well, this comment from an executive that I worked with recently illustrates that experience. He was very proud of the fact that last year, he had two protégés: a man and a woman. And he said, ""I helped the woman build confidence, I helped the man learn the business, and I didn't realize that I was treating them any differently."" And he was sincere about that.So what this illustrates is that as managers, whether we're women or men, we have mindsets about women and men, about careers in leadership, and these unexamined mindsets won't close the gender gap at the top. So how do we take this idea of the missing 33 percent and turn it into action? Well, for women, the answer is obvious: we have to begin to focus more on developing and demonstrating the skills we have that show that we're people who understand our businesses, where they're headed, and our role in taking it there. That's what enables that breakthrough from middle management to leadership at the top. But you don't have to be a middle manager to do this. One young scientist that works in a biotech firm used her insight about the missing 33 percent to weave financial impact data into a project update she did and got tremendous positive feedback from the managers in the room.So we don't want to put 100 percent of the responsibility on women's shoulders, nor would it be wise to do so, and here's why: In order for companies to achieve their strategic financial goals, executives understand that they have to have everyone pulling in the same direction. In other words, the term we use in business is, we have to have strategic alignment. And executives know this very well, and yet only 37 percent, according to a recent Conference Board report, believe that they have that strategic alignment in place. So for 63 percent of organizations, achieving their strategic financial goals is questionable. And if you think about what I've just shared, that you have situations where at least 50 percent of your middle managers haven't received clear messaging that they have to become focused on the business, where it's headed, and their role in taking it there, it's not surprising that that percentage of executives who are confident about alignment is so low, which is why there are other people who have a role to play in this. It's important for directors on boards to expect from their executives proportional pools of women when they sit down once a year for their succession discussions. Why? Because if they aren't seeing that, it could be a red flag that their organization isn't as aligned as it could potentially be. It's important for CEOs to also expect these proportional pools, and if they hear comments like, ""Well, she doesn't have enough business experience,"" ask the question, ""What are we going to do about that?"" It's important for H.R. executives to make sure that the missing 33 percent is appropriately emphasized, and it's important for women and men who are in management positions to examine the mindsets we hold about women and men, about careers and success, to make sure we are creating a level playing field for everybody.So let me close with the latest chapter in Tonya's story. Tonya emailed me two months ago, and she said that she had been interviewed for a new position, and during the interview, they probed about her business acumen and her strategic insights into the industry, and she said that she was so happy to report that now she has a new position reporting directly to the  chief information officer at her company. So for some of you, the missing 33 percent is an idea for you to put into action, and I hope that for all of you, you will see it as an idea worth spreading in order to help organizations be more effective, to help women create careers that soar, and to help close the gender gap at the top.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_colantuono_the_career_advice_you_probably_didn_t_get
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"I want to tell you how 20,000 remarkable young people from over 100 countries ended up in Cuba and are transforming health in their communities. Ninety percent of them would never have left home at all if it weren't for a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba and a commitment to go back to places like the ones they'd come from — remote farmlands, mountains, ghettos — to become doctors for people like themselves, to walk the walk.Havana's Latin American Medical School: It's the largest medical school in the world, graduating 23,000 young doctors since its first class of 2005, with nearly 10,000 more in the pipeline. Its mission, to train physicians for the people who need them the most: the over one billion who have never seen a doctor, the people who live and die under every poverty line ever invented. Its students defy all norms. They're the school's biggest risk and also its best bet. They're recruited from the poorest, most broken places on our planet by a school that believes they can become not just the good but the excellent physicians their communities desperately need, that they will practice where most doctors don't, in places not only poor but oftentimes dangerous, carrying venom antidotes in their backpacks or navigating neighborhoods riddled by drugs, gangs and bullets, their home ground. The hope is that they will help transform access to care, the health picture in impoverished areas, and even the way medicine itself is learned and practiced, and that they will become pioneers in our global reach for universal health coverage, surely a tall order. Two big storms and this notion of ""walk the walk"" prompted creation of ELAM back in 1998. The Hurricanes Georges and Mitch had ripped through the Caribbean and Central America, leaving 30,000 dead and two and a half million homeless. Hundreds of Cuban doctors volunteered for disaster response, but when they got there, they found a bigger disaster: whole communities with no healthcare, doors bolted shut on rural hospitals for lack of staff, and just too many babies dying before their first birthday. What would happen when these Cuban doctors left? New doctors were needed to make care sustainable, but where would they come from? Where would they train?In Havana, the campus of a former naval academy was turned over to the Cuban Health Ministry to become the Latin American Medical School, ELAM. Tuition, room and board, and a small stipend were offered to hundreds of students from the countries hardest hit by the storms. As a journalist in Havana, I watched the first 97 Nicaraguans arrive in March 1999, settling into dorms barely refurbished and helping their professors not only sweep out the classrooms but move in the desks and the chairs and the microscopes. Over the next few years, governments throughout the Americas requested scholarships for their own students, and the Congressional Black Caucus asked for and received hundreds of scholarships for young people from the USA. Today, among the 23,000 are graduates from 83 countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and enrollment has grown to 123 nations. More than half the students are young women. They come from 100 ethnic groups, speak 50 different languages. WHO Director Margaret Chan said, ""For once, if you are poor, female, or from an indigenous population, you have a distinct advantage, an ethic that makes this medical school unique.""Luther Castillo comes from San Pedro de Tocamacho on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. There's no running water, no electricity there, and to reach the village, you have to walk for hours or take your chances in a pickup truck like I did skirting the waves of the Atlantic. Luther was one of 40 Tocamacho children who started grammar school, the sons and daughters of a black indigenous people known as the Garífuna, 20 percent of the Honduran population. The nearest healthcare was fatal miles away. Luther had to walk three hours every day to middle school. Only 17 made that trip. Only five went on to high school, and only one to university: Luther, to ELAM, among the first crop of Garífuna graduates. Just two Garífuna doctors had preceded them in all of Honduran history. Now there are 69, thanks to ELAM.Big problems need big solutions, sparked by big ideas, imagination and audacity, but also solutions that work. ELAM's faculty had no handy evidence base to guide them, so they learned the hard way, by doing and correcting course as they went. Even the brightest students from these poor communities weren't academically prepared for six years of medical training, so a bridging course was set up in sciences. Then came language: these were Mapuche, Quechuas, Guaraní, Garífuna, indigenous peoples who learned Spanish as a second language, or Haitians who spoke Creole. So Spanish became part of the pre-pre-med curriculum. Even so, in Cuba, the music, the food, the smells, just about everything was different, so faculty became family, ELAM home. Religions ranged from indigenous beliefs to Yoruba, Muslim and Christian evangelical. Embracing diversity became a way of life.Why have so many countries asked for these scholarships? First, they just don't have enough doctors, and where they do, their distribution is skewed against the poor, because our global health crisis is fed by a crisis in human resources. We are short four to seven million health workers just to meet basic needs, and the problem is everywhere. Doctors are concentrated in the cities, where only half the world's people live, and within cities, not in the shantytowns or South L.A. Here in the United States, where we have healthcare reform, we don't have the professionals we need. By 2020, we will be short 45,000 primary care physicians. And we're also part of the problem. The United States is the number one importer of doctors from developing countries.The second reasons students flock to Cuba is the island's own health report card, relying on strong primary care. A commission from The Lancet rates Cuba among the best performing middle-income countries in health. Save the Children ranks Cuba the best country in Latin America to become a mother. Cuba has similar life expectancy and lower infant mortality than the United States, with fewer disparities, while spending per person one 20th of what we do on health here in the USA.Academically, ELAM is tough, but 80 percent of its students graduate. The subjects are familiar — basic and clinical sciences — but there are major differences. First, training has moved out of the ivory tower and into clinic classrooms and neighborhoods, the kinds of places most of these grads will practice. Sure, they have lectures and hospital rotations too, but community-based learning starts on day one. Second, students treat the whole patient, mind and body, in the context of their  families, their communities and their culture. Third, they learn public health: to assess their patients' drinking water, housing, social and economic conditions. Fourth, they are taught that a good patient interview and a thorough clinical exam provide most of the clues for diagnosis, saving costly technology for confirmation. And finally, they're taught over and over again the importance of prevention, especially as chronic diseases cripple health systems worldwide.Such an in-service learning also comes with a team approach, as much how to work in teams as how to lead them, with a dose of humility. Upon graduation, these doctors share their knowledge with nurse's aids, midwives, community health workers, to help them become better at what they do, not to replace them, to work with shamans and traditional healers.ELAM's graduates: Are they proving this audacious experiment right? Dozens of projects give us an inkling of what they're capable of doing. Take the Garífuna grads. They not only went to work back home, but they organized their communities to build Honduras' first indigenous hospital. With an architect's help, residents literally raised it from the ground up. The first patients walked through the doors in December 2007, and since then, the hospital has received nearly one million patient visits. And government is paying attention, upholding the hospital as a model of rural public health for Honduras.ELAM's graduates are smart, strong and also dedicated. Haiti, January 2010. The pain. People buried under 30 million tons of rubble. Overwhelming. Three hundred forty Cuban doctors were already on the ground long term. More were on their way. Many more were needed. At ELAM, students worked round the clock to contact 2,000 graduates. As a result, hundreds arrived in Haiti, 27 countries' worth, from Mali in the Sahara to St. Lucia, Bolivia, Chile and the USA. They spoke easily to each other in Spanish and listened to their patients in Creole thanks to Haitian medical students flown in from ELAM in Cuba. Many stayed for months, even through the cholera epidemic.Hundreds of Haitian graduates had to pick up the pieces, overcome their own heartbreak, and then pick up the burden of building a new public health system for Haiti. Today, with aid of organizations and governments from Norway to Cuba to Brazil, dozens of new health centers have been built, staffed, and in 35 cases, headed by ELAM graduates.Yet the Haitian story also illustrates some of the bigger problems faced in many countries. Take a look: 748 Haitian graduates by  2012, when cholera struck, nearly half working in the public health sector but one quarter unemployed, and 110 had left Haiti altogether. So in the best case scenarios, these graduates are staffing and thus strengthening public health systems, where often they're the only doctors around. In the worst cases, there are simply not enough jobs in the public health sector, where most poor people are treated, not enough political will, not enough resources, not enough anything — just too many patients with no care. The grads face pressure from their families too, desperate to make ends meet, so when there are no public sector jobs, these new MDs decamp into private practice, or go abroad to send money home.Worst of all, in some countries, medical societies influence accreditation bodies not to honor the ELAM degree, fearful these grads will take their jobs or reduce their patient loads and income. It's not a question of competencies. Here in the USA, the California Medical Board accredited the school after rigorous inspection, and the new physicians are making good on Cuba's big bet, passing their boards and accepted into highly respected residencies from New York to Chicago to New Mexico. Two hundred strong, they're coming back to the United States energized, and also dissatisfied. As one grad put it, in Cuba, ""We are trained to provide quality care with minimal resources, so when I see all the resources we have here, and you tell me that's not possible, I know it's not true. Not only have I seen it work, I've done the work.""ELAM's graduates, some from right here in D.C. and Baltimore, have come from the poorest of the poor to offer health, education and a voice to their communities. They've done the heavy lifting. Now we need to do our part to support the 23,000 and counting, All of us — foundations, residency directors, press, entrepreneurs, policymakers, people — need to step up. We need to do much more globally to give these new doctors the opportunity to prove their mettle. They need to be able to take their countries' licensing exams. They need jobs in the public health sector or in nonprofit health centers to put their training and commitment to work. They need the chance to be the doctors their patients need.To move forward, we may have to find our way back to that pediatrician who would knock on my family's door on the South Side of Chicago when I was a kid, who made house calls, who was a public servant. These aren't such new ideas of what medicine should be. What's new is the scaling up and the faces of the doctors themselves: an ELAM graduate is more likely to be a she than a he; In the Amazon, Peru or Guatemala, an indigenous doctor; in the USA, a doctor of color who speaks fluent Spanish. She is well trained, can be counted on, and shares the face and culture of her patients, and she deserves our support surely, because whether by subway, mule, or canoe, she is teaching us to walk the walk.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gail_reed_where_to_train_the_world_s_doctors_cuba
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"Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind. And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers. To give you a feel for this idea,imagine the following scenario: You walk into your child's day care center. As usual, there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up, but this time, the children's faces look weirdly similar, and you can't figure out which child is yours. Do you need new glasses? Are you losing your mind? You run through a quick mental checklist. No, you seem to be thinking clearly, and your vision is perfectly sharp. And everything looks normal except the children's faces. You can see the faces, but they don't look distinctive, and none of them looks familiar, and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter.This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people. It's called prosopagnosia, and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain. The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired; everything else is just fine.Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage. These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components, but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology, especially MRI. So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution, so I'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object, and we're going to fly through them and you're going to try to figure out what the object is. Here we go.It's not that easy. It's an artichoke.Okay, let's try another one, starting from the bottom and going through the top. Broccoli! It's a head of broccoli. Isn't it beautiful? I love that.Okay, here's another one. It's a brain, of course. In fact, it's my brain. We're going through slices through my head like that. That's my nose over on the right, and now we're going over here, right there.So this picture's nice, if I do say so myself, but it shows only anatomy. The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing. So here's how this works. Brains are like muscles. When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there. So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase, producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up.So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can't, let me describe one of the first studies I ever did. We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces, and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago, but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person, so we set out to look for it. So I was the first subject. I went into the scanner, I lay on my back, I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours. So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner, I can tell you that one of the skills that's really important for MRI research is bladder control. (Laughter)When I got out of the scanner, I did a quick analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects, and here's what I saw. Now this image looks just awful by today's standards, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. What it shows is that region right there, that little blob, it's about the size of an olive and it's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there. And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response, that is, higher neural activity, when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects. So that's pretty cool, but how do we know this isn't a fluke? Well, the easiest way is to just do the experiment again. So I got back in the scanner, I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob, and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again, and around about then I decided to believe it was for real. But still, maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there, so to find out, we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain.So the next question was, what does this thing really do? Is it really specialized just for face recognition? Well, maybe not, right? Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part. Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round. The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses. So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images, and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind, and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn't a face, like some of these.So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition? No, we haven't. Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything. All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts. To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function, you need to mess with it and see what happens, and normally we don't get to do that. But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures. So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area. So with the patient's consent, the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain. Now, the patient doesn't know where those electrodes are, and he's never heard of the face area. So let's watch what happens. It's going to start with a control condition that will say ""Sham"" nearly invisibly in red in the lower left, when no current is delivered, and you'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first. So let's watch.(Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. All right?Patient: Okay.Neurologist: One, two, three.Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. I'm going to do it one more time. Look at my face. One, two, three.Patient: You just turned into somebody else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy, it went to the left. You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different. That was a trip. (Laughter)Nancy Kanwisher: So this experiment — (Applause) — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception. So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process. Next, I'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found. So to do this, I've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain.So let's get started. Here's my right hemisphere. So we're oriented like that. You're looking at my head this way. Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that. Okay, now as you can see, the surface of the brain is all folded up. So that's not good. Stuff could be hidden in there. We want to see the whole thing, so let's inflate it so we can see the whole thing. Next, let's find that face area I've been talking about that responds to images like these. To see that, let's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom, and there it is, that's my face area. Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information, and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places, like right now, I'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active. There's another one out on the outside surface again where there's a couple more face regions as well. Also in this vicinity is a region that's selectively involved in processing visual motion, like these moving dots here, and that's in yellow at the bottom of the brain, and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these, and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain.Now all these regions I've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception. Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses, like hearing? Yes, we do. So if we turn the brain around a little bit, here's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago, and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch, like these. (Sirens) (Cello music) (Doorbell) In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch, like these. (Chomping) (Drum roll) (Toilet flushing)Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech.Okay, now let's look at these same regions. In my left hemisphere, there's a similar arrangement — not identical, but similar — and most of the same regions are in here, albeit sometimes different in size.Now, everything I've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception, vision and hearing. Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy, complicated mental processes? Yes, we do. So here in pink are my language regions. So it's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language, but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively. They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence, but not when you do other complex mental things, like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music.The most amazing region that's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise. This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking. So that may seem crazy, but actually, we humans do this all the time. You're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don't call home to say you're running late. I'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray, uncharted territory in the brain, and what's up with that?Well, I'm wondering about that too, and we're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions. But importantly, I don't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function, even mental functions that may be critical for survival. In fact, a few years ago, there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he'd found a brain region for detecting food, and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this. And further, he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects. So he was pretty stoked, and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on ""Oprah"" with his big discovery. But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these. And his region responded the same to both sets of images. So it wasn't a food area, it was just a region that liked colors and shapes. So much for ""Oprah.""But then the question, of course, is, how do we process all this other stuff that we don't have specialized brain regions for? Well, I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I've been describing, we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along. In fact, we've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well, of the seven that we've tested. So each of the brain regions that I've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject. I could take any of you, pop you in the scanner, and find each of those regions in your brain, and it would look a lot like my brain, although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size.What's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact that we have selective, specific components of mind and brain in the first place. I mean, it could have been otherwise. The brain could have been a single, general-purpose processor, more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife. Instead, what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind. So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components.It's early days in this enterprise. We've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind. The most fundamental questions remain unanswered. So for example, what does each of these regions do exactly? Why do we need three face areas and three place areas, and what's the division of labor between them? Second, how are all these things connected in the brain? With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain. Third, how does all of this very systematic structure get built, both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species? To address questions like that, scientists are now scanning other species of animals, and they're also scanning human infants.Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and autism. That's a hugely important goal, and I'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that's worth doing. The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_kanwisher_the_brain_is_a_swiss_army_knife
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"Recently, I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel. I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam, again playing music by this same composer. Let's take a look.(Music: George Frideric Handel, ""Allegro."" Performed by Daria van den Bercken.)(Video) Daria van den Bercken: I live there on the third floor. (In Dutch) I live there on the corner. I actually live there, around the corner. and you'd be really welcome.Man: (In Dutch) Does that sound like fun? Child: (In Dutch) Yes![(In Dutch) ""Handel house concert""](Applause)Daria van den Bercken: All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons.Now you may ask, why have I done these things? They're not really typical for a musician's day-to-day life. Well, I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible.It started a couple of years ago. I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little, when I found out that Handel had written works for the keyboard. Well, I was surprised. I did not know this. So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing. And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure, unprejudiced amazement. It was an experience of being totally in awe of the music, and I had not felt that in a long time. It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it. The first piece that I played through started like this.(Music)Well this sounds very melancholic, doesn't it? And I turned the page and what came next was this.(Music)Well, this sounds very energetic, doesn't it? So within a couple of minutes, and the piece isn't even finished yet, I experienced two very contrasting characters: beautiful melancholy and sheer energy. And I consider these two elements to be vital human expressions. And the purity of the music makes you hear it very effectively.I've given a lot of children's concerts for children of seven and eight years old, and whatever I play, whether it's Bach, Beethoven, even Stockhausen, or some jazzy music, they are open to hear it, really willing to listen, and they are comfortable doing so. And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older, 11, 12, I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that. The complexity of the music does become an issue, and actually the opinions of others — parents, friends, media — they start to count. But the young ones, they don't question their own opinion. They are in this constant state of wonder, and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children, even when growing up. And that is why I have played not only in the concert hall but also on the street, online, in the air: to feel that state of wonder, to truly listen, and to listen without prejudice. And I would like to invite you to do so now. (Music: George Frideric Handel, ""Chaconne in G Major."" Performed by Daria van den Bercken.)(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daria_van_den_bercken_why_i_take_the_piano_on_the_road_and_in_the_air
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"It's very nice to be here tonight.So I've been working on the history of income and wealth distribution for the past 15 years, and one of the interesting lessons coming from this historical evidence is indeed that, in the long run, there is a tendency for  the rate of return of capital to exceed the economy's growth rate, and this tends to lead to  high concentration of wealth. Not infinite concentration of wealth, but the higher the gap between r and g, the higher the level of inequality of wealth towards which society tends to converge.So this is a key force that I'm going to talk about today, but let me say right away that this is not the only important force in the dynamics of income  and wealth distribution, and there are many other forces that play an important role in the long-run dynamics of income and wealth distribution. Also there is a lot of data that still needs to be collected. We know a little bit more today than we used to know,  but we still know too little, and certainly there are  many different processes — economic, social, political — that need to be studied more. And so I'm going to focus today on this simple force, but that doesn't mean that other important forces do not exist.So most of the data I'm going to present comes from this database that's available online: the World Top Incomes Database. So this is the largest existing historical database on inequality, and this comes from the effort of over 30 scholars from several dozen countries. So let me show you a couple of facts coming from this database, and then we'll return to r bigger than g. So fact number one is that there has been a big reversal in the ordering of income inequality between the United States and Europe over the past century. So back in 1900, 1910, income inequality was actually much higher in Europe than in the United States, whereas today, it is a lot higher in the United States. So let me be very clear: The main explanation for this is not r bigger than g. It has more to do with changing supply and demand for skill, the race between education and technology, globalization, probably more unequal access to skills in the U.S., where you have very good, very top universities but where the bottom part of the educational system is not as good, so very unequal access to skills, and also an unprecedented rise of top managerial compensation of the United States, which is difficult to account for just on the basis of education. So there is more going on here, but I'm not going to talk too much about this today, because I want to focus on wealth inequality.So let me just show you a very simple indicator about the income inequality part. So this is the share of total income going to the top 10 percent. So you can see that one century ago, it was between 45 and 50 percent in Europe and a little bit above 40 percent in the U.S., so there was more inequality in Europe. Then there was a sharp decline during the first half of the 20th century, and in the recent decade, you can see that the U.S. has become more unequal than Europe, and this is the first fact I just talked about. Now, the second fact is more about wealth inequality, and here the central fact is that wealth inequality is always a lot higher than income inequality, and also that wealth inequality, although it has also increased in recent decades, is still less extreme today than what it was a century ago, although the total quantity of wealth relative to income has now recovered from the very large shocks caused by World War I, the Great Depression, World War II.So let me show you two graphs illustrating fact number two and fact number three. So first, if you look at the level of wealth inequality, this is the share of total wealth going to the top 10 percent of wealth holders, so you can see the same kind of reversal between the U.S. and Europe that we had before for income inequality. So wealth concentration was higher in Europe than in the U.S. a century ago, and now it is the opposite. But you can also show two things: First, the general level of wealth inequality is always higher than income inequality. So remember, for income inequality, the share going to the top 10 percent was between 30 and 50 percent of total income, whereas for wealth, the share is always between 60 and 90 percent. Okay, so that's fact number one, and that's very important for what follows. Wealth concentration is always a lot higher than income concentration.Fact number two is that the rise in wealth inequality in recent decades is still not enough to get us back to 1910. So the big difference today, wealth inequality is still very large, with 60, 70 percent of total wealth for the top 10, but the good news is that it's actually better than one century ago, where you had 90 percent in Europe going to the top 10. So today what you have is what I call the middle 40 percent, the people who are not in the top 10 and who are not in the bottom 50, and what you can view as the wealth middle class that owns 20 to 30 percent of total wealth, national wealth, whereas they used to be poor, a century ago, when there was basically no wealth middle class. So this is an important change, and it's interesting to see that wealth inequality has not fully recovered to pre-World War I levels, although the total quantity of wealth has recovered. Okay? So this is the total value of wealth relative to income, and you can see that in particular in Europe, we are almost back to the pre-World War I level. So there are really two different parts of the story here. One has to do with the total quantity of wealth that we accumulate, and there is nothing bad per se, of course, in accumulating a lot of wealth, and in particular if it is more diffuse and less concentrated. So what we really want to focus on is the long-run evolution of wealth inequality, and what's going to happen in the future. How can we account for the fact that until World War I, wealth inequality was so high and, if anything, was rising to even higher levels, and how can we think about the future?So let me come to some of the explanations and speculations about the future. Let me first say that probably the best model to explain why wealth is so much more concentrated than income is a dynamic, dynastic model where individuals have a long horizon and accumulate wealth for all sorts of reasons. If people were accumulating wealth only for life cycle reasons, you know, to be able to consume when they are old, then the level of wealth inequality should be more or less in line with the level of income inequality. But it will be very difficult to explain why you have so much more wealth inequality than income inequality with a pure life cycle model, so you need a story where people also care about wealth accumulation for other reasons. So typically, they want to transmit wealth to the next generation, to their children, or sometimes they want to accumulate wealth because of the prestige, the power that goes with wealth. So there must be other reasons for accumulating wealth than just life cycle to explain what we see in the data. Now, in a large class of dynamic models of wealth accumulation with such dynastic motive for accumulating wealth, you will have all sorts of random, multiplicative shocks. So for instance, some families have a very large number of children, so the wealth will be divided. Some families have fewer children. You also have shocks to rates of return. Some families make huge capital gains. Some made bad investments. So you will always have some mobility in the wealth process. Some people will move up, some people will move down. The important point is that, in any such model, for a given variance of such shocks, the equilibrium level of wealth inequality will be a steeply rising function of r minus g. And intuitively, the reason why the difference between the rate of return to wealth and the growth rate is important is that initial wealth inequalities will be amplified at a faster pace with a bigger r minus g. So take a simple example, with r equals five percent and g equals one percent, wealth holders only need to reinvest one fifth of their capital income to ensure that their wealth rises as fast as the size of the economy. So this makes it easier to build and perpetuate large fortunes because you can consume four fifths, assuming zero tax, and you can just reinvest one fifth. So of course some families will consume more than that, some will consume less, so there will be some mobility in the distribution, but on average, they only need to reinvest one fifth, so this allows high wealth inequalities to be sustained.Now, you should not be surprised by the statement that r can be bigger than g forever, because, in fact, this is what happened during most of the history of mankind. And this was in a way very obvious to everybody for a simple reason, which is that growth was close to zero percent during most of the history of mankind. Growth was maybe 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 percent, but very slow growth of population and output per capita, whereas the rate of return on capital of course was not zero percent. It was, for land assets, which was the traditional form of assets in preindustrial societies, it was typically five percent. Any reader of Jane Austen would know that. If you want an annual income of 1,000 pounds, you should have a capital value of 20,000 pounds so that five percent of 20,000 is 1,000. And in a way, this was the very foundation of society, because r bigger than g was what allowed holders of wealth and assets to live off their capital income and to do something else in life than just to care about their own survival.Now, one important conclusion of my historical research is that modern industrial growth did not change this basic fact as much as one might have expected. Of course, the growth rate following the Industrial Revolution rose, typically from zero to one to two percent, but at the same time, the rate of return to capital also rose so that the gap between the two did not really change. So during the 20th century, you had a very unique combination of events. First, a very low rate of return due to the 1914 and 1945 war shocks, destruction of wealth, inflation, bankruptcy during the Great Depression, and all of this reduced the private rate of return to wealth to unusually low levels between 1914 and 1945. And then, in the postwar period, you had unusually high growth rate, partly due to the reconstruction. You know, in Germany, in France, in Japan, you had five percent growth rate between 1950 and 1980 largely due to reconstruction, and also due to very large demographic growth, the Baby Boom Cohort effect. Now, apparently that's not going to last for very long, or at least the population growth is supposed to decline in the future, and the best projections we have is that the long-run growth is going to be closer to one to two percent rather than four to five percent. So if you look at this, these are the best estimates we have of world GDP growth and rate of return on capital, average rates of return on capital, so you can see that during most of the history of mankind, the growth rate was very small, much lower than the rate of return, and then during the 20th century, it is really the population growth, very high in the postwar period, and the reconstruction process that brought growth to a smaller gap with the rate of return. Here I use the United Nations population projections, so of course they are uncertain. It could be that we all start having a lot of children in the future, and the growth rates are going to be higher, but from now on, these are the best projections we have, and this will make global growth decline and the gap between the rate of return go up.Now, the other unusual event during the 20th century was, as I said, destruction, taxation of capital, so this is the pre-tax rate of return. This is the after-tax rate of return, and after destruction, and this is what brought the average rate of return after tax, after destruction, below the growth rate during a long time period. But without the destruction, without the taxation, this  would not have happened. So let me say that the balance between returns on capital and growth depends on many different factors that are very difficult to predict: technology and the development of capital-intensive techniques. So right now, the most capital-intensive sectors in the economy are the real estate sector, housing, the energy sector, but it could be in the future that we have a lot more robots in a number of sectors and that this would be a bigger share of the total capital stock that it is today. Well, we are very far from this, and from now, what's going on in the real estate sector, the energy sector, is much more important for the total capital stock and capital share.The other important issue is that there are scale effects in portfolio management, together with financial complexity, financial deregulation, that make it easier to get higher rates of return for a large portfolio, and this seems to be particularly strong for billionaires, large capital endowments. Just to give you one example, this comes from the Forbes billionaire rankings over the 1987-2013 period, and you can see the very top wealth holders have been going up at six, seven percent per year in real terms above inflation, whereas average income in the world, average wealth in the world, have increased at only two percent per year. And you find the same for large university endowments — the bigger the initial endowments, the bigger the rate of return.Now, what could be done? The first thing is that I think we need more financial transparency. We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information. We need a global registry of financial assets, more coordination on wealth taxation, and even wealth tax with a small tax rate will be a way to produce information so that then we can adapt our policies to whatever we observe. And to some extent, the fight against tax havens and automatic transmission of information is pushing us in this direction. Now, there are other ways to redistribute wealth, which it can be tempting to use. Inflation: it's much easier to print money than to write a tax code, so that's very tempting, but sometimes you don't know what you do with the money. This is a problem. Expropriation is very tempting. Just when you feel some people get too wealthy, you just expropriate them. But this is not a very efficient way to organize a regulation of wealth dynamics. So war is an even less efficient way, so I tend to prefer progressive taxation, but of course, history — (Laughter) — history will invent its own best ways, and it will probably involve a combination of all of these.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thomas Piketty. Thank you.Thomas, I want to ask you two or three questions, because it's impressive how you're in command of your data, of course, but basically what you suggest is growing wealth concentration is kind of a natural tendency of capitalism, and if we leave it to its own devices, it may threaten the system itself, so you're suggesting that we need to act to implement policies that redistribute wealth, including the ones we just saw: progressive taxation, etc. In the current political context, how realistic are those? How likely do you think that it is that they will be implemented?Thomas Piketty: Well, you know, I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen. I think one century ago, many people would have said that progressive income taxation would never happen and then it happened. And even five years ago, many people would have said that bank secrecy will be with us forever in Switzerland, that Switzerland was too powerful for the rest of the world, and then suddenly it took a few U.S. sanctions against Swiss banks for a big change to happen, and now we are moving toward more financial transparency. So I think it's not that difficult to better coordinate politically. We are going to have a treaty with half of the world GDP around the table with the U.S. and the European Union, so if half of the world GDP is not enough to make progress on financial transparency and minimal tax for multinational corporate profits, what does it take? So I think these are not technical difficulties. I think we can make progress if we have a more pragmatic approach to these questions and we have the proper sanctions on those who benefit from financial opacity.BG: One of the arguments against your point of view is that economic inequality is not only a feature of capitalism but is actually one of its engines. So we take measures to lower inequality, and at the same time we lower growth, potentially. What do you answer to that?TP: Yeah, I think inequality is not a problem per se. I think inequality up to a point can actually be useful for innovation and growth. The problem is, it's a question of degree. When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility. And for instance, the kind of wealth concentrations that we had in the 19th century and pretty much until World War I in every European country was, I think, not useful for growth. This was destroyed by a combination of tragic events and policy changes, and this did not prevent growth from happening. And also, extreme inequality can be bad for our democratic institutions if it creates very unequal access to political voice, and the influence of private money in U.S. politics, I think, is a matter of concern right now. So we don't want to return to that kind of extreme, pre-World War I inequality. Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.BG: I said at the beginning that your book has been criticized. Some of your data has been criticized. Some of your choice of data sets has been criticized. You have been accused of cherry-picking data to make your case. What do you answer to that?TP: Well, I answer that I am very happy that this book is stimulating debate. This is part of what it is intended for. Look, the reason why I put all the data online with all of the detailed computation is so that we can have  an open and transparent debate about this. So I have responded point by point to every concern. Let me say that if I was to rewrite the book today, I would actually conclude that the rise in wealth inequality, particularly in the United States, has been actually higher than what I report in my book. There is a recent study by Saez and Zucman showing, with new data which I didn't have at the time of the book, that wealth concentration in the U.S. has risen even more than what I report. And there will be other data in the future. Some of it will go in different directions. Look, we put online almost every week new, updated series on the World Top Income Database and we will keep doing so in the future, in particular in emerging countries, and I welcome all of those who want to contribute to this data collection process. In fact, I certainly agree that there is not enough transparency about wealth dynamics, and a good way to have better data would be to have a wealth tax with a small tax rate to begin with so that we can all agree about this important evolution and adapt our policies to whatever we observe. So taxation is a source of knowledge, and that's what we need the most right now.BG: Thomas Piketty, merci beaucoup.Thank you. TP: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capital_in_the_twenty_first_century
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"This is my niece, Stella. She's just turned one and started to walk. And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving- too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way. It is absolutely gorgeous. And one of her favorite  things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror. She absolutely loves her reflection. She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses. It is beautiful. Apparently, all of her friends do this and my mom tells me that I used to do this, and it got me thinking: When did I stop doing this? When is it suddenly not okay to love  the way that we look? Because apparently we don't.Ten thousand people every month google, ""Am I ugly?"" This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she  lives in Denver. And like any teenager, she just wants to  be liked and to fit in. It's Sunday night. She's getting ready for the week ahead at school. And she's slightly dreading it, and  she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her  that she's ugly. Because of the difference between what her mom  tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe. So, she takes a video of herself.  She posts it to YouTube and she asks people to please leave  a comment: ""Am I pretty or am I ugly?"" Well, so far, Faye has received  over 13,000 comments. Some of them are so nasty, they don't  bear thinking about. This is an average, healthy-looking  teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life. Thousands of people are posting videos like this, mostly teenage girls, reaching out in this way. But what's leading them to do this?Well, today's teenagers are rarely alone. They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting,  sharing, posting — it never ends. Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young. And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night. There's simply no privacy. And the social pressures that go along  with that are relentless. This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive. There's no separation between online and offline life. What's real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between. And it's also really hard to tell the difference  between what's authentic and what's digitally manipulated. What's a highlight in someone's life versus what's normal in the context of everyday.And where are they looking to for inspiration? Well, you can see the kinds of images that are covering the newsfeeds of girls today. Size zero models still dominate our catwalks. Airbrushing is now routine. And trends like #thinspiration, #thighgap, #bikinibridge and #proana. For those who don't know, #proana means pro-anorexia. These trends are teamed with the  stereotyping and flagrant objectification of women in today's popular culture. It is not hard to see what girls are benchmarking themselves against. But boys are not immune to this either. Aspiring to the chiseled jaw lines and ripped six packs of superhero-like sports stars and playboy music artists.But, what's the problem with all of this? Well, surely we want our kids to grow up as healthy,  well balanced individuals. But in an image-obsessed culture, we are training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on  their appearance at the expense of all of the other aspects of their identities. So, things like their relationships, the development of their physical abilities, and their studies and so on begin to suffer. Six out of 10 girls are now choosing not to do  something because they don't think they look good enough. These are not trivial activities. These are fundamental activities to their development as humans and as contributors to society and to  the workforce. Thirty-one percent, nearly one in  three teenagers, are withdrawing from classroom debate. They're failing to engage in classroom debate because they don't want to draw attention to the  way that they look. One in five are not showing up to class at all on days when they don't feel good about it. And when it comes to exams, if you don't think you look good enough, specifically if you don't think you are thin enough, you will score a lower grade point average than your peers who are not concerned with this. And this is consistent across Finland, the U.S. and China, and is true regardless of how much you actually weigh. So to be super clear, we're talking about the way you think you look, not how you actually look. Low body confidence is undermining  academic achievement.But it's also damaging health. Teenagers with low body confidence do less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, partake in more unhealthy weight control practices that can lead to eating disorders. They have lower self-esteem. They're more easily influenced by people around them and they're at greater risk of depression. And we think it's for all of these reasons that they take more risks with things like alcohol and drug use; crash dieting; cosmetic surgery;  unprotected, earlier sex; and self-harm. The pursuit of the perfect body is putting pressure on our healthcare systems and costing our governments billions of  dollars every year.And we don't grow out of it. Women who think they're overweight — again, regardless of whether they are or are not — have higher rates of absenteeism. Seventeen percent of women would not show up to a job interview on a day when they weren't feeling confident about the way that they look.Have a think about what this is doing to our economy. If we could overcome this, what that opportunity looks like. Unlocking this potential is in the interest of every single one of us.But how do we do that? Well, talking, on its own, only gets you so far. It's not enough by itself. If you actually want to make a difference, you have to do something. And we've learned there are three key ways: The first is we have to educate for body confidence. We have to help our teenagers develop strategies to overcome image-related pressures and build their self-esteem. Now, the good news is that there are many programs out there available to do this. The bad news is that most of them don't work. I was shocked to learn that many well-meaning programs are inadvertently actually making the situation worse. So we need to make damn sure that the programs that our kids are receiving are not only having a positive impact, but having a lasting impact as well.And the research shows  that the best programs address six key areas: The first is the influence of family,  friends and relationships. The second is media and celebrity culture, then how to handle teasing and bullying, the way we compete and compare with one another based on looks, talking about appearance — some people call this ""body talk"" or ""fat talk"" — and finally, the foundations of respecting and looking after yourself. These six things are crucial starting points for anyone serious about delivering body-confidence education that works. An education is critical, but tackling this problem is going to require each and everyone of us to step up and be better role models for the women and girls in our own lives. Challenging the status quo of how women are seen and talked about in our own circles.It is not okay that we judge the contribution of our politicians by their haircuts or the size of their breasts, or to infer that the determination or the success of an Olympian is down  to her not being a looker. We need to start judging people by what they do, not what they look like.We can all start by taking responsibility  for the types of pictures and comments that we post on our own social networks. We can compliment people based on  their effort and their actions and not on their appearance.And let me ask you, when was the last time that you kissed a mirror? Ultimately, we need to work together as communities, as governments and as businesses to really change this culture of ours so that our kids grow up valuing their  whole selves, valuing individuality, diversity, inclusion. We need to put the people that are making a real difference on our pedestals, making a difference in the real world. Giving them the airtime, because only then will we create a different world. A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life.Think about what this might mean  for someone in your life. Who have you got in mind? Is it your wife? Your sister? Your daughter? Your niece? Your friend? It could just be the woman  a couple of seats away from you today. What would it mean for her if she were freed from that voice of her inner critic, nagging her to have longer legs, thinner thighs, smaller stomach, shorter feet? What could it mean for her if we overcame this and unlocked her potential in that way?Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back. But let's show our kids the truth. Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel. Let's build self-esteem into our school curriculums. Let's each and every one of us change the way we talk and compare ourselves to other people. And let's work together as communities, from grassroots to governments, so that the happy little one-year-olds of today become the confident changemakers of tomorrow. Let's do this. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/meaghan_ramsey_why_thinking_you_re_ugly_is_bad_for_you
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"I have the feeling that we can all agree that we're moving towards a new model of the state and society. But, we're absolutely clueless as to what this is or what it should be. It seems like we need to have a conversation about democracyin our day and age. Let's think about it this way: We are 21st-century citizens, doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century. Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of this system. First of all, it's designed for an information technology that's over 500 years old. And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many. And the many get to vote once every  couple of years. In the second place, the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high. You either have to have a fair  bit of money and influence, or you have to devote your entire life to politics. You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe, one day, you'll get  to sit at a table where a decision is being made. And last but not least, the language of the system — it's incredibly cryptic. It's done for lawyers, by lawyers,and no one else can understand. So, it's a system where we can choose our authorities, but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions. So, in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation, our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can, more than ever before, express our desires and our concerns. Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being  simply passive recipientsof a monologue. So, it's really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results: silence or noise. Silence, in terms of citizens not engaging, simply not wanting to participate. There's this commonplace  [idea] that I truly, truly dislike, and it's this idea that we citizens are naturally apathetic. That we shun commitment. But, can you really blame us for not jumping at the opportunity of going to the middle of the city in the middle of a working day to attend, physically, a public hearing that has no impact whatsoever? Conflict is bound to happen between a system that no longer represents, nor has any dialogue capacity, and citizens that are increasingly used to representing themselves. And, then we find noise: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico Italy, France, Spain, the United States, they're all democracies. Their citizens have access to the ballot boxes. But they still feel the need,they need to take to the streets in order  to be heard. To me, it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies, ""No taxation without representation,"" can now be updated to ""No representation without a conversation."" We want our seat at the table.And rightly so. But in order to be part of this conversation, we need to know what we want to do next, because political action is being able to move from agitation to construction. My generation has been incredibly good at using new networks and technologies to organize protests, protests that were able to successfully impose agendas, roll back extremely pernicious legislation, and even overthrow authoritarian governments. And we should be immensely proud of this. But, we also must admit that we haven't been good at using those same networks and technologies to successfully articulate an alternative to what we're seeing and find the consensus and build  the alliances that are neededto make it happen. And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers, like the military or highly motivated and already organized groupsthat generally lie on the extremes. But our democracy is neither just a matter of voting once every couple of years. But it's not either the ability to bring millions onto the streets. So the question I'd like to raise here, and I do believe it's the most important  question we need to answer, is this one: If Internet is the new printing press, then what is democracy for the Internet era? What institutions do we want to buildfor the 21st-century society? I don't have the answer, just in case. I don't think anyone does. But I truly believe we can't afford to ignore this question anymore. So, I'd like to share our experience and what we've learned so far and hopefully contribute two centsto this conversation. Two years ago, with a group of friends from Argentina, we started thinking, ""how can  we get our representatives, our elected representatives, to represent us?"" Marshall McLuhan once said that politics is solving today's problems with yesterday's tools. So the question that motivated us was, can we try and solve some of today's problems with the tools that we use every single day of our lives? Our first approach was to design and develop a piece of software called DemocracyOS. DemocracyOS is an open-source web application that is designed to become a bridge between citizens and their elected representativesto make it easier for us to participate  from our everyday lives. So first of all, you can get informed so every new project that gets introduced in Congress gets immediately translated and explained in plain language on this platform. But we all know that social change is not going to come from just knowing more information, but from doing something with it. So better access to information should lead to a conversation about what we're going to do next, and DemocracyOS allows for that. Because we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences, one on top of each other, but that our healthy and robust public debateshould be, once again, one of its fundamental values. So DemocracyOS is about persuading  and being persuaded. It's about reaching a consensus as much as finding a proper way of channeling our disagreement. And finally, you can vote how you would like your elected  representative to vote. And if you do not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue, you can always delegate your vote to someone else, allowingfor a dynamic and emerging social leadership. It suddenly became very easy for us to simply compare these results with how our representatives were voting in Congress. But, it also became very evident that technology was not going to do the trick. What we needed to do to was to find actors that were able to grab this distributed knowledge in society and use it to make better and more fair decisions. So we reached out to traditional political parties and we offered them DemocracyOS. We said, ""Look, here you have a platform that you can use to build a two-way conversation with your constituencies."" And yes, we failed. We failed big time. We were sent to play  outside like little kids. Amongst other things, we were called naive. And I must be honest: I think, in hindsight, we were. Because the challenges that we face, they're not technological, they're cultural. Political parties were never willing to change the way they make their decisions. So it suddenly became a bit obvious that if we wanted to move forward with this idea,we needed to do it ourselves. And so we took quite a leap of faith, and in August last year, we founded our own political party, El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of  Buenos Aires. And taking an even bigger leap of faith, we ran for elections in October last year with this idea: if we want a seat in Congress, our candidate, our representatives were always going to vote according to what citizens decided on DemocracyOS. Every single project that got introduced in Congress, we were going vote according to what citizens decided on an online platform. It was our way of hacking the political system. We understood that if we wanted to become part of the conversation, to have a seat at the table, we needed to become valid stakeholders,and the only way of doing it is to play by the  system rules. But we were hacking it in the sense that we were radically changing the way a political party makes its decisions. For the first time, we were making our decisions together with those who we wereaffecting directly by those decisions. It was a very, very bold move for a two-month-old party in the city of Buenos Aires. But it got attention. We got 22,000 votes, that's 1.2 percent of the votes, and we came in second for the local options. So, even if that wasn't enough to win a seat in Congress, it was enough for us to become part of the conversation, to the extent that next month, Congress, as an institution, is launching for the first time in Argentina's history, a DemocracyOS to discuss, with the citizens, three pieces of legislation: two on urban transportation andone on the use of public space. Of course, our elected representatives are not saying, ""Yes, we're going to vote according to what citizens decide,"" but they're willing to try. They're willing to open up a new space for citizen engagement and hopefullythey'll be willing to listen as well. Our political system can be transformed, and not by subverting it, by destroying it, but by rewiring it with the tools thatInternet affords us now. But a real challenge is to find, to design to create, to empower those connectors that are able to innovate, to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democraciesto the 21st century. I'm not saying it's easy. But in our experience, we actually stand a chance of making it work. And in my heart, it's most definitely worth trying. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era
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"I live in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in Sindhekela, a village in Orissa, in India. My father was a government worker. My mother could not read or write, but she would say to me, ""A king is  worshipped only in his own kingdom. A poet is respected everywhere."" So I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. But I almost didn't go to college until an aunt offered financial help.I went to study in Sambalpur, the largest town in the region, where, already in college, I saw a television for the first time. I had dreams of going to the United States for higher studies. When the opportunity came, I crossed two oceans, with borrowed money for airfare and only a $20 bill in my pocket. In the U.S., I worked in a research center, part-time, while taking graduate classes in economics. And with the little I earned, I would finance myself and then I would send money home to my brother and my father.My story is not unique. There are millions of people who migrate each year. With the help of the family, they cross oceans, they cross deserts, they cross  rivers, they cross mountains. They risk their lives to realize a dream, and that dream is as simple as having a decent job somewhere so they can send money home and help the family, which has helped them before.There are 232 million international  migrants in the world. These are people who live in a country other than their country of birth. If there was a country made up of only international migrants, that would be larger, in population, than Brazil. That would be larger, in its size of the economy, than France. Some 180 million of them, from poor countries, send money home regularly.Those sums of money are called remittances. Here is a fact that might surprise you: 413 billion dollars, 413 billion dollars was the amount of remittances sent last year by migrants to developing countries. Migrants from developing countries, money sent to developing countries — 413 billion dollars. That's a remarkable number because that is three times the size of the total of development aid money. And yet, you and I, my colleagues in Washington, we endlessly debate and discuss about development aid, while we ignore remittances as small change.True, people send 200 dollars per month, on average. But, repeated month after month, by millions of people, these sums of money add up to rivers  of foreign currency. So India, last year, received 72  billion dollars, larger than its IT exports. In Egypt remittances are three times the size of revenues from the Suez Canal. In Tajikistan, remittances are 42 percent of GDP. And in poorer countries, smaller  countries, fragile countries, conflict-afflicted countries, remittances are a lifeline, as in Somalia or in Haiti.No wonder these flows have huge impacts on economies and on poor people. Remittances, unlike private investment money, they don't flow back at the first sign of trouble in the country. They actually act like an insurance. When the family is in trouble, facing hardship, facing hard times, remittances increase, they act like an insurance. Migrants send more money then. Unlike development aid money, that must go through official agencies, through governments, remittances directly reach the poor, reach the family, and often with business advice.So in Nepal, the share of poor people was 42 percent in 1995, the share of poor people in the population. By 2005, a decade later, at a time of political crisis, economic crisis, the share of poor people went down to 31 percent. That decline in poverty, most of it, about half of it, is believed to be because of remittances from India, another poor country. In El Salvador, the school dropout rate among children is lower in families that receive remittances. In Mexico and Sri Lanka, the birth weight of children is higher among families that receive remittances.Remittances are dollars wrapped with care. Migrants send money home for food, for buying necessities, for building houses, for funding education, for funding healthcare for the elderly, for business investments for friends and family. Migrants send even more money home for special occasions like a surgery or a wedding. And migrants also send money, perhaps far too many times, for unexpected funerals that they cannot attend.Much as these flows do all that good, there are barriers to these flows of remittances, these 400 billion dollars of remittances. Foremost among them is the exorbitant cost of sending money home. Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor. They will say, ""Up to 500 dollars if you want to send, we will charge you 30 dollars fixed."" If you are poor and if you have  only 200 dollars to send, you have to pay that $30 fee. The global average cost of sending money is eight percent. That means you send 100 dollars, the family on the other side receives only 92 dollars. To send money to Africa, the cost is even higher: 12 percent. To send money within Africa, the cost is even higher: over 20 percent. For example, sending money from Benin  to Nigeria. And then there is the case of Venezuela, where, because of exchange controls, you send 100 dollars and you are lucky if the family on the other side receives even 10 dollars. Of course, nobody sends money to Venezuela through the official channel. It all goes in suitcases. Whereever costs are high, money goes underground.And what is worse, many developing countries actually have a blanket ban on sending money out of the country. Many rich nations also have a blanket ban on sending money  to specific countries. So, is it that there are no options, no better options, cheaper options, to send money?There are. M-Pesa in Kenya enables people to send money and receive money at a fixed cost of only 60 cents per transaction. U.S. Fed started a program with Mexico to enable money service businesses to send money to Mexico for a fixed cost of only 67 cents per transaction. And yet, these faster, cheaper, better options can't be applied internationally because of the fear of money laundering, even though there is little data to support any connection, any significant connection between money laundering and these small remittance transactions. Many international banks now are wary of hosting bank accounts of money service businesses, especially those serving Somalia.Somalia, a country where the per capita income is only 250 dollars per year. Monthly remittances, on average, to Somalia is larger than that amount. Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations. Then there is the case of poor people from villages, like me. In the villages, the only place where you can get money is through the post office. Most of the governments in the world have allowed their post offices to have exclusive partnerships with money transfer companies. So, if I have to send money to my father in the village, I must send money through that particular money transfer company, even if the cost is high. I cannot go to a cheaper option. This has to go.So, what can international organizations and social entrepreneurs do to reduce the cost of sending money home? First, relax regulations on small remittances under 1,000 dollars. Governments should recognize that small remittances are not money laundering. Second, governments should abolish exclusive partnerships between their post office and the money  transfer company. For that matter, between the post office and any national banking system that has a large network that serves the poor. In fact, they should promote competition, open up the partnership so that we will bring down costs like we did, like they did, in the telecommunications industry. You have seen what has happened there. Third, large nonprofit philanthropic organizations should create a remittance platform on a nonprofit basis. They should create a nonprofit remittance platform to serve the money transfer companies so that they can send money at a low cost, while complying with all the complex regulations all over the world.The development community should set a goal of reducing remittance costs to one percent from the current eight percent. If we reduce costs to one percent, that would release a saving of  30 billion dollars per year. Thirty billion dollars, that's  larger than the entire bilateral aid budget going to Africa per year. That is larger than, or almost similar to, the total aid budget of the United States government, the largest donor on the planet. Actually, the savings would be larger than that 30 billion because remittance channels are also used for aid, trade and investment purposes.Another major impediment to the flow of remittances reaching the family is the large and exorbitant and illegal cost of recruitment, fees that migrants pay, migrant workers pay to laborers who found them the job.I was in Dubai a few years ago. I visited a camp for workers. It was 8 in the evening, dark, hot, humid. Workers were coming back from their grueling day of work, and I struck a conversation with a Bangladeshi construction worker. He was preoccupied that he is sending money home, he has been sending money home for a few months now, and the money is mostly going to the recruitment agent, to the labor agent who found him that job. And in my mind, I could picture the wife waiting for the monthly remittance. The remittance arrives. She takes the money and hands it over to the recruitment agent, while the children are looking on. This has to stop.It is not only construction  workers from Bangladesh, it is all the workers. There are millions of migrant workers who suffer from this problem. A construction worker from Bangladesh, on an average, pays about 4,000  dollars in recruitment fees for a job that gives him only 2,000  dollars per year in income. That means that for the two years or three years of his life, he is basically sending money to pay for the recruitment fees. The family doesn't get to see any of it.It is not only Dubai, it is the dark underbelly of every major city in the world. It is not only Bangladeshi construction workers, it is workers from all over the world. It is not only men. Women are especially vulnerable to recruitment malpractices.One of the most exciting and newest thing happening in the area of remittances is how to mobilize, through innovation, diaspora saving and diaspora giving. Migrants send money home, but they also save a large amount of money where they live. Annually, migrant savings are estimated to be 500 billion dollars. Most of that money is parked in bank deposits that give you zero percent interest rate. If a country were to come  and offer a three percent or four percent interest rate, and then say that the money would be used for building schools, roads, airports, train systems in the country of origin, a lot of migrants would be interested in parting with their money because it's not only financial gains that give them an opportunity to stay engaged with their country's development. Remittance channels can be used to sell these bonds to migrants because when they come on a monthly basis to send remittances, that's when you can actually sell it to them. You can also do the same for mobilizing diaspora giving. I would love to invest in a bullet train system in India and I would love to contribute to efforts to fight malaria in my village. Remittances are a great way of sharing prosperity between places in a targeted way that benefits those who need them most.Remittances empower people. We must do all we can to make remittances and recruitment safer and cheaper. And it can be done.As for myself, I have been away from India for two decades now. My wife is a Venezuelan. My children are Americans. Increasingly, I feel like a global citizen. And yet, I am growing nostalgic about my country of birth. I want to be in India and in the U.S. at the same time. My parents are not there anymore. My brothers and sisters have moved on. There is no real urgency for me to send money home. And yet, from time to time, I send money home to friends, to relatives, to the village, to be there, to stay engaged — that's part of my identity. And, I'm still striving to be a poet for the hardworking migrants and their struggle to break free of the cycle of poverty. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dilip_ratha_the_hidden_force_in_global_economics_sending_money_home
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"There is an entire genre of YouTube videos devoted to an experience which I am certain that everyone in this room has had. It entails an individual who, thinking they're alone, engages in some expressive behavior — wild singing, gyrating dancing, some mild sexual activity — only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone, that there is a person watching and lurking, the discovery of which causes them to immediately cease what they were doing in horror. The sense of shame and humiliation in their face is palpable. It's the sense of, ""This is something I'm willing to do only if no one else is watching.""This is the crux of the work on which I have been singularly focused for the last 16 months, the question of why privacy matters, a question that has arisen in the context of a global debate, enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden that the United States and its partners, unbeknownst to the entire world, has converted the Internet, once heralded as an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization, into an unprecedented zone of mass, indiscriminate surveillance.There is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate, even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance, which says that there is no real harm that comes from this large-scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy. This worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people. Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, have reasons to care about their privacy. But by contrast, good people are people who go to work, come home, raise their children, watch television. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes or to plan their kids' Little League games, and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them.The people who are actually saying that are engaged in a very extreme act of self-deprecation. What they're really saying is, ""I have agreed to make myself such a harmless and unthreatening and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear having the government know what it is that I'm doing."" This mindset has found what I think is its purest expression in a 2009 interview with the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, when asked about all the different ways his company is causing invasions of privacy for hundreds of millions of people around the world, said this: He said, ""If you're doing something that you don't want other people to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.""Now, there's all kinds of things to say about that mentality, the first of which is that the people who say that, who say that privacy isn't really important, they don't actually believe it, and the way you know that they don't actually believe it is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter, with their actions, they take all kinds of steps to safeguard their privacy. They put passwords on their email and their social media accounts, they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors, all steps designed to prevent other people from entering what they consider their private realm and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know. The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, ordered his employees at Google to cease speaking with the online Internet magazine CNET after CNET published an article full of personal, private information about Eric Schmidt, which it obtained exclusively through Google searches and using other Google products. (Laughter) This same division can be seen with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who in an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy is no longer a ""social norm."" Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife purchased not only their own house but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto for a total of 30 million dollars in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from monitoring what they do in their personal lives.Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, ""I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide."" I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, ""Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.""Not a single person has taken me up on that offer. I check and — (Applause) I check that email account religiously all the time. It's a very desolate place. And there's a reason for that, which is that we as human beings, even those of us who in words disclaim the importance of our own privacy, instinctively understand the profound importance of it. It is true that as human beings, we're social animals, which means we have a need for other people to know what we're doing and saying and thinking, which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online. But equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. There's a reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us — not just terrorists and criminals, all of us — have things to hide. There are all sorts of things that we do and think that we're willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn. We make judgments every single day about the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we're willing to have other people know, and the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we don't want anyone else to know about. People can very easily in words claim that they don't value their privacy, but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief.Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved universally and instinctively. It isn't just a reflexive movement like breathing air or drinking water. The reason is that when we're in a state where we can be monitored, where we can be watched, our behavior changes dramatically. The range of behavioral options that we consider when we think we're being watched severely reduce. This is just a fact of human nature that has been recognized in social science and in literature and in religion and in virtually every field of discipline. There are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. Human shame is a very powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and that's the reason why people, when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy.This realization was exploited most powerfully for pragmatic ends by the 18th- century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who set out to resolve an important problem ushered in by the industrial age, where, for the first time, institutions had become so large and centralized that they were no longer able to monitor and therefore control each one of their individual members, and the solution that he devised was an architectural design originally intended to be implemented in prisons that he called the panopticon, the primary attribute of which was the construction of an enormous tower in the center of the institution where whoever controlled the institution could at any moment watch any of the inmates, although they couldn't watch all of them at all times. And crucial to this design was that the inmates could not actually see into the panopticon, into the tower, and so they never knew if they were being watched or even when. And what made him so excited about this discovery was that that would mean that the prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched at any given moment, which would be the ultimate enforcer for obedience and compliance. The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault realized that that model could be used not just for prisons but for every institution that seeks to control human behavior: schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces. And what he said was that this mindset, this framework discovered by Bentham, was the key means of societal control for modern, Western societies, which no longer need the overt weapons of tyranny — punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents, or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party — because mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is a much more subtle though much more effective means of fostering compliance with social norms or with social orthodoxy, much more effective than brute force could ever be.The most iconic work of literature about surveillance and privacy is the George Orwell novel ""1984,"" which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a cliche. In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance, people instantaneously dismiss it as inapplicable, and what they say is, ""Oh, well in '1984,' there were monitors in people's homes, they were being watched at every given moment, and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face."" That is an actual fundamental misapprehension of the warnings that Orwell issued in ""1984."" The warning that he was issuing was about a surveillance state not that monitored everybody at all times, but where people were aware that they could be monitored at any given moment. Here is how Orwell's narrator, Winston Smith, described the surveillance system that they faced: ""There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment."" He went on to say, ""At any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and except in darkness every movement scrutinized.""The Abrahamic religions similarly posit that there's an invisible, all-knowing authority who, because of its omniscience, always watches whatever you're doing, which means you never have a private moment, the ultimate enforcer for obedience to its dictates.What all of these seemingly disparate works recognize, the conclusion that they all reach, is that a society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every tyrant, the most overt to the most subtle, craves that system. Conversely, even more importantly, it is a realm of privacy, the ability to go somewhere where we can think and reason and interact and speak without the judgmental eyes of others being cast upon us, in which creativity and exploration and dissent exclusively reside, and that is the reason why, when we allow a society to exist in which we're subject to constant monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled.The last point I want to observe about this mindset, the idea that only people who  are doing something wrong have things to hide and therefore reasons to care about privacy, is that it entrenches two very destructive messages, two destructive lessons, the first of which is that the only people who care about privacy, the only people who will seek out privacy, are by definition bad people. This is a conclusion that we should have all kinds of reasons for avoiding, the most important of which is that when you say, ""somebody who is doing bad things,"" you probably mean things like plotting a terrorist attack or engaging in violent criminality, a much narrower conception of what people who wield power mean when they say, ""doing bad things."" For them, ""doing bad things"" typically means doing something that poses meaningful challenges to the exercise of our own power.The other really destructive and, I think, even more insidious lesson that comes from accepting this mindset is there's an implicit bargain that people who accept this mindset have accepted, and that bargain is this: If you're willing to render yourself sufficiently harmless, sufficiently unthreatening to those who wield political power, then and only then can you be free of the dangers of surveillance. It's only those who are dissidents, who challenge power, who have something to worry about. There are all kinds of reasons why we should want to avoid that lesson as well. You may be a person who, right now, doesn't want to engage in that behavior, but at some point in the future you might. Even if you're somebody who decides that you never want to, the fact that there are other people who are willing to and able to resist and be adversarial to those in power — dissidents and journalists and activists and a whole range of others — is something that brings us all collective good that we should want to preserve. Equally critical is that the measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy. But the most important reason is that a system of mass surveillance suppresses our own freedom in all sorts of ways. It renders off-limits all kinds of behavioral choices without our even knowing that it's happened. The renowned socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, ""He who does not move does not notice his chains."" We can try and render the chains of mass surveillance invisible or undetectable, but the constraints that it imposes on us do not become any less potent.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Glenn, thank you. The case is rather convincing, I have to say, but I want to bring you back to the last 16 months and to Edward Snowden for a few questions, if you don't mind. The first one is personal to you. We have all read about the arrest of your partner, David Miranda in London, and other difficulties, but I assume that in terms of personal engagement and risk, that the pressure on you is not that easy to take on the biggest sovereign  organizations in the world. Tell us a little bit about that.Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think one of the things that happens is that people's courage in this regard gets contagious, and so although I and the other journalists with whom I was working were certainly aware of the risk — the United States continues to be the most powerful country in the world and doesn't appreciate it when you disclose thousands of their secrets on the Internet at will — seeing somebody who is a 29-year-old ordinary person who grew up in a very ordinary environment exercise the degree of principled courage that Edward Snowden risked, knowing that he was going to go to prison for the rest of his life or that his life would unravel, inspired me and inspired other journalists and inspired, I think, people around the world, including future whistleblowers, to realize that they can engage in that kind of behavior as well.BG: I'm curious about your relationship with Ed Snowden, because you have spoken with him a lot, and you certainly continue doing so, but in your book, you never call him Edward, nor Ed, you say ""Snowden."" How come?GG: You know, I'm sure that's something for a team of psychologists to examine. (Laughter) I don't really know. The reason I think that, one of the important objectives that he actually had, one of his, I think, most important tactics, was that he knew that one of the ways to distract attention from the substance of the revelations would be to try and personalize the focus on him, and for that reason, he stayed out of the media. He tried not to ever have his personal life subject to examination, and so I think calling him Snowden is a way of just identifying him as this important historical actor rather than trying to personalize him in a way that might distract attention from the substance.Moderator: So his revelations, your analysis, the work of other journalists, have really developed the debate, and many governments, for example, have reacted, including in Brazil, with projects and programs to reshape a little bit the design of the Internet, etc. There are a lot of things going on in that sense. But I'm wondering, for you personally, what is the endgame? At what point will you think, well, actually, we've succeeded  in moving the dial?GG: Well, I mean, the endgame for me as a journalist is very simple, which is to make sure that every single document that's newsworthy and that ought to be disclosed ends up being disclosed, and that secrets that should never have been kept in the first place end up uncovered. To me, that's the essence of journalism and that's what I'm committed to doing. As somebody who finds mass surveillance odious for all the reasons I just talked about and a lot more, I mean, I look at this as work that will never end until governments around the world are no longer able to subject entire populations to monitoring and surveillance unless they convince some court or some entity that the person they've targeted has actually done something wrong. To me, that's the way that privacy can be rejuvenated.BG: So Snowden is very, as we've seen at TED, is very articulate in presenting and portraying himself as a defender of democratic values and democratic principles. But then, many people really  find it difficult to believe that those are his only motivations. They find it difficult to believe that there was no money involved, that he didn't sell some of those secrets, even to China and to Russia, which are clearly not the best friends of the United States right now. And I'm sure many people in the room are wondering the same question. Do you consider it possible there is that part of Snowden we've not seen yet?GG: No, I consider that absurd and idiotic. (Laughter) If you wanted to, and I know you're just playing devil's advocate, but if you wanted to sell secrets to another country, which he could have done and become extremely rich doing so, the last thing you would  do is take those secrets and give them to journalists and ask journalists to publish them, because it makes those secrets worthless. People who want to enrich themselves do it secretly by selling  secrets to the government, but I think there's one important point worth making, which is, that accusation comes from people in the U.S. government, from people in the media who are loyalists to these various governments, and I think a lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people — ""Oh, he can't really be doing this for principled reasons, he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason"" — they're saying a lot more about themselves than they are the target of their accusations, because — (Applause) — those people, the ones who make that accusation, they themselves never act for any reason other than corrupt reasons, so they assume that everybody else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness as they are, and so that's the assumption. (Applause)BG: Glenn, thank you very much. GG: Thank you very much.BG: Glenn Greenwald. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
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"Sleep. It's something we spend about a third of our lives doing, but do any of us really understand what it's all about?Two thousand years ago, Galen, one of the most prominent medical researchers of the ancient world, proposed that while we're awake, our brain's motive force, its juice, would flow out to all the other parts of the body, animating them but leaving the brain all dried up, and he thought that when we sleep, all this moisture that filled the rest of the body would come rushing back, rehydrating the brain and refreshing the mind. Now, that sounds completely ridiculous to us now, but Galen was simply trying to explain something about sleep that we all deal with every day. See, we all know based on our own experience that when you sleep, it clears your mind, and when you don't sleep, it leaves your mind murky. But while we know a great deal more about sleep now than when Galen was around, we still haven't understood why it is that sleep, of all of our activities, has this incredible restorative function for the mind.So today I want to tell you about some recent research that may shed new light on this question. We've found that sleep may actually be a kind of elegant design solution to some of the brain's most basic needs, a unique way that the brain meets the high demands and the narrow margins that set it apart from all the other organs of the body.So almost all the biology that we observe can be thought of as a series of problems and their corresponding solutions, and the first problem that every organ must solve is a continuous supply of nutrients to fuel all those cells of the body. In the brain, that is especially critical; its intense electrical activity uses up a quarter of the body's entire energy supply, even though the brain accounts for only about two percent of the body's mass. So the circulatory system solves the nutrient delivery problem by sending blood vessels to supply nutrients and oxygen to every corner of our body.You can actually see it in this video here. Here, we're imaging blood vessels in the brain of a living mouse. The blood vessels form a complex network that fills the entire brain volume. They start at the surface of the brain, and then they dive down into the tissue itself, and as they spread out, they supply nutrients and oxygen to each and every cell in the brain.Now, just as every cell requires nutrients to fuel it, every cell also produces waste as a byproduct, and the clearance of that waste is the second basic problem that each organ has to solve. This diagram shows the body's lymphatic system, which has evolved to meet this need. It's a second parallel network of vessels that extends throughout the body. It takes up proteins and other waste from the spaces between the cells, it collects them, and then dumps them into the blood so they can be disposed of.But if you look really closely at this diagram, you'll see something that doesn't make a lot of sense. So if we were to zoom into this guy's head, one of the things that you would see there is that there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain. But that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? I mean, the brain is this intensely active organ that produces a correspondingly large amount of waste that must be efficiently cleared. And yet, it lacks lymphatic vessels, which means that the approach that the rest of the body takes to clearing away its waste won't work in the brain.So how, then, does the brain solve its waste clearance problem? Well, that seemingly mundane question is where our group first jumped into this story, and what we found as we dove down into the brain, down among the neurons and the blood vessels, was that the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, it was really unexpected. It was ingenious, but it was also beautiful. Let me tell you about what we found.So the brain has this large pool of clean, clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. We call it the CSF. The CSF fills the space that surrounds the brain, and wastes from inside the brain make their way out to the CSF, which gets dumped, along with  the waste, into the blood. So in that way, it sounds a lot like the lymphatic system, doesn't it? But what's interesting is that the fluid and the waste from inside the brain, they don't just percolate their way randomly out to these pools of CSF. Instead, there is a specialized network of plumbing that organizes and facilitates this process. You can see that in these videos. Here, we're again imaging into the brain of living mice. The frame on your left shows what's happening at the brain's surface, and the frame on your right shows what's happening down below the surface of the brain within the tissue itself. We've labeled the blood vessels in red, and the CSF that's surrounding the brain will be in green. Now, what was surprising to us was that the fluid on the outside of the brain, it didn't stay on the outside. Instead, the CSF was pumped back into and through the brain along the outsides of the blood vessels, and as it flushed down into the brain along the outsides of these vessels, it was actually helping to clear away, to clean the waste from the spaces between the brain's cells. If you think about it, using the outsides of these blood vessels like this is a really clever design solution, because the brain is enclosed in a rigid skull and it's packed full of cells, so there is no extra space inside it for a whole second set of vessels like the lymphatic system. Yet the blood vessels, they extend from the surface of the brain down to reach every single cell in the brain, which means that fluid that's traveling along the outsides of these vessels can gain easy access to the entire brain's volume, so it's actually this really clever way to repurpose one set of vessels, the blood vessels, to take over and replace the function of a second set of vessels, the lymphatic vessels, to make it so you don't need them. And what's amazing is that no other organ takes quite this approach to clearing away the waste from between its cells. This is a solution that is entirely unique to the brain.But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it's only happening in the sleeping brain. Here, the video on the left shows how much of the CSF is moving through the brain of a living mouse while it's awake. It's almost nothing. Yet in the same animal, if we wait just a little while until it's gone to sleep, what we see is that the CSF is rushing through the brain, and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out.So it seems that Galen may actually have been sort of on the right track when he wrote about fluid rushing through the brain when sleep came on. Our own research, now it's 2,000 years later, suggests that what's happening is that when the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn't have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that's accumulated throughout the day. So it's actually a little bit like how you or I, we put off our household chores during the work week when we don't have time to get to it, and then we play catch up on all the cleaning that we have to do when the weekend rolls around.Now, I've just talked a lot about waste clearance, but I haven't been very specific about the kinds of waste that the brain needs to be clearing during sleep in order to stay healthy. The waste product that these recent studies focused most on is amyloid-beta, which is a protein that's made in the brain all the time. My brain's making amyloid-beta right now, and so is yours. But in patients with Alzheimer's disease, amyloid-beta builds up and aggregates in the spaces between the brain's cells, instead of being cleared away  like it's supposed to be, and it's this buildup of amyloid-beta that's thought to be one of the key steps in the development of that terrible disease. So we measured how fast amyloid-beta is cleared from the brain when it's awake versus when it's asleep, and we found that indeed, the clearance of amyloid-beta is much more rapid from the sleeping brain.So if sleep, then, is part of the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, then this may dramatically change how we think about the relationship between sleep, amyloid-beta, and Alzheimer's disease. A series of recent clinical studies suggest that among patients who haven't yet developed Alzheimer's disease, worsening sleep quality and sleep duration are associated with a greater amount of amyloid-beta building up in the brain, and while it's important to point out that these studies don't prove that lack of sleep or poor sleep cause Alzheimer's disease, they do suggest that the failure of the brain to keep its house clean by clearing away waste like amyloid-beta may contribute to the development of conditions like Alzheimer's.So what this new research tells us, then, is that the one thing that all of you already knew about sleep, that even Galen understood about sleep, that it refreshes and clears the mind, may actually be a big part of what sleep is all about. See, you and I, we go to sleep every single night, but our brains, they never rest. While our body is still and our mind is off walking in dreams somewhere, the elegant machinery of the brain is quietly hard at work cleaning and maintaining this unimaginably complex machine. Like our housework, it's a dirty and a thankless job, but it's also important. In your house, if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month, your home will become completely unlivable very quickly. But in the brain, the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops, because when it comes to cleaning the brain, it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that's at stake, which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_iliff_one_more_reason_to_get_a_good_night_s_sleep
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"So imagine that a plane is about to crash with 250 children and babies, and if you knew how to stop that, would you?Now imagine that 60 planes full of babies under five crash every single day. That's the number of kids that never make it to their fifth birthday. 6.6 million children never make it to their fifth birthday.Most of these deaths are preventable, and that doesn't just make me sad, it makes me angry, and it makes me determined. Diarrhea and pneumonia are among the top two killers of children under five, and what we can do to prevent these diseases isn't some smart, new technological innovations. It's one of the world's oldest inventions: a bar of soap. Washing hands with soap, a habit we all take for granted, can reduce diarrhea by half, can reduce respiratory infections by one third. Handwashing with soap can have an impact on reducing flu, trachoma, SARS, and most recently in the case of cholera and Ebola outbreak, one of the key interventions is handwashing with soap. Handwashing with soap keeps kids in school. It stops babies from dying. Handwashing with soap is one of the most cost-effective ways of saving children's lives. It can save over 600,000 children every year. That's the equivalent of stopping 10 jumbo jets full of babies and children from crashing every single day. I think you'll agree with me that that's a pretty useful public health intervention.So now just take a minute. I think you need to get to know the person next to you. Why don't you just shake their hands. Please shake their hands. All right, get to know each other. They look really pretty. All right. So what if I told you that the person whose hands you just shook actually didn't wash their hands when they were coming out of the toilet? (Laughter) They don't look so pretty anymore, right? Pretty yucky, you would agree with me.Well, statistics are actually showing that four people out of five don't wash their hands when they come out of the toilet, globally. And the same way, we don't do it when we've got fancy toilets, running water, and soap available, it's the same thing in the countries where child mortality is really high.What is it? Is there no soap? Actually, soap is available. In 90 percent of households in India, 94 percent of households in Kenya, you will find soap. Even in countries where soap is the lowest, like Ethiopia, we are at 50 percent.So why is it? Why aren't people washing their hands? Why is it that Mayank, this young boy that I met in India, isn't washing his hands? Well, in Mayank's family, soap is used for bathing, soap is used for laundry, soap is used for washing dishes. His parents think sometimes it's a precious commodity, so they'll keep it in a cupboard. They'll keep it away from him so he doesn't waste it. On average, in Mayank's family, they will use soap for washing hands once a day at the very best, and sometimes even once a week for washing hands with soap. What's the result of that? Children pick up disease in the place that's supposed to love them and protect them the most, in their homes.Think about where you learned to wash your hands. Did you learn to wash your hands at home? Did you learn to wash your hands in school? I think behavioral scientists will tell you that it's very difficult to change the habits that you have had early in life.However, we all copy what everyone else does, and local cultural norms are something that shape how we change our behavior, and this is where the private sector comes in. Every second in Asia and Africa, 111 mothers will buy this bar to protect their family. Many women in India will tell you they learned all about hygiene, diseases, from this bar of soap from Lifebuoy brand. Iconic brands like this one have a responsibility to do good in the places where they sell their products. It's that belief, plus the scale of Unilever, that allows us to keep talking about handwashing with soap and hygiene to these mothers.Big businesses and brands can change and shift those social norms and make a difference for those habits that are so stubborn. Think about it: Marketeers spend all their time making us switch from one brand to the other. And actually, they know how to transform science and facts into compelling messages. Just for a minute, imagine when they put all their forces behind a message as powerful as handwashing with soap. The profit motive is transforming health outcomes in this world.But it's been happening for centuries: the Lifebuoy brand was launched in 1894 in Victorian England to actually combat cholera. Last week, I was in Ghana with the minister of health, because if you don't know, there's a cholera outbreak in Ghana at the moment. A hundred and eighteen years later, the solution is exactly the same: It's about ensuring that they have access to this bar of soap, and that they're using it, because that's the number one way to actually stop cholera from spreading. I think this drive for profit is extremely powerful, sometimes more powerful than the most committed charity or government.Government is doing what they can, especially in terms of the pandemics and epidemics such as cholera, or Ebola at the moment, but with competing priorities. The budget is not always there. And when you think about this, you think about what is required to make handwashing a daily habit, it requires sustained funding to refine this behavior. In short, those that fight for public health are actually dependent upon the soap companies to keep promoting handwashing with soap. We have friends like USAID, the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Plan, WaterAid, that all believe for a win-win-win partnership. Win for the public sector, because we help them reach their targets. Win for the private sector, because we build new generations of future handwashers. And most importantly, win for the most vulnerable. On October 15, we will celebrate Global Handwashing Day. Schools, communities, our friends in the public sector and our friends in the private sector — yes, on that day even our competitors, we all join hands to celebrate the world's most important public health intervention. What's required, and again where the private sector can make a huge difference, is coming up with this big, creative thinking that drives advocacy. If you take our Help a Child Reach 5 campaign, we've created great films that bring the message of handwashing with soap to the everyday person in a way that can relate to them. We've had over 30 million views. Most of these discussions are still happening online. I urge you to take five minutes and look at those films.I come from Mali, one of the world's poorest countries. I grew up in a family where every dinner conversation was around social justice. I trained in Europe's premier school of public health. I think I'm probably one of the only women in my country with this high degree in health, and the only one with a doctorate in handwashing with soap. (Laughter) (Applause)Nine years ago, I decided, with a successful public health career in the making, that I could make the biggest impact coming, selling and promoting the world's best invention in public health: soap. We run today the world's largest handwashing program by any public health standards. We've reached over 183 million people in 16 countries. My team and I have the ambition to reach one billion by 2020. Over the last four years, business has grown double digits, whilst child mortality has reduced in all the places where soap use has increased. It may be uncomfortable for some to hear — business growth and lives saved somehow equated in the same sentence — but it is that business growth that allows us to keep doing more. Without it, and without talking about it, we cannot achieve the change that we need.Last week, my team and I spent time visiting mothers that have all experienced the same thing: the death of a newborn. I'm a mom. I can't imagine anything more powerful and more painful. This one is from Myanmar. She had the most beautiful smile, the smile, I think, that life gives you when you've had a second chance. Her son, Myo, is her second one. She had a daughter who passed away at three weeks, and we know that the majority of children that actually die die in the first month of their life, and we know that if we give a bar of soap to every skilled birth attendant, and that if soap is used  before touching the babies, we can reduce and make a change in terms of those numbers. And that's what inspires me, inspires me to continue in this mission, to know that I can equip her with what's needed so that she can do the most beautiful job in the world: nurturing her newborn. And next time you think of a gift for a new mom and her family, don't look far: buy her soap. It's the most beautiful invention in public health.I hope you will join us and make handwashing part of your daily lives and our daily lives and help more children like Myo reach their fifth birthday.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/myriam_sidibe_the_simple_power_of_hand_washing
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"Almost a year ago, my aunt started suffering back pains. She went to see the doctor and they told her it was a normal injury for someone who had been playing tennis for almost 30 years. They recommended that she do some therapy, but after a while she wasn't feeling better, so the doctors decided to do further tests. They did an x-ray and discovered an injury in her lungs, and at the time they thought that the injury was a strain in the muscles and tendons between her ribs, but after a few weeks of treatment, again her health wasn't getting any better. So finally, they decided to do a biopsy, and two weeks later, the results of the biopsy came back. It was stage 3 lung cancer.Her lifestyle was almost free of risk. She never smoked a cigarette, she never drank alcohol, and she had been playing sports for almost half her life. Perhaps, that is why it took them almost six months to get her properly diagnosed.My story might be, unfortunately, familiar to most of you. One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it. Not only did that cancer diagnosis change the life of our family, but that process of going back and forth with new tests, different doctors describing symptoms, discarding diseases over and over, was stressful and frustrating, especially for my aunt. And that is the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history. We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any.Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate  response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before.The context, of course, is that we're living at a time where technology is disrupting our present at exponential rates, and the biological realm is no exception. It is said today that biotech is advancing at least six times faster than the growth rate of the processing power of computers. But progress in biotech is not only being accelerated, it is also being democratized. Just as personal computers or the Internet or smartphones leveled the playing field for entrepreneurship, politics or education, recent advances have leveled it up for biotech progress as well, and that is allowing multidisciplinary teams like ours to try to tackle and look at these problems with new approaches.We are a team of scientists and technologists from Chile, Panama, Mexico, Israel and Greece, and based on recent scientific discoveries, we believe that we have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at the very early stages through a blood sample. We do it by detecting a set of very small molecules that circulate freely in our blood called microRNAs.To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, I need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs. So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively  expressed at that particular moment. And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker.However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA. And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small.We believe that we have found a way to do so, and this is the first time that we've shown it in public. Let me do a demonstration. Imagine that next time you go to your doctor and do your next standard blood test, a lab technician extracts a total RNA, which is quite simple today, and puts it in a standard  96-well plate like this one. Each well of these plates has specific biochemistry that we assign, that is looking for a specific microRNA, acting like a trap that closes only when the microRNA is present in the sample, and when it does, it will shine with green color. To run the reaction, you put the plate inside a device like this one, and then you can put your smartphone on top of it. If we can have a camera here so you can see my screen. A smartphone is a connected computer and it's also a camera, good enough for our purpose. The smartphone is taking pictures, and when the reaction is over, it will send the pictures to our online database for processing and interpretation. This entire process lasts around 60 minutes, but when the process is over, wells that shine are matched  with the specific microRNAs and analyzed in terms of how much and how fast they shine. And then, when this entire process is over, this is what happens. This chart is showing the specific microRNAs present in this sample and how they reacted over time. Then, if we take this specific pattern of microRNA of this person's samples and compare it with existing scientific documentation that correlates microRNA patterns with a specific presence of a disease, this is how pancreatic cancer looks like. This inside is a real sample where we just detected pancreatic cancer.(Applause)Another important aspect of this approach is the gathering and mining of data in the cloud, so we can get results in real time and analyze them with our contextual information. If we want to better understand and decode diseases like cancer, we need to stop treating them as acute, isolated episodes, and consider and measure everything that affects our health on a permanent basis. This entire platform is a working prototype. It uses state-of-the-art molecular biology, a low-cost, 3D-printed device, and data science to try to tackle one of humanity's  toughest challenges. Since we believe early cancer detection should really be democratized, this entire solution costs at least 50 times less than current available methods, and we know that the community can help us accelerate this even more, so we're making the design of the device open-source.(Applause)Let me say very clearly that we are at the very early stages, but so far, we have been able to successfully identify the microRNA pattern of pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and hepatic cancer. And currently, we're doing a clinical trial in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center with 200 women for breast cancer.(Applause) This is the single non-invasive, accurate and affordable test that has the potential to dramatically change how cancer procedures and diagnostics have been done. Since we're looking for the microRNA patterns in your blood at any given time, you don't need to know which cancer you're looking for. You don't need to have any symptoms. You only need one milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools.Today, cancer detection happens mainly when symptoms appear. That is, at stage 3 or 4, and I believe that is too late. It is too expensive for our families. It is too expensive for humanity. We cannot lose the war against cancer. It not only costs us billions of dollars, but it also costs us the people we love. Today, my aunt, she's fighting bravely and going through this process with a very positive attitude. However, I want fights like this to become very rare. I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed at the very early stages, and I'm certain that in the very near future, because of this and other breakthroughs that we are seeing every day in the life sciences, the way we see cancer will radically change. It will give us the chance of detecting it early, understanding it better, and finding a cure.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jorge_soto_the_future_of_early_cancer_detection
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"So I started working with refugees because I wanted to make a difference, and making a difference starts with telling their stories. So when I meet refugees, I always ask them questions. Who bombed your house? Who killed your son? Did the rest of your family make it out alive? How are you coping in your life in exile? But there's one question that always seems to me to be most revealing, and that is: What did you take? What was that most important thing that you had to take with you when the bombs were exploding in your town, and the armed gangs were approaching your house?A Syrian refugee boy I know told me that he didn't hesitate when his life was in imminent danger. He took his high school diploma, and later he told me why. He said, ""I took my high school diploma because my life depended on it."" And he would risk his life to get that diploma. On his way to school, he would dodge snipers. His classroom sometimes shook with the sound of bombs and shelling, and his mother told me, ""Every day, I would say to him every morning, 'Honey, please don't go to school.'"" And when he insisted, she said, ""I would hug him as if it were for the last time."" But he said to his mother, ""We're all afraid, but our determination to graduate is stronger than our fear.""But one day, the family got terrible news. Hany's aunt, his uncle and his cousin were murdered in their homes for refusing to leave their house. Their throats were slit. It was time to flee.They left that day, right away, in their car, Hany hidden in the back because they were facing checkpoints of menacing soldiers. And they would cross the border into Lebanon, where they would find peace. But they would begin a life of grueling hardship and monotony. They had no choice but to build a shack on the side of a muddy field, and this is Hany's brother Ashraf, who plays outside.And that day, they joined the biggest population of refugees in the world, in a country, Lebanon, that is tiny. It only has four million citizens, and there are one million Syrian refugees living there. There's not a town, a city or a village that is not host to Syrian refugees. This is generosity and humanity that is remarkable. Think about it this way, proportionately. It would be as if the entire population of Germany, 80 million people, would flee to the United States in just three years. Half of the entire population of Syria is now uprooted, most of them inside the country. Six and a half million people have fled for their lives. Over and well over three million people have crossed the borders and have found sanctuary in the neighboring countries, and only a small proportion, as you see, have moved on to Europe. What I find most worrying is that half of all Syrian refugees are children. I took this picture of this little girl. It was just two hours after she had arrived after a long trek from Syria into Jordan.And most troubling of all is that only 20 percent of  Syrian refugee children are in school in Lebanon. And yet, Syrian refugee children, all refugee children tell us education is the most important thing in their lives. Why? Because it allows them to think of their future rather than the nightmare of their past. It allows them to think of hope rather than hatred.I'm reminded of a recent visit I took to a Syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq, and I met this girl, and I thought, ""She's beautiful,"" and I went up to her and asked her, ""Can I take your picture?"" And she said yes, but she refused to smile. I think she couldn't, because I think she must realize that she represents a lost generation of Syrian refugee children, a generation isolated and frustrated. And yet, look at what they fled: utter destruction, buildings, industries, schools, roads, homes. Hany's home was also destroyed. This will need to be rebuilt by architects, by engineers, by electricians. Communities will need teachers and lawyers and politicians interested in reconciliation and not revenge. Shouldn't this be rebuilt by the people with the largest stake, the societies in exile, the refugees?Refugees have a lot of time to prepare for their return. You might imagine that being a refugee is just a temporary state. Well far from it. With wars going on and on, the average time a refugee will spend in exile is 17 years. Hany was into his second year in limbo when I went to visit him recently, and we conducted our entire conversation in English, which he confessed to me he learned from reading all of Dan Brown's novels and from listening to American rap. We also spent some nice moments of laughter and fun with his beloved brother Ashraf. But I'll never forget what he told me when we ended our conversation that day. He said to me, ""If I am not a student, I am nothing.""Hany is one of 50 million people uprooted in this world today. Never since World War II have so many people been forcibly displaced. So while we're making sweeping progress in human health, in technology, in education and design, we are doing dangerously little to help the victims and we are doing far too little to stop and prevent the wars that are driving them from their homes.And there are more and more victims. Every day, on average, by the end of this day, 32,000 people will be forcibly displaced from their homes — 32,000 people. They flee across borders like this one. We captured this on the Syrian border to Jordan, and this is a typical day. Or they flee on unseaworthy and overcrowded boats, risking their lives in this case just to reach safety in Europe. This Syrian young man survived one of these boats that capsized — most of the people drowned — and he told us, ""Syrians are just looking for a quiet place where nobody hurts you, where nobody humiliates you, and where nobody kills you."" Well, I think that should be the minimum. How about a place of healing, of learning, and even opportunity? Americans and Europeans have the impression that proportionally huge numbers of refugees are coming to their country, but the reality is that 86 percent, the vast majority of refugees, are living in the developing world, in countries struggling with their own insecurity, with their own issues of helping their own populations and poverty. So wealthy countries in the world should recognize the humanity and the generosity of the countries that are hosting so many refugees. And all countries should make sure that no one fleeing war and persecution arrives at a closed border.(Applause)Thank you.But there is something more that we can do than just simply helping refugees survive. We can help them thrive. We should think of refugee camps and communities as more than just temporary population centers where people languish waiting for the war to end. Rather, as centers of excellence, where refugees can triumph over their trauma and train for the day that they can go home as agents of positive change and social transformation.It makes so much sense, but I'm reminded of the terrible war in Somalia that has been raging on for 22 years. And imagine living in this camp. I visited this camp. It's in Djibouti, neighboring Somalia, and it was so remote that we had to take a helicopter to fly there. It was dusty and it was terribly hot. And we went to visit a school and started talking to the children, and then I saw this girl across the room who looked to me to be the same age as my own daughter, and I went up and talked to her. And I asked her the questions that grown-ups ask kids, like, ""What is your favorite subject?"" and, ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" And this is when her face turned blank, and she said to me, ""I have no future. My schooling days are over."" And I thought, there must be some misunderstanding, so I turned to my colleague and she confirmed to me there is no funding for secondary education in this camp. And how I wished at that moment that I could say to her, ""We will build you a school."" And I also thought, what a waste. She should be and she is the future of Somalia.A boy named Jacob Atem had a different chance, but not before he experienced terribly tragedy. He watched — this is in Sudan — as his village — he was only seven years old — burned to the ground, and he learned that his mother and his father and his entire family were killed that day. Only his cousin survived, and the two of them walked for seven months — this is boys like him — chased and pursued by wild animals and armed gangs, and they finally made it to refugee camps where they found safety, and he would spend the next seven years in Kenya in a refugee camp.But his life changed when he got the chance to be resettled to the United States, and he found love in a foster family and he was able to go to school, and he wanted me to share with you this proud moment when he graduated from university.(Applause)I spoke to him on Skype the other day, and he was in his new university in Florida pursuing his Ph.D. in public health, and he proudly told me how he was able to raise enough funds from the American public to establish a health clinic back in his village back home.So I want to take you back to Hany. When I told him I was going to have the chance to speak to you here on the TED stage, he allowed me to read you a poem that he sent in an email to me.He wrote: ""I miss myself, my friends, times of reading novels or writing poems, birds and tea in the morning. My room, my books, myself, and everything that was making me smile. Oh, oh, I had so many dreams that were about to be realized.""So here is my point: Not investing in refugees is a huge missed opportunity. Leave them abandoned, and they risk exploitation and abuse, and leave them unskilled and uneducated, and delay by years the return to peace and prosperity in their countries. I believe how we treat the uprooted will shape the future of our world. The victims of war can hold the keys to lasting peace, and it's the refugees who can stop the cycle of violence.Hany is at a tipping point. We would love to help him go to university and to become an engineer, but our funds are prioritized for the basics in life: tents and blankets and mattresses and kitchen sets, food rations and a bit of medicine. University is a luxury. But leave him to languish in this muddy field, and he will become a member of a lost generation. Hany's story is a tragedy, but it doesn't have to end that way.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_fleming_let_s_help_refugees_thrive_not_just_survive
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"I know a man who soars above the city every night. In his dreams, he twirls and swirls with his toes kissing the Earth. Everything has motion, he claims, even a body as paralyzed as his own. This man is my father.Three years ago, when I found out that my father had suffered a severe stroke in his brain stem, I walked into his room in the ICU at the Montreal Neurological Institute and found him lying deathly still, tethered to a breathing machine. Paralysis had closed over his body slowly, beginning in his toes, then legs, torso, fingers and arms. It made its way up his neck, cutting off his ability to breathe, and stopped just beneath the eyes. He never lost consciousness. Rather, he watched from within as his body shut down, limb by limb, muscle by muscle.In that ICU room, I walked up to my father's body,and with a quivering voice and through tears, I began reciting the alphabet. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. At K, he blinked his eyes. I began again. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. He blinked again at the letter I, then at T, then at R, and A: Kitra. He said ""Kitra, my beauty, don't cry. This is a blessing."" There was no audible voice, but my father called out my name powerfully. Just 72 hours after his stroke, he had already embraced the totality of his condition. Despite his extreme physical state, he was completely present with me, guiding, nurturing, and being my father as much if not more than ever before.Locked-in syndrome is many people's worst nightmare. In French, it's sometimes called ""maladie de l'emmuré vivant."" Literally, ""walled-in-alive disease."" For many people, perhaps most, paralysis is an unspeakable horror, but my father's experience losing every system of his body was not an experience of feeling trapped, but rather of turning the psyche inwards, dimming down the external chatter, facing the recesses of his own mind, and in that place, falling in love with life and body anew.As a rabbi and spiritual man dangling between mind and body, life and death, the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him. He realized he no longer needed to look beyond the corporeal world in order to find the divine. ""Paradise is in this body. It's in this world,"" he said.I slept by my father's side for the first four months, tending as much as I could to his every discomfort, understanding the deep  human psychological fear of not being able to call out for help. My mother, sisters, brother and I, we surrounded him in a cocoon of healing. We became his mouthpiece, spending hours each day reciting the alphabet as he whispered back sermons and poetry with blinks of his eye. His room, it became our temple of healing. His bedside became a site for those seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us, my father was able to speak and uplift, letter by letter, blink by blink. Everything in our world became slow and tender as the din, drama and death of the hospital ward faded into the background. I want to read to you one of the first things that we transcribed in the week following the stroke. He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines: ""When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan. Universes are opened and closed continually. There are many when low, who stop growing. Last week, I was brought so low, but I felt the hand of my father around me, and my father brought me back.""When we weren't his voice, we were his legs and arms. I moved them like I know I would have wanted my own arms and legs to be moved were they still for all the hours of the day. I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face, bending each joint to keep it soft and limber. I'd ask him again and again to visualize the motion, to watch from within as the finger curled and extended, and to move along with it in his mind.Then, one day, from the corner of my eye, I saw his body slither like a snake, an involuntary spasm passing through the course of his limbs. At first, I thought it was my own hallucination, having spent so much time tending to this one body, so desperate to see anything react on its own. But he told me he felt tingles, sparks of electricity flickering on and off just beneath the surface of the skin. The following week, he began ever so slightly to show muscle resistance. Connections were being made. Body was slowly and gently reawakening, limb by limb, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch.As a documentary photographer, I felt the need to photograph each of his first movements like a mother with her newborn. I photographed him taking his first unaided breath, the celebratory moment after he showed muscle resistance for the very first time, the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence. I photographed the care and the love that surrounded him.But my photographs only told the outside story of a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a breathing machine. I wasn't able to portray his story from within, and so I began to search for a new visual language, one which strived to express the ephemeral quality of his spiritual experience.Finally, I want to share with you a video from a series that I've been working on that tries to express the slow, in-between existence that my father has experienced. As he began to regain his ability to breathe, I started recording his thoughts, and so the voice that you hear in this video is his voice.(Video) Ronnie Cahana: You have to believe you're paralyzed to play the part of a quadriplegic. I don't. In my mind, and in my dreams every night I Chagall-man float over the city twirl and swirl with my toes kissing the floor. I know nothing about the statement of man without motion. Everything has motion. The heart pumps. The body heaves. The mouth moves. We never stagnate. Life triumphs up and down.Kitra Cahana: For most of us, our muscles begin to twitch and move long before we are conscious, but my father tells me his privilege is living on the far periphery of the human experience. Like an astronaut who sees a perspective that very few of us will ever get to share, he wonders and watches as he takes his first breaths and dreams about crawling back home. So begins life at 57, he says. A toddler has no attitude in its being, but a man insists on his world every day.Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations to the degree that my father has, but we will all have moments of paralysis in our lives. I know I frequently confront walls that feel completely unscalable, but my father insists that there are no dead ends. Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing to give the very best of myself, and for him to give the very best of himself to me. Paralysis was an opening for him. It was an opportunity to emerge, to rekindle life force, to sit still long enough with himself so as to fall in love with the full continuum of creation.Today, my father is no longer locked in. He moves his neck with ease, has had his feeding peg removed, breathes with his own lungs, speaks slowly with his own quiet voice, and works every day to gain more movement in his paralyzed body. But the work will never be finished. As he says, ""I'm living in a broken world, and there is holy work to do.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kitra_cahana_my_father_locked_in_his_body_but_soaring_free
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"Technology has brought us so much: the moon landing, the Internet, the ability to sequence the human genome. But it also taps into a lot of our deepest fears, and about 30 years ago, the culture critic Neil Postman wrote a book called ""Amusing Ourselves to Death,"" which lays this out really brilliantly. And here's what he said, comparing the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. He said, Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us, and Huxley feared we would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. In a nutshell, it's a choice between Big Brother watching you and you watching Big Brother. (Laughter)But it doesn't have to be this way. We are not passive consumers of data and technology. We shape the role it plays in our lives and the way we make meaning from it, but to do that, we have to pay as much attention to how we think as how we code. We have to ask questions, and hard questions, to move past counting things to understanding them. We're constantly bombarded with stories about how much data there is in the world, but when it comes to big data and the challenges of interpreting it, size isn't everything. There's also the speed at which it moves, and the many varieties of data types, and here are just a few examples: images, text, video, audio. And what unites this disparate types of data is that they're created by people and they require context.Now, there's a group of data scientists out of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and they're called the Health Media Collaboratory, and they've been working with the Centers for Disease Control to better understand how people talk about quitting smoking, how they talk about electronic cigarettes, and what they can do collectively to help them quit. The interesting thing is, if you want to understand how people talk about smoking, first you have to understand what they mean when they say ""smoking."" And on Twitter, there are four main categories: number one, smoking cigarettes; number two, smoking marijuana; number three, smoking ribs; and number four, smoking hot women. (Laughter)So then you have to think about, well, how do people talk about electronic cigarettes? And there are so many different ways that people do this, and you can see from the slide it's a complex kind of a query. And what it reminds us is that language is created by people, and people are messy and we're complex and we use metaphors and slang and jargon and we do this 24/7 in many, many languages, and then as soon as we figure it out, we change it up.So did these ads that the CDC put on, these television ads that featured a woman with a hole in her throat and that were very graphic and very disturbing, did they actually have an impact on whether people quit? And the Health Media Collaboratory respected the limits of their data, but they were able to conclude that those advertisements — and you may have seen them — that they had the effect of jolting people into a thought process that may have an impact on future behavior. And what I admire and  appreciate about this project, aside from the fact, including the fact that it's based on real human need, is that it's a fantastic example of courage in the face of a sea of irrelevance.And so it's not just big data that causes challenges of interpretation, because let's face it, we human beings have a very rich history of taking any amount of data, no matter how small, and screwing it up. So many years ago, you may remember that former President Ronald Reagan was very criticized for making a statement that facts are stupid things. And it was a slip of the tongue, let's be fair. He actually meant to quote John Adams' defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials that facts are stubborn things. But I actually think there's a bit of accidental wisdom in what he said, because facts are stubborn things, but sometimes they're stupid, too.I want to tell you a personal story about why this matters a lot to me. I need to take a breath. My son Isaac, when he was two, was diagnosed with autism, and he was this happy, hilarious, loving, affectionate little guy, but the metrics on his developmental evaluations, which looked at things like  the number of words — at that point, none — communicative gestures and minimal eye contact, put his developmental level at that of a nine-month-old baby. And the diagnosis was factually correct, but it didn't tell the whole story. And about a year and a half later, when he was almost four, I found him in front of the computer one day running a Google image search on women, spelled ""w-i-m-e-n."" And I did what any obsessed parent would do, which is immediately started  hitting the ""back"" button to see what else he'd been searching for. And they were, in order: men, school, bus and computer. And I was stunned, because we didn't know that he could spell, much less read, and so I asked him, ""Isaac, how did you do this?"" And he looked at me very seriously and said, ""Typed in the box.""He was teaching himself to communicate, but we were looking in the wrong place, and this is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric — in this case, verbal communication — and undervalue others, such as creative problem-solving. Communication was hard for Isaac, and so he found a workaround to find out what he needed to know. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because forming a question is a really complex process, but he could get himself a lot of the way there by putting a word in a search box.And so this little moment had a really profound impact on me and our family because it helped us change our frame of reference for what was going on with him, and worry a little bit less and appreciate his resourcefulness more.Facts are stupid things. And they're vulnerable to misuse, willful or otherwise. I have a friend, Emily Willingham, who's a scientist, and she wrote a piece for Forbes not long ago entitled ""The 10 Weirdest Things Ever Linked to Autism."" It's quite a list. The Internet, blamed for everything, right? And of course mothers, because. And actually, wait, there's more, there's a whole bunch in  the ""mother"" category here. And you can see it's a pretty  rich and interesting list. I'm a big fan of being pregnant near freeways, personally. The final one is interesting, because the term ""refrigerator mother"" was actually the original hypothesis for the cause of autism, and that meant somebody  who was cold and unloving.And at this point, you might be thinking, ""Okay, Susan, we get it, you can take data, you can  make it mean anything."" And this is true, it's absolutely true, but the challenge is that we have this opportunity to try to make meaning out of it ourselves, because frankly, data doesn't  create meaning. We do. So as businesspeople, as consumers, as patients, as citizens, we have a responsibility, I think, to spend more time focusing on our critical thinking skills. Why? Because at this point in our history, as we've heard many times over, we can process exabytes of data at lightning speed, and we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past. Great, right? And so what we need to do instead is spend a little bit more time on things like the humanities and sociology, and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics, because they give us context that is so important for big data, and because they help us become better critical thinkers. Because after all, if I can spot a problem in an argument, it doesn't much matter whether it's expressed in words or in numbers. And this means teaching ourselves to find  those confirmation biases and false correlations and being able to spot a naked emotional appeal from 30 yards, because something that happens after something doesn't mean it happened  because of it, necessarily, and if you'll let me geek out on you for a second, the Romans called this  ""post hoc ergo propter hoc,"" after which therefore because of which.And it means questioning disciplines like demographics. Why? Because they're based on assumptions about who we all are based on our gender and our age and where we live as opposed to data on what  we actually think and do. And since we have this data, we need to treat it with appropriate privacy controls and consumer opt-in, and beyond that, we need to be clear about our hypotheses, the methodologies that we use, and our confidence in the result. As my high school algebra teacher used to say, show your math, because if I don't know what steps you took, I don't know what steps you didn't take, and if I don't know what questions you asked, I don't know what questions you didn't ask. And it means asking ourselves, really, the hardest question of all: Did the data really show us this, or does the result make us feel more successful and more comfortable?So the Health Media Collaboratory, at the end of their project, they were able to find that 87 percent of tweets about those very graphic and disturbing anti-smoking ads expressed fear, but did they conclude that they actually made people stop smoking? No. It's science, not magic.So if we are to unlock the power of data, we don't have to go blindly into Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future, or Huxley's vision of a trivial one, or some horrible cocktail of both. What we have to do is treat critical thinking with respect and be inspired by examples like the Health Media Collaboratory, and as they say in the superhero movies, let's use our powers for good.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_etlinger_what_do_we_do_with_all_this_big_data
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"I experienced my first coup d'état at the age of four. Because of the coup d'état, my family had to leave my native home of Ghana and move to the Gambia. As luck would have it, six months after we arrived, they too had a military coup. I vividly remember being woken up in the middle of the night and gathering the few belongings we could and walking for about two hours to a safe house. For a week, we slept under our beds because we were worried that bullets might fly through the window.Then, at the age of eight, we moved to Botswana. This time, it was different. There were no coups. Everything worked. Great education. They had such good infrastructure that even at the time they had a fiber-optic telephone system, long before it had reached Western countries.The only thing they didn't have is that they didn't have their own national television station, and so I remember watching TV from neighboring South Africa, and watching Nelson Mandela in jail being offered a chance to come out if he would give up the apartheid struggle. But he didn't. He refused to do that until he actually achieved his objective of freeing South Africa from apartheid. And I remember feeling how just one good leader could make such a big difference in Africa.Then at the age of 12, my family sent me to high school in Zimbabwe. Initially, this too was amazing: growing economy, excellent infrastructure, and it seemed like it was a model for economic development in Africa. I graduated from high school in Zimbabwe and I went off to college.Six years later, I returned to the country. Everything was different. It had shattered into pieces. Millions of people had emigrated, the economy was in a shambles, and it seemed all of a sudden that 30 years of development had been wiped out. How could a country go so bad so fast? Most people would agree that it's all because of leadership. One man, President Robert Mugabe, is almost single-handedly responsible for having destroyed this country.Now, all these experiences of living in different parts of Africa growing up did two things to me. The first is it made me fall in love with Africa. Everywhere I went, I experienced the wonderful beauty of our continent and saw the resilience and the spirit of our people, and at the time, I realized that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to making this continent great. But I also realized that making Africa great would require addressing this issue of leadership. You see, all these countries I lived in, the coups d'état and the corruption I'd seen in Ghana and Gambia and in Zimbabwe, contrasted with the wonderful examples I had seen in Botswana and in South  Africa of good leadership. It made me realize that Africa would rise or fall because of the quality of our leaders.Now, one might think, of course, leadership matters everywhere. But if there's one thing you take away from my talk today, it is this: In Africa, more than anywhere else in the world, the difference that just one good leader can make is much greater than anywhere  else, and here's why. It's because in Africa, we have weak institutions, like the judiciary, the constitution, civil society and so forth. So here's a general rule of thumb that I believe in: When societies have strong institutions, the difference that one good leader can make is limited, but when you have weak institutions, then just one good leader can make or break that country.Let me make it a bit more concrete. You become the president of the United States. You think, ""Wow, I've arrived. I'm the most powerful man in the world."" So you decide, perhaps let me pass a law. All of a sudden, Congress taps you on the shoulder and says, ""No, no, no, no, no, you can't do that."" You say, ""Let me try this way."" The Senate comes and says, ""Uh-uh, we don't think you can do that."" You say, perhaps, ""Let me print some money. I think the economy needs a stimulus."" The central bank governor will think you're crazy. You might get impeached for that. But if you become the president of Zimbabwe, and you say, ""You know, I really like this job. I think I'd like to stay in it forever."" (Laughter) Well, you just can. You decide you want to print money. You call the central bank governor and you say, ""Please double the money supply."" He'll say, ""Okay, yes, sir, is there anything else I can do for you?"" This is the power that African leaders have, and this is why they make the most difference on the continent.The good news is that the quality of leadership in Africa has been improving. We've had three generations  of leaders, in my mind. Generation one are those who appeared in the '50s and '60s. These are people like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. The legacy they left is that they brought independence to Africa. They freed us from colonialism, and let's give them credit for that. They were followed by generation two. These are people that brought nothing but havoc to Africa. Think warfare, corruption, human rights abuses. This is the stereotype of  the typical African leader that we typically think of: Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire, Sani Abacha from Nigeria. The good news is that most of these leaders have moved on, and they were replaced by generation three. These are people like the late Nelson Mandela and most of the leaders that we see in Africa today, like Paul Kagame and so forth. Now these leaders are by no means perfect, but the one thing they have done is that they have cleaned up much of the mess of generation two. They've stopped the fighting, and I call them the stabilizer generation. They're much more accountable to their people, they've improved macroeconomic policies, and we are seeing for the first time Africa's growing, and in  fact it's the second fastest growing economic region in the world. So these leaders are by no means perfect, but they are by and large the best leaders we've seen in the last 50 years.So where to from here? I believe that the next generation to come after this, generation four, has a unique opportunity to transform the continent. Specifically, they can do two things that previous generations have not done. The first thing they need to do is they need to create prosperity for the continent. Why is prosperity so important? Because none of the previous generations have been able to tackle this issue of poverty. Africa today has the fastest growing population in the world, but also is the poorest. By 2030, Africa will have a larger workforce than China, and by 2050, it will have the largest workforce in the world. One billion people will need jobs in Africa, so if we don't grow our economies fast enough, we're sitting on a ticking time bomb, not just for Africa but for the entire world.Let me show you an example of one person who is living up to this legacy of creating prosperity: Laetitia. Laetitia's a young woman from Kenya who at the age of 13 had to drop out of school because her family couldn't  afford to pay fees for her. So she started her own business rearing rabbits, which happen to be a delicacy in this part of Kenya that she's from. This business did so well that within a year, she was employing 15 women and was able to generate enough income that she was able to send herself to school, and through these women fund another 65 children to go to school. The profits that she generated, she used that to build a school, and today she educates 400 children in her community. And she's just turned 18. (Applause)Another example is Erick Rajaonary. Erick comes from the island of Madagascar. Now, Erick realized that agriculture would be the key to creating jobs in the rural areas of Madagascar, but he also realized that fertilizer was a very expensive input for most farmers in Madagascar. Madagascar has these very special bats that produce these droppings that are very high in nutrients. In 2006, Erick quit his job  as a chartered accountant and started a company to manufacture fertilizer from the bat droppings. Today, Erick has built a business that generates several million dollars of revenue, and he employs 70 people full time and another 800 people during the season when the bats drop their droppings the most. Now, what I like about this story is that it shows that opportunities  to create prosperity can be found almost anywhere. Erick is known as the Batman. (Laughter) And who would have thought that you would have been able to build a multimillion-dollar business employing so many people just from bat poo? The second thing that this generation needs to do is to create our institutions. They need to build these institutions such that we are never held to ransom again by a few individuals like Robert Mugabe.Now, all of this sounds great, but where are we going to get this generation four from? Do we just sit and hope that they emerge by chance, or that God gives them to us? No, I don't think so. It's too important an issue  for us to leave it to chance. I believe that we need to create African institutions, home-grown, that will identify and develop these leaders in a systematic, practical way. We've been doing this for the last 10 years through the African Leadership Academy. Laetitia is one of our young leaders. Today, we have 700 of them  that are being groomed for the African continent, and over the next 50 years, we expect to create 6,000 of them.But one thing has been troubling me. We would get about 4,000 applications a year for 100 young leaders that we could take into this academy, and so I saw the tremendous hunger that existed for this leadership training that we're offering. But we couldn't satisfy it. So today, I'm announcing for the first time in public an extension to this vision for the African Leadership Academy. We're building 25 brand new universities in Africa that are going to cultivate this next generation of African leaders. Each campus will have 10,000 leaders at a time so we'll be educating and developing 250,000 leaders at any given time. (Applause)Over the next 50 years, this institution will create three million transformative leaders for the continent.My hope is that half of them will become the entrepreneurs that we need, who will create these jobs that we need, and the other half will go into government and the nonprofit sector, and they will build the institutions that we need. But they won't just learn academics. They will also learn how to become leaders, and they will develop their skills as entrepreneurs. So think of this as Africa's Ivy League, but instead of getting admitted because of your SAT scores or because of how much money you have or which family you come from, the main criteria for getting into this university will be what is the potential that you have for transforming Africa?But what we're doing is  just one group of institutions. We cannot transform Africa by ourselves. My hope is that many, many other home-grown African institutions will blossom, and these institutions will all come together with a common vision of developing this next generation of African leaders, generation four, and they will teach them this common message: create jobs, build our institutions.Nelson Mandela once said, ""Every now and then, a generation is called upon to be great. You can be that great generation."" I believe that if we carefully identify and cultivate the next generation of African leaders, then this generation four that is coming up will be the greatest generation that Africa and indeed the entire world has ever seen.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fred_swaniker_the_leaders_who_ruined_africa_and_the_generation_who_can_fix_it
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"I suspect that every aid worker in Africa comes to a time in her career when she wants to take all  the money for her project — maybe it's a school or a training program — pack it in a suitcase, get on a plane flying over the poorest villages in the country, and start throwing that money out the window. Because to a veteran aid worker, the idea of putting cold, hard cash into the hands of the poorest people on Earth doesn't sound crazy, it sounds really satisfying.I had that moment right about the 10-year mark, and luckily, that's also when I learned that this idea actually exists, and it might be just what the aid system needs. Economists call it an unconditional cash transfer, and it's exactly that: It's cash given with no strings attached. Governments in developing countries have been doing this for decades, and it's only now, with more evidence and new technology that it's possible to make this a model for delivering aid. It's a pretty simple idea, right?Well, why did I spend a decade doing other stuff for the poor? Honestly, I believed that I could do more good with money for the poor than the poor could do for themselves. I held two assumptions: One, that poor people are poor in part because they're uneducated and don't make good choices; two is that we then need people like me to figure out what they need and get it to them. It turns out, the evidence says otherwise. In recent years, researchers have been studying what happens when we give poor people cash. Dozens of studies show across the board that people use cash transfers to improve their own lives. Pregnant women in Uruguay buy better food and give birth to healthier babies. Sri Lankan men invest in their businesses. Researchers who studied our work in Kenya found that people invested in a range of assets, from livestock to equipment  to home improvements, and they saw increases in income from business and farming one year after the cash was sent. None of these studies found that people spend more on drinking or smoking or that people work less. In fact, they work more.Now, these are all material needs. In Vietnam, elderly recipients used their cash transfers to pay for coffins. As someone who wonders if Maslow got it wrong, I find this choice to prioritize spiritual needs deeply humbling. I don't know if I would have chosen to give food or equipment or coffins, which begs the question: How good are we at allocating resources on behalf of the poor? Are we worth the cost? Again, we can look at empirical evidence on what happens when we give people stuff of our choosing. One very telling study looked at a program in India that gives livestock to the so-called ultra-poor, and they found that 30 percent of recipients had turned around and sold the livestock they had been given for cash. The real irony is, for every 100 dollars worth of assets this program gave someone, they spent another 99 dollars to do it. What if, instead, we use technology to put cash, whether from aid agencies or from any one of us directly into a poor person's hands. Today, three in four Kenyans use mobile money, which is basically a bank account that can run on any cell phone. A sender can pay a 1.6 percent fee and with the click of a button send money directly to a recipient's account with no intermediaries. Like the technologies that are disrupting industries in our own lives, payments technology in poor countries could disrupt aid. It's spreading so quickly that it's possible to imagine reaching billions of the world's poor this way.That's what we've started to do at GiveDirectly. We're the first organization dedicated to providing cash transfers to the poor. We've sent cash to 35,000  people across rural Kenya and Uganda in one-time payments of 1,000 dollars per family. So far, we've looked for the poorest people in the poorest villages, and in this part of the world, they're the ones living in homes made of mud and thatch, not cement and iron. So let's say that's your family. We show up at your door with an Android phone. We'll get your name, take your photo and a photo of your hut and grab the GPS coordinates. That night, we send all the data to the cloud, and each piece gets checked by an independent team using, for one example, satellite images. Then, we'll come back, we'll sell you a basic cell phone if you don't have one already, and a few weeks later, we send money to it. Something that five years ago would have seemed impossible we can now do efficiently and free of corruption.The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give. Today, the logic behind aid is too often, well, we do at least some good. When we're complacent with that as our bar, when we tell ourselves that giving aid is better than no aid at all, we tend to invest inefficiently, in our own ideas that strike us as innovative, on writing reports, on plane tickets and SUVs. What if the logic was, will we do better than cash given directly? Organizations would have to prove that they're doing more good for the poor than the poor can do for themselves. Of course, giving cash won't create public goods like eradicating disease or  building strong institutions, but it could set a higher bar for how we help individual families improve their lives.I believe in aid. I believe most aid is better than just throwing money out of a plane. I am also absolutely certain that a lot of aid today isn't better than giving directly to the poor. I hope that one day, it will be.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_sun_should_you_donate_differently
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"I have a confession to make. I am addicted to adventure, and as a young boy, I would rather look outside the window at the birds in the trees and the sky than looking at that two-dimensional chalky blackboard where time stands still and even sometimes dies. My teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn't paying attention in class. They didn't find anything  specifically wrong with me, other than being slightly  dyslexic because I'm a lefty. But they didn't test for curiosity. Curiosity, to me, is about our connection with the world, with the universe. It's about seeing what's  around that next coral head or what's around that next tree, and learning more not only about our environment but about ourselves.Now, my dream of dreams, I want to go explore the oceans of Mars, but until we can go there, I think the oceans still hold quite a few secrets. As a matter of fact, if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is and dissect it into a living space, the ocean represents over 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume, within which we've explored less than five percent. And I look at this, and I go, well, there are tools to go  deeper, longer and further: submarines, ROVs, even Scuba diving. But if we're going to explore the final frontier on this planet, we need to live there. We need to build a log cabin, if you will, at the bottom of the sea.And so there was a great curiosity in my soul when I went to go visit a TED [Prize winner] by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle. Maybe you've heard of her. Two years ago, she was staked out at the last undersea marine laboratory to try and save it, to try and petition for us not to scrap it and bring it back on land. We've only had about a dozen or so scientific labs at the bottom of the sea. There's only one left in the world: it's nine miles offshore and 65 feet down. It's called Aquarius. Aquarius, in some fashion, is a dinosaur, an ancient robot chained to the bottom, this Leviathan. In other ways, it's a legacy. And so with that visit, I realized  that my time is short if I wanted to experience what it was like to become an aquanaut.When we swam towards this after many moons of torture and two years of preparation, this habitat waiting to invite us was like a new home. And the point of going down to and living at this habitat was not to stay inside. It wasn't about living at something the size of a school bus. It was about giving us the luxury of time outside to wander, to explore, to understand more about this oceanic final frontier.We had megafauna come and visit us. This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans. But why this is so important, why this picture is up, is because this particular animal brought his friends around, and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were, they started getting curious about us, these new strangers that were moving into the neighborhood, doing things with plankton. We were studying all sorts of animals and critters, and they got closer and closer to us, and because of the luxury of time, these animals, these residents of the coral reef, were starting to get used to us, and these pelagics that normal travel through stopped. This particular animal actually circled for 31 full days during our mission. So mission 31 wasn't so much about breaking records. It was about that human-ocean connection.Because of the luxury of time, we were able to study animals such as sharks and grouper in aggregations that we've never seen before. It's like seeing dogs and  cats behaving well together. Even being able to commune with animals that are much larger than us, such as this endangered goliath grouper who only still resides in the Florida Keys. Of course, just like any neighbor, after a while, if they get tired, the goliath grouper barks at us, and this bark is so powerful that it actually stuns its prey before it aspirates it all within a split second. For us, it's just telling us to go back into the habitat and leave them alone.Now, this wasn't just about adventure. There was actually a serious note to it. We did a lot of science, and again, because of the luxury of time, we were able to do over three years of science in 31 days. In this particular case, we were using a PAM, or, let me just see if I can get this straight, a Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer. And our scientists from FIU, MIT, and from Northeastern were able to get a gauge for what coral reefs do when we're not around. The Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer, or PAM, gauges the fluorescence of corals as it pertains to pollutants in the water as well as climate change-related issues. We used all sorts of other cutting-edge tools, such as this sonde, or what I like to call the sponge proctologist, whereby the sonde itself tests for metabolism rates in what in this particular case is a barrel sponge, or the redwoods of the [ocean]. And this gives us a much better gauge of what's happening underwater with regard to climate change-related issues, and how the dynamics of that affect us here on land. And finally, we looked at predator-prey behavior. And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing, because as we take away some of the predators on these coral reefs around the world, the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently. What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef, darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes, they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral reefs. Well, within that 31 days, we were able to generate over 10 scientific papers on each one of these topics.But the point of adventure is not only to learn, it's to be able to share that  knowledge with the world, and with that, thanks to a  couple of engineers at MIT, we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic to capture slow-motion video, up to 20,000 frames per second in a little box that's worth 3,000 dollars. It's available to every one of us. And that particular camera gives us an insight into what fairly common animals do but we can't even see it in the blink of an eye. Let me show you a quick video of what this camera does. You can see the silky bubble come out of our hard hats. It gives us an insight into some of the animals that we were sitting right next to for 31 days and never normally would have paid attention to, such as hermit crabs. Now, using a cutting-edge piece of technology that's not really meant for the oceans is not always easy. We sometimes had to put the camera upside down, cordon it back to the lab, and actually man the trigger from the lab itself. But what this gives us is the foresight to look at and analyze in scientific and engineering terms some of the most amazing behavior that the human eye just can't pick up, such as this manta shrimp trying to catch its prey, within about .3 seconds. That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet, and if you ever try to catch a bullet in mid-flight with your eye, impossible. But now we can see things such as these Christmas tree worms pulling in and fanning out in a way that the eye just can't capture, or in this case, a fish throwing up grains of sand. This is an actual sailfin goby, and if you look at it in real time, it actually doesn't even show its fanning motion because it's so quick.One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater is that we had WiFi, and for 31 days straight we were able to connect with the world in real time  from the bottom of the sea and share all of these experiences. Quite literally right there I am Skyping in the classroom with one of the six continents and some of the 70,000  students that we connected every single day to some of these experiences. As a matter of fact, I'm showing a picture that I took with my smartphone from underwater of a goliath grouper laying on the bottom. We had never seen that before.And I dream of the day that we have underwater cities, and maybe, just maybe, if we push the boundaries of adventure and knowledge, and we share that knowledge with others out there, we can solve all sorts of problems. My grandfather used to say, ""People protect what they love."" My father, ""How can people protect what they don't understand?"" And I've thought about this my whole life. Nothing is impossible. We need to dream, we need to be creative, and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times. And whether it's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we've taken for granted, it's about adventure. And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities, and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fabien_cousteau_what_i_learned_from_spending_31_days_underwater
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"George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City, invented something. They got a patent in 1965 for what they call, ""a device to assist women in giving birth."" This device consists of a large, round table and some machinery. When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back, she is strapped down to the table, and the table is rotated at high speed. The child comes flying out through centrifugal force. If you look at their patent carefully, especially if you have any engineering background or talent, you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is  not perfectly adequate. (Laughter)Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people,  one of the main people, who helped answer the question, ""Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?"" And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains, we being human beings, true, have our brains packaged. They, the woodpeckers, typically will peck, they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands  of times every day. Every day! And as far as anyone knows, that doesn't bother them in the slightest.How does this happen? Their brain does not slosh around like ours does. Their brain is packed in very tightly, at least for blows coming  right from the front. Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when, in this country especially, people are becoming curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly. And the woodpecker maybe relates to that.There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called "" A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years."" Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn't  really know what to do about it. The man had cut his finger, he worked processing chickens, and then he started to smell really, really bad. So bad that when  he got in a room with the doctors and the nurses, they couldn't stand being  in the room with him. It was intolerable. They tried every drug, every other treatment they could think of. After a year, he still  smelled putrid. After two years, still smelled putrid. Three years, four years, still smelled putrid. After five years, it went away on its own. It's a mystery.In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old  tradition in her city. They live in a city that has huge hills, San Francisco-grade hills. And in the winter there, it gets very cold and very icy. There are lots of injuries. The tradition that they tested, they tested by asking people who were on their way to  work in the morning, to stop and try something out. Try one of two conditions. The tradition is that in the winter, in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots. And what they discovered by experiment, and it was quite graphic when they saw it, was that it's true. That if you wear your socks on the  outside rather than the inside, you're much more likely  to survive and not slip and fall.Now, I hope you will agree with me that these things I've just described to you, each of them, deserves some kind of prize. (Laughter) And that's what they got, each of them got an Ig Nobel prize. In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people, started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony. Every year we give out 10 prizes. The prizes are based on just  one criteria. It's very simple. It's that you've done something that  makes people laugh and then think. What you've done makes  people laugh and then think. Whatever it is, there's something about it that when people encounter it at first, their only possible reaction is to laugh. And then a week later, it's still rattling around in their heads and all they want to do  is tell their friends about it. That's the quality we look for.Every year, we get in the neighborhood of 9,000 new nominations  for the Ig Nobel prize. Of those, consistently between 10 percent and 20 percent of those nominations are people who nominate themselves. Those self-nominees almost never win. It's very difficult, numerically,  to win a prize if you want to. Even if you don't want to, it's very difficult numerically. You should know that when  we choose somebody to win an Ig Nobel prize, We get in touch with that person, very quietly. We offer them the chance to decline this great honor if they want to. Happily for us, almost everyone  who's offered a prize decides to accept.What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize? Well, you get several things. You get an Ig Nobel prize. The design is different every year. These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials. You're looking at a picture of the prize we gave last year, 2013. Most prizes in the world also give their winners some cash, some money. We don't have any money, so we can't give them. In fact, the winners have to pay their own way to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony, which most of them do. Last year, though, we did manage to scrape up some money. Last year, each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners received from us 10 trillion dollars. A $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. (Laughter) You may remember that  Zimbabwe had a little adventure for a few years there of inflation. They ended up printing bills that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars. The man responsible, who runs the national bank there, by the way, won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics.The other thing you win is an invitation to come to the ceremony, which happens at Harvard University. And when you get there, you come to Harvard's biggest  meeting place and classroom. It fits 1,100 people, it's jammed to the gills, and up on the stage, waiting to shake your hand, waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize, are a bunch of Nobel prize winners. That's the heart of the ceremony. The winners are kept secret until that moment, even the Nobel laureates  who will shake their hand don't know who they are until they're announced.I am going to tell you  about just a very few of the other medical-related prizes we've given. Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes. There are lots of these people who walk among you. Maybe you have one. A paper was published about 30 years ago called ""Injuries due to Falling Coconuts."" It was written by Dr. Peter Barss, who is Canadian. Dr. Barss came to the ceremony and explained that as a young doctor, he wanted to see the world. So he went to Papua New Guinea. When he got there, he went to work in a hospital, and he was curious what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital. He looked through the  records, and he discovered that a surprisingly large number of people in that hospital were there because of injuries due to falling coconuts. One typical thing that happens is people will come from the highlands, where there are not many coconut trees, down to visit their relatives on the coast, where there are lots. And they'll think that a coconut tree is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down. A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall, and has coconuts that weigh two pounds that can drop off at any time.A team of doctors in Europe published a series of papers about colonoscopies. You're all familiar with colonoscopies, one way or another. Or in some cases, one way and another. They, in these papers, explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies, how to minimize the chance that when you perform a colonoscopy, your patient will explode. (Laughter) Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan one of the authors, flew in from Paris to the ceremony, where he explained the history of this, that in the 1950s, when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time, people were figuring out how to do it well. And there were some difficulties at first. The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with, that you're looking inside a  long, narrow, dark place. And so, you want to have a larger space. You add some gas to inflate it so you have room to look around. Now, that's added to the  gas, the methane gas, that's already inside. The gas that they used at first, in many cases, was oxygen. So they added oxygen to methane gas. And then they wanted to be able to see, they needed light, so they'd put in a light source, which in the 1950s was very hot. So you had methane gas, which is flammable, oxygen and heat. They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly. (Laughter) Now it's rare that patients will explode, but it does still happen.The final thing that I want  to tell you about is a prize we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar. Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks. One to save your life, one to save the life of some  lucky bystander. (Laughter) Why would someone do this, you might wonder. Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony and she explained that  she grew up in Ukraine. She was one of the doctors who treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. And they later discovered that a lot of the worst medical problems came from the particles people breathed in. So she was always thinking after that about could there be some simple mask that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens. Years later, she moved to America. She had a baby, One day she looked, and on the floor, her infant son had picked up her bra, and had her bra on his face. And that's where the idea came from. She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony with the first prototype of the bra and she demonstrated: (Laughter) (Applause) [""Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate  (2008) in economics""] [""Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel  laureate (2001) in physics""]I myself own an emergency bra. (Laughter) It's my favorite bra, but I would be happy to  share it with any of you, should the need arise. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_abrahams_a_science_award_that_makes_you_laugh_then_think
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"Let me tell you a story about a little girl named Naghma. Naghma lived in a refugee camp with her parents and her eight brothers and sisters. Every morning, her father would wake up in the hopes he'd be picked for construction work, and on a good month he would earn 50 dollars. The winter was very harsh, and unfortunately, Naghma's brother died and her mother became very ill. In desperation, her father went to a neighbor to borrow 2,500 dollars. After several months of waiting, the neighbor became very impatient, and he demanded that he be paid back. Unfortunately, Naghma's father didn't have the money, and so the two men agreed to a jirga. So simply put, a jirga is a form of mediation that's used in Afghanistan's  informal justice system. It's usually presided over by religious leaders and village elders, and jirgas are often used in rural countries like Afghanistan, where there's deep-seated resentment against the formal system. At the jirga, the men sat together and they decided that the  best way to satisfy the debt would be if Naghma married the neighbor's 21-year-old son. She was six.Now, stories like Naghma's unfortunately are all too common, and from the comforts of our home, we may look at these stories as another crushing blow to women's rights. And if you watched Afghanistan on the news, you may have this view that it's a failed state. However, Afghanistan does have a legal system, and while jirgas are built on long-standing tribal customs, even in jirgas, laws are supposed to be followed, and it goes without saying that giving a child to satisfy a debt is not only grossly immoral, it's illegal.In 2008, I went to Afghanistan for a justice funded program, and I went there originally  on this nine-month program to train Afghan lawyers. In that nine months, I went around the country and I talked to hundreds of people that were locked up, and I talked to many businesses that were also operating in Afghanistan. And within these conversations, I started hearing the connections between the businesses and the people, and how laws that were meant to protect them were being underused, while gross and illegal punitive measures were overused. And so this put me on a quest for justness, and what justness means to me is using laws for their intended purpose, which is to protect. The role of laws is to protect. So as a result, I decided to  open up a private practice, and I became the first foreigner to litigate in Afghan courts. Throughout this time, I also studied many laws, I talked to many people, I read up on many cases, and I found that the lack of justness is not just a problem in Afghanistan, but it's a global problem. And while I originally shied away from representing human rights cases because I was really concerned about how it would affect me both professionally and personally, I decided that the need for justness was so great that I couldn't continue to ignore it. And so I started representing people like Naghma pro bono also.Now, since I've been in Afghanistan and since I've been an attorney for over 10 years, I've represented from CEOs  of Fortune 500 companies to ambassadors to little girls like Naghma, and with much success. And the reason for my success is very simple: I work the system from the inside out and use the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used.I find that achieving justness in places like Afghanistan is difficult, and there's three reasons. The first reason is that simply put, people are very uneducated as to what their legal rights were, and I find that this is a global problem. The second issue is that even with laws on the books, it's often superseded or ignored by tribal customs, like in the first jirga that sold Naghma off. And the third problem with achieving justness is that even with good, existing laws on the books, there aren't people or lawyers  that are willing to fight for those laws. And that's what I do: I use existing laws, often unused laws, and I work those to the benefits of my clients. We all need to create a global culture of human rights and be investors in a global  human rights economy, and by working in this mindset, we can significantly improve justice globally.Now let's get back to Naghma. Several people heard about this story, and so they contacted me because they wanted to pay the $2,500 debt. And it's not just that simple; you can't just throw money at this problem and think that it's going to disappear. That's not how it works in Afghanistan. So I told them I'd get involved, but in order to get involved,  what needed to happen is a second jirga needed to be called, a jirga of appeals. And so in order for that to happen, we needed to get the village elders together, we needed to get the tribal leaders together, the religious leaders. Naghma's father needed to agree, the neighbor needed to agree, and also his son needed to agree. And I thought, if I'm going to  get involved in this thing, then they also need to agree  that I preside over it.So, after hours of talking and tracking them down, and about 30 cups of tea, they finally agreed that we could sit down for a second jirga, and we did. And what was different about the second jirga is this time, we put the law at the center of it, and it was very important for me that they all understood that Naghma had a right to be protected. And at the end of this jirga, it was ordered by the judge that the first decision was erased, and that the $2,500 debt was satisfied, and we all signed a written order where all the men acknowledged that what they did was illegal, and if they did it again, that  they would go to prison. Most — (Applause) Thanks. And most importantly, the engagement was terminated and Naghma was free. Protecting Naghma and her right to be free protects us.Now, with my job, there's above-average amount of risks that are involved. I've been temporarily detained. I've been accused of running a brothel, accused of being a spy. I've had a grenade thrown at my office. It didn't go off, though. But I find that with my job, that the rewards far outweigh the risks, and as many risks as I take, my clients take far greater risks, because they have a lot more to lose if their cases go unheard, or worse, if they're penalized for having me as their lawyer. With every case that I take, I realize that as much as I'm standing behind my clients, that they're also standing behind me, and that's what keeps me going.Law as a point of leverage is crucial in protecting all of us. Journalists are very vital in making sure that that information is given to the public. Too often, we receive information from journalists but we forget how that information was given. This picture is a picture of the British press corps in Afghanistan. It was taken a couple of years ago by my friend David Gill. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since 2010, there have been  thousands of journalists who have been threatened, injured, killed, detained. Too often, when we get this information, we forget who it affects or how that information is given to us. What many journalists do,  both foreign and domestic, is very remarkable, especially in places like Afghanistan, and it's important that we never forget that, because what they're protecting is not only our right to receive that information but also the freedom of the press, which is vital to a democratic society.Matt Rosenberg is a journalist in Afghanistan. He works for The New York Times, and unfortunately, a few months ago he wrote an article that displeased people in the government. As a result, he was temporarily detained and he was illegally exiled out of the country. I represent Matt, and after dealing with the government, I was able to get legal acknowledgment that in fact he was illegally exiled, and that freedom of the press does exist in Afghanistan, and there's consequences if that's not followed. And I'm happy to say that as of a few days ago, the Afghan government formally invited him back into the country and they reversed their exile order of him.(Applause)If you censor one journalist,  then it intimidates others, and soon nations are silenced. It's important that we protect our journalists and freedom of the press, because that makes governments more accountable to us and more transparent. Protecting journalists and our right to receive information protects us.Our world is changing. We live in a different world now, and what were once individual problems are really now global problems for all of us. Two weeks ago, Afghanistan had its first democratic transfer of power and elected president Ashraf Ghani, which is huge, and I'm very optimistic about him, and I'm hopeful that he'll give Afghanistan the changes that it needs, especially within the legal sector. We live in a different world. We live in a world where my  eight-year-old daughter only knows a black president. There's a great possibility that our next president will be a woman, and as she gets older, she may question, can a white guy be president? (Laughter) (Applause)Our world is changing, and  we need to change with it, and what were once individual problems are problems for all of us. According to UNICEF, there are currently over 280 million boys and girls who are married under the age of 15. Two hundred and eighty million. Child marriages prolong the vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, lack of education.At the age of 12, Sahar was married. She was forced into this marriage and sold by her brother. When she went to her in-laws' house, they forced her into prostitution. Because she refused, she was tortured. She was severely beaten with metal rods. They burned her body. They tied her up in a basement and starved her. They used pliers to take out her fingernails. At one point, she managed to escape from this torture chamber to a neighbor's house, and when she went there, instead of protecting her, they dragged her back to her husband's house, and she was tortured even worse.When I met first Sahar, thankfully, Women for Afghan Women gave her a safe haven to go to. As a lawyer, I try to be very strong for all my clients, because that's very important to me, but seeing her, how broken and very weak as she was, was very difficult. It took weeks for us to really get to what happened to her when she was in that house, but finally she started opening up to me, and when she opened up, what I heard was she didn't know what her rights were, but she did know she had  a certain level of protection by her government that failed her, and so we were able to talk about what her legal options were.And so we decided to take this case to the Supreme Court. Now, this is extremely significant, because this is the first time that a victim of domestic violence in Afghanistan was being represented by a lawyer, a law that's been on the  books for years and years, but until Sahar, had never been used. In addition to this, we also decided to sue for civil damages, again using a law that's never been used, but we used it for her case. So there we were at the Supreme Court arguing in front of 12 Afghan justices, me as an American female lawyer, and Sahar, a young woman who when I met her couldn't  speak above a whisper. She stood up, she found her voice, and my girl told them that she wanted justice, and she got it. At the end of it all, the court unanimously agreed that her in-laws should be arrested for what they did to her, her fucking brother should also be arrested for selling her — (Applause) — and they agreed that she did have a right to civil compensation. What Sahar has shown us is that we can attack existing bad practices by using the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used, and by protecting Sahar, we are protecting ourselves.After having worked in Afghanistan for over six years now, a lot of my family and friends think that what I do looks like this. (Laughter) But in all actuality, what I do looks like this. Now, we can all do something. I'm not saying we should all buy a plane ticket and go to Afghanistan, but we can all be contributors to a global human rights economy. We can create a culture of transparency and accountability to the laws, and make governments more accountable to us, as we are to them.A few months ago, a South African lawyer visited me in my office and he said, ""I wanted to meet you. I wanted to see what a crazy person looked like."" The laws are ours, and no matter what your ethnicity, nationality, gender, race, they belong to us, and fighting for justice is not an act of insanity. Businesses also need to get with the program. A corporate investment in human rights is a capital gain on your businesses, and whether you're a business, an NGO, or a private citizen, rule  of law benefits all of us. And by working together with a concerted mindset, through the people, public and private sector, we can create a global human rights economy and all become global investors in human rights. And by doing this, we can achieve justness together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberley_motley_how_i_defend_the_rule_of_law
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"I came here to show you the Fotokite. It's a tethered, flying camera. But before I do that, I want to tell you a bit about where it came from, what motivated it.So I was born in Russia, and three years ago, in 2011, there were the Russian federal elections. There were massive irregularities reported, and people came out to protest, which was very unlikely for Russia. And no one really knew how significant these protests were, because, for whatever reason, the world media largely ignored it. Now, there was a group of photographers who kind of flew flying cameras as a hobby — usually photographing things like the Sphinx, the Pyramids — who happened to be right around the corner, and they flew a camera and they took some snapshots, some panoramas of this demonstration. Just completely independent entity, completely random occurrence, and the image, when I saw it, it really struck me. Here's one of the panoramas. So in a single image, you can really see the scale of this event — just the number of people, the colors, the banners. You just can't consider this insignificant. All in a single image, which was really cool to me.And I think, in the future, journalism and many other professions, there are flying cameras already quite commonly out there, but I think, you wait a few months, a few years, and for many professions, it's really going to be a requirement.And it make sense. It's  such a unique perspective. Nothing really communicates  this scale, for example, in context, in a way that this does. But there are a few hurdles,  and they are quite basic and quite fundamental.One is piloting. So for this image, they flew a camera, a five kilogram device with an SLR under it. It's quite heavy, lots of  spinning, sharp things. It's a bit uncomfortable to fly, probably also for the operator. In fact, you can see that on the  back of the pilot's shirt, it says, ""No questions until landing"" in Russian and in English, because people are curious, and they'll go tap you, and then you lose your focus and things happen. And these guys are great. They're professionals; they're really careful in what they do. So in the protests, maybe you noticed, they flew over the river so it was quite safe. But this doesn't necessarily apply to all people and all conditions, so we really have to make piloting easier.The other problem is regulations, or rather, the lack of good regulation. For many good reasons, it's just difficult to come up with common sense laws to regulate flying cameras. So we already have cameras. Everyone here, I'm sure, has a smartphone with a camera, right? There are more and more of them. You hear about people with Google Glass being attacked. You hear about, actually, a drone pilot, a hobbyist, was attacked two weeks ago because he was flying near a beach. Here's some personal input I didn't expect. Just yesterday, I was attacked by a guy who claimed that I was filming him. I was checking my email right here — easy way to get input for your talk. But I think there are better solutions. I think we have to defuse the situation. We have to come up with responsible solutions that address the privacy issues and the safety, accountability issues but still give us that perspective.And this is one potential solution. So this is the Fotokite. Well, let me see, it's a quadrocopter, but what's kind of special  about it is there's a leash. It's literally a dog leash. It's very convenient. And the neat thing about it is, to fly it, there's no joysticks, nothing like this. You just turn it on and you point in the direction that you want to fly. You give it a little twist. That's kind of the way you communicate. And there it goes.(Applause)So the interaction is super simple. It's like a personal flying pet. It just always maintains a certain angle to you, and if I move around with it, it'll actually follow me naturally. And of course, we can build on top of this. So this leash has some additional electronics. You can turn it on. And now, it's like telling your dog to fly lower, if you have such a dog. So, I can press a button and manipulate it rather easily. So I just shifted its position.And it's really safe. I don't know about you guys in the front row — (Laughter) — but at least in principle, you have to agree that you feel safer because there is a physical connection. Live demos are hard, right? Things go wrong all the time. But no matter what, this thing will actually prevent this thing from going into you. What's more, it tells you immediately that I am the one responsible for this device. You don't have to look for someone controlling it.Now, I can tell you that it's easy a lot, but I think a really good way to prove that is to grab a second one and launch it. And if I can do this on stage live, then I can show each and every one of you in five minutes how to  operate one of these devices.So now we have two eyes in the sky. (Applause) And now the trick is getting them back. (Laughter)So my question now to you is, well, it's a nice solution, it's very accessible, it's safe. What would you use it for? What would you use such a camera for in your life?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sergei_lupashin_a_flying_camera_on_a_leash
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"Humanity takes center stage at TED, but I would like to add  a voice for the animals, whose bodies and minds  and spirits shaped us.Some years ago, it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver. His name is Jimmy Smith, and he shared a story with me that is told among his people, who call themselves the Kwikwasut'inuxw.Once upon a time, he told me, all animals on Earth were one. Even though they look different on the outside, inside, they're all the same, and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity. When they arrived, they would all take off their skins. Raven shed his feathers, bear his fur, and salmon her scales, and then, they would dance. But one day, a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand. Embarrassed, the animals fled, and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way.The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities, all animals are one, has been a powerful inspiration to me. I like to get past the fur, the feathers and the scales. I want to get under the skin. No matter whether I'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog, my goal is to connect us with them, eye to eye.You may wonder, do I ever photograph people? Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions. You just have to learn how  to look past their disguise.As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are.As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life. But as humans with hearts, we can all rejoice in the unity of life, and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave.Let's find a way to join the dance.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_lanting_photos_that_give_voice_to_the_animal_kingdom
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"I just met you on a bus, and we would really like  to get to know each other, but I've got to get off at the next stop, so you're going to tell me  three things about yourself that just define you as a person, three things about yourself that will help me understand who you are, three things that just  get to your very essence. And what I'm wondering is, of those three things, is any one of them surviving some kind of trauma? Cancer survivor, rape survivor, Holocaust survivor, incest survivor.Ever notice how we tend to identify ourselves by our wounds? And where I have seen this survivor identity have the most consequences is in the cancer community. And I've been around this  community for a long time, because I've been a hospice  and a hospital chaplain for almost 30 years. And in 2005, I was working at a big cancer center when I received the news that my mother had breast cancer. And then five days later, I received the news that I had breast cancer. My mother and I can be competitive — (Laughter) — but I was really not trying to compete with her on this one. And in fact, I thought, well, if you have to have cancer, it's pretty convenient to be working at a place that treats it.But this is what I heard from  a lot of outraged people. What? You're the chaplain. You should be immune. Like, maybe I should have just gotten off with a warning instead of an actual ticket, because I'm on the force. So I did get my treatment at the cancer center where I worked, which was amazingly convenient, and I had chemotherapy and a mastectomy, and a saline implant put in, and so before I say another word, let me just say right now, this is the fake one. (Laughter) I have found that I need to get that out of the way, because I'll see somebody go ""Oh, I know it's this one."" And then I'll move or I'll  gesture and they'll go, ""No, it's that one."" So now you know.I learned a lot being a patient, and one of the surprising things was that only a small part of the cancer experience is about medicine. Most of it is about feelings and faith and losing and finding your identity and discovering strength and flexibility you never even knew you had. It's about realizing that the most important things in life are not things at all, but relationships, and it's about laughing in the face of uncertainty and learning that the way to get out of almost anything is to say, ""I have cancer.""So the other thing I learned was that I don't have to take on ""cancer survivor"" as my identity, but, boy, are there powerful forces pushing me to do just that. Now, don't, please, misunderstand me. Cancer organizations and the drive for early screening and cancer awareness and cancer research have normalized cancer, and this is a wonderful thing. We can now talk about cancer without whispering. We can talk about cancer and we can support one another. But sometimes, it feels like people go a little overboard and they start telling us how we're going to feel.So about a week after my surgery, we had a houseguest. That was probably our first mistake. And keep in mind that at this point in my life I had been a chaplain for over 20 years, and issues like dying and death and the meaning of life, these are all things I'd been  yakking about forever. So at dinner that night, our houseguest proceeds to stretch his arms up over his head, and say, ""You know, Deb, now you're really going to learn what's important. Yes, you are going to make some big changes in your life, and now you're going to start thinking about your death. Yep, this cancer is your wakeup call."" Now, these are golden words coming from someone who is speaking about their own experience, but when someone is telling you how you are going to feel, it's instant crap. The only reason I did not kill him with my bare hands was because I could not lift my right arm. But I did say a really bad word to him, followed by a regular word, that — (Laughter) — made my husband say, ""She's on narcotics."" (Laughter) And then after my treatment, it just felt like everyone was telling me what my experience was going to mean. ""Oh, this means you're going to be doing the walk."" ""Oh, this means you're coming to the luncheon."" ""This means you're going to be wearing the pink ribbon and the pink t-shirt and the headband and the earrings and the bracelet and the panties."" Panties. No, seriously, google it. (Laughter) How is that raising awareness? Only my husband should be seeing my panties. (Laughter) He's pretty aware of cancer already.It was at that point where I felt like, oh my God, this is just taking over my life. And that's when I told myself,  claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. We all know that the way to cope with trauma, with loss, with any life-changing experience, is to find meaning. But here's the thing: No one can tell us what our experience means. We have to decide what it means. And it doesn't have to be some gigantic, extroverted meaning. We don't all have to start a foundation or an organization or write a book or make a documentary. Meaning can be quiet and introverted. Maybe we make one small decision about our lives that can bring about big change.Many years ago, I had a patient, just a wonderful young man who was loved by the staff, and so it was something of a shock to us to realize that he had no friends. He lived by himself, he would come in for chemotherapy by himself, he would receive his treatment, and then he'd walk home alone. And I even asked him. I said, ""Hey, how come you never bring a friend with you?"" And he said, ""I don't really have any friends."" But he had tons of friends on the infusion floor. We all loved him, and people were going in and out of his room all the time. So at his last chemo, we sang him the song and we put the crown on his  head and we blew the bubbles, and then I asked him, I said, ""So what are you going to do now?"" And he answered, ""Make friends."" And he did. He started volunteering  and he made friends there, and he began going to a church and he made friends there, and at Christmas he invited my husband and me to a party in his apartment, and the place was filled with his friends. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. He decided that the meaning of his experience was to know the joy of friendship, and then learn to make friends.So what about you? How are you going to find meaning in your crappy experience? It could be a recent one, or it could be one that you've been carrying around for a really long time. It's never too late to change what it means, because meaning is dynamic. What it means today may not be what it means a year from now, or 10 years from now. It's never too late to become someone other than simply a survivor. Hear how static that word sounds? Survivor. No movement, no growth. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you, because if you do, I believe you will become trapped, you will not grow, you will not evolve.But of course, sometimes it's not outside pressures that cause us to take on that identity of survivor. Sometimes we just like the perks. Sometimes there's a payoff. But then we get stuck. Now, one of the first things I learned as a chaplain intern was the three C's of the chaplain's job: Comfort, clarify and, when necessary, confront or challenge. Now, we all pretty much love the comforting and the clarifying. The confronting, not so much.One of the other things that I loved about being a chaplain was seeing patients a year, or even several years after their treatment, because it was just really cool to see  how they had changed and how their lives had evolved and what had happened to them. So I was thrilled one day to get a page down into the lobby of the clinic from a patient who I had seen the year before, and she was there with her two adult daughters, who I also knew, for her one year follow-up exam. So I got down to the lobby, and they were ecstatic because she had just gotten all of her test results back and she was NED: No Evidence of Disease. Which I used to think meant Not Entirely Dead. So they were ecstatic, we sat down to visit, and it was so weird, because within two minutes, she  started retelling me the story of her diagnosis and her  surgery and her chemo, even though, as her chaplain,  I saw her every week, and so I knew this story. And she was using words like suffering, agony, struggle. And she ended her story with, ""I felt crucified."" And at that point, her two  daughters got up and said, ""We're going to go get coffee."" And they left. Tell me three things about yourself before the next stop. People were leaving the bus before she even got to number two or number three. So I handed her a tissue, and I gave her a hug, and then, because I really cared for this woman, I said, ""Get down off your cross."" And she said, ""What?"" And I repeated, ""Get down off your cross."" And to her credit, she could  talk about her reasons for embracing and then clinging to this identity. It got her a lot of attention. People were taking care of her for a change. But now, it was having the opposite effect. It was pushing people away. People kept leaving to get coffee. She felt crucified by her experience, but she didn't want to let that crucified self die. Now, perhaps you are thinking I was a little harsh with her, so I must tell you that I was speaking out of my own experience. Many, many years before, I had been fired from a job that I loved, and I would not stop talking about my innocence and the injustice and the betrayal and the deceipt, until finally, just like this woman, people were walking away from me, until I finally realized I wasn't just processing my feelings, I was feeding them. I didn't want to let that crucified self die. But we all know that with any resurrection story, you have to die first. The Christian story, Jesus was dead a whole day in the tomb before he was resurrected. And I believe that for us, being in the tomb means doing our own deep inner work around our wounds and allowing ourselves to be healed. We have to let that crucified self die so that a new self, a truer self, is born. We have to let that old story go so that a new story, a truer story, can be told. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you.What if there were no survivors, meaning, what if people decided to just claim their trauma as an experience instead of taking it on as an identity? Maybe it would be the end of being trapped in our wounds and the beginning of amazing self-exploration and discovery and growth. Maybe it would be the start of defining ourselves by who we have become and who we are becoming.So perhaps survivor was not one of the three things that you would tell me. No matter. I just want you all to know that I am really glad that we are on this bus together, and this is my stop.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/debra_jarvis_yes_i_survived_cancer_but_that_doesn_t_define_me
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"So this is Anna Hazare, and Anna Hazare may well be the most cutting-edge digital activist in the world today. And you wouldn't know it by looking at him. Hazare is a 77-year-old Indian  anticorruption and social justice activist. And in 2011, he was running a big campaign to address everyday corruption in India, a topic that Indian elites love to ignore. So as part of this campaign, he was using all of the traditional tactics that a good Gandhian organizer would use. So he was on a hunger strike, and Hazare realized through his hunger that actually maybe this time, in the 21st century, a hunger strike wouldn't be enough.So he started playing around  with mobile activism. So the first thing he did  is he said to people, ""Okay, why don't you send me a text message if you support my campaign against corruption?"" So he does this, he  gives people a short code, and about 80,000 people do it. Okay, that's pretty respectable. But then he decides, ""Let me tweak my tactics a little bit."" He says, ""Why don't you leave me a missed call?"" Now, for those of you who have lived in the global South, you'll know that missed calls are a really critical part of global mobile culture. I see people nodding. People leave missed calls all the time: If you're running late for a meeting and you just want to let them know that you're on the way, you leave them a missed call. If you're dating someone and  you just want to say ""I miss you"" you leave them a missed call. So a note for a dating tip here, in some cultures, if you want to please your lover, you call them and hang up. (Laughter) So why do people leave missed calls? Well, the reason of course is that they're trying to avoid charges associated with making calls and sending texts.So when Hazare asked people  to leave him a missed call, let's have a little guess how  many people actually did this? Thirty-five million. So this is one of the largest coordinated actions in human history. It's remarkable. And this reflects the extraordinary strength  of the emerging Indian middle class and the power that their mobile phones bring. But he used that, Hazare ended up with this massive  CSV file of mobile phone numbers, and he used that to deploy real people power on the ground to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Delhi to make a national point of  everyday corruption in India. It's a really striking story.So this is me when I was 12 years old. I hope you see the resemblance. And I was also an activist, and I have been an activist all my life. I had this really funny childhood where I traipsed around the world meeting world leaders and  Noble prize winners, talking about Third World debt, as it was then called, and demilitarization. I was a very, very serious child. (Laughter) And back then, in the early '90s, I had a very cutting-edge tech tool of my own: the fax. And the fax was the  tool of my activism. And at that time, it was the best way to get a message to a lot of people all at once. I'll give you one example of a fax campaign that I ran. It was the eve of the Gulf War and I organized a global campaign  to flood the hotel, the Intercontinental in Geneva, where James Baker and Tariq Aziz were meeting on the eve of the war, and I thought if I could  flood them with faxes, we'll stop the war.Well, unsurprisingly, that campaign was wholly unsuccessful. There are lots of reasons for that, but there's no doubt that  one sputtering fax machine in Geneva was a little bit of a bandwidth constraint in terms of the ability to  get a message to lots of people. And so, I went on to  discover some better tools. I cofounded Avaaz, which uses the  Internet to mobilize people and now has almost  40 million members, and I now run Purpose, which  is a home for these kinds of technology-powered movements. So what's the moral of this story? Is the moral of this story, you know what, the fax is kind of eclipsed by the mobile phone? This is another story of  tech-determinism? Well, I would argue that there's  actually more to it than that. I'd argue that in the last 20 years, something more fundamental has changed than just new tech. I would argue that there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the world.You ask any activist how  to understand the world, and they'll say, ""Look at where the power is, who has it, how it's shifting."" And I think we all sense that  something big is happening.So Henry Timms and I — Henry's a fellow movement builder — got talking one day and  we started to think, how can we make sense of this new world? How can we describe it and give it a framework that makes it more useful? Because we realized that many of the lessons that we were discovering in movements actually applied all over the world in many sectors of our society. So I want to introduce you to this framework: Old power, meet new power. And I want to talk to you about what new power is today. New power is the deployment of mass participation  and peer coordination — these are the two key elements — to create change and shift outcomes. And we see new power all around us.This is Beppe Grillo he was a populist Italian blogger who, with a minimal political apparatus and only some online tools, won more than 25 percent of the vote in recent Italian elections. This is Airbnb, which in just a few years has radically disrupted the hotel industry without owning a single square foot of real estate. This is Kickstarter, which we know has raised over a billion dollars from more than five million people. Now, we're familiar with all of these models. But what's striking is the commonalities, the structural features of  these new models and how they differ from old power.Let's look a little bit at this. Old power is held like a currency. New power works like a current. Old power is held by a few. New power isn't held by a few, it's made by many. Old power is all about download, and new power uploads. And you see a whole set of  characteristics that you can trace, whether it's in media or  politics or education.So we've talked a little bit  about what new power is. Let's, for a second, talk about  what new power isn't. New power is not your Facebook page. I assure you that having a  social media strategy can enable you to do just as much download as you used to do when you had the radio. Just ask Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, I assure you that his Facebook page has not embraced the power of participation. New power is not inherently positive. In fact, this isn't an normative argument that we're making, there are many good things  about new power, but it can produce bad outcomes. More participation, more peer coordination, sometimes distorts outcomes and there are some things, like things, for example,  in the medical profession that we want new power  to get nowhere near. And thirdly, new power is not the inevitable victor. In fact, unsurprisingly, as many of these new power models get to scale, what you see is this massive pushback from the forces of old power. Just look at this really  interesting epic struggle going on right now between  Edward Snowden and the NSA. You'll note that only one of  the two people on this slide is currently in exile. And so, it's not at all clear that new power will be  the inevitable victor.That said, keep one thing in mind: We're at the beginning of a very steep curve. So you think about some of  these new power models, right? These were just like someone's garage idea a few years ago, and now they're disrupting  entire industries. And so, what's interesting about new power, is the way it feeds on itself. Once you have an experience of new power, you tend to expect and  want more of it. So let's say you've used a peer-to-peer lending platform like Lending Tree or Prosper, then you've figured out that you don't need the bank, and who wants the bank, right? And so, that experience tends  to embolden you it tends to make you want more participation across more aspects of your life. And what this gives rise to is a set of values. We talked about the models that new power has engendered — the Airbnbs, the Kickstarters. What about the values? And this is an early sketch at what new power values look like.New power values prize transparency above all else. It's almost a religious  belief in transparency, a belief that if you shine  a light on something, it will be better. And remember that in the 20th  century, this was not at all true. People thought that gentlemen should sit behind closed doors and make comfortable agreements. New power values of informal, networked governance. New power folks would never  have invented the U.N. today, for better or worse. New power values participation, and new power is all about do-it-yourself. In fact, what's interesting  about new power is that it eschews some of  the professionalization and specialization that was all the rage in the 20th century.So what's interesting about these new power values and these new power models is what they mean for organizations. So we've spent a bit of time thinking, how can we plot organizations on a two-by-two where, essentially, we look at new power values and new power models and see where different people sit? We started with a U.S. analysis, and let me show you  some interesting findings. So the first is Apple. In this framework, we actually described Apple as an old power company. That's because the ideology, the governing ideology of Apple is the ideology of the perfectionist product designer in Cupertino. It's absolutely about that beautiful,  perfect thing descending upon us in perfection. And it does not value, as a  company, transparency. In fact, it's very secretive. Now, Apple is one of the most succesful companies in the world. So this shows that you can still pursue a successful  old power strategy. But one can argue that there's  real vulnerabilites in that model. I think another interesting comparison is that of the Obama campaign versus the Obama presidency. (Applause) Now, I like President Obama, but he ran with new  power at his back, right? And he said to people, we are the ones we've been waiting for. And he used crowdfunding to power a campaign. But when he got into office, he governed like more or less  all the other presidents did. And this is a really interesting trend, is when new power gets powerful, what happens? So this is a framework you  should look at and think about where your own organization sits on it. And think about where it should be in five or 10 years. So what do you do if you're old power? Well, if you're there  thinking, in old power, this won't happen to us. Then just look at the Wikipedia entry for Encyclopædia Britannica. Let me tell you, it's a very sad read.But if you are old power, the most important thing you  can do is to occupy yourself before others occupy you, before you are occupied. Imagine that a group of your biggest skeptics are camped in the heart of your organization asking the toughest questions and they can see everything inside of your organization. And ask them, would they  like what they see and should our model change? What about if you're new power? Is new power kind of just  riding the wave to glory? I would argue no. I would argue that there are some very real challenges to new power in this nascent phase. Let's stick with the Occupy Wall Street example for a moment. Occupy was this incredible example  of new power, the purest example of new power. And yet, it failed to consolidate. So the energy that it created was great for the meme phase, but they were so committed to participation, that they never got anything done. And in fact that model means that the challenge for new power is: how do you use institutional power without being institutionalized?One the other end of the spectra is Uber. Uber is an amazing, highly scalable new power model. That network is getting denser and denser by the day. But what's really interesting  about Uber is it hasn't really adopted new power values. This is a real quote from  the Uber CEO recently: He says, ""Once we get rid of the dude  in the car"" — he means drivers — ""Uber will be cheaper."" Now, new power models live and die by the strength of their networks. By whether the drivers and the consumers who use the service actually believe in it. Because they're not an exercise  of top-down perfectionism, they are about the network. And so, the challenge, and this is why it's in no way surprising, is that Uber's drivers  are now unionizing. It's extraordinary. Uber's drivers are turning on Uber. And the challenge for Uber — this isn't an easy situation for them — is that they are locked into a broader superstrcuture that is really old power. They've raised more than a billion  dollars in the capital markets. Those markets expect a financial return, and they way you get a financial return is by squeezing and squeezing your users and your drivers for more and more value and giving that value to your investors.So the big question about the future  of new power, in my view, is: Will that old power just emerge? So will new power elites just become old power and squeeze? Or will that new power base bite back? Will the next big Uber be co-owned by Uber drivers? And I think this going  to be a very interesting structural question.Finally, think about new power being more than just an entity that scales things that make us have slightly  better consumer experiences. My call to action for new power is to not be an island. We have major structural problems in the world today that could benefit enormously from the kinds of mass participation and peer coordination that these new power players know so well how to generate. And we badly need them to  turn their energies and their power to big, what economists might call public goods problems, that are often beyond markets where investors can easily be found. And I think if we can do that, we might be able to fundamentally change not only human beings' sense of  their own agency and power — because I think that's the most wonderful thing about new power, is that people feel more powerful — but we might also be able to change the way we relate to each other and the way we relate to  authority and institutions. And to me, that's absolutely worth trying for. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_heimans_what_new_power_looks_like
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"Fifty-four percent of the world's population lives in our cities. In developing countries, one third of that population is living in slums. Seventy-five percent of global energy consumption occurs in our cities, and 80 percent of gas emissions that cause global warming come from our cities. So things that you and I might think about as global problems, like climate change, the energy crisis or poverty, are really, in many ways, city problems. They will not be solved unless people who live in cities, like most of us, actually start doing a better job, because right now, we are  not doing a very good one. And that becomes very clear when we look into three aspects of city life: first, our citizens' willingness to engage with democratic institutions; second, our cities' ability to really include all of their residents; and lastly, our own ability to live fulfilling and happy lives.When it comes to engagement, the data is very clear. Voter turnout around the world peaked in the late '80s, and it has been declining at a pace that we have never seen before, and if those numbers are bad at the national level, at the level of our cities, they are just dismal. In the last two years, two of the world's most consolidated, oldest democracies, the U.S. and France, held nationwide municipal elections. In France, voter turnout hit a record low. Almost 40 percent of voters decided not to show up. In the U.S., the numbers were even scarier. In some American cities, voter turnout was close to five percent. I'll let that sink in for a second. We're talking about democratic cities in which 95 percent of people decided that it was not important to elect their leaders. The city of L.A., a city of four million people, elected its mayor with just a bit over 200,000 votes. That was the lowest turnout the city had seen in 100 years. Right here, in my city of Rio, in spite of mandatory voting, almost 30 percent of the voting population chose to either annul their votes or stay home and pay a fine in the last mayoral elections.When it comes to inclusiveness, our cities are not the best cases of success either, and again, you don't need to look very far in order to find proof of that. The city of Rio is incredibly unequal. This is Leblon. Leblon is the city's richest neighborhood. And this is Complexo do Alemão. This is where over 70,000 of the city's poorest residents live. Leblon has an HDI, a Human Development Index, of .967. That is higher than Norway, Switzerland or Sweden. Complexo do Alemão has an HDI of .711. It sits somewhere in between the HDI of Algeria and Gabon. So Rio, like so many cities across the global South, is a place where you can go from northern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the space of 30 minutes. If you drive, that is. If you take public transit, it's about two hours.And lastly, perhaps most importantly, cities, with the incredible wealth of relations that they enable, could be the ideal places for human happiness to flourish. We like being around people. We are social animals. Instead, countries where urbanization has already peaked seem to be the very countries in which cities have stopped making us happy. The United States population has suffered from a general decrease in happiness for the past three decades, and the main reason is this. The American way of building cities has caused good quality public spaces to virtually disappear in many, many American cities, and as a result, they have seen a decline of relations, of the things that make us happy. Many studies show an increase in solitude and a decrease in solidarity, honesty, and social and civic participation.So how do we start building cities that make us care? Cities that value their most important asset: the incredible diversity of the people who live in them? Cities that make us happy? Well, I believe that if we want to change what our cities look like, then we really have to change the decision-making processes that have given us the results  that we have right now. We need a participation revolution, and we need it fast. The idea of voting as our  only exercise in citizenship does not make sense anymore. People are tired of only being treated as empowered individuals every few years when it's time to delegate that power to someone else. If the protests that swept Brazil in June 2013 have taught us anything, it's that every time we try to exercise our power outside of an electoral context, we are beaten up, humiliated or arrested. And this needs to change, because when it does, not only will people re-engage with the structures of representation, but also complement these structures with direct, effective, and  collective decision making, decision making of the kind that attacks inequality by its very inclusive nature, decision making of the kind that can change our cities into better places for us to live.But there is a catch, obviously: Enabling widespread participation and redistributing power can be a logistical nightmare, and there's where technology can play an incredibly helpful role, by making it easier for people to organize, communicate and make decisions without having to be in the same room at the same time.Unfortunately for us, when it comes to fostering democratic processes, our city governments have not used technology to its full potential. So far, most city governments have been effective at using tech to turn citizens into human sensors who serve authorities with data on the city: potholes, fallen trees or broken lamps. They have also, to a lesser extent, invited people to participate in improving the outcome of decisions that were already made for them, just like my mom when I was eight and she told me that I had a choice: I had to be in bed by 8 p.m., but I could choose my pink pajamas or my blue pajamas. That's not participation, and in fact, governments have not been very good at using technology to enable participation on what matters — the way we allocate our budget, the way we occupy our land, and the way we manage our natural resources. Those are the kinds of decisions that can actually impact global problems that manifest themselves in our cities.The good news is, and I do have good news to share with you, we don't need to wait for governments to do this. I have reason to believe that it's possible for citizens to build their own structures of participation. Three years ago, I cofounded an organization called Meu Rio, and we make it easier for people in the city of Rio to organize around causes and places that they care about in their own city, and have an impact on those causes and places every day. In these past three years, Meu Rio grew to a network of 160,000 citizens of Rio. About 40 percent of those  members are young people aged 20 to 29. That is one in every 15 young people of that age in Rio today.Amongst our members is this adorable little girl, Bia, to your right, and Bia was just 11 years old when she started a campaign using one of our tools to save her model public school from demolition. Her school actually ranks among the best public schools in the country, and it was going to be demolished by the Rio de Janeiro state government to build, I kid you not, a parking lot for the World Cup right before the event happened. Bia started a campaign, and we even watched her school 24/7 through webcam monitoring, and many months afterwards, the government changed their minds. Bia's school stayed in place.There's also Jovita. She's an amazing woman whose daughter went missing about 10 years ago, and since then, she has been looking for her daughter. In that process, she found out that first, she was not alone. In the last year alone, 2013, 6,000 people disappeared in the state of Rio. But she also found out that in spite of that, Rio had no centralized intelligence system for solving missing persons cases. In other Brazilian cities, those systems have helped solve up to 80 percent of missing persons cases. She started a campaign, and after the secretary of  security got 16,000 emails from people asking him to do this, he responded, and started to build a police unit specializing in those cases. It was open to the public at the end of last month, and Jovita was there giving interviews and being very fancy.And then, there is Leandro. Leandro is an amazing guy in a slum in Rio, and he created a recycling project in the slum. At the end of last year, December 16, he received an eviction order by the Rio de Janeiro state government giving him two weeks to leave the space that he had been using for two years. The plan was to hand it over to a developer, who planned to turn it into a construction site. Leandro started a campaign using one of our tools, the Pressure Cooker, the same one that Bia and Jovita used, and the state government changed their minds before Christmas Eve.These stories make me happy, but not just because they have happy endings. They make me happy because they are happy beginnings. The teacher and parent community at Bia's school is looking for other ways they could improve that space even further. Leandro has ambitious plans to take his model to other low-income communities in Rio, and Jovita is volunteering at the police unit that she helped created. Bia, Jovita and Leandro are living examples of something that citizens and city  governments around the world need to know: We are ready. As citizens, we are ready to decide on our common destinies, because we know that the way we distribute power says a lot about how we actually value everyone, and because we know that enabling and participating in local politics is a sign that we truly care about our relations to one another, and we are ready to do this in cities around the world right now. With the Our Cities network, the Meu Rio team hopes to share what we have learned with other people who want to create similar initiatives in their own cities. We have already started doing it in São Paulo with incredible results, and want to take it to cities around the world through a network of citizen-centric, citizen-led organizations that can inspire us, challenge us, and remind us to demand real participation in our city lives.It is up to us to decide whether we want schools or parking lots, community-driven recycling projects or construction sites, loneliness or solidarity, cars or buses, and it is our responsibility to do that now, for ourselves, for our families, for the people who make our lives worth living, and for the incredible creativity, beauty, and wonder that make our cities, in spite of all of their problems, the greatest invention of our time.Obrigado. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alessandra_orofino_it_s_our_city_let_s_fix_it
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"You know, it's a big privilege for me to be working in one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world: the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands — Mauritius, Rodrigues, and Réunion — along with the island of Madagascar, they are blessed with unique plants found nowhere else in the world. And today I will tell you  about five of them and their particular features and why these plants are so unique.Take a look at this plant. I call it benjoin in the local vernacular, and the botanical name  is Terminalia bentzoe, subspecies bentzoe. This subspecies is endemic to Mauritius, and its particular feature is its heterophylly. What do I mean by heterophylly? It's that the same plant has got leaves that are different shapes and sizes. Now, these plants have evolved very far away from the mainland, and within specific ecosystems. Often, these particular features have evolved as a response to the threat presented by the local fauna, in this case, grazing tortoises. Tortoises are known to have poor eyesight, and as such, they tend to avoid the plants they don't recognize. So this evolutionary  foil safeguards the plant against these rather cute animals, and protects it and of course  ensures its survival.Now the question you're  probably asking yourself is, why is she telling us all these stories? The reason for that is that we tend to overlook the diversity and the variety of the natural world. These particular habitats are unique and they are host to a whole lot of plants. We don't realize how valuable and how precious these resources are, and yet, through our insouciance, we keep on destroying them. We're all familiar with the macro impact of urbanization, climate change, resource exploitation, but when that one last plant — or animal for that matter — when that very last specimen has disappeared from the face of this Earth, we would have lost an entire subset of the Earth's biology, and with it, important plants  with medicinal potential or which could have ingredients that would speak to the cosmetic, nutrition, pharma, and even the ethno-veterinary sectors, be gone forever. And here we have a very prime example of the iconic dodo, which comes from Mauritius, and, of course, we know is  now a symbol of extinction.We know plants have a  fundamental role to play. Well, first of all, they feed us and they also give us  the oxygen we breathe, but plants are also the source of important, biologically active ingredients that we should be studying very carefully, because human societies over the millennia, they have developed important knowledge, cultural traditions, and important plant-based medicinal resources. Here's a data point: 1.4 percent of the entire land surface is home to 40 percent of the species of higher plants, 35 percent of the species of vertebrates, and this 1.4 percent represents the 25 biodiversity hotspots in the world, and this 1.4 percent of the entire land surface already provides for 35 percent of the ecosystem services that vulnerable people depend on. And as you can see, the island of Mauritius where I work and where I live, belongs to one such biodiversity hotspot, and I study the unique plants on the island for their  biomedical applications.Now, let's go back again to that first plant I showed you, the one, of course, with  different-shaped leaves and different sizes, Terminalia bentzoe, subspecies bentzoe, a plant only found in Mauritius. Now, the local people, they used a decoction of the leaves against infectious diseases. Now our work, that is, the scientific validation of  this traditional information, has shown that precisely that leaf extract shows activity, potent activity, against a wide range of bacteria that could be pathogenic to humans. Now, could this plant be the answer to antibiotic resistance? You know, antibiotic resistance is proving to be a big challenge globally. While we may not be sure, one thing is certain: we will not want this plant to disappear. But the harsh reality is that this particular plant is in fact considered to be vulnerable in its natural habitat.This brings me to another example. This bush here is known as baume de l'ile plate in the local vernacular. The botanical name is Psiadia arguta. It's a plant which is rare, which is endemic to Mauritius. It used to grow on the mainland, but through the sheer  pressures of urbanization has been pushed out of the mainland, and we've managed to bring it back from the brink of extinction by developing in vitro plants which are now growing in the wild. Now, one thing I must  point out straightaway is that not all plants can be developed in vitro. While we humans, we are  happy in our comfort zone, these plants also need their ecosystem to be preserved, and they don't react — endemic plants don't react to very harsh  changes in their ecosystem, and yet we know what are the challenges that climate change, for example, is posing to these plants. Now, the local people again use the leaves in traditional medicine against respiratory problems. Now, our preliminary labwork on the leaf extract has shown that precisely these  leaves contain ingredients that are very close,  in terms of structures, chemical structures, to those medicines which are sold in the chemist's shop against asthma. So who knows what humanity will benefit from should this plant decide  to reveal all its secrets.Now, I come from the developing world where we are forever being  challenged with this issue of population explosion. Africa is the continent  which is getting younger, and whenever one talks  about population explosion, one talks about the issue of food security as being the other side of the same coin. Now this plant here, the baobab, could be part of the answer. It's an underutilized, neglected food plant. It defines the landscape of West Africa, where it is known as the tree of life, and later on I will tell you why the Africans consider it to be the tree of life. Now interestingly, there are many legends which are associated with this plant. Because of its sheer size, it was meant to be lording over lesser plants, so God didn't like this arrogance, uprooted it, and planted it upside down, hence its particular shape. And if you look at this tree again within the African context, in West Africa, it's known  as the palaver tree, because it performs great social functions. Now if you have a problem in the community, meeting under the palaver tree with the chiefs or the tribesmen would be synonymous to trying to find a solution to that particular problem, and also to reinforce trust and respect among members of the community. From the scientific point of view, there are eight species of baobab in the world. There's one from Africa, one from Australia, and six are endemic to the island of Madagascar. The one I have showed you is the one from Africa, Adansonia digitata. Now, the flower, this  beautiful white flower, it opens at night, is pollinated by bats, and it gives rise to the fruit which is curiously known as the monkey apple. The monkeys are not stupid animals. They know what's good for them. Now, if you open the fruit of the baobab, you'll see a white, floury pulp, which is very rich in nutrients and has got protein, more protein than in human milk. Yes, you heard right: more protein than in human milk. And this is one of the reasons why the nutrition companies of this world, they are looking for this fruit to provide what we know as reinforced food. The seeds give an oil, a very stable oil which is sought after  by the cosmetic industry to give to produce body lotions, for example. And if you look at the trunk, the trunk, of course, safeguards water, which is often harvested by a thirsty traveler, and the leaves are used in traditional medicine against infectious disease. Now, you can see now why the Africans consider it to be the tree of life. It's a complete plant, and in fact, the sheer size of these trees is hiding a massive potential, not only for the pharma, nutrition, and the cosmetic industry. What I have showed you here is only the species from Africa, Adansonia digitata. We have six species yet in Madagascar, and we don't know what  is the potential of this plant, but one thing we know is that the flora is considered to be  threatened with extinction.Let me take you to Africa again, and introduce you to one of my very favorite, the resurrection plant. Now here you'll find that even Jesus has competition. (Laughter) Now, this plant here has developed remarkable tolerance to drought, which enables it to withstand up to 98 percent dehydration  over the period of a year without damage, and yet it can regenerate  itself almost completely overnight, over 24 hours, and flower. Now, us human beings, we're always on the lookout for the elixir of youth. We don't want to get old, and rightly so. Why should we, especially if you can afford it? And this gives you an indication of what the plant looks like before. Now, if you are an inexperienced gardener, the first thing you'll do  when you visit the garden is to uproot this plant because it's dead. But if you water it, this is what you get. Absolutely amazing. Now, if you look at our aging process, the aging process is in fact the loss of water from the upper epidermis, resulting in wrinkling as we know it, especially women, we are so conscious of this. And this plant, in fact, is giving  the cosmetic chemists very important ingredients that are actually finding ways to slow down the aging process and at the same time reinforce the cells against the onslaught of environmental toxins.Now, these four examples I have just given you are just a very tiny reminder as to how our health and our survival are closely linked to the health and the resilience of our ecosystem, and why we should be very careful about preserving biodiversity. Every time a forest is cut down, every time a marsh is filled in, it is a potential lab that goes with it, and which we will never, ever recover. And I know what I'm talking about, coming from Mauritius and missing the dodo.Let me finish with just one last example. Conservation issues are normally guided towards rare, endemic plants, but what we call exotic plants, that is, the ones which grow in many different habitats across the world, they also need to be considered. You know why? Because the environment plays a very important role in modifying the composition of that plant.So let's take a look at this plant here, Centella asiatica. It's a weed. We call it a weed. Now, Centella asiatica  grows across the world in many different habitats —  in Africa, in Asia — and this plant has been instrumental in providing a solution  to that dreadful disease called leprosy in Madagascar in the 1940s. Now, while Centella  grows across the world — in Africa, in Asia —  the best quality Centella comes from Madagascar, because that Centella contains the three vital ingredients which are sought after by the pharma and the cosmetic companies. And the cosmetic companies  are already using it to make regenerating cream.Now, there is an ancient saying that for every disease known to mankind, there is a plant to cure it. Now, you may not  believe in ancient sayings. You may think they're obsolete now that our science and  technology are so powerful. So you may look on Centella as being an insignificant, humble weed, which, if destroyed, won't be missed. But you know, there is no such thing as a weed. It's a plant. It's a living biological lab that may well have answers to the question that we may have, but we have to ensure that it has the right to live.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ameenah_gurib_fakim_humble_plants_that_hide_surprising_secrets
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"I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that ""us"" idea.So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter)So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a  thought came to my mind. I said, ""I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin  in a couple of weeks"" — (Laughter) — ""and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect."" He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on  the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, ""He'd be an unexpected ally."" And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and  come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the  Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling,  compelling and credible. You can't buy that.What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's  better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a  Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these  trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living  and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a  problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you  want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us  to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband  of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them  when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when  you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room  are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different  worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they  can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, ""You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork."" (Laughter)Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kare_anderson_be_an_opportunity_maker
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"If there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis. The more complex the problem, the more the need for simplicity. So allow me to share three cases where we tried to apply design's power of synthesis.Let's start with the global challenge of urbanization. It's a fact that people are moving towards cities. and even if counterintuitive, it's good news. Evidence shows that people are better off in cities. But there's a problem that I would call the ""3S"" menace: The scale, speed, and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history. For you to have an idea, out of the three billion  people living in cities today, one billion are under the line of poverty. By 2030, out of the five billion people that will be living in cities, two billion are going to  be under the line of poverty. That means that we will have to build a one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family during the next 15 years. A one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family. If we don't solve this equation, it is not that people  will stop coming to cities. They will come anyhow, but they will live in slums, favelas and informal settlements.So what to do? Well, an answer may come from favelas and slums themselves. A clue could be in this  question we were asked 10 years ago. We were asked to accommodate 100 families that had been occupying illegally half a hectare in the center of the city of Iquique  in the north of Chile using a $10,000 subsidy with which we had to buy the land, provide the infrastructure, and build the houses that,  in the best of the cases, would be of around 40 square meters. And by the way, they said, the cost of the land, because it's in the center of the city, is three times more than what social housing can normally afford. Due to the difficulty of the question, we decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constraints, and we started a participatory design process, and testing what was  available there in the market. Detached houses, 30 families could be accommodated. Row houses, 60 families. [""100 families""] The only way to accommodate all of them was by building in height, and they threatened us to go on a hunger strike if we even dared to offer this as a solution, because they could not  make the tiny apartments expand. So the conclusion with the families — and this is important,  not our conclusion — with the families, was that we had a problem. We had to innovate.So what did we do? Well, a middle-class family lives reasonably well in around 80 square meters, but when there's no money, what the market does is to reduce the size of the house to 40 square meters. What we said was, what if, instead of thinking of 40 square meters as a small house, why don't we consider it half of a good one? When you rephrase the problem as half of a good house instead of a small one, the key question is, which half do we do? And we thought we had  to do with public money the half that families won't  be able to do individually. We identified five design conditions that belonged to the hard half of a house, and we went back to the  families to do two things: join forces and split tasks. Our design was something in between a building and a house. As a building, it could pay for expensive, well-located land, and as a house, it could expand. If, in the process of not being expelled to the periphery while getting a house, families kept their  network and their jobs, we knew that the expansion  would begin right away. So we went from this initial social housing to a middle-class unit achieved by families themselves within a couple of weeks.This was our first project in Iquique 10 years ago. This is our last project in Chile. Different designs, same principle: You provide the frame, and from then on, families take over.So the purpose of design, trying to understand and  trying to give an answer to the ""3S"" menace, scale, speed, and scarcity, is to channel people's own building capacity. We won't solve the one million people per week equation unless we use people's own power for building. So, with the right design, slums and favelas may not be the problem but actually the only possible solution. The second case is how design can contribute to sustainability. In 2012, we entered the competition for the Angelini Innovation Center, and the aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation. It is accepted that for such an aim, knowledge creation, interaction among people,  face-to-face contact, it's important, and we agreed on that. But for us, the question  of the right environment was a very literal question. We wanted to have a working space with the right light, with the right temperature, with the right air. So we asked ourselves: Does the typical office building help us in that sense? Well, how does that  building look, typically? It's a collection of floors, one on top of each other, with a core in the center with elevators, stairs,  pipes, wires, everything, and then a glass skin on the outside that, due to direct sun radiation, creates a huge greenhouse effect inside. In addition to that, let's say a guy working on the seventh floor goes every single day  through the third floor, but has no idea what the guy on that floor is working on. So we thought, well, maybe  we have to turn this scheme inside out. And what we did was, let's have an open atrium, a hollowed core, the same collection of floors, but have the walls and the mass in the perimeter, so that when the sun hits, it's not impacting directly glass, but a wall. When you have an open atrium inside, you are able to see what others are doing from within the building, and you have a better way to control light, and when you place the mass and the walls in the perimeter, then you are preventing direct sun radiation. You may also open those windows and get cross-ventilation. We just made those openings of such a scale that they could work as elevated squares, outdoor spaces throughout the entire height of the building. None of this is rocket science. You don't require sophisticated programming. It's not about technology. This is just archaic,  primitive common sense, and by using common sense, we went from 120 kilowatts per square meter per year, which is the typical energy consumption for cooling a glass tower, to 40 kilowatts per square meter per year. So with the right design, sustainability is nothing but the rigorous use of common sense. Last case I would like  to share is how design can provide more comprehensive answers against natural disasters. You may know that Chile, in 2010, was hit by an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake and tsunami, and we were called to work in the reconstruction of the Constitución, in the southern part of the country. We were given 100 days, three months, to design almost everything, from public buildings to public space, street grid, transportation, housing, and mainly how to protect the city against future tsunamis. This was new in Chilean urban design, and there were in the  air a couple of alternatives. First one: Forbid installation on ground zero. Thirty million dollars spent mainly in land expropriation. This is exactly what's being discussed in Japan nowadays, and if you have a disciplined population like the Japanese, this may work, but we know that in Chile, this land is going to be  occupied illegally anyhow, so this alternative was  unrealistic and undesirable. Second alternative: build a big wall, heavy infrastructure to resist the energy of the waves. This alternative was conveniently lobbied by big building companies, because it meant 42 million  dollars in contracts, and was also politically preferred, because it required no land expropriation. But Japan proved that trying to resist the force of nature is useless. So this alternative was irresponsible. As in the housing process, we had to include the community in the way of finding a solution for this, and we started a participatory design process.(Video) [In Spanish] Loudspeaker: What kind of city do you want? Vote for Constitución. Go to the Open House and express your options. Participate!Fisherman: I am a fisherman. Twenty-five fishermen work for me. Where should I take them? To the forest?Man: So why can't we have a concrete defense? Done well, of course.Man 2: I am the history of Constitución. And you come here to tell me that I cannot keep on living here? My whole family has lived here, I raised my children here, and my children will also  raise their children here. and my grandchildren  and everyone else will. But why are you imposing this on me? You! You are imposing this on me! In danger zone I am not authorized to build. He himself is saying that.Man 3: No, no, no, Nieves...Alejandro Aravena: I don't know if you were able to read the subtitles, but you can tell from the body language that participatory design is not a hippie, romantic, let's-all-dream-together-about- the-future-of-the-city kind of thing. It is actually — (Applause) It is actually not even with the families trying to find the right answer. It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question.So it was pretty obvious after this process that, well, we chicken out here and go away because it's too tense, or we go even further in asking, what else is bothering you? What other problems do you have and you want us to take  care of now that the city will have to be rethought from scratch? And what they said was, look, fine to protect the city  against future tsunamis, we really appreciate, but the next one  is going to come in, what, 20 years? But every single year, we have problems of flooding due to rain. In addition, we are in the middle of the forest region of the country, and our public space sucks. It's poor and it's scarce. And the origin of the city, our identity, is not really connected to the buildings that fell, it is connected to the river, but the river cannot be accessed publicly, because its shores are privately owned. So we thought that we had to produce a third alternative, and our approach was  against geographical threats, have geographical answers. What if, in between the city and the sea we have a forest, a forest that doesn't try to resist the energy of nature, but dissipates it by introducing friction? A forest that may be able to laminate the water and prevent the flooding? That may pay the historical debt of public space, and that may provide, finally, democratic access to the river. So as a conclusion of the participatory design, the alternative was validated politically and socially, but there was still the problem of the cost: 48 million dollars. So what we did was a survey in the public investment system, and found out that there  were three ministries with three projects in  the exact same place, not knowing of the existence  of the other projects. The sum of them: 52 million dollars. So design's power of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of the scarcest resource in cities, which is not money but coordination. By doing so, we were able to save four million dollars, and  that is why the forest is today under construction. (Applause)So be it the force of self construction, the force of common sense, or the force of nature, all these forces need to be translated into form, and what that form is modeling and shaping is not cement, bricks, or wood. It is life itself. Design's power of synthesis is just an attempt to put at the innermost core of architecture the force of life.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alejandro_aravena_my_architectural_philosophy_bring_the_community_into_the_process
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"Dre Urhahn: This theater  is built on Copacabana, which is the most famous  beach in the world, but 25 kilometers away from here in the North Zone of Rio lies a community called Vila Cruzeiro, and roughly 60,000 people live there. Now, the people here in Rio mostly know Vila Cruzeiro from the news, and unfortunately, news  from Vila Cruzeiro often is not good news. But Vila Cruzeiro is also the place where our story begins.Jeroen Koolhaas: Ten years  ago, we first came to Rio to shoot a documentary  about life in the favelas. Now, we learned that favelas  are informal communities. They emerged over the years when immigrants from the countryside came to the cities looking for work, like cities within the cities, known for problems like crime, poverty, and the violent drug war between police and the drug gangs. So what struck us was that these were communities that the people who lived there had built  with their own hands, without a master plan and like a giant work in progress. Where we're from, in Holland, everything is planned. We even have rules for  how to follow the rules. (Laughter)DU: So the last day of  filming, we ended up in Vila Cruzeiro, and  we were sitting down and we had a drink, and we were overlooking this hill with all these houses, and most of these houses looked unfinished, and they had walls of bare brick, but we saw some of these houses which were plastered and painted, and suddenly we had this idea: what would it look like if all these houses would be plastered and painted? And then we imagined one big design, one big work of art. Who would expect something like that in a place like this? So we thought, would that even be possible? So first we started to count the houses, but we soon lost count. But somehow the idea stuck.JK: We had a friend. He ran an NGO in Vila Cruzeiro. His name was Nanko, and he also liked the idea. He said, ""You know, everybody here would pretty much love  to have their houses plastered and painted. It's when a house is finished."" So he introduced us to the right people, and Vitor and Maurinho became our crew. We picked three houses in the center of the community and we start here. We made a few designs, and everybody liked this design of a boy flying a kite the best. So we started painting,  and the first thing we did was to paint everything blue, and we thought that looked  already pretty good. But they hated it. The people who lived there really hated it. They said, ""What did you do? You painted our house in  exactly the same color as the police station."" (Laughter) In a favela, that is not a good thing. Also the same color as the prison cell. So we quickly went ahead  and we painted the boy, and then we thought we were finished, we were really happy, but still, it wasn't good because the little kids started coming up to us, and they said, ""You know,  there's a boy flying the kite, but where is his kite?"" We said, ""Uh, it's art. You know, you have to imagine the kite."" (Laughter) And they said, ""No, no, no,  we want to see the kite."" So we quickly installed a kite way up high on the hill, so that you could see  the boy flying the kite and you could actually see a kite. So the local news started writing about it, which was great, and then even The Guardian wrote about it: ""Notorious slum becomes open-air gallery.""JK: So, encouraged by this success, we went back to Rio for a second project, and we stumbled upon this street. It was covered in concrete  to prevent mudslides, and somehow we saw a sort of river in it, and we imagined this river to be a river in Japanese style with koi carp swimming upstream. So we decided to paint that river, and we invited Rob Admiraal, who is a tattoo artist, and he specialized in the Japanese style. So little did we know that we would spend almost an entire year painting that river, together with Geovani and Robinho and Vitor, who lived nearby. And we even moved into the neighborhood when one of the guys that  lived on the street, Elias, told us that we could come  and live in his house, together with his family, which was fantastic. Unfortunately, during that time, another war broke out between the police and the drug gangs. (Video) (Gunfire) We learned that during those times, people in communities  really stick together during these times of hardship, but we also learned a  very important element, the importance of barbecues.  (Laughter) Because, when you throw a barbecue, it turns you from a guest into a host, so we decided to throw one almost every other week, and we got to know everybody  in the neighborhood.JK: We still had this  idea of the hill, though.DU: Yeah, yeah, we were talking about the scale of this, because this painting was incredibly big, and it was insanely detailed, and this process almost drove us completely insane ourselves. But we figured that maybe,  during this process, all the time that we had  spent in the neighborhood was maybe actually even more important than the painting itself.JK: So after all that time, this hill, this idea was still there, and we started to make sketches, models, and we figured something out. We figured that our ideas, our designs had to be a little bit more simple than that last project so that we could paint with more people and cover more houses at the same time. And we had an opportunity to try that out in a community in the central part of Rio, which is called Santa Marta, and we made a design for this place which looked like this, and then we got people to go along with it because turns out that if  your idea is ridiculously big, it's easier to get people to  go along with this. (Laughter) And the people of Santa Marta got together and in a little over a month they turned that square into this. (Applause) And this image somehow  went all over the world.DU: So then we received  an unexpected phone call from the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and they had this question if this idea, our approach, if this would actually  work in North Philly, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. So we immediately said yes. We had no idea how, but it seemed like a very  interesting challenge, so we did exactly the  same as we did in Rio, and we moved into the neighborhood and started barbecuing. (Laughter) So the project took almost two years to complete, and we made individual designs for every single house on  the avenue that we painted, and we made these designs together with the local store owners,  the building owners, and a team of about a dozen  young men and women. They were hired, and then they were trained as painters, and together they transformed their own neighborhood, the whole street, into a  giant patchwork of color. (Applause) And at the end, the city of Philadelphia thanked every single one of them and gave them a merit for their accomplishment.JK: So now we had painted a whole street. How about we do this whole hill now? We started looking for funding, but instead, we just ran into questions, like, how many houses  are you going to paint? How many square meters is that? How much paint are you going to use, and how many people are you going to employ? And we did try for years to write plans for the funding and answer  all those questions, but then we thought, in order to answer all those questions, you have to know exactly  what you're going to do before you actually get there and start. And maybe it's a mistake  to think like that. It would lose some of the  magic that we had learned about that if you go somewhere and you spend time there, you can let the project grow organically and have a life of its own.DU: So what we did is we decided to take this  plan and strip it away from all the numbers and all the ideas and presumptions and just go back to the base idea, which was to transform this hill into a giant work of art. And instead of looking for funding, we started a crowdfunding campaign, and in a little over a month, more than 1,500 people put together and donated over 100,000 dollars. So for us, this was an amazing  moment, because now — (Applause) — because now we finally had the freedom to use all the lessons that we had learned and create a project that was built the same way that the favela was built, from the ground on up, bottom up, with no master plan.JK: So we went back,  and we employed Angelo, and he's a local artist from Vila Cruzeiro, very talented guy, and he knows almost everybody there, and then we employed Elias, our former landlord who invited us into his house, and he's a master of construction. Together with them, we decided where to start. We picked this spot in Vila Cruzeiro, and houses are being plastered as we speak. And the good thing about them is that they are deciding which houses go next. They're even printing t-shirts, they're putting up banners explaining everything to everybody, and talking to the press. This article about Angelo appeared.DU: So while this is happening, we are bringing this  idea all over the world. So, like the project we  did in Philadelphia, we are also invited to do workshops, for instance in Curaçao, and right now we're planning  a huge project in Haiti.JK: So the favela was not only the place where this idea started: it was also the place that made it possible to work without a master plan, because these communities are informal — this was the inspiration — and in a communal effort,  together with the people, you can almost work like in an orchestra, where you can have a hundred instruments playing together to create a symphony.DU: So we want to thank everybody who wanted to become part of this dream and supported us along the way, and we are looking at continuing.JK: Yeah. And so one day pretty soon, when the colors start  going up on these walls, we hope more people will join us, and join this big dream, and maybe one day, the  whole of Vila Cruzeiro will be painted.DU: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/haas_hahn_how_painting_can_transform_communities
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"The first patient to ever be  treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work, he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days,  his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been  used to treat a human, and indeed no one even  knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities  that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it,  they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway.So they gave Albert Alexander, this Oxford policeman, the drug, and within 24 hours, he started getting better. His fever went down,  his appetite came back. Second day, he was doing much better. They were starting to  run out of penicillin, so what they would do  was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize  the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him, and that worked. Day four, well on the way to recovery. This was a miracle. Day five, they ran out of penicillin, and the poor man died.So that story didn't end that well, but fortunately for  millions of other people, like this child who was treated  again in the early 1940s, who was again dying of a sepsis, and within just six days, you can see, recovered thanks to this  wonder drug, penicillin. Millions have lived, and global health has been transformed. Now, antibiotics have been used for patients like this, but they've also been  used rather frivolously in some instances, for treating someone  with just a cold or the flu, which they might not have  responded to an antibiotic, and they've also been  used in large quantities sub-therapeutically, which means in small concentrations, to make chicken and hogs grow faster. Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat, we've spent a lot of  antibiotics on animals, not for treatment, not for sick animals, but primarily for growth promotion.Now, what did that lead us to? Basically, the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem, because we've now selected for just the resistant bacteria.And I'm sure you've all read about this in the newspapers, you've seen this in every magazine that you come across, but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem. This is serious. The next slide I'm about to show you is  of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter. Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug, and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug. And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance, mostly under about 10 percent across the United States. Now watch what happens  when we play the video.So I don't know where you live, but wherever it is, it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999, and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance. It's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries, and at the heart of it,  you might say, well, isn't this really just a medical issue? If we taught doctors how not  to use antibiotics as much, if we taught patients how  not to demand antibiotics, perhaps this really wouldn't be an issue, and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics. Now, it turns out that there's something  fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs, which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics, not only am I affected but  others are affected as well, in the same way as if I  choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere, that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere, and I don't necessarily take these costs into consideration. This is what economists might  call a problem of the commons, and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case  of antibiotics as well: that we don't consider — and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems — do not consider the costs  that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used.Now, that's a problem that's similar to another area that we all know about, which is of fuel use and energy, and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution  and climate change. And typically, in the case of energy, there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem. One is, we can make better use of the oil that we have, and that's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics, and we can do this in a number of ways that we'll talk about in a second, but the other option is the  ""drill, baby, drill"" option, which in the case of antibiotics  is to go find new antibiotics.Now, these are not separate. They're related, because if we invest heavily in new oil wells, we reduce the incentives  for conservation of oil in the same way that's going  to happen for antibiotics. The reverse is also going  to happen, which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately, we don't necessarily have  to make the investments in new drug development.And if you thought that these two were entirely, fully balanced between these two options, you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we're playing. The game is really one of coevolution, and coevolution is, in  this particular picture, between cheetahs and gazelles. Cheetahs have evolved to run faster, because if they didn't run faster, they wouldn't get any lunch. Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don't run faster, they would be lunch. Now, this is the game we're playing against the bacteria, except we're not the cheetahs, we're the gazelles, and the bacteria would, just in the course of this little talk, would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error, trying it over and over again. Whereas how do we stay  ahead of the bacteria? We have drug discovery processes, screening molecules, we have clinical trials, and then, when we think we have a drug, then we have the FDA regulatory process. And once we go through all of that, then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria.Now, this is clearly not a  game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead. We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down, and there are ideas that we  can borrow from energy that are helpful in thinking about how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well. Now, if you think about how we deal with energy pricing, for instance, we consider emissions taxes, which means we're imposing  the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy. We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well, and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately. There are clean energy subsidies, which are to switch to fuels which don't pollute as much or perhaps don't need fossil fuels. Now, the analogy here is, perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics, and if you think about it, what are  good substitutes for antibiotics? Well, turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work, so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people, particularly against  the seasonal influenza. And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use, both in this country as well as in many other countries, and that could really help. A third option might include something like tradeable permits. And these seem like faraway scenarios, but if you consider the  fact that we might not have antibiotics for many  people who have infections, we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others, and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need, but also on the basis of pricing. And certainly consumer education works. Very often, people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so, and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful, both on energy — When you tell someone that they're using a lot of energy during peak hour, they tend to cut back, and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics. A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they'd used in the previous month, and this was purely an  informational feedback, there was no shaming, but essentially that provided  some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics.Now, there's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well. If you look at the price of penicillin, the cost per day is about 10 cents. It's a fairly cheap drug. If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive, so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics, the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot. But what is that really telling us? That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap, effective  antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future, and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation. That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies, in the same way that  gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus, to, say, the development of electric cars. Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention, but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics, they're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs, which might save a patient's life only for a few months or perhaps a year, whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient's life forever. So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift, and it's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country, in many parts of the world, the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable. So we need to think about that.Now, there are backstop options, which is other alternative technologies that people are working on. It includes bacteriophages, probiotics, quorum sensing, synbiotics.Now, all of these are useful avenues to pursue, and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new  antibiotics starts going higher, and we've seen that the market does actually respond, and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new  antibiotics and development. But there are challenges here. We don't want to just throw money at a problem. What we want to be able to do is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics, and that really is the challenge here.Now, going back to these technologies, you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film, ""Nature will find a way."" So it's not as if these are  permanent solutions. We really have to remember that, whatever the technology might be, that nature will find some  way to work around it.You might think, well,  this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria, but it turns out that we  have the exact same identical problem in  many other fields as well, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a serious problem  in India and South Africa. Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive, and in some instances, even those don't work and you have XDR TB. Viruses are becoming resistant. Agricultural pests. Malaria parasites. Right now, much of the world depends on one drug, artemisinin drugs, essentially to treat malaria. Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged, and if this were to become widespread, that puts at risk the single drug that we have to  treat malaria around the world in a way that's currently  safe and efficacious. Mosquitos develop resistance. If you have kids, you probably  know about head lice, and if you're from New York City, I understand that the  specialty there is bedbugs. So those are also resistant. And we have to bring an example from across the pond. Turns out that rats are  also resistant to poisons.Now, what's common  to all of these things is the idea that we've had these technologies to control nature only for  the last 70, 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink, we have squandered our ability to control, because we have not recognized that natural selection and  evolution was going to find a way to get back, and we need to completely rethink how we're going to use measures to control biological organisms, and rethink how we incentivize the development, introduction, in the case of antibiotics prescription, and use of these valuable resources. And we really now need to  start thinking about them as natural resources. And so we stand at a crossroads. An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business. The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ramanan_laxminarayan_the_coming_crisis_in_antibiotics
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"On January 4, 1934, a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on, still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today, still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet. That young man wasn't a politician, he wasn't a businessman, a civil rights activist or a faith leader. He was that most unlikely of heroes, an economist. His name was Simon Kuznets and the report that  he delivered was called ""National Income, 1929-1932.""Now, you might think this is a rather dry and dull report. And you're absolutely right. It's dry as a bone. But this report is the foundation of how, today, we judge the  success of countries: what we know best as Gross Domestic Product, GDP.GDP has defined and shaped our lives for the last 80 years. And today I want to talk about a different way to measure the success of countries, a different way to define  and shape our lives for the next 80 years.But first, we have to understand how GDP came to dominate our lives. Kuznets' report was delivered at a moment of crisis. The U.S. economy was plummeting into the Great Depression and policy makers were  struggling to respond. Struggling because they didn't know what was going on. They didn't have data and statistics. So what Kuznet's report gave them was reliable data on what  the U.S. economy was producing, updated year by year. And armed with this information, policy makers were, eventually, able to find a way out  of the slump. And because Kuznets' invention was found to be so useful, it spread around the world. And now today, every country produces GDP statistics.But, in that first report, Kuznets himself delivered a warning. It's in the introductory chapter. On page seven he says, ""The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of  national income as defined above."" It's not the greatest sound  bite in the world, and it's dressed up in the cautious  language of the economist. But his message was clear: GDP is a tool to help us measure economic performance. It's not a measure of our well-being. And it shouldn't be a guide  to all decision making.But we have ignored Kuznets' warning. We live in a world where GDP is the benchmark of success in a global economy. Our politicians boast when GDP goes up. Markets move and trillions of dollars of capital move around the world based on which countries are going up and which countries  are going down, all measured in GDP. Our societies have become engines to create more GDP.But we know that GDP is flawed. It ignores the environment. It counts bombs and prisons as progress. It can't count happiness or community. And it has nothing to say  about fairness or justice. Is it any surprise that our world, marching to the drumbeat of GDP, is teetering on the brink of environmental disaster and filled with anger and conflict?We need a better way to measure our societies, a measure based on the real  things that matter to real people. Do I have enough to eat? Can I read and write? Am I safe? Do I have rights? Do I live in a society where I'm not discriminated against? Is my future and the future of my children  prevented from environmental destruction? These are questions that GDP does not and cannot answer.There have, of course, been efforts in the past to move beyond GDP. But I believe that we're living in a moment when we are ready for a measurement revolution. We're ready because we've seen, in the financial crisis of 2008, how our fetish for economic growth led us so far astray. We've seen, in the Arab Spring, how countries like Tunisia were supposedly economic superstars, but they were societies that were seething with discontentment. We're ready, because today we have the technology to gather and analyze data in ways that would have been unimaginable to Kuznets.Today, I'd like to introduce you  to the Social Progress Index. It's a measure of the  well-being of society, completely separate from GDP. It's a whole new way of looking at the world. The Social Progress Index begins by defining what it means to be a good society based around three dimensions. The first is, does everyone have the basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have access to the building blocks  to improve their lives: education, information, health and sustainable environment? And then third, does every  individual have access to a chance to pursue their goals and dreams and ambitions free from obstacles? Do they have rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination and access to the the world's most advanced knowledge? Together, these 12 components form the Social Progress framework. And for each of these 12 components, we have indicators to measure  how countries are performing. Not indicators of effort or intention, but real achievement. We don't measure how much a country spends on healthcare, we measure the length and  quality of people's lives. We don't measure whether governments pass laws against discrimination, we measure whether people  experience discrimination.But what you want to know is who's top, don't you? (Laughter) I knew that, I knew that, I knew that. Okay, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you on this chart. So here we are, what I've done here is put on the  vertical axis social progress. Higher is better. And then, just for comparison, just for fun, on the horizontal axis is GDP per capita. Further to the right is more. So the country in the world with the highest social progress, the number one country on social progress is New Zealand. (Applause) Well done! Never been; must go. (Laughter) The country with the least social progress, I'm sorry to say, is Chad. I've never been; maybe next year. (Laughter) Or maybe the year after.Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, ""Aha, but New Zealand has a higher GDP than Chad!"" It's a good point, well made. But let me show you two other countries. Here's the United States — considerably richer than New Zealand, but with a lower level of social progress. And then here's Senegal — it's got a higher level of  social progress than Chad, but the same level of GDP. So what's going on? Well, look. Let me bring in the rest of  the countries of the world, the 132 we've been able to measure, each one represented by a dot. There we go. Lots of dots. Now, obviously I can't do all of them, so a few highlights for you: The highest ranked G7 country is Canada. My country, the United Kingdom, is sort of middling, sort of dull, but who cares — at least we beat the French. (Laughter) And then looking at the  emerging economies, top of the BRICS,  pleased to say, is Brazil. (Applause) Come on, cheer! Go, Brazil! Beating South Africa, then Russia, then China and then India. Tucked away on the right-hand side, you will see a dot of a  country with a lot of GDP but not a huge amount  of social progress — that's Kuwait. Just above Brazil is a social progress superpower — that's Costa Rica. It's got a level of social progress the same  as some Western European countries, with a much lower GDP.Now, my slide is getting  a little cluttered and I'd like to step back a bit. So let me take away these countries, and then pop in the regression line. So this shows the average relationship between GDP and social progress. The first thing to notice, is that there's lots of noise around the trend line. And what this shows, what this empirically demonstrates, is that GDP is not destiny. At every level of GDP per capita, there are opportunities for more social progress, risks of less. The second thing to notice is that for poor countries, the curve is really steep. So what this tells us is that if poor countries can get a little bit of extra GDP, and if they reinvest that in doctors, nurses, water supplies, sanitation, etc., there's a lot of social progress bang for your GDP buck. And that's good news, and that's what  we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, with a lot of people lifted out of poverty by economic growth and good policies in poorer countries.But go on a bit further up the curve, and then we see it flattening out. Each extra dollar of GDP is buying less and less social progress. And with more and more of the world's population living on this part of the curve, it means GDP is becoming less and less useful as a guide to our development. I'll show you an example of Brazil.Here's Brazil: social progress of about 70 out of 100, GDP per capita about  14,000 dollars a year. And look, Brazil's above the line. Brazil is doing a reasonably good job of turning GDP into social progress. But where does Brazil go next? Let's say that Brazil adopts a bold economic plan to double GDP in the next decade. But that is only half a plan. It's less than half a plan, because where does Brazil want to go on social progress? Brazil, it's possible to increase your growth, increase your GDP, while stagnating or going backwards on social progress. We don't want Brazil to become like Russia. What you really want is for Brazil to get ever more efficient at creating  social progress from its GDP, so it becomes more like New Zealand. And what that means is that Brazil needs to prioritize social progress in its development plan and see that it's not just growth alone, it's growth with social progress. And that's what the Social  Progress Index does: It reframes the debate about development, not just about GDP alone, but inclusive, sustainable growth that brings real improvements  in people's lives. And it's not just about countries.Earlier this year, with our friends from the Imazon  nonprofit here in Brazil, we launched the first subnational  Social Progress Index. We did it for the Amazon region. It's an area the size of  Europe, 24 million people, one of the most deprived  parts of the country. And here are the results, and this is broken down into nearly 800 different municipalities. And with this detailed information about the real quality of life in this part of the country, Imazon and other partners from government,  business and civil society can work together to construct a development plan that will help really improve people's lives, while protecting that  precious global asset that is the Amazon Rainforest. And this is just the beginning, You can create a Social Progress Index for any state, region,  city or municipality. We all know and love TEDx; this is Social Pogress-x. This is a tool for anyone to come and use.Contrary to the way we  sometimes talk about it, GDP was not handed down from  God on tablets of stone. (Laughter) It's a measurement tool invented in the 20th century to address the challenges of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we face new challenges: aging, obesity, climate change, and so on. To face those challenges, we need new tools of measurement, new ways of valuing progress.Imagine if we could measure what nonprofits, charities, volunteers, civil society organizations really contribute to our society. Imagine if businesses competed not just on the basis of their economic contribution, but on their contribution  to social progress. Imagine if we could hold  politicians to account for really improving people's lives. Imagine if we could work together — government, business,  civil society, me, you — and make this century the  century of social progress. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_what_the_social_progress_index_can_reveal_about_your_country
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"What has the War on Drugs  done to the world? Look at the murder and mayhem in Mexico, Central America, so many  other parts of the planet, the global black market estimated at 300 billion dollars a year, prisons packed in the  United States and elsewhere, police and military drawn  into an unwinnable war that violates basic rights,  and ordinary citizens just hope they don't get  caught in the crossfire, and meanwhile, more people using more drugs than ever. It's my country's history  with alcohol prohibition and Al Capone, times 50.Which is why it's  particularly galling to me as an American that we've  been the driving force behind this global drug war. Ask why so many countries criminalize drugs they'd never heard of, why the U.N. drug treaties emphasize criminalization over health, even why most of the money worldwide for dealing with drug abuse goes not to helping agencies but those that punish, and you'll find the good old U.S. of A.Why did we do this? Some people, especially in Latin America, think it's not really about drugs. It's just a subterfuge for advancing the realpolitik interests of the U.S. But by and large, that's not it. We don't want gangsters and guerrillas funded with illegal drug money terrorizing and taking over other nations. No, the fact is, America really is crazy when it comes to drugs. I mean, don't forget, we're  the ones who thought that we could prohibit alcohol. So think about our global drug war not as any sort of rational policy, but as the international projection of a domestic psychosis. (Applause)But here's the good news. Now it's the Russians leading the Drug War and not us. Most politicians in my country want to roll back the Drug War now, put fewer people behind bars, not more, and I'm proud to say as an American that we now lead the world in reforming marijuana policies. It's now legal for medical purposes in almost half our 50 states, millions of people can  purchase their marijuana, their medicine, in government- licensed dispensaries, and over half my fellow  citizens now say it's time to legally regulate and tax marijuana more or less like alcohol. That's what Colorado and  Washington are doing, and Uruguay, and others  are sure to follow.So that's what I do: work to end the Drug War. I think it all started growing up in a fairly religious, moral family, eldest son of a rabbi, going off to university where I smoked some marijuana and I liked it. (Laughter) And I liked drinking too, but it was obvious that alcohol was really the more dangerous of the two, but my friends and I could get busted for smoking a joint.Now, that hypocrisy kept bugging me, so I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on international drug control. I talked my way into the State Department. I got a security clearance. I interviewed hundreds of DEA and other law enforcement agents all around Europe and the Americas, and I'd ask them, ""What do you think the answer is?"" Well, in Latin America, they'd say to me, ""You can't really cut off the supply. The answer lies back in the U.S., in cutting off the demand."" So then I go back home and I talk to people involved in anti-drug efforts there, and they'd say, ""You know, Ethan, you can't  really cut off the demand. The answer lies over there. You've got to cut off the supply."" Then I'd go and talk  to the guys in customs trying to stop drugs at the borders, and they'd say, ""You're  not going to stop it here. The answer lies over there, in cutting off supply and demand."" And it hit me: Everybody involved in this thought the answer lay in that area about which they knew the least.So that's when I started  reading everything I could about psychoactive drugs:  the history, the science, the politics, all of it, and the more one read, the more it hit you how a thoughtful, enlightened, intelligent  approach took you over here, whereas the politics and laws of my country were taking you over here. And that disparity struck me as this incredible intellectual and moral puzzle.There's probably never been a drug-free society. Virtually every society has ingested psychoactive substances to deal with pain, increase  our energy, socialize, even commune with God. Our desire to alter our consciousness may be as fundamental as our desires for food, companionship and sex. So our true challenge is to learn how to live with drugs so they cause the least possible harm and in some cases the  greatest possible benefit.I'll tell you something else I learned, that the reason some drugs  are legal and others not has almost nothing to do  with science or health or the relative risk of drugs, and almost everything to do with who uses and who is perceived  to use particular drugs. In the late 19th century, when most of the drugs that are now illegal were legal, the principal consumers  of opiates in my country and others were middle-aged white women, using them to alleviate aches and pains when few other analgesics were available. And nobody thought about  criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to  put Grandma behind bars. But when hundreds of thousands of Chinese started showing up in my country, working hard on the railroads and the mines and then kicking back in the evening just like they had in the old country with a few puffs on that opium pipe, that's when you saw the  first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada, driven by racist fears of Chinese transforming white women into opium-addicted sex slaves. The first cocaine prohibition  laws, similarly prompted by racist fears of black men  sniffing that white powder and forgetting their proper place in Southern society. And the first marijuana prohibition laws, all about fears of Mexican migrants in the West and the Southwest. And what was true in my country, is true in so many others as well, with both the origins of these laws and their implementation. Put it this way, and I exaggerate only slightly: If the principal smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principal consumers of Viagra were poor young black men, then smokable cocaine would be easy to get with a prescription from your doctor and selling Viagra would get you  five to 10 years behind bars. (Applause)I used to be a professor teaching about this. Now I'm an activist, a human rights activist, and what drives me is my shame at living in an otherwise great nation that has less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It's the people I meet  who have lost someone they love to drug-related  violence or prison or overdose or AIDS because our drug policies emphasize criminalization over health. It's good people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom,  even their children to the state, not because they hurt anyone but solely because they chose to use one drug instead of another.So is legalization the answer? On that, I'm torn: three days a week I think yes, three days a week I think no, and on Sundays I'm agnostic. But since today is Tuesday, let me just say that legally  regulating and taxing most of the drugs that  are now criminalized would radically reduce  the crime, violence, corruption and black markets, and the problems of adulterated and unregulated drugs, and improve public safety, and allow taxpayer resources to be developed to more useful purposes. I mean, look, the markets  in marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine are global commodities markets just like the global markets  in alcohol, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and so many other things. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply. Knock out one source and another inevitably emerges. People tend to think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation when in fact it represents  the abdication of regulation with criminals filling the void. Which is why putting criminal laws and police front and center in trying to control a dynamic global commodities market is a recipe for disaster. And what we really need to do is to bring the underground drug markets as much as possible aboveground and regulate them as  intelligently as we can to minimize both the harms of drugs and the harms of prohibitionist policies.Now, with marijuana, that obviously means legally regulating and  taxing it like alcohol. The benefits of doing so are enormous, the risks minimal. Will more people use marijuana? Maybe, but it's not  going to be young people, because it's not going to  be legalized for them, and quite frankly, they already have the best access to marijuana. I think it's going to be older people. It's going to be people in their 40s and 60s and 80s who find they prefer a little marijuana to that drink in the evening or the sleeping pill or that it helps with  their arthritis or diabetes or maybe helps spice up a  long-term marriage. (Laughter) And that just might be a  net public health benefit.As for the other drugs, look at Portugal, where  nobody goes to jail for possessing drugs, and the government's made  a serious commitment to treating addiction as a health issue. Look at Switzerland,  Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, where people who have been addicted to heroin for many years and repeatedly tried to quit and failed can get pharmaceutical  heroin and helping services in medical clinics, and  the results are in: Illegal drug abuse and disease and overdoses and crime  and arrests all go down, health and well-being improve, taxpayers benefit, and many drug users even put their addictions behind them.Look at New Zealand, which  recently enacted a law allowing certain recreational  drugs to be sold legally provided their safety had been established. Look here in Brazil, and some other countries, where a remarkable psychoactive substance, ayahuasca, can be legally  bought and consumed provided it's done so  within a religious context. Look in Bolivia and Peru, where all sorts of products  made from the coca leaf, the source of cocaine, are sold legally over the counter with no apparent harm to people's public health. I mean, don't forget, Coca-Cola had cocaine in it until 1900, and so far as we know was no more addictive than Coca-Cola is today.Conversely, think about cigarettes: Nothing can both hook you  and kill you like cigarettes. When researchers ask heroin addicts what's the toughest drug to  quit, most say cigarettes. Yet in my country and many others, half of all the people who  were ever addicted to cigarettes have quit without anyone being  arrested or put in jail or sent to a ""treatment program"" by a prosecutor or a judge. What did it were higher taxes and time and place  restrictions on sale and use and effective anti-smoking campaigns. Now, could we reduce smoking even more by making it totally illegal? Probably. But just imagine the drug war nightmare that would result.So the challenges we face today are twofold. The first is the policy challenge of designing and implementing alternatives to ineffective prohibitionist policies, even as we need to get  better at regulating and living with the drugs  that are now legal. But the second challenge is tougher, because it's about us. The obstacles to reform  lie not just out there in the power of the  prison industrial complex or other vested interests  that want to keep things the way they are, but within each and every one of us. It's our fears and our lack of knowledge and imagination that stands  in the way of real reform. And ultimately, I think that  boils down to the kids, and to every parent's desire to put our baby in a bubble, and the fear that somehow drugs will pierce that bubble and put our young ones at risk. In fact, sometimes it  seems like the entire War on Drugs gets justified as one great big child protection act, which any young person  can tell you it's not.So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a  healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education  mantra: Safety first.So this is what I've dedicated my life to, to building an organization and a movement of people who believe we  need to turn our backs on the failed prohibitions of the past and embrace new drug  policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights, where people who come from across the political spectrum and every other spectrum as well, where people who love our drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give  a damn about drugs, but every one of us believes  that this War on Drugs, this backward, heartless,  disastrous War on Drugs, has got to end.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.Chris Anderson: Ethan, congrats — quite the reaction. That was a powerful talk. Not quite a complete standing O, though, and I'm guessing that some people here and maybe a few watching online, maybe someone knows a teenager or a friend or whatever who got sick, maybe died from some drug overdose. I'm sure you've had these people approach you before. What do you say to them?Ethan Nadelmann: Chris, the most amazing thing that's happened of late is that I've met a growing number of people who have actually  lost a sibling or a child to a drug overdose, and 10 years ago, those  people just wanted to say, let's line up all the drug  dealers and shoot them and that will solve it. And what they've come to understand is that the Drug War did  nothing to protect their kids. If anything, it made it more likely that those kids were put at risk. And so they're now becoming part of this drug policy reform movement. There's other people who have kids, one's addicted to alcohol, the other one's addicted to cocaine or heroin, and they ask themselves the question: Why does this kid get to  take one step at a time and try to get better and that one's got to deal with jail and police and criminals all the time? So everybody's understanding, the Drug War's not protecting anybody.CA: Certainly in the U.S.,  you've got political gridlock on most issues. Is there any realistic chance of anything actually shifting on this  issue in the next five years?EN: I'd say it's quite remarkable.  I'm getting all these calls from journalists now who are saying to me, ""Ethan, it seems like the only two issues advancing politically in America right now are marijuana law reform and gay marriage. What are you doing right?"" And then you're looking at  bipartisanship breaking out with, actually, Republicans in the Congress and state legislatures  allowing bills to be enacted with majority Democratic support, so we've gone from being sort of the third rail, the most fearful issue of American politics, to becoming one of the most successful.CA: Ethan, thank you so much for coming to TEDGlobal. EN: Chris, thanks so much.CA: Thank you. EN: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_nadelmann_why_we_need_to_end_the_war_on_drugs
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"They told me that I'm a traitor to my own profession, that I should be fired, have my medical license taken away, that I should go back to my own country. My email got hacked. In a discussion forum for other doctors, someone took credit for ""Twitter-bombing"" my account. Now, I didn't know if this was a good or bad thing, but then came the response: ""Too bad it wasn't a real bomb.""I never thought that I would do something that would provoke this level of anger among other doctors. Becoming a doctor was my dream. I grew up in China, and my earliest memories are of being rushed to the hospital because I had such bad asthma that I was there nearly every week. I had this one doctor, Dr. Sam, who always took care of me. She was about the same age as my mother. She had this wild, curly hair, and she always wore these bright yellow flowery dresses. She was one of those doctors who, if you fell and you broke your arm, she would ask you why you weren't laughing because it's your humerus. Get it? See, you'd groan, but she'd always make you feel better after having seen her. Well, we all have that childhood hero that we want to grow up to be just like, right? Well, I wanted to be just like Dr. Sam. When I was eight, my parents and I moved to the U.S., and ours became the typical immigrant narrative. My parents cleaned hotel rooms and washed dishes and pumped gas so that I could pursue my dream. Well, eventually I learned enough English, and my parents were so happy the day that I got into medical school and took my oath of healing and service.But then one day, everything changed. My mother called me to tell me that she wasn't feeling well, she had a cough that wouldn't go away, she was short of breath and tired. Well, I knew that my mother was someone who never complained about anything. For her to tell me that something was the matter, I knew something had to be really wrong. And it was: We found out that she had stage IV breast cancer, cancer that by then had spread to her lungs, her bones, and her brain. My mother was brave, though, and she had hope. She went through surgery and radiation, and was on her third round of chemotherapy when she lost her address book. She tried to look up her oncologist's phone number on the Internet and she found it, but she found something else too. On several websites, he was listed as a highly paid speaker to a drug company, and in fact often spoke on behalf of the same chemo regimen that he had prescribed her. She called me in a panic, and I didn't know what to believe. Maybe this was the right chemo regimen for her, but maybe it wasn't. It made her scared and it made her doubt. When it comes to medicine, having that trust is a must, and when that trust is gone, then all that's left is fear.There's another side to this fear. As a medical student, I was taking care of this 19-year-old who was biking back to his dorm when he got struck and hit, run over by an SUV. He had seven broken ribs, shattered hip bones, and he was bleeding inside his belly and inside his brain. Now, imagine being his parents who flew in from Seattle, 2,000 miles away, to find their son in a coma. I mean, you'd want to find out what's going on with him, right? They asked to attend our bedside rounds where we discussed his condition and his plan, which I thought was a reasonable request, and also would give us a chance to show them how much we were trying and how much we cared. The head doctor, though, said no. He gave all kinds of reasons. Maybe they'll get in the nurse's way. Maybe they'll stop students from asking questions. He even said, ""What if they see mistakes and sue us?"" What I saw behind every excuse was deep fear, and what I learned was that to become a doctor, we have to put on our white coats, put up a wall, and hide behind it. There's a hidden epidemic in medicine. Of course, patients are scared when they come to the doctor. Imagine you wake up with this terrible bellyache, you go to the hospital, you're lying in this strange place, you're on this hospital gurney, you're wearing this flimsy gown, strangers are coming to poke and prod at you. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't even know if you're going to get the blanket you asked for 30 minutes ago. But it's not just patients who are scared; doctors are scared too. We're scared of patients finding out who we are and what medicine is all about. And so what do we do? We put on our white coats and we hide behind them. Of course, the more we hide, the more people want to know what it is that we're hiding. The more fear then spirals into mistrust and poor medical care. We don't just have a fear of sickness, we have a sickness of fear.Can we bridge this disconnect between what patients need and what doctors do? Can we overcome the sickness of fear? Let me ask you differently: If hiding isn't the answer, what if we did the opposite? What if doctors were to become totally transparent with their patients?Last fall, I conducted a research study to find out what it is that people want to know about their healthcare. I didn't just want to study patients in a hospital, but everyday people. So my two medical students, Suhavi Tucker and Laura Johns, literally took their research to the streets. They went to banks, coffee shops, senior centers, Chinese restaurants and train stations. What did they find? Well, when we asked people, ""What do you want to know about your healthcare?"" people responded with what they want to know about their doctors, because people understand health care to be the individual interaction between them and their doctors. When we asked, ""What do you want to know about your doctors?"" people gave three different answers. Some want to know that their doctor is competent and certified to practice medicine. Some want to be sure that their doctor is unbiased and is making decisions based on evidence and science, not on who pays them. Surprisingly to us, many people want to know something else about their doctors. Jonathan, a 28-year-old law student, says he wants to find someone who is comfortable with LGBTQ patients and specializes in LGBT health. Serena, a 32-year-old accountant, says that it's important to her for her doctor to share her values when it comes to reproductive choice and women's rights. Frank, a 59-year-old hardware store owner, doesn't even like going to the doctor and wants to find someone who believes in prevention first, but who is comfortable with alternative treatments. One after another, our respondents told us that that doctor-patient relationship is a deeply intimate one — that to show their doctors their bodies and tell them their deepest secrets, they want to first understand their doctor's values. Just because doctors have to see every patient doesn't mean that patients have to see every doctor. People want to know about their doctors first so that they can make an informed choice.As a result of this, I formed a campaign, Who's My Doctor? that calls for total transparency in medicine. Participating doctors voluntarily disclose on a public website not just information about where we went to medical school and what specialty we're in, but also our conflicts of interest. We go beyond the Government in the Sunshine Act about drug company affiliations, and we talk about how we're paid. Incentives matter. If you go to your doctor because of back pain, you might want to know he's getting paid 5,000 dollars to perform spine surgery versus 25 dollars to refer you to see a physical therapist, or if he's getting paid the same thing no matter what he recommends. Then, we go one step further. We add our values when it comes to women's health, LGBT health, alternative medicine, preventive health, and end-of-life decisions. We pledge to our patients that we are here to serve you, so you have a right to know who we are. We believe that transparency can be the cure for fear.I thought some doctors would sign on and others wouldn't, but I had no idea of the huge backlash that would ensue. Within one week of starting Who's My Doctor? Medscape's public forum and several online doctors' communities had thousands of posts about this topic. Here are a few.From a gastroenterologist in Portland: ""I devoted 12 years of my life to being a slave. I have loans and mortgages. I depend on lunches from drug companies to serve patients."" Well, times may be hard for everyone, but try telling your patient making 35,000 dollars a year to serve a family of four that you need the free lunch.From an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte: ""I find it an invasion of my privacy to disclose where my income comes from. My patients don't disclose their incomes to me."" But your patients' sources of income don't affect your health.From a psychiatrist in New York City: ""Pretty soon we will have to disclose whether we prefer cats to dogs, what model of car we drive, and what toilet paper we use."" Well, how you feel about Toyotas or Cottonelle won't affect your patients' health, but your views on a woman's right to choose and preventive medicine and end-of-life decisions just might. And my favorite, from a Kansas City cardiologist: ""More government-mandated stuff? Dr. Wen needs to move back to her own country."" Well, two pieces of good news. First of all, this is meant to be voluntary and not mandatory, and second of all, I'm American and I'm already here. (Laughter) (Applause)Within a month, my employers were getting calls asking for me to be fired. I received mail at my undisclosed home address with threats to contact the medical board to sanction me. My friends and family urged me to quit this campaign. After the bomb threat, I was done. But then I heard from patients. Over social media, a TweetChat, which I'd learned what that was by then, generated 4.3 million impressions, and thousands of people wrote to encourage me to continue. They wrote with things like, ""If doctors are doing something they're that ashamed of, they shouldn't be doing it."" ""Elected officials have to disclose campaign contributions. Lawyers have to disclose conflicts of interests. Why shouldn't doctors?"" And finally, many people wrote and said, ""Let us patients decide what's important when we're choosing a doctor."" In our initial trial, over 300 doctors have taken the total transparency pledge. What a crazy new idea, right? But actually, this is not that new of a concept at all. Remember Dr. Sam, my doctor in China, with the goofy jokes and the wild hair? Well, she was my doctor, but she was also our neighbor who lived in the building across the street. I went to the same school as her daughter. My parents and I trusted her because we knew who she was and what she stood for, and she had no need to hide from us. Just one generation ago, this was the norm in the U.S. as well. You knew that your family doctor was the father of two teenage boys, that he quit smoking a few years ago, that he says he's a regular churchgoer, but you see him twice a year: once at Easter and once when his mother-in-law comes to town. You knew what he was about, and he had no need to hide from you. But the sickness of fear has taken over, and patients suffer the consequences.I know this firsthand. My mother fought her cancer for eight years. She was a planner, and she thought a lot about how she wanted to live and how she wanted to die. Not only did she sign advance directives, she wrote a 12-page document about how she had suffered enough, how it was time for her to go. One day, when I was a resident physician, I got a call to say that she was in the intensive care unit. By the time I got there, she was about to be intubated and put on a breathing machine. ""But this is not what she wants,"" I said, ""and we have documents."" The ICU doctor looked at me in the eye, pointed at my then 16-year-old sister, and said, ""Do you remember when you were that age? How would you have liked to grow up without your mother?"" Her oncologist was there too, and said, ""This is your mother. Can you really face yourself for the rest of your life if you don't do everything for her?"" I knew my mother so well. I understood what her directives meant so well, but I was a physician. That was the single hardest decision I ever made, to let her die in peace, and I carry those words of those doctors with me every single day.We can bridge the disconnect between what doctors do and what patients need. We can get there, because we've been there before, and we know that transparency gets us to that trust. Research has shown us that openness also helps doctors, that having open medical records, being willing to talk about medical errors, will increase patient trust, improve health outcomes, and reduce malpractice. That openness, that trust, is only going to be more important as we move from the infectious to the behavioral model of disease. Bacteria may not care so much about trust and intimacy, but for people to tackle the hard lifestyle choices, to address issues like smoking cessation, blood-pressure management and diabetes control, well, that requires us to establish trust.Here's what other transparent doctors have said.Brandon Combs, an internist in Denver: ""This has brought me closer to my patients. The type of relationship I've developed — that's why I entered medicine.""Aaron Stupple, an internist in Denver: ""I tell my patients that I am totally open with them. I don't hide anything from them. This is me. Now tell me about you. We're in this together.""May Nguyen, a family physician in Houston: ""My colleagues are astounded by what I'm doing. They ask me how I could be so brave. I said, I'm not being brave, it's my job.""I leave you today with a final thought. Being totally transparent is scary. You feel naked, exposed and vulnerable, but that vulnerability, that humility, it can be an extraordinary benefit to the practice of medicine. When doctors are willing to step off our pedestals, take off our white coats, and show our patients who we are and what medicine is all about, that's when we begin to overcome the sickness of fear. That's when we establish trust. That's when we change the paradigm of medicine from one of secrecy and hiding to one that is fully open and engaged for our patients.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leana_wen_what_your_doctor_won_t_disclose
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"Vincent Moon: How can we use computers, cameras, microphones to represent the world in an alternative way, as much as possible? How, maybe, is it possible to use the Internet to create a new form of cinema? And actually, why do we record?Well, it is with such simple questions in mind that I started to make films 10 years ago, first with a friend, Christophe Abric. He had a website, La Blogothèque, dedicated to independent music. We were crazy about music. We wanted to represent  music in a different way, to film the music we love, the musicians we admired, as much as possible, far  from the music industry and far from the cliches attached to it. We started to publish every week sessions on the Internet. We are going to see a few extracts now.From Grizzly Bear in the shower to Sigur Ros playing in a Parisian cafe. From Phoenix playing by the Eiffel Tower to Tom Jones in his  hotel room in New York. From Arcade Fire in an elevator in the Olympia to Beirut going down a staircase in Brooklyn. From R.E.M. in a car to The National around a table at night in the south of France. From Bon Iver playing with some friends in an apartment in Montmartre to Yeasayer having a long night, and many, many, many more unknown or very famous bands.We published all those films for free on the Internet, and we wanted to share all those films and represent music in a different way. We wanted to create  another type of intimacy using all those new technologies. At the time, 10 years ago actually, there was no such project on the Internet, and I guess that's why the project we  were making, the Take Away Shows, got quite successful, reaching millions of viewers.After a while, I got a bit — I wanted to go somewhere else. I felt the need to travel and to discover some other music, to explore the world, going to other corners, and actually it was also this idea of nomadic cinema, sort of, that I had in mind. How could the use of new technologies  and the road fit together? How could I edit my films in a bus crossing the Andes? So I went on five-year travels around the globe. I started at the time in the digital film  and music label collection Petites Planètes, which was also an homage to French filmmaker Chris Marker. We're going to see now a few more extracts of those new films.From the tecno brega diva of northern Brazil, Gaby Amarantos to a female ensemble in Chechnya. From experimental electronic music  in Singapore with One Man Nation to Brazilian icon Tom Zé singing on his rooftop in São Paolo. From The Bambir, the great  rock band from Armenia to some traditional songs in a restaurant in Tbilisi, Georgia. From White Shoes, a great retro  pop band from Jakarta, Indonesia to DakhaBrakha, the revolutionary  band from Kiev, Ukraine. From Tomi Lebrero and his bandoneon and his friends in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to many other places and musicians around the world.My desire was to make it as a trek. To do all those films, it would have been impossible with a big company behind me, with a structure or anything. I was traveling alone with a backpack — computer, camera, microphones in it. Alone, actually, but  just with local people, meeting my team, which was absolutely not professional people, on the spot there, going from one place to another and to make cinema as a trek. I really believed that cinema could be this very simple thing: I want to make a film and you're going  to give me a place to stay for the night. I give you a moment of cinema and you offer me a capirinha. Well, or other drinks, depending on where you are.In Peru, they drink pisco sour. Well, when I arrived in Peru, actually, I had no idea about what I would do there. And I just had one phone number, actually, of one person. Three months later, after traveling all around the  country, I had recorded 33 films, only with the help of local people, only with the help of people that I was asking all the  time the same question: What is important to record here today? By living in such a way, by working without any structure, I was able to react to the moment and to decide, oh, this is  important to make now. This is important to  record that whole person. This is important to create this exchange. When I went to Chechnya, the first person I met looked at me and was like, ""What are you doing here? Are you a journalist? NGO? Politics? What kind of problems  are you going to study?"" Well, I was there to research on Sufi rituals in Chechnya, actually — incredible culture of Sufism in Chechnya, which is absolutely unknown  outside of the region. As soon as people understood that I would give them those films — I would publish them online for free under a Creative Commons license, but I would also really  give them to the people and I would let them do  what they want with it. I just want to represent  them in a beautiful light. I just want to portray them in a way that their grandchildren are going to look at their grandfather, and they're going to be like, ""Whoa, my grandfather is as  cool as Beyoncé."" (Laughter) It's a really important thing. (Applause)It's really important, because that's the way people are going to look differently at  their own culture, at their own land. They're going to think about it differently. It may be a way to maintain  a certain diversity. Why you will record? Hmm. There's a really good quote by American thinker Hakim Bey which says, ""Every recording is a tombstone of a live performance."" It's a really good  sentence to keep in mind nowadays in an era saturated by images. What's the point of that? Where do we go with it? I was researching. I was still  keeping this idea in mind: What's the point? I was researching on music, trying to pull, trying to get closer to a certain origin of it. Where is this all coming from? I am French. I had no idea about what I would discover,  which is a very simple thing: Everything was sacred, at first, and music was spiritual healing. How could I use my camera, my little tool, to get closer and maybe not only capture the trance but find an equivalent,  a cine-trance, maybe, something in complete harmony with the people?That is now my new research I'm doing on spirituality, on new  spirits around the world. Maybe a few more extracts now. From the Tana Toraja  funeral ritual in Indonesia to an Easter ceremony  in the north of Ethiopia. From jathilan, a popular trance ritual on the island of Java, to Umbanda in the north of Brazil. The Sufi rituals of Chechnya to a mass in the holiest  church of Armenia. Some Sufi songs in Harar, the holy city of Ethiopia, to an ayahuasca ceremony deep in the Amazon of  Peru with the Shipibo. Then to my new project,  the one I'm doing now here in Brazil, named ""Híbridos."" I'm doing it with Priscilla Telmon. It's research on the new  spiritualities all around the country. This is my quest, my own little quest  of what I call experimental ethnography, trying to hybrid all  those different genres, trying to regain a certain complexity.Why do we record? I was still there. I really believe cinema teaches us to see. The way we show the world is going to change the  way we see this world, and we live in a moment where the mass media are doing a terrible, terrible job at representing the world: violence, extremists, only spectacular events, only simplifications of everyday life. I think we are recording to regain a certain complexity. To reinvent life today, we have to make new forms of images. And it's very simple.Muito obrigado.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Vincent, Vincent, Vincent. Merci. We have to prepare for the following performance, and I have a question for you, and the question is this: You show up in places like the  ones you just have shown us, and you are carrying a camera and I assume that you are welcome but you are not always absolutely welcome. You walk into sacred rituals, private moments in a village, a town, a group of people. How do you break the barrier when you show up with a lens?VM: I think you break it with your body, more than with your knowledge. That's what it taught me to travel, to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain. The respect is stepping forward, not stepping backward, and I really think that by engaging your body in the moment, in the ceremony, in the places, people welcome you and understand your energy.BG: You told me that most of the videos you have made are  actually one single shot. You don't do much editing. I mean, you edited the ones for us at the beginning of the sessions because of the length, etc. Otherwise, you just go in and capture whatever happens in front of your eyes without much planning, and so is that the case? It's correct?VM: My idea is that I think that as long as we don't cut, in a way, as long as we let the viewer watch, more and more viewers  are going to feel closer, are going to get closer to the moment, to that moment and to that place. I really think of that as a matter  of respecting the viewer, to not cut all the time from one place to another, to just let the time go.BG: Tell me in a few words  about your new project, ""Híbridos,"" here in Brazil. Just before coming to  TEDGlobal, you have actually been traveling around  the country for that. Tell us a couple of things.VM: ""Híbridos"" is —  I really believe Brazil, far from the cliches, is the greatest religious country in the world, the greatest country  in terms of spirituality and in experimentations in spiritualities. And it's a big project I'm  doing over this year, which is researching in very different regions of Brazil, in very different forms of cults, and trying to understand  how people live together with spirituality nowadays.BG: The man who is going to  appear onstage momentarily, and Vincent's going to introduce him, is one of the subjects of  one of his past videos. When did you do a video with him?VM: I guess four years ago, four years in my first travel.BG: So it was one of  your first ones in Brazil. VM: It was amongst the  first ones in Brazil, yeah. I shot the film in Recife, in the place where he is from.BG: So let's introduce him.  Who are we waiting for?VM: I'll just make it very short. It's a very great honor for  me to welcome onstage one of the greatest Brazilian  musicians of all time. Please welcome Naná Vasconcelos.BG: Naná Vasconcelos!(Applause)(Music)Naná Vasconcelos: Let's go to the jungle.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vincent_moon_and_nana_vasconcelos_the_world_s_hidden_music_rituals
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"Picture this: It's Monday morning, you're at the office, you're settling in for the day at work, and this guy that you sort of  recognize from down the hall, walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair. Doesn't say a word — just rolls away with it. Doesn't give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs  that are out there. Doesn't acknowledge the fact  that you might need your chair to get some work done today. You wouldn't stand for  it. You'd make a stink. You'd follow that guy back to his cubicle and you'd say, ""Why my chair?""Okay, so now it's Tuesday morning and you're at the office, and a meeting invitation pops  up in your calendar. (Laughter) And it's from this woman who you  kind of know from down the hall, and the subject line references some  project that you heard a little bit about. But there's no agenda. There's no information about why you were invited to the meeting. And yet you accept the  meeting invitation, and you go. And when this highly  unproductive session is over, you go back to your desk, and you stand at your  desk and you say, ""Boy, I wish I had those two hours back, like I wish I had my chair back."" (Laughter)Every day, we allow our coworkers, who are otherwise very,  very nice people, to steal from us. And I'm talking about something far  more valuable than office furniture. I'm talking about time. Your time. In fact, I believe that we are in the middle of a global epidemic of a terrible new illness known as MAS: Mindless Accept Syndrome. (Laughter) The primary symptom of  Mindless Accept Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in your calendar. (Laughter) It's an involuntary reflex — ding,  click, bing — it's in your calendar, ""Gotta go, I'm already late  for a meeting."" (Laughter)Meetings are important, right? And collaboration is key to  the success of any enterprise. And a well-run meeting can yield  really positive, actionable results. But between globalization and pervasive information technology, the way that we work has really changed dramatically  over the last few years. And we're miserable. (Laughter) And we're miserable not because the  other guy can't run a good meeting, it's because of MAS, our  Mindless Accept Syndrome, which is a self-inflicted wound.Actually, I have evidence to prove that MAS is a global epidemic. Let me tell you why. A couple of years ago, I put a video  on Youtube, and in the video, I acted out every terrible  conference call you've ever been on. It goes on for about five minutes, and it has all the things that we  hate about really bad meetings. There's the moderator who has  no idea how to run the meeting. There are the participants who  have no idea why they're there. The whole thing kind of collapses into this collaborative train wreck. And everybody leaves very angry. It's kind of funny. (Laughter) Let's take a quick look. (Video) Our goal today is to come to an  agreement on a very important proposal. As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — Hi, who just joined? Hi, it's Joe. I'm working from home today. (Laughter) Hi, Joe. Thanks for  joining us today, great. I was just saying, we have a lot of people  on the call we'd like to get through, so let's skip the roll call and I'm gonna dive right in. Our goal today is to come to an  agreement on a very important proposal. As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — (Laughter) Hi, who just joined? No? I thought I heard a beep. (Laughter)Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds familiar  to me, too. A couple of weeks after I put that online, 500,000 people in dozens of countries, I mean dozens of countries, watched this video. And three years later, it's still getting  thousands of views every month. It's close to about a million right now. And in fact, some of the biggest companies in the world, companies that you've  heard of but I won't name, have asked for my permission to use  this video in their new-hire training to teach their new employees how  not to run a meeting at their company. And if the numbers — there are a million views and it's being used by all these companies — aren't enough proof that we have  a global problem with meetings, there are the many, many thousands of comments posted online after the video went up. Thousands of people wrote things like, ""OMG, that was my day today!"" ""That was my day every day!"" ""This is my life."" One guy wrote, ""It's funny because it's true. Eerily, sadly, depressingly true. It made me laugh until I cried. And cried. And I cried some more."" (Laughter) This poor guy said, ""My daily life until  retirement or death, sigh."" These are real quotes and it's real sad.A common theme running through all of these comments online is this fundamental belief  that we are powerless to do anything other  than go to meetings and suffer through these  poorly run meetings and live to meet another day. But the truth is, we're  not powerless at all. In fact, the cure for MAS is right here in our hands. It's right at our fingertips, literally. It's something that I call ¡No MAS! (Laughter) Which, if I remember my  high school Spanish, means something like,  ""Enough already, make it stop!""Here's how No MAS  works. It's very simple. First of all, the next time you  get a meeting invitation that doesn't have a lot  of information in it at all, click the tentative button! It's okay, you're allowed,  that's why it's there. It's right next to the accept button. Or the maybe button, or whatever button  is there for you not to accept immediately. Then, get in touch with the person who asked you to the meeting. Tell them you're very excited  to support their work, ask them what the goal  of the meeting is, and tell them you're interested in learning  how you can help them achieve their goal. And if we do this often enough, and we do it respectfully, people might start to be  a little bit more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations. And you can make more thoughtful  decisions about accepting it. People might actually start  sending out agendas. Imagine! Or they might not have a conference call with 12 people to talk about a status when they could just do a quick email and get it done with. People just might start to change their  behavior because you changed yours. And they just might bring your chair back, too. (Laughter) No MAS! Thank you. (Applause).","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_grady_how_to_save_the_world_or_at_least_yourself_from_bad_meetings
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"The Earth needs no introduction. It needs no introduction in part  because the Apollo 17 astronauts, when they were hurtling  around the moon in 1972, took this iconic image. It galvanized a whole  generation of human beings to realize that we're on  Spaceship Earth, fragile and finite as it is, and that we need  to take care of it. But while this picture is beautiful, it's static, and the Earth is constantly changing. It's changing on days' time scales with human activity. And the satellite imagery we  have of it today is old. Typically, years old. And that's important because you can't fix what you can't see. What we'd ideally want is images of the whole planet every day. So, what's standing in our way?What's the problem? This is the problem: Satellites are big, expensive  and they're slow. This one weighs three tons. It's six meters tall, four meters wide. It took up the entire fairing of a rocket just to launch it. One satellite, one rocket. It cost 855 million dollars. Satellites like these have  done an amazing job at helping us to understand our planet. But if we want to understand  it much more regularly, we need lots of satellites, and this model isn't scalable.So me and my friends,  we started Planet Labs to make satellites ultra-compact and small and highly capable. I'm going to show you what  our satellite looks like: This is our satellite.This is not a scale model, this is the real size. It's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, it weighs four kilograms, and we've stuffed the latest  and greatest electronics and sensor systems into  this little package so that even though this is really small, this can take pictures 10 times the resolution of the big satellite here, even though it weighs one  thousandth of the mass. And we call this satellite  ""Dove"" — Thank you. (Applause) We call this satellite ""Dove,"" and we call it ""Dove"" because  satellites are typically named after birds, but normally birds of prey: like Eagle, Hawk, Swoop,  Kill, I don't know, Kestrel, these sort of things. But ours have a  humanitarian mission, so we wanted to call them Doves. And we haven't just  built them, though. We've launched them. And not just one, but many.It all started in our garage. Yes, we built our first satellite prototype in our garage. Now, this is pretty normal for a Silicon Valley company that we are, but we believe it's the first time  for a space company. And that's not the only trick we learned from Silicon Valley. We rapidly prototype our satellites. We use ""release early,  release often"" on our software. And we take a different  risk approach. We take them outside and test them. We even put satellites in space just to test the satellites, and we've learned to manufacture our satellites at scale. We've used modern production techniques so we can build large numbers of them, I think for the first time. We call it agile aerospace, and that's what's enabled us to put so much capability into this little box.Now, what has bonded  our team over the years is the idea of democratizing access to satellite information. In fact, the founders of our  company, Chris, Robbie and I, we met over 15 years ago  at the United Nations when they were hosting a conference  about exactly that question: How do you use satellites  to help humanity? How do you use satellites to help  people in developing countries or with climate change? And this is what has bonded us. Our entire team is passionate about using satellites to help humanity. You could say  we're space geeks, but not only do we care  about what's up there, we care about what's down here, too.I'm going to show you a video from just four weeks ago  of two of our satellites being launched from the International Space Station. This is not an animation, this is a video taken by the astronaut  looking out of the window. It gives you a bit of a sense of  scale of our two satellites. It's like some of the  smallest satellites ever are being launched from  the biggest satellite ever. And right at the end, the solar array glints in the sun. It's really cool. Wait for it. Boom! Yeah. It's the money shot. (Laughter)So we didn't just launch  two of them like this, we launched 28 of them. It's the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in human history, and it's going to provide a completely radical new data set about our changing planet. But that's just the beginning. You see, we're going to launch more than 100 of these satellites like these over the  course of the next year. It's going to be the largest constellation of satellites in human history. And this is what it's going to do: Acting in a single-orbit plane that  stays fixed with respect to the sun, the Earth rotates underneath. They're all cameras pointed down, and they slowly scan across as  the Earth rotates underneath. The Earth rotates every 24 hours, so we scan every point on the  planet every 24 hours. It's a line scanner for the planet. We don't take a picture of  anywhere on the planet every day, we take a picture of every single place on the planet every day. Even though we launched these just a couple of weeks ago, we've already got some initial imagery from the satellites and I'm going to show it publicly for the first time right now. This is the very first picture taken by our satellite. It happened to be over  UC-Davis' campus in California when we  turned the camera on. But what's even cooler is when we compare it to the previous latest image of that area, which was taken many months ago. And the image on the left  is from our satellite, and we see buildings are being built. The general point is that we will be able to track urban growth as it happens around the whole world in all cities, every day.Water as well.Thank you. (Applause)We'll be able to see  the extent of all water bodies around the whole world every day and help water security. From water security  to food security. We'll see crops as they  grow in all the fields in every farmer's field around the planet every day. and help them to improve crop yield. This is a beautiful image that was taken just a few hours ago when the  satellite was flying over Argentina. The general point is there are probably hundreds and  thousands of applications of this data, I've mentioned a few, but there's others: deforestation, the ice caps melting. We can track all of these things, every tree on the planet every day. If you took the difference between today's image and yesterday's image, you'd see much of the world news — you'd see floods and fires and earthquakes. And we have decided, therefore, that the  best thing that we could do with our data is to ensure universal access to it. We want to ensure everyone can see it. Thank you. (Applause) We want to empower NGOs and  companies and scientists and journalists to be able to answer the questions that they have about the planet. We want to enable the developer community to run their apps on our data. In short, we want to democratize access to information about our planet.Which brings me back to this. You see, this will be an entirely new global data set. And we believe that together, we can help to take care  of our Spaceship Earth. And what I would like to leave you with is the following question: If you had access to imagery of the whole planet every single day, what would you do with that data? What problems would you solve? What exploration would you do? Well, I invite you to come and explore with us.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/will_marshall_teeny_tiny_satellites_that_photograph_the_entire_planet_every_day
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"Well, good afternoon. How many of you took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? (Applause) Woo hoo! Well, I have to tell you, from  the bottom of our hearts, thank you so very, very much. Do you know to date the ALS Association has raised 125 million dollars? Woo hoo! (Applause)It takes me back to the summer of 2011. My family, my kids had all grown up. We were officially empty nesters, and we decided, let's  go on a family vacation. Jenn, my daughter, and my son-in-law came down from New York. My youngest, Andrew, he came down from his home in Charlestown where he was working in Boston, and my son Pete, who had played at  Boston College, baseball, had played baseball  professionally in Europe, and had now come home and was selling group insurance, he also joined us. And one night, I found myself having a beer with Pete, and Pete was looking at  me and he just said, ""You know, Mom, I don't know, selling group insurance  is just not my passion."" He said, ""I just don't feel  I'm living up to my potential. I don't feel this is my mission in life."" And he said, ""You know,  oh by the way, Mom, I have to leave early from vacation because my inter-city league team  that I play for made the playoffs, and I have to get back to Boston  because I can't let my team down. I'm just not as passionate about my job as I am about baseball.""So off Pete went, and  left the family vacation — break a mother's heart — and he went, and we  followed four days later to see the next playoff game. We're at the playoff game,  Pete's at the plate, and a fastball's coming in, and it hits him on the wrist. Oh, Pete. His wrist went completely limp, like this. So for the next six months, Pete went back to his home in Southie, kept working that unpassionate job, and was going to doctors to see what was wrong with this wrist that never came back.Six months later, in March, he called my husband  and me, and he said, ""Oh, Mom and Dad, we have a doctor that found a diagnosis for that wrist. Do you want to come with the doctor's appointment with me?"" I said, ""Sure, we'll come in."" That morning, Pete, John and I all got up, got dressed, got in our cars — three separate cars because we were going to go to work after the doctor's appointment to find out what happened to the wrist. We walked into the  neurologist's office, sat down, four doctors walk in, and the head neurologist sits down. And he says, ""Well, Pete, we've been looking at all the tests, and I have to tell you,  it's not a sprained wrist, it's not a broken wrist, it's not nerve damage in the wrist, it's not an infection, it's not Lyme disease."" And there was this deliberate  elimination going up, and I was thinking to myself, where is he going with this? Then he put his hands on his knees, he looked right at my  27-year-old kid, and said, ""I don't know how to  tell a 27-year-old this: Pete, you have ALS."" ALS? I had had a friend whose  80-year-old father had ALS. I looked at my husband, he looked at me, and then we looked at the  doctor, and we said, ""ALS? Okay, what treatment? Let's go. What do we do? Let's go."" And he looked at us, and he said, ""Mr. and Mrs. Frates, I'm sorry to tell you this, but there's no treatment  and there's no cure."" We were the worst culprits. We didn't even understand that it had been 75 years since Lou Gehrig and nothing had been done  in the progress against ALS.So we all went home, and Jenn and Dan flew home from Wall Street, Andrew came home from Charlestown, and Pete went to B.C. to pick up his then-girlfriend Julie  and brought her home, and six hours later after diagnosis, we're sitting around  having a family dinner, and we're having small chat. I don't even remember  cooking dinner that night. But then our leader, Pete, set the vision, and talked to us just like  we were his new team. He said, ""There will be  no wallowing, people."" He goes, ""We're not looking back, we're looking forward. What an amazing opportunity  we have to change the world. I'm going to change the face of this unacceptable situation of ALS. We're going to move the needle, and I'm going to get it in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates."" And that was it. We  were given our directive.So in the days and months that followed, within a week, we had  our brothers and sisters and our family come to us, that they were already  creating Team Frate Train. Uncle Dave, he was the webmaster; Uncle Artie, he was the accountant; Auntie Dana, she was the graphic artist; and my youngest son, Andrew, quit his job, left his  apartment in Charlestown and says, ""I'm going to take care  of Pete and be his caregiver."" Then all those people,  classmates, teammates, coworkers that Pete had inspired throughout his whole life, the circles of Pete all started intersecting with one another, and made Team Frate Train.Six months after diagnosis, Pete was given an award at a  research summit for advocacy. He got up and gave a very eloquent speech, and at the end of the  speech, there was a panel, and on the panel were these pharmaceutical executives and biochemists and clinicians and I'm sitting there and  I'm listening to them and most of the content  went straight over my head. I avoided every science  class I ever could. But I was watching these people, and I was listening to them, and they were saying,  ""I, I do this, I do that,"" and there was a real  unfamiliarity between them. So at the end of their talk, the panel, they had questions and answers, and boom, my hand went right up, and I get the microphone, and I look at them and I say, ""Thank you. Thank you so much for working in ALS. It means so very much to us."" I said, ""But I do have to tell you that I'm watching your body language and I'm listening to what you're saying. It just doesn't seem like there's a whole  lot of collaboration going on here. And not only that, where's the flip chart with the action items and the  follow-up and the accountability? What are you going to do  after you leave this room?""And then I turned around and there was about 200 pairs  of eyes just staring at me. And it was that point that I realized that I had talked about  the elephant in the room. Thus my mission had begun. So over the next couple of years, Pete — we've had our highs and our lows. Pete was put on a compassionate use drug. It was hope in a bottle for  the whole ALS community. It was in a phase III trial. Then six months later, the  data comes back: no efficacy. We were supposed to  have therapies overseas, and the rug was  pulled out from under us. So for the next two years, we just watched my son  be taken away from me, little by little every day. Two and a half years ago, Pete was hitting home  runs at baseball fields. Today, Pete's completely paralyzed. He can't hold his head up any longer. He's confined to a motorized wheelchair. He can no longer swallow or eat. He has a feeding tube. He can't speak. He talks with eye gaze technology and a speech generating device, and we're watching his lungs, because his diaphragm  eventually is going to give out and then the decision will be made to put him on a ventilator or not. ALS robs the human of all their physical  parts, but the brain stays intact.So July 4th, 2014, 75th year of Lou Gehrig's  inspirational speech comes, and Pete is asked by MLB.com to write an article in the Bleacher Report. And it was very significant, because he  wrote it using his eye gaze technology.Twenty days later,  the ice started to fall. On July 27th, Pete's  roommate in New York City, wearing a Quinn For The Win shirt, signifying Pat Quinn, another  ALS patient known in New York, and B.C. shorts said, ""I'm taking the ALS  Ice Bucket Challenge,"" picked up the ice, put it over his head. ""And I'm nominating ...""  And he sent it up to Boston. And that was on July 27th. Over the next couple  of days, our news feed was full of family and friends. If you haven't gone back, the nice thing about Facebook is that you have the dates, you can go back. You've got to see Uncle Artie's  human Bloody Mary. I'm telling you, it's one of the best ones, and that was probably in day two. By about day four, Uncle  Dave, the webmaster, he isn't on Facebook, and I get a text from him,  and it says, ""Nancy, what the hell is going on?"" Uncle Dave gets a hit  every time Pete's website is gone onto, and his  phone was blowing up. So we all sat down and we realized, money is coming in — how amazing.So we knew awareness  would lead to funding, we just didn't know it would only take a couple of days. So we got together, put our best  501(c)(3)s on Pete's website, and off we went. So week one, Boston media. Week two, national media. It was during week two  that our neighbor next door opened up our door and threw a pizza across the kitchen floor, saying, ""I think you people might  need food in there."" (Laughter) Week three, celebrities —  Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood. Week four, global — BBC, Irish Radio. Did anyone see ""Lost In Translation""? My husband did Japanese television. It was interesting. (Laughter) And those videos, the popular ones. Paul Bissonnette's  glacier video, incredible. How about the redemption nuns of Dublin? Who's seen that one? It's absolutely fantastic. J.T., Justin Timberlake. That's when we knew, that  was a real A-list celebrity. I go back on my texts, and I can see ""JT! JT!"" My sister texting me. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. Incredible. And the ALS patients, you know what their favorite ones are, and their families'? All of them. Because this misunderstood and  underfunded ""rare"" disease, they just sat and watched people  saying it over and over: ""ALS, ALS."" It was unbelievable.And those naysayers, let's just talk a couple  of stats, shall we? Okay, so the ALS Association, they think by year end, it'll be 160 million dollars. ALS TDI in Cambridge, they raised three million dollars. Well, guess what? They had a clinical trial for a drug that they've been developing. It was on a three-year track for funding. Two months. It's coming out starting in two months. (Applause) And YouTube has reported that over 150 countries have posted Ice Bucket Challenges for ALS. And Facebook, 2.5 million videos, and I had the awesome adventure visiting the Facebook campus last week, and I said to them, ""I know what it was like in my house. I can't imagine what it  was like around here."" All she said was, ""Jaw-dropping.""And my family's favorite video? Bill Gates. Because the night Pete was diagnosed, he told us that he was going to get ALS in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates, and he did it. Goal number one, check. Now on to the treatment and cure. (Applause)So okay, after all of this ice, we know that it was much more than just pouring buckets of  ice water over your head, and I really would like to leave you with a couple of things that  I'd like you to remember. The first thing is, every morning when you wake up, you can choose to live your day in positivity. Would any of you blame me if I just was in the fetal position and pulled the covers  over my head every day? No, I don't think anybody would blame me, but Pete has inspired us to wake up every morning and be  positive and proactive. I actually had to ditch support groups because everybody was in there saying that spraying their lawns with chemicals, that's why they got ALS, and I was like, ""I don't think so,"" but I had to get away from the negativity.The second thing I want to leave you with is the person at the  middle of the challenge has to be willing to have  the mental toughness to put themselves out there. Pete still goes to baseball games and he still sits with his  teammates in the dugout, and he hangs his gravity feed bag right on the cages. You'll see the kids, they're  up there hanging it up. ""Pete, is that okay?"" ""Yup."" And then they put it  right into his stomach. Because he wants them to see what the reality of this is, and how he's never, ever going to give up.And the third thing I  want to leave you with: If you ever come across a situation that you see as so unacceptable, I want you to dig down as deep as you can and find your best mother bear and go after it. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)I know that I'm running over, but I've got to leave you with this: the gifts that my son has given me. I have had 29 years of having the honor of being the mother of Pete Frates. Pete Frates has been inspiring  and leading his whole life. He's thrown out kindness, and all that kindness  has come back to him. He walks the face of the Earth  right now and knows why he's here. What a gift.The second thing that my son has given me is he's given me my mission in life. Now I know why I'm here. I'm going to save my son, and if it doesn't happen in time for him, I'm going to work so that no other mother has to go through what I'm going through.And the third thing,  and last but not least gift that my son has given me, as an exclamation point to the miraculous month of August 2014: That girlfriend that he went to get on  the night of diagnosis is now his wife, and Pete and Julie have given me my  granddaughter, Lucy Fitzgerald Frates. Lucy Fitzgerald Frates came two weeks early as the exclamation point on August 31st, 2014.And so — (Applause) — And so let me leave you with  Pete's words of inspiration that he would use to classmates, coworkers and teammates. Be passionate. Be genuine. Be hardworking. And don't forget to be great.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_frates_why_my_family_started_the_als_ice_bucket_challenge_the_rest_is_history
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"I want you guys to imagine  that you're a soldier running through the battlefield. Now, you're shot in the leg with a bullet, which severs your femoral artery. Now, this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less  than three minutes. Unfortunately, by the time that a medic actually gets to you, what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more, with the application of pressure, to stop that type of bleed.Now, this problem is  not only a huge problem for the military, but it's  also a huge problem that's epidemic throughout  the entire medical field, which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body?So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the  wounds to heal normally.So now, before we do this, we  have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work. So now, everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells. So the cell is the most basic unit of life. But not many people know what else. But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix. So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that  holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. It allows them to feel what they're doing, where they are, and tells them how to act and how to behave.And it actually turns out that  the extracellular matrix is different from every  single part of the body. So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different  parts of the same organ actually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the  local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So now, for example,  think of the rainforest. You have the canopy,  you have the understory, and you have the forest floor. Now, all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants, and different animals call them home. So just like that, the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix.So now, behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix. So as you see, your cells sit  in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. So now every other piece  of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself.So when I was a freshman at NYU, what I discovered was  you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. So if you have a bleeding  wound like the one behind me, you can actually put  our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. So that means if you put it onto liver, it turns into something  that looks like liver, and if you put it onto skin, it turns into something  that looks just like skin. So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles  into this local tissue. So now, this has a whole  bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble  into it immediately.Now, this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure. So now, this type of bleed  is incredibly traumatic, and like I said before,  would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop. Now, in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself, our material is able to stop that bleed, and it's because it actually  goes on and works with the body to heal, so it reassembles into this piece of meat, and then the blood actually recognizes that that's happening,  and produces fibrin, producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds.So now this technology — Thank you. (Applause)So now this technology, by January, will be in the hands of veterinarians, and we're working very diligently to  try to get it into the hands of doctors, hopefully within the next year.But really, once again, I  want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running  through a battlefield. Now, you get hit in the leg with a bullet, and instead of bleeding  out in three minutes, you pull a small pack  of gel out of your belt, and with the press of a button, you're able to stop your own bleed and you're on your way to recovery.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_landolina_this_gel_can_make_you_stop_bleeding_instantly
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"I haven't told many people this, but in my head, I've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time. I am also autistic.People tend to diagnose autism with really specific  check-box descriptions, but in reality, it's a whole variation as to what we're like. For instance, my little brother, he's very severely autistic. He's nonverbal. He can't talk at all. But I love to talk. People often associate autism with liking maths and  science and nothing else, but I know so many autistic people who love being creative. But that is a stereotype, and the stereotypes of things are often, if not always, wrong. For instance, a lot of people think autism and think  ""Rain Man"" immediately. That's the common belief, that every single autistic  person is Dustin Hoffman, and that's not true.But that's not just with  autistic people, either. I've seen it with LGBTQ people, with women, with POC people. People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything  into a tiny little box with really specific labels. This is something that actually happened to me in real life: I googled ""autistic people are ..."" and it comes up with suggestions as to what you're going to type. I googled ""autistic people are ..."" and the top result was ""demons."" That is the first thing that people think when they think autism. They know. (Laughter)One of the things I can do  because I'm autistic — it's an ability rather than a disability — is I've got a very, very vivid imagination. Let me explain it to you a bit. It's like I'm walking in two  worlds most of the time. There's the real world,  the world that we all share, and there's the world in my mind, and the world in my mind  is often so much more real than the real world. Like, it's very easy for  me to let my mind loose because I don't try and fit  myself into a tiny little box. That's one of the best  things about being autistic. You don't have the urge to do that. You find what you want to do, you find a way to do it,  and you get on with it. If I was trying to fit myself into a box, I wouldn't be here, I  wouldn't have achieved half the things that I have now. There are problems, though. There are problems with being autistic, and there are problems with having too much imagination. School can be a problem in general, but having also to explain to a teacher on a daily basis that their lesson is inexplicably dull and you are secretly taking refuge in a world inside your head in  which you are not in that lesson, that adds to your list of problems. (Laughter) Also, when my imagination takes hold, my body takes on a life of its own. When something very exciting happens in my inner world, I've just got to run. I've got to rock backwards and forwards, or sometimes scream. This gives me so much energy, and I've got to have an  outlet for all that energy. But I've done that ever  since I was a child, ever since I was a tiny little girl. And my parents thought it was  cute, so they didn't bring it up, but when I got into school, they didn't really agree that it was cute. It can be that people  don't want to be friends with the girl that starts  screaming in an algebra lesson. And this doesn't normally  happen in this day and age, but it can be that people don't want  to be friends with the autistic girl. It can be that people  don't want to associate with anyone who won't  or can't fit themselves into a box that's labeled normal. But that's fine with me, because it sorts the wheat from the chaff, and I can find which people  are genuine and true and I can pick these people as my friends.But if you think about it, what is normal? What does it mean? Imagine if that was the best  compliment you ever received. ""Wow, you are really normal."" (Laughter) But compliments are, ""you are extraordinary"" or ""you step outside the box."" It's ""you're amazing."" So if people want to be these things, why are so many people  striving to be normal? Why are people pouring their  brilliant individual light into a mold? People are so afraid of variety  that they try and force everyone, even people who don't want  to or can't, to become normal. There are camps for LGBTQ people or autistic people to try and  make them this ""normal,"" and that's terrifying that people  would do that in this day and age.All in all, I wouldn't trade my autism and my imagination for the world. Because I am autistic, I've presented documentaries to the BBC, I'm in the midst of writing a book, I'm doing this — this is fantastic — and one of the best  things that I've achieved, that I consider to have achieved, is I've found ways of communicating with my little brother and sister, who as I've said are nonverbal.  They can't speak. And people would often write off someone who's nonverbal, but that's silly, because  my little brother and sister are the best siblings that  you could ever hope for. They're just the best,  and I love them so much and I care about them  more than anything else. I'm going to leave you with one question: If we can't get inside the person's minds, no matter if they're autistic or not, instead of punishing anything that strays from normal, why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rosie_king_how_autism_freed_me_to_be_myself
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"Now, I'm an ethnobotanist. That's a scientist who  works in the rainforest to document how people use local plants. I've been doing this for a long time, and I want to tell you, these people know these forests and these medicinal treasures better than we do and better than we ever will. But also, these cultures, these indigenous cultures, are disappearing much faster than the forests themselves. And the greatest and most endangered species in the Amazon Rainforest is not the jaguar, it's not the harpy eagle, it's the isolated and uncontacted tribes.Now four years ago, I injured my  foot in a climbing accident and I went to the doctor. She gave me heat, she gave me cold, aspirin, narcotic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, cortisone shots. It didn't work. Several months later, I was in the northeast Amazon, walked into a village, and the shaman said, ""You're limping."" And I'll never forget this as long as I live. He looked me in the face and he said, ""Take off your shoe and give  me your machete."" (Laughter) He walked over to a palm tree and carved off a fern, threw it in the fire, applied it to my foot, threw it in a pot of water, and had me drink the tea. The pain disappeared for seven months. When it came back, I went to see the shaman again. He gave me the same treatment, and I've been cured for three years now. Who would you rather be treated by? (Applause) Now, make no mistake — Western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised, but there's plenty of holes in it. Where's the cure for breast cancer? Where's the cure for schizophrenia? Where's the cure for acid reflux? Where's the cure for insomnia? The fact is that these people can sometimes, sometimes, sometimes cure things we cannot. Here you see a medicine man in the northeast Amazon treating leishmaniasis, a really nasty protozoal disease that afflicts 12 million people around the world. Western treatment are injections of antimony. They're painful, they're expensive, and they're probably not good for your heart; it's a heavy metal. This man cures it with three plants from the Amazon Rainforest.This is the magic frog. My colleague, the late great Loren McIntyre, discoverer of the source  lake of the Amazon, Laguna McIntyre in the Peruvian Andes, was lost on the Peru-Brazil border about 30 years ago. He was rescued by a group of  isolated Indians called the Matsés. They beckoned for him to follow them into the forest, which he did. There, they took out palm leaf baskets. There, they took out these green monkey frogs — these are big suckers, they're like this — and they began licking them. It turns out, they're highly hallucinogenic. McIntyre wrote about this and it was read  by the editor of High Times magazine. You see that ethnobotanists have  friends in all sorts of strange cultures. This guy decided he would go down to the Amazon and give it a whirl, or give it a lick, and  he did, and he wrote, ""My blood pressure went through the roof, I lost full control of my bodily functions, I passed out in a heap, I woke up in a hammock six hours later, felt like God for two days."" (Laughter) An Italian chemist read this and said, ""I'm not really interested in the theological  aspects of the green monkey frog. What's this about the change in blood pressure?"" Now, this is an Italian chemist who's working on a new treatment for high blood pressure based on peptides in the skin of the green monkey frog, and other scientists are looking at a cure for drug-resistant Staph aureus. How ironic if these isolated  Indians and their magic frog prove to be one of the cures.Here's an ayahuasca shaman in the northwest Amazon, in the middle of a yage ceremony. I took him to Los Angeles to meet a foundation officer looking for support for monies to protect their culture. This fellow looked at the medicine man, and he said, ""You didn't go to  medical school, did you?"" The shaman said, ""No, I did not."" He said, ""Well, then what can you know about healing?"" The shaman looked at him and he said, ""You know what? If you have  an infection, go to a doctor. But many human afflictions are diseases  of the heart, the mind and the spirit. Western medicine can't  touch those. I cure them."" (Applause)But all is not rosy in learning from nature about new medicines. This is a viper from Brazil, the venom of which was studied at the Universidade de São Paulo here. It was later developed into ACE inhibitors. This is a frontline treatment for hypertension. Hypertension causes over 10 percent of all deaths on the planet every day. This is a $4 billion industry based on venom from a Brazilian snake, and the Brazilians did not get a nickel. This is not an acceptable way of doing business.The rainforest has been called the  greatest expression of life on Earth. There's a saying in Suriname that I dearly love: ""The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask."" But as you all know, it's rapidly disappearing. Here in Brazil, in the Amazon, around the world. I took this picture from a small plane flying over the eastern border of the Xingu indigenous reserve in the state of Mato Grosso to the northwest of here. The top half of the picture, you see where the Indians live. The line through the middle is the eastern border of the reserve. Top half Indians, bottom half white guys. Top half wonder drugs, bottom half just a bunch of skinny-ass cows. Top half carbon sequestered in the forest where it belongs, bottom half carbon in the atmosphere where it's driving climate change. In fact, the number two cause of carbon being released into the atmosphere is forest destruction.But in talking about destruction, it's important to keep in mind that the Amazon is the mightiest landscape of all. It's a place of beauty and wonder. The biggest anteater in the world lives in the rain forest, tips the scale at 90 pounds. The goliath bird-eating spider is the world's largest spider. It's found in the Amazon as well. The harpy eagle wingspan is over seven feet. And the black cayman — these monsters can tip the scale at over half a ton. They're known to be man-eaters. The anaconda, the largest snake, the capybara, the largest rodent. A specimen from here in Brazil tipped the scale at 201 pounds.Let's visit where these creatures live, the northeast Amazon, home to the Akuriyo tribe. Uncontacted peoples hold a  mystical and iconic role in our imagination. These are the people who  know nature best. These are the people who truly live in total harmony with nature. By our standards, some would dismiss these people as primitive. ""They don't know how to make fire, or they didn't when they were first contacted."" But they know the forest far better than we do. The Akuriyos have 35 words for honey, and other Indians look up to them as being the true masters of the emerald realm. Here you see the face of my friend Pohnay. When I was a teenager rocking out to the Rolling Stones in my hometown of New Orleans, Pohnay was a forest nomad roaming the jungles of the northeast Amazon in a small band, looking for game, looking for medicinal plants, looking for a wife, in other small nomadic bands. But it's people like these that know things that we don't, and they have lots of  lessons to teach us.However, if you go into most of the forests of the Amazon, there are no indigenous peoples. This is what you find: rock carvings which indigenous peoples, uncontacted peoples, used to sharpen the edge of the stone axe. These cultures that once danced, made love, sang to the gods, worshipped the forest, all that's left is an imprint in stone, as you see here.Let's move to the western Amazon, which is really the epicenter of isolated peoples. Each of these dots represents a small, uncontacted tribe, and the big reveal today is we believe there are 14 or 15 isolated groups in the Colombian Amazon alone.Why are these people isolated? They know we exist, they know there's an outside world. This is a form of resistance. They have chosen to remain isolated, and I think it is their human right to remain so. Why are these the tribes that hide from man? Here's why. Obviously, some of this  was set off in 1492. But at the turn of the last century was the rubber trade. The demand for natural rubber, which came from the Amazon, set off the botanical equivalent of a gold rush. Rubber for bicycle tires, rubber for automobile tires, rubber for zeppelins. It was a mad race to get that rubber, and the man on the left, Julio Arana, is one of the true thugs of the story. His people, his company, and other companies like them killed, massacred, tortured, butchered Indians like the Witotos you see on the right hand side of the slide.Even today, when people come out of the forest, the story seldom has a happy ending. These are Nukaks. They were contacted in the '80s. Within a year, everybody over 40 was dead. And remember, these are preliterate societies. The elders are the libraries. Every time a shaman dies, it's as if a library has burned down. They have been forced off their lands. The drug traffickers have taken over the Nukak lands, and the Nukaks live as beggars in public parks in eastern Colombia. From the Nukak lands, I want to  take you to the southwest, to the most spectacular  landscape in the world: Chiribiquete National Park. It was surrounded by three isolated tribes and thanks to the Colombian government and Colombian colleagues, it has now expanded. It's bigger than the state of Maryland. It is a treasure trove of botanical diversity. It was first explored botanically in 1943 by my mentor, Richard Schultes, seen here atop the Bell Mountain, the sacred mountains of the Karijonas. And let me show you what it looks like today. Flying over Chiribiquete, realize that these lost world mountains are still lost. No scientist has been atop them. In fact, nobody has been atop the Bell Mountain since Schultes in '43. And we'll end up here with the Bell Mountain just to the east of the picture. Let me show you what it looks like today.Not only is this a treasure trove of botanical diversity, not only is it home to three isolated tribes, but it's the greatest treasure trove of pre-Colombian art in the world: over 200,000 paintings. The Dutch scientist Thomas van der Hammen described this as the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon Rainforest.But move from Chiribiquete down to the southeast, again in the Colombian Amazon. Remember, the Colombian Amazon is bigger than New England. The Amazon's a big forest, and Brazil's got a big part of it, but not all of it. Moving down to these two national parks, Cahuinari and Puré in the Colombian Amazon — that's the Brazilian border to the right — it's home to several groups of isolated and uncontacted peoples. To the trained eye, you can look at the roofs of these malocas, these longhouses, and see that there's cultural diversity. These are, in fact, different tribes. As isolated as these areas are, let me show you how the  outside world is crowding in. Here we see trade and transport increased in Putumayo. With the diminishment of the Civil War in Colombia, the outside world is showing up. To the north, we have illegal gold mining, also from the east, from Brazil. There's increased hunting and fishing for commercial purposes. We see illegal logging coming from the south, and drug runners are trying to move through the park and get into Brazil. This, in the past, is why you didn't mess with isolated Indians. And if it looks like this picture is out of focus because it was taken in a hurry, here's why. (Laughter) This looks like — (Applause) This looks like a hangar from the Brazilian Amazon. This is an art exhibit in Havana, Cuba. A group called Los Carpinteros. This is their perception of why you  shouldn't mess with uncontacted Indians.But the world is changing. These are Mashco-Piros on the Brazil-Peru border who stumbled out of the jungle because they were essentially chased out by drug runners and timber people. And in Peru, there's a very nasty business. It's called human safaris. They will take you in to isolated groups to take their picture. Of course, when you give them  clothes, when you give them tools, you also give them diseases. We call these ""inhuman safaris."" These are Indians again  on the Peru border, who were overflown by flights sponsored by missionaries. They want to get in there and turn them into Christians. We know how that turns out.What's to be done? Introduce technology to the contacted tribes, not the uncontacted tribes, in a culturally sensitive way. This is the perfect marriage of  ancient shamanic wisdom and 21st century technology. We've done this now with over 30 tribes, mapped, managed and increased protection of over 70 million acres of ancestral rainforest. (Applause)So this allows the Indians to take control of their environmental and cultural destiny. They also then set up guard houses to keep outsiders out. These are Indians, trained as indigenous park rangers, patrolling the borders and keeping the outside world at bay. This is a picture of actual contact. These are Chitonahua Indians on the Brazil-Peru border. They've come out of the jungle asking for help. They were shot at, their malocas, their  longhouses, were burned. Some of them were massacred. Using automatic weapons to  slaughter uncontacted peoples is the single most despicable and  disgusting human rights abuse on our planet today, and it has to stop. (Applause)But let me conclude by saying, this work can be spiritually rewarding, but it's difficult and it can be dangerous. Two colleagues of mine passed away recently in the crash of a small plane. They were serving the forest to protect those uncontacted tribes. So the question is, in conclusion, is what the future holds. These are the Uray people in Brazil. What does the future hold for them, and what does the future hold for us? Let's think differently. Let's make a better world. If the climate's going to change, let's have a climate that changes for the better rather than the worse. Let's live on a planet full of luxuriant vegetation, in which isolated peoples can remain in isolation, can maintain that mystery and that knowledge if they so choose. Let's live in a world where the shamans live in these forests and heal themselves and us with their mystical plants and their sacred frogs.Thanks again.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_plotkin_what_the_people_of_the_amazon_know_that_you_don_t
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"Vision is the most important and prioritized sense that we have. We are constantly looking at the world around us, and quickly we identify and make sense of what it is that we see.Let's just start with an example of that very fact. I'm going to show you a photograph of a person, just for a second or two, and I'd like for you to identify what emotion is on his face. Ready? Here you go. Go with your gut reaction. Okay. What did you see? Well, we actually surveyed over 120 individuals, and the results were mixed. People did not agree on what emotion they saw on his face. Maybe you saw discomfort. That was the most frequent response that we received. But if you asked the person on your left, they might have said regret or skepticism, and if you asked somebody on your right, they might have said something entirely different, like hope or empathy. So we are all looking at the very same face again. We might see something entirely different, because perception is subjective. What we think we see is actually filtered through our own mind's eye.Of course, there are many other examples of how we see the world through own mind's eye. I'm going to give you just a few. So dieters, for instance, see apples as larger than people who are not counting calories. Softball players see the ball as smaller if they've just come out of a slump, compared to people who  had a hot night at the plate. And actually, our political beliefs also can affect the way we see other people, including politicians. So my research team and I decided to test this question. In 2008, Barack Obama was running for president for the very first time, and we surveyed hundreds of Americans one month before the election. What we found in this survey was that some people, some Americans, think photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. Of these people, 75 percent voted for Obama in the actual election. Other people, though, thought photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. 89 percent of these people voted for McCain. We presented many photographs of Obama one at a time, so people did not realize that what we were changing from one photograph to the next was whether we had artificially lightened or darkened his skin tone.So how is that possible? How could it be that when I look at a person, an object, or an event, I see something very different than somebody else does? Well, the reasons are many, but one reason requires that we understand a little bit more about how our eyes work. So vision scientists know that the amount of information that we can see at any given point in time, what we can focus on, is actually relatively small. What we can see with great sharpness and clarity and accuracy is the equivalent of the surface area of our thumb on our outstretched arm. Everything else around that is blurry, rendering much of what is presented to our eyes as ambiguous. But we have to clarify and make sense of what it is that we see, and it's our mind that helps us fill in that gap. As a result, perception is a subjective experience, and that's how we end up seeing through our own mind's eye.So, I'm a social psychologist, and it's questions like these that really intrigue me. I am fascinated by those times when people do not see eye to eye. Why is it that somebody might literally see the glass as half full, and somebody literally sees it as half empty? What is it about what one person is thinking and feeling that leads them to see the world in an entirely different way? And does that even matter? So to begin to tackle these questions, my research team and I decided to delve deeply into an issue that has received international attention: our health and fitness. Across the world, people are struggling to manage their weight, and there is a variety of strategies that we have to help us keep the pounds off. For instance, we set the best of intentions to exercise after the holidays, but actually, the majority of Americans find that their New Year's resolutions are broken by Valentine's Day. We talk to ourselves in very encouraging ways, telling ourselves this is our year to get back into shape, but that is not enough to bring us back to our ideal weight. So why? Of course, there is no simple answer, but one reason, I argue, is that our mind's eye might work against us. Some people may literally see exercise as more difficult, and some people might literally see exercise as easier.So, as a first step to testing these questions, we gathered objective measurements of individuals' physical fitness. We measured the  circumference of their waist, compared to the  circumference of their hips. A higher waist-to-hip ratio is an indicator of being less physically fit than a lower waist-to-hip ratio. After gathering these measurements, we told our participants that they would walk to a finish line while carrying extra weight in a sort of race. But before they did that, we asked them to estimate the distance to the finish line. We thought that the physical states of their body might change how they perceived the distance. So what did we find? Well, waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. People who were out of shape and unfit actually saw the distance to the finish line as significantly greater than people who were in better shape. People's states of their own body changed how they perceived the environment. But so too can our mind. In fact, our bodies and our minds work in tandem to change how we see the world around us.That led us to think that maybe people with strong motivations and strong goals to exercise might actually see the finish line as closer than people who have weaker motivations. So to test whether motivations affect our perceptual experiences in this way, we conducted a second study. Again, we gathered objective measurements of people's physical fitness, measuring the circumference of their waist and the circumference of their hips, and we had them do a  few other tests of fitness. Based on feedback that we gave them, some of our participants told us they're not motivated to exercise any more. They felt like they already met their fitness goals and they weren't going to do anything else. These people were not motivated. Other people, though,  based on our feedback, told us they were highly  motivated to exercise. They had a strong goal to make it to the finish line. But again, before we had them walk to the finish line, we had them estimate the distance. How far away was the finish line? And again, like the previous study, we found that waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. Unfit individuals saw the distance as farther, saw the finish line as farther away, than people who were in better shape. Importantly, though, this only happened for people who were not motivated to exercise. On the other hand, people who were highly motivated to exercise saw the distance as short. Even the most out of shape individuals saw the finish line as just as close, if not slightly closer, than people who were in better shape.So our bodies can change how far away that finish line looks, but people who had committed to a manageable goal that they could accomplish in the near future and who believed that they were capable of meeting that goal actually saw the exercise as easier. That led us to wonder, is there a strategy that we could use and teach people that would help change their perceptions of the distance, help them make exercise look easier?So we turned to the vision science literature to figure out what should we do, and based on what we read, we came up with a strategy that we called, ""Keep  your eyes on the prize."" So this is not the slogan from an inspirational poster. It's an actual directive for how to look around your environment. People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see. We thought that this strategy would help make the exercise look easier. We compared this group to a baseline group. To this group we said, just look around the environment as you naturally would. You will notice the finish line, but you might also notice the garbage can off to the right, or the people and the  lamp post off to the left. We thought that people who used this strategy would see the distance as farther.So what did we find? When we had them estimate the distance, was this strategy successful for changing their perceptual experience? Yes. People who kept their eyes on the prize saw the finish line as 30 percent closer than people who looked around as they naturally would. We thought this was great. We were really excited because it meant that this strategy helped make the exercise look easier, but the big question was, could this help make exercise actually better? Could it improve the quality of exercise as well?So next, we told our participants, you are going to walk to the finish line while wearing extra weight. We added weights to their ankles that amounted to 15 percent of their body weight. We told them to lift their knees up high and walk to the finish line quickly. We designed this exercise in particular to be moderately challenging but not impossible, like most exercises that actually improve our fitness.So the big question, then: Did keeping your eyes on the prize and narrowly focusing on the finish line change their experience of the exercise? It did. People who kept their eyes on the prize told us afterward that it required 17 percent less exertion for them to do this exercise than people who looked around naturally. It changed their subjective experience of the exercise. It also changed the objective nature of their exercise. People who kept their eyes on the prize actually moved 23 percent faster than people who looked around naturally. To put that in perspective, a 23 percent increase is like trading in your 1980 Chevy Citation for a 1980 Chevrolet Corvette.We were so excited by this, because this meant that a strategy that costs nothing, that is easy for people to use, regardless of whether they're in shape or struggling to get there, had a big effect. Keeping your eyes on the prize made the exercise look and feel easier even when people were working harder because they were moving faster. Now, I know there's more to good health than walking a little bit faster, but keeping your eyes on the prize might be one additional strategy that you can use to help promote a healthy lifestyle.If you're not convinced yet that we all see the world through our own mind's eye, let me leave you with one final example. Here's a photograph of a beautiful  street in Stockholm, with two cars. The car in the back looks much larger than the car in the front. However, in reality, these cars are the same size, but that's not how we see it. So does this mean that our eyes have gone haywire and that our brains are a mess? No, it doesn't mean that at all. It's just how our eyes work. We might see the world in a different way, and sometimes that might not line up with reality, but it doesn't mean that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. We all see the world through our mind's eye, but we can teach ourselves to see it differently.So I can think of days that have gone horribly wrong for me. I'm fed up, I'm grumpy, I'm tired, and I'm so behind, and there's a big black cloud hanging over my head, and on days like these, it looks like everyone around me is down in the dumps too. My colleague at work looks annoyed when I ask for an extension on a deadline, and my friend looks frustrated when I show up late for lunch because a meeting ran long, and at the end of the day, my husband looks disappointed because I'd rather go to  bed than go to the movies. And on days like these, when everybody looks upset and angry to me, I try to remind myself that there are other ways of seeing them. Perhaps my colleague was confused, perhaps my friend was concerned, and perhaps my husband was  feeling empathy instead. So we all see the world through our own mind's eye, and on some days, it might look like the world is a dangerous and challenging and insurmountable place, but it doesn't have to look that way all the time. We can teach ourselves to see it differently, and when we find a way to make the world look nicer and easier, it might actually become so.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_balcetis_why_some_people_find_exercise_harder_than_others
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"I'm a lifelong traveler. Even as a little kid, I was actually working out that it would be cheaper to go to boarding school in England than just to the best school down the road from my parents' house in California. So, from the time I was nine years old I was flying alone several times a year over the North Pole, just to go to school. And of course the more I flew the more I came to love to fly, so the very week after I graduated from high school, I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend every season of my 18th year on a different continent. And then, almost inevitably, I became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one. And I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds  and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life. Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it. You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food. And I found that the best way that I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly, by going nowhere, just by sitting still. And of course sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives, a break. But it was also the only way that I could find to sift through the slideshow of my experience and make sense of the future and the past. And so, to my great surprise, I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba. And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions.And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us. It's an old idea. More than 2,000 years ago,  the Stoics were reminding us it's not our experience that makes our lives, it's what we do with it. Imagine a hurricane suddenly  sweeps through your town and reduces every last thing to rubble. One man is traumatized for life. But another, maybe even his brother, almost feels liberated, and decides this is a great chance to start his life anew. It's exactly the same event, but radically different responses. There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in ""Hamlet,"" but thinking makes it so. And this has certainly been my experience as a traveler. Twenty-four years ago I took  the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. But the trip lasted a few days. What I've done with it sitting still, going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking, that's lasted 24 years already and will probably last a lifetime. The trip, in other words, gave me some amazing sights, but it's only sitting still that allows me to turn those into lasting insights. And I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads, in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation, that if I really want to change my life I might best begin by changing my mind. Again, none of this is new; that's why Shakespeare and the Stoics were telling us this centuries ago, but Shakespeare never had to face 200 emails in a day. (Laughter) The Stoics, as far as I know, were not on Facebook. We all know that in our on-demand lives, one of the things that's most on demand is ourselves. Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. We can more and more easily  make contact with people on the furthest corners of the planet, but sometimes in that process we lose contact with ourselves. And one of my biggest surprises  as a traveler has been to find that often it's exactly the people who have most enabled us to get anywhere who are intent on going nowhere. In other words, precisely those beings who have created the technologies that override so many of the limits of old, are the ones wisest about the need for limits, even when it comes to technology. I once went to the Google headquarters and I saw all the things many of you have heard about; the indoor tree houses, the trampolines, workers at that time enjoying 20 percent of their paid time free so that they could just let their imaginations go wandering. But what impressed me even more was that as I was waiting for my digital I.D., one Googler was telling me about the program that he was about to start to teach the many, many Googlers who practice yoga to become trainers in it, and the other Googler was telling me about the book that he was about to write on the inner search engine, and the ways in which science has empirically shown that sitting still, or meditation, can lead not just to better  health or to clearer thinking, but even to emotional intelligence. I have another friend in Silicon Valley who is really one  of the most eloquent spokesmen for the latest technologies, and in fact was one of the founders of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. And Kevin wrote his last book on fresh technologies without a smartphone or a laptop or a TV in his home. And like many in Silicon Valley, he tries really hard to observe what they call an Internet sabbath, whereby for 24 or 48 hours every week they go completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they'll need  when they go online again. The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology. And when you speak of the sabbath, look at the Ten Commandments — there's only one word there for which the adjective ""holy"" is used, and that's the Sabbath. I pick up the Jewish holy book of the Torah — its longest chapter, it's on the Sabbath. And we all know that it's really one of our greatest luxuries, the empty space. In many a piece of music,  it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I as a writer will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.Now, in the physical domain,  of course, many people, if they have the resources, will try to get a place in the country, a second home. I've never begun to have those resources, but I sometimes remember that any time I want, I can get a second home in time, if not in space, just by taking a day off. And it's never easy because, of course,  whenever I do I spend much of it worried about all the extra stuff that's going to crash down on me the following day. I sometimes think I'd rather give up meat or sex or wine than the chance to check on my emails. (Laughter) And every season I do try to take three days off on retreat but a part of me still feels guilty to be leaving my poor wife behind and to be ignoring all those seemingly urgent emails from my bosses and maybe to be missing a friend's birthday party. But as soon as I get to a place of real quiet, I realize that it's only by going there that I'll have anything fresh or creative or joyful to share with my wife or bosses or friends. Otherwise, really, I'm just foisting on them my exhaustion or my distractedness, which is no blessing at all.And so when I was 29, I decided to remake my entire life in the light of going nowhere. One evening I was coming back from the office, it was after midnight, I was in a taxi driving through Times Square, and I suddenly realized that I was racing around so much I could never catch up with my life. And my life then, as it happened, was pretty much the one I might have dreamed of as a little boy. I had really interesting friends and colleagues, I had a nice apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street. I had, to me, a fascinating job  writing about world affairs, but I could never separate myself enough from them to hear myself think — or really, to understand if I was truly happy. And so, I abandoned my dream life for a single room on the backstreets of Kyoto, Japan, which was the place that had long exerted a strong, really mysterious gravitational pull on me. Even as a child I would just look at a painting of Kyoto and feel I recognized it; I knew it before I ever laid eyes on it. But it's also, as you all know, a beautiful city encircled by hills, filled with more than 2,000 temples and shrines, where people have been sitting still for 800 years or more. And quite soon after I moved there, I ended up where I still am with my wife, formerly our kids, in a two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere where we have no bicycle, no car, no TV I can understand, and I still have to support my loved ones as a travel writer and a journalist, so clearly this is not ideal for job advancement or for cultural excitement or for social diversion. But I realized that it gives me what I prize most, which is days and hours. I have never once had to use a cell phone there. I almost never have to look at the time, and every morning when I wake up, really the day stretches in front of me like an open meadow. And when life throws up one of its nasty surprises, as it will, more than once, when a doctor comes into my room wearing a grave expression, or a car suddenly veers in front of mine on the freeway, I know, in my bones, that it's the time I've spent going nowhere that is going to sustain me much more than all the time I've spent racing around to Bhutan or Easter Island.I'll always be a traveler — my livelihood depends on it — but one of the beauties of travel is that it allows you to bring stillness into the motion and the commotion of the world. I once got on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany, and a young German woman  came down and sat next to me and engaged me in a very friendly conversation for about 30 minutes, and then she just turned around and sat still for 12 hours. She didn't once turn on her video monitor, she never pulled out a book, she didn't even go to sleep, she just sat still, and something of her clarity and calm really imparted itself to me. I've noticed more and more people taking conscious measures these days to try to open up a space inside their lives. Some people go to black-hole resorts where they'll spend hundreds of dollars a night in order to hand over their cell phone and their laptop to the front desk on arrival. Some people I know, just before they go to sleep, instead of scrolling through their messages or checking out YouTube, just turn out the lights and listen to some music, and notice that they sleep much better and wake up much refreshed. I was once fortunate enough to drive into the high, dark mountains behind Los Angeles, where the great poet and singer and international heartthrob Leonard Cohen was living and working for many years as a full-time monk in the Mount Baldy Zen Center. And I wasn't entirely surprised when the record that he released at the age of 77, to which he gave the deliberately  unsexy title of ""Old Ideas,"" went to number one in the charts  in 17 nations in the world, hit the top five in nine others. Something in us, I think, is crying out for the sense of intimacy and depth that we get from people like that. who take the time and trouble to sit still. And I think many of us have the sensation, I certainly do, that we're standing about two inches away from a huge screen, and it's noisy and it's crowded and it's changing with every second, and that screen is our lives. And it's only by stepping back, and then further back, and holding still, that we can begin to see what the canvas means and to catch the larger picture. And a few people do that for us by going nowhere.So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still. So you can go on your next vacation to Paris or Hawaii, or New Orleans; I bet you'll have a wonderful time. But, if you want to come back home alive and full of fresh hope, in love with the world, I think you might want to try considering going nowhere. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_the_art_of_stillness
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"I would like to start with the story of Mary, a woman from an African village. Her first memories are of her family fleeing violent riots orchestrated by  the ruling political party. Her brother was murdered by the state-sponsored militia, and she was raped more than once just because she belonged to the wrong party.One morning, a month before the election, Mary's village was called  to another intimidation meeting. In this meeting, there is a man standing in front of them, telling them, ""We know who you are, we know who you will vote for, and if you're not going to drop the right paper, we're going to take revenge."" But for Mary, this meeting is different. She feels different. This time, she's waiting for this meeting, because this time, she's carrying a small hidden camera in her dress, a camera that nobody else can see. Nobody is allowed to film in these meetings. You risk your life if you do. Mary knows that, but she also knows that the only way to stop them and to protect herself and her community is to expose their intimidation, to make sure they understand somebody is following them, to break the impunity they feel. Mary and her friends were filming for months, undercover, the intimidation of the ruling political party.(Video) [""Filmed with hidden cameras""]Man: We are now going to speak about the upcoming elections. Nothing can stop us  from doing what we want. If we hear you are with [The Opposition] we will not forgive you.[""Militia intimidation rally""][The Party] can torture you at any time. The youth can beat you.[""Disruption of political meeting""]For those who lie, saying they  are back with [The Party], your time is running out.[""Party youth militia""]Some have died because they rebelled. Some have lost their homes. If you don't work together  with [The Party], you will lead a very bad life.Oren Yakobovich: These images were broadcast all over the world, but more importantly, they have been broadcast back to the community. The perpetrators saw them too. They understood somebody is following them. They got scared. Impunity was broken. Mary and her friends forced the ruling political party not to use violence during the election, and saved hundreds of lives. Mary is just one of hundreds of people that my organization had helped  to document human rights violations using cameras.My background should have led me to a different direction. I was born in Israel to a right-wing family, and as long as I remember myself, I wanted to join the Israeli army to serve my country and prove what I believed  was our right for the whole land. I joined the Israeli army  just after the first intifada, the first Palestinian uprising, and I served in one of the hard-minded, toughest, aggressive infantry units, and I got the biggest gun in my platoon. Quite fast, I became an officer and got soldiers under my command, and as time passed, I started serving in the West Bank, and I saw these images. I didn't like what I saw. It took me a while, but eventually I refused to serve in the West Bank and had to spend time in jail. It was a bit — (Applause) — It was not that bad, I have to say. It was a bit like being in a hotel, but with very shitty food. (Laughter)In jail, I kept thinking  that I need people to know. I need people to understand what the reality in the West Bank looks like. I need them to hear what I heard, I need them to see what I saw, but I also understood, we need  the Palestinians themselves, the people that are suffering, to be able to tell their own stories, not journalists or filmmakers that are coming outside of the situation.I joined a human rights organization, an Israeli human rights  organization called B'Tselem. Together, we analyzed the West Bank and picked 100 families that are living in the most risky places: close to checkpoints, near army bases, side by side with settlers. We gave them cameras and training. Quite fast, we started getting very disturbing images about how the settlers  and the soldiers are abusing them.I would like to share with you two clips from this project. Both of them were broadcast in Israel, and it created a massive debate. And I have to warn you, some of you might  find them quite explicit. The masked men you  will see in the first clips are Jewish settlers. Minutes before the camera was turned on, they approached a Palestinian family that was working their land and told them that they have to leave the land, because this land belongs to the Jewish settlers. The Palestinians refused. Let's see what happened. The masked men that are approaching are Jewish settlers. They are approaching the Palestinian family. This is a demonstration in the West Bank. The guy in green is Palestinian. He will be arrested in a second. Here you see him blindfolded and handcuffed. In a few seconds, he regrets  he came to this demonstration. He's been shot in the foot with a rubber bullet. He is okay.Not all the settlers and the soldiers are acting this way. We're talking about a tiny minority, but they have to be brought to justice. These clips, and others like them, forced the army and the police to start investigations. They've been shown in Israel, of course, and the Israeli public was exposed to them also. This project redefined the struggle for human rights in the occupied territories, and we managed to reduce the number  of violent attacks in the West Bank.The success of this project got me thinking how I can take the same methodology to other places in the world. Now, we tend to believe that today, with all of the technology, the smartphones and the Internet, we are able to see and understand most of what's happening in the world, and people are able to tell their story — but it's only partly true. Still today, with all the technology we have, less than half of the world's population has access to the Internet, and more than three billion people — I'm repeating the number — three billion people are consuming news that is censored by those in power. More or less around the same time, I'm approached by a great guy named Uri Fruchtmann. He's a filmmaker and an activist. We understood we were thinking along the same lines, and we decided to establish Videre, our organization, together. While building the organization in London, we've been traveling undercover to places where a community  was suffering from abuses, where mass atrocities were happening, and there was a lack of reporting. We tried to understand how we can help.There were four things that I learned. The first thing is that we have to engage with communities that are living in rural areas, where violations are happening far from the public eye. We need to partner with them, and we need to understand which images are not making it out there and help them to document them.The second thing I learned is that we have to enable them  to film in a safe way. Security has to be the priority. Where I used to work before, in the West Bank, one can take a camera out, most likely not going to get shot, but in places we wanted to work, just try to pull a phone out, and you're dead — literally dead. This is why we decided to take the operation undercover when necessary, and use mostly hidden cameras. Unfortunately, I can't show you the hidden cameras we're using today — for obvious reasons — but these are cameras we used before. You can buy them off the shelf. Today, we're building  a custom-made hidden camera, like the one that Mary was wearing in her dress to film the intimidation meeting of the ruling political party. It's a camera that nobody can see, that blends into the environment, into the surroundings. Now, filming securities go beyond using hidden cameras. Being secure starts way before the activist is turning the camera on. To keep our partners safe, we work to understand the risk of every location and of every shot before it's happened, building a backup plan if something goes wrong, and making sure  we have everything in place before our operations start.The third thing I learned is the importance of verification. You can have an amazing shot of atrocity, but if you can't verify it, it's worth nothing. Recently, like in the ongoing war  in Syria or the war in Gaza, we've seen images that are staged  or brought from a different conflict. This misinformation destroyed the credibility of the source, and it's harmed the credibility of other reliable and trustworthy sources. We use a variety of ways to make sure we can verify the information and we can trust the material. It starts with vetting the partners, understanding who they are, and working with them very intensively. How do you film a location? You film road signs, you film watches, you film newspapers. We are checking maps, looking at maps, double-checking the information, and looking also at  the metadata of the material.Now, the fourth and the most important thing I learned is how you use images  to create a positive change. To have an effect, the key thing is how you use the material.Today, we're working with hundreds of activists filming undercover. We work with them both to understand  the situation on the ground and which images  are missing to describe it, who are the ones that are  influencing the situation, and when to release the material to advance the struggle. Sometimes, it's about putting it in the media, mostly local ones, to create awareness. Sometimes it's working with decision makers, to change laws. Sometimes, it's working with lawyers to use as evidence in court. But more than often, the most effective way to create a social change is to work within the community.I want to give you one example. Fatuma is part of a network of women that are fighting abuses in Kenya. Women in her community have been harassed constantly on their way to school and on their way to work. They are trying to change  the behavior of the community from inside. In the next clip, Fatuma is taking us with her on her journey to work. Her voice is superimposed on images that she filmed herself using hidden cameras.(Video) Fatuma Chiusiku:  My name is Fatuma Chiusiku. I'm 32 years old, a mother, And Ziwa La Ng'Ombe is my home. Each morning, I ride the mini-bus Number 11. But instead of a peaceful journey to work, each day begins with fear. Come with me now and use my eyes to feel what I feel. As I walk, I think to myself: Will I be touched? Grabbed? Violated by this conductor again? Even the men inside the way they look at me touch my body, rub against me, grab me, and now, as I sit in my seat I only wish my mind was full of thoughts for my day, my dreams, my children at school, but instead I worry about the moment when we will arrive and I will be violated again.OY: Today, there is a new front in the fight for human rights. I used to carry a big gun. Now, I am carrying this. This is a much more powerful and much, much more effective weapon. But we have to use its power wisely. By putting the right images in the right hands at the right time, we can truly create an impact.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/oren_yakobovich_hidden_cameras_that_film_injustice_in_the_world_s_most_dangerous_places
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"So in the oasis of  intelligentsia that is TED, I stand here before you this evening as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places. I've been leading polar expeditions  for most of my adult life, and last month, my teammate  Tarka L'Herpiniere and I finished the most ambitious  expedition I've ever attempted. In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here from four months in the middle of nowhere, mostly grunting and swearing,  straight to the TED stage. So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless. One of the interesting side effects seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot. So I've had to write some notes to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes. This is the first talk I've given about this expedition, and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes, this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something that hadn't been done before. So I hope in that you might  find some food for thought.It was a journey, an  expedition in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth. It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place. It's twice the size of Australia, a continent that is the same size as China and India put together.As an aside, I have experienced an interesting phenomenon in the last few days, something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time, conversations that go something like this: ""Oh, Antarctica. Awesome. My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary."" Or, ""Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?"" (Laughter)Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. In the process, we broke the record for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles. (Applause) For those of you from the Bay Area, it was the same as walking from  here to San Francisco, then turning around and walking back again. So as camping trips go, it was a long one, and one I've seen summarized  most succinctly here on the hallowed pages  of Business Insider Malaysia. [""Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition  That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted""]Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival. Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us, none had made it to the pole and back, and five had died in the process.This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition. Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted.Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the  Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, where they would turn around and ski  back to the coast again on foot. Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole  in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. Scott's team ended up on foot. And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. Scott's team of five died  on the return journey. And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. How come this has remained  the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. No one's come close to that ever since. So this is the high-water mark  of human endurance, human endeavor,  human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. And of course some strange and  predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job.Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called ""man-hauling."" When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. Perhaps the reason no one had  attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense. Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised.You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. We didn't see a sunset either. It was 24-hour daylight. Living conditions were quite spartan. I changed my underwear  three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared  30 square feet on the canvas. Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. And the writing was important to me. As a kid, I was inspired by the  literature of adventure and exploration, and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and  the power of storytelling.So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the  challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: those of the weather and of  what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. The lowest wind chill  we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. You can see it's a beautiful,  shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands  and thousands of crevasses, these deep cracks in the glacial ice  up to 200 feet deep. Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued.We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop, a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. I think it's a marvelous thing that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. You can see on the left of  this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. And if we'd stopped there  and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this.If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible.But then we turned around, and this is where things get interesting. High on the Antarctic plateau, over 10,000 feet, it's very windy, very cold, very dry, we were exhausted. We'd covered 35 marathons, we were only halfway, and we had a safety net, of course, of ski planes and satellite phones and live, 24-hour tracking beacons that didn't exist for Scott, but in hindsight, rather than making our lives easier, the safety net actually allowed us to cut things very fine indeed, to sail very close to our absolute limits as human beings. And it is an exquisite form of torture to exhaust yourself to the point of starvation day after day while dragging a sledge full of food.For years, I'd been writing glib lines in sponsorship proposals about pushing the limits of human endurance, but in reality, that was  a very frightening place to be indeed. We had, before we'd got to the Pole, two weeks of almost permanent headwind, which slowed us down. As a result, we'd had several days of eating half rations. We had a finite amount of food in the sledges to make this journey, so we were trying to string that out by reducing our intake to half  the calories we should have been eating. As a result, we both became increasingly hypoglycemic — we had low blood sugar  levels day after day — and increasingly susceptible to the extreme cold. Tarka took this photo of me one evening after I'd nearly passed out with hypothermia. We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia, something I hadn't experienced before, and it was very humbling indeed. As much as you might like to think, as I do, that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit, that you'll go down swinging, hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice. You become utterly incapacitated. It's like being a drunk toddler. You become pathetic. I remember just wanting to lie down and quit. It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling, and a real surprise to me to be debilitated to that degree.And then we ran out of food completely, 46 miles short of the first of the depots that we'd laid on our outward journey. We'd laid 10 depots of food, literally burying food and fuel, for our return journey — the fuel was for a cooker so you could melt snow to get water — and I was forced to make the decision to call for a resupply flight, a ski plane carrying eight days of food to tide us over that gap. They took 12 hours to reach us from the other side of Antarctica.Calling for that plane was one of  the toughest decisions of my life. And I sound like a bit of a fraud standing here now with a sort of belly. I've put on 30 pounds in the last three weeks. Being that hungry has left an interesting mental scar, which is that I've been hoovering up every hotel buffet that I can find. (Laughter) But we were genuinely quite hungry, and in quite a bad way. I don't regret calling for that plane for a second, because I'm still standing here alive, with all digits intact,  telling this story. But getting external assistance like that was never part of the plan, and it's something my ego is still struggling with. This was the biggest dream I've ever had, and it was so nearly perfect.On the way back down to the coast, our crampons — they're  the spikes on our boots that we have for traveling over this blue ice on the glacier — broke on the top of the Beardmore. We still had 100 miles to go downhill on very slippery rock-hard blue ice. They needed repairing almost every hour. To give you an idea of scale, this is looking down towards the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. You could fit the entirety of Manhattan in the gap on the horizon. That's 20 miles between Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin. I've never felt as small  as I did in Antarctica. When we got down to the mouth of the glacier, we found fresh snow had obscured the dozens of deep crevasses. One of Shackleton's men described crossing this sort of terrain as like walking over the glass roof of a railway station. We fell through more times than I can remember, usually just putting a ski or a boot through the snow. Occasionally we went in all  the way up to our armpits, but thankfully never deeper than that.And less than five weeks ago, after 105 days, we crossed this oddly  inauspicious finish line, the coast of Ross Island  on the New Zealand side of Antarctica. You can see the ice in the foreground and the sort of rubbly rock behind that. Behind us lay an unbroken  ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles. We'd made the longest ever polar journey on foot, something I'd been dreaming  of doing for a decade.And looking back, I still stand by all the things I've been saying for years about the importance of goals and determination and self-belief, but I'll also admit that I hadn't given much thought to what happens when you reach the all-consuming goal that you've dedicated  most of your adult life to, and the reality is that I'm  still figuring that bit out. As I said, there are very few superficial signs that I've been away. I've put on 30 pounds. I've got some very faint, probably  covered in makeup now, frostbite scars. I've got one on my nose, one on  each cheek, from where the goggles are, but inside I am a very  different person indeed. If I'm honest, Antarctica challenged me and humbled me so deeply that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to put it into words. I'm still struggling to piece together my thoughts. That I'm standing here  telling this story is proof that we all can  accomplish great things, through ambition, through passion, through sheer stubbornness, by refusing to quit, that if you dream something  hard enough, as Sting said, it does indeed come to pass. But I'm also standing here  saying, you know what, that cliche about the journey being  more important than the destination? There's something in that. The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops,  the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it.A lot of people have asked me, what next? Right now, I am very happy just recovering and in front of hotel buffets. But as Bob Hope put it, I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it. (Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_saunders_to_the_south_pole_and_back_the_hardest_105_days_of_my_life
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"2014 is a very special year for me: 20 years as a consultant, 20 years of marriage, and I'm turning 50 in one month. That means I was born in 1964 in a small town in Germany.It was a gray November day, and I was overdue. The hospital's maternity ward was really stressed out because a lot of babies were born on this gray November day. As a matter of fact, 1964 was the year with the highest birth rate ever in Germany: more than 1.3 million. Last year, we just hit over 600,000, so half of my number.What you can see here is the German age pyramid, and there, the small black point at the top, that's me. (Laughter) (Applause) In red, you can see the potential working-age population, so people over 15 and under 65, and I'm actually only interested in this red area.Now, let's do a simple simulation of how this age structure will develop over the next couple of years. As you can see, the peak is moving to the right, and I, with many other baby boomers, will retire in 2030. By the way, I don't need any forecasts of birth rates for predicting this red area. The red area, so the potential working-age population in 2030, is already set in stone today, except for much higher migration rates. And if you compare this red area in 2030 with the red area in 2014, it is much, much smaller.So before I show you the rest of the world, what does this mean for Germany? So what we know from this picture is that the labor supply, so people who provide labor, will go down in Germany, and will go down significantly. Now, what about labor demand? That's where it gets tricky. As you might know, the consultant's favorite answer to any question is, ""It depends."" So I would say it depends. We didn't want to forecast the future. Highly speculative. We did something else. We looked at the GDP and productivity growth of Germany over the last 20 years, and calculated the following scenario: if Germany wants to continue this GDP and productivity growth, we could directly calculate how many people Germany would need to support this growth. And this is the green line: labor demand. So Germany will run into a major talent shortage very quickly. Eight million people are missing, which is more than 20 percent of our current workforce, so big numbers, really big numbers. And we calculated several scenarios, and the picture always looked like this.Now, to close the gap, Germany has to significantly increase migration, get many more women in the workforce, increase retirement age — by the way, we just lowered it this year — and all these measures at once. If Germany fails here, Germany will stagnate. We won't grow anymore. Why? Because the workers are not there who can generate this growth. And companies will look for talents somewhere else. But where?Now, we simulated labor supply and labor demand for the largest 15 economies in the world, representing more than 70 percent of world GDP, and the overall picture looks like this by 2020. Blue indicates a labor surplus, red indicates a labor shortfall, and gray are those countries which are borderline. So by 2020, we still see a labor surplus in some countries, like Italy, France, the U.S., but this picture will change dramatically by 2030. By 2030, we will face a global workforce crisis in most of our largest economies, including three out of the four BRIC countries. China, with its former one-child policy, will be hit, as well as Brazil and Russia.Now, to tell the truth, in reality, the situation will be even more challenging. What you can see here are average numbers. We de-averaged them and broke them down into different skill levels, and what we found were even higher shortfalls for high-skilled people and a partial surplus for low-skilled workers. So on top of an overall labor shortage, we will face a big skill mismatch in the future, and this means huge challenges in terms of education, qualification, upskilling for governments and companies.Now, the next thing we looked into was robots, automation, technology. Will technology change this picture and boost productivity? Now, the short answer would be that our numbers already include a significant growth in productivity driven by technology. A long answer would go like this. Let's take Germany again. The Germans have a certain reputation in the world when it comes to productivity. In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, ""Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines."" (Laughter) That was 1998. Sixteen years later, you'd probably say the opposite. ""Send me more of these machines. They work like Germans."" (Laughter) (Applause)Technology will replace a lot of jobs, regular jobs. Not only in the production industry, but even office workers are in jeopardy and might be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence, big data, or automation. So the key question is not if technology replaces some of these jobs, but when, how fast, and to what extent? Or in other words, will technology help us to solve this global workforce crisis? Yes and no. This is a more sophisticated version of ""it depends."" (Laughter)Let's take the automotive industry as an example, because there, more than 40 percent of industrial robots are already working and automation has already taken place. In 1980, less than 10 percent of the production cost of a car was caused by electronic parts. Today, this number is more than 30 percent and it will grow to more than 50 percent by 2030. And these new electronic parts and applications require new skills and have created a lot of new jobs, like the cognitive systems engineer who optimizes the interaction between driver and electronic system. In 1980, no one had the slightest clue that such a job would ever exist. As a matter of fact, the overall number of people involved in the production of a car has only changed slightly in the last decades, in spite of robots and automation.So what does this mean? Yes, technology will replace a lot of jobs, but we will also see a lot of new jobs and new skills on the horizon, and that means technology will worsen our overall skill mismatch. And this kind of de-averaging reveals the crucial challenge for governments and businesses.So people, high-skilled people, talents, will be the big thing in the next decade. If they are the scarce resource, we have to understand them much better. Are they actually willing to work abroad? What are their job preferences?To find out, this year we conducted a global survey among more than 200,000 job seekers from 189 countries. Migration is certainly one key measure to close a gap, at least in the short term, so we asked about mobility. More than 60 percent of these 200,000 job seekers are willing to work abroad. For me, a surprisingly high number. If you look at the employees aged 21 to 30, this number is even higher. If you split this number up by country, yes, the world is mobile, but only partly. The least mobile countries are Russia, Germany and the U.S. Now where would these people like to move? Number seven is Australia, where 28 percent could imagine moving. Then France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, U.K., and the top choice worldwide is the U.S.Now, what are the job preferences of these 200,000 people? So, what are they looking for? Out of a list of 26 topics, salary is only number eight. The top four topics are all around culture. Number four, having a great relationship with the boss; three, enjoying a great work-life balance; two, having a great relationship with colleagues; and the top priority worldwide is being appreciated for your work. So, do I get a thank you? Not only once a year with the annual bonus payment, but every day. And now, our global workforce crisis becomes very personal. People are looking for recognition. Aren't we all looking for recognition in our jobs?Now, let me connect the dots. We will face a global workforce crisis which consists of an overall labor shortage plus a huge skill mismatch, plus a big cultural challenge. And this global workforce crisis is approaching very fast. Right now, we are just at the turning point. So what can we, what can governments, what can companies do? Every company, but also every country, needs a people strategy, and to act on it immediately, and such a people strategy consists of four parts. Number one, a plan for how to forecast supply and demand for different jobs and different skills. Workforce planning will become  more important than financial planning. Two, a plan for how to attract great people: generation Y, women, but also retirees. Three, a plan for how to educate and upskill them. There's a huge upskilling challenge ahead of us. And four, for how to retain the best people, or in other words, how to realize an appreciation and relationship culture.However, one crucial underlying factor is to change our attitudes. Employees are resources, are assets, not costs, not head counts, not machines, not even the Germans.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rainer_strack_the_surprising_workforce_crisis_of_2030_and_how_to_start_solving_it_now
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"Ten years ago, I got a phone call that changed my life. At the time, I was  cardiologist at UCLA, specializing in cardiac  imaging techniques. The call came from a veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo. An elderly female chimpanzee had woken up with a facial droop and the veterinarians were worried that she'd had a stroke. They asked if I'd  come to the zoo and image the animal's heart to look for a possible cardiac cause.Now, to be clear, North American zoos are staffed by highly qualified,  board-certified veterinarians who take outstanding  care of their animal patients. But occasionally, they do reach into  the human medical community, particularly for some  speciality consultation, and I was one of the lucky physicians who was invited in to help. I had a chance to rule out a stroke in this chimpanzee and make sure that this gorilla  didn't have a torn aorta, evaluate this macaw for a heart murmur, make sure that this California sea lion's paricardium wasn't inflamed, and in this picture, I'm listening to the heart of a lion after a lifesaving,  collaborative procedure with veterinarians and physicians where we drained 700 cc's of  fluid from the sac in which this lion's  heart was contained. And this procedure, which I have done on many human patients, was identical, with the exception of that paw and that tail.Now most of the time, I was working at UCLA Medical Center with physicians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for my human patients, but some of the time, I was working at the Los Angeles Zoo with veterinarians, discussing  symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for their animal patients. And occasionally, on  the very same day, I went on rounds at  UCLA Medical Center and at the Los Angeles Zoo. And here's what started coming into very clear focus for me. Physicians and veterinarians were essentially taking care of the same disorders in their  animal and human patients: congestive heart failure, brain tumors, leukemia, diabetes,  arthritis, ALS, breast cancer, even psychiatric syndromes like depression, anxiety, compulsions, eating disorders and self-injury.Now, I've got a confession to make. Even though I studied comparative physiology and evolutionary biology as an undergrad — I had even written my senior  thesis on Darwinian theory — learning about the  significant overlap between the disorders of  animals and humans, it came as a much needed  wake-up call for me. So I started wondering, with all of these overlaps, how was it that I had never thought to ask a veterinarian, or consult the veterinary literature, for insights into one  of my human patients? Why had I never, nor had any of my  physician friends and colleagues whom I asked, ever attended  a veterinary conference? For that matter, why was  any of this a surprise? I mean, look, every single physician accepts some biological connection between animals and humans. Every medication that we prescribe or that we've taken ourselves or we've given to our families has first been tested on an animal.But there's something very different about giving an animal a  medication or a human disease and the animal developing  congestive heart failure or diabetes or breast cancer  on their own. Now, maybe some of the surprise comes from the increasing separation in our world between the urban and the nonurban. You know, we hear about these city kids who think that wool grows on trees or that cheese comes from a plant. Well, today's human hospitals, increasingly, are turning into these gleaming cathedrals of technology. And this creates a psychological distance between the human patients who are being treated there and animal patients who are living in oceans and farms and jungles.But I think there's an  even deeper reason. Physicians and scientists, we accept intellectually that our species, Homo sapiens, is merely  one species, no more unique or special than any other. But in our hearts, we don't  completely believe that. I feel it myself when I'm  listening to Mozart or looking at pictures of the  Mars Rover on my MacBook. I feel that tug of  human exceptionalism, even as I recognize the  scientifically isolating cost of seeing ourselves as a superior species, apart. Well, I'm trying these days. When I see a human patient now, I always ask, what do the animal doctors know about this problem that I don't know? And, might I be taking better  care of my human patient if I saw them as a human animal patient?Here are a few examples of the  kind of exciting connections that this kind of  thinking has led me to. Fear-induced heart failure. Around the year 2000, human cardiologists ""discovered"" emotionally induced heart failure. It was described in a gambling father  who had lost his life's savings with a roll of the dice, in a bride who'd been left at the alter. But it turns out, this  ""new"" human diagnosis was neither new, nor was it uniquely human. Veterinarians had been diagnosing,  treating and even preventing emotionally induced symptoms in animals ranging from monkeys to flamingos, from to deer to rabbits, since the 1970s. How many human lives  might have been saved if this veterinary knowledge had been put into the hands of E.R. docs and cardiologists?Self-injury. Some human patients  harm themselves. Some pluck out patches of hair, others actually cut themselves. Some animal patients  also harm themselves. There are birds that  pluck out feathers. There are stallions that repetitively bite their flanks until they bleed. But veterinarians have very specific and very effective ways of treating and even preventing self-injury in their self-injuring animals. Shouldn't this veterinary knowledge be put into the hands of psychotherapists and  parents and patients struggling with self-injury?Postpartum depression and  postpartum psychosis. Sometimes, soon after giving birth, some women become depressed, and sometimes they become seriously  depressed and even psychotic. They may neglect their newborn, and in some extreme cases, even harm the child. Equine veterinarians also know that occasionally, a mare, soon after giving birth, will neglect the foal, refusing to nurse, and in some instances, kick the foal, even to death. But veterinarians have devised an intervention to deal with this foal rejection syndrome that involves increasing  oxytocin in the mare. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, and this leads to renewed interest, on the part of the mare, in her foal. Shouldn't this information be put into the hands of ob/gyn's and family doctors and patients who are struggling with postpartum depression and psychosis?Well, despite all of this promise, unfortunately the gulf between our fields remains large. To explain it, I'm afraid I'm going  to have to air some dirty laundry. Some physicians can be real snobs about doctors who are not M.D.'s. I'm talking about dentists and  optometrists and psychologists, but maybe especially animal doctors. Of course, most physicians don't realize that it is harder to get into vet school these days than medical school, and that when we go  to medical school, we learn everything  there is to know about one species, Homo sapiens, but veterinarians need to learn about health and disease in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and birds. So I don't blame the vets for feeling annoyed by my profession's condescension and ignorance. But here's one from the vets: What do you call a veterinarian who can only take  care of one species? A physician. (Laughter)Closing the gap has become  a passion for me, and I'm doing this  through programs like Darwin on Rounds at UCLA, where we're bringing animal experts  and evolutionary biologists and embedding them on our medical teams with our interns and our residents. And through Zoobiquity conferences, where we bring medical schools  together with veterinary schools for collabortive discussions of the shared diseases and disorders of animal and human patients. At Zoobiquity conferences, participants learn how treating breast cancer in a tiger can help us better treat breast cancer in a kindergarten teacher; how understanding polycystic overies in a Holstein cow can help us better take care of a dance instructor  with painful periods; and how better understanding the  treatment of separation anxiety in a high-strung Sheltie can help an anxious young child struggling with his first days of school.In the United States and now  internationally, at Zoobiquity conferences physicians and veterinarians check  their attitudes and their preconceptions at the door and come  together as colleagues, as peers, as doctors. After all, we humans  are animals, too, and it's time for us physicians to embrace our patients' and our own animal natures and join veterinarians in a species-spanning approach to health.Because it turns out, some of the best and  most humanistic medicine is being practiced by doctors whose patients aren't human. And one of the best ways  we can take care of the human patient is by  paying close attention to how all the other  patients on the planet live, grow, get sick and heal.Thank you.(Applause).","https://www.ted.com/talks/barbara_natterson_horowitz_what_veterinarians_know_that_doctors_don_t
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(Music)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/aakash_odedra_a_dance_in_a_hurricane_of_paper_wind_and_light
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"So, I thought a lot about the first word I'd say today, and I decided to say ""Colombia."" And the reason, I don't know how many of you have visited Colombia, but Colombia is just north of the border with Brazil. It's a beautiful country with extraordinary people, like me and others — (Laughter) — and it's populated with incredible fauna, flora. It's got water; it's got everything to be the perfect place.But we have a few problems. You may have heard of some of them. We have the oldest standing guerrilla in the world. It's been around for over 50 years, which means that in my lifetime, I have never lived one day  of peace in my country. This guerrilla — and the main group is the FARC guerrillas, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — they have financed their war by kidnapping, by extortion, by getting into the drug trade, by illegal mining. There has been terrorism. There have been random bombs. So it's not good. It's not really good. And if you look at the human cost of this war over 50 years, we have had more than 5.7 million displaced population. It's one of the biggest displaced populations in the world, and this conflict has cost over 220,000 lives. So it's a little bit like the Bolívar wars again. It's a lot of people who have died unnecessarily.We are now in the middle of peace talks, and we've been trying to help resolve this problem peacefully, and as part of that, we decided to try something completely lateral and different: Christmas lights.So Christmas lights, and you're saying, what the hell is this guy going to talk about? I am going to talk about gigantic trees that we put in nine strategic  pathways in the jungle covered with Christmas lights. These trees helped us  demobilize 331 guerrillas, roughly five percent of the guerrilla force at the time. These trees were lit up at night, and they had a sign beside them that said, ""If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilize. At Christmas, everything is possible.""So how do we know these trees worked? Well, we got 331, which is okay, but we also know that not a lot of guerrillas saw them, but we know that a lot of guerrillas heard about them, and we know this because we are constantly talking to demobilized guerrillas.So let me take you back four years before the trees. Four years before the trees, we were approached by the government to help them come up with a communications strategy to get as many guerrillas as we could out of the jungle. The government had a military strategy, it had a legal strategy, it had a political strategy, but it said, ""We don't really have a communications strategy, and it probably would be a good thing to have,"" so we decided to immediately jump into this, because it is an opportunity to affect the outcome of the conflict with the things that we do, with the tools that we have.But we didn't know very much about it. We didn't understand in Colombia,  if you live in the cities, you're very far away from where  the war is actually happening, so you don't really understand it, and we asked the government  to give us access to as many demobilized guerrillas as possible. And we talked to about 60 of them before we felt we fully understood the problem. We talked about — they told us why  they had joined the guerrillas, why the left the guerrillas, what their dreams were, what their frustrations were, and from those conversations came the underlying insight that has guided this whole campaign, which is that guerrillas are as much prisoners of their organizations as the people they hold hostage.And at the beginning, we were so touched by these stories, we were so amazed by these stories, that we thought that maybe  the best way to talk to the guerrillas was to have them talk to themselves, so we recorded about a hundred different stories during the first year, and we put them on the radio and television so that the guerrillas in the jungle could hear stories, their stories, or stories similar to theirs, and when they heard them, they decided to go out.I want to tell you one of these stories. This person you see here  is Giovanni Andres. Giovanni Andres is 25 when we took that picture. He had been seven years in the guerrilla, and he had demobilized very recently. His story is the following: He was recruited when he was 17, and sometime later, in his squadron, if you will, this beautiful girl was recruited, and they fell in love. Their conversations were about what their family was going to be like, what their kids' names would be, how their life would be when they left the guerrilla. But it turns out that love is very strictly forbidden in the lower ranks of the guerrilla, so their romance was discovered and they were separated. He was sent very far away, and she was left behind. She was very familiar with the territory, so one night, when she was on guard, she just left, and she went to the army, she demobilized, and she was one of the persons that we had the fortune to talk to, and we were really touched by this story, so we made a radio spot, and it turns out, by chance, that far away, many,  many kilometers north, he heard her on the radio, and when he heard her on the radio, he said, ""What am I doing here? She had the balls to get out. I need to do the same thing."" And he did. He walked for two days and two nights, and he risked his life and he got out, and the only thing he wanted was to see her. The only thing that was in his mind was to see her. The story was, they did meet. I know you're wondering if they did meet. They did meet. She had been recruited when she was 15, and she left when she was 17, so there were a lot of other complications, but they did eventually meet. I don't know if they're together now, but I can find out. (Laughter) But what I can tell you is that our radio strategy was working.The problem is that it was working in the lower ranks of the guerrilla. It was not working with the commanders, the people that are more difficult to replace, because you can easily recruit but you can't get the older commanders. So we thought, well, we'll use the same strategy. We'll have commanders talking to commanders. And we even went as far as asking ex-commanders of the guerrilla to fly on helicopters with microphones telling the people that used to fight with them, ""There is a better life out there,"" ""I'm doing good,"" ""This is not worth it,"" etc. But, as you can all imagine, it was very easy to counteract, because what was the guerrilla going to say? ""Yeah, right, if he doesn't do that, he's going to get killed."" So it was easy, so we were suddenly left with nothing, because the guerrilla were spreading the word that all of those things are done because if they don't do it,  they're in danger.And somebody, some brilliant person in our team, came back and said, ""You know what I noticed? I noticed that around Christmastime, there have been peaks of demobilization since this war has started."" And that was incredible, because that led us to think  that we needed to talk to the human being and not to the soldier. We needed to step away from talking from government to army, from army to army, and we needed to talk about the universal values, and we needed to talk about humanity. And that was when the Christmas tree happened. This picture that I have here, you see this is the planning of the Christmas trees, and that man you see there with the three stars, he's Captain Juan Manuel Valdez. Captain Valdez was the first  high-ranking official to give us the helicopters  and the support we needed to put these Christmas trees up, and he said in that meeting something that I will never forget. He said, ""I want to do this because being generous makes me stronger, makes my men feel stronger."" And I get very emotional when I remember him because he was killed later in combat and we really miss him, but I wanted you all to see him, because he was really, really important. He gave us all the support to put up the first Christmas trees.What happened later is that the guerrillas who came out during the Christmas tree  operation and all of that said, ""That's really good, Christmas trees are really cool, but you know what? We really don't walk anymore. We use rivers.""So rivers are the highways of the jungle, and this is something we learned, and most of the recruiting was being done in and around the river villages. So we went to these river villages, and we asked the people, and probably some of them were direct acquaintances of the guerrillas. We asked them, ""Can you send guerrillas a message?"" We collected over 6,000 messages. Some of them were notes saying, get out. Some of them were toys. Some of them were candy. Even people took off their jewelry, their little crosses and religious things, and put them in these floating balls that we sent down the rivers so that they could be picked up at night. And we sent thousands of these down the rivers, and then picked them up later if they weren't. But lots of them were picked up. This generated, on average, a demobilization every six hours, so this was incredible and it was about: Come home at Christmas.Then came the peace process, and when the peace process started, the whole mindset of the guerrilla changed. And it changed because it makes you think, ""Well, if there's a peace process, this is probably going to be over. At some point I'm going to get out."" And their fears completely changed, and their fears were not about, ""Am I going to get killed?"" Their fears were, ""Am I going to be rejected? When I get out of this, am I going to be rejected?"" So the past Christmas,  what we did was we asked — we found 27 mothers of guerrillas, and we asked them to give us  pictures of their children, when they only could recognize themselves, so as not to put their lives in danger, and we asked them to give the most motherly message you can get, which is, ""Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child, so come home, I'm waiting for you."" You can see the pictures here. I'll show you a couple. (Applause) Thank you.And these pictures were placed in many different places, and a lot of them came back, and it was really, really beautiful.And then we decided to work with society. So we did mothers around Christmastime. Now let's talk about the rest of the people. And you may be aware of this or not, but there was a World Cup this year, and Colombia played really well, and it was a unifying moment for Colombia. And what we did was tell the guerrillas, ""Come, get out of the jungle. We're saving a place for you."" So this was television, this was  all different types of media saying, ""We are saving a place for you."" The soldier here in the commercial says, ""I'm saving a place for you right here in this helicopter so that you can get out of this jungle and go enjoy the World Cup."" Ex-football players, radio announcers, everybody was saving a place for the guerrilla.So since we started this work a little over eight years ago, 17,000 guerrillas have demobilized. I do not — (Applause)Thank you.I don't want to say in any way that it only has to do with what we do, but what I do know is that our work and the work that we do may have helped a lot of them start thinking about demobilization, and it may have helped a lot of them take the final decision. If that is true, advertising is still one of the most powerful tools of change that we have available. And I speak not only my behalf, but on behalf of all the colleagues I see here who work in advertising, and of all the team that has worked with me to do this, that if you want to change the world, or if you want to achieve  peace, please call us. We'd love to help.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jose_miguel_sokoloff_how_christmas_lights_helped_guerrillas_put_down_their_guns
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"When I arrived in Kiev, on February 1 this year, Independence Square was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. The protesters who occupied Maidan, as the square is known, prepared for battle, stockpiling homemade weapons and mass-producing improvised body armor. The Euromaidan protests began peacefully at the end of 2013, after the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a far-reaching accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia. In response, tens of thousands of dissatisfied citizens poured into central Kiev to demonstrate against this allegiance.As the months passed, confrontations between police and civilians intensified. I set up a makeshift portrait studio by the barricades on Hrushevsky Street. There, I photographed the fighters against a black curtain, a curtain that obscured the highly seductive and visual backdrop of fire, ice and smoke. In order to tell the individual human stories here, I felt that I needed to remove the dramatic visuals that had become so familiar and repetitive within the mainstream media. What I was witnessing was not only news, but also history. With this realization, I was free from the photojournalistic conventions of the newspaper and the magazine. Oleg, Vasiliy and Maxim were all ordinary men, with ordinary lives from ordinary towns. But the elaborate costumes that they had bedecked themselves in were quite extraordinary. I say the word ""costume"" because these were not clothes that had been issued or coordinated by anyone. They were improvised uniforms made up of decommissioned military equipment, irregular combat fatigues and trophies taken from the police. I became interested in the way they were choosing to represent themselves, this outward expression of masculinity, the ideal of the warrior.I worked slowly, using an analog film camera with a manual focusing loop and a handheld light meter. The process is old-fashioned. It gives me time to speak with each person and to look at them, in silence, while they look back at me.Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on February 20, which became known as Bloody Thursday. Snipers, loyal to the government, started firing on the civilians and protesters on Institutskaya Street. Many were killed in a very short space of time. The reception of the Hotel Ukraine became a makeshift morgue. There were lines of bodies laid in the street. And there was blood all over the pavements. The following day, President Yanukovych fled Ukraine. In all, three months of protests resulted in more than 120 confirmed dead and many more missing. History unfolded quickly, but celebration remained elusive in Maidan.As the days passed in Kiev's central square, streams of armed fighters were joined by tens of thousands of ordinary people, filling the streets in an act of collective mourning. Many were women who often carried flowers that they had brought to lay as marks of respect for the dead. They came day after day and they covered the square with millions of flowers. Sadness enveloped Maidan. It was quiet and I could hear the birds singing. I hadn't heard that before.I stopped women as they approached the barricades to lay their tributes and asked to make their picture. Most women cried when I photographed them. On the first day, my fixer, Emine, and I cried with almost every woman who visited our studio. There had been such a noticeable absence of women up until that point. And the color of their pastel coats, their shiny handbags, and the bunches of red carnations, white tulips and yellow roses that they carried jarred with the blackened square and the blackened men who were encamped there.It is clear to me that these two sets of pictures don't make much sense without the other. They are about men and women and the way we are — not the way we look, but the way we are. They speak about different gender roles in conflict, not only in Maidan, and not only in Ukraine. Men fight most wars and women mourn them. If the men showed the ideal of the warrior, then the women showed the implications of such violence.When I made these pictures, I believed that I was documenting the end of violent events in Ukraine. But now I understand that it is a record of the beginning. Today, the death toll stands around 3,000, while hundreds of thousands have been displaced. I was in Ukraine again six weeks ago. In Maidan, the barricades have been dismantled, and the paving stones which were used as weapons during the protests replaced, so that traffic flows freely through the center of the square. The fighters, the women and the flowers are gone. A huge billboard depicting geese flying over a wheat field covers the burned-out shell of the trade union's building and proclaims, ""Glory to Ukraine. Glory to heroes."" Thank you. (Applause).","https://www.ted.com/talks/anastasia_taylor_lind_fighters_and_mourners_of_the_ukrainian_revolution
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"Thank you. I have only got 18 minutes to explain something  that lasts for hours and days, so I'd better get started. Let's start with a clip from Al Jazeera's Listening Post.Richard Gizbert: Norway is a country that  gets relatively little media coverage. Even the elections this past week passed without much drama. And that's the Norwegian media in a nutshell: not much drama. A few years back, Norway's public TV channel NRK decided to broadcast live coverage of a seven-hour train ride — seven hours of simple footage, a train rolling down the tracks. Norwegians, more than a million of them according to the ratings, loved it. A new kind of reality TV show was born, and it goes against all the rules of TV engagement. There is no story line, no script, no drama, no climax, and it's called Slow TV. For the past two months, Norwegians have been watching  a cruise ship's journey up the coast, and there's a lot of fog on that coast. Executives at Norway's National Broadcasting Service are now considering broadcasting a night of knitting nationwide. On the surface, it sounds boring, because it is, but something about this TV experiment has gripped Norwegians. So we sent the Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro to Oslo to find out what it is, but first a warning: Viewers may find some of the images in the following report disappointing. (Laughter)Thomas Hellum: And then follows an eight-minute story on Al Jazeera about some strange TV programs in little Norway. Al Jazeera. CNN. How did we get there? We have to go back to 2009, when one of my colleagues got a great idea. Where do you get your ideas? In the lunchroom. So he said, why don't we make a radio program marking the day of the German invasion of Norway in 1940. We tell the story at the exact time during the night. Wow. Brilliant idea, except this was just a couple of weeks before the invasion day. So we sat in our lunchroom and discussed what other stories can you tell as they evolve? What other things take a really long time?So one of us came up with a train. The Bergen Railway had its  100-year anniversary that year It goes from western Norway to eastern Norway, and it takes exactly the same time as it did 40 years ago, over seven hours. (Laughter) So we caught our commissioning editors  in Oslo, and we said, we want to make a documentary about the Bergen Railway, and we want to make it in full length, and the answer was, ""Yes, but how long will the program be?"" ""Oh,"" we said, ""full length."" ""Yes, but we mean the program."" And back and forth.Luckily for us, they met us with laughter, very, very good laughter, so one bright day in September, we started a program that we thought should be seven hours and four minutes. Actually, it turned out to be seven hours and 14 minutes due to a signal failure at the last station. We had four cameras, three of them pointing out to the beautiful nature. Some talking to the guests, some information. (Video) Train announcement:  We will arrive at Haugastøl Station. TH: And that's about it, but of course, also the 160 tunnels gave us the opportunity to do some archives. Narrator [in Norwegian]: Then a bit of flirting while the food is digested. The last downhill stretch before we reach our destination. We pass Mjølfjell Station. Then a new tunnel. (Laughter) TH: And now we thought, yes, we have a brilliant program. It will fit for the 2,000 train spotters in Norway. We brought it on air in November 2009. But no, this was far more attractive. This is the five biggest TV channels in Norway on a normal Friday, and if you look at NRK2 over here, look what happened when they put on the Bergen Railway show: 1.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program. (Applause) And another funny thing: When the host on our main channel, after they have got news for you, she said, ""And on our second channel, the train has now nearly reached Myrdal station."" Thousands of people just jumped on the train on our second channel like this. (Laughter) This was also a huge success in terms of social media. It was so nice to see all the thousands of Facebook and Twitter users discussing the same view, talking to each other as if they were on the same train together. And especially, I like this one. It's a 76-year-old man. He's watched all the program, and at the end station, he rises up to pick up what he thinks is his luggage, and his head hit the curtain rod, and he realized he is in his own living room. (Applause)So that's strong and living TV. Four hundred and thirty-six minute by minute on a Friday night, and during that first night, the first Twitter message came: Why be a chicken? Why stop at 436 when you can expand that to 8,040, minute by minute, and do the iconic journey in Norway, the coastal ship journey Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes, almost 3,000 kilometers, covering most of our coast. It has 120-year-old, very interesting history, and literally takes part in life and death along the coast. So just a week after the Bergen Railway, we called the Hurtigruten company and we started planning for our next show.We wanted to do something different. The Bergen Railway was a recorded program. So when we sat in our editing room, we watched this picture — it's all Ål Station — we saw this journalist. We had called him, we had spoken to him, and when we left the station, he took this picture of us and he waved to the camera, and we thought, what if more people knew that we were on board that train? Would more people show up? What would it look like? So we decided our next project, it should be live. We wanted this picture of us on the fjord and on the screen at the same time.So this is not the first time NRK had been on board a ship. This is back in 1964, when the technical managers have suits and ties and NRK rolled all its equipment on board a ship, and 200 meters out of the shore, transmitting the signal back, and in the machine room, they talked to the machine guy, and on the deck, they have splendid entertainment. So being on a ship,  it's not the first time. But five and a half days in a row, and live, we wanted some help. And we asked our viewers out there, what do you want to see? What do you want us to film? How do you want this to look? Do you want us to make a website? What do you want on it? And we got some answers from you out there, and it helped us a very lot to build the program. So in June 2011, 23 of us went on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship and we set off. (Music)I have some really strong memories from that week, and it's all about people. This guy, for instance, he's head of research at the University in Tromsø (Laughter) And I will show you a piece of cloth, this one. It's the other strong memory. It belongs to a guy called Erik Hansen. And it's people like those two who took a firm grip of our program, and together with thousands of others along the route, they made the program what it became. They made all the stories. This is Karl. He's in the ninth grade. It says, ""I will be a little late for school tomorrow."" He was supposed to be in the school at 8 a.m. He came at 9 a.m., and he didn't get a note from his teacher, because the teacher had watched the program. (Laughter)How did we do this? Yes, we took a conference room on board the Hurtigruten. We turned it into a complete TV control room. We made it all work, of course, and then we took along 11 cameras. This is one of them. This is my sketch from February, and when you give this sketch to professional people in the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK, you get some cool stuff back. And with some very creative solutions.(Video) Narrator [in Norwegian]:  Run it up and down. This is Norway's most important drill right now. It regulates the height of a bow camera in NRK's live production, one of 11 that capture great shots from the MS Nord-Norge. Eight wires keep the camera stable. Cameraman: I work  on different camera solutions. They're just tools used in a different context.TH: Another camera is this one. It's normally used for sports. It made it possible for us to take close-up pictures of people 100 kilomteres away, like this one. (Laughter) People called us and asked, how is this man doing? He's doing fine. Everything went well. We also could take pictures of people waving at us, people along the route, thousands of them, and they all had a phone in their hand. And when you take a picture of them, and they get the message, ""Now we are on TV, dad,"" they start waving back. This was waving TV  for five and a half days, and people get so extremely happy when they can send a warm message to their loved ones.It was also a great success on social media. On the last day, we met Her Majesty the Queen of Norway, and Twitter couldn't quite handle it. And we also, on the web, during this week we streamed more than 100 years of video to 148 nations, and the websites are still there and they will be forever, actually, because Hurtigruten was selected to be part of the Norwegian UNESCO list of documents, and it's also in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest documentary ever. (Applause) Thank you.But it's a long program, so some watched part of it, like the Prime Minister. Some watched a little bit more. It says, ""I haven't used my bed for five days."" And he's 82 years old, and he hardly slept. He kept watching because something might happen, though it probably won't. (Laughter) This is the number of viewers along the route. You can see the famous Trollfjord and a day after, all-time high for NRK2. If you see the four biggest channels in Norway during June 2011, they will look like this, and as a TV producer, it's a pleasure to put Hurtigruten on top of it. It looks like this: 3.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program, and we are only five million here. Even the passengers on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship — (Laughter) — they chose to watched the telly instead of turning 90 degrees and watching out the window.So we were allowed to be  part of people's living room with this strange TV program, with music, nature, people. And Slow TV was now a buzzword, and we started looking for other things we could make Slow TV about. So we could either take something long and make it a topic, like with the railway and the Hurtigruten, or we could take a topic and make it long. This is the last project. It's the peep show. It's 14 hours of birdwatching on a TV screen, actually 87 days on the web. We have made 18 hours of live salmon fishing. It actually took three hours before we got the first fish, and that's quite slow. We have made 12 hours of boat ride into the beautiful Telemark Canal, and we have made another train ride with the northern railway, and because this we couldn't do live, we did it in four seasons just to give the viewer another experience on the way.So our next project got us some attention outside Norway. This is from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central.(Video) Stephen Colbert: I've got my eye on a wildly popular program from Norway called ""National Firewood Night,"" which consisted of mostly people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods, and then eight hours of a fire  burning in a fireplace. (Laughter) It destroyed the other  top Norwegian shows, like ""So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry"" and ""The Amazing Glacier Race."" And get this, almost 20 percent of the Norwegian population tuned in, 20 percent.TH: So, when wood fire and wood chopping can be that interesting, why not knitting? So on our next project, we used more than eight hours to go live from a sheep to a sweater, and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show, he liked that.(Music)(Video) Jimmy Kimmel: Even the people on the show are falling asleep, and after all that, the knitters actually failed to break the world record. They did not succeed, but remember the old Norwegian saying, it's not whether you win or lose that counts. In fact, nothing counts,  and death is coming for us all. (Laughter)TH: Exactly. So why does this stand out? This is so completely different to other TV programming. We take the viewer on a journey that happens right now in real time, and the viewer gets the feeling of actually being there, actually being on the train, on the boat, and knitting together with others, and the reason I think why they're doing that is because we don't edit the timeline. It's important that we don't edit the timeline, and it's also important that what we make Slow TV about is something that we all can relate to, that the viewer can relate to, and that somehow has  a root in our culture. This is a picture from last summer when we traveled the coast again for seven weeks. And of course this is a lot of planning, this is a lot of logistics. So this is the working plan for 150 people last summer, but more important is what you don't plan. You don't plan what's going to happen. You have to just take your cameras with you. It's like a sports event. You rig them and you see what's happening. So this is actually the whole running order for Hurtigruten, 134 hours, just written on one page. We didn't know anything more when we left Bergen.So you have to let the viewers make the stories themselves, and I'll give you an example of that. This is from last summer, and as a TV producer, it's a nice picture, but now you can cut to the next one. But this is Slow TV, so you have to keep this picture until  it really starts hurting your stomach, and then you keep it a little bit longer, and when you keep it that long, I'm sure some of you now have noticed the cow. Some of you have seen the flag. Some of you start wondering, is the farmer at home? Has he left? Is he watching the cow? And where is that cow going? So my point is, the longer you keep a picture like this, and we kept it for 10 minutes, you start making the stories in your own head. That's Slow TV.So we think that Slow TV is one nice way of telling a TV story, and we think that we can continue doing it, not too often, once or twice a year, so we keep the feeling of an event, and we also think that the good Slow TV idea, that's the idea when people say, ""Oh no, you can't put that on TV."" When people smile, it might be a very good slow idea, so after all, life is best when it's a bit strange.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_hellum_the_world_s_most_boring_television_and_why_it_s_hilariously_addictive
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"The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police  shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening  with surveillance equipment.NSA-style mass  surveillance is enabling local police departments  to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible.Location information can  be very sensitive. If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go  to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church  or if you don't go to church. And when that  information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain  a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact.This information used to be private. Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information.One of the key technologies  driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for — they're everywhere. Mounted on roads or  on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing.But more than that, increasingly, local police departments  are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that  passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. Did you know this was happening?When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date,  time and location, the police department had  photographs that captured where he was going and  often who he was with. The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. The government has  hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. And if you drive a car  in the United States, I would bet money  that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life.Mike hasn't done anything wrong. Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police  departments are doing it. At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together  into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. This document from the  Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal  the existence of this database. Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending.The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees.License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known  to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods.Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.The question is, what should we do about this? I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. History has shown that once the police  have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism.Fortunately, there are steps we can take. Local police departments can  be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data  about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. Thank you. (Applause).","https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_crump_the_small_and_surprisingly_dangerous_detail_the_police_track_about_you
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"When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships  between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network.Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down  on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network  we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. Under Armour, you may have heard of, is a Baltimore company, and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network.Let's take a look at San Francisco. You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. And so it leads to things like this. [""Evict Twitter""] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this.Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. It's a very heterogenous city in a way  that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. How cool is that? And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city.So we have all this data. It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. So what can we do with it? Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit.The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here — only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think  about diversity in a new way.And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so.So what is a city? I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city  is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_troy_social_maps_that_reveal_a_city_s_intersections_and_separations
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"I was on a long road trip this summer, and I was having a wonderful time listening to the amazing Isabel Wilkerson's ""The Warmth of Other Suns."" It documents six million black folks fleeing the South from 1915 to 1970 looking for a respite from all the brutality and trying to get to a better opportunity up North, and it was filled with stories of the resilience and the brilliance of African-Americans, and it was also really hard to hear all the stories of the horrors and the humility, and all the humiliations. It was especially hard to hear about the beatings and the burnings and the lynchings of black men. And I said, ""You know, this is a little deep. I need a break. I'm going to turn on the radio."" I turned it on, and there it was: Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, 18-year-old black man, unarmed, shot by a white police officer, laid on the ground dead, blood running for four hours while his grandmother and little children and his neighbors watched in horror, and I thought, here it is again. This violence, this brutality against black men has been going on for centuries. I mean, it's the same story. It's just different names. It could have been Amadou Diallo. It could have been Sean Bell. It could have been Oscar Grant. It could have been Trayvon Martin.This violence, this brutality, is really something that's part of our national psyche. It's part of our collective history. What are we going to do about it? You know that part of us that still crosses the street, locks the doors, clutches the purses, when we see young black men? That part.I mean, I know we're not shooting people down in the street, but I'm saying that the same stereotypes and prejudices that fuel those kinds of tragic incidents are in us. We've been schooled in them as well. I believe that we can stop these types of incidents, these Fergusons from happening, by looking within and being willing to change ourselves.So I have a call to action for you. There are three things that I want to offer us today to think about as ways to stop Ferguson from happening again; three things that I think will help us reform our images of young black men; three things that I'm hoping will not only protect them but will open the world so that they can thrive. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine our country embracing young black men, seeing them as part of our future, giving them that kind of openness, that kind of grace we give to people we love? How much better would our lives be? How much better would our country be?Let me just start with number one. We gotta get out of denial. Stop trying to be good people. We need real people. You know, I do a lot of diversity work, and people will come up to me at the beginning of the workshop. They're like, ""Oh, Ms. Diversity Lady, we're so glad you're here"" — (Laughter) — ""but we don't have a biased bone  in our body."" And I'm like, ""Really? Because I do this work every day, and I see all my biases.""I mean, not too long ago, I was on a plane and I heard the voice of a woman pilot coming over the P.A. system, and I was just so excited, so thrilled. I was like, ""Yes, women, we are rocking it. We are now in the stratosphere."" It was all good, and then it started getting turbulent and bumpy, and I was like, ""I hope she can drive."" (Laughter) I know. Right. But it's not even like I knew that was a bias until I was coming back on the other leg and there's always a guy driving and it's often turbulent and bumpy, and I've never questioned the confidence of the male driver. The pilot is good. Now, here's the problem. If you ask me explicitly, I would say, ""Female pilot: awesome."" But it appears that when things get funky and a little troublesome, a little risky, I lean on a bias that I didn't even know that I had. You know, fast-moving planes in the sky, I want a guy. That's my default. Men are my default. Who is your default? Who do you trust? Who are you afraid of? Who do you implicitly feel connected to? Who do you run away from?I'm going to tell you what we have learned. The implicit association test, which measures unconscious bias, you can go online and take it. Five million people have taken it. Turns out, our default is white. We like white people. We prefer white. What do I mean by that? When people are shown images  of black men and white men, we are more quickly able to associate that picture with a positive word, that white person with a positive word, than we are when we are  trying to associate positive with a black face, and vice versa. When we see a black face, it is easier for us to connect black with negative than it is white with negative. Seventy percent of white people taking that test prefer white. Fifty percent of black people taking that test prefer white. You see, we were all outside when the contamination came down.What do we do about the fact that our brain automatically associates? You know, one of the things that you probably are thinking about, and you're probably like, you know what, I'm just going to double down on my color blindness. Yes, I'm going to recommit to that. I'm going to suggest to you, no. We've gone about as far as we can go trying to make a difference trying to not see color. The problem was never that we saw color. It was what we did when we saw the color. It's a false ideal. And while we're busy  pretending not to see, we are not being aware of the ways in which racial difference is changing people's possibilities, that's keeping them from thriving, and sometimes it's causing them an early death.So in fact, what the scientists are telling us is, no way. Don't even think about color blindness. In fact, what they're suggesting is, stare at awesome black people. (Laughter) Look at them directly in their faces and memorize them, because when we look at awesome folks who are black, it helps to dissociate the association that happens automatically in our brain. Why do you think I'm showing you these beautiful black men behind me? There were so many, I had to cut them. Okay, so here's the thing: I'm trying to reset your automatic associations about who black men are. I'm trying to remind you that young black men grow up to be amazing human beings who have changed our lives and made them better.So here's the thing. The other possibility in science, and it's only temporarily changing our automatic assumptions, but one thing we know is that if you take a white person who is odious that you know, and stick it up next to a person of color, a black person, who is fabulous, then that sometimes actually causes us to disassociate too. So think Jeffrey Dahmer and Colin Powell. Just stare at them, right? (Laughter) But these are the things. So go looking for your bias. Please, please, just get out of denial and go looking for disconfirming data that will prove that in fact your old stereotypes are wrong.Okay, so that's number one: number two, what I'm going to say is move toward young black men instead of away from them. It's not the hardest thing to do, but it's also one of these things where you have to be conscious  and intentional about it. You know, I was in a Wall Street area  one time several years ago when I was with a colleague of mine, and she's really wonderful and she does diversity work with me and she's a woman of color, she's Korean. And we were outside, it was late at night, and we were sort of wondering where we were going, we were lost. And I saw this person across the street, and I was thinking, ""Oh great, black guy."" I was going toward him without even thinking about it. And she was like, ""Oh, that's interesting."" The guy across the street, he was a black guy. I think black guys generally know where they're going. I don't know why exactly I think that, but that's what I think. So she was saying, ""Oh, you were going, 'Yay, a black guy'?"" She said, ""I was going, 'Ooh, a black guy.'"" Other direction. Same need, same guy, same clothes, same time, same street, different reaction. And she said, ""I feel so bad. I'm a diversity consultant. I did the black guy thing. I'm a woman of color. Oh my God!"" And I said, ""You know what? Please. We really need to relax about this."" I mean, you've got to realize I go way back with black guys. (Laughter) My dad is a black guy. You see what I'm saying? I've got a 6'5"" black guy son. I was married to a black guy. My black guy thing is so wide and so deep that I can pretty much sort and figure out who that black guy is, and he was my black guy. He said, ""Yes, ladies, I know where you're going. I'll take you there.""You know, biases are the stories we make up about people before we know who they actually are. But how are we going to know who they are when we've been told to avoid and be afraid of them? So I'm going to tell you to walk toward your discomfort. And I'm not asking you to take any crazy risks. I'm saying, just do an inventory, expand your social and professional circles. Who's in your circle? Who's missing? How many authentic relationships do you have with young black people, folks, men, women? Or any other major difference from who you are and how you roll, so to speak? Because, you know what? Just look around your periphery. There may be somebody at work, in your classroom, in your house of worship, somewhere, there's some black young guy there. And you're nice. You say hi. I'm saying go deeper, closer, further, and build the kinds of relationships, the kinds of friendships that actually cause you to see the holistic person and to really go against the stereotypes. I know some of you are out there,I know because I have some white friends in particular that will say, ""You have no idea how awkward I am. Like, I don't think this is going to work for me. I'm sure I'm going to blow this."" Okay, maybe, but this thing is not  about perfection. It's about connection. And you're not going to get comfortable before you get uncomfortable. I mean, you just have to do it. And young black men, what I'm saying is if someone comes your way, genuinely and authentically, take the invitation. Not everyone is out to get you. Go looking for those people who can see your humanity. You know, it's the empathy and the compassion that comes out of having relationships with people who are different from you. Something really powerful and beautiful happens: you start to realize that they are you, that they are part of you, that they are you in your family, and then we cease to be bystanders and we become actors, we become advocates, and we become allies. So go away from your comfort into a bigger, brighter thing, because that is how we will stop another Ferguson from happening. That's how we create a community where everybody, especially young black men, can thrive.So this last thing is going to be harder, and I know it, but I'm just going to put it out there anyway. When we see something, we have to have the courage to say something, even to the people we love. You know, it's holidays and it's going to be a time when we're sitting around the table and having a good time. Many of us, anyways, will be in holidays, and you've got to listen to the conversations around the table. You start to say things like, ""Grandma's a bigot."" (Laughter) ""Uncle Joe is racist."" And you know, we love Grandma and we love Uncle Joe. We do. We know they're good people, but what they're saying is wrong. And we need to be able to say something, because you know who else is at the table? The children are at the table. And we wonder why these biases don't die, and move from generation to generation? Because we're not saying anything. We've got to be willing to say, ""Grandma, we don't call people that anymore."" ""Uncle Joe, it isn't true that he deserved that. No one deserves that."" And we've got to be willing to not shelter our children from the ugliness of racism when black parents don't have the luxury to do so, especially those who have  young black sons. We've got to take  our lovely darlings, our future, and we've got to tell them we have  an amazing country with incredible ideals, we have worked incredibly hard, and we have made some progress, but we are not done. We still have in us this old stuff about superiority and it is causing us to embed those further into our institutions and our society and generations, and it is making for despair and disparities and a devastating devaluing of young black men. We still struggle, you have to tell them, with seeing both the color and the character of young black men, but that you, and you expect them, to be part of the forces of change in this society that will stand against injustice and is willing, above all other things, to make a society where young black men  can be seen for all of who they are.So many amazing black men, those who are the most amazing statesmen that have ever lived, brave soldiers, awesome, hardworking laborers. These are people who are powerful preachers. They are incredible scientists and artists and writers. They are dynamic comedians. They are doting grandpas, caring sons. They are strong fathers, and they are young men with dreams of their own.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/verna_myers_how_to_overcome_our_biases_walk_boldly_toward_them
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"It used to be that if you wanted to get a computer to do something new, you would have to program it. Now, programming, for those of you here that haven't done it yourself, requires laying out in excruciating detail every single step that you want the computer to do in order to achieve your goal. Now, if you want to do something that you don't know how to do yourself, then this is going to be a great challenge.So this was the challenge faced by this man, Arthur Samuel. In 1956, he wanted to get this computer to be able to beat him at checkers. How can you write a program, lay out in excruciating detail, how to be better than you at checkers? So he came up with an idea: he had the computer play against itself thousands of times and learn how to play checkers. And indeed it worked, and in fact, by 1962, this computer had beaten the Connecticut state champion.So Arthur Samuel was the father of machine learning, and I have a great debt to him, because I am a machine learning practitioner. I was the president of Kaggle, a community of over 200,000 machine learning practictioners. Kaggle puts up competitions to try and get them to solve previously unsolved problems, and it's been successful  hundreds of times. So from this vantage point, I was able to find out a lot about what machine learning can do in the past, can do today, and what it could do in the future. Perhaps the first big success of  machine learning commercially was Google. Google showed that it is possible to find information by using a computer algorithm, and this algorithm is based on machine learning. Since that time, there have been many commercial successes of machine learning. Companies like Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to suggest products that you might like to buy, movies that you might like to watch. Sometimes, it's almost creepy. Companies like LinkedIn and Facebook sometimes will tell you about who your friends might be and you have no idea how it did it, and this is because it's using the power of machine learning. These are algorithms that have learned how to do this from data rather than being programmed by hand.This is also how IBM was successful in getting Watson to beat the two world champions at ""Jeopardy,"" answering incredibly subtle and complex questions like this one. [""The ancient 'Lion of Nimrud' went missing from this city's national museum in 2003  (along with a lot of other stuff)""] This is also why we are now able to see the first self-driving cars. If you want to be able to tell the difference between, say, a tree and a pedestrian, well, that's pretty important. We don't know how to write those programs by hand, but with machine learning, this is now possible. And in fact, this car has driven  over a million miles without any accidents on regular roads.So we now know that computers can learn, and computers can learn to do things that we actually sometimes don't know how to do ourselves, or maybe can do them better than us. One of the most amazing examples I've seen of machine learning happened on a project that I ran at Kaggle where a team run by a guy called Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto won a competition for automatic drug discovery. Now, what was extraordinary here is not just that they beat all of the algorithms developed by Merck or the international academic community, but nobody on the team had any background in chemistry or biology or life sciences, and they did it in two weeks. How did they do this? They used an extraordinary algorithm called deep learning. So important was this that in fact the success was covered in The New York Times in a front page article a few weeks later. This is Geoffrey Hinton here on the left-hand side. Deep learning is an algorithm inspired by how the human brain works, and as a result it's an algorithm which has no theoretical limitations on what it can do. The more data you give it and the more computation time you give it, the better it gets.The New York Times also showed in this article another extraordinary result of deep learning which I'm going to show you now. It shows that computers  can listen and understand.(Video) Richard Rashid: Now, the last step that I want to be able to take in this process is to actually speak to you in Chinese. Now the key thing there is, we've been able to take a large amount  of information from many Chinese speakers and produce a text-to-speech system that takes Chinese text and converts it into Chinese language, and then we've taken an hour or so of my own voice and we've used that to modulate the standard text-to-speech system so that it would sound like me. Again, the result's not perfect. There are in fact quite a few errors. (In Chinese) (Applause) There's much work to be done in this area. (In Chinese) (Applause)Jeremy Howard: Well, that was at a machine learning conference in China. It's not often, actually, at academic conferences that you do hear spontaneous applause, although of course sometimes at TEDx conferences, feel free. Everything you saw there was happening with deep learning. (Applause) Thank you. The transcription in English was deep learning. The translation to Chinese and the text in the top right, deep learning, and the construction of the voice was deep learning as well.So deep learning is this extraordinary thing. It's a single algorithm that can seem to do almost anything, and I discovered that a year earlier, it had also learned to see. In this obscure competition from Germany called the German Traffic Sign  Recognition Benchmark, deep learning had learned to recognize traffic signs like this one. Not only could it recognize the traffic signs better than any other algorithm, the leaderboard actually showed it was better than people, about twice as good as people. So by 2011, we had the first example of computers that can see better than people. Since that time, a lot has happened. In 2012, Google announced that they had a deep learning algorithm watch YouTube videos and crunched the data on 16,000 computers for a month, and the computer independently learned about concepts such as people and cats just by watching the videos. This is much like the way that humans learn. Humans don't learn by being told what they see, but by learning for themselves what these things are. Also in 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, who we saw earlier, won the very popular ImageNet competition, looking to try to figure out  from one and a half million images what they're pictures of. As of 2014, we're now down to a six percent error rate in image recognition. This is better than people, again.So machines really are doing an extraordinarily good job of this, and it is now being used in industry. For example, Google announced last year that they had mapped every single location in France in two hours, and the way they did it was that they fed street view images into a deep learning algorithm to recognize and read street numbers. Imagine how long it would have taken before: dozens of people, many years. This is also happening in China. Baidu is kind of  the Chinese Google, I guess, and what you see here in the top left is an example of a picture that I uploaded to Baidu's deep learning system, and underneath you can see that the system has understood what that picture is and found similar images. The similar images actually have similar backgrounds, similar directions of the faces, even some with their tongue out. This is not clearly looking at the text of a web page. All I uploaded was an image. So we now have computers which really understand what they see and can therefore search databases of hundreds of millions of images in real time.So what does it mean now that computers can see? Well, it's not just  that computers can see. In fact, deep learning has done more than that. Complex, nuanced sentences like this one are now understandable with deep learning algorithms. As you can see here, this Stanford-based system showing the red dot at the top has figured out that this sentence is expressing negative sentiment. Deep learning now in fact is near human performance at understanding what sentences are about and what it is saying about those things. Also, deep learning has been used to read Chinese, again at about native Chinese speaker level. This algorithm developed out of Switzerland by people, none of whom speak or understand any Chinese. As I say, using deep learning is about the best system in the world for this, even compared to native human understanding.This is a system that we put together at my company which shows putting all this stuff together. These are pictures which have no text attached, and as I'm typing in here sentences, in real time it's understanding these pictures and figuring out what they're about and finding pictures that are similar to the text that I'm writing. So you can see, it's actually understanding my sentences and actually understanding these pictures. I know that you've seen something like this on Google, where you can type in things and it will show you pictures, but actually what it's doing is it's searching the webpage for the text. This is very different from actually understanding the images. This is something that computers have only been able to do for the first time in the last few months.So we can see now that computers can not only see but they can also read, and, of course, we've shown that they can understand what they hear. Perhaps not surprising now that I'm going to tell you they can write. Here is some text that I generated using a deep learning algorithm yesterday. And here is some text that an algorithm out of Stanford generated. Each of these sentences was generated by a deep learning algorithm to describe each of those pictures. This algorithm before has never seen a man in a black shirt playing a guitar. It's seen a man before, it's seen black before, it's seen a guitar before, but it has independently generated this novel description of this picture. We're still not quite at human performance here, but we're close. In tests, humans prefer the computer-generated caption one out of four times. Now this system is now only two weeks old, so probably within the next year, the computer algorithm will be well past human performance at the rate things are going. So computers can also write.So we put all this together and it leads to very exciting opportunities. For example, in medicine, a team in Boston announced that they had discovered dozens of new clinically relevant features of tumors which help doctors make a prognosis of a cancer. Very similarly, in Stanford, a group there announced that, looking at tissues under magnification, they've developed  a machine learning-based system which in fact is better than human pathologists at predicting survival rates for cancer sufferers. In both of these cases, not only were the predictions more accurate, but they generated new insightful science. In the radiology case, they were new clinical indicators that humans can understand. In this pathology case, the computer system actually discovered that the cells around the cancer are as important as the cancer cells themselves in making a diagnosis. This is the opposite of what pathologists had been taught for decades. In each of those two cases, they were systems developed by a combination of medical experts and machine learning experts, but as of last year, we're now beyond that too. This is an example of identifying cancerous areas of human tissue under a microscope. The system being shown here can identify those areas more accurately, or about as accurately, as human pathologists, but was built entirely with deep learning using no medical expertise by people who have no background in the field. Similarly, here, this neuron segmentation. We can now segment neurons about as accurately as humans can, but this system was developed with deep learning using people with no previous  background in medicine.So myself, as somebody with no previous background in medicine, I seem to be entirely well qualified to start a new medical company, which I did. I was kind of terrified of doing it, but the theory seemed to suggest that it ought to be possible to do very useful medicine using just these data analytic techniques. And thankfully, the feedback has been fantastic, not just from the media but from the medical community, who have been very supportive. The theory is that we can take the middle part of the medical process and turn that into data analysis as much as possible, leaving doctors to do what they're best at. I want to give you an example. It now takes us about 15 minutes to generate a new medical diagnostic test and I'll show you that in real time now, but I've compressed it down to  three minutes by cutting some pieces out. Rather than showing you creating a medical diagnostic test, I'm going to show you  a diagnostic test of car images, because that's something we can all understand.So here we're starting with  about 1.5 million car images, and I want to create something that can split them into the angle of the photo that's being taken. So these images are entirely unlabeled, so I have to start from scratch. With our deep learning algorithm, it can automatically identify areas of structure in these images. So the nice thing is that the human and the computer can now work together. So the human, as you can see here, is telling the computer about areas of interest which it wants the computer then to try and use to improve its algorithm. Now, these deep learning systems actually are in 16,000-dimensional space, so you can see here the computer rotating this through that space, trying to find new areas of structure. And when it does so successfully, the human who is driving it can then point out the areas that are interesting. So here, the computer has successfully found areas, for example, angles. So as we go through this process, we're gradually telling the computer more and more about the kinds of structures we're looking for. You can imagine in a diagnostic test this would be a pathologist identifying areas of pathosis, for example, or a radiologist indicating potentially troublesome nodules. And sometimes it can be difficult for the algorithm. In this case, it got kind of confused. The fronts and the backs of the cars are all mixed up. So here we have to be a bit more careful, manually selecting these fronts as opposed to the backs, then telling the computer that this is a type of group that we're interested in.So we do that for a while, we skip over a little bit, and then we train the machine learning algorithm based on these couple of hundred things, and we hope that it's gotten a lot better. You can see, it's now started to fade some of these pictures out, showing us that it already is recognizing how to understand some of these itself. We can then use this concept of similar images, and using similar images, you can now see, the computer at this point is able to entirely find just the fronts of cars. So at this point, the human can tell the computer, okay, yes, you've done a good job of that.Sometimes, of course, even at this point it's still difficult to separate out groups. In this case, even after we let the computer try to rotate this for a while, we still find that the left sides and the right sides pictures are all mixed up together. So we can again give the computer some hints, and we say, okay, try and find a projection that separates out the left sides and the right sides as much as possible using this deep learning algorithm. And giving it that hint — ah, okay, it's been successful. It's managed to find a way of thinking about these objects that's separated out these together.So you get the idea here. This is a case not where the human is being replaced by a computer, but where they're working together. What we're doing here is we're replacing something that used to take a team of five or six people about seven years and replacing it with something that takes 15 minutes for one person acting alone.So this process takes about four or five iterations. You can see we now have 62 percent of our 1.5 million images  classified correctly. And at this point, we can start to quite quickly grab whole big sections, check through them to make sure that there's no mistakes. Where there are mistakes, we can let the computer know about them. And using this kind of process for each of the different groups, we are now up to an 80 percent success rate in classifying the 1.5 million images. And at this point, it's just a case of finding the small number that aren't classified correctly, and trying to understand why. And using that approach, by 15 minutes we get to 97 percent classification rates.So this kind of technique could allow us to fix a major problem, which is that there's a lack of medical expertise in the world. The World Economic Forum says that there's between a 10x and a 20x shortage of physicians in the developing world, and it would take about 300 years to train enough people to fix that problem. So imagine if we can help enhance their efficiency using these deep learning approaches?So I'm very excited about the opportunities. I'm also concerned about the problems. The problem here is that every area in blue on this map is somewhere where services are over 80 percent of employment. What are services? These are services. These are also the exact things that computers have just learned how to do. So 80 percent of the world's employment in the developed world is stuff that computers  have just learned how to do. What does that mean? Well, it'll be fine. They'll be replaced by other jobs. For example, there will be more jobs for data scientists. Well, not really. It doesn't take data scientists  very long to build these things. For example, these four algorithms were all built by the same guy. So if you think, oh,  it's all happened before, we've seen the results in the past of when new things come along and they get replaced by new jobs, what are these new jobs going to be? It's very hard for us to estimate this, because human performance grows at this gradual rate, but we now have a system, deep learning, that we know actually grows in capability exponentially. And we're here. So currently, we see the things around us and we say, ""Oh, computers are still pretty dumb."" Right? But in five years' time, computers will be off this chart. So we need to be starting to think about this capability right now.We have seen this once before, of course. In the Industrial Revolution, we saw a step change in capability thanks to engines. The thing is, though, that after a while, things flattened out. There was social disruption, but once engines were used  to generate power in all the situations, things really settled down. The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different from the Industrial Revolution, because the Machine Learning Revolution, it never settles down. The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before, so your previous understanding of what's possible is different.This is already impacting us. In the last 25 years, as capital productivity has increased, labor productivity has been flat, in fact even a little bit down.So I want us to start having this discussion now. I know that when I often tell people about this situation, people can be quite dismissive. Well, computers can't really think, they don't emote, they don't understand poetry, we don't really understand how they work. So what? Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do, so now's the time to start thinking about how we're going to adjust our social structures and economic structures to be aware of this new reality. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn
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"The power of yet.I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn't pass a course, they got the grade ""Not Yet."" And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I'm nothing, I'm nowhere. But if you get the grade ""Not Yet"", you understand that you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.""Not Yet"" also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, ""I love a challenge,"" or, ""You know, I was hoping this would be informative."" They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.So what do they do next? I'll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There's hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don't engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it.How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who don't know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, ""We have already raised a generation of young workers who can't get through the day without an award.""So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet?Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don't do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems.Just the words ""yet"" or ""not yet,"" we're finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students' mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter.Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students.So let's talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they've done so poorly for so long that many people think it's inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth-grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth-grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year, to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that's when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That's when they're getting smarter.I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, ""Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that's why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I've wasted most of my life.""Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with ""yet"".Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve
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"Has anyone among you ever been exposed to tear gas? Tear gas? Anyone? I'm sorry to hear that, so you might know that it's a very toxic substance, but you might not know that it's a very simple molecule with an unpronouncable name: it's called chlorobenzalmalononitrile. I made it. It's decades old, but it's becoming very trendy among police forces around the planet lately, it seems, and according to my experience as a non-voluntary breather of it, tear gas has two main but quite opposite effects. One, it can really burn your eyes, and two, it can also help you to open them.Tear gas definitely helped to open mine to something that I want to share with you this afternoon: that livestreaming the power of independent broadcasts through the web can be a game-changer in journalism, in activism, and as I see it, in the political discourse as well.That idea started  to dawn on me in early 2011 when I was covering a protest in São Paulo. It was the marijuana march, a gathering of people asking for the legalization of cannabis. When that group started to move, the riot police came from the back with rubber bullets, bombs, and then the gas. But to make a long story short, I had entered that protest as the editor-in-chief of a well-established printed magazine where I'd worked for 11 years, and thanks to this unsolicited effects of tear gas, I left it as a journalist that was now committed to new ways of sharing the raw experience of what it's like to be there, actually.So in the following week, I was back in the streets, but that time, I wasn't a member of any media outlet anymore. I was there as an independent livestreamer, and all I had with me was basically borrowed equipment. I had a very simple camera and a backpack with 3G modems. And I had this weblink that could be shared through social media, could be put in any website, and that time, the protest went along fine. There was no violence. There was no action scenes. But there was something really exciting, because I could see at a distance the TV channels covering it, and they had these big vans and the teams and the cameras, and I was basically doing the same thing and all I had was a backpack. And that was really exciting to a journalist, but the most interesting part was when I got back home, actually, because I learned that I had been watched by more than 90,000 people, and I got hundreds of emails and messages of people asking me, basically, how did I do it, how it was possible to do such a thing.And I learned something else, that that was actually the first time that somebody had ever done a livestreaming in a street protest in the country. And that really shocked me, because I was no geek, I was no technology guy, and all the equipment needed was already there, was easily available. And I realized that we had a frontier here, a very important one, that it was just a matter of changing the perspective, and the web could be actually used, already used, as a colossal and uncontrollable and highly anarchical TV channel, TV network, and anyone with very basic skills and very basic equipment, even someone like me who had this little stuttering issue, so if it happens, bear with me please, even someone like me could become a broadcaster. And that sounded revolutionary in my mind.So for the next couple of years, I started to experiment with livestreaming in different ways, not only in the streets but mostly in studios and in homes, until the beginning of 2013, last year, when I became the cofounder of a group called Mídia NINJA. NINJA is an acronym that stands for Narrativas Independentes  Jornalismo e Ação, or in English, independent narratives, journalism, and action. It was a media group that had little media plan. We didn't have any financial structure. We were not planning to make money out of this, which was wise, because you shouldn't try to make money out of journalism now. But we had a very solid and clear conviction, that we knew that the hyperconnected environment of social media could maybe allow us to consolidate a network of experimental journalists throughout the country. So we launched a Facebook page first, and then a manifesto, and started to cover the streets in a very simple way.But then something happened, something that wasn't predicted, that no one could have anticipated. Street protests started to erupt in São Paulo. They began as very local and specific. They were against the bus fare hike that had just happened in the city. This is a bus. It's written there, ""Theft."" But those kind of manifestations started to grow, and they kept happening. So the police violence against them started to grow as well. But there was another conflict, the one I believe that's more important here to make my point that it was a narrative conflict. There was this mainstream media version of the facts that anyone who was on the streets could easily challenge if they presented their own vision of what was actually happening there. And it was this clash of visions, this clash of narratives, that I think turned those protests into a long period in the country of political reckoning where hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million people took to the streets in the whole country.But it wasn't about the bus fare hike anymore. It was about everything. The people's demands, their expectations, the reasons why they were on the streets could be as diverse as they could be contradictory in many cases. If you could read it, you would understand me. But it was in this environment of political catharsis that the country was going through that it had to do with politics, indeed, but it had to do also with a new way of organizing, through a new way of communicating. It was in that environment that Mídia NINJA emerged from almost anonymity to become a national phenomenon, because we did have the right equipment. We are not using big cameras. We are using basically this. We are using smartphones. And that, actually, allowed us to become invisible in the middle of the protests, but it allowed us to do something else: to show what it was like to be in the protests, to present to people at home a subjective perspective.But there was something that is more important, I think, than the equipment. It was our mindset, because we are not behaving as a media outlet. We are not competing for news. We are trying to encourage people, to invite people, and to actually teach people how to do this, how they also could become broadcasters. And that was crucial to turn Mídia NINJA from a small group of people, and in a matter of weeks, we multiplied and we grew exponentially throughout the country. So in a matter of a week or two, as the protests kept happening, we were hundreds of young people connected in this network throughout the country. We were covering more than 50 cities at the same time. That's something that no TV channel could ever do. That was responsible for turning us suddenly, actually, into kind of the mainstream media of social media. So we had a couple of thousands of followers on our Facebook page, and soon we had a quarter of a million followers. Our posts and our videos were being seen by more than 11 million timelines a week. It was way more than any newspaper or any magazine could ever do.And that turned Mídia NINJA into something else, more than a media outlet, than a media project. It became almost like a public service to the citizen, to the protester, to the activist, because they had a very simple and efficient and peaceful tool to confront both police and media authority. Many of our images started  to be used in regular TV channels. Our livestreams started to be broadcast even in regular televisions when things got really rough. Some our images were responsible to take some people out of jail, people who were being arrested unfairly under false accusations, and we could prove them innocent. And that also turned Mídia NINJA very soon to be seen as almost an enemy of cops, unfortunately, and we started to be severely beaten, and eventually arrested on the streets. It happened in many cases. But that was also useful, because we were still at the web, so that helped to trigger an important debate in the country on the role of the media itself and the state of the freedom of the press in the country.So Mídia NINJA now evolved and finally consolidated itself in what we hoped it would become: a national network of hundreds of young people, self-organizing themselves locally to cover social, human rights issues, and expressing themselves not only politically but journalistically.What I started to do in the beginning of this year, as Mídia NINJA is already a self-organizing network, I'm dedicating myself to another project. It's called Fluxo, which is Portuguese for ""stream."" It's a journalism studio in São Paulo downtown, where I used livestream to experiment with what I call post-television formats. But I'm also trying to come up with ways to finance independent journalism through a direct relationship with an audience, with an active audience, because now I really want to try to make a living out of my tear gas resolution back then.But there's something more significant here, something that I believe is more important and more crucial than my personal example. I said that livestream could turn the web into a colossal TV network, but I believe it does something else, because after watching people using it, not only to cover things but to express, to organize themselves politically, I believe livestream can turn cyberspace into a global political arena where everyone might have a voice, a proper voice, because livestream takes the monopoly of the broadcast political discourse, of the verbal aspect of the political dialogue out of the mouths of just politicians and political pundits alone, and it empowers the citizen through this direct and non-mediated power of exchanging experiences and dialogue, empowers them to question and to influence authorities in ways in which we are about to see.And I believe it does something else that might be even more important, that the simplicity of the technology can merge objectivity and subjectivity in a very political way, as I see it, because it really helps the audience, the citizen, to see the world through somebody else's eye, so it helps the citizen to put him- or herself in other people's place. And that idea, I think,  should be the intention, should be the goal of any good journalism, any good activism, but most of all, any good politics.Thank you very much. It was an honor.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruno_torturra_got_a_smartphone_start_broadcasting
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"Our world has many superheroes. But they have the worst of all superpowers: invisibility. For example, the catadores, workers who collect recyclable  materials for a living. Catadores emerged from  social inequality, unemployment, and the abundance of solid waste from the deficiency of the  waste collection system. Catadores provide a heavy,  honest and essential work that benefits the entire population. But they are not acknowledged for it. Here in Brazil, they collect 90 percent of all the waste that's actually recycled.Most of the catadores work independently, picking waste from the streets and  selling to junk yards at very low prices. They may collect over 300 kilos in their bags, shopping carts,  bicycles and carroças. Carroças are carts built from wood or metal and found in several streets in Brazil, much like graffiti and street art. And this is how I first met these  marginalized superheroes.I am a graffiti artist and activist and my art is social, environmental  and political in nature. In 2007, I took my work beyond walls and onto the carroças, as a new urban support for my message. But at this time,  giving voice to the catadores. By adding art and humor to the cause, it became more appealing, which helped call attention  to the catadores and improve their self-esteem. And also, they are famous now  on the streets, on mass media and social.So, the thing is, I plunged into this universe  and have not stopped working since. I have painted over 200  carroças in many cities and have been invited to do exhibitions  and trips worldwide. And then I realized that catadores, in their invisibility, are not exclusive to Brazil. I met them in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, South Africa, Turkey and even in developed countries such as the United States and Japan. And this was when I realized that I needed to have more people join the cause because it's a big challenge. And then, I created a collaborative  movement called Pimp My Carroça — (Laughter) — which is  a large crowdfunded event. Thank you. (Applause). So Pimp My Carroça is a large  crowdfunded event to help catadores and their carroças. Catadores are assisted by well-being  professionals and healthcare, like physicians, dentists, podiatrists,  hair stylists, massage therapists and much more. But also, they also receive safety shirts, gloves, raincoats and eyeglasses to see in high-definition the city, while their carroças are renovated by our incredible volunteers. And then they receive safety items, too: reflective tapes, horns and mirrors. Then, finally, painted by a street artist and become part of part of this huge,  amazing mobile art exhibition.Pimp My Carroça took to the streets of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba. But to meet the demand in other cities, including outside of Brazil, we have created Pimpx, which is inspired by TEDx, and it's a simplified, do-it-yourself, crowdfunded edition of Pimp My Carroça. So now everybody can join.In two years, over 170 catadores, 800 volunteers and 200 street artists and more than 1,000 donors have been involved in the  Pimp My Carroça movement, whose actions have even been used in teaching recycling at a local school.So catadores are leaving  invisibility behind and becoming increasingly respected and valued. Because of their pimped carroças, they are able to fight back to prejudice, increase their income and  their interaction with society.So now, I'd like to challenge you  to start looking at and acknowledging the catadores and other  invisible superheroes from your city. Try to see the world as one,  without boundaries or frontiers. Believe it or not, there are over 20 million  catadores worldwide. So next time you see one, recognize them as a vital part of our society. Muito obrigado, thank you. (Applause).","https://www.ted.com/talks/mundano_pimp_my_trash_cart
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"I'm a lexicographer. I make dictionaries. And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible  into the dictionary. My job is not to decide what a word is; that is your job.Everybody who speaks English  decides together what's a word and what's not a word. Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other. Now, sometimes when people are trying  to decide whether a word is good or bad, they don't really have a good reason. So they say something like, ""Because grammar!"" (Laughter) I don't actually really care about grammar too much — don't tell anybody.But the word ""grammar,"" actually, there are two kinds of grammar. There's the kind of grammar that lives inside your brain, and if you're a native  speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language, it's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language. And this is what you learn when you learn a language as a child. And here's an example: This is a wug, right? It's a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of these. There are two ... Audience: Wugs. Erin McKean: Exactly! You know  how to make the plural of wug. That rule lives in your brain. You never had to be taught this rule,  you just understand it. This is an experiment that was invented by a professor at [Boston University] named Jean Berko Gleason back in 1958. So we've been talking about this  for a long time.Now, these kinds of natural rules  that exist in your brain, they're not like traffic laws, they're more like laws of nature. And nobody has to remind you to obey  a law of nature, right? When you leave the house in the morning,  your mom doesn't say, ""Hey, honey, I think it's going to be cold, take a hoodie, don't forget to obey the law of gravity."" Nobody says this. Now, there are other rules that are more about manners than they are about nature. So you can think of a word as like a hat. Once you know how hats work, nobody has to tell you,  ""Don't wear hats on your feet."" What they have to tell you is,  ""Can you wear hats inside? Who gets to wear a hat? What are the kinds of hats you get to wear?"" Those are more of the second kind  of grammar, which linguists often call usage,  as opposed to grammar.Now, sometimes people use this kind of  rules-based grammar to discourage people from making up words. And I think that is, well, stupid. So, for example,  people are always telling you, ""Be creative, make new music, do art,  invent things, science and technology."" But when it comes to  words, they're like, ""Don't! No. Creativity stops right here, whippersnappers. Give it a rest."" (Laughter) But that makes no sense to me. Words are great. We should have more of them. I want you to make as many new words as possible. And I'm going to tell you six ways that you can use to make new words in English.The first way is the simplest way. Basically, steal them from other  languages. [""Go rob other people""] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back , so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. We usually take words for things  that we like, like delicious food. We took ""kumquat"" from Chinese, we took ""caramel"" from French. We also take words  for cool things like ""ninja,"" right? We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because  ninjas are hard to steal from. (Laughter)So another way that you  can make words in English is by squishing two  other English words together. This is called compounding. Words in English are like Lego: If you use enough force,  you can put any two of them together. (Laughter) We do this all the time in English: Words like ""heartbroken,"" ""bookworm,""  ""sandcastle"" all are compounds. So go ahead and make words like ""duckface,"" just don't make duckface. (Laughter)Another way that you can make words  in English is kind of like compounding, but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off. So these are blend words, like ""brunch"" is a blend  of ""breakfast"" and ""lunch."" ""Motel"" is a blend of ""motor"" and ""hotel."" Who here knew that ""motel""  was a blend word? Yeah, that word is so old in English that lots of people don't know that  there are parts missing. ""Edutainment"" is a blend  of ""education"" and ""entertainment."" And of course, ""electrocute"" is a blend of ""electric"" and ""execute."" (Laughter)You can also make words by changing how they operate. This is called functional shift. You take a word that acts  as one part of speech, and you change it into another  part of speech. Okay, who here knew that ""friend"" hasn't always been a verb? ""Friend"" used to be noun  and then we verbed it. Almost any word in English can be verbed. You can also take adjectives  and make them into nouns. ""Commercial"" used to be an adjective  and now it's a noun. And of course, you can ""green"" things.Another way to make words in English is back-formation. You can take a word and you can kind of squish it down a little bit. So for example, in English we had the word ""editor"" before we had the word ""edit."" ""Edit"" was formed from ""editor."" Sometimes these back-formations  sound a little silly: Bulldozers bulldoze, butlers butle  and burglers burgle. (Laughter)Another way to make words in English is to take the first letters of something and squish them together. So National Aeronautics and Space  Administration becomes NASA. And of course you can do this  with anything, OMG!So it doesn't matter how silly  the words are. They can be really good words of English. ""Absquatulate"" is a perfectly  good word of English. ""Mugwump"" is a perfectly  good word of English. So the words don't have have to sound  normal, they can sound really silly.Why should you make words? You should make words because every word is a chance to express your idea and get  your meaning across. And new words grab people's attention. They get people to focus on what  you're saying and that gives you a better chance to get  your meaning across. A lot of people  on this stage today have said, ""In the future, you can do this, you can help with this, you can  help us explore, you can help us invent."" You can make a new word right now. English has no age limit. Go ahead, start making words today, send them to me, and I will put them  in my online dictionary, Wordnik. Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_go_ahead_make_up_new_words
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"So over the past few centuries, microscopes have revolutionized our world. They revealed to us a tiny world of objects, life and structures that are too small for us to see with our naked eyes. They are a tremendous contribution to science and technology. Today I'd like to introduce you to a new type of microscope, a microscope for changes. It doesn't use optics like a regular microscope to make small objects bigger, but instead it uses a video camera and image processing to reveal to us the tiniest motions and color changes in objects and people, changes that are impossible for us to see with our naked eyes. And it lets us look at our world in a completely new way.So what do I mean by color changes? Our skin, for example, changes its color very slightly when the blood flows under it. That change is incredibly subtle, which is why, when you look at other people, when you look at the person sitting next to you, you don't see their skin or their face changing color. When we look at this video of Steve here, it appears to us like a static picture, but once we look at this video through our new, special microscope, suddenly we see a completely different image. What you see here are small changes in the color of Steve's skin, magnified 100 times so that they become visible. We can actually see a human pulse. We can see how fast Steve's heart is beating, but we can also see the actual way that the blood flows in his face. And we can do that not just to visualize the pulse, but also to actually  recover our heart rates, and measure our heart rates. And we can do it with regular cameras and without touching the patients. So here you see the pulse and heart rate we extracted from a neonatal baby from a video we took with a regular DSLR camera, and the heart rate measurement we get is as accurate as the one you'd get with a standard monitor in a hospital. And it doesn't even have to be a video we recorded. We can do it essentially with other videos as well. So I just took a short clip from ""Batman Begins"" here just to show Christian Bale's pulse. (Laughter) And you know, presumably he's wearing makeup, the lighting here is kind of challenging, but still, just from the video, we're able to extract his pulse and show it quite well.So how do we do all that? We basically analyze the changes in the light that are recorded at every pixel in the video over time, and then we crank up those changes. We make them bigger so that we can see them. The tricky part is that those signals, those changes that we're after, are extremely subtle, so we have to be very careful when you try to separate them from noise that always exists in videos. So we use some clever image processing techniques to get a very accurate measurement of the color at each pixel in the video, and then the way the color changes over time, and then we amplify those changes. We make them bigger to create those types of enhanced videos, or magnified videos, that actually show us those changes.But it turns out we can do that not just to show tiny changes in color, but also tiny motions, and that's because the light that gets recorded in our cameras will change not only if the color of the object changes, but also if the object moves. So this is my daughter when she was about two months old. It's a video I recorded about three years ago. And as new parents, we all want to make sure our babies are healthy, that they're breathing, that they're alive, of course. So I too got one of those baby monitors so that I could see my daughter when she was asleep. And this is pretty much what you'll see with a standard baby monitor. You can see the baby's sleeping, but  there's not too much information there. There's not too much we can see. Wouldn't it be better, or more informative, or more useful, if instead we could look at the view like this. So here I took the motions and I magnified them 30 times, and then I could clearly see that my daughter was indeed alive and breathing. (Laughter) Here is a side-by-side comparison. So again, in the source video, in the original video, there's not too much we can see, but once we magnify the motions, the breathing becomes much more visible. And it turns out, there's a lot of phenomena we can reveal and magnify with our new motion microscope. We can see how our veins and arteries are pulsing in our bodies. We can see that our eyes are constantly moving in this wobbly motion. And that's actually my eye, and again this video was taken right after my daughter was born, so you can see I wasn't getting too much sleep. (Laughter) Even when a person is sitting still, there's a lot of information we can extract about their breathing patterns, small facial expressions. Maybe we could use those motions to tell us something about our thoughts or our emotions. We can also magnify small mechanical movements, like vibrations in engines, that can help engineers detect and diagnose machinery problems, or see how our buildings and structures sway in the wind and react to forces. Those are all things that our society knows how to measure in various ways, but measuring those motions is one thing, and actually seeing those motions as they happen is a whole different thing.And ever since we discovered this new technology, we made our code available online so that  others could use and experiment with it. It's very simple to use. It can work on your own videos. Our collaborators at Quanta Research even created this nice website where you can upload your videos and process them online, so even if you don't have any experience in computer science or programming, you can still very easily experiment with this new microscope. And I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of what others have done with it.So this video was made by a YouTube user called Tamez85. I don't know who that user is, but he, or she, used our code to magnify small belly movements during pregnancy. It's kind of creepy. (Laughter) People have used it to magnify pulsing veins in their hands. And you know it's not real science unless you use guinea pigs, and apparently this guinea pig is called Tiffany, and this YouTube user claims it is the first rodent on Earth that was motion-magnified.You can also do some art with it. So this video was sent to me by a design student at Yale. She wanted to see if there's any difference in the way her classmates move. She made them all stand still, and then magnified their motions. It's like seeing  still pictures come to life. And the nice thing with  all those examples is that we had nothing to do with them. We just provided this new tool, a new way to look at the world, and then people find other interesting, new and creative ways of using it.But we didn't stop there. This tool not only allows us to look at the world in a new way, it also redefines what we can do and pushes the limits of what we can do with our cameras. So as scientists, we started wondering, what other types of physical phenomena produce tiny motions that we could now use our cameras to measure? And one such phenomenon that we focused on recently is sound. Sound, as we all know, is basically changes in air pressure that travel through the air. Those pressure waves hit objects and they create small vibrations in them, which is how we hear and how we record sound. But it turns out that sound also produces visual motions. Those are motions that are not visible to us but are visible to a camera with the right processing. So here are two examples. This is me demonstrating my great singing skills. (Singing) (Laughter) And I took a high-speed video of my throat while I was humming. Again, if you stare at that video, there's not too much you'll be able to see, but once we magnify the motions 100 times, we can see all the motions and ripples in the neck that are involved in producing the sound. That signal is there in that video.We also know that singers can break a wine glass if they hit the correct note. So here, we're going to play a note that's in the resonance frequency of that glass through a loudspeaker that's next to it. Once we play that note and magnify the motions 250 times, we can very clearly see  how the glass vibrates and resonates in response to the sound. It's not something you're used to seeing every day. But this made us think. It gave us this crazy idea. Can we actually invert this process and recover sound from video by analyzing the tiny vibrations that sound waves create in objects, and essentially convert those back into the sounds that produced them. In this way, we can turn everyday objects into microphones.So that's exactly what we did. So here's an empty bag of chips that was lying on a table, and we're going to turn that  bag of chips into a microphone by filming it with a video camera and analyzing the tiny motions that sound waves create in it. So here's the sound that we played in the room.(Music: ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"")And this is a high-speed video we recorded of that bag of chips. Again it's playing. There's no chance you'll be able to see anything going on in that video just by looking at it, but here's the sound we were able to recover just by analyzing the tiny motions in that video.(Music: ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"")I call it — Thank you. (Applause) I call it the visual microphone. We actually extract audio signals from video signals. And just to give you a sense of the scale of the motions here, a pretty loud sound will cause that bag of chips to move less than a micrometer. That's one thousandth of a millimeter. That's how tiny the motions are that we are now able to pull out just by observing how light bounces off objects and gets recorded by our cameras.We can recover sounds from other objects, like plants.(Music: ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"")And we can recover speech as well. So here's a person speaking in a room.Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go.Michael Rubinstein: And here's that speech again recovered just from this video of that same bag of chips.Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go.MR: We used ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"" because those are said to be the first words that Thomas Edison spoke  into his phonograph in 1877. It was one of the first sound recording devices in history. It basically directed the sounds onto a diaphragm that vibrated a needle that essentially engraved the sound on tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder.Here's a demonstration of recording and  replaying sound with Edison's phonograph.(Video) Voice: Testing, testing, one two three. Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. Testing, testing, one two three. Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.MR: And now, 137 years later, we're able to get sound in pretty much similar quality but by just watching objects vibrate to sound with cameras, and we can even do that when the camera is 15 feet away from the object, behind soundproof glass.So this is the sound that we were  able to recover in that case.Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.MR: And of course, surveillance is the first application that comes to mind. (Laughter) But it might actually be useful for other things as well. Maybe in the future, we'll be able to use it, for example, to recover sound across space, because sound can't travel in space, but light can.We've only just begun exploring other possible uses for this new technology. It lets us see physical processes that we know are there but that we've never been able to see with our own eyes until now.This is our team. Everything I showed you today is a result of a collaboration with this great group of people you see here, and I encourage you and welcome you to check out our website, try it out yourself, and join us in exploring this world of tiny motions.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_rubinstein_see_invisible_motion_hear_silent_sounds_cool_creepy_we_can_t_decide
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"In the 1600s, there were so many right whales in Cape Cod Bay off the east coast of the U.S. that apparently you could walk across their backs from one end of the bay to the other. Today, they number in the hundreds, and they're endangered. Like them, many species of whales saw their numbers drastically reduced by 200 years of whaling, where they were hunted and killed for their whale meat, oil and whale bone.We only have whales in our waters today because of the Save the Whales movement of the '70s. It was instrumental in stopping commercial whaling, and was built on the idea that if we couldn't save whales, what could we save? It was ultimately a test of our political ability to halt environmental destruction. So in the early '80s, there was a ban on commercial whaling that came into force as a result of this campaign. Whales in our waters are still low in numbers, however, because they do face a range of other human-induced threats.Unfortunately, many people still think that whale conservationists like myself do what we do only because these creatures are charismatic and beautiful. This is actually a disservice, because whales are ecosystem engineers. They help maintain the stability and health of the oceans, and even provide services to human society.So let's talk about why saving whales is critical to the resiliency of the oceans. It boils down to two main things: whale poop and rotting carcasses.As whales dive to the depths to feed and come up to the surface to breathe, they actually release these enormous fecal plumes. This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting  nutrients from the depths to the surface waters where they  stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, which forms the base of all marine food chains. So really, having more whales in the oceans pooping is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem.Whales are also known to undertake some  of the longest migrations of all mammals. Gray whales off America migrate 16,000 kilometers between productive feeding areas and less productive calving, or birthing, areas and back every year. As they do so, they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that have it to places that need it. So clearly, whales are really important in nutrient cycling, both horizontally and vertically, through the oceans.But what's really cool is that they're  also really important after they're dead. Whale carcasses are some of  the largest form of detritus to fall from the ocean's surface,  and they're called whale fall. As these carcasses sink, they provide a feast to some 400-odd species, including the eel-shaped, slime-producing  hagfish. So over the 200 years of whaling, when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses from the oceans, we likely altered the rate and geographic  distribution of these whale falls that would descend into deep oceans, and as a result, probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized and dependent on these carcasses for their survival.Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbon, which is the equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans, and the deep oceans are what we call ""carbon sinks,"" because they trap and hold excess carbon from the atmosphere, and therefore help to delay global warming. Sometimes these carcasses also wash up on beaches and provide a meal to a number of predatory species on land.The 200 years of whaling was clearly detrimental and caused a reduction in the populations of whales between 60 to 90 percent. Clearly, the Save the Whales movement was instrumental in preventing commercial whaling from going on, but we need to revise this. We need to address the more modern, pressing problems that these whales face in our waters today. Amongst other things, we need to stop them from getting plowed down by container  ships when they're in their feeding areas, and stop them from getting entangled in fishing nets as they float around in the ocean. We also need to learn to contextualize our conservation messages, so people really understand the true  ecosystem value of these creatures.So, let's save the whales again, but this time, let's not just  do it for their sake. Let's also do it for ours.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/asha_de_vos_why_you_should_care_about_whale_poo
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"I have a confession to make. As a scientist and engineer, I've focused on efficiency for many years. But efficiency can be a cult, and today I'd like to tell you about a journey that moved me out of the cult and back to a far richer reality.A few years ago, after finishing my Ph.D.  in London, I moved to Boston. I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge. I bought a racing bicycle that summer, and I bicycled every day to work. To find my way, I used my phone. It sent me over Mass. Ave., Massachusetts Avenue, the shortest route from Boston to Cambridge. But after a month that I was cycling every day on the car-packed Mass. Ave., I took a different route one day. I'm not entirely sure why I took a different route that day, a detour. I just remember a feeling of surprise; surprise at finding a street with no cars, as opposed to the nearby Mass. Ave. full of cars; surprise at finding a street  draped by leaves and surrounded by trees. But after the feeling  of surprise, I felt shame. How could I have been so blind? For an entire month, I was so trapped in my mobile app that a journey to work became one thing only: the shortest path. In this single journey, there was no thought of enjoying the road, no pleasure in connecting with nature, no possibility of looking people in the eyes. And why? Because I was saving a minute out of my commute.Now let me ask you: Am I alone here? How many of you have never used a mapping app for finding directions? Most of you, if not all, have. And don't get me wrong — mapping apps are the greatest game-changer for encouraging people to explore the city. You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go. However, the app also assumes there are only a handful of directions to the destination. It has the power to make those handful of directions the definitive direction to that destination.After that experience, I changed. I changed my research from traditional data-mining to understanding how people experience the city. I used computer science tools to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale. I became captivated by the beauty and genius of traditional social science experiments done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch. The result of that research has been the creation of new maps, maps where you don't only find the shortest path, the blue one, but also the most enjoyable path, the red one. How was that possible?Einstein once said, ""Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."" So with a bit of imagination, we needed to understand which parts of the city people find beautiful. At the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, we thought about this simple experiment. If I were to show you these two urban scenes, and I were to ask you which one is more beautiful, which one would you say? Don't be shy. Who says A? Who says B? Brilliant. Based on that idea, we built a crowdsourcing platform, a web game. Players are shown pairs of urban scenes, and they're asked to choose which one  is more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on thousands of user votes, then we are able to see where consensus emerges. We are able to see which are the urban scenes that make people happy.After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs, and I teamed up with Luca and Rossano, and together, we aggregated those winning locations in London to build a new map of the city, a cartography weighted for human emotions. On this cartography, you're not only able to see and connect from point A to point B  the shortest segments, but you're also able to see the happy segment, the beautiful path, the quiet path. In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet path far more enjoyable than the shortest one, and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time. Participants also love to attach memories to places. Shared memories — that's where the old BBC building was; and personal memories — that's where I gave my first kiss. They also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded. So what if we had a mapping tool that would return the most enjoyable routes based not only on aesthetics but also based on smell, sound,  and memories? That's where our research is going right now. More generally, my research, what it tries to do is avoid the danger of the single path, to avoid robbing people of fully experiencing the city in which they live. Walk the path through the park, not through the car park, and you have an entirely different path. Walk the path full of people you love and not full of cars, and you have an entirely different path. It's that simple.I would like to end with this thought: do you remember ""The Truman Show?"" It's a media satire in which a real person doesn't know he's living in a fabricated world. Perhaps we live in a world fabricated for efficiency. Look at some of your daily habits, and as Truman did in the movie, escape the fabricated world. Why? Well, if you think that adventure is dangerous, try routine. It's deadly.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniele_quercia_happy_maps
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"I'm a tourism entrepreneur and a peacebuilder, but this is not how I started. When I was seven years old, I remember watching television and seeing people throwing rocks, and thinking, this must be a fun thing to do. So I got out to the street and threw rocks, not realizing I was supposed to throw rocks at Israeli cars. Instead, I ended up stoning my neighbors' cars. (Laughter) They were not enthusiastic about my patriotism.This is my picture with my brother. This is me, the little one, and I know what you're thinking: ""You used to look cute, what the heck happened to you?"" But my brother, who is older than me, was arrested when he was 18, taken to prison on charges of throwing stones. He was beaten up when he refused to confess that he threw stones, and as a result, had internal injuries that caused his death soon after he was released from prison.I was angry, I was bitter, and all I wanted was revenge.But that changed when I was 18. I decided that I needed Hebrew to get a job, and going to study Hebrew in that classroom was the first time I ever met Jews who were not soldiers. And we connected over really small things, like the fact that I love country music, which is really strange for Palestinians. But it was then that I realized also that we have a wall of anger, of hatred and of ignorance that separates us. I decided that it doesn't matter what happens to me. What really matters is how I deal with it. And therefore, I decided to dedicate my life to bringing down the walls that separate people.I do so through many ways. Tourism is one of them, but also media and education, and you might be wondering, really, can tourism change things? Can it bring down walls? Yes. Tourism is the best sustainable way to bring down those walls and to create a sustainable way of connecting with each other and creating friendships.In 2009, I cofounded Mejdi Tours, a social enterprise that aims to connect people, with two Jewish friends, by the way, and what we'll do, the model we did, for example, in Jerusalem, we would have two tour guides, one Israeli and one Palestinian, guiding the trips together, telling history and narrative and archaeology and conflict from totally different perspectives. I remember running a trip together with a friend named Kobi — Jewish congregation from Chicago, the trip was in Jerusalem — and we took them to a refugee camp, a Palestinian refugee camp, and there we had this amazing food. By the way, this is my mother. She's cool. And that's the Palestinian food called maqluba. It means ""upside-down."" You cook it with rice and chicken, and you flip it upside-down. It's the best meal ever. And we'll eat together. Then we had a joint band, Israeli and Palestinian musicians, and we did some belly-dancing. If you don't know any, I'll teach you later. But when we left, both sides, they were crying because they did not want to leave. Three years later, those relationships still exist.Imagine with me if the one billion people who travel internationally  every year travel like this, not being taken in the bus from one side to another, from one hotel to another, taking pictures from the windows of their buses of people and cultures, but actually connecting with people.You know, I remember having a Muslim group from the U.K. going to the house of an Orthodox Jewish family, and having their first Friday night dinners, that Sabbath dinner, and eating together hamin, which is a Jewish food, a stew, just having the connection of realizing, after a while, that a hundred years ago, their families came out of the same place in Northern Africa. This is not a photo profile for your Facebook. This is not disaster tourism. This is the future of travel, and I invite you to join me to do that, to change your travel. We're doing it all over the world now, from Ireland to Iran to Turkey, and we see ourselves going everywhere to change the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aziz_abu_sarah_for_more_tolerance_we_need_more_tourism
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"Guatemala is recovering from a 36-year armed conflict. A conflict that was fought during the Cold War. It was really just  a small leftist insurgency and a devastating response by the state. What we have as a result is 200,000 civilian victims, 160,000 of those killed in the communities: small children, men, women,  the elderly even. And then we have  about 40,000 others, the missing, the ones we're still looking for today. We call them the Desaparecidos.Now, 83 percent of the victims  are Mayan victims, victims that are the descendants of the original inhabitants of  Central America. And only about 17 percent are of  European descent. But the most important thing here is that the very people who are supposed to  defend us, the police, the military, are the ones that committed most of the crimes.Now the families, they want information. They want to know what happened. They want the bodies of their loved ones. But most of all, what they want is they want you, they want everyone to know that their loved ones did nothing wrong.Now, my case was that my father received death threats in 1980. And we left. We left Guatemala and we came here. So I grew up in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn as a matter of fact, and I went to New Utrecht High School and I graduated from Brooklyn College. The only thing was that I really didn't know what  was happening in Guatemala. I didn't care for it; it was too painful. But it wasn't till 1995 that I decided to do something about it. So I went back. I went back to Guatemala,  to look for the bodies, to understand what happened and to look for part of myself as well.The way we work is that we give people information. We talk to the family members and we let them choose. We let them decide to tell us the stories, to tell us what they saw, to tell us about their loved ones. And even more important, we let them choose to give us a piece of themselves. A piece, an essence, of who they are. And that DNA is what we're  going to compare to the DNA that comes from the skeletons.While we're doing that, though, we're looking for the bodies. And these are skeletons by now, most of these crimes  happened 32 years ago. When we find the grave, we take out the dirt and eventually clean  the body, document it, and exhume it. We literally bring the  skeleton out of the ground.Once we have those bodies, though, we take them back to the city, to our lab, and we begin a process of trying to understand mainly two things: One is how people died. So here you see a gunshot wound to the back of the head or a machete wound, for example. The other thing we want to understand is who they are. Whether it's a baby, or an adult. Whether it's a woman or a man. But when we're done with that analysis what we'll do is we'll take a small  fragment of the bone and we'll extract DNA from it. We'll take that DNA and then we'll compare it with the DNA of the families, of course.The best way to explain this to you is by showing you two cases. The first is the case  of the military diary. Now this is a document that was smuggled out of somewhere in 1999. And what you see there is the state following individuals, people that, like you,  wanted to change their country, and they jotted everything down. And one of the things that they wrote  down is when they executed them. Inside that yellow rectangle,  you see a code, it's a secret code: 300. And then you see a date. The 300 means ""executed"" and the date  means when they were executed. Now that's going to come into play in a second. What we did is we conducted an exhumation in 2003, where we exhumed 220 bodies from 53 graves in a military base. Grave 9, though, matched the family of Sergio Saul Linares. Now Sergio was a professor at the university. He graduted from Iowa State University and went back to Guatemala to change his country. And he was captured on  February 23, 1984. And if you can see there, he was  executed on March 29, 1984, which was incredible. We had the body, we had the family's  information and their DNA, and now we have documents that told us exactly what happened.But most important is about two weeks later, we go another hit, another match from the same grave to Amancio Villatoro. The DNA of that body also matched the DNA of that family. And then we noticed that he was also in the diary. But it was amazing to see that he was  also executed on March 29, 1984. So that led us to think, hmm,  how many bodies were in the grave? Six. So then we said, how many people were executed on March 29, 1984? That's right, six as well. So we have Juan de Dios, Hugo, Moises and Zoilo. All of them executed on the same date,  all captured at different locations and at different moments. All put in that grave. The only thing we needed now was the DNA of those four families So we went and we looked for them and we found them. And we identified those six bodies and gave them back to the families.The other case I want to tell you about is that of a military base  called CREOMPAZ. It actually means, ""to believe in peace,"" but the acronym really means Regional Command Center for Peacekeeping Operations. And this is where the Guatemalan military trains peacekeepers from other countries, the ones that serve with the U.N. and go to countries like Haiti and the Congo. Well, we have testimony that said that within this military base, there were bodies, there were graves. So we went in there with a search warrant and about two hours after we went in, we found the first of 84 graves,  a total of 533 bodies. Now, if you think about that, peacekeepers being trained on top of bodies. It's very ironic.But the bodies — face down, most of them, hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded, all types of trauma — these were people who were defenseless who were being executed. People that 533 families are looking for. So we're going to focus on Grave 15. Grave 15, what we noticed, was a grave full of women and children, 63 of them. And that immediately made us think, my goodness, where is there a case like this? When I got to Guatemala in 1995, I heard of a case of a massacre that happened on May 14, 1982, where the army came in, killed the men, and took the women and children  in helicopters to an unknown location. Well, guess what? The clothing from this grave matched the  clothing from the region where these people were taken from, where these women and children  were taken from.So we conducted some DNA analysis, and guess what? We identified Martina Rojas  and Manuel Chen. Both of them disappeared in that case, and now we could prove it. We have physical evidence that proves that this happened and that those people  were taken to this base. Now, Manuel Chen was three years old. His mother went to the river to wash  clothes, and she left him with a neighbor. That's when the army came and that's when he was taken away in  a helicopter and never seen again until we found him in Grave 15.So now with science, with archaeology,  with anthropology, with genetics, what we're doing is, we're giving a voice to the voiceless. But we're doing more than that. We're actually providing  evidence for trials, like the genocide trial that happened  last year in Guatemala where General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years.So I came here to tell you today that this is happening everywhere — it's happening in Mexico right in front of us today — and we can't let it go on anymore. We have to now come together and decide that we're not going to have  any more missing. So no more missing, guys. Okay? No more missing.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fredy_peccerelli_a_forensic_anthropologist_who_brings_closure_for_the_disappeared
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"When the Portuguese arrived in Latin America about 500 years ago, they obviously found this amazing tropical forest. And among all this biodiversity that they had never seen before, they found one species that caught their attention very quickly. This species, when you cut the bark, you find a very dark red resin that was very good to paint and dye fabric to make clothes. The indigenous people called this species pau brasil, and that's the reason why this land became ""land of Brasil,"" and later on, Brazil. That's the only country in the world that has the name of a tree. So you can imagine that it's very cool to be a forester in Brazil, among other reasons.Forest products are all around us. Apart from all those products, the forest is very important for climate regulation. In Brazil, almost 70 percent of the evaporation that makes rain actually comes from the forest. Just the Amazon pumps to the atmosphere 20 billion tons of water every day. This is more than what the Amazon River, which is the largest river in the world, puts in the sea per day, which is 17 billion tons. If we had to boil water to get the same effect as evapotranspiration, we would need six months of the entire power generation capacity of the world. So it's a hell of a service for all of us.We have in the world about four billion hectares of forests. This is more or less China, U.S., Canada and Brazil all together, in terms of size, to have an idea. Three quarters of that is in the temperate zone, and just one quarter is in the tropics, but this one quarter, one billion hectares, holds most of the biodiversity, and very importantly, 50 percent of the living biomass, the carbon. Now, we used to have six billion hectares of forest — 50 percent more than what we have — 2,000 years ago. We've actually lost two billion hectares in the last 2,000 years. But in the last 100 years, we lost half of that. That was when we shifted from deforestation of temperate forests to deforestation of tropical forests.So think of this: In 100 years, we lost the same amount of forest in the tropics that we lost in 2,000 years in temperate forests. That's the speed of the destruction that we are having.Now, Brazil is an important piece of this puzzle. We have the second largest forest in the world, just after Russia. It means 12 percent of all the world's forests are in Brazil, most of that in the Amazon. It's the largest piece of forest we have. It's a very big, large area. You can see that you could fit many of the European countries there. We still have 80 percent of the forest cover. That's the good news. But we lost 15 percent in just 30 years. So if you go with that speed, very soon, we will loose this powerful pump that we have in the Amazon that regulates our climate.Deforestation was growing fast and accelerating at the end of the '90s and the beginning of the 2000s. (Chainsaw sound) (Sound of falling tree) Twenty-seven thousand square kilometers in one year. This is 2.7 million hectares. It's almost like half of Costa Rica every year.So at this moment — this is 2003, 2004 — I happened to be coming to work in the government. And together with other teammates in the National Forest Department, we were assigned a task to join a team and find out the causes of deforestation, and make a plan to combat that at a national level, involving the local governments, the civil society, business, local communities, in an effort that could tackle those causes.So we came up with this plan with 144 actions in different areas. Now I will go through all of them one by one — no, just giving some examples of what we had done in the next few years. So the first thing, we set up a system with the national space agency that could actually see where deforestation is happening, almost in real time. So now in Brazil,  we have this system, DETER, where every month, or every two months, we get information on where deforestation is happening so we can actually act when it's happening. And all the information is fully transparent so others can replicate that in independent systems. This allows us, among other things, to apprehend 1.4 million cubic meters of logs that were illegally taken. Part of that we saw and sell, and all the revenue becomes a fund that now funds conservation projects of local communities as an endowment fund. This also allows us to make a big operation to seize corruption and illegal activities that ended up having 700 people in prison, including a lot of public servants. Then we made the connection that areas that have been doing illegal deforestation should not get any kind of credit or finance. So we cut this through the bank system and then linked this to the end users. So supermarkets, the slaughterhouses, and so on that buy products from illegal clear-cut areas, they also can be liable for the deforestation. So making all these connections to help to push the problem down. And also we work a lot on land tenure issues. It's very important for conflicts. Fifty million hectares of protected areas were created, which is an area the size of Spain. And of those, eight million were indigenous lands.Now we start to see results. So in the last 10 years, deforestation came down in Brazil 75 percent.(Applause)So if we compare it with the average deforestation that we had in the last decade, we saved 8.7 million hectares, which is the size of Austria. But more importantly, it avoided the emission of three billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is by far the largest contribution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, until today, as a positive action. One may think that when you do these kinds of actions to decrease, to push down deforestation, you will have an economic impact because you will not have economic activity or something like that. But it's interesting to know that it's quite the opposite. In fact, in the period when we have the deepest decline of deforestation, the economy grew, on average, double from the previous decade, when deforestation was actually going up. So it's a good lesson for us. Maybe this is completely disconnected, as we just learned by having deforestation come down.Now this is all good news, and it's quite an achievement, and we obviously should be very proud about that. But it's not even close to sufficient. In fact, if you think about the deforestation in the Amazon in 2013, that was over half a million hectares, which means that every minute, an area the size of two soccer fields is being cut in the Amazon last year, just last year. If we sum up the deforestation we have in the other biomes in Brazil, we are talking about still the largest deforestation rate in the world. It's more or less like we are forest heroes, but still deforestation champions. So we can't be satisfied, not even close to satisfied. So the next step, I think, is to fight to have zero loss of forest cover in Brazil and to have that as a goal for 2020. That's our next step.Now I've always been interested in the relationship between climate change and forests. First, because 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, so it's a big part of the problem. But also, forests can be a big part of the solution since that's the best way we know to sink, capture and store carbon. Now, there is another relationship of climate and forests that really stuck me in 2008 and made me change my career from forests to working with climate change. I went to visit Canada, in British Columbia, together with the chiefs of the forest services of other countries that we have a kind of alliance of them, like Canada, Russia, India, China, U.S. And when we were there we learned about this pine beetle that is literally eating the forests in Canada. What we see here, those brown trees, these are really dead trees. They are standing dead trees because of the larvae of the beetle. What happens is that this beetle is controlled by the cold weather in the winter. For many years now, they don't have the sufficient cold weather to actually control the population of this beetle. And it became a disease that is really killing billions of trees. So I came back with this notion that the forest is actually one of the earliest and most affected victims of climate change.So I was thinking, if I succeed in working with all my colleagues to actually help to stop deforestation, maybe we will lose the battle later on for climate change by floods, heat, fires and so on. So I decided to leave the forest service and start to work directly on climate change, find a way to think and understand the challenge, and go from there.Now, the challenge of climate change is pretty straightforward. The goal is very clear. We want to limit the increase of the average temperature of the planet to two degrees. There are several reasons for that. I will not get into that now. But in order to get to this limit of two degrees, which is possible for us to survive, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, defines that we have a budget of emissions of 1,000 billion tons of CO2 from now until the end of the century. So if we divide this by the number of years, what we have is an average budget of 11 billion tons of CO2 per year. Now what is one ton of CO2? It's more or less what one small car, running 20 kilometers a day, will emit in one year. Or it's one flight, one way, from São Paulo to Johannesburg or to London, one way. Two ways, two tons. So 11 billion tons is twice that.Now the emissions today are 50 billion tons, and it's growing. It's growing and maybe it will be 61 by 2020. Now we need to go down to 10 by 2050. And while this happens, the population will grow from seven to nine billion people, the economy will grow from 60 trillion dollars in 2010 to 200 trillion dollars. And so what we need to do is to be much more efficient in a way that we can go from seven tons of carbon per capita per person, per year, into something like one. You have to choose. You take the airplane or you have a car.So the question is, can we make it? And that's the exactly the same question I got when I was developing a plan to combat deforestation. It's such a big problem, so complex. Can we really do it? I think so. Think of this: Deforestation means 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil in the last decade. Now it's a little bit less than 30 percent. In the world, 60 percent is energy. So if we can tackle directly the energy, the same way we could tackle deforestation, maybe we can have a chance.So there are five things that I think we should do. First, we need to disconnect development from carbon emissions. We don't need to clear-cut all the forests to actually get more jobs and agriculture and have more economy. That's what we proved when we decreased deforestation and the economy continued to grow. Same thing could happen in the energy sector. Second, we have to move the incentives to the right place. Today, 500 billion dollars a year goes into subsidies for fossil fuels. Why don't we put a price on carbon and transfer this to the renewable energy? Third, we need to measure and make it transparent where, when and who is emitting greenhouse gases so we can have actions specifically for each one of those opportunities. Fourth, we need to leapfrog the routes of development, which means, you don't need to go to the landline telephone before you get to the mobile phones. Same way we don't need to go to fossil fuels to the one billion people who don't have access to energy before we get to the clean energy. And fifth and last, we need to share responsibility between governments, business and civil society. There is work to do for everybody, and we need to have everybody on board.So to finalize, I think the future is not like a fate that you have to just go as business as usual goes. We need to have the courage to actually change the route, invest in something new, think that we can actually change the route. I think we are doing this with deforestation in Brazil, and I hope we can do it also with climate change in the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tasso_azevedo_hopeful_lessons_from_the_battle_to_save_rainforests
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"When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have. Take Mansukh Prajapati, a potter in India. He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity. He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days. That's a cool invention, literally. In Africa, if you run out of your cell phone battery, don't panic. You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your  cell phone using bicycles. And since we are in South America, let's go to Lima in Peru, a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year. An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water, generating over 90 liters of water every day. The Peruvians are amazing. They can literally create water out of thin air.For the past seven years, I have met and studied hundreds of entrepreneurs in India, China, Africa and South America, and they keep amazing me. Many of them did not go to school. They don't invent stuff in big R&D labs. The street is the lab. Why do they do that? Because they don't have the kind of basic resources we take for granted, like capital and energy, and basic services like healthcare and education are also scarce in those regions. When external resources are scarce, you have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource, human ingenuity, and use that ingenuity to find clever ways to solve problems with limited resources.In India, we call it Jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised fix, a clever solution born in adversity. Jugaad solutions are not sophisticated or perfect, but they create more value at lower cost. For me, the entrepreneurs who will create Jugaad solutions are like alchemists. They can magically transform adversity into opportunity, and turn something of less value into something of high value. In other words, they mastered the art of doing more with less, which is the essence of frugal innovation.Frugal innovation is the ability  to create more economic and social value using fewer resources. Frugal innovation is not about making do; it's about making things better. Now I want to show you how, across emerging markets, entrepreneurs and companies are adopting  frugal innovation on a larger scale to cost-effectively deliver healthcare and energy to billions of people who may have little income but very high aspirations.Let's first go to China, where the country's largest I.T. service provider, Neusoft, has developed a telemedicine solution to help doctors in cities remotely treat old and poor patients in Chinese villages. This solution is based on simple-to-use medical devices that less qualified health workers like nurses can use in rural clinics. China desperately needs these frugal medical solutions because by 2050 it will be home to over half a billion senior citizens.Now let's go to Kenya, a country where half the population uses M-Pesa, a mobile payment solution. This is a great solution for the African continent because 80 percent of Africans don't have a bank account, but what is exciting is that M-Pesa is now becoming the source of other disruptive business models in sectors like energy. Take M-KOPA, the home solar solution that comes literally in a box that has a solar rooftop panel, three LED lights, a solar radio, and a cell phone charger. The whole kit, though, costs 200 dollars, which is too expensive for most Kenyans, and this is where mobile telephony can make the solution more affordable. Today, you can buy this kit by making an initial deposit of just 35 dollars, and then pay off the rest by making a daily micro-payment of 45 cents using your mobile phone. Once you've made 365 micro-payments, the system is unlocked, and you own the product and you start  receiving clean, free electricity. This is an amazing solution for Kenya, where 70 percent of people live off the grid. This shows that with frugal innovation what matters is that you take what is most abundant, mobile connectivity, to deal with what is scarce, which is energy.With frugal innovation, the global South is actually catching up and in some cases  even leap-frogging the North. Instead of building expensive hospitals, China is using telemedicine to cost-effectively treat millions of patients, and Africa, instead of building banks and electricity grids, is going straight to mobile payments and distributed clean energy.Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed to the way we innovate in the North. I live in Silicon Valley, where we keep chasing the next big technology thing. Think of the iPhone 5, 6, then 7, 8. Companies in the West spend billions of dollars investing in R&D, and use tons of natural resources to create ever more complex products, to differentiate their brands from competition, and they charge customers more money for new features. So the conventional business model  in the West is more for more. But sadly, this more for more model is running out of gas, for three reasons: First, a big portion of customers in the West because of the diminishing purchasing power, can no longer afford these expensive products. Second, we are running out of natural water and oil. In California, where I live, water scarcity is becoming a big problem. And third, most importantly, because of the growing income disparity between the rich  and the middle class in the West, there is a big disconnect between existing products and services and basic needs of customers. Do you know that today, there are over 70 million Americans today who are underbanked, because existing banking services are not designed to address their basic needs.The prolonged economic crisis in the West is making people think that they are about to lose the high standard of living and face deprivation. I believe that the only way we can sustain growth and prosperity in the West is if we learn to do more with less.The good news is, that's starting to happen. Several Western companies are now adopting frugal innovation to create affordable products for Western consumers. Let me give you two examples.When I first saw this building, I told myself it's some kind of postmodern house. Actually, it's a small manufacturing plant set up by Grameen Danone, a joint venture between  Grameen Bank of Muhammad Yunus and the food multinational Danone to make high-quality yogurt in Bangladesh. This factory is 10 percent the size of existing Danone factories and cost much less to build. I guess you can call it a low-fat factory. Now this factory, unlike Western factories that are highly automated, relies a lot on manual processes in order  to generate jobs for local communities. Danone was so inspired by this model that combines economic efficiency and social sustainability, they are planning to roll it out in other parts of the world as well.Now, when you see this example, you might be thinking, ""Well, frugal innovation is low tech."" Actually, no. Frugal innovation is also about making high tech more affordable and more accessible to more people. Let me give you an example.In China, the R&D engineers of Siemens Healthcare have designed a C.T. scanner that is easy enough to be used by less qualified health workers, like nurses and technicians. This device can scan more patients on a daily basis, and yet consumes less energy, which is great for hospitals, but it's also great for patients because it reduces the cost of treatment by 30 percent and radiation dosage by up to 60 percent. This solution was initially designed for the Chinese market, but now it's selling like hotcakes in the U.S. and Europe, where hospitals are pressured to deliver quality care at lower cost.But the frugal innovation revolution in the West is actually led by creative entrepreneurs who are coming up with amazing solutions to address basic needs in the U.S. and Europe. Let me quickly give you three examples of startups that personally inspire me. The first one happens to be launched by my neighbor in Silicon Valley. It's called gThrive. They make these wireless sensors designed like plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed information like soil conditions. This dynamic data allows farmers to optimize use of water energy while improving quality of the products and the yields, which is a great solution for California, which faces major water shortage. It pays for itself within one year.Second example is Be-Bound, also in Silicon Valley, that enables you to connect to the Internet even in no-bandwidth areas where there's no wi-fi or 3G or 4G. How do they do that? They simply use SMS, a basic technology, but that happens to be the most reliable and most widely available around the world. Three billion people today with  cell phones can't access the Internet. This solution can connect them to the Internet in a frugal way.And in France, there is a startup calle Compte Nickel, which is revolutionizing the banking sector. It allows thousands of people to walk into a Mom and Pop store and in just five minutes activate the service that gives them two products: an international bank account number and an international debit card. They charge a flat annual  maintenance fee of just 20 Euros. That means you can do all banking transactions — send and receive money, pay with your debit card — all with no additional charge. This is what I call low-cost banking without the bank. Amazingly, 75 percent of the customers using this service are the middle-class French who can't afford high banking fees.Now, I talked about frugal innovation, initially pioneered in the South, now being adopted in the North. Ultimately, we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity. The exciting news is that's starting to happen. Let's go to Nairobi to find that out.Nairobi has horrendous traffic jams. When I first saw them, I thought, ""Holy cow."" Literally, because you have to dodge cows as well when you drive in Nairobi. To ease the situation, the engineers at the IBM lab in Kenya are piloting a solution called Megaffic, which initially was designed by the Japanese engineers. Unlike in the West, Megaffic doesn't rely on roadside sensors, which are very expensive to install in Nairobi. Instead they process images, traffic data, collected from a small number of low-resolution webcams in Nairobi streets, and then they use analytic software to predict congestion points, and they can SMS drivers alternate routes to take. Granted, Megaffic is not as sexy as self-driving cars, but it promises to take Nairobi drivers from point A to point B at least 20 percent faster. And earlier this year, UCLA Health launched its Global Lab for Innovation, which seeks to identify frugal healthcare  solutions anywhere in the world that will be at least 20 percent cheaper than existing solutions in the U.S. and yet more effective. It also tries to bring together innovators from North and South to cocreate affordable healthcare solutions for all of humanity.I gave tons of examples of frugal innovators from around the world, but the question is, how do you go about adopting frugal innovation? Well, I gleaned out three principles from frugal innovators around the world that I want to share with you that you can apply in your own organization to do more with less.The first principle is: Keep it simple. Don't create solutions to impress customers. Make them easy enough to use and widely accessible, like the C.T. scanner we saw in China.Second principle:  Do not reinvent the wheel. Try to leverage existing resources and assets that are widely available, like using mobile telephony to offer clean energy or Mom and Pop stores to offer banking services.Third principle is: Think and act horizontally. Companies tend to scale up vertically by centralizing operations in big factories and warehouses, but if you want to be agile and deal with immense customer diversity, you need to scale out horizontally using a distributed supply chain with smaller manufacturing and distribution units, like Grameen Bank has shown.The South pioneered frugal innovation out of sheer necessity. The North is now learning to do more and better with less as it faces resource constraints. As an Indian-born French national who lives in the United States, my hope is that we transcend this artificial North-South divide so that we can harness the collective ingenuity of innovators from around the world to cocreate frugal solutions that will improve the quality of life of everyone in the world, while preserving our precious planet.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/navi_radjou_creative_problem_solving_in_the_face_of_extreme_limits
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"Let's go south. All of you are actually going south. This is the direction of south, this way, and if you go 8,000 kilometers out of the back of this room, you will come to as far south as you can go anywhere on Earth, the Pole itself.Now, I am not an explorer. I'm not an environmentalist. I'm actually just a survivor, and these photographs that I'm showing you here are dangerous. They are the ice melt of the South and North Poles. And ladies and gentlemen, we need to listen to what these places are telling us, and if we don't, we will end up with our own survival situation here on planet Earth.I have faced head-on these places, and to walk across a melting ocean of ice is without doubt the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me.Antarctica is such a hopeful place. It is protected by  the Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959. In 1991, a 50-year agreement was entered into that stops any exploitation in Antarctica, and this agreement could be altered, changed, modified, or even abandoned starting in the year 2041. Ladies and gentlemen, people already far up north from here in the Arctic are already taking advantage of this ice melt, taking out resources from areas already that have been covered in ice for the last 10, 20, 30,000, 100,000 years. Can they not join the dots and think, ""Why is the ice actually melting?""This is such an amazing place, the Antarctic, and I have worked hard for the last 23 years on this mission to make sure that what's happening up here in the North does never happen,  cannot happen in the South.Where did this all begin? It began for me at the age of 11. Check out that haircut.  It's a bit odd. (Laughter) And at the age of 11,  I was inspired by the real explorers to want to try to be the first to walk to both Poles. I found it incredibly inspiring that the idea of becoming a polar traveler went down pretty well with girls  at parties when I was at university. That was a bit more inspiring. And after years, seven years of fundraising, seven years of being told no, seven years of being told by my family to seek counseling and psychiatric help, eventually three of us found ourselves marching to the South Geographic Pole on the longest unassisted march ever made anywhere on Earth in history. In this photograph, we are standing in an area the size of the United States of America, and we're on our own. We have no radio  communications, no backup. Beneath our feet, 90 percent of all the world's ice, 70 percent of all the world's fresh water. We're standing on it. This is the power of Antarctica.On this journey, we faced the danger of crevasses, intense cold, so cold that sweat turns to ice inside your clothing, your teeth can crack, water can freeze in your eyes. Let's just say it's a bit chilly. (Laughter) And after 70 desperate days, we arrive at the South Pole. We had done it. But something happened to me on that 70-day journey in 1986 that brought me here, and it hurt. My eyes changed color in 70 days through damage. Our faces blistered out. The skin ripped off and we wondered why. And when we got home, we were told by NASA that a hole in the ozone had been discovered above the South Pole, and we'd walked underneath it the same year it had been discovered. Ultraviolet rays down, hit the ice, bounced back, fried out the eyes, ripped off our faces. It was a bit of a shock — (Laughter) — and it started me thinking.In 1989, we now head north. Sixty days, every step away from the safety of land across a frozen ocean. It was desperately cold again. Here's me coming in from washing naked at -60 Celsius. And if anybody ever says to you, ""I am cold"" — (Laughter) — if they look like this,  they are cold, definitely. (Applause)And 1,000 kilometers away from the safety of land, disaster strikes. The Arctic Ocean melts beneath our feet four months before it ever had in history, and we're 1,000 kilometers from safety. The ice is crashing around us, grinding, and I'm thinking, ""Are we going to die?"" But something clicked in my head on this day, as I realized we, as a world, are in a survival situation, and that feeling has never gone away for 25 long years. Back then, we had to march or die. And we're not some TV survivor program. When things go wrong for us, it's life or death, and our brave African-American Daryl, who would become the first American to walk to the North Pole, his heel dropped off  from frostbite 200 klicks out. He must keep going, he does, and after 60 days on the ice, we stood at the North Pole. We had done it. Yes, I became the first person in history stupid enough to walk to both Poles, but it was our success.And sadly, on return home, it was not all fun. I became very low. To succeed at something is often harder than actually making it happen. I was empty, lonely, financially destroyed. I was without hope, but hope came in the form of the great Jacques Cousteau, and he inspired me to take on  the 2041 mission. Being Jacques, he gave me clear instructions: Engage the world leaders, talk to industry and business, and above all, Rob, inspire young people, because they will choose the future of the preservation of Antarctica.For the world leaders, we've been to every world Earth Summit, all three of them, with our brave yacht, 2041, twice to Rio, once in '92, once in 2012, and for the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, we made the longest overland voyage ever made with a yacht, 13,000 kilometers around the whole of Southern Africa doing our best to inspire over a million young people in person about 2041 and about their environment.For the last 11 years, we have taken over 1,000 people, people from industry and business, women and men from companies, students from all over the world, down to Antarctica, and during those missions, we've managed to pull out over 1,500 tons of twisted metal left in Antarctica. That took eight years, and I'm so proud of it because we recycled all of it  back here in South America. I have been inspired ever since I could walk to recycle by my mum. Here she is, and my mum — (Applause) — my mum is still recycling, and as she is in her 100th year, isn't that fantastic? (Applause) And when — I love my mum. (Laughter) But when Mum was born, the population of our planet was only 1.8 billion people, and talking in terms of billions, we have taken young people from industry and business from India, from China. These are game-changing nations, and will be hugely important in the decision about the preservation of the Antarctic. Unbelievably, we've engaged and inspired women to come from the Middle East, often for the first time they've  represented their nations in Antarctica. Fantastic people, so inspired. To look after Antarctica, you've got to first engage people with this extraordinary place, form a relationship, form a bond, form some love. It is such a privilege to go to Antarctica, I can't tell you. I feel so lucky, and I've been 35 times in my life, and all those people who come with us return home as great champions, not only for Antarctica, but for local issues back in their own nations.Let's go back to where we began: the ice melt of the North and South Poles. And it's not good news. NASA informed us six months ago that the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf is now disintegrating. Huge areas of ice — look how big Antarctica is even compared to here — Huge areas of ice  are breaking off from Antarctica, the size of small nations. And NASA have calculated that the sea level will rise, it is definite, by one meter in the next 100 years, the same time that my mum has been on planet Earth. It's going to happen, and I've realized that  the preservation of Antarctica and our survival here on Earth are linked. And there is a very simple solution. If we are using more renewable energy in the real world, if we are being more efficient with the energy here, running our energy mix in a cleaner way, there will be no financial reason to go and exploit Antarctica. It won't make financial sense, and if we manage our energy better, we also may be able to slow down, maybe even stop, this great ice melt that threatens us.It's a big challenge, and what is our response to it? We've got to go back one last time, and at the end of next year, we will go back to the South Geographic Pole, where we arrived 30 years ago on foot, and retrace our steps of 1,600 kilometers, but this time only using renewable energy to survive. We will walk across those icecaps, which far down below are melting, hopefully inspiring some solutions on that issue.This is my son, Barney. He is coming with me. He is committed to walking side by side with his father, and what he will do is to translate these messages and inspire these messages to the minds of future young leaders. I'm extremely proud of him. Good on him, Barney.Ladies and gentlemen,  a survivor — and I'm good — a survivor sees a problem and doesn't go, ""Whatever."" A survivor sees a problem and deals with that problem before it becomes a threat. We have 27 years to preserve the Antarctic. We all own it. We all have responsibility. The fact that nobody owns it  maybe means that we can succeed. Antarctica is a moral line in the snow, and on one side of that line we should fight, fight hard for this one beautiful, pristine place left alone on Earth. I know it's possible. We are going to do it. And I'll leave you with these words from Goethe. I've tried to live by them.""If you can do, or dream you can, begin it now, for boldness has genius, power and magic in it.""Good luck to you all.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_swan_let_s_save_the_last_pristine_continent
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"We can cut violent deaths around the world by 50 percent in the next three decades. All we have to do is drop killing by 2.3 percent a year, and we'll hit that target.You don't believe me? Well, the leading epidemiologists and criminologists around the world seem to think we can, and so do I, but only if we focus on our cities, especially the most fragile ones.You see, I've been thinking about this a lot. For the last 20 years, I've been working in countries and cities ripped apart by conflict, violence, terrorism, or some insidious combination of all. I've tracked gun smugglers from Russia to Somalia, I've worked with warlords in Afghanistan and the Congo, I've counted cadavers in Colombia, in  Haiti, in Sri Lanka, in Papua New Guinea. You don't need to be on the front line, though, to get a sense that our planet is spinning out of control, right? There's this feeling that international instability is the new normal. But I want you to take a closer look, and I think you'll see that the geography of violence is changing, because it's not so much our nation states that are gripped by conflict and crime as our cities: Aleppo, Bamako, Caracas,  Erbil, Mosul, Tripoli, Salvador. Violence is migrating to the metropole.And maybe this is to be expected, right? After all, most people today, they live in cities, not the countryside. Just 600 cities, including 30 megacities, account for two thirds of global GDP. But when it comes to cities, the conversation is dominated by the North, that is, North America, Western Europe, Australia and Japan, where violence is  actually at historic lows. As a result, city enthusiasts, they talk about the triumph of the city, of the creative classes, and the mayors that will rule the world. Now, I hope that mayors do one day rule the world, but, you know, the fact is, we don't hear any conversation, really, about what is happening in the South. And by South, I mean Latin America, Africa, Asia, where violence in some cases is accelerating, where infrastructure is overstretched, and where governance is sometimes an aspiration and not a reality.Now, some diplomats and development experts and specialists, they talk about 40 to 50 fragile states that will shape security in the 21st century. I think it's fragile cities which will define the future of order and disorder. That's because warfare and humanitarian action are going to be concentrated in our cities, and the fight for development, whether you define that as eradicating poverty, universal healthcare, beating back climate change, will be won or lost in the shantytowns, slums and favelas of our cities. I want to talk to you about four megarisks that I think will define fragility in our time, and if we can get to grips with these, I think we can do something with that lethal violence problem.So let me start with some good news. Fact is, we're living in the most peaceful moment in human history. Steven Pinker and others have shown how the intensity and frequency of conflict is actually at an all-time low. Now, Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, as ghastly as these conflicts are, and they are horrific, they represent a relatively small blip upwards in a 50-year-long secular decline. What's more, we're seeing a dramatic reduction in homicide. Manuel Eisner and others have shown that for centuries, we've seen this incredible drop in murder, especially in the West. Most Northern cities today are 100 times safer than they were just 100 years ago.These two facts — the decline in armed  conflict and the decline in murder — are amongst the most extraordinary, if unheralded, accomplishments of human history, and we should be really excited, right? Well, yeah, we should. There's just one problem: These two scourges are still with us. You see, 525,000 people — men, women, boys and girls — die violently every single year. Research I've been doing with Keith Krause and others has shown that between 50,000 and 60,000 people are dying in war zones violently. The rest, almost 500,000 people, are dying outside of conflict zones. In other words, 10 times more people are dying outside of war than inside war. What's more, violence is moving south, to Latin America and the Caribbean, to parts of Central and Southern Africa, and to bits of the Middle East and Central Asia. Forty of the 50 most dangerous  cities in the world are right here in Latin America, 13 in Brazil, and the most dangerous of all, it's  San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second city, with a staggering homicide rate of 187 murders per 100,000 people. That's 23 times the global average.Now, if violence is re-concentrating geographically, it's also being reconfigured to the world's new topography, because when it comes to cities, the world ain't flat, like Thomas Friedman likes to say. It's spiky. The dominance of the city as the primary mode of urban living is one of the most extraordinary demographic reversals in history, and it all happened so fast. You all know the figures, right? There's 7.3 billion people in the world today; there will be 9.6 billion by 2050. But consider this one fact: In the 1800s, one in 30 people lived in cities, today it's one in two, and tomorrow virtually everyone is going to be there. And this expansion in urbanization is going to be neither even nor equitable. The vast majority, 90 percent, will be happening in the South, in cities of the South.So urban geographers and demographers, they tell us that it's not necessarily the size or even the density of cities that predicts violence, no. Tokyo, with 35 million people, is one of the largest, and some might say safest, urban metropolises in the world. No, it's the speed of urbanization that matters. I call this turbo-urbanization, and it's  one of the key drivers of fragility.When you think about the incredible expansion of these cities, and you think about turbo-urbanization, think about Karachi. Karachi was about 500,000 people in 1947, a hustling, bustling city. Today, it's 21 million people, and apart from accounting for three quarters of Pakistan's GDP, it's also one of the most violent cities in South Asia. Dhaka, Lagos, Kinshasa, these cities are now 40 times larger than they were in the 1950s.Now take a look at New York. The Big Apple, it took 150 years to get to eight million people. São Paulo, Mexico City, took 15 to reach that same interval.Now, what do these medium, large, mega-, and hypercities look like? What is their profile? Well, for one thing, they're young. What we're seeing in many of them is the rise of the youth bulge. Now, this is actually a good news story. It's a function of reductions in child mortality rates. But the youth bulge is something we've got to watch. What it basically means is the proportion of young people living in our fragile cities is much larger than those living  in our healthier and wealthier ones. In some fragile cities, 75 percent of the population is under the age of 30. Think about that: Three in four people are under 30. It's like Palo Alto on steroids. Now, if you look at Mogadishu for example, in Mogadishu the mean age is 16 years old. Ditto for Dhaka, Dili and Kabul. And Tokyo? It's 46. Same for most Western European cities. Now, it's not just youth that necessarily predicts violence. That's one factor among many, but youthfulness combined with unemployment, lack of education, and — this is the kicker —  being male, is a deadly proposition. They're statistically correlated, all those risk factors, with youth, and they tend to relate to increases in violence.Now, for those of you who are parents of teenage sons, you know what I'm talking about, right? Just imagine your boy without any structure with those unruly friends of his, out there cavorting about. Now, take away the parents, take away the education, limit the education possibilities, sprinkle in a little bit of drugs, alcohol and guns, and sit back and watch the fireworks. The implications are disconcerting. Right here in Brazil, the life expectancy is 73.6 years. If you live in Rio, I'm sorry, shave off two right there. But if you're young, you're uneducated, you lack employment, you're black, and you're male, your life expectancy drops to less than 60 years old. There's a reason why youthfulness and violence are the number one killers in this country.Okay, so it's not all doom and gloom in our cities. After all, cities are hubs of innovation, dynamism, prosperity,  excitement, connectivity. They're where the smart people gather. And those young people I just mentioned, they're more digitally savvy and tech-aware than ever before. And this explosion, the Internet, and mobile technology, means that the digital divide separating the North and the South between countries and within them, is shrinking. But as we've heard so many times, these new technologies are dual-edged, right? Take the case of law enforcement. Police around the world are starting to use remote sensing and big data to anticipate crime. Some cops are able to predict criminal violence before it even happens. The future crime scenario, it's here today, and we've got to be careful. We have to manage the issues of the public safety against rights to individual privacy.But it's not just the cops who are innovating. We've heard extraordinary activities of civil society groups who are engaging in local  and global collective action, and this is leading to digital protest and real revolution. But most worrying of all are criminal gangs who are going online and starting to colonize cyberspace. In Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, where I've been working, groups like the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel are hijacking social media. They're using it to recruit, to sell their products, to coerce, to intimidate and to kill. Violence is going virtual.So this is just a partial sketch of a fast-moving and dynamic and complex situation. I mean, there are many other megarisks that are going to define fragility in our time, not least income inequality, poverty, climate change, impunity. But we're facing a stark dilemma where some cities are going to thrive and drive global growth and others are going to stumble and pull it backwards. If we're going to change course, we need to start a conversation. We can't only focus on those cities that work, the Singapores, the Kuala Lumpurs, the Dubais, the Shanghais. We've got to bring those fragile cities into the conversation.One way to do this might be to start twinning our fragile cities with our healthier and wealthier ones, kickstarting a process of learning and collaboration and sharing of practices, of what works and what doesn't. A wonderful example of this is coming from El Salvador and Los Angeles, where the mayors in San Salvador and Los Angeles are collaborating on getting ex-gang members to work with current gang members, offering tutoring, education, and in the process are helping incubate cease-fires and truces, and we've seen homicide rates go down in San Salvador, once the world's most violent city, by 50 percent. We can also focus  on hot cities, but also hot spots. Place and location matter fundamentally in shaping violence in our cities. Did you know that between one and two percent of street addresses in any fragile city can predict up to 99 percent of violent crime? Take the case of São Paulo, where I've been working. It's gone from being Brazil's most dangerous city to one of its safest, and it did this by doubling down on information collection, hot spot mapping, and police reform, and in the process, it dropped homicide by 70 percent in just over 10 years. We also got to focus on those hot people. It's tragic, but being young, unemployed, uneducated, male, increases the risks of being killed and killing. We have to break this cycle of violence and get in there early with our children, our youngest children, and valorize them, not stigmatize them. There's wonderful work that's happening that I've been involved with in Kingston, Jamaica and right here in Rio, which is putting education, employment, recreation up front for these high-risk groups, and as a result, we're seeing violence going down in their communities.We've also got to make our cities safer, more inclusive, and livable for all. The fact is, social cohesion matters. Mobility matters in our cities. We've got to get away from this model of segregation, exclusion, and cities with walls. My favorite example of how to do this comes from Medellín. When I lived in Colombia in the late 1990s, Medellín was the murder capital  of the world, but it changed course, and it did this by deliberately investing in its low-income and most violent areas and integrating them with the middle-class ones through a network of cable cars, of public transport, and first-class infrastructure, and in the process, it dropped homicide by 79 percent in just under two decades.And finally, there's technology. Technology has enormous promise but also peril. We've seen examples here of extraordinary innovation, and much of it coming from this room, The police are engaging  in predictive analytics. Citizens are engaging in new crowdsourcing solutions. Even my own group is involved in developing applications to provide more accountability over police and increase safety among citizens. But we need to be careful.If I have one single message for you, it's this: There is nothing inevitable about lethal violence, and we can make our cities safer. Folks, we have the opportunity of a lifetime to drop homicidal violence in half within our lifetime. So I have just one question: What are we waiting for?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_muggah_how_to_protect_fast_growing_cities_from_failing
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"It's said that to be a poet you have to go to hell and back.The first time I visited the prison, I was not surprised by the noise of the padlocks, or the closing doors, or the cell bars, or by any of the things I had imagined.Maybe because the prison is in a quite open space. You can see the sky. Seagulls fly overhead, and you feel like you're next to the sea, that you're really close to the beach. But in fact, the gulls are looking for food in the dump near the prison.I went farther inside and I suddenly saw inmates moving across the corridors. Then it was as if I stepped back and thought that I could have very well been one of them. If I had another story, another context, different luck. Because nobody - nobody - can choose where they're born.In 2009, I was invited to join a project that San Martín National University conducted at the Unit 48 penitentiary, to coordinate a writing workshop. The prison service ceded some land at the end of the prison, which is where they constructed the University Center building.The first time I met with the prisoners, I asked them why they were asking for a writing workshop and they told me they wanted  to put on paper all that they couldn't say and do.Right then I decided that I wanted poetry to enter the prison. So I said to them why don't we work with poetry, if they knew what poetry was. But nobody had a clue what poetry really was. They also suggested to me that the workshop should be not just for the inmates taking university classes,  but for all the inmates. And so I said that to start this workshop, I needed to find a tool that we all had in common. That tool was language.We had language, we had the workshop. We could have poetry. But what I hadn't considered was that inequality exists in prison, too. Many of the prisoners hadn't even completed grammar school. Many couldn't use cursive, could barely print. They didn't write fluently, either. So we started looking for short poems. Very short, but very powerful.And we started to read, and we'd read one author, then another author, and by reading such short poems, they all began to realize that what the poetic language did was to break a certain logic, and create another system. Breaking the logic of language also breaks the logic of the system under which they've learned to respond. So a new system appeared, new rules that made them understand very quickly, - very quickly - that with poetic language they would be able to say absolutely whatever they wanted.It's said that to be a poet you have to go to hell and back. And they have plenty of hell. Plenty of hell.One of them once said: ""In prison you never sleep. You can never sleep in jail. You can never close your eyelids."" And so, like I’m doing now, I gave them a moment of silence, then said, “That's what poetry is, you guys. It's in this prison universe that you have all around you. Everything you say about how you never sleep, it exudes fear. All the things that go unwritten — all of that is poetry.""So we started appropriating that hell; we plunged ourselves, headfirst, into the seventh circle. And in that seventh circle of hell, our very own, beloved circle, they learned that they could make the walls invisible, that they could make the windows yell, and that we could hide inside the shadows. When the first year of the workshop had ended, we organized a little closing party, like you do when a job is done with so much love, and you want to celebrate with a party.We called family, friends,  the university authorities. The only thing the inmates had to do was read a poem, and receive their diplomas and applause. That was our simple party. The only thing I want to leave you with is the moment in which those men, some of them just huge when standing next to me, or the young boys - so young, but with an enormous pride, held their papers and trembled like little kids and sweated, and read their poems with their voices completely broken.That moment made me think a lot that for most of them, it was surely the very first time that someone applauded them for something they had done. In prison there are things that can't be done. In prison, you can't dream. In prison, you can't cry. There are words that are virtually forbidden, like the word ""time,"" the word ""future,"" the word ""wish"". But we dared to dream, and to dream a lot. We decided that they were going to write a book. Not only did they write a book, but they also bound it themselves. That was at the end of 2010. Then, we doubled the bet and wrote another book. And we bound that one, too. That was a short time ago, at the end of last year. What I see week after week, is how they're turning into different people; how they're being transformed. How words are empowering them with a dignity they had never known, that they couldn't even imagine. They had no idea such dignity could come from them.At the workshop, in that beloved hell we share, we all give something. We open our hands and hearts and give what we have, what we can. All of us; all of us equally. And so you feel that at least in a small way you're repairing that huge social fracture which makes it so that for many of them, prison is their only destination. I remember a verse by a tremendous poet, a great poet, from our Unit 48 workshop, Nicolás Dorado: ""I will need an infinite thread to sew up this huge wound.""Poetry does that; it sews up the wounds of exclusion. It opens doors.  Poetry works as a mirror. It creates a mirror, which is the poem. They recognize themselves, they look at themselves in the poem and write from who they are, and are from what they write.In order to write, they need to appropriate the moment of writing which is a moment of extraordinary freedom. They have to get into their heads, search for that bit of freedom that can never be taken away when they write and that is also useful to realize that freedom is possible even inside a prison, and that the only bars we have in our wonderful space is the word ""bars,"" and that all of us in our hell burn with happiness when we light the wick of the word.(Applause)I told you a lot about the prison, a lot about what I experience every week, and how I enjoy it and transform myself with the inmates. But you don't know how much I'd like it if you could feel, live, experience, even for a few seconds, what I enjoy every week and what makes me who I am. (Applause) Martín Bustamante:  The heart chews tears of time; blinded by that light, it hides the speed of existence where the images go rowing by. It fights; it hangs on.The heart cracks under sad gazes, rides on storms that spread fire, lifts chests lowered by shame, knows that it's not just reading and going on, it also wishes to see the infinite blue.The heart sits down to think about things, fights to avoid being ordinary, tries to love without hurting, breathes the sun, giving courage to itself, surrenders, travels toward reason.The heart fights among the swamps, skirts the edge of the underworld, falls exhausted, but won't give in to what's easy, while irregular steps of intoxication wake up, wake the stillness.I'm Martín Bustamante, I'm a prisoner in Unit 48 of San Martín, today is my day of temporary release. And for me, poetry and literature have changed my life.Thank you very much!Cristina Domenech: Thank you!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cristina_domenech_poetry_that_frees_the_soul
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"So we humans have an extraordinary potential for goodness, but also an immense power to do harm. Any tool can be used to build or to destroy. That all depends on our motivation. Therefore, it is all the more important to foster an altruistic motivation rather than a selfish one.So now we indeed are facing  many challenges in our times. Those could be personal challenges. Our own mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. There's also societal challenges: poverty in the midst of plenty, inequalities, conflict, injustice. And then there are the new challenges, which we don't expect. Ten thousand years ago, there were about five million human beings on Earth. Whatever they could do, the Earth's resilience  would soon heal human activities. After the Industrial and Technological Revolutions, that's not the same anymore. We are now the major agent of impact on our Earth. We enter the Anthropocene, the era of human beings. So in a way, if we were to say we need to continue this endless growth, endless use of material resources, it's like if this man was saying — and I heard a former head of state, I won't mention who, saying — ""Five years ago, we were at the edge of the precipice. Today we made a big step forward."" So this edge is the same that has been defined by scientists as the planetary boundaries. And within those boundaries, they can carry a number of factors. We can still prosper, humanity can still prosper for 150,000 years if we keep the same stability of climate as in the Holocene for the last 10,000 years. But this depends on choosing a voluntary simplicity, growing qualitatively, not quantitatively.So in 1900, as you can see, we were well within the limits of safety. Now, in 1950 came the great acceleration. Now hold your breath, not too long, to imagine what comes next. Now we have vastly overrun some of the planetary boundaries. Just to take biodiversity,  at the current rate, by 2050, 30 percent of all species  on Earth will have disappeared. Even if we keep their DNA in some fridge, that's not going to be reversible. So here I am sitting in front of a 7,000-meter-high,  21,000-foot glacier in Bhutan. At the Third Pole, 2,000 glaciers are melting fast, faster than the Arctic.So what can we do in that situation? Well, however complex politically, economically, scientifically the question of the environment is, it simply boils down to a question of altruism versus selfishness. I'm a Marxist of the Groucho tendency. (Laughter) Groucho Marx said, ""Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?"" (Laughter) Unfortunately, I heard the billionaire Steve Forbes, on Fox News, saying exactly  the same thing, but seriously. He was told about the rise of the ocean, and he said, ""I find it absurd to change my behavior today for something that will happen  in a hundred years."" So if you don't care for future generations, just go for it.So one of the main challenges of our times is to reconcile three time scales: the short term of the economy, the ups and downs of the stock market, the end-of-the-year accounts; the midterm of the quality of life — what is the quality every moment of our  life, over 10 years and 20 years? — and the long term of the environment. When the environmentalists speak with economists, it's like a schizophrenic dialogue, completely incoherent. They don't speak the same language. Now, for the last 10 years, I went around the world meeting economists, scientists, neuroscientists, environmentalists, philosophers, thinkers  in the Himalayas, all over the place. It seems to me, there's only one concept that can reconcile those three time scales. It is simply having more consideration for others. If you have more consideration for others, you will have a caring economics, where finance is at the service of society and not society at the service of finance. You will not play at the casino with the resources that people have entrusted you with. If you have more consideration for others, you will make sure that you remedy inequality, that you bring some kind  of well-being within society, in education, at the workplace. Otherwise, a nation that is the most powerful and the richest but everyone is miserable, what's the point? And if you have more consideration for others, you are not going to ransack that planet that we have and at the current rate, we don't have three planets to continue that way.So the question is, okay, altruism is the answer, it's not just a novel ideal, but can it be a real, pragmatic solution? And first of all, does it exist, true altruism, or are we so selfish? So some philosophers thought we were irredeemably selfish. But are we really all just like rascals? That's good news, isn't it? Many philosophers,  like Hobbes, have said so. But not everyone looks like a rascal. Or is man a wolf for man? But this guy doesn't seem too bad. He's one of my friends in Tibet. He's very kind. So now, we love cooperation. There's no better joy  than working together, is there? And then not only humans. Then, of course, there's the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. But in evolution, cooperation — though competition exists, of course — cooperation has to be much more creative to go to increased levels of complexity. We are super-cooperators  and we should even go further.So now, on top of that, the quality of human relationships. The OECD did a survey among 10 factors, including income, everything. The first one that people said, that's the main thing for my happiness, is quality of social relationships. Not only in humans. And look at those great-grandmothers. So now, this idea  that if we go deep within, we are irredeemably selfish, this is armchair science. There is not a single sociological study, psychological study, that's ever shown that. Rather, the opposite. My friend, Daniel Batson,  spent a whole life putting people in the lab in very complex situations. And of course we are sometimes selfish, and some people more than others. But he found that systematically, no matter what, there's a significant number of people who do behave altruistically, no matter what. If you see someone deeply wounded, great suffering, you might just help out of empathic distress — you can't stand it, so it's better to help than to keep on looking at that person. So we tested all that, and in the end,  he said, clearly people can be altruistic. So that's good news. And even further, we should look at the banality of goodness. Now look at here. When we come out, we aren't  going to say, ""That's so nice. There was no fistfight while this mob  was thinking about altruism."" No, that's expected, isn't it? If there was a fistfight, we would speak of that for months. So the banality of goodness is something that doesn't attract your attention, but it exists.Now, look at this. So some psychologists said, when I tell them I run 140 humanitarian  projects in the Himalayas that give me so much joy, they said, ""Oh, I see, you work for the warm glow. That is not altruistic. You just feel good."" You think this guy, when he jumped in front of the train, he thought, ""I'm going to feel so good when this is over?"" (Laughter) But that's not the end of it. They say, well, but when you interviewed him, he said, ""I had no choice. I had to jump, of course."" He has no choice. Automatic behavior. It's neither selfish nor altruistic. No choice? Well of course, this guy's not going to think for half an hour, ""Should I give my hand? Not give my hand?"" He does it. There is a choice, but it's obvious, it's immediate. And then, also, there he had a choice. (Laughter)There are people who had choice, like Pastor André Trocmé and his wife, and the whole village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France. For the whole Second World War, they saved 3,500 Jews, gave them shelter, brought them to Switzerland, against all odds, at the risk of their lives and those of their family. So altruism does exist.So what is altruism? It is the wish: May others be happy and find the cause of happiness. Now, empathy is the affective resonance or cognitive resonance that tells you, this person is joyful, this person suffers. But empathy alone is not sufficient. If you keep on being confronted with suffering, you might have empathic distress, burnout, so you need the greater sphere of loving-kindness. With Tania Singer at the Max Planck  Institute of Leipzig, we showed that the brain networks for empathy and loving-kindness are different. Now, that's all well done, so we got that from evolution, from maternal care, parental love, but we need to extend that. It can be extended even to other species.Now, if we want a more altruistic society, we need two things: individual change and societal change. So is individual change possible? Two thousand years of contemplative study said yes, it is. Now, 15 years of collaboration with neuroscience and epigenetics said yes, our brains change when you train in altruism. So I spent 120 hours in an MRI machine. This is the first time I went after two and a half hours. And then the result has been published in many scientific papers. It shows without ambiguity that there is structural change and functional change in the brain when you train the altruistic love. Just to give you an idea: this is the meditator at rest on the left, meditator in compassion meditation, you see all the activity, and then the control group at rest, nothing happened, in meditation, nothing happened. They have not been trained.So do you need 50,000 hours  of meditation? No, you don't. Four weeks, 20 minutes a day, of caring, mindfulness meditation already brings a structural change in the brain compared to a control group. That's only 20 minutes a day for four weeks.Even with preschoolers — Richard Davidson did that in Madison. An eight-week program: gratitude, loving- kindness, cooperation, mindful breathing. You would say,  ""Oh, they're just preschoolers."" Look after eight weeks, the pro-social behavior, that's the blue line. And then comes the ultimate scientific test, the stickers test. Before, you determine for each child who is their best friend in the class, their least favorite child, an unknown child, and the sick child, and they have to give stickers away. So before the intervention, they give most of it to their best friend. Four, five years old,  20 minutes three times a week. After the intervention, no more discrimination: the same amount of stickers to their  best friend and the least favorite child. That's something we should do in all the schools in the world.Now where do we go from there?(Applause)When the Dalai Lama heard that, he told Richard Davidson, ""You go to 10 schools, 100 schools, the U.N., the whole world.""So now where do we go from there? Individual change is possible. Now do we have to wait for an altruistic  gene to be in the human race? That will take 50,000 years, too much for the environment. Fortunately, there is the evolution of culture. Cultures, as specialists have shown, change faster than genes. That's the good news. Look, attitude towards war has dramatically changed over the years. So now individual change and cultural  change mutually fashion each other, and yes, we can achieve a more altruistic society.So where do we go from there? Myself, I will go back to the East. Now we treat 100,000 patients a year in our projects. We have 25,000 kids in school, four percent overhead. Some people say, ""Well, your stuff works in practice, but does it work in theory?"" There's always positive deviance. So I will also go back to my hermitage to find the inner resources to better serve others.But on the more global level, what can we do? We need three things. Enhancing cooperation: Cooperative learning in the school instead of competitive learning, Unconditional cooperation within corporations — there can be some competition between corporations, but not within. We need sustainable harmony. I love this term. Not sustainable growth anymore. Sustainable harmony means now we will reduce inequality. In the future, we do more with less, and we continue to grow qualitatively, not quantitatively. We need caring economics. The Homo economicus cannot deal with poverty in the midst of plenty, cannot deal with the problem of the common goods of the atmosphere, of the oceans. We need a caring economics. If you say economics should be compassionate, they say, ""That's not our job."" But if you say they don't care, that looks bad. We need local commitment, global responsibility. We need to extend altruism to the other 1.6 million species. Sentient beings  are co-citizens in this world. and we need to dare altruism.So, long live the altruistic revolution. Viva la revolución de altruismo.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_how_to_let_altruism_be_your_guide
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"My students and I work on very tiny robots. Now, you can think of these as robotic versions of something that you're all very familiar with: an ant. We all know that ants and other insects at this size scale can do some pretty incredible things. We've all seen a group of ants, or some version of that, carting off your potato chip at a picnic, for example.But what are the real challenges of engineering these ants? Well, first of all, how do we get the capabilities of an ant in a robot at the same size scale? Well, first we need to figure out how to make them move when they're so small. We need mechanisms like legs and efficient motors in order to support that locomotion, and we need the sensors, power and control in order to pull everything together in a semi-intelligent ant robot. And finally, to make these things really functional, we want a lot of them working together in order to do bigger things.So I'll start with mobility. Insects move around amazingly well. This video is from UC Berkeley. It shows a cockroach moving over incredibly rough terrain without tipping over, and it's able to do this because its legs are a combination of rigid materials, which is what we traditionally use to make robots, and soft materials. Jumping is another really interesting way to get around when you're very small. So these insects store energy in a spring and release that really quickly to get the high power they need to jump out of water, for example.So one of the big contributions from my lab has been to combine rigid and soft materials in very, very small mechanisms. So this jumping mechanism is about four millimeters on a side, so really tiny. The hard material here is silicon, and the soft material is silicone rubber. And the basic idea is that we're going to compress this, store energy in the springs, and then release it to jump. So there's no motors on board this right now, no power. This is actuated with a method that we call in my lab ""graduate student with tweezers."" (Laughter) So what you'll see in the next video is this guy doing amazingly well for its jumps. So this is Aaron, the graduate student in question, with the tweezers, and what you see is this  four-millimeter-sized mechanism jumping almost 40 centimeters high. That's almost 100 times its own length. And it survives, bounces on the table, it's incredibly robust, and of course survives quite well until we lose it because it's very tiny.Ultimately, though, we want to add motors to this too, and we have students in the lab working on millimeter-sized motors to eventually integrate onto small, autonomous robots. But in order to look at mobility and locomotion at this size scale to start, we're cheating and using magnets. So this shows what would eventually be part of a micro-robot leg, and you can see the silicone rubber joints and there's an embedded magnet that's being moved around by an external magnetic field.So this leads to the robot that I showed you earlier. The really interesting thing that this robot can help us figure out is how insects move at this scale. We have a really good model for how everything from a cockroach up to an elephant moves. We all move in this  kind of bouncy way when we run. But when I'm really small,  the forces between my feet and the ground are going to affect my locomotion a lot more than my mass, which is what causes that bouncy motion. So this guy doesn't work quite yet, but we do have slightly larger versions that do run around. So this is about a centimeter cubed, a centimeter on a side, so very tiny, and we've gotten this to run about 10 body lengths per second, so 10 centimeters per second. It's pretty quick for a little, small guy, and that's really only limited  by our test setup. But this gives you some idea of how it works right now. We can also make 3D-printed versions  of this that can climb over obstacles, a lot like the cockroach that you saw earlier.But ultimately we want to add everything onboard the robot. We want sensing, power, control, actuation all together, and not everything needs to be bio-inspired. So this robot's about the size of a Tic Tac. And in this case, instead of magnets or muscles to move this around, we use rockets. So this is a micro-fabricated energetic material, and we can create tiny pixels of this, and we can put one of these pixels on the belly of this robot, and this robot, then, is going to jump when it senses an increase in light.So the next video is one of my favorites. So you have this 300-milligram robot jumping about eight centimeters in the air. It's only four by four by seven millimeters in size. And you'll see a big flash at the beginning when the energetic is set off, and the robot tumbling through the air. So there was that big flash, and you can see the robot jumping up through the air. So there's no tethers on this, no wires connecting to this. Everything is onboard, and it jumped in response to the student just flicking on a desk lamp next to it.So I think you can imagine all the cool things that we could do with robots that can run and crawl and jump and roll at this size scale. Imagine the rubble that you get after  a natural disaster like an earthquake. Imagine these small robots running through that rubble to look for survivors. Or imagine a lot of small robots running around a bridge in order to inspect it and make sure it's safe so you don't get collapses like this, which happened outside of  Minneapolis in 2007. Or just imagine what you could do if you had robots that could swim through your blood. Right? ""Fantastic Voyage,"" Isaac Asimov. Or they could operate without having to cut you open in the first place. Or we could radically change the way we build things if we have our tiny robots work the same way that termites do, and they build these incredible eight-meter-high mounds, effectively well ventilated apartment buildings for other termites in Africa and Australia.So I think I've given you some of the possibilities of what we can do with these small robots. And we've made some advances so far, but there's still a long way to go, and hopefully some of you can contribute to that destination.Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_bergbreiter_why_i_make_robots_the_size_of_a_grain_of_rice
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"It is very fashionable and proper  to speak about food in all its forms, all its colors,  aromas and tastes. But after the food goes through  the digestive system, when it is thrown out as crap, it is no longer fashionable to speak about it. It is rather revolting.I'm a guy who has graduated  from bullshit to full-shit. (Laughter) My organization, Gram Vikas, which means ""village development organization,"" was working in the area  of renewable energy. On the most part, we were  producing biogas, biogas for rural kitchens. We produce biogas in India  by using animal manure, which usually, in India,  is called cow dung. But as the gender-sensitive  person that I am, I would like to call it bullshit. But realizing later on how important were sanitation and the disposal of crap in a proper way, we went into the arena of sanitation. Eighty percent of all diseases  in India and most developing countries are because of poor quality water. And when we look at the reason  for poor quality water, you find that it is our abysmal attitude  to the disposal of human waste.Human waste, in its rawest form, finds its way back to drinking water, bathing water, washing water, irrigation water, whatever water you see. And this is the cause for 80 percent  of the diseases in rural areas. In India, it is unfortunately only the women who carry water. So for all domestic needs, women have to carry water. So that is a pitiable state of affairs.Open defecation is rampant. Seventy percent of India defecates in the open. They sit there out in the open, with the wind on their sails, hiding their faces, exposing their bases, and sitting there in pristine glory — 70 percent of India. And if you look at the world total, 60 percent of all the crap that is thrown into the open is by Indians. A fantastic distinction. I don't know if we Indians can be proud of such a distinction. (Laughter)So we, together with a lot of villages, we began to talk about how to really  address this situation of sanitation. And we came together and formed  a project called MANTRA. MANTRA stands for Movement and Action Network for Transformation of Rural Areas. So we are speaking about transformation, transformation in rural areas. Villages that agree  to implement this project, they organize a legal society where the general body  consists of all members who elect a group of men and women who implement the project and, later on, who look after the operation and maintenance. They decide to build a toilet  and a shower room. And from a protected water source, water will be brought to an elevated water reservoir and piped to all households through three taps: one in the toilet, one in the shower,  one in the kitchen, 24 hours a day. The pity is that our cities, like New Delhi and Bombay, do not have a 24-hour water supply. But in these villages, we want to have it.There is a distinct difference  in the quality. Well in India, we have a theory, which is very much accepted by the government bureaucracy and all those who matter, that poor people deserve poor solutions and absolutely poor people deserve pathetic solutions. This, combined with  a Nobel Prize-worthy theory that the cheapest is the most economic, is the heady cocktail that the poor are forced to drink. We are fighting against this. We feel that the poor have been humiliated for centuries. And even in sanitation, they should not be humiliated. Sanitation is more about dignity than about human disposal of waste. And so you build these toilets  and very often, we have to hear that the toilets are better than their houses. And you can see that in front are  the attached houses and the others are the toilets.So these people, without a single exception of a family in a village, decide to build a toilet, a bathing room. And for that, they come together, collect all the local materials — local materials like rubble,  sand, aggregates, usually a government subsidy is available to meet at least part of the cost  of external materials like cement, steel, toilet commode. And they build a toilet  and a bathing room. Also, all the unskilled laborers, that is  daily wage earners, mostly landless, are given an opportunity to be  trained as masons and plumbers. So while these people are being trained,  others are collecting the materials. And when both are ready, they build a toilet, a shower room, and of course also a water tower,  an elevated water reservoir. We use a system of two leach pits  to treat the waste. From the toilet, the muck comes into the first leach pit. And when it is full, it is blocked  and it can go to the next. But we discovered that if you plant banana trees, papaya trees on the periphery of these leach pits, they grow very well because they suck up all the nutrients and you get very tasty bananas, papayas. If any of you come to my place, I would be happy to share these bananas and papayas with you. So there you can see  the completed toilets, the water towers.This is in a village where  most of the people are even illiterate. It is always a 24-hour water supply because water gets polluted very often when you store it — a child dips his or her hand into it, something falls into it. So no water is stored. It's always on tap. This is how an elevated  water reservoir is constructed. And that is the end product. Because it has to go high, and there is some space available, two or three rooms are made under the water tower, which are used by the village for  different committee meetings.We have had clear evidence of the great impact of this program. Before we started, there were, as usual, more than 80 percent of people suffering from waterborne diseases. But after this, we have empirical evidence that 82 percent, on average, among all these villages — 1,200 villages have completed it — waterborne diseases  have come down 82 percent. (Applause) Women usually used to spend,  especially in the summer months, about six to seven hours  a day carrying water. And when they went to carry water, because, as I said earlier, it's only women who carry water, they used to take their little children, girl children, also to carry water, or else to be back at home to look after the siblings. So there were less than nine percent of girl children attending school, even if there was a school. And boys, about 30 percent. But girls, it has gone to about 90 percent and boys, almost to 100 percent. (Applause) The most vulnerable section in a village are the landless laborers who are the daily wage-earners. Because they have gone  through this training to be masons and plumbers and bar benders, now their ability to earn has  increased 300 to 400 percent.So this is a democracy in action because there is a general body,  a governing board, the committee. People are questioning,  people are governing themselves, people are learning to manage their own affairs, they are taking their own futures into their hands. And that is democracy at the grassroots level in action. More than 1,200 villages  have so far done this. It benefits over 400,000 people and it's still going on. And I hope it continues to move ahead.For India and such developing countries, armies and armaments, software companies and spaceships may not be as important as taps and toilets.Thank you. Thank you very much.(Applause) Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_madiath_better_toilets_better_life
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"When I was young, I prided myself as a nonconformist in the conservative U.S. state I live in, Kansas. I didn't follow along with the crowd. I wasn't afraid to try weird clothing trends or hairstyles. I was outspoken and extremely social. Even these pictures and postcards  of my London semester abroad 16 years ago show that I obviously didn't care if I was perceived as weird or different. (Laughter)But that same year  I was in London, 16 years ago, I realized something about myself that actually was somewhat unique, and that changed everything. I became the opposite of who I thought I once was. I stayed in my room instead of socializing. I stopped engaging in clubs and leadership activities. I didn't want to stand out in the crowd anymore. I told myself it was because I was growing up and maturing, not that I was suddenly looking for acceptance. I had always assumed I was immune to needing acceptance. After all, I was a bit unconventional. But I realize now that the moment I realized something was different about me was the exact same moment that I began conforming and hiding.Hiding is a progressive habit, and once you start hiding, it becomes harder and harder to step forward and speak out. In fact, even now, when I was talking to people about what this talk was about, I made up a cover story and I even hid the truth about my TED Talk. So it is fitting and scary that I have returned  to this city 16 years later and I have chosen this stage to finally stop hiding. What have I been hiding for 16 years? I am a lesbian.(Applause)Thank you.I've struggled to say those words, because I didn't want to be defined by them. Every time I would think about coming out in the past, I would think to myself, but I just want to be known as Morgana, uniquely Morgana, but not ""my lesbian friend Morgana,"" or ""my gay coworker Morgana."" Just Morgana.For those of you from large metropolitan areas, this may not seem like a big deal to you. It may seem strange  that I have suppressed the truth and hidden this for so long. But I was paralyzed by my fear of not being accepted. And I'm not alone, of course. A 2013 Deloitte study found that a surprisingly large number of people hide aspects of their identity. Of all the employees they surveyed, 61 percent reported changing an aspect of their behavior or their appearance in order to fit in at work. Of all the gay, lesbian and bisexual employees, 83 percent admitted to changing some aspects of themselves so they would not  appear at work ""too gay."" The study found that even in companies with diversity policies and inclusion programs, employees struggle to be themselves at work because they believe  conformity is critical to their long-term career advancement. And while I was surprised that so many people just like me waste so much energy trying to hide themselves, I was scared when I discovered that my silence has life-or-death consequences and long-term social repercussions.Twelve years: the length by which  life expectancy is shortened for gay, lesbian and bisexual people in highly anti-gay communities compared to accepting communities. Twelve years reduced life expectancy. When I read that in The Advocate  magazine this year, I realized I could no longer afford to keep silent. The effects of personal stress and social stigmas are a deadly combination. The study found that gays in anti-gay communities had higher rates of heart disease, violence and suicide. What I once thought was simply a personal matter I realized had a ripple effect that went into the workplace and out into the community for every story just like mine. My choice to hide and not share who I really am may have inadvertently contributed to this exact same environment and atmosphere of discrimination.I'd always told myself there's no reason to share that I was gay, but the idea that my silence has social consequences was really driven home this year when I missed an opportunity to change the atmosphere of discrimination in my own home state of Kansas.In February, the Kansas House of  Representatives brought up a bill for vote that would have essentially allowed businesses to use religious freedom as a reason to deny gays services. A former coworker and friend of mine has a father who serves in the Kansas House of Representatives. He voted in favor of the bill, in favor of a law that would allow  businesses to not serve me.How does my friend feel about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning people? How does her father feel? I don't know, because I was never honest  with them about who I am. And that shakes me to the core. What if I had told her my story years ago? Could she have told  her father my experience? Could I have ultimately helped change his vote? I will never know, and that made me realize I had done nothing to try to make a difference.How ironic that I work in human resources, a profession that works to welcome, connect and encourage the development of employees, a profession that advocates that the diversity of society should be reflected in the workplace, and yet I have done nothing to advocate for diversity. When I came to this company one year ago, I thought to myself, this company  has anti-discrimination policies that protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Their commitment to diversity is evident through their global inclusion programs. When I walk through the doors of this company, I will finally come out. But I didn't. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, I did nothing.(Applause)When I was looking through my London journal and scrapbook from my London semester abroad 16 years ago, I came across this modified quote from Toni Morrison's book, ""Paradise."" ""There are more scary things inside than outside."" And then I wrote a note to myself at the bottom: ""Remember this."" I'm sure I was trying to encourage myself to get out and explore London, but the message I missed was the need  to start exploring and embracing myself. What I didn't realize until all these years later is that the biggest obstacles I will ever have to overcome are my own fears and insecurities. I believe that by facing my fears inside, I will be able to change reality outside. I made a choice today to reveal a part of myself that I have hidden for too long. I hope that this means I will never hide again, and I hope that by coming out today, I can do something to change the data and also to help others who feel different be more themselves and more fulfilled in both their professional and personal lives. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/morgana_bailey_the_danger_of_hiding_who_you_are
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"On June 12, 2014, precisely at 3:33 in a balmy winter afternoon in São Paulo, Brazil, a typical South American winter afternoon, this kid, this young man  that you see celebrating here like he had scored a goal, Juliano Pinto, 29 years old, accomplished a magnificent deed. Despite being paralyzed and not having any sensation from mid-chest to the tip of his toes as the result of a car crash six years ago that killed his brother and produced a complete spinal cord lesion that left Juliano in a wheelchair, Juliano rose to the occasion, and on this day did something that pretty much everybody that saw him  in the six years deemed impossible. Juliano Pinto delivered the opening kick of the 2014 Brazilian  World Soccer Cup here just by thinking. He could not move his body, but he could imagine the movements needed to kick a ball. He was an athlete before the lesion. He's a para-athlete right now. He's going to be in the Paralympic Games, I hope, in a couple years. But what the spinal cord lesion  did not rob from Juliano was his ability to dream. And dream he did that afternoon, for a stadium of about 75,000 people and an audience of close to a billion watching on TV.And that kick crowned, basically, 30 years of basic research studying how the brain, how this amazing universe that we have between our ears that is only comparable to universe that we have above our head because it has about 100 billion elements talking to each other through electrical brainstorms, what Juliano accomplished took 30 years to imagine in laboratories and about 15 years to plan.When John Chapin and I, 15 years ago, proposed in a paper that we would build something that we called a brain-machine interface, meaning connecting a brain to devices so that animals and humans could just move these devices, no matter how far they are from their own bodies, just by imagining what they want to do, our colleagues told us that we actually needed professional help, of the psychiatry variety. And despite that, a Scot and a Brazilian persevered, because that's how we were raised in our respective countries, and for 12, 15 years, we made demonstration after demonstration suggesting that this was possible.And a brain-machine interface is not rocket science, it's just brain research. It's nothing but using sensors to read the electrical brainstorms that a brain is producing to generate the motor commands that have to be downloaded to the spinal cord, so we projected sensors that can read hundreds and now thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating to actually make us move into space. And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command. By sensorizing these devices with lots of different types of sensors, as you are going to see in a moment, we actually sent messages back to the brain to confirm that that voluntary motor will was being enacted, no matter where — next to the subject, next door, or across the planet. And as this message gave feedback back to the brain, the brain realized its goal: to make us move. So this is just one experiment that we published a few years ago, where a monkey, without moving its body, learned to control the movements of an avatar arm, a virtual arm that doesn't exist. What you're listening to is the sound of the brain of this monkey as it explores three different visually identical spheres in virtual space. And to get a reward, a drop of orange juice that monkeys love, this animal has to detect, select one of these objects by touching, not by seeing it, by touching it, because every time this virtual hand touches one of the objects, an electrical pulse goes back to the brain of the animal describing the fine texture of the surface of this object, so the animal can judge what is  the correct object that he has to grab, and if he does that, he gets a reward without moving a muscle. The perfect Brazilian lunch: not moving a muscle and getting your orange juice.So as we saw this happening, we actually came and proposed the idea that we had published 15 years ago. We reenacted this paper. We got it out of the drawers, and we proposed that perhaps we could get a human being that is paralyzed to actually use the brain-machine interface to regain mobility. The idea was that if you suffered — and that can happen to any one of us. Let me tell you, it's very sudden. It's a millisecond of a collision, a car accident that transforms your life completely. If you have a complete lesion of the spinal cord, you cannot move because your brainstorms cannot reach your muscles. However, your brainstorms continue to be generated in your head. Paraplegic, quadriplegic patients dream about moving every night. They have that inside their head. The problem is how to get that code out of it and make the movement be created again.So what we proposed was, let's create a new body. Let's create a robotic vest. And that's exactly why Juliano could kick that ball just by thinking, because he was wearing the first brain-controlled robotic vest that can be used by paraplegic, quadriplegic patients to move and to regain feedback.That was the original idea, 15 years ago. What I'm going to show you is how 156 people from 25 countries all over the five continents of this beautiful Earth, dropped their lives, dropped their patents, dropped their dogs, wives, kids, school, jobs, and congregated to come to Brazil for 18 months to actually get this done. Because a couple years after Brazil was awarded the World Cup, we heard that the Brazilian government wanted to do something meaningful in the opening ceremony in the country that reinvented and perfected soccer until we met the Germans, of course. (Laughter) But that's a different talk, and a different neuroscientist needs to talk about that. But what Brazil wanted to do is to showcase a completely different country, a country that values science and technology, and can give a gift to millions, 25 million people around the world that cannot move any longer because of a spinal cord injury. Well, we went to the Brazilian government and to FIFA and proposed, well, let's have the kickoff of the 2014 World Cup be given by a Brazilian paraplegic using a brain-controlled exoskeleton that allows him to kick the ball and to feel the contact of the ball. They looked at us, thought that we were completely nuts, and said, ""Okay, let's try."" We had 18 months to do everything from zero, from scratch. We had no exoskeleton, we had no patients, we had nothing done. These people came all together and in 18 months, we got eight patients in a routine of training and basically built from nothing this guy, that we call Bra-Santos Dumont 1. The first brain-controlled exoskeleton to be built was named after the most famous Brazilian scientist ever, Alberto Santos Dumont, who, on October 19, 1901, created and flew himself the first controlled airship on air in Paris for a million people to see. Sorry, my American friends, I live in North Carolina, but it was two years before the Wright Brothers flew on the coast of North Carolina. (Applause) Flight control is Brazilian. (Laughter)So we went together with these guys and we basically put this exoskeleton together, 15 degrees of freedom, hydraulic machine that can be commanded by brain signals recorded by a non-invasive technology called electroencephalography that can basically allow the patient to imagine the movements and send his commands to the controls, the motors, and get it done. This exoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, one of my greatest friends, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt. It is a smart shirt with micro-vibrating elements that basically delivers the feedback and fools the patient's brain by creating a sensation that it is not a machine that is carrying him, but it is he who is walking again.So we got this going, and what you'll see here is the first time one of our patients, Bruno, actually walked. And he takes a few seconds because we are setting everything, and you are going to see a blue light cutting in front of the helmet because Bruno is going to imagine the movement that needs to be performed, the computer is going to analyze it, Bruno is going to certify it, and when it is certified, the device starts moving under the command of Bruno's brain. And he just got it right, and now he starts walking. After nine years without being able to move, he is walking by himself. And more than that — (Applause) — more than just walking, he is feeling the ground, and if the speed of the exo goes up, he tells us that he is walking again on the sand of Santos, the beach resort where he used to go before he had the accident. That's why the brain is creating a new sensation in Bruno's head.So he walks, and at the end of the walk — I am running out of time already — he says, ""You know, guys, I need to borrow this thing from you when I get married, because I wanted to walk to the priest and see my bride and actually be there by myself. Of course, he will have it whenever he wants.And this is what we wanted to show during the World Cup, and couldn't, because for some mysterious reason, FIFA cut its broadcast in half. What you are going to see very quickly is Juliano Pinto in the exo doing the kick a few minutes before we went to the pitch and did the real thing in front of the entire crowd, and the lights you are going to see just describe the operation. Basically, the blue lights pulsating indicate that the exo is ready to go. It can receive thoughts and it can deliver feedback, and when Juliano makes the decision to kick the ball, you are going to see two streams of green and yellow light coming from the helmet and going to the legs, representing the mental commands that were taken by the exo to actually make that happen. And in basically 13 seconds, Juliano actually did. You can see the commands. He gets ready,  the ball is set, and he kicks. And the most amazing thing is, 10 seconds after he did that, and looked at us on the pitch, he told us, celebrating as you saw, ""I felt the ball."" And that's priceless. (Applause)So where is this going to go? I have two minutes to tell you that it's going to the limits of your imagination. Brain-actuating technology is here. This is the latest: We just published this a year ago, the first brain-to-brain interface that allows two animals to exchange mental messages so that one animal that sees something coming from the environment can send a mental SMS, a torpedo, a neurophysiological torpedo, to the second animal, and the second animal performs the act that he needed to perform without ever knowing what the environment was sending as a message, because the message came from the first animal's brain.So this is the first demo. I'm going to be very quick because I want to show you the latest. But what you see here is the first rat getting informed by a light that is going to show up on the left of the cage that he has to press the left cage to basically get a reward. He goes there and does it. And the same time, he is sending a mental message to the second rat that didn't see any light, and the second rat, in 70 percent of the times is going to press the left lever and get a reward without ever experiencing the light in the retina.Well, we took this to a little higher limit by getting monkeys to collaborate  mentally in a brain net, basically to donate their brain activity and combine them to move the virtual arm that I showed you before, and what you see here is the first time the two monkeys combine their brains, synchronize their brains perfectly to get this virtual arm to move. One monkey is controlling the x dimension, the other monkey is controlling the y dimension. But it gets a little more interesting when you get three monkeys in there and you ask one monkey to control x and y, the other monkey to control y and z, and the third one to control x and z, and you make them all play the game together, moving the arm in 3D into a target to get the famous Brazilian orange juice. And they actually do. The black dot is the average of all these brains working in parallel, in real time. That is the definition of a biological computer, interacting by brain activity and achieving a motor goal.Where is this going? We have no idea. We're just scientists. (Laughter) We are paid to be children, to basically go to the edge and discover what is out there. But one thing I know: One day, in a few decades, when our grandchildren surf the Net just by thinking, or a mother donates her eyesight to an autistic kid who cannot see, or somebody speaks because of a brain-to-brain bypass, some of you will remember that it all started on a winter afternoon in a Brazilian soccer field with an impossible kick.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.Bruno Giussani: Miguel, thank you for sticking to your time. I actually would have given you a couple more minutes, because there are a couple of points we want to develop, and, of course, clearly it seems that we need connected  brains to figure out where this is going. So let's connect all this together. So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the monkeys is actually getting a signal and the other monkey is reacting to that signal just because the first one is receiving it and transmitting the neurological impulse.Miguel Nicolelis:  No, it's a little different. No monkey knows of the existence of the other two monkeys. They are getting a visual feedback in 2D, but the task they have to accomplish is 3D. They have to move an arm in three dimensions. But each monkey is only getting the two dimensions on the video screen that the monkey controls. And to get that thing done, you need at least two monkeys to synchronize their brains, but the ideal is three. So what we found out is that when one monkey starts slacking down, the other two monkeys enhance their performance to get the guy to come back, so this adjusts dynamically, but the global synchrony remains the same. Now, if you flip without telling the monkey the dimensions that each brain has to control, like this guy is controlling x and y, but he should be controlling now y and z, instantaneously, that animal's brain forgets about the old dimensions and it starts concentrating on the new dimensions. So what I need to say is that no Turing machine, no computer can predict what a brain net will do. So we will absorb technology as part of us. Technology will never absorb us. It's simply impossible.BG: How many times have you tested this? And how many times have you succeeded versus failed?MN: Oh, tens of times. With the three monkeys? Oh, several times. I wouldn't be able to talk about this here unless I had done it a few times. And I forgot to mention, because of time, that just three weeks ago, a European group just demonstrated the first man-to-man brain-to-brain connection. BG: And how does that play? MN: There was one bit of information — big ideas start in a humble way — but basically the brain activity of one subject was transmitted to a second object, all non-invasive technology. So the first subject got a message, like our rats, a visual message, and transmitted it to the second subject. The second subject received a magnetic pulse in the visual cortex, or a different pulse, two different pulses. In one pulse, the subject saw something. On the other pulse, he saw something different. And he was able to verbally indicate what was the message the first subject was sending through the Internet across continents.Moderator: Wow. Okay, that's where we are going. That's the next TED Talk at the next conference. Miguel Nicolelis, thank you. MN: Thank you, Bruno. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/miguel_nicolelis_brain_to_brain_communication_has_arrived_how_we_did_it
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"I want to speak about  a forgotten conflict. It's a conflict that rarely hits the headlines. It happens right here, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Now, most people outside of Africa don't know much about the war in Congo, so let me give you a couple of key facts. The Congolese conflict is the deadliest  conflict since World War II. It has caused almost four million deaths. It has destabilized most of Central Africa for the past 18 years. It is the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world.That's why I first went to Congo in 2001. I was a young humanitarian aid worker, and I met this woman who was my age. She was called Isabelle. Local militias had attacked Isabelle's village. They had killed many men, raped many women. They had looted everything. And then they wanted to take Isabelle, but her husband stepped in, and he said, ""No, please don't take Isabelle. Take me instead."" So he had gone to the forest with the militias, and Isabelle had never seen him again.Well, it's because of people like Isabelle and her husband that I have devoted my career to studying this war that we know so little about.Although there is one story about Congo that you may have heard. It's a story about minerals and rape. Policy statements and media reports both usually focus on a primary cause of violence in Congo — the illegal exploitation and trafficking of natural resources — and on a main consequence — sexual abuse of women and girls as a weapon of war.So, not that these two issues aren't important and tragic. They are. But today I want to tell you  a different story. I want to tell you a story that emphasizes a core cause of the ongoing conflict. Violence in Congo is in large part driven by local bottom-up conflicts that international peace efforts have failed to help address.The story starts from the fact that not only is Congo notable for being the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis, but it is also home to some of the largest international peacebuilding efforts in the world. Congo hosts the largest and most expensive United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. It was also the site of the first European-led peacekeeping mission, and for its first cases ever, the International Criminal Court chose to prosecute Congolese warlords. In 2006, when Congo held the first  free national elections in its history, many observers thought that an end to  violence in the region had finally come. The international community lauded the  successful organization of these elections as finally an example of successful international intervention in a failed state.But the eastern provinces have continued to face massive population displacements and horrific human rights violations. Shortly before I went back there last summer, there was a horrible massacre in the province of South Kivu. Thirty-three people were killed. They were mostly women and children, and many of them were hacked to death. During the past eight years, fighting in the eastern provinces has regularly reignited full-scale civil and international war. So basically, every time we feel that we are on the brink of peace, the conflict explodes again.Why? Why have the massive international efforts failed to help Congo  achieve lasting peace and security? Well, my answer to this question revolves around two central observations. First, one of the main reasons for the continuation of violence in Congo is fundamentally local — and when I say local, I really mean at the level of the individual, the family, the clan, the municipality, the community, the district, sometimes the ethnic group. For instance, you remember the story of Isabelle that I told you. Well, the reason why militias had attacked Isabelle's village was because they wanted to take the land that the villagers needed to cultivate food and to survive.The second central observation is that international peace efforts have failed to help address local conflicts because of the presence of a dominant peacebuilding culture. So what I mean is that Western and African diplomats, United Nations peacekeepers, donors, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations that work with the resolution of conflict, they all share a specific way of seeing the world. And I was one of these people, and I shared this culture, so I know all too well how powerful it is. Throughout the world, and throughout conflict zones, this common culture shapes the intervener's understanding of the causes of violence as something that is primarily located in the national and international spheres. It shapes our understanding of the path toward peace as something again that requires top-down intervention to address national and international tensions. And it shapes our understanding of the roles of foreign actors as engaging in national and international peace processes. Even more importantly, this common culture enables international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level tensions that often jeopardize the macro-level settlements.So for instance, in Congo, because of how they are socialized and trained, United Nations officials, donors, diplomats, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations, they interpret continued fighting and massacres as a top-down problem. To them, the violence they see is the consequence of tensions between President Kabila and various national opponents, and tensions between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. In addition, these international  peacebuilders view local conflicts as simply the result of national and international tensions, insufficient state authority, and what they call the Congolese people's so-called inherent penchant for violence.The dominant culture also constructs intervention at the national and international levels as the only natural and legitimate task for United Nations staffers and diplomats. And it elevates the organization of general elections, which is now a sort of cure-all, as the most crucial state reconstruction mechanism over more effective state-building approaches. And that happens not only in Congo but also in many other conflict zones.But let's dig deeper, into the other main sources of violence. In Congo, continuing violence is motivated not only by the national and international causes but also by longstanding bottom-up agendas whose main instigators are villagers, traditional chiefs, community chiefs or ethnic leaders. Many conflicts revolve around political, social and economic stakes that are distinctively local. For instance, there is a lot of competition at the village or district level over who can be chief of village or chief of territory according to traditional law, and who can control the distribution of land and the exploitation of local mining sites. This competition often results in localized fighting, for instance in one village or territory, and quite frequently, it escalates into generalized fighting, so across a whole province, and even at times into neighboring countries.Take the conflict between Congolese  of Rwandan descent and the so-called indigenous  communities of the Kivus. This conflict started in the 1930s during Belgian colonization, when both communities competed over access to land and to local power. Then, in 1960, after Congolese independence, it escalated because each camp tried to align with national politicians, but still to advance their local agendas. And then, at the time of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, these local actors allied with Congolese and Rwandan armed groups, but still to advance their local agendas in the provinces of the Kivus. And since then, these local disputes over land and local power have fueled violence, and they have regularly jeopardized the national and international settlements.So we can wonder why in these circumstances the international peacebuilders have failed to help implement local peacebuilding programs. And the answer is that international interveners deem the resolution of grassroots conflict an unimportant, unfamiliar, and illegitimate task. The very idea of becoming involved at the local level clashes fundamentally with existing cultural norms, and it threatens key organizational interests. For instance, the very identity of the United Nations as this macro-level diplomatic organization would be upended if it were to refocus on local conflicts. And the result is that neither the internal resistance to the dominant ways of working nor the external shocks have managed to convince international actors that they should reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention. And so far, there have been only very few exceptions. There have been exceptions, but only very few exceptions, to this broad pattern.So to wrap up, the story I just told you is a story about how a dominant peacebuilding culture shapes the intervener's understanding of what the causes of violence are, how peace is made, and what interventions should accomplish. These understandings enable international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level foundations that are so necessary for sustainable peace. The resulting inattention to local conflicts leads to inadequate peacebuilding in the short term and potential war resumption in the long term. And what's fascinating is that this analysis helps us to better understand many cases of lasting conflict and international intervention failures, in Africa and elsewhere. Local conflicts fuel violence in most war and post-war environments, from Afghanistan to Sudan to Timor-Leste, and in the rare cases where there have been comprehensive, bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives, these attempts have been successful at making peace sustainable. One of the best examples is the contrast between the relatively peaceful situation in Somaliland, which benefited from sustained grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, and the violence prevalent in the rest of Somalia, where peacebuilding has been mostly top-down. And there are several other cases in which local, grassroots conflict resolution has made a crucial difference.So if we want international peacebuilding to work, in addition to any top-down intervention, conflicts must be resolved from the bottom up. And again, it's not that national and international tensions don't matter. They do. And it's not that national and international peacebuilding isn't necessary. It is. Instead, it is that both macro-level and micro-level peacebuilding are needed to make peace sustainable, and local nongovernmental organizations, local authorities and  civil society representatives should be the main actors in the bottom-up process.So of course, there are obstacles. Local actors often lack the funding and sometimes the logistical means and the technical capacity to implement effective, local peacebuilding programs. So international actors should expand their funding and support for local conflict resolution.As for Congo, what can be done? After two decades of conflict and the deaths of millions, it's clear that we need to change our approach. Based on my field research, I believe that international and Congolese actors should pay more attention to the resolution of land conflict and the promotion of inter-community reconciliation. So for instance, in the province of the Kivus, the Life and Peace Institute and its Congolese partners have set up inter-community forums to discuss the specifics of local conflicts over land, and these forums have found solutions to help manage the violence. That's the kind of program that is sorely needed throughout eastern Congo. It's with programs like this that we can help people like Isabelle and her husband.So these will not be magic wands, but because they take into account deeply rooted causes of the violence, they could definitely be game-changers.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/severine_autesserre_to_solve_mass_violence_look_to_locals
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"Hi. Today I'm going to share my personal journey with female genital mutilation, FGM. Feel free to cry, laugh, cross your legs, or do anything your body feels like doing. I'm not going to name the things your body does.I was born in Sierra Leone. Did anybody watch ""Blood Diamond""? If you have any thoughts — I don't have any diamonds  on me, by the way. If you have heard of Ebola, well, that's in Sierra Leone as well. I don't have Ebola. You're all safe. Don't rush to the door. Be seated. You're fine. I was checked before I got here.My grandfather had three wives. Don't ask me why a man needs more than one wife. Men, do you need more than one wife? I don't think so. There you go. He was looking for a heart attack, that's what I say. Oh yeah, he was.When I was three, war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991. I remember literally going to bed one night, everything was good. The next day, I woke up, bombs were dropping everywhere, and people were trying to kill me and my family. We escaped the war and ended up in Gambia, in West Africa. Ebola is there as well. Stay away from it. While we were there as refugees, we didn't know what was going to become of us. My mom applied for refugee status. She's a wonderful, smart woman, that one, and we were lucky. Australia said, we will take you in. Good job, Aussies.Before we were meant to travel, my mom came home one day, and said, ""We're going on  a little holiday, a little trip."" She put us in a car, and we drove for hours and ended up in a bush in a remote area in Gambia. In this bush, we found two huts. An old lady came towards us. She was ethnic-looking, very old. She had a chat with my mom, and went back. Then she came back and walked away from us into a second hut. I'm standing there thinking, ""This is very confusing. I don't know what's going on."" The next thing I knew, my mom took me into this hut. She took my clothes off, and then she pinned me down on the floor. I struggled and tried to get her off me, but I couldn't. Then the old lady came towards me with a rusty-looking knife, one of the sharp knives, orange-looking, has never seen water or sunlight before. I thought she was going to slaughter me, but she didn't. She slowly slid down my body and ended up where my vagina is. She took hold of what I now know to be my clitoris, she took that rusty knife, and started cutting away, inch by inch. I screamed, I cried, and asked my mom to get off me so this pain will stop, but all she did was say, ""Be quiet."" This old lady sawed away at my flesh for what felt like forever, and then when she was done, she threw that piece of flesh across the floor as if it was the most disgusting thing she's ever touched. They both got off me, and left me there bleeding, crying, and confused as to what just happened.We never talked about this again. Very soon, we found that we were coming to Australia, and this is when you had the Sydney Olympics at the time, and people said we were going to the end of the world, there was nowhere else to go after Australia. Yeah, that comforted us a bit. It took us three days to get here. We went to Senegal, then France, and then Singapore. We went to the bathroom to wash our hands. We spent 15 minutes opening the tap like this. Then somebody came in, slid their hand under and water came out, and we thought, is this what we're in for? Like, seriously.We got to Adelaide, small place, where literally they dumped us in Adelaide, that's what I would say. They dumped us there. We were very grateful. We settled and we liked it. We were like, ""We're home, we're here."" Then somebody took us to Rundle Mall. Adelaide has only one mall. It's this small place. And we saw a lot of Asian people. My mom said all of a sudden, panicking, ""You brought us to the wrong place. You must take us back to Australia."" Yeah. It had to be explained to her that  there were a lot of Asians in Australia and we were in the right place. So fine, it's all good.My mom then had this brilliant idea that I should go to a girls school because they were less racist. I don't know where she read  that publication. (Laughter) Never found evidence of it to this day. Six hundred white kids,  and I was the only black child there. No, I was the only person with a bit of a color on me. Let me say that. Chocolate color. There were no Asians, no indigenous. All we had was some tan girls, girls who felt the need to be under the sun. It wasn't the same as my chocolate, though. Not the same. Settling in Australia was quite hard, but it became harder when I started volunteering for an organization called Women's Health Statewide, and I joined their female genital mutilation program without any awareness of what this program was actually about, or that it related to me in any way. I spent months educating nurses and doctors about what female genital mutilation was and where it was practiced: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and now, Australia and London and America, because, as we all know, we live in a multicultural society, and people who come from those backgrounds come with their culture, and sometimes they have cultural practices that we may not agree with, but they continue to practice them.One day, I was looking at the chart of the different types of female genital mutilation, FGM, I will just say FGM for short. Type I is when they cut off the hood. Type II is when they cut off the whole clitoris and some of your labia majora, or your outer lips, and Type III is when they  cut off the whole clitoris and then they sew you up so you only have a little hole to pee and have your period. My eyes went onto Type II. Before all of this, I pretty much had amnesia. I was in so much shock  and traumatized by what had happened, I didn't remember any of it. Yes, I was aware something bad happened to me, but I had no recollection of what had happened. I knew I had a scar down there, but I thought everybody had a scar down there. This had happened to everybody else. But when I looked at Type II, it all came back to me. I remembered what was done to me. I remembered being in that hut with that old lady and my mom holding me down.Words cannot express the pain I felt, the confusion that I felt, because now I realized that  what was done to me was a terrible thing that in this society was called barbaric, it was called mutilation. My mother had said it was called circumcision, but here it was mutilation. I was thinking, I'm mutilated? I'm a mutilated person. Oh my God.And then the anger came. I was a black angry woman. (Laughter) Oh yeah. A little one, but angry nevertheless. I went home and said to my mom, ""You did something."" This is not the African thing to do, pointing at your mother, but hey, I was ready for any consequences. ""You did something to me."" She's like, ""What are you talking about, Khadija?"" She's used to me mouthing off. I'm like, ""Those years ago, You circumcised me. You cut away something that belonged to me."" She said, ""Yes, I did. I did it for your own good. It was in your best interest. Your grandmother did it to me, and I did it to you. It's made you a woman."" I'm like, ""How?"" She said, ""You're empowered, Khadija. Do you get itchy down there?"" I'm like, ""No, why would I get itchy down there?"" She said, ""Well, if you were not circumcised, you would get itchy down there. Women who are not circumcised get itchy all the time. Then they sleep around with everybody. You are not going to sleep around with anybody."" And I thought, her definition of empowerment was very strange. (Laughter) That was the end of our first conversation. I went back to school. These were the days when we had  Dolly and Girlfriend magazines. There was always the sealed section. Anybody remember those sealed sections? The naughty bits, you know? Oh yeah, I love those. (Laughter) Anyway, there was always an article about pleasure and relationships and, of course, sex. But it always assumed that you had a clitoris, though, and I thought, this doesn't fit me. This doesn't talk about people like me. I don't have a clitoris. I watched TV and those women would moan like, ""Oh! Oh!"" I was like, these people and their damned clitoris. (Laughter) What is a woman without a clitoris supposed to do with her life? That's what I want to know. I want to do that too — ""Oh! Oh!"" and all of that. Didn't happen.So I came home once again and said to my mom, ""Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, that I should be having orgasms, and that white men should figure out how to find the clitoris."" Apparently, white men have a problem finding the clitoris. (Laughter) Just saying, it wasn't me. It was Dolly that said that. And I thought to myself, I had an inner joke in my head that said, ""I will marry a white man. He won't have that problem with me."" (Laughter) So I said to my mom, ""Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, and do you know what you have taken away from me, what you have denied me? You have invaded me in the most sacred way. I want pleasure. I want to get horny, dammit, as well."" And she said to me, ""Who is Dolly and Girlfriend? Are they your new friends, Khadija?"" I was like, ""No, they're not. That's a magazine, mom, a magazine.""She didn't get it. We came from two different worlds. When she was growing up, not having a clitoris was the norm. It was celebrated. I was an African Australian girl. I lived in a society that was very clitoris-centric. It was all about the damn clitoris! And I didn't have one! That pissed me off.So once I went through this strange phase of anger and pain and confusion, I remember booking an appointment with my therapist. Yes, I'm an African  who has a therapist. There you go. And I said to her, ""I was 13. I was a child. I was settling in a new country, I was dealing with racism and discrimination, English is my third language, and then there it was."" I said to her, ""I feel like I'm not a woman because of what was done to me. I feel incomplete. Am I going to be asexual?"" Because from what I knew about FGM, the whole aim of it was to control the sexuality of women. It's so that we don't have any sexual desire. And I said, ""Am I asexual now? Will I just live the rest of my life not feeling like having sex, not enjoying sex?"" She couldn't answer my questions, so they went unanswered.When I started having my period around the age of 14, I realized I didn't have  normal periods because of FGM. My periods were heavy, they were long, and they were very painful. Then they told me I had fibroids. They're like these little balls sitting there. One was covering one of my ovaries.And there came then the big news. ""We don't think you can have children, Khadija."" And once again, I was an angry black woman.I went home and I said to my mom, ""Your act, your action, no matter what your may defense may be"" — because she thought she did it out love — ""what you did out of love  is harming me, and it's hurting me. What do you have to say for that?"" She said, ""I did what I had to do as a mother."" I'm still waiting for an apology, by the way.Then I got married. And once again — FGM is like the gift that keeps giving. You figure that out very soon. Sex was very painful. It hurt all the time. And of course I realized, they said, ""You can't have kids."" I thought, ""Wow, is this my existence? Is this what life is all about?"" I'm proud to tell you, five months ago, I was told I was pregnant. (Applause)I am the lucky girl. There are so many women out there who have gone through FGM who have infertility. I know a nine-year-old girl who has incontinence, constant infections, pain. It's that gift. It doesn't stop giving. It affects every area of your life, and this happened to me because I was born a girl in the wrong place. That's why it happened to me.I channel all that anger,  all that pain, into advocacy because I needed my pain to be worth something. So I'm the director of an organization called No FGM Australia. You heard me right. Why No FGM Australia? FGM is in Australia. Two days ago, I had to call Child Protective Services, because somewhere in Australia, there's a four-year old there's a four-year-old whose mom  is planning on performing FGM on her. That child is in kindy. I'll let that sink in: four years old. A couple of months ago, I met a lady who is married to a Malaysian man. Her husband came home one day and said he was going to take their daughters back to Malaysia to cut off their clitoris. And she said, ""Why?"" He said they were dirty. And she said, ""Well, you married me."" He said, ""Oh, this is my cultural belief."" They then went into a whole discussion where she said to him, ""Over my dead body will you do that to my daughters."" But imagine if this woman wasn't aware of what FGM was, if they never had that conversation? Her children would have been flown over to Malaysia and they would have come back changed for the rest of their lives. Do you know the millions of dollars it would take us to deal with an issue like that? [Three children per day] in Australia are at risk of having FGM performed on them. This is an Australian problem, people. It's not an African problem. It's not a Middle Eastern problem. It's not white, it's not black, it has no color, it's everybody's problem. FGM is child abuse. It's violence against women. It's saying that women don't have a right to sexual pleasure. It says we don't have a right to our bodies. Well, I say no to that, and you know what? Bullshit. That's what I have to say to that. (Applause)I am proud to say that I'm doing my part in ending FGM. What are you going to do? There may be a child in your classroom who is at risk of FGM. There may be a patient who comes to your hospital who is at risk of FGM. But this is the reality, that even in our beloved Australia, the most wonderful place in the world, children are being abused because of a culture. Culture should not be a defense for child abuse. I want ever single one of you to see FGM as an issue for you. Make it personal. It could be your daughter, your sister, your cousin.I can't fight FGM alone. I could try, but I can't. So my appeal to you is, please join me. Sign my petition on Change.org and type in Khadija, my name, and it'll come up, and sign it. The aim of that is to get support for FGM victims in Australia and to protect little girls growing up here to not have this evil done to them, because every child has a right to pleasure. Every child has a right to their bodies being left intact, and dammit, ever child has a right to a clitoris. So please join me in ending this act.My favorite quote is, ""All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men and women to do nothing."" Are you going to let this evil of female genital mutilation to prevail in Australia? I don't think so, so please join me in ensuring that it ends in my generation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/khadija_gbla_my_mother_s_strange_definition_of_empowerment
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"I'm a blogger, a filmmaker and a butcher, and I'll explain how these identities come together.It started four years ago, when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City. Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets. It was an FBI agent's wet dream. (Laughter) But being a part of this community, we knew how welcoming this space was. For years, I'd seen photos  of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith, much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience.Frustrated by this myopic view, my friend and I had this crazy idea: Let's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog. We called it ""30 Mosques in 30 Days,"" and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities, ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina. What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America. The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities, but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey. There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so.And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world, I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film. My codirector, Omar, and I were at  a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film. The movie is called ""These Birds Walk,"" and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family. We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord, but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film ""more relevant,"" essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols. Of course, we didn't listen to them, and instead, we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth. The agenda behind our cinematic  immersion was only empathy, an emotion that's largely  deficient from films that come from our region of the world.And as ""These Birds Walk"" played at film  festivals and theaters internationally, I finally had my feet planted at home in New York, and with all the extra time and still no real money, my wife tasked me to cook more for us. And whenever I'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat, something felt off.For those that don't know, halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines. Unfortunately, the majority of halal meat in America doesn't rise to the standard that my faith calls for. The more I learned about these unethical practices, the more violated I felt, particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy. So, with emotions running high, and absolutely no experience in butchery, some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district. (Laughter) We call it Honest Chops, and we're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic, humanely raised animals, and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families. There's really nothing like it in America. The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim. For many, it is their first time  interacting with Islam on such an intimate level.So all these disparate projects — (Laughter) — are the result of a restlessness. They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community, and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules. We must fight with an inventive approach. With the trust, with the access, with the love that only we can bring, we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image, in every cut of meat, because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal, not only will we fail, but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories. But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance. It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful. They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bassam_tariq_the_beauty_and_diversity_of_muslim_life
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"So recently, we heard a lot about how social media helps empower protest, and that's true, but after more than a decade of studying and participating in multiple social movements, I've come to realize that the way technology empowers social movements can also paradoxically help weaken them. This is not inevitable, but overcoming it requires diving deep into what makes success possible over the long term. And the lessons apply in multiple domains.Now, take Turkey's Gezi Park protests, July 2013, which I went back to study in the field. Twitter was key to its organizing. It was everywhere in the park — well, along with a lot of tear gas. It wasn't all high tech. But the people in Turkey had already gotten used to the power of Twitter because of an unfortunate incident about a year before when military jets had bombed and killed 34 Kurdish smugglers near the border region, and Turkish media completely censored this news. Editors sat in their newsrooms and waited for the government to tell them what to do. One frustrated journalist could not take this anymore. He purchased his own plane ticket, and went to the village where this had occurred. And he was confronted by this scene: a line of coffins coming down a hill, relatives wailing. He later he told me how overwhelmed he felt, and didn't know what to do, so he took out his phone, like any one of us might, and snapped that picture and tweeted it out. And voila, that picture went viral and broke the censorship and forced mass media to cover it.So when, a year later, Turkey's Gezi protests happened, it started as a protest about a park being razed, but became an anti-authoritarian protest. It wasn't surprising that media also censored it, but it got a little ridiculous at times. When things were so intense, when CNN International was broadcasting live from Istanbul, CNN Turkey instead was broadcasting a documentary on penguins. Now, I love penguin documentaries, but that wasn't the news of the day. An angry viewer put his two screens together and snapped that picture, and that one too went viral, and since then, people call Turkish media the penguin media. (Laughter)But this time, people knew what to do. They just took out their phones and looked for actual news. Better, they knew to go to the park and take pictures and participate and share it more on social media. Digital connectivity was used for everything from food to donations. Everything was organized partially with the help of these new technologies.And using Internet to mobilize and publicize protests actually goes back a long way. Remember the Zapatistas, the peasant uprising in the southern Chiapas region of Mexico led by the masked, pipe-smoking, charismatic Subcomandante Marcos? That was probably the first movement that got global attention thanks to the Internet. Or consider Seattle '99, when a multinational grassroots effort brought global attention to what was then an obscure organization, the World Trade Organization, by also utilizing these digital technologies to help them organize. And more recently, movement after movement has shaken country after country: the Arab uprisings from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt and more; indignados in Spain, Italy, Greece; the Gezi Park protests; Taiwan; Euromaidan in Ukraine; Hong Kong. And think of more recent initiatives, like the #BringBackOurGirls hashtags. Nowadays, a network of tweets can unleash a global awareness campaign. A Facebook page can become the hub of a massive mobilization. Amazing.But think of the moments I just mentioned. The achievements they were able to have, their outcomes, are not really proportional to the size and energy they inspired. The hopes they rightfully raised are not really matched by what they were able to have as a result in the end. And this raises a question: As digital technology makes things easier for movements, why haven't successful outcomes become more likely as well? In embracing digital platforms for activism and politics, are we overlooking some of the benefits of doing things the hard way? Now, I believe so. I believe that the rule of thumb is: Easier to mobilize does not always mean easier to achieve gains.Now, to be clear, technology does empower in multiple ways. It's very powerful. In Turkey, I watched four young college students organize a countrywide citizen journalism network called 140Journos that became the central hub for uncensored news in the country. In Egypt, I saw another four young people use digital connectivity to organize the supplies and logistics for 10 field hospitals, very large operations, during massive clashes near Tahrir Square in 2011. And I asked the founder of this effort, called Tahrir Supplies, how long it took him to go from when he had the idea to when he got started. ""Five minutes,"" he said. Five minutes. And he had no training or background in logistics. Or think of the Occupy movement which rocked the world in 2011. It started with a single email from a magazine, Adbusters, to 90,000 subscribers in its list. About two months after that first email, there were in the United States 600 ongoing occupations and protests. Less than one month after the first physical occupation in Zuccotti Park, a global protest was held in about 82 countries, 950 cities. It was one of the largest global protests ever organized.Now, compare that to what the Civil Rights Movement had to do in 1955 Alabama to protest the racially segregated bus system, which they wanted to boycott. They'd been preparing for many years and decided it was time to swing into action after Rosa Parks was arrested. But how do you get the word out — tomorrow we're going to start the boycott — when you don't have Facebook, texting, Twitter, none of that? So they had to mimeograph 52,000 leaflets by sneaking into a university duplicating room and working all night, secretly. They then used the 68 African-American organizations that criss-crossed the city to distribute those leaflets by hand. And the logistical tasks were daunting, because these were poor people. They had to get to work, boycott or no, so a massive carpool was organized, again by meeting. No texting, no Twitter, no Facebook. They had to meet almost all the time to keep this carpool going.Today, it would be so much easier. We could create a database, available rides and what rides you need, have the database coordinate, and use texting. We wouldn't have to meet all that much. But again, consider this: the Civil Rights Movement in the United States navigated a minefield of political dangers, faced repression and overcame, won major policy concessions, navigated and innovated through risks. In contrast, three years after Occupy sparked that global conversation about inequality, the policies that fueled it are still in place. Europe was also rocked by anti-austerity protests, but the continent didn't shift its direction. In embracing these technologies, are we overlooking some of the benefits of slow and sustained? To understand this, I went back to Turkey about a year after the Gezi protests and I interviewed a range of people, from activists to politicians, from both the ruling party and the opposition party and movements. I found that the Gezi protesters were despairing. They were frustrated, and they had achieved much less than what they had hoped for. This echoed what I'd been hearing around the world from many other protesters that I'm in touch with. And I've come to realize that part of the problem is that today's protests have become a bit like climbing Mt. Everest with the help of 60 Sherpas, and the Internet is our Sherpa. What we're doing is taking the fast routes and not replacing the benefits of the slower work. Because, you see, the kind of work that went into organizing all those daunting, tedious logistical tasks did not just take care of those tasks, they also created the kind of organization that could think together collectively and make hard decisions together, create consensus and innovate, and maybe even more crucially, keep going together through differences. So when you see this March on Washington in 1963, when you look at that picture, where this is the march where Martin Luther King gave his famous ""I have a dream"" speech, 1963, you don't just see a march and you don't just hear a powerful speech, you also see the painstaking, long-term work that can put on that march. And if you're in power, you realize you have to take the capacity signaled by that march, not just the march, but the capacity signaled by that march, seriously. In contrast, when you look at Occupy's global marches that were organized in two weeks, you see a lot of discontent, but you don't necessarily see teeth that can bite over the long term. And crucially, the Civil Rights Movement innovated tactically from boycotts to lunch counter sit-ins to pickets to marches to freedom rides. Today's movements scale up very quickly without the organizational base that can see them through the challenges. They feel a little like startups that got very big without knowing what to do next, and they rarely manage to shift tactically because they don't have the depth of capacity to weather such transitions.Now, I want to be clear: The magic is not in the mimeograph. It's in that capacity to work together, think together collectively, which can only be built over time with a lot of work. To understand all this, I interviewed a top official from the ruling party in Turkey, and I ask him, ""How do you do it?"" They too use digital technology extensively, so that's not it. So what's the secret? Well, he told me. He said the key is he never took sugar with his tea. I said, what has that got to do with anything? Well, he said, his party starts getting ready for the next election the day after the last one, and he spends all day every day meeting with voters in their homes, in their wedding parties, circumcision ceremonies, and then he meets with his colleagues to compare notes. With that many meetings every day, with tea offered at every one of them, which he could not refuse, because that would be rude, he could not take even one cube of sugar per cup of tea, because that would be many kilos of sugar, he can't even calculate how many kilos, and at that point I realized why he was speaking so fast. We had met in the afternoon, and he was already way over-caffeinated. But his party won two major elections within a year of the Gezi protests with comfortable margins. To be sure, governments have different resources to bring to the table. It's not the same game, but the differences are instructive. And like all such stories, this is not a story just of technology. It's what technology allows us to do converging with what we want to do. Today's social movements want to operate informally. They do not want institutional leadership. They want to stay out of politics because they fear corruption and cooptation. They have a point. Modern representative democracies are being strangled in many countries by powerful interests. But operating this way makes it hard for them to sustain over the long term and exert leverage over the system, which leads to frustrated protesters dropping out, and even more corrupt politics. And politics and democracy without an effective challenge hobbles, because the causes that have inspired the modern recent movements are crucial. Climate change is barreling towards us. Inequality is stifling human growth and potential and economies. Authoritarianism is choking many countries. We need movements to be more effective.Now, some people have argued that the problem is today's movements are not formed of people who take as many risks as before, and that is not true. From Gezi to Tahrir to elsewhere, I've seen people put their lives and livelihoods on the line. It's also not true, as Malcolm Gladwell claimed, that today's protesters form weaker virtual ties. No, they come to these protests, just like before, with their friends, existing networks, and sometimes they do make new friends for life. I still see the friends that I made in those Zapatista-convened global protests more than a decade ago, and the bonds between strangers are not worthless. When I got tear-gassed in Gezi, people I didn't know helped me and one another instead of running away. In Tahrir, I saw people, protesters, working really hard to keep each other safe and protected. And digital awareness-raising is great, because changing minds is the bedrock of changing politics. But movements today have to move beyond participation at great scale very fast and figure out how to think together collectively, develop strong policy proposals, create consensus, figure out the political steps and relate them to leverage, because all these good intentions and bravery and sacrifice by itself are not going to be enough.And there are many efforts. In New Zealand, a group of young people are developing a platform called Loomio for participatory decision making at scale. In Turkey, 140Journos are holding hack-a-thons so that they support communities as well as citizen journalism. In Argentina, an open-source platform called DemocracyOS is bringing participation to parliaments and political parties. These are all great, and we need more, but the answer won't just be better online decision-making, because to update democracy, we are going to need to innovate at every level, from the organizational to the political to the social. Because to succeed over the long term, sometimes you do need tea without sugar along with your Twitter. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_how_the_internet_has_made_social_change_easy_to_organize_hard_to_win
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"When I was invited to give this talk  a couple of months ago, we discussed a number  of titles with the organizers, and a lot of different items were  kicked around and were discussed. But nobody suggested this one, and the reason for that was two months ago, Ebola was escalating exponentially and spreading over wider geographic areas than we had ever seen, and the world was terrified,  concerned and alarmed by this disease, in a way we've not  seen in recent history.But today, I can stand here  and I can talk to you about beating Ebola because of people  whom you've never heard of, people like Peter Clement, a Liberian  doctor who's working in Lofa County, a place that many of you have  never heard of, probably, in Liberia. The reason that Lofa County  is so important is because about five months ago, when the epidemic was  just starting to escalate, Lofa County was right at the center,  the epicenter of this epidemic. At that time, MSF and the treatment center there, they were seeing dozens of patients  every single day, and these patients, these communities were becoming more and more terrified as time went by, with this disease  and what it was doing to their families, to their communities,  to their children, to their relatives. And so Peter Clement was charged with  driving that 12-hour-long rough road from Monrovia, the capital, up to Lofa County, to try and help bring control to the escalating epidemic there.And what Peter found when he arrived was the terror that I just mentioned to you. So he sat down with the local chiefs,  and he listened. And what he heard was heartbreaking. He heard about the devastation  and the desperation of people affected by this disease. He heard the heartbreaking stories about not just the damage that Ebola did to people, but what it did to families  and what it did to communities. And he listened to the local chiefs there and what they told him — They said, ""When our children are sick,  when our children are dying, we can't hold them at a time when  we want to be closest to them. When our relatives die, we can't take care of them as our tradition demands. We are not allowed to wash  the bodies to bury them the way our communities and  our rituals demand. And for this reason, they were deeply disturbed, deeply alarmed and the entire epidemic  was unraveling in front of them.People were turning on the healthcare  workers who had come, the heroes who had come to try  and help save the community, to help work with the community, and they were unable to access them. And what happened then was  Peter explained to the leaders. The leaders listened.  They turned the tables. And Peter explained what Ebola was. He explained what the disease was. He explained what it did to their communities. And he explained that Ebola threatened  everything that made us human. Ebola means you can't hold your children the way you would in this situation. You can't bury your dead  the way that you would. You have to trust these people  in these space suits to do that for you.And ladies and gentlemen, what  happened then was rather extraordinary: The community and the health workers,  Peter, they sat down together and they put together a new plan  for controlling Ebola in Lofa County. And the reason that this is such  an important story, ladies and gentlemen, is because today, this county, which is  right at the center of this epidemic you've been watching,  you've been seeing in the newspapers, you've been seeing on  the television screens, today Lofa County is nearly eight weeks without seeing a single case of Ebola. (Applause)Now, this doesn't mean that  the job is done, obviously. There's still a huge risk that there will be additional cases there. But what it does teach us  is that Ebola can be beaten. That's the key thing. Even on this scale, even with the rapid kind of growth that we saw in this environment here, we now know Ebola can be beaten. When communities come together  with health care workers, work together, that's when this disease can be stopped.But how did Ebola end up in Lofa County in the first place? Well, for that, we have to go back  12 months, to the start of this epidemic. And as many of you know,  this virus went undetected, it evaded detection for three  or four months when it began. That's because this is not  a disease of West Africa, it's a disease of Central Africa,  half a continent away. People hadn't seen the disease before; health workers hadn't seen  the disease before. They didn't know what  they were dealing with, and to make it  even more complicated, the virus itself was causing a symptom, a type of a presentation that wasn't classical of the disease. So people didn't even recognize  the disease, people who knew Ebola. For that reason it evaded detection  for some time,But contrary to public belief  sometimes these days, once the virus was detected,  there was a rapid surge in of support. MSF rapidly set up an Ebola treatment  center, as many of you know, in the area. The World Health Organization and the partners that it works with deployed eventually hundreds of people  over the next two months to be able to help track the virus. The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is by then, this virus, well known now as Ebola,  had spread too far. It had already outstripped what was  one of the largest responses that had been mounted so far to an Ebola outbreak.By the middle of the year, not just Guinea but now Sierra Leone and Liberia were also infected. As the virus was spreading geographically, the numbers were increasing and at this time, not only were  hundreds of people infected and dying of the disease, but as importantly, the front line responders, the people who had gone to try and help, the health care workers, the other  responders were also sick and dying by the dozens. The presidents of these countries  recognized the emergencies. They met right around that time,  they agreed on common action and they put together an emergency  joint operation center in Conakry to try and work together to finish this disease and get it stopped, to implement the strategies we talked about.But what happened then was something  we had never seen before with Ebola. What happened then was the virus,  or someone sick with the virus, boarded an airplane,  flew to another country, and for the first time, we saw in another distant country the virus pop up again. This time it was in Nigeria, in the teeming metropolis of Lagos, 21 million people. Now the virus was in that environment. And as you can anticipate,  there was international alarm, international concern on a scale that  we hadn't seen in recent years caused by a disease like this. The World Health Organization immediately  called together an expert panel, looked at the situation,  declared an international emergency. And in doing so, the expectation would be that there would be a huge outpouring of international assistance to help these countries which were in so much trouble and concern at that time.But what we saw was  something very different. There was some great response. A number of countries came to assist — many, many NGOs and others, as you know, but at the same time, the opposite  happened in many places. Alarm escalated, and very soon  these countries found themselves not receiving the support they needed, but increasingly isolated. What we saw was commercial airlines [stopped] flying into these countries and people who hadn't even been exposed to the virus were no longer allowed to travel. This caused not only problems, obviously,  for the countries themselves, but also for the response. Those organizations that were  trying to bring people in, to try and help them respond to the outbreak, they could not get  people on airplanes, they could not get them into the  countries to be able to respond. In that situation, ladies and gentleman, a virus like Ebola takes advantage.And what we saw then was something  also we hadn't seen before. Not only did this virus  continue in the places where they'd already become infected, but then it started to escalate and we saw the case numbers that you see here, something we'd never seen before on such a scale, an exponential increase of Ebola cases not just in these countries or the areas  already infected in these countries but also spreading further and  deeper into these countries. Ladies and gentleman, this was one of the most concerning international emergencies in public health we've ever seen.And what happened in these countries then, many of you saw, again, on the television, read about in the newspapers, we saw the health system start to collapse under the weight of this epidemic. We saw the schools begin to close,  markets no longer started, no longer functioned the way  that they should in these countries. We saw that misinformation and  misperceptions started to spread even faster through the communities, which became even more alarmed about the situation. They started to recoil from those people  that you saw in those space suits, as they call them,  who had come to help them. And then the situation deteriorated even further. The countries had to declare a state of emergency. Large populations needed to be quarantined in some areas, and then riots broke out. It was a very, very terrifying situation.Around the world, many people began to ask, can we ever stop Ebola  when it starts to spread like this? And they started to ask, how well  do we really know this virus? The reality is we don't know  Ebola extremely well. It's a relatively modern disease in terms of what we know about it. We've known the disease only for 40 years, since it first popped up in Central Africa in 1976. But despite that, we do know many things: We know that this virus probably survives in a type of a bat. We know that it probably enters  a human population when we come in contact with a wild animal that has been infected with the virus  and probably sickened by it. Then we know that the virus spreads from person to person through contaminated body fluids. And as you've all seen, we know the horrific disease that it then causes in humans, where we see this disease cause severe fevers, diarrhea, vomiting, and then unfortunately, in 70 percent of the cases or often more, death. This is a very dangerous, debilitating, and deadly disease.But despite the fact that we've not known this disease for a particularly long time, and we don't know everything about it, we do know how to stop this disease. There are four things that are critical to stopping Ebola. First and foremost, the communities  have got to understand this disease, they've got to understand  how it spreads and how to stop it.And then we've got to be able to have  systems that can find every single case, every contact of those cases, and begin to track the transmission chains so that you can stop transmission. We have to have treatment centers, specialized Ebola treatment centers, where the workers can be protected as they try to provide support to the people who are infected, so that they might survive the disease. And then for those who do die, we have to ensure there is a safe, but at the same time dignified, burial process, so that there is no spread  at that time as well.So we do know how to stop Ebola, and these strategies work, ladies and gentlemen. The virus was stopped in Nigeria  by these four strategies and the people implementing  them, obviously. It was stopped in Senegal, where it had spread, and also in the other countries that were affected by this virus,  in this outbreak. So there's no question that  these strategies actually work. The big question, ladies and gentlemen, was whether these strategies could work on this scale, in this situation, with so many countries affected with the kind of exponential  growth that you saw.That was the big question that we were  facing just two or three months ago. Today we know the answer to that question. And we know that answer  because of the extraordinary work of an incredible group of NGOs, of governments, of local leaders, of U.N. agencies and many humanitarian  and other organizations that came and joined the fight to try and stop Ebola in West Africa.But what had to be done there  was slightly different. These countries took those strategies  I just showed you; the community engagement, the case finding, contact tracing, etc., and they turned them on their head. There was so much disease, they approached it differently. What they decided to do was they would  first try and slow down this epidemic by rapidly building as many beds as possible in specialized treatment centers so that they could prevent the disease from spreading from those were infected. They would rapidly build out many, many burial teams so that they could safely deal with the dead, and with that, they would try  and slow this outbreak to see if it could actually then  be controlled using the classic approach of case finding and contact tracing. And when I went to West Africa about three months ago, when I was there what I saw was extraordinary. I saw presidents opening emergency operation centers themselves against Ebola so that they could personally coordinate  and oversee and champion this surge of international support  to try and stop this disease. We saw militaries from within  those countries and from far beyond coming in to help build  Ebola treatment centers that could be used to isolate  those who were sick. We saw the Red Cross movement working with its partner agencies on the ground there to help train the communities so that they could actually safely bury their dead in a dignified manner themselves. And we saw the U.N. agencies,  the World Food Program, build a tremendous air bridge that could get responders to every single corner of these countries rapidly to be able to implement the strategies that we just talked about.What we saw, ladies and gentlemen,  which was probably most impressive, was this incredible work by the governments, by the leaders in these countries, with the communities, to try to ensure people  understood this disease, understood the extraordinary things they  would have to do to try and stop Ebola. And as a result, ladies and gentlemen, we saw something that we did not know only two or three months earlier, whether or not it would be possible. What we saw was  what you see now in this graph, when we took stock on December 1. What we saw was we could  bend that curve, so to speak, change this exponential growth, and bring some hope back to the ability to control this outbreak. And for this reason, ladies and gentlemen, there's absolutely no question now that we can catch up with this outbreak  in West Africa and we can beat Ebola.The big question, though,  that many people are asking, even when they saw this curve, they said, ""Well, hang on a minute — that's great you can slow it down, but can you actually drive it down to zero?"" We already answered that question  back at the beginning of this talk, when I spoke about Lofa County in Liberia. We told you the story how Lofa County got to a situation where they have not seen Ebola for eight weeks. But there are similar stories from  the other countries as well. From Gueckedou in Guinea, the first area where the first case was actually diagnosed.We've seen very, very few cases in the last couple of months, and here in Kenema, in Sierra Leone,  another area in the epicenter, we have not seen the virus for more than a couple of weeks — way too early to declare  victory, obviously, but evidence, ladies and gentlemen, not only can the response  catch up to the disease, but this disease can be driven to zero.The challenge now, of course,  is doing this on the scale needed right across these three countries, and that is a huge challenge. Because when you've been at something for this long, on this scale, two other big threats  come in to join the virus. The first of those is complacency, the risk that as this  disease curve starts to bend, the media look elsewhere,  the world looks elsewhere. Complacency always a risk.And the other risk, of course, is when you've been working so hard for so long, and slept so few hours  over the past months, people are tired, people become fatigued, and these new risks  start to creep into the response. Ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you today I've just come back from West Africa. The people of these countries, the leaders of these countries, they are not complacent. They want to drive Ebola to zero  in their countries. And these people, yes, they're tired,  but they are not fatigued. They have an energy, they have a courage, they have the strength  to get this finished.What they need, ladies and gentlemen, at this point, is the unwavering support of the  international community, to stand with them, to bolster and bring even more support  at this time, to get the job finished. Because finishing Ebola right now  means turning the tables on this virus, and beginning to hunt it.Remember, this virus, this whole crisis,  rather, started with one case, and is going to finish with one case. But it will only finish if those countries have got enough epidemiologists, enough health workers, enough logisticians and enough other people working with them to be able to find every one  of those cases, track their contacts and make sure that this disease  stops once and for all.Ladies and gentleman, Ebola can be beaten. Now we need you to take this story out to tell it to the people who will listen and educate them  on what it means to beat Ebola, and more importantly, we need you to advocate with the people who can help us bring the resources we need to these countries, to beat this disease. There are a lot of people out there  who will survive and will thrive, in part because of what you do  to help us beat Ebola.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_aylward_humanity_vs_ebola_the_winning_strategies_in_a_terrifying_war
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"You've heard of your I.Q., your general intelligence, but what's your Psy-Q? How much do you know about what makes you tick, and how good are you at predicting other people's behavior or even your own? And how much of what you think you know about psychology is wrong? Let's find out by counting down the top 10 myths of psychology.You've probably heard it said that when it comes to their psychology, it's almost as if men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But how different are men and women really? To find out, let's start by looking at something on which men and women really do differ and plotting some psychological gender differences on the same scale. One thing men and women do really differ on is how far they can throw a ball. So if we look at the data for men here, we see what is called a normal distribution curve. A few men can throw a ball really far, and a few men not far at all, but most a kind of average distance. And women share the same distribution as well, but actually there's quite a big difference. In fact, the average man can throw a ball further than about 98 percent of all women. So now let's look at what some psychological gender differences look like on the same standardized scale. Any psychologist will tell you that men are better at spatial awareness than women — so things like map-reading,  for example — and it's true, but let's have a look at the size of this difference. It's tiny; the lines are so close together they almost overlap. In fact, the average woman is better than 33 percent of all men, and of course, if that was 50 percent, then the two genders would be exactly equal. It's worth bearing in mind that this difference and the next one I'll show you are pretty much the biggest psychological gender differences ever discovered in psychology. So here's the next one. Any psychologist will tell you that women are better with language and grammar than men. So here's performance on the standardized grammar test. There go the women. There go the men. Again, yes, women are better on average, but the lines are so close that 33 percent of men are better than the average woman, and again, if it was 50 percent, that would represent complete gender equality. So it's not really a case of Mars and Venus. It's more a case of, if anything, Mars and Snickers: basically the same, but one's maybe  slightly nuttier than the other. I won't say which.Now we've got you warmed up. Let's psychoanalyze you using the famous Rorschach inkblot test. So you can probably see two, I dunno, two bears or two people or something. But what do you think they're doing? Put your hand up if you think they're saying hello. Not many people. Okay. Put your hands up if you think they are high-fiving. Okay. What if you think they're fighting? Only a few people there. Okay, so if you think they're saying hello or high-fiving, then that means you're a friendly person. If you think they're fighting, you're a bit more of a  nasty, aggressive person. Are you a lover or a fighter, basically. What about this one? This isn't really a voting one, so on  three everyone shout out what you see. One, two, three. (Audience shouting) I heard hamster. Who said hamster? That was very worrying. A guy there said hamster. Well, you should see some kind of two-legged animal here, and then the mirror image of them there. If you didn't, then this means that you have difficulty processing complex situations where there's a lot going on.Except, of course, it doesn't mean that at all. Rorschach inkblot tests have basically no validity when it comes to diagnosing people's personality and are not used by modern-day psychologists. In fact, one recent study found that when you do try to diagnose people's personalities using Rorschach inkblot tests, schizophrenia was diagnosed in about one sixth of apparently perfectly normal participants.So if you didn't do that well on this, maybe you are not a very visual type of person. So let's do another quick quiz to find out. When making a cake, do you prefer to — so hands up for each one again — do you prefer to use a recipe book with pictures? Yeah, a few people. Have a friend talk you through? Or have a go, making it up as you go along? Quite a few people there. Okay, so if you said A, then this means that you are a visual learner and you learn best when information is presented in a visual style. If you said B, it means you're an auditory learner, that you learn best when information is presented to you in an auditory format. And if you said C, it means that you're a kinesthetic learner, that you learn best when you get stuck in and do things with your hands.Except, of course, as you've probably guessed, that it doesn't, because the whole thing is a complete myth. Learning styles are made up and are  not supported by scientific evidence. So we know this because in tightly controlled experimental studies, when learners are given material to learn either in their preferred style or an opposite style, it makes no difference at all to the amount of information that they retain. And if you think about it for just a second, it's just obvious that this has to be true. It's obvious that the best presentation format depends not on you, but on what you're trying to learn. Could you learn to drive a car, for example, just by listening to someone telling you what to do with no kinesthetic experience? Could you solve simultaneous equations by talking them through in your head and without writing them down? Could you revise  for your architecture exams using interpretive dance if you're a kinesthetic learner? No. What you need to do  is match the material to be learned to the presentation format, not you.I know many of you are A-level students that will have recently gotten your GCSE results. And if you didn't quite get what you were hoping for, then you can't really blame your learning style, but one thing that you might want to think about blaming is your genes. So what this is all about is a recent study at University College London found that 58 percent of the variation between different students and their GCSE results was down to genetic factors. That sounds like a very precise figure, so how can we tell? Well, when we want to unpack the relative contributions of genes and the environment, what we can do is do a twin study. So identical twins share 100 percent of their environment and 100 percent of their genes, whereas non-identical twins share 100 percent of their environment, but just like any brother and sister, share only 50 percent of their genes. So by comparing how similar GCSE results are in identical twins versus non-identical twins, and doing some clever math, we can an idea of how much variation and performance is due to the environment and how much is due to genes. And it turns out that it's about 58 percent due to genes. So this isn't to undermine the hard work that you and your teachers here put in. If you didn't quite get the GCSE results that you were hoping for, then you can always try blaming your parents, or at least their genes.One thing that you shouldn't blame is being a left-brained or right-brained learner, because again, this is a myth. So the myth here is that the left brain is logical, it's good with equations like this, and the right brain is more creative, so the right brain is better at music. But again, this is a myth because nearly everything that you do involves nearly all parts of your brain talking together, even just the most mundane thing like having a normal conversation. However, perhaps one reason why this myth has survived is that there is a slight grain of truth to it. So a related version of the myth is that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people, which kind of makes sense because your brain controls the opposite hands, so left-handed people, the right side of the brain is slightly more active than the left-hand side of the brain, and the idea is the right-hand side is more creative. Now, it isn't true per se that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. What is true that ambidextrous people, or people who use both hands for different tasks, are more creative thinkers than one-handed people, because being ambidextrous involves having both sides of the brain talk to each other a lot, which seems to be involved in creating flexible thinking. The myth of the creative left-hander arises from the fact that being ambidextrous is more common amongst  left-handers than right-handers, so a grain of truth in the idea of the creative left-hander, but not much.A related myth that you've probably heard of is that we only use 10 percent of our brains. This is, again, a complete myth. Nearly everything that we do, even the most mundane thing, uses nearly all of our brains.That said, it is of course true that most of us don't use our brainpower quite as well as we could. So what could we do to boost our brainpower? Maybe we could listen to a nice bit of Mozart. Have you heard of the idea of the Mozart effect? So the idea is that listening  to Mozart makes you smarter and improves your  performance on I.Q. tests. Now again, what's interesting about this myth is that although it's basically a myth, there is a grain of truth to it. So the original study found that participants who were played Mozart music for a few minutes did better on a subsequent I.Q. test than participants who simply sat in silence. But a follow-up study recruited some people who liked Mozart music and then another group of people who were fans of  the horror stories of Stephen King. And they played the people the music or the stories. The people who preferred Mozart music to the stories got a bigger I.Q. boost from the Mozart than the stories, but the people who preferred the stories to the Mozart music got a bigger I.Q. boost from listening to the Stephen King stories than the Mozart music. So the truth is that listening to something that you enjoy perks you up a bit and gives you a temporary I.Q. boost on a narrow range of tasks. There's no suggestion that listening to Mozart, or indeed Stephen King stories, is going to make you any smarter in the long run.Another version of the Mozart myth is that listening to Mozart can make you not only cleverer but healthier, too. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be true of someone who listened to the music of Mozart almost every day, Mozart himself, who suffered from gonorrhea, smallpox, arthritis, and, what most people think eventually killed him in the end, syphilis. This suggests that Mozart should have bit more careful, perhaps, when choosing his sexual partners. But how do we choose a partner?So a myth that I have to say is sometimes spread a bit by sociologists is that our preferences in a romantic  partner are a product of our culture, that they're very culturally specific. But in fact, the data don't back this up. A famous study surveyed people from [37] different cultures across the globe, from Americans to Zulus, on what they look for in a partner. And in every single culture across the globe, men placed more value on physical attractiveness in a partner than did women, and in every single culture, too, women placed more importance than did men on ambition and high earning power. In every culture, too, men preferred women who were younger than themselves, an average of, I think it was 2.66 years, and in every culture, too, women preferred men who were older than them, so an average of 3.42 years, which is why we've got here ""Everybody needs a Sugar Daddy.""So moving on from trying to score with a partner to trying to score in basketball or football or whatever your sport is. The myth here is that sportsmen go through hot-hand streaks, Americans call them, or purple patches, we sometimes say in England, where they just can't miss, like this guy here. But in fact, what happens is that if you analyze the pattern of hits and misses statistically, it turns out that it's nearly always at random. Your brain creates patterns from the randomness. If you toss a coin, a streak of heads or tails is going  to come out somewhere in the randomness, and because the brain likes to see patterns where there are none, we look at these streaks and attribute meanings to them and say, ""Yeah he's really on form today,"" whereas actually you would get the same pattern if you were just getting hits and misses at random.So an exception to this, however, is penalty shootouts. A recent study looking at penalty shootouts in football shows that players who represent countries with a very bad record in penalty shootouts, like, for example, England, tend to be quicker to take their shots than countries with a better record, and presumably as a result, they're more likely to miss.Which raises the question of if there's any way that we could improve people's performance. And one thing you might think about doing is punishing people for their misses and seeing if that improves them. This idea, the effect that punishment can improve performance, is what participants thought they were testing in Milgram's famous learning and punishment experiment that you've probably heard about if you're a psychology student. The story goes that participants were prepared to give what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to a fellow participant when they got a question wrong, just because someone in a white coat told them to.But this story is a myth for three reasons. Firstly and most crucially, the lab coat wasn't white, it was in fact grey. Secondly, the participants were told before the study and reminded any time they raised a concern, that although the shocks were painful, they were not fatal and indeed caused no permanent damage whatsoever. And thirdly, participants didn't give the shocks just because someone in the coat told them to. When they were interviewed after the study, all the participants said that they firmly believed that the learning and punishment study served a worthy scientific purpose which would have enduring gains for science as opposed to the momentary nonfatal discomfort caused to the participants.Okay, so I've been talking for about 12 minutes now, and you've probably been  sitting there listening to me, analyzing my speech patterns  and body language and trying to work out if you should take any notice of what I'm saying, whether I'm telling the truth or whether I'm lying, but if so you've probably completely failed, because although we all think we can catch a liar from their body language and speech patterns, hundreds of psychological tests over the years have shown that all of us, including police officers and detectives, are basically at chance when it comes to detecting lies from body language and verbal patterns. Interestingly, there is one exception: TV appeals for missing relatives. It's quite easy to predict when the relatives are missing and when the appealers have in fact murdered the relatives themselves. So hoax appealers are more likely to shake their heads, to look away, and to make errors in their speech, whereas genuine appealers are more likely to express hope that the person will return safely and to avoid brutal language. So, for example, they might say ""taken from us"" rather than ""killed.""Speaking of which, it's about time I killed this talk, but before I do, I just want  to give you in 30 seconds the overarching myth of psychology. So the myth is that psychology is just a collection of interesting theories, all of which say something useful and all of which have something to offer. What I hope to have shown you in the past few minutes is that this isn't true. What we need to do is assess psychological theories by seeing what predictions they make, whether that is that listening to Mozart makes you smarter, that you learn better when information is presented in your preferred learning style or whatever it is, all of these are testable empirical predictions, and the only way we can make progress is to test these predictions against the data in tightly controlled experimental studies. And it's only by doing so that we can hope to discover which of these theories are well supported, and which, like all the ones I've told you about today, are myths.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_ambridge_10_myths_about_psychology_debunked
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"Some years ago, I stumbled across a simple design exercise that helps people understand and solve complex problems, and like many of these design exercises, it kind of seems trivial at first, but under deep inspection, it turns out that it reveals unexpected truths about the way that we collaborate and make sense of things.The exercise has three parts and begins with something that we all know how to do, which is how to make toast. It begins with a clean sheet of paper, a felt marker, and without using any words, you begin to draw how to make toast. And most people draw something like this. They draw a loaf of bread,  which is sliced, then put into a toaster. The toast is then deposited for some time. It pops up, and then voila! After two minutes, toast and happiness.Now, over the years, I've collected many hundreds of drawings of these toasts, and some of them are very good, because they really illustrate the toast-making process quite clearly. And then there are some that are, well, not so good. They really suck, actually, because you don't know what they're trying to say. Under close inspection, some reveal some aspects of toast-making while hiding others. So there's some that are all about the toast, and all about the transformation of toast. And there's others that are all about the toaster, and the engineers love to draw the mechanics of this. (Laughter) And then there are others that are about people. It's about visualizing the experience that people have. And then there are others that are about the supply chain of making toast that goes all the way back to the store. It goes through the supply chain networks of teleportation and all the way back to the field and wheat, and one all actually goes all the way back to the Big Bang. So it's crazy stuff. But I think it's obvious that even though these drawings are really wildly different, they share a common quality, and I'm wondering if you can see it. Do you see it? What's common about these?Most drawings have nodes and links. So nodes represent the tangible objects like the toaster and people, and links represent the connections between the nodes. And it's the combination of links and nodes that produces a full systems model, and it makes our private mental models visible about how we think something works. So that's the value of these things. What's interesting about these systems models is how they reveal our various points of view. So for example, Americans make toast with a toaster. That seems obvious. Whereas many Europeans make toast with a frying pan, of course, and many students make toast with a fire. I don't really understand this. A lot of MBA students do this.So you can measure the complexity by counting the number of nodes, and the average illustration has between four and eight nodes. Less than that, the drawing seems trivial, but it's quick to understand, and more than 13, the drawing produces a feeling of map shock. It's too complex. So the sweet spot is between 5 and 13. So if you want to communicate something visually, have between five and 13 nodes in your diagram. So though we may not be skilled at drawing, the point is that we intuitively know how to break down complex things into simple things and then  bring them back together again.So this brings us to our second part of  the exercise, which is how to make toast, but now with sticky notes or with cards. So what happens then? Well, with cards, most people tend to draw clear, more detailed, and more logical nodes. You can see the step by step analysis that takes place, and as they build up their model, they move their nodes around, rearranging them like Lego blocks. Now, though this might seem trivial, it's actually really important. This rapid iteration of expressing and then reflecting and analyzing is really the only way in which we get clarity. It's the essence of the design process. And systems theorists do tell us that the ease with which we can change a representation correlates to our willingness to improve the model. So sticky note systems are not only more fluid, they generally produce way more nodes than static drawings. The drawings are much richer.And this brings us to our third part of the exercise, which is to draw how to make toast, but this time in a group. So what happens then? Well, here's what happens. It starts out messy, and then it gets really messy, and then it gets messier, but as people refine the models, the best nodes become more prominent, and with each iteration, the model becomes clearer because people build on top of each other's ideas. What emerges is a unified systems model that integrates the diversity of everyone's individual points of view, so that's a really different outcome from what usually happens  in meetings, isn't it? So these drawings can contain 20 or more nodes, but participants don't feel map shock because they participate in the building of their models themselves. Now, what's also really interesting, that the groups spontaneously mix and add additional layers of organization to it. To deal with contradictions, for example, they add branching patterns and parallel patterns. Oh, and by the way, if they do it in complete silence, they do it much better and much more quickly. Really interesting — talking gets in the way.So here's some key lessons that can emerge from this. First, drawing helps us understand the situations as systems with nodes and their relationships. Movable cards produce better systems models, because we iterate much more fluidly. And then the group notes produce  the most comprehensive models because we synthesize several points of view. So that's interesting. When people work together under the right circumstances, group models are much better than individual models.So this approach works really great for drawing how to make toast, but what if you wanted to draw something more relevant or pressing, like your organizational vision, or customer experience, or long-term sustainability?There's a visual revolution that's taking place as more organizations are addressing their wicked problems by collaboratively drawing them out. And I'm convinced that those who see their world as movable nodes and links really have an edge.And the practice is really pretty simple. You start with a question, you collect the nodes, you refine the nodes, you do it over again, you refine and refine and refine, and the patterns emerge, and the group gets clarity and you answer the question.So this simple act of visualizing and doing over and over again produces some really remarkable outcomes. What's really important to know is that it's the conversations that are the important aspects, not just the models themselves. And these visual frames of reference can grow to several hundreds or even thousands of nodes. So, one example is from an organization called Rodale. Big publishing company. They lost a bunch of money one year, and their executive team for three days visualized their entire practice. And what's interesting is that after visualizing the entire business, systems upon systems, they reclaimed  50 million dollars of revenue, and they also moved from a D rating  to an A rating from their customers. Why? Because there's alignment from the executive team. So I'm now on a mission to help organizations solve their wicked problems by using collaborative visualization, and on a site that I've produced called drawtoast.com, I've collected a bunch of best practices. and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, you can learn more about the visual language and the structure of links and nodes that you can apply to general problem-solving, and download examples of various templates for unpacking the thorny problems that we all face in our organizations. So the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned.So next time you're confronted with an interesting challenge, remember what design has to teach us. Make your ideas visible, tangible, and consequential. It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful, and I believe it's an idea worth celebrating.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_got_a_wicked_problem_first_tell_me_how_you_make_toast
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"I'm an artist and I cut books. This is one of my first book works. It's called ""Alternate Route to Knowledge."" I wanted to create a stack of books so that somebody could come into the gallery and think they're just looking at a regular stack of books, but then as they got closer they would see this rough hole carved into it, and wonder what was happening, wonder why, and think about the material of the book. So I'm interested in the texture, but I'm more interested in the text and the images that we find within books.In most of my work, what I do is I seal the edges of a book with a thick varnish so it's creating sort of a skin on the outside of the book so it becomes a solid material, but then the pages inside are still loose, and then I carve into the surface of the book, and I'm not moving or adding anything. I'm just carving around whatever I find interesting. So everything you see within the finished piece is exactly where it was in the book before I began.I think of my work as sort of a remix, in a way, because I'm working with somebody else's material in the same way that a D.J. might be working with somebody else's music. This was a book of Raphael paintings, the Renaissance artist, and by taking his work and remixing it, carving into it, I'm sort of making it into something that's more new and more contemporary. I'm thinking also about breaking out of the box of the traditional book and pushing that linear format, and try to push the structure of the book itself so that the book can become fully sculptural.I'm using clamps and ropes and all sorts of materials, weights, in order to hold things  in place before I varnish so that I can push the form  before I begin, so that something like this can become a piece like this, which is just made from a single dictionary. Or something like this can become a piece like this. Or something like this, which who knows what that's going to be or why that's in my studio, will become a piece like this.So I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books, people don't want to rip books and nobody really wants to throw away a book, is that we think about books as living things, we think about them as a body, and they're created to relate to our body, as far as scale, but they also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things. So books really are alive. So I think of the book as a body, and I think of the book as a technology. I think of the book as a tool. And I also think of the book as a machine. I also think of the book as a landscape. This is a full set of encyclopedias that's been connected and sanded together, and as I carve through it, I'm deciding what I want to choose. So with encyclopedias, I could have chosen anything, but I specifically chose images of landscapes. And with the material itself, I'm using sandpaper and sanding the edges so not only the images suggest landscape, but the material itself suggests a landscape as well.So one of the things I do is when I'm carving through the book, I'm thinking about images, but I'm also thinking about text, and I think about them in a very similar way, because what's interesting is that when we're reading text, when we're reading a book, it puts images in our head, so we're sort of filling that piece. We're sort of creating images when we're reading text, and when we're looking at an image, we actually use language in order to understand what we're looking at. So there's sort of a yin-yang that happens, sort of a flip flop. So I'm creating a piece that the viewer is completing themselves.And I think of my work as almost an archaeology. I'm excavating and I'm trying to maximize the potential and discover as much as I possibly can and exposing it within my own work. But at the same time, I'm thinking about this idea of erasure, and what's happening now that most of our information is intangible, and this idea of loss, and this idea that not only is the format constantly shifting within computers, but the information itself, now that we don't have a physical backup, has to be constantly updated in order to not lose it. And I have several dictionaries in my own studio, and I do use a computer every day, and if I need to look up a word, I'll go on the computer, because I can go directly and instantly to what I'm looking up. I think that the book was never really the right format for nonlinear information, which is why we're seeing reference books becoming the first to be  endangered or extinct.So I don't think that the book will ever really die. People think that now that we have digital technology, the book is going to die, and we are seeing things shifting and things evolving. I think that the book will evolve, and just like people said painting would die when photography and printmaking became everyday materials, but what it really allowed painting to do was it allowed painting to quit its day job. It allowed painting to not have to have that everyday chore of telling the story, and painting became free and was allowed to tell its own story, and that's when we saw Modernism emerge, and we saw painting go into different branches. And I think that's what's happening with books now, now that most of our technology, most of our information, most of our personal and cultural  records are in digital form, I think it's really allowing the book to become something new. So I think it's a very exciting time for an artist like me, and it's very exciting to see what will happen with the book in the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_dettmer_old_books_reborn_as_intricate_art
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"So infectious diseases, right? Infectious diseases  are still the main cause of human suffering and death  around the world. Every year, millions of people die of diseases such as T.B., malaria, HIV, around the world  and even in the United States. Every year, thousands of Americans die of seasonal flu.Now of course, humans, we are creative. Right? We have come up with ways to protect ourselves against these diseases. We have drugs and vaccines. And we're conscious — we learn from our experiences and come up with creative solutions. We used to think we're alone in this, but now we know we're not. We're not the only medical doctors. Now we know that there's a lot of animals out there that can do it too. Most famous, perhaps, chimpanzees. Not so much different from us, they can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites. But the last few decades have shown us that other animals can do it too: elephants, porcupines, sheep, goats, you name it. And even more interesting than that is that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication too.The problem with infectious diseases, as we all know, is that pathogens continue to evolve, and a lot of the drugs that we have developed are losing their efficacy. And therefore, there is this great need to find new ways to discover drugs that we can use against our diseases.Now, I think that we should look at these animals, and we can learn from them how to treat our own diseases. As a biologist, I have been studying monarch butterflies for the last 10 years. Now, monarchs are extremely famous for their spectacular migrations from the U.S. and Canada down to Mexico every year, where millions of them come together, but it's not why I started studying them. I study monarchs because they get sick. They get sick like you. They get sick like me. And I think what they do can tell us a lot about drugs that we can develop for humans.Now, the parasites that monarchs get infected with are called ophryocystis elektroscirrha — a mouthful. What they do is they produce spores, millions of spores on the outside of the butterfly that are shown as little specks in between the scales of the butterfly. And this is really detrimental to the monarch. It shortens their lifespan, it reduces their ability to fly, it can even kill them before they're even adults. Very detrimental parasite.As part of my job, I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse growing plants, and the reason for this is that monarchs are extremely picky eaters. They only eat milkweed as larvae. Luckily, there are several species of milkweed that they can use, and all these milkweeds have cardenolides in them. These are chemicals that are toxic. They're toxic to most animals, but not to monarchs. In fact, monarchs can take up the chemicals, put it in their own bodies, and it makes them toxic against their predators, such as birds. And what they do, then, is advertise this toxicity through their beautiful warning colorations with this orange, black and white.So what I did during my job is grow plants in the greenhouse, different ones, different milkweeds. Some were toxic, including the tropical milkweed, with very high concentrations of these cardenolides. And some were not toxic. And then I fed them to monarchs. Some of the monarchs were healthy. They had no disease. But some of the monarchs were sick, and what I found is that some of these milkweeds are medicinal, meaning they reduce the disease symptoms in the monarch butterflies, meaning these monarchs can live longer when they are infected when feeding on these medicinal plants.And when I found this, I had this idea, and a lot of people said it was a crazy idea, but I thought,  what if monarchs can use this? What if they can use these plants as their own form of medicine? What if they can act as medical doctors?So my team and I started doing experiments. In the first types of experiments, we had caterpillars, and gave them a choice: medicinal milkweed versus non-medicinal milkweed. And then we measured how much they ate of each species over their lifetime. And the result, as so often  in science, was boring: Fifty percent of their food was medicinal. Fifty percent was not. These caterpillars didn't do anything for their own welfare.So then we moved on to adult butterflies, and we started asking the question whether it's the mothers that can medicate their offspring. Can the mothers lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick? We have done these experiments now over several years, and always get the same results. What we do is we put a monarch in a big cage, a medicinal plant on one side, a non-medicinal plant on the other side, and then we measure the number of eggs that the monarchs lay on each plant. And what we find when we do that is always the same. What we find is that the monarchs strongly prefer the medicinal milkweed. In other words, what these females are doing is they're laying 68 percent of their eggs in the medicinal milkweed. Intriguingly, what they do is they actually transmit the parasites when they're laying the eggs. They cannot prevent this. They can also not medicate themselves. But what these experiments tell us is that these monarchs, these mothers, can lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick.Now, this is a really important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs. Now, these are animals that are very small and we tend to think of them as very simple. They have tiny little brains, yet they can do this very sophisticated medication. Now, we know that even today, most of our drugs derive from natural products, including plants, and in indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. In this way, elephants have told us how to treat stomach upset, and porcupines have told people how to treat bloody diarrhea. What I think is important,  though, is to move beyond these large-brained mammals and give these guys more credit, these simple animals, these insects that we tend to think of as very, very simple with tiny little brains. The discovery that these animals can also use medication opens up completely new avenues, and I think that maybe one day, we will be treating human diseases with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies, and I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jaap_de_roode_how_butterflies_self_medicate
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"On Mondays and Thursdays, I learn how to die. I call them my terminal days. My wife Fernanda doesn't like the term, but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer and my parents and grandparents had it. And I kept thinking, one day I could be sitting in front of a doctor who looks at my exams and says, ""Ricardo, things don't look very good. You have six months or a year to live.""And you start thinking about what you would do with this time. And you say, ""I'm going to spend  more time with the kids. I'm going to visit these places, I'm going to go up and down mountains and places and I'm going to do all the things I didn't do when I had the time."" But of course, we all know these are very bittersweet memories  we're going to have. It's very difficult to do. You spend a good part of the time crying, probably. So I said, I'm going to do something else.Every Monday and Thursday, I'm going use my terminal days. And I will do, during those days, whatever it is I was going to do if I had received that piece of news. (Laughter)When you think about — (Applause) when you think about the opposite of work, we, many times, think it's leisure. And you say, ah, I need  some leisure time, and so forth. But the fact is that, leisure is a very busy thing. You go play golf and tennis, and you meet people, and you're going for lunch, and you're late for the movies. It's a very crowded thing that we do. The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health.So we started thinking about that as a company for the last 30 years. This is a complicated company with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars of business that makes rocket fuel propellent systems, runs 4,000 ATMs in Brazil, does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands. So this is not a simple business.We looked at it and we said, let's devolve to these people, let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of, this is when you arrive, this is how you dress, this is how you go to meetings, this is what you say, this is what you don't say, and let's see what's left. So we started this about 30 years ago, and we started dealing with this very issue. And so we said, look, the retirement, the whole issue of how  we distribute our graph of life. Instead of going mountain climbing when you're 82, why don't you do it next week? And we'll do it like this, we'll sell you back your Wednesdays for 10 percent of your salary. So now, if you were going to be  a violinist, which you probably weren't, you go and do this on Wednesday.And what we found — we thought, these are the older people who are going to be really interested in this program. And the average age of the first people who adhered were 29, of course. And so we started looking, and we said, we have to do things in a different way. So we started saying things like, why do we want to know what time you came to work, what time you left, etc.? Can't we exchange this for a contract for buying something from you, some kind of work? Why are we building these headquarters? Is it not an ego issue that we want to look solid and big and important? But we're dragging you two hours across town because of it?So we started asking questions one by one. We'd say it like this: One: How do we find people? We'd go out and try and recruit people and we'd say, look, when you come to us, we're not going to have two or three interviews and then you're going to be married to us for life. That's not how we do  the rest of our lives. So, come have your interviews. Anyone who's interested in interviewing, you will show up. And then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that, instead of just filling out the little  items of whether you're the right person. And then, come back. Spend an afternoon, spend a whole day, talk to anybody you want. Make sure we are the bride  you thought we were and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads. (Laughter)Slowly we went to a process  where we'd say things like, we don't want anyone to be a leader in the company if they haven't been  interviewed and approved by their future subordinates. Every six months, everyone gets  evaluated, anonymously, as a leader. And this determines whether they should continue in that leadership position, which is many times situational, as you know. And so if they don't have 70, 80 percent  of a grade, they don't stay, which is probably the reason why I haven't been CEO for more than 10 years. And over time, we started asking other questions.We said things like, why can't people set their own salaries? What do they need to know? There's only three things  you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. So let's give people these three pieces of information. So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in  and you could ask what someone spent,  how much someone makes, what they make in benefits,  what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. And this is 25 years ago.As this information started  coming to people, we said things like, we don't want  to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many  holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one  that's closest to your house, to the customer that  you're going to visit today. Don't tell us where you are. And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired. (Laughter)And so, the question we were asking was, how can we be taking care of people? People are the only thing we have. We can't have a department that runs after people and looks after people. So as we started finding that this worked, and we'd say, we're looking for — and this is, I think, the main thing I was looking for in the terminal days and in the company, which is, how do you set up for wisdom? We've come from an age of revolution, industrial revolution, an age of information, an age of knowledge, but we're not any closer to the age of wisdom. How we design, how do we organize, for more wisdom? So for example, many times, what's the smartest or the intelligent decision doesn't jive. So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday,  please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us,  for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday. (Laughter) (Applause)So the process is looking for wisdom. And in the process, of course,  we wanted people to know everything, and we wanted to be truly democratic about the way we ran things. So our board had two seats open  with the same voting rights, for the first two people who showed up. (Laughter) And so we had cleaning ladies voting on a board meeting, which had a lot of other very important people in suits and ties. And the fact is that they kept us honest.This process, as we started looking at the people who came to us, we'd say, now wait a second, people come to us and they say, where am I supposed to sit? How am I supposed to work? Where am I going to be in 5 years' time? And we looked at that and we said, we have to start much earlier. Where do we start? We said, oh, kindergarten  seems like a good place.So we set up a foundation, which now has,  for 11 years, three schools, where we started asking the same questions, how do you redesign school for wisdom? It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, we need the directors to do more. But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. Going from a math class, to biology, to 14th-century France is very silly. (Applause) So we started thinking,  what could it look like? And we put together people,  including people who like education, people like Paulo Freire,  and two ministers of education in Brazil and we said, if we were to design a school from scratch, what would it look like?And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. One guy, we'll call a tutor. A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek ""paideia"": Look after the kid. What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. But please don't teach, because the little you know compared  to Google, we don't want to know. Keep that to yourself. (Laughter) Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. So we have violinists teaching math. We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about  the course material anymore. We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. How do we express ourselves? So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar.And then we have things that everyone has forgotten, which are probably the most  important things in life. The very important things in life, we know nothing about. We know nothing about love, we know nothing about death, we know nothing about why we're here. So we need a thread in school that talks about everything we don't know. So that's a big part of what we do. (Applause) So over the years, we started going into other things. We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here  and do that, and so forth. We said, let's get the kids to do  something we call a circle, which meets once a week. And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. So can you all hit yourself on the head? Sure, for a week, try. They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide.And then, in this same vein, we keep a digital mosaic, because this is not constructivist or Montessori or something. It's something where we keep the Brazilian curriculum with 600 tiles of a mosaic, which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're 17. And follow this all the time and we know how they're doing and we say, you're not interested  in this now, let's wait a year. And the kids are in groups that don't have an age category, so the six-year-old kid who is ready for that with an 11-year-old, that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups and this stuff that we have  in the schools, in general. And they have a zero  to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours. Until we know they're 37 percent of the way we'd like them to be on this issue, so that we can send them out in the world with them knowing enough about it. And so the courses are World Cup Soccer, or building a bicycle. And people will sign up for  a 45-day course on building a bicycle. Now, try to build a bicycle without  knowing that pi is 3.1416. You can't. And try, any one of you,  using 3.1416 for something. You don't know anymore. So this is lost and that's what  we try to do there, which is looking  for wisdom in that school.And that brings us back to this graph and this distribution of our life. I accumulated a lot of money  when I think about it. When you think and you say, now is the time to give back — well, if you're giving back,  you took too much. (Laughter) (Applause) I keep thinking of Warren Buffet waking up one day and finding out he has 30 billion dollars more than he thought he had. And he looks and he says, what am I going to do with this? And he says, I'll give it to someone who really needs this. I'll give it to Bill Gates. (Laughter) And my guy, who's my financial advisor in New York, he says, look, you're a silly guy because you would have 4.1 times  more money today if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go. But I like sharing as you go better. (Applause)I taught MBAs at MIT for a time and I ended up, one day, at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is a beautiful cemetery in Cambridge. And I was walking around. It was my birthday and I was thinking. And the first time around,  I saw these tombstones and these wonderful people  who'd done great things and I thought, what do I want  to be remembered for? And I did another stroll around, and the second time, another question came to me, which did me better, which was, why do I want to be remembered at all? (Laughter) And that, I think,  took me different places. When I was 50, my wife Fernanda and I sat for a whole afternoon, we had a big pit with fire, and I threw everything I had ever  done into that fire. This is a book in 38 languages, hundreds and hundreds of articles and DVDs, everything there was. And that did two things. One, it freed our five kids from following in our steps, our shadow — They don't know what I do. (Laughter) Which is good. And I'm not going to take them somewhere and say, one day  all of this will be yours. (Laughter) The five kids know nothing, which is good.And the second thing is, I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement or whatever. I'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch in part of those terminal days. And some people would say, oh, so now you have this time, these terminal days, and so you go out and do everything. No, we've been to the beaches, so we've been to Samoa and Maldives and Mozambique, so that's done. I've climbed mountains in the Himalayas. I've gone down 60 meters to see  hammerhead sharks. I've spent 59 days on the back of a camel from Chad to Timbuktu. I've gone to the magnetic  North Pole on a dog sled. So, we've been busy. It's what I'd like to call  my empty bucket list. (Laughter)And with this rationale, I look at these days and I think, I'm not retired.  I don't feel retired at all. And so I'm writing a new book. We started three new companies in the last two years. I'm now working on getting this  school system for free out into the world, and I've found, very interestingly enough, that nobody wants it for free. And so I've been trying for 10 years to get the public system to take over this school rationale, much as the public schools we have, which has instead of 43 out of 100, as their rating, as their grades, has 91 out of 100. But for free, nobody wants it. So maybe we'll start charging for it  and then it will go somewhere. But getting this out is one of the things we want to do.And I think what this leaves us as a message for all of you, I think is a little bit like this: We've all learned how to go on Sunday night to email and work from home. But very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon. And if we're looking for wisdom, we need to learn to do that as well. And so, what we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing. What I want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this, you will come to the question, what for? What am I doing this for? And hopefully, as a result of that, and over time, I hope that with this, and that's what I'm wishing you, you'll have a much wiser future. Thank you very much. (Applause)Chris Anderson: So Ricardo,  you're kind of crazy. (Laughter) To many people, this seems crazy. And yet so deeply wise, also. The pieces I'm trying to put together are this: Your ideas are so radical. How, in business, for example, these ideas have been out for a while, probably the percentage of businesses  that have taken some of them is still quite low. Are there any times you've seen  some big company take on one of your ideas  and you've gone, ""Yes!""?Ricardo Semler: It happens. It happened about two weeks ago with Richard Branson, with his people saying, oh, I don't want to control your holidays anymore, or Netflix does a little bit of this and that, but I don't think it's very important. I'd like to see it happen maybe a little bit in a bit of a missionary zeal, but that's a very personal one. But the fact is that it takes a leap  of faith about losing control. And almost nobody who is in control is ready to take leaps of faith. It will have to come from kids  and other people who are starting companies  in a different way.CA: So that's the key thing? From your point of view the evidence is there, in the business point of view this works, but people just don't have the courage to — (Whoosh)RS: They don't even have the incentive. You're running a company with a 90-day mandate. It's a quarterly report. If you're not good in 90 days, you're out. So you say, ""Here's a great program that, in less than one generation —"" And the guy says, ""Get out of here."" So this is the problem. (Laughter)CA: What you're trying to do in education seems to me incredibly profound. Everyone is bothered about their country's education system. No one thinks that we've caught up yet to a world where there's Google and all these  technological options. So you've got actual evidence now that  the kids so far going through your system, there's a dramatic increase  in performance. How do we help you move these ideas forward?RS: I think it's that problem of ideas whose time has come. And I've never been very evangelical about these things. We put it out there. Suddenly, you find people — there's a group in Japan,  which scares me very much, which is called the Semlerists, and they have 120 companies. They've invited me. I've always been scared to go. And there is a group in Holland that has 600 small, Dutch companies. It's something that will flourish on its own. Part of it will be wrong,  and it doesn't matter. This will find its own place. And I'm afraid of the other one, which says, this is so good you've got to do this. Let's set up a system  and put lots of money into it and then people will do it no matter what.CA: So you have asked  extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel  that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here?RS: I always come back  to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, ""Dad, why do we exist?"" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy — how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing  of having the courage now — not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out  you have something — to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.CA: So that strikes me as a profound and quite beautiful way to end this penultimate day of TED. Ricardo Semler, thank you so much. RS: Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules
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"What's the fastest growing threat to Americans' health? Cancer? Heart attacks? Diabetes? The answer is actually none of these; it's Alzheimer's disease. Every 67 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As the number of Alzheimer's patients triples by the year 2050, caring for them, as well as the rest of the aging population, will become an overwhelming societal challenge.My family has experienced firsthand the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer's patient. Growing up in a family with three generations, I've always been very close to my grandfather. When I was four years old, my grandfather and I  were walking in a park in Japan when he suddenly got lost. It was one of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in my life, and it was also the first instance that informed us that my grandfather had Alzheimer's disease. Over the past 12 years, his condition got worse and worse, and his wandering in particular caused my family a lot of stress. My aunt, his primary caregiver, really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him, and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed. I became really concerned about my aunt's well-being as well as my grandfather's safety. I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family's problems, but couldn't find one.Then, one night about two years ago, I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed. The moment his foot landed on the floor, I thought, why don't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed, the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver's smartphone. That way, my aunt could sleep much better at night without having to worry about my grandfather's wandering.So now I'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock. Could I please have my sock model on the stage? Great. So once the patient steps onto the floor — (Ringing) — an alert is sent to the caregiver's smartphone.Thank you. (Applause)Thank you, sock model.So this is a drawing of my preliminary design.My desire to create a sensor-based technology perhaps stemmed from my lifelong love for sensors and technology. When I was six years old, an elderly family friend fell down in the bathroom and suffered severe injuries. I became concerned about my own grandparents and decided to invent a smart bathroom system. Motion sensors would be installed inside the tiles of bathroom floors to detect the falls of elderly patients whenever they fell down in the bathroom. Since I was only six years old at the time and I hadn't graduated from kindergarten yet, I didn't have the necessary resources and  tools to translate my idea into reality, but nonetheless, my research experience really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people. I really believe that sensors can improve the quality of life of the elderly.When I laid out my plan, I realized that I faced three main challenges: first, creating a sensor; second, designing a circuit; and third, coding a smartphone app. This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize than I initially had thought it to be.First, I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient's foot. After extensive research and testing of different materials like rubber, which I realized was too thick to be worn snugly on the bottom of the foot, I decided to print a film sensor with electrically conductive pressure-sensitive ink particles. Once pressure is applied, the connectivity between the particles increases. Therefore, I could design a circuit that would measure pressure by measuring electrical resistance.Next, I had to design a wearable wireless circuit, but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power and requires heavy, bulky batteries. Thankfully, I was able to find out about the Bluetooth low energy technology, which consumes very little power and can be driven by a coin-sized battery. This prevented the system from dying in the middle of the night.Lastly, I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform the care-giver's smartphone into a remote monitor. For this, I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks.Integrating these components, I was able to successfully create two prototypes, one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock, and another that's a re-attachable sensor assembly that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact with the bottom of the patient's foot. I've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now, and it's had a 100 percent success rate in detecting the over 900  known cases of his wandering. Last summer, I was able to beta test my device at several residential care facilities in California, and I'm currently incorporating the feedback to further improve the device  into a marketable product. Testing the device on a number of patients made me realize that I needed to invent solutions for people who didn't want to wear socks to sleep at night.So sensor data, collected on a vast number of patients, can be useful for improving patient care and also leading to a cure for the disease, possibly. For example, I'm currently examining correlations between the frequency of a patient's nightly wandering and his or her daily activities and diet.One thing I'll never forget is when my device first caught my grandfather's wandering out of bed at night. At that moment, I was really struck by the power of technology to change lives for the better. People living happily and healthfully — that's the world that I imagine.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kenneth_shinozuka_my_simple_invention_designed_to_keep_my_grandfather_safe
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"Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love. Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love.(Laughter)But it's not just because of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases. It's also because we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the perfect partner.Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, ""Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend"" —(Laughter)Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. Now, Peter's not a very greedy man. Of all of the available women in the UK, all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive.(Laughter)And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK.(Laughter)It's not looking very good, is it Peter? Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore.The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view. Because I know, just as well as all of you do, that love doesn't really work like that. Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable. But I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us, because, love, as with most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is, ultimately, all about the study of patterns. Patterns from predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of cities. And if we're being honest, none of those things are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either. Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything. Even something as mysterious as love. And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love.(Laughter)OK, so Top Tip #1: How to win at online dating. So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians. Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. And they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each other on an online dating website. And they've come up with some seriously interesting findings. But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage.(Laughter)Let me show you how this works. In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between one and five. Now, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a selection of people receive, you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website.This is the graph the OkCupid guys have come up with. And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally true that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get. But the question arises then of what is it about people up here who are so much more popular than people down here, even though they have the same score of attractiveness? And the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks that are important. So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. So if you take someone like Portia de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi is a very beautiful woman. Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but she's not a supermodel, either. If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. But some other people, i.e., most of the Internet ...(Laughter)seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse.(Laughter)Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive they thought Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were, and you ask them to give them a score between one and five I reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score. But the way that people would vote would be very different. So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the four because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion. There'd be a huge spread in her scores. And actually it's this spread that counts. It's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door.Now, I think this begins to make a bit more sense when you think in terms of the people who are sending these messages. So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested. That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive. Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be honest? But here's where the really interesting part comes. Because when people choose the pictures that they use on an online dating website, they often try to minimize the things that they think some people will find unattractive. The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo,(Laughter)or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful. You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive. Because the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage.OK, Top Tip #2: How to pick the perfect partner. So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. But the question arises of how do you then convert that success into longer-term happiness, and in particular, how do you decide when is the right time to settle down? Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. But, equally, you don't really want to leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of long-term happiness. As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, ""An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.""(Laughter)Thanks a lot, Jane. What do you know about love?(Laughter)So the question is then, how do you know when is the right time to settle down, given all the people that you can date in your lifetime? Thankfully, there's a rather delicious bit of mathematics that we can use to help us out here, called optimal stopping theory. So let's imagine, then, that you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be married by the time that you're 35. And there's a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness. Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me.So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential.(Laughter)And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. So here's the example. Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. Now unfortunately, I have to tell you that this method does come with some risks. For instance, imagine if your perfect partner appeared during your first 37 percent. Now, unfortunately, you'd have to reject them.(Laughter)Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone.(Laughter)Probably surrounded by cats ...(Laughter)nibbling at your remains.OK, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. That's OK, because you're in your rejection phase, so that's fine, you can reject them. But then imagine the next person to come along is just marginally less boring, dull and terrible ...(Laughter)than everybody that you've seen before. Now, if you are following the maths, I'm afraid you have to marry them ...(Laughter)and end up in a relationship which is, frankly, suboptimal. Sorry about that. But I do think that there's an opportunity here for Hallmark to cash in on and really cater for this market. A Valentine's Day card like this.(Laughter)""My darling husband, you are marginally less terrible than the first 37 percent of people I dated.""(Laughter)It's actually more romantic than I normally manage.(Laughter)OK, so this method doesn't give you a 100 percent success rate, but there's no other possible strategy that can do any better. And actually, in the wild, there are certain types of fish which follow and employ this exact strategy. So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. I also think that subconsciously, humans, we do sort of do this anyway. We give ourselves a little bit of time to play the field, get a feel for the marketplace or whatever when we're young. And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. I think this is conclusive proof, if ever it were needed, that everybody's brains are prewired to be just a little bit mathematical.OK, so that was Top Tip #2. Now, Top Tip #3: How to avoid divorce. OK, so let's imagine then that you picked your perfect partner and you're settling into a lifelong relationship with them. Now, I like to think that everybody would ideally like to avoid divorce, apart from, I don't know, Piers Morgan's wife, maybe?(Laughter)But it's a sad fact of modern life that one in two marriages in the States ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind. Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. For one thing, it's very hard to know what you should be measuring or what you should be quantifying. But this didn't stop a psychologist, John Gottman, who did exactly that. Gottman observed hundreds of couples having a conversation and recorded, well, everything you can think of. So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. But what Gottman and his team found was that one of the most important predictors for whether or not a couple is going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation.Now, couples that were very low-risk scored a lot more positive points on Gottman's scale than negative. Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. But it wasn't until he teamed up with a mathematician, James Murray, that they really started to understand what causes these negativity spirals and how they occur. And the results that they found, I think, are just incredibly impressively simple and interesting. So these equations predict how the wife or husband is going to respond in their next turn of the conversation, how positive or negative they're going to be. And these equations depend on the mood of the person when they're on their own, the mood of the person when they're with their partner, but most importantly, they depend on how much the husband and wife influence one another.Now, I think it's important to point out at this stage, that these exact equations have also been shown to be perfectly able at describing what happens between two countries in an arms race.(Laughter)So that an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.(Laughter)But the really important term in this equation is the influence that people have on one another, and in particular, something called ""the negativity threshold."" Now, the negativity threshold, you can think of as how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really pissed off, and vice versa. Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. So I would have thought that perhaps the most successful relationships were ones where there was a really high negativity threshold. Where couples let things go and only brought things up if they really were a big deal. But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal.Now of course, it takes a bit more than just a low negativity threshold and not compromising to have a successful relationship. But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger.So those are my top three tips of how maths can help you with love and relationships. But I hope, that aside from their use as tips, they also give you a little bit of insight into the power of mathematics. Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. So I hope that perhaps, for just a couple of you, a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love can persuade you to have a little bit more love for mathematics.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_fry_the_mathematics_of_love
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"I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. Now, one thing about being a twin is, it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. And clearly, I wasn't starving.(Laughter)When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of a different kind; and that is, how much more we value the body than we do the mind. I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say, ""Oh — a psychologist. So, not a real doctor,"" as if it should say that on my card.[Dr. Guy Winch, Just a Psychologist (Not a Real Doctor)](Laughter)This favoritism we show the body over the mind — I see it everywhere.I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. He was standing on a stool by the sink, brushing his teeth, when he slipped and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut so it doesn't become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? We've known it since we were five years old. But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? Nothing. How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds? Why is it that our physical health is so much more important to us than our psychological health?We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. It doesn't even occur to us that we should. ""Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head."" Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: ""Oh, just walk it off; it's all in your leg.""(Laughter)It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health. It's time we made them more equal, more like twins.Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist. So he's not a real doctor, either.(Laughter)We didn't study together, though. In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then, and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together. We decided to splurge, and that week, we would talk for 10 minutes.(Laughter)I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call — and waiting ... and waiting. But the phone didn't ring. Given the time difference, I assumed, ""OK, he's out with friends, he'll call later."" There were no cell phones then. But he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. I woke up the next morning. I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. I stumbled out of bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later. And it was my brother, and boy, was he pissed.(Laughter)It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. Now, I tried to explain what happened, but he said, ""I don't understand. If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?"" He was right. Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then. But I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness.Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me. But loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. And I did. There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. Loneliness won't just make you miserable; it will kill you. I'm not kidding. Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent. Fourteen percent! Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your long-term health and longevity as cigarette smoking. Now, cigarette packs come with warnings saying, ""This could kill you."" But loneliness doesn't. And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us.Failure does that as well. I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box with her lower lip trembling. The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and burst into tears without even touching it. Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. So: three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something, and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it.Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind. I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager with my brother. We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. There had been a robbery in the area and they were looking for suspects. The officer approached the car, and shined his flashlight on the driver, then on my brother in the front seat, and then on me. And his eyes opened wide and he said, ""Where have I seen your face before?""(Laughter)And I said, ""In the front seat.""(Laughter)But that made no sense to him whatsoever, so now he thought I was on drugs.(Laughter)So he drags me out of the car, he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I didn't have a police record, could I show him I had a twin in the front seat. But even as we were driving away, you could see by the look on his face he was convinced that I was getting away with something.(Laughter)Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed. You have to fight feelings of helplessness. You have to gain control over the situation. And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins.[Stop Emotional Bleeding]Our minds and our feelings — they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. They're more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next. I once worked with this woman who, after 20 years marriage and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date. She had met this guy online, and he seemed nice and he seemed successful, and most importantly, he seemed really into her. So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink. Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, ""I'm not interested,"" and walks out. Rejection is extremely painful. The woman was so hurt she couldn't move. All she could do was call a friend. Here's what the friend said: ""Well, what do you expect? You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say. Why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out with a loser like you?"" Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel? But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that. It's what the woman said to herself. And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection. We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't. We call ourselves names. Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it. And it's interesting that we do, because our self-esteem is already hurting. Why would we want to go and damage it even further? We wouldn't make a physical injury worse on purpose. You wouldn't get a cut on your arm and decide, ""Oh! I know — I'm going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it.""But we do that with psychological injuries all the time. Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. Because we don't prioritize our psychological health. We know from dozens of studies that when your self-esteem is lower, you are more vulnerable to stress and to anxiety; that failures and rejections hurt more, and it takes longer to recover from them. So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive your self-esteem, not join Fight Club and beat it into a pulp. When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend.[Protect Your Self-Esteem]We have to catch our unhealthy psychological habits and change them. And one of unhealthiest and most common is called rumination. To ruminate means to chew over. It's when your boss yells at you or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. Now, ruminating about upsetting events in this way can easily become a habit, and it's a very costly one, because by spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease.The problem is, the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop. I know this for a fact, because a little over a year ago, I developed the habit myself. You see, my twin brother was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His cancer was extremely aggressive. He had visible tumors all over his body. And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through. I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was suffering, even though he never complained, not once. He had this incredibly positive attitude. His psychological health was amazing. I was physically healthy, but psychologically, I was a mess. But I knew what to do. Studies tell us that even a two-minute distraction is sufficient to break the urge to ruminate in that moment. And so each time I had a worrying, upsetting, negative thought, I forced myself to concentrate on something else until the urge passed. And within one week, my whole outlook changed and became more positive and more hopeful.[Battle Negative Thinking]Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy, my brother had a CAT scan, and I was by his side when he got the results. All the tumors were gone. He still had three more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but we knew he would recover. This picture was taken two weeks ago.By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene.Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? If there were less loneliness and less depression? If people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? If they were happier and more fulfilled? I can, because that's the world I want to live in. And that's the world my brother wants to live in as well. And if you just become informed and change a few simple habits, well — that's the world we can all live in.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hygiene
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"In the mid-'90s, the CDC and Kaiser Permanente discovered an exposure that dramatically increased the risk for seven out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. In high doses, it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. Folks who are exposed in very high doses have triple the lifetime risk of heart disease and lung cancer and a 20-year difference in life expectancy. And yet, doctors today are not trained in routine screening or treatment. Now, the exposure I'm talking about is not a pesticide or a packaging chemical. It's childhood trauma.Okay. What kind of trauma am I talking about here? I'm not talking about failing a test or losing a basketball game. I am talking about threats that are so severe or pervasive that they literally get under our skin and change our physiology: things like abuse or neglect, or growing up with a parent  who struggles with mental illness or substance dependence.Now, for a long time, I viewed these things in the way  I was trained to view them, either as a social problem — refer to social services — or as a mental health problem — refer to mental health services. And then something happened to make me rethink my entire approach. When I finished my residency, I wanted to go someplace where I felt really needed, someplace where I could make a difference. So I came to work for California Pacific Medical Center, one of the best private hospitals in Northern California, and together, we opened a clinic in Bayview-Hunters Point, one of the poorest, most underserved neighborhoods in San Francisco. Now, prior to that point, there had been only one pediatrician in all of Bayview to serve more than 10,000 children, so we hung a shingle, and we were able to provide top-quality care regardless of ability to pay. It was so cool. We targeted the typical health disparities: access to care, immunization rates, asthma hospitalization rates, and we hit all of our numbers. We felt very proud of ourselves.But then I started noticing a disturbing trend. A lot of kids were being referred to me for ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but when I actually did a thorough history and physical, what I found was that for most of my patients, I couldn't make a diagnosis of ADHD. Most of the kids I was seeing had experienced such severe trauma that it felt like something else was going on. Somehow I was missing something important.Now, before I did my residency, I did a master's degree in public health, and one of the things that they teach you in public health school is that if you're a doctor and you see 100 kids that all drink from the same well, and 98 of them develop diarrhea, you can go ahead and write that prescription for dose after dose after dose of antibiotics, or you can walk over and say, ""What the hell is in this well?"" So I began reading everything that I could get my hands on about how exposure to adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children.And then one day, my colleague walked into my office, and he said, ""Dr. Burke, have you seen this?"" In his hand was a copy of a research study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. That day changed my clinical practice and ultimately my career.The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is something that everybody needs to know about. It was done by Dr. Vince Felitti at Kaiser and Dr. Bob Anda at the CDC, and together, they asked 17,500 adults about their history of exposure to what they called ""adverse  childhood experiences,"" or ACEs. Those include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; parental mental illness, substance dependence, incarceration; parental separation or divorce; or domestic violence. For every yes, you would get a point on your ACE score. And then what they did was they correlated these ACE scores against health outcomes. What they found was striking. Two things: Number one, ACEs are incredibly common. Sixty-seven percent of the population had at least one ACE, and 12.6 percent, one in eight, had four or more ACEs. The second thing that they found was that there was a dose-response relationship between ACEs and health outcomes: the higher your ACE score, the worse your health outcomes. For a person with an ACE score of four or more, their relative risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was two and a half times that of someone with an ACE score of zero. For hepatitis, it was also two and a half times. For depression, it was four and a half times. For suicidality, it was 12 times. A person with an ACE score of seven or more had triple the lifetime risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States of America.Well, of course this makes sense. Some people looked at this data and they said, ""Come on. You have a rough childhood, you're more likely to drink and smoke and do all these things that are going to ruin your health. This isn't science. This is just bad behavior.""It turns out this is exactly where the science comes in. We now understand better than we ever have before how exposure to early adversity affects the developing brains and bodies of children. It affects areas like the nucleus accumbens, the pleasure and reward center of the brain that is implicated in substance dependence. It inhibits the prefrontal cortex, which is necessary for impulse control and executive function, a critical area for learning. And on MRI scans, we see measurable differences in the amygdala, the brain's fear response center. So there are real neurologic reasons why folks exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to engage in high-risk behavior, and that's important to know.But it turns out that even if you don't engage in any high-risk behavior, you're still more likely to develop heart disease or cancer. The reason for this has to do with the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, the brain's and body's stress response system that governs our fight-or-flight response. How does it work? Well, imagine you're walking in the forest and you see a bear. Immediately, your hypothalamus sends a signal to your pituitary, which sends a signal  to your adrenal gland that says, ""Release stress hormones! Adrenaline! Cortisol!"" And so your heart starts to pound, Your pupils dilate, your airways open up, and you are ready to either fight that bear or run from the bear. And that is wonderful if you're in a forest and there's a bear. (Laughter) But the problem is what happens when the bear comes home every night, and this system is activated over and over and over again, and it goes from being adaptive, or life-saving, to maladaptive, or health-damaging. Children are especially sensitive to this repeated stress activation, because their brains and bodies are just developing. High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.So for me, this information threw my old training out the window, because when we understand the mechanism of a disease, when we know not only which pathways are disrupted, but how, then as doctors, it is our job to use this science for prevention and treatment. That's what we do.So in San Francisco, we created the Center for Youth Wellness to prevent, screen and heal the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress. We started simply with routine screening of every one of our kids at their regular physical, because I know that if my patient  has an ACE score of 4, she's two and a half times as likely to develop hepatitis or COPD, she's four and half times as likely to become depressed, and she's 12 times as likely to attempt to take her own life as my patient with zero ACEs. I know that when she's in my exam room. For our patients who do screen positive, we have a multidisciplinary treatment team that works to reduce the dose of adversity and treat symptoms using best practices, including home visits, care coordination, mental health care, nutrition, holistic interventions, and yes, medication when necessary. But we also educate parents about the impacts of ACEs and toxic stress the same way you would for covering electrical outlets, or lead poisoning, and we tailor the care of our asthmatics and our diabetics in a way that recognizes that they may need more aggressive treatment, given the changes to their hormonal and immune systems.So the other thing that happens when you understand this science is that you want to shout it from the rooftops, because this isn't just an issue for kids in Bayview. I figured the minute that everybody else heard about this, it would be routine screening, multi-disciplinary treatment teams, and it would be a race to the most effective clinical treatment protocols. Yeah. That did not happen. And that was a huge learning for me. What I had thought of as simply best clinical practice I now understand to be a movement. In the words of Dr. Robert Block, the former President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, ""Adverse childhood experiences are the single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today."" And for a lot of people, that's a terrifying prospect. The scope and scale of the problem seems so large that it feels overwhelming to think about how we might approach it. But for me, that's actually where the hopes lies, because when we have the right framework, when we recognize this to be a public health crisis, then we can begin to use the right  tool kit to come up with solutions. From tobacco to lead poisoning  to HIV/AIDS, the United States actually has quite a strong track record with addressing public health problems, but replicating those successes with ACEs and toxic stress is going to take determination and commitment, and when I look at what our nation's response has been so far, I wonder, why haven't we taken this more seriously?You know, at first I thought that we marginalized the issue because it doesn't apply to us. That's an issue for those kids in those neighborhoods. Which is weird, because the data doesn't bear that out. The original ACEs study was done in a population that was 70 percent Caucasian, 70 percent college-educated. But then, the more I talked to folks, I'm beginning to think that maybe I had it completely backwards. If I were to ask how many people in this room grew up with a family member who suffered from mental illness, I bet a few hands would go up. And then if I were to ask how many folks had a parent who maybe drank too much, or who really believed that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child, I bet a few more hands would go up. Even in this room, this is an issue that touches many of us, and I am beginning to believe that we marginalize the issue because it does apply to us. Maybe it's easier to see in other zip codes because we don't want to look at it. We'd rather be sick.Fortunately, scientific advances and, frankly, economic realities make that option less viable every day. The science is clear: Early adversity dramatically affects health across a lifetime. Today, we are beginning to understand how to interrupt the progression from early adversity to disease and early death, and 30 years from now, the child who has a high ACE score and whose behavioral symptoms go unrecognized, whose asthma management is not connected, and who goes on to develop high blood pressure and early heart disease or cancer will be just as anomalous as a six-month mortality from HIV/AIDS. People will look at that situation and say, ""What the heck happened there?"" This is treatable. This is beatable. The single most important thing that we need today is the courage to look this problem in the face and say, this is real and this is all of us. I believe that we are the movement.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime
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"As an Arab female photographer, I have always found ample inspiration for my projects in personal experiences. The passion I developed for knowledge, which allowed me to break barriers towards a better life was the motivation  for my project I Read I Write.Pushed by my own experience, as I was not allowed initially to pursue my higher education, I decided to explore and document stories of other women who changed their lives through education, while exposing and questioning the barriers they face. I covered a range of topics that concern women's education, keeping in mind the differences among Arab countries due to economic and social factors. These issues include female illiteracy, which is quite high in the region; educational reforms; programs for dropout students; and political activism among university students. As I started this work, it was not always easy  to convince the women to participate. Only after explaining to them how their stories might influence other women's lives, how they would become role models for their own community, did some agree. Seeking a collaborative and reflexive approach, I asked them to write their own words and ideas on prints of their own images. Those images were then shared in some of the classrooms, and worked to inspire and motivate other women going through similar educations  and situations. Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, wrote, ""I sought education in order to be independent and to not count on men with everything.""One of my first subjects was Umm El-Saad from Egypt. When we first met, she was barely able to write her name. She was attending a nine-month literacy program run by a local NGO in the Cairo suburbs. Months later, she was joking that her husband had threatened to pull her out of the classes, as he found out that his now literate wife was going through his phone text messages. (Laughter) Naughty Umm El-Saad. Of course, that's not why Umm El-Saad joined the program. I saw how she was longing to gain control over her simple daily routines, small details that we take for granted, from counting money at the market to helping her kids in homework. Despite her poverty and her community's mindset, which belittles women's education, Umm El-Saad, along with her Egyptian classmates, was eager to learn how to read and write.In Tunisia, I met Asma, one of the four activist women I interviewed. The secular bioengineering student is quite active on social media. Regarding her country, which treasured what has been called the Arab Spring, she said, ""I've always dreamt of discovering a new bacteria. Now, after the revolution, we have a new one every single day."" Asma was referring to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the region, which is another obstacle to women in particular.Out of all the women I met, Fayza from Yemen affected me the most. Fayza was forced to drop out of school at the age of eight when she was married. That marriage lasted for a year. At 14, she became the third wife of a 60-year-old man, and by the time she was 18, she was a divorced mother of three. Despite her poverty, despite her social status as a divorcée in an ultra-conservative society, and despite the opposition of her parents to her going back to school, Fayza knew that her only way to control her life was through education. She is now 26. She received a grant from a local NGO to fund her business studies at the university. Her goal is to find a job, rent a place to live in, and bring her kids back with her.The Arab states are going through tremendous change, and the struggles women face are overwhelming. Just like the women I photographed, I had to overcome many barriers to becoming the photographer I am today, many people along the way telling me what I can and cannot do. Umm El-Saad, Asma and Fayza, and many women across the Arab world, show that it is possible to overcome barriers to education, which they know is the best means to a better future. And here I would like to end with a quote by Yasmine, one of the four activist women I interviewed in Tunisia. Yasmine wrote, ""Question your convictions. Be who you to want to be, not who they want you to be. Don't accept their enslavement, for your mother birthed you free.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_boushnak_for_these_women_reading_is_a_daring_act
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"I am multidisciplinary.As a scientist, I've been a crew commander for a NASA Mars simulation last year, and as an artist, I create multicultural community art all over the planet. And recently, I've actually been combining both. But let me first talk a little more about that NASA mission.This is the HI-SEAS program. HI-SEAS is a NASA-funded planetary surface analogue on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, and it's a research program that is specifically designed to study the effects of long-term isolation of small crews. I lived in this dome for four months with a crew of six, a very interesting experience, of course. We did all kinds of research. Our main research was actually a food study, but apart from that food study — developing a new food system for astronauts living in deep space — we also did all kinds of other research. We did extra-vehicular activities, as you can see here, wearing mock-up space suits, but we also had our chores and lots of other stuff to do, like questionnaires at the end of every day. Busy, busy work.Now, as you can imagine, it's quite challenging to live with just a small group of people in a small space for a long time. There's all kinds of psychological challenges: how to keep a team together in these circumstances; how to deal with the warping of time you start to sense when you're living in these circumstances; sleep problems that arise; etc. But also we learned a lot. I learned a lot about how individual crew members actually cope with a situation like this; how you can keep a crew productive and happy, for example, giving them a good deal of autonomy is a good trick to do that; and honestly, I learned a lot about leadership, because I was a crew commander.So doing this mission, I really started thinking more deeply about our future in outer space. We will venture into outer space, and we will start inhabiting outer space. I have no doubt about it. It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen nevertheless. So I came up with a new art project called Seeker. And the Seeker project is actually challenging communities all over the world to come up with starship prototypes that re-envision human habitation and survival. That's the core of the project.Now, one important thing: This is not a dystopian project. This is not about, ""Oh my God, the world is going wrong and we have to escape because we need another future somewhere else."" No, no. The project is basically inviting people to take a step away from earthbound constraints and, as such, reimagine our future. And it's really helpful, and it works really well, so that's really the important part of what we're doing.Now, in this project, I'm using a cocreation approach, which is a slightly different approach from what you would expect from many artists. I'm essentially dropping a basic idea into a group, into a community, people start gravitating to the idea, and together, we shape  and build the artwork. It's a little bit like termites, really. We just work together, and even, for example, when architects visit what we're doing, sometimes they have a bit of a hard time understanding how we build without a master plan. We always come up with these fantastic large-scale scupltures that actually we can also inhabit. The first version was done in Belgium and Holland. It was built with a team of almost 50 people. This is the second iteration of that same project, but in Slovenia, in a different country, and the new group was like, we're going  to do the architecture differently. So they took away the architecture, they kept the base of the artwork, and they built an entirely new, much more biomorphic architecture on top of that. And that's another crucial part of the project. It's an evolving artwork, evolving architecture. This was the last version that was just presented a few weeks ago in Holland, which was using caravans  as modules to build a starship. We bought some second-hand caravans, cut them open, and reassembled them into a starship.Now, when we're thinking about starships, we're not just approaching it as a technological challenge. We're really looking at it as a combination of three systems: ecology, people and technology. So there's always a strong ecological component in the project. Here you can see aquaponic systems that are actually surrounding the astronauts, so they're constantly in contact with part of the food that they're eating.Now, a very typical thing for this project is that we run our own isolation missions inside these art and design projects. We actually lock ourselves up for multiple days on end, and test what we build. And this is, for example, on the right hand side you can see an isolation mission in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in Slovenia, where six artists and designers locked themselves up — I was part of that — for four days inside the museum. And, of course, obviously, this is a very performative and very strong experience for all of us.Now, the next version of the project is currently being developed together with Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran, who is also a TED Fellow, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a magical place. First of all, it's really considered a Mars analogue. It really does look like Mars in certain locations and has been used by NASA to test equipment. And it has a long history of being connected to space through observations of the stars. It's now home to ALMA, the large telescope that's being developed there. But also, it's the driest location on the planet, and that makes it extremely interesting to build our project, because suddenly, sustainability is something we have to explore fully. We have no other option, so I'm very curious to see what's going to happen.Now, a specific thing for this particular version of the project is that I'm very interested to see how we can connect with the local population, the native population. These people have been living there for a very long time and can be considered experts in sustainability, and so I'm very interested to see what we can learn from them, and have an input of indigenous knowledge into space exploration.So we're trying to redefine how we look at our future in outer space by exploring integration, biology, technology and people; by using a cocreation approach; and by using and exploring local traditions and to see how we can learn from the past and integrate that into our deep future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/angelo_vermeulen_how_to_go_to_space_without_having_to_go_to_space
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"An 18-year-old, African-American male joined the United States Air Force and was assigned to Mountain Home  Air Force Base and was a part of the air police squadron. Upon first arriving there, the first goal that I had was for me to identify an apartment, so I could bring my wife  and my new baby, Melanie, out to join me in Idaho.I immediately went to  the personnel office, and talking with the guys in personnel, they said, ""Hey, no problem finding  an apartment in Mountain Home, Idaho. The people down there love us  because they know if they have an airman who is coming in to rent  one of their apartments, they'll always get their money."" And that was a really important thing. He said, ""So here is a list  of people that you can call, and then they will then allow you  to select the apartment that you want."" So I got the list; I made the call. The lady answered on the other end and I told her what I wanted. She said, ""Oh, great you called. We have four or five apartments available right now."" She said, ""Do you want  a one-bedroom or two-bedroom?"" Then she said, ""Let's not talk about that. Just come on down,  select the apartment that you want. We'll sign the contract and you'll have keys in your hand to get your family out here right away.""So I was excited. I jumped in my car. I went downtown and knocked on the door. When I knocked on the door,  the woman came to the door, and she looked at me, and she said, ""Can I help you?"" I said, ""Yes, I'm the person  who called about the apartments. I was just coming down  to make my selection."" She said, ""You know what?  I'm really sorry, but my husband rented those apartments and didn't tell me about them."" I said, ""You mean he rented  all five of them in one hour?"" She didn't give me a response, and what she said was this: She said, ""Why don't you leave your number, and if we have some openings,  I'll give you a call?"" Needless to say, I did not get a call from her. Nor did I get any responses  from the other people that they gave me on the list where I could get apartments.So as a result of that, and feeling rejected, I went back to the base, and I talked to the squadron commander. His name was McDow, Major McDow. I said, ""Major McDow, I need your help."" I told him what happened,  and here's what he said to me: He said, ""James, I would love to help you. But you know the problem: We can't make people rent to folks  that they don't want to rent to. And besides, we have a great relationship with people in the community and we really don't want to damage that."" He said, ""So maybe this is  what you should do. Why don't you let your family stay home, because you do know  that you get a 30-day leave. So once a year, you can go home to your family, spend 30 days and then come on back.""Needless to say, that didn't resonate for me. So after leaving him,  I went back to personnel, and talking to the clerk, he said, ""Jim, I think I have a  solution for you. There's an airman who is leaving and he has a trailer. If you noticed, in Mountain Home, there are trailer parks and trailers all over the place. You can buy his trailer, and you'd probably get a really good deal because he wants to get out of town as soon as possible. And that would take care of your problem, and that would provide  the solution for you."" So I immediately jumped in my car, went downtown, saw the trailer — it was a small trailer, but under the circumstances, I figured that was the  best thing that I could do. So I bought the trailer. And then I asked him,  ""Can I just leave the trailer here, and that would take care  of all my problems, I wouldn't have to find another trailer park?"" He said, ""Before I say yes to that,  I need to check with management."" So I get back to the base, he called me back and management said, ""No, you can't leave the trailer here because we had promised that slot to some other people."" And that was strange to me because there were several  other slots that were open, but it just so happened that he  had promised that slot to someone else.So, what I did — and he said, ""You shouldn't worry, Jim, because there are a lot of trailer parks."" So I put out another exhaustive list of going to trailer parks. I went to one after another,  after another. And I got the same kind of rejection there that I received when I was looking  for the apartment. And as a result, the kind of comments that they made to me, in addition to saying that they didn't have any slots open, one person said, ""Jim, the reason why we can't rent to you, we already have a Negro family in the trailer park."" He said, ""And it's not me,  because I like you people."" (Laughs) And that's what I did, too. I chuckled, too. He said, ""But here's the problem: If I let you in, the other tenants  will move out and I can't afford to take that kind of a hit."" He said, ""I just can't rent to you.""Even though that was discouraging, it didn't stop me. I kept looking, and I looked at the far end  of the town in Mountain Home, and there was a small trailer park. I mean, a really small trailer park. It didn't have any paved roads in it, it didn't have the concrete slabs, it didn't have fencing to portion off your trailer slot  from other trailer slots. It didn't have a laundry facility. But the conclusion I reached  at that moment was that I didn't have  a lot of other options. So I called my wife, and I said, ""We're going to make this one work."" And we moved into it and we became homeowners in Mountain Home, Idaho. And of course, eventually things settled down.Four years after that, I received papers to move from Mountain Home, Idaho to a place called Goose Bay, Labrador. We won't even talk about that. It was another great location. (Laughter) So my challenge then was to get my family  from Mountain Home, Idaho to Sharon, Pennsylvania. That wasn't a problem because we had just purchased a brand-new automobile. My mother called  and said she'll fly out. She'll be with us as we drive, she'll help us manage the children. So she came out, her and Alice  put a lot of food together for the trip.That morning, we left at about 5 a.m. Great trip, having a great time,  good conversation. Somewhere around 6:30, 7 o'clock, we got a little bit tired, and we said, ""Why don't we get a motel so that we can rest and then have an early start in the morning?"" So we were looking at a number  of the motels as we drove down the road, and we saw one, it was a great big, bright flashing light that said, ""Vacancies, Vacancies, Vacanies."" So we stopped in. They were in the parking lot,  I went inside. When I walked inside, the lady was just finishing up  one contract with some folks, some other people  were coming in behind me. And so I walked to the counter, and she said, ""How can I help you?"" I said, ""I would like to get a motel  for the evening for my family."" She said, ""You know, I'm really sorry, I just rented the last one. We will not have any more  until the morning."" She said, ""But if you go down the road about an hour, 45 minutes, there's another trailer park down there."" I said, ""Yeah, but you still have the  'Vacancies' light on, and it's flashing."" She said, ""Oh, I forgot."" And she reached over  and turned the light off. She looked at me and I looked at her. There were other people in the room. She kind of looked at them. No one said anything. So I just got the hint and I left, and went outside to the parking lot. And I told my mother and I told my wife and also Melanie, and I said, ""It looks like we're going to have to drive a little bit further down the road to be able to sleep tonight."" And we did drive down the road, but just before we took off  and pulled out of the parking lot, guess what happened? The light came back on. And it said, ""Vacancies,  Vacancies, Vacancies."" We were able to find a nice place. It wasn't our preference, but it was secure and it was clean. And so we had a great sleep that night.The piece that's important about that is that we had similar kinds of experiences from Idaho all the way through  to Pennsylvania, where we were rejected from hotels,  motels and restaurants. But we made it to Pennsylvania. We got the family settled. Everyone was glad to see the kids. I jumped on a plane and shot off to Goose Bay, Labrador, which is another story, right? (Laughter)Here it is, 53 years later, I now have nine grandchildren,  two great-grandchildren. Five of the grandchildren are boys. I have master's, Ph.D., undergrad, one in medical school. I have a couple that are trending. They're almost there but not quite. (Laughter) I have one who has been  in college now for eight years. (Laughter) He doesn't have a degree yet,  but he wants to be a comedian. So we're just trying to get him to stay in school. Because you never know, just because you're funny at home, does not make you a comedian, right? (Laughter) But the thing about it,  they're all good kids — no drugs, no babies  in high school, no crime.So with that being the backdrop, I was sitting in my TV room watching TV, and they were talking about Ferguson and all the hullabaloo that was going on. And all of a sudden, one of the news  commentators got on the air and she said, ""In the last three months, eight unarmed African-American males have been killed by police, white homeowners, or white citizens."" For some reason, at that moment it just all hit me. I said, ""What is it? It is so insane. What is the hatred that's causing people  to do these kinds of things?""Just then, one of my grandsons called. He said, ""Granddad, did you hear what they said on TV?"" I said, ""Yes, I did."" He said, ""I'm just so confused. We do everything we do, but it seems that driving while black, walking while black, talking while black, it's just dangerous. What can we do? We do everything that you told us to do. When stopped by the police, we place both hands on the steering wheel at the 12 o'clock position. If asked to get identification, we tell them, 'I am slowly reaching over  into the glove compartment to get my I.D.' When pulled out of the car to be searched, when laid on the ground to be searched, when our trunks are opened to be searched, we don't push back, we don't challenge because we know, you've told us, 'Don't you challenge the police. After it's over, call us and we'll be the ones to challenge.""He said, ""And this is the piece  that really bugs me: Our white friends, our buddies, we kind of hang together. When they hear about these kinds of things happening to us, they say, 'Why do you take it? You need to push back. You need to challenge. You need to ask them  for their identification.'"" And here's what the boys have been taught to tell them: ""We know that you can do that, but please do not do that while we're in the car because the consequences for you are significantly different than the consequences for us.""And so as a grandparent,  what do I tell my grandsons? How do I keep them safe? How do I keep them alive? As a result of this, people have come to me and said, ""Jim, are you angry?"" And my response to that is this: ""I don't have the luxury of being angry, and I also know the consequences  of being enraged.""So therefore, the only thing that I can do is take my collective intellect and my energy and my ideas and my experiences and dedicate myself to challenge,  at any point in time, anything that looks  like it might be racist. So the first thing I have  to do is to educate, the second thing I have to do  is to unveil racism, and the last thing I need to do is do everything within my power to eradicate racism in my lifetime by any means necessary.The second thing I do is this: I want to appeal to Americans. I want to appeal to their humanity, to their dignity, to their civic pride and ownership to be able to not react to these  heinous crimes in an adverse manner. But instead, to elevate your level of societal knowledge, your level of societal awareness and societal consciousness to then collectively come together, all of us come together, to make sure that we speak out against and we challenge any kind of insanity, any kind of insanity that makes it  okay to kill unarmed people, regardless of their ethnicity, regardless of their race, regardless of their diversity makeup.We have to challenge that. It doesn't make any sense. The only way I think we can do that is through a collective. We need to have black and white  and Asian and Hispanic just to step forward and say, ""We are not going to accept  that kind of behavior anymore.""","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_a_white_sr_the_little_problem_i_had_renting_a_house
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"We humans have always been very concerned about the health of our bodies, but we haven't always been that good at figuring out what's important. Take the ancient Egyptians, for example: very concerned about the body parts they thought they'd need in the afterlife, but they left some parts out. This part, for example. Although they very carefully  preserved the stomach, the lungs, the liver, and so forth, they just mushed up the brain, drained it out through the nose, and threw it away, which makes sense, really, because what does a brain do for us anyway? But imagine if there were a kind of neglected organ in our bodies that weighed just as much as the brain and in some ways was just as important to who we are, but we knew so little about and treated with such disregard. And imagine if, through new scientific advances, we were just beginning to understand its importance to how we think of ourselves. Wouldn't you want to know more about it?Well, it turns out that we do have something just like that: our gut, or rather, its microbes. But it's not just the microbes in our gut that are important. Microbes all over our body turn out to be really critical to a whole range of differences that make different people who we are. So for example, have you ever noticed how some people get bitten by mosquitos way more often than others?It turns out that everyone's anecdotal experience out camping is actually true. For example, I seldom get bitten by mosquitos, but my partner Amanda attracts them in droves, and the reason why is that we have different microbes on our skin that produce different chemicals that the mosquitos detect.Now, microbes are also really important in the field of medicine. So, for example, what microbes you have in your gut determine whether particular painkillers are toxic to your liver. They also determine whether or not other drugs will work for your heart condition. And, if you're a fruit fly, at least, your microbes determine who you want to have sex with. We haven't demonstrated this in humans yet but maybe it's just a matter of time before we find out. (Laughter)So microbes are performing a huge range of functions. They help us digest our food. They help educate our immune system. They help us resist disease, and they may even be affecting our behavior. So what would a map of all these microbial communities look like? Well, it wouldn't look exactly like this, but it's a helpful guide for understanding biodiversity. Different parts of the world have different landscapes of organisms that are immediately characteristic of one place or another or another. With microbiology, it's kind of the same, although I've got to be honest with you: All the microbes essentially look the same under a microscope. So instead of trying to identify them visually, what we do is we look at their DNA sequences, and in a project called the Human Microbiome Project, NIH funded this $173 million project where hundreds  of researchers came together to map out all the A's, T's, G's, and C's, and all of these microbes in the human body. So when we take them together, they look like this. It's a bit more difficult to tell who lives where now, isn't it?What my lab does is develop computational techniques that allow us to take all these terabytes of sequence data and turn them into something that's a bit more useful as a map, and so when we do that with the human microbiome data from 250 healthy volunteers, it looks like this. Each point here represents all the complex microbes in an entire microbial community. See, I told you they basically all look the same. So what we're looking at is each point represents one microbial community from one body site of one healthy volunteer. And so you can see that there's different parts of the map in different colors, almost like separate continents. And what it turns out to be is that those, as the different regions of the body, have very different microbes in them. So what we have is we have the oral community up there in green. Over on the other side, we have the skin community in blue, the vaginal community in purple, and then right down at the bottom, we have the fecal community in brown. And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. So this is incredible when you think about it. What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth.And this is not to say that two people  look basically the same in the same body habitat, either. So you probably heard that we're pretty much all the same in terms of our human DNA. You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest.So these different microbes have all these different kinds  of functions that I told you about, everything from digesting food to involvement in different kinds of diseases, metabolizing drugs, and so forth. So how do they do all this stuff? Well, in part it's because although there's just three pounds of those microbes in our gut, they really outnumber us. And so how much do they outnumber us? Well, it depends on what you think of as our bodies. Is it our cells? Well, each of us consists of about 10 trillion human cells, but we harbor as many as 100 trillion microbial cells. So they outnumber us 10 to one. Now, you might think, well, we're human because of our DNA, but it turns out that each of us has about 20,000 human genes, depending on what you count exactly, but as many as two million to 20 million microbial genes. So whichever way we look at it, we're vastly outnumbered by our microbial symbionts. And it turns out that in addition  to traces of our human DNA, we also leave traces of our microbial DNA on everything we touch. We showed in a study a few years ago that you can actually match the palm of someone's hand up to the computer mouse that they use routinely with up to 95 percent accuracy. So this came out in a scientific journal a few years ago, but more importantly, it was featured on ""CSI: Miami,"" so you really know it's true. (Laughter)So where do our microbes come from in the first place? Well if, as I do, you have dogs or kids, you probably have some dark suspicions about that, all of which are true, by the way. So just like we can match you to your computer equipment by the microbes you share, we can also match you up to your dog. But it turns out that in adults, microbial communities are relatively stable, so even if you live together with someone, you'll maintain your separate microbial identity over a period of weeks, months, even years.It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome.When my own daughter was born a couple of years ago by emergency C-section, we took matters into our own hands and made sure she was coated with those vaginal microbes that she would have gotten naturally. Now, it's really difficult to tell whether this has had an effect on her health specifically, right? With a sample size of just one child, no matter how much we love her, you don't really have enough of a sample size to figure out what happens on average, but at two years old, she hasn't had an ear infection yet, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on that one. And what's more, we're starting to do clinical trials with more children to figure out whether this has a protective effect generally.So how we're born has a tremendous effect on what microbes we have initially, but where do we go after that? What I'm showing you again here is this map of the Human Microbiome Project Data, so each point represents a sample from one body site from one of 250 healthy adults. And you've seen children develop physically. You've seen them develop mentally. Now, for the first time, you're going to see one of my colleague's children develop microbially. So what we are going to look at is we're going to look  at this one baby's stool, the fecal community, which represents the gut, sampled every week for almost two and a half years. And so we're starting on day one. What's going to happen is that the infant is going to start off as this yellow dot, and you can see that he's starting off basically in the vaginal community, as we would expect from his delivery mode. And what's going to happen over these two and a half years is that he's going to travel  all the way down to resemble the adult fecal community from healthy volunteers down at the bottom. So I'm just going to start this going and we'll see how that happens.What you can see, and remember each step in this is just one week, what you can see is that week to week, the change in the microbial community of the feces of this one child, the differences week to week are much greater than the differences between individual healthy adults in the Human Microbiome Project cohort, which are those brown dots down at the bottom. And you can see he's starting to approach the adult fecal community. This is up to about two years. But something amazing is about to happen here. So he's getting antibiotics for an ear infection. What you can see is this huge change in the community, followed by a relatively rapid recovery. I'll just rewind that for you. And what we can see is that just over these few weeks, we have a much more radical change, a setback of many months  of normal development, followed by a relatively rapid recovery, and by the time he reaches day 838, which is the end of this video, you can see that he has essentially reached the healthy adult stool community, despite that antibiotic intervention.So this is really interesting because it raises fundamental questions about what happens when we intervene at different ages in a child's life. So does what we do early on, where the microbiome is changing so rapidly, actually matter, or is it like throwing a stone into a stormy sea, where the ripples will just be lost? Well, fascinatingly, it turns out that if you give children antibiotics in the first six months of life, they're more likely to become obese later on than if they don't get antibiotics then or only get them later, and so what we do early on may have profound impacts on the gut microbial community and on later health that we're only beginning to understand. So this is fascinating, because one day, in addition to the effects that antibiotics have on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are very important, they may also be degrading our gut microbial ecosystems, and so one day we may come to regard antibiotics with the same horror that we currently reserve for those metal tools that the Egyptians used to use to mush up the brains before they drained them out for embalming.So I mentioned that microbes have all these important functions, and they've also now, just over the past few years, been connected to a whole range of different diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, colon cancer, and even obesity. Obesity has a really  large effect, as it turns out, and today, we can tell whether you're lean or obese with 90 percent accuracy by looking at the microbes in your gut. Now, although that might sound impressive, in some ways it's a little bit problematic as a medical test, because you can probably tell which of these people is obese without knowing anything about their gut microbes, but it turns out that even if we sequence their complete genomes and had all their human DNA, we could only predict which one was obese with about 60 percent accuracy. So that's amazing, right? What it means that the three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you may be more important for some health conditions than every single gene in your genome.And then in mice, we can do a lot more. So in mice, microbes have been linked to all kinds of additional conditions, including things like multiple sclerosis, depression, autism, and again, obesity. But how can we tell whether these microbial differences that correlate with disease are cause or effect? Well, one thing we can do is we can raise some mice without any microbes of their own in a germ-free bubble. Then we can add in some microbes that we think are important, and see what happens. When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them  from a regular mouse. Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them  eat as much as they want.So this is really remarkable, right? The implication is that microbes can affect mammalian behavior. So you might be wondering whether we can  also do this sort of thing across species, and it turns out that if you take microbes from an obese person and transplant them into mice you've raised germ-free, those mice will also become fatter than if they received the microbes from a lean person, but we can design a microbial community that we inoculate them with that prevents them from gaining this weight.We can also do this for malnutrition. So in a project funded by the Gates Foundation, what we're looking at is children in Malawi who have kwashiorkor, a profound form of malnutrition, and mice that get the kwashiorkor community transplanted into them lose 30 percent of their body mass in just three weeks, but we can restore their health by using  the same peanut butter-based supplement that is used for  the children in the clinic, and the mice that receive the community from the healthy identical twins of the kwashiorkor children do fine. This is truly amazing because it suggests that we can pilot therapies by trying them out in a whole bunch of different mice with individual people's gut communities and perhaps tailor those therapies all the way down to the individual level.So I think it's really important that everyone has a chance to participate in this discovery. So, a couple of years ago, we started this project called American Gut, which allows you to claim a place  for yourself on this microbial map. This is now the largest crowd-funded science project that we know of — over 8,000 people have signed up at this point. What happens is, they send in their samples, we sequence the DNA of their microbes and then release the results back to them. We also release them, de-identified, to scientists, to educators, to interested members of the general public, and so forth, so anyone can have access to the data. On the other hand, when we do tours of our lab at the BioFrontiers Institute, and we explain that we use robots and lasers to look at poop, it turns out that not everyone wants to know. (Laughter) But I'm guessing that many of you do, and so I brought some kits here if you're interested in trying this out for yourself.So why might we want to do this? Well, it turns out that microbes are not just important for finding out where we are in terms of our health, but they can actually cure disease. This is one of the newest things we've been able to visualize with colleagues  at the University of Minnesota. So here's that map of the human microbiome again. What we're looking at now — I'm going to add in the community of some people with C. diff. So, this is a terrible form of diarrhea where you have to go up to 20 times a day, and these people have failed antibiotic therapy for two years before they're eligible for this trial. So what would happen if we transplanted some of the stool from a healthy donor, that star down at the bottom, into these patients. Would the good microbes do battle with the bad microbes and help to restore their health? So let's watch exactly what happens there. Four of those patients are about to get a transplant from that healthy donor at the bottom, and what you can see is that immediately, you have this radical change in the gut community. So one day after you do that transplant, all those symptoms clear up, the diarrhea vanishes, and they're essentially healthy again, coming to resemble the donor's community, and they stay there. (Applause)So we're just at the beginning of this discovery. We're just finding out that microbes have implications for all these different kinds of diseases, ranging from inflammatory  bowel disease to obesity, and perhaps even autism and depression. What we need to do, though, is we need to develop a kind of microbial GPS, where we don't just know where we are currently but also where we want to go and what we need to do in order to get there, and we need to be able to make this simple enough that even a child can use it. (Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_knight_how_our_microbes_make_us_who_we_are
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"While preparing for my talk I was reflecting on my life and trying to figure out where exactly was that moment when my journey began. A long time passed by, and I simply couldn't figure out the beginning or the middle or the end of my story. I always used to think that my beginning was one afternoon in my community when my mother had told me that I had escaped three arranged marriages by the time I was two. Or one evening when electricity had failed for eight hours in our community, and my dad sat, surrounded by all of us, telling us stories of when he was a little kid struggling to go to school while his father, who was a farmer, wanted him to work in the fields with him. Or that dark night when I was 16 when three little kids had come to me and they whispered in my ear that my friend was murdered in something called the honor killings.But then I realized that, as much as I know that these moments have contributed on my journey, they have influenced my journey but they have not been the beginning of it, but the true beginning of my journey was in front of a mud house in upper Sindh of Pakistan, where my father held the hand of my 14-year-old mother and they decided to walk out of the village to go to a town where they could send their kids to school. In a way, I feel like my life is kind of a result of some wise choices and decisions they've made.And just like that, another of their decisions was to keep me and my siblings connected to our roots. While we were living in a community I fondly remember as called Ribabad, which means community of the poor, my dad made sure that we also had a house in our rural homeland. I come from an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Balochistan called Brahui. Brahui, or Brohi, means mountain dweller, and it is also my language. Thanks to my father's very strict rules about connecting to our customs, I had to live a beautiful life of songs,  cultures, traditions, stories, mountains, and a lot of sheep. But then, living in two extremes between the traditions  of my culture, of my village, and then modern education in my school wasn't easy. I was aware that I was the only girl who got to have such freedom, and I was guilty of it. While going to school in Karachi and Hyderabad, a lot of my cousins and childhood friends were getting married off, some to older men, some in exchange, some even as second wives. I got to see the beautiful tradition and its magic fade in front of me when I saw that the birth of a girl child was celebrated with sadness, when women were told to have patience as their main virtue.Up until I was 16, I healed my sadness by crying, mostly at nights  when everyone would sleep and I would sob in my pillow, until that one night  when I found out my friend was killed in the name of honor.Honor killings is a custom where men and women are suspected of having relationships before or outside of the marriage, and they're killed by their family for it. Usually the killer is the brother or father or the uncle in the family. The U.N. reports there are about 1,000 honor murders every year in Pakistan, and these are only the reported cases.A custom that kills did not make any sense to me, and I knew I had to do something about it this time. I was not going to cry myself to sleep. I was going to do something, anything, to stop it. I was 16 — I started writing poetry and going door to door telling everybody about honor killings and why it happens, why it should be stopped, and raising awareness about it until I actually found a much, much  better way to handle this issue.In those days, we were living in a very small, one-roomed house in Karachi. Every year, during the monsoon seasons, our house would flood up with water — rainwater and sewage — and my mom and dad would be taking the water out. In those days, my dad brought home a huge machine, a computer. It was so big it looked as if it was going to take up half of the only room we had, and had so many pieces and wires that needed to be connected. But it was still the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me and my sisters. My oldest brother Ali got to be in charge of taking care of the computer, and all of us were given 10 to 15 minutes every day to use it. Being the oldest of eight kids, I got to use it the last, and that was after I had washed the dishes, cleaned the house, made dinner with my mom, and put blankets on the floor for everyone to sleep, and after that,  I would run to the computer, connect it to the Internet, and have pure joy and wonder for 10 to 15 minutes.In those days, I had discovered a website called Joogle. [Google] (Laughter) In my frantic wish to do something about this custom, I made use of Google and discovered Facebook, a website where people can connect to anyone around the world, and so, from my very tiny, cement-roofed room in Karachi, I connected with people in the U.K., the U.S., Australia and Canada, and created a campaign called WAKE UP Campaign against Honor Killings. It became enormous in just a few months. I got a lot of support from all around the world. Media was connecting to us. A lot of people were reaching out trying to raise awareness with us. It became so big that it went from online to the streets of my hometown, where we would do rallies and strikes trying to change the policies  in Pakistan for women's support. And while I thought everything was perfect, my team — which was basically my friends and neighbors at that time — thought everything was going so well, we had no idea a big opposition was coming to us.My community stood up against us, saying we were spreading un-Islamic behavior. We were challenging centuries-old customs in those communities. I remember my father receiving anonymous letters saying, ""Your daughter  is spreading Western culture in the honorable societies."" Our car was stoned at one point. One day I went to the office and found our metal signboard wrinkled and broken as if a lot of people had been hitting it with something heavy. Things got so bad that I had to hide myself in many ways. I would put up the windows of the car, veil my face, not speak while I was in public, but eventually situations got worse when my life was threatened, and I had to leave, back to Karachi, and our actions stopped.Back in Karachi, as an 18-year-old, I thought this was the biggest failure of my entire life. I was devastated. As a teenager, I was blaming myself for everything that happened. And it turns out, when we started reflecting, we did realize that it was actually me and my team's fault.There were two big reasons why our campaign had failed big time. One of those, the first reason, is we were standing against core values of people. We were saying no to something that was very important to them, challenging their code of honor, and hurting them deeply in the process. And number two, which was very important for me to learn, and amazing, and surprising for me to learn, was that we were not including the true heroes who should be fighting for themselves. The women in the villages had no idea we were fighting for them in the streets. Every time I would go back, I would find my cousins and friends with scarves on their faces, and I would ask, ""What happened?"" And they'd be like,  ""Our husbands beat us."" But we are working in the streets for you! We are changing the policies. How is that not impacting their life?So then we found out something which was very amazing for us. The policies of a country do not necessarily always affect the tribal and rural communities. It was devastating — like, oh, we can't actually do something about this? And we found out there's a huge gap when it comes to official policies and the real truth on the ground.So this time, we were like, we are going to do something different. We are going to use strategy, and we are going to go back and apologize. Yes, apologize. We went back to the communities and we said we are  very ashamed of what we did. We are here to apologize, and in fact, we are here to make it up to you. How do we do that? We are going to promote three of your main cultures. We know that it's music, language, and embroidery.Nobody believed us. Nobody wanted to work with us. It took a lot of convincing and discussions with these communities until they agreed that we are going to promote their language by making a booklet of their stories, fables and old tales in the tribe, and we would promote their music by making a CD of the songs from the tribe, and some drumbeating. And the third, which was my favorite, was we would promote their embroidery by making a center in the village where women would come every day to make embroidery.And so it began. We worked with one village, and we started our first center. It was a beautiful day. We started the center. Women were coming to make embroidery, and going through a life-changing process of education, learning about their rights, what Islam says about their rights, and enterprise development, how they can create money, and then how they can create money from money, how they can fight the customs that have been destroying their lives from so many centuries, because in Islam, in reality, women are supposed to be shoulder to shoulder with men. Women have so much status that we have not been hearing, that they have not been hearing, and we needed to tell them that they need to know where their rights are and how to take them by themselves, because they can do it and we can't.So this was the model which actually came out — very amazing. Through embroidery we were promoting their traditions. We went into the village. We would mobilize the community. We would make a center inside where 30 women will come for six months to learn about value addition of traditional embroidery, enterprise development, life skills and basic education, and about their rights and how to say no to those customs and how to stand as leaders for themselves and the society. After six months, we would connect these women to loans and to markets where they can become local entrepreneurs in their communities.We soon called this project Sughar. Sughar is a local word used in many, many languages in Pakistan. It means skilled and confident women. I truly believe, to create women leaders, there's only one thing you have to do: Just let them know that they have what it takes to be a leader. These women you see here, they have strong skills and potential to be leaders. All we had to do was remove the barriers that surrounded them, and that's what we decided to do.But then while we were thinking everything was going well, once again everything was fantastic, we found our next setback: A lot of men started seeing the visible changes in their wife. She's speaking more, she's making decisions — oh my gosh, she's handling  everything in the house. They stopped them from coming to the centers, and this time, we were like, okay, time for strategy two. We went to the fashion  industry in Pakistan and decided to do research about what happens there. Turns out the fashion industry in Pakistan is very strong and growing day by day, but there is less contribution from the tribal areas and to the tribal areas, especially women.So we decided to launch our first ever tribal women's very own fashion brand, which is now called Nomads. And so women started earning more, they started contributing more financially to the house, and men had to think again before saying no to them when they were coming to the centers.(Applause) Thank you, thank you.In 2013, we launched our first Sughar Hub instead of a center. We partnered with TripAdvisor and created a cement hall in the middle of a village and invited so many other organizations to work over there. We created this platform for the nonprofits so they can touch and work on the other issues that Sughar is not working on, which would be an easy place  for them to give trainings, use it as a farmer school, even as a marketplace, and anything they want to use it for, and they have been doing really amazingly. And so far, we have been able to support 900 women in 24 villages around Pakistan. (Applause)But that's actually not what I want. My dream is to reach out to one million women in the next 10 years, and to make sure that happens, this year we launched Sughar Foundation in the U.S. It is not just going to fund Sughar but many other organizations in Pakistan to replicate the idea and to find even more innovative ways to unleash the rural women's potential in Pakistan.Thank you so much.(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.Chris Anderson: Khalida, you are quite the force of nature. I mean, this story, in many ways, just seems beyond belief. It's incredible that someone so young could do achieve this much through so much force and ingenuity. So I guess one question: This is a spectacular dream to reach out and empower a million women — how much of the current  success depends on you, the force of this magnetic personality? How does it scale?Khalida Brohi: I think my job is to give the inspiration out, give my dream out. I can't teach how to do it, because there are so many different ways. We have been experimenting with three ways only. There are a hundred different ways to unleash potential in women. I would just give the inspiration and that's my job. I will keep doing it. Sughar will still be growing. We are planning to reach out to two more villages, and soon I believe  we will be scaling out of Pakistan into South Asia and beyond.CA: I love that when you talked about your team in the talk, I mean, you were all 18 at the time. What did this team look like? This was school friends, right?KB: Do people here believe that I'm at an age where I'm supposed to be a grandmother in my village? My mom was married at nine, and I am the oldest woman not married and not doing anything in my life in my village.CA: Wait, wait, wait, not doing anything?KB: No. CA: You're right.KB: People feel sorry for me, a lot of times.CA: But how much time are you spending now actually back in Balochistan? KB: I live over there. We live between, still, Karachi and Balochistan. My siblings are all going to school. I am still the oldest of eight siblings.CA: But what you're doing is definitely threatening to some people there. How do you handle safety? Do you feel safe? Are there issues there?KB: This question has come to me a lot of times before, and I feel like the word ""fear"" just comes to me and then drops, but there is one fear that I have that is different from that. The fear is that if I get killed, what would happen to the people who love me so much? My mom waits for me till late at night that I should come home. My sisters want to learn so much from me, and there are many, many girls in my community who want to talk to me and ask me different things, and I recently got engaged. (Laughs) (Applause)CA: Is he here? You've got to stand up. (Applause)KB: Escaping arranged marriages, I chose my own husband across the world in L.A., a really different world. I had to fight for a whole year. That's totally a different story. But I think that's the only thing that I'm afraid of, and I don't want my mom to not see anyone when she waits in the night.CA: So people who want to help you on their way, they can go on, they can maybe buy some of these clothes that you're bringing over that are actually made, the embroidery is done back in Balochistan?KB: Yeah.CA: Or they can get involved in the foundation.KB: Definitely. We are looking for as many people as we can, because now that the foundation's in the beginning process, I am trying to learn a lot about how to operate, how to get funding or reach out to more organizations, and especially in the e-commerce, which is very new for me. I mean, I am not a fashion person, believe me.CA: Well, it's been incredible to have you here. Please go on being courageous, go on being smart, and please stay safe.KB: Thank you so much. CA: Thank you, Khalida. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/khalida_brohi_how_i_work_to_protect_women_from_honor_killings
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"One of the first patients I had to see as a pediatrician was Sol, a beautiful month-old baby who was admitted with signs of a severe respiratory infection. Until then, I had never seen a patient worsen so fast. In just two days she was connected to a respirator and on the third day she died. Sol had whooping cough. After discussing the case in the room and after a quite distressing catharsis, I remember my chief resident said to me, ""Okay, take a deep breath. Wash your face. And now comes the hardest part: We have to go talk to her parents."" At that time, a thousand questions came to mind, from, ""How could a one-month-old baby be so unfortunate?"" to, ""Could we have done something about it?""Before vaccines existed, many infectious diseases killed millions of people per year. During the 1918 flu pandemic 50 million people died. That's greater than Argentina's current population. Perhaps, the older ones among you remember the polio epidemic that occurred in Argentina in 1956. At that time, there was no vaccine available against polio. People didn't know what to do. They were going crazy. They would go painting trees with caustic lime. They'd put little bags of camphor in their children's underwear, as if that could do something. During the polio epidemic, thousands of people died. And thousands of people were left with very significant neurological damage. I know this because I read about it, because thanks to vaccines, my generation was lucky to not live through an epidemic as terrible as this.Vaccines are one of the great successes of the 20th century's public health. After potable water, they are the interventions that have most reduced mortality, even more than antibiotics. Vaccines eradicated terrible diseases such as smallpox from the planet and succeeded in significantly reducing mortality due to other diseases such as measles, whooping cough, polio and many more.All these diseases are considered vaccine-preventable diseases. What does this mean? That they are potentially preventable, but in order to be so, something must be done. You need to get vaccinated. I imagine that most, if not all of us here today, received a vaccine at some point in our life. Now, I'm not so sure that many of us know which vaccines or boosters we should receive after adolescence. Have you ever wondered who we are protecting when we vaccinate? What do I mean by that? Is there any other effect beyond protecting ourselves?Let me show you something. Imagine for a moment that we are in a city that has never had a case of a particular disease, such as the measles. This would mean that no one in the city has ever had contact with the disease. No one has natural defenses against, nor been vaccinated against measles. If one day, a person sick with the measles appears in this city the disease won't find much resistance and will begin spreading from person to person, and in no time it will disseminate throughout the community. After a certain time a big part of the population will be ill. This happened when there were no vaccines.Now, imagine the complete opposite case. We are in a city where more than 90 percent of the population has defenses against the measles, which means that they either had the disease, survived, and developed natural defenses; or that they had been immunized against measles. If one day, a person sick with the measles appears in this city, the disease will find much more resistance and won't be transmitted that much from person to person. The spread will probably remain contained and a measles outbreak won't happen.I would like you to pay attention to something. People who are vaccinated are not only protecting themselves, but by blocking the dissemination of the disease within the community, they are indirectly protecting the people in this community who are not vaccinated. They create a kind of protective shield which prevents them from coming in contact with the disease, so that these people are protected. This indirect protection that the unvaccinated people within a community receive simply by being surrounded by vaccinated people, is called herd immunity.Many people in the community depend almost exclusively on this herd immunity to be protected against disease. The unvaccinated people you see in infographics are not just hypothetical. Those people are our nieces and nephews, our children, who may be too young to receive their first shots. They are our parents, our siblings, our acquaintances, who may have a disease, or take medication that lowers their defenses. There are also people who are allergic to a particular vaccine. They could even be among us, any of us who got vaccinated, but the vaccine didn't produce the expected effect, because not all vaccines are always 100 percent effective. All these people depend almost exclusively on herd immunity to be protected against diseases.To achieve this effect of herd immunity, it is necessary that a large percentage of the population be vaccinated. This percentage is called the threshold. The threshold depends on many variables: It depends on the germ's characteristics, and those of the immune response that the vaccine generates. But they all have something in common. If the percentage of the population in a vaccinated community is below this threshold number, the disease will begin to spread more freely and may generate an outbreak of this disease within the community. Even diseases which were  at some point controlled may reappear.This is not just a theory. This has happened, and is still happening. In 1998, a British researcher published an article in one of the most important medical journals, saying that the MMR vaccine, which is given for measles, mumps and rubella, was associated with autism. This generated an immediate impact. People began to stop getting vaccinated, and stopped vaccinating their children. And what happened? The number of people vaccinated, in many communities around the world, fell below this threshold. And there were outbreaks of measles in many cities in the world — in the U.S., in Europe. Many people got sick. People died of measles. What happened?This article also generated a huge stir within the medical community. Dozens of researchers began to assess if this was actually true. Not only could no one find a causal association between MMR and autism at the population level, but it was also found that this article had incorrect claims. Even more, it was fraudulent. It was fraudulent. In fact, the journal publicly retracted the article in 2010. One of the main concerns and excuses for not getting vaccinated are the adverse effects.Vaccines, like other drugs, can have potential adverse effects. Most are mild and temporary. But the benefits are always greater than possible complications. When we are ill, we want to heal fast. Many of us who are here take antibiotics when we have an infection, we take anti-hypertensives when we have high blood pressure, we take cardiac medications. Why? Because we are sick and we want to heal fast. And we don't question it much. Why is it so difficult to think of preventing diseases, by taking care of ourselves when we are healthy? We take care of ourselves a lot when affected by an illness, or in situations of imminent danger.I imagine most of us here, remember the influenza-A pandemic which broke out in 2009 in Argentina and worldwide. When the first cases began to come to light, we, here in Argentina, were entering the winter season. We knew absolutely nothing. Everything was a mess. People wore masks on the street, ran into pharmacies to buy alcohol gel. People would line up in pharmacies to get a vaccine, without even knowing if it was the right vaccine that would protect them against this new virus. We knew absolutely nothing. At that time, in addition to doing my fellowship at the Infant Foundation, I worked as a home pediatrician for a prepaid medicine company. I remember that I started my shift at 8 a.m., and by 8, I already had a list of 50 scheduled visits. It was chaos; people didn't know what to do. I remember the types of patients that I was examining. The patients were a little older than what we were used to seeing in winter, with longer fevers.And I mentioned that to my fellowship mentor, and he, for his part, had heard the same from a colleague, about the large number of pregnant women and young adults being hospitalized in intensive care, with hard-to-manage clinical profiles. At that time, we set out to understand what was happening. First thing Monday morning, we took the car and went to a hospital in Buenos Aires Province, that served as a referral hospital for cases of the new influenza virus. We arrived at the hospital; it was crowded. All health staff were dressed in NASA-like bio-safety suits. We all had face masks in our pockets. I, being a hypochondriac, didn't breathe for two hours. But we could see what was happening. Immediately, we started reaching out to pediatricians from six hospitals in the city and in Buenos Aires Province. Our main goal was to find out how this new virus behaved in contact with our children, in the shortest time possible. A marathon work. In less than three months, we could see what effect this new H1N1 virus had on the 251 children hospitalized by this virus. We could see which children got more seriously ill: children under four, especially those less than one year old; patients with neurological diseases; and young children with chronic pulmonary diseases. Identifying these at-risk groups was important to include them as priority groups in the recommendations for getting the influenza vaccine, not only here in Argentina, but also in other countries which the pandemic not yet reached.A year later, when a vaccine against the pandemic H1N1 virus became available, we wanted to see what happened. After a huge vaccination campaign aimed at protecting at-risk groups, these hospitals, with 93 percent of the at-risk groups vaccinated, had not hospitalized a single patient for the pandemic H1N1 virus. (Applause) In 2009: 251. In 2010: zero.Vaccination is an act of individual responsibility, but it has a huge collective impact. If I get vaccinated, not only am I protecting myself, but I am also protecting others. Sol had whooping cough. Sol was very young, and she hadn't yet received her first vaccine against whooping cough. I still wonder what would have happened if everyone around Sol had been vaccinated. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/romina_libster_the_power_of_herd_immunity
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"Six thousand miles of road, 600 miles of subway track, 400 miles of bike lanes and a half a mile of tram track, if you've ever been to Roosevelt Island.These are the numbers that make up the infrastructure of New York City. These are the statistics of our infrastructure. They're the kind of numbers you can find released in reports by city agencies. For example, the Department of Transportation will probably tell you how many miles of road they maintain. The MTA will boast how many miles of subway track there are. Most city agencies give us statistics. This is from a report this year from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, where we learn that there's about 13,500 taxis here in New York City. Pretty interesting, right? But did you ever think about where these numbers came from? Because for these numbers to exist, someone at the city agency had to stop and say, hmm, here's a number that somebody might want want to know. Here's a number  that our citizens want to know. So they go back to their raw data, they count, they add, they calculate, and then they put out reports, and those reports will have numbers like this.The problem is, how do they know all of our questions? We have lots of questions. In fact, in some ways there's literally an infinite number of questions that we can ask about our city. The agencies can never keep up. So the paradigm isn't exactly working, and I think our policymakers realize that, because in 2012, Mayor Bloomberg signed into law what he called the most ambitious and comprehensive open data legislation in the country. In a lot of ways, he's right. In the last two years,  the city has released 1,000 datasets on our open data portal, and it's pretty awesome. So you go and look at data like this, and instead of just counting the number of cabs, we can start to ask different questions.So I had a question. When's rush hour in New York City? It can be pretty bothersome. When is rush hour exactly? And I thought to myself, these cabs aren't just numbers, these are GPS recorders driving around in our city streets recording each and every ride they take. There's data there, and I looked at that data, and I made a plot of the average speed of taxis in New York City throughout the day. You can see that from about midnight to around 5:18 in the morning, speed increases, and at that point, things turn around, and they get slower and slower and slower until about 8:35 in the morning, when they end up at around 11 and a half miles per hour. The average taxi is going 11 and a half miles per hour on our city streets, and it turns out it stays that way for the entire day. (Laughter) So I said to myself, I guess there's no rush hour in New York City. There's just a rush day. Makes sense. And this is important for a couple of reasons. If you're a transportation planner, this might be pretty interesting to know. But if you want to get somewhere quickly, you now know to set your alarm for 4:45 in the morning and you're all set. New York, right?But there's a story behind this data. This data wasn't just available, it turns out. It actually came from something called a Freedom of Information Law Request, or a FOIL Request. This is a form you can find on the Taxi and Limousine Commission website. In order to access this data, you need to go get this form, fill it out, and they will notify you, and a guy named Chris Whong did exactly that. Chris went down, and they told him, ""Just bring a brand new hard drive  down to our office, leave it here for five hours, we'll copy the data and you take it back."" And that's where this data came from. Now, Chris is the kind of guy who wants to make the data public, and so it ended up online for all to use, and that's where this graph came from. And the fact that it exists is amazing. These GPS recorders — really cool. But the fact that we have citizens walking around with hard drives picking up data from city agencies to make it public — it was already kind of public, you could get to it, but it was ""public,"" it wasn't public. And we can do better than that as a city. We don't need our citizens walking around with hard drives.Now, not every dataset is behind a FOIL Request. Here is a map I made with the most dangerous intersections in New York City based on cyclist accidents. So the red areas are more dangerous. And what it shows is first the East side of Manhattan, especially in the lower area of Manhattan, has more cyclist accidents. That might make sense because there are more cyclists coming off the bridges there. But there's other hotspots worth studying. There's Williamsburg. There's Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. And this is exactly the kind of data we need for Vision Zero. This is exactly what we're looking for.But there's a story behind this data as well. This data didn't just appear. How many of you guys know this logo? Yeah, I see some shakes. Have you ever tried to copy and paste data out of a PDF and make sense of it? I see more shakes. More of you tried copying and pasting than knew the logo. I like that.So what happened is, the data that you just saw was actually on a PDF. In fact, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of PDF put out by our very own NYPD, and in order to access it, you would either have to copy and paste for hundreds and hundreds of hours, or you could be John Krauss. John Krauss was like, I'm not going to copy and paste this data. I'm going to write a program. It's called the NYPD Crash Data Band-Aid, and it goes to the NYPD's website and it would download PDFs. Every day it would search; if it found a PDF, it would download it and then it would run some PDF-scraping program, and out would come the text, and it would go on the Internet, and then people could make maps like that. And the fact that the data's here, the fact that we have access to it — Every accident, by the way, is a row in this table. You can imagine how many PDFs that is. The fact that we have access to that is great, but let's not release it in PDF form, because then we're having our citizens write PDF scrapers. It's not the best use of our citizens' time, and we as a city can do better than that.Now, the good news is that the de Blasio administration actually recently released this data a few months ago, and so now we can actually have access to it, but there's a lot of data still entombed in PDF. For example, our crime data is still only available in PDF. And not just our crime data, our own city budget. Our city budget is only readable right now in PDF form. And it's not just us that can't analyze it — our own legislators who vote for the budget also only get it in PDF. So our legislators cannot analyze  the budget that they are voting for. And I think as a city we can do a little better than that as well.Now, there's a lot of data that's not hidden in PDFs. This is an example of a map I made, and this is the dirtiest waterways in New York City. Now, how do I measure dirty? Well, it's kind of a little weird, but I looked at the level of fecal coliform, which is a measurement of fecal matter in each of our waterways. The larger the circle, the dirtier the water, so the large circles are dirty water, the small circles are cleaner. What you see is inland waterways. This is all data that was sampled by the city over the last five years. And inland waterways are, in general, dirtier. That makes sense, right? And the bigger circles are dirty. And I learned a few things from this. Number one: Never swim in anything that ends in ""creek"" or ""canal."" But number two: I also found the dirtiest waterway in New York City, by this measure, one measure. In Coney Island Creek, which is not the Coney Island you swim in, luckily. It's on the other side. But Coney Island Creek, 94 percent of samples taken over the last five years have had fecal levels so high that it would be against state law to swim in the water.And this is not the kind of fact that you're going to see boasted in a city report, right? It's not going to be  the front page on nyc.gov. You're not going to see it there, but the fact that we can get  to that data is awesome. But once again, it wasn't super easy, because this data was not on the open data portal. If you were to go to the open data portal, you'd see just a snippet of it,  a year or a few months. It was actually on the Department of Environmental Protection's website. And each one of these links is an Excel  sheet, and each Excel sheet is different. Every heading is different: you copy, paste, reorganize. When you do you can make maps and that's great, but once again, we can do better than that  as a city, we can normalize things.And we're getting there, because there's this website that Socrata makes called the Open Data Portal NYC. This is where 1,100 data sets  that don't suffer from the things I just told you live, and that number is growing, and that's great. You can download data in any format, be it CSV or PDF or Excel document. Whatever you want, you can download the data that way. The problem is, once you do, you will find that each agency codes their addresses differently. So one is street name,  intersection street, street, borough, address, building, building address. So once again, you're spending time, even when we have this portal, you're spending time normalizing our address fields. And that's not the best use  of our citizens' time. We can do better than that as a city. We can standardize our addresses, and if we do,  we can get more maps like this.This is a map of fire hydrants in New York City, but not just any fire hydrants. These are the top 250 grossing fire hydrants in terms of parking tickets. (Laughter) So I learned a few things from this map, and I really like this map. Number one, just don't park on the Upper East Side. Just don't. It doesn't matter where you park, you will get a hydrant ticket. Number two, I found the two highest grossing hydrants in all of New York City, and they're on the Lower East Side, and they were bringing in over 55,000 dollars a year in parking tickets. And that seemed a little strange to me when I noticed it, so I did a little digging and it turns out what you had is a hydrant and then something called a curb extension, which is like a seven-foot space to walk on, and then a parking spot. And so these cars came along, and the hydrant — ""It's all the way over there, I'm fine,"" and there was actually a parking spot painted there beautifully for them. They would park there, and the NYPD disagreed with this designation and would ticket them. And it wasn't just me  who found a parking ticket. This is the Google  Street View car driving by finding the same parking ticket.So I wrote about this on my blog, on I Quant NY, and the DOT responded, and they said, ""While the DOT has not received any complaints about this location, we will review the roadway markings and make any appropriate alterations."" And I thought to myself, typical government response, all right, moved on with my life.But then, a few weeks later, something incredible happened. They repainted the spot, and for a second I thought I saw the future of open data, because think about what happened here. For five years, this spot was being  ticketed, and it was confusing, and then a citizen found something, they told the city, and within a few weeks the problem was fixed. It's amazing. And a lot of people see open data as being a watchdog. It's not, it's about being a partner. We can empower our citizens to be better partners for government, and it's not that hard. All we need are a few changes. If you're FOILing data, if you're seeing your data  being FOILed over and over again, let's release it to the public, that's a sign that it should be made public. And if you're a government agency releasing a PDF, let's pass legislation that requires you to post it with the underlying data, because that data is coming from somewhere. I don't know where, but it's coming from somewhere, and you can release it with the PDF. And let's adopt and share some open data standards. Let's start with our addresses here in New York City. Let's just start normalizing our addresses. Because New York is a leader in open data. Despite all this, we are absolutely a leader in open data, and if we start normalizing things, and set an open data standard, others will follow. The state will follow, and maybe the federal government, Other countries could follow, and we're not that far off from a time where you could write one program and map information from 100 countries. It's not science fiction. We're actually quite close.And by the way, who are we empowering with this? Because it's not just John Krauss and it's not just Chris Whong. There are hundreds of meetups going on in New York City right now, active meetups. There are thousands of people attending these meetups. These people are going after work and on weekends, and they're attending these meetups to look at open data and make our city a better place. Groups like BetaNYC, who just last week  released something called citygram.nyc that allows you to subscribe to 311 complaints around your own home, or around your office. You put in your address, you get local complaints. And it's not just the tech community that are after these things. It's urban planners like  the students I teach at Pratt. It's policy advocates, it's everyone, it's citizens from a diverse set of backgrounds. And with some small, incremental changes, we can unlock the passion and the ability of our citizens to harness open data and make our city even better, whether it's one dataset, or one parking spot at a time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_wellington_how_we_found_the_worst_place_to_park_in_new_york_city_using_big_data
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"I'd like to start my performance by saying 90 percent of everything is crap. (Laughter) It's called Sturgeon's law, and what that means is that the majority of anything is always bad.I have a giraffe here. I'm going to throw the giraffe behind my back and whoever catches it is going to help me on this next thing. Sir, you caught the giraffe. I have a playing card in my hand. Freely name any card in the deck. Audience member: 10 of hearts. Helder Guimarães: 10 of hearts. You could have named any card in the deck, but you said the 10 of hearts. Ninety percent of everything is crap, so there's this to prove that Sturgeon was correct. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) Sir, this is not your show. (Laughter) Keep the giraffe for a moment, okay? Jesus. (Laughter) Crazy people.Well, the truth is, why is the majority of everything bad? And my answer is: I think we stop thinking too soon. I'll give you a clear little example, something that people used to do around the turn of the century — not this century, the other one. The idea was to take a piece of paper and fold it inside out using only your weaker hand, in my case, the left hand. Something that would look like this. By the way you reacted, I can see your lack of interest. (Laughter) But that's okay, I understand why. We stop thinking too soon.But if we give it a little bit more thought, like a paper clip. A paper clip makes this a little bit more interesting. Not only that, if instead of using my hand with the fingers, I use my hand closed into a fist, that makes this even a little bit more interesting. Not only that, but I will impose myself a time limit of one second, something that would look like this. Now — no, no, no. Sturgeon may be correct. But he doesn't have to be correct forever. Things can always change. Sir, what was the card? The 10 of hearts? There's this to prove that things can always change — the 10 of hearts. (Applause)Secrets are important. And secrets are valuable. And this is the best secret I've ever experienced. It starts with a deck of cards onto the table, an old man and a claim, ""I will not touch the deck till the end."" It doesn't matter who the man was, all that matters was that sentence ringing in my head: ""I will not touch the deck till the end.""Now, during all this time, he was holding a small notebook that sometimes he would open and flip through the pages and look at something. But I was not really paying attention to the book because I was paying attention the deck and the claim he had made before, ""I will not touch the deck till the end.""Now sir, you have the giraffe. Go ahead, throw it in any direction so that you can find someone else at random. Perfect. Sir, you're going to play my role in this story. The old man turned to me and he said, ""You could pick a red card or a black card."" My answer was ... Audience member 2: The black card. HG: Indeed! It was a black card. He said, ""It could be a club or a spade,"" and my answer was ... Audience member 2: Spade. HG: Indeed! It was a spade. He said, ""It could be a high spade or a low spade."" And my answer was ... Audience member 2: A high spade. HG: Indeed! It was a high spade. Since it's a high spade, it could be a nine, a 10, a jack, king, queen or the ace of spades. And my answer was ... Audience member 2: The king. HG: The king of spades, indeed. Now sir, let's be fair. You selected black, you selected spade, you selected the high spade, and you selected — sorry? Audience member 2: King. HG: King of spades. Did you feel I influenced you in any decision? Audience member 2: No, I just felt your energy. HG: But it was a free choice, correct? Because if not, we could start all over again. But it was really fair? Audience member 2: Absolutely.HG: Now, the old man turned to me and he asked me one more question, a number between one and 52. And the first number I thought of was ... Audience member 2: 17. HG: Indeed! It was the 17. The old man only said one more thing: ""This is the end."" And I knew exactly what that meant. I knew that he was going to touch the deck. Everything that you're about to see is exactly as it looked. He took the deck out of the box. Nothing in the box. He counted, ""One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10."" The tension was building. (Laughter) ""11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17."" And on the 17, instead of the king of spades, something appeared in the middle of the deck, that later, I would realize was actually a secret.The old man stood up, he left. I never saw him again. But he left his notebook that was there from the beginning. And when I picked it up, that was the best secret I've ever experienced. We are defined by the secrets we keep and by the secrets we share. And this was his way of sharing a secret with me. (Applause) Crazy shit! Now — (Laughter)I believe that amazing things happen all the time. I really do. And the reason why we don't see them as often, it's because we don't place ourselves in a position to search for those amazing things. But what if we decided to search for those amazing things, for those small coincidences in life that are truly amazing? So you have the giraffe, go ahead, throw it in any direction so you find one last person at random. Sir, I'm going to ask you, do you have, with you, a United States $1 bill? Audience member 3: I think so. HG: Yes? You see, a coincidence! (Laughter) Let's make sure you have it. Do you have it? Audience member 3: Yes. HG: Yes! Perfect. Now, I want you to do exactly the same thing I am about to do. I have a dollar bill here to explain. I want you to take the dollar bill, and fold the Washington part inside, like this. So you get this kind of big square, okay? Now, I want you to take the bill and fold it like this, lengthwise, so it becomes like a rectangle, and then again — really fold it, really crease it — and when you have it, please fold the bill again into a little square like this and let me know when you have it. Do you have it? Perfect.Now, I'm going to approach, and before we start, I want to make sure that we do this in very, very serious conditions. First of all, I want to ensure that we have a marker and we have a paper clip. First of all, take the marker and go ahead and sign the bill. And this is the reason why: later, I'm going to be doing a bunch of stuff on stage and I don't want you to think, oh, while I was distracted by Helder, someone came onstage and swapped the bill. So I want to make sure it's exactly the same bill. Now not only that, I want you to take the paper clip and put it around the bill. So even if nobody comes onstage and switches the bill, I don't have enough time to go open the bill and close it and see what I don't want to see. Is that fair? Now you can give me the marker back.And just like that, very clearly, I want to make sure that we place this in full view from the beginning of this experience and to make sure that everyone is going to see it, we're going to actually have a camera man onstage. Yes, perfect, so that you can see. That's your signature? Yes? Perfect. Now, we're going to use also the deck and a glass for this. And we're going to put ourselves in a position to search for an amazing coincidence.Do you mind, can you help me with this? Go ahead and take some cards and shuffle. And do you mind, can you take some cards and shuffle? You can take some cards and shuffle. You can shuffle cards in a variety of ways. You can shuffle cards like this. You can shuffle cards in a more messed up way, something like this. You can shuffle cards in the American way. As a Portuguese, I don't feel entitled to teach you guys how to do it. But the important part is after shuffling the cards, always remember to cut and complete the cards.Do you mind doing that for me, sir? Please cut and complete. And when you have it, place the cards up in the air. And you too, cut and complete and up in the air. Up in the air. A deck of cards cut and shuffled by one, two, three, four and five people.Now, very clearly, I'm going to gather the deck together. And just like that. I'm going to search for a coincidence in front of everyone. I'm going to try. I have some cards that maybe, maybe they don't mean anything. But maybe that's because we are not paying close attention. Because maybe, maybe they mean a lot. Before we start, sir, you gave me a dollar bill. Is that your signature? Audience member 3: Yes it is. HG: I want you to see very clearly that I'm going to open your bill and reveal a small secret that we created. And the secret of this dollar bill is the serial number.Madam, can you take the dollar bill? In the serial number, there is a letter. What is the first number after the letter? Audience member 4: Seven. HG: Seven. Seven. But, that's maybe just one coincidence. What is the second number? Audience member 4: Nine. So after the seven, we have a nine. And after the nine? Audience member 4: Two. HG: The two. And after the two? Audience member 4: Three. HG: Three, and after? Audience member 4: Three. HG: Three. Audience member 4: Seven. HG: Seven. Audience member 4: Four. HG: Four. Audience member 4: Two. HG: Two, and? Audience member 4: Q. HG: Q like in queen?(Applause) The queen of clubs! All the cards in order, just for you.And that's my show. Thank you very much and have a nice night.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/helder_guimaraes_a_magical_search_for_a_coincidence
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"As a software developer and technologist, I've worked on a number of civic technology projects over the years. Civic tech is sometimes referred to as tech for good, using technology to solve humanitarian problems.This is in 2010 in Uganda, working on a solution that allowed local populations to avoid government surveillance on their mobile phones for expressing dissent. That same technology was deployed later in North Africa for similar purposes to help activists stay connected when governments were deliberately shutting off connectivity as a means of population control.But over the years, as I have thought about these technologies and the things that I work on, a question kind of nags in the back of my mind, which is, what if we're wrong about the virtues of technology, and if it sometimes actively hurts the communities that we're intending to help? The tech industry around the world tends to operate under similar assumptions that if we build great things, it will positively affect everyone. Eventually, these innovations will get out and find everyone. But that's not always the case. I like to call this blind championing of technology ""trickle-down techonomics,"" to borrow a phrase. (Laughter) We tend to think that if we design things for the select few, eventually those technologies will reach everyone, and that's not always the case. Technology and innovation behaves a lot like wealth and capital. They tend to consolidate in the hands of the few, and sometimes they find their way out into the hands of the many.And so most of you aren't tackling oppressive regimes on the weekends, so I wanted to think of a few examples that might be a little bit more relatable.In the world of wearables and smartphones and apps, there's a big movement to track people's personal health with applications that track the number of calories that you burn or whether you're sitting too much or walking enough. These technologies make patient intake in medical facilities much more efficient, and in turn, these medical facilities are starting to expect these types of efficiencies. As these digital tools find their way into medical rooms, and they become digitally ready, what happens to the digitally invisible? What does the medical experience look like for someone who doesn't have the $400 phone or watch tracking their every movement? Do they now become a burden on the medical system? Is their experience changed?In the world of finance, Bitcoin and crypto-currencies are revolutionizing the way we move money around the world, but the challenge with these technologies is the barrier to entry is incredibly high, right? You need access to the same phones, devices, connectivity, and even where you don't, where you can find a proxy agent, usually they require a certain amount of capital to participate. And so the question that I ask myself is, what happens to the last community using paper notes when the rest of the world moves to digital currency?Another example from my hometown in Philadelphia: I recently went to the public library there, and they are facing an existential crisis. Public funding is dwindling, they have to reduce their footprint to stay open and stay relevant, and so one of the ways they're going about this is digitizing a number of the books and moving them to the cloud. This is great for most kids. Right? You can check out books from home, you can research on the way to school or from school, but these are really two big assumptions, that one, you have access at home, and two, that you have access to a mobile phone, and in Philadelphia, many kids do not. So what does their education experience look like in the wake of a completely cloud-based library, what used to be considered such a basic part of education? How do they stay competitive?A final example from across the world in East Africa: there's been a huge movement to digitize land ownership rights, for a number of reasons. Migrant communities, older generations dying off, and ultimately poor record-keeping have led to conflicts over who owns what. And so there was a big movement to put all this information online, to track all the ownership of these plots of land, put them in the cloud, and give them to the communities. But actually, the unintended consequence of this has been that venture capitalists, investors, real estate developers, have swooped in and they've begun buying up these plots of land right out from under these communities, because they have access to the technologies and the connectivity that makes that possible.So that's the common thread that connects these examples, the unintended consequences of the tools and the technologies that we make. As engineers, as technologists, we sometimes prefer efficiency over efficacy. We think more about doing things than the outcomes of what we are doing. This needs to change. We have a responsibility to think about the outcomes of the technologies we build, especially as they increasingly control the world in which we live. In the late '90s, there was a big push for ethics in the world of investment and banking. I think in 2014, we're long overdue for a similar movement in the area of tech and technology.So, I just encourage you, as you are all thinking about the next big thing, as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as engineers, as makers, that you think about the unintended consequences of the things that you're building, because the real innovation is in finding ways to include everyone.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_gosier_the_problem_with_trickle_down_techonomics
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"(Rainforest noises)In the summer of 2011, as a tourist, I visited the rainforests of Borneo for the very first time, and as you might imagine, it was the overwhelming sounds of the forest that struck me the most. There's this constant cacophony of noise. Some things actually do stick out. For example, this here is a big bird, a rhinoceros hornbill. This buzzing is a cicada. This is a family of gibbons. It's actually singing to each other over a great distance.The place where this was recorded was in fact a gibbon reserve, which is why you can hear so many of them, but in fact the most important noise that  was coming out of the forest that time was one that I didn't notice, and in fact nobody there had actually noticed it.So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve. They spend most of their time rehabilitating gibbons, but they also have to spend a lot of their time protecting their area from illegal logging that takes place on the side. And so if we take the sound of the forest and we actually turn down the gibbons, the insects, and the rest, in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard, was the sound of a chainsaw at great distance. They had three full-time guards who were posted around this sanctuary whose job was in fact to guard against illegal logging, and one day, we went walking, again as tourists, out into the forest, and within five minutes' walk, we stumbled upon somebody who was just sawing a tree down, five minutes' walk, a few hundred meters from the ranger station. They hadn't been able to hear the chainsaws, because as you heard, the forest is very, very loud.It struck me as quite unacceptable that in this modern time, just a few hundred meters away  from a ranger station in a sanctuary, that in fact nobody could hear it when someone who has a chainsaw gets fired up. It sounds impossible, but in fact, it was quite true.So how do we stop illegal logging? It's really tempting, as an engineer, always to come up with a high-tech, super-crazy high-tech solution, but in fact, you're in the rainforest. It has to be simple, it has to be scalable, and so what we also noticed while were there was that everything we needed was already there. We could build a system that would allow us to stop this using what's already there.Who was there? What was  already in the forest? Well, we had people. We had this group there that was  dedicated, three full-time guards, that was dedicated to go and stop it, but they just needed to know what was happening out in the forest. The real surprise, this is the big one, was that there was connectivity out in the forest. There was cell phone service way out in the middle of nowhere. We're talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road, there's certainly no electricity, but they had very good cell phone service, these people in the towns were on Facebook all the time, they're surfing the web on their phones, and this sort of got me thinking that in fact it would be possible to use the sounds of the forest, pick up the sounds  of chainsaws programmatically, because people can't hear them, and send an alert. But you have to have a device to go up in the trees. So if we can use some device to listen to the sounds of the forest, connect to the cell phone network that's there, and send an alert to people on the ground, perhaps we could have a solution to this issue for them.But let's take a moment to talk about saving the rainforest, because it's something that we've definitely all heard about forever. People in my generation have heard about saving the rainforest since we were kids, and it seems that the message has never changed: We've got to save the rainforest, it's super urgent, this many football fields have been destroyed yesterday. and yet here we are today, about half of the rainforest remains, and we have potentially more urgent  problems like climate change.But in fact, this is the little-known fact that I didn't realize at the time: Deforestation accounts  for more greenhouse gas than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships combined. It's the second highest contributor to climate change. Also, according to Interpol, as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest is illegal logging, like the illegal logging that we saw. So if we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there, then in fact we could eat heavily into this 17 percent and potentially have a major impact in the short term. It might just be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.And so here's the system that we imagine. It looks super high tech. The moment a sound of a chainsaw is heard in the forest, the device picks up the sound of the chainsaw, it sends an alert through the standard GSM network that's already there to a ranger in the field who can in fact show up in real time and stop the logging. It's no more about going out and finding a tree that's been cut. It's not about seeing  a tree from a satellite in an area that's been clear cut, it's about real-time intervention.So I said it was the cheapest and fastest way to do it, but in fact, actually, as you saw, they weren't able to do it, so it may not be so cheap and fast. But if the devices in the trees were actually cell phones, it could be pretty cheap. Cell phones are thrown away by the hundreds of millions every year, hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, not counting the rest of the world, which of course we should do, but in fact, cell phones are great. They're full of sensors. They can listen to the sounds of the forest. We do have to protect them. We have to put them in this box that you see here, and we do have to power them. Powering them is one of the greater engineering challenges that we had to deal with, because powering a cell phone under a tree canopy, any sort of solar power under a tree canopy, was an as-yet-unsolved problem, and that's this unique solar panel design that you see here, which in fact is built also from recycled byproducts of an industrial process. These are strips that are cut down.So this is me putting it all together in my parents' garage, actually. Thanks very much to them for allowing me to do that. As you can see, this is a device up in a tree. What you can see from here, perhaps, is that they are pretty well obscured up in the tree canopy at a distance. That's important, because although they are able to hear chainsaw noises up to a kilometer in the distance, allowing them to cover about three square kilometers, if someone were to take them, it would make the area unprotected.So does it actually work? Well, to test it, we took it back to Indonesia, not the same place, but another place, to another gibbon reserve that was threatened daily by illegal logging. On the very second day, it picked up illegal chainsaw noises. We were able to get a real-time alert. I got an email on my phone. Actually, we had just climbed the tree. Everyone had just gotten back down. All these guys are smoking cigarettes, and then I get an email, and they all quiet down, and in fact you can hear the chainsaw really, really faint in the background, but no one had noticed it  until that moment. And so then we took off to actually stop these loggers. I was pretty nervous. This is the moment where we've actually arrived close to where the loggers are. This is the moment where you can see where I'm actually regretting perhaps the entire endeavor. I'm not really sure what's on the other side of this hill. That guy's much braver than I am. But he went, so I had to go, walking up, and in fact, he made it over the hill, and interrupted the loggers in the act. For them, it was such a surprise — they had never, ever been interrupted before — that it was such an impressive event for them, that we've heard from our partners they have not been back since. They were, in fact, great guys. They showed us how the entire operation works, and what they really convinced us on the spot was that if you can show up in real time and stop people, it's enough of a deterrent they won't come back.So — Thank you. (Applause)Word of this spread, possibly because we told a lot of people, and in fact, then some really amazing stuff started to happen. People from around the world started to send us emails, phone calls. What we saw was that people throughout Asia, people throughout Africa, people throughout South America, they told us that they could use it too, and what's most important, what we'd found that we thought might be exceptional, in the forest there was pretty good cell phone service. That was not exceptional, we were told, and that particularly is on the periphery of the forests that are most under threat. And then something  really amazing happened, which was that people started sending us their own old cell phones. So in fact what we have now is a system where we can use people on the ground, people who are already there, who can both improve and use the existing connectivity, and we're using old cell phones that are being sent to us by people from around the world that want their phones to be doing  something else in their afterlife, so to speak. And if the rest of the device can be completely recycled, then we believe it's an entirely upcycled device.So again, this didn't come because of any sort of high-tech solution. It just came from using what's already there, and I'm thoroughly convinced that if it's not phones, that there's always going to be enough there that you can build similar solutions that can be very effective in new contexts.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/topher_white_what_can_save_the_rainforest_your_used_cell_phone
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"My name is Harry Baker. Harry Baker is my name. If your name was Harry Baker, then our names would be the same. (Laughter)It's a short introductory part.Yeah, I'm Harry. I study maths. I write poetry. So I thought I'd start with a love poem about prime numbers. (Laughter)This is called ""59."" I was going to call it ""Prime Time Loving."" That reaction is why I didn't. (Laughter)So, ""59.""59 wakes up on the wrong  side of the bed.Realizes all his hair is  on one side of his head.Takes just under a minute to work out that it’s because of the way that he slept.He finds some clothes and gets dressed.He can’t help but look in the mirror and be subtly impressedHow he looks rough around the edges and yet casually messed.And as he glances out the window, he sees the sight that he gets blessed with of 60 from across the street.Now 60 was beautiful.With perfectly trimmed cuticles, dressed in something suitable.Never rude or crude at all.Unimprovable, right on time as usual, more on cue than a snooker ball but liked to play it super cool.59 wanted to tell her that he knew her favorite flower.He thought of her every second, every minute, every hour.But he knew it wouldn’t work, he’d never get the girl.Because although she lived  across the street they came from different worlds.While 59 admired 60’s perfectly round figure, 60 thought 59 was odd. (Laughter)One of his favorite films was ""101 Dalmatians.""She preferred the sequel.He romanticized the idea they were star-crossed lovers.They could overcome the odds and evens because they had each other.While she maintained the strict views imposed on her by her motherThat separate could not be equal.And though at the time he felt stupid and dumbFor trying to love a girl controlled by her stupid mum,He should have been comforted by the simple sum.Take 59 away from 60, and you’re left with the one.Sure enough after two months of moping around,61 days later, 61 was who he found,He had lost his keys  and his parents were out.So one day after school  he went into a houseAs he noticed the slightly wonky numbers on the door,He wondered why he’d never introduced himself before,As she let him in, his jaw  dropped in awe.61 was like 60, but a little bit more. (Laughter)She had prettier eyes, and an approachable smile,And like him, rough around the edges, casual style,And like him, everything was in disorganized piles,And like him, her mum didn’t mind if friends stayed a while.Because she was like him,  and he liked her.He reckoned she would like him if she knew he was like her,And it was different this time. I mean, this girl was wicked,So he plucked up the courage and asked for her digits.She said, ""I'm 61."" He grinned, said, ""I'm 59.""Today I’ve had a really nice time,So tomorrow if you wanted you could come over to mine?She said, ""Sure.""She loved talking to someone  just as quirky,She agreed to this unofficial first date.In the end he was only ready one minute early,But it didn’t matter because she arrived one minute late.And from that moment on there was nonstop chatter,How they loved ""X Factor,"" how they had two factors,How that did not matter, distinctiveness made them better,By the end of the night they knew they were meant together.And one day she was talking about stuck-up 60,She noticed that 59 looked a bit shifty.He blushed, told her of his crush:“The best thing that never happened because it led to us.”61 was clever, see, not prone to jealousy,She looked him in the eyes and told him quite tenderly,""You’re 59, I’m 61, together we combine to become twice what 60 could ever be."" (Laughter)At this point 59 had tears in his eyes,Was so glad to have this one-of-a-kind girl in his life.He told her the very definition of being primeWas that with only one and himself could his heart divide,And she was the one he wanted to give his heart to,She said she felt the same and now she knew the films were half true.Because that wasn't real love, that love was just a sample,When it came to real love, they were a prime example.Cheers.(Applause)That was the first poem that I wrote and it was for a prime number-themed  poetry night — (Laughter) — which turned out to be a prime number-themed poetry competition. And I became a prime number-themed poetry competition winner, or as I like to call it, a prime minister. (Laughter) And this is how I discovered these things called poetry slams, and if you don't know what  a poetry slam is, it was a format come up with in America 30 years ago as a way of tricking people into going to poetry events by putting an exciting word like ""slam"" on the end. (Laughter)And each performer got three minutes to perform and then random audience members would hold up scorecards, and they would end up with a numerical score, and what this meant is, it kind of broke down the barrier between performer and audience and encouraged the kind of connection with the listener. And what it also means is you can win. And if you win a poetry slam, you can call yourself a slam champion and pretend you're a wrestler, and if you lose a poetry slam you can say, ""Oh, what? Poetry's a subjective art form, you can't put numbers on such things."" (Laughter)But I loved it, and I got involved in these slams, and I became the U.K. slam champion and got invited to the Poetry World Cup in Paris, which was unbelievable. It was people from all around the world speaking in their native languages to be judged by five French strangers. (Laughter) And somehow, I won, which was great, and I've been able to travel the world since doing it, but it also means that this next piece is technically the best poem in the world. (Laughter) So... (Applause) According to five French strangers.So this is ""Paper People.""I like people.I'd like some paper people.They’d be purple paper people. Maybe pop-up purple paper people.Proper pop-up purple paper people.""How do you prop up pop-up purple paper people?""I hear you cry. Well I ...I’d probably prop up proper pop-up purple paper peoplewith a proper pop-up purple people paperclip,but I’d pre-prepare appropriate adhesives as alternatives,a cheeky pack of Blu Tack just in case the paper slipped.Because I could build a pop-up metropolis.but I wouldn’t wanna deal with all the paper people politics.paper politicians with their paper-thin policies,broken promises without appropriate apologies.There’d be a little paper me. And a little paper you.And we could watch paper TV and it would all be pay-per-view. (Laughter)We’d see the poppy paper rappers rap about their paper packageor watch paper people carriers get stuck in paper traffic on the A4. (Laughter) Paper.There’d be a paper princess Kate but we’d all stare at paper Pippa,and then we’d all live in fear of killer Jack the Paper-Ripper,because the paper propaganda propagates the people's prejudices,papers printing pictures of the photogenic terrorists.A little paper me. And a little paper you.And in a pop-up population people’s problems pop up too.There’d be a pompous paper parliament who remained out of touch,and who ignored the people's protests about all the paper cuts,then the peaceful paper protests would get blown to paper pieces,by the confetti cannons manned by pre-emptive police.And yes there’d still be paper money, so there’d still be paper greed,and the paper piggy bankers pocketing more than they need,purchasing the potpourri to pepper their paper properties,others live in poverty and ain’t acknowledged properly.A proper poor economy where so many are proper poor,but while their needs are ignored the money goes to big wars.Origami armies unfold plans for paper planesand we remain imprisoned in our own paper chains,but the greater shame is that it always seems to stay the same,what changes is who’s in power choosing how to lay the blame,they’re naming names, forgetting these are names of people,because in the end it all comes down to people.I like people.'Cause even when the situation’s dire,it is only ever people who are able to inspire,and on paper, it’s hard to see how we all cope.But in the bottom of Pandora’s box there’s still hope,and I still hope 'cause I believe in people.People like my grandparents.Who every single day since I was born, have taken time out of their morning to pray for me.That’s 7892 days straight of someone checking I’m okay, and that’s amazing.People like my aunt who puts on plays with prisoners.People who are capable of genuine forgiveness.People like the persecuted Palestinians.People who go out of their way to make your life better, and expect nothing in return.You see, people have potential to be powerful.Just because the people in power tend to pretend to be victimswe don’t need to succumb to that system.And a paper population is no different.There’s a little paper me. And a little paper you.And in a pop-up population people's problems pop up too,but even if the whole world fell apart then we’d still make it through.Because we’re people.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much. I've just got time for one more.For me, poetry has been the ultimate way of ideas without frontiers. When I first started, the people who inspired me were the ones with the amazing stories, and I thought, as an 18-year-old with a happy life, it was too normal, but I could create these worlds where I could talk about my experiences and dreams and beliefs. So it's amazing to be here in front of you today. Thank you for being here. If you weren't here, it would be pretty much like the sound check yesterday. (Laughter) And this is more fun.So this last one is called ""The Sunshine Kid.""Thank you very much for listening.Old man sunshine was proud of his sun,And it brightened his day to see his little boy run,Not because of what he’d done, nor the problems overcome,But that despite that his disposition remained a sunny one.It hadn’t always been like this.There’d been times when he’d tried to hide his brightness,You see, every star hits periods of hardship,It takes a brighter light to inspire them through the darkness.If we go back to when he was born in a nebula,We know that he never was thought of as regular,Because he had a flair about him,To say the Midas touch is wrongBut all he went near seemed to turn a little bronze,Yes this sun was loved by some more than others,It was a case of Joseph and his dreamcoat and his brothersBecause standing out from the crowd had its pros and its cons,And jealousy created enemies in those he outshoneSuch as the Shadow People.Now the Shadow People didn’t like the Sunshine Kid,Because he showed up the dark things the Shadow People did,And when he shone he showed the places where the Shadow People hid,So the Shadow People had an evil plan to get rid of him,First up — they made fun of his sunspots,Shooting his dreams from the sky, their words were gunshots,Designed to remind him he wasn’t very coolAnd he didn’t fit in with any popular kids at school.They said his head was up in space and they would bring him down to Earth,Essentially he came from nothing and that is what he was worth,He’d never get to go to university to learn,Only degrees he’d ever show would be the first degree burnsFrom those that came too close, they told him he was too bright,That’s why no one ever looked him in the eyes,His judgment became cloudedSo did the sky, With evaporated tearsas the sun started to cry.Because the sunshine kid was bright, with a warm personality,And inside he burned savagelyHurt by the words and curses of the shadowy folkwho spoke holes in his soul and left cavities,And as his heart hardened, his spark darkened,Every time they called him names it cooled his flames,He thought they might like him if he kept his light dimBut they were busy telling lightning she had terrible aim,He couldn’t quite get to grips with what they said,So he let his light be eclipsed by what they said,He fell into a Lone Star State like Texas,And felt like he’d been punched in his solar plexus.But that’s when Little Miss Sunshine came alongSinging her favorite song about how we’re made to be strong,And you don’t have to be wrong to belong, Just be true to who you are,because we are all stars at heart.Little Miss Sunshine was hot stuff,The kind of girl when you looked at heryou forgot stuff,But for him, there was no forgetting her,The minute he saw her her image burned in his retina,She was out of this world, and she accepted him,Something about this girl meant he knew whenever she was next to him,Things weren’t as dark as they seemed, and he dared to dream,Shadows were nowhere to be seen; when she was there he beamed,His eyes would light up in ways that can’t be faked,When she grinned her rays erased the razor-tipped words of hate,They gave each other nicknames, they were ""cool star"" and ""fun sun,""And gradually the shadowy damage became undone,She was one in a septillion, and she was brilliant,Could turn the coldest blooded reptilians vermillion,Loved by billions, from Chileans to Brazilians,And taught the Sunshine Kid the meaning of resilience.She said: “All the darkness in the worldcannot put out the light from a single candleSo how the hell can they handle your light?Only you can choose to dim it, and the sky is the limit, so silence the critics by burning.”And if eyes are windows to the soul then she drew back the curtainsAnd let the sun shine through the hurting.In a universe of adversity these stars stuck together,And though days became nights the memories would last forever,Whether the weatherman said it or not, it would be fine,'Cause even behind the clouds the kid could still shine.Yes, the Sunshine Kid was bright, with a warm personality,And inside he burned savagely,Fueled by the fire inspired across galaxiesBy the girl who showed him belief.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harry_baker_a_love_poem_for_lonely_prime_numbers
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"Twenty-five years ago, scientists at CERN created the World Wide Web. Since then, the Internet has transformed  the way we communicate, the way we do business, and even the way we live. In many ways, the ideas that gave birth to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so many others, have now really transformed our lives, and this has brought us many real benefits such as a more connected society. However, there are also some downsides to this. Today, the average person has an astounding amount of personal information online, and we add to this online information every single time we post on Facebook, each time we search on Google, and each time we send an email.Now, many of us probably think, well, one email, there's nothing in there, right? But if you consider a year's worth of emails, or maybe even a lifetime of email, collectively, this tells a lot. It tells where we have been, who we have met, and in many ways, even what we're thinking about. And the more scary part about this is our data now lasts forever, so your data can and will outlive you. What has happened is that we've largely lost control over our data and also our privacy.So this year, as the web turns 25, it's very important for us to take a moment and think about the implications of this. We have to really think. We've lost privacy, yes, but actually what we've also lost is the idea of privacy itself. If you think about it, most of us here today probably remember  what life was like before the Internet, but today, there's a new generation that is being taught from a very young age to share everything online, and this is a generation that is not  going to remember when data was private. So we keep going down this road, 20 years from now, the word 'privacy' is going to have a completely different meaning from what it means to you and I.So, it's time for us  to take a moment and think, is there anything we can do about this? And I believe there is.Let's take a look at one of the most widely used forms of communication in the world today: email. Before the invention of email, we largely communicated using letters, and the process was quite simple. You would first start by writing your message on a piece of paper, then you would place it into a sealed envelope, and from there, you would go ahead and send it after you put a stamp and address on it. Unfortunately, today, when we actually send an email, we're not sending a letter. What you are sending, in many ways, is actually a postcard, and it's a postcard in the sense that everybody that sees it from the time it leaves your computer to when it gets to the recipient can actually read the entire contents.So, the solution to this has been known for some time, and there's many attempts to do it. The most basic solution is to use encryption, and the idea is quite simple. First, you encrypt the connection between your computer and the email server. Then, you also encrypt the data as it sits on the server itself. But there's a problem with this, and that is, the email servers also hold the encryption keys, so now you have a really big lock with a key placed right next to it. But not only that, any government could lawfully ask for and get the key to your data, and this is all without you being aware of it.So the way we fix this problem is actually relatively easy, in principle: You give everybody their own keys, and then you make sure the server doesn't actually have the keys. This seems like common sense, right? So the question that comes up is, why hasn't this been done yet?Well, if we really think about it, we see that the business model of the Internet today really isn't compatible with privacy. Just take a look at some of the biggest names on the web, and you see that advertising plays a huge role. In fact, this year alone, advertising is 137 billion dollars, and to optimize the ads that are shown to us, companies have to know everything about us. They need to know where we live, how old we are, what we like, what we don't like, and anything else they can get their hands on. And if you think about it, the best way to get this information is really just to invade our privacy. So these companies aren't going to give us our privacy. If we want to have privacy online, what we have to do is we've got to go out and get it ourselves.For many years, when it came to email, the only solution was something known as PGP, which was quite complicated and only accessible to the tech-savvy. Here's a diagram that basically shows the process for encrypting and decrypting messages. So needless to say, this is not a solution for everybody, and this actually is part of the problem, because if you think about communication, by definition, it involves having someone to communicate with. So while PGP does a great job of what it's designed to do, for the people out there who can't understand how to use it, the option to communicate privately simply does not exist. And this is a problem that we need to solve. So if we want to have privacy online, the only way we can succeed is if we get the whole world on board, and this is only possible if we bring down the barrier to entry. I think this is actually the key challenge that lies in the tech community. What we really have to do is work and make privacy more accessible.So last summer, when the Edward Snowden story came out, several colleagues and I decided to see if we could make this happen. At that time, we were working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research at the world's largest particle collider, which collides protons, by the way. We were all scientists, so we used our scientific creativity and came up with a very creative name for our project: ProtonMail. (Laughter) Many startups these days actually begin in people's garages or people's basements. We were a bit different. We started out at the CERN cafeteria, which actually is great, because look, you have all the food and water you could ever want. But even better than this is that every day between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., free of charge, the CERN cafeteria comes with several thousand scientists and engineers, and these guys basically know the answers to everything. So it was in this environment that we began working. What we actually want to do is we want to take your email and turn it into something that looks more like this, but more importantly, we want to do it in a way that you can't even tell that it's happened. So to do this, we actually need a combination of technology and also design.So how do we go about doing something like this? Well, it's probably a good idea not to put the keys on the server. So what we do is we generate encryption keys on your computer, and we don't generate a single key, but actually a pair of keys, so there's an RSA private key and an RSA public key, and these keys are mathematically connected.So let's have a look and see how this works when multiple people communicate. So here we have Bob and Alice, who want to communicate privately. So the key challenge is to take Bob's message and to get it to Alice in such a way that the server cannot read that message. So what we have to do is we have to encrypt it before it even leaves Bob's computer, and one of the tricks is, we encrypt it using the public key from Alice. Now this encrypted data is sent through the server to Alice, and because the message was encrypted using Alice's public key, the only key that can now decrypt it is a private key that belongs to Alice, and it turns out Alice is the only person that actually has this key. So we've now accomplished the objective, which is to get the message from Bob to Alice without the server being able to read what's going on.Actually, what I've shown here is a highly simplified picture. The reality is much more complex and it requires a lot of software that looks a bit like this. And that's actually the key design challenge: How do we take all this complexity, all this software, and implement it in a way that the user cannot see it. I think with ProtonMail, we have gotten pretty close to doing this.So let's see how it works in practice. Here, we've got Bob and Alice again, who also want to communicate securely. They simply create accounts on ProtonMail, which is quite simple and takes a few moments, and all the key encryption and generation is happening automatically in the background as Bob is creating his account. Once his account is created, he just clicks ""compose,"" and now he can write his email like he does today. So he fills in his information, and then after that,  all he has to do is click ""send,"" and just like that, without understanding cryptography, and without doing anything different from how he writes email today, Bob has just sent an encrypted message.What we have here is really just the first step, but it shows that with improving technology, privacy doesn't have to be difficult, it doesn't have to be disruptive. If we change the goal from maximizing  ad revenue to protecting data, we can actually make it accessible. Now, I know a question on everybody's minds is, okay, protecting privacy, this is a great goal, but can you actually do this without the tons of money that advertisements give you? And I think the answer is actually yes, because today, we've reached a point where people around the world really understand how important privacy is, and when you have that, anything is possible. Earlier this year, ProtonMail actually had so many users  that we ran out of resources, and when this happened, our community of users got together and donated half a million dollars. So this is just an example of what can happen when you bring the community together towards a common goal. We can also leverage the world. Right now, we have a quarter of a million people that have signed up for ProtonMail, and these people come from everywhere, and this really shows that privacy is not just an American or a European issue, it's a global issue that impacts all of us. It's something that we really have to pay attention to going forward.So what do we have to do to solve this problem? Well, first of all, we need to support a different business model for the Internet, one that does not rely entirely on advertisements for revenue and for growth. We actually need to build a new Internet where our privacy and our ability  to control our data is first and foremost. But even more importantly, we have to build an Internet  where privacy is no longer just an option but is also the default.We have done the first step with ProtonMail, but this is really just the first step in a very, very long journey. The good news I can share with you guys today, the exciting news, is that we're not traveling alone. The movement to protect people's privacy and freedom online is really gaining momentum, and today, there are dozens of projects from all around the world who are working together to improve our privacy. These projects protect things from our chat to voice communications, also our file storage, our online search, our online browsing, and many other things. And these projects are not backed by billions of dollars in advertising, but they've found support really from the people, from private individuals like you and I from all over the world.This really matters, because ultimately, privacy depends on each and every one of us, and we have to protect it now because our online data is more than just a collection of ones and zeros. It's actually a lot more than that. It's our lives, our personal stories, our friends, our families, and in many ways, also our hopes and our aspirations. We need to spend time now to really protect our right to share this only with people that we want to share this with, because without this, we simply can't have a free society. So now's the time for us to collectively stand up and say, yes, we do want to live in a world with online privacy, and yes, we can work together to turn this vision into a reality.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andy_yen_think_your_email_s_private_think_again
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"About 12 years ago, I gave up my career in banking to try to make the world a safer place. This involved a journey into national and global advocacy and meeting some of the most extraordinary people in the world. In the process, I became a civil society diplomat.Civil society diplomats do three things: They voice the concerns of the people, are not pinned down by national interests, and influence change through citizen networks, not only state ones. And if you want to change the world, we need more of them.But many people still ask, ""Can civil society really make a big difference? Can citizens influence and shape national and global policy?"" I never thought I would ask myself these questions, but here I am to share some lessons about two powerful civil society  movements that I've been involved in. They are in issues that I'm passionate about: gun control and drug policy. And these are issues that matter here. Latin America is ground zero for both of them.For example, Brazil — this beautiful country hosting TEDGlobal has the world's ugliest record. We are the number one champion in homicidal violence. One in every 10 people killed around the world is a Brazilian. This translates into over 56,000 people dying violently each year. Most of them are young, black boys dying by guns. Brazil is also one of the world's largest consumers of drugs, and the War on Drugs has been especially painful here. Around 50 percent of the homicides in the streets in Brazil are related to the War on Drugs. The same is true for about 25 percent of people in jail. And it's not just Brazil that is affected by the twin problems of guns and drugs. Virtually every country and city across Central and South America is in trouble. Latin America has nine percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of its global violent deaths.These are not problems we can run away from. I certainly could not. So the first campaign I got involved with started here in 2003 to change Brazil's gun law and to create a program to buy back weapons. In just a few years, we not only changed national legislation that made it much more difficult for civilians to buy a gun, but we collected and destroyed almost half a million weapons. This was one of the biggest buyback programs in history — (Applause) — but we also suffered some setbacks. We lost a referendum to ban gun sales to civilians in 2005.The second initiative was also home-grown, but is today a global movement to reform the international drug control regime. I am the executive coordinator of something called the Global Commission on Drug Policy. The commission is a high-level group of global leaders brought together to identify more humane and effective approaches to the issue of drugs. Since we started in 2008, the taboo on drugs is broken. Across the Americas, from the US and Mexico to Colombia and Uruguay, change is in the air.But rather than tell you the whole story about these two movements, I just want to share with you four key insights. I call them lessons to change the world. There are certainly many more, but these are the ones that stand out to me.So the first lesson is: Change and control the narrative. It may seem obvious, but a key ingredient to civil society diplomacy is first changing and then controlling the narrative. This is something that veteran politicians understand, but that civil society groups generally do not do very well. In the case of drug policy, our biggest success has been to change the discussion away from prosecuting a War on Drugs to putting people's health and safety first. In a cutting-edge report we just launched in New York, we also showed that the groups benefiting most from this $320 billion market are criminal gangs and cartels. So in order to undermine the power and profit of these groups, we need to change the conversation. We need to make illegal drugs legal. But before I get you too excited, I don't mean drugs should be a free-for-all. What I'm talking about, and what the Global Commission advocates for is creating a highly regulated market, where different drugs would have different degrees of regulation.As for gun control, we were successful in changing, but not so much in controlling, the narrative. And this brings me to my next lesson: Never underestimate your opponents. If you want to succeed in changing the world, you need to know who you're up against. You need to learn their motivations and points of view. In the case of gun control, we really underestimated our opponents. After a very successful gun-collection program, we were elated. We had support from 80 percent of Brazilians, and thought that this could help us win the referendum to ban gun sales to civilians. But we were dead wrong. During a televised 20-day public debate, our opponent used our own arguments against us. We ended up losing the popular vote. It was really terrible. The National Rifle Association — yes, the American NRA — came to Brazil. They inundated our campaign with their propaganda, that as you know, links the right to own guns to ideas of freedom and democracy. They simply threw everything at us. They used our national flag, our independence anthem. They invoked women's rights and misused images of Mandela, Tiananmen Square, and even Hitler. They won by playing with people's fears. In fact, guns were almost completely ignored in their campaign. Their focus was on individual rights. But I ask you, which right is more important, the right to life or the right to have a gun that takes life away? (Applause)We thought people would vote in defense of life, but in a country with a recent past of military dictatorship, the anti-government message of our opponents resonated, and we were not prepared to respond.Lesson learned. We've been more successful in the case of drug policy. If you asked most people 10 years ago if an end to the War on Drugs was possible, they would have laughed. After all, there are huge military police prisons and financial establishments benefiting from this war. But today, the international drug control regime is starting to crumble. Governments and civil societies are experimenting with new approaches. The Global Commission on Drug Policy really knew its opposition, and rather than fighting them, our chair — former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso — reached out to leaders from across the political spectrum, from liberals to conservatives. This high level group agreed to honestly discuss the merits and flaws of drug policies. It was this reasoned, informed and strategic discussion that revealed the sad truth about the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has simply failed across every metric. Drugs are cheaper and more available than ever, and consumption has risen globally. But even worse, it also generated massive negative unintended consequences. It is true that some people have made these arguments before, but we've made a difference by anticipating the arguments of our opponents and by leveraging powerful voices that a few years ago would probably have resisted change.Third lesson: Use data to drive your argument. Guns and drugs are emotive issues, and as we've painfully learned in the gun referendum campaign in Brazil, sometimes it's impossible to cut through the emotions and get to the facts. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. Until quite recently, we simply didn't know how many Brazilians were killed by guns. Amazingly, it was a local soap opera called ""Mulheres Apaixonadas"" — or ""Women in Love"" — that kicked off Brazil's national gun control campaign. In one highly viewed episode, a soap opera lead actress was killed by a stray bullet. Brazilian grannies and housewives were outraged, and in a case of art imitating life, this episode also included footage of a real gun control march that we had organized right here, outside in Copacabana Beach. The televised death and march had a huge impact on public opinion. Within weeks, our national congress approved the disarmament bill that had been languishing for years. We were then able to mobilize data to show the successful outcomes of the change in the law and gun collection program. Here is what I mean: We could prove that in just one year, we saved more than 5,000 lives.(Applause)And in the case of drugs, in order to undermine this fear and prejudice that surrounds the issue, we managed to gather and present data that shows that today's drug policies cause much more harm than drug use per se, and people are starting to get it.My fourth insight is: Don't be afraid to bring together odd bedfellows. What we've learned in Brazil — and this doesn't only apply to my country — is the importance of bringing diverse and eclectic folks together. If you want to change the world, it helps to have a good cross-section of society on your side. In both the case of guns and drugs, we brought together a wonderful mix of people. We mobilized the elite and got huge support from the media. We gathered the victims, human rights champions, cultural icons. We also assembled the professional classes — doctors, lawyers, academia and more.What I've learned over the last years is that you need coalitions of the willing and of the unwilling to make change. In the case of drugs, we needed libertarians, anti-prohibitionists, legalizers, and liberal politicians. They may not agree on everything; in fact, they disagree on almost everything. But the legitimacy of the campaign is based on their diverse points of view.Over a decade ago, I had a comfortable future working for an investment bank. I was as far removed from the world of civil society diplomacy as you can imagine. But I took a chance. I changed course, and on the way, I helped  to create social movements that I believe have made  some parts of the world safer. Each and every one of us has the power to change the world. No matter what the issue, and no matter how hard the fight, civil society is central to the blueprint for change.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ilona_szabo_de_carvalho_4_lessons_i_learned_from_taking_a_stand_against_drugs_and_gun_violence
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"Traditional prescriptions for growth in Africa are not working very well. After one trillion dollars in African development-related aid in the last 60 years, real per capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s. Aid is not doing too well.In response, the Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF and the World Bank — pushed for free trade not aid, yet the historical record shows little empirical evidence that free trade leads to economic growth.The newly prescribed  silver bullet is microcredit. We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor peasant in Africa is an entrepreneur. (Laughter) Yet my work and travel in 40-plus countries across Africa have taught me that most people want jobs instead.My solution: Forget micro-entrepreneurs. Let's invest in building pan-African titans like Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim. Mo took a contrarian bet on Africa when he founded Celtel International in '98 and built it into a mobile  cellular provider with 24 million subscribers across 14 African countries by 2004. The Mo model might be better than the everyman entrepreneur model, which prevents an effective means of diffusion and knowledge-sharing. Perhaps we are not at a stage in Africa where many actors and small enterprises leads to growth through competition.Consider these two alternative scenarios. One: You loan 200 dollars  to each of 500 banana farmers allowing them to dry  their surplus bananas and fetch 15 percent more revenue at the local market. Or two: You give 100,000 dollars to one savvy entrepreneur and help her set up a factory that yields 40 percent additional income to all 500 banana farmers and creates 50 additional jobs. We invested in the second scenario, and backed 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi to set up an agro-processing factory called Stawi to produce gluten-free banana-based flour and baby food. Stawi is leveraging economies of scale and using modern manufacturing processes to create value for not only its owners but its workers, who have an ownership in the business. Our dream is to take an Eric Muthomi and try to help him become a Mo Ibrahim, which requires skill, financing, local and global partnerships, and extraordinary perseverance.But why pan-African? The scramble for Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884 — where, quite frankly, we Africans were not exactly consulted — (Laughter) (Applause) — resulted in massive fragmentation and many sovereign states with small populations: Liberia, four million; Cape Verde, 500,000. Pan-Africa gives you one billion people, granted across 55 countries with trade barriers and other impediments, but our ancestors traded across the continent before Europeans drew lines around us. The pan-African opportunities outweigh the challenges, and that's why we're expanding Stawi's markets from just Kenya to Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana, and anywhere else that will buy our food. We hope to help solve food security, empower farmers, create jobs, develop the local economy, and we hope to become rich in the process. While it's not the sexiest approach, and maybe it doesn't achieve the same feel-good as giving a woman 100 dollars  to buy a goat on kiva.org, perhaps supporting fewer, higher-impact entrepreneurs to build massive businesses that scale pan-Africa can help change this.The political freedom for which our forebearers fought is meaningless without economic freedom. We hope to aid this fight for economic freedom by building world-class businesses, creating indigenous wealth, providing jobs that we so desperately need, and hopefully helping achieve this.Africa shall rise.Thank you.(Applause)Tom Rielly: So Sangu, of course, this is strong rhetoric. You're making 100 percent contrast between microcredit and regular investment and growing regular investment. Do you think there is a role for microcredit at all?Sangu Delle: I think there is a role. Microcredit has been a great, innovative way to expand financial access to the bottom of the pyramid. But for the problems we face in Africa, when we are looking at the Marshall Plan to revitalize war-torn Europe, it was not full of donations of sheep. We need more than just microcredit. We need more than just give 200 dollars. We need to build big businesses, and we need jobs.TR: Very good. Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sangu_delle_in_praise_of_macro_yes_macro_finance_in_africa
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"Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history. That's a lot to pack into 18 minutes.It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey. Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom. Around the corner from my bedroom was the bathroom that I used to share with my sister. And in between my bedroom and the bathroom was a balcony that overlooked the family room. And that's where everyone would hang out and watch TV, so that every time that I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom, everyone would see me, and every time I took a shower and would come back in a towel, everyone would see me. And I looked like this. I was awkward, insecure, and I hated it. I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house.And that's architecture. (Laughter) Done. That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy. And it's no surprise that we feel that way, because according to the EPA, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors. That's 90 percent of our time surrounded by architecture. That's huge. That means that architecture is shaping us in ways that we didn't even realize.That makes us a little bit gullible and very, very predictable. It means that when I show you a building like this, I know what you think: You think ""power"" and ""stability"" and ""democracy."" And I know you think that because it's based on a building that was build 2,500 years ago by the Greeks. This is a trick. This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time. We used it [200] years ago to build banks. We used it in the 19th century to build art museums. And in the 20th century in America, we used it to build houses. And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements.This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying. It's expensive, it takes a long time, and it's very complicated. And the people that build things — developers and governments — they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to.That's how we end up with buildings like this. This is a nice building. This is the Livingston Public Library that was completed in 2004 in my hometown, and, you know, it's got a dome and it's got this round thing  and columns, red brick, and you can kind of guess what Livingston is trying to say with this building: children, property values and history. But it doesn't have much to do with what a library actually does today. That same year, in 2004, on the other side of the country, another library was completed, and it looks like this. It's in Seattle. This library is about how we consume media in a digital age. It's about a new kind of public amenity for the city, a place to gather and read and share.So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different? And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing, pushing for new technologies, new typologies, new solutions for the way that we live today. And we push and we push and we push until we completely alienate all of you. We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we're dead inside because we've got no choice. We have to go to the other side and reengage those symbols that we know you love. So we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sellouts, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years.Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s. Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism. It's about concrete. (Laughter) You can guess this. Small windows, dehumanizing scale. This is really tough stuff. So as we get closer to the '80s, we start to reengage those symbols. We push the pendulum back into the other direction. We take these forms that we know you love and we update them. We add neon and we add pastels and we use new materials. And you love it. And we can't give you enough of it. We take Chippendale armoires and we turned those into skyscrapers, and skyscrapers can be medieval castles made out of glass. Forms got big, forms got bold and colorful. Dwarves became columns. (Laughter) Swans grew to the size of buildings. It was crazy. But it's the '80s, it's cool. (Laughter) We're all hanging out in malls and we're all moving to the suburbs, and out there, out in the suburbs, we can create our own architectural fantasies. And those fantasies, they can be Mediterranean or French or Italian. (Laughter) Possibly with endless breadsticks.This is the thing about postmodernism. This is the thing about symbols. They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. Because I know,  and I know all of you know, this isn't Tuscany. This is Ohio. (Laughter)So architects get frustrated, and we start pushing the pendulum back into the other direction. In the late '80s and early '90s, we start experimenting with something called deconstructivism. We throw out historical symbols, we rely on new, computer-aided design techniques, and we come up with new compositions, forms crashing into forms. This is academic and heady stuff, it's super unpopular, we totally alienate you. Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction. And then, something amazing happened.In 1997, this building opened. This is the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. And this building fundamentally changes the world's relationship to architecture. Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building. The New York Times called this building a miracle. Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed. So all of a sudden, everybody wants one of these buildings: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Springfield. (Laughter) Everybody wants one, and Gehry is everywhere. He is our very first starchitect.Now, how is it possible that these forms — they're wild and radical — how is it possible that they become so ubiquitous throughout the world? And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism. We created an emotional reaction to these forms. So did every mayor in the world. So every mayor knew that if they had these forms, they had culture and tourism.This phenomenon at the turn of the new millennium happened to a few other starchitects. It happened to Zaha and it happened to Libeskind, and what happened to these elite few architects at the turn of the new millennium could actually start to happen to the entire field of architecture, as digital media starts to increase the speed with which we consume information. Because think about how you consume architecture. A thousand years ago, you would have had to have walked to the village next door to see a building. Transportation speeds up: You can take a boat, you can take a plane, you can be a tourist. Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site. Architecture is everywhere now, and that means that the speed of communication has finally caught up to the speed of architecture.Because architecture actually moves quite quickly. It doesn't take long to think about a building. It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not. That's because there's never been a good feedback loop in architecture. That's how we end up with buildings like this. Brutalism wasn't a two-year movement, it was a 20-year movement. For 20 years, we were producing buildings like this because we had no idea how much you hated it. It's never going to happen again, I think, because we are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, of steel, or of the elevator, and it's a media revolution.So my theory is that when you apply media to this pendulum, it starts swinging faster and faster, until it's at both extremes nearly simultaneously, and that effectively blurs the difference between innovation and symbol, between us, the architects, and you, the public. Now we can make nearly instantaneous, emotionally charged symbols out of something that's brand new.Let me show you how this plays out in a project that my firm recently completed. We were hired to replace this building, which burned down. This is the center of a town called the Pines in Fire Island in New York State. It's a vacation community. We proposed a building that was audacious, that was different than any of the forms that the community was used to, and we were scared and our client was scared and the community was scared, so we created a series of photorealistic renderings that we put onto Facebook and we put onto Instagram, and we let people start to do what they do: share it, comment, like it, hate it. But that meant that two years before the building was complete, it was already a part of the community, so that when the renderings looked exactly like the finished product, there were no surprises. This building was already a part of this community, and then that first summer, when people started arriving and sharing the building on social media, the building ceased to be just an edifice and it became media, because these, these are not just pictures of a building, they're your pictures of a building. And as you use them to tell your story, they become part of your personal narrative, and what you're doing is you're short-circuiting all of our collective memory, and you're making these charged symbols for us to understand. That means we don't need the Greeks anymore to tell us what to think about architecture. We can tell each other what we think about architecture, because digital media hasn't just changed the relationship between all of us, it's changed the relationship between us and buildings. Think for a second about those librarians back in Livingston. If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search ""new libraries."" They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be. That's ammunition. That's ammunition that they can take with them to the mayor of Livingston, to the people of Livingston, and say, there's no one answer to what a library is today. Let's be a part of this. This abundance of experimentation gives them the freedom to run their own experiment.Everything is different now. Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore. Architects can hear you, and you're not intimidated by architecture. That means that that pendulum swinging back and forth from style to style, from movement to movement, is irrelevant. We can actually move forward and find relevant solutions to the problems that our society faces. This is the end of architectural history, and it means that the buildings of tomorrow are going to look a lot different than the buildings of today. It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works. It means that a stadium in Brooklyn can be a stadium in Brooklyn, not some red-brick historical pastiche of what we think a stadium ought to be. It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce. And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. It means that a parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida, can also be a place for sports and for yoga and you can even get married there late at night. (Laughter) It means that three architects can dream about swimming in the East River of New York, and then raise nearly half a million dollars from a community that gathered around their cause, no one client anymore. It means that no building is too small for innovation, like this little reindeer pavilion that's as muscly and sinewy as the animals it's designed to observe. And it means that a building doesn't have to be beautiful to be lovable, like this ugly little building in Spain, where the architects dug a hole, packed it with hay, and then poured concrete around it, and when the concrete dried, they invited someone to come and clean that hay out so that all that's left when it's done is this hideous little room that's filled with the imprints and scratches of how that place was made, and that becomes the most sublime place to watch a Spanish sunset.Because it doesn't matter if a cow builds our buildings or a robot builds our buildings. It doesn't matter how we build, it matters what we build. Architects already know how to make buildings that are greener and smarter and friendlier. We've just been waiting for all of you to want them. And finally, we're not on opposite sides anymore. Find an architect, hire an architect, work with us to design better buildings, better cities, and a better world, because the stakes are high. Buildings don't just reflect our society, they shape our society down to the smallest spaces: the local libraries, the homes where we raise our children, and the walk that they take from the bedroom to the bathroom.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_kushner_why_the_buildings_of_the_future_will_be_shaped_by_you
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"We need to change the culture in our jails and prisons, especially for young inmates. New York state is one of only two in the U.S. that automatically arrests and tries 16- to 17-year-olds as adults. This culture of violence takes these young people and puts them in a hostile environment, and the correctional officers pretty much allow any and everything to go on. There's not really much for these young people to do to actually enhance their talent and actually rehabilitate them. Until we can raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18, we need to focus on changing the daily lives of these young people.I know firsthand. Before I ever turned 18, I spent approximately 400 days on Rikers Island, and to add to that I spent almost 300 days in solitary confinement, and let me tell you this: Screaming at the top of your lungs all day on your cell door or screaming at the top of your lungs out the window, it gets tiring. Since there's not much for you to do while you're in there, you start pacing back and forth in your cell, you start talking to yourself, your thoughts start running wild, and then your thoughts become your own worst enemy. Jails are actually supposed to rehabilitate a person, not cause him or her to become more angry, frustrated, and feel more hopeless. Since there's not a discharge plan put in place for these young people, they pretty much  reenter society with nothing. And there's not really much for them to do to keep them from recidivating.But it all starts with the C.O.s. It's very easy for some people to look at these correctional officers as the good guys and the inmates as the bad guys, or vice versa for some, but it's a little more than that. See, these C.O.s are normal, everyday people. They come from the same neighborhoods as the population they ""serve."" They're just normal people. They're not robots, and there's  nothing special about them. They do pretty much everything anybody else in society does. The male C.O.s want to talk and flirt with the female C.O.s. They play the little high school kid games with each other. They politic with one another. And the female C.O.s gossip to each other.So I spent numerous amounts of time with numerous amounts of C.O.s, and let me tell you about this one in particular named Monroe. One day he pulled me in between the A and B doors which separate the north and south sides of our housing unit. He pulled me there because I had a physical altercation with another young man in my housing unit, and he felt, since there was a female officer working on the floor, that I violated his shift. So he punched me in my chest. He kind of knocked the wind out of me. I wasn't impulsive, I didn't react right away, because I know this is their house. I have no wins. All he has to do is pull his pin and backup will come immediately. So I just gave him a look in his eyes and I guess he saw the anger and frustration just burning, and he said to me, ""Your eyes are going to get you in a lot of trouble, because you're looking like you want to fight."" So he commenced to taking off his utility belt, he took off his shirt and his badge, and he said, ""We could fight.""So I asked him, ""You gonna hold it down?"" Now, that's a term that's commonly used on Rikers Island meaning that you're not going to say anything to anybody, and you're not going to report it. He said, ""Yeah, I'm gonna hold it down. You gonna hold it down?"" I didn't even respond. I just punched him right in his face, and we began fighting right then and there.Towards the end of the fight, he slammed me up against the wall, so while we were tussled up, he said to me, ""You good?"" as if he got the best of me, but in my mind, I know I got the best of him, so I replied very cocky, ""Oh, I'm good, you good?"" He said, ""Yeah, I'm good,  I'm good."" We let go, he shook my hand, said he gave me my respect, gave me a cigarette and sent me on my way.Believe it or not, you come across some C.O.s on Rikers Island that'll fight you one-on-one. They feel that they understand how it is, and they feel that I'm going to meet you where you're at. Since this is how you commonly handle your disputes, we can handle it in that manner. I walk away from it like a man, you walk away from it like a man, and that's it. Some C.O.s feel that they're jailing with you. This is why they have that mentality and that attitude and they go by that concept. In some instances, we're in it together with the C.O.s. However, institutions need to give these correctional officers proper trainings on how to properly deal with the adolescent population, and they also need to give them proper trainings on how to deal with  the mental health population as well. These C.O.s play a big factor in these young people's lives for x amount of time until a disposition is reached on their case. So why not try to mentor these young people while they're there? Why not try to give them some type of insight to make a change, so once they reenter back into society, they're doing something positive?A second big thing to help our teens in jails is better programming. When I was on Rikers Island, the huge thing was solitary confinement. Solitary confinement was originally designed to break a person mentally, physically and emotionally. That's what it was designed for. The U.S. Attorney General recently released a report stating that they're going to ban solitary confinement in New York state for teens.One thing that kept me sane while I was in solitary confinement was reading. I tried to educate myself as much as possible. I read any and everything I could get my hands on. And aside from that, I wrote music and short stories. Some programs that I feel would benefit our young people are art therapy programs for the kids that like to draw and have that talent, and what about the young individuals that are musically inclined? How about a music program for them that actually teaches them how to write and make music? Just a thought.When adolescents come to Rikers Island, C74, RNDC is the building that they're housed in. That's nicknamed ""gladiator school,"" because you have a young individual coming in from the street thinking that they're tough, being surrounded by a bunch of other young individuals from all of the five boroughs, and everybody feels that they're tough. So now you have a bunch of young gentlemen poking their chests out feeling that I have to prove I'm equally as tough as you or I'm tougher than you, you and you. But let's be honest: That culture is very dangerous and damaging to our young people. We need to help institutions and these teens realize that they don't have to lead the previous lifestyle that they led when they were on the street, that they can actually make a change.It's sad to report that while I was in prison, I used to hear dudes talking about when they get released from prison, what type of crimes they're going to commit when they get back in the street. The conversations used to sound something like this: ""Oh, when I hit the street, my brother got this connection for this, that and the third,"" or, ""My man over here got this connection for the low price. Let's exchange information,"" and, ""When we hit the town, we're going to do it real big."" I used to hear these conversations and think to myself, ""Wow, these dudes are really talking about going back in the street and committing future crimes."" So I came up with a name for that: I called it a go-back-to-jail-quick scheme because really, how long is that going to last? You get a retirement plan with that? Nice little pension? 401(k)? 403(b)? You get health insurance? Dental? (Laughter)But I will tell you this: Being in jail and being in prison, I came across some of the most intelligent, brilliant, and talented people that I would ever meet. I've seen individuals take a potato chip bag and turn it into the most beautiful picture frame. I've seen individuals take the state soap that's provided for free and turn them into the most beautiful sculptures that would make Michelangelo look like a kindergartner made it.At the age of 21, I was in a maximum-security prison called Elmira Correctional Facility. I just came out of the weight shack from working out, and I saw an older gentleman that I knew standing in the middle of the yard just looking up at the sky. Mind you, this older gentlemen was serving a 33-and-a-third-to-life sentence in which he already had served 20 years of that sentence.So I walk up to him and I said, ""O.G., what's going on, man, you good?""He looked at me, and he said, ""Yeah, I'm good, young blood.""I'm like, ""So what are you looking up at the sky for, man? What's so fascinating up there?""He said, ""You look up and you tell me what you see.""""Clouds."" (Laughter)He said, ""All right. What else do you see?"" At that time, it was a plane passing by.I said, ""All right, I see an airplane.""He said, ""Exactly, and what's  on that airplane?"" ""People."" ""Exactly. Now where's that plane and those people going?""""I don't know. You know? Please let me know if you do. Then let me get some lottery numbers.""He said, ""You're missing the big picture, young blood. That plane with those people is going somewhere, while we're here stuck. The big picture is this: That plane with those people going somewhere, that's life passing us by while we behind these walls, stuck.""Ever since that day, that sparked something in my mind and made me know I had to make a change. Growing up, I was always a good, smart kid. Some people would say I was a little too smart for my own good. I had dreams of becoming an architect or an archaeologist.Currently, I'm working at the Fortune Society, which is a reentry program, and I work with people as a case manager that are at high risk for recidivism. So I connect them with the services that they need once they're released from jail and prison so they can make a positive transition back into society. If I was to see my 15-year-old self today, I would sit down and talk to him and try to educate him and I would let him know, ""Listen, this is me. I'm you. This is us. We are one. Everything that you're about to do, I know what you're gonna do before you do it because I already did it, and I would encourage him not to hang out with x, y and z people. I would tell him not to be in such-and-such place. I would tell him, keep your behind in school, man, because that's where you need to be, because that's what's going to get you somewhere in life. This is the message that we should be sharing with our young men and young women. We shouldn't be treating them as adults and putting them in cultures of violence that are nearly impossible for them to escape.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ismael_nazario_what_i_learned_as_a_kid_in_jail
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"Hello. I'm a toy developer. With a dream of creating new toys that have never been seen before, I began working at a toy company nine years ago. When I first started working there, I proposed many new ideas to my boss every day. However, my boss always asked if I had the data to prove it would sell, and asked me to think of product development after analyzing market data. Data, data, data.So I analyzed the market data before thinking of a product. However, I was unable to think of anything new at that moment. (Laughter) My ideas were unoriginal. I wasn't getting any new ideas and I grew tired of thinking. It was so hard that I became this skinny. (Laughter) It's true. (Applause)You've all probably had similar experiences and felt this way too. Your boss was being difficult. The data was difficult. You become sick of thinking. Now, I throw out the data. It's my dream to create new toys. And now, instead of data, I'm using a game called Shiritori to come up with new ideas.I would like to introduce this method today. What is Shiritori? Take apple, elephant  and trumpet, for example. It's a game where  you take turns saying words that start with the last letter of the previous word. It's the same in Japanese and English. You can play Shiritori as you like: ""neko, kora, raibu, burashi,"" etc, etc. [Cat, cola, concert, brush] Many random words will come out. You force those words to connect to what you want to think of and form ideas. In my case, for example, since I want to think of toys, what could a toy cat be? A cat that lands after doing a somersault from a high place? How about a toy with cola? A toy gun where you shoot cola and get someone soaking wet? (Laughter)Ridiculous ideas are okay. The key is to keep them flowing. The more ideas you produce, you're sure to come up with some good ones, too. A brush, for example. Can we make a toothbrush into a toy? We could combine a toothbrush with a guitar and — (Music noises) — you've got a toy you can play with while brushing your teeth. (Laughter) (Applause) Kids who don't like to brush their teeth might begin to like it.Can we make a hat into a toy? How about something like a roulette game, where you try the hat on one by one, and then, when someone puts it on, a scary alien breaks through the top screaming, ""Ahh!"" I wonder if there would be a demand for this at parties?Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. Actually, this bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop Pop, a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. It was a big hit when it reached stores. Data had nothing to do with its success. Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time, so please pass this around amongst yourselves today and play with it. (Applause)Anyway, you continue to come up with useless ideas. Think up many trivial ideas, everyone. If you base your ideas on data analysis and know what you're aiming for, you'll end up trying too hard, and you can't produce new ideas. Even if you know what your aim is, think of ideas as freely as if you were throwing darts with your eyes closed. If you do this, you surely will hit somewhere near the center. At least one will. That's the one you should choose. If you do so, that idea will be in demand and, moreover, it will be brand new. That is how I think of new ideas.It doesn't have to be Shiritori; there are many different methods. You just have to choose words at random. You can flip through a dictionary and choose words at random. For example, you could look up two random letters and gather the results or go to the store and connect product names with what you want to think of. The point is to gather random words, not information from the category you're thinking for. If you do this, the ingredients for the association of ideas are collected and form connections that will produce many ideas. The greatest advantage to this method is the continuous flow of images. Because you're thinking of one word after another, the image of the previous word is still with you. That image will automatically be related with future words. Unconsciously, a concert will be connected to a brush and a roulette game will be connected to a hat. You wouldn't even realize it. You can come up with ideas that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise.This method is, of course, not just for toys. You can collect ideas for books, apps, events, and many other projects. I hope you all try this method. There are futures that are born from data. However, using this silly game called Shiritori, I look forward to the exciting future you will create, a future you couldn't even imagine.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shimpei_takahashi_play_this_game_to_come_up_with_original_ideas
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"I have a confession to make. I'm a business professor whose ambition has been to help people learn to lead. But recently, I've discovered that what many of us think of as great leadership does not work when it comes to leading innovation.I'm an ethnographer. I use the methods of anthropology to understand the questions in which I'm interested. So along with three co-conspirators, I spent nearly a decade observing up close and personal exceptional leaders of innovation. We studied 16 men and women, located in seven countries across the globe, working in 12 different industries. In total, we spent hundreds of hours on the ground, on-site, watching these leaders in action. We ended up with pages and pages and pages of field notes that we analyzed and looked for patterns in what our leaders did. The bottom line? If we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must unlearn our conventional notions of leadership.Leading innovation is not about creating a vision, and inspiring others to execute it. But what do we mean by innovation? An innovation is anything that is both new and useful. It can be a product or service. It can be a process or a way of organizing. It can be incremental, or it can be breakthrough. We have a pretty inclusive definition.How many of you recognize this man? Put your hands up. Keep your hands up, if you know who this is. How about these familiar faces? (Laughter) From your show of hands, it looks like many of you have seen a Pixar movie, but very few of you recognized Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of Pixar — one of the companies I had the privilege of studying.My first visit to Pixar was in 2005, when they were working on ""Ratatouille,"" that provocative movie about a rat becoming a master chef. Computer-generated movies are really mainstream today, but it took Ed and his colleagues nearly 20 years to create the first full-length C.G. movie. In the 20 years hence, they've produced 14 movies. I was recently at Pixar, and I'm here to tell you that number 15 is sure to be a winner.When many of us think about innovation, though, we think about an Einstein having an 'Aha!' moment. But we all know that's a myth. Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective genius. Let's think for a minute about what it takes to make a Pixar movie: No solo genius, no flash of inspiration produces one of those movies. On the contrary, it takes about 250 people four to five years, to make one of those movies.To help us understand the process, an individual in the studio drew a version of this picture. He did so reluctantly, because it suggested that the process  was a neat series of steps done by discrete groups. Even with all those arrows, he thought it failed to really tell you just how iterative, interrelated and, frankly, messy their process was.Throughout the making of a movie at Pixar, the story evolves. So think about it. Some shots go through quickly. They don't all go through in order. It depends on how vexing the challenges are that they come up with when they are working on a particular scene. So if you think about that scene in ""Up"" where the boy hands the piece of chocolate to the bird, that 10 seconds took one animator almost six months to perfect.The other thing about a Pixar movie is that no part of the movie is considered finished until the entire movie wraps. Partway through one production, an animator drew a character with an arched eyebrow that suggested a mischievous side. When the director saw that drawing, he thought it was great. It was beautiful, but he said, ""You've got to lose it; it doesn't fit the character."" Two weeks later, the director came back and said, ""Let's put in those few seconds of film."" Because that animator was allowed to share what we referred to as his slice of genius, he was able to help that director reconceive the character in a subtle but important way that really improved the story.What we know is, at the heart of innovation is a paradox. You have to unleash the talents and passions of many people and you have to harness them into a work that is actually useful. Innovation is a journey. It's a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different expertise and different points of view.Innovations rarely get created full-blown. As many of you know, they're the result, usually, of trial and error. Lots of false starts, missteps and mistakes. Innovative work can be very exhilarating, but it also can be really downright scary. So when we look at why it is that Pixar is able to do what it does, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on here?For sure, history and certainly Hollywood, is full of star-studded teams that have failed. Most of those failures are attributed to too many stars or too many cooks, if you will, in the kitchen. So why is it that Pixar, with all of its cooks, is able to be so successful time and time again? When we studied an Islamic Bank in Dubai, or a luxury brand in Korea, or a social enterprise in Africa, we found that innovative organizations are communities that have three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution. Creative abrasion is about being able to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse. In innovative organizations, they amplify differences, they don't minimize them. Creative abrasion is not about brainstorming, where people suspend their judgment. No, they know how to have very heated but constructive arguments to create a portfolio of alternatives.Individuals in innovative organizations learn how to inquire, they learn how to actively listen, but guess what? They also learn how to advocate for their point of view. They understand that innovation rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict. Creative agility is about being able to test and refine that portfolio of ideas through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment. It's about discovery-driven learning where you act, as opposed to plan, your way to the future. It's about design thinking where you have that interesting combination of the scientific method and the artistic process. It's about running a series of experiments, and not a series of pilots.Experiments are usually about learning. When you get a negative outcome, you're still really learning something that you need to know. Pilots are often about being right. When they don't work, someone or something is to blame. The final capability is creative resolution. This is about doing decision making in a way that you can actually combine even opposing ideas to reconfigure them in new combinations to produce a solution that is new and useful. When you look at innovative organizations, they never go along to get along. They don't compromise. They don't let one group or one individual dominate, even if it's the boss, even if it's the expert. Instead, they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision making process that allows for both/and solutions to arise and not simply either/or solutions. These three capabilities are why we see that Pixar is able to do what it does.Let me give you another example, and that example is the infrastructure group of Google. The infrastructure group of Google is the group that has to keep the website up and running 24/7. So when Google was about to introduce Gmail and YouTube, they knew that their data storage system wasn't adequate. The head of the engineering group and the infrastructure group at that time was a man named Bill Coughran. Bill and his leadership team, who he referred to as his brain trust, had to figure out what to do about this situation. They thought about it for a while. Instead of creating a group to tackle this task, they decided to allow groups to emerge spontaneously around different alternatives.Two groups coalesced. One became known as Big Table, the other became known as Build It From Scratch. Big Table proposed that they build on the current system. Build It From Scratch proposed that it was time for a whole new system. Separately, these two teams were allowed to work full-time on their particular approach. In engineering reviews, Bill described his role as, ""Injecting honesty into the process by driving debate.""Early on, the teams were encouraged to build prototypes so that they could ""bump them up against reality and discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach."" When Build It From Scratch shared their prototype with the group whose beepers would have to go off in the middle of the night if something went wrong with the website, they heard loud and clear about the limitations of their particular design. As the need for a solution became more urgent and as the data, or the evidence, began to come in, it became pretty clear that the Big Table solution was the right one for the moment. So they selected that one.But to make sure that they did not lose the learning of the Build it From Scratch team, Bill asked two members of that team to join a new team that was emerging to work on the next-generation system. This whole process took nearly two years, but I was told that they were all working at breakneck speed.Early in that process, one of the engineers had gone to Bill and said, ""We're all too busy for this inefficient system of running parallel experiments."" But as the process unfolded, he began to understand the wisdom of allowing talented people to play out their passions. He admitted, ""If you had forced us to all be on one team, we might have focused on proving who was right, and winning, and not on learning and discovering what was the best answer for Google.""Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? It's because they've mastered the capabilities required for that. They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making.Some of you may be sitting there and saying to yourselves right now, ""We don't know how to do those things in my organization. So why do they know how to do those things at Pixar, and why do they know how to do those things at Google?"" When many of the people that worked for Bill told us, in their opinion, that Bill was one of the finest leaders in Silicon Valley, we completely agreed; the man is a genius.Leadership is the secret sauce. But it's a different kind of leadership, not the kind many of us think about when we think about great leadership. One of the leaders I met with early on said to me, ""Linda, I don't read books on leadership. All they do is make me feel bad."" (Laughter) ""In the first chapter they say I'm supposed to create a vision. But if I'm trying to do something that's truly new, I have no answers. I don't know what direction we're going in and I'm not even sure I know how to figure out how to get there."" For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is needed.But if we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our understanding of what leadership is about. Leading innovation is about creating the space where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving.At this point, some of you may be wondering, ""What does that leadership really look like?"" At Pixar, they understand that innovation takes a village. The leaders focus on building a sense of community and building those three capabilities. How do they define leadership? They say leadership is about creating a world to which people want to belong. What kind of world do people want to belong in at Pixar? A world where you're living at the frontier. What do they focus their time on? Not on creating a vision. Instead they spend their time thinking about, ""How do we design a studio that has the sensibility of a public square so that people will interact? Let's put in a policy that anyone, no matter what their level or role, is allowed to give notes to the director about how they feel about a particular film. What can we do to make sure that all the disruptors, all the minority voices in this organization, speak up and are heard? And, finally, let's bestow credit in a very generous way."" I don't know if you've ever looked at the credits of a Pixar movie, but the babies born during a production are listed there. (Laughter)How did Bill think about what his role was? Bill said, ""I lead a volunteer organization. Talented people don't want to follow me anywhere. They want to cocreate with me the future. My job is to nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos."" How did he see his role? ""I'm a role model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. I'm never a dictator of viewpoints."" Advice about how you exercise the role? Hire people who argue with you. And, guess what? Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague.Some of you may be wondering now, what are these people thinking? They're thinking, ""I'm not the visionary, I'm the social architect. I'm creating the space where people are willing and able to share and combine their talents and passions."" If some of you are worrying now that you don't work at a Pixar, or you don't work at a Google, I want to tell you there's still hope. We've studied many organizations that were really not organizations you'd think of as ones where a lot of innovation happens.We studied a general counsel in a pharmaceutical company who had to figure out how to get the outside lawyers, 19 competitors, to collaborate and innovate. We studied the head of marketing at a German automaker where, fundamentally, they believed that it was the design engineers, not the marketeers, who were allowed to be innovative. We also studied Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company. When we met Vineet, his company was about, in his words, to become irrelevant. We watched as he turned that company into a global dynamo of I.T. innovation. At HCL technologies, like at many companies, the leaders had learned to see their role as setting direction and making sure that no one deviated from it. What he did is tell them it was time for them to think about rethinking what they were supposed to do. Because what was happening is that everybody was looking up and you weren't seeing the kind of bottom-up innovation we saw at Pixar or Google. So they began to work on that.They stopped giving answers, they stopped trying to provide solutions. Instead, what they did is they began to see the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the young sparks, the people who were closest to the customers, as the source of innovation. They began to transfer the organization's growth to that level. In Vineet's language, this was about inverting the pyramid so that you could unleash the power of the many by loosening the stranglehold of the few, and increase the quality and the speed of innovation that was happening every day.For sure, Vineet and all the other leaders that we studied were in fact visionaries. For sure, they understood that that was not their role. So I don't think it is accidental that many of you did not recognize Ed. Because Ed, like Vineet, understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it. If we want to invent a better future, and I suspect that's why many of us are here, then we need to reimagine our task. Our task is to create the space where everybody's slices of genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/linda_hill_how_to_manage_for_collective_creativity
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"I cannot forget them. Their names were Aslan, Alik, Andrei, Fernanda, Fred, Galina, Gunnhild, Hans, Ingeborg, Matti, Natalya, Nancy, Sheryl, Usman, Zarema, and the list is longer. For many, their existence, their humanity, has been reduced to statistics, coldly recorded as ""security incidents.""For me, they were colleagues belonging to that community of humanitarian aid workers that tried to bring a bit of comfort to the victims of the wars in Chechnya in the '90s. They were nurses, logisticians, shelter experts, paralegals, interpreters. And for this service, they were murdered, their families torn apart, and their story largely forgotten. No one was ever sentenced for these crimes.I cannot forget them. They live in me somehow, their memories giving me meaning every day. But they are also haunting the dark street of my mind.As humanitarian aid workers, they made the choice to be at the side of the victim, to provide some assistance, some comfort, some protection, but when they needed protection themselves, it wasn't there. When you see the headlines of your newspaper these days with the war in Iraq or in Syria — aid worker abducted, hostage executed — but who were they? Why were they there? What motivated them? How did we become so indifferent to these crimes? This is why I am here today with you. We need to find better ways to remember them. We also need to explain the key values to which they dedicated their lives. We also need to demand justice.When in '96 I was sent by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to the North Caucasus, I knew some of the risks. Five colleagues had been killed, three had been seriously injured, seven had already been taken hostage. So we were careful. We were using armored  vehicles, decoy cars, changing patterns of travel, changing homes, all sorts of security measures.Yet on a cold winter night of January '98, it was my turn. When I entered my flat in Vladikavkaz with a guard, we were surrounded by armed men. They took the guard, they put him on the floor, they beat him up in front of me, tied him, dragged him away. I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and forced to kneel, as the silencer of a gun pressed against my neck. When it happens to you, there is no time for thinking, no time for praying. My brain went on automatic, rewinding quickly the life I'd just left behind. It took me long minutes to figure out that those masked men there were not there to kill me, but that someone, somewhere, had ordered my kidnapping. Then a process of dehumanization started that day. I was no more than just a commodity.I normally don't talk about this, but I'd like to share a bit with you some of those 317 days of captivity. I was kept in an underground cellar, total darkness, for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day, and then the guards  would come, normally two. They would bring a big piece of bread, a bowl of soup, and a candle. That candle would burn for 15 minutes, 15 minutes of precious light, and then they would take it away, and I returned to darkness. I was chained by a metal cable to my bed. I could do only four small steps. I always dreamt of the fifth one. And no TV, no radio, no newspaper, no one to talk to. I had no towel, no soap, no toilet paper, just two metal buckets open, one for water, for one waste. Can you imagine that mock execution can be a pastime for guards when they are sadistic or when they are just bored or drunk? We are breaking my nerves very slowly.Isolation and darkness are particularly difficult to describe. How do you describe nothing? There are no words for the depths of loneliness I reached in that very thin border between sanity and madness. In the darkness, sometimes I played imaginary games of checkers. I would start with the black, play with the white, back to the black trying to trick the other side. I don't play checkers anymore. I was tormented by the thoughts of my family and my colleague, the guard, Edik. I didn't know what had happened to him. I was trying not to think, I tried to fill up my time by doing all sorts of physical exercise on the spot. I tried to pray, I tried all sorts of memorization games. But darkness also creates images and thoughts that are not normal. One part of your brain wants you to resist, to shout, to cry, and the other part of the brain orders you to shut up and just go through it. It's a constant internal debate; there is no one to arbitrate.Once a guard came to me, very aggressively, and he told me, ""Today you're going to kneel and beg for your food."" I wasn't in a good mood, so I insulted him. I insulted his mother, I insulted his ancestors. The consequence was moderate: he threw the food into my waste. The day after he came back with the same demand. He got the same answer, which had the same consequence. Four days later, the body was full of pain. I didn't know hunger hurt so much when you have so little. So when the guards came down, I knelt. I begged for my food. Submission was the only way for me to make it to another candle.After my kidnapping, I was transferred from North Ossetia to Chechnya, three days of slow travel in the trunks of different cars, and upon arrival, I was interrogated for 11 days by a guy called Ruslan. The routine was always the same: a bit more light, 45 minutes. He would come down to the cellar, he would ask the guards to tie me on the chair, and he would turn on the music loud. And then he would yell questions. He would scream. He would beat me. I'll spare you the details. There are many questions I could not understand, and there are some questions I did not want to understand. The length of the interrogation was the duration of the tape: 15 songs, 45 minutes. I would always long for the last song.On one day, one night in that cellar, I don't know what it was, I heard a child crying above my head, a boy, maybe two or three years old. Footsteps, confusion, people running. So when Ruslan came the day after, before he put the first question to me, I asked him, ""How is your son today? Is he feeling better?"" Ruslan was taken by surprise. He was furious that the guards may have leaked some details about his private life. I kept talking about NGOs supplying medicines to local clinics that may help his son to get better. And we talked about education, we talked about families. He talked to me about his children. I talked to him about my daughters. And then he'd talk about guns, about cars, about women, and I had to talk about guns, about cars, about women. And we talked until the last song on the tape. Ruslan was the most brutal man I ever met. He did not touch me anymore. He did not ask any other questions. I was no longer just a commodity.Two days after, I was transferred to another place. There, a guard came to me, very close — it was quite unusual — and he said with a very soft voice, he said, ""I'd like to thank you for the assistance your organization provided my family when we were displaced in nearby Dagestan."" What could I possibly reply? It was so painful. It was like a blade in the belly. It took me weeks of internal thinking to try to reconcile the good reasons we had to assist that family and the soldier of fortune he became. He was young, he was shy. I never saw his face. He probably meant well. But in those 15 seconds, he made me question everything we did, all the sacrifices.He made me think also how they see us. Until then, I had assumed that they know why we are there and what we are doing. One cannot assume this. Well, explaining why we do this is not that easy, even to our closest relatives. We are not perfect, we are not superior, we are not the world's fire brigade, we are not superheroes, we don't stop wars, we know that humanitarian response is not a substitute for political solution. Yet we do this because one life matters. Sometimes that's the only difference you make — one individual, one family, a small group of individuals — and it matters. When you have a tsunami, an earthquake or a typhoon, you see teams of rescuers coming from all over the world, searching for survivors for weeks. Why? Nobody questions this. Every life matters, or every life should matter. This is the same for us when we help refugees, people displaced within their country by conflict, or stateless persons,I know many people, when they are confronted by overwhelming suffering, they feel powerless and they stop there. It's a pity, because there are so many ways people can help. We don't stop with that feeling. We try to do whatever we can to provide some assistance, some protection, some comfort. We have to. We can't do otherwise. It's what makes us feel, I don't know, simply human.That's a picture of me the day of my release. Months after my release, I met the then-French prime minister. The second thing he told me: ""You were totally irresponsible to go to the North Caucasus. You don't know how many problems you've created for us."" It was a short meeting. (Laughter)I think helping people in danger is responsible. In that war, that nobody seriously wanted to stop, and we have many of these today, bringing some assistance to people in need and a bit of protection was not just an act of humanity, it was making a real difference for the people. Why could he not understand this? We have a responsibility to try. You've heard about that concept: Responsibility to Protect. Outcomes may depend on various parameters. We may even fail, but there is worse than failing — it's not even trying when we can.Well, if you are met this way, if you sign up for this sort of job, your life is going to be full of joy and sadness, because there are a lot of people we cannot help, a lot of people we cannot protect, a lot of people we did not save. I call them my ghost, and by having witnessed their suffering from close, you take a bit  of that suffering on yourself. Many young humanitarian workers go through their first experience with a lot of bitterness. They are thrown into situations where they are witness, but they are powerless to bring any change. They have to learn to accept it and gradually turn this into positive energy. It's difficult. Many don't succeed, but for those who do, there is no other job like this. You can see the difference you make every day.Humanitarian aid workers know the risk they are taking in conflict areas or  in post-conflict environments, yet our life, our job, is becoming  increasingly life-threatening, and the sanctity of our life is fading. Do you know that since the millennium, the number of attacks on humanitarian  aid workers has tripled? 2013 broke new records: 155 colleagues killed, 171 seriously wounded, 134 abducted. So many broken lives. Until the beginning of the civil war in Somalia in the late '80s, humanitarian aid workers were sometimes victims of what we call collateral damages, but by and large we were not the target of these attacks. This has changed. Look at this picture. Baghdad, August 2003: 24 colleagues were killed. Gone are the days when a U.N. blue flag or a Red Cross would automatically protect us.Criminal groups and some political groups have cross-fertilized over the last 20 years, and they've created these sort of hybrids with whom we have no way of communicating. Humanitarian principles are tested, questioned, and often ignored, but perhaps more importantly, we have abandoned the search for justice. There seems to be no consequence whatsoever for attacks against humanitarian aid workers. After my release, I was told not to seek any form of justice. It won't do you any good, that's what I was told. Plus, you're going to put in danger the life of other colleagues. It took me years to see the sentencingof three people associated  with my kidnapping, but this was the exception. There was no justice for any  of the humanitarian aid workers killed or abducted in Chechnya between '95 and '99, and it's the same all over the world. This is unacceptable. This is inexcusable. Attacks on humanitarian aid workers are war crimes in international law. Those crimes should not go unpunished. We must end this cycle of impunity. We must consider that those attacks against humanitarian aid workers are attacks against humanity itself. That makes me furious.I know I'm very lucky compared to the refugees I work for. I don't know what it is to have seen my whole town destroyed. I don't know what it is to have seen my relatives shot in front of me. I don't know what it is to lose the protection of my country. I also know that I'm very lucky compared to other hostages. Four days before my eventful release, four hostages were beheaded a few miles away from where I was kept in captivity. Why them? Why am I here today? No easy answer.I was received with a lot of support that I got from my relatives, from colleagues, from friends, from people I didn't know. They have helped me over the years to come out of the darkness. Not everyone was treated with the same attention. How many of my colleagues, after a traumatic incident, took their own life? I can count nine that I knew personally. How many of my colleagues went through a difficult divorce after a traumatic experience because they could not explain anything anymore to their spouse? I've lost that count. There is a price for this type of life.In Russia, all war monuments have this beautiful inscription at the top. It says, (In Russian) ""No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.""I do not forget my lost colleagues. I cannot forget anything. I call on you to remember their dedication and demand that humanitarian aid workers around the world be better protected. We should not let that light of hope they have brought to be switched off.After my ordeal, a lot of colleagues asked me, ""But why do you continue? Why do you do this sort of job? Why do you have to go back to it?"" My answer was very simple: If I had quit, that would have meant my kidnapper had won. They would have taken my soul and my humanity.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vincent_cochetel_i_was_held_hostage_for_317_days_here_s_what_i_thought_about
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"How many people here have heard of PMS? Everybody, right? Everyone knows that women go a little crazy right before they get their period, that the menstrual cycle throws them onto an inevitable hormonal roller coaster of irrationality and irritability. There's a general assumption that fluctuations in reproductive hormones cause extreme emotions and that the great majority of women are affected by this. Well, I am here to tell you that scientific evidence says neither of those assumptions is true. I'm here to give you  the good news about PMS.But first, let's take a look at how firmly the idea of PMS is entrenched in American culture. If you examine newspaper or magazine articles, you'll see how widely assumed it is that everyone gets PMS. In an article in the magazine Redbook titled ""You: PMS Free,"" readers were informed that between 80  to 90 percent of women suffer from PMS. L.A. Muscle magazine warned its readers that 40 to 50 percent of women suffer from PMS, and that it plays a major role in women's mental and physical health, and a couple of years ago, even the Wall Street Journal ran an article on calcium as a treatment for PMS, asking its female readers, ""Do you turn into a witch every month?""From all these articles, you would think there must be a mountain of research verifying the widespread nature of PMS. However, after five decades of research, there's no strong consensus on the definition, the cause, the treatment, or even  the existence of PMS. As most commonly defined by psychologists, PMS involves negative behavioral, cognitive and physical symptoms from the time of ovulation to menstruation. But here's where it gets tricky. Over 150 different symptoms have been used to diagnose PMS, and here are just a few of those.Now, I want to be clear here. I'm not saying women don't get some of these symptoms. What I'm saying is that getting some of these symptoms doesn't amount to a mental disorder, and when psychologists come up with a disorder that's so vaguely defined, the label eventually becomes meaningless. With a list of symptoms this long and wide, I could have PMS, you could have PMS, the guy in the third row here could have PMS, my dog could have PMS. (Laughter) Some researchers said you had to have five symptoms. Some said three. Other researchers said that symptoms were only meaningful if they were highly disturbing to you, but others said minor symptoms were just as important. For many years, because there was no standardization in the definition of PMS, when psychologists tried to report prevalence rates, their estimates ranged from five percent of women to 97 percent of women, so at the same time almost no one and almost everyone had PMS.Overall, the weaknesses in the methods of research on PMS have been considerable. First, many studies asked women to report their symptoms retrospectively, looking to the past and relying on memory, which is known to inflate reporting of PMS compared to what's called prospective reporting, which involves keeping a daily log of symptoms for at least two months in a row. Many studies also exclusively focused on white, middle-class women, which makes it problematic to apply study findings to all women. We know there's a strong cultural component to the belief in PMS because it's nearly unheard of outside of Western nations. Third, many studies failed to use control groups. If we want to understand the specific characteristics of women who have PMS, we need to be able to compare them to women who don't have PMS. And finally, many different types of questionnaires were used to diagnose PMS, focusing on different symptoms, symptom duration and severity. To do reliable research on any condition, scientists must agree on the specific characteristics that make up that condition so they're all talking about the same thing, and with PMS, this has not been the case.However, in 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, thankfully — it's also the manual for mental health professionals — they redefined PMS as PMDD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. And dysphoria refers to a feeling of agitation or unease. And according to these new DSM guidelines, in most menstrual cycles in the last year, at least five of 11 possible symptoms must appear in the week before menstruation starts; the symptoms must improve once menstruation has begun; and the symptoms must be absent the week after menstruation has ended. One of these symptoms must come from this list of four: marked mood swings, irritability, anxiety, or depression. The other symptoms could come from the first slide or from those on the second slide, including symptoms like feeling out of control and changes in sleep or appetite. The DSM also required now that the symptoms should be associated with clinically significant distress — there should be some kind of disturbance in work or school or social relationships — and that symptoms and symptom severity should now be documented by keeping a daily log for at least two cycles in a row. And finally, the DSM required that the emotional disturbance should be more than simply an exacerbation of an already existing disorder. So scientifically speaking, this is an improvement. We now have a limited number of symptoms, and a high impact on functioning that's required, and the reporting and timing of symptoms have both become very specific. Well, using this criteria and looking at most recent studies, we see that on average, three to eight percent of women suffer from PMDD. Not all women, not most women, not the majority of women, not even a lot of women: three to eight percent. For everyone else, variables like stressful events or happy occasions or even day of the week are more powerful predictors of mood than time of the month, and this is the information the scientific community has had since the 1990s. In 2002, my colleagues and I published an article describing the PMS and PMDD research, and several similar articles have appeared in psychology journals. The questions is, why hasn't this information trickled down to the public? Why do these myths persist?Well, certainly the onslaught of messages that women receive from books, TV, movies, the Internet, that everyone gets PMS go a long way in convincing them it must be true. Research tells us that the more a woman believes that everyone gets PMS, the more likely she is to erroneously report that she has it. Let me tell you what I mean by ""erroneously."" You might ask her, ""Do you have PMS?"" and she says yes, but then, when you have her  keep a daily log of psychological symptoms for two months, no correlation is found between her symptoms and time of the month.Another reason for the persistence of the PMS myth has to do with the narrow boundaries of the feminine role. Feminist psychologists like Joan Chrisler have suggested that taking on the label of PMS allows women to express emotions that would otherwise be considered unladylike. The near universal definition of a good woman is one who is happy, loving, caring for others, and taking great satisfaction from that role. Well, PMS has become a permission slip to be angry, complain, be irritated, without losing the title of good woman. We know that the variables in a woman's environment are much more likely to cause her to be angry than her hormones, but when she attributes anger to hormones, she's absolved of responsibility or criticism. ""Oh, that's not who she is. It's out of her control."" And while this can be a useful tool, it serves to invalidate women's emotions. When people respond to a woman's anger with the thought, ""Oh, it's just that time of the month,"" her ability to be taken seriously or effect change is severely limited.So who else benefits from the myth of PMS? Well, I can tell you that treating PMS has become a profitable,  thriving industry. Amazon.com currently offers over 1,900 books on PMS treatment. A quick Google search will bring up a cornucopia of clinics, workshops and seminars. Reputable Internet sources of medical information like WebMD or the Mayo Clinic list PMS as a known disorder. It's not a known disorder, but they list it. And they also list the medications that physicians have prescribed to treat it, like anti-depressants or hormones. Interestingly, though, both websites say that the success of medication in treating PMS symptoms vary from woman to woman. Well, that doesn't make sense. If you've got a distinct disorder with a distinct cause, which PMS is supposed to be, then the treatment should bring improvement for a great number of women. This has not been the case with these treatments, and FDA regulations say that for a drug to be deemed effective, a large portion of the target population should see clinically significant improvement. So we have not had that at all with these so-called treatments. However, the financial gain of perpetuating the myth that PMS is a common mental disorder and is treatable is quite substantial. When women are prescribed drugs like anti-depressants or hormones, medical protocol requires that they have physician follow-up every three months. That's a lot of doctor visits. Pharmaceutical companies reap untold profits when women are convinced they should take a prescribed medication for all of their child-bearing lives. Over-the-counter drugs like Midol even claim to treat PMS symptoms like tension and irritability, even though they only contain a diuretic, a pain reliever and caffeine. Now, far be it from me to argue with the magical powers of caffeine, but I don't think reducing tension is one of them. Since 2002, Midol has marketed a Teen Midol to adolescents. They are aiming at young girls early, to convince them that everyone gets PMS and that it will make you a monster, but wait, there's something you can do about it: Take Midol and you will be a human being again. In 2013, Midol took in 48 million dollars in sales revenue.So while perpetuating the myth of PMS has been lucrative for some, it comes with some serious adverse consequences for women. First, it contributes to the medicalization of women's reproductive health. The medical field has a long history of conceptualizing women's reproductive processes as illnesses that require treatment, and this has come at many costs, including excessive Cesarean deliveries, hysterectomies and prescribed hormone treatments that have harmed rather than enhanced women's health. Second, the PMS myth also contributes to the stereotype of women as irrational and overemotional. When the menstrual cycle is described as a hormonal roller coaster that turns women into angry beasts, it becomes easy to question  the competence of all women. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce, but still there's a minuscule number of women at the highest echelons of fields like government or business, and when we think about who makes for a good CEO or senator, someone who has qualities like  rationality, steadiness, competence come to mind, and in our culture, that sounds more like a man than a woman, and the PMS myth contributes to that.Psychologists know that the moods of men and women are more similar than different. One study followed men and women for four to six months and found that the number of mood swings they experienced and the severity of those mood swings were no different. And finally, the PMS myth keeps women from dealing with the actual issues causing them emotional upset. Individual issues like quality of relationship or work conditions or societal issues like racism or sexism or the daily grind of poverty are all strongly related to daily mood. Sweeping emotions under the rug of PMS keeps women from understanding the source of their negative emotions, but it also takes away the opportunity to take any action to change them.So the good news about PMS is that while some women get some symptoms because of the menstrual cycle, the great majority don't get a mental disorder. They go to work or school, take care of their families, and function at a normal level. We know the emotions and moods of men and women are more similar than different, so let's walk away from the tired old PMS myth of women as witches and embrace the reality of high emotional and professional functioning the great majority of women live every day.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robyn_stein_deluca_the_good_news_about_pms
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"We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand  the world at that scale.Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. But it gets strange, because even at  that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. So take the colors of our world. This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. But we're not seeing all the waves out there. In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it.Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors.Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world.Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us.Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. Your whole world is about smelling. You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. Everything is about smell for you. So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. You look at your human owner and you think, ""What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? (Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago?"" (Laughter)So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human.So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine.Now, how do we understand that? Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world.But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And this is a very efficient kind of machine. It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels.So I call this the P.H.  model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals.Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it.Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like ""Bzz, bzz, bzz."" It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else.The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them.So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. So here's the concept. So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. So as I'm speaking — (Applause) — the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. I'm feeling the sonic world around me.So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest.So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day.Scott Novich: You.David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board.SN: Where. Where.DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said.SN: Touch. Touch.DE: Now, he's not doing this — (Applause) — Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries.Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience?So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. He doesn't know what's going on. He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. (Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. (Laughter)Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have.We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away.And that's just the beginning. What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it.So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet.So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe?Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah.Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter)CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. So that stock market experiment. This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful?DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore.CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily  that sensory addition works? I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it?DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. The general story, though, is that it's extraordinarily flexible. So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. So I don't think we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of.CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. There are so many possible applications for this. Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away.CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much.DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans
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"I'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years, and it's in the area of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing.You see this object here. It looks fairly simple, but it's quite complex at the same time. It's a set of concentric geodesic structures with linkages between each one. In its context, it is not manufacturable by traditional manufacturing techniques. It has a symmetry such that you can't injection mold it. You can't even manufacture it through milling. This is a job for a 3D printer, but most 3D printers would take between three and 10 hours to fabricate it, and we're going to take the risk tonight to try to fabricate it onstage during this 10-minute talk. Wish us luck.Now, 3D printing is actually a misnomer. It's actually 2D printing over and over again, and it in fact uses the technologies associated with 2D printing. Think about inkjet printing where you lay down ink on a page to make letters, and then do that over and over again to build up a three-dimensional object. In microelectronics, they use something called lithography to do the same sort of thing, to make the transistors and integrated circuits and build up a structure several times. These are all 2D printing technologies.Now, I'm a chemist, a material scientist too, and my co-inventors are also material scientists, one a chemist, one a physicist, and we began to be interested in 3D printing. And very often, as you know, new ideas are often simple connections between people with different experiences in different communities, and that's our story.Now, we were inspired by the ""Terminator 2"" scene for T-1000, and we thought, why couldn't a 3D printer operate in this fashion, where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object? Okay, just like the movies. And could we be inspired by Hollywood and come up with ways to actually try to get this to work? And that was our challenge. And our approach would be, if we could do this, then we could fundamentally address the three issues holding back 3D printing from being a manufacturing process.One, 3D printing takes forever. There are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed parts. (Laughter) The layer by layer process leads to defects in mechanical properties, and if we could grow continuously, we could eliminate those defects. And in fact, if we could grow really fast, we could also start using materials that are self-curing, and we could have amazing properties. So if we could pull this off, imitate Hollywood, we could in fact address 3D manufacturing.Our approach is to use some standard knowledge in polymer chemistry to harness light and oxygen to grow parts continuously. Light and oxygen work in different ways. Light can take a resin and convert it to a solid, can convert a liquid to a solid. Oxygen inhibits that process. So light and oxygen are polar opposites from one another from a chemical point of view, and if we can control spatially the light and oxygen, we could control this process. And we refer to this as CLIP. [Continuous Liquid Interface Production.] It has three functional components. One, it has a reservoir that holds the puddle, just like the T-1000. At the bottom of the reservoir is a special window. I'll come back to that. In addition, it has a stage that will lower into the puddle and pull the object out of the liquid. The third component is a digital light projection system underneath the reservoir, illuminating with light in the ultraviolet region.Now, the key is that this window in the bottom of this reservoir, it's a composite, it's a very special window. It's not only transparent to light but it's permeable to oxygen. It's got characteristics like a contact lens. So we can see how the process works. You can start to see that as you lower a stage in there, in a traditional process, with an oxygen-impermeable window, you make a two-dimensional pattern and you end up gluing that onto the window with a traditional window, and so in order to introduce the next layer, you have to separate it, introduce new resin, reposition it, and do this process over and over again. But with our very special window, what we're able to do is, with oxygen coming through the bottom as light hits it, that oxygen inhibits the reaction, and we form a dead zone. This dead zone is on the order of tens of microns thick, so that's two or three diameters of a red blood cell, right at the window interface that remains a liquid, and we pull this object up, and as we talked about in a Science paper, as we change the oxygen content, we can change the dead zone thickness. And so we have a number of key variables that we control: oxygen content, the light, the light intensity, the dose to cure, the viscosity, the geometry, and we use very sophisticated software to control this process.The result is pretty staggering. It's 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3D printers, which is game-changing. In addition, as our ability to deliver liquid to that interface, we can go 1,000 times faster I believe, and that in fact opens up the opportunity for generating a lot of heat, and as a chemical engineer, I get very excited at heat transfer and the idea that we might one day have water-cooled 3D printers, because they're going so fast. In addition, because we're growing things, we eliminate the layers, and the parts are monolithic. You don't see the surface structure. You have molecularly smooth surfaces. And the mechanical properties of most parts made in a 3D printer are notorious for having properties that depend on the orientation with which how you printed it, because of the layer-like structure. But when you grow objects like this, the properties are invariant with the print direction. These look like injection-molded parts, which is very different than traditional 3D manufacturing. In addition, we're able to throw the entire polymer chemistry textbook at this, and we're able to design chemistries that can give rise to the properties you really want in a 3D-printed object.(Applause)There it is. That's great. You always take the risk that something like this won't work onstage, right?But we can have materials with great mechanical properties. For the first time, we can have elastomers that are high elasticity or high dampening. Think about vibration control or great sneakers, for example. We can make materials that have incredible strength, high strength-to-weight ratio, really strong materials, really great elastomers, so throw that in the audience there. So great material properties.And so the opportunity now, if you actually make a part that has the properties to be a final part, and you do it in game-changing speeds, you can actually transform manufacturing. Right now, in manufacturing, what happens is, the so-called digital thread in digital manufacturing. We go from a CAD drawing, a design, to a prototype to manufacturing. Often, the digital thread is broken right at prototype, because you can't go all the way to manufacturing because most parts don't have the properties to be a final part. We now can connect the digital thread all the way from design to prototyping to manufacturing, and that opportunity really opens up all sorts of things, from better fuel-efficient cars dealing with great lattice properties with high strength-to-weight ratio, new turbine blades, all sorts of wonderful things.Think about if you need a stent in an emergency situation, instead of the doctor pulling off a stent out of the shelf that was just standard sizes, having a stent that's designed for you, for your own anatomy with your own tributaries, printed in an emergency situation in real time out of the properties such that the stent could go away after 18 months: really-game changing. Or digital dentistry, and making these kinds of structures even while you're in the dentist chair. And look at the structures that my students are making at the University of North Carolina. These are amazing microscale structures.You know, the world is really good at nano-fabrication. Moore's Law has driven things from 10 microns and below. We're really good at that, but it's actually very hard to make things from 10 microns to 1,000 microns, the mesoscale. And subtractive techniques from the silicon industry can't do that very well. They can't etch wafers that well. But this process is so gentle, we can grow these objects up from the bottom using additive manufacturing and make amazing things in tens of seconds, opening up new sensor technologies, new drug delivery techniques, new lab-on-a-chip applications, really game-changing stuff.So the opportunity of making a part in real time that has the properties to be a final part really opens up 3D manufacturing, and for us, this is very exciting, because this really is owning the intersection between hardware, software and molecular science, and I can't wait to see what designers and engineers around the world are going to be able to do with this great tool.Thanks for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_desimone_what_if_3d_printing_was_25x_faster
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"You're looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that's changed, but only recently.It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk at the Forbes 30 Under 30 summit: 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30. That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, and the youngest, just four. I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs. Yes, I'm in rap songs. Almost 40 rap songs. (Laughter)But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. I know, right? He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined. You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again. (Laughter) (Applause) I realized later that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again. (Laughter) (Applause)At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22? Yep. That's what I thought. So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America. Of course, life is full of surprises.Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply.In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before. Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio, or watching television. That was it. But that wasn't my fate. Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere, and when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the Internet for a major news story, a click that reverberated around the world.What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers. Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes. News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret?Now, I admit I made mistakes, especially wearing that beret. But the attention and judgment that I received, not the story, but that I personally received, was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, that woman. I was seen by many but actually known by few. And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it cyberbullying and online harassment. Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others.In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. I lost almost everything, and I almost lost my life.Let me paint a picture for you. It is September of 1998. I'm sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights. I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation. For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the Sword of Damocles over my head. I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago? Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize.A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough, but a few weeks later, the audio tapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. The public humiliation was excruciating. Life was almost unbearable.This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by this, I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public — public without consent, public without context, and public without compassion.Fast forward 12 years to 2010, and now social media has been born. The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually make a mistake, and now it's for both public and private people. The consequences for some have become dire, very dire.I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University named Tyler Clementi. Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. A few days later, Tyler jumped from  the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was 18.My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quite understand, and then eventually I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation after it was too late. Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different. In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the Internet would take us. Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways, joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions, but the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed. Every day online, people, especially young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle this, are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don't, and there's nothing virtual about that. ChildLine, a U.K. nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: From 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and emails related to cyberbullying. A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. And you know what shocked me, although it shouldn't have, was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.Cruelty to others is nothing new, but online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained, and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community, but now it's the online community too. Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain, and there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price.For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame. It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy, and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls a culture of humiliation. Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone. Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its messages only have the lifespan of a few seconds. You can imagine the range of content that that gets. A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the lifespan of the messages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos, and videos were leaked online to now have a lifespan of forever. Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the Internet without their permission. One gossip website had over five million hits for this one story. And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking? The documents which received the most attention were private emails that had maximum public embarrassment value.But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming. The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others, notably women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community have paid, but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them. This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. We're in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get, the more we click. All the while, someone is making money off of the back  of someone else's suffering. With every click, we make a choice. The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking, and online harassment. Why? Because they all have humiliation at their cores. This behavior is a symptom of the culture we've created. Just think about it.Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs. We've seen that to be true with racism, homophobia, and plenty of other biases, today and in the past. As we've changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedoms. When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle. So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for an intervention on the Internet and in our culture.The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion — compassion and empathy. Online, we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, ""Shame can't survive empathy."" Shame cannot survive empathy. I've seen some very dark days in my life, and it was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals, and sometimes even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one person can make a difference. The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency over time, change can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity. We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the U.S., In the U.K., there's Anti-Bullying Pro, and in Australia, there's Project Rockit.We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression, but we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. The Internet is  the superhighway for the id, but online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world. We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion, and click with compassion. Just imagine walking a mile in someone else's headline. I'd like to end on a personal note. In the past nine months, the question I've been  asked the most is why. Why now? Why was I  sticking my head above the parapet? You can read between the lines in those questions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics. The top note answer was and is because it's time: time to stop tip-toeing around my past; time to stop living a life of opprobrium; and time to take back my narrative.It's also not just about saving myself. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. I know it's hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story. Have compassion for yourself. We all deserve compassion, and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world.Thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame
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"Let me show you something.(Video) Girl: Okay, that's a cat sitting in a bed. The boy is petting the elephant. Those are people that are going on an airplane. That's a big airplane.Fei-Fei Li: This is a three-year-old child describing what she sees in a series of photos. She might still have a lot to learn about this world, but she's already an expert at one very important task: to make sense of what she sees. Our society is more technologically advanced than ever. We send people to the moon, we make phones that talk to us or customize radio stations that can play only music we like. Yet, our most advanced machines and computers still struggle at this task. So I'm here today to give you a progress report on the latest advances in our research in computer vision, one of the most frontier and potentially revolutionary technologies in computer science.Yes, we have prototyped cars that can drive by themselves, but without smart vision, they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road, which can be run over, and a rock that size, which should be avoided. We have made fabulous megapixel cameras, but we have not delivered sight to the blind. Drones can fly over massive land, but don't have enough vision technology to help us to track the changes of the rainforests. Security cameras are everywhere, but they do not alert us when a child is drowning in a swimming pool. Photos and videos are becoming an integral part of global life. They're being generated at a pace that's far beyond what any human, or teams of humans, could hope to view, and you and I are contributing to that at this TED. Yet our most advanced software is still struggling at understanding and managing this enormous content. So in other words, collectively as a society, we're very much blind, because our smartest  machines are still blind.""Why is this so hard?"" you may ask. Cameras can take pictures like this one by converting lights into a two-dimensional array of numbers known as pixels, but these are just lifeless numbers. They do not carry meaning in themselves. Just like to hear is not the same as to listen, to take pictures is not the same as to see, and by seeing, we really mean understanding. In fact, it took Mother Nature 540 million years of hard work to do this task, and much of that effort went into developing the visual processing apparatus of our brains, not the eyes themselves. So vision begins with the eyes, but it truly takes place in the brain.So for 15 years now, starting from my Ph.D. at Caltech and then leading Stanford's Vision Lab, I've been working with my mentors, collaborators and students to teach computers to see. Our research field is called computer vision and machine learning. It's part of the general field of artificial intelligence. So ultimately, we want to teach the machines to see just like we do: naming objects, identifying people, inferring 3D geometry of things, understanding relations, emotions, actions and intentions. You and I weave together entire stories of people, places and things the moment we lay our gaze on them.The first step towards this goal is to teach a computer to see objects, the building block of the visual world. In its simplest terms, imagine this teaching process as showing the computers some training images of a particular object, let's say cats, and designing a model that learns from these training images. How hard can this be? After all, a cat is just a collection of shapes and colors, and this is what we did in the early days of object modeling. We'd tell the computer algorithm in a mathematical language that a cat has a round face, a chubby body, two pointy ears, and a long tail, and that looked all fine. But what about this cat? (Laughter) It's all curled up. Now you have to add another shape and viewpoint to the object model. But what if cats are hidden? What about these silly cats? Now you get my point. Even something as simple as a household pet can present an infinite number of variations to the object model, and that's just one object.So about eight years ago, a very simple and profound observation changed my thinking. No one tells a child how to see, especially in the early years. They learn this through real-world experiences and examples. If you consider a child's eyes as a pair of biological cameras, they take one picture about every 200 milliseconds, the average time an eye movement is made. So by age three, a child would have seen hundreds of millions of pictures of the real world. That's a lot of training examples. So instead of focusing solely on better and better algorithms, my insight was to give the algorithms the kind of training data that a child was given through experiences in both quantity and quality.Once we know this, we knew we needed to collect a data set that has far more images than we have ever had before, perhaps thousands of times more, and together with Professor Kai Li at Princeton University, we launched the ImageNet project in 2007. Luckily, we didn't have to mount a camera on our head and wait for many years. We went to the Internet, the biggest treasure trove of pictures that humans have ever created. We downloaded nearly a billion images and used crowdsourcing technology like the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to help us to label these images. At its peak, ImageNet was one of the biggest employers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers: together, almost 50,000 workers from 167 countries around the world helped us to clean, sort and label nearly a billion candidate images. That was how much effort it took to capture even a fraction of the imagery a child's mind takes in in the early developmental years.In hindsight, this idea of using big data to train computer algorithms may seem obvious now, but back in 2007, it was not so obvious. We were fairly alone on this journey for quite a while. Some very friendly colleagues advised me to do something more useful for my tenure, and we were constantly struggling for research funding. Once, I even joked to my graduate students that I would just reopen my dry cleaner's shop to fund ImageNet. After all, that's how I funded my college years.So we carried on. In 2009, the ImageNet project delivered a database of 15 million images across 22,000 classes of objects and things organized by everyday English words. In both quantity and quality, this was an unprecedented scale. As an example, in the case of cats, we have more than 62,000 cats of all kinds of looks and poses and across all species of domestic and wild cats. We were thrilled to have put together ImageNet, and we wanted the whole research world to benefit from it, so in the TED fashion, we opened up the entire data set to the worldwide research community for free. (Applause)Now that we have the data to nourish our computer brain, we're ready to come back to the algorithms themselves. As it turned out, the wealth of information provided by ImageNet was a perfect match to a particular class of machine learning algorithms called convolutional neural network, pioneered by Kunihiko Fukushima, Geoff Hinton, and Yann LeCun back in the 1970s and '80s. Just like the brain consists of billions of highly connected neurons, a basic operating unit in a neural network is a neuron-like node. It takes input from other nodes and sends output to others. Moreover, these hundreds of thousands or even millions of nodes are organized in hierarchical layers, also similar to the brain. In a typical neural network we use to train our object recognition model, it has 24 million nodes, 140 million parameters, and 15 billion connections. That's an enormous model. Powered by the massive data from ImageNet and the modern CPUs and GPUs to train such a humongous model, the convolutional neural network blossomed in a way that no one expected. It became the winning architecture to generate exciting new results in object recognition. This is a computer telling us this picture contains a cat and where the cat is. Of course there are more things than cats, so here's a computer algorithm telling us the picture contains a boy and a teddy bear; a dog, a person, and a small kite in the background; or a picture of very busy things like a man, a skateboard, railings, a lampost, and so on. Sometimes, when the computer is not so confident about what it sees, we have taught it to be smart enough to give us a safe answer instead of committing too much, just like we would do, but other times our computer algorithm is remarkable at telling us what exactly the objects are, like the make, model, year of the cars.We applied this algorithm to millions of Google Street View images across hundreds of American cities, and we have learned something really interesting: first, it confirmed our common wisdom that car prices correlate very well with household incomes. But surprisingly, car prices also correlate well with crime rates in cities, or voting patterns by zip codes.So wait a minute. Is that it? Has the computer already matched or even surpassed human capabilities? Not so fast. So far, we have just taught the computer to see objects. This is like a small child learning to utter a few nouns. It's an incredible accomplishment, but it's only the first step. Soon, another developmental milestone will be hit, and children begin to communicate in sentences. So instead of saying this is a cat in the picture, you already heard the little girl telling us this is a cat lying on a bed.So to teach a computer to see a picture and generate sentences, the marriage between big data and machine learning algorithm has to take another step. Now, the computer has to learn from both pictures as well as natural language sentences generated by humans. Just like the brain integrates vision and language, we developed a model that connects parts of visual things like visual snippets with words and phrases in sentences.About four months ago, we finally tied all this together and produced one of the first computer vision models that is capable of generating a human-like sentence when it sees a picture for the first time. Now, I'm ready to show you what the computer says when it sees the picture that the little girl saw at the beginning of this talk.(Video) Computer: A man is standing next to an elephant. A large airplane sitting on top of an airport runway.FFL: Of course, we're still working hard to improve our algorithms, and it still has a lot to learn. (Applause)And the computer still makes mistakes.(Video) Computer: A cat lying on a bed in a blanket.FFL: So of course, when it sees too many cats, it thinks everything might look like a cat.(Video) Computer: A young boy is holding a baseball bat. (Laughter)FFL: Or, if it hasn't seen a toothbrush, it confuses it with a baseball bat.(Video) Computer: A man riding a horse down a street next to a building. (Laughter)FFL: We haven't taught Art 101 to the computers.(Video) Computer: A zebra standing in a field of grass.FFL: And it hasn't learned to appreciate the stunning beauty of nature like you and I do.So it has been a long journey. To get from age zero to three was hard. The real challenge is to go from three to 13 and far beyond. Let me remind you with this picture of the boy and the cake again. So far, we have taught the computer to see objects or even tell us a simple story when seeing a picture.(Video) Computer: A person sitting at a table with a cake.FFL: But there's so much more  to this picture than just a person and a cake. What the computer doesn't see is that this is a special Italian cake that's only served during Easter time. The boy is wearing his favorite t-shirt given to him as a gift by his father after a trip to Sydney, and you and I can all tell how happy he is and what's exactly on his mind at that moment.This is my son Leo. On my quest for visual intelligence, I think of Leo constantly and the future world he will live in. When machines can see, doctors and nurses will have extra pairs of tireless eyes to help them to diagnose and take care of patients. Cars will run smarter and safer on the road. Robots, not just humans, will help us to brave the disaster zones to save the trapped and wounded. We will discover new species,  better materials, and explore unseen frontiers with the help of the machines.Little by little, we're giving sight to the machines. First, we teach them to see. Then, they help us to see better. For the first time, human eyes won't be the only ones pondering and exploring our world. We will not only use the machines for their intelligence, we will also collaborate with them in ways that we cannot even imagine.This is my quest: to give computers visual intelligence and to create a better future for Leo and for the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fei_fei_li_how_we_re_teaching_computers_to_understand_pictures
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"""Where are you from?"" said the pale, tattooed man. ""Where are you from?"" It's September 21, 2001, 10 days after the worst attack on America since World War II. Everyone wonders about the next plane. People are looking for scapegoats. The president,  the night before, pledges to ""bring our enemies to justice  or bring justice to our enemies.""And in the Dallas mini-mart, a Dallas mini-part surrounded by tire shops and strip joints a Bangladeshi immigrant  works the register. Back home, Raisuddin Bhuiyan was a big man, an Air Force officer. But he dreamed of a  fresh start in America. If he had to work briefly in a mini-mart to save up for I.T. classes and his wedding in two months, so be it.Then, on September 21,  that tattooed man enters the mart. He holds a shotgun. Raisuddin knows the drill: puts cash on the counter. This time, the man doesn't  touch the money. ""Where are you from?"" he asks. ""Excuse me?"" Raisuddin answers. His accent betrays him. The tattooed man, a self-styled true American vigilante, shoots Raisuddin in revenge for 9/11. Raisuddin feels millions of bees stinging his face. In fact, dozens of scalding,  birdshot pellets puncture his head.Behind the counter, he lays in blood. He cups a hand over his forehead to keep in the brains on which he'd gambled everything. He recites verses from the Koran, begging his God to live. He senses he is dying.He didn't die. His right eye left him. His fiancée left him. His landlord, the mini-mart owner, kicked him out. Soon he was homeless and  60,000 dollars in medical debt, including a fee for dialing  for an ambulance. But Raisuddin lived.And years later, he would ask what he could do to repay his God and become worthy of this second chance. He would come to believe, in fact, that this chance called for him to give a second chance to a man we might think deserved no chance at all.Twelve years ago, I was a fresh graduate seeking my way in the world. Born in Ohio to Indian immigrants, I settled on the ultimate rebellion  against my parents, moving to the country they had worked so damn hard to get out of. What I thought might be a six-month stint in Mumbai stretched to six years. I became a writer and found myself amid a magical story: the awakening of hope across much of the so-called Third World. Six years ago, I returned to America and realized something: The American Dream was thriving, but only in India. In America, not so much.In fact, I observed that  America was fracturing into two distinct societies: a republic of dreams and a republic of fears. And then, I stumbled onto this  incredible tale of two lives and of these two Americas that brutally collided in that Dallas mini-mart. I knew at once I wanted to learn more, and eventually that I would write a book about them, for their story was the story  of America's fracturing and of how it might be put back together.After he was shot, Raisuddin's life grew no easier. The day after admitting him, the hospital discharged him. His right eye couldn't see. He couldn't speak. Metal peppered his face. But he had no insurance,  so they bounced him. His family in Bangladesh  begged him, ""Come home."" But he told them he had  a dream to see about.He found telemarketing work, then he became an Olive Garden waiter, because where better to get over his fear of white people than the Olive Garden? (Laughter) Now, as a devout Muslim, he refused alcohol, didn't touch the stuff. Then he learned that not selling it would slash his pay. So he reasoned, like a budding  American pragmatist, ""Well, God wouldn't want me to starve, would he?"" And before long, in some months,  Raisuddin was that Olive Garden's highest grossing alcohol pusher. He found a man who taught him database administration. He got part-time I.T. gigs. Eventually, he landed a six-figure job at a blue chip tech company in Dallas.But as America began to work for Raisuddin, he avoided the classic error of the fortunate: assuming you're the rule,  not the exception. In fact, he observed that many with the fortune of being born American were nonetheless trapped in lives that  made second chances like his impossible. He saw it at the Olive Garden itself, where so many of his colleagues had childhood horror stories of family dysfunction, chaos,  addiction, crime. He'd heard a similar tale about the man who shot him back when he attended his trial. The closer Raisuddin got to the America he had coveted from afar, the more he realized there was another, equally real, America that was stingier with second chances. The man who shot Raisuddin grew up in that stingier America.From a distance, Mark Stroman was always the spark of parties, always making girls feel pretty. Always working, no matter what  drugs or fights he'd had the night before. But he'd always wrestled with demons. He entered the world through the three gateways that doom so many young American men: bad parents, bad schools, bad prisons. His mother told him, regretfully, as a boy that she'd been just 50 dollars  short of aborting him. Sometimes, that little boy  would be at school, he'd suddenly pull a knife  on his fellow classmates. Sometimes that same little boy would be at his grandparents', tenderly feeding horses. He was getting arrested before he shaved, first juvenile, then prison. He became a casual white supremacist and, like so many around him,  a drug-addled and absent father. And then, before long, he found himself on death row, for in his 2001 counter-jihad,  he had shot not one mini-mart clerk, but three. Only Raisuddin survived.Strangely, death row was  the first institution that left Stroman better. His old influences quit him. The people entering his life  were virtuous and caring: pastors, journalists, European pen-pals. They listened to him, prayed with him, helped him question himself. And sent him on a journey  of introspection and betterment. He finally faced the hatred  that had defined his life. He read Viktor Frankl,  the Holocaust survivor and regretted his swastika tattoos. He found God. Then one day in 2011,  10 years after his crimes, Stroman received news. One of the men he'd shot, the survivor, was fighting to save his life.You see, late in 2009, eight years after that shooting, Raisuddin had gone on his own journey, a pilgrimage to Mecca. Amid its crowds,  he felt immense gratitude, but also duty. He recalled promising God,  as he lay dying in 2001, that if he lived, he would serve  humanity all his days. Then, he'd gotten busy  relaying the bricks of a life. Now it was time to pay his debts. And he decided, upon reflection, that his method of payment would be an intervention  in the cycle of vengeance between the Muslim and Western worlds. And how would he intervene? By forgiving Stroman publicly in the name of Islam and its doctrine of mercy. And then suing the state of Texas and its governor Rick Perry to prevent them from executing Stroman, exactly like most people  shot in the face do. (Laughter)Yet Raisuddin's mercy was inspired  not only by faith. A newly minted American citizen, he had come to believe that Stroman was the product of a hurting America that couldn't just be lethally injected away. That insight is what moved me  to write my book ""The True American."" This immigrant begging America  to be as merciful to a native son as it had been to an adopted one. In the mini-mart, all those years earlier, not just two men,  but two Americas collided. An America that still dreams,  still strives, still imagines that tomorrow can build on today, and an America that has resigned to fate, buckled under stress and chaos, lowered expectations, an ducked into the oldest of refuges: the tribal fellowship of one's own narrow kind. And it was Raisuddin, despite being a newcomer, despite being attacked, despite being homeless and traumatized, who belonged to that republic of dreams and Stroman who belonged to that  other wounded country, despite being born with the privilege of a native white man.I realized these men's stories formed an urgent parable about America. The country I am so proud to call my own wasn't living through a  generalized decline as seen in Spain or Greece,  where prospects were dimming for everyone. America is simultaneously the most and the least successful country in the industrialized world. Launching the world's best companies, even as record numbers  of children go hungry. Seeing life-expectancy drop for large groups, even as it polishes  the world's best hospitals. America today is a sprightly young body, hit by one of those strokes  that sucks the life from one side, while leaving the other worryingly perfect.On July 20, 2011, right after  a sobbing Raisuddin testified in defense of Stroman's life, Stroman was killed by lethal injection by the state he so loved. Hours earlier, when Raisuddin still thought he could still save Stroman, the two men got to speak  for the second time ever. Here is an excerpt from their phone call. Raisuddin: ""Mark, you should know  that I am praying for God, the most compassionate and gracious. I forgive you and I do not hate you. I never hated you."" Stroman: ""You are a remarkable person. Thank you from my heart. I love you, bro.""Even more amazingly, after the execution, Raisuddin reached out to Stroman's  eldest daughter, Amber, an ex-convinct and an addict. and offered his help. ""You may have lost a father,"" he told her, ""but you've gained an uncle."" He wanted her, too, to have  a second chance.If human history were a parade, America's float would be  a neon shrine to second chances. But America, generous with second chances to the children of other lands, today grows miserly with first chances to the children of its own. America still dazzles at allowing anybody to become an American. But it is losing its luster at allowing every American to become a somebody.Over the last decade, seven million foreigners gained American citizenship. Remarkable. In the meanwhile, how many Americans gained a place in the middle class? Actually, the net influx was negative. Go back further,  and it's even more striking: Since the 60s, the middle class has shrunk by 20 percent, mainly because of the people tumbling out of it. And my reporting around the country tells me the problem is grimmer than simple inequality. What I observe is a pair of secessions from the unifying center of American life. An affluent secession of up, up and away, into elite enclaves of the educated and into a global matrix of work, money and connections, and an impoverished secession  of down and out into disconnected, dead-end lives that the fortunate scarcely see.And don't console yourself  that you are the 99 percent. If you live near a Whole Foods, if no one in your family serves  in the military, if you're paid by the year, not the hour, if most people you know finished college, if no one you know uses meth, if you married once and remain married, if you're not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record — if any or all of these things  describe you, then accept the possibility that actually, you may not know what's going on and you may be part of the problem.Other generations had to build  a fresh society after slavery, pull through a depression, defeat fascism, freedom-ride in Mississippi. The moral challenge of  my generation, I believe, is to reacquaint these two Americas, to choose union over secession once again. This ins't a problem we can tax or tax-cut away. It won't be solved by tweeting harder, building slicker apps, or starting one more  artisanal coffee roasting service. It is a moral challenge that begs  each of us in the flourishing America to take on the wilting America as our own, as Raisuddin tried to do.Like him, we can make pilgrimages. And there, in Baltimore and Oregon  and Appalachia, find new purpose, as he did. We can immerse ourselves  in that other country, bear witness to its hopes and sorrows, and, like Raisuddin, ask what we can do. What can you do? What can you do? What can we do? How might we build  a more merciful country?We, the greatest inventors in the world, can invent solutions to the problems  of that America, not only our own. We, the writers and the journalists,  can cover that America's stories, instead of shutting down  bureaus in its midst. We can finance that America's ideas, instead of ideas from New York  and San Francisco. We can put our stethoscopes to its backs, teach there, go to court there, make there, live there, pray there.This, I believe, is the calling  of a generation. An America whose two halves learn again to stride, to plow, to forge, to dare together. A republic of chances, rewoven, renewed, begins with us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anand_giridharadas_a_tale_of_two_americas_and_the_mini_mart_where_they_collided
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"Tonight, I'm going to try to make the case that inviting a loved one, a friend or even a stranger to record a meaningful interview with you just might turn out to be one of the most  important moments in that person's life, and in yours.When I was 22 years old, I was lucky enough to find my calling when I fell into making radio stories. At almost the exact same time, I found out that my dad, who I was very, very close to, was gay. I was taken completely by surprise. We were a very tight-knit family, and I was crushed. At some point, in one of our strained conversations, my dad mentioned the Stonewall riots. He told me that one night in 1969, a group of young black and Latino drag queens fought back against the police at a gay bar in Manhattan called the Stonewall Inn, and how this sparked the modern gay rights movement.It was an amazing story, and it piqued my interest. So I decided to pick up my tape  recorder and find out more. With the help of a young archivist named Michael Shirker, we tracked down all of the people we could find who had been at the Stonewall Inn that night. Recording these interviews, I saw how the microphone gave me the license to go places I otherwise never would have gone and talk to people I might not otherwise ever have spoken to. I had the privilege of getting to know some of the most amazing, fierce and courageous human beings I had ever met. It was the first time the story of Stonewall had been told to a national audience. I dedicated the program to my dad, it changed my relationship with him, and it changed my life.Over the next 15 years, I made many more radio documentaries, working to shine a light on people who are rarely heard from in the media. Over and over again, I'd see how this simple act of being interviewed could mean so much to people, particularly those who had been told that their stories didn't matter. I could literally see people's back straighten as they started to speak into the microphone.In 1998, I made a documentary about the last flophouse hotels on the Bowery in Manhattan. Guys stayed up in these cheap hotels for decades. They lived in cubicles the size of prison cells covered with chicken wire so you couldn't jump from one room into the next. Later, I wrote a book on the men with the photographer Harvey Wang. I remember walking into a flophouse with an early version of the book and showing one of the guys his page. He stood there staring at it in silence, then he grabbed the book out of my hand and started running down the long, narrow hallway holding it over his head shouting, ""I exist! I exist."" (Applause)In many ways, ""I exist"" became the clarion call for StoryCorps, this crazy idea that I had a dozen years ago. The thought was to take documentary work and turn it on its head. Traditionally, broadcast documentary has been about recording interviews to create a work of art or entertainment or education that is seen or heard by a whole lot of people, but I wanted to try something where the interview itself was the purpose of this work, and see if we could give many, many, many people the chance to be listened to in this way. So in Grand Central Terminal 11 years ago, we built a booth where anyone  can come to honor someone else by interviewing them about their life. You come to this booth and you're met by a facilitator who brings you inside. You sit across from, say, your grandfather for close to an hour and you listen and you talk. Many people think of it as, if this was to be our last conversation, what would I want to ask of and say to this person who means so much to me? At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview and another copy goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress so that your great-great-great-grandkids can someday get to know your grandfather through his voice and story.So we open this booth in one of the busiest places in the world and invite people to have this incredibly intimate conversation with another human being. I had no idea if it would work, but from the very beginning, it did. People treated the experience with incredible respect, and amazing conversations happened inside.I want to play just one animated excerpt from an interview recorded at that original Grand Central Booth. This is 12-year-old Joshua Littman interviewing his mother, Sarah. Josh has Asperger's syndrome. As you may know, kids with Asperger's are incredibly smart but have a tough time socially. They usually have obsessions. In Josh's case, it's with animals, so this is Josh talking with his mom Sarah at Grand Central nine years ago.(Video) Josh Littman: From a scale of one to 10, do you think your life would be different without animals? Sarah Littman: I think it would be an eight without animals, because they add so much pleasure to life.JL: How else do you think your life would be different without them?SL: I could do without things like cockroaches and snakes.JL: Well, I'm okay with snakes as long as they're not venomous or constrict you or anything.SL: Yeah, I'm not a big snake person —JL: But cockroach is just the insect we love to hate.SL: Yeah, it really is.JL: Have you ever thought you couldn't cope with having a child?SL: I remember when you were a baby, you had really bad colic, so you would just cry and cry.JL: What's colic? SL: It's when you get this stomach ache and all you do is scream for, like, four hours.JL: Even louder than Amy does?SL: You were pretty loud, but Amy's was more high-pitched.JL: I think it feels like everyone seems to like Amy more, like she's the perfect little angel.SL: Well, I can understand why you think that people like Amy more, and I'm not saying it's because of your Asperger's syndrome, but being friendly comes easily to Amy, whereas I think for you it's more difficult, but the people who take the time to get to know you love you so much.JL: Like Ben or Eric or Carlos? SL: Yeah —JL: Like I have better quality friends but less quantity? (Laughter)SL: I wouldn't judge the quality, but I think — JL: I mean, first it was like, Amy loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia, she loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia.SL: Part of that's a girl thing, honey. The important thing for you is that you have a few very good friends, and really that's what you need in life.JL: Did I turn out to be the son you wanted when I was born? Did I meet your expectations?SL: You've exceeded my expectations, sweetie, because, sure, you have these fantasies of what your child's going to be like, but you have made me grow so much as a parent, because you think —JL: Well, I was the one who made you a parent.SL: You were the one who made me a parent. That's a good point. (Laughter) But also because you think differently from what they tell you in the parenting books, I really had to learn to think outside of the box with you, and it's made me much more creative as a parent and as a person, and I'll always thank you for that.JL: And that helped when Amy was born?SL: And that helped when Amy was born, but you are so incredibly special to me and I'm so lucky to have you as my son. (Applause)David Isay: After this story ran on public radio, Josh received hundreds of letters telling him what an amazing kid he was. His mom, Sarah, bound them together in a book, and when Josh got picked on at school, they would read the letters together. I just want to acknowledge that two of my heroes are here with us tonight. Sarah Littman and her son Josh, who is now an honors student in college. (Applause)You know, a lot of people talk about crying when they hear StoryCorps stories, and it's not because they're sad. Most of them aren't. I think it's because you're hearing something authentic and pure at this moment, when sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and what's an advertisement. It's kind of the anti-reality TV. Nobody comes to StoryCorps to get rich. Nobody comes to get famous. It's simply an act of generosity and love. So many of these are just everyday people talking about lives lived with kindness, courage, decency and dignity, and when you hear that kind of story, it can sometimes feel like you're walking on holy ground. So this experiment  in Grand Central worked,and we expanded across the country. Today, more than 100,000 people in all 50 states in thousands of cities and towns across America have recorded StoryCorps interviews. It's now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. (Applause)We've hired and trained hundreds of facilitators to help guide people through the experience. Most serve a year or two with StoryCorps traveling the country, gathering the wisdom of humanity. They call it bearing witness, and if you ask them, all of the facilitators will tell you that the most important thing they've learned from being present during these interviews is that people are basically good. And I think for the first years of StoryCorps, you could argue that there was some kind of a selection bias happening, but after tens of thousands of interviews with every kind of person in every part of the country — rich, poor, five years old to 105, 80 different languages, across the political spectrum — you have to think that maybe these guys are actually onto something.I've also learned so much from these interviews. I've learned about the poetry and the wisdom and the grace that can be found in the words of people all around us when we simply take the time to listen, like this interview between a betting clerk in Brooklyn named Danny Perasa who brought his wife Annie to StoryCorps to talk about his love for her.(Audio) Danny Perasa: You see, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say ""I love you"" to you. And I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me. It's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house.Annie Perasa: If I don't have a note on the kitchen table, I think there's something wrong. You write a love letter to me every morning. DP: Well, the only thing that could possibly be wrong is I couldn't find a silly pen.AP: To my princess: The weather outside today is extremely rainy. I'll call you at 11:20 in the morning.DP: It's a romantic weather report.AP: And I love you. I love you. I love you.DP: When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens in the rest of the day, there's a shelter when you get home, there's a knowledge knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, ""Get your hands off me."" Being married is like having a color television set. You never want to go back to black and white. (Laughter)DI: Danny was about five feet tall with crossed eyes and one single snaggletooth, but Danny Perasa had more romance in his little pinky than all of Hollywood's leading men put together.What else have I learned? I've learned about the almost unimaginable capacity for the human spirit to forgive. I've learned about resilience and I've learned about strength.Like an interview with Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson. When Oshea was a teenager, he murdered Mary's only son, Laramiun Byrd, in a gang fight. A dozen years later, Mary went to prison to meet Oshea and find out who this person was who had taken her son's life. Slowly and remarkably, they became friends, and when he was finally released from the penitentiary, Oshea actually moved in next door to Mary. This is just a short excerpt of a conversation they had soon after Oshea was freed.(Video) Mary Johnson: My natural son is no longer here. I didn't see him graduate, and now you're going to college. I'll have the opportunity to see you graduate. I didn't see him get married. Hopefully one day, I'll be able to experience that with you. Oshea Israel: Just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner in which you are is my motivation. It motivates me to make sure that I stay on the right path. You still believe in me, and the fact that you can do it despite how much pain I caused you, it's amazing.MJ: I know it's not an easy thing to be able to share our story together, even with us sitting here looking at each other right now. I know it's not an easy thing, so I admire that you can do this.OI: I love you, lady. MJ: I love you too, son. (Applause)DI: And I've been reminded countless times of the courage and goodness of people, and how the arc of history truly does bend towards justice.Like the story of Alexis Martinez, who was born Arthur Martinez in the Harold Ickes projects in Chicago. In the interview, she talks with her daughter Lesley about joining a gang as a young man, and later in life transitioning into the woman she was always meant to be. This is Alexis and her daughter Lesley.(Audio) Alexis Martinez: One of the most difficult things for me was I was always afraid that I wouldn't be allowed to be in my granddaughters' lives, and you blew that completely out of the water, you and your husband. One of the fruits of that is, in my relationship with my granddaughters, they fight with each other sometimes over whether I'm he or she.Lesley Martinez: But they're free to talk about it.AM: They're free to talk about it, but that, to me, is a miracle.LM: You don't have to apologize. You don't have to tiptoe. We're not going to cut you off, and that's something I've always wanted you to just know, that you're loved.AM: You know, I live this every day now. I walk down the streets as a woman, and I really am at peace with who I am. I mean, I wish I had a softer voice maybe, but now I walk in love and I try to live that way every day.DI: Now I walk in love.I'm going to tell you a secret about StoryCorps. It takes some courage to have these conversations. StoryCorps speaks to our mortality. Participants know this recording will be heard long after they're gone. There's a hospice doctor named Ira Byock who has worked closely with us on recording interviews with people who are dying. He wrote a book called ""The Four Things That Matter Most"" about the four things you want to say to the most important people in your life before they or you die: thank you, I love you, forgive me, I forgive you. They're just about the most powerful words we can say to one another, and often that's what happens in a StoryCorps booth. It's a chance to have a sense of closure with someone you care about — no regrets, nothing left unsaid. And it's hard and it takes courage, but that's why we're alive, right?So, the TED Prize. When I first heard from TED and Chris a few months ago about the possibility of the Prize, I was completely floored. They asked me to come up with a very brief wish for humanity, no more than 50 words. So I thought about it, I wrote my 50 words, and a few weeks later, Chris called and said, ""Go for it.""So here is my wish: that you will help us take everything we've learned through StoryCorps and bring it to the world so that anyone anywhere can easily record a meaningful interview with another human being which will then be archived for history.How are we going to do that? With this. We're fast moving into a future where everyone in the world will have access to one of these, and it has powers I never could have imagined 11 years ago when I started StoryCorps. It has a microphone, it can tell you how to do things, and it can send audio files. Those are the key ingredients.So the first part of the wish is already underway. Over the past couple of months, the team at StoryCorps has been working furiously to create an app that will bring StoryCorps out of our booths so that it can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Remember, StoryCorps has always been two people and a facilitator helping them record their conversation, which is preserved forever, but at this very moment, we're releasing a public beta version of the StoryCorps app. The app is a digital facilitator that walks you through the StoryCorps interview process, helps you pick questions, and gives you all the tips you need to record a meaningful StoryCorps interview, and then with one tap upload it  to our archive at the Library of Congress.That's the easy part, the technology. The real challenge is up to you: to take this tool and figure out how we can use it all across America and around the world, so that instead of recording thousands of StoryCorps interviews a year, we could potentially record tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even more.Imagine, for example, a national homework assignment where every high school student studying U.S. history across the country records an interview with an elder over Thanksgiving, so that in one single weekend an entire generation of American lives and experiences are captured. (Applause) Or imagine mothers on opposite sides of a conflict somewhere in the world sitting down not to talk about that conflict but to find out who they are as people, and in doing so, begin to build bonds of trust; or that someday it becomes a tradition all over the world that people are honored with a StoryCorps interview on their 75th birthday; or that people in your community go into retirement homes or hospitals or homeless shelters or even prisons armed with this app to honor the people least heard in our society and ask them who they are, what they've learned in life, and how they want to be remembered. (Applause)Ten years ago, I recorded a StoryCorps interview with my dad who was a psychiatrist, and became a well-known gay activist. This is the picture of us at that interview. I never thought about that recording until a couple of years ago, when my dad, who seemed to be in perfect health and was still seeing patients 40 hours a week, was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away very suddenly a few days later. It was June 28, 2012, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots.I listened to that interview for the first time at three in the morning on the day that he died. I have a couple of young kids at home, and I knew that the only way they were going to get to know this person who was such a towering figure in my life would be through that session. I thought I couldn't believe in StoryCorps any more deeply than I did, but it was at that moment that I fully and viscerally grasped the importance of making these recordings.Every day, people come up to me and say, ""I wish I had interviewed my father or my grandmother or my brother, but I waited too long."" Now, no one has to wait anymore. At this moment, when so much of how we communicate is fleeting and inconsequential, join us in creating this digital archive of conversations that are enduring and important. Help us create this gift to our children, this testament to who we are as human beings. I hope you'll help us make this wish come true. Interview a family member, a friend or even a stranger. Together, we can create an archive of the wisdom of humanity, and maybe in doing so, we'll learn to listen a little more and shout a little less. Maybe these conversations will remind us what's really important. And maybe, just maybe, it will help us recognize that simple truth that every life, every single life, matters equally and infinitely. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_isay_everyone_around_you_has_a_story_the_world_needs_to_hear
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"I'm a potter, which seems like a fairly humble vocation. I know a lot about pots. I've spent about 15 years making them. One of the things that really excites me in my artistic practice and being trained as a potter is that you very quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing; that I spent a lot of time at my wheel with mounds of clay trying stuff; and that the limitations of my capacity, my ability, was based on my hands and my imagination; that if I wanted to make a really nice bowl and I didn't know how to make a foot yet, I would have to learn how to make a foot; that that process of learning has been very, very helpful to my life. I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world.There have been times in my artistic capacity that I wanted to reflect on other really important moments in the history of the U.S., the history of the world where tough things happened, but how do you talk about tough ideas without separating people from that content? Could I use art like these old, discontinued firehoses from Alabama, to talk about the complexities of a moment of civil rights in the '60s? Is it possible to talk about my father and I doing labor projects? My dad was a roofer, construction guy, he owned small businesses, and at 80, he was ready to retire and his tar kettle was my inheritance. Now, a tar kettle doesn't sound like much of an inheritance. It wasn't. It was stinky and it took up a lot of space in my studio, but I asked my dad if he would be willing to make some art with me, if we could reimagine this kind of nothing material as something very special. And by elevating the material and my dad's skill, could we start to think about tar just like clay, in a new way, shaping it differently, helping us to imagine what was possible?After clay, I was then kind of turned on to lots of different kinds of materials, and my studio grew a lot because I thought, well, it's not really about the material, it's about our capacity to shape things. I became more and more interested in ideas and more and more things that  were happening just outside my studio. Just to give you a little bit of context, I live in Chicago. I live on the South Side now. I'm a West Sider. For those of you who are not Chicagoans, that won't mean anything, but if I didn't mention that I was a West Sider, there would be a lot of people in the city that would be very upset.The neighborhood that I live in is Grand Crossing. It's a neighborhood that has seen better days. It is not a gated community by far. There is lots of abandonment in my neighborhood, and while I was kind of busy making pots and busy making art and having a good art career, there was all of this stuff that was happening just outside my studio. All of us know about failing housing markets and the challenges of blight, and I feel like we talk about it with some of our cities more than others, but I think a lot of our U.S. cities and beyond have the challenge of blight, abandoned buildings that people no longer know what to do anything with. And so I thought, is there a way that I could start to think about these buildings as an extension or an expansion of my artistic practice? And that if I was thinking along with other creatives — architects, engineers, real estate finance people — that us together might be able to kind of think in more complicated ways about the reshaping of cities.And so I bought a building. The building was really affordable. We tricked it out. We made it as beautiful as we could to try to just get some activity happening on my block. Once I bought the building for about 18,000 dollars, I didn't have any money left. So I started sweeping the building as a kind of performance. This is performance art, and people would come over, and I would start sweeping. Because the broom was free and sweeping was free. It worked out. (Laughter) But we would use the building, then, to stage exhibitions, small dinners, and we found that that building on my block, Dorchester — we now referred to the block as Dorchester projects — that in a way that building became a kind of gathering site for lots of different kinds of activity. We turned the building into what we called now the Archive House. The Archive House would do all of these amazing things. Very significant people in the city and beyond would find themselves in the middle of the hood. And that's when I felt like maybe there was a relationship between my history with clay and this new thing that was starting to develop, that we were slowly starting to reshape how people imagined the South Side of the city.One house turned into a few houses, and we always tried to suggest that not only is creating a beautiful vessel important, but the contents of what happens in those buildings is also very important. So we were not only thinking about development, but we were thinking about the program, thinking about the kind of connections that could happen between one house and another, between one neighbor and another. This building became what we call the Listening House, and it has a collection of discarded books from the Johnson Publishing Corporation, and other books from an old bookstore that was going out of business. I was actually just wanting to activate these buildings as much as I could with whatever and whoever would join me.In Chicago, there's amazing building stock. This building, which had been the former crack house on the block, and when the building became abandoned, it became a great opportunity to really imagine what else could happen there. So this space we converted into what we call Black Cinema House. Black Cinema House was an opportunity in the hood to screen films that were important and relevant to the folk who lived around me, that if we wanted to show an old Melvin Van Peebles film, we could. If we wanted to show ""Car Wash,"" we could. That would be awesome. The building we soon outgrew, and we had to move to a larger space. Black Cinema House, which was made from just a small piece of clay, had to grow into a much larger piece of clay, which is now my studio.What I realized was that for those of you who are zoning junkies, that some of the things that I was doing in these buildings that had been left behind, they were not the uses by which the buildings were built, and that there are city policies that say, ""Hey, a house that is residential needs to stay residential."" But what do you do in neighborhoods when ain't nobody interested in living there? That the people who have the means to leave have already left? What do we do with these abandoned buildings? And so I was trying to wake them up using culture.We found that that was so exciting for folk, and people were so responsive to the work, that we had to then find bigger buildings. By the time we found bigger buildings, there was, in part, the resources  necessary to think about those things. In this bank that we called the Arts Bank, it was in pretty bad shape. There was about six feet of standing water. It was a difficult project to finance, because banks weren't interested in the neighborhood because people weren't interested in the neighborhood because nothing had happened there. It was dirt. It was nothing. It was nowhere. And so we just started imagining, what else could happen in this building? (Applause)And so now that the rumor of my block has spread, and lots of people are starting to visit, we've found that the bank can now be a center for exhibition, archives, music performance, and that there are people who are now interested in being adjacent to those buildings because we brought some heat, that we kind of made a fire.One of the archives that we'll have there is this Johnson Publishing Corporation. We've also started to collect memorabilia from American history, from people who live or have lived in that neighborhood. Some of these images are degraded images of black people, kind of histories of very challenging content, and where better than a neighborhood with young people who are constantly asking themselves about their identity to talk about some of the complexities of race and class?In some ways, the bank represents a hub, that we're trying to create a pretty  hardcore node of cultural activity, and that if we could start to make multiple hubs and connect some cool green stuff around there, that the buildings that we've purchased and rehabbed, which is now around 60 or 70 units, that if we could land miniature Versailles on top of that, and connect these buildings by a beautiful greenbelt — (Applause) — that this place where people never wanted to be would become an important destination for folk from all over the country and world.In some ways, it feels very much like I'm a potter, that we tackle the things that are at our wheel, we try with the skill that we have to think about this next bowl that I want to make. And it went from a bowl to a singular house to a block to a neighborhood to a cultural district to thinking about the city, and at every point, there were things that I didn't know that I had to learn. I've never learned so much about zoning law in my life. I never thought I'd have to. But as a result of that, I'm finding that there's not just room for my own artistic practice, there's room for a lot of other artistic practices.So people started asking us, ""Well, Theaster, how are you going to go to scale?"" and, ""What's your sustainability plan?""(Laughter) (Applause)And what I found was that I couldn't export myself, that what seems necessary in cities like Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, is that there are people in those places who already believe in those places, that are already dying to make those places beautiful, and that often, those people who are passionate about a place are disconnected from the resources necessary to make cool things happen, or disconnected from a contingency of people that could help make things happen. So now, we're starting to give advice around the country on how to start with what you got, how to start with the things that are in front of you, how to make something out of nothing, how to reshape your world at a wheel or at your block or at the scale of the city.Thank you so much.(Applause)June Cohen: Thank you. So I think many people watching this will be asking themselves the question you just raised at the end: How can they do this in their own city? You can't export yourself. Give us a few pages out of your playbook about what someone who is inspired about their city can do to take on projects like yours?Theaster Gates: One of the things I've found that's really important is giving thought to not just the kind of individual project, like an old house, but what's the relationship between an old house, a local school, a small bodega, and is there some kind of synergy between those things? Can you get those folk talking? I've found that in cases where neighborhoods have failed, they still often have a pulse. How do you identify the pulse in that place, the passionate people, and then how do you get folk who have been fighting, slogging for 20 years, reenergized about the place that they live? And so someone has to do that work. If I were a traditional developer, I would be talking about buildings alone, and then putting a ""For Lease"" sign in the window. I think that you actually have to curate more than that, that there's a way in which you have to be mindful about, what are the businesses that I want to grow here? And then, are there people who live in this place who want to grow those businesses with me? Because I think it's not just a cultural space or housing; there has to be the recreation of an economic core. So thinking about those things together feels right.JC: It's hard to get people to create the spark again when people have been slogging for 20 years. Are there any methods you've found that have helped break through?TG: Yeah, I think that now there are lots of examples of folk who are doing amazing work, but those methods are sometimes like, when the media is constantly saying that only violent things happen in a place, then based on your skill set and the particular context, what are the things that you can do in your neighborhood to kind of fight some of that? So I've found that if you're a theater person, you have outdoor street theater festivals. In some cases, we don't have the resources in certain neighborhoods to do things that are a certain kind of splashy, but if we can then find ways of making sure that people who are local to a place, plus people who could be supportive of the things that are happening locally, when those people get together, I think really amazing things can happen.JC: So interesting. And how can you make sure that the projects you're creating are actually for the disadvantaged and not just for the sort of vegetarian indie movie crowd that might move in to take advantage of them.TG: Right on. So I think this is where it starts to get into the thick weeds.JC: Let's go there. TG: Right now, Grand Crossing is 99 percent black, or at least living, and we know that maybe who owns property in a place is different from who walks the streets every day. So it's reasonable to say that Grand Crossing is already in the process of being something different than it is today. But are there ways to think about housing trusts or land trusts or a mission-based development that starts to protect some of the space that happens, because when you have 7,500 empty lots in a city, you want something to happen there, but you need entities that are not just interested in the development piece, but entities that are interested in the stabilization piece, and I feel like often the developer piece is really motivated, but the other work of a kind of neighborhood consciousness, that part doesn't live anymore. So how do you start to grow up important watchdogs that ensure that the resources that are made available to new folk that are coming in are also distributed to folk who have lived in a place for a long time.JC: That makes so much sense. One more question: You make such a compelling case for beauty and the importance of beauty and the arts. There would be others who would argue that funds would be better spent on basic services for the disadvantaged. How do you combat that viewpoint, or come against it?TG: I believe that beauty  is a basic service. (Applause) Often what I have found is that when there are resources that have not been made available to certain under-resourced cities or neighborhoods or communities, that sometimes culture is the thing that helps to ignite, and that I can't do everything, but I think that there's a way in which if you can start with culture and get people kind of reinvested in their place, other kinds of adjacent amenities start to grow, and then people can make a demand that's a poetic demand, and the political demands that are necessary to wake up our cities, they also become very poetic.JC: It makes perfect sense to me. Theaster, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you. Theaster Gates.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/theaster_gates_how_to_revive_a_neighborhood_with_imagination_beauty_and_art
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"When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. Was it about me as a child refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? Or was it as a mother of an autistic child? Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? Well, it turns out, I'm all of these. So let me tell you my story.All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. I was five years old, clutching the hand of my nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to  what was going on. ""What is England and  why am I going there?"" I'm only alive because so long ago,  I was helped by generous strangers. I was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. But, sadly, I never bonded  with them again. But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. And I love England, my adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving. And then, I just got on with it. (Laughter)Let me take you back to the early 1960s. To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. But it was also a company of women, a company for women, an early social business. And people laughed at the very idea because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. Nobody would buy software, certainly not from a woman. Although women were then coming out of the universities with decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often, and I wanted opportunities for women.I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. We pioneered the concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. We pioneered all sorts of new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing,  and eventually, co-ownership when I took a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. For years, I was the first woman this, or the only woman that. And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account without my husband's permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay.Nobody really expected much  from people at work or in society because all the expectations then were about home and  family responsibilities. And I couldn't really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from ""Stephanie"" to ""Steve"" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone realized that he was a she. (Laughter)My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have started smaller:  on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in today's terms, and financed by my labor and  by borrowing against the house. My interests were scientific,  the market was commercial — things such as payroll, which I found rather boring. So I had to compromise with  operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge  that interested me and the commercial value  that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. And eventually, the work came in. We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed prices, one of the very first to do so. And who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder  of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch  of women working in their own homes. (Applause)All we used was a simple  ""trust the staff"" approach and a simple telephone. We even used to ask job applicants,  ""Do you have access to a telephone?""An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. And software was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. We used the standards ourselves, we were even paid to update  them over the years, and eventually, they were adopted by NATO. Our programmers — remember, only women, including gay and transgender — worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done. And they then wrote code,  usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched,  in order to verify it. All this, before it ever got near a computer. That was programming in the early 1960s.In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation  came in in Britain and that made it illegal to have  our pro-female policies. And as an example of  unintended consequences, my female company had to let the men in. (Laughter)When I started my company of women, the men said, ""How interesting, because it only works because it's small."" And later, as it became sizable,  they accepted, ""Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest."" And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I'd made 70 of the staff  into millionaires, they sort of said, ""Well done, Steve!"" (Laughter) (Applause)You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being  patted patronizingly. (Laughter) (Applause) And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink. (Laughter)Let me share with you  two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. Because the other day when I said,  ""My husband's an angel,"" a woman complained — ""You're lucky,"" she said, ""mine's still alive."" (Laughter)If success were easy,  we'd all be millionaires. But in my case, it came in the midst of family trauma and indeed, crisis. Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby. And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he had and turned into a wild,  unmanageable toddler. Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly autistic  and he never spoke again. Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. And then there's been a groundbreaking Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism. Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. I like doing new things  and making new things happen. And I've just started a three-year  think tank for autism.And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also founded  the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. The Oxford Internet Institute focuses not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet.Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. And I have learned to live without him, and I have learned to live  without his need of me. Philanthropy is all that I do now. I need never worry about getting lost because several charities would quickly come and find me. (Laughter)It's one thing to have an idea  for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know, making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24/7 commitment  that borders on the obsessive. So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. I believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly and in humility. Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else.We live our lives forward. So what has all that taught me? I learned that tomorrow's  never going to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. And that made me able to cope with change, indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dame_stephanie_shirley_why_do_ambitious_women_have_flat_heads
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"I'd like to tell you a story about death and architecture.A hundred years ago, we tended to die of infectious diseases like pneumonia, that, if they took hold, would take us away quite quickly. We tended to die at home, in our own beds, looked after by family, although that was the default option because a lot of people lacked access to medical care.And then in the 20th century a lot of things changed. We developed new medicines like penicillin so we could treat those infectious diseases. New medical technologies like x-ray machines were invented. And because they were so big and expensive, we needed large, centralized buildings to keep them in, and they became our modern hospitals.After the Second World War, a lot of countries set up  universal healthcare systems so that everyone who needed treatment could get it. The result was that lifespans extended from about 45 at the start of the century to almost double that today. The 20th century was this time of huge  optimism about what science could offer, but with all of the focus on life, death was forgotten, even as our approach to death changed dramatically.Now, I'm an architect, and for the past year and a half I've been looking at these changes and at what they mean for architecture related to death and dying. We now tend to die of cancer and heart disease, and what that means is that many of us will have a long period of chronic illness at the end of our lives. During that period, we'll likely spend a lot of time  in hospitals and hospices and care homes.Now, we've all been in a modern hospital. You know those fluorescent lights and the endless corridors and those rows of uncomfortable chairs. Hospital architecture has earned its bad reputation. But the surprising thing is, it wasn't always like this.This is L'Ospedale degli Innocenti, built in 1419 by Brunelleschi, who was one of the most famous and influential architects of his time. And when I look at this building and then think about hospitals today, what amazes me is this building's ambition. It's just a really great building. It has these courtyards in the middle so that all of the rooms have daylight and fresh air, and the rooms are big and they have high ceilings, so they just feel more comfortable to be in. And it's also beautiful. Somehow, we've forgotten that that's even possible for a hospital.Now, if we want better buildings for dying, then we have to talk about it, but because we find the subject of death uncomfortable, we don't talk about it, and we don't question how we as a society approach death. One of the things that surprised me most in my research, though, is how changeable attitudes actually are. This is the first crematorium in the U.K., which was built in Woking in the 1870s. And when this was first built, there were protests in the local village. Cremation wasn't socially acceptable, and 99.8 percent of people got buried. And yet, only a hundred years later, three quarters of us get cremated. People are actually really open to changing things if they're given the chance to talk about them.So this conversation about death and architecture was what I wanted to start when I did my first exhibition on it in Venice in June, which was called ""Death in Venice."" It was designed to be quite playful so that people would literally engage with it. This is one of our exhibits, which is an interactive map of London that shows just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death and dying, and as you wave your hand across the map, the name of that piece of real estate, the building or cemetery, is revealed. Another of our exhibits was a series of postcards that people could take away with them. And they showed people's homes and hospitals and cemeteries and mortuaries, and they tell the story of the different spaces that we pass through on either side of death. We wanted to show that where we die is a key part of how we die.Now, the strangest thing was the way that visitors reacted to the exhibition, especially the audio-visual works. We had people dancing and running and jumping as they tried to activate the exhibits in different ways, and at a certain point they would kind of stop and remember that they were in an exhibition about death, and that maybe that's not how you're supposed to act. But actually, I would question whether there is one way that you're supposed to act around death, and if there's not, I'd ask you to think about what you think a good death is, and what you think that architecture that supports a good death might be like, and mightn't it be a little less like this and a little more like this?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alison_killing_there_s_a_better_way_to_die_and_architecture_can_help
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"(Clicking) I was born with bilateral retinoblastoma, retinal cancer. My right eye was removed at seven months of age. I was 13 months when they removed my left eye. The first thing I did upon awakening from that last surgery was to climb out of my crib and begin wandering around the intensive care nursery, probably looking for the one who did this to me. (Laughter) Evidently, wandering around the nursery was not a problem for me without eyes. The problem was getting caught.It's impressions about blindness that are far more threatening to blind people than the blindness itself. Think for a moment about your own impressions of blindness. Think about your reactions when I first came onto the stage, or the prospect of your own blindness, or a loved one going blind. The terror is incomprehensible to most of us, because blindness is thought to epitomize ignorance and unawareness, hapless exposure to the ravages of the dark unknown. How poetic.Fortunately for me, my parents were not poetic. They were pragmatic. They understood that ignorance and fear were but matters of the mind, and the mind is adaptable. They believed that I should grow up to enjoy the same freedoms and responsibilities as everyone else. In their own words, I would move out — which I did when I was 18 — I will pay taxes — thanks — (Laughter) — and they knew the difference between love and fear. Fear immobilizes us in the face of challenge. They knew that blindness would pose a significant challenge. I was not raised with fear. They put my freedom first before all else, because that is what love does.Now, moving forward, how do I manage today? The world is a much larger nursery. Fortunately, I have my trusty long cane, longer than the canes used by most blind people. I call it my freedom staff. It will keep me, for example, from making an undignified  departure from the stage. (Laughter) I do see that cliff edge. They warned us earlier that every imaginable mishap has occurred to speakers up here on the stage. I don't care to set a new precedent.But beyond that, many of you may have heard me clicking as I came onto the stage — (Clicking) — with my tongue. Those are flashes of sound that go out and reflect from surfaces all around me, just like a bat's sonar, and return to me with patterns,  with pieces of information, much as light does for you. And my brain, thanks to my parents, has been activated to form images in my visual cortex, which we now call the imaging system, from those patterns of information, much as your brain does. I call this process flash sonar. It is how I have learned to see through my blindness, to navigate my journey through the dark unknowns of my own challenges, which has earned me the moniker ""the remarkable Batman.""Now, Batman I will accept. Bats are cool. Batman is cool. But I was not raised to think of myself as in any way remarkable. I have always regarded myself much like anyone else who navigates the dark unknowns of their own challenges. Is that so remarkable? I do not use my eyes, I use my brain.Now, someone, somewhere, must think that's remarkable, or I wouldn't be up here, but let's consider this for a moment. Everyone out there who faces or who has ever faced a challenge, raise your hands. Whoosh. Okay. Lots of hands going up, a moment, let me do a head count. (Clicking) This will take a while. (Clicking) (Laughter) Okay, lots of hands in the air. Keep them up. I have an idea. Those of you who use your brains to navigate these challenges, put your hands down. Okay, anyone with your hands still up has challenges of your own. (Laughter)So we all face challenges, and we all face the dark unknown, which is endemic to most challenges, which is what most of us fear, okay? But we all have brains that allow us, that activate to allow us to navigate the journey through these challenges. Okay?Case in point: I came up here and — (Clicking) — they wouldn't tell me where the lectern was. So you can't trust those TED folks. ""Find it yourself,"" they said. So — (Laughter) And the feedback for the P.A. system is no help at all.So now I present to you a challenge. So if you'd all close your eyes for just a moment, okay? And you're going to learn a bit of flash sonar. I'm going to make a sound. I'm going to hold this panel in front  of me, but I'm not going to move it. Just listen to the sound for a moment. Shhhhhhhhhh. Okay, nothing very interesting. Now, listen to what happens to that same exact sound when I move the panel. Shhhhhhhhhhh.  (Pitch getting higher and lower) You do not know the power of the dark side. (Laughter) I couldn't resist.Okay, now keep your eyes closed because, did you hear the difference? Okay. Now, let's be sure. For your challenge, you tell me, just say ""now"" when you hear the panel start to move. Okay? We'll relax into this.Shhhhhhh.Audience: Now. Daniel Kish: Good. Excellent. Open your eyes. All right. So just a few centimeters, you would notice the difference. You've experienced sonar. You'd all make great blind people. (Laughter) Let's have a look at what can happen when this activation process is given some time and attention.(Video) Juan Ruiz: It's like you guys can see with your eyes and we can see with our ears.Brian Bushway: It's not a matter of enjoying it more or less, it's about enjoying it differently.Shawn Marsolais: It goes across. DK: Yeah.SM: And then it's gradually coming back down again.DK: Yes! SM: That's amazing. I can, like, see the car. Holy mother!J. Louchart: I love being blind. If I had the opportunity, honestly, I wouldn't go back to being sighted.JR: The bigger the goal, the more obstacles you'll face, and on the other side of that goal is victory. [In Italian] (Applause)DK: Now, do these people look terrified? Not so much. We have delivered activation training to tens of thousands of blind and sighted people from all backgrounds in nearly 40 countries. When blind people learn to see, sighted people seem inspired to want to learn to see their way better, more clearly, with less fear, because this exemplifies the immense capacity within us all to navigate any type of challenge, through any form of darkness, to discoveries unimagined when we are activated.I wish you all a most activating journey.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Daniel, my friend. As I know you can see, it's a spectacular standing ovation at TED. Thank you for an extraordinary talk. Just one more question about your world, your inner world that you construct. We think that we have things in our world that you as a blind person don't have, but what's your world like? What do you have that we don't have?DK: Three hundred and sixty-degree view, so my sonar works about as well behind me as it does in front of me. It works around corners. It works through surfaces. Generally, it's kind of a fuzzy three-dimensional geometry. One of my students, who has now become an instructor, when he lost his vision, after a few months he was sitting in his three story house and he realized that he could hear everything going on throughout the house: conversations, people in the kitchen, people in the bathroom, several floors away, several walls away. He said it was something like having x-ray vision.CA: What do you picture that you're in right now? How do you picture this theater?DK: Lots of loudspeakers, quite frankly. It's interesting.  When people make a sound, when they laugh, when they fidget, when they take a drink or blow their nose or whatever, I hear everything. I hear every little movement that every single person makes. None of it really escapes my attention, and then, from a sonar perspective, the size of the room, the curvature  of the audience around the stage, it's the height of the room. Like I say, it's all that kind  of three-dimensional surface geometry all around me.CA: Well, Daniel, you have done a spectacular job of helping us all see the world in a different way. Thanks so much for that, truly. DK: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kish_how_i_use_sonar_to_navigate_the_world
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"G'day, my name's Kevin. I'm from Australia. I'm here to help. (Laughter)Tonight, I want to talk about a tale of two cities. One of those cities is called Washington, and the other is called Beijing. Because how these two capitals shape their future and the future of the United States and the future of China doesn't just affect those two countries, it affects all of us in ways, perhaps, we've never thought of: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the fish we eat, the quality of our oceans, the languages we speak in the future, the jobs we have, the political systems we choose, and, of course, the great questions of war and peace.You see that bloke? He's French. His name is Napoleon. A couple of hundred years ago, he made this extraordinary projection: ""China is a sleeping lion, and when she awakes, the world will shake."" Napoleon got a few things wrong; he got this one absolutely right. Because China is today not just woken up, China has stood up and China is on the march, and the question for us all is where will China go and how do we engage this giant of the 21st century?You start looking at the numbers, they start to confront you in a big way. It's projected that China will become, by whichever measure — PPP, market exchange rates — the largest economy in the world over the course of the decade ahead. They're already the largest trading nation, already the largest exporting nation, already the largest manufacturing nation, and they're also the biggest emitters of carbon in the world. America comes second.So if China does become the world's largest economy, think about this: It'll be the first time since this guy was on the throne of England — George III, not a good friend of Napoleon's — that in the world we will have as the largest economy a non-English speaking country, a non-Western country, a non-liberal democratic country. And if you don't think that's going to affect the way in which the world happens in the future, then personally, I think you've been smoking something, and it doesn't mean you're from Colorado.So in short, the question we have tonight is, how do we understand this mega-change, which I believe to be the biggest change for the first half of the 21st century? It'll affect so many things. It will go to the absolute core. It's happening quietly. It's happening persistently. It's happening in some senses under the radar, as we are all preoccupied with what's going in Ukraine, what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on with ISIS, what's going on with ISIL, what's happening with the future of our economies. This is a slow and quiet revolution. And with a mega-change comes also a mega-challenge, and the mega-challenge is this: Can these two great countries, China and the United States — China, the Middle Kingdom, and the United States, Měiguó — which in Chinese, by the way, means ""the beautiful country."" Think about that — that's the name that China has given this country for more than a hundred years. Whether these two great civilizations, these two great countries, can in fact carve out a common future for themselves and for the world? In short, can we carve out a future which is peaceful and mutually prosperous, or are we looking at a great challenge of war or peace? And I have 15 minutes to work through war or peace, which is a little less time than they gave this guy to write a book called ""War and Peace.""People ask me, why is it that a kid growing up in rural Australia got interested in learning Chinese? Well, there are two reasons for that. Here's the first of them. That's Betsy the cow. Now, Betsy the cow was one of a herd of dairy cattle that I grew up with on a farm in rural Australia. See those hands there? These are not built for farming. So very early on, I discovered that in fact, working in a farm was not designed for me, and China was a very safe remove from any career in Australian farm life.Here's the second reason. That's my mom. Anyone here ever listen to what their mom told them to do? Everyone ever do what their mom told them to do? I rarely did, but what my mom said to me was, one day, she handed me a newspaper, a headline which said, here we have a huge change. And that change is China entering the United Nations. 1971, I had just turned 14 years of age, and she handed me this headline. And she said, ""Understand this,  learn this, because it's going to affect your future.""So being a very good student of history, I decided that the best thing for me to do was, in fact, to go off and learn Chinese. The great thing about learning Chinese is that your Chinese teacher gives you a new name. And so they gave me this name: Kè, which means to overcome or to conquer, and Wén, and that's the character for literature or the arts. Kè Wén, Conqueror of the Classics. Any of you guys called ""Kevin""? It's a major lift from being called Kevin to be called Conqueror of the Classics. (Laughter) I've been called Kevin all my life. Have you been called Kevin all your life? Would you prefer to be called Conqueror of the Classics?And so I went off after that and joined the Australian Foreign Service, but here is where pride — before pride, there always comes a fall. So there I am in the embassy in Beijing, off to the Great Hall of the People with our ambassador, who had asked me to interpret for his first meeting in the Great Hall of the People. And so there was I. If you've been to a Chinese meeting, it's a giant horseshoe. At the head of the horsehoe are the really serious pooh-bahs, and down the end of the horseshoe are the not-so-serious pooh-bahs, the junior woodchucks like me. And so the ambassador began with this inelegant phrase. He said, ""China and Australia are currently enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness."" And I thought to myself, ""That sounds clumsy. That sounds odd. I will improve it."" Note to file: Never do that. It needed to be a little more elegant, a little more classical, so I rendered it as follows. [In Chinese]There was a big pause on the other side of the room. You could see the giant pooh-bahs at the head of the horseshoe, the blood visibly draining from their faces, and the junior woodchucks at the other end of the horseshoe engaged in peals of  unrestrained laughter. Because when I rendered his sentence, ""Australia and China are  enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness,"" in fact, what I said was that Australia and China were now experiencing fantastic orgasm. (Laughter)That was the last time I was asked to interpret. But in that little story, there's a wisdom, which is, as soon as you think you know something about this extraordinary civilization of 5,000 years of continuing history, there's always something new to learn.History is against us when it comes to the U.S. and China forging a common future together. This guy up here? He's not Chinese and he's not American. He's Greek. His name's Thucydides. He wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. And he made this extraordinary observation about Athens and Sparta. ""It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable."" And hence, a whole literature about something called the Thucydides Trap.This guy here? He's not American and he's not Greek. He's Chinese. His name is Sun Tzu. He wrote ""The Art of War,"" and if you see his statement underneath, it's along these lines: ""Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected."" Not looking good so far for China and the United States.This guy is an American. His name's Graham Allison. In fact, he's a teacher at the Kennedy School over there in Boston. He's working on a single project at the moment, which is, does the Thucydides Trap about the inevitably of war between rising powers and established great powers apply to the future of China-U.S. relations? It's a core question. And what Graham has done is explore 15 cases in history since the 1500s to establish what the precedents are. And in 11 out of 15 of them, let me tell you, they've ended in catastrophic war.You may say, ""But Kevin — or Conqueror of the Classics — that was the past. We live now in a world of interdependence and globalization. It could never happen again."" Guess what? The economic historians tell us that in fact, the time which we reached the greatest point of economic integration and globalization was in 1914, just before that happened, World War I, a sobering reflection from history.So if we are engaged in this great question of how China thinks, feels, and positions itself towards the United States, and the reverse, how do we get to the baseline of how these two countries and civilizations can possibly work together?Let me first go to, in fact, China's views of the U.S. and the rest of the West. Number one: China feels as if it's been humiliated at the hands of the West through a hundred years of history, beginning with the Opium Wars. When after that, the Western powers carved China up into little pieces, so that by the time it got to the '20s and '30s, signs like this one appeared on the streets of Shanghai. [""No dogs and Chinese allowed""] How would you feel if you were Chinese, in your own country,  if you saw that sign appear? China also believes and feels as if, in the events of 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, when Germany's colonies were given back to all sorts of countries around in the world, what about German colonies in China? They were, in fact, given to Japan. When Japan then invaded China in the 1930s the world looked away and was indifferent to what would happen to China. And then, on top of that, the Chinese to this day believe that the United States and the West do not accept the legitimacy of their political system because it's so radically different from those of us who come from liberal democracies, and believe that the United States to this day is seeking to undermine their political system. China also believes that it is being contained by U.S. allies and by those with strategic partnerships with the U.S. right around its periphery. And beyond all that, the Chinese have this feeling in their heart of hearts and in their gut of guts that those of us in the collective West are just too damned arrogant. That is, we don't recognize the problems in our own system, in our politics and our economics, and are very quick to point the finger elsewhere, and believe that, in fact, we in the collective West are guilty of a great bunch of hypocrisy.Of course, in international relations, it's not just the sound of one hand clapping. There's another country too, and that's called the U.S. So how does the U.S. respond to all of the above? The U.S. has a response to each of those. On the question of is the U.S. containing China, they say, ""No, look at the history of the Soviet Union. That was containment."" Instead, what we have done in the U.S. and the West is welcome China into the global economy, and on top of that, welcome them into the World Trade Organization. The U.S. and the West say China cheats on the question of intellectual property rights, and through cyberattacks on U.S. and global firms. Furthermore, the United States says that the Chinese political system is fundamentally wrong because it's at such fundamental variance to the human rights, democracy, and rule of law that we enjoy in the U.S. and the collective West. And on top of all the above, what does the United States say? That they fear that China will, when it has sufficient power, establish a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and wider East Asia, boot the United States out, and in time, when it's powerful enough, unilaterally seek to change the rules of the global order.So apart from all of that, it's just fine and dandy, the U.S.-China relationship. No real problems there. The challenge, though, is given those deep-rooted feelings, those deep-rooted emotions and thought patterns, what the Chinese call ""Sīwéi,"" ways of thinking, how can we craft a basis for a common future between these two?I argue simply this: We can do it on the basis on a framework of constructive realism for a common purpose. What do I mean by that? Be realistic about the things that we disagree on, and a management approach that doesn't enable any one of those differences to break into war or conflict until we've acquired the diplomatic skills to solve them. Be constructive in areas of the bilateral, regional and global engagement between the two, which will make a difference for all of humankind. Build a regional institution capable of cooperation in Asia, an Asia-Pacific community. And worldwide, act further, like you've begun to do at the end of last year by striking out against climate change with hands joined together rather than fists apart.Of course, all that happens if you've got a common mechanism and political will to achieve the above. These things are deliverable. But the question is, are they deliverable alone? This is what our head tells us we need to do, but what about our heart?I have a little experience in the question back home of how you try to bring together two peoples who, frankly, haven't had a whole lot in common in the past. And that's when I apologized to Australia's indigenous peoples. This was a day of reckoning in the Australian government, the Australian parliament, and for the Australian people. After 200 years of unbridled abuse towards the first Australians, it was high time that we white folks said we were sorry.The important thing — (Applause)The important thing that I remember is staring in the faces of all those from Aboriginal Australia as they came to listen to this apology. It was extraordinary to see, for example, old women telling me the stories of when they were five years old and literally ripped away from their parents, like this lady here. It was extraordinary for me to then be able to embrace and to kiss Aboriginal elders as they came into the parliament building, and one woman said to me, it's the first time a white fella had ever kissed her in her life, and she was over 70. That's a terrible story.And then I remember this family saying to me, ""You know, we drove all the way from the far North down to Canberra to come to this thing, drove our way through redneck country. On the way back, stopped at a cafe after the apology for a milkshake."" And they walked into this cafe quietly, tentatively, gingerly, a little anxious. I think you know what I'm talking about. But the day after the apology, what happened? Everyone in that cafe, every one of the white folks, stood up and applauded. Something had happened in the hearts of these people in Australia. The white folks, our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, and we haven't solved all these problems together, but let me tell you, there was a new beginning because we had gone not just to the head, we'd gone also to the heart.So where does that conclude in terms of the great question that we've been asked to address this evening, which is the future of U.S.-China relations? The head says there's a way forward. The head says there is a policy framework, there's a common narrative, there's a mechanism through regular summitry to do these things and to make them better. But the heart must also find a way to reimagine the possibilities of the America-China relationship, and the possibilities of China's future engagement in the world. Sometimes, folks, we just need to take a leap of faith not quite knowing where we might land.In China, they now talk about the Chinese Dream. In America, we're all familiar with the term ""the American Dream."" I think it's time, across the world, that we're able to think also of something we might also call a dream for all humankind. Because if we do that, we might just change the way that we think about each other.[In Chinese]That's my challenge to America. That's my challenge to China. That's my challenge to all of us, but I think where there's a will and where there is imagination we can turn this into a future driven by peace and prosperity and not once again repeat the tragedies of war.I thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thanks so much for that. Thanks so much for that. It feels like you yourself have a role to play in this bridging. You, in a way, are uniquely placed to speak to both sides.Kevin Rudd: Well, what we Australians do best is organize the drinks, so you get them together in one room, and we suggest this and suggest that, then we go and get the drinks. But no, look, for all of us who are friends of these two great countries, America and China, you can do something. You can make a practical contribution, and for all you good folks here, next time you meet someone from China, sit down and have a conversation. See what you can find out about where they come from and what they think, and my challenge for all the Chinese folks who are going to watch this TED Talk at some time is do the same. Two of us seeking to change the world can actually make a huge difference. Those of us up the middle, we can make a small contribution.CA: Kevin, all power to you, my friend. Thank you.KR: Thank you. Thank you, folks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_rudd_are_china_and_the_us_doomed_to_conflict
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"People back home call me a heckler, a troublemaker, an irritant, a rebel, an activist, the voice of the people. But that wasn't always me.Growing up, I had a nickname. They used to call me Softy, meaning the soft, harmless boy. Like every other human being, I avoided trouble. In my childhood, they taught me silence. Don't argue, do as you're told. In Sunday school, they taught me don't confront, don't argue, even if you're right, turn the other cheek.This was reinforced by the political climate of the time. (Laughter) Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich. (Laughter) Kenya's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals. This was reinforced by the political climate of the day. We had a president, Moi, who was a dictator. He ruled the country with an iron fist, and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested, tortured, jailed or even killed. That meant that people were taught to be smart cowards, stay out of trouble. Being a coward was not an insult. Being a coward was a compliment. We used to be told that a coward goes home to his mother. What that meant: that if you stayed out of trouble you're going to stay alive.I used to question this advice, and eight years ago we had an election in Kenya, and the results were violently disputed. What followed that election was terrible violence, rape, and the killing of over 1,000 people. My work was to document the violence. As a photographer, I took thousands of images, and after two months, the two politicians came together, had a cup of tea, signed a peace agreement, and the country moved on.I was a very disturbed man because I saw the violence firsthand. I saw the killings. I saw the displacement. I met women who had been raped, and it disturbed me, but the country never spoke about it. We pretended. We all became smart cowards. We decided to stay out of trouble and not talk about it.Ten months later, I quit my job. I said I could not stand it anymore. After quitting my job, I decided to organize my friends to speak about the violence in the country, to speak about the state of the nation, and June 1, 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president's attention. It's a national holiday, it's broadcast across the country, and I showed up at the stadium. My friends did not show up. I found myself alone, and I didn't know what to do. I was scared, but I knew very well that that particular day, I had to make a decision. Was I able to live as a coward, like everyone else, or was I going to make a stand? And when the president stood up to speak, I found myself on my feet shouting at the president, telling him to remember the post-election violence victims, to stop the corruption. And suddenly, out of nowhere, the police pounced on me like hungry lions. They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium, where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail. I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail, and that got me thinking. What was making me feel this way? My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did, and the images that I took were disturbing my life. The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans. Most Kenyans did not see the violence. It was a story to them.And so I decided to actually start a street exhibition to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it. We traveled the country and showed the images, and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path, where I decided to become silent no more, to talk about those things. We traveled, and our general site from our street exhibit became for political graffiti about the situation in the country, talking about corruption, bad leadership. We have even done symbolic burials. We have delivered live pigs to Kenya's parliament as a symbol of our politicians' greed. It has been done in Uganda and other countries, and what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country, across the continent.Where I used to stand up alone seven years ago, now I belong to a community of many people who stand up with me. I am no longer alone when I stand up to speak about these things. I belong to a group of young people who are passionate about the country, who want to bring about change, and they're no longer afraid, and they're no longer smart cowards. So that was my story. That day in the stadium, I stood up as a smart coward. By that one action, I said goodbye to the 24 years living as a coward.There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why. That day standing up in that stadium shouting at the President, I discovered why I was truly born, that I would no longer be silent in the face of injustice. Do you know why you were born? Thank you. (Applause)Tom Rielly: It's an amazing story. I just want to ask you a couple quick questions. So PAWA254: you've created a studio, a place where young people can go and harness the power of digital media to do some of this action. What's happening now with PAWA?Boniface Mwangi: So we have  this community of filmmakers, graffiti artists, musicians, and when there's an issue in the country, we come together, we brainstorm, and take up on that issue. So our most powerful tool is art, because we live in a very busy world where people are so busy in their life, and they don't have time to read. So we package our activism and we package our message in art. So from the music, the graffiti,  the art, that's what we do. Can I say one more thing?TR: Yeah, of course. (Applause)BM: In spite of being arrested, beaten up, threatened, the moment I discovered my voice, that I could actually stand up for what I really believed in, I'm no longer afraid. I used to be called softy, but I'm no longer softy, because I discovered who I really am, as in, that's what I want to do, and there's such beauty in doing that. There's nothing as powerful as that, knowing that I'm meant to do this, because you don't get scared, you just continue living your life.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/boniface_mwangi_boniface_mwangi_the_day_i_stood_up_alone
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"When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most  was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel.Today the greatest risk  of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be  a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we've actually invested very little  in a system to stop an epidemic. We're not ready for the next epidemic.Let's look at Ebola. I'm sure all of you read about it  in the newspaper, lots of tough challenges. I followed it carefully  through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication. And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we  didn't have a system at all. In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces.We didn't have a group of epidemiologists  ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. The case reports came in on paper. It was very delayed before they were put online and they were extremely inaccurate. We didn't have a medical team ready to go. We didn't have a way of preparing people. Now, Médecins Sans Frontières  did a great job orchestrating volunteers. But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers. There was no one there  to look at treatment approaches. No one to look at the diagnostics. No one to figure out  what tools should be used. As an example, we could have  taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasma back in people to protect them. But that was never tried.So there was a lot that was missing. And these things  are really a global failure. The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about. Now, in the movies it's quite different. There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood.The failure to prepare  could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically  more devastating than Ebola Let's look at the progression  of Ebola over this year. About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries. There's three reasons why it didn't spread more. The first is that there was a lot  of heroic work by the health workers. They found the people and they  prevented more infections. The second is the nature of the virus. Ebola does not spread through the air. And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick  that they're bedridden. Third, it didn't get into many urban areas. And that was just luck. If it had gotten into a lot  more urban areas, the case numbers  would have been much larger.So next time, we might not be so lucky. You can have a virus where people  feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. The source of the virus could be  a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse.In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu back in 1918. So here's what would happen: It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly. And you can see over 30 million people died from that epidemic. So this is a serious problem. We should be concerned.But in fact, we can build a really good response system. We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. We've got cell phones to get information from the public  and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they're moving. We have advances in biology that should dramatically change  the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. And we need preparedness.The best lessons, I think,  on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. We have reserves that can scale  us up to large numbers. NATO has a mobile unit  that can deploy very rapidly. NATO does a lot of war games  to check, are people well trained? Do they understand  about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? So they are absolutely ready to go. So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic.What are the key pieces? First, we need strong health systems in poor countries. That's where mothers  can give birth safely, kids can get all their vaccines. But, also where we'll see  the outbreak very early on. We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got  the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise. And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas. We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. The last time a germ game  was done in the United States was back in 2001,  and it didn't go so well. So far the score is germs: 1, people: 0. Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics. There are some big breakthroughs,  like the Adeno-associated virus, that could work very, very quickly.Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm. The World Bank estimates that  if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths. These investments  offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic. The primary healthcare, the R&D, those things would reduce  global health equity and make the world more just  as well as more safe.So I think this should absolutely be a priority. There's no need to panic. We don't have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement. But we need to get going, because time is not on our side.In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early  warning, a wake-up call, to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready  for the next epidemic.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_disaster_we_re_not_ready
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"I dedicated the past two years to understanding how people achieve their dreams. When we think about the dreams we have, and the dent we want to leave in the universe, it is striking to see how big of an overlap there is between the dreams that we have, and projects that never happen.(Laughter)So I'm here to talk to you today about five ways how not to follow your dreams.One: Believe in overnight success. You know the story, right? The tech guy built a mobile app and sold it very fast for a lot of money. You know, the story may seem real, but I bet it's incomplete. If you go investigate further, the guy has done 30 apps before and he has done a master's on the topic, a PhD. He has been working on the topic for 20 years.This is really interesting. I myself have a story in Brazil that people think is an overnight success. I come from a humble family, and two weeks before the deadline to apply for MIT, I started the application process. And, voilà! I got in. People may think it's an overnight success, but that only worked because for the 17 years prior to that, I took life and education seriously. Your overnight success story is always a result of everything you've done in your life through that moment.Two: Believe someone else has the answers for you. Constantly, people want to help out, right? All sorts of people: your family, your friends, your business partners, they all have opinions on which path you should take: ""And let me tell you, go through this pipe."" But whenever you go inside, there are other ways you have to pick as well. And you need to make those decisions yourself. No one else has the perfect answers for your life. And you need to keep picking those decisions, right? The pipes are infinite and you're going to bump your head, and it's a part of the process.Three, and it's very subtle but very important: Decide to settle when growth is guaranteed. So when your life is going great, you have put together a great team, and you have growing revenue, and everything is set — time to settle. When I launched my first book, I worked really, really hard to distribute it everywhere in Brazil. With that, over three million people downloaded it, over 50,000 people bought physical copies. When I wrote a sequel, some impact was guaranteed. Even if I did little, sales would be OK. But OK is never OK. When you're growing towards a peak, you need to work harder than ever and find yourself another peak. Maybe if I did little, a couple hundred thousand people would read it, and that's great already. But if I work harder than ever, I can bring this number up to millions. That's why I decided, with my new book, to go to every single state of Brazil. And I can already see a higher peak. There's no time to settle down.Fourth tip, and that's really important: Believe the fault is someone else's. I constantly see people saying, ""Yes, I had this great idea, but no investor had the vision to invest."" ""Oh, I created this great product, but the market is so bad, the sales didn't go well."" Or, ""I can't find good talent; my team is so below expectations."" If you have dreams, it's your responsibility to make them happen. Yes, it may be hard to find talent. Yes, the market may be bad. But if no one invested in your idea, if no one bought your product, for sure, there is something there that is your fault.(Laughter)Definitely. You need to get your dreams and make them happen. And no one achieved their goals alone. But if you didn't make them happen, it's your fault and no one else's. Be responsible for your dreams.And one last tip, and this one is really important as well: Believe that the only things that matter are the dreams themselves. Once I saw an ad, and it was a lot of friends, they were going up a mountain, it was a very high mountain, and it was a lot of work. You could see that they were sweating and this was tough. And they were going up, and they finally made it to the peak. Of course, they decided to celebrate, right? I'm going to celebrate, so, ""Yes! We made it, we're at the top!"" Two seconds later, one looks at the other and says, ""OK, let's go down.""(Laughter)Life is never about the goals themselves. Life is about the journey. Yes, you should enjoy the goals themselves, but people think that you have dreams, and whenever you get to reaching one of those dreams, it's a magical place where happiness will be all around. But achieving a dream is a momentary sensation, and your life is not. The only way to really achieve all of your dreams is to fully enjoy every step of your journey. That's the best way.And your journey is simple — it's made of steps. Some steps will be right on. Sometimes you will trip. If it's right on, celebrate, because some people wait a lot to celebrate. And if you tripped, turn that into something to learn. If every step becomes something to learn or something to celebrate, you will for sure enjoy the journey.So, five tips: Believe in overnight success, believe someone else has the answers for you, believe that when growth is guaranteed, you should settle down, believe the fault is someone else's, and believe that only the goals themselves matter. Believe me, you do that, and you will destroy your dreams.(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bel_pesce_5_ways_to_kill_your_dreams
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"Imagine you're in a bar, or a club, and you start talking, and after a while, the question comes up, ""So, what do you do for work?"" And since you think your job is interesting, you say, ""I'm a mathematician."" (Laughter) And inevitably, during that conversation one of these two phrases come up: A) ""I was terrible at math, but it wasn't my fault. It's because the teacher was awful."" (Laughter) Or B) ""But what is math really for?"" (Laughter) I'll now address Case B. (Laughter)When someone asks you what math is for, they're not asking you about applications of mathematical science. They're asking you, why did I have to study that bullshit I never used in my life again? (Laughter) That's what they're actually asking. So when mathematicians are asked what math is for, they tend to fall into two groups: 54.51 percent of mathematicians will assume an attacking position, and 44.77 percent of mathematicians will take a defensive position. There's a strange 0.8 percent, among which I include myself.Who are the ones that attack? The attacking ones are mathematicians who would tell you this question makes no sense, because mathematics have a meaning all their own — a beautiful edifice with its own logic — and that there's no point in constantly searching for all possible applications. What's the use of poetry? What's the use of love? What's the use of life itself?  What kind of question is that? (Laughter) Hardy, for instance, was a model of this type of attack.And those who stand in defense tell you, ""Even if you don't realize it, friend, math is behind everything."" (Laughter) Those guys, they always bring up bridges and computers. ""If you don't know math, your bridge will collapse."" (Laughter) It's true, computers are all about math. And now these guys have also started saying that behind information security and credit cards are prime numbers. These are the answers your math teacher would give you if you asked him. He's one of the defensive ones.Okay, but who's right then? Those who say that math doesn't need to have a purpose, or those who say that math is behind everything we do? Actually, both are right. But remember I told you I belong to that strange 0.8 percent claiming something else? So, go ahead, ask me what math is for.Audience: What is math for?Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón: Okay, 76.34 percent of you asked the question, 23.41 percent didn't say anything, and the 0.8 percent — I'm not sure what those guys are doing. Well, to my dear 76.31 percent — it's true that math doesn't need to serve a purpose, it's true that it's a beautiful structure, a logical one, probably one of the greatest collective efforts ever achieved in human history. But it's also true that there, where scientists and technicians are looking for mathematical theories that allow them to advance, they're within the structure of math, which permeates everything.It's true that we have to go somewhat deeper, to see what's behind science. Science operates on intuition, creativity. Math controls intuition and tames creativity. Almost everyone who hasn't heard this before is surprised when they hear that if you take a 0.1 millimeter thick sheet of paper, the size we normally use, and, if it were big enough, fold it 50 times, its thickness would extend almost the distance from the Earth to the sun. Your intuition tells you it's impossible. Do the math and you'll see it's right. That's what math is for.It's true that science, all types of science, only makes sense because it makes us better understand this beautiful world we live in. And in doing that, it helps us avoid the pitfalls of this painful world we live in. There are sciences that help us in this way quite directly. Oncological science, for example. And there are others we look at from afar, with envy sometimes, but knowing that we are what supports them. All the basic sciences support them, including math. All that makes science, science is the rigor of math. And that rigor factors in because its results are eternal.You probably said or were told at some point that diamonds are forever, right? That depends on your definition of forever! A theorem — that really is forever. (Laughter) The Pythagorean theorem is still true even though Pythagoras is dead, I assure you it's true. (Laughter) Even if the world collapsed the Pythagorean theorem would still be true. Wherever any two triangle sides and a good hypotenuse get together (Laughter) the Pythagorean theorem goes all out. It works like crazy. (Applause)Well, we mathematicians devote ourselves to come up with theorems. Eternal truths. But it isn't always easy to know the difference between an eternal truth, or theorem, and a mere conjecture. You need proof. For example, let's say I have a big, enormous, infinite field. I want to cover it with equal pieces, without leaving any gaps. I could use squares, right? I could use triangles. Not circles, those leave little gaps. Which is the best shape to use? One that covers the same surface, but has a smaller border. In the year 300, Pappus of Alexandria said the best is to use hexagons, just like bees do. But he didn't prove it. The guy said, ""Hexagons, great! Let's go with hexagons!"" He didn't prove it, it remained a conjecture. ""Hexagons!"" And the world, as you know, split into Pappists and anti-Pappists, until 1700 years later when in 1999, Thomas Hales proved that Pappus and the bees were right — the best shape to use was the hexagon. And that became a theorem, the honeycomb theorem, that will be true forever and ever, for longer than any diamond you may have. (Laughter)But what happens if we go to three dimensions? If I want to fill the space with equal pieces, without leaving any gaps, I can use cubes, right? Not spheres, those leave little gaps. (Laughter) What is the best shape to use? Lord Kelvin, of the famous Kelvin degrees and all, said that the best was to use a truncated octahedron which, as you all know — (Laughter) — is this thing here! (Applause) Come on. Who doesn't have a truncated octahedron at home? (Laughter) Even a plastic one. ""Honey, get the truncated octahedron, we're having guests."" Everybody has one! (Laughter)But Kelvin didn't prove it. It remained a conjecture — Kelvin's conjecture. The world, as you know, then split into Kelvinists and anti-Kelvinists (Laughter) until a hundred or so years later, someone found a better structure. Weaire and Phelan found this little thing over here — (Laughter) — this structure to which they gave the very clever name ""the Weaire-Phelan structure."" (Laughter) It looks like a strange object, but it isn't so strange, it also exists in nature. It's very interesting that this structure, because of its geometric properties, was used to build the Aquatics Center for the Beijing Olympic Games.There, Michael Phelps won eight gold medals, and became the best swimmer of all time. Well, until someone better comes along, right? As may happen with the Weaire-Phelan structure. It's the best until something better shows up. But be careful, because this one really stands a chance that in a hundred or so years, or even if it's in 1700 years, that someone proves it's the best possible shape for the job. It will then become a theorem, a truth, forever and ever. For longer than any diamond.So, if you want to tell someone that you will love them forever you can give them a diamond. But if you want to tell them that you'll love them forever and ever, give them a theorem! (Laughter) But hang on a minute! You'll have to prove it, so your love doesn't remain a conjecture.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_saenz_de_cabezon_math_is_forever
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"It would be nice to be objective in life, in many ways. The problem is that we have these color-tinted glasses as we look at all kinds of situations. For example, think about something as simple as beer. If I gave you a few beers to taste and I asked you to rate them on intensity and bitterness, different beers would occupy different space. But what if we tried to be objective about it? In the case of beer, it would be very simple. What if we did a blind taste? Well, if we did the same thing, you tasted the same beer, now in the blind taste, things would look slightly different. Most of the beers will go into one place. You will basically not be able to distinguish them, and the exception, of course, will be Guinness. (Laughter)Similarly, we can think about physiology. What happens when people expect something from their physiology? For example, we sold people pain medications. Some people, we told them the medications were expensive. Some people, we told them it was cheap. And the expensive pain medication worked better. It relieved more pain from people, because expectations do change our physiology. And of course, we all know that in sports, if you are a fan of a particular team, you can't help but see the game develop from the perspective of your team.So all of those are cases in which our preconceived notions and our expectations color our world. But what happened in more important questions? What happened with questions that had to do with social justice? So we wanted to think about what is the blind tasting version for thinking about inequality? So we started looking at inequality, and we did some large-scale surveys around the U.S. and other countries. So we asked two questions: Do people know what kind of level of inequality we have? And then, what level of inequality do we want to have? So let's think about the first question. Imagine I took all the people in the U.S. and I sorted them from the poorest on the right to the richest on the left, and then I divided them into five buckets: the poorest 20 percent, the next 20 percent, the next, the next, and the richest 20 percent. And then I asked you to tell me how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets. So to make it simpler, imagine I ask you to tell me, how much wealth do you think is concentrated in the bottom two buckets, the bottom 40 percent? Take a second. Think about it and have a number. Usually we don't think. Think for a second, have a real number in your mind. You have it?Okay, here's what lots of Americans tell us. They think that the bottom 20 percent has about 2.9 percent of the wealth, the next group has 6.4, so together it's slightly more than nine. The next group, they say, has 12 percent, 20 percent, and the richest 20 percent, people think has 58 percent of the wealth. You can see how this relates to what you thought.Now, what's reality? Reality is slightly different. The bottom 20 percent has 0.1 percent of the wealth. The next 20 percent has 0.2 percent of the wealth. Together, it's 0.3. The next group has 3.9, 11.3, and the richest group has 84-85 percent of the wealth. So what we actually have and what we think we have are very different.What about what we want? How do we even figure this out? So to look at this, to look at what we really want, we thought about the philosopher John Rawls. If you remember John Rawls, he had this notion of what's a just society. He said a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you would be willing to enter it in a random place. And it's a beautiful definition, because if you're wealthy, you might want the wealthy to have more money, the poor to have less. If you're poor, you might want more equality. But if you're going to go into that society in every possible situation, and you don't know, you have to consider all the aspects. It's a little bit like blind tasting in which you don't know what the outcome will be when you make a decision, and Rawls called this the ""veil of ignorance.""So, we took another group, a large group of Americans, and we asked them the question in the veil of ignorance. What are the characteristics of a country that would make you want to join it, knowing that you could end randomly at any place? And here is what we got. What did people want to give to the first group, the bottom 20 percent? They wanted to give them about 10 percent of the wealth. The next group, 14 percent of the wealth, 21, 22 and 32.Now, nobody in our sample wanted full equality. Nobody thought that socialism is a fantastic idea in our sample. But what does it mean? It means that we have this knowledge gap between what we have and what we think we have, but we have at least as big a gap between what we think is right to what we think we have.Now, we can ask these questions, by the way, not just about wealth. We can ask it about other things as well. So for example, we asked people from different parts of the world about this question, people who are liberals and conservatives, and they gave us basically  the same answer. We asked rich and poor, they gave us the same answer, men and women, NPR listeners and Forbes readers. We asked people in England, Australia, the U.S. — very similar answers. We even asked different departments of a university. We went to Harvard and we checked almost every department, and in fact, from Harvard Business School, where a few people wanted the wealthy to have more and the [poor] to have less, the similarity was astonishing. I know some of you went to Harvard Business School.We also asked this question about something else. We asked, what about the ratio of CEO pay to unskilled workers? So you can see what people think is the ratio, and then we can ask the question, what do they think should be the ratio? And then we can ask, what is reality? What is reality? And you could say, well, it's not that bad, right? The red and the yellow are not that different. But the fact is, it's because I didn't draw them on the same scale. It's hard to see, there's yellow and blue in there.So what about other outcomes of wealth? Wealth is not just about wealth. We asked, what about things like health? What about availability of prescription medication? What about life expectancy? What about life expectancy of infants? How do we want this to be distributed? What about education for young people? And for older people? And across all of those things, what we learned was that people don't like inequality of wealth, but there's other things where inequality, which is an outcome of wealth, is even more aversive to them: for example, inequality in health or education. We also learned that people are particularly open to changes in equality when it comes to people who have less agency — basically, young kids and babies, because we don't think of them as responsible for their situation.So what are some lessons from this? We have two gaps: We have a knowledge gap and we have a desirability gap And the knowledge gap is something that we think about, how do we educate people? How do we get people to think differently about inequality and the consequences of inequality in terms of health, education, jealousy, crime rate, and so on?Then we have the desirability gap. How do we get people to think differently about what we really want? You see, the Rawls definition, the Rawls way of looking at the world, the blind tasting approach, takes our selfish motivation out of the picture. How do we implement that to a higher degree on a more extensive scale?And finally, we also have an action gap. How do we take these things and actually do something about it? I think part of the answer is to think about people like young kids and babies that don't have much agency, because people seem to be more willing to do this.To summarize, I would say, next time you go to drink beer or wine, first of all, think about, what is it in your experience that is real, and what is it in your experience that is a placebo effect coming from expectations? And then think about what it also means for other decisions in your life, and hopefully also for policy questions that affect all of us.Thanks a lot.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_how_equal_do_we_want_the_world_to_be_you_d_be_surprised
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"I'd like to take you on the epic quest of the Rosetta spacecraft. To escort and land the probe on a comet, this has been my passion for the past two years. In order to do that, I need to explain to you something about the origin of the solar system.When we go back four and a half billion years, there was a cloud of gas and dust. In the center of this cloud, our sun formed and ignited. Along with that, what we now know as planets, comets and asteroids formed. What then happened, according to theory, is that when the Earth had cooled down a bit after its formation, comets massively impacted the Earth and delivered water to Earth. They probably also delivered complex organic material to Earth, and that may have bootstrapped the emergence of life. You can compare this to having to solve a 250-piece puzzle and not a 2,000-piece puzzle.Afterwards, the big planets like Jupiter and Saturn, they were not in their place where they are now, and they interacted gravitationally, and they swept the whole interior of the solar system clean, and what we now know as comets ended up in something called the Kuiper Belt, which is a belt of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. And sometimes these objects run into each other, and they gravitationally deflect, and then the gravity of Jupiter pulls them back into the solar system. And they then become the comets as we see them in the sky.The important thing here to note is that in the meantime, the four and a half billion years, these comets have been sitting on the outside of the solar system, and haven't changed — deep, frozen versions of our solar system.In the sky, they look like this. We know them for their tails. There are actually two tails. One is a dust tail, which is blown away by the solar wind. The other one is an ion tail, which is charged particles, and they follow the magnetic field in the solar system. There's the coma, and then there is the nucleus, which here is too small to see, and you have to remember that in the case of Rosetta, the spacecraft is in that center pixel. We are only 20, 30, 40 kilometers away from the comet.So what's important to remember? Comets contain the original material from which our solar system was formed, so they're ideal to study the components that were present at the time  when Earth, and life, started. Comets are also suspected of having brought the elements which may have bootstrapped life. In 1983, ESA set up its long-term Horizon 2000 program, which contained one cornerstone, which would be a mission to a comet. In parallel, a small mission to a comet, what you see here, Giotto, was launched, and in 1986, flew by the comet of Halley with an armada of other spacecraft. From the results of that mission, it became immediately clear that comets were ideal bodies to study to understand our solar system. And thus, the Rosetta mission was approved in 1993, and originally it was supposed to be launched in 2003, but a problem arose with an Ariane rocket. However, our P.R. department, in its enthusiasm, had already made 1,000 Delft Blue plates with the name of the wrong comets. So I've never had to buy any china since. That's the positive part. (Laughter)Once the whole problem was solved, we left Earth in 2004 to the newly selected comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This comet had to be specially selected because A, you have to be able to get to it, and B, it shouldn't have been in the solar system too long. This particular comet has been  in the solar system since 1959. That's the first time when it was deflected by Jupiter, and it got close enough to the sun to start changing. So it's a very fresh comet.Rosetta made a few historic firsts. It's the first satellite to orbit a comet, and to escort it throughout its whole tour through the solar system — closest approach to the sun, as we will see in August, and then away again to the exterior. It's the first ever landing on a comet. We actually orbit the comet using something which is not normally done with spacecraft. Normally, you look at the sky and you know where you point and where you are. In this case, that's not enough. We navigated by looking at landmarks on the comet. We recognized features — boulders, craters — and that's how we know where we are respective to the comet.And, of course, it's the first satellite to go beyond the orbit of Jupiter on solar cells. Now, this sounds more heroic than it actually is, because the technology to use radio isotope thermal generators wasn't available in Europe at that time, so there was no choice. But these solar arrays are big. This is one wing, and these are not specially selected small people. They're just like you and me. (Laughter) We have two of these wings, 65 square meters. Now later on, of course, when we got to the comet, you find out that 65 square meters of sail close to a body which is outgassing is not always a very handy choice.Now, how did we get to the comet? Because we had to go there for the Rosetta scientific objectives very far away — four times the distance of the Earth to the sun — and also at a much higher velocity than we could achieve with fuel, because we'd have to take six times as much fuel as the whole spacecraft weighed. So what do you do? You use gravitational flybys, slingshots, where you pass by a planet at very low altitude, a few thousand kilometers, and then you get the velocity of that planet around the sun for free. We did that a few times. We did Earth, we did Mars, we did twice Earth again, and we also flew by two asteroids, Lutetia and Steins. Then in 2011, we got so far from the sun that if the spacecraft got into trouble, we couldn't actually save the spacecraft anymore, so we went into hibernation. Everything was switched off except for one clock. Here you see in white the trajectory, and the way this works. You see that from the circle where we started, the white line, actually you get more and more and more elliptical, and then finally we approached the comet in May 2014, and we had to start doing the rendezvous maneuvers.On the way there, we flew by Earth and we took a few pictures to test our cameras. This is the moon rising over Earth, and this is what we now call a selfie, which at that time, by the way, that word didn't exist. (Laughter) It's at Mars. It was taken by the CIVA camera. That's one of the cameras on the lander, and it just looks under the solar arrays, and you see the planet Mars and the solar array in the distance.Now, when we got out of hibernation in January 2014, we started arriving at a distance of two million kilometers from the comet in May. However, the velocity the spacecraft had was much too fast. We were going 2,800 kilometers an hour faster than the comet, so we had to brake. We had to do eight maneuvers, and you see here, some of them were really big. We had to brake the first one by a few hundred kilometers per hour, and actually, the duration of that was seven hours, and it used 218 kilos of fuel, and those were seven nerve-wracking  hours, because in 2007, there was a leak in the system of the propulsion of Rosetta, and we had to close off a branch, so the system was actually operating at a pressure which it was never designed or qualified for.Then we got in the vicinity of the comet, and these were the first pictures we saw. The true comet rotation period is 12 and a half hours, so this is accelerated, but you will understand that our flight dynamics engineers thought, this is not going to be an easy thing to land on. We had hoped for some kind of spud-like thing where you could easily land. But we had one hope: maybe it was smooth. No. That didn't work either. (Laughter)So at that point in time, it was clearly unavoidable: we had to map this body in all the detail you could get, because we had to find an area which is 500 meters in diameter and flat. Why 500 meters? That's the error we have on landing the probe. So we went through this process, and we mapped the comet. We used a technique called photoclinometry. You use shadows thrown by the sun. What you see here is a rock sitting on the surface of the comet, and the sun shines from above. From the shadow, we, with our brain, can immediately determine roughly what the shape of that rock is. You can program that in a computer, you then cover the whole comet, and you can map the comet. For that, we flew special trajectories starting in August. First, a triangle of 100 kilometers on a side at 100 kilometers' distance, and we repeated the whole  thing at 50 kilometers. At that time, we had seen the comet at all kinds of angles, and we could use this technique to map the whole thing.Now, this led to a selection of landing sites. This whole process we had to do, to go from the mapping of the comet to actually finding the final landing site, was 60 days. We didn't have more. To give you an idea, the average Mars mission takes hundreds of scientists for years to meet about where shall we go? We had 60 days, and that was it.We finally selected the final landing site and the commands were prepared for Rosetta to launch Philae. The way this works is that Rosetta has to be at the right point in space, and aiming towards the comet, because the lander is passive. The lander is then pushed out and moves towards the comet. Rosetta had to turn around to get its cameras to actually look at Philae while it was departing and to be able to communicate with it.Now, the landing duration of the whole trajectory was seven hours. Now do a simple calculation: if the velocity of Rosetta is off by one centimeter per second, seven hours is 25,000 seconds. That means 252 meters wrong on the comet. So we had to know the velocity of Rosetta much better than one centimeter per second, and its location in space better than 100 meters at 500 million kilometers from Earth. That's no mean feat.Let me quickly take you through some of the science and the instruments. I won't bore you with all the details of all the instruments, but it's got everything. We can sniff gas, we can measure dust particles, the shape of them, the composition, there are magnetometers, everything. This is one of the results from an instrument which measures gas density at the position of Rosetta, so it's gas which has left the comet. The bottom graph is September of last year. There is a long-term variation, which in itself is not surprising, but you see the sharp peaks. This is a comet day. You can see the effect of the sun on the evaporation of gas and the fact that the comet is rotating. So there is one spot, apparently, where there is a lot of stuff coming from, it gets heated in the Sun, and then cools down on the back side. And we can see the density variations of this.These are the gases and the organic compounds that we already have measured. You will see it's an impressive list, and there is much, much, much more to come, because there are more measurements. Actually, there is a conference going on in Houston at the moment where many of these results are presented.Also, we measured dust particles. Now, for you, this will not look very impressive, but the scientists were thrilled when they saw this. Two dust particles: the right one they call Boris, and they shot it with tantalum in order to be able to analyze it. Now, we found sodium and magnesium. What this tells you is this is the concentration of these two materials at the time the solar system was formed, so we learned things about which materials were there when the planet was made.Of course, one of the important elements is the imaging. This is one of the cameras of Rosetta, the OSIRIS camera, and this actually was the cover of Science magazine on January 23 of this year. Nobody had expected this body to look like this. Boulders, rocks — if anything, it looks more like the Half Dome in Yosemite than anything else. We also saw things like this: dunes, and what look to be, on the righthand side, wind-blown shadows. Now we know these from Mars, but this comet doesn't have an atmosphere, so it's a bit difficult to create a wind-blown shadow. It may be local outgassing, stuff which goes up and comes back. We don't know, so there is a lot to investigate. Here, you see the same image twice. On the left-hand side, you see in the middle a pit. On the right-hand side, if you carefully look, there are three jets coming out of the bottom of that pit. So this is the activity of the comet. Apparently, at the bottom of these pits is where the active regions are, and where the material evaporates into space. There is a very intriguing crack in the neck of the comet. You see it on the right-hand side. It's a kilometer long, and it's two and a half meters wide. Some people suggest that actually, when we get close to the sun, the comet may split in two, and then we'll have to choose, which comet do we go for? The lander — again, lots of instruments, mostly comparable except for the things which hammer in the ground and drill, etc. But much the same as Rosetta, and that is because you want to compare what you find in space with what you find on the comet. These are called ground truth measurements.These are the landing descent images that were taken by the OSIRIS camera. You see the lander getting further and further away from Rosetta. On the top right, you see an image taken at 60 meters by the lander, 60 meters above the surface of the comet. The boulder there is some 10 meters. So this is one of the last images we took before we landed on the comet. Here, you see the whole sequence again, but from a different perspective, and you see three blown-ups from the bottom-left to the middle of the lander traveling over the surface of the comet. Then, at the top, there is a before and an after image of the landing. The only problem with the after image is, there is no lander. But if you carefully look at the right-hand side of this image, we saw the lander still there,  but it had bounced. It had departed again.Now, on a bit of a comical note here is that originally Rosetta was designed to have a lander which would bounce. That was discarded because it was way too expensive. Now, we forgot, but the lander knew. (Laughter) During the first bounce, in the magnetometers, you see here the data from them, from the three axes, x, y and z. Halfway through, you see a red line. At that red line, there is a change. What happened, apparently, is during the first bounce, somewhere, we hit the edge of a crater with one of the legs of the lander, and the rotation velocity of the lander changed. So we've been rather lucky that we are where we are.This is one of the iconic images of Rosetta. It's a man-made object, a leg of the lander, standing on a comet. This, for me, is one of the very best images of space science I have ever seen.(Applause)One of the things we still have to do is to actually find the lander. The blue area here is where we know it must be. We haven't been able to find it yet, but the search is continuing, as are our efforts to start getting the lander to work again. We listen every day, and we hope that between now and somewhere in April, the lander will wake up again.The findings of what we found on the comet: This thing would float in water. It's half the density of water. So it looks like a very big rock, but it's not. The activity increase we saw in June, July, August last year was a four-fold activity increase. By the time we will be at the sun, there will be 100 kilos a second leaving this comet: gas, dust, whatever. That's 100 million kilos a day.Then, finally, the landing day. I will never forget — absolute madness, 250 TV crews in Germany. The BBC was interviewing me, and another TV crew who was following me all day were filming me being interviewed, and it went on like that for the whole day. The Discovery Channel crew actually caught me when leaving the control room, and they asked the right question, and man, I got into tears, and I still feel this. For a month and a half, I couldn't think about landing day without crying, and I still have the emotion in me.With this image of the comet, I would like to leave you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fred_jansen_how_to_land_on_a_comet
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"I am a Hazara, and the homeland of my people is Afghanistan. Like hundreds of thousands of other Hazara kids, I was born in exile. The ongoing persecution and operation against the Hazaras forced my parents to leave Afghanistan.This persecution has had a long history going back to the late 1800s, and the rule of King Abdur Rahman. He killed 63 percent of  the Hazara population. He built minarets with their heads. Many Hazaras were sold into slavery, and many others fled the country for neighboring Iran and Pakistan. My parents also fled to Pakistan, and settled in Quetta, where I was born.After the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, I got a chance to go to Afghanistan for the first time, with foreign journalists. I was only 18, and I got a job working as an interpreter. After four years, I felt it was safe enough to move to Afghanistan permanently, and I was working there as a documentary photographer, and I worked on many stories.One of the most important stories that I did was the dancing boys of Afghanistan. It is a tragic story about an appalling tradition. It involves young kids dancing for warlords and powerful men in the society. These boys are often abducted or bought from their poor parents, and they are put to work as sex slaves. This is Shukur. He was kidnapped from Kabul by a warlord. He was taken to another province, where he was forced to work as a sex slave for the warlord and his friends.When this story was published in the Washington Post, I started receiving death threats, and I was forced to leave Afghanistan, as my parents were. Along with my family, I returned back to Quetta. The situation in Quetta had changed dramatically since I left in 2005. Once a peaceful haven for the Hazaras, it had now turned into the most dangerous city in Pakistan. Hazaras are confined into two small areas, and they are marginalized socially, educationally, and financially. This is Nadir. I had known him since my childhood. He was injured when his van was ambushed by terrorists in Quetta. He later died of his injuries. Around 1,600 Hazara members had been killed in various attacks, and around 3,000 of them were injured, and many of them permanently disabled. The attacks on the Hazara community would only get worse, so it was not surprising that many wanted to flee.After Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Australia is home to the fourth largest population of Hazaras in the world. When it came time to leave Pakistan, Australia seemed the obvious choice. Financially, only one of us could leave, and it was decided that I would go, in the hope that if I arrived at my destination safely, I could work to get the rest of my family to join me later.We all knew about the risks, and how terrifying the journey is, and I met many people who lost loved ones at sea. It was a desperate decision to take, to leave everything behind, and no one makes this decision easily. If I had been able to simply fly to Australia, it would have taken me less than 24 hours. But getting a visa was impossible. My journey was much longer, much more complicated, and certainly more dangerous, traveling to Thailand by air, and then by road and boat to Malaysia and into Indonesia, paying people and smugglers all the way and spending a lot of time hiding and a lot of time in fear of being caught.In Indonesia, I joined a group of seven asylum seekers. We all shared a bedroom in a town outside of Jakarta called Bogor. After spending a week in Bogor, three of my roommates left for the perilous journey, and we got the news two days later that a distressed boat sank in the sea en route to Christmas Island. We found out that our three roommates — Nawroz, Jaffar and Shabbir — were also among those. Only Jaffar was rescued. Shabbir and Nawroz were never seen again. It made me think, am I doing the right thing? I concluded I really had no other choice but to go on.A few weeks later, we got the call from the people smuggler to alert us that the boat is ready for us to commence our sea journey. Taken in the night towards the main vessel on a motorboat, we boarded an old fishing boat that was already overloaded. There were 93 of us, and we were all below deck. No one was allowed up on the top. We all paid 6,000 dollars each for this part of the trip. The first night and day went smoothly, but by the second night,  the weather turned.Waves tossed the boat around, and the timbers groaned. People below deck were crying, praying, recalling their loved ones. They were screaming. It was a terrible moment. It was like a scene from doomsday, or maybe like one of those scenes from those Hollywood movies that shows that everything is breaking apart and the world is just ending. It was happening to us for real. We didn't have any hope. Our boat was floating like a matchbox on the water without any control. The waves were much higher than our boat, and the water poured in faster than the motor pumps could take it out. We all lost hope. We thought, this is the end. We were watching our deaths, and I was documenting it.The captain told us that we are not going to make it, we have to turn back the boat. We went on the deck and turned our torches on and off to attract the attention of any passing boat. We kept trying to attract their attention by waving our life jackets and whistling.Eventually, we made it to a small island. Our boat crashing onto the rocks, I slipped into the water and destroyed my camera, whatever I had documented. But luckily, the memory card survived.It was a thick forest. We all split up into many groups as we argued over what to do next. We were all scared and confused. Then, after spending the night on the beach, we found a jetty and coconuts. We hailed a boat from a nearby resort, and then were quickly handed over to Indonesian water police.At Serang Detention Center, an immigration officer came and furtively strip-searched us. He took our mobile, my $300 cash, our shoes that we should not be able to escape, but we kept watching the guards, checking their movements, and around 4 a.m. when they sat around a fire, we removed two glass layers from an outside facing window and slipped through. We climbed a tree next to an outer wall that was topped with the shards of glass. We put the pillow on that and wrapped our forearms with bedsheets and climbed the wall, and we ran away with bare feet.I was free, with an uncertain future, no money. The only thing I had was the memory card with the pictures and footage. When my documentary was aired on SBS Dateline, many of my friends came to know about my situation, and they tried to help me. They did not allow me to take any other boat to risk my life. I also decided to stay in Indonesia and process my case through UNHCR, but I was really afraid that I would end up in Indonesia for many years doing nothing and unable to work, like every other asylum seeker.But it had happened to be a little bit different with me. I was lucky. My contacts worked to expedite my case through UNHCR, and I got resettled in Australia in May 2013.Not every asylum seeker is lucky like me. It is really difficult to live a life with an uncertain fate, in limbo.The issue of asylum seekers in Australia has been so extremely politicized that it has lost its human face. The asylum seekers have been demonized and then presented to the people. I hope my story and the story of other Hazaras could shed some light to show the people how these people are suffering in their countries of origin, and how they suffer, why they risk their lives to seek asylum.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/barat_ali_batoor_my_desperate_journey_with_a_human_smuggler
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"Today, I am going to talk about anger. When I was 11, seeing some of my friends  leaving the school because their parents  could not afford textbooks made me angry. When I was 27, hearing the plight of a desperate slave father whose daughter was  about to be sold to a brothel made me angry. At the age of 50, lying on the street, in a pool of blood, along with my own son, made me angry.Dear friends, for centuries we were taught anger is bad. Our parents, teachers, priests — everyone taught us how to control  and suppress our anger. But I ask why? Why can't we convert our anger for the larger good of society? Why can't we use our anger to challenge and change the evils of the world? That I tried to do.Friends, most of the brightest ideas came to my mind out of anger. Like when I was 35 and sat  in a locked-up, tiny prison. The whole night, I was angry. But it has given birth to a new idea. But I will come to that later on. Let me begin with the story of how I got a name for myself.I had been a big admirer  of Mahatma Gandhi since my childhood. Gandhi fought and lead  India's freedom movement. But more importantly, he taught us how to treat  the most vulnerable sections, the most deprived people,  with dignity and respect. And so, when India was celebrating Mahatma Gandhi's  birth centenary in 1969 — at that time I was 15 — an idea came to my mind. Why can't we celebrate it differently? I knew, as perhaps many of you might know, that in India, a large number of people are born in the lowest segment of caste. And they are treated as untouchables. These are the people — forget about allowing them  to go to the temples, they cannot even go into the houses  and shops of high-caste people.So I was very impressed with  the leaders of my town who were speaking very highly against the caste system and untouchability and talking of Gandhian ideals. So inspired by that, I thought, let us set an example by inviting these people to eat food cooked and served by the untouchable community. I went to some low-caste, so-called untouchable, people, tried to convince them, but it was unthinkable for them. They told me, ""No, no. It's not possible. It never happened."" I said, ""Look at these leaders, they are so great,  they are against untouchability. They will come. If nobody comes,  we can set an example."" These people thought that I was too naive. Finally, they were convinced.My friends and I took our bicycles and invited political leaders. And I was so thrilled, rather, empowered to see that each one of them  agreed to come. I thought, ""Great idea. We can set an example. We can bring about change in the society.""The day has come. All these untouchables, three women and two men, they agreed to come. I could recall that they had used  the best of their clothes. They brought new utensils. They had taken baths  hundreds of times because it was unthinkable for them to do. It was the moment of change. They gathered. Food was cooked. It was 7 o'clock. By 8 o'clock, we kept on waiting, because it's not very uncommon  that the leaders become late, for an hour or so.So after 8 o'clock, we took our bicycles and went to these leaders' homes, just to remind them. One of the leader's wives told me, ""Sorry, he is having some headache, perhaps he cannot come."" I went to another leader and his wife told me,  ""Okay, you go, he will definitely join."" So I thought that the dinner will take place, though not at that large a scale.I went back to the venue, which was a newly built Mahatma Gandhi Park. It was 10 o'clock. None of the leaders showed up. That made me angry. I was standing, leaning against Mahatma Gandhi's statue. I was emotionally drained, rather exhausted. Then I sat down where  the food was lying. I kept my emotions on hold. But then, when I took the first bite, I broke down in tears. And suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. And it was the healing, motherly touch  of an untouchable woman. And she told me, ""Kailash, why are you crying? You have done your bit. You have eaten the food cooked by untouchables, which has never happened in our memory."" She said, ""You won today."" And my friends, she was right.I came back home, a little after midnight, shocked to see that several  high-caste elderly people were sitting in my courtyard. I saw my mother and  elderly women were crying and they were pleading  to these elderly people because they had threatened  to outcaste my whole family. And you know, outcasting the family is the biggest social punishment one can think of. Somehow they agreed to punish only me, and the punishment was purification. That means I had to go 600 miles away from my hometown to the River Ganges to take a holy dip. And after that, I should organize a feast for priests, 101 priests, wash their feet and drink that water.It was total nonsense, and I refused to accept that punishment. How did they punish me? I was barred from entering into my own  kitchen and my own dining room, my utensils were separated. But the night when I was angry, they wanted to outcaste me. But I decided to outcaste  the entire caste system. (Applause)And that was possible because the beginning would have been to change the family name, or surname, because in India, most of the family names are caste names. So I decided to drop my name. And then, later on, I gave  a new name to myself: Satyarthi, that means, ""seeker of truth."" (Applause) And that was the beginning  of my transformative anger.Friends, maybe one of you can tell me, what was I doing before becoming a children's rights activist? Does anybody know? No. I was an engineer, an electrical engineer. And then I learned how the energy of burning fire, coal, the nuclear blast inside the chambers, raging river currents, fierce winds, could be converted into the light  and lives of millions. I also learned how the most uncontrollable form of energy could be harnessed for good  and making society better.So I'll come back to the story of when I was caught in the prison: I was very happy freeing  a dozen children from slavery, handing them over to their parents. I cannot explain my joy  when I free a child. I was so happy. But when I was waiting for my train to come back to my hometown, Delhi, I saw that dozens of children  were arriving; they were being trafficked by someone. I stopped them, those people. I complained to the police. So the policemen, instead of helping me, they threw me in this small,  tiny shell, like an animal. And that was the night of anger when one of the brightest  and biggest ideas was born. I thought that if I keep on freeing 10  children, and 50 more will join, that's not done. And I believed in the power of consumers, and let me tell you that this was the first time when a campaign was launched by me or anywhere in the world, to educate and sensitize the consumers to create a demand for child-labor-free rugs. In Europe and America,  we have been successful. And it has resulted  in a fall in child labor in South Asian countries by 80 percent. (Applause)Not only that, but this first-ever  consumer's power, or consumer's campaign has grown in other countries and other industries, maybe chocolate, maybe apparel,  maybe shoes — it has gone beyond. My anger at the age of 11, when I realized how important education is for every child, I got an idea to collect used books and help the poorest children. I created a book bank at the age of 11. But I did not stop. Later on, I cofounded the world's single largest civil society campaign for education that is the Global Campaign for Education. That has helped in changing  the whole thinking towards education from the charity mode to the human rights mode, and that has concretely helped  the reduction of out-of-school children by half in the last 15 years. (Applause)My anger at the age of 27, to free that girl who was about to be sold to a brothel, has given me an idea to go for a new strategy of raid and rescue, freeing children from slavery. And I am so lucky and proud to say that it is not one or 10 or 20, but my colleagues and I have been able to physically liberate 83,000 child slaves and hand them over back to their families and mothers. (Applause)I knew that we needed global policies. We organized the worldwide marches against child labor and that has also resulted in  a new international convention to protect the children who are in the worst forms. And the concrete result was that the number of child laborers globally has gone down by one third  in the last 15 years. (Applause)So, in each case, it began from anger, turned into an idea, and action. So anger, what next? Idea, and — Audience: Action Kailash Satyarthi: Anger, idea, action. Which I tried to do.Anger is a power, anger is an energy, and the law of nature is that energy can never be created and never  be vanished, can never be destroyed. So why can't the energy of anger be translated and harnessed to create a better and beautiful world, a more just and equitable world?Anger is within each one of you, and I will share a secret for a few seconds: that if we are confined in  the narrow shells of egos, and the circles of selfishness, then the anger will turn out to be hatred, violence, revenge, destruction. But if we are able to break the circles, then the same anger could turn  into a great power. We can break the circles  by using our inherent compassion and connect with the world through  compassion to make this world better. That same anger could be transformed into it.So dear friends, sisters and brothers, again, as a Nobel Laureate, I am urging you to become angry. I am urging you to become angry. And the angriest among us is the one who can transform his anger  into idea and action.Thank you so much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: For many years,  you've been an inspiration to others. Who or what inspires you and why?KS: Good question. Chris, let me tell you,  and that is the truth, each time when I free a child, the child who has lost all his hope that he will ever come back to his mother, the first smile of freedom, and the mother who has lost all hope that the son or daughter  can ever come back and sit in her lap, they become so emotional and the first tear of joy  rolls down on her cheek, I see the glimpse of God in it — this is my biggest inspiration. And I am so lucky that not once, as I said before, but thousands of times, I have been able to witness my God in the faces of those children and they are my biggest inspirations. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kailash_satyarthi_how_to_make_peace_get_angry
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"This is a kindergarten we designed in 2007. We made this kindergarten  to be a circle. It's a kind of endless circulation on top of the roof. If you are a parent, you know that kids love to keep making circles. This is how the rooftop looks.And why did we design this? The principal of this kindergarten said, ""No, I don't want a handrail."" I said, ""It's impossible."" But he insisted: ""How about having a net sticking out from the edge of the roof? So that it can catch the children falling off?"" (Laughter) I said, ""It's impossible.""And of course, the government official said, ""Of course you have to have a handrail."" But we could keep  that idea around the trees. There are three trees popping through. And we were allowed to call  this rope as a handrail. But of course, rope has nothing to do with them. They fall into the net. And you get more, and more, more. (Laughter) Sometimes 40 children  are around a tree. The boy on the branch, he loves the tree so he is eating the tree. (Laughter)And at the time of an event, they sit on the edge. It looks so nice from underneath. Monkeys in the zoo. (Laughter) Feeding time. (Laughter)  (Applause)And we made the roof as low as possible, because we wanted to see children on top of the roof, not only underneath the roof. And if the roof is too high, you see only the ceiling.And the leg washing place — there are many kinds of water taps. You see with the flexible tubes, you want to spray water to your friends, and the shower, and the one in front is quite normal. But if you look at this, the boy is not washing his boots, he's putting water into his boots. (Laughter)This kindergarten is completely open, most of the year. And there is no boundary between inside and outside. So it means basically this architecture is a roof. And also there is no boundary between classrooms. So there is no acoustic barrier at all. When you put many children in a quiet box, some of them get really nervous. But in this kindergarten, there is no reason they get nervous. Because there is no boundary.And the principal says if the boy in the corner doesn't want to stay in the room, we let him go. He will come back eventually, because it's a circle, it comes back. (Laughter)But the point is, in that kind of occasion, usually children try to hide somewhere. But here, just they leave and come back. It's a natural process.And secondly, we consider noise very important. You know that children sleep better in noise. They don't sleep in a quiet space. And in this kindergarten, these children show amazing concentration in class. And you know, our kind grew up in the jungle with noise. They need noise. And you know, you can talk to your friends in a noisy bar. You are not supposed to be in silence.And you know, these days we are trying to make everything under control. You know, it's completely open. And you should know that we can go skiing in -20 degrees in winter. In summer you go swimming. The sand is 50 degrees. And also, you should know that you are waterproof. You never melt in rain. So, children are supposed to be outside. So that is how we should treat them.This is how they divide classrooms. They are supposed to help teachers. They don't. (Laughter) I didn't put him in. A classroom. And a washbasin. They talk to each other around the well. And there are always  some trees in the classroom. A monkey trying to fish another monkey from above. (Laughter) Monkeys. (Laughter) And each classroom has at least one skylight. And this is where Santa Claus comes down at the time of Christmas.This is the annex building, right next to that oval-shaped kindergarten. The building is only five meters tall with seven floors. And of course, the ceiling height is very low. So you have to consider safety. So, we put our children, a daughter and a son. They tried to go in. He hit his head. He's okay. His skull is quite strong. He is resilient. It's my son. (Laughter) And he is trying to see if it is safe to jump off. And then we put other children.The traffic jam is awful in Tokyo, as you know. (Laughter) The driver in front, she needs to learn how to drive. Now these days, kids need a small dosage of danger. And in this kind of occasion, they learn to help each other. This is society. This is the kind of opportunity we are losing these days.Now, this drawing is showing the movement of a boy between 9:10 and 9:30. And the circumference of this building is 183 meters. So it's not exactly small at all. And this boy did 6,000 meters in the morning. But the surprise is yet to come. The children in this kindergarten do 4,000 meters on average. And these children have the highest athletic abilities among many kindergartens. The principal says, ""I don't train them. We leave them on top of the roof. Just like sheep."" (Laughter) They keep running. (Laughter)My point is don't control them, don't protect them too much, and they need to tumble sometimes. They need to get some injury. And that makes them learn how to live in this world. I think architecture is capable of changing this world, and people's lives. And this is one of the attempts to change the lives of children.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/takaharu_tezuka_the_best_kindergarten_you_ve_ever_seen
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"This is a story about capitalism. It's a system I love because of the successes and opportunities it's afforded me and millions of others.I started in my 20s trading commodities, cotton in particular, in the pits, and if there was ever a free market free-for-all, this was it, where men wearing ties  but acting like gladiators fought literally  and physically for a profit.Fortunately, I was good enough that by the time I was 30, I was able to move into the upstairs  world of money management, where I spent the next three decades as a global macro trader. And over that time, I've seen a lot of crazy things in the markets, and I've traded a lot of crazy manias. And unfortunately, I'm sad to report that right now  we might be in the grips of one of the most disastrous, certainly of my career, and one consistent takeaway is manias never end well.Now, over the past 50 years, we as a society have come to view our companies and corporations in a very narrow, almost monomaniacal fashion with regard to how we value them, and we have put so much emphasis on profits, on short-term quarterly earnings and share prices, at the exclusion of all else. It's like we've ripped the humanity out of our companies. Now, we don't do that — conveniently reduce something to a set of numbers that you can play with like Lego toys — we don't do that in our individual life. We don't treat somebody or value them based on their monthly income  or their credit score, but we have this double standard when it comes to the way that we value our businesses, and you know what? It's threatening the very underpinnings of our society. And here's how you'll see.This chart is corporate profit margins going back 40 years as a percentage of revenues, and you can see that we're at a 40-year high of 12.5 percent. Now, hooray if you're a shareholder, but if you're the other side of that, and you're the average American worker, then you can see it's not such a good thing. [""U.S. Share of Income Going to Labor vs. CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio""]Now, higher profit margins do not increase societal wealth. What they actually do is they exacerbate income inequality, and that's not a good thing. But intuitively, that makes sense, right? Because if the top 10 percent of American families own 90 percent of the stocks, as they take a greater share of corporate profits, then there's less wealth left for the rest of society.Again, income inequality is not a good thing. This next chart, made by The Equality Trust, shows 21 countries from Austria to Japan to New Zealand. On the horizontal axis is income inequality. The further to the right you go, the greater the income inequality. On the vertical axis are nine social and health metrics. The more you go up that, the worse the problems are, and those metrics include life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, literacy, social mobility, just to name a few. Now, those of you in the audience who are Americans may wonder, well, where does the United States rank? Where does it lie on that chart? And guess what? We're literally off the chart. Yes, that's us, with the greatest income inequality and the greatest social problems, according to those metrics.Now, here's a macro forecast that's easy to make, and that's, that gap between the wealthiest and the poorest, it will get closed. History always does it. It typically happens in one of three ways: either through revolution, higher taxes, or wars. None of those are on my bucket list. (Laughter)Now, there's another way to do it, and that's by increasing justness in corporate behavior, but the way that we're operating right now, that would require a tremendous change in behavior, and like an addict trying to kick a habit, the first step is to acknowledge that you have a problem. And let me just say, this profits mania that we're on is so deeply entrenched that we don't even realize how we're harming society. Here's a small but startling example of exactly how we're doing that: this chart shows corporate giving as a percentage of profits,  not revenues, over the last 30 years. Juxtapose that to the earlier chart of corporate profit margins, and I ask you, does that feel right?In all fairness, when I started writing this, I thought, ""Oh wow, what does my company, what does Tudor do?"" And I realized we give one percent of corporate profits to charity every year. And I'm supposed to be a philanthropist. When I realized that, I literally wanted to throw up. But the point is, this mania is so deeply entrenched that well-intentioned people like myself don't even realize that we're part of it.Now, we're not going to change corporate behavior by simply increasing corporate philanthropy or charitable contributions. And oh, by the way, we've since quadrupled that, but — (Applause) — Please. But we can do it by driving more just behavior. And one way to do it is actually trusting the system that got us here in the first place, and that's the free market system. About a year ago, some friends of mine and I started a not-for-profit called Just Capital. Its mission is very simple: to help companies and corporations learn how to operate in a more just fashion by using the public's input to define exactly what the criteria are for just corporate behavior. Now, right now, there's no widely accepted standard that a company or corporation can follow, and that's where Just Capital comes in, because beginning this year and every year we'll be conducting a nationwide survey of a representative sample of 20,000 Americans to find out exactly what they think are the criteria for justness in corporate behavior. Now, this is a model that's going to start in the United States but can be expanded anywhere around the globe, and maybe we'll find out that the most important thing for the public is that we create living wage jobs, or make healthy products, or help, not harm, the environment. At Just Capital, we don't know, and it's not for us to decide. We're but messengers, but we have 100 percent confidence  and faith in the American public to get it right. So we'll release the findings this September for the first time, and then next year, we'll poll again, and we'll take the additive step this time of ranking the 1,000 largest U.S. companies from number one to number 1,000 and everything in between. We're calling it the Just Index, and remember, we're an independent not-for-profit with no bias, and we will be giving the American public a voice. And maybe over time, we'll find out that as people come to know which companies are the most just, human and economic resources will be driven towards them, and they'll become the most prosperous and help our country be the most prosperous.Now, capitalism has been responsible for every major innovation that's made this world a more inspiring and wonderful place to live in. Capitalism has to be based on justice. It has to be, and now more than ever, with economic divisions growing wider every day. It's estimated that 47 percent of American workers can be displaced in the next 20 years. I'm not against progress. I want the driverless car and the jet pack just like everyone else. But I'm pleading for recognition that with increased wealth and profits has to come greater corporate social responsibility.""If justice is removed,"" said Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, ""the great, the immense fabric of human society must in a moment crumble into atoms.""Now, when I was young, and there was a problem, my mama used to always sigh and shake her head and say, ""Have mercy, have mercy."" Now's not the time for us, for the rest of us to show them mercy. The time is now for us to show them fairness, and we can do that, you and I, by starting where we work, in the businesses that we operate in. And when we put justness on par with profits, we'll get the most wonderful thing in all the world. We'll take back our humanity.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_tudor_jones_ii_why_we_need_to_rethink_capitalism
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"Well, you know, sometimes the most important things come in the smallest packages. I am going to try to convince you, in the 15 minutes I have, that microbes have a lot to say about questions such as, ""Are we alone?"" and they can tell us more about not only life in our solar system but also maybe beyond, and this is why I am tracking them down in the most impossible places on Earth, in extreme environments where conditions are really pushing them to the brink of survival. Actually, sometimes me too, when I'm trying to follow them too close. But here's the thing: We are the only advanced civilization in the solar system, but that doesn't mean that there is no microbial life nearby. In fact, the planets and moons you see here could host life — all of them — and we know that, and it's a strong possibility. And if we were going to find life on those moons and planets, then we would answer questions such as, are we alone in the solar system? Where are we coming from? Do we have family in the neighborhood? Is there life beyond our solar system?And we can ask all those questions because there has been a revolution in our understanding of what a habitable planet is, and today, a habitable planet is a planet that has a zone where water can stay stable, but to me this is a horizontal definition of habitability, because it involves a distance to a star, but there is another dimension to habitability, and this is a vertical dimension. Think of it as conditions in the subsurface of a planet where you are very far away from a sun, but you still have water, energy, nutrients, which for some of them means food, and a protection. And when you look at the Earth, very far away from any sunlight, deep in the ocean, you have life thriving and it uses only chemistry for life processes.So when you think of it  at that point, all walls collapse. You have no limitations, basically. And if you have been looking at the headlines lately, then you will see that we have discovered a subsurface ocean on Europa, on Ganymede, on Enceladus, on Titan, and now we are finding a geyser and hot springs on Enceladus, Our solar system is turning into a giant spa. For anybody who has gone to a spa knows how much microbes like that, right? (Laughter)So at that point, think also about Mars. There is no life possible at the surface of Mars today, but it might still be hiding underground.So, we have been making progress in our understanding of habitability, but we also have been making progress in our understanding of what the signatures of life are on Earth. And you can have what we call organic molecules, and these are the bricks of life, and you can have fossils, and you can minerals, biominerals, which is due to the reaction between bacteria and rocks, and of course you can have gases in the atmosphere. And when you look at those tiny green algae on the right of the slide here, they are the direct descendants of those who have been pumping oxygen a billion years ago in the atmosphere of the Earth. When they did that, they poisoned 90 percent of the life at the surface of the Earth, but they are the reason why you are breathing this air today.But as much as our understanding grows of all of these things, there is one question we still cannot answer, and this is, where are we coming from? And you know, it's getting worse, because we won't be able to find the physical evidence of where we are coming from on this planet, and the reason being is that anything that is older than four billion years is gone. All record is gone, erased by plate tectonics and erosion. This is what I call the Earth's biological horizon. Beyond this horizon we don't know where we are coming from.So is everything lost? Well, maybe not. And we might be able to find evidence of our own origin in the most unlikely place, and this place in Mars.How is this possible? Well clearly at the beginning of the solar system, Mars and the Earth were bombarded by giant asteroids and comets, and there were ejecta from these impacts all over the place. Earth and Mars kept throwing rocks at each other for a very long time. Pieces of rocks landed on the Earth. Pieces of the Earth landed on Mars. So clearly, those two planets may have been seeded by the same material. So yeah, maybe Granddady is sitting there on the surface and waiting for us. But that also means that we can go to Mars and try to find traces of our own origin. Mars may hold that secret for us. This is why Mars is so special to us.But for that to happen, Mars needed to be habitable at the time when conditions were right. So was Mars habitable? We have a number of missions telling us exactly the same thing today. At the time when life appeared on the Earth, Mars did have an ocean, it had volcanoes, it had lakes, and it had deltas like the beautiful picture you see here. This picture was sent by the Curiosity  rover only a few weeks ago. It shows the remnants of a delta, and this picture tells us something: water was abundant and stayed founting at the surface for a very long time. This is good news for life. Life chemistry takes a long time to actually happen.So this is extremely good news, but does that mean that if we go there, life will be easy to find on Mars? Not necessarily.Here's what happened: At the time when life exploded at the surface of the Earth, then everything went south for Mars, literally. The atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds, Mars lost its magnetosphere, and then cosmic rays and U.V. bombarded the surface and water escaped to space and went underground. So if we want to be able to understand, if we want to be able to find those traces of the signatures of life at the surface of Mars, if they are there, we need to understand what was the impact of each of these events on the preservation of its record. Only then will we be able to know where those signatures are hiding, and only then will we be able to send our rover to the right places where we can sample those rocks that may be telling us something really important about who we are, or, if not, maybe telling us that somewhere, independently, life has appeared on another planet.So to do that, it's easy. You only need to go back 3.5 billion years ago in the past of a planet. We just need a time machine.Easy, right? Well, actually, it is. Look around you — that's planet Earth. This is our time machine. Geologists are using it to go back in the past of our own planet. I am using it a little bit differently. I use planet Earth to go in very extreme environments where conditions were similar to those of Mars at the time when the climate changed, and there I'm trying  to understand what happened. What are the signatures of life? What is left? How are we going to find it? So for one moment now I'm going to take you with me on a trip into that time machine.And now, what you see here, we are at 4,500 meters in the Andes, but in fact we are less than a billion years after the Earth and Mars formed. The Earth and Mars will have looked pretty much exactly like that — volcanoes everywhere, evaporating lakes everywhere, minerals, hot springs, and then you see those mounds on the shore of those lakes? Those are built by the descendants of the first organisms that gave us the first fossil on Earth.But if we want to understand what's  going on, we need to go a little further. And the other thing about those sites is that exactly like on Mars three and a half billion years ago, the climate is changing very fast, and water and ice are disappearing. But we need to go back to that time when everything changed on Mars, and to do that, we need to go higher. Why is that? Because when you go higher, the atmosphere is getting thinner, it's getting more unstable, the temperature is getting cooler, and you have a lot more U.V. radiation. Basically, you are getting to those conditions on Mars when everything changed.So I was not promising anything about a leisurely trip on the time machine. You are not going to be sitting in that time machine. You have to haul 1,000 pounds of equipment to the summit of this 20,000-foot volcano in the Andes here. That's about 6,000 meters. And you also have to sleep on 42-degree slopes and really hope that there won't be any earthquake that night. But when we get to the summit, we actually find the lake we came for. At this altitude, this lake is experiencing exactly the same conditions as those on Mars three and a half billion years ago. And now we have to change our voyage into an inner voyage inside that lake, and to do that, we have to remove our mountain gear and actually don suits and go for it. But at the time we enter that lake, at the very moment we enter that lake, we are stepping back three and a half billion years in the past of another planet, and then we are going to get the answer came for. Life is everywhere, absolutely everywhere. Everything you see in this picture is a living organism. Maybe not so the diver, but everything else. But this picture is very deceiving. Life is abundant in those lakes, but like in many places on Earth  right now and due to climate change, there is a huge loss in biodiversity. In the samples that we took back home, 36 percent of the bacteria in those lakes were composed of three species, and those three species are the ones that have survived so far.Here's another lake, right next to the first one. The red color you see here is not due to minerals. It's actually due to the presence of a tiny algae. In this region, the U.V. radiation is really nasty. Anywhere on Earth, 11 is considered to be extreme. During U.V. storms there, the U.V. Index reaches 43. SPF 30 is not going to do anything  to you over there, and the water is so transparent in those lakes that the algae has nowhere to hide, really, and so they are developing their own sunscreen, and this is the red color you see. But they can adapt only so far, and then when all the water is gone from the surface, microbes have only one solution left: They go underground. And those microbes, the rocks you see in that slide here, well, they are actually living inside rocks and they are using the protection of the translucence of the rocks to get the good part of the U.V. and discard the part that could actually damage their DNA. And this is why we are taking our rover to train them to search  for life on Mars in these areas, because if there was life on Mars three and a half billion years ago, it had to use the same strategy to actually protect itself. Now, it is pretty obvious that going to extreme environments is helping us very much for the exploration of Mars  and to prepare missions. So far, it has helped us to understand the geology of Mars. It has helped to understand the past climate of Mars and its evolution, but also its habitability potential. Our most recent rover on Mars has discovered traces of organics. Yeah, there are organics at the surface of Mars. And it also discovered traces of methane. And we don't know yet if the methane in question is really from geology or biology. Regardless, what we know is that because of the discovery, the hypothesis that there is still life present on Mars today remains a viable one.So by now, I think I have convinced you that Mars is very special to us, but it would be a mistake to think that Mars is the only place in the solar system that is interesting to find potential microbial life. And the reason is because Mars and the Earth could have a common root to their tree of life, but when you go beyond Mars, it's not that easy. Celestial mechanics  is not making it so easy for an exchange of material between planets, and so if we were to discover life on those planets, it would be different from us. It would be a different type of life. But in the end, it might be just us, it might be us and Mars, or it can be many trees of life in the solar system. I don't know the answer yet, but I can tell you something: No matter what the result is, no matter what that magic number is, it is going to give us a standard by which we are going to be able  to measure the life potential, abundance and diversity beyond our own solar system. And this can be achieved by our generation. This can be our legacy, but only if we dare to explore.Now, finally, if somebody tells you that looking  for alien microbes is not cool because you cannot have a philosophical conversation with them, let me show you why and how you can tell them they're wrong. Well, organic material is going to tell you about environment, about complexity and about diversity. DNA, or any information carrier, is going to tell you about adaptation, about evolution, about survival, about planetary changes and about the transfer of information. All together, they are telling us what started as a microbial pathway, and why what started as a microbial pathway sometimes ends up as a civilization or sometimes ends up as a dead end.Look at the solar system, and look at the Earth. On Earth, there are many intelligent species, but only one has achieved technology. Right here in the journey of our own solar system, there is a very, very powerful message that says here's how we should look  for alien life, small and big. So yeah, microbes are talking and we are listening, and they are taking us, one planet at a time and one moon at a time, towards their big brothers out there. And they are telling us about diversity, they are telling us about abundance of life, and they are telling us how this life has survived thus far to reach civilization, intelligence, technology and, indeed, philosophy.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nathalie_cabrol_how_mars_might_hold_the_secret_to_the_origin_of_life
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"To be honest, by personality, I'm just not much of a crier. But I think in my career that's been a good thing. I'm a civil rights lawyer, and I've seen some  horrible things in the world. I began my career working  police abuse cases in the United States. And then in 1994, I was sent to Rwanda to be the director of the U.N.'s  genocide investigation. It turns out that tears  just aren't much help when you're trying  to investigate a genocide. The things I had to see,  and feel and touch were pretty unspeakable.What I can tell you is this: that the Rwandan genocide was one of the world's greatest failures of simple compassion. That word, compassion, actually  comes from two Latin words: cum passio, which simply mean  ""to suffer with."" And the things that I saw and experienced in Rwanda as I got up close to human suffering, it did, in moments, move me to tears. But I just wish that I,  and the rest of the world, had been moved earlier. And not just to tears, but to actually stop the genocide.Now by contrast, I've also been involved with one of the world's greatest successes of compassion. And that's the fight against  global poverty. It's a cause that probably has involved all of us here. I don't know if your first introduction might have been choruses of ""We Are the World,"" or maybe the picture of a sponsored child on your refrigerator door, or maybe the birthday you donated for fresh water. I don't really remember what my first introduction to poverty was but I do remember the most jarring.It was when I met Venus — she's a mom from Zambia. She's got three kids and she's a widow. When I met her, she had walked about 12 miles in the only garments she owned, to come to the capital city and to share her story. She sat down with me for hours, just ushered me in to  the world of poverty. She described what it was like  when the coals on the cooking fire finally just went completely cold. When that last drop  of cooking oil finally ran out. When the last of the food,  despite her best efforts, ran out. She had to watch her youngest son, Peter, suffer from malnutrition, as his legs just slowly bowed  into uselessness. As his eyes grew cloudy and dim. And then as Peter finally grew cold.For over 50 years, stories like this have been moving us to compassion. We whose kids have plenty to eat. And we're moved not only  to care about global poverty, but to actually try to do our part  to stop the suffering. Now there's plenty of room for critique  that we haven't done enough, and what it is that we've done hasn't been effective enough, but the truth is this: The fight against global poverty is probably the broadest, longest running manifestation of the  human phenomenon of compassion in the history of our species. And so I'd like to share a pretty shattering insight that might forever change the way you think about that struggle.But first, let me begin with what you probably already know. Thirty-five years ago, when I would have been graduating from high school, they told us that 40,000 kids every day died because of poverty. That number, today, is now  down to 17,000. Way too many, of course, but it does mean that every year, there's eight million kids who don't have to die from poverty. Moreover, the number of  people in our world who are living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living off about a dollar and a quarter a day, that has fallen from 50 percent, to only 15 percent. This is massive progress, and this exceeds everybody's  expectations about what is possible. And I think you and I, I think, honestly, that we can  feel proud and encouraged to see the way that compassion  actually has the power to succeed in stopping  the suffering of millions.But here's the part that you  might not hear very much about. If you move that poverty mark just up to two dollars a day, it turns out that virtually  the same two billion people who were stuck in that harsh poverty when I was in high school, are still stuck there, 35 years later.So why, why are so many billions still stuck in such harsh poverty? Well, let's think about Venus for a moment. Now for decades, my wife and I have been moved by common compassion to sponsor kids, to fund microloans, to support generous levels of foreign aid. But until I had actually talked to Venus, I would have had no idea that  none of those approaches actually addressed why she had to watch her son die. ""We were doing fine,"" Venus told me, ""until Brutus started to cause trouble."" Now, Brutus is Venus' neighbor  and ""cause trouble"" is what happened the day after Venus' husband died, when Brutus just came and threw Venus and the kids out of the house, stole all their land, and robbed their market stall. You see, Venus was thrown  into destitution by violence.And then it occurred to me, of course, that none of my child sponsorships, none of the microloans, none of the traditional  anti-poverty programs were going to stop Brutus, because they weren't meant to.This became even more clear to me when I met Griselda. She's a marvelous young girl living in a very poor community in Guatemala. And one of the things we've learned over the years is that perhaps the most powerful thing that Griselda and her family can do to get Griselda and her family  out of poverty is to make sure that she goes to school. The experts call this the Girl Effect. But when we met Griselda,  she wasn't going to school. In fact, she was rarely ever  leaving her home.Days before we met her, while she was walking home from church with her family, in broad daylight, men from her community  just snatched her off the street, and violently raped her. See, Griselda had every opportunity to go to school, it just wasn't safe for her to get there. And Griselda's not the only one. Around the world, poor women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44, they are — when victims of  the everyday violence of domestic abuse and sexual violence — those two forms of violence account for more death and disability than malaria, than car accidents, than war combined. The truth is, the poor of our world are trapped in whole systems of violence.In South Asia, for instance, I could drive past this rice mill and see this man hoisting  these 100-pound sacks of rice upon his thin back. But I would have no idea, until later, that he was actually a slave, held by violence in that rice mill since I was in high school. Decades of anti-poverty programs right in his community were never able to rescue him or any of the hundred other slaves from the beatings and the rapes and the torture of violence inside the rice mill. In fact, half a century of  anti-poverty programs have left more poor people in slavery than in any other time in human history.Experts tell us that there's about 35 million people in slavery today. That's about the population  of the entire nation of Canada, where we're sitting today. This is why, over time, I have come to call this epidemic of violence the Locust Effect. Because in the lives of the poor, it just descends like a plague and it destroys everything. In fact, now when you survey very, very poor communities, residents will tell you that their greatest fear is violence. But notice the violence that they fear is not the violence of  genocide or the wars, it's everyday violence.So for me, as a lawyer, of course, my first reaction was to think, well, of course we've got to change all the laws. We've got to make all this violence against the poor illegal. But then I found out, it already is. The problem is not that  the poor don't get laws, it's that they don't get law enforcement. In the developing world, basic law enforcement systems are so broken that recently the U.N. issued  a report that found that ""most poor people live outside the protection of the law."" Now honestly, you and I have  just about no idea of what that would mean because we have no  first-hand experience of it. Functioning law enforcement for us  is just a total assumption. In fact, nothing expresses that assumption more clearly than three simple numbers: 9-1-1, which, of course, is the number for the emergency police operator here in Canada and in the United States, where the average response time  to a police 911 emergency call is about 10 minutes. So we take this just  completely for granted.But what if there was no  law enforcement to protect you? A woman in Oregon recently experienced what this would be like. She was home alone in her  dark house on a Saturday night, when a man started to tear  his way into her home. This was her worst nightmare, because this man had actually put her in the hospital from an assault just two weeks before. So terrified, she picks up that phone and does what any of us would do: She calls 911 — but only to learn that because  of budget cuts in her county, law enforcement wasn't available  on the weekends. Listen. Dispatcher: I don't have anybody  to send out there. Woman: OK Dispatcher: Um, obviously if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? Or do you know if he is intoxicated or anything? Woman: I've already asked him. I've already told him I was calling you. He's broken in before, busted down my door, assaulted me. Dispatcher: Uh-huh. Woman: Um, yeah, so ... Dispatcher: Is there any way you could safely leave the residence? Woman: No, I can't, because he's blocking pretty much my only way out. Dispatcher: Well, the only thing I can do  is give you some advice, and call the sheriff's office tomorrow. Obviously, if he comes in and unfortunately has a weapon or is trying to cause you physical harm, that's a different story. You know, the sheriff's office doesn't work up there. I don't have anybody to send.""Gary Haugen: Tragically, the woman  inside that house was violently assaulted, choked and raped because this is what it means to live outside the rule of law. And this is where billions of our poorest live. What does that look like? In Bolivia, for example, if a man  sexually assaults a poor child, statistically, he's at greater risk of slipping in the shower and dying than he is of ever going  to jail for that crime. In South Asia, if you  enslave a poor person, you're at greater risk of being  struck by lightning than ever being sent  to jail for that crime. And so the epidemic of everyday  violence, it just rages on. And it devastates our efforts to try to help billions of people out of their two-dollar-a-day hell. Because the data just doesn't lie. It turns out that you can give  all manner of goods and services to the poor, but if you don't restrain the hands  of the violent bullies from taking it all away, you're going to be very disappointed in the long-term impact of your efforts.So you would think that the disintegration of basic law enforcement in the developing world would be a huge priority for the global fight against poverty. But it's not. Auditors of international assistance recently couldn't find even one percent of aid going  to protect the poor from the lawless chaos  of everyday violence. And honestly, when we do talk about  violence against the poor, sometimes it's in the weirdest of ways. A fresh water organization tells a heart-wrenching story of girls who are raped on the way to fetching water, and then celebrates the solution of a new well that drastically shortens their walk. End of story. But not a word about the rapists who are still right there in the community. If a young woman on one  of our college campuses was raped on her walk to the library, we would never celebrate the solution of moving the library closer to the dorm. And yet, for some reason, this is okay for poor people.Now the truth is, the traditional experts in economic development and poverty alleviation, they don't know how to fix this problem. And so what happens? They don't talk about it. But the more fundamental reason that law enforcement for the poor in the developing world is so neglected, is because the people inside the developing world, with money, don't need it. I was at the World Economic  Forum not long ago talking to corporate executives who have massive businesses in the developing world and I was just asking them, ""How do you guys protect all your people and property from all the violence?"" And they looked at each other,  and they said, practically in unison, ""We buy it.""Indeed, private security forces  in the developing world are now, four, five and seven times larger than the public police force. In Africa, the largest employer  on the continent now is private security. But see, the rich can pay for safety and can keep getting richer, but the poor can't pay for it and they're left totally unprotected and they keep getting thrown to the ground.This is a massive and scandalous outrage. And it doesn't have to be this way. Broken law enforcement can be fixed. Violence can be stopped. Almost all criminal justice systems, they start out broken and corrupt, but they can be transformed by fierce effort and commitment.The path forward is really pretty clear. Number one: We have to start making stopping violence indispensable  to the fight against poverty. In fact, any conversation about global poverty that doesn't include the problem  of violence must be deemed not serious.And secondly, we have to begin  to seriously invest resources and share expertise to support  the developing world as they fashion new,  public systems of justice, not private security, that give everybody a chance to be safe. These transformations  are actually possible and they're happening today. Recently, the Gates Foundation  funded a project in the second largest city  of the Philippines, where local advocates and local law enforcement were able to transform corrupt police and broken courts so drastically, that in just four short years, they were able to measurably reduce the commercial sexual violence  against poor kids by 79 percent.You know, from the hindsight of history, what's always most inexplicable and inexcusable are the simple failures of compassion. Because I think history convenes  a tribunal of our grandchildren and they just ask us, ""Grandma, Grandpa, where were you? Where were you, Grandpa, when  the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and were being rejected from our shores? Where were you? And Grandma, where were you when they were marching our Japanese-American neighbors off to internment camps? And Grandpa, where were you  when they were beating our African-American neighbors just because they were trying to register to vote?"" Likewise, when our grandchildren ask us, ""Grandma, Grandpa, where were you when two billion of the world's poorest were drowning in a lawless chaos of everyday violence?"" I hope we can say that we had compassion, that we raised our voice, and as a generation, we were moved to make the violence stop.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Really powerfully argued. Talk to us a bit about some of the things that have actually been happening to, for example, boost police training. How hard a process is that? GH: Well, one of the glorious  things that's starting to happen now is that the collapse of these systems and the consequences are becoming obvious. There's actually, now,  political will to do that. But it just requires now an investment of resources and transfer of expertise. There's a political will struggle  that's going to take place as well, but those are winnable fights, because we've done some examples around the world at International Justice Mission that are very encouraging.CA: So just tell us in one country, how much it costs to make a material difference  to police, for example — I know that's only one piece of it. GH: In Guatemala, for instance, we've started a project there with the local police  and court system, prosecutors, to retrain them so that they can  actually effectively bring these cases. And we've seen prosecutions against perpetrators of sexual violence increase by more than 1,000 percent. This project has been very modestly funded at about a million dollars a year, and the kind of bang  you can get for your buck in terms of leveraging a criminal justice system that could function if it were properly trained and motivated and led, and these countries,  especially a middle class that is seeing that there's  really no future with this total instability and total privatization of security I think there's an opportunity, a window for change.CA: But to make this happen, you have to look at each part in the chain — the police, who else? GH: So that's the thing  about law enforcement, it starts out with the police, they're the front end of the pipeline of justice, but they hand if off to the prosecutors, and the prosecutors  hand it off to the courts, and the survivors of violence  have to be supported by social services all the way through that. So you have to do an approach  that pulls that all together. In the past, there's been a little bit of training of the courts, but they get crappy evidence  from the police, or a little police intervention  that has to do with narcotics or terrorism but nothing to do with treating the common poor person with excellent law enforcement, so it's about pulling that all together, and you can actually have people in very poor communities experience law enforcement like us, which is imperfect in our  own experience, for sure, but boy, is it a great thing to sense that you can call 911 and maybe someone will protect you.CA: Gary, I think you've done  a spectacular job of bringing this to the world's attention in your book and right here today.Thanks so much.Gary Haugen.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_haugen_the_hidden_reason_for_poverty_the_world_needs_to_address_now
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"My first love was for the night sky. Love is complicated.You're looking at a fly-through of the  Hubble Space Telescope Ultra-Deep Field, one of the most distant images of our universe ever observed. Everything you see here is a galaxy, comprised of billions of stars each. And the farthest galaxy is  a trillion, trillion kilometers away.As an astrophysicist, I have the awesome privilege of studying some of the most exotic objects  in our universe. The objects that have captivated me  from first crush throughout my career are supermassive,  hyperactive black holes. Weighing one to 10 billion times  the mass of our own sun, these galactic black holes  are devouring material, at a rate of upwards of  1,000 times more than your ""average""  supermassive black hole. (Laughter)These two characteristics, with a few others, make them quasars. At the same time, the objects I study are producing some of the most powerful particle streams ever observed. These narrow streams, called jets, are moving at 99.99 percent  of the speed of light, and are pointed directly at the Earth.These jetted, Earth-pointed, hyperactive and supermassive black holes are called blazars, or blazing quasars. What makes blazars so special is that they're some of the universe's most efficient particle accelerators, transporting incredible amounts of energy throughout a galaxy.Here, I'm showing an artist's conception of a blazar. The dinner plate by which  material falls onto the black hole is called the accretion disc, shown here in blue. Some of that material is slingshotted around the black hole and accelerated to insanely high speeds in the jet, shown here in white. Although the blazar system is rare, the process by which nature pulls in material via a disk, and then flings some of it out via a jet, is more common. We'll eventually zoom out of  the blazar system to show its approximate relationship to the larger galactic context.Beyond the cosmic accounting of what goes in to what goes out, one of the hot topics in  blazar astrophysics right now is where the highest-energy  jet emission comes from. In this image, I'm interested in where this white blob forms and if, as a result, there's any  relationship between the jet and the accretion disc material.Clear answers to this question were almost completely inaccessible until 2008, when NASA launched a new telescope that better detects gamma ray light — that is, light with energies a million times higher than your standard x-ray scan. I simultaneously compare variations between the gamma ray light data and the visible light data from day to day and year to year, to better localize these gamma ray blobs. My research shows that in some instances, these blobs form much closer to the black hole than we initially thought.As we more confidently localize where these gamma ray  blobs are forming, we can better understand how jets are being accelerated, and ultimately reveal  the dynamic processes by which some of the most fascinating objects in our universe are formed.This all started as a love story. And it still is. This love transformed me from  a curious, stargazing young girl to a professional astrophysicist, hot on the heels of celestial discovery. Who knew that chasing after the universe would ground me so deeply to my mission here on Earth. Then again, when do we ever know where love's first flutter will truly take us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jedidah_isler_how_i_fell_in_love_with_quasars_blazars_and_our_incredible_universe
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"Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. It was the 1970s. I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. And the tool that I used  to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle. This is a commercial for  that particular item: (Video) Voice-over: What a jump! Evel's riding the amazing stunt cycle. That gyro-power sends him  over 100 feet at top speed.Chris Milk: So this was my joy back then. I rode this motorcycle everywhere. And I was there with Evel Knievel; we  jumped the Snake River Canyon together. I wanted the rocket. I never got the rocket, I only got the motorcycle. I felt so connected to this world. I didn't want to be a storyteller  when I grew up, I wanted to be stuntman. I was there. Evel Knievel was my friend. I had so much empathy for him.But it didn't work out. (Laughter) I went to art school. I started making music videos. And this is one of the early music videos that I made: (Music: ""Touch the Sky"" by Kanye West) CM: You may notice  some slight similarities here. (Laughter) And I got that rocket. (Laughter)So, now I'm a filmmaker, or, the beginning of a filmmaker, and I started using the tools that are available to me as a filmmaker to try to tell the most compelling stories that I can to an audience. And film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely  foreign from our own.Unfortunately, Evel Knievel did not feel the same  empathy for us that we felt for him, and he sued us for this video — (Laughter) — shortly thereafter. On the upside, the man  that I worshipped as a child, the man that I wanted  to become as an adult, I was finally able to get his autograph. (Applause)Let's talk about film now. Film, it's an incredible medium, but essentially, it's the same now as it was then. It's a group of rectangles that are played in a sequence. And we've done incredible things with those rectangles. But I started thinking about, is there a way that I can use modern and developing technologies to tell stories in different ways and tell different kinds of stories that maybe I couldn't tell using the traditional tools of filmmaking that we've been using for 100 years? So I started experimenting, and what I was trying to do was to build the ultimate empathy machine. And here's one of the early experiments: (Music)So this is called ""The Wilderness Downtown."" It was a collaboration with Arcade Fire. It asked you to put in the address where you grew up at the beginning of it. It's a website. And out of it starts growing these little boxes with different browser windows. And you see this teenager  running down a street, and then you see Google Street View and Google Maps imagery and you realize the street he's running down is yours. And when he stops in front of a house, he stops in front of your house. And this was great, and I saw people  having an even deeper emotional reaction to this than the things that  I had made in rectangles. And I'm essentially taking  a piece of your history and putting it inside  the framing of the story.But then I started thinking, okay, well that's a part of you, but how do I put all of you inside of the frame? So to do that, I started making art installations. And this is one called  ""The Treachery of Sanctuary."" It's a triptych. I'm going to show you the third panel. (Music) So now I've got you inside of the frame, and I saw people having even more visceral emotional reactions to this work than the previous one.But then I started thinking about frames, and what do they represent? And a frame is just a window. I mean, all the media that we watch — television, cinema — they're these windows into  these other worlds. And I thought, well, great.  I got you in a frame. But I don't want you in the frame, I don't want you in the window, I want you through the window, I want you on the other side, in the world, inhabiting the world.So that leads me back to virtual reality. Let's talk about virtual reality. Unfortunately, talking about virtual reality is like dancing about architecture. And this is actually someone dancing about architecture in virtual reality. (Laughter) So, it's difficult to explain. Why is it difficult to explain? It's difficult because it's a very  experiential medium. You feel your way inside of it. It's a machine, but inside of it, it feels like real life, it feels like truth. And you feel present in the world that you're inside and you feel present with the people that you're inside of it with.So, I'm going to show you a demo of a virtual reality film: a full-screen version of all the information that we capture when we shoot virtual reality. So we're shooting in every direction. This is a camera system that we built that has 3D cameras that look in every direction and binaural microphones that face in every direction. We take this and we build, basically, a sphere of a world that you inhabit. So what I'm going to show you is not a view into the world, it's basically the whole world stretched into a rectangle. So this film is called  ""Clouds Over Sidra,"" and it was made in conjunction with  our virtual reality company called VRSE and the United Nations, and a co-collaborator named Gabo Arora. And we went to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan in December and shot the story of a 12-year-old girl there named Sidra. And she and her family fled Syria through the desert into Jordan and she's been living in this camp for the last year and a half.(Video) Sidra: My name is Sidra. I am 12 years old. I am in the fifth grade. I am from Syria, in the Daraa Province, Inkhil City. I have lived here in the Zaatari camp in Jordan for the last year and a half. I have a big family: three brothers, one is a baby. He cries a lot. I asked my father if I cried when  I was a baby and he says I did not. I think I was a stronger baby than my brother.CM: So, when you're inside  of the headset. you're not seeing it like this. You're looking around through this world. You'll notice you see full 360 degrees, in all directions. And when you're sitting there in her room, watching her, you're not watching it through a television screen, you're not watching it through a window, you're sitting there with her. When you look down, you're sitting on the same ground that she's sitting on. And because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way. You empathize with her in a deeper way.And I think that we can change minds with this machine. And we've already started to try to change a few. So we took this film to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. And we showed it to a group of people whose decisions affect the lives of millions of people. And these are people  who might not otherwise be sitting in a tent  in a refugee camp in Jordan. But in January, one afternoon in Switzerland, they suddenly all found themselves there. (Applause) And they were affected by it.So we're going to make more of them. We're working with the  United Nations right now to shoot a whole series of these films. We just finished shooting a story in Liberia. And now, we're going  to shoot a story in India. And we're taking these films, and we're showing them  at the United Nations to people that work there and people that are visiting there. And we're showing  them to the people that can actually change the lives of the people inside of the films.And that's where I think we just start to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality. It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I've never seen before  in any other form of media. And it can change people's perception of each other. And that's how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world.So, it's a machine, but through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. And ultimately, we become more human.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine
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"Growing up, I didn't always understand why my parents made me follow the rules that they did. Like, why did I really  have to mow the lawn? Why was homework really that important? Why couldn't I put jelly beans  in my oatmeal?My childhood was abound with questions like this. Normal things about being a kid and realizing that sometimes, it was best to listen to my parents even when I didn't exactly understand why. And it's not that they didn't want me to think critically. Their parenting always sought  to reconcile the tension between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world, while ensuring that we never accepted the status quo as inevitable.I came to realize that this, in and of itself, was a very purposeful form of education. One of my favorite educators, Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire, speaks quite explicitly about the need for education to be used as a tool for critical  awakening and shared humanity. In his most famous book, ""Pedagogy of the Oppressed,"" he states, ""No one can be  authentically human while he prevents others from being so.""I've been thinking a lot about this  lately, this idea of humanity, and specifically, who in this world is afforded the privilege of being perceived as fully human. Over the course of  the past several months, the world has watched as unarmed black men, and women, have had their lives taken at the hands of police and vigilante. These events and all that  has transpired after them have brought me back to my own childhood and the decisions that my parents made about raising a black boy in America that growing up, I didn't always understand in the way that I do now.I think of how hard it must have been, how profoundly unfair it must have felt for them to feel like they had  to strip away parts of my childhood just so that I could come home at night.For example, I think of how one night, when I was around 12 years old, on an overnight field trip to another city, my friends and I bought Super Soakers and turned the hotel parking lot into our own water-filled battle zone. We hid behind cars, running through the darkness that lay between the streetlights, boundless laughter ubiquitous  across the pavement. But within 10 minutes, my father came outside,  grabbed me by my forearm and led me into our room with an unfamiliar grip. Before I could say anything, tell him how foolish he had  made me look in front of my friends, he derided me for being so naive. Looked me in the eye,  fear consuming his face, and said, ""Son, I'm sorry, but you can't act the same  as your white friends. You can't pretend to shoot guns. You can't run around in the dark. You can't hide behind anything other than your own teeth.""I know now how scared he must have been, how easily I could have fallen into the empty of the night, that some man would mistake this water for a good reason to wash all of this away.These are the sorts of messages I've been inundated with my entire life: Always keep your hands where they  can see them, don't move too quickly, take off your hood when the sun goes down. My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin. So that we could be kids,  not casket or concrete. And it's not because they thought it would make us better than anyone else it's simply because they wanted  to keep us alive.All of my black friends were raised with the same message, the talk, given to us  when we became old enough to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground, when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared.But what does it do to a child to grow up knowing that you cannot simply be a child? That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath, that you cannot simply be curious, that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake, that someone's implicit bias might be the reason you don't wake up in the morning.But this cannot be what defines us. Because we have parents who raised us to understand that our bodies weren't meant for the backside of a bullet, but for flying kites and jumping rope, and laughing until our stomachs burst. We had teachers who taught us  how to raise our hands in class, and not just to signal surrender, and that the only thing we should give up is the idea that we  aren't worthy of this world. So when we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't, it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not. I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy.And I refuse to accept that we can't build this world into something new, some place where a child's name doesn't have to be written  on a t-shirt, or a tombstone, where the value of someone's life isn't determined by anything other  than the fact that they had lungs, a place where every single  one of us can breathe.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/clint_smith_how_to_raise_a_black_son_in_america
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"These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. They're bizzarre, they're beautiful, and there's very little we know about them.These thoughts were going through my head when I looked at the pages of my first dinosaur book. I was about five years old at the time, and I decided there and then that I would become a paleontologist. Paleontology allowed me  to combine my love for animals with my desire to travel to  far-flung corners of the world.And now, a few years later, I've led several expeditions to the ultimate far-flung corner  on this planet, the Sahara. I've worked in the Sahara because I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a bizarre, giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus.A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. Unfortunately, all his Spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. So all we're left with are just a few drawings and notes.From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived  about 100 million years ago, was very big, it had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail, and it had long, slender jaws,  a bit like a crocodile, with conical teeth, that may have been used  to catch slippery prey, like fish. But that was pretty much  all we knew about this animal for the next 100 years.My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. It's a difficult place to work in. You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions, and it's very difficult to find good fossils there. But our hard work paid off. We discovered many incredible specimens. There's the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters.These fossils were deposited in a river system. The river system was also home  to a giant, car-sized coelacanth, a monster sawfish, and the skies over the river system were filled with pterosaurs, flying reptiles. It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine.So we're finding all these  incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus, but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. We were just finding bits and pieces and I was hoping that we'd find a partial skeleton at some point.Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of Spinosaurus. We returned to the site, we collected more bones. And so after 100 years we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature. And we were able to reconstruct it.We now know that  Spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile, very different from other  predatory dinosaurs, very different from the T. rex. But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skeleton. We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. We had leg bones, we had skull bones, we had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet — again, very unusual, no other dinosaur has feet like this — and we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment, or maybe for paddling in the water. We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of Spinosaurus bones, and it turns out that they're very dense and compact. Again, this is something we see in animals that spend a lot of time in the water, it's useful for buoyancy  control in the water.We C.T.-scanned all of our bones and built a digital Spinosaurus skeleton. And when we looked  at the digital skeleton, we realized that yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. It's bigger than a T. rex, and yes, the head has ""fish-eating"" written all over it, but really the entire skeleton has ""water-loving"" written all over it — dense bone, paddle-like feet, and the hind limbs are reduced in size, and again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount  of time in the water.So, as we fleshed out our Spinosaurus — I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin — we realize that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur, bigger than T. rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants, feeding on the many aquatic animals I showed you earlier on.So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. It's a dinosaur like no other. And some people told me, ""Wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. There are not many things left to discover in the world."" Well, I think nothing could be  further from the truth. I think the Sahara's  still full of treasures, and when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews, and he said, ""Always, there has been an adventure just around the corner — and the world is still full of corners."" That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines. And it is still true today.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nizar_ibrahim_how_we_unearthed_the_spinosaurus
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"I work with a bunch of mathematicians, philosophers and computer scientists, and we sit around and think about the future of machine intelligence, among other things. Some people think that some of these things are sort of science fiction-y, far out there, crazy. But I like to say, okay, let's look at the modern human condition. (Laughter) This is the normal way for things to be.But if we think about it, we are actually recently arrived guests on this planet, the human species. Think about if Earth was created one year ago, the human species, then,  would be 10 minutes old. The industrial era started two seconds ago. Another way to look at this is to think of world GDP over the last 10,000 years, I've actually taken the trouble to plot this for you in a graph.  It looks like this. (Laughter) It's a curious shape for a normal condition. I sure wouldn't want to sit on it. (Laughter)Let's ask ourselves, what is the cause of this current anomaly? Some people would say it's technology. Now it's true, technology has accumulated through human history, and right now, technology advances extremely rapidly — that is the proximate cause, that's why we are currently  so very productive. But I like to think back further  to the ultimate cause.Look at these two highly distinguished gentlemen: We have Kanzi — he's mastered 200 lexical tokens, an incredible feat. And Ed Witten unleashed the second superstring revolution. If we look under the hood,  this is what we find: basically the same thing. One is a little larger, it maybe also has a few tricks in the exact way it's wired. These invisible differences cannot be too complicated, however, because there have only been 250,000 generations since our last common ancestor. We know that complicated mechanisms take a long time to evolve. So a bunch of relatively minor changes take us from Kanzi to Witten, from broken-off tree branches to intercontinental ballistic missiles.So this then seems pretty obvious that everything we've achieved, and everything we care about, depends crucially on some relatively minor changes that made the human mind. And the corollary, of course, is that any further changes that could significantly change the substrate of thinking could have potentially  enormous consequences.Some of my colleagues  think we're on the verge of something that could cause a profound change in that substrate, and that is machine superintelligence. Artificial intelligence used to be about putting commands in a box. You would have human programmers that would painstakingly  handcraft knowledge items. You build up these expert systems, and they were kind of useful  for some purposes, but they were very brittle, you couldn't scale them. Basically, you got out only what you put in. But since then, a paradigm shift has taken place in the field of artificial intelligence.Today, the action is really  around machine learning. So rather than handcrafting knowledge representations and features, we create algorithms that learn, often from raw perceptual data. Basically the same thing that the human infant does. The result is A.I. that is not limited to one domain — the same system can learn to translate  between any pairs of languages, or learn to play any computer game on the Atari console. Now of course, A.I. is still nowhere near having the same powerful, cross-domain ability to learn and plan as a human being has. The cortex still has some  algorithmic tricks that we don't yet know how to match in machines.So the question is, how far are we from being able to match those tricks? A couple of years ago, we did a survey of some of the world's  leading A.I. experts, to see what they think, and one of the questions we asked was, ""By which year do you think there is a 50 percent probability that we will have achieved  human-level machine intelligence?"" We defined human-level here  as the ability to perform almost any job at least as well as an adult human, so real human-level, not just within some limited domain. And the median answer was 2040 or 2050, depending on precisely which  group of experts we asked. Now, it could happen much, much later, or sooner, the truth is nobody really knows.What we do know is that the ultimate  limit to information processing in a machine substrate lies far outside  the limits in biological tissue. This comes down to physics. A biological neuron fires, maybe,  at 200 hertz, 200 times a second. But even a present-day transistor operates at the Gigahertz. Neurons propagate slowly in axons, 100 meters per second, tops. But in computers, signals can travel at the speed of light. There are also size limitations, like a human brain has  to fit inside a cranium, but a computer can be the size of a warehouse or larger. So the potential for superintelligence  lies dormant in matter, much like the power of the atom  lay dormant throughout human history, patiently waiting there until 1945. In this century, scientists may learn to awaken the power of artificial intelligence. And I think we might then see an intelligence explosion.Now most people, when they think about what is smart and what is dumb, I think have in mind a picture roughly like this. So at one end we have the village idiot, and then far over at the other side we have Ed Witten, or Albert Einstein, or whoever your favorite guru is. But I think that from the point of view of artificial intelligence, the true picture is actually probably more like this: AI starts out at this point here, at zero intelligence, and then, after many, many  years of really hard work, maybe eventually we get to mouse-level artificial intelligence, something that can navigate  cluttered environments as well as a mouse can. And then, after many, many more years of really hard work, lots of investment, maybe eventually we get to chimpanzee-level artificial intelligence. And then, after even more years  of really, really hard work, we get to village idiot  artificial intelligence. And a few moments later,  we are beyond Ed Witten. The train doesn't stop at Humanville Station. It's likely, rather, to swoosh right by.Now this has profound implications, particularly when it comes  to questions of power. For example, chimpanzees are strong — pound for pound, a chimpanzee is about twice as strong as a fit human male. And yet, the fate of Kanzi  and his pals depends a lot more on what we humans do than on what the chimpanzees do themselves. Once there is superintelligence, the fate of humanity may depend on what the superintelligence does. Think about it: Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. Machines will then be better  at inventing than we are, and they'll be doing so  on digital timescales. What this means is basically a telescoping of the future. Think of all the crazy technologies  that you could have imagined maybe humans could have developed in the fullness of time: cures for aging, space colonization, self-replicating nanobots or uploading of minds into computers, all kinds of science fiction-y stuff that's nevertheless consistent  with the laws of physics. All of this superintelligence could  develop, and possibly quite rapidly.Now, a superintelligence with such  technological maturity would be extremely powerful, and at least in some scenarios, it would be able to get what it wants. We would then have a future that would be shaped by the preferences of this A.I. Now a good question is, what are those preferences? Here it gets trickier. To make any headway with this, we must first of all avoid anthropomorphizing. And this is ironic because  every newspaper article about the future of A.I. has a picture of this: So I think what we need to do is to conceive of the issue more abstractly, not in terms of vivid Hollywood scenarios.We need to think of intelligence  as an optimization process, a process that steers the future into a particular set of configurations. A superintelligence is a really strong optimization process. It's extremely good at using  available means to achieve a state in which its goal is realized. This means that there is no necessary connection between being highly intelligent in this sense, and having an objective that we humans would find worthwhile or meaningful.Suppose we give an A.I. the goal  to make humans smile. When the A.I. is weak, it performs useful or amusing actions that cause its user to smile. When the A.I. becomes superintelligent, it realizes that there is a more effective way to achieve this goal: take control of the world and stick electrodes into the facial muscles of humans to cause constant, beaming grins. Another example, suppose we give A.I. the goal to solve a difficult mathematical problem. When the A.I. becomes superintelligent, it realizes that the most effective way  to get the solution to this problem is by transforming the planet into a giant computer, so as to increase its thinking capacity. And notice that this gives the A.I.s an instrumental reason to do things to us that we might not approve of. Human beings in this model are threats, we could prevent the mathematical problem from being solved.Of course, perceivably things won't  go wrong in these particular ways; these are cartoon examples. But the general point here is important: if you create a really powerful optimization process to maximize for objective x, you better make sure  that your definition of x incorporates everything you care about. This is a lesson that's also taught in many a myth. King Midas wishes that everything he touches be turned into gold. He touches his daughter,  she turns into gold. He touches his food, it turns into gold. This could become practically relevant, not just as a metaphor for greed, but as an illustration of what happens if you create a powerful optimization process and give it misconceived  or poorly specified goals.Now you might say, if a computer starts sticking electrodes into people's faces, we'd just shut it off. A, this is not necessarily so easy to do if we've grown dependent on the system — like, where is the off switch  to the Internet? B, why haven't the chimpanzees flicked the off switch to humanity, or the Neanderthals? They certainly had reasons. We have an off switch,  for example, right here. (Choking) The reason is that we are  an intelligent adversary; we can anticipate threats  and plan around them. But so could a superintelligent agent, and it would be much better  at that than we are. The point is, we should not be confident that we have this under control here.And we could try to make our job a little bit easier by, say, putting the A.I. in a box, like a secure software environment, a virtual reality simulation from which it cannot escape. But how confident can we be that the A.I. couldn't find a bug. Given that merely human hackers find bugs all the time, I'd say, probably not very confident. So we disconnect the ethernet cable to create an air gap, but again, like merely human hackers routinely transgress air gaps using social engineering. Right now, as I speak, I'm sure there is some employee out there somewhere who has been talked into handing out  her account details by somebody claiming to be from the I.T. department.More creative scenarios are also possible, like if you're the A.I., you can imagine wiggling electrodes around in your internal circuitry to create radio waves that you can use to communicate. Or maybe you could pretend to malfunction, and then when the programmers open you up to see what went wrong with you, they look at the source code — Bam! — the manipulation can take place. Or it could output the blueprint to a really nifty technology, and when we implement it, it has some surreptitious side effect that the A.I. had planned. The point here is that we should  not be confident in our ability to keep a superintelligent genie locked up in its bottle forever. Sooner or later, it will out.I believe that the answer here is to figure out how to create superintelligent A.I. such that even if — when — it escapes, it is still safe because it is fundamentally on our side because it shares our values. I see no way around  this difficult problem.Now, I'm actually fairly optimistic that this problem can be solved. We wouldn't have to write down  a long list of everything we care about, or worse yet, spell it out  in some computer language like C++ or Python, that would be a task beyond hopeless. Instead, we would create an A.I. that uses its intelligence to learn what we value, and its motivation system is constructed in such a way that it is motivated to pursue our values or to perform actions that it predicts we would approve of. We would thus leverage  its intelligence as much as possible to solve the problem of value-loading.This can happen, and the outcome could be  very good for humanity. But it doesn't happen automatically. The initial conditions  for the intelligence explosion might need to be set up  in just the right way if we are to have a controlled detonation. The values that the A.I. has need to match ours, not just in the familiar context, like where we can easily check how the A.I. behaves, but also in all novel contexts that the A.I. might encounter in the indefinite future.And there are also some esoteric issues that would need to be solved, sorted out: the exact details of its decision theory, how to deal with logical uncertainty and so forth. So the technical problems that need to be solved to make this work look quite difficult — not as difficult as making  a superintelligent A.I., but fairly difficult. Here is the worry: Making superintelligent A.I. is a really hard challenge. Making superintelligent A.I. that is safe involves some additional  challenge on top of that. The risk is that if somebody figures out how to crack the first challenge without also having cracked  the additional challenge of ensuring perfect safety.So I think that we should work out a solution to the control problem in advance, so that we have it available  by the time it is needed. Now it might be that we cannot solve the entire control problem in advance because maybe some elements can only be put in place once you know the details of the  architecture where it will be implemented. But the more of the control problem that we solve in advance, the better the odds that the transition to the machine intelligence era will go well.This to me looks like a thing that is well worth doing and I can imagine that if  things turn out okay, that people a million years from now look back at this century and it might well be that they say that the one thing we did that really mattered was to get this thing right.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_bostrom_what_happens_when_our_computers_get_smarter_than_we_are
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"The brain is an amazing and complex organ. And while many people are fascinated by the brain, they can't really tell you that much about the properties about how the brain works because we don't teach neuroscience in schools.And one of the reasons why is that the equipment is so complex and so expensive that it's really only done at major universities and large institutions. And so in order to be able to access the brain, you really need to dedicate your life and spend six and a half years as a graduate student just to become a neuroscientist to get access to these tools.And that's a shame because one out of five of us, that's 20 percent of the entire world, will have a neurological disorder. And there are zero cures for these diseases. And so it seems that what we should be doing is reaching back earlier in the eduction process and teaching students about neuroscience so that in the future, they may be thinking about possibly becoming a brain scientist.When I was a graduate student, my lab mate Tim Marzullo and myself, decided that what if we took this complex equipment that we have for studying the brain and made it simple enough and affordable enough that anyone that you know, an amateur or a high school student, could learn and actually participate in the discovery of neuroscience.And so we did just that. A few years ago, we started a company called Backyard Brains and we make DIY neuroscience equipment and I brought some here tonight, and I want to do some demonstrations. You guys want to see some?So I need a volunteer. So right before — what is your name? (Applause) Sam Kelly: Sam. Greg Gage: All right, Sam, I'm going to record from your brain. Have you had this before? SK: No. GG: I need you to stick out your arm for science, roll up your sleeve a bit, So what I'm going to do, I'm putting electrodes on your arm, and you're probably wondering, I just said I'm going to record from your brain, what am I doing with your arm?Well, you have about 80 billion neurons inside your brain right now. They're sending electrical messages back and forth, and chemical messages. But some of your neurons right here in your motor cortex are going to send messages down when you move your arm like this. They're going to go down across your corpus callosum, down onto your spinal cord to your lower motor neuron out to your muscles here, and that electrical discharge is going to be picked up by these electrodes right here and we're going to be able to listen to exactly what your brain is going to be doing. So I'm going to turn this on for a second.Have you ever heard what your brain sounds like? SK: No. GG: Let's try it out. So go ahead and squeeze your hand. (Rumbling) So what you're listening to, so this is your motor units happening right here. Let's take a look at it as well. So I'm going to stand over here, and I'm going to open up our app here. So now I want you to squeeze. (Rumbling)So right here, these are the motor units that are happening from her spinal cord out to her muscle right here, and as she's doing it, you're seeing the electrical activity that's happening here. You can even click here and try to see one of them. So keep doing it really hard. So now we've paused on one motor action potential that's happening right now inside of your brain.Do you guys want to see some more? (Applause) That's interesting, but let's get it better. I need one more volunteer. What is your name, sir? Miguel Goncalves: Miguel. GG: Miguel, all right. You're going to stand right here. So when you're moving your arm like this, your brain is sending a signal down to your muscles right here. I want you to move your arm as well. So your brain is going to send a signal down to your muscles. And so it turns out that there is a nerve that's right here that runs up here that innervates these three fingers, and it's close enough to the skin that we might be able to stimulate that so that what we can do is copy your brain signals going out to your hand and inject it into your hand, so that your hand will move when your brain tells your hand to move. So in a sense, she will take away your free will and you will no longer have any control over this hand. You with me?So I just need to hook you up. (Laughter) So I'm going to find your ulnar nerve, which is probably right around here. You don't know what you're signing up for when you come up. So now I'm going to move away and we're going to plug it in to our human-to-human interface over here.Okay, so Sam, I want you to squeeze your hand again. Do it again. Perfect. So now I'm going to hook you up over here so that you get the — It's going to feel a little bit weird at first, this is going to feel like a — (Laughter) You know, when you lose your free will, and someone else becomes your agent, it does feel a bit strange.Now I want you to relax your hand. Sam, you're with me? So you're going to squeeze. I'm not going to turn it on yet, so go ahead and give it a squeeze.So now, are you ready, Miguel? MG: Ready as I'll ever be. GG: I've turned it on, so go ahead and turn your hand. Do you feel that a little bit? MG: Nope. GG: Okay, do it again? MG: A little bit. GG: A little bit? (Laughter) So relax. So hit it again. (Laughter) Oh, perfect, perfect. So relax, do it again.All right, so right now, your brain is controlling your arm and it's also controlling his arm, so go ahead and just do it one more time. All right, so it's perfect. (Laughter)So now, what would happen if I took over my control of your hand? And so, just relax your hand. What happens? Ah, nothing. Why not? Because the brain has to do it. So you do it again. All right, that's perfect.Thank you guys for being such a good sport. This is what's happening all across the world — electrophysiology! We're going to bring on the neuro-revolution.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/greg_gage_how_to_control_someone_else_s_arm_with_your_brain
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"Hi. I'm going to talk  to you today about laughter, and I just want to start  by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. This is when I was a little girl. I would've been about six. And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where they were laughing. They were laughing very, very hard. They were lying on the floor laughing. They were screaming with laughter. I did not know what they were  laughing at, but I wanted in. I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, ""Hoo hoo!"" (Laughter) Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor. (Laughter)At the time, though, I didn't understand anything of that. I just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. And it is a really weird thing to do. What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. So here we've got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful.(Audio: Laughing)Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. There's a point in there where I'm just, like, you've got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he's breathing out.(Audio: Laughing)This hasn't been edited; this is him.(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter)And finally we have —  this is a human female laughing. And laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises. (Audio: Laughing) She actually says, ""Oh my God, what is that?"" in French. We're all kind of with her. I have no idea.Now, to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using  your ribcage all the time. What you're all doing  at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing. So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs just by expanding and contracting your ribcage, and if I was to put a strap  around the outside of your chest called a breath belt, and just look  at that movement, you see a rather gentle sinusoidal movement, so that's breathing. You're all doing it. Don't stop. As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this. In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out — and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. It's why we can talk at all.Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you. It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect. You're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions — Ha! — gives you a sound. And as the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these — (Wheezing) — things happening. I'm brilliant at this. (Laughter)Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh. Nietzsche thought that humans are the only animals that laugh. In fact, you find laughter throughout the mammals. It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it — humans, primates, rats — you find it associated with things like tickling. That's the same for humans. You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times  more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. So if you ask human beings, ""When do you laugh?"" they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk about humor and they'll talk about jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them. You're laughing to show that you like them. You might even love them. You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them, and the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start, and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect. You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them. So it's still modulated by this social context. You have to put humor to one side and think about the social  meaning of laughter because that's where its origins lie.Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be two kinds of laughs that we have. So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you; they are choosing to do this. In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the speech I'm doing now. So we might imagine that laughter might actually have two different roots.So I've been looking at this in more detail. To do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. So imagine your friend told a joke, and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the joke's all that. So I'm going to play you  a couple of those. I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter, or if you think it's posed. So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter?(Audio: Laughing)What does that sound like to you? Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. How about this one?(Audio: Laughing)(Laughter)I'm the best.(Laughter) (Applause)Not really. No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this.What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. They seem to be different things to us. Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other, and we might be seeing something like that here, involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. They're acoustically very different. The real laughs are longer. They're higher in pitch. When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. For example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing. Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy, or feels extremely easy to spot.In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. Actually, it's not, it's actually an important social cue. We use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing. So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of ""ha ha ha ha ha"" sound that you never get, you could not do, if you were laughing involuntarily. So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts of things.We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter. And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment. We just played people real and posed laughs. We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter. We put other sounds in there  to distract them, and all they're doing is lying listening to sounds. We don't tell them to do anything. Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs, and what seems to be the case, when you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds. In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, ""A ha ha ha ha ha,"" you're trying to work out why they're laughing. Laughter is always meaningful. You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you are concerned, at that point in time, it has not necessarily anything to do with you, you still want to know why those people are laughing.Now, we've had the opportunity to look  at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range. So this is an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people two questions. First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real  or posed do these laughs sound? The real laughs are shown in red and the posed laughs are shown in blue. What you see is there is a rapid onset. As you get older, you get better and better at spotting real laughter. So six-year-olds are at chance, they can't really hear the difference. By the time you are older, you get better, but interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this dataset until you are in your late 30s and early 40s. You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty. You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens. You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life.If we turn the question around and now say not, what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but we say, how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile. And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter. Remember me laughing with my parents when I had no idea what was going on. You really can see this. Now everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes  less contagious to you. Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older, or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh. You need the social stuff there.So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect, but I'm coming to see that actually there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter. There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples. He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed. So you've got the two of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, ""Tell me something that your wife does that irritates you."" And what you see is immediately — just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner — you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. You can see physically, people become more stressed. What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. So in fact, when you look at close relationships, laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together. We're not just emitting it at each other to show that we like each other, we're making ourselves feel better together.Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships. I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho, and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens, and how that changes the mood.He's cold. He's about to get wet. He's got swimming trunks on, got a towel. Ice. What might possibly happen? Video starts. Serious mood. And his friends are already laughing. They are already laughing, hard. He's not laughing yet. (Laughter) He's starting to go now. And now they're all off. (Laughter) They're on the floor. (Laughter)The thing I really like about that is it's all very serious until he jumps onto the ice, and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing. And imagine if that had played him out with him standing there going, ""No seriously, Heinrich, I think this is broken,"" we wouldn't enjoy watching that. That would be stressful. Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing, and his friends are going, ""Heinrich, I think we need to go to the hospital now,"" that also wouldn't be funny. The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation, into a funny situation, into what we're  actually enjoying there, and I think that's  a really interesting use, and it's actually happening all the time.For example, I can remember something like this happening at my father's funeral. We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants. We're not Canadian. (Laughter) (Applause) These events are always difficult, I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place, and I can remember finding myself just before the whole thing started telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom, and I just thought at the time, I don't know why I'm doing this, and what I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh together with me. It was a very basic reaction to find some reason we can do this. We can laugh together. We're going to get through this. We're going to be okay.And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time. You do it so often, you don't even notice it. Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you're doing something, when you laugh with people, that's actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better. It's not something specific to humans — it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better.In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing  but mammals. (Laughter)Thank you.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sophie_scott_why_we_laugh
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"On the path that American children  travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey. The first is the one we hear  a lot about: college. Some of you may remember the excitement that you felt when you first set off for college. Some of you may be in college right now and you're feeling this excitement at this very moment.College has some shortcomings. It's expensive; it leaves young people in debt. But all in all, it's a pretty good path. Young people emerge from college with pride and with great friends and with a lot of knowledge  about the world. And perhaps most importantly, a better chance in the labor market than they had before they got there.Today I want to talk about the second institution overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States. And that institution is prison. Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of with teachers. They're going to court dates instead of to class. Their junior year abroad is instead a trip to a state correctional facility. And they're emerging from their 20s not with degrees in business and English, but with criminal records.This institution is also costing us a lot, about 40,000 dollars a year to send a young person to prison in New Jersey. But here, taxpayers are footing the bill and what kids are getting is a cold prison cell and a permanent mark against them when they come home and apply for work.There are more and more kids on this journey to adulthood than ever before in the United States and that's because in the past 40 years, our incarceration rate  has grown by 700 percent. I have one slide for this talk. Here it is. Here's our incarceration rate, about 716 people per 100,000 in the population. Here's the OECD countries.What's more, it's poor kids that we're sending to prison, too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it and the fulfillment of the American Dream. The problem's actually  a bit worse than this 'cause we're not just sending  poor kids to prison, we're saddling poor kids with court fees, with probation and parole restrictions, with low-level warrants, we're asking them to live  in halfway houses and on house arrest, and we're asking them  to negotiate a police force that is entering poor communities of color, not for the purposes  of promoting public safety, but to make arrest counts, to line city coffers.This is the hidden underside to our historic experiment in punishment: young people worried that at any moment, they will be stopped, searched and seized. Not just in the streets,  but in their homes, at school and at work.I got interested in this  other path to adulthood when I was myself a college student attending the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s. Penn sits within a historic  African-American neighborhood. So you've got these two parallel journeys going on simultaneously: the kids attending  this elite, private university, and the kids from  the adjacent neighborhood, some of whom are making it to college, and many of whom  are being shipped to prison.In my sophomore year, I started tutoring a young woman who was in high school who lived about 10 minutes away from the university. Soon, her cousin came home  from a juvenile detention center. He was 15, a freshman in high school. I began to get to know him  and his friends and family, and I asked him what he thought  about me writing about his life for my senior thesis in college. This senior thesis became a dissertation at Princeton and now a book.By the end of my sophomore year, I moved into the neighborhood and I spent the next six yearstrying to understand what young people were facing as they came of age. The first week I spent in this neighborhood, I saw two boys, five and seven years old, play this game of chase, where the older boy ran after the other boy. He played the cop. When the cop caught up to the younger boy, he pushed him down, handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs, took a quarter out of  the other child's pocket, saying, ""I'm seizing that."" He asked the child if  he was carrying any drugs or if he had a warrant. Many times, I saw this game repeated, sometimes children would  simply give up running, and stick their bodies flat  against the ground with their hands above their heads, or flat up against a wall. Children would yell at each other, ""I'm going to lock you up, I'm going to lock you up and you're never coming home!"" Once I saw a six-year-old child pull another child's pants down and try to do a cavity search.In the first 18 months that I lived in this neighborhood, I wrote down every time I saw any contact between police and people that were my neighbors. So in the first 18 months, I watched the police stop  pedestrians or people in cars, search people, run people's names, chase people through the streets, pull people in for questioning, or make an arrest every single day, with five exceptions. Fifty-two times, I watched the police break down doors, chase people through houses or make an arrest of someone in their home. Fourteen times in this first year and a half, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on or beat young men after they had caught them.Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers, Chuck and Tim. Chuck was 18 when we met, a senior in high school. He was playing on the basketball team and making C's and B's. His younger brother, Tim, was 10. And Tim loved Chuck; he followed him around a lot, looked to Chuck to be a mentor. They lived with their mom and grandfather in a two-story row home  with a front lawn and a back porch. Their mom was struggling with addiction all while the boys were growing up. She never really was able  to hold down a job for very long. It was their grandfather's pension that supported the family, not really enough to pay for food and clothes and school supplies for growing boys. The family was really struggling.So when we met, Chuck was a senior in high school. He had just turned 18. That winter, a kid in the schoolyard called Chuck's mom a crack whore. Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow and the school cops charged him  with aggravated assault. The other kid was fine the next day, I think it was his pride that was injured more than anything.But anyway, since Chuck was 18, this agg. assault case sent him  to adult county jail on State Road in northeast Philadelphia, where he sat, unable to pay the bail — he couldn't afford it — while the trial dates  dragged on and on and on through almost his entire senior year. Finally, near the end of this season, the judge on this assault case threw out most of the charges and Chuck came home with only a few hundred dollars' worth of court fees hanging over his head. Tim was pretty happy that day.The next fall, Chuck tried  to re-enroll as a senior, but the school secretary told him that he was then 19 and too old  to be readmitted. Then the judge on his assault case issued him a warrant for his arrest because he couldn't pay  the 225 dollars in court fees that came due a few weeks after the case ended. Then he was a high school dropout living on the run.Tim's first arrest came later that year after he turned 11. Chuck had managed to get his warrant lifted and he was on a payment plan for the court fees and he was driving Tim to school in his girlfriend's car. So a cop pulls them over, runs the car, and the car comes up  as stolen in California. Chuck had no idea where in the history of this car it had been stolen. His girlfriend's uncle bought it from a used car auction in northeast Philly. Chuck and Tim had never been outside of the tri-state, let alone to California. But anyway, the cops down at the precinct charged Chuck with  receiving stolen property. And then a juvenile judge,  a few days later, charged Tim, age 11, with accessory to receiving a stolen property and then he was placed on  three years of probation. With this probation sentence  hanging over his head,Chuck sat his little brother down and began teaching him how to run from the police. They would sit side by side  on their back porch looking out into the shared alleyway and Chuck would coach Tim how to spot undercover cars, how to negotiate a late-night police raid, how and where to hide.I want you to imagine for a second what Chuck and Tim's lives would be like if they were living in a neighborhood where kids were going to college, not prison. A neighborhood like the one  I got to grow up in. Okay, you might say. But Chuck and Tim, kids like them, they're committing crimes! Don't they deserve to be in prison? Don't they deserve to be  living in fear of arrest? Well, my answer would be no. They don't. And certainly not for the same things  that other young people with more privilege are doing with impunity. If Chuck had gone to my high school, that schoolyard fight  would have ended there, as a schoolyard fight. It never would have become an aggravated assault case. Not a single kid that I went to college with has a criminal record right now. Not a single one. But can you imagine how many might have if the police had stopped those kids and searched their pockets for drugs as they walked to class? Or had raided their frat parties in the middle of the night?Okay, you might say. But doesn't this high incarceration rate partly account for our  really low crime rate? Crime is down. That's a good thing. Totally, that is a good thing. Crime is down. It dropped precipitously in the '90s and through the 2000s. But according to a committee of academics convened by the National Academy of Sciences last year, the relationship between our historically high incarceration rates and our low crime rate is pretty shaky. It turns out that the crime rate goes up and down irrespective of how many young people we send to prison.We tend to think about justice in a pretty narrow way: good and bad, innocent and guilty. Injustice is about being  wrongfully convicted. So if you're convicted  of something you did do, you should be punished for it. There are innocent and guilty people, there are victims and  there are perpetrators. Maybe we could think a little bit more broadly than that.Right now, we're asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who have the least amount of family resources, who are attending  the country's worst schools, who are facing the toughest time in the labor market, who are living in neighborhoods where violence is an everyday problem, we're asking these kids to walk the thinnest possible line — to basically never do anything wrong.Why are we not providing support to young kids facing these challenges? Why are we offering only handcuffs, jail time and this fugitive existence? Can we imagine something better? Can we imagine a criminal justice system that prioritizes recovery, prevention, civic inclusion, rather than punishment? (Applause) A criminal justice system  that acknowledges the legacy of exclusion that poor people of color in the U.S. have faced and that does not promote and perpetuate those exclusions. (Applause) And finally, a criminal justice system that believes in black young people, rather than treating black young people  as the enemy to be rounded up. (Applause)The good news is that we already are. A few years ago, Michelle Alexander wrote ""The New Jim Crow,"" which got Americans to see  incarceration as a civil rights issue of historic proportions in a way they had not seen it before. President Obama and Attorney General  Eric Holder have come out very strongly on sentencing reform, on the need to address  racial disparity in incarceration. We're seeing states throw out Stop and Frisk as the civil rights violation that it is. We're seeing cities and states decriminalize possession of marijuana. New York, New Jersey and California have been dropping their  prison populations, closing prisons, while also seeing a big drop in crime. Texas has gotten into the game now, also closing prisons,  investing in education. This curious coalition is building  from the right and the left, made up of former prisoners and fiscal conservatives, of civil rights activists and libertarians, of young people taking to the streets to protest police violence against unarmed black teenagers, and older, wealthier people — some of you are here in the audience — pumping big money into  decarceration initiatives In a deeply divided Congress, the work of reforming  our criminal justice system is just about the only thing that the right and the left are coming together on.I did not think I would see this political moment in my lifetime. I think many of the people who have been working tirelessly to write about the causes and consequences of our historically  high incarceration rates did not think we would see this moment in our lifetime. The question for us now is, how much can we make of it? How much can we change?I want to end with a call to young people, the young people attending college and the young people struggling to stay out of prison or to make it through prison and return home. It may seem like these paths to adulthood are worlds apart, but the young people participating in these two institutions conveying us to adulthood, they have one thing in common: Both can be leaders in the work of reforming our criminal justice system. Young people have always been leaders in the fight for equal rights, the fight for more people  to be granted dignity and a fighting chance at freedom. The mission for the generation  of young people coming of age in this, a sea-change moment, potentially, is to end mass incarceration and  build a new criminal justice system, emphasis on the word justice.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alice_goffman_college_or_prison_two_destinies_one_blatant_injustice
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"I am a plant geneticist. I study genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress. In recent years, millions of people around the world have come to believe that there's something sinister about genetic modification. Today, I am going to provide a different perspective.First, let me introduce my husband, Raoul. He's an organic farmer. On his farm, he plants a variety of different crops. This is one of the many ecological farming practices he uses to keep his farm healthy. Imagine some of the reactions we get: ""Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? Can you agree on anything?""Well, we can, and it's not difficult, because we have the same goal. We want to help nourish the growing population without further destroying the environment. I believe this is the greatest challenge of our time.Now, genetic modification is not new; virtually everything we eat has been genetically modified in some manner. Let me give you a few examples. On the left is an image of the ancient ancestor of modern corn. You see a single roll of grain that's covered in a hard case. Unless you have a hammer, teosinte isn't good for making tortillas. Now, take a look at the ancient ancestor of banana. You can see the large seeds. And unappetizing brussel sprouts, and eggplant, so beautiful.Now, to create these varieties, breeders have used many different genetic techniques over the years. Some of them are quite creative, like mixing two different species together using a process called grafting to create this variety that's half tomato and half potato. Breeders have also used other types of genetic techniques, such as random mutagenesis, which induces uncharacterized mutations into the plants. The rice in the cereal that many of us fed our babies was developed using this approach.Now, today, breeders have even more options to choose from. Some of them are extraordinarily precise.I want to give you a couple examples from my own work. I work on rice, which is a staple food for more than half the world's people. Each year, 40 percent of the potential harvest is lost to pest and disease. For this reason, farmers plant rice varieties that carry genes for resistance. This approach has been used for nearly 100 years. Yet, when I started graduate school, no one knew what these genes were. It wasn't until the 1990s that scientists finally uncovered the genetic basis of resistance. In my laboratory, we isolated a gene for immunity to a very serious bacterial disease in Asia and Africa. We found we could engineer the gene into a conventional rice variety that's normally susceptible, and you can see the two leaves on the bottom here are highly resistant to infection.Now, the same month that my laboratory published our discovery on the rice immunity gene, my friend and colleague Dave Mackill stopped by my office. He said, ""Seventy million rice farmers are having trouble growing rice."" That's because their fields are flooded, and these rice farmers are living on less than two dollars a day. Although rice grows well in standing water, most rice varieties will die if they're submerged for more than three days. Flooding is expected to be increasingly problematic as the climate changes. He told me that his graduate student Kenong Xu and himself were studying an ancient variety of rice that had an amazing property. It could withstand two weeks of complete submergence. He asked if I would be willing to help them isolate this gene. I said yes — I was very excited, because I knew if we were successful, we could potentially help millions of farmers grow rice even when their fields were flooded.Kenong spent 10 years looking for this gene. Then one day, he said, ""Come look at this experiment. You've got to see it."" I went to the greenhouse and I saw that the conventional variety that was flooded for 18 days had died, but the rice variety that we had genetically engineered with a new gene we had discovered, called Sub1, was alive. Kenong and I were amazed and excited that a single gene could have this dramatic effect. But this is just a greenhouse experiment. Would this work in the field?Now, I'm going to show you a four-month time lapse video taken at the International Rice Research Institute. Breeders there developed a rice variety carrying the Sub1 gene using another genetic technique called precision breeding. On the left, you can see the Sub1 variety, and on the right is the conventional variety. Both varieties do very well at first, but then the field is flooded for 17 days. You can see the Sub1 variety does great. In fact, it produces three and a half times more grain than the conventional variety. I love this video because it shows the power of plant genetics to help farmers. Last year, with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three and a half million farmers grew Sub1 rice.(Applause)Thank you.Now, many people don't mind genetic modification when it comes to moving rice genes around, rice genes in rice plants, or even when it comes to mixing species together through grafting or random mutagenesis. But when it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, a lot of people say, ""Yuck."" Why would you do that? The reason is that sometimes it's the cheapest, safest, and most effective technology for enhancing food security and advancing sustainable agriculture. I'm going to give you three examples.First, take a look at papaya. It's delicious, right? But now, look at this papaya. This papaya is infected with papaya ringspot virus. In the 1950s, this virus nearly wiped out the entire production of papaya on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Many people thought that the Hawaiian papaya was doomed, but then, a local Hawaiian, a plant pathologist named Dennis Gonsalves, decided to try to fight this disease using genetic engineering. He took a snippet of viral DNA and he inserted it into the papaya genome. This is kind of like a human getting a vaccination. Now, take a look at his field trial. You can see the genetically engineered papaya in the center. It's immune to infection. The conventional papaya around the outside is severely infected with the virus. Dennis' pioneering work is credited with rescuing the papaya industry. Today, 20 years later, there's still no other method to control this disease. There's no organic method. There's no conventional method. Eighty percent of Hawaiian papaya is genetically engineered.Now, some of you may still feel a little queasy about viral genes in your food, but consider this: The genetically engineered papaya carries just a trace amount of the virus. If you bite into an organic or conventional papaya that is infected with the virus, you will be chewing on tenfold more viral protein.Now, take a look at this pest feasting on an eggplant. The brown you see is frass, what comes out the back end of the insect. To control this serious pest, which can devastate the entire eggplant crop in Bangladesh, Bangladeshi farmers spray insecticides two to three times a week, sometimes twice a day, when pest pressure is high. But we know that some insecticides are very harmful to human health, especially when farmers and their families cannot afford proper protection, like these children. In less developed countries, it's estimated that 300,000 people die every year because of insecticide misuse and exposure. Cornell and Bangladeshi scientists decided to fight this disease using a genetic technique that builds on an organic farming approach. Organic farmers like my husband Raoul spray an insecticide called B.T., which is based on a bacteria. This pesticide is very specific to caterpillar pests, and in fact, it's nontoxic to humans, fish and birds. It's less toxic than table salt. But this approach does not work well in Bangladesh. That's because these insecticide sprays are difficult to find, they're expensive, and they don't prevent the insect from getting inside the plants. In the genetic approach, scientists cut the gene out of the bacteria and insert it directly into the eggplant genome. Will this work to reduce insecticide sprays in Bangladesh? Definitely. Last season, farmers reported they were able to reduce their insecticide use by a huge amount, almost down to zero. They're able to harvest and replant for the next season.Now, I've given you a couple examples of how genetic engineering can be used to fight pests and disease and to reduce the amount of insecticides. My final example is an example where genetic engineering can be used to reduce malnutrition. In less developed countries, 500,000 children go blind every year because of lack of Vitamin A. More than half will die. For this reason, scientists supported by the Rockefeller Foundation genetically engineered a golden rice to produce beta-carotene, which is the precursor of Vitamin A. This is the same pigment that we find in carrots. Researchers estimate that just one cup of golden rice per day will save the lives of thousands of children. But golden rice is virulently opposed by activists who are against genetic modification. Just last year, activists invaded and destroyed a field trial in the Philippines. When I heard about the destruction, I wondered if they knew that they were destroying much more than a scientific research project, that they were destroying medicines that children desperately needed to save their sight and their lives.Some of my friends and family still worry: How do you know genes in the food are safe to eat? I explained the genetic engineering, the process of moving genes between species, has been used for more than 40 years in wines, in medicine, in plants, in cheeses. In all that time, there hasn't been a single case of harm to human health or the environment. But I say, look, I'm not asking you to believe me. Science is not a belief system. My opinion doesn't matter. Let's look at the evidence. After 20 years of careful study and rigorous peer review by thousands of independent scientists, every major scientific organization in the world has concluded that the crops currently on the market are safe to eat and that the process of genetic engineering is no more risky than older methods of genetic modification. These are precisely the same organizations that most of us trust when it comes to other important scientific issues such as global climate change or the safety of vaccines.Raoul and I believe that, instead of worrying about the genes in our food, we must focus on how we can help children grow up healthy. We must ask if farmers in rural communities can thrive, and if everyone can afford the food. We must try to minimize environmental degradation. What scares me most about the loud arguments and misinformation about plant genetics is that the poorest people who most need the technology may be denied access because of the vague fears and prejudices of those who have enough to eat.We have a huge challenge in front of us. Let's celebrate scientific innovation and use it. It's our responsibility to do everything we can to help alleviate human suffering and safeguard the environment.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.Chris Anderson: Powerfully argued. The people who argue against GMOs, as I understand it, the core piece comes from two things. One, complexity and unintended consequence. Nature is this incredibly complex machine. If we put out these brand new genes that we've created, that haven't been challenged by years of evolution, and they started mixing up with the rest of what's going on, couldn't that trigger some kind of cataclysm or problem, especially when you add in the commercial incentive that some companies have to put them out there? The fear is that those incentives mean that the decision is not made on purely scientific grounds, and even if it was, that there would be unintended consequences. How do we know that there isn't a big risk of some unintended consequence? Often our tinkerings with nature do lead to big, unintended consequences and chain reactions.Pamela Ronald: Okay, so on the commercial aspects, one thing that's really important to understand is that, in the developed world, farmers in the United States, almost all farmers, whether they're organic or conventional, they buy seed produced by seed companies. So there's definitely a commercial interest to sell a lot of seed, but hopefully they're selling seed that the farmers want to buy. It's different in the less developed world. Farmers there cannot afford the seed. These seeds are not being sold. These seeds are being distributed freely through traditional kinds of certification groups, so it is very important in less developed countries that the seed be freely available.CA: Wouldn't some activists say that this is actually part of the conspiracy? This is the heroin strategy. You seed the stuff, and people have no choice but to be hooked on these seeds forever?PR: There are a lot of conspiracy theories for sure, but it doesn't work that way. For example, the seed that's being distributed, the flood-tolerant rice, this is distributed freely through Indian and Bangladeshi seed certification agencies, so there's no commercial interest at all. The golden rice was developed through support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Again, it's being freely distributed. There are no commercial profits in this situation. And now to address your other question about, well, mixing genes, aren't there some unintended consequences? Absolutely — every time we do something different, there's an unintended consequence, but one of the points I was trying to make is that we've been doing kind of crazy things to our plants, mutagenesis using radiation or chemical mutagenesis. This induces thousands of uncharacterized mutations, and this is even a higher risk of unintended consequence than many of the modern methods. And so it's really important not to use the term GMO because it's scientifically meaningless. I feel it's very important to talk about a specific crop and a specific product, and think about the needs of the consumer.CA: So part of what's happening here is that there's a mental model in a lot of people that nature is nature, and it's pure and pristine, and to tinker with it is Frankensteinian. It's making something that's pure dangerous in some way, and I think you're saying that that whole model just misunderstands how nature is. Nature is a much more chaotic interplay of genetic changes that have been happening all the time anyway.PR: That's absolutely true, and there's no such thing as pure food. I mean, you could not spray eggplant with insecticides or not genetically engineer it, but then you'd be stuck eating frass. So there's no purity there.CA: Pam Ronald, thank you.  That was powerfully argued. PR: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pamela_ronald_the_case_for_engineering_our_food
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"Most of us think of motion as a very visual thing. If I walk across this stage or gesture with my hands while I speak, that motion is something that you can see. But there's a world of important motion that's too subtle for the human eye, and over the past few years, we've started to find that cameras can often see this motion even when humans can't.So let me show you what I mean. On the left here, you see video of a person's wrist, and on the right, you see video of a sleeping infant, but if I didn't tell you that these were videos, you might assume that you were looking at two regular images, because in both cases, these videos appear to be almost completely still. But there's actually a lot of subtle motion going on here, and if you were to touch the wrist on the left, you would feel a pulse, and if you were to hold the infant on the right, you would feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took each breath. And these motions carry a lot of significance, but they're usually too subtle for us to see, so instead, we have to observe them through direct contact, through touch.But a few years ago, my colleagues at MIT developed what they call a motion microscope, which is software that finds these subtle motions in video and amplifies them so that they become large enough for us to see. And so, if we use their software on the left video, it lets us see the pulse in this wrist, and if we were to count that pulse, we could even figure out this person's heart rate. And if we used the same software on the right video, it lets us see each breath that this infant takes, and we can use this as a contact-free way to monitor her breathing.And so this technology is really powerful because it takes these phenomena that we normally have to experience through touch and it lets us capture them visually and non-invasively.So a couple years ago, I started working with the folks that created that software, and we decided to pursue a crazy idea. We thought, it's cool that we can use software to visualize tiny motions like this, and you can almost think of it as a way to extend our sense of touch. But what if we could do the same thing with our ability to hear? What if we could use video to capture the vibrations of sound, which are just another kind of motion, and turn everything that we see into a microphone?Now, this is a bit of a strange idea, so let me try to put it in perspective for you. Traditional microphones work by converting the motion of an internal diaphragm into an electrical signal, and that diaphragm is designed to move readily with sound so that its motion can be recorded and interpreted as audio. But sound causes all objects to vibrate. Those vibrations are just usually too subtle and too fast for us to see.So what if we record them with a high-speed camera and then use software to extract tiny motions from our high-speed video, and analyze those motions to figure out what sounds created them? This would let us turn visible objects into visual microphones from a distance. And so we tried this out, and here's one of our experiments, where we took this potted plant that you see on the right and we filmed it with a high-speed camera while a nearby loudspeaker played this sound.(Music: ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"")And so here's the video that we recorded, and we recorded it at thousands of frames per second, but even if you look very closely, all you'll see are some leaves that are pretty much just sitting there doing nothing, because our sound only moved those leaves by about a micrometer. That's one ten-thousandth of a centimeter, which spans somewhere between a hundredth and a thousandth of a pixel in this image. So you can squint all you want, but motion that small is pretty much perceptually invisible. But it turns out that something can be perceptually invisible and still be numerically significant, because with the right algorithms, we can take this silent, seemingly still video and we can recover this sound.(Music: ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"")(Applause)So how is this possible? How can we get so much information out of so little motion? Well, let's say that those leaves move by just a single micrometer, and let's say that that shifts our image by just a thousandth of a pixel. That may not seem like much, but a single frame of video may have hundreds of thousands of pixels in it, and so if we combine all of the tiny motions that we see from across that entire image, then suddenly a thousandth of a pixel can start to add up to something pretty significant.On a personal note, we were pretty psyched when we figured this out. (Laughter) But even with the right algorithm, we were still missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. You see, there are a lot of factors that affect when and how well this technique will work. There's the object and how far away it is; there's the camera and the lens that you use; how much light is shining on the object and how loud your sound is. And even with the right algorithm, we had to be very careful with our early experiments, because if we got any of these factors wrong, there was no way to tell what the problem was. We would just get noise back. And so a lot of our early experiments looked like this. And so here I am, and on the bottom left, you can kind of see our high-speed camera, which is pointed at a bag of chips, and the whole thing is lit by these bright lamps. And like I said, we had to be very careful in these early experiments, so this is how it went down.(Video) Abe Davis: Three, two, one, go. Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb!(Laughter)AD: So this experiment looks completely ridiculous. (Laughter) I mean, I'm screaming at a bag of chips — (Laughter) — and we're blasting it with so much light, we literally melted the first bag we tried this on. (Laughter) But ridiculous as this experiment looks, it was actually really important, because we were able to recover this sound.(Audio) Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb!(Applause)AD: And this was really significant, because it was the first time we recovered intelligible human speech from silent video of an object. And so it gave us this point of reference, and gradually we could start to modify the experiment, using different objects or moving the object further away, using less light or quieter sounds. And we analyzed all of these experiments until we really understood the limits of our technique, because once we understood those limits, we could figure out how to push them.And that led to experiments like this one, where again, I'm going to speak to a bag of chips, but this time we've moved our camera about 15 feet away, outside, behind a soundproof window, and the whole thing is lit by only natural sunlight. And so here's the video that we captured. And this is what things sounded like from inside, next to the bag of chips.(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go.AD: And here's what we were able to recover from our silent video captured outside behind that window.(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go.(Applause)AD: And there are other ways that we can push these limits as well. So here's a quieter experiment where we filmed some earphones plugged into a laptop computer, and in this case, our goal was to recover the music that was playing on that laptop from just silent video of these two little plastic earphones, and we were able to do this so well that I could even Shazam our results. (Laughter)(Music: ""Under Pressure"" by Queen)(Applause)And we can also push things by changing the hardware that we use. Because the experiments I've shown you so far were done with a camera, a high-speed camera, that can record video about a 100 times faster than most cell phones, but we've also found a way to use this technique with more regular cameras, and we do that by taking advantage of what's called a rolling shutter. You see, most cameras record images one row at a time, and so if an object moves during the recording of a single image, there's a slight time delay between each row, and this causes slight artifacts that get coded into each frame of a video. And so what we found is that by analyzing these artifacts, we can actually recover sound using a modified version of our algorithm. So here's an experiment we did where we filmed a bag of candy while a nearby loudspeaker played the same ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"" music from before, but this time, we used just a regular store-bought camera, and so in a second, I'll play for you the sound that we recovered, and it's going to sound distorted this time, but listen and see if you can still recognize the music.(Audio: ""Mary Had a Little Lamb"")And so, again, that sounds distorted, but what's really amazing here is that we were able to do this with something that you could literally run out and pick up at a Best Buy.So at this point, a lot of people see this work, and they immediately think about surveillance. And to be fair, it's not hard to imagine how you might use this technology to spy on someone. But keep in mind that there's already a lot of very mature technology out there for surveillance. In fact, people have been using lasers to eavesdrop on objects from a distance for decades. But what's really new here, what's really different, is that now we have a way to picture the vibrations of an object, which gives us a new lens through which to look at the world, and we can use that lens to learn not just about forces like sound that cause an object to vibrate, but also about the object itself.And so I want to take a step back and think about how that might change the ways that we use video, because we usually use video to look at things, and I've just shown you how we can use it to listen to things. But there's another important way that we learn about the world: that's by interacting with it. We push and pull and poke and prod things. We shake things and see what happens. And that's something that video still won't let us do, at least not traditionally. So I want to show you some new work, and this is based on an idea I had just a few months ago, so this is actually the first time I've shown it to a public audience. And the basic idea is that we're going to use the vibrations in a video to capture objects in a way that will let us interact with them and see how they react to us.So here's an object, and in this case, it's a wire figure in the shape of a human, and we're going to film that object with just a regular camera. So there's nothing special about this camera. In fact, I've actually done this with my cell phone before. But we do want to see the object vibrate, so to make that happen, we're just going to bang a little bit on the surface where it's resting while we record this video.So that's it: just five seconds of regular video, while we bang on this surface, and we're going to use the vibrations in that video to learn about the structural and material properties of our object, and we're going to use that information to create something new and interactive. And so here's what we've created. And it looks like a regular image, but this isn't an image, and it's not a video, because now I can take my mouse and I can start interacting with the object. And so what you see here is a simulation of how this object would respond to new forces that we've never seen before, and we created it from just five seconds of regular video.(Applause)And so this is a really powerful way to look at the world, because it lets us predict how objects will respond to new situations, and you could imagine, for instance, looking at an old bridge and wondering what would happen, how would that bridge hold up if I were to drive my car across it. And that's a question that you probably want to answer before you start driving across that bridge. And of course, there are going to be limitations to this technique, just like there were with the visual microphone, but we found that it works in a lot of situations that you might not expect, especially if you give it longer videos.So for example, here's a video that I captured of a bush outside of my apartment, and I didn't do anything to this bush, but by capturing a minute-long video, a gentle breeze caused enough vibrations that we could learn enough about this bush to create this simulation. (Applause) And so you could imagine giving this to a film director, and letting him control, say, the strength and direction of wind in a shot after it's been recorded. Or, in this case, we pointed our camera at a hanging curtain, and you can't even see any motion in this video, but by recording a two-minute-long video, natural air currents in this room created enough subtle, imperceptible motions and vibrations that we could learn enough to create this simulation.And ironically, we're kind of used to having this kind of interactivity when it comes to virtual objects, when it comes to video games and 3D models, but to be able to capture this information from real objects in the real world using just simple, regular video, is something new that has a lot of potential.So here are the amazing people who worked with me on these projects. (Applause)And what I've shown you today is only the beginning. We've just started to scratch the surface of what you can do with this kind of imaging, because it gives us a new way to capture our surroundings with common, accessible technology. And so looking to the future, it's going to be really exciting to explore what this can tell us about the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/abe_davis_new_video_technology_that_reveals_an_object_s_hidden_properties
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"Isadora Duncan — (Music) — crazy, long-legged woman from San Francisco, got tired of this country, and she wanted to get out.Isadora was famous somewhere around 1908 for putting up a blue curtain, and she would stand with her hands over her solar plexus and she would wait, and she would wait, and then, she would move.(Music)Josh and I and Somi call this piece ""The Red Circle and the Blue Curtain."" Red circle. Blue curtain. But, this is not the beginning of the 20th century. This is a morning in Vancouver in 2015.(Music) (Singing)Come on, Josh!(Music)(Singing) Go!Are we there yet? I don't think so.Hey, yeah!(Music)What time is it?(Music)Where are we?Josh.Somi.Bill T.Josh.Somi.Bill T.(Applause)Yeah, yeah!","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_t_jones_the_dancer_the_singer_the_cellist_and_a_moment_of_creative_magic
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"You may not realize this, but there are more bacteria in your body than stars in our entire galaxy. This fascinating universe of bacteria inside of us is an integral part of our health, and our technology is evolving so rapidly that today we can program these bacteria like we program computers.Now, the diagram that you see here, I know it looks like some kind of sports play, but it is actually a blueprint of the first bacterial program I developed. And like writing software, we can print and write DNA into different algorithms and programs inside of bacteria. What this program does is produces fluorescent proteins in a rhythmic fashion and generates a small molecule that allows bacteria to communicate and synchronize, as you're seeing in this movie. The growing colony of bacteria that you see here is about the width of a human hair. Now, what you can't see is that our genetic program instructs these bacteria to each produce small molecules, and these molecules travel between the thousands of individual bacteria telling them when to turn on and off. And the bacteria synchronize quite well at this scale, but because the molecule that synchronizes them together can only travel so fast, in larger colonies of bacteria, this results in traveling waves between bacteria that are far away from each other, and you can see these waves going from right to left across the screen.Now, our genetic program relies on a natural phenomenon called quorum sensing, in which bacteria trigger coordinated and sometimes virulent behaviors once they reach a critical density. You can observe quorum sensing in action in this movie, where a growing colony of bacteria only begins to glow once it reaches a high or critical density. Our genetic program continues producing these rhythmic patterns of fluorescent proteins as the colony grows outwards. This particular movie and experiment we call The Supernova, because it looks like an exploding star.Now, besides programming these beautiful patterns, I wondered, what else can we get these bacteria to do? And I decided to explore how we can program bacteria to detect and treat diseases in our bodies like cancer. One of the surprising facts about bacteria is that they can naturally grow inside of tumors. This happens because typically tumors are areas where the immune system has no access, and so bacteria find these tumors and use them as a safe haven to grow and thrive. We started using probiotic bacteria which are safe bacteria that have a health benefit, and found that when orally delivered to mice, these probiotics would selectively grow inside of liver tumors. We realized that the most convenient way to highlight the presence of the probiotics, and hence, the presence of the tumors, was to get these bacteria to produce a signal that would be detectable in the urine, and so we specifically programmed these probiotics to make a molecule that would change the color of your urine to indicate the presence of cancer. We went on to show that this technology could sensitively and specifically detect liver cancer, one that is challenging to detect otherwise.Now, since these bacteria specifically localize to tumors, we've been programming them to not only detect cancer but also to treat cancer by producing therapeutic molecules from within the tumor environment that shrink the existing tumors, and we've been doing this using quorum sensing programs like you saw in the previous movies.Altogether, imagine in the future taking a programmed probiotic that could detect and treat cancer, or even other diseases. Our ability to program bacteria and program life opens up new horizons in cancer research, and to share this vision, I worked with artist Vik Muniz to create the symbol of the universe, made entirely out of bacteria or cancer cells. Ultimately, my hope is that the beauty and purpose of this microscopic universe can inspire new and creative approaches for the future of cancer research.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tal_danino_we_can_use_bacteria_to_detect_cancer_and_maybe_treat_it
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"In June of 1998, Tori Murden McClure left Nags Head, North Carolina for France.That's her boat, the American Pearl. It's 23 feet long and just six feet across at its widest point. The deck was the size of a cargo bed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Tori and her friends built it by hand, and it weighed about 1,800 pounds. Her plan was to row it alone across the Atlantic Ocean — no motor, no sail — something no woman and no American had ever done before. This would be her route: over 3,600 miles across the open North Atlantic Ocean.Professionally, Tori worked as a project administrator for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, her hometown, but her real passion was exploring. This was not her first big expedition. Several years earlier, she'd become the first woman to ski to the South Pole. She was an accomplished rower in college, even competed for a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, but this, this was different.(Video) (Music) Tori Murden McClure: Hi. It's Sunday, July 5. Sector time 9 a.m. So that's Kentucky time now.Dawn Landes: Tori made these videos as she rowed. This is her 21st day at sea. At this point, she'd covered over 1,000 miles, had had no radio contact in more than two weeks following a storm that disabled all her long-range communications systems just five days in. Most days looked like this. At this point, she'd rowed over 200,000 strokes, fighting the current and the wind. Some days, she traveled as little as 15 feet. Yeah. And as frustrating as those days were, other days were like this.(Video) TMM: And I want to show you my little friends.DL: She saw fish, dolphins, whales, sharks, and even some sea turtles. After two weeks with no human contact, Tori was able to contact a local cargo ship via VHF radio.(Video) TMM: Do you guys have a weather report, over?Man: Heading up to a low ahead of you but it's heading, and you're obviously going northeast and there's a high behind us. That'd be coming east-northeast also.TMM: Good.DL: She's pretty happy to talk to another human at this point.(Video) TMM: So weather report says nothing dramatic is going to happen soon.DL: What the weather report didn't tell her was that she was rowing right into the path of Hurricane Danielle in the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic.(Video) TMM: Just sprained my ankle. There's a very strong wind from the east now. It's blowing about. It's blowing! After 12 days of storm I get to row for four hours without a flagging wind. I'm not very happy right now. As happy as I was this morning, I am unhappy now, so ...DL: After nearly three months at sea, she'd covered over 3,000 miles. She was two thirds of the way there, but in the storm, the waves were the size of a seven-story building. Her boat kept capsizing. Some of them were pitchpole capsizes, flipping her end over end, and rowing became impossible.(Video) TMM: It's 6:30 a.m. I'm in something big, bad and ugly. Two capsizes. Last capsize, I took the rib off the top of my ceiling with my back. I've had about six capsizes now. The last one was a pitchpole. I have the Argus beacon with me. I would set off the distress signal, but quite frankly, I don't think they'd ever be able to find this little boat. It's so far underwater right now, the only part that's showing pretty much is the cabin. It's about 10 a.m. I've lost track of the number of capsizes. I seem to capsize about every 15 minutes. I think I may have broken my left arm. The waves are tearing the boat to shreds. I keep praying because I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this. DL: Tori set off her distress beacon and was rescued by a passing container ship. They found her abandoned boat two months later adrift near France. I read about it in the newspaper.In 1998, I was a high school student living in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, I live in New York City. I'm a songwriter. And her bravery stuck with me, and I'm adapting her story into a musical called ""Row."" When Tori returned home, she was feeling disheartened, she was broke. She was having a hard time making the transition back into civilization.In this scene, she sits at home. The phone is ringing, her friends are calling, but she doesn't know how to talk to them. She sings this song. It's called ""Dear Heart.""(Guitar)When I was dreaming,I took my bodyto beautiful placesI'd never been.I saw Gibraltar,and stars of Kentuckyburned in the moonlight,making me smile.And when I awoke here,the sky was so cloudy.I walked to a partywhere people I knowtry hard to know meand ask where I've been,but I can't explainwhat I've seen to them.Ah, listen, dear heart.Just pay attention,go right from the start.Ah, listen, dear heart.You can fall off the map,but don't fall apart.Ooh ooh ooh,ah ah ah ah ah.Ah ah,ah ah ah.When I was out there,the ocean would hold me,rock me and throw me,light as a child.But now I'm so heavy,nothing consoles me.My mind floats like driftwood,wayward and wild.Ah, listen, dear heart.Just pay attention,go right from the start.Ah, listen, dear heart.You can fall off the map,but don't fall apart.Ooh.Eventually, Tori starts to get her feet under her. She starts hanging out with her friends again. She meets a guy and falls in love for the first time. She gets a new job working for another Louisville native, Muhammad Ali. One day, at lunch with her new boss, Tori shares the news that two other women are setting out to row across the mid-Atlantic, to do something that she almost died trying to do.His response was classic Ali: ""You don't want to go through life as the woman who almost rowed across the ocean.""He was right. Tori rebuilt the American Pearl, and in December of 1999, she did it.(Applause) (Guitar)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dawn_landes_a_song_for_my_hero_the_woman_who_rowed_into_a_hurricane
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"(Music)These bees are in my backyard in Berkeley, California. Until last year, I'd never kept bees before, but National Geographic asked me to photograph a story about them, and I decided, to be able to take compelling images, I should start keeping bees myself. And as you may know, bees pollinate one third of our food crops, and lately they've been having a really hard time. So as a photographer, I wanted to explore what this problem really looks like. So I'm going to show you what I found over the last year.This furry little creature is a fresh young bee halfway emerged from its brood cell, and bees right now are dealing with several different problems, including pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss, but the single greatest threat is a parasitic mite from Asia, Varroa destructor. And this pinhead-sized mite crawls onto young bees and sucks their blood. This eventually destroys a hive because it weakens the immune system of the bees, and it makes them more vulnerable to stress and disease.Now, bees are the most sensitive when they're developing inside their brood cells, and I wanted to know what that process really looks like, so I teamed up with a bee lab at U.C. Davis and figured out how to raise bees in front of a camera. I'm going to show you the first 21 days of a bee's life condensed into 60 seconds.This is a bee egg as it hatches into a larva, and those newly hatched larvae swim around their cells feeding on this white goo that nurse bees secrete for them. Then, their head and their legs slowly differentiate as they transform into pupae. Here's that same pupation process, and you can actually see the mites running around in the cells. Then the tissue in their body reorganizes and the pigment slowly develops in their eyes. The last step of the process is their skin shrivels up and they sprout hair. (Music)So — (Applause)As you can see halfway through that video, the mites were running around on the baby bees, and the way that beekeepers typically manage these mites is they treat their hives with chemicals. In the long run, that's bad news, so researchers are working on finding alternatives to control these mites.This is one of those alternatives. It's an experimental breeding program at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge, and this queen and her attendant bees are part of that program.Now, the researchers figured out that some of the bees have a natural ability to fight mites, so they set out to breed a line of mite-resistant bees. This is what it takes to breed bees in a lab. The virgin queen is sedated and then artificially inseminated using this precision instrument. Now, this procedure allows the researchers to control exactly which bees are being crossed, but there's a tradeoff in having this much control. They succeeded in breeding mite-resistant bees, but in that process, those bees started to lose traits like their gentleness and their ability to store honey, so to overcome that problem, these researchers are now collaborating with commercial beekeepers. This is Bret Adee opening one of his 72,000 beehives. He and his brother run the largest beekeeping operation in the world, and the USDA is integrating their mite-resistant bees into his operation with the hope that over time, they'll be able to select the bees that are not only mite-resistant but also retain all of these qualities that make them useful to us.And to say it like that makes it sound like we're manipulating and exploiting bees, and the truth is, we've been doing that for thousands of years. We took this wild creature and put it inside of a box, practically domesticating it, and originally that was so that we could harvest their honey, but over time we started losing our native pollinators, our wild pollinators, and there are many places now where those wild pollinators can no longer meet the pollination demands of our agriculture, so these managed bees have become an integral part of our food system.So when people talk about saving bees, my interpretation of that is we need to save our relationship to bees, and in order to design new solutions, we have to understand the basic biology of bees and understand the effects of stressors that we sometimes cannot see. In other words, we have to understand bees up close.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anand_varma_a_thrilling_look_at_the_first_21_days_of_a_bee_s_life
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"When I was nine years old, my mom asked me what I would want my house to look like, and I drew this fairy mushroom. And then she actually built it. (Laughter)I don't think I realized this was so unusual at the time, and maybe I still haven't, because I'm still designing houses. This is a six-story bespoke home on the island of Bali. It's built almost entirely from bamboo. The living room overlooks the valley from the fourth floor. You enter the house by a bridge. It can get hot in the tropics, so we make big curving roofs to catch the breezes. But some rooms have tall windows to keep the air conditioning in and the bugs out. This room we left open. We made an air-conditioned, tented bed. And one client wanted a TV room in the corner of her living room. Boxing off an area with tall walls just didn't feel right, so instead, we made this giant woven pod.Now, we do have all the necessary luxuries, like bathrooms. This one is a basket in the corner of the living room, and I've got tell you, some people actually hesitate to use it. We have not quite figured out our acoustic insulation. (Laughter) So there are lots of things that we're still working on, but one thing I have learned is that bamboo will treat you well if you use it right.It's actually a wild grass. It grows on otherwise unproductive land — deep ravines, mountainsides. It lives off of rainwater, spring water, sunlight, and of the 1,450 species of bamboo that grow across the world, we use just seven of them.That's my dad. He's the one who got me building with bamboo, and he is standing in a clump of Dendrocalamus asper niger that he planted just seven years ago. Each year, it sends up a new generation of shoots. That shoot, we watched it grow a meter in three days just last week, so we're talking about sustainable timber in three years.Now, we harvest from hundreds of family-owned clumps. Betung, as we call it, it's really long, up to 18 meters of usable length. Try getting that truck down the mountain. And it's strong: it has the tensile strength of steel, the compressive strength of concrete. Slam four tons straight down on a pole, and it can take it. Because it's hollow, it's lightweight, light enough to be lifted by just a few men, or, apparently, one woman.(Laughter) (Applause)And when my father built Green School in Bali, he chose bamboo for all of the buildings on campus, because he saw it as a promise. It's a promise to the kids. It's one sustainable material that they will not run out of. And when I first saw these structures under construction about six years ago, I just thought, this makes perfect sense. It is growing all around us. It's strong. It's elegant. It's earthquake-resistant. Why hasn't this happened sooner, and what can we do with it next?So along with some of the original builders of Green School, I founded Ibuku. Ibu means ""mother,"" and ku means ""mine,"" so it represents my Mother Earth, and at Ibuku, we are a team of artisans, architects and designers, and what we're doing together is creating a new way of building. Over the past five years together, we have built over 50 unique structures, most of them in Bali. Nine of them are at Green Village — you've just seen inside some of these homes — and we fill them with bespoke furniture, we surround them with veggie gardens, we would love to invite you all to come visit someday. And while you're there, you can also see Green School — we keep building classrooms there each year — as well as an updated fairy mushroom house.We're also working on a little house for export. This is a traditional Sumbanese home that we replicated, right down to the details and textiles. A restaurant with an open-air kitchen. It looks a lot like a kitchen, right? And a bridge that spans 22 meters across a river.Now, what we're doing, it's not entirely new. From little huts to elaborate bridges like this one in Java, bamboo has been in use across the tropical regions of the world for literally tens of thousands of years. There are islands and even continents that were first reached by bamboo rafts. But until recently, it was almost impossible to reliably protect bamboo from insects, and so, just about everything that was ever built out of bamboo is gone. Unprotected bamboo weathers. Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust. And so that's why most people, especially in Asia, think that you couldn't be poor enough or rural enough to actually want to live in a bamboo house.And so we thought, what will it take to change their minds, to convince people that bamboo is worth building with, much less worth aspiring to?First, we needed safe treatment solutions. Borax is a natural salt. It turns bamboo into a viable building material. Treat it properly, design it carefully, and a bamboo structure can last a lifetime.Second, build something extraordinary out of it. Inspire people. Fortunately, Balinese culture fosters craftsmanship. It values the artisan. So combine those with the adventurous outliers from new generations of locally trained architects and designers and engineers, and always remember that you are designing for curving, tapering, hollow poles. No two poles alike, no straight lines, no two-by-fours here. The tried-and-true, well-crafted formulas and vocabulary of architecture do not apply here. We have had to invent our own rules. We ask the bamboo what it's good at, what it wants to become, and what it says is: respect it, design for its strengths, protect it from water, and to make the most of its curves.So we design in real 3D, making scale structural models out of the same material that we'll later use to build the house. And bamboo model-making, it's an art, as well as some hardcore engineering.So that's the blueprint of the house.(Laughter)And we bring it to site, and with tiny rulers, we measure each pole, and consider each curve, and we choose a piece of bamboo from the pile to replicate that house on site.When it comes down to the details, we consider everything. Why are doors so often rectangular? Why not round? How could you make a door better? Well, its hinges battle with gravity, and gravity will always win in the end, so why not have it pivot on the center where it can stay balanced? And while you're at it, why not doors shaped like teardrops?To reap the selective benefits and work within the constraints of this material, we have really had to push ourselves, and within that constraint, we have found space for something new. It's a challenge: how do you make a ceiling if you don't have any flat boards to work with? Let me tell you, sometimes I dream of sheet rock and plywood. (Laughter) But if what you've got is skilled craftsmen and itsy bitsy little splits, weave that ceiling together, stretch a canvas over it, lacquer it. How do you design durable kitchen countertops that do justice to this curving structure you've just built? Slice up a boulder like a loaf of bread, hand-carve each to fit the other, leave the crusts on, and what we're doing, it is almost entirely handmade. The structural connections of our buildings are reinforced by steel joints, but we use a lot of hand-whittled bamboo pins. There are thousands of pins in each floor. This floor is made of glossy and durable bamboo skin. You can feel the texture under bare feet.And the floor that you walk on, can it affect the way that you walk? Can it change the footprint that you'll ultimately leave on the world? I remember being nine years old and feeling wonder, and possibility, and a little bit of idealism. And we've got a really long way to go, there's a lot left to learn, but one thing I know is that with creativity and commitment, you can create beauty and comfort and safety and even luxury out of a material that will grow back.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elora_hardy_magical_houses_made_of_bamboo
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"I know what you're thinking: ""Why does that guy get to sit down?"" That's because this is radio.(Music)I tell radio stories about design, and I report on all kinds of stories: buildings and toothbrushes, mascots and wayfinding and fonts. My mission is to get people to engage with the design that they care about so they begin to pay attention to all forms of design. When you decode the world with design intent in mind, the world becomes kind of magical. Instead of seeing the broken things, you see all the little bits of genius that anonymous designers have sweated over to make our lives better. And that's essentially the definition of design: making life better and providing joy. And few things give me greater joy than a well-designed flag.(Laughter)Yeah!(Applause)Happy 50th anniversary on your flag, Canada. It is beautiful, gold standard. Love it.I'm kind of obsessed with flags. Sometimes I bring up the topic of flags, and people are like, ""I don't care about flags,"" and then we start talking about flags, and trust me, 100 percent of people care about flags. There's just something about them that works on our emotions.My family wrapped my Christmas presents as flags this year, including the blue gift bag that's dressed up as the flag of Scotland. I put this picture online, and sure enough, within the first few minutes, someone left a comment that said, ""You can take that Scottish Saltire and shove it up your ass.""(Laughter)See, people are passionate about flags, you know? That's the way it is.What I love about flags is that once you understand the design of flags, what makes a good flag, what makes a bad flag, you can understand the design of almost anything. So what I'm going to do here is, I cracked open an episode of my radio show, ""99% Invisible,"" and I'm going to reconstruct it here on stage, so when I press a button over here — Voice: S for Sound — Roman Mars: It's going to make a sound, and so whenever you hear a sound or a voice or a piece of music, it's because I pressed a button.Voice: Sound.RM: All right, got it? Here we go. Three, two.This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.(Music)Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design.Roman Mars: According to the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillological.Ted Kaye: Vexillology is the study of flags.RM: It's that extra ""lol"" that makes it sound weird.Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory.RM: Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn't even know cities had their own flags.TK: Most larger cities do have flags.RM: Well, I didn't know that, that's Ted Kaye, by the way.TK: Hello. RM: He's a flag expert, he's a totally awesome guy.TK: I'm Ted Kaye, I have edited a scholarly journal on flag studies, and I am currently involved with the Portland Flag Association and the North American Vexillological Association.RM: Ted literally wrote the book on flag design.Narrator: ""Good Flag, Bad Flag.""RM: It's more of a pamphlet, really, it's about 16 pages.TK: Yes, it's called ""Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag.""RM: And that first city flag I discovered in Chicago is a beaut: white field, two horizontal blue stripes, and four six-pointed red stars down the middle.(Sound)Narrator: Number two, use meaningful symbolism.TK: The blue stripes represent the water, the river and the lake.Narrator: The flag's images, colors or pattern should relate to what it symbolizes.TK: The red stars represent significant events in Chicago's history.RM: Namely, the founding of Fort Dearborn on the future site of Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire, the World Columbian Exposition, which everyone remembers because of the White City, and the Century of Progress Exposition, which no one remembers at all.Narrator: Number three, use two to three basic colors.TK: The basic rule for colors is to use two to three colors from the standard color set: red, white, blue, green, yellow and black.RM: The design of the Chicago flag has complete buy-in with an entire cross-section of the city. It is everywhere; every municipal building flies the flag.Whet Moser: There's probably at least one store on every block near where I work that sells some sort of Chicago flag paraphernalia.RM: That's Whet Moser from Chicago magazine.WM: Today, just for example, I went to get a haircut, and when I sat down in the barber's chair, there was a Chicago flag on the box that the barber kept all his tools in, and then in the mirror, there was a Chicago flag on the wall behind me. When I left, a guy passed me who had a Chicago flag badge on his backpack.RM: It's adaptable and remixable. The six-pointed stars in particular show up in all kinds of places.WM: The coffee I bought the other day had a Chicago star on it.RM: It's a distinct symbol of Chicago pride.TK: When a police officer or a firefighter dies in Chicago, often it's not the flag of the United States on his casket. It can be the flag of the city of Chicago. That's how deeply the flag has gotten into the civic imagery of Chicago.RM: And it isn't just that people love Chicago and therefore love the flag. I also think that people love Chicago more because the flag is so cool.TK: A positive feedback loop there between great symbolism and civic pride.RM: OK, so when I moved back to San Francisco in 2008, I researched its flag, because I had never seen it in the previous eight years I lived there. And I found it, I am sorry to say, sadly lacking.(Laughter)I know. It hurts me, too.(Laughter)TK: Well, let me start from the top.Narrator: Number one, keep it simple.TK: Keeping it simple.Narrator: The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory.TK: It's a relatively complex flag.RM: OK, here we go, OK. The main component of the San Francisco flag is a phoenix representing the city rising from the ashes after the devastating fires of the 1850s.TK: A powerful symbol for San Francisco.RM: I still don't really dig the phoenix. Design-wise, it manages to both be too crude and have too many details at the same time, which if you were trying for that, you wouldn't be able to do it, and it just looks bad at a distance, but having deep meaning puts that element in the plus column. Behind the phoenix, the background is mostly white, and then it has a substantial gold border around it.TK: Which is a very attractive design element.RM: I think it's OK, but —(Laughter) here come the big no-nos of flag design.Narrator: Number four, no lettering or seals. Never use writing of any kind.RM: Underneath the phoenix, there's a motto on a ribbon that translates to ""Gold in peace, iron in war,"" plus — and this is the big problem — it says San Francisco across the bottom.TK: If you need to write the name of what you're representing on your flag, your symbolism has failed.(Laughter)(Applause)RM: The United States flag doesn't say ""USA"" across the front. In fact, country flags, they tend to behave. Like, hats off to South Africa and Turkey and Israel and Somalia and Japan and Gambia. There's a bunch of really great country flags, but they obey good design principles because the stakes are high. They're on the international stage. But city, state and regional flags are another story.(Laughter)There is a scourge of bad flags —(Laughter)and they must be stopped.(Laughter)(Applause)That is the truth and that is the dare. The first step is to recognize that we have a problem.(Laughter)A lot of people tend to think that good design is just a matter of taste, and quite honestly, sometimes it is, actually, but sometimes it isn't, all right?(Laughter)Here's the full list of NAVA flag design principles.Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design.Narrator: Number one. TK: Keep it simple.Narrator: Number two. TK: Use meaningful symbolism.Narrator: Number three. TK: Use two to three basic colors.Narrator: Number four. TK: No lettering or seals.Narrator: Never use writing of any kind.TK: Because you can't read that at a distance.Narrator: Number five. TK: And be distinctive.RM: All the best flags tend to stick to these principles. And like I said before, most country flags are OK. But here's the thing: if you showed this list of principles to any designer of almost anything, they would say these principles — simplicity, deep meaning, having few colors or being thoughtful about colors, uniqueness, don't have writing you can't read — all those principles apply to them, too. But sadly, good design principles are rarely invoked in US city flags. Our biggest problem seems to be that fourth one. We just can't stop ourselves from putting our names on our flags, or little municipal seals with tiny writing on them. Here's the thing about municipal seals: They were designed to be on pieces of paper where you can read them, not on flags 100 feet away flapping in the breeze.So here's a bunch of flags again. Vexillologists call these SOBs: Seals on a bedsheet —(Laughter)and if you can't tell what city they go to, yeah, that's exactly the problem, except for Anaheim, apparently, they fixed it.(Laughter)These flags are everywhere in the US. The European equivalent of the municipal seal is the city coat of arms ... and this is where we can learn a lesson for how to do things right. So this is the city coat of arms of Amsterdam. Now, if this were a United States city, the flag would probably look like this. You know, yeah.(Laughter)But instead, the flag of Amsterdam looks like this. Rather than plopping the whole coat of arms on a solid background and writing ""Amsterdam"" below it, they just take the key elements of the escutcheon, the shield, and they turn it into the most badass city flag in the world.(Laughter)(Applause)And because it's so badass, those flags and crosses are found throughout Amsterdam, just like Chicago, they're used.Even though seal-on-a-bedsheet flags are particularly painful and offensive to me, nothing can quite prepare you for one of the biggest train wrecks in vexillological history.(Laughter)Are you ready? It's the flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.(Laughter)I mean, it's distinctive, I'll give them that.Steve Kodis: It was adopted in 1955.RM: The city ran a contest and gathered a bunch of submissions with all kinds of designs.SK: And an alderman by the name of Fred Steffan cobbled together parts of the submissions to make what is now the Milwaukee flag.RM: It's a kitchen sink flag. There's a gigantic gear representing industry, there's a ship recognizing the port, a giant stalk of wheat paying homage to the brewing industry. It's a hot mess, and Steve Kodis, a graphic designer from Milwaukee, wants to change it.SK: It's really awful. It's a misstep on the city's behalf, to say the least.RM: But what puts the Milwaukee flag over the top, almost to the point of self-parody, is on it is a picture of the Civil War battle flag of the Milwaukee regiment.SK: So that's the final element in it that just makes it that much more ridiculous, that there is a flag design within the Milwaukee flag.RM: On the flag. Yeah. Yeah.(Laughter)Yeah.(Music)Now, Milwaukee is a fantastic city. I've been there, I love it. The most depressing part of this flag, though, is that there have been two major redesign contests. The last one was held in 2001. 105 entries were received.TK: But in the end, the members of the Milwaukee Arts Board decided that none of the new entries were worthy of flying over the city.RM: They couldn't agree to change that thing!(Laughter)That's discouraging enough to make you think that good design and democracy just simply do not go together.(Laughter)But Steve Kotas is going to try one more time to redesign the Milwaukee flag.SK: I believe Milwaukee is a great city. Every great city deserves a great flag.RM: Steve isn't ready to reveal his design yet. One of the things about proposing one of these things is you have to get people on board, and then you reveal your design. But here's the trick: If you want to design a great flag, a kick-ass flag like Chicago's or DC's, which also has a great flag, start by drawing a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch rectangle on a piece of paper. Your design has to fit within that tiny rectangle. Here's why.TK: A three-by-five-foot flag on a pole 100 feet away looks about the same size as a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch rectangle seen about 15 inches from your eye. You'd be surprised by how compelling and simple the design can be when you hold yourself to that limitation.RM: Meanwhile, back in San Francisco. Is there anything we can do?TK: I like to say that in every bad flag there's a good flag trying to get out. The way to make San Francisco's flag a good flag is to take the motto off because you can't read that at a distance. Take the name off, and the border might even be made thicker, so it's more a part of the flag. And I would simply take the phoenix and make it a great big element in the middle of the flag.RM: But the current phoenix, that's got to go.TK: I would simplify or stylize the phoenix. Depict a big, wide-winged bird coming out of flames. Emphasize those flames.RM: So this San Francisco flag was designed by Frank Chimero based on Ted Kaye's suggestions. I don't know what he would do if we was completely unfettered and didn't follow those guidelines. Fans of my radio show and podcast, heard me complain about bad flags. They've sent me other suggested designs. This one's by Neil Mussett. Both are so much better.(Laughter)And I think if they were adopted, I would see them around the city.In my crusade to make flags of the world more beautiful, many listeners have taken it upon themselves to redesign their flags and look into the feasibility of getting them officially adopted.(Music)If you see your city flag and like it, fly it, even if it violates a design rule or two. I don't care. But if you don't see your city flag, maybe it doesn't exist, but maybe it does, and it just sucks, and I dare you to join the effort to try to change that.As we move more and more into cities, the city flag will become not just a symbol of that city as a place, but also, it could become a symbol of how that city considers design itself, especially today, as the populace is becoming more design-aware. And I think design awareness is at an all-time high. A well-designed flag could be seen as an indicator of how a city considers all of its design systems: its public transit, its parks, its signage. It might seem frivolous, but it's not.TK: Often when city leaders say, ""We have more important things to do than worry about a city flag,"" my response is, ""If you had a great city flag, you would have a banner for people to rally under to face those more important things.""(Music)RM: I've seen firsthand what a good city flag can do in the case of Chicago. The marriage of good design and civic pride is something that we need in all places. The best part about municipal flags is that we own them. They are an open-source, publicly owned design language of the community. When they are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and they are powerful. We could control the branding and graphical imagery of our cities with a good flag, but instead, by having bad flags we don't use, we cede that territory to sports teams and chambers of commerce and tourism boards. Sports teams can leave and break our hearts. And besides, some of us don't really care about sports. And tourism campaigns can just be cheesy. But a great city flag is something that represents a city to its people and its people to the world at large. And when that flag is a beautiful thing, that connection is a beautiful thing.So maybe all the city flags can be as inspiring as Hong Kong or Portland or Trondheim, and we can do away with all the bad flags like San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, and finally, when we're all done, we can do something about Pocatello, Idaho, considered by the North American Vexillological Association as the worst city flag in North America.[Proud to be Pocatello](Laughter)(Applause)Yeah.(Applause)That thing has a trademark symbol on it, people.(Laughter)That hurts me just to look at.(Laughter)Thank you so much for listening.(Applause)[Music by: Melodium (@melodiumbox) and Keegan DeWitt (@keegandewitt)]","https://www.ted.com/talks/roman_mars_why_city_flags_may_be_the_worst_designed_thing_you_ve_never_noticed
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"(Music) Dannielle Hadley: Life in Pennsylvania means just that: life without the possibility of parole. For us lifers, as we call ourselves, our only chance for release is through commutation, which has only been granted to two women since 1989, close to 30 years ago. Our song, ""This Is Not Our Home,"" it tells of our experiences while doing life without the possibility of parole.(Music)Brenda Watkins: I'm a woman.I'm a grandmother.I'm a daughter.I have a son.I'm not an angel.I'm not the devil.I came to jailwhen I was so young.I spend my time hereinside these prison walls.Lost friends to death,saw some go home.Watch years pass,people come and go,while I do life without parole.I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.I'm doing time here.This is not my home.Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.Will I seemy familyor die alone?As the years go by,I hold back my tears,because if I cry I'd give in to fear.I must be strong, have to hold on.Gotta get throughanother year.I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.I'm doing time here. This is not my home.Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.Will I seemy familyor die alone?I'm not saying that I'm not guilty,I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay.All I'm asking is for forgiveness.Gotta have hope I'll be free someday.Is there a place for mein the world out there?Will they ever know or care that I'm chained?Is there redemption for the sin of my younger days?Because I've changed.Lord knows I've changed.I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.I'm doing time here. This is not my home.Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.Will I seemy familyor die alone?Will I seemy familyor die alone?I'm known to you as Inmate 008106. Incarcerated 29 years. My name is Brenda Watkins. I was born and raised in Hoffman, North Carolina. This is not my home.(Applause)Thelma Nichols: Inmate number 0B2472. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Thelma Nichols. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A. This is not my home.(Applause)DH: 008494. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Dannielle Hadley. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A, and this is not my home.(Applause)Theresa Battles: Inmate 008309. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Theresa Battles. I'm from Norton, New Jersey, and this is not my home.(Applause)Debra Brown: I am known as Inmate 007080. I've been incarcerated for 30 years. My name is Debra Brown. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is not my home.(Applause)Joann Butler: 005961. I've been incarcerated for 37 years. My name is Joann Butler, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia. This is not my home.(Applause)Diane Hamill Metzger: Number 005634. I've been incarcerated for 39 and one half years. My name is Diane Hamill Metzger. I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.(Applause)Lena Brown: I am 004867. Incarcerated 40 years. My name is Lena Brown, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.(Applause)Trina Garnett: My number is 005545. My name is Trina Garnett, I've been incarcerated for 37 years, since I was 14 years old. Born and raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.(Applause)Will I seemy familyor die alone?Or die alone?(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/the_lady_lifers_a_moving_song_from_women_in_prison_for_life
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"Chris Anderson: So I guess what we're going to do is we're going to talk about your life, and using some pictures that you shared with me. And I think we should start right here with this one. Okay, now who is this?Martine Rothblatt: This is me with our oldest son Eli. He was about age five. This is taken in Nigeria right after having taken the Washington, D.C. bar exam.CA: Okay. But this doesn't really look like a Martine.MR: Right. That was myself as a male, the way I was brought up. Before I transitioned from male to female and Martin to Martine.CA: You were brought up Martin Rothblatt.MR: Correct.CA: And about a year after this picture, you married a beautiful woman. Was this love at first sight? What happened there?MR: It was love at the first sight. I saw Bina at a discotheque in Los Angeles, and we later began living together, but the moment I saw her, I saw just an aura of energy around her. I asked her to dance. She said she saw an aura of energy around me. I was a single male parent. She was a single female parent. We showed each other our kids' pictures, and we've been happily married for a third of a century now. (Applause)CA: And at the time, you were kind of this hotshot entrepreneur, working with satellites. I think you had two successful companies, and then you started addressing this problem of how could you use satellites to revolutionize radio. Tell us about that.MR: Right. I always loved space technology, and satellites, to me, are sort of like the canoes that our ancestors first pushed out into the water. So it was exciting for me to be part of the navigation of the oceans of the sky, and as I developed different types of satellite communication systems, the main thing I did was to launch bigger and more powerful satellites, the consequence of which was that the receiving antennas could be smaller and smaller, and after going through direct television broadcasting, I had the idea that if we could make a more powerful satellite, the receiving dish could be so small that it would just be a section of a parabolic dish, a flat little plate embedded into the roof of an automobile, and it would be possible to have nationwide satellite radio, and that's Sirius XM today.CA: Wow. So who here has used Sirius?(Applause)MR: Thank you for your monthly subscriptions.(Laughter)CA: So that succeeded despite all predictions at the time. It was a huge commercial success, but soon after this, in the early 1990s, there was this big transition in your life and you became Martine.MR: Correct. CA: So tell me, how did that happen? MR: It happened in consultation with Bina and our four beautiful children, and I discussed with each of them that I felt my soul was always female, and as a woman, but I was afraid people would laugh at me if I expressed it, so I always kept it bottled up and just showed my male side. And each of them had a different take on this. Bina said, ""I love your soul, and whether the outside is Martin and Martine, it doesn't it matter to me, I love your soul."" My son said, ""If you become a woman, will you still be my father?"" And I said, ""Yes, I'll always be your father,"" and I'm still his father today. My youngest daughter did an absolutely brilliant five-year-old thing. She told people, ""I love my dad and she loves me."" So she had no problem with a gender blending whatsoever.CA: And a couple years after this, you published this book: ""The Apartheid of Sex."" What was your thesis in this book?MR: My thesis in this book is that there are seven billion people in the world, and actually, seven billion unique ways to express one's gender. And while people may have the genitals of a male or a female, the genitals don't determine your gender or even really your sexual identity. That's just a matter of anatomy and reproductive tracts, and people could choose whatever gender they want if they weren't forced by society into categories of either male or female the way South Africa used to force people into categories of black or white. We know from anthropological science that race is fiction, even though racism is very, very real, and we now know from cultural studies that separate male or female genders is a constructed fiction. The reality is a gender fluidity that crosses the entire continuum from male to female.CA: You yourself don't always feel 100 percent female.MR: Correct. I would say in some ways I change my gender about as often as I change my hairstyle.CA: (Laughs) Okay, now, this is your gorgeous daughter, Jenesis. And I guess she was about this age when something pretty terrible happened.MR: Yes, she was finding herself unable to walk up the stairs in our house to her bedroom, and after several months of doctors, she was diagnosed to have a rare, almost invariably fatal disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension.CA: So how did you respond to that?MR: Well, we first tried to get her to the best doctors we could. We ended up at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The head of pediatric cardiology told us that he was going to refer her to get a lung transplant, but not to hold out any hope, because there are very few lungs available, especially for children. He said that all people with this illness died, and if any of you have seen the film ""Lorenzo's Oil,"" there's a scene when the protagonist kind of rolls down the stairway crying and bemoaning the fate of his son, and that's exactly how we felt about Jenesis.CA: But you didn't accept that as the limit of what you could do. You started trying to research and see if you could find a cure somehow.MR: Correct. She was in the intensive care ward for weeks at a time, and Bina and I would tag team to stay at the hospital while the other watched the rest of the kids, and when I was in the hospital and she was sleeping, I went to the hospital library. I read every article that I could find on pulmonary hypertension. I had not taken any biology, even in college, so I had to go from a biology textbook to a college-level textbook and then medical textbook and the journal articles, back and forth, and eventually I knew enough to think that it might be possible that somebody could find a cure. So we started a nonprofit foundation. I wrote a description asking people to submit grants and we would pay for medical research. I became an expert on the condition — doctors said to me, Martine, we really appreciate all the funding you've provided us, but we are not going to be able to find a cure in time to save your daughter. However, there is a medicine that was developed at the Burroughs Wellcome Company that could halt the progression of the disease, but Burroughs Wellcome has just been acquired by Glaxo Wellcome. They made a decision not to develop any medicines for rare and orphan diseases, and maybe you could use your expertise in satellite communications to develop this cure for pulmonary hypertension.CA: So how on earth did you get access to this drug?MR: I went to Glaxo Wellcome and after three times being rejected and having the door slammed in my face because they weren't going to out-license the drug to a satellite communications expert, they weren't going to send the drug out to anybody at all, and they thought I didn't have the expertise, finally I was able to persuade a small team of people to work with me and develop enough credibility. I wore down their resistance, and they had no hope this drug would even work, by the way, and they tried to tell me, ""You're just wasting your time. We're sorry about your daughter."" But finally, for 25,000 dollars and agreement to pay 10 percent of any revenues we might ever get, they agreed to give me worldwide rights to this drug.CA: And so you put this drug on the market in a really brilliant way, by basically charging what it would take to make the economics work.MR: Oh yes, Chris, but this really wasn't a drug that I ended up — after I wrote the check for 25,000, and I said, ""Okay, where's the medicine for Jenesis?"" they said, ""Oh, Martine, there's no medicine for Jenesis. This is just something we tried in rats."" And they gave me, like, a little plastic Ziploc bag of a small amount of powder. They said, ""Don't give it to any human,"" and they gave me a piece of paper which said it was a patent, and from that, we had to figure out a way to make this medicine. A hundred chemists in the U.S. at the top universities all swore that little patent could never be turned into a medicine. If it was turned into a medicine, it could never be delivered because it had a half-life of only 45 minutes.CA: And yet, a year or two later, you were there with a medicine that worked for Jenesis.MR: Chris, the astonishing thing is that this absolutely worthless piece of powder that had the sparkle of a promise of hope for Jenesis is not only keeping Jenesis and other people alive today, but produces almost a billion and a half dollars a year in revenue.(Applause)CA: So here you go. So you took this company public, right? And made an absolute fortune. And how much have you paid Glaxo, by the way, after that 25,000?MR: Yeah, well, every year we pay them 10 percent of 1.5 billion, 150 million dollars, last year 100 million dollars. It's the best return on investment they ever received. (Laughter)CA: And the best news of all, I guess, is this.MR: Yes. Jenesis is an absolutely brilliant young lady. She's alive, healthy today at 30. You see me, Bina and Jenesis there. The most amazing thing about Jenesis is that while she could do anything with her life, and believe me, if you grew up your whole life with people in your face saying that you've got a fatal disease, I would probably run to Tahiti and just not want to run into anybody again. But instead she chooses to work in United Therapeutics. She says she wants to do all she can to help other people with orphan diseases get medicines, and today, she's our project leader for all telepresence activities, where she helps digitally unite the entire company to work together to find cures for pulmonary hypertension.CA: But not everyone who has this disease has been so fortunate. There are still many people dying, and you are tackling that too. How?MR: Exactly, Chris. There's some 3,000 people a year in the United States alone, perhaps 10 times that number worldwide, who continue to die of this illness because the medicines slow down the progression but they don't halt it. The only cure for pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, emphysema, COPD, what Leonard Nimoy just died of, is a lung transplant, but sadly, there are only enough available lungs for 2,000 people in the U.S. a year to get a lung transplant, whereas nearly a half million people a year die of end-stage lung failure. CA: So how can you address that? MR: So I conceptualize the possibility that just like we keep cars and planes and buildings going forever with an unlimited supply of building parts and machine parts, why can't we create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs to keep people living indefinitely, and especially people with lung disease. So we've teamed up with the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter, and the company he founded with Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize, to genetically modify the pig genome so that the pig's organs will not be rejected by the human body and thereby to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. We do this through our company, United Therapeutics.CA: So you really believe that within, what, a decade, that this shortage of transplantable lungs maybe be cured, through these guys?MR: Absolutely, Chris. I'm as certain of that as I was of the success that we've had with direct television broadcasting, Sirius XM. It's actually not rocket science. It's straightforward engineering away one gene after another. We're so lucky to be born in the time that sequencing genomes is a routine activity, and the brilliant folks at Synthetic Genomics are able to zero in on the pig genome, find exactly the genes that are problematic, and fix them.CA: But it's not just bodies that — though that is amazing. (Applause) It's not just long-lasting bodies that are of interest to you now. It's long-lasting minds. And I think this graph for you says something quite profound. What does this mean?MR: What this graph means, and it comes from Ray Kurzweil, is that the rate of development in computer processing hardware, firmware and software, has been advancing along a curve such that by the 2020s, as we saw in earlier presentations today, there will be information technology that processes information and the world around us at the same rate as a human mind.CA: And so that being so, you're actually getting ready for this world by believing that we will soon be able to, what, actually take the contents of our brains and somehow preserve them forever? How do you describe that?MR: Well, Chris, what we're working on is creating a situation where people can create a mind file, and a mind file is the collection of their mannerisms, personality, recollection, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, everything that we've poured today into Google, into Amazon, into Facebook, and all of this information stored there will be able, in the next couple decades, once software is able to recapitulate consciousness, be able to revive the consciousness which is imminent in our mind file.CA: Now you're not just messing around with this. You're serious. I mean, who is this?MR: This is a robot version of my beloved spouse, Bina. And we call her Bina 48. She was programmed by Hanson Robotics out of Texas. There's the centerfold from National Geographic magazine with one of her caregivers, and she roams the web and has hundreds of hours of Bina's mannerisms, personalities. She's kind of like a two-year-old kid, but she says things that blow people away, best expressed by perhaps a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Harmon who says her answers are often frustrating, but other times as compelling as those of any flesh person she's interviewed.CA: And is your thinking here, part of your hope here, is that this version of Bina can in a sense live on forever, or some future upgrade to this version can live on forever? MR: Yes. Not just Bina, but everybody. You know, it costs us virtually nothing to store our mind files on Facebook, Instagram, what-have-you. Social media is I think one of the most extraordinary inventions of our time, and as apps become available that will allow us to out-Siri Siri, better and better, and develop consciousness operating systems, everybody in the world, billions of people, will be able to develop mind clones of themselves that will have their own life on the web.CA: So the thing is, Martine, that in any normal conversation, this would sound stark-staring mad, but in the context of your life, what you've done, some of the things we've heard this week, the constructed realities that our minds give, I mean, you wouldn't bet against it.MR: Well, I think it's really nothing coming from me. If anything, I'm perhaps a bit of a communicator of activities that are being undertaken by the greatest companies in China, Japan, India, the U.S., Europe. There are tens of millions of people working on writing code that expresses more and more aspects of our human consciousness, and you don't have to be a genius to see that all these threads are going to come together and ultimately create human consciousness, and it's something we'll value. There are so many things to do in this life, and if we could have a simulacrum, a digital doppelgänger of ourselves that helps us process books, do shopping, be our best friends, I believe our mind clones, these digital versions of ourselves, will ultimately be our best friends, and for me personally and Bina personally, we love each other like crazy. Each day, we are always saying, like, ""Wow, I love you even more than 30 years ago. And so for us, the prospect of mind clones and regenerated bodies is that our love affair, Chris, can go on forever. And we never get bored of each other. I'm sure we never will.CA: I think Bina's here, right? MR: She is, yeah. CA: Would it be too much, I don't know, do we have a handheld mic? Bina, could we invite you to the stage? I just have to ask you one question. Besides, we need to see you.(Applause)Thank you, thank you. Come and join Martine here. I mean, look, when you got married, if someone had told you that, in a few years time, the man you were marrying would become a woman, and a few years after that, you would become a robot — (Laughter) — how has this gone? How has it been?Bina Rothblatt: It's been really an exciting journey, and I would have never thought that at the time, but we started making goals and setting those goals and accomplishing things, and before you knew it, we just keep going up and up and we're still not stopping, so it's great.CA: Martine told me something really beautiful, just actually on Skype before this, which was that he wanted to live for hundreds of years as a mind file, but not if it wasn't with you.BR: That's right, we want to do it together. We're cryonicists as well, and we want to wake up together.CA: So just so as you know, from my point of view, this isn't only one of the most astonishing lives I have heard, it's one of the most astonishing love stories I've ever heard. It's just a delight to have you both here at TED. Thank you so much.MR: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martine_rothblatt_my_daughter_my_wife_our_robot_and_the_quest_for_immortality
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"When I was growing up, I really  liked playing hide-and-seek a lot. One time, though, I thought climbing a tree would lead to a great hiding spot, but I fell and broke my arm. I actually started first grade with a big cast all over my torso. It was taken off six weeks later, but even then, I couldn't extend my elbow, and I had to do physical therapy to flex and extend it, 100 times per day, seven days per week. I barely did it, because I found it boring and painful, and as a result, it took me another six weeks to get better.Many years later, my mom developed frozen shoulder, which leads to pain and stiffness in the shoulder. The person I believed for half of my life to have superpowers suddenly needed help to get dressed or to cut food. She went each week to physical therapy, but just like me, she barely followed the home treatment, and it took her over five months to feel better.Both my mom and I required physical therapy, a process of doing a suite of repetitive exercises in order to regain the range of movement lost due to an accident or injury. At first, a physical therapist works with patients, but then it's up to the patients to do their exercises at home. But patients find physical therapy boring, frustrating, confusing and lengthy before seeing results. Sadly, patient noncompliance can be as high as 70 percent. This means the majority of patients don't do their exercises and therefore take a lot longer to get better. All physical therapists agree that special exercises reduce the time needed for recovery, but patients lack the motivation to do them.So together with three friends, all of us software geeks, we asked ourselves, wouldn't it be interesting if patients could play their way to recovery? We started building MIRA, A P.C. software platform that uses this Kinect device, a motion capture camera, to transform traditional exercises into video games.My physical therapist has already set up a schedule for my particular therapy. Let's see how this looks. The first game asks me to fly a bee up and down to gather pollen to deposit in beehives, all while avoiding the other bugs. I control the bee by doing elbow extension and flexion, just like when I was seven years old after the cast was taken off.When designing a game, we speak to physical therapists at first to understand what movement patients need to do. We then make that a video game to give patients simple, motivating objectives to follow. But the software is very customizable, and physical therapists can also create their own exercises. Using the software, my physical therapist recorded herself performing a shoulder abduction, which is one of the movements my mom had to do when she had frozen shoulder. I can follow my therapist's example on the left side of the screen, while on the right, I see myself doing the recommended movement. I feel more engaged and confident, as I'm exercising alongside my therapist with the exercises my therapist thinks are best for me. This basically extends the application for physical therapists to create whatever exercises they think are best.This is an auction house game for preventing falls, designed to strengthen muscles and improve balance. As a patient, I need to do sit and stand movements, and when I stand up, I bid for the items I want to buy. (Laughter)In two days, my grandmother will be 82 years old, and there's a 50 percent chance for people over 80 to fall at least once per year, which could lead to a broken hip or even worse. Poor muscle tone and impaired balance are the number one cause of falls, so reversing these problems through targeted exercise will help keep older people like my grandmother safer and independent for longer. When my schedule ends, MIRA briefly shows me how I progressed throughout my session.I have just shown you three different games for kids, adults and seniors. These can be used with orthopedic or neurologic patients, but we'll soon have options for children with autism, mental health or speech therapy. My physical therapist can go back to my profile and see the data gathered during my sessions. She can see how much I moved, how many points I scored, with what speed I moved my joints, and so on. My physical therapist can use all of this to adapt my treatment.I'm so pleased this version is now in use in over 10 clinics across Europe and the U.S., and we're working on the home version. We want to enable physical therapists to prescribe this digital treatment and help patients play their way to recovery at home. If my mom or I had a tool like this when we needed physical therapy, then we would have been more successful following the treatment, and perhaps gotten better a lot sooner.Thank you.(Applause)Tom Rielly: So Cosmin, tell me what hardware is this that they're rapidly putting away? What is that made of, and how much does it cost?Cosmin Milhau: So it's a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for the demo, but you just need a computer and a Kinect, which is 120 dollars.TR: Right, and the Kinect is the thing that people use for their Xboxes to do 3D games, right?CM: Exactly, but you don't need the Xbox, you only need a camera.TR: Right, so this is less than a $1,000 solution.CM: Definitely, 400 dollars, you can definitely use it.TR: So right now, you're doing clinical trials in clinics.CM: Yes.TR: And then the hope is to get it so it's a home version and I can do my exercise remotely, and the therapist at the clinic can see how I'm doing and stuff like that.CM: Exactly.TR: Cool. Thanks so much. CM: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cosmin_mihaiu_physical_therapy_is_boring_play_a_game_instead
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"I'd like to have you look at this pencil. It's a thing. It's a legal thing. And so are books you might have or the cars you own. They're all legal things. The great apes that you'll see behind me, they too are legal things.Now, I can do that to a legal thing. I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. These great apes, you'll see. The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison who wrote a book called ""James & Other Apes."" And he tells in his book how every single one them, almost every one of them, is an orphan who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. They're legal things.So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human beings are legal persons.But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed.Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, and indeed I was moved by it, because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, defend the defenseless, and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, billions of nonhuman animals are. And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something that was literally impossible, the reason being that all of my clients, all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, were legal things; they were invisible. It was not going to work, so I decided that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole onto the other side of being legal persons.Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about truly animal rights, about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, and I knew it was going to take a long time. And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28.So what we had to do in order to begin was not only to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts of how you litigate that kind of case.So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, a legal cause of action. And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use to put their arguments in front of courts.It turns out there's a very interesting case that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart, whereby a black slave had used the legal system and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it.James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. He survived the Middle Passage, and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia. Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, because he wanted to get a set of godparents, because to an 18th-century slave, they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers was to help you escape.And so in the fall of 1771, James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers to canvass the city of London, find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, and he was chained to the deck, and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica where James was to be sold in the slave markets and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. Well now James' godparents swung into action. They approached the most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus on behalf of James Somerset.Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make when they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, capital G, capital W, and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. A writ of habeus corpus is issued. The detainer is required to bring the detainee in and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty.Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, because if James Somerset was a legal thing, he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, only if he could be a legal person. So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was brought in by the captain of the ship.There were a series of hearings over the next six months. On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word ""odious,"" that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. The free man who walked out of the courtroom looked exactly like the slave who had walked in, but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in common.The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, which I founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles do we want to put before the judges? What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, were they taught in law school, do they use every day, do they believe with all their hearts — and we chose liberty and equality.Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because of how you're put together, and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. And the supreme interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. So they are so powerful that in a common law country, if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect your self-determination and your autonomy.Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, and there's the rub, relevant way. So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, you're entitled to the right. Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. Some are included, some are excluded. But you have to, at the bare minimum you must — that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being like you're seeing behind me, that that's a violation of equality.We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. We chose the state of New York. Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. We decided upon chimpanzees, not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, but because they, Jane and others, have studied chimpanzees intensively for decades. We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits in which they set out more than 40 ways in which their complex cognitive capability, either individually or together, all added up to autonomy and self-determination.Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. But they're also conscious that they're conscious. They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. They know they're individuals, and that they can live. They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. They can anticipate tomorrow, which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, especially alone. It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it.They have some kind of moral capacity. When they play economic games with human beings, they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. They are numerate. They understand numbers. They can do some simple math. They can engage in language — or to stay out of the language wars, they're involved in intentional and referential communication in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those with whom they are speaking. They have culture. They have a material culture, a social culture. They have a symbolic culture. Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. It takes a long time to learn how to do that, and they excavated the area and they found that this material culture, this way of doing it, these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years through 225 chimpanzee generations.So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. Our chimpanzee, first we found two of them in the state of New York. Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. Then we found Tommy. Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. Tommy was a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. And we found Hercules and Leo. They're two young male chimpanzees who are being used for biomedical, anatomical research at Stony Brook. We found them.And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument that had been used with James Somerset, and we demanded that the judges issue these common law writs of habeus corpus. We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands — there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible.Now, all these cases are still going on. We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. We shall. We shall. This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. And to quote Winston Churchill, the way we view our cases is that they're not the end, they're not even the beginning of the end, but they are perhaps the end of the beginning.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_wise_chimps_have_feelings_and_thoughts_they_should_also_have_rights
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"Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And when we say ""infidelity,"" what exactly do we mean? Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship?For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness and their very identity: an affair. And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. So this talk is for anyone who has ever loved.Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it. In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so, that this is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible: once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. (Laughter) So how do we reconcile what is universally forbidden, yet universally practiced?Now, throughout history, men practically had a license to cheat with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam, so the double standard is as old as adultery itself. But who knows what's really going on under the sheets there, right? Because when it comes to sex, the pressure for men is to boast and to exaggerate, but the pressure for women is to hide, minimize and deny, which isn't surprising when you consider that there are still nine countries where women can be killed for straying.Now, monogamy used to be one person for life. Today, monogamy is one person at a time. (Laughter) (Applause)I mean, many of you probably have said, ""I am monogamous in all my relationships."" (Laughter)We used to marry, and had sex for the first time. But now we marry, and we stop having sex with others. The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die.Now, everyone wants to know what percentage of people cheat. I've been asked that question since I arrived at this conference. (Laughter) It applies to you. But the definition of infidelity keeps on expanding: sexting, watching porn, staying secretly active on dating apps. So because there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes an infidelity, estimates vary widely, from 26 percent to 75 percent. But on top of it, we are walking contradictions. So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one. (Laughter)Now, I like this definition of an affair — it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving, can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.So it's never been easier to cheat, and it's never been more difficult to keep a secret. And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll. When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security. Ironically, we used to turn to adultery — that was the space where we sought pure love. But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it.Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one. And infidelity tells me I'm not. It is the ultimate betrayal. Infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love. But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self.So my patient Fernando, he's plagued. He goes on: ""I thought I knew my life. I thought I knew who you were, who we were as a couple, who I was. Now, I question everything."" Infidelity — a violation of trust, a crisis of identity. ""Can I ever trust you again?"" he asks. ""Can I ever trust anyone again?""And this is also what my patient Heather is telling me, when she's talking to me about her story with Nick. Married, two kids. Nick just left on a business trip, and Heather is playing on his iPad with the boys, when she sees a message appear on the screen: ""Can't wait to see you."" Strange, she thinks, we just saw each other. And then another message: ""Can't wait to hold you in my arms."" And Heather realizes these are not for her. She also tells me that her father had affairs, but her mother, she found one little receipt in the pocket, and a little bit of lipstick on the collar. Heather, she goes digging, and she finds hundreds of messages, and photos exchanged and desires expressed. The vivid details of Nick's two-year affair unfold in front of her in real time, And it made me think: Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts.But then we have another paradox that we're dealing with these days. Because of this romantic ideal, we are relying on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb. And if the situation were reversed, Nick would be in the same situation. Staying is the new shame.So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can't all be pathological. The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life? What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? If even happy people cheat, what is it about?The vast majority of people that I actually work with are not at all chronic philanderers. They are often people who are deeply monogamous in their beliefs, and at least for their partner. But they find themselves in a conflict between their values and their behavior. They often are people who have actually been faithful for decades, but one day they cross a line that they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything. But for a glimmer of what? Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy.I'm thinking about another patient of mine, Priya, who is blissfully married, loves her husband, and would never want to hurt the man. But she also tells me that she's always done what was expected of her: good girl, good wife, good mother, taking care of her immigrant parents. Priya, she fell for the arborist who removed the tree from her yard after Hurricane Sandy. And with his truck and his tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. But at 47, Priya's affair is about the adolescence that she never had. And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. They feel alive. And they often will tell me stories of recent losses — of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor. Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. Is this it? Is there more? Am I going on for another 25 years like this? Will I ever feel that thing again? And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death.And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have.Now some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do. First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity. But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to. And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me. (Laughter)So how do we heal from an affair? Desire runs deep. Betrayal runs deep. But it can be healed. And some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine. But others will jolt us into new possibilities. The fact is, the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together. But some of them will merely survive, and others will actually be able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, ""You think I didn't want more? But I'm not the one who did it."" But now that the affair is exposed, they, too, get to claim more, and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well, either.I've noticed that a lot of couples, in the immediate aftermath of an affair, because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order, will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. And, partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustfully voracious, they don't know where it's coming from. Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire, and make way for an entirely new kind of truth.So when an affair is exposed, what are some of the specific things that couples can do? We know from trauma that healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing. So for the partner who had the affair, for Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential, important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife. But the truth is that I have noticed that quite a lot of people who have affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partner, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important. And Nick, he needs to hold vigil for the relationship. He needs to become, for a while, the protector of the boundaries. It's his responsibility to bring it up, because if he thinks about it, he can relieve Heather from the obsession, and from having to make sure that the affair isn't forgotten, and that in itself begins to restore trust.But for Heather, or deceived partners, it is essential to do things that bring back a sense of self-worth, to surround oneself with love and with friends and activities that give back joy and meaning and identity. But even more important, is to curb the curiosity to mine for the sordid details — Where were you? Where did you do it? How often? Is she better than me in bed? — questions that only inflict more pain, and keep you awake at night. And instead, switch to what I call the investigative questions, the ones that mine the meaning and the motives — What did this affair mean for you? What were you able to express or experience there that you could no longer do with me? What was it like for you when you came home? What is it about us that you value? Are you pleased this is over?Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. But affairs are here to stay, and they're not going away. And the dilemmas of love and desire, they don't yield just simple answers of black and white and good and bad, and victim and perpetrator. Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms. There are many ways that we betray our partner: with contempt, with neglect, with indifference, with violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt a partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage.Now, you've listened to me, and I know what you're thinking: She has a French accent, she must be pro-affair. (Laughter) So, you're wrong. I am not French. (Laughter) (Applause) And I'm not pro-affair. But because I think that good can come out of an affair, I have often been asked this very strange question: Would I ever recommend it? Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective. The main question that I've been asked since I arrived at this conference when I said I would talk about infidelity is, for or against? I said, ""Yes."" (Laughter)I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other — what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_rethinking_infidelity_a_talk_for_anyone_who_has_ever_loved
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"So if I told you that this was the face of pure joy, would you call me crazy? I wouldn't blame you, because every time I look at this Arctic selfie, I shiver just a little bit. I want to tell you a little bit about this photograph.I was swimming around in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle, and the water was hovering right at freezing. The air? A brisk -10 with windchill, and I could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands, feet and face, and rush to protect my vital organs. It was the coldest I've ever been. But even with swollen lips, sunken eyes, and cheeks flushed red, I have found that this place right here is somewhere I can find great joy.Now, when it comes to pain, psychologist Brock Bastian probably said it best when he wrote, ""Pain is a kind of shortcut to mindfulness. It makes us suddenly aware of everything in the environment. It brutally draws us in to a virtual sensory awareness of the world much like meditation.""If shivering is a form of meditation, then I would consider myself a monk. (Laughter)Now, before we get into the why would anyone ever want to surf in freezing cold water? I would love to give you a little perspective on what a day in my life can look like.(Music)(Video) Man: I mean, I know we were hoping for good waves, but I don't think anybody thought that was going to happen. I can't stop shaking. I am so cold.(Music)(Applause)Chris Burkard: So, surf photographer, right? I don't even know if it's a real job title, to be honest. My parents definitely didn't think so when I told them at 19 I was quitting my job to pursue this dream career: blue skies, warm tropical beaches, and a tan that lasts all year long. I mean, to me, this was it. Life could not get any better. Sweating it out, shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations. But there was just this one problem. You see, the more time I spent traveling to these exotic locations, the less gratifying it seemed to be. I set out seeking adventure, and what I was finding was only routine. It was things like wi-fi, TV, fine dining, and a constant cellular connection that to me were all the trappings of places heavily touristed in and out of the water, and it didn't take long for me to start feeling suffocated.I began craving wild, open spaces, and so I set out to find the places others had written off as too cold, too remote, and too dangerous to surf, and that challenge intrigued me. I began this sort of personal crusade against the mundane, because if there's one thing I've realized, it's that any career, even one as seemingly glamorous as surf photography, has the danger of becoming monotonous.So in my search to break up this monotony, I realized something: There's only about a third of the Earth's oceans that are warm, and it's really just that thin band around the equator. So if I was going to find perfect waves, it was probably going to happen somewhere cold, where the seas are notoriously rough, and that's exactly where I began to look. And it was my first trip to Iceland that I felt like I found exactly what I was looking for.I was blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape, but most importantly, I couldn't believe we were finding perfect waves in such a remote and rugged part of the world. At one point, we got to the beach only to find massive chunks of ice had piled on the shoreline. They created this barrier between us and the surf, and we had to weave  through this thing like a maze just to get out into the lineup. and once we got there, we were pushing aside these ice chunks trying to get into waves. It was an incredible experience, one I'll never forget, because amidst those harsh conditions, I felt like I stumbled onto one of the last quiet places, somewhere that I found a clarity and a connection with the world I knew I would never find on a crowded beach.I was hooked. I was hooked. (Laughter) Cold water was constantly on my mind, and from that point on, my career focused on these types of harsh and unforgiving environments, and it took me to places like Russia, Norway, Alaska, Iceland, Chile, the Faroe Islands, and a lot of places in between. And one of my favorite things about these places was simply the challenge and the creativity it took just to get there: hours, days, weeks spent on Google Earth trying to pinpoint any remote stretch of beach or reef we could actually get to. And once we got there, the vehicles were just as creative: snowmobiles, six-wheel Soviet troop carriers, and a couple of super-sketchy helicopter flights. (Laughter) Helicopters really scare me, by the way.There was this one particularly bumpy boat ride up the coast of Vancouver Island to this kind of remote surf spot, where we ended up watching helplessly from the water as bears ravaged our camp site. They walked off with our food and bits of our tent, clearly letting us know that we were at the bottom of the food chain and that this was their spot, not ours. But to me, that trip was a testament to the wildness I traded for those touristy beaches.Now, it wasn't until I traveled to Norway — (Laughter) — that I really learned to appreciate the cold. So this is the place where some of the largest, the most violent storms in the world send huge waves smashing into the coastline. We were in this tiny, remote fjord, just inside the Arctic Circle. It had a greater population of sheep than people, so help if we needed it was nowhere to be found. I was in the water  taking pictures of surfers, and it started to snow. And then the temperature began to drop. And I told myself, there's not a chance you're getting out of the water. You traveled all this way, and this is exactly what you've been waiting for: freezing cold conditions with perfect waves. And although I couldn't even feel my finger to push the trigger, I knew I wasn't getting out. So I just did whatever I could. I shook it off, whatever. But that was the point that I felt this wind gush through the valley and hit me, and what started as this light snowfall quickly became a full-on blizzard, and I started to lose perception of where I was. I didn't know if I was drifting out to sea or towards shore, and all I could really make out was the faint sound of seagulls and crashing waves.Now, I knew this place had a reputation for sinking ships and grounding planes, and while I was out there floating, I started to get a little bit nervous. Actually, I was totally freaking out — (Laughter) — and I was borderline hypothermic, and my friends eventually had to help me out of the water. And I don't know if it was delirium setting in or what, but they told me later I had a smile on my face the entire time.Now, it was this trip and probably that exact experience where I really began to feel like every photograph was precious, because all of a sudden in that moment, it was something I was forced to earn. And I realized, all this shivering had actually taught me something: In life, there are no shortcuts to joy. Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer just a little bit, and that tiny bit of suffering that I did for my photography, it added a value to my work that was so much more meaningful to me than just trying to fill the pages of magazines. See, I gave a piece of myself in these places, and what I walked away with was a sense of fulfillment I had always been searching for.So I look back at this photograph. It's easy to see frozen fingers and cold wetsuits and even the struggle that it took just to get there, but most of all, what I see is just joy.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_burkard_the_joy_of_surfing_in_ice_cold_water
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"I've learned some of my most important life lessons from drug dealers and gang members and prostitutes, and I've had some of my most profound theological conversations not in the hallowed halls of a seminary but on a street corner on a Friday night, at 1 a.m.That's a little unusual, since I am a Baptist minister, seminary-trained, and pastored a church for over 20 years, but it's true. It came as a part of my participation in a public safety crime reduction strategy that saw a 79 percent reduction in violent crime over an eight-year period in a major city.But I didn't start out wanting to be a part of somebody's crime reduction strategy. I was 25, had my first church. If you would have asked me what my ambition was, I would have told you I wanted to be a megachurch pastor. I wanted a 15-, 20,000-member church. I wanted my own television ministry. I wanted my own clothing line. (Laughter) I wanted to be your long distance carrier. You know, the whole nine yards. (Laughter)After about a year of pastoring, my membership went up about 20 members. So megachurchdom was way down the road. But seriously, if you'd have said, ""What is your ambition?"" I would have said just to be a good pastor, to be able to be with people through all the passages of life, to preach messages that would have an everyday meaning for folks, and in the African-American tradition, to be able to represent the community that I serve.But there was something else that was happening in my city and in the entire metro area, and in most metro areas in the United States, and that was the homicide rate started to rise precipitously. And there were young people who were killing each other for reasons that I thought were very trivial, like bumping into someone in a high school hallway, and then after school, shooting the person. Someone with the wrong color shirt on, on the wrong street corner at the wrong time. And something needed to be done about that. It got to the point where it started to change the character of the city. You could go to any housing project, for example, like the one that was down the street from my church, and you would walk in, and it would be like a ghost town, because the parents wouldn't allow their kids to come out and play, even in the summertime, because of the violence. You would listen in the neighborhoods on any given night, and to the untrained ear, it sounded like fireworks, but it was gunfire. You'd hear it almost every night, when you were cooking dinner, telling your child a bedtime story, or just watching TV. And you can go to any emergency room at any hospital, and you would see lying on gurneys young black and Latino men shot and dying. And I was doing funerals, but not of the venerated matriarchs and patriarchs who'd lived a long life and there's a lot to say. I was doing funerals of 18-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds, and I was standing in a church or at a funeral home struggling to say something that would make some meaningful impact. And so while my colleagues were building these cathedrals great and tall and buying property outside of the city and moving their congregations out so that they could create or recreate their cities of God, the social structures in the inner cities were sagging under the weight of all of this violence.And so I stayed, because somebody needed to do something, and so I had looked at what I had and moved on that. I started to preach decrying the violence in the community. And I started to look at the programming in my church, and I started to build programs that would catch the at-risk youth, those who were on the fence to the violence. I even tried to be innovative in my preaching. You all have heard of rap music, right? Rap music? I even tried to rap sermon one time. It didn't work, but at least I tried it. I'll never forget the young person who came to me after that sermon. He waited until everybody was gone, and he said, ""Rev, rap sermon, huh?"" And I was like, ""Yeah, what do you think?"" And he said, ""Don't do that again, Rev."" (Laughter)But I preached and I built these programs, and I thought maybe if my colleagues did the same that it would make a difference. But the violence just careened out of control, and people who were not involved in the violence were getting shot and killed: somebody going to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store, or someone who was sitting at a bus stop just waiting for a bus, or kids who were playing in the park, oblivious to the violence on the other side of the park, but it coming and visiting them. Things were out of control, and I didn't know what to do, and then something happened that changed everything for me. It was a kid by the name of Jesse McKie, walking home with his friend Rigoberto Carrion to the housing project down the street from my church. They met up with a group of youth who were from a gang in Dorchester, and they were killed. But as Jesse was running from the scene mortally wounded, he was running in the direction of my church, and he died some 100, 150 yards away. If he would have gotten to the church, it wouldn't have made a difference, because the lights were out; nobody was home. And I took that as a sign. When they caught some of the youth that had done this deed, to my surprise, they were around my age, but the gulf that was between us was vast. It was like we were in two completely different worlds.And so as I contemplated all of this and looked at what was happening, I suddenly realized that there was a paradox that was emerging inside of me, and the paradox was this: in all of those sermons that I preached decrying the violence, I was also talking about building community, but I suddenly realized that there was a certain segment of the population that I was not including in my definition of community. And so the paradox was this: If I really wanted the community that I was preaching for, I needed to reach out and embrace this group that I had cut out of my definition. Which meant not about building programs to catch those who were on the fences of violence, but to reach out and to embrace those who were committing the acts of violence, the gang bangers, the drug dealers.As soon as I came to that realization, a quick question came to my mind. Why me? I mean, isn't this a law enforcement issue? This is why we have the police, right? As soon as the question, ""Why me?"" came, the answer came just as quickly: Why me? Because I'm the one who can't sleep at night thinking about it. Because I'm the one looking around saying somebody needs to do something about this, and I'm starting to realize that that someone is me. I mean, isn't that how movements start anyway? They don't start with a grand convention and people coming together and then walking in lockstep with a statement. But it starts with just a few, or maybe just one.It started with me that way, and so I decided to figure out the culture of violence in which these young people who were committing them existed, and I started to volunteer at the high school. After about two weeks of volunteering at the high school, I realized that the youth that I was trying to reach, they weren't going to high school. I started to walk in the community, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that they weren't out during the day. So I started to walk the streets at night, late at night, going into the parks where they were, building the relationship that was necessary.A tragedy happened in Boston that brought a number of clergy together, and there was a small cadre of us who came to the realization that we had to come out of the four walls of our sanctuary and meet the youth where they were, and not try to figure out how to bring them in. And so we decided to walk together, and we would get together in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city on a Friday night and on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., and we would walk until 2 or 3 in the morning. I imagine we were quite the anomaly when we first started walking. I mean, we weren't drug dealers. We weren't drug customers. We weren't the police. Some of us would have collars on. It was probably a really odd thing. But they started speaking to us after a while, and what we found out is that while we were walking, they were watching us, and they wanted to make sure of a couple of things: that number one, we were going to be consistent in our behavior, that we would keep coming out there; and then secondly, they had wanted to make sure that we weren't out there to exploit them. Because there was always somebody who would say, ""We're going to take back the streets,"" but they would always seem to have a television camera with them, or a reporter, and they would enhance their own reputation to the detriment of those on the streets. So when they saw that we had none of that, they decided to talk to us. And then we did an amazing thing for preachers. We decided to listen and not preach. Come on, give it up for me. (Laughter) (Applause) All right, come on, you're cutting into my time now, okay? (Laughter) But it was amazing. We said to them, ""We don't know our own communities after 9 p.m. at night, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., but you do. You are the subject matter experts, if you will, of that period of time. So talk to us. Teach us. Help us to see what we're not seeing. Help us to understand what we're not understanding."" And they were all too happy to do that, and we got an idea of what life on the streets was all about, very different than what you see on the 11 o'clock news, very different than what is portrayed in popular media and even social media.And as we were talking with them, a number of myths were dispelled about them with us. And one of the biggest myths was that these kids were cold and heartless and uncharacteristically bold in their violence. What we found out was the exact opposite. Most of the young people who were out there on the streets are just trying to make it on the streets. And we also found out that some of the most intelligent and creative and magnificent and wise people that we've ever met were on the street, engaged in a struggle. And I know some of them call it survival, but I call them overcomers, because when you're in the conditions that they're in, to be able to live every day is an accomplishment of overcoming. And as a result of that, we said to them, ""How do you see this church, how do you see this institution helping this situation?"" And we developed a plan in conversation with these youths. We stopped looking at them as the problem to be solved, and we started looking at them as partners, as assets, as co-laborers in the struggle to reduce violence in the community. Imagine developing a plan, you have one minister at one table and a heroin dealer at the other table, coming up with a way in which the church can help the entire community.The Boston Miracle was about bringing people together. We had other partners. We had law enforcement partners. We had police officers. It wasn't the entire force, because there were still some who still had that lock-'em-up mentality, but there were other cops who saw the honor in partnering with the community, who saw the responsibility from themselves to be able to work as partners with community leaders and faith leaders in order to reduce violence in the community. Same with probation officers, same with judges, same with folks who were up that law enforcement chain, because they realized, like we did, that we'll never arrest ourselves out of this situation, that there will not be enough prosecutions made, and you cannot fill these jails up enough in order to alleviate the problem. I helped to start an organization 20 years ago, a faith-based organization, to deal with this issue. I left it about four years ago and started working in cities across the United States, 19 in total, and what I found out was that in those cities, there was always this component of community leaders who put their heads down and their nose to the grindstone, who checked their egos at the door and saw the whole as greater than the sum of its parts, and came together and found ways to work with youth out on the streets, that the solution is not more cops, but the solution is mining the assets that are there in the community, to have a strong community component in the collaboration around violence reduction.Now, there is a movement in the United States of young people who I am very proud of who are dealing with the structural issues that need to change if we're going to be a better society. But there is this political ploy to try to pit police brutality and police misconduct against black-on-black violence. But it's a fiction. It's all connected. When you think about decades of failed housing policies and poor educational structures, when you think about persistent unemployment and underemployment in a community, when you think about poor healthcare, and then you throw drugs into the mix and duffel bags full of guns, little wonder that you would see this culture of violence emerge. And then the response that comes from the state is more cops and more suppression of hot spots. It's all connected, and one of the wonderful things that we've been able to do is to be able to show the value of partnering together — community, law enforcement, private sector, the city — in order to reduce violence. You have to value that community component.I believe that we can end the era of violence in our cities. I believe that it is possible and that people are doing it even now. But I need your help. It can't just come from folks who are burning themselves out in the community. They need support. They need help. Go back to your city. Find those people. ""You need some help? I'll help you out."" Find those people. They're there. Bring them together with law enforcement, the private sector, and the city, with the one aim of reducing violence, but make sure that that community component is strong. Because the old adage that comes from Burundi is right: that you do for me, without me, you do to me.God bless you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeffrey_brown_how_we_cut_youth_violence_in_boston_by_79_percent
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"Someone who looks like me walks past you in the street. Do you think they're a mother, a refugee or a victim of oppression? Or do you think they're a cardiologist, a barrister or maybe your local politician? Do you look me up and down, wondering how hot I must get or if my husband has forced me to wear this outfit? What if I wore my scarf like this?I can walk down the street in the exact same outfit and what the world expects of me and the way I'm treated depends on the arrangement of this piece of cloth. But this isn't going to be another monologue about the hijab because Lord knows, Muslim women are so much more than the piece of cloth they choose, or not, to wrap their head in. This is about looking beyond your bias.What if I walked past you and later on you'd found out that actually I was a race car engineer, and that I designed my own race car and I ran my university's race team, because it's true. What if I told you that I was actually trained as a boxer for five years, because that's true, too. Would it surprise you? Why?Ladies and gentlemen, ultimately, that surprise and the behaviors associated with it are the product of something  called unconscious bias, or implicit prejudice. And that results in the ridiculously detrimental lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in areas of influence. Hello, Australian Federal Cabinet. (Applause)Let me just set something out from the outset: Unconscious bias is not the same as conscious discrimination. I'm not saying that in all of you,  there's a secret sexist or racist or ageist lurking within,  waiting to get out. That's not what I'm saying. We all have our biases. They're the filters through which we see the world around us. I'm not accusing anyone, bias is not an accusation. Rather, it's something that  has to be identified, acknowledged and mitigated against. Bias can be about race, it can be about gender. It can also be about class, education, disability. The fact is, we all have biases against what's different, what's different to our social norms.The thing is, if we want  to live in a world where the circumstances of your birth do not dictate your future and where equal opportunity is ubiquitous, then each and every one of us has a role to play in making sure unconscious bias does not determine our lives.There's this really famous experiment in the space of unconscious bias and that's in the space of gender in the 1970s and 1980s. So orchestras, back in the day, were made up mostly of dudes, up to only five percent were female. And apparently, that was because men played it differently, presumably better, presumably. But in 1952, The Boston Symphony Orchestra started an experiment. They started blind auditions. So rather than face-to-face auditions, you would have to play behind a screen. Now funnily enough, no immediate change was registered until they asked the audition-ers to take their shoes off before they entered the room. because the clickity-clack  of the heels against the hardwood floors was enough to give the ladies away. Now get this, there results of the audition showed that there was a 50 percent increased chance a woman would progress past the preliminary stage. And it almost tripled  their chances of getting in. What does that tell us? Well, unfortunately for the guys, men actually didn't play differently, but there was the perception that they did. And it was that bias that was determining their outcome.So what we're doing here  is identifying and acknowledging that a bias exists. And look, we all do it. Let me give you an example. A son and his father are in  a horrible car accident. The father dies on impact and the son, who's severely injured, is rushed to hospital. The surgeon looks at the son when they arrive and is like, ""I can't operate."" Why? ""The boy is my son."" How can that be? Ladies and gentlemen, the surgeon is his mother. Now hands up — and it's okay — but hands up if you initially assumed the surgeon was a guy? There's evidence that that unconscious bias exists, but we all just have to acknowledge that it's there and then look at ways  that we can move past it so that we can look at solutions.Now one of the interesting things around the space of unconscious bias is the topic of quotas. And this something  that's often brought up. And of of the criticisms  is this idea of merit. Look, I don't want to be picked  because I'm a chick, I want to be picked because  I have merit, because I'm the best person for the job. It's a sentiment that's pretty common among female engineers that I work with and that I know. And yeah, I get it, I've been there. But, if the merit idea was true, why would identical resumes,  in an experiment done in 2012 by Yale, identical resumes sent out for a lab technician, why would Jennifers be deemed less competent, be less likely to be offered the job, and be paid less than Johns. The unconscious bias is there, but we just have to look at how we can move past it.And, you know, it's interesting, there's some research that talks about why this is the case and it's called the merit paradox. And in organizations — and this is kind of ironic — in organizations that talk about merit being their primary value-driver in terms of who they hire, they were more likely to hire dudes and more likely to pay the guys more because apparently merit  is a masculine quality. But, hey.So you guys think you've got  a good read on me, you kinda think you know what's up. Can you imagine me running one of these? Can you imagine me walking in and being like, ""Hey boys, this is what's up. This is how it's done."" Well, I'm glad you can. (Applause) Because ladies and gentlemen, that's my day job. And the cool thing about it is that it's pretty entertaining. Actually, in places like Malaysia, Muslim women on rigs  isn't even comment-worthy. There are that many of them. But, it is entertaining.I remember, I was telling one of the guys, ""Hey, mate, look, I really want  to learn how to surf."" And he's like, ""Yassmin, I don't know how you can surf with all that gear you've got on, and I don't know any women-only beaches."" And then, the guy came up  with a brilliant idea, he was like, ""I know, you run that organization Youth Without Borders, right? Why don't you start a clothing line for Muslim chicks in beaches. You can call it  Youth Without Boardshorts."" (Laughter) And I was like, ""Thanks, guys."" And I remember another bloke  telling me that I should eat all the yogurt I could because that was the only culture  I was going to get around there.But, the problem is, it's kind of true because there's an intense  lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in places of influence. Now, in 2010, The Australian National University did an experiment where they sent out 4,000 identical applications to entry level jobs, essentially. To get the same number of interviews as someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, if you were Chinese, you had  to send out 68 percent more applications. If you were Middle Eastern — Abdel-Magied — you had to send out 64 percent, and if you're Italian,  you're pretty lucky, you only have to send out 12 percent more. In places like Silicon Valley, it's not that much better. In Google, they put out  some diversity results and 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian and nine, a bunch of blacks, Hispanics, all that kind of thing. And the rest of the tech world is not that much better and they've acknowledged it, but I'm not really sure what they're doing about it.The thing is, it doesn't trickle up. In a study done by Green Park, who are a British senior exec supplier, they said that over half of the FTSE 100 companies don't have a nonwhite leader at their board level, executive or non-executive. And two out of every three don't have an executive who's from a minority. And most of the minorities  that are at that sort of level are non-executive board directors. So their influence isn't that great.I've told you a bunch of terrible things. You're like, ""Oh my god, how bad is that? What can I do about it?"" Well, fortunately, we've identified that there's a problem. There's a lack of opportunity, and that's due to unconscious bias. But you might be sitting  there thinking, ""I ain't brown. What's that got to do with me?"" Let me offer you a solution. And as I've said before, we live in a world where we're looking for an ideal. And if we want to create a world where the circumstances of your birth don't matter, we all have to be part of the solution. And interestingly, the author of the lab resume experiment offered some sort of a solution. She said the one thing that brought the successful women together, the one thing that they had in common, was the fact that they had good mentors.So mentoring, we've all kind of heard that before, it's in the vernacular. Here's another challenge for you. I challenge each and every one of you to mentor someone different. Think about it. Everyone wants to mentor someone who kind of is familiar, who looks like us, we have shared experiences. If I see a Muslim chick  who's got a bit of attitude, I'm like, ""What's up? We can hang out."" You walk into a room and there's someone who went to the same school, you play the same sports, there's a high chance that you're going to want to help that person out. But for the person in the room who has no shared experiences with you it becomes extremely difficult  to find that connection.The idea of finding someone  different to mentor, someone who doesn't come from the same background as you, whatever that background is, is about opening doors  for people who couldn't even get to the damn hallway.Because ladies and gentlemen, the world is not just. People are not born  with equal opportunity. I was born in one of the poorest cities in the world, Khartoum. I was born brown, I was born female, and I was born Muslim in a world that is pretty suspicious of us for reasons I can't control. However, I also acknowledge the fact that I was born with privilege. I was born with amazing parents, I was given an education and had the blessing of migrating to Australia. But also, I've been blessed with amazing mentors who've opened doors for me  that I didn't even know were there. A mentor who said to me, ""Hey, your story's interesting. Let's write something about it so that I can share it with people."" A mentor who said, ""I know you're all those things that don't belong on an Australian rig, but come on anyway."" And here I am, talking to you.And I'm not the only one. There's all sorts of people in my communities that I see have been helped out by mentors. A young Muslim man in Sydney who ended up using his mentor's help to start up a poetry slam in Bankstown and now it's a huge thing. And he's able to change the lives of so many other young people. Or a lady here in Brisbane, an Afghan lady who's a refugee, who could barely speak English when she came to Australia, her mentors helped her become a doctor and she took our Young Queenslander  of the Year Award in 2008. She's an inspiration. This is so not smooth.This is me. But I'm also the woman in the rig clothes, and I'm also the woman who was in the abaya at the beginning. Would you have chosen to mentor me if you had seen me in one of those other versions of who I am? Because I'm that same person. We have to look past our unconscious bias, find someone to mentor who's at the opposite end of your spectrum because structural change takes time, and I don't have that level of patience. So if we're going to create a change, if we're going to create a world where we all have those kinds of opportunities, then choose to open doors for people. Because you might think that diversity has nothing to do with you, but we are all part of this system and we can all be part of that solution.And if you don't know where to find someone different, go to the places you wouldn't usually go. If you enroll in private high school tutoring, go to your local state school or maybe just drop into your local refugee tutoring center. Or perhaps you work at an office. Take out that new grad who looks totally out of place — 'cause that was me — and open doors for them, not in a tokenistic way, because we're not victims, but show them the opportunities because opening up your world will make you realize that  you have access to doors that they didn't even know existed and you didn't even know they didn't have.Ladies and gentlemen, there is a problem in our community with lack of opportunity, especially due to unconscious bias. But each and every one one of you has the potential to change that. I know you've been given a lot of challenges today, but if you can take this one piece and think about it a little differently, because diversity is magic. And I encourage you to look past your initial perceptions because I bet you, they're probably wrong.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yassmin_abdel_magied_what_does_my_headscarf_mean_to_you
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"I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. Not little green humanoids arriving in shiny UFOs, although that would be nice. But it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away.Every star in our sky is a sun. And if our sun has planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., surely those other stars should have planets also, and they do. And in the last two decades, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets.Our night sky is literally teeming with exoplanets. We know, statistically speaking, that every star has at least one planet. And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. Why are we here? Why does our universe exist? How did Earth form and evolve? How and why did life originate and populate our planet? The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? Is there life out there? Who is out there? You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. But I'm here to tell you just how close we're getting to finding out the answer to this question. It's the first time in human history that this really is within reach for us.Now when I think about the possibilities for life out there, I think of the fact that our sun is but one of many stars. This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. It's a collection of bound stars. But our [sun] is one of hundreds of billions of stars and our galaxy is one of upwards of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet.Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. And the highlighted stars are those with known exoplanets. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. And you can see the constellations overlaid and again, so many stars with planets. There's a special patch of the sky where we have thousands of planets.This is where the Kepler Space Telescope focused for many years. Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. This star is called Kepler-186f. It's a system of about five planets. And by the way, most of these exoplanets, we don't know too much about. We know their size, and their orbit and things like that. But there's a very special planet here called Kepler-186f. This planet is in a zone that is not too far from the star, so that the temperature may be just right for life. Here, the artist's conception is just zooming in and showing you what that planet might be like.So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. But actually, we just work on our computers like everyone else, and we get our data by email or downloading from a database. So instead of coming here to tell you about the somewhat tedious nature of the data and data analysis and the complex computer models we make, I have a different way to try to explain to you some of the things that we're thinking about exoplanets.Here's a travel poster: ""Kepler-186f: Where the grass is always redder on the other side."" That's because Kepler-186f orbits a red star, and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there, if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis, it has different pigments and looks red. ""Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth."" This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. ""Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company."" (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. If we could visit one of those planets, you literally would see two sunsets and have two shadows. So actually, science fiction got some things right. Tatooine from Star Wars. And I have a couple of other favorite exoplanets to tell you about. This one is Kepler-10b, it's a hot, hot planet. It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. And actually, it's so hot, we can't visit any of these planets, but if we could, we would melt long before we got there. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock and has liquid lava lakes.Gliese 1214b. This planet, we know the mass and the size and it has a fairly low density. It's somewhat warm. We actually don't know really anything about this planet, but one possibility is that it's a water world, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons that might be 50 percent water by mass. And in this case, it would have a thick steam atmosphere overlaying an ocean, not of liquid water, but of an exotic form of water, a superfluid — not quite a gas, not quite a liquid. And under that wouldn't be rock, but a form of high-pressure ice, like ice IX.So out of all these planets out there, and the variety is just simply astonishing, we mostly want to find the planets that are Goldilocks planets, we call them. Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold — but just right for life. But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat — the greenhouse effect. We have to be able to assess the greenhouse gases on other planets. Well, science fiction got some things wrong. The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there.Well, we don't need to travel at warp speeds to see other planet atmospheres, although I don't want to dissuade any budding engineers from figuring out how to do that. We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. This is a picture, a photograph of the Hubble Space Telescope taken by the shuttle Atlantis as it was departing after the last human space flight to Hubble. They installed a new camera, actually, that we use for exoplanet atmospheres. And so far, we've been able to study dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, about six of them in great detail. But those are not small planets like Earth. They're big, hot planets that are easy to see. We're not ready, we don't have the right technology yet to study small exoplanets. But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres.I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. And here's our sun, the white light of our sun split up, not by raindrops, but by a spectrograph. And you can see all these dark, vertical lines. Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. And this is actually how astronomers have studied objects in the heavens, literally, for over a century. So here, each different atom and molecule has a special set of lines, a fingerprint, if you will. And that's how we study exoplanet atmospheres. And I'll just never forget when I started working on exoplanet atmospheres 20 years ago, how many people told me, ""This will never happen. We'll never be able to study them. Why are you bothering?"" And that's why I'm pleased to tell you about all the atmospheres studied now, and this is really a field of its own. So when it comes to other planets, other Earths, in the future when we can observe them, what kind of gases would we be looking for? Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. That's a lot of oxygen. But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. So oxygen is here because of life. And our goal then is to look for gases in other planet atmospheres, gases that don't belong, that we might be able to attribute to life. But which molecules should we search for? I actually told you how diverse exoplanets are. We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths.And that's one of the main things I'm working on now, I have a theory about this. It reminds me that nearly every day, I receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such. So, please don't email me one of your crazy theories. (Laughter) Well, I had my own crazy theory. But, who does the MIT professor go to? Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, ""Sure, come and talk to me."" So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. And that theory was that life produces all small molecules, so many molecules. Like, everything I could think of, but not being a chemist. Think about it: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, methane, methyl chloride — so many gases. They also exist for other reasons, but just life even produces ozone. So we go to talk to him about this, and immediately, he shot down the theory. He found an example that didn't exist. So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field.But back to exoplanets, the point is that life produces so many different types of gases, literally thousands of gases. And so what we're doing now is just trying to figure out on which types of exoplanets, which gases could be attributed to life. And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life.So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. But a really big challenge ahead of us is: how? How are we going to find these planets? There are actually many ways to find planets, several different ways. But the one that I'm most focused on is how can we open a gateway so that in the future, we can find hundreds of Earths. We have a real shot at finding signs of life. And actually, I just finished leading a two-year project in this very special phase of a concept we call the starshade. And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. Here, you can see myself and two team members holding up one small part of the starshade. It's shaped like a giant flower, and this is one of the prototype petals. The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. Now, this has to be made very precisely, literally, the petals to microns and they have to deploy to millimeters. And this whole structure would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. It's about tens of meters in diameter. And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. Now this is a real project that we worked on, literally, you would not believe how hard. Just so you believe it's not just in movie format, here's a real photograph of a second-generation starshade deployment test bed in the lab. And in this case, I just wanted you to know that that central truss has heritage left over from large radio deployables in space.So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? Well, in the best case, we will find an image of another exo-Earth. Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. And this is actually a real photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, four billion miles away. And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics.But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth.And I can guaranteethat in the next generation of space telescopes, in the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. And the capability to split up the starlight so that we can look for gases and assess the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, estimate the surface temperature, and look for signs of life.But there's more. In this case of searching for other planets like Earth, we are making a new kind of map of the nearby stars and of the planets orbiting them, including [planets] that actually might be inhabitable by humans.And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds.Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: And I give you, for a question, Rosetta Mission Manager Fred Jansen.Fred Jansen: You mentioned halfway through that the technology to actually look at the spectrum of an exoplanet like Earth is not there yet. When do you expect this will be there, and what's needed?Actually, what we expect is what we call our next-generation Hubble telescope. And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable.JC: I'm going to ask you one follow-up question, too, Sara, as the generalist. So I am really struck by the notion in your career of the opposition you faced, that when you began thinking about exoplanets, there was extreme skepticism in the scientific community that they existed, and you proved them wrong. What did it take to take that on?SS: Well, the thing is that as scientists, we're supposed to be skeptical, because our job to make sure that what the other person is saying actually makes sense or not. But being a scientist, I think you've seen it from this session, it's like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this sort of resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.JC: I love that. Thank you, Sara.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sara_seager_the_search_for_planets_beyond_our_solar_system
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"Now, I've been making pictures for quite a long time, and normally speaking, a picture like this, for me, should be straightforward. I'm in southern Ethiopia. I'm with the Daasanach. There's a big family, there's a very beautiful tree, and I make these pictures with this very large, extremely cumbersome, very awkward technical plate film camera. Does anybody know 4x5 and 10x8 sheets of film, and you're setting it up, putting it on the tripod. I've got the family, spent the better part of a day talking with them. They sort of understand what I'm on about. They think I'm a bit crazy, but that's another story. And what's most important for me is the beauty and the aesthetic, and that's based on the light. So the light's setting on my left-hand side, and there's a balance in the communication with the Daasanach, the family of 30, all ages. There's babies and there's grandparents, I'm getting them in the tree and waiting for the light to set, and it's going, going, and I've got one sheet of film left, and I think, I'm okay, I'm in control, I'm in control. I'm setting it up and I'm setting up, and the light's just about to go, and I want it to be golden, I want it to be beautiful. I want it to be hanging on the horizon so it lights these people, in all the potential glory that they could be presented. And it's about to go  and it's about to go, and I put my sheet in the camera, it's all focused, and all of a sudden there's a massive ""whack,"" and I'm looking around, and in the top corner of the tree, one of the girls slaps the girl next to her, and the girl next to her pulls her hair, and all hell breaks loose, and I'm standing there going, ""But the light, the light. Wait, I need the light. Stay still! Stay still!"" And they start screaming, and then one of the men turns around and starts screaming, shouting, and the whole tree collapses, not the tree, but the people in the tree. They're all running around screaming, and they run back off into the village in this sort of cloud of smoke, and I'm left there standing behind my tripod. I've got my sheet, and the light's gone, and I can't make the picture. Where have they all gone? I had no idea.It took me a week, it took me a week to make the picture which you see here today, and I'll tell you why. (Applause) It's very, very, very simple — I spent a week going around the village, and I went to every single one: ""Hello, can you meet at the tree? What's your story? Who are you?"" And it all turned out to be about a boyfriend, for crying out loud. I mean, I have teenage kids. I should know. It was about a boyfriend. The girl on the top, she'd kissed the wrong boy, and they'd started having a fight. And there was a very, very beautiful lesson for me in that: If I was going to photograph these people in the dignified, respectful way that I had intended, and put them on a pedestal, I had to understand them. It wasn't just about turning up. It wasn't just about shaking a hand. It wasn't about just saying, ""I'm Jimmy, I'm a photographer."" I had to get to know every single one of them, right down to whose boyfriend is who and who is allowed to kiss who.So in the end, a week later, and I was absolutely exhausted, I mean on my knees going, ""Please get back up in that tree. It's a picture I need to make."" They all came back. I put them all back up in the tree. I made sure the girls were in the right position, and the ones that slapped, one was over there. They did look at each other. If you look at it later, they're staring at each other very angrily, and I've got the tree and everything, and then at the last minute, I go, ""The goat, the goat! I need something for the eye to look at. I need a white goat in the middle."" So I swapped all the goats around. I put the goats in. But even then I got it wrong, because if you can see on the left-hand side, another little boy storms off because I didn't choose his goat. So the moral being I have to learn to speak Goat as well as Daasanach.But anyway, the effort that goes into that picture and the story that I've just related to you, as you can imagine, there are hundreds of other bizarre, eccentric stories of hundreds of other people around the world. And this was about four years ago, and I set off on a journey, to be honest, a very indulgent journey. I'm a real romantic. I'm an idealist, perhaps in some ways naive. But I truly believe that there are people on the planet that are beautiful. It's very, very simple. It's not rocket science. I wanted to put these people on a pedestal. I wanted to put them on a pedestal like they'd never been seen before. So, I chose about 35 different groups, tribes, indigenous cultures. They were chosen purely because of their aesthetic, and I'll talk more about that later. I'm not an anthropologist, I have no technical study with the subject, but I do have a very, very, very deep passion, and I believe that I had to choose the most beautiful people on the planet in the most beautiful environment that they lived in, and put the two together and present them to you.About a year ago, I published the first pictures, and something extraordinarily exciting happened. The whole world came running, and it was a bizarre experience, because everybody, from everywhere: ""Who are they? What are they? How many are they? Where did you find them? Are they real? You faked it. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me."" Millions of questions for which, to be honest, I don't have the answers. I really didn't have the answers, and I could sort of understand, okay, they're beautiful, that was my intention, but the questions that I was being fired at, I could not answer them.Until, it was quite amusing, about a year ago somebody said, ""You've been invited to do a TED Talk."" And I said, ""Ted? Ted? Who's Ted? I haven't met Ted before."" He said, ""No, a TED Talk."" I said, ""But who's Ted? Do I have to talk to him or do we sit with each other on the stage?"" And, ""No, no, the TED group. You must know about it."" And I said, ""I've been in a teepee and in a yurt for the last five years. How do I know who Ted is? Introduce me to him."" Anyway, to cut a long story short, he said, ""We have to do a TED Talk."" Researched. Oh, exciting. That's great! And then eventually you're going to go to TEDGlobal. Even more exciting. But what you need to do, you need to teach the people lessons, lessons that you've learned on your travels around the world with these tribes. I thought, lessons, okay, well, what did I learn? Good question. Three. You need three lessons, and they need to be terribly profound. (Laughter) And I thought, three lessons, well, I'm going to think about it. (Applause)So I thought long and hard, and I stood here two days ago, and I had my test run, and I had my cards and my clicker in my hands and my pictures were on the screen, and I had my three lessons, and I started presenting them, and I had this very odd out-of-body experience. I sort of looked at myself standing there, going, ""Oh, Jimmy, this is complete loads of codswallop. All these people sitting here, they've had more of these talks, they've heard more lessons in their life. Who are you to tell them what you've learned? Who are you to guide them and who are you to show them what is right, what is wrong, what these people have to say?"" And I had a little bit of a, it was very private, a little bit of a meltdown. I went back, and a little bit like the boy walking away from the tree with his goats, very disgruntled, going, that didn't work, It wasn't what I wanted to communicate. And I thought long and hard about it, and I thought, well, the only thing I can communicate is very, very basic. You have to turn it all the way around. There's only one person I know here, and that's me. I'm still getting to know myself, and it's a lifelong journey, and I probably won't have all the answers, but I did learn some extraordinary things on this journey.So what I'm going to do is share with you my lessons. It's a very, as I explained at the beginning, very indulgent, very personal, how and why I made these pictures, and I leave it to you as the audience to interpret what these lessons have meant to me, what they could perhaps mean to you.I traveled enormously as a child. I was very nomadic. It was actually very exciting. All around the world, and I had this feeling that I was pushed off at great speed to become somebody, become that individual, Jimmy. Go off into the planet, and so I ran, and I ran, and my wife sometimes kids me, ""Jimmy, you look a bit like Forrest Gump,"" but I'm, ""No, it's all about something, trust me."" So I kept running and I kept running, and I sort of got somewhere and I sort of stood there and looked around me and I thought, well, where do I belong? Where do I fit? What am I? Where am I from? I had no idea. So I hope there aren't too many psychologists in this audience. Perhaps part of this journey is about me trying to find out where I belonged. So whilst going, and don't worry, I didn't when I arrived with these tribes, I didn't paint myself yellow and run around with these spears and loincloths.But what I did find were people that belonged themselves, and they inspired me, some extraordinary people, and I'd like to introduce you to some heroes of mine. They're the Huli.Now, the Huli are some of the most extraordinarily beautiful people on the planet. They're proud. They live in the Papua New Guinean highlands. There's not many of them left, and they're called the Huli wigmen. And images like this, I mean, this is what it's all about for me. And you've spent weeks and months there talking with them, getting there, and I want to put them on a pedestal, and I said, ""You have something that many people have not seen. You sit in this stunning nature."" And it really does look like this, and they really do look like this. This is the real thing. And you know why they're proud? You know why they look like this, and why I broke my back literally to photograph them and present them to you? It's because they have these extraordinary rituals.And the Huli have this ritual: When they're teenagers, becoming a man, they have to shave their heads, and they spend the rest of their life shaving their heads every single day, and what they do with that hair, they make it into a creation, a creation that's a very personal creation. It's their creation. It's their Huli creation. So they're called the Huli wigmen. That's a wig on his head. It's all made out of his human hair. And then they decorate that wig with the feathers of the birds of paradise, and don't worry, there are many birds there. There's very few people living, so nothing to get too upset about, and they spend the rest of their life recreating these hats and getting further and further, and it's extraordinary, and there's another group, they're called the Kalam, and they live in the next valley, but they speak a completely different language, they look completely different, and they wear a hat, and it's built out of scarabs, these fantastic emerald green little scarabs, and sometimes there are 5,000 or 6,000 scarabs in this hat, and they spend the whole of their life collecting these scarabs to build these hats.So the Huli inspired me in that they belong. Perhaps I have to work harder at finding a ritual which matters for me and going back into my past to see where I actually fit.An extremely important part of this project was about how I photograph these extraordinary people. And it's basically beauty. I think beauty matters. We spend the whole of our existence revolving around beauty: beautiful places, beautiful things, and ultimately, beautiful people. It's very, very, very significant. I've spent all of my life analyzing what do I look like? Am I perceived as beautiful? Does it matter if I'm a beautiful person or not, or is it purely based on my aesthetic? And then when I went off, I came to a very narrow conclusion. Do I have to go around the world photographing, excuse me, women between the age of 25 and 30? Is that what beauty is going to be? Is everything before and after that utterly irrelevant?And it was only until I went on a journey, a journey that was so extreme, I still get shivers when I think about it. I went to a part of the world, and I don't know whether any of you have ever heard of Chukotka. Has anybody ever heard of Chukotka? Chukotka probably is, technically, as far as one can go and still be on the living planet. It's 13 hours' flight from Moscow. First you've got to get to Moscow, and then 13 hours' flight nonstop from Moscow. And that's if you get there. As you can see, some people sort of miss the runway.And then when you land there, in Chukotka are the Chukchis. Now, the Chukchis are the last indigenous Inuits of Siberia, and they're people I'd heard about, I'd hardly seen any images of, but I knew they were there, and I'd been in touch with this guide, and this guide said, ""There's this fantastic tribe. There's only about 40 of them. You'll be okay. We'll find them."" So off we went on this journey. When we arrived there, after a month of traveling across the ice, and we'd got to them, but then I was not allowed to photograph them. They said, ""You cannot photograph us. You have to wait. You have to wait until you get to know us. You have to wait until you understand us. You have to wait until you see how we interact with one another."" And only then, it was many, many weeks later, I saw a respect. They had zero judgment. They observed one another, from the youth, from the middle aged to the old. They need each other. The children need to chew the meat all day because the adults don't have any teeth, but at the same time, the children take the old aged people out to the toilet because they're infirm, so there's this fantastic community of respect. And they adore and admire one another, and they truly taught me what beauty was. (Applause)Now I'm going to ask for a little bit of audience interaction. This is extremely important for the end of my talk. If you could look at somebody left to the right of you, and I want you to observe them, and I want you to give them a compliment. This is very important. Now, it may be their nose or their hair or even their aura, I don't mind, but please look at each other, give them a compliment. You have to be quick, because I'm running out of time. And you have to remember it.Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you, you've given each other compliments. Hold that compliment very, very tightly. Hold it for later.And the last thing, it was extraordinarily profound, and it happened only two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I went back to the Himba. Now, the Himba live in northern Namibia on the border of Angola, and I'd been there a few times before, and I'd gone back to present this book I'd made, to show them the pictures, to get into a discussion with them, to say, ""This is how I saw you. This is how I love you. This is how I respect you. What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong?"" So I wanted this debate. It was very, very, very emotional, and one night we were sitting around the campfire, and I have to be honest, I think I'd had a little bit too much to drink, and I was sort of sitting under the stars going, ""This is great, you've seen my pictures, we love each other."" (Laughter) And I'm a little bit slow, and I looked around me, and I said, I thought, maybe, the fence is missing. Wasn't there a fence here last time I came? You know, this big protective fence around the village, and they sort of looked at me and go, ""Yeah, chief die."" And I thought, okay, chief dying, right, you know, look up at the stars again, look at the campfire. Chief die. What on Earth does chief die have to do with the fence? ""Chief die. First we destroy, yeah? Then we reflect. Then we rebuild. Then we respect."" And I burst out in tears, because my father had only just died prior to this journey, and I didn't ever acknowledge him, I didn't ever appreciate him for the fact that I'm probably standing here today because of him. These people taught me that we are only who we are because of our parents and our grandparents and our forefathers going on and on and on before that, and I, no matter how romantic or how idealistic I am on this journey, I did not know that until two weeks ago. I did not know that until two weeks ago.So what's this all about? Well, there's an image I'd like to show you, quite a special image, and it wasn't essentially the image I wanted to choose. I was sitting there the other day, and I have to finish on a strong image. And somebody said, ""You have to show them the picture of the Nenets. The Nenets."" I was like, yeah, but that's not my favorite picture. She went, ""No no no no no no no. It's an amazing picture. You're in his eyes."" I said, ""What do you mean I'm in his eyes? It's a picture of the Nenets."" She said, ""No, look, look closely, you're in his eyes."" And when you look closely at this picture, there is a reflection of me in his eyes, so I think perhaps he has my soul, and I'm in his soul, and whilst these pictures look at you, I ask you to look at them. You may not be reflected in his eyes, but there is something extraordinarily important about these people. I don't ultimately have the answers, as I've just shared with you, but you must do. There must be something there. So if you can briefly reflect on what I was discussing about beauty and about belonging and about our ancestors and our roots, and I need you all to stand for me, please. (Laughter) Now you have no excuse. It's almost lunchtime, and this is not a standing ovation, so don't worry, I'm not fishing for compliments. But you were given a compliment a few minutes ago. Now I want you to stand tall. I want you to breathe in. This is what I say. I'm not going to get on my knees for two weeks. I'm not going to ask you to carry a goat, and I know you don't have any camels. Photography's extraordinarily powerful. It's this language which we now all understand. We truly do all understand it, and we have this global digital fireplace, don't we, but I want to share you with the world, because you are also a tribe. You are the TED tribe, yeah? But you have to remember that compliment. You have to stand tall, breathe in through your nose, and I'm going to photograph you. Okay? I need to do a panoramic shot, so it's going to take a minute, so you have to concentrate, okay? Breathe in, stand tall, no laughing. Shh, breathe through your nose. I'm going to photograph.(Clicks)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_nelson_gorgeous_portraits_of_the_world_s_vanishing_people
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"I'm really excited to share with you some findings that really surprise me about what makes companies  succeed the most, what factors actually matter the most for startup success.I believe that the startup organization is one of the greatest forms to make the world a better place. If you take a group of people  with the right equity incentives and organize them in a startup, you can unlock human potential in a way never before possible. You get them to achieve  unbelievable things.But if the startup  organization is so great, why do so many fail? That's what I wanted to find out. I wanted to find out what actually matters most for startup success.And I wanted to try  to be systematic about it, avoid some of my instincts and maybe misperceptions I have from so many companies I've seen over the years.I wanted to know this because I've been starting businesses since I was 12 years old when I sold candy at the bus stop in junior high school, to high school, when I made solar energy devices, to college, when I made loudspeakers. And when I graduated from college, I started software companies. And 20 years ago, I started Idealab, and in the last 20 years, we started more than 100 companies, many successes, and many big failures. We learned a lot from those failures.So I tried to look across what factors accounted the most for company success and failure. So I looked at these five. First, the idea. I used to think that  the idea was everything. I named my company Idealab for how much I worship the ""aha!"" moment when you first come up with the idea. But then over time, I came to think that maybe the team, the execution, adaptability, that mattered even more than the idea.I never thought I'd be quoting boxer Mike Tyson on the TED stage, but he once said, ""Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face."" (Laughter) And I think that's so true about business as well. So much about a team's execution is its ability to adapt to getting punched in the face by the customer. The customer is the true reality. And that's why I came to think that the team maybe was the most important thing.Then I started looking at the business model. Does the company have a very clear path generating customer revenues? That started rising to the top in my thinking about maybe what mattered most for success.Then I looked at the funding. Sometimes companies received intense amounts of funding. Maybe that's the most important thing?And then of course, the timing. Is the idea way too early and the world's not ready for it? Is it early, as in, you're in advance and you have to educate the world? Is it just right? Or is it too late, and there's already too many competitors?So I tried to look very carefully at these five factors across many companies. And I looked across all 100 Idealab companies, and 100 non-Idealab companies to try and come up with  something scientific about it.So first, on these Idealab companies, the top five companies — Citysearch, CarsDirect, GoTo, NetZero, Tickets.com — those all became billion-dollar successes. And the five companies on the bottom — Z.com, Insider Pages, MyLife, Desktop Factory, Peoplelink — we all had high hopes for, but didn't succeed.So I tried to rank across all  of those attributes how I felt those companies scored on each of those dimensions. And then for non-Idealab companies, I looked at wild successes, like Airbnb and Instagram and Uber and Youtube and LinkedIn.And some failures: Webvan, Kozmo, Pets.com Flooz and Friendster. The bottom companies had intense funding, they even had business models in some cases, but they didn't succeed. I tried to look at what factors actually accounted the most for success and failure across all of these companies, and the results really surprised me.The number one thing was timing. Timing accounted for 42 percent of the difference between success and failure. Team and execution came in second, and the idea, the differentiability of the idea, the uniqueness of the idea, that actually came in third.Now, this isn't absolutely definitive, it's not to say that  the idea isn't important, but it very much surprised me that the idea wasn't the most important thing. Sometimes it mattered more when  it was actually timed.The last two, business model and funding, made sense to me actually. I think business model makes sense to be that low because you can start out without a business model and add one later if your customers are demanding what you're creating. And funding, I think as well, if you're underfunded at first but you're gaining traction, especially in today's age, it's very, very easy to get intense funding.So now let me give you some specific examples about each of these. So take a wild success like Airbnb that everybody knows about. Well, that company was famously passed on by many smart investors because people thought, ""No one's going to rent out a space in their home to a stranger."" Of course, people proved that wrong. But one of the reasons it succeeded, aside from a good business model, a good idea, great execution, is the timing.That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money, and that maybe helped people overcome their objection to renting out their own home to a stranger.Same thing with Uber. Uber came out, incredible company, incredible business model, great execution, too. But the timing was so perfect for their need to get drivers into the system. Drivers were looking for extra money; it was very, very important.Some of our early successes, Citysearch, came out when people needed web pages. GoTo.com, which we announced actually at TED in 1998, was when companies were looking for cost-effective ways to get traffic. We thought the idea was so great, but actually, the timing was probably maybe more important. And then some of our failures. We started a company called Z.com, it was an online entertainment company. We were so excited about it — we raised enough money, we had a great business model, we even signed incredibly great Hollywood talent to join the company. But broadband penetration was too low in 1999-2000. It was too hard to watch video content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company eventually went out of business in 2003.Just two years later, when the codec problem was solved by Adobe Flash and when broadband penetration crossed 50 percent in America, YouTube was perfectly timed. Great idea, but unbelievable timing. In fact, YouTube didn't even have a business model when it first started. It wasn't even certain that  that would work out. But that was beautifully,  beautifully timed.So what I would say, in summary, is execution definitely matters a lot. The idea matters a lot. But timing might matter even more. And the best way to really assess timing is to really look at whether  consumers are really ready for what you have to offer them. And to be really, really honest about it, not be in denial about any results that you see, because if you have something you love, you want to push it forward, but you have to be very, very honest about that factor on timing.As I said earlier, I think startups can change the world and make the world a better place. I hope some of these insights can maybe help you have a slightly higher success ratio, and thus make something great come to the world that wouldn't have happened otherwise.Thank you very much, you've been a great audience.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed
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"Mark Twain summed up what I take to be one of the fundamental problems of cognitive science with a single witticism. He said, ""There's something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact."" (Laughter)Twain meant it as a joke, of course, but he's right: There's something fascinating about science. From a few bones, we infer the existence of dinosuars. From spectral lines, the composition of nebulae. From fruit flies, the mechanisms of heredity, and from reconstructed images of blood flowing through the brain, or in my case, from the behavior of very young children, we try to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition. In particular, in my lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I have spent the past decade trying to understand the mystery of how children learn so much from so little so quickly. Because, it turns out that the fascinating thing about science is also a fascinating thing about children, which, to put a gentler spin on Mark Twain, is precisely their ability to draw rich, abstract inferences rapidly and accurately from sparse, noisy data. I'm going to give you just two examples today. One is about a problem of generalization, and the other is about a problem of causal reasoning. And although I'm going to talk about work in my lab, this work is inspired by and indebted to a field. I'm grateful to mentors, colleagues, and collaborators around the world.Let me start with the problem of generalization. Generalizing from small samples of data is the bread and butter of science. We poll a tiny fraction of the electorate and we predict the outcome of national elections. We see how a handful of patients responds to treatment in a clinical trial, and we bring drugs to a national market. But this only works if our sample is randomly drawn from the population. If our sample is cherry-picked in some way — say, we poll only urban voters, or say, in our clinical trials for treatments for heart disease, we include only men — the results may not generalize to the broader population.So scientists care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, but what does that have to do with babies? Well, babies have to generalize from small samples of data all the time. They see a few rubber ducks and learn that they float, or a few balls and learn that they bounce. And they develop expectations about ducks and balls that they're going to extend to rubber ducks and balls for the rest of their lives. And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.So do babies care whether the tiny bit of evidence they see is plausibly representative of a larger population? Let's find out. I'm going to show you two movies, one from each of two conditions of an experiment, and because you're going to see just two movies, you're going to see just two babies, and any two babies differ from each other in innumerable ways. But these babies, of course, here stand in for groups of babies, and the differences you're going to see represent average group differences in babies' behavior across conditions. In each movie, you're going to see a baby doing maybe just exactly what you might expect a baby to do, and we can hardly make babies more magical than they already are. But to my mind the magical thing, and what I want you to pay attention to, is the contrast between these two conditions, because the only thing that differs between these two movies is the statistical evidence the babies are going to observe. We're going to show babies a box of blue and yellow balls, and my then-graduate student, now colleague at Stanford, Hyowon Gweon, is going to pull three blue balls in a row out of this box, and when she pulls those balls out, she's going to squeeze them, and the balls are going to squeak. And if you're a baby, that's like a TED Talk. It doesn't get better than that. (Laughter) But the important point is it's really easy to pull three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly blue balls. You could do that with your eyes closed. It's plausibly a random sample from this population. And if you can reach into a box at random and pull out things that squeak, then maybe everything in the box squeaks. So maybe babies should expect those yellow balls to squeak as well. Now, those yellow balls have funny sticks on the end, so babies could do other things with them if they wanted to. They could pound them or whack them. But let's see what the baby does.(Video) Hyowon Gweon: See this? (Ball squeaks) Did you see that? (Ball squeaks) Cool. See this one? (Ball squeaks) Wow.Laura Schulz: Told you. (Laughs)(Video) HG: See this one? (Ball squeaks) Hey Clara, this one's for you. You can go ahead and play. (Laughter)LS: I don't even have to talk, right? All right, it's nice that babies will generalize properties of blue balls to yellow balls, and it's impressive that babies can learn from imitating us, but we've known those things about babies for a very long time. The really interesting question is what happens when we show babies exactly the same thing, and we can ensure it's exactly the same because we have a secret compartment and we actually pull the balls from there, but this time, all we change is the apparent population from which that evidence was drawn. This time, we're going to show babies three blue balls pulled out of a box of mostly yellow balls, and guess what? You [probably won't] randomly draw three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly yellow balls. That is not plausibly randomly sampled evidence. That evidence suggests that maybe Hyowon was deliberately sampling the blue balls. Maybe there's something special about the blue balls. Maybe only the blue balls squeak. Let's see what the baby does.(Video) HG: See this? (Ball squeaks) See this toy? (Ball squeaks) Oh, that was cool. See? (Ball squeaks) Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play.(Fussing) (Laughter)LS: So you just saw two 15-month-old babies do entirely different things based only on the probability of the sample they observed. Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the percentage of babies who squeezed the ball in each condition, and as you'll see, babies are much more likely to generalize the evidence when it's plausibly representative of the population than when the evidence is clearly cherry-picked. And this leads to a fun prediction: Suppose you pulled just one blue ball out of the mostly yellow box. You [probably won't] pull three blue balls in a row at random out of a yellow box, but you could randomly sample just one blue ball. That's not an improbable sample. And if you could reach into a box at random and pull out something that squeaks, maybe everything in the box squeaks. So even though babies are going to see much less evidence for squeaking, and have many fewer actions to imitate in this one ball condition than in the condition you just saw, we predicted that babies themselves would squeeze more, and that's exactly what we found. So 15-month-old babies, in this respect, like scientists, care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, and they use this to develop expectations about the world: what squeaks and what doesn't, what to explore and what to ignore.Let me show you another example now, this time about a problem of causal reasoning. And it starts with a problem of confounded evidence that all of us have, which is that we are part of the world. And this might not seem like a problem to you, but like most problems, it's only a problem when things go wrong. Take this baby, for instance. Things are going wrong for him. He would like to make this toy go, and he can't. I'll show you a few-second clip. And there's two possibilities, broadly: Maybe he's doing something wrong, or maybe there's something wrong with the toy. So in this next experiment, we're going to give babies just a tiny bit of statistical data supporting one hypothesis over the other, and we're going to see if babies can use that to make different decisions about what to do.Here's the setup. Hyowon is going to try to make the toy go and succeed. I am then going to try twice and fail both times, and then Hyowon is going to try again and succeed, and this roughly sums up my relationship to my graduate students in technology across the board. But the important point here is it provides a little bit of evidence that the problem isn't with the toy, it's with the person. Some people can make this toy go, and some can't. Now, when the baby gets the toy, he's going to have a choice. His mom is right there, so he can go ahead and hand off the toy and change the person, but there's also going to be another toy at the end of that cloth, and he can pull the cloth towards him and change the toy. So let's see what the baby does.(Video) HG: Two, three. Go! (Music) LS: One, two, three, go! Arthur, I'm going to try again. One, two, three, go! YG: Arthur, let me try again, okay? One, two, three, go! (Music) Look at that. Remember these toys? See these toys? Yeah, I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. You can go ahead and play. LS: Okay, Laura, but of course, babies love their mommies. Of course babies give toys to their mommies when they can't make them work. So again, the really important question is what happens when we change the statistical data ever so slightly. This time, babies are going to see the toy work and fail in exactly the same order, but we're changing the distribution of evidence. This time, Hyowon is going to succeed once and fail once, and so am I. And this suggests it doesn't matter who tries this toy, the toy is broken. It doesn't work all the time. Again, the baby's going to have a choice. Her mom is right next to her, so she can change the person, and there's going to be another toy at the end of the cloth. Let's watch what she does.(Video) HG: Two, three, go! (Music) Let me try one more time. One, two, three, go! Hmm.LS: Let me try, Clara. One, two, three, go! Hmm, let me try again. One, two, three, go! (Music) HG: I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. You can go ahead and play. (Applause)LS: Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's choices in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and exploring. I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of literally hundreds in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich inferences from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. Children learn about new tools from just a few examples. They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language.I want to close with just two points. If you've been following my world, the field of brain and cognitive sciences, for the past few years, three big ideas will have come to your attention. The first is that this is the era of the brain. And indeed, there have been staggering discoveries in neuroscience: localizing functionally specialized regions of cortex, turning mouse brains transparent, activating neurons with light. A second big idea is that this is the era of big data and machine learning, and machine learning promises to revolutionize our understanding of everything from social networks to epidemiology. And maybe, as it tackles problems of scene understanding and natural language processing, to tell us something about human cognition. And the final big idea you'll have heard is that maybe it's a good idea we're going to know so much about brains and have so much access to big data, because left to our own devices, humans are fallible, we take shortcuts, we err, we make mistakes, we're biased, and in innumerable ways, we get the world wrong. I think these are all important stories, and they have a lot to tell us about what it means to be human, but I want you to note that today I told you a very different story. It's a story about minds and not brains, and in particular, it's a story about the kinds of computations that uniquely human minds can perform, which involve rich, structured knowledge and the ability to learn from small amounts of data, the evidence of just a few examples. And fundamentally, it's a story about how starting as very small children and continuing out all the way to the greatest accomplishments of our culture, we get the world right.Folks, human minds do not only learn from small amounts of data. Human minds think of altogether new ideas. Human minds generate research and discovery, and human minds generate art and literature and poetry and theater, and human minds take care of other humans: our old, our young, our sick. We even heal them. In the years to come, we're going to see technological innovations beyond anything I can even envision, but we are very unlikely to see anything even approximating the computational power of a human child in my lifetime or in yours. If we invest in these most powerful learners and their development, in babies and children and mothers and fathers and caregivers and teachers the ways we invest in our other most powerful and elegant forms of technology, engineering and design, we will not just be dreaming of a better future, we will be planning for one.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Laura, thank you. I do actually have a question for you. First of all, the research is insane. I mean, who would design an experiment like that? (Laughter) I've seen that a couple of times, and I still don't honestly believe that that can truly be happening, but other people have done similar experiments; it checks out. The babies really are that genius.LS: You know, they look really impressive in our experiments, but think about what they look like in real life, right? It starts out as a baby. Eighteen months later, it's talking to you, and babies' first words aren't just things like balls and ducks, they're things like ""all gone,"" which refer to disappearance, or ""uh-oh,"" which refer to unintentional actions. It has to be that powerful. It has to be much more powerful than anything I showed you. They're figuring out the entire world. A four-year-old can talk to you about almost anything. (Applause)CA: And if I understand you right, the other key point you're making is, we've been through these years where there's all this talk of how quirky and buggy our minds are, that behavioral economics and the whole theories behind that that we're not rational agents. You're really saying that the bigger story is how extraordinary, and there really is genius there that is underappreciated.LS: One of my favorite quotes in psychology comes from the social psychologist Solomon Asch, and he said the fundamental task of psychology is to remove the veil of self-evidence from things. There are orders of magnitude more decisions you make every day that get the world right. You know about objects and their properties. You know them when they're occluded. You know them in the dark. You can walk through rooms. You can figure out what other people are thinking. You can talk to them. You can navigate space. You know about numbers. You know causal relationships. You know about moral reasoning. You do this effortlessly, so we don't see it, but that is how we get the world right, and it's a remarkable and very difficult-to-understand accomplishment.CA: I suspect there are people in the audience who have this view of accelerating technological power who might dispute your statement that never in our lifetimes will a computer do what a three-year-old child can do, but what's clear is that in any scenario, our machines have so much to learn from our toddlers. LS: I think so. You'll have some machine learning folks up here. I mean, you should never bet against babies or chimpanzees or technology as a matter of practice, but it's not just a difference in quantity, it's a difference in kind. We have incredibly powerful computers, and they do do amazingly sophisticated things, often with very big amounts of data. Human minds do, I think, something quite different, and I think it's the structured, hierarchical nature of human knowledge that remains a real challenge.CA: Laura Schulz, wonderful food for thought. Thank you so much.LS: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_schulz_the_surprisingly_logical_minds_of_babies
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"In the great 1980s movie  ""The Blues Brothers,"" there's a scene where John Belushi goes to visit Dan Aykroyd in his apartment in Chicago for the very first time. It's a cramped, tiny space and it's just three feet away from the train tracks. As John sits on Dan's bed, a train goes rushing by, rattling everything in the room. John asks, ""How often does that train go by?"" Dan replies, ""So often, you won't even notice it."" And then, something falls off the wall.We all know what he's talking about. As human beings, we get used to everyday things really fast. As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things, to feel them, and try to improve upon them. For example, see this piece of fruit? See this little sticker? That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. But somewhere as the years passed, someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit. Why? So it could be easier for us to check out  at the grocery counter.Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. But now, there's a new problem. When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. Then rolling up that sticker — you know what I mean. And then trying to flick it off your fingers. (Applause) It's not fun, not at all.But something interesting happened. See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings. You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit. You felt upset. You just wanted to dive in. By the 10th time, you started to become less upset and you just started peeling the label off. By the 100th time, at least for me, I became numb to it. I simply picked up the piece of fruit, dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off, and then wondered, ""Was there another sticker?""So why is that? Why do we get used to everyday things? Well as human beings, we have limited brain power. And so our brains encode the  everyday things we do into habits so we can free up space  to learn new things. It's a process called habituation and it's one of the most basic ways, as humans, we learn.Now, habituation isn't always bad. Remember learning to drive? I sure do. Your hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the wheel, looking at every single object out there — the cars, the lights, the pedestrians. It's a nerve-wracking experience. So much so, that I couldn't even talk to anyone else in the car and I couldn't even listen to music. But then something interesting happened. As the weeks went by, driving became easier and easier. You habituated it. It started to become  fun and second nature. And then, you could talk  to your friends again and listen to music.So there's a good reason why our brains habituate things. If we didn't, we'd notice every little detail, all the time. It would be exhausting, and we'd have no time to learn about new things.But sometimes, habituation isn't good. If it stops us from noticing  the problems that are around us, well, that's bad. And if it stops us from noticing  and fixing those problems, well, then that's really bad.Comedians know all about this. Jerry Seinfeld's entire career was built on noticing those little details, those idiotic things we do every day that we don't even remember. He tells us about the time  he visited his friends and he just wanted to take  a comfortable shower. He'd reach out and grab the handle and turn it slightly one way, and it was 100 degrees too hot. And then he'd turn it the other way, and it was 100 degrees too cold. He just wanted a comfortable shower. Now, we've all been there, we just don't remember it. But Jerry did, and that's a comedian's job.But designers, innovators  and entrepreneurs, it's our job to not just notice those things, but to go one step further and try to fix them.See this, this person, this is Mary Anderson. In 1902 in New York City, she was visiting. It was a cold, wet, snowy day and she was warm inside a streetcar. As she was going to her destination, she noticed the driver opening the window to clean off the excess snow so he could drive safely. When he opened the window, though, he let all this cold, wet air inside, making all the passengers miserable. Now probably, most of those  passengers just thought, ""It's a fact of life, he's got to open the window to clean it. That's just how it is."" But Mary didn't. Mary thought, ""What if the diver could actually clean the windshield from the inside so that he could stay safe and drive and the passengers could  actually stay warm?"" So she picked up her sketchbook right then and there, and began drawing what would become the world's first windshield wiper.Now as a product designer, I try to learn from people like Mary to try to see the world  the way it really is, not the way we think it is. Why? Because it's easy to solve a problem that almost everyone sees. But it's hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees.Now some people think you're born with this ability or you're not, as if Mary Anderson was hardwired at birth to see the world more clearly. That wasn't the case for me. I had to work at it. During my years at Apple, Steve Jobs challenged us to come into work every day, to see our products through  the eyes of the customer, the new customer, the one that has fears  and possible frustrations and hopeful exhilaration that their new technology product could work straightaway for them. He called it staying beginners, and wanted to make sure that we focused on those tiny little details to make them faster, easier and seamless for the new customers.So I remember this clearly in the very earliest days of the iPod. See, back in the '90s, being a gadget freak like I am, I would rush out to the store for the very, very latest gadget. I'd take all the time to get to the store, I'd check out, I'd come back home, I'd start to unbox it. And then, there was  another little sticker: the one that said, ""Charge before use.""What! I can't believe it! I just spent all this time buying this product and now I have to charge before use. I have to wait what felt like an eternity to use that coveted new toy. It was crazy.But you know what? Almost every product back then did that. When it had batteries in it, you had to charge it before you used it. Well, Steve noticed that and he said, ""We're not going to let that  happen to our product."" So what did we do? Typically, when you have a product that has a hard drive in it, you run it for about  30 minutes in the factory to make sure that hard drive's going  to be working years later for the customer after they  pull it out of the box. What did we do instead? We ran that product for over two hours. Why? Well, first off, we could make a higher quality product, be easy to test, and make sure it was great for the customer. But most importantly, the battery came fully charged right out of the box, ready to use. So that customer,  with all that exhilaration, could just start using the product. It was great, and it worked. People liked it.Today, almost every product that you get that's battery powered comes out of the box fully charged, even if it doesn't have a hard drive. But back then, we noticed  that detail and we fixed it, and now everyone else does that as well. No more, ""Charge before use.""So why am I telling you this? Well, it's seeing the invisible problem, not just the obvious problem, that's important, not just for product design, but for everything we do. You see, there are invisible problems all around us, ones we can solve. But first we need to see them, to feel them.So, I'm hesitant to give you any tips about neuroscience or psychology. There's far too many experienced people in the TED community who would know much more about that than I ever will. But let me leave you with a few tips that I do, that we all can do, to fight habituation.My first tip is to look broader. You see, when you're tackling a problem, sometimes, there are a lot of steps that lead up to that problem. And sometimes, a lot  of steps after it. If you can take a step back and look broader, maybe you can change some of those boxes before the problem. Maybe you can combine them. Maybe you can remove them altogether to make that better.Take thermostats, for instance. In the 1900s when they first came out, they were really simple to use. You could turn them up or turn them down. People understood them. But in the 1970s, the energy crisis struck, and customers started thinking about how to save energy. So what happened? Thermostat designers decided  to add a new step. Instead of just turning up and down, you now had to program it. So you could tell it the temperature you wanted at a certain time. Now that seemed great. Every thermostat had started adding that feature. But it turned out that no one saved any energy. Now, why is that? Well, people couldn't predict the future. They just didn't know how their weeks would change season to season, year to year. So no one was saving energy, and what happened?Thermostat designers went back to the drawing board and they focused on that programming step. They made better U.I.s, they made better documentation. But still, years later, people were not saving any energy because they just couldn't predict the future. So what did we do? We put a machine-learning algorithm in instead of the programming that would simply watch when you turned it up and down, when you liked a certain temperature when you got up, or when you went away. And you know what? It worked. People are saving energy  without any programming.So, it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you take a step back  and look at all the boxes, maybe there's a way to remove one or combine them so that you can make  that process much simpler. So that's my first tip: look broader.For my second tip, it's to look closer. One of my greatest teachers  was my grandfather. He taught me all about the world. He taught me how things were built and how they were repaired, the tools and techniques necessary to make a successful project. I remember one story  he told me about screws, and about how you need to have the right screw for the right job. There are many different screws: wood screws, metal screws, anchors, concrete screws, the list went on and on. Our job is to make products that are easy to install for all of our customs themselves without professionals. So what did we do? I remembered that story  that my grandfather told me, and so we thought, ""How many different screws  can we put in the box? Was it going to be two, three, four, five? Because there's so many different wall types."" So we thought about it, we optimized it, and we came up with three different screws to put in the box. We thought that was going to solve the problem. But it turned out, it didn't.So we shipped the product, and people weren't having a great experience. So what did we do? We went back to the drawing board just instantly after we figured out we didn't get it right. And we designed a special screw, a custom screw, much to the chagrin of our investors. They were like, ""Why are you spending so much time on a little screw? Get out there and sell more!"" And we said, ""We will sell more if we get this right."" And it turned out, we did. With that custom little screw, there was just one screw in the box, that was easy to mount and put on the wall.So if we focus on those tiny details, the ones we may not see and we look at them as we say, ""Are those important or is that the way we've always done it? Maybe there's a way to get rid of those.""So my last piece of advice is to think younger. Every day, I'm confronted with interesting questions from my three young kids. They come up with questions like, ""Why can't cars fly around traffic?"" Or, ""Why don't my shoelaces have Velcro instead?"" Sometimes, those questions are smart. My son came to me the other day and I asked him, ""Go run out to the mailbox  and check it."" He looked at me, puzzled, and said, ""Why doesn't the mailbox just check itself and tell us when it has mail?"" (Laughter) I was like, ""That's a pretty  good question."" So, they can ask tons of questions and sometimes we find out we just don't have the right answers. We say, ""Son, that's just the way the world works."" So the more we're exposed to something, the more we get used to it. But kids haven't been around  long enough to get used to those things. And so when they run into problems, they immediately try to solve them, and sometimes they find a better way, and that way really is better.So my advice that we take to heart is to have young people on your team, or people with young minds. Because if you have those young minds, they cause everyone in the room to think younger. Picasso once said,  ""Every child is an artist. The problem is when he or she grows up, is how to remain an artist."" We all saw the world more clearly when we saw it for the first time, before a lifetime of habits  got in the way. Our challenge is to get back there, to feel that frustration, to see those little details, to look broader, look closer, and to think younger so we can stay beginners.It's not easy. It requires us pushing back against one of the most basic ways we make sense of the world. But if we do, we could do some pretty amazing things. For me, hopefully, that's better product design. For you, that could mean something else, something powerful.Our challenge is to wake up  each day and say, ""How can I experience the world better?"" And if we do, maybe, just maybe, we can get rid of these dumb little stickers.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tony_fadell_the_first_secret_of_design_is_noticing
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"The FBI is responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than any other organization. More than al Qaeda, more than al Shabaab, more than the Islamic State, more than all of them combined.This isn't likely how you think about the FBI. You probably think of FBI agents gunning down bad guys like John Dillinger, or arresting corrupt politicians.After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI became less concerned with gangsters and  crooked elected officials. The new target became terrorists, and the pursuit of terrorists  has consumed the FBI.Every year, the Bureau spends 3.3 billion dollars on domestic counterterrorism activities. Compare than to just 2.6 billion dollars combined for organized crime, financial fraud, public corruption and all other types of traditional criminal activity.I've spent years pouring through the case files of terrorism prosecutions in  the United States, and I've come to  the conclusion that the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at catching terrorists.In the 14 years since 9/11, you can count about six real  terrorist attacks in the United States. These include the Boston Marathon  bombings in 2013, as well as failed attacks, such as the time when  a man named Faisal Shahzad tried to deliver a car bomb to Times Square. In those same 14 years, the Bureau, however, has bragged about how it's foiled dozens of terrorism plots. In all, the FBI has arrested more than 175 people in aggressive, undercover  conterterrorism stings.These operations, which are usually led by an informant, provide the means and opportunity, and sometimes even the idea, for mentally ill and  economically desperate people to become what we now term terrorists.After 9/11, the FBI was given an edict: never again. Never another attack on American soil. FBI agents were told to find terrorists before they struck. To do this, agents recruited a network of more than 15,000 informants nationwide, all looking for anyone who  might be dangerous. An informant can earn  100,000 dollars or more for every terrorism case  they bring to the FBI. That's right, the FBI is paying mostly criminals and con men six figures to spy on communities in the United States, but mostly Muslim American communities.These informants nab people like  Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh. Both are mentally ill. Abdul-Latif had a history of huffing gasoline and attempting suicide. Mujahidh had schizoaffective disorder, he had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. In 2012, the FBI arrested these two men for conspiring to attack a military recruiting station outside Seattle with weapons provided,  of course, by the FBI. The FBI's informant was Robert Childs, a convicted rapist and child molester who was paid 90,000 dollars  for his work on the case. This isn't an outlier.In 2009, an FBI informant who had fled Pakistan on murder charges led four men in a plot to bomb  synagogues in the Bronx. The lead defendant was James Cromitie, a broke Walmart employee with a history of mental problems. And the informant had offered  him 250,000 dollars if he participated in that plot. There are many more examples.Today, The Intercept published my new story about a counterterrorism sting in Tampa involving Sami Osmakac, a young man who was living  near Tampa, Florida. Osmakac also had  schizoaffective disorder. He too was broke, and he had no connections to  international terrorist groups. Nonetheless, an FBI informant gave him a job, handed him money, introduced him to an undercover agent posing as a terrorist, and lured him in a plot to bomb an Irish bar.But here's what's interesting: The lead undercover agent — you can see him in this picture with his face blurred — would go back to the Tampa field office with his recording equipment on. Behind closed doors, FBI agents admitted that what they were doing was farcical. A federal judge doesn't want you to hear about these conversations. He sealed the transcripts and placed them under a protective order in an attempt to prevent someone like me from doing something like this. Behind closed doors, the lead agent, the squad supervisor, described their would-be terrorist as a ""retarded fool who didn't have a pot to piss in."" They described his terrorist ambitions as wishy-washy and a pipe dream scenario.But that didn't stop the FBI. They provided Sami Osmakac  everything he needed. They gave him a car bomb, they gave him an AK-47, they helped him make a so-called martyrdom video, and they even gave  him money for a taxi cab so that he could get to where they wanted him to go. As they were working the sting, the squad supervisor tells his agents he wanted a Hollywood ending. And he got a Hollywood ending. When Sami Osmakac attempted to deliver what he thought was a car bomb, he was arrested, convicted and  sentenced to 40 years in prison.Sami Osmakac isn't alone. He's one of more than  175 so-called terrorists, for whom the FBI has created  Hollywood endings. U.S. government officials call this the War on Terror. It's really just theater, a national security theater, with mentally ill men like Sami Osmakac unwitting actors in a  carefully choreographed production brought to you by the FBI.Thank you.(Applause)Tom Rielly: So, those are some pretty strong accusations, pretty strong charges. How can you back this up?Trevor Aaronson: My research began in 2010 when I received a grant from the  Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley, and a research assistant and I put together a database of all terrorism prosecutions at the time during  the first decade after 9/11. And we used the court file to find out whether the defendants had any connections to international terrorist groups, whether an informant was used, and whether the informant played the role of an agent provocateur by providing the means and opportunity. And we submitted that to the FBI and we asked them to respond to our database. If they believed there were any errors, we asked them to tell us what they were and we'd go back and check and they never challenged any of our findings. Later, I used that data  in a magazine article and later in my book, and on appearances on places like CBS and NPR, they were offered that opportunity again to say, ""Trevor Aaronson's  findings are wrong."" And they've never come forward and said, ""These are the problems with those findings."" So the data has since been used  by groups like Human Rights Watch on its recent report on  these types of sting operations. And so far, the FBI has never  really responded to these charges that it's really not catching terrorists so much as it's catching mentally ill people that it can dress up as terrorists  in these types of sting operations.TR: So The Intercept is that new investigative journalism website, that's cofounded by Glenn Greenwald. Tell us about your article  and why there.TA: The Intercept seemed to be the most logical place for this because my article is  really leveraging the fact that a source had leaked to me transcripts of these private FBI conversations that a federal judge had sealed based on the government's claim  that their release would irreparably damage  the U.S. government's law enforcement strategy. So a place like The Intercept was set up to protect journalists and publish their work when they're dealing with  very sensitive matters like this. So my story in The Intercept,  which was just published today, tells the story of how Sami Osmakac was set up in this FBI sting and goes into much greater detail. In this talk, I could only highlight the things that they said, such as calling him a ""retarded fool."" But it was much more elaborate, they went to great lengths to put money in Sami Osmakac's hands, which he then used to purchase weapons from the undercover agent. When he went to trial, the central piece of evidence  was that he paid for these weapons, when in truth, these transcripts show how the FBI orchestrated someone who was essentially mentally ill and broke to get money to then  pay for weapons that they could then charge him in a conspiracy for.TR: One final question. Less than 10 days ago, the FBI arrested some potential  ISIS suspects in Brooklyn, saying that they might be headed to Syria, and were those real, or examples of more of the same?TA: Well so far, we only know what's come out in the court file, but they seem to suggest it's another example of the same. These types of sting operations  have moved from flavor to flavor. So initially it was al Qaeda plots, and now the Islamic State is the current flavor. What's worth noting about that case is that the three men that were charged only began the plot to go to Syria after the introduction of the FBI informant, and in fact, the FBI informant had helped them with the travel documents that they needed. In kind of a comical turn  in that particular case, one of the defendant's mother had found out that he was interested in going to Syria and had hid his passport. So it's unclear that even if he had showed up at the airport, that he ever could have gone anywhere. So yes, there are people who might be interested in joining the Islamic State in the United States, and those are people that the United  States government should be looking at to see if they're interested in violence here. In this particular case, given the evidence that's so far come out, it suggests the FBI made it possible for these guys to move along in a plan to go to Syria when they were never close  to that in the first place.TR: Thanks a lot, that's amazing. TA: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_aaronson_how_this_fbi_strategy_is_actually_creating_us_based_terrorists
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"It was November 1, 2002, my first day as a principal, but hardly my first day in the school district of Philadelphia.I graduated from Philadelphia public schools, and I went on to teach special education for 20 years in a low-income, low-performing school in North Philadelphia, where crime is rampant and deep poverty is among the highest in the nation.Shortly after I walked into my new school, a huge fight broke out among the girls. After things were quickly under control, I immediately called a meeting in the school's auditorium to introduce myself as the school's new principal. (Applause)I walked in angry, a little nervous — (Laughter) — but I was determined to set the tone for my new students. I started listing as forcefully as I could my expectations for their behavior and my expectations for what they would learn in school. When, all of a sudden, a girl way in the back of the auditorium, she stood up and she said, ""Miss! Miss!"" When our eyes locked, she said, ""Why do you keep calling this a school? This is not a school.""In one outburst, Ashley had expressed what I felt and never quite was able to articulate about my own experience when I attended a low-performing school in the same neighborhood, many, many, many years earlier. That school was definitely not a school.Fast forwarding a decade later to 2012, I was entering my third low-performing school as principal. I was to be Strawberry Mansion's fourth principal in four years. It was labeled ""low-performing and persistently dangerous"" due to its low test scores and high number of weapons, drugs, assaults and arrests. Shortly as I approached the door of my new school and attempted to enter, and found the door locked with chains, I could hear Ashley's voice in my ears going, ""Miss! Miss! This is not a school."" The halls were dim and dark from poor lighting. There were tons of piles of broken old furniture and desks in the classrooms, and there were thousands of unused materials and resources. This was not a school. As the year progressed, I noticed that the classrooms were nearly empty. The students were just scared: scared to sit in rows in fear that something would happen; scared because they were often teased in the cafeteria for eating free food. They were scared from all the fighting and all the bullying. This was not a school.And then, there were the teachers, who were incredibly afraid for their own safety, so they had low expectations for the students and themselves, and they were totally unaware of their role in the destruction of the school's culture. This was the most troubling of all. You see, Ashley was right, and not just about her school. For far too many schools, for kids who live in poverty, their schools are really not schools at all. But this can change. Let me tell you how it's being done at Strawberry Mansion High School. Anybody who's ever worked with me will tell you I am known for my slogans. (Laughter) So today, I am going to use three that have been paramount in our quest for change.My first slogan is: if you're going to lead, lead. I always believed that what happens in a school and what does not happen in a school is up to the principal. I am the principal, and having that title required me to lead. I was not going to stay in my office, I was not going to delegate my work, and I was not going to be afraid to address anything that was not good for children, whether that made me liked or not. I am a leader, so I know I cannot do anything alone. So, I assembled a top-notch leadership team who believed in the possibility of all the children, and together, we tackled the small things, like resetting every single locker combination by hand so that every student could have a secure locker. We decorated every bulletin board in that building with bright, colorful, and positive messages. We took the chains off the front doors of the school. We got the lightbulbs replaced, and we cleaned every classroom to its core, recycling every, every textbook that was not needed, and discarded thousands of old materials and furniture. We used two dumpsters per day.And, of course, of course, we tackled the big stuff, like rehauling the entire school budget so that we can reallocate funds to have more teachers and support staff. We rebuilt the entire school day schedule from scratch to add a variety of start and end times, remediation, honors courses, extracurricular activities, and counseling, all during the school day. All during the school day. We created a deployment plan that specified where every single support person and police officer would be every minute of the day, and we monitored at every second of the day, and, our best invention ever, we devised a schoolwide discipline program titled ""Non-negotiables."" It was a behavior system — designed to promote positive behavior at all times.The results? Strawberry Mansion was removed from the Persistently Dangerous List our first year after being — (Applause) — after being on the Persistently Dangerous List for five consecutive years. Leaders make the impossible possible.That brings me to my second slogan: So what? Now what? (Laughter) (Applause)When we looked at the data, and we met with the staff, there were many excuses for why Strawberry Mansion was low-performing and persistently dangerous. They said that only 68 percent of the kids come to school on a regular basis, 100 percent of them live in poverty, only one percent of the parents participate, many of the children come from incarceration and single-parent homes, 39 percent of the students have special needs, and the state data revealed that six percent of the students were proficient in algebra, and 10 were proficient in literature.After they got through telling us all the stories of how awful the conditions and the children were, I looked at them, and I said, ""So what. Now what? What are we gonna do about it?"" (Applause)Eliminating excuses at every turn became my primary responsibility. We addressed every one of those excuses through a mandatory professional development, paving the way for intense focus on teaching and learning. After many observations, what we determined was that teachers knew what to teach but they did not know how to teach so many children with so many vast abilities. So, we developed a lesson delivery model for instruction that focused on small group instruction, making it possible for all the students to get their individual needs met in the classroom.The results? After one year, state data revealed that our scores have grown by 171 percent in Algebra and 107 percent in literature. (Applause) We have a very long way to go, a very long way to go, but we now approach every obstacle with a ""So What. Now What?"" attitude.And that brings me to my third and final slogan. (Laughter) If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will.My students have problems: social, emotional and economic problems you could never imagine. Some of them are parents themselves, and some are completely alone. If someone asked me my real secret for how I truly keep Strawberry Mansion moving forward, I would have to say that I love my students and I believe in their possibilities unconditionally. When I look at them, I can only see what they can become, and that is because I am one of them. I grew up poor in North Philadelphia too. I know what it feels like to go to a school that's not a school. I know what it feels like to wonder if there's ever going to be any way out of poverty. But because of my amazing mother, I got the ability to dream despite the poverty that surrounded me.So — (Applause) — if I'm going to push my students toward their dream and their purpose in life, I've got to get to know who they are. So I have to spend time with them, so I manage the lunchroom every day. (Laughter) And while I'm there, I talk to them about deeply personal things, and when it's their birthday, I sing ""Happy Birthday"" even though I cannot sing at all. (Laughter) I often ask them, ""Why do you want me to sing when I cannot sing at all?"" (Laughter) And they respond by saying, ""Because we like feeling special.""We hold monthly town hall meetings to listen to their concerns, to find out what is on their minds. They ask us questions like, ""Why do we have to follow rules?"" ""Why are there so many consequences?"" ""Why can't we just do what we want to do?"" (Laughter) They ask, and I answer each question honestly, and this exchange in listening helps to clear up any misconceptions. Every moment is a teachable moment.My reward, my reward for being non-negotiable in my rules and consequences is their earned respect. I insist on it, and because of this, we can accomplish things together. They are clear about my expectations for them, and I repeat those expectations every day over the P.A. system. I remind them — (Laughter) I remind them of those core values of focus, tradition, excellence, integrity and perseverance, and I remind them every day how education can truly change their lives. And I end every announcement the same: ""If nobody told you they loved you today, you remember I do, and I always will.""Ashley's words of ""Miss, Miss, this is not a school,"" is forever etched in my mind. If we are truly going to make real progress in addressing poverty, then we have to make sure that every school that serves children in poverty is a real school, a school, a school — (Applause) — a school that provides them with knowledge and mental training to navigate the world around them.I do not know all the answers, but what I do know is for those of us who are privileged and have the responsibility of leading a school that serves children in poverty, we must truly lead, and when we are faced with unbelievable challenges, we must stop and ask ourselves, ""So what. Now what? What are we going to do about it?"" And as we lead, we must never forget that every single one of our students is just a child, often scared by what the world tells them they should be, and no matter what the rest of the world tells them they should be, we should always provide them with hope, our undivided attention, unwavering belief in their potential, consistent expectations, and we must tell them often, if nobody told them they loved them today, remember we do, and we always will.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you, Jesus.","https://www.ted.com/talks/linda_cliatt_wayman_how_to_fix_a_broken_school_lead_fearlessly_love_hard
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"In 2011, during the final six months of Kim Jong-Il's life, I lived undercover in North Korea.I was born and raised in South Korea, their enemy. I live in America, their other enemy.Since 2002, I had visited North Korea a few times. And I had come to realize that to write about it with any meaning, or to understand the place beyond the regime's propaganda, the only option was total immersion. So I posed as a teacher and a missionary at an all-male university in Pyongyang.The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was founded by Evangelical Christians who cooperate with the regime to educate the sons of the North Korean elite, without proselytizing, which is a capital crime there. The students were 270 young men, expected to be the future leaders of the most isolated and brutal dictatorship in existence. When I arrived, they became my students.2011 was a special year, marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea's original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung. To celebrate the occasion, the regime shut down all universities, and sent students off to the fields to build the DPRK's much-heralded ideal as the world's most powerful and prosperous nation. My students were the only ones spared from that fate.North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation. Everything there is about the Great Leader. Every book, every newspaper article, every song, every TV program — there is just one subject. The flowers are named after him, the mountains are carved with his slogans. Every citizen wears the badge of the Great Leader at all times. Even their calendar system begins with the birth of Kim Il-Sung.The school was a heavily guarded prison, posing as a campus. Teachers could only leave on group outings accompanied by an official minder. Even then, our trips were limited to sanctioned national monuments celebrating the Great Leader. The students were not allowed to leave the campus, or communicate with their parents. Their days were meticulously mapped out, and any free time they had was devoted to honoring their Great Leader. Lesson plans had to meet the approval of North Korean staff, every class was recorded and reported on, every room was bugged, and every conversation, overheard. Every blank space was covered with the  portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, like everywhere else in North Korea.We were never allowed to discuss the outside world. As students of science and technology, many of them were computer majors but they did not know the existence of the Internet. They had never heard of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Facebook, Twitter — none of those things would have meant a thing. And I could not tell them.I went there looking for truth. But where do you even start when an entire nation's ideology, my students' day-to-day realities, and even my own position at the universities, were all built on lies?I started with a game. We played ""Truth and Lie."" A volunteer would write a sentence on the chalkboard, and the other students had to guess whether it was a truth or a lie. Once a student wrote, ""I visited China last year on vacation,"" and everyone shouted, ""Lie!"" They all knew this wasn't possible. Virtually no North Korean is allowed to leave the country. Even traveling within their own country requires a travel pass.I had hoped that this game would reveal some truth about my students, because they lie so often and so easily, whether about the mythical accomplishments of their Great Leader, or the strange claim that they cloned a rabbit as fifth graders. The difference between truth and lies seemed at times hazy to them. It took me a while to understand the different types of lies; they lie to shield their system from the world, or they were taught lies, and were just regurgitating them. Or, at moments, they lied out of habit. But if all they have ever known were lies, how could we expect them to be otherwise?Next, I tried to teach them essay writing. But that turned out to be nearly impossible. Essays are about coming up with one's own thesis, and making an evidence-based argument to prove it. These students, however, were simply told what to think, and they obeyed. In their world, critical thinking was not allowed.I also gave them the weekly assignment of writing a personal letter, to anybody. It took a long time, but eventually some of them began to write to their mothers, their friends, their girlfriends. Although those were just homework, and would never reach their intended recipients, my students slowly began to reveal their true feelings in them. They wrote that they were fed up with the sameness of everything. They were worried about their future. In those letters, they rarely ever mentioned their Great Leader.I was spending all of my time with these young men. We all ate meals together, played basketball together. I often called them gentlemen, which made them giggle. They blushed at the mention of girls. And I came to adore them. And watching them open up even in the tiniest of ways, was deeply moving.But something also felt wrong. During those months of living in their world, I often wondered if the truth would, in fact, improve their lives. I wanted so much to tell them the truth, of their country and of the outside world, where Arab youth were turning their rotten regime inside out, using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the world wide web, which wasn't worldwide after all. But for them, the truth was dangerous. By encouraging them to run after it, I was putting them at risk — of persecution, of heartbreak.When you're not allowed to express anything in the open, you become good at reading what is unspoken. In one of their personal letters to me, a student wrote that he understood why I always called them gentlemen. It was because I was wishing them to be gentle in life, he said.On my last day in December of 2011, the day Kim Jong-Il's death was announced, their world shattered. I had to leave without a proper goodbye. But I think they knew how sad I was for them.Once, toward the end of my stay, a student said to me, ""Professor, we never think of you as being different from us. Our circumstances are different, but you're the same as us. We want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same.""Today, if I could respond to my students with a letter of my own, which is of course impossible, I would tell them this: ""My dear gentlemen, It's been a bit over three years since I last saw you. And now, you must be 22 — maybe even as old as 23. At our final class, I asked you if there was anything you wanted. The only wish you expressed, the only thing you ever asked of me in all those months we spent together, was for me to speak to you in Korean. Just once. I was there to teach you English; you knew it wasn't allowed. But I understood then, you wanted to share that bond of our mother tongue. I called you my gentlemen, but I don't know if being gentle in Kim Jong-Un's merciless North Korea is a good thing. I don't want you to lead a revolution — let some other young person do it. The rest of the world might casually encourage or even expect some sort of North Korean Spring, but I don't want you to do anything risky, because I know in your world, someone is always watching. I don't want to imagine what might happen to you. If my attempts to reach you have inspired something new in you, I would rather you forget me. Become soldiers of your Great Leader, and live long, safe lives. You once asked me if I thought your city of Pyongyang was beautiful, and I could not answer truthfully then. But I know why you asked. I know that it was important for you to hear that I, your teacher, the one who has seen the world that you are forbidden from, declare your city as the most beautiful. I know hearing that would make your lives there a bit more bearable, but no, I don't find your capital beautiful. Not because it's monotone and concrete, but because of what it symbolizes: a monster that feeds off the rest of the country, where citizens are soldiers and slaves. All I see there is darkness. But it's your home, so I cannot hate it. And I hope instead that you, my lovely young gentlemen, will one day help make it beautiful.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suki_kim_this_is_what_it_s_like_to_go_undercover_in_north_korea
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"This is a play called ""Sell/Buy/Date."" It's my first since ""Bridge and Tunnel,"" which I did on Broadway, and this one, I — thank you — I've excerpted it just for you, so here we go.Right. Class, let's be absolutely certain all electronic devices are switched off before we begin. So class, hopefully you'll recognize what you just heard me say as the — ? Very good, the cellular phone announcement. Right? This was also known as a mobile phone. So you'll remember, people of that era would have had an external electronic device, right, something like this, and they all would have carried one of these around with them, and amongst their biggest fears was the sheer mortification that one of these might ring at some inopportune moment. Right? So a bit of trivia about that era for you. (Laughter)So the format of today's class is I will be presenting multiple BERT modules today from that period in history, right, so starting circa 2016. And remember, this was the very first year of the BERT program. So we've got quite a few of these to get through. Bear in mind, I will be living into various different bodies, different ages, also what were then called races, or ethnic groups, as you'll remember from Unit 1. And — (Laughter) — and along the gender continuum, I will be living into males as well. It was quite binary at that time. (Laughter) Also, don't forget, we are reading the book module for next week's focus on gender. Now, I know some of you have requested the book in pill form. I know people still believe ingesting it is better for retention, but since we are trying to experience what our forebears did, right, let's please just consider doing the actual ocular reading, okay? And also, how many people have your emotional shunts engaged? Right. Please toggle them off. Okay? I know it's challenging, but I want you to be able to feel the entire natural emo range, all right? It is essential to this part of the syllabus. Yes, Macy? All right. I understand. If you're unwilling to — All right, well, we can discuss that after class. All right, we will discuss your concerns. Just relax. Nobody's died and gone to composting. Okay. After class. Okay? After class. Let's just get started, okay. This first subject identified as a middle-class homemaker. Remember, these early modules in these people's full identities were protected, and this allowed them to speak more freely on our topic, which for many of them was taboo.Okay honey, now, I'm ready when you are. No, sweetheart, I said, I'm ready when you are. I'm freezing. It's like a meat locker in here in this recording studio. I should have brought a shmata. All this fancy technology but they can't afford heat. What is he saying? I can't hear you! I can't hear you through the glass, honey! There you are in my ear. Oh, you can hear me? The whole time. Oh, yes, I am a little chilly. Yes, oh the cold is for the machines, the new technology. Okay. Yes, now remind me again, you're recording not only my voice but my feelings and my memories? Right. Yes, BERT, yes, I read about it. Bio-Empathetic Resonant Technology. Right, right, so people will be able to feel my experience and my memory? Okay. No, right, I'm ready. I just thought you were going to give me a test to see how my memory's doing. I was going to tell you you're too late, it's already bad news. No, no, go ahead, honey.Oh, that's the first question? What do I think of prostitution? Are you soliciting me, young man? I've heard of May-December romances, but what are you, about 20 years old? Eighteen? Eighteen years. I think I have candies in my purse older than 18 years old. (Laughter) I'm teasing you, sweetheart. No, I'm comfortable with any question. Sure. So about the prostitution — oh, sex worker, sex worker. No, just in my day, they called it prostitution, not sex work. Oh, because it includes pornography also? Okay. No, well, I guess when I was a girl, we didn't really have a name for that either. We would have said dirty magazines, I suppose, or dirty movies. Well, it's not like what you have with the Internet. No, well, I don't mind sharing. My late husband and I, we were a very romantic couple. Lots of tenderness, you understand. Well, as you get older, you know, at one point I thought my husband might be helped by using some of the pills men can take, but he wasn't interested in those, so I thought, what about maybe watching an adult movie on the Internet? Just for inspiration, you understand. Well, at the time, neither of us were very good on the computer, so usually, if we needed help with the Internet, we would just call our children or our grandchildren, but obviously, in this case, that wasn't an option, so I thought, I'll have a look myself, just to see. How difficult could it be? You search for certain key words and you look — Oh wow is right, young man. You can't imagine what I saw. Well, first of all, I was just trying to find, you know, couples, normal couples making love, but this, so many people together at one time. You couldn't tell which part belonged to which body. How they even got the cameras to capture some of this, I couldn't tell you. But the one thing they didn't capture was making love. There was lots of making of something, but they took the love part right out of it, you know, the fun. It was all very extreme, you know? Like you would say, with the extreme sports. Lots of endurance, but never tenderness. So anyway, needless to say, that was $19.95 I'll never get back again, but it only showed up on the credit card as ""entertainment services,"" so my husband was never the wiser, and after all of that, well, you could say it turned out he didn't need the extra inspiration after all.Right, so next subject is a young woman — (Applause) — Next subject, class, is a young woman called Bella, a university student interviewed in 2016 during what was called an Intro to Feminist Porn class as part of her major in sex work at a college in the Bay Area. (Laughter)Yeah, I just want to, like, get a recording of, like, you guys recording me, like a meta recording, or whatever. It's just like this whole experience is just, like, really amazing, and I'd like to capture that for, like, Instagram and my Tumblr. So, like, hi guys, it's me, Bella, and I am, like, being interviewed right now for this, like, really amazing Bio-Empathetic Resonance Technology, which is, like, basically where they are, like, recording, as you can see from these, whatever, like, electrodes, the formation of, like, neuropeptides in my hippocampus, or whatever. They will later be able to reconstitute these as, like, my own actual memory, like actual experiences, so other people can, like, actually feel what I'm feeling right now. Okay. Okay.So, like, hello, BERT person of the future who is experiencing me. This is what it feels like to be, like, a college freshman, and also the, like, headache that you are experiencing through me is the, like, residual effect of the Jell-O shots which I had last night at the bi-weekly feminist pole dancing party which I cohost on Wednesdays. It's called ""Don't Get All Pole-emical"" — (Laughter) — and it's in Beekman Hall, and, what else, like, non-Jell-O shots are also available for vegans, and, oh, okay, yeah, totally, yeah, we should also focus on your questions also.So for your record, I am, like, a sex work studies major but minoring in social media with a concentration on notable YouTube memes. (Laughter) Yes, well, of course, like, I consider myself to be, like, obviously, like, a feminist. I was named for Bella Abzug, who was, like, a famous, like, feminist from history, and, like, also I feel that it is, like, important to, like, represent women who are, like, sex-positive feminists. What is sex-negative? Well, like, I guess I would ask, like, what do you think sex-negative is? (Laughter) Yeah, because, like, the terms that we use are, like, so important, because, like, we call it sex work because it helps people understand that, like, it's work, and, like, you know, just like there are, like, healthcare providers and, like, insurance providers, like, we think of these workers as, like, sex care providers. Yeah, but like, I don't think of myself like, providing direct sex care services per se as, like, being a requirement for me to be, like, an advocate. Like, I support other women's right to choose it voluntarily, like, if they enjoy it. Yeah, but, like, I see myself going forward as more likely, like, protecting sex workers', like, legal freedoms and rights. Yeah, so, like, basically, I'm planning on becoming a lawyer.Right, class. (Laughter) (Applause) So these next two modules are also circa 2016. One subject is an Irishwoman with a particularly noteworthy relationship to this issue, but first will be a West Indian woman, a self-described escort who was recorded at a sex workers' rights rally and parade. She was interviewed whilst marching in full carnival headdress and very little else.All right, you want me to start talking now. Yeah, I told you, you can put those wires anywhere you want to as long as it don't get in the way. Yeah, no, but, tell me again what the name of — BERT? BERT. Yeah, I was telling you, you know, I think I have in all my time I have had at least one client with that name, so this won't be the first time I had BERT all over me. Oh, I'm sorry, but you got to get into the spirit of it if you're going to interview me. All right? You can say it. No justice, no piece! No justice, no piece! But you see the sign? You get it? P-I-E-C-E. No justice, no piece of us. You understand?Right, so that's the part where I was telling you is that when I first came to this country, I worked every job I could find. I was a nanny; I was a home care attendant for all these different old people, and then I said, child, if I have to touch another white man's backside, I might as well get paid a lot more money for it than this, you understand? Pshh, you know how hard it is being a domestic worker? Some of these men, they're heavy. You have to pick them up and flip them over. Now, I let them pick me up and flip me over, you understand? Well, you have to have a sense of humor about it, that's what I think. No, but see, listen, you find me somebody who don't hate some part of their job. I mean, there's a lot of things about this job that I hate, but the money is not one of them, and I will tell you, as long as this is the best possibility for me to make real money, I am going to be Jamaican-No-Fakin' if that's what they want to call me. No, I'm not even from Jamaica. That's how they market me. My family is from Trinidad and the Virgin Islands. They don't know what I do, but you know what? My children, they know that their school fees are paid, they have their books and their computer, and this way, I know that they have a chance. So I'm not going to tell you that what I do, it's easy, I'm not going to tell you that I feel — what's that you said, liberated? But I'm going to tell you that I feel paid. Right. (Applause)Thanks, that's lovely, and just the cup of tea, love, and just a splash of the whiskey. It's perfect, that's grand. Just a drop more. A splash. Perfect. What was your name? Peter? Is that right, so, Peter? Right. So that, that is the unique part of it for me, right, is that I ended up in both, first in the convent, and then in the prostitution after. That's right. (Laughter) So one woman at the university here in Dublin, she wrote about me. She said, Maureen Fitzroy is the living embodiment of the whore-virgin dichotomy. Right? (Laughter) Doesn't it sound like something you need to go into hospital? Well, I've got this terrible dichotomy. Doesn't it.Right. Well, for me though, it was, as a girl, it started with me dad. I mean, half the time, when he spoke to us, it was just a sort of tell us we were all useless rotten idiots and we had no morals, that type of thing. And I certainly didn't do myself any favors. By the time I was 16, I had started messing about with this older fella, and he wanted it to be our little secret, and I did as I was told, didn't I, and when that got back to me dad, he had me sent straightaway to the convent. Well no, that older fella, he would still come to find me in the convent. Yeah, he'd leave me notes tucked into the holes in the brick at the back of the charity shop so we could meet. And he'd tell me how he's leaving his wife, and I believed him, until I got pregnant. I did, Peter, and I left him a note about it in our special place there, and I never did hear from him again. No, I gave it up for adoption so it could have a decent life, and then they wouldn't let me back into the convent.No, my one sister Virginia gave me a fiver for the coach to Dublin, and that's how I ended up here. Well, surprise, surprise, I fell in love with another fella much older than me, and I always say I was just so happy because he didn't drink, I married the bastard.Well, he didn't drink, but he did have just the wee heroin problem, didn't he, and — That's right, and before I knew it, he was the one who turned me on to the prostitution, my own husband. He had me supporting the both of us. I was 18. Well, it wasn't Pretty Woman, I can tell you that. That Julia Roberts, if she'd ever had to sleep with a man to put a few pounds in her pocket, I don't think she'd ever have made that film. Well, for your record, my opinion of the legalization, I'd say I'm against it. I just, I don't care what these young girls say. You know, living like that, you're just lost, and, you know, I'm 63 years old. I'm still trying to find who I am. You know, I never was a wife or a nun, or a prostitute even, really, not really. Nobody ever asked who I wanted to be. They just told me, and if you legalize it, then you're really telling these girls, ""Go on and get lost for a living,"" and a lot of them, they'll do as they're told.All right, so four perspectives from four quite — (Applause) — four quite different voices there, right? One woman saying sex itself is natural but the sex industry seems to mechanize or industrialize it. Then the second woman considered sex work to be empowering, liberating, and feminist, though she, herself, notably, did not seem keen to do it. The third woman, who actually was a so-called sex worker did not agree that it was liberating but she wanted the right to the economic empowerment, and then we hear the fourth woman saying not only prostitution itself but proscribed roles for women in general prevented her from ever finding who she was, right?So another fact most people did not know was the average age of an at-risk girl being introduced to the sex industry was 12 or 13.Also consider that the age when all girls in that society first became exposed to sexualized images of women was quite a bit earlier, right? This was a doll called Barbie, right? I initially thought she was an educational tool for anorexia prevention — (Laughter) — but actually she was considered by many to be a wholesome symbol of femininity, and often young girls began what was called dieting. Remember this? This was restricting food intake on purpose by the age of six, and defining themselves based on attractiveness by around that same time. Right?Yes? Right, Bradley, okay, excellent point. So there was a lucrative market in that society in convincing all people they had to look a certain way to even have a sex life, right? But girls, especially, were expected to be ""sexy"" while avoiding being perceived as ""sluts"" for being sexual. Right? So there's that shame piece we've heard about.Yes. Valerie, right? Okay, very good. Of course, men were having sex as well, but you'll remember from the reading, what were male sluts called? Very good, they were called men. (Laughter) (Applause) So not easy living in a world like that, right? Though it was not all bad news either. Most women in the early 2000s considered themselves empowered, and men generally felt they were also evolved in this area, and, in fact, most people would have been aware of issues like human trafficking, for example, but they would have seen that as quite separate from more recreational adult entertainment. And so we'll just very briefly, class — we don't have a lot of time — we'll just very briefly hear from a man on our topic at this stage. So this next subject was interviewed on the night of his bachelor party.Dude, can you, all right, can you just keep it down? I'm trying to talk to BERT right now. Oh, your name's not BERT. BERT's the name of the, oh, all right. No, no, no, totally, it's totally fine. I'm mostly sober, so I just want to be helpful. Yeah, and I totally believe in causes, yeah, like, all that stuff. (Laughter) And actually, I'm wearing Toms right now. Yeah, Toms, like, the shoes, like, you buy a pair and then a kid in Africa gets clean water. Yeah. Totally. But what was the question again? Sorry.Of course I believe in women's rights. I'm marrying a woman. (Laughter) No, but I mean, like, just because I'm in a strip club parking lot doesn't mean that I'm, like, a sexist or whatever. My fiancee is totally amazing, she's totally a strong girl, woman, smart woman, like, the whole thing.Yeah, she knows I'm here. She's probably at a strip club herself right now, like, as a joke, same as me.My best man, I told him he could surprise me, and he thought this would be hilarious, but this is not something. Yeah, we all went to B school together. Wharton. (Laughter)Yeah, so, dude, can you guys — All right, but it's my bachelor party, and I can spend it in the parking lot with Anderson Cooper if I want to. All right, I'll see you in there.All right, okay, so Anderson, so, like, first of all, stripping, but then, like, all the other things you're talking about, prostitution and all that stuff, that's, like, not the same thing at all. You know? Like, you keep calling it the sex industry or whatever, but it's like, if the girl wants to be an exotic dancer and she's 18, like, that's her right.Whoa, whoa, I hear what you're saying, but I just feel like people, they just want to make it seem like all dudes are just, like, predators, that we would just automatically go to a prostitute, or whatever. Even, like, when I pledged, you know, like when I rushed my fraternity. My brothers who I'm close to, those guys, they're all like me. We're just normal people, but, like, there's this myth that you must be that guy who is kind of an asshole, and like, all bros before hos or whatever. And actually, like, bros before hos, it doesn't mean like what it sounds like. It's actually just like a joking way of saying that you care about your brothers and you put them first.Yeah, but, you can't blame the media, either. I mean, like, if you go watch ""Hangover 2,"" and you think that's an instruction manual for your life, like, I don't know what to tell you. You know? You don't watch ""Bourne Identity"" and go drive your car over a gondola in Venice. (Laughter)Well, yeah, okay, like, if you're a little kid or whatever, of course it's different, but —Yeah, all right, I remember one thing like that. I was at this kid's house one time playing GTA, uh, Grand Theft Auto?Dude, are you from Canada? (Laughter)So, like, whatever, with Grand Theft Auto, you're this kid, like, you're this guy walking around or whatever, and you can basically, like, the more cops you kill, the more points you get, and stuff like that. But also, you can find prostitutes and obviously you can do sexual stuff with them, but you can, like, kill them and take your money back. Yeah, this kid, I remember he ran over a couple of them a few times with his car and he got all these points. We were, like, 10, I think. It felt pretty terrible, actually. No, I don't think I said anything, I just finished playing and went home.All right class, so then there were men who had more than just a passing relationship to this issue. (Laughter) The next subject described himself as a reformed and remorseful pimp turned motivational speaker, life coach and therapist, but if you want to know more about him, you'll have to come to the entire play.Thank you so much, you beautiful TED audience. I will see you for ""Sell/Buy/Date.""(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jones_one_woman_five_characters_and_a_sex_lesson_from_the_future
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"I love a great mystery, and I'm fascinated by the greatest unsolved mystery in science, perhaps because it's personal. It's about who we are, and I can't help but be curious.The mystery is this: What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences, such as your experience of the taste of chocolate or the feeling of velvet?Now, this mystery is not new. In 1868, Thomas Huxley wrote, ""How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp."" Now, Huxley knew that brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated, but he didn't know why. To the science of his day, it was a mystery. In the years since Huxley, science has learned a lot about brain activity, but the relationship between brain activity and conscious experiences is still a mystery. Why? Why have we made so little progress? Well, some experts think that we can't solve this problem because we lack the necessary concepts and intelligence. We don't expect monkeys to solve problems in quantum mechanics, and as it happens, we can't expect our species to solve this problem either. Well, I disagree. I'm more optimistic. I think we've simply made a false assumption. Once we fix it, we just might solve this problem. Today, I'd like tell you what that assumption is, why it's false, and how to fix it.Let's begin with a question: Do we see reality as it is? I open my eyes and I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato a meter away. As a result, I come to believe that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away. I then close my eyes, and my experience changes to a gray field, but is it still the case that in reality, there's a red tomato a meter away? I think so, but could I be wrong? Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perceptions?We have misinterpreted our perceptions before. We used to think the Earth is flat, because it looks that way. Pythagorus discovered that we were wrong. Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of the Universe, again because it looks that way. Copernicus and Galileo discovered, again, that we were wrong.Galileo then wondered if we might be misinterpreting our experiences in other ways. He wrote: ""I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated.""Now, that's a stunning claim. Could Galileo be right? Could we really be misinterpreting our experiences that badly? What does modern science have to say about this?Well, neuroscientists tell us that about a third of the brain's cortex is engaged in vision. When you simply open your eyes and look about this room, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses are engaged.Now, this is a bit surprising, because to the extent that we think about vision at all, we think of it as like a camera. It just takes a picture of objective reality as it is. Now, there is a part of vision that's like a camera: the eye has a lens that focuses an image on the back of the eye where there are 130 million photoreceptors, so the eye is like a 130-megapixel camera. But that doesn't explain the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that are engaged in vision. What are these neurons up to?Well, neuroscientists tell us that they are creating, in real time, all the shapes, objects, colors, and motions that we see. It feels like we're just taking a snapshot of this room the way it is, but in fact, we're constructing everything that we see. We don't construct the whole world at once. We construct what we need in the moment.Now, there are many demonstrations that are quite compelling that we construct what we see. I'll just show you two. In this example, you see some red discs with bits cut out of them, but if I just rotate the disks a little bit, suddenly, you see a 3D cube pop out of the screen. Now, the screen of course is flat, so the three-dimensional cube that you're experiencing must be your construction.In this next example, you see glowing blue bars with pretty sharp edges moving across a field of dots. In fact, no dots move. All I'm doing from frame to frame is changing the colors of dots from blue to black or black to blue. But when I do this quickly, your visual system creates the glowing blue bars with the sharp edges and the motion. There are many more examples, but these are just two that you construct what you see.But neuroscientists go further. They say that we reconstruct reality. So, when I have an experience that I describe as a red tomato, that experience is actually an accurate reconstruction of the properties of a real red tomato that would exist even if I weren't looking.Now, why would neuroscientists say that we don't just construct, we reconstruct? Well, the standard argument given is usually an evolutionary one. Those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage compared to those who saw less accurately, and therefore they were more likely to pass on their genes. We are the offspring of those who saw more accurately, and so we can be confident that, in the normal case, our perceptions are accurate. You see this in the standard textbooks. One textbook says, for example, ""Evolutionarily speaking, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate."" So the idea is that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions. They give you a survival advantage.Now, is this correct? Is this the right interpretation of evolutionary theory? Well, let's first look at a couple of examples in nature.The Australian jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy and brown. The female is flightless. The male flies, looking, of course, for a hot female. When he finds one, he alights and mates. There's another species in the outback, Homo sapiens. The male of this species has a massive brain that he uses to hunt for cold beer. (Laughter) And when he finds one, he drains it, and sometimes throws the bottle into the outback. Now, as it happens, these bottles are dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these beetles. The males swarm all over the bottles trying to mate. They lose all interest in the real females. Classic case of the male leaving the female for the bottle. (Laughter) (Applause) The species almost went extinct. Australia had to change its bottles to save its beetles. (Laughter) Now, the males had successfully found females for thousands, perhaps millions of years. It looked like they saw reality as it is, but apparently not. Evolution had given them a hack. A female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown, the bigger the better. (Laughter) Even when crawling all over the bottle, the male couldn't discover his mistake.Now, you might say, beetles, sure, they're very simple creatures, but surely not mammals. Mammals don't rely on tricks. Well, I won't dwell on this, but you get the idea. (Laughter)So this raises an important technical question: Does natural selection really favor seeing reality as it is? Fortunately, we don't have to wave our hands and guess; evolution is a mathematically precise theory. We can use the equations of evolution to check this out. We can have various organisms in artificial worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive, which sensory systems are more fit.A key notion in those equations is fitness. Consider this steak: What does this steak do for the fitness of an animal? Well, for a hungry lion looking to eat, it enhances fitness. For a well-fed lion looking to mate, it doesn't enhance fitness. And for a rabbit in any state, it doesn't enhance fitness, so fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes, but also on the organism, its state and its action. Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it's fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution.So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. Who wins?Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct.Now, this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage? That is a bit counterintuitive. But remember the jewel beetle. The jewel beetle survived for thousands, perhaps millions of years, using simple tricks and hacks. What the equations of evolution are telling us is that all organisms, including us,  are in the same boat as the jewel beetle. We do not see reality as it is. We're shaped with tricks and hacks that keep us alive.Still, we need some help with our intuitions. How can not perceiving reality as it is be useful? Well, fortunately, we have a very helpful metaphor: the desktop interface on your computer. Consider that blue icon for a TED Talk that you're writing. Now, the icon is blue and rectangular and in the lower right corner of the desktop. Does that mean that the text file itself in the computer is blue, rectangular, and in the lower right-hand corner of the computer? Of course not. Anyone who thought that misinterprets the purpose of the interface. It's not there to show you the reality of the computer. In fact, it's there to hide that reality. You don't want to know about the diodes and resistors and all the megabytes of software. If you had to deal with that, you could never write your text file or edit your photo. So the idea is that evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Space and time, as you perceive them right now, are your desktop. Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop.There's an obvious objection. Hoffman, if you think that train coming down the track at 200 MPH is just an icon of your desktop, why don't you step in front of it? And after you're gone, and your theory with you, we'll know that there's more to that train than just an icon. Well, I wouldn't step in front of that train for the same reason that I wouldn't carelessly drag that icon to the trash can: not because I take the icon literally — the file is not literally blue or rectangular — but I do take it seriously. I could lose weeks of work. Similarly, evolution has shaped us with perceptual symbols that are designed to keep us alive. We'd better take them seriously. If you see a snake, don't pick it up. If you see a cliff, don't jump off. They're designed to keep us safe, and we should take them seriously. That does not mean that we should take them literally. That's a logical error.Another objection: There's nothing really new here. Physicists have told us for a long time that the metal of that train looks solid but really it's mostly empty space with microscopic particles zipping around. There's nothing new here. Well, not exactly. It's like saying, I know that that blue icon on the desktop is not the reality of the computer, but if I pull out my trusty magnifying glass and look really closely, I see little pixels, and that's the reality of the computer. Well, not really — you're still on the desktop, and that's the point. Those microscopic particles are still in space and time: they're still in the user interface. So I'm saying something far more radical than those physicists.Finally, you might object, look, we all see the train, therefore none of us constructs the train. But remember this example. In this example, we all see a cube, but the screen is flat, so the cube that you see is the cube that you construct. We all see a cube because we all, each one of us, constructs the cube that we see. The same is true of the train. We all see a train because we each see the train that we construct, and the same is true of all physical objects.We're inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that this is an incorrect interpretation of our perceptions. Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktop that's designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adaptive behavior. Space as you perceive it is your desktop. Physical objects are just the icons in that desktop.We used to think that the Earth is flat because it looks that way. Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of reality because it looks that way. We were wrong. We had misinterpreted our perceptions. Now we believe that spacetime and objects are the nature of reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that once again, we're wrong. We're misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences. There's something that exists when you don't look, but it's not spacetime and physical objects. It's as hard for us to let go of spacetime and objects as it is for the jewel beetle to let go of its bottle. Why? Because we're blind to our own blindnesses. But we have an advantage over the jewel beetle: our science and technology. By peering through the lens of a telescope we discovered that the Earth is not the unmoving center of reality, and by peering through the lens of the theory of evolution we discovered that spacetime and objects are not the nature of reality. When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a red tomato, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a red tomato and is nothing like a red tomato. Similarly, when I have an experience that I describe as a lion or a steak, I'm interacting with reality, but that reality is not a lion or a steak. And here's the kicker: When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a brain, or neurons, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a brain or neurons and is nothing like a brain or neurons. And that reality, whatever it is, is the real source of cause and effect in the world — not brains, not neurons. Brains and neurons have no causal powers. They cause none of our perceptual experiences, and none of our behavior. Brains and neurons are a species-specific set of symbols, a hack.What does this mean for the mystery of consciousness? Well, it opens up new possibilities. For instance, perhaps reality is some vast machine that causes our conscious experiences. I doubt this, but it's worth exploring. Perhaps reality is some vast, interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other's conscious experiences. Actually, this isn't as crazy an idea as it seems, and I'm currently exploring it.But here's the point: Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life's greatest mystery. I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we've ever imagined.The theory of evolution presents us with the ultimate dare: Dare to recognize that perception is not about seeing truth, it's about having kids. And by the way, even this TED is just in your head.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: If that's really you there, thank you. So there's so much from this. I mean, first of all, some people may just be profoundly depressed at the thought that, if evolution does not favor reality, I mean, doesn't that to some extent undermine all our endeavors here, all our ability to think that we can think the truth, possibly even including your own theory, if you go there?Donald Hoffman: Well, this does not stop us from a successful science. What we have is one theory that turned out to be false, that perception is like reality and reality is like our perceptions. That theory turns out to be false. Okay, throw that theory away. That doesn't stop us from now postulating all sorts of other theories about the nature of reality, so it's actually progress to recognize that one of our theories was false. So science continues as normal. There's no problem here.CA: So you think it's possible — (Laughter) — This is cool, but what you're saying I think is it's possible that evolution can still get you to reason.DH: Yes. Now that's a very, very good point. The evolutionary game simulations that I showed were specifically about perception, and they do show that our perceptions have been shaped not to show us reality as it is, but that does not mean the same thing about our logic or mathematics. We haven't done these simulations, but my bet is that we'll find that there are some selection pressures for our logic and our mathematics to be at least in the direction of truth. I mean, if you're like me, math and logic is not easy. We don't get it all right, but at least the selection pressures are not uniformly away from true math and logic. So I think that we'll find that we have to look at each cognitive faculty one at a time and see what evolution does to it. What's true about perception may not be true about math and logic.CA: I mean, really what you're proposing is a kind of modern-day Bishop Berkeley interpretation of the world: consciousness causes matter, not the other way around.DH: Well, it's slightly different than Berkeley. Berkeley thought that, he was a deist, and he thought that the ultimate nature of reality is God and so forth, and I don't need to go where Berkeley's going, so it's quite a bit different from Berkeley. I call this conscious realism. It's actually a very different approach.CA: Don, I could literally talk with you for hours, and I hope to do that.Thanks so much for that. DH: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is
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"The first time I uttered a prayer was in a glass-stained cathedral.I was kneeling long after the congregation was on its feet,dip both hands into holy water,trace the trinity across my chest,my tiny body drooping  like a question markall over the wooden pew.I asked Jesus to fix me,and when he did not answerI befriended silence in the hopes that my sin would burnand salve my mouth would dissolve like sugar on tongue,but shame lingered as an aftertaste.And in an attempt to reintroduce me to sanctity,my mother told me of the miracle I was,said I could grow up  to be anything I want.I decided to be a boy.It was cute.I had snapback, toothless grin,used skinned knees as street cred,played hide and seek with  what was left of my goal.I was it.The winner to a game  the other kids couldn't play,I was the mystery of an anatomy,a question asked but not answered,tightroping between awkward boy and apologetic girl,and when I turned 12, the boy phase wasn't deemed cute anymore.It was met with nostalgic aunts who missed seeing my knees in the shadow of skirts,who reminded me that my kind of attitude would never bring a husband home,that I exist for heterosexual marriage and child-bearing.And I swallowed their insults along with their slurs.Naturally, I did not come out of the closet.The kids at my school opened it without my permission.Called me by a name I did not recognize,said ""lesbian,""but I was more boy than girl, more Ken than Barbie.It had nothing to do with hating my body,I just love it enough to let it go,I treat it like a house,and when your house is falling apart,you do not evacuate,you make it comfortable enough to house all your insides,you make it pretty enough to invite guests over,you make the floorboards strong enough to stand on.My mother fears I have named myself after fading things.As she counts the echoes left behind by Mya Hall, Leelah Alcorn, Blake Brockington.She fears that I'll die without a whisper,that I'll turn into ""what a shame"" conversations at the bus stop.She claims I have turned myself into a mausoleum,that I am a walking casket,news headlines have turned my identity into a spectacle,Bruce Jenner on everyone's lips while the brutality of living in this bodybecomes an asterisk  at the bottom of equality pages.No one ever thinks of us as humanbecause we are more ghost than flesh,because people fear that my gender expression is a trick,that it exists to be perverse,that it ensnares them without their consent,that my body is a feast for their eyes and handsand once they have fed off my queer,they'll regurgitate all the parts they did not like.They'll put me back into the closet, hang me with all the other skeletons.I will be the best attraction.Can you see how easy it is to talk people into coffins,to misspell their names on gravestones.And people still wonder why there are boys rotting,they go away in high school hallwaysthey are afraid of becoming another hashtag in a secondafraid of classroom discussions becoming like judgment dayand now oncoming traffic is embracing more transgender children than parents.I wonder how long it will bebefore the trans suicide notes start to feel redundant,before we realize that our bodies become lessons about sinway before we learn how to love them.Like God didn't save all this breath and mercy,like my blood is not the wine that washed over Jesus' feet.My prayers are now getting stuck in my throat.Maybe I am finally fixed,maybe I just don't care,maybe God finally listened to my prayers.Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lee_mokobe_a_powerful_poem_about_what_it_feels_like_to_be_transgender
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"Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and how we learn, to how we do business and make decisions, big ones and small. Our emotions also influence how we connect with one another. We've evolved to live in a world like this, but instead, we're living more and more of our lives like this — this is the text message from my daughter last night — in a world that's devoid of emotion. So I'm on a mission to change that. I want to bring emotions back into our digital experiences.I started on this path 15 years ago. I was a computer scientist in Egypt, and I had just gotten accepted to a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University. So I did something quite unusual for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife: With the support of my husband, who had to stay in Egypt, I packed my bags and I moved to England. At Cambridge, thousands of miles away from home, I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than I did with any other human. Yet despite this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling. It had no idea if I was happy, having a bad day, or stressed, confused, and so that got frustrating. Even worse, as I communicated online with my family back home, I felt that all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace. I was homesick, I was lonely, and on some days I was actually crying, but all I had to communicate these emotions was this. (Laughter) Today's technology has lots of I.Q., but no E.Q.; lots of cognitive intelligence, but no emotional intelligence. So that got me thinking, what if our technology could sense our emotions? What if our devices could sense how we felt and reacted accordingly, just the way an emotionally intelligent friend would? Those questions led me and my team to create technologies that can read and respond to our emotions, and our starting point was the human face.So our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states, everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy and curiosity. In emotion science, we call each facial muscle movement an action unit. So for example, action unit 12, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it is actually a lip corner pull, which is the main component of a smile. Try it everybody. Let's get some smiles going on. Another example is action unit 4. It's the brow furrow. It's when you draw your eyebrows together and you create all these textures and wrinkles. We don't like them, but it's a strong indicator of a negative emotion. So we have about 45 of these action units, and they combine to express hundreds of emotions.Teaching a computer to read these facial emotions is hard, because these action units, they can be fast, they're subtle, and they combine in many different ways. So take, for example, the smile and the smirk. They look somewhat similar, but they mean very different things. (Laughter) So the smile is positive, a smirk is often negative. Sometimes a smirk can make you become famous. But seriously, it's important for a computer to be able to tell the difference between the two expressions.So how do we do that? We give our algorithms tens of thousands of examples of people we know to be smiling, from different ethnicities, ages, genders, and we do the same for smirks. And then, using deep learning, the algorithm looks for all these textures and wrinkles and shape changes on our face, and basically learns that all smiles have common characteristics, all smirks have subtly different characteristics. And the next time it sees a new face, it essentially learns that this face has the same characteristics of a smile, and it says, ""Aha, I recognize this. This is a smile expression.""So the best way to demonstrate how this technology works is to try a live demo, so I need a volunteer, preferably somebody with a face. (Laughter) Cloe's going to be our volunteer today.So over the past five years, we've moved from being a research project at MIT to a company, where my team has worked really hard to make this technology work, as we like to say, in the wild. And we've also shrunk it so that the core emotion engine works on any mobile device with a camera, like this iPad. So let's give this a try.As you can see, the algorithm has essentially found Cloe's face, so it's this white bounding box, and it's tracking the main feature points on her face, so her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth and her nose. The question is, can it recognize her expression? So we're going to test the machine. So first of all, give me your poker face. Yep, awesome. (Laughter) And then as she smiles, this is a genuine smile, it's great. So you can see the green bar go up as she smiles. Now that was a big smile. Can you try a subtle smile to see if the computer can recognize? It does recognize subtle smiles as well. We've worked really hard to make that happen. And then eyebrow raised, indicator of surprise. Brow furrow, which is an indicator of confusion. Frown. Yes, perfect. So these are all the different action units. There's many more of them. This is just a slimmed-down demo. But we call each reading an emotion data point, and then they can fire together to portray different emotions. So on the right side of the demo — look like you're happy. So that's joy. Joy fires up. And then give me a disgust face. Try to remember what it was like when Zayn left One Direction. (Laughter) Yeah, wrinkle your nose. Awesome. And the valence is actually quite negative, so you must have been a big fan. So valence is how positive or negative an experience is, and engagement is how expressive she is as well. So imagine if Cloe had access to this real-time emotion stream, and she could share it with anybody she wanted to. Thank you. (Applause)So, so far, we have amassed 12 billion of these emotion data points. It's the largest emotion database in the world. We've collected it from 2.9 million face videos, people who have agreed to share their emotions with us, and from 75 countries around the world. It's growing every day. It blows my mind away that we can now quantify something as personal as our emotions, and we can do it at this scale.So what have we learned to date? Gender. Our data confirms something that you might suspect. Women are more expressive than men. Not only do they smile more, their smiles last longer, and we can now really quantify what it is that men and women respond to differently. Let's do culture: So in the United States, women are 40 percent more expressive than men, but curiously, we don't see any difference in the U.K. between men and women. (Laughter) Age: People who are 50 years and older are 25 percent more emotive than younger people. Women in their 20s smile a lot more than men the same age, perhaps a necessity for dating. But perhaps what surprised us the most about this data is that we happen to be expressive all the time, even when we are sitting in front of our devices alone, and it's not just when we're watching cat videos on Facebook. We are expressive when we're emailing, texting, shopping online, or even doing our taxes.Where is this data used today? In understanding how we engage with media, so understanding virality and voting behavior; and also empowering or emotion-enabling technology, and I want to share some examples that are especially close to my heart. Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with. In education, imagine if your learning apps sense that you're confused and slow down, or that you're bored, so it's sped up, just like a great teacher would in a classroom. What if your wristwatch tracked your mood, or your car sensed that you're tired, or perhaps your fridge knows that you're stressed, so it auto-locks to prevent you from binge eating. (Laughter) I would like that, yeah. What if, when I was in Cambridge, I had access to my real-time emotion stream, and I could share that with my family back home in a very natural way, just like I would've if we were all in the same room together?I think five years down the line, all our devices are going to have an emotion chip, and we won't remember what it was like when we couldn't just frown at our device and our device would say, ""Hmm, you didn't like that, did you?"" Our biggest challenge is that there are so many applications of this technology, my team and I realize that we can't build them all ourselves, so we've made this technology available so that other developers can get building and get creative. We recognize that there are potential risks and potential for abuse, but personally, having spent many years doing this, I believe that the benefits to humanity from having emotionally intelligent technology far outweigh the potential for misuse. And I invite you all to be part of the conversation. The more people who know about this technology, the more we can all have a voice in how it's being used. So as more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive. So I want those devices that have separated us to bring us back together. And by humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rana_el_kaliouby_this_app_knows_how_you_feel_from_the_look_on_your_face
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"An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University named William Muir studied chickens. He was interested in productivity — I think it's something that concerns all of us — but it's easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. (Laughter) He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment. Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens — you could call them superchickens — and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding.After six generations had passed, what did he find? Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They'd pecked the rest to death. (Laughter) The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest.Now, as I've gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, ""That superflock, that's my company."" (Laughter) Or, ""That's my country."" Or, ""That's my life.""All my life I've been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I've really never found it very inspiring. I've started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward. And I've never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars. But for the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. (Applause)So what is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others? Well, that's the question a team at MIT took to research. They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve. And what happened was exactly what you'd expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q. Instead, they had three characteristics, the really successful teams. First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. It's broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. (Applause) Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you're getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient? Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? We don't really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what's key to that is their social connectedness to each other.So how does this play out in the real world? Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends.An example: Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest. And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for? Now, you don't get taught this in engineering school — (Laughter) — and it's not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet. Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. The problem was solved in less than a day. Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success.Now, helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it's absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. But there isn't a single high-tech company I've worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it'll just happen normally, but it doesn't. When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I'd hired didn't know each other. They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum.Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other. The Swedes even have a special term for this. They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. It means collective restoration. At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they've created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. Have they all gone mad? Quite the opposite — they've figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. Companies don't have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks.Now, when you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital. Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness. And time is what builds value. When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it. Now, this isn't about chumminess, and it's no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that's what their contribution is. Conflict is frequent because candor is safe. And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. And it's only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. And that's what social capital supports.Now, we aren't really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. We're used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren't looking for individual pyrotechnics. They were looking for what happened between the students, because that's where the drama is. And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, ""Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. It's just, they don't last very long. It's the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves."" And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn't even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered. And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I've had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens. (Laughter) (Applause) Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. For decades, we've tried to motivate people with money, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. Now, we need to let people motivate each other. And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.We know that this works. When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense. CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. But one team that rose to the challenge adopted three key principles. The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. We need everybody. Everybody has a valid perspective. Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. And third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be. Now, this didn't mean Tudhope did nothing. He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first. And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented.There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now, and we won't solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work
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"Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who'd been there. The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism.But wait — wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.Why? Here's why. This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland.So what's going on? If it isn't vaccines, what is it? If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they tend to rely on phrases like ""broadened diagnostic criteria"" and ""better case finding"" to explain these rising numbers. But that kind of language doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact. If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place? Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions. I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling. For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health. There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature. This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next.The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner. In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents. They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare. By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa. That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective. For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism. He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis.Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn't pan out. He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents. These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost. At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory. One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two. When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, ""Beethoven!"" But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they'd heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval. As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large.Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare. Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner's theory of refrigerator parenting were ""bloody stupid,"" as she told me. She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie. Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis. To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families,Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier. They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population. They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community. What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse. Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty. In other words, these children didn't fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner's monolithic model would have predicted.At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data. How had no one noticed these children before? But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about. Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work. It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna's husband spoke German, and he translated it for her.The paper offered an alternate story of autism. Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s. Asperger's ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards. Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons. Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life. Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them. Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability. He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor. He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it. Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called ""the autism spectrum."" In the late '80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner's narrow model for Asperger's broad and inclusive one.These changes weren't happening in a vacuum. By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time. Before ""Rain Man"" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned ""Rain Man"" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like.Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced. You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated.The combination of ""Rain Man,"" the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness. The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved.Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare.If the CDC's current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world. In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term ""neurodiversity"" to celebrate the varieties of human cognition.One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken. By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. [Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the ""cure"" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential.An autistic [man] named Zosia Zaks once said, ""We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity."" As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society. We can't afford to waste a brain.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/steve_silberman_the_forgotten_history_of_autism
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"Along the ancient path of the Monongahela River, Braddock, Pennsylvania sits in the eastern region of Allegheny County, approximately nine miles outside of Pittsburgh.An industrial suburb, Braddock is home to Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works. Operating since 1875, it is the last functioning steel mill in the region. For 12 years, I have produced collaborative portraits, still lifes, landscapes and aerial views in order to build a visual archive to address the intersection of the steel industry, the environment, and the health care system's impact on the bodies of my family and community.The tradition and grand narrative of Braddock is mostly comprised of stories of industrialists and trade unions. Currently, the new narrative about Braddock, a poster child for Rust Belt revitalization, is a story of urban pioneers discovering a new frontier. Mass media has omitted the fact that Braddock is predominantly black. Our existence has been co-opted, silenced and erased.Fourth generation in a lineage of women, I was raised under the protection and care of Grandma Ruby, off 8th Street at 805 Washington Avenue. She worked as a manager for Goodwill. Mom was a nurse's aid. She watched the steel mills close and white flight to suburban developments. By the time my generation walked the streets, disinvestment at the local, state and federal level, eroded infrastructure, and the War on Drugs dismantled my family and community.Grandma Ruby's stepfather Gramps was one of few black men to retire from Carnegie's mill with his pension. He worked in high temperatures, tearing down and rebuilding furnaces, cleaning up spilt metal and slag. The history of a place is written on the body and the landscape. Areas of heavy truck traffic, exposure to benzene and atomized metals, risk cancer and lupus. One hundred twenty-three licensed beds, 652 employees, rehabilitation programs decimated. A housing discrimination lawsuit against Allegheny County removed where the projects Talbot Towers once stood. Recent rezoning for more light industry has since appeared. Google Maps and Google Earth pixelations conceal the flammable waste being used to squeeze the Bunn family off their home and land. In 2013, I chartered a helicopter with my cameras to document this aggressive dispossession. In flight, my observation reveals thousands of plastic white bundles owned by a conservation industry that claims it's eco-friendly and recycles millions of tires to preserve people's lives and to improve people's lives.My work spirals from the micro to the macro level, excavating hidden histories. Recently, at the Seattle Art Museum, Isaac Bunn and I mounted this exhibition, and the exhibition was used as a platform to launch his voice. Through reclamation of our narrative, we will continue to fight historic erasure and socioeconomic inequality.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/latoya_ruby_frazier_a_visual_history_of_inequality_in_industrial_america
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(Music)(Music) (Applause)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/joey_alexander_an_11_year_old_prodigy_performs_old_school_jazz
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"I am failing as a woman, I am failing as a feminist.I have passionate opinions about gender equality, but I worry that to freely accept the label of ""feminist,"" would not be fair to good feminists.I'm a feminist, but I'm a rather bad one. Oh, so I call myself a Bad Feminist. Or at least, I wrote an essay, and then I wrote a book called ""Bad Feminist,"" and then in interviews, people started calling me The Bad Feminist. (Laughter)So, what started as a bit of an inside joke with myself and a willful provocation, has become a thing.Let me take a step back. When I was younger, mostly in my teens and 20s, I had strange ideas about feminists as hairy, angry, man-hating, sex-hating women — as if those are bad things. (Laughter) These days, I look at how women are treated the world over, and anger, in particular, seems like a perfectly reasonable response.But back then, I worried about the tone people used when suggesting I might be a feminist. The feminist label was an accusation, it was an ""F"" word, and not a nice one. I was labeled a woman who doesn't play by the rules, who expects too much, who thinks far too highly of myself, by daring to believe I'm equal — (Coughs) — superior to a man. You don't want to be that rebel woman, until you realize that you very much are that woman, and cannot imagine being anyone else.As I got older, I began to accept that I am, indeed, a feminist, and a proud one. I hold certain truths to be self-evident: Women are equal to men. We deserve equal pay for equal work. We have the right to move through the world as we choose, free from harassment or violence. We have the right to easy, affordable access to birth control, and reproductive services. We have the right to make choices about our bodies, free from legislative oversight or evangelical doctrine. We have the right to respect.There's more. When we talk about the needs of women, we have to consider the other identities we inhabit. We are not just women. We are people with different bodies, gender expressions, faiths, sexualities, class backgrounds, abilities, and so much more. We need to take into account these differences and how they affect us, as much as we account for what we have in common. Without this kind of inclusion, our feminism is nothing.I hold these truths to be self-evident, but let me be clear: I'm a mess. I am full of contradictions. There are many ways in which I'm doing feminism wrong.I have another confession. When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume. (Laughter) Even though the lyrics are degrading to women — these lyrics offend me to my core — the classic Yin Yang Twins song ""Salt Shaker"" — it is amazing. (Laughter) ""Make it work with your wet t-shirt. Bitch, you gotta shake it 'til your camel starts to hurt!"" (Laughter) Think about it. (Laughter) Poetry, right? I am utterly mortified by my music choices. (Laughter)I firmly believe in man work, which is anything I don't want to do, including — (Laughter) — all domestic tasks, but also: bug killing, trash removal, lawn care and vehicle maintenance. I want no part of any of that. (Laughter) Pink is my favorite color. I enjoy fashion magazines and pretty things. I watch ""The Bachelor"" and romantic comedies, and I have absurd fantasies about fairy tales coming true.Some of my transgressions are more flagrant. If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that is her choice, and it is not my place to judge. If a woman chooses to stay home to raise her children, I embrace that choice, too. The problem is not that she makes herself economically vulnerable in that choice; the problem is that our society is set up to make women economically vulnerable when they choose. Let's deal with that. (Applause)I reject the mainstream feminism that has historically ignored or deflected the needs of women of color, working-class women, queer women and transgender women, in favor of supporting white, middle- and upper-class straight women. Listen, if that's good feminism — I am a very bad feminist. (Laughter)There is also this: As a feminist, I feel a lot of pressure. We have this tendency to put visible feminists on a pedestal. We expect them to pose perfectly. When they disappoint us, we gleefully knock them from the very pedestal we put them on. Like I said, I am a mess — consider me knocked off that pedestal before you ever try to put me up there. (Laughter)Too many women, particularly groundbreaking women and industry leaders, are afraid to be labeled as feminists. They're afraid to stand up and say, ""Yes, I am a feminist,"" for fear of what that label means, for fear of being unable to live up to unrealistic expectations.Take, for example, Beyoncé, or as I call her, The Goddess. (Laughter) She has emerged, in recent years, as a visible feminist. At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, she performed in front of the word ""feminist"" 10 feet high. It was a glorious spectacle to see this pop star openly embracing feminism and letting young women and men know that being a feminist is something to celebrate. As the moment faded, cultural critics began endlessly debating whether or not Beyoncé was, indeed, a feminist. They graded her feminism, instead of simply taking a grown, accomplished woman at her word. (Laughter) (Applause)We demand perfection from feminists, because we are still fighting for so much, we want so much, we need so damn much.We go far beyond reasonable, constructive criticism, to dissecting any given woman's feminism, tearing it apart until there's nothing left. We do not need to do that. Bad feminism — or really, more inclusive feminism — is a starting point.But what happens next? We go from acknowledging our imperfections to accountability, or walking the walk, and being a little bit brave. If I listen to degrading music, I am creating a demand for which artists are more than happy to contribute a limitless supply. These artists are not going to change how they talk about women in their songs until we demand that change by affecting their bottom line. Certainly, it is difficult. Why must it be so catchy? (Laughter) It's hard to make the better choice, and it is so easy to justify a lesser one. But — when I justify bad choices, I make it harder for women to achieve equality, the equality that we all deserve, and I need to own that.I think of my nieces, ages three and four. They are gorgeous and headstrong, brilliant girls, who are a whole lot of brave. I want them to thrive in a world where they are valued for the powerful creatures they are. I think of them, and suddenly, the better choice becomes far easier to make.We can all make better choices. We can change the channel when a television show treats sexual violence against women like sport, Game of Thrones. We can change the radio station when we hear songs that treat women as nothing. We can spend our box office dollars elsewhere when movies don't treat women as anything more than decorative objects. We can stop supporting professional sports where the athletes treat  their partners like punching bags. (Applause)In other ways, men — and especially straight white men — can say, ""No, I will not publish with your magazine, or participate in your project, or otherwise work with you, until you include a fair number of women, both as participants and decision makers. I won't work with you until your publication, or your organization, is more inclusive of all kinds of difference.""Those of us who are underrepresented and invited to participate in such projects, can also decline to be included until more of us are invited through the glass ceiling, and we are tokens no more.Without these efforts, without taking these stands, our accomplishments are going to mean very little. We can commit these small acts of bravery and hope that our choices trickle upward to the people in power — editors, movie and music producers, CEOs, lawmakers — the people who can make bigger, braver choices to create lasting, meaningful change.We can also boldly claim our feminism — good, bad, or anywhere in between. The last line of my book ""Bad Feminist"" says, ""I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all."" This is true for so many reasons, but first and foremost, I say this because once upon a time, my voice was stolen from me, and feminism helped me to get my voice back.There was an incident. I call it an incident so I can carry the burden of what happened. Some boys broke me, when I was so young, I did not know what boys can do to break a girl. They treated me like I was nothing. I began to believe I was nothing. They stole my voice, and in the after, I did not dare to believe that anything I might say could matter.But — I had writing. And there, I wrote myself back together. I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself. I read the words of women who might understand a story like mine, and women who looked like me, and understood what it was like to move through the world with brown skin. I read the words of women who showed me I was not nothing. I learned to write like them, and then I learned to write as myself. I found my voice again, and I started to believe that my voice is powerful beyond measure.Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are.In one hand, I hold the power to accomplish anything. And in my other, I hold the humbling reality that I am just one woman.I am a bad feminist, I am a good woman, I am trying to become better in how I think, and what I say, and what I do, without abandoning everything that makes me human. I hope that we can all do the same. I hope that we can all be a little bit brave, when we most need such bravery. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roxane_gay_confessions_of_a_bad_feminist
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"Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, blah.So what the hell was that? Well, you don't know because you couldn't understand it. It wasn't clear. But hopefully, it was said with enough conviction that it was at least alluringly mysterious.Clarity or mystery? I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a New Yorker every day, and there are two elements that absolutely fascinate me.Here's an example. Now, how many people know what this is? Okay. Now how many people know what this is? Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes by the genius Charles M. Schulz, we now have seven deft strokes that in and of themselves create an entire emotional life, one that has enthralled hundreds of millions of fans for over 50 years. This is actually a cover of a book that I designed about the work of Schulz and his art, which will be coming out this fall, and that is the entire cover. There is no other typographic information or visual information on the front, and the name of the book is ""Only What's Necessary."" So this is sort of symbolic about the decisions I have to make every day about the design that I'm perceiving, and the design I'm creating.So clarity. Clarity gets to the point. It's blunt. It's honest. It's sincere. We ask ourselves this. [""When should you be clear?""]Now, something like this, whether we can read it or not, needs to be really, really clear. Is it?This is a rather recent example of urban clarity that I just love, mainly because I'm always late and I am always in a hurry. So when these meters started showing up a couple of years ago on street corners, I was thrilled, because now I finally knew how many seconds I had to get across the street before I got run over by a car. Six? I can do that. (Laughter)So let's look at the yin to the clarity yang, and that is mystery. Mystery is a lot more complicated by its very definition. Mystery demands to be decoded, and when it's done right, we really, really want to. [""When should you be mysterious?""] In World War II, the Germans really, really wanted to decode this, and they couldn't.Here's an example of a design that I've done recently for a novel by Haruki Murakami, who I've done design work for for over 20 years now, and this is a novel about a young man who has four dear friends who all of a sudden, after their freshman year of college, completely cut him off with no explanation, and he is devastated. And the friends' names each have a connotation in Japanese to a color. So there's Mr. Red, there's Mr. Blue, there's Ms. White, and Ms. Black. Tsukuru Tazaki, his name does not correspond to a color, so his nickname is Colorless, and as he's looking back on their friendship, he recalls that they were like five fingers on a hand. So I created this sort of abstract representation of this, but there's a lot more going on underneath the surface of the story, and there's more going on underneath the surface of the jacket. The four fingers are now four train lines in the Tokyo subway system, which has significance within the story. And then you have the colorless subway line intersecting with each of the other colors, which basically he does later on in the story. He catches up with each of these people to find out why they treated him the way they did.And so this is the three-dimensional finished product sitting on my desk in my office, and what I was hoping for here is that you'll simply be allured by the mystery of what this looks like, and will want to read it to decode and find out and make more clear why it looks the way it does.[""The Visual Vernacular.""]This is a way to use a more familiar kind of mystery. What does this mean? This is what it means. [""Make it look like something else.""] The visual vernacular is the way we are used to seeing a certain thing applied to something else so that we see it in a different way.This is an approach I wanted to take to a book of essays by David Sedaris that had this title at the time. [""All the Beauty You Will Ever Need""] Now, the challenge here was that this title actually means nothing. It's not connected to any of the essays in the book. It came to the author's boyfriend in a dream. Thank you very much, so — (Laughter) — so usually, I am creating a design that is in some way based on the text, but this is all the text there is. So you've got this mysterious title that really doesn't mean anything, so I was trying to think: Where might I see a bit of mysterious text that seems to mean something but doesn't? And sure enough, not long after, one evening after a Chinese meal, this arrived, and I thought, ""Ah, bing, ideagasm!"" (Laughter) I've always loved the hilariously mysterious tropes of fortune cookies that seem to mean something extremely deep but when you think about them — if you think about them — they really don't. This says, ""Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future."" Thank you. (Laughter) But we can take this visual vernacular and apply it to Mr. Sedaris, and we are so familiar with how fortune cookie fortunes look that we don't even need the bits of the cookie anymore. We're just seeing this strange thing and we know we love David Sedaris, and so we're hoping that we're in for a good time.[""'Fraud' Essays by David Rakoff""] David Rakoff was a wonderful writer and he called his first book ""Fraud"" because he was getting sent on assignments by magazines to do things that he was not equipped to do. So he was this skinny little urban guy and GQ magazine would send him down the Colorado River whitewater rafting to see if he would survive. And then he would write about it, and he felt that he was a fraud and that he was misrepresenting himself. And so I wanted the cover of this book to also misrepresent itself and then somehow show a reader reacting to it.This led me to graffiti. I'm fascinated by graffiti. I think anybody who lives in an urban environment encounters graffiti all the time, and there's all different sorts of it. This is a picture I took on the Lower East Side of just a transformer box on the sidewalk and it's been tagged like crazy. Now whether you look at this and think, ""Oh, that's a charming urban affectation,"" or you look at it and say, ""That's illegal abuse of property,"" the one thing I think we can all agree on is that you cannot read it. Right? There is no clear message here. There is another kind of graffiti that I find far more interesting, which I call editorial graffiti. This is a picture I took recently in the subway, and sometimes you see lots of prurient, stupid stuff, but I thought this was interesting, and this is a poster that is saying rah-rah Airbnb, and someone has taken a Magic Marker and has editorialized about what they think about it. And it got my attention.So I was thinking, how do we apply this to this book? So I get the book by this person, and I start reading it, and I'm thinking, this guy is not who he says  he is; he's a fraud. And I get out a red Magic Marker, and out of frustration just scribble this across the front. Design done. (Laughter) And they went for it! (Laughter) Author liked it, publisher liked it, and that is how the book went out into the world, and it was really fun to see people reading this on the subway and walking around with it and what have you, and they all sort of looked like they were crazy. (Laughter)[""'Perfidia' a novel by James Ellroy""] Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer, a good friend, I've worked with him for many years. He is probably best known as the author of ""The Black Dahlia"" and ""L.A. Confidential."" His most recent novel was called this, which is a very mysterious name that I'm sure a lot of people know what it means, but a lot of people don't. And it's a story about a Japanese-American detective in Los Angeles in 1941 investigating a murder. And then Pearl Harbor happens, and as if his life wasn't difficult enough, now the race relations have really ratcheted up, and then the Japanese-American internment camps are quickly created, and there's lots of tension and horrible stuff as he's still trying to solve this murder. And so I did at first think very literally about this in terms of all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor and we'll add it to Los Angeles and we'll make this apocalyptic dawn on the horizon of the city. And so that's a picture from Pearl Harbor just grafted onto Los Angeles. My editor in chief said, ""You know, it's interesting but I think you can do better and I think you can make it simpler."" And so I went back to the drawing board, as I often do. But also, being alive to my surroundings, I work in a high-rise in Midtown, and every night, before I leave the office, I have to push this button to get out, and the big heavy glass doors open and I can get onto the elevator. And one night, all of a sudden, I looked at this and I saw it in a way that I hadn't really noticed it before. Big red circle, danger. And I thought this was so obvious that it had to have been done a zillion times, and so I did a Google image search, and I couldn't find another book cover that looked quite like this, and so this is really what solved the problem, and graphically it's more interesting and creates a bigger tension between the idea of a certain kind of sunrise coming up over L.A. and America.[""'Gulp' A tour of the human digestive system by Mary Roach.""]Mary Roach is an amazing writer who takes potentially mundane scientific subjects and makes them not mundane at all; she makes them really fun. So in this particular case, it's about the human digestive system. So I'm trying to figure out what is the cover of this book going to be. This is a self-portrait. (Laughter) Every morning I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror to see if my tongue is black. And if it's not, I'm good to go. (Laughter) I recommend you all do this. But I also started thinking, here's our introduction. Right? Into the human digestive system. But I think what we can all agree on is that actual photographs of human mouths, at least based on this, are off-putting. (Laughter) So for the cover, then, I had this illustration done which is literally more palatable and reminds us that it's best to approach the digestive system from this end. (Laughter) I don't even have to complete the sentence. All right.[""Unuseful mystery""] What happens when clarity and mystery get mixed up? And we see this all the time. This is what I call unuseful mystery. I go down into the subway — I take the subway a lot — and this piece of paper is taped to a girder. Right? And now I'm thinking, uh-oh, and the train's about to come and I'm trying to figure out what this means, and thanks a lot. Part of the problem here is that they've compartmentalized the information in a way they think is helpful, and frankly, I don't think it is at all. So this is mystery we do not need. What we need is useful clarity, so just for fun, I redesigned this. This is using all the same elements. (Applause) Thank you. I am still waiting for a call from the MTA. (Laughter) You know, I'm actually not even using more colors than they use. They just didn't even bother to make the 4 and the 5 green, those idiots. (Laughter) So the first thing we see is that there is a service change, and then, in two complete sentences with a beginning, a middle and an end, it tells us what the change is and what's going to be happening. Call me crazy! (Laughter)[""Useful mystery""] All right. Now, here is a piece of mystery that I love: packaging. This redesign of the Diet Coke can by Turner Duckworth is to me truly a piece of art. It's a work of art. It's beautiful. But part of what makes it so heartening to me as a designer is that he's taken the visual vernacular of Diet Coke — the typefaces, the colors, the silver background — and he's reduced them to their most essential parts, so it's like going back to the Charlie Brown face. It's like, how can you give them just enough information so they know what it is but giving them the credit for the knowledge that they already have about this thing? It looks great, and you would go into a delicatessen and all of a sudden see that on the shelf, and it's wonderful. Which makes the next thing — [""Unuseful clarity""] — all the more disheartening, at least to me. So okay, again, going back down into the subway, after this came out, these are pictures that I took. Times Square subway station: Coca-Cola has bought out the entire thing for advertising. Okay? And maybe some of you know where this is going. Ahem.""You moved to New York with the clothes on your back, the cash in your pocket, and your eyes on the prize. You're on Coke."" (Laughter) ""You moved to New York with an MBA, one clean suit, and an extremely firm handshake. You're on Coke."" (Laughter) These are real! (Laughter) Not even the support beams were spared, except they switched into Yoda mode. (Laughter) ""Coke you're on."" (Laughter) [""Excuse me, I'm on WHAT??""] This campaign was a huge misstep. It was pulled almost instantly due to consumer backlash and all sorts of unflattering parodies on the web — (Laughter) — and also that dot next to ""You're on,"" that's not a period, that's a trademark. So thanks a lot.So to me, this was just so bizarre about how they could get the packaging so mysteriously beautiful and perfect and the message so unbearably, clearly wrong. It was just incredible to me.So I just hope that I've been able to share with you some of my insights on the uses of clarity and mystery in my work, and maybe how you might decide to be more clear in your life, or maybe to be a bit more mysterious and not so over-sharing. (Laughter)And if there's just one thing that I leave you with from this talk, I hope it's this: Blih blih blih blah. Blah blah blih blih. [""'Judge This,' Chip Kidd""] Blih blih blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.Blah blah.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_kidd_the_art_of_first_impressions_in_design_and_life
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"This is my great uncle, my father's father's younger brother. His name was Joe McKenna. He was a young husband and a semi-pro basketball player and a fireman in New York City. Family history says he loved being a fireman, and so in 1938, on one of his days off, he elected to hang out at the firehouse. To make himself useful that day, he started polishing all the brass, the railings on the fire truck, the fittings on the walls, and one of the fire hose nozzles, a giant, heavy piece of metal, toppled off a shelf and hit him. A few days later, his shoulder started to hurt. Two days after that, he spiked a fever. The fever climbed and climbed. His wife was taking care of him, but nothing she did made a difference, and when they got the local doctor in, nothing he did mattered either.They flagged down a cab and took him to the hospital. The nurses there recognized right away that he had an infection, what at the time they would have called ""blood poisoning,"" and though they probably didn't say it, they would have known right away that there was nothing they could do.There was nothing they could do because the things we use now to cure infections didn't exist yet. The first test of penicillin, the first antibiotic, was three years in the future. People who got infections either recovered, if they were lucky, or they died. My great uncle was not lucky. He was in the hospital for a week, shaking with chills, dehydrated and delirious, sinking into a coma as his organs failed. His condition grew so desperate that the people from his firehouse lined up to give him transfusions hoping to dilute the infection surging through his blood.Nothing worked. He died. He was 30 years old.If you look back through history, most people died the way my great uncle died. Most people didn't die of cancer or heart disease, the lifestyle diseases that afflict us in the West today. They didn't die of those diseases because they didn't live long enough to develop them. They died of injuries — being gored by an ox, shot on a battlefield, crushed in one of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution — and most of the time from infection, which finished what those injuries began.All of that changed when antibiotics arrived. Suddenly, infections that had been a death sentence became something you recovered from in days. It seemed like a miracle, and ever since, we have been living inside the golden epoch of the miracle drugs.And now, we are coming to an end of it. My great uncle died in the last days of the pre-antibiotic era. We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple infections such as the one Joe had will kill people once again.In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance. Briefly, it works like this. Bacteria compete against each other for resources, for food, by manufacturing lethal compounds that they direct against each other. Other bacteria, to protect themselves, evolve defenses against that chemical attack. When we first made antibiotics, we took those compounds into the lab and made our own versions of them, and bacteria responded to our attack the way they always had.Here is what happened next: Penicillin was distributed in 1943, and widespread penicillin resistance arrived by 1945. Vancomycin arrived in 1972, vancomycin resistance in 1988. Imipenem in 1985, and resistance to in 1998. Daptomycin, one of the most recent drugs, in 2003, and resistance to it just a year later in 2004.For 70 years, we played a game of leapfrog — our drug and their resistance, and then another drug, and then resistance again — and now the game is ending. Bacteria develop resistance so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided making antibiotics is not in their best interest, so there are infections moving across the world for which, out of the more than 100 antibiotics available on the market, two drugs might work with side effects, or one drug, or none.This is what that looks like. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, identified a single case in a hospital in North Carolina of an infection resistant to all but two drugs. Today, that infection, known as KPC, has spread to every state but three, and to South America, Europe and the Middle East. In 2008, doctors in Sweden diagnosed a man from India with a different infection resistant to all but one drug that time. The gene that creates that resistance, known as NDM, has now spread from India into China, Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada, and the United States.It would be natural to hope that these infections are extraordinary cases, but in fact, in the United States and Europe, 50,000 people a year die of infections which no drugs can help. A project chartered by the British government known as the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year.That is a lot of deaths, and yet, the chances are good that you don't feel at risk, that you imagine these people were hospital patients in intensive care units or nursing home residents near the ends of their lives, people whose infections are remote from us, in situations we can't identify with.What you didn't think about, none of us do, is that antibiotics support almost all of modern life.If we lost antibiotics, here's what else we'd lose: First, any protection for people with weakened immune systems — cancer patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, premature babies.Next, any treatment that installs foreign objects in the body: stents for stroke, pumps for diabetes, dialysis, joint replacements. How many athletic baby boomers need new hips and knees? A recent study estimates that without antibiotics, one out of ever six would die.Next, we'd probably lose surgery. Many operations are preceded by prophylactic doses of antibiotics. Without that protection, we'd lose the ability to open the hidden spaces of the body. So no heart operations, no prostate biopsies, no Cesarean sections. We'd have to learn to fear infections that now seem minor. Strep throat used to cause heart failure. Skin infections led to amputations. Giving birth killed, in the cleanest hospitals, almost one woman out of every 100. Pneumonia took three children out of every 10.More than anything else, we'd lose the confident way we live our everyday lives. If you knew that any injury could kill you, would you ride a motorcycle, bomb down a ski slope, climb a ladder to hang your Christmas lights, let your kid slide into home plate? After all, the first person to receive penicillin, a British policeman named Albert Alexander, who was so ravaged by infection that his scalp oozed pus and doctors had to take out an eye, was infected by doing something very simple. He walked into his garden and scratched his face on a thorn. That British project I mentioned which estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year also predicts that if we can't get this under control by 2050, not long, the worldwide toll will be 10 million deaths a year.How did we get to this point where what we have to look forward to is those terrifying numbers? The difficult answer is, we did it to ourselves. Resistance is an inevitable biological process, but we bear the responsibility for accelerating it. We did this by squandering antibiotics with a heedlessness that now seems shocking. Penicillin was sold over the counter until the 1950s. In much of the developing world, most antibiotics still are. In the United States, 50 percent of the antibiotics given in hospitals are unnecessary. Forty-five percent of the prescriptions written in doctor's offices are for conditions that antibiotics cannot help. And that's just in healthcare. On much of the planet, most meat animals get antibiotics every day of their lives, not to cure illnesses, but to fatten them up and to protect them against the factory farm conditions they are raised in. In the United States, possibly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year go to farm animals, not to humans, creating resistant bacteria that move off the farm in water, in dust, in the meat the animals become. Aquaculture depends on antibiotics too, particularly in Asia, and fruit growing relies on antibiotics to protect apples, pears, citrus, against disease. And because bacteria can pass their DNA to each other like a traveler handing off a suitcase at an airport, once we have encouraged that resistance into existence, there is no knowing where it will spread.This was predictable. In fact, it was predicted by Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. He was given the Nobel Prize in 1945 in recognition, and in an interview shortly after, this is what he said:""The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with a pencillin-resistant organism."" He added, ""I hope this evil can be averted.""Can we avert it? There are companies working on novel antibiotics, things the superbugs have never seen before. We need those new drugs badly, and we need incentives: discovery grants, extended patents, prizes, to lure other companies into making antibiotics again.But that probably won't be enough. Here's why: Evolution always wins. Bacteria birth a new generation every 20 minutes. It takes pharmaceutical chemistry 10 years to derive a new drug. Every time we use an antibiotic, we give the bacteria billions of chances to crack the codes of the defenses we've constructed. There has never yet been a drug they could not defeat.This is asymmetric warfare, but we can change the outcome. We could build systems to harvest data to tell us automatically and specifically how antibiotics are being used. We could build gatekeeping into drug order systems so that every prescription gets a second look. We could require agriculture to give up antibiotic use. We could build surveillance systems to tell us where resistance is emerging next.Those are the tech solutions. They probably aren't enough either, unless we help. Antibiotic resistance is a habit. We all know how hard it is to change a habit. But as a society, we've done that in the past. People used to toss litter into the streets, used to not wear seatbelts, used to smoke inside public buildings. We don't do those things anymore. We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest. We changed social norms. We could change social norms around antibiotic use too.I know that the scale of antibiotic resistance seems overwhelming, but if you've ever bought a fluorescent lightbulb because you were concerned about climate change, or read the label on a box of crackers because you think about the deforestation from palm oil, you already know what it feels like to take a tiny step to address an overwhelming problem. We could take those kinds of steps for antibiotic use too. We could forgo giving an antibiotic if we're not sure it's the right one. We could stop insisting on a prescription for our kid's ear infection before we're sure what caused it. We could ask every restaurant, every supermarket, where their meat comes from. We could promise each other never again to buy chicken or shrimp or fruit raised with routine antibiotic use, and if we did those things, we could slow down the arrival of the post-antibiotic world.But we have to do it soon. Penicillin began the antibiotic era in 1943. In just 70 years, we walked ourselves up to the edge of disaster. We won't get 70 years to find our way back out again.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maryn_mckenna_what_do_we_do_when_antibiotics_don_t_work_any_more
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"So in 1885, Karl Benz invented the automobile. Later that year, he took it out for the first public test drive, and — true story — crashed into a wall. For the last 130 years, we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, the driver. We've made the car stronger. We've added seat belts, we've added air bags, and in the last decade, we've actually started trying to make the car smarter to fix that bug, the driver.Now, today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between patching around the problem with driver assistance systems and actually having fully self-driving cars and what they can do for the world. I'm also going to talk to you a little bit about our car and allow you to see how it sees the world and how it reacts and what it does, but first I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem. And it's a big problem: 1.2 million people are killed on the world's roads every year. In America alone, 33,000 people are killed each year. To put that in perspective, that's the same as a 737 falling out of the sky every working day. It's kind of unbelievable. Cars are sold to us like this, but really, this is what driving's like. Right? It's not sunny, it's rainy, and you want to do anything other than drive. And the reason why is this: Traffic is getting worse. In America, between 1990 and 2010, the vehicle miles traveled increased by 38 percent. We grew by six percent of roads, so it's not in your brains. Traffic really is substantially worse than it was not very long ago.And all of this has a very human cost. So if you take the average commute time in America, which is about 50 minutes, you multiply that by the 120 million workers we have, that turns out to be about six billion minutes wasted in commuting every day. Now, that's a big number, so let's put it in perspective. You take that six billion minutes and you divide it by the average life expectancy of a person, that turns out to be 162 lifetimes spent every day, wasted, just getting from A to B. It's unbelievable. And then, there are those of us who don't have the privilege of sitting in traffic. So this is Steve. He's an incredibly capable guy, but he just happens to be blind, and that means instead of a 30-minute drive to work in the morning, it's a two-hour ordeal of piecing together bits of public transit or asking friends and family for a ride. He doesn't have that same freedom that you and I have to get around. We should do something about that.Now, conventional wisdom would say that we'll just take these driver assistance systems and we'll kind of push them and incrementally improve them, and over time, they'll turn into self-driving cars. Well, I'm here to tell you that's like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I'll be able to fly. We actually need to do something a little different. And so I'm going to talk to you about three different ways that self-driving systems are different than driver assistance systems. And I'm going to start with some of our own experience.So back in 2013, we had the first test of a self-driving car where we let regular people use it. Well, almost regular — they were 100 Googlers, but they weren't working on the project. And we gave them the car and we allowed them to use it in their daily lives. But unlike a real self-driving car, this one had a big asterisk with it: They had to pay attention, because this was an experimental vehicle. We tested it a lot, but it could still fail. And so we gave them two hours of training, we put them in the car, we let them use it, and what we heard back was something awesome, as someone trying to bring a product into the world. Every one of them told us they loved it. In fact, we had a Porsche driver who came in and told us on the first day, ""This is completely stupid. What are we thinking?"" But at the end of it, he said, ""Not only should I have it, everyone else should have it, because people are terrible drivers."" So this was music to our ears, but then we started to look at what the people inside the car were doing, and this was eye-opening. Now, my favorite story is this gentleman who looks down at his phone and realizes the battery is low, so he turns around like this in the car and digs around in his backpack, pulls out his laptop, puts it on the seat, goes in the back again, digs around, pulls out the charging cable for his phone, futzes around, puts it into the laptop, puts it on the phone. Sure enough, the phone is charging. All the time he's been doing 65 miles per hour down the freeway. Right? Unbelievable. So we thought about this and we said, it's kind of obvious, right? The better the technology gets, the less reliable the driver is going to get. So by just making the cars incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need.Let me talk about something a little technical for a moment here. So we're looking at this graph, and along the bottom is how often does the car apply the brakes when it shouldn't. You can ignore most of that axis, because if you're driving around town, and the car starts stopping randomly, you're never going to buy that car. And the vertical axis is how often the car is going to apply the brakes when it's supposed to to help you avoid an accident. Now, if we look at the bottom left corner here, this is your classic car. It doesn't apply the brakes for you, it doesn't do anything goofy, but it also doesn't get you out of an accident. Now, if we want to bring a driver assistance system into a car, say with collision mitigation braking, we're going to put some package of technology on there, and that's this curve, and it's going to have some operating properties, but it's never going to avoid all of the accidents, because it doesn't have that capability. But we'll pick some place along the curve here, and maybe it avoids half of accidents that the human driver misses, and that's amazing, right? We just reduced accidents on our roads by a factor of two. There are now 17,000 less people dying every year in America.But if we want a self-driving car, we need a technology curve that looks like this. We're going to have to put more sensors in the vehicle, and we'll pick some operating point up here where it basically never gets into a crash. They'll happen, but very low frequency. Now you and I could look at this and we could argue about whether it's incremental, and I could say something like ""80-20 rule,"" and it's really hard to move up to that new curve. But let's look at it from a different direction for a moment. So let's look at how often the technology has to do the right thing. And so this green dot up here is a driver assistance system. It turns out that human drivers make mistakes that lead to traffic accidents about once every 100,000 miles in America. In contrast, a self-driving system is probably making decisions about 10 times per second, so order of magnitude, that's about 1,000 times per mile. So if you compare the distance between these two, it's about 10 to the eighth, right? Eight orders of magnitude. That's like comparing how fast I run to the speed of light. It doesn't matter how hard I train, I'm never actually going to get there. So there's a pretty big gap there.And then finally, there's how the system can handle uncertainty. So this pedestrian here might be stepping into the road, might not be. I can't tell, nor can any of our algorithms, but in the case of a driver assistance system, that means it can't take action, because again, if it presses the brakes unexpectedly, that's completely unacceptable. Whereas a self-driving system can look at that pedestrian and say, I don't know what they're about to do, slow down, take a better look, and then react appropriately after that.So it can be much safer than a driver assistance system can ever be. So that's enough about the differences between the two. Let's spend some time talking about how the car sees the world.So this is our vehicle. It starts by understanding where it is in the world, by taking a map and its sensor data and aligning the two, and then we layer on top of that what it sees in the moment. So here, all the purple boxes you can see are other vehicles on the road, and the red thing on the side over there is a cyclist, and up in the distance, if you look really closely, you can see some cones. Then we know where the car is in the moment, but we have to do better than that: we have to predict what's going to happen. So here the pickup truck in top right is about to make a left lane change because the road in front of it is closed, so it needs to get out of the way. Knowing that one pickup truck is great, but we really need to know what everybody's thinking, so it becomes quite a complicated problem. And then given that, we can figure out how the car should respond in the moment, so what trajectory it should follow, how quickly it should slow down or speed up. And then that all turns into just following a path: turning the steering wheel left or right, pressing the brake or gas. It's really just two numbers at the end of the day. So how hard can it really be?Back when we started in 2009, this is what our system looked like. So you can see our car in the middle and the other boxes on the road, driving down the highway. The car needs to understand where it is and roughly where the other vehicles are. It's really a geometric understanding of the world. Once we started driving on neighborhood and city streets, the problem becomes a whole new level of difficulty. You see pedestrians crossing in front of us, cars crossing in front of us, going every which way, the traffic lights, crosswalks. It's an incredibly complicated problem by comparison. And then once you have that problem solved, the vehicle has to be able to deal with construction. So here are the cones on the left forcing it to drive to the right, but not just construction in isolation, of course. It has to deal with other people moving through that construction zone as well. And of course, if anyone's breaking the rules, the police are there and the car has to understand that that flashing light on the top of the car means that it's not just a car, it's actually a police officer. Similarly, the orange box on the side here, it's a school bus, and we have to treat that differently as well.When we're out on the road, other people have expectations: So, when a cyclist puts up their arm, it means they're expecting the car to yield to them and make room for them to make a lane change. And when a police officer stood in the road, our vehicle should understand that this means stop, and when they signal to go, we should continue.Now, the way we accomplish this is by sharing data between the vehicles. The first, most crude model of this is when one vehicle sees a construction zone, having another know about it so it can be in the correct lane to avoid some of the difficulty. But we actually have a much deeper understanding of this. We could take all of the data that the cars have seen over time, the hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles that have been out there and understand what they look like and use that to infer what other vehicles should look like and other pedestrians should look like. And then, even more importantly, we could take from that a model of how we expect them to move through the world. So here the yellow box is a pedestrian crossing in front of us. Here the blue box is a cyclist and we anticipate that they're going to nudge out and around the car to the right. Here there's a cyclist coming down the road and we know they're going to continue to drive down the shape of the road. Here somebody makes a right turn, and in a moment here, somebody's going to make a U-turn in front of us, and we can anticipate that behavior and respond safely.Now, that's all well and good for things that we've seen, but of course, you encounter lots of things that you haven't seen in the world before. And so just a couple of months ago, our vehicles were driving through Mountain View, and this is what we encountered. This is a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck in circles on the road. (Laughter) Now it turns out, there is nowhere in the DMV handbook that tells you how to deal with that, but our vehicles were able to encounter that, slow down, and drive safely. Now, we don't have to deal with just ducks. Watch this bird fly across in front of us. The car reacts to that. Here we're dealing with a cyclist that you would never expect to see anywhere other than Mountain View. And of course, we have to deal with drivers, even the very small ones. Watch to the right as someone jumps out of this truck at us. And now, watch the left as the car with the green box decides he needs to make a right turn at the last possible moment. Here, as we make a lane change, the car to our left decides it wants to as well. And here, we watch a car blow through a red light and yield to it. And similarly, here, a cyclist blowing through that light as well. And of course, the vehicle responds safely. And of course, we have people who do I don't know what sometimes on the road, like this guy pulling out between two self-driving cars. You have to ask, ""What are you thinking?"" (Laughter)Now, I just fire-hosed you with a lot of stuff there, so I'm going to break one of these down pretty quickly. So what we're looking at is the scene with the cyclist again, and you might notice in the bottom, we can't actually see the cyclist yet, but the car can: it's that little blue box up there, and that comes from the laser data. And that's not actually really easy to understand, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn that laser data and look at it, and if you're really good at looking at laser data, you can see a few dots on the curve there, right there, and that blue box is that cyclist. Now as our light is red, the cyclist's light has turned yellow already, and if you squint, you can see that in the imagery. But the cyclist, we see, is going to proceed through the intersection. Our light has now turned green, his is solidly red, and we now anticipate that this bike is going to come all the way across. Unfortunately the other drivers next to us were not paying as much attention. They started to pull forward, and fortunately for everyone, this cyclists reacts, avoids, and makes it through the intersection. And off we go.Now, as you can see, we've made some pretty exciting progress, and at this point we're pretty convinced this technology is going to come to market. We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience that our vehicles have. We are looking forward to having this technology on the road, and we think the right path is to go through the self-driving rather than driver assistance approach because the urgency is so large. In the time I have given this talk today, 34 people have died on America's roads.How soon can we bring it out? Well, it's hard to say because it's a really complicated problem, but these are my two boys. My oldest son is 11, and that means in four and a half years, he's going to be able to get his driver's license. My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn't happen.Thank you.(Laughter) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Chris, I've got a question for you.Chris Urmson: Sure.CA: So certainly, the mind of your cars is pretty mind-boggling. On this debate between driver-assisted and fully driverless — I mean, there's a real debate going on out there right now. So some of the companies, for example, Tesla, are going the driver-assisted route. What you're saying is that that's kind of going to be a dead end because you can't just keep improving that route and get to fully driverless at some point, and then a driver is going to say, ""This feels safe,"" and climb into the back, and something ugly will happen.CU: Right. No, that's exactly right, and it's not to say that the driver assistance systems aren't going to be incredibly valuable. They can save a lot of lives in the interim, but to see the transformative opportunity to help someone like Steve get around, to really get to the end case in safety, to have the opportunity to change our cities and move parking out and get rid of these urban craters we call parking lots, it's the only way to go.CA: We will be tracking your progress with huge interest. Thanks so much, Chris. CU: Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road
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"When you're a child, anything and everything is possible. The challenge, so often, is hanging on to that as we grow up. And as a four-year-old, I had the opportunity to sail for the first time.I will never forget the excitement as we closed the coast. I will never forget the feeling of adventure as I climbed on board the boat and stared into her tiny cabin for the first time. But the most amazing feeling was the feeling of freedom, the feeling that I felt when we hoisted her sails. As a four-year-old child, it was the greatest sense of freedom that I could ever imagine. I made my mind up there and then that one day, somehow, I was going to sail around the world.So I did what I could in my life to get closer to that dream. Age 10, it was saving my school dinner money change. Every single day for eight years, I had mashed potato and baked beans, which cost 4p each, and gravy was free. Every day I would pile up the change on the top of my money box, and when that pile reached a pound, I would drop it in and cross off one of the 100 squares I'd drawn on a piece of paper. Finally, I bought a tiny dinghy. I spent hours sitting on it in the garden dreaming of my goal. I read every book I could on sailing, and then eventually, having been told by my school I wasn't clever enough to be a vet, left school age 17 to begin my apprenticeship in sailing.So imagine how it felt just four years later to be sitting in a boardroom in front of someone who I knew could make that dream come true. I felt like my life depended on that moment, and incredibly, he said yes. And I could barely contain my excitement as I sat in that first design meeting designing a boat on which I was going to sail solo nonstop around the world. From that first meeting to the finish line of the race, it was everything I'd ever imagined. Just like in my dreams, there were amazing parts and tough parts. We missed an iceberg by 20 feet. Nine times, I climbed to the top of her 90-foot mast. We were blown on our side in the Southern Ocean. But the sunsets, the wildlife, and the remoteness were absolutely breathtaking. After three months at sea, age just 24, I finished in second position. I'd loved it, so much so that within six months I decided to go around the world again, but this time not in a race: to try to be the fastest person ever to sail solo nonstop around the world. Now for this, I needed a different craft: bigger, wider, faster, more powerful. Just to give that boat some scale, I could climb inside her mast all the way to the top. Seventy-five foot long, 60 foot wide. I affectionately called her Moby. She was a multihull. When we built her, no one had ever made it solo nonstop around the world in one, though many had tried, but whilst we built her, a Frenchman took a boat 25 percent bigger than her and not only did he make it, but he took the record from 93 days right down to 72. The bar was now much, much higher.And these boats were exciting to sail. This was a training sail off the French coast. This I know well because I was one of the five crew members on board. Five seconds is all it took from everything being fine to our world going black as the windows were thrust underwater, and that five seconds goes quickly. Just see how far below those guys the sea is. Imagine that alone in the Southern Ocean plunged into icy water, thousands of miles away from land.It was Christmas Day. I was forging into the Southern Ocean underneath Australia. The conditions were horrendous. I was approaching a part in the ocean which was 2,000 miles away from the nearest town. The nearest land was Antarctica, and the nearest people would be those manning the European Space Station above me. (Laughter) You really are in the middle of nowhere. If you need help, and you're still alive, it takes four days for a ship to get to you and then four days for that ship to get you back to port. No helicopter can reach you out there, and no plane can land. We are forging ahead of a huge storm. Within it, there was 80 knots of wind, which was far too much wind for the boat and I to cope with. The waves were already 40 to 50 feet high, and the spray from the breaking crests was blown horizontally like snow in a blizzard. If we didn't sail fast enough, we'd be engulfed by that storm, and either capsized or smashed to pieces. We were quite literally hanging on for our lives and doing so on a knife edge.The speed I so desperately needed brought with it danger. We all know what it's like driving a car 20 miles an hour, 30, 40. It's not too stressful. We can concentrate. We can turn on the radio. Take that 50, 60, 70, accelerate through to 80, 90, 100 miles an hour. Now you have white knuckles and you're gripping the steering wheel. Now take that car off road at night and remove the windscreen wipers, the windscreen, the headlights and the brakes. That's what it's like in the Southern Ocean. (Laughter) (Applause) You could imagine it would be quite difficult to sleep in that situation, even as a passenger. But you're not a passenger. You're alone on a boat you can barely stand up in, and you have to make every single decision on board. I was absolutely exhausted, physically and mentally. Eight sail changes in 12 hours. The mainsail weighed three times my body weight, and after each change, I would collapse on the floor soaked with sweat with this freezing Southern Ocean air burning the back of my throat.But out there, those lowest of the lows are so often contrasted with the highest of the highs. A few days later, we came out of the back of the low. Against all odds, we'd been able to drive ahead of the record within that depression. The sky cleared, the rain stopped, and our heartbeat, the monstrous seas around us were transformed into the most beautiful moonlit mountains.It's hard to explain, but you enter a different mode when you head out there. Your boat is your entire world, and what you take with you when you leave is all you have. If I said to you all now, ""Go off into Vancouver and find everything you will need for your survival for the next three months,"" that's quite a task. That's food, fuel, clothes, even toilet roll and toothpaste. That's what we do, and when we leave we manage it down to the last drop of diesel and the last packet of food. No experience in my life could have given me a better understanding of the definition of the word ""finite."" What we have out there is all we have. There is no more.And never in my life had I ever translated that definition of finite that I'd felt on board to anything outside of sailing until I stepped off the boat at the finish line having broken that record.(Applause)Suddenly I connected the dots. Our global economy is no different. It's entirely dependent on finite materials we only have once in the history of humanity. And it was a bit like seeing something you weren't expecting under a stone and having two choices: I either put that stone to one side and learn more about it, or I put that stone back and I carry on with my dream job of sailing around the world.I chose the first. I put it to one side and I began a new journey of learning, speaking to chief executives, experts, scientists, economists to try to understand just how our global economy works. And my curiosity took me to some extraordinary places.This photo was taken in the burner of a coal-fired power station. I was fascinated by coal, fundamental to our global energy needs, but also very close to my family. My great-grandfather was a coal miner, and he spent 50 years of his life underground. This is a photo of him, and when you see that photo, you see someone from another era. No one wears trousers with a waistband quite that high in this day and age. (Laughter) But yet, that's me with my great-grandfather, and by the way, they are not his real ears. (Laughter)We were close. I remember sitting on his knee listening to his mining stories. He talked of the camaraderie underground, and the fact that the miners used to save the crusts of their sandwiches to give to the ponies they worked with underground. It was like it was yesterday. And on my journey of learning, I went to the World Coal Association website, and there in the middle of the homepage, it said, ""We have about 118 years of coal left."" And I thought to myself, well, that's well outside my lifetime, and a much greater figure than the predictions for oil. But I did the math, and I realized that my great-grandfather had been born exactly 118 years before that year, and I sat on his knee until I was 11 years old, and I realized it's nothing in time, nor in history. And it made me make a decision I never thought I would make: to leave the sport of solo sailing behind me and focus on the greatest challenge I'd ever come across: the future of our global economy.And I quickly realized it wasn't just about energy. It was also materials. In 2008, I picked up a scientific study looking at how many years we have of valuable materials to extract from the ground: copper, 61; tin, zinc, 40; silver, 29. These figures couldn't be exact, but we knew those materials were finite. We only have them once. And yet, our speed that we've used these materials has increased rapidly, exponentially. With more people in the world with more stuff, we've effectively seen 100 years of price declines in those basic commodities erased in just 10 years. And this affects all of us. It's brought huge volatility in prices, so much so that in 2011, your average European car manufacturer saw a raw material price increase of 500 million Euros, wiping away half their operating profits through something they have absolutely no control over.And the more I learned, the more I started to change my own life. I started traveling less, doing less, using less. It felt like actually doing less was what we had to do. But it sat uneasy with me. It didn't feel right. It felt like we were buying ourselves time. We were eking things out a bit longer. Even if everybody changed, it wouldn't solve the problem. It wouldn't fix the system. It was vital in the transition, but what fascinated me was, in the transition to what? What could actually work?It struck me that the system itself, the framework within which we live, is fundamentally flawed, and I realized ultimately that our operating system, the way our economy functions, the way our economy's been built, is a system in itself. At sea, I had to understand complex systems. I had to take multiple inputs, I had to process them, and I had to understand the system to win. I had to make sense of it. And as I looked at our global economy, I realized it too is that system, but it's a system that effectively can't run in the long term.And I realized we've been perfecting what's effectively a linear economy for 150 years, where we take a material out of the ground, we make something out of it, and then ultimately that product gets thrown away, and yes, we do recycle some of it, but more an attempt to get out what we can at the end, not by design. It's an economy that fundamentally can't run in the long term, and if we know that we have finite materials, why would we build an economy that would effectively use things up, that would create waste? Life itself has existed for billions of years and has continually adapted to use materials effectively. It's a complex system, but within it, there is no waste. Everything is metabolized. It's not a linear economy at all, but circular.And I felt like the child in the garden. For the first time on this new journey, I could see exactly where we were headed. If we could build an economy that would use things rather than use them up, we could build a future that really could work in the long term. I was excited. This was something to work towards. We knew exactly where we were headed. We just had to work out how to get there, and it was exactly with this in mind that we created the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in September 2010.Many schools of thought fed our thinking and pointed to this model: industrial symbiosis, performance economy, sharing economy, biomimicry, and of course, cradle-to-cradle design. Materials would be defined as either technical or biological, waste would be designed out entirely, and we would have a system that could function absolutely in the long term.So what could this economy look like? Maybe we wouldn't buy light fittings, but we'd pay for the service of light, and the manufacturers would recover the materials and change the light fittings when we had more efficient products. What if packaging was so nontoxic it could dissolve in water and we could ultimately drink it? It would never become waste. What if engines were re-manufacturable, and we could recover the component materials and significantly reduce energy demand. What if we could recover components from circuit boards, reutilize them, and then fundamentally recover the materials within them through a second stage? What if we could collect food waste, human waste? What if we could turn that into fertilizer, heat, energy, ultimately reconnecting nutrients systems and rebuilding natural capital? And cars — what we want is to move around. We don't need to own the materials within them. Could cars become a service and provide us with mobility in the future? All of this sounds amazing, but these aren't just ideas, they're real today, and these lie at the forefront of the circular economy. What lies before us is to expand them and scale them up.So how would you shift from linear to circular? Well, the team and I at the foundation thought you might want to work with the top universities in the world, with leading businesses within the world, with the biggest convening platforms in the world, and with governments. We thought you might want to work with the best analysts and ask them the question, ""Can the circular economy decouple growth from resource constraints? Is the circular economy able to rebuild natural capital? Could the circular economy replace current chemical fertilizer use?"" Yes was the answer to the decoupling, but also yes, we could replace current fertilizer use by a staggering 2.7 times. But what inspired me most about the circular economy was its ability to inspire young people. When young people see the economy through a circular lens, they see brand new opportunities on exactly the same horizon. They can use their creativity and knowledge to rebuild the entire system, and it's there for the taking right now, and the faster we do this, the better.So could we achieve this in their lifetimes? Is it actually possible? I believe yes. When you look at the lifetime of my great-grandfather, anything's possible. When he was born, there were only 25 cars in the world; they had only just been invented. When he was 14, we flew for the first time in history. Now there are 100,000 charter flights every single day. When he was 45, we built the first computer. Many said it wouldn't catch on, but it did, and just 20 years later we turned it into a microchip of which there will be thousands in this room here today. Ten years before he died, we built the first mobile phone. It wasn't that mobile, to be fair, but now it really is, and as my great-grandfather left this Earth, the Internet arrived. Now we can do anything, but more importantly, now we have a plan.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dame_ellen_macarthur_the_surprising_thing_i_learned_sailing_solo_around_the_world
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"As a matter of fact, I was trying to think about my career since I left the White House, and the best example I have is a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago. This little boy is looking up at his father, and he says, ""Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a former president.""(Laughter)Well, I have had a great blessing as a former president, because I have had an access that very few other people in the world have ever had to get to know so many people around this whole universe. Not only am I familiar with the 50 states in the United States, but also my wife and I have visited more than 145 countries in the world, and the Carter Center has had full-time programs in 80 nations on Earth. And a lot of times, when we go into a country, we not only the meet the king or the president, but we also meet the villagers who live in the most remote areas of Africa.So our overall commitment at the Carter Center is to promote human rights, and knowing the world as I do, I can tell you without any equivocation that the number one abuse of human rights on Earth is, strangely, not addressed quite often, is the abuse of women and girls.(Applause)There are a couple of reasons for this that I'll mention to begin with. First of all is the misinterpretation of religious scriptures, holy scriptures, in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, Quran and so forth, and these have been misinterpreted by men who are now in the ascendant positions in the synagogues and the churches and in the mosques. And they interpret these rules to make sure that women are ordinarily relegated to a secondary position compared to men in the eyes of God.This is a very serious problem. It's ordinarily not addressed. A number of years ago, in the year 2000, I had been a Baptist, a Southern Baptist for 70 years — I tell you, I still teach Sunday school every Sunday; I'll be teaching this Sunday as well — but the Southern Baptist Convention in the year 2000 decided that women should play a secondary position, a subservient position to men. So they issued an edict, in effect, that prevents women from being priests, pastors, deacons in the church, or chaplains in the military, and if a woman teaches a classroom in a Southern Baptist seminary, they cannot teach if a boy is in the room, because you can find verses in the Bible, there's over 30,000 verses in the Bible, that say that a woman shouldn't teach a man, and so forth. But the basic thing is the scriptures are misinterpreted to keep men in an ascendant position. That is an all-pervasive problem, because men can exert that power and if an abusive husband or an employer, for instance, wants to cheat women, they can say that if women are not equal in the eyes of God, why should I treat them as equals myself? Why should I pay them equal pay for doing the same kind of work?The other very serious blight that causes this problem is the excessive resort to violence, and that is increasing tremendously around the world. In the United States of America, for instance, we have had an enormous increase in abuse of poor people, mostly black people and minorities, by putting them in prison. When I was in office as governor of Georgia, one out of every 1,000 Americans were in prison. Nowadays, 7.3 people per 1,000 are in prison. That's a sevenfold increase. And since I left the White House, there's been an 800 percent increase in the number of women who are black who are in prison. We also have [one of the only countries] on Earth that still has the death penalty that is a developed country. And we rank right alongside the countries that are most abusive in all elements of human rights in encouraging the death penalty. We're in California now, and I figured out the other day that California has spent four billion dollars in convicting 13 people for the death penalty. If you add that up, that's 307 million dollars it costs California to send a person to be executed. Nebraska this week just passed a law abolishing the death penalty, because it costs so much. (Applause) So the resort to violence and abuse of poor people and helpless people is another cause of the increase in abuse of women.Let me just go down a very few abuses of women that concern me most, and I'll be fairly brief, because I have a limited amount of time, as you know.One is genital mutilation. Genital mutilation is horrible and not known by American women, but in some countries, many countries, when a child is born that's a girl, very soon in her life, her genitals are completely cut away by a so-called cutter who has a razor blade and, in a non-sterilized way, they remove the exterior parts of a woman's genitalia. And sometimes, in more extreme cases but not very rare cases, they sew the orifice up so the girl can just urinate or menstruate. And then later, when she gets married, the same cutter goes in and opens the orifice up so she can have sex. This is not a rare thing, although it's against the law in most countries. In Egypt, for instance, 91 percent of all the females that live in Egypt today have been sexually mutilated in that way. In some countries, it's more than 98 percent of the women are cut that way before they reach maturity. This is a horrible affliction on all women that live in those countries.Another very serious thing is honor killings, where a family with misinterpretation, again, of a holy scripture — there's nothing in the Quran that mandates this — will execute a girl in their family if she is raped or if she marries a man that her father does not approve, or sometimes even if she wears inappropriate clothing. And this is done by members of her own family, so the family becomes murderers when the girl brings so-called disgrace to the family. An analysis was done in Egypt not so long ago by the United Nations and it showed that 75 percent of these murders of a girl are perpetrated by the father, the uncle or the brother, but 25 percent of the murders are conducted by women.Another problem that we have in the world that relates to women particularly is slavery, or human trafficking it's called nowadays. There were about 12.5 million people sold from Africa into slavery in the New World back in the 19th century and the 18th century. There are 30 million people now living in slavery. The United States Department of State now has a mandate from Congress to give a report every year, and the State Department reports that 800,000 people are sold across international borders every year into slavery, and that 80 percent of those sold are women, into sexual slavery. In the United States right this moment, 60,000 people are living in human bondage, or slavery. Atlanta, Georgia, where the Carter Center is located and where I teach at Emory University, they have between 200 and 300 women, people sold into slavery every month. It's the number one place in the nation because of that. Atlanta has the busiest airport in the world, and they also have a lot of passengers that come from the Southern Hemisphere. If a brothel owner wants to buy a girl that has brown or black skin, they can do it for 1,000 dollars. A white-skinned girl brings several times more than that, and the average brothel owner in Atlanta and in the United States now can earn about $35,000 per slave. The sex trade in Atlanta, Georgia, exceeds the total drug trade in Atlanta, Georgia. So this is another very serious problem, and the basic problem is prostitution, because there's not a whorehouse in America that's not known by the local officials, the local policemen, or the chief of police or the mayor and so forth.And this leads to one of the worst problems, and that is that women are bought increasingly and put into sexual slavery in all countries in the world.Sweden has got a good approach to it. About 15 to 20 years ago, Sweden decided to change the law, and women are no longer prosecuted if they are in sexual slavery, but the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers are prosecuted, and — (Applause) — prostitution has gone down. In the United States, we take just the opposite position. For every male arrested for illegal sex trade, 25 women are arrested in the United States of America. Canada, Ireland, I've already said Sweden, France, and other countries are moving now towards this so-called Swedish model. That's another thing that can be done.We have two great institutions in this country that all of us admire: our military and our great university system. In the military, they are now analyzing how many sexual assaults take place. The last report I got, there were 26,000 sexual assaults that took place in the military — 26,000. Only 3,000, not much more than 1 percent, are actually prosecuted, and the reason is that the commanding officer of any organization — a ship like my submarine, or a battalion in the Army or a company in the Marines — the commanding officer has the right under law to decide whether to prosecute a rapist or not, and of course, the last thing they want is for anybody to know that under their command, sexual assaults are taking place, so they do not do it. That law needs to be changed.About one out of four girls who enter American universities will be sexually assaulted before she graduates, and this is now getting a lot of publicity, partially because of my book, but other things, and so 89 universities in America are now condemned by the Department of Education under Title IX because the officials of the universities are not taking care of the women to protect them from sexual assault. The Department of Justice says that more than half of the rapes on a college campus take place by serial rapists, because outside of the university system, if they rape somebody, they'll be prosecuted, but when they get on a university campus, they can rape with impunity. They're not prosecuted. Those are the kinds of things that go on in our society.Another thing that's very serious about the abuse of women and girls is the lack of equal pay for equal work, as you know. (Applause) And this is sometimes misinterpreted, but for full-time employment, a woman in the United States now gets 23 percent less than a man. When I became president, the difference was 39 percent. So we've made some progress, partially because I was president and so forth — (Applause) (Laughter) — but in the last 15 years, there's been no progress made, so it's been just about 23 or 24 percent difference for the last 15 years. These are the kind of things that go on. If you take the Fortune 500 companies, 23 of them have women CEOs, out of 500, and those CEOs, I need not tell you, make less on an average than the other CEOs. Well, that's what goes on in our country.Another problem with the United States is we are the most warlike nation on Earth. We have been to war with about 25 different countries since the Second World War. Sometimes, we've had soldiers on the ground fighting. The other times, we've been flying overhead dropping bombs on people. Other times, of course, now, we have drones that attack people and so forth. We've been at war with 25 different countries or more since the Second World War. There was four years, I won't say which ones, where we didn't — (Applause) — we didn't drop a bomb, we didn't launch a missile, we didn't fire a bullet. But anyway, those kinds of things, the resort to violence and the misinterpretation of the holy scriptures are what causes, are the basic causes, of abuse of women and girls.There's one more basic cause that I need not mention, and that is that in general, men don't give a damn. (Applause) That's true. The average man that might say, I'm against the abuse of women and girls quietly accepts the privileged position that we occupy, and this is very similar to what I knew when I was a child, when separate but equal had existed. Racial discrimination, legally, had existed for 100 years, from 1865 at the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War, all the way up to the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson got the bills passed for equal rights. But during that time, there were many white people that didn't think that racial discrimination was okay, but they stayed quiet, because they enjoyed the privileges of better jobs, unique access to jury duty, better schools, and everything else, and that's the same thing that exists today, because the average man really doesn't care. Even though they say, ""I'm against discrimination against girls and women,"" they enjoy a privileged position. And it's very difficult to get the majority of men who control the university system, the majority of men that control the military system, the majority of men that control the governments of the world, and the majority of men that control the great religions.So what is the basic thing that we need to do today? I would say the best thing that we could do today is for the women in the powerful nations like this one, and where you come from, Europe and so forth, who have influence and who have freedom to speak and to act, need to take the responsibility on yourselves to be more forceful in demanding an end to racial discrimination against girls and women all over the world. The average woman in Egypt doesn't have much to say about her daughters getting genitally mutilated and so forth. I didn't even go down to detail about that. But I hope that out of this conference, that every woman here  will get your husbands to realize that these abuses on the college campuses and the military and so forth and in the future job market, need to protect your daughters and your granddaughters.I have 12 grandchildren, four children, and 10 great-grandchildren, and I think often about them and about the plight that they will face in America, not only if they lived in Egypt or a foreign country, in having equal rights, and I hope that all of you will join me in being a champion for women and girls around the world and protect their human rights. Thank you very much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_carter_why_i_believe_the_mistreatment_of_women_is_the_number_one_human_rights_abuse
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"A few years ago, my mom developed rheumatoid arthritis. Her wrists, knees and toes swelled up, causing crippling, chronic pain. She had to file for disability. She stopped attending our local mosque. Some mornings it was too painful for her to brush her teeth. I wanted to help. But I didn't know how. I'm not a doctor.So, what I am is a historian of medicine. So I started to research the history of chronic pain. Turns out, UCLA has an entire history of pain collection in their archives. And I found a story — a fantastic story — of a man who saved — rescued — millions of people from pain; people like my mom. Yet, I had never heard of him. There were no biographies of him, no Hollywood movies. His name was John J. Bonica. But when our story begins, he was better known as Johnny ""Bull"" Walker.It was a summer day in 1941. The circus had just arrived in the tiny town of Brookfield, New York. Spectators flocked to see the wire-walkers, the tramp clowns — if they were lucky, the human cannonball. They also came to see the strongman, Johnny ""Bull"" Walker, a brawny bully who'd pin you for a dollar. You know, on that particular day, a voice rang out over the circus P.A. system. They needed a doctor urgently, in the live animal tent. Something had gone wrong with the lion tamer. The climax of his act had gone wrong, and his head was stuck inside the lion's mouth. He was running out of air; the crowd watched in horror as he struggled and then passed out. When the lion finally did relax its jaws, the lion tamer just slumped to the ground, motionless. When he came to a few minutes later, he saw a familiar figure hunched over him. It was Bull Walker. The strongman had given the lion tamer mouth-to-mouth, and saved his life.Now, the strongman hadn't told anyone, but he was actually a third-year medical student. He toured with the circus during summers to pay tuition, but kept it a secret to protect his persona. He was supposed to be a brute, a villain — not a nerdy do-gooder. His medical colleagues didn't know his secret, either. As he put it, ""If you were an athlete, you were a dumb dodo."" So he didn't tell them about the circus, or about how he wrestled professionally on evenings and weekends. He used a pseudonym like Bull Walker, or later, the Masked Marvel. He even kept it a secret that same year, when he was crowned the Light Heavyweight Champion of the world.Over the years, John J. Bonica lived these parallel lives. He was a wrestler; he was a doctor. He was a heel; he was a hero. He inflicted pain, and he treated it. And he didn’t know it at the time, but over the next five decades, he'd draw on these dueling identities to forge a whole new way to think about pain. It'd change modern medicine so much so, that decades later, Time magazine would call him pain relief's founding father. But that all happened later.In 1942, Bonica graduated medical school and married Emma, his sweetheart, whom he had met at one of his matches years before. He still wrestled in secret — he had to. His internship at New York's St. Vincent's Hospital paid nothing. With his championship belt, he wrestled in big-ticket venues, like Madison Square Garden, against big-time opponents, like Everett ""The Blonde Bear"" Marshall, or three-time world champion, Angelo Savoldi.The matches took a toll on his body; he tore hip joints, fractured ribs. One night, The Terrible Turk's big toe scratched a scar like Capone's down the side of his face. The next morning at work, he had to wear a surgical mask to hide it. Twice Bonica showed up to the O.R. with one eye so bruised, he couldn't see out of it. But worst of all were his mangled cauliflower ears. He said they felt like two baseballs on the sides of his head. Pain just kept accumulating in his life.Next, he watched his wife go into labor at his hospital. She heaved and pushed, clearly in anguish. Her obstetrician called out to the intern on duty to give her a few drops of ether to ease her pain. But the intern was a young guy, just three weeks on the job — he was jittery, and in applying the ether, irritated Emma's throat. She vomited and choked, and started to turn blue. Bonica, who was watching all this, pushed the intern out of the way, cleared her airway, and saved his wife and his unborn daughter. At that moment, he decided to devote his life to anesthesiology. Later, he'd even go on to help develop the epidural, for delivering mothers. But before he could focus on obstetrics, Bonica had to report for basic training.Right around D-Day, Bonica showed up to Madigan Army Medical Center, near Tacoma. At 7,700 beds, it was one of the largest army hospitals in America. Bonica was in charge of all pain control there. He was only 27. Treating so many patients, Bonica started noticing cases that contradicted everything he had learned. Pain was supposed to be a kind of alarm bell — in a good way — a body's way of signaling an injury, like a broken arm. But in some cases, like after a patient had a leg amputated, that patient might still complain of pain in that nonexistent leg. But if the injury had been treated, why would the alarm bell keep ringing? There were other cases in which there was no evidence of an injury whatsoever, and yet, still the patient hurt.Bonica tracked down all the specialists at his hospital — surgeons, neurologists, psychiatrists, others. And he tried to get their opinions on his patients. It took too long, so he started organizing group meetings over lunch. It would be like a tag team of specialists going up against the patient's pain. No one had ever focused on pain this way before.After that, he hit the books. He read every medical textbook he could get his hands on, carefully noting every mention of the word ""pain."" Out of the 14,000 pages he read, the word ""pain"" was on 17 and a half of them. Seventeen and a half. For the most basic, most common, most frustrating part of being a patient. Bonica was shocked — I'm quoting him, he said, ""What the hell kind of conclusion can you come to there? The most important thing from the patient's perspective, they don't talk about.""So over the next eight years, Bonica would talk about it. He'd write about it; he'd write those missing pages. He wrote what would later be known as the Bible of Pain. In it he proposed new strategies, new treatments using nerve-block injections. He proposed a new institution, the Pain Clinic, based on those lunchtime meetings. But the most important thing about his book was that it was kind of an emotional alarm bell for medicine. A desperate plea to doctors to take pain seriously in patients' lives. He recast the very purpose of medicine. The goal wasn't to make patients better; it was to make patients feel better. He pushed his pain agenda for decades, before it finally took hold in the mid-'70s. Hundreds of pain clinics sprung up all over the world.But as they did — a tragic twist. Bonica's years of wrestling caught up to him. He had been out of the ring for over 20 years, but those 1,500 professional bouts had left a mark on his body. Still in his mid-50s, he suffered severe osteoarthritis. Over the next 20 years he'd have 22 surgeries, including four spine operations, and hip replacement after hip replacement. He could barely raise his arm, turn his neck. He needed aluminum crutches to walk. His friends and former students became his doctors. One recalled that he probably had more nerve-block injections than anyone else on the planet. Already a workaholic, he worked even more — 15- to 18-hour days. Healing others became more than just his job, it was his own most effective form of relief. ""If I wasn't as busy as I am,"" he told a reporter at the time, ""I would be a completely disabled guy.""On a business trip to Florida in the early 1980s, Bonica got a former student to drive him to the Hyde Park area in Tampa. They drove past palm trees and pulled up to an old mansion, with giant silver howitzer cannons hidden in the garage. The house belonged to the Zacchini family, who were something like American circus royalty. Decades earlier, Bonica had watched them, clad in silver jumpsuits and goggles, doing the act they pioneered — the Human Cannonball. But now they were like him: retired. That generation is all dead now, including Bonica, so there's no way to know exactly what they said that day. But still, I love imagining it. The strongman and the human cannonballs reunited, showing off old scars, and new ones. Maybe Bonica gave them medical advice. Maybe he told them what he later said in an oral history, which is that his time in the circus and wrestling deeply molded his life.Bonica saw pain close up. He felt it. He lived it. And it made it impossible for him to ignore in others. Out of that empathy, he spun a whole new field, played a major role in getting medicine to acknowledge pain in and of itself.In that same oral history, Bonica claimed that pain is the most complex human experience. That it involves your past life, your current life, your interactions, your family. That was definitely true for Bonica.But it was also true for my mom. It's easy for doctors to see my mom as a kind of professional patient, a woman who just spends her days in waiting rooms. Sometimes I get stuck seeing her that same way. But as I saw Bonica's pain — a testament to his fully lived life — I started to remember all the things that my mom's pain holds. Before they got swollen and arthritic, my mom's fingers clacked away in the hospital H.R. department where she worked. They folded samosas for our entire mosque. When I was a kid, they cut my hair, wiped my nose, tied my shoes.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/latif_nasser_the_amazing_story_of_the_man_who_gave_us_modern_pain_relief
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"Every group of female friends has the funny one, the one you go to when you need a good cry, the one who tells you to suck it up when you've had a hard day. And this group was no different. Except that this was a community of groundbreaking women who came together — first to become teammates, then friends, and then family — in the least likely of places: on the Special Operations battlefield. This was a group of women whose friendship and valor was cemented not only by what they had seen and done at the tip of the spear, but by the fact that they were there at a time when women — officially, at least — remained banned from ground combat, and America had no idea they existed.This story begins with Special Operations leaders, some of the most tested men in the United States military, saying, ""We need women to help us wage this war."" ""America would never kill its way to the end of its wars,"" it argued. ""Needed more knowledge and more understanding.""And as everyone knows, if you want to understand what's happening in a community and in a home, you talk to women, whether you're talking about Southern Afghanistan, or Southern California. But in this case, men could not talk to women, because in a conservative and traditional society like Afghanistan, that would cause grave offense. So you needed women soldiers out there. That meant, at this time in the war, that the women who would be recruited to serve alongside Army Rangers and Navy SEALs, would be seeing the kind of combat experienced by less than five percent of the entire United States military. Less than five percent.So the call went out. ""Female soldiers: Become a part of history. Join Special Operations on the battlefield in Afghanistan."" This is in 2011. And from Alabama to Alaska, a group of women who had always wanted to do something that mattered alongside the best of the best, and to make a difference for their country, answered that call to serve. And for them it was not about politics, it was about serving with purpose.And so, the women who came to North Carolina to compete for a spot on these teams which would put women on the Special Operations front lines, landed and found very quickly a community, the likes of which they had never seen. Full of women who were as fierce and as fit as they were, and as driven to make a difference. They didn't have to apologize for who they were, and in fact, they could celebrate it. And what they found when they were there was that all of a sudden, there were lots of people like them. As one of them said, ""It was like you looked around and realized there was more than one giraffe at the zoo.""Among this team of standouts was Cassie, a young woman who managed to be an ROTC cadet, a sorority sister and a Women's Studies minor, all in one person. Tristan, a West Point track star, who always ran and road marched with no socks, and had shoes whose smell proved it. (Laughter) Amber, a Heidi look-alike, who had always wanted to be in the infantry, and when she found out that women couldn't be, she decided to become an intel officer. She served in Bosnia, and later helped the FBI to bust drug gangs in Pennsylvania. And then there was Kate, who played high school football all four years, and actually wanted to drop out after the first, to go into the glee club, but when boys told her that girls couldn't play football, she decided to stay for all the little girls who would come after her.For them, biology had shaped part of their destiny, and put, as Cassie once said, ""everything noble out of reach for girls."" And yet, here was a chance to serve with the best of the best on a mission that mattered to their country, not despite the fact that they were female, but because of it.This team of women, in many ways, was like women everywhere. They wore makeup, and in fact, they would bond in the ladies' room over eyeliner and eye pencil. They also wore body armor. They would put 50 pounds of weight on their backs, and board the helicopter for an operation, and they would come back and watch a movie called ""Bridesmaids."" (Laughter) They even wore a thing called Spanx, because, as they found very quickly, the uniforms made for men were big where they should be small, and small where they should be big. So Lane, an Iraq War veteran — you see her here on my left — decided she was going to go on Amazon and order a pair of Spanx to her base, so that her pants would fit better when she went out on mission each night.These women would get together over video conference from all around Afghanistan from their various bases, and they would talk about what it was like to be one of the only women doing what they were doing. They would swap jokes, they would talk about what was working, what wasn't, what they had learned to do well, what they needed to do better. And they would talk about some of the lighter moments of being women out on the Special Operations front lines, including the Shewee, which was a tool that let you pee like a guy, although it's said to have had only a 40 percent accuracy rate out there. (Laughter)These women lived in the ""and."" They proved you could be fierce and you could be feminine. You could wear mascara and body armor. You could love CrossFit, and really like cross-stitch. You could love to climb out of helicopters and you could also love to bake cookies. Women live in the and every single day, and these women brought that to this mission as well. On this life and death battlefield they never forgot that being female may have brought them to the front lines, but being a soldier is what would prove themselves there.There was the night Amber went out on mission, and in talking to the women of the house, realized that there was a barricaded shooter lying in wait for the Afghan and American forces who were waiting to enter the home. Another night it was Tristan who found out that there were pieces that make up explosives all around the house in which they were standing, and that in fact, explosives lay all the way between there and where they were about to head that night. There was the night another one of their teammates proved herself to a decidedly skeptical team of SEALs, when she found the intel item they were looking for wrapped up in a baby's wet diaper. And there was the night that Isabel, another one of their teammates, found the things that they were looking for, and received an Impact Award from the Rangers who said that without her, the things and the people they were looking for that night would never have been found.That night and so many others, they went out to prove themselves, not only for one another, but for everybody who would come after them. And also for the men alongside whom they served. We talk a lot about how behind every great man is a good woman. And in this case, next to these women stood men who wanted to see them succeed. The Army Ranger who trained them had served 12 deployments. And when they told him that he had to go train girls, he had no idea what to expect. But at the end of eight days with these women in the summer of 2011, he told his fellow Ranger, ""We have just witnessed history. These may well be our own Tuskegee Airmen."" (Applause)At the heart of this team was the one person who everyone called ""the best of us."" She was a petite blonde dynamo, who barely reached five-foot-three. And she was this wild mix of Martha Stewart, and what we know as G.I. Jane. She was someone who loved to make dinner for her husband, her Kent State ROTC sweetheart who pushed her to be her best, and to trust herself, and to test every limit she could. She also loved to put 50 pounds of weight on her back and run for miles, and she loved to be a soldier. She was somebody who had a bread maker in her office in Kandahar, and would bake a batch of raisin bread, and then go to the gym and bust out 25 or 30 pull-ups from a dead hang. She was the person who, if you needed an extra pair of boots or a home-cooked dinner, would be on your speed dial. Because she never, ever would talk to you about how good she was, but let her character speak through action. She was famous for taking the hard right over the easy wrong. And she was also famous for walking up to a 15-foot rope, climbing it using only her arms, and then shuffling away and apologizing, because she knew she was supposed to use both her arms and her legs, as the Rangers had trained them. (Laughter)Some of our heroes return home to tell their stories. And some of them don't. And on October 22, 2011, First Lieutenant Ashley White was killed alongside two Rangers, Christopher Horns and Kristoffer Domeij. Her death threw this program built for the shadows into a very public spotlight. Because after all, the ban on women in combat was still very much in place. And at her funeral, the head of Army Special Operations came, and gave a public testimony not just to the courage of Ashley White, but to all her team of sisters. ""Make no mistake about it,"" he said, ""these women are warriors, and they have written a new chapter in what it means to be a female in the United States Army.""Ashley's mom is a teacher's aide and a school bus driver, who bakes cookies on the side. She doesn't remember much about that overwhelming set of days, in which grief — enormous grief — mixed with pride. But she does remember one moment. A stranger with a child in her hand came up to her and she said, ""Mrs. White, I brought my daughter here today, because I wanted her to know what a hero was. And I wanted her to know that heroes could be women, too.""It is time to celebrate all the unsung heroines who reach into their guts and find the heart and the grit to keep going and to test every limit. This very unlikely band of sisters bound forever in life and afterward did indeed become part of history, and they paved the way for so many who would come after them, as much as they stood on the shoulders of those who had come before. These women showed that warriors come in all shapes and sizes. And women can be heroes, too. Thank you so much. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gayle_tzemach_lemmon_meet_the_first_women_to_fight_on_the_front_lines_of_an_american_war
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"My colleagues and I are fascinated by the science of moving dots. So what are these dots? Well, it's all of us. And we're moving in our homes, in our offices, as we shop and travel throughout our cities and around the world. And wouldn't it be great if we could understand all this movement? If we could find patterns and meaning and insight in it. And luckily for us, we live in a time where we're incredibly good at capturing information about ourselves. So whether it's through sensors or videos, or apps, we can track our movement with incredibly fine detail.So it turns out one of the places where we have the best data about movement is sports. So whether it's basketball or baseball, or football or the other football, we're instrumenting our stadiums and our players to track their movements every fraction of a second. So what we're doing is turning our athletes into — you probably guessed it — moving dots.So we've got mountains of moving dots and like most raw data, it's hard to deal with and not that interesting. But there are things that, for example, basketball coaches want to know. And the problem is they can't know them because they'd have to watch every second of every game, remember it and process it. And a person can't do that, but a machine can. The problem is a machine can't see the game with the eye of a coach. At least they couldn't until now. So what have we taught the machine to see?So, we started simply. We taught it things like passes, shots and rebounds. Things that most casual fans would know. And then we moved on to things slightly more complicated. Events like post-ups, and pick-and-rolls, and isolations. And if you don't know them, that's okay. Most casual players probably do. Now, we've gotten to a point where today, the machine understands complex events like down screens and wide pins. Basically things only professionals know. So we have taught a machine to see with the eyes of a coach.So how have we been able to do this? If I asked a coach to describe something like a pick-and-roll, they would give me a description, and if I encoded that as an algorithm, it would be terrible. The pick-and-roll happens to be this dance in basketball between four players, two on offense and two on defense. And here's kind of how it goes. So there's the guy on offense without the ball the ball and he goes next to the guy guarding the guy with the ball, and he kind of stays there and they both move and stuff happens, and ta-da, it's a pick-and-roll.(Laughter)So that is also an example of a terrible algorithm. So, if the player who's the interferer — he's called the screener — goes close by, but he doesn't stop, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. Or if he does stop, but he doesn't stop close enough, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. Or, if he does go close by and he does stop but they do it under the basket, it's probably not a pick-and-roll. Or I could be wrong, they could all be pick-and-rolls. It really depends on the exact timing, the distances, the locations, and that's what makes it hard. So, luckily, with machine learning, we can go beyond our own ability to describe the things we know.So how does this work? Well, it's by example. So we go to the machine and say, ""Good morning, machine. Here are some pick-and-rolls, and here are some things that are not. Please find a way to tell the difference."" And the key to all of this is to find features that enable it to separate. So if I was going to teach it the difference between an apple and orange, I might say, ""Why don't you use color or shape?"" And the problem that we're solving is, what are those things? What are the key features that let a computer navigate the world of moving dots? So figuring out all these relationships with relative and absolute location, distance, timing, velocities — that's really the key to the science of moving dots, or as we like to call it, spatiotemporal pattern recognition, in academic vernacular. Because the first thing is, you have to make it sound hard — because it is.The key thing is, for NBA coaches, it's not that they want to know whether a pick-and-roll happened or not. It's that they want to know how it happened. And why is it so important to them? So here's a little insight. It turns out in modern basketball, this pick-and-roll is perhaps the most important play. And knowing how to run it, and knowing how to defend it, is basically a key to winning and losing most games. So it turns out that this dance has a great many variations and identifying the variations is really the thing that matters, and that's why we need this to be really, really good.So, here's an example. There are two offensive and two defensive players, getting ready to do the pick-and-roll dance. So the guy with ball can either take, or he can reject. His teammate can either roll or pop. The guy guarding the ball can either go over or under. His teammate can either show or play up to touch, or play soft and together they can either switch or blitz and I didn't know most of these things when I started and it would be lovely if everybody moved according to those arrows. It would make our lives a lot easier, but it turns out movement is very messy. People wiggle a lot and getting these variations identified with very high accuracy, both in precision and recall, is tough because that's what it takes to get a professional coach to believe in you. And despite all the difficulties with the right spatiotemporal features we have been able to do that.Coaches trust our ability of our machine to identify these variations. We're at the point where almost every single contender for an NBA championship this year is using our software, which is built on a machine that understands the moving dots of basketball. So not only that, we have given advice that has changed strategies that have helped teams win very important games, and it's very exciting because you have coaches who've been in the league for 30 years that are willing to take advice from a machine. And it's very exciting, it's much more than the pick-and-roll. Our computer started out with simple things and learned more and more complex things and now it knows so many things. Frankly, I don't understand much of what it does, and while it's not that special to be smarter than me, we were wondering, can a machine know more than a coach? Can it know more than person could know? And it turns out the answer is yes.The coaches want players to take good shots. So if I'm standing near the basket and there's nobody near me, it's a good shot. If I'm standing far away surrounded by defenders, that's generally a bad shot. But we never knew how good ""good"" was, or how bad ""bad"" was quantitatively. Until now.So what we can do, again, using spatiotemporal features, we looked at every shot. We can see: Where is the shot? What's the angle to the basket? Where are the defenders standing? What are their distances? What are their angles? For multiple defenders, we can look at how the player's moving and predict the shot type. We can look at all their velocities and we can build a model that predicts what is the likelihood that this shot would go in under these circumstances? So why is this important? We can take something that was shooting, which was one thing before, and turn it into two things: the quality of the shot and the quality of the shooter. So here's a bubble chart, because what's TED without a bubble chart?(Laughter)Those are NBA players. The size is the size of the player and the color is the position. On the x-axis, we have the shot probability. People on the left take difficult shots, on the right, they take easy shots. On the [y-axis] is their shooting ability. People who are good are at the top, bad at the bottom. So for example, if there was a player who generally made 47 percent of their shots, that's all you knew before. But today, I can tell you that player takes shots that an average NBA player would make 49 percent of the time, and they are two percent worse. And the reason that's important is that there are lots of 47s out there. And so it's really important to know if the 47 that you're considering giving 100 million dollars to is a good shooter who takes bad shots or a bad shooter who takes good shots. Machine understanding doesn't just change how we look at players, it changes how we look at the game.So there was this very exciting game a couple of years ago, in the NBA finals. Miami was down by three, there was 20 seconds left. They were about to lose the championship. A gentleman named LeBron James came up and he took a three to tie. He missed. His teammate Chris Bosh got a rebound, passed it to another teammate named Ray Allen. He sank a three. It went into overtime. They won the game. They won the championship. It was one of the most exciting games in basketball. And our ability to know the shot probability for every player at every second, and the likelihood of them getting a rebound at every second can illuminate this moment in a way that we never could before. Now unfortunately, I can't show you that video. But for you, we recreated that moment at our weekly basketball game about 3 weeks ago.(Laughter)And we recreated the tracking that led to the insights. So, here is us. This is Chinatown in Los Angeles, a park we play at every week, and that's us recreating the Ray Allen moment and all the tracking that's associated with it. So, here's the shot. I'm going to show you that moment and all the insights of that moment. The only difference is, instead of the professional players, it's us, and instead of a professional announcer, it's me. So, bear with me.Miami. Down three. Twenty seconds left. Jeff brings up the ball. Josh catches, puts up a three![Calculating shot probability][Shot quality][Rebound probability]Won't go![Rebound probability]Rebound, Noel. Back to Daria.[Shot quality]Her three-pointer — bang! Tie game with five seconds left. The crowd goes wild.(Laughter)That's roughly how it happened.(Applause)Roughly.(Applause) That moment had about a nine percent chance of happening in the NBA and we know that and a great many other things. I'm not going to tell you how many times it took us to make that happen.(Laughter)Okay, I will! It was four.(Laughter)Way to go, Daria.But the important thing about that video and the insights we have for every second of every NBA game — it's not that. It's the fact you don't have to be a professional team to track movement. You do not have to be a professional player to get insights about movement.In fact, it doesn't even have to be about sports because we're moving everywhere. We're moving in our homes, in our offices, as we shop and we travel throughout our cities and around our world. What will we know? What will we learn? Perhaps, instead of identifying pick-and-rolls, a machine can identify the moment and let me know when my daughter takes her first steps. Which could literally be happening any second now.Perhaps we can learn to better use our buildings, better plan our cities. I believe that with the development of the science of moving dots, we will move better, we will move smarter, we will move forward.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rajiv_maheswaran_the_math_behind_basketball_s_wildest_moves
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"I'll begin today by sharing a poem written by my friend from Malawi, Eileen Piri. Eileen is only 13 years old, but when we were going through the collection of poetry that we wrote, I found her poem so interesting, so motivating. So I'll read it to you. She entitled her poem ""I'll Marry When I Want."" (Laughter)""I'll marry when I want. My mother can't force me to marry. My father cannot force me to marry. My uncle, my aunt, my brother or sister, cannot force me to marry. No one in the world can force me to marry. I'll marry when I want. Even if you beat me, even if you chase me away, even if you do anything bad to me, I'll marry when I want.I'll marry when I want, but not before I am well educated, and not before I am all grown up.I'll marry when I want.""This poem might seem odd, written by a 13-year-old girl, but where I and Eileen come from, this poem, which I have just read to you, is a warrior's cry.I am from Malawi. Malawi is one of the poorest countries, very poor, where gender equality is questionable.Growing up in that country, I couldn't make my own choices in life. I couldn't even explore personal opportunities in life.I will tell you a story of two different girls, two beautiful girls. These girls grew up under the same roof. They were eating the same food. Sometimes, they would share clothes, and even shoes. But their lives ended up differently, in two different paths. The other girl is my little sister. My little sister was only 11 years old when she got pregnant. It's a hurtful thing. Not only did it hurt her, even me. I was going through a hard time as well.As it is in my culture, once you reach puberty stage, you are supposed to go to initiation camps. In these initiation camps, you are taught how to sexually please a man. There is this special day, which they call ""Very Special Day"" where a man who is hired by the community comes to the camp and sleeps with the little girls. Imagine the trauma that these young girls go through every day. Most girls end up pregnant. They even contract HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.For my little sister, she ended up being pregnant. Today, she's only 16 years old and she has three children. Her first marriage did not survive, nor did her second marriage.On the other side, there is this girl. She's amazing. (Laughter) (Applause) I call her amazing because she is. She's very fabulous. That girl is me. (Laughter) When I was 13 years old, I was told, you are grown up, you have now reached of age, you're supposed to go to the initiation camp. I was like, ""What? I'm not going to go to the initiation camps."" You know what the women said to me? ""You are a stupid girl. Stubborn. You do not respect the traditions of our society, of our community.""I said no because I knew where I was going. I knew what I wanted in life. I had a lot of dreams as a young girl. I wanted to get well educated, to find a decent job in the future. I was imagining myself as a lawyer, seated on that big chair. Those were the imaginations that were going through my mind every day. And I knew that one day, I would contribute something, a little something to my community. But every day after refusing, women would tell me, ""Look at you, you're all grown up. Your little sister has a baby. What about you?"" That was the music that I was hearing every day, and that is the music that girls hear every day when they don't do something that the community needs them to do.When I compared the two stories between me and my sister, I said, ""Why can't I do something? Why can't I change something that has happened for a long time in our community?""That was when I called other girls just like my sister, who have children, who have been in class but they have forgotten how to read and write. I said, ""Come on, we can  remind each other how to read and write again, how to hold the pen, how to read, to hold the book."" It was a great time I had with them. Nor did I just learn a little about them, but they were able to tell me their personal stories, what they were facing every day as young mothers. That was when I was like, 'Why can't we take all these things that are happening to us and present them and tell our mothers, our traditional leaders, that these are the wrong things?"" It was a scary thing to do, because these traditional leaders, they are already accustomed to the things that have been there for ages. A hard thing to change, but a good thing to try.So we tried. It was very hard, but we pushed. And I'm here to say that in my community, it was the first community after girls pushed so hard to our traditional leader, and our leader stood up for us and said no girl has to be married before the age of 18. (Applause)In my community, that was the first time a community, they had to call the bylaws, the first bylaw that protected girls in our community.We did not stop there. We forged ahead. We were determined to fight for girls not just in my community, but even in other communities. When the child marriage bill was being presented in February, we were there at the Parliament house. Every day, when the members of Parliament were entering, we were telling them, ""Would you please support the bill?"" And we don't have much technology like here, but we have our small phones. So we said, ""Why can't we get  their numbers and text them?"" So we did that. It was a good thing. (Applause) So when the bill passed, we texted them back, ""Thank you for supporting the bill."" (Laughter) And when the bill was signed by the president, making it into law, it was a plus. Now, in Malawi, 18 is the legal marriage age, from 15 to 18. (Applause)It's a good thing to know that the bill passed, but let me tell you this: There are countries where 18 is the legal marriage age, but don't we hear cries of women and girls every day? Every day, girls' lives are being wasted away. This is high time for leaders to honor their commitment. In honoring this commitment, it means keeping girls' issues at heart every time. We don't have to be subjected as second, but they have to know that women, as we are in this room, we are not just women, we are not just girls, we are extraordinary. We can do more.And another thing for Malawi, and not just Malawi but other countries: The laws which are there, you know how a law is not a law until it is enforced? The law which has just recently passed and the laws that in other countries have been there, they need to be publicized at the local level, at the community level, where girls' issues are very striking. Girls face issues, difficult issues, at the community level every day. So if these young girls know that there are laws that protect them, they will be able to stand up and defend themselves because they will know that there is a law that protects them.And another thing I would say is that girls' voices and women's voices are beautiful, they are there, but we cannot do this alone. Male advocates, they have to jump in, to step in and work together. It's a collective work. What we need is what girls elsewhere need: good education, and above all, not to marry whilst 11.And furthermore, I know that together, we can transform the legal, the cultural and political framework that denies girls of their rights. I am standing here today and declaring that we can end child marriage in a generation. This is the moment where a girl and a girl, and millions of girls worldwide, will be able to say, ""I will marry when I want.""(Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/memory_banda_a_warrior_s_cry_against_child_marriage
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"One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop.And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them — it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances — to the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let's think about this middle row here. Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter) Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? That's what I thought.First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right — those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks — What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie. (Laughter)And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called ""Rat Park,"" which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings.And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk — I might after this — (Laughter) — but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the approximately gazillion pounds that it costs to get into a TED Talk, I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You've got work you love. You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, ""I was a drug addict,"" and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, ""Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but"" — and this is the crucial next step — ""take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society."" And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down. One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system.Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to eating. Before these talks began — you guys know this — we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this. It looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park.If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? Everyone has a bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with the addicts in our lives is typified by, I think, the reality show ""Intervention,"" if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in our lives is defined by reality TV, but that's another TED Talk. If you've ever seen the show ""Intervention,"" it's a pretty simple premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives.So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone.And I think the core of that message — you're not alone, we love you — has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
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"This summer I was back in Ohio for a family wedding, and when I was there, there was a meet and greet with Anna and Elsa from ""Frozen."" Not the Anna and Elsa from ""Frozen,"" as this was not a Disney-sanctioned event. These two entrepreneurs had a business of running princess parties. Your kid is turning five? They'll come sing some songs, sprinkle some fairy dust, it's great. And they were not about to miss out on the opportunity that was the phenomenon and that was ""Frozen.""So they get hired by a local toy store, kids come in on a Saturday morning, buy some Disney swag, get their picture taken with the princesses, call it a day. It's like Santa Claus without the seasonal restrictions. (Laughter)And my three-and-a-half-year-old niece Samantha was in the thick of it. She could care less that these two women were signing posters and coloring books as Snow Queen and Princess Ana with one N to avoid copyright lawsuits. (Laughter) According to my niece and the 200-plus kids in the parking lot that day, this was the Anna and Elsa from ""Frozen.""It is a blazing hot Saturday morning in August in Ohio. We get there at 10 o'clock, the scheduled start time, and we are handed number 59. By 11 o'clock they had called numbers 21 through 25; this was going to be a while, and there is no amount of free face painting or temporary tattoos that could prevent the meltdowns that were occurring outside of the store. (Laughter)So, by 12:30 we get called: ""56 to 63, please."" And as we walk in, it is a scene I can only describe you as saying it looked like Norway threw up. (Laughter) There were cardboard cut-out snowflakes covering the floor, glitter on every flat surface, and icicles all over the walls.And as we stood in line in an attempt to give my niece a better vantage point than the backside of the mother of number 58, I put her up on my shoulders, and she was instantly riveted by the sight of the princesses. And as we moved forward, her excitement only grew, and as we finally got to the front of the line, and number 58 unfurled her poster to be signed by the princesses, I could literally feel the excitement running through her body. And let's be honest, at that point, I was pretty excited too. (Laughter) I mean, the Scandinavian decadence was mesmerizing. (Laughter)So we get to the front of the line, and the haggard clerk turns to my niece and says, ""Hi, honey. You're next! Do you want to get down, or you're going to stay on your dad's shoulders for the picture?' (Laughter) And I was, for a lack of a better word, frozen. (Laughter)It's amazing that in an unexpected instant we are faced with the question, who am I? Am I an aunt? Or am I an advocate? Millions of people have seen my video about how to have a hard conversation, and there one was, right in front of me. At the same time, there's nothing more important to me than the kids in my life, so I found myself in a situation that we so often find ourselves in, torn between two things, two impossible choices. Would I be an advocate? Would I take my niece off my shoulders and turn to the clerk and explain to her that I was in fact her aunt, not her father, and that she should be more careful and not to jump to gender conclusions based on haircuts and shoulder rides — (Laughter) — and while doing that, miss out on what was, to this point, the greatest moment of my niece's life. Or would I be an aunt? Would I brush off that comment, take a million pictures, and not be distracted for an instant from the pure joy of that moment, and by doing that, walk out with the shame that comes up for not standing up for myself, especially in front of my niece.Who was I? Which one was more important? Which role was more worth it? Was I an aunt? Or was I an advocate? And I had a split second to decide.We are taught right now that we are living in a world of constant and increasing polarity. It's so black and white, so us and them, so right and wrong. There is no middle, there is no gray, just polarity. Polarity is a state in which two ideas or opinions are completely opposite from each other; a diametrical opposition. Which side are you on? Are you unequivocally and without question antiwar, pro-choice, anti-death penalty, pro-gun regulation, proponent of open borders and pro-union? Or, are you absolutely  and uncompromisingly pro-war, pro-life, pro-death penalty, a believer that the Second Amendment is absolute, anti-immigrant and pro-business? It's all or none, you're with us or against us. That is polarity.The problem with polarity  and absolutes is that it eliminates the individuality of our human experience and that makes it contradictory to our human nature. But if we are pulled in these two directions, but it's not really where we exist — polarity is not our actual reality — where do we go from there? What's at the other end of that spectrum?I don't think it's an unattainable, harmonious utopia, I think the opposite of polarity is duality. Duality is a state of having two parts, but not in diametrical opposition, in simultaneous existence. Don't think it's possible? Here are the people I know: I know Catholics who are pro-choice, and feminists who wear hijabs, and veterans who are antiwar, and NRA members who think I should be able to get married. Those are the people I know, those are my friends and family, that is the majority of our society, that is you, that is me. (Applause) Duality is the ability to hold both things. But the question is: Can we own our duality? Can we have the courage to hold both things?I work at a restaurant in town, I became really good friends with the busser. I was a server and we had  a great relationship, we had a really great time together. Her Spanish was great because she was from Mexico. (Laughter) That line actually went the other way. Her English was limited, but significantly better than my Spanish. But we were united by our similarities, not separated by our differences. And we were close, even though we came from very different worlds. She was from Mexico, she left her family behind so she could come here and afford them a better life back home. She was a devout conservative Catholic, a believer in traditional family values, stereotypical roles of men and women, and I was, well, me. (Laughter)But the things that bonded us were when she asked about my girlfriend, or she shared pictures that she had from her family back home. Those were the things that brought us together. So one day, we were in the back, scarfing down food as quickly as we could, gathered around a small table, during a very rare lull, and a new guy from the kitchen came over — who happened to be her cousin — and sat down with all the bravado and machismo that his 20-year-old body could hold. (Laughter) And he said to her, [in Spanish] ""Does Ash have a boyfriend?"" And she said, [in Spanish] ""No, she has a girlfriend."" And he said, [in Spanish] ""A girlfriend?!?"" And she set down her fork, and locked eyes with him, and said, [in Spanish] ""Yes, a girlfriend. That is all."" And his smug smile quickly dropped to one of maternal respect, grabbed his plate, walked off, went back to work. She never made eye contact with me. She left, did the same thing — it was a 10-second conversation, such a short interaction.And on paper, she had so much more in common with him: language, culture, history, family, her community was her lifeline here, but her moral compass trumped all of that. And a little bit later, they were joking around in the kitchen in Spanish, that had nothing to do with me, and that is duality. She didn't have to choose some P.C. stance on gayness over her heritage. She didn't have to choose her family over our friendship. It wasn't Jesus or Ash. (Laughter) (Applause)Her individual morality was so strongly rooted that she had the courage to hold both things. Our moral integrity is our responsibility and we must be prepared to defend it even when it's not convenient. That's what it means to be an ally, and if you're going to be an ally, you have to be an active ally: Ask questions, act when you hear something inappropriate, actually engage.I had a family friend who for years used to call my girlfriend my lover. Really? Lover? So overly sexual, so '70s gay porn. (Laughter) But she was trying, and she asked. She could have called her my friend, or my ""friend,"" or my ""special friend"" — (Laughter) — or even worse, just not asked at all. Believe me, we would rather have you ask. I would rather have her say lover, than say nothing at all.People often say to me, ""Well, Ash, I don't care. I don't see race or religion or sexuality. It doesn't matter to me. I don't see it."" But I think the opposite of homophobia and racism and xenophobia is not love, it's apathy. If you don't see my gayness, then you don't see me. If it doesn't matter to you who I sleep with, then you cannot imagine what it feels like when I walk down the street late at night holding her hand, and approach a group of people and have to make the decision if I should hang on to it or if I should I drop it when all I want to do is squeeze it tighter. And the small victory I feel when I make it by and don't have to let go. And the incredible cowardice and disappointment I feel when I drop it. If you do not see that struggle that is unique to my human experience because I am gay, then you don't see me. If you are going to be an ally, I need you to see me.As individuals, as allies, as humans, we need to be able to hold both things: both the good and the bad, the easy and the hard. You don't learn how to hold two things just from the fluff, you learn it from the grit. And what if duality is just the first step? What if through compassion and empathy and human interaction we are able to learn to hold two things? And if we can hold two things, we can hold four, and if we can hold four, we can hold eight, and if we can hold eight, we can hold hundreds.We are complex individuals, swirls of contradiction. You are all holding so many things right now. What can you do to hold just a few more?So, back to Toledo, Ohio. I'm at the front of the line, niece on my shoulders, the frazzled clerk calls me Dad. Have you ever been mistaken for the wrong gender? Not even that. Have you ever been called something you are not? Here's what it feels like for me: I am instantly an internal storm of contrasting emotions. I break out into a sweat that is a combination of rage and humiliation, I feel like the entire store is staring at me, and I simultaneously feel invisible. I want to explode in a tirade of fury, and I want to crawl under a rock. And top all of that off with the frustration that I'm wearing an out-of-character tight-fitting purple t-shirt, so this whole store can see my boobs, to make sure this exact same thing doesn't happen. (Laughter) But, despite my best efforts to be seen as the gender I am, it still happens. And I hope with every ounce of my body that no one heard — not my sister, not my girlfriend, and certainly not my niece. I am accustomed to this familiar hurt, but I will do whatever I need to do to protect the people I love from it.But then I take my niece off my shoulders, and she runs to Elsa and Anna — the thing she's been waiting so long for — and all that stuff goes away. All that matters is the smile on her face. And as the 30 seconds we waited two and a half hours for comes to a close we gather up our things, and I lock eyes with the clerk again; and she gives me an apologetic smile and mouths, ""I am so sorry!"" (Laughter) And her humanity, her willingness to admit her mistake disarms me immediately, then I give her a: ""It's okay, it happens. But thanks.""And I realize in that moment that I don't have to be either an aunt or an advocate, I can be both. I can live in duality, and I can hold two things. And if I can hold two things in that environment, I can hold so many more things. As my girlfriend and my niece hold hands and skip out the front of the door, I turn to my sister and say, ""Was it worth it?"" And she said, ""Are you kidding me? Did you see the look on her face? This was the greatest day of her life!"" (Laughter) ""It was worth the two and a half hours in the heat, it was worth the overpriced coloring book that we already had a copy of."" (Laughter) ""It was even worth you  getting called Dad."" (Laughter) And for the first time ever in my life, it actually was.Thank you, Boulder. Have a good night.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ash_beckham_when_to_take_a_stand_and_when_to_let_it_go
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"About 10 years ago, I went through a little bit of a hard time. So I decided to go see a therapist. I had been seeing her for a few months, when she looked at me one day and said, ""Who actually raised you until you were three?"" Seemed like a weird question. I said, ""My parents."" And she said, ""I don't think that's actually the case; because if it were, we'd be dealing with things that are far more complicated than just this.""It sounded like the setup to a joke, but I knew she was serious. Because when I first started seeing her, I was trying to be the funniest person in the room. And I would try and crack these jokes, but she caught on to me really quickly, and whenever I tried to make a joke, she would look at me and say, ""That is actually really sad."" (Laughter) It's terrible.So I knew I had to be serious, and I asked my parents who had actually raised me until I was three? And to my surprise, they said my primary caregiver had been a distant relative of the family. I had called her my auntie.I remember my auntie so clearly, it felt like she had been part of my life when I was much older. I remember the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around me like a curtain when she bent to pick me up; her soft, southern Thai accent; the way I would cling to her, even if she just wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. I loved her, but [with] the ferocity that a child has sometimes before she understands that love also requires letting go.But my clearest and sharpest memory of my auntie, is also one of my first memories of life at all. I remember her being beaten and slapped by another member of my family. I remember screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as I did every single time it happened, for things as minor as wanting to go out with her friends, or being a little late. I became so hysterical over her treatment, that eventually, she was just beaten behind closed doors.Things got so bad for her that eventually she ran away. As an adult, I learned later that she had been just 19 when she was brought over from Thailand to the States to care for me, on a tourist visa. She wound up working in Illinois for a time, before eventually returning to Thailand, which is where I ran into her again, at a political rally in Bangkok. I clung to her again, as I had when I was a child, and I let go, and then I promised that I would call. I never did, though. Because I was afraid if I said everything that she meant to me — that I owed perhaps the best parts of who I became to her care, and that the words ""I'm sorry"" were like a thimble to bail out all the guilt and shame and rage I felt over everything she had endured to care for me for as long as she had — I thought if I said those words to her, I would never stop crying again. Because she had saved me. And I had not saved her.I'm a journalist, and I've been writing and researching human trafficking for the past eight years or so, and even so, I never put together this personal story with my professional life until pretty recently. I think this profound disconnect actually symbolizes most of our understanding about human trafficking. Because human trafficking is far more prevalent, complex and close to home than most of us realize.I spent time in jails and brothels, interviewed hundreds of survivors and law enforcement, NGO workers. And when I think about what we've done about human trafficking, I am hugely disappointed. Partly because we don't even talk about the problem right at all. When I say ""human trafficking,"" most of you probably don't think about someone like my auntie. You probably think about a young girl or woman, who's been brutally forced into prostitution by a violent pimp. That is real suffering, and that is a real story. That story makes me angry for far more than just the reality of that situation, though.As a journalist, I really care about how we relate to each other through language, and the way we tell that story, with all the gory, violent detail, the salacious aspects — I call that ""look at her scars"" journalism. We use that story to convince ourselves that human trafficking is a bad man doing a bad thing to an innocent girl. That story lets us off the hook. It takes away all the societal context that we might be indicted for, for the structural inequality, or the poverty, or the barriers to migration. We let ourselves think that human trafficking is only about forced prostitution, when in reality, human trafficking is embedded in our everyday lives.Let me show you what I mean. Forced prostitution accounts for 22 percent of human trafficking. Ten percent is in state- imposed forced labor. but a whopping 68 percent is for the purpose of creating the goods and delivering the services that most of us rely on every day, in sectors like agricultural work, domestic work and construction. That is food and care and shelter. And somehow, these most essential workers are also among the world's most underpaid and exploited today. Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person's labor. And it's found in cotton fields, and coltan mines, and even car washes in Norway and England. It's found in U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.It's found in Thailand's fishing industry. That country has become the largest exporter of shrimp in the world. But what are the circumstances behind all that cheap and plentiful shrimp? Thai military were caught selling Burmese and Cambodian migrants onto fishing boats. Those fishing boats were taken out, the men put to work, and they were thrown overboard if they made the mistake of falling sick, or trying to resist their treatment. Those fish were then used to feed shrimp, The shrimp were then sold to four major global retailers: Costco, Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour.Human trafficking is found on a smaller scale than just that, and in places you would never even imagine. Traffickers have forced young people to drive ice cream trucks, or to sing in touring boys' choirs. Trafficking has even been found in a hair braiding salon in New Jersey.The scheme in that case was incredible. The traffickers found young families who were from Ghana and Togo, and they told these families that ""your daughters are going to get a fine education in the United States."" They then located winners of the green card lottery, and they told them, ""We'll help you out. We'll get you a plane ticket. We'll pay your fees. All you have to do is take this young girl with you, say that she's your sister or your spouse. Once everyone arrived in New Jersey, the young girls were taken away, and put to work for 14-hour days, seven days a week, for five years. They made their traffickers nearly four million dollars.This is a huge problem. So what have we done about it? We've mostly turned to the criminal justice system. But keep in mind, most victims of human trafficking are poor and marginalized. They're migrants, people of color. Sometimes they're in the sex trade. And for populations like these, the criminal justice system is too often part of the problem, rather than the solution. In study after study, in countries ranging from Bangladesh to the United States, between 20 and 60 percent of the people in the sex trade who were surveyed said that they had been raped or assaulted by the police in the past year alone. People in prostitution, including people who have been trafficked into it, regularly receive multiple convictions for prostitution. Having that criminal record makes it so much more difficult to leave poverty, leave abuse, or leave prostitution, if that person so desires. Workers outside of the sex sector — if they try and resist their treatment, they risk deportation. In case after case I've studied, employers have no problem calling on law enforcement to try and threaten or deport their striking trafficked workers. If those workers run away, they risk becoming part of the great mass of undocumented workers who are also subject to the whims of law enforcement if they're caught.Law enforcement is supposed to identify victims and prosecute traffickers. But out of an estimated 21 million victims of human trafficking in the world, they have helped and identified fewer than 50,000 people. That's like comparing the population of the world to the population of Los Angeles, proportionally speaking. As for convictions, out of an estimated 5,700 convictions in 2013, fewer than 500 were for labor trafficking. Keep in mind that labor trafficking accounts for 68 percent of all trafficking, but fewer than 10 percent of the convictions.I've heard one expert say that trafficking happens where need meets greed. I'd like to add one more element to that. Trafficking happens in sectors where workers are excluded from protections, and denied the right to organize. Trafficking doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in systematically degraded work environments. You might be thinking, oh, she's talking about failed states, or war-torn states, or — I'm actually talking about the United States. Let me tell you what that looks like.I spent many months researching a trafficking case called Global Horizons, involving hundreds of Thai farm workers. They were sent all over the States, to work in Hawaii pineapple plantations, and Washington apple orchards, and anywhere the work was needed. They were promised three years of solid agricultural work. So they made a calculated risk. They sold their land, they sold their wives' jewelry, to make thousands in recruitment fees for this company, Global Horizons. But once they were brought over, their passports were confiscated. Some of the men were beaten and held at gunpoint. They worked so hard they fainted in the fields. This case hit me so hard.After I came back home, I was wandering through the grocery store, and I froze in the produce department. I was remembering the over-the-top meals the Global Horizons survivors would make for me every time I showed up to interview them. They finished one meal with this plate of perfect, long-stemmed strawberries, and as they handed them to me, they said, ""Aren't these the kind of strawberries you eat with somebody special in the States? And don't they taste so much better when you know the people whose hands picked them for you?""As I stood in that grocery store weeks later, I realized I had no idea of who to thank for this plenty, and no idea of how they were being treated. So, like the journalist I am, I started digging into the agricultural sector. And I found there are too many fields, and too few labor inspectors. I found multiple layers of plausible deniability between grower and distributor and processor, and God knows who else. The Global Horizons survivors had been brought to the States on a temporary guest worker program. That guest worker program ties a person's legal status to his or her employer, and denies that worker the right to organize. Mind you, none of what I am describing about this agricultural sector or the guest worker program is actually human trafficking. It is merely what we find legally tolerable. And I would argue this is fertile ground for exploitation. And all of this had been hidden to me, before I had tried to understand it.I wasn't the only person grappling with these issues. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is one of the biggest anti-trafficking philanthropists in the world. And even he wound up accidentally investing nearly 10 million dollars in the pineapple plantation cited as having the worst working conditions in that Global Horizons case. When he found out, he and his wife were shocked and horrified, and they wound up writing an op-ed for a newspaper, saying that it was up to all of us to learn everything we can about the labor and supply chains of the products that we support. I totally agree.What would happen if each one of us decided that we are no longer going to support companies if they don't eliminate exploitation from their labor and supply chains? If we demanded laws calling for the same? If all the CEOs out there decided that they were going to go through their businesses and say, ""no more""? If we ended recruitment fees for migrant workers? If we decided that guest workers should have the right to organize without fear of retaliation? These would be decisions heard around the world. This isn't a matter of buying a fair-trade peach and calling it a day, buying a guilt-free zone with your money. That's not how it works. This is the decision to change a system that is broken, and that we have unwittingly but willingly allowed ourselves to profit from and benefit from for too long.We often dwell on human trafficking survivors' victimization. But that is not my experience of them. Over all the years that I've been talking to them, they have taught me that we are more than our worst days. Each one of us is more than what we have lived through. Especially trafficking survivors. These people were the most resourceful and resilient and responsible in their communities. They were the people that you would take a gamble on. You'd say, I'm gong to sell my rings, because I have the chance to send you off to a better future. They were the emissaries of hope.These survivors don't need saving. They need solidarity, because they're behind some of the most exciting social justice movements out there today. The nannies and housekeepers who marched with their families and their employers' families — their activism got us an international treaty on domestic workers' rights. The Nepali women who were trafficked into the sex trade — they came together, and they decided that they were going to make the world's first anti-trafficking organization actually headed and run by trafficking survivors themselves. These Indian shipyard workers were trafficked to do post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. They were threatened with deportation, but they broke out of their work compound and they marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to protest labor exploitation. They cofounded an organization called the National Guest Worker Alliance, and through this organization, they have wound up helping other workers bring to light exploitation and abuses in supply chains in Walmart and Hershey's factories. And although the Department of Justice declined to take their case, a team of civil rights lawyers won the first of a dozen civil suits this February, and got their clients 14 million dollars.These survivors are fighting for people they don't even know yet, other workers, and for the possibility of a just world for all of us. This is our chance to do the same. This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society; that our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people's pain; that our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice.I was so reluctant to share my story of my auntie with you. Before I started this TED process and climbed up on this stage, I had told literally a handful of people about it, because, like many a journalist, I am far more interested in learning about your stories than sharing much, if anything, about my own. I also haven't done my journalistic due diligence on this. I haven't issued my mountains of document requests, and interviewed everyone and their mother, and I haven't found my auntie yet. I don't know her story of what happened, and of her life now. The story as I've told it to you is messy and unfinished. But I think it mirrors the messy and unfinished situation we're all in, when it comes to human trafficking. We are all implicated in this problem. But that means we are all also part of its solution. Figuring out how to build a more just world is our work to do, and our story to tell. So let us tell it the way we should have done, from the very beginning. Let us tell this story together.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/noy_thrupkaew_human_trafficking_is_all_around_you_this_is_how_it_works
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"It was the middle of summer and well past closing time in the downtown Berkeley bar where my friend Polly and I worked together as bartenders. Usually at the end of our shift we had a drink — but not that night. ""I'm pregnant. Not sure what I'm going to do yet,"" I told Polly. Without hesitation, she replied, ""I've had an abortion."" Before Polly, no one had ever told me that she'd had an abortion. I'd graduated from college just a few months earlier and I was in a new relationship when I found out that I was pregnant. When I thought about my choices, I honestly did not know how to decide, what criteria I should use. How would I know what the right decision was? I worried that I would regret  an abortion later. Coming of age on the beaches of Southern California, I grew up in the middle of  our nation's abortion wars. I was born in a trailer on the third anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Our community was surfing Christians. We cared about God, the less fortunate, and the ocean. Everyone was pro-life. As a kid, the idea of abortion made me so sad that I knew if I ever got pregnant I could never have one. And then I did. It was a step towards the unknown. But Polly had given me a very special gift: the knowledge that I wasn't alone and the realization that abortion was something that we can talk about. Abortion is common. According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in three women in America will have an abortion in their lifetime. But for the last few decades, the dialogue around abortion in the United States has left little room for anything beyond  pro-life and pro-choice. It's political and polarizing.But as much as abortion is hotly debated, it's still rare for us, whether as fellow women or even just as fellow people, to talk with one another about the abortions that we have. There is a gap. Between what happens in politics and what happens in real life, and in that gap, a battlefield mentality. An ""are you with us  or against us?"" stance takes root. This isn't just about abortion. There are so many important issues  that we can't talk about. And so finding ways to shift the conflict to a place of conversation is the work of my life. There are two main ways to get started. One way is to listen closely. And the other way is to share stories. So, 15 years ago, I cofounded an organization called Exhale to start listening to people  who have had abortions. The first thing we did was create  a talk-line, where women and men could call to get emotional support. Free of judgment and politics, believe it or not, nothing like our sevice had ever existed. We needed a new framework that could  hold all the experiences that we were hearing on our talk-line. The feminist who regrets her abortion. The Catholic who is grateful for hers. The personal experiences that weren't  fitting neatly into one box or the other. We didn't think it was right  to ask women to pick a side. We wanted to show them that the whole world was on their side, as they were going through this deeply personal experience. So we invented ""pro-voice.""Beyond abortion, pro-voice works on hard issues that we've struggled with globally for years, issues like immigration, religious tolerance, violence against women. It also works on deeply personal topics  that might only matter to you and your immediate family and friends. They have a terminal illness,  their mother just died, they have a child with special needs and they can't talk about it. Listening and storytelling are the hallmarks of pro-voice practice. Listening and storytelling. That sounds pretty nice. Sounds maybe, easy? We could all do that. It's not easy. It's very hard. Pro-voice is hard because we are talking about things everyone's fighting about or the things that no one  wants to talk about. I wish I could tell you that when you  decide to be pro-voice, that you'll find beautiful moments of breakthrough  and gardens full of flowers, where listening and storytelling creates wonderful ""a-ha"" moments. I wish I could tell you that there would be a feminist welcoming party for you, or that there's a long-lost sisterhood of people who are just ready to have your back when you get slammed. But it can be vulnerable and exhausting  to tell our own stories when it feels like nobody cares. And if we truly listen to one another, we will hear things that demand that we shift our own perceptions. There is no perfect time and there is no perfect place to start a difficult conversation. There's never a time when everyone will be on the same page, share the same lens, or know the same history. So, let's talk about listening and how to be a good listener. There's lots of ways to be a good listener and I'm going to give you just a couple. One is to ask open-ended questions. You can ask yourself or someone  that you know, ""How are you feeling?"" ""What was that like?"" ""What do you hope for, now?"" Another way to be a good listener  is to use reflective language. If someone is talking about their own personal experience, use the words that they use. If someone is talking about an abortion and they say the word ""baby,"" you can say ""baby."" If they say ""fetus,"" you can say ""fetus."" If someone describes themselves as gender queer to you, you can say ""gender queer."" If someone kind of looks like a he, but they say they're a she — it's cool. Call that person a she. When we reflect the language of the person who is sharing their own story, we are conveying that we are interested in understanding who they are and what they're going through. The same way that we hope people are  interested in knowing us. So, I'll never forget being in one  of the Exhale counselor meetings, listening to a volunteer talk about how she was getting a lot of calls from Christian women who  were talking about God. Now, some of our volunteers are religious, but this particular one was not. At first, it felt a little weird for her  to talk to callers about God. So, she decided to get comfortable. And she stood in front of her mirror  at home, and she said the word ""God."" ""God."" ""God."" ""God."" ""God."" ""God."" ""God."" Over and over and over again until the word no longer felt strange coming out her mouth. Saying the word God did not turn this  volunteer into a Christian, but it did make her a much  better listener of Christian women. So, another way to be pro-voice is to share stories, and one risk that you take on, when you share your story with someone else, is that given the same set of circumstances as you they might actually make a different decision. For example, if you're telling a story  about your abortion, realize that she might have had the baby. She might have placed for adoption. She might have told her parents  and her partner — or not. She might have felt relief and confidence, even though you felt sad and lost. This is okay. Empathy gets created the moment we imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes. It doesn't mean we all have  to end up in the same place. It's not agreement, it's not sameness that pro-voice is after. It creates a culture and a society that  values what make us special and unique. It values what makes us human, our flaws and our imperfections. And this way of thinking allows us to see our differences with respect, instead of fear. And it generates the empathy that we need to overcome all the ways that we try to hurt one another. Stigma, shame, prejudice,  discrimination, oppression. Pro-voice is contagious, and the more it's practiced the more it spreads. So, last year I was pregnant again. This time I was looking forward  to the birth of my son. And while pregnant, I had never been asked how I was feeling so much in all my life. (Laughter) And however I replied, whether I was feeling wonderful and excited or scared and totally freaked out, there was always someone there giving me a ""been there"" response. It was awesome. It was a welcome, yet dramatic departure from what I experience when I talk about my mixed feelings of my abortion. Pro-voice is about the real stories of real people making an impact on the way abortion and so many other politicized and stigmatized issues are understood and discussed. From sexuality and mental health to poverty and incarceration. Far beyond definition as single right or wrong decisions, our experiences can exist on a spectrum. Pro-voice focuses that conversation on human experience and it makes support and respect possible for all. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aspen_baker_a_better_way_to_talk_about_abortion
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"Alec Soth: So about 10 years ago, I got a call from a woman in Texas, Stacey Baker, and she'd seen some of my photographs in an art exhibition and was wondering if she could commission me to take a portrait of her parents. Now, at the time I hadn't met Stacey, and I thought this was some sort of wealthy oil tycoon and I'd struck it rich, but it was only later that I found out she'd actually taken out a loan to make this happen.I took the picture of her parents, but I was actually more excited about photographing Stacey. The picture I made that day ended up becoming one of my best-known portraits. At the time I made this picture, Stacey was working as an attorney for the State of Texas. Not long after, she left her job to study photography in Maine, and while she was there, she ended up meeting the director of photography at the New York Times Magazine and was actually offered a job. Stacey Baker: In the years since, Alec and I have done a number of magazine projects together, and we've become friends.A few months ago, I started talking to Alec about a fascination of mine. I've always been obsessed with how couples meet. I asked Alec how he and his wife Rachel met, and he told me the story of a high school football game where she was 16 and he was 15, and he asked her out. He liked her purple hair. She said yes, and that was it. I then asked Alec if he'd be interested in doing a photography project exploring this question.AS: And I was interested in the question, but I was actually much more interested in Stacey's motivation for asking it, particularly since I'd never known Stacey to have a boyfriend. So as part of this project, I thought it'd be interesting if she tried to meet someone. So my idea was to have Stacey here go speed dating in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day. (Laughter) (Applause) (Music)SB: We ended up at what was advertised as the world's largest speed dating event. I had 19 dates and each date lasted three minutes. Participants were given a list of ice- breaker questions to get the ball rolling, things like, ""If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be?"" That sort of thing.My first date was Colin. He's from England, and he once married a woman he met after placing an ad for a Capricorn. Alec and I saw him at the end of the evening, and he said he'd kissed a woman in line at one of the concession stands.Zack and Chris came to the date-a-thon together.This is Carl. I asked Carl, ""What's the first thing you notice about a woman?"" He said, ""Tits."" (Laughter)Matthew is attracted to women with muscular calves. We talked about running. He does triathlons, I run half-marathons. Alec actually liked his eyes and asked if I was attracted to him, but I wasn't, and I don't think he was attracted to me either.Austin and Mike came together. Mike asked me a hypothetical question. He said, ""You're in an elevator running late for a meeting. Someone makes a dash for the elevator. Do you hold it open for them?"" And I said I would not. (Laughter)Cliff said the first thing he notices about a woman is her teeth, and we complimented each other's teeth. Because he's an open mouth sleeper, he says he has to floss more to help prevent gum disease, and so I asked him how often he flosses, and he said, ""Every other day."" (Laughter) Now, as someone who flosses twice a day, I wasn't really sure that that was flossing more but I don't think I said that out loud.Bill is an auditor, and we talked the entire three minutes about auditing. (Laughter)The first thing Spencer notices about a woman is her complexion. He feels a lot of women wear too much makeup, and that they should only wear enough to accentuate the features that they have. I told him I didn't wear any makeup at all and he seemed to think that that was a good thing. Craig told me he didn't think I was willing to be vulnerable. He was also frustrated when I couldn't remember my most embarrassing moment. He thought I was lying, but I wasn't. I didn't think he liked me at all, but at the end of the night, he came back to me and he gave me a box of chocolates.William was really difficult to talk to. I think he was drunk. (Laughter)Actor Chris McKenna was the MC of the event. He used to be on ""The Young and the Restless."" I didn't actually go on a date with him. Alec said he saw several women give their phone numbers to him.Needless to say, I didn't fall in love. I didn't feel a particular connection with any of the men that I went on dates with, and I didn't feel like they felt a particular connection with me either.AS: Now, the most beautiful thing to me — (Laughter) — as a photographer is the quality of vulnerability. The physical exterior reveals a crack in which you can get a glimpse at a more fragile interior. At this date-a-thon event, I saw so many examples of that, but as I watched Stacey's dates and talked to her about them, I realized how different photographic love is from real love.What is real love? How does it work? In order to work on this question and to figure out how someone goes from meeting on a date to having a life together, Stacey and I went to Sun City Summerlin, which is the largest retirement community in Las Vegas. Our contact there was George, who runs the community's photography club. He arranged for us to meet other couples in their makeshift photo studio. SB: After 45 years of marriage, Anastasia's husband died two years ago,so we asked if she had an old wedding picture. She met her husband when she was a 15-year-old waitress at a small barbecue place in Michigan. He was 30. She'd lied about her age. He was the first person she'd dated.Dean had been named photographer of the year in Las Vegas two years in a row, and this caught Alec's attention, as did the fact  that he met his wife, Judy, at the same age when Alec met Rachel. Dean admitted that he likes to look at beautiful women, but he's never questioned his decision to marry Judy.AS: George met Josephine at a parish dance. He was 18, she was 15. Like a lot of the couples we met, they weren't especially philosophical about their early choices. George said something that really stuck with me. He said, ""When you get that feeling, you just go with it.""Bob and Trudy met on a blind date when she was still in high school. They said they weren't particularly attracted to each other when the first met. Nevertheless, they were married soon after.SB: The story that stayed with me the most was that of George, the photography club president, and his wife, Mary. This was George and Mary's second marriage. They met at a country-western club in Louisville, Kentucky called the Sahara. He was there alone drinking and she was with friends. When they started dating, he owed the IRS 9,000 dollars in taxes, and she offered to help him get out of debt, so for the next year, he turned his paychecks over to Mary, and she got him out of debt. George was actually an alcoholic when they married, and Mary knew it. At some point in their marriage, he says he consumed 54 beers in one day. Another time, when he was drunk, he threatened to kill Mary and her two kids, but they escaped and a SWAT team was called to the house. Amazingly, Mary took him back, and eventually things got better. George has been involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn't had a drink in 36 years.(Music)At the end of the day, after we left Sun City, I told Alec that I didn't actually think that the stories of how these couples met were all that interesting. What was more interesting was how they managed to stay together.AS: They all had this beautiful quality of endurance, but that was true of the singles, too. The world is hard, and the singles were out there trying to connect with other people, and the couples were holding onto each other after all these decades.My favorite pictures on this trip were of Joe and Roseanne. Now, by the time we met Joe and Roseanne, we'd gotten in the habit of asking couples if they had an old wedding photograph. In their case, they simultaneously pulled out of their wallets the exact same photograph. What's more beautiful, I thought to myself, this image of a young couple who has just fallen in love or the idea of these two people holding onto this image for decades?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alec_soth_stacey_baker_this_is_what_enduring_love_looks_like
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"This back here was my brain cancer. Isn't it nice? (Laughter) The key phrase is ""was,"" phew. (Applause)Having brain cancer was really, as you can imagine, shocking news for me. I knew nothing about cancer. In Western cultures, when you have cancer, it's as if you disappear in a way. Your life as a complex human being is replaced by medical data: Your images, your exams, your lab values, a list of medicines. And everyone changes as well. You suddenly become a disease on legs. Doctors start speaking a language which you don't understand. They start pointing their fingers at your body and your images. People start changing as well because they start dealing with the disease, instead of with the human being. They say, ""What did the doctor say?"" before even saying, ""Hello.""And in the meanwhile, you're left with questions to which nobody gives an answer. These are the ""Can I?"" questions: Can I work while I have cancer? Can I study? Can I make love? Can I be creative? And you wonder, ""What have I done to deserve this?"" You wonder, ""Can I change something about my lifestyle?"" You wonder, ""Can I do something? Are there any other options?""And, obviously, doctors are the good guys in all these scenarios, because they are very professional and dedicated to curing you. But they also are very used to having to deal with patients, so I'd say that they sometimes lose the idea that this is torture for you and that you become, literally, a patient — ""patient"" means ""the one who waits."" (Laughter) Things are changing, but classically, they tend to not engage you in any way to learn about your condition, to get your friends and family engaged, or showing you ways in which you can change your lifestyle to minimize the risks of what you're going through. But instead, you're forced there to wait in the hands of a series of very professional strangers.While I was in the hospital, I asked for a printed-out picture of my cancer and I spoke with it. It was really hard to obtain, because it's not common practice to ask for a picture of your own cancer. I talked to it and I said, ""Okay, cancer, you're not all there is to me. There's more to me. A cure, whichever it is, will have to deal with the whole of me."" And so, the next day, I left the hospital against medical advice. I was determined to change my relationship with the cancer and I was determined to learn more about my cancer before doing anything as drastic as a surgery.I'm an artist, I use several forms of open-source technologies and open information in my practice. So my best bet was to get it all out there, get the information out there, and use it so that it could be accessed by anyone. So I created a website, which is called La Cura, on which I put my medical data, online. I actually had to hack it and that's a thing which we can talk about in another speech. (Laughter) I chose this word, La Cura — La Cura in Italian means ""the cure"" — because in many different cultures, the word ""cure"" can mean many different things. In our Western cultures, it means eradicating or reversing a disease, but in different cultures, for example, a culture from Asia, from the Mediterranean, from Latin countries, from Africa, it can mean many more things.Of course, I was interested in the opinions of doctors and healthcare providers, but I was also interested in the cure of the artist, of the poet, of the designer, of, who knows, the musicians. I was interested in the social cure, I was interested in the psychological cure, I was interested in the spiritual cure, I was interested in the emotional cure, I was interested in any form of cure.And, it worked. The La Cura website went viral. I received lots of media attention from Italy and from abroad and I quickly received more than 500,000 contacts — emails, social networking — most of them were a suggestion on how to cure my cancer, but more of them were about how to cure myself as a full individual. For example, many thousands of videos, images, pictures, art performances were produced for La Cura. For example, here we see Francesca Fini in her performance. Or, as artist Patrick Lichty has done: He produced a 3D sculpture of my tumor and put it on sale on Thingiverse. Now you can have my cancer, too! (Laughter) Which is a nice thing, if you think about it, we can share our cancer.And this was going on — scientists, the traditional medicine experts, several researchers, doctors — all connected with me to give advice. With all this information and support, I was able to form a team of several neurosurgeons, traditional doctors, oncologists, and several hundred volunteers with whom I was able to discuss the information I was receiving, which is very important. And together, we were able to form a strategy for my own cure in many languages, according to many cultures. And the current strategy spans the whole world and thousands of years of human history, which is quite remarkable for me. [Surgery]The follow-up MRIs showed, luckily, little to no growth of the cancer. So I was able to take my time and choose. I chose the doctor I wanted to work with, I chose the hospital I wanted to stay in, and in the meanwhile, I was supported by thousands of people, none of whom felt pity for me. Everyone felt like they could take an active role in helping me to get well, and this was the most important part of La Cura.What are the outcomes? I'm fine, as you can see, pretty fine. (Applause) I had excellent news after the surgery — I have — I had a very low-grade glioma, which is a ""good"" kind of cancer which doesn't grow a lot. I have completely changed my life and my lifestyle. Everything I did was thoughtfully designed to get me engaged.Up until the very last few minutes of the surgery, which was very intense, a matrix of electrodes was implanted in my brain from this side, to be able to build a functional map of what the brain controls. And right before the operation, we were able to discuss the functional map of my brain with the doctor, to understand which risks I was running into and if there were any I wanted to avoid. Obviously, there were. [Open]And this openness was really the fundamental part of La Cura. Thousands of people shared their stories, their experiences. Doctors got to talk with people they don't usually consult when they think about cancer. I'm a self-founding, continuous state of translation among many different languages, in which science meets emotion and conventional research meets traditional research. [Society]The most important thing of La Cura was to feel like a part of a really engaged and connected society whose wellness really depends on the wellness of all of its components. This global performance is my open-source cure for cancer. And from what I feel, it's a cure for me, but for us all.Thank you.(Applause).","https://www.ted.com/talks/salvatore_iaconesi_what_happened_when_i_open_sourced_my_brain_cancer
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"So, people are more afraid of insects than they are of dying. (Laughter) At least, according to a 1973 ""Book of Lists"" survey which preceded all those online best, worst, funniest lists that you see today. Only heights and public speaking exceeded the six-legged as sources of fear. And I suspect if you had put spiders in there, the combinations of insects and spiders would have just topped the chart. Now, I am not one of those people. I really love insects. I think they're interesting and beautiful, and sometimes even cute. (Laughter) And I'm not alone. For centuries, some of the greatest minds in science, from Charles Darwin to E.O. Wilson, have drawn inspiration from studying some of the smallest minds on Earth. Well, why is that? What is that keeps us coming back to insects? Some of it, of course, is just the sheer magnitude of almost everything about them. They're more numerous than any other kind of animal. We don't even know how many species of insects there are, because new ones are being discovered all the time. There are at least a million, maybe as many as 10 million. This means that you could have an insect-of-the-month calendar and not have to reuse a species for over 80,000 years. (Laughter) Take that, pandas and kittens! (Laughter)More seriously, insects are essential. We need them. It's been estimated that 1 out of every 3 bites of food is made possible by a pollinator. Scientist use insects to make fundamental discoveries about everything from the structure of our nervous systems to how our genes and DNA work. But what I love most about insects is what they can tell us about our own behavior. Insects seem like they do everything that people do. They meet, they mate, they fight, they break up. And they do so with what looks like love or animosity. But what drives their behaviors is really different than what drives our own, and that difference can be really illuminating. There's nowhere where that's more true than when it comes to one of our most consuming interests — sex.Now, I will maintain. and I think I can defend, what may seem like a surprising statement. I think sex in insects is more interesting than sex in people. (Laughter) And the wild variety that we see makes us challenge some of our own assumptions about what it means to be male and female. Of course, to start with, a lot of insects don't need to have sex at all to reproduce. Female aphids can make little, tiny clones of themselves without ever mating. Virgin birth, right there. On your rose bushes. (Laughter) When they do have sex, even their sperm is more interesting than human sperm. There are some kinds of fruit flies whose sperm is longer than the male's own body. And that's important because the males use their sperm to compete. Now, male insects do compete with weapons, like the horns on these beetles. But they also compete after mating with their sperm. Dragonflies and damselflies have penises that look kind of like Swiss Army knives with all of the attachments pulled out. (Laughter) They use these formidable devices like scoops, to remove the sperm from previous males that the female has mated with. (Laughter) So, what can we learn from this? (Laughter) All right, it is not a lesson in the sense of us imitating them or of them setting an example for us to follow. Which, given this, is probably just as well. And also, did I mention sexual cannibalism is rampant among insects? So, no, that's not the point. But what I think insects do, is break a lot of the rules that we humans have about the sex roles. So, people have this idea that nature dictates kind of a 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. So that males are always supposed to be dominant and aggressive, and females are passive and coy.But that's just not the case. So for example, take katydids, which are relatives of crickets and grasshoppers. The males are very picky about who they mate with, because they not only transfer sperm during mating, they also give the female something called a nuptial gift. You can see two katydids mating in these photos. In both panels, the male's the one on the right, and that sword-like appendage is the female's egg-laying organ. The white blob is the sperm, the green blob is the nuptial gift, and the male manufactures this from his own body and it's extremely costly to produce. It can weigh up to a third of his body mass. I will now pause for a moment and let you think about what it would be like if human men, every time they had sex, had to produce something that weighed 50, 60, 70 pounds. (Laughter) Okay, they would not be able to do that very often. (Laughter) And indeed, neither can the katydids. And so what that means is the katydid males are very choosy about who they offer these nuptial gifts to. Now, the gift is very nutritious, and the female eats it during and after mating. So, the bigger it is, the better off the male is, because that means more time for his sperm to drain into her body and fertilize her eggs. But it also means that the males are very passive about mating, whereas the females are extremely aggressive and competitive, in an attempt to get as many of these nutritious nuptial gifts as they can. So, it's not exactly a stereotypical set of rules. Even more generally though, males are actually not all that important in the lives of a lot of insects. In the social insects — the bees and wasps and ants — the individuals that you see every day — the ants going back and forth to your sugar bowl, the honey bees that are flitting from flower to flower — all of those are always female. People have had a hard time getting their head around that idea for millennia. The ancient Greeks knew that there was a class of bees, the drones, that are larger than the workers, although they disapproved of the drones' laziness because they could see that the drones just hang around the hive until the mating flight — they're the males. They hang around until the mating flight, but they don't participate in gathering nectar or pollen. The Greeks couldn't figure out the drones' sex, and part of the confusion was that they were aware of the stinging ability of bees but they found it difficult to believe that any animals that bore such a weapon could possibly be a female. Aristotle tried to get involved as well. He suggested, ""OK, if the stinging individuals are going to be the males ..."" Then he got confused, because that would have meant the males were also taking care of the young in a colony, and he seemed to think that would be completely impossible. He then concluded that maybe bees had the organs of both sexes in the same individual, which is not that far-fetched, some animals do that, but he never really did get it figured out. And you know, even today, my students, for instance, call every animal they see, including insects, a male. And when I tell them that the ferocious army-ant soldiers with their giant jaws, used to defend the colony, are all always female, they seem to not quite believe me. (Laughter) And certainly all of the movies — Antz, Bee Movie — portray the main character in the social insects as being male. Well, what difference does this make? These are movies. They're fiction. They have talking animals in them. What difference does it make if they talk like Jerry Seinfeld? I think it does matter, and it's a problem that actually is part of a much deeper one that has implications for medicine and health and a lot of other aspects of our lives. You all know that scientists use what we call model systems, which are creatures — white rats or fruit flies — that are kind of stand-ins for all other animals, including people. And the idea is that what's true for a person will also be true for the white rat. And by and large, that turns out to be the case. But you can take the idea of a model system too far. And what I think we've done, is use males, in any species, as though they are the model system. The norm. The way things are supposed to be. And females as a kind of variant — something special that you only study after you get the basics down. And so, back to the insects. I think what that means is that people just couldn't see what was in front of them. Because they assumed that the world's stage was largely occupied by male players and females would only have minor, walk-on roles. But when we do that, we really miss out on a lot of what nature is like. And we can also miss out on the way natural, living things, including people, can vary. And I think that's why we've used males as models in a lot of medical research, something that we know now to be a problem if we want the results to apply to both men and women. Well, the last thing I really love about insects is something that a lot of people find unnerving about them. They have little, tiny brains with very little cognitive ability, the way we normally think of it. They have complicated behavior, but they lack complicated brains. And so, we can't just think of them as though they're little people because they don't do things the way that we do. I really love that it's difficult to anthropomorphize insects, to look at them and just think of them like they're little people in exoskeletons, with six legs. (Laughter) Instead, you really have to accept them on their own terms, because insects make us question what's normal and what's natural. Now, you know, people write fiction and talk about parallel universes. They speculate about the supernatural, maybe the spirits of the departed walking among us. The allure of another world is something that people say is part of why they want to dabble in the paranormal. But as far as I'm concerned, who needs to be able to see dead people, when you can see live insects? Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marlene_zuk_what_we_learn_from_insects_kinky_sex_lives
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"In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, ""Oh my God, I'm exactly the same."" Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent. If a newspaper ran some racist or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. We could get them. We could hit them with a weapon that we understood but they didn't — a social media shaming. Advertisers would withdraw their advertising. When powerful people misused their privilege, we were going to get them. This was like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies were being leveled out. We were going to do things better.Soon after that, a disgraced pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer — he'd been caught plagiarizing and faking quotes, and he was drenched in shame and regret, he told me. And he had the opportunity to publicly apologize at a foundation lunch. This was going to be the most important speech of his life. Maybe it would win him some salvation. He knew before he arrived that the foundation was going to be live-streaming his event, but what he didn't know until he turned up, was that they'd erected a giant screen Twitter feed right next to his head. (Laughter) Another one in a monitor screen in his eye line.I don't think the foundation did this because they were monstrous. I think they were clueless: I think this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality.And here were some of the Tweets that were cascading into his eye line, as he was trying to apologize:""Jonah Lehrer, boring us into forgiving him."" (Laughter)And, ""Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame.""That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern.And, ""Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath.""That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, ""Bored! Sociopath!"" (Laughter)You know, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges.Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water.Let me tell you a story. It's about a woman called Justine Sacco. She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers, and she'd Tweet little acerbic jokes to them, like this one on a plane from New York to London: [Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant."" -Inner monologue as inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.] So Justine chuckled to herself, and pressed send, and got no replies, and felt that sad feeling that we all feel when the Internet doesn't congratulate us for being funny. (Laughter) Black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. And then she got to Heathrow, and she had a little time to spare before her final leg, so she thought up another funny little acerbic joke:[Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!]And she chuckled to herself, pressed send, got on the plane, got no replies, turned off her phone, fell asleep, woke up 11 hours later, turned on her phone while the plane was taxiing on the runway, and straightaway there was a message from somebody that she hadn't spoken to since high school, that said, ""I am so sorry to see what's happening to you."" And then another message from a best friend, ""You need to call me right now. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter."" (Laughter)What had happened is that one of her 170 followers had sent the Tweet to a Gawker journalist, and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers: [And now, a funny holiday joke from IAC's PR boss] And then it was like a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, I talked to the Gawker journalist. I emailed him and asked him how it felt, and he said, ""It felt delicious."" And then he said, ""But I'm sure she's fine.""But she wasn't fine, because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it piece by piece. First there were the philanthropists: [If @JustineSacco's unfortunate words ... bother you, join me in supporting @CARE's work in Africa.] [In light of ... disgusting, racist tweet, I'm donating to @care today] Then came the beyond horrified: [... no words for that horribly disgusting racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified.]Was anybody on Twitter that night? A few of you. Did Justine's joke overwhelm your Twitter feed the way it did mine? It did mine, and I thought what everybody thought that night, which was, ""Wow, somebody's screwed! Somebody's life is about to get terrible!"" And I sat up in my bed, and I put the pillow behind my head, and then I thought, I'm not entirely sure that joke was intended to be racist. Maybe instead of gleefully flaunting her privilege, she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege. There's a comedy tradition of this, like South Park or Colbert or Randy Newman. Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was not being as good at it as Randy Newman. In fact, when I met Justine a couple of weeks later in a bar, she was just crushed, and I asked her to explain the joke, and she said, ""Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making of fun of that bubble.""You know, another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, ""I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist,"" and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, ""Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too."" And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart.It started to get darker: [Everyone go report this cunt @JustineSacco] Then came the calls for her to be fired. [Good luck with the job hunt in the new year. #GettingFired] Thousands of people around the world decided it was their duty to get her fired. [@JustineSacco last tweet of your career. #SorryNotSorry Corporations got involved, hoping to sell their products on the back of Justine's annihilation: [Next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight!] (Laughter)A lot of companies were making good money that night. You know, Justine's name was normally Googled 40 times a month. That month, between December the 20th and the end of December, her name was Googled 1,220,000 times. And one Internet economist told me that that meant that Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming — we got nothing. (Laughter) We were like unpaid shaming interns for Google. (Laughter)And then came the trolls: [I'm actually kind of hoping Justine Sacco gets aids? lol] Somebody else on that wrote, ""Somebody HIV-positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS."" And that person got a free pass. Nobody went after that person. We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. Justine was really uniting a lot of disparate groups that night, from philanthropists to ""rape the bitch."" [@JustineSacco I hope you get fired! You demented bitch... Just let the world know you're planning to ride bare back while in Africa.]Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, ""I'm going to get you fired."" When a woman gets shamed, it's, ""I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus.""And then Justine's employers got involved: [IAC on @JustineSacco tweet: This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.] And that's when the anger turned to excitement: [All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail. #fired] [Oh man, @justinesacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands.] [We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired.] What we had was a delightful narrative arc. We knew something that Justine didn't. Can you think of anything less judicial than this? Justine was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself, and her inability was a huge part of the hilarity. On Twitter that night, we were like toddlers crawling towards a gun. Somebody worked out exactly which plane she was on, so they linked to a flight tracker website. [British Airways Flight 43 On-time - arrives in 1 hour 34 minutes] A hashtag began trending worldwide: # hasJustineLandedYet? [It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasJustineLandedYet] [Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can't look away. Can't leave.] [#HasJustineLandedYet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night.] [Is no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures] And guess what? Yes there was. [@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. And if you want to know what it looks like to discover that you've just been torn to shreds because of a misconstrued liberal joke, not by trolls, but by nice people like us, this is what it looks like: [... She's decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.]So why did we do it? I think some people were genuinely upset, but I think for other people, it's because Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston Review, ""This isn't social justice. It's a cathartic alternative.""For the past three years, I've been going around the world meeting people like Justine Sacco — and believe me, there's a lot of people like Justine Sacco. There's more every day. And we want to think they're fine, but they're not fine. The people I met were mangled. They talked to me about depression, and anxiety and insomnia and suicidal thoughts. One woman I talked to, who also told a joke that landed badly, she stayed home for a year and a half. Before that, she worked with adults with learning difficulties, and was apparently really good at her job.Justine was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. But it was worse than that. She was losing herself. She was waking up in the middle of the night, forgetting who she was. She was got because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. And of course, that's a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But the phrase ""misuse of privilege"" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.Justine had 170 Twitter followers, and so to make it work, she had to be fictionalized. Word got around that she was the daughter the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco. [Let us not be fooled by #JustineSacco her father is a SA mining billionaire. She's not sorry. And neither is her father.] I thought that was true about Justine, until I met her at a bar, and I asked her about her billionaire father, and she said, ""My father sells carpets.""And I think back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, ""Oh my God, I'm exactly the same."" These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil.Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.Let's not do that.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon.Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno.BG: Don't go away. What strikes me about Justine's story is also the fact that if you Google her name today, this story covers the first 100 pages of Google results — there is nothing else about her. In your book, you mention another story of another victim who actually got taken on by a reputation management firm, and by creating blogs and posting nice, innocuous stories about her love for cats and holidays and stuff, managed to get the story off the first couple pages of Google results, but it didn't last long. A couple of weeks later, they started creeping back up to the top result. Is this a totally lost battle?Jon Ronson: You know, I think the very best thing we can do, if you see a kind of unfair or an ambiguous shaming, is to speak up, because I think the worst thing that happened to Justine was that nobody supported her — like, everyone was against her, and that is profoundly traumatizing, to be told by tens of thousands of people that you need to get out. But if a shaming happens and there's a babble of voices, like in a democracy, where people are discussing it, I think that's much less damaging. So I think that's the way forward, but it's hard, because if you do stand up for somebody, it's incredibly unpleasant.BG: So let's talk about your experience, because you stood up by writing this book. By the way, it's mandatory reading for everybody, okay? You stood up because the book actually puts the spotlight on shamers. And I assume you didn't only have friendly reactions on Twitter.JR: It didn't go down that well with some people. (Laughter) I mean, you don't want to just concentrate — because lots of people understood, and were really nice about the book. But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, ""We are the powerful people abusing our power now,"" I get people saying, ""Well you must be a racist too.""BG: So the other night — yesterday — we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table — and that was a nice, constructive discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge of insults.JR: Yeah. This happened last night. We had like a TED dinner last night. We were chatting and it was lovely and nice, and I decided to check Twitter. Somebody said, ""You are a white supremacist."" And then I went back and had a nice conversation with somebody, and then I went back to Twitter, somebody said my very existence made the world a worse place. My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the Internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I'm starting to think of that as a really nice option.BG: Jon, thank you. JR: Thank you, Bruno.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_what_happens_when_online_shaming_spirals_out_of_control
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"So on my way here, the passenger next to me and I had a very interesting conversation during my flight. He told me, ""It seems like the United States has run out of jobs, because they're just making some up: cat psychologist, dog whisperer, tornado chaser.""A couple of seconds later, he asked me, ""So what do you do?""And I was like, ""Peacebuilder?"" (Laughter)Every day, I work to amplify the voices of women and to highlight their experiences and their participation in peace processes and conflict resolution, and because of my work, I recognize that the only way to ensure the full participation of women globally is by reclaiming religion.Now, this matter is vitally important to me. As a young Muslim woman, I am very proud of my faith. It gives me the strength and conviction to do my work every day. It's the reason I can be here in front of you. But I can't overlook the damage that has been done in the name of religion, not just my own, but all of the world's major faiths. The misrepresentation and misuse and manipulation of religious scripture has influenced our social and cultural norms, our laws, our daily lives, to a point where we sometimes don't recognize it.My parents moved from Libya, North Africa, to Canada in the early 1980s, and I am the middle child of 11 children. Yes, 11. But growing up, I saw my parents, both religiously devout and spiritual people, pray and praise God for their blessings, namely me of course, but among others. (Laughter) They were kind and funny and patient, limitlessly patient, the kind of patience that having 11 kids forces you to have. And they were fair. I was never subjected to religion through a cultural lens. I was treated the same, the same was expected of me. I was never taught that God judged differently based on gender. And my parents' understanding of God as a merciful and beneficial friend and provider shaped the way I looked at the world.Now, of course, my upbringing had additional benefits. Being one of 11 children is Diplomacy 101. (Laughter) To this day, I am asked where I went to school, like, ""Did you go to Kennedy School of Government?"" and I look at them and I'm like, ""No, I went to the Murabit School of International Affairs."" It's extremely exclusive. You would have to talk to my mom to get in. Lucky for you, she's here. But being one of 11 children and having 10 siblings teaches you a lot about power structures and alliances. It teaches you focus; you have to talk fast or say less, because you will always get cut off. It teaches you the importance of messaging. You have to ask questions in the right way to get the answers you know you want, and you have to say no in the right way to keep the peace.But the most important lesson I learned growing up was the importance of being at the table. When my mom's favorite lamp broke, I had to be there when she was trying to find out how and by who, because I had to defend myself, because if you're not, then the finger is pointed at you, and before you know it, you will be grounded. I am not speaking from experience, of course.When I was 15 in 2005, I completed high school and I moved from Canada — Saskatoon — to Zawiya, my parents' hometown in Libya, a very traditional city. Mind you, I had only ever been to Libya before on vacation, and as a seven-year-old girl, it was magic. It was ice cream and trips to the beach and really excited relatives.Turns out it's not the same as a 15-year-old young lady. I very quickly became introduced to the cultural aspect of religion. The words ""haram"" — meaning religiously prohibited — and ""aib"" — meaning culturally inappropriate — were exchanged carelessly, as if they meant the same thing and had the same consequences. And I found myself in conversation after conversation with classmates and colleagues, professors, friends, even relatives, beginning to question my own role and my own aspirations. And even with the foundation my parents had provided for me, I found myself questioning the role of women in my faith.So at the Murabit School of International Affairs, we go very heavy on the debate, and rule number one is do your research, so that's what I did, and it surprised me how easy it was to find women in my faith who were leaders, who were innovative, who were strong — politically, economically, even militarily. Khadija financed the Islamic movement in its infancy. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for her. So why weren't we learning about her? Why weren't we learning about these women? Why were women being relegated to positions which predated the teachings of our faith? And why, if we are equal in the eyes of God, are we not equal in the eyes of men?To me, it all came back to the lessons I had learned as a child. The decision maker, the person who gets to control the message, is sitting at the table, and unfortunately, in every single world faith, they are not women. Religious institutions are dominated by men and driven by male leadership, and they create policies in their likeness, and until we can change the system entirely, then we can't realistically expect to have full economic and political participation of women. Our foundation is broken. My mom actually says, you can't build a straight house on a crooked foundation.In 2011, the Libyan revolution broke out, and my family was on the front lines. And there's this amazing thing that happens in war, a cultural shift almost, very temporary. And it was the first time that I felt it was not only acceptable for me to be involved, but it was encouraged. It was demanded. Myself and other women had a seat at the table. We weren't holding hands or a medium. We were part of decision making. We were information sharing. We were crucial. And I wanted and needed for that change to be permanent.Turns out, that's not that easy. It only took a few weeks before the women that I had previously worked with were returning back to their previous roles, and most of them were driven by words of encouragement from religious and political leaders, most of whom cited religious scripture as their defense. It's how they gained popular support for their opinions.So initially, I focused on the economic and political empowerment of women. I thought that would lead to cultural and social change. It turns out, it does a little, but not a lot. I decided to use their defense as my offense, and I began to cite and highlight Islamic scripture as well.In 2012 and 2013, my organization led the single largest and most widespread campaign in Libya. We entered homes and schools and universities, even mosques. We spoke to 50,000 people directly, and hundreds of thousands more through billboards and television commercials, radio commercials and posters.And you're probably wondering how a women's rights organization was able to do this in communities which had previously opposed our sheer existence. I used scripture. I used verses from the Quran and sayings of the Prophet, Hadiths, his sayings which are, for example, ""The best of you is the best to their family."" ""Do not let your brother oppress another."" For the first time, Friday sermons led by local community imams promoted the rights of women. They discussed taboo issues, like domestic violence. Policies were changed. In certain communities, we actually had to go as far as saying the International Human Rights Declaration, which you opposed because it wasn't written by religious scholars, well, those same principles are in our book. So really, the United Nations just copied us.By changing the message, we were able to provide an alternative narrative which promoted the rights of women in Libya. It's something that has now been replicated internationally, and while I am not saying it's easy — believe me, it's not. Liberals will say you're using religion and call you a bad conservative. Conservatives will call you a lot of colorful things. I've heard everything from, ""Your parents must be extremely ashamed of you"" — false; they're my biggest fans — to ""You will not make it to your next birthday"" — again wrong, because I did. And I remain a very strong believer that women's rights and religion are not mutually exclusive. But we have to be at the table. We have to stop giving up our position, because by remaining silent, we allow for the continued persecution and abuse of women worldwide. By saying that we're going to fight for women's rights and fight extremism with bombs and warfare, we completely cripple local societies which need to address these issues so that they're sustainable.It is not easy, challenging distorted religious messaging. You will have your fair share of insults and ridicule and threats. But we have to do it. We have no other option than to reclaim the message of human rights, the principles of our faith, not for us, not for the women in your families, not for the women in this room, not even for the women out there, but for societies that would be transformed with the participation of women. And the only way we can do that, our only option, is to be, and remain, at the table.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alaa_murabit_what_my_religion_really_says_about_women
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"This is a map of New York State that was made in 1937 by the General Drafting Company. It's an extremely famous map among cartography nerds, because down here at the bottom of the Catskill Mountains, there is a little town called Roscoe — actually, this will go easier if I just put it up here — There's Roscoe, and then right above Roscoe is Rockland, New York, and then right above that is the tiny town of Agloe, New York.Agloe, New York, is very famous to cartographers, because it's a paper town. It's also known as a copyright trap. Mapmakers — because my map of New York and your map of New York are going to look very similar, on account of the shape of New York — often, mapmakers will insert fake places onto their maps, in order to protect their copyright. Because then, if my fake place shows up on your map, I can be well and truly sure that you have robbed me. Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials of the two guys who made this map, Ernest Alpers and Otto [G.] Lindberg, and they released this map in 1937. Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map with Agloe, New York, on it, at the same exact intersection of two dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. Well, you can imagine the delight over at General Drafting. They immediately call Rand McNally, and they say, ""We've caught you! We made Agloe, New York, up. It is a fake place. It's a paper town. We're going to sue your pants off!"" And Rand McNally says, ""No, no, no, no, Agloe is real."" Because people kept going to that intersection of two dirt roads —(Laughter)in the middle of nowhere, expecting there to be a place called Agloe — someone built a place called Agloe, New York.(Laughter)It had a gas station, a general store, two houses at its peak.(Laughter)And this is of course a completely irresistible metaphor to a novelist, because we would all like to believe that the stuff that we write down on paper can change the actual world in which we're actually living, which is why my third book is called ""Paper Towns"".But what interests me ultimately more than the medium in which this happened, is the phenomenon itself. It's easy enough to say that the world shapes our maps of the world, right? Like the overall shape of the world is obviously going to affect our maps. But what I find a lot more interesting is the way that the manner in which we map the world changes the world. Because the world would truly be a different place if North were down. And the world would be a truly different place if Alaska and Russia weren't on opposite sides of the map. And the world would be a different place if we projected Europe to show it in its actual size. The world is changed by our maps of the world. The way that we choose — sort of, our personal cartographic enterprise, also shapes the map of our lives, and that in turn shapes our lives.I believe that what we map changes the life we lead. And I don't mean that in some, like, secret-y Oprah's Angels network, like, you-can-think-your-way- out-of-cancer sense. But I do believe that while maps don't show you where you will go in your life, they show you where you might go. You very rarely go to a place that isn't on your personal map.So I was a really terrible student when I was a kid. My GPA was consistently in the low 2s. And I think the reason that I was such a terrible student is that I felt like education was just a series of hurdles that had been erected before me, and I had to jump over in order to achieve adulthood. And I didn't really want to jump over these hurdles, because they seemed completely arbitrary, so I often wouldn't, and then people would threaten me, you know, they'd threaten me with this ""going on [my] permanent record,"" or ""You'll never get a good job."" I didn't want a good job! As far as I could tell at eleven or twelve years old, like, people with good jobs woke up very early in the morning,(Laughter)and the men who had good jobs, one of the first things they did was tie a strangulation item of clothing around their necks. They literally put nooses on themselves, and then they went off to their jobs, whatever they were. That's not a recipe for a happy life. These people — in my, symbol-obsessed, twelve year-old imagination — these people who are strangling themselves as one of the first things they do each morning, they can't possibly be happy. Why would I want to jump over all of these hurdles and have that be the end? That's a terrible end!And then, when I was in tenth grade, I went to this school, Indian Springs School, a small boarding school, outside of Birmingham, Alabama. And all at once I became a learner. And I became a learner, because I found myself in a community of learners. I found myself surrounded by people who celebrated intellectualism and engagement, and who thought that my ironic oh-so-cool disengagement wasn't clever, or funny, but, like, it was a simple and unspectacular response to very complicated and compelling problems. And so I started to learn, because learning was cool. I learned that some infinite sets are bigger than other infinite sets, and I learned that iambic pentameter is and why it sounds so good to human ears. I learned that the Civil War was a nationalizing conflict, I learned some physics, I learned that correlation shouldn't be confused with causation — all of these things, by the way, enriched my life on a literally daily basis. And it's true that I don't use most of them for my ""job,"" but that's not what it's about for me. It's about cartography.What is the process of cartography? It's, you know, sailing upon some land, and thinking, ""I think I'll draw that bit of land,"" and then wondering, ""Maybe there's some more land to draw."" And that's when learning really began for me. It's true that I had teachers that didn't give up on me, and I was very fortunate to have those teachers, because I often gave them cause to think there was no reason to invest in me. But a lot of the learning that I did in high school wasn't about what happened inside the classroom, it was about what happened outside of the classroom. For instance, I can tell you that ""There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons — That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes —"" not because I memorized Emily Dickinson in school when I was in high school, but because there was a girl when I was in high school, and her name was Amanda, and I had a crush on her, and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry. The reason I can tell you what opportunity cost is, is because one day when I was playing Super Mario Kart on my couch, my friend Emmet walked in, and he said, ""How long have you been playing Super Mario Kart?"" And I said, ""I don't know, like, six hours?"" and he said, ""Do you realize that if you'd worked at Baskin-Robbins those six hours, you could have made 30 dollars, so in some ways, you just paid thirty dollars to play Super Mario Kart."" And I was, like, ""I'll take that deal.""(Laughter)But I learned what opportunity cost is.And along the way, the map of my life got better. It got bigger; it contained more places. There were more things that might happen, more futures I might have. It wasn't a formal, organized learning process, and I'm happy to admit that. It was spotty, it was inconsistent, there was a lot I didn't know. I might know, you know, Cantor's idea that some infinite sets are larger than other infinite sets, but I didn't really understand the calculus behind that idea. I might know the idea of opportunity cost, but I didn't know the law of diminishing returns. But the great thing about imagining learning as cartography, instead of imagining it as arbitrary hurdles that you have to jump over, is that you see a bit of coastline, and that makes you want to see more. And so now I do know at least some of the calculus that underlies all of that stuff.So, I had one learning community in high school, then I went to another for college, and then I went to another, when I started working at a magazine called ""Booklist,"" where I was an assistant, surrounded by astonishingly well-read people. And then I wrote a book. And like all authors dream of doing, I promptly quit my job.(Laughter)And for the first time since high school, I found myself without a learning community, and it was miserable. I hated it. I read many, many books during this two-year period. I read books about Stalin, and books about how the Uzbek people came to identify as Muslims, and I read books about how to make atomic bombs, but it just felt like I was creating my own hurdles, and then jumping over them myself, instead of feeling the excitement of being part of a community of learners, a community of people who are engaged together in the cartographic enterprise of trying to better understand and map the world around us.And then, in 2006, I met that guy. His name is Ze Frank. I didn't actually meet him, just on the Internet. Ze Frank was running, at the time, a show called ""The Show with Ze Frank,"" and I discovered the show, and that was my way back into being a community learner again. Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas:(Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built in the middle of a huge, hot desert. Almost everything here was brought from somewhere else — the sort of rocks, the trees, the waterfalls. These fish are almost as out of place as my pig that flew. Contrasted to the scorching desert that surrounds this place, so are these people. Things from all over the world have been rebuilt here, away from their histories, and away from the people that experience them differently. Sometimes improvements were made — even the Sphinx got a nose job. Here, there's no reason to feel like you're missing anything. This New York means the same to me as it does to everyone else. Everything is out of context, and that means context allows for everything: Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef. This fabrication of place could be one of the world's greatest achievements, because no one belongs here; everyone does. As I walked around this morning, I noticed most of the buildings were huge mirrors reflecting the sun back into the desert. But unlike most mirrors, which present you with an outside view of yourself embedded in a place, these mirrors come back empty.John Green: Makes me nostalgic for the days when you could see the pixels in online video.(Laughter)Ze isn't just a great public intellectual, he's also a brilliant community builder, and the community of people that built up around these videos was in many ways a community of learners. So we played Ze Frank at chess collaboratively, and we beat him. We organized ourselves to take a young man on a road trip across the United States. We turned the Earth into a sandwich, by having one person hold a piece of bread at one point on the Earth, and on the exact opposite point of the Earth, have another person holding a piece of bread. I realize that these are silly ideas, but they are also ""learny"" ideas, and that was what was so exciting to me, and if you go online, you can find communities like this all over the place. Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr, and yes, you will see people complaining about calculus, but you'll also see people re-blogging those complaints, making the argument that calculus is interesting and beautiful, and here's a way in to thinking about the problem that you find unsolvable. You can go to places like Reddit, and find sub-Reddits, like ""Ask a Historian"" or ""Ask Science,"" where you can ask people who are in these fields a wide range of questions, from very serious ones to very silly ones. But to me, the most interesting communities of learners that are growing up on the Internet right now are on YouTube, and admittedly, I am biased. But I think in a lot of ways, the YouTube page resembles a classroom. Look for instance at ""Minute Physics,"" a guy who's teaching the world about physics:(Video) Let's cut to the chase. As of July 4, 2012, the Higgs boson is the last fundamental piece of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered experimentally. But, you might ask, why was the Higgs boson included in the standard model, alongside well-known particles like electrons and photons and quarks, if it hadn't been discovered back then in the 1970s? Good question. There are two main reasons. First, just like the electron is an excitation in the electron field, the Higgs boson is simply a particle which is an excitation of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field. The Higgs field in turn plays an integral role in our model for the weak nuclear force. In particular, the Higgs field helps explain why it's so weak. We'll talk more about this in a later video, but even though weak nuclear theory was confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations, the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled with the weak force, that until now we've been unable to confirm its actual and independent existence.JG: Or here's a video that I made as part of my show ""Crash Course,"" talking about World War I:(Video) The immediate cause was of course the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Quick aside: It's worth noting that the first big war of the twentieth century began with an act of terrorism. So Franz Ferdinand wasn't particularly well-liked by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph — now that is a mustache! But even so, the assassination led Austria to issue an ultimatum to Serbia, whereupon Serbia accepted some, but not all, of Austria's demands, leading Austria to declare war against Serbia. And then Russia, due to its alliance with the Serbs, mobilized its army. Germany, because it had an alliance with Austria, told Russia to stop mobilizing, which Russia failed to do, so then Germany mobilized its own army, declared war on Russia, cemented an alliance with the Ottomans, and then declared war on France, because, you know, France.(Laughter)And it's not just physics and world history that people are choosing to learn through YouTube. Here's a video about abstract mathematics.(Video) So you're me, and you're in math class yet again, because they make you go every single day. And you're learning about, I don't know, the sums of infinite series. That's a high school topic, right? Which is odd, because it's a cool topic, but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway. So I guess that's why they allow infinite series in the curriculum. So, in a quite understandable need for distraction, you're doodling and thinking more about what the plural of ""series"" should be than about the topic at hand: ""serieses,"" ""seriese,"" ""seriesen,"" and ""serii?"" Or is it that the singular should be changed: one ""serie,"" or ""serum,"" just like the singular of ""sheep"" should be ""shoop."" But the whole concept of things like 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on approaches one, is useful if, say, you want to draw a line of elephants, each holding the tail of the next one: normal elephant, young elephant, baby elephant, dog-sized elephant, puppy-sized elephant, all the way down to Mr. Tusks and beyond. Which is at least a tiny bit awesome, because you can get an infinite number of elephants in a line, and still have it fit across a single notebook page.JG: And lastly, here's Destin, from ""Smarter Every Day,"" talking about the conservation of angular momentum, and, since it's YouTube, cats:(Video) Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to ""Smarter Every Day."" So you've probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet. Today's question is: why? Like most simple questions, there's a very complex answer. For instance, let me reword this question: How does a cat go from feet-up to feet-down in a falling reference frame, without violating the conservation of angular momentum?(Laughter)JG: So, here's something all four of these videos have in common: They all have more than half a million views on YouTube. And those are people watching not in classrooms, but because they are part of the communities of learning that are being set up by these channels. And I said earlier that YouTube is like a classroom to me, and in many ways it is, because here is the instructor — it's like the old-fashioned classroom: here's the instructor, and then beneath the instructor are the students, and they're all having a conversation. And I know that YouTube comments have a very bad reputation in the world of the Internet, but in fact, if you go on comments for these channels, what you'll find is people engaging the subject matter, asking difficult, complicated questions that are about the subject matter, and then other people answering those questions. And because the YouTube page is set up so that the page in which I'm talking to you is on the exact — the place where I'm talking to you is on the exact same page as your comments, you are participating in a live and real and active way in the conversation. And because I'm in comments usually, I get to participate with you. And you find this whether it's world history, or mathematics, or science, or whatever it is.You also see young people using the tools and the sort of genres of the Internet in order to create places for intellectual engagement, instead of the ironic detachment that maybe most of us associate with memes and other Internet conventions — you know, ""Got bored. Invented calculus."" Or, here's Honey Boo Boo criticizing industrial capitalism:[""Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.""]In case you can't see what she says ... yeah.I really believe that these spaces, these communities, have become for a new generation of learners, the kind of communities, the kind of cartographic communities that I had when I was in high school, and then again when I was in college. And as an adult, re-finding these communities has re-introduced me to a community of learners, and has encouraged me to continue to be a learner even in my adulthood, so that I no longer feel like learning is something reserved for the young. Vi Hart and ""Minute Physics"" introduced me to all kinds of things that I didn't know before. And I know that we all hearken back to the days of the Parisian salon in the Enlightenment, or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish, ""Oh, I wish I could have been a part of that, I wish I could have laughed at Dorothy Parker's jokes."" But I'm here to tell you that these places exist, they still exist. They exist in corners of the Internet, where old men fear to tread.(Laughter)And I truly, truly believe that when we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s, when we made Agloe real, we were just getting started.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_green_the_nerd_s_guide_to_learning_everything_online
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"In 2012, when I painted the minaret of Jara Mosque in my hometown of Gabés, in the south of Tunisia, I never thought that graffiti would bring so much attention to a city.At the beginning, I was just looking for a wall in my hometown, and it happened that the minaret was built in '94. And for 18 years, those 57 meters of concrete stayed grey. When I met the imam for the first time, and I told him what I wanted to do, he was like, ""Thank God you finally came,"" and he told me that for years he was waiting for somebody to do something on it. The most amazing thing about this imam is that he didn't ask me anything — neither a sketch, or what I was going to write.In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of calligraffiti — a mix of calligraphy and graffiti. I use quotes or poetry. For the minaret, I thought that the most relevant message to be put on a mosque should come from the Quran, so I picked this verse: ""Oh humankind, we have created you from a male and a female, and made you people and tribe, so you may know each other."" It was a universal call for peace, tolerance, and acceptance coming from the side that we don't usually portray in a good way in the media.I was amazed to see how the local community reacted to the painting, and how it made them proud to see the minaret getting so much attention from international press all around the world. For the imam, it was not just the painting; it was really deeper than that. He hoped that this minaret would become a monument for the city, and attract people to this forgotten place of Tunisia. The universality of the message, the political context of Tunisia at this time, and the fact that I was writing Quran in a graffiti way were not insignificant. It reunited the community.Bringing people, future generations, together through Arabic calligraphy is what I do. Writing messages is the essence of my artwork. What is funny, actually, is that even Arabic-speaking people really need to focus a lot to decipher what I'm writing. You don't need to know the meaning to feel the piece. I think that Arabic script touches your soul before it reaches your eyes. There is a beauty in it that you don't need to translate. Arabic script speaks to anyone, I believe; to you, to you, to you, to anybody, and then when you get the meaning, you feel connected to it. I always make sure to write messages that are relevant to the place where I'm painting, but messages that have a universal dimension, so anybody around the world can connect to it.I was born and raised in France, in Paris, and I started learning how to write and read Arabic when I was 18. Today I only write messages in Arabic. One of the reasons this is so important to me, is because of all the reaction that I've experienced all around the world.In Rio de Janeiro, I translated this Portuguese poem from Gabriela Tôrres Barbosa, who was giving an homage to the poor people of the favela, and then I painted it on the rooftop. The local community were really intrigued by what I was doing, but as soon as I gave them the meaning of the calligraphy, they thanked me, as they felt connected to the piece.In South Africa, in Cape Town, the local community of Philippi offered me the only concrete wall of the slum. It was a school, and I wrote on it a quote from Nelson Mandela, saying, ""[in Arabic],"" which means, ""It seems impossible until it's done."" Then this guy came to me and said, ""Man, why you don't write in English?"" and I replied to him, ""I would consider your concern legit if you asked me why I didn't write in Zulu.""In Paris, once, there was this event, and someone gave his wall to be painted. And when he saw I was painting in Arabic, he got so mad — actually, hysterical — and he asked for the wall to be erased. I was mad and disappointed. But a week later, the organizer of the event asked me to come back, and he told me that there was a wall right in front of this guy's house. So, this guy — (Laughter) like, was forced to see it every day. At the beginning, I was going to write, ""[In Arabic],"" which means, ""In your face,"" but — (Laughter) I decided to be smarter and I wrote, ""[In Arabic],"" which means, ""Open your heart.""I'm really proud of my culture, and I'm trying to be an ambassador of it through my artwork. And I hope that I can break the stereotypes we all know, with the beauty of Arabic script. Today, I don't write the translation of the message anymore on the wall. I don't want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken, as it's art and you can appreciate it without knowing the meaning, as you can enjoy any music from other countries. Some people see that as a rejection or a closed door, but for me, it's more an invitation — to my language, to my culture, and to my art.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/el_seed_street_art_with_a_message_of_hope_and_peace
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"Seventy-thousand years ago, our ancestors were insignificant animals. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. Their impact on the world was not much greater than that of jellyfish or fireflies or woodpeckers. Today, in contrast, we control this planet. And the question is: How did we come from there to here? How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes, minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of planet Earth?Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level. We want to believe — I want to believe — that there is something special about me, about my body, about my brain, that makes me so superior to a dog or a pig, or a chimpanzee. But the truth is that, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. And if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island, and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bet on the chimpanzee, not on myself. And this is not something wrong with me personally. I guess if they took almost any one of you, and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some island, the chimpanzee would do much better.The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level; it's on the collective level. Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. Now, there are other animals — like the social insects, the bees, the ants — that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don't do so flexibly. Their cooperation is very rigid. There is basically just one way in which a beehive can function. And if there's a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees, or a communist dictatorship of worker bees.Other animals, like the social mammals — the wolves, the elephants, the dolphins, the chimpanzees — they can cooperate much more flexibly, but they do so only in small numbers, because cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge, one of the other. I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee, and I want to cooperate with you. I need to know you personally. What kind of chimpanzee are you? Are you a nice chimpanzee? Are you an evil chimpanzee? Are you trustworthy? If I don't know you, how can I cooperate with you?The only animal that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us, Homo sapiens. One versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tienanmen Square or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. Complete madness.In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos, usually. What we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now: I'm standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. Similarly, I don't really know all the people who have organized and worked on this event. I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here, yesterday, to London. I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras, which are recording what I'm saying. I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I read in preparation for this talk. And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the Internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi.Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas. This is something chimpanzees cannot do. They communicate, of course, but you will never catch a chimpanzee traveling to some distant chimpanzee band to give them a talk about bananas or about elephants, or anything else that might interest chimpanzees. Now cooperation is, of course, not always nice; all the horrible things humans have been doing throughout history — and we have been doing some very horrible things — all those things are also based on large-scale cooperation. Prisons are a system of cooperation; slaughterhouses are a system of cooperation; concentration camps are a system of cooperation. Chimpanzees don't have slaughterhouses and prisons and concentration camps.Now suppose I've managed to convince you perhaps that yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive listener is: How, exactly, do we do it? What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. A chimpanzee may say, ""Look! There's a lion, let's run away!"" Or, ""Look! There's a banana tree over there! Let's go and get bananas!"" Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. A human can say, ""Look, there is a god above the clouds! And if you don't do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell."" And if you all believe this story that I've invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. This is something only humans can do. You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him, ""... after you die, you'll go to chimpanzee heaven ..."" (Laughter) ""... and you'll receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds. So now give me this banana."" No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story. Only humans believe such stories, which is why we control the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.Now you may find it acceptable that yes, in the religious field, humans cooperate by believing in the same fictions. Millions of people come together to build a cathedral or a mosque or fight in a crusade or a jihad, because they all believe in the same stories about God and heaven and hell. But what I want to emphasize is that exactly the same mechanism underlies all other forms of mass-scale human cooperation, not only in the religious field.Take, for example, the legal field. Most legal systems today in the world are based on a belief in human rights. But what are human rights? Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens. Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won't find any rights. The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries. They may be very positive stories, very good stories, but they're still just fictional stories that we've invented.The same is true of the political field. The most important factors in modern politics are states and nations. But what are states and nations? They are not an objective reality. A mountain is an objective reality. You can see it, you can touch it, you can even smell it. But a nation or a state, like Israel or Iran or France or Germany, this is just a story that we've invented and became extremely attached to.The same is true of the economic field. The most important actors today in the global economy are companies and corporations. Many of you today, perhaps, work for a corporation, like Google or Toyota or McDonald's. What exactly are these things? They are what lawyers call legal fictions. They are stories invented and maintained by the powerful wizards we call lawyers. (Laughter) And what do corporations do all day? Mostly, they try to make money. Yet, what is money? Again, money is not an objective reality; it has no objective value. Take this green piece of paper, the dollar bill. Look at it — it has no value. You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it, you cannot wear it. But then came along these master storytellers — the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers — and they tell us a very convincing story: ""Look, you see this green piece of paper? It is actually worth 10 bananas."" And if I believe it, and you believe it, and everybody believes it, it actually works. I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to the supermarket, give it to a complete stranger whom I've never met before, and get, in exchange, real bananas which I can actually eat. This is something amazing. You could never do it with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees trade, of course: ""Yes, you give me a coconut, I'll give you a banana."" That can work. But, you give me a worthless piece of paper and you except me to give you a banana? No way! What do you think I am, a human? (Laughter)Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in human rights, not everybody believes in nationalism, but everybody believes in money, and in the dollar bill. Take, even, Osama Bin Laden. He hated American politics and American religion and American culture, but he had no objection to American dollars. He was quite fond of them, actually. (Laughter)To conclude, then: We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. All other animals live in an objective reality. Their reality consists of objective entities, like rivers and trees and lions and elephants. We humans, we also live in an objective reality. In our world, too, there are rivers and trees and lions and elephants. But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations. And what is amazing is that as history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities. Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities, like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank — entities that exist only in our own imagination.Thank you. (Applause)Bruno Giussani: Yuval, you have a new book out. After Sapiens, you wrote another one, and it's out in Hebrew, but not yet translated into ...Yuval Noah Harari: I'm working on the translation as we speak.BG: In the book, if I understand it correctly, you argue that the amazing breakthroughs that we are experiencing right now not only will potentially make our lives better, but they will create — and I quote you — ""... new classes and new class struggles, just as the industrial revolution did."" Can you elaborate for us?YNH: Yes. In the industrial revolution, we saw the creation of a new class of the urban proletariat. And much of the political and social history of the last 200 years involved what to do with this class, and the new problems and opportunities. Now, we see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. (Laughter) As computers become better and better in more and more fields, there is a distinct possibility that computers will out-perform us in most tasks and will make humans redundant. And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be, ""What do we need humans for?"", or at least, ""What do we need so many humans for?""BG: Do you have an answer in the book?YNH: At present, the best guess we have is to keep them happy with drugs and computer games ... (Laughter) but this doesn't sound like a very appealing future.BG: Ok, so you're basically saying in the book and now, that for all the discussion about the growing evidence of significant economic inequality, we are just kind of at the beginning of the process?YNH: Again, it's not a prophecy; it's seeing all kinds of possibilities before us. One possibility is this creation of a new massive class of useless people. Another possibility is the division of humankind into different biological castes, with the rich being upgraded into virtual gods, and the poor being degraded to this level of useless people.BG: I feel there is another TED talk coming up in a year or two. Thank you, Yuval, for making the trip.YNH: Thanks! (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans
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"For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias. I document what these groups do when they're not shooting. My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation. I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library.Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed. It used to be a contest between states. No longer. It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors. For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor. So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful.So how do we do that? We need to know what makes these organizations tick. We know a lot about how they fight, why they fight, but no one looks at what they're doing when they're not fighting. Yet, armed struggle and unarmed politics are related. It is all part of the same organization. We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture.And armed groups today are complex organizations. Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel. But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus. Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007. So these groups do way more than just shoot. They multi-task. They set up complex communication machines — radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies. And up here, you have the ISIS magazine, printed in English and published to recruit. Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising — not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies. Now, these activities are keys. They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand.Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services. They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs. Hezbollah offers all of these services and more. Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security. The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security. Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population. But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength and their power. For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work.Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side. But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision. These groups are hybrid. They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance.And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state. Now, what do you call a group like Hezbollah? They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions, they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system. Is this a state? Is it a rebel group? Or maybe something else, something different and new? And what about ISIS? The lines are blurred. We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap. This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools. Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach. This also matters very much for peacemaking and peacebuilding. If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence.So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability. To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/benedetta_berti_the_surprising_way_groups_like_isis_stay_in_power
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"Imagine a place where your neighbors greet your children by name; a place with splendid vistas; a place where you can drive just 20 minutes and put your sailboat on the water. It's a seductive place, isn't it?I don't live there. (Laughter) But I did journey on a 27,000-mile trip for two years, to the fastest-growing and whitest counties in America.What is a Whitopia? I define Whitopia in three ways: First, a Whitopia has posted at least six percent population growth since 2000. Secondly, the majority of that growth comes from white migrants. And third, the Whitopia has an ineffable charm, a pleasant look and feel, a je Ne sais quoi. (Laughter)To learn how and why Whitopias are ticking, I immersed myself for several months apiece in three of them: first, St. George, Utah; second, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; and third, Forsyth County, Georgia.First stop, St. George — a beautiful town of red rock landscapes. In the 1850s, Brigham Young dispatched families to St. George to grow cotton because of the hot, arid climate. And so they called it Utah's Dixie, and the name sticks to this day. I approached my time in each Whitopia like an anthropologist. I made detailed spreadsheets of all the power brokers in the communities, who I needed to meet, where I needed to be, and I threw myself with gusto in these communities. I went to zoning board meetings, I went to Democratic clubs and Republican clubs. I went to poker nights. In St. George, I rented a home at the Entrada, one of the town's premier gated communities. There were no Motel 6's or Howard Johnsons for me. I lived in Whitopia as a resident, and not like a visitor.I rented myself this home by phone. (Laughter) (Applause)Golf is the perfect seductive symbol of Whitopia. When I went on my journey, I had barely ever held a golf club. By the time I left, I was golfing at least three times a week. (Laughter)Golf helps people bond. Some of the best interviews I ever scored during my trip were on the golf courses. One venture capitalist, for example, invited me to golf in his private club that had no minority members.I also went fishing. (Laughter) Because I had never fished, this fellow had to teach me how to cast my line and what bait to use.I also played poker every weekend. It was Texas Hold 'em with a $10 buy-in. My poker mates may have been bluffing about the hands that they drew, but they weren't bluffing about their social beliefs. Some of the most raw, salty conversations I ever had during my journey were at the poker table.I'm a gung ho entertainer. I love to cook, I hosted many dinner parties, and in return, people invited me to their dinner parties, and to their barbecues, and to their pool parties, and to their birthday parties.But it wasn't all fun. Immigration turned out to be a big issue in this Whitopia. The St. George's Citizens Council on Illegal Immigration held regular and active protests against immigration, and so what I gleaned from this Whitopia is what a hot debate this would become. It was a real-time preview, and so it has become.Next stop: Almost Heaven, a cabin I rented for myself in Coeur d'Alene, in the beautiful North Idaho panhandle. I rented this place for myself, also by phone. (Laughter)The book ""A Thousand Places To See Before You Die"" lists Coeur d'Alene — it's a gorgeous paradise for huntsmen, boatmen and fishermen.My growing golf skills came in handy in Coeur d'Alene. I golfed with retired LAPD cops. In 1993, around 11,000 families and cops fled Los Angeles after the L.A. racial unrest, for North Idaho, and they've built an expatriated community. Given the conservatism of these cops, there's no surprise that North Idaho has a strong gun culture. In fact, it is said, North Idaho has more gun dealers than gas stations. So what's a resident to do to fit in? I hit the gun club. When I rented a gun, the gentleman behind the counter was perfectly pleasant and kind, until I showed him my New York City driver's license. That's when he got nervous. I'm not as bad a shot as I thought I might have been.What I learned from North Idaho is the peculiar brand of paranoia that can permeate a community when so many cops and guns are around.In North Idaho, in my red pickup truck, I kept a notepad. And in that notepad I counted more Confederate flags than black people. In North Idaho, I found Confederate flags on key chains, on cellphone paraphernalia, and on cars.About a seven-minute drive from my hidden lake cabin was the compound of Aryan Nations, the white supremacist group. America's Promise Ministries, the religious arm of Aryan Nations, happened to have a three-day retreat during my visit. So I decided to crash it. (Laughter) I'm the only non-Aryan journalist I'm aware of ever to have done so. (Laughter) Among the many memorable episodes of that retreat... (Laughter) ...is when Abe, an Aryan, sidled up next to me. He slapped my knee, and he said, ""Hey Rich, I just want you to know one thing. We are not white supremacists. We are white separatists. We don't think we're better than you, we just want to be away from you."" (Laughter)Indeed, most white people in Whitopia are neither white supremacists or white separatists; in fact, they're not there for explicitly racial reasons at all. Rather, they emigrate there for friendliness, comfort, security, safety — reasons that they implicitly associate to whiteness in itself.Next stop was Georgia. In Georgia, I stayed in an exurb north of Atlanta. In Utah, I found poker; in Idaho, I found guns; in Georgia, I found God. (Laughter) The way that I immersed myself in this Whitopia was to become active at First Redeemer Church, a megachurch that's so huge that it has golf carts to escort the congregants around its many parking lots on campus. I was active in the youth ministry. And for me, personally, I was more comfortable in this Whitopia than say, in a Colorado, or an Idaho, or even a suburban Boston. That is because [there], in Georgia, white people and black people are more historically familiar to one another. I was less exotic in this Whitopia. (Laughter)But what does it all mean? Whitopian dreaming, Whitopia migration, is a push-pull phenomenon, full of alarming pushes and alluring pulls, and Whitopia operates at the level of conscious and unconscious bias. It's possible for people to be in Whitopia not for racist reasons, though it has racist outcomes. Many Whitopians feel pushed by illegals, social welfare abuse, minorities, density, crowded schools. Many Whitopians feel pulled by merit, freedom, the allure of privatism — privatized places, privatized people, privatized things. And I learned in Whitopia how a country can have racism without racists.Many of my smug urban liberal friends couldn't believe I would go on such a venture. The reality is that many white Americans are affable and kind. Interpersonal race relations — how we treat each other as human beings — are vastly better than in my parents' generation. Can you imagine me going to Whitopia 40 years ago? What a journey that would have been. (Laughter) And yet, some things haven't changed. America is as residentially and educationally segregated today as it was in 1970.As Americans, we often find ways to cook for each other, to dance with each other, to host with each other, but why can't that translate into how we treat each other as communities? It's a devastating irony, how we have gone forward as individuals, and backwards as communities.One of the Whitopian outlooks that really hit me was a proverbial saying: ""One black man is a delightful dinner guest; 50 black men is a ghetto.""One of the big contexts animating my Whitopian journey was the year 2042. By 2042, white people will no longer be the American majority. As such, will there be more Whitopias? In looking at this, the danger of Whitopia is that the more segregation we have, the less we can look at and confront conscious and unconscious bias.I ventured on my two-year, 27,000 mile journey to learn where, why, and how white people are fleeing, but I didn't expect to have so much fun on my journey. (Laughter) I didn't expect to learn so much about myself. I don't expect I'll be living in a Whitopia — or a Blacktopia, for that matter. I do plan to continue golfing every chance I get. (Laughter) And I'll just have to leave the guns and megachurches back in Whitopia.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rich_benjamin_my_road_trip_through_the_whitest_towns_in_america
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"There's this quote by activist and punk rock musician Jello Biafra that I love. He says, ""Don't hate the media. Be the media."" I'm an artist. I like working with media and technology because A, I'm familiar with them and I like the power they hold. And B, I hate them and I'm terrified of the power they hold.(Laughter)I remember watching, in 2003, an interview between Fox News host Tony Snow and then-US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. They were talking about the recent invasion of Iraq, and Rumsfeld is asked the question, ""Well, we're hear about our body counts, but we never hear about theirs, why?"" And Rumsfeld's answer is, ""Well, we don't do body counts on other people."" Right?It's estimated that between 150,000 to one million Iraqis, civilians, have died as a result of the US-led invasion in 2003. That number is in stark contrast with the 4,486 US service members who died during that same window of time. I wanted to do more than just bring awareness to this terrifying number. I wanted to create a monument for the individual civilians who died as a result of the invasion.Monuments to war, such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, are often enormous in scale. Very powerful and very one-sided. I wanted my monument to live in the world, and to circulate. I remember when I was a boy in school, my teacher assigned us this classic civics assignment where you take a sheet of paper and you write a member of your government. And we were told, if we wrote a really good letter, if we really thought about it, we would get back more than just a simple formed letter as a reply.This is my ""Notepad."" What looks like an everyday, yellow legal tablet of paper is actually a monument to the individual Iraqi civilians that died as a result of the US invasion. ""Notepad"" is an act of protest and an act of commemoration disguised as an everyday tablet of paper. The lines of the paper, when magnified, are revealed to be micro-printed text that contains the details, the names, the dates and locations of individual Iraqi civilians that died.So, for the last 5 years, I've been taking pads of this paper, tons of this stuff, and smuggling it into the stationery supplies of the United States and the Coalition governments.(Laughter)(Applause)I don't have to tell you guys this is not the place to discuss how I did that.(Laughter)But also, I've been meeting one-on-one with members and former members of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, who assisted in the invasion.And so, whenever I can, I meet with one of them, and I share the project with them. And last summer, I had the chance to meet with former United States Attorney General and Torture Memo author, Alberto Gonzales.(Video) Matt Kenyon: May I give this to you? This is a special legal tablet. It's actually part of an ongoing art project.Alberto Gonzalez: This is a special legal pad?MK: Yes. You won't believe me, but it's in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; I'm an artist.MK: And all of the lines of the paper are actually —AG: Are they going to disappear?MK: No, they're micro-printed text that contains the names of individual Iraqi civilians who have died since the invasion of Iraq.AG: Yeah. OK.AG: Thank you. MK: Thank you.(Laughter)The way he says ""thank you"" really creeps me out.(Laughter)OK, so I'd like each of you to look under your chairs. There's an envelope. And please open it. The paper you're holding in your hand contains the details of Iraqi civilians that died as result of the invasion. I'd like you to use this paper and write a member of government. You can help to smuggle this civilian body count into government archives. Because every letter that's sent in to the government, and this is all across the world, of course — every letter that is sent in is archived, filed and recorded. Together, we can put this in the mailboxes and under the noses of people in power. Everything that's sent in eventually becomes part of the permanent archive of our government, our shared historical record.Thank you.(Applause)Tom Rielly: So, tell me Matt, how did this idea come into your head, of ""Notepad""?Matt Kenyon: I'd just finished a project that dealt with the US Coalition side of the war and it was a black armband that was called the ""Improvised Empathetic Device"" which accumulated, in real time, the names, ranks, cause of death and location of US service members who had died overseas, and each time the Department of Defense or CENTCOM released their data, it would stab me in the arm. And so, I became aware that there was a spectacle associated with our own people who were dying overseas, but a disproportionate amount of casualties were the civilian casualties.TR: Thank you so much.MK: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_kenyon_how_i_snuck_a_memorial_for_iraqi_civilians_into_the_us_government
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"What do you do when you have a headache? You swallow an aspirin. But for this pill to get to your head, where the pain is, it goes through your stomach, intestines and various other organs first.Swallowing pills is the most effective and painless way of delivering any medication in the body. The downside, though, is that swallowing any medication leads to its dilution. And this is a big problem, particularly in HIV patients. When they take their anti-HIV drugs, these drugs are good for lowering the virus in the blood, and increasing the CD4 cell counts. But they are also notorious for their adverse side effects, but mostly bad, because they get diluted by the time they get to the blood, and worse, by the time they get to the sites where it matters most: within the HIV viral reservoirs. These areas in the body — such as the lymph nodes, the nervous system, as well as the lungs — where the virus is sleeping, and will not readily get delivered in the blood of patients that are under consistent anti-HIV drugs therapy. However, upon discontinuation of therapy, the virus can awake and infect new cells in the blood.Now, all this is a big problem in treating HIV with the current drug treatment, which is a life-long treatment that must be swallowed by patients. One day, I sat and thought, ""Can we deliver anti-HIV directly within its reservoir sites, without the risk of drug dilution?"" As a laser scientist, the answer was just before my eyes: Lasers, of course. If they can be used for dentistry, for diabetic wound-healing and surgery, they can be used for anything imaginable, including transporting drugs into cells.As a matter of fact, we are currently using laser pulses to poke or drill extremely tiny holes, which open and close almost immediately in HIV-infected cells, in order to deliver drugs within them. ""How is that possible?"" you may ask. Well, we shine a very powerful but super-tiny laser beam onto the membrane of HIV-infected cells while these cells are immersed in liquid containing the drug. The laser pierces the cell, while the cell swallows the drug in a matter of microseconds. Before you even know it, the induced hole becomes immediately repaired.Now, we are currently testing this technology in test tubes or in Petri dishes, but the goal is to get this technology in the human body, apply it in the human body. ""How is that possible?"" you may ask. Well, the answer is: through a three-headed device. Using the first head, which is our laser, we will make an incision in the site of infection. Using the second head, which is a camera, we meander to the site of infection. Finally, using a third head, which is a drug-spreading sprinkler, we deliver the drugs directly at the site of infection, while the laser is again used to poke those cells open.Well, this might not seem like much right now. But one day, if successful, this technology can lead to complete eradication of HIV in the body. Yes. A cure for HIV. This is every HIV researcher's dream — in our case, a cure lead by lasers.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patience_mthunzi_could_we_cure_hiv_with_lasers
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"Today, I want to talk to you about dreams.I have been a lucid dreamer my whole life, and it's cooler than in the movies. (Laughter) Beyond flying, breathing fire, and making hot men spontaneously appear ... (Laughter) I can do things like read and write music. Fun fact is that I wrote my personal statement to college in a dream. And I did accepted. So, yeah.I am a very visual thinker. I think in pictures, not words. To me, words are more like instincts and language.There are many people like me; Nikola Tesla, for example, who could visualize, design, test, and troubleshoot everything — all of his inventions — in his mind, accurately.Language is kind of exclusive to our species, anyway. I am a bit more primitive, like a beta version of Google Translate. (Laughter)My brain has the ability to hyper-focus on things that interest me. For example, once I had an affair with calculus that lasted longer than some celebrity marriages. (Laughter)There are some other unusual things about me. You may have noticed that I don't have much inflection in my voice. That's why people often confuse me with a GPS. (Laughter) This can make basic communication a challenge, unless you need directions. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)A few years ago, when I started doing presentations, I went to get head shots done for the first time. The photographer told me to look flirty. (Laughter) And I had no idea what she was talking about. (Laughter)She said, ""Do that thing, you know, with your eyes, when you're flirting with guys.""""What thing?"" I asked.""You know, squint.""And so I tried, really. It looked something like this. (Laughter) I looked like I was searching for Waldo. (Laughter)There's a reason for this, as there is a reason that Waldo is hiding. (Laughter)I have Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism that impairs the basic social skills one is expected to display. It's made life difficult in many ways, and growing up, I struggled to fit in socially. My friends would tell jokes, but I didn't understand them. My personal heroes were George Carlin and Stephen Colbert — and they taught me humor. My personality switched from being shy and awkward to being defiant and cursing out a storm. Needless to say, I did not have many friends. I was also hypersensitive to texture. The feel of water on my skin was like pins and needles, and so for years, I refused to shower. I can assure you that my hygiene routine is up to standards now, though. (Laughter)I had to do a lot to get here, and my parents — things kind of got out of control when I was sexually assaulted by a peer, and on top of everything, it made a difficult situation worse. And I had to travel 2,000 miles across the country to get treatment, but within days of them prescribing a new medication, my life turned into an episode of the Walking Dead. I became paranoid, and began to hallucinate that rotting corpses were coming towards me. My family finally rescued me, but by that time, I had lost 19 pounds in those three weeks, as well as developing severe anemia, and was on the verge of suicide.I transferred to a new treatment center that understood my aversions, my trauma, and my social anxiety, and they knew how to treat it, and I got the help I finally needed. And after 18 months of hard work, I went on to do incredible things.One of the things with Asperger's is that oftentimes, these people have a very complex inner life, and I know for myself, I have a very colorful personality, rich ideas, and just a lot going on in my mind. But there's a gap between where that stands, and how I communicate it with the rest of the world. And this can make basic communication a challenge.Not many places would hire me, due to my lack of social skills, which is why I applied to Waffle House. (Laughter) Waffle House is an exceptional 24-hour diner — (Laughter) (Applause) thank you — where you can order your hash browns the many ways that someone would dispose of a human corpse ... (Laughter) Sliced, diced, peppered, chunked, topped, capped, and covered. (Laughter) As social norms would have it, you should only go to Waffle House at an ungodly hour in the night. (Laughter) So one time, at 2 am, I was chatting with a waitress, and I asked her, ""What's the most ridiculous thing that's happened to you on the job?"" And she told me that one time, a man walked in completely naked. (Laughter) I said, ""Great! Sign me up for the graveyard shift!"" (Laughter) Needless to say, Waffle House did not hire me.So in terms of having Asperger's, it can be viewed as a disadvantage, and sometimes it is a real pain in the butt, but it's also the opposite. It's a gift, and it allows me to think innovatively. At 19, I won a research competition for my research on coral reefs, and I ended up speaking at the UN Convention of Biological Diversity, presenting this research. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And at 22, I'm getting ready to graduate college, and I am a co-founder of a biotech company called AutismSees. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)But consider what I had to do to get here: 25 therapists, 11 misdiagnoses, and years of pain and trauma. I spent a lot of time thinking if there's a better way, and I think there is: autism-assistive technology. This technology could play an integral role in helping people with autistic spectrum disorder, or ASD.The app Podium, released by my company, AutismSees, has the ability to independently assess and help develop communication skills. In addition to this, it tracks eye contact through camera and simulates a public-speaking and job-interview experience. And so maybe one day, Waffle House will hire me, after practicing on it some more. (Laughter) And one of the great things is that I've used Podium to help me prepare for today, and it's been a great help. But it's more than that. There's more that can be done. For people with ASD — it has been speculated that many innovative scientists, researchers, artists, and engineers have it; like, for example, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, and Bill Gates are some examples. But the problem that's encountered is that these brilliant ideas often can't be shared if there are communication roadblocks. And so, many people with autism are being overlooked every day, and they're being taken advantage of. So my dream for people with autism is to change that, to remove the roadblocks that prevent them from succeeding.One of the reasons I love lucid dreaming is because it allows me to be free, without judgment of social and physical consequences. When I'm flying over scenes that I create in my mind, I am at peace. I am free from judgment, and so I can do whatever I want, you know? I'm making out with Brad Pitt, and Angelina is totally cool with it. (Laughter)But the goal of autism-assistive technology is bigger than that, and more important. My goal is to shift people's perspective of autism and people with higher-functioning Asperger's because there is a lot they can do. I mean, look at Temple Grandin, for example. And by doing so, we allow people to share their talents with this world and move this world forward. In addition, we give them the courage to pursue their dreams in the real world, in real time.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alix_generous_how_i_learned_to_communicate_my_inner_life_with_asperger_s
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"Over the past 10 years, I've been researching the way people organize and visualize information. And I've noticed an interesting shift.For a long period of time, we believed in a natural ranking order in the world around us, also known as the great chain of being, or ""Scala naturae"" in Latin, a top-down structure that normally starts with God at the very top, followed by angels, noblemen, common people, animals, and so on. This idea was actually based on Aristotle's ontology, which classified all things known to man in a set of opposing categories, like the ones you see behind me. But over time, interestingly enough, this concept adopted the branching schema of a tree in what became known as the Porphyrian tree, also considered to be the oldest tree of knowledge.The branching scheme of the tree was, in fact, such a powerful metaphor for conveying information that it became, over time, an important communication tool to map a variety of systems of knowledge. We can see trees being used to map morality, with the popular tree of virtues and tree of vices, as you can see here, with these beautiful illustrations from medieval Europe. We can see trees being used to map consanguinity, the various blood ties between people. We can also see trees being used to map genealogy, perhaps the most famous archetype of the tree diagram. I think many of you in the audience have probably seen family trees. Many of you probably even have your own family trees drawn in such a way. We can see trees even mapping systems of law, the various decrees and rulings of kings and rulers. And finally, of course, also a very popular scientific metaphor, we can see trees being used to map all species known to man. And trees ultimately became such a powerful visual metaphor because in many ways, they really embody this human desire for order, for balance, for unity, for symmetry.However, nowadays we are really facing new complex, intricate challenges that cannot be understood by simply employing a simple tree diagram. And a new metaphor is currently emerging, and it's currently replacing the tree in visualizing various systems of knowledge. It's really providing us with a new lens to understand the world around us. And this new metaphor is the metaphor of the network. And we can see this shift from trees into networks in many domains of knowledge.We can see this shift in the way we try to understand the brain. While before, we used to think of the brain as a modular, centralized organ, where a given area was responsible for a set of actions and behaviors, the more we know about the brain, the more we think of it as a large music symphony, played by hundreds and thousands of instruments. This is a beautiful snapshot created by the Blue Brain Project, where you can see 10,000 neurons and 30 million connections. And this is only mapping 10 percent of a mammalian neocortex. We can also see this shift in the way we try to conceive of human knowledge.These are some remarkable trees of knowledge, or trees of science, by Spanish scholar Ramon Llull. And Llull was actually the precursor, the very first one who created the metaphor of science as a tree, a metaphor we use every single day, when we say, ""Biology is a branch of science,"" when we say, ""Genetics is a branch of science."" But perhaps the most beautiful of all trees of knowledge, at least for me, was created for the French encyclopedia by Diderot and d'Alembert in 1751. This was really the bastion of the French Enlightenment, and this gorgeous illustration was featured as a table of contents for the encyclopedia. And it actually maps out all domains of knowledge as separate branches of a tree.But knowledge is much more intricate than this. These are two maps of Wikipedia showing the inter-linkage of articles — related to history on the left, and mathematics on the right. And I think by looking at these maps and other ones that have been created of Wikipedia — arguably one of the largest rhizomatic structures ever created by man — we can really understand how human knowledge is much more intricate and interdependent, just like a network.We can also see this interesting shift in the way we map social ties between people. This is the typical organization chart. I'm assuming many of you have seen a similar chart as well, in your own corporations, or others. It's a top-down structure that normally starts with the CEO at the very top, and where you can drill down all the way to the individual workmen on the bottom. But humans sometimes are, well, actually, all humans are unique in their own way, and sometimes you really don't play well under this really rigid structure.I think the Internet is really changing this paradigm quite a lot. This is a fantastic map of online social collaboration between Perl developers. Perl is a famous programming language, and here, you can see how different programmers are actually exchanging files, and working together on a given project. And here, you can notice that this is a completely decentralized process — there's no leader in this organization, it's a network.We can also see this interesting shift when we look at terrorism. One of the main challenges of understanding terrorism nowadays is that we are dealing with decentralized, independent cells, where there's no leader leading the whole process. And here, you can actually see how visualization is being used. The diagram that you see behind me shows all the terrorists involved in the Madrid attack in 2004. And what they did here is, they actually segmented the network into three different years, represented by the vertical layers that you see behind me. And the blue lines tie together the people that were present in that network year after year. So even though there's no leader per se, these people are probably the most influential ones in that organization, the ones that know more about the past, and the future plans and goals of this particular cell.We can also see this shift from trees into networks in the way we classify and organize species. The image on the right is the only illustration that Darwin included in ""The Origin of Species,"" which Darwin called the ""Tree of Life."" There's actually a letter from Darwin to the publisher, expanding on the importance of this particular diagram. It was critical for Darwin's theory of evolution. But recently, scientists discovered that overlaying this tree of life is a dense network of bacteria, and these bacteria are actually tying together species that were completely separated before, to what scientists are now calling not the tree of life, but the web of life, the network of life.And finally, we can really see this shift, again, when we look at ecosystems around our planet. No more do we have these simplified predator-versus-prey diagrams we have all learned at school. This is a much more accurate depiction of an ecosystem. This is a diagram created by Professor David Lavigne, mapping close to 100 species that interact with the codfish off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. And I think here, we can really understand the intricate and interdependent nature of most ecosystems that abound on our planet.But even though recent, this metaphor of the network, is really already adopting various shapes and forms, and it's almost becoming a growing visual taxonomy. It's almost becoming the syntax of a new language. And this is one aspect that truly fascinates me. And these are actually 15 different typologies I've been collecting over time, and it really shows the immense visual diversity of this new metaphor. And here is an example. On the very top band, you have radial convergence, a visualization model that has become really popular over the last five years. At the top left, the very first project is a gene network, followed by a network of IP addresses — machines, servers — followed by a network of Facebook friends. You probably couldn't find more disparate topics, yet they are using the same metaphor, the same visual model, to map the never-ending complexities of its own subject. And here are a few more examples of the many I've been collecting, of this growing visual taxonomy of networks.But networks are not just a scientific metaphor. As designers, researchers, and scientists try to map a variety of complex systems, they are in many ways influencing traditional art fields, like painting and sculpture, and influencing many different artists. And perhaps because networks have this huge aesthetical force to them — they're immensely gorgeous — they are really becoming a cultural meme, and driving a new art movement, which I've called ""networkism."" And we can see this influence in this movement in a variety of ways. This is just one of many examples, where you can see this influence from science into art. The example on your left side is IP-mapping, a computer-generated map of IP addresses; again — servers, machines. And on your right side, you have ""Transient Structures and Unstable Networks"" by Sharon Molloy, using oil and enamel on canvas. And here are a few more paintings by Sharon Molloy, some gorgeous, intricate paintings.And here's another example of that interesting cross-pollination between science and art. On your left side, you have ""Operation Smile."" It is a computer-generated map of a social network. And on your right side, you have ""Field 4,"" by Emma McNally, using only graphite on paper. Emma McNally is one of the main leaders of this movement, and she creates these striking, imaginary landscapes, where you can really notice the influence from traditional network visualization.But networkism doesn't happen only in two dimensions. This is perhaps one of my favorite projects of this new movement. And I think the title really says it all — it's called: ""Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web."" And I just find this particular project to be immensely powerful. It was created by Tomás Saraceno, and he occupies these large spaces, creates these massive installations using only elastic ropes. As you actually navigate that space and bounce along those elastic ropes, the entire network kind of shifts, almost like a real organic network would.And here's yet another example of networkism taken to a whole different level. This was created by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota in a piece called ""In Silence."" And Chiharu, like Tomás Saraceno, fills these rooms with this dense network, this dense web of elastic ropes and black wool and thread, sometimes including objects, as you can see here, sometimes even including people, in many of her installations.But networks are also not just a new trend, and it's too easy for us to dismiss it as such. Networks really embody notions of decentralization, of interconnectedness, of interdependence. And this new way of thinking is critical for us to solve many of the complex problems we are facing nowadays, from decoding the human brain, to understanding the vast universe out there. On your left side, you have a snapshot of a neural network of a mouse — very similar to our own at this particular scale. And on your right side, you have the Millennium Simulation. It was the largest and most realistic simulation of the growth of cosmic structure. It was able to recreate the history of 20 million galaxies in approximately 25 terabytes of output. And coincidentally or not, I just find this particular comparison between the smallest scale of knowledge — the brain — and the largest scale of knowledge — the universe itself — to be really quite striking and fascinating. Because as Bruce Mau once said, ""When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters.""Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/manuel_lima_a_visual_history_of_human_knowledge
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"This is a painting from the 16th century from Lucas Cranach the Elder. It shows the famous Fountain of Youth. If you drink its water or you bathe in it, you will get health and youth. Every culture, every civilization has dreamed of finding eternal youth. There are people like Alexander the Great or Ponce De León, the explorer, who spent much of their life chasing the Fountain of Youth. They didn't find it. But what if there was something to it? What if there was something to this Fountain of Youth?I will share an absolutely amazing development in aging research that could revolutionize the way we think about aging and how we may treat age-related diseases in the future. It started with experiments that showed, in a recent number of studies about growing, that animals — old mice — that share a blood supply with young mice can get rejuvenated. This is similar to what you might see in humans, in Siamese twins, and I know this sounds a bit creepy. But what Tom Rando, a stem-cell researcher, reported in 2007, was that old muscle from a mouse can be rejuvenated if it's exposed to young blood through common circulation. This was reproduced by Amy Wagers at Harvard a few years later, and others then showed that similar rejuvenating effects could be observed in the pancreas, the liver and the heart. But what I'm most excited about, and several other labs as well, is that this may even apply to the brain.So, what we found is that an old mouse exposed to a young environment in this model called parabiosis, shows a younger brain — and a brain that functions better. And I repeat: an old mouse that gets young blood through shared circulation looks younger and functions younger in its brain. So when we get older — we can look at different aspects of human cognition, and you can see on this slide here, we can look at reasoning, verbal ability and so forth. And up to around age 50 or 60, these functions are all intact, and as I look at the young audience here in the room, we're all still fine.(Laughter)But it's scary to see how all these curves go south. And as we get older, diseases such as Alzheimer's and others may develop. We know that with age, the connections between neurons — the way neurons talk to each other, the synapses — they start to deteriorate; neurons die, the brain starts to shrink, and there's an increased susceptibility for these neurodegenerative diseases.One big problem we have — to try to understand how this really works at a very molecular mechanistic level — is that we can't study the brains in detail, in living people. We can do cognitive tests, we can do imaging — all kinds of sophisticated testing. But we usually have to wait until the person dies to get the brain and look at how it really changed through age or in a disease. This is what neuropathologists do, for example. So, how about we think of the brain as being part of the larger organism. Could we potentially understand more about what happens in the brain at the molecular level if we see the brain as part of the entire body? So if the body ages or gets sick, does that affect the brain? And vice versa: as the brain gets older, does that influence the rest of the body? And what connects all the different tissues in the body is blood. Blood is the tissue that not only carries cells that transport oxygen, for example, the red blood cells, or fights infectious diseases, but it also carries messenger molecules, hormone-like factors that transport information from one cell to another, from one tissue to another, including the brain. So if we look at how the blood changes in disease or age, can we learn something about the brain? We know that as we get older, the blood changes as well, so these hormone-like factors change as we get older. And by and large, factors that we know are required for the development of tissues, for the maintenance of tissues — they start to decrease as we get older, while factors involved in repair, in injury and in inflammation — they increase as we get older.So there's this unbalance of good and bad factors, if you will. And to illustrate what we can do potentially with that, I want to talk you through an experiment that we did. We had almost 300 blood samples from healthy human beings 20 to 89 years of age, and we measured over 100 of these communication factors, these hormone-like proteins that transport information between tissues. And what we noticed first is that between the youngest and the oldest group, about half the factors changed significantly. So our body lives in a very different environment as we get older, when it comes to these factors. And using statistical or bioinformatics programs, we could try to discover those factors that best predict age — in a way, back-calculate the relative age of a person. And the way this looks is shown in this graph. So, on the one axis you see the actual age a person lived, the chronological age. So, how many years they lived.And then we take these top factors that I showed you, and we calculate their relative age, their biological age. And what you see is that there is a pretty good correlation, so we can pretty well predict the relative age of a person. But what's really exciting are the outliers, as they so often are in life. You can see here, the person I highlighted with the green dot is about 70 years of age but seems to have a biological age, if what we're doing here is really true, of only about 45. So is this a person that actually looks much younger than their age? But more importantly: Is this a person who is maybe at a reduced risk to develop an age-related disease and will have a long life — will live to 100 or more? On the other hand, the person here, highlighted with the red dot, is not even 40, but has a biological age of 65. Is this a person at an increased risk of developing an age-related disease? So in our lab, we're trying to understand these factors better, and many other groups are trying to understand, what are the true aging factors, and can we learn something about them to possibly predict age-related diseases?So what I've shown you so far is simply correlational, right? You can just say, ""Well, these factors change with age,"" but you don't really know if they do something about aging. So what I'm going to show you now is very remarkable and it suggests that these factors can actually modulate the age of a tissue. And that's where we come back to this model called parabiosis.So, parabiosis is done in mice by surgically connecting the two mice together, and that leads then to a shared blood system, where we can now ask, ""How does the old brain get influenced by exposure to the young blood?"" And for this purpose, we use young mice that are an equivalency of 20-year-old people, and old mice that are roughly 65 years old in human years.What we found is quite remarkable. We find there are more neural stem cells that make new neurons in these old brains. There's an increased activity of the synapses, the connections between neurons. There are more genes expressed that are known to be involved in the formation of new memories. And there's less of this bad inflammation. But we observed that there are no cells entering the brains of these animals. So when we connect them, there are actually no cells going into the old brain, in this model. Instead, we've reasoned, then, that it must be the soluble factors, so we could collect simply the soluble fraction of blood which is called plasma, and inject either young plasma or old plasma into these mice, and we could reproduce these rejuvenating effects, but what we could also do now is we could do memory tests with mice.As mice get older, like us humans, they have memory problems. It's just harder to detect them, but I'll show you in a minute how we do that. But we wanted to take this one step further, one step closer to potentially being relevant to humans. What I'm showing you now are unpublished studies, where we used human plasma, young human plasma, and as a control, saline, and injected it into old mice, and asked, can we again rejuvenate these old mice? Can we make them smarter?And to do this, we used a test. It's called a Barnes maze. This is a big table that has lots of holes in it, and there are guide marks around it, and there's a bright light, as on this stage here. The mice hate this and they try to escape, and find the single hole that you see pointed at with an arrow, where a tube is mounted underneath where they can escape and feel comfortable in a dark hole. So we teach them, over several days, to find this space on these cues in the space, and you can compare this for humans, to finding your car in a parking lot after a busy day of shopping.(Laughter)Many of us have probably had some problems with that.So, let's look at an old mouse here. This is an old mouse that has memory problems, as you'll notice in a moment. It just looks into every hole, but it didn't form this spacial map that would remind it where it was in the previous trial or the last day. In stark contrast, this mouse here is a sibling of the same age, but it was treated with young human plasma for three weeks, with small injections every three days. And as you noticed, it almost looks around, ""Where am I?"" — and then walks straight to that hole and escapes. So, it could remember where that hole was.So by all means, this old mouse seems to be rejuvenated — it functions more like a younger mouse. And it also suggests that there is something not only in young mouse plasma, but in young human plasma that has the capacity to help this old brain. So to summarize, we find the old mouse, and its brain in particular, are malleable. They're not set in stone; we can actually change them. It can be rejuvenated. Young blood factors can reverse aging, and what I didn't show you — in this model, the young mouse actually suffers from exposure to the old. So there are old-blood factors that can accelerate aging. And most importantly, humans may have similar factors, because we can take young human blood and have a similar effect. Old human blood, I didn't show you, does not have this effect; it does not make the mice younger.So, is this magic transferable to humans? We're running a small clinical study at Stanford, where we treat Alzheimer's patients with mild disease with a pint of plasma from young volunteers, 20-year-olds, and do this once a week for four weeks, and then we look at their brains with imaging. We test them cognitively, and we ask their caregivers for daily activities of living. What we hope is that there are some signs of improvement from this treatment. And if that's the case, that could give us hope that what I showed you works in mice might also work in humans.Now, I don't think we will live forever. But maybe we discovered that the Fountain of Youth is actually within us, and it has just dried out. And if we can turn it back on a little bit, maybe we can find the factors that are mediating these effects, we can produce these factors synthetically and we can treat diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's disease or other dementias.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tony_wyss_coray_how_young_blood_might_help_reverse_aging_yes_really
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"For more than 100 years, the telephone companies have provided wiretapping assistance to governments.For much of this time, this assistance was manual. Surveillance took place manually and wires were connected by hand. Calls were recorded to tape. But as in so many other industries, computing has changed everything. The telephone companies built surveillance features into the very core of their networks. I want that to sink in for a second: Our telephones and the networks that carry our calls were wired for surveillance first. First and foremost.So what that means is that when you're talking to your spouse, your children, a colleague or your doctor on the telephone, someone could be listening. Now, that someone might be your own government; it could also be another government, a foreign intelligence service, or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker or any other party that breaks into the surveillance system, that hacks into the surveillance system of the telephone companies.But while the telephone companies have built surveillance as a priority, Silicon Valley companies have not. And increasingly, over the last couple years, Silicon Valley companies have built strong encryption technology into their communications products that makes surveillance extremely difficult.For example, many of you might have an iPhone, and if you use an iPhone to send a text message to other people who have an iPhone, those text messages cannot easily be wiretapped. And in fact, according to Apple, they're not able to even see the text messages themselves. Likewise, if you use FaceTime to make an audio call or a video call with one of your friends or loved ones, that, too, cannot be easily wiretapped.And it's not just Apple. WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook and used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, also has built strong encryption technology into its product, which means that people in the Global South can easily communicate without their governments, often authoritarian, wiretapping their text messages.So, after 100 years of being able to listen to any telephone call — anytime, anywhere — you might imagine that government officials are not very happy. And in fact, that's what's happening. Government officials are extremely mad. And they're not mad because these encryption tools are now available. What upsets them the most is that the tech companies have built encryption features into their products and turned them on by default. It's the default piece that matters.In short, the tech companies have democratized encryption. And so, government officials like British Prime Minister David Cameron, they believe that all communications — emails, texts, voice calls — all of these should be available to governments, and encryption is making that difficult.Now, look — I'm extremely sympathetic to their point of view. We live in a dangerous time in a dangerous world, and there really are bad people out there. There are terrorists and other serious national security threats that I suspect we all want the FBI and the NSA to monitor.But those surveillance features come at a cost. The reason for that is that there is no such thing as a terrorist laptop, or a drug dealer's cell phone. We all use the same communications devices. What that means is that if the drug dealers' telephone calls or the terrorists' telephone calls can be intercepted, then so can the rest of ours, too. And I think we really need to ask: Should a billion people around the world be using devices that are wiretap friendly?So the scenario of hacking of surveillance systems that I've described — this is not imaginary. In 2009, the surveillance systems that Google and Microsoft built into their networks — the systems that they use to respond to lawful surveillance requests from the police — those systems were compromised by the Chinese government, because the Chinese government wanted to figure out which of their own agents the US government was monitoring.By the same token, in 2004, the surveillance system built into the network of Vodafone Greece — Greece's largest telephone company — was compromised by an unknown entity, and that feature, the surveillance feature, was used to wiretap the Greek Prime Minister and members of the Greek cabinet. The foreign government or hackers who did that were never caught.And really, this gets to the very problem with these surveillance features, or backdoors. When you build a backdoor into a communications network or piece of technology, you have no way of controlling who's going to go through it. You have no way of controlling whether it'll be used by your side or the other side, by good guys, or by bad guys.And so for that reason, I think that it's better to build networks to be as secure as possible. Yes, this means that in the future, encryption is going to make wiretapping more difficult. It means that the police are going to have a tougher time catching bad guys. But the alternative would mean to live in a world where anyone's calls or anyone's text messages could be surveilled by criminals, by stalkers and by foreign intelligence agencies. And I don't want to live in that kind of world.And so right now, you probably have the tools to thwart many kinds of government surveillance already on your phones and already in your pockets, you just might not realize how strong and how secure those tools are, or how weak the other ways you've used to communicate really are.And so, my message to you is this: We need to use these tools. We need to secure our telephone calls. We need to secure our text messages. I want you to use these tools. I want you to tell your loved ones, I want you to tell your colleagues: Use these encrypted communications tools. Don't just use them because they're cheap and easy, but use them because they're secure.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_a_brief_history_of_phone_wiretapping_and_how_to_avoid_it
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"I was raised by lesbians in the mountains, and I sort of came like a forest gnome to New York City a while back. (Laughter) Really messed with my head, but I'll get into that later.I'll start with when I was eight years old. I took a wood box, and I buried a dollar bill, a pen and a fork inside this box in Colorado. And I thought some strange humanoids or aliens in 500 years would find this box and learn about the way our species exchanged ideas, maybe how we ate our spaghetti. I really didn't know. Anyway, this is kind of funny, because here I am, 30 years later, and I'm still making boxes.Now, at some point I was in Hawaii — I like to hike and surf and do all that weird stuff, and I was making a collage for my ma. And I took a dictionary and I ripped it up, and I made it into a sort of Agnes Martin grid, and I poured resin all over it and a bee got stuck. Now, she's afraid of bees and she's allergic to them, so I poured more resin on the canvas, thinking I could hide it or something. Instead, the opposite happened: It sort of created a magnification, like a magnifying glass, on the dictionary text.So what did I do? I built more boxes. This time, I started putting electronics, frogs, strange bottles I'd find in the street — anything I could find — because I was always finding things my whole life, and trying to make relationships and tell stories between these objects. So I started drawing around the objects, and I realized: Holy moly, I can draw in space! I can make free-floating lines, like the way you would draw around a dead body at a crime scene. So I took the objects out, and I created my own taxonomy of invented specimens. First, botanical — which you can kind of get a sense of. Then I made some weird insects and creatures. It was really fun; I was just drawing on the layers of resin.And it was cool, because I was actually starting to have shows and stuff, I was making some money, I could take my girlfriend for dinner, and like, go to Sizzler. It was some good shit, man. (Laughter)At some point, I got up to the human form, life-size resin sculptures with drawings of humans inside the layers. This was great, except for one thing: I was going to die. I didn't know what to do, because the resin was going to kill me. And I went to bed every night thinking about it.So I tried using glass. I started drawing on the layers of glass, almost like if you drew on a window, then you put another window, and another window, and you had all these windows together that made a three-dimensional composition. And this really worked, because I could stop using the resin.So I did this for years, which culminated in a very large work, which I call ""The Triptych."" ""The Triptych"" was largely inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's ""[The] Garden of Earthly Delights,"" which is a painting in the [Museo del] Prado in Spain. Do you guys know this painting? Good, it's a cool painting. It's kind of ahead of its time, they say. So, ""The Triptych."" I'll walk you through this piece. It weighs 24,000 pounds. It's 18 feet long. It's double-sided, so it's 36 feet of composition. It's kind of weird. Well, that's the blood fountain. (Laughter) To the left, you have Jesus and the locusts. There's a cave where all these animal-headed creatures travel between two worlds. They go from the representational world, to this analog-mesh underworld, where they're hiding. This is where the animal-headed creatures are by the lighthouse, and they're all about to commit mass suicide into the ocean. The ocean is made up of thousands of elements. This is a bird god tied up to a battleship. (Laughter) Billy Graham is in the ocean; the Horizon from the oil spill; Waldo; Osama Bin Laden's shelter — there's all kinds of weird stuff that you can find if you look really hard, in the ocean. Anyway, this is a lady creature. She's coming out of the ocean, and she's spitting oil into one hand and she has clouds coming out of her other hand. Her hands are like scales, and she has the mythological reference of the Earth and cosmos in balance.So that's one side of ""The Triptych."" It's a little narrative thing. That's her hand that she's spitting into. And then, when you go to the other side, she has like a trunk, like a bird's beak, and she's spitting clouds out of her trunk. Then she has an 18-foot-long serpent's tail that connects ""The Triptych."" Anyway, her tail catches on fire from the back of the volcano. (Laughter) I don't know why that happened.(Laughter)That happens, you know. Her tail terminates in a cycloptic eyeball, made out of 1986 terrorist cards. Have you guys seen those? They were made in the 1980's, they're like baseball cards of terrorists. Way ahead of their time.(Laughter)That will bring you to my latest project. I'm in the middle of two projects: One's called ""Psychogeographies."" It's about a six-year project to make 100 of these humans. Each one is an archive of our culture, through our ripped-up media and matter, whether it's encyclopedias or dictionaries or magazines. But each one acts as a sort of an archive in the shape of a human, and they travel in groups of 20, 4, or 12 at a time. They're like cells — they come together, they divide. And you kind of walk through them. It's taking me years. Each one is basically a 3,000-pound microscope slide with a human stuck inside.This one has a little cave in his chest. That's his head; there's the chest, you can kind of see the beginning. I'm going to go down the body for you: There's a waterfall coming out of his chest, covering his penis — or not-penis, or whatever it is, a kind of androgynous thing. I'll take you quickly through these works, because I can't explain them for too long. There are the layers, you can kind of see it. That's a body getting split in half. This one has two heads, and it's communicating between the two heads. You can see the pills coming out, going into one head from this weird statue. There's a little forest scene inside the chest cavity. Can you see that?Anyway, this talk's all about these boxes, like the boxes we're in. This box we're in, the solar system is a box. This brings you to my latest box. It's a brick box. It's called Pioneer Works.(Cheers)Inside of this box is a physicist, a neuroscientist, a painter, a musician, a writer, a radio station, a museum, a school, a publishing arm to disseminate all the content we make there into the world; a garden. We shake this box up, and all these people kind of start hitting each other like particles.And I think that's the way you change the world. You redefine your insides and the box that you're living in. And you come together to realize that we're all in this together, that this delusion of difference — this idea of countries, of borders, of religion — doesn't work. We're all really made up of the same stuff, in the same box. And if we don't start exchanging that stuff sweetly and nicely, we're all going to die real soon.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dustin_yellin_a_journey_through_the_mind_of_an_artist
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"I'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science, one that is still speculative but hugely exciting, and certainly one that's growing very rapidly. Quantum biology asks a very simple question: Does quantum mechanics — that weird and wonderful and powerful theory of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules that underpins so much of modern physics and chemistry — also play a role inside the living cell? In other words: Are there processes, mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics? Now, quantum biology isn't new; it's been around since the early 1930s. But it's only in the last decade or so that careful experiments — in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy — have shown very clear, firm evidence that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics to explain them.Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemists, molecular biologists — it's a very interdisciplinary field. I come from quantum physics, so I'm a nuclear physicist.I've spent more than three decades trying to get my head around quantum mechanics. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, said, If you're not astonished by it, then you haven't understood it. So I sort of feel happy that I'm still astonished by it. That's a good thing. But it means I study the very smallest structures in the universe — the building blocks of reality. If we think about the scale of size, start with an everyday object like the tennis ball, and just go down orders of magnitude in size — from the eye of a needle down to a cell, down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme — you eventually reach the nano-world.Now, nanotechnology may be a term you've heard of. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. My area is the atomic nucleus, which is the tiny dot inside an atom. It's even smaller in scale. This is the domain of quantum mechanics, and physicists and chemists have had a long time to try and get used to it. Biologists, on the other hand, have got off lightly, in my view. They are very happy with their balls-and-sticks models of molecules.(Laughter)The balls are the atoms, the sticks are the bonds between the atoms. And when they can't build them physically in the lab, nowadays, they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule. This is a protein made up of 100,000 atoms. It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics to explain it. Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s. It is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas that explain the world of the very small. And it's a world that's very different from our everyday world, made up of trillions of atoms. It's a world built on probability and chance. It's a fuzzy world. It's a world of phantoms, where particles can also behave like spread-out waves.If we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics, then, as the fundamental foundation of reality itself, then it's not surprising that we say quantum physics underpins organic chemistry. After all, it gives us the rules that tell us how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules. Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity, gives us molecular biology, which of course leads to life itself. So in a way, it's sort of not surprising. It's almost trivial. You say, ""Well, of course life ultimately must depend of quantum mechanics."" But so does everything else. So does all inanimate matter, made up of trillions of atoms.Ultimately, there's a quantum level where we have to delve into this weirdness. But in everyday life, we can forget about it. Because once you put together trillions of atoms, that quantum weirdness just dissolves away. Quantum biology isn't about this. Quantum biology isn't this obvious. Of course quantum mechanics underpins life at some molecular level. Quantum biology is about looking for the non-trivial — the counterintuitive ideas in quantum mechanics — and to see if they do, indeed, play an important role in describing the processes of life.Here is my perfect example of the counterintuitiveness of the quantum world. This is the quantum skier. He seems to be intact, he seems to be perfectly healthy, and yet, he seems to have gone around both sides of that tree at the same time. Well, if you saw tracks like that you'd guess it was some sort of stunt, of course. But in the quantum world, this happens all the time. Particles can multitask, they can be in two places at once. They can do more than one thing at the same time. Particles can behave like spread-out waves. It's almost like magic.Physicists and chemists have had nearly a century of trying to get used to this weirdness. I don't blame the biologists for not having to or wanting to learn quantum mechanics.You see, this weirdness is very delicate; and we physicists work very hard to maintain it in our labs. We cool our system down to near absolute zero, we carry out our experiments in vacuums, we try and isolate it from any external disturbance. That's very different from the warm, messy, noisy environment of a living cell. Biology itself, if you think of molecular biology, seems to have done very well in describing all the processes of life in terms of chemistry — chemical reactions. And these are reductionist, deterministic chemical reactions, showing that, essentially, life is made of the same stuff as everything else, and if we can forget about quantum mechanics in the macro world, then we should be able to forget about it in biology, as well.Well, one man begged to differ with this idea. Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger's Cat fame, was an Austrian physicist. He was one of the founders of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. In 1944, he wrote a book called ""What is Life?"" It was tremendously influential. It influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA. To paraphrase a description in the book, he says: At the molecular level, living organisms have a certain order, a structure to them that's very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity.In fact, living matter seems to behave in this order, in a structure, just like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero, where quantum effects play a very important role. There's something special about the structure — the order — inside a living cell. So, Schrödinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life. It's a very speculative, far-reaching idea, and it didn't really go very far.But as I mentioned at the start, in the last 10 years, there have been experiments emerging, showing where some of these certain phenomena in biology do seem to require quantum mechanics.I want to share with you just a few of the exciting ones. This is one of the best-known phenomena in the quantum world, quantum tunneling. The box on the left shows the wavelike, spread-out distribution of a quantum entity — a particle, like an electron, which is not a little ball bouncing off a wall. It's a wave that has a certain probability of being able to permeate through a solid wall, like a phantom leaping through to the other side. You can see a faint smudge of light in the right-hand box. Quantum tunneling suggests that a particle can hit an impenetrable barrier, and yet somehow, as though by magic, disappear from one side and reappear on the other. The nicest way of explaining it is if you want to throw a ball over a wall, you have to give it enough energy to get over the top of the wall. In the quantum world, you don't have to throw it over the wall, you can throw it at the wall, and there's a certain non-zero probability that it'll disappear on your side, and reappear on the other.This isn't speculation, by the way. We're happy — well, ""happy"" is not the right word —(Laughter)we are familiar with this.(Laughter)Quantum tunneling takes place all the time; in fact, it's the reason our Sun shines. The particles fuse together, and the Sun turns hydrogen into helium through quantum tunneling. Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered that quantum tunneling also takes place inside living cells. Enzymes, those workhorses of life, the catalysts of chemical reactions — enzymes are biomolecules that speed up chemical reactions in living cells, by many, many orders of magnitude. And it's always been a mystery how they do this.Well, it was discovered that one of the tricks that enzymes have evolved to make use of, is by transferring subatomic particles, like electrons and indeed protons, from one part of a molecule to another via quantum tunneling. It's efficient, it's fast, it can disappear — a proton can disappear from one place, and reappear on the other. Enzymes help this take place.This is research that's been carried out back in the 80s, particularly by a group in Berkeley, Judith Klinman. Other groups in the UK have now also confirmed that enzymes really do this.Research carried out by my group — so as I mentioned, I'm a nuclear physicist, but I've realized I've got these tools of using quantum mechanics in atomic nuclei, and so can apply those tools in other areas as well. One question we asked is whether quantum tunneling plays a role in mutations in DNA. Again, this is not a new idea; it goes all the way back to the early 60s. The two strands of DNA, the double-helix structure, are held together by rungs; it's like a twisted ladder. And those rungs of the ladder are hydrogen bonds — protons, that act as the glue between the two strands. So if you zoom in, what they're doing is holding these large molecules — nucleotides — together. Zoom in a bit more. So, this a computer simulation. The two white balls in the middle are protons, and you can see that it's a double hydrogen bond. One prefers to sit on one side; the other, on the other side of the two strands of the vertical lines going down, which you can't see. It can happen that these two protons can hop over. Watch the two white balls. They can jump over to the other side. If the two strands of DNA then separate, leading to the process of replication, and the two protons are in the wrong positions, this can lead to a mutation.This has been known for half a century. The question is: How likely are they to do that, and if they do, how do they do it? Do they jump across, like the ball going over the wall? Or can they quantum-tunnel across, even if they don't have enough energy? Early indications suggest that quantum tunneling can play a role here. We still don't know yet how important it is; this is still an open question. It's speculative, but it's one of those questions that is so important that if quantum mechanics plays a role in mutations, surely this must have big implications, to understand certain types of mutations, possibly even those that lead to turning a cell cancerous.Another example of quantum mechanics in biology is quantum coherence, in one of the most important processes in biology, photosynthesis: plants and bacteria taking sunlight, and using that energy to create biomass. Quantum coherence is the idea of quantum entities multitasking. It's the quantum skier. It's an object that behaves like a wave, so that it doesn't just move in one direction or the other, but can follow multiple pathways at the same time.Some years ago, the world of science was shocked when a paper was published showing experimental evidence that quantum coherence takes place inside bacteria, carrying out photosynthesis. The idea is that the photon, the particle of light, the sunlight, the quantum of light captured by a chlorophyll molecule, is then delivered to what's called the reaction center, where it can be turned into chemical energy. And in getting there, it doesn't just follow one route; it follows multiple pathways at once, to optimize the most efficient way of reaching the reaction center without dissipating as waste heat. Quantum coherence taking place inside a living cell. A remarkable idea, and yet evidence is growing almost weekly, with new papers coming out, confirming that this does indeed take place.My third and final example is the most beautiful, wonderful idea. It's also still very speculative, but I have to share it with you. The European robin migrates from Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean, every autumn, and like a lot of other marine animals and even insects, they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. Now, the Earth's magnetic field is very, very weak; it's 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet, and yet it affects the chemistry — somehow — within a living organism. That's not in doubt — a German couple of ornithologists, Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko, in the 1970s, confirmed that indeed, the robin does find its way by somehow sensing the Earth's magnetic field, to give it directional information — a built-in compass.The puzzle, the mystery was: How does it do it? Well, the only theory in town — we don't know if it's the correct theory, but the only theory in town — is that it does it via something called quantum entanglement. Inside the robin's retina — I kid you not — inside the robin's retina is a protein called cryptochrome, which is light-sensitive. Within cryptochrome, a pair of electrons are quantum-entangled. Now, quantum entanglement is when two particles are far apart, and yet somehow remain in contact with each other. Even Einstein hated this idea; he called it ""spooky action at a distance.""(Laughter)So if Einstein doesn't like it, then we can all be uncomfortable with it. Two quantum-entangled electrons within a single molecule dance a delicate dance that is very sensitive to the direction the bird flies in the Earth's magnetic field.We don't know if it's the correct explanation, but wow, wouldn't it be exciting if quantum mechanics helps birds navigate? Quantum biology is still in it infancy. It's still speculative. But I believe it's built on solid science. I also think that in the coming decade or so, we're going to start to see that actually, it pervades life — that life has evolved tricks that utilize the quantum world. Watch this space.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_al_khalili_how_quantum_biology_might_explain_life_s_biggest_questions
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"The child's symptoms begin with mild fever, headache, muscle pains, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, then bleeding from the mouth, nose and gums. Death follows in the form of organ failure from low blood pressure.Sounds familiar? If you're thinking this is Ebola, actually, in this case, it's not. It's an extreme form of dengue fever, a mosquito-born disease which also does not have an effective therapy or a vaccine, and kills 22,000 people each year. That is actually twice the number of people that have been killed by Ebola in the nearly four decades that we've known about it. As for measles, so much in the news recently, the death toll is actually tenfold higher. Yet for the last year, it has been Ebola that has stolen all of the headlines and the fear.Clearly, there is something deeply rooted about it, something which scares us and fascinates us more than other diseases. But what is it, exactly? Well, it's hard to acquire Ebola, but if you do, the risk of a horrible death is high. Why? Because right now, we don't have any effective therapy or vaccine available.And so, that's the clue. We may have it someday. So we rightfully fear Ebola, because it doesn't kill as many people as other diseases. In fact, it's much less transmissible than viruses such as flu or measles. We fear Ebola because of the fact that it kills us and we can't treat it. We fear the certain inevitability that comes with Ebola. Ebola has this inevitability that seems to defy modern medical science.But wait a second, why is that? We've known about Ebola since 1976. We've known what it's capable of. We've had ample opportunity to study it in the 24 outbreaks that have occurred. And in fact, we've actually had vaccine candidates available now for more than a decade. Why is that those vaccines are just going into clinical trials now?This goes to the fundamental problem we have with vaccine development for infectious diseases. It goes something like this: The people most at risk for these diseases are also the ones least able to pay for vaccines. This leaves little in the way of market incentives for manufacturers to develop vaccines, unless there are large numbers of people who are at risk in wealthy countries. It's simply too commercially risky.As for Ebola, there is absolutely no market at all, so the only reason we have two vaccines in late-stage clinical trials now, is actually because of a somewhat misguided fear. Ebola was relatively ignored until September 11 and the anthrax attacks, when all of a sudden, people perceived Ebola as, potentially, a bioterrorism weapon.Why is it that the Ebola vaccine wasn't fully developed at this point? Well, partially, because it was really difficult — or thought to be difficult — to weaponize the virus, but mainly because of the financial risk in developing it. And this is really the point. The sad reality is, we develop vaccines not based upon the risk the pathogen poses to people, but on how economically risky it is to develop these vaccines. Vaccine development is expensive and complicated. It can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to take even a well-known antigen and turn it into a viable vaccine.Fortunately for diseases like Ebola, there are things we can do to remove some of these barriers. The first is to recognize when there's a complete market failure. In that case, if we want vaccines, we have to provide incentives or some type of subsidy. We also need to do a better job at being able to figure out which are the diseases that most threaten us. By creating capabilities within countries, we then create the ability for those countries to create epidemiological and laboratory networks which are capable of collecting and categorizing these pathogens. The data from that then can be used to understand the geographic and genetic diversity, which then can be used to help us understand how these are being changed immunologically, and what type of reactions they promote.So these are the things that can be done, but to do this, if we want to deal with a complete market failure, we have to change the way we view and prevent infectious diseases. We have to stop waiting until we see evidence of a disease becoming a global threat before we consider it as one. So, for Ebola, the paranoid fear of an infectious disease, followed by a few cases transported to wealthy countries, led the global community to come together, and with the work of dedicated vaccine companies, we now have these: Two Ebola vaccines in efficacy trials in the Ebola countries —(Applause)and a pipeline of vaccines that are following behind.Every year, we spend billions of dollars, keeping a fleet of nuclear submarines permanently patrolling the oceans to protect us from a threat that almost certainly will never happen. And yet, we spend virtually nothing to prevent something as tangible and evolutionarily certain as epidemic infectious diseases. And make no mistake about it — it's not a question of ""if,"" but ""when."" These bugs are going to continue to evolve and they're going to threaten the world. And vaccines are our best defense. So if we want to be able to prevent epidemics like Ebola, we need to take on the risk of investing in vaccine development and in stockpile creation. And we need to view this, then, as the ultimate deterrent — something we make sure is available, but at the same time, praying we never have to use it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_berkley_the_troubling_reason_why_vaccines_are_made_too_late_if_they_re_made_at_all
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"Over a million people are killed each year in disasters. Two and a half million people will be permanently disabled or displaced, and the communities will take 20 to 30 years to recover and billions of economic losses.If you can reduce the initial response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by a thousand days, or three years. See how that works? If the initial responders can get in, save lives, mitigate whatever flooding danger there is, that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild the houses, which then means you can restore the economy, and maybe even make it better and more resilient to the next disaster. A major insurance company told me that if they can get a homeowner's claim processed one day earlier, it'll make a difference of six months in that person getting their home repaired.And that's why I do disaster robotics — because robots can make a disaster go away faster.Now, you've already seen a couple of these. These are the UAVs. These are two types of UAVs: a rotorcraft, or hummingbird; a fixed-wing, a hawk. And they're used extensively since 2005 — Hurricane Katrina. Let me show you how this hummingbird, this rotorcraft, works. Fantastic for structural engineers. Being able to see damage from angles you can't get from binoculars on the ground or from a satellite image, or anything flying at a higher angle. But it's not just structural engineers and insurance people who need this. You've got things like this fixed-wing, this hawk. Now, this hawk can be used for geospatial surveys. That's where you're pulling imagery together and getting 3D reconstruction.We used both of these at the Oso mudslides up in Washington State, because the big problem was geospatial and hydrological understanding of the disaster — not the search and rescue. The search and rescue teams had it under control and knew what they were doing. The bigger problem was that river and mudslide might wipe them out and flood the responders. And not only was it challenging to the responders and property damage, it's also putting at risk the future of salmon fishing along that part of Washington State. So they needed to understand what was going on. In seven hours, going from Arlington, driving from the Incident Command Post to the site, flying the UAVs, processing the data, driving back to Arlington command post — seven hours. We gave them in seven hours data that they could take only two to three days to get any other way — and at higher resolution. It's a game changer.And don't just think about the UAVs. I mean, they are sexy — but remember, 80 percent of the world's population lives by water, and that means our critical infrastructure is underwater — the parts that we can't get to, like the bridges and things like that. And that's why we have unmanned marine vehicles, one type of which you've already met, which is SARbot, a square dolphin. It goes underwater and uses sonar. Well, why are marine vehicles so important and why are they very, very important? They get overlooked. Think about the Japanese tsunami — 400 miles of coastland totally devastated, twice the amount of coastland devastated by Hurricane Katrina in the United States. You're talking about your bridges, your pipelines, your ports — wiped out. And if you don't have a port, you don't have a way to get in enough relief supplies to support a population. That was a huge problem at the Haiti earthquake. So we need marine vehicles.Now, let's look at a viewpoint from the SARbot of what they were seeing. We were working on a fishing port. We were able to reopen that fishing port, using her sonar, in four hours. That fishing port was told it was going to be six months before they could get a manual team of divers in, and it was going to take the divers two weeks. They were going to miss the fall fishing season, which was the major economy for that part, which is kind of like their Cape Cod. UMVs, very important.But you know, all the robots I've shown you have been small, and that's because robots don't do things that people do. They go places people can't go. And a great example of that is Bujold. Unmanned ground vehicles are particularly small, so Bujold —(Laughter)Say hello to Bujold.(Laughter)Bujold was used extensively at the World Trade Center to go through Towers 1, 2 and 4. You're climbing into the rubble, rappelling down, going deep in spaces. And just to see the World Trade Center from Bujold's viewpoint, look at this. You're talking about a disaster where you can't fit a person or a dog — and it's on fire. The only hope of getting to a survivor way in the basement, you have to go through things that are on fire. It was so hot, on one of the robots, the tracks began to melt and come off. Robots don't replace people or dogs, or hummingbirds or hawks or dolphins. They do things new. They assist the responders, the experts, in new and innovative ways.The biggest problem is not making the robots smaller, though. It's not making them more heat-resistant. It's not making more sensors. The biggest problem is the data, the informatics, because these people need to get the right data at the right time.So wouldn't it be great if we could have experts immediately access the robots without having to waste any time of driving to the site, so whoever's there, use their robots over the Internet. Well, let's think about that. Let's think about a chemical train derailment in a rural county. What are the odds that the experts, your chemical engineer, your railroad transportation engineers, have been trained on whatever UAV that particular county happens to have? Probably, like, none. So we're using these kinds of interfaces to allow people to use the robots without knowing what robot they're using, or even if they're using a robot or not. What the robots give you, what they give the experts, is data.The problem becomes: who gets what data when? One thing to do is to ship all the information to everybody and let them sort it out. Well, the problem with that is it overwhelms the networks, and worse yet, it overwhelms the cognitive abilities of each of the people trying to get that one nugget of information they need to make the decision that's going to make the difference. So we need to think about those kinds of challenges. So it's the data.Going back to the World Trade Center, we tried to solve that problem by just recording the data from Bujold only when she was deep in the rubble, because that's what the USAR team said they wanted. What we didn't know at the time was that the civil engineers would have loved, needed the data as we recorded the box beams, the serial numbers, the locations, as we went into the rubble. We lost valuable data. So the challenge is getting all the data and getting it to the right people.Now, here's another reason. We've learned that some buildings — things like schools, hospitals, city halls — get inspected four times by different agencies throughout the response phases. Now, we're looking, if we can get the data from the robots to share, not only can we do things like compress that sequence of phases to shorten the response time, but now we can begin to do the response in parallel. Everybody can see the data. We can shorten it that way.So really, ""disaster robotics"" is a misnomer. It's not about the robots. It's about the data.(Applause)So my challenge to you: the next time you hear about a disaster, look for the robots. They may be underground, they may be underwater, they may be in the sky, but they should be there. Look for the robots, because robots are coming to the rescue.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_murphy_these_robots_come_to_the_rescue_after_a_disaster
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"Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize [winner] in economics, once wrote: ""Productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything.""So this is serious. There are not that many things on earth that are ""almost everything."" Productivity is the principal driver of the prosperity of a society. So we have a problem. In the largest European economies, productivity used to grow five percent per annum in the '50s, '60s, early '70s. From '73 to '83: three percent per annum. From '83 to '95: two percent per annum. Since 1995: less than one percent per annum. The same profile in Japan. The same profile in the US, despite a momentary rebound 15 years ago, and despite all the technological innovations around us: the Internet, the information, the new information and communication technologies.When productivity grows three percent per annum, you double the standard of living every generation. Every generation is twice as well-off as its parents'. When it grows one percent per annum, it takes three generations to double the standard of living. And in this process, many people will be less well-off than their parents. They will have less of everything: smaller roofs, or perhaps no roof at all, less access to education, to vitamins, to antibiotics, to vaccination — to everything. Think of all the problems that we're facing at the moment. All. Chances are that they are rooted in the productivity crisis.Why this crisis? Because the basic tenets about efficiency — effectiveness in organizations, in management — have become counterproductive for human efforts. Everywhere in public services — in companies, in the way we work, the way we innovate, invest — try to learn to work better. Take the holy trinity of efficiency: clarity, measurement, accountability. They make human efforts derail.There are two ways to look at it, to prove it. One, the one I prefer, is rigorous, elegant, nice — math. But the full math version takes a little while, so there is another one. It is to look at a relay race. This is what we will do today. It's a bit more animated, more visual and also faster — it's a race. Hopefully, it's faster.(Laughter)World championship final — women. Eight teams in the final. The fastest team is the US team. They have the fastest women on earth. They are the favorite team to win. Notably, if you compare them to an average team, say, the French team,(Laughter)based on their best performances in the 100-meter race, if you add the individual times of the US runners, they arrive at the finish line 3.2 meters ahead of the French team. And this year, the US team is in great shape. Based on their best performance this year, they arrive 6.4 meters ahead of the French team, based on the data. We are going to look at the race. At some point you will see, towards the end, that Torri Edwards, the fourth US runner, is ahead. Not surprising — this year she got the gold medal in the 100-meter race. And by the way, Chryste Gaines, the second runner in the US team, is the fastest woman on earth. So, there are 3.5 billion women on earth. Where are the two fastest? On the US team. And the two other runners on the US team are not bad, either.(Laughter)So clearly, the US team has won the war for talent. But behind, the average team is trying to catch up. Let's watch the race.(Video: French sportscasters narrate race)(Video: Race narration ends)Yves Morieux: So what happened? The fastest team did not win; the slower one did. By the way, I hope you appreciate the deep historical research I did to make the French look good.(Laughter)But let's not exaggerate — it's not archeology, either.(Laughter)But why? Because of cooperation. When you hear this sentence: ""Thanks to cooperation, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts."" This is not poetry; this is not philosophy. This is math. Those who carry the baton are slower, but their baton is faster. Miracle of cooperation: it multiplies energy, intelligence in human efforts. It is the essence of human efforts: how we work together, how each effort contributes to the efforts of others. With cooperation, we can do more with less.Now, what happens to cooperation when the holy grail — the holy trinity, even — of clarity, measurement, accountability — appears?Clarity. Management reports are full of complaints about the lack of clarity. Compliance audits, consultants' diagnostics. We need more clarity, we need to clarify the roles, the processes. It is as though the runners on the team were saying, ""Let's be clear — where does my role really start and end? Am I supposed to run for 95 meters, 96, 97...?"" It's important, let's be clear. If you say 97, after 97 meters, people will drop the baton, whether there is someone to take it or not.Accountability. We are constantly trying to put accountability in someone's hands. Who is accountable for this process? We need somebody accountable for this process. So in the relay race, since passing the baton is so important, then we need somebody clearly accountable for passing the baton. So between each runner, now we will have a new dedicated athlete, clearly dedicated to taking the baton from one runner, and passing it to the next runner. And we will have at least two like that. Well, will we, in that case, win the race? That I don't know, but for sure, we would have a clear interface, a clear line of accountability. We will know who to blame. But we'll never win the race. If you think about it, we pay more attention to knowing who to blame in case we fail, than to creating the conditions to succeed. All the human intelligence put in organization design — urban structures, processing systems — what is the real goal? To have somebody guilty in case they fail. We are creating organizations able to fail, but in a compliant way, with somebody clearly accountable when we fail. And we are quite effective at that — failing.Measurement. What gets measured gets done. Look, to pass the baton, you have to do it at the right time, in the right hand, at the right speed. But to do that, you have to put energy in your arm. This energy that is in your arm will not be in your legs. It will come at the expense of your measurable speed. You have to shout early enough to the next runner when you will pass the baton, to signal that you are arriving, so that the next runner can prepare, can anticipate. And you have to shout loud. But the blood, the energy that will be in your throat will not be in your legs. Because you know, there are eight people shouting at the same time. So you have to recognize the voice of your colleague. You cannot say, ""Is it you?"" Too late!(Laughter)Now, let's look at the race in slow motion, and concentrate on the third runner. Look at where she allocates her efforts, her energy, her attention. Not all in her legs — that would be great for her own speed — but in also in her throat, arm, eye, brain. That makes a difference in whose legs? In the legs of the next runner. But when the next runner runs super-fast, is it because she made a super effort, or because of the way the third runner passed the baton? There is no metric on earth that will give us the answer. And if we reward people on the basis of their measurable performance, they will put their energy, their attention, their blood in what can get measured — in their legs. And the baton will fall and slow down.To cooperate is not a super effort, it is how you allocate your effort. It is to take a risk, because you sacrifice the ultimate protection granted by objectively measurable individual performance. It is to make a super difference in the performance of others, with whom we are compared. It takes being stupid to cooperate, then. And people are not stupid; they don't cooperate.You know, clarity, accountability, measurement were OK when the world was simpler. But business has become much more complex. With my teams, we have measured the evolution of complexity in business. It is much more demanding today to attract and retain customers, to build advantage on a global scale, to create value. And the more business gets complex, the more, in the name of clarity, accountability, measurement we multiply structures, processes, systems.You know, this drive for clarity and accountability triggers a counterproductive multiplication of interfaces, middle offices, coordinators that do not only mobilize people and resources, but that also add obstacles. And the more complicated the organization, the more difficult it is to understand what is really happening. So we need summaries, proxies, reports, key performance indicators, metrics. So people put their energy in what can get measured, at the expense of cooperation. And as performance deteriorates, we add even more structure, process, systems. People spend their time in meetings, writing reports they have to do, undo and redo. Based on our analysis, teams in these organizations spend between 40 and 80 percent of their time wasting their time, but working harder and harder, longer and longer, on less and less value-adding activities. This is what is killing productivity, what makes people suffer at work.Our organizations are wasting human intelligence. They have turned against human efforts. When people don't cooperate, don't blame their mindsets, their mentalities, their personality — look at the work situations. Is it really in their personal interest to cooperate or not, if, when they cooperate, they are individually worse off? Why would they cooperate? When we blame personalities instead of the clarity, the accountability, the measurement, we add injustice to ineffectiveness.We need to create organizations in which it becomes individually useful for people to cooperate. Remove the interfaces, the middle offices — all these complicated coordination structures. Don't look for clarity; go for fuzziness. Fuzziness overlaps. Remove most of the quantitative metrics to assess performance. Speed the ""what."" Look at cooperation, the ""how."" How did you pass the baton? Did you throw it, or did you pass it effectively? Am I putting my energy in what can get measured — my legs, my speed — or in passing the baton?You, as leaders, as managers, are you making it individually useful for people to cooperate? The future of our organizations, our companies, our societies hinges on your answer to these questions.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yves_morieux_how_too_many_rules_at_work_keep_you_from_getting_things_done
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"When I was 14 years old, I was interested in science — fascinated by it, excited to learn about it. And I had a high school science teacher who would say to the class, ""The girls don't have to listen to this.""Encouraging, yes.(Laughter)I chose not to listen — but to that statement alone.So let me take you to the Andes mountains in Chile, 500 kilometers, 300 miles northeast of Santiago. It's very remote, it's very dry and it's very beautiful. And there's not much there. There are condors, there are tarantulas, and at night, when the light dims, it reveals one of the darkest skies on Earth. It's kind of a magic place, the mountain. It's a wonderful combination of very remote mountaintop with exquisitely sophisticated technology.And our ancestors, for as long as there's been recorded history, have looked at the night sky and pondered the nature of our existence. And we're no exception, our generation. The only difficulty is that the night sky now is blocked by the glare of city lights. And so astronomers go to these very remote mountaintops to view and to study the cosmos. So telescopes are our window to the cosmos.It's no exaggeration to say that the Southern Hemisphere is going to be the future of astronomy for the 21st century. We have an array of existing telescopes already, in the Andes mountains in Chile, and that's soon to be joined by a really sensational array of new capability. There will be two international groups that are going to be building giant telescopes, sensitive to optical radiation, as our eyes are. There will be a survey telescope that will be scanning the sky every few nights. There will be radio telescopes, sensitive to long-wavelength radio radiation. And then there will be telescopes in space. There'll be a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope; it's called the James Webb Telescope, and it will be launched in 2018. There'll be a satellite called TESS that will discover planets outside of our solar system.For the last decade, I've been leading a group — a consortium — international group, to build what will be, when it's finished, the largest optical telescope in existence. It's called the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT. This telescope is going to have mirrors that are 8.4 meters in diameter — each of the mirrors. That's almost 27 feet. So it dwarfs this stage — maybe out to the fourth row in this audience. Each of the seven mirrors in this telescope will be almost 27 feet in diameter. Together, the seven mirrors in this telescope will comprise 80 feet in diameter. So, essentially the size of this entire auditorium. The whole telescope will stand about 43 meters high, and again, being in Rio, some of you have been to see the statue of the giant Christ. The scale is comparable in height; in fact, it's smaller than this telescope will be. It's comparable to the size of the Statue of Liberty. And it's going to be housed in an enclosure that's 22 stories — 60 meters high. But it's an unusual building to protect this telescope. It will have open windows to the sky, be able to point and look at the sky, and it will actually rotate on a base — 2,000 tons of rotating building.The Giant Magellan Telescope will have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be 20 million times more sensitive than the human eye. And it may, for the first time ever, be capable of finding life on planets outside of our solar system. It's going to allow us to look back at the first light in the universe — literally, the dawn of the cosmos. The cosmic dawn. It's a telescope that's going to allow us to peer back, witness galaxies as they were when they were actually assembling, the first black holes in the universe, the first galaxies.Now, for thousands of years, we have been studying the cosmos, we've been wondering about our place in the universe. The ancient Greeks told us that the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, Copernicus displaced the Earth, and put the Sun at the heart of the cosmos. And as we've learned over the centuries, since Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist, first turned, in that time, a two-inch, very small telescope, to the sky, every time we have built larger telescopes, we have learned something about the universe; we've made discoveries, without exception. We've learned in the 20th century that the universe is expanding and that our own solar system is not at the center of that expansion. We know now that the universe is made of about 100 billion galaxies that are visible to us, and each one of those galaxies has 100 billion stars within it.So we're looking now at the deepest image of the cosmos that's ever been taken. It was taken using the Hubble Space Telescope, and by pointing the telescope at what was previously a blank region of sky, before the launch of Hubble. And if you can imagine this tiny area, it's only one-fiftieth of the size of the full moon. So, if you can imagine the full moon. And there are now 10,000 galaxies visible within that image. And the faintness of those images and the tiny size is only a result of the fact that those galaxies are so far away, the vast distances. And each of those galaxies may contain within it a few billion or even hundreds of billions of individual stars. Telescopes are like time machines. So the farther back we look in space, the further back we see in time. And they're like light buckets — literally, they collect light. So larger the bucket, the larger the mirror we have, the more light we can see, and the farther back we can view.So, we've learned in the last century that there are exotic objects in the universe — black holes. We've even learned that there's dark matter and dark energy that we can't see. So you're looking now at an actual image of dark matter.(Laughter)You got it. Not all audiences get that.(Laughter)So the way we infer the presence of dark matter — we can't see it — but there's an unmistakable tug, due to gravity. We now can look out, we see this sea of galaxies in a universe that's expanding.What I do myself is to measure the expansion of the universe, and one of the projects that I carried out in the 1990s used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure how fast the universe is expanding. We can now trace back to 14 billion years. We've learned over time that stars have individual histories; that is, they have birth, they have middle ages and some of them even have dramatic deaths. So the embers from those stars actually then form the new stars that we see, most of which turn out to have planets going around them.And one of the really surprising results in the last 20 years has been the discovery of other planets going around other stars. These are called exoplanets. And until 1995, we didn't even know the existence of any other planets, other than going around our own sun. But now, there are almost 2,000 other planets orbiting other stars that we can now detect, measure masses for. There are 500 of those that are multiple-planet systems. And there are 4,000 — and still counting — other candidates for planets orbiting other stars. They come in a bewildering variety of different kinds. There are Jupiter-like planets that are hot, there are other planets that are icy, there are water worlds and there are rocky planets like the Earth, so-called ""super-Earths,"" and there have even been planets that have been speculated diamond worlds.So we know there's at least one planet, our own Earth, in which there is life. We've even found planets that are orbiting two stars. That's no longer the province of science fiction. So around our own planet, we know there's life, we've developed a complex life, we now can question our own origins. And given all that we've discovered, the overwhelming numbers now suggest that there may be millions, perhaps — maybe even hundreds of millions — of other [planets] that are close enough — just the right distance from their stars that they're orbiting — to have the existence of liquid water and maybe could potentially support life. So we marvel now at those odds, the overwhelming odds, and the amazing thing is that within the next decade, the GMT may be able to take spectra of the atmospheres of those planets, and determine whether or not they have the potential for life.So, what is the GMT project? It's an international project. It includes Australia, South Korea, and I'm happy to say, being here in Rio, that the newest partner in our telescope is Brazil.(Applause)It also includes a number of institutions across the United States, including Harvard University, the Smithsonian and the Carnegie Institutions, and the Universities of Arizona, Chicago, Texas-Austin and Texas A&M University. It also involves Chile.So, the making of the mirrors in this telescope is also fascinating in its own right. Take chunks of glass, melt them in a furnace that is itself rotating. This happens underneath the football stadium at the University of Arizona. It's tucked away under 52,000 seats. Nobody know it's happening. And there's essentially a rotating cauldron. The mirrors are cast and they're cooled very slowly, and then they're polished to an exquisite precision. And so, if you think about the precision of these mirrors, the bumps on the mirror, over the entire 27 feet, amount to less than one-millionth of an inch. So, can you visualize that? Ow!(Laughter)That's one five-thousandths of the width of one of my hairs, over this entire 27 feet. It's a spectacular achievement. It's what allows us to have the precision that we will have.So, what does that precision buy us? So the GMT, if you can imagine — if I were to hold up a coin, which I just happen to have, and I look at the face of that coin, I can see from here the writing on the coin; I can see the face on that coin. My guess that even in the front row, you can't see that. But if we were to turn the Giant Magellan Telescope, all 80-feet diameter that we see in this auditorium, and point it 200 miles away, if I were standing in São Paulo, we could resolve the face of this coin. That's the extraordinary resolution and power of this telescope. And if we were —(Applause)If an astronaut went up to the Moon, a quarter of a million miles away, and lit a candle — a single candle — then we would be able to detect it, using the GMT. Quite extraordinary.This is a simulated image of a cluster in a nearby galaxy. ""Nearby"" is astronomical, it's all relative. It's tens of millions of light-years away. This is what this cluster would look like. So look at those four bright objects, and now lets compare it with a camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. You can see faint detail that starts to come through. And now finally — and look how dramatic this is — this is what the GMT will see. So, keep your eyes on those bright images again. This is what we see on one of the most powerful existing telescopes on the Earth, and this, again, what the GMT will see. Extraordinary precision.So, where are we? We have now leveled the top of the mountaintop in Chile. We blasted that off. We've tested and polished the first mirror. We've cast the second and the third mirrors. And we're about to cast the fourth mirror. We had a series of reviews this year, international panels that came in and reviewed us, and said, ""You're ready to go to construction."" And so we plan on building this telescope with the first four mirrors. We want to get on the air quickly, and be taking science data — what we astronomers call ""first light,"" in 2021. And the full telescope will be finished in the middle of the next decade, with all seven mirrors.So we're now poised to look back at the distant universe, the cosmic dawn. We'll be able to study other planets in exquisite detail.But for me, one of the most exciting things about building the GMT is the opportunity to actually discover something that we don't know about — that we can't even imagine at this point, something completely new. And my hope is that with the construction of this and other facilities, that many young women and men will be inspired to reach for the stars.Thank you very much. Obrigado.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Wendy. Stay with me, because I have a question for you. You mentioned different facilities. So the Magellan Telescope is going up, but also ALMA and others in Chile and elsewhere, including in Hawaii. Is it about cooperation and complementarity, or about competition? I know there's competition in terms of funding, but what about the science?Wendy Freedman: In terms of the science, they're very complementary. The telescopes that are in space, the telescopes on the ground, telescopes with different wavelength capability, telescopes even that are similar, but different instruments — they will all look at different parts of the questions that we're asking. So when we discover other planets, we'll be able to test those observations, we'll be able to measure the atmospheres, be able to look in space with very high resolution. So, they're very complementary. You're right about the funding, we compete; but scientifically, it's very complementary.BG: Wendy, thank you very much for coming to TEDGlobal.WF: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_freedman_this_new_telescope_might_show_us_the_beginning_of_the_universe
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"I will always remember the first time I met the girl in the blue uniform. I was eight at the time, living in the village with my grandmother, who was raising me and other children. Famine had hit my country of Zimbabwe, and we just didn't have enough to eat. We were hungry. And that's when the girl in the blue uniform came to my village with the United Nations to feed the children.As she handed me my porridge, I asked her why she was there, and without hesitation, she said, ""As Africans, we must uplift all the people of Africa."" I had absolutely no idea what she meant.(Laughter)But her words stuck with me.Two years later, famine hit my country for the second time. My grandmother had no choice but to send me to the city to live with an aunt I had never met before. So at the age of 10, I found myself in school for the very first time. And there, at the city school, I would experience what it was to be unequal. You see, in the village, we were all equal. But in the eyes and the minds of the other kids, I was not their equal. I couldn't speak English, and I was way behind in terms of reading and writing. But this feeling of inequality would get even more complex. Every school holiday spent back in the village with my grandmother made me consciously aware of the inequalities this incredible opportunity had created within my own family. Suddenly, I had much more than the rest of my village. And in their eyes, I was no longer their equal.I felt guilty. But I thought about the girl in the blue uniform, and I remember thinking, ""That's who I want to be — someone like her, someone who uplifts other people."" This childhood experience led me to the United Nations, and to my current role with UN Women, where we are addressing one of the greatest inequalities that affects more than half of the world's population — women and girls.Today, I want to share with you a simple idea that seeks to uplift all of us together. Eight months ago, under the visionary leadership of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, head of UN Women, we launched a groundbreaking initiative called HeForShe, inviting men and boys from around the world to stand in solidarity with each other and with women, to create a shared vision for gender equality. This is an invitation for those who believe in equality for women and men, and those who don't yet know that they believe.The initiative is based on a simple idea: that what we share is much more powerful than what divides us. We all feel the same things. We all want the same things, even when those things sometimes remain unspoken. HeForShe is about uplifting all of us, women and men together. It's moving us towards an inflection point for gender equality.Imagine a blank page with one horizontal line splitting it in half. Now imagine that women are represented here, and men are represented here. In our current population, HeForShe is about moving the 3.2 billion men, one man at a time, across that line, so that ultimately, men can stand alongside women and be on the right side of history, making gender equality a reality in the 21st century.However, engaging men in the movement would prove quite controversial. Why invite men? They are the problem.(Laughter)In fact, men don't care, we were told.But something incredible happened when we launched HeForShe. In just three days, more than 100,000 men had signed up and committed to be agents of change for equality. Within that first week, at least one man in every single country in the world stood up to be counted, and within that same week, HeForShe created more than 1.2 billion conversations on social media. And that's when the emails started pouring in, sometimes as many as a thousand a day. We heard from a man out of Zimbabwe, who, after hearing about HeForShe, created a ""husband school.""(Laughter)He literally went around his village, hand-picking all of the men that were abusive to their partners, and committed to turn them into better husbands and fathers. In Pune, India, a youth advocate organized an innovative bicycle rally, mobilizing 700 cyclists to share the HeForShe messages within their own community.In another impact story, a man sent a very personal note of something that had happened in his own community. He wrote, ""Dear Madam, I have lived all of my life next door to a man who continuously beats up his wife. Two weeks ago, I was listening to my radio, and your voice came on, and you spoke about something called the HeForShe, and the need for men to play their role. Within a few hours, I heard the woman cry again next door, but for the first time, I didn't just sit there. I felt compelled to do something, so I went over and I confronted the husband. Madam, it has been two weeks, and the woman has not cried since. Thank you for giving me a voice.""(Applause)Personal impact stories such as these show that we are tapping into something within men, but getting to a world where women and men are equal is not just a matter of bringing men to the cause. We want concrete, systematic, structural change that can equalize the political, economic and social realities for women and men. We are asking men to make concrete actions, calling them to intervene at a personal level, to change their behavior. We are calling upon governments, businesses, universities, to change their policies. We want male leaders to become role models and change agents within their own institutions.Already, a number of prominent men and leaders have stepped up and made some concrete HeForShe commitments. In a few early success stories, a leading French hospitality company, Accor, has committed to eliminate the pay gap for all of its 180,000 employees by 2020.(Applause)The government of Sweden, under its current feminist government, has committed to close both the employment and the pay gap for all of its citizens within the current electoral term. In Japan, the University of Nagoya is building, as part of their HeForShe commitments, what will become one of Japan's leading gender-research centers.Now, eight months later, a movement is building. We are seeing men sign up from every single walk of life, and from every single corner in the world, from the United Nations' own Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Secretary-Generals of NATO and the EU Council, from the prime minister of Bhutan to the president of Sierra Leone.In Europe alone, all the male EU Commissioners and the members of Parliament of the Swedish and Iceland governments have signed up to be HeForShe. In fact, one in 20 men in Iceland has joined the movement. The rallying call of our passionate goodwill ambassador, Emma Watson, has garnered more than five billion media impressions, mobilizing hundreds and thousands of students around the world to create more than a hundred HeForShe student associations.Now this is the beginning of the vision that HeForShe has for the world that we want to see. Einstein once said, ""A human being is part of the whole ... but he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest ... This delusion is a kind of prison for us ... Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion.""If women and men are part of a greater whole, as Einstein suggests, it is my hope that HeForShe can help free us to realize that it is not our gender that defines us, but ultimately, our shared humanity. HeForShe is tapping into women's and men's dreams, the dreams that we have for ourselves, and the dreams that we have for our families, our children, friends, communities.So that's what it is about. HeForShe is about uplifting all of us together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_nyamayaro_an_invitation_to_men_who_want_a_better_world_for_women
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"If you want to buy high-quality, low-price cocaine, there really is only one place to go, and that is the dark net anonymous markets.Now, you can't get to these sites with a normal browser — Chrome or Firefox — because they're on this hidden part of the Internet, known as Tor hidden services, where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in .onion, and which you access with a special browser called the Tor browser.Now, the Tor browser was originally a U.S. Naval intelligence project. It then became open source, and it allows anybody to browse the net without giving away their location. And it does this by encrypting your IP address and then routing it via several other computers around the world that use the same software. You can use it on the normal Internet, but it's also your key to the dark net. And because of this fiendishly clever encryption system, the 20 or 30 — we don't know exactly — thousand sites that operate there are incredibly difficult to shut down. It is a censorship-free world visited by anonymous users.Little wonder, then, that it's a natural place to go for anybody with something to hide, and that something, of course, need not be illegal. On the dark net, you will find whistle-blower sites, The New Yorker. You will find political activism blogs. You will find libraries of pirated books. But you'll also find the drugs markets, illegal pornography, commercial hacking services, and much more besides. Now, the dark net is one of the most interesting, exciting places anywhere on the net. And the reason is, because although innovation, of course, takes place in big businesses, takes place in world-class universities, it also takes place in the fringes, because those on the fringes — the pariahs, the outcasts — they're often the most creative, because they have to be. In this part of the Internet, you will not find a single lolcat, a single pop-up advert anywhere. And that's one of the reasons why I think many of you here will be on the dark net fairly soon.(Laughter)Not that I'm suggesting anyone in this audience would use it to go and procure high-quality narcotics. But let's say for a moment that you were.(Laughter)Bear with me. The first thing you will notice on signing up to one of these sites is how familiar it looks. Every single product — thousands of products — has a glossy, high-res image, a detailed product description, a price. There's a ""Proceed to checkout"" icon. There is even, most beautifully of all, a ""Report this item"" button.(Laughter)Incredible.You browse through the site, you make your choice, you pay with the crypto-currency bitcoin, you enter an address —  preferably not your home address — and you wait for your product to arrive in the post, which it nearly always does. And the reason it does is not because of the clever encryption. That's important. Something far simpler than that. It's the user reviews.(Laughter)You see, every single vendor on these sites uses a pseudonym, naturally enough, but they keep the same pseudonym to build up a reputation. And because it's easy for the buyer to change allegiance whenever they want, the only way of trusting a vendor is if they have a good history of positive feedback from other users of the site.And this introduction of competition and choice does exactly what the economists would predict. Prices tend to go down, product quality tends to go up, and the vendors are attentive, they're polite, they're consumer-centric, offering you all manner of special deals, one-offs, buy-one-get-one-frees, free delivery, to keep you happy.I spoke to Drugsheaven. Drugsheaven was offering excellent and consistent marijuana at a reasonable price. He had a very generous refund policy, detailed T's and C's, and good shipping times.""Dear Drugsheaven,"" I wrote, via the internal emailing system that's also encrypted, of course. ""I'm new here. Do you mind if I buy just one gram of marijuana?""A couple of hours later, I get a reply. They always reply.""Hi there, thanks for your email. Starting small is a wise thing to do. I would, too, if I were you.""(Laughter)""So no problem if you'd like to start with just one gram. I do hope we can do business together. Best wishes, Drugsheaven.""(Laughter)I don't know why he had a posh English accent, but I assume he did.Now, this kind of consumer-centric attitude is the reason why, when I reviewed 120,000 pieces of feedback that had been left on one of these sites over a three-month period, 95 percent of them were five out of five. The customer, you see, is king. But what does that mean? Well, on the one hand, that means there are more drugs, more available, more easily, to more people. And by my reckoning, that is not a good thing. But, on the other hand, if you are going to take drugs, you have a reasonably good way of guaranteeing a certain level of purity and quality, which is incredibly important if you're taking drugs. And you can do so from the comfort of your own home, without the risks associated with buying on the streets.Now, as I said, you've got to be creative and innovative to survive in this marketplace. And the 20 or so sites that are currently in operation — by the way, they don't always work, they're not always perfect; the site that I showed you was shut down 18 months ago, but not before it had turned over a billion dollars' worth of trade. But these markets, because of the difficult conditions in which they are operating, the inhospitable conditions, are always innovating, always thinking of ways of getting smarter, more decentralized, harder to censor, and more customer-friendly.Let's take the payment system. You don't pay with your credit card, of course — that would lead directly back to you. So you use the crypto-currency bitcoin, which is easily exchanged for real-world currencies and gives quite a high degree of anonymity to its users.But at the beginning of these sites, people noticed a flaw. Some of the unscrupulous dealers were running away with peoples' bitcoin before they'd mailed the drugs out. The community came up with a solution, called multi-signature escrow payments. So on purchasing my item, I would send my bitcoin to a neutral, secure third digital wallet. The vendor, who would see that I'd sent it, would be confident that they could then send the product to me, and then when I received it, at least two of the three people engaged in the transaction — vendor, buyer, site administrator — would have to sign the transaction off with a unique digital signature, and then the money would be transferred.Brilliant! Elegant. It works.But then they realized there was a problem with bitcoin, because every bitcoin transaction is actually recorded publicly in a public ledger. So if you're clever, you can try and work out who's behind them. So they came up with a tumbling service. Hundreds of people send their bitcoin into one address, they're tumbled and jumbled up, and then the right amount is sent on to the right recipients, but they're different bitcoins: micro-laundering systems.(Laughter)It's incredible.Interested in what drugs are trending right now on the dark net markets? Check Grams, the search engine. You can even buy some advertising space.(Laughter)Are you an ethical consumer worried about what the drugs industry is doing? Yeah. One vendor will offer you fair trade organic cocaine.(Laughter)That's not being sourced from Colombian druglords, but Guatemalan farmers. They even promised to reinvest 20 percent of any profits into local education programs.(Laughter)There's even a mystery shopper.Now, whatever you think about the morality of these sites — and I submit that it's not actually an easy question — the creation of functioning, competitive, anonymous markets, where nobody knows who anybody else is, constantly at risk of being shut down by the authorities, is a staggering achievement, a phenomenal achievement. And it's that kind of innovation that's why those on the fringes are often the harbingers of what is to come.It's easy to forget that because of its short life, the Internet has actually changed many times over the last 30 years or so. It started in the '70s as a military project, morphed in the 1980s to an academic network, co-opted by commercial companies in the '90s, and then invaded by all of us via social media in the noughties, but I think it's going to change again. And I think things like the dark net markets — creative, secure, difficult to censor — I think that's the future.And the reason it's the future is because we're all worried about our privacy. Surveys consistently show concerns about privacy. The more time we spend online, the more we worry about them, and those surveys show our worries are growing. We're worried about what happens to our data. We're worried about who might be watching us.Since the revelations from Edward Snowden, there's been a huge increase in the number of people using various privacy-enhancing tools. There are now between two and three million daily users of the Tor browser, the majority of which use is perfectly legitimate, sometimes even mundane. And there are hundreds of activists around the world working on techniques and tools to keep you private online — default encrypted messaging services. Ethereum, which is a project which tries to link up the connected but unused hard drives of millions of computers around the world, to create a sort of distributed Internet that no one really controls. Now, we've had distributed computing before, of course. We use it for everything from Skype to the search for extraterrestrial life. But you add distributed computing and powerful encryption — that's very, very hard to censor and control. Another called MaidSafe works on similar principles. Another called Twister, and so on and so on.And here's the thing — the more of us join, the more interesting those sites become, and then the more of us join, and so on. And I think that's what's going to happen.In fact, it's already happening. The dark net is no longer a den for dealers and a hideout for whistle-blowers. It's already going mainstream. Just recently, the musician Aphex Twin released his album as a dark net site. Facebook has started a dark net site. A group of London architects have opened a dark net site for people worried about regeneration projects. Yes, the dark net is going mainstream, and I predict that fairly soon, every social media company, every major news outlet, and therefore most of you in this audience, will be using the dark net, too.So the Internet is about to get more interesting, more exciting, more innovative, more terrible, more destructive. That's good news if you care about liberty. It's good news if you care about freedom. It's good news if you care about democracy. It's also good news if you want to browse for illegal pornography and if you want to buy and sell drugs with impunity. Neither entirely dark, nor entirely light. It's not one side or the other that's going to win out, but both.Thank you very much, indeed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_bartlett_how_the_mysterious_dark_net_is_going_mainstream
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"Chris Anderson: You were something of a mathematical phenom. You had already taught at Harvard and MIT at a young age. And then the NSA came calling. What was that about?Jim Simons: Well the NSA — that's the National Security Agency — they didn't exactly come calling. They had an operation at Princeton, where they hired mathematicians to attack secret codes and stuff like that. And I knew that existed. And they had a very good policy, because you could do half your time at your own mathematics, and at least half your time working on their stuff. And they paid a lot. So that was an irresistible pull. So, I went there.CA: You were a code-cracker.JS: I was.CA: Until you got fired.JS: Well, I did get fired. Yes.CA: How come?JS: Well, how come? I got fired because, well, the Vietnam War was on, and the boss of bosses in my organization was a big fan of the war and wrote a New York Times article, a magazine section cover story, about how we would win in Vietnam. And I didn't like that war, I thought it was stupid. And I wrote a letter to the Times, which they published, saying not everyone who works for Maxwell Taylor, if anyone remembers that name, agrees with his views. And I gave my own views ...CA: Oh, OK. I can see that would —JS: ... which were different from General Taylor's. But in the end, nobody said anything. But then, I was 29 years old at this time, and some kid came around and said he was a stringer from Newsweek magazine and he wanted to interview me and ask what I was doing about my views. And I told him, ""I'm doing mostly mathematics now, and when the war is over, then I'll do mostly their stuff."" Then I did the only intelligent thing I'd done that day — I told my local boss that I gave that interview. And he said, ""What'd you say?"" And I told him what I said. And then he said, ""I've got to call Taylor."" He called Taylor; that took 10 minutes. I was fired five minutes after that.CA: OK.JS: But it wasn't bad.CA: It wasn't bad, because you went on to Stony Brook and stepped up your mathematical career. You started working with this man here. Who is this?JS: Oh, [Shiing-Shen] Chern. Chern was one of the great mathematicians of the century. I had known him when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. And I had some ideas, and I brought them to him and he liked them. Together, we did this work which you can easily see up there. There it is.CA: It led to you publishing a famous paper together. Can you explain at all what that work was?JS: No.(Laughter)JS: I mean, I could explain it to somebody.(Laughter)CA: How about explaining this?JS: But not many. Not many people.CA: I think you told me it had something to do with spheres, so let's start here.JS: Well, it did, but I'll say about that work — it did have something to do with that, but before we get to that — that work was good mathematics. I was very happy with it; so was Chern. It even started a little sub-field that's now flourishing. But, more interestingly, it happened to apply to physics, something we knew nothing about — at least I knew nothing about physics, and I don't think Chern knew a heck of a lot. And about 10 years after the paper came out, a guy named Ed Witten in Princeton started applying it to string theory and people in Russia started applying it to what's called ""condensed matter."" Today, those things in there called Chern-Simons invariants have spread through a lot of physics. And it was amazing. We didn't know any physics. It never occurred to me that it would be applied to physics. But that's the thing about mathematics — you never know where it's going to go.CA: This is so incredible. So, we've been talking about how evolution shapes human minds that may or may not perceive the truth. Somehow, you come up with a mathematical theory, not knowing any physics, discover two decades later that it's being applied to profoundly describe the actual physical world. How can that happen?JS: God knows.(Laughter)But there's a famous physicist named [Eugene] Wigner, and he wrote an essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Somehow, this mathematics, which is rooted in the real world in some sense — we learn to count, measure, everyone would do that — and then it flourishes on its own. But so often it comes back to save the day. General relativity is an example. [Hermann] Minkowski had this geometry, and Einstein realized, ""Hey! It's the very thing in which I can cast general relativity."" So, you never know. It is a mystery. It is a mystery.CA: So, here's a mathematical piece of ingenuity. Tell us about this.JS: Well, that's a ball — it's a sphere, and it has a lattice around it — you know, those squares. What I'm going to show here was originally observed by [Leonhard] Euler, the great mathematician, in the 1700s. And it gradually grew to be a very important field in mathematics: algebraic topology, geometry. That paper up there had its roots in this. So, here's this thing: it has eight vertices, 12 edges, six faces. And if you look at the difference — vertices minus edges plus faces — you get two. OK, well, two. That's a good number. Here's a different way of doing it — these are triangles covering — this has 12 vertices and 30 edges and 20 faces, 20 tiles. And vertices minus edges plus faces still equals two. And in fact, you could do this any which way — cover this thing with all kinds of polygons and triangles and mix them up. And you take vertices minus edges plus faces — you'll get two. Here's a different shape. This is a torus, or the surface of a doughnut: 16 vertices covered by these rectangles, 32 edges, 16 faces. Vertices minus edges comes out to be zero. It'll always come out to zero. Every time you cover a torus with squares or triangles or anything like that, you're going to get zero. So, this is called the Euler characteristic. And it's what's called a topological invariant. It's pretty amazing. No matter how you do it, you're always get the same answer. So that was the first sort of thrust, from the mid-1700s, into a subject which is now called algebraic topology.CA: And your own work took an idea like this and moved it into higher-dimensional theory, higher-dimensional objects, and found new invariances?JS: Yes. Well, there were already higher-dimensional invariants: Pontryagin classes — actually, there were Chern classes. There were a bunch of these types of invariants. I was struggling to work on one of them and model it sort of combinatorially, instead of the way it was typically done, and that led to this work and we uncovered some new things. But if it wasn't for Mr. Euler — who wrote almost 70 volumes of mathematics and had 13 children, who he apparently would dandle on his knee while he was writing — if it wasn't for Mr. Euler, there wouldn't perhaps be these invariants.CA: OK, so that's at least given us a flavor of that amazing mind in there. Let's talk about Renaissance. Because you took that amazing mind and having been a code-cracker at the NSA, you started to become a code-cracker in the financial industry. I think you probably didn't buy efficient market theory. Somehow you found a way of creating astonishing returns over two decades. The way it's been explained to me, what's remarkable about what you did wasn't just the size of the returns, it's that you took them with surprisingly low volatility and risk, compared with other hedge funds. So how on earth did you do this, Jim?JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. I started trading and it went very well. I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. I mean, I think it was pure luck. It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models — just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on.CA: Can we take a look at this? Because here's a typical graph of some commodity. I look at that, and I say, ""That's just a random, up-and-down walk — maybe a slight upward trend over that whole period of time."" How on earth could you trade looking at that, and see something that wasn't just random?JS: In the old days — this is kind of a graph from the old days, commodities or currencies had a tendency to trend. Not necessarily the very light trend you see here, but trending in periods. And if you decided, OK, I'm going to predict today, by the average move in the past 20 days — maybe that would be a good prediction, and I'd make some money. And in fact, years ago, such a system would work — not beautifully, but it would work. You'd make money, you'd lose money, you'd make money. But this is a year's worth of days, and you'd make a little money during that period. It's a very vestigial system.CA: So you would test a bunch of lengths of trends in time and see whether, for example, a 10-day trend or a 15-day trend was predictive of what happened next.JS: Sure, you would try all those things and see what worked best. Trend-following would have been great in the '60s, and it was sort of OK in the '70s. By the '80s, it wasn't.CA: Because everyone could see that. So, how did you stay ahead of the pack?JS: We stayed ahead of the pack by finding other approaches — shorter-term approaches to some extent. The real thing was to gather a tremendous amount of data — and we had to get it by hand in the early days. We went down to the Federal Reserve and copied interest rate histories and stuff like that, because it didn't exist on computers. We got a lot of data. And very smart people — that was the key. I didn't really know how to hire people to do fundamental trading. I had hired a few — some made money, some didn't make money. I couldn't make a business out of that. But I did know how to hire scientists, because I have some taste in that department. So, that's what we did. And gradually these models got better and better, and better and better.CA: You're credited with doing something remarkable at Renaissance, which is building this culture, this group of people, who weren't just hired guns who could be lured away by money. Their motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science.JS: Well, I'd hoped that might be true. But some of it was money.CA: They made a lot of money.JS: I can't say that no one came because of the money. I think a lot of them came because of the money. But they also came because it would be fun.CA: What role did machine learning play in all this?JS: In a certain sense, what we did was machine learning. You look at a lot of data, and you try to simulate different predictive schemes, until you get better and better at it. It doesn't necessarily feed back on itself the way we did things. But it worked.CA: So these different predictive schemes can be really quite wild and unexpected. I mean, you looked at everything, right? You looked at the weather, length of dresses, political opinion.JS: Yes, length of dresses we didn't try.CA: What sort of things?JS: Well, everything. Everything is grist for the mill — except hem lengths. Weather, annual reports, quarterly reports, historic data itself, volumes, you name it. Whatever there is. We take in terabytes of data a day. And store it away and massage it and get it ready for analysis. You're looking for anomalies. You're looking for — like you said, the efficient market hypothesis is not correct.CA: But any one anomaly might be just a random thing. So, is the secret here to just look at multiple strange anomalies, and see when they align?JS: Any one anomaly might be a random thing; however, if you have enough data you can tell that it's not. You can see an anomaly that's persistent for a sufficiently long time — the probability of it being random is not high. But these things fade after a while; anomalies can get washed out. So you have to keep on top of the business.CA: A lot of people look at the hedge fund industry now and are sort of ... shocked by it, by how much wealth is created there, and how much talent is going into it. Do you have any worries about that industry, and perhaps the financial industry in general? Kind of being on a runaway train that's — I don't know — helping increase inequality? How would you champion what's happening in the hedge fund industry?JS: I think in the last three or four years, hedge funds have not done especially well. We've done dandy, but the hedge fund industry as a whole has not done so wonderfully. The stock market has been on a roll, going up as everybody knows, and price-earnings ratios have grown. So an awful lot of the wealth that's been created in the last — let's say, five or six years — has not been created by hedge funds. People would ask me, ""What's a hedge fund?"" And I'd say, ""One and 20."" Which means — now it's two and 20 — it's two percent fixed fee and 20 percent of profits. Hedge funds are all different kinds of creatures.CA: Rumor has it you charge slightly higher fees than that.JS: We charged the highest fees in the world at one time. Five and 44, that's what we charge.CA: Five and 44. So five percent flat, 44 percent of upside. You still made your investors spectacular amounts of money.JS: We made good returns, yes. People got very mad: ""How can you charge such high fees?"" I said, ""OK, you can withdraw."" But ""How can I get more?"" was what people were —(Laughter)But at a certain point, as I think I told you, we bought out all the investors because there's a capacity to the fund.CA: But should we worry about the hedge fund industry attracting too much of the world's great mathematical and other talent to work on that, as opposed to the many other problems in the world?JS: Well, it's not just mathematical. We hire astronomers and physicists and things like that. I don't think we should worry about it too much. It's still a pretty small industry. And in fact, bringing science into the investing world has improved that world. It's reduced volatility. It's increased liquidity. Spreads are narrower because people are trading that kind of stuff. So I'm not too worried about Einstein going off and starting a hedge fund.CA: You're at a phase in your life now where you're actually investing, though, at the other end of the supply chain — you're actually boosting mathematics across America. This is your wife, Marilyn. You're working on philanthropic issues together. Tell me about that.JS: Well, Marilyn started — there she is up there, my beautiful wife — she started the foundation about 20 years ago. I think '94. I claim it was '93, she says it was '94, but it was one of those two years.(Laughter)We started the foundation, just as a convenient way to give charity. She kept the books, and so on. We did not have a vision at that time, but gradually a vision emerged — which was to focus on math and science, to focus on basic research. And that's what we've done. Six years ago or so, I left Renaissance and went to work at the foundation. So that's what we do.CA: And so Math for America is basically investing in math teachers around the country, giving them some extra income, giving them support and coaching. And really trying to make that more effective and make that a calling to which teachers can aspire.JS: Yeah — instead of beating up the bad teachers, which has created morale problems all through the educational community, in particular in math and science, we focus on celebrating the good ones and giving them status. Yeah, we give them extra money, 15,000 dollars a year. We have 800 math and science teachers in New York City in public schools today, as part of a core. There's a great morale among them. They're staying in the field. Next year, it'll be 1,000 and that'll be 10 percent of the math and science teachers in New York [City] public schools.(Applause)CA: Jim, here's another project that you've supported philanthropically: Research into origins of life, I guess. What are we looking at here? JS: Well, I'll save that for a second. And then I'll tell you what you're looking at. Origins of life is a fascinating question. How did we get here? Well, there are two questions: One is, what is the route from geology to biology — how did we get here? And the other question is, what did we start with? What material, if any, did we have to work with on this route? Those are two very, very interesting questions. The first question is a tortuous path from geology up to RNA or something like that — how did that all work? And the other, what do we have to work with? Well, more than we think. So what's pictured there is a star in formation. Now, every year in our Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars, about two new stars are created. Don't ask me how, but they're created. And it takes them about a million years to settle out. So, in steady state, there are about two million stars in formation at any time. That one is somewhere along this settling-down period. And there's all this crap sort of circling around it, dust and stuff. And it'll form probably a solar system, or whatever it forms. But here's the thing — in this dust that surrounds a forming star have been found, now, significant organic molecules. Molecules not just like methane, but formaldehyde and cyanide — things that are the building blocks — the seeds, if you will — of life. So, that may be typical. And it may be typical that planets around the universe start off with some of these basic building blocks. Now does that mean there's going to be life all around? Maybe. But it's a question of how tortuous this path is from those frail beginnings, those seeds, all the way to life. And most of those seeds will fall on fallow planets.CA: So for you, personally, finding an answer to this question of where we came from, of how did this thing happen, that is something you would love to see.JS: Would love to see. And like to know — if that path is tortuous enough, and so improbable, that no matter what you start with, we could be a singularity. But on the other hand, given all this organic dust that's floating around, we could have lots of friends out there. It'd be great to know.CA: Jim, a couple of years ago, I got the chance to speak with Elon Musk, and I asked him the secret of his success, and he said taking physics seriously was it. Listening to you, what I hear you saying is taking math seriously, that has infused your whole life. It's made you an absolute fortune, and now it's allowing you to invest in the futures of thousands and thousands of kids across America and elsewhere. Could it be that science actually works? That math actually works?JS: Well, math certainly works. Math certainly works. But this has been fun. Working with Marilyn and giving it away has been very enjoyable.CA: I just find it — it's an inspirational thought to me, that by taking knowledge seriously, so much more can come from it. So thank you for your amazing life, and for coming here to TED.Thank you.Jim Simons!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_simons_a_rare_interview_with_the_mathematician_who_cracked_wall_street
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"So I grew up in Orlando, Florida. I was the son of an aerospace engineer. I lived and breathed the Apollo program. We either saw the launches from our backyard or we saw it by driving in the hour over to the Cape. I was impressed by, obviously, space and everything about it, but I was most impressed by the engineering that went into it.Behind me you see an amazing view, a picture that was taken from the International Space Station, and it shows a portion of our planet that's rarely seen and rarely studied and almost never explored. That place is called the stratosphere.If you start on the planet and you go up and up and up, it gets colder and colder and colder, until you reach the beginning of the stratosphere, and then an amazing thing happens. It gets colder at a much slower rate, and then it starts warming up, and then it gets warmer and warmer until the point where you can almost survive without any protection, about zero degrees, and then you end up getting colder and colder, and that's the top of the stratosphere. It is one of the least accessible places on our planet. Most often, when it's visited, it's by astronauts who are blazing up at it at probably several times the speed of sound, and they get a few seconds on the way up, and then they get this blazing ball of fire coming back in, on the way back in.But the question I asked is, is it possible to linger in the stratosphere? Is it possible to experience the stratosphere? Is it possible to explore the stratosphere?I studied this using my favorite search engine for quite a while, about a year, and then I made a scary phone call. It was a reference from a friend of mine to call Taber MacCallum from Paragon Space Development Corporation, and I asked him the question: is it possible to build a system to go into the stratosphere? And he said it was. And after a period of about three years, we proceeded to do just that. And on October 24 of last year, in this suit, I started on the ground, I went up in a balloon to 135,890 feet — but who's counting?(Laughter)Came back to Earth at speeds of up to 822 miles an hour. It was a four-minute and 27-second descent. And when I got to 10,000 feet, I opened a parachute and I landed.(Applause)But this is really a science talk, and it's really an engineering talk, and what was amazing to me about that experience is that Taber said, yes, I think we can build a stratospheric suit, and more than that, come down tomorrow and let's talk to the team that formed the core of the group that actually built it. And they did something which I think is important, which is they took the analogy of scuba diving. So in scuba diving, you have a self-contained system. You have everything that you could ever need. You have a scuba tank. You have a wetsuit. You have visibility. And that scuba is exactly this system, and we're going to launch it into the stratosphere.Three years later, this is what we have. We've got an amazing suit that was made by ILC Dover. ILC Dover was the company that made all of the Apollo suits and all of the extravehicular activity suits. They had never sold a suit commercially, only to the government, but they sold one to me, which I am very grateful for. Up here we have a parachute. This was all about safety. Everyone on the team knew that I have a wife and two small children — 10 and 15 — and I wanted to come back safely. So there's a main parachute and a reserve parachute, and if I do nothing, the reserve parachute is going to open because of an automatic opening device. The suit itself can protect me from the cold. This area in the front here has thermal protection. It will actually heat water that will wrap around my body. It has two redundant oxygen tanks. Even if I was to get a quarter-inch hole in this suit, which is extremely unlikely, this system would still protect me from the low pressure of space.The main advantage of this system is weight and complexity. So the system weighs about 500 pounds, and if you compare it to the other attempt recently to go up in the stratosphere, they used a capsule. And to do a capsule, there's an amazing amount of complexity that goes into it, and it weighed about 3,000 pounds, and to raise 3,000 pounds to an altitude of 135,000 feet, which was my target altitude, it would have taken a balloon that was 45 to 50 million cubic feet. Because I only weighed 500 pounds in this system, we could do it with a balloon that was five times smaller than that, and that allowed us to use a launch system that was dramatically simpler than what needs to be done for a much larger balloon.So with that, I want to take you to Roswell, New Mexico, on October 24. We had an amazing team that got up in the middle of the night. And here's the suit. Again, this is using the front loader that you'll see in a second, and I want to play you a video of the actual launch. Roswell's a great place to launch balloons, but it's a fantastic place to land under a parachute, especially when you're going to land 70 miles away from the place you started. That's a helium truck in the background. It's darkness. I've already spent about an hour and a half pre-breathing. And then here you see the suit going on. It takes about an hour to get the suit on. Astronauts get this really nice air-conditioned van to go to the launch pad, but I got a front loader.(Laughter)You can see the top. You can see the balloon up there. That's where the helium is. This is Dave clearing the airspace with the FAA for 15 miles. And there we go.(Laughter)That's me waving with my left hand. The reason I'm waving with my left hand is because on the right hand is the emergency cutaway.(Laughter)My team forbade me from using my right hand. So the trip up is beautiful. It's kind of like Google Earth in reverse.(Laughter)It took two hours and seven minutes to go up, and it was the most peaceful two hours and seven minutes. I was mostly trying to relax. My heart rate was very low and I was trying not to use very much oxygen. You can see how the fields in the background are relatively big at this point, and you can see me going up and up.It's interesting here, because if you look, I'm right over the airport, and I'm probably at 50,000 feet, but immediately I'm about to go into a stratospheric wind of over 120 miles an hour. This is my flight director telling me that I had just gone higher than anybody else had ever gone in a balloon, and I was about 4,000 feet from release. This is what it looks like. You can see the darkness of space, the curvature of the Earth, the fragile planet below. I'm practicing my emergency procedures mentally right now. If anything goes wrong, I want to be ready. And the main thing that I want to do here is to have a release and fall and stay completely stable.(Video) Ground control. Everyone ready? Five. Four. Three. Two. One.Alan Eustace: There's the balloon going by, fully inflated at this point. And there you can see a drogue parachute, which I'll demonstrate in just a second, because that's really important. There's the balloon going by a second time. Right now, I'm about at the speed of sound. There's nothing for me to tell it's the speed of sound, and very soon I will actually be as fast as I ever get, 822 miles an hour.(Video) Ground control: We lost the data.AE: So now I'm down low right now and you can basically see the parachute come out right there. At this point, I'm very happy that there's a parachute out. I thought I was the only one happy, but it turns out mission control was really happy as well. The really nice thing about this is the moment I opened — I had a close of friend of mine, Blikkies, my parachute guy. He flew in another airplane, and he actually jumped out and landed right next to me. He was my wingman on the descent. This is my landing, but it's probably more properly called a crash.(Laughter)I hate to admit it, but this wasn't even close to my worst landing.(Laughter)(Applause)(Video) Man: How are you doing?AE: Hi there! Yay.(Laughter)So I want to tell you one thing that you might not have seen in that video, but one of the most critical parts of the entire thing was the release and what happens right after you release. And what we tried to do was use something called a drogue parachute, and a drogue parachute was there to stabilize me. And I'll show you one of those right now. If any of you have ever gone tandem skydiving, you probably used one of these. But the problem with one of these things is right when you release, you're in zero gravity. So it's very easy for this to just turn right around you. And before you know it, you can be tangled up or spinning, or you can release this drogue late, in which case what happens is you're going down at 800 miles an hour, and this thing is going to destroy itself and not be very useful. But the guys at United Parachute Technologies came up with this idea, and it was a roll that looks like that, but watch what happens when I pull it out. It's forming a pipe. This pipe is so solid that you can take this drogue parachute and wrap it around, and there's no way it will ever tangle with you. And that prevented a very serious potential problem.So nothing is possible without an amazing team of people. The core of this was about 20 people that worked on this for the three years, and they were incredible. People asked me what the best part of this whole thing was, and it was a chance to work with the best experts in meteorology and ballooning and parachute technology and environmental systems and high altitude medicine. It was fantastic. It's an engineer's dream to work with that group of people. And I also at the same time wanted to thank my friends at Google, both for supporting me during this effort and also covering for me in the times that I was away. But there's one other group I wanted to thank, and that's my family. Yay.(Applause)I would constantly give them speeches about the safety of technology, and they weren't hearing any of it. It was super hard on them, and the only reason that my wife put up with it was because I came back incredibly happy after each of the 250 tests, and she didn't want to take that away from me. So I want to close with a story. My daughter Katelyn, my 15-year-old, she and I were in the car, and we were driving down the road, and she was sitting there, and she had this idea, and she goes, ""Dad, I've got this idea."" And so I listened to her idea and I said, ""Katelyn, that's impossible."" And she looks at me and she goes, ""Dad, after what you just did, how can you call anything impossible?"" And I laughed, and I said, ""OK, it's not impossible, it's just very, very hard."" And then I paused for a second, and I said, ""Katelyn, it may not be impossible, it may not even be very, very hard, it's just that I don't know how to do it.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_eustace_i_leapt_from_the_stratosphere_here_s_how_i_did_it
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"Today I'm going to talk about work. And the question I want to ask and answer is this: ""Why do we work?"" Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living our lives just filled with bouncing from one TED-like adventure to another?(Laughter)You may be asking yourselves that very question. Now, I know of course, we have to make a living, but nobody in this room thinks that that's the answer to the question, ""Why do we work?"" For folks in this room, the work we do is challenging, it's engaging, it's stimulating, it's meaningful. And if we're lucky, it might even be important.So, we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not why we do what we do. And in general, I think we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that we do. When we say of somebody that he's ""in it for the money,"" we are not just being descriptive.(Laughter)Now, I think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for me an incredibly profound question. Why, if this is so obvious, why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning? How is it that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous, meaningless and soul-deadening? Why is it that as capitalism developed, it created a mode of production, of goods and services, in which all the nonmaterial satisfactions that might come from work were eliminated? Workers who do this kind of work, whether they do it in factories, in call centers, or in fulfillment warehouses, do it for pay. There is certainly no other earthly reason to do what they do except for pay.So the question is, ""Why?"" And here's the answer: the answer is technology. Now, I know, I know — yeah, yeah, yeah, technology, automation screws people, blah blah — that's not what I mean. I'm not talking about the kind of technology that has enveloped our lives, and that people come to TED to hear about. I'm not talking about the technology of things, profound though that is. I'm talking about another technology. I'm talking about the technology of ideas. I call it, ""idea technology"" — how clever of me.(Laughter)In addition to creating things, science creates ideas. Science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act.If you think your poverty is God's will, you pray. If you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy, you shrink into despair. And if you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt. Whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution, depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty. This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings, and this is why idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.And there's something special about idea technology, that makes it different from the technology of things. With things, if the technology sucks, it just vanishes, right? Bad technology disappears. With ideas — false ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true. Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas.And that's how the industrial revolution created a factory system in which there was really nothing you could possibly get out of your day's work, except for the pay at the end of the day. Because the father — one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith — was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone ever did anything. So we created a factory system consistent with that false view of human nature. But once that system of production was in place, there was really no other way for people to operate, except in a way that was consistent with Adam Smith's vision. So the work example is merely an example of how false ideas can create a circumstance that ends up making them true.It is not true that you ""just can't get good help anymore."" It is true that you ""can't get good help anymore"" when you give people work to do that is demeaning and soulless. And interestingly enough, Adam Smith — the same guy who gave us this incredible invention of mass production, and division of labor — understood this. He said, of people who worked in assembly lines, of men who worked in assembly lines, he says: ""He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become."" Now, notice the word here is ""become."" ""He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become."" Whether he intended it or not, what Adam Smith was telling us there, is that the very shape of the institution within which people work creates people who are fitted to the demands of that institution and deprives people of the opportunity to derive the kinds of satisfactions from their work that we take for granted.The thing about science — natural science — is that we can spin fantastic theories about the cosmos, and have complete confidence that the cosmos is completely indifferent to our theories. It's going to work the same damn way no matter what theories we have about the cosmos. But we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings.The distinguished anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, said, years ago, that human beings are the ""unfinished animals."" And what he meant by that was that it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live. That human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work.And so you people — pretty much the closest I ever get to being with masters of the universe — you people should be asking yourself a question, as you go back home to run your organizations. Just what kind of human nature do you want to help design?Thank you.(Applause)Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_we_think_about_work_is_broken
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"Well, we all need a reason to wake up. For me, it just took 11,000 volts.I know you're too polite to ask, so I will tell you.One night, sophomore year of college, just back from Thanksgiving holiday, a few of my friends and I were horsing around, and we decided to climb atop a parked commuter train. It was just sitting there, with the wires that run overhead. Somehow, that seemed like a great idea at the time. We'd certainly done stupider things. I scurried up the ladder on the back, and when I stood up, the electrical current entered my arm, blew down and out my feet, and that was that. Would you believe that watch still works? Takes a licking!(Laughter)My father wears it now in solidarity.That night began my formal relationship with death — my death — and it also began my long run as a patient. It's a good word. It means one who suffers. So I guess we're all patients.Now, the American health care system has more than its fair share of dysfunction — to match its brilliance, to be sure. I'm a physician now, a hospice and palliative medicine doc, so I've seen care from both sides. And believe me: almost everyone who goes into healthcare really means well — I mean, truly. But we who work in it are also unwitting agents for a system that too often does not serve.Why? Well, there's actually a pretty easy answer to that question, and it explains a lot: because healthcare was designed with diseases, not people, at its center. Which is to say, of course, it was badly designed. And nowhere are the effects of bad design more heartbreaking or the opportunity for good design more compelling than at the end of life, where things are so distilled and concentrated. There are no do-overs.My purpose today is to reach out across disciplines and invite design thinking into this big conversation. That is, to bring intention and creativity to the experience of dying. We have a monumental opportunity in front of us, before one of the few universal issues as individuals as well as a civil society: to rethink and redesign how it is we die.So let's begin at the end. For most people, the scariest thing about death isn't being dead, it's dying, suffering. It's a key distinction. To get underneath this, it can be very helpful to tease out suffering which is necessary as it is, from suffering we can change. The former is a natural, essential part of life, part of the deal, and to this we are called to make space, adjust, grow. It can be really good to realize forces larger than ourselves. They bring proportionality, like a cosmic right-sizing. After my limbs were gone, that loss, for example, became fact, fixed — necessarily part of my life, and I learned that I could no more reject this fact than reject myself. It took me a while, but I learned it eventually. Now, another great thing about necessary suffering is that it is the very thing that unites caregiver and care receiver — human beings. This, we are finally realizing, is where healing happens. Yes, compassion — literally, as we learned yesterday — suffering together.Now, on the systems side, on the other hand, so much of the suffering is unnecessary, invented. It serves no good purpose. But the good news is, since this brand of suffering is made up, well, we can change it. How we die is indeed something we can affect. Making the system sensitive to this fundamental distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering gives us our first of three design cues for the day. After all, our role as caregivers, as people who care, is to relieve suffering — not add to the pile.True to the tenets of palliative care, I function as something of a reflective advocate, as much as prescribing physician. Quick aside: palliative care — a very important field but poorly understood — while it includes, it is not limited to end of life care. It is not limited to hospice. It's simply about comfort and living well at any stage. So please know that you don't have to be dying anytime soon to benefit from palliative care.Now, let me introduce you to Frank. Sort of makes this point. I've been seeing Frank now for years. He's living with advancing prostate cancer on top of long-standing HIV. We work on his bone pain and his fatigue, but most of the time we spend thinking out loud together about his life — really, about our lives. In this way, Frank grieves. In this way, he keeps up with his losses as they roll in, so that he's ready to take in the next moment. Loss is one thing, but regret, quite another. Frank has always been an adventurer — he looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting — and no fan of regret. So it wasn't surprising when he came into clinic one day, saying he wanted to raft down the Colorado River. Was this a good idea? With all the risks to his safety and his health, some would say no. Many did, but he went for it, while he still could. It was a glorious, marvelous trip: freezing water, blistering dry heat, scorpions, snakes, wildlife howling off the flaming walls of the Grand Canyon — all the glorious side of the world beyond our control. Frank's decision, while maybe dramatic, is exactly the kind so many of us would make, if we only had the support to figure out what is best for ourselves over time.So much of what we're talking about today is a shift in perspective. After my accident, when I went back to college, I changed my major to art history. Studying visual art, I figured I'd learn something about how to see — a really potent lesson for a kid who couldn't change so much of what he was seeing. Perspective, that kind of alchemy we humans get to play with, turning anguish into a flower.Flash forward: now I work at an amazing place in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, where we have a little ritual that helps with this shift in perspective. When one of our residents dies, the mortuary men come, and as we're wheeling the body out through the garden, heading for the gate, we pause. Anyone who wants — fellow residents, family, nurses, volunteers, the hearse drivers too, now — shares a story or a song or silence, as we sprinkle the body with flower petals. It takes a few minutes; it's a sweet, simple parting image to usher in grief with warmth, rather than repugnance. Contrast that with the typical experience in the hospital setting, much like this — floodlit room lined with tubes and beeping machines and blinking lights that don't stop even when the patient's life has. Cleaning crew swoops in, the body's whisked away, and it all feels as though that person had never really existed. Well-intended, of course, in the name of sterility, but hospitals tend to assault our senses, and the most we might hope for within those walls is numbness — anesthetic, literally the opposite of aesthetic. I revere hospitals for what they can do; I am alive because of them. But we ask too much of our hospitals. They are places for acute trauma and treatable illness. They are no place to live and die; that's not what they were designed for.Now mind you — I am not giving up on the notion that our institutions can become more humane. Beauty can be found anywhere. I spent a few months in a burn unit at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey, where I got really great care at every turn, including good palliative care for my pain. And one night, it began to snow outside. I remember my nurses complaining about driving through it. And there was no window in my room, but it was great to just imagine it coming down all sticky. Next day, one of my nurses smuggled in a snowball for me. She brought it in to the unit. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt holding that in my hand, and the coldness dripping onto my burning skin; the miracle of it all, the fascination as I watched it melt and turn into water. In that moment, just being any part of this planet in this universe mattered more to me than whether I lived or died. That little snowball packed all the inspiration I needed to both try to live and be OK if I did not. In a hospital, that's a stolen moment.In my work over the years, I've known many people who were ready to go, ready to die. Not because they had found some final peace or transcendence, but because they were so repulsed by what their lives had become — in a word, cut off, or ugly. There are already record numbers of us living with chronic and terminal illness, and into ever older age. And we are nowhere near ready or prepared for this silver tsunami. We need an infrastructure dynamic enough to handle these seismic shifts in our population. Now is the time to create something new, something vital. I know we can because we have to. The alternative is just unacceptable. And the key ingredients are known: policy, education and training, systems, bricks and mortar. We have tons of input for designers of all stripes to work with.We know, for example, from research what's most important to people who are closer to death: comfort; feeling unburdened and unburdening to those they love; existential peace; and a sense of wonderment and spirituality.Over Zen Hospice's nearly 30 years, we've learned much more from our residents in subtle detail. Little things aren't so little. Take Janette. She finds it harder to breathe one day to the next due to ALS. Well, guess what? She wants to start smoking again — and French cigarettes, if you please. Not out of some self-destructive bent, but to feel her lungs filled while she has them. Priorities change. Or Kate — she just wants to know her dog Austin is lying at the foot of her bed, his cold muzzle against her dry skin, instead of more chemotherapy coursing through her veins — she's done that. Sensuous, aesthetic gratification, where in a moment, in an instant, we are rewarded for just being. So much of it comes down to loving our time by way of the senses, by way of the body — the very thing doing the living and the dying.Probably the most poignant room in the Zen Hospice guest house is our kitchen, which is a little strange when you realize that so many of our residents can eat very little, if anything at all. But we realize we are providing sustenance on several levels: smell, a symbolic plane. Seriously, with all the heavy-duty stuff happening under our roof, one of the most tried and true interventions we know of, is to bake cookies. As long as we have our senses — even just one — we have at least the possibility of accessing what makes us feel human, connected. Imagine the ripples of this notion for the millions of people living and dying with dementia. Primal sensorial delights that say the things we don't have words for, impulses that make us stay present — no need for a past or a future.So, if teasing unnecessary suffering out of the system was our first design cue, then tending to dignity by way of the senses, by way of the body — the aesthetic realm — is design cue number two. Now this gets us quickly to the third and final bit for today; namely, we need to lift our sights, to set our sights on well-being, so that life and health and healthcare can become about making life more wonderful, rather than just less horrible. Beneficence.Here, this gets right at the distinction between a disease-centered and a patient- or human-centered model of care, and here is where caring becomes a creative, generative, even playful act. ""Play"" may sound like a funny word here. But it is also one of our highest forms of adaptation. Consider every major compulsory effort it takes to be human. The need for food has birthed cuisine. The need for shelter has given rise to architecture. The need for cover, fashion. And for being subjected to the clock, well, we invented music. So, since dying is a necessary part of life, what might we create with this fact? By ""play"" I am in no way suggesting we take a light approach to dying or that we mandate any particular way of dying. There are mountains of sorrow that cannot move, and one way or another, we will all kneel there. Rather, I am asking that we make space — physical, psychic room, to allow life to play itself all the way out — so that rather than just getting out of the way, aging and dying can become a process of crescendo through to the end. We can't solve for death. I know some of you are working on this.(Laughter)Meanwhile, we can —(Laughter)We can design towards it. Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well — not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_end_of_life
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"Billie Jean King: Hi, everyone!(Applause)Thanks, Pat. Thank you! Getting me all wound up, now!(Laughter)Pat Mitchell: Good! You know, when I was watching the video again of the match, you must have felt like the fate of the world's women was on every stroke you took. Were you feeling that?BJK: First of all, Bobby Riggs — he was the former number one player, he wasn't just some hacker, by the way. He was one of my heroes and I admired him. And that's the reason I beat him, actually, because I respected him.(Laughter)It's true — my mom and especially my dad always said: ""Respect your opponent, and never underestimate them, ever."" And he was correct. He was absolutely correct. But I knew it was about social change. And I was really nervous whenever we announced it, and I felt like the whole world was on my shoulders. And I thought, ""If I lose, it's going to put women back 50 years, at least."" Title IX had just been passed the year before — June 23, 1972. And women's professional tennis — there were nine of us who signed a one-dollar contract in 1970 — now remember, the match is in '73. So we were only in our third year of having a tour where we could actually play, have a place to compete and make a living. So there were nine of us that signed that one-dollar contract. And our dream was for any girl, born any place in the world — if she was good enough — there would be a place for her to compete and for us to make a living. Because before 1968, we made 14 dollars a day, and we were under the control of organizations. So we really wanted to break away from that. But we knew it wasn't really about our generation so much; we knew it was about the future generations.We do stand on the shoulders of the people that came before us, there is no question. But every generation has the chance to make it better. That was really on my mind. I really wanted to start matching the hearts and minds to Title IX. Title IX, in case anybody doesn't know, which a lot of people probably don't, said that any federal funds given to a high school, college or university, either public or private, had to — finally — give equal monies to boys and girls. And that changed everything.(Applause)So you can have a law, but it's changing the hearts and minds to match up with it. That's when it really rocks, totally. So that was on my mind. I wanted to start that change in the hearts and minds.But two things came out of that match. For women: self-confidence, empowerment. They actually had enough nerve to ask for a raise. Some women have waited 10, 15 years to ask. I said, ""More importantly, did you get it?""(Laughter)And they did! And for the men? A lot of the men today don't realize it, but if you're in your 50s, 60s or whatever, late 40s, you're the first generation of men of the Women's Movement — whether you like it or not!(Laughter)(Applause)And for the men, what happened for the men, they'd come up to me — and most times, the men are the ones who have tears in their eyes, it's very interesting. They go, ""Billie, I was very young when I saw that match, and now I have a daughter. And I am so happy I saw that as a young man."" And one of those young men, at 12 years old, was President Obama. And he actually told me that when I met him, he said: ""You don't realize it, but I saw that match at 12. And now I have two daughters, and it has made a difference in how I raise them."" So both men and women got a lot out of it, but different things.PM: And now there are generations — at least one or two — who have experienced the equality that Title IX and other fights along the way made possible. And for women, there are generations who have also experienced teamwork. They got to play team sports in a way they hadn't before. So you had a legacy already built in terms of being an athlete, a legacy of the work you did to lobby for equal pay for women athletes and the Women's Sports Foundation. What now are you looking to accomplish with The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative?BJK: I think it goes back to an epiphany I had at 12. At 11, I wanted to be the number one tennis player in the world, and a friend had asked me to play and I said, ""What's that?"" Tennis was not in my family — basketball was, other sports. Fast forward to 12 years old,(Laughter)and I'm finally starting to play in tournaments where you get a ranking at the end of the year. So I was daydreaming at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, and I started thinking about my sport and how tiny it was, but also that everybody who played wore white shoes, white clothes, played with white balls — everybody who played was white. And I said to myself, at 12 years old, ""Where is everyone else?"" And that just kept sticking in my brain. And that moment, I promised myself I'd fight for equal rights and opportunities for boys and girls, men and women, the rest of my life. And that tennis, if I was fortunate enough to become number one — and I knew, being a girl, it would be harder to have influence, already at that age — that I had this platform. And tennis is global. And I thought, ""You know what? I've been given an opportunity that very few people have had."" I didn't know if I was going to make it — this was only 12. I sure wanted it, but making it is a whole other discussion. I just remember I promised myself, and I really try to keep my word. That's who I truly am, just fighting for people.And, unfortunately, women have had less. And we are considered less. And so my attentions, where did they have to go? It was just ... you have to. And learn to stick up for yourself, hear your own voice. You hear the same words keep coming out all the time, and I got really lucky because I had an education. And I think if you can see it you can be it, you know? If you can see it, you can be it. You look at Pat, you look at other leaders, you look at these speakers, look at yourself, because everyone — everyone — can do something extraordinary. Every single person.PM: And your story, Billie, has inspired so many women everywhere. Now with the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, you're taking on an even bigger cause. Because one thing we hear a lot about is women taking their voice, working to find their way into leadership positions. But what you're talking about is even bigger than that. It's inclusive leadership. And this is a generation that has grown up thinking more inclusively —BJK: Isn't it great? Look at the technology! It's amazing how it connects us all! It's about connection. It's simply amazing what's possible because of it. But the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative is really about the workforce mostly, and trying to change it, so people can actually go to work and be their authentic selves.Because most of us have two jobs: One, to fit in — I'll give you a perfect example. An African American woman gets up an hour earlier to go to work, straightens her hair in the bathroom, goes to the bathroom probably four, five, six times a day to keep straightening her hair, to keep making sure she fits in. So she's working two jobs. She's got this other job, whatever that may be, but she's also trying to fit in. Or this poor man who kept his diploma — he went to University of Michigan, but he never would talk about his poverty as a youngster, ever — just would not mention it. So he made sure they saw he was well-educated. And then you see a gay guy who has an NFL — which means American football for all of you out there, it's a big deal, it's very macho — and he talked about football all the time, because he was gay and he didn't want anybody to know. It just goes on and on. So my wish for everyone is to be able to be their authentic self 24/7, that would be the ultimate. And we catch ourselves — I mean, I catch myself to this day. Even being gay I catch myself, you know, like,(Gasp)a little uncomfortable, a little surge in my gut, feeling not totally comfortable in my own skin. So, I think you have to ask yourself — I want people to be themselves, whatever that is, just let it be.PM: And the first research the Leadership Initiative did showed that, that these examples you just used — that many of us have the problem of being authentic. But what you've just looked at is this millennial generation, who have benefited from all these equal opportunities — which may not be equal but exist everywhere —BJK: First of all, I'm really lucky. Partnership with Teneo, a strategic company that's amazing. That's really the reason I'm able to do this. I've had two times in my life where I've actually had men really behind me with power. And that was in the old days with Philip Morris with Virginia Slims, and this is the second time in my entire life. And then Deloitte. The one thing I wanted was data — facts. So Deloitte sent out a survey, and over 4,000 people now have answered, and we're continuing in the workplace.And what do the millennials feel? Well, they feel a lot, but what they're so fantastic about is — you know, our generation was like, ""Oh, we're going to get representation."" So if you walk into a room, you see everybody represented. That's not good enough anymore, which is so good! So the millennials are fantastic; they want connection, engagement. They just want you to tell us what you're feeling, what you're thinking, and get into the solution. They're problem-solvers, and of course, you've got the information at your fingertips, compared to when I was growing up.PM: What did the research show you about millennials? Are they going to make a difference? Are they going to create a world where there is really an inclusive work force?BJK: Well, in 2025, 75 percent of the global workforce is going to be millennials. I think they are going to help solve problems. I think they have the wherewithal to do it. I know they care a lot. They have big ideas and they can make big things happen. I want to stay in the now with the young people, I don't want to get behind.(Laughter)PM: I don't think there's any chance! But what you found out in the research about millennials is not really the experience that a lot of people have with millennials.BJK: No, well, if we want to talk — OK, I've been doing my little mini-survey. I've been talking to the Boomers, who are their bosses, and I go, ""What do you think about the millennials?"" And I'm pretty excited, like it's good, and they get this face —(Laughter)""Oh, you mean the 'Me' generation?""(Laughter)I say, ""Do you really think so? Because I do think they care about the environment and all these things."" And they go, ""Oh, Billie, they cannot focus.""(Laughter)They actually have proventhat the average focus for an 18-year-old is 37 seconds.(Laughter)They can't focus. And they don't really care. I just heard a story the other night: a woman owns a gallery and she has these workers. She gets a text from one of the workers, like an intern, she's just starting — she goes, ""Oh, by the way, I'm going to be late because I'm at the hairdresser's.""(Laughter)So she arrives, and this boss says, ""What's going on?"" And she says, ""Oh, I was late, sorry, how's it going?"" She says, ""Well, guess what? I'd like you leave, you're finished."" She goes, ""OK.""(Laughter)No problem! PM: Now Billie, that story — I know, but that's what scares the boomers — I'm just telling you — so I think it's good for us to share.(Laughter)No, it is good for us to share, because we're our authentic selves and what we're really feeling, so we've got to take it both ways, you know? But I have great faith because — if you've been in sports like I have — every generation gets better. It's a fact. With the Women's Sports Foundation being the advocates for Title IX still, because we're trying to keep protecting the law, because it's in a tenuous position always, so we really are concerned, and we do a lot of research. That's very important to us. And I want to hear from people. But we really have to protect what Title IX stands for worldwide. And you heard President Carter talk about how Title IX is protected. And do you know that every single lawsuit that girls, at least in sports, have gone up against — whatever institutions — has won? Title IX is there to protect us. And it is amazing. But we still have to get the hearts and minds — the hearts and minds to match the legislation is huge.PM: So what gets you up every morning? What keeps you sustaining your work, sustaining the fight for equality, extending it, always exploring new areas, trying to find new ways ... ?BJK: Well, I always drove my parents crazy because I was always the curious one. I'm highly motivated. My younger brother was a Major League Baseball player. My poor parents did not care if we were any good.(Laughter)And we drove them crazy because we pushed, we pushed because we wanted to be the best. And I think it's because of what I'm hearing today in TED talks. I think to listen to these different women, to listen to different people, to listen to President Carter — 90 years old, by the way, and he we was throwing these figures out that I would never — I'd have to go, ""Excuse me, wait a minute, I need to get a list out of these figures."" He was rattling off — I mean, that's amazing, I'm sorry.PM: He's an amazing man.(Applause)BJK: And then you're going to have President Mary Robinson, who's a former president — Thank you, Irish! 62 percent! LGBTQ! Yes!(Applause)Congress is voting in June on same-sex marriage, so these are things that for some people are very hard to hear. But always remember, every one of us is an individual, a human being with a beating heart, who cares and wants to live their authentic life. OK? You don't have to agree with somebody, but everyone has the opportunity.I think we all have an obligation to continue to keep moving the needle forward, always. And these people have been so inspiring. Everyone matters. And every one of you is an influencer. You out there listening, out there in the world, plus the people here — every single person's an influencer. Never, ever forget that. OK? So don't ever give up on yourself.PM: Billie, you have been an inspiration for us.BJK: Thanks, Pat!(Applause)Thanks, TED!(Applause)Thanks a lot!","https://www.ted.com/talks/billie_jean_king_this_tennis_icon_paved_the_way_for_women_in_sports
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"What I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about fear and the cost of fear and the age of fear from which we are now emerging. I would like you to feel comfortable with my doing that by letting you know that I know something about fear and anxiety. I'm a Jewish guy from New Jersey.(Laughter)I could worry before I could walk.(Laughter)Please, applaud that.(Applause)Thank you.But I also grew up in a time where there was something to fear. We were brought out in the hall when I was a little kid and taught how to put our coats over our heads to protect us from global thermonuclear war. Now even my seven-year-old brain knew that wasn't going to work. But I also knew that global thermonuclear war was something to be concerned with.And yet, despite the fact that we lived for 50 years with the threat of such a war, the response of our government and of our society was to do wonderful things. We created the space program in response to that. We built our highway system in response to that. We created the Internet in response to that. So sometimes fear can produce a constructive response. But sometimes it can produce an un-constructive response.On September 11, 2001, 19 guys took over four airplanes and flew them into a couple of buildings. They exacted a horrible toll. It is not for us to minimize what that toll was. But the response that we had was clearly disproportionate — disproportionate to the point of verging on the unhinged. We rearranged the national security apparatus of the United States and of many governments to address a threat that, at the time that those attacks took place, was quite limited. In fact, according to our intelligence services, on September 11, 2001, there were 100 members of core Al-Qaeda. There were just a few thousand terrorists. They posed an existential threat to no one.But we rearranged our entire national security apparatus in the most sweeping way since the end of the Second World War. We launched two wars. We spent trillions of dollars. We suspended our values. We violated international law. We embraced torture. We embraced the idea that if these 19 guys could do this, anybody could do it. And therefore, for the first time in history, we were seeing everybody as a threat. And what was the result of that? Surveillance programs that listened in on the emails and phone calls of entire countries — hundreds of millions of people — setting aside whether those countries were our allies, setting aside what our interests were. I would argue that 15 years later, since today there are more terrorists, more terrorist attacks, more terrorist casualties — this by the count of the U.S. State Department — since today the region from which those attacks emanate is more unstable than at any time in its history, since the Flood, perhaps, we have not succeeded in our response.Now you have to ask, where did we go wrong? What did we do? What was the mistake that was made? And you might say, well look, Washington is a dysfunctional place. There are political food fights. We've turned our discourse into a cage match. And that's true. But there are bigger problems, believe it or not, than that dysfunction, even though I would argue that dysfunction that makes it impossible to get anything done in the richest and most powerful country in the world is far more dangerous than anything that a group like ISIS could do, because it stops us in our tracks and it keeps us from progress.But there are other problems. And the other problems came from the fact that in Washington and in many capitals right now, we're in a creativity crisis. In Washington, in think tanks, where people are supposed to be thinking of new ideas, you don't get bold new ideas, because if you offer up a bold new idea, not only are you attacked on Twitter, but you will not get confirmed in a government job. Because we are reactive to the heightened venom of the political debate, you get governments that have an us-versus-them mentality, tiny groups of people making decisions. When you sit in a room with a small group of people making decisions, what do you get? You get groupthink. Everybody has the same worldview, and any view from outside of the group is seen as a threat. That's a danger. You also have processes that become reactive to news cycles. And so the parts of the U.S. government that do foresight, that look forward, that do strategy — the parts in other governments that do this — can't do it, because they're reacting to the news cycle. And so we're not looking ahead.On 9/11, we had a crisis because we were looking the wrong way. Today we have a crisis because, because of 9/11, we are still looking in the wrong direction, and we know because we see transformational trends on the horizon that are far more important than what we saw on 9/11; far more important than the threat posed by these terrorists; far more important even than the instability that we've got in some areas of the world that are racked by instability today. In fact, the things that we are seeing in those parts of the world may be symptoms. They may be a reaction to bigger trends. And if we are treating the symptom and ignoring the bigger trend, then we've got far bigger problems to deal with.And so what are those trends? Well, to a group like you, the trends are apparent. We are living at a moment in which the very fabric of human society is being rewoven. If you saw the cover of The Economist a couple of days ago — it said that 80 percent of the people on the planet, by the year 2020, would have a smartphone. They would have a small computer connected to the Internet in their pocket. In most of Africa, the cell phone penetration rate is 80 percent. We passed the point last October when there were more mobile cellular devices, SIM cards, out in the world than there were people. We are within years of a profound moment in our history, when effectively every single human being on the planet is going to be part of a man-made system for the first time, able to touch anyone else — touch them for good, touch them for ill. And the changes associated with that are changing the very nature of every aspect of governance and life on the planet in ways that our leaders ought to be thinking about, when they're thinking about these immediate threats.On the security side, we've come out of a Cold War in which it was too costly to fight a nuclear war, and so we didn't, to a period that I call Cool War, cyber war, where the costs of conflict are actually so low, that we may never stop. We may enter a period of constant warfare, and we know this because we've been in it for several years. And yet, we don't have the basic doctrines to guide us in this regard. We don't have the basic ideas formulated. If someone attacks us with a cyber attack, do have the ability to respond with a kinetic attack? We don't know. If somebody launches a cyber attack, how do we deter them? When China launched a series of cyber attacks, what did the U.S. government do? It said, we're going to indict a few of these Chinese guys, who are never coming to America. They're never going to be anywhere near a law enforcement officer who's going to take them into custody. It's a gesture — it's not a deterrent.Special forces operators out there in the field today discover that small groups of insurgents with cell phones have access to satellite imagery that once only superpowers had. In fact, if you've got a cell phone, you've got access to power that a superpower didn't have, and would have highly classified 10 years ago. In my cell phone, I have an app that tells me where every plane in the world is, and its altitude, and its speed, and what kind of aircraft it is, and where it's going and where it's landing. They have apps that allow them to know what their adversary is about to do. They're using these tools in new ways. When a cafe in Sydney was taken over by a terrorist, he went in with a rifle... and an iPad. And the weapon was the iPad. Because he captured people, he terrorized them, he pointed the iPad at them, and then he took the video and he put it on the Internet, and he took over the world's media.But it doesn't just affect the security side. The relations between great powers — we thought we were past the bipolar era. We thought we were in a unipolar world, where all the big issues were resolved. Remember? It was the end of history. But we're not. We're now seeing that our basic assumptions about the Internet — that it was going to connect us, weave society together — are not necessarily true. In countries like China, you have the Great Firewall of China. You've got countries saying no, if the Internet happens within our borders we control it within our borders. We control the content. We are going to control our security. We are going to manage that Internet. We are going to say what can be on it. We're going to set a different set of rules. Now you might think, well, that's just China. But it's not just China. It's China, India, Russia. It's Saudi Arabia, it's Singapore, it's Brazil. After the NSA scandal, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, they said, let's create a new Internet backbone, because we can't be dependent on this other one. And so all of a sudden, what do you have? You have a new bipolar world in which cyber-internationalism, our belief, is challenged by cyber-nationalism, another belief.We are seeing these changes everywhere we look. We are seeing the advent of mobile money. It's happening in the places you wouldn't expect. It's happening in Kenya and Tanzania, where millions of people who haven't had access to financial services now conduct all those services on their phones. There are 2.5 million people who don't have financial service access that are going to get it soon. A billion of them are going to have the ability to access it on their cell phone soon. It's not just going to give them the ability to bank. It's going to change what monetary policy is. It's going to change what money is. Education is changing in the same way. Healthcare is changing in the same way. How government services are delivered is changing in the same way.And yet, in Washington, we are debating whether to call the terrorist group that has taken over Syria and Iraq ISIS or ISIL or Islamic State. We are trying to determine how much we want to give in a negotiation with the Iranians on a nuclear deal which deals with the technologies of 50 years ago, when in fact, we know that the Iranians right now are engaged in cyber war with us and we're ignoring it, partially because businesses are not willing to talk about the attacks that are being waged on them.And that gets us to another breakdown that's crucial, and another breakdown that couldn't be more important to a group like this, because the growth of America and real American national security and all of the things that drove progress even during the Cold War, was a public-private partnership between science, technology and government that began when Thomas Jefferson sat alone in his laboratory inventing new things. But it was the canals and railroads and telegraph; it was radar and the Internet. It was Tang, the breakfast drink — probably not the most important of those developments. But what you had was a partnership and a dialogue, and the dialogue has broken down. It's broken down because in Washington, less government is considered more. It's broken down because there is, believe it or not, in Washington, a war on science — despite the fact that in all of human history, every time anyone has waged a war on science, science has won.(Applause)But we have a government that doesn't want to listen, that doesn't have people at the highest levels that understand this. In the nuclear age, when there were people in senior national security jobs, they were expected to speak throw-weight. They were expected to know the lingo, the vocabulary. If you went to the highest level of the U.S. government now and said, ""Talk to me about cyber, about neuroscience, about the things that are going to change the world of tomorrow,"" you'd get a blank stare. I know, because when I wrote this book, I talked to 150 people, many from the science and tech side, who felt like they were being shunted off to the kids' table. Meanwhile, on the tech side, we have lots of wonderful people creating wonderful things, but they started in garages and they didn't need the government and they don't want the government. Many of them have a political view that's somewhere between libertarian and anarchic: leave me alone.But the world's coming apart. All of a sudden, there are going to be massive regulatory changes and massive issues associated with conflict and massive issues associated with security and privacy. And we haven't even gotten to the next set of issues, which are philosophical issues. If you can't vote, if you can't have a job, if you can't bank, if you can't get health care, if you can't be educated without Internet access, is Internet access a fundamental right that should be written into constitutions? If Internet access is a fundamental right, is electricity access for the 1.2 billion who don't have access to electricity a fundamental right? These are fundamental issues. Where are the philosophers? Where's the dialogue?And that brings me to the reason that I'm here. I live in Washington. Pity me.(Laughter)The dialogue isn't happening there. These big issues that will change the world, change national security, change economics, create hope, create threats, can only be resolved when you bring together groups of people who understand science and technology back together with government. Both sides need each other. And until we recreate that connection, until we do what helped America grow and helped other countries grow, then we are going to grow ever more vulnerable. The risks associated with 9/11 will not be measured in terms of lives lost by terror attacks or buildings destroyed or trillions of dollars spent. They'll be measured in terms of the costs of our distraction from critical issues and our inability to get together scientists, technologists, government leaders, at a moment of transformation akin to the beginning of the Renaissance, akin to the beginning of the major transformational eras that have happened on Earth, and start coming up with, if not the right answers, then at least the right questions.We are not there yet, but discussions like this and groups like you are the places where those questions can be formulated and posed. And that's why I believe that groups like TED, discussions like this around the planet, are the place where the future of foreign policy, of economic policy, of social policy, of philosophy, will ultimately take place. And that's why it's been a pleasure speaking to you.Thank you very, very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_rothkopf_how_fear_drives_american_politics
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"For the last 50 years, a lot of smart, well-resourced people — some of you, no doubt — have been trying to figure out how to reduce poverty in the United States. People have created and invested millions of dollars into non-profit organizations with the mission of helping people who are poor.They've created think tanks that study issues like education, job creation and asset-building, and then advocated for policies to support our most marginalized communities. They've written books and columns and given passionate speeches, decrying the wealth gap that is leaving more and more people entrenched at the bottom end of the income scale. And that effort has helped. But it's not enough. Our poverty rates haven't changed that much in the last 50 years, since the War on Poverty was launched. I'm here to tell you that we have overlooked the most powerful and practical resource. Here it is: people who are poor.Up in the left-hand corner is Jobana, Sintia and Bertha. They met when they all had small children, through a parenting class at a family resource center in San Francisco. As they grew together as parents and friends, they talked a lot about how hard it was to make money when your kids are little. Child care is expensive, more than they'd earn in a job. Their husbands worked, but they wanted to contribute financially, too.So they hatched a plan. They started a cleaning business. They plastered neighborhoods with flyers and handed business cards out to their families and friends, and soon, they had clients calling. Two of them would clean the office or house and one of them would watch the kids. They'd rotate who'd cleaned and who'd watch the kids. (Laughs) It's awesome, right?(Laughter)And they split the money three ways. It was not a full-time gig, no one could watch the little ones all day. But it made a difference for their families. Extra money to pay for bills when a husband's work hours were cut. Money to buy the kids clothes as they were growing. A little extra money in their pockets to make them feel some independence.Up in the top-right corner is Theresa and her daughter, Brianna. Brianna is one of those kids with this sparkly, infectious, outgoing personality. For example, when Rosie, a little girl who spoke only Spanish, moved in next door, Brianna, who spoke only English, borrowed her mother's tablet and found a translation app so the two of them could communicate.(Laughter)I know, right? Rosie's family credits Brianna with helping Rosie to learn English.A few years ago, Brianna started to struggle academically. She was growing frustrated and kind of withdrawn and acting out in class. And her mother was heartbroken over what was happening. Then they found out that she was going to have to repeat second grade and Brianna was devastated. Her mother felt hopeless and overwhelmed and alone because she knew that her daughter was not getting the support she needed, and she did not know how to help her. One afternoon, Theresa was catching up with a group of friends, and one of them said, ""Theresa, how are you?"" And she burst into tears. After she shared her story, one of her friends said, ""I went through the exact same thing with my son about a year ago."" And in that moment, Theresa realized that so much of her struggle was not having anybody to talk with about it. So she created a support group for parents like her. The first meeting was her and two other people. But word spread, and soon 20 people, 30 people were showing up for these monthly meetings that she put together. She went from feeling helpless to realizing how capable she was of supporting her daughter, with the support of other people who were going through the same struggle. And Brianna is doing fantastic — she's doing great academically and socially.That in the middle is my man Baakir, standing in front of BlackStar Books and Caffe, which he runs out of part of his house. As you walk in the door, Baakir greets you with a ""Welcome black home.""(Laughter)Once inside, you can order some Algiers jerk chicken, perhaps a vegan walnut burger, or jive turkey sammich. And that's sammich — not sandwich. You must finish your meal with a buttermilk drop, which is several steps above a donut hole and made from a very secret family recipe. For real, it's very secret, he won't tell you about it.But BlackStar is much more than a café. For the kids in the neighborhood, it's a place to go after school to get help with homework. For the grown-ups, it's where they go to find out what's going on in the neighborhood and catch up with friends. It's a performance venue. It's a home for poets, musicians and artists. Baakir and his partner Nicole, with their baby girl strapped to her back, are there in the mix of it all, serving up a cup of coffee, teaching a child how to play Mancala, or painting a sign for an upcoming community event.I have worked with and learned from people just like them for more than 20 years. I have organized against the prison system, which impacts poor folks, especially black, indigenous and Latino folks, at an alarming rate. I have worked with young people who manifest hope and promise, despite being at the effect of racist discipline practices in their schools, and police violence in their communities. I have learned from families who are unleashing their ingenuity and tenacity to collectively create their own solutions. And they're not just focused on money. They're addressing education, housing, health, community — the things that we all care about. Everywhere I go, I see people who are broke but not broken. I see people who are struggling to realize their good ideas, so that they can create a better life for themselves, their families, their communities. Jobana, Sintia, Bertha, Theresa and Baakir are the rule, not the shiny exception. I am the exception.I was raised by a quietly fierce single mother in Rochester, New York. I was bussed to a school in the suburbs, from a neighborhood that many of my classmates and their parents considered dangerous. At eight, I was a latchkey kid. I'd get myself home after school every day and do homework and chores, and wait for my mother to come home. After school, I'd go to the corner store and buy a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, which I'd heat up on the stove as my afternoon snack. If I had a little extra money, I'd buy a Hostess Fruit Pie.(Laughter)Cherry. Not as good as a buttermilk drop.(Laughter)We were poor when I was a kid. But now, I own a home in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood in Oakland, California. I've built a career. My husband is a business owner. I have a retirement account. My daughter is not even allowed to turn on the stove unless there's a grown-up at home and she doesn't have to, because she does not have to have the same kind of self-reliance that I had to at her age. My kids' raviolis are organic and full of things like spinach and ricotta, because I have the luxury of choice when it comes to what my children eat.I am the exception, not because I'm more talented than Baakir or my mother worked any harder than Jobana, Sintia or Bertha, or cared any more than Theresa. Marginalized communities are full of smart, talented people, hustling and working and innovating, just like our most revered and most rewarded CEOs. They are full of people tapping into their resilience to get up every day, get the kids off to school and go to jobs that don't pay enough, or get educations that are putting them in debt. They are full of people applying their savvy intelligence to stretch a minimum wage paycheck, or balance a job and a side hustle to make ends meet. They are full of people doing for themselves and for others, whether it's picking up medication for an elderly neighbor, or letting a sibling borrow some money to pay the phone bill, or just watching out for the neighborhood kids from the front stoop.I am the exception because of luck and privilege, not hard work. And I'm not being modest or self-deprecating — I am amazing.(Laughter)But most people work hard. Hard work is the common denominator in this equation, and I'm tired of the story we tell that hard work leads to success, because that allows —Thank you.(Applause)... because that story allows those of us who make it to believe we deserve it, and by implication, those who don't make it don't deserve it. We tell ourselves, in the back of our minds, and sometimes in the front of our mouths, ""There must be something a little wrong with those poor people."" We have a wide range of beliefs about what that something wrong is. Some people tell the story that poor folks are lazy freeloaders who would cheat and lie to get out of an honest day's work. Others prefer the story that poor people are helpless and probably had neglectful parents that didn't read to them enough, and if they were just told what to do and shown the right path, they could make it.For every story I hear demonizing low-income single mothers or absentee fathers, which is how people might think of my parents, I've got 50 that tell a different story about the same people, showing up every day and doing their best. I'm not saying that some of the negative stories aren't true, but those stories allow us to not really see who people really are, because they don't paint a full picture. The quarter-truths and limited plot lines have us convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing. What if we recognized that what's working is the people and what's broken is our approach? What if we realized that the experts we are looking for, the experts we need to follow, are poor people themselves? What if, instead of imposing solutions, we just added fire to the already-burning flame that they have? Not directing — not even empowering — but just fueling their initiative.Just north of here, we have an example of what this could look like: Silicon Valley. A whole venture capital industry has grown up around the belief that if people have good ideas and the desire to manifest them, we should give them lots and lots and lots of money.(Laughter)Right? But where is our strategy for Theresa and Baakir? There are no incubators for them, no accelerators, no fellowships. How are Jobana, Sintia and Bertha really all that different from the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world? Baakir has experience and a track record. I'd put my money on him.So, consider this an invitation to rethink a flawed strategy. Let's grasp this opportunity to let go of a tired, faulty narrative and listen and look for true stories, more beautifully complex stories, about who marginalized people and families and communities are.I'm going to take a minute to speak to my people. We cannot wait for somebody else to get it right. Let us remember what we are capable of; all that we have built with blood, sweat and dreams; all the cogs that keep turning; and the people kept afloat because of our backbreaking work. Let us remember that we are magic. If you need some inspiration to jog your memory, read Octavia Butler's ""Parable of the Sower."" Listen to Reverend King's ""Letter from Birmingham Jail."" Listen to Suheir Hammad recite ""First Writing Since,"" or Esperanza Spalding perform ""Black Gold."" Set your gaze upon the art of Kehinde Wiley or Favianna Rodriguez. Look at the hands of your grandmother or into the eyes of someone who loves you. We are magic. Individually, we don't have a lot of wealth and power, but collectively, we are unstoppable. And we spend a lot of our time and energy organizing our power to demand change from systems that were not made for us. Instead of trying to alter the fabric of existing ways, let's weave and cut some fierce new cloth. Let's use some of our substantial collective power toward inventing and bringing to life new ways of being that work for us.Desmond Tutu talks about the concept of ubuntu, in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process that they embarked on after apartheid. He says it means, ""My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours; we belong to a bundle of life."" A bundle of life. The Truth and Reconciliation process started by elevating the voices of the unheard. If this country is going to live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all, then we need to elevate the voices of our unheard, of people like Jobana, Sintia and Bertha, Theresa and Baakir. We must leverage their solutions and their ideas. We must listen to their true stories, their more beautifully complex stories.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mia_birdsong_the_story_we_tell_about_poverty_isn_t_true
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"I'm here to recruit men to support gender equality.(Cheers)Wait, wait. What? What do men have to do with gender equality? Gender equality is about women, right? I mean, the word gender is about women. Actually, I'm even here speaking as a middle class white man.Now, I wasn't always a middle class white man. It all happened for me about 30 years ago when I was in graduate school, and a bunch of us graduate students got together one day, and we said, you know, there's an explosion of writing and thinking in feminist theory, but there's no courses yet. So we did what graduate students typically do in a situation like that. We said, OK, let's have a study group. We'll read a text, we'll talk about it, we'll have a potluck dinner.(Laughter)So every week, 11 women and me got together.(Laughter)We would read some text in feminist theory and have a conversation about it. And during one of our conversations, I witnessed an interaction that changed my life forever. It was a conversation between two women. One of the women was white, and one was black. And the white woman said — this is going to sound very anachronistic now — the white woman said, ""All women face the same oppression as women. All women are similarly situated in patriarchy, and therefore all women have a kind of intuitive solidarity or sisterhood."" And the black woman said, ""I'm not so sure. Let me ask you a question."" So the black woman says to the white woman, ""When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, what do you see?"" And the white woman said, ""I see a woman."" And the black woman said, ""You see, that's the problem for me. Because when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror,"" she said, ""I see a black woman. To me, race is visible. But to you, race is invisible. You don't see it."" And then she said something really startling. She said, ""That's how privilege works. Privilege is invisible to those who have it."" It is a luxury, I will say to the white people sitting in this room, not to have to think about race every split second of our lives. Privilege is invisible to those who have it.Now remember, I was the only man in this group, so when I witnessed this, I went, ""Oh no.""(Laughter)And somebody said, ""Well what was that reaction?"" And I said, ""Well, when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, I see a human being. I'm kind of the generic person. You know, I'm a middle class white man. I have no race, no class, no gender. I'm universally generalizable.""(Laughter)So I like to think that was the moment I became a middle class white man, that class and race and gender were not about other people, they were about me. I had to start thinking about them, and it had been privilege that had kept it invisible to me for so long.Now, I wish I could tell you this story ends 30 years ago in that little discussion group, but I was reminded of it quite recently at my university where I teach. I have a colleague, and she and I both teach the sociology of gender course on alternate semesters. So she gives a guest lecture for me when I teach. I give a guest lecture for her when she teaches. So I walk into her class to give a guest lecture, about 300 students in the room, and as I walk in, one of the students looks up and says, ""Oh, finally, an objective opinion.""All that semester, whenever my colleague opened her mouth, what my students saw was a woman. I mean, if you were to say to my students, ""There is structural inequality based on gender in the United States,"" they'd say, ""Well of course you'd say that. You're a woman. You're biased."" When I say it, they go, ""Wow, is that interesting. Is that going to be on the test? How do you spell 'structural'?""(Laughter)So I hope you all can see, this is what objectivity looks like.(Laughter) (Applause)Disembodied Western rationality.(Laughter)And that, by the way, is why I think men so often wear ties.(Laughter)Because if you are going to embody disembodied Western rationality, you need a signifier, and what could be a better signifier of disembodied Western rationality than a garment that at one end is a noose and the other end points to the genitals?(Laughter) (Applause)That is mind-body dualism right there.So making gender visible to men is the first step to engaging men to support gender equality.Now, when men first hear about gender equality, when they first start thinking about it, they often think, many men think, well, that's right, that's fair, that's just, that's the ethical imperative. But not all men. Some men think — the lightning bolt goes off, and they go, ""Oh my God, yes, gender equality,"" and they will immediately begin to mansplain to you your oppression. They see supporting gender equality something akin to the cavalry, like, ""Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention, ladies, we'll take it from here."" This results in a syndrome that I like to call 'premature self-congratulation.'(Laughter) (Applause)There's another group, though, that actively resists gender equality, that sees gender equality as something that is detrimental to men. I was on a TV talk show opposite four white men. This is the beginning of the book I wrote, 'Angry White Men.' These were four angry white men who believed that they, white men in America, were the victims of reverse discrimination in the workplace. And they all told stories about how they were qualified for jobs, qualified for promotions, they didn't get them, they were really angry. And the reason I'm telling you this is I want you to hear the title of this particular show. It was a quote from one of the men, and the quote was, ""A Black Woman Stole My Job."" And they all told their stories, qualified for jobs, qualified for promotions, didn't get it, really angry. And then it was my turn to speak, and I said, ""I have just one question for you guys, and it's about the title of the show, 'A Black Woman Stole My Job.' Actually, it's about one word in the title. I want to know about the word 'my.' Where did you get the idea it was your job? Why isn't the title of the show, 'A Black Woman Got the Job?' or 'A Black Woman Got A Job?'"" Because without confronting men's sense of entitlement, I don't think we'll ever understand why so many men resist gender equality.(Applause)Look, we think this is a level playing field, so any policy that tilts it even a little bit, we think, ""Oh my God, water's rushing uphill. It's reverse discrimination against us.""(Laughter)So let me be very clear: white men in Europe and the United States are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world. It is called ""the history of the world.""(Laughter) (Applause)So, now I've established some of the obstacles to engaging men, but why should we support gender equality? Of course, it's fair, it's right and it's just. But more than that, gender equality is also in our interest as men. If you listen to what men say about what they want in their lives, gender equality is actually a way for us to get the lives we want to live.Gender equality is good for countries. It turns out, according to most studies, that those countries that are the most gender equal are also the countries that score highest on the happiness scale. And that's not just because they're all in Europe.(Laughter)Even within Europe, those countries that are more gender equal also have the highest levels of happiness.It is also good for companies. Research by Catalyst and others has shown conclusively that the more gender-equal companies are, the better it is for workers, the happier their labor force is. They have lower job turnover. They have lower levels of attrition. They have an easier time recruiting. They have higher rates of retention, higher job satisfaction, higher rates of productivity. So the question I'm often asked in companies is, ""Boy, this gender equality thing, that's really going to be expensive, huh?"" And I say, ""Oh no, in fact, what you have to start calculating is how much gender inequality is already costing you. It is extremely expensive."" So it is good for business.And the other thing is, it's good for men. It is good for the kind of lives we want to live, because young men especially have changed enormously, and they want to have lives that are animated by terrific relationships with their children. They expect their partners, their spouses, their wives, to work outside the home and be just as committed to their careers as they are.I was talking, to give you an illustration of this change — Some of you may remember this. When I was a lot younger, there was a riddle that was posed to us. Some of you may wince to remember this riddle. This riddle went something like this.A man and his son are driving on the freeway, and they're in a terrible accident, and the father is killed, and the son is brought to the hospital emergency room, and as they're bringing the son into the hospital emergency room, the emergency room attending physician sees the boy and says, ""Oh, I can't treat him, that's my son."" How is this possible?We were flummoxed by this. We could not figure this out.(Laughter)Well, I decided to do a little experiment with my 16-year old son. He had a bunch of his friends hanging out at the house watching a game on TV recently. So I decided I would pose this riddle to them, just to see, to gauge the level of change. Well, 16-year-old boys, they immediately turned to me and said, ""It's his mom."" Right? No problem. Just like that. Except for my son, who said, ""Well, he could have two dads.""(Laughter) (Applause)That's an index, an indicator of how things have changed. Younger men today expect to be able to balance work and family. They want to be dual-career, dual-carer couples. They want to be able to balance work and family with their partners. They want to be involved fathers.Now, it turns out that the more egalitarian our relationships, the happier both partners are. Data from psychologists and sociologists are quite persuasive here. I think we have the persuasive numbers, the data, to prove to men that gender equality is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win. Here's what the data show. Now, when men begin the process of engaging with balancing work and family, we often have two phrases that we use to describe what we do. We pitch in and we help out.(Laughter)And I'm going to propose something a little bit more radical, one word: ""share.""(Laughter)Because here's what the data show: when men share housework and childcare, their children do better in school. Their children have lower rates of absenteeism, higher rates of achievement. They are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. They are less likely to see a child psychiatrist. They are less likely to be put on medication.So when men share housework and childcare, their children are happier and healthier, and men want this.When men share housework and childcare, their wives are happier. Duh. Not only that, their wives are healthier. Their wives are less likely to see a therapist, less likely to be diagnosed with depression, less likely to be put on medication, more likely to go to the gym, report higher levels of marital satisfaction. So when men share housework and childcare, their wives are happier and healthier, and men certainly want this as well. When men share housework and childcare, the men are healthier. They smoke less, drink less, take recreational drugs less often. They are less likely to go to the ER but more like to go to a doctor for routine screenings. They are less likely to see a therapist, less likely to be diagnosed with depression, less likely to be taking prescription medication. So when men share housework and childcare, the men are happier and healthier. And who wouldn't want that?And finally, when men share housework and childcare, they have more sex.(Laughter)Now, of these four fascinating findings, which one do you think Men's Health magazine put on its cover?(Laughter)""Housework Makes Her Horny. (Not When She Does It.)""(Laughter)Now, I will say, just to remind the men in the audience, these data were collected over a really long period of time, so I don't want listeners to say, ""Hmm, OK, I think I'll do the dishes tonight."" These data were collected over a really long period of time. But I think it shows something important, that when Men's Health magazine put it on their cover, they also called, you'll love this, ""Choreplay.""So, what we found is something really important, that gender equality is in the interest of countries, of companies, and of men, and their children and their partners, that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. It's not a win-lose. It is a win-win for everyone. And what we also know is we cannot fully empower women and girls unless we engage boys and men. We know this. And my position is that men need the very things that women have identified that they need to live the lives they say they want to live in order to live the lives that we say we want to live.In 1915, on the eve of one of the great suffrage demonstrations down Fifth Avenue in New York City, a writer in New York wrote an article in a magazine, and the title of the article was, ""Feminism for Men."" And this was the first line of that article: ""Feminism will make it possible for the first time for men to be free.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality_is_good_for_everyone_men_included
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"I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. ""To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This."" And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.So here are a couple of sample questions.Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along.Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony. So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love. But then we did, and —(Laughter)And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together? And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months. And this question is really what I want to talk about today. But let's come back to it.(Laughter)So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. But as it turned out, I had no idea.So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog. And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called. Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news —(Laughter)and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship.(Laughter)And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase ""Are you still together?"" and several messages popped up immediately. They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. I did radio interviews and they asked. I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, ""Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?"" And I promptly turned bright red.I understand that this is part of the deal. If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it. But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response. The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own. In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success.So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship. I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together. I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us. I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for.And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love.But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering. My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place. What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them? If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile? Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love. Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called ""sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure."" Sounds romantic, doesn't it? But the study did work. The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers. They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies. The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published.So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, ""So, I tried your study, and it didn't work."" He seemed a little mystified by this. ""You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?"" I asked.""Well..."" He paused. ""I think she just wants to be friends.""""But did you become better friends?"" I asked. ""Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?"" He nodded.""So, then it worked,"" I said.I don't think this is the answer he was looking for. In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love.I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup. I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him. So I turned to science. I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache. I don't know if I realized this at the time — I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing — but it seems really obvious in retrospect. I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then. And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways. I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed. I am more confident about asking for what I want. But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for. What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely. Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together.So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love. There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying. The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood. But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story. The version of the story that asks, ""Are you still together?"" and is content with a yes or no answer.So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not? How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run? How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt? I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone.So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love. Falling in love is the easy part. So at the end of my article, I wrote, ""Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be."" And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice. I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me. I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America. But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in. And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true.I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write.(Laughter)But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/mandy_len_catron_falling_in_love_is_the_easy_part
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"Wow, what an honor. I always wondered what this would feel like.So eight years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life. I had a friend tell me, ""Don't worry about how much you like the work you're doing now. It's all about just building your resume.""And I'd just come back from living in Spain for a while, and I'd joined this Fortune 500 company. I thought, ""This is fantastic. I'm going to have big impact on the world."" I had all these ideas. And within about two months, I noticed at about 10am every morning I had this strange urge to want to slam my head through the monitor of my computer. I don't know if anyone's ever felt that. And I noticed pretty soon after that that all the competitors in our space had already automated my job role. And this is right about when I got this sage advice to build up my resume.Well, as I'm trying to figure out what two-story window I'm going to jump out of and change things up, I read some altogether different advice from Warren Buffett, and he said, ""Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age.""(Laughter)And I heard that, and that was all I needed. Within two weeks, I was out of there, and I left with one intention: to find something that I could screw up. That's how tough it was. I wanted to have some type of impact. It didn't matter what it was.And I found pretty quickly that I wasn't alone: it turns out that over 80 percent of the people around don't enjoy their work. I'm guessing this room is different, but that's the average that Deloitte has done with their studies. So I wanted to find out, what is it that sets these people apart, the people who do the passionate, world-changing work, that wake up inspired every day, and then these people, the other 80 percent who lead these lives of quiet desperation.So I started to interview all these people doing this inspiring work, and I read books and did case studies, 300 books altogether on purpose and career and all this, totally just self-immersion, really for the selfish reason of — I wanted to find the work that I couldn't not do, what that was for me.But as I was doing this, more and more people started to ask me, ""You're into this career thing. I don't like my job. Can we sit down for lunch?"" I'd say, ""Sure."" But I would have to warn them, because at this point, my quit rate was also 80 percent. Of the people I'd sit down with for lunch, 80 percent would quit their job within two months. I was proud of this, and it wasn't that I had any special magic. It was that I would ask one simple question. It was, ""Why are you doing the work that you're doing?"" And so often their answer would be, ""Well, because somebody told me I'm supposed to."" And I realized that so many people around us are climbing their way up this ladder that someone tells them to climb, and it ends up being leaned up against the wrong wall, or no wall at all.The more time I spent around these people and saw this problem, I thought, what if we could create a community, a place where people could feel like they belonged and that it was OK to do things differently, to take the road less traveled, where that was encouraged, and inspire people to change? And that later became what I now call Live Your Legend, which I'll explain in a little bit. But as I've made these discoveries, I noticed a framework of really three simple things that all these different passionate world-changers have in common, whether you're a Steve Jobs or if you're just, you know, the person that has the bakery down the street. But you're doing work that embodies who you are. I want to share those three with you, so we can use them as a lens for the rest of today and hopefully the rest of our life.The first part of this three-step passionate work framework is becoming a self-expert and understanding yourself, because if you don't know what you're looking for, you're never going to find it. And the thing is that no one is going to do this for us. There's no major in university on passion and purpose and career. I don't know how that's not a required double major, but don't even get me started on that. I mean, you spend more time picking out a dorm room TV set than you do you picking your major and your area of study. But the point is, it's on us to figure that out, and we need a framework, we need a way to navigate through this.And so the first step of our compass is finding out what our unique strengths are. What are the things that we wake up loving to do no matter what, whether we're paid or we're not paid, the things that people thank us for? And the Strengths Finder 2.0 is a book and also an online tool. I highly recommend it for sorting out what it is that you're naturally good at.And next, what's our framework or our hierarchy for making decisions? Do we care about the people, our family, health, or is it achievement, success, all this stuff? We have to figure out what it is to make these decisions, so we know what our soul is made of, so that we don't go selling it to some cause we don't give a shit about.And then the next step is our experiences. All of us have these experiences. We learn things every day, every minute about what we love, what we hate, what we're good at, what we're terrible at. And if we don't spend time paying attention to that and assimilating that learning and applying it to the rest of our lives, it's all for nothing. Every day, every week, every month of every year I spend some time just reflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and what do I want to repeat, what can I apply more to my life.And even more so than that, as you see people, especially today, who inspire you, who are doing things where you say ""Oh God, what Jeff is doing, I want to be like him."" Why are you saying that? Open up a journal. Write down what it is about them that inspires you. It's not going to be everything about their life, but whatever it is, take note on that, so over time we'll have this repository of things that we can use to apply to our life and have a more passionate existence and make a better impact. Because when we start to put these things together, we can then define what success actually means to us, and without these different parts of the compass, it's impossible. We end up in the situation — we have that scripted life that everybody seems to be living going up this ladder to nowhere.It's kind of like in Wall Street 2, if anybody saw that, the peon employee asks the big Wall Street banker CEO, ""What's your number? Everyone's got a number, where if they make this money, they'll leave it all."" He says, ""Oh, it's simple. More."" And he just smiles. And it's the sad state of most of the people that haven't spent time understanding what matters for them, who keep reaching for something that doesn't mean anything to us, but we're doing it because everyone said we're supposed to. But once we have this framework together, we can start to identify the things that make us come alive. You know, before this, a passion could come and hit you in the face, or maybe in your possible line of work, you might throw it away because you don't have a way of identifying it. But once you do, you can see something that's congruent with my strengths, my values, who I am as a person, so I'm going to grab ahold of this, I'm going to do something with it, and I'm going to pursue it and try to make an impact with it.And Live Your Legend and the movement we've built wouldn't exist if I didn't have this compass to identify, ""Wow, this is something I want to pursue and make a difference with."" If we don't know what we're looking for, we're never going to find it, but once we have this framework, this compass, then we can move on to what's next — and that's not me up there — doing the impossible and pushing our limits. There's two reasons why people don't do things. One is they tell themselves they can't do them, or people around them tell them they can't do them. Either way, we start to believe it. Either we give up, or we never start in the first place.The things is, everyone was impossible until somebody did it. Every invention, every new thing in the world, people thought were crazy at first. Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, it was a physical impossibility to break the four-minute mile in a foot race until Roger Bannister stood up and did it. And then what happened? Two months later, 16 people broke the four-minute mile. The things that we have in our head that we think are impossible are often just milestones waiting to be accomplished if we can push those limits a bit. And I think this starts with probably your physical body and fitness more than anything, because we can control that. If you don't think you can run a mile, you show yourself you can run a mile or two, or a marathon, or lose five pounds, or whatever it is, you realize that confidence compounds and can be transferred into the rest of your world.And I've actually gotten into the habit of this a little bit with my friends. We have this little group. We go on physical adventures, and recently, I found myself in a kind of precarious spot. I'm terrified of deep, dark, blue water. I don't know if anyone's ever had that same fear ever since they watched Jaws 1, 2, 3 and 4 like six times when I was a kid. But anything above here, if it's murky, I can already feel it right now. I swear there's something in there. Even if it's Lake Tahoe, it's fresh water, totally unfounded fear, ridiculous, but it's there. Anyway, three years ago I find myself on this tugboat right down here in the San Francisco Bay. It's a rainy, stormy, windy day, and people are getting sick on the boat, and I'm sitting there wearing a wetsuit, and I'm looking out the window in pure terror thinking I'm about to swim to my death. I'm going to try to swim across the Golden Gate. And my guess is some people in this room might have done that before. I'm sitting there, and my buddy Jonathan, who had talked me into it, he comes up to me and he could see the state I was in. And he says, ""Scott, hey man, what's the worst that could happen? You're wearing a wetsuit. You're not going to sink. And If you can't make it, just hop on one of the 20 kayaks. Plus, if there's a shark attack, why are they going to pick you over the 80 people in the water?"" So thanks, that helps. He's like, ""But really, just have fun with this. Good luck."" And he dives in, swims off. OK.Turns out, the pep talk totally worked, and I felt this total feeling of calm, and I think it was because Jonathan was 13 years old.(Laughter)And of the 80 people swimming that day, 65 of them were between the ages of nine and 13. Think how you would have approached your world differently if at nine years old you found out you could swim a mile and a half in 56-degree water from Alcatraz to San Francisco. What would you have said yes to? What would you have not given up on? What would you have tried? As I'm finishing this swim, I get to Aquatic Park, and I'm getting out of the water and of course half the kids are already finished, so they're cheering me on and they're all excited. And I got total popsicle head, if anyone's ever swam in the Bay, and I'm trying to just thaw my face out, and I'm watching people finish. And I see this one kid, something didn't look right. And he's just flailing like this. And he's barely able to sip some air before he slams his head back down. And I notice other parents were watching too, and I swear they were thinking the same thing I was: this is why you don't let nine-year-olds swim from Alcatraz. This was not fatigue. All of a sudden, two parents run up and grab him, and they put him on their shoulders, and they're dragging him like this, totally limp. And then all of a sudden they walk a few more feet and they plop him down in his wheelchair. And he puts his fists up in the most insane show of victory I've ever seen. I can still feel the warmth and the energy on this guy when he made this accomplishment. I had seen him earlier that day in his wheelchair. I just had no idea he was going to swim. I mean, where is he going to be in 20 years? How many people told him he couldn't do that, that he would die if tried that?You prove people wrong, you prove yourself wrong, that you can make little incremental pushes of what you believe is possible. You don't have to be the fastest marathoner in the world, just your own impossibilities, to accomplish those, and it starts with little bitty steps. And the best way to do this is to surround yourself with passionate people. The fastest things to do things you don't think can be done is to surround yourself with people already doing them.There's this quote by Jim Rohn and it says. ""You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."" And there is no bigger lifehack in the history of the world from getting where you are today to where you want to be than the people you choose to put in your corner. They change everything, and it's a proven fact. In 1898, Norman Triplett did this study with a bunch of cyclists, and he would measure their times around the track in a group, and also individually. And he found that every time the cyclists in the group would cycle faster. And it's been repeated in all kinds of walks of life since then, and it proves the same thing over again, that the people around you matter, and environment is everything. But it's on you to control it, because it can go both ways. With 80 percent of people who don't like the work they do, that means most people around us, not in this room, but everywhere else, are encouraging complacency and keeping us from pursuing the things that matter to us so we have to manage those surroundings.I found myself in this situation — personal example, a couple years ago. Has anyone ever had a hobby or a passion they poured their heart and soul into, unbelievable amount of time, and they so badly want to call it a business, but no one's paying attention and it doesn't make a dime? OK, I was there for four years trying to build this Live Your Legend movement to help people do work that they genuinely cared about and that inspired them, and I was doing all I could, and there were only three people paying attention, and they're all right there: my mother, father and my wife, Chelsea. Thank you guys for the support.(Applause)And this is how badly I wanted it, it grew at zero percent for four years, and I was about to shut it down, and right about then, I moved to San Francisco and started to meet some pretty interesting people who had these crazy lifestyles of adventure, of businesses and websites and blogs that surrounded their passions and helped people in a meaningful way. And one of my friends, now, he has a family of eight, and he supports his whole family with a blog that he writes for twice a week. They just came back from a month in Europe, all of them together. This blew my mind. How does this even exist? And I got unbelievably inspired by seeing this, and instead of shutting it down, I decided, let's take it seriously. And I did everything I could to spend my time, every waking hour possible trying to hound these guys, hanging out and having beers and workouts, whatever it was. And after four years of zero growth, within six months of hanging around these people, the community at Live Your Legend grew by 10 times. In another 12 months, it grew by 160 times. And today over 30,000 people from 158 countries use our career and connection tools on a monthly basis. And those people have made up that community of passionate folks who inspired that possibility that I dreamed of for Live Your Legend so many years back.The people change everything, and this is why — you know, you ask what was going on. Well, for four years, I knew nobody in this space, and I didn't even know it existed, that people could do this stuff, that you could have movements like this. And then I'm over here in San Francisco, and everyone around me was doing it. It became normal, so my thinking went from how could I possibly do this to how could I possibly not. And right then, when that happens, that switch goes on in your head, it ripples across your whole world. And without even trying, your standards go from here to here. You don't need to change your goals. You just need to change your surroundings. That's it, and that's why I love being around this whole group of people, why I go to every TED event I can, and watch them on my iPad on the way to work, whatever it is. Because this is the group of people that inspires possibility. We have a whole day to spend together and plenty more.To sum things up, in terms of these three pillars, they all have one thing in common more than anything else. They are 100 percent in our control. No one can tell you you can't learn about yourself. No one can tell you you can't push your limits and learn your own impossible and push that. No one can tell you you can't surround yourself with inspiring people or get away from the people who bring you down. You can't control a recession. You can't control getting fired or getting in a car accident. Most things are totally out of our hands. These three things are totally on us, and they can change our whole world if we decide to do something about it.And the thing is, it's starting to happen on a widespread level. I just read in Forbes, the US Government reported for the first time in a month where more people had quit their jobs than had been laid off. They thought this was an anomaly, but it's happened three months straight. In a time where people claim it's kind of a tough environment, people are giving a middle finger to this scripted life, the things that people say you're supposed to do, in exchange for things that matter to them and do the things that inspire them.And the thing is, people are waking up to this possibility, that really the only thing that limits possibility now is imagination. That's not a cliché anymore. I don't care what it is that you're into, what passion, what hobby. If you're into knitting, you can find someone who is killing it knitting, and you can learn from them. It's wild. And that's what this whole day is about, to learn from the folks speaking, and we profile these people on Live Your Legend every day, because when ordinary people are doing the extraordinary, and we can be around that, it becomes normal. And this isn't about being Gandhi or Steve Jobs, doing something crazy. It's just about doing something that matters to you, and makes an impact that only you can make.Speaking of Gandhi, he was a recovering lawyer, as I've heard the term, and he was called to a greater cause, something that mattered to him, he couldn't not do. And he has this quote that I absolutely live by. ""First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.""Everything was impossible until somebody did it. You can either hang around the people who tell you it can't be done and tell you you're stupid for trying, or surround yourself with the people who inspire possibility, the people who are in this room. Because I see it as our responsibility to show the world that what's seen as impossible can become that new normal. And that's already starting to happen. First, do the things that inspire us, so we can inspire other people to do the things that inspire them. But we can't find that unless we know what we're looking for. We have to do our work on ourself, be intentional about that, and make those discoveries. Because I imagine a world where 80 percent of people love the work they do. What would that look like? What would the innovation be like? How would you treat the people around you? Things would start to change.And as we finish up, I have just one question to ask you guys, and I think it's the only question that matters. And it's what is the work you can't not do? Discover that, live it, not just for you, but for everybody around you, because that is what starts to change the world. What is the work you can't not do?Thank you guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_dinsmore_how_to_find_work_you_love
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"(Arabic) I seek refuge in Allah from cursed Satan. In the Name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful.(English) I was born in a middle class family. My father was five years old when he lost his father, but by the time I was born, he was already a businessman. But it didn't make a difference to him if his children were going to be a boy or a girl: they were going to go to school. So I guess I was the lucky one.My mother had 16 pregnancies. From 16 pregnancies, five of us are alive. You can imagine as a child what I went through. Day to day, I watched women being carried to a graveyard, or watched children going to a graveyard. At that time, when I finished my high school, I really wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a doctor to help women and children. So I completed my education, but I wanted to go to university. Unfortunately, in my country, there wasn't a dormitory for girls, so I was accepted in medical school, but I could not go there. So as a result, my father sent me to America.I came to America. I completed my education. While I was completing my education, my country was invaded by Russia. And do you know that at the time I was completing my education, I didn't know what was going on with my family or with my country. There were months, years, I didn't know about it. My family was in a refugee camp. So as soon as I completed my education, I brought my family to America. I wanted them to be safe.But where was my heart? My heart was in Afghanistan. Day after day, when I listened to the news, when I followed what was going on with my country, my heart was breaking up. I really wanted to go back to my country, but at the same time I knew I could not go there, because there was no place for me. I had a good job. I was a professor at a university. I earned good money. I had a good life. My family was here. I could live with them. But I wasn't happy. I wanted to go back home. So I went to the refugee camp. And when I went to the refugee camp in Pakistan, there were 7.5 million refugees. 7.5 million refugees. About 90 percent of them were women and children. Most of the men have been killed or they were in war. And you know, in the refugee camp, when I went day-to-day to do a survey, I found things you never could imagine. I saw a widow with five to eight children sitting there and weeping and not knowing what to do. I saw a young woman have no way to go anywhere, no education, no entertainment, no place to even live. I saw young men that had lost their father and their home, and they are supporting the family as a 10-to-12-year old boy — being the head of the household, trying to protect their sister and their mother and their children.So it was a very devastating situation. My heart was beating for my people, and I didn't know what to do. At that moment, we talk about momentum. At that moment, I felt, what can I do for these people? How could I help these people? I am one individual. What can I do for them?But at that moment, I knew that education changed my life. It transformed me. It gave me status. It gave me confidence. It gave me a career. It helped me to support my family, to bring my family to another country, to be safe. And I knew that at that moment that what I should give to my people is education and health, and that's what I went after.But do you think it was easy? No, because at that time, education was banned for girls, completely. And also, by Russia invading Afghanistan, people were not trusting anyone. It was very hard to come and say, ""I want to do this."" Who am I? Somebody who comes from the United States. Somebody who got educated here. Did they trust me? Of course not.So I really needed to build the trust in this community. How am I going to do that? I went and surveyed and looked and looked. I asked. Finally, I found one man. He was 80 years old. He was a mullah. I went to his tent in the camp, and I asked him, ""I want to make you a teacher."" And he looked at me, and he said, ""Crazy woman, crazy woman, how do you think I can be a teacher?"" And I told him, ""I will make you a teacher."" Finally, he accepted my offer, and once I started a class in his compound, the word spread all over. In a matter of one year, we had 25 schools set up, 15,000 children going to school, and it was amazing.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.But of course, we're doing all our work, we were giving teacher training. We were training women's rights, human rights, democracy, rule of law. We were giving all kinds of training. And one day, I tell you, one day I was in the office in Peshawar, Pakistan. All of a sudden, I saw my staff running to rooms and locking the doors and telling me, ""Run away, hide!"" And you know, as a leader, what do you do? You're scared. You know it's dangerous. You know your life is on the line. But as a leader, you have to hold it together. You have to hold it together and show strength. So I said, ""What's going on?"" And these people were pouring into my office. So I invited them to the office. They came, and there were nine of them — nine Taliban. They were the ugliest looking men you can ever see.(Laughter)Very mean-looking people, black clothes, black turban, and they pour into my office. And I invited them to have a seat and have tea. They said no. They are not going to drink tea. And of course, with the tone of voice they were using, it was very scary, but I was really shaking up. But also I was strong, holding myself up. And, of course, by that time, you know how I dress — I dress from head to toe in a black hijab. The only thing you could see, my eyes. They asked me, ""What are you doing? Don't you know that school is banned for girls? What are you doing here?"" And you know, I just looked at them, and I said, ""What school? Where is the school?""(Laughter)(Applause)And they look at my face, and they said, ""You are teaching girls here."" I said, ""This is a house of somebody. We have some students coming, and they are all learning Koran, Holy Book. And you know, Koran says that if you learn the Holy Book, the woman, they can be a good wife, and they can obey their husband.""(Laughter)And I tell you one thing: that's the way you work with those people, and you know —(Laughter)So by that time, they started speaking Pashto. They talked to each other, and they said, ""Let's go, leave her alone, she's OK."" And you know, this time, I offered them tea again, and they took a sip and they left. By that time, my staff poured into my office. They were scared to death. They didn't know why they didn't kill me. They didn't know why they didn't take me away. But everybody was happy to see me. Very happy, and I was happy to be alive, of course.(Laughter)Of course, I was happy to be alive. But also, as we continuously gave training during the fall of the Taliban — of course during the Taliban there is another story. We went underground and we provided education for 80 schoolgirls, 3,000 students underground, and continuously we trained.With the fall of the Taliban, we went into the country, and we opened school after school. We opened women's learning center. We continuously opened clinics. We worked with mothers and children. We had reproductive health training. We had all kinds of training that you can imagine. I was very happy. I was delighted with the outcome of my work. And one day, with four trainers and one bodyguard, I was going up north of Kabul, and all of a sudden, again, I was stopped in the middle of the road by 19 young men. Rifles on their shoulders, they blocked the road. And I told my driver, ""What's going on?"" And the driver said, ""I don't know."" He asked them. They said, ""We have nothing to do with you."" They called my name. They said, ""We want her."" My bodyguard got out, said, ""I can answer you. What do you want?"" They said, ""Nothing."" They called my name. And by that time, the women are yelling and screaming inside the car. I am very shaken up, and I told myself, this is it. This time, we all are going to be killed. There is no doubt in my mind. But still, the moment comes, and you take strength from whatever you believe and whatever you do. It's in your heart. You believe in your worth, and you can walk on it.So I just hold myself on the side of the car. My leg was shaking, and I got outside. And I asked them, ""What can I do for you?"" You know what they said to me? They said, ""We know who you are. We know where you are going. Every day you go up north here and there. You train women, you teach them and also you give them an opportunity to have a job. You build their skills. How about us?""(Laughter)(Applause)""And you know, how about us? What are we going to do?"" I looked at them, and I said, ""I don't know.""(Laughter)They said, ""It's OK. The only thing we can do, what we know, from the time we're born, we just hold the gun and kill. That's all we know."" And you know what that means. It's a trap to me, of course. So I walk out of there. They said, ""We'll let you go, go."" And so I walked into the car, I sit in the car, and I told the driver, ""Turn around and go back to the office."" At that time, we only were supporting girls. We only had money for women to train them, to send them to school, and nothing else.By the time I came to the office, of course my trainers were gone. They ran away home. Nobody stayed there. My bodyguard was the only one there, and my voice was completely gone. I was shaken up, and I sat on my table, and I said, ""What am I going to do?"" How am I going to solve this problem? Because we had training going on up north already. Hundreds of women were there coming to get training.So I was sitting there, all of a sudden, at this moment, talking about momentum, we are, at that moment, one of my wonderful donors called me about a report. And she asked me, ""Sakena?"" And I answered her. She said, ""It's not you. What's wrong with you?"" I said, ""Nothing."" I tried to cover. No matter what I tried to do, she didn't believe me, and she asked me again. ""OK, tell me what's going on?"" I told her the whole story. At that time, she said, ""OK, you go next time, and you will help them. You will help them."" And when, two days later, I went the same route, and do you know, they were not in here, they were a little back further, the same young men, standing up there and holding the rifle and pointing to us to stop the car. So we stopped the car. I got out. I said, ""OK, let's go with me."" And they said, ""Yes."" I said, ""On one condition, that whatever I say, you accept it."" And they said, yes, they do. So I took them to the mosque, and to make a long story short, I told them I'd give them teachers. Today, they are the best trainers. They learn English, they learn how to be teachers, they learn computers, and they are my guides. Every area that is unknown to us in the mountain areas, they go with me. They are ahead, and we go. And they protect us. And —(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)That tells you that education transforms people. When you educate people, they are going to be different, and today all over, we need to work for gender equality. We cannot only train women but forget about the men, because the men are the real people who are giving women the hardest time.(Laughter)So we started training men because the men should know the potential of women, know how much these potential men has, and how much these women can do the same job they are doing. So we are continuously giving training to men, and I really believe strongly. I live in a country that was a beautiful country. I just want to share this with you. It was a beautiful country, beautiful, peaceful country. We were going everywhere. Women were getting education: lawyer, engineer, teacher, and we were going from house to house. We never locked our doors. But you know what happened to my country. Today, people cannot walk out of their door without security issues. But we want the same Afghanistan we had before. And I want to tell you the other side. Today, the women of Afghanistan are working very, very hard. They are earning degrees. They are training to be lawyers. They are training to be doctors, back again. They are training to be teachers, and they are running businesses. So it is so wonderful to see people like that reach their complete potential, and all of this is going to happen.I want to share this with you, because of love, because of compassion, and because of trust and honesty. If you have these few things with you, you will accomplish. We have one poet, Mawlānā Rūmī. He said that by having compassion and having love, you can conquer the world. And I tell you, we could. And if we could do it in Afghanistan, I am sure 100 percent that everyone can do it in any part of the world.Thank you very, very much.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sakena_yacoobi_how_i_stopped_the_taliban_from_shutting_down_my_school
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"For the last year, everyone's been watching the same show, and I'm not talking about ""Game of Thrones,"" but a horrifying, real-life drama that's proved too fascinating to turn off. It's a show produced by murderers and shared around the world via the Internet. Their names have become familiar: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto Jogo.Their beheadings by the Islamic State were barbaric, but if we think they were archaic, from a remote, obscure age, then we're wrong. They were uniquely modern, because the murderers acted knowing well that millions of people would tune in to watch.The headlines called them savages and barbarians, because the image of one man overpowering another, killing him with a knife to the throat, conforms to our idea of ancient, primitive practices, the polar opposite of our urban, civilized ways. We don't do things like that. But that's the irony. We think a beheading has nothing to do with us, even as we click on the screen to watch. But it is to do with us. The Islamic State beheadings are not ancient or remote. They're a global, 21st century event, a 21st century event that takes place in our living rooms, at our desks, on our computer screens. They're entirely dependent on the power of technology to connect us. And whether we like it or not, everyone who watches is a part of the show.And lots of people watch. We don't know exactly how many. Obviously, it's difficult to calculate. But a poll taken in the UK, for example, in August 2014, estimated that 1.2 million people had watched the beheading of James Foley in the few days after it was released. And that's just the first few days, and just Britain. A similar poll taken in the United States in November 2014 found that nine percent of those surveyed had watched beheading videos, and a further 23 percent had watched the videos but had stopped just before the death was shown. Nine percent may be a small minority of all the people who could watch, but it's still a very large crowd. And of course that crowd is growing all the time, because every week, every month, more people will keep downloading and keep watching.If we go back 11 years, before sites like YouTube and Facebook were born, it was a similar story. When innocent civilians like Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, were beheaded, those videos were shown during the Iraq War.Nick Berg's beheading quickly became one of the most searched for items on the Internet. Within a day, it was the top search term across search engines like Google, Lycos, Yahoo. In the week after Nick Berg's beheading, these were the top 10 search terms in the United States. The Berg beheading video remained the most popular search term for a week, and it was the second most popular search term for the whole month of May, runner-up only to ""American Idol."" The al-Qaeda-linked website that first showed Nick Berg's beheading had to close down within a couple of days due to overwhelming traffic to the site. One Dutch website owner said that his daily viewing figures rose from 300,000 to 750,000 every time a beheading in Iraq was shown. He told reporters 18 months later that it had been downloaded many millions of times, and that's just one website. A similar pattern was seen again and again when videos of beheadings were released during the Iraq War.Social media sites have made these images more accessible than ever before, but if we take another step back in history, we'll see that it was the camera that first created a new kind of crowd in our history of beheadings as public spectacle. As soon as the camera appeared on the scene, a full lifetime ago on June 17, 1939, it had an immediate and unequivocal effect.That day, the first film of a public beheading was created in France. It was the execution, the guillotining, of a German serial killer, Eugen Weidmann, outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. Weidmann was due to be executed at the crack of dawn, as was customary at the time, but his executioner was new to the job, and he'd underestimated how long it would take him to prepare. So Weidmann was executed at 4:30 in the morning, by which time on a June morning, there was enough light to take photographs, and a spectator in the crowd filmed the event, unbeknownst to the authorities. Several still photographs were taken as well, and you can still watch the film online today and look at the photographs. The crowd on the day of Weidmann's execution was called ""unruly"" and ""disgusting"" by the press, but that was nothing compared to the untold thousands of people who could now study the action over and over again, freeze-framed in every detail.The camera may have made these scenes more accessible than ever before, but it's not just about the camera. If we take a bigger leap back in history, we'll see that for as long as there have been public judicial executions and beheadings, there have been the crowds to see them. In London, as late as the early 19th century, there might be four or five thousand people to see a standard hanging. There could be 40,000 or 50,000 to see a famous criminal killed. And a beheading, which was a rare event in England at the time, attracted even more.In May 1820, five men known as the Cato Street Conspirators were executed in London for plotting to assassinate members of the British government. They were hung and then decapitated. It was a gruesome scene. Each man's head was hacked off in turn and held up to the crowd. And 100,000 people, that's 10,000 more than can fit into Wembley Stadium, had turned out to watch. The streets were packed. People had rented out windows and rooftops. People had climbed onto carts and wagons in the street. People climbed lamp posts. People had been known to have died in the crush on popular execution days.Evidence suggests that throughout our history of public beheadings and public executions, the vast majority of the people who come to see are either enthusiastic or, at best, unmoved. Disgust has been comparatively rare, and even when people are disgusted and are horrified, it doesn't always stop them from coming out all the same to watch.Perhaps the most striking example of the human ability to watch a beheading and remain unmoved and even be disappointed was the introduction in France in 1792 of the guillotine, that famous decapitation machine. To us in the 21st century, the guillotine may seem like a monstrous contraption, but to the first crowds who saw it, it was actually a disappointment. They were used to seeing long, drawn-out, torturous executions on the scaffold, where people were mutilated and burned and pulled apart slowly. To them, watching the guillotine in action, it was so quick, there was nothing to see. The blade fell, the head fell into a basket, out of sight immediately, and they called out, ""Give me back my gallows, give me back my wooden gallows.""The end of torturous public judicial executions in Europe and America was partly to do with being more humane towards the criminal, but it was also partly because the crowd obstinately refused to behave in the way that they should. All too often, execution day was more like a carnival than a solemn ceremony.Today, a public judicial execution in Europe or America is unthinkable, but there are other scenarios that should make us cautious about thinking that things are different now and we don't behave like that anymore.Take, for example, the incidents of suicide baiting. This is when a crowd gathers to watch a person who has climbed to the top of a public building in order to kill themselves, and people in the crowd shout and jeer, ""Get on with it! Go on and jump!"" This is a well-recognized phenomenon. One paper in 1981 found that in 10 out of 21 threatened suicide attempts, there was incidents of suicide baiting and jeering from a crowd. And there have been incidents reported in the press this year. This was a very widely reported incident in Telford and Shropshire in March this year.And when it happens today, people take photographs and they take videos on their phones and they post those videos online. When it comes to brutal murderers who post their beheading videos, the Internet has created a new kind of crowd. Today, the action takes place in a distant time and place, which gives the viewer a sense of detachment from what's happening, a sense of separation. It's nothing to do with me. It's already happened. We are also offered an unprecedented sense of intimacy. Today, we are all offered front row seats. We can all watch in private, in our own time and space, and no one need ever know that we've clicked on the screen to watch.This sense of separation — from other people, from the event itself — seems to be key to understanding our ability to watch, and there are several ways in which the Internet creates a sense of detachment that seems to erode individual moral responsibility. Our activities online are often contrasted with real life, as though the things we do online are somehow less real. We feel less accountable for our actions when we interact online. There's a sense of anonymity, a sense of invisibility, so we feel less accountable for our behavior. The Internet also makes it far easier to stumble upon things inadvertently, things that we would usually avoid in everyday life. Today, a video can start playing before you even know what you're watching. Or you may be tempted to look at material that you wouldn't look at in everyday life or you wouldn't look at if you were with other people at the time. And when the action is pre-recorded and takes place in a distant time and space, watching seems like a passive activity. There's nothing I can do about it now. It's already happened.All these things make it easier as an Internet user for us to give in to our sense of curiosity about death, to push our personal boundaries, to test our sense of shock, to explore our sense of shock.But we're not passive when we watch. On the contrary, we're fulfilling the murderer's desire to be seen. When the victim of a decapitation is bound and defenseless, he or she essentially becomes a pawn in their killer's show. Unlike a trophy head that's taken in battle, that represents the luck and skill it takes to win a fight, when a beheading is staged, when it's essentially a piece of theater, the power comes from the reception the killer receives as he performs. In other words, watching is very much part of the event. The event no longer takes place in a single location at a certain point in time as it used to and as it may still appear to. Now the event is stretched out in time and place, and everyone who watches plays their part.We should stop watching, but we know we won't. History tells us we won't, and the killers know it too.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Let me get this back. Thank you. Let's move here. While they install for the next performance, I want to ask you the question that probably many here have, which is how did you get interested in this topic?Frances Larson: I used to work at a museum called the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which was famous for its display of shrunken heads from South America. People used to say, ""Oh, the shrunken head museum, the shrunken head museum!"" And at the time, I was working on the history of scientific collections of skulls. I was working on the cranial collections, and it just struck me as ironic that here were people coming to see this gory, primitive, savage culture that they were almost fantasizing about and creating without really understanding what they were seeing, and all the while these vast — I mean hundreds of thousands of skulls in our museums, all across Europe and the States — were kind of upholding this Enlightenment pursuit of scientific rationality. So I wanted to kind of twist it round and say, ""Let's look at us."" We're looking through the glass case at these shrunken heads. Let's look at our own history and our own cultural fascination with these things. BG: Thank you for sharing that.FL: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/frances_larson_why_public_beheadings_get_millions_of_views
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"A question I'm often asked is, where did I get my passion for human rights and justice? It started early. I grew up in the west of Ireland, wedged between four brothers, two older than me and two younger than me. So of course I had to be interested in human rights, and equality and justice, and using my elbows!(Laughter)And those issues stayed with me and guided me, and in particular, when I was elected the first woman President of Ireland, from 1990 to 1997. I dedicated my presidency to having a space for those who felt marginalized on the island of Ireland, and bringing together communities from Northern Ireland with those from the Republic, trying to build peace. And I went as the first Irish president to the United Kingdom and met with Queen Elizabeth II, and also welcomed to my official residence — which we call ""Áras an Uachtaráin,"" the house of the president — members of the royal family, including, notably, the Prince of Wales. And I was aware that at the time of my presidency, Ireland was a country beginning a rapid economic progress. We were a country that was benefiting from the solidarity of the European Union. Indeed, when Ireland first joined the European Union in 1973, there were parts of the country that were considered developing, including my own beloved native county, County Mayo. I led trade delegations here to the United States, to Japan, to India, to encourage investment, to help to create jobs, to build up our economy, to build up our health system, our education — our development.What I didn't have to do as president was buy land on mainland Europe, so that Irish citizens could go there because our island was going underwater. What I didn't have to think about, either as president or as a constitutional lawyer, was the implications for the sovereignty of the territory because of the impact of climate change. But that is what President Tong, of the Republic of Kiribati, has to wake up every morning thinking about. He has bought land in Fiji as an insurance policy, what he calls, ""migration with dignity,"" because he knows that his people may have to leave their islands. As I listened to President Tong describing the situation, I really felt that this was a problem that no leader should have to face. And as I heard him speak about the pain of his problems, I thought about Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought about her and those who worked with her on the Commission on Human Rights, which she chaired in 1948, and drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For them, it would have been unimaginable that a whole country could go out of existence because of human-induced climate change.I came to climate change not as a scientist or an environmental lawyer, and I wasn't really impressed by the images of polar bears or melting glaciers. It was because of the impact on people, and the impact on their rights — their rights to food and safe water, health, education and shelter. And I say this with humility, because I came late to the issue of climate change. When I served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, climate change wasn't at the front of my mind. I don't remember making a single speech on climate change. I knew that there was another part of the United Nations — the UN Convention on Climate Change — that was dealing with the issue of climate change. It was later when I started to work in African countries on issues of development and human rights. And I kept hearing this pervasive sentence: ""Oh, but things are so much worse now, things are so much worse."" And then I explored what was behind that; it was about changes in the climate — climate shocks, changes in the weather.I met Constance Okollet, who had formed a women's group in Eastern Uganda, and she told me that when she was growing up, she had a very normal life in her village and they didn't go hungry, they knew that the seasons would come as they were predicted to come, they knew when to sow and they knew when to harvest, and so they had enough food. But, in recent years, at the time of this conversation, they had nothing but long periods of drought, and then flash flooding, and then more drought. The school had been destroyed, livelihoods had been destroyed, their harvest had been destroyed. She forms this women's group to try to keep her community together. And this was a reality that really struck me, because of course, Constance Okollet wasn't responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that were causing this problem.Indeed, I was very struck about the situation in Malawi in January of this year. There was an unprecedented flooding in the country, it covered about a third of the country, over 300 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands lost their livelihoods. And the average person in Malawi emits about 80 kg of CO2 a year. The average US citizen emits about 17.5 metric tons. So those who are suffering disproportionately don't drive cars, don't have electricity, don't consume very significantly, and yet they are feeling more and more the impacts of the changes in the climate, the changes that are preventing them from knowing how to grow food properly, and knowing how to look after their future. I think it was really the importance of the injustice that really struck me very forcibly.And I know that we're not able to address some of that injustice because we're not on course for a safe world. Governments around the world agreed at the conference in Copenhagen, and have repeated it at every conference on climate, that we have to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming above pre-Industrial standards. But we're on course for about four degrees. So we face an existential threat to the future of our planet. And that made me realize that climate change is the greatest threat to human rights in the 21st century.And that brought me then to climate justice. Climate justice responds to the moral argument — both sides of the moral argument — to address climate change. First of all, to be on the side of those who are suffering most and are most effected. And secondly, to make sure that they're not left behind again, when we start to move and start to address climate change with climate action, as we are doing.In our very unequal world today, it's very striking how many people are left behind. In our world of 7.2 billion people, about 3 billion are left behind. 1.3 billion don't have access to electricity, and they light their homes with kerosene and candles, both of which are dangerous. And in fact they spend a lot of their tiny income on that form of lighting. 2.6 billion people cook on open fires — on coal, wood and animal dung. And this causes about 4 million deaths a year from indoor smoke inhalation, and of course, most of those who die are women. So we have a very unequal world, and we need to change from ""business as usual."" And we shouldn't underestimate the scale and the transformative nature of the change which will be needed, because we have to go to zero carbon emissions by about 2050, if we're going to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming. And that means we have to leave about two-thirds of the known resources of fossil fuels in the ground.It's a very big change, and it means that obviously, industrialized countries must cut their emissions, must become much more energy-efficient, and must move as quickly as possible to renewable energy. For developing countries and emerging economies, the problem and the challenge is to grow without emissions, because they must develop; they have very poor populations. So they must develop without emissions, and that is a different kind of problem. Indeed, no country in the world has actually grown without emissions. All the countries have developed with fossil fuels, and then may be moving to renewable energy. So it is a very big challenge, and it requires the total support of the international community, with the necessary finance and technology, and systems and support, because no country can make itself safe from the dangers of climate change. This is an issue that requires complete human solidarity. Human solidarity, if you like, based on self-interest — because we are all in this together, and we have to work together to ensure that we reach zero carbon by 2050.The good news is that change is happening, and it's happening very fast. Here in California, there's a very ambitious emissions target to cut emissions. In Hawaii, they're passing legislation to have 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. And governments are very ambitious around the world. In Costa Rica, they have committed to being carbon-neutral by 2021. In Ethiopia, the commitment is to be carbon-neutral by 2027. Apple have pledged that their factories in China will use renewable energy. And there is a race on at the moment to convert electricity from tidal and wave power, in order that we can leave the coal in the ground. And that change is both welcome and is happening very rapidly. But it's still not enough, and the political will is still not enough.Let me come back to President Tong and his people in Kiribati. They actually could be able to live on their island and have a solution, but it would take a lot of political will. President Tong told me about his ambitious idea to either build up or even float the little islands where his people live. This, of course, is beyond the resources of Kiribati itself. It would require great solidarity and support from other countries, and it would require the kind of imaginative idea that we bring together when we want to have a space station in the air. But wouldn't it be wonderful to have this engineering wonder and to allow a people to remain in their sovereign territory, and be part of the community of nations? That is the kind of idea that we should be thinking about. Yes, the challenges of the transformation we need are big, but they can be solved. We are actually, as a people, very capable of coming together to solve problems.I was very conscious of this as I took part this year in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. 1945 was an extraordinary year. It was a year when the world faced what must have seemed almost insoluble problems — the devastation of the world wars, particularly the Second World War; the fragile peace that had been brought about; the need for a whole economic regeneration. But the leaders of that time didn't flinch from this. They had the capacity, they had a sense of being driven by never again must the world have this kind of problem. And they had to build structures for peace and security. And what did we get? What did they achieve? The Charter of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, as they're called, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. A Marshall Plan for Europe, a devastated Europe, to reconstruct it. And indeed a few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.2015 is a year that is similar in its importance to 1945, with similar challenges and similar potential. There will be two big summits this year: the first one, in September in New York, is the summit for the sustainable development goals. And then the summit in Paris in December, to give us a climate agreement. The sustainable development goals are intended to help countries to live sustainably, in tune with Mother Earth, not to take out of Mother Earth and destroy ecosystems, but rather, to live in harmony with Mother Earth, by living under sustainable development. And the sustainable development goals will come into operation for all countries on January 1, 2016. The climate agreement — a binding climate agreement — is needed because of the scientific evidence that we're on a trajectory for about a four-degree world and we have to change course to stay below two degrees. So we need to take steps that will be monitored and reviewed, so that we can keep increasing the ambition of how we cut emissions, and how we move more rapidly to renewable energy, so that we have a safe world.The reality is that this issue is much too important to be left to politicians and to the United Nations.(Laughter)It's an issue for all of us, and it's an issue where we need more and more momentum. Indeed, the face of the environmentalist has changed, because of the justice dimension. It's now an issue for faith-based organizations, under very good leadership from Pope Francis, and indeed, the Church of England, which is divesting from fossil fuels. It's an issue for the business community, and the good news is that the business community is changing very rapidly — except for the fossil fuel industries —(Laughter)Even they are beginning to slightly change their language — but only slightly. But business is not only moving rapidly to the benefits of renewable energy, but is urging politicians to give them more signals, so that they can move even more rapidly. It's an issue for the trade union movement. It's an issue for the women's movement. It's an issue for young people.I was very struck when I learned that Jibreel Khazan, one of the Greensboro Four who had taken part in the Woolworth sit-ins, said quite recently that climate change is the lunch counter moment for young people. So, lunch counter moment for young people of the 21st century — the sort of real human rights issue of the 21st century, because he said it is the greatest challenge to humanity and justice in our world.I recall very much the Climate March last September, and that was a huge momentum, not just in New York, but all around the world. and we have to build on that. I was marching with some of The Elders family, and I saw a placard a little bit away from me, but we were wedged so closely together — because after all, there were 400,000 people out in the streets of New York — so I couldn't quite get to that placard, I would have just liked to have been able to step behind it, because it said, ""Angry Grannies!""(Laughter)That's what I felt. And I have five grandchildren now, I feel very happy as an Irish grandmother to have five grandchildren, and I think about their world, and what it will be like when they will share that world with about 9 billion other people in 2050. We know that inevitably it will be a climate-constrained world, because of the emissions we've already put up there, but it could be a world that is much more equal and much fairer, and much better for health, and better for jobs and better for energy security, than the world we have now, if we have switched sufficiently and early enough to renewable energy, and no one is left behind. No one is left behind.And just as we've been looking back this year — in 2015 to 1945, looking back 70 years — I would like to think that they will look back, that world will look back 35 years from 2050, 35 years to 2015, and that they will say, ""Weren't they good to do what they did in 2015? We really appreciate that they took the decisions that made a difference, and that put the world on the right pathway, and we benefit now from that pathway,"" that they will feel that somehow we took our responsibilities, we did what was done in 1945 in similar terms, we didn't miss the opportunity, we lived up to our responsibilities. That's what this year is about.And somehow for me, it's captured in words of somebody that I admired very much. She was a mentor of mine, she was a friend, she died much too young, she was an extraordinary personality, a great champion of the environment: Wangari Maathai. Wangari said once, ""In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called upon to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground."" And that's what we have to do. We have to reach a new level of consciousness, a higher moral ground. And we have to do it this year in those two big summits. And that won't happen unless we have the momentum from people around the world who say: ""We want action now, we want to change course, we want a safe world, a safe world for future generations, a safe world for our children and our grandchildren, and we're all in this together.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_robinson_why_climate_change_is_a_threat_to_human_rights
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"When I was only three or four, I fell in love with poetry, with the rhythms and the music of language; with the power of metaphor and of imagery, poetry being the essence of communication — the discipline, the distillation. And all these years later, the poems I'll read today are from my just-finished seventh book of poetry.Well, five years ago, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Though there's no cure yet, advances in treatment are really impressive. But you can imagine that I was appalled to learn that women are largely left out of research trials, despite gender-specific medical findings having demonstrated that we are not actually just small men —(Laughter)who happen to have different reproductive systems. Gender-specific medicine is good for men, too.But you bring to a crisis the person you already are, including the, yes, momentum that you've learned to invoke through passionate caring and through action, both of which require but also create energy. So as an activist, I began working with the Parkinson's Disease Foundation — that's pdf.org — to create a major initiative to put women on the Parkinson's disease map. And as a poet, I began working with this subject matter, finding it tragic, hilarious, sometimes even joyful. I do not feel diminished by Parkinson's; I feel distilled by it, and I actually very much like the woman I'm distilling into.""No Signs of Struggle""Growing small requires enormity of will: just sitting still in the doctor's waiting room watching the future shuffle in and out, watching it stoop; stare at you while you try not to look. Rare is an exchange: a smile of brief, wry recognition.You are the new kid on the block. Everyone here was you once. You are still learning that growing small requires a largeness of spirit you can't fit into yet: acceptance of irritating help from those who love you; giving way and over, but not up.You've swallowed hard the contents of the ""Drink Me"" bottle, and felt yourself shrink. Now, familiar furniture looms, floors tilt, and doorknobs yield only when wrestled round with both hands. It demands colossal patience, all this growing small: your diminished sleep at night, your handwriting, your voice, your height.You are more the incredible shrinking woman than the Buddhist mystic, serene, making do with less. Less is not always more. Yet in this emptying space, space glimmers, becoming visible. Here is a place behind the eyes of those accustomed by what some would call diminishment.It is a place of merciless poetry, a gift of presence previously ignored, drowned in the daily clutter. Here every gesture needs intention, is alive with consciousness. Nothing is automatic.You can spot it in the provocation of a button, an arm poking at a sleeve, a balancing act at a night-time curb while negotiating the dark. Feats of such modest valor, who would suspect them to be exercises in an intimate, fierce discipline, a metaphysics of being relentlessly aware?Such understated power here, in these tottering dancers who exert stupendous effort on tasks most view as insignificant. Such quiet beauty here, in these, my soft-voiced, stiff-limbed people; such resolve masked by each placid face. There is immensity required in growing small, so bent on such unbending grace.(Applause)Thank you.This one is called ""On Donating My Brain to Science.""(Laughter)Not a problem. Skip over all the pages reassuring religious people. Already a universal donor: kidneys, corneas, liver, lungs, tissue, heart, veins, whatever.Odd that the modest brain never imagined its unique value in research, maybe saving someone else from what it is they're not quite sure I have. Flattering, that.So fill in the forms, drill through the answers, trill out a blithe spirit.And slice me, dice me, spread me on your slides. Find what I'm trying to tell you.Earn me, learn me, scan me, squint through your lens. Uncover what I'd hint at if I could.Be my guest, do your best, harvest me, track the clues. This was a good brain while alive. This was a brain that paid its dues.So slice me, dice me, smear me on your slides, stain me, explain me, drain me like a cup. Share me, hear me:I want to be used I want to be used I want to be used up.(Applause)(Applause ends)And this one's called ""The Ghost Light.""Lit from within is the sole secure way to traverse dark matter. Some life forms — certain mushrooms, snails, jellyfish, worms — glow bioluminescent, and people as well; we emit infra-red light from our most lucent selves. Our tragedy is we can't see it.We see by reflecting. We need biofluorescence to show our true colors. External illumination can distort, though. When gravity bends light, huge galaxy clusters can act as telescopes, elongating background images of star systems to faint arcs — a lensing effect like viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine.A glass of wine or two now makes me weave as if acting the drunkard's part; as if, besotted with unrequited love for the dynamic Turner canvasses spied out by the Hubble, I could lurch down a city street set without provoking every pedestrian walk-on stare.Stare as long as you need to. If you think about it, walking, even standing, is illogical — such tiny things, feet! —(Laughter)especially when one's body is not al dente anymore.(Laughter)Besides, creature of extremes and excess, I've always thought Apollo beautiful but boring, and a bit of a dumb blonde. Dionysians don't do balance.Balance, in other words, has never been my strong point. But I digress. More and more these days, digression seems the most direct route through from where I've lost or found myself out of place, mind, turn, time.Place your foot just so, mind how you turn: too swift a swivel can bring you down. Take your time ushering the audience out, saying goodbye to the actors. The ghost light is what they call the single bulb hanging above the bare stage in an empty theater.In the empty theater of such a night, waking to meet no external radiance, this is the final struggle left to win, this the sole beacon to beckon the darkness in and let the rest begin, this the lens through which at last to see both Self and Other arrayed with the bright stain of original sin: lit from within.(Applause)And this is the last one.""This Dark Hour""Late summer, 4 A.M. The rain slows to a stop, dripping still from the broad leaves of blue hostas unseen in the garden's dark. Barefoot, careful on the slick slate slabs, I need no light, I know the way, stoop by the mint bed, scoop a fistful of moist earth, then grope for a chair, spread a shawl, and sit, breathing in the wet green August air.This is the small, still hour before the newspaper lands in the vestibule like a grenade, the phone shrills, the computer screen blinks and glares awake.There is this hour: poem in my head, soil in my hand: unnamable fullness. This hour, when blood of my blood bone of bone, child grown to manhood now — stranger, intimate, not distant but apart — lies safe, off dreaming melodies while love sleeps, safe, in his arms.To have come to this place, lived to this moment: immeasurable lightness. The density of black starts to blur umber. Tentative, a cardinal's coloratura, then the mourning dove's elegy. Sable glimmers toward grey; objects emerge, trailing shadows; night ages toward day. The city stirs.There will be other dawns, nights, gaudy noons. Likely, I'll lose my way. There will be stumbling, falling, cursing the dark. Whatever comes, there was this hour when nothing mattered, all was unbearably dear.And when I'm done with daylights, should those who loved me grieve too long a while, let them remember that I had this hour — this dark, perfect hour — and smile.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_morgan_4_powerful_poems_about_parkinson_s_and_growing_older
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"In the year 1901, a woman called Auguste was taken to a medical asylum in Frankfurt. Auguste was delusional and couldn't remember even the most basic details of her life. Her doctor was called Alois. Alois didn't know how to help Auguste, but he watched over her until, sadly, she passed away in 1906. After she died, Alois performed an autopsy and found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain — the likes of which he'd never seen before.Now here's the even more striking thing. If Auguste had instead been alive today, we could offer her no more help than Alois was able to 114 years ago. Alois was Dr. Alois Alzheimer. And Auguste Deter was the first patient to be diagnosed with what we now call Alzheimer's disease. Since 1901, medicine has advanced greatly. We've discovered antibiotics and vaccines to protect us from infections, many treatments for cancer, antiretrovirals for HIV, statins for heart disease and much more. But we've made essentially no progress at all in treating Alzheimer's disease.I'm part of a team of scientists who has been working to find a cure for Alzheimer's for over a decade. So I think about this all the time. Alzheimer's now affects 40 million people worldwide. But by 2050, it will affect 150 million people — which, by the way, will include many of you. If you're hoping to live to be 85 or older, your chance of getting Alzheimer's will be almost one in two. In other words, odds are you'll spend your golden years either suffering from Alzheimer's or helping to look after a friend or loved one with Alzheimer's. Already in the United States alone, Alzheimer's care costs 200 billion dollars every year. One out of every five Medicare dollars get spent on Alzheimer's. It is today the most expensive disease, and costs are projected to increase fivefold by 2050, as the baby boomer generation ages.It may surprise you that, put simply, Alzheimer's is one of the biggest medical and social challenges of our generation. But we've done relatively little to address it. Today, of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, Alzheimer's is the only one we cannot prevent, cure or even slow down. We understand less about the science of Alzheimer's than other diseases because we've invested less time and money into researching it. The US government spends 10 times more every year on cancer research than on Alzheimer's despite the fact that Alzheimer's costs us more and causes a similar number of deaths each year as cancer.The lack of resources stems from a more fundamental cause: a lack of awareness. Because here's what few people know but everyone should: Alzheimer's is a disease, and we can cure it. For most of the past 114 years, everyone, including scientists, mistakenly confused Alzheimer's with aging. We thought that becoming senile was a normal and inevitable part of getting old. But we only have to look at a picture of a healthy aged brain compared to the brain of an Alzheimer's patient to see the real physical damage caused by this disease. As well as triggering severe loss of memory and mental abilities, the damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer's significantly reduces life expectancy and is always fatal.Remember Dr. Alzheimer found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain a century ago. For almost a century, we didn't know much about these. Today we know they're made from protein molecules. You can imagine a protein molecule as a piece of paper that normally folds into an elaborate piece of origami. There are spots on the paper that are sticky. And when it folds correctly, these sticky bits end up on the inside. But sometimes things go wrong, and some sticky bits are on the outside. This causes the protein molecules to stick to each other, forming clumps that eventually become large plaques and tangles. That's what we see in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.We've spent the past 10 years at the University of Cambridge trying to understand how this malfunction works. There are many steps, and identifying which step to try to block is complex — like defusing a bomb. Cutting one wire might do nothing. Cutting others might make the bomb explore. We have to find the right step to block, and then create a drug that does it.Until recently, we for the most part have been cutting wires and hoping for the best. But now we've got together a diverse group of people — medics, biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians. And together, we've managed to identify a critical step in the process and are now testing a new class of drugs which would specifically block this step and stop the disease.Now let me show you some of our latest results. No one outside of our lab has seen these yet. Let's look at some videos of what happened when we tested these new drugs in worms. So these are healthy worms, and you can see they're moving around normally. These worms, on the other hand, have protein molecules sticking together inside them — like humans with Alzheimer's. And you can see they're clearly sick. But if we give our new drugs to these worms at an early stage, then we see that they're healthy, and they live a normal lifespan. This is just an initial positive result, but research like this shows us that Alzheimer's is a disease that we can understand and we can cure.After 114 years of waiting, there's finally real hope for what can be achieved in the next 10 or 20 years. But to grow that hope, to finally beat Alzheimer's, we need help. This isn't about scientists like me — it's about you. We need you to raise awareness that Alzheimer's is a disease and that if we try, we can beat it. In the case of other diseases, patients and their families have led the charge for more research and put pressure on governments, the pharmaceutical industry, scientists and regulators. That was essential for advancing treatment for HIV in the late 1980s. Today, we see that same drive to beat cancer. But Alzheimer's patients are often unable to speak up for themselves. And their families, the hidden victims, caring for their loved ones night and day, are often too worn out to go out and advocate for change. So, it really is down to you. Alzheimer's isn't, for the most part, a genetic disease. Everyone with a brain is at risk. Today, there are 40 million patients like Auguste, who can't create the change they need for themselves. Help speak up for them, and help demand a cure.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/samuel_cohen_alzheimer_s_is_not_normal_aging_and_we_can_cure_it
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"Last year, I went on my first book tour. In 13 months, I flew to 14 countries and gave some hundred talks. Every talk in every country began with an introduction, and every introduction began, alas, with a lie: ""Taiye Selasi comes from Ghana and Nigeria,"" or ""Taiye Selasi comes from England and the States."" Whenever I heard this opening sentence, no matter the country that concluded it — England, America, Ghana, Nigeria — I thought, ""But that's not true."" Yes, I was born in England and grew up in the United States. My mum, born in England, and raised in Nigeria, currently lives in Ghana. My father was born in Gold Coast, a British colony, raised in Ghana, and has lived for over 30 years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For this reason, my introducers also called me ""multinational."" ""But Nike is multinational,"" I thought, ""I'm a human being.""Then, one fine day, mid-tour, I went to Louisiana, a museum in Denmark where I shared the stage with the writer Colum McCann. We were discussing the role of locality in writing, when suddenly it hit me. I'm not multinational. I'm not a national at all. How could I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept? It's a question that had been bothering me for going on two decades. From newspapers, textbooks, conversations, I had learned to speak of countries as if they were eternal, singular, naturally occurring things, but I wondered: to say that I came from a country suggested that the country was an absolute, some fixed point in place in time, a constant thing, but was it? In my lifetime, countries had disappeared — Czechoslovakia; appeared — Timor-Leste; failed — Somalia. My parents came from countries that didn't exist when they were born. To me, a country — this thing that could be born, die, expand, contract — hardly seemed the basis for understanding a human being.And so it came as a huge relief to discover the sovereign state. What we call countries are actually various expressions of sovereign statehood, an idea that came into fashion only 400 years ago. When I learned this, beginning my masters degree in international relations, I felt a sort of surge of relief. It was as I had suspected. History was real, cultures were real, but countries were invented. For the next 10 years, I sought to re- or un-define myself, my world, my work, my experience, beyond the logic of the state.In 2005, I wrote an essay, ""What is an Afropolitan,"" sketching out an identity that privileged culture over country. It was thrilling how many people could relate to my experience, and instructional how many others didn't buy my sense of self. ""How can Selasi claim to come from Ghana,"" one such critic asked, ""when she's never known the indignities of traveling abroad on a Ghanian passport?""Now, if I'm honest, I knew just what she meant. I've got a friend named Layla who was born and raised in Ghana. Her parents are third-generation Ghanians of Lebanese descent. Layla, who speaks fluent Twi, knows Accra like the back of her hand, but when we first met years ago, I thought, ""She's not from Ghana."" In my mind, she came from Lebanon, despite the patent fact that all her formative experience took place in suburban Accra. I, like my critics, was imagining some Ghana where all Ghanaians had brown skin or none held U.K. passports. I'd fallen into the limiting trap that the language of coming from countries sets — the privileging of a fiction, the singular country, over reality: human experience. Speaking with Colum McCann that day, the penny finally dropped. ""All experience is local,"" he said. ""All identity is experience,"" I thought. ""I'm not a national,"" I proclaimed onstage. ""I'm a local. I'm multi-local.""See, ""Taiye Selasi comes from the United States,"" isn't the truth. I have no relationship with the United States, all 50 of them, not really. My relationship is with Brookline, the town where I grew up; with New York City, where I started work; with Lawrenceville, where I spend Thanksgiving. What makes America home for me is not my passport or accent, but these very particular experiences and the places they occur. Despite my pride in Ewe culture, the Black Stars, and my love of Ghanaian food, I've never had a relationship with the Republic of Ghana, writ large. My relationship is with Accra, where my mother lives, where I go each year, with the little garden in Dzorwulu where my father and I talk for hours. These are the places that shape my experience. My experience is where I'm from.What if we asked, instead of ""Where are you from?"" — ""Where are you a local?"" This would tell us so much more about who and how similar we are. Tell me you're from France, and I see what, a set of clichés? Adichie's dangerous single story, the myth of the nation of France? Tell me you're a local of Fez and Paris, better yet, Goutte d'Or, and I see a set of experiences. Our experience is where we're from.So, where are you a local? I propose a three-step test. I call these the three ""R’s"": rituals, relationships, restrictions.First, think of your daily rituals, whatever they may be: making your coffee, driving to work, harvesting your crops, saying your prayers. What kind of rituals are these? Where do they occur? In what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know your face? As a child, I carried out fairly standard suburban rituals in Boston, with adjustments made for the rituals my mother brought from London and Lagos. We took off our shoes in the house, we were unfailingly polite with our elders, we ate slow-cooked, spicy food. In snowy North America, ours were rituals of the global South. The first time I went to Delhi or to southern parts of Italy, I was shocked by how at home I felt. The rituals were familiar. ""R"" number one, rituals.Now, think of your relationships, of the people who shape your days. To whom do you speak at least once a week, be it face to face or on FaceTime? Be reasonable in your assessment; I'm not talking about your Facebook friends. I'm speaking of the people who shape your weekly emotional experience. My mother in Accra, my twin sister in Boston, my best friends in New York: these relationships are home for me. ""R"" number two, relationships.We're local where we carry out our rituals and relationships, but how we experience our locality depends in part on our restrictions. By restrictions, I mean, where are you able to live? What passport do you hold? Are you restricted by, say, racism, from feeling fully at home where you live? By civil war, dysfunctional governance, economic inflation, from living in the locality where you had your rituals as a child? This is the least sexy of the R’s, less lyric than rituals and relationships, but the question takes us past ""Where are you now?"" to ""Why aren't you there, and why?"" Rituals, relationships, restrictions.Take a piece of paper and put those three words on top of three columns, then try to fill those columns as honestly as you can. A very different picture of your life in local context, of your identity as a set of experiences, may emerge.So let's try it. I have a friend named Olu. He's 35 years old. His parents, born in Nigeria, came to Germany on scholarships. Olu was born in Nuremberg and lived there until age 10. When his family moved to Lagos, he studied in London, then came to Berlin. He loves going to Nigeria — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the political corruption there. Where is Olu from?I have another friend named Udo. He's also 35 years old. Udo was born in Córdoba, in northwest Argentina, where his grandparents migrated from Germany, what is now Poland, after the war. Udo studied in Buenos Aires, and nine years ago came to Berlin. He loves going to Argentina —  the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the economic corruption there. Where is Udo from? With his blonde hair and blue eyes, Udo could pass for German, but holds an Argentinian passport, so needs a visa to live in Berlin. That Udo is from Argentina has largely to do with history. That he's a local of Buenos Aires and Berlin, that has to do with life.Olu, who looks Nigerian, needs a visa to visit Nigeria. He speaks Yoruba with an English accent, and English with a German one. To claim that he's ""not really Nigerian,"" though, denies his experience in Lagos, the rituals he practiced growing up, his relationship with family and friends.Meanwhile, though Lagos is undoubtedly one of his homes, Olu always feels restricted there, not least by the fact that he's gay.Both he and Udo are restricted by the political conditions of their parents' countries, from living where some of their most meaningful rituals and relationships occur. To say Olu is from Nigeria and Udo is from Argentina distracts from their common experience. Their rituals, their relationships, and their restrictions are the same.Of course, when we ask, ""Where are you from?"" we're using a kind of shorthand. It's quicker to say ""Nigeria"" than ""Lagos and Berlin,"" and as with Google Maps, we can always zoom in closer, from country to city to neighborhood. But that's not quite the point. The difference between ""Where are you from?"" and ""Where are you a local?"" isn't the specificity of the answer; it's the intention of the question. Replacing the language of nationality with the language of locality asks us to shift our focus to where real life occurs. Even that most glorious expression of countryhood, the World Cup, gives us national teams comprised mostly of multilocal players. As a unit of measurement for human experience, the country doesn't quite work. That's why Olu says, ""I'm German, but my parents come from Nigeria."" The ""but"" in that sentence belies the inflexibility of the units, one fixed and fictional entity bumping up against another. ""I'm a local of Lagos and Berlin,"" suggests overlapping experiences, layers that merge together, that can't be denied or removed. You can take away my passport, but you can't take away my experience. That I carry within me. Where I'm from comes wherever I go.To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we do away with countries. There's much to be said for national history, more for the sovereign state. Culture exists in community, and community exists in context. Geography, tradition, collective memory: these things are important. What I'm questioning is primacy. All of those introductions on tour began with reference to nation, as if knowing what country I came from would tell my audience who I was. What are we really seeking, though, when we ask where someone comes from? And what are we really seeing when we hear an answer?Here's one possibility: basically, countries represent power. ""Where are you from?"" Mexico. Poland. Bangladesh. Less power. America. Germany. Japan. More power. China. Russia. Ambiguous.(Laughter)It's possible that without realizing it, we're playing a power game, especially in the context of multi-ethnic countries. As any recent immigrant knows, the question ""Where are you from?"" or ""Where are you really from?"" is often code for ""Why are you here?""Then we have the scholar William Deresiewicz's writing of elite American colleges. ""Students think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan — never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.""I'm with him. To call one student American, another Pakistani, then triumphantly claim student body diversity ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same milieu. The same holds true on the other end of the economic spectrum. A Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeeper in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions than nationality implies.Perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them. I'm often asked if I plan to ""go back"" to Ghana. I go to Accra every year, but I can't ""go back"" to Ghana. It's not because I wasn't born there. My father can't go back, either. The country in which he was born, that country no longer exists. We can never go back to a place and find it exactly where we left it. Something, somewhere will always have changed, most of all, ourselves. People.Finally, what we're talking about is human experience, this notoriously and gloriously disorderly affair. In creative writing, locality bespeaks humanity. The more we know about where a story is set, the more local color and texture, the more human the characters start to feel, the more relatable, not less. The myth of national identity and the vocabulary of coming from confuses us into placing ourselves into mutually exclusive categories. In fact, all of us are multi — multi-local, multi-layered. To begin our conversations with an acknowledgement of this complexity brings us closer together, I think, not further apart. So the next time that I'm introduced, I'd love to hear the truth: ""Taiye Selasi is a human being, like everybody here. She isn't a citizen of the world, but a citizen of worlds. She is a local of New York, Rome and Accra.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local
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"So I've had the great privilege of traveling to some incredible places, photographing these distant landscapes and remote cultures all over the world. I love my job.But people think it's this string of epiphanies and sunrises and rainbows, when in reality, it looks more something like this.(Laughter)This is my office.We can't afford the fanciest places to stay at night, so we tend to sleep a lot outdoors. As long as we can stay dry, that's a bonus. We also can't afford the fanciest restaurants. So we tend to eat whatever's on the local menu. And if you're in the Ecuadorian Páramo, you're going to eat a large rodent called a cuy.(Laughter)But what makes our experiences perhaps a little bit different and a little more unique than that of the average person is that we have this gnawing thing in the back of our mind that even in our darkest moments, and those times of despair, we think, ""Hey, there might be an image to be made here, there might be a story to be told.""And why is storytelling important? Well, it helps us to connect with our cultural and our natural heritage. And in the Southeast, there's an alarming disconnect between the public and the natural areas that allow us to be here in the first place. We're visual creatures, so we use what we see to teach us what we know.Now the majority of us aren't going to willingly go way down to a swamp. So how can we still expect those same people to then advocate on behalf of their protection? We can't.So my job, then, is to use photography as a communication tool, to help bridge the gap between the science and the aesthetics, to get people talking, to get them thinking, and to hopefully, ultimately, get them caring.I started doing this 15 years ago right here in Gainesville, right here in my backyard. And I fell in love with adventure and discovery, going to explore all these different places that were just minutes from my front doorstep. There are a lot of beautiful places to find. Despite all these years that have passed, I still see the world through the eyes of a child and I try to incorporate that sense of wonderment and that sense of curiosity into my photography as often as I can.And we're pretty lucky because here in the South, we're still blessed with a relatively blank canvas that we can fill with the most fanciful adventures and incredible experiences. It's just a matter of how far our imagination will take us. See, a lot of people look at this and they say, ""Oh yeah, wow, that's a pretty tree."" But I don't just see a tree — I look at this and I see opportunity. I see an entire weekend. Because when I was a kid, these were the types of images that got me off the sofa and dared me to explore, dared me to go find the woods and put my head underwater and see what we have.And folks, I've been photographing all over the world and I promise you, what we have here in the South, what we have in the Sunshine State, rivals anything else that I've seen. But yet our tourism industry is busy promoting all the wrong things. Before most kids are 12, they'll have been to Disney World more times than they've been in a canoe or camping under a starry sky. And I have nothing against Disney or Mickey; I used to go there, too. But they're missing out on those fundamental connections that create a real sense of pride and ownership for the place that they call home.And this is compounded by the issue that the landscapes that define our natural heritage and fuel our aquifer for our drinking water have been deemed as scary and dangerous and spooky. When our ancestors first came here, they warned, ""Stay out of these areas, they're haunted. They're full of evil spirits and ghosts."" I don't know where they came up with that idea. But it's actually led to a very real disconnect, a very real negative mentality that has kept the public disinterested, silent, and ultimately, our environment at risk. We're a state that's surrounded and defined by water, and yet for centuries, swamps and wetlands have been regarded as these obstacles to overcome. And so we've treated them as these second-class ecosystems, because they have very little monetary value and of course, they're known to harbor alligators and snakes — which, I'll admit, these aren't the most cuddly of ambassadors.(Laughter)So it became assumed, then, that the only good swamp was a drained swamp. And in fact, draining a swamp to make way for agriculture and development was considered the very essence of conservation not too long ago.But now we're backpedaling, because the more we come to learn about these sodden landscapes, the more secrets we're starting to unlock about interspecies relationships and the connectivity of habitats, watersheds and flyways. Take this bird, for example: this is the prothonotary warbler. I love this bird because it's a swamp bird, through and through, a swamp bird. They nest and they mate and they breed in these old-growth swamps in these flooded forests. And so after the spring, after they raise their young, they then fly thousand of miles over the Gulf of Mexico into Central and South America. And then after the winter, the spring rolls around and they come back. They fly thousands of miles over the Gulf of Mexico. And where do they go? Where do they land? Right back in the same tree. That's nuts. This is a bird the size of a tennis ball — I mean, that's crazy! I used a GPS to get here today, and this is my hometown.(Laughter)It's crazy. So what happens, then, when this bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico into Central America for the winter and then the spring rolls around and it flies back, and it comes back to this: a freshly sodded golf course?This is a narrative that's all too commonly unraveling here in this state. And this is a natural process that's occurred for thousands of years and we're just now learning about it. So you can imagine all else we have to learn about these landscapes if we just preserve them first. Now despite all this rich life that abounds in these swamps, they still have a bad name.Many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of wading into Florida's blackwater. I can understand that. But what I loved about growing up in the Sunshine State is that for so many of us, we live with this latent but very palpable fear that when we put our toes into the water, there might be something much more ancient and much more adapted than we are. Knowing that you're not top dog is a welcomed discomfort, I think. How often in this modern and urban and digital age do you actually get the chance to feel vulnerable, or consider that the world may not have been made for just us?So for the last decade, I began seeking out these areas where the concrete yields to forest and the pines turn to cypress, and I viewed all these mosquitoes and reptiles, all these discomforts, as affirmations that I'd found true wilderness, and I embrace them wholly. Now as a conservation photographer obsessed with blackwater, it's only fitting that I'd eventually end up in the most famous swamp of all: the Everglades.Growing up here in North Central Florida, it always had these enchanted names, places like Loxahatchee and Fakahatchee, Corkscrew, Big Cypress. I started what turned into a five-year project to hopefully reintroduce the Everglades in a new light, in a more inspired light. But I knew this would be a tall order, because here you have an area that's roughly a third the size the state of Florida, it's huge. And when I say Everglades, most people are like, ""Oh, yeah, the national park."" But the Everglades is not just a park; it's an entire watershed, starting with the Kissimmee chain of lakes in the north, and then as the rains would fall in the summer, these downpours would flow into Lake Okeechobee, and Lake Okeechobee would fill up and it would overflow its banks and spill southward, ever slowly, with the topography, and get into the river of grass, the Sawgrass Prairies, before meting into the cypress slews, until going further south into the mangrove swamps, and then finally — finally — reaching Florida Bay, the emerald gem of the Everglades, the great estuary, the 850 square-mile estuary.So sure, the national park is the southern end of this system, but all the things that make it unique are these inputs that come in, the fresh water that starts 100 miles north. So no manner of these political or invisible boundaries protect the park from polluted water or insufficient water. And unfortunately, that's precisely what we've done. Over the last 60 years, we have drained, we have dammed, we have dredged the Everglades to where now only one third of the water that used to reach the bay now reaches the bay today. So this story is not all sunshine and rainbows, unfortunately. For better or for worse, the story of the Everglades is intrinsically tied to the peaks and the valleys of mankind's relationship with the natural world.But I'll show you these beautiful pictures, because it gets you on board. And while I have your attention, I can tell you the real story. It's that we're taking this, and we're trading it for this, at an alarming rate. And what's lost on so many people is the sheer scale of which we're discussing. Because the Everglades is not just responsible for the drinking water for 7 million Floridians; today it also provides the agricultural fields for the year-round tomatoes and oranges for over 300 million Americans. And it's that same seasonal pulse of water in the summer that built the river of grass 6,000 years ago. Ironically, today, it's also responsible for the over half a million acres of the endless river of sugarcane. These are the same fields that are responsible for dumping exceedingly high levels of fertilizers into the watershed, forever changing the system.But in order for you to not just understand how this system works, but to also get personally connected to it, I decided to break the story down into several different narratives. And I wanted that story to start in Lake Okeechobee, the beating heart of the Everglade system. And to do that, I picked an ambassador, an iconic species. This is the Everglade snail kite. It's a great bird, and they used to nest in the thousands, thousands in the northern Everglades. And then they've gone down to about 400 nesting pairs today. And why is that? Well, it's because they eat one source of food, an apple snail, about the size of a ping-pong ball, an aquatic gastropod.So as we started damming up the Everglades, as we started diking Lake Okeechobee and draining the wetlands, we lost the habitat for the snail. And thus, the population of the kites declined. And so, I wanted a photo that would not only communicate this relationship between wetland, snail and bird, but I also wanted a photo that would communicate how incredible this relationship was, and how very important it is that they've come to depend on each other, this healthy wetland and this bird. And to do that, I brainstormed this idea. I started sketching out these plans to make a photo, and I sent it to the wildlife biologist down in Okeechobee — this is an endangered bird, so it takes special permission to do. So I built this submerged platform that would hold snails just right under the water. And I spent months planning this crazy idea. And I took this platform down to Lake Okeechobee and I spent over a week in the water, wading waist-deep, 9-hour shifts from dawn until dusk, to get one image that I thought might communicate this. And here's the day that it finally worked:[Video: (Mac Stone narrating) After setting up the platform, I look off and I see a kite coming over the cattails. And I see him scanning and searching. And he gets right over the trap, and I see that he's seen it. And he beelines, he goes straight for the trap. And in that moment, all those months of planning, waiting, all the sunburn, mosquito bites — suddenly, they're all worth it. (Mac Stone in film) Oh my gosh, I can't believe it!]You can believe how excited I was when that happened. But what the idea was, is that for someone who's never seen this bird and has no reason to care about it, these photos, these new perspectives, will help shed a little new light on just one species that makes this watershed so incredible, so valuable, so important. Now, I know I can't come here to Gainesville and talk to you about animals in the Everglades without talking about gators. I love gators, I grew up loving gators. My parents always said I had an unhealthy relationship with gators. But what I like about them is, they're like the freshwater equivalent of sharks. They're feared, they're hated, and they are tragically misunderstood. Because these are a unique species, they're not just apex predators. In the Everglades, they are the very architects of the Everglades, because as the water drops down in the winter during the dry season, they start excavating these holes called gator holes. And they do this because as the water drops down, they'll be able to stay wet and they'll be able to forage. And now this isn't just affecting them, other animals also depend on this relationship, so they become a keystone species as well. So how do you make an apex predator, an ancient reptile, at once look like it dominates the system, but at the same time, look vulnerable? Well, you wade into a pit of about 120 of them, then you hope that you've made the right decision.(Laughter)I still have all my fingers, it's cool.But I understand, I know I'm not going to rally you guys, I'm not going to rally the troops to ""Save the Everglades for the gators!"" It won't happen because they're so ubiquitous, we see them now, they're one of the great conservation success stories of the US. But there is one species in the Everglades that no matter who you are, you can't help but love, too, and that's the roseate spoonbill. These birds are great, but they've had a really tough time in the Everglades, because they started out with thousands of nesting pairs in Florida Bay, and at the turn of the 20th century, they got down to two — two nesting pairs. And why? That's because women thought they looked better on their hats then they did flying in the sky. Then we banned the plume trade, and their numbers started rebounding. And as their numbers started rebounding, scientists began to pay attention, they started studying these birds.And what they found out is that these birds' behavior is intrinsically tied to the annual draw-down cycle of water in the Everglades, the thing that defines the Everglades watershed. What they found out is that these birds started nesting in the winter as the water drew down, because they're tactile feeders, so they have to touch whatever they eat. And so they wait for these concentrated pools of fish to be able to feed enough to feed their young. So these birds became the very icon of the Everglades — an indicator species of the overall health of the system. And just as their numbers were rebounding in the mid-20th century — shooting up to 900, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200 — just as that started happening, we started draining the southern Everglades. And we stopped two-thirds of that water from moving south. And it had drastic consequences. And just as those numbers started reaching their peak, unfortunately, today, the real spoonbill story, the real photo of what it looks like is more something like this. And we're down to less than 70 nesting pairs in Florida Bay today, because we've disrupted the system so much. So all these different organizations are shouting, they're screaming, ""The Everglades is fragile! It's fragile!"" It is not. It is resilient. Because despite all we've taken, despite all we've done and we've drained and we've dammed and we've dredged it, pieces of it are still here, waiting to be put back together.And this is what I've loved about South Florida, that in one place, you have this unstoppable force of mankind meeting the immovable object of tropical nature. And it's at this new frontier that we are forced with a new appraisal. What is wilderness worth? What is the value of biodiversity, or our drinking water? And fortunately, after decades of debate, we're finally starting to act on those questions. We're slowly undertaking these projects to bring more freshwater back to the bay. But it's up to us as citizens, as residents, as stewards to hold our elected officials to their promises.What can you do to help? It's so easy. Just get outside, get out there. Take your friends out, take your kids out, take your family out. Hire a fishing guide. Show the state that protecting wilderness not only makes ecological sense, but economic sense as well. It's a lot of fun, just do it — put your feet in the water. The swamp will change you, I promise.Over the years, we've been so generous with these other landscapes around the country, cloaking them with this American pride, places that we now consider to define us: Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone. And we use these parks and these natural areas as beacons and as cultural compasses. And sadly, the Everglades is very commonly left out of that conversation. But I believe it's every bit as iconic and emblematic of who we are as a country as any of these other wildernesses. It's just a different kind of wild.But I'm encouraged, because maybe we're finally starting to come around, because what was once deemed this swampy wasteland, today is a World Heritage site. It's a wetland of international importance. And we've come a long way in the last 60 years. And as the world's largest and most ambitious wetland restoration project, the international spotlight is on us in the Sunshine State. Because if we can heal this system, it's going to become an icon for wetland restoration all over the world. But it's up to us to decide which legacy we want to attach our flag to.They say that the Everglades is our greatest test. If we pass it, we get to keep the planet. I love that quote, because it's a challenge, it's a prod. Can we do it? Will we do it? We have to, we must. But the Everglades is not just a test. It's also a gift, and ultimately, our responsibility.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mac_stone_stunning_photos_of_the_endangered_everglades
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"Imagine being unable to say, ""I am hungry,"" ""I am in pain,"" ""thank you,"" or ""I love you."" Being trapped inside your body, a body that doesn't respond to commands. Surrounded by people, yet utterly alone. Wishing you could reach out, to connect, to comfort, to participate. For 13 long years, that was my reality.Most of us never think twice about talking, about communicating. I've thought a lot about it. I've had a lot of time to think.For the first 12 years of my life, I was a normal, happy, healthy little boy. Then everything changed. I contracted a brain infection. The doctors weren't sure what it was, but they treated me the best they could. However, I progressively got worse. Eventually, I lost my ability to control my movements, make eye contact, and finally, my ability to speak.While in hospital, I desperately wanted to go home. I said to my mother, ""When home?"" Those were the last words I ever spoke with my own voice. I would eventually fail every test for mental awareness. My parents were told I was as good as not there. A vegetable, having the intelligence of a three-month-old baby. They were told to take me home and try to keep me comfortable until I died.My parents, in fact my entire family's lives, became consumed by taking care of me the best they knew how. Their friends drifted away. One year turned to two, two turned to three. It seemed like the person I once was began to disappear. The Lego blocks and electronic circuits I'd loved as a boy were put away. I had been moved out of my bedroom into another more practical one. I had become a ghost, a faded memory of a boy people once knew and loved.Meanwhile, my mind began knitting itself back together. Gradually, my awareness started to return. But no one realized that I had come back to life. I was aware of everything, just like any normal person. I could see and understand everything, but I couldn't find a way to let anybody know. My personality was entombed within a seemingly silent body, a vibrant mind hidden in plain sight within a chrysalis.The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life locked inside myself, totally alone. I was trapped with only my thoughts for company. I would never be rescued. No one would ever show me tenderness. I would never talk to a friend. No one would ever love me. I had no dreams, no hope, nothing to look forward to. Well, nothing pleasant. I lived in fear, and, to put it bluntly, was waiting for death to finally release me, expecting to die all alone in a care home.I don't know if it's truly possible to express in words what it's like not to be able to communicate. Your personality appears to vanish into a heavy fog and all of your emotions and desires are constricted, stifled and muted within you. For me, the worst was the feeling of utter powerlessness. I simply existed. It's a very dark place to find yourself because in a sense, you have vanished. Other people controlled every aspect of my life. They decided what I ate and when. Whether I was laid on my side or strapped into my wheelchair. I often spent my days positioned in front of the TV watching Barney reruns. I think because Barney is so happy and jolly, and I absolutely wasn't, it made it so much worse.I was completely powerless to change anything in my life or people's perceptions of me. I was a silent, invisible observer of how people behaved when they thought no one was watching. Unfortunately, I wasn't only an observer. With no way to communicate, I became the perfect victim: a defenseless object, seemingly devoid of feelings that people used to play out their darkest desires. For more than 10 years, people who were charged with my care abused me physically, verbally and sexually. Despite what they thought, I did feel. The first time it happened, I was shocked and filled with disbelief. How could they do this to me? I was confused. What had I done to deserve this? Part of me wanted to cry and another part wanted to fight. Hurt, sadness and anger flooded through me. I felt worthless. There was no one to comfort me. But neither of my parents knew this was happening. I lived in terror, knowing it would happen again and again. I just never knew when. All I knew was that I would never be the same. I remember once listening to Whitney Houston singing, ""No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity."" And I thought to myself, ""You want to bet?""Perhaps my parents could have found out and could have helped. But the years of constant caretaking, having to wake up every two hours to turn me, combined with them essentially grieving the loss of their son, had taken a toll on my mother and father. Following yet another heated argument between my parents, in a moment of despair and desperation, my mother turned to me and told me that I should die. I was shocked, but as I thought about what she had said, I was filled with enormous compassion and love for my mother, yet I could do nothing about it.There were many moments when I gave up, sinking into a dark abyss. I remember one particularly low moment. My dad left me alone in the car while he quickly went to buy something from the store. A random stranger walked past, looked at me and he smiled. I may never know why, but that simple act, the fleeting moment of human connection, transformed how I was feeling, making me want to keep going.My existence was tortured by monotony, a reality that was often too much to bear. Alone with my thoughts, I constructed intricate fantasies about ants running across the floor. I taught myself to tell the time by noticing where the shadows were. As I learned how the shadows moved as the hours of the day passed, I understood how long it would be before I was picked up and taken home. Seeing my father walk through the door to collect me was the best moment of the day.My mind became a tool that I could use to either close down to retreat from my reality or enlarge into a gigantic space that I could fill with fantasies. I hoped that my reality would change and someone would see that I had come back to life. But I had been washed away like a sand castle built too close to the waves, and in my place was the person people expected me to be. To some I was Martin, a vacant shell, the vegetable, deserving of harsh words, dismissal and even abuse. To others, I was the tragically brain-damaged boy who had grown to become a man. Someone they were kind to and cared for. Good or bad, I was a blank canvas onto which different versions of myself were projected.It took someone new to see me in a different way. An aromatherapist began coming to the care home about once a week. Whether through intuition or her attention to details that others failed to notice, she became convinced that I could understand what was being said. She urged my parents to have me tested by experts in augmentative and alternative communication. And within a year, I was beginning to use a computer program to communicate. It was exhilarating, but frustrating at times. I had so many words in my mind, that I couldn't wait to be able to share them. Sometimes, I would say things to myself simply because I could. In myself, I had a ready audience, and I believed that by expressing my thoughts and wishes, others would listen, too.But as I began to communicate more, I realized that it was in fact only just the beginning of creating a new voice for myself. I was thrust into a world I didn't quite know how to function in. I stopped going to the care home and managed to get my first job making photocopies. As simple as this may sound, it was amazing. My new world was really exciting but often quite overwhelming and frightening. I was like a man-child, and as liberating as it often was, I struggled. I also learned that many of those who had known me for a long time found it impossible to abandon the idea of Martin they had in their heads. While those I had only just met struggled to look past the image of a silent man in a wheelchair. I realized that some people would only listen to me if what I said was in line with what they expected. Otherwise, it was disregarded and they did what they felt was best.I discovered that true communication is about more than merely physically conveying a message. It is about getting the message heard and respected. Still, things were going well. My body was slowly getting stronger. I had a job in computing that I loved, and had even got Kojak, the dog I had been dreaming about for years.However, I longed to share my life with someone. I remember staring out the window as my dad drove me home from work, thinking I have so much love inside of me and nobody to give it to. Just as I had resigned myself to being single for the rest of my life, I met Joan. Not only is she the best thing that has ever happened to me, but Joan helped me to challenge my own misconceptions about myself. Joan said it was through my words that she fell in love with me. However, after all I had been through, I still couldn't shake the belief that nobody could truly see beyond my disability and accept me for who I am.I also really struggled to comprehend that I was a man. The first time someone referred to me as a man, it stopped me in my tracks. I felt like looking around and asking, ""Who, me?"" That all changed with Joan. We have an amazing connection and I learned how important it is to communicate openly and honestly. I felt safe, and it gave me the confidence to truly say what I thought. I started to feel whole again, a man worthy of love.I began to reshape my destiny. I spoke up a little more at work. I asserted my need for independence to the people around me. Being given a means of communication changed everything. I used the power of words and will to challenge the preconceptions of those around me and those I had of myself.Communication is what makes us human, enabling us to connect on the deepest level with those around us — telling our own stories, expressing wants, needs and desires, or hearing those of others by really listening. All this is how the world knows who we are. So who are we without it?True communication increases understanding and creates a more caring and compassionate world. Once, I was perceived to be an inanimate object, a mindless phantom of a boy in a wheelchair. Today, I am so much more. A husband, a son, a friend, a brother, a business owner, a first-class honors graduate, a keen amateur photographer. It is my ability to communicate that has given me all this.We are told that actions speak louder than words. But I wonder, do they? Our words, however we communicate them, are just as powerful. Whether we speak the words with our own voices, type them with our eyes, or communicate them non-verbally to someone who speaks them for us, words are among our most powerful tools.I have come to you through a terrible darkness, pulled from it by caring souls and by language itself. The act of you listening to me today brings me farther into the light. We are shining here together. If there is one most difficult obstacle to my way of communicating, it is that sometimes I want to shout and other times simply to whisper a word of love or gratitude. It all sounds the same. But if you will, please imagine these next two words as warmly as you can:Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_pistorius_how_my_mind_came_back_to_life_and_no_one_knew
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"Raise your hand if you've ever been asked the question ""What do you want to be when you grow up?""Now if you had to guess, how old would you say you were when you were first asked this question? You can just hold up fingers. Three. Five. Three. Five. Five. OK. Now, raise your hand if the question ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" has ever caused you any anxiety.(Laughter)Any anxiety at all.I'm someone who's never been able to answer the question ""What do you want to be when you grow up?""See, the problem wasn't that I didn't have any interests — it's that I had too many. In high school, I liked English and math and art and I built websites and I played guitar in a punk band called Frustrated Telephone Operator. Maybe you've heard of us.(Laughter)This continued after high school, and at a certain point, I began to notice this pattern in myself where I would become interested in an area and I would dive in, become all-consumed, and I'd get to be pretty good at whatever it was, and then I would hit this point where I'd start to get bored. And usually I would try and persist anyway, because I had already devoted so much time and energy and sometimes money into this field. But eventually this sense of boredom, this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this, this isn't challenging anymore — it would get to be too much. And I would have to let it go.But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, ""Yes! I found my thing,"" and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored. And eventually, I would let it go. But then I would discover something new and totally different, and I would dive into that.This pattern caused me a lot of anxiety, for two reasons. The first was that I wasn't sure how I was going to turn any of this into a career. I thought that I would eventually have to pick one thing, deny all of my other passions, and just resign myself to being bored. The other reason it caused me so much anxiety was a little bit more personal. I worried that there was something wrong with this, and something wrong with me for being unable to stick with anything. I worried that I was afraid of commitment, or that I was scattered, or that I was self-sabotaging, afraid of my own success.If you can relate to my story and to these feelings, I'd like you to ask yourself a question that I wish I had asked myself back then. Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things. I'll tell you where you learned it: you learned it from the culture.We are first asked the question ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" when we're about five years old. And the truth is that no one really cares what you say when you're that age.(Laughter)It's considered an innocuous question, posed to little kids to elicit cute replies, like, ""I want to be an astronaut,"" or ""I want to be a ballerina,"" or ""I want to be a pirate."" Insert Halloween costume here.(Laughter)But this question gets asked of us again and again as we get older in various forms — for instance, high school students might get asked what major they're going to pick in college. And at some point, ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night. Why?See, while this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be. In fact, it does just the opposite, because when someone asks you what you want to be, you can't reply with 20 different things, though well-meaning adults will likely chuckle and be like, ""Oh, how cute, but you can't be a violin maker and a psychologist. You have to choose.""This is Dr. Bob Childs —(Laughter)and he's a luthier and psychotherapist. And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor turned illustrator, entrepreneur, teacher and creative director. But most kids don't hear about people like this. All they hear is that they're going to have to choose. But it's more than that. The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it.But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way? What if there are a lot of different subjects that you're curious about, and many different things you want to do? Well, there is no room for someone like you in this framework. And so you might feel alone. You might feel like you don't have a purpose. And you might feel like there's something wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. What you are is a multipotentialite.(Laughter)(Applause)A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. It's a mouthful to say. It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite. You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person. Actually, during the Renaissance period, it was considered the ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines. Barbara Sher refers to us as ""scanners."" Use whichever term you like, or invent your own. I have to say I find it sort of fitting that as a community, we cannot agree on a single identity.(Laughter)It's easy to see your multipotentiality as a limitation or an affliction that you need to overcome. But what I've learned through speaking with people and writing about these ideas on my website, is that there are some tremendous strengths to being this way. Here are three multipotentialite super powers.One: idea synthesis. That is, combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx drew from their shared interests in cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design, when they founded Meshu. Meshu is a company that creates custom geographically-inspired jewelry. Sha and Rachel came up with this unique idea not despite, but because of their eclectic mix of skills and experiences. Innovation happens at the intersections. That's where the new ideas come from. And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection.The second multipotentialite superpower is rapid learning. When multipotentialites become interested in something, we go hard. We observe everything we can get our hands on. We're also used to being beginners, because we've been beginners so many times in the past, and this means that we're less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. What's more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we've learned to every new area we pursue, so we're rarely starting from scratch.Nora Dunn is a full-time traveler and freelance writer. As a child concert pianist, she honed an incredible ability to develop muscle memory. Now, she's the fastest typist she knows.(Laughter)Before becoming a writer, Nora was a financial planner. She had to learn the finer mechanics of sales when she was starting her practice, and this skill now helps her write compelling pitches to editors. It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you're drawn to, even if you end up quitting. You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn't have anticipated.The third multipotentialite superpower is adaptability; that is, the ability to morph into whatever you need to be in a given situation. Abe Cajudo is sometimes a video director, sometimes a web designer, sometimes a Kickstarter consultant, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes, apparently, James Bond.(Laughter)He's valuable because he does good work. He's even more valuable because he can take on various roles, depending on his clients' needs. Fast Company magazine identified adaptability as the single most important skill to develop in order to thrive in the 21st century. The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it is the individuals and organizations that can pivot in order to meet the needs of the market that are really going to thrive.Idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at, and three skills that they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them.Now, let's say that you are, in your heart, a specialist. You came out of the womb knowing you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon. Don't worry — there's nothing wrong with you, either.(Laughter)In fact, some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together. The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project. It's a beautiful partnership. But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired. And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers.So with that said, if there is one thing you take away from this talk, I hope that it is this: embrace your inner wiring, whatever that may be. If you're a specialist at heart, then by all means, specialize. That is where you'll do your best work. But to the multipotentialites in the room, including those of you who may have just realized in the last 12 minutes that you are one —(Laughter)to you I say: embrace your many passions. Follow your curiosity down those rabbit holes. Explore your intersections. Embracing our inner wiring leads to a happier, more authentic life. And perhaps more importantly — multipotentialites, the world needs us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_calling
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"Over our lifetimes, we've all contributed to climate change. Actions, choices and behaviors will have led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. And I think that that's quite a powerful thought. But it does have the potential to make us feel guilty when we think about decisions we might have made around where to travel to, how often and how, about the energy that we choose to use in our homes or in our workplaces, or quite simply the lifestyles that we lead and enjoy. But we can also turn that thought on its head, and think that if we've had such a profound but a negative impact on our climate already, then we have an opportunity to influence the amount of future climate change that we will need to adapt to.So we have a choice. We can either choose to start to take climate change seriously, and significantly cut and mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions, and then we will have to adapt to less of the climate change impacts in future. Alternatively, we can continue to really ignore the climate change problem. But if we do that, we are also choosing to adapt to very much more powerful climate impacts in future. And not only that. As people who live in countries with high per capita emissions, we're making that choice on behalf of others as well. But the choice that we don't have is a no climate change future.Over the last two decades, our government negotiators and policymakers have been coming together to discuss climate change, and they've been focused on avoiding a two-degree centigrade warming above pre-industrial levels. That's the temperature that's associated with dangerous impacts across a range of different indicators, to humans and to the environment. So two degrees centigrade constitutes dangerous climate change.But dangerous climate change can be subjective. So if we think about an extreme weather event that might happen in some part of the world, and if that happens in a part of the world where there is good infrastructure, where there are people that are well-insured and so on, then that impact can be disruptive. It can cause upset, it could cause cost. It could even cause some deaths. But if that exact same weather event happens in a part of the world where there is poor infrastructure, or where people are not well-insured, or they're not having good support networks, then that same climate change impact could be devastating. It could cause a significant loss of home, but it could also cause significant amounts of death.So this is a graph of the CO2 emissions at the left-hand side from fossil fuel and industry, and time from before the Industrial Revolution out towards the present day. And what's immediately striking about this is that emissions have been growing exponentially. If we focus in on a shorter period of time from 1950, we have established in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, then rolling on a few years, in 2009 we had the Copenhagen Accord, where it established avoiding a two-degree temperature rise in keeping with the science and on the basis of equity. And then in 2012, we had the Rio+20 event. And all the way through, during all of these meetings and many others as well, emissions have continued to rise. And if we focus on our historical emission trend in recent years, and we put that together with our understanding of the direction of travel in our global economy, then we are much more on track for a four-degree centigrade global warming than we are for the two-degree centigrade.Now, let's just pause for a moment and think about this four-degree global average temperature. Most of our planet is actually made up of the sea. Now, because the sea has a greater thermal inertia than the land, the average temperatures over land are actually going to be higher than they are over the sea. The second thing is that we as human beings don't experience global average temperatures. We experience hot days, cold days, rainy days, especially if you live in Manchester like me.So now put yourself in a city center. Imagine somewhere in the world: Mumbai, Beijing, New York, London. It's the hottest day that you've ever experienced. There's sun beating down, there's concrete and glass all around you. Now imagine that same day — but it's six, eight, maybe 10 to 12 degrees warmer on that day during that heat wave. That's the kind of thing we're going to experience under a four-degree global average temperature scenario.And the problem with these extremes, and not just the temperature extremes, but also the extremes in terms of storms and other climate impacts, is our infrastructure is just not set up to deal with these sorts of events. So our roads and our rail networks have been designed to last for a long time and withstand only certain amounts of impacts in different parts of the world. And this is going to be extremely challenged. Our power stations are expected to be cooled by water to a certain temperature to remain effective and resilient. And our buildings are designed to be comfortable within a particular temperature range. And this is all going to be significantly challenged under a four-degree-type scenario. Our infrastructure has not been designed to cope with this.So if we go back, also thinking about four degrees, it's not just the direct impacts, but also some indirect impacts. So if we take food security, for example. Maize and wheat yields in some parts of the world are expected to be up to 40 percent lower under a four-degree scenario, rice up to 30 percent lower. This will be absolutely devastating for global food security. So all in all, the kinds of impacts anticipated under this four-degree centigrade scenario are going to be incompatible with global organized living.So back to our trajectories and our graphs of four degrees and two degrees. Is it reasonable still to focus on the two-degree path? There are quite a lot of my colleagues and other scientists who would say that it's now too late to avoid a two-degree warming. But I would just like to draw on my own research on energy systems, on food systems, aviation and also shipping, just to say that I think there is still a small fighting chance of avoiding this two-degree dangerous climate change. But we really need to get to grips with the numbers to work out how to do it.So if you focus in on this trajectory and these graphs, the yellow circle there highlights that the departure from the red four-degree pathway to the two-degree green pathway is immediate. And that's because of cumulative emissions, or the carbon budget. So in other words, because of the lights and the projectors that are on in this room right now, the CO2 that is going into our atmosphere as a result of that electricity consumption lasts a very long time. Some of it will be in our atmosphere for a century, maybe much longer. It will accumulate, and greenhouse gases tend to be cumulative. And that tells us something about these trajectories. First of all, it tells us that it's the area under these curves that matter, not where we reach at a particular date in future. And that's important, because it doesn't matter if we come up with some amazing whiz-bang technology to sort out our energy problem on the last day of 2049, just in the nick of time to sort things out. Because in the meantime, emissions will have accumulated. So if we continue on this red, four-degree centigrade scenario pathway, the longer we continue on it, that will need to be made up for in later years to keep the same carbon budget, to keep the same area under the curve, which means that that trajectory, the red one there, becomes steeper. So in other words, if we don't reduce emissions in the short to medium term, then we'll have to make more significant year-on-year emission reductions. We also know that we have to decarbonize our energy system. But if we don't start to cut emissions in the short to medium term, then we will have to do that even sooner. So this poses really big challenges for us.The other thing it does is tells us something about energy policy. If you live in a part of the world where per capita emissions are already high, it points us towards reducing energy demand. And that's because with all the will in the world, the large-scale engineering infrastructure that we need to roll out rapidly to decarbonize the supply side of our energy system is just simply not going to happen in time. So it doesn't matter whether we choose nuclear power or carbon capture and storage, upscale our biofuel production, or go for a much bigger roll-out of wind turbines and wave turbines. All of that will take time. So because it's the area under the curve that matters, we need to focus on energy efficiency, but also on energy conservation — in other words, using less energy. And if we do that, that also means that as we continue to roll out the supply-side technology, we will have less of a job to do if we've actually managed to reduce our energy consumption, because we will then need less infrastructure on the supply side.Another issue that we really need to grapple with is the issue of well-being and equity. There are many parts of the world where the standard of living needs to rise. Bbut with energy systems currently reliant on fossil fuel, as those economies grow so will emissions. And now, if we're all constrained by the same amount of carbon budget, that means that if some parts of the world's emissions are needing to rise, then other parts of the world's emissions need to reduce.So that poses very significant challenges for wealthy nations. Because according to our research, if you're in a country where per capita emissions are really high — so North America, Europe, Australia — emissions reductions of the order of 10 percent per year, and starting immediately, will be required for a good chance of avoiding the two-degree target. Let me just put that into context. The economist Nicholas Stern said that emission reductions of more than one percent per year had only ever been associated with economic recession or upheaval. So this poses huge challenges for the issue of economic growth, because if we have our high carbon infrastructure in place, it means that if our economies grow, then so do our emissions. So I'd just like to take a quote from a paper by myself and Kevin Anderson back in 2011 where we said that to avoid the two-degree framing of dangerous climate change, economic growth needs to be exchanged at least temporarily for a period of planned austerity in wealthy nations.This is a really difficult message to take, because what it suggests is that we really need to do things differently. This is not about just incremental change. This is about doing things differently, about whole system change, and sometimes it's about doing less things. And this applies to all of us, whatever sphere of influence we have. So it could be from writing to our local politician to talking to our boss at work or being the boss at work, or talking with our friends and family, or, quite simply, changing our lifestyles. Because we really need to make significant change. At the moment, we're choosing a four-degree scenario. If we really want to avoid the two-degree scenario, there really is no time like the present to act.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Alice, basically what you're saying, the talk is, unless wealthy nations start cutting 10 percent per year the emissions now, this year, not in 2020 or '25, we are going to go straight to the four-plus-degree scenario. I am wondering what's your take on the cut by 70 percent for 2070.Alice Bows-Larkin: Yeah, it's just nowhere near enough to avoid two degrees. One of the things that often — when there are these modeling studies that look at what we need to do, is they tend to hugely overestimate how quickly other countries in the world can start to reduce emissions. So they make kind of heroic assumptions about that. The more we do that, because it's the cumulative emissions, the short-term stuff that really matters. So it does make a huge difference. If a big country like China, for example, continues to grow even for just a few extra years, that will make a big difference to when we need to decarbonize. So I don't think we can even say when it will be, because it all depends on what we have to do in the short term. But I think we've just got huge scope, and we don't pull those levers that allow us to reduce the energy demand, which is a shame.BG: Alice, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this data.ABL: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alice_bows_larkin_we_re_too_late_to_prevent_climate_change_here_s_how_we_adapt
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"I want to talk to you about the future of medicine. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about the past. Now, throughout much of the recent history of medicine, we've thought about illness and treatment in terms of a profoundly simple model. In fact, the model is so simple that you could summarize it in six words: have disease, take pill, kill something.Now, the reason for the dominance of this model is of course the antibiotic revolution. Many of you might not know this, but we happen to be celebrating the hundredth year of the introduction of antibiotics into the United States. But what you do know is that that introduction was nothing short of transformative. Here you had a chemical, either from the natural world or artificially synthesized in the laboratory, and it would course through your body, it would find its target, lock into its target — a microbe or some part of a microbe — and then turn off a lock and a key with exquisite deftness, exquisite specificity. And you would end up taking a previously fatal, lethal disease — a pneumonia, syphilis, tuberculosis — and transforming that into a curable, or treatable illness. You have a pneumonia, you take penicillin, you kill the microbe and you cure the disease.So seductive was this idea, so potent the metaphor of lock and key and killing something, that it really swept through biology. It was a transformation like no other. And we've really spent the last 100 years trying to replicate that model over and over again in noninfectious diseases, in chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension and heart disease. And it's worked, but it's only worked partly. Let me show you. You know, if you take the entire universe of all chemical reactions in the human body, every chemical reaction that your body is capable of, most people think that that number is on the order of a million. Let's call it a million. And now you ask the question, what number or fraction of reactions can actually be targeted by the entire pharmacopoeia, all of medicinal chemistry? That number is 250. The rest is chemical darkness. In other words, 0.025 percent of all chemical reactions in your body are actually targetable by this lock and key mechanism. You know, if you think about human physiology as a vast global telephone network with interacting nodes and interacting pieces, then all of our medicinal chemistry is operating on one tiny corner at the edge, the outer edge, of that network. It's like all of our pharmaceutical chemistry is a pole operator in Wichita, Kansas who is tinkering with about 10 or 15 telephone lines.So what do we do about this idea? What if we reorganized this approach? In fact, it turns out that the natural world gives us a sense of how one might think about illness in a radically different way, rather than disease, medicine, target. In fact, the natural world is organized hierarchically upwards, not downwards, but upwards, and we begin with a self-regulating, semi-autonomous unit called a cell. These self-regulating, semi-autonomous units give rise to self-regulating, semi-autonomous units called organs, and these organs coalesce to form things called humans, and these organisms ultimately live in environments, which are partly self-regulating and partly semi-autonomous.What's nice about this scheme, this hierarchical scheme building upwards rather than downwards, is that it allows us to think about illness as well in a somewhat different way. Take a disease like cancer. Since the 1950s, we've tried rather desperately to apply this lock and key model to cancer. We've tried to kill cells using a variety of chemotherapies  or targeted therapies, and as most of us know, that's worked. It's worked for diseases like leukemia. It's worked for some forms of breast cancer, but eventually you run to the ceiling of that approach. And it's only in the last 10 years or so that we've begun to think about using the immune system, remembering that in fact the cancer cell doesn't grow in a vacuum. It actually grows in a human organism. And could you use the organismal capacity, the fact that human beings have an immune system, to attack cancer? In fact, it's led to the some of the most spectacular new medicines in cancer.And finally there's the level of the environment, isn't there? You know, we don't think of cancer as altering the environment. But let me give you an example of a profoundly carcinogenic environment. It's called a prison. You take loneliness, you take depression, you take confinement, and you add to that, rolled up in a little white sheet of paper, one of the most potent neurostimulants that we know, called nicotine, and you add to that one of the most potent addictive substances that you know, and you have a pro-carcinogenic environment. But you can have anti-carcinogenic environments too. There are attempts to create milieus, change the hormonal milieu for breast cancer, for instance. We're trying to change the metabolic milieu for other forms of cancer.Or take another disease, like depression. Again, working upwards, since the 1960s and 1970s, we've tried, again, desperately to turn off molecules that operate between nerve cells — serotonin, dopamine — and tried to cure depression that way, and that's worked, but then that reached the limit. And we now know that what you really probably need to do is to change the physiology of the organ, the brain, rewire it, remodel it, and that, of course, we know study upon study has shown that talk therapy does exactly that, and study upon study has shown that talk therapy combined with medicines, pills, really is much more effective than either one alone. Can we imagine a more immersive environment that will change depression? Can you lock out the signals that elicit depression? Again, moving upwards along this hierarchical chain of organization. What's really at stake perhaps here is not the medicine itself but a metaphor. Rather than killing something, in the case of the great chronic degenerative diseases — kidney failure, diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis — maybe what we really need to do is change the metaphor to growing something. And that's the key, perhaps, to reframing our thinking about medicine.Now, this idea of changing, of creating a perceptual shift, as it were, came home to me to roost in a very personal manner about 10 years ago. About 10 years ago — I've been a runner most of my life — I went for a run, a Saturday morning run, I came back and woke up and I basically couldn't move. My right knee was swollen up, and you could hear that ominous crunch of bone against bone. And one of the perks of being a physician is that you get to order your own MRIs. And I had an MRI the next week, and it looked like that. Essentially, the meniscus of cartilage that is between bone had been completely torn and the bone itself had been shattered.Now, if you're looking at me and feeling sorry, let me tell you a few facts. If I was to take an MRI of every person in this audience, 60 percent of you would show signs of bone degeneration and cartilage degeneration like this. 85 percent of all women by the age of 70 would show moderate to severe cartilage degeneration. 50 to 60 percent of the men in this audience would also have such signs. So this is a very common disease. Well, the second perk of being a physician is that you can get to experiment on your own ailments. So about 10 years ago we began, we brought this process into the laboratory, and we began to do simple experiments, mechanically trying to fix this degeneration. We tried to inject chemicals into the knee spaces of animals to try to reverse cartilage degeneration, and to put a short summary on a very long and painful process, essentially it came to naught. Nothing happened. And then about seven years ago, we had a research student from Australia. The nice thing about Australians is that they're habitually used to looking at the world upside down.(Laughter)And so Dan suggested to me, ""You know, maybe it isn't a mechanical problem. Maybe it isn't a chemical problem. Maybe it's a stem cell problem."" In other words, he had two hypotheses. Number one, there is such a thing as a skeletal stem cell — a skeletal stem cell that builds up the entire vertebrate skeleton, bone, cartilage and the fibrous elements of skeleton, just like there's a stem cell in blood, just like there's a stem cell in the nervous system. And two, that maybe that, the degeneration or dysfunction of this stem cell is what's causing osteochondral arthritis, a very common ailment. So really the question was, were we looking for a pill when we should have really been looking for a cell. So we switched our models, and now we began to look for skeletal stem cells. And to cut again a long story short, about five years ago, we found these cells. They live inside the skeleton. Here's a schematic and then a real photograph of one of them. The white stuff is bone, and these red columns that you see and the yellow cells are cells that have arisen from one single skeletal stem cell — columns of cartilage, columns of bone coming out of a single cell. These cells are fascinating. They have four properties. Number one is that they live where they're expected to live. They live just underneath the surface of the bone, underneath cartilage. You know, in biology, it's location, location, location. And they move into the appropriate areas and form bone and cartilage. That's one. Here's an interesting property. You can take them out of the vertebrate skeleton, you can culture them in petri dishes in the laboratory, and they are dying to form cartilage. Remember how we couldn't form cartilage for love or money? These cells are dying to form cartilage. They form their own furls of cartilage around themselves. They're also, number three, the most efficient repairers of fractures that we've ever encountered. This is a little bone, a mouse bone that we fractured and then let it heal by itself. These stem cells have come in and repaired, in yellow, the bone, in white, the cartilage, almost completely. So much so that if you label them with a fluorescent dye you can see them like some kind of peculiar cellular glue coming into the area of a fracture, fixing it locally and then stopping their work. Now, the fourth one is the most ominous, and that is that their numbers decline precipitously, precipitously, tenfold, fiftyfold, as you age.And so what had happened, really, is that we found ourselves in a perceptual shift. We had gone hunting for pills but we ended up finding theories. And in some ways we had hooked ourselves back onto this idea: cells, organisms, environments, because we were now thinking about bone stem cells, we were thinking about arthritis in terms of a cellular disease.And then the next question was, are there organs? Can you build this as an organ outside the body? Can you implant cartilage into areas of trauma? And perhaps most interestingly, can you ascend right up and create environments? You know, we know that exercise remodels bone, but come on, none of us is going to exercise. So could you imagine ways of passively loading and unloading bone so that you can recreate or regenerate degenerating cartilage?And perhaps more interesting, and more importantly, the question is, can you apply this model more globally outside medicine? What's at stake, as I said before, is not killing something, but growing something. And it raises a series of, I think, some of the most interesting questions about how we think about medicine in the future. Could your medicine be a cell and not a pill? How would we grow these cells? What we would we do to stop the malignant growth of these cells? We heard about the problems of unleashing growth. Could we implant suicide genes into these cells to stop them from growing? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body and then implanted into the body? Could that stop some of the degeneration? What if the organ needed to have memory? In cases of diseases of the nervous system some of those organs had memory. How could we implant those memories back in? Could we store these organs? Would each organ have to be developed for an individual human being and put back? And perhaps most puzzlingly, could your medicine be an environment? Could you patent an environment? You know, in every culture, shamans have been using environments as medicines. Could we imagine that for our future? I've talked a lot about models. I began this talk with models. So let me end with some thoughts about model building. That's what we do as scientists. You know, when an architect builds a model, he or she is trying to show you a world in miniature. But when a scientist is building a model, he or she is trying to show you the world in metaphor. He or she is trying to create a new way of seeing. The former is a scale shift. The latter is a perceptual shift.Now, antibiotics created such a perceptual shift in our way of thinking about medicine that it really colored, distorted, very successfully, the way we've thought about medicine for the last hundred years. But we need new models to think about medicine in the future. That's what's at stake.You know, there's a popular trope out there that the reason we haven't had the transformative impact on the treatment of illness is because we don't have powerful-enough drugs, and that's partly true. But perhaps the real reason is that we don't have powerful-enough ways of thinking about medicines. It's certainly true that it would be lovely to have new medicines. But perhaps what's really at stake are three more intangible M's: mechanisms, models, metaphors.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: I really like this metaphor. How does it link in? There's a lot of talk in technologyland about the personalization of medicine, that we have all this data and that medical treatments of the future will be for you specifically, your genome, your current context. Does that apply to this model you've got here?Siddhartha Mukherjee: It's a very interesting question. We've thought about personalization of medicine very much in terms of genomics. That's because the gene is such a dominant metaphor, again, to use that same word, in medicine today, that we think the genome will drive the personalization of medicine. But of course the genome is just the bottom of a long chain of being, as it were. That chain of being, really the first organized unit of that, is the cell. So, if we are really going to deliver in medicine in this way, we have to think of personalizing cellular therapies, and then personalizing organ or organismal therapies, and ultimately personalizing immersion therapies for the environment. So I think at every stage, you know — there's that metaphor, there's turtles all the way. Well, in this, there's personalization all the way.CA: So when you say medicine could be a cell and not a pill, you're talking about potentially your own cells.SM: Absolutely. CA: So converted to stem cells, perhaps tested against all kinds of drugs or something, and prepared.SM: And there's no perhaps. This is what we're doing. This is what's happening, and in fact, we're slowly moving, not away from genomics, but incorporating genomics into what we call multi-order, semi-autonomous, self-regulating systems, like cells, like organs, like environments.CA: Thank you so much.SM: Pleasure. Thanks.","https://www.ted.com/talks/siddhartha_mukherjee_soon_we_ll_cure_diseases_with_a_cell_not_a_pill
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"Two twin domes, two radically opposed design cultures. One is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread. One is synthetic, the other organic. One is imposed on the environment, the other creates it. One is designed for nature, the other is designed by her.Michelangelo said that when he looked at raw marble, he saw a figure struggling to be free. The chisel was Michelangelo's only tool. But living things are not chiseled. They grow. And in our smallest units of life, our cells, we carry all the information that's required for every other cell to function and to replicate.Tools also have consequences. At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.But you don't find homogenous material assemblies in nature. Take human skin, for example. Our facial skins are thin with large pores. Our back skins are thicker, with small pores. One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier, and yet it's the same skin: no parts, no assemblies. It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity. So here this is a split screen to represent my split world view, the split personality of every designer and architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin. These two worldviews, my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play out on the two screens behind me. My work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth.You're probably asking yourselves: Why now? Why was this not possible 10 or even five years ago? We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we've never had access to before. These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA. And at the intersection of these four fields, my team and I create. Please meet the minds and hands of my students.We design objects and products and structures and tools across scales, from the large-scale, like this robotic arm with an 80-foot diameter reach with a vehicular base that will one day soon print entire buildings, to nanoscale graphics made entirely of genetically engineered microorganisms that glow in the dark. Here we've reimagined the mashrabiya, an archetype of ancient Arabic architecture, and created a screen where every aperture is uniquely sized to shape the form of light and heat moving through it.In our next project, we explore the possibility of creating a cape and skirt — this was for a Paris fashion show with Iris van Herpen — like a second skin that are made of a single part, stiff at the contours, flexible around the waist. Together with my long-term 3D printing collaborator Stratasys, we 3D-printed this cape and skirt with no seams between the cells, and I'll show more objects like it. This helmet combines stiff and soft materials in 20-micron resolution. This is the resolution of a human hair. It's also the resolution of a CT scanner. That designers have access to such high-resolution analytic and synthetic tools, enables to design products that fit not only the shape of our bodies, but also the physiological makeup of our tissues. Next, we designed an acoustic chair, a chair that would be at once structural, comfortable and would also absorb sound. Professor Carter, my collaborator, and I turned to nature for inspiration, and by designing this irregular surface pattern, it becomes sound-absorbent. We printed its surface out of 44 different properties, varying in rigidity, opacity and color, corresponding to pressure points on the human body. Its surface, as in nature, varies its functionality not by adding another material or another assembly, but by continuously and delicately varying material property.But is nature ideal? Are there no parts in nature? I wasn't raised in a religious Jewish home, but when I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories from the Hebrew Bible, and one of them stuck with me and came to define much of what I care about. As she recounts: ""On the third day of Creation, God commands the Earth to grow a fruit-bearing fruit tree."" For this first fruit tree, there was to be no differentiation between trunk, branches, leaves and fruit. The whole tree was a fruit. Instead, the land grew trees that have bark and stems and flowers. The land created a world made of parts. I often ask myself, ""What would design be like if objects were made of a single part? Would we return to a better state of creation?""So we looked for that biblical material, that fruit-bearing fruit tree kind of material, and we found it. The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions and butterflies. We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part. So that's what we did. We called Legal Seafood —(Laughter)we ordered a bunch of shrimp shells, we grinded them and we produced chitosan paste. By varying chemical concentrations, we were able to achieve a wide array of properties — from dark, stiff and opaque, to light, soft and transparent. In order to print the structures in large scale, we built a robotically controlled extrusion system with multiple nozzles. The robot would vary material properties on the fly and create these 12-foot-long structures made of a single material, 100 percent recyclable. When the parts are ready, they're left to dry and find a form naturally upon contact with air. So why are we still designing with plastics? The air bubbles that were a byproduct of the printing process were used to contain photosynthetic microorganisms that first appeared on our planet 3.5 billion year ago, as we learned yesterday. Together with our collaborators at Harvard and MIT, we embedded bacteria that were genetically engineered to rapidly capture carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar. For the first time, we were able to generate structures that would seamlessly transition from beam to mesh, and if scaled even larger, to windows. A fruit-bearing fruit tree. Working with an ancient material, one of the first lifeforms on the planet, plenty of water and a little bit of synthetic biology, we were able to transform a structure made of shrimp shells into an architecture that behaves like a tree. And here's the best part: for objects designed to biodegrade, put them in the sea, and they will nourish marine life; place them in soil, and they will help grow a tree.The setting for our next exploration using the same design principles was the solar system. We looked for the possibility of creating life-sustaining clothing for interplanetary voyages. To do that, we needed to contain bacteria and be able to control their flow. So like the periodic table, we came up with our own table of the elements: new lifeforms that were computationally grown, additively manufactured and biologically augmented. I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics. We 3D-printed our own channels in order to control the flow of these liquid bacterial cultures. In our first piece of clothing, we combined two microorganisms. The first is cyanobacteria. It lives in our oceans and in freshwater ponds. And the second, E. coli, the bacterium that inhabits the human gut. One converts light into sugar, the other consumes that sugar and produces biofuels useful for the built environment. Now, these two microorganisms never interact in nature. In fact, they never met each other. They've been here, engineered for the first time, to have a relationship inside a piece of clothing. Think of it as evolution not by natural selection, but evolution by design. In order to contain these relationships, we've created a single channel that resembles the digestive tract, that will help flow these bacteria and alter their function along the way. We then started growing these channels on the human body, varying material properties according to the desired functionality. Where we wanted more photosynthesis, we would design more transparent channels. This wearable digestive system, when it's stretched end to end, spans 60 meters. This is half the length of a football field, and 10 times as long as our small intestines. And here it is for the first time unveiled at TED — our first photosynthetic wearable, liquid channels glowing with life inside a wearable clothing.(Applause)Thank you.Mary Shelley said, ""We are unfashioned creatures, but only half made up."" What if design could provide that other half? What if we could create structures that would augment living matter? What if we could create personal microbiomes that would scan our skins, repair damaged tissue and sustain our bodies? Think of this as a form of edited biology. This entire collection, Wanderers, that was named after planets, was not to me really about fashion per se, but it provided an opportunity to speculate about the future of our race on our planet and beyond, to combine scientific insight with lots of mystery and to move away from the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosis between our bodies, the microorganisms that we inhabit, our products and even our buildings. I call this material ecology.To do this, we always need to return back to nature. By now, you know that a 3D printer prints material in layers. You also know that nature doesn't. It grows. It adds with sophistication. This silkworm cocoon, for example, creates a highly sophisticated architecture, a home inside which to metamorphisize. No additive manufacturing today gets even close to this level of sophistication. It does so by combining not two materials, but two proteins in different concentrations. One acts as the structure, the other is the glue, or the matrix, holding those fibers together. And this happens across scales. The silkworm first attaches itself to the environment — it creates a tensile structure — and it then starts spinning a compressive cocoon. Tension and compression, the two forces of life, manifested in a single material.In order to better understand how this complex process works, we glued a tiny earth magnet to the head of a silkworm, to the spinneret. We placed it inside a box with magnetic sensors, and that allowed us to create this 3-dimensional point cloud and visualize the complex architecture of the silkworm cocoon. However, when we placed the silkworm on a flat patch, not inside a box, we realized it would spin a flat cocoon and it would still healthily metamorphisize. So we started designing different environments, different scaffolds, and we discovered that the shape, the composition, the structure of the cocoon, was directly informed by the environment.Silkworms are often boiled to death inside their cocoons, their silk unraveled and used in the textile industry. We realized that designing these templates allowed us to give shape to raw silk without boiling a single cocoon.(Applause)They would healthily metamorphisize, and we would be able to create these things.So we scaled this process up to architectural scale. We had a robot spin the template out of silk, and we placed it on our site. We knew silkworms migrated toward darker and colder areas, so we used a sun path diagram to reveal the distribution of light and heat on our structure. We then created holes, or apertures, that would lock in the rays of light and heat, distributing those silkworms on the structure.We were ready to receive the caterpillars. We ordered 6,500 silkworms from an online silk farm. And after four weeks of feeding, they were ready to spin with us. We placed them carefully at the bottom rim of the scaffold, and as they spin they pupate, they mate, they lay eggs, and life begins all over again — just like us but much, much shorter.Bucky Fuller said that tension is the great integrity, and he was right. As they spin biological silk over robotically spun silk, they give this entire pavilion its integrity. And over two to three weeks, 6,500 silkworms spin 6,500 kilometers. In a curious symmetry, this is also the length of the Silk Road. The moths, after they hatch, produce 1.5 million eggs. This could be used for 250 additional pavilions for the future.So here they are, the two worldviews. One spins silk out of a robotic arm, the other fills in the gaps.If the final frontier of design is to breathe life into the products and the buildings around us, to form a two-material ecology, then designers must unite these two worldviews. Which brings us back, of course, to the beginning. Here's to a new age of design, a new age of creation, that takes us from a nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature, and that demands of us for the first time that we mother nature.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/neri_oxman_design_at_the_intersection_of_technology_and_biology
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"Can we, as adults, grow new nerve cells? There's still some confusion about that question, as this is a fairly new field of research. For example, I was talking to one of my colleagues, Robert, who is an oncologist, and he was telling me, ""Sandrine, this is puzzling. Some of my patients that have been told they are cured of their cancer still develop symptoms of depression."" And I responded to him, ""Well, from my point of view that makes sense. The drug you give to your patients that stops the cancer cells multiplying also stops the newborn neurons being generated in their brain."" And then Robert looked at me like I was crazy and said, ""But Sandrine, these are adult patients — adults do not grow new nerve cells."" And much to his surprise, I said, ""Well actually, we do."" And this is a phenomenon that we call neurogenesis.[Neurogenesis]Now Robert is not a neuroscientist, and when he went to medical school he was not taught what we know now — that the adult brain can generate new nerve cells. So Robert, you know, being the good doctor that he is, wanted to come to my lab to understand the topic a little bit better. And I took him for a tour of one of the most exciting parts of the brain when it comes to neurogenesis — and this is the hippocampus. So this is this gray structure in the center of the brain. And what we've known already for very long, is that this is important for learning, memory, mood and emotion. However, what we have learned more recently is that this is one of the unique structures of the adult brain where new neurons can be generated. And if we slice through the hippocampus and zoom in, what you actually see here in blue is a newborn neuron in an adult mouse brain. So when it comes to the human brain — my colleague Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet, has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons.So why are these new neurons important and what are their functions? First, we know that they're important for learning and memory. And in the lab we have shown that if we block the ability of the adult brain to produce new neurons in the hippocampus, then we block certain memory abilities. And this is especially new and true for spatial recognition — so like, how you navigate your way in the city.We are still learning a lot, and neurons are not only important for memory capacity, but also for the quality of the memory. And they will have been helpful to add time to our memory and they will help differentiate very similar memories, like: how do you find your bike that you park at the station every day in the same area, but in a slightly different position?And more interesting to my colleague Robert is the research we have been doing on neurogenesis and depression. So in an animal model of depression, we have seen that we have a lower level of neurogenesis. And if we give antidepressants, then we increase the production of these newborn neurons, and we decrease the symptoms of depression, establishing a clear link between neurogenesis and depression. But moreover, if you just block neurogenesis, then you block the efficacy of the antidepressant. So by then, Robert had understood that very likely his patients were suffering from depression even after being cured of their cancer, because the cancer drug had stopped newborn neurons from being generated. And it will take time to generate new neurons that reach normal functions.So, collectively, now we think we have enough evidence to say that neurogenesis is a target of choice if we want to improve memory formation or mood, or even prevent the decline associated with aging, or associated with stress.So the next question is: can we control neurogenesis? The answer is yes. And we are now going to do a little quiz. I'm going to give you a set of behaviors and activities, and you tell me if you think they will increase neurogenesis or if they will decrease neurogenesis. Are we ready? OK, let's go.So what about learning? Increasing? Yes. Learning will increase the production of these new neurons.How about stress? Yes, stress will decrease the production of new neurons in the hippocampus.How about sleep deprivation? Indeed, it will decrease neurogenesis.How about sex? Oh, wow!(Laughter)Yes, you are right, it will increase the production of new neurons. However, it's all about balance here. We don't want to fall in a situation —(Laughter)about too much sex leading to sleep deprivation.(Laughter)How about getting older? So the neurogenesis rate will decrease as we get older, but it is still occurring.And then finally, how about running? I will let you judge that one by yourself.So this is one of the first studies that was carried out by one of my mentors, Rusty Gage from the Salk Institute, showing that the environment can have an impact on the production of new neurons. And here you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had no running wheel in its cage. And the little black dots you see are actually newborn neurons-to-be. And now, you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had a running wheel in its cage. So you see the massive increase of the black dots representing the new neurons-to-be.So activity impacts neurogenesis, but that's not all. What you eat will have an effect on the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. So here we have a sample of diet — of nutrients that have been shown to have efficacy. And I'm just going to point a few out to you: Calorie restriction of 20 to 30 percent will increase neurogenesis. Intermittent fasting — spacing the time between your meals — will increase neurogenesis. Intake of flavonoids, which are contained in dark chocolate or blueberries, will increase neurogenesis. Omega-3 fatty acids, present in fatty fish, like salmon, will increase the production of these new neurons. Conversely, a diet rich in high saturated fat will have a negative impact on neurogenesis. Ethanol — intake of alcohol — will decrease neurogenesis. However, not everything is lost; resveratrol, which is contained in red wine, has been shown to promote the survival of these new neurons. So next time you are at a dinner party, you might want to reach for this possibly ""neurogenesis-neutral"" drink.(Laughter)And then finally, let me point out the last one — a quirky one. So Japanese groups are fascinated with food textures, and they have shown that actually soft diet impairs neurogenesis, as opposed to food that requires mastication — chewing — or crunchy food.So all of this data, where we need to look at the cellular level, has been generated using animal models. But this diet has also been given to human participants, and what we could see is that the diet modulates memory and mood in the same direction as it modulates neurogenesis, such as: calorie restriction will improve memory capacity, whereas a high-fat diet will exacerbate symptoms of depression — as opposed to omega-3 fatty acids, which increase neurogenesis, and also help to decrease the symptoms of depression. So we think that the effect of diet on mental health, on memory and mood, is actually mediated by the production of the new neurons in the hippocampus. And it's not only what you eat, but it's also the texture of the food, when you eat it and how much of it you eat.On our side — neuroscientists interested in neurogenesis — we need to understand better the function of these new neurons, and how we can control their survival and their production. We also need to find a way to protect the neurogenesis of Robert's patients. And on your side — I leave you in charge of your neurogenesis.Thank you.(Applause)Margaret Heffernan: Fantastic research, Sandrine. Now, I told you you changed my life — I now eat a lot of blueberries.Sandrine Thuret: Very good.MH: I'm really interested in the running thing. Do I have to run? Or is it really just about aerobic exercise, getting oxygen to the brain? Could it be any kind of vigorous exercise?ST: So for the moment, we can't really say if it's just the running itself, but we think that anything that indeed will increase the production — or moving the blood flow to the brain, should be beneficial.MH: So I don't have to get a running wheel in my office?ST: No, you don't!MH: Oh, what a relief! That's wonderful. Sandrine Thuret, thank you so much.ST: Thank you, Margaret.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sandrine_thuret_you_can_grow_new_brain_cells_here_s_how
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"(Guitar music)I was just thinking that I have been missing you way too longThere's something inside this weary headthat wants us to love just insteadBut I was just thinking, merely thinkingI've got loads of pictures,I've got the one of you in that dancing dressBut man I feel silly in that dim lightJust after doing you by the sight of my Kodak delights,I am sinking, merely sinkingI think about long distance rates instead of kissing you babeI'm a singer without a songIf I wait for you longermy affection is strongerand I ... I was just thinking, merely thinkingthat this boat is sinkingI'm tired of postcards, especially the ones with cute dogs and cupidsI'm tired of calling you and missing you and dreaming I slept with youDon't get me wrong I still desperately love youinside this weary headI just want us to love just insteadBut I was just thinking and thinking, merely thinkingI think about long distance rates instead of kissing you babeand time is running me stillIf I wait for you longermy affection is strongerI ... I was just thinkingI ... I was just thinkingthat I'm tired of calling you once a weekthinking of long distance rates instead of kissing youSo baby I'm sinking,merely sinking(Guitar music ends)(Applause)Thank you.Singing is sharing. When you sing, you have to know what you're talking about intimately, and you have to be willing to share this insight and give away a piece of yourself. I look for this intention to share in everything, and I ask: what are the intentions behind this architecture or this product or this restaurant or this meal? And if your intentions are to impress people or to get the big applause at the end, then you are taking, not giving.And this is a song that's about — it's the kind of song that everyone has their version of. This song is called ""Home,"" and it's sort of a ""This is where I'm from, nice to meet you all,"" kind of song.(Laughter)(Applause)(Piano music)Home is the sound of birds early in the morningHome is a song I've always rememberedHome is the memory of my first day in schoolHome is the books that I carry aroundHome is an alley in a faraway townHome is the places I’ve been and where I’d like to goHomeI'm always gonna feel at homeNo matter where I may roamI'm always gonna find my way back homeNo matter how far I’m goneI’m always gonna feel this longingNo matter where I might stayHome is a feather twirling in the airHome is flowers in a windowsillHome is all the things she said to meHome is a photo I never threw awayHome is the smile on my face when I dieHome is the taste of an apple pieI met a woman, she always lived in the same placeAnd she said home is where you’re born and raisedAnd I met a man, he sat looking out to the seaAnd he said home is where you want to beI met a girl in some downtown barAnd she said I'll have whatever he's havingAnd I asked her how come we never met before?And she said all my life I’ve been tryingto get a place of my ownI’m always gonna feel at homeNo matter where I may roamAlways gonna find my way back homeNo matter how far I’m goneI'm always gonna feel this longingNo matter where I might stay(Piano music)(Piano music ends)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/teitur_home_is_a_song_i_ve_always_remembered
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"Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? In the next decade? Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years?Well, according to the governments of the world, yes we can. In the last few days, the leaders of the world, meeting at the UN in New York, agreed a new set of Global Goals for the development of the world to 2030. And here they are: these goals are the product of a massive consultation exercise. The Global Goals are who we, humanity, want to be.Now that's the plan, but can we get there? Can this vision for a better world really be achieved? Well, I'm here today because we've run the numbers, and the answer, shockingly, is that maybe we actually can. But not with business as usual.Now, the idea that the world is going to get a better place may seem a little fanciful. Watch the news every day and the world seems to be going backwards, not forwards. And let's be frank: it's pretty easy to be skeptical about grand announcements coming out of the UN.But please, I invite you to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. Because back in 2001, the UN agreed another set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals. And the flagship target there was to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. The target was to take from a baseline of 1990, when 36 percent of the world's population lived in poverty, to get to 18 percent poverty this year.Did we hit this target? Well, no, we didn't. We exceeded it. This year, global poverty is going to fall to 12 percent. Now, that's still not good enough, and the world does still have plenty of problems. But the pessimists and doomsayers who say that the world can't get better are simply wrong.So how did we achieve this success? Well, a lot of it was because of economic growth. Some of the biggest reductions in poverty were in countries such as China and India, which have seen rapid economic growth in recent years. So can we pull off the same trick again? Can economic growth get us to the Global Goals? Well, to answer that question, we need to benchmark where the world is today against the Global Goals and figure out how far we have to travel.But that ain't easy, because the Global Goals aren't just ambitious, they're also pretty complicated. Over 17 goals, there are then 169 targets and literally hundreds of indicators. Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific — end hunger — others are a lot vaguer — promote peaceful and tolerant societies.So to help us with this benchmarking, I'm going to use a tool called the Social Progress Index. What this does is measures all the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve, but sums it up into a single number that we can use as our benchmark and track progress over time.The Social Progress Index basically asks three fundamental questions about a society. First of all, does everyone have the basic needs of survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have the building blocks of a better life: education, information, health and a sustainable environment? And does everyone have the opportunity to improve their lives, through rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, and access to the world's most advanced knowledge?The Social Progress Index sums all this together using 52 indicators to create an aggregate score on a scale of 0 to 100. And what we find is that there's a wide diversity of performance in the world today. The highest performing country, Norway, scores 88. The lowest performing country, Central African Republic, scores 31. And we can add up all the countries together, weighting for the different population sizes, and that global score is 61. In concrete terms, that means that the average human being is living on a level of social progress about the same of Cuba or Kazakhstan today.That's where we are today: 61 out of 100. What do we have to get to to achieve the Global Goals?Now, the Global Goals are certainly ambitious, but they're not about turning the world into Norway in just 15 years. So having looked at the numbers, my estimate is that a score of 75 would not only be a giant leap forward in human well-being, it would also count as hitting the Global Goals target. So there's our target, 75 out of 100. Can we get there?Well, the Social Progress Index can help us calculate this, because as you might have noticed, there are no economic indicators in there; there's no GDP or economic growth in the Social Progress Index model. And what that lets us do is understand the relationship between economic growth and social progress.Let me show you on this chart. So here on the vertical axis, I've put social progress, the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve. Higher is better. And then on the horizontal axis, is GDP per capita. Further to the right means richer. And in there, I'm now going to put all the countries of the world, each one represented by a dot, and on top of that I'm going to put the regression line that shows the average relationship. And what this tells us is that as we get richer, social progress does tend to improve. However, as we get richer, each extra dollar of GDP is buying us less and less social progress. And now we can use this information to start building our forecast. So here is the world in 2015. We have a social progress score of 61 and a GDP per capita of $14,000. And the place we're trying to get to, remember, is 75, that Global Goals target. So here we are today, $14,000 per capita GDP. How rich are we going to be in 2030? That's what we need to know next. Well, the best forecast we can find comes from the US Department of Agriculture, which forecasts 3.1 percent average global economic growth over the next 15 years, which means that in 2030, if they're right, per capita GDP will be about $23,000. So now the question is: if we get that much richer, how much social progress are we going to get? Well, we asked a team of economists at Deloitte who checked and crunched the numbers, and they came back and said, well, look: if the world's average wealth goes from $14,000 a year to $23,000 a year, social progress is going to increase from 61 to 62.4.(Laughter)Just 62.4. Just a tiny increase.Now this seems a bit strange. Economic growth seems to have really helped in the fight against poverty, but it doesn't seem to be having much impact on trying to get to the Global Goals. So what's going on? Well, I think there are two things. The first is that in a way, we're the victims of our own success. We've used up the easy wins from economic growth, and now we're moving on to harder problems. And also, we know that economic growth comes with costs as well as benefits. There are costs to the environment, costs from new health problems like obesity.So that's the bad news. We're not going to get to the Global Goals just by getting richer.So are the pessimists right?Well, maybe not. Because the Social Progress Index also has some very good news. Let me take you back to that regression line. So this is the average relationship between GDP and social progress, and this is what our last forecast was based on. But as you saw already, there is actually lots of noise around this trend line.What that tells us, quite simply, is that GDP is not destiny. We have countries that are underperforming on social progress, relative to their wealth. Russia has lots of natural resource wealth, but lots of social problems. China has boomed economically, but hasn't made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. India has a space program and millions of people without toilets. Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are overperforming on social progress relative to their GDP. Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. And Costa Rica's not alone. From poor countries like Rwanda to richer countries like New Zealand, we see that it's possible to get lots of social progress, even if your GDP is not so great.And that's really important, because it tells us two things. First of all, it tells us that we already in the world have the solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. It also tells us that we're not slaves to GDP. Our choices matter: if we prioritize the well-being of people, then we can make a lot more progress than our GDP might expect.How much? Enough to get us to the Global Goals? Well, let's look at some numbers. What we know already: the world today is scoring 61 on social progress, and the place we want to get to is 75. If we rely on economic growth alone, we're going to get to 62.4. So let's assume now that we can get the countries that are currently underperforming on social progress — the Russia, China, Indias — just up to the average. How much social progress does that get us? Well, that takes us to 65. It's a bit better, but still quite a long way to go. So let's get a little bit more optimistic and say, what if every country gets a little bit better at turning its wealth into well-being? Well then, we get to 67. And now let's be even bolder still. What if every country in the world chose to be like Costa Rica in prioritizing human well-being, using its wealth for the well-being of its citizens? Well then, we get to nearly 73, very close to the Global Goals.Can we achieve the Global Goals? Certainly not with business as usual. Even a flood tide of economic growth is not going to get us there, if it just raises the mega-yachts and the super-wealthy and leaves the rest behind. If we're going to achieve the Global Goals we have to do things differently. We have to prioritize social progress, and really scale solutions around the world. I believe the Global Goals are a historic opportunity, because the world's leaders have promised to deliver them. Let's not dismiss the goals or slide into pessimism; let's hold them to that promise. And we need to hold them to that promise by holding them accountable, tracking their progress all the way through the next 15 years.And I want to finish by showing you a way to do that, called the People's Report Card. The People's Report Card brings together all this data into a simple framework that we'll all be familiar with from our school days, to hold them to account. It grades our performance on the Global Goals on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst, and A is humanity at its best. Our world today is scoring a C-. The Global Goals are all about getting to an A, and that's why we're going to be updating the People's Report Card annually, for the world and for all the countries of the world, so we can hold our leaders to account to achieve this target and fulfill this promise. Because getting to the Global Goals will only happen if we do things differently, if our leaders do things differently, and for that to happen, that needs us to demand it.So let's reject business as usual. Let's demand a different path. Let's choose the world that we want.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Michael. Michael, just one question: the Millennium Development Goals established 15 years ago, they were kind of applying to every country but it turned out to be really a scorecard for emerging countries. Now the new Global Goals are explicitly universal. They ask for every country to show action and to show progress. How can I, as a private citizen, use the report card to create pressure for action?Michael Green: This is a really important point; it's a big shift in priorities — it's no longer about poor countries and just poverty. It's about every country. And every country is going to have challenges in getting to the Global Goals. Even, I'm sorry to say, Bruno, Switzerland has got to work to do. And so that's why we're going to produce these report cards in 2016 for every country in the world. Then we can really see, how are we doing? And it's not going to be rich countries scoring straight A's. And that, then, I think, is to provide a point of focus for people to start demanding action and start demanding progress.BG: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_how_we_can_make_the_world_a_better_place_by_2030
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"In my lab, we build autonomous aerial robots like the one you see flying here. Unlike the commercially available drones that you can buy today, this robot doesn't have any GPS on board. So without GPS, it's hard for robots like this to determine their position. This robot uses onboard sensors, cameras and laser scanners, to scan the environment. It detects features from the environment, and it determines where it is relative to those features, using a method of triangulation. And then it can assemble all these features into a map, like you see behind me. And this map then allows the robot to understand where the obstacles are and navigate in a collision-free manner.What I want to show you next is a set of experiments we did inside our laboratory, where this robot was able to go for longer distances. So here you'll see, on the top right, what the robot sees with the camera. And on the main screen — and of course this is sped up by a factor of four — on the main screen you'll see the map that it's building. So this is a high-resolution map of the corridor around our laboratory. And in a minute you'll see it enter our lab, which is recognizable by the clutter that you see.(Laughter)But the main point I want to convey to you is that these robots are capable of building high-resolution maps at five centimeters resolution, allowing somebody who is outside the lab, or outside the building to deploy these without actually going inside, and trying to infer what happens inside the building.Now there's one problem with robots like this. The first problem is it's pretty big. Because it's big, it's heavy. And these robots consume about 100 watts per pound. And this makes for a very short mission life. The second problem is that these robots have onboard sensors that end up being very expensive — a laser scanner, a camera and the processors. That drives up the cost of this robot.So we asked ourselves a question: what consumer product can you buy in an electronics store that is inexpensive, that's lightweight, that has sensing onboard and computation? And we invented the flying phone.(Laughter)So this robot uses a Samsung Galaxy smartphone that you can buy off the shelf, and all you need is an app that you can download from our app store. And you can see this robot reading the letters, ""TED"" in this case, looking at the corners of the ""T"" and the ""E"" and then triangulating off of that, flying autonomously. That joystick is just there to make sure if the robot goes crazy, Giuseppe can kill it.(Laughter)In addition to building these small robots, we also experiment with aggressive behaviors, like you see here. So this robot is now traveling at two to three meters per second, pitching and rolling aggressively as it changes direction. The main point is we can have smaller robots that can go faster and then travel in these very unstructured environments.And in this next video, just like you see this bird, an eagle, gracefully coordinating its wings, its eyes and feet to grab prey out of the water, our robot can go fishing, too.(Laughter)In this case, this is a Philly cheesesteak hoagie that it's grabbing out of thin air.(Laughter)So you can see this robot going at about three meters per second, which is faster than walking speed, coordinating its arms, its claws and its flight with split-second timing to achieve this maneuver. In another experiment, I want to show you how the robot adapts its flight to control its suspended payload, whose length is actually larger than the width of the window. So in order to accomplish this, it actually has to pitch and adjust the altitude and swing the payload through. But of course we want to make these even smaller, and we're inspired in particular by honeybees. So if you look at honeybees, and this is a slowed down video, they're so small, the inertia is so lightweight —(Laughter)that they don't care — they bounce off my hand, for example. This is a little robot that mimics the honeybee behavior. And smaller is better, because along with the small size you get lower inertia. Along with lower inertia —(Robot buzzing, laughter)along with lower inertia, you're resistant to collisions. And that makes you more robust. So just like these honeybees, we build small robots. And this particular one is only 25 grams in weight. It consumes only six watts of power. And it can travel up to six meters per second. So if I normalize that to its size, it's like a Boeing 787 traveling ten times the speed of sound.(Laughter)And I want to show you an example. This is probably the first planned mid-air collision, at one-twentieth normal speed. These are going at a relative speed of two meters per second, and this illustrates the basic principle. The two-gram carbon fiber cage around it prevents the propellers from entangling, but essentially the collision is absorbed and the robot responds to the collisions. And so small also means safe. In my lab, as we developed these robots, we start off with these big robots and then now we're down to these small robots. And if you plot a histogram of the number of Band-Aids we've ordered in the past, that sort of tailed off now. Because these robots are really safe.The small size has some disadvantages, and nature has found a number of ways to compensate for these disadvantages. The basic idea is they aggregate to form large groups, or swarms. So, similarly, in our lab, we try to create artificial robot swarms. And this is quite challenging because now you have to think about networks of robots. And within each robot, you have to think about the interplay of sensing, communication, computation — and this network then becomes quite difficult to control and manage. So from nature we take away three organizing principles that essentially allow us to develop our algorithms. The first idea is that robots need to be aware of their neighbors. They need to be able to sense and communicate with their neighbors.So this video illustrates the basic idea. You have four robots — one of the robots has actually been hijacked by a human operator, literally. But because the robots interact with each other, they sense their neighbors, they essentially follow. And here there's a single person able to lead this network of followers. So again, it's not because all the robots know where they're supposed to go. It's because they're just reacting to the positions of their neighbors.(Laughter)So the next experiment illustrates the second organizing principle. And this principle has to do with the principle of anonymity. Here the key idea is that the robots are agnostic to the identities of their neighbors. They're asked to form a circular shape, and no matter how many robots you introduce into the formation, or how many robots you pull out, each robot is simply reacting to its neighbor. It's aware of the fact that it needs to form the circular shape, but collaborating with its neighbors it forms the shape without central coordination. Now if you put these ideas together, the third idea is that we essentially give these robots mathematical descriptions of the shape they need to execute. And these shapes can be varying as a function of time, and you'll see these robots start from a circular formation, change into a rectangular formation, stretch into a straight line, back into an ellipse. And they do this with the same kind of split-second coordination that you see in natural swarms, in nature.So why work with swarms? Let me tell you about two applications that we are very interested in. The first one has to do with agriculture, which is probably the biggest problem that we're facing worldwide. As you well know, one in every seven persons in this earth is malnourished. Most of the land that we can cultivate has already been cultivated. And the efficiency of most systems in the world is improving, but our production system efficiency is actually declining. And that's mostly because of water shortage, crop diseases, climate change and a couple of other things.So what can robots do? Well, we adopt an approach that's called Precision Farming in the community. And the basic idea is that we fly aerial robots through orchards, and then we build precision models of individual plants. So just like personalized medicine, while you might imagine wanting to treat every patient individually, what we'd like to do is build models of individual plants and then tell the farmer what kind of inputs every plant needs — the inputs in this case being water, fertilizer and pesticide. Here you'll see robots traveling through an apple orchard, and in a minute you'll see two of its companions doing the same thing on the left side. And what they're doing is essentially building a map of the orchard. Within the map is a map of every plant in this orchard.(Robot buzzing)Let's see what those maps look like. In the next video, you'll see the cameras that are being used on this robot. On the top-left is essentially a standard color camera. On the left-center is an infrared camera. And on the bottom-left is a thermal camera. And on the main panel, you're seeing a three-dimensional reconstruction of every tree in the orchard as the sensors fly right past the trees. Armed with information like this, we can do several things. The first and possibly the most important thing we can do is very simple: count the number of fruits on every tree. By doing this, you tell the farmer how many fruits she has in every tree and allow her to estimate the yield in the orchard, optimizing the production chain downstream.The second thing we can do is take models of plants, construct three-dimensional reconstructions, and from that estimate the canopy size, and then correlate the canopy size to the amount of leaf area on every plant. And this is called the leaf area index. So if you know this leaf area index, you essentially have a measure of how much photosynthesis is possible in every plant, which again tells you how healthy each plant is. By combining visual and infrared information, we can also compute indices such as NDVI. And in this particular case, you can essentially see there are some crops that are not doing as well as other crops. This is easily discernible from imagery, not just visual imagery but combining both visual imagery and infrared imagery.And then lastly, one thing we're interested in doing is detecting the early onset of chlorosis — and this is an orange tree — which is essentially seen by yellowing of leaves. But robots flying overhead can easily spot this autonomously and then report to the farmer that he or she has a problem in this section of the orchard.Systems like this can really help, and we're projecting yields that can improve by about ten percent and, more importantly, decrease the amount of inputs such as water by 25 percent by using aerial robot swarms.Lastly, I want you to applaud the people who actually create the future, Yash Mulgaonkar, Sikang Liu and Giuseppe Loianno, who are responsible for the three demonstrations that you saw.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_the_future_of_flying_robots
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"We all go to doctors. And we do so with trust and blind faith that the test they are ordering and the medications they're prescribing are based upon evidence — evidence that's designed to help us. However, the reality is that that hasn't always been the case for everyone. What if I told you that the medical science discovered over the past century has been based on only half the population?I'm an emergency medicine doctor. I was trained to be prepared in a medical emergency. It's about saving lives. How cool is that? OK, there's a lot of runny noses and stubbed toes, but no matter who walks through the door to the ER, we order the same tests, we prescribe the same medication, without ever thinking about the sex or gender of our patients. Why would we? We were never taught that there were any differences between men and women.A recent Government Accountability study revealed that 80 percent of the drugs withdrawn from the market are due to side effects on women. So let's think about that for a minute. Why are we discovering side effects on women only after a drug has been released to the market? Do you know that it takes years for a drug to go from an idea to being tested on cells in a laboratory, to animal studies, to then clinical trials on humans, finally to go through a regulatory approval process, to be available for your doctor to prescribe to you? Not to mention the millions and billions of dollars of funding it takes to go through that process. So why are we discovering unacceptable side effects on half the population after that has gone through? What's happening?Well, it turns out that those cells used in that laboratory, they're male cells, and the animals used in the animal studies were male animals, and the clinical trials have been performed almost exclusively on men.How is it that the male model became our framework for medical research? Let's look at an example that has been popularized in the media, and it has to do with the sleep aid Ambien. Ambien was released on the market over 20 years ago, and since then, hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been written, primarily to women, because women suffer more sleep disorders than men. But just this past year, the Food and Drug Administration recommended cutting the dose in half for women only, because they just realized that women metabolize the drug at a slower rate than men, causing them to wake up in the morning with more of the active drug in their system. And then they're drowsy and they're getting behind the wheel of the car, and they're at risk for motor vehicle accidents. And I can't help but think, as an emergency physician, how many of my patients that I've cared for over the years were involved in a motor vehicle accident that possibly could have been prevented if this type of analysis was performed and acted upon 20 years ago when this drug was first released. How many other things need to be analyzed by gender? What else are we missing?World War II changed a lot of things, and one of them was this need to protect people from becoming victims of medical research without informed consent. So some much-needed guidelines or rules were set into place, and part of that was this desire to protect women of childbearing age from entering into any medical research studies. There was fear: what if something happened to the fetus during the study? Who would be responsible? And so the scientists at this time actually thought this was a blessing in disguise, because let's face it — men's bodies are pretty homogeneous. They don't have the constantly fluctuating levels of hormones that could disrupt clean data they could get if they had only men. It was easier. It was cheaper. Not to mention, at this time, there was a general assumption that men and women were alike in every way, apart from their reproductive organs and sex hormones. So it was decided: medical research was performed on men, and the results were later applied to women.What did this do to the notion of women's health? Women's health became synonymous with reproduction: breasts, ovaries, uterus, pregnancy. It's this term we now refer to as ""bikini medicine."" And this stayed this way until about the 1980s, when this concept was challenged by the medical community and by the public health policymakers when they realized that by excluding women from all medical research studies we actually did them a disservice, in that apart from reproductive issues, virtually nothing was known about the unique needs of the female patient.Since that time, an overwhelming amount of evidence has come to light that shows us just how different men and women are in every way. You know, we have this saying in medicine: children are not just little adults. And we say that to remind ourselves that children actually have a different physiology than normal adults. And it's because of this that the medical specialty of pediatrics came to light. And we now conduct research on children in order to improve their lives. And I know the same thing can be said about women. Women are not just men with boobs and tubes. But they have their own anatomy and physiology that deserves to be studied with the same intensity.Let's take the cardiovascular system, for example. This area in medicine has done the most to try to figure out why it seems men and women have completely different heart attacks. Heart disease is the number one killer for both men and women, but more women die within the first year of having a heart attack than men. Men will complain of crushing chest pain — an elephant is sitting on their chest. And we call this typical. Women have chest pain, too. But more women than men will complain of ""just not feeling right,"" ""can't seem to get enough air in,"" ""just so tired lately."" And for some reason we call this atypical, even though, as I mentioned, women do make up half the population.And so what is some of the evidence to help explain some of these differences? If we look at the anatomy, the blood vessels that surround the heart are smaller in women compared to men, and the way that those blood vessels develop disease is different in women compared to men. And the test that we use to determine if someone is at risk for a heart attack, well, they were initially designed and tested and perfected in men, and so aren't as good at determining that in women. And then if we think about the medications — common medications that we use, like aspirin. We give aspirin to healthy men to help prevent them from having a heart attack, but do you know that if you give aspirin to a healthy woman, it's actually harmful?What this is doing is merely telling us that we are scratching the surface. Emergency medicine is a fast-paced business. In how many life-saving areas of medicine, like cancer and stroke, are there important differences between men and women that we could be utilizing? Or even, why is it that some people get those runny noses more than others, or why the pain medication that we give to those stubbed toes work in some and not in others?The Institute of Medicine has said every cell has a sex. What does this mean? Sex is DNA. Gender is how someone presents themselves in society. And these two may not always match up, as we can see with our transgendered population. But it's important to realize that from the moment of conception, every cell in our bodies — skin, hair, heart and lungs — contains our own unique DNA, and that DNA contains the chromosomes that determine whether we become male or female, man or woman.It used to be thought that those sex-determining chromosomes pictured here — XY if you're male, XX if you're female — merely determined whether you would be born with ovaries or testes, and it was the sex hormones that those organs produced that were responsible for the differences we see in the opposite sex. But we now know that that theory was wrong — or it's at least a little incomplete. And thankfully, scientists like Dr. Page from the Whitehead Institute, who works on the Y chromosome, and Doctor Yang from UCLA, they have found evidence that tells us that those sex-determining chromosomes that are in every cell in our bodies continue to remain active for our entire lives and could be what's responsible for the differences we see in the dosing of drugs, or why there are differences between men and women in the susceptibility and severity of diseases. This new knowledge is the game-changer, and it's up to those scientists that continue to find that evidence, but it's up to the clinicians to start translating this data at the bedside, today. Right now. And to help do this, I'm a co-founder of a national organization called Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative, and we collect all of this data so that it's available for teaching and for patient care. And we're working to bring together the medical educators to the table. That's a big job. It's changing the way medical training has been done since its inception.But I believe in them. I know they're going to see the value of incorporating the gender lens into the current curriculum. It's about training the future health care providers correctly. And regionally, I'm a co-creator of a division within the Department of Emergency Medicine here at Brown University, called Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine, and we conduct the research to determine the differences between men and women in emergent conditions, like heart disease and stroke and sepsis and substance abuse, but we also believe that education is paramount.We've created a 360-degree model of education. We have programs for the doctors, for the nurses, for the students and for the patients. Because this cannot just be left up to the health care leaders. We all have a role in making a difference. But I must warn you: this is not easy. In fact, it's hard. It's essentially changing the way we think about medicine and health and research. It's changing our relationship to the health care system. But there's no going back. We now know just enough to know that we weren't doing it right.Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, ""Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.""And the first step towards change is awareness. This is not just about improving medical care for women. This is about personalized, individualized health care for everyone. This awareness has the power to transform medical care for men and women. And from now on, I want you to ask your doctors whether the treatments you are receiving are specific to your sex and gender. They may not know the answer — yet. But the conversation has begun, and together we can all learn. Remember, for me and my colleagues in this field, your sex and gender matter.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alyson_mcgregor_why_medicine_often_has_dangerous_side_effects_for_women
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"So this right here is the tiny village of Elle, close to Lista. It's right at the southernmost tip of Norway. And on January 2 this year, an elderly guy who lives in the village, he went out to see what was cast ashore during a recent storm. And on a patch of grass right next to the water's edge, he found a wetsuit. It was grey and black, and he thought it looked cheap. Out of each leg of the wetsuit there were sticking two white bones. It was clearly the remains of a human being.And usually, in Norway, dead people are identified quickly. So the police started searching through missing reports from the local area, national missing reports, and looked for accidents with a possible connection. They found nothing. So they ran a DNA profile, and they started searching internationally through Interpol. Nothing. This was a person that nobody seemed to be missing. It was an invisible life heading for a nameless grave. But then, after a month, the police in Norway got a message from the police in the Netherlands. A couple of months earlier, they had found a body, in an identical wetsuit, and they had no idea who this person was. But the police in the Netherlands managed to trace the wetsuit by an RFID chip that was sewn in the suit. So they were then able to tell that both wetsuits were bought by the same customer at the same time, October 7, 2014, in the French city of Calais by the English Channel. But this was all they were able to figure out. The customer paid cash. There was no surveillance footage from the shop. So it became a cold case.We heard this story, and it triggered me and my colleague, photographer Tomm Christiansen, and we of course had the obvious question: who were these people? At the time, I'd barely heard about Calais, but it took about two or three seconds to figure out Calais is basically known for two things. It's the spot in continental Europe closest to Britain, and a lot of migrants and refugees are staying in this camp and are trying desperately to cross over to Britain. And right there was a plausible theory about the identity of the two people, and the police made this theory as well. Because if you or I or anybody else with a firm connection to Europe goes missing off the coast of France, people would just know. Your friends or family would report you missing, the police would come search for you, the media would know, and there would be pictures of you on lampposts. It's difficult to disappear without a trace. But if you just fled the war in Syria, and your family, if you have any family left, don't necessarily know where you are, and you're staying here illegally amongst thousands of others who come and go every day. Well, if you disappear one day, nobody will notice. The police won't come search for you because nobody knows you're gone.And this is what happened to Shadi Omar Kataf and Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria.Me and Tomm went to Calais for the first time in April this year, and after three months of investigation, we were able to tell the story about how these two young men fled the war in Syria, ended up stuck in Calais, bought wetsuits and drowned in what seems to have been an attempt to swim across the English Channel in order to reach England. It is a story about the fact that everybody has a name, everybody has a story, everybody is someone. But it is also a story about what it's like to be a refugee in Europe today.So this is where we started our search. This is in Calais. Right now, between 3,500 and 5,000 people are living here under horrible conditions. It has been dubbed the worst refugee camp in Europe. Limited access to food, limited access to water, limited access to health care. Disease and infections are widespread. And they're all stuck here because they're trying to get to England in order to claim asylum. And they do that by hiding in the back of trucks headed for the ferry, or the Eurotunnel, or they sneak inside the tunnel terminal at night to try to hide on the trains.Most want to go to Britain because they know the language, and so they figure it would be easier to restart their lives from there. They want to work, they want to study, they want to be able to continue their lives. A lot of these people are highly educated and skilled workers. If you go to Calais and talk to refugees, you'll meet lawyers, politicians, engineers, graphic designers, farmers, soldiers. You've got the whole spectrum. But who all of these people are usually gets lost in the way we talk about refugees and migrants, because we usually do that in statistics.So you have 60 million refugees globally. About half a million have made the crossing over the Mediterranean into Europe so far this year, and roughly 4,000 are staying in Calais. But these are numbers, and the numbers don't say anything about who these people are, where they came from, or why they're here.And first, I want to tell you about one of them. This is 22-year-old Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. We first heard about him after being in Calais the first time looking for answers to the theory of the two dead bodies. And after a while, we heard this story about a Syrian man who was living in Bradford in England, and had been desperately searching for his nephew Mouaz for months. And it turned out the last time anybody had heard anything from Mouaz was October 7, 2014. That was the same date the wetsuits were bought. So we flew over there and we met the uncle and we did DNA samples of him, and later on got additional DNA samples from Mouaz's closest relative who now lives in Jordan. The analysis concluded the body who was found in a wetsuit on a beach in the Netherlands was actually Mouaz Al Balkhi. And while we were doing all this investigation, we got to know Mouaz's story. He was born in the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1991. He was raised in a middle class family, and his father in the middle there is a chemical engineer who spent 11 years in prison for belonging to the political opposition in Syria. While his father was in prison, Mouaz took responsibility and he cared for his three sisters. They said he was that kind of guy. Mouaz studied to become an electrical engineer at the University of Damascus.So a couple of years into the Syrian war, the family fled Damascus and went to the neighboring country, Jordan. Their father had problems finding work in Jordan, and Mouaz could not continue his studies, so he figured, ""OK, the best thing I can do to help my family would be to go somewhere where I can finish my studies and find work."" So he goes to Turkey.In Turkey, he's not accepted at a university, and once he had left Jordan as a refugee, he was not allowed to reenter. So then he decides to head for the UK, where his uncle lives. He makes it into Algeria, walks into Libya, pays a people smuggler to help him with the crossing into Italy by boat, and from there on he heads to Dunkirk, the city right next to Calais by the English Channel. We know he made at least 12 failed attempts to cross the English Channel by hiding in a truck. But at some point, he must have given up all hope. The last night we know he was alive, he spent at a cheap hotel close to the train station in Dunkirk. We found his name in the records, and he seems to have stayed there alone. The day after, he went into Calais, entered a sports shop a couple of minutes before 8 o'clock in the evening, along with Shadi Kataf. They both bought wetsuits, and the woman in the shop was the last person we know of to have seen them alive. We have tried to figure out where Shadi met Mouaz, but we weren't able to do that. But they do have a similar story. We first heard about Shadi after a cousin of his, living in Germany, had read an Arabic translation of the story made of Mouaz on Facebook. So we got in touch with him. Shadi, a couple of years older than Mouaz, was also raised in Damascus. He was a working kind of guy. He ran a tire repair shop and later worked in a printing company. He lived with his extended family, but their house got bombed early in the war. So the family fled to an area of Damascus known as Camp Yarmouk.Yarmouk is being described as the worst place to live on planet Earth. They've been bombed by the military, they've been besieged, they've been stormed by ISIS and they've been cut off from supplies for years. There was a UN official who visited last year, and he said, ""They ate all the grass so there was no grass left."" Out of a population of 150,000, only 18,000 are believed to still be left in Yarmouk. Shadi and his sisters got out. The parents are still stuck inside.So Shadi and one of his sisters, they fled to Libya. This was after the fall of Gaddafi, but before Libya turned into full-blown civil war. And in this last remaining sort of stability in Libya, Shadi took up scuba diving, and he seemed to spend most of his time underwater. He fell completely in love with the ocean, so when he finally decided that he could no longer be in Libya, late August 2014, he hoped to find work as a diver when he reached Italy. Reality was not that easy. We don't know much about his travels because he had a hard time communicating with his family, but we do know that he struggled. And by the end of September, he was living on the streets somewhere in France. On October 7, he calls his cousin in Belgium, and explains his situation. He said, ""I'm in Calais. I need you to come get my backpack and my laptop. I can't afford to pay the people smugglers to help me with the crossing to Britain, but I will go buy a wetsuit and I will swim."" His cousin, of course, tried to warn him not to, but Shadi's battery on the phone went flat, and his phone was never switched on again. What was left of Shadi was found nearly three months later, 800 kilometers away in a wetsuit on a beach in Norway. He's still waiting for his funeral in Norway, and none of his family will be able to attend.Many may think that the story about Shadi and Mouaz is a story about death, but I don't agree. To me, this is a story about two questions that I think we all share: what is a better life, and what am I willing to do to achieve it? And to me, and probably a lot of you, a better life would mean being able to do more of what we think of as meaningful, whether that be spending more time with your family and friends, travel to an exotic place, or just getting money to buy that cool new device or a pair of new sneakers. And this is all within our reach pretty easily.But if you are fleeing a war zone, the answers to those two questions are dramatically different. A better life is a life in safety. It's a life in dignity. A better life means not having your house bombed, not fearing being kidnapped. It means being able to send your children to school, go to university, or just find work to be able to provide for yourself and the ones you love. A better life would be a future of some possibilities compared to nearly none, and that's a strong motivation. And I have no trouble imagining that after spending weeks or even months as a second-grade citizen, living on the streets or in a horrible makeshift camp with a stupid, racist name like ""The Jungle,"" most of us would be willing to do just about anything. If I could ask Shadi and Mouaz the second they stepped into the freezing waters of the English Channel, they would probably say, ""This is worth the risk,"" because they could no longer see any other option. And that's desperation, but that's the reality of living as a refugee in Western Europe in 2015.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Anders. This is Tomm Christiansen, who took most of the pictures you have seen and they've done reporting together. Tomm, you two have been back to Calais recently. This was the third trip. It was after the publication of the article. What has changed? What have you seen there?Tomm Christiansen: The first time we were in Calais, it was about 1,500 refugees there. They had a difficult time, but they were positive, they had hope. The last time, the camp has grown, maybe four or five thousand people. It seemed more permanent, NGOs have arrived, a small school has opened. But the thing is that the refugees have stayed for a longer time, and the French government has managed to seal off the borders better, so now The Jungle is growing, along with the despair and hopelessness among the refugees.BG: Are you planning to go back? And continue the reporting?TC: Yes.BG: Anders, I'm a former journalist, and to me, it's amazing that in the current climate of slashing budgets and publishers in crisis, Dagbladet has consented so many resources for this story, which tells a lot about newspapers taking the responsibility, but how did you sell it to your editors?Anders Fjellberg: It wasn't easy at first, because we weren't able to know what we actually could figure out. As soon as it became clear that we actually could be able to identify who the first one was, we basically got the message that we could do whatever we wanted, just travel wherever you need to go, do whatever you need to do, just get this done.BG: That's an editor taking responsibility. The story, by the way, has been translated and published across several European countries, and certainly will continue to do. And we want to read the updates from you. Thank you Anders. Thank you Tomm.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anders_fjellberg_two_nameless_bodies_washed_up_on_the_beach_here_are_their_stories
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"As a singer-songwriter, people often ask me about my influences or, as I like to call them, my sonic lineages. And I could easily tell you that I was shaped by the jazz and hip hop that I grew up with, by the Ethiopian heritage of my ancestors, or by the 1980s pop on my childhood radio stations. But beyond genre, there is another question: how do the sounds we hear every day influence the music that we make? I believe that everyday soundscape can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting, and to look at this idea a little bit more closely, I'm going to talk today about three things: nature, language and silence — or rather, the impossibility of true silence. And through this I hope to give you a sense of a world already alive with musical expression, with each of us serving as active participants, whether we know it or not.I'm going to start today with nature, but before we do that, let's quickly listen to this snippet of an opera singer warming up. Here it is.(Singing)(Singing ends)It's beautiful, isn't it? Gotcha! That is actually not the sound of an opera singer warming up. That is the sound of a bird slowed down to a pace that the human ear mistakenly recognizes as its own. It was released as part of Peter Szöke's 1987 Hungarian recording ""The Unknown Music of Birds,"" where he records many birds and slows down their pitches to reveal what's underneath. Let's listen to the full-speed recording.(Bird singing)Now, let's hear the two of them together so your brain can juxtapose them.(Bird singing at slow then full speed)(Singing ends)It's incredible. Perhaps the techniques of opera singing were inspired by birdsong. As humans, we intuitively understand birds to be our musical teachers.In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part of the origin of music itself. The story goes like this: 1,500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Aksum, a major trading center of the ancient world. His name was Yared. When Yared was seven years old his father died, and his mother sent him to go live with an uncle, who was a priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yared had to study and study and study and study, and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him. One by one, these birds became his teachers. They taught him music — scales, in fact. And Yared, eventually recognized as Saint Yared, used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. And he used these scales to compose and to create an indigenous musical notation system. And these scales evolved into what is known as kiñit, the unique, pentatonic, five-note, modal system that is very much alive and thriving and still evolving in Ethiopia today.Now, I love this story because it's true at multiple levels. Saint Yared was a real, historical figure, and the natural world can be our musical teacher. And we have so many examples of this: the Pygmies of the Congo tune their instruments to the pitches of the birds in the forest around them. Musician and natural soundscape expert Bernie Krause describes how a healthy environment has animals and insects taking up low, medium and high-frequency bands, in exactly the same way as a symphony does. And countless works of music were inspired by bird and forest song. Yes, the natural world can be our cultural teacher.So let's go now to the uniquely human world of language. Every language communicates with pitch to varying degrees, whether it's Mandarin Chinese, where a shift in melodic inflection gives the same phonetic syllable an entirely different meaning, to a language like English, where a raised pitch at the end of a sentence ... (Going up in pitch) implies a question?(Laughter)As an Ethiopian-American woman, I grew up around the language of Amharic, Amhariña. It was my first language, the language of my parents, one of the main languages of Ethiopia. And there are a million reasons to fall in love with this language: its depth of poetics, its double entendres, its wax and gold, its humor, its proverbs that illuminate the wisdom and follies of life. But there's also this melodicism, a musicality built right in. And I find this distilled most clearly in what I like to call emphatic language — language that's meant to highlight or underline or that springs from surprise. Take, for example, the word: ""indey."" Now, if there are Ethiopians in the audience, they're probably chuckling to themselves, because the word means something like ""No!"" or ""How could he?"" or ""No, he didn't."" It kind of depends on the situation. But when I was a kid, this was my very favorite word, and I think it's because it has a pitch. It has a melody. You can almost see the shape as it springs from someone's mouth. ""Indey"" — it dips, and then raises again. And as a musician and composer, when I hear that word, something like this is floating through my mind.(Music and singing ""Indey"")(Music ends)Or take, for example, the phrase for ""It is right"" or ""It is correct"" — ""Lickih nehu ... Lickih nehu."" It's an affirmation, an agreement. ""Lickih nehu."" When I hear that phrase, something like this starts rolling through my mind.(Music and singing ""Lickih nehu"")(Music ends)And in both of those cases, what I did was I took the melody and the phrasing of those words and phrases and I turned them into musical parts to use in these short compositions. And I like to write bass lines, so they both ended up kind of as bass lines.Now, this is based on the work of Jason Moran and others who work intimately with music and language, but it's also something I've had in my head since I was a kid, how musical my parents sounded when they were speaking to each other and to us. It was from them and from Amhariña that I learned that we are awash in musical expression with every word, every sentence that we speak, every word, every sentence that we receive. Perhaps you can hear it in the words I'm speaking even now.Finally, we go to the 1950s United States and the most seminal work of 20th century avant-garde composition: John Cage's ""4:33,"" written for any instrument or combination of instruments. The musician or musicians are invited to walk onto the stage with a stopwatch and open the score, which was actually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art — the score, that is. And this score has not a single note written and there is not a single note played for four minutes and 33 seconds. And, at once enraging and enrapturing, Cage shows us that even when there are no strings being plucked by fingers or hands hammering piano keys, still there is music, still there is music, still there is music. And what is this music? It was that sneeze in the back.(Laughter)It is the everyday soundscape that arises from the audience themselves: their coughs, their sighs, their rustles, their whispers, their sneezes, the room, the wood of the floors and the walls expanding and contracting, creaking and groaning with the heat and the cold, the pipes clanking and contributing. And controversial though it was, and even controversial though it remains, Cage's point is that there is no such thing as true silence. Even in the most silent environments, we still hear and feel the sound of our own heartbeats. The world is alive with musical expression. We are already immersed.Now, I had my own moment of, let's say, remixing John Cage a couple of months ago when I was standing in front of the stove cooking lentils. And it was late one night and it was time to stir, so I lifted the lid off the cooking pot, and I placed it onto the kitchen counter next to me, and it started to roll back and forth making this sound.(Sound of metal lid clanking against a counter)(Clanking ends)And it stopped me cold. I thought, ""What a weird, cool swing that cooking pan lid has."" So when the lentils were ready and eaten, I hightailed it to my backyard studio, and I made this.(Music, including the sound of the lid, and singing)(Music ends)Now, John Cage wasn't instructing musicians to mine the soundscape for sonic textures to turn into music. He was saying that on its own, the environment is musically generative, that it is generous, that it is fertile, that we are already immersed.Musician, music researcher, surgeon and human hearing expert Charles Limb is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and he studies music and the brain. And he has a theory that it is possible — it is possible — that the human auditory system actually evolved to hear music, because it is so much more complex than it needs to be for language alone. And if that's true, it means that we're hard-wired for music, that we can find it anywhere, that there is no such thing as a musical desert, that we are permanently hanging out at the oasis, and that is marvelous. We can add to the soundtrack, but it's already playing.And it doesn't mean don't study music. Study music, trace your sonic lineages and enjoy that exploration. But there is a kind of sonic lineage to which we all belong. So the next time you are seeking percussion inspiration, look no further than your tires, as they roll over the unusual grooves of the freeway, or the top-right burner of your stove and that strange way that it clicks as it is preparing to light. When seeking melodic inspiration, look no further than dawn and dusk avian orchestras or to the natural lilt of emphatic language. We are the audience and we are the composers and we take from these pieces we are given. We make, we make, we make, we make, knowing that when it comes to nature or language or soundscape, there is no end to the inspiration — if we are listening.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/meklit_hadero_the_unexpected_beauty_of_everyday_sounds
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"Father Daniel Berrigan once said that ""writing about prisoners is a little like writing about the dead."" I think what he meant is that we treat prisoners as ghosts. They're unseen and unheard. It's easy to simply ignore them and it's even easier when the government goes to great lengths to keep them hidden.As a journalist, I think these stories of what people in power do when no one is watching, are precisely the stories that we need to tell. That's why I began investigating the most secretive and experimental prison units in the United States, for so-called ""second-tier"" terrorists. The government calls these units Communications Management Units or CMUs. Prisoners and guards call them ""Little Guantanamo."" They are islands unto themselves. But unlike Gitmo they exist right here, at home, floating within larger federal prisons.There are 2 CMUs. One was opened inside the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and the other is inside this prison, in Marion, Illinois. Neither of them underwent the formal review process that is required by law when they were opened. CMU prisoners have all been convicted of crimes. Some of their cases are questionable and some involve threats and violence. I'm not here to argue the guilt or innocence of any prisoner. I'm here because as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said, ""When the prisons and gates slam shut, prisoners do not lose their human quality.""Every prisoner I've interviewed has said there are three flecks of light in the darkness of prison: phone calls, letters and visits from family. CMUs aren't solitary confinement, but they radically restrict all of these to levels that meet or exceed the most extreme prisons in the United States. Their phone calls can be limited to 45 minutes a month, compared to the 300 minutes other prisoners receive. Their letters can be limited to six pieces of paper. Their visits can be limited to four hours per month, compared to the 35 hours that people like Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph receive in the supermax. On top of that, CMU visits are non-contact which means prisoners are not allowed to even hug their family. As one CMU prisoner said, ""We're not being tortured here, except psychologically.""The government won't say who is imprisoned here. But through court documents, open records requests and interviews with current and former prisoners, some small windows into the CMUs have opened.There's an estimated 60 to 70 prisoners here, and they're overwhelmingly Muslim. They include people like Dr. Rafil Dhafir, who violated the economic sanctions on Iraq by sending medical supplies for the children there. They've included people like Yassin Aref. Aref and his family fled to New York from Saddam Hussein's Iraq as refugees. He was arrested in 2004 as part of an FBI sting. Aref is an imam and he was asked to bear witness to a loan, which is a tradition in Islamic culture. It turned out that one of the people involved in the loan was trying to enlist someone else in a fake attack. Aref didn't know. For that, he was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.The CMUs also include some non-Muslim prisoners. The guards call them ""balancers,"" meaning they help balance out the racial numbers, in hopes of deflecting law suits. These balancers include animal rights and environmental activists like Daniel McGowan.McGowan was convicted of participating in two arsons in the name of defending the environment as part of the Earth Liberation Front. During his sentencing, he was afraid that he would be sent to a rumored secret prison for terrorists. The judge dismissed all those fears, saying that they weren't supported by any facts. But that might be because the government hasn't fully explained why some prisoners end up in a CMU, and who is responsible for these decisions. When McGowan was transferred, he was told it's because he is a ""domestic terrorist,"" a term the FBI uses repeatedly when talking about environmental activists. Now, keep in mind there are about 400 prisoners in US prisons who are classified as terrorists, and only a handful of them are in the CMUs. In McGowan's case, he was previously at a low-security prison and he had no communications violations.So, why was he moved? Like other CMU prisoners, McGowan repeatedly asked for an answer, a hearing, or some opportunity for an appeal. This example from another prisoner shows how those requests are viewed. ""Wants a transfer."" ""Told him no."" At one point, the prison warden himself recommended McGowan's transfer out of the CMU citing his good behavior, but the warden was overruled by the Bureau of Prison's Counterterrorism Unit, working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI.Later I found out that McGowan was really sent to a CMU not because of what he did, but what he has said. A memo from the Counterterrorism Unit cited McGowan's ""anti-government beliefs."" While imprisoned, he continued writing about environmental issues, saying that activists must reflect on their mistakes and listen to each other. Now, in fairness, if you've spent any time at all in Washington, DC, you know this is really a radical concept for the government.(Laughter)I actually asked to visit McGowan in the CMU. And I was approved. That came as quite a shock. First, because as I've discussed on this stage before, I learned that the FBI has been monitoring my work. Second, because it would make me the first and only journalist to visit a CMU. I had even learned through the Bureau of Prisons Counterterrorism Unit, that they had been monitoring my speeches about CMUs, like this one. So how could I possibly be approved to visit? A few days before I went out to the prison, I got an answer.I was allowed to visit McGowan as a friend, not a journalist. Journalists are not allowed here. McGowan was told by CMU officials that if I asked any questions or published any story, that he would be punished for my reporting. When I arrived for our visit, the guards reminded me that they knew who I was and knew about my work. And they said that if I attempted to interview McGowan, the visit would be terminated. The Bureau of Prisons describes CMUs as ""self-contained housing units."" But I think that's an Orwellian way of describing black holes. When you visit a CMU, you go through all the security checkpoints that you would expect. But then the walk to the visitation room is silent. When a CMU prisoner has a visit, the rest of the prison is on lockdown. I was ushered into a small room, so small my outstretched arms could touch each wall. There was a grapefruit-sized orb in the ceiling for the visit to be live-monitored by the Counterterrorism Unit in West Virginia. The unit insists that all the visits have to be in English for CMU prisoners, which is an additional hardship for many of the Muslim families. There is a thick sheet of foggy, bulletproof glass and on the other side was Daniel McGowan. We spoke through these handsets attached to the wall and talked about books and movies. We did our best to find reasons to laugh. To fight boredom and amuse himself while in the CMU, McGowan had been spreading a rumor that I was secretly the president of a Twilight fan club in Washington, DC(Laughter)For the record, I'm not.(Laughter) But I kind of the hope the FBI now thinks that Bella and Edward are terrorist code names.(Laughter)During our visit, McGowan spoke most and at length about his niece Lily, his wife Jenny and how torturous it feels to never be able to hug them, to never be able to hold their hands. Three months after our visit, McGowan was transferred out of the CMU and then, without warning, he was sent back again. I had published leaked CMU documents on my website and the Counterterrorism Unit said that McGowan had called his wife and asked her to mail them. He wanted to see what the government was saying about him, and for that he was sent back to the CMU. When he was finally released at the end of his sentence, his story got even more Kafkaesque. He wrote an article for the Huffington Post headlined, ""Court Documents Prove I was Sent to a CMU for my Political Speech.""The next day he was thrown back in jail for his political speech. His attorneys quickly secured his release, but the message was very clear: Don't talk about this place.Today, nine years after they were opened by the Bush administration, the government is codifying how and why CMUs were created. According to the Bureau of Prisons, they are for prisoners with ""inspirational significance."" I think that is very nice way of saying these are political prisons for political prisoners.Prisoners are sent to a CMU because of their race, their religion or their political beliefs.Now, if you think that characterization is too strong, just look at some of the government's own documents. When some of McGowan's mail was rejected by the CMU, the sender was told it's because the letters were intended ""for political prisoners."" When another prisoner, animal rights activist Andy Stepanian, was sent to a CMU, it was because of his anti-government and anti-corporate views.Now, I know all of this may be hard to believe, that it's happening right now, and in the United States. But the unknown reality is that the US has a dark history of disproportionately punishing people because of their political beliefs. In the 1960s, before Marion was home to the CMU, it was home to the notorious Control Unit. Prisoners were locked down in solitary for 22 hours a day. The warden said the unit was to ""control revolutionary attitudes."" In the 1980s, another experiment called the Lexington High Security Unit held women connected to the Weather Underground, Black Liberation and Puerto Rican independent struggles. The prison radically restricted communication and used sleep deprivation, and constant light for so-called ""ideological conversion."" Those prisons were eventually shut down, but only through the campaigning of religious groups and human rights advocates, like Amnesty International.Today, civil rights lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights are challenging CMUs in court for depriving prisoners of their due process rights and for retaliating against them for their protected political and religious speech. Many of these documents would have never come to light without this lawsuit.The message of these groups and my message for you today is that we must bear witness to what is being done to these prisoners. Their treatment is a reflection of the values held beyond prison walls. This story is not just about prisoners. It is about us. It is about our own commitment to human rights. It is about whether we will choose to stop repeating the mistakes of our past. If we don't listen to what Father Berrigan described as the stories of the dead, they will soon become the stories of ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)(Applause ends)Tom Rielly: I have a couple questions. When I was in high school, I learned about the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, freedom of speech, due process and  about 25 other laws and rights that seem to be violated by this. How could this possibly be happening?Will Potter: I think that's the number one question I get throughout all of my work, and the short answer is that people don't know. I think the solution to any of these types of situations, any rights abuses, are really dependent on two things. They're dependent on knowledge that it's actually happening and then a means and efficacy to actually make a change. And unfortunately with these prisoners, one, people don't know what's happening at all and then they're already disenfranchised populations who don't have access to attorneys, not native English speakers. In some of these cases, they have great representation that I mentioned, but there's just not a public awareness of what's happening.TR: Isn't it guaranteed in prison that you have right to council or access to council?WP: There's a tendency in our culture to see when people have been convicted of a crime, no matter if that charge was bogus or legitimate, that whatever happens to them after that is warranted. And I think that's a really damaging and dangerous narrative that we have, that allows these types of things to happen, as the general public just kind of turns a blind eye to it.TR: All those documents on screen were all real documents, word for word, unchanged at all, right?WP: Absolutely. I've actually uploaded all of them to my website. It's willpotter.com/CMU and it's a footnoted version of the talk, so you can see the documents for yourself without the little snippets. You can see the full version. I relied overwhelmingly on primary source documents or on primary interviews with former and current prisoners, with people that are dealing with this situation every day. And like I said, I've been there myself, as well.TR: You're doing courageous work.WP: Thank you very much. Thank you all.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/will_potter_the_secret_us_prisons_you_ve_never_heard_of_before
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"A few years ago, with my colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, I invented a new technology for editing genomes. It's called CRISPR-Cas9. The CRISPR technology allows scientists to make changes to the DNA in cells that could allow us to cure genetic disease.You might be interested to know that the CRISPR technology came about through a basic research project that was aimed at discovering how bacteria fight viral infections. Bacteria have to deal with viruses in their environment, and we can think about a viral infection like a ticking time bomb — a bacterium has only a few minutes to defuse the bomb before it gets destroyed. So, many bacteria have in their cells an adaptive immune system called CRISPR, that allows them to detect viral DNA and destroy it.Part of the CRISPR system is a protein called Cas9, that's able to seek out, cut and eventually degrade viral DNA in a specific way. And it was through our research to understand the activity of this protein, Cas9, that we realized that we could harness its function as a genetic engineering technology — a way for scientists to delete or insert specific bits of DNA into cells with incredible precision — that would offer opportunities to do things that really haven't been possible in the past.The CRISPR technology has already been used to change the DNA in the cells of mice and monkeys, other organisms as well. Chinese scientists showed recently that they could even use the CRISPR technology to change genes in human embryos. And scientists in Philadelphia showed they could use CRISPR to remove the DNA of an integrated HIV virus from infected human cells.The opportunity to do this kind of genome editing also raises various ethical issues that we have to consider, because this technology can be employed not only in adult cells, but also in the embryos of organisms, including our own species. And so, together with my colleagues, I've called for a global conversation about the technology that I co-invented, so that we can consider all of the ethical and societal implications of a technology like this.What I want to do now is tell you what the CRISPR technology is, what it can do, where we are today and why I think we need to take a prudent path forward in the way that we employ this technology.When viruses infect a cell, they inject their DNA. And in a bacterium, the CRISPR system allows that DNA to be plucked out of the virus, and inserted in little bits into the chromosome — the DNA of the bacterium. And these integrated bits of viral DNA get inserted at a site called CRISPR. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. (Laughter)A big mouthful — you can see why we use the acronym CRISPR. It's a mechanism that allows cells to record, over time, the viruses they have been exposed to. And importantly, those bits of DNA are passed on to the cells' progeny, so cells are protected from viruses not only in one generation, but over many generations of cells. This allows the cells to keep a record of infection, and as my colleague, Blake Wiedenheft, likes to say, the CRISPR locus is effectively a genetic vaccination card in cells. Once those bits of DNA have been inserted into the bacterial chromosome, the cell then makes a little copy of a molecule called RNA, which is orange in this picture, that is an exact replicate of the viral DNA. RNA is a chemical cousin of DNA, and it allows interaction with DNA molecules that have a matching sequence.So those little bits of RNA from the CRISPR locus associate — they bind — to protein called Cas9, which is white in the picture, and form a complex that functions like a sentinel in the cell. It searches through all of the DNA in the cell, to find sites that match the sequences in the bound RNAs. And when those sites are found — as you can see here, the blue molecule is DNA — this complex associates with that DNA and allows the Cas9 cleaver to cut up the viral DNA. It makes a very precise break. So we can think of the Cas9 RNA sentinel complex like a pair of scissors that can cut DNA — it makes a double-stranded break in the DNA helix. And importantly, this complex is programmable, so it can be programmed to recognize particular DNA sequences, and make a break in the DNA at that site.As I'm going to tell you now, we recognized that that activity could be harnessed for genome engineering, to allow cells to make a very precise change to the DNA at the site where this break was introduced. That's sort of analogous to the way that we use a word-processing program to fix a typo in a document.The reason we envisioned using the CRISPR system for genome engineering is because cells have the ability to detect broken DNA and repair it. So when a plant or an animal cell detects a double-stranded break in its DNA, it can fix that break, either by pasting together the ends of the broken DNA with a little, tiny change in the sequence of that position, or it can repair the break by integrating a new piece of DNA at the site of the cut. So if we have a way to introduce double-stranded breaks into DNA at precise places, we can trigger cells to repair those breaks, by either the disruption or incorporation of new genetic information. So if we were able to program the CRISPR technology to make a break in DNA at the position at or near a mutation causing cystic fibrosis, for example, we could trigger cells to repair that mutation.Genome engineering is actually not new, it's been in development since the 1970s. We've had technologies for sequencing DNA, for copying DNA, and even for manipulating DNA. And these technologies were very promising, but the problem was that they were either inefficient, or they were difficult enough to use that most scientists had not adopted them for use in their own laboratories, or certainly for many clinical applications. So, the opportunity to take a technology like CRISPR and utilize it has appeal, because of its relative simplicity. We can think of older genome engineering technologies as similar to having to rewire your computer each time you want to run a new piece of software, whereas the CRISPR technology is like software for the genome, we can program it easily, using these little bits of RNA.So once a double-stranded break is made in DNA, we can induce repair, and thereby potentially achieve astounding things, like being able to correct mutations that cause sickle cell anemia or cause Huntington's Disease. I actually think that the first applications of the CRISPR technology are going to happen in the blood, where it's relatively easier to deliver this tool into cells, compared to solid tissues.Right now, a lot of the work that's going on applies to animal models of human disease, such as mice. The technology is being used to make very precise changes that allow us to study the way that these changes in the cell's DNA affect either a tissue or, in this case, an entire organism.Now in this example, the CRISPR technology was used to disrupt a gene by making a tiny change in the DNA in a gene that is responsible for the black coat color of these mice. Imagine that these white mice differ from their pigmented litter-mates by just a tiny change at one gene in the entire genome, and they're otherwise completely normal. And when we sequence the DNA from these animals, we find that the change in the DNA has occurred at exactly the place where we induced it, using the CRISPR technology.Additional experiments are going on in other animals that are useful for creating models for human disease, such as monkeys. And here we find that we can use these systems to test the application of this technology in particular tissues, for example, figuring out how to deliver the CRISPR tool into cells. We also want to understand better how to control the way that DNA is repaired after it's cut, and also to figure out how to control and limit any kind of off-target, or unintended effects of using the technology.I think that we will see clinical application of this technology, certainly in adults, within the next 10 years. I think that it's likely that we will see clinical trials and possibly even approved therapies within that time, which is a very exciting thing to think about. And because of the excitement around this technology, there's a lot of interest in start-up companies that have been founded to commercialize the CRISPR technology, and lots of venture capitalists that have been investing in these companies.But we have to also consider that the CRISPR technology can be used for things like enhancement. Imagine that we could try to engineer humans that have enhanced properties, such as stronger bones, or less susceptibility to cardiovascular disease or even to have properties that we would consider maybe to be desirable, like a different eye color or to be taller, things like that. ""Designer humans,"" if you will. Right now, the genetic information to understand what types of genes would give rise to these traits is mostly not known. But it's important to know that the CRISPR technology gives us a tool to make such changes, once that knowledge becomes available.This raises a number of ethical questions that we have to carefully consider, and this is why I and my colleagues have called for a global pause in any clinical application of the CRISPR technology in human embryos, to give us time to really consider all of the various implications of doing so. And actually, there is an important precedent for such a pause from the 1970s, when scientists got together to call for a moratorium on the use of molecular cloning, until the safety of that technology could be tested carefully and validated.So, genome-engineered humans are not with us yet, but this is no longer science fiction. Genome-engineered animals and plants are happening right now. And this puts in front of all of us a huge responsibility, to consider carefully both the unintended consequences as well as the intended impacts of a scientific breakthrough.Thank you.(Applause)(Applause ends)Bruno Giussani: Jennifer, this is a technology with huge consequences, as you pointed out. Your attitude about asking for a pause or a moratorium or a quarantine is incredibly responsible. There are, of course, the therapeutic results of this, but then there are the un-therapeutic ones and they seem to be the ones gaining traction, particularly in the media. This is one of the latest issues of The Economist — ""Editing humanity."" It's all about genetic enhancement, it's not about therapeutics. What kind of reactions did you get back in March from your colleagues in the science world, when you asked or suggested that we should actually pause this for a moment and think about it?Jennifer Doudna: My colleagues were actually, I think, delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this openly. It's interesting that as I talk to people, my scientific colleagues as well as others, there's a wide variety of viewpoints about this. So clearly it's a topic that needs careful consideration and discussion.BG: There's a big meeting happening in December that you and your colleagues are calling, together with the National Academy of Sciences and others, what do you hope will come out of the meeting, practically?JD: Well, I hope that we can air the views of many different individuals and stakeholders who want to think about how to use this technology responsibly. It may not be possible to come up with a consensus point of view, but I think we should at least understand what all the issues are as we go forward.BG: Now, colleagues of yours, like George Church, for example, at Harvard, they say, ""Yeah, ethical issues basically are just a question of safety. We test and test and test again, in animals and in labs, and then once we feel it's safe enough, we move on to humans."" So that's kind of the other school of thought, that we should actually use this opportunity and really go for it. Is there a possible split happening in the science community about this? I mean, are we going to see some people holding back because they have ethical concerns, and some others just going forward because some countries under-regulate or don't regulate at all?JD: Well, I think with any new technology, especially something like this, there are going to be a variety of viewpoints, and I think that's perfectly understandable. I think that in the end, this technology will be used for human genome engineering, but I think to do that without careful consideration and discussion of the risks and potential complications would not be responsible.BG: There are a lot of technologies and other fields of science that are developing exponentially, pretty much like yours. I'm thinking about artificial intelligence, autonomous robots and so on. No one seems — aside from autonomous warfare robots — nobody seems to have launched a similar discussion in those fields, in calling for a moratorium. Do you think that your discussion may serve as a blueprint for other fields?JD: Well, I think it's hard for scientists to get out of the laboratory. Speaking for myself, it's a little bit uncomfortable to do that. But I do think that being involved in the genesis of this really puts me and my colleagues in a position of responsibility. And I would say that I certainly hope that other technologies will be considered in the same way, just as we would want to consider something that could have implications in other fields besides biology.BG: Jennifer, thanks for coming to TED.JD: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_doudna_we_can_now_edit_our_dna_but_let_s_do_it_wisely
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"I'd like to start by asking you all to go to your happy place, please. Yes, your happy place, I know you've got one even if it's fake.(Laughter)OK, so, comfortable? Good.Now I'd like to you to mentally answer the following questions. Is there any strip lighting in your happy place? Any plastic tables? Polyester flooring? Mobile phones? No? I think we all know that our happy place is meant to be somewhere natural, outdoors — on a beach, fireside. We'll be reading or eating or knitting. And we're surrounded by natural light and organic elements. Natural things make us happy. And happiness is a great motivator; we strive for happiness. Perhaps that's why we're always redesigning everything, in the hopes that our solutions might feel more natural. So let's start there — with the idea that good design should feel natural.Your phone is not very natural. And you probably think you're addicted to your phone, but you're really not. We're not addicted to devices, we're addicted to the information that flows through them. I wonder how long you would be happy in your happy place without any information from the outside world. I'm interested in how we access that information, how we experience it. We're moving from a time of static information, held in books and libraries and bus stops, through a period of digital information, towards a period of fluid information, where your children will expect to be able to access anything, anywhere at any time, from quantum physics to medieval viticulture, from gender theory to tomorrow's weather, just like switching on a lightbulb — Imagine that.Humans also like simple tools. Your phone is not a very simple tool. A fork is a simple tool.(Laughter)And we don't like them made of plastic, in the same way I don't really like my phone very much — it's not how I want to experience information.I think there are better solutions than a world mediated by screens. I don't hate screens, but I don't feel — and I don't think any of us feel that good about how much time we spend slouched over them. Fortunately, the big tech companies seem to agree. They're actually heavily invested in touch and speech and gesture, and also in senses — things that can turn dumb objects, like cups, and imbue them with the magic of the Internet, potentially turning this digital cloud into something we might touch and move.The parents in crisis over screen time need physical digital toys teaching their kids to read, as well as family-safe app stores. And I think, actually, that's already really happening.Reality is richer than screens. For example, I love books. For me they are time machines — atoms and molecules bound in space, from the moment of their creation to the moment of my experience. But frankly, the content's identical on my phone. So what makes this a richer experience than a screen? I mean, scientifically. We need screens, of course. I'm going to show film, I need the enormous screen. But there's more than you can do with these magic boxes. Your phone is not the Internet's door bitch.(Laughter)We can build things — physical things, using physics and pixels, that can integrate the Internet into the world around us. And I'm going to show you a few examples of those.A while ago, I got to work with a design agency, Berg, on an exploration of what the Internet without screens might actually look like. And they showed us a range ways that light can work with simple senses and physical objects to really bring the Internet to life, to make it tangible. Like this wonderfully mechanical YouTube player. And this was an inspiration to me.Next I worked with the Japanese agency, AQ, on a research project into mental health. We wanted to create an object that could capture the subjective data around mood swings that's so essential to diagnosis. This object captures your touch, so you might press it very hard if you're angry, or stroke it if you're calm. It's like a digital emoji stick. And then you might revisit those moments later, and add context to them online. Most of all, we wanted to create an intimate, beautiful thing that could live in your pocket and be loved.The binoculars are actually a birthday present for the Sydney Opera House's 40th anniversary. Our friends at Tellart in Boston brought over a pair of street binoculars, the kind you might find on the Empire State Building, and they fitted them with 360-degree views of other iconic world heritage sights —(Laughter)using Street View. And then we stuck them under the steps. So, they became this very physical, simple reappropriation, or like a portal to these other icons. So you might see Versailles or Shackleton's Hut. Basically, it's virtual reality circa 1955.(Laughter)In our office we use hacky sacks to exchange URLs. This is incredibly simple, it's like your Opal card. You basically put a website on the little chip in here, and then you do this and ... bosh! — the website appears on your phone. It's about 10 cents.Treehugger is a project that we're working on with Grumpy Sailor and Finch, here in Sydney. And I'm very excited about what might happen when you pull the phones apart and you put the bits into trees, and that my children might have an opportunity to visit an enchanted forest guided by a magic wand, where they could talk to digital fairies and ask them questions, and be asked questions in return. As you can see, we're at the cardboard stage with this one.(Laughter)But I'm very excited by the possibility of getting kids back outside without screens, but with all the powerful magic of the Internet at their fingertips. And we hope to have something like this working by the end of the year.So let's recap. Humans like natural solutions. Humans love information. Humans need simple tools. These principles should underpin how we design for the future, not just for the Internet. You may feel uncomfortable about the age of information that we're moving into. You may feel challenged, rather than simply excited. Guess what? Me too. It's a really extraordinary period of human history.We are the people that actually build our world, there are no artificial intelligences... yet.(Laughter)It's us — designers, architects, artists, engineers. And if we challenge ourselves, I think that actually we can have a happy place filled with the information we love that feels as natural and as simple as switching on lightbulb. And although it may seem inevitable, that what the public wants is watches and websites and widgets, maybe we could give a bit of thought to cork and light and hacky sacks.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_uglow_an_internet_without_screens_might_look_like_this
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"I would like to invite you to come along on a visit to a dark continent. It is the continent hidden under the surface of the earth. It is largely unexplored, poorly understood, and the stuff of legends. But it is made also of dramatic landscapes like this huge underground chamber, and it is rich with surprising biological and mineralogical worlds.Thanks to the efforts of intrepid voyagers in the last three centuries — actually, we know also thanks to satellite technology, of course — we know almost every single square meter of our planet's surface. However, we know still very little about what is hidden inside the earth. Because a cave landscape, like this deep shaft in Italy, is hidden, the potential of cave exploration — the geographical dimension — is poorly understood and unappreciated. Because we are creatures living on the surface, our perception of the inner side of the planet is in some ways skewed, as is that of the depth of the oceans or of the upper atmosphere.However, since systematic cave exploration started about one century ago, we know actually that caves exist in every continent of the world. A single cave system, like Mammoth Cave, which is in Kentucky, can be as long as more than 600 kilometers. And an abyss like Krubera Voronya, which is in the Caucasus region, actually the deepest cave explored in the world, can go as far as more than 2,000 meters below the surface. That means a journey of weeks for a cave explorer.Caves form in karstic regions. So karstic regions are areas of the world where the infiltrating water along cracks, fractures, can easily dissolve soluble lithologies, forming a drainage system of tunnels, conduits — a three-dimensional network, actually. Karstic regions cover almost 20 percent of the continents' surface, and we know actually that speleologists in the last 50 years have explored roughly 30,000 kilometers of cave passages around the world, which is a big number. But geologists have estimated that what is still missing, to be discovered and mapped, is something around 10 million kilometers.That means that for each meter of a cave that we already know, that we have explored, there are still some tens of kilometers of undiscovered passages. That means that this is really an endless continent, and we will never be able to explore it completely. And this estimation is made without considering other types of caves, like, for example, inside glaciers or even volcanic caves, which are not karstic, but are formed by lava flows. And if we have a look at other planets like, for example, Mars, you will see that this characteristic is not so specific of our home planet. However, I will show to you now that we do not need to go to Mars to explore alien worlds.I'm a speleologist, that means a cave explorer. And I started with this passion when I was really young in the mountains not far from my hometown in North Italy, in the karstic regions of the Alps and the Dolomites. But soon, the quest for exploration brought me to the farthest corner of the planet, searching for new potential entrances of this undiscovered continent. And in 2009, I had the opportunity to visit the tepui table mountains, which are in the Orinoco and Amazon basins. These massifs enchanted me from the first time I saw them. They are surrounded by vertical, vertiginous rock walls with silvery waterfalls that are lost in the forest. They really inspired in me a sense of wilderness, with a soul older than millions and millions of years. And this dramatic landscape inspired among other things also Conan Doyle's ""The Lost World"" novel in 1912. And they are, really, a lost world. Scientists consider those mountains as islands in time, being separated from the surrounding lowlands since tens of millions of years ago. They are surrounded by up to 1,000-meter-high walls, resembling a fortress, impregnable by humans. And, in fact, only a few of these mountains have been climbed and explored on their top.These mountains contain also a scientific paradox: They are made by quartz, which is a very common mineral on the earth's crust, and the rock made up by quartz is called quartzite, and quartzite is one of the hardest and least soluble minerals on earth. So we do not expect at all to find a cave there. Despite this, in the last 10 years, speleologists from Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and, of course, Venezuela and Brazil, have explored several caves in this area. So how can it be possible?To understand this contradiction, we have to consider the time factor, because the history of the tepuis is extremely long, starting about 1.6 billion years ago with the formation of the rock, and then evolving with the uplift of the region 150 million years ago, after the disruption of the Pangaea supercontinent and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean. So you can imagine that the water had tens or even hundreds of millions of years to sculpt the strangest forms on the tepuis' surfaces, but also to open the fractures and form stone cities, rock cities, fields of towers which are characterized in the famous landscape of the tepuis. But nobody could have imagined what was happening inside a mountain in so long a time frame.And so I was focusing in 2010 on one of those massifs, the Auyán-tepui, which is very famous because it hosts Angel Falls, which is the highest waterfall in the world — about 979 meters of vertical drop. And I was searching for hints of the existence of cave systems through satellite images, and finally we identified an area of collapses of the surface — so, big boulders, rock piles — and that means that there was a void below. It was a clear indication that there was something inside the mountain.So we did several attempts to reach this area, by land and with a helicopter, but it was really difficult because — you have to imagine that these mountains are covered by clouds most of the year, by fog. There are strong winds, and there are almost 4,000 millimeters of rainfall per year, so it's really, really difficult to find good conditions. And only in 2013 we finally landed on the spot and we started the exploration of the cave.The cave is huge. It's a huge network under the surface of the tepui plateau, and in only ten days of expedition, we explored more than 20 kilometers of cave passages. And it's a huge network of underground rivers, channels, big rooms, extremely deep shafts.So it's really an incredible place. And we named it Imawarì Yeuta. That means, in the Pemón indigenous language, ""The House of the Gods."" You have to imagine that indigenous people have never been there. It was impossible for them to reach this area. However, there were legends about the existence of a cave in the mountain. So when we started the exploration, we had to explore with a great respect, both because of the religious beliefs of the indigenous people, but also because it was really a sacred place, because no human had entered there before. So we had to use special protocols to not contaminate the environment with our presence, and we tried also to share with the community, with the indigenous community, our discoveries.And the caves represent, really, a snapshot of the past. The time needed for their formation could be as long as 50 or even 100 million years, which makes them possibly the oldest caves that we can explore on earth. What you can find there is really evidence of a lost world.When you enter a quartzite cave, you have to completely forget what you know about caves — classic limestone caves or the touristic caves that you can visit in several places in the world. Because what seems a simple stalactite here is not made by calcium carbonate, but is made by opal, and one of those stalactites can require tens of millions of years to be formed. But you can find even stranger forms, like these mushrooms of silica growing on a boulder. And you can imagine our talks when we were exploring the cave. We were the first entering and discovering those unknown things, things like those monster eggs. And we were a bit scared because it was all a discovery, and we didn't want to find a dinosaur. We didn't find a dinosaur.(Laughter)Anyway, actually, we know that this kind of formation, after several studies, we know that these kinds of formations are living organisms. They are bacterial colonies using silica to build mineral structures resembling stromatolites. Stromatolites are some of the oldest forms of life that we can find on earth. And here in the tepuis, the interesting thing is that these bacteria colonies have evolved in complete isolation from the external surface, and without being in contact with humans. They have never been in contact with humans. So the implications for science are enormous, because here you could find, for example, microbes that could be useful to resolve diseases in medicine, or you could find even a new kind of material with unknown properties. And, in fact, we discovered in the cave a new mineral structure for science, which is rossiantonite, a phosphate-sulfate.So whatever you find in the cave, even a small cricket, has evolved in the dark in complete isolation. And, really, everything that you can feel in the cave are real connections between the biological and the mineralogical world. So as we explore this dark continent and discover its mineralogical and biological diversity and uniqueness, we will find probably clues about the origin of life on our planet and on the relationship and evolution of life in relationship with the mineral world. What seems only a dark, empty environment could be in reality a chest of wonders full of useful information.With a team of Italian, Venezuelan and Brazilian speleologists, which is called La Venta Teraphosa, we will be back soon to Latin America, because we want to explore other tepuis in the farthest areas of the Amazon. There are still very unknown mountains, like Marahuaca, which is almost 3,000 meters high above sea level, or Aracà, which is in the upper region of Rio Negro in Brazil. And we suppose that we could find there even bigger cave systems, and each one with its own undiscovered world.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Francesco. Give me that to start so we don't forget. Francesco, you said we don't need to go to Mars to find alien life, and indeed, last time we spoke, you were in Sardinia and you were training European astronauts. So what do you, a speleologist, tell and teach to the astronauts?Francesco Sauro: Yeah, we are — it's a program of training for not only European, but also NASA, Roskosmos, JAXA astronauts, in a cave. So they stay in a cave for about one week in isolation. They have to work together in a real, real dangerous environment, and it's a real alien environment for them because it's unusual. It's always dark. They have to do science. They have a lot of tasks. And it's very similar to a journey to Mars or the International Space Station.BG: In principle. FS: Yes.BG: I want to go back to one of the pictures that was in your slide show, and it's just representative of the other photos —Weren't those photos amazing? Yeah?Audience: Yeah!(Applause)FS: I have to thank the photographers from the team La Venta, because all of those photos are from the photographers.BG: You bring, actually, photographers with you in the expedition. They're professionals, they're speleologists and photographers. But when I look at these pictures, I wonder: there is zero light down there, and yet they look incredibly well-exposed. How do you take these pictures? How do your colleagues, the photographers, take these pictures?FS: Yeah. They are working in a darkroom, basically, so you can open the shutter of the camera and use the lights to paint the environment.BG: So you're basically —FS: Yes. You can even keep the shutter open for one minute and then paint the environment. The final result is what you want to achieve.BG: You spray the environment with light and that's what you get. Maybe we can try this at home someday, I don't know.(Laughter)BG: Francesco, grazie. FS: Grazie.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/francesco_sauro_deep_under_the_earth_s_surface_discovering_beauty_and_science
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"I want to tell you three stories about the power of relationships to solve the deep and complex social problems of this century.You know, sometimes it seems like all these problems of poverty, inequality, ill health, unemployment, violence, addiction — they're right there in one person's life. So I want to tell you about someone like this that I know. I'm going to call her Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening. The TV's on at full volume. One of her sons is fighting with one of her daughters. Another son, Ryan, is keeping up this constant stream of abuse from the kitchen, and the dogs are locked behind the bedroom door and straining. Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners, and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. And Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her.But when I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives, 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them. They think nothing of calling social services to try and mediate one of the many arguments that broke out. And the family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. And the governments say that there are 100,000 families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. And they also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes. None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference.This is a chart we made in the same city with another family like Ella's. This shows 30 years of intervention in that family's life. And just as with Ella, not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem. One of the policemen says to me, ""Look, I just deliver the message and then I leave.""So, I've spent time living with families like Ella's in different parts of the world, because I want to know: what can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? I want to know what it feels like to live in Ella's family. I want to know what's going on and what we can do differently.Well, the first thing I learned is that cost is a really slippery concept. Because when the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year. Because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart, exactly where they are.And I also spent time with the frontline workers, and I learned that it is an impossible situation. So Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86 percent of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, more meetings with colleagues to discuss the forms, and maybe most shockingly, the 14 percent of the time he has to be with Ryan is spent getting data and information for the system. So he says to Ryan, ""How often have you been smoking? Have you been drinking? When did you go to school?"" And this kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan.When we made this chart, the frontline workers, the professionals — they stared at it absolutely amazed. It snaked around the walls of their offices. So many hours, so well meant, but ultimately so futile. And there was this moment of absolute breakdown, and then of clarity: we had to work in a different way.So in a really brave step, the leaders of the city where Ella lives agreed that we could start by reversing Ryan's ratio. So everyone who came into contact with Ella or a family like Ella's would spend 80 percent of their time working with the families and only 20 percent servicing the system. And even more radically, the families would lead and they would decide who was in a best position to help them. So Ella and another mother were asked to be part of an interview panel, to choose from amongst the existing professionals who would work with them. And many, many people wanted to join us, because you don't go into this kind of work to manage a system, you go in because you can and you want to make a difference.So Ella and the mother asked everybody who came through the door, ""What will you do when my son starts kicking me?"" And so the first person who comes in says, ""Well, I'll look around for the nearest exit and I will back out very slowly, and if the noise is still going on, I'll call my supervisor."" And the mothers go, ""You're the system. Get out of here!"" And then the next person who comes is a policeman, and he says, ""Well, I'll tackle your son to the ground and then I'm not sure what I'll do."" And the mothers say, ""Thank you."" So, they chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers, who said — well, they weren't going to talk in jargon. They showed their human qualities and convinced the mothers that they would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them.So these new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. And so one of the families went out for supper. They went to McDonald's and they sat down and they talked and they listened for the first time in a long time. Another family asked the team if they would help them do up their home. And one mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise.And in a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers. And then some remarkable changes took place. Maybe it's not surprising that the journey for Ella has had some big steps backwards as well as forwards. But today, she's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, and the neighbors, who previously just hoped this family would be moved anywhere except next door to them, are fine. They've made some new friendships. And all the same people have been involved in this transformation — same families, same workers. But the relationship between them has been supported to change.So I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. And I've learned that this really has to change.So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, a kind of authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change, to be brave like Ella and try something new. And, you know, it's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge, who was the architect of the first welfare state and the author of the Beveridge Report, had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system. And the impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. The Beveridge Report sold over 100,000 copies in the first weeks of publication alone. People queued in the rain on a November night to get hold of a copy, and it was read across the country, across the colonies, across Europe, across the United States of America, and it had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions — they are global, and they've come to seem like common sense. They've become so ingrained in us, that actually we don't even see them anymore. And I think it's really important to say that in the 20th century, they were remarkably successful, these institutions. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges.So let me tell you a second story. What do you think today is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking? It's loneliness. According to government statistics, one person over 60 — one in three — doesn't speak to or see another person in a week. One person in 10, that's 850,000 people, doesn't speak to anyone else in a month. And we're not the only people with this problem; this problem touches the whole of the Western world. And it's even more acute in countries like China, where a process of rapid urbanization, mass migration, has left older people alone in the villages. And so the services that Beveridge designed and exported — they can't address this kind of problem. Loneliness is like a collective relational challenge, and it can't be addressed by a traditional bureaucratic response.So some years ago, wanting to understand this problem, I started to work with a group of about 60 older people in South London, where I live. I went shopping, I played bingo, but mainly I was just observing and listening. I wanted to know what we could do differently. And if you ask them, people tell you they want two things. They want somebody to go up a ladder and change a light bulb, or to be there when they come out of hospital. They want on-demand, practical support. And they want to have fun. They want to go out, do interesting things with like-minded people, and make friends like we've all made friends at every stage of our lives. So we rented a phone line, hired a couple of handymen, and started a service we called ""Circle."" And Circle offers its local membership a toll-free 0 800 number that they can call on demand for any support. And people have called us for so many reasons. They've called because their pets are unwell, their DVD is broken, they've forgotten how to use their mobile phone, or maybe they are coming out of hospital and they want someone to be there. And Circle also offers a rich social calendar — knitting, darts, museum tours, hot air ballooning — you name it. But here's the interesting thing, the really deep change: over time, the friendships that have formed have begun to replace the practical offer.So let me tell you about Belinda. Belinda's a Circle member, and she was going into hospital for a hip operation, so she called her local Circle to say they wouldn't see her for a bit. And Damon, who runs the local Circle, calls her back and says, ""How can I help?"" And Belinda says, ""Oh no, I'm fine — Jocelyn is doing the shopping, Tony's doing the gardening, Melissa and Joe are going to come in and cook and chat."" So five Circle members had organized themselves to take care of Belinda. And Belinda's 80, although she says that she feels 25 inside, but she also says that she felt stuck and pretty down when she joined Circle. But the simple act of encouraging her to come along to that first event led to a process where natural friendships formed, friendships that today are replacing the need for expensive services. It's relationships that are making the difference.So I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and center of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems — they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology.I've talked about the first two factors. It's technology that enables these approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people. So the technology we've used is really simple, it's made up of available things like databases, mobile phones. Circle has got this very simple system that underpins it, enables a small local team to support a membership of up to a thousand. And you can contrast this with a neighborhood organization of the 1970s, when this kind of scale just wasn't possible, neither was the quality or the longevity that the spine of technology can provide.So it's relationships underpinned by technology that can turn the Beveridge models on their heads. The Beveridge models are all about institutions with finite resources, anonymously managing access. In my work at the front line, I've seen again and again how up to 80 percent of resource is spent keeping people out. So professionals have to administer these increasingly complex forms of administration that are basically about stopping people accessing the service or managing the queue. And Circle, like the relational services that we and others have designed, inverts this logic. What it says is, the more people, the more relationships, the stronger the solution. So I want to tell you my third and final story, which is about unemployment. In Britain, as in most places in the world, our welfare states were primarily designed to get people into work, to educate them for this, and to keep them healthy. But here, too, the systems are failing. And so the response has been to try and make these old systems even more efficient and transactional — to speed up processing times, divide people into ever-smaller categories, try and target services at them more efficiently — in other words, the very opposite of relational.But guess how most people find work today? Through word of mouth. It turns out that in Britain today, most new jobs are not advertised. So it's friends that tell you about a job, it's friends that recommend you for a job, and it's a rich and diverse social network that helps you find work. Maybe some of you here this evening are thinking, ""But I found my job through an advert,"" but if you think back, it was probably a friend that showed you the ad and then encouraged you to apply. But not surprisingly, people who perhaps most need this rich and diverse network are those who are most isolated from it.So knowing this, and also knowing about the costs and failure of current systems, we designed something new with relationships at its heart. We designed a service that encourages people to meet up, people in and out of work, to work together in structured ways and try new opportunities. And, well, it's very hard to compare the results of these new systems with the old transactional models, but it looks like, with our first 1,000 members, we outperformed existing services by a factor of three, at a fraction of the cost. And here, too, we've used technology, but not to network people in the way that a social platform would do. We've used it to bring people face to face and connect them with each other, building real relationships and supporting people to find work.At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. And in it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions. And human relationships were already withering. But unfortunately, this third report was much less read than Beveridge's earlier work.But today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services, in an approach that I call ""Relational Welfare."" We need to leave behind these old, transactional, unsuitable, outdated models, and we need to adopt instead the shared collective relational responses that can support a family like Ella's, that can address an issue like loneliness, that can support people into work and up the skills curve in a modern labor market, that can also address challenges of education, of health care systems, and so many more of those problems that are pressing on our societies. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hilary_cottam_social_services_are_broken_how_we_can_fix_them
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"When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, ""You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself."" So freedom came with responsibility. But my imagination would take me to all these wonderful places, where everything was possible. So I grew up in a bubble of innocence — or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth. And growing up, I found out that adults make a mess, and they're not very good at cleaning up after themselves.Fast forward, I am an adult now, and I teach citizen science and invention at the Hong Kong Harbour School. And it doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash. So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches — and no, he is not drinking alcohol, and if he is, I did not give it to him.(Laughter)And so it's sad to say, but today more than 80 percent  of the oceans have plastic in them. It's a horrifying fact. And in past decades, we've been taking those big ships out and those big nets, and we collect those plastic bits that we look at under a microscope, and we sort them, and then we put this data onto a map. But that takes forever, it's very expensive, and so it's quite risky to take those big boats out.So with my students, ages six to 15, we've been dreaming of inventing a better way. So we've transformed our tiny Hong Kong classroom into a workshop. And so we started building this small workbench, with different heights, so even really short kids can participate. And let me tell you, kids with power tools are awesome and safe.(Laughter)Not really. And so, back to plastic. We collect this plastic and we grind it to the size we find it in the ocean, which is very small because it breaks down. And so this is how we work. I let the imaginations of my students run wild. And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work. And so we have agreed that instead of collecting plastic bits, we are going to collect only the data. So we're going to get an image of the plastic with a robot — so robots, kids get very excited. And the next thing we do — we do what we call ""rapid prototyping."" We are so rapid at prototyping that the lunch is still in the lunchbox when we're hacking it.(Laughter)And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there — and this is the image that we get in the robot. So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water.So we documented this invention step by step on a website for inventors called Instructables, in the hope that somebody would make it even better.What was really cool about this project was that the students saw a local problem, and boom — they are trying to immediately address it.[I can investigate my local problem]But my students in Hong Kong are hyperconnected kids. And they watch the news, they watch the Internet, and they came across this image. This was a child, probably under 10, cleaning up an oil spill bare-handed, in the Sundarbans, which is the world's largest mangrove forest in Bangladesh. So they were very shocked, because this is the water they drink, this is the water they bathe in, this is the water they fish in — this is the place where they live. And also you can see the water is brown, the mud is brown and oil is brown, so when everything is mixed up, it's really hard to see what's in the water. But, there's a technology that's rather simple, that's called spectrometry, that allows you see what's in the water. So we built a rough prototype of a spectrometer, and you can shine light through different substances that produce different spectrums, so that can help you identify what's in the water. So we packed this prototype of a sensor, and we shipped it to Bangladesh. So what was cool about this project was that beyond addressing a local problem, or looking at a local problem, my students used their empathy and their sense of being creative to help, remotely, other kids.[I can investigate a remote problem]So I was very compelled by doing the second experiments, and I wanted to take it even further — maybe addressing an even harder problem, and it's also closer to my heart.So I'm half Japanese and half French, and maybe you remember in 2011 there was a massive earthquake in Japan. It was so violent that it triggered several giant waves — they are called tsunami — and those tsunami destroyed many cities on the eastern coast of Japan. More than 14,000 people died in an instant. Also, it damaged the nuclear power plant of Fukushima, the nuclear power plant just by the water. And today, I read the reports and an average of 300 tons are leaking from the nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. And today the whole Pacific Ocean has traces of contamination of cesium-137. If you go outside on the West Coast, you can measure Fukushima everywhere. But if you look at the map, it can look like most of the radioactivity has been washed away from the Japanese coast, and most of it is now — it looks like it's safe, it's blue. Well, reality is a bit more complicated than this.So I've been going to Fukushima every year since the accident, and I measure independently and with other scientists, on land, in the river — and this time we wanted to take the kids. So of course we didn't take the kids, the parents wouldn't allow that to happen.(Laughter)But every night we would report to ""Mission Control"" — different masks they're wearing. It could look like they didn't take the work seriously, but they really did because they're going to have to live with radioactivity their whole life. And so what we did with them is that we'd discuss the data we collected that day, and talk about where we should be going next — strategy, itinerary, etc... And to do this, we built a very rough topographical map of the region around the nuclear power plant. And so we built the elevation map, we sprinkled pigments to represent real-time data for radioactivity, and we sprayed water to simulate the rainfall. And with this we could see that the radioactive dust was washing from the top of the mountain into the river system, and leaking into the ocean. So it was a rough estimate.But with this in mind, we organized this expedition, which was the closest civilians have been to the nuclear power plant. We are sailing 1.5 kilometers away from the nuclear power plant, and with the help of the local fisherman, we are collecting sediment from the seabed with a custom sediment sampler we've invented and built. We pack the sediment into small bags, we then dispatch them to hundreds of small bags that we send to different universities, and we produce the map of the seabed radioactivity, especially in estuaries where the fish will reproduce, and I will hope that we will have improved the safety of the local fishermen and of your favorite sushi.(Laughter)You can see a progression here — we've gone from a local problem to a remote problem to a global problem. And it's been super exciting to work at these different scales, with also very simple, open-source technologies. But at the same time, it's been increasingly frustrating because we have only started to measure the damage that we have done. We haven't even started to try to solve the problems. And so I wonder if we should just take a leap and try to invent better ways to do all these things.And so the classroom started to feel a little bit small, so we found an industrial site in Hong Kong, and we turned it into the largest mega-space focused on social and environmental impact. It's in central Hong Kong, and it's a place we can work with wood, metal, chemistry, a bit of biology, a bit of optics, basically you can build pretty much everything there. And its a place where adults and kids can play together. It's a place where kids' dreams can come true, with the help of adults, and where adults can be kids again.Student: Acceleration! Acceleration!Cesar Harada: We're asking questions such as, can we invent the future of mobility with renewable energy? For example. Or, can we help the mobility of the aging population by transforming very standard wheelchairs into cool, electric vehicles?So plastic, oil and radioactivity are horrible, horrible legacies, but the very worst legacy that we can leave our children is lies. We can no longer afford to shield the kids from the ugly truth because we need their imagination to invent the solutions.So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers — we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_harada_how_i_teach_kids_to_love_science
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"Interpreter: Piano, ""p,"" is my favorite musical symbol. It means to play softly. If you're playing a musical instrument and you notice a ""p"" in the score, you need to play softer. Two p's — even softer. Four p's — extremely soft. This is my drawing of a p-tree, which demonstrates no matter how many thousands upon thousands of p's there may be, you'll never reach complete silence. That's my current definition of silence: a very obscure sound.I'd like to share a little bit about the history of American Sign Language, ASL, plus a bit of my own background. French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s, and as time went by, mixed with local signs, it evolved into the language we know today as ASL. So it has a history of about 200 years.I was born deaf, and I was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of my life. And I believed it to be true. Yet, I realize now that that wasn't the case at all. Sound was very much a part of my life, really, on my mind every day. As a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it's as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them.So how is it that I understand sound? Well, I watch how people behave and respond to sound. You people are like my loudspeakers, and amplify sound. I learn and mirror that behavior. At the same time, I've learned that I create sound, and I've seen how people respond to me. Thus I've learned, for example ... ""Don't slam the door!"" ""Don't make too much noise when you're eating from the potato-chip bag!""(Laughter)""Don't burp, and when you're eating, make sure you don't scrape your utensils on the plate."" All of these things I term ""sound etiquette."" Maybe I think about sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does. I'm hyper-vigilant around sound. And I'm always waiting in eager nervous anticipation around sound, about what's to come next.Hence, this drawing. TBD, to be decided. TBC, to be continued. TBA, to be announced. And you notice the staff — there are no notes contained in the lines. That's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears.In Deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound. This is a sign for ""staff"" in ASL. A typical staff contains five lines. Yet for me, signing it with my thumb sticking up like that doesn't feel natural. That's why you'll notice in my drawings, I stick to four lines on paper.In the year 2008, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there. Prior to this time, I had been working as a painter. During this summer, I visited different museums and gallery spaces, and as I went from one place to the next, I noticed there was no visual art there. At that time, sound was trending, and this struck me ... there was no visual art, everything was auditory.Now sound has come into my art territory. Is it going to further distance me from art? I realized that doesn't have to be the case at all. I actually know sound. I know it so well that it doesn't have to be something just experienced through the ears. It could be felt tactually, or experienced as a visual, or even as an idea.So I decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into my art practice. And everything that I had been taught regarding sound, I decided to do away with and unlearn. I started creating a new body of work. And when I presented this to the art community, I was blown away with the amount of support and attention I received. I realized: sound is like money, power, control — social currency. In the back of my mind, I've always felt that sound was your thing, a hearing person's thing. And sound is so powerful that it could either disempower me and my artwork, or it could empower me. I chose to be empowered.There's a massive culture around spoken language. And just because I don't use my literal voice to communicate, in society's eyes it's as if I don't have a voice at all. So I need to work with individuals who can support me as an equal and become my voice. And that way, I'm able to maintain relevancy in society today.So at school, at work and institutions, I work with many different ASL interpreters. And their voice becomes my voice and identity. They help me to be heard. And their voices hold value and currency. Ironically, by borrowing out their voices, I'm able to maintain a temporary form of currency, kind of like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate. If I didn't continue this practice, I feel that I could just fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency.So with sound as my new art medium, I delved into the world of music. And I was surprised to see the similarities between music and ASL. For example, a musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper. And the same holds true for a concept in ASL. They're both highly spatial and highly inflected — meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.I'd like to share with you a piano metaphor, to have you have a better understanding of how ASL works. So, envision a piano. ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano — such as facial expression, body movement, speed, hand shape and so on, as you play the piano — English is a linear language, as if one key is being pressed at a time. However, ASL is more like a chord — all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL. If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning. The same applies to music in regards to pitch, tone and volume. In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical parameters, you can express different ideas.For example, take the sign TO-LOOK-AT. This is the sign TO-LOOK-AT. I'm looking at you. Staring at you.(Laughter)(Laughter)Oh — busted.(Laughter)Uh-oh. What are you looking at? Aw, stop.(Laughter)I then started thinking, ""What if I was to look at ASL through a musical lens?"" If I was to create a sign and repeat it over and over, it could become like a piece of visual music. For example, this is the sign for ""day,"" as the sun rises and sets. This is ""all day."" If I was to repeat it and slow it down, visually it looks like a piece of music. All ... day. I feel the same holds true for ""all night."" ""All night."" This is ALL-NIGHT, represented in this drawing. And this led me to thinking about three different kinds of nights: ""last night,"" ""overnight,"" (Sings) ""all night long.""(Laughter)I feel like the third one has a lot more musicality than the other two.(Laughter)This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time. For example, 1H is one hand, 2H is two hand, present tense happens closest and in front of the body, future is in front of the body and the past is to your back. So, the first example is ""a long time ago."" Then ""past,"" ""used to"" and the last one, which is my favorite, with the very romantic and dramatic notion to it, ""once upon a time.""(Laughter)""Common time"" is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure. Yet when I see the word ""common time,"" what automatically comes to mind for me is ""at the same time."" So notice RH: right hand, LH: left hand. We have the staff across the head and the chest.[Head: RH, Flash claw][Common time][Chest: LH, Flash claw]I'm now going to demonstrate a hand shape called the ""flash claw."" Can you please follow along with me? Everybody, hands up. Now we're going to do it in both the head and the chest, kind of like ""common time"" or at the same time. Yes, got it. That means ""to fall in love"" in International [Sign].(Laughter)International [Sign], as a note, is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world.The second one I'd like to demonstrate is this — please follow along with me again. And now this. This is ""colonization"" in ASL.(Laughter)Now the third — please follow along again. And again. This is ""enlightenment"" in ASL. So let's do all three together. ""Fall in love,"" ""colonization"" and ""enlightenment."" Good job, everyone.(Laughter)Notice how all three signs are very similar, they all happen at the head and the chest, but they convey quite different meanings.So it's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is. However, in this day and age, we live in a very audio-centric world. And just because ASL has no sound to it, it automatically holds no social currency. We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency — without sound. And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society. And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music.ASL is such a rich treasure that I'd like you to have the same experience. And I'd like to invite you to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language. And you never know, you might just fall in love with us.(Applause)Thank you.Denise Kahler-Braaten: Hey, that's me.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christine_sun_kim_the_enchanting_music_of_sign_language
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"A year ago, we were invited by the Swiss Embassy in Berlin to present our art projects. We are used to invitations, but this invitation really thrilled us. The Swiss Embassy in Berlin is special. It is the only old building in the government district that was not destroyed during the Second World War, and it sits right next to the Federal Chancellery. No one is closer to Chancellor Merkel than the Swiss diplomats.(Laughter)The government district in Berlin also contains the Reichstag — Germany's parliament — and the Brandenburg Gate, and right next to the gate there are other embassies, in particular the US and the British Embassy.Although Germany is an advanced democracy, citizens are limited in their constitutional rights in its government district. The right of assembly and the right to demonstrate are restricted there. And this is interesting from an artistic point of view. The opportunities to exercise participation and to express oneself are always bound to a certain order and always subject to a specific regulation. With an awareness of the dependencies of these regulations, we can gain a new perspective. The given terms and conditions shape our perception, our actions and our lives.And this is crucial in another context. Over the last couple of years, we learned that from the roofs of the US and the British Embassy, the secret services have been listening to the entire district, including the mobile phone of Angela Merkel. The antennas of the British GCHQ are hidden in a white cylindrical radome, while the listening post of the American NSA is covered by radio transparent screens.But how to address these hidden and disguised forces? With my colleague, Christoph Wachter, we accepted the invitation of the Swiss Embassy. And we used this opportunity to exploit the specific situation.If people are spying on us, it stands to reason that they have to listen to what we are saying.(Laughter)On the roof of the Swiss Embassy, we installed a series of antennas. They weren't as sophisticated as those used by the Americans and the British.(Laughter)They were makeshift can antennas, not camouflaged but totally obvious and visible. The Academy of Arts joined the project, and so we built another large antenna on their rooftop, exactly between the listening posts of the NSA and the GCHQ.(Laughter)Never have we been observed in such detail while building an art installation. A helicopter circled over our heads with a camera registering each and every move we made, and on the roof of the US Embassy, security officers patrolled. Although the government district is governed by a strict police order, there are no specific laws relating to digital communication. Our installation was therefore perfectly legal, and the Swiss Ambassador informed Chancellor Merkel about it. We named the project ""Can You Hear Me?""(Laughter)The antennas created an open and free Wi-Fi communication network in which anyone who wanted to would be able to participate using any Wi-Fi-enabled device without any hindrance, and be able to send messages to those listening on the frequencies that were being intercepted. Text messages, voice chat, file sharing — anything could be sent anonymously. And people did communicate. Over 15,000 messages were sent. Here are some examples.""Hello world, hello Berlin, hello NSA, hello GCHQ.""""NSA Agents, Do the Right Thing! Blow the whistle!""""This is the NSA. In God we trust. All others we track!!!!!""(Laughter)""#@nonymous is watching #NSA #GCHQ - we are part of your organizations. # expect us. We will #shutdown""""This is the NSA's Achilles heel. Open Networks.""""Agents, what twisted story of yourself will you tell your grandchildren?""""@NSA My neighbors are noisy. Please send a drone strike.""(Laughter)""Make Love, Not cyberwar.""We invited the embassies and the government departments to participate in the open network, too, and to our surprise, they did. Files appeared on the network, including classified documents leaked from the parliamentary investigation commission, which highlights that the free exchange and discussion of vital information is starting to become difficult, even for members of a parliament. We also organized guided tours to experience and sound out the power constellations on-site. The tours visited the restricted zones around the embassies, and we discussed the potential and the highlights of communication.If we become aware of the constellation, the terms and conditions of communication, it not only broadens our horizon, it allows us to look behind the regulations that limit our worldview, our specific social, political or aesthetic conventions.Let's look at an actual example. The fate of people living in the makeshift settlements on the outskirts of Paris is hidden and faded from view. It's a vicious circle. It's not poverty, not racism, not exclusion that are new. What is new is how these realities are hidden and how people are made invisible in an age of global and overwhelming communication and exchange. Such makeshift settlements are considered illegal, and therefore those living in them don't have a chance of making their voices heard. On the contrary, every time they appear, every time they risk becoming visible, merely gives grounds for further persecution, expulsion and suppression. What interested us was how we could come to know this hidden side. We were searching for an interface and we found one. It's not a digital interface, but a physical one: it's a hotel.We named the project ""Hotel Gelem."" Together with Roma families, we created several Hotel Gelems in Europe, for example, in Freiburg in Germany, in Montreuil near Paris, and also in the Balkans. These are real hotels. People can stay there. But they aren't a commercial enterprise. They are a symbol. You can go online and ask for a personal invitation to come and live for a few days in the Hotel Gelem, in their homes, eating, working and living with the Roma families. Here, the Roma families are not the travelers; the visitors are. Here, the Roma families are not a minority; the visitors are.The point is not to make judgments, but rather to find out about the context that determines these disparate and seemingly insurmountable contradictions. In the world of globalization, the continents are drifting closer to each other. Cultures, goods and people are in permanent exchange, but at the same time, the gap between the world of the privileged and the world of the excluded is growing.We were recently in Australia. For us, it was no problem to enter the country. We have European passports, visas and air tickets. But asylum seekers who arrive by boat in Australia are deported or taken to prison. The interception of the boats and the disappearance of the people into the detention system are veiled by the Australian authorities. These procedures are declared to be secret military operations. After dramatic escapes from crisis zones and war zones, men, women and children are detained by Australia without trial, sometimes for years.During our stay, however, we managed to reach out and work with asylum seekers who were imprisoned, despite strict screening and isolation. From these contexts was born an installation in the art space of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.On the face of it, it was a very simple installation. On the floor, a stylized compass gave the direction to each immigration detention center, accompanied by the distance and the name of the immigration facility. But the exhibition step came in the form of connectivity. Above every floor marking, there was a headset. Visitors were offered the opportunity to talk directly to a refugee who was or had been imprisoned in a specific detention facility and engage in a personal conversation. In the protected context of the art exhibition, asylum seekers felt free to talk about themselves, their story and their situation, without fear of consequences. Visitors immersed themselves in long conversations about families torn apart, about dramatic escapes from war zones, about suicide attempts, about the fate of children in detention. Emotions ran deep. Many wept. Several revisited the exhibition. It was a powerful experience.Europe is now facing a stream of migrants. The situation for the asylum seekers is made worse by contradictory policies and the temptation of militarized responses. We have also established communication systems in remote refugee centers in Switzerland and Greece. They are all about providing basic information — weather forecasts, legal information, guidance. But they are significant. Information on the Internet that could ensure survival along dangerous routes is being censored, and the provision of such information is becoming increasingly criminalized.This brings us back to our network and to the antennas on the roof of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin and the ""Can You Hear Me?"" project. We should not take it for granted to be boundlessly connected. We should start making our own connections, fighting for this idea of an equal and globally interconnected world. This is essential to overcome our speechlessness and the separation provoked by rival political forces. It is only in truly exposing ourselves to the transformative power of this experience that we can overcome prejudice and exclusion.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Mathias. The other half of your artistic duo is also here. Christoph Wachter, come onstage.(Applause)First, tell me just a detail: the name of the hotel is not a random name. Gelem means something specific in the Roma language.Mathias Jud: Yes, ""Gelem, Gelem"" is the title of the Romani hymn, the official, and it means ""I went a long way.""BG: That's just to add the detail to your talk. But you two traveled to the island of Lesbos very recently, you're just back a couple of days ago, in Greece, where thousands of refugees are arriving and have been arriving over the last few months. What did you see there and what did you do there?Christoph Wachter: Well, Lesbos is one of the Greek islands close to Turkey, and during our stay, many asylum seekers arrived by boat on overcrowded dinghies, and after landing, they were left completely on their own. They are denied many services. For example, they are not allowed to buy a bus ticket or to rent a hotel room, so many families literally sleep in the streets. And we installed networks there to allow basic communication, because I think, I believe, it's not only that we have to speak about the refugees, I think we need to start talking to them. And by doing so, we can realize that it is about human beings, about their lives and their struggle to survive.BG: And allow them to talk as well. Christoph, thank you for coming to TED. Mathias, thank you for coming to TED and sharing your story.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mathias_jud_art_that_lets_you_talk_back_to_nsa_spies
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"A few years ago, I broke into my own house. I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees — and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet — it was very cold. And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys. In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them. So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight. I thought about calling a locksmith — at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold. I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase.So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it. This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even.Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy.(Laughter)And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport.(Laughter)So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight. Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep.(Laughter)And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening? Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe. So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later. I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight.(Laughter)It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. I'll start with the obvious ones.Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works. There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things — where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things. But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around. So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. So in the home, designate a spot for your keys — a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. For your passport, a particular drawer. For your reading glasses, a particular table. If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them.What about travel? Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud. If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement.Now these are some rather obvious things. Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol. Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place.And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make. And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision.And so I want to talk about that. And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition. But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making — any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts.So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, ""I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high."" Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke. And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, ""You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin."" And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them. And so you're thinking, ""Yeah! Give me the statin.""But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less. It's for the number needed to treat. Now, what is this, the NNT? It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped. And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that? The number should be one. My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help. But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way. And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me. We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough. But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? How many people have to take it before one person is helped? 300. This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com. I ran through the numbers myself. 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented.Now you're probably thinking, ""Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol. Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway."" But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, ""Tell me about the side effects."" Right? So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients. And they include terrible things — debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress — but now you're thinking, ""Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug."" But wait a minute. Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly. So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot. 300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people. You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug.Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not. I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor. Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent. You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not.Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat. For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49. That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped. And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients. They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence. And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two.So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot. And you also want to think about things like quality of life. Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end? These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones. You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking.Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter. Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations.I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. We all are going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place.Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through. So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_levitin_how_to_stay_calm_when_you_know_you_ll_be_stressed
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"A girl I've never met before changed my life and the life of thousands of other people. I'm the CEO of DoSomething.org. It's one of the largest organizations in the world for young people. In fact it's bigger than the Boy Scouts in the United States. And we're not homophobic.(Laughter)And it's true — the way we communicate with young people is by text, because that's how young people communicate. So we'll run over 200 campaigns this year, things like collecting peanut butter for food pantries, or making Valentine's Day cards for senior citizens who are homebound. And we'll text them. And we'll have a 97 percent open rate. It'll over-index Hispanic and urban. We collected 200,000 jars of peanut butter and over 365,000 Valentine's Day cards. This is big scale. OK —(Applause)But there's one weird side effect. Every time we send out a text message, we get back a few dozen text messages having nothing to do with peanut butter or hunger or senior citizens — but text messages about being bullied, text messages about being addicted to pot. And the worst message we ever got said exactly this: ""He won't stop raping me. It's my dad. He told me not to tell anyone. Are you there?""We couldn't believe this was happening. We couldn't believe that something so horrific could happen to a human being, and that she would share it with us — something so intimate, so personal. And we realized we had to stop triaging this and we had to build a crisis text line for these people in pain. So we launched Crisis Text Line, very quietly, in Chicago and El Paso — just a few thousand people in each market. And in four months, we were in all 295 area codes in America. Just to put that into perspective, that's zero marketing and faster growth than when Facebook first launched.(Applause)Text is unbelievably private. No one hears you talking. So we spike everyday at lunch time — kids are sitting at the lunch table and you think that she's texting the cute boy across the hall, but she's actually texting us about her bulimia. And we don't get the word ""like"" or ""um"" or hyperventilating or crying. We just get facts.We get things like, ""I want to die. I have a bottle of pills on the desk in front of me."" And so the crisis counselor says, ""How about you put those pills in the drawer while we text?"" And they go back and forth for a while. And the crisis counselor gets the girl to give her her address, because if you're texting a text line, you want help. So she gets the address and the counselor triggers an active rescue while they're texting back and forth. And then it goes quiet — 23 minutes with no response from this girl. And the next message that comes in says — it's the mom — ""I had no idea, and I was in the house, we're in an ambulance on our way to the hospital."" As a mom that one just — The next message comes a month later. ""I just got out of the hospital. I was diagnosed as bipolar, and I think I'm going to be OK.""(Applause)I would love to tell you that that's an unusual exchange, but we're doing on average 2.41 active rescues a day. Thirty percent of our text messages are about suicide and depression — huge. The beautiful thing about Crisis Text Line is that these are strangers counseling other strangers on the most intimate issues, and getting them from hot moments to cold moments. It's exciting, and I will tell you that we have done a total of more than 6.5 million text messages in less than two years.(Applause)But the thing that really gets me hot and sweaty about this, the thing that really gets me psyched is the data: 6.5 million messages — that's the volume, velocity and variety to provide a really juicy corpus. We can do things like predictive work. We can do all kinds of conclusions and learnings from that data set. So we can be better, and the world can be better. So how do we use the data to make us better? Alright, chances are someone here, someone watching this has seen a therapist or a shrink at some point in time in your life — you do not have to raise your hand.(Laughter)How do you know that person's any good? Oh, they have a degree from Harvard on the wall? Are you sure he didn't graduate in the bottom 10 percent?(Laughter)When my husband and I saw a marriage counselor, I thought she was a genius when she said, ""I'll see you guys in two weeks — but I need to see you next week, sir.""(Laughter)We have the data to know what makes a great counselor. We know that if you text the words ""numbs"" and ""sleeve,"" there's a 99 percent match for cutting. We know that if you text in the words ""mg"" and ""rubber band,"" there's a 99 percent match for substance abuse. And we know that if you text in ""sex,"" ""oral"" and ""Mormon,"" you're questioning if you're gay. Now that's interesting information that a counselor could figure out but that algorithm in our hands means that an automatic pop-up says, ""99 percent match for cutting — try asking one of these questions"" to prompt the counselor. Or ""99 percent match for substance abuse, here are three drug clinics near the texter."" It makes us more accurate.On the day that Robin Williams committed suicide, people flooded hotlines all over this country. It was sad to see an icon, a funnyman, commit suicide, and there were three hour wait times on every phone hotline in the country. We had a spike in volume also. The difference was if you text us, ""I want to die,"" or ""I want to kill myself,"" the algorithm reads that, you're code orange, and you become number one in the queue. So we can handle severity, not chronological.(Applause)This data is also making the world better because I'm sitting on the world's first map of real-time crises. Think about it: those 6.5 million messages, auto-tagging through natural language processes, all of these data points — I can tell you that the worst day of the week for eating disorders: Monday. The worst time of day for substance abuse: 5am. And that Montana is a beautiful place to visit but you do not want to live there, because it is the number one state for suicidal ideation.And we've made this data public and free and open. We've pulled all the personally identifiable information. And it's in a place called CrisisTrends.org. Because I want schools to be able to see that Monday is the worst day for eating disorders, so that they can plan meals and guidance counselors to be there on Mondays. And I want families to see that substance abuse questions spike at 5am. I want somebody to take care of those Native American reservations in Montana.(Applause)Data, evidence makes policy, research, journalism, policing, school boards — everything better. I don't think of myself as a mental health activist. I think of myself as a national health activist. I get really excited about this data, I'm a little nerdy. Yeah, that sounded too girly. I'm nerdy.(Laughter)I love data. And the only difference really between me and those people in hoodies down the road with their fat-funded companies, is that I'm not inspired by helping you find Chinese food at 2am in Dallas, or helping you touch your wrist and get a car immediately, or swipe right and get laid. I'm inspired —(Laughter, applause)I want to use tech and data to make the world a better place. I want to use it to help that girl, who texted in about  being raped by her father. Because the truth is we never heard from her again. And I hope that she is somewhere safe and healthy, and I hope that she sees this talk and she knows that her desperation and her courage inspired the creation of Crisis Text Line and inspires me every freaking day.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_lublin_the_heartbreaking_text_that_inspired_a_crisis_help_line
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"Every day, I listen to harrowing stories of people fleeing for their lives, across dangerous borders and unfriendly seas. But there's one story that keeps me awake at night, and it's about Doaa.A Syrian refugee, 19 years old, she was living a grinding existence in Egypt working day wages. Her dad was constantly thinking of his thriving business back in Syria that had been blown to pieces by a bomb. And the war that drove them there was still raging in its fourth year. And the community that once welcomed them there had become weary of them. And one day, men on motorcycles tried to kidnap her. Once an aspiring student thinking only of her future, now she was scared all the time.But she was also full of hope, because she was in love with a fellow Syrian refugee named Bassem. Bassem was also struggling in Egypt, and he said to Doaa, ""Let's go to Europe; seek asylum, safety. I will work, you can study — the promise of a new life."" And he asked her father for her hand in marriage.But they knew to get to Europe they had to risk their lives, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea, putting their hands in smugglers', notorious for their cruelty. And Doaa was terrified of the water. She always had been. She never learned to swim.It was August that year, and already 2,000 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean, but Doaa knew of a friend who had made it all the way to Northern Europe, and she thought, ""Maybe we can, too."" So she asked her parents if they could go, and after a painful discussion, they consented, and Bassem paid his entire life savings — 2,500 dollars each — to the smugglers.It was a Saturday morning when the call came, and they were taken by bus to a beach, hundreds of people on the beach. They were taken then by small boats onto an old fishing boat, 500 of them crammed onto that boat, 300 below, [200] above. There were Syrians, Palestinians, Africans, Muslims and Christians, 100 children, including Sandra — little Sandra, six years old — and Masa, 18 months. There were families on that boat, crammed together shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet. Doaa was sitting with her legs crammed up to her chest, Bassem holding her hand.Day two on the water, they were sick with worry and sick to their stomachs from the rough sea.Day three, Doaa had a premonition. And she said to Bassem, ""I fear we're not going to make it. I fear the boat is going to sink."" And Bassem said to her, ""Please be patient. We will make it to Sweden, we will get married and we will have a future.""Day four, the passengers were getting agitated. They asked the captain, ""When will we get there?"" He told them to shut up, and he insulted them. He said, ""In 16 hours we will reach the shores of Italy."" They were weak and weary. Soon they saw a boat approach — a smaller boat, 10 men on board, who started shouting at them, hurling insults, throwing sticks, asking them to all disembark and get on this smaller, more unseaworthy boat. The parents were terrified for their children, and they collectively refused to disembark. So the boat sped away in anger, and a half an hour later, came back and started deliberately ramming a hole in the side of Doaa's boat, just below where she and Bassem were sitting. And she heard how they yelled, ""Let the fish eat your flesh!"" And they started laughing as the boat capsized and sank.The 300 people below deck were doomed. Doaa was holding on to the side of the boat as it sank, and watched in horror as a small child was cut to pieces by the propeller. Bassem said to her, ""Please let go, or you'll be swept in and the propeller will kill you, too."" And remember — she can't swim. But she let go and she started moving her arms and her legs, thinking, ""This is swimming."" And miraculously, Bassem found a life ring. It was one of those child's rings that they use to play in swimming pools and on calm seas. And Doaa climbed onto the ring, her arms and her legs dangling by the side. Bassem was a good swimmer, so he held her hand and tread water. Around them there were corpses. Around 100 people survived initially, and they started coming together in groups, praying for rescue. But when a day went by and no one came, some people gave up hope, and Doaa and Bassem watched as men in the distance took their life vests off and sank into the water.One man approached them with a small baby perched on his shoulder, nine months old — Malek. He was holding onto a gas canister to stay afloat, and he said to them, ""I fear I am not going to survive. I'm too weak. I don't have the courage anymore."" And he handed little Malek over to Bassem and to Doaa, and they perched her onto the life ring. So now they were three, Doaa, Bassem and little Malek.And let me take a pause in this story right here and ask the question: why do refugees like Doaa take these kinds of risks? Millions of refugees are living in exile, in limbo. They're living in countries [fleeing] from a war that has been raging for four years. Even if they wanted to return, they can't. Their homes, their businesses, their towns and their cities have been completely destroyed. This is a UNESCO World Heritage City, Homs, in Syria. So people continue to flee into neighboring countries, and we build refugee camps for them in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people live in camps like these, and thousands and thousands more, millions, live in towns and cities. And the communities, the neighboring countries that once welcomed them with open arms and hearts are overwhelmed. There are simply not enough schools, water systems, sanitation. Even rich European countries could never handle such an influx without massive investment. The Syria war has driven almost four million people over the borders, but over seven million people are on the run inside the country. That means that over half the Syrian population has been forced to flee. Back to those neighboring countries hosting so many. They feel that the richer world has done too little to support them. And days have turned into months, months into years. A refugee's stay is supposed to be temporary.Back to Doaa and Bassem in the water. It was their second day, and Bassem was getting very weak. And now it was Doaa's turn to say to Bassem, ""My love, please hold on to hope, to our future. We will make it."" And he said to her, ""I'm sorry, my love, that I put you in this situation. I have never loved anyone as much as I love you."" And he released himself into the water, and Doaa watched as the love of her life drowned before her eyes.Later that day, a mother came up to Doaa with her small 18-month-old daughter, Masa. This was the little girl I showed you in the picture earlier, with the life vests. Her older sister Sandra had just drowned, and her mother knew she had to do everything in her power to save her daughter. And she said to Doaa, ""Please take this child. Let her be part of you. I will not survive."" And then she went away and drowned.So Doaa, the 19-year-old refugee who was terrified of the water, who couldn't swim, found herself in charge of two little baby kids. And they were thirsty and they were hungry and they were agitated, and she tried her best to amuse them, to sing to them, to say words to them from the Quran. Around them, the bodies were bloating and turning black. The sun was blazing during the day. At night, there was a cold moon and fog. It was very frightening. On the fourth day in the water, this is how Doaa probably looked on the ring with her two children.A woman came on the fourth day and approached her and asked her to take another child — a little boy, just four years old. When Doaa took the little boy and the mother drowned, she said to the sobbing child, ""She just went away to find you water and food."" But his heart soon stopped, and Doaa had to release the little boy into the water.Later that day, she looked up into the sky with hope, because she saw two planes crossing in the sky. And she waved her arms, hoping they would see her, but the planes were soon gone.But that afternoon, as the sun was going down, she saw a boat, a merchant vessel. And she said, ""Please, God, let them rescue me."" She waved her arms and she felt like she shouted for about two hours. And it had become dark, but finally the searchlights found her and they extended a rope, astonished to see a woman clutching onto two babies.They pulled them onto the boat, they got oxygen and blankets, and a Greek helicopter came to pick them up and take them to the island of Crete.But Doaa looked down and asked, ""What of Malek?"" And they told her the little baby did not survive — she drew her last breath in the boat's clinic. But Doaa was sure that as they had been pulled up onto the rescue boat, that little baby girl had been smiling.Only 11 people survived that wreck, of the 500. There was never an international investigation into what happened. There were some media reports about mass murder at sea, a terrible tragedy, but that was only for one day. And then the news cycle moved on.Meanwhile, in a pediatric hospital on Crete, little Masa was on the edge of death. She was really dehydrated. Her kidneys were failing. Her glucose levels were dangerously low. The doctors did everything in their medical power to save them, and the Greek nurses never left her side, holding her, hugging her, singing her words. My colleagues also visited and said pretty words to her in Arabic. Amazingly, little Masa survived.And soon the Greek press started reporting about the miracle baby, who had survived four days in the water without food or anything to drink, and offers to adopt her came from all over the country.And meanwhile, Doaa was in another hospital on Crete, thin, dehydrated. An Egyptian family took her into their home as soon as she was released. And soon word went around about Doaa's survival, and a phone number was published on Facebook. Messages started coming in.""Doaa, do you know what happened to my brother? My sister? My parents? My friends? Do you know if they survived?""One of those messages said, ""I believe you saved my little niece, Masa."" And it had this photo. This was from Masa's uncle, a Syrian refugee who had made it to Sweden with his family and also Masa's older sister. Soon, we hope, Masa will be reunited with him in Sweden, and until then, she's being cared for in a beautiful orphanage in Athens.And Doaa? Well, word went around about her survival, too. And the media wrote about this slight woman, and couldn't imagine how she could survive all this time under such conditions in that sea, and still save another life. The Academy of Athens, one of Greece's most prestigious institutions, gave her an award of bravery, and she deserves all that praise, and she deserves a second chance. But she wants to still go to Sweden. She wants to reunite with her family there. She wants to bring her mother and her father and her younger siblings away from Egypt there as well, and I believe she will succeed. She wants to become a lawyer or a politician or something that can help fight injustice. She is an extraordinary survivor.But I have to ask: what if she didn't have to take that risk? Why did she have to go through all that? Why wasn't there a legal way for her to study in Europe? Why couldn't Masa have taken an airplane to Sweden? Why couldn't Bassem have found work? Why is there no massive resettlement program for Syrian refugees, the victims of the worst war of our times? The world did this for the Vietnamese in the 1970s. Why not now? Why is there so little investment in the neighboring countries hosting so many refugees? And why, the root question, is so little being done to stop the wars, the persecution and the poverty that is driving so many people to the shores of Europe? Until these issues are resolved, people will continue to take to the seas and to seek safety and asylum.And what happens next? Well, that is largely Europe's choice. And I understand the public fears. People are worried about their security, their economies, the changes of culture. But is that more important than saving human lives? Because there is something fundamental here that I think overrides the rest, and it is about our common humanity. No person fleeing war or persecution should have to die crossing a sea to reach safety.(Applause)One thing is for sure, that no refugee would be on those dangerous boats if they could thrive where they are. And no migrant would take that dangerous journey if they had enough food for themselves and their children. And no one would put their life savings in the hands of those notorious smugglers if there was a legal way to migrate.So on behalf of little Masa and on behalf of Doaa and of Bassem and of those 500 people who drowned with them, can we make sure that they did not die in vain? Could we be inspired by what happened, and take a stand for a world in which every life matters?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_fleming_a_boat_carrying_500_refugees_sunk_at_sea_the_story_of_two_survivors
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"This is one of the most amazing animals on the face of the Earth. This is a tapir. Now this, this is a baby tapir, the cutest animal offspring in the animal kingdom.(Laughter)By far. There is no competition here.I have dedicated the past 20 years of my life to the research and conservation of tapirs in Brazil, and it has been absolutely amazing. But at the moment, I've been thinking really, really hard about the impact of my work. I've been questioning myself about the real contributions I have made for the conservation of these animals I love so much. Am I being effective in safeguarding their survival? Am I doing enough? I guess the big question here is, am I studying tapirs and contributing to their conservation, or am I just documenting their extinction?The world is facing so many different conservation crises. We all know that. It's all over the news every day. Tropical forests and other ecosystems are being destroyed, climate change, so many species on the brink of extinction: tigers, lions, elephants, rhinos, tapirs.This is the lowland tapir, the tapir species I work with, the largest terrestrial mammal of South America. They're massive. They're powerful. Adults can weigh up to 300 kilos. That's half the size of a horse. They're gorgeous.Tapirs are mostly found in tropical forests such as the Amazon, and they absolutely need large patches of habitat in order to find all the resources they need to reproduce and survive. But their habitat is being destroyed, and they have been hunted out of several parts of their geographic distribution.And you see, this is very, very unfortunate because tapirs are extremely important for the habitats where they are found. They're herbivores. Fifty percent of their diet consists of fruit, and when they eat the fruit, they swallow the seeds, which they disperse throughout the habitat through their feces. They play this major role in shaping and maintaining the structure and diversity of the forest, and for that reason, tapirs are known as gardeners of the forest. Isn't that amazing? If you think about it, the extinction of tapirs would seriously affect biodiversity as a whole.I started my tapir work in 1996, still very young, fresh out of college, and it was a pioneer research and conservation program. At that point, we had nearly zero information about tapirs, mostly because they're so difficult to study. They're nocturnal, solitary, very elusive animals, and we got started getting very basic data about these animals.But what is it that a conservationist does? Well, first, we need data. We need field research. We need those long-term datasets to support conservation action, and I told you tapirs are very hard to study, so we have to rely on indirect methods to study them. We have to capture and anesthetize them so that we can install GPS collars around their necks and follow their movements, which is a technique used by many other conservationists around the world. And then we can gather information about how they use space, how they move through the landscape, what are their priority habitats, and so much more.Next, we must disseminate what we learn. We have to educate people about tapirs and how important these animals are. And it's amazing how many people around the world do not know what a tapir is. In fact, many people think this is a tapir. Let me tell you, this is not a tapir.(Laughter)This is a giant anteater. Tapirs do not eat ants. Never. Ever.And then next we have to provide training, capacity building. It is our responsibility to prepare the conservationists of the future. We are losing several conservation battles, and we need more people doing what we do, and they need the skills, and they need the passion to do that. Ultimately, we conservationists, we must be able to apply our data, to apply our accumulated knowledge to support actual conservation action. Our first tapir program took place in the Atlantic Forest in the eastern part of Brazil, one of the most threatened biomes in the world. The destruction of the Atlantic Forest began in the early 1500s, when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil, beginning European colonization in the eastern part of South America. This forest was almost completely cleared for timber, agriculture, cattle ranching and the construction of cities, and today only seven percent of the Atlantic forest is still left standing. And tapirs are found in very, very small, isolated, disconnected populations. In the Atlantic Forest, we found out that tapirs move through open areas of pastureland and agriculture going from one patch of forest to patch of forest. So our main approach in this region was to use our tapir data to identify the potential places for the establishment of wildlife corridors in between those patches of forest, reconnecting the habitat so that tapirs and many other animals could cross the landscape safely.After 12 years in the Atlantic Forest, in 2008, we expanded our tapir conservation efforts to the Pantanal in the western part of Brazil near the border with Bolivia and Paraguay. This is the largest continuous freshwater floodplain in the world, an incredible place and one of the most important strongholds for lowland tapirs in South America. And working in the Pantanal has been extremely refreshing because we found large, healthy tapir populations in the area, and we have been able to study tapirs in the most natural conditions we'll ever find, very much free of threats.In the Pantanal, besides the GPS collars, we are using another technique: camera traps. This camera is equipped with a movement sensor and it photographs animals when they walk in front of it. So thanks to these amazing devices, we have been able to gather precious information about tapir reproduction and social organization which are very important pieces of the puzzle when you're trying to develop those conservation strategies.And right now, 2015, we are expanding our work once again to the Brazilian Cerrado, the open grasslands and shrub forests in the central part of Brazil. Today this region is the very epicenter of economic development in my country, where natural habitat and wildlife populations are rapidly being eradicated by several different threats, including once again cattle ranching, large sugarcane and soybean plantations, poaching, roadkill, just to name a few. And somehow, tapirs are still there, which gives me a lot of hope. But I have to say that starting this new program in the Cerrado was a bit of a slap in the face. When you drive around and you find dead tapirs along the highways and signs of tapirs wandering around in the middle of sugarcane plantations where they shouldn't be, and you talk to kids and they tell you that they know how tapir meat tastes because their families poach and eat them, it really breaks your heart.The situation in the Cerrado made me realize — it gave me the sense of urgency. I am swimming against the tide. It made me realize that despite two decades of hard work trying to save these animals, we still have so much work to do if we are to prevent them from disappearing. We have to find ways to solve all these problems. We really do, and you know what? We really came to a point in the conservation world where we have to think out of the box. We'll have to be a lot more creative than we are right now. And I told you, roadkill is a big problem for tapirs in the Cerrado, so we just came up with the idea of putting reflective stickers on the GPS collars we put on the tapirs. These are the same stickers used on big trucks to avoid collision. Tapirs cross the highways after dark, so the stickers will hopefully help drivers see this shining thing crossing the highway, and maybe they will slow down a little bit. For now, this is just a crazy idea. We don't know. We'll see if it will reduce the amount of tapir roadkill. But the point is, maybe this is the kind of stuff that needs to be done.And although I'm struggling with all these questions in my mind right now, I have a pact with tapirs. I know in my heart that tapir conservation is my cause. This is my passion. I am not alone. I have this huge network of supporters behind me, and there is no way I'm ever going to stop. I will continue doing this, most probably for the rest of my life. And I'll keep doing this for Patrícia, my namesake, one of the first tapirs we captured and monitored in the Atlantic Forest many, many years ago; for Rita and her baby Vincent in the Pantanal. And I'll keep doing this for Ted, a baby tapir we captured in December last year also in the Pantanal.And I will keep doing this for the hundreds of tapirs that I've had the pleasure to meet over the years and the many others I know I will encounter in the future. These animals deserve to be cared for. They need me. They need us. And you know? We human beings deserve to live in a world where we can get out there and see and benefit from not only tapirs but all the other beautiful species, now and in the future.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_medici_the_coolest_animal_you_know_nothing_about_and_how_we_can_save_it
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"I would like to demonstrate for the first time in public that it is possible to transmit a video from a standard off-the-shelf LED lamp to a solar cell with a laptop acting as a receiver. There is no Wi-Fi involved, it's just light.And you may wonder, what's the point? And the point is this: There will be a massive extension of the Internet to close the digital divide, and also to allow for what we call ""The Internet of Things"" — tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet.In my view, such an extension of the Internet can only work if it's almost energy-neutral. This means we need to use existing infrastructure as much as possible. And this is where the solar cell and the LED come in.I demonstrated for the first time, at TED in 2011, Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity. Li-Fi uses off-the-shelf LEDs to transmit data incredibly fast, and also in a safe and secure manner. Data is transported by the light, encoded in subtle changes of the brightness. If we look around, we have many LEDs around us, so there's a rich infrastructure of Li-Fi transmitters around us. But so far, we have been using special devices — small photo detectors, to receive the information encoded in the data. I wanted to find a way to also use existing infrastructure to receive data from our Li-Fi lights. And this is why I have been looking into solar cells and solar panels.A solar cell absorbs light and converts it into electrical energy. This is why we can use a solar cell to charge our mobile phone. But now we need to remember that the data is encoded in subtle changes of the brightness of the LED, so if the incoming light fluctuates, so does the energy harvested from the solar cell. This means we have a principal mechanism in place to receive information from the light and by the solar cell, because the fluctuations of the energy harvested correspond to the data transmitted.Of course the question is: can we receive very fast and subtle changes of the brightness, such as the ones transmitted by our LED lights? And the answer to that is yes, we can. We have shown in the lab that we can receive up to 50 megabytes per second from a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell. And this is faster than most broadband connections these days.Now let me show you in practice. In this box is a standard, off-the-shelf LED lamp. This is a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell; it is connected to the laptop. And also we have an instrument here to visualize the energy we harvest from the solar cell. And this instrument shows something at the moment. This is because the solar cell already harvests light from the ambient light.Now what I would like to do first is switch on the light, and I'll simply, only switch on the light, for a moment, and what you'll notice is that the instrument jumps to the right. So the solar cell, for a moment, is harvesting energy from this artificial light source. If I turn it off, we see it drops. I turn it on ... So we harvest energy with the solar cell.But next I would like to activate the streaming of the video. And I've done this by pressing this button. So now this LED lamp here is streaming a video by changing the brightness of the LED in a very subtle way, and in a way that you can't recognize with your eye, because the changes are too fast to recognize. But in order to prove the point, I can block the light of the solar cell. So first you notice the energy harvesting drops and the video stops as well. If I remove the blockage, the video will restart.(Applause)And I can repeat that. So we stop the transmission of the video and energy harvesting stops as well. So that is to show that the solar cell acts as a receiver.But now imagine that this LED lamp is a street light, and there's fog. And so I want to simulate fog, and that's why I brought a handkerchief with me.(Laughter)And let me put the handkerchief over the solar cell. First you notice the energy harvested drops, as expected, but now the video still continues. This means, despite the blockage, there's sufficient light coming through the handkerchief to the solar cell, so that the solar cell is able to decode and stream that information, in this case, a high-definition video.What's really important here is that a solar cell has become a receiver for high-speed wireless signals encoded in light, while it maintains its primary function as an energy-harvesting device. That's why it is possible to use existing solar cells on the roof of a hut to act as a broadband receiver from a laser station on a close by hill, or indeed, lamp post.And It really doesn't matter where the beam hits the solar cell. And the same is true for translucent solar cells integrated into windows, solar cells integrated into street furniture, or indeed, solar cells integrated into these billions of devices that will form the Internet of Things. Because simply, we don't want to charge these devices regularly, or worse, replace the batteries every few months.As I said to you, this is the first time I've shown this in public. It's very much a lab demonstration, a prototype. But my team and I are confident that we can take this to market within the next two to three years. And we hope we will be able to contribute to closing the digital divide, and also contribute to connecting all these billions of devices to the Internet. And all of this without causing a massive explosion of energy consumption — because of the solar cells, quite the opposite.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harald_haas_a_breakthrough_new_kind_of_wireless_internet
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(Guitar music starts)(Music ends)(Applause)(Distorted guitar music starts)(Music ends)(Applause)(Ambient/guitar music starts)(Music ends)(Applause),"https://www.ted.com/talks/kaki_king_a_musical_escape_into_a_world_of_light_and_color
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"Jenni Chang: When I told my parents I was gay, the first thing they said to me was, ""We're bringing you back to Taiwan.""(Laughter)In their minds, my sexual orientation was America's fault. The West had corrupted me with divergent ideas, and if only my parents had never left Taiwan, this would not have happened to their only daughter. In truth, I wondered if they were right.Of course, there are gay people in Asia, just as there are gay people in every part of the world. But is the idea of living an ""out"" life, in the ""I'm gay, this is my spouse, and we're proud of our lives together"" kind of way just a Western idea?If I had grown up in Taiwan, or any place outside of the West, would I have found models of happy, thriving LGBT people?Lisa Dazols: I had similar notions. As an HIV social worker in San Francisco, I had met many gay immigrants. They told me their stories of persecution in their home countries, just for being gay, and the reasons why they escaped to the US. I saw how this had beaten them down. After 10 years of doing this kind of work, I needed better stories for myself. I knew the world was far from perfect, but surely not every gay story was tragic.JC: So as a couple, we both had a need to find stories of hope. So we set off on a mission to travel the world and look for the people we finally termed as the ""Supergays.""(Laughter)These would be the LGBT individuals who were doing something extraordinary in the world. They would be courageous, resilient, and most of all, proud of who they were. They would be the kind of person that I aspire to be. Our plan was to share their stories to the world through film.LD: There was just one problem. We had zero reporting and zero filmmaking experience.(Laughter)We didn't even know where to find the Supergays, so we just had to trust that we'd figure it all out along the way. So we picked 15 countries in Asia, Africa and South America, countries outside the West that varied in terms of LGBT rights. We bought a camcorder, ordered a book on how to make a documentary —(Laughter)you can learn a lot these days — and set off on an around-the-world trip.JC: One of the first countries that we traveled to was Nepal. Despite widespread poverty, a decade-long civil war, and now recently, a devastating earthquake, Nepal has made significant strides in the fight for equality. One of the key figures in the movement is Bhumika Shrestha. A beautiful, vibrant transgendered woman, Bhumika has had to overcome being expelled from school and getting incarcerated because of her gender presentation. But, in 2007, Bhumika and Nepal's LGBT rights organization successfully petitioned the Nepali Supreme Court to protect against LGBT discrimination.Here's Bhumika:(Video) BS: What I'm most proud of? I'm a transgendered person. I'm so proud of my life. On December 21, 2007, the supreme court gave the decision for the Nepal government to give transgender identity cards and same-sex marriage.LD: I can appreciate Bhumika's confidence on a daily basis. Something as simple as using a public restroom can be a huge challenge when you don't fit in to people's strict gender expectations. Traveling throughout Asia, I tended to freak out women in public restrooms. They weren't used to seeing someone like me. I had to come up with a strategy, so that I could just pee in peace.(Laughter)So anytime I would enter a restroom, I would thrust out my chest to show my womanly parts, and try to be as non-threatening as possible. Putting out my hands and saying, ""Hello"", just so that people could hear my feminine voice. This all gets pretty exhausting, but it's just who I am. I can't be anything else.JC: After Nepal, we traveled to India. On one hand, India is a Hindu society, without a tradition of homophobia. On the other hand, it is also a society with a deeply patriarchal system, which rejects anything that threatens the male-female order. When we spoke to activists, they told us that empowerment begins with ensuring proper gender equality, where the women's status is established in society. And in that way, the status of LGBT people can be affirmed as well.LD: There we met Prince Manvendra. He's the world's first openly gay prince. Prince Manvendra came out on the ""Oprah Winfrey Show,"" very internationally. His parents disowned him and accused him of bringing great shame to the royal family. We sat down with Prince Manvendra and talked to him about why he decided to come out so very publicly.Here he is:(Video) Prince Manvendra:  I felt there was a lot of need to break this stigma and discrimination which is existing in our society. And that instigated me to come out openly and talk about myself. Whether we are gay, we are lesbian, we are transgender, bisexual or whatever sexual minority we come from, we have to all unite and fight for our rights. Gay rights cannot be won in the court rooms, but in the hearts and the minds of the people.JC: While getting my hair cut, the woman cutting my hair asked me, ""Do you have a husband?"" Now, this was a dreaded question that I got asked a lot by locals while traveling. When I explained to her that I was with a woman instead of a man, she was incredulous, and she asked me a lot of questions about my parents' reactions and whether I was sad that I'd never be able to have children. I told her that there are no limitations to my life and that Lisa and I do plan to have a family some day. Now, this woman was ready to write me off as yet another crazy Westerner. She couldn't imagine that such a phenomenon could happen in her own country. That is, until I showed her the photos of the Supergays that we interviewed in India. She recognized Prince Manvendra from television and soon I had an audience of other hairdressers interested in meeting me.(Laughter)And in that ordinary afternoon, I had the chance to introduce an entire beauty salon to the social changes that were happening in their own country.LD: From India, we traveled to East Africa, a region known for intolerance towards LGBT people. In Kenya, 89 percent of people who come out to their families are disowned. Homosexual acts are a crime and can lead to incarceration. In Kenya, we met the soft-spoken David Kuria. David had a huge mission of wanting to work for the poor and improve his own government. So he decided to run for senate. He became Kenya's first openly gay political candidate. David wanted to run his campaign without denying the reality of who he was. But we were worried for his safety because he started to receive death threats.(Video) David Kuria:  At that point, I was really scared because they were actually asking for me to be killed. And, yeah, there are some people out there who do it and they feel that they are doing a religious obligation.JC: David wasn't ashamed of who he was. Even in the face of threats, he stayed authentic.LD: At the opposite end of the spectrum is Argentina. Argentina's a country where 92 percent of the population identifies as Catholic. Yet, Argentina has LGBT laws that are even more progressive than here in the US. In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the 10th in the world to adopt marriage equality.There, we met María Rachid. María was a driving force behind that movement.María Rachid (Spanish): I always say that, in reality, the effects of marriage equality are not only for those couples that get married. They are for a lot of people that, even though they may never get married, will be perceived differently by their coworkers, their families and neighbors, from the national state's message of equality. I feel very proud of Argentina because Argentina today is a model of equality. And hopefully soon, the whole world will have the same rights.JC: When we made the visit to my ancestral lands, I wish I could have shown my parents what we found there. Because here is who we met:(Video) One, two, three. Welcome gays to Shanghai!(Laughter)A whole community of young, beautiful Chinese LGBT people. Sure, they had their struggles. But they were fighting it out. In Shanghai, I had the chance to speak to a local lesbian group and tell them our story in my broken Mandarin Chinese. In Taipei, each time we got onto the metro, we saw yet another lesbian couple holding hands. And we learned that Asia's largest LGBT pride event happens just blocks away from where my grandparents live. If only my parents knew.LD: By the time we finished our not-so-straight journey around the world,(Laughter)we had traveled 50,000 miles and logged 120 hours of video footage. We traveled to 15 countries and interviewed 50 Supergays. Turns out, it wasn't hard to find them at all.JC: Yes, there are still tragedies that happen on the bumpy road to equality. And let's not forget that 75 countries still criminalize homosexuality today. But there are also stories of hope and courage in every corner of the world. What we ultimately took away from our journey is, equality is not a Western invention.LD: One of the key factors in this equality movement is momentum, momentum as more and more people embrace their full selves and use whatever opportunities they have to change their part of the world, and momentum as more and more countries find models of equality in one another. When Nepal protected against LGBT discrimination, India pushed harder. When Argentina embraced marriage equality, Uruguay and Brazil followed. When Ireland said yes to equality,(Applause)the world stopped to notice. When the US Supreme Court makes a statement to the world that we can all be proud of.(Applause)JC: As we reviewed our footage, what we realized is that we were watching a love story. It wasn't a love story that was expected of me, but it is one filled with more freedom, adventure and love than I could have ever possibly imagined. One year after returning home from our trip, marriage equality came to California. And in the end, we believe, love will win out.(Video) By the power vested in me, by the state of California and by God Almighty, I now pronounce you spouses for life. You may kiss.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jenni_chang_and_lisa_dazols_this_is_what_lgbt_life_is_like_around_the_world
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"So whenever I visit a school and talk to students, I always ask them the same thing: Why do you Google? Why is Google the search engine of choice for you? Strangely enough, I always get the same three answers. One, ""Because it works,"" which is a great answer; that's why I Google, too. Two, somebody will say, ""I really don't know of any alternatives."" It's not an equally great answer and my reply to that is usually, ""Try to Google the word 'search engine,' you may find a couple of interesting alternatives."" And last but not least, thirdly, inevitably, one student will raise her or his hand and say, ""With Google, I'm certain to always get the best, unbiased search result."" Certain to always get the best, unbiased search result.Now, as a man of the humanities, albeit a digital humanities man, that just makes my skin curl, even if I, too, realize that that trust, that idea of the unbiased search result is a cornerstone in our collective love for and appreciation of Google. I will show you why that, philosophically, is almost an impossibility.But let me first elaborate, just a little bit, on a basic principle behind each search query that we sometimes seem to forget. So whenever you set out to Google something, start by asking yourself this: ""Am I looking for an isolated fact?"" What is the capital of France? What are the building blocks of a water molecule? Great — Google away. There's not a group of scientists who are this close to proving that it's actually London and H30. You don't see a big conspiracy among those things. We agree, on a global scale, what the answers are to these isolated facts.But if you complicate your question just a little bit and ask something like, ""Why is there an Israeli-Palestine conflict?"" You're not exactly looking for a singular fact anymore, you're looking for knowledge, which is something way more complicated and delicate. And to get to knowledge, you have to bring 10 or 20 or 100 facts to the table and acknowledge them and say, ""Yes, these are all true."" But because of who I am, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, I will value them differently. And I will say, ""Yes, this is true, but this is more important to me than that."" And this is where it becomes interesting, because this is where we become human. This is when we start to argue, to form society. And to really get somewhere, we need to filter all our facts here, through friends and neighbors and parents and children and coworkers and newspapers and magazines, to finally be grounded in real knowledge, which is something that a search engine is a poor help to achieve.So, I promised you an example just to show you why it's so hard to get to the point of true, clean, objective knowledge — as food for thought. I will conduct a couple of simple queries, search queries. We'll start with ""Michelle Obama,"" the First Lady of the United States. And we'll click for pictures. It works really well, as you can see. It's a perfect search result, more or less. It's just her in the picture, not even the President.How does this work? Quite simple. Google uses a lot of smartness to achieve this, but quite simply, they look at two things more than anything. First, what does it say in the caption under the picture on each website? Does it say ""Michelle Obama"" under the picture? Pretty good indication it's actually her on there. Second, Google looks at the picture file, the name of the file as such uploaded to the website. Again, is it called ""MichelleObama.jpeg""? Pretty good indication it's not Clint Eastwood in the picture. So, you've got those two and you get a search result like this — almost.Now, in 2009, Michelle Obama was the victim of a racist campaign, where people set out to insult her through her search results. There was a picture distributed widely over the Internet where her face was distorted to look like a monkey. And that picture was published all over. And people published it very, very purposefully, to get it up there in the search results. They made sure to write ""Michelle Obama"" in the caption and they made sure to upload the picture as ""MichelleObama.jpeg,"" or the like. You get why — to manipulate the search result. And it worked, too. So when you picture-Googled for ""Michelle Obama"" in 2009, that distorted monkey picture showed up among the first results.Now, the results are self-cleansing, and that's sort of the beauty of it, because Google measures relevance every hour, every day. However, Google didn't settle for that this time, they just thought, ""That's racist and it's a bad search result and we're going to go back and clean that up manually. We are going to write some code and fix it,"" which they did. And I don't think anyone in this room thinks that was a bad idea. Me neither.But then, a couple of years go by, and the world's most-Googled Anders, Anders Behring Breivik, did what he did. This is July 22 in 2011, and a terrible day in Norwegian history. This man, a terrorist, blew up a couple of government buildings walking distance from where we are right now in Oslo, Norway and then he traveled to the island of Utøya and shot and killed a group of kids. Almost 80 people died that day.And a lot of people would describe this act of terror as two steps, that he did two things: he blew up the buildings and he shot those kids. It's not true. It was three steps. He blew up those buildings, he shot those kids, and he sat down and waited for the world to Google him. And he prepared all three steps equally well.And if there was somebody who immediately understood this, it was a Swedish web developer, a search engine optimization expert in Stockholm, named Nikke Lindqvist. He's also a very political guy and he was right out there in social media, on his blog and Facebook. And he told everybody, ""If there's something that this guy wants right now, it's to control the image of himself. Let's see if we can distort that. Let's see if we, in the civilized world, can protest against what he did through insulting him in his search results.""And how? He told all of his readers the following, ""Go out there on the Internet, find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — publish them in your feeds, on your websites, on your blogs. Make sure to write the terrorist's name in the caption, make sure to name the picture file ""Breivik.jpeg."" Let's teach Google that that's the face of the terrorist."" And it worked. Two years after that campaign against Michelle Obama, this manipulation campaign against Anders Behring Breivik worked. If you picture-Googled for him weeks after the July 22 events from Sweden, you'd see that picture of dog poop high up in the search results, as a little protest.Strangely enough, Google didn't intervene this time. They did not step in and manually clean those search results up. So the million-dollar question, is there anything different between these two happenings here? Is there anything different between what happened to Michelle Obama and what happened to Anders Behring Breivik? Of course not. It's the exact same thing, yet Google intervened in one case and not in the other.Why? Because Michelle Obama is an honorable person, that's why, and Anders Behring Breivik is a despicable person. See what happens there? An evaluation of a person takes place and there's only one power-player in the world with the authority to say who's who. ""We like you, we dislike you. We believe in you, we don't believe in you. You're right, you're wrong. You're true, you're false. You're Obama, and you're Breivik."" That's power if I ever saw it.So I'm asking you to remember that behind every algorithm is always a person, a person with a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate. And my message goes out not only to Google, but to all believers in the faith of code around the world. You need to identify your own personal bias. You need to understand that you are human and take responsibility accordingly.And I say this because I believe we've reached a point in time when it's absolutely imperative that we tie those bonds together again, tighter: the humanities and the technology. Tighter than ever. And, if nothing else, to remind us that that wonderfully seductive idea of the unbiased, clean search result is, and is likely to remain, a myth.Thank you for your time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_ekstrom_the_moral_bias_behind_your_search_results
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"Religion is more than belief. It's power, and it's influence. And that influence affects all of us, every day, regardless of your own belief. Despite the enormous influence of religion on the world today, we hold them to a different standard of scrutiny and accountability than any other sector of our society. For example, if there were a multinational organization, government or corporation today that said no female could be on a leadership board, not one woman could have a decision-making authority, not one woman could handle any financial matter, we would have outrage. There would be sanctions. And yet this is a common practice in almost every world religion today.We accept things in our religious lives that we do not accept in our secular lives, and I know this because I've been doing it for three decades. I was the type of girl that fought every form of gender discrimination growing up. I played pickup basketball games with the boys and inserted myself. I said I was going to be the first female President of the United States. I have been fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, which has been dead for 40 years. I'm the first woman in both sides of my family to ever work outside the home and ever receive a higher education.I never accepted being excluded because I was a woman, except in my religion. Throughout all of that time, I was a part of a very patriarchal orthodox Mormon religion. I grew up in an enormously traditional family. I have eight siblings, a stay-at-home mother. My father's actually a religious leader in the community. And I grew up in a world believing that my worth and my standing was in keeping these rules that I'd known my whole life. You get married a virgin, you never drink alcohol, you don't smoke, you always do service, you're a good kid. Some of the rules we had were strict, but you followed the rules because you loved the people and you loved the religion and you believed.Everything about Mormonism determined what you wore, who you dated, who you married. It determined what underwear we wore. I was the kind of religious where everyone I know donated 10 percent of everything they earned to the church, including myself. From paper routes and babysitting, I donated 10 percent. I was the kind of religious where I heard parents tell children when they're leaving on a two-year proselytizing mission that they would rather have them die than return home without honor, having sinned. I was the type and the kind of religious where kids kill themselves every single year because they're terrified of coming out to our community as gay. But I was also the kind of religious where it didn't matter where in the world I lived, I had friendship, instantaneous mutual aid. This was where I felt safe. This is certainty and clarity about life. I had help raising my little daughter. So that's why I accepted without question that only men can lead, and I accepted without question that women can't have the spiritual authority of God on the Earth, which we call the priesthood. And I allowed discrepancies between men and women in operating budgets, disciplinary councils, in decision-making capacities, and I gave my religion a free pass because I loved it.Until I stopped, and I realized that I had been allowing myself to be treated as the support staff to the real work of men. And I faced this contradiction in myself, and I joined with other activists in my community. We've been working very, very, very hard for the last decade and more.The first thing we did was raise consciousness. You can't change what you can't see. We started podcasting, blogging, writing articles. I created lists of hundreds of ways that men and women are unequal in our community.The next thing we did was build advocacy organizations. We tried to do things that were unignorable, like wearing pants to church and trying to attend all-male meetings. These seem like simple things, but to us, the organizers, they were enormously costly. We lost relationships. We lost jobs. We got hate mail on a daily basis. We were attacked in social media and national press. We received death threats. We lost standing in our community. Some of us got excommunicated. Most of us got put in front of a disciplinary council, and were rejected from the communities that we loved because we wanted to make them better, because we believed that they could be.And I began to expect this reaction from my own people. I know what it feels like when you feel like someone's trying to change you or criticize you. But what utterly shocked me was throughout all of this work I received equal measures of vitriol from the secular left, the same vehemence as the religious right. And what my secular friends didn't realize was that this religious hostility, these phrases of, ""Oh, all religious people are crazy or stupid."" ""Don't pay attention to religion."" ""They're going to be homophobic and sexist."" What they didn't understand was that that type of hostility did not fight religious extremism, it bred religious extremism. Those arguments don't work, and I know because I remember someone telling me that I was stupid for being Mormon. And what it caused me to do was defend myself and my people and everything we believe in, because we're not stupid.So criticism and hostility doesn't work, and I didn't listen to these arguments. When I hear these arguments, I still continue to bristle, because I have family and friends. These are my people, and I'm the first to defend them, but the struggle is real. How do we respect someone's religious beliefs while still holding them accountable for the harm or damage that those beliefs may cause others? It's a tough question. I still don't have a perfect answer. My parents and I have been walking on this tightrope for the last decade. They're intelligent people. They're lovely people. And let me try to help you understand their perspective. In Mormonism, we believe that after you die, if you keep all the rules and you follow all the rituals, you can be together as a family again. And to my parents, me doing something as simple as having a sleeveless top right now, showing my shoulders, that makes me unworthy. I won't be with my family in the eternities. But even more, I had a brother die in a tragic accident at 15, and something as simple as this means we won't be together as a family. And to my parents, they cannot understand why something as simple as fashion or women's rights would prevent me from seeing my brother again. And that's the mindset that we're dealing with, and criticism does not change that. And so my parents and I have been walking this tightrope, explaining our sides, respecting one another, but actually invalidating each other's very basic beliefs by the way we live our lives, and it's been difficult. The way that we've been able to do that is to get past those defensive shells and really see the soft inside of unbelief and belief and try to respect each other while still holding boundaries clear.The other thing that the secular left and the atheists and the orthodox and the religious right, what they all don't understand was why even care about religious activism? I cannot tell you the hundreds of people who have said, ""If you don't like religion, just leave."" Why would you try to change it? Because what is taught on the Sabbath leaks into our politics, our health policy, violence around the world. It leaks into education, military, fiscal decision-making. These laws get legally and culturally codified. In fact, my own religion has had an enormous effect on this nation. For example, during Prop 8, my church raised over 22 million dollars to fight same-sex marriage in California. Forty years ago, political historians will say, that if it wasn't for the Mormon opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, we'd have an Equal Rights Amendment in our Constitution today. How many lives did that affect? And we can spend time fighting every single one of these little tiny laws and rules, or we can ask ourselves, why is gender inequality the default around the world? Why is that the assumption?Because religion doesn't just create the roots of morality, it creates the seeds of normality. Religions can liberate or subjugate, they can empower or exploit, they can comfort or destroy, and the people that tip the scales over to the ethical and the moral are often not those in charge. Religions can't be dismissed or ignored. We need to take them seriously. But it's not easy to influence a religion, like we just talked about.But I'll tell you what my people have done. My groups are small, there's hundreds of us, but we've had huge impact. Right now, women's pictures are hanging in the halls next to men for the first time. Women are now allowed to pray in our church-wide meetings, and they never were before in the general conferences. As of last week, in a historic move, three women were invited down to three leadership boards that oversee the entire church. We've seen perceptual shifts in the Mormon community that allow for talk of gender inequality. We've opened up space, regardless of being despised, for more conservative women to step in and make real changes, and the words ""women"" and ""the priesthood"" can now be uttered in the same sentence. I never had that. My daughter and my nieces are inheriting a religion that I never had, that's more equal — we've had an effect.It wasn't easy standing in those lines trying to get into those male meetings. There were hundreds of us, and one by one, when we got to the door, we were told, ""I'm sorry, this meeting is just for men,"" and we had to step back and watch men get into the meeting as young as 12 years old, escorted and walked past us as we all stood in line. But not one woman in that line will forget that day, and not one little boy that walked past us will forget that day.If we were a multinational corporation or a government, and that had happened, there would be outrage, but we're just a religion. We're all just part of religions. We can't keep looking at religion that way, because it doesn't only affect me, it affects my daughter and all of your daughters and what opportunities they have, what they can wear, who they can love and marry, if they have access to reproductive healthcare. We need to reclaim morality in a secular context that creates ethical scrutiny and accountability for religions all around the world, but we need to do it in a respectful way that breeds cooperation and not extremism. And we can do it through unignorable acts of bravery, standing up for gender equality.It's time that half of the world's population had voice and equality within our world's religions, churches, synagogues, mosques and shrines around the world. I'm working on my people. What are you doing for yours?(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chelsea_shields_how_i_m_working_for_change_inside_my_church
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"It was April 8, 2003. I was in Baghdad, covering the war in Iraq. That day, Americans tanks started arriving in Baghdad. We were just a few journalists in the Palestine Hotel, and, as happens in war, the fighting began to approach outside our windows. Baghdad was covered in black smoke and oil. It smelled awful. We couldn't see a thing, but we knew what was happening.Of course, I was supposed to be writing an article, but that's how it always goes — you're supposed to be writing and something big happens. So I was in my room on the 16th floor, writing and looking out the window every now and then to see what was happening. Suddenly, there was a huge explosion. During the previous three weeks, there had been shelling with half-ton missiles, but this time, the shock — I felt it inside of me, and I thought, ""It's very close. It's very, very close.""So I went down to see what was happening. I went down to the 15th floor to take a look. And I saw people, journalists, screaming in the hallways. I walked into a room and realized that it had been hit by a missile. Someone had been wounded. There was a man near the window, a cameraman named Taras Protsyuk, lying face-down. Having worked in a hospital before, I wanted to help out. So I turned him over. And when I turned him over, I noticed that he was open from sternum to pubis, but I couldn't see anything, nothing at all. All I saw was a white, pearly, shiny spot that blinded me, and I didn't understand what was going on.Once the spot disappeared and I could see his wound, which was very serious, my buddies and I put a sheet underneath him, and we carried him onto an elevator that stopped at each of the 15 floors. We put him in a car that took him to the hospital. He died on the way to the hospital. The Spanish cameraman José Couso, who was on the 14th floor and also hit — because the shell had exploded between the two floors — died on the operating table. As soon as the car left, I went back. There was that article I was supposed to write — which I had to write.And so — I returned to the hotel lobby with my arms covered in blood, when one of the hotel gofers stopped me and asked me to pay the tax I hadn't paid for 10 days. I told him to get lost. And I said to myself: ""Clear your head, put it all aside. If you want to write, you need to put it all aside."" And that's what I did. I went upstairs, wrote my article and sent it off.Later, aside from the feeling of having lost my colleagues, something else was bothering me. I kept seeing that shiny, pearly spot, and I couldn't understand what it meant. And then, the war was over.Later, I thought: ""That's not possible. I can't just not know what happened."" Because it wasn't the first time, and it didn't only happen to me. I have seen things like that happen to others in my 20 to 35 years of reporting. I have seen things that had an effect on me too. For example, there was this man I knew in Lebanon, a 25-year-old veteran who had been fighting for five years — a real veteran — who we would follow everywhere. He would crawl in the dark with confidence — he was a great soldier, a true soldier — so we would follow him, knowing that we would be safe with him. And one day, as I was told — and I've seen him again since — he was back in the camp, playing cards, when someone came in next door, and discharged their weapon. As the gun went off, that blast, that one shot, made him duck quickly under the table, like a child. He was shaking, panicking. And since then, he has never been able to get up and fight. He ended up working as a croupier in a Beirut casino where I later found him, because he couldn't sleep, so it was quite a suitable job.So I thought to myself, ""What is this thing that can kill you without leaving any visible scars? How does that happen? What is this unknown thing?"" It was too common to be coincidental.So I started to investigate — that's all I know how to do. I started to investigate by looking through books, reaching out to psychiatrists, going to museums, libraries, etc. Finally, I discovered that some people knew about this — often military psychiatrists — and that what we were dealing with was called trauma. Americans call it PTSD or traumatic neurosis. It was something that existed, but that we never spoke about.So, this trauma — what is it? Well, it's an encounter with death. I don't know if you've ever had an experience with death — I'm not talking about dead bodies, or someone's grandfather lying in a hospital bed, or someone who got hit by a car. I'm talking about facing the void of death. And that is something no one is supposed to see. People used to say, ""Neither the sun, nor death can be looked at with a steady eye."" A human being should not have to face the void of death.But when that happens, it can remain invisible for a while — days, weeks, months, sometimes years. And then, at some point, it explodes, because it's something that has entered your brain — a sort of window between an image and your mind — that has penetrated your brain, staying there and taking up all the space inside. And there are people — men, women, who suddenly no longer sleep. And they experience horrible anxiety attacks — panic attacks, not just minor fears. They suddenly don't want to sleep, because when they do, they have the same nightmare every night. They see the same image every night. What type of image? For example, a soldier who enters a building and comes face to face with another soldier aiming at him. He looks at the gun, straight down the barrel. And this barrel suddenly becomes enormous, deformed. It becomes fluffy, swallowing everything. And he says — later he will say, ""I saw death. I saw myself dead, therefore I'm dead."" And from then on, he knows he is dead. It is not a perception — he is convinced that he is dead. In reality, someone came in, the guy left or didn't shoot, whatever, and he didn't actually get shot — but to him, he died in that moment. Or it can be the smell of a mass grave — I saw a lot of that in Rwanda. It can be the voice of a friend calling, and they're being slaughtered and there's nothing you can do. You hear that voice, and you wake up every night — for weeks, months — in a trance-like state, anxious and terrified, like a child. I have seen men cry — just like children — from seeing the same image.So having that image of horror in your brain, seeing the void of death — that analogue of horror which is hiding something — will completely take over. You cannot do anything, anything at all. You cannot work anymore, you cannot love anymore. You go home and don't recognize anyone. You don't even recognize yourself. You hide and don't leave the house, you lock yourself in, you become ill. I know people who placed small cans outside their house with coins inside, in case someone tried to get in. All of a sudden, you feel like you want to die or kill or hide or run away. You want to be loved, but you hate everyone. It's a feeling that seizes you entirely day in and day out, and you suffer tremendously. And no one understands. They say, ""There's nothing wrong with you. You seem fine, you have no injuries. You went to war, came back; you're fine."" These people suffer tremendously. Some commit suicide. After all, suicide is like updating your daily planner — I'm already dead, I might as well commit suicide. Plus, there is no more pain. Some commit suicide, others end up under the bridge, drinking. Everyone remembers that grandfather or uncle or neighbor who used to drink, never said a word, always in a bad mood, beat his wife and who would end up either sinking into alcoholism or dying.And why do we not talk about this? We don't talk about it because it's taboo. It's not like we don't have the words to express the void of death. But others don't want hear it. The first time I returned from an assignment, They said, ""Oh! He's back."" There was a fancy dinner — white tablecloth, candles, guests. ""Tell us everything!"" Which I did. After 20 minutes, people were giving me dirty looks, the hostess had her nose in the ashtray. It was horrible and I realized I ruined the whole evening. So I don't talk about it anymore. We're just not ready to listen. People say outright: ""Please, stop.""Is that a rare occurrence? No, it's extremely common. One third of the soldiers who died in Iraq — well, not ""died,"" let me re-phrase that — one third of the US soldiers who went to Iraq suffer from PTSD. In 1939, there were still 200,000 soldiers from the First World War that were being treated in British psychiatric hospitals. In Vietnam, 54,000 people died — Americans. In 1987, the US government identified 102,000 — twice as many — 102,000 veterans who died from committing suicide. Twice as many deaths by suicide than by combat in Vietnam. So you see, this relates to everything, not just modern warfare, but also ancient wars — you can read about it, the evidence is there. So why do we not talk about it? Why have we not talked about it? The problem is that if you don't talk about it, you're heading for disaster.The only way to heal — and the good news here is that this is treatable — think Munch's The Scream, Goya, etc. — it's indeed treatable. The only way to heal from this trauma, from this encounter with death that overwhelms, petrifies and kills you is to find a way to express it.People used to say, ""Language is the only thing that holds all of us together."" Without language, we're nothing. It's the thing that makes us human. In the face of such a horrible image — a wordless image of oblivion that obsesses us — the only way to cope with it is to put human words to it. Because these people feel excluded from humanity. No one wants to see them anymore and they don't want to see anyone. They feel dirty, defiled, ashamed. Someone said, ""Doctor, I don't use the subway anymore because I'm afraid people will see the horror in my eyes."" Another guy thought he had a terrible skin disease and spent six months with dermatologists, going from doctor to doctor. And then one day, they sent him to a psychiatrist. During his second session, he told the psychiatrist he had a terrible skin disease from head to toe. The psychiatrist asked, ""Why are you in this state?"" And the man said, ""Well, because I'm dead, so I must be rotting away.""So you see this is something that has a profound effect on people. In order to heal, we need to talk about it. The horror needs to be put into words — human words, so we can organize it and talk about it again. We have to look death in the face. And if we can do that, if we can talk about these things, then step by step, by working it out verbally, we can reclaim our place in humanity. And it is important. Silence kills us.So what does this mean? It means that after a trauma, without question, we lose our ""unbearable lightness of being,"" that sense of immortality that keeps us here — meaning, if we're here, we almost feel like we're immortal, which we're not, but if we didn't believe that, we'd say, ""What's the point of it all?"" But trauma survivors have lost that feeling of immortality. They've lost their lightness. But they have found something else. So this means that if we manage to look death in the face, and actually confront it, rather than keep quiet and hide, like some of the men or women I know did, such as Michael from Rwanda, Carole from Iraq, Philippe from the Congo and other people I know, like Sorj Chalandon, now a great writer, who gave up field assignments after a trauma. Five friends of mine committed suicide, they're the ones who did not survive the trauma.So if we can look death in the face, if we, mortal humans, human mortals, understand that we are human and mortal, mortal and human, if we can confront death and identify it once again as the most mysterious place of all mysterious places, since no one has ever seen it — if we can give it back this meaning, yes, we may die, survive and come back to life, but we'll come back stronger than before. Much stronger.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jean_paul_mari_the_chilling_aftershock_of_a_brush_with_death
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"This is the Air Jordan 3 Black Cement. This might be the most important sneaker in history. First released in 1988, this is the shoe that started Nike marketing as we know it. This is the shoe that propelled the entire Air Jordan lineage, and perhaps saved Nike. The Air Jordan 3 Black Cement did for sneakers what the iPhone did for phones. It's been re-released four times. Every celebrity's been seen wearing it. There's a site about what to wear with the Black Cement. It's been right under your nose for decades and you never looked down. And right about now, most of you are probably thinking, ""Sneakers?""(Laughter)Yes. Yes, sneakers. Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce.In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. And that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale. And just minutes after that, thousands of those pairs were on eBay for two and three times retail. In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. But here's the thing: this happens every single Saturday. Every week there's another release or two or three, and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the Jordan 3 Black Cement.This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads — people who collect sneakers — and my daughter.(Laughter)That's an ""I love Dad"" T-shirt.For the brands, sneakerheads are a very important demographic. These are the tastemakers; these are the Apple fanboys. Because who else is going to buy a pair of $8,000 Back to the Future sneakers?(Laughter)Yeah, 8,000 dollars.And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much —(Laughter)Now we have sneaker addictions. In a market where in the past 12 months, there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the United States alone, at a value of 1.2 billion dollars. And that's a conservative estimate — I should know, I am a sneakerhead. This is my collection. In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time. People have thousands.I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. I grew up playing basketball when Michael Jordan played, I always wanted Air Jordans, my mother would never buy me Air Jordans, as soon as I got some money I bought Air Jordans — literally, we all have the exact same story. But here's where mine diverged. After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. So I thought, I wonder if I could get ahold of some sneaker data, just to play with for my own amusement. The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. Others have used the data to validate insurance claims. And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry. And here's the best part: sneakerheads have sneaker portfolios.(Laughter)Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. So sneakerhead Dan builds his collection and identifies which 352 are his. He can see it's worth 103,000 dollars — frankly, a modest collection. At the asset level, he can see gain-loss by shoe. Here he's made over 600 dollars on one pair. I have one of those.(Laughter)So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? At some point I asked myself what's really going on in the market, and two comparisons started to emerge. Are sneakers more like stocks or drugs?(Laughter)In fact, one guy emailed to say he thought his 15-year-old son was selling drugs and later found out he was selling sneakers.(Laughter)And now they use the data to do it together. And that's because sneakers are an investment opportunity where none other exists. And I don't just mean the kid selling sneakers instead of drugs. How about all kids? You have to be 18 to play the stock market. I sold chewing gum in sixth grade, Blow Pops in ninth grade and collected baseball cards through high school. The cards are long dead, and the candy market's usually quite local.For a lot of people, sneakers are a legal and accessible investment opportunity — a democratized stock market, but also unregulated. Which is why the story you're probably most familiar with is people killing each other for sneakers. And while that definitely happens and is tragic, it's not nearly the epidemic some media would have you believe. In fact, it's a very small piece of a much bigger and better story.So sneakers have clear similarities to both the stock exchange and the illegal drug trade, but perhaps the most fundamental is the existence of a central actor. Someone is making the rules. In the case of sneakers, that someone is Nike.Let me walk you through some numbers.The resell market, we know, is $1.2 billion. Nike, including Jordan brand, accounts for 96 percent of all shoes sold on the secondary market. Just complete domination. Sneakerheads love Jordans. And profit on the secondary market is about a third. That means that sneakerheads made 380 million dollars selling Nikes last year. Let's jump to retail for a second. Skechers, earlier this year, became the number two footwear brand in the country, surpassing Adidas — this was a big deal. And in the 12 months ending in June, Skechers's net income was 209 million dollars. That means that Nike's customers make almost twice as much profit as their closest competitor. That —(Laughter)How is that even possible?The sneaker market is just supply and demand, but Nike's gotten very good at using supply — limited sneakers — and the distribution of those sneakers to their own benefit. So it's really just supply. Sneakerheads joke that as long as it's limited and Nike, they'll buy it. Shoes that sell for 8,000 dollars do so because they're very rare. It's no different than any other collectible market, only this isn't a market at all. It's a false construct created by Nike — ingeniously created by Nike, in the most positive sense — to sell more shoes. And in the process, it provided tens of thousands of people with life-long passions, myself included. If Nike wanted to kill the resell market, they could do so tomorrow, all they have to do is release more shoes. But we certainly don't want them to, nor is it in their best interest. That's because unlike Apple, who will sell an iPhone to anyone who wants one, Nike doesn't make their money by just selling $200 sneakers. They sell millions of shoes to millions of people for 60 dollars. And sneakerheads are the ones who drive the marketing and the hype and the PR and the brand cachet, and enable Nike to sell millions of $60 sneakers.It's marketing. It's marketing the likes of which has never been seen before — this isn't in any textbook. For 15 years Nike has propped up an artificial commodities market, with a Facebook-level hyped IPO every single weekend. Drive by any Footlocker at 8am on a Saturday morning, and there will be a line down the street and around the block, and sometimes those kids have been waiting there all week. You know those crazy iPhone lines you see on the news every other year? Nike lines happen 104 times more often. So Nike sets the rules. And they do so by controlling supply and distribution.But once a pair leaves the retail channel, it's the Wild West. There are very few — if any — legal, unregulated markets of this size. So Nike is definitely not the stock exchange. In fact, there is no central exchange. By last count, there were 48 different online markets that I know of. Some are eBay clones, some are mobile markets, and then you have consignment shops and brick-and-mortar stores, and sneaker conventions, and reseller sites, and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter — literally, anywhere sneakerheads come into contact with each other, shoes will be bought and sold.But that means no efficiencies, no transparency, sometimes not even authenticity. Can you imagine if that's how stocks were bought? What if the way to buy a share of Apple stock was to search over 100 places online and off, including every time you walk down the street just hoping to pass someone wearing some Apple stock? Never knowing who had the best price, or even if the stock you were looking at was real. That would surely make you say:[WTF?]Of course that's not how we buy stock. But what if that's not how we need to buy sneakers either? What if the inverse is true, and what if we could buy sneakers exactly the same way as we buy stock? And what if it wasn't just sneakers, but any similar product, like watches and handbags and women's shoes, and any collectible, any seasonal item and any markdown item? What if there was a stock market for commerce? A stock market of things. And not only could you buy in a much more educated and efficient manner, but you could engage in all the sophisticated financial transactions you can with the stock market. Shorts and options and futures and well, maybe you see where this is going. Maybe you want to invest in a stock market of things. Because if you had invested in a pair of Air Jordan 3 Black Cement in 2011, you could either be wearing them onstage,(Laughter)or have earned 162 percent on your money — double the S&P and 20 percent more than Apple.(Laughter)And that's why we're talking about sneakers.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/josh_luber_why_sneakers_are_a_great_investment
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"What if I could present you a story that you would remember with your entire body and not just with your mind? My whole life as a journalist, I've really been compelled to try to make stories that can make a difference and maybe inspire people to care. I've worked in print. I've worked in documentary. I've worked in broadcast. But it really wasn't until I got involved with virtual reality that I started seeing these really intense, authentic reactions from people that really blew my mind.So the deal is that with VR, virtual reality, I can put you on scene in the middle of the story. By putting on these goggles that track wherever you look, you get this whole-body sensation, like you're actually, like, there. So five years ago was about when I really began to push the envelope with using virtual reality and journalism together. And I wanted to do a piece about hunger. Families in America are going hungry, food banks are overwhelmed, and they're often running out of food. Now, I knew I couldn't make people feel hungry, but maybe I could figure out a way to get them to feel something physical.So — again, this is five years ago — so doing journalism and virtual reality together was considered a worse-than-half-baked idea, and I had no funding. Believe me, I had a lot of colleagues laughing at me. And I did, though, have a really great intern, a woman named Michaela Kobsa-Mark. And together we went out to food banks and started recording audio and photographs. Until one day she came back to my office and she was bawling, she was just crying. She had been on scene at a long line, where the woman running the line was feeling extremely overwhelmed, and she was screaming, ""There's too many people! There's too many people!"" And this man with diabetes doesn't get food in time, his blood sugar drops too low, and he collapses into a coma. As soon as I heard that audio, I knew that this would be the kind of evocative piece that could really describe what was going on at food banks.So here's the real line. You can see how long it was, right? And again, as I said, we didn't have very much funding, so I had to reproduce it with virtual humans that were donated, and people begged and borrowed favors to help me create the models and make things as accurate as we could. And then we tried to convey what happened that day with as much as accuracy as is possible.(Video) Voice: There's too many people! There's too many people!Voice: OK, he's having a seizure.Voice: We need an ambulance.Nonny de la Peña: So the man on the right, for him, he's walking around the body. For him, he's in the room with that body. Like, that guy is at his feet. And even though, through his peripheral vision, he can see that he's in this lab space, he should be able to see that he's not actually on the street, but he feels like he's there with those people. He's very cautious not to step on this guy who isn't really there, right?So that piece ended up going to Sundance in 2012, a kind of amazing thing, and it was the first virtual reality film ever, basically. And when we went, I was really terrified. I didn't really know how people were going to react and what was going to happen. And we showed up with this duct-taped pair of goggles.(Video) Oh, you're crying. You're crying. Gina, you're crying.So you can hear the surprise in my voice, right? And this kind of reaction ended up being the kind of reaction we saw over and over and over: people down on the ground trying to comfort the seizure victim, trying to whisper something into his ear or in some way help, even though they couldn't. And I had a lot of people come out of that piece saying, ""Oh my God, I was so frustrated. I couldn't help the guy,"" and take that back into their lives.So after this piece was made, the dean of the cinema school at USC, the University of Southern California, brought in the head of the World Economic Forum to try ""Hunger,"" and he took off the goggles, and he commissioned a piece about Syria on the spot. And I really wanted to do something about Syrian refugee kids, because children have been the worst affected by the Syrian civil war. I sent a team to the border of Iraq to record material at refugee camps, basically an area I wouldn't send a team now, as that's where ISIS is really operating. And then we also recreated a street scene in which a young girl is singing and a bomb goes off. Now, when you're in the middle of that scene and you hear those sounds, and you see the injured around you, it's an incredibly scary and real feeling. I've had individuals who have been involved in real bombings tell me that it evokes the same kind of fear.[The civil war in Syria may seem far away] [until you experience it yourself.](Girl singing)(Explosion)[Project Syria] [A virtual reality experience]NP: We were then invited to take the piece to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And it wasn't advertised. And we were put in this tapestry room. There was no press about it, so anybody who happened to walk into the museum to visit it that day would see us with these crazy lights. You know, maybe they would want to see the old storytelling of the tapestries. They were confronted by our virtual reality cameras. But a lot of people tried it, and over a five-day run we ended up with 54 pages of guest book comments, and we were told by the curators there that they'd never seen such an outpouring. Things like, ""It's so real,"" ""Absolutely believable,"" or, of course, the one that I was excited about, ""A real feeling as if you were in the middle of something that you normally see on the TV news.""So, it works, right? This stuff works. And it doesn't really matter where you're from or what age you are — it's really evocative.Now, don't get me wrong — I'm not saying that when you're in a piece you forget that you're here. But it turns out we can feel like we're in two places at once. We can have what I call this duality of presence, and I think that's what allows me to tap into these feelings of empathy. Right?So that means, of course, that I have to be very cautious about creating these pieces. I have to really follow best journalistic practices and make sure that these powerful stories are built with integrity. If we don't capture the material ourselves, we have to be extremely exacting about figuring out the provenance and where did this stuff come from and is it authentic?Let me give you an example. With this Trayvon Martin case, this is a guy, a kid, who was 17 years old and he bought soda and a candy at a store, and on his way home he was tracked by a neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman who ended up shooting and killing him. To make that piece, we got the architectural drawings of the entire complex, and we rebuilt the entire scene inside and out, based on those drawings. All of the action is informed by the real 911 recorded calls to the police. And interestingly, we broke some news with this story. The forensic house that did the audio reconstruction, Primeau Productions, they say that they would testify that George Zimmerman, when he got out of the car, he cocked his gun before he went to give chase to Martin.So you can see that the basic tenets of journalism, they don't really change here, right? We're still following the same principles that we would always. What is different is the sense of being on scene, whether you're watching a guy collapse from hunger or feeling like you're in the middle of a bomb scene. And this is kind of what has driven me forward with these pieces, and thinking about how to make them. We're trying to make this, obviously, beyond the headset, more available. We're creating mobile pieces like the Trayvon Martin piece. And these things have had impact. I've had Americans tell me that they've donated, direct deductions from their bank account, money to go to Syrian children refugees. And ""Hunger in LA,"" well, it's helped start a new form of doing journalism that I think is going to join all the other normal platforms in the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nonny_de_la_pena_the_future_of_news_virtual_reality
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"Chris Anderson: Perhaps we could start by just telling us about your country. It's three dots there on the globe. Those dots are pretty huge. I think each one is about the size of California. Tell us about Kiribati.Anote Tong: Well, let me first begin by saying how deeply grateful I am for this opportunity to share my story with people who do care. I think I've been sharing my story with a lot of people who don't care too much. But Kiribati is comprised of three groups of islands: the Gilbert Group on the west, we have the Phoenix Islands in the middle, and the Line Islands in the east. And quite frankly, Kiribati is perhaps the only country that is actually in the four corners of the world, because we are in the Northern Hemisphere, in the Southern Hemisphere, and also in the east and the west of the International Date Line. These islands are entirely made up of coral atolls, and on average about two meters above sea level. And so this is what we have. Usually not more than two kilometers in width. And so, on many occasions, I've been asked by people, ""You know, you're suffering, why don't you move back?"" They don't understand. They have no concept of what it is that's involved. With the rising sea, they say, ""Well, you can move back."" And so this is what I tell them. If we move back, we will fall off on the other side of the ocean. OK? But these are the kinds of issues that people don't understand.CA: So certainly this is just a picture of fragility there. When was it that you yourself realized that there might be impending peril for your country?AT: Well, the story of climate change has been one that has been going on for quite a number of decades. And when I came into office in 2003, I began talking about climate change at the United Nations General Assembly, but not with so much passion, because then there was still this controversy among the scientists whether it was human-induced, whether it was real or it wasn't. But I think that that debate was fairly much concluded in 2007 with the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which made a categorical statement that it is real, it's human-induced, and it's predicting some very serious scenarios for countries like mine. And so that's when I got very serious. In the past, I talked about it. We were worried. But when the scenarios, the predictions came in 2007, it became a real issue for us.CA: Now, those predictions are, I think, that by 2100, sea levels are forecast to rise perhaps three feet. There's scenarios where it's higher than that, for sure, but what would you say to a skeptic who said, ""What's three feet? You're on average six feet above sea level. What's the problem?""AT: Well, I think it's got to be understood that a marginal rise in sea level would mean a loss of a lot of land, because much of the land is low. And quite apart from that, we are getting the swells at the moment. So it's not about getting two feet. I think what many people do not understand is they think climate change is something that is happening in the future. Well, we're at the very bottom end of the spectrum. It's already with us. We have communities who already have been dislocated. They have had to move, and every parliament session, I'm getting complaints from different communities asking for assistance to build seawalls, to see what we can do about the freshwater lens because it's being destroyed, and so in my trips to the different islands, I'm seeing evidence of communities which are now having to cope with the loss of food crops, the contamination of the water lenses, and I see these communities perhaps leaving, having to relocate, within five to 10 years.CA: And then, I think the country suffered its first cyclone, and this is connected, yes? What happened here?AT: Well, we're on the equator, and I'm sure many of you understand that when you're on the equator, it's supposed to be in the doldrums. We're not supposed to get the cyclones. We create them, and then we send them either north or south.(Laughter)But they aren't supposed to come back. But for the first time, at the beginning of this year, the Cyclone Pam, which destroyed Vanuatu, and in the process, the very edges of it actually touched our two southernmost islands, and all of Tuvalu was underwater when Hurricane Pam struck. But for our two southernmost islands, we had waves come over half the island, and so this has never happened before. It's a new experience. And I've just come back from my own constituency, and I've seen these beautiful trees which had been there for decades, they've been totally destroyed. So this is what's happening, but when we talk about the rising sea level, we think it's something that happens gradually. It comes with the winds, it comes with the swells, and so they can be magnified, but what we are beginning to witness is the change in the weather pattern, which is perhaps the more urgent challenge that we will face sooner than perhaps the rising sea level.CA: So the country is already seeing effects now. As you look forward, what are your options as a country, as a nation?AT: Well, I've been telling this story every year. I think I visit a number of — I've been traveling the world to try and get people to understand. We have a plan, we think we have a plan. And on one occasion, I think I spoke in Geneva and there was a gentleman who was interviewing me on something like this, and I said, ""We are looking at floating islands,"" and he thought it was funny, but somebody said, ""No, this is not funny. These people are looking for solutions."" And so I have been looking at floating islands. The Japanese are interested in building floating islands.But, as a country, we have made a commitment that no matter what happens, we will try as much as possible to stay and continue to exist as a nation. What that will take, it's going to be something quite significant, very, very substantial. Either we live on floating islands, or we have to build up the islands to continue to stay out of the water as the sea level rises and as the storms get more severe. But even that, it's going to be very, very difficult to get the kind of resourcing that we would need.CA: And then the only recourse is some form of forced migration.AT: Well, we are also looking at that because in the event that nothing comes forward from the international community, we are preparing, we don't want to be caught like what's happening in Europe. OK? We don't want to mass migrate at some point in time. We want to be able to give the people the choice today, those who choose and want to do that, to migrate. We don't want something to happen that they are forced to migrate without having been prepared to do so. Of course, our culture is very different, our society is very different, and once we migrate into a different environment, a different culture, there's a whole lot of adjustments that are required.CA: Well, there's forced migration in your country's past, and I think just this week, just yesterday or the day before yesterday, you visited these people. What happened here? What's the story here?AT: Yes, and I'm sorry, I think somebody was asking why we were sneaking off to visit that place. I had a very good reason, because we have a community of Kiribati people living in that part of the Solomon Islands, but these were people who were relocated from the Phoenix Islands, in fact, in the 1960s. There was serious drought, and the people could not continue to live on the island, and so they were moved to live here in the Solomon Islands. And so yesterday it was very interesting to meet with these people. They didn't know who I was. They hadn't heard of me. Some of them later recognized me, but I think they were very happy. Later they really wanted to have the opportunity to welcome me formally. But I think what I saw yesterday was very interesting because here I see our people. I spoke in our language, and of course they spoke back, they replied, but their accent, they are beginning not to be able to speak Kiribati properly. I saw them, there was this lady with red teeth. She was chewing betel nuts, and it's not something we do in Kiribati. We don't chew betel nuts. I met also a family who have married the local people here, and so this is what is happening. As you go into another community, there are bound to be changes. There is bound to be a certain loss of identity, and this is what we will be looking for in the future if and when we do migrate.CA: It must have been just an extraordinarily emotional day because of these questions about identity, the joy of seeing you and perhaps an emphasized sense of what they had lost. And it's very inspiring to hear you say you're going to fight to the end to try to preserve the nation in a location.AT: This is our wish. Nobody wants ever to leave their home, and so it's been a very difficult decision for me. As a leader, you don't make plans to leave your island, your home, and so I've been asked on a number of occasions, ""So how do you feel?"" And it doesn't feel good at all. It's an emotional thing, and I've tried to live with it, and I know that on occasions, I'm accused of not trying to solve the problem because I can't solve the problem. It's something that's got to be done collectively.Climate change is a global phenomenon, and as I've often argued, unfortunately, the countries, when we come to the United Nations — I was in a meeting with the Pacific Island Forum countries where Australia and New Zealand are also members, and we had an argument. There was a bit of a story in the news because they were arguing that to cut emissions, it would be something that they're unable to do because it would affect the industries. And so here I was saying, OK, I hear you, I understand what you're saying, but try also to understand what I'm saying because if you do not cut your emissions, then our survival is on the line. And so it's a matter for you to weigh this, these moral issues. It's about industry as opposed to the survival of a people.CA: You know, I ask you yesterday what made you angry, and you said, ""I don't get angry."" But then you paused. I think this made you angry.AT: I'd refer you to my earlier statement at the United Nations. I was very angry, very frustrated and then depressed. There was a sense of futility that we are fighting a fight that we have no hope of winning. I had to change my approach. I had to become more reasonable because I thought people would listen to somebody who was rational, but I remain radically rational, whatever that is.(Laughter)CA: Now, a core part of your nation's identity is fishing. I think you said pretty much everyone is involved in fishing in some way.AT: Well, we eat fish every day, every day, and I think there is no doubt that our rate of consumption of fish is perhaps the highest in the world. We don't have a lot of livestock, so it's fish that we depend on.CA: So you're dependent on fish, both at the local level and for the revenues that the country receives from the global fishing business for tuna, and yet despite that, a few years ago you took a very radical step. Can you tell us about that? I think something happened right here in the Phoenix Islands.AT: Let me give some of the background of what fish means for us. We have one of the largest tuna fisheries remaining in the world. In the Pacific, I think we own something like 60 percent of the remaining tuna fisheries, and it remains relatively healthy for some species, but not all. And Kiribati is one of the three major resource owners, tuna resource owners. And at the moment, we have been getting something like 80 to 90 percent of our revenue from access fees, license fees.CA: Of your national revenue.AT: National revenue, which drives everything that we do in governments, hospitals, schools and what have you. But we decided to close this, and it was a very difficult decision. I can assure you, politically, locally, it was not easy, but I was convinced that we had to do this in order to ensure that the fishery remains sustainable. There had been some indications that some of the species, in particular the bigeye, was under serious threat. The yellowfin was also heavily fished. Skipjack remains healthy. And so we had to do something like that, and so that was the reason I did that. Another reason why I did that was because I had been asking the international community that in order to deal with climate change, in order to fight climate change, there has got to be sacrifice, there has got to be commitment. So in asking the international community to make a sacrifice, I thought we ourselves need to make that sacrifice. And so we made the sacrifice. And forgoing commercial fishing in the Phoenix Islands protected area would mean a loss of revenue. We are still trying to assess what that loss would be because we actually closed it off at the beginning of this year, and so we will see by the end of this year what it means in terms of the lost revenue.CA: So there's so many things playing into this. On the one hand, it may prompt healthier fisheries. I mean, how much are you able to move the price up that you charge for the remaining areas?AT: The negotiations have been very difficult, but we have managed to raise the cost of a vessel day. For any vessel to come in to fish for a day, we have raised the fee from — it was $6,000 and $8,000, now to $10,000, $12,000 per vessel day. And so there's been that significant increase. But at the same time, what's important to note is, whereas in the past these fishing boats might be fishing in a day and maybe catch 10 tons, now they're catching maybe 100 tons because they've become so efficient. And so we've got to respond likewise. We've got to be very, very careful because the technology has so improved. There was a time when the Brazilian fleet moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They couldn't. They started experimenting if they could, per se. But now they've got ways of doing it, and they've become so efficient.CA: Can you give us a sense of what it's like in those negotiations? Because you're up against companies that have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, essentially. How do you hold the line? Is there any advice you can give to other leaders who are dealing with the same companies about how to get the most for your country, get the most for the fish? What advice would you give?AT: Well, I think we focus too often on licensing in order to get the rate of return, because what we are getting from license fees is about 10 percent of the landed value of the catch on the side of the wharf, not in the retail shops. And we only get about 10 percent. What we have been trying to do over the years is actually to increase our participation in the industry, in the harvesting, in the processing, and eventually, hopefully, the marketing. They're not easy to penetrate, but we are working towards that, and yes, the answer would be to enhance. In order to increase our rate of return, we have to become more involved. And so we've started doing that, and we have to restructure the industry. We've got to tell these people that the world has changed. Now we want to produce the fish ourselves.CA: And meanwhile, for your local fishermen, they are still able to fish, but what is business like for them? Is it getting harder? Are the waters depleted? Or is that being run on a sustainable basis?AT: For the artisanal fishery, we do not participate in the commercial fishing activity except only to supply the domestic market. The tuna fishery is really entirely for the foreign market, mostly here in the US, Europe, Japan. So I am a fisherman, very much, and I used to be able to catch yellowfin. Now it's very, very rare to be able to catch yellowfin because they are being lifted out of the water by the hundreds of tons by these purse seiners.CA: So here's a couple of beautiful girls from your country. I mean, as you think about their future, what message would you have for them and what message would you have for the world?AT: Well, I've been telling the world that we really have to do something about what is happening to the climate because for us, it's about the future of these children. I have 12 grandchildren, at least. I think I have 12, my wife knows.(Laughter)And I think I have eight children. It's about their future. Every day I see my grandchildren, about the same age as these young girls, and I do wonder, and I get angry sometimes, yes I do. I wonder what is to become of them. And so it's about them that we should be telling everybody, that it's not about their own national interest, because climate change, regrettably, unfortunately, is viewed by many countries as a national problem. It's not. And this is the argument we got into recently with our partners, the Australians and New Zealanders, because they said, ""We can't cut any more."" This is what one of the leaders, the Australian leader, said, that we've done our part, we are cutting back. I said, What about the rest? Why don't you keep it? If you could keep the rest of your emissions within your boundaries, within your borders, we'd have no question. You can go ahead as much as you like. But unfortunately, you're sending it our way, and it's affecting the future of our children. And so surely I think that is the heart of the problem of climate change today.We will be meeting in Paris at the end of this year, but until we can think of this as a global phenomenon, because we create it, individually, as nations, but it affects everybody else, and yet, we refuse to do anything about it, and we deal with it as a national problem, which it is not — it is a global issue, and it's got to be dealt with collectively.CA: People are incredibly bad at responding to graphs and numbers, and we shut our minds to it. Somehow, to people, we're slightly better at responding to that sometimes. And it seems like it's very possible that your nation, despite, actually because of the intense problems you face, you may yet be the warning light to the world that shines most visibly, most powerfully. I just want to thank you,  I'm sure, on behalf of all of us, for your extraordinary leadership and for being here.Mr. President, thank you so much.AT: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anote_tong_my_country_will_be_underwater_soon_unless_we_work_together
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"Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. What is going on? Something's going on.But why is the question always do they love us? Why is it always about us? Why are we such narcissists? I found a different question to ask animals. Who are you?There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. But is that true? What are other beings doing with those brains? What are they thinking and feeling? Is there a way to know? I think there is a way in. I think there are several ways in. We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do.The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. The first neurons came from jellyfish. Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. The first chordates gave rise to the first vertebrates. The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. What does that say about the minds of crayfish? Can we tell anything about that? Well, it turns out that if you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks every time it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. How do we show how much we care about crayfish anxiety? Mostly, we boil them.(Laughter)Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? Mostly boiled. If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, ""Follow me,"" and the moray will understand that signal. The moray may go into the crevice and get the fish, but the fish may bolt and the grouper may get it. This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. How do we celebrate that ancient partnership? Mostly fried. A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them.Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. Chimpanzees don't teach. Killer whales teach and killer whales share food.When evolution makes something new, it uses the parts it has in stock, off the shelf, before it fabricates a new twist. And our brain has come to us through the enormity of the deep sweep of time. If you look at the human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain, what you see is we have basically a very big chimpanzee brain. It's a good thing ours is bigger, because we're also really insecure.(Laughter)But, uh oh, there's a dolphin, a bigger brain with more convolutions. OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are.We've been neighbors for a very long time. No one would mistake these elephants as being relaxed. They're obviously very concerned about something. What are they concerned about? It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. Not only do elephants know that there are humans, they know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are OK and some are dangerous.They have been watching us for much longer than we have been watching them. They know us better than we know them. We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. We are kin under the skin. The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. We see helping where help is needed. We see curiosity in the young. We see the bonds of family connections. We recognize affection. Courtship is courtship. And then we ask, ""Are they conscious?""When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious.Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. Empathy is the mind's ability to match moods with your companions. It's a very useful thing. If your companions start to move quickly, you have to feel like you need to hurry up. We're all in a hurry now. The oldest form of empathy is contagious fear. If your companions suddenly startle and fly away, it does not work very well for you to say, ""Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left.""(Laughter)Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. So there's basic empathy: you feel sad, it makes me sad. I see you happy, it makes me happy.Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: ""I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. I don't feel that same grief, but I get it; I know what you feel and it concerns me.""And then if we're motivated to act on sympathy, I call that compassion.Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathic creatures, we kill them and we eat them. Now, maybe you say OK, well, those are different species. That's just predation, and humans are predators. But we don't treat our own kind too well either. People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. They have the same structures. The same hormones that create mood and motivation in us are in those brains as well. It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. That is not scientific.So OK, so a reporter said to me, ""Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?"" And I started to rifle through all the hundreds of scientific references that I put in my book and I realized that the answer was right in the room with me. When my dog gets off the rug and comes over to me — not to the couch, to me — and she rolls over on her back and exposes her belly, she has had the thought, ""I would like my belly rubbed. I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. I know I can trust him because we're family. He'll get the job done, and it will feel good.""(Laughter)She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that.But we see other animals and we say, ""Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it.""That tall-finned male is L41. He's 38 years old. The female right on his left side is L22. She's 44. They've known each other for decades. They know exactly who they are. They know who their friends are. They know who their rivals are. Their life follows the arc of a career. They know where they are all the time.This is an elephant named Philo. He was a young male. This is him four days later. Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. We want to carve their teeth. Why can't we wait for them to die? Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1980, there were vast strongholds of elephant range in Central and Eastern Africa. And now their range is shattered into little shards. This is the geography of an animal that we are driving to extinction, a fellow being, the most magnificent creature on land.Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. We killed every single wolf south of the Canadian border, actually. But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. And then people came. People came by the thousands to see the wolves, the most accessibly visible wolves in the world.And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. A pack is a family. It has some breeding adults and the young of several generations. And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. Sisters kicked out other sisters. That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. They wouldn't let her because they were jealous of her. She was getting too much attention from two new males, and she was the precocious one. That was too much for them. She wound up wandering outside the park and getting shot. The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate.We cause so much pain to them. The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. Those people in the boat had nothing at all to fear. This whale is T20. He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. The seal weighed about as much as the people in the boat. They had nothing to fear. They eat seals. Why don't they eat us? Why can we trust them around our toddlers? Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? And that's happened more than one time.In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. She knows them very well. She knows who they all are. They know her. They recognize the research boat. When she shows up, it's a big happy reunion. Except, one time showed up and they didn't want to come near the boat, and that was really strange. And they couldn't figure out what was going on until somebody came out on deck and announced that one of the people onboard had died during a nap in his bunk. How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? Why would they care? And why would it spook them? These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all.At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. Dolly came over and looked at him, went back to her mother, nursed for a minute or two, came back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin got the idea of using milk to represent smoke. When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art.(Laughter)The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. But love is not the thing that makes us human. It's not special to us. We are not the only ones who care about our mates. We are not the only ones who care about our children.Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. If that stops, it all goes away. If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. All of these birds have plastic in them now. This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge — died, packed with red cigarette lighters.This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with the rest of the world. But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. We paint animals on the walls. We don't paint cell phones. We don't paint work cubicles. We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. We have company. And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us.So we started with a question: Do they love us? We're going to ask another question. Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_safina_what_are_animals_thinking_and_feeling
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"There's something about caves — a shadowy opening in a limestone cliff that draws you in. As you pass through the portal between light and dark, you enter a subterranean world — a place of perpetual gloom, of earthy smells, of hushed silence.Long ago in Europe, ancient people also entered these underground worlds. As witness to their passage, they left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, like this panel of humans, triangles and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain. You now walk the same path as these early artists. And in this surreal, otherworldly place, it's almost possible to imagine that you hear the muffled footfall of skin boots on soft earth, or that you see the flickering of a torch around the next bend.When I'm in a cave, I often find myself wondering what drove these people to go so deep to brave dangerous and narrow passageways to leave their mark? In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave. As we crawled forward, military-style, with the ceiling getting ever lower, we finally got to a point where the ceiling was so low that my husband and project photographer, Dylan, could no longer achieve focus on the ceiling with his DSLR camera. So while he filmed me, I kept following the trail of red paint with a single light and a point-and-shoot camera that we kept for that type of occasion. Half a kilometer underground.Seriously. What was somebody doing down there with a torch or a stone lamp?(Laughter)I mean — me, it makes sense, right?But you know, this is the kind of question that I'm trying to answer with my research. I study some of the oldest art in the world. It was created by these early artists in Europe, between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. And the thing is that I'm not just studying it because it's beautiful, though some of it certainly is. But what I'm interested in is the development of the modern mind, of the evolution of creativity, of imagination, of abstract thought, about what it means to be human. While all species communicate in one way or another, only we humans have really taken it to another level. Our desire and ability to share and collaborate has been a huge part of our success story. Our modern world is based on a global network of information exchange made possible, in large part, by our ability to communicate — in particular, using graphic or written forms of communication. The thing is, though, that we've been building on the mental achievements of those that came before us for so long that it's easy to forget that certain abilities haven't already existed. It's one of the things I find most fascinating about studying our deep history. Those people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on. They were the original shoulders. And while a surprising number of important inventions come out of that distant time, what I want to talk to you about today is the invention of graphic communication.There are three main types of communication, spoken, gestural — so things like sign language — and graphic communication. Spoken and gestural are by their very nature ephemeral. It requires close contact for a message to be sent and received. And after the moment of transmission, it's gone forever. Graphic communication, on the other hand, decouples that relationship. And with its invention, it became possible for the first time for a message to be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment in place and time.Europe is one of the first places that we start to see graphic marks regularly appearing in caves, rock shelters and even a few surviving open-air sites. But this is not the Europe we know today. This was a world dominated by towering ice sheets, three to four kilometers high, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra. This was the Ice Age.Over the last century, more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across the continent, decorated with animals, abstract shapes and even the occasional human like these engraved figures from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily. They provide us with a rare glimpse into the creative world and imagination of these early artists.Since their discovery, it's been the animals that have received the majority of the study like this black horse from Cullalvera in Spain, or this unusual purple bison from La Pasiega. But for me, it was the abstract shapes, what we call geometric signs, that drew me to study the art. The funny this is that at most sites the geometric signs far outnumber the animal and human images. But when I started on this back in 2007, there wasn't even a definitive list of how many shapes there were, nor was there a strong sense of whether the same ones appeared across space or time. Before I could even get started on my questions, my first step was to compile a database of all known geometric signs from all of the rock art sites. The problem was that while they were well documented at some sites, usually the ones with the very nice animals, there was also a large number of them where it was very vague — there wasn't a lot of description or detail. Some of them hadn't been visited in half a century or more. These were the ones that I targeted for my field work.Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily. And it was totally worth it. We found new, undocumented geometric signs at 75 percent of the sites we visited. This is the level of accuracy I knew I was going to need if I wanted to start answering those larger questions.So let's get to those answers. Barring a handful of outliers, there are only 32 geometric signs. Only 32 signs across a 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe. That is a very small number. Now, if these were random doodles or decorations, we would expect to see a lot more variation, but instead what we find are the same signs repeating across both space and time. Some signs start out strong, before losing popularity and vanishing, while other signs are later inventions. But 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire time period — things like lines, rectangles triangles, ovals and circles like we see here from the end of the Ice Age, at a 10,000-year-old site high in the Pyrenees Mountains. And while certain signs span thousands of kilometers, other signs had much more restricted distribution patterns, with some being limited to a single territory, like we see here with these divided rectangles that are only found in northern Spain, and which some researchers have speculated could be some sort of family or clan signs.On a side note, there is surprising degree of similarity in the earliest rock art found all the way from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia. With many of the same signs appearing in such far-flung places, especially in that 30,000 to 40,000-year range, it's starting to seem increasingly likely that this invention actually traces back to a common point of origin in Africa. But that I'm afraid, is a subject for a future talk.So back to the matter at hand. There could be no doubt that these signs were meaningful to their creators, like these 25,000-year-old bas-relief sculptures from La Roque de Venasque in France. We might not know what they meant, but the people of the time certainly did. The repetition of the same signs, for so long, and at so many sites tells us that the artists were making intentional choices. If we're talking about geometric shapes, with specific, culturally recognized, agreed-upon meanings, than we could very well be looking at one of the oldest systems of graphic communication in the world.I'm not talking about writing yet. There's just not enough characters at this point to have represented all of the words in the spoken language, something which is a requirement for a full writing system. Nor do we see the signs repeating regularly enough to suggest that they were some sort of alphabet. But what we do have are some intriguing one-offs, like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain, known as ""The Inscription,"" with its symmetrical markings on the left, possible stylized representations of hands in the middle, and what looks a bit like a bracket on the right.The oldest systems of graphic communication in the world — Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the earliest Chinese script, all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, with each coming into existence from an earlier protosystem made up of counting marks and pictographic representations, where the meaning and the image were the same. So a picture of a bird would really have represented that animal. It's only later that we start to see these pictographs become more stylized, until they almost become unrecognizable and that we also start to see more symbols being invented to represent all those other missing words in language — things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives.So knowing all this, it seems highly unlikely that the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe were truly abstract written characters. Instead, what's much more likely is that these early artists were also making counting marks, maybe like this row of lines from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, as well as creating stylized representations of things from the world around them. Could some of the signs be weaponry or housing? Or what about celestial objects like star constellations? Or maybe even rivers, mountains, trees — landscape features, possibly like this black penniform surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs from the site of El Castillo in Spain. The term penniform means ""feather-shaped"" in Latin, but could this actually be a depiction of a plant or a tree? Some researchers have begun to ask these questions about certain signs at specific sites, but I believe the time has come to revisit this category as a whole. The irony in all of this, of course, is that having just carefully classified all of the signs into a single category, I have a feeling that my next step will involve breaking it back apart as different types of imagery are identified and separated off.Now don't get me wrong, the later creation of fully developed writing was an impressive feat in its own right. But it's important to remember that those early writing systems didn't come out of a vacuum. And that even 5,000 years ago, people were already building on something much older, with its origins stretching back tens of thousands of years — to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond, to that point, deep in our collective history, when someone first came up with the idea of making a graphic mark, and forever changed the nature of how we communicate.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/genevieve_von_petzinger_why_are_these_32_symbols_found_in_ancient_caves_all_over_europe
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"It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. What do my bookshelves say about me? Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. I'd always thought of myself as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. But my bookshelves told a rather different story. Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock.And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame. I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter them. So, I decided to prescribe myself an intensive course of global reading. 2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. And so I decided to use it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. And so I did. And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today.But it started with some practical problems. After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week,I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations, and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world. Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English-language publishers. So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from French and published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland. French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in.The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary xenophobe. So how on earth was I going to read the world?I was going to have to ask for help. So in October 2011, I registered my blog, ayearofreadingtheworld.com, and I posted a short appeal online. I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might read from other parts of the planet. Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. At first, it was friends and colleagues. Then it was friends of friends. And pretty soon, it was strangers.Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur. She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me? I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books — Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet.But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. Some took on research on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still.Books often came from surprising sources. My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account. And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the work of the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. I found Morgan's website and I sent him a message, asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel ""The Golden Horse."" He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English.Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me self-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones.(Laughter)And I read about an orgy in a tree in Angola.But perhaps the most amazing example of the lengths that people were prepared to go to to help me read the world, came towards the end of my quest, when I tried to get hold of a book from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. Now, having spent several months trying everything I could think of to find a book that had been translated into English from the nation, it seemed as though the only option left to me was to see if I could get something translated for me from scratch. Now, I was really dubious whether anyone was going to want to help with this, and give up their time for something like that. But, within a week of me putting a call out on Twitter and Facebook for Portuguese speakers, I had more people than I could involve in the project, including Margaret Jull Costa, a leader in her field, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. With my nine volunteers in place, I managed to find a book by a São Toméan author that I could buy enough copies of online. Here's one of them. And I sent a copy out to each of my volunteers. They all took on a couple of short stories from this collection, stuck to their word, sent their translations back to me, and within six weeks, I had the entire book to read.In that case, as I found so often during my year of reading the world, my not knowing and being open about my limitations had become a big opportunity. When it came to São Tomé and Príncipe, it was a chance not only to learn something new and discover a new collection of stories, but also to bring together a group of people and facilitate a joint creative endeavor. My weakness had become the project's strength.The books I read that year opened my eyes to many things. As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes. That can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly if you're reading a book from a culture that may have quite different values to your own. But it can also be really enlightening. Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas can help clarify your own thinking. And it can also show up blind spots in the way you might have been looking at the world.When I looked back at much of the English-language literature I'd grown up with, for example, I began to see how narrow a lot of it was, compared to the richness that the world has to offer. And as the pages turned, something else started to happen, too. Little by little, that long list of countries that I'd started the year with, changed from a rather dry, academic register of place names into living, breathing entities.Now, I don't want to suggest that it's at all possible to get a rounded picture of a country simply by reading one book. But cumulatively, the stories I read that year made me more alive than ever before to the richness, diversity and complexity of our remarkable planet. It was as though the world's stories and the people who'd gone to such lengths to help me read them had made it real to me. These days, when I look at my bookshelves or consider the works on my e-reader, they tell a rather different story. It's the story of the power books have to connect us across political, geographical, cultural, social, religious divides. It's the tale of the potential human beings have to work together.And, it's testament to the extraordinary times we live in, where, thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever before for a stranger to share a story, a worldview, a book with someone she may never meet, on the other side of the planet. I hope it's a story I'm reading for many years to come. And I hope many more people will join me. If we all read more widely, there'd be more incentive for publishers to translate more books, and we would all be richer for that.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ann_morgan_my_year_reading_a_book_from_every_country_in_the_world
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"Your company launches a search for an open position. The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. Now the choosing begins. Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. All the right stuff. Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. But remember — both are qualified. So I ask you: who are you going to pick?My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. We call A ""the Silver Spoon,"" the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. And we call B ""the Scrapper,"" the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers —(Laughter)which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked —(Laughter)let me explain.A resume tells a story. And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview.To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit. But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed?I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. Our lives were one part ""Cuckoo's Nest,"" one part ""Awakenings"" and one part ""A Beautiful Mind.""(Laughter)I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality.Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth.In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. One-third.Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs.In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. What's remarkable — among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful.One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. He did it, he succeeded. His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard.Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, ""What can I do differently to create a better result?"" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, ""Business challenges? —(Laughter)Really? Piece of cake. I got this.""(Laughter)And that reminds me — humor. Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective.And finally, there are relationships. People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. I was lucky. In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college.(Laughter)I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S&P 500 by 25 percent.So back to my original question. Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose.Hire the Scrapper.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/regina_hartley_why_the_best_hire_might_not_have_the_perfect_resume
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"Now... let's go back in time. It's 1974. There is the gallery somewhere in the world, and there is a young girl, age 23, standing in the middle of the space. In the front of her is a table. On the table there are 76 objects for pleasure and for pain. Some of the objects are a glass of water, a coat, a shoe, a rose. But also the knife, the razor blade, the hammer and the pistol with one bullet. There are instructions which say, ""I'm an object. You can use everything on the table on me. I'm taking all responsibility — even killing me. And the time is six hours.""The beginning of this performance was easy. People would give me the glass of water to drink, they'd give me the rose. But very soon after, there was a man who took the scissors and cut my clothes, and then they took the thorns of the rose and stuck them in my stomach. Somebody took the razor blade and cut my neck and drank the blood, and I still have the scar. The women would tell the men what to do. And the men didn't rape me because it was just a normal opening, and it was all public, and they were with their wives. They carried me around and put me on the table, and put the knife between my legs. And somebody took the pistol and bullet and put it against my temple. And another person took the pistol and they started a fight.And after six hours were finished, I... started walking towards the public. I was a mess. I was half-naked, I was full of blood and tears were running down my face. And everybody escaped, they just ran away. They could not confront myself, with myself as a normal human being. And then — what happened is I went to the hotel, it was at two in the morning. And I looked at myself in the mirror, and I had a piece of gray hair. Alright — please take off your blindfolds.Welcome to the performance world. First of all, let's explain what the performance is. So many artists, so many different explanations, but my explanation for performance is very simple. Performance is a mental and physical construction that the performer makes in a specific time in a space in front of an audience and then energy dialogue happens. The audience and the performer make the piece together. And the difference between performance and theater is huge. In the theater, the knife is not a knife and the blood is just ketchup. In the performance, the blood is the material, and the razor blade or knife is the tool. It's all about being there in the real time, and you can't rehearse performance, because you can't do many of these types of things twice — ever. Which is very important, the performance is — you know, all human beings are always afraid of very simple things. We're afraid of suffering, we're afraid of pain, we're afraid of mortality. So what I'm doing — I'm staging these kinds of fears in front of the audience. I'm using your energy, and with this energy I can go and push my body as far as I can. And then I liberate myself from these fears. And I'm your mirror. If I can do this for myself, you can do it for you.After Belgrade, where I was born, I went to Amsterdam. And you know, I've been doing performances since the last 40 years. And here I met Ulay, and he was the person I actually fell in love with. And we made, for 12 years, performances together. You know the knife and the pistols and the bullets, I exchange into love and trust. So to do this kind work you have to trust the person completely because this arrow is pointing to my heart. So, heart beating and adrenaline is rushing and so on, is about trust, is about total trust to another human being.Our relationship was 12 years, and we worked on so many subjects, both male and female energy. And as every relationship comes to an end, ours went too. We didn't make phone calls like normal human beings do and say, you know, ""This is over."" We walked the Great Wall of China to say goodbye. I started at the Yellow Sea, and he started from the Gobi Desert. We walked, each of us, three months, two and a half thousand kilometers. It was the mountains, it was difficult. It was climbing, it was ruins. It was, you know, going through the 12 Chinese provinces, this was before China was open in '87. And we succeeded to meet in the middle to say goodbye. And then our relationship stopped.And now, it completely changed how I see the public. And one very important piece I made in those days was ""Balkan Baroque."" And this was the time of the Balkan Wars, and I wanted to create some very strong, charismatic image, something that could serve for any war at any time, because the Balkan Wars are now finished, but there's always some war, somewhere. So here I am washing two and a half thousand dead, big, bloody cow bones. You can't wash the blood, you never can wash shame off the wars. So I'm washing this six hours, six days, and wars are coming off these bones, and becoming possible — an unbearable smell. But then something stays in the memory.I want to show you the one who really changed my life, and this was the performance in MoMa, which I just recently made. This performance — when I said to the curator, ""I'm just going to sit at the chair, and there will be an empty chair at the front, and anybody from the public can come and sit as long as they want."" The curator said to me, ""That's ridiculous, you know, this is New York, this chair will be empty, nobody has time to sit in front of you.""(Laughter)But I sit for three months. And I sit everyday, eight hours — the opening of the museum — and 10 hours on Friday when the museum is open 10 hours, and I never move. And I removed the table and I'm still sitting, and this changed everything. This performance, maybe 10 or 15 years ago — nothing would have happened. But the need of people to actually experience something different, the public was not anymore the group — relation was one to one. I was watching these people, they would come and sit in front of me, but they would have to wait for hours and hours and hours to get to this position, and finally, they sit.And what happened? They are observed by the other people, they're photographed, they're filmed by the camera, they're observed by me and they have nowhere to escape except in themselves. And that makes a difference. There was so much pain and loneliness, there's so much incredible things when you look in somebody else's eyes, because in the gaze with that total stranger, that you never even say one word — everything happened. And I understood when I stood up from that chair after three months, I am not the same anymore. And I understood that I have a very strong mission, that I have to communicate this experience to everybody.And this is how, for me, was born the idea to have an institute of immaterial performing arts. Because thinking about immateriality, performance is time-based art. It's not like a painting. You have the painting on the wall, the next day it's there. Performance, if you are missing it, you only have the memory, or the story of somebody else telling you, but you actually missed the whole thing. So you have to be there. And in my point, if you talk about immaterial art, music is the highest — absolutely highest art of all, because it's the most immaterial. And then after this is performance, and then everything else. That's my subjective way.This institute is going to happen in Hudson, upstate New York, and we are trying to build with Rem Koolhaas, an idea. And it's very simple. If you want to get experience, you have to give me your time. You have to sign the contract before you enter the building, that you will spend there a full six hours, you have to give me your word of honor. It's something so old-fashioned, but if you don't respect your own word of honor and you leave before — that's not my problem. But it's six hours, the experience. And then after you finish, you get a certificate of accomplishment, so get home and frame it if you want.(Laughter)This is orientation hall. The public comes in, and the first thing you have to do is dress in lab coats. It's this importance of stepping from being just a viewer into experimenter. And then you go to the lockers and you put your watch, your iPhone, your iPod, your computer and everything digital, electronic. And you are getting free time for yourself for the first time. Because there is nothing wrong with technology, our approach to technology is wrong. We are losing the time we have for ourselves. This is an institute to actually give you back this time.So what you do here, first you start slow walking, you start slowing down. You're going back to simplicity. After slow walking, you're going to learn how to drink water — very simple, drinking water for maybe half an hour. After this, you're going to the magnet chamber, where you're going to create some magnet streams on your body. Then after this, you go to crystal chamber. After crystal chamber, you go to eye-gazing chamber, after eye-gazing chamber, you go to a chamber where you are lying down. So it's the three basic positions of the human body, sitting, standing and lying. And slow walking. And there is a sound chamber. And then after you've seen all of this, and prepared yourself mentally and physically, then you are ready to see something with a long duration, like in immaterial art. It can be music, it can be opera, it can be a theater piece, it can be film, it can be video dance. You go to the long duration chairs because now you are comfortable. In the long duration chairs, you're transported to the big place where you're going to see the work. And if you fall asleep, which is very possible because it's been a long day, you're going to be transported to the parking lot.(Laughter)And you know, sleeping is very important. In sleeping, you're still receiving art. So in the parking lot you stay for a certain amount of time, and then after this you just, you know, go back, you see more of the things you like to see or go home with your certificate.So this institute right now is virtual. Right now, I am just making my institute in Brazil, then it's going to be in Australia, then it's coming here, to Canada and everywhere. And this is to experience a kind of simple method, how you go back to simplicity in your own life. Counting rice will be another thing.(Laughter)You know, if you count rice you can make life, too. How to count rice for six hours? It's incredibly important. You know, you go through this whole range of being bored, being angry, being completely frustrated, not finishing the amount of rice you're counting. And then this unbelievable amount of peace you get when satisfying work is finished — or counting sand in the desert. Or having the sound-isolated situation — that you have headphones, that you don't hear anything, and you're just there together without sound, with the people experiencing silence, just the simple silence.We are always doing things we like in our life. And this is why you're not changing. You do things in life — it's just nothing happens if you always do things the same way. But my method is to do things I'm afraid of, the things I fear, the things I don't know, to go to territory that nobody's ever been.And then also to include the failure. I think failure is important because if you go, if you experiment, you can fail. If you don't go into that area and you don't fail, you are actually repeating yourself over and over again. And I think that human beings right now need a change, and the only change to be made is a personal level change. You have to make the change on yourself. Because the only way to change consciousness and to change the world around us, is to start with yourself. It's so easy to criticize how it's different, the things in the world and they're not right, and the governments are corrupted and there's hunger in the world and there's wars — the killing. But what we do on the personal level — what is our contribution to this whole thing?Can you turn to your neighbor, the one you don't know, and look at them for two full minutes in their eyes, right now?(Chatter)I'm asking two minutes of your time, that's so little. Breathe slowly, don't try to blink, don't be self-conscious. Be relaxed. And just look a complete stranger in your eyes, in his eyes.(Silence) Thank you for trusting me.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you so much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/marina_abramovic_an_art_made_of_trust_vulnerability_and_connection
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"What was the most difficult job you ever did? Was it working in the sun? Was it working to provide food for a family or a community? Was it working days and nights trying to protect lives and property? Was it working alone or working on a project that wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but that might improve human health or save a life? Was it working to build something, create something, make a work of art? Was it work for which you were never sure you were fully understood or appreciated? The people in our communities who do these jobs deserve our attention, our love and our deepest support.But people aren't the only ones in our communities who do these difficult jobs. These jobs are also done by the plants, the animals and the ecosystems on our planet, including the ecosystems I study: the tropical coral reefs. Coral reefs are farmers. They provide food, income and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Coral reefs are security guards. The structures that they build protect our shorelines from storm surge and waves, and the biological systems that they house filter the water and make it safer for us to work and play. Coral reefs are chemists. The molecules that we're discovering on coral reefs are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs. And coral reefs are artists. The structures that they build are some of the most beautiful things on planet Earth. And this beauty is the foundation of the tourism industry in many countries with few or little other natural resources.So for all of these reasons, all of these ecosystem services, economists estimate the value of the world's coral reefs in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And yet despite all that hard work being done for us and all that wealth that we gain, we have done almost everything we possibly could to destroy that. We have taken the fish out of the oceans and we have added in fertilizer, sewage, diseases, oil, pollution, sediments. We have trampled the reefs physically with our boats, our fins, our bulldozers, and we have changed the chemistry of the entire sea, warmed the waters and made storms worse. And these would all be bad on their own, but these threats magnify each other and compound one another and make each other worse.I'll give you an example. Where I live and work, in Curaçao, a tropical storm went by a few years ago. And on the eastern end of the island, where the reefs are intact and thriving, you could barely tell a tropical storm had passed. But in town, where corals had died from overfishing, from pollution, the tropical storm picked up the dead corals and used them as bludgeons to kill the corals that were left. This is a coral that I studied during my PhD — I got to know it quite well. And after this storm took off half of its tissue, it became infested with algae, the algae overgrew the tissue and that coral died. This magnification of threats, this compounding of factors is what Jeremy Jackson describes as the ""slippery slope to slime."" It's hardly even a metaphor because many of our reefs now are literally bacteria and algae and slime.Now, this is the part of the talk where you may expect me to launch into my plea for us to all save the coral reefs. But I have a confession to make: that phrase drives me nuts. Whether I see it in a tweet, in a news headline or the glossy pages of a conservation brochure, that phrase bothers me, because we as conservationists have been sounding the alarms about the death of coral reefs for decades. And yet, almost everyone I meet, no matter how educated, is not sure what a coral is or where they come from. How would we get someone to care about the world's coral reefs when it's an abstract thing they can barely understand? If they don't understand what a coral is or where it comes from, or how funny or interesting or beautiful it is, why would we expect them to care about saving them?So let's change that. What is a coral and where does it come from? Corals are born in a number of different ways, but most often by mass spawning: all of the individuals of a single species on one night a year, releasing all the eggs they've made that year into the water column, packaged into bundles with sperm cells. And those bundles go to the surface of the ocean and break apart. And hopefully — hopefully — at the surface of the ocean, they meet the eggs and sperm from other corals. And that is why you need lots of corals on a coral reef — so that all of their eggs can meet their match at the surface. When they're fertilized, they do what any other animal egg does: divides in half again and again and again. Taking these photos under the microscope every year is one of my favorite and most magical moments of the year. At the end of all this cell division, they turn into a swimming larva — a little tiny blob of fat the size of a poppy seed, but with all of the sensory systems that we have. They can sense color and light, textures, chemicals, pH. They can even feel pressure waves; they can hear sound. And they use those talents to search the bottom of the reef for a place to attach and live the rest of their lives.So imagine finding a place where you would live the rest of your life when you were just two days old. They attach in the place they find most suitable, they build a skeleton underneath themselves, they build a mouth and tentacles, and then they begin the difficult work of building the world's coral reefs. One coral polyp will divide itself again and again and again, leaving a limestone skeleton underneath itself and growing up toward the sun. Given hundreds of years and many species, what you get is a massive limestone structure that can be seen from space in many cases, covered by a thin skin of these hardworking animals. Now, there are only a few hundred species of corals on the planet, maybe 1,000. But these systems house millions and millions of other species, and that diversity is what stabilizes the systems, and it's where we're finding our new medicines. It's how we find new sources of food. I'm lucky enough to work on the island of Curaçao, where we still have reefs that look like this. But, indeed, much of the Caribbean and much of our world is much more like this.Scientists have studied in increasing detail the loss of the world's coral reefs, and they have documented with increasing certainty the causes. But in my research, I'm not interested in looking backward. My colleagues and I in Curaçao are interested in looking forward at what might be. And we have the tiniest reason to be optimistic. Because even in some of these reefs that we probably could have written off long ago, we sometimes see baby corals arrive and survive anyway. And we're starting to think that baby corals may have the ability to adjust to some of the conditions that the adults couldn't. They may be able to adjust ever so slightly more readily to this human planet. So in the research I do with my colleagues in Curaçao, we try to figure out what a baby coral needs in that critical early stage, what it's looking for and how we can try to help it through that process. I'm going to show you three examples of the work we've done to try to answer those questions.A few years ago we took a 3D printer and we made coral choice surveys — different colors and different textures, and we simply asked the coral where they preferred to settle. And we found that corals, even without the biology involved, still prefer white and pink, the colors of a healthy reef. And they prefer crevices and grooves and holes, where they will be safe from being trampled or eaten by a predator. So we can use this knowledge, we can go back and say we need to restore those factors — that pink, that white, those crevices, those hard surfaces — in our conservation projects. We can also use that knowledge if we're going to put something underwater, like a sea wall or a pier. We can choose to use the materials and colors and textures that might bias the system back toward those corals. Now in addition to the surfaces, we also study the chemical and microbial signals that attract corals to reefs. Starting about six years ago, I began culturing bacteria from surfaces where corals had settled. And I tried those one by one by one, looking for the bacteria that would convince corals to settle and attach. And we now have many bacterial strains in our freezer that will reliably cause corals to go through that settlement and attachment process. So as we speak, my colleagues in Curaçao are testing those bacteria to see if they'll help us raise more coral settlers in the lab, and to see if those coral settlers will survive better when we put them back underwater.Now in addition to these tools, we also try to uncover the mysteries of species that are under-studied. This is one of my favorite corals, and always has been: dendrogyra cylindrus, the pillar coral. I love it because it makes this ridiculous shape, because its tentacles are fat and look fuzzy and because it's rare. Finding one of these on a reef is a treat. In fact, it's so rare, that last year it was listed as a threatened species on the endangered species list. And this was in part because in over 30 years of research surveys, scientists had never found a baby pillar coral. We weren't even sure if they could still reproduce, or if they were still reproducing.So four years ago, we started following these at night and watching to see if we could figure out when they spawn in Curaçao. We got some good tips from our colleagues in Florida, who had seen one in 2007, one in 2008, and eventually we figured out when they spawn in Curaçao and we caught it. Here's a female on the left with some eggs in her tissue, about to release them into the seawater. And here's a male on the right, releasing sperm. We collected this, we got it back to the lab, we got it to fertilize and we got baby pillar corals swimming in our lab. Thanks to the work of our scientific aunts and uncles, and thanks to the 10 years of practice we've had in Curaçao at raising other coral species, we got some of those larvae to go through the rest of the process and settle and attach, and turn into metamorphosed corals. So this is the first pillar coral baby that anyone ever saw.(Applause)And I have to say — if you think baby pandas are cute, this is cuter.(Laughter)So we're starting to figure out the secrets to this process, the secrets of coral reproduction and how we might help them. And this is true all around the world; scientists are figuring out new ways to handle their embryos, to get them to settle, maybe even figuring out the methods to preserve them at low temperatures, so that we can preserve their genetic diversity and work with them more often. But this is still so low-tech. We are limited by the space on our bench, the number of hands in the lab and the number of coffees we can drink in any given hour.Now, compare that to our other crises and our other areas of concern as a society. We have advanced medical technology, we have defense technology, we have scientific technology, we even have advanced technology for art. But our technology for conservation is behind. Think back to the most difficult job you ever did. Many of you would say it was being a parent. My mother described being a parent as something that makes your life far more amazing and far more difficult than you could've ever possibly imagined. I've been trying to help corals become parents for over 10 years now. And watching the wonder of life has certainly filled me with amazement to the core of my soul. But I've also seen how difficult it is for them to become parents. The pillar corals spawned again two weeks ago, and we collected their eggs and brought them back to the lab. And here you see one embryo dividing, alongside 14 eggs that didn't fertilize and will blow up. They'll be infected with bacteria, they will explode and those bacteria will threaten the life of this one embryo that has a chance. We don't know if it was our handling methods that went wrong and we don't know if it was just this coral on this reef, always suffering from low fertility. Whatever the cause, we have much more work to do before we can use baby corals to grow or fix or, yes, maybe save coral reefs.So never mind that they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Coral reefs are hardworking animals and plants and microbes and fungi. They're providing us with art and food and medicine. And we almost took out an entire generation of corals. But a few made it anyway, despite our best efforts, and now it's time for us to thank them for the work they did and give them every chance they have to raise the coral reefs of the future, their coral babies.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_marhaver_how_we_re_growing_baby_corals_to_rebuild_reefs
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"What does a working mother look like? If you ask the Internet, this is what you'll be told. Never mind that this is what you'll actually produce if you attempt to work at a computer with a baby on your lap.(Laughter)But no, this isn't a working mother. You'll notice a theme in these photos. We'll look at a lot of them. That theme is amazing natural lighting, which, as we all know, is the hallmark of every American workplace.There are thousands of images like these. Just put the term ""working mother"" into any Google image search engine, stock photo site. They're all over the Internet, they're topping blog posts and news pieces, and I've become kind of obsessed with them and the lie that they tell us and the comfort that they give us, that when it comes to new working motherhood in America, everything's fine.But it's not fine. As a country, we are sending millions of women back to work every year, incredibly and kind of horrifically soon after they give birth. That's a moral problem but today I'm also going to tell you why it's an economic problem.I got so annoyed and obsessed with the unreality of these images, which look nothing like my life, that I recently decided to shoot and star in a parody series of stock photos that I hoped the world would start to use just showing the really awkward reality of going back to work when your baby's food source is attached to your body. I'm just going to show you two of them.(Laughter)Nothing says ""Give that girl a promotion"" like leaking breast milk through your dress during a presentation. You'll notice that there's no baby in this photo, because that's not how this works, not for most working mothers.Did you know, and this will ruin your day, that every time a toilet is flushed, its contents are aerosolized and they'll stay airborne for hours? And yet, for many new working mothers, this is the only place during the day that they can find to make food for their newborn babies.I put these things, a whole dozen of them, into the world. I wanted to make a point. I didn't know what I was also doing was opening a door, because now, total strangers from all walks of life write to me all the time just to tell me what it's like for them to go back to work within days or weeks of having a baby. I'm going to share 10 of their stories with you today. They are totally real, some of them are very raw, and not one of them looks anything like this.Here's the first. ""I was an active duty service member at a federal prison. I returned to work after the maximum allowed eight weeks for my C-section. A male coworker was annoyed that I had been out on 'vacation,' so he intentionally opened the door on me while I was pumping breast milk and stood in the doorway with inmates in the hallway.""Most of the stories that these women, total strangers, send to me now, are not actually even about breastfeeding.A woman wrote to me to say, ""I gave birth to twins and went back to work after seven unpaid weeks. Emotionally, I was a wreck. Physically, I had a severe hemorrhage during labor, and major tearing, so I could barely get up, sit or walk. My employer told me I wasn't allowed to use my available vacation days because it was budget season.""I've come to believe that we can't look situations like these in the eye because then we'd be horrified, and if we get horrified then we have to do something about it. So we choose to look at, and believe, this image. I don't really know what's going on in this picture, because I find it weird and slightly creepy.(Laughter)Like, what is she doing? But I know what it tells us. It tells us that everything's fine. This working mother, all working mothers and all of their babies, are fine. There's nothing to see here. And anyway, women have made a choice, so none of it's even our problem.I want to break this choice thing down into two parts. The first choice says that women have chosen to work. So, that's not true. Today in America, women make up 47 percent of the workforce, and in 40 percent of American households a woman is the sole or primary breadwinner. Our paid work is a part, a huge part, of the engine of this economy, and it is essential for the engines of our families. On a national level, our paid work is not optional.Choice number two says that women are choosing to have babies, so women alone should bear the consequences of those choices. You know, that's one of those things that when you hear it in passing, can sound correct. I didn't make you have a baby. I certainly wasn't there when that happened. But that stance ignores a fundamental truth, which is that our procreation on a national scale is not optional. The babies that women, many of them working women, are having today, will one day fill our workforce, protect our shores, make up our tax base. Our procreation on a national scale is not optional. These aren't choices. We need women to work. We need working women to have babies. So we should make doing those things at the same time at least palatable, right?OK, this is pop quiz time: what percentage of working women in America do you think have no access to paid maternity leave? 88 percent. 88 percent of working mothers will not get one minute of paid leave after they have a baby.So now you're thinking about unpaid leave. It exists in America. It's called FMLA. It does not work. Because of the way it's structured, all kinds of exceptions, half of new mothers are ineligible for it.Here's what that looks like. ""We adopted our son. When I got the call, the day he was born, I had to take off work. I had not been there long enough to qualify for FMLA, so I wasn't eligible for unpaid leave. When I took time off to meet my newborn son, I lost my job.""These corporate stock photos hide another reality, another layer. Of those who do have access to just that unpaid leave, most women can't afford to take much of it at all. A nurse told me, ""I didn't qualify for short-term disability because my pregnancy was considered a preexisting condition. We used up all of our tax returns and half of our savings during my six unpaid weeks. We just couldn't manage any longer. Physically it was hard, but emotionally it was worse. I struggled for months being away from my son.""So this decision to go back to work so early, it's a rational economic decision driven by family finances, but it's often physically horrific because putting a human into the world is messy.A waitress told me, ""With my first baby, I was back at work five weeks postpartum. With my second, I had to have major surgery after giving birth, so I waited until six weeks to go back. I had third degree tears.""23 percent of new working mothers in America will be back on the job within two weeks of giving birth.""I worked as a bartender and cook, average of 75 hours a week while pregnant. I had to return to work before my baby was a month old, working 60 hours a week. One of my coworkers was only able to afford 10 days off with her baby.""Of course, this isn't just a scenario with economic and physical implications. Childbirth is, and always will be, an enormous psychological event.A teacher told me, ""I returned to work eight weeks after my son was born. I already suffer from anxiety, but the panic attacks I had prior to returning to work were unbearable.""Statistically speaking, the shorter a woman's leave after having a baby, the more likely she will be to suffer from postpartum mood disorders like depression and anxiety, and among many potential consequences of those disorders, suicide is the second most common cause of death in a woman's first year postpartum.Heads up that this next story — I've never met this woman, but I find it hard to get through.""I feel tremendous grief and rage that I lost an essential, irreplaceable and formative time with my son. Labor and delivery left me feeling absolutely broken. For months, all I remember is the screaming: colic, they said. On the inside, I was drowning. Every morning, I asked myself how much longer I could do it. I was allowed to bring my baby to work. I closed my office door while I rocked and shushed and begged him to stop screaming so I wouldn't get in trouble. I hid behind that office door every damn day and cried while he screamed. I cried in the bathroom while I washed out the pump equipment. Every day, I cried all the way to work and all the way home again. I promised my boss that the work I didn't get done during the day, I'd make up at night from home. I thought, there's just something wrong with me that I can't swing this.""So those are the mothers. What of the babies? As a country, do we care about the millions of babies born every year to working mothers? I say we don't, not until they're of working and tax-paying and military-serving age. We tell them we'll see them in 18 years, and getting there is kind of on them. One of the reasons I know this is that babies whose mothers have 12 or more weeks at home with them are more likely to get their vaccinations and their well checks in their first year, so those babies are more protected from deadly and disabling diseases. But those things are hidden behind images like this.America has a message for new mothers who work and for their babies. Whatever time you get together, you should be grateful for it, and you're an inconvenience to the economy and to your employers. That narrative of gratitude runs through a lot of the stories I hear.A woman told me, ""I went back at eight weeks after my C-section because my husband was out of work. Without me, my daughter had failure to thrive. She wouldn't take a bottle. She started losing weight. Thankfully, my manager was very understanding. He let my mom bring my baby, who was on oxygen and a monitor, four times a shift so I could nurse her.""There's a little club of countries in the world that offer no national paid leave to new mothers. Care to guess who they are? The first eight make up eight million in total population. They are Papua New Guinea, Suriname and the tiny island nations of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tonga. Number nine is the United States of America, with 320 million people. Oh, that's it. That's the end of the list. Every other economy on the planet has found a way to make some level of national paid leave work for the people doing the work of the future of those countries, but we say, ""We couldn't possibly do that."" We say that the market will solve this problem, and then we cheer when corporations offer even more paid leave to the women who are already the highest-educated and highest-paid among us. Remember that 88 percent? Those middle- and low-income women are not going to participate in that. We know that there are staggering economic, financial, physical and emotional costs to this approach. We have decided — decided, not an accident, to pass these costs directly on to working mothers and their babies. We know the price tag is higher for low-income women, therefore disproportionately for women of color. We pass them on anyway.All of this is to America's shame. But it's also to America's risk. Because what would happen if all of these individual so-called choices to have babies started to turn into individual choices not to have babies.One woman told me, ""New motherhood is hard. It shouldn't be traumatic. When we talk about expanding our family now, we focus on how much time I would have to care for myself and a new baby. If we were to have to do it again the same way as with our first, we might stick with one kid.""The birthrate needed in America to keep the population stable is 2.1 live births per woman. In America today, we are at 1.86. We need women to have babies, and we are actively disincentivizing working women from doing that. What would happen to work force, to innovation, to GDP, if one by one, the working mothers of this country were to decide that they can't bear to do this thing more than once?I'm here today with only one idea worth spreading, and you've guessed what it is. It is long since time for the most powerful country on Earth to offer national paid leave to the people doing the work of the future of this country and to the babies who represent that future. Childbirth is a public good. This leave should be state-subsidized. It should have no exceptions for small businesses, length of employment or entrepreneurs. It should be able to be shared between partners. I've talked today a lot about mothers, but co-parents matter on so many levels.Not one more woman should have to go back to work while she is hobbling and bleeding. Not one more family should have to drain their savings account to buy a few days of rest and recovery and bonding. Not one more fragile infant should have to go directly from the incubator to day care because his parents have used up all of their meager time sitting in the NICU. Not one more working family should be told that the collision of their work, their needed work and their needed parenthood, is their problem alone.The catch is that when this is happening to a new family, it is consuming, and a family with a new baby is more financially vulnerable than they've ever been before, so that new mother cannot afford to speak up on her own behalf. But all of us have voices. I am done, done having babies, and you might be pre-baby, you might be post-baby, you might be no baby. It should not matter. We have to stop framing this as a mother's issue, or even a women's issue. This is an American issue.We need to stop buying the lie that these images tell us. We need to stop being comforted by them. We need to question why we're told that this can't work when we see it work everywhere all over the world. We need to recognize that this American reality is to our dishonor and to our peril. Because this is not, this is not, and this is not what a working mother looks like.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_shortall_how_america_fails_new_parents_and_their_babies
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"You might think there are many things that I can't do because I cannot see. That's largely true. Actually, I just needed to have a bit of help to come up to the stage.But there is also a lot that I can do. This is me rock climbing for the first time. Actually, I love sports and I can play many sports, like swimming, skiing, skating, scuba diving, running and so on. But there is one limitation: somebody needs to help me. I want to be independent.I lost my sight at the age of 14 in a swimming pool accident. I was an active, independent teenager, and suddenly I became blind. The hardest thing for me was losing my independence. Things that until then seemed simple became almost impossible to do alone. For example, one of my challenges was textbooks. Back then, there were no personal computers, no Internet, no smartphones. So I had to ask one of my two brothers to read me textbooks, and I had to create my own books in Braille. Can you imagine? Of course, my brothers were not happy about it, and later, I noticed they were not there whenever I needed them. (Laughter) I think they tried to stay away from me. I don't blame them. I really wanted to be freed from relying on someone. That became my strong desire to ignite innovation.Jump ahead to the mid-1980s. I got to know cutting-edge technologies and I thought to myself, how come there is no computer technology to create books in Braille? These amazing technologies must be able to also help people with limitations like myself. That's the moment my innovation journey began.I started developing digital book technologies, such as a digital Braille editor, digital Braille dictionary and a digital Braille library network. Today, every student who is visually impaired can read textbooks, by using personal computers and mobile devices, in Braille or in voice. This may not surprise you, since everyone now has digital books in their tablets in 2015. But Braille went digital many years before digital books, already in the late 1980s, almost 30 years ago. Strong and specific needs of the blind people made this opportunity to create digital books way back then. And this is actually not the first time this happened, because history shows us accessibility ignites innovation. The telephone was invented while developing a communication tool for hearing impaired people. Some keyboards were also invented to help people with disabilities.Now I'm going to give you another example from my own life. In the '90s, people around me started talking about the Internet and web browsing. I remember the first time I went on the web. I was astonished. I could access newspapers at any time and every day. I could even search for any information by myself. I desperately wanted to help the blind people have access to the Internet, and I found ways to render the web into synthesized voice, which dramatically simplified the user interface.This led me to develop the Home Page Reader in 1997, first in Japanese and later, translated into 11 languages. When I developed the Home Page Reader, I got many comments from users. One that I strongly remember said, ""For me, the Internet is a small window to the world.""It was a revolutionary moment for the blind. The cyber world became accessible, and this technology that we created for the blind has many uses, way beyond what I imagined. It can help drivers listen to their emails or it can help you listen to a recipe while cooking.Today, I am more independent, but it is still not enough. For example, when I approached the stage just now, I needed assistance. My goal is to come up here independently. And not just here. My goal is to be able to travel and do things that are simple to you.OK, now let me show you the latest technologies. This is a smartphone app that we are working on.(Video) Electronic voice: 51 feet to the door, and keep straight.EV: Take the two doors to go out. The door is on your right.EV: Nick is approaching. Looks so happy. Chieko Asakawa: Hi, Nick!(Laughter) CA: Where are you going? You look so happy.Nick: Oh — well, my paper just got accepted. CA: That's great! Congratulations.Nick: Thanks. Wait — how'd you know it was me, and that I look happy? (Chieko and Nick laugh)Man: Hi. (Laughter) CA: Oh ... hi.EV: He is not talking to you, but on his phone.EV: Potato chips.EV: Dark chocolate with almonds.EV: You gained 5 pounds since yesterday; take apple instead of chocolate.(Laughter)EV: Approaching.EV: You arrived.CA: Now ...(Applause)Thank you.So now the app navigates me by analyzing beacon signals and smartphone sensors and permits me to move around indoor and outdoor environments all by myself. But the computer vision part that showed who is approaching, in which mood — we are still working on that part. And recognizing facial expressions is very important for me to be social.So now the fusions of technologies are ready to help me see the real world. We call this cognitive assistance. It understands our surrounding world and whispers to me in voice or sends a vibration to my fingers. Cognitive assistance will augment missing or weakened abilities — in other words, our five senses. This technology is only in an early stage, but eventually, I'll be able to find a classroom on campus, enjoy window shopping or find a nice restaurant while walking along a street. It will be amazing if I can find you on the street before you notice me. It will become my best buddy, and yours.So, this really is a great challenge. It is a challenge that needs collaboration, which is why we are creating an open community to accelerate research activities. Just this morning, we announced the open-source fundamental technologies you just saw in the video.The frontier is the real world. The blind community is exploring this technical frontier and the pathfinder. I hope to work with you to explore the new era, and the next time that I'm on this stage, through technology and innovation, I will be able to walk up here all by myself.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chieko_asakawa_how_new_technology_helps_blind_people_explore_the_world
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"(Video) Announcer: 10 seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. Official top. Plus one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Guillaume Néry, France. Constant weight, 123 meters, three minutes and 25 seconds. National record attempt. 70 meters. [123 meters](Applause)(Video) Judge: White card. Guillaume Néry! National record!Guillaume Néry: Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much, thanks for the warm welcome. That dive you just watched is a journey — a journey between two breaths. A journey that takes place between two breaths — the last one before diving into the water, and the first one, coming back to the surface. That dive is a journey to the very limits of human possibility, a journey into the unknown. But it's also, and above all, an inner journey, where a number of things happen, physiologically as well as mentally. And that's why I'm here today, to share my journey with you and to take you along with me.So, we start with the last breath. (Breathing in) (Breathing out) As you noticed, that last breath in is slow, deep and intense. It ends with a special technique called the carp, which allows me to store one to two extra liters of air in my lungs by compressing it. When I leave the surface, I have about 10 liters of air in my lungs. As soon as I leave the surface the first mechanism kicks in: the diving reflex. The first thing the diving reflex does is make your heart rate drop. My heart beat will drop from about 60-70 per minute to about 30-40 beats per minute in a matter of seconds; almost immediately.Next, the diving reflex causes peripheral vasoconstriction, which means that the blood flow will leave the body's extremities to feed the most important organs: the lungs, the heart and the brain. This mechanism is innate. I cannot control it. If you go underwater, even if you've never done it before, you'll experience the exact same effects. All human beings share this characteristic. And what's extraordinary is that we share this instinct with marine mammals — all marine mammals: dolphins, whales, sea lions, etc. When they dive deep into the ocean, these mechanisms become activated, but to a greater extent. And, of course, it works much better for them. It's absolutely fascinating.Right as I leave the surface, nature gives me a push in the right direction, allowing me to descend with confidence.So as I dive deeper into the blue, the pressure slowly starts to squeeze my lungs. And since it's the amount of air in my lungs that makes me float, the farther down I go, the more pressure there is on my lungs, the less air they contain and the easier it is for my body to fall. And at one point, around 35 or 40 meters down, I don't even need to swim. My body is dense and heavy enough to fall into the depths by itself, and I enter what's called the free fall phase. The free fall phase is the best part of the dive. It's the reason I still dive. Because it feels like you're being pulled down and you don't need to do anything. I can go from 35 meters to 123 meters without making a single movement. I let myself be pulled by the depths, and it feels like I'm flying underwater. It's truly an amazing feeling — an extraordinary feeling of freedom.And so I slowly continue sliding to the bottom. 40 meters down, 50 meters down, and between 50 and 60 meters, a second physiological response kicks in. My lungs reach residual volume, below which they're not supposed to be compressed, in theory. And this second response is called blood shift, or ""pulmonary erection"" in French. I prefer ""blood shift.""(Laughter)So blood shift — how does it work? The capillaries in the lungs become engorged with blood — which is caused by the suction — so the lungs can harden and protect the whole chest cavity from being crushed. It prevents the two walls of the lungs from collapsing, from sticking together and caving in. Thanks to this phenomenon, which we also share with marine mammals, I'm able to continue with my dive.60, 70 meters down, I keep falling, faster and faster, because the pressure is crushing my body more and more. Below 80 meters, the pressure becomes a lot stronger, and I start to feel it physically. I really start to feel the suffocation. You can see what it looks like — not pretty at all. The diaphragm is completely collapsed, the rib cage is squeezed in, and mentally, there is something going on as well.You may be thinking, ""This doesn't look enjoyable. How do you do it?"" If I relied on my earthly reflexes — what do we do above water when there's a problem? We resist, we go against it. We fight. Underwater, that doesn't work. If you try that underwater, you might tear your lungs, spit up blood, develop an edema and you'll have to stop diving for a good amount of time. So what you need to do, mentally, is to tell yourself that nature and the elements are stronger than you.And so I let the water crush me. I accept the pressure and go with it. At this point, my body receives this information, and my lungs start relaxing. I relinquish all control, and relax completely. The pressure starts crushing me, and it doesn't feel bad at all. I even feel like I'm in a cocoon, protected.And the dive continues. 80, 85 meters down, 90, 100. 100 meters — the magic number. In every sport, it's a magic number. For swimmers and athletes and also for us, free divers, it's a number everyone dreams of. Everyone wishes one day to be able to get to 100 meters. And it's a symbolic number for us, because in the 1970s, doctors and physiologists did their math, and predicted that the human body would not be able to go below 100 meters. Below that, they said, the human body would implode. And then the Frenchman, Jacques Mayol — you all know him as the hero in ""The Big Blue"" — came along and dived down to 100 meters. He even reached 105 meters. At that time, he was doing ""no limits."" He'd use weights to descend faster and come back up with a balloon, just like in the movie. Today, we go down 200 meters in no limit free diving. I can do 123 meters by simply using muscle strength. And in a way, it's all thanks to him, because he challenged known facts, and with a sweep of his hand, got rid of the theoretical beliefs and all the mental limits that we like to impose on ourselves. He showed us that the human body has an infinite ability to adapt.So I carry on with my dive. 105, 110, 115. The bottom is getting closer. 120, 123 meters. I'm at the bottom.And now, I'd like to ask you to join me and put yourself in my place. Close your eyes. Imagine you get to 123 meters. The surface is far, far away. You're alone. There's hardly any light. It's cold — freezing cold. The pressure is crushing you completely — 13 times stronger than on the surface. And I know what you're thinking: ""This is horrible. What the hell am I doing here? He's insane."" But no. That's not what I think when I'm down there. When I'm at the bottom, I feel good. I get this extraordinary feeling of well-being. Maybe it's because I've completely released all tensions and let myself go. I feel great, without the need to breathe.Although, you'd agree, I should be worried. I feel like a tiny dot, a little drop of water, floating in the middle of the ocean. And each time, I picture the same image. [The Pale Blue Dot] It's that small dot the arrow is pointing to. Do you know what it is? It's planet Earth. Planet Earth, photographed by the Voyager probe, from 4 billion kilometers away. And it shows that our home is that small dot over there, floating in the middle of nothing.That's how I feel when I'm at the bottom, at 123 meters. I feel like a small dot, a speck of dust, stardust, floating in the middle of the cosmos, in the middle of nothing, in the immensity of space. It's a fascinating sensation, because when I look up, down, left, right, in front, behind, I see the same thing: the infinite deep blue. Nowhere else on Earth you can experience this — looking all around you, and seeing the same thing. It's extraordinary. And at that moment, I still get that feeling each time, building up inside of me — the feeling of humility.Looking at this picture, I feel very humble — just like when I'm all the way down at the bottom — because I'm nothing, I'm a little speck of nothingness lost in all of time and space. And it still is absolutely fascinating. I decide to go back to the surface, because this is not where I belong. I belong up there, on the surface.So I start heading back up. I get something of a shock at the very moment when I decide to go up. First, because it takes a huge effort to tear yourself away from the bottom. It pulled you down on the way in, and will do the same on the way up. You have to swim twice as hard. Then, I'm hit with another phenomenon known as narcosis. I don't know if you've heard of that. It's called nitrogen narcosis. It's something that happens to scuba divers, but it can happen to free divers. It's caused by nitrogen dissolving in the blood, which causes confusion between the conscious and unconscious mind. A flurry of thoughts goes spinning through your head. You can't control them, and you shouldn't try to — you have to let it happen. The more you try to control it, the harder it is to manage. Then, a third thing happens: the desire to breathe. I'm not a fish, I'm a human being, and the desire to breathe reminds me of that fact. Around 60, 70 meters, you start to feel the need to breathe. And with everything else that's going on, you can very easily lose your ground and start to panic. When that happens, you think, ""Where's the surface? I want to go up. I want to breathe now."" You should not do that. Never look up to the surface — not with your eyes, or your mind. You should never picture yourself up there. You have to stay in the present. I look at the rope right in front of me, leading me back to the surface. And I focus on that, on the present moment. Because if I think about the surface, I panic. And if I panic, it's over. Time goes faster this way.And at 30 meters: deliverance. I'm not alone any more. The safety divers, my guardian angels, join me. They leave the surface, we meet at 30 meters, and they escort me for the final few meters, where potential problems could arise. Every time I see them, I think to myself, ""It's thanks to you."" It's thanks to them, my team, that I'm here. It brings back the sense of humility. Without my team, without all the people around me, the adventure into the deep would be impossible. A journey into the deep is above all a group effort.So I'm happy to finish my journey with them, because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. 20 meters, 10 meters, my lungs slowly return to their normal volume. Buoyancy pushes me up to the surface. Five meters below the surface, I start to breathe out, so that as soon as I get to the surface all I do is breathe in. And so I arrive at the surface. (Breathing in) Air floods into my lungs. It's like being born again, a relief. It feels good. Though the journey was extraordinary, I do need to feel those small oxygen molecules fueling my body. It's an extraordinary sensation, but at the same time it's traumatizing. It's a shock to the system, as you can you imagine. I go from complete darkness to the light of day, from the near-silence of the depths to the commotion up top. In terms of touch, I go from the soft, velvety feeling of the water, to air rubbing across my face. In terms of smell, there is air rushing into my lungs.And in return, my lungs open up. They were completely squashed just 90 seconds ago, and now, they've opened up again. So all of this affects quite a lot of things. I need a few seconds to come back, and to feel ""all there"" again. But that needs to happen quickly, because the judges are there to verify my performance; I need to show them I'm in perfect physical condition. You saw in the video, I was doing a so-called exit protocol. Once at the surface, I have 15 seconds to take off my nose clip, give this signal and say (English) ""I am OK."" Plus, you need to be bilingual.(Laughter)On top of everything — that's not very nice. Once the protocol is completed, the judges show me a white card, and that's when the joy starts. I can finally celebrate what has just happened.So, the journey I've just described to you is a more extreme version of free diving. Luckily, it's far from just that. For the past few years, I've been trying to show another side of free diving, because the media mainly talks about competitions and records. But free diving is more than just that. It's about being at ease in the water. It's extremely beautiful, very poetic and artistic.So my wife and I decided to film it and try to show another side of it, mostly to make people want to go into the water. Let me show you some images to finish my story. It's a mix of beautiful underwater photos.(Music)I'd like you to know that if one day you try to stop breathing, you'll realize that when you stop breathing, you stop thinking, too. It calms your mind.Today, in the 21st century, we're under so much pressure. Our minds are overworked, we think at a million miles an hour, we're always stressed. Being able to free dive lets you, just for a moment, relax your mind. Holding your breath underwater means giving yourself the chance to experience weightlessness. It means being underwater, floating, with your body completely relaxed, letting go of all your tensions. This is our plight in the 21st century: our backs hurt, our necks hurt, everything hurts, because we're stressed and tense all the time. But when you're in the water, you let yourself float, as if you were in space. You let yourself go completely. It's an extraordinary feeling. You can finally get in touch with your body, mind and spirit. Everything feels better, all at once.Learning how to free dive is also about learning to breathe correctly. We breathe with our first breath at birth, up until our last one. Breathing gives rhythm to our lives. Learning how to breathe better is learning how to live better. Holding your breath in the sea, not necessarily at 100 meters, but maybe at two or three, putting on your goggles, a pair of flippers, means you can go see another world, another universe, completely magical. You can see little fish, seaweed, the flora and fauna, you can watch it all discreetly, sliding underwater, looking around, and coming back to the surface, leaving no trace. It's an amazing feeling to become one with nature like that.And if I may say one more thing, holding your breath, being in the water, finding this underwater world — it's all about connecting with yourself. You heard me talk a lot about the body's memory that dates back millions of years, to our marine origins. The day you get back into the water, when you hold your breath for a few seconds, you will reconnect with those origins. And I guarantee it's absolute magic. I encourage you to try it out.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/guillaume_nery_the_exhilarating_peace_of_freediving
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"Great things happen at intersections. In fact, I would argue that some of the most interesting things of the human experience occur at the intersections, in the liminal space, where by liminal I mean the space in-between. There's freedom in that in-between, freedom to create from the indefiniteness of not-quite-here, not-quite-there, a new self-definition. Some of the great intersections of the world come to mind, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or Times Square in New York City, both bustling with the excitement of a seemingly endless stream of people. Other intersections, like the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, or Canfield Drive and Copper Creek Court in Ferguson, Missouri, also come to mind because of the tremendous energy at the intersection of human beings, ideologies and the ongoing struggle for justice.Beyond the physical landscape of our planet, some of the most famous celestial images are of intersections. Stars are born at the messy intersection of gas and dust, instigated by gravity's irrevocable pull. Stars die by this same intersection, this time flung outward in a violent collision of smaller atoms, intersecting and efficiently fusing into altogether new and heavier things. We can all think of intersections that have special meaning to us. To be intersectional, then, is to occupy a position at an intersection.I've lived the entirety of my life in the in-between, in the liminal space between dreams and reality, race and gender, poverty and plenty, science and society. I am both black and a woman. Like the birth of stars in the heavenlies, this robust combination of knowing results in a shining example of the explosive fusion of identities.I am also an astrophysicist. I study blazars, supermassive, hyperactive black holes that sit at the centers of massive galaxies and shoot out jets nearby those black holes at speeds approaching the speed of light in a process we are still trying to completely understand.I have dreamed of becoming an astrophysicist since I was 12 years old. I had no idea that at that time, according to Dr. Jamie Alexander's archive of African-American women in physics, only 18 black women in the United States had ever earned a PhD in a physics-related discipline, and that the first black woman to graduate with a PhD in an astronomy-related field did so just one year before my birth.As I journeyed along my path, I encountered the best and worst of life at an intersection: the tremendous opportunity to self-define, the collision of expectation and experience, the exhilaration of victorious breakthroughs and, sometimes, the explosive pain of regeneration.I began my college experience just after my family had fallen apart. Our financial situation disintegrated just after my father's departure from our lives. This thrust my mother, my sister and I out of the relative comfort of middle-class life and into the almost constant struggle to make ends meet. Thus, I was one of roughly 60 percent of women of color who find finances to be a major barrier to their educational goals. Thankfully, Norfolk State University provided me with full funding, and I was able to achieve my bachelor's in physics.After graduation, and despite knowing that I wanted a PhD in astrophysics, I fell through the cracks. It was a poster that saved my dream, and some really incredible people and programs. The American Physical Society had this beautiful poster encouraging students of color to become physicists. It was striking to me because it featured a young black girl, probably around 12 years old, looking studiously at some physics equations. I remember thinking I was looking directly back at the little girl who first dared to dream this dream. I immediately wrote to the Society and requested my personal copy of the poster, which to this day still hangs in my office. I described to them in the email my educational path, and my desire to find myself again in pursuit of the PhD. They directed me to the Fisk-Vanderbilt University Bridge Program, itself an intersection of the master's and PhD degrees at two institutions. After two years out of school, they accepted me into the program, and I found myself again on the path to the PhD.After receiving my master's at Fisk, I went on to Yale to complete my PhD. Once I was physically occupying the space that would ultimately give way to my childhood aspirations, I anticipated a smooth glide to the PhD.(Laughter)It became immediately apparent that not everyone was thrilled to have that degree of liminality in their space. I was ostracized by many of my classmates, one of whom went so far as to invite me to ""do what I really came here to do"" as he pushed all the dirty dishes from our meal in front of me to clean up. I wish that were an isolated occurrence, but for many women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, this is something they have long endured. One hundred percent of the 60 women of color interviewed in a recent study by Joan C. Williams at UC Hastings reported facing racialized gender bias, including being mistaken for the janitorial staff. This mistaken identity was not reported by any of the white women interviewed for this study, which comprised 557 women in total. While there is nothing inherently wrong with a janitorial position, and in fact my forefathers and foremothers were able to attend college because many of their parents worked these jobs, it was a clear attempt to put me in my place.While there was certainly the acute pain of the encounter, the real issue is that my appearance can tell anyone anything about my ability. Beyond that, though, it underscores that the women of color in STEM do not experience the same set of barriers that just women or just people of color face. That's why today I want to highlight women of color in STEM, who are inexorably, unapologetically living as the inseparable sum of identities.STEM itself is an intersectional term, such that its true richness cannot be appreciated without considering the liminal space between disciplines. Science, the pursuit of understanding the physical world by way of chemistry, physics, biology, cannot be accomplished in the absence of mathematics. Engineering requires the application of basic science and math to the lived experience. Technology sits firmly on the foundation of math, engineering and science. Math itself serves the critical role of Rosetta Stone, decoding and encoding the physical principles of the world. STEM is utterly incomplete without each individual piece. This is to say nothing of the enrichment that is realized when STEM is combined with other disciplines.The purpose for this talk is twofold: first, to say directly to every black, Latina, indigenous, First Nation or any other woman or girl who finds herself resting at the blessed intersection of race and gender, that you can be anything you want to be. My personal hope is that you'll become an astrophysicist, but beyond that, anything you want. Do not think for one minute that because you are who you are, you cannot be who you imagine yourself to be. Hold fast to those dreams and let them carry you into a world you can't even imagine.Secondly, among the most pressing issues of our time, most now find their intersection with STEM. We have as a global society solved most of the single-faceted issues of our time. Those that remain require a thorough investigation of the liminal space between disciplines to create the multifaceted solutions of tomorrow. Who better to solve these liminal problems than those who have faced their whole lives at the intersections. We as thought leaders and decision makers must push past the first steps of diversity and into the richer and more robust territory of full inclusion and equal opportunity.One of my favorite examples of liminal excellence comes from the late Dr. Claudia Alexander, a black woman plasma physicist, who passed away this past July after a 10-year bout with breast cancer. She was a NASA project scientist who spearheaded the NASA side of the Rosetta mission, which became famous this year for landing a rover on a comet, and the 1.5 billion dollar Galileo mission to Jupiter, two high-profile scientific victories for NASA, the United States and the world. Dr. Alexander said it this way: ""I'm used to walking between two cultures. For me, it's among the purposes of my life to take us from states of ignorance to states of understanding with bold exploration that you can't do every day.""This shows exactly the power of a liminal person. She had the technical ability to spearhead some of the most ambitious space missions of our time, and she perfectly understood her place of being exactly who she was in any place she was.Jessica Matthews, inventor of the SOCCKET line of sports products, like soccer balls, that generate renewable energy as you play with them, said it this way: ""A major part of invention isn't just creating things, it's understanding people and understanding the systems that make this world."" The reason I tell my story and the story of Dr. Alexander and Jessica Matthews is because they are fundamentally intersectional stories, the stories of lives lived at the nexus of race, gender and innovation.Despite implicit and explicit questions of my right to be in an elite space, I'm proud to report that when I graduated, I was the first black woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics in Yale's then 312-year history.(Applause)I am now part of a small but growing cadre of women of color in STEM who are poised to bring new perspectives and new ideas to life on the most pressing issues of our time: things like educational inequities, police brutality, HIV/AIDS, climate change, genetic editing, artificial intelligence and Mars exploration. This is to say nothing of the things we haven't even thought of yet.Women of color in STEM occupy some of the toughest and most exciting sociotechnological issues of our time. Thus, we are uniquely positioned to contribute to and drive these conversations in ways that are more inclusive of a wider variety of lived experience. This outlook can be expanded to the many intersectional people whose experiences, positive and negative, enrich the conversations in ways that outmatch even the best-resourced homogenous groups.This is not a request born out of a desire to fit in. It's a reminder that we cannot get to the best possible outcomes for the totality of humanity without precisely this collaboration, this bringing together of the liminal, the differently lived, distinctly experienced and disparately impacted. Simply put, we cannot be the most excellent expression of our collective genius without the full measure of humanity brought to bear.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jedidah_isler_the_untapped_genius_that_could_change_science_for_the_better
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"In the past few months, I've been traveling for weeks at a time with only one suitcase of clothes. One day, I was invited to an important event, and I wanted to wear something special and new for it. So I looked through my suitcase and I couldn't find anything to wear. I was lucky to be at the technology conference on that day, and I had access to 3D printers. So I quickly designed a skirt on my computer, and I loaded the file on the printer. It just printed the pieces overnight. The next morning, I just took all the pieces, assembled them together in my hotel room, and this is actually the skirt that I'm wearing right now.(Applause)So it wasn't the first time that I printed clothes. For my senior collection at fashion design school, I decided to try and 3D print an entire fashion collection from my home. The problem was that I barely knew anything about 3D printing, and I had only nine months to figure out how to print five fashionable looks.I always felt most creative when I worked from home. I loved experimenting with new materials, and I always tried to develop new techniques to make the most unique textiles for my fashion projects. I loved going to old factories and weird stores in search of leftovers of strange powders and weird materials, and then bring them home to experiment on. As you can probably imagine, my roommates didn't like that at all.(Laughter)So I decided to move on to working with big machines, ones that didn't fit in my living room. I love the exact and the custom work I can do with all kinds of fashion technologies, like knitting machines and laser cutting and silk printing.One summer break, I came here to New York for an internship at a fashion house in Chinatown. We worked on two incredible dresses that were 3D printed. They were amazing — like you can see here. But I had a few issues with them. They were made from hard plastics and that's why they were very breakable. The models couldn't sit in them, and they even got scratched from the plastics under their arms.With 3D printing, the designers had so much freedom to make the dresses look exactly like they wanted, but still, they were very dependent on big and expensive industrial printers that were located in a lab far from their studio.Later that year, a friend gave me a 3D printed necklace, printed using a home printer. I knew that these printers were much cheaper and much more accessible than the ones we used at my internship. So I looked at the necklace, and then I thought, ""If I can print a necklace from home, why not print my clothes from home, too?"" I really liked the idea that I wouldn't have to go to the market and pick fabrics that someone else chose to sell — I could just design them and print them directly from home.I found a small makerspace, where I learned everything I know about 3D printing. Right away, they literally gave me the key to the lab, so I could experiment into the night, every night.The main challenge was to find the right filament for printing clothes with. So what is a filament? Filament is the material you feed the printer with. And I spent a month or so experimenting with PLA, which is a hard and scratchy, breakable material.The breakthrough came when I was introduced to Filaflex, which is a new kind of filament. It's strong, yet very flexible. And with it, I was able to print the first garment, the red jacket that had the word ""Liberté"" — ""freedom"" in French — embedded into it. I chose this word because I felt so empowered and free when I could just design a garment from my home and then print it by myself. And actually, you can easily download this jacket, and easily change the word to something else. For example, your name or your sweetheart's name.(Laughter)So the printer plates are small, so I had to piece the garment together, just like a puzzle.And I wanted to solve another challenge. I wanted to print textiles that I would use just like regular fabrics. That's when I found an open-source file from an architect who designed a pattern that I love. And with it, I was able to print a beautiful textile that I would use just like a regular fabric. And it actually even looks a little bit like lace.So I took his file and I modified it, and changed it, played with it — many kinds of versions out of it. And I needed to print another 1,500 more hours to complete printing my collection. So I brought six printers to my home and just printed 24-7. And this is actually a really slow process, but let's remember the Internet was significantly slower 20 years ago, so 3D printing will also accelerate and in no time you'll be able to print a T-Shirt in your home in just a couple of hours, or even minutes.So you guys, you want to see what it looks like?Audience: Yeah!(Applause)Danit Peleg: Rebecca is wearing one of my five outfits. Almost everything here she's wearing, I printed from my home. Even her shoes are printed.Audience: Wow!Audience: Cool!(Applause)Danit Peleg: Thank you, Rebecca. (To audience) Thank you, guys.So I think in the future, materials will evolve, and they will look and feel like fabrics we know today, like cotton or silk. Imagine personalized clothes that fit exactly to your measurements.Music was once a very physical thing. You would have to go to the record shop and buy CDs, but now you can just download the music — digital music — directly to your phone. Fashion is also a very physical thing. And I wonder what our world will look like when our clothes will be digital, just like this skirt is.Thank you so much.(Applause)[Thank You](Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danit_peleg_forget_shopping_soon_you_ll_download_your_new_clothes
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"Can I get a show of hands — how many of you in this room have been on a plane in this past year? That's pretty good. Well, it turns out that you share that experience with more than three billion people every year. And when we put so many people in all these metal tubes that fly all over the world, sometimes, things like this can happen and you get a disease epidemic.I first actually got into this topic when I heard about the Ebola outbreak last year. And it turns out that, although Ebola spreads through these more range-limited, large-droplet routes, there's all these other sorts of diseases that can be spread in the airplane cabin. The worst part is, when we take a look at some of the numbers, it's pretty scary. So with H1N1, there was this guy that decided to go on the plane and in the matter of a single flight actually spread the disease to 17 other people. And then there was this other guy with SARS, who managed to go on a three-hour flight and spread the disease to 22 other people. That's not exactly my idea of a great superpower.When we take a look at this, what we also find is that it's very difficult to pre-screen for these diseases. So when someone actually goes on a plane, they could be sick and they could actually be in this latency period in which they could actually have the disease but not exhibit any symptoms, and they could, in turn, spread the disease to many other people in the cabin.How that actually works is that right now we've got air coming in from the top of the cabin and from the side of the cabin, as you see in blue. And then also, that air goes out through these very efficient filters that eliminate 99.97 percent of pathogens near the outlets. What happens right now, though, is that we have this mixing airflow pattern. So if someone were to actually sneeze, that air would get swirled around multiple times before it even has a chance to go out through the filter. So I thought: clearly, this is a pretty serious problem.I didn't have the money to go out and buy a plane, so I decided to build a computer instead. It actually turns out that with computational fluid dynamics, what we're able to do is create these simulations that give us higher resolutions than actually physically going in and taking readings in the plane. And so how, essentially, this works is you would start out with these 2D drawings — these are floating around in technical papers around the Internet. I take that and then I put it into this 3D-modeling software, really building that 3D model. And then I divide that model that I just built into these tiny pieces, essentially meshing it so that the computer can better understand it. And then I tell the computer where the air goes in and out of the cabin, throw in a bunch of physics and basically sit there and wait until the computer calculates the simulation.So what we get, actually, with the conventional cabin is this: you'll notice the middle person sneezing, and we go ""Splat!"" — it goes right into people's faces. It's pretty disgusting. From the front, you'll notice those two passengers sitting next to the central passenger not exactly having a great time. And when we take a look at that from the side, you'll also notice those pathogens spreading across the length of the cabin.The first thing I thought was, ""This is no good."" So I actually conducted more than 32 different simulations and ultimately, I came up with this solution right here. This is what I call a — patent pending — Global Inlet Director. With this, we're able to reduce pathogen transmission by about 55 times, and increase fresh-air inhalation by about 190 percent.So how this actually works is we would install this piece of composite material into these existing spots that are already in the plane. So it's very cost-effective to install and we can do this directly overnight. All we have to do is put a couple of screws in there and you're good to go. And the results that we get are absolutely amazing. Instead of having those problematic swirling airflow patterns, we can create these walls of air that come down in-between the passengers to create personalized breathing zones.So you'll notice the middle passenger here is sneezing again, but this time, we're able to effectively push that down to the filters for elimination. And same thing from the side, you'll notice we're able to directly push those pathogens down. So if you take a look again now at the same scenario but with this innovation installed, you'll notice the middle passenger sneezes, and this time, we're pushing that straight down into the outlet before it gets a chance to infect any other people. So you'll notice the two passengers sitting next to the middle guy are breathing virtually no pathogens at all. Take a look at that from the side as well, you see a very efficient system.And in short, with this system, we win. When we take a look at what this means, what we see is that this not only works if the middle passenger sneezes, but also if the window-seat passenger sneezes or if the aisle-seat passenger sneezes.And so with this solution, what does this mean for the world? Well, when we take a look at this from the computer simulation into real life, we can see with this 3D model that I built over here, essentially using 3D printing, we can see those same airflow patterns coming down, right to the passengers. In the past, the SARS epidemic actually cost the world about 40 billion dollars. And in the future, a big disease outbreak could actually cost the world in excess of three trillion dollars. So before, it used to be that you had to take an airplane out of service for one to two months, spend tens of thousands of man hours and several million dollars to try to change something. But now, we're able to install something essentially overnight and see results right away.So it's really now a matter of taking this through to certification, flight testing, and going through all of these regulatory approvals processes. But it just really goes to show that sometimes the best solutions are the simplest solutions. And two years ago, even, this project would not have happened, just because the technology then wouldn't have supported it. But now with advanced computing and how developed our Internet is, it's really the golden era for innovation.And so the question I ask all of you today is: why wait? Together, we can build the future today.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raymond_wang_how_germs_travel_on_planes_and_how_we_can_stop_them
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"Nicole Paris: TEDYouth, make some noise!(Beatboxing) TEDYouth, make some —(Beatboxing)(Beatboxing ends)Are you ready?(Cheers and applause)Are you ready?Ed Cage: Yeah, yeah, yeah!(Beatboxing)(Laughter)EC: Y'all like that? Let me show you how we used to do it —NP: Get it pops, go ahead.EC: ... when I was growing up in the '90s.(Beatboxing)(Beatboxing ends)(Laughter)(Beatboxing)NP: Pops, pops, pops, pops, pops, pops, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up! Oh my God. OK, he's trying to battle me. Hold on, right now, hold on. Do you remember when you used to beatbox me to sleep?EC: Yeah, yeah, I remember. That's when she was a little baby. We would do something like this.(Beatboxing)NP: I remember that.(Beatboxing)NP: All right, pops, pops, pops, chill out, chill out. Hold up, hold up, hold up.EC: Y'all remember the video. This is like a little payback or something for 50 million people calling me the loser.NP: Hold up, hold up. But a lot of people out there don't really know what beatboxing is, where it started from.EC: Right, right.NP: Where it came from. So why don't you give them a little history — just a tickle — a bit of history of where it comes from.EC: Beatbox started here in New York.(Cheers)That's right, that's right. New York, New York! Everybody like, ""Yeah!"" Well, we from St. Louis.(Laughter)NP: Now you can put y'all hands down.(Laughter)EC: But beatbox started here in New York. What you would have is that, when we would go to parties, you would have the DJ and you would have the rapper. But because I don't have electricity coming out of me, we had to emulate what the beats was doing. So when you would see the beatboxer, you would see us over to the side. Then you would see a rapper, and when the rapper began to rap, we would do a simple beat, because back then the beats were simple —(Beatboxing)or —(Beatboxing)Those were simple beats. But now, you got folks that want to do all type of stuff with their beats now, and they want to humiliate their father, which is not right when you want to humiliate the person that take care of you, pay all your tuition, (Nicole laughs) especially when you have 50 million people that just go around and call you ""the loser."" Well, I'm taking that to heart. But now we do something different in our house, so we have these jam sessions, and our jam sessions consist of us jamming in church. You know, in church, we'll look at each other like,(Beatboxing)(Laughter)and we'll text the beat to each other. Or we'll be in the kitchen cooking, road trips, airports.NP: Standing right there in the corner, ""Aw, Dad — listen to that.""(Beatboxing)Naw, I'm kidding. But you know what? We're talking all about this jam session and everything.EC: Yeah.NP: Why don't we give them a little peek, just a tiny bit of our jam session?NP: Y'all want to hear some jam session? EC: Y'all ready for a jam session?(Cheers)NP: Sorry? I can't hear you.(Cheers)Yeah! Kick it, pops!(Beatboxing)(Applause)(Beatboxing)(Beatboxing ends)(Applause)NP: I'm getting ready to go!EC: Y'all ready? Everybody stand up! Come on, everybody stand up! Get on up! Come on, stretch!(Beatboxing)(Beatboxing ends)NP: That's it.(Cheers and applause)Thank you! Make some noise!EG: Thank you, everybody!NP: Make some noise! Make some noise!Thank you!","https://www.ted.com/talks/nicole_paris_and_ed_cage_a_beatboxing_lesson_from_a_father_daughter_duo
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"So when I was a kid ... this was my team.(Laughter)I stunk at sports. I didn't like to play them, I didn't like to watch them. So this is what I did. I went fishing. And for all of my growing up I fished on the shores of Connecticut, and these are the creatures that I saw on a regular basis. But after I grew up and went to college, and I came home in the early 90's, this is what I found. My team had shrunk. It was like literally having your roster devastated. And as I sort of looked into that, from a very personal point of view as a fisherman, I started to kind of figure out, well, what was the rest of the world thinking about it?First place I started to look was fish markets. And when I went to fish markets, in spite of where I was — whether I was in North Carolina, or Paris, or London, or wherever — I kept seeing this weirdly repeating trope of four creatures, again and again — on the menus, on ice — shrimp, tuna, salmon and cod. And I thought this was pretty strange, and as I looked at it, I was wondering, did anyone else notice this sort of shrinking of the market?Well, when I looked into it, I realized that people didn't look at it as their team. Ordinary people, the way they looked at seafood was like this. It's not an unusual human characteristic to reduce the natural world down to very few elements. We did it before, 10,000 years ago, when we came out of our caves. If you look at fire pits from 10,000 years ago, you'll see raccoons, you'll see, you know, wolves, you'll see all kinds of different creatures. But if you telescope to the age of — you know, 2,000 years ago, you'll see these four mammals: pigs, cows, sheep and goats. It's true of birds, too. You look at the menus in New York City restaurants 150 years ago, 200 years ago, you'll see snipe, woodcock, grouse, dozens of ducks, dozens of geese. But telescope ahead to the age of modern animal husbandry, and you'll see four: turkeys, ducks, chicken and geese.So it makes sense that we've headed in this direction. But how have we headed in this direction? Well ... first it's a very, very new problem. This is the way we've been fishing the oceans over the last 50 years. World War II was a tremendous incentive to arm ourselves in a war against fish. All of the technology that we perfected during World War II — sonar, lightweight polymers — all these things were redirected towards fish. And so you see this tremendous buildup in fishing capacity, quadrupling in the course of time, from the end of World War II to the present time. And right now that means we're taking between 80 and 90 million metric tons out of the sea every year. That's the equivalent of the human weight of China taken out of the sea every year. And it's no coincidence that I use China as the example because China is now the largest fishing nation in the world.Well, that's only half the story. The other half of the story is this incredible boom in fish farming and aquaculture, which is now, only in the last year or two, starting to exceed the amount of wild fish that we produce. So that if you add wild fish and farmed fish together, you get the equivalent of two Chinas created from the ocean each and every year. And again, it's not a coincidence that I use China as the example, because China, in addition to being the biggest catcher of fish, is also the biggest farmer of fish.So let's look though at the four choices we are making right now. The first one — by far the most consumed seafood in America and in much of the West, is shrimp. Shrimp in the wild — as a wild product — is a terrible product. 5, 10, 15 pounds of wild fish are regularly killed to bring one pound of shrimp to the market. They're also incredibly fuel inefficient to bring to the market. In a recent study that was produced out of Dalhousie University, it was found that dragging for shrimp is one of the most carbon-intensive ways of fishing that you can find.So you can farm them, and people do farm them, and they farm them a lot in this very area. Problem is ... the place where you farm shrimp is in these wild habitats — in mangrove forests. Now look at those lovely roots coming down. Those are the things that hold soil together, protect coasts, create habitats for all sorts of young fish, young shrimp, all sorts of things that are important to this environment. Well, this is what happens to a lot of coastal mangrove forests. We've lost millions of acres of coastal mangroves over the last 30 or 40 years. That rate of destruction has slowed, but we're still in a major mangrove deficit.The other thing that's going on here is a phenomenon that the filmmaker Mark Benjamin called ""Grinding Nemo."" This phenomenon is very, very relevant to anything that you've ever seen on a tropical reef. Because what's going on right now, we have shrimp draggers dragging for shrimp, catching a huge amount of bycatch, that bycatch in turn gets ground up and turned into shrimp food. And sometimes, many of these vessels — manned by slaves — are catching these so-called ""trash fish,"" fish that we would love to see on a reef, grinding them up and turning them into shrimp feed — an ecosystem literally eating itself and spitting out shrimp.The next most consumed seafood in America, and also throughout the West, is tuna. So tuna is this ultimate global fish. These huge management areas have to be observed in order for tuna to be well managed. Our own management area, called a Regional Fisheries Management Organization, is called ICCAT, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. The great naturalist Carl Safina once called it, ""The International Conspiracy to Catch all the Tunas."" Of course we've seen incredible improvement in ICCAT in the last few years, there is total room for improvement, but it remains to be said that tuna is a global fish, and to manage it, we have to manage the globe.Well, we could also try to grow tuna but tuna is a spectacularly bad animal for aquaculture. Many people don't know this but tuna are warm-blooded. They can heat their bodies 20 degrees above ambient temperature, they can swim at over 40 miles an hour. So that pretty much eliminates all the advantages of farming a fish, right? A farmed fish is — or a fish is cold-blooded, it doesn't move too much. That's a great thing for growing protein. But if you've got this crazy, wild creature that swims at 40 miles an hour and heats its blood — not a great candidate for aquaculture.The next creature — most consumed seafood in America and throughout the West — is salmon. Now salmon got its plundering, too, but it didn't really necessarily happen through fishing. This is my home state of Connecticut. Connecticut used to be home to a lot of wild salmon. But if you look at this map of Connecticut, every dot on that map is a dam. There are over 3,000 dams in the state of Connecticut. I often say this is why people in Connecticut are so uptight —(Laughter)If somebody could just unblock Connecticut's chi, I feel that we could have an infinitely better world. But I made this particular comment at a convention once of national parks officers, and this guy from North Carolina sidled up to me, he says, ""You know, you oughtn't be so hard on your Connecticut, cause we here in North Carolina, we got 35,000 dams."" So it's a national epidemic, it's an international epidemic. And there are dams everywhere, and these are precisely the things that stop wild salmon from reaching their spawning grounds.So as a result, we've turned to aquaculture, and salmon is one the most successful, at least from a numbers point of view. When they first started farming salmon, it could take as many as six pounds of wild fish to make a single pound of salmon. The industry has, to its credit, greatly improved. They've gotten it below two to one, although it's a little bit of a cheat because if you look at the way aquaculture feed is produced, they're measuring pellets — pounds of pellets per pound of salmon. Those pellets are in turn reduced fish. So the actual — what's called the FIFO, the fish in and the fish out — kind of hard to say. But in any case, credit to the industry, it has lowered the amount of fish per pound of salmon.Problem is we've also gone crazy with the amount of salmon that we're producing. Aquaculture is the fastest growing food system on the planet. It's growing at something like seven percent per year. And so even though we're doing less per fish to bring it to the market, we're still killing a lot of these little fish.And it's not just fish that we're feeding fish to, we're also feeding fish to chickens and pigs. So we've got chickens and they're eating fish, but weirdly, we also have fish that are eating chickens. Because the byproducts of chickens — feathers, blood, bone — get ground up and fed to fish. So I often wonder, is there a fish that ate a chicken that ate a fish? It's sort of a reworking of the chicken and egg thing. Anyway —(Laughter)All together, though, it results in a terrible mess. What you're talking about is something between 20 and 30 million metric tons of wild creatures that are taken from the ocean and used and ground up. That's the equivalent of a third of a China, or of an entire United States of humans that's taken out of the sea each and every year.The last of the four is a kind of amorphous thing. It's what the industry calls ""whitefish."" There are many fish that get cycled into this whitefish thing but the way to kind of tell the story, I think, is through that classic piece of American culinary innovation, the Filet-O-Fish sandwich. So the Filet-O-Fish sandwich actually started as halibut. And it started because a local franchise owner found that when he served his McDonald's on Friday, nobody came. Because it was a Catholic community, they needed fish. So he went to Ray Kroc and he said, ""I'm going to bring you a fish sandwich, going to be made out of halibut."" Ray Kroc said, ""I don't think it's going to work. I want to do a Hula Burger, and there's going to be a slice of pineapple on a bun. But let's do this, let's have a bet. Whosever sandwich sells more, that will be the winning sandwich."" Well, it's kind of sad for the ocean that the Hula Burger didn't win. So he made his halibut sandwich. Unfortunately though, the sandwich came in at 30 cents. Ray wanted the sandwich to come in at 25 cents, so he turned to Atlantic cod. We all know what happened to Atlantic cod in New England.So now the Filet-O-Fish sandwich is made out of Alaska pollock, it's the largest fin fish fishery in the United States, 2 to 3 billion pounds of fish taken out of the sea every single year. If we go through the pollock, the next choice is probably going to be tilapia. Tilapia is one of those fish nobody ever heard of 20 years ago. It's actually a very efficient converter of plant protein into animal protein, and it's been a godsend to the third world. It's actually a tremendously sustainable solution, it goes from an egg to an adult in nine months. The problem is that when you look about the West, it doesn't do what the West wants it to do. It really doesn't have what's called an oily fish profile. It doesn't have the EPA and DHA omega-3s that we all think are going to make us live forever.So what do we do? I mean, first of all, what about this poor fish, the clupeids? The fish that represent a huge part of that 20 to 30 million metric tons. Well, one possibility that a lot of conservationists have raised is could we eat them? Could we eat them directly instead of feeding them to salmon? There are arguments for it. They are tremendously fuel efficient to bring to market, a fraction of the fuel cost of say, shrimp, and at the very top of the carbon efficiency scale. They also are omega-3 rich, a great source for EPA and DHA. So that is a potential. And if we were to go down that route what I would say is, instead of paying a few bucks a pound — or a few bucks a ton, really — and making it into aquafeed, could we halve the catch and double the price for the fishermen and make that our way of treating these particular fish?Other possibility though, which is much more interesting, is looking at bivalves, particularly mussels. Now, mussels are very high in EPA and DHA, they're similar to canned tuna. They're also extremely fuel efficient. To bring a pound of mussels to market is about a thirtieth of the carbon as required to bring beef to market. They require no forage fish, they actually get their omega-3s by filtering the water of microalgae. In fact, that's where omega-3s come from, they don't come from fish. Microalgae make the omega-3s, they're only bioconcentrated in fish.Mussels and other bivalves do tremendous amounts of water filtration. A single mussel can filter dozens of gallons every single day. And this is incredibly important when we look at the world. Right now, nitrification, overuse of phosphates in our waterways are causing tremendous algal blooms. Over 400 new dead zones have been created in the last 20 years, tremendous sources of marine life death.We also could look at not a fish at all. We could look at a vegetable. We could look at seaweed, the kelps, all these different varieties of things that can be high in omega-3s, can be high in proteins, tremendously good things. They filter the water just like mussels do. And weirdly enough, it turns out that you can actually feed this to cows. Now, I'm not a big fan of cattle. But if you wanted to keep growing cattle in a time and place where water resources are limited, you're growing seaweed in the water, you don't have to water it — major consideration.And the last fish is a question mark. We have the ability to create aquacultured fish that creates a net gain of marine protein for us. This creature would have to be vegetarian, it would have to be fast growing, it would have to be adaptable to a changing climate and it would have to have that oily fish profile, that EPA, DHA, omega-3 fatty acid profile that we're looking for.This exists kind of on paper. I have been reporting on these subjects for 15 years. Every time I do a new story, somebody tells me, ""We can do all that. We can do it. We've figured it all out. We can produce a fish that's a net gain of marine protein and has omega-3s."" Great. It doesn't seem to be getting scaled up. It is time to scale this up. If we do, 30 million metric tons of seafood, a third of the world catch, stays in the water.So I guess what I'm saying is this is what we've been going with. We tend to go with our appetites rather than our minds. But if we went with this, or some configuration of it, we might have a little more of this.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_greenberg_the_four_fish_we_re_overeating_and_what_to_eat_instead
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"We're at a tipping point in human history, a species poised between gaining the stars and losing the planet we call home.Even in just the past few years, we've greatly expanded our knowledge of how Earth fits within the context of our universe. NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of potential planets around other stars, indicating that Earth is but one of billions of planets in our galaxy. Kepler is a space telescope that measures the subtle dimming of stars as planets pass in front of them, blocking just a little bit of that light from reaching us. Kepler's data reveals planets' sizes as well as their distance from their parent star. Together, this helps us understand whether these planets are small and rocky, like the terrestrial planets in our own Solar System, and also how much light they receive from their parent sun. In turn, this provides clues as to whether these planets that we discover might be habitable or not.Unfortunately, at the same time as we're discovering this treasure trove of potentially habitable worlds, our own planet is sagging under the weight of humanity. 2014 was the hottest year on record. Glaciers and sea ice that have been with us for millennia are now disappearing in a matter of decades. These planetary-scale environmental  changes that we have set in motion are rapidly outpacing our ability to alter their course.But I'm not a climate scientist, I'm an astronomer. I study planetary habitability as influenced by stars with the hopes of finding the places in the universe where we might discover life beyond our own planet. You could say that I look for choice alien real estate.Now, as somebody who is deeply embedded in the search for life in the universe, I can tell you that the more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself. Each one of these new worlds invites a comparison between the newly discovered planet and the planets we know best: those of our own Solar System.Consider our neighbor, Mars. Mars is small and rocky, and though it's a bit far from the Sun, it might be considered a potentially habitable world if found by a mission like Kepler. Indeed, it's possible that Mars was habitable in the past, and in part, this is why we study Mars so much. Our rovers, like Curiosity, crawl across its surface, scratching for clues as to the origins of life as we know it. Orbiters like the MAVEN mission sample the Martian atmosphere, trying to understand how Mars might have lost its past habitability. Private spaceflight companies now offer not just a short trip to near space but the tantalizing possibility of living our lives on Mars.But though these Martian vistas resemble the deserts of our own home world, places that are tied in our imagination to ideas about pioneering and frontiers, compared to Earth Mars is a pretty terrible place to live. Consider the extent to which we have not colonized the deserts of our own planet, places that are lush by comparison with Mars. Even in the driest, highest places on Earth, the air is sweet and thick with oxygen exhaled from thousands of miles away by our rainforests.I worry — I worry that this excitement about colonizing Mars and other planets carries with it a long, dark shadow: the implication and belief by some that Mars will be there to save us from the self-inflicted destruction of the only truly habitable planet we know of, the Earth. As much as I love interplanetary exploration, I deeply disagree with this idea. There are many excellent reasons to go to Mars, but for anyone to tell you that Mars will be there to back up humanity is like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening later on the lifeboats. (Laughter) (Applause)Thank you.But the goals of interplanetary exploration and planetary preservation are not opposed to one another. No, they're in fact two sides of the same goal: to understand, preserve and improve life into the future. The extreme environments of our own world are alien vistas. They're just closer to home. If we can understand how to create and maintain habitable spaces out of hostile, inhospitable spaces here on Earth, perhaps we can meet the needs of both preserving our own environment and moving beyond it.I leave you with a final thought experiment: Fermi's paradox. Many years ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked that, given the fact that our universe has been around for a very long time and we expect that there are many planets within it, we should have found evidence for alien life by now. So where are they? Well, one possible solution to Fermi's paradox is that, as civilizations become technologically advanced enough to consider living amongst the stars, they lose sight of how important it is to safeguard the home worlds that fostered that advancement to begin with. It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonization alone will save us from ourselves, but planetary preservation and interplanetary exploration can work together.If we truly believe in our ability to bend the hostile environments of Mars for human habitation, then we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lucianne_walkowicz_let_s_not_use_mars_as_a_backup_planet
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"So, I have an overlooked but potentially lucrative investment opportunity for you. Over the past 10 years in the UK, the return on burial plots has outperformed the UK property market by a ratio of around three to one. There are private cemeteries being set up with plots for sale to investors, and they start at around 3,900 pounds. And they're projected to achieve about 40 percent growth. The biggest advantage is that this is a market with continuous demand.Now, this is a real proposition, and there are companies out there that really are offering this investment, but my interest in it is quite different. I'm an architect and urban designer, and for the past year and a half, I've been looking at approaches to death and dying and at how they've shaped our cities and the buildings within them.So in the summer, I did my first exhibition on death and architecture in Venice, and it was called ""Death in Venice."" And because death is a subject that many of us find quite uncomfortable to talk about, the exhibition was designed to be quite playful, so that people would literally engage with it. So one of our exhibits was an interactive map of London which showed just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death. As you wave your hand across the map, the name of the piece of real estate — the building or the cemetery — is revealed. And those white shapes that you can see, they're all of the hospitals and hospices and mortuaries and cemeteries in the city. In fact, the majority are cemeteries. We wanted to show that, even though death and burial are things that we might not think about, they're all around us, and they're important parts of our cities.So about half a million people die in the UK each year, and of those, around a quarter will want to be buried. But the UK, like many Western European countries, is running out of burial space, especially in the major cities. And the Greater London Authority has been aware of this for a while, and the main causes are population growth, the fact that existing cemeteries are almost full. There's a custom in the UK that graves are considered to be occupied forever, and there's also development pressure — people want to use that same land to build houses or offices or shops.So they came up with a few solutions. They were like, well, maybe we can reuse those graves after 50 years. Or maybe we can bury people, like, four deep, so that four people can be buried in the same plot, and we can make more efficient use of the land that way, and in that way, hopefully London will still have space to bury people in the near future.But, traditionally, cemeteries haven't been taken care of by the local authority. In fact, the surprising thing is that there's no legal obligation on anyone in the UK to provide burial space. Traditionally, it's been done by private and religious organizations, like churches and mosques and synagogues. But there's also occasionally been a for-profit group who has wanted to get in on the act. And, you know, they look at the small size of a burial plot and that high cost, and it looks like there's serious money to be made.So, actually, if you want to go out and start your own cemetery, you kind of can. There was this couple in South Wales, and they had a farmhouse and a load of fields next to it, and they wanted to develop the land. They had a load of ideas. They first thought about making a caravan park, but the council said no. And then they wanted to make a fish farm and again the council said no. Then they hit on the idea of making a cemetery and they calculated that by doing this, they could increase the value of their land from about 95,000 pounds to over one million pounds.But just to come back to this idea of making profit from cemeteries, like, it's kind of ludicrous, right? The thing is that the high cost of those burial plots is actually very misleading. They look like they're expensive, but that cost reflects the fact that you need to maintain the burial plot — like, someone has to cut the grass for the next 50 years. That means it's very difficult to make money from cemeteries. And it's the reason that normally they're run by the council or by a not-for-profit group. But anyway, the council granted these people permission, and they're now trying to build their cemetery.So just to explain to you kind of how this works: If I want to build something in the UK, like a cemetery for example, then I have to apply for planning permission first. So if I want to build a new office building for a client or if I want to extend my home or, you know, if I have a shop and I want to convert it into an office, I have to do a load of drawings, and I submit them to the council for permission. And they'll look at things like how it fits in the surroundings. So they'll look at what it looks like. But they'll also think about things like what impact is it going to have on the local environment? And they'll be thinking about things like, is this thing going to cause pollution or is there going to be a lot of traffic that wants to go to this thing that I've built? But also good things. Is it going to add local services like shops to the neighborhood that local people would like to use? And they'll weigh up the advantages and the disadvantages and they'll make a decision.So that's how it works if I want to build a large cemetery. But what if I've got a piece of land and I just want to bury a few people, like five or six? Well, then — actually, I don't need permission from anyone! There's actually almost no regulation in the UK around burial, and the little bit that there is, is about not polluting water courses, like not polluting rivers or groundwater. So actually, if you want to go and make your own mini-cemetery, then you can.But I mean, like — really, who does this? Right? Well, if you're an aristocratic family and you have a large estate, then there's a chance that you'll have a mausoleum on it, and you'll bury your family there. But the really weird thing is that you don't need to have a piece of land of a certain size before you're allowed to start burying people on it. And so that means that, technically, this applies to, like, the back garden of your house in the suburbs.(Laughter)So what if you wanted to try this yourself at home? Well, there's a few councils that have guidance on their website which can help you.So, the first thing that they tell you is that you need to have a certificate of burial before you can go ahead — you're not allowed to just murder people and put them under the patio.(Laughter)They also tell you that you need to keep a record of where the grave is. But that's pretty much it for formal requirements. Now, they do warn you that your neighbors might not like this, but, legally speaking, there's almost nothing that they can do about it. And just in case any of you still had that profit idea in your mind about how much those burial plots cost and how much money you might be able to make, they also warn that it might cause the value of your house to drop by 20 percent. Although, actually, it's more likely that no one will want to buy your house at all after that.So what I find fascinating about this is the fact that it kind of sums up many of our attitudes towards death. In the UK, and I think that the figures across Europe are probably similar, only about 30 percent of people have ever talked to anyone about their wishes around death, and even for people over 75, only 45 percent of people have ever talked about this. And the reasons that people give ... you know, they think that their death is far off or they think that they're going to make people uncomfortable by talking about it. And you know, to a certain extent, there are other people out there who are taking care of things for us. The government has all this regulation and bureaucracy around things like burying a death, for example, and there's people like funeral directors who devote their entire working lives to this issue. But when it comes to our cities and thinking about how death fits in our cities, there's much less regulation and design and thought than we might imagine.So we're not thinking about this, but all of the people we imagine are thinking about it — they're not taking care of it either.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alison_killing_what_happens_when_a_city_runs_out_of_room_for_its_dead
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"Pat Mitchell: So I was thinking about female friendship a lot, and by the way, these two women, I'm very honored to say, have been my friends for a very long time, too. Jane Fonda: Yes we have.PM: And one of the things that I read about female friendship is something that Cervantes said. He said, ""You can tell a lot about someone,"" in this case a woman, ""by the company that she keeps."" So let's start with —(Laughter)JF: We're in big trouble.Lily Tomlin: Hand me one of those waters, I'm extremely dry.(Laughter)JF: You're taking up our time. We have a very limited —LT: Just being with her sucks the life out of me.(Laughter)JF: You ain't seen nothing yet. Anyway — sorry.PM: So tell me, what do you look for in a friend?LT: I look for someone who has a sense of fun, who's audacious, who's forthcoming, who has politics, who has even a small scrap of passion for the planet, someone who's decent, has a sense of justice and who thinks I'm worthwhile.(Laughter)(Applause)JF: You know, I was thinking this morning, I don't even know what I would do without my women friends. I mean it's, ""I have my friends, therefore I am.""LT: (Laughter)JF: No, it's true. I exist because I have my women friends. They — You're one of them. I don't know about you. But anyway —(Laughter)You know, they make me stronger, they make me smarter, they make me braver. They tap me on the shoulder when I might be in need of course-correcting. And most of them are a good deal younger than me, too. You know? I mean, it's nice — LT: Thank you.(Laughter)JF: No, I do, I include you in that, because listen, you know — it's nice to have somebody still around to play with and learn from when you're getting toward the end. I'm approaching — I'll be there sooner than you.LT: No, I'm glad to have you parallel aging alongside me.(Laughter)JF: I'm showing you the way.(Laughter)LT: Well, you are and you have.PM: Well, as we grow older, and as we go through different kinds of life's journeys, what do you do to keep your friendships vital and alive?LT: Well you have to use a lot of —JF: She doesn't invite me over much, I'll tell you that.LT: I have to use a lot of social media — You be quiet now. And so —(Laughter)LT: And I look through my emails, I look through my texts to find my friends, so I can answer them as quickly as possible, because I know they need my counsel.(Laughter)They need my support, because most of my friends are writers, or activists, or actors, and you're all three ... and a long string of other descriptive phrases, and I want to get to you as soon as possible, I want you to know that I'm there for you.JF: Do you do emojis?LT: Oh ... JF: No?LT: That's embarrassing. JF: I'm really into emojis.LT: No, I spell out my — I spell out my words of happiness and congratulations, and sadness.JF: You spell it right out —LT: I spell it, every letter.(Laughter)JF: Such a purist. You know, as I've gotten older, I've understood more the importance of friendships, and so, I really make an effort to reach out and make play dates — not let too much time go by. I read a lot so, as Lily knows all too well, my books that I like, I send to my friends.LT: When we knew we would be here today you sent me a lot of books about women, female friendships, and I was so surprised to see how many books, how much research has been done recently —JF: And were you grateful? LT: I was grateful.(Laughter)PM: And —LT: Wait, no, it's really important because this is another example of how women are overlooked, put aside, marginalized. There's been very little research done on us, even though we volunteered lots of times.JF: That's for sure.(Laughter)LT: This is really exciting, and you all will be interested in this. The Harvard Medical School study has shown that women who have close female friendships are less likely to develop impairments — physical impairments as they age, and they are likely to be seen to be living much more vital, exciting —JF: And longer —LT: Joyful lives.JF: We live five years longer than men.LT: I think I'd trade the years for joy.(Laughter)LT: But the most important part is they found — the results were so exciting and so conclusive — the researchers found that not having close female friends is detrimental to your health, as much as smoking or being overweight.JF: And there's something else, too —LT: I've said my part, so ...(Laughter)JF: OK, well, listen to my part, because there's an additional thing. Because they only — for years, decades — they only researched men when they were trying to understand stress, only very recently have they researched what happens to women when we're stressed, and it turns out that when we're stressed — women, our bodies get flooded by oxytocin. Which is a feel-good, calming, stress-reducing hormone. Which is also increased when we're with our women friends. And I do think that's one reason why we live longer. And I feel so bad for men because they don't have that. Testosterone in men diminishes the effects of oxytocin.LT: Well, when you and I and Dolly made ""9 to 5"" ...JF: Oh —LT: We laughed, we did, we laughed so much, we found we had so much in common and we're so different. Here she is, like Hollywood royalty, I'm like a tough kid from Detroit, [Dolly's] a Southern kid from a poor town in Tennessee, and we found we were so in sync as women, and we must have — we laughed — we must have added at least a decade onto our lifespans.JF: I think — we sure crossed our legs a lot.(Laughter) If you know what I mean.LT: I think we all know what you mean.(Laughter)PM: You're adding decades to our lives right now. So among the books that Jane sent us both to read on female friendship was one by a woman we admire greatly, Sister Joan Chittister, who said about female friendship that women friends are not just a social act, they're a spiritual act. Do you think of your friends as spiritual? Do they add something spiritual to your lives?LT: Spiritual — I absolutely think that. Because — especially people you've known a long time, people you've spent time with — I can see the spiritual essence inside them, the tenderness, the vulnerability. There's actually kind of a love, an element of love in the relationship. I just see deeply into your soul.PM: Do you think that, Jane —LT: But I have special powers.JF: Well, there's all kinds of friends. There's business friends, and party friends, I've got a lot of those.(Laughter)But the oxytocin-producing friendships have ... They feel spiritual because it's a heart opening, right? You know, we go deep. And — I find that I shed tears a lot with my intimate friends. Not because I'm sad but because I'm so touched and inspired by them.LT: And you know one of you is going to go soon.(Laughter)PM: Well, two of us are sitting here, Lily, which one are you talking about?(Laughter) And I always think, when women talk about their friendships, that men always look a little mystified. What are the differences, in your opinion, between men friendships and women friendships?JF: There's a lot of difference, and I think we have to have a lot of empathy for men —(Laughter)that they don't have what we have. Which I think may be why they die sooner.(Laughter)I have a lot of compassion for men, because women, no kidding, we — women's relationships, our friendships are full disclosure, we go deep. They're revelatory. We risk vulnerability — this is something men don't do. I mean how many times have I asked you, ""Am I doing OK?"" ""Did I really screw up there?""PM: You're doing great.(Laughter)JF: But I mean, we ask questions like that of our women friends, and men don't. You know, people describe women's relationships as face-to-face, whereas men's friendships are more side-by-side.LT: I mean most of the time men don't want to reveal their emotions, they want to bury deeper feelings. I mean, that's the general, conventional thought. They would rather go off in their man cave and watch a game or hit golf balls, or talk about sports, or hunting, or cars or have sex. I mean, it's just the kind of — it's a more manly behavior.JF: You meant — LT: They talk about sex. I meant they might have sex if they could get somebody in their man cave to —(Laughter)JF: You know something, though, that I find very interesting — and again, psychologists didn't know this until relatively recently — is that men are born every bit as relational as women are. If you look at films of newborn baby boys and girls, you'll see the baby boys just like the girls, gazing into their mother's eyes, you know, needing that relational exchange of energy. When the mother looks away, they could see the dismay on the child, even the boy would cry. They need relationship. So the question is why, as they grow older, does that change? And the answer is patriarchal culture, which says to boys and young men that to be needing of relationship, to be emotional with someone is girly. That a real man doesn't ask directions or express a need, they don't go to doctors if they feel bad. They don't ask for help. There's a quote that I really like, ""Men fear that becoming 'we' will erase his 'I'."" You know, his sense of self. Whereas women's sense of self has always been kind of porous. But our ""we"" is our saving grace, it's what makes us strong. It's not that we're better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove.LT: And, well —JF: That's a Gloria Steinem quote. So we can express our humanity — LT: I know who Gloria Steinem is.JF: I know you know who she is, but I think it's a —(Laughter)No, but it's a great quote, I think. We're not better than men, we just don't have our masculinity to prove. And that's really important.LT: But men are so inculcated in the culture to be comfortable in the patriarchy. And we've got to make something different happen.JF: Women's friendships are like a renewable source of power.LT: Well, that's what's exciting about this subject. It's because our friendships — female friendships are just a hop to our sisterhood, and sisterhood can be a very powerful force, to give the world — to make it what it should be — the things that humans desperately need.PM: It is why we're talking about it, because women's friendships are, as you said, Jane, a renewable source of power. So how do we use that power?JF: Well, women are the fastest growing demographic in the world, especially older women. And if we harness our power, we can change the world. And guess what? We need to.(Applause)And we need to do it soon. And one of the things that we need to do — and we can do it as women — for one thing, we kind of set the consumer standards. We need to consume less. We in the Western world need to consume less and when we buy things, we need to buy things that are made locally, when we buy food, we need to buy food that's grown locally. We are the ones that need to get off the grid. We need to make ourselves independent from fossil fuels. And the fossil fuel companies — the Exxons and the Shell Oils and those bad guys — cause they are — are going to tell us that we can't do it without going back to the Stone Age. You know, that the alternatives just aren't quite there yet, and that's not true. There are countries in the world right now that are living mostly on renewable energy and doing just fine. And they tell us that if we do wean ourselves from fossil fuel that we're going to be back in the Stone Age, and in fact, if we begin to use renewable energy, and not drill in the Arctic, and not drill —LT: Oh, boy.JF: And not drill in the Alberta tar sands — Right. That we will be — there will be more democracy and more jobs and more well-being, and it's women that are going to lead the way.LT: Maybe we have the momentum to start a third-wave feminist movement with our sisterhood around the world, with women we don't see, women we may never meet, but we join together that way, because — Aristotle said — most people — people would die without male friendships. And the operative word here was ""male."" Because they thought that friendships should be between equals and women were not considered equal —JF: They didn't think we had souls even, the Greeks.LT: No, exactly. That shows you just how limited Aristotle was.(Laughter)And wait, no, here's the best part. It's like, you know, men do need women now. The planet needs women. The US Constitution needs women. We are not even in the Constitution.JF: You're talking about the Equal Rights Amendment.LT: Right. Justice Ginsberg said something like — every constitution that's been written since the end of World War II included a provision that made women citizens of equal stature, but ours does not. So that would be a good place to start. Very, very mild —JF: Right.(Applause)And gender equality, it's like a tide, it would lift all boats, not just women.PM: Needing new role models on how to do that. How to be friends, how to think about our power in different ways, as consumers, as citizens of the world, and this is what makes Jane and Lily a role model of how women can be friends — for a very long time, and even if they occasionally disagree.Thank you. Thank you both.(Applause)JF: Thanks.LT: Thank you.JF: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jane_fonda_and_lily_tomlin_a_hilarious_celebration_of_lifelong_female_friendship
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"Bruno Giussani: Commissioner, thank you for coming to TED.António Guterres: Pleasure.BG: Let's start with a figure. During 2015, almost one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe from many different countries, of course, from Syria and Iraq, but also from Afghanistan and Bangladesh and Eritrea and elsewhere. And there have been reactions of two different kinds: welcoming parties and border fences. But I want to look at it a little bit from the short-term and the long-term perspective. And the first question is very simple: Why has the movement of refugees spiked so fast in the last six months?AG: Well, I think, basically, what triggered this huge increase was the Syrian refugee group. There has been an increased movement into Europe from Africa, from Asia, but slowly growing, and all of a sudden we had this massive increase in the first months of this year. Why? I think there are three reasons, two long-term ones and the trigger. The long-term ones, in relation to Syrians, is that hope is less and less clear for people. I mean, they look at their own country and they don't see much hope to go back home, because there is no political solution, so there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Second, the living conditions of the Syrians in the neighboring countries have been deteriorating. We just had research with the World Bank, and 87 percent of the Syrians in Jordan and 93 percent of the Syrians in Lebanon live below the national poverty lines. Only half of the children go to school, which means that people are living very badly. Not only are they refugees, out of home, not only have they suffered what they have suffered, but they are living in very, very dramatic conditions.And then the trigger was when all of a sudden, international aid decreased. The World Food Programme was forced, for lack of resources, to cut by 30 percent food support to the Syrian refugees. They're not allowed to work, so they are totally dependent on international support, and they felt, ""The world is abandoning us."" And that, in my opinion, was the trigger. All of a sudden, there was a rush, and people started to move in large numbers and, to be absolutely honest, if I had been in the same situation and I would have been brave enough to do it, I think I would have done the same.BG: But I think what surprised many people is it's not only sudden, but it wasn't supposed to be sudden. The war in Syria has been happening for five years. Millions of refugees are in camps and villages and towns around Syria. You have yourself warned about the situation and about the consequences of a breakdown of Libya, for example, and yet Europe looked totally unprepared.AG: Well, unprepared because divided, and when you are divided, you don't want to recognize the reality. You prefer to postpone decisions, because you do not have the capacity to make them. And the proof is that even when the spike occurred, Europe remained divided and was unable to put in place a mechanism to manage the situation. You talk about one million people. It looks enormous, but the population of the European Union is 550 million people, which means we are talking about one per every [550] Europeans. Now, in Lebanon, we have one refugee per three Lebanese. And Lebanon? Struggling, of course, but it's managing. So, the question is: is this something that could have been managed if — not mentioning the most important thing, which would have been addressing the root causes, but forgetting about root causes for now, looking at the phenomenon as it is — if Europe were able to come together in solidarity to create an adequate reception capacity of entry points? But for that, the countries at entry points need to be massively supported, and then screening the people with security checks and all the other mechanisms, distributing those that are coming into all European countries, according to the possibilities of each country. I mean, if you look at the relocation program that was approved by the Commission, always too little too late, or by the Council, too little too late —BG: It's already breaking down.AG: My country is supposed to receive four thousand. Four thousand in Portugal means nothing. So this is perfectly manageable if it is managed, but in the present circumstances, the pressure is at the point of entry, and then, as people move in this chaotic way through the Balkans, then they come to Germany, Sweden, basically, and Austria. They are the three countries that are, in the end, receiving the refugees. The rest of Europe is looking without doing much.BG: Let me try to bring up three questions, playing a bit devil's advocate. I'll try to ask them, make them blunt. But I think the questions are very present in the minds of many people in Europe right now, The first, of course, is about numbers. You say 550 million versus one million is not much, but realistically, how many people can Europe take?AG: Well, that is a question that has no answer, because refugees have the right to be protected. And there is such a thing as international law, so there is no way you can say, ""I take 10,000 and that's finished."" I remind you of one thing: in Turkey, at the beginning of the crisis, I remember one minister saying, ""Turkey will be able to receive up to 100,000 people."" Turkey has now two million three-hundred thousand or something of the sort, if you count all refugees.So I don't think it's fair to say how many we can take. What it is fair to say is: how we can we organize ourselves to assume our international responsibilities? And Europe has not been able to do so, because basically, Europe is divided because there is no solidarity in the European project. And it's not only about refugees; there are many other areas. And let's be honest, this is the moment in which we need more Europe instead of less Europe. But as the public less and less believes in European institutions, it is also each time more difficult to convince the public that we need more Europe to solve these problems.BG: We seem to be at the point where the numbers turn into political shifts, particularly domestically. We saw it again this weekend in France, but we have seen it over and over in many countries: in Poland and in Denmark and in Switzerland and elsewhere, where the mood changes radically because of the numbers, although they are not very significant in absolute numbers. The Prime Minister of —AG: But, if I may, on these: I mean, what does a European see at home in a village where there are no migrants? What a European sees is, on television, every single day, a few months ago, opening the news every single day, a crowd coming, uncontrolled, moving from border to border, and the images on television were of hundreds or thousands of people moving. And the idea is that nobody is taking care of it — this is happening without any kind of management. And so their idea was, ""They are coming to my village."" So there was this completely false idea that Europe was being invaded and our way of life is going to change, and everything will — And the problem is that if this had been properly managed, if people had been properly received, welcomed, sheltered at point of entry, screened at point of entry, and the moved by plane to different European countries, this would not have scared people. But, unfortunately, we have a lot of people scared, just because Europe was not able to do the job properly.BG: But there are villages in Germany with 300 inhabitants and 1,000 refugees. So, what's your position? How do you imagine these people reacting?AG: If there would be a proper management of the situation and the proper distribution of people all over Europe, you would always have the percentage that I mentioned: one per each 2,000. It is because things are not properly managed that in the end we have situations that are totally impossible to live with, and of course if you have a village — in Lebanon, there are many villages that have more Syrians than Lebanese; Lebanon has been living with that. I'm not asking for the same to happen in Europe, for all European villages to have more refugees than inhabitants. What I am asking is for Europe to do the job properly, and to be able to organize itself to receive people as other countries in the world were forced to do in the past.BG: So, if you look at the global situation not only at Europe —(Applause)BG: Yes!(Applause)BG: If you look at the global situation, so, not only at Europe, I know you can make a long list of countries that are not really stepping up, but I'm more interested in the other part — is there somebody who's doing the right thing?AG: Well, 86 percent of the refugees in the world are in the developing world. And if you look at countries like Ethiopia — Ethiopia has received more than 600,000 refugees. All the borders in Ethiopia are open. And they have, as a policy, they call the ""people to people"" policy that every refugee should be received. And they have South Sudanese, they have Sudanese, they have Somalis. They have all the neighbors. They have Eritreans. And, in general, African countries are extremely welcoming of refugees coming, and I would say that in the Middle East and in Asia, we have seen a tendency for borders to be open.Now we see some problems with the Syrian situation, as the Syrian situation evolved into also a major security crisis, but the truth is that for a large period, all borders in the Middle East were open. The truth is that for Afghans, the borders of Pakistan and Iran were open for, at the time, six million Afghans that came. So I would say that even today, the trend in the developing world has been for borders to be open. The trend in the developed world is for these questions to become more and more complex, especially when there is, in the public opinion, a mixture of discussions between refugee protections on one side and security questions — in my opinion, misinterpreted — on the other side.BG: We'll come back to that too, but you mentioned the cutting of funding and the vouchers from the World Food Programme. That reflects the general underfunding of the organizations working on these issues. Now that the world seems to have woken up, are you getting more funding and more support, or it's still the same?AG: We are getting more support. I would say that we are coming close to the levels of last year. We were much worse during the summer. But that is clearly insufficient to address the needs of the people and address the needs of the countries that are supporting the people. And here we have a basic review of the criteria, the objectives, the priorities of development cooperation that is required.For instance, Lebanon and Jordan are middle-income countries. Because they are middle-income countries, they cannot receive soft loans or grants from the World Bank. Now, today this doesn't make any sense, because they are providing a global public good. They have millions of refugees there, and to be honest, they are pillars of stability in the region, with all the difficulties they face, and the first line of defense of our collective security. So it doesn't make sense that these countries are not a first priority in development cooperation policies. And they are not. And not only do the refugees live in very dramatic circumstances inside those countries, but the local communities themselves are suffering, because salaries went down, because there are more unemployed, because prices and rents went up. And, of course, if you look at today's situation of the indicators in these countries, it is clear that, especially their poor groups of the population, are living worse and worse because of the crisis they are facing.BG: Who should be providing this support? Country by country, international organizations, the European Union? Who should be coming up with this support?AG: We need to join all efforts. It's clear that bilateral cooperation is essential. It's clear that multilateral cooperation is essential. It's clear that international financial institutions should have flexibility in order to be able to invest more massively in support to these countries. We need to combine all the instruments and to understand that today, in protracted situations, at a certain moment, that it doesn't make sense anymore to make a distinction between humanitarian aid and development aid or development processes. Because you are talking about children in school, you are talking about health, you are talking about infrastructure that is overcrowded. You are talking about things that require a long-term perspective, a development perspective and not only an emergency humanitarian aid perspective.BG: I would like your comment on something that was in newspapers this morning. It is a statement made by the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for US President, Donald Trump. Yesterday, he said this.(Laughter)No, listen to this. It's interesting. I quote: ""I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US, until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on."" How do you react to that?AG: Well, it's not only Donald Trump. We have seen several people around the world with political responsibility saying, for instance, that Muslims refugees should not be received. And the reason why they say this is because they think that by doing or saying this, they are protecting the security of their countries. Now, I've been in government. I am very keen on the need for governments to protect the security of their countries and their people. But if you say, like that, in the US or in any European country, ""We are going to close our doors to Muslim refugees,"" what you are saying is the best possible help for the propaganda of terrorist organizations. Because what you are saying —(Applause)What you are saying will be heard by all the Muslims in your own country, and it will pave the way for the recruitment and the mechanisms that, through technology, Daesh and al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and all those other groups are today penetrating in our societies. And it's just telling them, ""You are right, we are against you."" So obviously, this is creating in societies that are all multiethnic, multi-religious, multicultural, this is creating a situation in which, really, it is much easier for the propaganda of these terrorist organizations to be effective in recruiting people for terror acts within the countries where these kinds of sentences are expressed.BG: Have the recent attacks in Paris and the reactions to them made your job more difficult?AG: Undoubtedly.BG: In what sense?AG: In the sense that, I mean, for many people the first reaction in relation to these kinds of terrorist attacks is: close all borders — not understanding that the terrorist problem in Europe is largely homegrown. We have thousands and thousands of European fighters in Syria and in Iraq, so this is not something that you solve by just not allowing Syrians to come in. And I must say, I am convinced that the passport that appeared, I believe, was put by the person who has blown —BG: — himself up, yeah.AG: [I believe] it was on purpose, because part of the strategies of Daesh is against refugees, because they see refugees as people that should be with the caliphate and are fleeing to the crusaders. And I think that is part of Daesh's strategy to make Europe react, closing its doors to Muslim refugees and having an hostility towards Muslims inside Europe, exactly to facilitate Daesh's work.And my deep belief is that it was not the refugee movement that triggered terrorism. I think, as I said, essentially terrorism in Europe is today a homegrown movement in relation to the global situation that we are facing, and what we need is exactly to prove these groups wrong, by welcoming and integrating effectively those that are coming from that part of the world.And another thing that I believe is that to a large extent, what we are today paying for in Europe is the failures of integration models that didn't work in the '60s, in the '70s, in the '80s, in relation to big migration flows that took place at that time and generated what is today in many of the people, for instance, of the second generation of communities, a situation of feeling marginalized, having no jobs, having improper education, living in some of the neighborhoods that are not adequately provided by public infrastructure. And this kind of uneasiness, sometimes even anger, that exists in this second generation is largely due to the failure of integration policies, to the failure of what should have been a much stronger investment in creating the conditions for people to live together and respect each other. For me it is clear.(Applause)For me it is clear that all societies will be multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious in the future. To try to avoid it is, in my opinion, impossible. And for me it's a good thing that they will be like that, but I also recognize that, for that to work properly, you need a huge investment in the social cohesion of your own societies. And Europe, to a large extent, failed in that investment in the past few decades.BG: Question: You are stepping down from your job at the end of the year, after 10 years. If you look back at 2005, when you entered that office for the first time, what do you see?AG: Well, look: In 2005, we were helping one million people go back home in safety and dignity, because conflicts had ended. Last year, we helped 124,000. In 2005, we had about 38 million people displaced by conflict in the world. Today, we have more than 60 million. At that time, we had had, recently, some conflicts that were solved. Now, we see a multiplication of new conflicts and the old conflicts never died: Afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. It is clear that the world today is much more dangerous than it was. It is clear that the capacity of the international community to prevent conflicts and to timely solve them, is, unfortunately, much worse than what it was 10 years ago. There are no clear power relations in the world, no global governance mechanisms that work, which means that we live in a situation where impunity and unpredictability tend to prevail, and that means that more and more people suffer, namely those that are displaced by conflicts.BG: It's a tradition in American politics that when a President leaves the Oval Office for the last time, he leaves a handwritten note on the desk for his successor that walks in a couple of hours later. If you had to write such a note to your successor, Filippo Grandi, what would you write?AG: Well, I don't think I would write any message. You know, one of the terrible things when one leaves an office is to try to become the backseat driver, always telling the new one what to do. So that, I will not do. If I had to say something to him, it would be, ""Be yourself, and do your best.""BG: Commissioner, thank you for the job you do. Thank you for coming to TED.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_guterres_refugees_have_the_right_to_be_protected
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"In 2008, Burhan Hassan, age 17, boarded a flight from Minneapolis to the Horn of Africa. And while Burhan was the youngest recruit, he was not alone. Al-Shabaab managed to recruit over two dozen young men in their late teens and early 20s with a heavy presence on social media platforms like Facebook. With the Internet and other technologies, they've changed our everyday lives, but they've also changed recruitment, radicalization and the front lines of conflict today.What about the links connecting Twitter, Google and protesters fighting for democracy? These numbers represent Google's public DNS servers, effectively the only digital border crossing protesters had and could use to communicate with each other, to reach the outside world and to spread viral awareness of what was happening in their own country.Today, conflict is essentially borderless. If there are bounds to conflict today, they're bound by digital, not physical geography. And under all this is a vacuum of power where non-state actors, individuals and private organizations have the advantage over slow, outdated military and intelligence agencies. And this is because, in the digital age of conflict, there exists a feedback loop where new technologies, platforms like the ones I mentioned, and more disruptive ones, can be adapted, learned, and deployed by individuals and organizations faster than governments can react.To understand the pace of our own government thinking on this, I like to turn to something aptly named the Worldwide Threat Assessment, where every year the Director of National Intelligence in the US looks at the global threat landscape, and he says, ""These are the threats, these are the details, and this is how we rank them."" In 2007, there was absolutely no mention of cyber security. It took until 2011, when it came at the end, where other things, like West African drug trafficking, took precedence. In 2012, it crept up, still behind things like terrorism and proliferation. In 2013, it became the top threat, in 2014 and for the foreseeable future.What things like that show us is that there is a fundamental inability today on the part of governments to adapt and learn in digital conflict, where conflict can be immaterial, borderless, often wholly untraceable. And conflict isn't just online to offline, as we see with terrorist radicalization, but it goes the other way as well.We all know the horrible events that unfolded in Paris this year with the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks. What an individual hacker or a small group of anonymous individuals did was enter those social media conversations that so many of us took part in. #JeSuisCharlie. On Facebook, on Twitter, on Google, all sorts of places where millions of people, myself included, were talking about the events and saw images like this, the emotional, poignant image of a baby with ""Je suis Charlie"" on its wrist. And this turned into a weapon. What the hackers did was weaponize this image, where unsuspecting victims, like all of us in those conversations, saw this image, downloaded it but it was embedded with malware. And so when you downloaded this image, it hacked your system. It took six days to deploy a global malware campaign. The divide between physical and digital domains today ceases to exist, where we have offline attacks like those in Paris appropriated for online hacks.And it goes the other way as well, with recruitment. We see online radicalization of teens, who can then be deployed globally for offline terrorist attacks.With all of this, we see that there's a new 21st century battle brewing, and governments don't necessarily take a part.So in another case, Anonymous vs. Los Zetas. In early September 2011 in Mexico, Los Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels, hung two bloggers with a sign that said, ""This is what will happen to all Internet busybodies."" A week later, they beheaded a young girl. They severed her head, put it on top of her computer with a similar note. And taking the digital counteroffensive because governments couldn't even understand what was going on or act, Anonymous, a group we might not associate as the most positive force in the world, took action, not in cyber attacks, but threatening information to be free. On social media, they said, ""We will release information that ties prosecutors and governors to corrupt drug deals with the cartel."" And escalating that conflict, Los Zetas said, ""We will kill 10 people for every bit of information you release."" And so it ended there because it would become too gruesome to continue. But what was powerful about this was that anonymous individuals, not federal policia, not military, not politicians, could strike fear deep into the heart of one of the most powerful, violent organizations in the world. And so we live in an era that lacks the clarity of the past in conflict, in who we're fighting, in the motivations behind attacks, in the tools and techniques used, and how quickly they evolve. And the question still remains: what can individuals, organizations and governments do?For answers to these questions, it starts with individuals, and I think peer-to-peer security is the answer. Those people in relationships that bought over teens online, we can do that with peer-to-peer security. Individuals have more power than ever before to affect national and international security. And we can create those positive peer-to-peer relationships on and offline, we can support and educate the next generation of hackers, like myself, instead of saying, ""You can either be a criminal or join the NSA."" That matters today. And it's not just individuals — it's organizations, corporations even. They have an advantage to act across more borders, more effectively and more rapidly than governments can, and there's a set of real incentives there. It's profitable and valuable to be seen as trustworthy in the digital age, and will only be more so in future generations to come.But we still can't ignore government, because that's who we turn to for collective action to keep us safe and secure. But we see where that's gotten us so far, where there's an inability to adapt and learn in digital conflict, where at the highest levels of leadership, the Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, they say, ""Cyber Pearl Harbor will happen."" ""Cyber 9/11 is imminent."" But this only makes us more fearful, not more secure. By banning encryption in favor of mass surveillance and mass hacking, sure, GCHQ and the NSA can spy on you. But that doesn't mean that they're the only ones that can. Capabilities are cheap, even free. Technical ability is rising around the world, and individuals and small groups have the advantage. So today it might just be the NSA and GCHQ, but who's to say that the Chinese can't find that backdoor? Or in another generation, some kid in his basement in Estonia?And so I would say that it's not what governments can do, it's that they can't. Governments today need to give up power and control in order to help make us more secure. Giving up mass surveillance and hacking and instead fixing those backdoors means that, yeah, they can't spy on us, but neither can the Chinese or that hacker in Estonia a generation from now. And government support for technologies like Tor and Bitcoin mean giving up control, but it means that developers, translators, anybody with an Internet connection, in countries like Cuba, Iran and China, can sell their skills, their products, in the global marketplace, but more importantly sell their ideas, show us what's happening in their own countries.And so it should be not fearful, it should be inspiring to the same governments that fought for civil rights, free speech and democracy in the great wars of the last century, that today, for the first time in human history, we have a technical opportunity to make billions of people safer around the world that we've never had before in human history. It should be inspiring.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_bijou_governments_don_t_understand_cyber_warfare_we_need_hackers
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"Ten years ago, I had my first exhibition here. I had no idea if it would work or was at all possible, but with a few small steps and a very steep learning curve, I made my first sculpture, called ""The Lost Correspondent."" Teaming up with a marine biologist and a local dive center, I submerged the work off the coast of Grenada, in an area decimated by Hurricane Ivan. And then this incredible thing happened. It transformed. One sculpture became two. Two quickly became 26. And before I knew it, we had the world's first underwater sculpture park.In 2009, I moved to Mexico and started by casting local fisherman. This grew to a small community, to almost an entire movement of people in defense of the sea. And then finally, to an underwater museum, with over 500 living sculptures. Gardening, it seems, is not just for greenhouses. We've since scaled up the designs: ""Ocean Atlas,"" in the Bahamas, rising 16 feet up to the surface and weighing over 40 tons, to now currently in Lanzarote, where I'm making an underwater botanical garden, the first of its kind in the Atlantic Ocean.Each project, we use materials and designs that help encourage life; a long-lasting pH-neutral cement provides a stable and permanent platform. It is textured to allow coral polyps to attach. We position them down current from natural reefs so that after spawning, there's areas for them to settle. The formations are all configured so that they aggregate fish on a really large scale. Even this VW Beetle has an internal living habitat to encourage crustaceans such as lobsters and sea urchins.So why exhibit my work in the ocean? Because honestly, it's really not easy. When you're in the middle of the sea under a hundred-foot crane, trying to lower eight tons down to the sea floor, you start to wonder whether I shouldn't have taken up watercolor painting instead.(Laughter)But in the end, the results always blow my mind.(Music)The ocean is the most incredible exhibition space an artist could ever wish for. You have amazing lighting effects changing by the hour, explosions of sand covering the sculptures in a cloud of mystery, a unique timeless quality and the procession of inquisitive visitors, each lending their own special touch to the site.(Music)But over the years, I've realized that the greatest thing about what we do, the really humbling thing about the work, is that as soon as we submerge the sculptures, they're not ours anymore, because as soon as we sink them, the sculptures, they belong to the sea. As new reefs form, a new world literally starts to evolve, a world that continuously amazes me. It's a bit of a cliché, but nothing man-made can ever match the imagination of nature.Sponges look like veins across the faces. Staghorn coral morphs the form. Fireworms scrawl white lines as they feed. Tunicates explode from the faces. Sea urchins crawl across the bodies feeding at night. Coralline algae applies a kind of purple paint. The deepest red I've ever seen in my life lives underwater. Gorgonian fans oscillate with the waves. Purple sponges breathe water like air. And grey angelfish glide silently overhead.And the amazing response we've had to these works tells me that we've managed to plug into something really primal, because it seems that these images translate across the world, and that's made me focus on my responsibility as an artist and about what I'm trying to achieve. I'm standing here today on this boat in the middle of the ocean, and this couldn't be a better place to talk about the really, really important effect of my work. Because as we all know, our reefs are dying, and our oceans are in trouble.So here's the thing: the most used, searched and shared image of all my work thus far is this. And I think this is for a reason, or at least I hope it is. What I really hope is that people are beginning to understand that when we think of the environment and the destruction of nature, that we need to start thinking about our oceans, too.Since building these sites, we've seen some phenomenal and unexpected results. Besides creating over 800 square meters of new habitats and living reef, visitors to the marine park in Cancun now divide half their time between the museum and the natural reefs, providing significant rest for natural, overstressed areas. Visitors to ""Ocean Atlas"" in the Bahamas highlighted a leak from a nearby oil refinery. The subsequent international media forced the local government to pledge 10 million dollars in coastal cleanups. The sculpture park in Grenada was instrumental in the government designating a spot — a marine-protected area. Entrance fees to the park now help fund park rangers to manage tourism and fishing quotas. The site was actually listed as a ""Wonder of the World"" by National Geographic.So why are we all here today in this room? What do we all have in common? I think we all share a fear that we don't protect our oceans enough. And one way of thinking about this is that we don't regard our oceans as sacred, and we should. When we see incredible places — like the Himalayas or the La Sagrada Família, or the Mona Lisa, even — when we see these incredible places and things, we understand their importance. We call them sacred, and we do our best to cherish them, to protect them and to keep them safe. But in order to do that, we are the ones that have to assign that value; otherwise, it will be desecrated by someone who doesn't understand that value.So I want to finish up tonight by talking about sacred things. When we were naming the site in Cancun, we named it a museum for a very important and simple reason: museums are places of preservation, of conservation and of education. They're places where we keep objects of great value to us, where we simply treasure them for them being themselves. If someone was to throw an egg at the Sistine Chapel, we'd all go crazy. If someone wanted to build a seven-star hotel at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, then we would laugh them out of Arizona. Yet every day we dredge, pollute and overfish our oceans. And I think it's easier for us to do that, because when we see the ocean, we don't see the havoc we're wreaking. Because for most people, the ocean is like this. And it's really hard to think of something that's just so plain and so enormous, as fragile. It's simply too massive, too vast, too endless. And what do you see here? I think most people actually look past to the horizon. So I think there's a real danger that we never really see the sea, and if we don't really see it, if it doesn't have its own iconography, if we miss its majesty, then there's a big danger that we take it for granted.Cancun is famous for spring break, tequila and foam parties. And its waters are where frat boys can ride around on Jet Skis and banana boats. But because of our work there, there's now a little corner of Cancun that is simply precious for being itself. And we don't want to stop in Grenada, in Cancun or the Bahamas. Just last month, I installed these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Thames River, in central London, right in front of the Houses of Parliament, putting a stark message about climate change in front of the people that have the power to help change things.Because for me, this is just the beginning of the mission. We want to team up with other inventors, creators, philanthropists, educators, biologists, to see better futures for our oceans. And we want to see beyond sculpture, beyond art, even.Say you're a 14-year-old kid from the city, and you've never seen the ocean. And instead of getting taken to the natural history museum or an aquarium, you get taken out to the ocean, to an underwater Noah's Ark, which you can access through a dry-glass viewing tunnel, where you can see all the wildlife of the land be colonized by the wildlife of the ocean. Clearly, it would blow your mind.So let's think big and let's think deep. Who knows where our imagination and willpower can lead us? I hope that by bringing our art into the ocean, that not only do we take advantage of amazing creativity and visual impact of the setting, but that we are also giving something back, and by encouraging new environments to thrive, and in some way opening up a new — or maybe it's a really old way of seeing the seas: as delicate, precious places, worthy of our protection.Our oceans are sacred.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jason_decaires_taylor_an_underwater_art_museum_teeming_with_life
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"What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy? There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous.(Laughter)And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. We're given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy?We did that. The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field. But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s. And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men. And I'm the fourth director of the study.Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed. They were given medical exams. We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents. And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life. They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction.The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study still continues. Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives.Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, ""Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting."" The Harvard men never ask that question.(Laughter)To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. We interview them in their living rooms. We get their medical records from their doctors. We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, ""You know, it's about time.""(Laughter)So what have we learned? What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.We've learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely.And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn't. And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. But the people who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain.And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer. And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline. And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories.So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? Well, we're human. What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good and keep them that way. Relationships are messy and they're complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. It's also lifelong. It never ends. The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.So what about you? Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60. What might leaning in to relationships even look like?Well, the possibilities are practically endless. It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years, because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges.I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain. More than a century ago, he was looking back on his life, and he wrote this: ""There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.""The good life is built with good relationships.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness
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"A hundred years ago this month, a 36-year-old Albert Einstein stood up in front of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin to present a radical new theory of space, time and gravity: the general theory of relativity.General relativity is unquestionably Einstein's masterpiece, a theory which reveals the workings of the universe at the grandest scales, capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees to the beginning of time and space.1915 must have been an exciting year to be a physicist. Two new ideas were turning the subject on its head. One was Einstein's theory of relativity, the other was arguably even more revolutionary: quantum mechanics, a mind-meltingly strange yet stunningly successful new way of understanding the microworld, the world of atoms and particles.Over the last century, these two ideas have utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. It's thanks to relativity and quantum mechanics that we've learned what the universe is made from, how it began and how it continues to evolve. A hundred years on, we now find ourselves at another turning point in physics, but what's at stake now is rather different. The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature, or whether maybe for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don't have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it.This is the essential problem: the universe is far, far too interesting. Relativity and quantum mechanics appear to suggest that the universe should be a boring place. It should be dark, lethal and lifeless. But when we look around us, we see we live in a universe full of interesting stuff, full of stars, planets, trees, squirrels. The question is, ultimately, why does all this interesting stuff exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? This contradiction is the most pressing problem in fundamental physics, and in the next few years, we may find out whether we'll ever be able to solve it.At the heart of this problem are two numbers, two extremely dangerous numbers. These are properties of the universe that we can measure, and they're extremely dangerous because if they were different, even by a tiny bit, then the universe as we know it would not exist. The first of these numbers is associated with the discovery that was made a few kilometers from this hall, at CERN, home of this machine, the largest scientific device ever built by the human race, the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC whizzes subatomic particles around a 27-kilometer ring, getting them closer and closer to the speed of light before smashing them into each other inside gigantic particle detectors. On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced to the world that they'd spotted a new fundamental particle being created at the violent collisions at the LHC: the Higgs boson.Now, if you followed the news at the time, you'll have seen a lot of physicists getting very excited indeed, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we get that way every time we discover a new particle. Well, that is kind of true, but the Higgs boson is particularly special. We all got so excited because finding the Higgs proves the existence of a cosmic energy field. Now, you may have trouble imagining an energy field, but we've all experienced one. If you've ever held a magnet close to a piece of metal and felt a force pulling across that gap, then you've felt the effect of a field. And the Higgs field is a little bit like a magnetic field, except it has a constant value everywhere. It's all around us right now. We can't see it or touch it, but if it wasn't there, we would not exist. The Higgs field gives mass to the fundamental particles that we're made from. If it wasn't there, those particles would have no mass, and no atoms could form and there would be no us.But there is something deeply mysterious about the Higgs field. Relativity and quantum mechanics tell us that it has two natural settings, a bit like a light switch. It should either be off, so that it has a zero value everywhere in space, or it should be on so it has an absolutely enormous value. In both of these scenarios, atoms could not exist, and therefore all the other interesting stuff that we see around us in the universe would not exist. In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on, not zero but 10,000 trillion times weaker than its fully on value, a bit like a light switch that's got stuck just before the off position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe.So this is the first of our dangerous numbers, the strength of the Higgs field. Theorists have spent decades trying to understand why it has this very peculiarly fine-tuned number, and they've come up with a number of possible explanations. They have sexy-sounding names like ""supersymmetry"" or ""large extra dimensions."" I'm not going to go into the details of these ideas now, but the key point is this: if any of them explained this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field, then we should see new particles being created at the LHC along with the Higgs boson. So far, though, we've not seen any sign of them.But there's actually an even worse example of this kind of fine-tuning of a dangerous number, and this time it comes from the other end of the scale, from studying the universe at vast distances. One of the most important consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity was the discovery that the universe began as a rapid expansion of space and time 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang. Now, according to early versions of the Big Bang theory, the universe has been expanding ever since with gravity gradually putting the brakes on that expansion. But in 1998, astronomers made the stunning discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. The universe is getting bigger and bigger faster and faster driven by a mysterious repulsive force called dark energy.Now, whenever you hear the word ""dark"" in physics, you should get very suspicious because it probably means we don't know what we're talking about.(Laughter)We don't know what dark energy is, but the best idea is that it's the energy of empty space itself, the energy of the vacuum. Now, if you use good old quantum mechanics to work out how strong dark energy should be, you get an absolutely astonishing result. You find that dark energy should be 10 to the power of 120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy. That's one with 120 zeroes after it. This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it's impossible to get your head around. We often use the word ""astronomical"" when we're talking about big numbers. Well, even that one won't do here. This number is bigger than any number in astronomy. It's a thousand trillion trillion trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the entire universe.So that's a pretty bad prediction. In fact, it's been called the worst prediction in physics, and this is more than just a theoretical curiosity. If dark energy were anywhere near this strong, then the universe would have been torn apart, stars and galaxies could not form, and we would not be here. So this is the second of those dangerous numbers, the strength of dark energy, and explaining it requires an even more fantastic level of fine-tuning than we saw for the Higgs field. But unlike the Higgs field, this number has no known explanation.The hope was that a complete combination of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is the theory of the universe at grand scales, with quantum mechanics, the theory of the universe at small scales, might provide a solution. Einstein himself spent most of his later years on a futile search for a unified theory of physics, and physicists have kept at it ever since.One of the most promising candidates for a unified theory is string theory, and the essential idea is, if you could zoom in on the fundamental particles that make up our world, you'd see actually that they're not particles at all, but tiny vibrating strings of energy, with each frequency of vibration corresponding to a different particle, a bit like musical notes on a guitar string.So it's a rather elegant, almost poetic way of looking at the world, but it has one catastrophic problem. It turns out that string theory isn't one theory at all, but a whole collection of theories. It's been estimated, in fact, that there are 10 to the 500 different versions of string theory. Each one would describe a different universe with different laws of physics. Now, critics say this makes string theory unscientific. You can't disprove the theory. But others actually turned this on its head and said, well, maybe this apparent failure is string theory's greatest triumph. What if all of these 10 to the 500 different possible universes actually exist out there somewhere in some grand multiverse? Suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers. In most of the multiverse, dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form. We live in one of the places in the multiverse where the two numbers are just right. We live in a Goldilocks universe.Now, this idea is extremely controversial, and it's easy to see why. If we follow this line of thinking, then we will never be able to answer the question, ""Why is there something rather than nothing?"" In most of the multiverse, there is nothing, and we live in one of the few places where the laws of physics allow there to be something. Even worse, we can't test the idea of the multiverse. We can't access these other universes, so there's no way of knowing whether they're there or not.So we're in an extremely frustrating position. That doesn't mean the multiverse doesn't exist. There are other planets, other stars, other galaxies, so why not other universes? The problem is, it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure. Now, the idea of the multiverse has been around for a while, but in the last few years, we've started to get the first solid hints that this line of reasoning may get born out. Despite high hopes for the first run of the LHC, what we were looking for there — we were looking for new theories of physics: supersymmetry or large extra dimensions that could explain this weirdly fine-tuned value of the Higgs field. But despite high hopes, the LHC revealed a barren subatomic wilderness populated only by a lonely Higgs boson. My experiment published paper after paper where we glumly had to conclude that we saw no signs of new physics.The stakes now could not be higher. This summer, the LHC began its second phase of operation with an energy almost double what we achieved in the first run. What particle physicists are all desperately hoping for are signs of new particles, micro black holes, or maybe something totally unexpected emerging from the violent collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. If so, then we can continue this long journey that began 100 years ago with Albert Einstein towards an ever deeper understanding of the laws of nature.But if, in two or three years' time, when the LHC switches off again for a second long shutdown, we've found nothing but the Higgs boson, then we may be entering a new era in physics: an era where there are weird features of the universe that we cannot explain; an era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly forever beyond our reach; an era where we will never be able to answer the question, ""Why is there something rather than nothing?""Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Harry, even if you just said the science may not have some answers, I would like to ask you a couple of questions, and the first is: building something like the LHC is a generational project. I just mentioned, introducing you, that we live in a short-term world. How do you think so long term, projecting yourself out a generation when building something like this?Harry Cliff: I was very lucky that I joined the experiment I work on at the LHC in 2008, just as we were switching on, and there are people in my research group who have been working on it for three decades, their entire careers on one machine. So I think the first conversations about the LHC were in 1976, and you start planning the machine without the technology that you know you're going to need to be able to build it. So the computing power did not exist in the early '90s when design work began in earnest. One of the big detectors which record these collisions, they didn't think there was technology that could withstand the radiation that would be created in the LHC, so there was basically a lump of lead in the middle of this object with some detectors around the outside, but subsequently we have developed technology. So you have to rely on people's ingenuity, that they will solve the problems, but it may be a decade or more down the line.BG: China just announced two or three weeks ago that they intend to build a supercollider twice the size of the LHC. I was wondering how you and your colleagues welcome the news.HC: Size isn't everything, Bruno. BG: I'm sure. I'm sure.(Laughter)It sounds funny for a particle physicist to say that. But I mean, seriously, it's great news. So building a machine like the LHC requires countries from all over the world to pool their resources. No one nation can afford to build a machine this large, apart from maybe China, because they can mobilize huge amounts of resources, manpower and money to build machines like this. So it's only a good thing. What they're really planning to do is to build a machine that will study the Higgs boson in detail and could give us some clues as to whether these new ideas, like supersymmetry, are really out there, so it's great news for physics, I think.BG: Harry, thank you. HC: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/harry_cliff_have_we_reached_the_end_of_physics
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"Roy Price is a man that most of you have probably never heard about, even though he may have been responsible for 22 somewhat mediocre  minutes of your life on April 19, 2013. He may have also been responsible for 22 very entertaining minutes, but not very many of you. And all of that goes back to a decision that Roy had to make about three years ago.So you see, Roy Price is a senior executive with Amazon Studios. That's the TV production company of Amazon. He's 47 years old, slim, spiky hair, describes himself on Twitter as ""movies, TV, technology, tacos."" And Roy Price has a very responsible job, because it's his responsibility to pick the shows, the original content that Amazon is going to make. And of course that's a highly competitive space. I mean, there are so many TV shows already out there, that Roy can't just choose any show. He has to find shows that are really, really great. So in other words, he has to find shows that are on the very right end of this curve here.So this curve here is the rating distribution of about 2,500 TV shows on the website IMDB, and the rating goes from one to 10, and the height here shows you how many shows get that rating. So if your show gets a rating of nine points or higher, that's a winner. Then you have a top two percent show. That's shows like ""Breaking Bad,"" ""Game of Thrones,"" ""The Wire,"" so all of these shows that are addictive, whereafter you've watched a season, your brain is basically like, ""Where can I get more of these episodes?"" That kind of show. On the left side, just for clarity, here on that end, you have a show called ""Toddlers and Tiaras"" —(Laughter)— which should tell you enough about what's going on on that end of the curve.Now, Roy Price is not worried about getting on the left end of the curve, because I think you would have to have some serious brainpower to undercut ""Toddlers and Tiaras."" So what he's worried about is this middle bulge here, the bulge of average TV, you know, those shows that aren't really good or really bad, they don't really get you excited. So he needs to make sure that he's really on the right end of this.So the pressure is on, and of course it's also the first time that Amazon is even doing something like this, so Roy Price does not want to take any chances. He wants to engineer success. He needs a guaranteed success, and so what he does is, he holds a competition.So he takes a bunch of ideas for TV shows, and from those ideas, through an evaluation, they select eight candidates for TV shows, and then he just makes the first episode of each one of these shows and puts them online for free for everyone to watch. And so when Amazon is giving out free stuff, you're going to take it, right? So millions of viewers are watching those episodes.What they don't realize is that, while they're watching their shows, actually, they are being watched. They are being watched by Roy Price and his team, who record everything. They record when somebody presses play, when somebody presses pause, what parts they skip, what parts they watch again. So they collect millions of data points, because they want to have those data points to then decide which show they should make. And sure enough, so they collect all the data, they do all the data crunching, and an answer emerges, and the answer is, ""Amazon should do a sitcom about four Republican US Senators."" They did that show.So does anyone know the name of the show? (Audience: ""Alpha House."") Yes, ""Alpha House,"" but it seems like not too many of you here remember that show, actually, because it didn't turn out that great. It's actually just an average show, actually — literally, in fact, because the average of this curve here is at 7.4, and ""Alpha House"" lands at 7.5, so a slightly above average show, but certainly not what Roy Price and his team were aiming for. Meanwhile, however, at about the same time, at another company, another executive did manage to land a top show using data analysis, and his name is Ted, Ted Sarandos, who is the Chief Content Officer of Netflix, and just like Roy, he's on a constant mission to find that great TV show, and he uses data as well to do that, except he does it a little bit differently. So instead of holding a competition, what he did — and his team of course — was they looked at all the data they already had about Netflix viewers, you know, the ratings they give their shows, the viewing histories, what shows people like, and so on. And then they use that data to discover all of these little bits and pieces about the audience: what kinds of shows they like, what kind of producers, what kind of actors. And once they had all of these pieces together, they took a leap of faith, and they decided to license not a sitcom about four Senators but a drama series about a single Senator. You guys know the show?(Laughter)Yes, ""House of Cards,"" and Netflix of course, nailed it with that show, at least for the first two seasons.(Laughter) (Applause)""House of Cards"" gets a 9.1 rating on this curve, so it's exactly where they wanted it to be.Now, the question of course is, what happened here? So you have two very competitive, data-savvy companies. They connect all of these millions of data points, and then it works beautifully for one of them, and it doesn't work for the other one. So why? Because logic kind of tells you that this should be working all the time. I mean, if you're collecting millions of data points on a decision you're going to make, then you should be able to make a pretty good decision. You have 200 years of statistics to rely on. You're amplifying it with very powerful computers. The least you could expect is good TV, right?And if data analysis does not work that way, then it actually gets a little scary, because we live in a time where we're turning to data more and more to make very serious decisions that go far beyond TV. Does anyone here know the company Multi-Health Systems? No one. OK, that's good actually. OK, so Multi-Health Systems is a software company, and I hope that nobody here in this room ever comes into contact with that software, because if you do, it means you're in prison.(Laughter)If someone here in the US is in prison, and they apply for parole, then it's very likely that data analysis software from that company will be used in determining whether to grant that parole. So it's the same principle as Amazon and Netflix, but now instead of deciding whether a TV show is going to be good or bad, you're deciding whether a person is going to be good or bad. And mediocre TV, 22 minutes, that can be pretty bad, but more years in prison, I guess, even worse.And unfortunately, there is actually some evidence that this data analysis, despite having lots of data, does not always produce optimum results. And that's not because a company like Multi-Health Systems doesn't know what to do with data. Even the most data-savvy companies get it wrong. Yes, even Google gets it wrong sometimes.In 2009, Google announced that they were able, with data analysis, to predict outbreaks of influenza, the nasty kind of flu, by doing data analysis on their Google searches. And it worked beautifully, and it made a big splash in the news, including the pinnacle of scientific success: a publication in the journal ""Nature."" It worked beautifully for year after year after year, until one year it failed. And nobody could even tell exactly why. It just didn't work that year, and of course that again made big news, including now a retraction of a publication from the journal ""Nature."" So even the most data-savvy companies, Amazon and Google, they sometimes get it wrong. And despite all those failures, data is moving rapidly into real-life decision-making — into the workplace, law enforcement, medicine. So we should better make sure that data is helping.Now, personally I've seen a lot of this struggle with data myself, because I work in computational genetics, which is also a field where lots of very smart people are using unimaginable amounts of data to make pretty serious decisions like deciding on a cancer therapy or developing a drug. And over the years, I've noticed a sort of pattern or kind of rule, if you will, about the difference between successful decision-making with data and unsuccessful decision-making, and I find this a pattern worth sharing, and it goes something like this.So whenever you're solving a complex problem, you're doing essentially two things. The first one is, you take that problem apart into its bits and pieces so that you can deeply analyze those bits and pieces, and then of course you do the second part. You put all of these bits and pieces back together again to come to your conclusion. And sometimes you have to do it over again, but it's always those two things: taking apart and putting back together again.And now the crucial thing is that data and data analysis is only good for the first part. Data and data analysis, no matter how powerful, can only help you taking a problem apart and understanding its pieces. It's not suited to put those pieces back together again and then to come to a conclusion. There's another tool that can do that, and we all have it, and that tool is the brain. If there's one thing a brain is good at, it's taking bits and pieces back together again, even when you have incomplete information, and coming to a good conclusion, especially if it's the brain of an expert.And that's why I believe that Netflix was so successful, because they used data and brains where they belong in the process. They use data to first understand lots of pieces about their audience that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to understand at that depth, but then the decision to take all these bits and pieces and put them back together again and make a show like ""House of Cards,"" that was nowhere in the data. Ted Sarandos and his team made that decision to license that show, which also meant, by the way, that they were taking a pretty big personal risk with that decision. And Amazon, on the other hand, they did it the wrong way around. They used data all the way to drive their decision-making, first when they held their competition of TV ideas, then when they selected ""Alpha House"" to make as a show. Which of course was a very safe decision for them, because they could always point at the data, saying, ""This is what the data tells us."" But it didn't lead to the exceptional results that they were hoping for.So data is of course a massively useful tool to make better decisions, but I believe that things go wrong when data is starting to drive those decisions. No matter how powerful, data is just a tool, and to keep that in mind, I find this device here quite useful. Many of you will ...(Laughter)Before there was data, this was the decision-making device to use.(Laughter)Many of you will know this. This toy here is called the Magic 8 Ball, and it's really amazing, because if you have a decision to make, a yes or no question, all you have to do is you shake the ball, and then you get an answer — ""Most Likely"" — right here in this window in real time. I'll have it out later for tech demos.(Laughter)Now, the thing is, of course — so I've made some decisions in my life where, in hindsight, I should have just listened to the ball. But, you know, of course, if you have the data available, you want to replace this with something much more sophisticated, like data analysis to come to a better decision. But that does not change the basic setup. So the ball may get smarter and smarter and smarter, but I believe it's still on us to make the decisions if we want to achieve something extraordinary, on the right end of the curve. And I find that a very encouraging message, in fact, that even in the face of huge amounts of data, it still pays off to make decisions, to be an expert in what you're doing and take risks. Because in the end, it's not data, it's risks that will land you on the right end of the curve.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_wernicke_how_to_use_data_to_make_a_hit_tv_show
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"I am in search of another planet in the universe where life exists. I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. But I know that it's there. And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it.On our planet, where there's water, there's life. So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. What I do picks up where their job ends. I model the possible climates of exoplanets. And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life.Take the planet Venus. It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. That's hot enough to melt lead. Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life.We don't know what the atmospheres of these planets are like because the planets are so small and dim compared to their stars and so far away from us. For example, one of the closest planets that could support surface water — it's called Gliese 667 Cc — such a glamorous name, right, nice phone number for a name — it's 23 light years away. So that's more than 100 trillion miles. Trying to measure the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet passing in front of its host star is hard. It's like trying to see a fruit fly passing in front of a car's headlight. OK, now imagine that car is 100 trillion miles away, and you want to know the precise color of that fly.So I use computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need to have a suitable climate for water and life.Here's an artist's concept of the planet Kepler-62f, with the Earth for reference. It's 1,200 light years away, and just 40 percent larger than Earth. Our NSF-funded work found that it could be warm enough for open water from many types of atmospheres and orientations of its orbit. So I'd like future telescopes to follow up on this planet to look for signs of life.Ice on a planet's surface is also important for climate. Ice absorbs longer, redder wavelengths of light, and reflects shorter, bluer light. That's why the iceberg in this photo looks so blue. The redder light from the sun is absorbed on its way through the ice. Only the blue light makes it all the way to the bottom. Then it gets reflected back to up to our eyes and we see blue ice. My models show that planets orbiting cooler stars could actually be warmer than planets orbiting hotter stars. There's another contradiction — that ice absorbs the longer wavelength light from cooler stars, and that light, that energy, heats the ice.Using climate models to explore how these contradictions can affect planetary climate is vital to the search for life elsewhere.And it's no surprise that this is my specialty. I'm an African-American female astronomer and a classically trained actor who loves to wear makeup and read fashion magazines, so I am uniquely positioned to appreciate contradictions in nature —(Laughter)(Applause)... and how they can inform our search for the next planet where life exists.My organization, Rising Stargirls, teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. That's another contradiction — science and art don't often go together, but interweaving them can help these girls bring their whole selves to what they learn, and maybe one day join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions, and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aomawa_shields_how_we_ll_find_life_on_other_planets
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"Our grandparents' generation created an amazing system of canals and reservoirs that made it possible for people to live in places where there wasn't a lot of water. For example, during the Great Depression, they created the Hoover Dam, which in turn, created Lake Mead and made it possible for the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles to provide water for people who lived in a really dry place.In the 20th century, we literally spent trillions of dollars building infrastructure to get water to our cities. In terms of economic development, it was a great investment. But in the last decade, we've seen the combined effects of climate change, population growth and competition for water resources threaten these vital lifelines and water resources.This figure shows you the change in the lake level of Lake Mead that happened in the last 15 years. You can see starting around the year 2000, the lake level started to drop. And it was dropping at such a rate that it would have left the drinking water intakes for Las Vegas high and dry. The city became so concerned about this that they recently constructed a new drinking water intake structure that they referred to as the ""Third Straw"" to pull water out of the greater depths of the lake.The challenges associated with providing water to a modern city are not restricted to the American Southwest. In the year 2007, the third largest city in Australia, Brisbane, came within 6 months of running out of water. A similar drama is playing out today in São Paulo, Brazil, where the main reservoir for the city has gone from being completely full in 2010, to being nearly empty today as the city approaches the 2016 Summer Olympics.For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in one of the world's great cities, we've never truly experienced the effects of a catastrophic drought. We like to complain about the navy showers we have to take. We like our neighbors to see our dirty cars and our brown lawns. But we've never really faced the prospect of turning on the tap and having nothing come out. And that's because when things have gotten bad in the past, it's always been possible to expand a reservoir or dig a few more groundwater wells. Well, in a time when all of the water resources are spoken for, it's not going to be possible to rely on this tried and true way of providing ourselves with water.Some people think that we're going to solve the urban water problem by taking water from our rural neighbors. But that's an approach that's fraught with political, legal and social dangers. And even if we succeed in grabbing the water from our rural neighbors, we're just transferring the problem to someone else and there's a good chance it will come back and bite us in the form of higher food prices and damage to the aquatic ecosystems that already rely upon that water.I think that there's a better way to solve our urban water crisis and I think that's to open up four new local sources of water that I liken to faucets. If we can make smart investments in these new sources of water in the coming years, we can solve our urban water problem and decrease the likelihood that we'll ever run across the effects of a catastrophic drought.Now, if you told me 20 years ago that a modern city could exist without a supply of imported water, I probably would have dismissed you as an unrealistic and uninformed dreamer. But my own experiences working with some of the world's most water-starved cities in the last decades have shown me that we have the technologies and the management skills to actually transition away from imported water, and that's what I want to tell you about tonight.The first source of local water supply that we need to develop to solve our urban water problem will flow with the rainwater that falls in our cities. One of the great tragedies of urban development is that as our cities grew, we started covering all the surfaces with concrete and asphalt. And when we did that, we had to build storm sewers to get the water that fell on the cities out before it could cause flooding, and that's a waste of a vital water resource. Let me give you an example.This figure here shows you the volume of water that could be collected in the city of San Jose if they could harvest the stormwater that fell within the city limits. You can see from the intersection of the blue line and the black dotted line that if San Jose could just capture half of the water that fell within the city, they'd have enough water to get them through an entire year.Now, I know what some of you are probably thinking. ""The answer to our problem is to start building great big tanks and attaching them to the downspouts of our roof gutters, rainwater harvesting."" Now, that's an idea that might work in some places. But if you live in a place where it mainly rains in the winter time and most of the water demand is in the summertime, it's not a very cost-effective way to solve a water problem. And if you experience the effects of a multiyear drought, like California's currently experiencing, you just can't build a rainwater tank that's big enough to solve your problem.I think there's a lot more practical way to harvest the stormwater and the rainwater that falls in our cities, and that's to capture it and let it percolate into the ground. After all, many of our cities are sitting on top of a natural water storage system that can accommodate huge volumes of water.For example, historically, Los Angeles has obtained about a third of its water supply from a massive aquifer that underlies the San Fernando Valley. Now, when you look at the water that comes off of your roof and runs off of your lawn and flows down the gutter, you might say to yourself, ""Do I really want to drink that stuff?"" Well, the answer is you don't want to drink it until it's been treated a little bit. And so the challenge that we face in urban water harvesting is to capture the water, clean the water and get it underground.And that's exactly what the city of Los Angeles is doing with a new project that they're building in Burbank, California. This figure here shows the stormwater park that they're building by hooking a series of stormwater collection systems, or storm sewers, and routing that water into an abandoned gravel quarry. The water that's captured in the quarry is slowly passed through a man-made wetland, and then it goes into that ball field there and percolates into the ground, recharging the drinking water aquifer of the city.And in the process of passing through the wetland and percolating through the ground, the water encounters microbes that live on the surfaces of the plants and the surfaces of the soil, and that purifies the water. And if the water's still not clean enough to drink after it's been through this natural treatment process, the city can treat it again when they pump if back out of the groundwater aquifers before they deliver it to people to drink.The second tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with the wastewater that comes out of our sewage treatment plants. Now, many of you are probably familiar with the concept of recycled water. You've probably seen signs like this that tell you that the shrubbery and the highway median and the local golf course is being watered with water that used to be in a sewage treatment plant. We've been doing this for a couple of decades now. But what we're learning from our experience is that this approach is much more expensive that we expected it to be. Because once we build the first few water recycling systems close to the sewage treatment plant, we have to build longer and longer pipe networks to get that water to where it needs to go. And that becomes prohibitive in terms of cost.What we're finding is that a much more cost-effective and practical way of recycling wastewater is to turn treated wastewater into drinking water through a two-step process. In the first step in this process we pressurize the water and pass it through a reverse osmosis membrane: a thin, permeable plastic membrane that allows water molecules to pass through but traps and retains the salts, the viruses and the organic chemicals that might be present in the wastewater.In the second step in the process, we add a small amount of hydrogen peroxide and shine ultraviolet light on the water. The ultraviolet light cleaves the hydrogen peroxide into two parts that are called hydroxyl radicals, and these hydroxyl radicals are very potent forms of oxygen that break down most organic chemicals.After the water's been through this two-stage process, it's safe to drink. I know, I've been studying recycled water using every measurement technique known to modern science for the past 15 years. We've detected some chemicals that can make it through the first step in the process, but by the time we get to the second step, the advanced oxidation process, we rarely see any chemicals present. And that's in stark contrast to the taken-for-granted water supplies that we regularly drink all the time.There's another way we can recycle water. This is an engineered treatment wetland that we recently built on the Santa Ana River in Southern California. The treatment wetland receives water from a part of the Santa Ana River that in the summertime consists almost entirely of wastewater effluent from cities like Riverside and San Bernardino. The water comes into our treatment wetland, it's exposed to sunlight and algae and those break down the organic chemicals, remove the nutrients and inactivate the waterborne pathogens. The water gets put back in the Santa Ana River, it flows down to Anaheim, gets taken out at Anaheim and percolated into the ground, and becomes the drinking water of the city of Anaheim, completing the trip from the sewers of Riverside County to the drinking water supply of Orange County.Now, you might think that this idea of drinking wastewater is some sort of futuristic fantasy or not commonly done. Well, in California, we already recycle about 40 billion gallons a year of wastewater through the two-stage advanced treatment process I was telling you about. That's enough water to be the supply of about a million people if it were their sole water supply.The third tap that we need to open up will not be a tap at all, it will be a kind of virtual tap, it will be the water conservation that we manage to do. And the place where we need to think about water conservation is outdoors because in California and other modern American cities, about half of our water use happens outdoors.In the current drought, we've seen that it's possible to have our lawns survive and our plants survive with about half as much water. So there's no need to start painting concrete green and putting in Astroturf and buying cactuses. We can have California-friendly landscaping with soil moisture detectors and smart irrigation controllers and have beautiful green landscapes in our cities.The fourth and final water tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with desalinated seawater. Now, I know what you probably heard people say about seawater desalination. ""It's a great thing to do if you have lots of oil, not a lot of water and you don't care about climate change."" Seawater desalination is energy-intensive no matter how you slice it. But that characterization of seawater desalination as being a nonstarter is hopelessly out of date. We've made tremendous progress in seawater desalination in the past two decades.This picture shows you the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western hemisphere that's currently being built north of San Diego. Compared to the seawater desalination plant that was built in Santa Barbara 25 years ago, this treatment plant will use about half the energy to produce a gallon of water.But just because seawater desalination has become less energy-intensive, doesn't mean we should start building desalination plants everywhere. Among the different choices we have, it's probably the most energy-intensive and potentially environmentally damaging of the options to create a local water supply.So there it is. With these four sources of water, we can move away from our reliance on imported water. Through reform in the way we landscape our surfaces and our properties, we can reduce outdoor water use by about 50 percent, thereby increasing  the water supply by 25 percent. We can recycle the water that makes it into the sewer, thereby increasing our water supply by 40 percent. And we can make up the difference through a combination of stormwater harvesting and seawater desalination.So, let's create a water supply that will be able to withstand any of the challenges that climate change throws at us in the coming years. Let's create a water supply that uses local sources and leaves more water in the environment for fish and for food. Let's create a water system that's consistent with out environmental values. And let's do it for our children and our grandchildren and let's tell them this is the system that they have to take care of in the future because it's our last chance to create a new kind of water system.Thank you very much for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_sedlak_4_ways_we_can_avoid_a_catastrophic_drought
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"A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. And it managed to get through my spam filter. I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh.(Laughter)I know.(Laughter)It went like this: it said, ""Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon."" Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do.(Laughter)And I said, ""Solomon, Your email intrigues me.""(Laughter)(Applause)And the game was afoot.He said, ""Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you.""(Laughter)""You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes.""(Laughter)So I knew I was dealing with a professional.(Laughter)I said, ""How much is it worth?""He said, ""We will start with smaller quantity,"" — I was like, aww — and then he said, ""of 25 kgs.(Laughter)The worth should be about $2.5 million.""I said, ""Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big.(Applause)I can handle it. How much gold do you have?""(Laughter)He said, ""It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment.""I said, ""50 kgs? There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton.""(Laughter)(Applause)He said, ""What do you do for a living?""(Laughter)I said, ""I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager.""(Laughter)This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no.Then I started to panic. I was like, ""Where are you based?"" I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. That's a lot of gold.""He said, ""It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment.""I said, ""Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. Hold tight.""(Laughter)This is what I sent Solomon.(Laughter)(Applause)I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on.(Laughter)I said, ""Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. I've had one of my assistants run the numbers.(Laughter)We're ready for shipping as much gold as possible.""There's always a moment where they try to tug your heartstrings, and this was it for Solomon. He said, ""I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well."" And I said, ""That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on?"" And he said, ""On RealEstate, what about you?""I thought about it for a long time. And I said, ""One word; Hummus.""(Laughter)""It's going places.(Laughter)I was in Sainsbury's the other day and there were like 30 different varieties. Also you can cut up carrots, and you can dip them. Have you ever done that, Solomon?""(Laughter)He said, ""I have to go bed now.""(Laughter)(Applause)""Till morrow. Have sweet dream.""I didn't know what to say! I said, ""Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir.""(Laughter)Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. It was getting a bit out of hand. Friends were saying, ""James, do you want to come for a drink?"" I was like, ""I can't, I'm expecting an email about some gold.""So I figured I had to knock it on the head. I had to take it to a ridiculous conclusion. So I concocted a plan. I said, ""Solomon, I'm concerned about security. When we email each other, we need to use a code."" And he agreed.(Laughter)I said, ""Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence:Lawyer: Gummy Bear.Bank: Cream Egg.Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M&Ms.Documents: Jelly Beans.Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard.""(Laughter)I knew these were all words they use, right? I said, ""Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence.""(Laughter)I didn't hear back. I thought, I've gone too far. I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. I said, ""Solomon, Is the deal still on? KitKat.""(Laughter)Because you have to be consistent. Then I did get an email back from him. He said, ""The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah ...""I said, ""Dude, you have to use the code!"" What followed is the greatest email I've ever received.(Laughter)I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. This was a good day. ""The business is on. I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear —(Laughter)so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M&Ms process to start.(Laughter)Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard.""(Applause)And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf.(Laughter)(Applause)Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. I don't think what I'm doing is mean. There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. All I'm doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right?And if you're going to do this — and I highly recommend you do — get yourself a pseudonymous email address. Don't use your own email address. That's what I was doing at the start and it was a nightmare. I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response —(Laughter)to a medical question I had.But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this:(Laughter)""I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT."" I was like, oh! — that Winnie Mandela.(Laughter)I know so many.""I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION.""Let that sink in. She sent me this, which is hysterical.(Laughter)And this. And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. But to be honest, if there's nothing written on it, it's just a shape!(Laughter)I said, ""Winnie, I'm really sorry to hear of this. Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious.""(Laughter)That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive.She said, ""KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. ONE LOVE.""(Laughter)I said, ""Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY.""(Laughter)(Applause)She said, ""MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE.""(Laughter)I said, ""no problemo.I SHOT THE SHERIFF.""[ (BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY) ](Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_when_you_reply_to_spam_email
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"Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. The auditorium was empty. It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett. 1,400 people were coming. And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play.But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. Then the producer came over to Vera and said ... ""If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play.""There'd been a mistake. The opera house had provided the wrong instrument. This one had this harsh, tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away. The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. It wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large space such as the Cologne Opera House.So Keith Jarrett left. He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano. Now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano. And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert. And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, ""Never forget ... only for you.""And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began.(Music)Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality. But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row.It's an electrifying performance. It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic. And the audience loved it. Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history.Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. He had embraced that mess, and it soared. But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct. He didn't want to play. Of course, I think any of us, in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way, we'd have the same instinct. We don't want to be asked to do good work with bad tools. We don't want to have to overcome unnecessary hurdles. But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. And I think our instinct is also wrong. I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess. So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll.So cognitive psychology first. We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance. For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers. And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes. So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman. But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized. Now, these are really ugly fonts, and they're difficult fonts to read. But at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been asked to read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams, in a variety of subjects. And the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down, forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit more about what they were reading, to interpret it ... and so they learned more.Another example. The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters. What do I mean by that? What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you. Can you do that? If you can, you have good, strong attentional filters. But some people really struggle with that. Some of Carson's undergraduate subjects struggled with that. They had weak filters, they had porous filters — let a lot of external information in. And so what that meant is they were constantly being interrupted by the sights and the sounds of the world around them. If there was a television on while they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out.Now, you would think that that was a disadvantage ... but no. When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters were vastly more likely to have some real creative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album. These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill. They were able to think outside the box because their box was full of holes.Let's talk about complexity science. So how do you solve a really complex — the world's full of complicated problems — how do you solve a really complicated problem?For example, you try to make a jet engine. There are lots and lots of different variables, the operating temperature, the materials, all the different dimensions, the shape. You can't solve that kind of problem all in one go, it's too hard. So what do you do? Well, one thing you can do is try to solve it step-by-step. So you have some kind of prototype and you tweak it, you test it, you improve it. You tweak it, you test it, you improve it. Now, this idea of marginal gains will eventually get you a good jet engine. And it's been quite widely implemented in the world. So you'll hear about it, for example, in high performance cycling, web designers will talk about trying to optimize their web pages, they're looking for these step-by-step gains.That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. But you know what would make it a better way? A dash of mess. You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end. And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust.Let's talk about social psychology. So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime — alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects. And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime. And there were two treatments in this experiment. In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. In other cases, three friends and a stranger. And you can see where I'm going with this.Obviously I'm going to say that the groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively, which is true, they did. Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively. So the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chance of getting the answer right. Which is actually not that great — in multiple choice, for three answers? 50-50's not good.(Laughter)The three friends and the stranger, even though the stranger didn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversation to accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chance of finding the right answer. That's quite a big leap in performance.But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it. So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job. They were complacent. When she spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time — it's actually rather difficult, it's rather awkward ... and they were full of doubt. They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had. And I think that really exemplifies the challenge that we're dealing with here.Because, yeah — the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move ... these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. But we don't feel that they're helping us. We feel that they're getting in the way ... and so we resist. And that's why the last example is really important.So I want to talk about somebody from the background of the world of rock 'n' roll. And you may know him, he's actually a TED-ster. His name is Brian Eno. He is an ambient composer — rather brilliant.He's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the great rock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years. He's worked with David Bowie on ""Heroes,"" he worked with U2 on ""Achtung Baby"" and ""The Joshua Tree,"" he's worked with DEVO, he's worked with Coldplay, he's worked with everybody.And what does he do to make these great rock bands better? Well, he makes a mess. He disrupts their creative processes. It's his role to be the awkward stranger. It's his role to tell them that they have to play the unplayable piano.And one of the ways in which he creates this disruption is through this remarkable deck of cards — I have my signed copy here — thank you, Brian. They're called The Oblique Strategies, he developed them with a friend of his. And when they're stuck in the studio, Brian Eno will reach for one of the cards. He'll draw one at random, and he'll make the band follow the instructions on the card.So this one ... ""Change instrument roles."" Yeah, everyone swap instruments — Drummer on the piano — Brilliant, brilliant idea.""Look closely at the most  embarrassing details. Amplify them.""""Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate.""These cards are disruptive.Now, they've proved their worth in album after album. The musicians hate them.(Laughter)So Phil Collins was playing drums on an early Brian Eno album. He got so frustrated he started throwing beer cans across the studio.Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's ""Lodger"" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, ""Brian, this experiment is stupid."" But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies. And he tells his students to use The Oblique Strategies because he's realized something. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you.The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list — list on the recording studio wall. A checklist of things you might try if you got stuck.The list didn't work. Know why? Not messy enough. Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely.And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. These things help us. They help us solve problems, they help us be more creative.But also ... we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this. So however we do it ... whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_how_messy_problems_can_inspire_creativity
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"I have been a police officer for a very, very long time. And you see these notes in my hand because I'm also a black preacher.(Laughter)And if you know anything about black preachers, we'll close, and then we'll keep going for another 20 minutes.(Laughter)So I need this to keep pushing this thing forward. I've been a police officer for a very long time, and I mean I predated technology. I'm talking about before pagers.(Laughter)Laugh if you want to, but I'm telling the truth. I predate War on Our Fellow Man — I mean, War on Drugs. I predate all of that. I predate so much and I've been through ebbs and flows and I've been through good and bad times, and still I absolutely love being a police officer. I love being a police officer because it's always been a calling for me and never a job.And even with that, my personal truth is that law enforcement is in a crisis. It's an invisible crisis, and it has been for many, many years. Even though we in law enforcement say, ""You know what? We can't arrest our way out of this."" We say in law enforcement things like, ""Yeah, it's illegal to profile."" You know what? In law enforcement, we even agree that we have to adopt this thinking and become more oriented to community policing. And yet all the while, still, we continue in the same vein, the same vein that contradicts everything that we just admitted.And so that's the reason for me, several years ago. Because I was tired of the racism, I was tired of discrimination, I was tired of the ""-isms"" and the schisms. I was just so tired. I was tired of the vicious cycle, and I was tired of it even in the beloved agency in the department that I still love today. And so my wife and I, we sat down and we decided and we targeted a date that we would retire. We would retire and I would go off into the sunset, maybe do ministry full time, love my wife a long time. Y'all know what I'm talking about.(Laughter)But we decided that I would retire. But then there was a higher power than I. There was a love for the city that I loved, that I grew up in, that I was educated in — a city that pulled my heart back into the system. So we didn't retire. We didn't retire and so what happened was, over the next — I would say, 18 months, 19 months, I had this passion to implement some radical policing. And so now, over the next 19 months, I shifted, and I transcended from being a drug sergeant — ready to retire as a drug sergeant — and went from level to level to level, until I find myself as a district commander, commander of the worst district in Baltimore city. We call it the Eastern District, the most violent district, the most impoverished district — 46 percent unemployment in that district. National rating at that time, national rating, the AIDS and the tuberculosis [rating], was always on the top 10 list for zip codes for cities across the nation, or just zip codes across the nation. The top 10 — I didn't say state, I didn't say city — that little neighborhood.And I said, you know what? We gotta do something different. We gotta do something different. We gotta think radical. We gotta think outside the box. And so in order to bring change that I desperately wanted and I desperately felt in my heart, I had to start listening to that inner spirit. I had to start listening to that man on the inside that went against everything that I had been trained to do.But we still did it. We still did it because we listened to that inner spirit, because I realized this: if I was to see real police reform in the communities that I had authority over for public safety, we had to change our stinkin' thinkin'.We had to change it. And so what we did is we started to think holistically and not paramilitarily. So we thought differently. And we started to realize that it could never be and never should have been us versus them. And so I decided to come to that intersection where I could meet all classes, all races, all creeds, all colors; where I would meet the businesses and the faith-based, and the eds, the meds, and I would meet all the people that made up the communities that I had authority over.So I met them and I began to listen. See, police have a problem. Off the top, we want to bring things into the community and come up with these extravagant strategies and deployments, but we never talk to the community about them. And we shove them into the community and say, ""Take that."" But we said we'd get rid of that stinkin' thinkin', so we talked to our communities. We said, ""This is your community table. We'll pull up a chair. We want to hear from you. What's going to work in your community?"" And then some great things started to happen.See, here's the thing: I had to figure out a way to shift 130 cops that were under my tutelage from being occupiers of communities to being partners. I had to figure out how to do that. Because here's the crazy thing: in law enforcement, we have evolved into something incredible. Listen, we have become great protectors. We know how to protect you. But we have exercised that arm so much, so very much. If I was a natural police department and I represented a police department, you would see this incredible, beautiful, 23-inch arm.(Laughter)It's pretty, ain't it? It's cut up. No fat on it. Mmm it look good. It just look good!(Laughter)That's a great arm — protection! That's who we are, but we've exercised it so much sometimes that it has led to abuse. It's led to coldness and callousness and dehumanized us. And we've forgotten the mantra across this nation is to protect and serve. Y'all don't know that? Protect and serve.(Laughter)So you look at the other arm, and then you look at it and ... there it is.(Laughter)You know, it's kinda weak. It looks sickly. It's withering and it's dying because we've invested so much in our protective arm. But we forgot to treat our communities like they're our customers; like they're our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers. And so somehow, along the way, we've gotten out of balance. And because we are a proud profession, it is very hard for us to look in the mirror and see our mistakes. It's even harder to make a change.And so, as I try to hurry and get through this, I need to say this: it's not just law enforcement, though. Because every one of us makes up a community. Everybody makes up a community. And as communities — can I say this? — we have put too much responsibility on law enforcement. Too much.(Applause)And then we have the audacity and the nerve to get upset with law enforcement when we take action. There is no way in the world that we, as a community, should be calling the police for kids playing ball in the street. No way in the world that we should be calling the police because my neighbor's music is up too loud, because his dog came over to my yard and did a number two; there's no way we should be calling the police. But we have surrendered so much of our responsibility. Listen, when I was a little boy coming up in Baltimore — and listen, we played rough in the street — I ain't never see the police come and break us up. You know who came? It was the elders. It was the parental figures in the community. It was those guardians, it was that village mentality. They came and said, ""Stop that!"" and ""Do this."" and ""Stop that."" We had mentors throughout all of the community.So it takes all of us, all of us. And when I say community, I'm talking about everything that makes up a community, even — listen, because I'm a preacher, I'm very hard on the churches, because I believe the churches too often have become MIA, missing in action. I believe they have shifted over the last 10, 20 years from being community churches, where you walk outside your door, round the corner and you're in church. They shifted from that and became commuter churches. So you now have churches who have become disconnected by default from the very community where they're planted. And they don't take care of that community.I could go on and on, but I really need to wrap this up. Community and policing: we've all lost that precious gift, and I call it relational equity. We've lost it with one another. It's not somebody else's fault — it's all of our fault. We all take responsibility in this. But I say this: it's not too late for all of us to build our cities and nation to make it great again. It is never too late. It is never too late. You see, after three years of my four-and-a-half-year commandship in that district, three years in, after putting pastors in the car with my police because I knew this — it's a little secret — I knew this: it was hard to stay a nasty police officer while you're riding around with a clergy.(Laughter)(Applause)You'd be getting in and out of the car, looking to your right, talking about: ""Father, forgive me, for I have sinned,"" all day long — you can't do it! So we came up with some incredible initiatives, engagements for our community and police to build that trust back. We began to deal with our youth and with those who we consider are on the wrong side of the fence. We knew we had an economic problem, so we began to create jobs. We knew there was sickness in our community and they didn't have access to proper medical care, so we'd partner up. We got to that intersection and partnered up with anybody that wanted to partner with us and talked about what we needed holistically, never thinking about the crime. Because at the end of the day, if we took care of the needs of the people, if we got to the root cause, the crime would take care of itself. It would take care of itself.(Applause)And so, after three years of a four-and-a-half-year stint, we looked back and we looked over and found out that we were at a 40-year historical low: our crime numbers, our homicides — everything had dropped down, back to the 1970s. And it might go back further, but the problem is, we only started keeping data since 1970. Forty-year crime low, so much so, I had other commanders call me, ""Hey Mel, whatcha doin', man? Whatcha doin'? We gotta get some of that!""(Laughter)And so we gave them some of that. And in a short period of time, the city went to a 30-year crime low. For the first time in 30 years, we fell, Baltimore city, to under 200 homicides — 197 to be exact. And we celebrated, because we had learned to become great servers, become great servers first.But I gotta tell you this: these last few years, as much as we had learned to become great proactive police officers and great relational police officers rather than reactive, these last years have disappointed me. They have broken my heart. The uprising still hurts. It still hurts my heart, because truly I believe that it should've never happened. I believe it should've never happened if we were allowed to continue along the vein that we were in, servicing our community, treating them like human beings, treating them with respect, loving on them first. If we continued in that vein, it would've never happened. But somehow, we went back to business as usual.But I'm excited again! I'm excited again, because now we have a police commissioner who not only talks about community policing, but he absolutely understands it, and more importantly, he embraces it. So I'm very excited now. Listen, I'm excited about Baltimore today, because we, as many cities, I believe shall rise from the ashes. I believe — I truly believe —(Applause)that we will be great again. I believe, as we continue to wrap arms and continue to say, ""We're in this together,"" because it's not just an intersection: once we meet, we now gotta get on the same path for the same goals, and this city will become great again. This nation will become great again. Because we have the same goal: we all want peace. We all want respect for one another. We all want love. And I believe we are back on that road, and I'm so excited about it.So listen, I thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time.God bless you all.(Applause)God bless you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melvin_russell_i_love_being_a_police_officer_but_we_need_reform
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"I once said, ""If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet."" I was wrong.I said those words back in 2011, when a Facebook page I anonymously created helped spark the Egyptian revolution. The Arab Spring revealed social media's greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings. The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart. I would like to share my own experience in using social media for activism, and talk about some of the challenges I have personally faced and what we could do about them.In the early 2000s, Arabs were flooding the web. Thirsty for knowledge, for opportunities, for connecting with the rest of the people around the globe, we escaped our frustrating political realities and lived a virtual, alternative life. Just like many of them, I was completely apolitical until 2009. At the time, when I logged into social media, I started seeing more and more Egyptians aspiring for political change in the country. It felt like I was not alone.In June 2010, Internet changed my life forever. While browsing Facebook, I saw a photo, a terrifying photo, of a tortured, dead body of a young Egyptian guy. His name was Khaled Said. Khaled was a 29-year-old Alexandrian who was killed by police. I saw myself in his picture. I thought, ""I could be Khaled.""I could not sleep that night, and I decided to do something. I anonymously created a Facebook page and called it ""We are all Khaled Said."" In just three days, the page had over 100,000 people, fellow Egyptians who shared the same concern. Whatever was happening had to stop.I recruited my co-admin, AbdelRahman Mansour. We worked together for hours and hours. We were crowdsourcing ideas from the people. We were engaging them. We were calling collectively for actions, and sharing news that the regime did not want Egyptians to know. The page became the most followed page in the Arab world. It had more fans than established media organizations and even top celebrities.On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled out of Tunisia after mounting protests against his regime. I saw a spark of hope. Egyptians on social media were wondering, ""If Tunisia did it, why can't we?"" I posted an event on Facebook and called it ""A Revolution against Corruption, Injustice and Dictatorship."" I posed a question to the 300,000 users of the page at the time: ""Today is the 14th of January. The 25th of January is Police Day. It's a national holiday. If 100,000 of us take to the streets of Cairo, no one is going to stop us. I wonder if we could do it.""In just a few days, the invitation reached over a million people, and over 100,000 people confirmed attendance. Social media was crucial for this campaign. It helped a decentralized movement arise. It made people realize that they were not alone. And it made it impossible for the regime to stop it. At the time, they didn't even understand it. And on January 25th, Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo and other cities, calling for change, breaking the barrier of fear and announcing a new era.Then came the consequences. A few hours before the regime cut off the Internet and telecommunications, I was walking in a dark street in Cairo, around midnight. I had just tweeted, ""Pray for Egypt. The government must be planning a massacre tomorrow.""I was hit hard on my head. I lost my balance and fell down, to find four armed men surrounding me. One covered my mouth and the others paralyzed me. I knew I was being kidnapped by state security.I found myself in a cell, handcuffed, blindfolded. I was terrified. So was my family, who started looking for me in hospitals, police stations and even morgues.After my disappearance, a few of my fellow colleagues who knew I was the admin of the page told the media about my connection with that page, and that I was likely arrested by state security. My colleagues at Google started a search campaign trying to find me, and the fellow protesters in the square demanded my release.After 11 days of complete darkness, I was set free. And three days later, Mubarak was forced to step down. It was the most inspiring and empowering moment of my life. It was a time of great hope. Egyptians lived a utopia for 18 days during the revolution. They all shared the belief that we could actually live together despite our differences, that Egypt after Mubarak would be for all.But unfortunately, the post-revolution events were like a punch in the gut. The euphoria faded, we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to intense polarization. Social media only amplified that state, by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech. The environment was purely toxic. My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech. I started to worry about the safety of my family. But of course, this wasn't just about me. The polarization reached its peak between the two main powers — the army supporters and the Islamists. People in the center, like me, started feeling helpless. Both groups wanted you to side with them; you were either with them or against them. And on the 3rd of July 2013, the army ousted Egypt's first democratically elected president, after three days of popular protest that demanded his resignation.That day I made a very hard decision. I decided to go silent, completely silent. It was a moment of defeat. I stayed silent for more than two years, and I used the time to reflect on everything that happened, trying to understand why did it happen. It became clear to me that while it's true that polarization is primarily driven by our human behavior, social media shapes this behavior and magnifies its impact. Say you want to say something that is not based on a fact, pick a fight or ignore someone that you don't like. These are all natural human impulses, but because of technology, acting on these impulses is only one click away.In my view, there are five critical challenges facing today's social media.First, we don't know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people's biases are now believed and spread among millions of people.Second, we create our own echo chambers. We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow and block everybody else.Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. All of us probably know that. It's as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars.And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet, and we are less motivated to change these views, even when new evidence arises.Fifth — and in my point of view, this is the most critical — today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It's as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.I witnessed how these critical challenges contributed to an already polarized Egyptian society, but this is not just about Egypt. Polarization is on the rise in the whole world. We need to work hard on figuring out how technology could be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.There's a lot of debate today on how to combat online harassment and fight trolls. This is so important. No one could argue against that. But we need to also think about how to design social media experiences that promote civility and reward thoughtfulness. I know for a fact if I write a post that is more sensational, more one-sided, sometimes angry and aggressive, I get to have more people see that post. I will get more attention.But what if we put more focus on quality? What is more important: the total number of readers of a post you write, or who are the people who have impact that read what you write? Couldn't we just give people more incentives to engage in conversations, rather than just broadcasting opinions all the time? Or reward people for reading and responding to views that they disagree with? And also, make it socially acceptable that we change our minds, or probably even reward that? What if we have a matrix that says how many people changed their minds, and that becomes part of our social media experience? If I could track how many people are changing their minds, I'd probably write more thoughtfully, trying to do that, rather than appealing to the people who already agree with me and ""liking"" because I just confirmed their biases.We also need to think about effective crowdsourcing mechanisms, to fact-check widely spread online information, and reward people who take part in that. In essence, we need to rethink today's social media ecosystem and redesign its experiences to reward thoughtfulness, civility and mutual understanding.As a believer in the Internet, I teamed up with a few friends, started a new project, trying to find answers and explore possibilities. Our first product is a new media platform for conversations. We're hosting conversations that promote mutual understanding and hopefully change minds. We don't claim to have the answers, but we started experimenting with different discussions about very divisive issues, such as race, gun control, the refugee debate, relationship between Islam and terrorism. These are conversations that matter.Today, at least one out of three people on the planet have access to the Internet. But part of this Internet is being held captive by the less noble aspects of our human behavior.Five years ago, I said, ""If you want to liberate society, all you need is the Internet.""Today, I believe if we want to liberate society, we first need to liberate the Internet.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_let_s_design_social_media_that_drives_real_change
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"For much of the past century, architecture was under the spell of a famous doctrine. ""Form follows function"" had become modernity's ambitious manifesto and detrimental straitjacket, as it liberated architecture from the decorative, but condemned it to utilitarian rigor and restrained purpose. Of course, architecture is about function, but I want to remember a rewriting of this phrase by Bernard Tschumi, and I want to propose a completely different quality. If form follows fiction, we could think of architecture and buildings as a space of stories — stories of the people that live there, of the people that work in these buildings. And we could start to imagine the experiences our buildings create.In this sense, I'm interested in fiction not as the implausible but as the real, as the reality of what architecture means for the people that live in it and with it. Our buildings are prototypes, ideas for how the space of living or how the space of working could be different, and what a space of culture or a space of media could look like today. Our buildings are real; they're being built. They're an explicit engagement in physical reality and conceptual possibility. I think of our architecture as organizational structures. At their core is indeed structural thinking, like a system: How can we arrange things in both a functional and experiential way? How can we create structures that generate a series of relationships and narratives? And how can fictive stories of the inhabitants and users of our buildings script the architecture, while the architecture scripts those stories at the same time?And here comes the second term into play, what I call ""narrative hybrids"" — structures of multiple simultaneous stories that unfold throughout the buildings we create. So we could think of architecture as complex systems of relationships, both in a programmatic and functional way and in an experiential and emotive or social way.This is the headquarters for China's national broadcaster, which I designed together with Rem Koolhaas at OMA. When I first arrived in Beijing in 2002, the city planners showed us this image: a forest of several hundred skyscrapers to emerge in the central business district, except at that time, only a handful of them existed. So we had to design in a context that we knew almost nothing about, except one thing: it would all be about verticality.Of course, the skyscraper is vertical — it's a profoundly hierarchical structure, the top always the best, the bottom the worst, and the taller you are, the better, so it seems. And we wanted to ask ourselves, could a building be about a completely different quality? Could it undo this hierarchy, and could it be about a system that is more about collaboration, rather than isolation? So we took this needle and bent it back into itself, into a loop of interconnected activities. Our idea was to bring all aspects of television-making into one single structure: news, program production, broadcasting, research and training, administration — all into a circuit of interconnected activities where people would meet in a process of exchange and collaboration.I still very much like this image. It reminds one of biology classes, if you remember the human body with all its organs and circulatory systems, like at school. And suddenly you think of architecture no longer as built substance, but as an organism, as a life form. And as you start to dissect this organism, you can identify a series of primary technical clusters — program production, broadcasting center and news. Those are tightly intertwined with social clusters: meeting rooms, canteens, chat areas — informal spaces for people to meet and exchange. So the organizational structure of this building was a hybrid between the technical and the social, the human and the performative. And of course, we used the loop of the building as a circulatory system, to thread everything together and to allow both visitors and staff to experience all these different functions in a great unity.With 473,000 square meters, it is one of the largest buildings ever built in the world. It has a population of over 10,000 people, and of course, this is a scale that exceeds the comprehension of many things and the scale of typical architecture. So we stopped work for a while and sat down and cut 10,000 little sticks and glued them onto a model, just simply to confront ourselves with what that quantity actually meant.But of course, it's not a number, it is the people, it is a community that inhabits the building, and in order to both comprehend this, but also script this architecture, we identified five characters, hypothetical characters, and we followed them throughout their day in a life in this building, thought of where they would meet, what they would experience. So it was a way to script and design the building, but of course, also to communicate its experiences. This was part of an exhibition with the Museum of Modern Art in both New York and Beijing.This is the main broadcast control room, a technical installation so large, it can broadcast over 200 channels simultaneously. And this is how the building stands in Beijing today. Its first broadcast live was the London Olympics 2012, after it had been completed from the outside for the Beijing Olympics. And you can see at the very tip of this 75-meter cantilever, those three little circles. And they're indeed part of a public loop that goes through the building. They're a piece of glass that you can stand on and watch the city pass by below you in slow motion.The building has become part of everyday life in Beijing. It is there. It has also become a very popular backdrop for wedding photography.(Laughter)But its most important moment is maybe sill this one. ""That's Beijing"" is similar to ""Time Out,"" a magazine that broadcasts what is happening in town during the week, and suddenly you see the building portrayed no longer as physical matter, but actually as an urban actor, as part of a series of personas that define the life of the city. So architecture suddenly assumes the quality of a player, of something that writes stories and performs stories. And I think that could be one of its primary meanings that we believe in.But of course, there's another story to this building. It is the story of the people that made it — 400 engineers and architects that I was guiding over almost a decade of collaborative work that we spent together in scripting this building, in imagining its reality and ultimately getting it built in China.This is a residential development in Singapore, large scale. If we look at Singapore like most of Asia and more and more of the world, of course, it is dominated by the tower, a typology that indeed creates more isolation than connectedness, and I wanted to ask, how could we think about living, not only in terms of the privacy and individuality of ourselves and our apartment, but in an idea of a collective? How could we think about creating a communal environment in which sharing things was as great as having your own?The typical answer to the question — we had to design 1,040 apartments — would have looked like this: 24-story height limit given by the planning authorities, 12 towers with nothing but residual in between — a very tight system that, although the tower isolates you, it doesn't even give you privacy, because you're so close to the next one, that it is very questionable what the qualities of this would be.So I proposed to topple the towers, throw the vertical into the horizontal and stack them up, and what looks a bit random from the side, if you look from the viewpoint of the helicopter, you can see its organizational structure is actually a hexagonal grid, in which these horizontal building blocks are stacked up to create huge outdoor courtyards — central spaces for the community, programmed with a variety of amenities and functions. And you see that these courtyards are not hermetically sealed spaces. They're open, permeable; they're interconnected. We called the project ""The Interlace,"" thinking that we interlace and interconnect the human beings and the spaces alike. And the detailed quality of everything we designed was about animating the space and giving the space to the inhabitants. And, in fact, it was a system where we would layer primarily communal spaces, stacked to more and more individual and private spaces. So we would open up a spectrum between the collective and the individual.A little piece of math: if we count all the green that we left on the ground, minus the footprint of the buildings, and we would add back the green of all the terraces, we have 112 percent green space, so more nature than not having built a building. And of course this little piece of math shows you that we are multiplying the space available to those who live there. This is, in fact, the 13th floor of one of these terraces. So you see new datum planes, new grounds planes for social activity.We paid a lot of attention to sustainability. In the tropics, the sun is the most important thing to pay attention to, and, in fact, it is seeking protection from the sun. We first proved that all apartments would have sufficient daylight through the year. We then went on to optimize the glazing of the facades to minimize the energy consumption of the building. But most importantly, we could prove that through the geometry of the building design, the building itself would provide sufficient shading to the courtyards so that those would be usable throughout the entire year. We further placed water bodies along the prevailing wind corridors, so that evaporative cooling would create microclimates that, again, would enhance the quality of those spaces available for the inhabitants. And it was the idea of creating this variety of choices, of freedom to think where you would want to be, where you would want to escape, maybe, within the own complexity of the complex in which you live.But coming from Asia to Europe: a building for a German media company based in Berlin, transitioning from the traditional print media to the digital media. And its CEO asked a few very pertinent questions: Why would anyone today still want to go to the office, because you can actually work anywhere? And how could a digital identity of a company be embodied in a building? We created not only an object, but at the center of this object we created a giant space, and this space was about the experience of a collective, the experience of collaboration and of togetherness. Communication, interaction as the center of a space that in itself would float, like what we call the collaborative cloud, in the middle of the building, surrounded by an envelope of standard modular offices. So with only a few steps from your quiet work desk, you could participate in the giant collective experience of the central space.Finally, we come to London, a project commissioned by the London Legacy Development Corporation of the Mayor of London. We were asked to undertake a study and investigate the potential of a site out in Stratford in the Olympic Park. In the 19th century, Prince Albert had created Albertopolis. And Boris Johnson thought of creating Olympicopolis.The idea was to bring together some of Britain's greatest institutions, some international ones, and to create a new system of synergies. Prince Albert, as yet, created Albertopolis in the 19th century, thought of showcasing all achievements of mankind, bringing arts and science closer together. And he built Exhibition Road, a linear sequence of those institutions.But of course, today's society has moved on from there. We no longer live in a world in which everything is as clearly delineated or separated from each other. We live in a world in which boundaries start to blur between the different domains, and in which collaboration and interaction becomes far more important than keeping separations. So we wanted to think of a giant culture machine, a building that would orchestrate and animate the various domains, but allow them to interact and collaborate. At the base of it is a very simple module, a ring module. It can function as a double-loaded corridor, has daylight, has ventilation. It can be glazed over and turned into a giant exhibitional performance space. These modules were stacked together with the idea that almost any function could, over time, occupy any of these modules. So institutions could shrink or contract, as, of course, the future of culture is, in a way, the most uncertain of all. This is how the building sits, adjacent to the Aquatics Centre, opposite the Olympic Stadium. And you can see how its cantilevering volumes project out and engage the public space and how its courtyards animate the public inside.The idea was to create a complex system in which institutional entities could maintain their own identity, in which they would not be subsumed in a singular volume. Here's a scale comparison to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It both shows the enormous scale and potential of the project, but also the difference: here, it is a multiplicity of a heterogeneous structure, in which different entities can interact without losing their own identity. And it was this thought: to create an organizational structure that would allow for multiple narratives to be scripted — for those in the educational parts that create and think culture; for those that present the visual arts, the dance; and for the public to be admitted into all of this with a series of possible trajectories, to script their own reading of these narratives and their own experience.And I want to end on a project that is very small, in a way, very different: a floating cinema in the ocean of Thailand. Friends of mine had founded a film festival, and I thought, if we think of the stories and narratives of movies, we should also think of the narratives of the people that watch them. So I designed a small modular floating platform, based on the techniques of local fishermen, how they built their lobster and fish farms. We collaborated with the local community and built, out of recycled materials of their own, this fantastical floating platform that gently moved in the ocean as we watched films from the British film archive, [1903] ""Alice in Wonderland,"" for example. The most primordial experiences of the audience merged with the stories of the movies.So I believe that architecture exceeds the domain of physical matter, of the built environment, but is really about how we want to live our lives, how we script our own stories and those of others.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ole_scheeren_why_great_architecture_should_tell_a_story
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"I'm an underwater explorer, more specifically a cave diver.I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, but growing up in Canada as a young girl, that wasn't really available to me. But as it turns out, we know a lot more about space than we do about the underground waterways coursing through our planet, the very lifeblood of Mother Earth. So I decided to do something that was even more remarkable. Instead of exploring outer space, I wanted to explore the wonders of inner space.Now, a lot of people will tell you that cave diving is perhaps one of the most dangerous endeavors. I mean, imagine yourself here in this room, if you were suddenly plunged into blackness, with your only job to find the exit, sometimes swimming through these large spaces, and at other times crawling beneath the seats, following a thin guideline, just waiting for the life support to provide your very next breath. Well, that's my workplace.But what I want to teach you today is that our world is not one big solid rock. It's a whole lot more like a sponge. I can swim through a lot of the pores in our earth's sponge, but where I can't, other life-forms and other materials can make that journey without me. And my voice is the one that's going to teach you about the inside of Mother Earth.There was no guidebook available to me when I decided to be the first person to cave dive inside Antarctic icebergs. In 2000, this was the largest moving object on the planet. It calved off the Ross Ice Shelf, and we went down there to explore ice edge ecology and search for life-forms beneath the ice.We use a technology called rebreathers. It's an awful lot like the same technology that is used for space walks. This technology enables us to go deeper than we could've imagined even 10 years ago. We use exotic gases, and we can make missions even up to 20 hours long underwater.I work with biologists. It turns out that caves are repositories of amazing life-forms, species that we never knew existed before. Many of these life-forms live in unusual ways. They have no pigment and no eyes in many cases, and these animals are also extremely long-lived. In fact, animals swimming in these caves today are identical in the fossil record that predates the extinction of the dinosaurs. So imagine that: these are like little swimming dinosaurs. What can they teach us about evolution and survival? When we look at an animal like this remipede swimming in the jar, he has giant fangs with venom. He can actually attack something 40 times his size and kill it. If he were the size of a cat, he'd be the most dangerous thing on our planet. And these animals live in remarkably beautiful places, and in some cases, caves like this, that are very young, yet the animals are ancient. How did they get there?I also work with physicists, and they're interested oftentimes in global climate change. They can take rocks within the caves, and they can slice them and look at the layers within with rocks, much like the rings of a tree, and they can count back in history and learn about the climate on our planet at very different times. The red that you see in this photograph is actually dust from the Sahara Desert. So it's been picked up by wind, blown across the Atlantic Ocean. It's rained down in this case on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas. It soaks in through the ground and deposits itself in the rocks within these caves. And when we look back in the layers of these rocks, we can find times when the climate was very, very dry on earth, and we can go back many hundreds of thousands of years.Paleoclimatologists are also interested in where the sea level stands were at other times on earth. Here in Bermuda, my team and I embarked on the deepest manned dives ever conducted in the region, and we were looking for places where the sea level used to lap up against the shoreline, many hundreds of feet below current levels.I also get to work with paleontologists and archaeologists. In places like Mexico, in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba, we're looking at cultural remains and also human remains in caves, and they tell us a lot about some of the earliest inhabitants of these regions.But my very favorite project of all was over 15 years ago, when I was a part of the team that made the very first accurate, three-dimensional map of a subterranean surface. This device that I'm driving through the cave was actually creating a three-dimensional model as we drove it. We also used ultra low frequency radio to broadcast back to the surface our exact position within the cave. So I swam under houses and businesses and bowling alleys and golf courses, and even under a Sonny's BBQ Restaurant,Pretty remarkable, and what that taught me was that everything we do on the surface of our earth will be returned to us to drink. Our water planet is not just rivers, lakes and oceans, but it's this vast network of groundwater that knits us all together. It's a shared resource from which we all drink. And when we can understand our human connections with our groundwater and all of our water resources on this planet, then we'll be working on the problem that's probably the most important issue of this century.So I never got to be that astronaut that I always wanted to be, but this mapping device, designed by Dr. Bill Stone, will be. It's actually morphed. It's now a self-swimming autonomous robot, artificially intelligent, and its ultimate goal is to go to Jupiter's moon Europa and explore oceans beneath the frozen surface of that body.And that's pretty amazing.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_heinerth_the_mysterious_world_of_underwater_caves
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"I believe that the secret to producing extremely drought-tolerant crops, which should go some way to providing food security in the world, lies in resurrection plants, pictured here, in an extremely droughted state. You might think that these plants look dead, but they're not. Give them water, and they will resurrect, green up, start growing, in 12 to 48 hours.Now, why would I suggest that producing drought-tolerant crops will go towards providing food security? Well, the current world population is around 7 billion. And it's estimated that by 2050, we'll be between 9 and 10 billion people, with the bulk of this growth happening in Africa.The food and agricultural organizations of the world have suggested that we need a 70 percent increase in current agricultural practice to meet that demand. Given that plants are at the base of the food chain, most of that's going to have to come from plants.That percentage of 70 percent does not take into consideration the potential effects of climate change.This is taken from a study by Dai published in 2011, where he took into consideration all the potential effects of climate change and expressed them — amongst other things — increased aridity due to lack of rain or infrequent rain. The areas in red shown here, are areas that until recently have been very successfully used for agriculture, but cannot anymore because of lack of rainfall. This is the situation that's predicted to happen in 2050. Much of Africa, in fact, much of the world, is going to be in trouble. We're going to have to think of some very smart ways of producing food. And preferably among them, some drought-tolerant crops.The other thing to remember about Africa is that most of their agriculture is rainfed.Now, making drought-tolerant crops is not the easiest thing in the world. And the reason for this is water. Water is essential to life on this planet. All living, actively metabolizing organisms, from microbes to you and I, are comprised predominately of water. All life reactions happen in water. And loss of a small amount of water results in death. You and I are 65 percent water — we lose one percent of that, we die. But we can make behavioral changes to avoid that. Plants can't. They're stuck in the ground. And so in the first instance they have a little bit more water than us, about 95 percent water, and they can lose a little bit more than us, like 10 to about 70 percent, depending on the species, but for short periods only.Most of them will either try to resist or avoid water loss. So extreme examples of resistors can be found in succulents. They tend to be small, very attractive, but they hold onto their water at such great cost that they grow extremely slowly. Examples of avoidance of water loss are found in trees and shrubs. They send down very deep roots, mine subterranean water supplies and just keep flushing it through them at all times, keeping themselves hydrated.The one on the right is called a baobab. It's also called the upside-down tree, simply because the proportion of roots to shoots is so great that it looks like the tree has been planted upside down. And of course the roots are required for hydration of that plant.And probably the most common strategy of avoidance is found in annuals. Annuals make up the bulk of our plant food supplies. Up the west coast of my country, for much of the year you don't see much vegetation growth. But come the spring rains, you get this: flowering of the desert.The strategy in annuals, is to grow only in the rainy season. At the end of that season they produce a seed, which is dry, eight to 10 percent water, but very much alive. And anything that is that dry and still alive, we call desiccation-tolerant.In the desiccated state, what seeds can do is lie in extremes of environment for prolonged periods of time. The next time the rainy season comes, they germinate and grow, and the whole cycle just starts again.It's widely believed that the evolution of desiccation-tolerant seeds allowed the colonization and the radiation of flowering plants, or angiosperms, onto land.But back to annuals as our major form of food supplies. Wheat, rice and maize form 95 percent of our plant food supplies. And it's been a great strategy because in a short space of time you can produce a lot of seed. Seeds are energy-rich so there's a lot of food calories, you can store it in times of plenty for times of famine, but there's a downside. The vegetative tissues, the roots and leaves of annuals, do not have much by way of inherent resistance, avoidance or tolerance characteristics. They just don't need them. They grow in the rainy season and they've got a seed to help them survive the rest of the year.And so despite concerted efforts in agriculture to make crops with improved properties of resistance, avoidance and tolerance — particularly resistance and avoidance because we've had good models to understand how those work — we still get images like this. Maize crop in Africa, two weeks without rain and it's dead.There is a solution: resurrection plants. These plants can lose 95 percent of their cellular water, remain in a dry, dead-like state for months to years, and give them water, they green up and start growing again. Like seeds, these are desiccation-tolerant. Like seeds, these can withstand extremes of environmental conditions. And this is a really rare phenomenon. There are only 135 flowering plant species that can do this.I'm going to show you a video of the resurrection process of these three species in that order. And at the bottom, there's a time axis so you can see how quickly it happens.(Applause)Pretty amazing, huh?So I've spent the last 21 years trying to understand how they do this. How do these plants dry without dying? And I work on a variety of different resurrection plants, shown here in the hydrated and dry states, for a number of reasons.One of them is that each of these plants serves as a model for a crop that I'd like to make drought-tolerant.So on the extreme top left, for example, is a grass, it's called Eragrostis nindensis, it's got a close relative called Eragrostis tef — a lot of you might know it as ""teff"" — it's a staple food in Ethiopia, it's gluten-free, and it's something we would like to make drought-tolerant.The other reason for looking at a number of plants, is that, at least initially, I wanted to find out: do they do the same thing? Do they all use the same mechanisms to be able to lose all that water and not die?So I undertook what we call a systems biology approach in order to get a comprehensive understanding of desiccation tolerance, in which we look at everything from the molecular to the whole plant, ecophysiological level.For example we look at things like changes in the plant anatomy as they dried out and their ultrastructure. We look at the transcriptome, which is just a term for a technology in which we look at the genes that are switched on or off, in response to drying. Most genes will code for proteins, so we look at the proteome. What are the proteins made in response to drying? Some proteins would code for enzymes which make metabolites, so we look at the metabolome.Now, this is important because plants are stuck in the ground. They use what I call a highly tuned chemical arsenal to protect themselves from all the stresses of their environment. So it's important that we look at the chemical changes involved in drying.And at the last study that we do at the molecular level, we look at the lipidome — the lipid changes in response to drying. And that's also important because all biological membranes are made of lipids. They're held as membranes because they're in water. Take away the water, those membranes fall apart. Lipids also act as signals to turn on genes.Then we use physiological and biochemical studies to try and understand the function of the putative protectants that we've actually discovered in our other studies. And then use all of that to try and understand how the plant copes with its natural environment.I've always had the philosophy that I needed a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance in order to make a meaningful suggestion for a biotic application.I'm sure some of you are thinking, ""By biotic application, does she mean she's going to make genetically modified crops?"" And the answer to that question is: depends on your definition of genetic modification.All of the crops that we eat today, wheat, rice and maize, are highly genetically modified from their ancestors, but we don't consider them GM because they're being produced by conventional breeding. If you mean, am I going to put resurrection plant genes into crops, your answer is yes.In the essence of time, we have tried that approach. More appropriately, some of my collaborators at UCT, Jennifer Thomson, Suhail Rafudeen, have spearheaded that approach and I'm going to show you some data soon.But we're about to embark upon an extremely ambitious approach, in which we aim to turn on whole suites of genes that are already present in every crop. They're just never turned on under extreme drought conditions. I leave it up to you to decide whether those should be called GM or not.I'm going to now just give you some of the data from that first approach. And in order to do that I have to explain a little bit about how genes work.So you probably all know that genes are made of double-stranded DNA. It's wound very tightly into chromosomes that are present in every cell of your body or in a plant's body. If you unwind that DNA, you get genes. And each gene has a promoter, which is just an on-off switch, the gene coding region, and then a terminator, which indicates that this is the end of this gene, the next gene will start.Now, promoters are not simple on-off switches. They normally require a lot of fine-tuning, lots of things to be present and correct before that gene is switched on. So what's typically done in biotech studies is that we use an inducible promoter, we know how to switch it on. We couple that to genes of interest and put that into a plant and see how the plant responds.In the study that I'm going to talk to you about, my collaborators used a drought-induced promoter, which we discovered in a resurrection plant. The nice thing about this promoter is that we do nothing. The plant itself senses drought. And we've used it to drive antioxidant genes from resurrection plants. Why antioxidant genes? Well, all stresses, particularly drought stress, results in the formation of free radicals, or reactive oxygen species, which are highly damaging and can cause crop death. What antioxidants do is stop that damage.So here's some data from a maize strain that's very popularly used in Africa. To the left of the arrow are plants without the genes, to the right — plants with the antioxidant genes. After three weeks without watering, the ones with the genes do a hell of a lot better.Now to the final approach. My research has shown that there's considerable similarity in the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance in seeds and resurrection plants. So I ask the question, are they using the same genes? Or slightly differently phrased, are resurrection plants using genes evolved in seed desiccation tolerance in their roots and leaves? Have they retasked these seed genes in roots and leaves of resurrection plants?And I answer that question, as a consequence of a lot of research from my group and recent collaborations from a group of Henk Hilhorst in the Netherlands, Mel Oliver in the United States and Julia Buitink in France. The answer is yes, that there is a core set of genes that are involved in both.And I'm going to illustrate this very crudely for maize, where the chromosomes below the off switch represent all the genes that are required for desiccation tolerance. So as maize seeds dried out at the end of their period of development, they switch these genes on. Resurrection plants switch on the same genes when they dry out. All modern crops, therefore, have these genes in their roots and leaves, they just never switch them on. They only switch them on in seed tissues.So what we're trying to do right now is to understand the environmental and cellular signals that switch on these genes in resurrection plants, to mimic the process in crops.And just a final thought. What we're trying to do very rapidly is to repeat what nature did in the evolution of resurrection plants some 10 to 40 million years ago.My plants and I thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_farrant_how_we_can_make_crops_survive_without_water
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"I have a question. Can a computer write poetry? This is a provocative question. You think about it for a minute, and you suddenly have a bunch of other questions like: What is a computer? What is poetry? What is creativity? But these are questions that people spend their entire lifetime trying to answer, not in a single TED Talk. So we're going to have to try a different approach.So up here, we have two poems. One of them is written by a human, and the other one's written by a computer. I'm going to ask you to tell me which one's which. Have a go:Poem 1: Little Fly / Thy summer's play, / My thoughtless hand / Has brush'd away. Am I not / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?Poem 2: We can feel / Activist through your life's / morning / Pauses to see, pope I hate the / Non all the night to start a / great otherwise (...)Alright, time's up. Hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. OK, most of you. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Very brave of you, because the first one was written by the human poet William Blake. The second one was written by an algorithm that took all the language from my Facebook feed on one day and then regenerated it algorithmically, according to methods that I'll describe a little bit later on. So let's try another test. Again, you haven't got ages to read this, so just trust your gut.Poem 1: A lion roars and a dog barks. It is interesting / and fascinating that a bird will fly and not / roar or bark. Enthralling stories about animals are in my dreams and I will sing them all if I / am not exhausted or weary.Poem 2: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You are really beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All / the stuff they've always talked about (...)Alright, time's up. So if you think the first poem was written by a human, put your hand up. OK. And if you think the second poem was written by a human, put your hand up. We have, more or less, a 50/50 split here. It was much harder.The answer is, the first poem was generated by an algorithm called Racter, that was created back in the 1970s, and the second poem was written by a guy called Frank O'Hara, who happens to be one of my favorite human poets.(Laughter)So what we've just done now is a Turing test for poetry. The Turing test was first proposed by this guy, Alan Turing, in 1950, in order to answer the question, can computers think? Alan Turing believed that if a computer was able to have a to have a text-based conversation with a human, with such proficiency such that the human couldn't tell whether they are talking to a computer or a human, then the computer can be said to have intelligence.So in 2013, my friend Benjamin Laird and I, we created a Turing test for poetry online. It's called bot or not, and you can go and play it for yourselves. But basically, it's the game we just played. You're presented with a poem, you don't know whether it was written by a human or a computer and you have to guess. So thousands and thousands of people have taken this test online, so we have results.And what are the results? Well, Turing said that if a computer could fool a human 30 percent of the time that it was a human, then it passes the Turing test for intelligence. We have poems on the bot or not database that have fooled 65 percent of human readers into thinking it was written by a human. So, I think we have an answer to our question. According to the logic of the Turing test, can a computer write poetry? Well, yes, absolutely it can. But if you're feeling a little bit uncomfortable with this answer, that's OK. If you're having a bunch of gut reactions to it, that's also OK because this isn't the end of the story.Let's play our third and final test. Again, you're going to have to read and tell me which you think is human.Poem 1: Red flags the reason for pretty flags. / And ribbons. Ribbons of flags / And wearing material / Reasons for wearing material. (...)Poem 2: A wounded deer leaps highest, / I've heard the daffodil I've heard the flag to-day / I've heard the hunter tell; / 'Tis but the ecstasy of death, / And then the brake is almost done (...)OK, time is up. So hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Whoa, that's a lot more people. So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. And Poem 2 was generated by an algorithm called RKCP. Now before we go on, let me describe very quickly and simply, how RKCP works. So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of engineering at Google and a firm believer in artificial intelligence. So, you give RKCP a source text, it analyzes the source text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text.So in the poem we just saw before, Poem 2, the one that you all thought was human, it was fed a bunch of poems by a poet called Emily Dickinson it looked at the way she used language, learned the model, and then it regenerated a model according to that same structure. But the important thing to know about RKCP is that it doesn't know the meaning of the words it's using. The language is just raw material, it could be Chinese, it could be in Swedish, it could be the collected language from your Facebook feed for one day. It's just raw material. And nevertheless, it's able to create a poem that seems more human than Gertrude Stein's poem, and Gertrude Stein is a human.So what we've done here is, more or less, a reverse Turing test. So Gertrude Stein, who's a human, is able to write a poem that fools a majority of human judges into thinking that it was written by a computer. Therefore, according to the logic of the reverse Turing test, Gertrude Stein is a computer.(Laughter)Feeling confused? I think that's fair enough.So far we've had humans that write like humans, we have computers that write like computers, we have computers that write like humans, but we also have, perhaps most confusingly, humans that write like computers.So what do we take from all of this? Do we take that William Blake is somehow more of a human than Gertrude Stein? Or that Gertrude Stein is more of a computer than William Blake?(Laughter)These are questions I've been asking myself for around two years now, and I don't have any answers. But what I do have are a bunch of insights about our relationship with technology.So my first insight is that, for some reason, we associate poetry with being human. So that when we ask, ""Can a computer write poetry?"" we're also asking, ""What does it mean to be human and how do we put boundaries around this category? How do we say who or what can be part of this category?"" This is an essentially philosophical question, I believe, and it can't be answered with a yes or no test, like the Turing test. I also believe that Alan Turing understood this, and that when he devised his test back in 1950, he was doing it as a philosophical provocation.So my second insight is that, when we take the Turing test for poetry, we're not really testing the capacity of the computers because poetry-generating algorithms, they're pretty simple and have existed, more or less, since the 1950s. What we are doing with the Turing test for poetry, rather, is collecting opinions about what constitutes humanness. So, what I've figured out, we've seen this when earlier today, we say that William Blake is more of a human than Gertrude Stein. Of course, this doesn't mean that William Blake was actually more human or that Gertrude Stein was more of a computer. It simply means that the category of the human is unstable. This has led me to understand that the human is not a cold, hard fact. Rather, it is something that's constructed with our opinions and something that changes over time.So my final insight is that the computer, more or less, works like a mirror that reflects any idea of a human that we show it. We show it Emily Dickinson, it gives Emily Dickinson back to us. We show it William Blake, that's what it reflects back to us. We show it Gertrude Stein, what we get back is Gertrude Stein. More than any other bit of technology, the computer is a mirror that reflects any idea of the human we teach it.So I'm sure a lot of you have been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence recently. And much of the conversation is, can we build it? Can we build an intelligent computer? Can we build a creative computer? What we seem to be asking over and over is can we build a human-like computer?But what we've seen just now is that the human is not a scientific fact, that it's an ever-shifting, concatenating idea and one that changes over time. So that when we begin to grapple with the ideas of artificial intelligence in the future, we shouldn't only be asking ourselves, ""Can we build it?"" But we should also be asking ourselves, ""What idea of the human do we want to have reflected back to us?"" This is an essentially philosophical idea, and it's one that can't be answered with software alone, but I think requires a moment of species-wide, existential reflection.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/oscar_schwartz_can_a_computer_write_poetry
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"Welcome to Bayeku, a riverine community in Ikorodu, Lagos — a vivid representation of several riverine communities across Nigeria, communities whose waterways have been infested by an invasive aquatic weed; communities where economic livelihoods have been hampered: fishing, marine transportation and trading; communities where fish yields have diminished; communities where schoolchildren are unable to go to school for days, sometimes weeks, on end. Who would have thought that this plant with round leaves, inflated stems, and showy, lavender flowers would cause such havoc in these communities.The plant is known as water hyacinth and its botanical name, Eichhornia crassipes. Interestingly, in Nigeria, the plant is also known by other names, names associated with historical events, as well as myths. In some places, the plant is called Babangida. When you hear Babangida, you remember the military and military coups. And you think: fear, restraint. In parts of Nigeria in the Niger Delta, the plant is also known as Abiola. When you hear Abiola, you remember annulled elections and you think: dashed hopes. In the southwestern part of Nigeria, the plant is known as Gbe'borun. Gbe'borun is a Yoruba phrase which translates to ""gossip,"" or ""talebearer."" When you think of gossip, you think: rapid reproduction, destruction. And in the Igala-speaking part of Nigeria, the plant is known as A Kp'iye Kp'oma, And when you hear that, you think of death. It literally translates to ""death to mother and child.""I personally had my encounter with this plant in the year 2009. It was shortly after I had relocated from the US to Nigeria. I'd quit my job in corporate America and decided to take this big leap of faith, a leap of faith that came out of a deep sense of conviction that there was a lot of work to do in Nigeria in the area of sustainable development. And so here I was in the year 2009, actually, at the end of 2009, in Lagos on the Third Mainland Bridge.And I looked to my left and saw this very arresting image. It was an image of fishing boats that had been hemmed in by dense mats of water hyacinth. And I was really pained by what I saw because I thought to myself, ""These poor fisherfolk, how are they going to go about their daily activities with these restrictions."" And then I thought, ""There's got to be a better way."" A win-win solution whereby the environment is taken care of by the weeds being cleared out of the way and then this being turned into an economic benefit for the communities whose lives are impacted the most by the infestation of the weed. That, I would say, was my spark moment.And so I did further research to find out more about the beneficial uses of this weed. Out of the several, one struck me the most. It was the use of the plant for handicrafts. And I thought, ""What a great idea."" Personally, I love handicrafts, especially handicrafts that are woven around a story. And so I thought, ""This could be easily deployed within the communities without the requirement of technical skills."" And I thought to myself, ""Three simple steps to a mega solution.""First step: Get out into the waterways and harvest the water hyacinth. That way, you create access.Secondly, you dry the water hyacinth stems.And thirdly, you weave the water hyacinth into products.The third step was a challenge. See, I'm a computer scientist by background and not someone in the creative arts. And so I began my quest to find out how I can learn how to weave.And this quest took me to a community in Ibadan, where I lived, called Sabo. Sabo translates to ""strangers' quarters."" And the community is predominantly made up of people from the northern part of the country. So I literally took my dried weeds in hand, there were several more of them, and went knocking from door to door to find out who could teach me how to weave these water hyacinth stems into ropes. And I was directed to the shed of Malam Yahaya. The problem, though, is that Malam Yahaya doesn't speak English and neither did I speak Hausa. But some little kids came to the rescue and helped translate. And that began my journey of learning how to weave and transform these dried water hyacinth stems into long ropes.With my long ropes in hand, I was now equipped to make products. And that was the beginning of partnerships. Working with rattan basket makers to come up with products. So with this in hand, I felt confident that I would be able to take this knowledge back into the riverine communities and help them to transform their adversity into prosperity. So taking these weeds and actually weaving them into products that can be sold. So we have pens, we have tableware, we have purses, we have tissue boxes. Thereby, helping the communities to see water hyacinth in a different light. Seeing water hyacinth as being valuable, being aesthetic, being durable, tough, resilient. Changing names, changing livelihoods.From Gbe'borun, gossip, to Olusotan, storyteller. And from A Kp'iye Kp'oma, which is ""killer of mother and child,"" to Ya du j'ewn w'Iye kp'Oma, ""provider of food for mother and child.""And I'd like to end with a quote by Michael Margolis. He said, ""If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories. And if you want to change a culture, change the stories.""And so, from Makoko community, to Abobiri, to Ewoi, to Kolo, to Owahwa, Esaba, we have changed the story.Thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/achenyo_idachaba_how_i_turned_a_deadly_plant_into_a_thriving_business
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"Imagine you're in Rome, and you've made your way to the Vatican Museums. And you've been shuffling down long corridors, past statues, frescoes, lots and lots of stuff. You're heading towards the Sistine Chapel. At last — a long corridor, a stair and a door. You're at the threshold of the Sistine Chapel.So what are you expecting? Soaring domes? Choirs of angels? We don't really have any of that there. Instead, you may ask yourself, what do we have?Well, curtains up on the Sistine Chapel. And I mean literally, you're surrounded by painted curtains, the original decoration of this chapel. Churches used tapestries not just to keep out cold during long masses, but as a way to represent the great theater of life. The human drama in which each one of us plays a part is a great story, a story that encompasses the whole world and that came to unfold in the three stages of the painting in the Sistine Chapel.Now, this building started out as a space for a small group of wealthy, educated Christian priests. They prayed there. They elected their pope there. Five hundred years ago, it was the ultimate ecclesiastical man cave. So, you may ask, how can it be that today it attracts and delights five million people a year, from all different backgrounds? Because in that compressed space, there was a creative explosion, ignited by the electric excitement of new geopolitical frontiers, which set on fire the ancient missionary tradition of the Church and produced one of the greatest works of art in history.Now, this development took place as a great evolution, moving from the beginning of a few elite, and eventually able to speak to audiences of people that come from all over the world. This evolution took place in three stages, each one linked to a historical circumstance. The first one was rather limited in scope. It reflected the rather parochial perspective. The second one took place after worldviews were dramatically altered after Columbus's historical voyage; and the third, when the Age of Discovery was well under way and the Church rose to the challenge of going global.The original decoration of this church reflected a smaller world. There were busy scenes that told the stories of the lives of Jesus and Moses, reflecting the development of the Jewish and Christian people. The man who commissioned this, Pope Sixtus IV, assembled a dream team of Florentine art, including men like Sandro Botticelli and the man who would become Michelangelo's future painting teacher, Ghirlandaio. These men, they blanketed the walls with a frieze of pure color, and in these stories you'll notice familiar landscapes, the artists using Roman monuments or a Tuscan landscape to render a faraway story, something much more familiar. With the addition of images of the Pope's friends and family, this was a perfect decoration for a small court limited to the European continent. But in 1492, the New World was discovered, horizons were expanding, and this little 133 by 46-foot microcosm had to expand as well. And it did, thanks to a creative genius, a visionary and an awesome story.Now, the creative genius was Michelangelo Buonarroti, 33 years old when he was tapped to decorate 12,000 square feet of ceiling, and the deck was stacked against him — he had trained in painting but had left to pursue sculpture. There were angry patrons in Florence because he had left a stack of incomplete commissions, lured to Rome by the prospect of a great sculptural project, and that project had fallen through. And he had been left with a commission to paint 12 apostles against a decorative background in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which would look like every other ceiling in Italy.But genius rose to the challenge. In an age when a man dared to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, Michelangelo dared to chart new artistic waters. He, too, would tell a story — no Apostles — but a story of great beginnings, the story of Genesis.Not really an easy sell, stories on a ceiling. How would you be able to read a busy scene from 62 feet below? The painting technique that had been handed on for 200 years in Florentine studios was not equipped for this kind of a narrative.But Michelangelo wasn't really a painter, and so he played to his strengths. Instead of being accustomed to filling space with busyness, he took a hammer and chisel and hacked away at a piece of marble to reveal the figure within. Michelangelo was an essentialist; he would tell his story in massive, dynamic bodies.This plan was embraced by the larger-than-life Pope Julius II, a man who was unafraid of Michelangelo's brazen genius. He was nephew to Pope Sixtus IV, and he had been steeped in art for 30 years and he knew its power. And history has handed down the moniker of the Warrior Pope, but this man's legacy to the Vatican — it wasn't fortresses and artillery, it was art. He left us the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel. He left St. Peter's Basilica as well as an extraordinary collection of Greco-Roman sculptures — decidedly un-Christian works that would become the seedbed of the world's first modern museum, the Vatican Museums. Julius was a man who envisioned a Vatican that would be eternally relevant through grandeur and through beauty, and he was right. The encounter between these two giants, Michelangelo and Julius II, that's what gave us the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was so committed to this project, that he succeeded in getting the job done in three and a half years, using a skeleton crew and spending most of the time, hours on end, reaching up above his head to paint the stories on the ceiling.So let's look at this ceiling and see storytelling gone global. No more familiar artistic references to the world around you. There's just space and structure and energy; a monumental painted framework which opens onto nine panels, more driven by sculptural form than painterly color. And we stand in the far end by the entrance, far from the altar and from the gated enclosure intended for the clergy and we peer into the distance, looking for a beginning. And whether in scientific inquiry or in biblical tradition, we think in terms of a primal spark. Michelangelo gave us an initial energy when he gave us the separation of light and dark, a churning figure blurry in the distance, compressed into a tight space. The next figure looms larger, and you see a figure hurtling from one side to the next. He leaves in his wake the sun, the moon, vegetation. Michelangelo didn't focus on the stuff that was being created, unlike all the other artists. He focused on the act of creation.And then the movement stops, like a caesura in poetry and the creator hovers. So what's he doing? Is he creating land? Is he creating sea? Or is he looking back over his handiwork, the universe and his treasures, just like Michelangelo must have, looking back over his work in the ceiling and proclaiming, ""It is good.""So now the scene is set, and you get to the culmination of creation, which is man. Adam leaps to the eye, a light figure against a dark background. But looking closer, that leg is pretty languid on the ground, the arm is heavy on the knee. Adam lacks that interior spark that will impel him to greatness. That spark is about to be conferred by the creator in that finger, which is one millimeter from the hand of Adam. It puts us at the edge of our seats, because we're one moment from that contact, through which that man will discover his purpose, leap up and take his place at the pinnacle of creation.And then Michelangelo threw a curveball. Who is in that other arm? Eve, first woman. No, she's not an afterthought. She's part of the plan. She's always been in his mind. Look at her, so intimate with God that her hand curls around his arm. And for me, an American art historian from the 21st century, this was the moment that the painting spoke to me. Because I realized that this representation of the human drama was always about men and women — so much so, that the dead center, the heart of the ceiling, is the creation of woman, not Adam. And the fact is, that when you see them together in the Garden of Eden, they fall together and together their proud posture turns into folded shame.You are at critical juncture now in the ceiling. You are exactly at the point where you and I can go no further into the church. The gated enclosure keeps us out of the inner sanctum, and we are cast out much like Adam and Eve. The remaining scenes in the ceiling, they mirror the crowded chaos of the world around us. You have Noah and his Ark and the flood. You have Noah. He's making a sacrifice and a covenant with God. Maybe he's the savior. Oh, but no, Noah is the one who grew grapes, invented wine, got drunk and passed out naked in his barn. It is a curious way to design the ceiling, now starting out with God creating life, ending up with some guy blind drunk in a barn. And so, compared with Adam, you might think Michelangelo is making fun of us.But he's about to dispel the gloom by using those bright colors right underneath Noah: emerald, topaz, scarlet on the prophet Zechariah. Zechariah foresees a light coming from the east, and we are turned at this juncture to a new destination, with sibyls and prophets who will lead us on a parade. You have the heroes and heroines who make safe the way, and we follow the mothers and fathers. They are the motors of this great human engine, driving it forward.And now we're at the keystone of the ceiling, the culmination of the whole thing, with a figure that looks like he's about to fall out of his space into our space, encroaching our space.This is the most important juncture. Past meets present. This figure, Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of the whale, for the Christians, is the symbol of the renewal of humanity through Jesus' sacrifice, but for the multitudes of visitors to that museum from all faiths who visit there every day, he is the moment the distant past encounters and meets immediate reality.All of this brings us to the yawning archway of the altar wall, where we see Michelangelo's Last Judgment, painted in 1534 after the world had changed again. The Reformation had splintered the Church, the Ottoman Empire had made Islam a household word and Magellan had found a route into the Pacific Ocean. How is a 59-year-old artist who has never been any further than Venice going to speak to this new world? Michelangelo chose to paint destiny, that universal desire, common to all of us, to leave a legacy of excellence. Told in terms of the Christian vision of the Last Judgment, the end of the world, Michelangelo gave you a series of figures who are wearing these strikingly beautiful bodies. They have no more covers, no more portraits except for a couple. It's a composition only out of bodies, 391, no two alike, unique like each and every one of us. They start in the lower corner, breaking away from the ground, struggling and trying to rise. Those who have risen reach back to help others, and in one amazing vignette, you have a black man and a white man pulled up together in an incredible vision of human unity in this new world. The lion's share of the space goes to the winner's circle. There you find men and women completely nude like athletes. They are the ones who have overcome adversity, and Michelangelo's vision of people who combat adversity, overcome obstacles — they're just like athletes. So you have men and women flexing and posing in this extraordinary spotlight. Presiding over this assembly is Jesus, first a suffering man on the cross, now a glorious ruler in Heaven. And as Michelangelo proved in his painting, hardship, setbacks and obstacles, they don't limit excellence, they forge it.Now, this does lead us to one odd thing. This is the Pope's private chapel, and the best way you can describe that is indeed a stew of nudes. But Michelangelo was trying to use only the best artistic language, the most universal artistic language he could think of: that of the human body. And so instead of the way of showing virtue such as fortitude or self-mastery, he borrowed from Julius II's wonderful collection of sculptures in order to show inner strength as external power.Now, one contemporary did write that the chapel was too beautiful to not cause controversy. And so it did. Michelangelo soon found that thanks to the printing press, complaints about the nudity spread all over the place, and soon his masterpiece of human drama was labeled pornography, at which point he added two more portraits, one of the man who criticized him, a papal courtier, and the other one of himself as a dried up husk, no athlete, in the hands of a long-suffering martyr. The year he died he saw several of these figures covered over, a triumph for trivial distractions over his great exhortation to glory.And so now we stand in the here and now. We are caught in that space between beginnings and endings, in the great, huge totality of the human experience. The Sistine Chapel forces us to look around as if it were a mirror. Who am I in this picture? Am I one of the crowd? Am I the drunk guy? Am I the athlete? And as we leave this haven of uplifting beauty, we are inspired to ask ourselves life's biggest questions: Who am I, and what role do I play in this great theater of life?Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Elizabeth Lev, thank you.Elizabeth, you mentioned this whole issue of pornography, too many nudes and too many daily life scenes and improper things in the eyes of the time. But actually the story is bigger. It's not just touching up and covering up some of the figures. This work of art was almost destroyed because of that.Elizabeth Lev: The effect of the Last Judgment was enormous. The printing press made sure that everybody saw it. And so, this wasn't something that happened within a couple of weeks. It was something that happened over the space of 20 years of editorials and complaints, saying to the Church, ""You can't possibly tell us how to live our lives. Did you notice you have pornography in the Pope's chapel?"" And so after complaints and insistence of trying to get this work destroyed, it was finally the year that Michelangelo died that the Church finally found a compromise, a way to save the painting, and that was in putting up these extra 30 covers, and that happens to be the origin of fig-leafing. That's where it all came about, and it came about from a church that was trying to save a work of art, not indeed deface or destroyed it.BG: This, what you just gave us, is not the classic tour that people get today when they go to the Sistine Chapel.(Laughter)EL: I don't know, is that an ad?(Laughter)BG: No, no, no, not necessarily, it is a statement. The experience of art today is encountering problems. Too many people want to see this there, and the result is five million people going through that tiny door and experiencing it in a completely different way than we just did.EL: Right. I agree. I think it's really nice to be able to pause and look. But also realize, even when you're in those days, with 28,000 people a day, even those days when you're in there with all those other people, look around you and think how amazing it is that some painted plaster from 500 years ago can still draw all those people standing side by side with you, looking upwards with their jaws dropped. It's a great statement about how beauty truly can speak to us all through time and through geographic space.BG: Liz, grazie.EL: Grazie a te.BG: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_lev_the_unheard_story_of_the_sistine_chapel
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"Democracy. In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. We see democracy not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is, but we see it as part of our society's furniture. We tend to think of it as an intransigent given. We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. It doesn't.Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism, spectacular growth, while politics remains democracy-free. Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods, here in Europe.Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece — the newly elected Greek government — in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister, I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation's democratic process — our elections — could not be allowed to interfere with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece. At that moment, I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew, or the Chinese Communist Party, indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.Tonight, here, I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. I want to ask you to join me in believing again that Lee Kuan Yew, the Chinese Communist Party and indeed the Eurogroup are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy — that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy. And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted.Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies as we speak. I call it the twin peaks paradox. One peak you understand — you know it, you recognize it — is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow over the United States, Europe, the whole world. We all recognize the mountain of debts. But few people discern its twin. A mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and to corporations, too terrified to invest it into the productive activities that can generate the incomes from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs, like green energy.Now let me give you two numbers. Over the last three months, in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone, we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars on all the wealth-producing goods — things like industrial plants, machinery, office blocks, schools, roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth. $3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion that has been slushing around in the same countries, in our financial institutions, doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash form twin peaks,  failing to cancel each other out through the normal operation of the markets.The result is stagnant wages, more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe out of work. And consequently, low aggregate demand, which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors, who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing — exactly like Oedipus' father, who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle that his son would grow up to kill him, unwittingly engineered the conditions that ensured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him.This is my quarrel with capitalism. Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies, green technologies, which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth.Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer? I believe so, but before we move on, what do we mean by democracy? Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government.Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded.What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state. Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn't last long. Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone.Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power.Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? It's not because their DNA has degenerated.(Laughter)It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate.Indeed, I spoke about my quarrel with capitalism. If you think about it, it is a little bit like a population of predators, that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on, that in the end they starve.Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis. Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations.So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth.Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants.Now, this is not an original idea. The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago and it didn't go very well, did it?The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste.But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism's doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including — soon, I believe — in places like China.So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we'd better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary.(Laughter)So the question is not whether capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. The more interesting question is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society, where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora.I think we can afford to be optimistic. But what would it take, what would it look like to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia?In practical terms, allow me to share just briefly, a couple of examples.At the level of the enterprise, imagine a capital market, where you earn capital as you work, and where your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company — whichever one you happen to work at at that time — is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment. Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks.At the level of the global political economy, imagine for a moment that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, on behalf of all humanity. And imagine further that all international trade is denominated in this currency — let's call it ""the cosmos,"" in units of cosmos — with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of cosmos units proportional to the country's trade deficit, or indeed to a country's trade surplus. And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies, especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce.This is not a new idea. It's what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The problem is that back then, they didn't have the technology to implement it. Now we do, especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere.The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between capital and labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy.Will such a world dawn? Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia? The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively. It is our choice, and we'd better make it democratically.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Yanis ... It was you who described yourself in your bios as a libertarian Marxist. What is the relevance of Marx's analysis today?Yanis Varoufakis: Well, if there was any relevance in what I just said, then Marx is relevant. Because the whole point of reunifying the political and economic is — if we don't do it, then technological innovation is going to create such a massive fall in aggregate demand,what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation. With this crisis migrating from one part of the world, as it is now, it will destabilize not only our democracies, but even the emerging world that is not that keen on liberal democracy. So if this analysis holds water, then Marx is absolutely relevant. But so is Hayek, that's why I'm a libertarian Marxist, and so is Keynes, so that's why I'm totally confused.(Laughter)BG: Indeed, and possibly we are too, now.(Laughter)(Applause)YV: If you are not confused, you are not thinking, OK?BG: That's a very, very Greek philosopher kind of thing to say —YV: That was Einstein, actually —BG: During your talk you mentioned Singapore and China, and last night at the speaker dinner, you expressed a pretty strong opinion about how the West looks at China. Would you like to share that?YV: Well, there's a great degree of hypocrisy. In our liberal democracies, we have a semblance of democracy. It's because we have confined, as I was saying in my talk, democracy to the political sphere, while leaving the one sphere where all the action is — the economic sphere — a completely democracy-free zone.In a sense, if I am allowed to be provocative, China today is closer to Britain in the 19th century. Because remember, we tend to associate liberalism with democracy — that's a mistake, historically. Liberalism, liberal, it's like John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill was particularly skeptical about the democratic process. So what you are seeing now in China is a very similar process to the one that we had in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, especially the transition from the first to the second. And to be castigating China for doing that which the West did in the 19th century, smacks of hypocrisy.BG: I am sure that many people here are wondering about your experience as the Finance Minister of Greece earlier this year.YV: I knew this was coming.BG: Yes.BG: Six months after, how do you look back at the first half of the year?YV: Extremely exciting, from a personal point of view, and very disappointing, because we had an opportunity to reboot the Eurozone. Not just Greece, the Eurozone. To move away from the complacency and the constant denial that there was a massive — and there is a massive architectural fault line going through the Eurozone, which is threatening, massively, the whole of the European Union process.We had an opportunity on the basis of the Greek program — which by the way, was the first program to manifest that denial — to put it right. And, unfortunately, the powers in the Eurozone, in the Eurogroup, chose to maintain denial.But you know what happens. This is the experience of the Soviet Union. When you try to keep alive an economic system that architecturally cannot survive, through political will and through authoritarianism, you may succeed in prolonging it, but when change happens it happens very abruptly and catastrophically.BG: What kind of change are you foreseeing?YV: Well, there's no doubt that if we don't change the architecture of the Eurozone, the Eurozone has no future.BG: Did you make any mistakes when you were Finance Minister?YV: Every day.BG: For example? YV: Anybody who looks back —(Applause)No, but seriously. If there's any Minister of Finance, or of anything else for that matter, who tells you after six months in a job, especially in such a stressful situation, that they have made no mistake, they're dangerous people. Of course I made mistakes.The greatest mistake was to sign the application for the extension of a loan agreement in the end of February. I was imagining that there was a genuine interest on the side of the creditors to find common ground. And there wasn't. They were simply interested in crushing our government, just because they did not want to have to deal with the architectural fault lines that were running through the Eurozone. And because they didn't want to admit that for five years they were implementing a catastrophic program in Greece. We lost one-third of our nominal GDP. This is worse than the Great Depression. And no one has come clean from the troika of lenders that have been imposing this policy to say, ""This was a colossal mistake.""BG: Despite all this, and despite the aggressiveness of the discussion, you seem to be remaining quite pro-European.YV: Absolutely. Look, my criticism of the European Union and the Eurozone comes from a person who lives and breathes Europe. My greatest fear is that the Eurozone will not survive. Because if it doesn't, the centrifugal forces that will be unleashed will be demonic, and they will destroy the European Union. And that will be catastrophic not just for Europe but for the whole global economy.We are probably the largest economy in the world. And if we allow ourselves to fall into a route of the postmodern 1930's, which seems to me to be what we are doing, then that will be detrimental to the future of Europeans and non-Europeans alike.BG: We definitely hope you are wrong on that point. Yanis, thank you for coming to TED.YV: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yanis_varoufakis_capitalism_will_eat_democracy_unless_we_speak_up
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"I'm a marine biologist and an explorer-photographer with National Geographic, but I want to share a secret. This image is totally incorrect, totally incorrect. I see a couple of people crying in the back that I've blown their idea of mermaids. All right, the mermaid is indeed real, but anyone who's gone on a dive will know that the ocean looks more like this. It's because the ocean is this massive filter, and as soon as you start going underwater, you're going to lose your colors, and it's going to get dark and blue very quickly.But we're humans — we're terrestrial mammals. And we've got trichromatic vision, so we see in red, green and blue, and we're just complete color addicts. We love eye-popping color, and we try to bring this eye-popping color underwater with us.So there's been a long and sordid history of bringing color underwater, and it starts 88 years ago with Bill Longley and Charles Martin, who were trying to take the first underwater color photograph. And they're in there with old-school scuba suits, where you're pumping air down to them, and they've got a pontoon of high-explosive magnesium powder, and the poor people at the surface are not sure when they're going to pull the string when they've got their frame in focus, and — boom! — a pound of high explosives would go off so they could put a little bit of light underwater and get an image like this beautiful hogfish. I mean, it's a gorgeous image, but this is not real. They're creating an artificial environment so we can satisfy our own addiction to color.And looking at it the other way, what we've been finding is that instead of bringing color underwater with us, that we've been looking at the blue ocean, and it's a crucible of blue, and these animals living there for millions of years have been evolving all sorts of ways to take in that blue light and give off other colors. And here's just a little sample of what this secret world looks like. It's like an underwater light show.(Music)Again, what we're seeing here is blue light hitting this image. These animals are absorbing the blue light and immediately transforming this light.So if you think about it, the ocean is 71 percent of the planet, and blue light can extend down to almost a 1,000 meters. As we go down underwater, after about 10 meters, all the red is gone. So if you see anything under 10 meters that's red, it's an animal transforming and creating its own red. This is the largest single monochromatic blue environment on our planet.And my gateway into this world of biofluorescence begins with corals. And I want to give a full TED Talk on corals and just how cool these things are. One of the things that they do, one of their miraculous feats, is they produce lots of these fluorescent proteins, fluorescent molecules. And in this coral, it could be making up to 14 percent of its body mass — could be this fluorescent protein. So you wouldn't be making, like, 14 percent muscle and not using it, so it's likely doing something that has a functional role. And for the last 10, 15 years, this was so special to me, because this molecule has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary tools in biomedical science, and it's allowing us to better see inside ourselves.So, how do I study this? In order to study biofluorescence, we swim at night. And when I started out, I was just using these blue duct-tape filters over my strobe, so I could make sure I'm actually seeing the light that's being transformed by the animals. We're making an exhibit for the Museum of Natural History, and we're trying to show off how great the fluorescent corals are on the reef, and something happened that just blew me away: this. In the middle of our corals, is this green fluorescent fish. It's the first time we've ever seen a green fluorescent fish or any vertebrate for that matter. And we're rubbing our eyes, checking the filters, thinking that somebody's maybe playing a joke on us with the camera, but the eel was real.It was the first green fluorescent eel that we found, and this just changed my trajectory completely. So I had to put down my corals and team up with a fish scientist, John Sparks, and begin a search around the world to see how prevalent this phenomenon is. And fish are much more interesting than corals, because they have really advanced vision, and some of the fish even have, the way that I was photographing it, they have lenses in their eyes that would magnify the fluorescence. So I wanted to seek this out further.So we designed a new set of gear and we're scouring the reefs around the world, looking for fluorescent life. And it's a bit like ""E.T. phone home."" We're out there swimming with this blue light, and we're looking for a response, for animals to be absorbing the light and transferring this back to us. And eventually, we found our photobombing Kaupichphys eel. It's a really shy, reclusive eel that we know almost nothing about. They're only about the size of my finger, and they spend about 99.9 percent of their time hidden under a rock. But these eels do come out to mate under full-moon nights, and that full-moon night translates underwater to blue. Perhaps they're using this as a way to see each other, quickly find each other, mate, go back into their hole for the next long stint of time. But then we started to find other fluorescent marine life, like this green fluorescent bream, with its, like, racing stripes along its head and its nape, and it's almost camouflaged and fluorescing at the same intensity as the fluorescent coral there.After this fish, we were introduced to this red fluorescent scorpionfish cloaked and hidden on this rock. The only time we've ever seen this, it's either on red fluorescent algae or red fluorescent coral.Later, we found this stealthy green fluorescent lizardfish. These lizardfish come in many varieties, and they look almost exactly alike under white light. But if you look at them under fluorescent light, you see lots of patterns, you can really see the differences among them. And in total — we just reported this last year — we found over 200 species of biofluorescent fish.One of my inspirations is French artist and biologist Jean Painlevé. He really captures this entrepreneuring, creative spirit in biology. He would design his own gear, make his own cameras, and he was fascinated with the seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, and he filmed for the first time the seahorse giving birth. So this is the male seahorse. They were one of the first fish to start swimming upright with their brain above their head. The males give birth, just phenomenal creatures. So he stayed awake for days. He even put this electrical visor on his head that would shock him, so he could capture this moment. Now, I wish I could have shown Painlevé the moment where we found biofluorescent seahorses in the exact same species that he was studying. And here's our footage.(Music)They're the most cryptic fish. You could be swimming right on top of them and not see the seahorse. They would blend right into the algae, which would also fluoresce red, but they've got great vision, and they go through this long mating ritual, and perhaps they're using it in that effect.But things got pretty edgy when we found green fluorescence in the stingray, because stingrays are in the Elasmobranch class, which includes ... sharks. So I'm, like, a coral biologist. Somebody's got to go down and check to see if the sharks are fluorescent. And there I am.(Laughter)And I was like, ""Maybe I should go back to corals.""(Laughter)It turns out that these sharks are not fluorescent. And then we found it. In a deep, dark canyon off the coast of California, we found the first biofluorescent swellshark, right underneath all the surfers. Here it is. They're just about a meter long. It's called a swellshark. And they call them a swellshark because if they're threatened, they can gulp down water and blow up like an inner tube, about twice their size, and wedge themselves under a rock, so they don't get eaten by a predator. And here is our first footage of these biofluorescent swellsharks. Just magnificent — I mean, they're showing these distinct patterns, and there are areas that are fluorescent and areas that are not fluorescent, but they've also got these twinkling spots on them that are much brighter than other parts of the shark.But this is all beautiful to see. I was like, this is gorgeous. But what does it mean to the shark? Can they see this? And we looked in the literature, and nothing was known about this shark's vision. So I took this shark to eye specialist Ellis Loew at Cornell University, and we found out that this shark sees discretely and acutely in the blue-green interface, probably about 100 times better than we can see in the dark, but they only see blue-green. So what it's doing is taking this blue world and it's absorbing the blue, creating green. It's creating contrast that they can indeed see. So we have a model, showing that it creates an ability for them to see all these patterns. And males and females also have, we're finding, distinct patterns among them.But our last find came really just a few miles from where we are now, in the Solomon Islands. Swimming at night, I encountered the first biofluorescent sea turtle. So now it's going from fish and sharks into reptiles, which, again, this is only one month old, but it shows us that we know almost nothing about this hawksbill turtle's vision. And it makes me think about how much more there is to learn. And here in the Solomon Islands, there's only a few thousand breeding females of this species left, and this is one of the hotspots for them. So it shows us how much we need to really protect these animals while they're still here, and understand them.In thinking about biofluorescence, I wanted to know, how deep does it go? Does this go all the way to the bottom of the ocean? So we started using submarines, and we equipped them with special blue lights on the front here. And we dropped down, and we noticed one important thing — that as we get down to 1,000 meters, it drops off. There's no biofluorescent marine life down there, below 1,000 meters — almost nothing, it's just darkness. So it's mainly a shallow phenomenon. And below 1,000 meters, we encountered the bioluminescent zone, where nine out of 10 animals are actually making their own lights and flashing and blinking.As I try to get deeper, this is slapping on a one-person submarine suit — some people call this my ""Jacques Cousteau meets Woody Allen"" moment.(Laughter)But as we explore down here, I was thinking about: How do we interact with life delicately? Because we're entering a new age of exploration, where we have to take great care, and we have to set examples how we explore. So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University, and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers, so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there. The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean come from oil and gas and military, who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle. Some corals could be 1,000 years old. You don't want to just go and crush them with a big claw. So my dream is something like this. At night, I'm in a submarine, I have force-feedback gloves, and I could delicately set up a lab in the front of my submarine, where the squishy robot fingers are delicately collecting and putting things in jars, and we can conduct our research.Back to the powerful applied applications. Here, you're looking at a living brain that's using the DNA of fluorescent marine creatures, this one from jellyfish and corals, to illuminate the living brain and see its connections. It's funny that we're using RGB just to kind of satisfy our own human intuition, so we can see our brains better. And even more mind-blowing, is my close colleague Vincent Pieribone at Yale, who has actually designed and engineered a fluorescent protein that responds to voltage. So he could see when a single neuron fires. You're essentially looking at a portal into consciousness that was designed by marine creatures.So this brings me all back to perspective and relationship. From deep space, our universe looks like a human brain cell, and then here we are in the deep ocean, and we're finding marine creatures and cells that can illuminate the human mind. And it's my hope that with illuminated minds, we could ponder the overarching interconnectedness of all life, and fathom how much more lies in store if we keep our oceans healthy.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_gruber_glow_in_the_dark_sharks_and_other_stunning_sea_creatures
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"It was an afternoon in the fall of 2005. I was working at the ACLU as the organization's science advisor. I really, really loved my job, but I was having one of those days where I was feeling just a little bit discouraged.So I wandered down the hallway to my colleague Chris Hansen's office. Chris had been at the ACLU for more than 30 years, so he had deep institutional knowledge and insights.I explained to Chris that I was feeling a little bit stuck. I had been investigating a number of issues at the intersection of science and civil liberties — super interesting. But I wanted the ACLU to engage these issues in a much bigger way, in a way that could really make a difference.So Chris cut right to the chase, and he says, ""Well, of all the issues you've been looking at, what are the top five?""""Well, there's genetic discrimination, and reproductive technologies, and biobanking, and ... oh, there's this really cool issue, functional MRI and using it for lie detection, and ... oh, and of course, there's gene patents.""""Gene patents?""""Yes, you know, patents on human genes.""""No! You're telling me that the US government has been issuing patents on part of the human body? That can't be right.""I went back to my office and sent Chris three articles. And 20 minutes later, he came bursting in my office. ""Oh my god! You're right! Who can we sue?""(Laughter)Now Chris is a really brilliant lawyer, but he knew almost nothing about patent law and certainly nothing about genetics. I knew something about genetics, but I wasn't even a lawyer, let alone a patent lawyer. So clearly we had a lot to learn before we could file a lawsuit.First, we needed to understand exactly what was patented when someone patented a gene. Gene patents typically contain dozens of claims, but the most controversial of these are to so-called ""isolated DNA"" — namely, a piece of DNA that has been removed from a cell.Gene patent proponents say, ""See? We didn't patent the gene in your body, we patented an isolated gene."" And that's true, but the problem is that any use of the gene requires that it be isolated. And the patents weren't just to a particular gene that they isolated, but on every possible version of that gene.So what does that mean?That means that you can't give your gene to your doctor and ask him or her to look at it, say, to see if it has any mutations, without permission of the patent holder. It also means that the patent holder has the right to stop anyone from using that gene in research or clinical testing. Allowing patent holders, often private companies, to lock up stretches of the human genome was harming patients.Consider Abigail, a 10-year-old with long QT syndrome, a serious heart condition that, if left untreated, can result in sudden death. The company that obtained a patent on two genes associated with this condition developed a test to diagnose the syndrome. But then they went bankrupt and they never offered it. So another lab tried to offer the test, but the company that held the patents threatened to sue the lab for patent infringement. So as a result, for 2 years, no test was available. During that time, Abigail died of undiagnosed long QT.Gene patents clearly were a problem and were harming patients. But was there a way we could challenge them?Turns out that the Supreme Court has made clear through a long line of cases, that certain things are not patent eligible. You can't patent products of nature — the air, the water, minerals, elements of the periodic table. And you can't patent laws of nature — the law of gravity, E = mc2. These things are just too fundamental and must remain free to all and reserved exclusively to none.It seemed to us that DNA, the most fundamental structure of life, that codes for the production of all of our proteins, is both a product of nature and a law of nature, regardless of whether it's in our bodies or sitting in the bottom of a test tube.As we delved into this issue, we traveled all over the country to speak with many different experts — scientists, medical professionals, lawyers, patent lawyers. Most of them agreed that we were right as a matter of policy, and, at least in theory, as a matter of law. All of them thought our chances of winning a gene-patent challenge were about zero.Why is that? Well, the patent office had been issuing these patents for more than 20 years. There were literally thousands of patents on human genes. The patent bar was deeply entrenched in the status quo, the biotech industry had grown up around this practice, and legislation to ban gene patents had been introduced year after year in Congress, and had gone absolutely nowhere. So the bottom line: courts just weren't going to be willing to overturn these patents.Now, neither Chris nor I were the type to shy away from a challenge, and hearing, ""Being right just isn't enough,"" seemed all the more reason to take on this fight. So we set out to build our case.Now, patent cases tend to be: Company A sues Company B over some really narrow, obscure technical issue. We weren't really interested in that kind of case, and we thought this case was much bigger than that. This was about scientific freedom, medical progress, the rights of patients. So we decided we were going to develop a case that was not like your typical patent case — more like a civil rights case.We set out to identify a gene-patent holder that was vigorously enforcing its patents and then to organize a broad coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could tell the court about all the ways that these patents were harming patients and innovation.We found the prime candidate to sue in Myriad Genetics, a company that's based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Myriad held patents on two genes, the BRCA1 and the BRCA2 genes. Women with certain mutations along these genes are considered to be at a significantly increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. Myriad had used its patents to maintain a complete monopoly on BRCA testing in the United States. It had forced multiple labs that were offering BRCA testing to stop. It charged a lot of money for its test — over 3,000 dollars. It had stopped sharing its clinical data with the international scientific community. And perhaps worst of all, for a period of several years, Myriad refused to update its test to include additional mutations that had been identified by a team of researchers in France.It has been estimated that during that period, for several years, as many as 12 percent of women undergoing testing received the wrong answer — a negative test result that should have been positive.This is Kathleen Maxian. Kathleen's sister Eileen developed breast cancer at age 40 and she was tested by Myriad. The test was negative. The family was relieved. That meant that Eileen's cancer most likely didn't run in the family, and that other members of her family didn't need to be tested. But two years later, Kathleen was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. It turned out that Kathleen's sister was among the 12 percent who received a false-negative test result. Had Eileen received the proper result, Kathleen would have then been tested, and her ovarian cancer could have been prevented.Once we settled on Myriad, we then had to form a coalition of plaintiffs and experts that could illuminate these problems. We ended up with 20 highly committed plaintiffs: genetic counselors, geneticists who had received cease and desist letters, advocacy organizations, four major scientific organizations that collectively represented more than 150,000 scientists and medical professionals, and individual women who either couldn't afford Myriad's test, or who wanted to obtain a second opinion but could not, as a result of the patents.One of the major challenges we had in preparing the case was figuring out how best to communicate the science. So in order to argue that what Myriad did was not an invention, and that isolated BRCA genes were products of nature, we had to explain a couple of basic concepts, like: What's a gene? What's DNA? How is DNA isolated, and why isn't that an invention?We spent hours and hours with our plaintiffs and experts, trying to come up with ways of explaining these concepts simply yet accurately. And we ended up relying heavily on the use of metaphors, like gold.So isolating DNA — it's like extracting gold from a mountain or taking it out of a stream bed. You might be able to patent the process for mining the gold, but you can't patent the gold itself. It might've taken a lot of hard work and effort to dig the gold out of the mountain; you still can't patent it, it's still gold. And the gold, once it's extracted, can clearly be used for all sorts of things that it couldn't be used for when it was in the mountain; you can make jewelry out of it for example — still can't patent the gold, it's still gold.So now it's 2009, and we're ready to file our case. We filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York, and the case was randomly assigned to Judge Robert Sweet. In March 2010, Judge Sweet issued his opinion — 152 pages — and a complete victory for our side.In reading the opinion, we could not get over how eloquently he described the science in the case. I mean, our brief — it was pretty good, but not this good. How did he develop such a deep understanding of this issue in such a short time? We just could not comprehend how this had happened. So it turned out, Judge Sweet's clerk working for him at the time, was not just a lawyer — he was a scientist. He was not just a scientist — he had a PhD in molecular biology.(Laughter)What an incredible stroke of luck!Myriad then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And here things got really interesting.First, in a pivotal moment of this case, the US government switched sides.So in the district court the government submitted a brief on Myriad's side. But now in direct opposition to its own patent office, the US government files a brief that states that is has reconsidered this issue in light of the district court's opinion, and has concluded that isolated DNA is not patent eligible. This was a really big deal, totally unexpected.The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit hears all patent cases, and it has a reputation for being very, very pro-patent. So even with this remarkable development, we expected to lose. And we did. Sort of. Ends up split decision, 2 to 1. But the two judges who ruled against us, did so for completely different reasons. The first one, Judge Lourie, made up his own novel, biological theory — totally wrong.(Laughter)He decided Myriad had created a new chemical — made absolutely no sense. Myriad didn't even argue this, so it came out of the blue. The other, Judge Moore, said she basically agreed with us that isolated DNA is a product of nature. But she's like, ""I don't want to shake up the biotech industry."" The third, Judge Bryson, agreed with us.So now we sought review by the Supreme Court. And when you petition the Supreme Court, you have to present a question that you want the Court to answer. Usually these questions take the form of a super-long paragraph, like a whole page long with lots and lots of clauses, ""wherein this"" and ""therefore that."" We submitted perhaps the shortest question presented ever. Four words: Are human genes patentable?Now when Chris first asked me what I thought of these words, I said, ""Well, I don't know. I think you have to say, 'Is isolated DNA patentable?'""""Nope. I want the justices to have the very same reaction that I had when you brought this issue to me seven years ago.""Well, I certainly couldn't argue with that.The Supreme Court only hears about one percent of the cases that it receives, and it agreed to hear ours. The day of the oral argument arrives, and it was really, really exciting — long line of people outside, people had been standing in line since 2:30 in the morning to try to get into the courthouse. Two breast cancer organizations, Breast Cancer Action and FORCE, had organized a demonstration on the courthouse steps.Chris and I sat quietly in the hallway, moments before he was to walk in and argue the most important case of his career. I was clearly more nervous than he was. But any remaining panic subsided as I walked into the courtroom and looked around at a sea of friendly faces: our individual women clients who had shared their deeply personal stories, the geneticists who had taken huge chunks of time out of their busy careers to dedicate themselves to this fight and representatives from a diverse array of medical, patient advocacy, environmental and religious organizations, who had submitted friend of the court briefs in the case.Also in the room were three leaders of the Human Genome Project, including the co-discoverer of DNA himself, James Watson, who had submitted a brief to the court, where he referred to gene patenting as ""lunacy.""(Laughter)The diversity of the communities represented in this room and the contributions each had made to make this day a reality spoke volumes to what was at stake.The argument itself was riveting. Chris argued brilliantly. But for me, the most thrilling aspect was watching the Supreme Court justices grapple with isolated DNA, through a series of colorful analogies and feisty exchanges, very much the same way as our legal team had done for the past seven years. Justice Kagan likened isolating DNA to extracting a medicinal plant from the Amazon. Justice Roberts distinguished it from carving a baseball bat from a tree. And in one of my absolutely favorite moments, Justice Sotomayor proclaimed isolated DNA to be ""just nature sitting there.""(Laughter)We felt pretty confident leaving the courtroom that day, but I could never have anticipated the outcome: nine to zero.""A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature, and not patent-eligible merely because it has been isolated. And furthermore, Myriad did not create anything.""Within 24 hours of the decision, five labs had announced that they would begin to offer testing for the BRCA genes. Some of them promised to offer the tests at a lower price than Myriad's. Some promised to provide a more comprehensive test than the one Myriad was offering.But of course the decision goes far beyond Myriad. It ends a 25-year practice of allowing patents on human genes in the United States. It clears a significant barrier to biomedical discovery and innovation. And it helps to ensure that patients like Abigail, Kathleen and Eileen have access to the tests that they need.A few weeks after the court issued its decision, I received a small package in the mail. It was from Bob Cook-Deegan, a professor at Duke University and one the very first people Chris and I went to visit when we started to consider whether to bring this case. I opened it up to find a small stuffed animal.(Laughter)We took a big risk in taking this case. Part of what gave us the courage to take that risk was knowing that we were doing the right thing. The process took nearly eight years from the start to finish, with many twists and turns along the way. A little luck certainly helped, but it was the communities that we bridged, the alliances that we created, that made pigs fly.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tania_simoncelli_should_you_be_able_to_patent_a_human_gene
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"This is Pleurobot. Pleurobot is a robot that we designed to closely mimic a salamander species called Pleurodeles waltl. Pleurobot can walk, as you can see here, and as you'll see later, it can also swim.So you might ask, why did we design this robot? And in fact, this robot has been designed as a scientific tool for neuroscience. Indeed, we designed it together with neurobiologists to understand how animals move, and especially how the spinal cord controls locomotion. But the more I work in biorobotics, the more I'm really impressed by animal locomotion. If you think of a dolphin swimming or a cat running or jumping around, or even us as humans, when you go jogging or play tennis, we do amazing things. And in fact, our nervous system solves a very, very complex control problem. It has to coordinate more or less 200 muscles perfectly, because if the coordination is bad, we fall over or we do bad locomotion. And my goal is to understand how this works.There are four main components behind animal locomotion. The first component is just the body, and in fact we should never underestimate to what extent the biomechanics already simplify locomotion in animals. Then you have the spinal cord, and in the spinal cord you find reflexes, multiple reflexes that create a sensorimotor coordination loop between neural activity in the spinal cord and mechanical activity. A third component are central pattern generators. These are very interesting circuits in the spinal cord of vertebrate animals that can generate, by themselves, very coordinated rhythmic patterns of activity while receiving only very simple input signals. And these input signals coming from descending modulation from higher parts of the brain, like the motor cortex, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, will all modulate activity of the spinal cord while we do locomotion. But what's interesting is to what extent just a low-level component, the spinal cord, together with the body, already solve a big part of the locomotion problem. You probably know it by the fact that you can cut the head off a chicken, it can still run for a while, showing that just the lower part, spinal cord and body, already solve a big part of locomotion.Now, understanding how this works is very complex, because first of all, recording activity in the spinal cord is very difficult. It's much easier to implant electrodes in the motor cortex than in the spinal cord, because it's protected by the vertebrae. Especially in humans, very hard to do. A second difficulty is that locomotion is really due to a very complex and very dynamic interaction between these four components. So it's very hard to find out what's the role of each over time. This is where biorobots like Pleurobot and mathematical models can really help.So what's biorobotics? Biorobotics is a very active field of research in robotics where people want to take inspiration from animals to make robots to go outdoors, like service robots or search and rescue robots or field robots. And the big goal here is to take inspiration from animals to make robots that can handle complex terrain — stairs, mountains, forests, places where robots still have difficulties and where animals can do a much better job. The robot can be a wonderful scientific tool as well. There are some very nice projects where robots are used, like a scientific tool for neuroscience, for biomechanics or for hydrodynamics. And this is exactly the purpose of Pleurobot. So what we do in my lab is to collaborate with neurobiologists like Jean-Marie Cabelguen, a neurobiologist in Bordeaux in France, and we want to make spinal cord models and validate them on robots. And here we want to start simple.So it's good to start with simple animals like lampreys, which are very primitive fish, and then gradually go toward more complex locomotion, like in salamanders, but also in cats and in humans, in mammals. And here, a robot becomes an interesting tool to validate our models. And in fact, for me, Pleurobot is a kind of dream becoming true. Like, more or less 20 years ago I was already working on a computer making simulations of lamprey and salamander locomotion during my PhD. But I always knew that my simulations were just approximations. Like, simulating the physics in water or with mud or with complex ground, it's very hard to simulate that properly on a computer. Why not have a real robot and real physics? So among all these animals, one of my favorites is the salamander. You might ask why, and it's because as an amphibian, it's a really key animal from an evolutionary point of view. It makes a wonderful link between swimming, as you find it in eels or fish, and quadruped locomotion, as you see in mammals, in cats and humans. And in fact, the modern salamander is very close to the first terrestrial vertebrate, so it's almost a living fossil, which gives us access to our ancestor, the ancestor to all terrestrial tetrapods.So the salamander swims by doing what's called an anguilliform swimming gait, so they propagate a nice traveling wave of muscle activity from head to tail. And if you place the salamander on the ground, it switches to what's called a walking trot gait. In this case, you have nice periodic activation of the limbs which are very nicely coordinated with this standing wave undulation of the body, and that's exactly the gait that you are seeing here on Pleurobot. Now, one thing which is very surprising and fascinating in fact is the fact that all this can be generated just by the spinal cord and the body. So if you take a decerebrated salamander — it's not so nice but you remove the head — and if you electrically stimulate the spinal cord, at low level of stimulation this will induce a walking-like gait. If you stimulate a bit more, the gait accelerates. And at some point, there's a threshold, and automatically, the animal switches to swimming. This is amazing. Just changing the global drive, as if you are pressing the gas pedal of descending modulation to your spinal cord, makes a complete switch between two very different gaits. And in fact, the same has been observed in cats. If you stimulate the spinal cord of a cat, you can switch between walk, trot and gallop. Or in birds, you can make a bird switch between walking, at a low level of stimulation, and flapping its wings at high-level stimulation. And this really shows that the spinal cord is a very sophisticated locomotion controller.So we studied salamander locomotion in more detail, and we had in fact access to a very nice X-ray video machine from Professor Martin Fischer in Jena University in Germany. And thanks to that, you really have an amazing machine to record all the bone motion in great detail. That's what we did. So we basically figured out which bones are important for us and collected their motion in 3D. And what we did is collect a whole database of motions, both on ground and in water, to really collect a whole database of motor behaviors that a real animal can do. And then our job as roboticists was to replicate that in our robot. So we did a whole optimization process to find out the right structure, where to place the motors, how to connect them together, to be able to replay these motions as well as possible. And this is how Pleurobot came to life.So let's look at how close it is to the real animal. So what you see here is almost a direct comparison between the walking of the real animal and the Pleurobot. You can see that we have almost a one-to-one exact replay of the walking gait. If you go backwards and slowly, you see it even better. But even better, we can do swimming. So for that we have a dry suit that we put all over the robot —(Laughter)and then we can go in water and start replaying the swimming gaits. And here, we were very happy, because this is difficult to do. The physics of interaction are complex. Our robot is much bigger than a small animal, so we had to do what's called dynamic scaling of the frequencies to make sure we had the same interaction physics. But you see at the end, we have a very close match, and we were very, very happy with this. So let's go to the spinal cord. So here what we did with Jean-Marie Cabelguen is model the spinal cord circuits. And what's interesting is that the salamander has kept a very primitive circuit, which is very similar to the one we find in the lamprey, this primitive eel-like fish, and it looks like during evolution, new neural oscillators have been added to control the limbs, to do the leg locomotion. And we know where these neural oscillators are but what we did was to make a mathematical model to see how they should be coupled to allow this transition between the two very different gaits. And we tested that on board of a robot.And this is how it looks. So what you see here is a previous version of Pleurobot that's completely controlled by our spinal cord model programmed on board of the robot. And the only thing we do is send to the robot through a remote control the two descending signals it normally should receive from the upper part of the brain. And what's interesting is, by playing with these signals, we can completely control speed, heading and type of gait. For instance, when we stimulate at a low level, we have the walking gait, and at some point, if we stimulate a lot, very rapidly it switches to the swimming gait. And finally, we can also do turning very nicely by just stimulating more one side of the spinal cord than the other. And I think it's really beautiful how nature has distributed control to really give a lot of responsibility to the spinal cord so that the upper part of the brain doesn't need to worry about every muscle. It just has to worry about this high-level modulation, and it's really the job of the spinal cord to coordinate all the muscles.So now let's go to cat locomotion and the importance of biomechanics. So this is another project where we studied cat biomechanics, and we wanted to see how much the morphology helps locomotion. And we found three important criteria in the properties, basically, of the limbs. The first one is that a cat limb more or less looks like a pantograph-like structure. So a pantograph is a mechanical structure which keeps the upper segment and the lower segments always parallel. So a simple geometrical system that kind of coordinates a bit the internal movement of the segments. A second property of cat limbs is that they are very lightweight. Most of the muscles are in the trunk, which is a good idea, because then the limbs have low inertia and can be moved very rapidly. The last final important property is this very elastic behavior of the cat limb, so to handle impacts and forces. And this is how we designed Cheetah-Cub.So let's invite Cheetah-Cub onstage. So this is Peter Eckert, who does his PhD on this robot, and as you see, it's a cute little robot. It looks a bit like a toy, but it was really used as a scientific tool to investigate these properties of the legs of the cat. So you see, it's very compliant, very lightweight, and also very elastic, so you can easily press it down and it will not break. It will just jump, in fact. And this very elastic property is also very important. And you also see a bit these properties of these three segments of the leg as pantograph.Now, what's interesting is that this quite dynamic gait is obtained purely in open loop, meaning no sensors, no complex feedback loops. And that's interesting, because it means that just the mechanics already stabilized this quite rapid gait, and that really good mechanics already basically simplify locomotion. To the extent that we can even disturb a bit locomotion, as you will see in the next video, where we can for instance do some exercise where we have the robot go down a step, and the robot will not fall over, which was a surprise for us. This is a small perturbation. I was expecting the robot to immediately fall over, because there are no sensors, no fast feedback loop. But no, just the mechanics stabilized the gait, and the robot doesn't fall over. Obviously, if you make the step bigger, and if you have obstacles, you need the full control loops and reflexes and everything. But what's important here is that just for small perturbation, the mechanics are right. And I think this is a very important message from biomechanics and robotics to neuroscience, saying don't underestimate to what extent the body already helps locomotion.Now, how does this relate to human locomotion? Clearly, human locomotion is more complex than cat and salamander locomotion, but at the same time, the nervous system of humans is very similar to that of other vertebrates. And especially the spinal cord is also the key controller for locomotion in humans. That's why, if there's a lesion of the spinal cord, this has dramatic effects. The person can become paraplegic or tetraplegic. This is because the brain loses this communication with the spinal cord. Especially, it loses this descending modulation to initiate and modulate locomotion. So a big goal of neuroprosthetics is to be able to reactivate that communication using electrical or chemical stimulations. And there are several teams in the world that do exactly that, especially at EPFL. My colleagues Grégoire Courtine and Silvestro Micera, with whom I collaborate.But to do this properly, it's very important to understand how the spinal cord works, how it interacts with the body, and how the brain communicates with the spinal cord. This is where the robots and models that I've presented today will hopefully play a key role towards these very important goals.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Auke, I've seen in your lab other robots that do things like swim in pollution and measure the pollution while they swim. But for this one, you mentioned in your talk, like a side project, search and rescue, and it does have a camera on its nose.Auke Ijspeert: Absolutely. So the robot — We have some spin-off projects where we would like to use the robots to do search and rescue inspection, so this robot is now seeing you. And the big dream is to, if you have a difficult situation like a collapsed building or a building that is flooded, and this is very dangerous for a rescue team or even rescue dogs, why not send in a robot that can crawl around, swim, walk, with a camera onboard to do inspection and identify survivors and possibly create a communication link with the survivor.BG: Of course, assuming the survivors don't get scared by the shape of this.AI: Yeah, we should probably change the appearance quite a bit, because here I guess a survivor might die of a heart attack just of being worried that this would feed on you. But by changing the appearance and it making it more robust, I'm sure we can make a good tool out of it.BG: Thank you very much. Thank you and your team.","https://www.ted.com/talks/auke_ijspeert_a_robot_that_runs_and_swims_like_a_salamander
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"Melati Wijsen: Bali — island of gods.Isabel Wijsen: A green paradise.MW: Or ... a paradise lost. Bali: island of garbage.IW: In Bali, we generate 680 cubic meters of plastic garbage a day. That's about a 14-story building. And when it comes to plastic bags, less than five percent gets recycled.MW: We know that changes the image you may have of our island. It changed ours, too, when we learned about it, when we learned that almost all plastic bags in Bali end up in our drains and then in our rivers and then in our ocean. And those that don't even make it to the ocean, they're either burned or littered.IW: So we decided to do something about it. And we've been working for almost three years now to try to say no to plastic bags on our home island. And we have had some significant successes.MW: We are sisters, and we go to the best school on earth: Green School, Bali. Green School is not only different in the way that it is built out of bamboo, but also in the way that it teaches. We are taught to become leaders of today, something a normal textbook cannot match.IW: One day we had a lesson in class where we learned about significant people, like Nelson Mandela, Lady Diana and Mahatma Gandhi. Walking home that day, we agreed that we also wanted to be significant. Why should we wait until we were grown up to be significant? We wanted to do something now.MW: Sitting on the sofa that night, we brainstormed and thought of all the issues facing Bali. And one thing that stood out to us the most was the plastic garbage. But that is a huge problem. So we looked into what was a realistic target for us kids: plastic bags. And the idea was born.IW: We started researching, and let's just say, the more we learned, there was nothing good about plastic bags. And you know what? We don't even need them.MW: We were really inspired by the efforts to say no to plastic bags in many other places, from Hawaii to Rwanda and to severals cities like Oakland and Dublin.IW: And so the idea turned into the launch of ""Bye Bye Plastic Bags."" MW: In the years that we have been campaigning, we have learned a lot.Lesson number one: you cannot do it all by yourself. You need a big team of like-minded kids, and so we formed the Bye Bye Plastic Bags crew. The volunteer team includes children from all over the island, from both international and local schools. And together with them, we started a multi-layered approach, based on an on- and off-line signature petition, educational and inspirational presentations at schools and we raise general awareness at markets, festivals, beach clean-ups. And last but not least, we distribute alternative bags, bags like net bags, recycled newspaper bags or 100 percent organic material bags, all made by local initiatives on the island.IW: We run a pilot village, home of 800 families. The village mayor was our first friend and he loved our T-shirts, so that helped. We focused on making the customers aware, because that's where the change needs to happen. The village is already two-thirds along the way of becoming plastic bag free.Our first attempts to get the government of Bali on board failed. So we thought, ""Hmm ... a petition with one million signatures. They can't ignore us, right?""MW: Right!IW: But, who would have guessed one million signatures is, like, a thousand times a thousand?(Laughter)We got stuck — till we learned lesson number two: think outside the box. Someone mentioned that the Bali airport handles 16 million arrivals and departures a year.MW: But how do we get into the airport? And here comes lesson number three: persistence. Off we headed to the airport. We got past the janitor. And then it was his boss's boss, and then the assistant office manager, and then the office manager, and then ... we got shuffled down two levels and thought, well, here comes the janitor again.And after several days knocking on doors and just being kids on a mission, we finally got to the commercial manager of Bali airports. And we gave him the ""Bali of plastic bags"" speech, and being a very nice man, he said, [imitating the man's voice] ""I cannot believe what I'm about say, but I'm going to give authorization to collect signatures behind customs and immigrations.""(Laughter)(Applause)IW: In our first hour and a half there, we got almost 1,000 signatures. How cool is that?Lesson number four: you need champions at all levels of society, from students to commercial managers to famous people. And thanks to the attraction of Green School, we had access to a steady stream of celebrities. Ban Ki Moon taught us that Secretary-Generals of the United Nations don't sign petitions —(Laughter)even if kids ask nicely. But he promised to spread the word, and now we work closely with the United Nations.MW: Jane Goodall taught us the power of a people's network. She started with just one Roots & Shoots group and now she has 4,000 groups around the world. We are one of them. She's a real inspiration.If you're a fellow Rotarian, nice to meet you. We're Interactors, the youngest department of Rotary International.IW: But we have also learned much about patience,MW: how to deal with frustrations,IW: leadership,MW: teamwork,IW: friendship,MW: we learned more about the Balinese and their cultureIW: and we learned about the importance of commitment.MW: It's not always easy. Sometimes it does get a little bit hard to walk your talk.IW: But last year, we did exactly that. We went to India to give a talk, and our parents took us to visit the former private house of Mahatma Gandhi. We learned about the power of hunger strikes he did to reach his goals. Yes, by the end of the tour, when we met our parents again, we both made a decision and said, ""We're going on a hunger strike!""(Laughter)MW: And you can probably imagine their faces. It took a lot of convincing, and not only to our parents but to our friends and to our teachers as well. Isabel and I were serious about doing this. So we met with a nutritionist, and we came up with a compromise of not eating from sunrise to sunset every day until the governor of Bali would agree to meet with us to talk about how to stop plastic bags on Bali.IW: Our ""mogak makan,"" as it is called in Bahasa Indonesia, started. We used social media to support our goal and already on day two, police started to come to our home and school. What were these two girls doing? We knew we weren't making the governor look his best by doing this food strike — we could have gone to jail. But, hey, it worked. Twenty-four hours later, we were picked up from school and escorted to the office of the governor.MW: And there he was —(Applause)waiting for us to meet and speak, being all supportive and thankful for our willingness to care for the beauty and the environment of Bali.He signed a promise to help the people of Bali say no to plastic bags. And we are now friends, and on a regular basis, we remind him and his team of the promises he has made. And indeed, recently he stated and committed that Bali will be plastic bag free by 2018.(Applause)IW: Also, at the International Airport of Bali, one of our supporters is planning to start a plastic bag-free policy by 2016.MW: Stop handing out free plastic bags and bring in your own reusable bag is our next message to change that mindset of the public.IW: Our short-term campaign, ""One Island / One Voice,"" is all about this. We check and recognize the shops and restaurants that have declared themselves a plastic bag-free zone, and we put this sticker at their entrance and publish their names on social media and some important magazines on Bali. And conversely, that highlights those who do not have the sticker.(Laughter)MW: So, why are we actually telling you all of this? Well, partly, it is because we are proud of the results that, together with our team, we have been able to reach. But also because along the way, we have learned that kids can do things. We can make things happen. Isabel and I were only 10 and 12 years old when we started this. We never had a business plan, nor a fixed strategy, nor any hidden agendas — just the idea in front of us and a group of friends working with us. All we wanted to do was stop those plastic bags from wrapping and suffocating our beautiful home. Kids have a boundless energy and a motivation to be the change the world needs.IW: So to all the kids of this beautiful but challenging world: go for it! Make that difference. We're not telling you it's going to be easy. We're telling you it's going to be worth it. Us kids may only be 25 percent of the world's population, but we are 100 percent of the future.MW: We still have a lot of work to do, but know that we still not stop until the first question asked when arriving at the Bali airports will beBoth: ""Welcome to Bali, do you have nay plastic bags to declare?""(Laughter)Om shanti shanti shanti om.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melati_and_isabel_wijsen_our_campaign_to_ban_plastic_bags_in_bali
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"Code is the next universal language. In the seventies, it was punk music that drove the whole generation. In the eighties, it was probably money. But for my generation of people, software is the interface to our imagination and our world. And that means that we need a radically, radically more diverse set of people to build those products, to not see computers as mechanical and lonely and boring and magic, to see them as things that they can tinker and turn around and twist, and so forth.My personal journey into the world of programming and technology started at the tender age of 14. I had this mad teenage crush on an older man, and the older man in question just happened to be the then Vice President of the United States, Mr. Al Gore. And I did what every single teenage girl would want to do. I wanted to somehow express all of this love, so I built him a website, it's over here. And in 2001, there was no Tumblr, there was no Facebook, there was no Pinterest. So I needed to learn to code in order to express all of this longing and loving.And that is how programming started for me. It started as a means of self-expression. Just like when I was smaller, I would use crayons and legos. And when I was older, I would use guitar lessons and theater plays. But then, there were other things to get excited about, like poetry and knitting socks and conjugating French irregular verbs and coming up with make-believe worlds and Bertrand Russell and his philosophy. And I started to be one of those people who felt that computers are boring and technical and lonely.Here's what I think today. Little girls don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. Little girls are amazing. They are really, really good at concentrating on things and being exact and they ask amazing questions like, ""What?"" and ""Why?"" and ""How?"" and ""What if?"" And they don't know that they are not supposed to like computers. It's the parents who do. It's us parents who feel like computer science is this esoteric, weird science discipline that only belongs to the mystery makers. That it's almost as far removed from everyday life as, say, nuclear physics.And they are partly right about that. There's a lot of syntax and controls and data structures and algorithms and practices, protocols and paradigms in programming. And we as a community, we've made computers smaller and smaller. We've built layers and layers of abstraction on top of each other between the man and the machine to the point that we no longer have any idea how computers work or how to talk to them. And we do teach our kids how the human body works, we teach them how the combustion engine functions and we even tell them that if you want to really be an astronaut you can become one. But when the kid comes to us and asks, ""So, what is a bubble sort algorithm?"" Or, ""How does the computer know what happens when I press 'play,' how does it know which video to show?"" Or, ""Linda, is Internet a place?"" We adults, we grow oddly silent. ""It's magic,"" some of us say. ""It's too complicated,"" the others say.Well, it's neither. It's not magic and it's not complicated. It all just happened really, really, really fast. Computer scientists built these amazing, beautiful machines, but they made them very, very foreign to us, and also the language we speak to the computers so that we don't know how to speak to the computers anymore without our fancy user interfaces.And that's why no one recognized that when I was conjugating French irregular verbs, I was actually practicing my pattern recognition skills. And when I was excited about knitting, I actually was following a sequence of symbolic commands that included loops inside of them. And that Bertrand Russell's lifelong quest to find an exact language between English and mathematics found its home inside of a computer. I was a programmer, but no one knew it.The kids of today, they tap, swipe and pinch their way through the world. But unless we give them tools to build with computers, we are raising only consumers instead of creators.This whole quest led me to this little girl. Her name is Ruby, she is six years old. She is completely fearless, imaginative and a little bit bossy. And every time I would run into a problem in trying to teach myself programming like, ""What is object-oriented design or what is garbage collection?"", I would try to imagine how a six-year-old little girl would explain the problem.And I wrote a book about her and I illustrated it and the things Ruby taught me go like this. Ruby taught me that you're not supposed to be afraid of the bugs under your bed. And even the biggest of the problems are a group of tiny problems stuck together. And Ruby also introduced me to her friends, the colorful side of the Internet culture. She has friends like the Snow Leopard, who is beautiful but doesn't want to play with the other kids. And she has friends like the green robots that are really friendly but super messy. And she has friends like Linux the penguin who's really ruthlessly efficient, but somewhat hard to understand. And idealistic foxes, and so on.In Ruby's world, you learn technology through play. And, for instance, computers are really good at repeating stuff, so the way Ruby would teach loops goes like this. This is Ruby's favorite dance move, it goes, ""Clap, clap, stomp, stomp clap, clap and jump."" And you learn counter loops by repeating that four times. And you learn while loops by repeating that sequence while I'm standing on one leg. And you learn until loops by repeating that sequence until mom gets really mad. (Laughter) And most of all, you learn that there are no ready answers.When coming up with the curriculum for Ruby's world, I needed to really ask the kids how they see the world and what kind of questions they have and I would organize play testing sessions. I would start by showing the kids these four pictures. I would show them a picture of a car, a grocery store, a dog and a toilet. And I would ask, ""Which one of these do you think is a computer?"" And the kids would be very conservative and go, ""None of these is a computer. I know what a computer is: it's that glowing box in front of which mom or dad spends way too much time."" But then we would talk and we would discover that actually, a car is a computer, it has a navigation system inside of it. And a dog — a dog might not be a computer, but it has a collar and the collar might have a computer inside of it. And grocery stores, they have so many different kinds of computers, like the cashier system and the burglar alarms. And kids, you know what? In Japan, toilets are computers and there's even hackers who hack them. (Laughter)And we go further and I give them these little stickers with an on/off button on them. And I tell the kids, ""Today you have this magic ability to make anything in this room into a computer."" And again, the kids go, ""Sounds really hard, I don't know the right answer for this."" But I tell them, ""Don't worry, your parents don't know the right answer, either. They've just started to hear about this thing called The Internet of Things. But you kids, you are going to be the ones who are really going to live up in a world where everything is a computer.""And then I had this little girl who came to me and took a bicycle lamp and she said, ""This bicycle lamp, if it were a computer, it would change colors."" And I said, ""That's a really good idea, what else could it do?"" And she thinks and she thinks, and she goes, ""If this bicycle lamp were a computer, we could go on a biking trip with my father and we would sleep in a tent and this biking lamp could also be a movie projector."" And that's the moment I'm looking for, the moment when the kid realizes that the world is definitely not ready yet, that a really awesome way of making the world more ready is by building technology and that each one of us can be a part of that change.Final story, we also built a computer. And we got to know the bossy CPU and the helpful RAM and ROM that help it remember things. And after we've assembled our computer together, we also design an application for it. And my favorite story is this little boy, he's six years old and his favorite thing in the world is to be an astronaut. And the boy, he has these huge headphones on and he's completely immersed in his tiny paper computer because you see, he's built his own intergalactic planetary navigation application. And his father, the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit, is on the other side of the room and the boy's important mission is to bring the father safely back to earth. And these kids are going to have a profoundly different view of the world and the way we build it with technology.Finally, the more approachable, the more inclusive, and the more diverse we make the world of technology, the more colorful and better the world will look like. So, imagine with me, for a moment, a world where the stories we tell about how things get made don't only include the twentysomething-year-old Silicon Valley boys, but also Kenyan schoolgirls and Norwegian librarians. Imagine a world where the little Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow, who live in a permanent reality of 1s and 0s, they grow up to be very optimistic and brave about technology. They embrace the powers and the opportunities and the limitations of the world. A world of technology that is wonderful, whimsical and a tiny bit weird.When I was a girl, I wanted to be a storyteller. I loved make-believe worlds and my favorite thing to do was to wake up in the mornings in Moominvalley. In the afternoons, I would roam around the Tatooines. And in the evenings, I would go to sleep in Narnia. And programming turned out to be the perfect profession for me. I still create worlds. Instead of stories, I do them with code.Programming gives me this amazing power to build my whole little universe with its own rules and paradigms and practices. Create something out of nothing with the pure power of logic.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/linda_liukas_a_delightful_way_to_teach_kids_about_computers
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"As a boy in Lima, my grandfather told me a legend of the Spanish conquest of Peru. Atahualpa, emperor of the Inca, had been captured and killed. Pizarro and his conquistadors had grown rich, and tales of their conquest and glory had reached Spain and was bringing new waves of Spaniards, hungry for gold and glory. They would go into towns and ask the Inca, ""Where's another civilization we can conquer? Where's more gold?""And the Inca, out of vengeance, told them, ""Go to the Amazon. You'll find all the gold you want there. In fact, there is a city called Paititi — El Dorado in Spanish — made entirely of gold.""The Spanish set off into the jungle, but the few that return come back with stories, stories of powerful shamans, of warriors with poisoned arrows, of trees so tall they blotted out the sun, spiders that ate birds, snakes that swallowed men whole and a river that boiled.All this became a childhood memory. And years passed. I'm working on my PhD at SMU, trying to understand Peru's geothermal energy potential, when I remember this legend, and I began asking that question. Could the boiling river exist?I asked colleagues from universities, the government, oil, gas and mining companies, and the answer was a unanimous no. And this makes sense. You see, boiling rivers do exist in the world, but they're generally associated with volcanoes. You need a powerful heat source to produce such a large geothermal manifestation. And as you can see from the red dots here, which are volcanoes, we don't have volcanoes in the Amazon, nor in most of Peru. So it follows: We should not expect to see a boiling river.Telling this same story at a family dinner, my aunt tells me, ""But no, Andrés, I've been there. I've swum in that river.""(Laughter)Then my uncle jumps in. ""No, Andrés, she's not kidding. You see, you can only swim in it after a very heavy rain, and it's protected by a powerful shaman. Your aunt, she's friends with his wife.""(Laughter)""¿Cómo?"" [""Huh?""]You know, despite all my scientific skepticism, I found myself hiking into the jungle, guided by my aunt, over 700 kilometers away from the nearest volcanic center, and well, honestly, mentally preparing myself to behold the legendary ""warm stream of the Amazon.""But then ... I heard something, a low surge that got louder and louder as we came closer. It sounded like ocean waves constantly crashing, and as we got closer, I saw smoke, vapor, coming up through the trees. And then, I saw this.I immediately grabbed for my thermometer, and the average temperatures in the river were 86 degrees C. This is not quite the 100-degree C boiling but definitely close enough. The river flowed hot and fast. I followed it upriver and was led by, actually, the shaman's apprentice to the most sacred site on the river. And this is what's bizarre — It starts off as a cold stream. And here, at this site, is the home of the Yacumama, mother of the waters, a giant serpent spirit who births hot and cold water. And here we find a hot spring, mixing with cold stream water underneath her protective motherly jaws and thus bringing their legends to life.The next morning, I woke up and —(Laughter)I asked for tea. I was handed a mug, a tea bag and, well, pointed towards the river. To my surprise, the water was clean and had a pleasant taste, which is a little weird for geothermal systems.What was amazing is that the locals had always known about this place, and that I was by no means the first outsider to see it. It was just part of their everyday life. They drink its water. They take in its vapor. They cook with it, clean with it, even make their medicines with it.I met the shaman, and he seemed like an extension of the river and his jungle. He asked for my intentions and listened carefully. Then, to my tremendous relief — I was freaking out, to be honest with you — a smile began to snake across his face, and he just laughed.(Laughter)I had received the shaman's blessing to study the river, on the condition that after I take the water samples and analyze them in my lab, wherever I was in the world, that I pour the waters back into the ground so that, as the shaman said, the waters could find their way back home.I've been back every year since that first visit in 2011, and the fieldwork has been exhilarating, demanding and at times dangerous. One story was even featured in National Geographic Magazine. I was trapped on a small rock about the size of a sheet of paper in sandals and board shorts, in between an 80 degree C river and a hot spring that, well, looked like this, close to boiling. And on top of that, it was Amazon rain forest. Pshh, pouring rain, couldn't see a thing. The temperature differential made it all white. It was a whiteout. Intense.Now, after years of work, I'll soon be submitting my geophysical and geochemical studies for publication. And I'd like to share, today, with all of you here, on the TED stage, for the first time, some of these discoveries.Well, first off, it's not a legend. Surprise!(Laughter)When I first started the research, the satellite imagery was too low-resolution to be meaningful. There were just no good maps. Thanks to the support of the Google Earth team, I now have this. Not only that, the indigenous name of the river, Shanay-timpishka, ""boiled with the heat of the sun,"" indicating that I'm not the first to wonder why the river boils, and showing that humanity has always sought to explain the world around us.So why does the river boil?(Bubbling sounds)It actually took me three years to get that footage.Fault-fed hot springs. As we have hot blood running through our veins and arteries, so, too, the earth has hot water running through its cracks and faults. Where these arteries come to the surface, these earth arteries, we'll get geothermal manifestations: fumaroles, hot springs and in our case, the boiling river.What's truly incredible, though, is the scale of this place. Next time you cross the road, think about this. The river flows wider than a two-lane road along most of its path. It flows hot for 6.24 kilometers. Truly impressive. There are thermal pools larger than this TED stage, and that waterfall that you see there is six meters tall — and all with near-boiling water.We mapped the temperatures along the river, and this was by far the most demanding part of the fieldwork. And the results were just awesome. Sorry — the geoscientist in me coming out. And it showed this amazing trend. You see, the river starts off cold. It then heats up, cools back down, heats up, cools back down, heats up again, and then has this beautiful decay curve until it smashes into this cold river.Now, I understand not all of you are geothermal scientists, so to put it in more everyday terms: Everyone loves coffee. Yes? Good. Your regular cup of coffee, 54 degrees C, an extra-hot one, well, 60. So, put in coffee shop terms, the boiling river plots like this. There you have your hot coffee. Here you have your extra-hot coffee, and you can see that there's a bit point there where the river is still hotter than even the extra-hot coffee. And these are average water temperatures. We took these in the dry season to ensure the purest geothermal temperatures.But there's a magic number here that's not being shown, and that number is 47 degrees C, because that's where things start to hurt, and I know this from very personal experience. Above that temperature, you don't want to get in that water. You need to be careful. It can be deadly.I've seen all sorts of animals fall in, and what's shocking to me, is the process is pretty much the same. So they fall in and the first thing to go are the eyes. Eyes, apparently, cook very quickly. They turn this milky-white color. The stream is carrying them. They're trying to swim out, but their meat is cooking on the bone because it's so hot. So they're losing power, losing power, until finally they get to a point where hot water goes into their mouths and they cook from the inside out.(Laughter)A bit sadistic, aren't we? Jeez. Leave them marinating for a little longer. What's, again, amazing are these temperatures. They're similar to things that I've seen on volcanoes all over the world and even super-volcanoes like Yellowstone.But here's the thing: the data is showing that the boiling river exists independent of volcanism. It's neither magmatic or volcanic in origin, and again, over 700 kilometers away from the nearest volcanic center.How can a boiling river exist like this? I've asked geothermal experts and volcanologists for years, and I'm still unable to find another non-volcanic geothermal system of this magnitude. It's unique. It's special on a global scale. So, still — how does it work? Where do we get this heat? There's still more research to be done to better constrain the problem and better understand the system, but from what the data is telling us now, it looks to be the result of a large hydrothermal system.Basically, it works like this: So, the deeper you go into the earth, the hotter it gets. We refer to this as the geothermal gradient. The waters could be coming from as far away as glaciers in the Andes, then seeping down deep into the earth and coming out to form the boiling river after getting heated up from the geothermal gradient, all due to this unique geologic setting.Now, we found that in and around the river — this is working with colleagues from National Geographic, Dr. Spencer Wells, and Dr. Jon Eisen from UC Davis — we genetically sequenced the extremophile lifeforms living in and around the river, and have found new lifeforms, unique species living in the boiling river.But again, despite all of these studies, all of these discoveries and the legends, a question remains: What is the significance of the boiling river? What is the significance of this stationary cloud that always hovers over this patch of jungle? And what is the significance of a detail in a childhood legend?To the shaman and his community, it's a sacred site. To me, as a geoscientist, it's a unique geothermal phenomenon. But to the illegal loggers and cattle farmers, it's just another resource to exploit. And to the Peruvian government, it's just another stretch of unprotected land ready for development.My goal is to ensure that whoever controls this land understands the boiling river's uniqueness and significance. Because that's the question, one of significance. And the thing there is, we define significance. It's us. We have that power. We are the ones who draw that line between the sacred and the trivial. And in this age, where everything seems mapped, measured and studied, in this age of information, I remind you all that discoveries are not just made in the black void of the unknown but in the white noise of overwhelming data.There remains so much to explore. We live in an incredible world. So go out. Be curious. Because we do live in a world where shamans still sing to the spirits of the jungle, where rivers do boil and where legends do come to life.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andres_ruzo_the_mythical_boiling_river_of_the_amazon
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"When I was first learning to meditate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath, and when my mind wandered, to bring it back.Sounded simple enough. Yet I'd sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirts in the middle of winter. I'd take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work. Actually, it was exhausting. The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important.So why is it so hard to pay attention? Well, studies show that even when we're really trying to pay attention to something — like maybe this talk — at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed.So what's going on here? It turns out that we're fighting one of the most evolutionarily-conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that's conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man.This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement, and basically goes like this. We see some food that looks good, our brain says, ""Calories! ... Survival!"" We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, ""Remember what you're eating and where you found it."" We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward.Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, ""You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why don't you try eating something good so you'll feel better?"" We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we're mad or sad, we feel better.Same process, just a different trigger. Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal — feeling sad — triggers that urge to eat.Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids outside smoking and we think, ""Hey, I want to be cool."" So we start smoking. The Marlboro Man wasn't a dork, and that was no accident. See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit. So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet.Now, with these same brain processes, we've gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world.So back to my breath. What if instead of fighting our brains, or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural, reward-based learning process ... but added a twist? What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience?I'll give you an example. In my lab, we studied whether mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. Now, just like trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. And the majority of them had tried this before and failed — on average, six times.Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. In fact, we even told them to smoke. What? Yeah, we said, ""Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it's like when you do.""And what did they notice? Well here's an example from one of our smokers. She said, ""Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!"" Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that's why she joined our program. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit.(Laughter)Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. She started to become disenchanted with her behavior.Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn't smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. We call this cognitive control. We're using cognition to control our behavior. Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn't that helpful.Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. We're much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we're stressed out or tired, even though we know it's not going to be helpful. We just can't help ourselves.When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important. Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level — to know it in our bones so we don't have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. We're just less interested in doing it in the first place.And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors, becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go.This isn't to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones.The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment. This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding.What does curiosity feel like? It feels good. And what happens when we get curious? We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations — oh, there's tightness, there's tension, there's restlessness — and that these body sensations come and go. These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on.In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. We become this inner scientist where we're eagerly awaiting that next data point.Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking. So it actually works.And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride.In contrast, when we let go — step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what's happening — this same brain region quiets down.Now we're testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that's driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors.Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory? We can deliver these tools to peoples' fingertips in the contexts that matter most. So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises.So if you don't smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you're bored, or you're trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you're driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity, just be curiously aware of what's happening in your body and mind in that moment. It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops ... or step out of it.Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better — notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/judson_brewer_a_simple_way_to_break_a_bad_habit
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"You may never have heard of Kenema, Sierra Leone or Arua, Nigeria. But I know them as two of the most extraordinary places on earth.In hospitals there, there's a community of nurses, physicians and scientists that have been quietly battling one of the deadliest threats to humanity for years: Lassa virus. Lassa virus is a lot like Ebola. It can cause a severe fever and can often be fatal. But these individuals, they risk their lives every day to protect the individuals in their communities, and by doing so, protect us all.But one of the most extraordinary things I learned about them on one of my first visits out there many years ago was that they start each morning — these challenging, extraordinary days on the front lines — by singing. They gather together, and they show their joy. They show their spirit. And over the years, from year after year as I've visited them and they've visited me, I get to gather with them and I sing and we write and we love it, because it reminds us that we're not just there to pursue science together; we're bonded through a shared humanity.And that of course, as you can imagine, becomes extremely important, even essential, as things begin to change. And that changed a great deal in March of 2014, when the Ebola outbreak was declared in Guinea. This is the first outbreak in West Africa, near the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia. And it was frightening, frightening for us all. We had actually suspected for some time that Lassa and Ebola were more widespread than thought, and we thought it could one day come to Kenema.And so members of my team immediately went out and joined Dr. Humarr Khan and his team there, and we set up diagnostics to be able to have sensitive molecular tests to pick up Ebola if it came across the border and into Sierra Leone. We'd already set up this kind of capacity for Lassa virus, we knew how to do it, the team is outstanding. We just had to give them the tools and place to survey for Ebola.And unfortunately, that day came. On May 23, 2014, a woman checked into the maternity ward at the hospital, and the team ran those important molecular tests and they identified the first confirmed case of Ebola in Sierra Leone. This was an exceptional work that was done. They were able to diagnose the case immediately, to safely treat the patient and to begin to do contact tracing to follow what was going on. It could've stopped something. But by the time that day came, the outbreak had already been breeding for months. With hundreds of cases, it had already eclipsed all previous outbreaks. And it came into Sierra Leone not as that singular case, but as a tidal wave.We had to work with the international community, with the Ministry of Health, with Kenema, to begin to deal with the cases, as the next week brought 31, then 92, then 147 cases — all coming to Kenema, one of the only places in Sierra Leone that could deal with this.And we worked around the clock trying to do everything we could, trying to help the individuals, trying to get attention, but we also did one other simple thing. From that specimen that we take from a patient's blood to detect Ebola, we can discard it, obviously. The other thing we can do is, actually, put in a chemical and deactivate it, so just place it into a box and ship it across the ocean, and that's what we did. We sent it to Boston, where my team works. And we also worked around the clock doing shift work, day after day, and we quickly generated 99 genomes of the Ebola virus. This is the blueprint — the genome of a virus is the blueprint. We all have one. It says everything that makes up us, and it tells us so much information.The results of this kind of work are simple and they're powerful. We could actually take these 99 different viruses, look at them and compare them, and we could see, actually, compared to three genomes that had been previously published from Guinea, we could show that the outbreak emerged in Guinea months before, once into the human population, and from there had been transmitting from human to human. Now, that's incredibly important when you're trying to figure out how to intervene, but the important thing is contact tracing. We also could see that as the virus was moving between humans, it was mutating. And each of those mutations are so important, because the diagnostics, the vaccines, the therapies that we're using, are all based on that genome sequence, fundamentally — that's what drives it. And so global health experts would need to respond, would have to develop, to recalibrate everything that they were doing.But the way that science works, the position I was in at that point is, I had the data, and I could have worked in a silo for many, many months, analyzed the data carefully, slowly, submitted the paper for publication, gone through a few back-and-forths, and then finally when the paper came out, might release that data. That's the way the status quo works.Well, that was not going to work at this point, right? We had friends on the front lines and to us it was just obvious that what we needed is help, lots of help. So the first thing we did is, as soon as the sequences came off the machines, we published it to the web. We just released it to the whole world and said, ""Help us."" And help came.Before we knew it, we were being contacted from people all over, surprised to see the data out there and released. Some of the greatest viral trackers in the world were suddenly part of our community. We were working together in this virtual way, sharing, regular calls, communications, trying to follow the virus minute by minute, to see ways that we could stop it.And there are so many ways that we can form communities like that. Everybody, particularly when the outbreak started to expand globally, was reaching out to learn, to participate, to engage. Everybody wants to play a part. The amount of human capacity out there is just amazing, and the Internet connects us all. And could you imagine that instead of being frightened of each other, that we all just said, ""Let's do this. Let's work together, and let's make this happen.""But the problem is that the data that all of us are using, Googling on the web, is just too limited to do what we need to do. And so many opportunities get missed when that happens. So in the early part of the epidemic from Kenema, we'd had 106 clinical records from patients, and we once again made that publicly available to the world. And in our own lab, we could show that you could take those 106 records, we could train computers to predict the prognosis for Ebola patients to near 100 percent accuracy. And we made an app that could release that, to make that available to health-care workers in the field.But 106 is just not enough to make it powerful, to validate it. So we were waiting for more data to release that. and the data has still not come. We are still waiting, tweaking away, in silos rather than working together. And this just — we can't accept that. Right? You, all of you, cannot accept that. It's our lives on the line. And in fact, actually, many lives were lost, many health-care workers, including beloved colleagues of mine, five colleagues: Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Dr. Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Mohamed Fullah. These are just five of many health-care workers at Kenema and beyond that died while the world waited and while we all worked, quietly and separately.See, Ebola, like all threats to humanity, it's fueled by mistrust and distraction and division. When we build barriers amongst ourselves and we fight amongst ourselves, the virus thrives. But unlike all threats to humanity, Ebola is one where we're actually all the same. We're all in this fight together. Ebola on one person's doorstep could soon be on ours. And so in this place with the same vulnerabilities, the same strengths, the same fears, the same hopes, I hope that we work together with joy.A graduate student of mine was reading a book about Sierra Leone, and she discovered that the word ""Kenema,"" the hospital that we work at and the city where we work in Sierra Leone, is named after the Mende word for ""clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze."" That was really profound for us, because without knowing it, we'd always felt that in order to honor the individuals in Kenema where we worked, we had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together. And we have to do that. We all have to demand that of ourselves and others — to be open to each other when an outbreak happens, to fight in this fight together. Because this is not the first outbreak of Ebola, it will not be the last, and there are many other microbes out there that are lying in wait, like Lassa virus and others. And the next time this happens, it could happen in a city of millions, it could start there. It could be something that's transmitted through the air. It could even be disseminated intentionally. And I know that that is frightening, I understand that, but I know also, and this experience shows us, that we have the technology and we have the capacity to win this thing, to win this and have the upper hand over viruses. But we can only do it if we do it together and we do it with joy.So for Dr. Khan and for all of those who sacrificed their lives on the front lines in this fight with us always, let us be in this fight with them always. And let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pardis_sabeti_how_we_ll_fight_the_next_deadly_virus
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"Hello. My name is Matthew Williams, and I am a champion. I have won medals in three different sports and national games in Canada, competed at the international level in basketball and was proud to represent Canada on the world stage.(Applause)I train five days a week for basketball and speed skating, work with top quality coaches and mental performance consultants to be at my best in my sport. By the way, all that is through Special Olympics. Does that change the way you think of me and my accomplishments?The world does not see all people like me as champions. Not long ago, people like me were shunned and hidden away. There has been lots of change since Special Olympics began in 1968, but in too many cases, people with intellectual disabilities are invisible to the wider population. People use the r-word in front of me, and they think it doesn't matter. That's the word ""retard"" or ""retarded"" used in a derogatory manner. They're not thinking about how much it hurts me and my friends.I don't want you to think I'm here because I'm a charity case. I am here because there is still a big problem with the way many people see individuals with intellectual disabilities, or, too often, how they don't see them at all.Did you know the World Games happened this year? I was one of over 6,500 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 165 countries who competed in LA. There was over 62,000 spectators watching opening ceremonies, and there was live coverage on TSN and ESPN. Did you even know that happened?What do you think of when you see someone like me? I am here today to challenge you to look at us as equals.Special Olympics transforms the self-identity of athletes with intellectual disabilities and the perceptions of everyone watching. For those of you who aren't familiar, Special Olympics is for athletes with intellectual disabilities. Special Olympics is separate from the Paralympics and Olympics. We offer high-quality, year round sports programs for people with intellectual disabilities that changes lives and perceptions. This movement has changed my life and those of so many others. And it has changed the way the world sees people with intellectual disabilities.I was born with epilepsy and an intellectual disability. Growing up, I played hockey until I was 12 years old. The older I got, the more I felt it was harder to keep up with everyone else, and I was angry and frustrated. For a while, I did not play any sports, didn't have many friends and felt left out and sad.There was a time when people with intellectual disabilities were hidden away from society. No one thought they could participate in sports, let alone be a valued member of society. In the 1960s, Dr. Frank Hayden, a scientist at the University of Toronto, was studying the effects of regular exercise on the fitness levels of children with intellectual disabilities. Using rigorous scientific research, Dr. Hayden and other researchers came to the conclusion that it was simply the lack of opportunity to participate that caused their fitness levels to suffer.Lots of people doubted that people with intellectual disabilities could benefit from fitness programs and sports competition opportunities. But pioneers like Dr. Hayden and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of Special Olympics, persevered, and Special Olympics athletes have proved them right four and a half million times over.(Applause)Before I joined Special Olympics, I was nervous because I was young, shy, not confident and didn't have many friends. When I got there, though, everyone was very encouraging, supportive, and let me be myself without being judged. Now, I am a basketball player and speed skater who has competed at provincial, national games, and this year made it all the way to the World Summer Games in LA, where I was part of the first ever Canadian basketball team to compete at World Games.(Applause)I am one of more than four and a half million athletes around the globe, and I've heard so many similar stories. Being Special Olympics athletes restores our pride and dignity.Special Olympics also addresses critical health needs. Studies have shown that, on average, men with intellectual disabilities die 13 years younger than men without, and women with intellectual disabilities die 20 years younger than women without. Special Olympics keeps us healthy by getting us active and participating in sport. Also, our coaches teach us about nutrition and health. Special Olympics also provides free health screening for athletes who have difficulty communicating with their doctor or accessing health care.At the 2015 World Summer Games, my Team Canada teammates and I played the Nigerian basketball team. The day before our game, the Nigerian basketball team went to the World Games Healthy Athlete screening, where seven of 10 members were given hearing aids for free and got to hear clearly for the first time.(Applause)The change in them was amazing. They were more excited, happy and confident, because their coach could vocally communicate with them. And they were emotional because they could hear the sounds of the basketball, the sounds of the whistle and the cheering fans in the stands — sounds that we take for granted. Special Olympics is transforming more than just the athlete in their sport. Special Olympics is transforming their lives off the field. This year, research findings showed that nearly half of the adults in the US don't know a single person with an intellectual disability, and the 44 percent of Americans who don't have personal contact with intellectual disabilities are significantly less accepting and positive.Then there's the r-word, proving that people with intellectual disabilities are still invisible to far too many people. People use it as a casual term or an insult. It was tweeted more than nine million times last year, and it is deeply hurtful to me and my four and a half million fellow athletes around the planet. People don't think it's insulting, but it is. As my fellow athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens wrote in an open letter to a political pundit who used the r-word as an insult, ""Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you walk away with your heart unchanged.""(Applause)This year, at the 2015 World Summer Games, people lined up for hours to get into the final night of powerlifting competition. So it was standing room only when my teammate Jackie Barrett, the Newfoundland Moose, deadlifted 655 pounds and lifted 611 pounds in the squat —(Applause)setting huge new records for Special Olympics. Jackie is a record holder among all powerlifters in Newfoundland — not just Special Olympics, all powerlifters. Jackie was a huge star in LA, and ESPN live-tweeted his record-breaking lifts and were wowed by his performance.Fifty years ago, few imagined individuals with intellectual disabilities could do anything like that. This year, 60,000 spectators filled the famous LA Memorial Coliseum to watch the opening ceremonies of World Games and cheer athletes from 165 countries around the world. Far from being hidden away, we were cheered and celebrated. Special Olympics teaches athletes to be confident and proud of themselves. Special Olympics teaches the world that people with intellectual disabilities deserve respect and inclusion.(Applause)Now, I have dreams and achievements in my sport, great coaches, respect and dignity, better health, and I am pursuing a career as a personal trainer.(Applause)I am no longer hidden, bullied and I am here doing a TED Talk.(Applause)The world is a different place because of Special Olympics, but there is still farther to go. So the next time you see someone with an intellectual disability, I hope you will see their ability. The next time someone uses the r-word near you, I hope you will tell them how much it hurts. I hope you will think about getting involved with Special Olympics.(Applause)I would like to leave you with one final thought. Nelson Mandela said, ""Sports has the power to change the world."" Special Olympics is changing the world by transforming four and a half million athletes and giving us a place to be confident, meet friends, not be judged and get to feel like and be champions.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/matthew_williams_special_olympics_let_me_be_myself_a_champion
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"Our ability to create and sustain economic growth is the defining challenge of our time.Of course there are other challenges — health care, disease burdens and pandemics, environmental challenges and, of course, radicalized terrorism. However, to the extent that we can actually solve the economic growth challenge, it will take us a long way to solving the challenges that I've just elucidated.More importantly, unless and until we solve economic growth and create sustainable, long-term economic growth, we'll be unable to address the seemingly intractable challenges that continue to pervade the globe today, whether it's health care, education or economic development.The fundamental question is this: How are we going to create economic growth in advanced and developed economies like the United States and across Europe at a time when they continue to struggle to create economic growth after the financial crisis?They continue to underperform and to see an erosion in the three key drivers of economic growth: capital, labor and productivity. In particular, these developed economies continue to see debts and deficits, the decline and erosion of both the quality and quantity of labor and they also see productivity stalling.In a similar vein, how are we going to create economic growth in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives and where, on average, 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25? In these countries, it is essential that they grow at a minimum of seven percent a year in order to put a dent in poverty and to double per capita incomes in one generation. And yet today, the largest emerging economies — countries with at least 50 million people — continue to struggle to reach that seven percent magic mark. Worse than that, countries like India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and even China are falling below that seven percent number and, in many cases, actually regressing.Economic growth matters. With economic growth, countries and societies enter into a virtuous cycle of upward mobility, opportunity and improved living standards. Without growth, countries contract and atrophy, not just in the annals of economic statistics but also in the meaning of life and how lives are lived. Economic growth matters powerfully for the individual. If growth wanes, the risk to human progress and the risk of political and social instability rises, and societies become dimmer, coarser and smaller.The context matters. And countries in emerging markets do not need to grow at the same rates as developed countries.Now, I know some of you in this room find this to be a risky proposition. There are some people here who will turn around and be quite disillusioned by what's happened around the world and basically ascribe that to economic growth. You worry about the overpopulation of the planet. And looking at the UN's recent statistics and projections that the world will have 11 billion people on the planet before it plateaus in 2100, you're concerned about what that does to natural resources — arable land, potable water, energy and minerals. You are also concerned about the degradation of the environment. And you worry about how man, embodied in the corporate globalist, has become greedy and corrupt.But I'm here to tell you today that economic growth has been the backbone of changes in living standards of millions of people around the world. And more importantly, it's not just economic growth that has been driven by capitalism.The definition of capitalism, very simply put, is that the factors of production, such as trade and industry, capital and labor, are left in the hands of the private sector and not the state.It's really essential here that we understand that fundamentally the critique is not for economic growth per se but what has happened to capitalism. And to the extent that we need to create economic growth over the long term, we're going to have to pursue it with a better form of economic stance.Economic growth needs capitalism, but it needs it to work properly. And as I mentioned a moment ago, the core of the capitalist system has been defined by private actors. And even this, however, is a very simplistic dichotomy. Capitalism: good; non-capitalism: bad. When in practical experience, capitalism is much more of a spectrum. And we have countries such as China, which have practiced more state capitalism, and we have countries like the Unites States which are more market capitalist.Our efforts to critique the capitalist system, however, have tended to focus on countries like China that are in fact not blatantly market capitalism.However, there is a real reason and real concern for us to now focus our attentions on purer forms of capitalism, particularly those embodied by the United States. This is really important because this type of capitalism has increasingly been afforded the critique that it is now fostering corruption and, worse still, it's increasing income inequality — the idea that the few are benefiting at the expense of the many.The two really critical questions that we need to address is how can we fix capitalism so that it can help create economic growth but at the same time can help to address social ills.In order to think about that framing, we have to ask ourselves, how does capitalism work today? Very simplistically, capitalism is set on the basis of an individual utility maximizer — a selfish individual who goes after what he or she wants. And only after they've maximized their utility do they then decide it's important to provide support to other social contracts. Of course, in this system governments do tax, and they use part of their revenues to fund social programs, recognizing that government's role is not just regulation but also to be arbiter of social goods. But nevertheless, this framework — this two-stage framework — is the basis from which we must now start to think about how we can improve the capitalist model.I would argue that there are two sides to this challenge. First of all, we can draw on the right-wing policies to see what could be beneficial for us to think about how we can improve capitalism.In particular, right-leaning policies have tended to focus on things like conditional transfers, where we pay and reward people for doing the things that we actually think can help enhance economic growth. For example, sending children to school, parents could earn money for that, or getting their children inoculated or immunized, parents could get paid for doing that.Now, quite apart from the debate on whether or not we should be paying people to do what we think they should do anyway, the fact of the matter is that pay for performance has actually yielded some positive results in places like Mexico, in Brazil and also in pilot programs in New York.But there are also benefits and significant changes underway on left-leaning policies. Arguments that government should expand its role and responsibility so that it's not so narrowly defined and that government should be much more of an arbiter of the factors of production have become commonplace with the success of China. But also we've started to have debates about how the role of the private sector should move away from just being a profit motive and really be more engaged in the delivery of social programs. Things like the corporate social responsibility programs, albeit small in scale, are moving in that right direction. Of course, left-leaning policies have also tended to blur the lines between government, NGOs and private sector.Two very good examples of this are the 19th-century United States, when the infrastructure rollout was really about public-private partnerships. More recently, of course, the advent of the Internet has also proven to the world that public and private can work together for the betterment of society.My fundamental message to you is this: We cannot continue to try and solve the world economic growth challenges by being dogmatic and being unnecessarily ideological. In order to create sustainable, long-term economic growth and solve the challenges and social ills that continue to plague the world today, we're going to have to be more broad-minded about what might work.Ultimately, we have to recognize that ideology is the enemy of growth.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: I want to ask a couple of questions, Dambisa, because one could react to your last sentence by saying growth is also an ideology, it's possibly the dominant ideology of our times. What do you say to those who react that way?DM: Well, I think that that's completely legitimate, and I think that we're already having that discussion. There's a lot of work going on around happiness and other metrics being used for measuring people's success and improvements in living standards. And so I think that we should be open to what could deliver improvements in people's living standards and continue to reduce poverty around the world.BG: So you're basically pleading for rehabilitating growth, but the only way for that happen without compromising the capacity of the earth, to take us on a long journey, is for economic growth somehow to decouple from the underlying use of resources. Do you see that happening?DM: Well, I think that I'm more optimistic about human ability and ingenuity. I think if we start to constrain ourselves using the finite, scarce and depleting resources that we know today, we could get quite negative and quite concerned about the way the world is.However, we've seen the Club of Rome, we've seen previous claims that the world would be running out of resources, and it's not to argue that those things are not valid. But I think, with ingenuity we could see desalination, I think we could reinvest in energy, so that we can actually get better outcomes. And so in that sense, I'm much more optimistic about what humans can do.BG: The thing that strikes me about your proposals for rehabilitating growth and taking a different direction is that you're kind of suggesting to fix capitalism with more capitalism — with putting a price tag on good behavior as incentive or developing a bigger role for business in social issues. Is that what you're suggesting?DM: I'm suggesting we have to be open-minded. I think it is absolutely the case that traditional models of economic growth are not working the way we would like them to. And I think it's no accident that today the largest economy in the world, the United States, has democracy, liberal democracy, as it's core political stance and it has free market capitalism — to the extent that it is free — free market capitalism as its economic stance. The second largest economy is China. It has deprioritized democracy and it has state capitalism, which is a completely different model. These two countries, completely different political models and completely different economic models, and yet they have the same income inequality number measured as a Gini coefficient.I think those are the debates we should have, because it's not clear at all what model we should be adopting, and I think there needs to be much more discourse and much more humility about what we know and what we don't know.BG: One last question. The COP21 is going on in Paris. If you could send a tweet to all the heads of state and heads of delegations there, what would you say?DM: Again, I would be very much about being open-minded. As you're aware, the issues around the environmental concerns have been on the agenda many times now — in Copenhagen, '72 in Stockholm — and we keep revisiting these issues partly because there is not a fundamental agreement, in fact there's a schism between what the developed countries believe and want and what emerging market countries want. Emerging market countries need to continue to create economic growth so that we don't have political uncertainty in the those countries. Developed countries recognize that they have a real, important responsibility not only just to manage their CO2 emissions and some of the degradation that they're contributing to the world, but also as trendsetters in R&D. And so they have to come to the table as well. But in essence, it cannot be a situation where we start ascribing policies to the emerging markets without developed countries themselves also taking quite a swipe at what they're doing both in demand and supply in developed markets.BG: Dambisa, thank you for coming to TED. DM: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dambisa_moyo_economic_growth_has_stalled_let_s_fix_it
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"We've evolved with tools, and tools have evolved with us. Our ancestors created these hand axes 1.5 million years ago, shaping them to not only fit the task at hand but also their hand.However, over the years, tools have become more and more specialized. These sculpting tools have evolved through their use, and each one has a different form which matches its function. And they leverage the dexterity of our hands in order to manipulate things with much more precision. But as tools have become more and more complex, we need more complex controls to control them. And so designers have become very adept at creating interfaces that allow you to manipulate parameters while you're attending to other things, such as taking a photograph and changing the focus or the aperture.But the computer has fundamentally changed the way we think about tools because computation is dynamic. So it can do a million different things and run a million different applications. However, computers have the same static physical form for all of these different applications and the same static interface elements as well. And I believe that this is fundamentally a problem, because it doesn't really allow us to interact with our hands and capture the rich dexterity that we have in our bodies. And my belief is that, then, we must need new types of interfaces that can capture these rich abilities that we have and that can physically adapt to us and allow us to interact in new ways. And so that's what I've been doing at the MIT Media Lab and now at Stanford.So with my colleagues, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, we created inFORM, where the interface can actually come off the screen and you can physically manipulate it. Or you can visualize 3D information physically and touch it and feel it to understand it in new ways. Or you can interact through gestures and direct deformations to sculpt digital clay. Or interface elements can arise out of the surface and change on demand. And the idea is that for each individual application, the physical form can be matched to the application. And I believe this represents a new way that we can interact with information, by making it physical.So the question is, how can we use this? Traditionally, urban planners and architects build physical models of cities and buildings to better understand them. So with Tony Tang at the Media Lab, we created an interface built on inFORM to allow urban planners to design and view entire cities. And now you can walk around it, but it's dynamic, it's physical, and you can also interact directly. Or you can look at different views, such as population or traffic information, but it's made physical.We also believe that these dynamic shape displays can really change the ways that we remotely collaborate with people. So when we're working together in person, I'm not only looking at your face but I'm also gesturing and manipulating objects, and that's really hard to do when you're using tools like Skype. And so using inFORM, you can reach out from the screen and manipulate things at a distance. So we used the pins of the display to represent people's hands, allowing them to actually touch and manipulate objects at a distance. And you can also manipulate and collaborate on 3D data sets as well, so you can gesture around them as well as manipulate them. And that allows people to collaborate on these new types of 3D information in a richer way than might be possible with traditional tools. And so you can also bring in existing objects, and those will be captured on one side and transmitted to the other. Or you can have an object that's linked between two places, so as I move a ball on one side, the ball moves on the other as well. And so we do this by capturing the remote user using a depth-sensing camera like a Microsoft Kinect.Now, you might be wondering how does this all work, and essentially, what it is, is 900 linear actuators that are connected to these mechanical linkages that allow motion down here to be propagated in these pins above. So it's not that complex compared to what's going on at CERN, but it did take a long time for us to build it. And so we started with a single motor, a single linear actuator, and then we had to design a custom circuit board to control them. And then we had to make a lot of them. And so the problem with having 900 of something is that you have to do every step 900 times. And so that meant that we had a lot of work to do. So we sort of set up a mini-sweatshop in the Media Lab and brought undergrads in and convinced them to do ""research"" —(Laughter)and had late nights watching movies, eating pizza and screwing in thousands of screws. You know — research.(Laughter)But anyway, I think that we were really excited by the things that inFORM allowed us to do. Increasingly, we're using mobile devices, and we interact on the go. But mobile devices, just like computers, are used for so many different applications. So you use them to talk on the phone, to surf the web, to play games, to take pictures or even a million different things. But again, they have the same static physical form for each of these applications. And so we wanted to know how can we take some of the same interactions that we developed for inFORM and bring them to mobile devices.So at Stanford, we created this haptic edge display, which is a mobile device with an array of linear actuators that can change shape, so you can feel in your hand where you are as you're reading a book. Or you can feel in your pocket new types of tactile sensations that are richer than the vibration. Or buttons can emerge from the side that allow you to interact where you want them to be. Or you can play games and have actual buttons. And so we were able to do this by embedding 40 small, tiny linear actuators inside the device, and that allow you not only to touch them but also back-drive them as well.But we've also looked at other ways to create more complex shape change. So we've used pneumatic actuation to create a morphing device where you can go from something that looks a lot like a phone ... to a wristband on the go. And so together with Ken Nakagaki at the Media Lab, we created this new high-resolution version that uses an array of servomotors to change from interactive wristband to a touch-input device to a phone.(Laughter)And we're also interested in looking at ways that users can actually deform the interfaces to shape them into the devices that they want to use. So you can make something like a game controller, and then the system will understand what shape it's in and change to that mode.So, where does this point? How do we move forward from here? I think, really, where we are today is in this new age of the Internet of Things, where we have computers everywhere — they're in our pockets, they're in our walls, they're in almost every device that you'll buy in the next five years. But what if we stopped thinking about devices and think instead about environments? And so how can we have smart furniture or smart rooms or smart environments or cities that can adapt to us physically, and allow us to do new ways of collaborating with people and doing new types of tasks?So for the Milan Design Week, we created TRANSFORM, which is an interactive table-scale version of these shape displays, which can move physical objects on the surface; for example, reminding you to take your keys. But it can also transform to fit different ways of interacting. So if you want to work, then it can change to sort of set up your work system. And so as you bring a device over, it creates all the affordances you need and brings other objects to help you accomplish those goals.So, in conclusion, I really think that we need to think about a new, fundamentally different way of interacting with computers. We need computers that can physically adapt to us and adapt to the ways that we want to use them and really harness the rich dexterity that we have of our hands, and our ability to think spatially about information by making it physical. But looking forward, I think we need to go beyond this, beyond devices, to really think about new ways that we can bring people together, and bring our information into the world, and think about smart environments that can adapt to us physically. So with that, I will leave you.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sean_follmer_shape_shifting_tech_will_change_work_as_we_know_it
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"On January 26, 2013, a band of al-Qaeda militants entered the ancient city of Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. There, they set fire to a medieval library of 30,000 manuscripts written in Arabic and several African languages and ranging in subject from astronomy to geography, history to medicine, including one book which records perhaps the first treatment for male erectile dysfunction. Unknown in the West, this was the collected wisdom of an entire continent, the voice of Africa at a time when Africa was thought not to have a voice at all. The mayor of Bamako, who witnessed the event, called the burning of the manuscripts ""a crime against world cultural heritage."" And he was right — or he would have been, if it weren't for the fact that he was also lying.In fact, just before, African scholars had collected a random assortment of old books and left them out for the terrorists to burn. Today, the collection lies hidden in Bamako, the capital of Mali, moldering in the high humidity. What was rescued by ruse is now once again in jeopardy, this time by climate.But Africa, and the far-flung corners of the world, are not the only places, or even the main places in which manuscripts that could change the history of world culture are in jeopardy. Several years ago, I conducted a survey of European research libraries and discovered that, at the barest minimum, there are 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500 that are illegible because of water damage, fading, mold and chemical reagents. The real number is likely double that, and that doesn't even count Renaissance manuscripts and modern manuscripts and cultural heritage objects such as maps.What if there were a technology that could recover these lost and unknown works? Imagine worldwide how a trove of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts could radically transform our knowledge of the past. Imagine what unknown classics we would discover which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music — or, more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities, building new bridges between people and culture. These are the questions that transformed me from a medieval scholar, a reader of texts, into a textual scientist.What an unsatisfying word ""reader"" is. For me, it conjures up images of passivity, of someone sitting idly in an armchair waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel. How much better to be a participant in the past, an adventurer in an undiscovered country, searching for the hidden text. As an academic, I was a mere reader. I read and taught the same classics that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years — Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Petrarch — and with every scholarly article that I published I added to human knowledge in ever-diminishing slivers of insight. What I wanted to be was an archaeologist of the past, a discoverer of literature, an Indiana Jones without the whip — or, actually, with the whip.(Laughter) And I wanted it not just for myself but I wanted it for my students as well.And so six years ago, I changed the direction of my career. At the time, I was working on ""The Chess of Love,"" the last important long poem of the European Middle Ages never to have been edited. And it wasn't edited because it existed in only one manuscript which was so badly damaged during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II that generations of scholars had pronounced it lost. For five years, I had been working with an ultraviolet lamp trying to recover traces of the writing and I'd gone about as far as technology at the time could actually take me.And so I did what many people do. I went online, and there I learned about how multispectral imaging had been used to recover two lost treatises of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes from a 13th-century palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript which has been erased and overwritten.And so, out of the blue, I decided to write to the lead imaging scientist on the Archimedes palimpsest project, Professor Roger Easton, with a plan and a plea. And to my surprise, he actually wrote back. With his help, I was able to win a grant from the US government to build a transportable, multispectral imaging lab, And with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess into a new medieval classic.So how does multispectral imaging actually work? Well, the idea behind multispectral imaging is something that anyone who is familiar with infrared night vision goggles will immediately appreciate: that what we can see in the visible spectrum of light is only a tiny fraction of what's actually there. The same is true with invisible writing. Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared, and these are shown down onto the manuscript from above from banks of LEDs, and another multispectral light source which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript. Up to 35 images per sequence per leaf are imaged this way using a high-powered digital camera equipped with a lens which is made out of quartz. There are about five of these in the world. And once we capture these images, we feed them through statistical algorithms to further enhance and clarify them, using software which was originally designed for satellite images and used by people like geospatial scientists and the CIA.The results can be spectacular. You may already have heard of what's been done for the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are slowly gelatinizing. Using infrared, we've been able to read even the darkest corners of the Dead Sea Scrolls. You may not be aware, however, of other Biblical texts that are in jeopardy.Here, for example, is a leaf from a manuscript that we imaged, which is perhaps the most valuable Christian Bible in the world. The Codex Vercellensis is the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin, and it dates from the first half of the fourth century. This is the closest we can come to the Bible at the time of the foundation of Christendom under Emperor Constantine, and at the time also of the Council of Nicaea, when the basic creed of Christianity was being agreed upon. This manuscript, unfortunately, has been very badly damaged, and it's damaged because for centuries it had been used and handled in swearing in ceremonies in the church. In fact, that purple splotch that you see in the upper left hand corner is Aspergillus, which is a fungus which originates in the unwashed hands of a person with tuberculosis. Our imaging has enabled me to make the first transcription of this manuscript in 250 years.Having a lab that can travel to collections where it's needed, however, is only part of the solution. The technology is expensive and very rare, and the imaging and image processing skills are esoteric. That means that mounting recoveries is beyond the reach of most researchers and all but the wealthiest institutions. That's why I founded the Lazarus Project, a not-for-profit initiative to bring multispectral imaging to individual researchers and smaller institutions at little or no cost whatsoever. Over the past five years, our team of imaging scientists, scholars and students has travelled to seven different countries and have recovered some of the world's most valuable damaged manuscripts, included the Vercelli Book, which is the oldest book of English, the Black Book of Carmarthen, the oldest book of Welsh, and some of the most valuable earliest Gospels located in what is now the former Soviet Georgia.So, spectral imaging can recover lost texts. More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object, the story of how, when and by whom a text was created, and, sometimes, what the author was thinking at the time he wrote. Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago at the Library of Congress. Curators had noticed that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten. The word overwritten was ""citizens."" Perhaps you can guess what the word underneath was. ""Subjects."" There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson.Or consider the 1491 Martellus Map, which we imaged at Yale's Beinecke Library. This was the map that Columbus likely consulted before he traveled to the New World and which gave him his idea of what Asia looked like and where Japan was located. The problem with this map is that its inks and pigments had so degraded over time that this large, nearly seven-foot map, made the world look like a giant desert. Until now, we had very little idea, detailed idea, that is, of what Columbus knew of the world and how world cultures were represented. The main legend of the map was entirely illegible under normal light. Ultraviolet did very little for it. Multispectral gave us everything. In Asia, we learned of monsters with ears so long that they could cover the creature's entire body. In Africa, about a snake who could cause the ground to smoke. Like starlight, which can convey images of the way the Universe looked in the distant past, so multispectral light can take us back to the first stuttering moments of an object's creation. Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind, the naïvetés, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of the human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us.What about the future? There's so much of the past, and so few people with the skills to rescue it before these objects disappear forever. That's why I have begun to teach this new hybrid discipline that I call ""textual science."" Textual science is a marriage of the traditional skills of a literary scholar — the ability to read old languages and old handwriting, the knowledge of how texts are made in order to be able to place and date them — with new techniques like imaging science, the chemistry of inks and pigments, computer-aided optical character recognition.Last year, a student in my class, a freshman, with a background in Latin and Greek, was image-processing a palimpsest that we had photographed at a famous library in Rome. As he worked, tiny Greek writing began to appear from behind the text. Everyone gathered around, and he read a line from a lost work of the Greek comic dramatist Menander. This was the first time in well over a thousand years that those words had been pronounced aloud. In that moment, he became a scholar.Ladies and gentlemen, that is the future of the past.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gregory_heyworth_how_i_m_discovering_the_secrets_of_ancient_texts
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"So I come from the tallest people on the planet — the Dutch. It hasn't always been this way. In fact, all across the globe, people have been gaining height. In the last 150 years, in developed countries, on average, we have gotten 10 centimeters taller. And scientists have a lot of theories about why this is, but almost all of them involve nutrition, namely the increase of dairy and meat.In the last 50 years, global meat consumption has more than quadrupled, from 71 million tons to 310 million tons. Something similar has been going on with milk and eggs. In every society where incomes have risen, so has protein consumption. And we know that globally, we are getting richer. And as the middle class is on the rise, so is our global population, from 7 billion of us today to 9.7 billion by 2050, which means that by 2050, we are going to need at least 70 percent more protein than what is available to humankind today. And the latest prediction of the UN puts that population number, by the end of this century, at 11 billion, which means that we are going to need a lot more protein.This challenge is staggering — so much so, that recently, a team at Anglia Ruskin Global Sustainability Institute suggested that if we don't change our global policies and food production systems, our societies might actually collapse in the next 30 years.Currently, our ocean serves as the main source of animal protein. Over 2.6 billion people depend on it every single day. At the same time, our global fisheries are two-and-a-half times larger than what our oceans can sustainably support, meaning that humans take far more fish from the ocean than the oceans can naturally replace.WWF recently published a report showing that just in the last 40 years, our global marine life has been slashed in half. And another recent report suggests that of our largest predatory species, such as swordfish and bluefin tuna, over 90 percent has disappeared since the 1950s.And there are a lot of great, sustainable fishing initiatives across the planet working towards better practices and better-managed fisheries. But ultimately, all of these initiatives are working towards keeping current catch constant. It's unlikely, even with the best-managed fisheries, that we are going to be able to take much more from the ocean than we do today.We have to stop plundering our oceans the way we have. We need to alleviate the pressure on it. And we are at a point where if we push much harder for more produce, we might face total collapse. Our current systems are not going to feed a growing global population.So how do we fix this? What's the world going to look like in just 35 short years when there's 2.7 billion more of us sharing the same resources? We could all become vegan. Sounds like a great idea, but it's not realistic and it's impossibly hard to mandate globally.People are eating animal protein whether we like it or not. And suppose we fail to change our ways and continue on the current path, failing to meet demands.The World Health Organization recently reported that 800 million people are suffering from malnutrition and food shortage, which is due to that same growing, global population and the declining access to resources like water, energy and land. It takes very little imagination to picture a world of global unrest, riots and further malnutrition. People are hungry, and we are running dangerously low on natural resources. For so, so many reasons, we need to change our global food production systems.We must do better and there is a solution. And that solution lies in aquaculture — the farming of fish, plants like seaweed, shellfish and crustaceans. As the great ocean hero Jacques Cousteau once said, ""We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters. That's what civilization is all about — farming instead of hunting."" Fish is the last food that we hunt.And why is it that we keep hearing phrases like, ""Life's too short for farmed fish,"" or, ""Wild-caught, of course!"" over fish that we know virtually nothing about? We don't know what it ate during its lifetime, and we don't know what pollution it encounters. And if it was a large predatory species, it might have gone through the coast of Fukushima yesterday. We don't know. Very few people realize the traceability in fisheries never goes beyond the hunter that caught the wild animal.But let's back up for a second and talk about why fish is the best food choice. It's healthy, it prevents heart disease, it provides key amino acids and key fatty acids like Omega-3s, which is very different from almost any other type of meat. And aside from being healthy, it's also a lot more exciting and diverse.Think about it — most animal farming is pretty monotonous. Cow is cow, sheep is sheep, pig's pig, and poultry — turkey, duck, chicken — pretty much sums it up. And then there's 500 species of fish being farmed currently. not that Western supermarkets reflect that on their shelves, but that's beside that point.And you can farm fish in a very healthy manner that's good for us, good for the planet and good for the fish. I know I sound fish-obsessed —(Laughter)Let me explain: My brilliant partner and wife, Amy Novograntz, and I got involved in aquaculture a couple of years ago. We were inspired by Sylvia Earle, who won the TED Prize in 2009. We actually met on Mission Blue I in the Galapagos. Amy was there as the TED Prize Director; me, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands and concerned citizen, love to dive, passion for the oceans.Mission Blue truly changed our lives. We fell in love, got married and we came away really inspired, thinking we really want to do something about ocean conservation — something that was meant to last, that could make a real difference and something that we could do together.Little did we expect that that would lead us to fish farming. But a few months after we got off the boat, we got to a meeting at Conservation International, where the Director General of WorldFish was talking about aquaculture, asking a room full of environmentalists to stop turning from it, realize what was going on and to really get involved because aquaculture has the potential to be just what our oceans and populations need.We were stunned when we heard the stats that we didn't know more about this industry already and excited about the chance to help get it right.And to talk about stats — right now, the amount of fish consumed globally, wild catch and farmed combined, is twice the tonnage of the total amount of beef produced on planet earth last year. Every single fishing vessel combined, small and large, across the globe, together produce about 65 million tons of wild-caught seafood for human consumption.Aquaculture this year, for the first time in history, actually produces more than what we catch from the wild.But now this: Demand is going to go up. In the next 35 years, we are going to need an additional 85 million tons to meet demand, which is one-and-a-half times as much, almost, as what we catch globally out of our oceans. An enormous number.It's safe to assume that that's not going to come from the ocean. It needs to come from farming. And talk about farming — for farming you need resources. As a human needs to eat to grow and stay alive, so does an animal. A cow needs to eat eight to nine pounds of feed and drink almost 8,000 liters of water to create just one pound of meat. Experts agree that it's impossible to farm cows for every inhabitant on this planet. We just don't have enough feed or water.And we can't keep cutting down rain forests for it. And fresh water — planet earth has a very limited supply. We need something more efficient to keep humankind alive on this planet.And now let's compare that with fish farming. You can farm one pound of fish with just one pound of feed, and depending on species, even less. And why is that? Well, that's because fish, first of all, float. They don't need to stand around all day resisting gravity like we do. And most fish are cold-blooded — they don't need to heat themselves. Fish chills.(Laughter)And it needs very little water, which is counterintuitive, but as we say, it swims in it but it hardly drinks it. Fish are the most resource-efficient animal protein available to humankind, aside from insects.How much we've learned since. For example, on top of that 65 million tons that's annually caught for human consumption, there's an additional 30 million tons caught for animal feed, mostly sardines and anchovies for the aquaculture industry that's turned into fish meal and fish oil.This is madness. Sixty-five percent of these fisheries, globally, are badly managed. Some of the worst issues of our time are connected to it. It's destroying our oceans. The worst slavery issues imaginable are connected to it. Recently, an article came out of Stanford saying that if 50 percent of the world's aquaculture industry would stop using fish meal, our oceans would be saved. Now think about that for a minute.Now, we know that the oceans have far more problems — they have pollution, there's acidification, coral reef destruction and so on. But it underlines the impact of our fisheries, and it underlines how interconnected everything is. Fisheries, aquaculture, deforestation, climate change, food security and so on.In the search for alternatives, the industry, on a massive scale, has reverted to plant-based alternatives like soy, industrial chicken waste, blood meal from slaughterhouses and so on.And we understand where these choices come from, but this is not the right approach. It's not sustainable, it's not healthy. Have you ever seen a chicken at the bottom of the ocean? Of course not. If you feed salmon soy with nothing else, it literally explodes. Salmon is a carnivore, it has no way to digest soy.Now, fish farming is by far the best animal farming available to humankind. But it's had a really bad reputation. There's been excessive use of chemicals, there's been virus and disease transfered to wild populations, ecosystem destruction and pollution, escaped fish breeding with wild populations, altering the overall genetic pool, and then of course, as just mentioned, the unsustainable feed ingredients.How blessed were the days when we could just enjoy food that was on our plate, whatever it was. Once you know, you know. You can't go back. It's not fun. We really need a transparent food system that we can trust, that produces healthy food.But the good news is that decades of development and research have led to a lot of new technologies and knowledge that allow us to do a lot better. We can now farm fish without any of these issues.I think of agriculture before the green revolution — we are at aquaculture and the blue revolution. New technologies means that we can now produce a feed that's perfectly natural, with a minimal footprint that consists of microbes, insects, seaweeds and micro-algae. Healthy for the people, healthy for the fish, healthy for the planet.Microbes, for example, can be a perfect alternative for high-grade fish meal — at scale.Insects are the — well, first of all, the perfect recycling because they're grown on food waste; but second, think of fly-fishing, and you know how logical it actually is to use it as fish feed. You don't need large tracts of land for it and you don't need to cut down rain forests for it. And microbes and insects are actually net water producers.This revolution is starting as we speak, it just needs scale. We can now farm far more species than ever before in controlled, natural conditions, creating happy fish.I imagine, for example, a closed system that's performing more efficiently than insect farming, where you can produce healthy, happy, delicious fish with little or no effluent, almost no energy and almost no water and a natural feed with a minimal footprint. Or a system where you grow up to 10 species next to each other — off of each other, mimicking nature. You need very little feed, very little footprint. I think of seaweed growing off the effluent of fish, for example.There's great technologies popping up all over the globe. From alternatives to battle disease so we don't need antibiotics and chemicals anymore, to automated feeders that feel when the fish are hungry, so we can save on feed and create less pollution. Software systems that gather data across farms, so we can improve farm practices.There's really cool stuff happening all over the globe. And make no mistake — all of these things are possible at a cost that's competitive to what a farmer spends today. Tomorrow, there will be no excuse for anyone to not do the right thing.So somebody needs to connect the dots and give these developments a big kick in the butt. And that's what we've been working on the last couple of years, and that's what we need to be working on together — rethinking everything from the ground up, with a holistic view across the value chain, connecting all these things across the globe, alongside great entrepreneurs that are willing to share a collective vision.Now is the time to create change in this industry and to push it into a sustainable direction. This industry is still young, much of its growth is still ahead. It's a big task, but not as far-fetched as you might think. It's possible.So we need to take pressure off the ocean. We want to eat good and healthy. And if we eat an animal, it needs to be one that had a happy and healthy life.We need to have a meal that we can trust, live long lives. And this is not just for people in San Francisco or Northern Europe — this is for all of us. Even in the poorest countries, it's not just about money. People prefer something fresh and healthy that they can trust over something that comes from far away that they know nothing about. We're all the same.The day will come where people will realize — no, demand — farmed fish on their plate that's farmed well and that's farmed healthy — and refuse anything less.You can help speed this up. Ask questions when you order seafood. Where does my fish come from? Who raised it, and what did it eat? Information about where your fish comes from and how it was produced needs to be much more readily available. And consumers need to put pressure on the aquaculture industry to do the right thing.So every time you order, ask for detail and show that you really care about what you eat and what's been given to you. And eventually, they will listen. And all of us will benefit.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_velings_the_case_for_fish_farming
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"15 years ago, I volunteered to participate in a research study that involved a genetic test. When I arrived at the clinic to be tested, I was handed a questionnaire. One of the very first questions asked me to check a box for my race: White, black, Asian, or Native American.I wasn't quite sure how to answer the question. Was it aimed at measuring the diversity of research participants' social backgrounds? In that case, I would answer with my social identity, and check the box for ""black."" But what if the researchers were interested in investigating some association between ancestry and the risk for certain genetic traits? In that case, wouldn't they want to know something about my ancestry, which is just as much European as African? And how could they make scientific findings about my genes if I put down my social identity as a black woman? After all, I consider myself a black woman with a white father rather than a white woman with a black mother entirely for social reasons. Which racial identity I check has nothing to do with my genes. Well, despite the obvious importance of this question to the study's scientific validity, I was told, ""Don't worry about it, just put down however you identify yourself."" So I check ""black,"" but I had no confidence in the results of a study that treated a critical variable so unscientifically.That personal experience with the use of race in genetic testing got me thinking: Where else in medicine is race used to make false biological predictions?Well, I found out that race runs deeply throughout all of medical practice. It shapes physicians' diagnoses, measurements, treatments, prescriptions, even the very definition of diseases. And the more I found out, the more disturbed I became.Sociologists like me have long explained that race is a social construction. When we identify people as black, white, Asian, Native American, Latina, we're referring to social groupings with made up demarcations that have changed over time and vary around the world. As a legal scholar, I've also studied how lawmakers, not biologists, have invented the legal definitions of races.And it's not just the view of social scientists. You remember when the map of the human genome was unveiled at a White House ceremony in June 2000? President Bill Clinton famously declared, ""I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same."" And he might have added that that less than one percent of genetic difference doesn't fall into racial boxes.Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and now heads NIH, echoed President Clinton. ""I am happy that today, the only race we're talking about is the human race.""Doctors are supposed to practice evidence-based medicine, and they're increasingly called to join the genomic revolution. But their habit of treating patients by race lags far behind.Take the estimate of glomerular filtration rate, or GFR. Doctors routinely interpret GFR, this important indicator of kidney function, by race. As you can see in this lab test, the exact same creatinine level, the concentration in the blood of the patient, automatically produces a different GFR estimate depending on whether or not the patient is African-American. Why?I've been told it's based on an assumption that African-Americans have more muscle mass than people of other races. But what sense does it make for a doctor to automatically assume I have more muscle mass than that female bodybuilder? Wouldn't it be far more accurate and evidence-based to determine the muscle mass of individual patients just by looking at them?Well, doctors tell me they're using race as a shortcut. It's a crude but convenient proxy for more important factors, like muscle mass, enzyme level, genetic traits they just don't have time to look for. But race is a bad proxy. In many cases, race adds no relevant information at all. It's just a distraction. But race also tends to overwhelm the clinical measures. It blinds doctors to patients' symptoms, family illnesses, their history, their own illnesses they might have — all more evidence-based than the patient's race. Race can't substitute for these important clinical measures without sacrificing patient well-being.Doctors also tell me race is just one of many factors they take into account, but there are numerous medical tests, like the GFR, that use race categorically to treat black, white, Asian patients differently just because of their race.Race medicine also leaves patients of color especially vulnerable to harmful biases and stereotypes. Black and Latino patients are twice as likely to receive no pain medication as whites for the same painful long bone fractures because of stereotypes that black and brown people feel less pain, exaggerate their pain, and are predisposed to drug addiction.The Food and Drug Administration has even approved a race-specific medicine. It's a pill called BiDil to treat heart failure in self-identified African-American patients. A cardiologist developed this drug without regard to race or genetics, but it became convenient for commercial reasons to market the drug to black patients. The FDA then allowed the company, the drug company, to test the efficacy in a clinical trial that only included African-American subjects. It speculated that race stood in as a proxy for some unknown genetic factor that affects heart disease or response to drugs. But think about the dangerous message it sent, that black people's bodies are so substandard, a drug tested in them is not guaranteed to work in other patients.In the end, the drug company's marketing scheme failed. For one thing, black patients were understandably wary of using a drug just for black people. One elderly black woman stood up in a community meeting and shouted, ""Give me what the white people are taking!""(Laughter)And if you find race-specific medicine surprising, wait until you learn that many doctors in the United States still use an updated version of a diagnostic tool that was developed by a physician during the slavery era, a diagnostic tool that is tightly linked to justifications for slavery.Dr. Samuel Cartwright graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He practiced in the Deep South before the Civil War, and he was a well-known expert on what was then called ""Negro medicine."" He promoted the racial concept of disease, that people of different races suffer from different diseases and experience common diseases differently. Cartwright argued in the 1850s that slavery was beneficial for black people for medical reasons. He claimed that because black people have lower lung capacity than whites, forced labor was good for them. He wrote in a medical journal, ""It is the red vital blood sent to the brain that liberates their minds when under the white man's control, and it is the want of sufficiency of red vital blood that chains their minds to ignorance and barbarism when in freedom."" To support this theory, Cartwright helped to perfect a medical device for measuring breathing called the spirometer to show the presumed deficiency in black people's lungs.Today, doctors still uphold Cartwright's claim the black people as a race have lower lung capacity than white people. Some even use a modern day spirometer that actually has a button labeled ""race"" so the machine adjusts the measurement for each patient according to his or her race. It's a well-known function called ""correcting for race.""The problem with race medicine extends far beyond misdiagnosing patients. Its focus on innate racial differences in disease diverts attention and resources from the social determinants that cause appalling racial gaps in health: lack of access to high-quality medical care; food deserts in poor neighborhoods; exposure to environmental toxins; high rates of incarceration; and experiencing the stress of racial discrimination.You see, race is not a biological category that naturally produces these health disparities because of genetic difference. Race is a social category that has staggering biological consequences, but because of the impact of social inequality on people's health. Yet race medicine pretends the answer to these gaps in health can be found in a race-specific pill. It's much easier and more lucrative to market a technological fix for these gaps in health than to deal with the structural inequities that produce them.The reason I'm so passionate about ending race medicine isn't just because it's bad medicine. I'm also on this mission because the way doctors practice medicine continues to promote a false and toxic view of humanity. Despite the many visionary breakthroughs in medicine we've been learning about, there's a failure of imagination when it comes to race. Would you imagine with me, just a moment: What would happen if doctors stopped treating patients by race? Suppose they rejected an 18th-century classification system and incorporated instead the most advanced knowledge of human genetic diversity and unity, that human beings cannot be categorized into biological races? What if, instead of using race as a crude proxy for some more important factor, doctors actually investigated and addressed that more important factor? What if doctors joined the forefront of a movement to end the structural inequities caused by racism, not by genetic difference?Race medicine is bad medicine, it's poor science and it's a false interpretation of humanity. It is more urgent than ever to finally abandon this backward legacy and to affirm our common humanity by ending the social inequalities that truly divide us.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/dorothy_roberts_the_problem_with_race_based_medicine
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"So I'm a neurosurgeon. And like most of my colleagues, I have to deal, every day, with human tragedies. I realize how your life can change from one second to the other after a major stroke or after a car accident. And what is very frustrating for us neurosurgeons is to realize that unlike other organs of the body, the brain has very little ability for self-repair. And after a major injury of your central nervous system, the patients often remain with a severe handicap. And that's probably the reason why I've chosen to be a functional neurosurgeon.What is a functional neurosurgeon? It's a doctor who is trying to improve a neurological function through different surgical strategies. You've certainly heard of one of the famous ones called deep brain stimulation, where you implant an electrode in the depths of the brain in order to modulate a circuit of neurons to improve a neurological function. It's really an amazing technology in that it has improved the destiny of patients with Parkinson's disease, with severe tremor, with severe pain. However, neuromodulation does not mean neuro-repair. And the dream of functional neurosurgeons is to repair the brain. I think that we are approaching this dream.And I would like to show you that we are very close to this. And that with a little bit of help, the brain is able to help itself.So the story started 15 years ago. At that time, I was a chief resident working days and nights in the emergency room. I often had to take care of patients with head trauma. You have to imagine that when a patient comes in with a severe head trauma, his brain is swelling and he's increasing his intracranial pressure. And in order to save his life, you have to decrease this intracranial pressure. And to do that, you sometimes have to remove a piece of swollen brain. So instead of throwing away these pieces of swollen brain, we decided with Jean-François Brunet, who is a colleague of mine, a biologist, to study them.What do I mean by that? We wanted to grow cells from these pieces of tissue. It's not an easy task. Growing cells from a piece of tissue is a bit the same as growing very small children out from their family. So you need to find the right nutrients, the warmth, the humidity and all the nice environments to make them thrive. So that's exactly what we had to do with these cells. And after many attempts, Jean-François did it. And that's what he saw under his microscope.And that was, for us, a major surprise. Why? Because this looks exactly the same as a stem cell culture, with large green cells surrounding small, immature cells. And you may remember from biology class that stem cells are immature cells, able to turn into any type of cell of the body. The adult brain has stem cells, but they're very rare and they're located in deep and small niches in the depths of the brain. So it was surprising to get this kind of stem cell culture from the superficial part of swollen brain we had in the operating theater.And there was another intriguing observation: Regular stem cells are very active cells — cells that divide, divide, divide very quickly. And they never die, they're immortal cells. But these cells behave differently. They divide slowly, and after a few weeks of culture, they even died. So we were in front of a strange new cell population that looked like stem cells but behaved differently.And it took us a long time to understand where they came from. They come from these cells. These blue and red cells are called doublecortin-positive cells. All of you have them in your brain. They represent four percent of your cortical brain cells. They have a very important role during the development stage. When you were fetuses, they helped your brain to fold itself. But why do they stay in your head? This, we don't know. We think that they may participate in brain repair because we find them in higher concentration close to brain lesions. But it's not so sure. But there is one clear thing — that from these cells, we got our stem cell culture. And we were in front of a potential new source of cells to repair the brain. And we had to prove this.So to prove it, we decided to design an experimental paradigm. The idea was to biopsy a piece of brain in a non-eloquent area of the brain, and then to culture the cells exactly the way Jean-François did it in his lab. And then label them, to put color in them in order to be able to track them in the brain. And the last step was to re-implant them in the same individual. We call these autologous grafts — autografts.So the first question we had, ""What will happen if we re-implant these cells in a normal brain, and what will happen if we re-implant the same cells in a lesioned brain?"" Thanks to the help of professor Eric Rouiller, we worked with monkeys.So in the first-case scenario, we re-implanted the cells in the normal brain and what we saw is that they completely disappeared after a few weeks, as if they were taken from the brain, they go back home, the space is already busy, they are not needed there, so they disappear.In the second-case scenario, we performed the lesion, we re-implanted exactly the same cells, and in this case, the cells remained — and they became mature neurons. And that's the image of what we could observe under the microscope. Those are the cells that were re-implanted. And the proof they carry, these little spots, those are the cells that we've labeled in vitro, when they were in culture.But we could not stop here, of course. Do these cells also help a monkey to recover after a lesion? So for that, we trained monkeys to perform a manual dexterity task. They had to retrieve food pellets from a tray. They were very good at it. And when they had reached a plateau of performance, we did a lesion in the motor cortex corresponding to the hand motion. So the monkeys were plegic, they could not move their hand anymore. And exactly the same as humans would do, they spontaneously recovered to a certain extent, exactly the same as after a stroke. Patients are completely plegic, and then they try to recover due to a brain plasticity mechanism, they recover to a certain extent, exactly the same for the monkey.So when we were sure that the monkey had reached his plateau of spontaneous recovery, we implanted his own cells. So on the left side, you see the monkey that has spontaneously recovered. He's at about 40 to 50 percent of his previous performance before the lesion. He's not so accurate, not so quick. And look now when we re-implant the cells: Two months after re-implantation, the same individual.(Applause)It was also very exciting results for us, I tell you. Since that time, we've understood much more about these cells. We know that we can cryopreserve them, we can use them later on. We know that we can apply them in other neuropathological models, like Parkinson's disease, for example. But our dream is still to implant them in humans. And I really hope that I'll be able to show you soon that the human brain is giving us the tools to repair itself.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Jocelyne, this is amazing, and I'm sure that right now, there are several dozen people in the audience, possibly even a majority, who are thinking, ""I know somebody who can use this."" I do, in any case. And of course the question is, what are the biggest obstacles before you can go into human clinical trials?Jocelyne Bloch: The biggest obstacles are regulations. (Laughs) So, from these exciting results, you need to fill out about two kilograms of papers and forms to be able to go through these kind of trials.BG: Which is understandable, the brain is delicate, etc.JB: Yes, it is, but it takes a long time and a lot of patience and almost a professional team to do it, you know?BG: If you project yourself — having done the research and having tried to get permission to start the trials, if you project yourself out in time, how many years before somebody gets into a hospital and this therapy is available?JB: So, it's very difficult to say. It depends, first, on the approval of the trial. Will the regulation allow us to do it soon? And then, you have to perform this kind of study in a small group of patients. So it takes, already, a long time to select the patients, do the treatment and evaluate if it's useful to do this kind of treatment. And then you have to deploy this to a multicentric trial. You have to really prove first that it's useful before offering this treatment up for everybody.BG: And safe, of course. JB: Of course.BG: Jocelyne, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this. BG: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jocelyne_bloch_the_brain_may_be_able_to_repair_itself_with_help
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"All right, I want to see a show of hands: how many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food?(Laughter)And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don't want to talk to them?(Laughter)You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in ""My Fair Lady"": Stick to the weather and your health. But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects —(Laughter)are not safe either. So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can't speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it's not normal. Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided, than we ever have been in history. We're less likely to compromise, which means we're not listening to each other. And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. Again, that means we're not listening to each other. A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and somewhere along the way, we lost that balance.Now, part of that is due to technology. The smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day. And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face. There's this great piece in The Atlantic. It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. And he gave his kids a communication project. He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific subject without using notes. And he said this: ""I came to realize...""(Laughter)""I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communications skills. It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?""Now, I make my living talking to people: Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. I talk to people that I like. I talk to people that I don't like. I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level. But I still have a great conversation with them. So I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen.Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look, nod and smile to show that you're paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. So I want you to forget all of that. It is crap.(Laughter)There is no reason to learn how to show you're paying attention if you are in fact paying attention.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. So, I'm going to teach you how to interview people, and that's actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and, please God, without offending anybody.We've all had really great conversations. We've had them before. We know what it's like. The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you've made a real connection or you've been perfectly understood. There is no reason why most of your interactions can't be like that.So I have 10 basic rules. I'm going to walk you through all of them, but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you'll already enjoy better conversations.Number one: Don't multitask. And I don't mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever is in your hand. I mean, be present. Be in that moment. Don't think about your argument you had with your boss. Don't think about what you're going to have for dinner. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation, but don't be half in it and half out of it.Number two: Don't pontificate. If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or pushback or growth, write a blog.(Laughter)Now, there's a really good reason why I don't allow pundits on my show: Because they're really boring. If they're conservative, they're going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. If they're liberal, they're going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. Totally predictable. And you don't want to be like that. You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. Again, assume that you have something to learn.Bill Nye: ""Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don't."" I put it this way: Everybody is an expert in something.Number three: Use open-ended questions. In this case, take a cue from journalists. Start your questions with who, what, when, where, why or how. If you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out. If I ask you, ""Were you terrified?"" you're going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence, which is ""terrified,"" and the answer is ""Yes, I was"" or ""No, I wasn't."" ""Were you angry?"" ""Yes, I was very angry."" Let them describe it. They're the ones that know. Try asking them things like, ""What was that like?"" ""How did that feel?"" Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it, and you're going to get a much more interesting response.Number four: Go with the flow. That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind. We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems like it comes out of nowhere, or it's already been answered. That means the host probably stopped listening two minutes ago because he thought of this really clever question, and he was just bound and determined to say that. And we do the exact same thing. We're sitting there having a conversation with someone, and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop.(Laughter)And we stop listening. Stories and ideas are going to come to you. You need to let them come and let them go.Number five: If you don't know, say that you don't know. Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record, and so they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. Do that. Err on the side of caution. Talk should not be cheap.Number six: Don't equate your experience with theirs. If they're talking about having lost a family member, don't start talking about the time you lost a family member. If they're talking about the trouble they're having at work, don't tell them about how much you hate your job. It's not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual. And, more importantly, it is not about you. You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. Somebody asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was, and he said, ""I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers.""(Laughter)Conversations are not a promotional opportunity.Number seven: Try not to repeat yourself. It's condescending, and it's really boring, and we tend to do it a lot. Especially in work conversations or in conversations with our kids, we have a point to make, so we just keep rephrasing it over and over. Don't do that.Number eight: Stay out of the weeds. Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. They don't care. What they care about is you. They care about what you're like, what you have in common. So forget the details. Leave them out.Number nine: This is not the last one, but it is the most important one. Listen. I cannot tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the number one most important skill that you could develop. Buddha said, and I'm paraphrasing, ""If your mouth is open, you're not learning."" And Calvin Coolidge said, ""No man ever listened his way out of a job.""(Laughter)Why do we not listen to each other? Number one, we'd rather talk. When I'm talking, I'm in control. I don't have to hear anything I'm not interested in. I'm the center of attention. I can bolster my own identity. But there's another reason: We get distracted. The average person talks at about 225 word per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. And look, I know, it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. You're just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place.(Laughter)You have to listen to one another. Stephen Covey said it very beautifully. He said, ""Most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply.""One more rule, number 10, and it's this one: Be brief.[A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject. — My Sister](Laughter)(Applause) All of this boils down to the same basic concept, and it is this one: Be interested in other people.You know, I grew up with a very famous grandfather, and there was kind of a ritual in my home. People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us, and she'd say, ""Do you know who that was? She was the runner-up to Miss America. He was the mayor of Sacramento. She won a Pulitzer Prize. He's a Russian ballet dancer."" And I kind of grew up assuming everyone has some hidden, amazing thing about them. And honestly, I think it's what makes me a better host. I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can, I keep my mind open, and I'm always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed.You do the same thing. Go out, talk to people, listen to people, and, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/celeste_headlee_10_ways_to_have_a_better_conversation
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"So a while ago, I tried an experiment. For one year, I would say yes to all the things that scared me. Anything that made me nervous, took me out of my comfort zone, I forced myself to say yes to. Did I want to speak in public? No, but yes. Did I want to be on live TV? No, but yes. Did I want to try acting? No, no, no, but yes, yes, yes.And a crazy thing happened: the very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear, made it not scary. My fear of public speaking, my social anxiety, poof, gone. It's amazing, the power of one word. ""Yes"" changed my life. ""Yes"" changed me. But there was one particular yes that affected my life in the most profound way, in a way I never imagined, and it started with a question from my toddler.I have these three amazing daughters, Harper, Beckett and Emerson, and Emerson is a toddler who inexplicably refers to everyone as ""honey."" as though she's a Southern waitress.(Laughter)""Honey, I'm gonna need some milk for my sippy cup.""(Laughter)The Southern waitress asked me to play with her one evening when I was on my way somewhere, and I said, ""Yes."" And that yes was the beginning of a new way of life for my family. I made a vow that from now on, every time one of my children asks me to play, no matter what I'm doing or where I'm going, I say yes, every single time. Almost. I'm not perfect at it, but I try hard to practice it. And it's had a magical effect on me, on my children, on our family. But it's also had a stunning side effect, and it wasn't until recently that I fully understood it, that I understood that saying yes to playing with my children likely saved my career.See, I have what most people would call a dream job. I'm a writer. I imagine. I make stuff up for a living. Dream job. No. I'm a titan. Dream job. I create television. I executive produce television. I make television, a great deal of television. In one way or another, this TV season, I'm responsible for bringing about 70 hours of programming to the world. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV —(Applause)Three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. Each show creates hundreds of jobs that didn't exist before. The budget for one episode of network television can be anywhere from three to six million dollars. Let's just say five. A new episode made every nine days times four shows, so every nine days that's 20 million dollars worth of television, four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 16 episodes going on at all times: 24 episodes of ""Grey's,"" 21 episodes of ""Scandal,"" 15 episodes of ""How To Get Away With Murder,"" 10 episodes of ""The Catch,"" that's 70 hours of TV, that's 350 million dollars for a season. In America, my television shows are back to back to back on Thursday night. Around the world, my shows air in 256 territories in 67 languages for an audience of 30 million people. My brain is global, and 45 hours of that 70 hours of TV are shows I personally created and not just produced, so on top of everything else, I need to find time, real quiet, creative time, to gather my fans around the campfire and tell my stories. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 350 million dollars, campfires burning all over the world. You know who else is doing that? Nobody, so like I said, I'm a titan. Dream job.(Applause)Now, I don't tell you this to impress you. I tell you this because I know what you think of when you hear the word ""writer."" I tell you this so that all of you out there who work so hard, whether you run a company or a country or a classroom or a store or a home, take me seriously when I talk about working, so you'll get that I don't peck at a computer and imagine all day, so you'll hear me when I say that I understand that a dream job is not about dreaming. It's all job, all work, all reality, all blood, all sweat, no tears. I work a lot, very hard, and I love it.When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyoncé. And it is all of those things at the same time. I love working. It is creative and mechanical and exhausting and exhilarating and hilarious and disturbing and clinical and maternal and cruel and judicious, and what makes it all so good is the hum. There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good. A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever. And a lot of people, when I try to explain the hum, they assume that I'm talking about the writing, that my writing brings me joy. And don't get me wrong, it does. But the hum — it wasn't until I started making television that I started working, working and making and building and creating and collaborating, that I discovered this thing, this buzz, this rush, this hum. The hum is more than writing. The hum is action and activity. The hum is a drug. The hum is music. The hum is light and air. The hum is God's whisper right in my ear. And when you have a hum like that, you can't help but strive for greatness. That feeling, you can't help but strive for greatness at any cost. That's called the hum. Or, maybe it's called being a workaholic.(Laughter)Maybe it's called genius. Maybe it's called ego. Maybe it's just fear of failure. I don't know. I just know that I'm not built for failure, and I just know that I love the hum. I just know that I want to tell you I'm a titan, and I know that I don't want to question it.But here's the thing: the more successful I become, the more shows, the more episodes, the more barriers broken, the more work there is to do, the more balls in the air, the more eyes on me, the more history stares, the more expectations there are. The more I work to be successful, the more I need to work. And what did I say about work? I love working, right? The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the hum. I like that hum. I love that hum. I need that hum. I am that hum. Am I nothing but that hum?And then the hum stopped. Overworked, overused, overdone, burned out. The hum stopped.Now, my three daughters are used to the truth that their mother is a single working titan. Harper tells people, ""My mom won't be there, but you can text my nanny."" And Emerson says, ""Honey, I'm wanting to go to ShondaLand."" They're children of a titan. They're baby titans. They were 12, 3, and 1 when the hum stopped. The hum of the engine died. I stopped loving work. I couldn't restart the engine. The hum would not come back. My hum was broken. I was doing the same things I always did, all the same titan work, 15-hour days, working straight through the weekends, no regrets, never surrender, a titan never sleeps, a titan never quits, full hearts, clear eyes, yada, whatever. But there was no hum. Inside me was silence. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time ... I was the perfect titan. I was a titan you could take home to your mother. All the colors were the same, and I was no longer having any fun. And it was my life. It was all I did. I was the hum, and the hum was me. So what do you do when the thing you do, the work you love, starts to taste like dust?Now, I know somebody's out there thinking, ""Cry me a river, stupid writer titan lady.""(Laughter)But you know, you do, if you make, if you work, if you love what you do, being a teacher, being a banker, being a mother, being a painter, being Bill Gates, if you simply love another person and that gives you the hum, if you know the hum, if you know what the hum feels like, if you have been to the hum, when the hum stops, who are you? What are you? What am I? Am I still a titan? If the song of my heart ceases to play, can I survive in the silence?And then my Southern waitress toddler asks me a question. I'm on my way out the door, I'm late, and she says, ""Momma, wanna play?""And I'm just about to say no, when I realize two things. One, I'm supposed to say yes to everything, and two, my Southern waitress didn't call me ""honey."" She's not calling everyone ""honey"" anymore. When did that happen? I'm missing it, being a titan and mourning my hum, and here she is changing right before my eyes. And so she says, ""Momma, wanna play?"" And I say, ""Yes."" There's nothing special about it. We play, and we're joined by her sisters, and there's a lot of laughing, and I give a dramatic reading from the book Everybody Poops. Nothing out of the ordinary.(Laughter)And yet, it is extraordinary, because in my pain and my panic, in the homelessness of my humlessness, I have nothing to do but pay attention. I focus. I am still. The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note does not exist. All that exists are sticky fingers and gooey kisses and tiny voices and crayons and that song about letting go of whatever it is that Frozen girl needs to let go of.(Laughter)It's all peace and simplicity. The air is so rare in this place for me that I can barely breathe. I can barely believe I'm breathing. Play is the opposite of work. And I am happy. Something in me loosens. A door in my brain swings open, and a rush of energy comes. And it's not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen. I feel it. A hum creeps back. Not at full volume, barely there, it's quiet, and I have to stay very still to hear it, but it is there. Not the hum, but a hum.And now I feel like I know a very magical secret. Well, let's not get carried away. It's just love. That's all it is. No magic. No secret. It's just love. It's just something we forgot. The hum, the work hum, the hum of the titan, that's just a replacement. If I have to ask you who I am, if I have to tell you who I am, if I describe myself in terms of shows and hours of television and how globally badass my brain is, I have forgotten what the real hum is. The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific. The hum is joy-specific. The real hum is love-specific. The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life. The real hum is confidence and peace. The real hum ignores the stare of history, and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure. The real hum is singular and original. The real hum is God's whisper in my ear, but maybe God was whispering the wrong words, because which one of the gods was telling me I was the titan?It's just love. We could all use a little more love, a lot more love. Any time my child asks me to play, I will say yes. I make it a firm rule for one reason, to give myself permission, to free me from all of my workaholic guilt. It's a law, so I don't have a choice, and I don't have a choice, not if I want to feel the hum.I wish it were that easy, but I'm not good at playing. I don't like it. I'm not interested in doing it the way I'm interested in doing work. The truth is incredibly humbling and humiliating to face. I don't like playing. I work all the time because I like working. I like working more than I like being at home. Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle, because what kind of person likes working more than being at home?Well, me. I mean, let's be honest, I call myself a titan. I've got issues.(Laughter)And one of those issues isn't that I am too relaxed.(Laughter)We run around the yard, up and back and up and back. We have 30-second dance parties. We sing show tunes. We play with balls. I blow bubbles and they pop them. And I feel stiff and delirious and confused most of the time. I itch for my cell phone always. But it is OK. My tiny humans show me how to live and the hum of the universe fills me up. I play and I play until I begin to wonder why we ever stop playing in the first place.You can do it too, say yes every time your child asks you to play. Are you thinking that maybe I'm an idiot in diamond shoes? You're right, but you can still do this. You have time. You know why? Because you're not Rihanna and you're not a Muppet. Your child does not think you're that interesting.(Laughter)You only need 15 minutes. My two- and four-year-old only ever want to play with me for about 15 minutes or so before they think to themselves they want to do something else. It's an amazing 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes. If I'm not a ladybug or a piece of candy, I'm invisible after 15 minutes.(Laughter)And my 13-year-old, if I can get a 13-year-old to talk to me for 15 minutes I'm Parent of the Year.(Laughter)15 minutes is all you need. I can totally pull off 15 minutes of uninterrupted time on my worst day. Uninterrupted is the key. No cell phone, no laundry, no anything. You have a busy life. You have to get dinner on the table. You have to force them to bathe. But you can do 15 minutes. My kids are my happy place, they're my world, but it doesn't have to be your kids, the fuel that feeds your hum, the place where life feels more good than not good. It's not about playing with your kids, it's about joy. It's about playing in general. Give yourself the 15 minutes. Find what makes you feel good. Just figure it out and play in that arena.I'm not perfect at it. In fact, I fail as often as I succeed, seeing friends, reading books, staring into space. ""Wanna play?"" starts to become shorthand for indulging myself in ways I'd given up on right around the time I got my first TV show, right around the time I became a titan-in-training, right around the time I started competing with myself for ways unknown. 15 minutes? What could be wrong with giving myself my full attention for 15 minutes? Turns out, nothing. The very act of not working has made it possible for the hum to return, as if the hum's engine could only refuel while I was away. Work doesn't work without play.It takes a little time, but after a few months, one day the floodgates open and there's a rush, and I find myself standing in my office filled with an unfamiliar melody, full on groove inside me, and around me, and it sends me spinning with ideas, and the humming road is open, and I can drive it and drive it, and I love working again. But now, I like that hum, but I don't love that hum. I don't need that hum. I am not that hum. That hum is not me, not anymore. I am bubbles and sticky fingers and dinners with friends. I am that hum. Life's hum. Love's hum. Work's hum is still a piece of me, it is just no longer all of me, and I am so grateful. And I don't give a crap about being a titan, because I have never once seen a titan play Red Rover, Red Rover.I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. My brain is still global. My campfires still burn. The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. The more I play, the better I work. The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life's hum. The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned, awkward, brand new, alive non-titan feels like me. The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am. I'm a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine. That part of the job, that's living the dream. That's the dream of the job. Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy.I said yes to less work and more play. Titans need not apply.Wanna play?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shonda_rhimes_my_year_of_saying_yes_to_everything
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"1.3 billion years ago, in a distant, distant galaxy, two black holes locked into a spiral, falling inexorably towards each other and collided, converting three Suns' worth of stuff into pure energy in a tenth of a second. For that brief moment in time, the glow was brighter than all the stars in all the galaxies in all of the known Universe. It was a very big bang.But they didn't release their energy in light. I mean, you know, they're black holes. All that energy was pumped into the fabric of space and time itself, making the Universe explode in gravitational waves.Let me give you a sense of the timescale at work here. 1.3 billion years ago, Earth had just managed to evolve multicellular life. Since then, Earth has made and evolved corals, fish, plants, dinosaurs, people and even — God save us — the Internet. And about 25 years ago, a particularly audacious set of people — Rai Weiss at MIT, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever at Caltech — decided that it would be really neat to build a giant laser detector with which to search for the gravitational waves from things like colliding black holes.Now, most people thought they were nuts. But enough people realized that they were brilliant nuts that the US National Science Foundation decided to fund their crazy idea. So after decades of development, construction and imagination and a breathtaking amount of hard work, they built their detector, called LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.For the last several years, LIGO's been undergoing a huge expansion in its accuracy, a tremendous improvement in its detection ability. It's now called Advanced LIGO as a result.In early September of 2015, LIGO turned on for a final test run while they sorted out a few lingering details. And on September 14 of 2015, just days after the detector had gone live, the gravitational waves from those colliding black holes passed through the Earth. And they passed through you and me. And they passed through the detector.(Audio) Scott Hughes: There's two moments in my life more emotionally intense than that. One is the birth of my daughter. The other is when I had to say goodbye to my father when he was terminally ill. You know, it was the payoff of my career, basically. Everything I'd been working on — it's no longer science fiction! (Laughs)Allan Adams: So that's my very good friend and collaborator, Scott Hughes, a theoretical physicist at MIT, who has been studying gravitational waves from black holes and the signals that they could impart on observatories like LIGO, for the past 23 years.So let me take a moment to tell you what I mean by a gravitational wave. A gravitational wave is a ripple in the shape of space and time. As the wave passes by, it stretches space and everything in it in one direction, and compresses it in the other. This has led to countless instructors of general relativity doing a really silly dance to demonstrate in their classes on general relativity. ""It stretches and expands, it stretches and expands.""So the trouble with gravitational waves is that they're very weak; they're preposterously weak. For example, the waves that hit us on September 14 — and yes, every single one of you stretched and compressed under the action of that wave — when the waves hit, they stretched the average person by one part in 10 to the 21. That's a decimal place, 20 zeroes, and a one. That's why everyone thought the LIGO people were nuts. Even with a laser detector five kilometers long — and that's already crazy — they would have to measure the length of those detectors to less than one thousandth of the radius of the nucleus of an atom. And that's preposterous.So towards the end of his classic text on gravity, LIGO co-founder Kip Thorne described the hunt for gravitational waves as follows: He said, ""The technical difficulties to be surmounted in constructing such detectors are enormous. But physicists are ingenious, and with the support of a broad lay public, all obstacles will surely be overcome."" Thorne published that in 1973, 42 years before he succeeded.Now, coming back to LIGO, Scott likes to say that LIGO acts like an ear more than it does like an eye. I want to explain what that means. Visible light has a wavelength, a size, that's much smaller than the things around you, the features on people's faces, the size of your cell phone. And that's really useful, because it lets you make an image or a map of the things around you, by looking at the light coming from different spots in the scene about you.Sound is different. Audible sound has a wavelength that can be up to 50 feet long. And that makes it really difficult — in fact, in practical purposes, impossible — to make an image of something you really care about. Your child's face. Instead, we use sound to listen for features like pitch and tone and rhythm and volume to infer a story behind the sounds. That's Alice talking. That's Bob interrupting. Silly Bob.So, the same is true of gravitational waves. We can't use them to make simple images of things out in the Universe. But by listening to changes in the amplitude and frequency of those waves, we can hear the story that those waves are telling. And at least for LIGO, the frequencies that it can hear are in the audio band. So if we convert the wave patterns into pressure waves and air, into sound, we can literally hear the Universe speaking to us. For example, listening to gravity, just in this way, can tell us a lot about the collision of two black holes, something my colleague Scott has spent an awful lot of time thinking about.(Audio) SH: If the two black holes are non-spinning, you get a very simple chirp: whoop! If the two bodies are spinning very rapidly, I have that same chirp, but with a modulation on top of it, so it kind of goes: whir, whir, whir! It's sort of the vocabulary of spin imprinted on this waveform.AA: So on September 14, 2015, a date that's definitely going to live in my memory, LIGO heard this:[Whirring sound]So if you know how to listen, that is the sound of —(Audio) SH: ... two black holes, each of about 30 solar masses, that were whirling around at a rate comparable to what goes on in your blender.AA: It's worth pausing here to think about what that means. Two black holes, the densest thing in the Universe, one with a mass of 29 Suns and one with a mass of 36 Suns, whirling around each other 100 times per second before they collide. Just imagine the power of that. It's fantastic. And we know it because we heard it.That's the lasting importance of LIGO. It's an entirely new way to observe the Universe that we've never had before. It's a way that lets us hear the Universe and hear the invisible.And there's a lot out there that we can't see — in practice or even in principle. So supernova, for example: I would love to know why very massive stars explode in supernovae. They're very useful; we've learned a lot about the Universe from them. The problem is, all the interesting physics happens in the core, and the core is hidden behind thousands of kilometers of iron and carbon and silicon. We'll never see through it, it's opaque to light. Gravitational waves go through iron as if it were glass — totally transparent. The Big Bang: I would love to be able to explore the first few moments of the Universe, but we'll never see them, because the Big Bang itself is obscured by its own afterglow. With gravitational waves, we should be able to see all the way back to the beginning. Perhaps most importantly, I'm positive that there are things out there that we've never seen that we may never be able to see and that we haven't even imagined — things that we'll only discover by listening.And in fact, even in that very first event, LIGO found things that we didn't expect. Here's my colleague and one of the key members of the LIGO collaboration, Matt Evans, my colleague at MIT, addressing exactly that:(Audio) Matt Evans: The kinds of stars which produce the black holes that we observed here are the dinosaurs of the Universe. They're these massive things that are old, from prehistoric times, and the black holes are kind of like the dinosaur bones with which we do this archeology. So it lets us really get a whole nother angle on what's out there in the Universe and how the stars came to be, and in the end, of course, how we came to be out of this whole mess.AA: Our challenge now is to be as audacious as possible. Thanks to LIGO, we know how to build exquisite detectors that can listen to the Universe, to the rustle and the chirp of the cosmos. Our job is to dream up and build new observatories — a whole new generation of observatories — on the ground, in space. I mean, what could be more glorious than listening to the Big Bang itself? Our job now is to dream big. Dream with us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_adams_what_the_discovery_of_gravitational_waves_means
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"What started as a platform for hobbyists is poised to become a multibillion-dollar industry. Inspection, environmental monitoring, photography and film and journalism: these are some of the potential applications for commercial drones, and their enablers are the capabilities being developed at research facilities around the world.For example, before aerial package delivery entered our social consciousness, an autonomous fleet of flying machines built a six-meter-tall tower composed of 1,500 bricks in front of a live audience at the FRAC Centre in France, and several years ago, they started to fly with ropes. By tethering flying machines, they can achieve high speeds and accelerations in very tight spaces. They can also autonomously build tensile structures. Skills learned include how to carry loads, how to cope with disturbances, and in general, how to interact with the physical world.Today we want to show you some new projects that we've been working on. Their aim is to push the boundary of what can be achieved with autonomous flight.Now, for a system to function autonomously, it must collectively know the location of its mobile objects in space. Back at our lab at ETH Zurich, we often use external cameras to locate objects, which then allows us to focus our efforts on the rapid development of highly dynamic tasks. For the demos you will see today, however, we will use new localization technology developed by Verity Studios, a spin-off from our lab. There are no external cameras. Each flying machine uses onboard sensors to determine its location in space and onboard computation to determine what its actions should be. The only external commands are high-level ones such as ""take off"" and ""land.""This is a so-called tail-sitter. It's an aircraft that tries to have its cake and eat it. Like other fixed-wing aircraft, it is efficient in forward flight, much more so than helicopters and variations thereof. Unlike most other fixed-wing aircraft, however, it is capable of hovering, which has huge advantages for takeoff, landing and general versatility. There is no free lunch, unfortunately. One of the limitations with tail-sitters is that they're susceptible to disturbances such as wind gusts. We're developing new control architectures and algorithms that address this limitation. The idea is for the aircraft to recover no matter what state it finds itself in, and through practice, improve its performance over time.(Applause)OK.When doing research, we often ask ourselves fundamental abstract questions that try to get at the heart of a matter. For example, one such question would be, what is the minimum number of moving parts needed for controlled flight? Now, there are practical reasons why you may want to know the answer to such a question. Helicopters, for example, are affectionately known as machines with a thousand moving parts all conspiring to do you bodily harm. It turns out that decades ago, skilled pilots were able to fly remote-controlled aircraft that had only two moving parts: a propeller and a tail rudder. We recently discovered that it could be done with just one.This is the monospinner, the world's mechanically simplest controllable flying machine, invented just a few months ago. It has only one moving part, a propeller. It has no flaps, no hinges, no ailerons, no other actuators, no other control surfaces, just a simple propeller. Even though it's mechanically simple, there's a lot going on in its little electronic brain to allow it to fly in a stable fashion and to move anywhere it wants in space. Even so, it doesn't yet have the sophisticated algorithms of the tail-sitter, which means that in order to get it to fly, I have to throw it just right. And because the probability of me throwing it just right is very low, given everybody watching me, what we're going to do instead is show you a video that we shot last night.(Laughter)(Applause)If the monospinner is an exercise in frugality, this machine here, the omnicopter, with its eight propellers, is an exercise in excess. What can you do with all this surplus? The thing to notice is that it is highly symmetric. As a result, it is ambivalent to orientation. This gives it an extraordinary capability. It can move anywhere it wants in space irrespective of where it is facing and even of how it is rotating. It has its own complexities, mainly having to do with the interacting flows from its eight propellers. Some of this can be modeled, while the rest can be learned on the fly. Let's take a look.(Applause)If flying machines are going to enter part of our daily lives, they will need to become extremely safe and reliable. This machine over here is actually two separate two-propeller flying machines. This one wants to spin clockwise. This other one wants to spin counterclockwise. When you put them together, they behave like one high-performance quadrocopter. If anything goes wrong, however — a motor fails, a propeller fails, electronics, even a battery pack — the machine can still fly, albeit in a degraded fashion. We're going to demonstrate this to you now by disabling one of its halves.(Applause)This last demonstration is an exploration of synthetic swarms. The large number of autonomous, coordinated entities offers a new palette for aesthetic expression. We've taken commercially available micro quadcopters, each weighing less than a slice of bread, by the way, and outfitted them with our localization technology and custom algorithms. Because each unit knows where it is in space and is self-controlled, there is really no limit to their number.(Applause)(Applause)(Applause)Hopefully, these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up new revolutionary roles for flying machines. That ultrasafe one over there for example has aspirations to become a flying lampshade on Broadway.(Laughter)The reality is that it is difficult to predict the impact of nascent technology. And for folks like us, the real reward is the journey and the act of creation. It's a continual reminder of how wonderful and magical the universe we live in is, that it allows creative, clever creatures to sculpt it in such spectacular ways. The fact that this technology has such huge commercial and economic potential is just icing on the cake.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raffaello_d_andrea_meet_the_dazzling_flying_machines_of_the_future
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"I was excited to be a part of the ""Dream"" theme, and then I found out I'm leading off the ""Nightmare?"" section of it.(Laughter)And certainly there are things about the climate crisis that qualify. And I have some bad news, but I have a lot more good news. I'm going to propose three questions and the answer to the first one necessarily involves a little bad news. But — hang on, because the answers to the second and third questions really are very positive.So the first question is, ""Do we really have to change?"" And of course, the Apollo Mission, among other things changed the environmental movement, really launched the modern environmental movement. 18 months after this Earthrise picture was first seen on earth, the first Earth Day was organized. And we learned a lot about ourselves looking back at our planet from space. And one of the things that we learned confirmed what the scientists have long told us. One of the most essential facts about the climate crisis has to do with the sky. As this picture illustrates, the sky is not the vast and limitless expanse that appears when we look up from the ground. It is a very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. That right now is the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently organized. We are spewing 110 million tons of heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every 24 hours, free of charge, go ahead.And there are many sources of the greenhouse gases, I'm certainly not going to go through them all. I'm going to focus on the main one, but agriculture is involved, diet is involved, population is involved. Management of forests, transportation, the oceans, the melting of the permafrost. But I'm going to focus on the heart of the problem, which is the fact that we still rely on dirty, carbon-based fuels for 85 percent of all the energy that our world burns every year. And you can see from this image that after World War II, the emission rates started really accelerating. And the accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year. Fact-checked over and over again, conservative, it's the truth. Now it's a big planet, but —(Explosion sound)that is a lot of energy, particularly when you multiply it 400,000 times per day. And all that extra heat energy is heating up the atmosphere, the whole earth system.Let's look at the atmosphere. This is a depiction of what we used to think of as the normal distribution of temperatures. The white represents normal temperature days; 1951-1980 are arbitrarily chosen. The blue are cooler than average days, the red are warmer than average days. But the entire curve has moved to the right in the 1980s. And you'll see in the lower right-hand corner the appearance of statistically significant numbers of extremely hot days. In the 90s, the curve shifted further. And in the last 10 years, you see the extremely hot days are now more numerous than the cooler than average days. In fact, they are 150 times more common on the surface of the earth than they were just 30 years ago.So we're having record-breaking temperatures. Fourteen of the 15 of the hottest years ever measured with instruments have been in this young century. The hottest of all was last year. Last month was the 371st month in a row warmer than the 20th-century average. And for the first time, not only the warmest January, but for the first time, it was more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. These higher temperatures are having an effect on animals, plants, people, ecosystems.But on a global basis, 93 percent of all the extra heat energy is trapped in the oceans. And the scientists can measure the heat buildup much more precisely now at all depths: deep, mid-ocean, the first few hundred meters. And this, too, is accelerating. It goes back more than a century. And more than half of the increase has been in the last 19 years. This has consequences.The first order of consequence: the ocean-based storms get stronger. Super Typhoon Haiyan went over areas of the Pacific five and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal before it slammed into Tacloban, as the most destructive storm ever to make landfall. Pope Francis, who has made such a difference to this whole issue, visited Tacloban right after that. Superstorm Sandy went over areas of the Atlantic nine degrees warmer than normal before slamming into New York and New Jersey. The second order of consequences are affecting all of us right now. The warmer oceans are evaporating much more water vapor into the skies. Average humidity worldwide has gone up four percent. And it creates these atmospheric rivers. The Brazilian scientists call them ""flying rivers."" And they funnel all of that extra water vapor over the land where storm conditions trigger these massive record-breaking downpours. This is from Montana. Take a look at this storm last August. As it moves over Tucson, Arizona. It literally splashes off the city. These downpours are really unusual.Last July in Houston, Texas, it rained for two days, 162 billion gallons. That represents more than two days of the full flow of Niagara Falls in the middle of the city, which was, of course, paralyzed. These record downpours are creating historic floods and mudslides.This one is from Chile last year. And you'll see that warehouse going by. There are oil tankers cars going by. This is from Spain last September, you could call this the running of the cars and trucks, I guess. Every night on the TV news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.(Laughter)I mean, really.The insurance industry has certainly noticed, the losses have been mounting up. They're not under any illusions about what's happening. And the causality requires a moment of discussion. We're used to thinking of linear cause and linear effect — one cause, one effect. This is systemic causation. As the great Kevin Trenberth says, ""All storms are different now. There's so much extra energy in the atmosphere, there's so much extra water vapor. Every storm is different now."" So, the same extra heat pulls the soil moisture out of the ground and causes these deeper, longer, more pervasive droughts and many of them are underway right now.It dries out the vegetation and causes more fires in the western part of North America. There's certainly been evidence of that, a lot of them.More lightning, as the heat energy builds up, there's a considerable amount of additional lightning also.These climate-related disasters also have geopolitical consequences and create instability. The climate-related historic drought that started in Syria in 2006 destroyed 60 percent of the farms in Syria, killed 80 percent of the livestock, and drove 1.5 million climate refugees into the cities of Syria, where they collided with another 1.5 million refugees from the Iraq War. And along with other factors, that opened the gates of Hell that people are trying to close now. The US Defense Department has long warned of consequences from the climate crisis, including refugees, food and water shortages and pandemic disease.Right now we're seeing microbial diseases from the tropics spread to the higher latitudes; the transportation revolution has had a lot to do with this. But the changing conditions change the latitudes and the areas where these microbial diseases can become endemic and change the range of the vectors, like mosquitoes and ticks that carry them. The Zika epidemic now — we're better positioned in North America because it's still a little too cool and we have a better public health system. But when women in some regions of South and Central America are advised not to get pregnant for two years — that's something new, that ought to get our attention. The Lancet, one of the two greatest medical journals in the world, last summer labeled this a medical emergency now. And there are many factors because of it.This is also connected to the extinction crisis. We're in danger of losing 50 percent of all the living species on earth by the end of this century. And already, land-based plants and animals are now moving towards the poles at an average rate of 15 feet per day.Speaking of the North Pole, last December 29, the same storm that caused historic flooding in the American Midwest, raised temperatures at the North Pole 50 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, causing the thawing of the North Pole in the middle of the long, dark, winter, polar night. And when the land-based ice of the Arctic melts, it raises sea level.Paul Nicklen's beautiful photograph from Svalbard illustrates this. It's more dangerous coming off Greenland and particularly, Antarctica. The 10 largest risk cities for sea-level rise by population are mostly in South and Southeast Asia. When you measure it by assets at risk, number one is Miami: three and a half trillion dollars at risk. Number three: New York and Newark. I was in Miami last fall during the supermoon, one of the highest high-tide days. And there were fish from the ocean swimming in some of the streets of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Del Rey. And this happens regularly during the highest-tide tides now. Not with rain — they call it ""sunny-day flooding."" It comes up through the storm sewers. And the Mayor of Miami speaks for many when he says it is long past time this can be viewed through a partisan lens. This is a crisis that's getting worse day by day. We have to move beyond partisanship.And I want to take a moment to honor these House Republicans —(Applause)who had the courage last fall to step out and take a political risk, by telling the truth about the climate crisis.So the cost of the climate crisis is mounting up, there are many of these aspects I haven't even mentioned. It's an enormous burden. I'll mention just one more, because the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, after their annual survey of 750 economists, said the climate crisis is now the number one risk to the global economy. So you get central bankers like Mark Carney, the head of the UK Central Bank, saying the vast majority of the carbon reserves are unburnable. Subprime carbon. I'm not going to remind you what happened with subprime mortgages, but it's the same thing. If you look at all of the carbon fuels that were burned since the beginning of the industrial revolution, this is the quantity burned in the last 16 years. Here are all the ones that are proven and left on the books, 28 trillion dollars. The International Energy Agency says only this amount can be burned. So the rest, 22 trillion dollars — unburnable. Risk to the global economy. That's why divestment movement makes practical sense and is not just a moral imperative.So the answer to the first question, ""Must we change?"" is yes, we have to change. Second question, ""Can we change?"" This is the exciting news! The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over. We see an exponential curve for wind installations now. We see the cost coming down dramatically. Some countries — take Germany, an industrial powerhouse with a climate not that different from Vancouver's, by the way — one day last December, got 81 percent of all its energy from renewable resources, mainly solar and wind. A lot of countries are getting more than half on an average basis.More good news: energy storage, from batteries particularly, is now beginning to take off because the cost has been coming down very dramatically to solve the intermittency problem. With solar, the news is even more exciting! The best projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt per year by 2010. When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. This year, we're on track to beat it 68 times over.We're going to win this. We are going to prevail. The exponential curve on solar is even steeper and more dramatic. When I came to this stage 10 years ago, this is where it was. We have seen a revolutionary breakthrough in the emergence of these exponential curves.(Applause)And the cost has come down 10 percent per year for 30 years. And it's continuing to come down.Now, the business community has certainly noticed this, because it's crossing the grid parity point. Cheaper solar penetration rates are beginning to rise. Grid parity is understood as that line, that threshold, below which renewable electricity is cheaper than electricity from burning fossil fuels. That threshold is a little bit like the difference between 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 33 degrees Fahrenheit, or zero and one Celsius. It's a difference of more than one degree, it's the difference between ice and water. And it's the difference between markets that are frozen up, and liquid flows of capital into new opportunities for investment. This is the biggest new business opportunity in the history of the world, and two-thirds of it is in the private sector. We are seeing an explosion of new investment. Starting in 2010, investments globally in renewable electricity generation surpassed fossils. The gap has been growing ever since. The projections for the future are even more dramatic, even though fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 times larger than renewables. And by the way, if you add the projections for nuclear on here, particularly if you assume that the work many are doing to try to break through to safer and more acceptable, more affordable forms of nuclear, this could change even more dramatically.So is there any precedent for such a rapid adoption of a new technology? Well, there are many, but let's look at cell phones. In 1980, AT&T, then Ma Bell, commissioned McKinsey to do a global market survey of those clunky new mobile phones that appeared then. ""How many can we sell by the year 2000?"" they asked. McKinsey came back and said, ""900,000."" And sure enough, when the year 2000 arrived, they did sell 900,000 — in the first three days. And for the balance of the year, they sold 120 times more. And now there are more cell connections than there are people in the world.So, why were they not only wrong, but way wrong? I've asked that question myself, ""Why?""(Laughter)And I think the answer is in three parts. First, the cost came down much faster than anybody expected, even as the quality went up. And low-income countries, places that did not have a landline grid — they leap-frogged to the new technology. The big expansion has been in the developing counties. So what about the electricity grids in the developing world? Well, not so hot. And in many areas, they don't exist. There are more people without any electricity at all in India than the entire population of the United States of America. So now we're getting this: solar panels on grass huts and new business models that make it affordable. Muhammad Yunus financed this one in Bangladesh with micro-credit. This is a village market. Bangladesh is now the fastest-deploying country in the world: two systems per minute on average, night and day. And we have all we need: enough energy from the Sun comes to the earth every hour to supply the full world's energy needs for an entire year. It's actually a little bit less than an hour. So the answer to the second question, ""Can we change?"" is clearly ""Yes."" And it's an ever-firmer ""yes.""Last question, ""Will we change?"" Paris really was a breakthrough, some of the provisions are binding and the regular reviews will matter a lot. But nations aren't waiting, they're going ahead. China has already announced that starting next year, they're adopting a nationwide cap and trade system. They will likely link up with the European Union. The United States has already been changing. All of these coal plants were proposed in the next 10 years and canceled. All of these existing coal plants were retired. All of these coal plants have had their retirement announced. All of them — canceled. We are moving forward. Last year — if you look at all of the investment in new electricity generation in the United States, almost three-quarters was from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar.We are solving this crisis. The only question is: how long will it take to get there? So, it matters that a lot of people are organizing to insist on this change. Almost 400,000 people marched in New York City before the UN special session on this. Many thousands, tens of thousands, marched in cities around the world. And so, I am extremely optimistic. As I said before, we are going to win this.I'll finish with this story. When I was 13 years old, I heard that proposal by President Kennedy to land a person on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. And I heard adults of that day and time say, ""That's reckless, expensive, may well fail."" But eight years and two months later, in the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, there was great cheer that went up in NASA's mission control in Houston. Here's a little-known fact about that: the average age of the systems engineers, the controllers in the room that day, was 26, which means, among other things, their age, when they heard that challenge, was 18.We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: ""After the final 'no,' there comes a 'yes,' and on that 'yes', the future world depends."" When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women's Suffrage and Women's Rights Movement met endless no's, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final ""no"" comes a ""yes.""When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we're going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: You've got this incredible combination of skills. You've got this scientist mind that can understand the full range of issues, and the ability to turn it into the most vivid language. No one else can do that, that's why you led this thing. It was amazing to see it 10 years ago, it was amazing to see it now.Al Gore: Well, you're nice to say that, Chris. But honestly, I have a lot of really good friends in the scientific community who are incredibly patient and who will sit there and explain this stuff to me over and over and over again until I can get it into simple enough language that I can understand it. And that's the key to trying to communicate.CA: So, your talk. First part: terrifying, second part: incredibly hopeful. How do we know that all those graphs, all that progress, is enough to solve what you showed in the first part?AG: I think that the crossing — you know, I've only been in the business world for 15 years. But one of the things I've learned is that apparently it matters if a new product or service is more expensive than the incumbent, or cheaper than. Turns out, it makes a difference if it's cheaper than.(Laughter)And when it crosses that line, then a lot of things really change. We are regularly surprised by these developments. The late Rudi Dornbusch, the great economist said, ""Things take longer to happen then you think they will, and then they happen much faster than you thought they could."" I really think that's where we are. Some people are using the phrase ""The Solar Singularity"" now, meaning when it gets below the grid parity, unsubsidized in most places, then it's the default choice.Now, in one of the presentations yesterday, the jitney thing, there is an effort to use regulations to slow this down. And I just don't think it's going to work.There's a woman in Atlanta, Debbie Dooley, who's the Chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party. They enlisted her in this effort to put a tax on solar panels and regulations. And she had just put solar panels on her roof and she didn't understand the request.(Laughter)And so she went and formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and they formed a new organization called the Green Tea Party.(Laughter)(Applause)And they defeated the proposal. So, finally, the answer to your question is, this sounds a little corny and maybe it's a cliché, but 10 years ago — and Christiana referred to this — there are people in this audience who played an incredibly significant role in generating those exponential curves. And it didn't work out economically for some of them, but it kick-started this global revolution. And what people in this audience do now with the knowledge that we are going to win this. But it matters a lot how fast we win it.CA: Al Gore, that was incredibly powerful. If this turns out to be the year, that the partisan thing changes, as you said, it's no longer a partisan issue, but you bring along people from the other side together, backed by science, backed by these kinds of investment opportunities, backed by reason that you win the day — boy, that's really exciting.Thank you so much.AG: Thank you so much for bringing me back to TED. Thank you!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_the_case_for_optimism_on_climate_change
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"What do you think when you look at me? A woman of faith? An expert? Maybe even a sister. Or oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist. Or just an airport security line delay. That one's actually true.(Laughter)If some of your perceptions were negative, I don't really blame you. That's just how the media has been portraying people who look like me. One study found that 80 percent of news coverage about Islam and Muslims is negative. And studies show that Americans say that most don't know a Muslim. I guess people don't talk to their Uber drivers.(Laughter)Well, for those of you who have never met a Muslim, it's great to meet you. Let me tell you who I am. I'm a mom, a coffee lover — double espresso, cream on the side. I'm an introvert. I'm a wannabe fitness fanatic. And I'm a practicing, spiritual Muslim. But not like Lady Gaga says, because baby, I wasn't born this way. It was a choice.When I was 17, I decided to come out. No, not as a gay person like some of my friends, but as a Muslim, and decided to start wearing the hijab, my head covering. My feminist friends were aghast: ""Why are you oppressing yourself?"" The funny thing was, it was actually at that time a feminist declaration of independence from the pressure I felt as a 17-year-old, to conform to a perfect and unattainable standard of beauty. I didn't just passively accept the faith of my parents. I wrestled with the Quran. I read and reflected and questioned and doubted and, ultimately, believed. My relationship with God — it was not love at first sight. It was a trust and a slow surrender that deepened with every reading of the Quran. Its rhythmic beauty sometimes moves me to tears. I see myself in it. I feel that God knows me. Have you ever felt like someone sees you, completely understands you and yet loves you anyway? That's how it feels.And so later, I got married, and like all good Egyptians, started my career as an engineer.(Laughter)I later had a child, after getting married, and I was living essentially the Egyptian-American dream.And then that terrible morning of September, 2001. I think a lot of you probably remember exactly where you were that morning. I was sitting in my kitchen finishing breakfast, and I look up on the screen and see the words ""Breaking News."" There was smoke, airplanes flying into buildings, people jumping out of buildings. What was this? An accident? A malfunction? My shock quickly turned to outrage. Who would do this? And I switch the channel and I hear,""... Muslim terrorist ...,"" ""... in the name of Islam ...,"" ""... Middle-Eastern descent ...,"" ""... jihad ...,"" ""... we should bomb Mecca."" Oh my God.Not only had my country been attacked, but in a flash, somebody else's actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect.That same day, we had to drive across Middle America to move to a new city to start grad school. And I remember sitting in the passenger seat as we drove in silence, crouched as low as I could go in my seat, for the first time in my life, afraid for anyone to know I was a Muslim.We moved into our apartment that night in a new town in what felt like a completely different world. And then I was hearing and seeing and reading warnings from national Muslim organizations saying things like, ""Be alert,"" ""Be aware,"" ""Stay in well-lit areas,"" ""Don't congregate.""I stayed inside all week. And then it was Friday that same week, the day that Muslims congregate for worship. And again the warnings were, ""Don't go that first Friday, it could be a target."" And I was watching the news, wall-to-wall coverage. Emotions were so raw, understandably, and I was also hearing about attacks on Muslims, or people who were perceived to be Muslim, being pulled out and beaten in the street. Mosques were actually firebombed. And I thought, we should just stay home.And yet, something didn't feel right. Because those people who attacked our country attacked our country. I get it that people were angry at the terrorists. Guess what? So was I. And so to have to explain yourself all the time isn't easy. I don't mind questions. I love questions. It's the accusations that are tough.Today we hear people actually saying things like, ""There's a problem in this country, and it's called Muslims. When are we going to get rid of them?"" So, some people want to ban Muslims and close down mosques. They talk about my community kind of like we're a tumor in the body of America. And the only question is, are we malignant or benign? You know, a malignant tumor you extract altogether, and a benign tumor you just keep under surveillance.The choices don't make sense, because it's the wrong question. Muslims, like all other Americans, aren't a tumor in the body of America, we're a vital organ.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Muslims are inventors and teachers, first responders and Olympic athletes.Now, is closing down mosques going to make America safer? It might free up some parking spots, but it will not end terrorism. Going to a mosque regularly is actually linked to having more tolerant views of people of other faiths and greater civic engagement. And as one police chief in the Washington, DC area recently told me, people don't actually get radicalized at mosques. They get radicalized in their basement or bedroom, in front of a computer. And what you find about the radicalization process is it starts online, but the first thing that happens is the person gets cut off from their community, from even their family, so that the extremist group can brainwash them into believing that they, the terrorists, are the true Muslims, and everyone else who abhors their behavior and ideology are sellouts or apostates. So if we want to prevent radicalization, we have to keep people going to the mosque.Now, some will still argue Islam is a violent religion. After all, a group like ISIS bases its brutality on the Quran. Now, as a Muslim, as a mother, as a human being, I think we need to do everything we can to stop a group like ISIS. But we would be giving in to their narrative if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people.(Applause)Thank you.ISIS has as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity.(Applause)Both groups claim to base their ideology on their holy book. But when you look at them, they're not motivated by what they read in their holy book. It's their brutality that makes them read these things into the scripture.Recently, a prominent imam told me a story that really took me aback. He said that a girl came to him because she was thinking of going to join ISIS. And I was really surprised and asked him, had she been in contact with a radical religious leader? And he said the problem was quite the opposite, that every cleric that she had talked to had shut her down and said that her rage, her sense of injustice in the world, was just going to get her in trouble. And so with nowhere to channel and make sense of this anger, she was a prime target to be exploited by extremists promising her a solution. What this imam did was to connect her back to God and to her community. He didn't shame her for her rage — instead, he gave her constructive ways to make real change in the world. What she learned at that mosque prevented her from going to join ISIS.I've told you a little bit about how Islamophobia affects me and my family. But how does it impact ordinary Americans? How does it impact everyone else? How does consuming fear 24 hours a day affect the health of our democracy, the health of our free thought?Well, one study — actually, several studies in neuroscience — show that when we're afraid, at least three things happen. We become more accepting of authoritarianism, conformity and prejudice. One study showed that when subjects were exposed to news stories that were negative about Muslims, they became more accepting of military attacks on Muslim countries and policies that curtail the rights of American Muslims.Now, this isn't just academic. When you look at when anti-Muslim sentiment spiked between 2001 and 2013, it happened three times, but it wasn't around terrorist attacks. It was in the run up to the Iraq War and during two election cycles. So Islamophobia isn't just the natural response to Muslim terrorism as I would have expected. It can actually be a tool of public manipulation, eroding the very foundation of a free society, which is rational and well-informed citizens. Muslims are like canaries in the coal mine. We might be the first to feel it, but the toxic air of fear is harming us all.(Applause)And assigning collective guilt isn't just about having to explain yourself all the time. Deah and his wife Yusor were a young married couple living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they both went to school. Deah was an athlete. He was in dental school, talented, promising ... And his sister would tell me that he was the sweetest, most generous human being she knew. She was visiting him there and he showed her his resume, and she was amazed. She said, ""When did my baby brother become such an accomplished young man?"" Just a few weeks after Suzanne's visit to her brother and his new wife, their neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, murdered them, as well as Yusor's sister, Razan, who was visiting for the afternoon, in their apartment, execution style, after posting anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page. He shot Deah eight times. So bigotry isn't just immoral, it can even be lethal.So, back to my story. What happened after 9/11? Did we go to the mosque or did we play it safe and stay home? Well, we talked it over, and it might seem like a small decision, but to us, it was about what kind of America we wanted to leave for our kids: one that would control us by fear or one where we were practicing our religion freely. So we decided to go to the mosque. And we put my son in his car seat, buckled him in, and we drove silently, intensely, to the mosque. I took him out, I took off my shoes, I walked into the prayer hall and what I saw made me stop. The place was completely full. And then the imam made an announcement, thanking and welcoming our guests, because half the congregation were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, people of faith and no faith, who had come not to attack us, but to stand in solidarity with us.(Applause)I just break down at this time. These people were there because they chose courage and compassion over panic and prejudice.What will you choose? What will you choose at this time of fear and bigotry? Will you play it safe? Or will you join those who say we are better than that?Thank you.(Applause)Thank you so much.Helen Walters: So Dalia, you seem to have struck a chord. But I wonder, what would you say to those who might argue that you're giving a TED Talk, you're clearly a deep thinker, you work at a fancy think tank, you're an exception, you're not the rule. What would you say to those people?Dalia Mogahed: I would say, don't let this stage distract you, I'm completely ordinary. I'm not an exception. My story is not unusual. I am as ordinary as they come. When you look at Muslims around the world — and I've done this, I've done the largest study ever done on Muslims around the world — people want ordinary things. They want prosperity for their family, they want jobs and they want to live in peace. So I am not in any way an exception. When you meet people who seem like an exception to the rule, oftentimes it's that the rule is broken, not that they're an exception to it.HW: Thank you so much. Dalia Mogahed.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dalia_mogahed_what_do_you_think_when_you_look_at_me
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"I believe big institutions have unique potential to create change, and I believe that we as individuals have unique power to influence the direction that those institutions take.Now, these beliefs did not come naturally to me, because trusting big institutions, not really part of my family legacy. My mother escaped North Korea when she was 10 years old. To do so, she had to elude every big institution in her life: repressive governments, occupying armies and even armed border patrols. Later, when she decided she wanted to emigrate to the United States, she had to defy an entire culture that said the girls would never be the best and brightest. Only because her name happens to sound like a boy's was she able to finagle her way into the government immigration exam to come to the United States.Because of her bravery and passion, I've had all the opportunities that she never did, and that has made my story so different. Instead of running away from big institutions, I've actually run toward them. I've had the chance over the course of my career to work for The Wall Street Journal, the White House and now one of the largest financial institutions in the world, where I lead sustainable investing.Now, these institutions are like tankers, and working inside of them, I've come to appreciate what large wakes they can leave, and I've become convinced that the institution of the global capital markets, the nearly 290 trillion dollars of stocks and bonds in the world, that that may be one of our most powerful forces for positive social change at our disposal, if we ask it to be.Now, I know some of you are thinking, global capital markets, positive social change, not usually in the same sentence or even the same paragraph. I think many people think of the capital markets kind of like an ocean. It's a vast, impersonal, uncaring force of nature that is not affected by our wishes or desires. So the best that our little savings accounts or retirement accounts can do is to try to catch some waves in the good cycles and hope that we don't get inundated in the turbulent ones, but certainly our decisions on how to steer our little retirement accounts don't affect the tides, don't change the shape or size or direction of the waves.But why is that? Because actually, one third of this ocean of capital actually belongs to individuals like us, and most of the rest of the capital markets is controlled by the institutions that get their power and authority and their capital from us, as members, participants, beneficiaries, shareholders or citizens. So if we are the ultimate owners of the capital markets, why aren't we able to make our voices heard? Why can't we make some waves?So let me ask you a different question: did any of you buy fair trade coffee the last time you were at a supermarket or at Starbucks? OK. Do any of you go to the restaurant and order the sustainably farmed trout instead of the miso-glazed Chilean sea bass that you really wish you could have? Do any of you drive hybrid cars or even electric cars?So why do we do these things? Right? One electric car doesn't amount to much in a fleet of 1.2 billion combustion engine vehicles. One fish is just one fish in the sea. And one cup of coffee doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But we do these things because we believe they matter, that our actions add up, that our choices might influence others and collectively, what an impact we can have.So, in my bag I have a coffee mug that I bought a couple of years ago. It's a reusable mug. It has all these things printed on it. Look at some of the things that are on it, that it says.""This one cup can be used again and again.""""This one cup may inspire others to use one too.""""This one cup helps save the planet."" I had no idea this plastic cup was so powerful.(Laughter)So why do we think that our choice of a four dollar shade-grown fair trade artisanal cup of coffee in a reusable mug matters, but what we do with 4,000 dollars in our investment account for our IRA doesn't? Why can't we tell the supermarket and the capital markets that we care, that we care about fair labor standards, that we care about sustainable production methods and about healthy communities? Why aren't we voting with our investment dollars, but we would vote with our lattes?So I think it has something to do with the myths, the fables that we all carry around in our collective consciousness. Do you remember the Grimm's fairy tale about the magic porridge pot? If you said to the pot, ""Boil, little pot, boil,"" it would fill up with sweet porridge. And if you said, ""Stop, little pot, stop,"" it would stop. But if you got the words wrong, it wouldn't listen, and things could go terribly awry. So I think when it comes to markets, we have a little bit of a similar fable in our heads. We believe that the markets is this magic pot that obeys only one command: make more money. Only those words said exactly that way will make the pot fill up with gold. Add in some extra words like ""protect the environment,"" the spell might not work. Put in the wrong words like ""promote social justice,"" and you might see your gold coins shrink or even vanish entirely, according to this fable.So we asked people, what do you really think? And we actually went out and polled a thousand individual investors, and we found something fascinating. Overwhelmingly, people wanted to add those extra words into the formula. 71 percent of people said yes, they were interested in sustainable investing, which we define as taking the best in class investment process that you already have traditionally and adding in the extra information you get when you think about the environment and society and good governance. 71 percent wanted that. 72 percent said that they believe that companies who did that would actually do better financially. So people really do believe that you can do well by doing good. But here was the weird thing: 54 percent of the people still said if they put their money in those kinds of stocks, they thought that they would make less money.So is it true? Do you get less sweet porridge if you invest in shade-grown coffee instead of drinking it? Well, you know, the investors in companies like Burt's Bees or Ben & Jerry's wouldn't say so. Right? Both of those started out as small, socially conscious companies that ended up becoming so popular with consumers that the giants Unilever and Clorox bought them for hundreds of millions of dollars each. But here's the important thing. Those corporations realized that if they wanted to protect the value of their investments, they had to preserve that socially conscious mission. If they didn't keep adding in those extra words of environmentally friendly and socially conscious, those brands wouldn't make more money.But maybe this is just the exception the proves the rule, right? The serious companies that fund our economy and that fund our retirements and that really make the world go round, they need to stick to making more money. So, Harvard Business School actually researched this, and they found something fascinating. If you had invested a dollar 20 years ago in a portfolio of companies that focused narrowly on making more money quarter by quarter, that one dollar would have grown to 14 dollars and 46 cents. That's not bad until you consider that if instead you'd invested that same dollar in a portfolio of companies that focused on growing their business and on the most important environmental and social issues, that one dollar would have grown to 28 dollars and 36 cents. almost twice as much sweet porridge.Now, let's be clear, they didn't make that outperformance by giving away money to seem like a nice corporate citizen. They did it by focusing on the things that matter to their business, like wasting less energy and water in their manufacturing processes; like making sure the CEO contracts had the CEOs incentivized for the long-term results of the company and the communities they served, not just quarterly results; or building a first class culture that would have higher employee loyalty, retention and productivity. Now, Harvard's not alone. Oxford also did a research study where they examined 120 different studies looking at the effect of sustainability and economic results, and they found time and time and time again that the companies that cared about these kinds of important things actually had better operational efficiency, lower cost of capital and better performance in their stock price.And then there's Al Gore. So 20 years ago, when I worked for Al Gore in the White House, he was one of the early pioneers pleading with businesses and governments to pay attention to the challenges of climate change. Post-White House, he opened an investment firm called Generation, where he baked environmental sustainability and other things right into the core investment process. And at the time there was a good bit of skepticism about his views. Ten years later, his track record is one more proof point that sustainable investing done right can be sound investing. Far from making less sweet porridge because he added sustainability into the mix, he actually significantly outperformed the benchmark.Now, sustainable investing, the good news is it doesn't require a magic spell and it doesn't require some investment secret, and it's not just for the elite. It is not just about private equity for billionaires. It's not just groovy-sounding investments like clean technology or microfinance in emerging markets or artisanal bakeries in Brooklyn. It's about stocks and bonds and Fortune 500 companies. It's about mutual funds. It's about all the things we already see in the market today.So here's why I'm convinced that we collectively have the power to make sustainable investing the new normal.First, the proof points are coming out all the time that sustainable investing done right, preserving all the same good principles of investing, the traditional sphere, can pay. It makes sense.Secondly, the biggest obstacle standing in our way may actually just be in our heads. We just need to let go of that myth that if you add your values into your investment thinking, that you get less sweet porridge. And once you get rid of the fable, you can actually start appreciating those facts we've been talking about.And third, the future is already here. Sustainable investment today is a 20 trillion dollar market and it's the fastest-growing segment of the investment industry. In the United States, it has grown enormously, as you can see. It now represents one out of every six dollars under professional management in the United States.So what are we waiting for? For me, it goes back to the inspiration that I received from my mother. She knew that she wanted a life where she would have the freedom to make her own choices and to have her voice heard and write her own story. She was passionate about that goal and she was clear that she would let no army, no obstacle, no big institution stand in her way. She made it to the States, and she became a teacher, an award-winning author and a mother, and ended up sending her daughters to Harvard. And these days, you can tell that she is amply comfortable holding court in the most powerful institutions in the world. It seems almost too prophetic that her name in Korean means ""passionate clarity.""Passionate clarity: that's what I think we need to drive change. Passion about the change we want to see in the world, and clarity that we are able to help chart the course. We have more opportunity today than ever before to make choices. We have more power than ever before to make our voices heard.So change your perspective. Vote with your small change. Invest in the change you want to see in the world. Change the fables and change the markets.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/audrey_choi_how_to_make_a_profit_while_making_a_difference
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"When I moved to Harare in 1985, social justice was at the core of Zimbabwe's national health policy. The new government emerged from a long war of independence and immediately proclaimed a socialist agenda: health care services, primary education became essentially free. A massive expansion of rural health centers placed roughly 80 percent of the population less than a two-hour walk from these facilities, a truly remarkable accomplishment. In 1980, the year of independence, 25 percent of Zimbabwean children were fully immunized. By 1990, a mere decade later, this proportion stood at 80 percent.I felt tremendously privileged to be part of this transformation, a revolution. The excitement, the camaraderie, was palpable. Working side by side with brilliant Zimbabweans — scientists, doctors, activists — I felt connected not only to an African independence movement, but to a global progressive public health movement.But there were daunting challenges. Zimbabwe reported its first AIDS case in 1985, the year I arrived. I had taken care of a few patients with AIDS in the early 1980s, when I did my medical training at Harlem Hospital, but — we had no idea what lay in store for Africa. Infection rate stood at about two percent in my early days there. These would soar to one out of every four adults by the time I left Harare 17 years later. By the mid-1990s, I'd told hundreds of people in the prime of life that they were HIV-positive. I saw colleagues and friends die, my students, hospital patients, die.In response, my colleagues and I set up a clinic. We did condom demonstrations. We launched school education and workplace interventions. We did research. We counseled the partners of infected men about how to protect themselves. We worked hard, and at the time, I believed that I was doing my best. I was providing excellent treatment, such as it was. But I was not talking about structural change.Former UN Secretary Kofi Annan has spoken candidly about his personal failure leading to the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, he was head of the UN peacekeeping department. At a 10-year memorial for the genocide, he reflected, ""I believed at the time I was doing my best, but I realized after the genocide that there was more I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support.""The AIDS epidemic caught the health community unprepared, and today, when the World Health Organization estimates that 39 million people have lost their lives to this disease, I'm not alone in feeling remorse and regret at not having done more earlier.But while living in Zimbabwe, I didn't see my role as an advocacy or a political one. I was there for my technical skills, both my clinical and my research epidemiology skills. And in my mind, my job was to take care of patients and to do research to better understand the population patterns of transmission, and I hoped that we'd slow the spread of the virus. I was aware that socially marginalized populations were at disproportionate risk of getting and dying of AIDS. And on the sugar plantations, which really more closely resembled feudal fiefdoms than any modern enterprise, 60 percent of pregnant women tested HIV-positive.I worked to show how getting infected was not a moral failure but instead related to a culture of male superiority, to forced migrant labor and to colonialism. Whites were largely unscathed.As health professionals, our tools were pitifully weak: imploring people to change their individual behaviors, use condoms, reduce number of partners. Infection rates climbed, and when treatment became available in the West, treatment that remains our most potent weapon against this virus, it was unaffordable to the public sector across Africa. I didn't speak out about the unequal access to these life-saving drugs or about the underlying economic and political systems that were driving infection rates in such huge swaths of the population. I rationalized my silence by reminding myself that I was a guest in the country, that sounding the alarm could even get me kicked out, keep me from doing good work, taking care of my patients, doing much-needed research. So I didn't speak out about the government's early stance on AIDS. I didn't voice my concerns loudly enough.Many doctors, health professionals, may think I did nothing wrong. Our pact with our patients, the Hippocratic Oath and its variants, is about the sanctity of the patient-doctor relationship. And I did everything I could for each and every patient of mine.But I knew that epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only biology, but more importantly patterns of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination related to race, gender, sexuality, class and more. It was true of AIDS. It was true just recently of Ebola. Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer, who worked on AIDS in Haiti, call this structural violence: structural because inequities are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, often in ways that are invisible to those with privilege and power; and violence because its impact — premature deaths, suffering, illness — is violent. We do little for our patients if we fail to recognize these social injustices. Sounding the alarm is the first step towards doing public health right, and it's how we may rally support to break through and create real change together.So these days, I'm not staying quiet. I'm speaking up about a lot of things, even when it makes listeners uncomfortable, even when it makes me uncomfortable. And a lot of this is about racial disparities and institutionalized racism, things that we're not supposed to have in this country anymore, certainly not in the practice of medicine or public health. But we have them, and we pay for them in lives cut short. That's why sounding the alarm about the impact of racism on health in the United States, the ongoing institutional and interpersonal violence that people of color face, compounded by our tragic legacy of 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow and 60 years of imperfect equality, sounding the alarm about this is central to doing my job right as New York City's Health Commissioner. In New York City, premature mortality — that's death before the age of 65 — is 50 percent higher for black men than white ones. A black woman in 2012 faced more than 10 times the risk of dying related to childbirth as a white woman. And though we've made enormous strides in reducing infant mortality rates, a black baby still faces nearly three times the risk of death in its first year of life as compared to a white baby.New York City's not exceptional. These statistics are paralleled by statistics found across the United States. A recent New York Times analysis reported that there are 1.5 million missing black men across the country. They noted that more than one out of every six black men who today should be between the ages of 25 and 54 years have disappeared from daily life, lost either to prison or premature death. There is great injustice in the daily and disproportionate violence faced by young black men, the focus of recent protests under the banner #BlackLivesMatter. But we have to remember that enduring and disparate rates and the occurrence and outcome of common medical conditions — heart disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV — diseases that may kill slowly and quietly and take even more black lives prematurely.As the #BlackLivesMatter movement unfolded, I felt frustrated and angry that the medical community has been reluctant to even use the word ""racism"" in our research and our work. You've probably felt something every time I've said it. Our medical students held die-ins in their white coats, but the medical community has largely stood by passively as ongoing discrimination continues to affect the disease profile and mortality. And I worry that the trend towards personalized and precision medicine, looking for biological or genetic targets to better tailor treatment, may inadvertently cause us to lose sight of the big picture, that it is the daily context, where a person lives, grows, works, loves, that most importantly determines population health, and for too many of us, poor health.As health professionals in our daily work, whether in the clinic or doing research, we are witness to great injustice: the homeless person who is unable to follow medical advice because he has more pressing priorities; the transgender youth who is contemplating suicide because our society is just so harsh; the single mother who has been made to feel that she is responsible for the poor health of her child.Our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change. Rightfully or not, our societal position gives our voices great credibility, and we shouldn't waste that.I regret not speaking up in Zimbabwe, and I've promised myself that as New York City's Health Commissioner, I will use every opportunity I have to sound the alarm and rally support for health equity. I will speak out against racism, and I hope you will join me, and I will join you when you speak out against sexism or any other form of inequality. It's time for us to rise up and collectively speak up about structural inequality. We don't have to have all the answers to call for change. We just need courage. The health of our patients, the health of us all, depends on it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_bassett_why_your_doctor_should_care_about_social_justice
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"There are a few things that all of us need. We all need air to breathe. We need clean water to drink. We need food to eat. We need shelter and love. You know. Love is great, too. And we all need a safe place to pee.(Laughter) Yeah?As a trans person who doesn't fit neatly into the gender binary, if I could change the world tomorrow to make it easier for me to navigate, the very first thing I would do is blink and create single stall, gender-neutral bathrooms in all public places.(Applause) Trans people and trans issues, they've been getting a lot of mainstream media attention lately. And this is a great and necessary thing, but most of that attention has been focused on a very few individuals, most of whom are kinda rich and pretty famous, and probably don't have to worry that much anymore about where they're going to pee in between classes at their community college, or where they're going to get changed into their gym strip at their public high school. Fame and money insulates these television star trans people from most of the everyday challenges that the rest of us have to tackle on a daily basis.Public bathrooms. They've been a problem for me since as far back as I can remember, first when I was just a little baby tomboy and then later as a masculine-appearing, predominantly estrogen-based organism.(Laughter)Now, today as a trans person, public bathrooms and change rooms are where I am most likely to be questioned or harassed. I've often been verbally attacked behind their doors. I've been hauled out by security guards with my pants still halfway pulled up. I've been stared at, screamed at, whispered about, and one time I got smacked in the face by a little old lady's purse that from the looks of the shiner I took home that day I am pretty certain contained at least 70 dollars of rolled up small change and a large hard candy collection.(Laughter)And I know what some of you are thinking, and you're mostly right. I can and do just use the men's room most of the time these days. But that doesn't solve my change room dilemmas, does it? And I shouldn't have to use the men's room because I'm not a man. I'm a trans person.And now we've got these fearmongering politicians that keep trying to pass these bathroom bills. Have you heard about these? They try to legislate to try and force people like myself to use the bathroom that they deem most appropriate according to the gender I was assigned at birth. And if these politicians ever get their way, in Arizona or California or Florida or just last week in Houston, Texas, or Ottawa, well then, using the men's room will not be a legal option for me either.And every time one of these politicians brings one of these bills to the table, I can't help but wonder, you know, just who will and exactly how would we go about enforcing laws like these. Right? Panty checks? Really. Genital inspections outside of bath change rooms at public pools? There's no legal or ethical or plausible way to enforce laws like these anyway. They exist only to foster fear and promote transphobia. They don't make anyone safer. But they do for sure make the world more dangerous for some of us.And meanwhile, our trans children suffer. They drop out of school, or they opt out of life altogether. Trans people, especially trans and gender-nonconforming youth face additional challenges when accessing pools and gyms, but also universities, hospitals, libraries. Don't even get me started on how they treat us in airports.If we don't move now to make sure that these places are truly open and accessible to everyone, then we just need to get honest and quit calling them public places. We need to just admit that they are really only open for people who fit neatly into one of two gender boxes, which I do not. I never have. And this starts very early.I know a little girl. She's the daughter of a friend of mine. She's a self-identified tomboy. I'm talking about cowboy boots and Caterpillar yellow toy trucks and bug jars, the whole nine yards. One time I asked her what her favorite color was. She told me, ""Camouflage.""(Laughter)So that awesome little kid, she came home from school last October from her half day of preschool with soggy pants on because the other kids at school were harassing her when she tried to use the girls' bathroom. And the teacher had already instructed her to stay out of the boys' bathroom. And she had drank two glasses of that red juice at the Halloween party, and I mean, who can resist that red juice, right? It's so good. And she couldn't hold her pee any longer.Her and her classmates were four years old. They already felt empowered enough to police her use of the so-called public bathrooms. She was four years old. She had already been taught the brutal lesson that there was no bathroom door at preschool with a sign on it that welcomed people like her. She'd already learned that bathrooms were going to be a problem, and that problem started with her and was hers alone. So my friend asked me to talk to her little daughter, and I did. I wanted to tell her that me and her mom were going to march on down and talk to that school, and the problem was going to go away, but I knew that wasn't true. I wanted to tell her that it was all going to get better when she got older, but I couldn't. So I asked her to tell me the story of what had happened, asked her to tell me how it made her feel. ""Mad and sad,"" she told me. So I told her that she wasn't alone and that it wasn't right what had happened to her, and then she asked me if I had ever peed in my pants before. I said yes, I had, but not for a really long time.(Laughter)Which of course was a lie, because you know how you hit, like, 42 or 43, and sometimes you just, I don't know, you pee a little bit when you cough or sneeze, when you're running upstairs, or you're stretching. Don't lie. It happens. Right? She doesn't need to know that, I figure.(Laughter)I told her, when you get older, your bladder is going to grow bigger, too. When you get old like me, you're going to be able to hold your pee for way longer, I promised her.""Until you can get home?"" she asked me.I said, ""Yes, until you can get home."" She seemed to take some comfort in that.So let's just build some single stall, gender-neutral bathrooms with a little bench for getting changed into your gym clothes. We can't change the world overnight for our children, but we can give them a safe and private place to escape that world, if only for just a minute. This we can do. So let's just do it.And if you are one of those people who is sitting out there right now already coming up with a list of reasons in your head why this is not a priority, or it's too expensive, or telling yourself that giving a trans person a safe place to pee or get changed in supports a lifestyle choice that you feel offends your morality, or your masculinity, or your religious beliefs, then let me just appeal to the part of your heart that probably, hopefully, does care about the rest of the population. If you can't bring yourself to care enough about people like me, then what about women and girls with body image issues? What about anyone with body image stuff going on? What about that boy at school who is a foot shorter than his classmates, whose voice still hasn't dropped yet? Hey? Oh, grade eight, what a cruel master you can be. Right? What about people with anxiety issues? What about people with disabilities or who need assistance in there? What about folks with bodies who, for whatever reason, don't fit into the mainstream idea of what a body should look like? How many of us still feel shy or afraid to disrobe in front of our peers, and how many of us allow that fear to keep us from something as important as physical exercise? Would all those people not benefit from these single stall facilities?We can't change transphobic minds overnight, but we can give everybody a place to get changed in so that we can all get to work making the world safer for all of us.Thank you for listening.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ivan_coyote_why_we_need_gender_neutral_bathrooms
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"As a kid, I used to dream about the ocean. It was this wild place full of color and life, home to these alien-looking, fantastical creatures. I pictured big sharks ruling the food chain and saw graceful sea turtles dancing across coral reefs.As a marine biologist turned photographer, I've spent most of my career looking for places as magical as those I used to dream about when I was little. As you can see, I began exploring bodies of water at a fairly young age. But the first time I truly went underwater, I was about 10 years old. And I can still vividly remember furiously finning to reach this old, encrusted cannon on a shallow coral reef. And when I finally managed to grab hold of it, I looked up, and I was instantly surrounded by fish in all colors of the rainbow. That was the day I fell in love with the ocean.Thomas PeschakConservation PhotographerIn my 40 years on this planet, I've had the great privilege to explore some of its most incredible seascapes for National Geographic Magazine and the Save Our Seas Foundation. I've photographed everything from really, really big sharks to dainty ones that fit in the palm of your hand. I've smelled the fishy, fishy breath of humpback whales feeding just feet away from me in the cold seas off Canada's Great Bear Rainforest. And I've been privy to the mating rituals of green sea turtles in the Mozambique Channel.Everyone on this planet affects and is affected by the ocean. And the pristine seas I used to dream of as a child are becoming harder and harder to find. They are becoming more compressed and more threatened. As we humans continue to maintain our role as the leading predator on earth, I've witnessed and photographed many of these ripple effects firsthand. For a long time, I thought I had to shock my audience out of their indifference with disturbing images. And while this approach has merits, I have come full circle. I believe that the best way for me to effect change is to sell love. I guess I'm a matchmaker of sorts and as a photographer, I have the rare opportunity to reveal animals and entire ecosystems that lie hidden beneath the ocean's surface. You can't love something and become a champion for it if you don't know it exists. Uncovering this — that is the power of conservation photography.(Music)I've visited hundreds of marine locations, but there are a handful of seascapes that have touched me incredibly deeply. The first time I experienced that kind of high was about 10 years ago, off South Africa's rugged, wild coast. And every June and July, enormous shoals of sardines travel northwards in a mass migration we call the Sardine Run. And boy, do those fish have good reason to run. In hot pursuit are hoards of hungry and agile predators. Common dolphins hunt together and they can separate some of the sardines from the main shoal and they create bait balls. They drive and trap the fish upward against the ocean surface and then they rush in to dine on this pulsating and movable feast. Close behind are sharks. Now, most people believe that sharks and dolphins are these mortal enemies, but during the Sardine Run, they actually coexist. In fact, dolphins actually help sharks feed more effectively. Without dolphins, the bait balls are more dispersed and sharks often end up with what I call a sardine donut, or a mouth full of water. Now, while I've had a few spicy moments with sharks on the sardine run, I know they don't see me as prey. However, I get bumped and tail-slapped just like any other guest at this rowdy, rowdy banquet.From the shores of Africa we travel east, across the vastness that is the Indian Ocean to the Maldives, an archipelago of coral islands. And during the stormy southwest monsoon, manta rays from all across the archipelago travel to a tiny speck in Baa Atoll called Hanifaru. Armies of crustaceans, most no bigger than the size of your pupils, are the mainstay of the manta ray's diet. When plankton concentrations become patchy, manta rays feed alone and they somersault themselves backwards again and again, very much like a puppy chasing its own tail.(Music)However, when plankton densities increase, the mantas line up head-to-tail to form these long feeding chains, and any tasty morsel that escapes the first or second manta in line is surely to be gobbled up by the next or the one after. As plankton levels peak in the bay, the mantas swim closer and closer together in a unique behavior we call cyclone feeding. And as they swirl in tight formation, this multi-step column of mantas creates its own vortex, sucking in and delivering the plankton right into the mantas' cavernous mouths. The experience of diving amongst such masses of hundreds of rays is truly unforgettable.(Music)When I first photographed Hanifaru, the site enjoyed no protection and was threatened by development. And working with NGOs like the Manta Trust, my images eventually helped Hanifaru become a marine-protected area. Now, fisherman from neighboring islands, they once hunted these manta rays to make traditional drums from their skins. Today, they are the most ardent conservation champions and manta rays earn the Maldivian economy in excess of 8 million dollars every single year.I have always wanted to travel back in time to an era where maps were mostly blank or they read, ""There be dragons."" And today, the closest I've come is visiting remote atolls in the western Indian Ocean. Far, far away from shipping lanes and fishing fleets, diving into these waters is a poignant reminder of what our oceans once looked like.Very few people have heard of Bassas da India, a tiny speck of coral in the Mozambique Channel. Its reef forms a protective outer barrier and the inner lagoon is a nursery ground for Galapagos sharks. These sharks are anything but shy, even during the day. I had a bit of a hunch that they'd be even bolder and more abundant at night.(Music)Never before have I encountered so many sharks on a single coral outcrop. Capturing and sharing moments like this — that reminds me why I chose my path.Earlier this year, I was on assignment for National Geographic Magazine in Baja California. And about halfway down the peninsula on the Pacific side lies San Ignacio Lagoon, a critical calving ground for gray whales. For 100 years, this coast was the scene of a wholesale slaughter, where more than 20,000 gray whales were killed, leaving only a few hundred survivors. Today the descendents of these same whales nudge their youngsters to the surface to play and even interact with us.(Music)This species truly has made a remarkable comeback.Now, on the other side of the peninsula lies Cabo Pulmo, a sleepy fishing village. Decades of overfishing had brought them close to collapse. In 1995, local fisherman convinced the authorities to proclaim their waters a marine reserve. But what happened next was nothing short of miraculous. In 2005, after only a single decade of protection, scientists measured the largest recovery of fish ever recorded.But don't take my word for it — come with me. On a single breath, swim with me in deep, into one of the largest and densest schools of fish I have ever encountered.(Music)We all have the ability to be creators of hope. And through my photography, I want to pass on the message that it is not too late for our oceans. And particularly, I want to focus on nature's resilience in the face of 7.3 billion people.My hope is that in the future, I will have to search much, much harder to make photographs like this, while creating images that showcase our respectful coexistence with the ocean. Those will hopefully become an everyday occurrence for me.To thrive and survive in my profession, you really have to be a hopeless optimist. And I always operate on the assumption that the next great picture that will effect change is right around the corner, behind the next coral head, inside the next lagoon or possibly, in the one after it.(Music)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_peschak_dive_into_an_ocean_photographer_s_world
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"I'm a textile artist most widely known for starting the yarn bombing movement. Yarn bombing is when you take knitted or crocheted material out into the urban environment, graffiti-style — or, more specifically, without permission and unsanctioned.But when I started this over 10 years ago, I didn't have a word for it, I didn't have any ambitious notions about it, I had no visions of grandeur. All I wanted to see was something warm and fuzzy and human-like on the cold, steel, gray facade that I looked at everyday.So I wrapped the door handle. I call this the Alpha Piece. Little did I know that this tiny piece would change the course of my life.So clearly the reaction was interesting. It intrigued me and I thought, ""What else could I do?"" Could I do something in the public domain that would get the same reaction? So I wrapped the stop sign pole near my house. The reaction was wild. People would park their cars and get out of their cars and stare at it, and scratch their heads and stare at it, and take pictures of it and take pictures next to it, and all of that was really exciting to me and I wanted to do every stop sign pole in the neighborhood. And the more that I did, the stronger the reaction.So at this point I'm smitten. I'm hooked. This was all seductive. I found my new passion and the urban environment was my playground.So this is some of my early work. I was very curious about this idea of enhancing the ordinary, the mundane, even the ugly, and not taking away its identity or its functionality but just giving it a well-tailored suit out of knitting. And this was fun for me. It was really fun to take inanimate objects and have them come to life.So ... I think we all see the humor in this, but —(Laughter)I was at a point where I wanted to take it seriously. I wanted to analyze it. I wanted to know why I was letting this take over my life, why I was passionate about it, why were other people reacting so strongly to it. And I realized something. We all live in this fast-paced, digital world, but we still crave and desire something that's relatable.I think we've all become desensitized by our overdeveloped cities that we live in, and billboards and advertisements, and giant parking lots, and we don't even complain about that stuff anymore. So when you stumble upon a stop sign pole that's wrapped in knitting and it seems so out of place and then gradually — weirdly — you find a connection to it, that is the moment. That is the moment I love and that is the moment I love to share with others.So at this point, my curiosity grew. It went from the fire hydrants and the stop sign poles to what else can I do with this material. Can I do something big and large-scale and insurmountable?So that's when the bus happened. This was a real game changer for me. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for this one.At this point, people were recognizing my work but there wasn't much out there that was wrapped in knitting that was large-scale, and this definitely was the first city bus to be wrapped in knitting.So at this point, I'm experiencing, or I'm witnessing something interesting. I may have started yarn bombing but I certainly don't own it anymore. It had reached global status. People from all over the world were doing this. And I know this because I would travel to certain parts of the world that I'd never been to, and I'd stumble upon a stop sign pole and I knew I didn't wrap it.So as I pursued my own goals with my art — this is a lot of my recent work — so was yarn bombing. Yarn bombing was also growing. And that experience showed me the hidden power of this craft and showed me that there was this common language I had with the rest of the world. It was through this granny hobby — this unassuming hobby — that I found commonality with people that I never thought I'd have a connection with.So as I tell my story today, I'd also like to convey to you that hidden power can be found in the most unassuming places, and we all possess skills that are just waiting to be discovered.If you think about our hands, these tools that are connected to us, and what they're capable of doing — building houses and furniture, and painting giant murals — and most of the time we hold a controller or a cell phone. And I'm totally guilty of this as well. But if you think about it, what would happen if you put those things down? What would you make? What would you create with your own hands?A lot of people think that I am a master knitter but I actually couldn't knit a sweater to save my life. But I did something interesting with knitting that had never been done before.I also wasn't ""supposed to be"" an artist in the sense that I wasn't formally trained to do this — I'm a math major actually. So I didn't think this was in the cards for me, but I also know that I didn't stumble upon this. And when this happened to me, I held on tight, I fought for it and I'm proud to say that I am a working artist today.So as we ponder the future, know that your future might not be so seamless. And one day, you might be as bored as I was and knit a door handle to change your world forever.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/magda_sayeg_how_yarn_bombing_grew_into_a_worldwide_movement
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"So you go to the doctor and get some tests. The doctor determines that you have high cholesterol and you would benefit from medication to treat it. So you get a pillbox. You have some confidence, your physician has some confidence that this is going to work. The company that invented it did a lot of studies, submitted it to the FDA. They studied it very carefully, skeptically, they approved it. They have a rough idea of how it works, they have a rough idea of what the side effects are. It should be OK. You have a little more of a conversation with your physician and the physician is a little worried because you've been blue, haven't felt like yourself, you haven't been able to enjoy things in life quite as much as you usually do. Your physician says, ""You know, I think you have some depression. I'm going to have to give you another pill.""So now we're talking about two medications. This pill also — millions of people have taken it, the company did studies, the FDA looked at it — all good. Think things should go OK. Think things should go OK. Well, wait a minute. How much have we studied these two together?Well, it's very hard to do that. In fact, it's not traditionally done. We totally depend on what we call ""post-marketing surveillance,"" after the drugs hit the market. How can we figure out if bad things are happening between two medications? Three? Five? Seven? Ask your favorite person who has several diagnoses how many medications they're on.Why do I care about this problem? I care about it deeply. I'm an informatics and data science guy and really, in my opinion, the only hope — only hope — to understand these interactions is to leverage lots of different sources of data in order to figure out when drugs can be used together safely and when it's not so safe.So let me tell you a data science story. And it begins with my student Nick. Let's call him ""Nick,"" because that's his name.(Laughter)Nick was a young student. I said, ""You know, Nick, we have to understand how drugs work and how they work together and how they work separately, and we don't have a great understanding. But the FDA has made available an amazing database. It's a database of adverse events. They literally put on the web — publicly available, you could all download it right now — hundreds of thousands of adverse event reports from patients, doctors, companies, pharmacists. And these reports are pretty simple: it has all the diseases that the patient has, all the drugs that they're on, and all the adverse events, or side effects, that they experience. It is not all of the adverse events that are occurring in America today, but it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of drugs.So I said to Nick, ""Let's think about glucose. Glucose is very important, and we know it's involved with diabetes. Let's see if we can understand glucose response. I sent Nick off. Nick came back.""Russ,"" he said, ""I've created a classifier that can look at the side effects of a drug based on looking at this database, and can tell you whether that drug is likely to change glucose or not.""He did it. It was very simple, in a way. He took all the drugs that were known to change glucose and a bunch of drugs that don't change glucose, and said, ""What's the difference in their side effects? Differences in fatigue? In appetite? In urination habits?"" All those things conspired to give him a really good predictor. He said, ""Russ, I can predict with 93 percent accuracy when a drug will change glucose.""I said, ""Nick, that's great."" He's a young student, you have to build his confidence. ""But Nick, there's a problem. It's that every physician in the world knows all the drugs that change glucose, because it's core to our practice. So it's great, good job, but not really that interesting, definitely not publishable.""(Laughter)He said, ""I know, Russ. I thought you might say that."" Nick is smart. ""I thought you might say that, so I did one other experiment. I looked at people in this database who were on two drugs, and I looked for signals similar, glucose-changing signals, for people taking two drugs, where each drug alone did not change glucose, but together I saw a strong signal.""And I said, ""Oh! You're clever. Good idea. Show me the list."" And there's a bunch of drugs, not very exciting. But what caught my eye was, on the list there were two drugs: paroxetine, or Paxil, an antidepressant; and pravastatin, or Pravachol, a cholesterol medication.And I said, ""Huh. There are millions of Americans on those two drugs."" In fact, we learned later, 15 million Americans on paroxetine at the time, 15 million on pravastatin, and a million, we estimated, on both. So that's a million people who might be having some problems with their glucose if this machine-learning mumbo jumbo that he did in the FDA database actually holds up. But I said, ""It's still not publishable, because I love what you did with the mumbo jumbo, with the machine learning, but it's not really standard-of-proof evidence that we have."" So we have to do something else. Let's go into the Stanford electronic medical record. We have a copy of it that's OK for research, we removed identifying information. And I said, ""Let's see if people on these two drugs have problems with their glucose.""Now there are thousands and thousands of people in the Stanford medical records that take paroxetine and pravastatin. But we needed special patients. We needed patients who were on one of them and had a glucose measurement, then got the second one and had another glucose measurement, all within a reasonable period of time — something like two months. And when we did that, we found 10 patients. However, eight out of the 10 had a bump in their glucose when they got the second P — we call this P and P — when they got the second P. Either one could be first, the second one comes up, glucose went up 20 milligrams per deciliter. Just as a reminder, you walk around normally, if you're not diabetic, with a glucose of around 90. And if it gets up to 120, 125, your doctor begins to think about a potential diagnosis of diabetes. So a 20 bump — pretty significant.I said, ""Nick, this is very cool. But, I'm sorry, we still don't have a paper, because this is 10 patients and — give me a break — it's not enough patients.""So we said, what can we do? And we said, let's call our friends at Harvard and Vanderbilt, who also — Harvard in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville, who also have electronic medical records similar to ours. Let's see if they can find similar patients with the one P, the other P, the glucose measurements in that range that we need.God bless them, Vanderbilt in one week found 40 such patients, same trend. Harvard found 100 patients, same trend. So at the end, we had 150 patients from three diverse medical centers that were telling us that patients getting these two drugs were having their glucose bump somewhat significantly.More interestingly, we had left out diabetics, because diabetics already have messed up glucose. When we looked at the glucose of diabetics, it was going up 60 milligrams per deciliter, not just 20. This was a big deal, and we said, ""We've got to publish this."" We submitted the paper. It was all data evidence, data from the FDA, data from Stanford, data from Vanderbilt, data from Harvard. We had not done a single real experiment.But we were nervous. So Nick, while the paper was in review, went to the lab. We found somebody who knew about lab stuff. I don't do that. I take care of patients, but I don't do pipettes. They taught us how to feed mice drugs. We took mice and we gave them one P, paroxetine. We gave some other mice pravastatin. And we gave a third group of mice both of them. And lo and behold, glucose went up 20 to 60 milligrams per deciliter in the mice.So the paper was accepted based on the informatics evidence alone, but we added a little note at the end, saying, oh by the way, if you give these to mice, it goes up.That was great, and the story could have ended there. But I still have six and a half minutes.(Laughter)So we were sitting around thinking about all of this, and I don't remember who thought of it, but somebody said, ""I wonder if patients who are taking these two drugs are noticing side effects of hyperglycemia. They could and they should. How would we ever determine that?""We said, well, what do you do? You're taking a medication, one new medication or two, and you get a funny feeling. What do you do? You go to Google and type in the two drugs you're taking or the one drug you're taking, and you type in ""side effects."" What are you experiencing? So we said OK, let's ask Google if they will share their search logs with us, so that we can look at the search logs and see if patients are doing these kinds of searches. Google, I am sorry to say, denied our request. So I was bummed. I was at a dinner with a colleague who works at Microsoft Research and I said, ""We wanted to do this study, Google said no, it's kind of a bummer."" He said, ""Well, we have the Bing searches.""(Laughter)Yeah. That's great. Now I felt like I was —(Laughter)I felt like I was talking to Nick again. He works for one of the largest companies in the world, and I'm already trying to make him feel better. But he said, ""No, Russ — you might not understand. We not only have Bing searches, but if you use Internet Explorer to do searches at Google, Yahoo, Bing, any ... Then, for 18 months, we keep that data for research purposes only."" I said, ""Now you're talking!"" This was Eric Horvitz, my friend at Microsoft.So we did a study where we defined 50 words that a regular person might type in if they're having hyperglycemia, like ""fatigue,"" ""loss of appetite,"" ""urinating a lot,"" ""peeing a lot"" — forgive me, but that's one of the things you might type in. So we had 50 phrases that we called the ""diabetes words."" And we did first a baseline. And it turns out that about .5 to one percent of all searches on the Internet involve one of those words. So that's our baseline rate. If people type in ""paroxetine"" or ""Paxil"" — those are synonyms — and one of those words, the rate goes up to about two percent of diabetes-type words, if you already know that there's that ""paroxetine"" word. If it's ""pravastatin,"" the rate goes up to about three percent from the baseline. If both ""paroxetine"" and ""pravastatin"" are present in the query, it goes up to 10 percent, a huge three- to four-fold increase in those searches with the two drugs that we were interested in, and diabetes-type words or hyperglycemia-type words.We published this, and it got some attention. The reason it deserves attention is that patients are telling us their side effects indirectly through their searches. We brought this to the attention of the FDA. They were interested. They have set up social media surveillance programs to collaborate with Microsoft, which had a nice infrastructure for doing this, and others, to look at Twitter feeds, to look at Facebook feeds, to look at search logs, to try to see early signs that drugs, either individually or together, are causing problems.What do I take from this? Why tell this story? Well, first of all, we have now the promise of big data and medium-sized data to help us understand drug interactions and really, fundamentally, drug actions. How do drugs work? This will create and has created a new ecosystem for understanding how drugs work and to optimize their use. Nick went on; he's a professor at Columbia now. He did this in his PhD for hundreds of pairs of drugs. He found several very important interactions, and so we replicated this and we showed that this is a way that really works for finding drug-drug interactions.However, there's a couple of things. We don't just use pairs of drugs at a time. As I said before, there are patients on three, five, seven, nine drugs. Have they been studied with respect to their nine-way interaction? Yes, we can do pair-wise, A and B, A and C, A and D, but what about A, B, C, D, E, F, G all together, being taken by the same patient, perhaps interacting with each other in ways that either makes them more effective or less effective or causes side effects that are unexpected? We really have no idea. It's a blue sky, open field for us to use data to try to understand the interaction of drugs.Two more lessons: I want you to think about the power that we were able to generate with the data from people who had volunteered their adverse reactions through their pharmacists, through themselves, through their doctors, the people who allowed the databases at Stanford, Harvard, Vanderbilt, to be used for research. People are worried about data. They're worried about their privacy and security — they should be. We need secure systems. But we can't have a system that closes that data off, because it is too rich of a source of inspiration, innovation and discovery for new things in medicine.And the final thing I want to say is, in this case we found two drugs and it was a little bit of a sad story. The two drugs actually caused problems. They increased glucose. They could throw somebody into diabetes who would otherwise not be in diabetes, and so you would want to use the two drugs very carefully together, perhaps not together, make different choices when you're prescribing. But there was another possibility. We could have found two drugs or three drugs that were interacting in a beneficial way. We could have found new effects of drugs that neither of them has alone, but together, instead of causing a side effect, they could be a new and novel treatment for diseases that don't have treatments or where the treatments are not effective. If we think about drug treatment today, all the major breakthroughs — for HIV, for tuberculosis, for depression, for diabetes — it's always a cocktail of drugs.And so the upside here, and the subject for a different TED Talk on a different day, is how can we use the same data sources to find good effects of drugs in combination that will provide us new treatments, new insights into how drugs work and enable us to take care of our patients even better?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/russ_altman_what_really_happens_when_you_mix_medications
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"There are times when I feel really quite ashamed to be a European. In the last year, more than a million people arrived in Europe in need of our help, and our response, frankly, has been pathetic.There are just so many contradictions. We mourn the tragic death of two-year-old Alan Kurdi, and yet, since then, more than 200 children have subsequently drowned in the Mediterranean. We have international treaties that recognize that refugees are a shared responsibility, and yet we accept that tiny Lebanon hosts more Syrians than the whole of Europe combined. We lament the existence of human smugglers, and yet we make that the only viable route to seek asylum in Europe. We have labor shortages, and yet we exclude people who fit our economic and demographic needs from coming to Europe. We proclaim our liberal values in opposition to fundamentalist Islam, and yet — we have repressive policies that detain child asylum seekers, that separate children from their families, and that seize property from refugees.What are we doing? How has the situation come to this, that we've adopted such an inhumane response to a humanitarian crisis?I don't believe it's because people don't care, or at least I don't want to believe it's because people don't care. I believe it's because our politicians lack a vision, a vision for how to adapt an international refugee system created over 50 years ago for a changing and globalized world. And so what I want to do is take a step back and ask two really fundamental questions, the two questions we all need to ask. First, why is the current system not working? And second, what can we do to fix it?So the modern refugee regime was created in the aftermath of the Second World War by these guys. Its basic aim is to ensure that when a state fails, or worse, turns against its own people, people have somewhere to go, to live in safety and dignity until they can go home. It was created precisely for situations like the situation we see in Syria today. Through an international convention signed by 147 governments, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and an international organization, UNHCR, states committed to reciprocally admit people onto their territory who flee conflict and persecution.But today, that system is failing. In theory, refugees have a right to seek asylum. In practice, our immigration policies block the path to safety. In theory, refugees have a right to a pathway to integration, or return to the country they've come from. But in practice, they get stuck in almost indefinite limbo. In theory, refugees are a shared global responsibility. In practice, geography means that countries proximate the conflict take the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees. The system isn't broken because the rules are wrong. It's that we're not applying them adequately to a changing world, and that's what we need to reconsider.So I want to explain to you a little bit about how the current system works. How does the refugee regime actually work? But not from a top-down institutional perspective, rather from the perspective of a refugee. So imagine a Syrian woman. Let's call her Amira. And Amira to me represents many of the people I've met in the region. Amira, like around 25 percent of the world's refugees, is a woman with children, and she can't go home because she comes from this city that you see before you, Homs, a once beautiful and historic city now under rubble. And so Amira can't go back there. But Amira also has no hope of resettlement to a third country, because that's a lottery ticket only available to less than one percent of the world's refugees.So Amira and her family face an almost impossible choice. They have three basic options. The first option is that Amira can take her family to a camp. In the camp, she might get assistance, but there are very few prospects for Amira and her family. Camps are in bleak, arid locations, often in the desert. In the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, you can hear the shells across the border in Syria at nighttime. There's restricted economic activity. Education is often of poor quality. And around the world, some 80 percent of refugees who are in camps have to stay for at least five years. It's a miserable existence, and that's probably why, in reality, only nine percent of Syrians choose that option.Alternatively, Amira can head to an urban area in a neighboring country, like Amman or Beirut. That's an option that about 75 percent of Syrian refugees have taken. But there, there's great difficulty as well. Refugees in such urban areas don't usually have the right to work. They don't usually get significant access to assistance. And so when Amira and her family have used up their basic savings, they're left with very little and likely to face urban destitution.So there's a third alternative, and it's one that increasing numbers of Syrians are taking. Amira can seek some hope for her family by risking their lives on a dangerous and perilous journey to another country, and it's that which we're seeing in Europe today.Around the world, we present refugees with an almost impossible choice between three options: encampment, urban destitution and dangerous journeys. For refugees, that choice is the global refugee regime today. But I think it's a false choice. I think we can reconsider that choice. The reason why we limit those options is because we think that those are the only options that are available to refugees, and they're not. Politicians frame the issue as a zero-sum issue, that if we benefit refugees, we're imposing costs on citizens. We tend to have a collective assumption that refugees are an inevitable cost or burden to society. But they don't have to. They can contribute.So what I want to argue is there are ways in which we can expand that choice set and still benefit everyone else: the host states and communities, our societies and refugees themselves. And I want to suggest four ways we can transform the paradigm of how we think about refugees. All four ways have one thing in common: they're all ways in which we take the opportunities of globalization, mobility and markets, and update the way we think about the refugee issue.The first one I want to think about is the idea of enabling environments, and it starts from a very basic recognition that refugees are human beings like everyone else, but they're just in extraordinary circumstances. Together with my colleagues in Oxford, we've embarked on a research project in Uganda looking at the economic lives of refugees. We chose Uganda not because it's representative of all host countries. It's not. It's exceptional. Unlike most host countries around the world, what Uganda has done is give refugees economic opportunity. It gives them the right to work. It gives them freedom of movement. And the results of that are extraordinary both for refugees and the host community. In the capital city, Kampala, we found that 21 percent of refugees own a business that employs other people, and 40 percent of those employees are nationals of the host country. In other words, refugees are making jobs for citizens of the host country. Even in the camps, we found extraordinary examples of vibrant, flourishing and entrepreneurial businesses.For example, in a settlement called Nakivale, we found examples of Congolese refugees running digital music exchange businesses. We found a Rwandan who runs a business that's available to allow the youth to play computer games on recycled games consoles and recycled televisions. Against the odds of extreme constraint, refugees are innovating, and the gentleman you see before you is a Congolese guy called Demou-Kay. Demou-Kay arrived in the settlement with very little, but he wanted to be a filmmaker. So with friends and colleagues, he started a community radio station, he rented a video camera, and he's now making films. He made two documentary films with and for our team, and he's making a successful business out of very little. It's those kinds of examples that should guide our response to refugees. Rather than seeing refugees as inevitably dependent upon humanitarian assistance, we need to provide them with opportunities for human flourishing.Yes, clothes, blankets, shelter, food are all important in the emergency phase, but we need to also look beyond that. We need to provide opportunities to connectivity, electricity, education, the right to work, access to capital and banking. All the ways in which we take for granted that we are plugged in to the global economy can and should apply to refugees.The second idea I want to discuss is economic zones. Unfortunately, not every host country in the world takes the approach Uganda has taken. Most host countries don't open up their economies to refugees in the same way. But there are still pragmatic alternative options that we can use.Last April, I traveled to Jordan with my colleague, the development economist Paul Collier, and we brainstormed an idea while we were there with the international community and the government, an idea to bring jobs to Syrians while supporting Jordan's national development strategy. The idea is for an economic zone, one in which we could potentially integrate the employment of refugees alongside the employment of Jordanian host nationals. And just 15 minutes away from the Zaatari refugee camp, home to 83,000 refugees, is an existing economic zone called the King Hussein Bin Talal Development Area. The government has spent over a hundred million dollars connecting it to the electricity grid, connecting it to the road network, but it lacked two things: access to labor and inward investment. So what if refugees were able to work there rather than being stuck in camps, able to support their families and develop skills through vocational training before they go back to Syria? We recognized that that could benefit Jordan, whose development strategy requires it to make the leap as a middle income country to manufacturing. It could benefit refugees, but it could also contribute to the postconflict reconstruction of Syria by recognizing that we need to incubate refugees as the best source of eventually rebuilding Syria.We published the idea in the journal Foreign Affairs. King Abdullah has picked up on the idea. It was announced at the London Syria Conference two weeks ago, and a pilot will begin in the summer.(Applause)The third idea that I want to put to you is preference matching between states and refugees to lead to the kinds of happy outcomes you see here in the selfie featuring Angela Merkel and a Syrian refugee. What we rarely do is ask refugees what they want, where they want to go, but I'd argue we can do that and still make everyone better off. The economist Alvin Roth has developed the idea of matching markets, ways in which the preference ranking of the parties shapes an eventual match. My colleagues Will Jones and Alex Teytelboym have explored ways in which that idea could be applied to refugees, to ask refugees to rank their preferred destinations, but also allow states to rank the types of refugees they want on skills criteria or language criteria and allow those to match. Now, of course you'd need to build in quotas on things like diversity and vulnerability, but it's a way of increasing the possibilities of matching. The matching idea has been successfully used to match, for instance, students with university places, to match kidney donors with patients, and it underlies the kind of algorithms that exist on dating websites. So why not apply that to give refugees greater choice?It could also be used at the national level, where one of the great challenges we face is to persuade local communities to accept refugees. And at the moment, in my country, for instance, we often send engineers to rural areas and farmers to the cities, which makes no sense at all. So matching markets offer a potential way to bring those preferences together and listen to the needs and demands of the populations that host and the refugees themselves.The fourth idea I want to put to you is of humanitarian visas. Much of the tragedy and chaos we've seen in Europe was entirely avoidable. It stems from a fundamental contradiction in Europe's asylum policy, which is the following: that in order to seek asylum in Europe, you have to arrive spontaneously by embarking on those dangerous journeys that I described. But why should those journeys be necessary in an era of the budget airline and modern consular capabilities? They're completely unnecessary journeys, and last year, they led to the deaths of over 3,000 people on Europe's borders and within European territory.If refugees were simply allowed to travel directly and seek asylum in Europe, we would avoid that, and there's a way of doing that through something called a humanitarian visa, that allows people to collect a visa at an embassy or a consulate in a neighboring country and then simply pay their own way through a ferry or a flight to Europe. It costs around a thousand euros to take a smuggler from Turkey to the Greek islands. It costs 200 euros to take a budget airline from Bodrum to Frankfurt. If we allowed refugees to do that, it would have major advantages. It would save lives, it would undercut the entire market for smugglers, and it would remove the chaos we see from Europe's front line in areas like the Greek islands. It's politics that prevents us doing that rather than a rational solution.And this is an idea that has been applied. Brazil has adopted a pioneering approach where over 2,000 Syrians have been able to get humanitarian visas, enter Brazil, and claim refugee status on arrival in Brazil. And in that scheme, every Syrian who has gone through it has received refugee status and been recognized as a genuine refugee.There is a historical precedent for it as well. Between 1922 and 1942, these Nansen passports were used as travel documents to allow 450,000 Assyrians, Turks and Chechens to travel across Europe and claim refugee status elsewhere in Europe. And the Nansen International Refugee Office received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of this being a viable strategy.So all four of these ideas that I've presented you are ways in which we can expand Amira's choice set. They're ways in which we can have greater choice for refugees beyond those basic, impossible three options I explained to you and still leave others better off.In conclusion, we really need a new vision, a vision that enlarges the choices of refugees but recognizes that they don't have to be a burden. There's nothing inevitable about refugees being a cost. Yes, they are a humanitarian responsibility, but they're human beings with skills, talents, aspirations, with the ability to make contributions — if we let them.In the new world, migration is not going to go away. What we've seen in Europe will be with us for many years. People will continue to travel, they'll continue to be displaced, and we need to find rational, realistic ways of managing this — not based on the old logics of humanitarian assistance, not based on logics of charity, but building on the opportunities offered by globalization, markets and mobility. I'd urge you all to wake up and urge our politicians to wake up to this challenge.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alexander_betts_our_refugee_system_is_failing_here_s_how_we_can_fix_it
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"Today I wanted to — well, this morning — I want to talk about the future of human-driven transportation; about how we can cut congestion, pollution and parking by getting more people into fewer cars; and how we can do it with the technology that's in our pockets. And yes, I'm talking about smartphones ... not self-driving cars.But to get started we've got to go back over 100 years. Because it turns out there was an Uber way before Uber. And if it had survived, the future of transportation would probably already be here.So let me introduce you to the jitney. In 1914 it was created or invented by a guy named LP Draper. He was a car salesman from LA, and he had an idea. Well, he was cruising around downtown Los Angeles, my hometown, and he saw trolleys with long lines of people trying to get to where they wanted to go. He said, well, why don't I just put a sign on my car that takes people wherever they want to go for a jitney — that was slang for a nickel.And so people jumped on board, and not just in Los Angeles but across the country. And within one year, by 1915, there were 50,000 rides per day in Seattle, 45,000 rides per day in Kansas and 150,000 rides per day in Los Angeles. To give you some perspective, Uber in Los Angeles is doing 157,000 rides per day, today ... 100 years later.And so these are the trolley guys, the existing transportation monopoly at the time. They were clearly not happy about the jitney juggernaut. And so they got to work and they went to cities across the country and got regulations put in place to slow down the growth of the jitney.And there were all kinds of regulations. There were licenses — often they were pricey. In some cities, if you were a jitney driver, you were required to be in the jitney for 16 hours a day. In other cities, they required two jitney drivers for one jitney. But there was a really interesting regulation which was they had to put a backseat light — install it in every Jitney — to stop a new pernicious innovation which they called spooning.(Laughter)All right. So what happened? Well, within a year this thing had taken off. But the jitney, by 1919, was regulated completely out of existence.That's unfortunate ... because, well, when you can't share a car, then you have to own one. And car ownership skyrocketed and it's no wonder that by 2007, there was a car for every man, woman and child in the United States. And that phenomenon had gone global. In China by 2011, there were more car sales happening in China than in the US.Now, all this private ownership of course had a public cost. In the US, we spend 7 billion hours a year, wasted, sitting in traffic. 160 billion dollars in lost productivity, of course also sitting in traffic, and one-fifth of all of our carbon footprint is spewed out in the air by those cars that we're sitting in.Now, that's only four percent of our problem though. Because if you have to own a car then that means 96 percent of the time your car is sitting idle. And so, up to 30 percent of our land and our space is used storing these hunks of steel. We even have skyscrapers built for cars. That's the world we live in today.Now, cities have been dealing with this problem for decades. It's called mass transit. And even in a city like New York City, one of the most densely populated in the world and one of the most sophisticated mass transit systems in the world, there are still 2.5 million cars that go over those bridges every day. Why is that? Well, it's because mass transit hasn't yet figured out how to get to everybody's doorstep. And so back in San Francisco, where I live, the situation's much worse, in fact, much worse around the world.And so the beginning of Uber in 2010 was — well, we just wanted to push a button and get a ride. We didn't have any grand ambitions. But it just turned out that lots of people wanted to push a button and get a ride, and ultimately what we started to see was a lot of duplicate rides. We saw a lot of people pushing the same button at the same time going essentially to the same place.And so we started thinking about, well, how do we make those two trips and turn them into one. Because if we did, that ride would be a lot cheaper — up to 50 percent cheaper — and of course for the city you've got a lot more people and a lot fewer cars.And so the big question for us was: would it work? Could you have a cheaper ride cheap enough that people would be willing to share it? And the answer, fortunately, is a resounding yes.In San Francisco, before uberPOOL, we had — well, everybody would take their car wherever the heck they wanted. And the bright colors is where we have the most cars. And once we introduced uberPOOL, well, you see there's not as many bright colors. More people getting around the city in fewer cars, taking cars off the road. It looks like uberPOOL is working.And so we rolled it out in Los Angeles eight months ago. And since then, we've taken 7.9 million miles off the roads and we've taken 1.4 thousand metric tons of CO2 out of the air. But the part that I'm really —(Applause)But my favorite statistic — remember, I'm from LA, I spent years of my life sitting behind the wheel, going, ""How do we fix this?"" — my favorite part is that eight months later, we have added 100,000 new people that are carpooling every week.Now, in China everything is supersized, and so we're doing 15 million uberPOOL trips per month, that's 500,000 per day. And of course we're seeing that exponential growth happen. In fact, we're seeing it in LA, too. And when I talk to my team, we don't talk about, ""Hey, well, 100,000 people carpooling every week and we're done."" How do we get that to a million? And in China, well, that could be several million.And so uberPOOL is a very great solution for urban carpooling. But what about the suburbs?This is the street where I grew up in Los Angeles, it's actually a suburb called Northridge, California, and, well — look, those mailboxes, they kind of just go on forever. And every morning at about the same time, cars roll of out their driveway, most of them, one person in the car, and they go to work, they go to their place of work. So the question for us is: well, how do we turn all of these commuter cars — and literally there's tens of millions of them — how do we turn all these commuter cars into shared cars?Well, we have something for this that we recently launched called uberCOMMUTE. You get up in the morning, get ready for work, get your coffee, go to your car and you light up the Uber app, and all of a sudden, you become an Uber driver. And we'll match you up with one of your neighbors on your way to work and it's a really great thing.There's just one hitch ... it's called regulation. So 54 cents a mile, what is that? Well, that is what the US government has determined that the cost of owning a car is per mile. You can pick up anybody in the United States and take them wherever they want to go at a moment's notice, for 54 cents a mile or less. But if you charge 60 cents a mile, you're a criminal. But what if for 60 cents a mile we could get half a million more people carpooling in Los Angeles? And what if at 60 cents a mile we could get 50 million people carpooling in the United States? If we could, it's obviously something we should do.And so it goes back to the lesson of the jitney. If by 1915 this thing was taking off, imagine without the regulations that happened, if that thing could just keep going. How would our cities be different today? Would we have parks in the place of parking lots? Well, we lost that chance. But technology has given us another opportunity.Now, I'm as excited as anybody else about self-driving cars but do we have to really wait five, 10 or even 20 years to make our new cities a reality? With the technology in our pockets today, and a little smart regulation, we can turn every car into a shared car, and we can reclaim our cities starting today.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Travis, thank you.Travis Kalanick: Thank you.CA: You know — I mean the company you've built is absolutely astounding. You only just talked about a small part of it here — a powerful part — the idea of turning cars into public transport like that, it's cool. But I've got a couple other questions because I know they're out there on people's minds.So first of all, last week I think it was, I switched on my phone and tried to book an Uber and I couldn't find the app. You had this very radical, very bold, brave redesign.TK: Sure.CA: How did it go? Did you notice other people not finding the app that day? Are you going to win people over for this redesign?TK: Well, first I should probably just say, well, what we were trying to accomplish. And I think if you know a little bit about our history, it makes a lot more sense. Which is, when we first got started, it was just black cars. It was literally you push a button and get an S-Class. And so what we did was almost what I would call an immature version of a luxury brand that looked like a badge on a luxury car.And as we've gone worldwide and gone from S-Classes to auto rickshaws in India, it became something that was important for us to be more accessible, to be more hyperlocal, to be about the cities we were in and that's what you see with the patterns and colors. And to be more iconic, because a U doesn't mean anything in Sanskrit, and a U doesn't mean anything in Mandarin. And so that was a little bit what it was about.Now, when you first roll out something like that, I mean, your hands are sweating, you've got — you know, you're a little worried. What we saw is a lot of people — actually, at the beginning, we saw a lot more people opening the app because they were curious what they would find when they opened it. And our numbers were slightly up from what we expected.CA: OK, that's cool.Now, so you, yourself, are something of an enigma, I would say. Your supporters and investors, who have been with you the whole way, believe that the only chance of sort of taking on the powerful, entrenched interests of taxi industry and so forth, is to have someone who is a fierce, relentless competitor, which you've certainly proved to be.Some people feel you've almost taken that culture too far, and you know — like a year or two ago there was a huge controversy where a lot of women got upset. How did it feel like inside the company during that period? Did you notice a loss of business? Did you learn anything from that?TK: Well, look, I think — I've been an entrepreneur since I've been in high school and you have — In various different ways an entrepreneur will see hard times and for us, it was about a year and a half ago, and for us it was hard times, too.Now, inside, we felt like — I guess at the end of the day we felt like we were good people doing good work, but on the outside that wasn't evident. And so there was a lot that we had to do to sort of — We'd gone from a very small company — I mean if you go literally two and a half years ago, our company was 400 people, and today it's 6,500. And so when you go through that growth, you have to sort of cement your cultural values and talk about them all of the time. And make sure that people are constantly checking to say, ""Are we good people doing good work?"" And if you check those boxes, the next part of that is making sure you're telling your story. And I think we learned a lot of lessons but I think at the end of it we came out stronger. But it was certainly a difficult period.CA: It seems to me, everywhere you turn, you're facing people who occasionally give you a hard time. Some Uber drivers in New York and elsewhere are mad as hell now because you changed the fees and they can barely — they claim — barely afford the deal anymore.How — You know, you said that you started this originally — just the coolness of pressing a button and summoning a ride. This thing's taken off, you're affecting the whole global economy, basically, at this point. You're being forced to be, whether you want it or not, a kind of global visionary who's changing the world. I mean — who are you? Do you want that? Are you ready to go with that and be what that takes?TK: Well, there's a few things packed in that question, so —(Laughter)First is on the pricing side — I mean, keep in mind, right? UberX, when we first started, was literally 10 or 15 percent cheaper than our black car product. It's now in many cities, half the price of a taxi. And we have all the data to show that the divers are making more per hour than they would as taxi drivers.What happens is when the price goes down, people are more likely to take Uber at different times of the day than they otherwise would have, and they're more likely to use it in places they wouldn't have before. And what that means for a driver is wherever he or she drops somebody off, they're much more likely to get a pickup and get back in. And so what that means is more trips per hour, more minutes of the hour where they're productive and actually, earnings come up.And we have cities where we've done literally five or six price cuts and have seen those price cuts go up over time. So even in New York — We have a blog post we call ""4 Septembers"" — compare the earnings September after September after September. Same month every year. And we see the earnings going up over time as the price comes down. And there's a perfect price point — you can't go down forever. And in those places where we bring the price down but we don't see those earnings pop, we bring the prices back up.So that addresses that first part. And then the enigma and all of this — I mean, the kind of entrepreneur I am is one that gets really excited about solving hard problems. And the way I like to describe it is it's kind of like a math professor. You know? If a math professor doesn't have hard problems to solve, that's a really sad math professor. And so at Uber we like the hard problems and we like getting excited about those and solving them. But we don't want just any math problem, we want the hardest ones that we can possibly find, and we want the one that if you solve it, there's a little bit of a wow factor.CA: In a couple years' time — say five years' time, I don't know when — you roll out your incredible self-driving cars, at probably a lower cost than you currently pay for an Uber ride. What do you say to your army of a million drivers plus at that time?TK: Explain that again — at which time?CA: At the time when self-driving cars are coming —TK: Sure, sure, sure. Sorry, I missed that.CA: What do you say to a driver? TK: Well, look, I think the first part is it's going to take — it's likely going to take a lot longer than I think some of the hype or media might expect. That's part one.Part two is it's going to also take — there's going to be a long transition. These cars will work in certain places and not in others.For us it's an interesting challenge, right? Because, well — Google's been investing in this since 2007, Tesla's going to be doing it, Apple's going to be doing it, the manufacturers are going to be doing it. This is a world that's going to exist, and for good reason. A million people die a year in cars. And we already looked at the billions or even trillions of hours worldwide that people are spending sitting in them, driving frustrated, anxious. And think about the quality of life that improves when you give people their time back and it's not so anxiety-ridden. So I think there's a lot of good.And so the way we think about it is that it's a challenge, but one for optimistic leadership, Where instead of resisting — resisting technology, maybe like the taxi industry, or the trolley industry — we have to embrace it or be a part of the future.But how do we optimistically lead through it? Are there ways to partner with cities? Are there ways to have education systems, vocational training, etc., for that transition period. It will take a lot longer than I think we all expect, especially that transition period. But it is a world that's going to exist, and it is going to be a better world.CA: Travis, what you're building is absolutely incredible and I'm hugely grateful to you for coming to TED and sharing so openly.Thank you so much. TK: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/travis_kalanick_uber_s_plan_to_get_more_people_into_fewer_cars
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"So a few years ago, I did something really brave, or some would say really stupid. I ran for Congress.For years, I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics as a fundraiser, as an organizer, but in my heart, I always wanted to run. The sitting congresswoman had been in my district since 1992. She had never lost a race, and no one had really even run against her in a Democratic primary. But in my mind, this was my way to make a difference, to disrupt the status quo. The polls, however, told a very different story. My pollsters told me that I was crazy to run, that there was no way that I could win.But I ran anyway, and in 2012, I became an upstart in a New York City congressional race. I swore I was going to win. I had the endorsement from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal snapped pictures of me on election day, and CNBC called it one of the hottest races in the country. I raised money from everyone I knew, including Indian aunties that were just so happy an Indian girl was running. But on election day, the polls were right, and I only got 19 percent of the vote, and the same papers that said I was a rising political star now said I wasted 1.3 million dollars on 6,321 votes. Don't do the math. It was humiliating.Now, before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure. Nor is it about leaning in. I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress because I was 33 years old and it was the first time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave, where I didn't worry about being perfect.And I'm not alone: so many women I talk to tell me that they gravitate towards careers and professions that they know they're going to be great in, that they know they're going to be perfect in, and it's no wonder why. Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off headfirst. And by the time they're adults, whether they're negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they're habituated to take risk after risk. They're rewarded for it. It's often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you've had two failed start-ups. In other words, we're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave.Some people worry about our federal deficit, but I, I worry about our bravery deficit. Our economy, our society, we're just losing out because we're not raising our girls to be brave. The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look.In the 1980s, psychologist Carol Dweck looked at how bright fifth graders handled an assignment that was too difficult for them. She found that bright girls were quick to give up. The higher the IQ, the more likely they were to give up. Bright boys, on the other hand, found the difficult material to be a challenge. They found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts.What's going on? Well, at the fifth grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science, so it's not a question of ability. The difference is in how boys and girls approach a challenge. And it doesn't just end in fifth grade. An HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, but women, women will apply only if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. 100 percent. This study is usually invoked as evidence that, well, women need a little more confidence. But I think it's evidence that women have been socialized to aspire to perfection, and they're overly cautious.(Applause)And even when we're ambitious, even when we're leaning in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take less risks in our careers. And so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind, and it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect.(Applause)So in 2012, I started a company to teach girls to code, and what I found is that by teaching them to code I had socialized them to be brave. Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life. It requires perseverance. It requires imperfection.We immediately see in our program our girls' fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect. Every Girls Who Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week, when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she'll say, ""I don't know what code to write."" The teacher will look at her screen, and she'll see a blank text editor. If she didn't know any better, she'd think that her student spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses undo a few times, she'll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn't get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she'd rather show nothing at all. Perfection or bust.It turns out that our girls are really good at coding, but it's not enough just to teach them to code.My friend Lev Brie, who is a professor at the University of Columbia and teaches intro to Java tells me about his office hours with computer science students. When the guys are struggling with an assignment, they'll come in and they'll say, ""Professor, there's something wrong with my code."" The girls will come in and say, ""Professor, there's something wrong with me.""We have to begin to undo the socialization of perfection, but we've got to combine it with building a sisterhood that lets girls know that they are not alone. Because trying harder is not going to fix a broken system. I can't tell you how many women tell me,""I'm afraid to raise my hand, I'm afraid to ask a question, because I don't want to be the only one who doesn't understand, the only one who is struggling. When we teach girls to be brave and we have a supportive network cheering them on, they will build incredible things, and I see this every day. Take, for instance, two of our high school students who built a game called Tampon Run — yes, Tampon Run — to fight against the menstruation taboo and sexism in gaming. Or the Syrian refugee who dared show her love for her new country by building an app to help Americans get to the polls. Or a 16-year-old girl who built an algorithm to help detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant in the off chance that she can save her daddy's life because he has cancer. These are just three examples of thousands, thousands of girls who have been socialized to be imperfect, who have learned to keep trying, who have learned perseverance. And whether they become coders or the next Hillary Clinton or Beyoncé, they will not defer their dreams.And those dreams have never been more important for our country. For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population. We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection, and we've got to do it now. We cannot wait for them to learn how to be brave like I did when I was 33 years old. We have to teach them to be brave in schools and early in their careers, when it has the most potential to impact their lives and the lives of others, and we have to show them that they will be loved and accepted not for being perfect but for being courageous. And so I need each of you to tell every young woman you know — your sister, your niece, your employee, your colleague — to be comfortable with imperfection, because when we teach girls to be imperfect, and we help them leverage it, we will build a movement of young women who are brave and who will build a better world for themselves and for each and every one of us.Thank you.(Applause) Thank you.Chris Anderson: Reshma, thank you. It's such a powerful vision you have. You have a vision. Tell me how it's going. How many girls are involved now in your program?Reshma Saujani: Yeah. So in 2012, we taught 20 girls. This year we'll teach 40,000 in all 50 states.(Applause)And that number is really powerful, because last year we only graduated 7,500 women in computer science. Like, the problem is so bad that we can make that type of change quickly.CA: And you're working with some of the companies in this room even, who are welcoming graduates from your program?RS: Yeah, we have about 80 partners, from Twitter to Facebook to Adobe to IBM to Microsoft to Pixar to Disney, I mean, every single company out there. And if you're not signed up, I'm going to find you, because we need every single tech company to embed a Girls Who Code classroom in their office.CA: And you have some stories back from some of those companies that when you mix in more gender balance in the engineering teams, good things happen.RS: Great things happen. I mean, I think that it's crazy to me to think about the fact that right now 85 percent of all consumer purchases are made by women. Women use social media at a rate of 600 percent more than men. We own the Internet, and we should be building the companies of tomorrow. And I think when companies have diverse teams, and they have incredible women that are part of their engineering teams, they build awesome things, and we see it every day.CA: Reshma, you saw the reaction there. You're doing incredibly important work. This whole community is cheering you on. More power to you. Thank you.RS: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/reshma_saujani_teach_girls_bravery_not_perfection
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"Food crisis. It's in the news every day. But what is it?Some places in the world it's too little food, maybe too much. Other places, GMO is saving the world. Maybe GMO is the problem? Too much agricultural runoff creating bad oceans, toxic oceans, attenuation of nutrition. They go on and on. And I find the current climate of this discussion incredibly disempowering. So how do we bring that to something that we understand?How is this apple food crisis? You've all eaten an apple in the last week, I'm sure. How old do you think it was from when it was picked? Two weeks? Two months? Eleven months — the average age of an apple in a grocery store in the United States. And I don't expect it to be much different in Europe or anywhere else in the world. We pick them, we put them in cold storage, we gas the cold storage — there's actually documented proof of workers trying to go into these environments to retrieve an apple, and dying, because the atmosphere that they slow down the process of the apple with is also toxic to humans.How is it that none of you knew this? Why didn't I know this? Ninety percent of the quality of that apple — all of the antioxidants — are gone by the time we get it. It's basically a little ball of sugar. How did we get so information poor and how can we do better?I think what's missing is a platform. I know platforms — I know computers, they put me on the Internet when I was young. I did very weird things —(Laughter)on this platform. But I met people, and I could express myself.How do you express yourself in food? If we had a platform, we might feel empowered to question: What if? For me, I questioned: What if climate was democratic? So, this is a map of climate in the world. The most productive areas in green, the least productive in red. They shift and they change, and Californian farmers now become Mexican farmers. China picks up land in Brazil to grow better food, and we're a slave to climate. What if each country had its own productive climate? What would that change about how we live? What would that change about quality of life and nutrition?The last generation's problem was, we need more food and we need it cheap. Welcome to your global farm. We built a huge analog farm. All these traces — these are cars, planes, trains and automobiles. It's a miracle that we feed seven billion people with just a few of us involved in the production of food.What if ... we built a digital farm? A digital world farm. What if you could take this apple, digitize it somehow, send it through particles in the air and reconstitute it on the other side? What if?Going through some of these quotes, you know, they inspire me to do what I do.First one:[""Japanese farming has no youth, no water, no land and no future.""]That's what I landed to the day that I went to Minamisanriku, one stop south of Fukushima, after the disaster. The kids have headed to Sendai and Tokyo, the land is contaminated, they already import 70 percent of their own food. But it's not unique to Japan. Two percent of the American population is involved in farming. What good answer comes from two percent of any population? As we go around the world, 50 percent of the African population is under 18. Eighty percent don't want to be farmers. Farming is hard. The life of a small-shareholder farmer is miserable. They go into the city. In India: farmers' families not being able to have basic access to utilities, more farmer suicides this year and the previous 10 before that. It's uncomfortable to talk about. Where are they going? Into the city. No young people, and everyone's headed in. So how do we build this platform that inspires the youth?Welcome to the new tractor. This is my combine. A number of years ago now, I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and Home Depot and I started hacking. And I built silly things and I made plants dance and I attached them to my computer and I killed them all — a lot.(Laughter)I eventually got them to survive. And I created one of the most intimate relationships I've ever had in my life, because I was learning the language of plants. I wanted to make it bigger. They said, ""Knock yourself out, kid! Here's an old electronics room that nobody wants. What can you do?""With my team, we built a farm inside of the media lab, a place historically known not for anything about biology but everything about digital life. Inside of these 60 square feet, we produced enough food to feed about 300 people once a month — not a lot of food. And there's a lot of interesting technology in there. But the most interesting thing? Beautiful, white roots, deep, green colors and a monthly harvest. Is this a new cafeteria? Is this a new retail experience? Is this a new grocery store? I can tell you one thing for sure: this is the first time anybody in the media lab ripped the roots off of anything.(Laughter)We get our salad in bags; there's nothing wrong with that. But what happens when you have an image-based processing expert, a data scientist, a roboticist, ripping roots off and thinking, ""Huh. I know something about — I could make this happen, I want to try.""In that process we would bring the plants out and we would take some back to the lab, because if you grew it, you don't throw it away; it's kind of precious to you. I have this weird tongue now, because I'm afraid to let anybody eat anything until I've eaten it first, because I want it to be good. So I eat lettuce every day and I can tell the pH of a lettuce within .1.(Laughter)I'm like, ""No, that's 6.1 — no, no, you can't eat it today.""(Applause)This lettuce that day was hyper sweet. It was hyper sweet because the plant had been stressed and it created a chemical reaction in the plant to protect itself: ""I'm not going to die!"" And the plants not-going-to-die, taste sweet to me. Technologists falling backwards into plant physiology.So we thought other people needed to be able to try this. We want to see what people can create, so we conceived of a lab that could be shipped anywhere. And then we built it.So on the facade of the media lab is my lab, that has about 30 points of sensing per plant. If you know about the genome or genetics, this is the phenome, right? The phenomena. When you say, ""I like the strawberries from Mexico,"" you really like the strawberries from the climate that produced the expression that you like. So if you're coding climate — this much CO2, this much O2 creates a recipe — you're coding the expression of that plant, the nutrition of that plant, the size of that plant, the shape, the color, the texture. We need data, so we put a bunch of sensors in there to tell us what's going on.If you think of your houseplants, and you look at your houseplant and you're super sad, because you're like, ""Why are you dying? Won't you talk to me?""(Laughter)Farmers develop the most beautiful fortune-telling eyes by the time they're in their late 60s and 70s. They can tell you when you see that plant dying that it's a nitrogen deficiency, a calcium deficiency or it needs more humidity. Those beautiful eyes are not being passed down.These are eyes in the cloud of a farmer. We trend those data points over time. We correlate those data points to individual plants. These are all the broccoli in my lab that day, by IP address.(Laughter)We have IP-addressable broccoli.(Applause)So if that's not weird enough, you can click one and you get a plant profile. And what this tells you is downloadable progress on that plant, but not like you'd think, it's not just when it's ready. When does it achieve the nutrition that I need? When does it achieve the taste that I desire? Is it getting too much water? Is it getting too much sun? Alerts. It can talk to me, it's conversant, we have a language.(Laughter)(Applause)I think of that as the first user on the plant Facebook, right? That's a plant profile and that plant will start making friends.(Laughter)And I mean it — it will make friends with other plants that use less nitrogen, more phosphorus, less potassium. We're going to learn about a complexity that we can only guess at now. And they may not friend us back — I don't know, they might friend us back, it depends on how we act.So this is my lab now. It's a little bit more systematized, my background is designing data centers in hospitals of all things, so I know a little bit about creating a controlled environment.And so — inside of this environment, we're experimenting with all kinds of things. This process, aeroponics, was developed by NASA for Mir Space Station for reducing the amount of water they send into space. What it really does is give the plant exactly what it wants: water, minerals and oxygen. Roots are not that complicated, so when you give them that, you get this amazing expression. It's like the plant has two hearts. And because it has two hearts, it grows four or five times faster. It's a perfect world. We've gone a long way into technology and seed for an adverse world and we're going to continue to do that, but we're going to have a new tool, too, which is perfect world.So we've grown all kinds of things. These tomatoes hadn't been in commercial production for 150 years. Do you know that we have rare and ancient seed banks? Banks of seed. It's amazing. They have germplasm alive and things that you've never eaten. I am the only person in this room that's eaten that kind of tomato. Problem is it was a sauce tomato and we don't know how to cook, so we ate a sauce tomato, which is not that great. But we've done things with protein — we've grown all kinds of things. We've grown humans —(Laughter)Well maybe you could, but we didn't.But what we realized is, the tool was too big, it was too expensive. I was starting to put them around the world and they were about 100,000 dollars. Finding somebody with 100 grand in their back pocket isn't easy, so we wanted to make a small one.This project was actually one of my student's — mechanical engineering undergraduate, Camille. So Camille and I and my team, we iterated all summer, how to make it cheaper, how to make it work better, how to make it so other people can make it. Then we dropped them off in schools, seventh through eleventh grade. And if you want to be humbled, try to teach a kid something.So I went into this school and I said, ""Set it to 65 percent humidity.""The seventh grader said, ""What's humidity?""And I said, ""Oh, it's water in air.""He said, ""There's no water in air, you're an idiot.""(Laughter)And I was like, ""Alright, don't trust me. Actually — don't trust me, right? Set it to 100. He sets it to 100 and what happens? It starts to condense, make a fog and eventually drip.And he says, ""Oh. Humidity is rain. Why didn't you just tell me that?""(Laughter)We've created an interface for this that's much like a game. They have a 3D environment, they can log into it anywhere in the world on their smartphone, on their tablet. They have different parts of the bots — the physical, the sensors. They select recipes that have been created by other kids anywhere in the world. They select and activate that recipe, they plant a seedling. While it's growing, they make changes. They're like, ""Why does a plant need CO2 anyway? Isn't CO2 bad? It kills people."" Crank up CO2, plant dies. Or crank down CO2, plant does very well. Harvest plant, and you've created a new digital recipe.It's an iterative design and development and exploration process. They can download, then, all of the data about that new plant that they developed or the new digital recipe and what did it do — was it better or was it worse? Imagine these as little cores of processing. We're going to learn so much.Here's one of the food computers, as we call them, in a school in three weeks' time. This is three weeks of growth. But more importantly, it was the first time that this kid ever thought he could be a farmer — or that he would want to be a farmer.So, we've open-sourced all of this. It's all online; go home, try to build your first food computer. It's going to be difficult — I'm just telling you. We're in the beginning, but it's all there. It's very important to me that this is easily accessible. We're going to keep making it more so.These are farmers, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, environmental engineer, computer scientist, plant scientist, economist, urban planners. On one platform, doing what they're good at. But we got a little too big.This is my new facility that I'm just starting. This warehouse could be anywhere. That's why I chose it. And inside of this warehouse we're going to build something kind of like this. These exist right now. Take a look at it. These exist, too. One grows greens, one grows Ebola vaccine. Pretty amazing that plants and this DARPA Grand Challenge winner is one of the reasons we're getting ahead of Ebola. The plants are producing the protein that's Ebola resistant. So pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, all they way down to lettuce.But these two things look nothing alike, and that's where I am with my field. Everything is different. We're in that weird ""We're alright"" stage and it's like, ""Here's my black box —"" ""No, buy mine."" ""No, no, no — I've got intellectual property that's totally valuable. Don't buy his, buy mine.""And the reality is, we're just at the beginning, in a time when society is shifting, too. When we ask for more, cheaper food, we're now asking for better, environmentally friendly food. And when you have McDonald's advertising what's in the Chicken McNugget, the most mysterious food item of all time — they are now basing their marketing plan on that — everything is changing.So into the world now. Personal food computers, food servers and food data centers run on the open phenome. Think open genome, but we're going to put little climate recipes, like Wikipedia, that you can pull down, actuate and grow.What does this look like in a world? You remember the world connected by strings? We start having beacons. We start sending information about food, rather than sending food. This is not just my fantasy, this is where we're already deploying. Food computers, food servers, soon-to-be food data centers, connecting people together to share information.The future of food is not about fighting over what's wrong with this. We know what's wrong with this. The future of food is about networking the next one billion farmers and empowering them with a platform to ask and answer the question, ""What if?""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caleb_harper_this_computer_will_grow_your_food_in_the_future
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"Well, I'm an ocean chemist. I look at the chemistry of the ocean today. I look at the chemistry of the ocean in the past. The way I look back in the past is by using the fossilized remains of deepwater corals. You can see an image of one of these corals behind me. It was collected from close to Antarctica, thousands of meters below the sea, so, very different than the kinds of corals you may have been lucky enough to see if you've had a tropical holiday.So I'm hoping that this talk will give you a four-dimensional view of the ocean. Two dimensions, such as this beautiful two-dimensional image of the sea surface temperature. This was taken using satellite, so it's got tremendous spatial resolution. The overall features are extremely easy to understand. The equatorial regions are warm because there's more sunlight. The polar regions are cold because there's less sunlight. And that allows big icecaps to build up on Antarctica and up in the Northern Hemisphere. If you plunge deep into the sea, or even put your toes in the sea, you know it gets colder as you go down, and that's mostly because the deep waters that fill the abyss of the ocean come from the cold polar regions where the waters are dense.If we travel back in time 20,000 years ago, the earth looked very much different. And I've just given you a cartoon version of one of the major differences you would have seen if you went back that long. The icecaps were much bigger. They covered lots of the continent, and they extended out over the ocean. Sea level was 120 meters lower. Carbon dioxide [levels] were very much lower than they are today. So the earth was probably about three to five degrees colder overall, and much, much colder in the polar regions.What I'm trying to understand, and what other colleagues of mine are trying to understand, is how we moved from that cold climate condition to the warm climate condition that we enjoy today. We know from ice core research that the transition from these cold conditions to warm conditions wasn't smooth, as you might predict from the slow increase in solar radiation. And we know this from ice cores, because if you drill down into ice, you find annual bands of ice, and you can see this in the iceberg. You can see those blue-white layers. Gases are trapped in the ice cores, so we can measure CO2 — that's why we know CO2 was lower in the past — and the chemistry of the ice also tells us about temperature in the polar regions. And if you move in time from 20,000 years ago to the modern day, you see that temperature increased. It didn't increase smoothly. Sometimes it increased very rapidly, then there was a plateau, then it increased rapidly. It was different in the two polar regions, and CO2 also increased in jumps.So we're pretty sure the ocean has a lot to do with this. The ocean stores huge amounts of carbon, about 60 times more than is in the atmosphere. It also acts to transport heat across the equator, and the ocean is full of nutrients and it controls primary productivity.So if we want to find out what's going on down in the deep sea, we really need to get down there, see what's there and start to explore. This is some spectacular footage coming from a seamount about a kilometer deep in international waters in the equatorial Atlantic, far from land. You're amongst the first people to see this bit of the seafloor, along with my research team. You're probably seeing new species. We don't know. You'd have to collect the samples and do some very intense taxonomy. You can see beautiful bubblegum corals. There are brittle stars growing on these corals. Those are things that look like tentacles coming out of corals. There are corals made of different forms of calcium carbonate growing off the basalt of this massive undersea mountain, and the dark sort of stuff, those are fossilized corals, and we're going to talk a little more about those as we travel back in time.To do that, we need to charter a research boat. This is the James Cook, an ocean-class research vessel moored up in Tenerife. Looks beautiful, right? Great, if you're not a great mariner. Sometimes it looks a little more like this. This is us trying to make sure that we don't lose precious samples. Everyone's scurrying around, and I get terribly seasick, so it's not always a lot of fun, but overall it is.So we've got to become a really good mapper to do this. You don't see that kind of spectacular coral abundance everywhere. It is global and it is deep, but we need to really find the right places. We just saw a global map, and overlaid was our cruise passage from last year. This was a seven-week cruise, and this is us, having made our own maps of about 75,000 square kilometers of the seafloor in seven weeks, but that's only a tiny fraction of the seafloor. We're traveling from west to east, over part of the ocean that would look featureless on a big-scale map, but actually some of these mountains are as big as Everest. So with the maps that we make on board, we get about 100-meter resolution, enough to pick out areas to deploy our equipment, but not enough to see very much. To do that, we need to fly remotely-operated vehicles about five meters off the seafloor. And if we do that, we can get maps that are one-meter resolution down thousands of meters. Here is a remotely-operated vehicle, a research-grade vehicle. You can see an array of big lights on the top. There are high-definition cameras, manipulator arms, and lots of little boxes and things to put your samples.Here we are on our first dive of this particular cruise, plunging down into the ocean. We go pretty fast to make sure the remotely operated vehicles are not affected by any other ships. And we go down, and these are the kinds of things you see. These are deep sea sponges, meter scale. This is a swimming holothurian — it's a small sea slug, basically. This is slowed down. Most of the footage I'm showing you is speeded up, because all of this takes a lot of time. This is a beautiful holothurian as well. And this animal you're going to see coming up was a big surprise. I've never seen anything like this and it took us all a bit surprised. This was after about 15 hours of work and we were all a bit trigger-happy, and suddenly this giant sea monster started rolling past. It's called a pyrosome or colonial tunicate, if you like. This wasn't what we were looking for. We were looking for corals, deep sea corals. You're going to see a picture of one in a moment. It's small, about five centimeters high. It's made of calcium carbonate, so you can see its tentacles there, moving in the ocean currents. An organism like this probably lives for about a hundred years. And as it grows, it takes in chemicals from the ocean. And the chemicals, or the amount of chemicals, depends on the temperature; it depends on the pH, it depends on the nutrients. And if we can understand how these chemicals get into the skeleton, we can then go back, collect fossil specimens, and reconstruct what the ocean used to look like in the past. And here you can see us collecting that coral with a vacuum system, and we put it into a sampling container. We can do this very carefully, I should add.Some of these organisms live even longer. This is a black coral called Leiopathes, an image taken by my colleague, Brendan Roark, about 500 meters below Hawaii. Four thousand years is a long time. If you take a branch from one of these corals and polish it up, this is about 100 microns across. And Brendan took some analyses across this coral — you can see the marks — and he's been able to show that these are actual annual bands, so even at 500 meters deep in the ocean, corals can record seasonal changes, which is pretty spectacular.But 4,000 years is not enough to get us back to our last glacial maximum. So what do we do? We go in for these fossil specimens. This is what makes me really unpopular with my research team. So going along, there's giant sharks everywhere, there are pyrosomes, there are swimming holothurians, there's giant sponges, but I make everyone go down to these dead fossil areas and spend ages kind of shoveling around on the seafloor. And we pick up all these corals, bring them back, we sort them out. But each one of these is a different age, and if we can find out how old they are and then we can measure those chemical signals, this helps us to find out what's been going on in the ocean in the past.So on the left-hand image here, I've taken a slice through a coral, polished it very carefully and taken an optical image. On the right-hand side, we've taken that same piece of coral, put it in a nuclear reactor, induced fission, and every time there's some decay, you can see that marked out in the coral, so we can see the uranium distribution. Why are we doing this? Uranium is a very poorly regarded element, but I love it. The decay helps us find out about the rates and dates of what's going on in the ocean. And if you remember from the beginning, that's what we want to get at when we're thinking about climate. So we use a laser to analyze uranium and one of its daughter products, thorium, in these corals, and that tells us exactly how old the fossils are.This beautiful animation of the Southern Ocean I'm just going to use illustrate how we're using these corals to get at some of the ancient ocean feedbacks. You can see the density of the surface water in this animation by Ryan Abernathey. It's just one year of data, but you can see how dynamic the Southern Ocean is. The intense mixing, particularly the Drake Passage, which is shown by the box, is really one of the strongest currents in the world coming through here, flowing from west to east. It's very turbulently mixed, because it's moving over those great big undersea mountains, and this allows CO2 and heat to exchange with the atmosphere in and out. And essentially, the oceans are breathing through the Southern Ocean. We've collected corals from back and forth across this Antarctic passage, and we've found quite a surprising thing from my uranium dating: the corals migrated from south to north during this transition from the glacial to the interglacial. We don't really know why, but we think it's something to do with the food source and maybe the oxygen in the water.So here we are. I'm going to illustrate what I think we've found about climate from those corals in the Southern Ocean. We went up and down sea mountains. We collected little fossil corals. This is my illustration of that. We think back in the glacial, from the analysis we've made in the corals, that the deep part of the Southern Ocean was very rich in carbon, and there was a low-density layer sitting on top. That stops carbon dioxide coming out of the ocean. We then found corals that are of an intermediate age, and they show us that the ocean mixed partway through that climate transition. That allows carbon to come out of the deep ocean. And then if we analyze corals closer to the modern day, or indeed if we go down there today anyway and measure the chemistry of the corals, we see that we move to a position where carbon can exchange in and out. So this is the way we can use fossil corals to help us learn about the environment.So I want to leave you with this last slide. It's just a still taken out of that first piece of footage that I showed you. This is a spectacular coral garden. We didn't even expect to find things this beautiful. It's thousands of meters deep. There are new species. It's just a beautiful place. There are fossils in amongst, and now I've trained you to appreciate the fossil corals that are down there.So next time you're lucky enough to fly over the ocean or sail over the ocean, just think — there are massive sea mountains down there that nobody's ever seen before, and there are beautiful corals.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_robinson_the_secrets_i_find_on_the_mysterious_ocean_floor
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"In India, we have these huge families. I bet a lot of you all must have heard about it. Which means that there are a lot of family events. So as a child, my parents used to drag me to these family events.But the one thing that I always looked forward to was playing around with my cousins. And there was always this one uncle who used to be there, always ready, jumping around with us, having games for us, making us kids have the time of our lives. This man was extremely successful: he was confident and powerful. But then I saw this hale and hearty person deteriorate in health. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's.Parkinson's is a disease that causes degeneration of the nervous system, which means that this person who used to be independent suddenly finds tasks like drinking coffee, because of tremors, much more difficult. My uncle started using a walker to walk, and to take a turn, he literally had to take one step at a time, like this, and it took forever. So this person, who used to be the center of attention in every family gathering, was suddenly hiding behind people. He was hiding from the pitiful look in people's eyes.And he's not the only one in the world. Every year, 60,000 people are newly diagnosed with Parkinson's, and this number is only rising. As designers, we dream that our designs solve these multifaceted problems, one solution that solves it all, but it need not always be like that. You can also target simple problems and create small solutions for them and eventually make a big impact. So my aim here was to not cure Parkinson's, but to make their everyday tasks much more simple, and then make an impact.Well, the first thing I targeted was tremors, right? My uncle told me that he had stopped drinking coffee or tea in public just out of embarrassment, so, well, I designed the no-spill cup. It works just purely on its form. The curve on top deflects the liquid back inside every time they have tremors, and this keeps the liquid inside compared to a normal cup. But the key here is that it is not tagged as a Parkinson's patient product. It looks like a cup that could be used by you, me, any clumsy person, and that makes it much more comforting for them to use, to blend in. So, well, one problem solved, many more to go.All this while, I was interviewing him, questioning him, and then I realized that I was getting very superficial information, or just answers to my questions. But I really needed to dig deeper to get a new perspective. So I thought, well, let's observe him in his daily tasks, while he's eating, while he's watching TV. And then, when I was actually observing him walking to his dining table, it struck me, this man who finds it so difficult to walk on flat land, how does he climb a staircase? Because in India we do not have a fancy rail that takes you up a staircase like in the developed countries. One actually has to climb the stairs. So he told me, ""Well, let me show you how I do it."" Let's take a look at what I saw.So he took really long to reach this position, and then all this while, I'm thinking, ""Oh my God, is he really going to do it? Is he really, really going to do it without his walker?"" And then ...(Laughter)And the turns, he took them so easily.So — shocked? Well, I was too. So this person who could not walk on flat land was suddenly a pro at climbing stairs.On researching this, I realized that it's because it's a continuous motion. There's this other man who also suffers from the same symptoms and uses a walker, but the moment he's put on a cycle, all his symptoms vanish, because it is a continuous motion. So the key for me was to translate this feeling of walking on a staircase back to flat land. And a lot of ideas were tested and tried on him, but the one that finally worked was this one. Let's take a look.(Laughter)(Applause)He walked faster, right?(Applause)I call this the staircase illusion, and actually when the staircase illusion abruptly ended, he froze, and this is called freezing of gait. So it happens a lot, so why not have a staircase illusion flowing through all their rooms, making them feel much more confident? You know, technology is not always it. What we need are human-centered solutions. I could have easily made it into a projection, or a Google Glass, or something like that. But I stuck to simple print on the floor. This print could be taken into hospitals to make them feel much more welcome.What I wish to do is make every Parkinson's patient feel like my uncle felt that day. He told me that I made him feel like his old self again.""Smart"" in today's world has become synonymous to high tech, and the world is only getting smarter and smarter day by day. But why can't smart be something that's simple and yet effective? All we need is a little bit of empathy and some curiosity, to go out there, observe. But let's not stop at that. Let's find these complex problems. Don't be scared of them. Break them, boil them down into much smaller problems, and then find simple solutions for them. Test these solutions, fail if needed, but with newer insights to make it better. Imagine what we all could do if we all came up with simple solutions. What would the world be like if we combined all our simple solutions? Let's make a smarter world, but with simplicity.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mileha_soneji_simple_hacks_for_life_with_parkinson_s
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"In case you are wondering, no, I'm not wearing a dress, and no, I'm not saying what I'm wearing underneath.(Laughter)This is a gho. This is my national dress. This is how all men dress in Bhutan. That is how our women dress. Like our women, we men get to wear pretty bright colors, but unlike our women, we get to show off our legs.(Laughter)Our national dress is unique, but this is not the only thing that's unique about my country. Our promise to remain carbon neutral is also unique, and this is what I'd like to speak about today, our promise to remain carbon neutral.But before I proceed, I should set you the context. I should tell you our story.Bhutan is a small country in the Himalayas. We've been called Shangri-La, even the last Shangri-La. But let me tell you right off the bat, we are not Shangri-La. My country is not one big monastery populated with happy monks.(Laughter)The reality is that there are barely 700,000 of us sandwiched between two of the most populated countries on earth, China and India. The reality is that we are a small, underdeveloped country doing our best to survive. But we are doing OK. We are surviving. In fact, we are thriving, and the reason we are thriving is because we've been blessed with extraordinary kings. Our enlightened monarchs have worked tirelessly to develop our country, balancing economic growth carefully with social development, environmental sustainability and cultural preservation, all within the framework of good governance. We call this holistic approach to development ""Gross National Happiness,"" or GNH. Back in the 1970s, our fourth king famously pronounced that for Bhutan, Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.(Applause)Ever since, all development in Bhutan is driven by GNH, a pioneering vision that aims to improve the happiness and well-being of our people.But that's easier said than done, especially when you are one of the smallest economies in the world. Our entire GDP is less than two billion dollars. I know that some of you here are worth more —(Laughter)individually than the entire economy of my country.So our economy is small, but here is where it gets interesting. Education is completely free. All citizens are guaranteed free school education, and those that work hard are given free college education. Healthcare is also completely free. Medical consultation, medical treatment, medicines: they are all provided by the state. We manage this because we use our limited resources very carefully, and because we stay faithful to the core mission of GNH, which is development with values. Our economy is small, and we must strengthen it. Economic growth is important, but that economic growth must not come from undermining our unique culture or our pristine environment.Today, our culture is flourishing. We continue to celebrate our art and architecture, food and festivals, monks and monasteries. And yes, we celebrate our national dress, too. This is why I can wear my gho with pride. Here's a fun fact: you're looking at the world's biggest pocket.(Laughter)It starts here, goes around the back, and comes out from inside here. In this pocket we store all manner of personal goods from phones and wallets to iPads, office files and books.(Laughter)(Applause)But sometimes — sometimes even precious cargo.So our culture is flourishing, but so is our environment. 72 percent of my country is under forest cover. Our constitution demands that a minimum of 60 percent of Bhutan's total land shall remain under forest cover for all time.(Applause)Our constitution, this constitution, imposes forest cover on us. Incidentally, our king used this constitution to impose democracy on us. You see, we the people didn't want democracy. We didn't ask for it, we didn't demand it, and we certainly didn't fight for it. Instead, our king imposed democracy on us by insisting that he include it in the constitution. But he went further. He included provisions in the constitution that empower the people to impeach their kings, and included provisions in here that require all our kings to retire at the age of 65.(Applause)Fact is, we already have a king in retirement: our previous king, the Great Fourth, retired 10 years ago at the peak of his popularity. He was all of 51 years at that time.So as I was saying, 72 percent of our country is under forest cover, and all that forest is pristine. That's why we are one of the few remaining global biodiversity hotspots in the world, and that's why we are a carbon neutral country. In a world that is threatened with climate change, we are a carbon neutral country.Turns out, it's a big deal. Of the 200-odd countries in the world today, it looks like we are the only one that's carbon neutral. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Bhutan is not carbon neutral. Bhutan is carbon negative. Our entire country generates 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, but our forests, they sequester more than three times that amount, so we are a net carbon sink for more than four million tons of carbon dioxide each year. But that's not all.(Applause)We export most of the renewable electricity we generate from our fast-flowing rivers. So today, the clean energy that we export offsets about six million tons of carbon dioxide in our neighborhood. By 2020, we'll be exporting enough electricity to offset 17 million tons of carbon dioxide. And if we were to harness even half our hydropower potential, and that's exactly what we are working at, the clean, green energy that we export would offset something like 50 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. That is more CO2 than what the entire city of New York generates in one year.So inside our country, we are a net carbon sink. Outside, we are offsetting carbon. And this is important stuff. You see, the world is getting warmer, and climate change is a reality. Climate change is affecting my country. Our glaciers are melting, causing flash floods and landslides, which in turn are causing disaster and widespread destruction in our country. I was at that lake recently. It's stunning. That's how it looked 10 years ago, and that's how it looked 20 years ago. Just 20 years ago, that lake didn't exist. It was a solid glacier. A few years ago, a similar lake breached its dams and wreaked havoc in the valleys below. That destruction was caused by one glacier lake. We have 2,700 of them to contend with. The point is this: my country and my people have done nothing to contribute to global warming, but we are already bearing the brunt of its consequences. And for a small, poor country, one that is landlocked and mountainous, it is very difficult. But we are not going to sit on our hands doing nothing. We will fight climate change. That's why we have promised to remain carbon neutral.We first made this promise in 2009 during COP 15 in Copenhagen, but nobody noticed. Governments were so busy arguing with one another and blaming each other for causing climate change, that when a small country raised our hands and announced, ""We promise to remain carbon neutral for all time,"" nobody heard us. Nobody cared.Last December in Paris, at COP 21, we reiterated our promise to remain carbon neutral for all time to come. This time, we were heard. We were noticed, and everybody cared. What was different in Paris was that governments came round together to accept the realities of climate change, and were willing to come together and act together and work together. All countries, from the very small to the very large, committed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change says that if these so-called intended commitments are kept, we'd be closer to containing global warming by two degrees Celsius.By the way, I've requested the TED organizers here to turn up the heat in here by two degrees, so if some of you are feeling warmer than usual, you know who to blame.It's crucial that all of us keep our commitments. As far as Bhutan is concerned, we will keep our promise to remain carbon neutral. Here are some of the ways we are doing it. We are providing free electricity to our rural farmers. The idea is that, with free electricity, they will no longer have to use firewood to cook their food. We are investing in sustainable transport and subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles. Similarly, we are subsidizing the cost of LED lights, and our entire government is trying to go paperless. We are cleaning up our entire country through Clean Bhutan, a national program, and we are planting trees throughout our country through Green Bhutan, another national program.But it is our protected areas that are at the core of our carbon neutral strategy. Our protected areas are our carbon sink. They are our lungs. Today, more than half our country is protected, as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuaries. But the beauty is that we've connected them all with one another through a network of biological corridors. Now, what this means is that our animals are free to roam throughout our country. Take this tiger, for example. It was spotted at 250 meters above sea level in the hot, subtropical jungles. Two years later, that same tiger was spotted near 4,000 meters in our cold alpine mountains. Isn't that awesome?(Applause)We must keep it that way. We must keep our parks awesome. So every year, we set aside resources to prevent poaching, hunting, mining and pollution in our parks, and resources to help communities who live in those parks manage their forests, adapt to climate change, and lead better lives while continuing to live in harmony with Mother Nature.But that is expensive. Over the next few years, our small economy won't have the resources to cover all the costs that are required to protect our environment. In fact, when we run the numbers, it looks like it'll take us at least 15 years before we can fully finance all our conservation efforts. But neither Bhutan, nor the world can afford to spend 15 years going backwards.This is why His Majesty the King started Bhutan For Life. Bhutan For Life gives us the time we need. It gives us breathing room. It is essentially a funding mechanism to look after our parks, to protect our parks, until our government can take over on our own fully. The idea is to raise a transition fund from individual donors, corporations and institutions, but the deal is closed only after predetermined conditions are met and all funds committed. So multiparty, single closing: an idea we borrowed from Wall Street. This means that individual donors can commit without having to worry that they'll be left supporting an underfunded plan. It's something like a Kickstarter project, only with a 15-year time horizon and millions of tons of carbon dioxide at stake. Once the deal is closed, we use the transition fund to protect our parks, giving our government time to increase our own funding gradually until the end of the 15-year period. After that, our government guarantees full funding forever.We are almost there. We expect to close later this year. Naturally, I'm pretty excited.(Applause)The World Wildlife Fund is our principle partner in this journey, and I want to give them a big shoutout for the excellent work they are doing in Bhutan and across the world.(Applause)Whew, it is getting warm in here.I thank you for listening to our story, a story of how we are keeping our promise to remain carbon neutral, a story of how we are keeping our country pristine, for ourselves, our children, for your children and for the world. But we are not here to tell stories, are we? We are here to dream together. So in closing, I'd like to share one more dream that I have. What if we could mobilize our leadership and our resources, our influence and our passion, to replicate the Bhutan For Life idea to other countries so that they too can conserve their protected areas for all time. After all, there are many other countries who face the same issues that we face. They too have natural resources that can help win the world's fight for sustainability, only they may not have the ability to invest in them now. So what if we set up Earth For Life, a global fund, to kickstart the Bhutan For Life throughout the world? I invite you to help me, to carry this dream beyond our borders to all those who care about our planet's future. After all, we're here to dream together, to work together, to fight climate change together, to protect our planet together. Because the reality is we are in it together. Some of us might dress differently, but we are in it together.Thank you very much, and kadrin chhe la. Thank you.(Applause)Thank you, thank you, thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/tshering_tobgay_this_country_isn_t_just_carbon_neutral_it_s_carbon_negative
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"There we were, souls and bodies packed into a Texas church on the last night of our lives. Packed into a room just like this, but with creaky wooden pews draped in worn-down red fabric, with an organ to my left and a choir at my back and a baptism pool built into the wall behind them. A room like this, nonetheless. With the same great feelings of suspense, the same deep hopes for salvation, the same sweat in the palms and the same people in the back not paying attention.(Laughter)This was December 31, 1999, the night of the Second Coming of Christ, and the end of the world as I knew it. I had turned 12 that year and had reached the age of accountability. And once I stopped complaining about how unfair it was that Jesus would return as soon as I had to be accountable for all that I had done, I figured I had better get my house in order very quickly.So I went to church as often as I could. I listened for silence as anxiously as one might listen for noise, trying to be sure that the Lord hadn't pulled a fast one on me and decided to come back early.And just in case he did, I built a backup plan, by reading the ""Left Behind"" books that were all the rage at the time. And I found in their pages that if I was not taken in the rapture at midnight, I had another shot. All I had to do was avoid taking the mark of the beast, fight off demons, plagues and the Antichrist himself. It would be hard —(Laughter)but I knew I could do it.(Laughter)But planning time was over now. It was 11:50pm. We had 10 minutes left, and my pastor called us out of the pews and down to the altar because he wanted to be praying when midnight struck. So every faction of the congregation took its place. The choir stayed in the choir stand, the deacons and their wives — or the Baptist Bourgeoisie as I like to call them —(Laughter)took first position in front of the altar. You see, in America, even the Second Coming of Christ has a VIP section.(Laughter)(Applause)And right behind the Baptist Bourgeoisie were the elderly — these men and women whose young backs had been bent under hot suns in the cotton fields of East Texas, and whose skin seemed to be burnt a creaseless noble brown, just like the clay of East Texas, and whose hopes and dreams for what life might become outside of East Texas had sometimes been bent and broken even further than their backs.Yes, these men and women were the stars of the show for me. They had waited their whole lives for this moment, just as their medieval predecessors had longed for the end of the world, and just as my grandmother waited for the Oprah Winfrey Show to come on Channel 8 every day at 4 o'clock. And as she made her way to the altar, I snuck right in behind her, because I knew for sure that my grandmother was going to heaven. And I thought that if I held on to her hand during this prayer, I might go right on with her.So I held on and I closed my eyes to listen, to wait. And the prayers got louder. And the shouts of response to the call of the prayer went up higher even still. And the organ rolled on in to add the dirge. And the heat came on to add to the sweat. And my hand gripped firmer, so I wouldn't be the one left in the field. My eyes clenched tighter so I wouldn't see the wheat being separated from the chaff. And then a voice rang out above us: ""Amen.""It was over. I looked at the clock. It was after midnight. I looked at the elder believers whose savior had not come, who were too proud to show any signs of disappointment, who had believed too much and for too long to start doubting now. But I was upset on their behalf. They had been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled, and I had gone right along with them. I had prayed their prayers, I had yielded not to temptation as best I could. I had dipped my head not once, but twice in that snot-inducing baptism pool. I had believed. Now what?I got home just in time to turn on the television and watch Peter Jennings announce the new millennium as it rolled in around the world. It struck me that it would have been strange anyway, for Jesus to come back again and again based on the different time zones.(Laughter)And this made me feel even more ridiculous — hurt, really. But there on that night, I did not stop believing. I just believed a new thing: that it was possible not to believe. It was possible the answers I had were wrong, that the questions themselves were wrong. And now, where there was once a mountain of certitude, there was, running right down to its foundation, a spring of doubt, a spring that promised rivers.I can trace the whole drama of my life back to that night in that church when my savior did not come for me; when the thing I believed most certainly turned out to be, if not a lie, then not quite the truth. And even though most of you prepared for Y2K in a very different way, I'm convinced that you are here because some part of you has done the same thing that I have done since the dawn of this new century, since my mother left and my father stayed away and my Lord refused to come. And I held out my hand, reaching for something to believe in.I held on when I arrived at Yale at 18, with the faith that my journey from Oak Cliff, Texas was a chance to leave behind all the challenges I had known, the broken dreams and broken bodies I had seen. But when I found myself back home one winter break, with my face planted in the floor, my hands tied behind my back and a burglar's gun pressed to my head, I knew that even the best education couldn't save me.I held on when I showed up at Lehman Brothers as an intern in 2008.(Laughter)So hopeful —(Laughter)that I called home to inform my family that we'd never be poor again.(Laughter)But as I witnessed this temple of finance come crashing down before my eyes, I knew that even the best job couldn't save me.I held on when I showed up in Washington DC as a young staffer, who had heard a voice call out from Illinois, saying, ""It's been a long time coming, but in this election, change has come to America."" But as the Congress ground to a halt and the country ripped at the seams and hope and change began to feel like a cruel joke, I knew that even the political second coming could not save me.I had knelt faithfully at the altar of the American Dream, praying to the gods of my time of success, and money, and power. But over and over again, midnight struck, and I opened my eyes to see that all of these gods were dead.And from that graveyard, I began the search once more, not because I was brave, but because I knew that I would either believe or I would die.So I took a pilgrimage to yet another mecca, Harvard Business School —(Laughter)this time, knowing that I could not simply accept the salvation that it claimed to offer. No, I knew there'd be more work to do.The work began in the dark corner of a crowded party, in the late night of an early, miserable Cambridge winter, when three friends and I asked a question that young folks searching for something real have asked for a very long time: ""What if we took a road trip?""(Laughter)We didn't know where'd we go or how we'd get there, but we knew we had to do it. Because all our lives we yearned, as Jack Kerouac wrote, to ""sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere,"" and go find out what everybody was doing all over the country. So even though there were other voices who said that the risk was too great and the proof too thin, we went on anyhow.We went on 8,000 miles across America in the summer of 2013, through the cow pastures of Montana, through the desolation of Detroit, through the swamps of New Orleans, where we found and worked with men and women who were building small businesses that made purpose their bottom line. And having been trained at the West Point of capitalism, this struck us as a revolutionary idea.(Laughter)And this idea spread, growing into a nonprofit called MBAs Across America, a movement that landed me here on this stage today. It spread because we found a great hunger in our generation for purpose, for meaning. It spread because we found countless entrepreneurs in the nooks and crannies of America who were creating jobs and changing lives and who needed a little help.But if I'm being honest, it also spread because I fought to spread it. There was no length to which I would not go to preach this gospel, to get more people to believe that we could bind the wounds of a broken country, one social business at a time. But it was this journey of evangelism that led me to the rather different gospel that I've come to share with you today.It began one evening almost a year ago at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, at a gala for alumni of Harvard Business School. Under a full-size replica of a whale, I sat with the titans of our time as they celebrated their peers and their good deeds. There was pride in a room where net worth and assets under management surpassed half a trillion dollars. We looked over all that we had made, and it was good.(Laughter)But it just so happened, two days later, I had to travel up the road to Harlem, where I found myself sitting in an urban farm that had once been a vacant lot, listening to a man named Tony tell me of the kids that showed up there every day. All of them lived below the poverty line. Many of them carried all of their belongings in a backpack to avoid losing them in a homeless shelter. Some of them came to Tony's program, called Harlem Grown, to get the only meal they had each day. Tony told me that he started Harlem Grown with money from his pension, after 20 years as a cab driver. He told me that he didn't give himself a salary, because despite success, the program struggled for resources. He told me that he would take any help that he could get. And I was there as that help.But as I left Tony, I felt the sting and salt of tears welling up in my eyes. I felt the weight of revelation that I could sit in one room on one night, where a few hundred people had half a trillion dollars, and another room, two days later, just 50 blocks up the road, where a man was going without a salary to get a child her only meal of the day.And it wasn't the glaring inequality that made me want to cry, it wasn't the thought of hungry, homeless kids, it wasn't rage toward the one percent or pity toward the 99. No, I was disturbed because I had finally realized that I was the dialysis for a country that needed a kidney transplant. I realized that my story stood in for all those who were expected to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, even if they didn't have any boots; that my organization stood in for all the structural, systemic help that never went to Harlem or Appalachia or the Lower 9th Ward; that my voice stood in for all those voices that seemed too unlearned, too unwashed, too unaccommodated.And the shame of that, that shame washed over me like the shame of sitting in front of the television, watching Peter Jennings announce the new millennium again and again and again. I had been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled. But this time, the false savior was me.You see, I've come a long way  from that altar on the night I thought the world would end, from a world where people spoke in tongues and saw suffering as a necessary act of God and took a text to be infallible truth. Yes, I've come so far that I'm right back where I started.Because it simply is not true to say that we live in an age of disbelief — no, we believe today just as much as any time that came before. Some of us may believe in the prophecy of Brené Brown or Tony Robbins. We may believe in the bible of The New Yorker or the Harvard Business Review. We may believe most deeply when we worship right here at the church of TED, but we desperately want to believe, we need to believe. We speak in the tongues of charismatic leaders that promise to solve all our problems. We see suffering as a necessary act of the capitalism that is our god, we take the text of technological progress to be infallible truth. And we hardly realize the human price we pay when we fail to question one brick, because we fear it might shake our whole foundation.But if you are disturbed by the unconscionable things that we have come to accept, then it must be questioning time. So I have not a gospel of disruption or innovation or a triple bottom line. I do not have a gospel of faith to share with you today, in fact. I have and I offer a gospel of doubt. The gospel of doubt does not ask that you stop believing, it asks that you believe a new thing: that it is possible not to believe. It is possible the answers we have are wrong, it is possible the questions themselves are wrong. Yes, the gospel of doubt means that it is possible that we, on this stage, in this room, are wrong. Because it raises the question, ""Why?"" With all the power that we hold in our hands, why are people still suffering so bad?This doubt leads me to share that we are putting my organization, MBAs Across America, out of business. We have shed our staff and closed our doors and we will share our model freely with anyone who sees their power to do this work without waiting for our permission. This doubt compels me to renounce the role of savior that some have placed on me, because our time is too short and our odds are too long to wait for second comings, when the truth is that there will be no miracles here.And this doubt, it fuels me, it gives me hope that when our troubles overwhelm us, when the paths laid out for us seem to lead to our demise, when our healers bring no comfort to our wounds, it will not be our blind faith — no, it will be our humble doubt that shines a little light into the darkness of our lives and of our world and lets us raise our voice to whisper or to shout or to say simply, very simply, ""There must be another way.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/casey_gerald_the_gospel_of_doubt
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"I want to tell you the story about the time I almost got kidnapped in the trunk of a red Mazda Miata. It's the day after graduating from design school and I'm having a yard sale. And this guy pulls up in this red Mazda and he starts looking through my stuff. And he buys a piece of art that I made. And it turns out he's alone in town for the night, driving cross-country on a road trip before he goes into the Peace Corps. So I invite him out for a beer and he tells me all about his passion for making a difference in the world.Now it's starting to get late, and I'm getting pretty tired. As I motion for the tab, I make the mistake of asking him, ""So where are you staying tonight?"" And he makes it worse by saying, ""Actually, I don't have a place."" And I'm thinking, ""Oh, man!"" What do you do? We've all been there, right? Do I offer to host this guy? But, I just met him — I mean, he says he's going to the Peace Corps, but I don't really know if he's going to the Peace Corps and I don't want to end up kidnapped in the trunk of a Miata. That's a small trunk!So then I hear myself saying, ""Hey, I have an airbed you can stay on in my living room."" And the voice in my head goes, ""Wait, what?""That night, I'm laying in bed, I'm staring at the ceiling and thinking, ""Oh my god, what have I done? There's a complete stranger sleeping in my living room. What if he's psychotic?"" My anxiety grows so much, I leap out of bed, I sneak on my tiptoes to the door, and I lock the bedroom door.It turns out he was not psychotic. We've kept in touch ever since. And the piece of art he bought at the yard sale is hanging in his classroom; he's a teacher now.This was my first hosting experience, and it completely changed my perspective. Maybe the people that my childhood taught me to label as strangers were actually friends waiting to be discovered. The idea of hosting people on airbeds gradually became natural to me and when I moved to San Francisco, I brought the airbed with me.So now it's two years later. I'm unemployed, I'm almost broke, my roommate moves out, and then the rent goes up. And then I learn there's a design conference coming to town, and all the hotels are sold out. And I've always believed that turning fear into fun is the gift of creativity.So here's what I pitch my best friend and my new roommate Brian Chesky: ""Brian, thought of a way to make a few bucks — turning our place into 'designers bed and breakfast,' offering young designers who come to town a place to crash, complete with wireless Internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. Ha!""We built a basic website and Airbed and Breakfast was born. Three lucky guests got to stay on a 20-dollar airbed on the hardwood floor. But they loved it, and so did we. I swear, the ham and Swiss cheese omelets we made tasted totally different because we made them for our guests. We took them on adventures around the city, and when we said goodbye to the last guest, the door latch clicked, Brian and I just stared at each other. Did we just discover it was possible to make friends while also making rent?The wheels had started to turn. My old roommate, Nate Blecharczyk, joined as engineering co-founder. And we buckled down to see if we could turn this into a business.Here's what we pitched investors: ""We want to build a website where people publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces, their bedrooms, the bathrooms — the kinds of rooms you usually keep closed when people come over. And then, over the Internet, they're going to invite complete strangers to come sleep in their homes. It's going to be huge!""(Laughter)We sat back, and we waited for the rocket ship to blast off. It did not. No one in their right minds would invest in a service that allows strangers to sleep in people's homes. Why? Because we've all been taught as kids, strangers equal danger.Now, when you're faced with a problem, you fall back on what you know, and all we really knew was design. In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something — it's the whole experience. We learned to do that for objects, but here, we were aiming to build Olympic trust between people who had never met. Could design make that happen? Is it possible to design for trust?I want to give you a sense of the flavor of trust that we were aiming to achieve. I've got a 30-second experiment that will push you past your comfort zone. If you're up for it, give me a thumbs-up. OK, I need you to take out your phones. Now that you have your phone out, I'd like you to unlock your phone. Now hand your unlocked phone to the person on your left.(Laughter)That tiny sense of panic you're feeling right now —(Laughter)is exactly how hosts feel the first time they open their home. Because the only thing more personal than your phone is your home. People don't just see your messages, they see your bedroom, your kitchen, your toilet.Now, how does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone? Most of us feel really responsible. That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home. And it's because of this that our company can even exist. By the way, who's holding Al Gore's phone?(Laughter)Would you tell Twitter he's running for President?(Laughter)(Applause)OK, you can hand your phones back now.So now that you've experienced the kind of trust challenge we were facing, I'd love to share a few discoveries we've made along the way. What if we changed one small thing about the design of that experiment? What if your neighbor had introduced themselves first, with their name, where they're from, the name of their kids or their dog? Imagine that they had 150 reviews of people saying, ""They're great at holding unlocked phones!""(Laughter)Now how would you feel about handing your phone over?It turns out, a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust. And we didn't actually get it right the first time. It's hard for people to leave bad reviews. Eventually, we learned to wait until both guests and hosts left the review before we reveal them.Now, here's a discovery we made just last week. We did a joint study with Stanford, where we looked at people's willingness to trust someone based on how similar they are in age, location and geography. The research showed, not surprisingly, we prefer people who are like us. The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. Now, that's a natural social bias. But what's interesting is what happens when you add reputation into the mix, in this case, with reviews.Now, if you've got less than three reviews, nothing changes. But if you've got more than 10, everything changes. High reputation beats high similarity. The right design can actually help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases.Now we also learned that building the right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure. This is what happens when a guest first messages a host. If you share too little, like, ""Yo,"" acceptance rates go down. And if you share too much, like, ""I'm having issues with my mother,""(Laughter)acceptance rates also go down. But there's a zone that's just right, like, ""Love the artwork in your place. Coming for vacation with my family."" So how do we design for just the right amount of disclosure? We use the size of the box to suggest the right length, and we guide them with prompts to encourage sharing.We bet our whole company on the hope that, with the right design, people would be willing to overcome the stranger-danger bias. What we didn't realize is just how many people were ready and waiting to put the bias aside.This is a graph that shows our rate of adoption. There's three things happening here. The first, an unbelievable amount of luck. The second is the efforts of our team. And third is the existence of a previously unsatisfied need. Now, things have been going pretty well.Obviously, there are times when things don't work out. Guests have thrown unauthorized parties and trashed homes. Hosts have left guests stranded in the rain. In the early days, I was customer service, and those calls came right to my cell phone. I was at the front lines of trust breaking. And there's nothing worse than those calls, it hurts to even think about them. And the disappointment in the sound of someone's voice was and, I would say, still is our single greatest motivator to keep improving.Thankfully, out of the 123 million nights we've ever hosted, less than a fraction of a percent have been problematic. Turns out, people are justified in their trust. And when trust works out right, it can be absolutely magical.We had a guest stay with a host in Uruguay, and he suffered a heart attack. The host rushed him to the hospital. They donated their own blood for his operation. Let me read you his review.(Laughter)""Excellent house for sedentary travelers prone to myocardial infarctions.(Laughter)The area is beautiful and has direct access to the best hospitals.(Laughter)Javier and Alejandra instantly become guardian angels who will save your life without even knowing you. They will rush you to the hospital in their own car while you're dying and stay in the waiting room while the doctors give you a bypass. They don't want you to feel lonely, they bring you books to read. And they let you stay at their house extra nights without charging you. Highly recommended!""(Applause)Of course, not every stay is like that. But this connection beyond the transaction is exactly what the sharing economy is aiming for.Now, when I heard that term, I have to admit, it tripped me up. How do sharing and transactions go together? So let's be clear; it is about commerce. But if you just called it the rental economy, it would be incomplete. The sharing economy is commerce with the promise of human connection. People share a part of themselves, and that changes everything.You know how most travel today is, like, I think of it like fast food — it's efficient and consistent, at the cost of local and authentic. What if travel were like a magnificent buffet of local experiences? What if anywhere you visited, there was a central marketplace of locals offering to get you thoroughly drunk on a pub crawl in neighborhoods you didn't even know existed. Or learning to cook from the chef of a five-star restaurant?Today, homes are designed around the idea of privacy and separation. What if homes were designed to be shared from the ground up? What would that look like? What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation.In South Korea, in the city of Seoul, they've actually even started this. They've repurposed hundreds of government parking spots to be shared by residents. They're connecting students who need a place to live with empty-nesters who have extra rooms. And they've started an incubator to help fund the next generation of sharing economy start-ups.Tonight, just on our service, 785,000 people in 191 countries will either stay in a stranger's home or welcome one into theirs. Clearly, it's not as crazy as we were taught.We didn't invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever. There's been many other websites like ours. So, why did ours eventually take off? Luck and timing aside, I've learned that you can take the components of trust, and you can design for that. Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias. And that's amazing to me. It blows my mind. I think about this every time I see a red Miata go by.Now, we know design won't solve all the world's problems. But if it can help out with this one, if it can make a dent in this, it makes me wonder, what else can we design for next?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_gebbia_how_airbnb_designs_for_trust
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"So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this. So, you know —(Laughter)you get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done, things stay civil.(Laughter)And I would want to do that like that. That would be the plan. I would have it all ready to go, but then, actually, the paper would come along, and then I would kind of do this.(Laughter)And that would happen every single paper.But then came my 90-page senior thesis, a paper you're supposed to spend a year on. And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. It was way too big a project. So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this. This is how the year would go. So I'd start off light, and I'd bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear just like a little staircase. How hard could it be to walk up the stairs? No big deal, right?But then, the funniest thing happened. Those first few months? They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. So we had an awesome new revised plan.(Laughter)And then —(Laughter)But then those middle months actually went by, and I didn't really write words, and so we were here. And then two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters — humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters — sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline.I thought that was the end of everything. But a week later I get a call, and it's the school. And they say, ""Is this Tim Urban?"" And I say, ""Yeah."" And they say, ""We need to talk about your thesis."" And I say, ""OK."" And they say, ""It's the best one we've ever seen.""(Laughter)(Applause)That did not happen.(Laughter)It was a very, very bad thesis.(Laughter)I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you thought, ""This guy is amazing!""(Laughter)No, no, it was very, very bad. Anyway, today I'm a writer-blogger guy. I write the blog Wait But Why. And a couple of years ago, I decided to write about procrastination. My behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around me, and I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why we are the way we are. Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. And to test this, I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so I could compare them. I actually brought them here to show you today. I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference. I know that if you're not a trained brain expert, it's not that obvious, but just take a look, OK? So here's the brain of a non-procrastinator.(Laughter)Now ... here's my brain.(Laughter)There is a difference. Both brains have a Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an Instant Gratification Monkey. Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator? Well, it means everything's fine until this happens.[This is a perfect time to get some work done.] [Nope!]So the Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he actually takes the wheel, and he says, ""Actually, let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding scandal, because I just remembered that that happened.(Laughter)Then —(Laughter)Then we're going to go over to the fridge, to see if there's anything new in there since 10 minutes ago. After that, we're going to go on a YouTube spiral that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking about magnets and ends much, much later with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom.(Laughter)""All of that's going to take a while, so we're not going to really have room on the schedule for any work today. Sorry!""(Sigh)Now, what is going on here? The Instant Gratification Monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things: easy and fun.Now, in the animal world, that works fine. If you're a dog and you spend your whole life doing nothing other than easy and fun things, you're a huge success!(Laughter)And to the Monkey, humans are just another animal species. You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might have worked OK. But, if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times. We're in an advanced civilization, and the Monkey does not know what that is. Which is why we have another guy in our brain, the Rational Decision-Maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize the future. We can see the big picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account. And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now. Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. That's why there's an overlap. Sometimes they agree. But other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant, for the sake of the big picture. And that's when we have a conflict. And for the procrastinator, that conflict tends to end a certain way every time, leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone, an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the Makes Sense circle. I call it the Dark Playground.(Laughter)Now, the Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred — all of those good procrastinator feelings. And the question is, in this situation, with the Monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen?Well, turns out the procrastinator has a guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him and watching over him in his darkest moments — someone called the Panic Monster.(Laughter)Now, the Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he's the only thing the Monkey is terrified of. Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because the people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED Talk.(Laughter)Now, of course, I said yes. It's always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past.(Laughter)(Applause) But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind. He was saying, ""Are we clear on what we just accepted? Do we get what's going to be now happening one day in the future? We need to sit down and work on this right now."" And the Monkey said, ""Totally agree, but let's just open Google Earth and zoom in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scroll up for two and a half hours til we get to the top of the country, so we can get a better feel for India.""(Laughter)So that's what we did that day.(Laughter)As six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. And I opened up the website, and there was my face staring right back at me. And guess who woke up?(Laughter)So the Panic Monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem.(Laughter)And the Monkey — remember, he's terrified of the Panic Monster — boom, he's up the tree! And finally, finally, the Rational Decision-Maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk.Now, the Panic Monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like me could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write eight pages. And this entire situation, with the three characters — this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but in the end, it works. This is what I decided to write about on the blog a couple of years ago.When I did, I was amazed by the response. Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. These are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students.(Laughter)And they were all writing, saying the same thing: ""I have this problem too."" But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives, about what this Monkey had done to them. And I thought about this, and I said, well, if the procrastinator's system works, then what's going on? Why are all of these people in such a dark place?Well, it turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination. Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the Panic Monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. So if you wanted a career where you're a self-starter — something in the arts, something entrepreneurial — there's no deadlines on those things at first, because nothing's happening, not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get momentum, get things going. There's also all kinds of important things outside of your career that don't involve any deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health, working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working.Now if the procrastinator's only mechanism of doing these hard things is the Panic Monster, that's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations, the Panic Monster doesn't show up. He has nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination, they're not contained; they just extend outward forever. And it's this long-term kind of procrastination that's much less visible and much less talked about than the funnier, short-term deadline-based kind. It's usually suffered quietly and privately. And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets. And I thought, that's why those people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place. It's not that they're cramming for some project. It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them.So I read these emails and I had a little bit of an epiphany — that I don't think non-procrastinators exist. That's right — I think all of you are procrastinators. Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us,(Laughter)and some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but remember: the Monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there.Now, I want to show you one last thing. I call this a Life Calendar. That's one box for every week of a 90-year life. That's not that many boxes, especially since we've already used a bunch of those. So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar. We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. We need to stay aware of the Instant Gratification Monkey. That's a job for all of us. And because there's not that many boxes on there, it's a job that should probably start today.Well, maybe not today, but ...(Laughter)You know. Sometime soon.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator
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"Hannah is excited to be going to college. She couldn't wait to get out of her parents' house, to prove to them that she's an adult, and to prove to her new friends that she belongs.She heads to a campus party where she sees a guy that she has a crush on. Let's call him Mike. The next day, Hannah wakes up with a pounding headache. She can only remember the night in flashes. But what she does remember is throwing up in the hall outside Mike's room and staring at the wall silently while he was inside her, wanting it to stop, then shakily stumbling home. She doesn't feel good about what happened, but she thinks, ""Maybe this is just what sex in college is?""One in five women and one in 13 men will be sexually assaulted at some point during their college career in the United States. Less than 10 percent will ever report their assault to their school or to the police. And those who do, on average, wait 11 months to make the report.Hannah initially just feels like dealing with what happened on her own. But when she sees Mike taking girls home from parties, she's worried about them.After graduation, Hannah learns that she was one of five women who Mike did the exact same thing to. And this is not an unlikely scenario because 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders. But with such low reporting rates, it's fairly unlikely that even repeat perpetrators will be reported, much less anything happen if they are.In fact, only six percent of assaults reported to the police end with the assailant spending a single day in prison. Meaning, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll get away with it. This means there's practically no deterrent to assault in the United States.Now, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist by training. I'm interested in systems and networks and where we can concentrate our resources to do the most good. So this, to me, is a tragic but a solvable problem.So when the issue of campus assault started hitting the news a few years ago, it felt like a unique opportunity to make a change. And so we did. We started by talking to college survivors. And what they wish they'd had in college is pretty simple; they wanted a website, one they could use at the time and place that felt safest to them with clearly written information about their reporting options, with the ability to electronically report their assault, rather than having the first step to go in and talk to someone who may or may not believe them. With the option to create a secure, timestamped document of what happened to them, preserving evidence even if they don't want to report yet. And lastly, and perhaps most critically, with the ability to report their assault only if someone else reported the same assailant. You see, knowing that you weren't the only one changes everything. It changes the way you frame your own experience, it changes the way you think about your perpetrator, it means that if you do come forward, you'll have someone else's back and they'll have yours.We created a website that actually does this and we launched it [...] in August, on two college campuses.And we included a unique matching system where if Mike's first victim had come forward, saved her record, entered into the matching system and named Mike, and Mike's second victim had done the same thing a few months later, they would have matched and the verified contact information of both survivors would have been sent to the authorities at the same time for investigation and follow up.If a system like this had existed for Hannah and her peers, it's more likely that they would have reported, that they would have been believed, and that Mike would have been kicked off campus, gone to jail, or at least gotten the help that he needed. And if we were able to stop repeat offenders like Mike after just their second assault following a match, survivors like Hannah would never even be assaulted in the first place. We could prevent 59 percent of sexual assaults just by stopping repeat perpetrators earlier on. And because we're creating a real deterrent to assault, for perhaps the first time, maybe the Mikes of the world would never even try to assault anyone.The type of system I'm describing, the type of system that survivors want is a type of information escrow, meaning an entity that holds on to information for you and only releases it to a third party when certain pre-agreed upon conditions are met, such as a match. The application that we built is for college campuses. But the same type of system could be used in the military or even the workplace.We don't have to live in a world where 99 percent of rapists get away with it. We can create one where those who do wrong are held accountable, where survivors get the support and justice they deserve, where the authorities get the information they need, and where there's a real deterrent to violating the rights of another human being.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_ladd_the_reporting_system_that_sexual_assault_survivors_want
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"I come from one of the most liberal, tolerant, progressive places in the United States, Seattle, Washington. And I grew up with a family of great Seattlites. My mother was an artist, my father was a college professor, and I am truly grateful for my upbringing, because I always felt completely comfortable designing my life exactly as I saw fit.And in point of fact, I took a route that was not exactly what my parents had in mind. When I was 19, I dropped out of college — dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs.(Laughter)And I went on the road as a professional French horn player, which was my lifelong dream. I played chamber music all over the United States and Europe, and I toured for a couple of years with a great jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird. And by the end of my 20s, I wound up as a member of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in Spain. What a great life.And you know, my parents never complained. They supported me all the way through it. It wasn't their dream. They used to tell their neighbors and friends, ""Our son, he's taking a gap decade.""(Laughter)And — There was, however, one awkward conversation about my lifestyle that I want to tell you about. I was 27, and I was home from Barcelona, and I was visiting my parents for Christmas, and I was cooking dinner with my mother, and we were alone in the kitchen. And she was quiet, too quiet. Something was wrong. And so I said, ""Mom, what's on your mind?"" And she said, ""Your dad and I are really worried about you."" And I said, ""What?"" I mean, what could it be, at this point? And she said, ""I want you to be completely honest with me: have you been voting for Republicans?""(Laughter)Now, the truth is, I wasn't really political, I was just a French horn player. But I had a bit of an epiphany, and they had detected it, and it was causing some confusion. You see, I had become an enthusiast for capitalism, and I want to tell you why that is. It stems from a lifelong interest of mine in, believe it or not, poverty.See, when I was a kid growing up in Seattle, I remember the first time I saw real poverty. We were a lower middle class family, but that's of course not real poverty. That's not even close. The first time I saw poverty, and poverty's face, was when I was six or seven years old, early 1970s. And it was like a lot of you, kind of a prosaic example, kind of trite. It was a picture in the National Geographic Magazine of a kid who was my age in East Africa, and there were flies on his face and a distended belly. And he wasn't going to make it, and I knew that, and I was helpless. Some of you remember that picture, not exactly that picture, one just like it. It introduced the West to grinding poverty around the world. Well, that vision kind of haunted me as I grew up and I went to school and I dropped out and dropped in and started my family. And I wondered, what happened to that kid? Or to people just like him all over the world? And so I started to study, even though I wasn't in college, I was looking for the answer: what happened to the world's poorest people? Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better? What?And I found the answer, and it changed my life, and I want to share it with you.See — most Americans believe that poverty has gotten worse since we were children, since they saw that vision. If you ask Americans, ""Has poverty gotten worse or better around the world?"", 70 percent will say that hunger has gotten worse since the early 1970s. But here's the truth. Here's the epiphany that I had that changed my thinking. From 1970 until today, the percentage of the world's population living in starvation levels, living on a dollar a day or less, obviously adjusted for inflation, that percentage has declined by 80 percent. There's been an 80 percent decline in the world's worst poverty since I was a kid. And I didn't even know about it. This, my friends, that's a miracle. That's something we ought to celebrate. It's the greatest antipoverty achievement in the history of mankind, and it happened in our lifetimes.(Applause)So when I learned this, I asked, what did that? What made it possible? Because if you don't know why, you can't do it again. If you want to replicate it and get the next two billion people out of poverty, because that's what we're talking about: since I was a kid, two billion of the least of these, our brothers and sisters, have been pulled out of poverty. I want the next two billion, so I've got to know why. And I went in search of an answer. And it wasn't a political answer, because I didn't care. You know what, I still don't care. I wanted the best answer from mainstream economists left, right and center.And here it is. Here are the reasons. There are five reasons that two billion of our brothers and sisters have been pulled out of poverty since I was a kid. Number one: globalization. Number two: free trade. Number three: property rights. Number four: rule of law. Number five: entrepreneurship. It was the free enterprise system spreading around the world after 1970 that did that.Now, I'm not naive. I know that free enterprise isn't perfect, and I know that free enterprise isn't everything we need to build a better world. But that is great. And that's beyond politics. Here's what I learned. This is the epiphany. Capitalism is not just about accumulation. At its best, it's about aspiration, which is what so many people on this stage talk about, is the aspiration that comes from dreams that are embedded in the free enterprise system. And we've got to share it with more people.Now, I want to tell you about a second epiphany that's related to that first one that I think can bring us progress, not just around the world, but right here at home. The best quote I've ever heard to summarize the thoughts that I've just given you about pulling people out of poverty is as follows: ""Free markets have created more wealth than any system in history. They have lifted billions out of poverty.""Who said it? It sounds like Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan. Wrong. President Barack Obama said that. Why do I know it by heart? Because he said it to me. Crazy. And I said, ""Hallelujah."" But more than that, I said, ""What an opportunity.""You know what I was thinking? It was at an event that we were doing on the subject at Georgetown University in May of 2015. And I thought, this is the solution to the biggest problem facing America today. What? It's coming together around these ideas, liberals and conservatives, to help people who need us the most.Now, I don't have to tell anybody in this room that we're in a crisis, in America and many countries around the world with political polarization. It's risen to critical, crisis levels. It's unpleasant. It's not right. There was an article last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is one of the most prestigious scientific journals published in the West. And it was an article in 2014 on political motive asymmetry. What's that? That's what psychologists call the phenomenon of assuming that your ideology is based in love but your opponents' ideology is based in hate. It's common in world conflict. You expect to see this between Palestinians and Israelis, for example. What the authors of this article found was that in America today, a majority of Republicans and Democrats suffer from political motive asymmetry. A majority of people in our country today who are politically active believe that they are motivated by love but the other side is motivated by hate. Think about it. Think about it. Most people are walking around saying, ""You know, my ideology is based on basic benevolence, I want to help people, but the other guys, they're evil and out to get me."" You can't progress as a society when you have this kind of asymmetry. It's impossible.How do we solve it? Well, first, let's be honest: there are differences. Let's not minimize the differences. That would be really naïve. There's a lot of good research on this. A veteran of the TED stage is my friend Jonathan Haidt. He's a psychology professor at New York University. He does work on the ideology and values and morals of different people to see how they differ. And he's shown, for example, that conservatives and liberals have a very different emphasis on what they think is important. For example, Jon Haidt has shown that liberals care about poverty 59 percent more than they care about economic liberty. And conservatives care about economic liberty 28 percent more than they care about poverty.Irreconcilable differences, right? We'll never come together. Wrong. That is diversity in which lies our strength. Remember what pulled up the poor. It was the obsession with poverty, accompanied by the method of economic freedom spreading around the world. We need each other, in other words, if we want to help people and get the next two billion people out of poverty. There's no other way.Hmm. How are we going to get that? It's a tricky thing, isn't it. We need innovative thinking. A lot of it's on this stage. Social entrepreneurship. Yeah. Absolutely. Phenomenal. We need investment overseas in a sustainable, responsible, ethical and moral way. Yes. Yes.But you know what we really need? We need a new day in flexible ideology. We need to be less predictable. Don't we? Do you ever feel like your own ideology is starting to get predictable? Kinda conventional? Do you ever feel like you're always listening to people who agree with you? Why is that dangerous? Because when we talk in this country about economics, on the right, conservatives, you're always talking about taxes and regulations and big government. And on the left, liberals, you're talking about economics, it's always about income inequality. Right? Now those are important things, really important to me, really important to you. But when it comes to lifting people up who are starving and need us today, those are distractions. We need to come together around the best ways to mitigate poverty using the best tools at our disposal, and that comes only when conservatives recognize that they need liberals and their obsession with poverty, and liberals need conservatives and their obsession with free markets. That's the diversity in which lies the future strength of this country, if we choose to take it.So how are we going to do it? How are we going to do it together? I've got to have some action items, not just for you but for me. Number one. Action item number one: remember, it's not good enough just to tolerate people who disagree. It's not good enough. We have to remember that we need people who disagree with us, because there are people who need all of us who are still waiting for these tools. Now, what are you going to do? How are you going to express that? Where does this start? It starts here. You know, all of us in this room, we're blessed. We're blessed with people who listen to us. We're blessed with prosperity. We're blessed with leadership. When people hear us, with the kind of unpredictable ideology, then maybe people will listen. Maybe progress will start at that point. That's number one. Number two. Number two: I'm asking you and I'm asking me to be the person specifically who blurs the lines, who is ambiguous, who is hard to classify. If you're a conservative, be the conservative who is always going on about poverty and the moral obligation to be a warrior for the poor. And if you're a liberal, be a liberal who is always talking about the beauty of free markets to solve our problems when we use them responsibly.If we do that, we get two things. Number one: we get to start to work on the next two billion and be the solution that we've seen so much of in the past and we need to see more of in the future. That's what we get. And the second is that we might just be able to take the ghastly holy war of ideology that we're suffering under in this country and turn it into a competition of ideas based on solidarity and mutual respect. And then maybe, just maybe, we'll all realize that our big differences aren't really that big after all.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_brooks_a_conservative_s_plea_let_s_work_together
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"Today's computers are so amazing that we fail to notice how terrible they really are. I'd like to talk to you today about this problem, and how we can fix it with neuroscience.First, I'd like to take you back to a frosty night in Harlem in 2011 that had a profound impact on me. I was sitting in a dive bar outside of Columbia University, where I studied computer science and neuroscience, and I was having this great conversation with a fellow student about the power of holograms to one day replace computers. And just as we were getting to the best part of the conversation, of course, his phone lights up. And he pulls it towards himself, and he looks down and he starts typing. And then he forces his eyeballs back up to mine and he goes, ""Keep going. I'm with you."" But of course his eyes were glazed over, and the moment was dead.Meanwhile across the bar, I noticed another student holding his phone, this time towards a group. He was swiping through pictures on Instagram, and these kids were laughing hysterically. And that dichotomy between how crappy I was feeling and how happy they were feeling about the same technology, really got me thinking. And the more I thought of it, the more I realized it was clearly not the digital information that was the bad guy here, it was simply the display position that was separating me from my friend and that was binding those kids together.See, they were connected around something, just like our ancestors who evolved their social cognitions telling stories around the campfire. And that's exactly what tools should do, I think. They should extend our bodies. And I think computers today are doing quite the opposite. Whether you're sending an email to your wife or you're composing a symphony or just consoling a friend, you're doing it in pretty much the same way. You're hunched over these rectangles, fumbling with buttons and menus and more rectangles. And I think this is the wrong way, I think we can start using a much more natural machine. We should use machines that bring our work back into the world. We should use machines that use the principles of neuroscience to extend our senses versus going against them.Now it just so happens that I have such a machine here. It's called the Meta 2. Let's try it out. Now in front of me right now, I can see the audience, and I can see my very hands. And in three, two, one, we're going to see an immersive hologram appear, a very realistic hologram appear in front of me, of our very glasses I'm wearing on my head right now. And of course this could be anything that we're shopping for or learning from, and I can use my hands to very nicely kind of move it around with fine control. And I think Iron Man would be proud. We're going to come back to this in just a bit.(Applause)Now if you're anything like me, your mind is already reeling with the possibilities of what we can do with this kind of technology, so let's look at a few.My mom is an architect, so naturally the first thing I imagined was laying out a building in 3D space instead of having to use these 2D floor plans. She's actually touching graphics right now and selecting an interior decor. This was all shot through a GoPro through our very glasses.And this next use case is very personal to me, it's Professor Adam Gazzaley's glass brain project, courtesy of UCSF. As a neuroscience student, I would always fantasize about the ability to learn and memorize these complex brain structures with an actual machine, where I could touch and play with the various brain structures.Now what you're seeing is called augmented reality, but to me, it's part of a much more important story — a story of how we can begin to extend our bodies with digital devices, instead of the other way around.Now ... in the next few years, humanity's going to go through a shift, I think. We're going to start putting an entire layer of digital information on the real world. Just imagine for a moment what this could mean for storytellers, for painters, for brain surgeons, for interior decorators and maybe for all of us here today. And what I think we need to do as a community, is really try and make an effort to imagine how we can create this new reality in a way that extends the human experience, instead of gamifying our reality or cluttering it with digital information. And that's what I'm very passionate about.Now, I want to tell you a little secret. In about five years — this is not the smallest device — in about five years, these are all going to look like strips of glass on our eyes that project holograms. And just like we don't care so much about which phone we buy in terms of the hardware — we buy it for the operating system — as a neuroscientist, I always dreamt of building the iOS of the mind, if you will. And it's very, very important that we get this right, because we might be living inside of these things for at least as long as we've lived with the Windows graphical user interface. And I don't know about you, but living inside of Windows scares me.(Laughter)To isolate the single most intuitive interface out of infinity, we use neuroscience to drive our design guidelines, instead of letting a bunch of designers fight it out in the boardroom. And the principle we all revolve around is what's called the ""Neural Path of Least Resistance.""At every turn, we're connecting the iOS of the brain with our brain on, for the first time, our brain's terms. In other words, we're trying to create a zero learning-curve computer. We're building a system that you've always known how to use.Here are the first three design guidelines that we employ in this brand-new form of user experience. First and foremost, you are the operating system. Traditional file systems are complex and abstract, and they take your brain extra steps to decode them. We're going against the Neural Path of Least Resistance. Meanwhile, in augmented reality, you can of course place your holographic TED panel over here, and your holographic email on the other side of the desk, and your spatial memory evolved just fine to go ahead and retrieve them. You could put your holographic Tesla that you're shopping for — or whatever model my legal team told me to put in right before the show.(Laughter)Perfect. And your brain knows exactly how to get it back.The second interface guideline we call ""touch to see."" What do babies do when they see something that grabs their interest? They try and reach out and touch it. And that's exactly how the natural machine should work as well. Turns out the visual system gets a fundamental boost from a sense we call proprioception — that's the sense of our body parts in space. So by touching our work directly, we're not only going to control it better, we're also going to understand it much more deeply. Hence, touch to see.But it's not enough to experience things ourselves. We're inherently these social primates. And this leads me to our third guideline, the holographic campfire from our first story.Our mirror-neuron subsystem suggests that we can connect with each other and with our work much better if we can see each other's faces and hands in 3D. So if you look at the video behind me, you can see two Meta users playing around with the same hologram, making eye contact, connected around this thing, instead of being distracted by external devices.Let's go ahead and try this again with neuroscience in mind. So again, our favorite interface, the iOS of the mind. I'm going to now take a step further and go ahead and grab this pair of glasses and leave it right here by the desk. I'm now with you, I'm in the moment, we're connecting. My spatial memory kicks in, and I can go ahead and grab it and bring it right back here, reminding me that I am the operating system. And now my proprioception is working, and I can go ahead and explode these glasses into a thousand parts and touch the very sensor that is currently scanning my hand.But it's not enough to see things alone, so in a second, my co-founder Ray is going to make a 3D call — Ray?(Ringing)Hey Ray, how's it going? Guys, I can see this guy in front me in full 3D. And he is photo-realistic.(Applause)Thank you.My mirror-neuron subsystem suggests that this is going to replace phones in not too long. Ray, how's it going?Ray: Great. We're live today.(Applause)MG: Ray, give the crowd a gift of the holographic brain we saw from the video earlier. Guys, this is not only going to change phones, it's also going to change the way we collaborate.Thank you so much.Thanks, Ray.Ray: You're welcome.(Applause)MG: So folks, this is the message that I discovered in that bar in 2011: The future of computers is not locked inside one of these screens. It's right here, inside of us.(Applause)So if there's one idea that I could leave you with here today, it's that the natural machine is not some figment of the future, it's right here in 2016. Which is why all hundred of us at Meta, including the administrative staff, the executives, the designers, the engineers — before TED2017, we're all going to be throwing away our external monitors and replacing them with a truly and profoundly more natural machine.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you, appreciate it. Thanks, guys.Chris Anderson: So help me out on one thing, because there've been a few augmented reality demos shown over the last year or so out there. And there's sometimes a debate among technologists about, are we really seeing the real thing on-screen? There's this issue of field of view, that somehow the technology is showing a broader view than you would actually see wearing the glasses. Were we seeing the real deal there?MG: Absolutely the real deal. Not only that, we took extra measures to shoot it with a GoPro through the actual lens in the various videos that you've seen here. We want to try to simulate the experience for the world that we're actually seeing through the glasses, and not cut any corners.CA: Thank you so much for showing us that.MG: Thanks so much, I appreciate that.","https://www.ted.com/talks/meron_gribetz_a_glimpse_of_the_future_through_an_augmented_reality_headset
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"The following are my opinions, and do not reflect the opinions or policies of any particular prosecutor's office.(Laughter)I am a prosecutor. I believe in law and order. I am the adopted son of a police officer, a Marine and a hairdresser. I believe in accountability and that we should all be safe in our communities. I love my job and the people that do it. I just think that it's our responsibility to do it better.By a show of hands, how many of you, by the age of 25, had either acted up in school, went somewhere you were specifically told to stay out of, or drank alcohol before your legal age?(Laughter)All right.How many of you shoplifted, tried an illegal drug or got into a physical fight — yes, even with a sibling? Now, how many of you ever spent one day in jail for any of those decisions? How many of you sitting here today think that you're a danger to society or should be defined by those actions of youthful indiscretion?(Laughter)Point taken.When we talk about criminal justice reform, we often focus on a few things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. But first I'm going to — since you shared with me, I'm going to give you a confession on my part. I went to law school to make money. I had no interest in being a public servant, I had no interest in criminal law, and I definitely didn't think that I would ever be a prosecutor.Near the end of my first year of law school, I got an internship in the Roxbury Division of Boston Municipal Court. I knew of Roxbury as an impoverished neighborhood in Boston, plagued by gun violence and drug crime. My life and my legal career changed the first day of that internship. I walked into a courtroom, and I saw an auditorium of people who, one by one, would approach the front of that courtroom to say two words and two words only: ""Not guilty."" They were predominately black and brown. And then a judge, a defense attorney and a prosecutor would make life-altering decisions about that person without their input. They were predominately white. As each person, one by one, approached the front of that courtroom, I couldn't stop but think: How did they get here? I wanted to know their stories. And as the prosecutor read the facts of each case, I was thinking to myself, we could have predicted that. That seems so preventable... not because I was an expert in criminal law, but because it was common sense.Over the course of the internship, I began to recognize people in the auditorium, not because they were criminal masterminds but because they were coming to us for help and we were sending them out without any.My second year of law school I worked as a paralegal for a defense attorney, and in that experience I met many young men accused of murder. Even in our ""worst,"" I saw human stories. And they all contained childhood trauma, victimization, poverty, loss, disengagement from school, early interaction with the police and the criminal justice system, all leading to a seat in a courtroom. Those convicted of murder were condemned to die in prison, and it was during those meetings with those men that I couldn't fathom why we would spend so much money to keep this one person in jail for the next 80 years when we could have reinvested it up front, and perhaps prevented the whole thing from happening in the first place.(Applause)My third year of law school, I defended people accused of small street crimes, mostly mentally ill, mostly homeless, mostly drug-addicted, all in need of help. They would come to us, and we would send them away without that help. They were in need of our assistance. But we weren't giving them any. Prosecuted, adjudged and defended by people who knew nothing about them.The staggering inefficiency is what drove me to criminal justice work. The unfairness of it all made me want to be a defender. The power dynamic that I came to understand made me become a prosecutor.I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the problem. We know the criminal justice system needs reform, we know there are 2.3 million people in American jails and prisons, making us the most incarcerated nation on the planet. We know there's another seven million people on probation or parole, we know that the criminal justice system disproportionately affects people of color, particularly poor people of color. And we know there are system failures happening everywhere that bring people to our courtrooms. But what we do not discuss is how ill-equipped our prosecutors are to receive them. When we talk about criminal justice reform, we, as a society, focus on three things. We complain, we tweet, we protest about the police, about sentencing laws and about prison. We rarely, if ever, talk about the prosecutor.In the fall of 2009, a young man was arrested by the Boston Police Department. He was 18 years old, he was African American and he was a senior at a local public school. He had his sights set on college but his part-time, minimum-wage job wasn't providing the financial opportunity he needed to enroll in school. In a series of bad decisions, he stole 30 laptops from a store and sold them on the Internet. This led to his arrest and a criminal complaint of 30 felony charges. The potential jail time he faced is what stressed Christopher out the most. But what he had little understanding of was the impact a criminal record would have on his future.I was standing in arraignments that day when Christopher's case came across my desk. And at the risk of sounding dramatic, in that moment, I had Christopher's life in my hands. I was 29 years old, a brand-new prosecutor, and I had little appreciation for how the decisions I would make would impact Christopher's life. Christopher's case was a serious one and it needed to be dealt with as such, but I didn't think branding him a felon for the rest of his life was the right answer.For the most part, prosecutors step onto the job with little appreciation of the impact of our decisions, regardless of our intent. Despite our broad discretion, we learn to avoid risk at all cost, rendering our discretion basically useless. History has conditioned us to believe that somehow, the criminal justice system brings about accountability and improves public safety, despite evidence to the contrary. We're judged internally and externally by our convictions and our trial wins, so prosecutors aren't really incentivized to be creative at our case dispositions, or to take risks on people we might not otherwise. We stick to an outdated method, counterproductive to achieving the very goal that we all want, and that's safer communities.Yet most prosecutors standing in my space would have arraigned Christopher. They have little appreciation for what we can do. Arraigning Christopher would give him a criminal record, making it harder for him to get a job, setting in motion a cycle that defines the failing criminal justice system today. With a criminal record and without a job, Christopher would be unable to find employment, education or stable housing. Without those protective factors in his life, Christopher would be more likely to commit further, more serious crime. The more contact Christopher had with the criminal justice system, the more likely it would be that he would return again and again and again — all at tremendous social cost to his children, to his family and to his peers. And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a terrible public safety outcome for the rest of us.When I came out of law school, I did the same thing as everybody else. I came out as a prosecutor expected to do justice, but I never learned what justice was in my classes — none of us do. None of us do.And yet, prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. Our power is virtually boundless. In most cases, not the judge, not the police, not the legislature, not the mayor, not the governor, not the President can tell us how to prosecute our cases. The decision to arraign Christopher and give him a criminal record was exclusively mine. I would choose whether to prosecute him for 30 felonies, for one felony, for a misdemeanor, or at all. I would choose whether to leverage Christopher into a plea deal or take the case to trial, and ultimately, I would be in a position to ask for Christopher to go to jail. These are decisions that prosecutors make every day unfettered, and we are unaware and untrained of the grave consequences of those decisions.One night this past summer, I was at a small gathering of professional men of color from around the city. As I stood there stuffing free finger sandwiches into my mouth, as you do as public servant —(Laughter)I noticed across the room, a young man waving and smiling at me and approaching me. And I recognized him, but I couldn't place from where, and before I knew it, this young man was hugging me. And thanking me. ""You cared about me, and you changed my life."" It was Christopher.See, I never arraigned Christopher. He never faced a judge or a jail, he never had a criminal record. Instead, I worked with Christopher; first on being accountable for his actions, and then, putting him in a position where he wouldn't re-offend. We recovered 75 percent of the computers that he sold and gave them back to Best Buy, and came up with a financial plan to repay for the computers we couldn't recover. Christopher did community service. He wrote an essay reflecting on how this case could impact his future and that of the community. He applied to college, he obtained financial aid, and he went on to graduate from a four-year school.(Applause)After we finished hugging, I looked at his name tag, to learn that Christopher was the manager of a large bank in Boston. Christopher had accomplished — and making a lot more money than me —(Laughter)He had accomplished all of this in the six years since I had first seen him in Roxbury Court. I can't take credit for Christopher's journey to success, but I certainly did my part to keep him on the path.There are thousands of Christophers out there, some locked in our jails and prisons. We need thousands of prosecutors to recognize that and to protect them. An employed Christopher is better for public safety than a condemned one. It's a bigger win for all of us. In retrospect, the decision not to throw the book at Christopher makes perfect sense. When I saw him that first day in Roxbury Court, I didn't see a criminal standing there. I saw myself — a young person in need of intervention. As an individual caught selling a large quantity of drugs in my late teens, I knew firsthand the power of opportunity as opposed to the wrath of the criminal justice system. Along the way, with the help and guidance of my district attorney, my supervisor and judges, I learned the power of the prosecutor to change lives instead of ruining them.And that's how we do it in Boston. We helped a woman who was arrested for stealing groceries to feed her kids get a job. Instead of putting an abused teenager in adult jail for punching another teenager, we secured mental health treatment and community supervision. A runaway girl who was arrested for prostituting, to survive on the streets, needed a safe place to live and grow — something we could help her with. I even helped a young man who was so afraid of the older gang kids showing up after school, that one morning instead of a lunchbox into his backpack, he put a loaded 9-millimeter. We would spend our time that we'd normally take prepping our cases for months and months for trial down the road by coming up with real solutions to the problems as they presented.Which is the better way to spend our time? How would you prefer your prosecutors to spend theirs? Why are we spending 80 billion dollars on a prison industry that we know is failing, when we could take that money and reallocate it into education, into mental health treatment, into substance abuse treatment and to community investment so we can develop our neighborhoods?(Applause)So why should this matter to you? Well, one, we're spending a lot of money. Our money. It costs 109,000 dollars in some states to lock up a teenager for a year, with a 60 percent chance that that person will return to the very same system. That is a terrible return on investment.Number two: it's the right thing to do. If prosecutors were a part of creating the problem, it's incumbent on us to create a solution and we can do that using other disciplines that have already done the data and research for us.And number three: your voice and your vote can make that happen. The next time there's a local district attorney's election in your jurisdiction, ask candidates these questions. One: What are you doing to make me and my neighbors safer? Two: What data are you collecting, and how are you training your prosecutors to make sure that it's working? And number three: If it's not working for everybody, what are you doing to fix it? If they can't answer the questions, they shouldn't be doing the job.Each one of you that raised your hand at the beginning of this talk is a living, breathing example of the power of opportunity, of intervention, of support and of love. While each of you may have faced your own brand of discipline for whatever malfeasances you committed, barely any of you needed a day in jail to make you the people that you are today — some of the greatest minds on the planet.Every day, thousands of times a day, prosecutors around the United States wield power so great that it can bring about catastrophe as quickly as it can bring about opportunity, intervention, support and yes, even love. Those qualities are the hallmarks of a strong community, and a strong community is a safe one. If our communities are broken, don't let the lawyers that you elect fix them with outdated, inefficient, expensive methods.Demand more; vote for the prosecutor who's helping people stay out of jail, not putting them in.Demand better. You deserve it, your children deserve it, the people who are tied up in the system deserve it, but most of all, the people that we are sworn to protect and do justice for demand it.We must, we must do better.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much.","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_foss_a_prosecutor_s_vision_for_a_better_justice_system
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"People returning to work after a career break: I call them relaunchers. These are people who have taken career breaks for elder care, for childcare reasons, pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. Closely related are career transitioners of all kinds: veterans, military spouses, retirees coming out of retirement or repatriating expats. Returning to work after a career break is hard because of a disconnect between the employers and the relaunchers. Employers can view hiring people with a gap on their resume as a high-risk proposition, and individuals on career break can have doubts about their abilities to relaunch their careers, especially if they've been out for a long time. This disconnect is a problem that I'm trying to help solve.Now, successful relaunchers are everywhere and in every field. This is Sami Kafala. He's a nuclear physicist in the UK who took a five-year career break to be home with his five children. The Singapore press recently wrote about nurses returning to work after long career breaks. And speaking of long career breaks, this is Mimi Kahn. She's a social worker in Orange County, California, who returned to work in a social services organization after a 25-year career break. That's the longest career break that I'm aware of. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took a five-year career break early in her career.And this is Tracy Shapiro, who took a 13-year career break. Tracy answered a call for essays by the Today Show from people who were trying to return to work but having a difficult time of it. Tracy wrote in that she was a mom of five who loved her time at home, but she had gone through a divorce and needed to return to work, plus she really wanted to bring work back into her life because she loved working. Tracy was doing what so many of us do when we feel like we've put in a good day in the job search. She was looking for a finance or accounting role, and she had just spent the last nine months very diligently researching companies online and applying for jobs with no results.I met Tracy in June of 2011, when the Today Show asked me if I could work with her to see if I could help her turn things around. The first thing I told Tracy was she had to get out of the house. I told her she had to go public with her job search and tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. I also told her, ""You are going to have a lot of conversations that don't go anywhere. Expect that, and don't be discouraged by it. There will be a handful that ultimately lead to a job opportunity.""I'll tell you what happened with Tracy in a little bit, but I want to share with you a discovery that I made when I was returning to work after my own career break of 11 years out of the full-time workforce. And that is, that people's view of you is frozen in time. What I mean by this is, when you start to get in touch with people and you get back in touch with those people from the past, the people with whom you worked or went to school, they are going to remember you as you were before your career break. And that's even if your sense of self has diminished over time, as happens with so many of us the farther removed we are from our professional identities. So for example, you might think of yourself as someone who looks like this. This is me, crazy after a day of driving around in my minivan. Or here I am in the kitchen. But those people from the past, they don't know about any of this. They only remember you as you were, and it's a great confidence boost to be back in touch with these people and hear their enthusiasm about your interest in returning to work.There's one more thing I remember vividly from my own career break. And that was that I hardly kept up with the business news. My background is in finance, and I hardly kept up with any news when I was home caring for my four young children. So I was afraid I'd go into an interview and start talking about a company that didn't exist anymore. So I had to resubscribe to the Wall Street Journal and read it for a good six months cover to cover before I felt like I had a handle on what was going on in the business world again.I believe relaunchers are a gem of the workforce, and here's why. Think about our life stage: for those of us who took career breaks for childcare reasons, we have fewer or no maternity leaves. We did that already. We have fewer spousal or partner job relocations. We're in a more settled time of life. We have great work experience. We have a more mature perspective. We're not trying to find ourselves at an employer's expense. Plus we have an energy, an enthusiasm about returning to work precisely because we've been away from it for a while.On the flip side, I speak with employers, and here are two concerns that employers have about hiring relaunchers.The first one is, employers are worried that relaunchers are technologically obsolete. Now, I can tell you, having been technologically obsolete myself at one point, that it's a temporary condition. I had done my financial analysis so long ago that I used Lotus 1-2-3. I don't know if anyone can even remember back that far, but I had to relearn it on Excel. It actually wasn't that hard. A lot of the commands are the same. I found PowerPoint much more challenging, but now I use PowerPoint all the time. I tell relaunchers that employers expect them to come to the table with a working knowledge of basic office management software. And if they're not up to speed, then it's their responsibility to get there. And they do.The second area of concern that employers have about relaunchers is they're worried that relaunchers don't know what they want to do. I tell relaunchers that they need to do the hard work to figure out whether their interests and skills have changed or have not changed while they have been on career break. That's not the employer's job. It's the relauncher's responsibility to demonstrate to the employer where they can add the most value.Back in 2010 I started noticing something. I had been tracking return to work programs since 2008, and in 2010, I started noticing the use of a short-term paid work opportunity, whether it was called an internship or not, but an internship-like experience, as a way for professionals to return to work. I saw Goldman Sachs and Sara Lee start corporate reentry internship programs. I saw a returning engineer, a nontraditional reentry candidate, apply for an entry-level internship program in the military, and then get a permanent job afterward. I saw two universities integrate internships into mid-career executive education programs.So I wrote a report about what I was seeing, and it became this article for Harvard Business Review called ""The 40-Year-Old Intern."" I have to thank the editors there for that title, and also for this artwork where you can see the 40-year-old intern in the midst of all the college interns. And then, courtesy of Fox Business News, they called the concept ""The 50-Year-Old Intern.""(Laughter)So five of the biggest financial services companies have reentry internship programs for returning finance professionals. And at this point, hundreds of people have participated. These internships are paid, and the people who move on to permanent roles are commanding competitive salaries. And now, seven of the biggest engineering companies are piloting reentry internship programs for returning engineers as part of an initiative with the Society of Women Engineers. Now, why are companies embracing the reentry internship? Because the internship allows the employer to base their hiring decision on an actual work sample instead of a series of interviews, and the employer does not have to make that permanent hiring decision until the internship period is over. This testing out period removes the perceived risk that some managers attach to hiring relaunchers, and they are attracting excellent candidates who are turning into great hires.Think about how far we have come. Before this, most employers were not interested in engaging with relaunchers at all. But now, not only are programs being developed specifically with relaunchers in mind, but you can't even apply for these programs unless you have a gap on your résumé.This is the mark of real change, of true institutional shift, because if we can solve this problem for relaunchers, we can solve it for other career transitioners too. In fact, an employer just told me that their veterans return to work program is based on their reentry internship program. And there's no reason why there can't be a retiree internship program. Different pool, same concept.So let me tell you what happened with Tracy Shapiro. Remember that she had to tell everyone she knew about her interest in returning to work. Well, one critical conversation with another parent in her community led to a job offer for Tracy, and it was an accounting job in a finance department. But it was a temp job. The company told her there was a possibility it could turn into something more, but no guarantees. This was in the fall of 2011. Tracy loved this company, and she loved the people and the office was less than 10 minutes from her house. So even though she had a second job offer at another company for a permanent full-time role, she decided to take her chances with this internship and hope for the best. Well, she ended up blowing away all of their expectations, and the company not only made her a permanent offer at the beginning of 2012, but they made it even more interesting and challenging, because they knew what Tracy could handle.Fast forward to 2015, Tracy's been promoted. They've paid for her to get her MBA at night. She's even hired another relauncher to work for her. Tracy's temp job was a tryout, just like an internship, and it ended up being a win for both Tracy and her employer.Now, my goal is to bring the reentry internship concept to more and more employers. But in the meantime, if you are returning to work after a career break, don't hesitate to suggest an internship or an internship-like arrangement to an employer that does not have a formal reentry internship program. Be their first success story, and you can be the example for more relaunchers to come.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_fishman_cohen_how_to_get_back_to_work_after_a_career_break
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"So, this is a story about how we know what we know.It's a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. She's a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff.(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me ""Dr. Dead Things.""Latif Nasser: And I think she's particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra.Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole.(Audio) NR: Really, it's not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil.LN: And at some point, she noticed something.(Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was just lying on the surface.LN: And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that's the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before — prehistoric plant parts. But that night, back at camp ...(Audio) NR: ... I get out the hand lens, I'm looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn't quite look like this has tree rings. Maybe it's a preservation thing, but it looks really like ... bone.LN: Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny.(Audio) NR: It's not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag.LN: And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it was challenging.(Audio) NR: It's broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I'm trying to use sand and putty, and it's not looking good. So finally, we used a 3D surface scanner.LN: Ooh! NR: Yeah, right?(Laughter)LN: It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually.(Audio) NR: It's kind of magical when it all fits together.LN: How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? Was there a potential that you'd put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something?(Laughter)(Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this.LN: What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. But it couldn't have been either of those. It was just too big.(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It's a really big animal.LN: So what animal could it be? Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea.(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it.LN: It smelled kind of like singed flesh. It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it.Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called ""collagen fingerprinting."" It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match.So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx.(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It's kind of important.(Laughter)LN: And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. And he found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to ... a camel.(Laughter)(Audio) NR: And I'm thinking, what? That's amazing — if it's true.LN: So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton.(Audience reacts)Yeah. Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel.(Laughter)Now, when you hear the word ""camel,"" what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature — hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic?Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia's discovery, that camels are actually originally American.(Music: The Star-Spangled Banner)(Laughter)They started here. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more.(Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different?NR: Yeah, you're going to have different body sizes. You'll have some with really long necks, so they're actually functionally like giraffes.LN: Some had snouts, like crocodiles.(Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits.LN: What? Rabbit-sized camels?(Audio) NR: The earliest ones. So those ones you probably would not recognize.LN: Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel.(Audio) NR: I know, wouldn't that be great?(Laughter)LN: And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct.So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn't fully explain how Natalia found one so far north. Like, this is, temperature-wise, the polar opposite of the Sahara. Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. But still, like, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. You'd have blizzards. You'd have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. Like, how ... How? How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions?(Laughter)Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. And it's kind of brilliant. What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? What if that hump — which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat —(Laughter)was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce? And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? Like, for instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a, you know, fat backpack, means that you don't have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. So it helps heat dissipate easier. It's this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel's quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past.Now, I'm not the first person to tell this story. Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. But I love it for a totally different reason. For me, it's a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes.So I was trained as a historian. And I've learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes.(Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? That's a great story! It's totally adapted for that. Clearly, it always lived there.LN: But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. Like, in this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere.(Applause)This is Azuri. Azuri, hi, how are you doing? OK, here, I've got one of these for you here.(Laughter)So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall.(Laughter)That's not even a joke. Anyway —But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine.(Laughter)Right, Azuri?And, really, that we're all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/latif_nasser_you_have_no_idea_where_camels_really_come_from
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"It began with one question: If Africa was a bar, what would your country be drinking or doing? I kicked it off with a guess about South Africa, which wasn't exactly according to the rules because South Africa's not my country. But alluding to the country's continual attempts to build a postracial society after being ravaged for decades by apartheid, I tweeted, #ifafricawasabar South Africa would be drinking all kinds of alcohol and begging them to get along in its stomach.And then I waited. And then I had that funny feeling where I wondered if I crossed the line. So, I sent out a few other tweets about my own country and a few other African countries I'm familiar with. And then I waited again, but this time I read through almost every tweet I had ever tweeted to convince myself, no, to remind myself that I'm really funny and that if nobody gets it, that's fine.But luckily, I didn't have to do that for very long. Very soon, people were participating. In fact, by the end of that week in July, the hashtag #ifafricawasabar would have garnered around 60,000 tweets, lit up the continent and made its way to publications all over the world.People were using the hashtag to do many different things. To poke fun at their stereotypes: [#IfAfricaWasABar Nigeria would be outside explaining that he will pay the entrance fee, all he needs is the bouncer's account details.](Laughter)To criticize government spending: [#ifafricawasabar South Africa would be ordering bottles it can't pronounce running a tab it won't be able to pay]To make light of geopolitical tensions: [#IfAfricaWasABar South Sudan would be the new guy with serious anger management issues.]To remind us that even in Africa there are some countries we don't know exist: [#IfAfricaWasABar Lesotho would be that person who nobody really knows but is always in the pictures.]And also to make fun of the countries that don't think that they're in Africa: [#IfAfricaWasABar Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco be like ""What the hell are we doing here?!!""](Laughter)And to note the countries that had made a big turnaround: [#ifAfricawasabar Rwanda would be that girl that comes with no money and no transport but leaves drunk, happy and rich]But most importantly, people were using the hashtag to connect. People were connecting over their Africanness. So for one week in July, Twitter became a real African bar. And I was really thrilled, mainly because I realized that Pan-Africanism could work, that we had before us, between us, at our fingertips a platform that just needed a small spark to light in us a hunger for each other.My name is Siyanda Mohutsiwa, I'm 22 years old and I am Pan-Africanist by birth. Now, I say I'm Pan-Africanist by birth because my parents are from two different African countries. My father's from a country called Botswana in southern Africa. It's only slightly bigger than Germany. This year we celebrate our 50th year of stable democracy. And it has some very progressive social policies. My mother's country is the Kingdom of Swaziland. It's a very, very small country, also in southern Africa. It is Africa's last complete monarchy. So it's been ruled by a king and a royal family in line with their tradition, for a very long time.On paper, these countries seem very different. And when I was a kid, I could see the difference. It rained a lot in one country, it didn't rain quite as much in the other. But outside of that, I didn't really realize why it mattered that my parents were from two different places. But it would go on to have a very peculiar effect on me. You see, I was born in one country and raised in the other.When we moved to Botswana, I was a toddler who spoke fluent SiSwati and nothing else. So I was being introduced to my new home, my new cultural identity, as a complete outsider, incapable of comprehending anything that was being said to me by the family and country whose traditions I was meant to move forward. But very soon, I would shed SiSwati. And when I would go back to Swaziland, I would be constantly confronted by how very non-Swazi I was becoming.Add to that my entry into Africa's private school system, whose entire purpose is to beat the Africanness out of you, and I would have a very peculiar adolescence. But I think that my interest in ideas of identity was born here, in the strange intersection of belonging to two places at once but not really belonging to either one very well and belonging to this vast space in between and around simultaneously. I became obsessed with the idea of a shared African identity.Since then, I have continued to read about politics and geography and identity and what all those things mean. I've also held on to a deep curiosity about African philosophies. When I began to read, I gravitated towards the works of black intellectuals like Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, who tackled complex ideas like decolonization and black consciousness. And when I thought, at 14, that I had digested these grand ideas, I moved on to the speeches of iconic African statesmen like Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara and Congo's Patrice Lumumba. I read every piece of African fiction that I could get my hands on.So when Twitter came, I hopped on with the enthusiasm of a teenage girl whose friends are super, super bored of hearing about all this random stuff.The year was 2011 and all over southern Africa and the whole continent, affordable data packages for smartphones and Internet surfing became much easier to get. So my generation, we were sending messages to each other on this platform that just needed 140 characters and a little bit of creativity. On long commutes to work, in lectures that some of us should have been paying attention to, on our lunch breaks, we would communicate as much as we could about the everyday realities of being young and African.But of course, this luxury was not available to everybody. So this meant that if you were a teenage girl in Botswana and you wanted to have fun on the Internet, one, you had to tweet in English. Two, you had to follow more than just the three other people you knew online. You had to follow South Africans, Zimbabweans, Ghanaians, Nigerians. And suddenly, your whole world opened up. And my whole world did open up.I followed vibrant Africans who were travelling around the continent, taking pictures of themselves and posting them under the hashtag #myafrica. Because at that time, if you were to search Africa on Twitter or on Google or any kind of social media, you would think that the entire continent was just pictures of animals and white guys drinking cocktails in hotel resorts.(Laughter)But Africans were using this platform to take some kind of ownership of the tourism sectors. It was Africans taking selfies on the beaches of Nigeria. It was Africans in cocktail bars in Nairobi.And these were the same Africans that I began to meet in my own travels around the continent. We would discuss African literature, politics, economic policy. But almost invariably, every single time, we would end up discussing Twitter. And that's when I realized what this was. We were standing in the middle of something amazing, because for the first time ever young Africans could discuss the future of our continent in real time, without the restriction of borders, finances and watchful governments.Because the little known truth is many Africans know a lot less about other African countries than some Westerners might know about Africa as a whole. This is by accident, but sometimes, it's by design. For example, in apartheid South Africa, black South Africans were constantly being bombarded with this message that any country ruled by black people was destined for failure. And this was done to convince them that they were much better off under crushing white rule than they were living in a black and free nation. Add to that Africa's colonial, archaic education system, which has been unthinkingly carried over from the 1920s — and at the age of 15, I could name all the various causes of the wars that had happened in Europe in the past 200 years, but I couldn't name the president of my neighboring country. And to me, this doesn't make any sense because whether we like it or not, the fates of African people are deeply intertwined.When disaster hits, when turmoil hits, we share the consequences. When Burundians flee political turmoil, they go to us, to other African countries. Africa has six of the world's largest refugee centers. What was once a Burundian problem becomes an African problem. So to me, there are no Sudanese problems or South African problems or Kenyan problems, only African problems because eventually, we share the turmoil.So if we share the problems, why aren't we doing a better job of sharing the successes? How can we do that? Well, in the long term, we can shoot towards increasing inter-African trade, removing borders and putting pressure on leaders to fulfill regional agreements they've already signed. But I think that the biggest way for Africa to share its successes is to foster something I like to call social Pan-Africanism.Now, political Pan-Africanism already exists, so I'm not inventing anything totally new here. But political Pan-Africanism is usually the African unity of the political elite. And who does that benefit? Well, African leaders, almost exclusively. No, what I'm talking about is the Pan-Africanism of the ordinary African. Young Africans like me, we are bursting with creative energy, with innovative ideas. But with bad governance and shaky institutions, all of this potential could go to waste. On a continent where more than a handful of leaders have been in power longer than the majority of the populations has been alive, we are in desperate need of something new, something that works. And I think that thing is social Pan-Africanism.My dream is that young Africans stop allowing borders and circumstance to suffocate our innovation. My dream is that when a young African comes up with something brilliant, they don't say, ""Well, this wouldn't work in my country,"" and then give up. My dream is that young Africans begin to realize that the entire continent is our canvas, is our home. Using the Internet, we can begin to think collaboratively, we can begin to innovate together. In Africa, we say, ""If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together."" And I believe that social Pan-Africanism is how we can go far together.And this is already happening. Access to these online networks has given young Africans something we've always had to violently take: a voice. We now have a platform. Before now, if you wanted to hear from the youth in Africa, you waited for the 65-year-old minister of youth —(Laughter)to wake up in the morning, take his heartburn medication and then tell you the plans he has for your generation in 20 years time. Before now, if you wanted to be heard by your possibly tyrannical government, you were pushed to protest, suffer the consequences and have your fingers crossed that some Western paper somewhere might make someone care. But now we have opportunities to back each other up in ways we never could before.We support South African students who are marching against ridiculously high tertiary fees. We support Zimbabwean women who are marching to parliament. We support Angolan journalists who are being illegally detained. For the first time ever, African pain and African aspiration has the ability to be witnessed by those who can empathize with it the most: other Africans.I believe that with a social Pan-Africanist thinking and using the Internet as a tool, we can begin to rescue each other, and ultimately, to rescue ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/siyanda_mohutsiwa_how_young_africans_found_a_voice_on_twitter
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"Thousands of years from now, we'll look back at the first century of computing as a fascinating but very peculiar time — the only time in history where humans were reduced to live in 2D space, interacting with technology as if we were machines; a singular, 100-year period in the vastness of time where humans communicated, were entertained and managed their lives from behind a screen.Today, we spend most of our time tapping and looking at screens. What happened to interacting with each other? I don't know about you, but I feel limited inside this 2D world of monitors and pixels. And it is this very limitation and my desire to connect with people that inspires me as a creator. Put simply: I want to create a new reality, a reality where technology brings us infinitely closer to each other, a reality where people, not devices, are the center of everything.I dream of a reality where technology senses what we see, touch and feel; a reality where technology no longer gets in our way, but instead embraces who we are. I dream of technology on a human path. We have all experienced technology that enables people to act more like people, products that enable natural interactions, voice controls or biometrics.This is the next step in the evolution. This is Microsoft HoloLens, the first fully untethered holographic computer. Devices like this will bring 3D holographic content right into our world, enhancing the way we experience life beyond our ordinary range of perceptions. Now, I'm not thinking about a distant future. I'm talking about today. We are already seeing car companies like Volvo designing cars differently with HoloLens; universities like Case Western redefining the way medical students learn; and my personal favorite, NASA is using HoloLens to let scientists explore planets holographically.Now, this is important. By bringing holograms into our world, I'm not just talking about a new device or a better computer. I'm talking about freeing ourselves from the 2D confines of traditional computing.Put it this way: temporally adjusted, we're like cave people in computer terms. We've barely discovered charcoal and started drawing the first stick figures in our cave. Now, this is the perspective I apply to my work every single day. And now for the next few minutes, I invite all of you to apply the same perspective to the journey ahead of us.Now, as I put this HoloLens on, let me explain the setup a little bit. It's probably the most risky demo we have ever done on any stage with HoloLens, and I can't think of a better place to do it than here at TED. Momentarily, I am going to be seeing holograms right on this stage, just as clearly as I can see all of you. Now at the same time, we have also this special camera that just walked in onstage so that all of you can share in this experience with me up on all the monitors.So let's start our journey. And what better place to begin our journey, than in the computer cave of 2D. Let's explore the world all around us with this new lens, and understand the computer world from a brand new perspective.The computer universe is both marvelous and primitive. It's a universe based on causality. As developers, we dream the different causes and then we program the different effects. Double click on an icon, that's a cause. Open an application, that's an effect. Now when we compare this to our physical universe, it is overly constraining, because our universe is not digital. Our universe is analog. Our universe doesn't think in terms of zero or one, true or false, or black or white. We exist in a world governed by quantum physics, a universe of zero and one both at the same time, a reality based on infinite probabilities and shades of gray. You can see how these two worlds collide.So why are screens so pervasive in our analog life? We see screens from the moment we wake up, to the moment we fall asleep. Why?I think it's because computers give us superpowers. Within the digital universe, we have the power to displace space and the power to displace time. It doesn't matter if you're using technology for entertainment, productivity or communication. Think of it this way: let's all go home tonight and watch our favorite show on television. This is theater — time and space displaced. As soon as I'm done with this TED Talk, I'm going to immediately call my lovely family in Seattle. That's displacement of space. Now, these are such great superpowers that we put up with the two-dimensional limitations of our current digital world. But what if we didn't have to? What if we could have these same digital powers in our world? You can already see glimmers of this, but I believe our children's children will grow up in a world devoid of 2D technology. It's remarkable to dream of this world, a world where technology truly understands us — where we live, work and communicate — with tools that enhance the human experience, not machines that limit our humanity.So how do we get there? For me, the answer required looking at the problem from a different perspective. It required sensing the world from the perspective of a machine. If you're a machine trying to sense our world, how would you actually break the problem down? You'd probably try to classify things as a human, an environment or an object. But how would that machine then interact with reality? And I can think of three ways.First, as a machine, I would observe or I would input reality. Speech recognition and biometric authentication are great examples of a machine interacting with humans from an input perspective. Secondly, as a machine, I could place digital information, or output information, into reality. Holograms are examples of a machine interacting with an environment from an output perspective. Finally, as a machine, I could exchange energy with the world via haptics. Now, imagine being able to feel the temperature of a virtual object, or better yet, imagine pushing a hologram and having it push you back with equal force.With this perspective, we are able to collapse reality into a simple matrix. Now here's a secret: as an engineer, I get really excited anytime I can reduce something to the matrix. From self-driving cars to smartphones to this holographic computer on my head, machines are becoming capable of understanding our world. And they are starting to interact with us in significantly more personal ways.Now, imagine having granular control over everything in the world. Move the dial one way, and you get reality. Move the dial the other way, and you get virtual reality. Now, imagine dialing your entire environment between virtual and real worlds. I love it down here. Now, imagine if I could look at all of you and dial from real humans into elves. When technology truly understands our world, it will again transform the ways we interact, the ways we work and the ways we play.Less than half a century ago, two courageous men landed on the moon, using computers that were less powerful than the phones in your pockets. Six hundred million humans watched them on grainy, black-and-white televisions. And the world? The world was mesmerized.Now imagine how our children and their children will experience the continued exploration of space with technology that understands this world. We already live in a world where real-time universal translators exist. And I can squint, and I can already see holographic telepresence in our near future. In fact, since we've been lucky with our demo so far, let's try doing something else even more crazy. I invite you to experience, for the first time anywhere in the world, here on the TED stage, a real-life holographic teleportation, between me and my friend, Dr. Jeffrey Norris, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Finger crossed. Hi, Jeff.Jeff Norris: Hey, Alex.Alex Kipman: Phew! That worked. How are you doing today, Jeff?(Applause)JN: Doing great. I had an awesome week.AK: So, can you tell us a little bit, Jeff, about where you are?JN: Well, I'm actually in three places. I'm standing in a room across the street, while I'm standing on this stage with you, while I'm standing on Mars, a hundred million miles away.AK: Wow, a hundred million miles away. This is crazy! Can you tell us a little bit more about where all this data from Mars is coming from?JN: Absolutely. This is a precise holographic replica of Mars, built from data captured by the Curiosity Mars Rover, that I can explore as easily as a place on Earth. Humans are natural explorers. We can instantly understand an environment, just by being present in it. We've built tools like our Mars Rover to extend our vision and lengthen our reach. But for decades, we've explored from a seat behind screens and keyboards. Now, we're leaping over all of that, over the giant antennas and the relay satellites and the vastness between worlds to take our first steps on this landscape as if we were truly there. Today, a group of scientists on our mission are seeing Mars as never before — an alien world made a little more familiar, because they're finally exploring it as humans should.But our dreams don't have to end with making it just like being there. When we dial this real world to the virtual, we can do magical things. We can see in invisible wavelengths or teleport to the top of a mountain. Perhaps someday, we'll feel the minerals in a rock just by touching it. We're taking the first steps. But we want the whole world to join us in taking the next, because this is not a journey for a few, but for all of us.AK: Thank you Jeff, this was amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on the TED stage today.(Applause)JN: Thank you Alex, bye bye.AK: Bye, Jeff.(Applause)I dream about this future every single day. I take inspiration from our ancestors. We used to live in tribes where we interacted, communicated and worked together. We are all beginning to build technology that will enable us to return to the humanity that brought us where we are today — technology that will let us stop living inside this 2D world of monitors and pixels, and let us start remembering what it feels like to live in our 3D world. It's a phenomenal time to be human.Thank you.(Applause)Helen Walters: Thanks so much. I have some questions.AK: OK.HW: So there's been some talk in the press. And I'll just ask you straight, then we have a straight answer. There's been talk about the difference between the demos and the reality of the commercial product. Talk about this field of view issue. Is this type of experience what someone who buys the product will get?AK: It's a great question, Or, said better, this is a question we've been receiving in the media for possibly the last year. If you do your research, I haven't answered that question. I've purposely ignored it, because ultimately, it's the wrong question to ask. That's the equivalent of me showing holograms to someone for the first time, and you then saying, ""What's the size of your television?"" The field of view for the product is almost irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the density of lights, or radiance, that shows up. Better said, what the angular resolution is of the things that you see. So from that perspective, what you saw — you know, the camera is wearing a HoloLens. So even if I wanted to cheat, I can't.HW: But the camera has a different lens on it than our eye. Right?AK: The camera has a fish-eye lens on it. It's seeing a much wider view than the human eye is. So if you think about the points of light that show up radially from the vision of the camera, which is the thing that matters: how many points of light can I get in a given volume? That's the same as I get on this HoloLens as I will on that one. Now, this camera sees a much wider view of the world, right?HW: Jesus Christ!(Laughter)AK: He did show up! I told you he'd show up. Come this way.(Laughter)HW: Oh, shit.AK: And there's holographic Jeff Norris.HW: I knew something was happening, but I really wasn't sure what.AK: So in short: to be super crisp, the camera that you see on the screen has a wider field of view than the human eye. But the angular resolution of the holograms that you see, the points of light per unit of area, are actually the same.HW: So you spent — Jeff, I'll get to you in a minute — so you spent a lot of time mapping the stage —AK: That's right.HW: So help me out here: if I buy a HoloLens and have it at home, I don't need to map my apartment, right?AK: The HoloLens maps in real time at about five frames per second, with this technology that we call spatial mapping. So in your home, as soon as you put it on, holograms will start showing up, and you'll start placing them and they'll start learning your home. In a stage environment where we're trying to get something on my head to communicate with something over there with all of the wireless connectivity that usually brings all conferences down, we don't take the risk of trying to do this live. So what we do is pre-map the stage at five frames per second with the same spatial-mapping technology that you'll use with the product at home, and then we store it, so that when there's shenanigans of wireless in an environment like this, between the camera's HoloLens and the one on my head, we don't have things disappear. Because ultimately, the holograms are coming from this HoloLens, and that one is just viewing the HoloLens. So if I lose connectivity, you would stop seeing beautiful things on the screen.HW: And it was beautiful. Um ... Jeff?JN: Yes?HW: Hi.AK: I'll take a step back.HW: So Jeff, you were on Mars, you were here, you were in a room across the street. Tell me more about the fact that, with holograms, you have sight but you don't have touch, you don't have smell. Is this scientifically useful now? That's my question for a hologram.JN: Thanks for the question. Absolutely, I believe that these technologies are scientifically useful right now, and that's why we're using them in multiple parts of our work at NASA. So we're using it to improve the ways that we explore Mars. We're also using it for our astronauts on the space station. We're even using it now to design the next generation of our spacecraft.HW: Amazing. OK, Jeff, please go away. Thank you very much.(Laughter)Alex, really, that was amazing. Thank you so much.AK: Thank you.HW: Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_kipman_the_dawn_of_the_age_of_holograms
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"It has been 128 years since the last country in the world abolished slavery and 53 years since Martin Luther King pronounced his ""I Have A Dream"" speech. But we still live in a world where the color of our skin not only gives a first impression, but a lasting one that remains.I was born in a family full of colors. My father is the son of a maid from whom he inherited an intense dark chocolate tone. He was adopted by those who I know as my grandparents. The matriarch, my grandma, has a porcelain skin and cotton-like hair. My grandpa was somewhere between a vanilla and strawberry yogurt tone, like my uncle and my cousin. My mother is a cinnamon-skin daughter of a native Brazilian, with a pinch of hazel and honey, and a man [who is] a mix of coffee with milk, but with a lot of coffee. She has two sisters. One in a toasted-peanut skin and the other, also adopted, more on the beige side, like a pancake.(Laughter)Growing up in this family, color was never important for me. Outside home, however, things were different soon. Color had many other meanings.I remember my first drawing lessons in school as a bunch of contradictory feelings. It was exciting and creative but I never understood the unique flesh-colored pencil. I was made of flesh but I wasn't pink. My skin was brown, and people said I was black. I was seven years old with a mess of colors in my head.Later, when I took my cousin to school, I was usually taken for the nanny. By helping in the kitchen at a friend's party, people thought I was the maid. I was even treated like a prostitute just because I was walking alone on the beach with European friends. And many times, visiting my grandma or friends in upper class buildings, I was invited not to use the main elevator. Because in the end, with this color and this hair, I cannot belong to some places.In some way, I get to used to it and accept part of it. However, something inside of me keeps revolving and struggling.Years later I married a Spaniard. But not any Spaniard. I chose one with the skin color of a lobster when sunburnt.(Laughter)Since then, a new question started to chase me. What will be the color of your children? As you can understand, this is my last concern. But thinking about it, with my previous background, my story led me to make my personal exercise as a photographer. And that is how Humanae was born.Humanae is a pursuit to highlight our true colors, rather than the untrue white, red, black or yellow associated with race. It's a kind of game to question our codes. It's a work in progress from a personal story to a global history.I portray the subjects in a white background. Then I choose an 11-pixel square from the nose, paint the background, and look for the corresponding color in the industrial palette, Pantone.I started with my family and friends, then more and more people joined the adventure, thanks to public calls coming through the social media.I thought that the main space to show my work was the Internet because I want an open concept that invites everybody to push the share button in both the computer and their brain.The snowball started to roll. The project had a great welcome — invitations, exhibitions, physical formats, galleries and museums ... just happened. And among them, my favorite: when Humanae occupies public spaces and appears in the street, it fosters a popular debate and creates a feeling of community.I have portrayed more than 3,000 people in 13 different countries, 19 different cities around the world. Just to mention some of them — from someone included in the Forbes list, to refugees who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. In Paris, from the UNESCO Headquarters to a shelter. And students both in Switzerland and favelas in Rio de Janeiro.All kinds of beliefs, gender identities or physical impairments, a newborn or terminally ill. We all together build Humanae.Those portraits make us rethink how we see each other. When modern science is questioning the race concept, what does it mean for us to be black, white, yellow, red? Is it the eye, the nose, the mouth, the hair? Or does it have to do with our origin, nationality or bank account?This personal exercise turned out to be a discovery. Suddenly I realized that Humanae was useful for many people. It represents a sort of mirror for those who cannot find themselves reflected in any label.It was amazing that people started to share their thoughts about the work with me. I have hundreds of that, I will share with you, too.A mother of 11 years — A mother of an 11-year-old girl wrote me, ""Very good for me as a tool to work on her confidence, as this past weekend one of her girlfriends argued with her that she does not belong and should not be allowed to live in Norway. So your work has a very special place in my heart and it's very important for me.""A woman shared her portrait on Facebook and wrote, ""All my life, people from across the globe had difficulties to place me in a group, a stereotype, a box. Perhaps we should stop. Instead of framing, ask the individual, 'How would you label yourself?' Then I would say, 'Hi. I'm Massiel. I'm a Dominican-Dutch, I grew up in a mixed family and I'm a bisexual woman.' ""Besides these unexpected and touching reactions, Humanae finds a new life in a different variety of fields. Just to show you some examples, illustrators and art students using it as a reference for their sketches and their studies. It's a collection of faces.Researchers in the fields of anthropology, physics and neuroscience use Humanae with different scientific approaches related to human ethnicity, optophysiology, face recognition or Alzheimer's.One of the most important impacts of the project is that Humanae was chosen to be the cover of Foreign Affairs, one of the most relevant political publications. And talking about foreign affairs, I found the perfect ambassadors for my project ... teachers. They are the ones that use Humanae as a tool for educational purposes. Their passion encourages me to go back to drawing classes, but this time as a teacher myself.My students, both adults and kids, paint their self-portraits, trying to discover their own unique color.As a photographer, I realize that I can be a channel for others to communicate. As an individual, as Angélica, every time I take a picture, I feel that I am sitting in front of a therapist. All the frustration, fear and loneliness that I once felt ... becomes love.The last country — the last country in the world who abolished slavery is the country where I was born, Brazil. We still have to work hard to abolish discrimination. That remains a common practice worldwide, and that will not disappear by itself.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/angelica_dass_the_beauty_of_human_skin_in_every_color
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"OK, so, confession: I've always been weirdly obsessed with advertising. I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons, paying more attention to the commercials than to the shows, trying to figure out how they were trying to get inside my head. Ultimately, that led me to my dream job. I became a partner at a big New York ad agency.But then, all of that suddenly changed on February 23, 1997, when my little brother Matt was shot in the head in a shooting that happened on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Suddenly, my family was thrown into the middle of a nightmare, being told that my brother was going to die, actually being given the opportunity to say goodbye to him, then several emergency brain surgeries and now what's amounted, for Matt, to a lifetime spent courageously recovering from a traumatic brain injury. He is definitely my hero.But as much as (Applause) — yeah, deserves it —(Applause)But as much as this tragedy was a nightmare for my family, I often think about how much worse it could have been; in fact, how much worse it is for the 90 families every day who aren't as fortunate, who lose loved ones — brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, parents. They don't all make national headlines. In fact, most of them don't. They go largely unnoticed, in a nation that's kind of come to accept a disgraceful national epidemic as some kind of new normal.So I quit my job in advertising to try and do something about this disgraceful national epidemic, because I came to realize that the challenges to preventing gun violence are actually the same ones that made me love advertising, which is to try to figure out how to engage people. Only instead of doing it to sell products, doing it to save lives. And that comes down to finding common ground, where what I want overlaps with what you want. And you might be surprised to learn, when it comes to gun violence, just how much common ground there is.Let's look, for example, at people who love to hunt, a sport enjoyed by millions across the US. It's a proud tradition. Families. In some places, the first day of hunting season is actually a school holiday. What do hunters want? Well, they want to hunt. They love their guns. They believe deeply in the Second Amendment right to own those guns. But that doesn't mean there isn't common ground.In fact, there's a lot of it, starting with the basic idea of keeping guns out of dangerous hands. This isn't about taking certain guns away from all people. It's about keeping all guns away from certain people, and it's the people that, it turns out, we all agree shouldn't have guns: convicted violent criminals, domestic abusers, the dangerously mentally ill. We can all appreciate how Brady background checks have been incredibly effective in keeping guns out of those dangerous hands. In 20 years, Brady background checks at federally licensed firearm dealers have blocked 2.4 million gun sales to those people that we all agree shouldn't have guns.(Applause)And whether you love guns or hate guns, you probably also appreciate that there shouldn't be thousands of gun sales every day at guns shows or online without those Brady background checks, just like there shouldn't be two lines to get on an airplane — one with security and one with no security. And —(Applause)And the numbers show the overwhelming agreement among the American public: 90 percent of Americans support expanding Brady background checks to all gun sales — including 90 percent of Republicans, more than 80 percent of gun owners, more than 70 percent of NRA members. This is not a controversial idea. In fact, only six percent of the American public disagrees. That's about the percentage of the American public that believes the moon landing was a fake.(Laughter)And it's also about the percentage that believes the government is putting mind-controlling technology in our TV broadcast signals. That's the extent to which we agree about background checks.But what about the 300 million guns already out there in homes across America? Well first, it's important to realize that those guns are mostly in the hands and homes of decent, law-abiding people like you and me, who want what we all want — including keeping our families safe. In fact, that's why more and more people are choosing to own guns. Ten years ago, 42 percent of the American public believed — incorrectly — that a gun makes your home safer. Today, that number is 63 percent.Why? I kind of hate to say it, because it gets to the dark underbelly of advertising, which is if you tell a big enough lie enough times, eventually that lie becomes the truth. And that's exactly what's happened here. The corporate gun lobby has spent billions of dollars blocking the CDC from doing research into the public health epidemic of gun violence; blocking pediatricians from talking to parents about the dangers of guns in the home; blocking smart-gun technology and other technology that would prevent kids from firing parents' guns and would save lives. They're desperate to hide the truth, because they view the truth as a threat to their bottom line.And every day, people are dying as a result. And a lot of those people are children. Every day in the US, nine kids are just shot unintentionally. 900 children and teens take their own lives every year. And here's the thing: they're almost all with a parent's gun. Even two-thirds of school shootings happen with a gun taken from the home, including the terrible tragedy at Sandy Hook. I meet so many of these parents; it's the most heartbreaking part of my job. These are not bad people. They're just living with the unimaginable consequences of a very bad decision, made based on very bad information that was put into their minds by very bad people, who know good and well the misery that they're causing, but just don't care. And the result is a nightmare — not only for families like mine, but for, really, at the end of the day, all of us.But I'm not here to talk about the nightmare of gun violence. I'm here to talk about our dream, and it's a dream we all share, which is the dream of a better, safer, future. For my organization, for the Brady Campaign, that dream is reflected in the bold goal to cut the number of gun deaths in the US in half by 2025. And I hope to leave all of you here tonight with a strong sense of exactly why that dream is so absolutely within reach. Because folks, for every great movement around the world, there's a moment where you can look back and say, ""That's when things really started to change."" And I'm here to say that for the movement to end gun violence in America, that moment is here.(Applause)We are so clearly at a tipping point, because the American public has come together by the millions like never before, based on that common ground, to say, ""Enough."" Enough of the mass shootings in malls and movie theaters and churches and schools. Enough of the daily terror of gun violence in homes and streets that's claimed the lives of women and young black men in staggering proportions. Enough of easy access to guns by the people that we all agree shouldn't have them. And enough of a small group of craven politicians putting the interests of the corporate gun lobby ahead of the people they have been elected to represent. Enough.(Applause)And the really exciting thing is, it's not just the usual suspects like me that are saying it anymore. It's so much bigger than that. And if you want proof, let's start where most conversations in the US seem to start — with Kim Kardashian.(Laughter)And here's the thing: it's not really a joke. I mean, think about when issues change. It's when they go from being political and advocacy issues to being part of pop culture, voices coming from everywhere, celebrities using their platforms, musicians, athletes. The NBA has come forward. Conservative pundits that you never would have imagined have come forward. There's real cultural change — I even hear there's a TED Talk about it this year. That's the extent to which this cultural change is happening. And yes, Kim Kardashian has made an unsolicited passionate appeal to her 35 million Twitter followers for expanded background checks.Let's look at the political elections that are heating up. This used to be the classic third-rail issue for Democrats. Couldn't run from it fast enough. Now candidates are running on it. Some are being forced to reverse very bad positions they defended very comfortably, until very recently. For somebody like me, watching people wave around their negative NRA ratings — it's almost surreal to watch. We're still outfunded, yes, by the corporate gun lobby, and ultimately that needs to change. But you know what? We're smarter and we're scrappier, and we have the truth on our side. And we're on offense.You know, they say that the Internet democratizes information. Social media and some of the organizing tools that plug into it have democratized activism. It's allowed us to show what 90 percent support really looks like. Sometimes I think of it — you know, we're converging and attacking instantly by the millions, kind of like white blood cells. It's enabled us to start to really close — and this is the bottom line — close that disgraceful disconnect between what the American public wants and what our elected leaders are doing about it.Until recently, the narrative in Congress was that calls from the other side, from that six percent, outnumbered calls from our side 10 to one. We're flipping that narrative on its head. After that recent terrible tragedy in San Bernardino, we jammed Congressional switchboards. We put 15,000 calls into Congress in 24 hours. And you know what? We got a vote on a bill that nobody thought was going to see the light of day anytime soon. We're seeing real movement to repeal some of the most evil, ugly gun lobby legislation passed over the last dark decade. The stranglehold of the gun lobby is clearly being broken. We've seen President Obama's historic executive actions. They don't go all the way, but they are going to save lives, because they expand Brady background checks to thousands of gun sales that didn't have them previously. And we're marching across the country — we're not just waiting for Congress to act; that would almost be the definition of insanity. We're marching across the country, state by state, marriage-equality style.And you know what? We're winning. Congress is almost always the last to wake up and realize that it's on the wrong side of history. And when they do, it's always because the American public shakes them. And that's exactly what we're doing right now, as we're in this tipping point.You know, recently I was flying cross-country to give a speech to a large group like this, although far less intimidating, and the woman sitting next to me happened to be binge-watching one of my all-time favorite TV shows, ""Mad Men,"" a period TV show about advertising in the 1960s. And as I was trying to think about how to end my remarks, I'd glance up at her screen every now and then, and it seemed that every time I did, I'd see somebody smoking in an office or around children or while pregnant or drinking and driving or driving without seat belts or sexually harassing a coworker.And ultimately it dawned on me: what tremendous inspiration to those of us who have this dream to end gun violence. I mean, think about how much the world has changed in a relatively short period of time, how all those behaviors that were once considered commonplace or normal — some even glamorous or sexy — have become stigmatized in just a generation or two, once they became conversations about our common ground. That is the magnitude of the change we have the potential to create around gun violence.And that's my dream, that maybe someday, some period TV show will depict the terrible nightmare of gun violence, and a future generation of children might only be able to imagine how terrible it must have been.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gross_why_gun_violence_can_t_be_our_new_normal
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"So there are lands few and far between on Earth itself that are hospitable to humans by any measure, but survive we have. Our primitive ancestors, when they found their homes and livelihood endangered, they dared to make their way into unfamiliar territories in search of better opportunities. And as the descendants of these explorers, we have their nomadic blood coursing through our own veins. But at the same time, distracted by our bread and circuses and embroiled in the wars that we have waged on each other, it seems that we have forgotten this desire to explore. We, as a species, we're evolved uniquely for Earth, on Earth, and by Earth, and so content are we with our living conditions that we have grown complacent and just too busy to notice that its resources are finite, and that our Sun's life is also finite. While Mars and all the movies made in its name have reinvigorated the ethos for space travel, few of us seem to truly realize that our species' fragile constitution is woefully unprepared for long duration journeys into space.Let us take a trek to your local national forest for a quick reality check. So just a quick show of hands here: how many of you think you would be able to survive in this lush wilderness for a few days? Well, that's a lot of you. How about a few weeks? That's a decent amount. How about a few months? That's pretty good too. Now, let us imagine that this local national forest experiences an eternal winter. Same questions: how many of you think you would be able to survive for a few days? That's quite a lot. How about a few weeks? So for a fun twist, let us imagine that the only source of water available is trapped as frozen blocks miles below the surface. Soil nutrients are so minimal that no vegetation can be found, and of course hardly any atmosphere exists to speak of.Such examples are only a few of the many challenges we would face on a planet like Mars. So how do we steel ourselves for voyages whose destinations are so far removed from a tropical vacation? Will we continuously ship supplies from Planet Earth? Build space elevators, or impossible miles of transport belts that tether your planet of choice to our home planet? And how do we grow things like food that grew up on Earth like us?But I'm getting ahead of myself. In our species' journey to find a new home under a new sun, we are more likely than not going to be spending much time in the journey itself, in space, on a ship, a hermetic flying can, possibly for many generations.The longest continuous amount of time that any human has spent in space is in the vicinity of 12 to 14 months. From astronauts' experiences in space, we know that spending time in a microgravity environment means bone loss, muscle atrophy, cardiovascular problems, among many other complications that range for the physiological to the psychological. And what about macrogravity, or any other variation in gravitational pull of the planet that we find ourselves on?In short, our cosmic voyages will be fraught with dangers both known and unknown. So far we've been looking to this new piece of mechanical technology or that great next generation robot as part of a lineup to ensure our species safe passage in space. Wonderful as they are, I believe the time has come for us to complement these bulky electronic giants with what nature has already invented: the microbe, a single-celled organism that is itself a self-generating, self-replenishing, living machine. It requires fairly little to maintain, offers much flexibility in design and only asks to be carried in a single plastic tube.The field of study that has enabled us to utilize the capabilities of the microbe is known as synthetic biology. It comes from molecular biology, which has given us antibiotics, vaccines and better ways to observe the physiological nuances of the human body. Using the tools of synthetic biology, we can now edit the genes of nearly any organism, microscopic or not, with incredible speed and fidelity. Given the limitations of our man-made machines, synthetic biology will be a means for us to engineer not only our food, our fuel and our environment, but also ourselves to compensate for our physical inadequacies and to ensure our survival in space.To give you an example of how we can use synthetic biology for space exploration, let us return to the Mars environment. The Martian soil composition is similar to that of Hawaiian volcanic ash, with trace amounts of organic material. Let's say, hypothetically, what if martian soil could actually support plant growth without using Earth-derived nutrients? The first question we should probably ask is, how would we make our plants cold-tolerant? Because, on average, the temperature on Mars is a very uninviting negative 60 degrees centigrade. The next question we should ask is, how do we make our plants drought-tolerant? Considering that most of the water that forms as frost evaporates more quickly than I can say the word ""evaporate."" Well, it turns out we've already done things like this. By borrowing genes for anti-freeze protein from fish and genes for drought tolerance from other plants like rice and then stitching them into the plants that need them, we now have plants that can tolerate most droughts and freezes. They're known on Earth as GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, and we rely on them to feed all the mouths of human civilization. Nature does stuff like this already, without our help. We have simply found more precise ways to do it.So why would we want to change the genetic makeup of plants for space? Well, to not do so would mean needing to engineer endless acres of land on an entirely new planet by releasing trillions of gallons of atmospheric gasses and then constructing a giant glass dome to contain it all. It's an unrealistic engineering enterprise that quickly becomes a high-cost cargo transport mission. One of the best ways to ensure that we will have the food supplies and the air that we need is to bring with us organisms that have been engineered to adapt to new and harsh environments. In essence, using engineered organisms to help us terraform a planet both in the short and long term. These organisms can then also be engineered to make medicine or fuel.So we can use synthetic biology to bring highly engineered plants with us, but what else can we do? Well, I mentioned earlier that we, as a species, were evolved uniquely for planet Earth. That fact has not changed much in the last five minutes that you were sitting here and I was standing there. And so, if we were to dump any of us on Mars right this minute, even given ample food, water, air and a suit, we are likely to experience very unpleasant health problems from the amount of ionizing radiation that bombards the surface of planets like Mars that have little or nonexistent atmosphere. Unless we plan to stay holed up underground for the duration of our stay on every new planet, we must find better ways of protecting ourselves without needing to resort to wearing a suit of armor that weighs something equal to your own body weight, or needing to hide behind a wall of lead.So let us appeal to nature for inspiration. Among the plethora of life here on Earth, there's a subset of organisms known as extremophiles, or lovers of extreme living conditions, if you'll remember from high school biology. And among these organisms is a bacterium by the name of Deinococcus radiodurans. It is known to be able to withstand cold, dehydration, vacuum, acid, and, most notably, radiation. While its radiation tolerance mechanisms are known, we have yet to adapt the relevant genes to mammals. To do so is not particularly easy. There are many facets that go into its radiation tolerance, and it's not as simple as transferring one gene. But given a little bit of human ingenuity and a little bit of time, I think to do so is not very hard either. Even if we borrow just a fraction of its ability to tolerate radiation, it would be infinitely better than what we already have, which is just the melanin in our skin. Using the tools of synthetic biology, we can harness Deinococcus radiodurans' ability to thrive under otherwise very lethal doses of radiation. As difficult as it is to see, homo sapiens, that is humans, evolves every day, and still continues to evolve. Thousands of years of human evolution has not only given us humans like Tibetans, who can thrive in low-oxygen conditions, but also Argentinians, who can ingest and metabolize arsenic, the chemical element that can kill the average human being. Every day, the human body evolves by accidental mutations that equally accidentally allow certain humans to persevere in dismal situations.But, and this is a big but, such evolution requires two things that we may not always have, or be able to afford, and they are death and time. In our species' struggle to find our place in the universe, we may not always have the time necessary for the natural evolution of extra functions for survival on non-Earth planets. We're living in what E.O. Wilson has termed the age of gene circumvention, during which we remedy our genetic defects like cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy with temporary external supplements. But with every passing day, we approach the age of volitional evolution, a time during which we as a species will have the capacity to decide for ourselves our own genetic destiny. Augmenting the human body with new abilities is no longer a question of how, but of when.Using synthetic biology to change the genetic makeup of any living organisms, especially our own, is not without its moral and ethical quandaries. Will engineering ourselves make us less human? But then again, what is humanity but star stuff that happens to be conscious? Where should human genius direct itself? Surely it is a bit of a waste to sit back and marvel at it. How do we use our knowledge to protect ourselves from the external dangers and then protect ourselves from ourselves?I pose these questions not to engender the fear of science but to bring to light the many possibilities that science has afforded and continues to afford us. We must coalesce as humans to discuss and embrace the solutions not only with caution but also with courage.Mars is a destination, but it will not be our last. Our true final frontier is the line we must cross in deciding what we can and should make of our species' improbable intelligence.Space is cold, brutal and unforgiving. Our path to the stars will be rife with trials that will bring us to question not only who we are but where we will be going. The answers will lie in our choice to use or abandon the technology that we have gleaned from life itself, and it will define us for the remainder of our term in this universe.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_nip_how_humans_could_evolve_to_survive_in_space
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"Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new.To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities: exploration and exploitation. Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing.Consider Facit. I'm actually old enough to remember them. Facit was a fantastic company. They were born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world. Everybody used them. And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? They continued doing exactly the same. In six months, they went from maximum revenue ... and they were gone. Gone.To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap, small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators.(Laughter)Facit did too much exploitation. But exploration can go wild, too.A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. Let's call them OncoSearch. The company was brilliant. They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure, certain forms of blood cancer. Every day was about creating something new. They were extremely innovative, and the mantra was, ""When we only get it right,"" or even, ""We want it perfect."" The sad thing is, before they became perfect — even good enough — they became obsolete. OncoSearch did too much exploration.I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The founder of the idea is Jim March. And to me the power of the idea is its practicality.Exploration. Exploration is about coming up with what's new. It's about search, it's about discovery, it's about new products, it's about new innovations. It's about changing our frontiers. Our heroes are people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc. I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. We all know that exploration is risky. We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we know that the risks are high.Exploitation is the opposite. Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better. Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. It's about making good products faster and cheaper. Exploitation is not risky — in the short term. But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long term. And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. That's the risk of exploitation.So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit. Small children, they explore all day. All day it's about exploration. As we grow older, we explore less because we have more knowledge to exploit on. The same goes for companies. Companies become, by nature, less innovative as they become more competent.And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways. For example, ""How can I both effectively run and reinvent my company?"" Or, ""How can I make sure that our company changes before we become obsolete or are hit by a crisis?"" So, doing one well is difficult. Doing both well as the same time is art — pushing both exploration and exploitation.So one thing we've found is only about two percent of companies are able to effectively explore and exploit at the same time, in parallel. But when they do, the payoffs are huge. So we have lots of great examples. We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability — there are lots of examples, and the benefits are huge.Why is balancing so difficult? I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where we are. So I'll talk about two, but there are many.So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. We discover something, but we don't have the patience or the persistence to get at it and make it work. So instead of staying with it, we create something new. But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but being frustrated. OncoSearch was a good example. A famous example is, of course, Xerox. But we don't only see this in companies. We see this in the public sector as well. We all know that any kind of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years to work. But still, we change much more often. We really don't give them the chance.Another trap is the success trap. Facit fell into the success trap. They literally held the future in their hands, but they couldn't see it. They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they wouldn't change. We are like that, too. When we know something well, it's difficult to change. Bill Gates has said: ""Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail."" That's the challenge with success.So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. And they apply to our companies. The first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also buy an insurance in the future. Netflix — they could so easily have been content with earlier generations of distribution, but they always — and I think they will always — keep pushing for the next battle. I see other companies that say, ""I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes.""Second one: think in multiple time scales. I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one. Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company, innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. So when we think one year, innovation isn't really that important. Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company — suddenly, innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. But companies can't choose. They need to fund the journey and lead the long term.Third: invite talent. I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and exploitation by ourselves. I think it's a team sport. I think we need to allow challenging. I think the mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is to constructively challenge. I think that's also what good parenting is about.Last one: be skeptical of success. Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. Riding into Rome on the carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, ""Remember, you're only human.""So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. But it's difficult, and we need to be conscious.I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. First question is, looking at your own company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of just going on autopilot? And what can you do to challenge?Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on me? Is that something I should do more of? In my case, yes.So let me leave you with this. Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/knut_haanaes_two_reasons_companies_fail_and_how_to_avoid_them
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"Seven years ago, a student came to me and asked me to invest in his company. He said, ""I'm working with three friends, and we're going to try to disrupt an industry by selling stuff online."" And I said, ""OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right?"" ""No, we all took internships just in case it doesn't work out."" ""All right, but you're going to go in full time once you graduate."" ""Not exactly. We've all lined up backup jobs."" Six months go by, it's the day before the company launches, and there is still not a functioning website. ""You guys realize, the entire company is a website. That's literally all it is."" So I obviously declined to invest.And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker.(Laughter) They sell glasses online. They were recently recognized as the world's most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars. And now? My wife handles our investments. Why was I so wrong?To find out, I've been studying people that I come to call ""originals."" Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on. And they look nothing like I expected. I want to show you today three things I've learned about recognizing originals and becoming a little bit more like them.So the first reason that I passed on Warby Parker was they were really slow getting off the ground. Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator. Well, I have a confession for you. I'm the opposite. I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet. I just feel that a few months ahead of time.(Laughter)So this started early: when I was a kid, I took Nintendo games very seriously. I would wake up at 5am, start playing and not stop until I had mastered them. Eventually it got so out of hand that a local newspaper came and did a story on the dark side of Nintendo, starring me.(Laughter)(Applause)Since then, I have traded hair for teeth.(Laughter)But this served me well in college, because I finished my senior thesis four months before the deadline. And I was proud of that, until a few years ago. I had a student named Jihae, who came to me and said, ""I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating."" And I was like, ""That's cute, where are the four papers you owe me?""(Laughter)No, she was one of our most creative students, and as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test. So I challenged her to get some data. She goes into a bunch of companies. She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate. Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are. And sure enough, the precrastinators like me, who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative than people who procrastinate moderately. So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators. She was like, ""I don't know. They didn't fill out my survey.""(Laughter)No, here are our results. You actually do see that the people who wait until the last minute are so busy goofing off that they don't have any new ideas. And on the flip side, the people who race in are in such a frenzy of anxiety that they don't have original thoughts either. There's a sweet spot where originals seem to live. Why is this? Maybe original people just have bad work habits. Maybe procrastinating does not cause creativity.To find out, we designed some experiments. We asked people to generate new business ideas, and then we get independent readers to evaluate how creative and useful they are. And some of them are asked to do the task right away. Others we randomly assign to procrastinate by dangling Minesweeper in front of them for either five or 10 minutes. And sure enough, the moderate procrastinators are 16 percent more creative than the other two groups. Now, Minesweeper is awesome, but it's not the driver of the effect, because if you play the game first before you learn about the task, there's no creativity boost. It's only when you're told that you're going to be working on this problem, and then you start procrastinating, but the task is still active in the back of your mind, that you start to incubate. Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.So just as we were finishing these experiments, I was starting to write a book about originals, and I thought, ""This is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate, while writing a chapter on procrastination."" So I metaprocrastinated, and like any self-respecting precrastinator, I woke up early the next morning and I made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate.(Laughter)And then I worked diligently toward my goal of not making progress toward my goal. I started writing the procrastination chapter, and one day — I was halfway through — I literally put it away in mid-sentence for months. It was agony. But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas. As Aaron Sorkin put it, ""You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking."" And along the way I discovered that a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators. Take Leonardo da Vinci. He toiled on and off for 16 years on the Mona Lisa. He felt like a failure. He wrote as much in his journal. But some of the diversions he took in optics transformed the way that he modeled light and made him into a much better painter. What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? The night before the biggest speech of his life, the March on Washington, he was up past 3am, rewriting it. He's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go onstage, and he is still scribbling notes and crossing out lines. When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in, he leaves his prepared remarks to utter four words that changed the course of history: ""I have a dream."" That was not in the script. By delaying the task of finalizing the speech until the very last minute, he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas. And because the text wasn't set in stone, he had freedom to improvise.Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity. What you see with a lot of great originals is that they are quick to start but they're slow to finish. And this is what I missed with Warby Parker. When they were dragging their heels for six months, I looked at them and said, ""You know, a lot of other companies are starting to sell glasses online."" They missed the first-mover advantage. But what I didn't realize was they were spending all that time trying to figure out how to get people to be comfortable ordering glasses online. And it turns out the first-mover advantage is mostly a myth. Look at a classic study of over 50 product categories, comparing the first movers who created the market with the improvers who introduced something different and better. What you see is that the first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent, compared with only 8 percent for the improvers. Look at Facebook, waiting to build a social network until after Myspace and Friendster. Look at Google, waiting for years after Altavista and Yahoo. It's much easier to improve on somebody else's idea than it is to create something new from scratch. So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don't have to be first. You just have to be different and better.But that wasn't the only reason I passed on Warby Parker. They were also full of doubts. They had backup plans lined up, and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original, because I expected that originals would look something like this.(Laughter)Now, on the surface, a lot of original people look confident, but behind the scenes, they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do. They just manage it differently. Let me show you: this is a depiction of how the creative process works for most of us.(Laughter)Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt. There's self-doubt and idea doubt. Self-doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did. And so the key to being original is just a simple thing of avoiding the leap from step three to step four. Instead of saying, ""I'm crap,"" you say, ""The first few drafts are always crap, and I'm just not there yet."" So how do you get there? Well, there's a clue, it turns out, in the Internet browser that you use. We can predict your job performance and your commitment just by knowing what web browser you use. Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study —(Laughter)But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users. Yes.(Applause)They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way. Why? It's not a technical advantage. The four browser groups on average have similar typing speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge. It's about how you got the browser. Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari, those came preinstalled on your computer, and you accepted the default option that was handed to you. If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask, is there a different option out there, and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser. So people hear about this study and they're like, ""Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?""(Laughter)No, it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu. There's a name for it. It's called vuja de.(Laughter)Vuja de is when you look at something you've seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes. It's a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can't get the green light for more than half a century. In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen. But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense. She rewrites the first act, reinvents the villain as a tortured hero and Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever. So there's a simple message from this story. When you feel doubt, don't let it go.(Laughter)What about fear? Originals feel fear, too. They're afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they're even more afraid of failing to try. They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all. They know that in the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science, are the chances not taken.Elon Musk told me recently, he didn't expect Tesla to succeed. He was sure the first few SpaceX launches would fail to make it to orbit, let alone get back, but it was too important not to try. And for so many of us, when we have an important idea, we don't bother to try. But I have some good news for you. You are not going to get judged on your bad ideas. A lot of people think they will. If you look across industries and ask people about their biggest idea, their most important suggestion, 85 percent of them stayed silent instead of speaking up. They were afraid of embarrassing themselves, of looking stupid. But guess what? Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas, tons of them, in fact. Take the guy who invented this. Do you care that he came up with a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only kids but adults, too? No. You celebrate Thomas Edison for pioneering the light bulb.(Laughter)If you look across fields, the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most. Take classical composers, the best of the best. Why do some of them get more pages in encyclopedias than others and also have their compositions rerecorded more times? One of the best predictors is the sheer volume of compositions that they generate. The more output you churn out, the more variety you get and the better your chances of stumbling on something truly original. Even the three icons of classical music — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — had to generate hundreds and hundreds of compositions to come up with a much smaller number of masterpieces. Now, you may be wondering, how did this guy become great without doing a whole lot? I don't know how Wagner pulled that off. But for most of us, if we want to be more original, we have to generate more ideas.The Warby Parker founders, when they were trying to name their company, they needed something sophisticated, unique, with no negative associations to build a retail brand, and they tested over 2,000 possibilities before they finally put together Warby and Parker. So if you put all this together, what you see is that originals are not that different from the rest of us. They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate. They have bad ideas. And sometimes, it's not in spite of those qualities but because of them that they succeed.So when you see those things, don't make the same mistake I did. Don't write them off. And when that's you, don't count yourself out either. Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity, that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try, and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.Look, being original is not easy, but I have no doubt about this: it's the best way to improve the world around us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers
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"I'm here to talk to you today about a story that we have all been conditioned to believe is not possible. It's a story about a living, breathing start-up flourishing in an unlikely environment: the United States government. Now, this start-up is fundamentally beginning to disrupt the way government does business from the inside out. But before I get there, let's start with the problem.For me, the problem begins with a number: 137. 137 is the average number of days a veteran has to wait to have benefits processed by the VA. 137 days. Now, in order to file that application in the first place, she has to navigate over 1,000 different websites and over 900 different call-in numbers, all owned and operated by the United States government.Now, we live in times of incredible change. The private sector is constantly changing and improving itself all the time. For that matter, it's removing every single inconvenience in my life that I could possibly think of. I could be sitting on my couch in my apartment, and from my phone, I can order a warm, gluten-free meal that can arrive at my door in less than 10 minutes. But meanwhile, a working mother who depends on food stamps to support her family has to complete an arduous, complicated application which she might not even be able to do online. And the inability of her to do that same work from her couch means that she might be having to take days or hours off of work that she can't spare. And this growing dichotomy between the beneficiaries of the tech revolution and those it's left behind is one of the greatest challenges of our time —(Applause)Because government's failure to deliver digital services that work is disproportionately impacting the very people who need it most. It's impacting the students trying to go to college, the single mothers trying to get health care, the veterans coming home from battle. They can't get what they need when they need it. And for these Americans, government is more than just a presidential election every four years. Government is a lifeline that provides services they need and depend on and deserve. Which is, quite frankly, why government needs to get its shit together and catch up. Just saying.(Applause)Now, this wasn't always a problem I was passionate about. When I joined President Obama's campaign in 2008, we brought the tech industry's best practices into politics. We earned more money, we engaged more volunteers and we earned more votes than any political campaign in history. We were a cutting-edge start-up that changed the game of politics forever. So when the President asked a small group of us to bring that very same disruption directly into government, I knew it wasn't going to be easy work, but I was eager and showed up ready to get to work.Now, on my first day in DC, my first day in government, I walked into the office and they handed me a laptop. And the laptop was running Windows 98.(Laughter)I mean, three entire presidential elections had come and gone since the government had updated the operating system on that computer. Three elections! Which is when we realized this problem was a whole lot bigger than we ever could have imagined. Let me paint the picture for you.The federal government is the largest institution in the world. It spends over 86 billion dollars a year — 86 billion — on federal IT projects. For context: that is more than the entire venture capital industry spends annually — on everything. Now, the problem here is that we the taxpayers are not getting what we pay for, because 94 percent of federal IT projects are over budget or behind schedule. 94 percent! For those of you keeping score, yes, the number 94 is very close to 100.(Laughter)There's another problem: 40 percent of those never end up seeing the light of day. They are completely scrapped or abandoned. Now, this is a very existentially painful moment for any organization, because it means as government continues to operate as it's programmed to do, failure is nearly inevitable. And when the status quo is the riskiest option, that means there is simply no other choice than radical disruption.So, what do we do about it? How do we fix this? Well, the irony of all of this is that we actually don't have to look any further than our backyard, because right here in America are the very ideas, the very people, who have swept our world into a radically different place than it was two decades ago. So what would it look like if it was actually as easy to get student loans or veterans' benefits as it is to order cat food to my house? What would it look like if there was an easy pathway for the very entrepreneurs and innovators who have disrupted our tech sector to come and disrupt their government?Well, my friends, here's where we get to talk about some of the exciting new formulas we've discovered for creating change in government. Enter the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is a new network of start-ups, a team of teams, organizing themselves across government to create radical change. The mission of the United States Digital Service is to help government deliver world-class digital services for students, immigrants, children, the elderly — everybody — at dramatically lower costs. We are essentially trying to build a more awesome government, for the people, by the people, today. We don't care — (Applause) Thank you.(Applause)Who doesn't want a more awesome government, right?We don't care about politics. We care about making government work better, because it's the only one we've got.(Applause)Now, you can think of our team — well, it's pretty funny — you can think of our team a little bit like the Peace Corps meets DARPA meets SEAL Team 6. We're like the Peace Corps for nerds, but instead of traveling to crazy, interesting, far-off places, you spend a lot of time indoors, behind computers, helping restore the fabric of our democracy.(Laughter)Now, this team — our playbook for the United States Digital Service is pretty simple. The first play is we recruit the very best talent our country has to offer, and recruit them for short tours of duty inside government. These are the very people who have helped build the products and companies that have made our tech sector amongst the most innovative in the world. Second, we pair these incredible people from the tech core with the dedicated civil servants already inside government on the ground creating change. Third, we strategically deploy them in a targeted formation at the most mission-critical, life-changing, important services that government offers. And finally, we give them massive air cover, from the leadership inside the agencies all the way up to the President himself, to transform these services for the better.Now, this team is beginning to disrupt how government does business from the inside out. If you study classic patterns of disruption, one very common pattern is rather simple. It's to take something that has become routine and standard in one industry and apply it to another where it's a radical departure from the status quo. Think about what Airbnb took that was normal from hospitality and revolutionized my apartment. The United States Digital Service is doing exactly that. We are taking what Silicon Valley and the private sector has learned through a ton of hard work about how to build planetary-scale digital services that delight users at lower cost, and we're applying that to government, where it is a radical departure from the status quo.Now, the good news is: it's starting to work. We know this because we can already see the results from some of our early projects, like the rescue effort of Healthcare.gov, when that went off the rails. Fixing Healthcare.gov was the first place that we ran this play, and today we are taking that same play and scaling it across a large number of government's most important citizen-facing services. Now, if I can take a moment and brag about the team for a second — it is the highest concentration of badasses I could have ever dreamed of. We have top talent from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the likes, all on staff today, all choosing to join their government. And what's incredible is, everybody is as eager and kind as they are intelligent. And I might add, by the way, over half of us are women.(Applause)The best way to understand this strategy is actually to walk through a couple of examples of how it's working out in the wild. I'm going to give you two examples quickly.The first one is about immigration. This, my friends, is your typical immigration application. Yes, you guessed it — it's almost entirely paper-based. In the best case, the application takes about six to eight months to process. It is physically shipped thousands of miles — thousands of miles! — between no less than six processing centers. Now, little story: about a decade ago, the government thought that if it brought this system online, it could save taxpayer dollars and provide a better service, which was a great idea. So, the typical government process began. Six years and 1.2 billion dollars later, no working product was delivered — 1.2 billion with a ""B."" Now at this point, the agency responsible, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, could have kept pouring money into the failing program. Sadly, that's what often happens. That's the status quo today. But they didn't. The dedicated civil servants inside the agency decided to stand up and call for change. We deployed a small team of just six people, and what many people don't know is that's the same size as the rescue effort of Healthcare.gov — just six people. And that team jumped in, side-by-side, to support the agency in transitioning this project into more modern business practices, more modern development practices. Now, in non-tech speak, what that basically means is taking big, multi-year projects and breaking them up into bite-sized chunks, so that way we can reduce the risk and actually start to see results every couple of weeks, instead of waiting in a black box for years.So within less than three months of our team being on the ground, we were already able to push our first products to production. The first one, this is the form I-90. This is used to file for your replacement green card. Now, for immigrant visa holders, a replacement green card is a big deal. Your green card is your proof of identification, it's your work authorization, it's the proof that you can be here in this country. So waiting six months while the government processes the replacement is not cool. I'm excited to tell you that today, you can now, for the first time, file for a replacement green card entirely online without anyone touching a piece of paper. It is faster, it is cheaper, and it's a better user experience for the applicant and the government employees alike.(Applause)Another one, quickly. Last fall, we just released a brand-new practice civics test. So as part of becoming a US citizen, you have to pass a civics test. For anyone who has taken this test, it can be quite the stressful process. So our team released a very easy, simple-to-use tool in plain language to help people prepare, to help ease their nerves, to help them feel more confident in taking the next step in pursuing their American dream. Because all of this work, all of this work on immigration, is about taking complicated processes and making them more human.The other day, one of the dedicated civil servants on the ground said something incredibly profound. She said that she's never been this hopeful or optimistic about a project in her entire time in government. And she's been doing this for 30 years. That is exactly the kind of hope and culture change we are trying to create.For my second example, I want to bring it back to veterans for a second, and what we are doing to build them a VA that is worthy of their service and their sacrifice. I'm proud to say that just a few months ago, we released a brand-new beta of a new website, Vets.gov. Vets.gov is a simple, easy-to-use website that brings all of the online services a veteran needs into one place. One website, not thousands. The site is a work in progress, but it's significant progress, because it's designed with the users who matter most: the veterans themselves. This might sound incredibly obvious, because it should be, but sadly, this isn't normal for government. Far too often, product decisions are made by committees of stakeholders who do their best to represent the interests of the user, but they're not necessarily the users themselves. So our team at the VA went out, we looked at the data, we talked to veterans themselves and we started simple and small, with the two most important services that matter most to them: education benefits and disability benefits. I'm proud to say that they are live on the site today, and as the team continues to streamline more services, they will be ported over here, and the old sites, shut down.(Applause)To me, this is what change looks like in 2016.When you walk out of the Oval Office, the first time I was ever there, I noticed a quote the President had embroidered on the rug. It's the classic JFK quote. It says, ""No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."" It's true. We have the tools to solve these problems. We have the tools to come together as a society, as a country, and to fix this together. Yes, it's hard. It's particularly hard when we have to fight, when we have to refuse to succumb to the belief that things won't change. But in my experience, it's often the hardest things that are the most worth doing, because if we don't do them, who will? This is on us, all of us, together, because government is not an abstract institution or a concept. Our government is us.(Applause)Today, it is no longer a question of if change is possible. The question is not, ""Can we?"" The question is, ""Will we?""Will you?Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/haley_van_dyck_how_a_start_up_in_the_white_house_is_changing_business_as_usual
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"I want you to reimagine how life is organized on earth. Think of the planet like a human body that we inhabit. The skeleton is the transportation system of roads and railways, bridges and tunnels, air and seaports that enable our mobility across the continents. The vascular system that powers the body are the oil and gas pipelines and electricity grids. that distribute energy. And the nervous system of communications is the Internet cables, satellites, cellular networks and data centers that allow us to share information.This ever-expanding infrastructural matrix already consists of 64 million kilometers of roads, four million kilometers of railways, two million kilometers of pipelines and one million kilometers of Internet cables. What about international borders? We have less than 500,000 kilometers of borders.Let's build a better map of the world. And we can start by overcoming some ancient mythology. There's a saying with which all students of history are familiar: ""Geography is destiny."" Sounds so grave, doesn't it? It's such a fatalistic adage. It tells us that landlocked countries are condemned to be poor, that small countries cannot escape their larger neighbors, that vast distances are insurmountable. But every journey I take around the world, I see an even greater force sweeping the planet: connectivity.The global connectivity revolution, in all of its forms — transportation, energy and communications — has enabled such a quantum leap in the mobility of people, of goods, of resources, of knowledge, such that we can no longer even think of geography as distinct from it. In fact, I view the two forces as fusing together into what I call ""connectography.""Connectography represents a quantum leap in the mobility of people, resources and ideas, but it is an evolution, an evolution of the world from political geography, which is how we legally divide the world, to functional geography, which is how we actually use the world, from nations and borders, to infrastructure and supply chains.Our global system is evolving from the vertically integrated empires of the 19th century, through the horizontally interdependent nations of the 20th century, into a global network civilization in the 21st century. Connectivity, not sovereignty, has become the organizing principle of the human species.(Applause)We are becoming this global network civilization because we are literally building it. All of the world's defense budgets and military spending taken together total just under two trillion dollars per year. Meanwhile, our global infrastructure spending is projected to rise to nine trillion dollars per year within the coming decade. And, well, it should. We have been living off an infrastructure stock meant for a world population of three billion, as our population has crossed seven billion to eight billion and eventually nine billion and more. As a rule of thumb, we should spend about one trillion dollars on the basic infrastructure needs of every billion people in the world.Not surprisingly, Asia is in the lead. In 2015, China announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which together with a network of other organizations aims to construct a network of iron and silk roads, stretching from Shanghai to Lisbon.And as all of this topographical engineering unfolds, we will likely spend more on infrastructure in the next 40 years, we will build more infrastructure in the next 40 years, than we have in the past 4,000 years.Now let's stop and think about it for a minute. Spending so much more on building the foundations of global society rather than on the tools to destroy it can have profound consequences. Connectivity is how we optimize the distribution of people and resources around the world. It is how mankind comes to be more than just the sum of its parts. I believe that is what is happening.Connectivity has a twin megatrend in the 21st century: planetary urbanization. Cities are the infrastructures that most define us. By 2030, more than two thirds of the world's population will live in cities. And these are not mere little dots on the map, but they are vast archipelagos stretching hundreds of kilometers.Here we are in Vancouver, at the head of the Cascadia Corridor that stretches south across the US border to Seattle. The technology powerhouse of Silicon Valley begins north of San Francisco down to San Jose and across the bay to Oakland. The sprawl of Los Angeles now passes San Diego across the Mexican border to Tijuana. San Diego and Tijuana now share an airport terminal where you can exit into either country. Eventually, a high-speed rail network may connect the entire Pacific spine. America's northeastern megalopolis begins in Boston through New York and Philadelphia to Washington. It contains more than 50 million people and also has plans for a high-speed rail network.But Asia is where we really see the megacities coming together. This continuous strip of light from Tokyo through Nagoya to Osaka contains more than 80 million people and most of Japan's economy. It is the world's largest megacity. For now.But in China, megacity clusters are coming together with populations reaching 100 million people. The Bohai Rim around Beijing, The Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta, stretching from Hong Kong north to Guangzhou. And in the middle, the Chongqing-Chengdu megacity cluster, whose geographic footprint is almost the same size as the country of Austria.And any number of these megacity clusters has a GDP approaching two trillion dollars — that's almost the same as all of India today. So imagine if our global diplomatic institutions, such as the G20, were to base their membership on economic size rather than national representation. Some Chinese megacities may be in and have a seat at the table, while entire countries, like Argentina or Indonesia would be out.Moving to India, whose population will soon exceed that of China, it too has a number of megacity clusters, such as the Delhi Capital Region and Mumbai. In the Middle East, Greater Tehran is absorbing one third of Iran's population. Most of Egypt's 80 million people live in the corridor between Cairo and Alexandria. And in the gulf, a necklace of city-states is forming, from Bahrain and Qatar, through the United Arab Emirates to Muscat in Oman.And then there's Lagos, Africa's largest city and Nigeria's commercial hub. It has plans for a rail network that will make it the anchor of a vast Atlantic coastal corridor, stretching across Benin, Togo and Ghana, to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast.But these countries are suburbs of Lagos. In a megacity world, countries can be suburbs of cities. By 2030, we will have as many as 50 such megacity clusters in the world. So which map tells you more? Our traditional map of 200 discrete nations that hang on most of our walls, or this map of the 50 megacity clusters?And yet, even this is incomplete because you cannot understand any individual megacity without understanding its connections to the others. People move to cities to be connected, and connectivity is why these cities thrive. Any number of them, such as Sao Paulo or Istanbul or Moscow, has a GDP approaching or exceeding one third of one half of their entire national GDP.But equally importantly, you cannot calculate any of their individual value without understanding the role of the flows of people, of finance, of technology that enable them to thrive. Take the Gauteng province of South Africa, which contains Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria. It too represents just over a third of South Africa's GDP. But equally importantly, it is home to the offices of almost every single multinational corporation that invests directly into South Africa and indeed, into the entire African continent.Cities want to be part of global value chains. They want to be part of this global division of labor. That is how cities think. I've never met a mayor who said to me, ""I want my city to be cut off."" They know that their cities belong as much to the global network civilization as to their home countries.Now, for many people, urbanization causes great dismay. They think cities are wrecking the planet. But right now, there are more than 200 intercity learning networks thriving. That is as many as the number of intergovernmental organizations that we have. And all of these intercity networks are devoted to one purpose, mankind's number one priority in the 21st century: sustainable urbanization.Is it working? Let's take climate change. We know that summit after summit in New York and Paris is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what we can see is that transferring technology and knowledge and policies between cities is how we've actually begun to reduce the carbon intensity of our economies.Cities are learning from each other. How to install zero-emissions buildings, how to deploy electric car-sharing systems. In major Chinese cities, they're imposing quotas on the number of cars on the streets. In many Western cities, young people don't even want to drive anymore. Cities have been part of the problem, now they are part of the solution.Inequality is the other great challenge to achieving sustainable urbanization. When I travel through megacities from end to end — it takes hours and days — I experience the tragedy of extreme disparity within the same geography. And yet, our global stock of financial assets has never been larger, approaching 300 trillion dollars. That's almost four times the actual GDP of the world.We have taken on such enormous debts since the financial crisis, but have we invested them in inclusive growth? No, not yet. Only when we build sufficient, affordable public housing, when we invest in robust transportation networks to allow people to connect to each other both physically and digitally, that's when our divided cities and societies will come to feel whole again.(Applause)And that is why infrastructure has just been included in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, because it enables all the others. Our political and economic leaders are learning that connectivity is not charity, it's opportunity. And that's why our financial community needs to understand that connectivity is the most important asset class of the 21st century.Now, cities can make the world more sustainable, they can make the world more equitable, I also believe that connectivity between cities can make the world more peaceful. If we look at regions of the world with dense relations across borders, we see more trade, more investment and more stability. We all know the story of Europe after World War II, where industrial integration kicked off a process that gave rise to today's peaceful European Union. And you can see that Russia, by the way, is the least connected of major powers in the international system. And that goes a long way towards explaining the tensions today. Countries that have less stake in the system also have less to lose in disturbing it. In North America, the lines that matter most on the map are not the US-Canada border or the US-Mexico border, but the dense network of roads and railways and pipelines and electricity grids and even water canals that are forming an integrated North American union. North America does not need more walls, it needs more connections.(Applause)But the real promise of connectivity is in the postcolonial world. All of those regions where borders have historically been the most arbitrary and where generations of leaders have had hostile relations with each other. But now a new group of leaders has come into power and is burying the hatchet.Let's take Southeast Asia, where high-speed rail networks are planned to connect Bangkok to Singapore and trade corridors from Vietnam to Myanmar. Now this region of 600 million people coordinates its agricultural resources and its industrial output. It is evolving into what I call a Pax Asiana, a peace among Southeast Asian nations.A similar phenomenon is underway in East Africa, where a half dozen countries are investing in railways and multimodal corridors so that landlocked countries can get their goods to market. Now these countries coordinate their utilities and their investment policies. They, too, are evolving into a Pax Africana.One region we know could especially use this kind of thinking is the Middle East. As Arab states tragically collapse, what is left behind but the ancient cities, such as Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad? In fact, the nearly 400 million people of the Arab world are almost entirely urbanized. As societies, as cities, they are either water rich or water poor, energy rich or energy poor. And the only way to correct these mismatches is not through more wars and more borders, but through more connectivity of pipelines and water canals. Sadly, this is not yet the map of the Middle East. But it should be, a connected Pax Arabia, internally integrated and productively connected to its neighbors: Europe, Asia and Africa.Now, it may not seem like connectivity is what we want right now towards the world's most turbulent region. But we know from history that more connectivity is the only way to bring about stability in the long run. Because we know that in region after region, connectivity is the new reality. Cities and countries are learning to aggregate into more peaceful and prosperous wholes.But the real test is going to be Asia. Can connectivity overcome the patterns of rivalry among the great powers of the Far East? After all, this is where World War III is supposed to break out. Since the end of the Cold War, a quarter century ago, at least six major wars have been predicted for this region. But none have broken out.Take China and Taiwan. In the 1990s, this was everyone's leading World War III scenario. But since that time, the trade and investment volumes across the straits have become so intense that last November, leaders from both sides held a historic summit to discuss eventual peaceful reunification. And even the election of a nationalist party in Taiwan that's pro-independence earlier this year does not undermine this fundamental dynamic.China and Japan have an even longer history of rivalry and have been deploying their air forces and navies to show their strength in island disputes. But in recent years, Japan has been making its largest foreign investments in China. Japanese cars are selling in record numbers there. And guess where the largest number of foreigners residing in Japan today comes from? You guessed it: China.China and India have fought a major war and have three outstanding border disputes, but today India is the second largest shareholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. They're building a trade corridor stretching from Northeast India through Myanmar and Bangladesh to Southern China. Their trade volume has grown from 20 billion dollars a decade ago to 80 billion dollars today.Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have fought three wars and continue to dispute Kashmir, but they're also negotiating a most-favored-nation trade agreement and want to complete a pipeline stretching from Iran through Pakistan to India.And let's talk about Iran. Wasn't it just two years ago that war with Iran seemed inevitable? Then why is every single major power rushing to do business there today?Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot guarantee that World War III will not break out. But we can definitely see why it hasn't happened yet. Even though Asia is home to the world's fastest growing militaries, these same countries are also investing billions of dollars in each other's infrastructure and supply chains. They are more interested in each other's functional geography than in their political geography. And that is why their leaders think twice, step back from the brink, and decide to focus on economic ties over territorial tensions.So often it seems like the world is falling apart, but building more connectivity is how we put Humpty Dumpty back together again, much better than before. And by wrapping the world in such seamless physical and digital connectivity, we evolve towards a world in which people can rise above their geographic constraints. We are the cells and vessels pulsing through these global connectivity networks.Everyday, hundreds of millions of people go online and work with people they've never met. More than one billion people cross borders every year, and that's expected to rise to three billion in the coming decade.We don't just build connectivity, we embody it. We are the global network civilization, and this is our map. A map of the world in which geography is no longer destiny. Instead, the future has a new and more hopeful motto: connectivity is destiny.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/parag_khanna_how_megacities_are_changing_the_map_of_the_world
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"When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Proudly, I said: ""An artist."" ""No, you don't,"" he said, ""You can't make a living being an artist!""My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein.(Laughter)I have always loved math and science, later, coding. And so I decided to study computer programming in college. In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, ""That is what I want to do with my life."" The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me.Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. And because it's a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. I was fascinated by all of it. But then I got my first taste of lighting.Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. Here you can see I've added a light, I'm turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this.There's this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. It's where we go from this to this. It's the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it's an actual place that exists. This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist.As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience's eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set.Did you see WALL-E?(Laughter)There he is.As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly.(Laughter)While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience.So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. ""Finding Nemo"" is an excellent example of this. A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. But how do you make it look underwater?In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. So we coded up a light that mimics this physics — first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths.In this clip you can see two other important elements. The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. The second is the caustics. These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean's surface. Here we have the fog beams. These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don't see the water surface. The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater.You can see how we're using the science — the physics of water, light and movement — to tether that artistic freedom. But we are not beholden to it. We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood.We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. So here's a traditionally colored underwater scene. But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what's happening. In this scene, it's really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we're trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story.We use science to create something wonderful. We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. He finds beauty in the simplest things. But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect.(Laughter)His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. He doesn't have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions.We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. He was starting to look glassy-eyed.(Laughter)Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he's capable of falling in love. So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem.So we started with the lenses. Here's the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes — usually Eve. So we couldn't just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it's not working. We turn it down, it's still not working.And then we have our eureka moment. We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there's a character with emotion inside. Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we've come to love.(Video) WALL-E: Eva?Danielle Feinberg: There's a beauty in these unexpected moments — when you find the key to unlocking a robot's soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. The jellyfish in ""Finding Nemo"" was one of those moments for me.There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. This was one of those scenes. The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. As we went along, we were floundering. The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. That scientific tether was strangling the scene.But even through all the frustrations, I still believed it could be beautiful. So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. I came in one morning and checked the previous night's work. And I got excited. And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people.In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Just long enough for me to think, ""Oh no, this is doomed."" And then he started clapping. And then the production designer started clapping. And then the whole room was clapping. This is the moment that I live for in lighting. The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in.We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. It's this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real — and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danielle_feinberg_the_magic_ingredient_that_brings_pixar_movies_to_life
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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort.Now, I want to tell you a story about that. It involves data from a NASA mission, ordinary people and one of the most extraordinary stars in our galaxy.It began in 2009 with the launch of NASA's Kepler mission. Kepler's main scientific objective was to find planets outside of our solar system. It did this by staring at a single field in the sky, this one, with all the tiny boxes. And in this one field, it monitored the brightness of over 150,000 stars continuously for four years, taking a data point every 30 minutes. It was looking for what astronomers call a transit. This is when the planet's orbit is aligned in our line of sight, just so that the planet crosses in front of a star. And when this happens, it blocks out a tiny bit of starlight, which you can see as a dip in this curve.And so the team at NASA had developed very sophisticated computers to search for transits in all the Kepler data.At the same time of the first data release, astronomers at Yale were wondering an interesting thing: What if computers missed something?And so we launched the citizen science project called Planet Hunters to have people look at the same data. The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer. However, there was a lot of skepticism around this. My colleague, Debra Fischer, founder of the Planet Hunters project, said that people at the time were saying, ""You're crazy. There's no way that a computer will miss a signal."" And so it was on, the classic human versus machine gamble. And if we found one planet, we would be thrilled. When I joined the team four years ago, we had already found a couple. And today, with the help of over 300,000 science enthusiasts, we have found dozens, and we've also found one of the most mysterious stars in our galaxy.So to understand this, let me show you what a normal transit in Kepler data looks like. On this graph on the left-hand side you have the amount of light, and on the bottom is time. The white line is light just from the star, what astronomers call a light curve. Now, when a planet transits a star, it blocks out a little bit of this light, and the depth of this transit reflects the size of the object itself. And so, for example, let's take Jupiter. Planets don't get much bigger than Jupiter. Jupiter will make a one percent drop in a star's brightness. Earth, on the other hand, is 11 times smaller than Jupiter, and the signal is barely visible in the data.So back to our mystery. A few years ago, Planet Hunters were sifting through data looking for transits, and they spotted a mysterious signal coming from the star KIC 8462852. The observations in May of 2009 were the first they spotted, and they started talking about this in the discussion forums.They said and object like Jupiter would make a drop like this in the star's light, but they were also saying it was giant. You see, transits normally only last for a few hours, and this one lasted for almost a week.They were also saying that it looks asymmetric, meaning that instead of the clean, U-shaped dip that we saw with Jupiter, it had this strange slope that you can see on the left side. This seemed to indicate that whatever was getting in the way and blocking the starlight was not circular like a planet. There are few more dips that happened, but for a couple of years, it was pretty quiet.And then in March of 2011, we see this. The star's light drops by a whole 15 percent, and this is huge compared to a planet, which would only make a one percent drop. We described this feature as both smooth and clean. It also is asymmetric, having a gradual dimming that lasts almost a week, and then it snaps right back up to normal in just a matter of days.And again, after this, not much happens until February of 2013. Things start to get really crazy. There is a huge complex of dips in the light curve that appear, and they last for like a hundred days, all the way up into the Kepler mission's end. These dips have variable shapes. Some are very sharp, and some are broad, and they also have variable durations. Some last just for a day or two, and some for more than a week. And there's also up and down trends within some of these dips, almost like several independent events were superimposed on top of each other. And at this time, this star drops in its brightness over 20 percent. This means that whatever is blocking its light has an area of over 1,000 times the area of our planet Earth.This is truly remarkable. And so the citizen scientists, when they saw this, they notified the science team that they found something weird enough that it might be worth following up. And so when the science team looked at it, we're like, ""Yeah, there's probably just something wrong with the data."" But we looked really, really, really hard, and the data were good. And so what was happening had to be astrophysical, meaning that something in space was getting in the way and blocking starlight. And so at this point, we set out to learn everything we could about the star to see if we could find any clues to what was going on. And the citizen scientists who helped us in this discovery, they joined along for the ride watching science in action firsthand.First, somebody said, you know, what if this star was very young and it still had the cloud of material it was born from surrounding it. And then somebody else said, well, what if the star had already formed planets, and two of these planets had collided, similar to the Earth-Moon forming event. Well, both of these theories could explain part of the data, but the difficulties were that the star showed no signs of being young, and there was no glow from any of the material that was heated up by the star's light, and you would expect this if the star was young or if there was a collision and a lot of dust was produced. And so somebody else said, well, how about a huge swarm of comets that are passing by this star in a very elliptical orbit? Well, it ends up that this is actually consistent with our observations. But I agree, it does feel a little contrived. You see, it would take hundreds of comets to reproduce what we're observing. And these are only the comets that happen to pass between us and the star. And so in reality, we're talking thousands to tens of thousands of comets. But of all the bad ideas we had, this one was the best. And so we went ahead and published our findings.Now, let me tell you, this was one of the hardest papers I ever wrote. Scientists are meant to publish results, and this situation was far from that. And so we decided to give it a catchy title, and we called it: ""Where's The Flux?"" I will let you work out the acronym.(Laughter)So this isn't the end of the story. Around the same time I was writing this paper, I met with a colleague of mine, Jason Wright, and he was also writing a paper on Kepler data. And he was saying that with Kepler's extreme precision, it could actually detect alien megastructures around stars, but it didn't. And then I showed him this weird data that our citizen scientists had found, and he said to me, ""Aw crap, Tabby. Now I have to rewrite my paper.""So yes, the natural explanations were weak, and we were curious now. So we had to find a way to rule out aliens. So together, we convinced a colleague of ours who works on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that this would be an extraordinary target to pursue. We wrote a proposal to observe the star with the world's largest radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory.A couple months later, news of this proposal got leaked to the press and now there are thousands of articles, over 10,000 articles, on this star alone. And if you search Google Images, this is what you'll find.Now, you may be wondering, OK, Tabby, well, how do aliens actually explain this light curve? OK, well, imagine a civilization that's much more advanced than our own. In this hypothetical circumstance, this civilization would have exhausted the energy supply of their home planet, so where could they get more energy? Well, they have a host star just like we have a sun, and so if they were able to capture more energy from this star, then that would solve their energy needs. So they would go and build huge structures. These giant megastructures, like ginormous solar panels, are called Dyson spheres.This image above are lots of artists' impressions of Dyson spheres. It's really hard to provide perspective on the vastness of these things, but you can think of it this way. The Earth-Moon distance is a quarter of a million miles. The simplest element on one of these structures is 100 times that size. They're enormous. And now imagine one of these structures in motion around a star. You can see how it would produce anomalies in the data such as uneven, unnatural looking dips.But it remains that even alien megastructures cannot defy the laws of physics. You see, anything that uses a lot of energy is going to produce heat, and we don't observe this. But it could be something as simple as they're just reradiating it away in another direction, just not at Earth.Another idea that's one of my personal favorites is that we had just witnessed an interplanetary space battle and the catastrophic destruction of a planet. Now, I admit that this would produce a lot of dust that we don't observe. But if we're already invoking aliens in this explanation, then who is to say they didn't efficiently clean up all this mess for recycling purposes?(Laughter)You can see how this quickly captures your imagination.Well, there you have it. We're in a situation that could unfold to be a natural phenomenon we don't understand or an alien technology we don't understand. Personally, as a scientist, my money is on the natural explanation. But don't get me wrong, I do think it would be awesome to find aliens. Either way, there is something new and really interesting to discover.So what happens next? We need to continue to observe this star to learn more about what's happening. But professional astronomers, like me, we have limited resources for this kind of thing, and Kepler is on to a different mission.And I'm happy to say that once again, citizen scientists have come in and saved the day. You see, this time, amateur astronomers with their backyard telescopes stepped up immediately and started observing this star nightly at their own facilities, and I am so excited to see what they find.What's amazing to me is that this star would have never been found by computers because we just weren't looking for something like this. And what's more exciting is that there's more data to come. There are new missions that are coming up that are observing millions more stars all over the sky.And just think: What will it mean when we find another star like this? And what will it mean if we don't find another star like this?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tabetha_boyajian_the_most_mysterious_star_in_the_universe
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"[On April 3, 2016 we saw the largest data leak in history.] [The Panama Papers exposed rich and powerful people] [hiding vast amounts of money in offshore accounts.] [What does this mean?] [We called Robert Palmer of Global Witness to explain.]This week, there have been a whole slew and deluge of stories coming out from the leak of 11 million documents from a Panamanian-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca. The release of these papers from Panama lifts the veil on a tiny piece of the secretive offshore world. We get an insight into how clients and banks and lawyers go to companies like Mossack Fonseca and say, ""OK, we want an anonymous company, can you give us one?"" So you actually get to see the emails, you get to see the exchanges of messages, you get to see the mechanics of how this works, how this operates.Now, this has already started to have pretty immediate repercussions. The Prime Minister of Iceland has resigned. We've also had news that an ally of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad has also got offshore companies. There's been allegations of a $2 billion money trail that leads back to President Vladimir Putin of Russia via his close childhood friend, who happens to be a top cellist. And there will be a lot of rich individuals out there and others who will be nervous about the next set of stories and the next set of leaked documents.Now, this sounds like the plot of a spy thriller or a John Grisham novel. It seems very distant from you, me, ordinary people. Why should we care about this? But the truth is that if rich and powerful individuals are able to keep their money offshore and not pay the taxes that they should, it means that there is less money for vital public services like healthcare, education, roads. And that affects all of us.Now, for my organization Global Witness, this exposé has been phenomenal. We have the world's media and political leaders talking about how individuals can use offshore secrecy to hide and disguise their assets — something we have been talking about and exposing for a decade.Now, I think a lot of people find this entire world baffling and confusing, and hard to understand how this sort of offshore world works. I like to think of it a bit like a Russian doll. So you can have one company stacked inside another company, stacked inside another company, making it almost impossible to really understand who is behind these structures. It can be very difficult for law enforcement or tax authorities, journalists, civil society to really understand what's going on.I also think it's interesting that there's been less coverage of this issue in the United States. And that's perhaps because some prominent US people just haven't figured in this exposé, in this scandal. Now, that's not because there are no rich Americans who are stashing their assets offshore. It's just because of the way in which offshore works, Mossack Fonseca has fewer American clients. I think if we saw leaks from the Cayman Islands or even from Delaware or Wyoming or Nevada, you would see many more cases and examples linking back to Americans.In fact, in a number of US states you need less information, you need to provide less information to get a company than you do to get a library card. That sort of secrecy in America has allowed employees of school districts to rip off schoolchildren. It has allowed scammers to rip off vulnerable investors. This is the sort of behavior that affects all of us.Now, at Global Witness, we wanted to see what this actually looked like in practice. How does this actually work? So what we did is we sent in an undercover investigator to 13 Manhattan law firms. Our investigator posed as an African minister who wanted to move suspect funds into the United States to buy a house, a yacht, a jet. Now, what was truly shocking was that all but one of those lawyers provided our investigator with suggestions on how to move those suspect funds. These were all preliminary meetings, and none of the lawyers took us on as a client and of course no money moved hands, but it really shows the problem with the system.It's also important to not just think about this as individual cases. This is not just about an individual lawyer who's spoken to our undercover investigator and provided suggestions. It's not just about a particular senior politician who's been caught up in a scandal. This is about how a system works, that entrenches corruption, tax evasion, poverty and instability. And in order to tackle this, we need to change the game. We need to change the rules of the game to make this sort of behavior harder.This may seem like doom and gloom, like there's nothing we can do about it, like nothing has ever changed, like there will always be rich and powerful individuals. But as a natural optimist, I do see that we are starting to get some change.Over the last couple of years, we've seen a real push towards greater transparency when it comes to company ownership. This issue was put on the political agenda by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron at a big G8 Summit that was held in Northern Ireland in 2013. And since then, the European Union is going to be creating central registers at a national level of who really owns and controls companies across Europe.One of the things that is sad is that, actually, the US is lagging behind. There's bipartisan legislation that had been introduced in the House and the Senate, but it isn't making as much progress as we'd like to see. So we'd really want to see the Panama leaks, this huge peek into the offshore world, be used as a way of opening up in the US and around the world.For us at Global Witness, this is a moment for change. We need ordinary people to get angry at the way in which people can hide their identity behind secret companies. We need business leaders to stand up and say, ""Secrecy like this is not good for business."" We need political leaders to recognize the problem, and to commit to changing the law to open up this sort of secrecy.Together, we can end the secrecy that is currently allowing tax evasion, corruption, money laundering to flourish.","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_palmer_the_panama_papers_exposed_a_huge_global_problem_what_s_next
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"Chris Anderson: This is such a strange thing. Your software, Linux, is in millions of computers, it probably powers much of the Internet. And I think that there are, like, a billion and a half active Android devices out there. Your software is in every single one of them. It's kind of amazing. You must have some amazing software headquarters driving all this. That's what I thought — and I was shocked when I saw a picture of it. I mean, this is — this is the Linux world headquarters.(Laughter)(Applause)Linus Torvalds: It really doesn't look like much. And I have to say, the most interesting part in this picture, that people mostly react to, is the walking desk. It is the most interesting part in my office and I'm not actually using it anymore. And I think the two things are related.The way I work is ... I want to not have external stimulation. You can kind of see, on the walls are this light green. I'm told that at mental institutions they use that on the walls.(Laughter)It's like a calming color, it's not something that really stimulates you.What you can't see is the computer here, you only see the screen, but the main thing I worry about in my computer is — it doesn't have to be big and powerful, although I like that — it really has to be completely silent. I know people who work for Google and they have their own small data center at home, and I don't do that. My office is the most boring office you'll ever see. And I sit there alone in the quiet. If the cat comes up, it sits in my lap. And I want to hear the cat purring, not the sound of the fans in the computer.CA: So this is astonishing, because working this way, you're able to run this vast technology empire — it is an empire — so that's an amazing testament to the power of open source.Tell us how you got to understand open source and how it lead to the development of Linux.LT: I mean, I still work alone. Really — I work alone in my house, often in my bathrobe. When a photographer shows up, I dress up, so I have clothes on.(Laughter)And that's how I've always worked. I mean, this was how I started Linux, too. I did not start Linux as a collaborative project. I started it as one in a series of many projects I had done at the time for myself, partly because I needed the end result, but even more because I just enjoyed programming. So it was about the end of the journey, which, 25 years later, we still have not reached. But it was really about the fact that I was looking for a project on my own and there was no open source, really, on my radar at all.And what happened is ... the project grows and becomes something you want to show off to people. Really, this is more of a, ""Wow, look at what I did!"" And trust me — it was not that great back then. I made it publicly available, and it wasn't even open source at that point. At that point it was source that was open, but there was no intention behind using the kind of open-source methodology that we think of today to improve it. It was more like, ""Look, I've been working on this for half a year, I'd love to have comments.""And other people approached me. At the University of Helsinki, I had a friend who was one of the open source — it was called mainly ""free software"" back then — and he actually introduced me to the notion that, hey, you can use these open-source licenses that had been around. And I thought about it for a while. I was actually worried about the whole commercial interests coming in. I mean, that's one of the worries I think most people who start out have, is that they worry about somebody taking advantage of their work, right? And I decided, ""What the hell?"" And —CA: And then at some point, someone contributed some code that you thought, ""Wow, that really is interesting, I would not have thought of that. This could actually improve this.""LT: It didn't even start by people contributing code, it was more that people started contributing ideas. And just the fact that somebody else takes a look at your project — and I'm sure it's true of other things, too, but it's definitely true in code — is that somebody else takes an interest in your code, looks at it enough to actually give you feedback and give you ideas. That was a huge thing for me.I was 21 at the time, so I was young, but I had already programmed for half my life, basically. And every project before that had been completely personal and it was a revelation when people just started commenting, started giving feedback on your code. And even before they started giving code back, that was, I think, one of the big moments where I said, ""I love other people!"" Don't get me wrong — I'm actually not a people person.(Laughter)I don't really love other people —(Laughter)But I love computers, I love interacting with other people on email, because it kind of gives you that buffer. But I do love other people who comment and get involved in my project. And it made it so much more.CA: So was there a moment when you saw what was being built and it suddenly started taking off, and you thought, ""Wait a sec, this actually could be something huge, not just a personal project that I'm getting nice feedback on, but a kind of explosive development in the whole technology world""?LT: Not really. I mean, the big point for me, really, was not when it was becoming huge, it was when it was becoming little. The big point for me was not being alone and having 10, maybe 100 people being involved — that was a big point. Then everything else was very gradual. Going from 100 people to a million people is not a big deal — to me. Well, I mean, maybe it is if you're —(Laughter)If you want to sell your result then it's a huge deal — don't get me wrong. But if you're interested in the technology and you're interested in the project, the big part was getting the community. Then the community grew gradually. And there's actually not a single point where I went like, ""Wow, that just took off!"" because it — I mean — it took a long time, relatively.CA: So all the technologists that I talk to really credit you with massively changing their work. And it's not just Linux, it's this thing called Git, which is this management system for software development. Tell us briefly about that and your role in that.LT: So one of the issues we had, and this took a while to start to appear, is when you ... When you grow from having 10 people or 100 people working on a project to having 10,000 people, which — I mean, right now we're in the situation where just on the kernel, we have 1,000 people involved in every single release and that's every two months, roughly two or three months. Some of those people don't do a lot. There's a lot of people who make small, small changes.But to maintain this, the scale changes how you have to maintain it. And we went through a lot of pain. And there are whole projects that do only source-code maintenance. CVS is the one that used to be the most commonly used, and I hated CVS with a passion and refused to touch it and tried something else that was radical and interesting and everybody else hated.CA: (Laughs)LT: And we were in this bad spot, where we had thousands of people who wanted to participate, but in many ways, I was the kind of break point, where I could not scale to the point where I could work with thousands of people.So Git is my second big project, which was only created for me to maintain my first big project. And this is literally how I work. I don't code for — well, I do code for fun — but I want to code for something meaningful so every single project I've ever done has been something I needed and —CA: So really, both Linux and Git kind of arose almost as an unintended consequence of your desire not to have to work with too many people.LT: Absolutely. Yes.(Laughter)CA: That's amazing. LT: Yeah.(Applause)And yet, you're the man who's transformed technology not just once but twice, and we have to try and understand why it is. You've given us some clues, but ... Here's a picture of you as a kid, with a Rubik's Cube. You mentioned that you've been programming since you were like 10 or 11, half your life.Were you this sort of computer genius, you know, übernerd, were you the star at school who could do everything? What were you like as a kid?LT: Yeah, I think I was the prototypical nerd. I mean, I was ... I was not a people person back then. That's my younger brother. I was clearly more interested in the Rubik's Cube than my younger brother.(Laughter)My younger sister, who's not in the picture, when we had family meetings — and it's not a huge family, but I have, like, a couple of cousins — she would prep me beforehand. Like, before I stepped into the room she would say, ""OK. That's so-and-so ..."" Because I was not — I was a geek. I was into computers, I was into math, I was into physics. I was good at that. I don't think I was particularly exceptional. Apparently, my sister said that my biggest exceptional quality was that I would not let go.CA: OK, so let's go there, because that's interesting. You would not let go. So that's not about being a geek and being smart, that's about being ... stubborn?LT: That's about being stubborn. That's about, like, just starting something and not saying, ""OK, I'm done, let's do something else — Look: shiny!""And I notice that in many other parts in my life, too. I lived in Silicon Valley for seven years. And I worked for the same company, in Silicon Valley, for the whole time. That is unheard of. That's not how Silicon Valley works. The whole point of Silicon Valley is that people jump between jobs to kind of mix up the pot. And that's not the kind of person I am.CA: But during the actual development of Linux itself, that stubbornness sometimes brought you in conflict with other people. Talk about that a bit. Was that essential to sort of maintain the quality of what was being built? How would you describe what happened?LT: I don't know if it's essential. Going back to the ""I'm not a people person,"" — sometimes I'm also ... shall we say, ""myopic"" when it comes to other people's feelings, and that sometimes makes you say things that hurt other people. And I'm not proud of that.(Applause)But, at the same time, it's — I get people who tell me that I should be nice. And then when I try to explain to them that maybe you're nice, maybe you should be more aggressive, they see that as me being not nice.(Laughter)What I'm trying to say is we are different. I'm not a people person; it's not something I'm particularly proud of, but it's part of me. And one of the things I really like about open source is it really allows different people to work together. We don't have to like each other — and sometimes we really don't like each other. Really — I mean, there are very, very heated arguments. But you can, actually, you can find things that — you don't even agree to disagree, it's just that you're interested in really different things.And coming back to the point where I said earlier that I was afraid of commercial people taking advantage of your work, it turned out, and very quickly turned out, that those commercial people were lovely, lovely people. And they did all the things that I was not at all interested in doing, and they had completely different goals. And they used open source in ways that I just did not want to go. But because it was open source they could do it, and it actually works really beautifully together.And I actually think it works the same way. You need to have the people-people, the communicators, the warm and friendly people who like —(Laughter)really want to hug you and get you into the community. But that's not everybody. And that's not me. I care about the technology. There are people who care about the UI. I can't do UI to save my life. I mean, if I was stranded on an island and the only way to get off that island was the make a pretty UI, I'd die there.(Laughter)So there's different kinds of people, and I'm not making excuses, I'm trying to explain.CA: Now, when we talked last week, you talked about some other trait that you have, which I found really interesting. It's this idea called taste.And I've just got a couple of images here. I think this is an example of not particularly good taste in code, and this one is better taste, which one can immediately see. What is the difference between these two?LT: So this is — How many people here actually have coded?CA: Oh my goodness.LT: So I guarantee you, everybody who raised their hand, they have done what's called a singly-linked list. And it's taught — This, the first not very good taste approach, is basically how it's taught to be done when you start out coding. And you don't have to understand the code.The most interesting part to me is the last if statement. Because what happens in a singly-linked list — this is trying to remove an existing entry from a list — and there's a difference between if it's the first entry or whether it's an entry in the middle. Because if it's the first entry, you have to change the pointer to the first entry. If it's in the middle, you have to change the pointer of a previous entry. So they're two completely different cases.CA: And that's better.LT: And this is better. It does not have the if statement. And it doesn't really matter — I don't want you understand why it doesn't have the if statement, but I want you to understand that sometimes you can see a problem in a different way and rewrite it so that a special case goes away and becomes the normal case. And that's good code. But this is simple code. This is CS 101. This is not important — although, details are important.To me, the sign of people I really want to work with is that they have good taste, which is how ... I sent you this stupid example that is not relevant because it's too small. Good taste is much bigger than this. Good taste is about really seeing the big patterns and kind of instinctively knowing what's the right way to do things.CA: OK, so we're putting the pieces together here now. You have taste, in a way that's meaningful to software people. You're —(Laughter)LT: I think it was meaningful to some people here.CA: You're a very smart computer coder, and you're hellish stubborn. But there must be something else. I mean, you've changed the future. You must have the ability of these grand visions of the future. You're a visionary, right?LT: I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really — I mean — I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, ""I want to go there."" But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am.(Cheers)(Applause)CA: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them?LT: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him.(Laughter)The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified for being kind of pedestrian and is — I mean, his most famous quote is, ""Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."" And I'm in the Edison camp, even if people don't always like him. Because if you actually compare the two, Tesla has kind of this mind grab these days, but who actually changed the world? Edison may not have been a nice person, he did a lot of things — he was maybe not so intellectual, not so visionary. But I think I'm more of an Edison than a Tesla.CA: So our theme at TED this week is dreams — big, bold, audacious dreams. You're really the antidote to that.LT: I'm trying to dial it down a bit, yes.CA: That's good.(Laughter) We embrace you, we embrace you.Companies like Google and many others have made, arguably, like, billions of dollars out of your software. Does that piss you off?LT: No. No, it doesn't piss me off for several reasons. And one of them is, I'm doing fine. I'm really doing fine.But the other reason is — I mean, without doing the whole open source and really letting go thing, Linux would never have been what it is. And it's brought experiences I don't really enjoy, public talking, but at the same time, this is an experience. Trust me. So there's a lot of things going on that make me a very happy man and thinking I did the right choices.CA: Is the open source idea — this is, I think we'll end here — is the open source idea fully realized now in the world, or is there more that it could go, are there more things that it could do?LT: So, I'm of two minds there. I think one reason open source works so well in code is that at the end of the day, code tends to be somewhat black and white. There's often a fairly good way to decide, this is done correctly and this is not done well. Code either works or it doesn't, which means that there's less room for arguments. And we have arguments despite this, right? In many other areas — I mean, people have talked about open politics and things like that — and it's really hard sometimes to say that, yes, you can apply the same principles in some other areas just because the black and white turns into not just gray, but different colors.So, obviously open source in science is making a comeback. Science was there first. But then science ended up being pretty closed, with very expensive journals and some of that going on. And open source is making a comeback in science, with things like arXiv and open journals. Wikipedia changed the world, too. So there are other examples, I'm sure there are more to come.CA: But you're not a visionary, and so it's not up to you to name them.LT: No.(Laughter)It's up to you guys to make them, right?CA: Exactly.Linus Torvalds, thank you for Linux, thank you for the Internet, thank you for all those Android phones.Thank you for coming here to TED and revealing so much of yourself.LT: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linux
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"I want to introduce you to an amazing woman. Her name is Davinia. Davinia was born in Jamaica, emigrated to the US at the age of 18, and now lives just outside of Washington, DC. She's not a high-powered political staffer, nor a lobbyist. She'd probably tell you she's quite unremarkable, but she's having the most remarkable impact. What's incredible about Davinia is that she's willing to spend time every single week focused on people who are not her: people not her in her neighborhood, her state, nor even in her country — people she'd likely never meet.Davinia's impact started a few years ago when she reached out to all of her friends on Facebook, and asked them to donate their pennies so she could fund girls' education. She wasn't expecting a huge response, but 700,000 pennies later, she's now sent over 120 girls to school. When we spoke last week, she told me she's become a little infamous at the local bank every time she rocks up with a shopping cart full of pennies.Now — Davinia is not alone. Far from it. She's part of a growing movement. And there's a name for people like Davinia: global citizens. A global citizen is someone who self-identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, a tribe or a nation, but as a member of the human race, and someone who is prepared to act on that belief, to tackle our world's greatest challenges. Our work is focused on finding, supporting and activating global citizens. They exist in every country and among every demographic.I want to make the case to you today that the world's future depends on global citizens. I'm convinced that if we had more global citizens active in our world, then every single one of the major challenges we face — from poverty, climate change, gender inequality — these issues become solvable. They are ultimately global issues, and they can ultimately only be solved by global citizens demanding global solutions from their leaders.Now, some people's immediate reaction to this idea is that it's either a bit utopian or even threatening. So I'd like to share with you a little of my story today, how I ended up here, how it connects with Davinia and, hopefully, with you.Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I was one of those seriously irritating little kids that never, ever stopped asking, ""Why?"" You might have been one yourself. I used to ask my mum the most annoying questions. I'd ask her questions like, ""Mum, why I can't I dress up and play with puppets all day?"" ""Why do you want fries with that?"" ""What is a shrimp, and why do we have to keep throwing them on the barbie?""(Laughter)""And mum — this haircut. Why?""(Laughter)The worst haircut, I think. Still terrible.As a ""why"" kid, I thought I could change the world, and it was impossible to convince me otherwise. And when I was 12 and in my first year of high school, I started raising money for communities in the developing world. We were a really enthusiastic group of kids, and we raised more money than any other school in Australia. And so I was awarded the chance to go to the Philippines to learn more. It was 1998. We were taken into a slum in the outskirts of Manila. It was there I became friends with Sonny Boy, who lived on what was literally a pile of steaming garbage. ""Smoky Mountain"" was what they called it. But don't let the romance of that name fool you, because it was nothing more than a rancid landfill that kids like Sonny Boy spent hours rummaging through every single day to find something, anything of value.That night with Sonny Boy and his family changed my life forever, because when it came time to go to sleep, we simply laid down on this concrete slab the size of half my bedroom with myself, Sonny Boy, and the rest of his family, seven of us in this long line, with the smell of rubbish all around us and cockroaches crawling all around. And I didn't sleep a wink, but I lay awake thinking to myself, ""Why should anyone have to live like this when I have so much? Why should Sonny Boy's ability to live out his dreams be determined by where he's born, or what Warren Buffett called 'the ovarian lottery?'"" I just didn't get it, and I needed to understand why.Now, I only later came to understand that the poverty I'd seen in the Philippines was the result of decisions made or not made, man-made, by a succession of colonial powers and corrupt governments who had anything but the interests of Sonny Boy at heart. Sure, they didn't create Smoky Mountain, but they may as well have. And if we're to try to help kids like Sonny Boy, it wouldn't work just to try to send him a few dollars or to try to clean up the garbage dump on which he lived, because the core of the problem lay elsewhere. And as I worked on community development projects over the coming years trying to help build schools, train teachers, and tackle HIV and AIDS, I came to see that community development should be driven by communities themselves, and that although charity is necessary, it's not sufficient. We need to confront these challenges on a global scale and in a systemic way. And the best thing I could do is try to mobilize a large group of citizens back home to insist that our leaders engage in that systemic change.That's why, a few years later, I joined with a group of college friends in bringing the Make Poverty History campaign to Australia. We had this dream of staging this small concert around the time of the G20 with local Aussie artists, and it suddenly exploded one day when we got a phone call from Bono, the Edge and Pearl Jam, who all agreed to headline our concert. I got a little bit excited that day, as you can see.(Laughter)But to our amazement, the Australian government heard our collective voices, and they agreed to double investment into global health and development — an additional 6.2 billion dollars. It felt like —(Applause)It felt like this incredible validation. By rallying citizens together, we helped persuade our government to do the unthinkable, and act to fix a problem miles outside of our borders.But here's the thing: it didn't last. See, there was a change in government, and six years later, all that new money disappeared. What did we learn? We learned that one-off spikes are not enough. We needed a sustainable movement, not one that is susceptible to the fluctuating moods of a politician or the hint of an economic downturn. And it needed to happen everywhere; otherwise, every individual government would have this built-in excuse mechanism that they couldn't possibly carry the burden of global action alone.And so this is what we embarked upon. And as we embarked upon this challenge, we asked ourselves, how do we gain enough pressure and build a broad enough army to win these fights for the long term? We could only think of one way. We needed to somehow turn that short-term excitement of people involved with the Make Poverty History campaign into long-term passion. It had to be part of their identity. So in 2012, we cofounded an organization that had exactly that as its goal. And there was only one name for it: Global Citizen.But this is not about any one organization. This is about citizens taking action. And research data tells us that of the total population who even care about global issues, only 18 percent have done anything about it. It's not that people don't want to act. It's often that they don't know how to take action, or that they believe that their actions will have no effect. So we had to somehow recruit and activate millions of citizens in dozens of countries to put pressure on their leaders to behave altruistically.And as we did so, we discovered something really thrilling, that when you make global citizenship your mission, you suddenly find yourself with some extraordinary allies. See, extreme poverty isn't the only issue that's fundamentally global. So, too, is climate change, human rights, gender equality, even conflict. We found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with people who are passionate about targeting all these interrelated issues.But how did we actually go about recruiting and engaging those global citizens? Well, we used the universal language: music. We launched the Global Citizen Festival in the heart of New York City in Central Park, and we persuaded some of the world's biggest artists to participate. We made sure that these festivals coincided with the UN General Assembly meeting, so that leaders who need to hear our voices couldn't possible ignore them.But there was a twist: you couldn't buy a ticket. You had to earn it. You had to take action on behalf of a global cause, and only once you'd done that could you earn enough points to qualify. Activism is the currency. I had no interest in citizenship purely as some sort of feel-good thing. For me, citizenship means you have to act, and that's what we required. And amazingly, it worked. Last year, more than 155,000 citizens in the New York area alone earned enough points to qualify. Globally, we've now signed up citizens in over 150 countries around the world. And last year, we signed up more than 100,000 new members each and every week of the whole year.See, we don't need to create global citizens from nothing. We're already everywhere. We just need to be organized and motivated to start acting. And this is where I believe we can learn a lot from Davinia, who started taking action as a global citizen back in 2012. Here's what she did. It wasn't rocket science. She started writing letters, emailing politicians' offices. She volunteered her time in her local community. That's when she got active on social media and started to collect pennies — a lot of pennies.Now, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot to you. How will that achieve anything? Well, it achieved a lot because she wasn't alone. Her actions, alongside 142,000 other global citizens', led the US government to double their investment into Global Partnership for Education. And here's Dr. Raj Shah, the head of USAID, making that announcement. See, when thousands of global citizens find inspiration from each other, it's amazing to see their collective power. Global citizens like Davinia helped persuade the World Bank to boost their investment into water and sanitation. Here's the Bank's president Jim Kim announcing 15 billion dollars onstage at Global Citizen, and Prime Minister Modi of India affirmed his commitment to put a toilet in every household and school across India by 2019. Global citizens encouraged by the late-night host Stephen Colbert launched a Twitter invasion on Norway. Erna Solberg, the country's Prime Minister, got the message, committing to double investment into girls' education. Global citizens together with Rotarians called on the Canadian, UK, and Australian governments to boost their investment into polio eradication. They got together and committed 665 million dollars.But despite all of this momentum, we face some huge challenges. See, you might be thinking to yourself, how can we possibly persuade world leaders to sustain a focus on global issues? Indeed, the powerful American politician Tip O'Neill once said, ""All politics is local."" That's what always got politicians elected: to seek, gain and hold onto power through the pursuit of local or at very best national interests.I experienced this for the first time when I was 21 years old. I took a meeting with a then-Australian Foreign Minister who shall remain nameless —[Alexander Downer](Laughter)And behind closed doors, I shared with him my passion to end extreme poverty. I said, ""Minister — Australia has this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals. We can do this."" And he paused, looked down on me with cold, dismissive eyes, and he said, ""Hugh, no one gives a funk about foreign aid."" Except he didn't use the word ""funk."" He went on. He said we need to look after our own backyard first.This is, I believe, outdated, even dangerous thinking. Or as my late grandfather would say, complete BS. Parochialism offers this false dichotomy because it pits the poor in one country against the poor in another. It pretends we can isolate ourselves and our nations from one another. The whole world is our backyard, and we ignore it at our peril. See, look what happened when we ignored Rwanda, when we ignore Syria, when we ignore climate change. Political leaders ought to give a ""funk"" because the impact of climate change and extreme poverty comes right to our shore.Now, global citizens — they understand this. We live in a time that favors the global citizen, in an age where every single voice can be heard. See, do you remember when the Millennium Development Goals were signed back in the year 2000? The most we could do in those days was fire off a letter and wait for the next election. There was no social media. Today, billions of citizens have more tools, more access to information, more capacity to influence than ever before. Both the problems and the tools to solve them are right before us. The world has changed, and those of us who look beyond our borders are on the right side of history.So where are we? So we run this amazing festival, we've scored some big policy wins, and citizens are signing up all over the world. But have we achieved our mission? No. We have such a long way to go.But this is the opportunity that I see. The concept of global citizenship, self-evident in its logic but until now impractical in many ways, has coincided with this particular moment in which we are privileged to live. We, as global citizens, now have a unique opportunity to accelerate large-scale positive change around the world. So in the months and years ahead, global citizens will hold world leaders accountable to ensure that the new Global Goals for Sustainable Development are tracked and implemented. Global citizens will partner with the world's leading NGOs to end diseases like polio and malaria. Global citizens will sign up in every corner of this globe, increasing the frequency, quality and impact of their actions. These dreams are within reach. Imagine an army of millions growing into tens of millions, connected, informed, engaged and unwilling to take no for an answer.Over all these years, I've tried to reconnect with Sonny Boy. Sadly, I've been unable to. We met long before social media, and his address has now been relocated by the authorities, as often happens with slums. I'd love to sit down with him, wherever he is, and share with him how much the time I spent on Smoky Mountain inspired me. Thanks to him and so many others, I came to understand the importance of being part of a movement of people — the kids willing to look up from their screens and out to the world, the global citizens. Global citizens who stand together, who ask the question ""Why?,"" who reject the naysayers, and embrace the amazing possibilities of the world we share.I'm a global citizen.Are you?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_evans_what_does_it_mean_to_be_a_citizen_of_the_world
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"Strap yourselves in, we're going to Mars.Not just a few astronauts — thousands of people are going to colonize Mars. And I am telling you that they're going to do this soon. Some of you will end up working on projects on Mars, and I guarantee that some of your children will end up living there.That probably sounds preposterous, so I'm going to share with you how and when that will happen. But first I want to discuss the obvious question: Why the heck should we do this?12 years ago, I gave a TED talk on 10 ways the world could end suddenly. We are incredibly vulnerable to the whims of our own galaxy. A single, large asteroid could take us out forever. To survive we have to reach beyond the home planet. Think what a tragedy it would be if all that humans have accomplished were suddenly obliterated.And there's another reason we should go: exploration is in our DNA. Two million years ago humans evolved in Africa and then slowly but surely spread out across the entire planet by reaching into the wilderness that was beyond their horizons. This stuff is inside us. And they prospered doing that. Some of the greatest advances in civilization and technology came because we explored.Yes, we could do a lot of good with the money it will take to establish a thriving colony on Mars. And yes we should all be taking far better care of our own home planet. And yes, I worry we could screw up Mars the way we've screwed up Earth.But think for a moment, what we had when John F. Kennedy told us we would put a human on the moon. He excited an entire generation to dream. Think how inspired we will be to see a landing on Mars. Perhaps then we will look back at Earth and see that that is one people instead of many and perhaps then we will look back at Earth, as we struggle to survive on Mars, and realize how precious the home planet is.So let me tell you about the extraordinary adventure we're about to undertake. But first, a few fascinating facts about where we're going. This picture actually represents the true size of Mars compared to Earth. Mars is not our sister planet. It's far less than half the size of the Earth, and yet despite the fact that it's smaller, the surface area of Mars that you can stand on is equivalent to the surface area of the Earth that you can stand on, because the Earth is mostly covered by water.The atmosphere on Mars is really thin — 100 times thinner than on Earth — and it's not breathable, it's 96 percent carbon dioxide.It's really cold there. The average temperature is minus 81 degrees, although there is quite a range of temperature.A day on Mars is about as long as a day on Earth, plus about 39 minutes. Seasons and years on Mars are twice as long as they are on Earth.And for anybody who wants to strap on some wings and go flying one day, Mars has a lot less gravity than on Earth, and it's the kind of place where you can jump over your car instead of walk around it.Now, as you can see, Mars isn't exactly Earth-like, but it's by far the most livable other place in our entire solar system.Here's the problem. Mars is a long way away, a thousand times farther away from us than our own moon. The Moon is 250,000 miles away and it took Apollo astronauts three days to get there. Mars is 250 million miles away and it will take us eight months to get there — 240 days. And that's only if we launch on a very specific day, at a very specific time, once every two years, when Mars and the Earth are aligned just so, so the distance that the rocket would have to travel will be the shortest. 240 days is a long time to spend trapped with your colleagues in a tin can.And meanwhile, our track record of getting to Mars is lousy. We and the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians, have actually sent 44 rockets there, and the vast majority of them have either missed or crashed. Only about a third of the missions to Mars have been successful.And we don't at the moment have a rocket big enough to get there anyway. We once had that rocket, the Saturn V. A couple of Saturn Vs would have gotten us there. It was the most magnificent machine ever built by humans, and it was the rocket that took us to the Moon. But the last Saturn V was used in 1973 to launch the Skylab space station, and we decided to do something called the shuttle instead of continuing on to Mars after we landed on the Moon. The biggest rocket we have now is only half big enough to get us anything to Mars.So getting to Mars is not going to be easy and that brings up a really interesting question ... how soon will the first humans actually land here?Now, some pundits think if we got there by 2050, that'd be a pretty good achievement.These days, NASA seems to be saying that it can get humans to Mars by 2040. Maybe they can. I believe that they can get human beings into Mars orbit by 2035. But frankly, I don't think they're going to bother in 2035 to send a rocket to Mars, because we will already be there.We're going to land on Mars in 2027. And the reason is this man is determined to make that happen. His name is Elon Musk, he's the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Now, he actually told me that we would land on Mars by 2025, but Elon Musk is more optimistic than I am — and that's going a ways — so I'm giving him a couple of years of slack. Still ... you've got to ask yourself, can this guy really do this by 2025 or 2027?Well, let's put a decade with Elon Musk into a little perspective. Where was this 10 years ago? That's the Tesla electric automobile. In 2005, a lot of people in the automobile industry were saying, we would not have a decent electric car for 50 years.And where was that? That is SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, lifting six tons of supplies to the International Space Station. 10 years ago, SpaceX had not launched anything, or fired a rocket to anywhere. So I think it's a pretty good bet that the person who is revolutionizing the automobile industry in less than 10 years and the person who created an entire rocket company in less than 10 years will get us to Mars by 2027.Now, you need to know this: governments and robots no longer control this game. Private companies are leaping into space and they will be happy to take you to Mars.And that raises a really big question. Can we actually live there? Now, NASA may not be able to get us there until 2040, or we may get there a long time before NASA, but NASA has taken a huge responsibility in figuring out how we can live on Mars.Let's look at the problem this way. Here's what you need to live on Earth: food, water, shelter and clothing. And here's what you need to live on Mars: all of the above, plus oxygen.So let's look at the most important thing on this list first. Water is the basis of all life as we know it, and it's far too heavy for us to carry water from the Earth to Mars to live, so we have to find water if our life is going to succeed on Mars. And if you look at Mars, it looks really dry, it looks like the entire planet is a desert. But it turns out that it's not. The soil alone on Mars contains up to 60 percent water. And a number of orbiters that we still have flying around Mars have shown us — and by the way, that's a real photograph — that lots of craters on Mars have a sheet of water ice in them. It's not a bad place to start a colony.Now, here's a view of a little dig the Phoenix Lander did in 2008, showing that just below the surface of the soil is ice — that white stuff is ice. In the second picture, which is four days later than the first picture, you can see that some of it is evaporating.Orbiters also tell us that there are huge amounts of underground water on Mars as well as glaciers. In fact, if only the water ice at the poles on Mars melted, most of the planet would be under 30 feet of water. So there's plenty of water there, but most of it's ice, most of it's underground, it takes a lot of energy to get it and a lot of human labor.This is a device cooked up at the University of Washington back in 1998. It's basically a low-tech dehumidifier. And it turns out the Mars atmosphere is often 100 percent humid. So this device can extract all the water that humans will need simply from the atmosphere on Mars.Next we have to worry about what we will breathe. Frankly, I was really shocked to find out that NASA has this problem worked out. This is a scientist at MIT named Michael Hecht. And he's developed this machine, Moxie. I love this thing. It's a reverse fuel cell, essentially, that sucks in the Martian atmosphere and pumps out oxygen. And you have to remember that CO2 — carbon dioxide, which is 96 percent of Mars' atmosphere — CO2 is basically 78 percent oxygen.Now, the next big rover that NASA sends to Mars in 2020 is going to have one of these devices aboard, and it will be able to produce enough oxygen to keep one person alive indefinitely. But the secret to this — and that's just for testing — the secret to this is that this thing was designed from the get-go to be scalable by a factor of 100.Next, what will we eat? Well, we'll use hydroponics to grow food, but we're not going to be able to grow more than 15 to 20 percent of our food there, at least not until water is running on the surface of Mars and we actually have the probability and the capability of planting crops. In the meantime, most of our food will arrive from Earth, and it will be dried.And then we need some shelter. At first we can use inflatable, pressurized buildings as well as the landers themselves. But this really only works during the daytime. There is too much solar radiation and too much radiation from cosmic rays. So we really have to go underground.Now, it turns out that the soil on Mars, by and large, is perfect for making bricks. And NASA has figured this one out, too. They're going to throw some polymer plastic into the bricks, shove them in a microwave oven, and then you will be able to build buildings with really thick walls. Or we may choose to live underground in caves or in lava tubes, of which there are plenty.And finally there's clothing. On Earth we have miles of atmosphere piled up on us, which creates 15 pounds of pressure on our bodies at all times, and we're constantly pushing out against that. On Mars there's hardly any atmospheric pressure. So Dava Newman, a scientist at MIT, has created this sleek space suit. It will keep us together, block radiation and keep us warm.So let's think about this for a minute. Food, shelter, clothing, water, oxygen ... we can do this. We really can. But it's still a little complicated and a little difficult.So that leads to the next big — really big step — in living the good life on Mars. And that's terraforming the planet: making it more like Earth, reengineering an entire planet.That sounds like a lot of hubris, but the truth is that the technology to do everything I'm about to tell you already exists.First we've got to warm it up. Mars is incredibly cold because it has a very thin atmosphere. The answer lies here, at the south pole and at the north pole of Mars, both of which are covered with an incredible amount of frozen carbon dioxide — dry ice. If we heat it up, it sublimes directly into the atmosphere and thickens the atmosphere the same way it does on Earth.And as we know, CO2 is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. Now, my favorite way of doing this is to erect a very, very large solar sail and focus it — it essentially serves as a mirror — and focus it on the south pole of Mars at first. As the planet spins, it will heat up all that dry ice, sublime it, and it will go into the atmosphere. It actually won't take long for the temperature on Mars to start rising, probably less than 20 years.Right now, on a perfect day at the equator, in the middle of summer on Mars, temperatures can actually reach 70 degrees, but then they go down to minus 100 at night.(Laughter)What we're shooting for is a runaway greenhouse effect: enough temperature rise to see a lot of that ice on Mars — especially the ice in the ground — melt. Then we get some real magic.As the atmosphere gets thicker, everything gets better. We get more protection from radiation, more atmosphere makes us warmer, makes the planet warmer, so we get running water and that makes crops possible. Then more water vapor goes into the air, forming yet another potent greenhouse gas. It will rain and it will snow on Mars. And a thicker atmosphere will create enough pressure so that we can throw away those space suits. We only need about five pounds of pressure to survive. Eventually, Mars will be made to feel a lot like British Columbia.We'll still be left with the complicated problem of making the atmosphere breathable, and frankly that could take 1,000 years to accomplish. But humans are amazingly smart and incredibly adaptable.There is no telling what our future technology will be able to accomplish and no telling what we can do with our own bodies. In biology right now, we are on the very verge of being able to control our own genetics, what the genes in our own bodies are doing, and certainly, eventually, our own evolution. We could end up with a species of human being on Earth that is slightly different from the species of human beings on Mars.But what would you do there? How would you live? It's going to be the same as it is on Earth. Somebody's going to start a restaurant, somebody's going to build an iron foundry. Someone will make documentary movies of Mars and sell them on Earth. Some idiot will start a reality TV show.(Laughter)There will be software companies, there will be hotels, there will be bars.This much is certain: it will be the most disruptive event in our lifetimes, and I think it will be the most inspiring.Ask any 10-year-old girl if she wants to go to Mars. Children who are now in elementary school are going to choose to live there.Remember when we landed humans on the Moon? When that happened, people looked at each other and said, ""If we can do this, we can do anything."" What are they going to think when we actually form a colony on Mars?Most importantly, it will make us a spacefaring species. And that means humans will survive no matter what happens on Earth. We will never be the last of our kind.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_petranek_your_kids_might_live_on_mars_here_s_how_they_ll_survive
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"Cancer affects all of us — especially the ones that come back over and over again, the highly invasive and drug-resistant ones, the ones that defy medical treatment, even when we throw our best drugs at them. Engineering at the molecular level, working at the smallest of scales, can provide exciting new ways to fight the most aggressive forms of cancer.Cancer is a very clever disease. There are some forms of cancer, which, fortunately, we've learned how to address relatively well with known and established drugs and surgery. But there are some forms of cancer that don't respond to these approaches, and the tumor survives or comes back, even after an onslaught of drugs.We can think of these very aggressive forms of cancer as kind of supervillains in a comic book. They're clever, they're adaptable, and they're very good at staying alive. And, like most supervillains these days, their superpowers come from a genetic mutation. The genes that are modified inside these tumor cells can enable and encode for new and unimagined modes of survival, allowing the cancer cell to live through even our best chemotherapy treatments.One example is a trick in which a gene allows a cell, even as the drug approaches the cell, to push the drug out, before the drug can have any effect. Imagine — the cell effectively spits out the drug. This is just one example of the many genetic tricks in the bag of our supervillain, cancer. All due to mutant genes.So, we have a supervillain with incredible superpowers. And we need a new and powerful mode of attack. Actually, we can turn off a gene. The key is a set of molecules known as siRNA. siRNA are short sequences of genetic code that guide a cell to block a certain gene. Each siRNA molecule can turn off a specific gene inside the cell. For many years since its discovery, scientists have been very excited about how we can apply these gene blockers in medicine.But, there is a problem. siRNA works well inside the cell. But if it gets exposed to the enzymes that reside in our bloodstream or our tissues, it degrades within seconds. It has to be packaged, protected through its journey through the body on its way to the final target inside the cancer cell.So, here's our strategy. First, we'll dose the cancer cell with siRNA, the gene blocker, and silence those survival genes, and then we'll whop it with a chemo drug. But how do we carry that out? Using molecular engineering, we can actually design a superweapon that can travel through the bloodstream. It has to be tiny enough to get through the bloodstream, it's got to be small enough to penetrate the tumor tissue, and it's got to be tiny enough to be taken up inside the cancer cell. To do this job well, it has to be about one one-hundredth the size of a human hair.Let's take a closer look at how we can build this nanoparticle. First, let's start with the nanoparticle core. It's a tiny capsule that contains the chemotherapy drug. This is the poison that will actually end the tumor cell's life. Around this core, we'll wrap a very thin, nanometers-thin blanket of siRNA. This is our gene blocker. Because siRNA is strongly negatively charged, we can protect it with a nice, protective layer of positively charged polymer. The two oppositely charged molecules stick together through charge attraction, and that provides us with a protective layer that prevents the siRNA from degrading in the bloodstream. We're almost done.(Laughter)But there is one more big obstacle we have to think about. In fact, it may be the biggest obstacle of all. How do we deploy this superweapon? I mean, every good weapon needs to be targeted, we have to target this superweapon to the supervillain cells that reside in the tumor.But our bodies have a natural immune-defense system: cells that reside in the bloodstream and pick out things that don't belong, so that it can destroy or eliminate them. And guess what? Our nanoparticle is considered a foreign object. We have to sneak our nanoparticle past the tumor defense system. We have to get it past this mechanism of getting rid of the foreign object by disguising it.So we add one more negatively charged layer around this nanoparticle, which serves two purposes. First, this outer layer is one of the naturally charged, highly hydrated polysaccharides that resides in our body. It creates a cloud of water molecules around the nanoparticle that gives us an invisibility cloaking effect. This invisibility cloak allows the nanoparticle to travel through the bloodstream long and far enough to reach the tumor, without getting eliminated by the body.Second, this layer contains molecules which bind specifically to our tumor cell. Once bound, the cancer cell takes up the nanoparticle, and now we have our nanoparticle inside the cancer cell and ready to deploy.Alright! I feel the same way. Let's go!(Applause)The siRNA is deployed first. It acts for hours, giving enough time to silence and block those survival genes. We have now disabled those genetic superpowers. What remains is a cancer cell with no special defenses. Then, the chemotherapy drug comes out of the core and destroys the tumor cell cleanly and efficiently. With sufficient gene blockers, we can address many different kinds of mutations, allowing the chance to sweep out tumors, without leaving behind any bad guys.So, how does our strategy work? We've tested these nanostructure particles in animals using a highly aggressive form of triple-negative breast cancer. This triple-negative breast cancer exhibits the gene that spits out cancer drug as soon as it is delivered.Usually, doxorubicin — let's call it ""dox"" — is the cancer drug that is the first line of treatment for breast cancer. So, we first treated our animals with a dox core, dox only. The tumor slowed their rate of growth, but they still grew rapidly, doubling in size over a period of two weeks.Then, we tried our combination superweapon. A nanolayer particle with siRNA against the chemo pump, plus, we have the dox in the core. And look — we found that not only did the tumors stop growing, they actually decreased in size and were eliminated in some cases. The tumors were actually regressing.(Applause)What's great about this approach is that it can be personalized. We can add many different layers of siRNA to address different mutations and tumor defense mechanisms. And we can put different drugs into the nanoparticle core. As doctors learn how to test patients and understand certain tumor genetic types, they can help us determine which patients can benefit from this strategy and which gene blockers we can use.Ovarian cancer strikes a special chord with me. It is a very aggressive cancer, in part because it's discovered at very late stages, when it's highly advanced and there are a number of genetic mutations. After the first round of chemotherapy, this cancer comes back for 75 percent of patients. And it usually comes back in a drug-resistant form. High-grade ovarian cancer is one of the biggest supervillains out there. And we're now directing our superweapon toward its defeat.As a researcher, I usually don't get to work with patients. But I recently met a mother who is an ovarian cancer survivor, Mimi, and her daughter, Paige. I was deeply inspired by the optimism and strength that both mother and daughter displayed and by their story of courage and support. At this event, we spoke about the different technologies directed at cancer. And Mimi was in tears as she explained how learning about these efforts gives her hope for future generations, including her own daughter. This really touched me. It's not just about building really elegant science. It's about changing people's lives. It's about understanding the power of engineering on the scale of molecules.I know that as students like Paige move forward in their careers, they'll open new possibilities in addressing some of the big health problems in the world — including ovarian cancer, neurological disorders, infectious disease — just as chemical engineering has found a way to open doors for me, and has provided a way of engineering on the tiniest scale, that of molecules, to heal on the human scale.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paula_hammond_a_new_superweapon_in_the_fight_against_cancer
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"In 1962 at Rice University, JFK told the country about a dream he had, a dream to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade. The eponymous moonshot.No one knew if it was possible to do but he made sure a plan was put in place to do it if it was possible. That's how great dreams are. Great dreams aren't just visions, they're visions coupled to strategies for making them real.I have the incredible good fortune to work at a moonshot factory. At X — formerly called Google X — you'll find an aerospace engineer working alongside a fashion designer and former military ops commanders brainstorming with laser experts. These inventors, engineers and makers are dreaming up technologies that we hope can make the world a wonderful place.We use the word ""moonshots"" to remind us to keep our visions big — to keep dreaming. And we use the word ""factory"" to remind ourselves that we want to have concrete visions — concrete plans to make them real.Here's our moonshot blueprint. Number one: we want to find a huge problem in the world that affects many millions of people. Number two: we want to find or propose a radical solution for solving that problem. And then number three: there has to be some reason to believe that the technology for such a radical solution could actually be built.But I have a secret for you. The moonshot factory is a messy place. But rather than avoid the mess, pretend it's not there, we've tried to make that our strength. We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove that we're wrong. That's it, that's the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first. Get excited and cheer, ""Hey! How are we going to kill our project today?""We've got this interesting balance going where we allow our unchecked optimism to fuel our visions. But then we also harness enthusiastic skepticism to breathe life, breathe reality into those visions.I want to show you a few of the projects that we've had to leave behind on the cutting room floor, and also a few of the gems that at least so far, have not only survived that process, but have been accelerated by it.Last year we killed a project in automated vertical farming. This is some of the lettuce that we grew. One in nine people in the world suffers from undernourishment. So this is a moonshot that needs to happen. Vertical farming uses 10 times less water and a hundred times less land than conventional farming. And because you can grow the food close to where it's consumed, you don't have to transport it large distances. We made progress in a lot of the areas like automated harvesting and efficient lighting. But unfortunately, we couldn't get staple crops like grains and rice to grow this way. So we killed the project.Here's another huge problem. We pay enormous costs in resources and environmental damage to ship goods worldwide. Economic development of landlocked countries is limited by lack of shipping infrastructure. The radical solution? A lighter-than-air, variable-buoyancy cargo ship. This has the potential to lower, at least overall, the cost, time and carbon footprint of shipping without needing runways. We came up with this clever set of technical breakthroughs that together might make it possible for us to lower the cost enough that we could actually make these ships — inexpensively enough in volume. But however cheap they would have been to make in volume it turned out that it was going to cost close to 200 million dollars to design and build the first one.200 million dollars is just way too expensive. Because X is structured with these tight feedback loops of making mistakes and learning and new designs, we can't spend 200 million dollars to get the first data point about whether we're on the right track or not. If there's an Achilles' heel in one our projects, we want to know it now, up front, not way down the road. So we killed this project, too.Discovering a major flaw in a project doesn't always mean that it ends the project. Sometimes it actually gets us onto a more productive path.This is our fully self-driving vehicle prototype, which we built without a steering wheel or break pedal. But that wasn't actually our goal when we started.With 1.2 million people dying on the roads globally every year, building a car that drives itself was a natural moonshot to take. Three and a half years ago, when we had these Lexus, retrofitted, self-driving cars in testing, they were doing so well, we gave them out to other Googlers to find out what they thought of the experience. And what we discovered was that our plan to have the cars do almost all the driving and just hand over to the users in case of emergency was a really bad plan. It wasn't safe because the users didn't do their job. They didn't stay alert in case the car needed to hand control back to them.This was a major crisis for the team. It sent them back to the drawing board. And they came up with a beautiful, new perspective. Aim for a car where you're truly a passenger. You tell the car where you want to go, you push a button and it takes you from point A to point B by itself.We're really grateful that we had this insight as early on in the project as we did. And it's shaped everything we've done since then. And now our cars have self-driven more than 1.4 million miles, and they're out everyday on the streets of Mountain View, California and Austin, Texas.The cars team shifted their perspective. This is one of X's mantras. Sometimes shifting your perspective is more powerful than being smart.Take wind energy. It's one of my favorite examples of perspective shifting. There's no way that we're going to build a better standard wind turbine than the experts in that industry. But we found a way to get up higher into the sky, and so get access to faster, more consistent winds, and so more energy without needing hundreds of tons of steel to get there.Our Makani energy kite rises up from its perch by spinning up those propellers along its wing. And it pulls out a tether as it rises, pulling energy up through the tether. Once the tether's all the way out, it goes into crosswind circles in the sky. And now those propellers that lifted it up have become flying turbines. And that sends energy back down the tether.We haven't yet found a way to kill this project. And the longer it survives that pressure, the more excited we get that this could become a cheaper and more deployable form of wind energy for the world.Probably the craziest sounding project we have is Project Loon. We're trying to make balloon-powered Internet. A network of balloons in the stratosphere that beam an internet connection down to rural and remote areas of the world. This could bring online as many as four billion more people, who today have little or no internet connection.But you can't just take a cell tower, strap it to a balloon and stick it in the sky. The winds are too strong, it would be blown away. And the balloons are too high up to tie it to the ground.Here comes the crazy moment. What if, instead, we let the balloons drift and we taught them how to sail the winds to go where the needed to go? It turns out the stratosphere has winds that are going in quite different speeds and directions in thin strata. So we hoped that using smart algorithms and wind data from around the world, we could maneuver the balloons a bit, getting them to go up and down just a tiny bit in the stratosphere to grab those winds going in those different directions and speeds. The idea is to have enough balloons so as one balloon floats out of your area, there's another balloon ready to float into place, handing off the internet connection, just like your phone hands off between cell towers as you drive down the freeway.We get how crazy that vision sounds — there's the name of the project to remind us of that. So since 2012, the Loon team has prioritized the work that seems the most difficult and so the most likely to kill their project.The first thing that they did was try to get a Wi-Fi connection from a balloon in the stratosphere down to an antenna on the ground. It worked. And I promise you there were bets that it wasn't going to. So we kept going.Could we get the balloon to talk directly to handsets, so that we didn't need the antenna as an intermediary receiver? Yeah.Could we get the balloon bandwidth high enough so it was a real Internet connection? So that people could have something more than just SMS? The early tests weren't even a megabit per second, but now we can do up to 15 megabits per second. Enough to watch a TED Talk.Could we get the balloons to talk to each other through the sky so that we could reach our signal deeper into rural areas? Check.Could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up for more than 100 days, while costing less than five percent of what traditional, long-life balloons have cost to make? Yes. In the end. But I promise you, you name it, we had to try it to get there. We made round, silvery balloons. We made giant pillow-shaped balloons. We made balloons the size of a blue whale. We busted a lot of balloons.(Laughter)Since one of the things that was most likely to kill the Loon project was whether we could guide the balloons through the sky, one of our most important experiments was putting a balloon inside a balloon.So there are two compartments here, one with air and then one with helium. The balloon pumps air in to make itself heavier, or lets air out to make it lighter. And these weight changes allow it to rise or fall, and that simple movement of the balloon is its steering mechanism. It floats up or down, hoping to grab winds going in the speed and direction that it wants.But is that good enough for it to navigate through the world? Barely at first, but better all the time.This particular balloon, our latest balloon, can navigate a two-mile vertical stretch of sky and can sail itself to within 500 meters of where it wants to go from 20,000 kilometers away.We have lots more to do in terms of fine-tuning the system and reducing costs. But last year, a balloon built inexpensively went around the world 19 times over 187 days. So we're going to keep going.(Applause)Our balloons today are doing pretty much everything a complete system needs to do. We're in discussions with telcos around the world, and we're going to fly over places like Indonesia for real service testing this year.This probably all sounds too good to be true, and you're right. Being audacious and working on big, risky things makes people inherently uncomfortable.You cannot yell at people and force them to fail fast. People resist. They worry. ""What will happen to me if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I be fired?""I started with our secret. I'm going to leave you with how we actually make it happen. The only way to get people to work on big, risky things — audacious ideas — and have them run at all the hardest parts of the problem first, is if you make that the path of least resistance for them.We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.We believe in dreams at the moonshot factory. But enthusiastic skepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism. It's optimism's perfect partner. It unlocks the potential in every idea. We can create the future that's in our dreams.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/astro_teller_the_unexpected_benefit_of_celebrating_failure
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"I have spent the past 38 years trying to be invisible. I'm a copy editor. I work at The New Yorker, and copyediting for The New Yorker is like playing shortstop for a Major League Baseball team: every little movement gets picked over by the critics — God forbid you should commit an error.Just to clarify: copy editors don't choose what goes into the magazine. We work at the level of the sentence, maybe the paragraph, the words, the punctuation. Our business is in the details. We put the diaeresis, the double dot, over the ""i"" in ""naïve."" We impose house style. Every publication has a house style. The New Yorker's is particularly distinctive. We sometimes get teased for our style. Imagine — we still spell ""teen-ager"" with a hyphen, as if that word had just been coined. But you see that hyphen in ""teen-age"" and that diaeresis over ""coöperate,"" and you know you're reading The New Yorker.Copyediting at The New Yorker is a mechanical process. There is a related role called query proofreading, or page-OK'ing. Whereas copyediting is mechanical, query proofreading is interpretive. We make suggestions to the author through the editor to improve the emphasis of a sentence or point out unintentional repetitions and supply compelling alternatives. Our purpose is to make the author look good.Note that we give our proofs not directly to the author, but to the editor. This often creates a good cop/bad cop dynamic in which the copy editor — I'll use that as an umbrella term — is invariably the bad cop. If we do our job well, we're invisible, but as soon as we make a mistake, we copy editors become glaringly visible. Here is the most recent mistake that was laid at my door.[Last Tuesday, Sarah Palin, the pre-Trump embodiment of populist no-nothingism in the Republican Party, endorsed Trump.]""Where were The New Yorker's fabled copy editors?"" a reader wrote. ""Didn't the writer mean 'know-nothingism'?""Ouch. There's no excuse for this mistake. But I like it: ""no-nothingism."" It might be American vernacular for ""nihilism.""(Laughter)Here, another reader quotes a passage from the magazine:[Ruby was seventy-six, but she retained her authoritative bearing; only her unsteady gait belied her age.]He added: ""Surely, someone at The New Yorker knows the meaning of 'belied,' and that it is the opposite of how it is used in this sentence. Come on! Get it together.""Belie: to give a false impression. It should have been ""betrayed.""E.B. White once wrote of commas in The New Yorker: ""They fall with the precision of knives outlining a body.""(Laughter)And it's true — we get a lot of complaints about commas. ""Are there really two commas in 'Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard'?"" There may not be on the sign, but yes, that is New Yorker style for ""Jr."" One wag wrote:[""Please, could you expel, or, at least, restrain, the comma-maniac, on your editorial staff?""](Laughter)Ah, well. In this case, those commas are well-placed, except that there should not be one between ""maniac"" and ""on.""(Laughter)Also, if we must have commas around ""at least,"" we might change it up by using dashes around that phrase: ""... — or, at least, restrain —"" Perfect.(Applause)Then there's this: ""Love you, love your magazine, but can you please stop writing massive numbers as text?""[two and a half million ...]No.(Laughter)One last cri de coeur from a spelling stickler:[""Those long stringy things are vocal cords, not chords.""]The outraged reader added, ""I'm sure I'm not the first to write regarding this egregious proofreading error, but I'm equally sure I won't be the last. Fie!""(Laughter)I used to like getting mail.There is a pact between writers and editors. The editor never sells out the writer, never goes public about bad jokes that had to be cut or stories that went on too long. A great editor saves a writer from her excesses. Copy editors, too, have a code; we don't advertise our oversights. I feel disloyal divulging them here, so let's have look at what we do right.Somehow, I've gotten a reputation for sternness. But I work with writers who know how to have their way with me. I've known Ian Frazier, or ""Sandy,"" since the early 80s. And he's one of my favorites, even though he sometimes writes a sentence that gives a copy editor pause. Here is one from a story about Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy:[A dock that had been broken in the middle and lost its other half sloped down toward the water, its support pipes and wires leaning forward like when you open a box of linguine and it slides out.](Laughter)This would never have got past the grammarian in the days of yore. But what could I do? Technically, the ""like"" should be an ""as,"" but it sounds ridiculous, as if the author were about to embark on an extended Homeric simile — ""as when you open a box of linguine.""(Laughter)I decided that the hurricane conferred poetic justice on Sandy and let the sentence stand.(Laughter)Generally, if I think something is wrong, I query it three times. I told Sandy that not long ago in a moment of indiscretion and he said,""Only three?""So, he has learned to hold out.Recently, he wrote a story for ""Talk of the Town,"" that's the section at the front of the magazine with short pieces on subjects ranging from Ricky Jay's exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum to the introduction of doggie bags in France. Sandy's story was about the return to the Bronx of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. There were three things in it that I had to challenge.First, a grammar query. The justice was wearing black and Sandy wrote,[Her face and hands stood out like in an old, mostly dark painting.]Now, unlike with the hurricane, with this ""like,"" the author didn't have the excuse of describing hurricane damage. ""Like"" in this sense is a preposition, and a preposition takes an object, which is a noun. This ""like"" had to be an ""as."" ""As in an old, mostly dark painting.""Second, a spelling issue. The author was quoting someone who was assisting the justice:[""It will be just a minute. We are getting the justice mic'ed,""]Mic'ed? The music industry spells it ""mic"" because that's how it's spelled on the equipment. I'd never seen it used as a verb with this spelling, and I was distraught to think that ""mic'ed"" would get into the magazine on my watch.(Laughter)New Yorker style for ""microphone"" in its abbreviated form is ""mike.""Finally, there was a sticky grammar and usage issue in which the pronoun has to have the same grammatical number as its antecedent.[everyone in the vicinity held their breath]""Their"" is plural and ""everyone,"" its antecedent, is singular. You would never say, ""Everyone were there."" Everyone was there. Everyone is here. But people say things like, ""Everyone held their breath"" all the time. To give it legitimacy, copy editors call it ""the singular 'their,'"" as if calling it singular makes it no longer plural.(Laughter)It is my job when I see it in print to do my best to eliminate it. I couldn't make it, ""Everyone held her breath,"" or ""Everyone held his breath,"" or ""Everyone held his or her breath."" Whatever I suggested had to blend in. I asked, through the editor, if the author would consider changing it to ""All in the vicinity held their breath,"" because ""all"" is plural. Nope.I tried again: ""All those present held their breath?"" I thought this sounded vaguely judicial. But the editor pointed out that we could not have ""present"" and ""presence"" in the same sentence. When the final proof came back, the author had accepted ""as"" for ""like,"" and ""miked"" for ""mic'ed."" But on ""Everyone held their breath,"" he stood his ground. Two out of three isn't bad.In the same issue, in that piece on doggie bags in France, there was the gratuitous use of the f-word by a Frenchman. I wonder, when the mail comes in, which will have offended the readers more.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_norris_the_nit_picking_glory_of_the_new_yorker_s_comma_queen
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"I have one more reason for optimism: climate change. Maybe you don't believe it, but here is the fact.On December 12, 2015, in Paris, under the United Nations, 195 governments got together and unanimously — if you've worked with governments, you know how difficult that is — unanimously decided to intentionally change the course of the global economy in order to protect the most vulnerable and improve the life of all of us. Now, that is a remarkable achievement.(Applause)But it is even more remarkable if you consider where we had been just a few years ago. 2009, Copenhagen. Who remembers Copenhagen? Well, after years of working toward a climate agreement, the same governments convened in Copenhagen and failed miserably.Why did it fail miserably? For many different reasons, but primarily because of the deeply entrenched divide between the global North and the global South. So now, six months after this failure, I was called in to assume the responsibility of the global climate change negotiations. You can imagine, the perfect moment to start this new job. The global mood on climate change was in the trash can. No one believed that a global agreement could ever be possible. In fact, neither did I. If you promise not to tell anyone outside of this wonderful TED audience, I'm going to divulge a secret that has been gratefully buried by history. On my first press conference, a journalist asked, ""Um, Ms. Figueres, do you think that a global agreement is ever going to be possible?"" And without engaging brain, I heard me utter, ""Not in my lifetime."" Well, you can imagine the faces of my press team who were horrified at this crazy Costa Rican woman who was their new boss. And I was horrified, too. Now, I wasn't horrified at me, because I'm kind of used to myself. I was actually horrified at the consequences of what I had just said, at the consequences for the world in which all our children are going to have to live. It was frankly a horrible moment for me, and I thought, well, no, hang on, hang on. Impossible is not a fact, it's an attitude. It's only an attitude. And I decided right then and there that I was going to change my attitude and I was going to help the world change its attitude on climate change.So I don't know — No, just this? Thanks. I don't know — what you would do if you were told your job is to save the planet. Put that on the job description. And you have full responsibility, but you have absolutely no authority, because governments are sovereign in every decision that they take.Well, I would really love to know what you would do on the first Monday morning, but here's what I did: I panicked.(Laughter)And then I panicked again, because I realized I have no idea how we're going to solve this problem. And then I realized I have no idea how we're going to solve this problem, but I do know one thing: we have got to change the tone of this conversation. Because there is no way you can deliver victory without optimism.And here, I use optimism as a very simple word, but let's understand it in its broader sense. Let's understand it as courage, hope, trust, solidarity, the fundamental belief that we humans can come together and can help each other to better the fate of mankind. Well, you can imagine that I thought that without that, there was no way we were going to get out of the paralysis of Copenhagen. And for six years, I have stubbornly, relentlessly injected optimism into the system, no matter what the questions from the press — and I have gotten better at those — and no matter what the evidence to the contrary. And believe you me, there has been a lot of contrary evidence. But relentless optimism into the system.And pretty soon, we began to see changes happening in many areas, precipitated by thousands of people, including many of you here today, and I thank you. And this TED community will not be surprised if I tell you the first area in which we saw remarkable change was ... technology. We began to see that clean technologies, in particular renewable energy technologies, began to drop price and increase in capacity, to the point where today we are already building concentrated solar power plants that have the capacity to power entire cities, to say nothing of the fact of what we are doing on mobility and intelligent buildings. And with this shift in technologies, we were able to begin to understand that there was a shift in the economic equation, because we were able to recognize that yes, there are huge costs to climate change, and yes, there are compounded risks. But there also are economic advantages and intrinsic benefits, because the dissemination of the clean technologies is going to bring us cleaner air, better health, better transportation, more livable cities, more energy security, more energy access to the developing world. In sum, a better world than what we have now.And with that understanding, you should have witnessed, in fact, part of you were, the spread of ingenuity and excitement that went through, first through nonnational governments, the private sector, captains of industry, insurance companies, investors, city leaders, faith communities, because they all began to understand, this actually can be in their interest. This can actually improve their bottom line.And it wasn't just the usual suspects. I have to tell you I had the CEO of a major, major oil and gas company come to me at the beginning of last year and say — privately, of course — he did not know how he was going to change his company, but he is going to change it, because he's interested in long-term viability. Well, now we have a shift in the economic equation, and with that, with broader support from everyone, it did not take very long before we saw that national governments woke up to the fact that this is in their national interest. And when we asked countries to begin to identify how they could contribute to global efforts but based on their national interest, 189 countries out of 195, 189 countries sent their comprehensive climate change plans, based on their national interest, concurrent with their priorities, consistent with their national sustainable development plans.Well, once you protect the core interests of nations, then you can understand that nations were ready to begin to converge onto a common path, onto a common direction of travel that is going to take us probably several decades, but over those several decades is going to take us into the new economy, into a decarbonized, highly resilient economy, And the national contributions that are currently on the table on behalf of national governments are insufficient to get us to a stabilized climate, but they are only the first step, and they will improve over time. And the measurement, reporting and verification of all of those efforts is legally binding. And the checkpoints that we're going to have every five years to assess collective progress towards our goal are legally binding, and the path itself toward a decarbonized and more resilient economy is legally binding.And here's the more important part: What did we have before? A very small handful of countries who had undertaken very reduced, short-term emission reduction commitments that were completely insufficient and furthermore, largely perceived as a burden. Now what do we have? Now we have all countries of the world contributing with different intensities from different approaches in different sectors, but all of them contributing to a common goal and along a path with environmental integrity. Well, once you have all of this in place and you have shifted this understanding, then you see that governments were able to go to Paris and adopt the Paris agreement.(Applause)So, as I look back over the past six years, first I remember the day the Paris agreement was adopted. I cannot tell you the euphoria in the room. 5,000 people jumping out of their seats, crying, clapping, screaming, yelling, torn between euphoria and still disbelief at what they had just seen, because so many people had worked for years towards this, and this was finally their reality.And it wasn't just those who had participated directly. A few weeks ago, I was with a colleague who was trying to decide on a Tahitian pearl that he wanted to give to his wonderful wife Natasha. And once he had finally decided what he was going to buy, the jeweler said to him, ""You know, you're very lucky that you're buying this now, because these pearls could go extinct very soon because of climate change."" ""But,"" the jeweler said, ""have you heard, the governments have just come to a decision, and Tahiti could have a chance."" Well, what a fantastic confirmation that perhaps, perhaps here is hope, here is a possible chance. I'm the first one to recognize that we have a lot of work still to do. We've only just started our work on climate change. And in fact, we need to make sure that we redouble our efforts over the next five years that are the urgent five years. But I do believe that we have come over the past six years from the impossible to the now unstoppable. And how did we do that? By injecting transformational optimism that allowed us to go from confrontation to collaboration, that allowed us to understand that national and local interests are not necessarily at odds with global needs, and that if we understand that, we can bring them together and we can merge them harmoniously.And as I look forward to other global issues that will require our attention this century — food security, water security, home security, forced migration — I see that we certainly do not know how we are going to solve those problems yet. But we can take a page out of what we have done on climate change and we can understand that we have got to reinterpret the zero-sum mentality. Because we were trained to believe that there always are winners and losers, and that your loss is my gain. Well, now that we're in a world in which we have reached planetary boundaries and that we are not just so interconnected, but increasingly interdependent on each other, your loss is no longer my gain. We're either all losers or we all can be winners. But we are going to have to decide between zero and sum. We're going to have to decide between zero benefit for all or living life as the sum of all of us. We've done it once. We can do it again.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christiana_figueres_the_inside_story_of_the_paris_climate_agreement
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"Some people think that there's a TED Talk formula:""Give a talk on a round, red rug.""""Share a childhood story.""""Divulge a personal secret.""""End with an inspiring call to action.""No. That's not how to think of a TED Talk. In fact, if you overuse those devices, you're just going to come across as clichéd or emotionally manipulative.But there is one thing that all great TED Talks have in common, and I would like to share that thing with you,because over the past 12 years, I've had a ringside seat, listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers, like these. I've helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them their secrets of what makes for a great talk.And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it's this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners' minds an extraordinary gift — a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.Let me show you what I mean. Here's Haley. She is about to give a TED Talk and frankly, she's terrified.(Video) Presenter: Haley Van Dyck!(Applause)Over the course of 18 minutes, 1,200 people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with Haley's brain and with each other. They're literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. And I don't just mean they're feeling the same emotions. There's something even more startling happening.Let's take a look inside Haley's brain for a moment. There are billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. But look here, right here — a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea. And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening. That's right; in just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into 1,200 minds, just by people listening to a voice and watching a face.But wait — what is an idea anyway? Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.Here are just a few examples shared from the TED stage. Sir Ken Robinson — creativity is key to our kids' future.(Video) Sir Ken Robinson: My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.Chris Anderson: Elora Hardy — building from bamboo is beautiful.(Video) Elora Hardy: It is growing all around us, it's strong, it's elegant, it's earthquake-resistant.CA: Chimamanda Adichie — people are more than a single identity.(Video) Chimamanda Adichie: The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.CA: Your mind is teeming with ideas, and not just randomly. They're carefully linked together. Collectively they form an amazingly complex structure that is your personal worldview. It's your brain's operating system. It's how you navigate the world. And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas.So, for example, if one little component of your worldview is the idea that kittens are adorable, then when you see this, you'll react like this. But if another component of your worldview is the idea that leopards are dangerous, then when you see this, you'll react a little bit differently. So, it's pretty obvious why the ideas that make up your worldview are crucial. You need them to be as reliable as possible — a guide, to the scary but wonderful real world out there.Now, different people's worldviews can be dramatically different. For example, how does your worldview react when you see this image:(Video) Dalia Mogahed: What do you think when you look at me? ""A woman of faith,"" ""an expert,"" maybe even ""a sister""? Or ""oppressed,"" ""brainwashed,"" ""a terrorist""?CA: Whatever your answer, there are millions of people out there who would react very differently. So that's why ideas really matter. If communicated properly, they're capable of changing, forever, how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well into the future. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.So if you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task:One, limit your talk to just one major idea. Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you're most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the through-line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way.Two, give your listeners a reason to care. Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience's curiosity. Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn't make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone's worldview, they'll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.Three, build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands. You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listeners' minds — but not your language, their language. You start where they are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands.For example, when Jennifer Kahn wanted to explain the incredible new biotechnology called CRISPR, she said, ""It's as if, for the first time, you had a word processor to edit DNA. CRISPR allows you to cut and paste genetic information really easily."" Now, a vivid explanation like that delivers a satisfying aha moment as it snaps into place in our minds. It's important, therefore, to test your talk on trusted friends, and find out which parts they get confused by.Four, here's the final tip: Make your idea worth sharing. By that I mean, ask yourself the question: ""Who does this idea benefit?"" And I need you to be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, I'm sorry to say, it's probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else's day or change someone else's perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_teds_secret_to_great_public_speaking
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"I'm turning 44 next month, and I have the sense that 44 is going to be a very good year, a year of fulfillment, realization. I have that sense, not because of anything particular in store for me, but because I read it would be a good year in a 1968 book by Norman Mailer.""He felt his own age, forty-four ..."" wrote Mailer in ""The Armies of the Night,"" ""... felt as if he were a solid embodiment of bone, muscle, heart, mind, and sentiment to be a man, as if he had arrived.""Yes, I know Mailer wasn't writing about me. But I also know that he was; for all of us — you, me, the subject of his book, age more or less in step, proceed from birth along the same great sequence: through the wonders and confinements of childhood; the emancipations and frustrations of adolescence; the empowerments and millstones of adulthood; the recognitions and resignations of old age. There are patterns to life, and they are shared. As Thomas Mann wrote: ""It will happen to me as to them.""We don't simply live these patterns. We record them, too. We write them down in books, where they become narratives that we can then read and recognize. Books tell us who we've been, who we are, who we will be, too. So they have for millennia. As James Salter wrote, ""Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.""And so six years ago, a thought leapt to mind: if life passed into pages, there were, somewhere, passages written about every age. If I could find them, I could assemble them into a narrative. I could assemble them into a life, a long life, a hundred-year life, the entirety of that same great sequence through which the luckiest among us pass. I was then 37 years old, ""an age of discretion,"" wrote William Trevor. I was prone to meditating on time and age. An illness in the family and later an injury to me had long made clear that growing old could not be assumed. And besides, growing old only postponed the inevitable, time seeing through what circumstance did not. It was all a bit disheartening.A list, though, would last. To chronicle a life year by vulnerable year would be to clasp and to ground what was fleeting, would be to provide myself and others a glimpse into the future, whether we made it there or not. And when I then began to compile my list, I was quickly obsessed, searching pages and pages for ages and ages. Here we were at every annual step through our first hundred years. ""Twenty-seven ... a time of sudden revelations,"" ""sixty-two, ... of subtle diminishments.""I was mindful, of course, that such insights were relative. For starters, we now live longer, and so age more slowly. Christopher Isherwood used the phrase ""the yellow leaf"" to describe a man at 53, only one century after Lord Byron used it to describe himself at 36.(Laughter)I was mindful, too, that life can swing wildly and unpredictably from one year to the next, and that people may experience the same age differently. But even so, as the list coalesced, so, too, on the page, clear as the reflection in the mirror, did the life that I had been living: finding at 20 that ""... one is less and less sure of who one is;"" emerging at 30 from the ""... wasteland of preparation into active life;"" learning at 40 ""... to close softly the doors to rooms [I would] not be coming back to."" There I was.Of course, there we all are. Milton Glaser, the great graphic designer whose beautiful visualizations you see here, and who today is 85 — all those years ""... a ripening and an apotheosis,"" wrote Nabokov — noted to me that, like art and like color, literature helps us to remember what we've experienced.And indeed, when I shared the list with my grandfather, he nodded in recognition. He was then 95 and soon to die, which, wrote Roberto Bolaño, ""... is the same as never dying."" And looking back, he said to me that, yes, Proust was right that at 22, we are sure we will not die, just as a thanatologist named Edwin Shneidman was right that at 90, we are sure we will. It had happened to him, as to them.Now the list is done: a hundred years. And looking back over it, I know that I am not done. I still have my life to live, still have many more pages to pass into. And mindful of Mailer, I await 44.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prager_wisdom_from_great_writers_on_every_year_of_life
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"So, there's an actor called Dustin Hoffman. And years ago, he made this movie which some of you may have heard of, called ""The Graduate."" And there's two key scenes in that movie. The first one is the seduction scene. I'm not going to talk about that tonight.(Laughter)The second scene is where he's taken out by the old guy to the pool, and as a young college graduate, the old guy basically says one word, just one word. And of course, all of you know what that word is. It's ""plastics.""(Laughter)And the only problem with that is, it was completely the wrong advice.(Laughter)Let me tell you why it was so wrong. The word should have been ""silicon."" And the reason it should have been silicon is because the basic patents for semiconductors had already been made, had already been filed, and they were already building them. So Silicon Valley was just being built in 1967, when this movie was released. And the year after the movie was released, Intel was founded. So had the graduate heard the right one word, maybe he would have ended up onstage — oh, I don't know — maybe with these two.(Laughter)So as you're thinking of that, let's see what bit of advice we might want to give so that your next graduate doesn't become a Tupperware salesman.(Laughter)So in 2015, what word of advice would you give people, when you took a college graduate out by the pool and you said one word, just one word? I think the answer would be ""lifecode."" So what is ""lifecode?"" Lifecode is the various ways we have of programming life. So instead of programming computers, we're using things to program viruses or retroviruses or proteins or DNA or RNA or plants or animals, or a whole series of creatures. And as you're thinking about this incredible ability to make life do what you want it to do, what it's programmed to do, what you end up doing is taking what we've been doing for thousands of years, which is breeding, changing, mixing, matching all kinds of life-forms, and we accelerate it.And this is not something new. This humble mustard weed has been modified so that if you change it in one way, you get broccoli. And if you change it in a second way, you get kale. And if you change it in a third way, you get cauliflower. So when you go to these all-natural, organic markets, you're really going to a place where people have been changing the lifecode of plants for a long time. The difference today, to pick a completely politically neutral term —[Intelligent design](Laughter)We're beginning to practice intelligent design. That means that instead of doing this at random and seeing what happens over generations, we're inserting specific genes, we're inserting specific proteins, and we're changing lifecode for very deliberate purposes. And that allows us to accelerate how this stuff happens.Let me just give you one example. Some of you occasionally might think about sex. And we kind of take it for granted how we've changed sex. So we think it's perfectly normal and natural to change it. What's happened with sex over time is — normally, sex equals baby, eventually. But in today's world, sex plus pill equals no baby.(Laughter)And again, we think that's perfectly normal and natural, but that has not been the case for most of human history. And it's not the case for animals. What it is does is it gives us control, so sex becomes separate from conception. And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, then we've been playing with stuff that's a little bit more advanced, like art. Not in the sense of painting and sculpture, but in the sense of assisted reproductive technologies. So what are assisted reproductive technologies? Assisted reproductive technologies are things like in vitro fertilization. And when you do in vitro fertilization, there's very good reasons to do it. Sometimes you just can't conceive otherwise. But when you do that, what you’re doing is separating sex, conception, baby. So you haven't just taken control of when you have a baby, you've separated when the baby and where the baby is fertilized. So you've separated the baby from the body from the act. And as you're thinking of other things we've been doing, think about twins. So you can freeze sperm, you can freeze eggs, you can freeze fertilized eggs. And what does that mean? Well, that's a good thing if you're a cancer patient. You're about to go under chemotherapy or under radiation, so you save these things. You don't irradiate them. But if you can save them and you can freeze them, and you can have a surrogate mother, it means that you've decoupled sex from time. It means you can have twins born — oh, in 50 years?(Laughter)In a hundred years? Two hundred years? And these are three really profound changes that are not, like, future stuff. This is stuff we take for granted today.So this lifecode stuff turns out to be a superpower. It turns out to be this incredibly powerful way of changing viruses, of changing plants, of changing animals, perhaps even of evolving ourselves. It's something that Steve Gullans and I have been thinking about for a while.Let's have some risks. Like every powerful technology, like electricity, like an automobile, like computers, this stuff potentially can be misused. And that scares a lot of people. And as you apply these technologies, you can even turn human beings into chimeras. Remember the Greek myth where you mix animals? Well, some of these treatments actually end up changing your blood type. Or they'll put male cells in a female body or vice versa, which sounds absolutely horrible until you realize, the reason you're doing that is you're substituting bone marrow during cancer treatments. So by taking somebody else's bone marrow, you may be changing some fundamental aspects of yourself, but you're also saving your life. And as you're thinking about this stuff, here's something that happened 20 years ago.This is Emma Ott. She's a recent college admittee. She's studying accounting. She played two varsity sports. She graduated as a valedictorian. And that's not particularly extraordinary, except that she's the first human being born to three parents. Why? Because she had a deadly mitochondrial disease that she might have inherited. So when you swap out a third person's DNA and you put it in there, you save the lives of people. But you also are doing germline engineering, which means her kids, if she has kids, will be saved and won't go through this. And [their] kids will be saved, and their grandchildren will be saved, and this passes on.That makes people nervous. So 20 years ago, the various authorities said, why don't we study this for a while? There are risks to doing stuff, and there are risks to not doing stuff, because there were a couple dozen people saved by this technology, and then we've been thinking about it for the next 20 years. So as we think about it, as we take the time to say, ""Hey, maybe we should have longer studies, maybe we should do this, maybe we should do that,"" there are consequences to acting, and there are consequences to not acting. Like curing deadly diseases — which, by the way, is completely unnatural. It is normal and natural for humans to be felled by massive epidemics of polio, of smallpox, of tuberculosis. When we put vaccines into people, we are putting unnatural things into their body because we think the benefit outweighs the risk. Because we've built unnatural plants, unnatural animals, we can feed about seven billion people. We can do things like create new life-forms. And as you create new life-forms, again, that sounds terribly scary and terribly bothersome, until you realize that those life-forms live on your dining room table. Those flowers you've got on your dining room table — there's not a lot that's natural about them, because people have been breeding the flowers to make this color, to be this size, to last for a week. You don't usually give your loved one wildflowers because they don't last a whole lot of time.What all this does is it flips Darwin completely on his head. See, for four billion years, what lived and died on this planet depended on two principles: on natural selection and random mutation. And so what lived and died, what was structured, has now been flipped on its head. And what we've done is created this completely parallel evolutionary system where we are practicing unnatural selection and non-random mutation.So let me explain these things. This is natural selection. This is unnatural selection.(Laughter)So what happens with this stuff is, we started breeding wolves thousands of years ago in central Asia to turn them into dogs. And then we started turning them into big dogs and into little dogs. But if you take one of the chihuahuas you see in the Hermès bags on Fifth Avenue and you let it loose on the African plain, you can watch natural selection happen.(Laughter)Few things on Earth are less natural than a cornfield. You will never, under any scenario, walk through a virgin forest and see the same plant growing in orderly rows at the same time, nothing else living there. When you do a cornfield, you're selecting what lives and what dies. And you're doing that through unnatural selection. It's the same with a wheat field, it's the same with a rice field. It's the same with a city, it's the same with a suburb. In fact, half the surface of Earth has been unnaturally engineered so that what lives and what dies there is what we want, which is the reason why you don't have grizzly bears walking through downtown Manhattan.How about this random mutation stuff? Well, this is random mutation. This is Antonio Alfonseca. He's otherwise known as the Octopus, his nickname. He was the Relief Pitcher of the Year in 2000. And he had a random mutation that gave him six fingers on each hand, which turns out to be really useful if you're a pitcher.(Laughter)How about non-random mutation? A non-random mutation is beer. It's wine. It's yogurt. How many times have you walked through the forest and found all-natural cheese? Or all-natural yogurt? So we've been engineering this stuff. Now, the interesting thing is, we get to know the stuff better. We found one of the single most powerful gene-editing instruments, CRISPR, inside yogurt. And as we start engineering cells, we're producing eight out of the top 10 pharmaceutical products, including the stuff that you use to treat arthritis, which is the number one best-selling drug, Humira.So this lifecode stuff. It really is a superpower. It really is a way of programming stuff, and there's nothing that's going to change us more than this lifecode. So as you're thinking of lifecode, let's think of five principles as to how we start guiding, and I'd love you to give me more.So, principle number one: we have to take responsibility for this stuff. The reason we have to take responsibility is because we're in charge. These aren't random mutations. This is what we are doing, what we are choosing. It's not, ""Stuff happened."" It didn't happen at random. It didn't come down by a verdict of somebody else. We engineer this stuff, and it's the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it.Principle number two: we have to recognize and celebrate diversity in this stuff. There have been at least 33 versions of hominids that have walked around this Earth. Most all of them went extinct except us. But the normal and natural state of this Earth is we have various versions of humans walking around at the same time, which is why most of us have some Neanderthal in us. Some of us have some Denisova in us. And some in Washington have a lot more of it.(Laughter)Principle number three: we have to respect other people's choices. Some people will choose to never alter. Some people will choose to alter all. Some people will choose to alter plants but not animals. Some people will choose to alter themselves. Some people will choose to evolve themselves. Diversity is not a bad thing, because even though we think of humans as very diverse, we came so close to extinction that all of us descend from a single African mother and the consequence of that is there's more genetic diversity in 55 African chimpanzees than there are in seven billion humans.Principle number four: we should take about a quarter of the Earth and only let Darwin run the show there. It doesn't have to be contiguous, doesn't have to all be tied together. It should be part in the oceans, part on land. But we should not run every evolutionary decision on this planet. We want to have our evolutionary system running. We want to have Darwin's evolutionary system running. And it's just really important to have these two things running in parallel and not overwhelm evolution.(Applause)Last thing I'll say. This is the single most exciting adventure human beings have been on. This is the single greatest superpower humans have ever had. It would be a crime for you not to participate in this stuff because you're scared of it, because you're hiding from it. You can participate in the ethics. You can participate in the politics. You can participate in the business. You can participate in just thinking about where medicine is going, where industry is going, where we're going to take the world. It would be a crime for all of us not to be aware when somebody shows up at a swimming pool and says one word, just one word, if you don't listen if that word is ""lifecode.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_we_can_reprogram_life_how_to_do_it_wisely
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"Periods. Blood. Menstruation. Gross. Secret. Hidden. Why?A natural biological process that every girl and woman goes through every month for about half of her life. A phenomenon that is so significant that the survival and propagation of our species depends on it. Yet we consider it a taboo. We feel awkward and shameful talking about it.When I got my first periods, I was told to keep it a secret from others — even from my father and brother. Later when this chapter appeared in our textbooks, our biology teacher skipped the subject.(Laughter)You know what I learned from it? I learned that it is really shameful to talk about it. I learned to be ashamed of my body. I learned to stay unaware of periods in order to stay decent.Research in various parts of India shows that three out of every 10 girls are not aware of menstruation at the time of their first periods. And in some parts of Rajasthan this number is as high as nine out of 10 girls being unaware of it. You'd be surprised to know that most of the girls that I have spoken to, who did not know about periods at the time of their first menstruation thought that they have got blood cancer and they're going to die soon.Menstrual hygiene is a very important risk factor for reproductive tract infections. But in India, only 12 percent of girls and women have access to hygienic ways of managing their periods. If you do the math, 88 percent of girls and women use unhygienic ways to manage their periods.I was one of them. I grew up in a small town called Garhwa, in Jharkhand, where even buying a sanitary napkin is considered shameful. So when I started getting my periods, I began with using rags. After every use I would wash and reuse them. But to store them, I would hide and keep it in a dark, damp place so that nobody finds out that I'm menstruating. Due to repeated washing the rags would become coarse, and I would often get rashes and infections using them.I wore these already for five years until I moved out of that town. Another issue that periods brought in my life those of the social restrictions that are imposed upon our girls and women when they're on their periods. I think you all must be aware of it, but I'll still list it for the few who don't.I was not allowed to touch or eat pickles. I was not allowed to sit on the sofa or some other family member's bed. I had to wash my bed sheet after every period, even if it was not stained. I was considered impure and forbidden from worshipping or touching any object of religious importance. You'll find signposts outside temples denying the entry of menstruating girls and women.Ironically, most of the time it is the older woman who imposes such restrictions on younger girls in a family. After all, they have grown up accepting such restrictions as norms. And in the absence of any intervention, it is the myth and misconception that propagate from generation to generation.During my years of work in this field, I have even come across stories where girls have to eat and wash their dishes separately. They're not allowed to take baths during periods, and in some households they are even secluded from other family members. About 85 percent of girls and women in India would follow one or more restrictive customs on their periods every month. Can you imagine what this does to the self-esteem and self-confidence of a young girl? The psychological trauma that this inflicts, affecting her personality, her academic performance and every single aspect of growing up during her early formative years?I religiously followed all these restrictive customs for 13 years, until a discussion with my partner, Tuhin, changed my perception about menstruation forever. In 2009, Tuhin and I were pursuing our postgraduation in design. We fell in love with each other and I was at ease discussing periods with him. Tuhin knew little about periods.(Laughter)He was astonished to know that girls get painful cramps and we bleed every month.(Laughter)Yeah. He was completely shocked to know about the restrictions that are imposed upon menstruating girls and women by their own families and their society. In order to help me with my cramps, he would go on the Internet and learn more about menstruation. When he shared his findings with me, I realized how little I knew about menstruation myself. And many of my beliefs actually turned out to be myths.That's when we wondered: if we, being so well educated, were so ill-informed about menstruation, there would be millions of girls out there who would be ill-informed, too. To study — to understand the problem better, I undertook a year-long research to study the lack of awareness about menstruation and the root cause behind it.While it is generally believed that menstrual unawareness and misconception is a rural phenomenon, during my research, I found that it is as much an urban phenomenon as well. And it exists with the educated urban class, also. While talking to many parents and teachers, I found that many of them actually wanted to educate girls about periods before they have started getting their menstrual cycle. And — but they lacked the proper means themselves. And since it is a taboo, they feel inhibition and shameful in talking about it.Girls nowadays get their periods in classes six and seven, but our educational curriculum teaches girls about periods only in standard eight and nine. And since it is a taboo, teachers still skip the subject altogether.So school does not teach girls about periods, parents don't talk about it. Where do the girls go? Two decades ago and now — nothing has changed. I shared these finding with Tuhin and we wondered: What if we could create something that would help girls understand about menstruation on their own — something that would help parents and teachers talk about periods comfortably to young girls?During my research, I was collecting a lot of stories. These were stories of experiences of girls during their periods. These stories would make girls curious and interested in talking about menstruation in their close circle. That's what we wanted. We wanted something that would make the girls curious and drive them to learn about it. We wanted to use these stories to teach girls about periods.So we decided to create a comic book, where the cartoon characters would enact these stories and educate girls about menstruation in a fun and engaging way. To represent girls in their different phases of puberty, we have three characters. Pinki, who has not gotten her period yet, Jiya who gets her period during the narrative of the book and Mira who has already been getting her period. There is a fourth character, Priya Didi. Through her, girls come to know about the various aspects of growing up and menstrual hygiene management.While making the book, we took great care that none of the illustrations were objectionable in any way and that it is culturally sensitive. During our prototype testing, we found that the girls loved the book. They were keen on reading it and knowing more and more about periods on their own. Parents and teachers were comfortable in talking about periods to young girls using the book, and sometimes even boys were interested in reading it.(Laughter)(Applause)The comic book helped in creating an environment where menstruation ceased to be a taboo. Many of the volunteers took this prototype themselves to educate girls and take menstrual awareness workshops in five different states in India. And one of the volunteers took this prototype to educate young monks and took it to this monastery in Ladakh.We made the final version of the book, called ""Menstrupedia Comic"" and launched in September last year. And so far, more than 4,000 girls have been educated by using the book in India and —(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)And 10 different countries. We are constantly translating the book into different languages and collaborating with local organizations to make this book available in different countries.15 schools in different parts of India have made this book a part of their school curriculum to teach girls about menstruation.(Applause)I am amazed to see how volunteers, individuals, parents, teachers, school principals, have come together and taken this menstrual awareness drive to their own communities, have made sure that the girls learn about periods at the right age and helped in breaking this taboo.I dream of a future where menstruation is not a curse, not a disease, but a welcoming change in a girl's life. And I would —(Applause)And I would like to end this with a small request to all the parents here.Dear parents, if you would be ashamed of periods, your daughters would be, too. So please be period positive.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aditi_gupta_a_taboo_free_way_to_talk_about_periods
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"How do you find a dinosaur? Sounds impossible, doesn't it? It's not. And the answer relies on a formula that all paleontologists use. And I'm going to tell you the secret.First, find rocks of the right age. Second, those rocks must be sedimentary rocks. And third, layers of those rocks must be naturally exposed. That's it. Find those three things and get yourself on the ground, chances are good that you will find fossils.Now let me break down this formula. Organisms exist only during certain geological intervals. So you have to find rocks of the right age, depending on what your interests are. If you want to find trilobites, you have to find the really, really old rocks of the Paleozoic — rocks between a half a billion and a quarter-billion years old. Now, if you want to find dinosaurs, don't look in the Paleozoic, you won't find them. They hadn't evolved yet. You have to find the younger rocks of the Mesozoic, and in the case of dinosaurs, between 235 and 66 million years ago.Now, it's fairly easy to find rocks of the right age at this point, because the Earth is, to a coarse degree, geologically mapped. This is hard-won information. The annals of Earth history are written in rocks, one chapter upon the next, such that the oldest pages are on bottom and the youngest on top.Now, were it quite that easy, geologists would rejoice. It's not. The library of Earth is an old one. It has no librarian to impose order. Operating over vast swaths of time, myriad geological processes offer every possible insult to the rocks of ages. Most pages are destroyed soon after being written. Some pages are overwritten, creating difficult-to-decipher palimpsests of long-gone landscapes. Pages that do find sanctuary under the advancing sands of time are never truly safe. Unlike the Moon — our dead, rocky companion — the Earth is alive, pulsing with creative and destructive forces that power its geological metabolism. Lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts all date back to about the age of the Solar System. Moon rocks are forever. Earth rocks, on the other hand, face the perils of a living lithosphere. All will suffer ruination, through some combination of mutilation, compression, folding, tearing, scorching and baking.Thus, the volumes of Earth history are incomplete and disheveled. The library is vast and magnificent — but decrepit. And it was this tattered complexity in the rock record that obscured its meaning until relatively recently. Nature provided no card catalog for geologists — this would have to be invented. Five thousand years after the Sumerians learned to record their thoughts on clay tablets, the Earth's volumes remained inscrutable to humans. We were geologically illiterate, unaware of the antiquity of our own planet and ignorant of our connection to deep time.It wasn't until the turn of the 19th century that our blinders were removed, first, with the publication of James Hutton's ""Theory of the Earth,"" in which he told us that the Earth reveals no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end; and then, with the printing of William Smith's map of Britain, the first country-scale geological map, giving us for the first time predictive insight into where certain types of rocks might occur. After that, you could say things like, ""If we go over there, we should be in the Jurassic,"" or, ""If we go up over that hill, we should find the Cretaceous.""So now, if you want to find trilobites, get yourself a good geological map and go to the rocks of the Paleozoic. If you want to find dinosaurs like I do, find the rocks of Mesozoic and go there. Now of course, you can only make a fossil in a sedimentary rock, a rock made by sand and mud. You can't have a fossil in an igneous rock formed by magma, like a granite, or in a metamorphic rock that's been heated and squeezed. And you have to get yourself in a desert. It's not that dinosaurs particularly lived in deserts; they lived on every land mass and in every imaginable environment. It's that you need to go to a place that's a desert today, a place that doesn't have too many plants covering up the rocks, and a place where erosion is always exposing new bones at the surface. So find those three things: rocks of the right age, that are sedimentary rocks, in a desert, and get yourself on the ground, and you literally walk until you see a bone sticking out of the rock.Here's a picture that I took in Southern Patagonia. Every pebble that you see on the ground there is a piece of dinosaur bone. So when you're in that right situation, it's not a question of whether you'll find fossils or not; you're going to find fossils. The question is: Will you find something that is scientifically significant? And to help with that, I'm going to add a fourth part to our formula, which is this: get as far away from other paleontologists as possible.(Laughter)It's not that I don't like other paleontologists. When you go to a place that's relatively unexplored, you have a much better chance of not only finding fossils but of finding something that's new to science. So that's my formula for finding dinosaurs, and I've applied it all around the world.In the austral summer of 2004, I went to the bottom of South America, to the bottom of Patagonia, Argentina, to prospect for dinosaurs: a place that had terrestrial sedimentary rocks of the right age, in a desert, a place that had been barely visited by paleontologists. And we found this. This is a femur, a thigh bone, of a giant, plant-eating dinosaur. That bone is 2.2 meters across. That's over seven feet long.Now, unfortunately, that bone was isolated. We dug and dug and dug, and there wasn't another bone around. But it made us hungry to go back the next year for more. And on the first day of that next field season, I found this: another two-meter femur, only this time not isolated, this time associated with 145 other bones of a giant plant eater. And after three more hard, really brutal field seasons, the quarry came to look like this. And there you see the tail of that great beast wrapping around me. The giant that lay in this grave, the new species of dinosaur, we would eventually call ""Dreadnoughtus schrani."" Dreadnoughtus was 85 feet from snout to tail. It stood two-and-a-half stories at the shoulder, and all fleshed out in life, it weighed 65 tons. People ask me sometimes, ""Was Dreadnoughtus bigger than a T. rex?"" That's the mass of eight or nine T. rex.Now, one of the really cool things about being a paleontologist is when you find a new species, you get to name it. And I've always thought it a shame that these giant, plant-eating dinosaurs are too often portrayed as passive, lumbering platters of meat on the landscape.(Laughter)They're not. Big herbivores can be surly, and they can be territorial — you do not want to mess with a hippo or a rhino or a water buffalo. The bison in Yellowstone injure far more people than do the grizzly bears. So can you imagine a big bull, 65-ton Dreadnoughtus in the breeding season, defending a territory? That animal would have been incredibly dangerous, a menace to all around, and itself would have had nothing to fear. And thus the name, ""Dreadnoughtus,"" or, ""fears nothing.""Now, to grow so large, an animal like Dreadnoughtus would've had to have been a model of efficiency. That long neck and long tail help it radiate heat into the environment, passively controlling its temperature. And that long neck also serves as a super-efficient feeding mechanism. Dreadnoughtus could stand in one place and with that neck clear out a huge envelope of vegetation, taking in tens of thousands of calories while expending very few. And these animals evolved a bulldog-like wide-gait stance, giving them immense stability, because when you're 65 tons, when you're literally as big as a house, the penalty for falling over is death. Yeah, these animals are big and tough, but they won't take a blow like that. Dreadnoughtus falls over, ribs break and pierce lungs. Organs burst. If you're a big 65-ton Dreadnoughtus, you don't get to fall down in life — even once.Now, after this particular Dreadnoughtus carcass was buried and de-fleshed by a multitude of bacteria, worms and insects, its bones underwent a brief metamorphosis, exchanging molecules with the groundwater and becoming more and more like the entombing rock. As layer upon layer of sediment accumulated, pressure from all sides weighed in like a stony glove whose firm and enduring grip held each bone in a stabilizing embrace.And then came the long ... nothing. Epoch after epoch of sameness, nonevents without number. All the while, the skeleton lay everlasting and unchanging in perfect equilibrium within its rocky grave. Meanwhile, Earth history unfolded above. The dinosaurs would reign for another 12 million years before their hegemony was snuffed out in a fiery apocalypse. The continents drifted. The mammals rose. The Ice Age came.And then, in East Africa, an unpromising species of ape evolved the odd trick of sentient thought. These brainy primates were not particularly fast or strong. But they excelled at covering ground, and in a remarkable diaspora surpassing even the dinosaurs' record of territorial conquest, they dispersed across the planet, ravishing every ecosystem they encountered, along the way, inventing culture and metalworking and painting and dance and music and science and rocket ships that would eventually take 12 particularly excellent apes to the surface of the Moon.With seven billion peripatetic Homo sapiens on the planet, it was perhaps inevitable that one of them would eventually trod on the grave of the magnificent titan buried beneath the badlands of Southern Patagonia. I was that ape. And standing there, alone in the desert, it was not lost on me that the chance of any one individual entering the fossil record is vanishingly small. But the Earth is very, very old. And over vast tracts of time, the improbable becomes the probable. That's the magic of the geological record. Thus, multitudinous creatures living and dying on an old planet leave behind immense numbers of fossils, each one a small miracle, but collectively, inevitable.Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hits the Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs. This easily might not have been. But we only get one history, and it's the one that we have. But this particular reality was not inevitable. The tiniest perturbation of that asteroid far from Earth would have caused it to miss our planet by a wide margin. The pivotal, calamitous day during which the dinosaurs were wiped out, setting the stage for the modern world as we know it didn't have to be. It could've just been another day — a Thursday, perhaps — among the 63 billion days already enjoyed by the dinosaurs. But over geological time, improbable, nearly impossible events do occur. Along the path from our wormy, Cambrian ancestors to primates dressed in suits, innumerable forks in the road led us to this very particular reality. The bones of Dreadnoughtus lay underground for 77 million years. Who could have imagined that a single species of shrew-like mammal living in the cracks of the dinosaur world would evolve into sentient beings capable of characterizing and understanding the very dinosaurs they must have dreaded?I once stood at the head of the Missouri River and bestraddled it. There, it's nothing more than a gurgle of water that issues forth from beneath a rock in a boulder in a pasture, high in the Bitterroot Mountains. The stream next to it runs a few hundred yards and ends in a small pond. Those two streams — they look identical. But one is an anonymous trickle of water, and the other is the Missouri River. Now go down to the mouth of the Missouri, near St. Louis, and it's pretty obvious that that river is a big deal. But go up into the Bitterroots and look at the Missouri, and human prospection does not allow us to see it as anything special. Now go back to the Cretaceous Period and look at our tiny, fuzzball ancestors. You would never guess that they would amount to anything special, and they probably wouldn't have, were it not for that pesky asteroid.Now, make a thousand more worlds and a thousand more solar systems and let them run. You will never get the same result. No doubt, those worlds would be both amazing and amazingly improbable, but they would not be our world and they would not have our history. There are an infinite number of histories that we could've had. We only get one, and wow, did we ever get a good one. Dinosaurs like Dreadnoughtus were real. Sea monsters like the mosasaur were real. Dragonflies with the wingspan of an eagle and pill bugs the length of a car really existed.Why study the ancient past? Because it gives us perspective and humility. The dinosaurs died in the world's fifth mass extinction, snuffed out in a cosmic accident through no fault of their own. They didn't see it coming, and they didn't have a choice. We, on the other hand, do have a choice. And the nature of the fossil record tells us that our place on this planet is both precarious and potentially fleeting. Right now, our species is propagating an environmental disaster of geological proportions that is so broad and so severe, it can rightly be called the sixth extinction. Only unlike the dinosaurs, we can see it coming. And unlike the dinosaurs, we can do something about it. That choice is ours.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kenneth_lacovara_hunting_for_dinosaurs_showed_me_our_place_in_the_universe
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"How much do you need to know about a person before you'd feel comfortable making a loan?Suppose you wanted to lend 1,000 dollars to the person sitting two rows behind you. What would you need to know about that person before you'd feel comfortable?My mom came to the US from India in her late thirties. She's a doctor in Brooklyn, and she often lets friends and neighbors come to see her for health services, whether they can pay right away or not. I remember running into her patients with her at the grocery store or on the sidewalk, and sometimes they would come and pay her right on the spot for previous appointments. She would thank them, and ask them about their families and their health. She gave them credit because she trusted them.Most of us are like my mom. We would give credit to someone we know or that we live next to. But most of us are probably not going to lend to a stranger unless we know a little something about them.Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions don't know us on a personal level, but they do have a way of trusting us, and that's through our credit scores. Our credit scores have been created through an aggregation and analysis of our public consumer credit data. And because of them, we have pretty much easy access to all of the goods and services that we need, from getting electricity to buying a home, or taking a risk and starting a business.But ... there are 2.5 billion people around the world that don't have a credit score. That's a third of the world's population. They don't have a score because there are no formal public records on them — no bank accounts, no credit histories and no social security numbers. And because they don't have a score, they don't have access to the credit or financial products that can improve their lives. They are not trusted.So we wanted to find a way to build trust and to open up financial access for these 2.5 billion. So we created a mobile application that builds credit scores for them using mobile data. There are currently over one billion smartphones in emerging markets. And people are using them the same way that we do. They're texting their friends, they're looking up directions, they're browsing the Internet and they're even making financial transactions.Over time, this data is getting captured on our phones, and it provides a really rich picture of a person's life. Our customers give us access to this data and we capture it through our mobile application. It helps us understand the creditworthiness of people like Jenipher, a small-business owner in Nairobi, Kenya. Jenipher is 65 years old, and for decades has been running a food stall in the central business district. She has three sons who she put through vocational school, and she's also the leader of her local chama, or savings group.Jenipher's food stall does well. She makes just enough every day to cover her expenses. But she's not financially secure. Any emergency could force her into debt. And she has no discretionary income to improve her family's way of living, for emergencies, or for investing into growing her business. If Jenipher wants credit, her options are limited. She could get a microloan, but she'd have to form a group that could help vouch for her credibility. And even then, the loan sizes would be way too small to really have an impact on her business, averaging around 150 dollars. Loan sharks are always an option, but with interest rates that are well above 300 percent, they're financially risky. And because Jenipher doesn't have collateral or a credit history, she can't walk into a bank and ask for a business loan.But one day, Jenipher's son convinced her to download our application and apply for a loan. Jenipher answered a few questions on her phone and she gave us access to a few key data points on her device.And here's what we saw. So, bad news first. Jenipher had a low savings balance and no previous loan history. These are factors that would have thrown up a red flag to a traditional bank. But there were other points in her history that showed us a much richer picture of her potential. So for one, we saw that she made regular phone calls to her family in Uganda. Well, it turns out that the data shows a four percent increase in repayment among people who consistently communicate with a few close contacts. We could also see that though she traveled around a lot throughout the day, she actually had pretty regular travel patterns, and she was either at home or at her food stall. And the data shows a six percent increase in repayment among customers who are consistent with where they spend most of their time.We could also see that she communicated a lot with many different people throughout the day and that she had a strong support network. Our data shows that people who communicate with more than 58 different contacts tend to be more likely to be good borrowers. In Jenipher's case, she communicated with 89 different individuals, which showed a nine percent increase in her repayment.These are just some of the thousands of different data points that we look at to understand a person's creditworthiness. And after analyzing all of these different data points, we took the first risk and gave Jenipher a loan. This is data that would not be found on a paper trail or in any formal financial record. But it proves trust. By looking beyond income, we can see that people in emerging markets that may seem risky and unpredictable on the surface are actually willing and have the capacity to repay.Our credit scores have helped us deliver over 200,000 loans in Kenya in just the past year. And our repayment rates are above 90 percent — which, by the way, is in line with traditional bank repayment rates.With something as simple as a credit score, we're giving people the power to build their own futures. Our customers have used their loans for family expenses, emergencies, travel and for investing back into growing their businesses. They're now building better economies and communities where more people can succeed.Over the past two years of using our product, Jenipher has increased her savings by 60 percent. She's also started two additional food stalls and is now making plans for her own restaurant. She's applying for a small-business loan from a commercial bank, because she now has the credit history to prove she deserves it.I saw Jenipher in Nairobi just last week, and she told me how excited she was to get started. She said, ""Only my son believed I could do this. I didn't think this was for me."" She's lived her whole life believing that there was a part of the world that was closed off to her.Our job now is to open the world to Jenipher and the billions like her that deserve to be trusted.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shivani_siroya_a_smart_loan_for_people_with_no_credit_history_yet
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"So I'm an artist, but a little bit of a peculiar one. I don't paint. I can't draw. My shop teacher in high school wrote that I was a menace on my report card. You probably don't really want to see my photographs. But there is one thing I know how to do: I know how to program a computer. I can code.And people will tell me that 100 years ago, folks like me didn't exist, that it was impossible, that art made with data is a new thing, it's a product of our age, it's something that's really important to think of as something that's very ""now."" And that's true.But there is an art form that's been around for a very long time that's really about using information, abstract information, to make emotionally resonant pieces. And it's called music. We've been making music for tens of thousands of years, right? And if you think about what music is — notes and chords and keys and harmonies and melodies — these things are algorithms. These things are systems that are designed to unfold over time, to make us feel. I came to the arts through music. I was trained as a composer, and about 15 years ago, I started making pieces that were designed to look at the intersection between sound and image, to use an image to unveil a musical structure or to use a sound to show you something interesting about something that's usually pictorial.So what you're seeing on the screen is literally being drawn by the musical structure of the musicians onstage, and there's no accident that it looks like a plant, because the underlying algorithmic biology of the plant is what informed the musical structure in the first place. So once you know how to do this, once you know how to code with media, you can do some pretty cool stuff.This is a project I did for the Sundance Film Festival. Really simple idea: you take every Academy Award Best Picture, you speed it up to one minute each and string them all together. And so in 75 minutes, I can show you the history of Hollywood cinema. And what it really shows you is the history of editing in Hollywood cinema. So on the left, we've got Casablanca; on the right, we've got Chicago. And you can see that Casablanca is a little easier to read. That's because the average length of a cinematic shot in the 1940s was 26 seconds, and now it's around six seconds.This is a project that was inspired by some work that was funded by the US Federal Government in the early 2000s, to look at video footage and find a specific actor in any video. And so I repurposed this code to train a system on one person in our culture who would never need to be surveilled in that manner, which is Britney Spears. I downloaded 2,000 paparazzi photos of Britney Spears and trained my computer to find her face and her face alone. I can run any footage of her through it and will center her eyes in the frame, and this sort of is a little double commentary about surveillance in our society. We are very fraught with anxiety about being watched, but then we obsess over celebrity.What you're seeing on the screen here is a collaboration I did with an artist named Lián Amaris. What she did is very simple to explain and describe, but very hard to do. She took 72 minutes of activity, getting ready for a night out on the town, and stretched it over three days and performed it on a traffic island in slow motion in New York City. I was there, too, with a film crew. We filmed the whole thing, and then we reversed the process, speeding it up to 72 minutes again, so it looks like she's moving normally and the whole world is flying by.At a certain point, I figured out that what I was doing was making portraits. When you think about portraiture, you tend to think about stuff like this. The guy on the left is named Gilbert Stuart. He's sort of the first real portraitist of the United States. And on the right is his portrait of George Washington from 1796. This is the so-called Lansdowne portrait. And if you look at this painting, there's a lot of symbolism, right? We've got a rainbow out the window. We've got a sword. We've got a quill on the desk. All of these things are meant to evoke George Washington as the father of the nation.This is my portrait of George Washington. And this is an eye chart, only instead of letters, they're words. And what the words are is the 66 words in George Washington's State of the Union addresses that he uses more than any other president. So ""gentlemen"" has its own symbolism and its own rhetoric. And it's really kind of significant that that's the word he used the most. This is the eye chart for George W. Bush, who was president when I made this piece. And how you get there, from ""gentlemen"" to ""terror"" in 43 easy steps, tells us a lot about American history, and gives you a different insight than you would have looking at a series of paintings. These pieces provide a history lesson of the United States through the political rhetoric of its leaders. Ronald Reagan spent a lot of time talking about deficits. Bill Clinton spent a lot of time talking about the century in which he would no longer be president, but maybe his wife would be. Lyndon Johnson was the first President to give his State of the Union addresses on prime-time television; he began every paragraph with the word ""tonight."" And Richard Nixon, or more accurately, his speechwriter, a guy named William Safire, spent a lot of time thinking about language and making sure that his boss portrayed a rhetoric of honesty.This project is shown as a series of monolithic sculptures. It's an outdoor series of light boxes. And it's important to note that they're to scale, so if you stand 20 feet back and you can read between those two black lines, you have 20/20 vision.(Laughter)This is a portrait. And there's a lot of these. There's a lot of ways to do this with data. I started looking for a way to think about how I can do a more democratic form of portraiture, something that's more about my country and how it works. Every 10 years, we make a census in the United States. We literally count people, find out who lives where, what kind of jobs we've got, the language we speak at home. And this is important stuff — really important stuff. But it doesn't really tell us who we are. It doesn't tell us about our dreams and our aspirations.And so in 2010, I decided to make my own census. And I started looking for a corpus of data that had a lot of descriptions written by ordinary Americans. And it turns out that there is such a corpus of data that's just sitting there for the taking. It's called online dating.So in 2010, I joined 21 different online dating services, as a gay man, a straight man, a gay woman and a straight woman, in every zip code in America and downloaded about 19 million people's dating profiles — about 20 percent of the adult population of the United States. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is going to become really freaking obvious. Just go with me.(Laughter)So what I did was I sorted all this stuff by zip code. And I looked at word analysis. These are some dating profiles from 2010 with the word ""lonely"" highlighted. If you look at these things topographically, if you imagine dark colors to light colors are more use of the word, you can see that Appalachia is a pretty lonely place. You can also see that Nebraska ain't that funny. This is the kinky map, so what this is showing you is that the women in Alaska need to get together with the men in southern New Mexico, and have a good time. And I have this at a pretty granular level, so I can tell you that the men in the eastern half of Long Island are way more interested in being spanked than men in the western half of Long Island. This will be your one takeaway from this whole conference. You're going to remember that fact for, like, 30 years.(Laughter)When you bring this down to a cartographic level, you can make maps and do the same trick I was doing with the eye charts. You can replace the name of every city in the United States with the word people use more in that city than anywhere else. If you've ever dated anyone from Seattle, this makes perfect sense. You've got ""pretty."" You've got ""heartbreak."" You've got ""gig."" You've got ""cigarette."" They play in a band and they smoke. And right above that you can see ""email."" That's Redmond, Washington, which is the headquarters of the Microsoft Corporation. Some of these you can guess — so, Los Angeles is ""acting"" and San Francisco is ""gay."" Some are a little bit more heartbreaking. In Baton Rouge, they talk about being curvy; downstream in New Orleans, they still talk about the flood. Folks in the American capital will say they're interesting. People in Baltimore, Maryland, will say they're afraid. This is New Jersey. I grew up somewhere between ""annoying"" and ""cynical.""(Laughter) (Applause)And New York City's number one word is ""now,"" as in, ""Now I'm working as a waiter, but actually I'm an actor.""(Laughter)Or, ""Now I'm a professor of engineering at NYU, but actually I'm an artist."" If you go upstate, you see ""dinosaur."" That's Syracuse. The best place to eat in Syracuse, New York, is a Hell's Angels barbecue joint called Dinosaur Barbecue. That's where you would take somebody on a date. I live somewhere between ""unconditional"" and ""midsummer,"" in Midtown Manhattan. And this is gentrified North Brooklyn, so you've got ""DJ"" and ""glamorous"" and ""hipsters"" and ""urbane."" So that's maybe a more democratic portrait. And the idea was, what if we made red-state and blue-state maps based on what we want to do on a Friday night?This is a self-portrait. This is based on my email, about 500,000 emails sent over 20 years. You can think of this as a quantified selfie. So what I'm doing is running a physics equation based on my personal data. You have to imagine everybody I've ever corresponded with. It started out in the middle and it exploded with a big bang. And everybody has gravity to one another, gravity based on how much they've been emailing, who they've been emailing with. And it also does sentimental analysis, so if I say ""I love you,"" you're heavier to me. And you attract to my email addresses in the middle, which act like mainline stars. And all the names are handwritten.Sometimes you do this data and this work with real-time data to illuminate a specific problem in a specific city. This is a Walther PPK 9mm semiautomatic handgun that was used in a shooting in the French Quarter of New Orleans about two years ago on Valentine's Day in an argument over parking. Those are my cigarettes. This is the house where the shooting took place. This project involved a little bit of engineering. I've got a bike chain rigged up as a cam shaft, with a computer driving it. That computer and the mechanism are buried in a box. The gun's on top welded to a steel plate. There's a wire going through to the trigger, and the computer in the box is online. It's listening to the 911 feed of the New Orleans Police Department, so that anytime there's a shooting reported in New Orleans,(Gunshot sound)the gun fires. Now, there's a blank, so there's no bullet. There's big light, big noise and most importantly, there's a casing. There's about five shootings a day in New Orleans, so over the four months this piece was installed, the case filled up with bullets. You guys know what this is — you call this ""data visualization."" When you do it right, it's illuminating. When you do it wrong, it's anesthetizing. It reduces people to numbers. So watch out.One last piece for you. I spent the last summer as the artist in residence for Times Square. And Times Square in New York is literally the crossroads of the world. One of the things people don't notice about it is it's the most Instagrammed place on Earth. About every five seconds, someone commits a selfie in Times Square. That's 17,000 a day, and I have them all.(Laughter)These are some of them with their eyes centered.Every civilization, will use the maximum level of technology available to make art. And it's the responsibility of the artist to ask questions about what that technology means and how it reflects our culture.So I leave you with this: we're more than numbers. We're people, and we have dreams and ideas. And reducing us to statistics is something that's done at our peril.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/r_luke_dubois_insightful_human_portraits_made_from_data
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"Hello. This is my first trip, first time in life I'm outside of the walls of Gaza. I'm so happy to be here.(Applause)My ambition always was to be a pilot, to fly a plane, to feel free to fly the sky, to touch the sky. But that didn't happen. Simply, I live in Gaza, there is no airport. All borders are closed on every side. We live in one of the biggest prisons in the world. The only thing I can do is just to look up to the sky. On some days, we are lucky if we have electricity for four or five hours. When it's cold, we make a fire on the front or on the roof of our homes. Sometimes we make food, too.My job in Gaza is to arrange everything for journalists who come to my homeland to tell the stories about what's going on in Gaza. Many mornings, I had to go to the border area to collect a journalist. If anything should happen to the journalist, or if the journalist decides to cover a story the government doesn't want us to cover, bad things could happen.Navigating through my country helping journalists, filmmakers, news crews, is my working life. I believe my success comes from building a relationship not only with journalists and the news crews, but also with the communities in the Gaza Strip. These communities who don't want their stories to be told, I never looked to them as stories or numbers. But like me, they are human beings.I have built up many relationships over 10 years. And guess what? This gives me the chance to get access to people, to stories that others can't. In some certain situations, I feel, as a woman, I have more power. Many male journalists in my society, they want to cover a story about drug addiction in my country. That problem started when the Gaza tunnel was being built. With the siege on Gaza, tunnels brought people all the basic needs like food, building material, other stuff we needed. But not anymore, because the Egyptian side flooded them up with water and they are not working anymore. Drugs were being smuggled, and many young people got addicted, too. In the tradition of the Palestinian society, it's forbidden for men to enter the household. So, no male journalists get the story. But I did.I have a wonderful husband, a wonderful husband who supports me despite all the criticism he gets from the society. He's at home now with my two kids, and I have another one that's growing in here.(Applause)When I'm working, I call him every two hours, and he knows if he doesn't hear from me, he should call my contact, the one who gives me access to the story, which is the one who I trust.One of the times in Gaza, during the kidnapping of the British journalist Alan Johnston, I was asked by an American magazine to set up a meeting with the kidnappers in Gaza, and I did. The journalist covering the story and I were asked to meet outside of his hotel. They came, they picked us up in a black van with black windows, they were wearing masks on that day. And they drove us away, far away in the middle of a field. They took our cell phones and we did the interview with the kidnapper outside in that field. I was so scared that day, a day I will never forget.So, why do I do what I do? I do it because I believe if I didn't, a huge part of the story about Gaza will be missing. There are some more stories I could tell you about my country. And not all of them are bad. I love my country, despite the terrible situation we live in — siege, poverty, unemployment — but there is life. There are people who are dreamers and amazing people full of energy. We have wonderful music, and a great music school. We have parkour dancers who dance in the rubble of their homes. And Gaza is the only place in the Arab world where Muslims and Christians live in strong brotherhood.(Applause)During the time of war, the hardest part for me is leaving the house early in the morning, leaving my children. I take a picture of them everyday because I never know if I will make it back to them. Being a fixer and a journalist is difficult and dangerous in Gaza. But when I hear the sound of the shelling or the sound of the bombing, I just head straight toward it, because I want to be there first, because these stories should be told.When my children were small and we heard the sound of the war, I used to tell them that they were fireworks. Now they are older, they understand. I do have terrible nightmares because of all that I witnessed during war times, especially these lifeless bodies of young children. I still remember a little girl, her name is Hala. She's the only survivor from her family. Her picture will be with me forever. I will never forget her.I'm proud that I can stand here and be here today with you. I'm proud that I can tell you stories, sad and happy, stories about my small corner of the world, Gaza. I'm proud that I am the first female fixer working in Gaza. And the funny thing is they call me Mr. Rambo in Gaza.(Laughter)I hope one day, I will get the chance to tell the stories of all other women, all other amazing women I know in my country. I hope that one day I can help other women in my country to be fixers like me. And of course sometimes, I feel I can't do this work anymore, it's just too much for me. But I remember these words: ""Don't limit your challenge, but challenge your limit. Don't allow others to stand in front of your dreams.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ameera_harouda_why_i_put_myself_in_danger_to_tell_the_stories_of_gaza
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"Will we do whatever it takes to tackle climate change?I come at this question not as a green campaigner, in fact, I confess to be rather hopeless at recycling. I come at it as a professional observer of financial policy making and someone that wonders how history will judge us.One day, this ring that belonged to my grandfather will pass to my son, Charlie. And I wonder what his generation and perhaps the one that follows will make of the two lives this ring has worked.My grandfather was a coal miner. In his time, burning fossil fuels for energy and for allowing economies to develop was accepted. We know now that that is not the case because of the greenhouse gases that coal produces. But today, I fear it's the industry in which I work that will be judged more harshly because of its impact on the climate — more harshly than my grandfather's industry, even.I work, of course, in the banking industry, which will be remembered for its crisis in 2008 — a crisis that diverted the attention and finances of governments away from some really, really important promises, like promises made at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to mobilize 100 billion dollars a year to help developing countries move away from burning fossil fuels and transition to using cleaner energy. That promise is already in jeopardy. And that's a real problem, because that transition to cleaner energy needs to happen sooner rather than later.Firstly, because greenhouse gases, once released, stay in the atmosphere for decades. And secondly, if a developing economy builds its power grid around fossil fuels today, it's going to be way more costly to change later on. So for the climate, history may judge that the banking crisis happened at just the wrong time. The story need not be this gloomy, though.Three years ago, I argued that governments could use the tools deployed to save the financial system to meet other global challenges. And these arguments are getting stronger, not weaker, with time. Let's take a brief reminder of what those tools looked like.When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the central banks of the US and UK began buying bonds issued by their own governments in a policy known as ""quantitative easing."" Depending on what happens to those bonds when they mature, this is money printing by another name. And boy, did they print. The US alone created four trillion dollars' worth of its own currency. This was not done in isolation. In a remarkable act of cooperation, the 188 countries that make up the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, agreed to issue 250 billion dollars' worth of their own currency — the Special Drawing Right — to boost reserves around the world.When the financial crisis moved to Europe, the European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, promised ""to do whatever it takes."" And they did. The Bank of Japan repeated those words — that exact same commitment — to do ""whatever it takes"" to reflate their economy. In both cases, ""whatever it takes"" meant trillions of dollars more in money-printing policies that continue today. What this shows is that when faced with some global challenges, policy makers are able to act collectively, with urgency, and run the risks of unconventional policies like money printing.So, let's go back to that original question: Can we print money for climate finance? Three years ago, the idea of using money in this way was something of a taboo. Once you break down and dismantle the idea that money is a finite resource, governments can quickly get overwhelmed by demands from their people to print more and more money for other causes: education, health care, welfare — even defense.And there are some truly terrible historical examples of money printing — uncontrolled money printing — leading to hyperinflation. Think: Weimar Republic in 1930; Zimbabwe more recently, in 2008, when the prices of basic goods like bread are doubling every day. But all of this is moving the public debate forward, so much so, that money printing for the people is now discussed openly in the financial media, and even in some political manifestos.But it's important the debate doesn't stop here, with printing national currencies. Because climate change is a shared global problem, there are some really compelling reasons why we should be printing that international currency that's issued by the IMF, to fund it. The Special Drawing Right, or SDR, is the IMF's electronic unit of account that governments use to transfer funds amongst each other. Think of it as a peer-to-peer payment network, like Bitcoin, but for governments.And it's truly global. Each of the 188 members of the IMF hold SDR quotas as part of their foreign exchange reserves. These are national stores of wealth that countries keep to protect themselves against currency crises. And that global nature is why, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the IMF issued those extra 250 billion dollars — because it served as a collective global action that safeguarded countries large and small in one fell swoop.But here — here's the intriguing part. More than half of those extra SDRs that were printed in 2009 — 150 billion dollars' worth — went to developed market countries who, for the most part, have a modest need for these foreign exchange reserves, because they have flexible exchange rates. So those extra reserves that were printed in 2009, in the end, for developed market countries at least, weren't really needed. And they remain unused today.So here's an idea. As a first step, why don't we start spending those unused, those extra SDRs that were printed in 2009, to combat climate change?They could, for example, be used to buy bonds issued by the UN's Green Climate Fund. This was a fund created in 2009, following that climate agreement in Copenhagen. And it was designed to channel funds towards developing countries to meet their climate projects. It's been one of the most successful funds of its type, raising almost 10 billion dollars. But if we use those extra SDRs that were issued, it helps governments get back on track, to meet that promise of 100 billion dollars a year that was derailed by the financial crisis.It could also — it could also serve as a test case. If the inflationary consequences of using SDRs in this way are benign, it could be used to justify the additional, extra issuance of SDRs, say, every five years, again, with the commitment that developed-market countries would direct their share of the new reserves to the Green Climate Fund.Printing international money in this way has several advantages over printing national currencies. The first is it's really easy to argue that spending money to mitigate climate change benefits everyone. No one section of society benefits from the printing press over another. That problem of competing claims is mitigated. It's also fair to say that because it takes so many countries to agree to issue these extra SDRs, it's highly unlikely that money printing would get out of control. What you end up with is a collective, global action aimed — and it's controlled global action — aimed at a global good. And, as we've learned with the money-printing schemes, whatever concerns we have can be allayed by rules.So, for example, the issuance of these extra SDRs every five years could be capped, such that this international currency is never more than five percent of global foreign exchange reserves. That's important because it would allay well, let's say, the ridiculous concerns that the US might have that the SDR could ever challenge the dollar's dominant role in international finance. And in fact, I think the only thing that the SDR would likely steal from the dollar under this scheme is its nickname, the ""greenback."" Because even with that cap in place, the IMF could have followed up its issuance — its massive issuance of SDRs in 2009 — with a further 200 billion dollars of SDRs in 2014.So hypothetically, that would mean that developed countries could have contributed up to 300 billion dollars' worth of SDRs to the Green Climate Fund. That's 30 times what it has today. And you know, as spectacular as that sounds, it's only just beginning to look like ""whatever it takes.""And just to think what amazing things could be done with that money, consider this: in 2009, Norway promised one billion dollars of its reserves to Brazil if they followed through on their goals on deforestation. That program has since delivered a 70 percent reduction in deforestation in the past decade. That's saving 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the equivalent of taking all American cars off the roads for three whole years. So what could we do with 300 other pay-for-performance climate projects like that, organized on a global scale? We could take cars off the roads for a generation.So, let's not quibble about whether we can afford to fund climate change. The real question is: Do we care enough about future generations to take the very same policy risks we took to save the financial system? After all, we could do it, we did do it and we are doing it today.We must, must, must do ""whatever it takes.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_metcalfe_a_provocative_way_to_finance_the_fight_against_climate_change
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"For the next 16 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey that is probably the biggest dream of humanity: to understand the code of life.So for me, everything started many, many years ago when I met the first 3D printer. The concept was fascinating. A 3D printer needs three elements: a bit of information, some raw material, some energy, and it can produce any object that was not there before.I was doing physics, I was coming back home and I realized that I actually always knew a 3D printer. And everyone does. It was my mom.(Laughter)My mom takes three elements: a bit of information, which is between my father and my mom in this case, raw elements and energy in the same media, that is food, and after several months, produces me. And I was not existent before.So apart from the shock of my mom discovering that she was a 3D printer, I immediately got mesmerized by that piece, the first one, the information. What amount of information does it take to build and assemble a human? Is it much? Is it little? How many thumb drives can you fill?Well, I was studying physics at the beginning and I took this approximation of a human as a gigantic Lego piece. So, imagine that the building blocks are little atoms and there is a hydrogen here, a carbon here, a nitrogen here. So in the first approximation, if I can list the number of atoms that compose a human being, I can build it. Now, you can run some numbers and that happens to be quite an astonishing number. So the number of atoms, the file that I will save in my thumb drive to assemble a little baby, will actually fill an entire Titanic of thumb drives — multiplied 2,000 times. This is the miracle of life. Every time you see from now on a pregnant lady, she's assembling the biggest amount of information that you will ever encounter. Forget big data, forget anything you heard of. This is the biggest amount of information that exists.(Applause)But nature, fortunately, is much smarter than a young physicist, and in four billion years, managed to pack this information in a small crystal we call DNA. We met it for the first time in 1950 when Rosalind Franklin, an amazing scientist, a woman, took a picture of it. But it took us more than 40 years to finally poke inside a human cell, take out this crystal, unroll it, and read it for the first time. The code comes out to be a fairly simple alphabet, four letters: A, T, C and G. And to build a human, you need three billion of them. Three billion. How many are three billion? It doesn't really make any sense as a number, right?So I was thinking how I could explain myself better about how big and enormous this code is. But there is — I mean, I'm going to have some help, and the best person to help me introduce the code is actually the first man to sequence it, Dr. Craig Venter. So welcome onstage, Dr. Craig Venter.(Applause)Not the man in the flesh, but for the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page-by-page, letter-by-letter: 262,000 pages of information, 450 kilograms, shipped from the United States to Canada thanks to Bruno Bowden, Lulu.com, a start-up, did everything. It was an amazing feat.But this is the visual perception of what is the code of life. And now, for the first time, I can do something fun. I can actually poke inside it and read. So let me take an interesting book ... like this one. I have an annotation; it's a fairly big book. So just to let you see what is the code of life. Thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of letters. And they apparently make sense. Let's get to a specific part. Let me read it to you:(Laughter)""AAG, AAT, ATA.""To you it sounds like mute letters, but this sequence gives the color of the eyes to Craig. I'll show you another part of the book. This is actually a little more complicated.Chromosome 14, book 132:(Laughter)As you might expect.(Laughter)""ATT, CTT, GATT.""This human is lucky, because if you miss just two letters in this position — two letters of our three billion — he will be condemned to a terrible disease: cystic fibrosis. We have no cure for it, we don't know how to solve it, and it's just two letters of difference from what we are.A wonderful book, a mighty book, a mighty book that helped me understand and show you something quite remarkable. Every one of you — what makes me, me and you, you — is just about five million of these, half a book. For the rest, we are all absolutely identical. Five hundred pages is the miracle of life that you are. The rest, we all share it. So think about that again when we think that we are different. This is the amount that we share.So now that I have your attention, the next question is: How do I read it? How do I make sense out of it? Well, for however good you can be at assembling Swedish furniture, this instruction manual is nothing you can crack in your life.(Laughter)And so, in 2014, two famous TEDsters, Peter Diamandis and Craig Venter himself, decided to assemble a new company. Human Longevity was born, with one mission: trying everything we can try and learning everything we can learn from these books, with one target — making real the dream of personalized medicine, understanding what things should be done to have better health and what are the secrets in these books.An amazing team, 40 data scientists and many, many more people, a pleasure to work with. The concept is actually very simple. We're going to use a technology called machine learning. On one side, we have genomes — thousands of them. On the other side, we collected the biggest database of human beings: phenotypes, 3D scan, NMR — everything you can think of. Inside there, on these two opposite sides, there is the secret of translation. And in the middle, we build a machine. We build a machine and we train a machine — well, not exactly one machine, many, many machines — to try to understand and translate the genome in a phenotype. What are those letters, and what do they do? It's an approach that can be used for everything, but using it in genomics is particularly complicated. Little by little we grew and we wanted to build different challenges. We started from the beginning, from common traits. Common traits are comfortable because they are common, everyone has them.So we started to ask our questions: Can we predict height? Can we read the books and predict your height? Well, we actually can, with five centimeters of precision. BMI is fairly connected to your lifestyle, but we still can, we get in the ballpark, eight kilograms of precision. Can we predict eye color? Yeah, we can. Eighty percent accuracy. Can we predict skin color? Yeah we can, 80 percent accuracy. Can we predict age? We can, because apparently, the code changes during your life. It gets shorter, you lose pieces, it gets insertions. We read the signals, and we make a model.Now, an interesting challenge: Can we predict a human face? It's a little complicated, because a human face is scattered among millions of these letters. And a human face is not a very well-defined object. So, we had to build an entire tier of it to learn and teach a machine what a face is, and embed and compress it. And if you're comfortable with machine learning, you understand what the challenge is here.Now, after 15 years — 15 years after we read the first sequence — this October, we started to see some signals. And it was a very emotional moment. What you see here is a subject coming in our lab. This is a face for us. So we take the real face of a subject, we reduce the complexity, because not everything is in your face — lots of features and defects and asymmetries come from your life. We symmetrize the face, and we run our algorithm. The results that I show you right now, this is the prediction we have from the blood.(Applause)Wait a second. In these seconds, your eyes are watching, left and right, left and right, and your brain wants those pictures to be identical. So I ask you to do another exercise, to be honest. Please search for the differences, which are many. The biggest amount of signal comes from gender, then there is age, BMI, the ethnicity component of a human. And scaling up over that signal is much more complicated. But what you see here, even in the differences, lets you understand that we are in the right ballpark, that we are getting closer. And it's already giving you some emotions.This is another subject that comes in place, and this is a prediction. A little smaller face, we didn't get the complete cranial structure, but still, it's in the ballpark. This is a subject that comes in our lab, and this is the prediction. So these people have never been seen in the training of the machine. These are the so-called ""held-out"" set. But these are people that you will probably never believe. We're publishing everything in a scientific publication, you can read it.But since we are onstage, Chris challenged me. I probably exposed myself and tried to predict someone that you might recognize. So, in this vial of blood — and believe me, you have no idea what we had to do to have this blood now, here — in this vial of blood is the amount of biological information that we need to do a full genome sequence. We just need this amount. We ran this sequence, and I'm going to do it with you. And we start to layer up all the understanding we have. In the vial of blood, we predicted he's a male. And the subject is a male. We predict that he's a meter and 76 cm. The subject is a meter and 77 cm. So, we predicted that he's 76; the subject is 82. We predict his age, 38. The subject is 35. We predict his eye color. Too dark. We predict his skin color. We are almost there. That's his face.Now, the reveal moment: the subject is this person.(Laughter)And I did it intentionally. I am a very particular and peculiar ethnicity. Southern European, Italians — they never fit in models. And it's particular — that ethnicity is a complex corner case for our model. But there is another point. So, one of the things that we use a lot to recognize people will never be written in the genome. It's our free will, it's how I look. Not my haircut in this case, but my beard cut. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to, in this case, transfer it — and this is nothing more than Photoshop, no modeling — the beard on the subject. And immediately, we get much, much better in the feeling.So, why do we do this? We certainly don't do it for predicting height or taking a beautiful picture out of your blood. We do it because the same technology and the same approach, the machine learning of this code, is helping us to understand how we work, how your body works, how your body ages, how disease generates in your body, how your cancer grows and develops, how drugs work and if they work on your body.This is a huge challenge. This is a challenge that we share with thousands of other researchers around the world. It's called personalized medicine. It's the ability to move from a statistical approach where you're a dot in the ocean, to a personalized approach, where we read all these books and we get an understanding of exactly how you are. But it is a particularly complicated challenge, because of all these books, as of today, we just know probably two percent: four books of more than 175.And this is not the topic of my talk, because we will learn more. There are the best minds in the world on this topic. The prediction will get better, the model will get more precise. And the more we learn, the more we will be confronted with decisions that we never had to face before about life, about death, about parenting.So, we are touching the very inner detail on how life works. And it's a revolution that cannot be confined in the domain of science or technology. This must be a global conversation. We must start to think of the future we're building as a humanity. We need to interact with creatives, with artists, with philosophers, with politicians. Everyone is involved, because it's the future of our species. Without fear, but with the understanding that the decisions that we make in the next year will change the course of history forever.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/riccardo_sabatini_how_to_read_the_genome_and_build_a_human_being
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"I was three months pregnant with twins when my husband Ross and I went to my second sonogram.I was 35 years old at the time, and I knew that that meant we had a higher risk of having a child with a birth defect. So, Ross and I researched the standard birth defects, and we felt reasonably prepared.Well, nothing would have prepared us for the bizarre diagnosis that we were about to face. The doctor explained that one of our twins, Thomas, had a fatal birth defect called anencephaly. This means that his brain was not formed correctly because part of his skull was missing. Babies with this diagnosis typically die in utero or within a few minutes, hours or days of being born. But the other twin, Callum, appeared to be healthy, as far as the doctor could tell, and these twins were identical, genetically identical.So after a lot of questions about how this could have possibly happened, a selective reduction was mentioned, and while this procedure was not impossible, it posed some unique risks for the healthy twin and for me, so we decided to carry the pregnancy to term. So there I was, three months pregnant, with two trimesters ahead of me, and I had to find a way to manage my blood pressure and my stress. And it felt like having a roommate point a loaded gun at you for six months. But I stared down the barrel of that gun for so long that I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. While there was nothing we could do to prevent the tragedy, I wanted to find a way for Thomas's brief life to have some kind of positive impact.So I asked my nurse about organ, eye and tissue donation. She connected with our local organ-procurement organization, the Washington Regional Transplant Community. WRTC explained to me that Thomas would probably be too small at birth to donate for transplant, and I was shocked: I didn't even know you could be rejected for that. But they said that he would be a good candidate to donate for research. This helped me see Thomas in a new light. As opposed to just a victim of a disease, I started to see him as a possible key to unlock a medical mystery.On March 23, 2010, the twins were born, and they were both born alive. And just like the doctor said, Thomas was missing the top part of his skull, but he could nurse, drink from a bottle, cuddle and grab our fingers like a normal baby, and he slept in our arms. After six days, Thomas died in Ross's arms surrounded by our family.We called WRTC, who sent a van to our home and brought him to Children's National Medical Center. A few hours later, we got a call to say that the recovery was a success, and Thomas's donations would be going to four different places. His cord blood would go to Duke University. His liver would go to a cell-therapy company called Cytonet in Durham. His corneas would go to Schepens Eye Research Institute, which is part of Harvard Medical School, and his retinas would go to the University of Pennsylvania.A few days later, we had a funeral with our immediate family, including baby Callum, and we basically closed this chapter in our lives. But I did find myself wondering, what's happening now? What are the researchers learning? And was it even worthwhile to donate?WRTC invited Ross and I to a grief retreat, and we met about 15 other grieving families who had donated their loved one's organs for transplant. Some of them had even received letters from the people who received their loved one's organs, saying thank you. I learned that they could even meet each other if they'd both sign a waiver, almost like an open adoption. And I was so excited, I thought maybe I could write a letter or I could get a letter and learn about what happened. But I was disappointed to learn that this process only exists for people who donate for transplant. So I was jealous. I had transplant envy, I guess.(Laughter)But over the years that followed, I learned a lot more about donation, and I even got a job in the field.And I came up with an idea. I wrote a letter that started out, ""Dear Researcher."" I explained who I was, and I asked if they could tell me why they requested infant retinas in March of 2010, and I asked if my family could visit their lab. I emailed it to the eye bank that arranged the donation, the Old Dominion Eye Foundation, and asked if they could send it to the right person. They said that they had never done this before, and they couldn't guarantee a response, but they wouldn't be an obstacle, and they would deliver it.Two days later, I got a response from Dr. Arupa Ganguly of the University of Pennsylvania. She thanked me for the donation, and she explained that she is studying retinoblastoma, which is a deadly cancer of the retina that affects children under the age of five, and she said that yes, we were invited to visit her lab.So next we talked on the phone, and one of the first things she said to me was that she couldn't possibly imagine how we felt, and that Thomas had given the ultimate sacrifice, and that she seemed to feel indebted to us. So I said, ""Nothing against your study, but we didn't actually pick it. We donated to the system, and the system chose your study. I said, ""And second of all, bad things happen to children every day, and if you didn't want these retinas, they would probably be buried in the ground right now. So to be able to participate in your study gives Thomas's life a new layer of meaning. So, never feel guilty about using this tissue.""Next, she explained to me how rare it was. She had placed a request for this tissue six years earlier with the National Disease Research Interchange. She got only one sample of tissue that fit her criteria, and it was Thomas's.Next, we arranged a date for me to come visit the lab, and we chose March 23, 2015, which was the twins' fifth birthday. After we hung up, I emailed her some pictures of Thomas and Callum, and a few weeks later, we received this T-shirt in the mail.A few months later, Ross, Callum and I piled in the car and we went for a road trip. We met Arupa and her staff, and Arupa said that when I told her not to feel guilty, that it was a relief, and that she hadn't seen it from our perspective. She also explained that Thomas had a secret code name. The same way Henrietta Lacks is called HeLa, Thomas was called RES 360. RES means research, and 360 means he was the 360th specimen over the course of about 10 years.She also shared with us a unique document, and it was the shipping label that sent his retinas from DC to Philadelphia. This shipping label is like an heirloom to us now. It's the same way that a military medal or a wedding certificate might be.Arupa also explained that she is using Thomas's retina and his RNA to try to inactivate the gene that causes tumor formation, and she even showed us some results that were based on RES 360. Then she took us to the freezer and she showed us the two samples that she still has that are still labeled RES 360. There's two little ones left. She said she saved it because she doesn't know when she might get more. After this, we went to the conference room and we relaxed and we had lunch together, and the lab staff presented Callum with a birthday gift. It was a child's lab kit. And they also offered him an internship.(Laughter)So in closing, I have two simple messages today. One is that most of us probably don't think about donating to research. I know I didn't. I think I'm a normal person. But I did it. It was a good experience, and I recommend it, and it brought my family a lot of peace. And second is if you work with human tissue and you wonder about the donor and about the family, write them a letter. Tell them you received it, tell them what you're working on, and invite them to visit your lab, because that visit may be even more gratifying for you than it is for them. And I'd also like to ask you a favor. If you're ever successful in arranging one of these visits, please tell me about it.The other part of my family's story is that we ended up visiting all four facilities that received Thomas's donations. And we met amazing people doing inspiring work. The way I see it now is that Thomas got into Harvard, Duke and Penn —(Laughter)And he has a job at Cytonet, and he has colleagues and he has coworkers who are in the top of their fields. And they need him in order to do their job. And a life that once seemed brief and insignificant revealed itself to be vital, everlasting and relevant. And I only hope that my life can be as relevant.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_gray_how_my_son_s_short_life_made_a_lasting_difference
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"Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon, which has meant different things at different times. But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common: they began with a dream. And the bolder the dream, the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it. And this is why the greatest designers are almost always the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades.This has been the case throughout history, all the way back to the year 300 BC, when a 13-year-old became the king of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country. He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power through military conquest. And his design skills — improbable though it sounds — would be essential in enabling him to do so.At the time, all weapons were made by hand to different specifications. So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle, they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows from their bow. This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat and very vulnerable, too. Ying solved this problem by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically, so they were interchangeable. And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields and every other form of weaponry. His formidably equipped army won batter after battle, and within 15 years, his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors, to found the mighty Chinese Empire.Now, no one, of course, would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time — why would they? And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively but with tremendous ingenuity to achieve his ends. And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer, who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted. This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard.This was the golden age of piracy, where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas. Colonial trade was flourishing, and piracy was highly profitable. And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils, they needed to attack their enemies so brutally that they would surrender on sight. So in other words, they could take the ships without wasting ammunition, or incurring casualties.So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard by playing the part of a merciless brute. He wore heavy jackets and big hats to accentuate his height. He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face. He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder. He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight, so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack. And like many pirates of that era, he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones, because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries, that their meaning was instantly recognizable, even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas: surrender or you'll suffer. So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight.Put like that, it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design, and why their deadly symbol —(Laughter)there's more — why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones was a precursor of today's logos, rather like the big red letters standing behind me, but of course with a different message.(Laughter)Yet design was also used to nobler ends by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer, the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale. Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone. Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family, who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Crimean War. Once there, she swiftly realized that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there, in the filthy, fetid wards, than they were of battle wounds. So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics to be designed and built.Back in Britain, she mounted another campaign, this time for civilian hospitals, and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them. The Nightingale ward, as it is called, dominated hospital design for decades to come, and elements of it are still used today. But by then, design was seen as a tool of the Industrial Age. It was formalized and professionalized, but it was restricted to specific roles and generally applied in pursuit of commercial goals rather than being used intuitively, as Florence Nightingale, Blackbeard and Ying Zheng had done.By the 20th century, this commercial ethos was so powerful, that any designers who deviated from it risked being seen as cranks or subversives.Now among them is one of my great design heroes, the brilliant László Moholy-Nagy. He was the Hungarian artist and designer whose experiments with the impact of technology on daily life were so powerful that they still influence the design of the digital images we see on our phone and computer screens. He radicalized the Bauhaus Design School in 1920s Germany, and yet some of his former colleagues shunned him when he struggled to open a new Bauhaus in Chicago years later. Moholy's ideas were as bold and incisive as ever, but his approach to design was too experimental, as was his insistence on seeing it, as he put it, as an attitude, not a profession to be in tune with the times.And sadly, the same applied to another design maverick: Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was yet another brilliant design visionary and design activist, who was completely committed to designing a sustainable society in such a forward-thinking way that he started talking about the importance of environmentalism in design in the 1920s. Now he, despite his efforts, was routinely mocked as a crank by many in the design establishment, and admittedly, some of his experiments failed, like the flying car that never got off the ground. And yet, the geodesic dome, his design formula to build an emergency shelter from scraps of wood, metal, plastic, bits of tree, old blankets, plastic sheeting — just about anything that's available at the time — is one of the greatest feats of humanitarian design, and has provided sorely needed refuge to many, many people in desperate circumstances ever since.Now, it was the courage and verve of radical designers like Bucky and Moholy that drew me to design. I began my career as a news journalist and foreign correspondent. I wrote about politics, economics and corporate affairs, and I could have chosen to specialize in any of those fields. But I picked design, because I believe it's one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to improve our quality of life.Thank you, fellow TED design buffs.(Applause)And greatly as I admire the achievements of professional designers, which have been extraordinary and immense, I also believe that design benefits hugely from the originality, the lateral thinking and the resourcefulness of its rebels and renegades. And we're living at a remarkable moment in design, because this is a time when the two camps are coming closer together. Because even very basic advances in digital technology have enabled them to operate increasingly independently, in or out of a commercial context, to pursue ever more ambitious and eclectic objectives.So in theory, basic platforms like crowdfunding, cloud computing, social media are giving greater freedom to professional designers and giving more resources for the improvisational ones, and hopefully, a more receptive response to their ideas.Now, some of my favorite examples of this are in Africa, where a new generation of designers are developing incredible Internet of Things technologies to fulfill Florence Nightingale's dream of improving healthcare in countries where more people now have access to cell phones than to clean, running water.And among them is Arthur Zang. He's a young, Cameroonian design engineer who has a adapted a tablet computer into the Cardiopad, a mobile heart-monitoring device. It can be used to monitor the hearts of patients in remote, rural areas. The data is then sent on a cellular network to well-equipped hospitals hundreds of miles away for analysis. And if any problems are spotted by the specialists there, a suitable course of treatment is recommended. And this of course saves many patients from making long, arduous, expensive and often pointless journeys to those hospitals, and makes it much, much likelier that their hearts will actually be checked.Arthur Zang started working on the Cardiopad eight years ago, in his final year at university. But he failed to persuade any conventional sources to give him investment to get the project off the ground. He posted the idea on Facebook, where a Cameroonian government official saw it and managed to secure a government grant for him. He's now developing not only the Cardiopad, but other mobile medical devices to treat different conditions.And he isn't alone, because there are many other inspiring and enterprising designers who are also pursuing extraordinary projects of their own. And I'm going to finish by looking at just a few of them. One is Peek Vision. This is a group of doctors and designers in Kenya, who've developed an Internet of Things technology of their own, as a portable eye examination kit. Then there's Gabriel Maher, who is developing a new design language to enable us to articulate the subtleties of our changing gender identities, without recourse to traditional stereotypes.All of these designers and many more are pursuing their dreams, by the making the most of their newfound freedom, with the discipline of professional designers and the resourcefulness of rebels and renegades. And we all stand to benefit.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alice_rawsthorn_pirates_nurses_and_other_rebel_designers
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"When I think about dreams, like many of you, I think about this picture. I was eight when I watched Neil Armstrong step off the Lunar Module onto the surface of the Moon. I had never seen anything like it before, and I've never seen anything like it since.We got to the Moon for one simple reason: John Kennedy committed us to a deadline. And in the absence of that deadline, we would still be dreaming about it. Leonard Bernstein said two things are necessary for great achievement: a plan and not quite enough time.(Laughter)Deadlines and commitments are the great and fading lessons of Apollo. And they are what give the word ""moonshot"" its meaning. And our world is in desperate need of political leaders willing to set bold deadlines for the achievement of daring dreams on the scale of Apollo again.When I think about dreams, I think about the drag queens of LA and Stonewall and millions of other people risking everything to come out when that was really dangerous, and of this picture of the White House lit up in rainbow colors, yes —(Applause) —celebrating America's gay and lesbian citizens' right to marry. It is a picture that in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined when I was 18 and figuring out that I was gay and feeling estranged from my country and my dreams because of it.I think about this picture of my family that I never dreamed I could ever have —(Applause) —and of our children holding this headline I never dreamed could ever be printed about the Supreme Court ruling.We need more of the courage of drag queens and astronauts.(Laughter)(Applause)But I want to talk about the need for us to dream in more than one dimension, because there was something about Apollo that I didn't know when I was 8, and something about organizing that the rainbow colors over. Of the 30 astronauts in the original Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, only seven marriages survived. Those iconic images of the astronauts bouncing on the Moon obscure the alcoholism and depression on Earth.Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, asked during the time of Apollo, ""What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?"" And what can we gain by the right to marry if we are not able to cross the acrimony and emotional distance that so often separates us from our love? And not just in marriage. I have seen the most hurtful, destructive, tragic infighting in LGBT and AIDS and breast cancer and non-profit activism, all in the name of love.Thomas Merton also wrote about wars among saints and that ""there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace."" Too often our dreams become these compartmentalized fixations on some future that destroy our ability to be present for our lives right now. Our dreams of a better life for some future humanity or some other humanity in another country alienate us from the beautiful human beings sitting next to us at this very moment.Well, that's just the price of progress, we say. You can go to the Moon or you can have stability in your family life. And we can't conceive of dreaming in both dimensions at the same time. And we don't set the bar much higher than stability when it comes to our emotional life. Which is why our technology for talking to one another has gone vertical, our ability to listen and understand one another has gone nowhere. Our access to information is through the roof, our access to joy, grounded. But this idea, that our present and our future are mutually exclusive, that to fulfill our potential for doing we have to surrender our profound potential for being, that the number of transistors on a circuit can be doubled and doubled, but our capacity for compassion and humanity and serenity and love is somehow limited is a false and suffocating choice.Now, I'm not suggesting simply the uninspiring idea of more work-life balance. What good is it for me to spend more time with my kids at home if my mind is always somewhere else while I'm doing it? I'm not even talking about mindfulness. Mindfulness is all of a sudden becoming a tool for improving productivity.(Laughter)Right?I'm talking about dreaming as boldly in the dimension of our being as we do about industry and technology. I'm talking about an audacious authenticity that allows us to cry with one another, a heroic humility that allows us to remove our masks and be real. It is our inability to be with one another, our fear of crying with one another, that gives rise to so many of the problems we are frantically trying to solve in the first place, from Congressional gridlock to economic inhumanity.(Applause)I'm talking about what Jonas Salk called an Epoch B, a new epoch in which we become as excited about and curious about and scientific about the development of our humanity as we are about the development of our technology.We should not shrink from this opportunity simply because we don't really understand it. There was a time when we didn't understand space. Or because we're more used to technology and activism. That is the very definition of being stuck in a comfort zone. We are now very comfortable imagining unimaginable technological achievement. In 2016, it is the dimension of our being itself that cries out for its fair share of our imagination.Now, we're all here to dream, but maybe if we're honest about it, each of us chasing our own dream. You know, looking at the name tags to see who can help me with my dream, sometimes looking right through one another's humanity. I can't be bothered with you right now. I have an idea for saving the world. Right?(Laughter)Years ago, once upon a time, I had this beautiful company that created these long journeys for heroic civic engagement. And we had this mantra: ""Human. Kind. Be Both."" And we encouraged people to experiment outrageously with kindness. Like, ""Go help everybody set up their tents."" And there were a lot of tents.(Laughter)""Go buy everybody Popsicles."" ""Go help people fix their flat tires even though you know the dinner line is going to get longer.""And people really took us up on this, so much so that if you got a flat tire on the AIDS ride, you had trouble fixing it, because there were so many people there asking you if you needed help.For a few days, for tens of thousands of people, we created these worlds that everybody said were the way they wish the world could always be. What if we experimented with creating that kind of world these next few days? And instead of going up to someone and asking them, ""What do you do?"" ask them, ""So what are your dreams?"" or ""What are your broken dreams?"" You know, ""TED."" Tend to Each other's Dreams.(Applause)Maybe it's ""I want to stay sober"" or ""I want to build a tree house with my kid."" You know, instead of going up to the person everybody wants to meet, go up to the person who is all alone and ask them if they want to grab a cup of coffee.I think what we fear most is that we will be denied the opportunity to fulfill our true potential, that we are born to dream and we might die without ever having the chance.Imagine living in a world where we simply recognize that deep, existential fear in one another and love one another boldly because we know that to be human is to live with that fear. It's time for us to dream in multiple dimensions simultaneously, and somewhere that transcends all of the wondrous things we can and will and must do lies the domain of all the unbelievable things we could be.It's time we set foot into that dimension and came out about the fact that we have dreams there, too. If the Moon could dream, I think that would be its dream for us. It's an honor to be with you.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_dream_we_haven_t_dared_to_dream
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"Do I look real to you? Hope so. I have no idea if you're seeing this, but I'm just going to look ahead and trust that you're there. I've drawn a semicircle in the sand in front of me so I don't walk past it and look like I'm floating in midair.Right now I'm standing in the open air, on a beach under a palm tree, in the exact spot where your stage used to be. I have 12 minutes with you. I set a limit. My wife Navid once said that infinite possibility is a creator's worst enemy. For example, this dress: I'd asked her to design something that a priest might have worn in 23rd-century Cairo. But we only had three days to make it, and the only fabric we had was an old duvet cover that another resident left behind. But she did it, and it's perfect. And she looked at it and said, ""Proof of concept — creation needs constraint."" So with these 12 minutes, I'm going to tell you about my greatest discovery.For my whole life, my obsession has been eternal life, as I know it is so many of yours. You may be happy to know that your research will pay off. I am 318 years old. The average human lifespan is now 432 years, and my work has been to extend the human lifespan indefinitely. And I've never questioned that someday, we'll reach a point where we'll be content. But the opposite keeps happening: the longer we live, the longer we want to live, the less we want to die.Who can blame us? The universe is so big. There won't ever not be more to see. Just yesterday, I was reading about how you can take out a boat on Europa and sail from island to island all over the planet, and some of the islands have villages that you can stay and visit and sleep under the shadow of Jupiter. And then there's this other island where there's just one songwriter who sits and plays mandolin for the ocean. And then there are others where there's no one and there never has been, and so you go just for the pleasure of touching your foot to sand that no foot has ever touched before. You could spend 400 years doing just that.Right now the Moon is rising in the Northeast. I can see the cities on it with my naked eye. They're connected like nerve clusters: Mariapolis on the South Pole, and Ramachandran on the Equator. And New Tehran in the Sea of Tranquility.That's where Navid and I met. We were both artists downtown. The day we met, we were passing each other in Azadi Square, and we bumped shoulders. And I turned to apologize and she, without saying hello or introducing herself or anything, said, ""Well, why do you think we didn't just pass through each other?"" And first of all, I thought, ""Who the hell are you?"" But second, the question annoyed me, because the answer is so simple. I said, ""We didn't pass through each other because elementary particles have mass and because the space between elementary particles is filled with the binding energy that also has the properties of mass, and we've known that for 800 years."" She must have been in one of those moods where she likes to mess with strangers. Or maybe she was just flirting with me, because she looked at me and said, ""I thought you'd say that. Think deeper."" And then she took off her belt, this belt that I'm wearing now, and she said, ""Our universe is built so that particles have mass. Without that basic constraint, we'd have just passed right through each other at the speed of light and never even known.""And that's how our romance began. Navid and I never ran out of things to talk about. Never. It was incredible. It was like we were both heroes climbing up into a mountain range together and we kept arriving at new vistas, and these new, perfect constellations of words would come out of us to describe them. And we'd forget them as soon as we made them, and throw them over our shoulder and go on to the next thing, on and up. Or one time, Navid said that our talk was like we were always making bread, and that we were always adding in a little more flour and a little more water, and folding it in and turning it over and never getting around to baking it.If my obsession was eternal life, Navid's obsession was touch. She had a genius for it. All of her work revolved around it. My body was like a canvas for her, and she would draw her fingertip down over my face so slowly that I couldn't feel it moving. And she was obsessed with the exact moment when I would stop being able to tell the difference between her body and mine. Or she would just lie across me and dig her shoulder into mine and say, ""Pilar, why does this feel so good?"" I'd say, ""I don't know!"" And she always had a facetious answer for her facetious question, but the answer I remember today is, ""It feels good because the universe chose its constraints, and we are its art.""It's always funny what you think the future is going to be like versus what it turns out to be. In your time, scientists thought humans could freeze themselves and wake up in the future. And they did — but then they died. In your time, scientists thought humans could replace organs and extend life for hundreds of years. And they did, but eventually, they died anyway. In your time, Earth is the only place people live. In my time, Earth is the place people come to die.So when Navid started to show the signs, our friends assumed I would do what everyone does, which is say goodbye and send her to Earth, so that none of us would have to look at her or be around her or think about her and her ... failure to keep living. More than anything, they didn't want to be around her actual physical body. They kept referring to it as ""declining,"" even though she herself was fascinated by it, the changes it was going through, following the rules of its nature day by day, independent of her will. I did send Navid to Earth. But I came with her. I remember a friend of ours, just before we left, said, ""I just think it's arrogant, like the rules don't apply to you, like you think your love is that special."" But I did.So, even here on Earth, I kept working on how to extend life. It didn't occur to me that there could be any other response. I kept going back to that thing that Navid said to me that day in Azadi Square, that without that basic constraint — a universe that granted mass to matter — we would not exist. That's one rule. Another rule is that all mass is subject to entropy. And there is no way to be in this universe without mass. I know. I tried everything. I tried creating a photon box where the Higgs field was altered. I tried recording all subatomic movements in my body and replaying them on closed loop. Nothing worked.But my final innovation was to create a coil dimension with the boundaries of a body in which time moved infinitely slower, but whose projection would appear to move in normal time. That body would then appear in our universe as a hologram — here but not here. When I realized I'd done it, I ran to her room, so happy to tell her I'd done it, moving through space almost normally to all eyes, even to my own, and went to lie down next to her, and forgot, and fell right through her. I'd found a way to eternal life, at the expense of the one thing Navid loved most, which was to touch and be touched. And she threw me out. I still got to watch, though.Humans live 400 years now, and we still die. And when death comes, the dying still pick at their bedsheets, and their arms break out in blue and violet blooms on the insides, and their breaths get further and further apart, like they're falling asleep.I've always thought that what gives a life meaning is adventure. And death is just a problem we haven't discovered the solution to yet. But maybe a life has meaning only because it ends. Maybe that's the paradox: constraints don't constrain, they allow perfect freedom.(Sighs)There was a thunderstorm here this morning. There is another forecast for tonight, but for now the sky is clear. I can't feel the wind here, but I just asked one of the caretakers who passed by what it felt like, and she said it felt warm, like melted butter. An answer worthy of my wife. I have to find my way back to the flesh. Until then, I take up no space but the space you give me.","https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_byrne_a_sci_fi_vision_of_love_from_a_318_year_old_hologram
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"Today, I am going to show you how this tablet and this virtual-reality headset that I'm wearing are going to completely revolutionize science education. And I'm also going to show you how it can make any science teacher more than twice as effective. But before I show you how all of this is possible, let's talk briefly about why improving the quality of science education is so vitally important.If you think about it, the world is growing incredibly fast. And with that growth comes a whole list of growing challenges, challenges such as dealing with global warming, solving starvation and water shortages and curing diseases, to name just a few.And who, exactly, is going to help us solve all of these great challenges? Well, to a very last degree, it is these young students. This is the next generation of young, bright scientists. And in many ways, we all rely on them for coming up with new, great innovations to help us solve all these challenges ahead of us. And so a couple of years back, my cofounder and I were teaching university students just like these, only the students we were teaching looked a little bit more like this here.(Laughter)And yes, this is really the reality out there in way too many universities around the world: students that are bored, disengaged and sometimes not even sure why they're learning about a topic in the first place.So we started looking around for new, innovative teaching methods, but what we found was quite disappointing. We saw that books were being turned into e-books, blackboards were being turned into YouTube videos and lecture hall monologues were being turned into MOOCs — massive online open courses. And if you think about it, all we're really doing here is taking the same content and the same format, and bringing it out to more students — which is great, don't get me wrong, that is really great — but the teaching method is still more or less the same, no real innovation there.So we started looking elsewhere. What we found was that flight simulators had been proven over and over again to be far more effective when used in combination with real, in-flight training to train the pilots. And so we thought to ourselves: Why not just apply that to science? Why not build a virtual laboratory simulator?Well, we did it. We basically set out to create a fully simulated, one-to-one, virtual reality laboratory simulator, where the students could perform experiments with mathematical equations that would simulate what would happen in a real-world lab. But not just simple simulations — we would also create advanced simulations with top universities like MIT, to bring out cutting-edge cancer research to these students. And suddenly, the universities could save millions of dollars by letting the students perform virtual experiments before they go into the real laboratory. And not only that; now, they could also understand — even on a molecular level inside the machine — what is happening to the machines. And then they could suddenly perform dangerous experiments in the labs as well. For instance also here, learning about salmonella bacteria, which is an important topic that many schools cannot teach for good safety reasons. And we, of course, quiz the students and then give the teachers a full dashboard, so they fully understand where the students are at.But we didn't stop there, because we had seen just how important meaning is for the students' engagement in the class. So we brought in game designers to create fun and engaging stories. For instance, here in this case, where the students have to solve a mysterious CSI murder case using their core science skills.And the feedback we got when we launched all of this was quite overwhelmingly positive. Here we have 300 students, all passionately solving CSI murder cases while learning core science skills. And what I love the most about this is really when the students come up to me sometimes afterwards, all surprised and a little confused, and say, ""I just spent two hours in this virtual lab, and ... and I didn't check Facebook.""(Laughter)That's how engaging and immersive this really is for the students.And so, to investigate whether this really worked, a learning psychologist did a study with 160 students — that was from Stanford University and Technical University of Denmark. And what they did is split the students into two groups. One group would only use the virtual laboratory simulations, the other group would only use traditional teaching methods, and they had the same amount of time. Then, interestingly, they gave the students a test before and after the experiment, so they could clearly measure the learning impact of the students. And what they found was a surprisingly high 76 percent increase in the learning effectiveness when using virtual laboratories over traditional teaching methods.But even more interestingly, the second part of this study investigated what the teacher's impact was on the learning. And what they found was that when you combined the virtual laboratories with teacher-led coaching and mentoring, then we saw a total 101 percent increase in the learning effectiveness, which effectively doubles the science teacher's impact with the same amount of time spent. So a couple of months back, we started asking ourselves — we have a wonderful team now of learning psychologists and teachers and scientists and game developers — and we started asking ourselves: How can we keep ourselves to our promise of constantly reimagining education?And today, I am really excited to be presenting what we came up with and have been working incredibly hard to create. I will explain briefly what this is. Basically, I take my mobile phone — most students already have these, smartphones — and I plug it into this virtual-reality headset, a low-cost headset. And now what I can effectively do is, I can literally step into this virtual world. We'll have some of you in the audience also get to try this, because it is really something that you have to try to fully feel how immersive it really is. It literally feels like I just stepped inside this virtual lab. Do you see me up on the screen?Audience: Yes.Michael Bodekaer: Great! Awesome.So basically, I have just turned my mobile phone into a fully simulated, million-dollar Ivy League laboratory with all this amazing equipment that I can interact with. I can, for instance, pick up the pipette and do experiments with it. I have my E-Ggel, my PCR and — oh, look there, I have my next-generation sequencing machine, and there I even have my electron microscope. I mean, who's carrying around an electron microscope in their pocket? And here I have my machine, I can do different experiments on the machine. And over here I have the door, I can go into other experiments, I can perform in the laboratories. And here, I have my learning tablet. This is an intelligent tablet that allows me to read about relevant theory. As you can see, I can interact with it. I can watch videos and see content that is relevant to the experiment that I'm performing right now. Then over here, I have Marie. She is my teacher — my lab assistant — and what she does is guides me through this whole laboratory. And very soon, the teachers will be able to literally teleport themselves into this virtual world that I'm in right now and help me, guide me, through this whole experiment.And now before I finalize this, I want to show you an even cooler thing, I think — something you cannot even do in real laboratories. This is a PCR machine. I'm now going to start this experiment. And what I just did is literally shrunk myself a million times into the size of a molecule — and it really feels like it, you have to try this. So now it feels like I'm standing inside the machine and I'm seeing all the DNA, and I see the molecules. I see the polymerase and the enzymes and so forth. And I can see how in this case, DNA is being replicated millions of times, just like it's happening inside your body right now. And I can really feel and understand how all of this works.Now, I hope that gives you a little bit of a sense of the possibilities in these new teaching methods. And I want to also emphasize that everything you just saw also works on iPads and laptops without the headsets. I say that for a very important reason. In order for us to really empower and inspire the next generation of scientists, we really need teachers to drive the adoption of new technologies in the classroom. And so in many ways, I believe that the next big, quantum leap in science education lies no longer with the technology, but rather with the teachers' decision to push forward and adopt these technologies inside the classrooms. And so it is our hope that more universities and schools and teachers will collaborate with technology companies to realize this full potential.And so, lastly, I'd like to leave you with a little story that really inspires me. And that is the story of Jack Andraka. Some of you might already know him. Jack invented a new, groundbreaking low-cost test for pancreatic cancer at the age 15. And when Jack shares his story of how he did this huge breakthrough, he also explains that one thing almost prevented him from making this breakthrough. And that was that he did not have access to real laboratories, because he was too inexperienced to be allowed in.Now, imagine if we could bring Ivy League, million-dollar virtual laboratories out to all these students just like Jack, all over the world, and give them the latest, greatest, most fancy machines you can imagine that would quite literally make any scientist in here jump up and down out of pure excitement. And then imagine how that would empower and inspire a whole new generation of young and bright scientists, ready to innovate and change the world.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bodekaer_this_virtual_lab_will_revolutionize_science_class
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"So this is a talk about gene drives, but I'm going to start by telling you a brief story. 20 years ago, a biologist named Anthony James got obsessed with the idea of making mosquitos that didn't transmit malaria.It was a great idea, and pretty much a complete failure. For one thing, it turned out to be really hard to make a malaria-resistant mosquito. James managed it, finally, just a few years ago, by adding some genes that make it impossible for the malaria parasite to survive inside the mosquito.But that just created another problem. Now that you've got a malaria-resistant mosquito, how do you get it to replace all the malaria-carrying mosquitos? There are a couple options, but plan A was basically to breed up a bunch of the new genetically-engineered mosquitos release them into the wild and hope that they pass on their genes. The problem was that you'd have to release literally 10 times the number of native mosquitos to work. So in a village with 10,000 mosquitos, you release an extra 100,000. As you might guess, this was not a very popular strategy with the villagers.(Laughter)Then, last January, Anthony James got an email from a biologist named Ethan Bier. Bier said that he and his grad student Valentino Gantz had stumbled on a tool that could not only guarantee that a particular genetic trait would be inherited, but that it would spread incredibly quickly. If they were right, it would basically solve the problem that he and James had been working on for 20 years.As a test, they engineered two mosquitos to carry the anti-malaria gene and also this new tool, a gene drive, which I'll explain in a minute. Finally, they set it up so that any mosquitos that had inherited the anti-malaria gene wouldn't have the usual white eyes, but would instead have red eyes. That was pretty much just for convenience so they could tell just at a glance which was which.So they took their two anti-malarial, red-eyed mosquitos and put them in a box with 30 ordinary white-eyed ones, and let them breed. In two generations, those had produced 3,800 grandchildren. That is not the surprising part. This is the surprising part: given that you started with just two red-eyed mosquitos and 30 white-eyed ones, you expect mostly white-eyed descendants. Instead, when James opened the box, all 3,800 mosquitos had red eyes.When I asked Ethan Bier about this moment, he became so excited that he was literally shouting into the phone. That's because getting only red-eyed mosquitos violates a rule that is the absolute cornerstone of biology, Mendelian genetics. I'll keep this quick, but Mendelian genetics says when a male and a female mate, their baby inherits half of its DNA from each parent. So if our original mosquito was aa and our new mosquito is aB, where B is the anti-malarial gene, the babies should come out in four permutations: aa, aB, aa, Ba. Instead, with the new gene drive, they all came out aB. Biologically, that shouldn't even be possible.So what happened? The first thing that happened was the arrival of a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR in 2012. Many of you have probably heard about CRISPR, so I'll just say briefly that CRISPR is a tool that allows researchers to edit genes very precisely, easily and quickly. It does this by harnessing a mechanism that already existed in bacteria. Basically, there's a protein that acts like a scissors and cuts the DNA, and there's an RNA molecule that directs the scissors to any point on the genome you want. The result is basically a word processor for genes. You can take an entire gene out, put one in, or even edit just a single letter within a gene. And you can do it in nearly any species.OK, remember how I said that gene drives originally had two problems? The first was that it was hard to engineer a mosquito to be malaria-resistant. That's basically gone now, thanks to CRISPR. But the other problem was logistical. How do you get your trait to spread? This is where it gets clever.A couple years ago, a biologist at Harvard named Kevin Esvelt wondered what would happen if you made it so that CRISPR inserted not only your new gene but also the machinery that does the cutting and pasting. In other words, what if CRISPR also copied and pasted itself. You'd end up with a perpetual motion machine for gene editing. And that's exactly what happened. This CRISPR gene drive that Esvelt created not only guarantees that a trait will get passed on, but if it's used in the germline cells, it will automatically copy and paste your new gene into both chromosomes of every single individual. It's like a global search and replace, or in science terms, it makes a heterozygous trait homozygous.So, what does this mean? For one thing, it means we have a very powerful, but also somewhat alarming new tool. Up until now, the fact that gene drives didn't work very well was actually kind of a relief. Normally when we mess around with an organism's genes, we make that thing less evolutionarily fit. So biologists can make all the mutant fruit flies they want without worrying about it. If some escape, natural selection just takes care of them.What's remarkable and powerful and frightening about gene drives is that that will no longer be true. Assuming that your trait does not have a big evolutionary handicap, like a mosquito that can't fly, the CRISPR-based gene drive will spread the change relentlessly until it is in every single individual in the population. Now, it isn't easy to make a gene drive that works that well, but James and Esvelt think that we can.The good news is that this opens the door to some remarkable things. If you put an anti-malarial gene drive in just 1 percent of Anopheles mosquitoes, the species that transmits malaria, researchers estimate that it would spread to the entire population in a year. So in a year, you could virtually eliminate malaria. In practice, we're still a few years out from being able to do that, but still, a 1,000 children a day die of malaria. In a year, that number could be almost zero. The same goes for dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever.And it gets better. Say you want to get rid of an invasive species, like get Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. All you have to do is release a gene drive that makes the fish produce only male offspring. In a few generations, there'll be no females left, no more carp. In theory, this means we could restore hundreds of native species that have been pushed to the brink.OK, that's the good news, this is the bad news. Gene drives are so effective that even an accidental release could change an entire species, and often very quickly. Anthony James took good precautions. He bred his mosquitos in a bio-containment lab and he also used a species that's not native to the US so that even if some did escape, they'd just die off, there'd be nothing for them to mate with. But it's also true that if a dozen Asian carp with the all-male gene drive accidentally got carried from the Great Lakes back to Asia, they could potentially wipe out the native Asian carp population. And that's not so unlikely, given how connected our world is. In fact, it's why we have an invasive species problem. And that's fish. Things like mosquitos and fruit flies, there's literally no way to contain them. They cross borders and oceans all the time.OK, the other piece of bad news is that a gene drive might not stay confined to what we call the target species. That's because of gene flow, which is a fancy way of saying that neighboring species sometimes interbreed. If that happens, it's possible a gene drive could cross over, like Asian carp could infect some other kind of carp. That's not so bad if your drive just promotes a trait, like eye color. In fact, there's a decent chance that we'll see a wave of very weird fruit flies in the near future. But it could be a disaster if your drive is deigned to eliminate the species entirely.The last worrisome thing is that the technology to do this, to genetically engineer an organism and include a gene drive, is something that basically any lab in the world can do. An undergraduate can do it. A talented high schooler with some equipment can do it.Now, I'm guessing that this sounds terrifying.(Laughter)Interestingly though, nearly every scientist I talk to seemed to think that gene drives were not actually that frightening or dangerous. Partly because they believe that scientists will be very cautious and responsible about using them.(Laughter)So far, that's been true. But gene drives also have some actual limitations. So for one thing, they work only in sexually reproducing species. So thank goodness, they can't be used to engineer viruses or bacteria. Also, the trait spreads only with each successive generation. So changing or eliminating a population is practical only if that species has a fast reproductive cycle, like insects or maybe small vertebrates like mice or fish. In elephants or people, it would take centuries for a trait to spread widely enough to matter.Also, even with CRISPR, it's not that easy to engineer a truly devastating trait. Say you wanted to make a fruit fly that feeds on ordinary fruit instead of rotting fruit, with the aim of sabotaging American agriculture. First, you'd have to figure out which genes control what the fly wants to eat, which is already a very long and complicated project. Then you'd have to alter those genes to change the fly's behavior to whatever you'd want it to be, which is an even longer and more complicated project. And it might not even work, because the genes that control behavior are complex. So if you're a terrorist and have to choose between starting a grueling basic research program that will require years of meticulous lab work and still might not pan out, or just blowing stuff up? You'll probably choose the later.This is especially true because at least in theory, it should be pretty easy to build what's called a reversal drive. That's one that basically overwrites the change made by the first gene drive. So if you don't like the effects of a change, you can just release a second drive that will cancel it out, at least in theory.OK, so where does this leave us? We now have the ability to change entire species at will. Should we? Are we gods now? I'm not sure I'd say that. But I would say this: first, some very smart people are even now debating how to regulate gene drives. At the same time, some other very smart people are working hard to create safeguards, like gene drives that self-regulate or peter out after a few generations. That's great. But this technology still requires a conversation. And given the nature of gene drives, that conversation has to be global. What if Kenya wants to use a drive but Tanzania doesn't? Who decides whether to release a gene drive that can fly?I don't have the answer to that question. All we can do going forward, I think, is talk honestly about the risks and benefits and take responsibility for our choices. By that I mean, not just the choice to use a gene drive, but also the choice not to use one. Humans have a tendency to assume that the safest option is to preserve the status quo. But that's not always the case. Gene drives have risks, and those need to be discussed, but malaria exists now and kills 1,000 people a day. To combat it, we spray pesticides that do grave damage to other species, including amphibians and birds.So when you hear about gene drives in the coming months, and trust me, you will be hearing about them, remember that. It can be frightening to act, but sometimes, not acting is worse.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_kahn_gene_editing_can_now_change_an_entire_species_forever
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"Imagine that you invented a device that can record my memories, my dreams, my ideas, and transmit them to your brain. That would be a game-changing technology, right? But in fact, we already possess this device, and it's called human communication system and effective storytelling. To understand how this device works, we have to look into our brains. And we have to formulate the question in a slightly different manner.Now we have to ask how these neuron patterns in my brain that are associated with my memories and ideas are transmitted into your brains. And we think there are two factors that enable us to communicate. First, your brain is now physically coupled to the sound wave that I'm transmitting to your brain. And second, we developed a common neural protocol that enabled us to communicate.So how do we know that? In my lab in Princeton, we bring people to the fMRI scanner and we scan their brains while they are either telling or listening to real-life stories. And to give you a sense of the stimulus we are using, let me play 20 seconds from a story that we used, told by a very talented storyteller, Jim O'Grady.(Audio) Jim O'Grady: So I'm banging out my story and I know it's good, and then I start to make it better —(Laughter)by adding an element of embellishment. Reporters call this ""making shit up.""(Laughter)And they recommend against crossing that line. But I had just seen the line crossed between a high-powered dean and assault with a pastry. And I kinda liked it.""Uri Hasson: OK, so now let's look into your brain and see what's happening when you listen to these kinds of stories. And let's start simple — let's start with one listener and one brain area: the auditory cortex that processes the sounds that come from the ear. And as you can see, in this particular brain area, the responses are going up and down as the story is unfolding. Now we can take these responses and compare them to the responses in other listeners in the same brain area. And we can ask: How similar are the responses across all listeners?So here you can see five listeners. And we start to scan their brains before the story starts, when they're simply lying in the dark and waiting for the story to begin. As you can see, the brain area is going up and down in each one of them, but the responses are very different, and not in sync. However, immediately as the story is starting, something amazing is happening.(Audio) JO: So I'm banging out my story and I know it's good, and then I start to make it —UH: Suddenly, you can see that the responses in all of the subjects lock to the story, and now they are going up and down in a very similar way across all listeners. And in fact, this is exactly what is happening now in your brains when you listen to my sound speaking. We call this effect ""neural entrainment."" And to explain to you what is neural entrainment, let me first explain what is physical entrainment.So, we'll look and see five metronomes. Think of these five metronomes as five brains. And similar to the listeners before the story starts, these metronomes are going to click, but they're going to click out of phase.(Clicking)Now see what will happen when I connect them together by placing them on these two cylinders.(Clicking)Now these two cylinders start to rotate. This rotation vibration is going through the wood and is going to couple all the metronomes together. And now listen to the click.(Synchronized clicking)This is what you call physical entrainment. Now let's go back to the brain and ask: What's driving this neural entrainment? Is it simply the sounds that the speaker is producing? Or maybe it's the words. Or maybe it's the meaning that the speaker is trying to convey.So to test it, we did the following experiment. First, we took the story and played it backwards. And that preserved many of the original auditory features, but removed the meaning. And it sounds something like that.(Audio) JO: (Unintelligible)And we flashed colors in the two brains to indicate brain areas that respond very similarly across people. And as you can see, this incoming sound induced entrainment or alignment in all of the brains in auditory cortices that process the sounds, but it didn't spread deeper into the brain.Now we can take these sounds and build words out of it. So if we take Jim O'Grady and scramble the words, we'll get a list of words.(Audio) JO: ... an animal ... assorted facts ... and right on ... pie man ... potentially ... my storiesUH: And you can see that these words start to induce alignment in early language areas, but not more than that. Now we can take the words and start to build sentences out of them.(Audio) JO: And they recommend against crossing that line. He says: ""Dear Jim, Good story. Nice details. Didn't she only know about him through me?""UH: Now you can see that the responses in all the language areas that process the incoming language become aligned or similar across all listeners. However, only when we use the full, engaging, coherent story do the responses spread deeper into the brain into higher-order areas, which include the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex, and make all of them respond very similarly. And we believe that these responses in higher-order areas are induced or become similar across listeners because of the meaning conveyed by the speaker, and not by words or sound. And if we are right, there's a strong prediction over here if I tell you the exact same ideas using two very different sets of words, your brain responses will still be similar.And to test it, we did the following experiment in my lab. We took the English story and translated it to Russian. Now you have two different sounds and linguistic systems that convey the exact same meaning. And you play the English story to the English listeners and the Russian story to the Russian listeners, and we can compare their responses across the groups. And when we did that, we didn't see responses that are similar in auditory cortices in language, because the language and sound are very different. However, you can see that the responses in high-order areas were still similar across these two groups. We believe this is because they understood the story in a very similar way, as we confirmed, using a test after the story ended.And we think that this alignment is necessary for communication. For example, as you can tell, I am not a native English speaker. I grew up with another language, and the same might be for many of you in the audience. And still, we can communicate. How come? We think we can communicate because we have this common code that presents meaning.So far, I've only talked about what's happening in the listener's brain, in your brain, when you're listening to talks. But what's happening in the speaker's brain, in my brain, when I'm speaking to you? To look in the speaker's brain, we asked the speaker to go into the scanner, we scan his brain and then compare his brain responses to the brain responses of the listeners listening to the story. You have to remember that producing speech and comprehending speech are very different processes. Here we're asking: How similar are they? To our surprise, we saw that all these complex patterns within the listeners actually came from the speaker brain. So production and comprehension rely on very similar processes. And we also found the stronger the similarity between the listener's brain and the speaker's brain, the better the communication. So I know that if you are completely confused now, and I do hope that this is not the case, your brain responses are very different than mine. But I also know that if you really understand me now, then your brain ... and your brain ... and your brain are really similar to mine.Now, let's take all this information together and ask: How can we use it to transmit a memory that I have from my brain to your brains? So we did the following experiment. We let people watch, for the first time in their life, a TV episode from the BBC series ""Sherlock,"" while we scanned their brains. And then we asked them to go back to the scanner and tell the story to another person that never watched the movie. So let's be specific. Think about this exact scene, when Sherlock is entering the cab in London driven by the murderer he is looking for.With me, as a viewer, there is a specific brain pattern in my brain when I watch it. Now, the exact same pattern, I can reactivate in my brain again by telling the word: Sherlock, London, murderer. And when I'm transmitting these words to your brains now, you have to reconstruct it in your mind. In fact, we see that pattern emerging now in your brains. And we were really surprised to see that the pattern you have now in your brains when I'm describing to you these scenes would be very similar to the pattern I had when I watched this movie a few months ago in the scanner. This starts to tell you about the mechanism by which we can tell stories and transmit information. Because, for example, now you're listening really hard and trying to understand what I'm saying. And I know that it's not easy. But I hope that at one point in the talk we clicked, and you got me. And I think that in a few hours, a few days, a few months, you're going to meet someone at a party, and you're going to tell him about this lecture, and suddenly it will be as if he is standing now here with us. Now you can see how we can take this mechanism and try to transmit memories and knowledge across people, which is wonderful, right?But our ability to communicate relies on our ability to have common ground. Because, for example, if I'm going to use the British synonym ""hackney carriage"" instead of ""cab,"" I know that I'm going to be misaligned with most of you in the audience. This alignment depends not only on our ability to understand the basic concept; it also depends on our ability to develop common ground and understanding and shared belief systems. Because we know that in many cases, people understand the exact same story in very different ways.So to test it in the lab, we did the following experiment. We took a story by J.D. Salinger, in which a husband lost track of his wife in the middle of a party, and he's calling his best friend, asking, ""Did you see my wife?"" For half of the subjects, we said that the wife was having an affair with the best friend. For the other half, we said that the wife is loyal and the husband is very jealous. This one sentence before the story started was enough to make the brain responses of all the people that believed the wife was having an affair be very similar in these high-order areas and different than the other group. And if one sentence is enough to make your brain similar to people that think like you and very different than people that think differently than you, think how this effect is going to be amplified in real life, when we are all listening to the exact same news item after being exposed day after day after day to different media channels, like Fox News or The New York Times, that give us very different perspectives on reality.So let me summarize. If everything worked as planned tonight, I used my ability to vocalize sound to be coupled to your brains. And I used this coupling to transmit my brain patterns associated with my memories and ideas into your brains. In this, I start to reveal the hidden neural mechanism by which we communicate. And we know that in the future it will enable us to improve and facilitate communication. But these studies also reveal that communication relies on a common ground. And we have to be really worried as a society if we lose this common ground and our ability to speak with people that are slightly different than us because we let a few very strong media channels take control of the mic, and manipulate and control the way we all think. And I'm not sure how to fix it because I'm only a scientist. But maybe one way to do it is to go back to the more natural way of communication, which is a dialogue, in which it's not only me speaking to you now, but a more natural way of talking, in which I am speaking and I am listening, and together we are trying to come to a common ground and new ideas. Because after all, the people we are coupled to define who we are. And our desire to be coupled to another brain is something very basic that starts at a very early age.So let me finish with an example from my own private life that I think is a good example of how coupling to other people is really going to define who we are.This my son Jonathan at a very early age. See how he developed a vocal game together with my wife, only from the desire and pure joy of being coupled to another human being.(Both vocalizing)(Laughter)Now, think how the ability of my son to be coupled to us and other people in his life is going to shape the man he is going to become. And think how you change on a daily basis from the interaction and coupling to other people in your life.So keep being coupled to other people. Keep spreading your ideas, because the sum of all of us together, coupled, is greater than our parts.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_hasson_this_is_your_brain_on_communication
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"As a conceptual artist, I'm constantly looking for creative ways to spark challenging conversations. I do this though painting, sculpture, video and performance. But regardless of the format, two of my favorite materials are history and dialogue.In 2007, I created ""Lotus,"" a seven-and-a-half-foot diameter, 600-pound glass depiction of a lotus blossom. In Buddhism, the lotus is a symbol for transcendence and for purity of mind and spirit. But a closer look at this lotus reveals each petal to be the cross-section of a slave ship. This iconic diagram was taken from a British slaving manual and later used by abolitionists to show the atrocities of slavery. In America, we don't like to talk about slavery, nor do we look at it as a global industry. But by using this Buddhist symbol, I hope to universalize and transcend the history and trauma of black America and encourage discussions about our shared past.To create ""Lotus,"" we carved over 6,000 figures. And this later led to a commission by the City of New York to create a 28-foot version in steel as a permanent installation at the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a school for black and latino students, the two groups most affected by this history. The same two groups are very affected by a more recent phenomenon, but let me digress.I've been collecting wooden African figures from tourist shops and flea markets around the world. The authenticity and origin of them is completely debatable, but people believe these to be imbued with power, or even magic. Only recently have I figured out how to use this in my own work.(Gun shots)Since 2012, the world has witnessed the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice and literally countless other unarmed black citizens at the hands of the police, who frequently walk away with no punishment at all. In consideration of these victims and the several times that even I, a law-abiding, Ivy League professor, have been targeted and harassed at gunpoint by the police. I created this body of work simply entitled ""BAM.""It was important to erase the identity of each of these figures, to make them all look the same and easier to disregard. To do this, I dip them in a thick, brown wax before taking them to a shooting range where I re-sculpted them using bullets. And it was fun, playing with big guns and high-speed video cameras. But my reverence for these figures kept me from actually pulling the trigger, somehow feeling as if I would be shooting myself. Finally, my cameraman, Raul, fired the shots. I then took the fragments of these and created molds, and cast them first in wax, and finally in bronze like the image you see here, which bears the marks of its violent creation like battle wounds or scars.When I showed this work recently in Miami, a woman told me she felt every gun shot to her soul. But she also felt that these artworks memorialized the victims of these killings as well as other victims of racial violence throughout US history.But ""Lotus"" and ""BAM"" are larger than just US history. While showing in Berlin last year, a philosophy student asked me what prompted these recent killings. I showed him a photo of a lynching postcard from the early 1900s and reminded him that these killings have been going on for over 500 years. But it's only through questions like his and more thoughtful dialogue about history and race can we evolve as individuals and society.I hope my artwork creates a safe space for this type of honest exchange and an opportunity for people to engage one another in real and necessary conversation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sanford_biggers_an_artist_s_unflinching_look_at_racial_violence
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"In the space that used to house one transistor, we can now fit one billion. That made it so that a computer the size of an entire room now fits in your pocket. You might say the future is small.As an engineer, I'm inspired by this miniaturization revolution in computers. As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer. Now when I say that, what most people hear me say is that we're working on curing cancer. And we are. But it turns out that there's an incredible opportunity to save lives through the early detection and prevention of cancer.Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are fully preventable using methods that we already have in hand today. Things like vaccination, timely screening and of course, stopping smoking. But even with the best tools and technologies that we have today, some tumors can't be detected until 10 years after they've started growing, when they are 50 million cancer cells strong. What if we had better technologies to detect some of these more deadly cancers sooner, when they could be removed, when they were just getting started?Let me tell you about how miniaturization might get us there. This is a microscope in a typical lab that a pathologist would use for looking at a tissue specimen, like a biopsy or a pap smear. This $7,000 microscope would be used by somebody with years of specialized training to spot cancer cells. This is an image from a colleague of mine at Rice University, Rebecca Richards-Kortum. What she and her team have done is miniaturize that whole microscope into this $10 part, and it fits on the end of an optical fiber. Now what that means is instead of taking a sample from a patient and sending it to the microscope, you can bring the microscope to the patient. And then, instead of requiring a specialist to look at the images, you can train the computer to score normal versus cancerous cells.Now this is important, because what they found working in rural communities, is that even when they have a mobile screening van that can go out into the community and perform exams and collect samples and send them to the central hospital for analysis, that days later, women get a call with an abnormal test result and they're asked to come in. Fully half of them don't turn up because they can't afford the trip. With the integrated microscope and computer analysis, Rebecca and her colleagues have been able to create a van that has both a diagnostic setup and a treatment setup. And what that means is that they can do a diagnosis and perform therapy on the spot, so no one is lost to follow up.That's just one example of how miniaturization can save lives. Now as engineers, we think of this as straight-up miniaturization. You took a big thing and you made it little. But what I told you before about computers was that they transformed our lives when they became small enough for us to take them everywhere. So what is the transformational equivalent like that in medicine? Well, what if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world? It sounds a little bit like science fiction. But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. Nanotechnology allows us to shrink the parts that make up the detector from the width of a human hair, which is 100 microns, to a thousand times smaller, which is 100 nanometers. And that has profound implications.It turns out that materials actually change their properties at the nanoscale. You take a common material like gold, and you grind it into dust, into gold nanoparticles, and it changes from looking gold to looking red. If you take a more exotic material like cadmium selenide — forms a big, black crystal — if you make nanocrystals out of this material and you put it in a liquid, and you shine light on it, they glow. And they glow blue, green, yellow, orange, red, depending only on their size. It's wild! Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are all made of cotton, but they are different colors depending only on their size.(Laughter)So as a physician, what's just as interesting to me is that it's not just the color of materials that changes at the nanoscale; the way they travel in your body also changes. And this is the kind of observation that we're going to use to make a better cancer detector.So let me show you what I mean. This is a blood vessel in the body. Surrounding the blood vessel is a tumor. We're going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. Now it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky, and so nanoparticles can leak out from the bloodstream into the tumor. Whether they leak out depends on their size. So in this image, the smaller, hundred-nanometer, blue nanoparticles are leaking out, and the larger, 500-nanometer, red nanoparticles are stuck in the bloodstream. So that means as an engineer, depending on how big or small I make a material, I can change where it goes in your body.In my lab, we recently made a cancer nanodetector that is so small that it could travel into the body and look for tumors. We designed it to listen for tumor invasion: the orchestra of chemical signals that tumors need to make to spread. For a tumor to break out of the tissue that it's born in, it has to make chemicals called enzymes to chew through the scaffolding of tissues. We designed these nanoparticles to be activated by these enzymes. One enzyme can activate a thousand of these chemical reactions in an hour. Now in engineering, we call that one-to-a-thousand ratio a form of amplification, and it makes something ultrasensitive. So we've made an ultrasensitive cancer detector.OK, but how do I get this activated signal to the outside world, where I can act on it? For this, we're going to use one more piece of nanoscale biology, and that has to do with the kidney. The kidney is a filter. Its job is to filter out the blood and put waste into the urine. It turns out that what the kidney filters is also dependent on size. So in this image, what you can see is that everything smaller than five nanometers is going from the blood, through the kidney, into the urine, and everything else that's bigger is retained. OK, so if I make a 100-nanometer cancer detector, I inject it in the bloodstream, it can leak into the tumor where it's activated by tumor enzymes to release a small signal that is small enough to be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine, I have a signal in the outside world that I can detect.OK, but there's one more problem. This is a tiny little signal, so how do I detect it? Well, the signal is just a molecule. They're molecules that we designed as engineers. They're completely synthetic, and we can design them so they are compatible with our tool of choice. If we want to use a really sensitive, fancy instrument called a mass spectrometer, then we make a molecule with a unique mass. Or maybe we want make something that's more inexpensive and portable. Then we make molecules that we can trap on paper, like a pregnancy test. In fact, there's a whole world of paper tests that are becoming available in a field called paper diagnostics.Alright, where are we going with this? What I'm going to tell you next, as a lifelong researcher, represents a dream of mine. I can't say that's it's a promise; it's a dream. But I think we all have to have dreams to keep us pushing forward, even — and maybe especially — cancer researchers.I'm going to tell you what I hope will happen with my technology, that my team and I will put our hearts and souls into making a reality. OK, here goes. I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. I imagine that this could even happen without the need for steady electricity, or a medical professional in the room. Maybe they could be far away and connected only by the image on a smartphone.Now I know this sounds like a dream, but in the lab we already have this working in mice, where it works better than existing methods for the detection of lung, colon and ovarian cancer. And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they've started growing, in all walks of life, all around the globe, and that this would lead to earlier treatments, and that we could save more lives than we can today, with early detection.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sangeeta_bhatia_this_tiny_particle_could_roam_your_body_to_find_tumors
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"Hi. Let me ask the audience a question: Did you ever lie as a child? If you did, could you please raise your hand? Wow! This is the most honest group of people I've ever met.(Laughter)So for the last 20 years, I've been studying how children learn to tell lies. And today, I'm going to share with you some of the discoveries we have made.But to begin, I'm going to tell you a story from Mr. Richard Messina, who is my friend and an elementary school principal. He got a phone call one day. The caller says, ""Mr. Messina, my son Johnny will not come to school today because he's sick.""Mr. Messina asks, ""Who am I speaking to, please?""And the caller says, ""I am my father.""(Laughter)So this story —(Laughter)sums up very nicely three common beliefs we have about children and lying. One, children only come to tell lies after entering elementary school. Two, children are poor liars. We adults can easily detect their lies. And three, if children lie at a very young age, there must be some character flaws with them, and they are going to become pathological liars for life. Well, it turns out all of the three beliefs are wrong.We have been playing guessing games with children all over the world. Here is an example. So in this game, we asked children to guess the numbers on the cards. And we tell them if they win the game, they are going to get a big prize. But in the middle of the game, we make an excuse and leave the room. And before we leave the room, we tell them not to peek at the cards. Of course, we have hidden cameras in the room to watch their every move. Because the desire to win the game is so strong, more than 90 percent of children will peek as soon as we leave the room.(Laughter)The crucial question is: When we return and ask the children whether or not they have peeked, will the children who peeked confess or lie about their transgression?We found that regardless of gender, country, religion, at two years of age, 30 percent lie, 70 percent tell the truth about their transgression. At three years of age, 50 percent lie and 50 percent tell the truth. At four years of age, more than 80 percent lie. And after four years of age, most children lie. So as you can see, lying is really a typical part of development. And some children begin to tell lies as young as two years of age.So now, let's take a closer look at the younger children. Why do some but not all young children lie? In cooking, you need good ingredients to cook good food. And good lying requires two key ingredients. The first key ingredient is theory of mind, or the mind-reading ability. Mind reading is the ability to know that different people have different knowledge about the situation and the ability to differentiate between what I know and what you know. Mind reading is important for lying because the basis of lying is that I know you don't know what I know. Therefore, I can lie to you.The second key ingredient for good lying is self-control. It is the ability to control your speech, your facial expression and your body language, so that you can tell a convincing lie. And we found that those young children who have more advanced mind-reading and self-control abilities tell lies earlier and are more sophisticated liars. As it turns out, these two abilities are also essential for all of us to function well in our society. In fact, deficits in mind-reading and self-control abilities are associated with serious developmental problems, such as ADHD and autism. So if you discover your two-year-old is telling his or her first lie, instead of being alarmed, you should celebrate —(Laughter)because it signals that your child has arrived at a new milestone of typical development.Now, are children poor liars? Do you think you can easily detect their lies? Would you like to give it a try? Yes? OK. So I'm going to show you two videos. In the videos, the children are going to respond to a researcher's question, ""Did you peek?"" So try to tell me which child is lying and which child is telling the truth. Here's child number one. Are you ready?(Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No.Kang Lee: And this is child number two.(Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No.KL: OK, if you think child number one is lying, please raise your hand. And if you think child number two is lying, please raise your hand. OK, so as a matter of fact, child number one is telling the truth, child number two is lying. Looks like many of you are terrible detectors of children's lies.(Laughter)Now, we have played similar kinds of games with many, many adults from all walks of life. And we show them many videos. In half of the videos, the children lied. In the other half of the videos, the children told the truth. And let's find out how these adults performed. Because there are as many liars as truth tellers, if you guess randomly, there's a 50 percent chance you're going to get it right. So if your accuracy is around 50 percent, it means you are a terrible detector of children's lies.So let's start with undergrads and law school students, who typically have limited experience with children. No, they cannot detect children's lies. Their performance is around chance.Now how about social workers and child-protection lawyers, who work with children on a daily basis? Can they detect children's lies? No, they cannot.(Laughter)What about judges, customs officers and police officers, who deal with liars on a daily basis? Can they detect children's lies? No, they cannot.What about parents? Can parents detect other children's lies? No, they cannot.What about, can parents detect their own children's lies? No, they cannot.(Laughter) (Applause)So now you may ask why children's lies are so difficult to detect. Let me illustrate this with my own son, Nathan. This is his facial expression when he lies.(Laughter)So when children lie, their facial expression is typically neutral. However, behind this neutral expression, the child is actually experiencing a lot of emotions, such as fear, guilt, shame and maybe a little bit of liar's delight.(Laughter)Unfortunately, such emotions are either fleeting or hidden. Therefore, it's mostly invisible to us.So in the last five years, we have been trying to figure out a way to reveal these hidden emotions. Then we made a discovery.We know that underneath our facial skin, there's a rich network of blood vessels. When we experience different emotions, our facial blood flow changes subtly. And these changes are regulated by the autonomic system that is beyond our conscious control. By looking at facial blood flow changes, we can reveal people's hidden emotions. Unfortunately, such emotion-related facial blood flow changes are too subtle to detect by our naked eye. So to help us reveal people's facial emotions, we have developed a new imaging technology we call ""transdermal optical imaging.""To do so, we use a regular video camera to record people when they experience various hidden emotions. And then, using our image processing technology, we can extract transdermal images of facial blood flow changes. By looking at transdermal video images, now we can easily see facial blood flow changes associated with the various hidden emotions. And using this technology, we can now reveal the hidden emotions associated with lying, and therefore detect people's lies. We can do so noninvasively, remotely, inexpensively, with an accuracy at about 85 percent, which is far better than chance level.And in addition, we discovered a Pinocchio effect. No, not this Pinocchio effect.(Laughter)This is the real Pinocchio effect. When people lie, the facial blood flow on the cheeks decreases, and the facial blood flow on the nose increases.Of course, lying is not the only situation that will evoke our hidden emotions. So then we asked ourselves, in addition to detecting lies, how can our technology be used? One application is in education. For example, using this technology, we can help this mathematics teacher to identify the student in his classroom who may experience high anxiety about the topic he's teaching so that he can help him. And also we can use this in health care. For example, every day I Skype my parents, who live thousands of miles away. And using this technology, I can not only find out what's going on in their lives but also simultaneously monitor their heart rate, their stress level, their mood and whether or not they are experiencing pain. And perhaps in the future, their risks for heart attack or hypertension. And you may ask: Can we use this also to reveal politicians' emotions?(Laughter)For example, during a debate. Well, the answer is yes. Using TV footage, we could detect the politicians' heart rate, mood and stress, and perhaps in the future, whether or not they are lying to us. We can also use this in marketing research, for example, to find out whether or not people like certain consumer products. We can even use it in dating. So for example, if your date is smiling at you, this technology can help you to determine whether she actually likes you or she is just trying to be nice to you. And in this case, she is just trying to be nice to you.(Laughter)So transdermal optical imaging technology is at a very early stage of development. Many new applications will come about that we don't know today. However, one thing I know for sure is that lying will never be the same again.Thank you very much.Xiè xie.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kang_lee_can_you_really_tell_if_a_kid_is_lying
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"By raising your hand, how many of you know at least one person on the screen? Wow, it's almost a full house. It's true, they are very famous in their fields. And do you know what all of them have in common? They all died of pancreatic cancer. However, although it's very, very sad this news, it's also thanks to their personal stories that we have raised awareness of how lethal this disease can be.It's become the third cause of cancer deaths, and only eight percent of the patients will survive beyond five years. That's a very tiny number, especially if you compare it with breast cancer, where the survival rate is almost 90 percent. So it doesn't really come as a surprise that being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer means facing an almost certain death sentence. What's shocking, though, is that in the last 40 years, this number hasn't changed a bit, while much more progress has been made with other types of tumors. So how can we make pancreatic cancer treatment more effective? As a biomedical entrepreneur, I like to work on problems that seem impossible, understanding their limitations and trying to find new, innovative solutions that can change their outcome.The first piece of bad news with pancreatic cancer is that your pancreas is in the middle of your belly, literally. It's depicted in orange on the screen. But you can barely see it until I remove all the other organs in front. It's also surrounded by many other vital organs, like the liver, the stomach, the bile duct. And the ability of the tumor to grow into those organs is the reason why pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful tumor types. The hard-to-reach location also prevents the doctor from surgically removing it, as is routinely done for breast cancer, for example. So all of these reasons leave chemotherapy as the only option for the pancreatic cancer patient.This brings us to the second piece of bad news. Pancreatic cancer tumors have very few blood vessels. Why should we care about the blood vessel of a tumor? Let's think for a second how chemotherapy works. The drug is injected in the vein and it navigates throughout the body until it reaches the tumor site. It's like driving on a highway, trying to reach a destination. But what if your destination doesn't have an exit on the highway? You will never get there. And that's exactly the same problem for chemotherapy and pancreatic cancer. The drugs navigate throughout all of your body. They will reach healthy organs, resulting in high toxic effect for the patients overall, but very little will go to the tumor. Therefore, the efficacy is very limited.To me, it seems very counterintuitive to have a whole-body treatment to target a specific organ. However, in the last 40 years, a lot of money, research and effort have gone towards finding new, powerful drugs to treat pancreatic cancer, but nothing has been done in changing the way we deliver them to the patient.So after two pieces of bad news, I'm going to give you good news, hopefully. With a collaborator at MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, we have revolutionized the way we treat cancer by making localized drug delivery a reality. We are basically parachuting you on top of your destination, avoiding your having to drive all around the highway. We have embedded the drug into devices that look like this one. They are flexible enough that they can be folded to fit into the catheter, so the doctor can implant it directly on top of the tumor with minimally invasive surgery. But they are solid enough that once they are positioned on top of the tumor, they will act as a cage. They will actually physically prevent the tumor from entering other organs, controlling the metastasis.The devices are also biodegradable. That means that once in the body, they start dissolving, delivering the drug only locally, slowly and more effectively than what is done with the current whole-body treatment. In pre-clinical study, we have demonstrated that this localized approach is able to improve by 12 times the response to treatment.So we took a drug that is already known and by just delivering it locally where it's needed the most, we allow a response that is 12 times more powerful, reducing the systemic toxic effect. We are working relentlessly to bring this technology to the next level. We are finalizing the pre-clinical testing and the animal model required prior to asking the FDA for approval for clinical trials.Currently, the majority of patients will die from pancreatic cancer. We are hoping that one day, we can reduce their pain, extend their life and potentially make pancreatic cancer a curable disease.By rethinking the way we deliver the drug, we don't only make it more powerful and less toxic, we are also opening the door to finding new innovative solutions for almost all other impossible problems in pancreatic cancer patients and beyond.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_indolfi_good_news_in_the_fight_against_pancreatic_cancer
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"I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realized that I really had a problem. There was something really wrong with me.This was about a year before 9/11, and America wasn't at war yet. We weren't talking about PTSD. We were not yet talking about the effect of trauma and war on the human psyche. I'd been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the Taliban. And at that point the Taliban had an air force, they had fighter planes, they had tanks, they had artillery, and we really got hammered pretty badly a couple of times. We saw some very ugly things. But I didn't really think it affected me. I didn't think much about it.I came home to New York, where I live. Then one day I went down into the subway, and for the first time in my life, I knew real fear. I had a massive panic attack. I was way more scared than I had ever been in Afghanistan. Everything I was looking at seemed like it was going to kill me, but I couldn't explain why. The trains were going too fast. There were too many people. The lights were too bright. Everything was too loud, everything was moving too quickly. I backed up against a support column and just waited for it. When I couldn't take it any longer, I ran out of the subway station and walked wherever I was going.Later, I found out that what I had was short-term PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder. We evolved as animals, as primates, to survive periods of danger, and if your life has been in danger, you want to react to unfamiliar noises. You want to sleep lightly, wake up easily. You want to have nightmares and flashbacks of the thing that could kill you. You want to be angry because it makes you predisposed to fight, or depressed, because it keeps you out of circulation a little bit. Keeps you safe. It's not very pleasant, but it's better than getting eaten.Most people recover from that pretty quickly. It takes a few weeks, a few months. I kept having panic attacks, but they eventually went away. I had no idea it was connected to the war that I'd seen. I just thought I was going crazy, and then I thought, well, now I'm not going crazy anymore.About 20 percent of people, however, wind up with chronic, long-term PTSD. They are not adapted to temporary danger. They are maladapted for everyday life, unless they get help. We know that the people who are vulnerable to long-term PTSD are people who were abused as children, who suffered trauma as children, people who have low education levels, people who have psychiatric disorders in their family. If you served in Vietnam and your brother is schizophrenic, you're way more likely to get long-term PTSD from Vietnam.So I started to study this as a journalist, and I realized that there was something really strange going on. The numbers seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Every war that we have fought as a country, starting with the Civil War, the intensity of the combat has gone down. As a result, the casualty rates have gone down. But disability rates have gone up. They should be going in the same direction, but they're going in different directions.The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced, thank God, a casualty rate about one third of what it was in Vietnam. But they've also created — they've also produced three times the disability rates. Around 10 percent of the US military is actively engaged in combat, 10 percent or under. They're shooting at people, killing people, getting shot at, seeing their friends get killed. It's incredibly traumatic. But it's only about 10 percent of our military. But about half of our military has filed for some kind of PTSD compensation from the government.And suicide doesn't even fit into this in a very logical way. We've all heard the tragic statistic of 22 vets a day, on average, in this country, killing themselves. Most people don't realize that the majority of those suicides are veterans of the Vietnam War, that generation, and their decision to take their own lives actually might not be related to the war they fought 50 years earlier. In fact, there's no statistical connection between combat and suicide. If you're in the military and you're in a lot of combat, you're no more likely to kill yourself than if you weren't. In fact, one study found that if you deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, you're actually slightly less likely to commit suicide later.I studied anthropology in college. I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation. I wrote a thesis on Navajo long-distance runners. And recently, while I was researching PTSD, I had this thought. I thought back to the work I did when I was young, and I thought, I bet the Navajo, the Apache, the Comanche — I mean, these are very warlike nations — I bet they weren't getting PTSD like we do. When their warriors came back from fighting the US military or fighting each other, I bet they pretty much just slipped right back into tribal life.And maybe what determines the rate of long-term PTSD isn't what happened out there, but the kind of society you come back to. And maybe if you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal society, you can get over trauma pretty quickly. And if you come back to an alienating, modern society, you might remain traumatized your entire life. In other words, maybe the problem isn't them, the vets; maybe the problem is us.Certainly, modern society is hard on the human psyche by every metric that we have. As wealth goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up instead of down. If you live in modern society, you're up to eight times more likely to suffer from depression in your lifetime than if you live in a poor, agrarian society. Modern society has probably produced the highest rates of suicide and depression and anxiety and loneliness and child abuse ever in human history. I saw one study that compared women in Nigeria, one of the most chaotic and violent and corrupt and poorest countries in Africa, to women in North America. And the highest rates of depression were urban women in North America. That was also the wealthiest group.So let's go back to the US military. Ten percent are in combat. Around 50 percent have filed for PTSD compensation. So about 40 percent of veterans really were not traumatized overseas but have come home to discover they are dangerously alienated and depressed. So what is happening with them? What's going on with those people, the phantom 40 percent that are troubled but don't understand why?Maybe it's this: maybe they had an experience of sort of tribal closeness in their unit when they were overseas. They were eating together, sleeping together, doing tasks and missions together. They were trusting each other with their lives. And then they come home and they have to give all that up and they're coming back to a society, a modern society, which is hard on people who weren't even in the military. It's just hard on everybody.And we keep focusing on trauma, PTSD. But for a lot of these people, maybe it's not trauma. I mean, certainly, soldiers are traumatized and the ones who are have to be treated for that. But a lot of them — maybe what's bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. I mean, maybe we just have the wrong word for some of it, and just changing our language, our understanding, would help a little bit. ""Post-deployment alienation disorder."" Maybe even just calling it that for some of these people would allow them to stop imagining trying to imagine a trauma that didn't really happen in order to explain a feeling that really is happening. And in fact, it's an extremely dangerous feeling. That alienation and depression can lead to suicide. These people are in danger. It's very important to understand why.The Israeli military has a PTSD rate of around one percent. The theory is that everyone in Israel is supposed to serve in the military. When soldiers come back from the front line, they're not going from a military environment to a civilian environment. They're coming back to a community where everyone understands about the military. Everyone's been in it or is going to be in it. Everyone understands the situation they're all in. It's as if they're all in one big tribe.We know that if you take a lab rat and traumatize it and put it in a cage by itself, you can maintain its trauma symptoms almost indefinitely. And if you take that same lab rat and put it in a cage with other rats, after a couple of weeks, it's pretty much OK.After 9/11, the murder rate in New York City went down by 40 percent. The suicide rate went down. The violent crime rate in New York went down after 9/11. Even combat veterans of previous wars who suffered from PTSD said that their symptoms went down after 9/11 happened. The reason is that if you traumatize an entire society, we don't fall apart and turn on one another. We come together. We unify. Basically, we tribalize, and that process of unifying feels so good and is so good for us, that it even helps people who are struggling with mental health issues. During the blitz in London, admissions to psychiatric wards went down during the bombings.For a while, that was the kind of country that American soldiers came back to — a unified country. We were sticking together. We were trying to understand the threat against us. We were trying to help ourselves and the world. But that's changed. Now, American soldiers, American veterans are coming back to a country that is so bitterly divided that the two political parties are literally accusing each other of treason, of being an enemy of the state, of trying to undermine the security and the welfare of their own country. The gap between rich and poor is the biggest it's ever been. It's just getting worse. Race relations are terrible. There are demonstrations and even riots in the streets because of racial injustice. And veterans know that any tribe that treated itself that way — in fact, any platoon that treated itself that way — would never survive. We've gotten used to it. Veterans have gone away and are coming back and seeing their own country with fresh eyes. And they see what's going on. This is the country they fought for. No wonder they're depressed. No wonder they're scared.Sometimes, we ask ourselves if we can save the vets. I think the real question is if we can save ourselves. If we can, I think the vets are going to be fine. It's time for this country to unite, if only to help the men and women who fought to protect us.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_junger_our_lonely_society_makes_it_hard_to_come_home_from_war
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"I want to talk about sex for money. I'm not like most of the people you'll have heard speaking about prostitution before. I'm not a police officer or a social worker. I'm not an academic, a journalist or a politician. And as you'll probably have picked up from Maryam's blurb, I'm not a nun, either.(Laughter)Most of those people would tell you that selling sex is degrading; that no one would ever choose to do it; that it's dangerous; women get abused and killed. In fact, most of those people would say, ""There should be a law against it!"" Maybe that sounds reasonable to you. It sounded reasonable to me until the closing months of 2009, when I was working two dead-end, minimum-wage jobs. Every month my wages would just replenish my overdraft. I was exhausted and my life was going nowhere. Like many others before me, I decided sex for money was a better option. Now don't get me wrong — I would have loved to have won the lottery instead. But it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, and my rent needed paying. So I signed up for my first shift in a brothel.In the years that have passed, I've had a lot of time to think. I've reconsidered the ideas I once had about prostitution. I've given a lot of thought to consent and the nature of work under capitalism. I've thought about gender inequality and the sexual and reproductive labor of women. I've experienced exploitation and violence at work. I've thought about what's needed to protect other sex workers from these things. Maybe you've thought about them, too. In this talk, I'll take you through the four main legal approaches applied to sex work throughout the world, and explain why they don't work; why prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to. Then I'm going tell you about what we, as sex workers, actually want.The first approach is full criminalization. Half the world, including Russia, South Africa and most of the US, regulates sex work by criminalizing everyone involved. So that's seller, buyer and third parties. Lawmakers in these countries apparently hope that the fear of getting arrested will deter people from selling sex. But if you're forced to choose between obeying the law and feeding yourself or your family, you're going to do the work anyway, and take the risk.Criminalization is a trap. It's hard to get a conventional job when you have a criminal record. Potential employers won't hire you. Assuming you still need money, you'll stay in the more flexible, informal economy. The law forces you to keep selling sex, which is the exact opposite of its intended effect. Being criminalized leaves you exposed to mistreatment by the state itself. In many places you may be coerced into paying a bribe or even into having sex with a police officer to avoid arrest. Police and prison guards in Cambodia, for example, have been documented subjecting sex workers to what can only be described as torture: threats at gunpoint, beatings, electric shocks, rape and denial of food.Another worrying thing: if you're selling sex in places like Kenya, South Africa or New York, a police officer can arrest you if you're caught carrying condoms, because condoms can legally be used as evidence that you're selling sex. Obviously, this increases HIV risk. Imagine knowing if you're busted carrying condoms, it'll be used against you. It's a pretty strong incentive to leave them at home, right? Sex workers working in these places are forced to make a tough choice between risking arrest or having risky sex. What would you choose? Would you pack condoms to go to work? How about if you're worried the police officer would rape you when he got you in the van?The second approach to regulating sex work seen in these countries is partial criminalization, where the buying and selling of sex are legal, but surrounding activities, like brothel-keeping or soliciting on the street, are banned. Laws like these — we have them in the UK and in France — essentially say to us sex workers, ""Hey, we don't mind you selling sex, just make sure it's done behind closed doors and all alone."" And brothel-keeping, by the way, is defined as just two or more sex workers working together. Making that illegal means that many of us work alone, which obviously makes us vulnerable to violent offenders. But we're also vulnerable if we choose to break the law by working together. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was nervous after she was attacked at work, so I said that she could see her clients from my place for a while. During that time, we had another guy turn nasty. I told the guy to leave or I'd call the police. And he looked at the two of us and said, ""You girls can't call the cops. You're working together, this place is illegal."" He was right. He eventually left without getting physically violent, but the knowledge that we were breaking the law empowered that man to threaten us. He felt confident he'd get away with it.The prohibition of street prostitution also causes more harm than it prevents. Firstly, to avoid getting arrested, street workers take risks to avoid detection, and that means working alone or in isolated locations like dark forests where they're vulnerable to attack. If you're caught selling sex outdoors, you pay a fine. How do you pay that fine without going back to the streets? It was the need for money that saw you in the streets in the first place. And so the fines stack up, and you're caught in a vicious cycle of selling sex to pay the fines you got for selling sex.Let me tell you about Mariana Popa who worked in Redbridge, East London. The street workers on her patch would normally wait for clients in groups for safety in numbers and to warn each other about how to avoid dangerous guys. But during a police crackdown on sex workers and their clients, she was forced to work alone to avoid being arrested. She was stabbed to death in the early hours of October 29, 2013. She had been working later than usual to try to pay off a fine she had received for soliciting.So if criminalizing sex workers hurts them, why not just criminalize the people who buy sex? This is the aim of the third approach I want to talk about — the Swedish or Nordic model of sex-work law. The idea behind this law is that selling sex is intrinsically harmful and so you're, in fact, helping sex workers by removing the option. Despite growing support for what's often described as the ""end demand"" approach, there's no evidence that it works. There's just as much prostitution in Sweden as there was before. Why might that be? It's because people selling sex often don't have other options for income. If you need that money, the only effect that a drop in business is going have is to force you to lower your prices or offer more risky sexual services. If you need to find more clients, you might seek the help of a manager. So you see, rather than putting a stop to what's often descried as pimping, a law like this actually gives oxygen to potentially abusive third parties.To keep safe in my work, I try not to take bookings from someone who calls me from a withheld number. If it's a home or a hotel visit, I try to get a full name and details. If I worked under the Swedish model, a client would be too scared to give me that information. I might have no other choice but to accept a booking from a man who is untraceable if he later turns out to be violent. If you need their money, you need to protect your clients from the police. If you work outdoors, that means working alone or in isolated locations, just as if you were criminalized yourself. It might mean getting into cars quicker, less negotiating time means snap decisions. Is this guy dangerous or just nervous? Can you afford to take the risk? Can you afford not to?Something I'm often hearing is, ""Prostitution would be fine if we made it legal and regulated it."" We call that approach legalization, and it's used by countries like the Netherlands, Germany and Nevada in the US. But it's not a great model for human rights. And in state-controlled prostitution, commercial sex can only happen in certain legally-designated areas or venues, and sex workers are made to comply with special restrictions, like registration and forced health checks. Regulation sounds great on paper, but politicians deliberately make regulation around the sex industry expensive and difficult to comply with. It creates a two-tiered system: legal and illegal work. We sometimes call it ""backdoor criminalization."" Rich, well-connected brothel owners can comply with the regulations, but more marginalized people find those hoops impossible to jump through. And even if it's possible in principle, getting a license or proper venue takes time and costs money. It's not going to be an option for someone who's desperate and needs money tonight. They might be a refugee or fleeing domestic abuse. In this two-tiered system, the most vulnerable people are forced to work illegally, so they're still exposed to all the dangers of criminalization I mentioned earlier.So. It's looking like all attempts to control or prevent sex work from happening makes things more dangerous for people selling sex. Fear of law enforcement makes them work alone in isolated locations, and allows clients and even cops to get abusive in the knowledge they'll get away with it. Fines and criminal records force people to keep selling sex, rather than enabling them to stop. Crackdowns on buyers drive sellers to take dangerous risks and into the arms of potentially abusive managers.These laws also reinforce stigma and hatred against sex workers. When France temporarily brought in the Swedish model two years ago, ordinary citizens took it as a cue to start carrying out vigilante attacks against people working on the street. In Sweden, opinion surveys show that significantly more people want sex workers to be arrested now than before the law was brought in. If prohibition is this harmful, you might ask, why it so popular?Firstly, sex work is and always has been a survival strategy for all kinds of unpopular minority groups: people of color, migrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, particularly trans women. These are the groups most heavily profiled and punished through prohibitionist law. I don't think this is an accident. These laws have political support precisely because they target people that voters don't want to see or know about.Why else might people support prohibition? Well, lots of people have understandable fears about trafficking. Folks think that foreign women kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery can be saved by shutting a whole industry down. So let's talk about trafficking. Forced labor does occur in many industries, especially those where the workers are migrants or otherwise vulnerable, and this needs to be addressed. But it's best addressed with legislation targeting those specific abuses, not an entire industry. When 23 undocumented Chinese migrants drowned while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay in 2004, there were no calls to outlaw the entire seafood industry to save trafficking victims. The solution is clearly to give workers more legal protections, allowing them to resist abuse and report it to authorities without fear of arrest.The way the term trafficking is thrown around implies that all undocumented migration into prostitution is forced. In fact, many migrants have made a decision, out of economic need, to place themselves into the hands of people smugglers. Many do this with the full knowledge that they'll be selling sex when they reach their destination. And yes, it can often be the case that these people smugglers demand exorbitant fees, coerce migrants into work they don't want to do and abuse them when they're vulnerable. That's true of prostitution, but it's also true of agricultural work, hospitality work and domestic work. Ultimately, nobody wants to be forced to do any kind of work, but that's a risk many migrants are willing to take, because of what they're leaving behind. If people were allowed to migrate legally they wouldn't have to place their lives into the hands of people smugglers. The problems arise from the criminalization of migration, just as they do from the criminalization of sex work itself.This is a lesson of history. If you try to prohibit something that people want or need to do, whether that's drinking alcohol or crossing borders or getting an abortion or selling sex, you create more problems than you solve. Prohibition barely makes a difference to the amount of people actually doing those things. But it makes a huge difference as to whether or not they're safe when they do them.Why else might people support prohibition? As a feminist, I know that the sex industry is a site of deeply entrenched social inequality. It's a fact that most buyers of sex are men with money, and most sellers are women without. You can agree with all that — I do — and still think prohibition is a terrible policy. In a better, more equal world, maybe there would be far fewer people selling sex to survive, but you can't simply legislate a better world into existence. If someone needs to sell sex because they're poor or because they're homeless or because they're undocumented and they can't find legal work, taking away that option doesn't make them any less poor or house them or change their immigration status.People worry that selling sex is degrading. Ask yourself: is it more degrading than going hungry or seeing your children go hungry? There's no call to ban rich people from hiring nannies or getting manicures, even though most of the people doing that labor are poor, migrant women. It's the fact of poor migrant women selling sex specifically that has some feminists uncomfortable. And I can understand why the sex industry provokes strong feelings. People have all kinds of complicated feelings when it comes to sex. But we can't make policy on the basis of mere feelings, especially not over the heads of the people actually effected by those policies. If we get fixated on the abolition of sex work, we end up worrying more about a particular manifestation of gender inequality, rather than about the underlying causes.People get really hung up on the question, ""Well, would you want your daughter doing it?"" That's the wrong question. Instead, imagine she is doing it. How safe is she at work tonight? Why isn't she safer?So we've looked at full criminalization, partial criminalization, the Swedish or Nordic Model and legalization, and how they all cause harm. Something I never hear asked is: ""What do sex workers want?"" After all, we're the ones most affected by these laws.New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003. It's crucial to remember that decriminalization and legalization are not the same thing. Decriminalization means the removal of laws that punitively target the sex industry, instead treating sex work much like any other kind of work. In New Zealand, people can work together for safety, and employers of sex workers are accountable to the state. A sex worker can refuse to see a client at any time, for any reason, and 96 percent of street workers report that they feel the law protects their rights. New Zealand hasn't actually seen an increase in the amount of people doing sex work, but decriminalizing it has made it a lot safer. But the lesson from New Zealand isn't just that its particular legislation is good, but that crucially, it was written in collaboration with sex workers; namely, the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective. When it came to making sex work safer, they were ready to hear it straight from sex workers themselves.Here in the UK, I'm part of sex worker-led groups like the Sex Worker Open University and the English Collective of Prostitutes. And we form part of a global movement demanding decriminalization and self-determination. The universal symbol of our movement is the red umbrella. We're supported in our demands by global bodies like UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and Amnesty International. But we need more allies. If you care about gender equality or poverty or migration or public health, then sex worker rights matter to you. Make space for us in your movements. That means not only listening to sex workers when we speak but amplifying our voices. Resist those who silence us, those who say that a prostitute is either too victimized, too damaged to know what's best for herself, or else too privileged and too removed from real hardship, not representative of the millions of voiceless victims. This distinction between victim and empowered is imaginary. It exists purely to discredit sex workers and make it easy to ignore us.No doubt many of you work for a living. Well, sex work is work, too. Just like you, some of us like our jobs, some of us hate them. Ultimately, most of us have mixed feelings. But how we feel about our work isn't the point. And how others feel about our work certainly isn't. What's important is that we have the right to work safely and on our own terms.Sex workers are real people. We've had complicated experiences and complicated responses to those experiences. But our demands are not complicated. You can ask expensive escorts in New York City, brothel workers in Cambodia, street workers in South Africa and every girl on the roster at my old job in Soho, and they will all tell you the same thing. You can speak to millions of sex workers and countless sex work-led organizations. We want full decriminalization and labor rights as workers.I'm just one sex worker on the stage today, but I'm bringing a message from all over the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juno_mac_the_laws_that_sex_workers_really_want
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"So this is James Risen. You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name, Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans. But it's another chapter in that book that may have an even more lasting impact. In it, he describes a catastrophic US intelligence operation in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints of a nuclear bomb to Iran. If that sounds crazy, go read it. It's an incredible story.But you know who didn't like that chapter? The US government. For nearly a decade afterwards, Risen was the subject of a US government investigation in which prosecutors demanded that he testify against one of his alleged sources. And along the way, he became the face for the US government's recent pattern of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists.You see, under the First Amendment, the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest. But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news and protect the identities of the brave men and women who get it to them. So when the government came knocking, Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him: he refused and said he'd rather go to jail. So from 2007 to 2015, Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison.That is, until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened. Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case, the government dropped their demands to Risen altogether. It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance, there are very few places reporters and sources can hide. And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify, they could have his digital trail testify against him instead. So completely in secret and without his consent, prosecutors got Risen's phone records. They got his email records, his financial and banking information, his credit reports, even travel records with a list of flights he had taken. And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling, Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower.Sadly, this is only one case of many. President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers, and instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more than all other administrations combined. Now, you can see how this could be a problem, especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret. Since 9/11, virtually every important story about national security has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist. So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job that the First Amendment is supposed to protect because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone.But just as technology has allowed the government to circumvent reporters' rights, the press can also use technology to protect their sources even better than before. And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them, rather than on the witness stand after the fact. Communications software now exists that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book, and is much more surveillance-resistant than regular emails or phone calls. For example, one such tool is SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that was originally created by the late Internet luminary Aaron Swartz, and is now developed at the non-profit where I work, Freedom of the Press Foundation. Instead of sending an email, you go to a news organization's website, like this one here on The Washington Post. From there, you can upload a document or send information much like you would on any other contact form. It'll then be encrypted and stored on a server that only the news organization has access to. So the government can no longer secretly demand the information, and much of the information they would demand wouldn't be available in the first place.SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle for protecting press freedom in the 21st century. Unfortunately, governments all over the world are constantly developing new spying techniques that put us all at risk. And it's up to us going forward to make sure that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing. It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's health care whistleblower alerting us to overcrowded hospitals, or the next environmental worker sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water, or a Wall Street insider warning us of the next financial crisis. After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women who expose crimes, but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_timm_how_free_is_our_freedom_of_the_press
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"So I know TED is about a lot of things that are big, but I want to talk to you about something very small. So small, it's a single word. The word is ""misfit."" It's one of my favorite words, because it's so literal. I mean, it's a person who sort of missed fitting in. Or a person who fits in badly. Or this: ""a person who is poorly adapted to new situations and environments."" I'm a card-carrying misfit. And I'm here for the other misfits in the room, because I'm never the only one. I'm going to tell you a misfit story.Somewhere in my early 30s, the dream of becoming a writer came right to my doorstep. Actually, it came to my mailbox in the form of a letter that said I'd won a giant literary prize for a short story I had written. The short story was about my life as a competitive swimmer and about my crappy home life, and a little bit about how grief and loss can make you insane. The prize was a trip to New York City to meet big-time editors and agents and other authors. So kind of it was the wannabe writer's dream, right? You know what I did the day the letter came to my house? Because I'm me, I put the letter on my kitchen table, I poured myself a giant glass of vodka with ice and lime, and I sat there in my underwear for an entire day, just staring at the letter. I was thinking about all the ways I'd already screwed my life up. Who the hell was I to go to New York City and pretend to be a writer? Who was I?I'll tell you. I was a misfit. Like legions of other children, I came from an abusive household that I narrowly escaped with my life. I already had two epically failed marriages underneath my belt. I'd flunked out of college not once but twice and maybe even a third time that I'm not going to tell you about.(Laughter)And I'd done an episode of rehab for drug use. And I'd had two lovely staycations in jail. So I'm on the right stage.(Laughter)But the real reason, I think, I was a misfit, is that my daughter died the day she was born, and I hadn't figured out how to live with that story yet. After my daughter died I also spent a long time homeless, living under an overpass in a kind of profound state of zombie grief and loss that some of us encounter along the way. Maybe all of us, if you live long enough. You know, homeless people are some of our most heroic misfits, because they start out as us. So you see, I'd missed fitting in to just about every category out there: daughter, wife, mother, scholar. And the dream of being a writer was really kind of like a small, sad stone in my throat.It was pretty much in spite of myself that I got on that plane and flew to New York City, where the writers are. Fellow misfits, I can almost see your heads glowing. I can pick you out of a room. At first, you would've loved it. You got to choose the three famous writers you wanted to meet, and these guys went and found them for you. You got set up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, where you got to drink Scotch late in the night with cool, smart, swank people. And you got to pretend you were cool and smart and swank, too. And you got to meet a bunch of editors and authors and agents at very, very fancy lunches and dinners. Ask me how fancy.Audience: How fancy?Lidia Yuknavitch: I'm making a confession: I stole three linen napkins —(Laughter)from three different restaurants. And I shoved a menu down my pants.(Laughter)I just wanted some keepsakes so that when I got home, I could believe it had really happened to me. You know?The three writers I wanted to meet were Carole Maso, Lynne Tillman and Peggy Phelan. These were not famous, best-selling authors, but to me, they were women-writer titans. Carole Maso wrote the book that later became my art bible. Lynne Tillman gave me permission to believe that there was a chance my stories could be part of the world. And Peggy Phelan reminded me that maybe my brains could be more important than my boobs. They weren't mainstream women writers, but they were cutting a path through the mainstream with their body stories, I like to think, kind of the way water cut the Grand Canyon.It nearly killed me with joy to hang out with these three over-50-year-old women writers. And the reason it nearly killed me with joy is that I'd never known a joy like that. I'd never been in a room like that. My mother never went to college. And my creative career to that point was a sort of small, sad, stillborn thing. So kind of in those first nights in New York I wanted to die there. I was just like, ""Kill me now. I'm good. This is beautiful."" Some of you in the room will understand what happened next.First, they took me to the offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Farrar, Straus and Giroux was like my mega-dream press. I mean, T.S. Eliot and Flannery O'Connor were published there. The main editor guy sat me down and talked to me for a long time, trying to convince me I had a book in me about my life as a swimmer. You know, like a memoir. The whole time he was talking to me, I sat there smiling and nodding like a numb idiot, with my arms crossed over my chest, while nothing, nothing, nothing came out of my throat. So in the end, he patted me on the shoulder like a swim coach might. And he wished me luck and he gave me some free books and he showed me out the door.Next, they took me to the offices of W.W. Norton, where I was pretty sure I'd be escorted from the building just for wearing Doc Martens. But that didn't happen. Being at the Norton offices felt like reaching up into the night sky and touching the moon while the stars stitched your name across the cosmos. I mean, that's how big a deal it was to me. You get it? Their lead editor, Carol Houck Smith, leaned over right in my face with these beady, bright, fierce eyes and said, ""Well, send me something then, immediately!"" See, now most people, especially TED people, would have run to the mailbox, right? It took me over a decade to even imagine putting something in an envelope and licking a stamp.On the last night, I gave a big reading at the National Poetry Club. And at the end of the reading, Katharine Kidde of Kidde, Hoyt & Picard Literary Agency, walked straight up to me and shook my hand and offered me representation, like, on the spot. I stood there and I kind of went deaf. Has this ever happened to you? And I almost started crying because all the people in the room were dressed so beautifully, and all that came out of my mouth was: ""I don't know. I have to think about it."" And she said, ""OK, then,"" and walked away. All those open hands out to me, that small, sad stone in my throat ...You see, I'm trying to tell you something about people like me. Misfit people — we don't always know how to hope or say yes or choose the big thing, even when it's right in front of us. It's a shame we carry. It's the shame of wanting something good. It's the shame of feeling something good. It's the shame of not really believing we deserve to be in the room with the people we admire.If I could, I'd go back and I'd coach myself. I'd be exactly like those over-50-year-old women who helped me. I'd teach myself how to want things, how to stand up, how to ask for them. I'd say, ""You! Yeah, you! You belong in the room, too."" The radiance falls on all of us, and we are nothing without each other. Instead, I flew back to Oregon, and as I watched the evergreens and rain come back into view, I just drank many tiny bottles of airplane ""feel sorry for yourself."" I thought about how, if I was a writer, I was some kind of misfit writer. What I'm saying is, I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, and with only a headful and heart-ful of memories of having sat so near the beautiful writers. Memory was the only prize I allowed myself.And yet, at home in the dark, back in my underwear, I could still hear their voices. They said, ""Don't listen to anyone who tries to get you to shut up or change your story."" They said, ""Give voice to the story only you know how to tell."" They said, ""Sometimes telling the story is the thing that saves your life.""Now I am, as you can see, the woman over 50. And I'm a writer. And I'm a mother. And I became a teacher. Guess who my favorite students are. Although it didn't happen the day that dream letter came through my mailbox, I did write a memoir, called ""The Chronology of Water."" In it are the stories of how many times I've had to reinvent a self from the ruins of my choices, the stories of how my seeming failures were really just weird-ass portals to something beautiful. All I had to do was give voice to the story.There's a myth in most cultures about following your dreams. It's called the hero's journey. But I prefer a different myth, that's slightly to the side of that or underneath it. It's called the misfit's myth. And it goes like this: even at the moment of your failure, right then, you are beautiful. You don't know it yet, but you have the ability to reinvent yourself endlessly. That's your beauty.You can be a drunk, you can be a survivor of abuse, you can be an ex-con, you can be a homeless person, you can lose all your money or your job or your husband or your wife, or the worst thing of all, a child. You can even lose your marbles. You can be standing dead center in the middle of your failure and still, I'm only here to tell you, you are so beautiful. Your story deserves to be heard, because you, you rare and phenomenal misfit, you new species, are the only one in the room who can tell the story the way only you would. And I'd be listening.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lidia_yuknavitch_the_beauty_of_being_a_misfit
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"We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed, how they lived, how they fought ... but how did they think?One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought — our ability to imagine, to be conscious, to dream — have always been the same. Another possibility is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture may have also changed the structural columns of human thought.We may all have different opinions about this. Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate. But is this question even amenable to science?Here I'd like to propose that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked just based on a few bricks, that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records, the fossils, of human thought.And in fact, doing some form of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture, Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics. And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world, as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses ... what today we would call hallucinations. And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices. And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts.So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness, at least in the way we perceive it today, where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence — is a quite recent cultural development. And this theory is quite spectacular, but it has an obvious problem which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples. So the question is whether the theory that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner.And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious. It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote, ""Hello, I'm Plato, and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness.""(Laughter)And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem. We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said. The word introspection does not appear a single time in the books we want to analyze.So our way to solve this is to build the space of words. This is a huge space that contains all words in such a way that the distance between any two of them is indicative of how closely related they are. So for instance, you want the words ""dog"" and ""cat"" to be very close together, but the words ""grapefruit"" and ""logarithm"" to be very far away. And this has to be true for any two words within the space.And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words. One is just asking the experts, a bit like we do with dictionaries. Another possibility is following the simple assumption that when two words are related, they tend to appear in the same sentences, in the same paragraphs, in the same documents, more often than would be expected just by pure chance. And this simple hypothesis, this simple method, with some computational tricks that have to do with the fact that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space, turns out to be quite effective.And just to give you a flavor of how well this works, this is the result we get when we analyze this for some familiar words. And you can see first that words automatically organize into semantic neighborhoods. So you get the fruits, the body parts, the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on.The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy. So for instance, you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories of the astronomic and the physics terms. And then there are very fine things. For instance, the word astronomy, which seems a bit bizarre where it is, is actually exactly where it should be, between what it is, an actual science, and between what it describes, the astronomical terms.And we could go on and on with this. Actually, if you stare at this for a while, and you just build random trajectories, you will see that it actually feels a bit like doing poetry. And this is because, in a way, walking in this space is like walking in the mind.And the last thing is that this algorithm also identifies what are our intuitions, of which words should lead in the neighborhood of introspection. So for instance, words such as ""self,"" ""guilt,"" ""reason,"" ""emotion,"" are very close to ""introspection,"" but other words, such as ""red,"" ""football,"" ""candle,"" ""banana,"" are just very far away.And so once we've built the space, the question of the history of introspection, or of the history of any concept which before could seem abstract and somehow vague, becomes concrete — becomes amenable to quantitative science.All that we have to do is take the books, we digitize them, and we take this stream of words as a trajectory and project them into the space, and then we ask whether this trajectory spends significant time circling closely to the concept of introspection.And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection.And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition.So we just ran this same analysis on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we got virtually the same pattern. Again, you see a small increase for the oldest books in the Old Testament, and then it increases much more rapidly in the new books of the New Testament. And then we get the peak of introspection in ""The Confessions of Saint Augustine,"" about four centuries after Christ. And this was very important, because Saint Augustine had been recognized by scholars, philologists, historians, as one of the founders of introspection. Actually, some believe him to be the father of modern psychology.So our algorithm, which has the virtue of being quantitative, of being objective, and of course of being extremely fast — it just runs in a fraction of a second — can capture some of the most important conclusions of this long tradition of investigation. And this is in a way one of the beauties of science, which is that now this idea can be translated and generalized to a whole lot of different domains.So in the same way that we asked about the past of human consciousness, maybe the most challenging question we can pose to ourselves is whether this can tell us something about the future of our own consciousness. To put it more precisely, whether the words we say today can tell us something of where our minds will be in a few days, in a few months or a few years from now.And in the same way many of us are now wearing sensors that detect our heart rate, our respiration, our genes, on the hopes that this may help us prevent diseases, we can ask whether monitoring and analyzing the words we speak, we tweet, we email, we write, can tell us ahead of time whether something may go wrong with our minds. And with Guillermo Cecchi, who has been my brother in this adventure, we took on this task. And we did so by analyzing the recorded speech of 34 young people who were at a high risk of developing schizophrenia.And so what we did is, we measured speech at day one, and then we asked whether the properties of the speech could predict, within a window of almost three years, the future development of psychosis. But despite our hopes, we got failure after failure. There was just not enough information in semantics to predict the future organization of the mind. It was good enough to distinguish between a group of schizophrenics and a control group, a bit like we had done for the ancient texts, but not to predict the future onset of psychosis.But then we realized that maybe the most important thing was not so much what they were saying, but how they were saying it. More specifically, it was not in which semantic neighborhoods the words were, but how far and fast they jumped from one semantic neighborhood to the other one. And so we came up with this measure, which we termed semantic coherence, which essentially measures the persistence of speech within one semantic topic, within one semantic category.And it turned out to be that for this group of 34 people, the algorithm based on semantic coherence could predict, with 100 percent accuracy, who developed psychosis and who will not. And this was something that could not be achieved — not even close — with all the other existing clinical measures.And I remember vividly, while I was working on this, I was sitting at my computer and I saw a bunch of tweets by Polo — Polo had been my first student back in Buenos Aires, and at the time he was living in New York. And there was something in this tweets — I could not tell exactly what because nothing was said explicitly — but I got this strong hunch, this strong intuition, that something was going wrong. So I picked up the phone, and I called Polo, and in fact he was not feeling well. And this simple fact, that reading in between the lines, I could sense, through words, his feelings, was a simple, but very effective way to help.What I tell you today is that we're getting close to understanding how we can convert this intuition that we all have, that we all share, into an algorithm. And in doing so, we may be seeing in the future a very different form of mental health, based on objective, quantitative and automated analysis of the words we write, of the words we say.Gracias.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mariano_sigman_your_words_may_predict_your_future_mental_health
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"I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet.My drawings explore moments of transition, turbulence and tranquility in the landscape, allowing viewers to emotionally connect with a place you might never have the chance to visit. I choose to convey the beauty as opposed to the devastation. If you can experience the sublimity of these landscapes, perhaps you'll be inspired to protect and preserve them.Behavioral psychology tells us that we take action and make decisions based on our emotions above all else. And studies have shown that art impacts our emotions more effectively than a scary news report. Experts predict ice-free Arctic summers as early as 2020. And sea levels are likely to rise between two and ten feet by century's end. I have dedicated my career to illuminating these projections with an accessible medium, one that moves us in a way that statistics may not.My process begins with traveling to the places at the forefront of climate change. On-site, I take thousands of photographs. Back in the studio, I work from both my memory of the experience and the photographs to create very large-scale compositions, sometimes over 10 feet wide.I draw with soft pastel, which is dry like charcoal, but colors. I consider my work drawings but others call them painting. I cringe, though, when I'm referred to as a ""finger painter.""(Laughter)But I don't use any tools and I have always used my fingers and palms to manipulate the pigment on the paper. Drawing is a form of meditation for me. It quiets my mind. I don't perceive what I'm drawing as ice or water. Instead, the image is stripped down to its most basic form of color and shape. Once the piece is complete, I can finally experience the composition as a whole, as an iceberg floating through glassy water, or a wave cresting with foam. On average, a piece this size takes me about, as you can see, 10 seconds.(Laughter)(Applause)Really, more like 200 hours, 250 hours for something that size. But I've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon, really. My mom was an artist, and growing up, we always had art supplies all over the house. My mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and I were fortunate enough to join and support her on these adventures. We rode camels in Northern Africa and mushed on dog sleds near the North Pole.In August of 2012, I led my first expedition, taking a group of artists and scholars up the northwest coast of Greenland. My mother was originally supposed to lead this trip. She and I were in the early stages of planning, as we had intended to go together, when she fell victim to a brain tumor. The cancer quickly took over her body and mind, and she passed away six months later. During the months of her illness, though, her dedication to the expedition never wavered, and I made a promise to carry out her final journey.My mother's passion for the Arctic echoed through my experience in Greenland, and I felt the power and the fragility of the landscape. The sheer size of the icebergs is humbling. The ice fields are alive with movement and sound in a way that I never expected. I expanded the scale of my compositions to give you that same sense of awe that I experienced. Yet, while the grandeur of the ice is evident, so, too, is its vulnerability. From our boat, I could see the ice sweating under the unseasonably warm sun.We had a chance to visit many of the Inuit communities in Greenland that now face huge challenges. The locals spoke to me of vast areas of sea ice that are no longer freezing over as they once did. And without ice, their hunting and harvesting grounds are severely diminished, threatening their way of life and survival.The melting glaciers in Greenland are one of the largest contributing factors to rising sea levels, which have already begun to drown some of our world's lowest-lying islands. One year after my trip to Greenland, I visited the Maldives, the lowest and flattest country in the entire world. While I was there, I collected images and inspiration for a new body of work: drawings of waves lapping on the coast of a nation that could be entirely underwater within this century.Devastating events happen every day on scales both global and personal. When I was in Greenland, I scattered my mother's ashes amidst the melting ice. Now she remains a part of the landscape she loved so much, even as it, too, passes and takes on new form.Among the many gifts my mother gave me was the ability to focus on the positive, rather than the negative. My drawings celebrate the beauty of what we all stand to lose. I hope they can serve as records of sublime landscapes in flux, documenting the transition and inspiring our global community to take action for the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zaria_forman_drawings_that_show_the_beauty_and_fragility_of_earth
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"What do you see? Most of you see a barbershop, but I see an opportunity: an opportunity for health, an opportunity for health equity.For black men, the barbershop is not just a place where you get your hair cut or your beard trimmed. No, it's much more than that. Historically, the barbershop has been a safe haven for black men. It's a place where we go for friendship, solidarity and solace. It's a place where we go to get away from the stress of the grind of work and sometimes home life. It's a place where we don't have to worry about how we're being perceived by the outside world. It's a place where we don't feel threatened, or threatening. It's a place of loyalty and trust. For that reason, it's one of the few places where we can fearlessly be ourselves and just ... talk. The talk, the shop talk, the conversation, that is the essence of the black barbershop.I can remember going to the barbershop with my dad as a kid. We went to Mr. Mike's barbershop every other Saturday. And like clockwork, the same group of men would be there every time we went, either waiting on their favorite barber or just soaking up the atmosphere.I can remember the jovial greeting that warmly welcomed us every time we went.""Hey Rev,"" they would say to my dad. He's a local pastor, and they treated him like a celebrity.""Hey young fella, how you doing?"" they would say to me, making me feel just as special.I remember the range of the conversations was immense. The men would talk about politics and sports and music and world news, national news, neighborhood news. There was some talk about women and what it was like to be a black man in America. But many times they also talked about health. The conversations about health were lengthy and deep. The men often recounted their doctor's recommendations to cut salt in their diet or to eat less fried foods or to stop smoking or to reduce stress. They talked about the different ways you could reduce stress, like simplifying one's love life —(Laughter)all ways to treat high blood pressure.There's a lot of talk about high blood pressure in the barbershop. That's because almost 40 percent of black men have it. That means that almost every single black man either has high blood pressure or knows a black man who has it.Sometimes, those conversations in the barbershop would be about what happens when high blood pressure is not adequately addressed.""Say, did you hear about Jimmy? He had a stroke.""""Did you hear about Eddie? He died last week. Massive heart attack. He was 50.""More black men die from high blood pressure than from anything else, even though decades of medical wisdom and science have demonstrated that death from high blood pressure can be prevented with timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment.So why is high blood pressure so differentially deadly for black men? Because too often, high blood pressure is either untreated or under-treated in black men, in part because of our lower engagement with the primary healthcare system. Black men, in particular those with high blood pressure, are less likely to have a primary care doctor than other groups.But why? Some of our earliest research on black men's health revealed that for many, the doctor's office is associated with fear, mistrust, disrespect, and unnecessary unpleasantness. The doctor's office is only a place that you go when you don't feel well. And when you do go, you might wait for hours only to get the run-around and to be evaluated by a stoic figure in a white coat who only has 10 minutes to give you and who doesn't value the talk. So it's no wonder that some men don't want to be bothered and skip going to the doctor altogether, especially if they feel fine.But herein lies the problem. You can feel just fine while high blood pressure ravages your most vital organs.This is Denny Moe, owner of Denny Moe's Superstar Barbershop in Harlem. I've been lucky enough to have Denny as my barber for the last eight years.He said to me once, ""Hey Doc, you know, lots of black men trust their barbers more than they trust their doctors.""This was stunning to me, at first, but not so much when you think about it. Black men have been with their current barbers on average as long as I've been with Denny, about eight years. And black men see their barbers about every two weeks. Not only do you trust your barber with your look and with your style, but you also trust him with your secrets and sometimes your life. Denny, like many barbers, is more than just an artist, a businessman and confidant. He's a leader and a passionate advocate for the well-being of his community. The very first time I walked into Denny Moe's shop, he wasn't just cutting hair. He was also orchestrating a voter registration drive to give a voice to his customers and his community.With this kind of activism, and community investment that typifies the black barbershop, of course the barbershop is a perfect place to talk about high blood pressure and other health concerns in the community.First, the barbershop is not a medical setting, and so it doesn't have all the negative psychological baggage that comes along with that. When you're in a barbershop, you're in your territory, and you're among friends who share your history, your struggle and your health risks.Second, because the barbershop is a place of connection, loyalty and trust, it's a place where you're more open to have a conversation about health and especially about high blood pressure. After all, conversations about high blood pressure have all the elements of great shop talk: stress and high blood pressure, food and high blood pressure, relationships and high blood pressure, and yes, what it's like to be a black man in America and high blood pressure.But you can do more than just talk about high blood pressure in the barbershop. You can concretely take action. Here we have an opportunity to partner with the Denny Moe's of the world and empower communities to address the health inequities that uniquely affect it. When high blood pressure screening expanded from clinics and hospitals to communities in the 1960s and '70s, black physicians like Dr. Eli Saunders in Baltimore and Dr. Keith Ferdinand in New Orleans were at the forefront of bringing health promotion to community hubs in urban black neighborhoods.These pioneers paved the way for my professional journey with barbershops and health, which began in Chicago in medical school.The very first research project that I worked on as a medical student was to help design healthcare interventions that would appeal to black men. We conducted about a dozen focus groups with a broad cross-section of black men, and we learned that for them, being healthy was as much about being perceived as healthy as it was about feeling healthy, and that feeling good went hand in hand with looking good. This work led to the development of Project Brotherhood, a community clinic founded by Dr. Eric Whitaker that provided tailored healthcare to black men. Part of this tailored care involved having a barber on the premises to reward the men who came for needed healthcare with a free haircut, to let the men know that we, too, valued how they looked as well as how they felt, and that what was important to them was also important to us.But while there's only one Project Brotherhood, there are thousands of black barbershops where the intersection of health and haircuts can be cultivated. The next stop on my journey was Dallas, Texas, where we learned that barbers were not only willing but fully able to roll up their sleeves and participate in delivering needed health services to improve the health of their customers and their community. We teamed up with an amazing cadre of black barbers and taught them how to measure blood pressure and how to counsel their customers and refer them to doctors to help manage high blood pressure. The barbers were not only willing to do it but they were damn good at it. Over a three-year period, the barbers measured thousands of blood pressures resulting in hundreds of black men being referred to doctors for medical care of their high blood pressure. These barber-doctor partnerships resulted in a 20 percent increase in the number of men who were able to achieve target blood pressure levels and a three-point drop, on average, in the blood pressure of each participant. If we were to extrapolate that three point drop to every single black man with high blood pressure in America, we would prevent 800 heart attacks, 500 strokes and 900 deaths from high blood pressure in just one year.And our experience with barbershops has been no different in New York City, where my journey has currently led me. With an incredible team of diverse research assistants, community health workers and volunteers, we've been able to partner with over 200 barbershops and other trusted community venues to reach over 7,000 older black men. And we've offered high blood pressure screening and counseling to each and every one of them. Thanks to Denny Moe and the myriad other barbers and community leaders who shared the vision of opportunity and empowerment to make a difference in their communities, we've been able to not only lower blood pressure in our participants, but we've also been able to impact other health indicators.So what do you see? What is your barbershop? Where is that place for you where people who are affected by a unique problem can meet a unique solution? When you find that place, see the opportunity.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_ravenell_how_barbershops_can_keep_men_healthy
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"I was a Marine with 1/1 Weapons Company, 81's platoon, out in Camp Pendleton, California. Oorah!Audience: Oorah!(Laughter)I joined a few months after September 11, feeling like I think most people in the country did at the time, filled with a sense of patriotism and retribution and the desire to do something — that, coupled with that fact that I wasn't doing anything. I was 17, just graduated from high school that past summer, living in the back room of my parents' house paying rent, in the small town I was raised in in Northern Indiana, called Mishawaka. I can spell that later for people who are interested —(Laughter)Mishawaka is many good things but cultural hub of the world it is not, so my only exposure to theater and film was limited to the plays I did in high school and Blockbuster Video, may she rest in peace.(Laughter)I was serious enough about acting that I auditioned for Juilliard when I was a senior in high school, didn't get in, determined college wasn't for me and applied nowhere else, which was a genius move. I also did that Hail Mary LA acting odyssey that I always heard stories about, of actors moving to LA with, like, seven dollars and finding work and successful careers. I got as far as Amarillo, Texas, before my car broke down. I spent all my money repairing it, finally made it to Santa Monica — not even LA — stayed for 48 hours wandering the beach, basically, got in my car, drove home, thus ending my acting career, so —(Laughter)Seventeen, Mishawaka ... parents' house, paying rent, selling vacuums ... telemarketing, cutting grass at the local 4-H fairgrounds. This was my world going into September, 2001.So after the 11th, and feeling an overwhelming sense of duty, and just being pissed off in general — at myself, my parents, the government; not having confidence, not having a respectable job, my shitty mini-fridge that I just drove to California and back — I joined the Marine Corps and loved it. I loved being a Marine. It's one of the things I'm most proud of having done in my life. Firing weapons was cool, driving and detonating expensive things was great. But I found I loved the Marine Corps the most for the thing I was looking for the least when I joined, which was the people: these weird dudes — a motley crew of characters from a cross section of the United States — that on the surface I had nothing in common with. And over time, all the political and personal bravado that led me to the military dissolved, and for me, the Marine Corps became synonymous with my friends.And then, a few years into my service and months away from deploying to Iraq, I dislocated my sternum in a mountain-biking accident, and had to be medically separated. Those never in the military may find this hard to understand, but being told I wasn't getting deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan was very devastating for me. I have a very clear image of leaving the base hospital on a stretcher and my entire platoon is waiting outside to see if I was OK.And then, suddenly, I was a civilian again. I knew I wanted to give acting another shot, because — again, this is me — I thought all civilian problems are small compared to the military. I mean, what can you really bitch about now, you know? ""It's hot. Someone should turn on the air conditioner."" ""This coffee line is too long."" I was a Marine, I knew how to survive. I'd go to New York and become an actor. If things didn't work out, I'd live in Central Park and dumpster-dive behind Panera Bread.(Laughter)I re-auditioned for Juilliard and this time I was lucky, I got in. But I was surprised by how complex the transition was from military to civilian. And I was relatively healthy; I can't imagine going through that process on top of a mental or physical injury. But regardless, it was difficult. In part, because I was in acting school — I couldn't justify going to voice and speech class, throwing imaginary balls of energy at the back of the room, doing acting exercises where I gave birth to myself —(Laughter)while my friends were serving without me overseas. But also, because I didn't know how to apply the things I learned in the military to a civilian context. I mean that both practically and emotionally. Practically, I had to get a job. And I was an Infantry Marine, where you're shooting machine guns and firing mortars. There's not a lot of places you can put those skills in the civilian world.(Laughter)Emotionally, I struggled to find meaning. In the military, everything has meaning. Everything you do is either steeped in tradition or has a practical purpose. You can't smoke in the field because you don't want to give away your position. You don't touch your face — you have to maintain a personal level of health and hygiene. You face this way when ""Colors"" plays, out of respect for people who went before you. Walk this way, talk this way because of this. Your uniform is maintained to the inch. How diligently you followed those rules spoke volumes about the kind of Marine you were. Your rank said something about your history and the respect you had earned.In the civilian world there's no rank. Here you're just another body, and I felt like I constantly had to prove my worth all over again. And the respect civilians were giving me while I was in uniform didn't exist when I was out of it. There didn't seem to be a ... a sense of community, whereas in the military, I felt this sense of community. How often in the civilian world are you put in a life-or-death situation with your closest friends and they constantly demonstrate that they're not going to abandon you? And meanwhile, at acting school ...(Laughter)I was really, for the first time, discovering playwrights and characters and plays that had nothing to do with the military, but were somehow describing my military experience in a way that before to me was indescribable. And I felt myself becoming less aggressive as I was able to put words to feelings for the first time and realizing what a valuable tool that was.And when I was reflecting on my time in the military, I wasn't first thinking on the stereotypical drills and discipline and pain of it; but rather, the small, intimate human moments, moments of great feeling: friends going AWOL because they missed their families, friends getting divorced, grieving together, celebrating together, all within the backdrop of the military. I saw my friends battling these circumstances, and I watched the anxiety it produced in them and me, not being able to express our feelings about it.The military and theater communities are actually very similar. You have a group of people trying to accomplish a mission greater than themselves; it's not about you. You have a role, you have to know your role within that team. Every team has a leader or director; sometimes they're smart, sometimes they're not. You're forced to be intimate with complete strangers in a short amount of time; the self-discipline, the self-maintenance. I thought, how great would it be to create a space that combined these two seemingly dissimilar communities, that brought entertainment to a group of people that, considering their occupation, could handle something a bit more thought-provoking than the typical mandatory-fun events that I remember being ""volun-told"" to go to in the military —(Laughter)all well-intended but slightly offensive events, like ""Win a Date with a San Diego Chargers Cheerleader,"" where you answer a question about pop culture, and if you get it right you win a date, which was a chaperoned walk around the parade deck with this already married, pregnant cheerleader —(Laughter)Nothing against cheerleaders, I love cheerleaders. The point is more, how great would it be to have theater presented through characters that were accessible without being condescending. So we started this nonprofit called Arts in the Armed Forces, where we tried to do that, tried to join these two seemingly dissimilar communities. We pick a play or select monologues from contemporary American plays that are diverse in age and race like a military audience is, grab a group of incredible theater-trained actors, arm them with incredible material, keep production value as minimal as possible — no sets, no costumes, no lights, just reading it — to throw all the emphasis on the language and to show that theater can be created at any setting.It's a powerful thing, getting in a room with complete strangers and reminding ourselves of our humanity, and that self-expression is just as valuable a tool as a rifle on your shoulder. And for an organization like the military, that prides itself on having acronyms for acronyms, you can get lost in the sauce when it comes to explaining a collective experience. And I can think of no better community to arm with a new means of self-expression than those protecting our country.We've gone all over the United States and the world, from Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland, to Camp Pendleton, to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, to USAG Bavaria, on- and off-Broadway theaters in New York. And for the performing artists we bring, it's a window into a culture they otherwise would not have had exposure to. And for the military, it's the exact same.And in doing this for the past six years, I'm always reminded that acting is many things. It's a craft, it's a political act, it's a business, it's — whatever adjective is most applicable to you. But it's also a service. I didn't get to finish mine, so whenever I get to be of service to this ultimate service industry, the military, for me, again — there's not many things better than that.Thank you.(Applause)We're going to be doing a piece from Marco Ramirez, called ""I am not Batman."" An incredible actor and good friend of mine, Jesse Perez, is going to be reading, and Matt Johnson, who I just met a couple hours ago. They're doing it together for the first time, so we'll see how it goes.Jesse Perez and Matt Johnson.(Applause)Jesse Perez: It's the middle of the night and the sky is glowing like mad, radioactive red. And if you squint, you can maybe see the moon through a thick layer of cigarette smoke and airplane exhaust that covers the whole city, like a mosquito net that won't let the angels in.(Drum beat)And if you look up high enough, you can see me standing on the edge of an 87-story building. And up there, a place for gargoyles and broken clock towers that have stayed still and dead for maybe like 100 years, up there is me.(Beat)And I'm frickin' Batman.(Beat)And I gots Batmobiles and batarangs and frickin' bat caves, like, for real. And all it takes is a broom closet or a back room or a fire escape, and Danny's hand-me-down jeans are gone. And my navy blue polo shirt, the one that looks kinda good on me but has that hole on it near the butt from when it got snagged on the chain-link fence behind Arturo's but it isn't even a big deal because I tuck that part in and it's, like, all good. That blue polo shirt — it's gone, too! And I get like, like ... transformational.(Beat)And nobody pulls out a belt and whips Batman for talkin' back.(Beat)Or for not talkin' back.And nobody calls Batman simple or stupid or skinny. And nobody fires Batman's brother from the Eastern Taxi Company 'cause they was making cutbacks, neither. 'Cause they got nothing but respect. And not like afraid-respect, just, like, respect-respect.(Laughter)'Cause nobody's afraid of you. 'Cause Batman doesn't mean nobody no harm.(Beat)Ever. (Double beat)'Cause all Batman really wants to do is save people and maybe pay abuela's bills one day and die happy. And maybe get, like, mad-famous for real.(Laughter)Oh — and kill the Joker.(Drum roll)Tonight, like most nights, I'm all alone. And I'm watchin' and I'm waitin' like a eagle or like a — no, yeah, like a eagle.(Laughter)And my cape is flapping in the wind cause it's frickin' long and my pointy ears are on, and that mask that covers like half my face is on, too, and I got, like, bulletproof stuff all in my chest so no one can hurt me. And nobody — nobody! — is gonna come between Batman ... and justice.(Drums) (Laughter)From where I am, I can hear everything.(Silence)Somewhere in the city, there's a old lady picking Styrofoam leftovers up out of a trash can and she's putting a piece of sesame chicken someone spit out into her own mouth. And somewhere there's a doctor with a wack haircut in a black lab coat trying to find a cure for the diseases that are gonna make us all extinct for real one day. And somewhere there's a man, a man in a janitor's uniform, stumbling home drunk and dizzy after spending half his paycheck on 40-ounce bottles of twist-off beer, and the other half on a four-hour visit to some lady's house on a street where the lights have all been shot out by people who'd rather do what they do in this city in the dark. And half a block away from janitor man, there's a group of good-for-nothings who don't know no better, waiting for janitor man with rusted bicycle chains and imitation Louisville Sluggers, and if they don't find a cent on him, which they won't, they'll just pound at him till the muscles in their arms start burning, till there's no more teeth to crack out.But they don't count on me. They don't count on no Dark Knight, with a stomach full of grocery-store brand macaroni and cheese and cut-up Vienna sausages.(Laughter)'Cause they'd rather believe I don't exist.And from 87 stories up, I can hear one of the good-for-nothings say, ""Gimme the cash!"" — real fast like that, just, ""Gimme me the fuckin' cash!"" And I see janitor man mumble something in drunk language and turn pale, and from 87 stories up, I can hear his stomach trying to hurl its way out his Dickies.So I swoop down, like, mad-fast and I'm like darkness, I'm like, ""Swoosh!"" And I throw a batarang at the one naked lightbulb.(Cymbal)And they're all like, ""Whoa, muthafucker! Who just turned out the lights?""(Laughter)""What's that over there?"" ""What?""""Gimme me what you got, old man!""""Did anybody hear that?"" ""Hear what? There ain't nothing. No, really — there ain't no bat!""But then ... one out of the three good-for-nothings gets it to the head — pow!And number two swings blindly into the dark cape before him, but before his fist hits anything, I grab a trash can lid and — right in the gut! And number one comes back with the jump kick, but I know judo karate, too, so I'm like —(Drums)Twice!(Drums)(Laughter)(Drums)But before I can do any more damage, suddenly we all hear a ""click-click."" And suddenly everything gets quiet. And the one good-for-nothing left standing grips a handgun and aims it straight up, like he's holding Jesus hostage, like he's threatening maybe to blow a hole in the moon. And the good-for-nothing who got it to the head, who tried to jump-kick me, and the other good-for-nothing who got it in the gut, is both scrambling back away from the dark figure before 'em. And the drunk man, the janitor man, is huddled in a corner, praying to Saint Anthony 'cause that's the only one he could remember.(Double beat) And there's me: eyes glowing white, cape blowing softly in the wind.(Beat) Bulletproof chest heaving, my heart beating right through it in a Morse code for: ""Fuck with me just once come on just try.""And the one good-for-nothing left standing, the one with the handgun — yeah, he laughs. And he lowers his arm. And he points it at me and gives the moon a break. And he aims it right between my pointy ears, like goal posts and he's special teams. And janitor man is still calling Saint Anthony, but he ain't pickin' up. And for a second, it seems like ... maybe I'm gonna lose.Nah!(Drums)Shoot! Shoot! Fwa-ka-ka!""Don't kill me, man!""Snap! Wrist crack! Neck! Slash!Skin meets acid: ""Ahhhhhhh!""And he's on the floor and I'm standing over him and I got the gun in my hands now and I hate guns, I hate holding 'em 'cause I'm Batman. And, asterisk: Batman don't like guns 'cause his parents got iced by guns a long time ago. But for just a second, my eyes glow white, and I hold this thing for I could speak to the good-for-nothing in a language he maybe understands. Click-click!(Beat)And the good-for-nothings become good-for-disappearing into whatever toxic waste, chemical sludge shithole they crawled out of. And it's just me and janitor man. And I pick him up, and I wipe sweat and cheap perfume off his forehead. And he begs me not to hurt him and I grab him tight by his janitor-man shirt collar, and I pull him to my face and he's taller than me but the cape helps, so he listens when I look him straight in the eyes. And I say two words to him: ""Go home.""And he does, checking behind his shoulder every 10 feet. And I swoosh from building to building on his way there 'cause I know where he lives. And I watch his hands tremble as he pulls out his key chain and opens the door to his building. And I'm back in bed before he even walks in through the front door.And I hear him turn on the faucet and pour himself a glass of warm tap water. And he puts the glass back in the sink. And I hear his footsteps. And they get slower as they get to my room. And he creaks my door open, like, mad-slow. And he takes a step in, which he never does.(Beat) And he's staring off into nowhere, his face, the color of sidewalks in summer. And I act like I'm just waking up and I say, ""Ah, what's up, Pop?"" And janitor man says nothing to me. But I see in the dark, I see his arms go limp and his head turns back, like, towards me. And he lifts it for I can see his face, for I could see his eyes. And his cheeks is drippin', but not with sweat. And he just stands there breathing, like he remembers my eyes glowing white, like he remembers my bulletproof chest, like he remembers he's my pop. And for a long time I don't say nothin'. And he turns around, hand on the doorknob. And he ain't looking my way, but I hear him mumble two words to me: ""I'm sorry.""And I lean over, and I open my window just a crack. If you look up high enough, you could see me. And from where I am —(Cymbals)I could hear everything.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_driver_my_journey_from_marine_to_actor
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"OK, first, some introductions. My mom, Jennie, took this picture. That's my dad, Frank, in the middle. And on his left, my sisters: Mary Catherine, Judith Ann, Theresa Marie. John Patrick's sitting on his lap and Kevin Michael's on his right. And in the pale-blue windbreaker, Susan Diane. Me. I loved growing up in a big family. And one of my favorite things was picking names. But by the time child number seven came along, we had nearly run out of middle names. It was a long deliberation before we finally settled on Jennifer Bridget. Every parent in this audience knows the joy and excitement of picking a new baby's name. And I was excited and thrilled to help my mom in that special ceremonial moment.But it's not like that everywhere. I travel a lot and I see a lot. But it took me by surprise to learn in an area of Ethiopia, parents delay picking the names for their new babies by a month or more. Why delay? Why not take advantage of this special ceremonial time? Well, they delay because they're afraid. They're afraid their baby will die. And this loss might be a little more bearable without a name. A face without a name might help them feel just a little less attached.So here we are in one part of the world — a time of joy, excitement, dreaming of the future of that child — while in another world, parents are filled with dread, not daring to dream of a future for their child beyond a few precious weeks. How can that be? How can it be that 2.6 million babies die around the world before they're even one month old? 2.6 million. That's the population of Vancouver. And the shocking thing is: Why? In too many cases, we simply don't know.Now, I remember recently seeing an updated pie chart. And the pie chart was labeled, ""Causes of death in children under five worldwide."" And there was a pretty big section of that pie chart, about 40 percent — 40 percent was labeled ""neonatal."" Now, ""neonatal"" is not a cause of death. Neonatal is simply an adjective, an adjective that means that the child is less than one month old. For me, ""neonatal"" said: ""We have no idea.""Now, I'm a scientist. I'm a doctor. I want to fix things. But you can't fix what you can't define. So our first step in restoring the dreams of those parents is to answer the question: Why are babies dying?So today, I want to talk about a new approach, an approach that I feel will not only help us know why babies are dying, but is beginning to completely transform the whole field of global health. It's called ""Precision Public Health.""For me, precision medicine comes from a very special place. I trained as a cancer doctor, an oncologist. I got into it because I wanted to help people feel better. But too often my treatments made them feel worse. I still remember young women being driven to my clinic by their moms — adults, who had to be helped into my exam room by their mothers. They were so weak from the treatment I had given them. But at the time, in those front lines in the war on cancer, we had few tools. And the tools we did have couldn't differentiate between the cancer cells that we wanted to hit hard and those healthy cells that we wanted to preserve. And so the side effects that you're all very familiar with — hair loss, being sick to your stomach, having a suppressed immune system, so infection was a constant threat — were always surrounding us.And then I moved to the biotechnology industry. And I got to work on a new approach for breast cancer patients that could do a better job of telling the healthy cells from the unhealthy or cancer cells. It's a drug called Herceptin. And what Herceptin allowed us to do is to precisely target HER2-positive breast cancer, at the time, the scariest form of breast cancer. And that precision let us hit hard the cancer cells, while sparing and being more gentle on the normal cells. A huge breakthrough. It felt like a miracle, so much so that today, we're harnessing all those tools — big data, consumer monitoring, gene sequencing and more — to tackle a broad variety of diseases. That's allowing us to target individuals with the right remedies at the right time.Precision medicine revolutionized cancer therapy. Everything changed. And I want everything to change again. So I've been asking myself: Why should we limit this smarter, more precise, better way to tackle diseases to the rich world? Now, don't misunderstand me — I'm not talking about bringing expensive medicines like Herceptin to the developing world, although I'd actually kind of like that. What I am talking about is moving from this precise targeting for individuals to tackle public health problems in populations.Now, OK, I know probably you're thinking, ""She's crazy. You can't do that. That's too ambitious."" But here's the thing: we're already doing this in a limited way, and it's already starting to make a big difference.So here's what's happening. Now, I told you I trained as a cancer doctor. But like many, many doctors who trained in San Francisco in the '80s, I also trained as an AIDS doctor. It was a terrible time. AIDS was a death sentence. All my patients died. Now, things are better, but HIV/AIDS remains a terrible global challenge. Worldwide, about 17 million women are living with HIV. We know that when these women become pregnant, they can transfer the virus to their baby. We also know in the absence of therapy, half those babies will not survive until the age of two. But we know that antiretroviral therapy can virtually guarantee that she will not transmit the virus to the baby. So what do we do?Well, a one-size-fits-all approach, kind of like that blast of chemo, would mean we test and treat every pregnant woman in the world. That would do the job. But it's just not practical. So instead, we target those areas where HIV rates are the highest. We know in certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa we can test and treat pregnant women where rates are highest. This precision approach to a public health problem has cut by nearly half HIV transmission from mothers to baby in the last five years.(Applause)Screening pregnant women in certain areas in the developing world is a powerful example of how precision public health can change things on a big scale.So ... How do we do that? We can do that because we know. We know who to target, what to target, where to target and how to target. And that, for me, are the important  elements of precision public health: who, what, where and how.But let's go back to the 2.6 million babies who die before they're one month old. Here's the problem: we just don't know. It may seem unbelievable, but the way we figure out the causes of infant mortality in those countries with the highest infant mortality is a conversation with mom. A health worker asks a mom who has just lost her child, ""Was the baby vomiting? Did they have a fever?"" And that conversation may take place as long as three months after the baby has died. Now, put yourself in the shoes of that mom. It's a heartbreaking, excruciating conversation. And even worse — it's not that helpful, because we might know there was a fever or vomiting, but we don't know why. So in the absence of knowing that knowledge, we cannot prevent that mom, that family, or other families in that community from suffering the same tragedy.But what if we applied a precision public health approach? Let's say, for example, we find out in certain areas of Africa that babies are dying because of a bacterial infection transferred from the mother to the baby, known as Group B streptococcus. In the absence of treatment, mom has a seven times higher chance that her next baby will die. Once we define the problem, we can prevent that death with something as cheap and safe as penicillin. We can do that because then we'll know. And that's the point: once we know, we can bring the right interventions to the right population in the right places to save lives.With this approach, and with these interventions and others like them, I have no doubt that a precision public health approach can help our world achieve our 15-year goal. And that would translate into a million babies' lives saved every single year. One million babies every single year.And why would we stop there? A much more powerful approach to public health — imagine what might be possible. Why couldn't we more effectively tackle malnutrition? Why wouldn't we prevent cervical cancer in women? And why not eradicate malaria?(Applause)Yes, clap for that!(Applause)So, you know, I live in two different worlds, one world populated by scientists, and another world populated by public health professionals. The promise of precision public health is to bring these two worlds together. But you know, we all live in two worlds: the rich world and the poor world. And what I'm most excited about about precision public health is bridging these two worlds. Every day in the rich world, we're bringing incredible talent and tools — everything at our disposal — to precisely target diseases in ways I never imagined would be possible. Surely, we can tap into that kind of talent and tools to stop babies dying in the poor world. If we did, then every parent would have the confidence to name their child the moment that child is born, daring to dream that that child's life will be measured in decades, not days.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sue_desmond_hellmann_a_smarter_more_precise_way_to_think_about_public_health
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"Thank you very much. Good evening.Some of you may have noticed that my last name is Nutt. And if you did, you are forgiven for wondering how a Nutt managed to end up in a war zone. I actually was offered, right out of medical school, and accepted a volunteer contract to work with UNICEF in war-torn Somalia, that was worth one dollar. And, you see, I had to be paid this dollar in the event that the UN needed to issue an evacuation order, so that I would be covered. I was, after all, heading into one of the world's most dangerous places. And by now, some of you may be asking yourselves, and I just want to reassure you, that I did get half the money up front.(Laughter)But you see, this is how, with 50 cents in my pocket, I ended up in Baidoa, Somalia. Journalists called it the ""city of death."" And they called it the city of death because 300,000 people had lost their lives there — 300,000 people, mostly as a result of war-related famine and disease.I was part of a team that was tasked with trying to figure out how best to respond to this humanitarian catastrophe. It was right on the heels of the Rwandan genocide, and aid money to the region was drying up. Many aid organizations, unfortunately, had been forced to close their doors. And so the question that I was asked to specifically help answer, which is one that aid workers ask themselves in war zones the world over, is: What the hell do we do now? You know, the security environment in Somalia at that moment in time — and nothing has really changed too much — can best be described as ""Mad Max"" by way of ""A Clockwork Orange.""And I remember very distinctly a couple of days after my arrival, I went up to a feeding clinic. There were dozens of women who were standing in line, and they were clutching their infants very close. About 20 minutes into this conversation I was having with this one young woman, I leaned forward and tried to put my finger in the palm of her baby's hand. And when I did this, I discovered that her baby was already in rigor. She was stiff, and her little, lifeless hand was curled into itself. She had died hours before of malnutrition and dehydration. I later learned that as her baby was dying, this young woman had been held for two days by some teenage boys who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and they were trying to shake her down for more money, money she very clearly did not have. And this is a scene that I have confronted in war zones the world over; places where kids, some as young as eight — they are this big — and those kids, they have never been to school. But they have fought and they have killed with automatic rifles.Is this just the way the world is? Some will you tell you that war is unavoidably human. After all, it is as old as existence itself. We say never again, and yet it happens again and again and again. But I will tell you that I have seen the absolute worst of what we as human beings are capable of doing to one another, and yet I still believe a different outcome is possible. Do you want to know why? Because over 20 years of doing this work, going in and out of war zones around the world, I have come to understand that there are aspects of this problem that we, all of us, as people occupying this shared space, that we can change — not through force or coercion or invasion, but by simply looking at all of the options available to us and choosing the ones that favor peace at the expense of war, instead of war at the expense of peace.How so? Well, I want you to consider this: there are at least 800 million small arms and light weapons in circulation in the world today. The vast majority of civilians, like that young baby, who are dying in war zones around the world, are dying at the hands of various armed groups who rely on a near-infinite supply of cheap, easy and efficient weapons to rape, threaten, intimidate and brutalize those civilians at every turn. How cheap? Well, in some parts of the world, you can buy an AK-47 for as little as 10 dollars. In many places in which I have worked, it is easier to get access to an automatic rifle than it is to get access to clean drinking water.And so now the important part: Can anything be done about this? To answer that question, let's take a look at this map of the world. And now, let's add in all of the countries that are currently at war, and the number of people who have either died or have been displaced as a result of that violence. It is a staggering number — more than 40 million people. But you will also notice something else about this map. You will notice that most of those countries are in the Global South. Now, let's look at the countries that are the world's top 20 exporters of small arms in the world. And what do we notice? Well, you see them in green. You will notice that those are mostly countries in the Global North, primarily Western countries. What does this tell us? This tells us that most of the people who are dying in war are living in poor countries, and yet most of the people who are profiting from war are living in rich countries — people like you and me.And then what if we go beyond small arms for a second. What if we look at all weapons in circulation in the world? Who does the biggest business? Well, roughly 80 percent of those weapons come from none other than the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany. It's shocking, isn't it?Now, some of you might be saying at this moment in time, ""Oh yeah, but OK, hang on a second there ... Nutt.""(Laughter)Grade school was spectacular for me. It was, really, a wonderful experience.(Laughter)But you might be saying to yourselves, You know, all of these weapons in war zones — they're not a cause, but an effect of the violence that plagues them each and every single day. You know, places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where they need these weapons to be able to maintain law and order, promote peace and security, to combat terror groups — surely this is a good thing.Let's take a look at that assumption for just one moment, because you see there has been a boom in the small-arms trade since the start of the War on Terror. In fact, it is a business that has grown threefold over the past 15 years. And now let's compare that to the number of people who have directly died in armed conflict around the world in that same period. What do you notice? Well, you notice that, in fact, that also goes up roughly three- to fourfold. They basically go up and end at the same point.Now, we can have a circular argument here about whether this increase in fatalities is a response to the increase of small arms, or the other way around. But here's what we should really take away from this. What we should take away from this is that this is a relationship worth scrutinizing, especially when you consider that small arms that were shipped to Iraq for use by the Iraqi Army, or to Syria for so-called moderate opposition fighters, that those arms, many of them, are now in the hands of ISIS; or when you consider that arms that were shipped to Libya are now actively drifting across the Sahel, and ending up with groups like Boko Haram and al Qaeda and other militant groups.And therein lies the problem. Because, you see, small arms anywhere are a menace everywhere, because their first stop is rarely their last.Spending on war per person per year now amounts to about 249 dollars — 249 dollars per person, which is roughly 12 times what we spend on foreign aid, money that is used to educate and vaccinate children and combat malnutrition in the Global South. But we can shift that balance. How do we do this? Well, it is essentially a problem of both supply and demand, so we can tackle it from both sides.On the supply side, we can push our governments to adopt international arms transparency mechanisms like the Arms Trade Treaty, which makes it so that rich countries have to be more accountable for where their arms are going and what their arms might be used for. Here in the United States, the largest arms-exporting country in the world by far, President Obama has rightly signed the Arms Trade Treaty, but none of it takes effect, it isn't binding, until it is approved and ratified by the Senate. This is where we need to make our voices heard. You know, the curbing of small arms — it's not going to solve the problem of war. Increased control mechanisms won't solve that problem. But it's an important step in the right direction. And it's up to all of us who live in those rich countries to make change here.What about on the demand side? You know, there are generations around the world who are being lost to war. It is possible to disrupt that cycle of violence with investments in education, in strengthening the rule of law and in economic development, especially for women. I have personally seen just how incredibly powerful those kinds of efforts can be around the world.But here's the thing: they take time, which means for you as individuals, if you want to give, please, by all means do it. But know that how you give is just as important as how much you give. Regular contributions like monthly contributions are a far more effective way of giving, because they allow humanitarian organizations to properly plan and be invested over the long term, and to be present in the lives of families who have been affected by war, wars that many of us, frankly, all too quickly forget.When I first got on that plane for Somalia as a young doctor, I had no idea what it meant to live with war. But I can tell you that I know what it means now. And I know what it means to lie in bed in the pitch-black night and listen to that haunting ""pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!"" of automatic gunfire, and wonder with absolute dread how many minutes I have left until it will be right on top of me. I can tell you that it is a terrifying and agonizing fear, one that millions of people around the world are forced to confront each and every single day, especially children. Over the years of doing this work, unfortunately, war has killed far too many people close to me. And on at least a couple of occasions, war has very nearly killed me as well.But I firmly believe, which is why I get up and do what I do every single day, that we can make different choices here. Because you see, war is ours, as human beings. We buy it, sell it, spread it and wage it. We are therefore not powerless to solve it. On the contrary, we are the only ones who can.Thank you very much, and I want to wish you the greatest success.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/samantha_nutt_the_real_harm_of_the_global_arms_trade
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"Eric Hirshberg: So I assume that Norman doesn't need much of an introduction, but TED's audience is global, it's diverse, so I've been tasked with starting with his bio, which could easily take up the entire 18 minutes. So instead we're going to do 93 years in 93 seconds or less.(Laughter)You were born in New Hampshire.Norman Lear: New Haven, Connecticut.EH: New Haven, Connecticut.(Laughter)NL: There goes seven more seconds.EH: Nailed it.(Laughter)You were born in New Haven, Connecticut. Your father was a con man — I got that right. He was taken away to prison when you were nine years old. You flew 52 missions as a fighter pilot in World War II. You came back to —NL: Radio operator.EH: You came to LA to break into Hollywood, first in publicity, then in TV. You had no training as a writer, formally, but you hustled your way in. Your breakthrough, your debut, was a little show called ""All in the Family."" You followed that up with a string of hits that to this day is unmatched in Hollywood: ""Sanford and Son,"" ""Maude,"" ""Good Times,"" ""The Jeffersons,"" ""One Day at a Time,"" ""Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,"" to name literally a fraction of them. Not only are they all commercially —(Applause)Not only are they all commercially successful, but many of them push our culture forward by giving the underrepresented members of society their first prime-time voice. You have seven shows in the top 10 at one time. At one point, you aggregate an audience of 120 million people per week watching your content. That's more than the audience for Super Bowl 50, which happens once a year.NL: Holy shit.(Laughter)(Applause)EH: And we're not even to the holy shit part.(Laughter)You land yourself on Richard Nixon's enemies list — he had one.That's an applause line, too.(Applause)You're inducted into the TV Hall of Fame on the first day that it exists. Then came the movies. ""Fried Green Tomatoes,"" ""The Princess Bride,"" ""Stand By Me,"" ""This Is Spinal Tap.""(Applause)Again, just to name a fraction.(Applause)Then you wipe the slate clean, start a third act as a political activist focusing on protecting the First Amendment and the separation of church and state. You start People For The American Way. You buy the Declaration of Independence and give it back to the people. You stay active in both entertainment and politics until the ripe old of age of 93, when you write a book and make a documentary about your life story. And after all that, they finally think you're ready for a TED Talk.(Laughter)(Applause)NL: I love being here. And I love you for agreeing to do this.EH: Thank you for asking. It's my honor. So here's my first question. Was your mother proud of you?(Laughter)NL: My mother ... what a place to start. Let me put it this way — when I came back from the war, she showed me the letters that I had written her from overseas, and they were absolute love letters.(Laughter)This really sums up my mother. They were love letters, as if I had written them to — they were love letters. A year later I asked my mother if I could have them, because I'd like to keep them all the years of my life ... She had thrown them away.(Laughter)That's my mother.(Laughter)The best way I can sum it up in more recent times is — this is also more recent times — a number of years ago, when they started the Hall of Fame to which you referred. It was a Sunday morning, when I got a call from the fellow who ran the TV Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was calling me to tell me they had met all day yesterday and he was confidentially telling me they were going to start a hall of fame and these were the inductees. I started to say ""Richard Nixon,"" because Richard Nixon —EH: I don't think he was on their list.NL: William Paley, who started CBS, David Sarnoff, who started NBC, Edward R. Murrow, the greatest of the foreign correspondents, Paddy Chayefsky — I think the best writer that ever came out of television — Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and me.EH: Not bad.NL: I call my mother immediately in Hartford, Connecticut. ""Mom, this is what's happened, they're starting a hall of fame.""I tell her the list of names and me, and she says, ""Listen, if that's what they want to do, who am I to say?""(Laughter)(Applause)That's my Ma. I think it earns that kind of a laugh because everybody has a piece of that mother.(Laughter)EH: And the sitcom Jewish mother is born, right there.So your father also played a large role in your life, mostly by his absence.NL: Yeah.EH: Tell us what happened when you were nine years old.NL: He was flying to Oklahoma with three guys that my mother said, ""I don't want you to have anything to do with them, I don't trust those men."" That's when I heard, maybe not for the first time, ""Stifle yourself, Jeanette, I'm going."" And he went. It turns out he was picking up some fake bonds, which he was flying across the country to sell. But the fact that he was going to Oklahoma in a plane, and he was going to bring me back a 10-gallon hat, just like Ken Maynard, my favorite cowboy wore. You know, this was a few years after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. I mean, it was exotic that my father was going there. But when he came back, they arrested him as he got off the plane.That night newspapers were all over the house, my father was with his hat in front of his face, manacled to a detective. And my mother was selling the furniture, because we were leaving — she didn't want to stay in that state of shame, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. And selling the furniture — the house was loaded with people.And in the middle of all of that, some strange horse's ass put his hand on my shoulder and said, ""Well, you're the man of the house now."" I'm crying, and this asshole says, ""You're the man of the house now."" And I think that was the moment I began to understand the foolishness of the human condition. So ... it took a lot of years to look back at it and feel it was a benefit. But —EH: It's interesting you call it a benefit.NL: Benefit in that it gave me that springboard. I mean that I could think how foolish it was to say to this crying nine-year-old boy, ""You're the man of the house now."" And then I was crying, and then he said, ""And men of the house don't cry."" And I ...(Laughter)So ... I look back, and I think that's when I learned the foolishness of the human condition, and it's been that gift that I've used.EH: So you have a father who's absent, you have a mother for whom apparently nothing is good enough. Do you think that starting out as a kid who maybe never felt heard started you down a journey that ended with you being an adult with a weekly audience of 120 million people?NL: I love the way you put that question, because I guess I've spent my life wanting — if anything, wanting to be heard. I think — It's a simple answer, yes, that was what sparked — well, there were other things, too. When my father was away, I was fooling with a crystal radio set that we had made together, and I caught a signal that turned out to be Father Coughlin.(Laughter)Yeah, somebody laughed.(Laughter)But not funny, this was a horse's — another horse's ass — who was very vocal about hating the New Deal and Roosevelt and Jews. The first time I ran into an understanding that there were people in this world that hated me because I was born to Jewish parents. And that had an enormous effect on my life.EH: So you had a childhood with little in the way of strong male role models, except for your grandfather. Tell us about him.NL: Oh, my grandfather. Well here's the way I always talked about that grandfather. There were parades, lots of parades when I was a kid. There were parades on Veteran's Day — there wasn't a President's Day. There was Abraham Lincoln's birthday, George Washington's birthday and Flag Day ... And lots of little parades. My grandfather used to take me and we'd stand on the street corner, he'd hold my hand, and I'd look up and I'd see a tear running down his eye. And he meant a great deal to me.And he used to write presidents of the United States. Every letter started, ""My dearest, darling Mr. President,"" and he'd tell him something wonderful about what he did. But when he disagreed with the President, he also wrote, ""My dearest, darling Mr. President, Didn't I tell you last week ...?""(Laughter)And I would run down the stairs every now and then and pick up the mail. We were three flights up, 74 York Street, New Haven, Connecticut. And I'd pick up a little white envelope reading, ""Shya C. called at this address."" And that's the story I have told about my grandfather —EH: They wrote him back on the envelopes —NL: They wrote back. But I have shown them myself, going way back to Phil Donahue and others before him, literally dozens of interviews in which I told that story. This will be the second time I have said the whole story was a lie. The truth was my grandfather took me to parades, we had lots of those. The truth is a tear came down his eye.The truth is he would write an occasional letter, and I did pick up those little envelopes. But ""My dearest darling Mr. President,"" all the rest of it, is a story I borrowed from a good friend whose grandfather was that grandfather who wrote those letters. And, I mean, I stole Arthur Marshall's grandfather and made him my own. Always.When I started to write my memoir — ""Even this —"" How about that? ""Even This I Get to Experience."" When I started to write the memoir and I started to think about it, and then I — I — I did a reasonable amount of crying, and I realized how much I needed the father. So much so that I appropriated Arthur Marshall's grandfather. So much so, the word ""father"" — I have six kids by the way. My favorite role in life. It and husband to my wife Lyn. But I stole the man's identity because I needed the father.Now I've gone through a whole lot of shit and come out on the other side, and I forgive my father — the best thing I — the worst thing I — The word I'd like to use about him and think about him is — he was a rascal. The fact that he lied and stole and cheated and went to prison ... I submerge that in the word ""rascal.""EH: Well there's a saying that amateurs borrow and professionals steal.NL: I'm a pro.EH: You're a pro.(Laughter)And that quote is widely attributed to John Lennon, but it turns out he stole it from T.S. Eliot. So you're in good company.(Laughter)EH: I want to talk about your work. Obviously the impact of your work has been written about and I'm sure you've heard about it all your life: what it meant to people, what it meant to our culture, you heard the applause when I just named the names of the shows, you raised half the people in the room through your work. But have there ever been any stories about the impact of your work that surprised you?NL: Oh, god — surprised me and delighted me from head to toe. There was ""An Evening with Norman Lear"" within the last year that a group of hip-hop impresarios, performers and the Academy put together. The subtext of ""An Evening with ..."" was: What do a 92-year-old Jew — then 92 — and the world of hip-hop have in common? Russell Simmons was among seven on the stage. And when he talked about the shows, he wasn't talking about the Hollywood, George Jefferson in ""The Jeffersons,"" or the show that was a number five show. He was talking about a simple thing that made a big —EH: Impact on him?NL: An impact on him — I was hesitating over the word, ""change."" It's hard for me to imagine, you know, changing somebody's life, but that's the way he put it. He saw George Jefferson write a check on ""The Jeffersons,"" and he never knew that a black man could write a check. And he says it just impacted his life so — it changed his life.And when I hear things like that — little things — because I know that there isn't anybody in this audience that wasn't likely responsible today for some little thing they did for somebody, whether it's as little as a smile or an unexpected ""Hello,"" that's how little this thing was. It could have been the dresser of the set who put the checkbook on the thing, and George had nothing to do while he was speaking, so he wrote it, I don't know. But —EH: So in addition to the long list I shared in the beginning, I should have also mentioned that you invented hip-hop.(Laughter)NL: Well ...EH: I want to talk about —NL: Well, then do it.(Laughter)EH: You've lead a life of accomplishment, but you've also built a life of meaning. And all of us strive to do both of those things — not all of us manage to. But even those of us who do manage to accomplish both of those, very rarely do we figure out how to do them together. You managed to push culture forward through your art while also achieving world-beating commercial success. How did you do both?NL: Here's where my mind goes when I hear that recitation of all I accomplished. This planet is one of a billion, they tell us, in a universe of which there are billions — billions of universes, billions of planets ... which we're trying to save and it requires saving. But ... anything I may have accomplished is — my sister once asked me what she does about something that was going on in Newington, Connecticut. And I said, ""Write your alderman or your mayor or something."" She said, ""Well I'm not Norman Lear, I'm Claire Lear."" And that was the first time I said what I'm saying, I said, ""Claire. With everything you think about what I may have done and everything you've done,"" — she never left Newington — ""can you get your fingers close enough when you consider the size of the planet and so forth, to measure anything I may have done to anything you may have done?""So ... I am convinced we're all responsible for doing as much as I may have accomplished. And I understand what you're saying —EH: It's an articulate deflection —NL: But you have to really buy into the size and scope of the creator's enterprise, here.EH: But here on this planet you have really mattered.NL: I'm a son of a gun.(Laughter)EH: So I have one more question for you. How old do you feel?NL: I am the peer of whoever I'm talking to.EH: Well, I feel 93.(Applause)NL: We out of here?EH: Well, I feel 93 years old, but I hope to one day feel as young as the person I'm sitting across from.Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Norman Lear.(Applause)NL: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/norman_lear_an_entertainment_icon_on_living_a_life_of_meaning
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"I'm driven by pure passion to create photographs that tell stories. Photography can be described as the recording of a single moment frozen within a fraction of time. Each moment or photograph represents a tangible piece of our memories as time passes. But what if you could capture more than one moment in a photograph? What if a photograph could actually collapse time, compressing the best moments of the day and the night seamlessly into one single image?I've created a concept called ""Day to Night"" and I believe it's going to change the way you look at the world. I know it has for me.My process begins by photographing iconic locations, places that are part of what I call our collective memory. I photograph from a fixed vantage point, and I never move. I capture the fleeting moments of humanity and light as time passes. Photographing for anywhere from 15 to 30 hours and shooting over 1,500 images, I then choose the best moments of the day and night.Using time as a guide, I seamlessly blend those best moments into one single photograph, visualizing our conscious journey with time. I can take you to Paris for a view from the Tournelle Bridge. And I can show you the early morning rowers along the River Seine. And simultaneously, I can show you Notre Dame aglow at night. And in between, I can show you the romance of the City of Light.I am essentially a street photographer from 50 feet in the air, and every single thing you see in this photograph actually happened on this day.Day to Night is a global project, and my work has always been about history. I'm fascinated by the concept of going to a place like Venice and actually seeing it during a specific event. And I decided I wanted to see the historical Regata, an event that's actually been taking place since 1498. The boats and the costumes look exactly as they did then. And an important element that I really want you guys to understand is: this is not a timelapse, this is me photographing throughout the day and the night. I am a relentless collector of magical moments. And the thing that drives me is the fear of just missing one of them.The entire concept came about in 1996. LIFE Magazine commissioned me to create a panoramic photograph of the cast and crew of Baz Luhrmann's film Romeo + Juliet. I got to the set and realized: it's a square. So the only way I could actually create a panoramic was to shoot a collage of 250 single images. So I had DiCaprio and Claire Danes embracing. And as I pan my camera to the right, I noticed there was a mirror on the wall and I saw they were actually reflecting in it. And for that one moment, that one image I asked them, ""Would you guys just kiss for this one picture?"" And then I came back to my studio in New York, and I hand-glued these 250 images together and stood back and went, ""Wow, this is so cool! I'm changing time in a photograph."" And that concept actually stayed with me for 13 years until technology finally has caught up to my dreams.This is an image I created of the Santa Monica Pier, Day to Night. And I'm going to show you a little video that gives you an idea of what it's like being with me when I do these pictures. To start with, you have to understand that to get views like this, most of my time is spent up high, and I'm usually in a cherry picker or a crane. So this is a typical day, 12-18 hours, non-stop capturing the entire day unfold.One of the things that's great is I love to people-watch. And trust me when I tell you, this is the greatest seat in the house to have.But this is really how I go about creating these photographs. So once I decide on my view and the location, I have to decide where day begins and night ends. And that's what I call the time vector. Einstein described time as a fabric. Think of the surface of a trampoline: it warps and stretches with gravity. I see time as a fabric as well, except I take that fabric and flatten it, compress it into single plane.One of the unique aspects of this work is also, if you look at all my pictures, the time vector changes: sometimes I'll go left to right, sometimes front to back, up or down, even diagonally. I am exploring the space-time continuum within a two-dimensional still photograph.Now when I do these pictures, it's literally like a real-time puzzle going on in my mind. I build a photograph based on time, and this is what I call the master plate. This can take us several months to complete. The fun thing about this work is I have absolutely zero control when I get up there on any given day and capture photographs. So I never know who's going to be in the picture, if it's going to be a great sunrise or sunset — no control. It's at the end of the process, if I've had a really great day and everything remained the same, that I then decide who's in and who's out, and it's all based on time. I'll take those best moments that I pick over a month of editing and they get seamlessly blended into the master plate. I'm compressing the day and night as I saw it, creating a unique harmony between these two very discordant worlds.Painting has always been a really important influence in all my work and I've always been a huge fan of Albert Bierstadt, the great Hudson River School painter. He inspired a recent series that I did on the National Parks. This is Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley. So this is the photograph I created of Yosemite. This is actually the cover story of the 2016 January issue of National Geographic. I photographed for over 30 hours in this picture. I was literally on the side of a cliff, capturing the stars and the moonlight as it transitions, the moonlight lighting El Capitan. And I also captured this transition of time throughout the landscape. The best part is obviously seeing the magical moments of humanity as time changed — from day into night.And on a personal note, I actually had a photocopy of Bierstadt's painting in my pocket. And when that sun started to rise in the valley, I started to literally shake with excitement because I looked at the painting and I go, ""Oh my god, I'm getting Bierstadt's exact same lighting 100 years earlier.""Day to Night is about all the things, it's like a compilation of all the things I love about the medium of photography. It's about landscape, it's about street photography, it's about color, it's about architecture, perspective, scale — and, especially, history.This is one of the most historical moments I've been able to photograph, the 2013 Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama. And if you look closely in this picture, you can actually see time changing in those large television sets. You can see Michelle waiting with the children, the president now greets the crowd, he takes his oath, and now he's speaking to the people. There's so many challenging aspects when I create photographs like this. For this particular photograph, I was in a 50-foot scissor lift up in the air and it was not very stable. So every time my assistant and I shifted our weight, our horizon line shifted. So for every picture you see, and there were about 1,800 in this picture, we both had to tape our feet into position every time I clicked the shutter. (Applause)I've learned so many extraordinary things doing this work. I think the two most important are patience and the power of observation. When you photograph a city like New York from above, I discovered that those people in cars that I sort of live with everyday, they don't look like people in cars anymore. They feel like a giant school of fish, it was a form of emergent behavior. And when people describe the energy of New York, I think this photograph begins to really capture that. When you look closer in my work, you can see there's stories going on. You realize that Times Square is a canyon, it's shadow and it's sunlight. So I decided, in this photograph, I would checkerboard time. So wherever the shadows are, it's night and wherever the sun is, it's actually day.Time is this extraordinary thing that we never can really wrap our heads around. But in a very unique and special way, I believe these photographs begin to put a face on time. They embody a new metaphysical visual reality. When you spend 15 hours looking at a place, you're going to see things a little differently than if you or I walked up with our camera, took a picture, and then walked away.This was a perfect example. I call it ""Sacré-Coeur Selfie."" I watched over 15 hours all these people not even look at Sacré-Coeur. They were more interested in using it as a backdrop. They would walk up, take a picture, and then walk away. And I found this to be an absolutely extraordinary example, a powerful disconnect between what we think the human experience is versus what the human experience is evolving into. The act of sharing has suddenly become more important than the experience itself. (Applause)And finally, my most recent image, which has such a special meaning for me personally: this is the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. And this is photographed in the middle of the Seronera, this is not a reserve. I went specifically during the peak migration to hopefully capture the most diverse range of animals. Unfortunately, when we got there, there was a drought going on during the peak migration, a five-week drought. So all the animals were drawn to the water. I found this one watering hole, and felt if everything remained the same way it was behaving, I had a real opportunity to capture something unique.We spent three days studying it, and nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed during our shoot day. I photographed for 26 hours in a sealed crocodile blind, 18 feet in the air. What I witnessed was unimaginable. Frankly, it was Biblical. We saw, for 26 hours, all these competitive species share a single resource called water. The same resource that humanity is supposed to have wars over during the next 50 years. The animals never even grunted at each other. They seem to understand something that we humans don't. That this precious resource called water is something we all have to share.When I created this picture, I realized that Day to Night is really a new way of seeing, compressing time, exploring the space-time continuum within a photograph.As technology evolves along with photography, photographs will not only communicate a deeper meaning of time and memory, but they will compose a new narrative of untold stories, creating a timeless window into our world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wilkes_the_passing_of_time_caught_in_a_single_photo
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"What is it that French people do better than all the others? If you would take polls, the top three answers might be: love, wine and whining.(Laughter)Maybe. But let me suggest a fourth one: mathematics. Did you know that Paris has more mathematicians than any other city in the world? And more streets with mathematicians' names, too. And if you look at the statistics of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize for mathematics, and always awarded to mathematicians below the age of 40, you will find that France has more Fields medalists per inhabitant than any other country.What is it that we find so sexy in math? After all, it seems to be dull and abstract, just numbers and computations and rules to apply. Mathematics may be abstract, but it's not dull and it's not about computing. It is about reasoning and proving our core activity. It is about imagination, the talent which we most praise. It is about finding the truth. There's nothing like the feeling which invades you when after months of hard thinking, you finally understand the right reasoning to solve your problem. The great mathematician André Weil likened this — no kidding — to sexual pleasure. But noted that this feeling can last for hours, or even days.The reward may be big. Hidden mathematical truths permeate our whole physical world. They are inaccessible to our senses but can be seen through mathematical lenses. Close your eyes for moment and think of what is occurring right now around you. Invisible particles from the air around are bumping on you by the billions and billions at each second, all in complete chaos. And still, their statistics can be accurately predicted by mathematical physics. And open your eyes now to the statistics of the velocities of these particles.The famous bell-shaped Gauss Curve, or the Law of Errors — of deviations with respect to the mean behavior. This curve tells about the statistics of velocities of particles in the same way as a demographic curve would tell about the statistics of ages of individuals. It's one of the most important curves ever. It keeps on occurring again and again, from many theories and many experiments, as a great example of the universality which is so dear to us mathematicians.Of this curve, the famous scientist Francis Galton said, ""It would have been deified by the Greeks if they had known it. It is the supreme law of unreason."" And there's no better way to materialize that supreme goddess than Galton's Board. Inside this board are narrow tunnels through which tiny balls will fall down randomly, going right or left, or left, etc. All in complete randomness and chaos. Let's see what happens when we look at all these random trajectories together.(Board shaking)This is a bit of a sport, because we need to resolve some traffic jams in there. Aha. We think that randomness is going to play me a trick on stage.There it is. Our supreme goddess of unreason. the Gauss Curve, trapped here inside this transparent box as Dream in ""The Sandman"" comics. For you I have shown it, but to my students I explain why it could not be any other curve. And this is touching the mystery of that goddess, replacing a beautiful coincidence by a beautiful explanation.All of science is like this. And beautiful mathematical explanations are not only for our pleasure. They also change our vision of the world. For instance, Einstein, Perrin, Smoluchowski, they used the mathematical analysis of random trajectories and the Gauss Curve to explain and prove that our world is made of atoms.It was not the first time that mathematics was revolutionizing our view of the world. More than 2,000 years ago, at the time of the ancient Greeks, it already occurred. In those days, only a small fraction of the world had been explored, and the Earth might have seemed infinite. But clever Eratosthenes, using mathematics, was able to measure the Earth with an amazing accuracy of two percent.Here's another example. In 1673, Jean Richer noticed that a pendulum swings slightly slower in Cayenne than in Paris. From this observation alone, and clever mathematics, Newton rightly deduced that the Earth is a wee bit flattened at the poles, like 0.3 percent — so tiny that you wouldn't even notice it on the real view of the Earth.These stories show that mathematics is able to make us go out of our intuition measure the Earth which seems infinite, see atoms which are invisible or detect an imperceptible variation of shape. And if there is just one thing that you should take home from this talk, it is this: mathematics allows us to go beyond the intuition and explore territories which do not fit within our grasp.Here's a modern example you will all relate to: searching the Internet. The World Wide Web, more than one billion web pages — do you want to go through them all? Computing power helps, but it would be useless without the mathematical modeling to find the information hidden in the data.Let's work out a baby problem. Imagine that you're a detective working on a crime case, and there are many people who have their version of the facts. Who do you want to interview first? Sensible answer: prime witnesses. You see, suppose that there is person number seven, tells you a story, but when you ask where he got if from, he points to person number three as a source. And maybe person number three, in turn, points at person number one as the primary source. Now number one is a prime witness, so I definitely want to interview him — priority. And from the graph we also see that person number four is a prime witness. And maybe I even want to interview him first, because there are more people who refer to him.OK, that was easy, but now what about if you have a big bunch of people who will testify? And this graph, I may think of it as all people who testify in a complicated crime case, but it may just as well be web pages pointing to each other, referring to each other for contents. Which ones are the most authoritative? Not so clear.Enter PageRank, one of the early cornerstones of Google. This algorithm uses the laws of mathematical randomness to determine automatically the most relevant web pages, in the same way as we used randomness in the Galton Board experiment. So let's send into this graph a bunch of tiny, digital marbles and let them go randomly through the graph. Each time they arrive at some site, they will go out through some link chosen at random to the next one. And again, and again, and again. And with small, growing piles, we'll keep the record of how many times each site has been visited by these digital marbles.Here we go. Randomness, randomness. And from time to time, also let's make jumps completely randomly to increase the fun.And look at this: from the chaos will emerge the solution. The highest piles correspond to those sites which somehow are better connected than the others, more pointed at than the others. And here we see clearly which are the web pages we want to first try. Once again, the solution emerges from the randomness. Of course, since that time, Google has come up with much more sophisticated algorithms, but already this was beautiful.And still, just one problem in a million. With the advent of digital area, more and more problems lend themselves to mathematical analysis, making the job of mathematician a more and more useful one, to the extent that a few years ago, it was ranked number one among hundreds of jobs in a study about the best and worst jobs published by the Wall Street Journal in 2009.Mathematician — best job in the world. That's because of the applications: communication theory, information theory, game theory, compressed sensing, machine learning, graph analysis, harmonic analysis. And why not stochastic processes, linear programming, or fluid simulation? Each of these fields have monster industrial applications. And through them, there is big money in mathematics. And let me concede that when it comes to making money from the math, the Americans are by a long shot the world champions, with clever, emblematic billionaires and amazing, giant companies, all resting, ultimately, on good algorithm.Now with all this beauty, usefulness and wealth, mathematics does look more sexy. But don't you think that the life a mathematical researcher is an easy one. It is filled with perplexity, frustration, a desperate fight for understanding.Let me evoke for you one of the most striking days in my mathematician's life. Or should I say, one of the most striking nights. At that time, I was staying at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton — for many years, the home of Albert Einstein and arguably the most holy place for mathematical research in the world. And that night I was working and working on an elusive proof, which was incomplete. It was all about understanding the paradoxical stability property of plasmas, which are a crowd of electrons. In the perfect world of plasma, there are no collisions and no friction to provide the stability like we are used to. But still, if you slightly perturb a plasma equilibrium, you will find that the resulting electric field spontaneously vanishes, or damps out, as if by some mysterious friction force.This paradoxical effect, called the Landau damping, is one of the most important in plasma physics, and it was discovered through mathematical ideas. But still, a full mathematical understanding of this phenomenon was missing. And together with my former student and main collaborator Clément Mouhot, in Paris at the time, we had been working for months and months on such a proof. Actually, I had already announced by mistake that we could solve it. But the truth is, the proof was just not working. In spite of more than 100 pages of complicated, mathematical arguments, and a bunch discoveries, and huge calculation, it was not working. And that night in Princeton, a certain gap in the chain of arguments was driving me crazy. I was putting in there all my energy and experience and tricks, and still nothing was working. 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., not working. Around 4 a.m., I go to bed in low spirits. Then a few hours later, waking up and go, ""Ah, it's time to get the kids to school —"" What is this? There was this voice in my head, I swear. ""Take the second term to the other side, Fourier transform and invert in L2.""(Laughter)Damn it, that was the start of the solution!You see, I thought I had taken some rest, but really my brain had continued to work on it. In those moments, you don't think of your career or your colleagues, it's just a complete battle between the problem and you.That being said, it does not harm when you do get a promotion in reward for your hard work. And after we completed our huge analysis of the Landau damping, I was lucky enough to get the most coveted Fields Medal from the hands of the President of India, in Hyderabad on 19 August, 2010 — an honor that mathematicians never dare to dream, a day that I will remember until I live.What do you think, on such an occasion? Pride, yes? And gratitude to the many collaborators who made this possible. And because it was a collective adventure, you need to share it, not just with your collaborators. I believe that everybody can appreciate the thrill of mathematical research, and share the passionate stories of humans and ideas behind it. And I've been working with my staff at Institut Henri Poincaré, together with partners and artists of mathematical communication worldwide, so that we can found our own, very special museum of mathematics there.So in a few years, when you come to Paris, after tasting the great, crispy baguette and macaroon, please come and visit us at Institut Henri Poincaré, and share the mathematical dream with us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cedric_villani_what_s_so_sexy_about_math
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"The world is filled with incredible objects and rich cultural heritage. And when we get access to them, we are blown away, we fall in love. But most of the time, the world's population is living without real access to arts and culture. What might the connections be when we start exploring our heritage, the beautiful locations and the art in this world?Before we get started in this presentation, I just want to take care of a few housekeeping points. First, I am no expert in art or culture. I fell into this by mistake, but I'm loving it. Secondly, all of what I'm going to show you belongs to the amazing museums, archives and foundations that we partner with. None of this belongs to Google. And finally, what you see behind me is available right now on your mobile phones, on your laptops.This is our current platform, where you can explore thousands of museums and objects at your fingertips, in extremely high-definition detail. The diversity of the content is what's amazing. If we just had European paintings, if we just had modern art, I think it gets a bit boring. For example, this month, we launched the ""Black History"" channel with 82 curated exhibitions, which talk about arts and culture in that community. We also have some amazing objects from Japan, centered around craftsmanship, called ""Made in Japan."" And one of my favorite exhibitions, which actually is the idea of my talk, is — I didn't expect to become a fan of Japanese dolls. But I am, thanks to this exhibition, that has really taught me about the craftsmanship behind the soul of a Japanese doll. Trust me, it's very exciting. Take my word for it.So, moving on swiftly. One quick thing I wanted to showcase in this platform, which you can share with your kids and your friends right now, is you can travel to all these amazing institutions virtually, as well. One of our recent ideas was with The Guggenheim Museum in New York, where you can get a taste of what it might feel like to actually be there. You can go to the ground floor and obviously, most of you, I assume, have been there. And you can see the architectural masterpiece that it is. But imagine this accessibility for a kid in Bombay who's studying architecture, who hasn't had a chance to go to The Guggenheim as yet. You can obviously look at objects in the Guggenheim Museum, you can obviously get into them and so on and so forth. There's a lot of information here.But this is not the purpose of my talk today. This exists right now. What we now have are the building blocks to a very exciting future, when it comes to arts and culture and accessibility to arts and culture. So I am joined today onstage by my good friend and artist in residence at our office in Paris, Cyril Diagne, who is the professor of interactive design at ECAL University in Lausanne, Switzerland. What Cyril and our team of engineers have been doing is trying to find these connections and visualize a few of these.So I'm going to go quite quick now. This object you see behind me — oh, just clarification: Always, seeing the real thing is better. In case people think I'm trying to replicate the real thing. So, moving on. This object you see behind me is the Venus of Berekhat Ram. It's one of the oldest objects in the world, found in the Golan Heights around 233,000 years ago, and currently residing at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is also one of the oldest objects on our platform.So let's zoom. We start from this one object. What if we zoomed out and actually tried to experience our own cultural big bang? What might that look like? This is what we deal with on a daily basis at the Cultural Institute — over six million cultural artifacts curated and given to us by institutions, to actually make these connections. You can travel through time, you can understand more about our society through these. You can look at it from the perspective of our planet, and try to see how it might look without borders, if we just organized art and culture. We can also then plot it by time, which obviously, for the data geek in me, is very fascinating. You can spend hours looking at every decade and the contributions in that decade and in those years for art, history and cultures. We would love to spend hours showing you each and every decade, but we don't have the time right now. So you can go on your phone and actually do it yourself.(Applause)But if you don't mind and can hold your applause till later, I don't want to run out of time, because I want to show you a lot of cool stuff.So, just very quickly: you can move on from here to another very interesting idea. Beyond the pretty picture, beyond the nice visualization, what is the purpose, how is this useful? This next idea comes from discussions with curators that we've been having at museums, who, by the way, I've fallen in love with, because they dedicate their whole life to try to tell these stories. One of the curators told me, ""Amit, what would it be like if you could create a virtual curator's table where all these six million objects are displayed in a way for us to look at the connections between them?"" You can spend a lot of time, trust me, looking at different objects and understanding where they come from. It's a crazy Matrix experience.(Laughter)Just moving on, let's take the world-famous Vincent Van Gogh, who is very well-represented on this platform. Thanks to the diversity of the institutions we have, we have over 211 high-definition, amazing artworks by this artist, now organized in one beautiful view. And as it resolves, and as Cyril goes deeper, you can see all the self-portraits, you can see still life. But I just wanted to highlight one very quick example, which is very timely: ""The Bedroom."" This is an artwork where three copies exist — one at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, one at the Orsay in Paris and one at the Art Institute of Chicago, which, actually, currently is hosting a reunion of all three artworks physically, I think only for the second time ever. But, it is united digitally and virtually for anybody to look at in a very different way, and you won't get pushed in the line in the crowd. So let's take you and let's travel through ""The Bedroom"" very quickly, so you can experience what we are doing for every single object. We want the image to speak as much as it can on a digital platform. And all you need is an internet connection and a computer(Applause)And, Cyril, if you can go deeper, quickly. I'm sorry, this is all live, so you have to give Cyril a little bit of — and this is available for every object: modern art, contemporary art, Renaissance — you name it, even sculpture.Sometimes, you don't know what can attract you to an artwork or to a museum or to a cultural discovery. So for me, personally, it was quite a challenge because when I decided to make this my full-time job at Google, my mother was not very supportive. I love my mother, but she thought I was wasting my life with this museum stuff. And for her, a museum is what you do when you go on vacation and you tick-mark and it's over, right? And it took around four and a half years for me to convince my lovely Indian mother that actually, this is worthwhile. And the way I did it was, I realized one day that she loves gold. So I started showing her all objects that have the material gold in them. And the first thing my mom asks me is, ""How can we buy these?""(Laughter)And obviously, my salary is not that high, so I was like, ""We can't actually do that, mom. But you can explore them virtually."" And so now my mom — every time I meet her, she asks me, ""Any more gold, any more silver in your project? Can you show me?"" And that's the idea I'm trying to illustrate. It does not matter how you get in, as long as you get in. Once you get in, you're hooked.Moving on from here very quickly, there is kind of a playful idea, actually, to illustrate the point of access, and I'm going to go quite quickly on this one. We all know that seeing the artwork in person is amazing. But we also know that most of us can't do it, and the ones that can afford to do it, it's complicated. So — Cyril, can we load up our art trip, what do we call it? We don't have a good name for this. But essentially, we have around 1,000 amazing institutions, 68 countries. But let's start with Rembrandt. We might have time for only one example. But thanks to the diversity, we've got around 500 amazing Rembrandt object artworks from 46 institutions and 17 countries. Let's say that on your next vacation, you want to go see every single one of them. That is your itinerary, you will probably travel 53,000 kilometers, visit around, I think, 46 institutions, and just FYI, you might release 10 tons of CO2 emissions.(Laughter)But remember, it's art, so you can justify it, perhaps, in some way.Moving on swiftly from here, is something a little bit more technical and more interesting. All that we've shown you so far uses metadata to make the connections. But obviously we have something cool nowadays that everyone likes to talk about, which is machine learning. So what we thought is, let's strip out all the metadata, let's look at what machine learning can do based purely on visual recognition of this entire collection. What we ended up with is this very interesting map, these clusters that have no reference point information, but has just used visuals to cluster things together. Each cluster is an art to us by itself of discovery. But one of the clusters we want to show you very quickly is this amazing cluster of portraits that we found from museums around the world. If you could zoom in a little bit more, Cyril. Just to show you, you can just travel through portraits. And essentially, you can do nature, you can do horses and clusters galore.When we saw all these portraits, we were like, ""Hey, can we do something fun for kids, or can we do something playful to get people interested in portraits?"" Because I haven't really seen young kids really excited to go to a portrait gallery. I wanted to try to figure something out. So we created something called the portrait matcher. It's quite self-explanatory, so I'm just going to let Cyril show his beautiful face. And essentially what's happening is, with the movement of his head, we are matching different portraits around the world from museums.(Applause)And I don't know about you, but I've shown it to my nephew and sister, and the reaction is just phenomenal. All they ask me is, ""When can we go see this?"" And by the way, if we're nice, maybe, Cyril, you can smile and find a happy one? Oh, perfect. By the way, this is not rehearsed. Congrats, Cyril. Great stuff. Oh wow. OK, let's move on; otherwise, this will just take the whole time.(Applause)So, art and culture can be fun also, right? For our last quick experiment — we call all of these ""experiments"" — our last quick experiment comes back to machine learning. We show you clusters, visual clusters, but what if we could ask the machine to also name these clusters? What if it could automatically tag them, using no actual metadata? So what we have is this kind of explorer, where we have managed to match, I think, around 4,000 labels. And we haven't really done anything special here, just fed the collection. And we found interesting categories. We can start with horses, a very straightforward category. You would expect to see that the machine has put images of horses, right? And it has, but you also notice, right over there, that it has a very abstract image that it has still managed to recognize and cluster as horses. We also have an amazing head in terms of a horse. And each one has the tags as to why it got categorized in this.So let's move to another one which I found very funny and interesting, because I don't understand how this category came up. It's called ""Lady in Waiting."" If, Cyril, you do it very quickly, you will see that we have these amazing images of ladies, I guess, in waiting or posing. I don't really understand it. But I've been trying to ask my museum contacts, you know, ""What is this? What's going on here?"" And it's fascinating.Coming back to gold very quickly, I wanted to search for gold and see how the machine tagged all the gold. But, actually, it doesn't tag it as gold. We are living in popular times. It tags it as ""bling-bling.""(Laughter)I'm being hard on Cyril, because I'm moving too fast. Essentially, here you have all the bling-bling of the world's museums organized for you.And finally, to end this talk and these experiments, what I hope you feel after this talk is happiness and emotion. And what would we see when we see happiness? If we actually look at all the objects that have been tagged under ""happiness,"" you would expect happiness, I guess. But there was one that came up that was very fascinating and interesting, which was this artwork by Douglas Coupland, our friend and artist in residence as well, called, ""I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain."" I don't know why the machine feels like it misses its pre-Internet brain and it's been tagged here, but it's a very interesting thought. I sometimes do miss my pre-Internet brain, but not when it comes to exploring arts and culture online.So take out your phones, take out your computers, go visit museums. And just a quick call-out to all the amazing archivists, historians, curators, who are sitting in museums, preserving all this culture. And the least we can do is get our daily dose of art and culture for ourselves and our kids.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amit_sood_every_piece_of_art_you_ve_ever_wanted_to_see_up_close_and_searchable
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"Have you ever been asked by your Chinese friend, ""What is your zodiac sign?"" Don't think they are making small talk. If you say, ""I'm a Monkey,"" they immediately know you are either 24, 36, 48 or 60 years old.(Laughter) Asking a zodiac sign is a polite way of asking your age.By revealing your zodiac sign, you are also being evaluated. Judgments are being made about your fortune or misfortune, your personality, career prospects and how you will do in a given year. If you share you and your partner's animal signs, they will paint a picture in their mind about your private life. Maybe you don't believe in the Chinese zodiac. As a quarter of the world population is influenced by it, you'd be wise to do something about that.So what is the Chinese zodiac, exactly? Most Westerners think of Greco-Roman zodiac, the signs divided into 12 months. The Chinese zodiac is different. It's a 12-year cycle labeled with animals, starting with a Rat and ending with a Pig, and has no association with constellations. For example, if you were born in 1975, you are a Rabbit. Can you see your zodiac sign there? Our Chinese ancestors constructed a very complicated theoretical framework based on yin and yang, the five elements and the 12 zodiac animals. Over thousands of years, this popular culture has affected people's major decisions, such as naming, marriage, giving birth and attitude towards each other. And some of the implications are quite amazing.The Chinese believe certain animals get on better than the others. So parents choose specific years to give birth to babies, because they believe the team effort by the right combination of animals can give prosperity to families. We even refer to the zodiac when entering into romantic relations. I'm a Pig; I should have perfect romance with Tigers, Goats and Rabbits. Chinese people believe some animals are natural enemies. As a Pig, I need to be careful with a Snake. Raise your hand if you are a Snake. Let's have a chat later.(Laughter)We believe some animals are luckier than the others, such as the Dragon. Unlike the Western tradition, the Chinese Dragon is a symbol for power, strength and wealth. It's everyone's dream to have a Dragon baby. Jack Ma's parents must have been very proud. And they are not the only ones. In 2012, the Year of the Dragon, the birthrate in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan increased by five percent. That means another one million more babies. With a traditional preference to baby boys, the boy-girl ratio that year was 120 to 100. When those Dragon boys grow up, they will face much more severe competition in love and job markets.According to the BBC and the Chinese government's press release, January 2015 saw a peak of Cesarean sections. Why? That was the last month for the Year of the Horse. It's not because they like horses so much, it's because they try to avoid having unlucky Goat babies.(Laughter)If you are a Goat, please don't feel bad. Those are Goat babies. They don't look like losers to me.(Laughter)Tiger is another undesirable animal, due to its volatile temperament. Many Chinese regions saw a sharp decline of birthrate during those years. Perhaps one should consider zodiac in reverse, as those Tiger and Goat babies will face much less competition. Maybe they are the lucky ones. I went through the Forbes top 300 richest people in the world, and it's interesting to see the most undesirable two animals, the Goat and Tiger, are at the top of the chart, even higher than the Dragon. So maybe we should consider, maybe it's much better to have less competition.One last but interesting point: many Chinese people make their investment decisions based on the zodiac sign index. Although the belief and tradition of the zodiac sign has been over thousands of years, the trend of using it in making major decisions did not really happen until the past few decades. Our ancestors were very busy surviving poverty, drought, famine, riot, disease and civil war. And finally, Chinese people have the time, wealth and technology to create an ideal life they've always wanted. The collective decision made by 1.3 billion people has caused the fluctuation in economics and demand on everything, from health care and education to property and consumer goods. As China plays such an important role in the global economy and geopolitics, the decisions made based on the zodiac and other Chinese traditions end up impacting everyone around the world.Are there any Monkeys here? 2016 is the Year of the Monkey. Monkeys are clever, curious, creative and mischievous.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shaolan_the_chinese_zodiac_explained
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"Today 40 million Americans are indebted for their passage to the new economy. Too poor to pay their way through college, they now owe lenders more than one trillion US dollars. They do find what jobs they can get to pay off a debt that is secured on their person. In America, even a bankrupt gambler gets a second chance. But it is nearly impossible for an American to get discharged their student loan debts.Once upon a time in America, going to college did not mean graduating with debt. My friend Paul's father graduated from Colorado State University on the GI Bill. For his generation, higher education was free or almost free, because it was thought of as a public good. Not anymore. When Paul also graduated from Colorado State University, he paid for his English degree by working part-time. 30 years ago, higher education tuition was affordable, reasonable, and what debts you accumulated, you paid off by graduation date. Not anymore. Paul's daughter followed in his footsteps, but with one difference: when she graduated five years ago, it was with a whopping debt.Students like Kate have to take on a loan because the cost of higher education has become unaffordable for many if not most American families. But so what? Getting into debt to buy an expensive education is not all bad if you could pay it off with the increased income that you earned from it. But that's where the rubber meets the road. Even a college grad earned 10 percent more in 2001 than she did in 2013.So ... tuition costs up, public funding down, family incomes diminished, personal incomes weak. Is it any wonder that more than a quarter of those who must cannot make their student loan payments? The worst of times can be the best of times, because certain truths flash up in ways that you can't ignore. I want to speak of three of them today.1.2 trillion dollars of debts for diplomas make it abundantly obvious that higher education is a consumer product you can buy. All of us talk about education just as the economists do now, as an investment that you make to improve the human stock by training them for work. As an investment you make to sort and classify people so that employers can hire them more easily. The U.S. News & World Report ranks colleges just as the consumer report rates washing machines. The language is peppered with barbarisms. Teachers are called ""service providers,"" students are called ""consumers."" Sociology and Shakespeare and soccer and science, all of these are ""content.""Student debt is profitable. Only not on you. Your debt fattens the profit of the student loan industry. The two 800-pound gorillas of which — Sallie Mae and Navient — posted last year a combined profit of 1.2 billion dollars. And just like home mortgages, student loans can be bundled and packaged and sliced and diced, and sold on Wall Street. And colleges and universities that invest in these securitized loans profit twice. Once from your tuition, and then again from the interest on debt.With all that money to be made, are we surprised that some in the higher education business have begun to engage in false advertising, in bait and switch ... in exploiting the very ignorance that they pretend to educate?Third: diplomas are a brand. Many years ago my teacher wrote, ""When students are treated as consumers, they're made prisoners of addiction and envy."" Just as consumers can be sold and resold upgraded versions of an iPhone, so also people can be sold more and more education. College is the new high school, we already say that. But why stop there? People can be upsold on certifications and recertifications, master's degrees, doctoral degrees.Higher education is also marketed as a status object. Buy a degree, much like you do a Lexus of a Louis Vuitton bag, to distinguish yourself from others. So you can be the object of envy of others. Diplomas are a brand.But these truths are often times hidden by a very noisy sales pitch. There is not a day that goes by without some policy guy on television telling us, ""A college degree is absolutely essential to get on that up escalator to a middle-class life."" And the usual evidence offered is the college premium: a college grad who makes on average 56 percent more than a high school grad.Let's look at that number more carefully, because on the face of it, it seems to belie the stories we all hear about college grads working as baristas and cashiers. Of 100 people who enroll in any form of post-secondary education, 45 do not complete it in a timely fashion, for a number of reasons, including financial. Of the 55 that do graduate, two will remain unemployed, and another 18 are underemployed. So, college grads earn more than high school grads, but does it pay for the exorbitant tuition and the lost wages while at college?Now even economists admit going to college pays off for only those who complete it. But that's only because high school wages have been cut to the bone, for decades now. For decades, workers with a high school degree have been denied a fair share of what they have produced. And had they received as they should have, then going to college would have been a bad investment for many. College premium? I think it's a high school discount.Two out of three people who enroll are not going to find an adequate job. And the future, for them, doesn't look particularly promising — in fact, it's downright bleak. And it is they who are going to suffer the most punishing forms of student debt. And it is they, curiously and sadly, who are marketed most loudly about this college premium thing. That's not just cynical marketing, that's cruel.So what do we do? What if students and parents treated higher education as a consumer product? Everybody else seems to. Then, like any other consumer product, you would demand to know what you're paying for. When you buy medicines, you get a list of side effects. When you buy a higher educational product, you should have a warning label that allows consumers to choose, make informed choices. When you buy a car, it tells you how many miles per gallon to expect. Who knows what to expect from a degree say, in Canadian Studies. There is such a thing, by the way.What if there was an app for that? One that linked up the cost of a major to the expected income. Let's call it Income-Based Tuition or IBT. One of you make this.(Laughter)Discover your reality.(Laughter)There are three advantages, three benefits to Income-Based Tuition. Any user can figure out how much money he or she will make from a given college and major. Such informed users are unlikely to fall victim to the huckster's ploy, to the sales pitch. But also to choose wisely. Why would anybody pay more for college than let's say, 15 percent of the additional income they earn?There's a second benefit to Income-Based Tuition. By tying the cost to the income, college administrators would be forced to manage costs better, to find innovative ways to do so. For instance, all of you students here pay roughly the same tuition for every major. That is manifestly unfair, and should change. An engineering student uses more resources and facilities and labs and faculty than a philosophy student. But the philosophy student, as a consequence, is subsidizing the engineering student. Who then, by the way, goes on and earns more money. Why should two people buy the same product, pay the same, but one person receive half or a third of the service. In fact, college grads, some majors, pay 25 percent of their income servicing their student debt, while others pay five percent. That kind if inequity would end when majors are priced more correctly.Now of course, all this data — and one of you is going to do this, right? All this data has to be well designed, maybe audited by public accounting firms to avoid statistical lies. We know about statistics, right?But be that as it may, the third and biggest benefit of Income-Based Tuition, is it would free Americans from the fear and the fact of financial ruin because they bought a defective product.Perhaps, in time, young and old Americans may rediscover, as the gentleman said earlier, their curiosity, their love of learning — begin to study what they love, love what they study, follow their passion ... getting stimulated by their intelligence, follow paths of inquiry that they really want to.After all, it was Eric and Kevin, two years ago, just exactly these kinds of young men, who prompted me and worked with me, and still do, in the study of indebted students in America.Thank you for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sajay_samuel_how_college_loans_exploit_students_for_profit
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"I'm an Iranian-American Muslim female, like all of you. And I'm also a social justice comedian, something that I insist is an actual job.To explain what that is, let me tell you how I got here. I've performed all over the country. And let me tell you, America is majestic, right? It's got breathtaking nature, waffle houses and diabetes as far as the eye can see. It is really something.Now, the American population can be broken up into three main categories: there's mostly wonderful people, haters and Florida.(Laughter)Besides Florida, the most troubling category here are the Haters. They are a minority, but they overcompensate by being extra loud. They have the Napoleon complex of demographics, and yes, some of the men do wear heels.As a social justice comedian, it's my goal to convert these haters, because they hate a lot of things, which leads to negative outcomes, like racism, violence and Ted Nugent. This is not an exhaustive list; I'm probably missing 3-7 items.But the point is, we have to reckon with the haters. But there's variance within this group and it's not efficient to go after all of them, right? So what I've done is created a highly scientific Taxonomy of Haters. I basically took all of the haters, I put them in a petri dish, like a scientist, and this is what I found.(Laughter)First off, we have the trolls. These are your garden-variety digital haters. They're the people who quit their jobs so they can post on YouTube videos all day long. There's also the drive-by haters. Now, these people will be at a stoplight, they'll wait for the light to turn green and when it does, they yell, ""Go back to your own country!"" Now back in the day, they would've actually gotten out of their cars and hated you to your face. But they just don't make them like they used to — which is another sign of the decline in America.(Laughter)The next category is the mission-oriented-bigot- whose-group-affiliation- gives-them-cover-for-hating hater. These guys like to hate via a seemingly nice organization, like a church or a nonprofit, and they oftentimes like to speak in an old-timey voice.But the group I'm most interested in is the swing hater. The swing hater is sister to the swing voter — they just can't decide! They're like ideological sluts who move from hating to not hating. And they do it because they don't have enough information. This is the group I like to target with social justice comedy. Why comedy? Because on a scale of comedy to brochure, the average American prefers comedy, as you can see from this graph.(Laughter)Comedy is very popular. And by the way, this is a mathematically accurate graph, generated from fake numbers.(Laughter)Now, the question is: Why does social justice comedy work? Because, first off, it makes you laugh. And when you're laughing, you enter into a state of openness. And in that moment of openness, a good social justice comedian can stick in a whole bunch of information, and if they're really skilled, a rectal exam.(Laughter)Here are some ground rules for social justice comedy: first off, it's not partisan. This isn't political comedy, this is about justice, and no one is against justice. Two, it's inviting and warm, it makes you feel like you're sitting inside of a burrito. Three, it's funny but sneaky, like you could be hearing an interesting treatise on income inequality, that's encased in a really sophisticated poop joke.(Laughter)Here's how I see social justice comedy working. A few years ago, I rounded up a bunch of Muslim-American comedians — in a non-violent way —(Laughter)And we went around the country to places like Alabama, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia — places where they love the Muzzies — and we did stand-up shows. We called the tour ""The Muslims Are Coming!""(Laughter)We turned this into a movie, and then after the movie came out, a known hate group spent 300,000 dollars on an anti-Muslim poster campaign with the MTA — that's the New York City subway system. Now, the posters were truly offensive, not to mentioned poorly designed — I mean, if you're going to be bigoted, you might as well use a better font.(Laughter)But we decided, why not launch our own poster campaign that says nice things about Muslims, while promoting the movie. So myself and fellow comedian Dean Obeidallah decided to launch the fighting-bigotry- with-delightful-posters campaign. We raised the money, worked with the MTA for over 5 months, got the posters approved, and two days after they were supposed to go up, the MTA decided to ban the posters, citing political content.Let's take a look at a couple of those posters. Here's one. Facts about Muslims: Muslims invented the concept of a hospital. OK. Fact: Grown-up Muslims can do more push-ups than baby Muslims.(Laughter)Fact: Muslims invented Justin Timberlake.(Laughter)Let's take a look at another one. The ugly truth about Muslims: they have great frittata recipes.Now clearly, frittatas are considered political by the MTA. Either that, or the mere mention of Muslims in a positive light was considered political — but it isn't. It's about justice. So we decided to change our fighting-bigortry- with-delightful-posters campaign and turn it into the fighting-bigotry- with-a-delightful-lawsuit campaign.(Laughter)So basically, what I'm saying is a couple of dirt-bag comedians took on a major New York City agency and the comedians won.(Applause and cheers)Thank you. Victory was a very weird feeling. I was like, ""Is this what blonde girls feel like all the time? 'Cause this is amazing!""(Laughter)Here's another example. I'm asked everywhere I go: ""Why don't Muslims denounce terrorism?"" We do. But OK, I'll take the bait. So I decided to launch thedailydenouncer.com. It's a website that denounces terrorism every day of the week, while taking the weekends off. Let's take a look at an example. They generally appear as single-panel cartoons, ""I denounce terrorism! I also denounce people who never fill the paper tray!"" The point of the website is that it denounces terrorism while recognizing that it's ridiculous that we have to constantly denounce terrorism.But if bigotry isn't your thing, social justice comedy is useful for all sorts of issues. For example, myself and fellow comedian Lee Camp went to the Cayman Islands to investigate offshore banking. Now, the United States loses something like 300 billion dollars a year in these offshore tax havens. Not to brag, but at the end of every month, I have something like 5-15 dollars in disposable income. So we walked into these banks in the Cayman Islands and asked if we could open up a bank account with eight dollars and 27 cents.(Laughter)The bank managers would indulge us for 30-45 seconds before calling security. Security would come out, brandish their weapons, and then we would squeal with fear and run away, because — and this is the last rule of social justice comedy — sometimes it makes you want to take a dump in your pants.Most of my work is meant to be fun. It's meant to generate a connection and laughter. But yes, sometimes I get run off the grounds by security. Sometimes I get mean tweets and hate mail. Sometimes I get voice mails saying that if I continue telling my jokes, they'll kill me and they'll kill my family. And those death threats are definitely not funny.But despite the occasional danger, I still think that social justice comedy is one of our best weapons. I mean, we've tried a lot of approaches to social justice, like war and competitive ice dancing. But still, a lot of things are still kind of awful. So I think it's time we try and tell a really good poop joke.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/negin_farsad_a_highly_scientific_taxonomy_of_haters
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"I've been living in rural East Africa for about 10 years, and I want to share a field perspective with you on global poverty. I believe that the greatest failure of the human race is the fact that we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Hungry, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic, insurmountable problems, too big to solve. But as a field practitioner, I believe these are actually very solvable problems if we just take the right strategies.Archimedes was an ancient Greek thinker, and he taught us that if we lean on the right levers, we can move the world. In the fight against extreme poverty, I believe there are three powerful levers that we can lean on. This talk is all about those levers, and why they make poverty a winnable fight in our lifetimes.What is extreme poverty? When I first moved to rural East Africa, I stayed overnight with a farm family. They were wonderful people. They invited me into their home. We sang songs together and ate a simple dinner. They gave me a blanket to sleep on the floor. In the morning, however, there was nothing to eat. And then at lunchtime, I watched with an increasingly sick feeling as the eldest girl in the family cooked porridge as a substitute for lunch. For that meal, every child drank one cup to survive. And I cannot tell you how ashamed I felt when they handed one of those cups to me, and I knew I had to accept their hospitality.Children need food not only to survive but also to grow physically and mentally. Every day they fail to eat, they lose a little bit of their future. Amongst the extreme poor, one in three children are permanently stunted from a lifetime of not eating enough. When that's combined with poor access to health care, one in 10 extremely poor children die before they reach age five. And only one quarter of children complete high school because they lack school fees. Hunger and extreme poverty curb human potential in every possible way. We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve these problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because every person on this planet matters. This child matters. These children matter. This girl matters.You know, we see things like this, and we're upset by them, but they seem like such big problems. We don't know how to take effective action. But remember our friend Archimedes. Global poverty has powerful levers. It's a problem like any other. I live and work in the field, and as a practitioner, I believe these are very solvable problems. So for the next 10 minutes, let's not be sad about the state of the world. Let's engage our brains. Let's engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are.Lever number one: most of the world's poor are farmers. Think about how extraordinary this is. If this picture represents the world's poor, then more than half engage in farming as a major source of income. This gets me really excited. All of these people, one profession. Think how powerful this is. When farmers become more productive, then more than half the world's poor earn more money and climb out of poverty. And it gets better. The product of farming is, of course, food. So when farmers become more productive, they earn more food, and they don't just help themselves, but they help to feed healthy communities and thriving economies. And when farmers become more productive, they reduce environmental pressure. We only have two ways we can feed the world: we can either make our existing farmland a lot more productive, or we can clear cut forest and savannah to make more farmland, which would be environmentally disastrous. Farmers are basically a really important leverage point. When farmers become more productive, they earn more income, they climb out of poverty, they feed their communities and they reduce environmental land pressure. Farmers stand at the center of the world.And not a farmer like this one, but rather this lady. Most of the farmers I know are actually women. Look at the strength and the will radiating from this woman. She is physically strong, mentally tough, and she will do whatever it takes to earn a better life for her children. If we're going to put the future of humanity in one person's hands, then I'm really glad it's her.(Applause)There's just one problem: many smallholder farmers lack access to basic tools and knowledge. Currently, they take a little bit of saved food grain from the prior year, they plant it in the ground and they till it with a manual hand hoe. These are tools and techniques that date to the Bronze Age, and it's why many farmers are still very poor.But good news, again. Lever number two: humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. Let me walk you through the three most basic factors in farming. First, hybrid seed is created when you cross two seeds together. If you naturally pollinate a high-yielding variety together with a drought-resistant variety, you get a hybrid that inherits positive traits from both of its parents. Next, conventional fertilizer, if used responsibly, is environmentally sustainable. If you micro-dose just a pinch of fertilizer to a plant that's taller than I am, you unlock enormous yield gain. These are known as farm inputs. Farm inputs need to be combined with good practice. When you space your seeds and plant with massive amounts of compost, farmers multiply their harvests. These proven tools and practices have more than tripled agricultural productivity in every major region of the world, moving mass numbers of people out of poverty. We just haven't finished delivering these things to everybody just yet, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.So overall, this is amazing news. Humanity actually solved agricultural poverty a century ago, in theory. We just haven't delivered these things to everybody just yet. In this century, the reason that people remain poor is because maybe they live in remote places. They lack access to these things. Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people. We don't need more genius types right now. The humble delivery guy is going to end global poverty in our lifetime.So these are the three levers, and the most powerful lever is simply delivery. Wherever the world's companies, governments and nonprofits set up delivery networks for life-improving goods, we eliminate poverty.OK, so that sounds really nice in theory, but what about in practice? What do these delivery networks look like? I want to share the concrete example that I know best, my organization, One Acre Fund. We only serve the farmer, and our job is to provide her with the tools that she needs to succeed. We start off by delivering farm inputs to really rural places. Now, this may appear initially very challenging, but it's pretty possible. Let me show you. We buy farm inputs with the combined power of our farmer network, and store it in 20 warehouses like this. Then, during input delivery, we rent hundreds of 10-ton trucks and send them out to where farmers are waiting in the field. They then get their individual orders and walk it home to their farms. It's kind of like Amazon for rural farmers. Importantly, realistic delivery also includes finance, a way to pay. Farmers pay us little by little over time, covering most of our expenses. And then we surround all that with training. Our rural field officers deliver practical, hands-on training to farmers in the field every two weeks.Wherever we deliver our services, farmers use these tools to climb out of poverty. This is a farmer in our program, Consolata. Look at the pride on her face. She has achieved a modest prosperity that I believe is the human right of every hardworking person on the planet. Today, I'm proud to say that we're serving about 400,000 farmers like Consolata.(Applause)The key to doing this is scalable delivery. In any given area, we hire a rural field officer who delivers our services to 200 farmers, on average, with more than 1,000 people living in those families. Today, we have 2,000 of these rural field officers growing very quickly. This is our delivery army, and we're just one organization. There are many companies, governments and nonprofits that have delivery armies just like this. And I believe we stand at a moment in time where collectively, we are capable of delivering farm services to all farmers.Let me show you how possible this is. This is a map of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a map of the United States for scale. I chose Sub-Saharan Africa because this is a huge delivery territory. It's very challenging. But we analyzed every 50-mile by 50-mile block on the continent, and we found that half of farmers live in just these shaded regions. That's a remarkably small area overall. If you were to lay these boxes next to each other within a map of the United States, they would only cover the Eastern United States. You can order pizza anywhere in this territory and it'll arrive to your house hot, fresh and delicious. If America can deliver pizza to an area of this size, then Africa's companies, governments and non-profits can deliver farm services to all of her farmers. This is possible.I'm going to wrap up by generalizing beyond just farming. In every field of human development, humanity has already invented effective tools to end poverty. We just need to deliver them. So again, in every area of human development, super-smart people a long time ago invented inexpensive, highly effective tools. Humanity is armed to the teeth with simple, effective solutions to poverty. We just need to deliver these to a pretty small area. Again using the map of Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, remember that rural poverty is concentrated in these blue shaded areas. Urban poverty is even more concentrated, in these green little dots. Again, using a map of the United States for scale, this is what I would call a highly achievable delivery zone. In fact, for the first time in human history, we have a vast amount of delivery infrastructure available to us. The world's companies, governments and non-profits have delivery armies that are fully capable of covering this relatively small area. We just lack the will.If we are willing, every one of us has a role to play. We first need more people to pursue careers in human development, especially if you live in a developing nation. We need more front line health workers, teachers, farmer trainers, sales agents for life-improving goods. These are the delivery people that dedicate their careers to improving the lives of others. But we also need a lot of support roles. These are roles available at just my organization alone, and we're just one out of many. This may surprise you, but no matter what your technical specialty, there is a role for you in this fight. And no matter how logistically possible it is to end poverty, we need a lot more resources. This is our number one constraint. For private investors, we need a big expansion of venture capital, private equity, working capital, available in emerging markets. But there are also limits to what private business can accomplish. Private businesses often struggle to profitably serve the extreme poor, so philanthropy still has a major role to play. Anybody can give, but we need more leadership. We need more visionary philanthropists and global leaders who will take problems in human development and lead humanity to wipe them off the face of the planet. If you're interested in these ideas, check out this website.We need more leaders. Humanity has put people on the moon. We've invented supercomputers that fit into our pockets and connect us with anybody on the planet. We've run marathons at a five-minute mile pace. We are an exceptional people. But we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Until every girl like this one has an opportunity to earn her full human potential, we have failed to become a truly moral and just human race. Logistically speaking, it's incredibly possible to end extreme poverty. We just need to deliver proven goods and services to everybody. If we have the will, every one of us has a role to play. Let's deploy our time, our careers, our collective wealth. Let us deliver an end to extreme poverty in this lifetime.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_youn_3_reasons_why_we_can_win_the_fight_against_poverty
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"War has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was born in Afghanistan, just six months after the Soviets invaded, and even though I was too young to understand what was happening, I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me.Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict. I learned that when people have a fundamental issue at stake, for most of them, giving in is not an option. For these types conflicts — when people's rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated — they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. Which means that no matter how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it. Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. Instead, we must offer them a tool that's at least as powerful and as effective as violence.This is the work I do. For the past 13 years, I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict. Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years. In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this country — as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned with the environment — these rights weren't handed to us. They were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them. But because we haven't learned from this history, nonviolent struggle as a technique is widely misunderstood.I met recently with a group of Ethiopian activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot. They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked. Years ago they held a protest. The government arrested everyone, and that was the end of that. The idea that nonviolent struggle is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. Because although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own, they don't actually create change — at least change that is fundamental.(Laughter)Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely ... or even not so nicely.(Laughter)Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power. Nonviolent activists can neutralize the military by causing soldiers to defect. They can disrupt the economy through strikes and boycotts. And they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media.There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. My colleague and mentor, Gene Sharp, has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. And protest is only one. Let me give you a recent example.Until a few months ago, Guatemala was ruled by corrupt former military officials with ties to organized crime. People were generally aware of this, but most of them felt powerless to do anything about it — until one group of citizens, just 12 regular people, put out a call on Facebook to their friends to meet in the central plaza, holding signs with a message: ""Renuncia YA"" — resign already. To their surprise, 30,000 people showed up. They stayed there for months as protests spread throughout the country. At one point, the organizers delivered hundreds of eggs to various government buildings with a message: ""If you don't have the huevos"" — the balls — ""to stop corrupt candidates from running for office, you can borrow ours.""(Laughter)(Applause)President Molina responded by vowing that he would never step down. And the activists realized that they couldn't just keep protesting and ask the president to resign. They needed to leave him no choice. So they organized a general strike, in which people throughout the country refused to work. In Guatemala City alone, over 400 businesses and schools shut their doors. Meanwhile, farmers throughout the country blocked major roads. Within five days, the president, along with dozens of other government officials, resigned already.(Applause)I've been greatly inspired by the creativity and bravery of people using nonviolent action in nearly every country in the world. For example, recently a group of activists in Uganda released a crate of pigs in the streets. You can see here that the police are confused about what to do with them.(Laughter)The pigs were painted the color of the ruling party. One pig was even wearing a hat, a hat that people recognized.(Laughter)Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. A general wouldn't march his troops into battle unless he had a plan to win the war. Yet this is how most of the world's nonviolent movements operate. Nonviolent struggle is just as complex as military warfare, if not more. Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives.The technique of war has been developed over thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to understanding and improving how it works. Meanwhile, nonviolent struggle is rarely systematically studied, and even though the number is growing, there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. This is dangerous, because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we're facing.The US government recently admitted that it's in a stalemate in its war against ISIS. But what most people don't know is that people have stood up to ISIS using nonviolent action. When ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, they announced that they were putting in place a new public school curriculum, based on their own extremist ideology. But on the first day of school, not a single child showed up. Parents simply refused to send them. They told journalists they would rather homeschool their children than to have them brainwashed.This is an example of just one act of defiance in just one city. But what if it was coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolent resistance that have taken place against ISIS? What if the parents' boycott was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function; the skilled labor needed to produce food; the engineers needed to extract and refine oil; the media infrastructure and communications networks and transportation systems, and the local businesses that ISIS relies on? It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent. But it's time we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have in facing it.Here's an idea worth spreading: let's learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in place of war. Violence as a tool of conflict could then be abandoned in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. With human innovation, we can make nonviolent struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war. The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_raqib_the_secret_to_effective_nonviolent_resistance
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"I've got a confession. I love looking through people's garbage. Now, it's not some creepy thing. I'm usually just looking for old electronics, stuff I can take to my workshop and hack. I do have a fetish for CD-ROM drives. Each one's got three different motors, so now you can build things that move. There's switches so you can turn things on and off. There's even a freaking laser, so you can make a cool robot into an awesome robot.Now, I've built a lot of stuff out of garbage, and some of these things have even been kind of useful. But here's the thing, for me, garbage is just a chance to play, to be creative and build things to amuse myself. This is what I love doing, so I just made it part of my day job. I lead a university-based biological research lab, where we value curiosity and exploration above all else. We aren't focused on any particular problem, and we're not trying to solve any particular disease. This is just a place where people can come and ask fascinating questions and find answers. And I realized a long time ago that if I challenge people to build the equipment they need out of the garbage I find, it's a great way to foster creativity. And what happened was that artists and scientists from around the world started coming to my lab. And it's not just because we value unconventional ideas, it's because we test and validate them with scientific rigor.So one day I was hacking something, I was taking it apart, and I had this sudden idea: Could I treat biology like hardware? Could I dismantle a biological system, mix and match the parts and then put it back together in some new and creative way? My lab started working on this, and I want to show you the result.Can any of you guys tell me what fruit this is?Audience: Apple!Andrew Pelling: That's right — it's an apple. Now, I actually want you to notice as well that this is a lot redder than most apples. And that's because we grew human cells into it. We took a totally innocent Macintosh apple, removed all the apple cells and DNA and then implanted human cells. And what we're left with after removing all the apple cells is this cellulose scaffold. This is the stuff that gives plants their shape and texture. And these little holes that you can see, this is where all the apple cells used to be. So then we come along, we implant some mammalian cells that you can see in blue. What happens is, these guys start multiplying and they fill up this entire scaffold.As weird as this is, it's actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized. And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. This is the point when people started asking me, ""Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?"" And I'm like, ""You've come to the right place.""(Laughter)I actually brought this up with my wife. She's a musical instrument maker, and she does a lot of wood carving for a living. So I asked her, ""Could you, like, literally carve some ears out of an apple for us?"" And she did. So I took her ears to the lab. We then started preparing them. Yeah, I know.(Laughter)It's a good lab, man.(Laughter)And then we grew cells on them. And this is the result.Listen, my lab is not in the ear-manufacturing business. People have actually been working on this for decades. Here's the issue: commercial scaffolds can be really expensive and problematic, because they're sourced from proprietary products, animals or cadavers. We used an apple and it cost pennies.What's also really cool here is it's not that hard to make these things. The equipment you need can be built from garbage, and the key processing step only requires soap and water. So what we did was put all the instructions online as open source. And then we founded a mission-driven company, and we're developing kits to make it easier for anyone with a sink and a soldering iron to make these things at home. What I'm really curious about is if one day, it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen.Speaking of kitchens, here's some asparagus. They're tasty, and they make your pee smell funny.(Laughter)Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord.So here's the question: Can we grow axons and neurons down these channels? Because if we can, then maybe we can use asparagus to form new connections between the ends of damaged and severed nerves. Or maybe even a spinal cord. Don't get me wrong — this is exceptionally challenging and really hard work to do, and we are not the only ones working on this. But we are the only ones using asparagus.(Laughter)Right now, we've got really promising pilot data. And we're working with tissue engineers and neurosurgeons to find out what's actually possible.So listen, all of the work I've shown you, the stuff that I've built that's all around me on this stage and the other projects my lab is involved in are all a direct result of me playing with your garbage. Play — play is a key part of my scientific practice. It's how I train my mind to be unconventional and to be creative and to decide to make human apple ears.So, the next time any of you are looking at some old, broken-down, malfunctioning, piece-of-crap technology, I want you to think of me. Because I want it.(Laughter)Seriously, please find any way to get in touch with me, and let's see what we can build.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_pelling_this_scientist_makes_ears_out_of_apples
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"When I was a kid, I experienced something so powerful, I spent the rest of my life searching for it, and in all the wrong places. What I experienced wasn't virtual reality. It was music. And this is where the story begins.That's me, listening to the Beatles' ""White Album."" And the look on my face is the feeling that I've been searching for ever since. Music goes straight to the emotional vein, into your bloodstream and right into your heart. It deepens every experience. Fellas?(Music)This is the amazing McKenzie Stubbert and Joshua Roman. Music —(Applause)Yeah.Music makes everything have more emotional resonance. Let's see how it does for this talk. The right piece of music at the right time fuses with us on a cellular level. When I hear that one song from that one summer with that one girl, I'm instantly transported back there again. Hey, Stacey.Here's a part of the story, though, where I got a little greedy. I thought if I added more layers on top of the music, I could make the feelings even more powerful. So I got into directing music videos. This is what they looked like. That's my brother, Jeff. Sorry about this, Jeff.(Laughter)Here's me, just so we're even. Incredible moves. Should've been a dancer.(Laughter)These experiments grew, and in time, started to look more like this. In both, I'm searching for the same thing, though, to capture that lightning in a bottle. Except, I'm not. Adding moving pictures over the music added narrative dimension, yes, but never quite equated the power that just raw music had for me on its own. This is not a great thing to realize when you've devoted your life and professional career to becoming a music video director. I kept asking myself, did I take the wrong path? So I started thinking: if I could involve you, the audience, more, I might be able to make you feel something more as well.So Aaron Koblin and I began auditioning new technologies that could put more of you inside of the work, like your childhood home in ""The Wilderness Downtown,"" your hand-drawn portraits, in ""The Johnny Cash Project,"" and your interactive dreams in ""3 Dreams of Black."" We were pushing beyond the screen, trying to connect more deeply to people's hearts and imaginations. But it wasn't quite enough. It still didn't have the raw experiential power of pure music for me.So I started chasing a new technology that I only had read about in science fiction. And after years of searching, I found a prototype. It was a project from Nonny de la Peña in Mark Bolas's lab in USC. And when I tried it, I knew I'd found it. I could taste the lightning. It was called virtual reality. This was it five years ago when I ran into it. This is what it looks like now.I quickly started building things in this new medium, and through that process we realized something: that VR is going to play an incredibly important role in the history of mediums. In fact, it's going to be the last one. I mean this because it's the first medium that actually makes the jump from our internalization of an author's expression of an experience, to our experiencing it firsthand. You look confused. I'll explain. Don't worry.(Laughter)If we go back to the origins of mediums, by all best guesses, it starts around a fire, with a good story. Our clan leader is telling us about how he hunted the woolly mammoth on the tundra that day. We hear his words and translate them into our own internal truths. The same thing happens when we look at the cave painting version of the story, the book about the mammoth hunt, the play, the radio broadcast, the television show or the movie. All of these mediums require what we call ""suspension of disbelief,"" because there's a translation gap between the reality of the story and our consciousness interpreting the story into our reality. I'm using the word ""consciousness"" as a feeling of reality that we get from our senses experiencing the world around us.Virtual reality bridges that gap. Now, you are on the tundra hunting with the clan leader. Or you are the clan leader. Or maybe you're even the woolly mammoth.(Laughter)So here's what special about VR. In all other mediums, your consciousness interprets the medium. In VR, your consciousness is the medium. So the potential for VR is enormous. But where are we now? What is the current state of the art? Well, we are here. We are the equivalent of year one of cinema. This is the Lumière Brothers film that allegedly sent a theater full of people running for their lives as they thought a train was coming toward them. Similar to this early stage of this medium, in VR, we also have to move past the spectacle and into the storytelling. It took this medium decades to figure out its preferred language of storytelling, in the form of a feature film. In VR today, we're more learning grammar than writing language.We've made 15 films in the last year at our VR company, Vrse, and we've learned a few things. We found that we have a unique, direct path into your senses, your emotions, even your body.So let me show you some things. For the purpose of this demo, we're going to take every direction that you could possibly look, and stretch it into this giant rectangle. OK, here we go.So, first: camera movement is tricky in VR. Done wrong, it can actually make you sick. We found if you move the camera at a constant speed in a straight line, you can actually get away with it, though. The first day in film school, they told me you have to learn every single rule before you can break one. We have not learned every single rule. We've barely learned any at all, but we're already trying to break them to see what kind of creative things we can accomplish. In this shot here, where we're moving up off the ground, I added acceleration. I did that because I wanted to give you a physical sensation of moving up off the ground. In VR, I can give that to you.(Music)Not surprisingly, music matters a lot in this medium as well. It guides us how to feel. In this project we made with the New York Times, Zach Richter and our friend, JR, we take you up in a helicopter, and even though you're flying 2,000 feet above Manhattan, you don't feel afraid. You feel triumphant for JR's character. The music guides you there.(Music)Contrary to popular belief, there is composition in virtual reality, but it's completely different than in film, where you have a rectangular frame. Composition is now where your consciousness exists and how the world moves around you. In this film, ""Waves of Grace,"" which was a collaboration between Vrse, the United Nations, Gabo Arora, and Imraan Ismail, we also see the changing role of the close-up in virtual reality. A close-up in VR means you're actually close up to someone. It brings that character inside of your personal space, a space that we'd usually reserve for the people that we love. And you feel an emotional closeness to the character because of what you feel to be a physical closeness.Directing VR is not like directing for the rectangle. It's more of a choreography of the viewer's attention. One tool we can use to guide your attention is called ""spatialized sound."" I can put a sound anywhere in front of you, to left or right, even behind you, and when you turn your head, the sound will rotate accordingly. So I can use that to direct your attention to where I want you to see. Next time you hear someone singing over your shoulder, it might be Bono.(Laughter)VR makes us feel like we are part of something. For most of human history, we lived in small family units. We started in caves, then moved to clans and tribes, then villages and towns, and now we're all global citizens. But I believe that we are still hardwired to care the most about the things that are local to us. And VR makes anywhere and anyone feel local. That's why it works as an empathy machine. Our film ""Clouds Over Sidra"" takes you to a Syrian refugee camp, and instead of watching a story about people over there, it's now a story about us here.But where do we go from here? The tricky thing is that with all previous mediums, the format is fixed at its birth. Film has been a sequence of rectangles, from Muybridge and his horses to now. The format has never changed. But VR as a format, as a medium, isn't complete yet. It's not using physical celluloid or paper or TV signals. It actually employs what we use to make sense of the world. We're using your senses as the paints on the canvas, but only two right now. Eventually, we can see if we will have all of our human senses employed, and we will have agency to live the story in any path we choose. And we call it virtual reality right now, but what happens when we move past simulated realities? What do we call it then? What if instead of verbally telling you about a dream, I could let you live inside that dream? What if instead of just experiencing visiting some reality on Earth, you could surf gravitational waves on the edge of a black hole, or create galaxies from scratch, or communicate with each other not using words but using our raw thoughts? That's not a virtual reality anymore. And honestly I don't know what that's called. But I hope you see where we're going.But here I am, intellectualizing a medium I'm saying is experiential. So let's experience it. In your hands, you hopefully hold a piece of cardboard. Let's open the flap. Tap on the power button to unlock the phone. For the people watching at home, we're going to put up a card right now to show you how to download this experience on your phone yourself, and even get a Google cardboard of your own to try it with. We played in cardboard boxes as kids, and as adults, I'm hoping we can all find a little bit of that lightning by sticking our head in one again. You're about to participate in the largest collective VR viewing in history. And in that classic old-timey style of yesteryear, we're all going to watch something at the exact same time, together. Let's hope it works. What's the countdown look like? I can't see.Audience: ...15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1(Birds singing)(Train engine)Audience: (Shreiks)(Video) JR: Let me tell you how I shot the cover of the New York Times Magazine, ""Walking New York."" I just got strapped on outside the helicopter, and I had to be perfectly vertical so I could grab it. And when I was perfectly above — you know, with the wind, we had to redo it a few times — then I kept shooting.(Video) Woman's voice: Dear Lord, protect us from evil, for you are the Lord, the light. You who gave us life took it away. Let your will be done. Please bring peace to the many who have lost loved ones. Help us to live again.(Music)(Video) (Children's voices)Child's voice: There are more kids in Zaatari than adults right now. Sometimes I think we are the ones in charge.Chris Milk: How was it?(Applause)That was a cheap way of getting you to do a standing ovation. I just made you all stand. I knew you'd applaud at the end.(Applause)I believe that everyone on Earth needs to experience what you just experienced. That way we can collectively start to shape this, not as a tech platform but as a humanity platform. And to that end, in November of last year, the New York Times and Vrse made a VR project called ""The Displaced."" It launched with one million Google Cardboards sent out to every Sunday subscriber with their newspaper. But a funny thing happened that Sunday morning. A lot of people got them that were not the intended recipients on the mailing label. And we started seeing this all over Instagram. Look familiar?Music led me on a path of searching for what seemed like the unattainable for a very long time. Now, millions of kids just had the same formative experience in their childhood that I had in mine. Only I think this one surpasses it. Let's see where this leads them.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_the_birth_of_virtual_reality_as_an_art_form
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"What does it mean to spend our time well? I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to spend my time. Probably too much — I probably obsess over it. My friends think I do. But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days, it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me, and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away.Specifically, it feels like little bits of my time get slipped away to various things like this, like technology — I check things. I'll give you an example. If this email shows up — how many of you have gotten an email like this, right? I've been tagged in a photo. When this appears, I can't help but click on it right now. Right? Because, like, what if it's a bad photo? So I have to click it right now. But I'm not just going to click ""See photo,"" what I'm actually going to do is spend the next 20 minutes.(Laughter)But the worst part is that I know this is what's going to happen, and even knowing that's what's going to happen doesn't stop me from doing it again the next time. Or I find myself in a situation like this, where I check my email and I pull down to refresh, But the thing is that 60 seconds later, I'll pull down to refresh again. Why am I doing this? This doesn't make any sense.But I'll give you a hint why this is happening. What do you think makes more money in the United States than movies, game parks and baseball combined? Slot machines. How can slot machines make all this money when we play with such small amounts of money? We play with coins. How is this possible? Well, the thing is ... my phone is a slot machine. Every time I check my phone, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get? What am I going to get? Every time I check my email, I'm playing the slot machine, saying, ""What am I going to get?"" Every time I scroll a news feed, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get next? And the thing is that, again, knowing exactly how this works — and I'm a designer, I know exactly how the psychology of this works, I know exactly what's going on — but it doesn't leave me with any choice, I still just get sucked into it.So what are we going to do? Because it leaves us with this all-or-nothing relationship with technology, right? You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out. Right?So we need to restore choice. We want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it, and we're going to need help from designers, because knowing this stuff doesn't help. We're going to need design help. So what would that look like?So let's take an example that we all face: chat — text messaging. So let's say there's two people. Nancy's on the left and she's working on a document, and John's on the right. And John suddenly remembers, ""I need to ask Nancy for that document before I forget."" So when he sends her that message, it blows away her attention.That's what we're doing all the time, bulldozing each other's attention, left and right. And there's serious cost to this, because every time we interrupt each other, it takes us about 23 minutes, on average, to refocus our attention. We actually cycle through two different projects before we come back to the original thing we were doing. This is Gloria Mark's research combined with Microsoft research, that showed this. And her research also shows that it actually trains bad habits. The more interruptions we get externally, it's conditioning and training us to interrupt ourselves. We actually self-interrupt every three-and-a-half minutes.This is crazy. So how do we fix this? Because Nancy and John are in this all-or-nothing relationship. Nancy might want to disconnect, but then she'd be worried: What if I'm missing something important?Design can fix this problem. Let's say you have Nancy again on the left, John on the right. And John remembers, ""I need to send Nancy that document."" Except this time, Nancy can mark that she's focused. Let's say she drags a slider and says, ""I want to be focused for 30 minutes,"" so — bam — she's focused. Now when John wants to message her, he can get the thought off of his mind — because he has a need, he has this thought, and he needs to dump it out before he forgets. Except this time, it holds the messages so that Nancy can still focus, but John can get the thought off of his mind.But this only works if one last thing is true, which is that Nancy needs to know that if something is truly important, John can still interrupt. But instead of having constant accidental or mindless interruptions, we're now only creating conscious interruptions,So we're doing two things here. We're creating a new choice for both Nancy and John, But there's a second, subtle thing we're doing here, too. And it's that we're changing the question we're answering. Instead of the goal of chat being: ""Let's design it so it's easy to send a message"" — that's the goal of chat, it should be really easy to send a message to someone — we change the goal to something deeper and a human value, which is: ""Let's create the highest possible quality communication in a relationship between two people. So we upgraded the goal.Now, do designers actually care about this? Do we want to have conversations about what these deeper human goals are? Well, I'll tell you one story. A little over a year ago, I got to help organize a meeting between some of technology's leading designers and Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is an international spokesperson for mindfulness meditation. And it was the most amazing meeting. You have to imagine — picture a room — on one side of the room, you have a bunch of tech geeks; on the other side of the room, you have a bunch of long brown robes, shaved heads, Buddhist monks. And the questions were about the deepest human values, like what does the future of technology look like when you're designing for the deepest questions and the deepest human values? And our conversation centered on listening more deeply to what those values might be. He joked in our conversation that what if, instead of a spell check, you had a compassion check, meaning, you might highlight a word that might be accidentally abrasive — perceived as abrasive by someone else.So does this kind of conversation happen in the real world, not just in these design meetings? Well, the answer is yes, and one of my favorites is Couchsurfing. If you didn't know, Couchsurfing is a website that matches people who are looking for a place to stay with a free couch, from someone who's trying to offer it.So, great service — what would their design goal be? What are you designing for if you work at Couchsurfing? Well, you would think it's to match guests with hosts. Right? That's a pretty good goal. But that would kind of be like our goal with messaging before, where we're just trying to deliver a message.So what's the deeper, human goal? Well, they set their goal as the need to create lasting, positive experiences and relationships between people who've never met before. And the most amazing thing about this was in 2007, they introduced a way to measure this, which is incredible. I'll tell you how it works. For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing — a way of measuring success. So what they do is, let's say you take two people who meet up, and they take the number of days those two people spent together, and then they estimate how many hours were in those days — how many hours did those two people spend together? And then after they spend that time together, they ask both of them: How positive was your experience? Did you have a good experience with this person that you met? And they subtract from those positive hours the amount of time people spent on the website, because that's a cost to people's lives. Why should we value that as success? And what you were left with is something they refer to as ""net orchestrated conviviality,"" or, really, just a net ""Good Times"" created. The net hours that would have never existed, had Couchsurfing not existed.Can you imagine how inspiring it would be to come to work every day and measure your success in the actual net new contribution of hours in people's lives that are positive, that would have never existed if you didn't do what you were about to do at work today? Can you imagine a whole world that worked this way?Can you imagine a social network that — let's say you care about cooking, and it measured its success in terms of cooking nights organized and the cooking articles that you were glad you read, and subtracted from that the articles you weren't glad you read or the time you spent scrolling that you didn't like? Imagine a professional social network that, instead of measuring its success in terms of connections created or messages sent, instead measured its success in terms of the job offers that people got that they were excited to get. And subtracted the amount of time people spent on the website. Or imagine dating services, like maybe Tinder or something, where instead of measuring the number of swipes left and right people did, which is how they measure success today, instead measured the deep, romantic, fulfilling connections people created. Whatever that was for them, by the way.But can you imagine a whole world that worked this way, that was helping you spend your time well? Now to do this you also need a new system, because you're probably thinking, today's Internet economy — today's economy in general — is measured in time spent. The more users you have, the more usage you have, the more time people spend, that's how we measure success.But we've solved this problem before. We solved it with organic, when we said we need to value things a different way. We said this is a different kind of food. So we can't compare it just based on price; this is a different category of food. We solved it with Leed Certification, where we said this is a different kind of building that stood for different values of environmental sustainability.What if we had something like that for technology? What if we had something whose entire purpose and goal was to help create net new positive contributions to human life? And what if we could value it a different way, so it would actually work? Imagine you gave this different premium shelf space on app stores. Imagine you had web browsers that helped route you to these kinds of design products. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to live and create that world?We can create this world today. Company leaders, all you have to do — only you can prioritize a new metric, which is your metric for net positive contribution to human life. And have an honest conversation about that. Maybe you're not doing so well to start with, but let's start that conversation.Designers, you can redefine success; you can redefine design. Arguably, you have more power than many people in your organization to create the choices that all of us live by. Maybe like in medicine, where we have a Hippocratic oath to recognize the responsibility and this higher value that we have to treat patients. What if designers had something like that, in terms of this new kind of design?And users, for all of us — we can demand technology that works this way. Now it may seem hard, but McDonald's didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there. Walmart didn't have organic food until the consumer demand was there. We have to demand this new kind of technology. And we can do that. And doing that would amount to shifting from a world that's driven and run entirely on time spent, to world that's driven by time well spent.I want to live in this world, and I want this conversation to happen. Let's start that conversation now.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_how_better_tech_could_protect_us_from_distraction
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"I could never have imagined that a 19-year-old suicide bomber would actually teach me a valuable lesson. But he did. He taught me to never presume anything about anyone you don't know.On a Thursday morning in July 2005, the bomber and I, unknowingly, boarded the same train carriage at the same time, standing, apparently, just feet apart. I didn't see him. Actually, I didn't see anyone. You know not to look at anyone on the Tube, but I guess he saw me. I guess he looked at all of us, as his hand hovered over the detonation switch. I've often wondered: What was he thinking? Especially in those final seconds.I know it wasn't personal. He didn't set out to kill or maim me, Gill Hicks. I mean — he didn't know me. No. Instead, he gave me an unwarranted and an unwanted label. I had become the enemy. To him, I was the ""other,"" the ""them,"" as opposed to ""us."" The label ""enemy"" allowed him to dehumanize us. It allowed him to push that button. And he wasn't selective. Twenty-six precious lives were taken in my carriage alone, and I was almost one of them.In the time it takes to draw a breath, we were plunged into a darkness so immense that it was almost tangible; what I imagine wading through tar might be like. We didn't know we were the enemy. We were just a bunch of commuters who, minutes earlier, had followed the Tube etiquette: no direct eye contact, no talking and absolutely no conversation.But in the lifting of the darkness, we were reaching out. We were helping each other. We were calling out our names, a little bit like a roll call, waiting for responses.""I'm Gill. I'm here. I'm alive. OK.""""I'm Gill. Here. Alive. OK.""I didn't know Alison. But I listened for her check-ins every few minutes. I didn't know Richard. But it mattered to me that he survived.All I shared with them was my first name. They didn't know that I was a head of a department at the Design Council. And here is my beloved briefcase, also rescued from that morning. They didn't know that I published architecture and design journals, that I was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, that I wore black — still do — that I smoked cigarillos. I don't smoke cigarillos anymore. I drank gin and I watched TED Talks, of course, never dreaming that one day I would be standing, balancing on prosthetic legs, giving a talk.I was a young Australian woman doing extraordinary things in London. And I wasn't ready for that all to end. I was so determined to survive that I used my scarf to tie tourniquets around the tops of my legs, and I just shut everything and everyone out, to focus, to listen to myself, to be guided by instinct alone. I lowered my breathing rate. I elevated my thighs. I held myself upright and I fought the urge to close my eyes.I held on for almost an hour, an hour to contemplate the whole of my life up until this point. Perhaps I should have done more. Perhaps I could have lived more, seen more. Maybe I should have gone running, dancing, taken up yoga. But my priority and my focus was always my work. I lived to work. Who I was on my business card mattered to me. But it didn't matter down in that tunnel.By the time I felt that first touch from one of my rescuers, I was unable to speak, unable to say even a small word, like ""Gill."" I surrendered my body to them. I had done all I possibly could, and now I was in their hands.I understood just who and what humanity really is, when I first saw the ID tag that was given to me when I was admitted to hospital. And it read: ""One unknown estimated female."" One unknown estimated female. Those four words were my gift. What they told me very clearly was that my life was saved, purely because I was a human being. Difference of any kind made no difference to the extraordinary lengths that the rescuers were prepared to go to save my life, to save as many unknowns as they could, and putting their own lives at risk. To them, it didn't matter if I was rich or poor, the color of my skin, whether I was male or female, my sexual orientation, who I voted for, whether I was educated, if I had a faith or no faith at all. Nothing mattered other than I was a precious human life.I see myself as a living fact. I am proof that unconditional love and respect can not only save, but it can transform lives. Here is a wonderful image of one of my rescuers, Andy, and I taken just last year. Ten years after the event, and here we are, arm in arm.Throughout all the chaos, my hand was held tightly. My face was stroked gently. What did I feel? I felt loved. What's shielded me from hatred and wanting retribution, what's given me the courage to say: this ends with me is love. I was loved.I believe the potential for widespread positive change is absolutely enormous because I know what we're capable of. I know the brilliance of humanity. So this leaves me with some pretty big things to ponder and some questions for us all to consider: Is what unites us not far greater than what can ever divide? Does it have to take a tragedy or a disaster for us to feel deeply connected as one species, as human beings? And when will we embrace the wisdom of our era to rise above mere tolerance and move to an acceptance for all who are only a label until we know them?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gill_hicks_i_survived_a_terrorist_attack_here_s_what_i_learned
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"As a little Hawaiian, my mom and auntie always told me stories about Kalaupapa — the Hawaiian leper colony surrounded by the highest sea cliffs in the world — and Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who gave his life for the Hawaiian community. As a young nurse, my aunt trained the nuns caring for the remaining lepers almost a 100 years after Father Damien died of leprosy. I remember stories she told about traveling down switchback cliff paths on a mule, while my uncle played her favorite hula songs on the ukulele all the way down to Kalaupapa.You see, as a youngster, I was always curious about a few things. First was why a Belgian missionary chose to live in complete isolation in Kalaupapa, knowing he would inevitably contract leprosy from the community of people he sought to help. And secondly, where did the leprosy bacteria come from? And why were Kānaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaii, so susceptible to developing leprosy, or ""mai Pake?""This got my curious about what makes us unique as Hawaiians — namely, our genetic makeup. But it wasn't until high school, through the Human Genome Project, that I realized I wasn't alone in trying to connect our unique genetic ancestry to our potential health, wellness and illness. You see, the 2.7 billion-dollar project promised an era of predictive and preventative medicine based on our unique genetic makeup. So to me it always seemed obvious that in order to achieve this dream, we would need to sequence a diverse cohort of people to obtain the full spectrum of human genetic variation on the planet. That's why 10 years later, it continues to shock me, knowing that 96 percent of genome studies associating common genetic variation with specific diseases have focused exclusively on individuals of European ancestry.Now you don't need a PhD to see that that leaves four percent for the rest of diversity. And in my own searching, I've discovered that far less than one percent have actually focused on indigenous communities, like myself. So that begs the question: Who is the Human Genome Project actually for? Just like we have different colored eyes and hair, we metabolize drugs differently based on the variation in our genomes. So how many of you would be shocked to learn that 95 percent of clinical trials have also exclusively featured individuals of European ancestry?This bias and systematic lack of engagement of indigenous people in both clinical trials and genome studies is partially the result of a history of distrust. For example, in 1989, researchers from Arizona State University obtained blood samples from Arizona's Havasupai tribe, promising to alleviate the burden of type 2 diabetes that was plaguing their community, only to turn around and use those exact same samples — without the Havasupai's consent — to study rates of schizophrenia, inbreeding, and challenge the Havasupai's origin story. When the Havasupai found out, they sued successfully for $700,000, and they banned ASU from conducting research on their reservation. This culminated in a sort of domino effect with local tribes in the Southwest — including the Navajo Nation, one of the largest tribes in the country — putting a moratorium on genetic research.Now despite this history of distrust, I still believe that indigenous people can benefit from genetic research. And if we don't do something soon, the gap in health disparities is going to continue to widen. Hawaii, for example, has the longest life expectancy on average of any state in the US, yet native Hawaiians like myself die a full decade before our non-native counterparts, because we have some of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and the number one and number two killers in the US: cardiovascular disease and cancer.So how do we ensure the populations of people that need genome sequencing the most are not the last to benefit? My vision is to make genetic research more native, to indigenize genome sequencing technology.Traditionally, genomes are sequenced in laboratories. Here's an image of your classic genome sequencer. It's huge. It's the size of a refrigerator. There's this obvious physical limitation. But what if you could sequence genomes on the fly? What if you could fit a genome sequencer in your pocket? This nanopore-based sequencer is one 10,000th the size of your traditional genome sequencer. It doesn't have the same physical limitations, in that it's not tethered to a lab bench with extraneous cords, large vats of chemicals or computer monitors. It allows us to de-black box genome sequencing technology development in a way that's immersive and collaborative, activating and empowering indigenous communities ... as citizen scientists.100 years later in Kalaupapa, we now have the technology to sequence leprosy bacteria in real time, using mobile genome sequencers, remote access to the Internet and cloud computation. But only if that's what Hawaiian people want. In our space, on our terms.IndiGenomics is about science for the people by the people. We'll be starting with a tribal consultation resource, focused on educating indigenous communities on the potential use and misuse of genetic information. Eventually we'd like to have our own IndiGenomics research institute to conduct our own experiments and educate the next generation of indigenous scientists.In the end, indigenous people need to be partners in and not subjects of genetic research. And for those on the outside, just as Father Damien did, the research community needs to immerse itself in indigenous culture or die trying.Mahalo.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/keolu_fox_why_genetic_research_must_be_more_diverse
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"So we all have our own biases. For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years.This is what a classroom in a public school in India looks like. There are 1 million such schools in India. And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. These are things that you and I would expect an 8-year-old to be able to do. By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. In India, public schools not only offer free education — they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is.So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. So she said to us, ""Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. Can you possibly help?""Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. One, that I had never done anything like this before. And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. We knew that we had to craft our own journey.But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. People said, ""Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms."" By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things.So I said, ""Hang on, stop. Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve."" So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us.So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. Well, when we went inside schools, we found something completely different. On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. But they were not teaching. I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students.So we asked the teachers, ""What's going on, why are you not teaching?"" And they said, ""This is what's expected of us. When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed.""You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. Not explicitly, but implicitly. And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things.So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program.So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, ""Let's look around and see what we can find."" And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. Small things being done by NGOs, being done by foundations. But what was also interesting was that none of them actually scaled. All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools.So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, ""Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools."" Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. And hence, innovations don't scale. So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, ""Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools."" And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. Much easier said than done. (Laughter)I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, ""Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?""In the end, I think we did find solutions to many of the issues. I'll give you an example. In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. Children shouldn't memorize things from books, they should do activities, and that's a more effective way to learn. Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. We needed another solution. We couldn't think of anything. One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. That was a huge eureka moment for us. So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, ""To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids."" And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one.Now, this brings me to my last point. How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? The department used to have a process which is very interesting. I like to call it ""The Chain of Hope."" They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. It was a little bit ridiculous. Now, we knew technology was the answer, but we also knew that most of these schools don't have a computer or email. However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp.So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. It spreads like wildfire. You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. Teachers can ask clarification questions instantaneously. And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. So today, when you go to a school in Haryana, things look different. The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. Often with innovative techniques. When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly.When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. But not in Haryana. In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. And I said, ""Why are you smiling, what's going on?"" And she said, ""I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to.""So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? I certainly believe so. I think if you give them the right levers, they can move mountains.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/seema_bansal_how_to_fix_a_broken_education_system_without_any_more_money
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"What an intriguing group of individuals you are ... to a psychologist.(Laughter)I've had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it's fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today.(Laughter)And I thought you might like to know who you are.(Laughter)But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself.I'm in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us — each of you — is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person.Now, already you may be saying of yourself, ""I'm not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere."" Or you may say of yourself, ""I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit.""(Laughter)But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent ""twitiness"" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so.One of the most influential approaches in personality science is known as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, ""O"" stands for ""open to experience,"" versus those who are more closed. ""C"" stands for ""conscientiousness,"" in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. ""E"" — ""extroversion,"" in contrast to more introverted people. ""A"" — ""agreeable individuals,"" in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And ""N"" — ""neurotic individuals,"" in contrast to those who are more stable.All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, I find intriguing. With my classes, I sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: I tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow.(Laughter)Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they have successfully licked the elbow of the person sitting next to them.(Laughter)Those are the extroverts.Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what I call our three natures. First, our biogenic nature — our neurophysiology. Second, our sociogenic or second nature, which has to do with the cultural and social aspects of our lives. And third, what makes you individually you — idiosyncratic — what I call your ""idiogenic"" nature.Let me explain. One of the things that characterizes extroverts is they need stimulation. And that stimulation can be achieved by finding things that are exciting: loud noises, parties and social events here at TED — you see the extroverts forming a magnetic core. They all gather together. And I've seen you. The introverts are more likely to spend time in the quiet spaces up on the second floor, where they are able to reduce stimulation — and may be misconstrued as being antisocial, but you're not necessarily antisocial. It may be that you simply realize that you do better when you have a chance to lower that level of stimulation.Sometimes it's an internal stimulant, from your body. Caffeine, for example, works much better with extroverts than it does introverts. When extroverts come into the office at nine o'clock in the morning and say, ""I really need a cup of coffee,"" they're not kidding — they really do. Introverts do not do as well, particularly if the tasks they're engaged in — and they've had some coffee — if those tasks are speeded, and if they're quantitative, introverts may give the appearance of not being particularly quantitative. But it's a misconstrual.So here are the consequences that are really quite intriguing: we're not always what seem to be, and that takes me to my next point. I should say, before getting to this, something about sexual intercourse, although I may not have time. And so, if you would like me to — yes, you would? OK.(Laughter)There are studies done on the frequency with which individuals engage in the conjugal act, as broken down by male, female; introvert, extrovert. So I ask you: How many times per minute — oh, I'm sorry, that was a rat study —(Laughter)How many times per month do introverted men engage in the act? 3.0. Extroverted men? More or less? Yes, more. 5.5 — almost twice as much. Introverted women: 3.1. Extroverted women? Frankly, speaking as an introverted male, which I will explain later — they are heroic. 7.5. They not only handle all the male extroverts, they pick up a few introverts as well.(Laughter)(Applause)We communicate differently, extroverts and introverts. Extroverts, when they interact, want to have lots of social encounter punctuated by closeness. They'd like to stand close for comfortable communication. They like to have a lot of eye contact, or mutual gaze. We found in some research that they use more diminutive terms when they meet somebody. So when an extrovert meets a Charles, it rapidly becomes ""Charlie,"" and then ""Chuck,"" and then ""Chuckles Baby.""(Laughter)Whereas for introverts, it remains ""Charles,"" until he's given a pass to be more intimate by the person he's talking to. We speak differently. Extroverts prefer black-and-white, concrete, simple language. Introverts prefer — and I must again tell you that I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine — we speak differently. We prefer contextually complex, contingent, weasel-word sentences —(Laughter)More or less.(Laughter)As it were.(Laughter)Not to put too fine a point upon it — like that.When we talk, we sometimes talk past each other. I had a consulting contract I shared with a colleague who's as different from me as two people can possibly be. First, his name is Tom. Mine isn't.(Laughter)Secondly, he's six foot five. I have a tendency not to be.(Laughter)And thirdly, he's as extroverted a person as you could find. I am seriously introverted. I overload so much, I can't even have a cup of coffee after three in the afternoon and expect to sleep in the evening.We had seconded to this project a fellow called Michael. And Michael almost brought the project to a crashing halt. So the person who seconded him asked Tom and me, ""What do you make of Michael?"" Well, I'll tell you what Tom said in a minute. He spoke in classic ""extrovert-ese."" And here is how extroverted ears heard what I said, which is actually pretty accurate. I said, ""Well Michael does have a tendency at times of behaving in a way that some of us might see as perhaps more assertive than is normally called for.""(Laughter)Tom rolled his eyes and he said, ""Brian, that's what I said: he's an asshole!""(Laughter)(Applause)Now, as an introvert, I might gently allude to certain ""assholic"" qualities in this man's behavior, but I'm not going to lunge for the a-word.(Laughter)But the extrovert says, ""If he walks like one, if he talks like one, I call him one."" And we go past each other.Now is this something that we should be heedful of? Of course. It's important that we know this. Is that all we are? Are we just a bunch of traits? No, we're not. Remember, you're like some other people and like no other person. How about that idiosyncratic you? As Elizabeth or as George, you may share your extroversion or your neuroticism. But are there some distinctively Elizabethan features of your behavior, or Georgian of yours, that make us understand you better than just a bunch of traits? That make us love you? Not just because you're a certain type of person.I'm uncomfortable putting people in pigeonholes. I don't even think pigeons belong in pigeonholes. So what is it that makes us different? It's the doings that we have in our life — the personal projects. You have a personal project right now, but nobody may know it here. It relates to your kid — you've been back three times to the hospital, and they still don't know what's wrong. Or it could be your mom. And you'd been acting out of character. These are free traits. You're very agreeable, but you act disagreeably in order to break down those barriers of administrative torpor in the hospital, to get something for your mom or your child.What are these free traits? They're where we enact a script in order to advance a core project in our lives. And they are what matters. Don't ask people what type you are; ask them, ""What are your core projects in your life?"" And we enact those free traits. I'm an introvert, but I have a core project, which is to profess. I'm a professor. And I adore my students, and I adore my field. And I can't wait to tell them about what's new, what's exciting, what I can't wait to tell them about. And so I act in an extroverted way, because at eight in the morning, the students need a little bit of humor, a little bit of engagement to keep them going in arduous days of study.But we need to be very careful when we act protractedly out of character. Sometimes we may find that we don't take care of ourselves. I find, for example, after a period of pseudo-extroverted behavior, I need to repair somewhere on my own. As Susan Cain said in her ""Quiet"" book, in a chapter that featured the strange Canadian professor who was teaching at the time at Harvard, I sometimes go to the men's room to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous extroverts.(Laughter)I remember one particular day when I was retired to a cubicle, trying to avoid overstimulation. And a real extrovert came in beside me — not right in my cubicle, but in the next cubicle over — and I could hear various evacuatory noises, which we hate — even our own, that's why we flush during as well as after.(Laughter)And then I heard this gravelly voice saying, ""Hey, is that Dr. Little?""(Laughter)If anything is guaranteed to constipate an introvert for six months, it's talking on the john.(Laughter)That's where I'm going now. Don't follow me.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_little_who_are_you_really_the_puzzle_of_personality
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"When we're designing new products, services or businesses, the only time you'll know if they're any good, if the designs are good, is to see how they're used in the real world, in context.I'm reminded of that every time I walk past Highbury Fields in north London. It's absolutely beautiful. There's a big open green space. There's Georgian buildings around the side. But then there's this mud trap that cuts across the middle. People clearly don't want to walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is self-reinforcing.Now, this shortcut is called a desire path, and it's often the path of least resistance. I find them fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge.Now at this point, I should apologize, because you guys are going to start seeing these everywhere. But today, I'm going to pick three I find interesting and share what actually it reminds me about launching new products and services. The first is in the capital city of Brazil — Brasilia. And it reminds me that sometimes, you have to just focus on designing for a real need at low friction. Now, Brasilia is fascinating. It was designed by Niemeyer in the '50s. It was the golden age of flying, so he laid it out like a plane, as you can see there. Slightly worryingly, he put most of the important government buildings in the cockpit. But if you zoom in, in the very center of Brasilia, just where the point is there, you see it's littered with desire paths. They're absolutely everywhere.Now, they thought that they had future-proofed this design. They thought in the future we wouldn't need to walk anywhere — we'd be able to drive — so there was little need for walkways or pavements. But as you can see, there's a real need. These are very dangerous desire paths. If we just pick one, in the middle, you can see it crosses 15 lanes of traffic. It won't surprise you guys that Brasilia has five times the pedestrian accident rate of your average US city. People are resourceful. They'll always find the low-friction route to save money, save time.Not all these desire paths are dangerous, I was reminded flying here when I was in Heathrow. Many of us get frustrated when we're confronted with the obligatory walk through duty-free. It was amazing to me how many people refused to take the long, meandering path to the left, and just cut through to the right, cut through the desire path.The question that's interesting is: What do designers think when they see our behavior here? Do they think we're stupid? Do they think we're lazy? Or do they accept that this is the only truth? This is their product. We're effectively co-designing their product. So our job is to design for real needs at low friction, because if you don't, the customer will, anyway.The second desire path I wanted to share is at the University of California. And it reminds me that sometimes the best way to come up with a great design is just to launch it. Now, university campuses are fantastic for spotting desire paths. I think it's because students are always late and they're pretty smart. So they're dashing to lectures. They'll always find the shortcut. And the designers here knew that. So they built the buildings and then they waited a few months for the paths to form. They then paved them. (Laughter) Incredibly smart approach. In fact, often, just launching the straw man of a service can teach you what people really want.For example, Ayr Muir in Boston knew he wanted to open a restaurant. But where should it be? What should the menu be? He launched a service, in this case a food truck, and he changed the location each day. He'd write a different menu on the side in a whiteboard marker to figure out what people wanted. He now has a chain of restaurants. So it can be incredibly efficient to launch something to spot the desire paths.The third and final desire path I wanted to share with you is the UNIH. It reminds me that the world's in flux, and we have to respond to those changes. So as you'll guess, this is a hospital. I've marked for you on the left the Oncology Department. The patients would usually stay in the hotels down on the bottom right. This was a patient-centered organization, so they laid on cars for their patients. But what they realized when they started offering chemotherapy is the patients rarely wanted to get in cars. They were too nauseous, so they'd walk back to their hotels. This desire path that you see diagonally, formed. The patients even called it ""The Chemo Trail."" Now, when the hospital saw this originally, they tried to lay turf back over it, ignore it. But after a while, they realized it was an important need they were meeting for their patients, so they paved it.And I think our job is often to pave these emerging desire paths. If we look back at the one in North London again, that desire path hasn't always been there. The reason it sprung up is people were traveling to the mighty Arsenal Football Club stadium on game days, from the Underground station you see on the bottom right. So you see the desire path. If we just wind the clock back a few years, when the stadium was being constructed, there is no desire path.So our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging, and, where appropriate, pave them, as someone did here. Someone installed a barrier, people started walking across and round the bottom as you see, and they paved it.(Laughter)But I think this is a wonderful reminder as well, that, actually, the world is in flux. It's constantly changing, because if you look at the top of this image, there's another desire path forming.So these three desire paths remind me we need to design for real human needs. I think empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success. Design for real needs and design them in low friction, because if you don't offer them in low friction, someone else will, often the customer.Secondly, often the best way to learn what people really want is to launch your service. The answer is rarely inside the building. Get out there and see what people really want.And finally, in part because of technology, the world is incredibly flux at the moment. It's changing constantly. These desire paths are going to spring up faster than ever. Our job is to pick the appropriate ones and pave over them.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_hulme_what_can_we_learn_from_shortcuts
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"Once there was a star. Like everything else, she was born; grew to be around 30 times the mass of our sun and lived for a very long time. Exactly how long, people cannot really tell. Just like everything in life, she reached the end of her regular star days when her heart, the core of her life, exhausted its fuel. But that was no end.She transformed into a supernova, and in the process releasing a tremendous amount of energy, outshining the rest of the galaxy and emitting, in one second, the same amount of energy our sun will release in 10 days. And she evolved into another role in our galaxy.Supernova explosions are very extreme. But the ones that emit gamma rays are even more extreme. In the process of becoming a supernova, the interior of the star collapses under its own weight and it starts rotating ever faster, like an ice skater when pulling their arms in close to their body. In that way, it starts rotating very fast and it increases, powerfully, its magnetic field. The matter around the star is dragged around, and some energy from that rotation is transferred to that matter and the magnetic field is increased even further. In that way, our star had extra energy to outshine the rest of the galaxy in brightness and gamma ray emission.My star, the one in my story, became what is known as a magnetar. And just for your information, the magnetic field of a magnetar is 1,000 trillion times the magnetic field of Earth. The most energetic events ever measured by astronomers carry the name gamma-ray bursts because we observe them as bursts most or explosions, most strongly measured as gamma-ray light. Our star, like the one in our story that became a magnetar, is detected as a gamma-ray burst during the most energetic portion of the explosion. Yet, even though gamma-ray bursts are the strongest events ever measured by astronomers, we cannot see them with our naked eye. We depend, we rely on other methods in order to study this gamma-ray light. We cannot see them with our naked eye. We can only see an itty bitty, tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. And beyond that, we rely on other methods.Yet as astronomers, we study a wider range of light and we depend on other methods to do that. On the screen, it may look like this. You're seeing a plot. That is a light curve. It's a plot of intensity of light over time. It is a gamma-ray light curve. Sighted astronomers depend on this kind of plot in order to interpret how this light intensity changes over time. On the left, you will be seeing the light intensity without a burst, and on the right, you will be seeing the light intensity with the burst.Early during my career, I could also see this kind of plot. But then, I lost my sight. I completely lost my sight because of extended illness, and with it, I lost the opportunity to see this plot and the opportunity to do my physics. It was a very strong transition for me in many ways. And professionally, it left me without a way to do my science. I longed to access and scrutinize this energetic light and figure out the astrophysical cause. I wanted to experience the spacious wonder, the excitement, the joy produced by the detection of such a titanic celestial event.I thought long and hard about it, when I suddenly realized that all a light curve is, is a table of numbers converted into a visual plot. So along with my collaborators, we worked really hard and we translated the numbers into sound. I achieved access to the data, and today I'm able to do physics at the level of the best astronomer, using sound. And what people have been able to do, mainly visually, for hundreds of years, now I do it using sound.(Applause) Listening to this gamma-ray burst that you're seeing on the — (Applause continues)Thank you.Listening to this burst that you're seeing on the screen brought something to the ear beyond the obvious burst. Now I'm going to play the burst for you. It's not music, it's sound.(Digital beeping sounds)This is scientific data converted into sound, and it's mapped in pitch. The process is called sonification.So listening to this brought something to the ear besides the obvious burst. When I examine the very strong low-frequency regions, or bass line — I'm zooming into the bass line now. We noted resonances characteristic of electrically charged gasses like the solar wind. And I want you to hear what I heard. You will hear it as a very fast decrease in volume. And because you're sighted, I'm giving you a red line indicating what intensity of light is being converted into sound.(Digital hum and whistling sound)The (Whistles) is frogs at home, don't pay attention to that.(Laughter)(Digital hum and whistling sound)I think you heard it, right?So what we found is that the bursts last long enough in order to support wave resonances, which are things caused by exchanges of energy between particles that may have been excited, that depend on the volume. You may remember that I said that the matter around the star is dragged around? It transmits power with frequency and field distribution determined by the dimensions. You may remember that we were talking about a super-massive star that became a very strong magnetic field magnetar. If this is the case, then outflows from the exploding star may be associated with this gamma-ray burst.What does that mean? That star formation may be a very important part of these supernova explosions. Listening to this very gamma-ray burst brought us to the notion that the use of sound as an adjunctive visual display may also support sighted astronomers in the search for more information in the data. Simultaneously, I worked on analyzing measurements from other telescopes, and my experiments demonstrated that when you use sound as an adjunctive visual display, astronomers can find more information in this now more accessible data set. This ability to transform data into sound gives astronomy a tremendous power of transformation. And the fact that a field that is so visual may be improved in order to include anyone with interest in understanding what lies in the heavens is a spirit-lifter.When I lost my sight, I noticed that I didn't have access to the same amount and quality of information a sighted astronomer had. It was not until we innovated with the sonification process that I regained the hope to be a productive member of the field that I had worked so hard to be part of.Yet, information access is not the only area in astronomy where this is important. The situation is systemic and scientific fields are not keeping up. The body is something changeable — anyone may develop a disability at any point. Let's think about, for example, scientists that are already at the top of their careers. What happens to them if they develop a disability? Will they feel excommunicated as I did? Information access empowers us to flourish. It gives us equal opportunities to display our talents and choose what we want to do with our lives, based on interest and not based on potential barriers. When we give people the opportunity to succeed without limits, that will lead to personal fulfillment and prospering life. And I think that the use of sound in astronomy is helping us to achieve that and to contribute to science.While other countries told me that the study of perception techniques in order to study astronomy data is not relevant to astronomy because there are no blind astronomers in the field, South Africa said, ""We want people with disabilities to contribute to the field."" Right now, I'm working at the South African Astronomical Observatory, at the Office of Astronomy for Development. There, we are working on sonification techniques and analysis methods to impact the students of the Athlone School for the Blind. These students will be learning radio astronomy, and they will be learning the sonification methods in order to study astronomical events like huge ejections of energy from the sun, known as coronal mass ejections. What we learn with these students — these students have multiple disabilities and coping strategies that will be accommodated — what we learn with these students will directly impact the way things are being done at the professional level. I humbly call this development. And this is happening right now.I think that science is for everyone. It belongs to the people, and it has to be available to everyone, because we are all natural explorers. I think that if we limit people with disabilities from participating in science, we'll sever our links with history and with society. I dream of a level scientific playing field, where people encourage respect and respect each other, where people exchange strategies and discover together. If people with disabilities are allowed into the scientific field, an explosion, a huge titanic burst of knowledge will take place, I am sure.(Digital beeping sounds)That is the titanic burst.Thank you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wanda_diaz_merced_how_a_blind_astronomer_found_a_way_to_hear_the_stars
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"So, I lead a team at Google that works on machine intelligence; in other words, the engineering discipline of making computers and devices able to do some of the things that brains do. And this makes us interested in real brains and neuroscience as well, and especially interested in the things that our brains do that are still far superior to the performance of computers.Historically, one of those areas has been perception, the process by which things out there in the world — sounds and images — can turn into concepts in the mind. This is essential for our own brains, and it's also pretty useful on a computer. The machine perception algorithms, for example, that our team makes, are what enable your pictures on Google Photos to become searchable, based on what's in them. The flip side of perception is creativity: turning a concept into something out there into the world. So over the past year, our work on machine perception has also unexpectedly connected with the world of machine creativity and machine art.I think Michelangelo had a penetrating insight into to this dual relationship between perception and creativity. This is a famous quote of his: ""Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and the job of the sculptor is to discover it."" So I think that what Michelangelo was getting at is that we create by perceiving, and that perception itself is an act of imagination and is the stuff of creativity.The organ that does all the thinking and perceiving and imagining, of course, is the brain. And I'd like to begin with a brief bit of history about what we know about brains. Because unlike, say, the heart or the intestines, you really can't say very much about a brain by just looking at it, at least with the naked eye. The early anatomists who looked at brains gave the superficial structures of this thing all kinds of fanciful names, like hippocampus, meaning ""little shrimp."" But of course that sort of thing doesn't tell us very much about what's actually going on inside.The first person who, I think, really developed some kind of insight into what was going on in the brain was the great Spanish neuroanatomist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, in the 19th century, who used microscopy and special stains that could selectively fill in or render in very high contrast the individual cells in the brain, in order to start to understand their morphologies. And these are the kinds of drawings that he made of neurons in the 19th century.This is from a bird brain. And you see this incredible variety of different sorts of cells, even the cellular theory itself was quite new at this point. And these structures, these cells that have these arborizations, these branches that can go very, very long distances — this was very novel at the time. They're reminiscent, of course, of wires. That might have been obvious to some people in the 19th century; the revolutions of wiring and electricity were just getting underway. But in many ways, these microanatomical drawings of Ramón y Cajal's, like this one, they're still in some ways unsurpassed.We're still more than a century later, trying to finish the job that Ramón y Cajal started. These are raw data from our collaborators at the Max Planck Institute of Neuroscience. And what our collaborators have done is to image little pieces of brain tissue. The entire sample here is about one cubic millimeter in size, and I'm showing you a very, very small piece of it here. That bar on the left is about one micron. The structures you see are mitochondria that are the size of bacteria. And these are consecutive slices through this very, very tiny block of tissue. Just for comparison's sake, the diameter of an average strand of hair is about 100 microns. So we're looking at something much, much smaller than a single strand of hair.And from these kinds of serial electron microscopy slices, one can start to make reconstructions in 3D of neurons that look like these. So these are sort of in the same style as Ramón y Cajal. Only a few neurons lit up, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to see anything here. It would be so crowded, so full of structure, of wiring all connecting one neuron to another.So Ramón y Cajal was a little bit ahead of his time, and progress on understanding the brain proceeded slowly over the next few decades. But we knew that neurons used electricity, and by World War II, our technology was advanced enough to start doing real electrical experiments on live neurons to better understand how they worked. This was the very same time when computers were being invented, very much based on the idea of modeling the brain — of ""intelligent machinery,"" as Alan Turing called it, one of the fathers of computer science.Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts looked at Ramón y Cajal's drawing of visual cortex, which I'm showing here. This is the cortex that processes imagery that comes from the eye. And for them, this looked like a circuit diagram. So there are a lot of details in McCulloch and Pitts's circuit diagram that are not quite right. But this basic idea that visual cortex works like a series of computational elements that pass information one to the next in a cascade, is essentially correct.Let's talk for a moment about what a model for processing visual information would need to do. The basic task of perception is to take an image like this one and say, ""That's a bird,"" which is a very simple thing for us to do with our brains. But you should all understand that for a computer, this was pretty much impossible just a few years ago. The classical computing paradigm is not one in which this task is easy to do.So what's going on between the pixels, between the image of the bird and the word ""bird,"" is essentially a set of neurons connected to each other in a neural network, as I'm diagramming here. This neural network could be biological, inside our visual cortices, or, nowadays, we start to have the capability to model such neural networks on the computer. And I'll show you what that actually looks like.So the pixels you can think about as a first layer of neurons, and that's, in fact, how it works in the eye — that's the neurons in the retina. And those feed forward into one layer after another layer, after another layer of neurons, all connected by synapses of different weights. The behavior of this network is characterized by the strengths of all of those synapses. Those characterize the computational properties of this network. And at the end of the day, you have a neuron or a small group of neurons that light up, saying, ""bird.""Now I'm going to represent those three things — the input pixels and the synapses in the neural network, and bird, the output — by three variables: x, w and y. There are maybe a million or so x's — a million pixels in that image. There are billions or trillions of w's, which represent the weights of all these synapses in the neural network. And there's a very small number of y's, of outputs that that network has. ""Bird"" is only four letters, right? So let's pretend that this is just a simple formula, x ""x"" w = y. I'm putting the times in scare quotes because what's really going on there, of course, is a very complicated series of mathematical operations.That's one equation. There are three variables. And we all know that if you have one equation, you can solve one variable by knowing the other two things. So the problem of inference, that is, figuring out that the picture of a bird is a bird, is this one: it's where y is the unknown and w and x are known. You know the neural network, you know the pixels. As you can see, that's actually a relatively straightforward problem. You multiply two times three and you're done. I'll show you an artificial neural network that we've built recently, doing exactly that.This is running in real time on a mobile phone, and that's, of course, amazing in its own right, that mobile phones can do so many billions and trillions of operations per second. What you're looking at is a phone looking at one after another picture of a bird, and actually not only saying, ""Yes, it's a bird,"" but identifying the species of bird with a network of this sort. So in that picture, the x and the w are known, and the y is the unknown. I'm glossing over the very difficult part, of course, which is how on earth do we figure out the w, the brain that can do such a thing? How would we ever learn such a model?So this process of learning, of solving for w, if we were doing this with the simple equation in which we think about these as numbers, we know exactly how to do that: 6 = 2 x w, well, we divide by two and we're done. The problem is with this operator. So, division — we've used division because it's the inverse to multiplication, but as I've just said, the multiplication is a bit of a lie here. This is a very, very complicated, very non-linear operation; it has no inverse. So we have to figure out a way to solve the equation without a division operator. And the way to do that is fairly straightforward. You just say, let's play a little algebra trick, and move the six over to the right-hand side of the equation. Now, we're still using multiplication. And that zero — let's think about it as an error. In other words, if we've solved for w the right way, then the error will be zero. And if we haven't gotten it quite right, the error will be greater than zero.So now we can just take guesses to minimize the error, and that's the sort of thing computers are very good at. So you've taken an initial guess: what if w = 0? Well, then the error is 6. What if w = 1? The error is 4. And then the computer can sort of play Marco Polo, and drive down the error close to zero. As it does that, it's getting successive approximations to w. Typically, it never quite gets there, but after about a dozen steps, we're up to w = 2.999, which is close enough. And this is the learning process.So remember that what's been going on here is that we've been taking a lot of known x's and known y's and solving for the w in the middle through an iterative process. It's exactly the same way that we do our own learning. We have many, many images as babies and we get told, ""This is a bird; this is not a bird."" And over time, through iteration, we solve for w, we solve for those neural connections.So now, we've held x and w fixed to solve for y; that's everyday, fast perception. We figure out how we can solve for w, that's learning, which is a lot harder, because we need to do error minimization, using a lot of training examples.And about a year ago, Alex Mordvintsev, on our team, decided to experiment with what happens if we try solving for x, given a known w and a known y. In other words, you know that it's a bird, and you already have your neural network that you've trained on birds, but what is the picture of a bird? It turns out that by using exactly the same error-minimization procedure, one can do that with the network trained to recognize birds, and the result turns out to be ... a picture of birds. So this is a picture of birds generated entirely by a neural network that was trained to recognize birds, just by solving for x rather than solving for y, and doing that iteratively.Here's another fun example. This was a work made by Mike Tyka in our group, which he calls ""Animal Parade."" It reminds me a little bit of William Kentridge's artworks, in which he makes sketches, rubs them out, makes sketches, rubs them out, and creates a movie this way. In this case, what Mike is doing is varying y over the space of different animals, in a network designed to recognize and distinguish different animals from each other. And you get this strange, Escher-like morph from one animal to another.Here he and Alex together have tried reducing the y's to a space of only two dimensions, thereby making a map out of the space of all things recognized by this network. Doing this kind of synthesis or generation of imagery over that entire surface, varying y over the surface, you make a kind of map — a visual map of all the things the network knows how to recognize. The animals are all here; ""armadillo"" is right in that spot.You can do this with other kinds of networks as well. This is a network designed to recognize faces, to distinguish one face from another. And here, we're putting in a y that says, ""me,"" my own face parameters. And when this thing solves for x, it generates this rather crazy, kind of cubist, surreal, psychedelic picture of me from multiple points of view at once. The reason it looks like multiple points of view at once is because that network is designed to get rid of the ambiguity of a face being in one pose or another pose, being looked at with one kind of lighting, another kind of lighting. So when you do this sort of reconstruction, if you don't use some sort of guide image or guide statistics, then you'll get a sort of confusion of different points of view, because it's ambiguous. This is what happens if Alex uses his own face as a guide image during that optimization process to reconstruct my own face. So you can see it's not perfect. There's still quite a lot of work to do on how we optimize that optimization process. But you start to get something more like a coherent face, rendered using my own face as a guide.You don't have to start with a blank canvas or with white noise. When you're solving for x, you can begin with an x, that is itself already some other image. That's what this little demonstration is. This is a network that is designed to categorize all sorts of different objects — man-made structures, animals ... Here we're starting with just a picture of clouds, and as we optimize, basically, this network is figuring out what it sees in the clouds. And the more time you spend looking at this, the more things you also will see in the clouds. You could also use the face network to hallucinate into this, and you get some pretty crazy stuff.(Laughter)Or, Mike has done some other experiments in which he takes that cloud image, hallucinates, zooms, hallucinates, zooms hallucinates, zooms. And in this way, you can get a sort of fugue state of the network, I suppose, or a sort of free association, in which the network is eating its own tail. So every image is now the basis for, ""What do I think I see next? What do I think I see next? What do I think I see next?""I showed this for the first time in public to a group at a lecture in Seattle called ""Higher Education"" — this was right after marijuana was legalized.(Laughter)So I'd like to finish up quickly by just noting that this technology is not constrained. I've shown you purely visual examples because they're really fun to look at. It's not a purely visual technology. Our artist collaborator, Ross Goodwin, has done experiments involving a camera that takes a picture, and then a computer in his backpack writes a poem using neural networks, based on the contents of the image. And that poetry neural network has been trained on a large corpus of 20th-century poetry. And the poetry is, you know, I think, kind of not bad, actually.(Laughter)In closing, I think that per Michelangelo, I think he was right; perception and creativity are very intimately connected. What we've just seen are neural networks that are entirely trained to discriminate, or to recognize different things in the world, able to be run in reverse, to generate. One of the things that suggests to me is not only that Michelangelo really did see the sculpture in the blocks of stone, but that any creature, any being, any alien that is able to do perceptual acts of that sort is also able to create because it's exactly the same machinery that's used in both cases.Also, I think that perception and creativity are by no means uniquely human. We start to have computer models that can do exactly these sorts of things. And that ought to be unsurprising; the brain is computational.And finally, computing began as an exercise in designing intelligent machinery. It was very much modeled after the idea of how could we make machines intelligent. And we finally are starting to fulfill now some of the promises of those early pioneers, of Turing and von Neumann and McCulloch and Pitts. And I think that computing is not just about accounting or playing Candy Crush or something. From the beginning, we modeled them after our minds. And they give us both the ability to understand our own minds better and to extend them.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_how_computers_are_learning_to_be_creative
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"So I'd like you to imagine for a moment that you're a soldier in the heat of battle. Maybe you're a Roman foot soldier or a medieval archer or maybe you're a Zulu warrior. Regardless of your time and place, there are some things that are constant. Your adrenaline is elevated, and your actions are stemming from these deeply ingrained reflexes, reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy.So now, I'd like you to imagine playing a very different role, that of the scout. The scout's job is not to attack or defend. The scout's job is to understand. The scout is the one going out, mapping the terrain, identifying potential obstacles. And the scout may hope to learn that, say, there's a bridge in a convenient location across a river. But above all, the scout wants to know what's really there, as accurately as possible. And in a real, actual army, both the soldier and the scout are essential. But you can also think of each of these roles as a mindset — a metaphor for how all of us process information and ideas in our daily lives. What I'm going to argue today is that having good judgment, making accurate predictions, making good decisions, is mostly about which mindset you're in.To illustrate these mindsets in action, I'm going to take you back to 19th-century France, where this innocuous-looking piece of paper launched one of the biggest political scandals in history. It was discovered in 1894 by officers in the French general staff. It was torn up in a wastepaper basket, but when they pieced it back together, they discovered that someone in their ranks had been selling military secrets to Germany.So they launched a big investigation, and their suspicions quickly converged on this man, Alfred Dreyfus. He had a sterling record, no past history of wrongdoing, no motive as far as they could tell. But Dreyfus was the only Jewish officer at that rank in the army, and unfortunately at this time, the French Army was highly anti-Semitic. They compared Dreyfus's handwriting to that on the memo and concluded that it was a match, even though outside professional handwriting experts were much less confident in the similarity, but never mind that. They went and searched Dreyfus's apartment, looking for any signs of espionage. They went through his files, and they didn't find anything. This just convinced them more that Dreyfus was not only guilty, but sneaky as well, because clearly he had hidden all of the evidence before they had managed to get to it.Next, they went and looked through his personal history for any incriminating details. They talked to his teachers, they found that he had studied foreign languages in school, which clearly showed a desire to conspire with foreign governments later in life. His teachers also said that Dreyfus was known for having a good memory, which was highly suspicious, right? You know, because a spy has to remember a lot of things.So the case went to trial, and Dreyfus was found guilty. Afterwards, they took him out into this public square and ritualistically tore his insignia from his uniform and broke his sword in two. This was called the Degradation of Dreyfus. And they sentenced him to life imprisonment on the aptly named Devil's Island, which is this barren rock off the coast of South America. So there he went, and there he spent his days alone, writing letters and letters to the French government begging them to reopen his case so they could discover his innocence. But for the most part, France considered the matter closed.One thing that's really interesting to me about the Dreyfus Affair is this question of why the officers were so convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. I mean, you might even assume that they were setting him up, that they were intentionally framing him. But historians don't think that's what happened. As far as we can tell, the officers genuinely believed that the case against Dreyfus was strong. Which makes you wonder: What does it say about the human mind that we can find such paltry evidence to be compelling enough to convict a man?Well, this is a case of what scientists call ""motivated reasoning."" It's this phenomenon in which our unconscious motivations, our desires and fears, shape the way we interpret information. Some information, some ideas, feel like our allies. We want them to win. We want to defend them. And other information or ideas are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down. So this is why I call motivated reasoning, ""soldier mindset.""Probably most of you have never persecuted a French-Jewish officer for high treason, I assume, but maybe you've followed sports or politics, so you might have noticed that when the referee judges that your team committed a foul, for example, you're highly motivated to find reasons why he's wrong. But if he judges that the other team committed a foul — awesome! That's a good call, let's not examine it too closely. Or, maybe you've read an article or a study that examined some controversial policy, like capital punishment. And, as researchers have demonstrated, if you support capital punishment and the study shows that it's not effective, then you're highly motivated to find all the reasons why the study was poorly designed. But if it shows that capital punishment works, it's a good study. And vice versa: if you don't support capital punishment, same thing.Our judgment is strongly influenced, unconsciously, by which side we want to win. And this is ubiquitous. This shapes how we think about our health, our relationships, how we decide how to vote, what we consider fair or ethical. What's most scary to me about motivated reasoning or soldier mindset, is how unconscious it is. We can think we're being objective and fair-minded and still wind up ruining the life of an innocent man.However, fortunately for Dreyfus, his story is not over. This is Colonel Picquart. He's another high-ranking officer in the French Army, and like most people, he assumed Dreyfus was guilty. Also like most people in the army, he was at least casually anti-Semitic. But at a certain point, Picquart began to suspect: ""What if we're all wrong about Dreyfus?"" What happened was, he had discovered evidence that the spying for Germany had continued, even after Dreyfus was in prison. And he had also discovered that another officer in the army had handwriting that perfectly matched the memo, much closer than Dreyfus's handwriting. So he brought these discoveries to his superiors, but to his dismay, they either didn't care or came up with elaborate rationalizations to explain his findings, like, ""Well, all you've really shown, Picquart, is that there's another spy who learned how to mimic Dreyfus's handwriting, and he picked up the torch of spying after Dreyfus left. But Dreyfus is still guilty."" Eventually, Picquart managed to get Dreyfus exonerated. But it took him 10 years, and for part of that time, he himself was in prison for the crime of disloyalty to the army.A lot of people feel like Picquart can't really be the hero of this story because he was an anti-Semite and that's bad, which I agree with. But personally, for me, the fact that Picquart was anti-Semitic actually makes his actions more admirable, because he had the same prejudices, the same reasons to be biased as his fellow officers, but his motivation to find the truth and uphold it trumped all of that.So to me, Picquart is a poster child for what I call ""scout mindset."" It's the drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but just to see what's really there as honestly and accurately as you can, even if it's not pretty or convenient or pleasant. This mindset is what I'm personally passionate about. And I've spent the last few years examining and trying to figure out what causes scout mindset. Why are some people, sometimes at least, able to cut through their own prejudices and biases and motivations and just try to see the facts and the evidence as objectively as they can?And the answer is emotional. So, just as soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is, too. It's just rooted in different emotions. For example, scouts are curious. They're more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or an itch to solve a puzzle. They're more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. Scouts also have different values. They're more likely to say they think it's virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they're less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak. And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person isn't tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic. So they can believe that capital punishment works. If studies come out showing that it doesn't, they can say, ""Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Doesn't mean I'm bad or stupid.""This cluster of traits is what researchers have found — and I've also found anecdotally — predicts good judgment. And the key takeaway I want to leave you with about those traits is that they're primarily not about how smart you are or about how much you know. In fact, they don't correlate very much with IQ at all. They're about how you feel. There's a quote that I keep coming back to, by Saint-Exupéry. He's the author of ""The Little Prince."" He said, ""If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.""In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable. But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset. We need to change the way we feel. We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs.So the question I want to leave you with is: What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_galef_why_you_think_you_re_right_even_if_you_re_wrong
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"Ichthyology, the study of fishes. It looks like a big, boring word, but it's actually quite exciting, because ichthyology is the only ""ology"" with ""YOLO"" in it.(Laughter)Now, to the cool kids in the audience, you already know, YOLO stands for ""you only live once,"" and because I only have one life, I'm going to spend it doing what I always dreamt of doing: seeing the hidden wonders of the world and discovering new species. And that's what I get to do.Now, in recent years, I really focused on caves for finding new species. And it turns out, there's lots of new cavefish species out there. You just have to know where to look, and to maybe be a little thin.(Laughter)Now, cavefishes can tell me a lot about biology and geology. They can tell me how the landmasses around them have changed and moved by being stuck in these little holes, and they can tell me about the evolution of sight, by being blind.Now, fish have eyes that are essentially the same as ours. All vertebrates do, and each time a fish species starts to adapt to this dark, cold, cave environment, over many, many generations, they lose their eyes and their eyesight until the end up like an eyeless cavefish like this one here. Now, each cavefish species has evolved in a slightly different way, and each one has a unique geological and biological story to tell us, and that's why it's so exciting when we find a new species.So this is a new species we described, from southern Indiana. We named it Amblyopsis hoosieri, the Hoosier cavefish.(Laughter)Its closest relatives are cavefishes in Kentucky, in the Mammoth Cave system. And they start to diverge when the Ohio River split them a few million years ago. And in that time they developed these subtle differences in the genetic architecture behind their blindness. There's this gene called rhodopsin that's super-critical for sight. We have it, and these species have it too, except one species has lost all function in that gene, and the other one maintains it. So this sets up this beautiful natural experiment where we can look at the genes behind our vision, and at the very roots of how we can see.But the genes in these cavefishes can also tell us about deep geological time, maybe no more so than in this species here. This is a new species we described from Madagascar that we named Typhleotris mararybe. That means ""big sickness"" in Malagasy, for how sick we got trying to collect this species. Now, believe it or not, swimming around sinkholes full of dead things and cave full of bat poop isn't the smartest thing you could be doing with your life, but YOLO.(Laughter)Now, I love this species despite the fact that it tried to kill us, and that's because this species in Madagascar, its closest relatives are 6,000 kilometers away, cavefishes in Australia. Now, there's no way a three-inch-long freshwater cavefish can swim across the Indian Ocean, so what we found when we compared the DNA of these species is that they've been separated for more than 100 million years, or about the time that the southern continents were last together. So in fact, these species didn't move at all. It's the continents that moved them. And so they give us, through their DNA, this precise model and measure of how to date and time these ancient geological events.Now, this species here is so new I'm not even allowed to tell you its name yet, but I can tell you it's a new species from Mexico, and it's probably already extinct. It's probably extinct because the only known cave system it's from was destroyed when a dam was built nearby. Unfortunately for cavefishes, their groundwater habitat is also our main source of drinking water.Now, we actually don't know this species' closest relative, yet. It doesn't appear to be anything else in Mexico, so maybe it's something in Cuba, or Florida, or India. But whatever it is, it might tell us something new about the geology of the Caribbean, or the biology of how to better diagnose certain types of blindness. But I hope we discover this species before it goes extinct too.And I'm going to spend my one life as an ichthyologist trying to discover and save these humble little blind cavefishes that can tell us so much about the geology of the planet and the biology of how we see.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/prosanta_chakrabarty_clues_to_prehistoric_times_found_in_blind_cavefish
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"At Free America, we've done a listening and learning tour. We visited not only with prosecutors but with legislators, with inmates in our state and local prisons. We've gone to immigration detention centers. We've met a lot of people. And we've seen that redemption and transformation can happen in our prisons, our jails and our immigration detention centers, giving hope to those who want to create a better life after serving their time.Imagine if we also considered the front end of this prison pipeline. What would it look like if we intervened, with rehabilitation as a core value — with love and compassion as core values? We would have a society that is safer, healthier and worthy of raising our children in.I want to introduce you to James Cavitt. James served 12 years in the San Quentin State Prison and is being released in 18 months. Now James, like you and me, is more than the worst thing he's done. He is a father, a husband, a son, a poet. He committed a crime; he's paying his debt, and working hard to build the skills to make the transition back to a productive life when he enters the civilian population again.Now James, like millions of people behind bars, is an example of what happens if we believe that our failings don't define who we are, that we are all worthy of redemption and if we support those impacted by mass incarceration, we can all heal together.I'd like to introduce you to James right now, and he's going to share his journey of redemption through spoken word.James Cavitt: Thanks, John. TED, welcome to San Quentin. The talent is abundant behind prison walls. Future software engineers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, musicians and artists. This piece is inspired by all of the hard work that men and women are doing on the inside to create better lives and futures for themselves after they serve their time.This piece is entitled, ""Where I Live.""I live in a world where most people are too afraid to go. Surrounded by tall, concrete walls, steel bars, where razor wire have a way of cutting away at the hopes for a brighter tomorrow.I live in a world that kill people who kill people in order to teach people that killing people is wrong. Imagine that.Better yet, imagine a world where healed people helped hurt people heal and become strong. Maybe then we would all be singin' ""Redemption Song.""I live in a world that has been called ""hell on Earth"" by those trapped inside. But I've come to the stark realization that prison — it really is what you make it. You see, in spite of the harshness of my reality, there is a silver lining. I knew that my freedom was gonna come, it was just a matter of time. And so I treated my first steps as if they were my last mile, and I realized that you don't have to be free in order to experience freedom.And just because you're free, doesn't mean that you have freedom. Many of us, for years, have been battling our inner demons. We walk around smiling when inside we're really screamin': freedom!Don't you get it? We're all serving time; we're just in different places. As for me, I choose to be free from the prisons I've created. The key: forgiveness. Action's my witness. If we want freedom, then we gotta think different. Because freedom ... it isn't a place. It's a mind setting.Thank you.(Applause)(Piano)John Legend: Old pirates, yes, they rob I. Sold I to the merchant ships. Minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit.My hands were made strong by the hand of the almighty. We forward in this generation triumphantly.Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs.Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time.How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? Some say it's just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book.Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs.(Piano)Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy 'cause none of them can stop the time.How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look? Some say it's just a part of it, we've got to fulfill the book.Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs. These songs of freedom.'Cause all I ever had — redemption songs. Redemption songs. Redemption songs.(Piano)(Applause)Thank you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_legend_redemption_song
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"Hi. My name is Marwa, and I'm an architect. I was born and raised in Homs, a city in the central western part of Syria, and I've always lived here. After six years of war, Homs is now a half-destroyed city. My family and I were lucky; our place is still standing. Although for two years, we were like prisoners at home. Outside there were demonstrations and battles and bombings and snipers. My husband and I used to run an architecture studio in the old town main square. It's gone, as is most of the old town itself. Half of the city's other neighborhoods are now rubble. Since the ceasefire in late 2015, large parts of Homs have been more or less quiet. The economy is completely broken, and people are still fighting. The merchants who had stalls in the old city market now trade out of sheds on the streets. Under our apartment, there is a carpenter, sweetshops, a butcher, a printing house, workshops, among many more. I have started teaching part-time, and with my husband, who juggles several jobs, we've opened a small bookshop. Other people do all sorts of jobs to get by.When I look at my destroyed city, of course, I ask myself: What has led to this senseless war? Syria was largely a place of tolerance, historically accustomed to variety, accommodating a wide range of beliefs, origins, customs, goods, food. How did my country — a country with communities living harmoniously together and comfortable in discussing their differences — how did it degenerate into civil war, violence, displacement and unprecedented sectarian hatred? There were many reasons that had led to the war — social, political and economic. They all have played their role. But I believe there is one key reason that has been overlooked and which is important to analyze, because from it will largely depend whether we can make sure that this doesn't happen again. And that reason is architecture.Architecture in my country has played an important role in creating, directing and amplifying conflict between warring factions, and this is probably true for other countries as well. There is a sure correspondence between the architecture of a place and the character of the community that has settled there. Architecture plays a key role in whether a community crumbles or comes together. Syrian society has long lived the coexistence of different traditions and backgrounds. Syrians have experienced the prosperity of open trade and sustainable communities. They have enjoyed the true meaning of belonging to a place, and that was reflected in their built environment, in the mosques and churches built back-to-back, in the interwoven souks and public venues, and the proportions and sizes based on principles of humanity and harmony.This architecture of mixity can still be read in the remains. The old Islamic city in Syria was built over a multilayered past, integrating with it and embracing its spirit. So did its communities. People lived and worked with each other in a place that gave them a sense of belonging and made them feel at home. They shared a remarkably unified existence.But over the last century, gradually this delicate balance of these places has been interfered with; first, by the urban planners of the colonial period, when the French went enthusiastically about, transforming what they saw as the un-modern Syrian cities. They blew up city streets and relocated monuments. They called them improvements, and they were the beginning of a long, slow unraveling. The traditional urbanism and architecture of our cities assured identity and belonging not by separation, but by intertwining. But over time, the ancient became worthless, and the new, coveted. The harmony of the built environment and social environment got trampled over by elements of modernity — brutal, unfinished concrete blocks, neglect, aesthetic devastation, divisive urbanism that zoned communities by class, creed or affluence.And the same was happening to the community. As the shape of the built environment changed, so the lifestyles and sense of belonging of the communities also started changing. From a register of togetherness, of belonging, architecture became a way of differentiation, and communities started drifting apart from the very fabric that used to unite them, and from the soul of the place that used to represent their common existence.While many reasons had led to the Syrian war, we shouldn't underestimate the way in which, by contributing to the loss  of identity and self-respect, urban zoning and misguided, inhumane architecture have nurtured sectarian divisions and hatred. Over time, the united city has morphed into a city center with ghettos along its circumference. And in turn, the coherent communities became distinct social groups, alienated from each other and alienated from the place. From my point of view, losing the sense of belonging to a place and a sense of sharing it with someone else has made it a lot easier to destroy.The clear example can be seen in the informal housing system, which used to host, before the war, over 40 percent of the population. Yes, prior to the war, almost half of the Syrian population lived in slums, peripheral areas without proper infrastructure, made of endless rows of bare block boxes containing people, people who mostly belonged to the same group, whether based on religion, class, origin or all of the above.This ghettoized urbanism proved to be a tangible precursor of war. Conflict is much easier between pre-categorized areas — where the ""others"" live. The ties that used to bind the city together — whether they were social, through coherent building, or economic, through trade in the souk, or religious, through the coexistent presence — were all lost in the misguided and visionless modernization of the built environment.Allow me an aside. When I read about heterogeneous urbanism in other parts of the world, involving ethnic neighborhoods in British cities or around Paris or Brussels, I recognize the beginning of the kind of instability we have witnessed so disastrously here in Syria.We have severely destroyed cities, such as Homs, Aleppo, Daraa and many others, and almost half of the population of the country is now displaced.Hopefully, the war will end, and the question that, as an architect, I have to ask, is: How do we rebuild? What are the principles that we should adopt in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes? From my point of view, the main focus should be on creating places that make their people feel they belong. Architecture and planning need to recapture some of the traditional values that did just that, creating the conditions for coexistence and peace, values of beauty that don't exhibit ostentation, but rather, approachability and ease, moral values that promote generosity and acceptance, architecture that is for everyone to enjoy, not just for the elite, just as used to be in the shadowed alleys of the old Islamic city, mixed designs that encourage a sense of community.There is a neighborhood here in Homs that's called Baba Amr that has been fully destroyed. Almost two years ago, I introduced this design into a UN-Habitat competition for rebuilding it. The idea was to create an urban fabric inspired by a tree, capable of growing and spreading organically, echoing the traditional bridge hanging over the old alleys, and incorporating apartments, private courtyards, shops, workshops, places for parking and playing and leisure, trees and shaded areas. It's far from perfect, obviously. I drew it during the few hours of electricity we get. And there are many possible ways to express belonging and community through architecture. But compare it with the freestanding, disconnected blocks proposed by the official project for rebuilding Baba Amr.Architecture is not the axis around which all human life rotates, but it has the power to suggest and even direct human activity. In that sense, settlement, identity and social integration are all the producer and product of effective urbanism. The coherent urbanism of the old Islamic city and of many old European towns, for instance, promote integration, while rows of soulless housing or tower blocks, even when they are luxurious, tend to promote isolation and ""otherness."" Even simple things like shaded places or fruit plants or drinking water inside the city can make a difference in how people feel towards the place, and whether they consider it a generous place that gives, a place that's worth keeping, contributing to, or whether they see it as an alienating place, full of seeds of anger. In order for a place to give, its architecture should be giving, too.Our built environment matters. The fabric of our cities is reflected in the fabric of our souls. And whether in the shape of informal concrete slums or broken social housing or trampled old towns or forests of skyscrapers, the contemporary urban archetypes that have emerged all across the Middle East have been one cause of the alienation and fragmentation of our communities.We can learn from this. We can learn how to rebuild in another way, how to create an architecture that doesn't contribute only to the practical and economic aspects of people's lives, but also to their social, spiritual and psychological needs. Those needs were totally overlooked in the Syrian cities before the war. We need to create again cities that are shared by the communities that inhabit them. If we do so, people will not feel the need to seek identities opposed to the other identities all around, because they will all feel at home.Thank you for listening.","https://www.ted.com/talks/marwa_al_sabouni_how_syria_s_architecture_laid_the_foundation_for_brutal_war
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"I am British.(Laughter)(Applause)Never before has the phrase ""I am British"" elicited so much pity.(Laughter)I come from an island where many of us like to believe there's been a lot of continuity over the last thousand years. We tend to have historically imposed change on others but done much less of it ourselves.So it came as an immense shock to me when I woke up on the morning of June 24 to discover that my country had voted to leave the European Union, my Prime Minister had resigned, and Scotland was considering a referendum that could bring to an end the very existence of the United Kingdom. So that was an immense shock for me, and it was an immense shock for many people, but it was also something that, over the following several days, created a complete political meltdown in my country. There were calls for a second referendum, almost as if, following a sports match, we could ask the opposition for a replay. Everybody was blaming everybody else. People blamed the Prime Minister for calling the referendum in the first place. They blamed the leader of the opposition for not fighting it hard enough. The young accused the old. The educated blamed the less well-educated. That complete meltdown was made even worse by the most tragic element of it: levels of xenophobia and racist abuse in the streets of Britain at a level that I have never seen before in my lifetime. People are now talking about whether my country is becoming a Little England, or, as one of my colleagues put it, whether we're about to become a 1950s nostalgia theme park floating in the Atlantic Ocean.(Laughter)But my question is really, should we have the degree of shock that we've experienced since? Was it something that took place overnight? Or are there deeper structural factors that have led us to where we are today? So I want to take a step back and ask two very basic questions. First, what does Brexit represent, not just for my country, but for all of us around the world? And second, what can we do about it? How should we all respond?So first, what does Brexit represent? Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Brexit teaches us many things about our society and about societies around the world. It highlights in ways that we seem embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are. The vote split along lines of age, education, class and geography. Young people didn't turn out to vote in great numbers, but those that did wanted to remain. Older people really wanted to leave the European Union. Geographically, it was London and Scotland that most strongly committed to being part of the European Union, while in other parts of the country there was very strong ambivalence. Those divisions are things we really need to recognize and take seriously. But more profoundly, the vote teaches us something about the nature of politics today. Contemporary politics is no longer just about right and left. It's no longer just about tax and spend. It's about globalization. The fault line of contemporary politics is between those that embrace globalization and those that fear globalization.(Applause)If we look at why those who wanted to leave — we call them ""Leavers,"" as opposed to ""Remainers"" — we see two factors in the opinion polls that really mattered. The first was immigration, and the second sovereignty, and these represent a desire for people to take back control of their own lives and the feeling that they are unrepresented by politicians. But those ideas are ones that signify fear and alienation. They represent a retreat back towards nationalism and borders in ways that many of us would reject. What I want to suggest is the picture is more complicated than that, that liberal internationalists, like myself, and I firmly include myself in that picture, need to write ourselves back into the picture in order to understand how we've got to where we are today. When we look at the voting patterns across the United Kingdom, we can visibly see the divisions. The blue areas show Remain and the red areas Leave. When I looked at this, what personally struck me was the very little time in my life I've actually spent in many of the red areas. I suddenly realized that, looking at the top 50 areas in the UK that have the strongest Leave vote, I've spent a combined total of four days of my life in those areas. In some of those places, I didn't even know the names of the voting districts. It was a real shock to me, and it suggested that people like me who think of ourselves as inclusive, open and tolerant, perhaps don't know our own countries and societies nearly as well as we like to believe.(Applause)And the challenge that comes from that is we need to find a new way to narrate globalization to those people, to recognize that for those people who have not necessarily been to university, who haven't necessarily grown up with the Internet, that don't get opportunities to travel, they may be unpersuaded by the narrative that we find persuasive in our often liberal bubbles.(Applause)It means that we need to reach out more broadly and understand. In the Leave vote, a minority have peddled the politics of fear and hatred, creating lies and mistrust around, for instance, the idea that the vote on Europe could reduce the number of refugees and asylum-seekers coming to Europe, when the vote on leaving had nothing to do with immigration from outside the European Union. But for a significant majority of the Leave voters the concern was disillusionment with the political establishment. This was a protest vote for many, a sense that nobody represented them, that they couldn't find a political party that spoke for them, and so they rejected that political establishment.This replicates around Europe and much of the liberal democratic world. We see it with the rise in popularity of Donald Trump in the United States, with the growing nationalism of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, with the increase in popularity of Marine Le Pen in France. The specter of Brexit is in all of our societies.So the question I think we need to ask is my second question, which is how should we collectively respond? For all of us who care about creating liberal, open, tolerant societies, we urgently need a new vision, a vision of a more tolerant, inclusive globalization, one that brings people with us rather than leaving them behind.That vision of globalization is one that has to start by a recognition of the positive benefits of globalization. The consensus amongst economists is that free trade, the movement of capital, the movement of people across borders benefit everyone on aggregate. The consensus amongst international relations scholars is that globalization brings interdependence, which brings cooperation and peace. But globalization also has redistributive effects. It creates winners and losers. To take the example of migration, we know that immigration is a net positive for the economy as a whole under almost all circumstances. But we also have to be very aware that there are redistributive consequences, that importantly, low-skilled immigration can lead to a reduction in wages for the most impoverished in our societies and also put pressure on house prices. That doesn't detract from the fact that it's positive, but it means more people have to share in those benefits and recognize them.In 2002, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, gave a speech at Yale University, and that speech was on the topic of inclusive globalization. That was the speech in which he coined that term. And he said, and I paraphrase, ""The glass house of globalization has to be open to all if it is to remain secure. Bigotry and ignorance are the ugly face of exclusionary and antagonistic globalization.""That idea of inclusive globalization was briefly revived in 2008 in a conference on progressive governance involving many of the leaders of European countries. But amid austerity and the financial crisis of 2008, the concept disappeared almost without a trace. Globalization has been taken to support a neoliberal agenda. It's perceived to be part of an elite agenda rather than something that benefits all. And it needs to be reclaimed on a far more inclusive basis than it is today.So the question is, how can we achieve that goal? How can we balance on the one hand addressing fear and alienation while on the other hand refusing vehemently to give in to xenophobia and nationalism? That is the question for all of us. And I think, as a social scientist, that social science offers some places to start. Our transformation has to be about both ideas and about material change, and I want to give you four ideas as a starting point.The first relates to the idea of civic education. What stands out from Brexit is the gap between public perception and empirical reality. It's been suggested that we've moved to a postfactual society, where evidence and truth no longer matter, and lies have equal status to the clarity of evidence. So how can we —(Applause)How can we rebuild respect for truth and evidence into our liberal democracies? It has to begin with education, but it has to start with the recognition that there are huge gaps.In 2014, the pollster Ipsos MORI published a survey on attitudes to immigration, and it showed that as numbers of immigrants increase, so public concern with immigration also increases, although it obviously didn't unpack causality, because this could equally be to do not so much with numbers but the political and media narrative around it. But the same survey also revealed huge public misinformation and misunderstanding about the nature of immigration. For example, in these attitudes in the United Kingdom, the public believed that levels of asylum were a greater proportion of immigration than they were, but they also believed the levels of educational migration were far lower as a proportion of overall migration than they actually are. So we have to address this misinformation, the gap between perception and reality on key aspects of globalization. And that can't just be something that's left to our schools, although that's important to begin at an early age. It has to be about lifelong civic participation and public engagement that we all encourage as societies.The second thing that I think is an opportunity is the idea to encourage more interaction across diverse communities.(Applause)One of the things that stands out for me very strikingly, looking at immigration attitudes in the United Kingdom, is that ironically, the regions of my country that are the most tolerant of immigrants have the highest numbers of immigrants. So for instance, London and the Southeast have the highest numbers of immigrants, and they are also by far the most tolerant areas. It's those areas of the country that have the lowest levels of immigration that actually are the most exclusionary and intolerant towards migrants.So we need to encourage exchange programs. We need to ensure that older generations who maybe can't travel get access to the Internet. We need to encourage, even on a local and national level, more movement, more participation, more interaction with people who we don't know and whose views we might not necessarily agree with.The third thing that I think is crucial, though, and this is really fundamental, is we have to ensure that everybody shares in the benefits of globalization. This illustration from the Financial Times post-Brexit is really striking. It shows tragically that those people who voted to leave the European Union were those who actually benefited the most materially from trade with the European Union. But the problem is that those people in those areas didn't perceive themselves to be beneficiaries. They didn't believe that they were actually getting access to material benefits of increased trade and increased mobility around the world.I work on questions predominantly to do with refugees, and one of the ideas I spent a lot of my time preaching, mainly to developing countries around the world, is that in order to encourage the integration of refugees, we can't just benefit the refugee populations, we also have to address the concerns of the host communities in local areas. But in looking at that, one of the policy prescriptions is that we have to provide disproportionately better education facilities, health facilities, access to social services in those regions of high immigration to address the concerns of those local populations. But while we encourage that around the developing world, we don't take those lessons home and incorporate them in our own societies.Furthermore, if we're going to really take seriously the need to ensure people share in the economic benefits, our businesses and corporations need a model of globalization that recognizes that they, too, have to take people with them.The fourth and final idea I want to put forward is an idea that we need more responsible politics. There's very little social science evidence that compares attitudes on globalization. But from the surveys that do exist, what we can see is there's huge variation across different countries and time periods in those countries for attitudes and tolerance of questions like migration and mobility on the one hand and free trade on the other. But one hypothesis that I think emerges from a cursory look at that data is the idea that polarized societies are far less tolerant of globalization. It's the societies like Sweden in the past, like Canada today, where there is a centrist politics, where right and left work together, that we encourage supportive attitudes towards globalization. And what we see around the world today is a tragic polarization, a failure to have dialogue between the extremes in politics, and a gap in terms of that liberal center ground that can encourage communication and a shared understanding. We might not achieve that today, but at the very least we have to call upon our politicians and our media to drop a language of fear and be far more tolerant of one another.(Applause)These ideas are very tentative, and that's in part because this needs to be an inclusive and shared project.I am still British. I am still European. I am still a global citizen. For those of us who believe that our identities are not mutually exclusive, we have to all work together to ensure that globalization takes everyone with us and doesn't leave people behind. Only then will we truly reconcile democracy and globalization.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alexander_betts_why_brexit_happened_and_what_to_do_next
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"I used to have this recurring dream where I'd walk into a roomful of people, and I'd try not to make eye contact with anyone. Until someone notices me, and I just panic. And the person walks up to me, and says, ""Hi, my name is So-and-so. And what is your name?"" And I'm just quiet, unable to respond. After some awkward silence, he goes, ""Have you forgotten your name?"" And I'm still quiet. And then, slowly, all the other people in the room begin to turn toward me and ask, almost in unison,(Voice-over, several voices) ""Have you forgotten your name?"" As the chant gets louder, I want to respond, but I don't.I'm a visual artist. Some of my work is humorous, and some is a bit funny but in a sad way. And one thing that I really enjoy doing is making these little animations where I get to do the voice-over for all kinds of characters. I've been a bear.(Video) Bear (Safwat Saleem's voice): Hi.(Laughter)Safwat Saleem: I've been a whale.(Video) Whale (SS's voice): Hi.(Laughter)SS: I've been a greeting card.(Video) Greeting card (SS's voice): Hi.(Laughter)SS: And my personal favorite is Frankenstein's monster.(Video) Frankenstein's monster (SS's voice): (Grunts)(Laughter)SS: I just had to grunt a lot for that one.A few years ago, I made this educational video about the history of video games. And for that one, I got to do the voice of Space Invader.(Video) Space Invader (SS's voice): Hi.SS: A dream come true, really,(Laughter) And when that video was posted online, I just sat there on the computer, hitting ""refresh,"" excited to see the response. The first comment comes in.(Video) Comment: Great job. SS: Yes! I hit ""refresh.""(Video) Comment: Excellent video. I look forward to the next one.SS: This was just the first of a two-part video. I was going to work on the second one next. I hit ""refresh.""(Video) Comment: Where is part TWO? WHEREEEEE? I need it NOWWWWW!: P(Laughter)SS: People other than my mom were saying nice things about me, on the Internet! It felt like I had finally arrived. I hit ""refresh.""(Video) Comment: His voice is annoying. No offense.SS: OK, no offense taken. Refresh.(Video) Comment: Could you remake this without peanut butter in your mouth?SS: OK, at least the feedback is somewhat constructive. Hit ""refresh.""(Video) Comment: Please don't use this narrator again u can barely understand him.SS: Refresh.(Video) Comment: Couldn't follow because of the Indian accent.SS: OK, OK, OK, two things. Number one, I don't have an Indian accent, I have a Pakistani accent, OK? And number two, I clearly have a Pakistani accent.(Laughter)But comments like that kept coming in, so I figured I should just ignore them and start working on the second part of the video. I recorded my audio, but every time I sat down to edit, I just could not do it. Every single time, it would take me back to my childhood, when I had a much harder time speaking.I've stuttered for as long as I can remember. I was the kid in class who would never raise his hand when he had a question — or knew the answer. Every time the phone rang, I would run to the bathroom so I would not have to answer it. If it was for me, my parents would say I'm not around. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. And I hated introducing myself, especially in groups. I'd always stutter on my name, and there was usually someone who'd go, ""Have you forgotten your name?"" And then everybody would laugh. That joke never got old.(Laughter)I spent my childhood feeling that if I spoke, it would become obvious that there was something wrong with me, that I was not normal. So I mostly stayed quiet. And so you see, eventually for me to even be able to use my voice in my work was a huge step for me. Every time I record audio, I fumble my way through saying each sentence many, many times, and then I go back in and pick the ones where I think I suck the least.(Voice-over) SS: Audio editing is like Photoshop for your voice. I can slow it down, speed it up, make it deeper, add an echo. And if I stutter along the way, and if I stutter along the way, I just go back in and fix it. It's magic.SS: Using my highly edited voice in my work was a way for me to finally sound normal to myself. But after the comments on the video, it no longer made me feel normal. And so I stopped using my voice in my work. Since then, I've thought a lot about what it means to be normal. And I've come to understand that ""normal"" has a lot to do with expectations.Let me give you an example. I came across this story about the Ancient Greek writer, Homer. Now, Homer mentions very few colors in his writing. And even when he does, he seems to get them quite a bit wrong. For example, the sea is described as wine red, people's faces are sometimes green and sheep are purple. But it's not just Homer. If you look at all of the ancient literature — Ancient Chinese, Icelandic, Greek, Indian and even the original Hebrew Bible — they all mention very few colors. And the most popular theory for why that might be the case is that cultures begin to recognize a color only once they have the ability to make that color. So basically, if you can make a color, only then can you see it. A color like red, which was fairly easy for many cultures to make — they began to see that color fairly early on. But a color like blue, which was much harder to make — many cultures didn't begin to learn how to make that color until much later. They didn't begin to see it until much later as well. So until then, even though a color might be all around them, they simply did not have the ability to see it. It was invisIble. It was not a part of their normal.And that story has helped put my own experience into context. So when I first read the comments on the video, my initial reaction was to take it all very personally. But the people commenting did not know how self-conscious I am about my voice. They were mostly reacting to my accent, that it is not normal for a narrator to have an accent.But what is normal, anyway? We know that reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you're black. We know that professors are less likely to help female or minority students. And we know that resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. Why is that? Because of our expectations of what is normal. We think it is normal when a black student has spelling errors. We think it is normal when a female or minority student does not succeed. And we think it is normal that a white employee is a better hire than a black employee. But studies also show that discrimination of this kind, in most cases, is simply favoritism, and it results more from wanting to help people that you can relate to than the desire to harm people that you can't relate to.And not relating to people starts at a very early age. Let me give you an example. One library that keeps track of characters in the children's book collection every year, found that in 2014, only about 11 percent of the books had a character of color. And just the year before, that number was about eight percent, even though half of American children today come from a minority background. Half.So there are two big issues here. Number one, children are told that they can be anything, they can do anything, and yet, most stories that children of color consume are about people who are not like them. Number two is that majority groups don't get to realize the great extent to which they are similar to minorities — our everyday experiences, our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our mutual love for hummus. It's delicious!(Laughter)Just like the color blue for Ancient Greeks, minorities are not a part of what we consider normal, because normal is simply a construction of what we've been exposed to, and how visible it is around us.And this is where things get a bit difficult. I can accept the preexisting notion of normal — that normal is good, and anything outside of that very narrow definition of normal is bad. Or I can challenge that preexisting notion of normal with my work and with my voice and with my accent and by standing here onstage, even though I'm scared shitless and would rather be in the bathroom.(Laughter)(Applause)(Video) Sheep (SS's voice): I'm now slowly starting to use my voice in my work again. And it feels good. It does not mean I won't have a breakdown the next time a couple dozen people say that I talk (Mumbling) like I have peanut butter in my mouth.(Laughter)SS: It just means I now have a much better understanding of what's at stake, and how giving up is not an option.The Ancient Greeks didn't just wake up one day and realize that the sky was blue. It took centuries, even, for humans to realize what we had been ignoring for so long. And so we must continuously challenge our notion of normal, because doing so is going to allow us as a society to finally see the sky for what it is.(Video) Characters: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Frankenstein's monster: (Grunts)(Laughter)SS: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/safwat_saleem_why_i_keep_speaking_up_even_when_people_mock_my_accent
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"I'll never forget the sound of laughing with my friends. I'll never forget the sound of my mother's voice right before I fell asleep. And I'll never forget the comforting sound of water trickling down a stream. Imagine my fear, pure fear, when, at the age of 10, I was told I was going to lose my hearing. And over the next five years, it progressed until I was classified as profoundly deaf.But I believe that losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I've ever received. You see, I get to experience the world in a unique way. And I believe that these unique experiences that people with disabilities have is what's going to help us make and design a better world for everyone — both for people with and without disabilities.I used to be a disability rights lawyer, and I spent a lot of my time focused on enforcing the law, ensuring that accommodations were made. And then I had to quickly learn international policy, because I was asked to work on the UN Convention that protects people with disabilities. As the leader of the NGO there, I spent most of my energy trying to convince people about the capabilities of people with disabilities. But somewhere along the way, and after many career transitions that my parents weren't so happy about —(Laughter)I stumbled upon a solution that I believe may be an even more powerful tool to solve some of the world's greatest problems, disability or not. And that tool is called design thinking.Design thinking is a process for innovation and problem solving. There are five steps. The first is defining the problem and understanding its constraints. The second is observing people in real-life situations and empathizing with them. Third, throwing out hundreds of ideas — the more the better, the wilder the better. Fourth, prototyping: gathering whatever you can, whatever you can find, to mimic your solution, to test it and to refine it. And finally, implementation: ensuring that the solution you came up with is sustainable.Warren Berger says that design thinking teaches us to look sideways, to reframe, to refine, to experiment and, probably most importantly, ask those stupid questions. Design thinkers believe that everyone is creative. They believe in bringing people from multiple disciplines together, because they want to share multiple perspectives and bring them together and ultimately merge them to form something new.Design thinking is such a successful and versatile tool that it has been applied in almost every industry. I saw the potential that it had for the issues I faced, so I decided to go back to school and get my master's in social design. This looks at how to use design to create positive change in the world. While I was there, I fell in love with woodworking. But what I quickly realized was that I was missing out on something. As you're working with a tool, right before it's about to kick back at you — which means the piece or the tool jumps back at you — it makes a sound. And I couldn't hear this sound. So I decided, why not try and solve it? My solution was a pair of safety glasses that were engineered to visually alert the user to pitch changes in the tool, before the human ear could pick it up. Why hadn't tool designers thought of this before?(Laughter)Two reasons: one, I was a beginner. I wasn't weighed down by expertise or conventional wisdom. The second is: I was Deaf. My unique experience of the world helped inform my solution.And as I went on, I kept running into more and more solutions that were originally made for people with disabilities, and that ended up being picked up, embraced and loved by the mainstream, disability or not. This is an OXO potato peeler. It was originally designed for people with arthritis, but it was so comfortable, everybody loved it. Text messaging: that was originally designed for people who are Deaf. And as you know, everybody loves that, too.(Laughter)I started thinking: What if we changed our mindset? What if we started designing for disability first — not the norm? As you see, when we design for disability first, we often stumble upon solutions that are not only inclusive, but also are often better than when we design for the norm.And this excites me, because this means that the energy it takes to accommodate someone with a disability can be leveraged, molded and played with as a force for creativity and innovation. This moves us from the mindset of trying to change the hearts and the deficiency mindset of tolerance, to becoming an alchemist, the type of magician that this world so desperately needs to solve some of its greatest problems.Now, I also believe that people with disabilities have great potential to be designers within this design-thinking process. Without knowing it, from a very early age, I've been a design thinker, fine-tuning my skills. Design thinkers are, by nature, problem solvers. So imagine listening to a conversation and only understanding 50 percent of what is said. You can't ask them to repeat every single word. They would just get frustrated with you. So without even realizing it, my solution was to take the muffled sound I heard, that was the beat, and turn it into a rhythm and place it with the lips I read. Years later, someone commented that my writing had a rhythm to it. Well, this is because I experience conversations as rhythms. I also became really, really good at failing.(Laughter)Quite literally. My first semester in Spanish, I got a D. But what I learned was that when I picked myself up and changed a few things around, eventually, I succeeded. Similarly, design thinking encourages people to fail and fail often, because eventually, you will succeed. Very few great innovations in this world have come from someone succeeding on the first try.I also experienced this lesson in sports. I'll never forget my coach saying to my mom, ""If she just didn't have her hearing loss, she would be on the national team."" But what my coach, and what I didn't even know at the time, was that my hearing loss actually helped me excel at sports. You see, when you lose your hearing, not only do you adapt your behavior, but you also adapt your physical senses. One example of this is that my visual attention span increased. Imagine a soccer player, coming down the left flank. Imagine being goalkeeper, like I was, and the ball is coming down the left flank. A person with normal hearing would have the visual perspective of this. I had the benefit of a spectrum this wide. So I picked up the players over here, that were moving about and coming down the field. And I picked them up quicker, so that if the ball was passed, I could reposition myself and be ready for that shot.So as you can see, I've been a design thinker for nearly all my life. My observation skills have been honed so that I pick up on things that others would never pick up on. My constant need to adapt has made me a great ideator and problem solver. And I've often had to do this within limitations and constraints. This is something that designers also have to deal with frequently.My work most recently took me to Haiti. Design thinkers often seek out extreme situations, because that often informs some of their best designs. And Haiti — it was like a perfect storm.I lived and worked with 300 Deaf individuals that were relocated after the 2010 earthquake. But five and a half years later, there still was no electricity; there still was no safe drinking water; there were still no job opportunities; there was still rampant crime, and it went unpunished. International aid organizations came one by one. But they came with pre-determined solutions. They didn't come ready to observe and to adapt based on the community's needs. One organization gave them goats and chickens. But they didn't realize that there was so much hunger in that community, that when the Deaf went to sleep at night and couldn't hear, people broke into their yards and their homes and stole these chickens and goats, and eventually they were all gone.Now, if that organization had taken the time to observe Deaf people, to observe the community, they would have realized their problem and perhaps they would have come up with a solution, something like a solar light, lighting up a secure pen to put them in at night to ensure their safety.You don't have to be a design thinker to insert the ideas I've shared with you today. You are creative. You are a designer — everyone is. Let people like me help you. Let people with disabilities help you look sideways, and in the process, solve some of the greatest problems.That's it. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elise_roy_when_we_design_for_disability_we_all_benefit
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"""Mom, who are these people?"" It was an innocent question from my young daughter Alia around the time when she was three. We were walking along with my husband in one of Abu Dhabi's big fancy malls. Alia was peering at a huge poster standing tall in the middle of the mall. It featured the three rulers of the United Arab Emirates. As she tucked in my side, I bent down and explained that these were the rulers of the UAE who had worked hard to develop their nation and preserve its unity. She asked, ""Mom, why is it that here where we live, and back in Lebanon, where grandma and grandpa live, we never see the pictures of powerful women on the walls? Is it because women are not important?""This is probably the hardest question I've had to answer in my years as a parent and in my 16-plus years of professional life, for that matter. I had grown up in my hometown in Lebanon, the younger of two daughters to a very hard-working pilot and director of operations for the Lebanese Airlines and a super-supportive stay-at-home mom and grandma. My father had encouraged my sister and I to pursue our education even though our culture emphasized at the time that it was sons and not daughters who should be professionally motivated. I was one of very few girls of my generation who left home at 18 to study abroad. My father didn't have a son, and so I, in a sense, became his.Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I hope I didn't do too badly in making my father proud of his would-be son. As I got my Bachelor's and PhD in electrical engineering, did R&D in the UK, then consulting in the Middle East, I have always been in male-dominated environments. Truth be told, I have never found a role model I could truly identify with. My mother's generation wasn't into professional leadership. There were some encouraging men along the way, but none knew the demands and pressures I was facing, pressures that got particularly acute when I had my own two beautiful children. And although Western women love to give us poor, oppressed Arab women advice, they live different lives with different constraints.So Arab women of my generation have had to become our own role models. We have had to juggle more than Arab men, and we have had to face more cultural rigidity than Western women. As a result, I would like to think that we poor, oppressed women actually have some useful, certainly hard-earned lessons to share, lessons that might turn out useful for anyone wishing to thrive in the modern world. Here are three of mine.[""Convert their sh*t into your fuel.""](Laughter)(Applause)There is this word that everybody is touting as the key to success: resilience. Well, what exactly is resilience, and how do you develop it? I believe resilience is simply the ability to transform shit into fuel.In my previous job, well before my current firm, I was working with a man we will call John. I had teamed up with John and was working hard, hoping he would notice how great I was and that he would come to support my case to make partner at the firm. I was, in addition to delivering on my consulting projects, writing passionately on the topic of women economic empowerment. One day, I got to present my research to a roomful of MBA students. John was part of the audience listening for the first time to the details of my study. As I proceeded with my presentation, I could see John in the corner of my eye. He had turned a dark shade of pink and had slid under his chair in apparent shame.I finished my presentation to an applauding audience and we rushed out and jumped into the car. There he exploded. ""What you did up there was unacceptable! You are a consultant, not an activist!"" I said, ""John, I don't understand. I presented a couple of gender parity indices, and some conclusions about the Arab world. Yes, we do happen to be today at the bottom of the index, but what is it that I said or presented that was not factual?""To which he replied, ""The whole premise of your study is wrong. What you are doing is dangerous and will break the social fabric of our society."" He paused, then added, ""When women have children, their place is in the home.""Time stood still for a long while, and all I could think and repeat in the chaos of my brain was: ""You can forget about that partnership, Leila. It's just never going to happen."" It took me a couple of days to fully absorb this incident and its implications, but once I did, I reached three conclusions. One, that these were his issues, his complexes. There may be many like him in our society, but I would never let their issues become mine. Two, that I needed another sponsor, and fast.(Laughter)I got one, by the way, and boy, was he great. And three, that I would get to show John what women with children can do. I apply this lesson equally well to my personal life. As I have progressed in my career, I have received many words of encouragement, but I have also often been met by women, men and couples who have clearly had an issue with my husband and I having chosen the path of a dual-career couple.So you get this well-meaning couple who tells you straight out at a family gathering or at a friends gathering, that, come on, you must know you're not a great mom, given how much you're investing in your career, right? I would lie if I said these words didn't hurt. My children are the most precious thing to me, and the thought that I could be failing them in any way is intolerable. But just like I did with John, I quickly reminded myself that these were their issues, their complexes. So instead of replying, I gave back one of my largest smiles as I saw, in flashing light, the following sign in my mind's eye.[Be happy, it drives people crazy.](Applause)You see, as a young woman in these situations, you have two options. You can either decide to internalize these negative messages that are being thrown at you, to let them make you feel like a failure, like success is way too hard to ever achieve, or you can choose to see that others' negativity is their own issue, and instead transform it into your own personal fuel. I have learned to always go for option two, and I have found that it has taken me from strength to strength. And it's true what they say: success is the best revenge.Some women in the Middle East are lucky enough to be married to someone supportive of their career. Correction: I should say ""smart enough,"" because who you marry is your own choice, and you'd better marry someone supportive if you plan to have a long career. Still today, the Arab man is not an equal contributor in the home. It's simply not expected by our society, and even frowned upon as not very manly. As for the Arab woman, our society still assumes that her primary source of happiness should be the happiness and prosperity of her children and husband. She mostly exists for her family. Things are changing, but it will take time.For now, it means that the professional Arab woman has to somehow maintain the perfect home, make sure that her children's every need is being taken care of and manage her demanding career. To achieve this, I have found the hard way that you need to apply your hard-earned professional skills to your personal life. You need to work your life.Here is how I do this in my personal life. One thing to know about the Middle East is that nearly every family has access to affordable domestic help. The challenge therefore becomes how to recruit effectively. Just like I would in my business life, I have based the selection of who would support me with my children while I'm at work on a strong referral. Cristina had worked for four years with my sister and the quality of her work was well-established. She is now an integral member of our family, having been with us since Alia was six months old. She makes sure that the house is running smoothly while I'm at work, and I make sure to empower her in the most optimal conditions for her and my children, just like I would my best talent at work. This lesson applies whatever your childcare situation, whether an au pair, nursery, part-time nanny that you share with someone else. Choose very carefully, and empower.If you look at my calendar, you will see every working day one and a half hours from 7pm to 8:30pm UAE time blocked and called ""family time."" This is sacred time. I have done this ever since Alia was a baby. I do everything in my power to protect this time so that I can be home by then to spend quality time with my children, asking them about their day, checking up on homework, reading them a bedtime story and giving them lots of kisses and cuddles. If I'm traveling, in whatever the time zone, I use Skype to connect with my children even if I am miles away. Our son Burhan is five years old, and he's learning to read and do basic maths.Here's another confession: I have found that our daughter is actually more successful at teaching him these skills than I am.(Laughter)It started as a game, but Alia loves playing teacher to her little brother, and I have found that these sessions actually improve Burhan's literacy, increase Alia's sense of responsibility, and strengthen the bonding between them, a win-win all around.The successful Arab women I know have each found their unique approach to working their life as they continue to shoulder the lion's share of responsibility in the home.But this is not just about surviving in your dual role as a career woman and mother. This is also about being in the present. When I am with my children, I try to leave work out of our lives. Instead of worrying about how many minutes I can spend with them every day, I focus on turning these minutes into memorable moments, moments where I'm seeing my kids, hearing them, connecting with them.[""Join forces, don't compete.""]Arab women of my generation have not been very visible in the public eye as they grew up. This explains, I think, to some extent, why you find so few women in politics in the Arab world. The upside of this, however, is that we have spent a lot of time developing a social skill behind the scenes, in coffee shops, in living rooms, on the phone, a social skill that is very important to success: networking. I would say the average Arab woman has a large network of friends and acquaintances. The majority of those are also women.In the West, it seems like ambitious women often compare themselves to other women hoping to be noticed as the most successful woman in the room. This leads to the much-spoken-about competitive behavior between professional women. If there's only room for one woman at the top, then you can't make room for others, much less lift them up.Arab women, generally speaking, have not fallen for this psychological trap. Faced with a patriarchal society, they have found that by helping each other out, all benefit.In my previous job, I was the most senior woman in the Middle East, so one could think that investing in my network of female colleagues couldn't bring many benefits and that I should instead invest my time developing my relationships with male seniors and peers. Yet two of my biggest breaks came through the support of other women. It was the head of marketing who initially suggested I be considered as a young global leader to the World Economic Forum. She was familiar with my media engagements and my publications, and when she was asked to voice her opinion, she highlighted my name. It was a young consultant, a Saudi lady and friend, who helped me sell my first project in Saudi Arabia, a market I was finding hard to gain traction in as a woman. She introduced me to a client, and that introduction led to the first of very many projects for me in Saudi. Today, I have two senior women on my team, and I see making them successful as key to my own success. Women continue to advance in the world, not fast enough, but we're moving.The Arab world, too, is making progress, despite many recent setbacks. Just this year, the UAE appointed five new female ministers to its cabinet, for a total of eight female ministers. That's nearly 28 percent of the cabinet, and more than many developed countries can claim. This is today my daughter Alia's favorite picture. This is the result, no doubt, of great leadership, but it is also the result of strong Arab women not giving up and continuously pushing the boundaries. It is the result of Arab women deciding every day like me to convert shit into fuel, to work their life to keep work out of their life, and to join forces and not compete.As I look to the future, my hopes for my daughter when she stands on this stage some 20, 30 years from now are that she be as proud to call herself her mother's daughter as her father's daughter.My hopes for my son are that by then, the expression ""her mother's son"" or ""mama's boy"" would have taken on a completely different meaning.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/leila_hoteit_3_lessons_on_success_from_an_arab_businesswoman
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"Tonight, I'm going to share with you my passion for science. I'm not talking about science that takes baby steps. I'm talking about science that takes enormous leaps. I'm talking Darwin, I'm talking Einstein, I'm talking revolutionary science that turns the world on its head. In a moment, I'm going to talk about two ideas that might do this. I say ""might"" because, with revolutionary ideas, most are flat wrong, and even those that are right seldom have the impact that we want them to have.To explain why I picked two ideas in particular, I'm going to start with a mystery. 1847, Vienna, Austria. Ignaz Semmelweis was a somber, compulsively thorough doctor who ran two maternity clinics. They were identical except for one thing. Women were dying of high fevers soon after giving birth three times more often at one of the clinics than at the other. Trying to figure out what the difference was that caused this, Semmelweis looked at everything he could. Sanitation? No. Medical procedures? No. Air flow? No.The puzzle went unsolved until he happened to autopsy a doctor who died of an infected scalpel cut. The doctor's symptoms were identical to those of the mothers who were dying. How was that possible? How could a male doctor get the same thing as new mothers? Semmelweis reconstructed everything the doctor had done right before he got sick, and he discovered that he'd been autopsying a corpse. Had something gotten in his wound that killed him? With growing excitement, Semmelweis looked for any connection he could between dead bodies in the morgue and dead mothers in his delivery room, and he found it. It turned out that at the hospital with the high death rate, but not the others, doctors delivered babies immediately after autopsying corpses in the morgue. Aha! Corpses were contaminating the doctors' hands and killing his mothers. So he ordered the doctors to sterilize their hands, and the deaths stopped. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered infectious disease.But the doctors of the day thought he was crazy, because they knew, and had for hundreds of years, that odorous vapors called miasmas caused disease, not these hypothetical particles that you couldn't see. It took 20 years for Frenchman Louis Pasteur to prove that Semmelweis was right. Pasteur was an agricultural chemist who tried to figure out why milk and beer spoiled so often. He found that bacteria were the culprits. He also found that bacteria could kill people in exactly the same way that Semmelweis's patients were dying.We now look at what I want to talk about tonight, in two ideas. We saw it with Semmelweis, that he was a revolutionary. He did it for two reasons. One, he opened our eyes to a completely new world. We'd known since the 1680s about bacteria. We just didn't know that bacteria killed people. And he also demolished fond ideas that people kept close to their heart. Miasmas didn't kill people. Bacteria killed people.So this brings me to the two ideas I want to talk about tonight. One has opened our eyes to a completely new universe, and the other attacks long-held beliefs.Let's get started with Dr. Eric Betzig. He's a physicist who has opened our eyes to an entirely new world by violating the laws of physics. Betzig is a true rebel. He quit a job at prestigious Bell Laboratory inventing new microscopes for biology because he thought scientists were taking his brilliant inventions and doing lousy work with them. So he became a househusband, but he never lost his passion for figuring out how to get microscopes to see finer and finer details than had ever been seen before or ever could be seen. This is crucial if we're ever going to understand how cells work, and how cancer works, and how something 150th the size of a head of a pin can do all these amazing things, like make proteins and move charges around and all of those things.There's just one problem. There's this thing called the law of physics, and part of the law of physics is the thing called the diffraction limit. The diffraction limit is kind of like when you go to a doctor's office, you can only see so far down, no matter how good glasses you have.This was a so-called impossible problem. But one of Betzig's friends figured out how to take a tiny molecule that was smaller than the best microscope could see and get it to light up and fluoresce. ""Aha!"" Betzig said. ""I think maybe the laws of physics are not so unbreakable after all.""So he lashed together a microscope in his friend's living room. He had no laboratory. This revolutionary instrument got different protein molecules to light up in different colors, and with a computer, he was able to turn very, very fuzzy blurs into very sharp dots and produce images of unprecedented and startling clarity.For this work, last year, Eric Betzig won the Nobel Prize. Why? Because now we can see with unprecedented detail things that we never had seen before, and now doctors can get a better handle on things like cancer.But do you think Betzig was satisfied there? No. He wanted movies. The problem was that even the genius microscopes that he invented were just too slow. So what did he do? He came up with a 200-year-old idea called moiré patterns. So the way that works is if you take two very, very fine patterns and you move them across each other, you will see a gross pattern that a microscope can see that otherwise you would not be able to see. So he applied this technique to taking a really blurry image of a cell and moving lots of structured light patterns across it until this cell became crystal clear. And here is the result: a mysterious new world, full of strange things zipping around doing things that we don't know what they're doing. But when we figure it out, we'll have a better handle on life itself.For example, those green globs that you see? Those things are called clathrins. They're molecules that protect other molecules as they move through a cell. Unfortunately, viruses sometimes hijack those to infect cells. Also, you see those little squiggly wormlike things moving around? Those are actin molecules. Unfortunately, viruses also climb down those things to get into the cell nucleus to replicate themselves and make you sick.Now that we can look at movies of what's actually going on deep inside a cell, we have a much better chance of curing viral diseases like AIDS.So when you look at a movie like this, it's very clear that Betzig has opened our eyes to a completely new world. But he hasn't shattered any cherished beliefs.That leads us to Dr. Aubrey de Grey at Cambridge. De Grey definitely has scientists squirming with an interesting idea: we can be immortal. We can beat aging. Now, most scientists think he's a crackpot. Any Biology 101 student knows that aging is an inevitable consequence of living. For example, when we eat, we take in food and we metabolize it, and that throws off what we call free radicals. You might have heard of those. Also known as oxygen ions, those bind to our DNA, cause it to mutate, and cause us to get old and lose our hair.(Laughter)It's just like, no, it's exactly like oxygen binding to iron and making it rust. So you age because you rust out.(Laughter)Oh, and scientists also know there is something called immortality: in cancer cells. So if you stop aging, all of you are going to turn into giant walking malignant tumors.These are cherished beliefs, but could de Grey be on to something? I think he deserves a closer look. First of all, I have a really hard time seeing him as a crackpot. Yeah, he started off life as a computer scientist, not a biologist, but he earned a PhD in biology from Cambridge, and he has published some very significant work on mitochondrial DNA and a bunch of other stuff. Secondly, he started an antiaging foundation that has identified seven different causes of aging, to me, that seem very plausible, and he is hot in pursuit of fixes for every single one of them. For example, one of the reasons we age is that our mitochondrial DNA mutates, and we get kind of old and our cells lose energy. He believes, and he's made a convincing case, that using viruses we can do gene therapy, fix that DNA and rejuvenate our cells.One more thing. We have an existent proof that extreme longevity is possible. Bristlecone pine trees live 5,000 years, and some lobsters don't age at all.Now, this doesn't mean that de Grey is going to revolutionize our lifespans. I mean, after all, we're not trees, and most of us are not lobsters.(Laughter)But I've got to believe that there are Darwins and Einsteins out there, and I'll tell you why. Consider this: there are seven times more people alive today than during Darwin's time. There are four times as many people alive today as Einstein. When you consider that the proportion of scientists in the population has skyrocketed, there are now seven million scientists. I've got to believe, and I do believe, that there's one of them out there who is working right now in obscurity to rock our lives, and I don't know about you, but I can't wait to be rocked.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_haseltine_what_will_be_the_next_big_scientific_breakthrough
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"We are stealing nature from our children. Now, when I say this, I don't mean that we are destroying nature that they will have wanted us to preserve, although that is unfortunately also the case. What I mean here is that we've started to define nature in a way that's so purist and so strict that under the definition we're creating for ourselves, there won't be any nature left for our children when they're adults. But there's a fix for this. So let me explain.Right now, humans use half of the world to live, to grow their crops and their timber, to pasture their animals. If you added up all the human beings, we would weigh 10 times as much as all the wild mammals put together. We cut roads through the forest. We have added little plastic particles to the sand on ocean beaches. We've changed the chemistry of the soil with our artificial fertilizers. And of course, we've changed the chemistry of the air. So when you take your next breath, you'll be breathing in 42 percent more carbon dioxide than if you were breathing in 1750. So all of these changes, and many others, have come to be kind of lumped together under this rubric of the ""Anthropocene."" And this is a term that some geologists are suggesting we should give to our current epoch, given how pervasive human influence has been over it. Now, it's still just a proposed epoch, but I think it's a helpful way to think about the magnitude of human influence on the planet.So where does this put nature? What counts as nature in a world where everything is influenced by humans?So 25 years ago, environmental writer Bill McKibben said that because nature was a thing apart from man and because climate change meant that every centimeter of the Earth was altered by man, then nature was over. In fact, he called his book ""The End of Nature.""I disagree with this. I just disagree with this. I disagree with this definition of nature, because, fundamentally, we are animals. Right? Like, we evolved on this planet in the context of all the other animals with which we share a planet, and all the other plants, and all the other microbes. And so I think that nature is not that which is untouched by humanity, man or woman. I think that nature is anywhere where life thrives, anywhere where there are multiple species together, anywhere that's green and blue and thriving and filled with life and growing. And under that definition, things look a little bit different.Now, I understand that there are certain parts of this nature that speak to us in a special way. Places like Yellowstone, or the Mongolian steppe, or the Great Barrier Reef or the Serengeti. Places that we think of as kind of Edenic representations of a nature before we screwed everything up. And in a way, they are less impacted by our day to day activities. Many of these places have no roads or few roads, so on, like such. But ultimately, even these Edens are deeply influenced by humans.Now, let's just take North America, for example, since that's where we're meeting. So between about 15,000 years ago when people first came here, they started a process of interacting with the nature that led to the extinction of a big slew of large-bodied animals, from the mastodon to the giant ground sloth, saber-toothed cats, all of these cool animals that unfortunately are no longer with us. And when those animals went extinct, you know, the ecosystems didn't stand still. Massive ripple effects changed grasslands into forests, changed the composition of forest from one tree to another. So even in these Edens, even in these perfect-looking places that seem to remind us of a past before humans, we're essentially looking at a humanized landscape. Not just these prehistoric humans, but historical humans, indigenous people all the way up until the moment when the first colonizers showed up. And the case is the same for the other continents as well. Humans have just been involved in nature in a very influential way for a very long time.Now, just recently, someone told me,""Oh, but there are still wild places.""And I said, ""Where? Where? I want to go.""And he said, ""The Amazon.""And I was like, ""Oh, the Amazon. I was just there. It's awesome. National Geographic sent me to Manú National Park, which is in the Peruvian Amazon, but it's a big chunk of rainforest, uncleared, no roads, protected as a national park, one of the most, in fact, biodiverse parks in the world. And when I got in there with my canoe, what did I find, but people. People have been living there for hundreds and thousands of years. People live there, and they don't just float over the jungle. They have a meaningful relationship with the landscape. They hunt. They grow crops. They domesticate crops. They use the natural resources to build their houses, to thatch their houses. They even make pets out of animals that we consider to be wild animals. These people are there and they're interacting with the environment in a way that's really meaningful and that you can see in the environment.Now, I was with an anthropologist on this trip, and he told me, as we were floating down the river, he said, ""There are no demographic voids in the Amazon."" This statement has really stuck with me, because what it means is that the whole Amazon is like this. There's people everywhere. And many other tropical forests are the same, and not just tropical forests. People have influenced ecosystems in the past, and they continue to influence them in the present, even in places where they're harder to notice.So, if all of the definitions of nature that we might want to use that involve it being untouched by humanity or not having people in it, if all of those actually give us a result where we don't have any nature, then maybe they're the wrong definitions. Maybe we should define it by the presence of multiple species, by the presence of a thriving life.Now, if we do it that way, what do we get? Well, it's this kind of miracle. All of a sudden, there's nature all around us. All of a sudden, we see this Monarch caterpillar munching on this plant, and we realize that there it is, and it's in this empty lot in Chattanooga. And look at this empty lot. I mean, there's, like, probably, a dozen, minimum, plant species growing there, supporting all kinds of insect life, and this is a completely unmanaged space, a completely wild space. This is a kind of wild nature right under our nose, that we don't even notice.And there's an interesting little paradox, too. So this nature, this kind of wild, untended part of our urban, peri-urban, suburban agricultural existence that flies under the radar, it's arguably more wild than a national park, because national parks are very carefully managed in the 21st century. Crater Lake in southern Oregon, which is my closest national park, is a beautiful example of a landscape that seems to be coming out of the past. But they're managing it carefully. One of the issues they have now is white bark pine die-off. White bark pine is a beautiful, charismatic — I'll say it's a charismatic megaflora that grows up at high altitude — and it's got all these problems right now with disease. There's a blister rust that was introduced, bark beetle. So to deal with this, the park service has been planting rust-resistant white bark pine seedlings in the park, even in areas that they are otherwise managing as wilderness. And they're also putting out beetle repellent in key areas as I saw last time I went hiking there. And this kind of thing is really much more common than you would think. National parks are heavily managed. The wildlife is kept to a certain population size and structure. Fires are suppressed. Fires are started. Non-native species are removed. Native species are reintroduced. And in fact, I took a look, and Banff National Park is doing all of the things I just listed: suppressing fire, having fire, radio-collaring wolves, reintroducing bison. It takes a lot of work to make these places look untouched.(Laughter)(Applause)And in a further irony, these places that we love the most are the places that we love a little too hard, sometimes. A lot of us like to go there, and because we're managing them to be stable in the face of a changing planet, they often are becoming more fragile over time.Which means that they're the absolute worst places to take your children on vacation, because you can't do anything there. You can't climb the trees. You can't fish the fish. You can't make a campfire out in the middle of nowhere. You can't take home the pinecones. There are so many rules and restrictions that from a child's point of view, this is, like, the worst nature ever. Because children don't want to hike through a beautiful landscape for five hours and then look at a beautiful view. That's maybe what we want to do as adults, but what kids want to do is hunker down in one spot and just tinker with it, just work with it, just pick it up, build a house, build a fort, do something like that.Additionally, these sort of Edenic places are often distant from where people live. And they're expensive to get to. They're hard to visit. So this means that they're only available to the elites, and that's a real problem. The Nature Conservancy did a survey of young people, and they asked them, how often do you spend time outdoors? And only two out of five spent time outdoors at least once a week. The other three out of five were just staying inside. And when they asked them why, what are the barriers to going outside, the response of 61 percent was, ""There are no natural areas near my home.""And this is crazy. This is just patently false. I mean, 71 percent of people in the US live within a 10-minute walk of a city park. And I'm sure the figures are similar in other countries. And that doesn't even count your back garden, the urban creek, the empty lot. Everybody lives near nature. Every kid lives near nature. We've just somehow forgotten how to see it. We've spent too much time watching David Attenborough documentaries where the nature is really sexy —(Laughter)and we've forgotten how to see the nature that is literally right outside our door, the nature of the street tree.So here's an example: Philadelphia. There's this cool elevated railway that you can see from the ground, that's been abandoned. Now, this may sound like the beginning of the High Line story in Manhattan, and it's very similar, except they haven't developed this into a park yet, although they're working on it. So for now, it's still this little sort of secret wilderness in the heart of Philadelphia, and if you know where the hole is in the chain-link fence, you can scramble up to the top and you can find this completely wild meadow just floating above the city of Philadelphia. Every single one of these plants grew from a seed that planted itself there. This is completely autonomous, self-willed nature. And it's right in the middle of the city. And they've sent people up there to do sort of biosurveys, and there are over 50 plant species up there. And it's not just plants. This is an ecosystem, a functioning ecosystem. It's creating soil. It's sequestering carbon. There's pollination going on. I mean, this is really an ecosystem.So scientists have started calling ecosystems like these ""novel ecosystems,"" because they're often dominated by non-native species, and because they're just super weird. They're just unlike anything we've ever seen before. For so long, we dismissed all these novel ecosystems as trash. We're talking about regrown agricultural fields, timber plantations that are not being managed on a day-to-day basis, second-growth forests generally, the entire East Coast, where after agriculture moved west, the forest sprung up. And of course, pretty much all of Hawaii, where novel ecosystems are the norm, where exotic species totally dominate. This forest here has Queensland maple, it has sword ferns from Southeast Asia. You can make your own novel ecosystem, too. It's really simple. You just stop mowing your lawn.(Laughter)Ilkka Hanski was an ecologist in Finland, and he did this experiment himself. He just stopped mowing his lawn, and after a few years, he had some grad students come, and they did sort of a bio-blitz of his backyard, and they found 375 plant species, including two endangered species.So when you're up there on that future High Line of Philadelphia, surrounded by this wildness, surrounded by this diversity, this abundance, this vibrance, you can look over the side and you can see a local playground for a local school, and that's what it looks like. These children have, that — You know, under my definition, there's a lot of the planet that counts as nature, but this would be one of the few places that wouldn't count as nature. There's nothing there except humans, no other plants, no other animals. And what I really wanted to do was just, like, throw a ladder over the side and get all these kids to come up with me into this cool meadow. In a way, I feel like this is the choice that faces us. If we dismiss these new natures as not acceptable or trashy or no good, we might as well just pave them over. And in a world where everything is changing, we need to be very careful about how we define nature.In order not to steal it from our children, we have to do two things. First, we cannot define nature as that which is untouched. This never made any sense anyway. Nature has not been untouched for thousands of years. And it excludes most of the nature that most people can visit and have a relationship with, including only nature that children cannot touch. Which brings me to the second thing that we have to do, which is that we have to let children touch nature, because that which is untouched is unloved.(Applause)We face some pretty grim environmental challenges on this planet. Climate change is among them. There's others too: habitat loss is my favorite thing to freak out about in the middle of the night. But in order to solve them, we need people — smart, dedicated people — who care about nature. And the only way we're going to raise up a generation of people who care about nature is by letting them touch nature.I have a Fort Theory of Ecology, Fort Theory of Conservation. Every ecologist I know, every conservation biologist I know, every conservation professional I know, built forts when they were kids. If we have a generation that doesn't know how to build a fort, we'll have a generation that doesn't know how to care about nature.And I don't want to be the one to tell this kid, who is on a special program that takes Philadelphia kids from poor neighborhoods and takes them to city parks, I don't want to be the one to tell him that the flower he's holding is a non-native invasive weed that he should throw away as trash. I think I would much rather learn from this boy that no matter where this plant comes from, it is beautiful, and it deserves to be touched and appreciated.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emma_marris_nature_is_everywhere_we_just_need_to_learn_to_see_it
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"This is a man-made forest. It can spread over acres and acres of area, or it could fit in a small space — as small as your house garden. Each of these forests is just two years old. I have a forest in the backyard of my own house. It attracts a lot of biodiversity.(Bird call)I wake up to this every morning, like a Disney princess.(Laughter)I am an entrepreneur who facilitates the making of these forests professionally. We have helped factories, farms, schools, homes, resorts, apartment buildings, public parks and even a zoo to have one of such forests. A forest is not an isolated piece of land where animals live together. A forest can be an integral part of our urban existence. A forest, for me, is a place so dense with trees that you just can't walk into it. It doesn't matter how big or small they are.Most of the world we live in today was forest. This was before human intervention. Then we built up our cities on those forests, like São Paulo, forgetting that we belong to nature as well, as much as 8.4 million other species on the planet. Our habitat stopped being our natural habitat. But not anymore for some of us. A few others and I today make these forests professionally — anywhere and everywhere.I'm an industrial engineer. I specialize in making cars. In my previous job at Toyota, I learned how to convert natural resources into products. To give you an example, we would drip the sap out of a rubber tree, convert it into raw rubber and make a tire out of it — the product. But these products can never become a natural resource again. We separate the elements from nature and convert them into an irreversible state. That's industrial production.Nature, on the other hand, works in a totally opposite way. The natural system produces by bringing elements together, atom by atom. All the natural products become a natural resource again. This is something which I learned when I made a forest in the backyard of my own house. And this was the first time I worked with nature, rather than against it. Since then, we have made 75 such forests in 25 cities across the world. Every time we work at a new place, we find that every single element needed to make a forest is available right around us. All we have to do is to bring these elements together and let nature take over.To make a forest we start with soil. We touch, feel and even taste it to identify what properties it lacks. If the soil is made up of small particles it becomes compact — so compact, that water cannot seep in. We mix some local biomass available around, which can help soil become more porous. Water can now seep in. If the soil doesn't have the capacity to hold water, we will mix some more biomass — some water-absorbent material like peat or bagasse, so soil can hold this water and it stays moist.To grow, plants need water, sunlight and nutrition. What if the soil doesn't have any nutrition in it? We don't just add nutrition directly to the soil. That would be the industrial way. It goes against nature. We instead add microorganisms to the soil. They produce the nutrients in the soil naturally. They feed on the biomass we have mixed in the soil, so all they have to do is eat and multiply. And as their number grows, the soil starts breathing again. It becomes alive.We survey the native tree species of the place. How do we decide what's native or not? Well, whatever existed before human intervention is native. That's the simple rule. We survey a national park to find the last remains of a natural forest. We survey the sacred groves, or sacred forests around old temples. And if we don't find anything at all, we go to museums to see the seeds or wood of trees existing there a long time ago. We research old paintings, poems and literature from the place, to identify the tree species belonging there.Once we know our trees, we divide them in four different layers: shrub layer, sub-tree layer, tree layer and canopy layer. We fix the ratios of each layer, and then we decide the percentage of each tree species in the mix. If we are making a fruit forest, we increase the percentage of fruit-bearing trees. It could be a flowering forest, a forest that attracts a lot of birds or bees, or it could simply be a native, wild evergreen forest.We collect the seeds and germinate saplings out of them. We make sure that trees belonging to the same layer are not planted next to each other, or they will fight for the same vertical space when they grow tall. We plant the saplings close to each other. On the surface, we spread a thick layer of mulch, so when it's hot outside the soil stays moist. When it's cold, frost formation happens only on the mulch, so soil can still breathe while it's freezing outside. The soil is very soft — so soft, that roots can penetrate into it easily, rapidly.Initially, the forest doesn't seem like it's growing, but it's growing under the surface. In the first three months, roots reach a depth of one meter. These roots form a mesh, tightly holding the soil. Microbes and fungi live throughout this network of roots. So if some nutrition is not available in the vicinity of a tree, these microbes are going to get the nutrition to the tree. Whenever it rains, magically, mushrooms appear overnight. And this means the soil below has a healthy fungal network.Once these roots are established, forest starts growing on the surface. As the forest grows we keep watering it — for the next two to three years, we water the forest. We want to keep all the water and soil nutrition only for our trees, so we remove the weeds growing on the ground. As this forest grows, it blocks the sunlight. Eventually, the forest becomes so dense that sunlight can't reach the ground anymore. Weeds cannot grow now, because they need sunlight as well.At this stage, every single drop of water that falls into the forest doesn't evaporate back into the atmosphere. This dense forest condenses the moist air and retains its moisture. We gradually reduce and eventually stop watering the forest. And even without watering, the forest floor stays moist and sometimes even dark. Now, when a single leaf falls on this forest floor, it immediately starts decaying. This decayed biomass forms humus, which is food for the forest. As the forest grows, more leaves fall on the surface — it means more humus is produced, it means more food so the forest can grow still bigger. And this forest keeps growing exponentially.Once established, these forests are going to regenerate themselves again and again — probably forever. In a natural forest like this, no management is the best management. It's a tiny jungle party.(Laughter)This forest grows as a collective. If the same trees — same species — would have been planted independently, it wouldn't grow so fast. And this is how we create a 100-year-old forest in just 10 years.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shubhendu_sharma_how_to_grow_a_forest_in_your_backyard
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"There's this fact that I love that I read somewhere once, that one of the things that's contributed to homo sapiens' success as a species is our lack of body hair — that our hairlessness, our nakedness combined with our invention of clothing, gives us the ability to modulate our body temperature and thus be able to survive in any climate we choose. And now we've evolved to the point where we can't survive without clothing. And it's more than just utility, now it's a communication. Everything that we choose to put on is a narrative, a story about where we've been, what we're doing, who we want to be.I was a lonely kid. I didn't have an easy time finding friends to play with, and I ended up making a lot of my own play. I made a lot of my own toys. It began with ice cream. There was a Baskin-Robbins in my hometown, and they served ice cream from behind the counter in these giant, five-gallon, cardboard tubs. And someone told me — I was eight years old — someone told me that when they were done with those tubs, they washed them out and kept them in the back, and if you asked they would give you one. It took me a couple of weeks to work up the courage, but I did, and they did. They gave me one — I went home with this beautiful cardboard tub. I was trying to figure out what I could do with this exotic material — metal ring, top and bottom. I started turning it over in my head, and I realized, ""Wait a minute — my head actually fits inside this thing.""(Laughter)Yeah, I cut a hole out, I put some acetate in there and I made myself a space helmet.(Laughter)I needed a place to wear the space helmet, so I found a refrigerator box a couple blocks from home. I pushed it home, and in my parents' guest room closet, I turned it into a spaceship. I started with a control panel out of cardboard. I cut a hole for a radar screen and put a flashlight underneath it to light it. I put a view screen up, which I offset off the back wall — and this is where I thought I was being really clever — without permission, I painted the back wall of the closet black and put a star field, which I lit up with some Christmas lights I found in the attic, and I went on some space missions.A couple years later, the movie ""Jaws"" came out. I was way too young to see it, but I was caught up in ""Jaws"" fever, like everyone else in America at the time. There was a store in my town that had a ""Jaws"" costume in their window, and my mom must have overheard me talking to someone about how awesome I thought this costume was, because a couple days before Halloween, she blew my freaking mind by giving me this ""Jaws"" costume.Now, I recognize it's a bit of a trope for people of a certain age to complain that kids these days have no idea how good they have it, but let me just show you a random sampling of entry-level kids' costumes you can buy online right now ... ... and this is the ""Jaws"" costume my mom bought for me.(Laughter)This is a paper-thin shark face and a vinyl bib with the poster of ""Jaws"" on it.(Laughter)And I loved it.A couple years later, my dad took me to a film called ""Excalibur."" I actually got him to take me to it twice, which is no small thing, because it is a hard, R-rated film. But it wasn't the blood and guts or the boobs that made me want to go see it again. They helped —(Laughter)It was the armor. The armor in ""Excalibur"" was intoxicatingly beautiful to me. These were literally knights in shining, mirror-polished armor. And moreover, the knights in ""Excalibur"" wear their armor everywhere. All the time — they wear it at dinner, they wear it to bed.(Laughter)I was like, ""Are they reading my mind? I want to wear armor all the time!""(Laughter)So I went back to my favorite material, the gateway drug for making, corrugated cardboard, and I made myself a suit of armor, replete with the neck shields and a white horse. Now that I've oversold it, here's a picture of the armor that I made.(Laughter)(Applause)Now, this is only the first suit of armor I made inspired by ""Excalibur."" A couple of years later, I convinced my dad to embark on making me a proper suit of armor. Over about a month, he graduated me from cardboard to roofing aluminum called flashing and still, one of my all-time favorite attachment materials, POP rivets. We carefully, over that month, constructed an articulated suit of aluminum armor with compound curves. We drilled holes in the helmet so that I could breathe, and I finished just in time for Halloween and wore it to school. Now, this is the one thing in this talk that I don't have a slide to show you, because no photo exists of this armor. I did wear it to school, there was a yearbook photographer patrolling the halls, but he never found me, for reasons that are about to become clear.There were things I didn't anticipate about wearing a complete suit of aluminum armor to school. In third period math, I was standing in the back of class, and I'm standing in the back of class because the armor did not allow me to sit down.(Laughter)This is the first thing I didn't anticipate. And then my teacher looks at me sort of concerned about halfway through the class and says, ""Are you feeling OK?"" I'm thinking, ""Are you kidding? Am I feeling OK? I'm wearing a suit of armor! I am having the time of my —"" And I'm just about to tell her how great I feel, when the classroom starts to list to the left and disappear down this long tunnel, and then I woke up in the nurse's office. I had passed out from heat exhaustion, wearing the armor. And when I woke up, I wasn't embarrassed about having passed out in front of my class, I was wondering, ""Who took my armor? Where's my armor?""OK, fast-forward a whole bunch of years, some colleagues and I get hired to make a show for Discovery Channel, called ""MythBusters."" And over 14 years, I learn on the job how to build experimental methodologies and how to tell stories about them for television. I also learn early on that costuming can play a key role in this storytelling.I use costumes to add humor, comedy, color and narrative clarity to the stories we're telling. And then we do an episode called ""Dumpster Diving,"" and I learn a little bit more about the deeper implications of what costuming means to me. In the episode ""Dumpster Diving,"" the question we were trying to answer is: Is jumping into a dumpster as safe as the movies would lead you to believe?(Laughter)The episode was going to have two distinct parts to it. One was where we get trained to jump off buildings by a stuntman into an air bag. And the second was the graduation to the experiment: we'd fill a dumpster full of material and we'd jump into it. I wanted to visually separate these two elements, and I thought, ""Well, for the first part we're training, so we should wear sweatsuits — Oh! Let's put 'Stunt Trainee' on the back of the sweatsuits. That's for the training."" But for the second part, I wanted something really visually striking — ""I know! I'll dress as Neo from 'The Matrix.'""(Laughter)So I went to Haight Street. I bought some beautiful knee-high, buckle boots. I found a long, flowing coat on eBay. I got sunglasses, which I had to wear contact lenses in order to wear. The day of the experiment shoot comes up, and I step out of my car in this costume, and my crew takes a look at me ... and start suppressing their church giggles. They're like, ""(Laugh sound)."" And I feel two distinct things at this moment. I feel total embarrassment over the fact that it's so nakedly clear to my crew that I'm completely into wearing this costume.(Laughter)But the producer in my mind reminds myself that in the high-speed shot in slow-mo, that flowing coat is going to look beautiful behind me.(Laughter)Five years into the ""MythBusters"" run, we got invited to appear at San Diego Comic-Con. I'd known about Comic-Con for years and never had time to go. This was the big leagues — this was costuming mecca. People fly in from all over the world to show their amazing creations on the floor in San Diego. And I wanted to participate. I decided that I would put together an elaborate costume that covered me completely, and I would walk the floor of San Diego Comic-Con anonymously. The costume I chose? Hellboy. That's not my costume, that's actually Hellboy.(Laughter)But I spent months assembling the most screen-accurate Hellboy costume I could, from the boots to the belt to the pants to the right hand of doom. I found a guy who made a prosthetic Hellboy head and chest and I put them on. I even had contact lenses made in my prescription. I wore it onto the floor at Comic-Con and I can't even tell you how balls hot it was in that costume.(Laughter)Sweating! I should've remembered this. I'm sweating buckets and the contact lenses hurt my eyes, and none of it matters because I'm totally in love.(Laughter)Not just with the process of putting on this costume and walking the floor, but also with the community of other costumers. It's not called costuming at Cons, it's called ""cosplay."" Now ostensibly, cosplay means people who dress up as their favorite characters from film and television and especially anime, but it is so much more than that. These aren't just people who find a costume and put it on — they mash them up. They bend them to their will. They change them to be the characters they want to be in those productions. They're super clever and genius. They let their freak flag fly and it's beautiful.(Laughter)But more than that, they rehearse their costumes. At Comic-Con or any other Con, you don't just take pictures of people walking around. You go up and say, ""Hey, I like your costume, can I take your picture?"" And then you give them time to get into their pose. They've worked hard on their pose to make their costume look great for your camera. And it's so beautiful to watch. And I take this to heart. At subsequent Cons, I learn Heath Ledger's shambling walk as the Joker from ""The Dark Knight."" I learn how to be a scary Ringwraith from ""Lord of the Rings,"" and I actually frighten some children. I learned that ""hrr hrr hrr"" — that head laugh that Chewbacca does.And then I dressed up as No-Face from ""Spirited Away."" If you don't know about ""Spirited Away"" and its director, Hayao Miyazaki, first of all, you're welcome.(Laughter)This is a masterpiece, and one of my all-time favorite films. It's about a young girl named Chihiro who gets lost in the spirit world in an abandoned Japanese theme park. And she finds her way back out again with the help of a couple of friends she makes — a captured dragon named Haku and a lonely demon named No-Face. No-Face is lonely and he wants to make friends, and he thinks the way to do it is by luring them to him and producing gold in his hand. But this doesn't go very well, and so he ends up going on kind of a rampage until Chihiro saves him, rescues him.So I put together a No-Face costume, and I wore it on the floor at Comic-Con. And I very carefully practiced No-Face's gestures. I resolved I would not speak in this costume at all. When people asked to take my picture, I would nod and I would shyly stand next to them. They would take the picture and then I would secret out from behind my robe a chocolate gold coin. And at the end of the photo process, I'd make it appear for them. Ah, ah ah! — like that.And people were freaking out. ""Holy crap! Gold from No-Face! Oh my god, this is so cool!"" And I'm feeling and I'm walking the floor and it's fantastic. And about 15 minutes in something happens. Somebody grabs my hand, and they put a coin back into it. And I think maybe they're giving me a coin as a return gift, but no, this is one of the coins that I'd given away. I don't know why. And I keep on going, I take some more pictures. And then it happens again. Understand, I can't see anything inside this costume. I can see through the mouth — I can see people's shoes. I can hear what they're saying and I can see their feet. But the third time someone gives me back a coin, I want to know what's going on. So I sort of tilt my head back to get a better view, and what I see is someone walking away from me going like this. And then it hits me: it's bad luck to take gold from No-Face. In the film ""Spirited Away,"" bad luck befalls those who take gold from No-Face.This isn't a performer-audience relationship; this is cosplay. We are, all of us on that floor, injecting ourselves into a narrative that meant something to us. And we're making it our own. We're connecting with something important inside of us. And the costumes are how we reveal ourselves to each other.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_savage_my_love_letter_to_cosplay
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"Imagine you are a part of a crew of astronauts traveling to Mars or some distant planet. The travel time could take a year or even longer. The space on board and the resources would be limited. So you and the crew would have to figure out how to produce food with minimal inputs. What if you could bring with you just a few packets of seeds, and grow crops in a matter of hours? And what if those crops would then make more seeds, enabling you to feed the entire crew with just those few packets of seeds for the duration of the trip?Well, the scientists at NASA actually figured out a way to do this. What they came up with was actually quite interesting. It involved microorganisms, which are single-celled organisms. And they also used hydrogen from water. The types of microbes that they used were called hydrogenotrophs, and with these hydrogenotrophs, you can create a virtuous carbon cycle that would sustain life onboard a spacecraft. Astronauts would breathe out carbon dioxide, that carbon dioxide would then be captured by the microbes and converted into a nutritious, carbon-rich crop. The astronauts would then eat that carbon-rich crop and exhale the carbon out in the form of carbon dioxide, which would then be captured by the microbes, to create a nutritious crop, which then would be exhaled in the form of carbon dioxide by the astronauts. So in this way, a closed-loop carbon cycle is created.So why is this important? We need carbon to survive as humans, and we get our carbon from food. On a long space journey, you simply wouldn't be able to pick up any carbon along the way, so you'd have to figure out how to recycle it on board.This is a clever solution, right? But the thing is, that research didn't really go anywhere. We haven't yet gone to Mars. We haven't yet gone to another planet. And this was actually done in the '60s and '70s. So a colleague of mine, Dr. John Reed, and I, were interested, actually, in carbon recycling here on Earth. We wanted to come up with technical solutions to address climate change. And we discovered this research by reading some papers published in the '60s — 1967 and later — articles about this work. And we thought it was a really good idea. So we said, well, Earth is actually like a spaceship. We have limited space and limited resources, and on Earth, we really do need to figure out how to recycle our carbon better.So we had the idea, can we take some of these NASA-type ideas and apply them to our carbon problem here on Earth? Could we cultivate these NASA-type microbes in order to make valuable products here on Earth? We started a company to do it. And in that company, we discovered that these hydrogenotrophs — which I'll actually call nature's supercharged carbon recyclers — we found that they are a powerful class of microbes that had been largely overlooked and understudied, and that they could make some really valuable products.So we began cultivating these products, these microbes, in our lab. We found that we can make essential amino acids from carbon dioxide using these microbes. And we even made a protein-rich meal that has an amino acid profile similar to what you might find in some animal proteins. We began cultivating them even further, and we found that we can make oil. Oils are used to manufacture many products. We made an oil that was similar to a citrus oil, which can be used for flavoring and for fragrances, but it also can be used as a biodegradable cleaner or even as a jet fuel. And we made an oil that's similar to palm oil. Palm oil is used to manufacture a wide range of consumer and industrial goods.We began working with manufacturers to scale up this technology, and we're currently working with them to bring some of these products to market. We believe this type of technology can indeed help us profitably recycle carbon dioxide into valuable products — something that's beneficial for the planet but also beneficial for business. That's what we're doing today. But tomorrow, this type of technology and using these types of microbes actually could help us do something even greater if we take it to the next level. We believe that this type of technology can actually help us address an issue with agriculture and allow us to create a type of agriculture that's sustainable, that will allow us to scale to meet the demands of tomorrow.And why might we need a sustainable agriculture? Well, actually, it is estimated that the population will reach about 10 billion by 2050, and we're projecting that we will need to increase food production by 70 percent. In addition, we will need many more resources and raw materials to make consumer goods and industrial goods. So how will we scale to meet that demand?Well, modern agriculture simply cannot sustainably scale to meet that demand. There are a number of reasons why. One of them is that modern agriculture is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. In fact, it emits more greenhouse gases than our cars, our trucks, our planes and our trains combined. Another reason is that modern ag simply takes up a whole lot of land. We have cleared 19.4 million square miles for crops and livestock. What does that look like? Well, that's roughly the size of South America and Africa combined.Let me give you a specific example. In Indonesia, an amount of virgin rainforest was cleared totaling the size of approximately Ireland, between 2000 and 2012. Just think of all of the species, the diversity, that was removed in the process, whether plant life, insects or animal life. And a natural carbon sink was also removed.So let me make this real for you. This clearing happened primarily to make room for palm plantations. And as I mentioned before, palm oil is used to manufacture many products. In fact, it is estimated that over 50 percent of consumer products are manufactured using palm oil. And that includes things like ice cream, cookies ... It includes cooking oils. It also includes detergents, lotions, soaps. You and I both probably have numerous items in our kitchens and our bathrooms that were manufactured using palm oil. So you and I are direct beneficiaries of removed rainforests.Modern ag has some problems, and we need solutions if we want to scale sustainably. I believe that microbes can be a part of the answer — specifically, these supercharged carbon recyclers. These supercharged carbon recyclers, like plants, serve as the natural recyclers in their ecosystems where they thrive. And they thrive in exotic places on Earth, like hydrothermal vents and hot springs. In those ecosystems, they take carbon and recycle it into the nutrients needed for those ecosystems. And they're rich in nutrients, such as oils and proteins, minerals and carbohydrates.And actually, microbes are already an integral part of our everyday lives. If you enjoy a glass of pinot noir on a Friday night, after a long, hard work week, then you are enjoying a product of microbes. If you enjoy a beer from your local microbrewery — a product of microbes. Or bread, or cheese, or yogurt. These are all products of microbes. But the beauty and power associated with these supercharged carbon recyclers lies in the fact that they can actually produce in a matter of hours versus months. That means we can make crops much faster than we're making them today. They grow in the dark, so they can grow in any season and in any geography and any location. They can grow in containers that require minimal space. And we can get to a type of vertical agriculture. Instead of our traditional horizontal agriculture that requires so much land, we can scale vertically, and as a result produce much more product per area.If we implement this type of approach and use these carbon recyclers, then we wouldn't have to remove any more rainforests to make the food and the goods that we consume. Because, at a large scale, you can actually make 10,000 times more output per land area than you could — for instance, if you used soybeans — if you planted soybeans on that same area of land over a period of a year. Ten thousand times over a period of a year. So this is what I mean by a new type of agriculture. And this is what I mean by developing a system that allows us to sustainably scale to meet the demands of 10 billion.And what would be the products of this new type of agriculture? Well, we've already made a protein meal, so you can imagine something similar to a soybean meal, or even cornmeal, or wheat flour. We've already made oils, so you can imagine something similar to coconut oil or olive oil or soybean oil. So this type of crop can actually produce the nutrients that would give us pasta and bread, cakes, nutritional items of many sorts. Furthermore, since oil is used to manufacture multiple other goods, industrial products and consumer products, you can imagine being able to make detergents, soaps, lotions, etc., using these types of crops.Not only are we running out of space, but if we continue to operate under the status quo with modern agriculture, we run the risk of robbing our progeny of a beautiful planet. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can imagine a future of abundance. Let us create systems that keep planet Earth, our spaceship, not only from not crashing, but let us also develop systems and ways of living that will be beneficial to the lives of ourselves and the 10 billion that will be on this planet by 2050.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_dyson_a_forgotten_space_age_technology_could_change_how_we_grow_food
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"So when I decided to create an art piece in Manshiyat Naser, the neighborhood of the Cairo garbage collectors in Egypt, I never thought this project would be the most amazing human experience that I would ever live. As an artist, I had this humanist intention of beautifying a poor and neglected neighborhood by bringing art to it and hopefully shining light on this isolated community.The first time I heard about this Christian Coptic community was in 2009 when the Egyptian authorities under the regime of Hosni Mubarak decided to slaughter 300,000 pigs using the pretext of H1N1 virus. Originally, they are pig breeders. Their pigs and other animals are fed with the organic waste that they collect on a daily basis. This event killed their livelihood. The first time I entered Manshiyat Naser, it felt like a maze. I was looking for the St. Simon Monastery on the top of the Muqattam Mountain. So you go right, then straight, then right again, then left to reach all the way to the top. But to reach there, you must dodge between the trucks overpacked with garbage and slalom between the tuk-tuks, the fastest vehicle to move around in the neighborhood. The smell of the garbage unloaded from those trucks was intense, and the noise of the traffic was loud and overbearing. Add to it the din created by the crushers in those warehouses along the way. From outside it looks chaotic, but everything is perfectly organized.The Zaraeeb, that’s how they call themselves, which means the pig breeders, have been collecting the garbage of Cairo and sorting it in their own neighborhood for decades. They have developed one of the most efficient and highly profitable systems on a global level. Still, the place is perceived as dirty, marginalized and segregated because of their association with the trash. So my initial idea was to create an anamorphic piece, a piece that you can only see from one vantage point. I wanted to challenge myself artistically by painting over several buildings and having it only fully visible from one point on the Muqattam Mountain. The Muqattam Mountain is the pride of the community. This is where they built the St. Simon Monastery, a 10,000-seat cave church that they carved into the mountain itself.So, the first time I stood on top of the mountain and I looked at the neighborhood, I asked myself, how on earth will I convince all those owners to let me paint on their buildings? And then Magd came. Magd is a guide from the Church. He told me the only person I needed to convince was Father Samaan, who is the leader of the community. But to convince Father Samaan, I needed to convince Mario, who is a Polish artist who moved to Cairo 20 years ago and who created all the artwork of the Cave Church. I am really grateful to Mario. He was the key of the project. He managed to get me a meeting with Father Samaan, and surprisingly, he loved the idea. He asked me about where I painted before and how I will make it happen. And he was mainly concerned by what I was going to write.In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of Arabic calligraphy. I make sure those messages are relevant to the place where I am painting but have this universal dimension, so anybody around the world can relate to it.So for Manshiyat Naser, I decided to write in Arabic the words of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, a Coptic bishop from the third century, who said: (Arabic), which means in English, ""Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first.""It was really important for me that the community felt connected to the words. And for me this quote was perfectly reflecting the spirit of the project.So Father Samaan blessed the project, and his approval brought all the residents on board. Hundreds of liters of paint, a dozen blue manual lifts, several trips back and forth to Cairo, a strong and solid team from France, North Africa, Middle East and the US, and after a year of planning and logistics, there we are, my team and some members from the local community creating a piece that will spread over 50 buildings, some filling up the space of the calligraphy that I trace with colors. Here some blue, there some yellow, there some orange. Some others carrying some sand bags and putting them on the top of the buildings to hold those manual lifts, and some others assembling and disassembling those same lifts and moving them around the different buildings.At the beginning of the project, I numbered all those buildings on my sketch, and there was no real interaction with the community. People didn’t get the point of all this. But fast enough, those building numbers became family names.The first building was the house of Uncle Ibrahim. Uncle Ibrahim is such an enthusiastic person. He was always singing and making jokes, and his daughters and sons saved me from his bull who wanted to attack me on the fourth floor.(Laughter)Actually, the bull saw me from the window and came out on the balcony.(Laughter)Yeah.Uncle Ibrahim was always hanging out on the balcony and talking to me while I was painting. I remember him saying that he didn’t go to the mountain for 10 years, and that he never takes a day off. He said that if he stopped working, who will stop the garbage? But surprisingly, at the end of the project, he came all the way to the mountain to look at the piece. He was really proud to see his house painted, and he said that this project was a project of peace and — sorry —(Applause)Thank you.He said that it was a project of peace and unity and that it brought people together.So his perception towards the project changed, and my perception towards the community changed also, and towards what they do. All the garbage that everybody is disgusted by is not theirs. They just work out of it. Actually, they don’t live in the garbage. They live from the garbage. So I started doubting myself and wondering what was the real purpose of this whole project? It was not about beautifying a place by bringing art to it. It was about switching perception and opening a dialogue on the connection that we have with communities that we don’t know. So day after day, the calligraphy circle was taking shape, and we were always excited to go back on the mountain to look at the piece. And standing exactly at this point every day made my realize the symbolism behind this anamorphic piece. If you want to see the real image of somebody, maybe you should change your angle.There was doubts and difficulties, like fears and stress. It wasn't simple to work in such environments, sometimes having pigs under you while you paint or climbing a stack of garbage to reach a lift. But we all got over the fear of the heights, the swinging lifts, the strength of the smell and also the stress of not finishing on time.But the kindness of all those people made us forget everything. The building number 3 was the house of Uncle Bakheet and Aunty Fareeda. In Egyptian, they have this expression that says, ""Ahsen Nas,"" which means ""the best people."" They were the best people. We used to take our break in front of their houses, and all the kids of the neighborhood used to join us. I was impressed and amazed by the kids of Manshiyat Naser. For the first few days, they were always refusing anything we were offering them, even a snack or a drink. So I asked Aunty Fareeda, ""Why is that?"" And she told me they teach their kids to refuse anything from somebody that they don't know because maybe this person needs it more than they do.So at this exact point I realized actually the Zaraeeb community was the ideal context to raise the topic of perception. We need to question our level of misconception and judgment we can have as a society upon communities based on their differences. I remember how we got delayed on Uncle Ibrahim's house when his pigs that are bred on the rooftop were eating the sand bags that hold the lifts.(Laughter)The house of Uncle Bakheet and Aunty Fareeda was this kind of meeting point. Everybody used to gather there. I think this is what Uncle Ibrahim meant when he said that was a project of peace and unity, because I really felt that people were coming together. Everyone was greeting us with a smile, offering us a drink or inviting us into their own house for lunch. Sometime, you are at the first level of a building, and somebody opens his window and offers you some tea. And then the same thing happens on the second floor. And you keep going all the way to the top.(Laughter)(Applause)I think I never drink as much tea as I did in Egypt.(Laughter)And to be honest with you, we could have finished earlier, but I think it took us three weeks because of all those tea breaks.(Laughter)In Egypt, they have another expression, which is ""Nawartouna,"" which means, ""You brought light to us."" In Manshiyat Naser they were always telling us this. The calligraphy, actually — I used a white glow-in-the-dark paint for the calligraphy so at the end of the project, we rented some black light projectors and lit up the whole neighborhood, surprising everybody around. We wanted to tell them that they are the ones who brought light to us.(Applause)The Zaraeeb community are strong, honest, hard workers, and they know their value. The people of Cairo call them ""the Zabaleen,"" which means ""the people of the garbage,"" but ironically, the people of Manshiyat Naser call the people of Cairo the Zabaleen. They say, they are the ones who produce the garbage, not them.(Laughter)(Applause)The goal was to leave something to this community, but I feel that they are the ones who left something in our lives. You know, the art project was just a pretext for this amazing human experience. The art piece at some point will disappear, vanish, and actually there is somebody who is building a second floor in front of Uncle Ibrahim's house, so it's covering part of the painting, so I might need to go back and paint over it.(Laughter)It was about the experience, about the story, about the moment.From the streets of the neighborhood, the painting appears in fragments, isolated from one another, standing alone. But connected with the sign of calligraphy that today reveals the powerful message that we should all think about before we want to judge somebody.Anyone who wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/el_seed_a_project_of_peace_painted_across_50_buildings
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"What do you do if you had to figure out the information behind 11.5 million documents, verify it and make sense of it? That was a challenge that a group of journalists had to face late last year. An anonymous person calling himself John Doe had somehow managed to copy nearly 40 years of records of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. This is one of many firms around the world that specialize in setting up accounts in offshore tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, for rich and powerful people who like to keep secrets.John Doe had managed to copy every spreadsheet from this firm, every client file, every email, from 1977 to the present day. It represented the biggest cache of inside information into the tax haven system that anyone had ever seen. But it also presented a gigantic challenge to investigative journalism. Think about it: 11.5 million documents, containing the secrets of people from more than 200 different countries. Where do you start with such a vast resource? Where do you even begin to tell a story that can trail off into every corner of the globe, and that can affect almost any person in any language, sometimes in ways they don't even know yet.John Doe had given the information to two journalists at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. He said he was motivated by — and I quote — ""The scale of the injustice that the documents would reveal."" But one user alone can never make sense of such a vast amount of information. So the Süddeutsche Zeitung reached out to my organization in Washington, DC, The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. We decided to do something that was the very opposite of everything we'd been taught to do as journalists: share.(Laughter)By nature, investigative reporters are lone wolves. We fiercely guard our secrets, at times even from our editors, because we know that the moment we tell them what we have, they'll want that story right away. And to be frank, when you get a good story, you like to keep the glory to yourself.But there's no doubt that we live in a shrinking world, and that the media has largely been slow to wake up to this. The issues we report on are more and more transnational. Giant corporations operate on a global level. Environmental and health crises are global. So, too, are financial flows and financial crises. So it seems staggering that journalism has been so late to cover stories in a truly global way. And it also seems staggering that journalism has been so slow to wake up to the possibilities that technology brings, rather than being frightened of it. The reason journalists are scared of technology is this: the profession's largest institutions are going through tough times because of the changing way that people are consuming news. The advertising business models that have sustained reporting are broken. And this has plunged journalism into crisis, forcing those institutions to reexamine how they function.But where there is crisis, there is also opportunity. The first challenge presented by what would eventually become known as the Panama Papers was to make the documents searchable and readable. There were nearly five million emails, two million PDFs that needed to be scanned and indexed, and millions more files and other kinds of documents. They all needed to be housed in a safe and secure location in the cloud. We next invited reporters to have a look at the documents. In all, reporters from more than 100 media organizations in 76 countries — from the BBC in Britain to Le Monde newspaper in France to the Asahi Shimbun in Japan. ""Native eyes on native names,"" we called it, the idea being, who best to tell you who was important to Nigeria than a Nigerian journalist? Who best in Canada than a Canadian? There were only two rules for everyone who was invited: we all agreed to share everything that we found with everybody else, and we all agreed to publish together on the same day.We chose our media partners based on trust that had been built up through previous smaller collaborations and also from leads that jumped out from the documents. Over the next few months, my small nonprofit organization of less than 20 people was joined by more than 350 other reporters from 25 language groups. The biggest information leak in history had now spawned the biggest journalism collaboration in history: 376 sets of native eyes doing what journalists normally never do, working shoulder to shoulder, sharing information, but telling no one. For it became clear at this point that in order to make the biggest kind of noise, we first needed the biggest kind of silence.To manage the project over the many months it would take, we built a secure virtual newsroom. We used encrypted communication systems, and we built a specially designed search engine. Inside the virtual newsroom, the reporters could gather around the themes that were emerging from the documents. Those interested in blood diamonds or exotic art, for instance, could share information about how the offshore world was being used to hide the trade in both of those commodities. Those interested in sport could share information about how famous sports stars were putting their image rights into offshore companies, thereby likely avoiding taxes in the countries where they plied their trade.But perhaps most exciting of all were the number of world leaders and elect politicians that were emerging from the documents — figures like Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine, close associates of Vladimir Putin in Russia and the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who is linked through his late father, Ian Cameron.Buried in the documents were secret offshore entities, such as Wintris Inc., a company in the British Virgin Islands that had actually belonged to the sitting Icelandic prime minister. I like to refer to Johannes Kristjansson, the Icelandic reporter we invited to join the project, as the loneliest man in the world. For nine months, he refused paid work and lived off the earnings of his wife. He pasted tarps over the windows of his home to prevent prying eyes during the long Icelandic winter. And he soon ran out of excuses to explain his many absences, as he worked red-eyed, night after night, month after month. In all that time, he sat on information that would eventually bring down the leader of his country.Now, when you're an investigative reporter and you make an amazing discovery, such as your prime minster can be linked to a secret offshore company, that that company has a financial interest in Icelandic banks — the very issue he's been elected on — well, your instinct is to scream out very loud. Instead, as one of the few people that he could speak to, Johannes and I shared a kind of gallows humor. ""Wintris is coming,"" he used to say.(Laughter)(Applause)We were big fans of ""Game of Thrones.""When reporters like Johannes wanted to scream, they did so inside the virtual newsroom, and then they turned those screams into stories by going outside the documents to court records, official company registers, and by eventually putting questions to those that we intended to name. Panama Papers actually allowed the reporters to look at the world through a different lens from everybody else.As we were researching the story, unconnected to us, a major political bribery scandal happened in Brazil. A new leader was elected in Argentina. The FBI began to indict officials at FIFA, the organization that controls the world of professional soccer. The Panama Papers actually had unique insights into each one of these unfolding events. So you can imagine the pressure and the ego dramas that could have ruined what we were trying to do. Any of one of these journalists, they could have broken the pact. But they didn't. And on April 3 this year, at exactly 8pm German time, we published simultaneously in 76 countries.(Applause)The Panama Papers quickly became one of the biggest stories of the year. This is the scene in Iceland the day after we published. It was the first of many protests. The Icelandic prime minister had to resign. It was a first of many resignations. We spotlighted many famous people such as Lionel Messi, the most famous soccer player in the world. And there were some unintended consequences. These alleged members of a Mexican drug cartel were arrested after we published details about their hideout. They'd been using the address to register their offshore company.(Laughter)There's a kind of irony in what we've been able to do. The technology — the Internet — that has broken the business model is allowing us to reinvent journalism itself. And this dynamic is producing unprecedented levels of transparency and impact. We showed how a group of journalists can effect change across the world by applying new methods and old-fashioned journalism techniques to vast amounts of leaked information. We put all-important context around what was given to us by John Doe. And by sharing resources, we were able to dig deep — much deeper and longer than most media organizations allow these days, because of financial concerns.Now, it was a big risk, and it wouldn't work for every story, but we showed with the Panama Papers that you can write about any country from just about anywhere, and then choose your preferred battleground to defend your work. Try obtaining a court injunction that would prevent the telling of a story in 76 different countries. Try stopping the inevitable.Shortly after we published, I got a three-word text from Johannes: ""Wintris has arrived.""(Laughter)It had arrived and so, too, perhaps has a new era for journalism.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Gerard, thank you.I guess you're going to send that applause to the 350 journalists who worked with you, right?Now, a couple of questions I would like to ask. The first one is, you'd been working in secrecy for over a year with 350-something colleagues from all over the world — was there ever a moment when you thought that the leak may be leaked, that the collaboration may just be broken by somebody publishing a story? Or somebody not in the group releasing some information that they got to know?Gerard Ryle: We had a series of crises along the way, including when something major was happening in the world, the journalists from that country wanted to publish right away. We had to calm them down. Probably the biggest crisis we had was a week before publication. We'd sent a series of questions to the associates of Vladimir Putin, but instead of responding, the Kremlin actually held a press conference and denounced us, and denounced the whole thing as being, I guess, a plot from the West. At that point, Putin thought it was just about him. And, of course, a lot of editors around the world were very nervous about this. They thought the story was going to get out. You can imagine the amount of time they'd spent, the amount of resources, money spent on this. So I had to basically spend the last week calming everyone down, a bit like a general, where you're holding your troops back: ""Calm, remain calm."" And then eventually, of course, they all did.BG: And then a couple weeks ago or so, you released a lot of the documents as an open database for everybody to search via keyword, essentially.GR: We very much believe that the basic information about the offshore world should be made public. Now, we didn't publish the underlying documents of the journalists we're working with. But the basic information such as the name of a person, what their offshore company was and the name of that company, is now all available online. In fact, the biggest resource of its kind basically is out there nowBG: Gerard, thank you for the work you do.GR: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gerard_ryle_how_the_panama_papers_journalists_broke_the_biggest_leak_in_history
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"Hello, everybody. I brought with me today a baby diaper. You'll see why in a second. Baby diapers have interesting properties. They can swell enormously when you add water to them, an experiment done by millions of kids every day.(Laughter)But the reason why is that they're designed in a very clever way. They're made out of a thing called a swellable material. It's a special kind of material that, when you add water, it will swell up enormously, maybe a thousand times in volume. And this is a very useful, industrial kind of polymer. But what we're trying to do in my group at MIT is to figure out if we can do something similar to the brain. Can we make it bigger, big enough that you can peer inside and see all the tiny building blocks, the biomolecules, how they're organized in three dimensions, the structure, the ground truth structure of the brain, if you will? If we could get that, maybe we could have a better understanding of how the brain is organized to yield thoughts and emotions and actions and sensations. Maybe we could try to pinpoint the exact changes in the brain that result in diseases, diseases like Alzheimer's and epilepsy and Parkinson's, for which there are few treatments, much less cures, and for which, very often, we don't know the cause or the origins and what's really causing them to occur. Now, our group at MIT is trying to take a different point of view from the way neuroscience has been done over the last hundred years. We're designers. We're inventors. We're trying to figure out how to build technologies that let us look at and repair the brain. And the reason is, the brain is incredibly, incredibly complicated.So what we've learned over the first century of neuroscience is that the brain is a very complicated network, made out of very specialized cells called neurons with very complex geometries, and electrical currents will flow through these complexly shaped neurons. Furthermore, neurons are connected in networks. They're connected by little junctions called synapses that exchange chemicals and allow the neurons to talk to each other. The density of the brain is incredible. In a cubic millimeter of your brain, there are about 100,000 of these neurons and maybe a billion of those connections. But it's worse. So, if you could zoom in to a neuron, and, of course, this is just our artist's rendition of it. What you would see are thousands and thousands of kinds of biomolecules, little nanoscale machines organized in complex, 3D patterns, and together they mediate those electrical pulses, those chemical exchanges that allow neurons to work together to generate things like thoughts and feelings and so forth.Now, we don't know how the neurons in the brain are organized to form networks, and we don't know how the biomolecules are organized within neurons to form these complex, organized machines. If we really want to understand this, we're going to need new technologies. But if we could get such maps, if we could look at the organization of molecules and neurons and neurons and networks, maybe we could really understand how the brain conducts information from sensory regions, mixes it with emotion and feeling, and generates our decisions and actions. Maybe we could pinpoint the exact set of molecular changes that occur in a brain disorder. And once we know how those molecules have changed, whether they've increased in number or changed in pattern, we could use those as targets for new drugs, for new ways of delivering energy into the brain in order to repair the brain computations that are afflicted in patients who suffer from brain disorders.We've all seen lots of different technologies over the last century to try to confront this. I think we've all seen brain scans taken using MRI machines. These, of course, have the great power that they are noninvasive, they can be used on living human subjects. But also, they're spatially crude. Each of these blobs that you see, or voxels, as they're called, can contain millions and millions of neurons. So it's not at the level of resolution where it can pinpoint the molecular changes that occur or the changes in the wiring of these networks that contributes to our ability to be conscious and powerful beings.At the other extreme, you have microscopes. Microscopes, of course, will use light to look at little tiny things. For centuries, they've been used to look at things like bacteria. For neuroscience, microscopes are actually how neurons were discovered in the first place, about 130 years ago. But light is fundamentally limited. You can't see individual molecules with a regular old microscope. You can't look at these tiny connections. So if we want to make our ability to see the brain more powerful, to get down to the ground truth structure, we're going to need to have even better technologies.My group, a couple years ago, started thinking: Why don't we do the opposite? If it's so darn complicated to zoom in to the brain, why can't we make the brain bigger? It initially started with two grad students in my group, Fei Chen and Paul Tillberg. Now many others in my group are helping with this process. We decided to try to figure out if we could take polymers, like the stuff in the baby diaper, and install it physically within the brain. If we could do it just right, and you add water, you can potentially blow the brain up to where you could distinguish those tiny biomolecules from each other. You would see those connections and get maps of the brain. This could potentially be quite dramatic.We brought a little demo here. We got some purified baby diaper material. It's much easier just to buy it off the Internet than to extract the few grains that actually occur in these diapers. I'm going to put just one teaspoon here of this purified polymer. And here we have some water. What we're going to do is see if this teaspoon of the baby diaper material can increase in size. You're going to see it increase in volume by about a thousandfold before your very eyes. I could pour much more of this in there, but I think you've got the idea that this is a very, very interesting molecule, and if can use it in the right way, we might be able to really zoom in on the brain in a way that you can't do with past technologies.OK. So a little bit of chemistry now. What's going on in the baby diaper polymer? If you could zoom in, it might look something like what you see on the screen. Polymers are chains of atoms arranged in long, thin lines. The chains are very tiny, about the width of a biomolecule, and these polymers are really dense. They're separated by distances that are around the size of a biomolecule. This is very good because we could potentially move everything apart in the brain. If we add water, what will happen is, this swellable material is going to absorb the water, the polymer chains will move apart from each other, and the entire material is going to become bigger. And because these chains are so tiny and spaced by biomolecular distances, we could potentially blow up the brain and make it big enough to see.Here's the mystery, then: How do we actually make these polymer chains inside the brain so we can move all the biomolecules apart? If we could do that, maybe we could get ground truth maps of the brain. We could look at the wiring. We can peer inside and see the molecules within. To explain this, we made some animations where we actually look at, in these artist renderings, what biomolecules might look like and how we might separate them. Step one: what we'd have to do, first of all, is attach every biomolecule, shown in brown here, to a little anchor, a little handle. We need to pull the molecules of the brain apart from each other, and to do that, we need to have a little handle that allows those polymers to bind to them and to exert their force.Now, if you just take baby diaper polymer and dump it on the brain, obviously, it's going to sit there on top. So we need to find a way to make the polymers inside. And this is where we're really lucky. It turns out, you can get the building blocks, monomers, as they're called, and if you let them go into the brain and then trigger the chemical reactions, you can get them to form those long chains, right there inside the brain tissue. They're going to wind their way around biomolecules and between biomolecules, forming those complex webs that will allow you, eventually, to pull apart the molecules from each other. And every time one of those little handles is around, the polymer will bind to the handle, and that's exactly what we need in order to pull the molecules apart from each other.All right, the moment of truth. We have to treat this specimen with a chemical to kind of loosen up all the molecules from each other, and then, when we add water, that swellable material is going to start absorbing the water, the polymer chains will move apart, but now, the biomolecules will come along for the ride. And much like drawing a picture on a balloon, and then you blow up the balloon, the image is the same, but the ink particles have moved away from each other. And that's what we've been able to do now, but in three dimensions.There's one last trick. As you can see here, we've color-coded all the biomolecules brown. That's because they all kind of look the same. Biomolecules are made out of the same atoms, but just in different orders. So we need one last thing in order to make them visible. We have to bring in little tags, with glowing dyes that will distinguish them. So one kind of biomolecule might get a blue color. Another kind of biomolecule might get a red color. And so forth. And that's the final step. Now we can look at something like a brain and look at the individual molecules, because we've moved them far apart enough from each other that we can tell them apart.So the hope here is that we can make the invisible visible. We can turn things that might seem small and obscure and blow them up until they're like constellations of information about life. Here's an actual video of what it might look like. We have here a little brain in a dish — a little piece of a brain, actually. We've infused the polymer in, and now we're adding water. What you'll see is that, right before your eyes — this video is sped up about sixtyfold — this little piece of brain tissue is going to grow. It can increase by a hundredfold or even more in volume. And the cool part is, because those polymers are so tiny, we're separating biomolecules evenly from each other. It's a smooth expansion. We're not losing the configuration of the information. We're just making it easier to see.So now we can take actual brain circuitry — here's a piece of the brain involved with, for example, memory — and we can zoom in. We can start to actually look at how circuits are configured. Maybe someday we could read out a memory. Maybe we could actually look at how circuits are configured to process emotions, how the actual wiring of our brain is organized in order to make us who we are. And of course, we can pinpoint, hopefully, the actual problems in the brain at a molecular level. What if we could actually look into cells in the brain and figure out, wow, here are the 17 molecules that have altered in this brain tissue that has been undergoing epilepsy or changing in Parkinson's disease or otherwise being altered? If we get that systematic list of things that are going wrong, those become our therapeutic targets. We can build drugs that bind those. We can maybe aim energy at different parts of the brain in order to help people with Parkinson's or epilepsy or other conditions that affect over a billion people around the world.Now, something interesting has been happening. It turns out that throughout biomedicine, there are other problems that expansion might help with. This is an actual biopsy from a human breast cancer patient. It turns out that if you look at cancers, if you look at the immune system, if you look at aging, if you look at development — all these processes are involving large-scale biological systems. But of course, the problems begin with those little nanoscale molecules, the machines that make the cells and the organs in our body tick. So what we're trying to do now is to figure out if we can actually use this technology to map the building blocks of life in a wide variety of diseases. Can we actually pinpoint the molecular changes in a tumor so that we can actually go after it in a smart way and deliver drugs that might wipe out exactly the cells that we want to?You know, a lot of medicine is very high risk. Sometimes, it's even guesswork. My hope is we can actually turn what might be a high-risk moon shot into something that's more reliable. If you think about the original moon shot, where they actually landed on the moon, it was based on solid science. We understood gravity; we understood aerodynamics. We knew how to build rockets. The science risk was under control. It was still a great, great feat of engineering. But in medicine, we don't necessarily have all the laws. Do we have all the laws that are analogous to gravity, that are analogous to aerodynamics? I would argue that with technologies like the kinds I'm talking about today, maybe we can actually derive those. We can map the patterns that occur in living systems, and figure out how to overcome the diseases that plague us.You know, my wife and I have two young kids, and one of my hopes as a bioengineer is to make life better for them than it currently is for us. And my hope is, if we can turn biology and medicine from these high-risk endeavors that are governed by chance and luck, and make them things that we win by skill and hard work, then that would be a great advance.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_boyden_baby_diapers_inspired_this_new_way_to_study_the_brain
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"Imagine you're walking through a forest. I'm guessing you're thinking of a collection of trees, what we foresters call a stand, with their rugged stems and their beautiful crowns. Yes, trees are the foundation of forests, but a forest is much more than what you see, and today I want to change the way you think about forests. You see, underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it's a single organism. It might remind you of a sort of intelligence.How do I know this? Here's my story. I grew up in the forests of British Columbia. I used to lay on the forest floor and stare up at the tree crowns. They were giants. My grandfather was a giant, too. He was a horse logger, and he used to selectively cut cedar poles from the inland rainforest. Grandpa taught me about the quiet and cohesive ways of the woods, and how my family was knit into it. So I followed in grandpa's footsteps.He and I had this curiosity about forests, and my first big ""aha"" moment was at the outhouse by our lake. Our poor dog Jigs had slipped and fallen into the pit. So grandpa ran up with his shovel to rescue the poor dog. He was down there, swimming in the muck. But as grandpa dug through that forest floor, I became fascinated with the roots, and under that, what I learned later was the white mycelium and under that the red and yellow mineral horizons. Eventually, grandpa and I rescued the poor dog, but it was at that moment that I realized that that palette of roots and soil was really the foundation of the forest.And I wanted to know more. So I studied forestry. But soon I found myself working alongside the powerful people in charge of the commercial harvest. The extent of the clear-cutting was alarming, and I soon found myself conflicted by my part in it. Not only that, the spraying and hacking of the aspens and birches to make way for the more commercially valuable planted pines and firs was astounding. It seemed that nothing could stop this relentless industrial machine.So I went back to school, and I studied my other world. You see, scientists had just discovered in the laboratory in vitro that one pine seedling root could transmit carbon to another pine seedling root. But this was in the laboratory, and I wondered, could this happen in real forests? I thought yes. Trees in real forests might also share information below ground. But this was really controversial, and some people thought I was crazy, and I had a really hard time getting research funding. But I persevered, and I eventually conducted some experiments deep in the forest, 25 years ago. I grew 80 replicates of three species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar. I figured the birch and the fir would be connected in a belowground web, but not the cedar. It was in its own other world. And I gathered my apparatus, and I had no money, so I had to do it on the cheap. So I went to Canadian Tire —(Laughter)and I bought some plastic bags and duct tape and shade cloth, a timer, a paper suit, a respirator. And then I borrowed some high-tech stuff from my university: a Geiger counter, a scintillation counter, a mass spectrometer, microscopes. And then I got some really dangerous stuff: syringes full of radioactive carbon-14 carbon dioxide gas and some high pressure bottles of the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. But I was legally permitted.(Laughter)Oh, and I forgot some stuff, important stuff: the bug spray, the bear spray, the filters for my respirator. Oh well.The first day of the experiment, we got out to our plot and a grizzly bear and her cub chased us off. And I had no bear spray. But you know, this is how forest research in Canada goes.(Laughter)So I came back the next day, and mama grizzly and her cub were gone. So this time, we really got started, and I pulled on my white paper suit, I put on my respirator, and then I put the plastic bags over my trees. I got my giant syringes, and I injected the bags with my tracer isotope carbon dioxide gases, first the birch. I injected carbon-14, the radioactive gas, into the bag of birch. And then for fir, I injected the stable isotope carbon-13 carbon dioxide gas. I used two isotopes, because I was wondering whether there was two-way communication going on between these species. I got to the final bag, the 80th replicate, and all of a sudden mama grizzly showed up again. And she started to chase me, and I had my syringes above my head, and I was swatting the mosquitos, and I jumped into the truck, and I thought, ""This is why people do lab studies.""(Laughter)I waited an hour. I figured it would take this long for the trees to suck up the CO2 through photosynthesis, turn it into sugars, send it down into their roots, and maybe, I hypothesized, shuttle that carbon belowground to their neighbors. After the hour was up, I rolled down my window, and I checked for mama grizzly. Oh good, she's over there eating her huckleberries. So I got out of the truck and I got to work. I went to my first bag with the birch. I pulled the bag off. I ran my Geiger counter over its leaves. Kkhh! Perfect. The birch had taken up the radioactive gas. Then the moment of truth. I went over to the fir tree. I pulled off its bag. I ran the Geiger counter up its needles, and I heard the most beautiful sound. Kkhh! It was the sound of birch talking to fir, and birch was saying, ""Hey, can I help you?"" And fir was saying, ""Yeah, can you send me some of your carbon? Because somebody threw a shade cloth over me."" I went up to cedar, and I ran the Geiger counter over its leaves, and as I suspected, silence. Cedar was in its own world. It was not connected into the web interlinking birch and fir.I was so excited, I ran from plot to plot and I checked all 80 replicates. The evidence was clear. The C-13 and C-14 was showing me that paper birch and Douglas fir were in a lively two-way conversation. It turns out at that time of the year, in the summer, that birch was sending more carbon to fir than fir was sending back to birch, especially when the fir was shaded. And then in later experiments, we found the opposite, that fir was sending more carbon to birch than birch was sending to fir, and this was because the fir was still growing while the birch was leafless. So it turns out the two species were interdependent, like yin and yang.And at that moment, everything came into focus for me. I knew I had found something big, something that would change the way we look at how trees interact in forests, from not just competitors but to cooperators. And I had found solid evidence of this massive belowground communications network, the other world.Now, I truly hoped and believed that my discovery would change how we practice forestry, from clear-cutting and herbiciding to more holistic and sustainable methods, methods that were less expensive and more practical. What was I thinking? I'll come back to that.So how do we do science in complex systems like forests? Well, as forest scientists, we have to do our research in the forests, and that's really tough, as I've shown you. And we have to be really good at running from bears. But mostly, we have to persevere in spite of all the stuff stacked against us. And we have to follow our intuition and our experiences and ask really good questions. And then we've got to gather our data and then go verify. For me, I've conducted and published hundreds of experiments in the forest. Some of my oldest experimental plantations are now over 30 years old. You can check them out. That's how forest science works.So now I want to talk about the science. How were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating? Well, it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon but also nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and allele chemicals and hormones — information. And you know, I have to tell you, before me, scientists had thought that this belowground mutualistic symbiosis called a mycorrhiza was involved. Mycorrhiza literally means ""fungus root."" You see their reproductive organs when you walk through the forest. They're the mushrooms. The mushrooms, though, are just the tip of the iceberg, because coming out of those stems are fungal threads that form a mycelium, and that mycelium infects and colonizes the roots of all the trees and plants. And where the fungal cells interact with the root cells, there's a trade of carbon for nutrients, and that fungus gets those nutrients by growing through the soil and coating every soil particle. The web is so dense that there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single footstep. And not only that, that mycelium connects different individuals in the forest, individuals not only of the same species but between species, like birch and fir, and it works kind of like the Internet.You see, like all networks, mycorrhizal networks have nodes and links. We made this map by examining the short sequences of DNA of every tree and every fungal individual in a patch of Douglas fir forest. In this picture, the circles represent the Douglas fir, or the nodes, and the lines represent the interlinking fungal highways, or the links.The biggest, darkest nodes are the busiest nodes. We call those hub trees, or more fondly, mother trees, because it turns out that those hub trees nurture their young, the ones growing in the understory. And if you can see those yellow dots, those are the young seedlings that have established within the network of the old mother trees. In a single forest, a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees. And using our isotope tracers, we have found that mother trees will send their excess carbon through the mycorrhizal network to the understory seedlings, and we've associated this with increased seedling survival by four times.Now, we know we all favor our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub? So we set about an experiment, and we grew mother trees with kin and stranger's seedlings. And it turns out they do recognize their kin. Mother trees colonize their kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks. They send them more carbon below ground. They even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings. So we've used isotope tracing to trace carbon moving from an injured mother tree down her trunk into the mycorrhizal network and into her neighboring seedlings, not only carbon but also defense signals. And these two compounds have increased the resistance of those seedlings to future stresses. So trees talk.(Applause)Thank you.Through back and forth conversations, they increase the resilience of the whole community. It probably reminds you of our own social communities, and our families, well, at least some families.(Laughter)So let's come back to the initial point. Forests aren't simply collections of trees, they're complex systems with hubs and networks that overlap and connect trees and allow them to communicate, and they provide avenues for feedbacks and adaptation, and this makes the forest resilient. That's because there are many hub trees and many overlapping networks. But they're also vulnerable, vulnerable not only to natural disturbances like bark beetles that preferentially attack big old trees but high-grade logging and clear-cut logging. You see, you can take out one or two hub trees, but there comes a tipping point, because hub trees are not unlike rivets in an airplane. You can take out one or two and the plane still flies, but you take out one too many, or maybe that one holding on the wings, and the whole system collapses.So now how are you thinking about forests? Differently?(Audience) Yes.Cool. I'm glad.So, remember I said earlier that I hoped that my research, my discoveries would change the way we practice forestry. Well, I want to take a check on that 30 years later here in western Canada.This is about 100 kilometers to the west of us, just on the border of Banff National Park. That's a lot of clear-cuts. It's not so pristine. In 2014, the World Resources Institute reported that Canada in the past decade has had the highest forest disturbance rate of any country worldwide, and I bet you thought it was Brazil. In Canada, it's 3.6 percent per year. Now, by my estimation, that's about four times the rate that is sustainable.Now, massive disturbance at this scale is known to affect hydrological cycles, degrade wildlife habitat, and emit greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, which creates more disturbance and more tree diebacks.Not only that, we're continuing to plant one or two species and weed out the aspens and birches. These simplified forests lack complexity, and they're really vulnerable to infections and bugs. And as climate changes, this is creating a perfect storm for extreme events, like the massive mountain pine beetle outbreak that just swept across North America, or that megafire in the last couple months in Alberta.So I want to come back to my final question: instead of weakening our forests, how can we reinforce them and help them deal with climate change? Well, you know, the great thing about forests as complex systems is they have enormous capacity to self-heal. In our recent experiments, we found with patch-cutting and retention of hub trees and regeneration to a diversity of species and genes and genotypes that these mycorrhizal networks, they recover really rapidly. So with this in mind, I want to leave you with four simple solutions. And we can't kid ourselves that these are too complicated to act on.First, we all need to get out in the forest. We need to reestablish local involvement in our own forests. You see, most of our forests now are managed using a one-size-fits-all approach, but good forest stewardship requires knowledge of local conditions.Second, we need to save our old-growth forests. These are the repositories of genes and mother trees and mycorrhizal networks. So this means less cutting. I don't mean no cutting, but less cutting.And third, when we do cut, we need to save the legacies, the mother trees and networks, and the wood, the genes, so they can pass their wisdom onto the next generation of trees so they can withstand the future stresses coming down the road. We need to be conservationists.And finally, fourthly and finally, we need to regenerate our forests with a diversity of species and genotypes and structures by planting and allowing natural regeneration. We have to give Mother Nature the tools she needs to use her intelligence to self-heal. And we need to remember that forests aren't just a bunch of trees competing with each other, they're supercooperators.So back to Jigs. Jigs's fall into the outhouse showed me this other world, and it changed my view of forests. I hope today to have changed how you think about forests.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
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"So this is my niece. Her name is Yahli. She is nine months old. Her mum is a doctor, and her dad is a lawyer. By the time Yahli goes to college, the jobs her parents do are going to look dramatically different.In 2013, researchers at Oxford University did a study on the future of work. They concluded that almost one in every two jobs have a high risk of being automated by machines. Machine learning is the technology that's responsible for most of this disruption. It's the most powerful branch of artificial intelligence. It allows machines to learn from data and mimic some of the things that humans can do. My company, Kaggle, operates on the cutting edge of machine learning. We bring together hundreds of thousands of experts to solve important problems for industry and academia. This gives us a unique perspective on what machines can do, what they can't do and what jobs they might automate or threaten.Machine learning started making its way into industry in the early '90s. It started with relatively simple tasks. It started with things like assessing credit risk from loan applications, sorting the mail by reading handwritten characters from zip codes. Over the past few years, we have made dramatic breakthroughs. Machine learning is now capable of far, far more complex tasks. In 2012, Kaggle challenged its community to build an algorithm that could grade high-school essays. The winning algorithms were able to match the grades given by human teachers. Last year, we issued an even more difficult challenge. Can you take images of the eye and diagnose an eye disease called diabetic retinopathy? Again, the winning algorithms were able to match the diagnoses given by human ophthalmologists.Now, given the right data, machines are going to outperform humans at tasks like this. A teacher might read 10,000 essays over a 40-year career. An ophthalmologist might see 50,000 eyes. A machine can read millions of essays or see millions of eyes within minutes. We have no chance of competing against machines on frequent, high-volume tasks.But there are things we can do that machines can't do. Where machines have made very little progress is in tackling novel situations. They can't handle things they haven't seen many times before. The fundamental limitations of machine learning is that it needs to learn from large volumes of past data. Now, humans don't. We have the ability to connect seemingly disparate threads to solve problems we've never seen before.Percy Spencer was a physicist working on radar during World War II, when he noticed the magnetron was melting his chocolate bar. He was able to connect his understanding of electromagnetic radiation with his knowledge of cooking in order to invent — any guesses? — the microwave oven.Now, this is a particularly remarkable example of creativity. But this sort of cross-pollination happens for each of us in small ways thousands of times per day. Machines cannot compete with us when it comes to tackling novel situations, and this puts a fundamental limit on the human tasks that machines will automate.So what does this mean for the future of work? The future state of any single job lies in the answer to a single question: To what extent is that job reducible to frequent, high-volume tasks, and to what extent does it involve tackling novel situations? On frequent, high-volume tasks, machines are getting smarter and smarter. Today they grade essays. They diagnose certain diseases. Over coming years, they're going to conduct our audits, and they're going to read boilerplate from legal contracts. Accountants and lawyers are still needed. They're going to be needed for complex tax structuring, for pathbreaking litigation. But machines will shrink their ranks and make these jobs harder to come by.Now, as mentioned, machines are not making progress on novel situations. The copy behind a marketing campaign needs to grab consumers' attention. It has to stand out from the crowd. Business strategy means finding gaps in the market, things that nobody else is doing. It will be humans that are creating the copy behind our marketing campaigns, and it will be humans that are developing our business strategy.So Yahli, whatever you decide to do, let every day bring you a new challenge. If it does, then you will stay ahead of the machines.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_goldbloom_the_jobs_we_ll_lose_to_machines_and_the_ones_we_won_t
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"Imagine that you are a product designer. And you've designed a product, a new type of product, called the human immune system. You're pitching this product to a skeptical, strictly no-nonsense manager. Let's call him Bob. I think we all know at least one Bob, right? How would that go?Bob, I've got this incredible idea for a completely new type of personal health product. It's called the human immune system. I can see from your face that you're having some problems with this. Don't worry. I know it's very complicated. I don't want to take you through the gory details, I just want to tell you about some of the amazing features of this product. First of all, it cleverly uses redundancy by having millions of copies of each component — leukocytes, white blood cells — before they're actually needed, to create a massive buffer against the unexpected. And it cleverly leverages diversity by having not just leukocytes but B cells, T cells, natural killer cells, antibodies. The components don't really matter. The point is that together, this diversity of different approaches can cope with more or less anything that evolution has been able to throw up. And the design is completely modular. You have the surface barrier of the human skin, you have the very rapidly reacting innate immune system and then you have the highly targeted adaptive immune system. The point is, that if one system fails, another can take over, creating a virtually foolproof system.I can see I'm losing you, Bob, but stay with me, because here is the really killer feature. The product is completely adaptive. It's able to actually develop targeted antibodies to threats that it's never even met before. It actually also does this with incredible prudence, detecting and reacting to every tiny threat, and furthermore, remembering every previous threat, in case they are ever encountered again. What I'm pitching you today is actually not a stand-alone product. The product is embedded in the larger system of the human body, and it works in complete harmony with that system, to create this unprecedented level of biological protection. So Bob, just tell me honestly, what do you think of my product?And Bob may say something like, I sincerely appreciate the effort and passion that have gone into your presentation, blah blah blah —(Laughter)But honestly, it's total nonsense. You seem to be saying that the key selling points of your product are that it is inefficient and complex. Didn't they teach you 80-20? And furthermore, you're saying that this product is siloed. It overreacts, makes things up as it goes along and is actually designed for somebody else's benefit. I'm sorry to break it to you, but I don't think this one is a winner.If we went with Bob's philosophy, I think we'd actually end up with a more efficient immune system. And efficiency is always important in the short term. Less complex, more efficient, more bang for the buck. Who could say no to that? Unfortunately, there's one very tiny problem, and that is that the user of this product, you or I, would probably die within one week of the next winter, when we encountered a new strain of the influenza virus.I first became interested in biology and business, and longevity and resilience, when I was asked a very unusual question by the CEO of a global tech company. And the question was: What do we have to do to make sure that our company lasts 100 years? A seemingly innocent question, but actually, it's a little trickier than you might think, considering that the average US public company now can expect a life span of only 30 years. That is less than half of the life span that its employees can expect to enjoy.Now, if you were the CEO of such a company, badgered by investors and buffeted by change, we might forgive you for not even worrying too much about what happens 30 years out. But here's something that should keep you awake at night: the probability that your company will not be around in five year's time, on average, is now a staggering 32 percent. That's a one in three chance that your company will be taken over or will fail within just five years.Let's come back to our tech CEO's question. Where better to turn for advice than nature, that's been in the business of life and death for longer than any company? As a lapsed biologist, I decided to immediately call a real biologist, my friend Simon Levin, Professor of Biology and Mathematics at Princeton University. Together, we looked at a variety of biological systems, ranging from natural tropical rainforests through to managed forests and fisheries. And we asked ourselves the question: What makes these systems resilient and enduring?And what we found was that the same six principles that we saw underpinning the miracle of the human immune system actually cropped up again and again, from redundancy through to embeddedness. In fact, we saw these principles not only in biologically enduring systems, we also found them being very characteristic of long-lived social systems, like the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, believe it or not. We also went on to look at business, and found that these very same properties also characterized businesses that were resilient and long-lived, and we noted their absence from ones which were short-lived.Let's first take a look at what happens when the corporate immune system collapses. This beautiful building is part of the Shitennoji Temple Complex in Osaka, Japan. In fact, it's one of the oldest temples in Japan. It was built by a Korean artisan, because at the time, Japan was not yet building temples. And this Korean artisan went on to found a temple-building company. Amazingly, his company, Kongō Gumi, was still around 1,428 years later. In fact, it became the oldest continuously operating company in the world.So how is Kongō Gumi doing today? Not too well, I'm afraid. It borrowed very heavily during the bubble period of the Japanese economy, to invest in real estate. And when the bubble burst, it couldn't refinance its loans. The company failed, and it was taken over by a major construction company. Tragically, after 40 generations of very careful stewardship by the Kongō family, Kongō Gumi succumbed to a spectacular lapse in the ability to apply a principle of prudence.Speaking of company failures: we're all familiar with the failure of Kodak, the company that declared bankruptcy in January 2012. Much more interesting, however, is the question: Why did Fujifilm — same product, same pressures from digital technology, same time — why was Fujifilm able to survive and flourish?Fujifilm used its capabilities in chemistry, material science and optics to diversify into a number of areas, ranging from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals, to medical systems to biomaterials. Some of these diversification attempts failed. But in aggregate, it was able to adapt its portfolio sufficiently to survive and flourish. As the CEO, Mr. Komori, put it, the strategy succeeded because it had ""more pockets and drawers"" than the rivals. He meant, of course, that they were able to create more options than the rivals. Fujifilm survived because it applied the principles of prudence, diversity and adaptation.A catastrophic factory fire, like the one we see here, completely wiped out, in one evening, the only plant which supplied Toyota with valves for car-braking systems. The ultimate test of resilience. Car production ground to a screeching halt. How was it, then, that Toyota was able to recover car production? Can you imagine how long it took? Just five days. From having no braking valves to complete recovery in five days. How was this possible? Toyota managed its network of suppliers in such a collaborative manner that it could work very quickly and smoothly with suppliers to repurpose production, fill the missing braking valve capacity and have car production come online again. Toyota applied the principles of modularity of its supply network, embeddedness in an integrated system and the functional redundancy to be able to repurpose, smoothly, existing capacity.Now fortunately, few companies succumb to catastrophic fires. But we do read in the newspaper every day about companies succumbing to the disruption of technology. How is it, then, that the consumer optics giant Essilor is able to avoid technology disruption, and even profit from it? And yes, technology disruption is not only a big deal in software and electronics. Essilor carefully scans the competitive environment for potentially disruptive technologies. It acquires those technologies very early, before they've become expensive or competitors have mobilized around them, and it then develops those technologies itself, even at the risk of failure or the risk of self-disruption. Essilor stays ahead of its game, and has delivered spectacular performance for over 40 years, by using the principles of prudence and adaptation.OK, if these principles are so powerful, you might be thinking, why are they not commonplace in business? Why do we not use these words every day? Well, change has to first start in the mind. If we think back to our pitch to Bob, in order to apply the principles that underpin the miracle of the human immune system, we first need to think differently about business. Now typically, when we think about business, we use what I call ""mechanical thinking."" We set goals, we analyze problems, we construct and we adhere to plans, and more than anything else, we stress efficiency and short-term performance. Now, don't get me wrong — this is a splendidly practical and effective way of addressing relatively simple challenges in relatively stable environments. It's the way that Bob — and probably many of us, myself included — process most business problems we're faced with every day. In fact, it was a pretty good mental model for business — overall — until about the mid-1980s, when the conjunction of globalization and a revolution in technology and telecommunications made business far more dynamic and unpredictable.But what about those more dynamic and unpredictable situations that we now increasingly face? I think in addition to the mechanical thinking, we now need to master the art of biological thinking, as embodied by our six principles. In other words, we need to think more modestly and subtly about when and how we can shape, rather than control, unpredictable and complex situations. It's a little like the difference between throwing a ball and releasing a bird. The ball would head in a straight line, probably towards the intended target, and the bird certainly would not.So what do you think? Sounds a little impractical, a little theoretical, perhaps? Not at all. Every small entrepreneurial company naturally thinks and acts biologically. Why? Because it lacks the resources to shape its environment through brute force. It lacks the scale to buffer change, and it's constantly thinking about the tough odds for a start-up to survive. Now, the irony is, of course, that every large company started off as a small, entrepreneurial company. But along the way somewhere, many have lost this ability to think and act biologically. They need to rejuvenate their ability to think biologically in order to survive and thrive in today's environment.So let's not just think about short-term performance. Every company I know spends plenty of time thinking about the central question of strategy: How good is our competitive game? In addition, let's also consider the second, more biological and equally important question: How long will that game last?Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_reeves_how_to_build_a_business_that_lasts_100_years
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"Whenever I get to travel for work, I try to find out where my drinking water comes from, and where my poop and pee go.(Laughter)This has earned me the nickname ""The Poo Princess"" in my family, and it's ruined many family vacations, because this is not normal. But thinking about where it all goes is the first step in activating what are actually superpowers in our poop and pee.(Laughter)Yeah. And if we use them well, we can live healthier and more beautifully.Check out this landscape in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Just notice what kinds of words and feelings come to mind. This landscape was watered with treated sewage water. Does that change anything for you? I imagine it might. And that's OK. How we feel about this is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be.And I want to explain how it works, but what words do I use? I mean, I can use profane words like ""shit"" and ""piss,"" and then my grandma won't watch the video. Or I can use childish words like ""poo"" and ""pee."" Eh. Or I can use scientific words like ""excrement"" and ""feces."" Humph. I'll use a mix.(Laughter)It's all I got. (Laughs)So, in this suburb, the poo and the pee and the wash water are going to this treatment plant right in the middle of the community. It looks more like a park than a treatment plant. The poo at the very bottom of all those layers of gravel — not touching anyone — is providing solid food for those marsh plants. And the clean, clear water that comes out the other end is traveling underground to water each person's yard. So even though they're in a desert, they get their own personal oasis.This approach is called Integrated Water Management, or holistic or closed-loop. Whatever you want to call it, it's in conflict with the status quo of how we think about sanitation, which is contain, treat, push it away. But in this approach, we're doing one step better. We're designing for reuse from the very beginning, because everything does get reused, only now we're planning for it. And often, that makes for really beautiful spaces. But the most important thing about this system isn't the technicals of how it works. It's how you feel about it. Do you want this in your yard? Why not?I got really curious about this question. Why don't we see more innovation in sanitation? Why isn't that kind of thing the new normal? And I care so much about this question, that I work for a nonprofit called Recode. We want to accelerate adoption of sustainable building and development practices. We want more innovation. But a lot of times, whole categories of innovation — ones that can help us live more beautifully — turn out to be illegal. Today's regulations and codes were written under the assumption that best practices would remain best practices, with incremental updates forever and ever. But innovation isn't always incremental. It turns out, how we feel about any particular new technique gets into everything we do: how we talk about it, how we encourage people to study, our jokes, our codes ... And it ultimately determines how innovative we can be.So, that's the first reason we don't innovate in sanitation. We're kind of uncomfortable talking about sanitation, that's why I've gotten called ""The Poo Princess"" so much. The second reason is: we think the problem is solved here in the US. But not so. Here in the US we still get sick from drinking shit in our sewage water. Seven million people get sick every year, 900 die annually. And we're not taking a holistic approach to making it better. So we're not solving it.Where I live in Portland, Oregon, I can't take Echo for a swim during the rainy season, because we dump raw sewage sometimes into our river. Our rainwater and our sewage go to the same treatment plant. Too much rain overflows into the river. And Portland is not alone here. Forty percent of municipalities self-report dumping raw or partially treated sewage into our waterways.The other bummer going on here with our status quo is that half of all of your poop and pee is going to fertilize farmland. The other half is being incinerated or land-filled. And that's a bummer to me, because there are amazing nutrients in your daily doody. It is comparable to pig manure; we're omnivores, they're omnivores. Think of your poo and pee as a health smoothie for a tree.(Laughter)The other bummer going on here is that we're quickly moving all the drugs we take into our waterways. The average wastewater treatment plant can remove maybe half of the drugs that come in. The other half goes right out the other side. Consider what a cocktail of pharmaceuticals — hormones, steroids, Vicodin — does to a fish, to a dog, to a child.But this isn't just some problem that we need to contain. If we flip this around, we can create a resource that can solve so many of our other problems. And I want to get you comfortable with this idea, so imagine the things I'm going to show you, these technologies, and this attitude that says, ""We're going to reuse this. Let's design to make it beautiful"" — as advanced potty training.(Laughter)I think you're ready for it. I think we as a culture are ready for advanced potty training. And there are three great reasons to enroll today. Number one: we can fertilize our food. Each one of us is pooping and peeing something that could fertilize half or maybe all of our food, depending on our diet. That dark brown poo in the toilet is dark brown because of what? Dead stuff, bacteria. That's carbon. And carbon, if we're getting that into the soil, is going to bind to the other minerals and nutrients in there. Boom! Healthier food. Voilà! Healthier people. Chemical fertilizers by definition don't have carbon in them. Imagine if we could move our animal manure and our human manure to our soil, we might not need to rely on fossil fuel-based fertilizers, mine minerals from far away. Imagine how much energy we could save.Now, some of us are concerned about industrial pollutants contaminating this reuse cycle. That can be addressed. But we need to separate our discomfort about talking about poo and pee so we can calmly talk about how we want to reuse it and what things we don't want to reuse. And get this: if we change our approach to sanitation, we can start to slow down climate change. Remember that carbon in the poop? If we can get that into our soil bank, it's going to start to absorb carbon dioxide that we put into the air. And that could help slow down global warming.I want to show you some brave souls who've had the courage to embrace this advanced potty training approach. So those folks in New Mexico — why did they do it? 'Cause they're in a desert? 'Cause they save money? Yeah. But more importantly, they felt comfortable seeing what was going down the toilet as a resource.Here's an average house in Portland, Oregon. This house is special because they have a composting toilet turning all their poo and pee, over time, into a soil amendment. Their wash water, their shower water, is going underground to a series of mulch basins, and then watering that orchard downhill. When they went to get this permitted, it wasn't allowed in Oregon. But it was allowed in five other states nearby. That was Recode's — my organization's — first code-change campaign.Here's a great example where the Integrated Water Management approach was the cheapest. This is three high-rise residential buildings in downtown Portland, and they're not flushing to the sewer system. How? Well, their wash water is getting reused to flush toilets, cool mechanical systems, water the landscape. And then once the building has thoroughly used everything — aka, shat in it — it's treated to highest standard right on-site by plants and bacteria, and then infiltrated into the groundwater right below. And all that was cheaper than updating the surrounding sewer infrastructure.So that's the last reason we should get really excited about doing things differently: we can save a lot of money. This was the first permit of its kind in Oregon. Brave and open-minded people sat down and felt comfortable saying, ""Yeah, that shit makes sense.""(Laughter)""Let's do it.""(Applause)You know?I keep showing examples where everyone's reusing everything on-site. Why? Well, when we look at our aging infrastructure — and it is old — and we look at the cost of updating it, three-quarters of that cost is just the pipes snaking through our city. So as we build anew, as we renovate, it might make more sense to treat and reuse everything on-site.San Francisco realized that it made sense to invest in rebates for every household to reuse their wash water and their rainwater to water the backyard, because the amount of water they would save as a community would be so big. But why were all these projects so innovative? The money piece, yeah. But more importantly, they felt comfortable with this idea of advanced potty training.Imagine if we embraced innovation for sanitation the way we have for, say, solar power. Think about it — solar power used to be uncommon and unaffordable. Now it's more a part of our web of power than ever before. And it's creating resiliency. We now have sources of power like the sun that don't vary with our earthly dramas. What's driving all that innovation? It's us. We're talking about energy. It's cool to talk about energy. Some folks are even talking about the problems with the limited resources where our current energy is coming from. We encourage our best and brightest to work on this issue — better solar panels, better batteries, everything.So let's talk about where our drinking water is coming from, where our poo and pee are actually going. If we can get over this discomfort with this entire topic, we could create something that creates our future goldmine. Every time you flush the toilet, I want you to think, ""Where is my poop and pee going? Will they be gainfully employed?""(Laughter)""Or are they going to be wreaking havoc in some waterway?""If you don't know, find out. And if you don't like the answer, figure out how you can communicate to those who can drive this change that you have advanced potty training, that you are ready for reuse. How all of you feel is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/molly_winter_the_taboo_secret_to_healthier_plants_and_people
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"The narrative of a rising Africa is being challenged.About 10 years ago, I spoke about an Africa, an Africa of hope and opportunity, an Africa of entrepreneurs, an Africa very different from the Africa that you normally hear about of death, poverty and disease. And that what I spoke about, became part of what is known now as the narrative of the rising Africa.I want to tell you two stories about this rising Africa. The first has to do with Rwanda, a country that has gone through many trials and tribulations. And Rwanda has decided to become the technology hub, or a technology hub on the continent. It's a country with mountainous and hilly terrain, a little bit like here, so it's very difficult to deliver services to people. So what has Rwanda said? In order to save lives, it's going to try using drones to deliver lifesaving drugs, vaccines and blood to people in hard-to-reach places in partnership with a company called Zipline, with UPS, and also with the Gavi, a global vaccine alliance. In doing this, it will save lives. This is part of the type of innovation we want to see in the rising Africa.The second story has to do with something that I'm sure most of you have seen or will remember. Very often, countries in Africa suffer drought and floods, and it's getting more frequent because of climate change effects. When this happens, they normally wait for international appeals to raise money. You see pictures of children with flies on their faces, carcasses of dead animals and so on. Now these countries, 32 countries, came together under the auspices of the African Union and decided to form an organization called the African Risk Capacity. What does it do? It's a weather-based insurance agency, and what these countries do is to pay insurance each year, about 3 million dollars a year of their own resources, so that in the event they have a difficult drought situation or flood, this money will be paid out to them, which they can then use to take care of their populations, instead of waiting for aid to come. The African Risk Capacity last year paid 26 million dollars to Mauritania, Senegal and Niger. This enabled them to take care of 1.3 million people affected by drought. They were able to restore livelihoods, buy fodder for cattle, feed children in school and in short keep the populations home instead of migrating out of the area.So these are the kinds of stories of an Africa ready to take responsibility for itself, and to look for solutions for its own problems. But that narrative is being challenged now because the continent has not been doing well in the last two years. It had been growing at five percent per annum for the last one and a half decades, but this year's forecast was three percent. Why? In an uncertain global environment, commodity prices have fallen. Many of the economies are still commodity driven, and therefore their performance has slipped. And now the issue of Brexit doesn't make it any easier. I never knew that the Brexit could happen and that it could be one of the things that would cause global uncertainty such as we have.So now we've got this situation, and I think it's time to take stock and to say what were the things that the African countries did right? What did they do wrong? How do we build on all of this and learn lessons so that we can keep Africa rising?So let me talk about six things that I think we did right. The first is managing our economies better. The '80s and '90s were the lost decades, when Africa was not doing well, and some of you will remember an ""Economist"" cover that said, ""The Lost Continent."" But in the 2000s, policymakers learned that they needed to manage the macroeconomic environment better, to ensure stability, keep inflation low in single digits, keep their fiscal deficits low, below three percent of GDP, give investors, both domestic and foreign, some stability so they'll have confidence to invest in these economies. So that was number one.Two, debt. In 1994, the debt-to-GDP ratio of African countries was 130 percent, and they didn't have fiscal space. They couldn't use their resources to invest in their development because they were paying debt. There may be some of you in this room who worked to support African countries to get debt relief. So private creditors, multilaterals and bilaterals came together and decided to do the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and give debt relief. So this debt relief in 2005 made the debt-to-GDP ratio fall down to about 30 percent, and there was enough resources to try and reinvest.The third thing was loss-making enterprises. Governments were involved in business which they had no business being in. And they were running businesses, they were making losses. So some of these enterprises were restructured, commercialized, privatized or closed, and they became less of a burden on government.The fourth thing was a very interesting thing. The telecoms revolution came, and African countries jumped on it. In 2000, we had 11 million phone lines. Today, we have about 687 million mobile lines on the continent. And this has enabled us to go, move forward with some mobile technology where Africa is actually leading. In Kenya, the development of mobile money — M-Pesa, which all of you have heard about — it took some time for the world to notice that Africa was ahead in this particular technology. And this mobile money is also providing a platform for access to alternative energy. You know, people who can now pay for solar the same way they pay for cards for their telephone. So this was a very good development, something that went right.We also invested more in education and health, not enough, but there were some improvements. 250 million children were immunized in the last one and a half decades.The other thing was that conflicts decreased. There were many conflicts on the continent. Many of you are aware of that. But they came down, and our leaders even managed to dampen some coups. New types of conflicts have emerged, and I'll refer to those later.So based on all this, there's also some differentiation on the continent that I want you to know about, because even as the doom and gloom is here, there are some countries — Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal are performing relatively well at the moment.But what did we do wrong? Let me mention eight things. You have to have more things wrong than right.(Laughter)So there are eight things we did wrong. The first was that even though we grew, we didn't create enough jobs. We didn't create jobs for our youth. Youth unemployment on the continent is about 15 percent, and underemployment is a serious problem.The second thing that we did is that the quality of growth was not good enough. Even those jobs we created were low-productivity jobs, so we moved people from low-productivity agriculture to low-productivity commerce and working in the informal sector in the urban areas.The third thing is that inequality increased. So we created more billionaires. 50 billionaires worth 96 billion dollars own more wealth than the bottom 75 million people on the continent.Poverty, the proportion of people in poverty — that's the fourth thing — did decrease, but the absolute numbers did not because of population growth. And population growth is something that we don't have enough of a dialogue about on the continent. And I think we will need to get a handle on it, particularly how we educate girls. That is the road to really working on this particular issue.The fifth thing is that we didn't invest enough in infrastructure. We had investment from the Chinese. That helped some countries, but it's not enough. The consumption of electricity in Africa on the continent in Sub-Saharan Africa is equivalent to Spain. The total consumption is equivalent to that of Spain. So many people are living in the dark, and as the President of the African Development Bank said recently, Africa cannot develop in the dark.The other thing we have not done is that our economies retain the same structure that we've had for decades. So even though we've been growing, the structure of the economies has not changed very much. We are still exporting commodities, and exporting commodities is what? It's exporting jobs. Our manufacturing value-added is only 11 percent. We are not creating enough decent manufacturing jobs for our youth, and trade among ourselves is low. Only about 12 percent of our trade is among ourselves. So that's another serious problem.Then governance. Governance is a serious issue. We have weak institutions, and sometimes nonexistent institutions, and I think this gives way for corruption. Corruption is an issue that we have not yet gotten a good enough handle on, and we have to fight tooth and nail, that and increased transparency in the way we manage our economies and the way we manage our finances.We also need to be wary of new conflicts, new types of conflicts, such as we have with Boko Haram in my country, Nigeria, and with Al-Shabaab in Kenya. We need to partner with international partners, developed countries, to fight this together. Otherwise, we create a new reality which is not the type we want for a rising Africa.And finally, the issue of education. Our education systems in many countries are broken. We are not creating the types of skills needed for the future. So we have to find a way to educate better. So those are the things that we are not doing right.Now, where do we go from there? I believe that the way forward is to learn to manage success. Very often, when people succeed or countries succeed, they forget what made them succeed. Learning what you're successful at, managing it and keeping it is vital for us. So all those things I said we did right, we have to learn to do it right again, keep doing it right. Managing the economy while creating stability is vital, getting prices right, and policy consistency. Very often, we are not consistent. One regime goes out, another comes in and they throw away even the functioning policies that were there before. What does this do? It creates uncertainty for people, for households, uncertainties for business. They don't know whether and how to invest.Debt: we must manage the success we had in reducing our debt, but now countries are back to borrowing again, and we see our debt-to-GDP ratio beginning to creep up, and in certain countries, debt is becoming a problem, so we have to avoid that. So managing success.The next thing is focusing with a laser beam on those things we did not do well. First and foremost is infrastructure. Yes, most countries now recognize they have to invest in this, and they are trying to do the best they can to do that. We must. The most important thing is power. You cannot develop in the dark.And then governance and corruption: we have to fight. We have to make our countries transparent. And above all, we have to engage our young people. We have genius in our young people. I see it every day. It's what makes me wake up in the morning and feel ready to go. We have to unleash the genius of our young people, get out of their way, support them to create and innovate and lead the way. And I know that they will lead us in the right direction.And our women, and our girls: we have to recognize that girls and women are a gift. They have strength, and we have to unleash that strength so that they can contribute to the continent.I strongly believe that when we do all of these things, we find that the rising Africa narrative is not a fluke. It's a trend. It's a trend, and if we continue, if we unleash our youth, if we unleash our women, we may step backwards sometimes, we may even step sideways, but the trend is clear. Africa will continue to rise.And I tell you businesspeople in the audience, investment in Africa is not for today, is not for tomorrow, it's not a short-term thing, it's a longer term thing. But if you are not invested in Africa, then you will be missing one of the most important emerging opportunities in the world.Thank you.(Applause)Kelly Stoetzel: So you mentioned corruption in your talk, and you're known, well-known as a strong anticorruption fighter. But that's had consequences. People have fought back, and your mother was kidnapped. How have you been handling this? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: It's been very difficult. Thank you for mentioning the issue of the kidnap of my mother. It's a very difficult subject. But what it means is that when you fight corruption, when you touch the pockets of people who are stealing money, they don't just keep quiet. They fight back, and the issue for you is when they try to intimidate you, do you give up, or do you fight on? Do you find a way to stay on and fight back? And the answer that I had with the teams I worked with is we have to fight on. We have to create those institutions. We have to find ways to stop these people from taking away the heritage of the future. And so that's what we did. And even out of government, we continued to make that point. In our countries, nobody, nobody is going to fight corruption for us but us. And therefore, that comes with consequences, and we just have to do the best we can. But I thank you and thank TED for giving us a voice to say to those people, you will not win, and we will not be intimidated.Thank you.(Applause)Kelly Stoetzel: Thank you so much for your great talk and important work.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ngozi_okonjo_iweala_how_africa_can_keep_rising
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"I'm really glad to be here. I'm glad you're here, because that would be a little weird. I'm glad we're all here. And by ""here,"" I don't mean here. Or here. But here. I mean Earth. And by ""we,"" I don't mean those of us in this auditorium, but life, all life on Earth —(Laughter)from complex to single-celled, from mold to mushrooms to flying bears.(Laughter)The interesting thing is, Earth is the only place we know of that has life — 8.7 million species. We've looked other places, maybe not as hard as we should or we could, but we've looked and haven't found any; Earth is the only place we know of with life. Is Earth special? This is a question I've wanted to know the answer to since I was a small child, and I suspect 80 percent of this auditorium has thought the same thing and also wanted to know the answer. To understand whether there are any planets — out there in our solar system or beyond — that can support life, the first step is to understand what life here requires.It turns out, of all of those 8.7 million species, life only needs three things. On one side, all life on Earth needs energy. Complex life like us derives our energy from the sun, but life deep underground can get its energy from things like chemical reactions. There are a number of different energy sources available on all planets. On the other side, all life needs food or nourishment. And this seems like a tall order, especially if you want a succulent tomato.(Laughter)However, all life on Earth derives its nourishment from only six chemical elements, and these elements can be found on any planetary body in our solar system. So that leaves the thing in the middle as the tall pole, the thing that's hardest to achieve. Not moose, but water.(Laughter)Although moose would be pretty cool.(Laughter)And not frozen water, and not water in a gaseous state, but liquid water. This is what life needs to survive, all life. And many solar system bodies don't have liquid water, and so we don't look there. Other solar system bodies might have abundant liquid water, even more than Earth, but it's trapped beneath an icy shell, and so it's hard to access, it's hard to get to, it's hard to even find out if there's any life there.So that leaves a few bodies that we should think about. So let's make the problem simpler for ourselves. Let's think only about liquid water on the surface of a planet. There are only three bodies to think about in our solar system, with regard to liquid water on the surface of a planet, and in order of distance from the sun, it's: Venus, Earth and Mars. You want to have an atmosphere for water to be liquid. You have to be very careful with that atmosphere. You can't have too much atmosphere, too thick or too warm an atmosphere, because then you end up too hot like Venus, and you can't have liquid water. But if you have too little atmosphere and it's too thin and too cold, you end up like Mars, too cold. So Venus is too hot, Mars is too cold, and Earth is just right. You can look at these images behind me and you can see automatically where life can survive in our solar system. It's a Goldilocks-type problem, and it's so simple that a child could understand it.However, I'd like to remind you of two things from the Goldilocks story that we may not think about so often but that I think are really relevant here. Number one: if Mama Bear's bowl is too cold when Goldilocks walks into the room, does that mean it's always been too cold? Or could it have been just right at some other time? When Goldilocks walks into the room determines the answer that we get in the story. And the same is true with planets. They're not static things. They change. They vary. They evolve. And atmospheres do the same. So let me give you an example.Here's one of my favorite pictures of Mars. It's not the highest resolution image, it's not the sexiest image, it's not the most recent image, but it's an image that shows riverbeds cut into the surface of the planet; riverbeds carved by flowing, liquid water; riverbeds that take hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of years to form. This can't happen on Mars today. The atmosphere of Mars today is too thin and too cold for water to be stable as a liquid. This one image tells you that the atmosphere of Mars changed, and it changed in big ways. And it changed from a state that we would define as habitable, because the three requirements for life were present long ago. Where did that atmosphere go that allowed water to be liquid at the surface?Well, one idea is it escaped away to space. Atmospheric particles got enough energy to break free from the gravity of the planet, escaping away to space, never to return. And this happens with all bodies with atmospheres. Comets have tails that are incredibly visible reminders of atmospheric escape. But Venus also has an atmosphere that escapes with time, and Mars and Earth as well. It's just a matter of degree and a matter of scale. So we'd like to figure out how much escaped over time so we can explain this transition.How do atmospheres get their energy for escape? How do particles get enough energy to escape? There are two ways, if we're going to reduce things a little bit. Number one, sunlight. Light emitted from the sun can be absorbed by atmospheric particles and warm the particles. Yes, I'm dancing, but they —(Laughter)Oh my God, not even at my wedding.(Laughter)They get enough energy to escape and break free from the gravity of the planet just by warming. A second way they can get energy is from the solar wind. These are particles, mass, material, spit out from the surface of the sun, and they go screaming through the solar system at 400 kilometers per second, sometimes faster during solar storms, and they go hurtling through interplanetary space towards planets and their atmospheres, and they may provide energy for atmospheric particles to escape as well.This is something that I'm interested in, because it relates to habitability. I mentioned that there were two things about the Goldilocks story that I wanted to bring to your attention and remind you about, and the second one is a little bit more subtle. If Papa Bear's bowl is too hot, and Mama Bear's bowl is too cold, shouldn't Baby Bear's bowl be even colder if we're following the trend? This thing that you've accepted your entire life, when you think about it a little bit more, may not be so simple. And of course, distance of a planet from the sun determines its temperature. This has to play into habitability. But maybe there are other things we should be thinking about. Maybe it's the bowls themselves that are also helping to determine the outcome in the story, what is just right.I could talk to you about a lot of different characteristics of these three planets that may influence habitability, but for selfish reasons related to my own research and the fact that I'm standing up here holding the clicker and you're not —(Laughter)I would like to talk for just a minute or two about magnetic fields. Earth has one; Venus and Mars do not. Magnetic fields are generated in the deep interior of a planet by electrically conducting churning fluid material that creates this big old magnetic field that surrounds Earth. If you have a compass, you know which way north is. Venus and Mars don't have that. If you have a compass on Venus and Mars, congratulations, you're lost.(Laughter)Does this influence habitability? Well, how might it? Many scientists think that a magnetic field of a planet serves as a shield for the atmosphere, deflecting solar wind particles around the planet in a bit of a force field-type effect having to do with electric charge of those particles. I like to think of it instead as a salad bar sneeze guard for planets.(Laughter)And yes, my colleagues who watch this later will realize this is the first time in the history of our community that the solar wind has been equated with mucus.(Laughter)OK, so the effect, then, is that Earth may have been protected for billions of years, because we've had a magnetic field. Atmosphere hasn't been able to escape. Mars, on the other hand, has been unprotected because of its lack of magnetic field, and over billions of years, maybe enough atmosphere has been stripped away to account for a transition from a habitable planet to the planet that we see today.Other scientists think that magnetic fields may act more like the sails on a ship, enabling the planet to interact with more energy from the solar wind than the planet would have been able to interact with by itself. The sails may gather energy from the solar wind. The magnetic field may gather energy from the solar wind that allows even more atmospheric escape to happen. It's an idea that has to be tested, but the effect and how it works seems apparent. That's because we know energy from the solar wind is being deposited into our atmosphere here on Earth. That energy is conducted along magnetic field lines down into the polar regions, resulting in incredibly beautiful aurora. If you've ever experienced them, it's magnificent. We know the energy is getting in. We're trying to measure how many particles are getting out and if the magnetic field is influencing this in any way.So I've posed a problem for you here, but I don't have a solution yet. We don't have a solution. But we're working on it. How are we working on it? Well, we've sent spacecraft to all three planets. Some of them are orbiting now, including the MAVEN spacecraft which is currently orbiting Mars, which I'm involved with and which is led here, out of the University of Colorado. It's designed to measure atmospheric escape. We have similar measurements from Venus and Earth. Once we have all our measurements, we can combine all these together, and we can understand how all three planets interact with their space environment, with the surroundings. And we can decide whether magnetic fields are important for habitability or not.Once we have that answer, why should you care? I mean, I care deeply ... And financially as well, but deeply.(Laughter)First of all, an answer to this question will teach us more about these three planets, Venus, Earth and Mars, not only about how they interact with their environment today, but how they were billions of years ago, whether they were habitable long ago or not. It will teach us about atmospheres that surround us and that are close. But moreover, what we learn from these planets can be applied to atmospheres everywhere, including planets that we're now observing around other stars. For example, the Kepler spacecraft, which is built and controlled here in Boulder, has been observing a postage stamp-sized region of the sky for a couple years now, and it's found thousands of planets — in one postage stamp-sized region of the sky that we don't think is any different from any other part of the sky.We've gone, in 20 years, from knowing of zero planets outside of our solar system, to now having so many, that we don't know which ones to investigate first. Any lever will help. In fact, based on observations that Kepler's taken and other similar observations, we now believe that, of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, on average, every star has at least one planet. In addition to that, estimates suggest there are somewhere between 40 billion and 100 billion of those planets that we would define as habitable in just our galaxy.We have the observations of those planets, but we just don't know which ones are habitable yet. It's a little bit like being trapped on a red spot —(Laughter)on a stage and knowing that there are other worlds out there and desperately wanting to know more about them, wanting to interrogate them and find out if maybe just one or two of them are a little bit like you. You can't do that. You can't go there, not yet. And so you have to use the tools that you've developed around you for Venus, Earth and Mars, and you have to apply them to these other situations, and hope that you're making reasonable inferences from the data, and that you're going to be able to determine the best candidates for habitable planets, and those that are not.In the end, and for now, at least, this is our red spot, right here. This is the only planet that we know of that's habitable, although very soon we may come to know of more. But for now, this is the only habitable planet, and this is our red spot. I'm really glad we're here.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dave_brain_what_a_planet_needs_to_sustain_life
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"How do we build a society without fossil fuels?This is a very complex challenge, and I believe developing countries could take the lead in this transition. And I'm aware that this is a contentious statement, but the reality is that so much is at stake in our countries if we let fossil fuels stay at the center of our development. We can do it differently. And it's time, it really is time, to debunk the myth that a country has to choose between development on the one hand and environmental protection, renewables, quality of life, on the other.I come from Costa Rica, a developing country. We are nearly five million people, and we live right in the middle of the Americas, so it's very easy to remember where we live. Nearly 100 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources, five of them.(Applause)Hydropower, geothermal, wind, solar, biomass.Did you know that last year, for 299 days, we did not use any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity? It's a fantastic achievement, and yet, it hides a paradox, which is that nearly 70 percent of all our energy consumption is oil.Why? Because of our transportation system, which is totally dependent on fossil fuels, like it is in most countries. So if we think of the energy transition as a marathon, the question is, how do we get to the finish line, how do we decarbonize the rest of the economy? And it's fair to say that if we don't succeed, it's difficult to see who will. So that is why I want to talk to you about Costa Rica, because I believe we are a great candidate in pioneering a vision for development without fossil fuels.If you know one thing about our country, it's that we don't have an army. So I'm going to take you back to 1948. That year, the country was coming out of civil war. Thousands of Costa Ricans had died, and families were bitterly split. And yet, a surprising idea won the hearts and minds: we would reboot the country, and that Second Republic would have no army. So we abolished it. And the president at the time, José Figueres, found a powerful way by smashing the walls of an army base. The following year, 1949, we made that decision permanent in the new constitution, and that is why I can tell you that story nearly 70 years later. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful they made that decision before I was born, because it allowed me and millions of others to live in a very stable country.And you might be thinking that it was good luck, but it wasn't. There was a pattern of deliberate choices. In the '40s, Costa Ricans were given free education and free health care. We called that social guarantees. By abolishing the army, we were able to turn military spending into social spending, and that was a driver of stability. In the '50s —(Applause)In the '50s, we started investing in hydropower, and that kept us away from the trap of using fossil fuels for electricity generation, which is what the world is struggling with today. In the '70s we invested in national parks, and that kept us away from the deeply flawed logic of growth, growth, growth at any cost that you see others embracing, especially in the developing world. In the '90s, we pioneered payments for ecosystem services, and that helped us reverse deforestation and boosted ecotourism, which today is a key engine of growth. So investing in environmental protection did not hurt our economy. Quite the opposite.And it doesn't mean we are perfect, and it doesn't mean we don't have contradictions. That's not the point. The point is that, by making our own choices, we were able to develop resilience in dealing with development problems.Also, if you take a country like ours, the GDP per capita is around 11,000 dollars, depending on how you measure it. But according to the Social Progress Index, we are an absolute outlier when it comes to turning GDP into social progress. Abolishing the army, investing in nature and people, did something very powerful, too. It shaped the narrative, the narrative of a small country with big ideas, and it was very empowering to grow up with that narrative.So the question is, what is the next big idea for this generation? And I believe what comes next is for this generation to let go of fossil fuels for good, just as we did with the army.Fossil fuels create climate change. We know that, and we know how vulnerable we are to the impacts of climate change. So as a developing country, it is in our best interest to build development without fossil fuels that harm people in the first place. Because why would we continue importing oil for transportation if we can use electricity instead?Remember, this is the country where electricity comes from water in our rivers, heat from volcanoes, wind turbines, solar panels, biowaste. Abolishing fossil fuels means disrupting our transportation system so that we can power our cars, buses and trains with electricity instead of dirty energy.And transportation, let me tell you, has become an existential issue for us Costa Ricans, because the model we have is not working for us. It's hurting people, it's hurting companies, and it's hurting our health.Because when policies and infrastructure fail, this is what happens on a daily basis. Two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening. I don't understand why we have to accept this as normal. It's offensive to have to waste our time like this every single day. And this highway is actually quite good compared to what you see in other countries where traffic is exploding. You know, Costa Ricans call this ""presa."" Presa means ""imprisoned."" And people are turning violent in a country that is otherwise happy in pura vida. It's happening. So a lot is at stake.The good news is that when we talk about clean transportation and different mobility, we're not talking about some distant utopia out there. We're talking about electric mobility that is happening today. By 2022, electric cars and conventional cars are expected to cost the same, and cities are already trying electric buses. And these really cool creatures are saving money, and they reduce pollution. So if we want to get rid of oil-based transportation, we can, because we have options now that we didn't have before. It's really exciting.But of course, some get very uncomfortable with this idea, and they will come and they will tell you that the world is stuck with oil, and so is Costa Rica, so get real. That's what they tell you. And you know what the answer to that argument is? That in 1948, we didn't say the world is stuck with armies, so let's keep our army, too. No, we made a very brave choice, and that choice made the whole difference.So it's time for this generation to be brave again and abolish fossil fuels for good. And I'll give you three reasons why we have to do this.First, our model of transportation and urbanization is broken, so this is the best moment to redefine our urban and mobility future. We don't want cities that are built for cars. We want cities for people where we can walk and we can use bikes. And we want public transportation, lots of it, public transportation that is clean and dignifying. Because if we continue adding fleets of conventional cars, our cities will become unbearable.Second, we have to change, but incremental change is not going to be sufficient. We need transformational change. And there are some incremental projects in my country, and I am the first one to celebrate them. But let's not kid ourselves. We're not talking about ending up with really beautiful electric cars here and a few electric buses there while we keep investing in the same kind of infrastructure, more cars, more roads, more oil. We're talking about breaking free from oil, and you cannot get there through incrementalism.Third, and you know this one, the world is hungry for inspiration. It craves stories of success in dealing with complex issues, especially in developing countries. So I believe Costa Rica can be an inspiration to others, as we did last year when we disclosed that for so many days we were not using any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity. The news went viral around the world. Also, and this makes me extremely proud, a Costa Rican woman, Christiana Figueres, played a decisive role in the negotiations of the Paris climate agreement. So we have to protect that legacy and be an example.So what comes next? The people. How do we get people to own this? How do we get people to believe that it's possible to build a society without fossil fuels? A lot of work from the ground up is needed.That is why, in 2014, we created Costa Rica Limpia. ""Limpia"" means ""clean,"" because we want to empower and we want to inspire citizens. If citizens don't get engaged, clean transportation decisions will be bogged down by endless, and I mean endless, technical discussions, and by avalanches of lobbying by various established interests. Wanting to be a green country powered by renewables is already part of our story. We should not let anybody take that away from us.Last year, we brought people from our seven provinces to talk about climate change in terms that matter to them, and we also brought this year another group of Costa Ricans to talk about renewable energy. And you know what? These people disagree on almost everything except on renewable energy and clean transportation and clean air. It brings people together.And the key to real participation is to help people not to feel small. People feel powerless, and they are tired of not being heard. So what we do is concrete things, and we translate technical issues into citizen language to show that citizens have a role to play and can play it together. For the first time, we're tracking the promises that were made on clean transportation, and politicos know that they have to deliver it, but the tipping point will come when we form coalitions — citizens, companies, champions of public transportation — that will make electric mobility the new normal, especially in a developing country.By the time the next election comes, I believe every candidate will have to disclose where they stand on the abolition of fossil fuels. Because this question has to enter our mainstream politics. And I'm telling you, this is not a question of climate policy or environmental agenda. It's about the country that we want and the cities that we have and the cities that we want and who makes that choice. Because at the end of the day, what we have to show is that development with renewable energy is good for the people, for Costa Ricans that are alive today and especially for those who haven't been born.This is our National Museum today. It's bright and peaceful, and when you stand up in front of it, it's really hard to believe these were military barracks at the end of the '40s. We started a new life without an army in this place, and here is where our abolition of fossil fuels will be announced one day. And we will make history again.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/monica_araya_a_small_country_with_big_ideas_to_get_rid_of_fossil_fuels
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"Is there life beyond Earth in our solar system?Wow, what a powerful question. You know, as a scientist — planetary scientist — we really didn't take that very seriously until recently.Carl Sagan always said, ""It takes extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims."" And the claims of having life beyond Earth need to be definitive, they need to be loud and they need to be everywhere for us to be able to believe it.So how do we make this journey? What we decided to do is first look for those ingredients for life. The ingredients of life are: liquid water — we have to have a solvent, can't be ice, has to be liquid. We also have to have energy. We also have to have organic material — things that make us up, but also things that we need to consume.So we have to have these elements in environments for long periods of time for us to be able to be confident that life, in that moment when it starts, can spark and then grow and evolve.Well, I have to tell you that early in my career, when we looked at those three elements, I didn't believe that they were beyond Earth in any length of time and for any real quantity.Why? We look at the inner planets. Venus is way too hot — it's got no water. Mars — dry and arid. It's got no water. And beyond Mars, the water in the solar system is all frozen.But recent observations have changed all that. It's now turning our attention to the right places for us to take a deeper look and really start to answer our life question.So when we look out into the solar system, where are the possibilities? We're concentrating our attention on four locations. The planet Mars and then three moons of the outer planets: Titan, Europa and small Enceladus.So what about Mars? Let's go through the evidence. Well, Mars we thought was initially moon-like: full of craters, arid and a dead world.And so about 15 years ago, we started a series of missions to go to Mars and see if water existed on Mars in its past that changed its geology. We ought to be able to notice that. And indeed we started to be surprised right away. Our higher resolution images show deltas and river valleys and gulleys that were there in the past. And in fact, Curiosity — which has been roving on the surface now for about three years — has really shown us that it's sitting in an ancient river bed, where water flowed rapidly. And not for a little while, perhaps hundreds of millions of years. And if everything was there, including organics, perhaps life had started.Curiosity has also drilled in that red soil and brought up other material. And we were really excited when we saw that. Because it wasn't red Mars, it was gray material, it's gray Mars. We brought it into the rover, we tasted it, and guess what? We tasted organics — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur — they were all there.So Mars in its past, with a lot of water, perhaps plenty of time, could have had life, could have had that spark, could have grown. And is that life still there? We don't know that.But a few years ago we started to look at a number of craters. During the summer, dark lines would appear down the sides of these craters. The more we looked, the more craters we saw, the more of these features. We now know more than a dozen of them.A few months ago the fairy tale came true. We announced to the world that we know what these streaks are. It's liquid water. These craters are weeping during the summer. Liquid water is flowing down these craters. So what are we going to do now — now that we see the water? Well, it tells us that Mars has all the ingredients necessary for life. In its past it had perhaps two-thirds of its northern hemisphere — there was an ocean. It has weeping water right now. Liquid water on its surface. It has organics. It has all the right conditions.So what are we going to do next? We're going to launch a series of missions to begin that search for life on Mars. And now it's more appealing than ever before.As we move out into the solar system, here's the tiny moon Enceladus. This is not in what we call the traditional habitable zone, this area around the sun. This is much further out. This object should be ice over a silicate core.But what did we find? Cassini was there since 2006, and after a couple years looked back after it flew by Enceladus and surprised us all. Enceladus is blasting sheets of water out into the solar system and sloshing back down onto the moon. What a fabulous environment. Cassini just a few months ago also flew through the plume, and it measured silicate particles. Where does the silica come from? It must come from the ocean floor. The tidal energy is generated by Saturn, pulling and squeezing this moon — is melting that ice, creating an ocean. But it's also doing that to the core.Now, the only thing that we can think of that does that here on Earth as an analogy ... are hydrothermal vents. Hydrothermal vents deep in our ocean were discovered in 1977. Oceanographers were completely surprised. And now there are thousands of these below the ocean.What do we find? The oceanographers, when they go and look at these hydrothermal vents, they're teeming with life, regardless of whether the water is acidic or alkaline — doesn't matter. So hydrothermal vents are a fabulous abode for life here on Earth.So what about Enceladus? Well, we believe because it has water and has had it for a significant period of time, and we believe it has hydrothermal vents with perhaps the right organic material, it is a place where life could exist. And not just microbial — maybe more complex because it's had time to evolve.Another moon, very similar, is Europa. Galileo visited Jupiter's system in 1996 and made fabulous observations of Europa. Europa, we also know, has an under-the-ice crust ocean. Galileo mission told us that, but we never saw any plumes. But we didn't look for them.Hubble, just a couple years ago, observing Europa, saw plumes of water spraying from the cracks in the southern hemisphere, just exactly like Enceladus.These moons, which are not in what we call a traditional habitable zone, that are out in the solar system, have liquid water. And if there are organics there, there may be life.This is a fabulous set of discoveries because these moons have been in this environment like that for billions of years. Life started here on Earth, we believe, after about the first 500 million, and look where we are. These moons are fabulous moons.Another moon that we're looking at is Titan. Titan is a huge moon of Saturn. It perhaps is much larger than the planet Mercury. It has an extensive atmosphere. It's so extensive — and it's mostly nitrogen with a little methane and ethane — that you have to peer through it with radar.And on the surface, Cassini has found liquid. We see lakes ... actually almost the size of our Black Sea in some places. And this area is not liquid water; it's methane. If there's any place in the solar system where life is not like us, where the substitute of water is another solvent — and it could be methane — it could be Titan.Well, is there life beyond Earth in the solar system? We don't know yet, but we're hot on the pursuit. The data that we're receiving is really exciting and telling us — forcing us to think about this in new and exciting ways. I believe we're on the right track. That in the next 10 years, we will answer that question. And if we answer it, and it's positive, then life is everywhere in the solar system. Just think about that. We may not be alone.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_green_3_moons_and_a_planet_that_could_have_alien_life
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"In July of 1911, a 35-year-old Yale graduate and professor set out from his rainforest camp with his team. After climbing a steep hill and wiping the sweat from his brow, he described what he saw beneath him. He saw rising from the dense rainforest foliage this incredible interlocking maze of structures built of granite, beautifully put together.What's amazing about this project is that it was the first funded by National Geographic, and it graced the front cover of its magazine in 1912. This professor used state-of-the-art photography equipment to record the site, forever changing the face of exploration.The site was Machu Picchu, discovered and explored by Hiram Bingham. When he saw the site, he asked, ""This is an impossible dream. What could it be?""So today, 100 years later, I invite you all on an incredible journey with me, a 37-year-old Yale graduate and professor.(Cheers)We will do nothing less than use state-of-the-art technology to map an entire country. This is a dream started by Hiram Bingham, but we are expanding it to the world, making archaeological exploration more open, inclusive, and at a scale simply not previously possible.This is why I am so excited to share with you all today that we will begin the 2016 TED Prize platform in Latin America, more specifically Peru.(Applause)Thank you.We will be taking Hiram Bingham's impossible dream and turning it into an amazing future that we can all share in together.So Peru doesn't just have Machu Picchu. It has absolutely stunning jewelry, like what you can see here. It has amazing Moche pottery of human figures. It has the Nazca Lines and amazing textiles. So as part of the TED Prize platform, we are going to partnering with some incredible organizations, first of all with DigitalGlobe, the world's largest provider of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. They're going to be helping us build out this amazing crowdsourcing platform they have. Maybe some of you used it with the MH370 crash and search for the airplane. Of course, they'll also be providing us with the satellite imagery. National Geographic will be helping us with education and of course exploration. As well, they'll be providing us with rich content for the platform, including some of the archival imagery like you saw at the beginning of this talk and some of their documentary footage. We've already begun to build and plan the platform, and I'm just so excited.So here's the cool part. My team, headed up by Chase Childs, is already beginning to look at some of the satellite imagery. Of course, what you can see here is 0.3-meter data. This is site called Chan Chan in northern Peru. It dates to 850 AD. It's a really amazing city, but let's zoom in. This is the type and quality of data that you all will get to see. You can see individual structures, individual buildings. And we've already begun to find previously unknown sites. What we can say already is that as part of the platform, you will all help discover thousands of previously unknown sites, like this one here, and this potentially large one here. Unfortunately, we've also begun to uncover large-scale looting at sites, like what you see here. So many sites in Peru are threatened, but the great part is that all of this data is going to be shared with archaeologists on the front lines of protecting these sites.So I was just in Peru, meeting with their Minister of Culture as well as UNESCO. We'll be collaborating closely with them. Just so you all know, the site is going to be in both English and Spanish, which is absolutely essential to make sure that people in Peru and across Latin America can participate. Our main project coprincipal investigator is the gentleman you see here, Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo, professor at Catholic University. As a respected Peruvian archaeologist and former vice-minister, Dr. Castillo will be helping us coordinate and share the data with archaeologists so they can explore these sites on the ground. He also runs this amazing drone mapping program, some of the images of which you can see behind me here and here. And this data will be incorporated into the platform, and also he'll be helping to image some of the new sites you help find.Our on-the-ground partner who will be helping us with education, outreach, as well as site preservation components, is the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, led by Dr. Larry Coben. Some of you may not be aware that some of the world's poorest communities coexist with some of the world's most well-known archaeological sites. What SPI does is it helps to empower these communities, in particular women, with new economic approaches and business training. So it helps to teach them to create beautiful handicrafts which are then sold on to tourists. This empowers the women to treasure their cultural heritage and take ownership of it. I had the opportunity to spend some time with 24 of these women at a well-known archaeological site called Pachacamac, just outside Lima. These women were unbelievably inspiring, and what's great is that SPI will help us transform communities near some of the sites that you help to discover.Peru is just the beginning. We're going to be expanding this platform to the world, but already I've gotten thousands of emails from people all across the world — professors, educators, students, and other archaeologists — who are so excited to help participate. In fact, they're already suggesting amazing places for us to help discover, including Atlantis. I don't know if we're going to be looking for Atlantis, but you never know.So I'm just so excited to launch this platform. It's going to be launched formally by the end of the year. And I have to say, if what my team has already discovered in the past few weeks are any indication, what the world discovers is just going to be beyond imagination. Make sure to hold on to your alpacas.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_parcak_hunting_for_peru_s_lost_civilizations_with_satellites
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"June 29, 2016.My dear fellow citizen:I write to you today, to you who have lost in this era. At this moment in our common life, when the world is full of breaking and spite and fear,I address this letter simply to you, even though we both know there are many of you behind this ""you,"" and many of me behind this ""I.""I write to you because at present, this quaking world we share scares me. I gather it scares you, too. Some of what we fear, I suspect, we fear in common. But much of what we fear seems to be each other. You fear the world I want to live in, and I fear your visions in turn.Do you know that feeling you get when you know it's going to storm before it storms? Do you also feel that now, fellow citizen? That malaise and worry that some who know feel reminds them of the 1930s?Perhaps you don't, because our fears of each other are not in sync. In this round, I sense that your fears of me, of the world that I have insisted is right for us both, has gathered over a generation. It took time for your fears to trigger my fears, not least because at first, I never thought I needed to fear you.I heard you but did not listen, all these years when you said that this amazing new world wasn't amazing for you, for many of you, across the industrialized world; that the open, liquid world I relished, of people and goods and technologies flowing freely, going where they pleased, globally, was not, for you, an emancipation.I have walked through your towns and, while looking, failed to see. I did notice in Stephenville, Texas, that the town square was dominated by one lawyer's office after another, because of all the people rotating in and out of the prison. I did notice the barren shops in Wagner, South Dakota, and the VFW gathering hall that stood in mockery of a community's dream to endure. I did notice at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania Wal-Mart, that far too many people in their 20s and 30s looked a decade or two from death, with patchy, flared-up skin and thinning, stringy hair and browning, ground-down teeth and a lostness in their eyes.I did notice that the young people I encountered in Paris, in Florence, in Barcelona, had degrees but no place to take them, living on internships well into their 30s, their lives prevented from launching, because of an economy that creates wealth — just not jobs. I did notice the news about those parts of London becoming ghost quarters, where the global super-rich turn fishy money into empty apartments and price lifelong residents of a city, young couples starting out, out of their own home.And I heard that the fabric of your life was tearing. You used to be able to count on work, and now you couldn't. You used to be able to nourish your children, and guarantee that they would climb a little bit further in life than you had, and now you couldn't. You used to be made to feel dignity in your work, and now you didn't. It used to be normal for people like you to own a home, and now it wasn't.I cannot say I didn't know these things, but I was distracted creating a future in which we could live on Mars, even as you struggled down here on Earth. I was distracted innovating immortality, even as many of you began to live shorter lives than your parents had.I heard all of these things, but I didn't listen. I looked but didn't see. I read, didn't understand.I paid attention only when you began to vote and shout, and when your voting and shouting, when the substance of it, began to threaten me.I listened only when you moved toward shattering continental unions and electing vulgar demagogues.Only then did your pain become of interest to me.I know that feeling hurt is often prologue to dealing hurt. I wonder now if you would be less eager to deal it if I had stood with you when you merely felt it.I ask myself why I didn't stand with you then.One reason is that I became entranced by the gurus of change, became a worshiper of the religion of the new for novelty's sake, and of globalization and open borders and kaleidoscopic diversity.Once change became my totalizing faith, I could be blind. I could fail to see change's consequences. I could overlook the importance of roots, traditions, rituals, stability — and belonging.And the more fundamentalist I became in my worship of change and openness, the more I drove you towards the other polarity, to cling, to freeze, to close, to belong.I now see as I didn't before that not having the right skin or right organ is not the only varietal of disadvantage. There is a subtler, quieter disadvantage in having those privileged traits and yet feeling history to be moving away from you; that while the past was hospitable to people like you, the future will be more hospitable to others; that the world is growing less familiar, less yours day by day.I will not concede for a moment that old privileges should not dwindle. They cannot dwindle fast enough. It is for you to learn to live in a new century in which there are no bonuses for showing up with the right skin and right organs. If and when your anger turns to hate, please know that there is no space for that in our shared home. But I will admit, fellow citizen, that I have discounted the burden of coping with the loss of status. I have forgotten that what is socially necessary can also be personally gruelling.A similar thing happened with the economy that you and I share. Just as I cannot and don't wish to turn back to the clock on equality and diversity, and yet must understand the sense of loss they can inspire, so, too, I refuse and could not if I wished turn back the clock on an ever more closely knit, interdependent world, and on inventions that won't stop being invented. And yet I must understand your experience of these things.You have for years been telling me that your experience of these things is not as good as my theories forecast.Yet before you could finish a complaining sentence about the difficulty of living with erratic hours, volatile pay, vanishing opportunities, about the pain of dropping your children off at 24-hour day care to make your 3am shift, I shot back at you — before you could finish your sentence — my dogma, about how what you are actually experiencing was flexibility and freedom.Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself; to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like ""the sharing economy,"" and ""disruption"" and ""global resourcing.""I see now that what I was really doing, at times, was buying your pain on the cheap, sprucing it up and trying to sell it back to you as freedom.I have wanted to believe and wanted you to believe that the system that has been good to me, that has made my life ever more seamless, is also the best system for you.I have condescended to you with the idea that you are voting against your economic interests — voting against your interests, as if I know your interests. That is just my dogmatic economism talking. I have a weakness for treating people's economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you.So here we are, in a scary but not inexplicable moment of demagoguery, fracture, xenophobia, resentment and fear.And I worry for us both if we continue down this road, me not listening, you feeling unheard, you shouting to get me to listen.I worry when each of us is seduced by visions of the future that have no place for the other.If this goes on, if this goes on, there may be blood. There are already hints of this blood in newspapers every day. There may be roundups, raids, deportations, camps, secessions. And no, I do not think that I exaggerate. There may be even talk of war in places that were certain they were done with it.There is always the hope of redemption. But it will not be a cheap, shallow redemption that comes through blather about us all being in it together. This will take more.It will take accepting that we both made choices to be here.We create our ""others."" As parents, as neighbors, as citizens, we witness and sometimes ignore each other into being.You were not born vengeful. I have some role in whatever thirst you now feel for revenge, and that thirst now tempts me to plot ever more elaborate escapes from our common life, from the schools and neighborhoods and airports and amusement parks that we used to share.We face, then, a problem not of these large, impersonal forces. We face a problem of your and my relations. We chose ways of relating to each other that got us here. We can choose ways of relating that get us out.But there are things we might have to let go of, fellow citizen, starting with our own cherished versions of reality.Imagine if you let go of fantasies of a society purged of these or those people. Imagine if I let go of my habit of saving the world behind your back, of deliberating on the future of your work, your food, your schools, in places where you couldn't get past security.We can do this only if we first accept that we have neglected each other. If there is hope to summon in this ominous hour, it is this. We have, for too long, chased various shimmering dreams at the cost of attention to the foundational dream of each other, the dream of tending to each other, of unleashing each other's wonders, of moving through history together. We could dare to commit to the dream of each other as the thing that matters before every neon thing.Let us dare.Sincerely yours,a fellow citizen.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anand_giridharadas_a_letter_to_all_who_have_lost_in_this_era
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"I opened a blind man's head. I didn't make him think or reflect — I cracked his head open, literally. We were walking with him holding onto my shoulder, I miscalculated how much space there was between us, and I knocked him into a gate.(Laughter)Five stitches in his forehead. At that moment, I felt like the worst teacher in the world. I really didn't know how to apologize. Luckily, El Pulga is one of those people who takes things quite well. And to this day, he says that I was the coach who left the most important mark on his career.(Laughter)The truth is, when I started working at the institute for the blind, I was surprised by a lot of things. A lot of the things they did, I never imagined they could: they swam, did exercise, played cards. They drank mate, and could pour it without burning themselves in the process.But when I saw them playing soccer — that was amazing. They had a dirt field, rusty goalposts and broken nets. The blind who attended the institute would play their games there, just like I did at a field near my house. But they played without being able to see. The ball made a sound so they could locate it. They had a guide behind the rival team's goal to know where to kick the ball. And they used eye masks. There were guys who could still see a little, and they wore eye masks so everyone was equal.When I was more at ease with them, I asked for a mask myself. I put it on and tried to play. I had played soccer all my life. This is where it got even more amazing: within two seconds, I didn't know where I was standing. I had studied physical education because I loved high performance.I started working at the institute by chance. My other job was with the Argentinian National Rowing Team, and I felt that was my thing. Here, everything was twice as hard. I'll never forget the first day I did the warm-up with the team. I lined them up in front of me — I used to do that with the rowing team — and I said, ""OK, everyone bend down,"" going like this. When I looked up, two guys were seated, three were lying down and others were squatting.(Laughter)How could I do here the same things I was doing there? It took me a while. I started looking for tools to learn from them, from the teachers who worked with them. I learned I couldn't explain a play on a chalkboard like a coach does, but I could use a plastic tray and some bottle caps so they could follow me by way of touch. I also learned they could run on a track if I ran with them, holding a rope. So we started looking for volunteers to help us run with them.I was enjoying it, and finding purpose and meaning in what we were doing. It was hard at first, it was uncomfortable, but I decided to overcome the discomfort. And there came a time when it became the most fascinating job I'd ever had.I think that's when I wondered: Why couldn't we be a high-performance team as well? Of course, one thing was missing: I needed to find out what they wanted, the real protagonists of this story. Three hours of training, playing soccer on that field, were not going to be enough. We would have to train differently.We started to train harder, and the results were great; they asked for more. I came to understand that they, too, wondered why they couldn't do high-performance. When we felt ready, we knocked at CENARD's door. CENARD is the National Center for High-Performance Sports here in Argentina. It was hard to get them to hear what we had to say. But it was considerably more difficult to get the other athletes training there to consider us their equals. In fact, they would let us use the field only when no other teams were using it. And we were known as ""the blind ones."" Not everyone knew exactly what we were doing there.The 2006 World Championship was a turning point in the team's history. It was held in Buenos Aires for the first time. It was our chance to show everyone what we had been doing all that time. We made it to the finals. We were growing as a team.It was us against Brazil in the finals. They were the best team in the tournament. They won every game by a landslide. Hardly anyone believed we could win that game. Hardly anyone — except for us.During pre-game meetings, in the locker room, during each warm-up, it smelled of victory. I swear that smell exists. I smelled it several times with the team, but I remember it in particular, the day before we played that final. The Argentine Football Association had opened their doors to us.We were training at AFA, where Verón, Higuain and Messi trained. For the first time ever, we felt like a true national team. At 7:30pm, the day before the game, we were in the lounge discussing strategy, and a waiter knocks on the door, interrupting our conversation. He suggested we go to church. He came to invite us to church. I tried to get rid of him, saying it wasn't a good time, that we better leave it for another day. He kept insisting, asking me to please let him take the guys to church, because that day, a pastor who performed miracles would be there.I was slightly afraid to ask what type of miracles he meant, and he replied nonchalantly, ""Coach, let me take the team to the church, and when we return, I guarantee that half of them will be able to see.""(Laughter)Some of the guys laughed, but imagine being a blind person and someone says that to you. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing; it was an awkward silence. I didn't want to make him feel bad, because he truly believed this could happen.One of the players saved me, when he stood up and confidently said, ""Juan,"" — that was the kid's name — Gonza already told you it's not the best time to go to church. Besides, let me make this clear: if we go to that church, and I end up being able to see when we return, I will beat you so hard if I can't play tomorrow.""(Laughter)(Applause)Juan left, laughing in resignation, and we continued with our pregame talk. That night when I went to sleep, I began to dream about the next day's game, imagining what could happen, how we would play. And that's when I noticed that smell of victory I mentioned a while ago. And it's because at that moment, I thought: if the other players had the same desire as Diego going into the game, it was impossible for us not to win.The next day was going to be wonderful. We got up at 9am, the game was at 7pm, and we were already eager to play. We left AFA, and the bus was full of flags that people had given to us. We were talking about the game, and we could hear people honking and cheering, ""Go Murciélagos! Today's the day! The final challenge!""The guys asked me, ""Do they know us? Do they know we're playing?"" Some people followed the bus to CENARD. We arrived and found an amazing scene. In the corridor leading from the locker room to the game field, I was walking with Silvio, who was holding onto my shoulder, so I could guide him. Fortunately, there were no gates along the way.(Laughter)When we reached the field, he asked me about everything. He didn't want to miss a single detail. He said, ""Tell me what you see, tell me who's playing the drums.""I tried to explain what was happening with as much detail as possible. I told him, ""The stands are packed, a lot of people couldn't get in, there are blue and white balloons all over the field, they're opening a giant Argentine flag that covers the entire grandstand.""Suddenly, he cuts me off and says, ""Do you see a flag that says 'San Pedro'?"" That's the city where he lives. I started looking into the stands and I spotted a little white flag with lettering done in black spray paint, that read: ""Silvio, your family and all of San Pedro are here.""I told him that and he replied, ""That's my mom, tell me where she is, I want to I wave at her."" I pointed him toward the flag and showed him with his arm where they were sitting, and he waved his arms in that direction. About 20 or 30 people stood up and gave him an ovation. When that happened, I saw how his face changed, how moved he was. It was moving for me, too; two seconds later, I had a lump in my throat. It was strange — I felt both the excitement of what was happening, and the anger and the anguish that he could not see it.A few days later when I told him what I had experienced, he tried to reassure me, saying, ""Gonza, don't feel bad, I could see them. Differently, but I swear to you that I saw them all.""The game started. We could not fail; it was the final. The audience was quiet, like here, because in soccer for the blind, the public has to be quiet so the players can hear the ball. They're only allowed to cheer when the game is over.And when there were eight minutes to go, the crowd did all the cheering they hadn't done in the first 32 minutes. When pigeon-toed Silvio nailed the ball at an angle, they cheered with all their heart, in an incredible way.Today, if you go to CENARD, you'll see a huge poster on the door, with a photo of our team, Los Murciélagos. They're a model national team, everyone in CENARD knows who they are, and after having won two World Championships and two Paralympic medals, no one doubts they are high-performance athletes.(Applause)(Applause ends)I was lucky to train this team for 10 years, first as a trainer and later as their coach. I feel that they've given me much more than what I've given them.Last year, they asked me to coach another national team, Power Soccer. It's a national team of young men who play soccer in wheelchairs. They use motorized wheelchairs that they drive with a joystick, because they don't have enough strength in their arms to use conventional chairs. They added a bumper to the chair, a safeguard that protects their feet, while allowing them to kick the ball. It's the first time that, instead of being the spectators, they're now the main characters. It's the first time their parents, friends and siblings can see them play.For me, it's a new challenge, with the same discomfort, insecurity, and fear I had when I started working with the blind. But I approach it all from a more experienced position. That's why from day one, I treat them as athletes on the field, and off the field, I try to put myself in their shoes and behave without prejudice, because treating them naturally feels best to them.Both teams play soccer; something once unthinkable for them. They had to adapt the rules to do so. And both teams broke the same rule — the one that said they couldn't play soccer.When you see them play, you see competition, not disability. The problem starts when the game is over, and they leave the field. Then they step in to play our game, in a society whose rules don't really take them into account or care for them.I learned from sports that disability greatly depends on the rules of the game. I believe that if we change some of the rules of our game, we can make life a little easier for them.We all know there are people with disabilities; we see them daily. But by having no direct contact with them, we're not aware of the problems they face every day, like how hard it is for them to get on a bus, find a job, take the subway or cross the street.It's true that there is an increasing social responsibility regarding the inclusion of people with disabilities. But I think it's still not enough. I think change needs to come from every one of us. First, by leaving behind our indifference toward the disabled, and then by respecting the rules that do take them into account. They are few, but they do exist.I cracked a blind man's head open — El Pulga's head. I can assure you these two teams opened mine as well. They taught me that above all, you have to get out there and play every game in this beautiful tournament that we call life.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gonzalo_vilarino_how_argentina_s_blind_soccer_team_became_champions
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"Guys, we have an issue.(Laughter)Growth is fading away, and it's a big deal. Our global economy stops growing. And it's not new. Growth has actually declined for the last 50 years. If we continue like this, we need to learn how to live in a world with no growth in the next decade. This is scary because when the economy doesn't grow, our children don't get better lives. What's even scarier is that when the pie does not grow, each of us get a smaller piece. We're then ready to fight for a bigger one. This creates tensions and serious conflicts. Growth matters a lot.If we look at the history of growth, times of big growth have always been fueled by big manufacturing revolutions. It happened three times, every 50-60 years. The steam engine in the middle of the 19th century, the mass-production model in the beginning of the 20th century — thanks, Mr. Ford. And the first automation wave in the 1970s.Why did these manufacturing revolutions create huge growth in our economies? Because they have injected huge productivity improvement. It's rather simple: in order to grow, you need to be producing more, putting more into our economy. This means either more labor or more capital or more productivity. Each time, productivity has been the growth lever.I'm here today to tell you that we are on the verge of another huge change, and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again. It will get us out of our growth slump and it will change radically the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade. I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway.It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution. Actually, we've made some pretty lame attempts to try to revitalize it. But none of them have been the big overhaul we really need to get us growing again. For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor. Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long. Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized them by product. The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand.This did help productivity for a while. But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain. Let's take fashion retail. Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid supply chains. When fast-fashion competitors like Zara started replenishing their stocks faster from two collections a year to one collection a month, none of them have been able to keep up with the pace. Most of them are in great difficulties today.Yet, with all of their shortcomings, those are the factories we know today. When you open the doors, they look the same as they did 50 years ago. We've just changed the location, the size, the way they operate. Can you name anything else that looks the same as it did 50 years ago? It's crazy. We've made all the tweaks to the model that we could, and now we hit its limits.After all of our attempts to fix the manufacturing model failed, we thought growth could come from elsewhere. We turned to the tech sector — there's been quite a lot of innovations there. Just to name one: the Internet. We hoped it could produce growth. And indeed, it changed our lives. It made big waves in the media, the service, the entertainment spaces. But it hasn't done much for productivity. Actually, what's surprising is that productivity is on the decline despite all of those innovation efforts. Imagine that — sitting at work, scrolling through Facebook, watching videos on YouTube has made us less productive. Weird.(Laughter)This is why we are not growing. We failed at reinventing the manufacturing space, and large technological innovations have played away from it. But what if we could combine those forces? What if the existing manufacturing and large technological innovation came together to create the next big manufacturing reinvention.Bingo! This is the fourth manufacturing revolution, and it's happening right now. Major technologies are entering the manufacturing space, big time. They will boost industrial productivity by more than a third. This is massive, and it will do a lot in creating growth. Let me tell you about some of them.Have you already met advanced manufacturing robots? They are the size of humans, they actually collaborate with them, and they can be programmed in order to perform complex, non-repetitive tasks. Today in our factories, only 8 percent of the tasks are automated. The less complex, the more repetitive ones. It will be 25 percent in 10 years. It means that by 2025, advanced robots will complement workers to be, together, 20 percent more productive, to manufacture 20 percent more outputs, to achieve 20 percent additional growth.This isn't some fancy, futuristic idea. These robots are working for us right now. Last year in the US, they helped Amazon prepare and ship all the products required for Cyber Monday, the annual peak of online retail. Last year in the US, it was the biggest online shopping day of the year and of history. Consumers spent 3 billion dollars on electronics that day. That's real economic growth.Then there's additive manufacturing, 3D printing. 3D printing has already improved plastic manufacturing and it's now making its way through metal. Those are not small industries. Plastic and metals represent 25 percent of global manufacturing production.Let's take a real example. In the aerospace industry, fuel nozzles are some of the most complex parts to manufacture, for one reason: they are made up of 20 different parts that need to be separately produced and then painstakingly assembled. Aerospace companies are now using 3D printing, which allows them to turn those 20 different parts into just one. The results? 40 percent more productivity, 40 percent more output produced, 40 percent more growth for this specific industry.But actually, the most exciting part of this new manufacturing revolution goes much beyond productivity. It's about producing better, smarter products. It's about scale customization. Imagine a world where you can buy the exact products you want with the functionalities you need, with the design you want, with the same cost and lead time as a product that's been mass produced, like your car, or your clothes or your cell phone. The new manufacturing revolution makes it possible.Advanced robots can be programmed in order to perform any product configuration without any setup time or ramp up. 3D printers instantaneously produce any customized design. We are now able to produce a batch of one product, your product, at the same cost and lead time as a batch of many. Those are only a few examples of the manufacturing revolution at play.Not only will manufacturing become more productive, it will also become more flexible, and those were exactly the elements of growth that we are missing. But actually, there are even some bigger implications for all of us when manufacturing will find its way back into the limelight. It will create a huge macroeconomic shift.First, our factories will be relocated into our home markets. In the world of scale customization, consumer proximity is the new norm.Then, our factories will be smaller, agile. Scale does not matter anymore, flexibility does. They will be operating on a multi-product, made-to-order basis. The change will be drastic.Globalization will enter a new era. The East-to-West trade flows will be replaced by regional trade flows. East for East, West for West. When you think about that, the old model was pretty much insane. Piling up stocks, making products travel the whole world before they reach their end consumers. The new model, producing just next to the consumer market, will be much cleaner, much better for our environment. In mature economies, manufacturing will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity and more growth. Good news, isn't it?But here's the thing with growth — it does not come automatically. Mature economies will have to seize it. We'll have to massively re-train our workforce. In most countries, like in my country, France, we've told our children that manufacturing had no future. That it was something happening far away. We need to reverse that and teach manufacturing again at university. Only the countries that will boldly transform will be able to seize this growth.It's also a chance for developing economies. Of course China and other emerging economies won't be the factory of the world anymore. Actually, it was not a sustainable model in the long term, as those countries are becoming richer. Last year, it was already as expensive to produce in Brazil as to produce in France. By 2018, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US.The new manufacturing revolution will accelerate the transition of those emerging economies towards a model driven by domestic consumption. And this is good, because this is where growth will be created. In the next five years, the next billion consumers in China will inject more growth in our economies than the top five European markets together.This fourth manufacturing revolution is a chance for all of us. If we play it right, we'll see sustainable growth in all of our economies. This means more wealth distributed to all of us and a better future for our children.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/olivier_scalabre_the_next_manufacturing_revolution_is_here
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"I am a palliative care physician and I would like to talk to you today about health care. I'd like to talk to you about the health and care of the most vulnerable population in our country — those people dealing with the most complex serious health issues. I'd like to talk to you about economics as well. And the intersection of these two should scare the hell out of you — it scares the hell out of me.I'd also like to talk to you about palliative medicine: a paradigm of care for this population, grounded in what they value. Patient-centric care based on their values that helps this population live better and longer. It's a care model that tells the truth and engages one-on-one and meets people where they're at.I'd like to start by telling the story of my very first patient. It was my first day as a physician, with the long white coat ... I stumbled into the hospital and right away there's a gentleman, Harold, 68 years old, came to the emergency department. He had had headaches for about six weeks that got worse and worse and worse and worse. Evaluation revealed he had cancer that had spread to his brain. The attending physician directed me to go share with Harold and his family the diagnosis, the prognosis and options of care.Five hours into my new career, I did the only thing I knew how. I walked in, sat down, took Harold's hand, took his wife's hand and just breathed.He said, ""It's not good news is it, sonny?""I said, ""No.""And so we talked and we listened and we shared. And after a while I said, ""Harold, what is it that has meaning to you? What is it that you hold sacred?""And he said, ""My family.""I said, ""What do you want to do?""He slapped me on the knee and said, ""I want to go fishing.""I said, ""That, I know how to do.""Harold went fishing the next day. He died a week later.As I've gone through my training in my career, I think back to Harold. And I think that this is a conversation that happens far too infrequently. And it's a conversation that had led us to crisis, to the biggest threat to the American way of life today, which is health care expenditures.So what do we know? We know that this population, the most ill, takes up 15 percent of the gross domestic product — nearly 2.3 trillion dollars. So the sickest 15 percent take up 15 percent of the GDP. If we extrapolate this out over the next two decades with the growth of baby boomers, at this rate it is 60 percent of the GDP. Sixty percent of the gross domestic product of the United States of America — it has very little to do with health care at that point. It has to do with a gallon of milk, with college tuition. It has to do with every thing that we value and every thing that we know presently. It has at stake the free-market economy and capitalism of the United States of America.Let's forget all the statistics for a minute, forget the numbers. Let's talk about the value we get for all these dollars we spend. Well, the Dartmouth Atlas, about six years ago, looked at every dollar spent by Medicare — generally this population. We found that those patients who have the highest per capita expenditures had the highest suffering, pain, depression. And, more often than not, they die sooner.How can this be? We live in the United States, it has the greatest health care system on the planet. We spend 10 times more on these patients than the second-leading country in the world. That doesn't make sense. But what we know is, out of the top 50 countries on the planet with organized health care systems, we rank 37th. Former Eastern Bloc countries and sub-Saharan African countries rank higher than us as far as quality and value.Something I experience every day in my practice, and I'm sure, something many of you on your own journeys have experienced: more is not more. Those individuals who had more tests, more bells, more whistles, more chemotherapy, more surgery, more whatever — the more that we do to someone, it decreases the quality of their life. And it shortens it, most often.So what are we going to do about this? What are we doing about this? And why is this so? The grim reality, ladies and gentlemen, is that we, the health care industry — long white-coat physicians — are stealing from you. Stealing from you the opportunity to choose how you want to live your lives in the context of whatever disease it is. We focus on disease and pathology and surgery and pharmacology. We miss the human being. How can we treat this without understanding this? We do things to this; we need to do things for this.The triple aim of healthcare: one, improve patient experience. Two, improve the population health. Three, decrease per capita expenditure across a continuum. Our group, palliative care, in 2012, working with the sickest of the sick — cancer, heart disease, lung disease, renal disease, dementia — how did we improve patient experience?""I want to be at home, Doc.""""OK, we'll bring the care to you.""Quality of life, enhanced. Think about the human being.Two: population health. How did we look at this population differently, and engage with them at a different level, a deeper level, and connect to a broader sense of the human condition than my own? How do we manage this group, so that of our outpatient population, 94 percent, in 2012, never had to go to the hospital? Not because they couldn't. But they didn't have to. We brought the care to them. We maintained their value, their quality.Number three: per capita expenditures. For this population, that today is 2.3 trillion dollars and in 20 years is 60 percent of the GDP, we reduced health care expenditures by nearly 70 percent. They got more of what they wanted based on their values, lived better and are living longer, for two-thirds less money.While Harold's time was limited, palliative care's is not. Palliative care is a paradigm from diagnosis through the end of life. The hours, weeks, months, years, across a continuum — with treatment, without treatment.Meet Christine. Stage III cervical cancer, so, metastatic cancer that started in her cervix, spread throughout her body. She's in her 50s and she is living. This is not about end of life, this is about life. This is not just about the elderly, this is about people.This is Richard. End-stage lung disease.""Richard, what is it that you hold sacred?""""My kids, my wife and my Harley.""(Laughter)""Alright! I can't drive you around on it because I can barely pedal a bicycle, but let's see what we can do.""Richard came to me, and he was in rough shape. He had this little voice telling him that maybe his time was weeks to months. And then we just talked. And I listened and tried to hear — big difference. Use these in proportion to this.I said, ""Alright, let's take it one day at a time,"" like we do in every other chapter of our life. And we have met Richard where Richard's at day-to-day. And it's a phone call or two a week, but he's thriving in the context of end-stage lung disease.Now, palliative medicine is not just for the elderly, it is not just for the middle-aged. It is for everyone.Meet my friend Jonathan. We have the honor and pleasure of Jonathan and his father joining us here today. Jonathan is in his 20s, and I met him several years ago. He was dealing with metastatic testicular cancer, spread to his brain. He had a stroke, he had brain surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. Upon meeting him and his family, he was a couple of weeks away from a bone marrow transplant, and in listening and engaging, they said, ""Help us understand — what is cancer?""How did we get this far without understanding what we're dealing with? How did we get this far without empowering somebody to know what it is they're dealing with, and then taking the next step and engaging in who they are as human beings to know if that is what we should do? Lord knows we can do any kind of thing to you. But should we?And don't take my word for it. All the evidence that is related to palliative care these days demonstrates with absolute certainty people live better and live longer. There was a seminal article out of the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010. A study done at Harvard by friends of mine, colleagues. End-stage lung cancer: one group with palliative care, a similar group without. The group with palliative care reported less pain, less depression. They needed fewer hospitalizations. And, ladies and gentlemen, they lived three to six months longer. If palliative care were a cancer drug, every cancer doctor on the planet would write a prescription for it. Why don't they? Again, because we goofy, long white-coat physicians are trained and of the mantra of dealing with this, not with this.This is a space that we will all come to at some point. But this conversation today is not about dying, it is about living. Living based on our values, what we find sacred and how we want to write the chapters of our lives, whether it's the last or the last five. What we know, what we have proven, is that this conversation needs to happen today — not next week, not next year. What is at stake is our lives today and the lives of us as we get older and the lives of our children and our grandchildren. Not just in that hospital room or on the couch at home, but everywhere we go and everything we see. Palliative medicine is the answer to engage with human beings, to change the journey that we will all face, and change it for the better.To my colleagues, to my patients, to my government, to all human beings, I ask that we stand and we shout and we demand the best care possible, so that we can live better today and ensure a better life tomorrow. We need to shift today so that we can live tomorrow.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/timothy_ihrig_what_we_can_do_to_die_well
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"I once had this nightmare: I'm standing in the middle of a deserted field full of land mines. In real life, I love to hike, but every time I want to go on a hike, it makes me nervous. I have this thought in the back of my mind that I might lose a limb.This underlying fear started 10 years ago, after I met Mohammed, a cluster bomb survivor of the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War in Lebanon. Mohammed, like so many other survivors all around the world, had to live through the horrifying repercussions of cluster munitions on a daily basis.When the one-month conflict started in Lebanon, I was still working at Agence France-Presse in Paris. I remember how I was glued to the screens, anxiously following the news. I wanted to reassure myself that the falling bombs missed my parents' home. When I arrived in Beirut on assignment to cover that war, I was relieved to be united with my family, after they had finally managed to escape southern Lebanon. The day the war was over, I remember seeing this image — one of blocked roads, of displaced people eagerly rushing south, back to their homes, regardless of what they would find.An estimated four million cluster submunitions were spread in Lebanon during the 34-day conflict. Mohammed lost both legs during the last week of the conflict. The fact that he lives a five-minute drive from my parents' home made it easier to follow him through the years. It was now almost 10 years since we first met. I saw the young boy who had to endure physical and emotional trauma. I saw the teenager who tried to offer his friends tattoos, in return for a set fee of five dollars. And I know the young, jobless man who spends hours surfing the Internet trying to meet a girl who might become his girlfriend. His fate and the effects of losing his legs are now his daily reality.Survivors of bomb trauma like Mohammed have to deal with so many details that never occur to us. Who would have imagined that so many daily tasks we do or take for granted, such as going to the beach or even picking up something from the floor, would become sources of stress and anxiety? Well, that's what eventually became of Mohammed, due to his inflexible prosthetic legs.Ten years ago, I had no clue what a cluster bomb was, nor its horrifying implications. I learned that this indiscriminate weapon was used in so many parts of the world and continues to kill on a regular basis, without distinguishing between a military target or a child. I naively asked myself, ""But seriously, who made those weapons? And what for?""Let me explain to you what a cluster bomb is. It's a large canister filled with bomblets. When it's dropped from the air, it opens up in midair to release hundreds of bomblets. They scatter around wide areas and on impact, many fail to explode. Those unexploded ones end up just like landmines — sitting on the ground, waiting for their next target. If someone steps on them by accident or picks them up, they can explode. These weapons are extremely unpredictable, which makes the threat even bigger. One day, a farmer can work his land without a problem. The next day, he can make fire and burn some branches, and the submunitions close by could be set off because of the heat. The problem is children mistake those bomblets for toys, because they can look like bouncy balls or soda cans.Being a documentary photographer, I decided to go back to Lebanon a few months after the conflict ended to meet cluster bomb survivors. And I met a few — Hussein and Rasha, who both lost a leg to submunitions. Their stories are similar to so many other kids' stories across the world and are a testimony to the horrifying implications of the continuous use of such weapons.That's when I met Mohammed, in January 2007. He was 11 years old, and I met him exactly four months after his accident. When I first saw him, he was going through painful physiotherapy to recover from his fresh wounds. Still in shock at such a young age, Mohammed was struggling to get used to his new body. He would even wake up sometimes at night wanting to scratch his lost feet. What drew me closer to his story was my instant realization of the difficulties Mohammed was likely to face in the future — that what he has been suffering while adjusting to his injury at the age of 11, would increase manyfold.Even before his disability, Mohammed's life wasn't easy. He was born in the Rashidieh Camp for Palestinian refugees, and this is where he still lives. Lebanon holds some 400,000 Palestinian refugees, and they suffer from discriminatory laws. They're not allowed to work in the public sector or practice certain professions and are denied the right to own property. This is one of the reasons why Mohammed doesn't really regret dropping out of school right after his injury. He said, ""What's the point of a university degree when I can't find a job to start with?""Cluster bomb use creates a vicious circle of impact on communities, and not only the lives of their victims. Many who get injured by this weapon drop out of school, can't find jobs or even lose their jobs, therefore losing the ability to provide for their families. This is not to mention the continuous physical pain and the experience of feeling isolated. These weapons affect the poorest of the poor. The high medical cost is a burden to the families. They end up relying on humanitarian agencies, which is insufficient and unsustainable, especially when injuries require lifelong support to the injured. Ten years after Mohammed's injury, he is still unable to afford proper prosthetic legs. He's very cautious with his steps, as a couple of falls over the years brought him embarrassment among his friends. He joked that since he doesn't have legs, some days he tries to walk on his hands.One of the worst yet invisible impacts of the weapon is the psychological scars it leaves. In one of Mohammed's early medical reports, he was diagnosed with signs of PTSD. He suffered from anxiety, poor appetite, sleep disturbance and showed signs of anger. The reality is Mohammed never received proper help to fully recover. His current obsession is to leave Lebanon at any cost — even if it meant embarking on a hazardous journey along with refugees drifting towards Europe today through the Mediterranean. Knowing how risky such a journey would be, he said, ""If I were to die on the way, it doesn't matter."" To Mohammed, he is dead here, anyway.Cluster bombs are a world problem, as this munition keeps destroying and hurting whole communities for generations to come. In an online interview with the director of the Mines Advisory Group, Jamie Franklin, he said, ""The US forces dropped over two million tons of munitions over Laos. If they couldn't find their targets in Vietnam, there were free-drop areas in Laos where planes would drop their loads before going back to base, because it's dangerous to land with loaded planes."" According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, in Laos alone — one of the poorest countries in the world — nine to 27 million unexploded submunitions remain. Some 11,000 people have been killed or injured since 1973. This lethal weapon has been used by over 20 states during armed conflicts in over 35 countries, such as Ukraine, Iraq and Sudan.So far, 119 states have joined an international treaty banning cluster bombs, which is officially called the Convention on Cluster Munitions. But some of the biggest producers of cluster munitions — namely, the United States, Russia and China — remain outside of this lifesaving treaty and continue to produce them, reserve the right to produce them in the future, keep those harmful weapons in their stockpiles and even possibly use them in the future.Cluster bombs have reportedly been used most recently in the ongoing conflicts in Yemen and Syria. According to research on the worldwide investments in cluster munitions producers by Pax, a Dutch-based NGO, financial institutions invested billions of US dollars into companies that make cluster munitions. The majority of these institutions are based in countries that have not yet signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions.Getting back to Mohammed, one of the few jobs he was able to find was picking lemons. When I ask him if it's safe to work in the field he said, ""I'm not sure."" Research shows that cluster munitions often contaminate areas where agriculture is the main source of income. According to Handicap International's research, 98 percent of those killed or injured by cluster munitions are civilians. Eighty-four percent of casualties are males. In countries where these people have no choice but to work in those fields, they simply do it and risk it.Mohammed is the only male to three sisters. Culturally, he's expected to provide for his family, but he simply can't. He tried to have so many different jobs, but he couldn't keep any due to his physical disability and the less-than-friendly environment to people with disabilities, to say the least. It hurts him a lot when he goes out looking for a job, and he's turned away with a small amount of money paid to him out of pity. He said, ""I'm not here to beg for money, I just want to earn it.""Mohammed today is 21 years old. He's illiterate, and he communicates with voice messages. Here is one of his messages.(Audio) Mohammed: (Speaking in Arabic)Laura Boushnak: He said, ""My dream is to run, and I'm pretty sure once I start running, I would never stop.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_boushnak_the_deadly_legacy_of_cluster_bombs
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"The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it's not social media. It's not big data. It's not robotics. It's not even AI. You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It's called the blockchain. Blockchain.Now, it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually.You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. And that's great. This is democratized information. But when it comes to assets — things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets — sending you a copy is a really bad idea. If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money —(Laughter)and that I can't send it to you. This has been called the ""double-spend"" problem by cryptographers for a long time.So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries — middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on — to establish trust in our economy. And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, identification of people, through to clearing, settling and record keeping. And overall, they do a pretty good job. But there are growing problems.To begin, they're centralized. That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are — JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. They slow things down. It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. And they take a big piece of the action — 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country. They capture our data, and that means we can't monetize it or use it to better manage our lives. Our privacy is being undermined. And the biggest problem is that overall, they've appropriated the largesse of the digital age asymmetrically: we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality.So what if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value — some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? What if there were a native medium for value?Well, in 2008, the financial industry crashed and, perhaps propitiously, an anonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto created a paper where he developed a protocol for a digital cash that used an underlying cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. And this cryptocurrency enabled people to establish trust and do transactions without a third party. And this seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world, that has everyone excited or terrified or otherwise interested in many places. Now, don't be confused about Bitcoin — Bitcoin is an asset; it goes up and down, and that should be of interest to you if you're a speculator. More broadly, it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a fiat currency controlled by a nation-state. And that's of greater interest. But the real pony here is the underlying technology. It's called blockchain.So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code. And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, ""The Trust Protocol.""Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work? Fair enough. Assets — digital assets like money to music and everything in between — are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. And out there, around the world, is a group of people called ""miners."" These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. They have massive computing power at their fingertips — 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. These miners do a lot of work. And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems.And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and to validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. And then — this is the key part — that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. And every one is time-stamped, kind of like with a digital waxed seal. So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. Tough to do. This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. Blockchain. That's how it works.So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. There are many. The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. One of them is that you can build smart contracts. It's kind of what it sounds like. It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment — the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense — of agreements between people. And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens.(Applause)So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. Recognize this? Rube Goldberg machine. It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success?Now, why should you care? Well, let me describe some applications. Prosperity. The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case.So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. Could we pre-distribute wealth? Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? Let me describe five ways that this can be done.Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, ""I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm."" This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future.So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. And once it's there, this is immutable. You can't hack it. This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people.Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. My view is that ... these companies are not really sharing. In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. They aggregate services together, and they sell them. What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments — they're built into the system. And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity.Number three: the biggest flow of funds from the developed world to the developing world is not corporate investment, and it's not even foreign aid. It's remittances. This is the global diaspora; people have left their ancestral lands, and they're sending money back to their families at home. This is 600 billion dollars a year, and it's growing, and these people are getting ripped off.Analie Domingo is a housekeeper. She lives in Toronto, and every month she goes to the Western Union office with some cash to send her remittances to her mom in Manila. It costs her around 10 percent; the money takes four to seven days to get there; her mom never knows when it's going to arrive. It takes five hours out of her week to do this.Six months ago, Analie Domingo used a blockchain application called Abra. And from her mobile device, she sent 300 bucks. It went directly to her mom's mobile device without going through an intermediary. And then her mom looked at her mobile device — it's kind of like an Uber interface, there's Abra ""tellers"" moving around. She clicks on a teller that's a five-star teller, who's seven minutes away. The guy shows up at the door, gives her Filipino pesos, she puts them in her wallet. The whole thing took minutes, and it cost her two percent. This is a big opportunity for prosperity.Number four: the most powerful asset of the digital age is data. And data is really a new asset class, maybe bigger than previous asset classes, like land under the agrarian economy, or an industrial plant, or even money. And all of you — we — create this data. We create this asset, and we leave this trail of digital crumbs behind us as we go throughout life. And these crumbs are collected into a mirror image of you, the virtual you. And the virtual you may know more about you than you do, because you can't remember what you bought a year ago, or said a year ago, or your exact location a year ago. And the virtual you is not owned by you — that's the big problem.So today, there are companies working to create an identity in a black box, the virtual you owned by you. And this black box moves around with you as you travel throughout the world, and it's very, very stingy. It only gives away the shred of information that's required to do something. A lot of transactions, the seller doesn't even need to know who you are. They just need to know that they got paid.And then this avatar is sweeping up all of this data and enabling you to monetize it. And this is a wonderful thing, because it can also help us protect our privacy, and privacy is the foundation of a free society. Let's get this asset that we create back under our control, where we can own our own identity and manage it responsibly.Finally —(Applause)Finally, number five: there are a whole number of creators of content who don't receive fair compensation, because the system for intellectual property is broken. It was broken by the first era of the internet. Take music. Musicians are left with crumbs at the end of the whole food chain. You know, if you were a songwriter, 25 years ago, you wrote a hit song, it got a million singles, you could get royalties of around 45,000 dollars. Today, you're a songwriter, you write a hit song, it gets a million streams, you don't get 45k, you get 36 dollars, enough to buy a nice pizza.So Imogen Heap, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, is now putting music on a blockchain ecosystem. She calls it ""Mycelia."" And the music has a smart contract surrounding it. And the music protects her intellectual property rights. You want to listen to the song? It's free, or maybe a few micro-cents that flow into a digital account. You want to put the song in your movie, that's different, and the IP rights are all specified. You want to make a ringtone? That's different. She describes that the song becomes a business. It's out there on this platform marketing itself, protecting the rights of the author, and because the song has a payment system in the sense of bank account, all the money flows back to the artist, and they control the industry, rather than these powerful intermediaries. Now, this is —(Applause)This is not just songwriters, it's any creator of content, like art, like inventions, scientific discoveries, journalists. There are all kinds of people who don't get fair compensation, and with blockchains, they're going to be able to make it rain on the blockchain. And that's a wonderful thing.So, these are five opportunities out of a dozen to solve one problem, prosperity, which is one of countless problems that blockchains are applicable to.Now, technology doesn't create prosperity, of course — people do. But my case to you is that, once again, the technology genie has escaped from the bottle, and it was summoned by an unknown person or persons at this uncertain time in human history, and it's giving us another kick at the can, another opportunity to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things, and solve some of the world's most difficult problems, if we will it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_how_the_blockchain_is_changing_money_and_business
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"As a lover of human anatomy, I'm so excited that we're finally putting our bodies at the center of focus. Through practices such as preventive medicine, patient empowerment and self-monitoring — down to now obsessing over every single step we take in a day. All of this works to promote a healthy connection between ourselves and our bodies.Despite all this focus on the healthy self, general public knowledge of the anatomical self is lacking. Many people don't know the location of their vital organs, or even how they function. And that's because human anatomy is a difficult and time-intensive subject to learn.How many of you here made it through anatomy? Wow, good — most of you are in medicine. I, like you, spent countless hours memorizing hundreds of structures. Something no student of anatomy could do without the help of visuals. Because at the end of the day, whether you remember every little structure or not, these medical illustrations are what makes studying anatomy so intriguing. In looking at them, we're actually viewing a manual of our very selves.But what happens when we're done studying? These beautiful illustrations are then shut back into the pages of a medical textbook, or an app, referenced only when needed. And for the public, medical illustrations may only be encountered passively on the walls of a doctor's office.From the beginnings of modern medicine, medical illustration, and therefore anatomy, have existed primarily within the realm of medical education. Yet there's something fascinating happening right now. Artists are breaking anatomy out of the confines of the medical world and are thrusting it into the public space. For the past nine years, I have been cataloguing and sharing this rise in anatomical art with the public — all from my perspective as a medical illustrator.But before I get into showing you how artists are reclaiming anatomy today, it's important to understand how art influenced anatomy in the past.Now, anatomy is by its very nature a visual science, and the first anatomists to understand this lived during the Renaissance. They relied on artists to help advertise their discoveries to their peers in the public. And this drive to not only teach but also to entertain resulted in some of the strangest anatomical illustrations.Anatomy was caught in a struggle between science, art and culture that lasted for over 500 years. Artists rendered dissected cadavers as alive, posed in these humorous anatomical stripteases. Imagine seeing that in your textbooks today. They also showed them as very much dead — unwillingly stripped of their skin. Disembodied limbs were often posed in literal still lives. And some illustrations even included pop culture references. This is Clara, a famous rhinoceros that was traveling Europe in the mid-1700s, at a time when seeing a rhino was an exciting rarity. Including her in this illustration was akin to celebrity sponsorship today.The introduction of color then brought a whole new depth and clarity to anatomy that made it stunning.By the early 20th century, the perfect balance of science and art had finally been struck with the emergence of medical illustrators. They created a universal representation of anatomy — something that was neither alive nor dead, that was free from those influences of artistic culture. And this focus on no-frills accuracy was precisely for the benefit of medical education. And this is what we get to study from today.But why is it that medical illustration — both past and present — captures our imaginations? Now, we are innately tuned into the beauty of the human body. And medical illustration is still art. Nothing can elicit an emotional response — from joy to complete disgust — more than the human body. And today, artists armed with that emotion, are grasping anatomy from the medical world, and are reinvigorating it through art in the most imaginative ways.A perfect example of this is Spanish contemporary artist Fernando Vicente. He takes 19th century anatomical illustrations of the male body and envelops them in a female sensuality. The women in his paintings taunt us to view beyond their surface anatomy, thereby introducing a strong femininity that was previously lacking in the history of anatomical representation.Artistry can also be seen in the repair and recovery of the human body. This is an X-ray of a woman who fractured and dislocated her ankle in a roller-skating accident. As a tribute to her trauma, she commissioned Montreal-based architect Federico Carbajal to construct a wire sculpture of her damaged lower leg. Now, notice those bright red screws magnified in the sculpture. These are the actual surgical screws used in reconstructing her ankle. It's medical hardware that's been repurposed as art.People often ask me how I choose the art that I showcase online or feature in gallery shows. And for me it's a balance between the technique and a concept that pushes the boundaries of anatomy as a way to know thyself, which is why the work of Michael Reedy struck me. His serious figure drawings are often layered in elements of humor. For instance, take a look at her face. Notice those red marks. Michael manifests the consuming insecurity of a skin condition as these maniacal cartoon monsters annoying and out of control in the background. On the mirrored figure, he renders the full anatomy and covers it in glitter, making it look like candy. By doing this, Michael downplays the common perception of anatomy so closely tied to just disease and death.Now, this next concept might not make much sense, but human anatomy is no longer limited to humans. When you were a child, did you ever wish that your toys could come to life? Well, Jason Freeny makes those dreams come true with his magical toy dissections.(Laughter)One might think that this would bring a morbid edge to one's innocent childhood characters, but Jason says of his dissections, ""One thing I've never seen in a child's reaction to my work is fear."" It's always wonder, amazement and wanting to explore. Fear of anatomy and guts is a learned reaction.This anatomization also extends to politically and socially charged objects. In Noah Scalin's ""Anatomy of War,"" we see a gun dissected to reveal human organs. But if you look closely, you'll notice that it lacks a brain. And if you keep looking, you might also notice that Noah has so thoughtfully placed the rectum at the business end of that gun barrel.Now, this next artist I've been following for many years, watching him excite the public about anatomy. Danny Quirk is a young artist who paints his subjects in the process of self-dissection. He bends the rules of medical illustration by inserting a very dramatic light and shadow. And this creates a 3-D illusion that lends itself very well to painting directly on the human skin. Danny makes it look as if a person's skin has actually been removed. And this effect — also cool and tattoo-like — easily transitions into a medical illustration. Now Danny is currently traveling the world, teaching anatomy to the public via his body paintings, which is why it was so shocking to find out that he was rejected from medical illustration programs. But he's doing just fine.Then there are artists who are extracting anatomy from both the medical world and the art world and are placing it directly on the streets. London-based SHOK-1 paints giant X-rays of pop culture icons. His X-rays show how culture can come to have an anatomy of its own, and conversely how culture can become part of the anatomy of a person. You come to admire his work because reproducing X-rays by hand, let alone with spray paint, is extremely difficult. But then again this is a street artist, who also happens to hold a degree in applied chemistry.Nychos, an Austrian street artist, takes the term ""exploded view"" to a whole new level, splattering human and animal dissections on walls all over the world. Influenced by comics and heavy metal, Nychos inserts a very youthful and enticing energy into anatomy that I just love.Street artists believe that art belongs to the public. And this street anatomy is so captivating because it is the furthest removed from the medical world. It forces you to look at it, and confront your own perceptions about anatomy, whether you find it beautiful, gross, morbid or awe-inspiring, like I do. That it elicits these responses at all is due to our intimate and often changing relationship with it.All of the artists that I showed you here today referenced medical illustrations for their art. But for them, anatomy isn't just something to memorize, but a base from which to understand the human body on a meaningful level; to depict it in ways that we can relate, whether it be through cartoons, body painting or street art.Anatomical art has the power to reach far beyond the pages of a medical textbook, to ignite an excitement in the public, and reinvigorate an enthusiasm in the medical world, ultimately connecting our innermost selves with our bodies through art.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/vanessa_ruiz_the_spellbinding_art_of_human_anatomy
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"Twelve years ago, I picked up a camera for the first time to film the olive harvest in a Palestinian village in the West Bank. I thought I was there to make a single documentary and would then move on to some other part of the world. But something kept bringing me back.Now, usually, when international audiences hear about that part of the world, they often just want that conflict to go away. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bad, and we wish it could just disappear. We feel much the same way about other conflicts around the world. But every time we turn our attention to the news, it seems like one more country has gone up in flames. So I've been wondering whether we should not start looking at conflict in a different way — whether instead of simply wishing to end conflict, we focus instead on how to wage conflict. This has been a big question for me, one I've pursued together with my team at the nonprofit Just Vision. After witnessing several different kinds of struggles in the Middle East, I started noticing some patterns on the more successful ones. I wondered whether these variables held across cases, and if they did, what lessons we could glean for waging constructive conflict, in Palestine, Israel and elsewhere.There is some science about this. In a study of 323 major political conflicts from 1900 to 2006, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns were almost 100 percent more likely to lead to success than violent campaigns. Nonviolent campaigns are also less likely to cause physical harm to those waging the campaign, as well as their opponents. And, critically, they typically lead to more peaceful and democratic societies. In other words, nonviolent resistance is a more effective and constructive way of waging conflict.But if that's such an easy choice, why don't more groups use it? Political scientist Victor Asal and colleagues have looked at several factors that shape a political group's choice of tactics. And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a movement's decision to adopt nonviolence or violence is not whether that group is more left-wing or right-wing, not whether the group is more or less influenced by religious beliefs, not whether it's up against a democracy or a dictatorship, and not even the levels of repression that that group is facing. The greatest predictor of a movement's decision to adopt nonviolence is its ideology regarding the role of women in public life.(Applause)When a movement includes in its discourse language around gender equality, it increases dramatically the chances it will adopt nonviolence, and thus, the likelihood it will succeed.The research squared up with my own documentation of political organizing in Israel and Palestine. I've noticed that movements which welcome women into leadership positions, such as the one I documented in a village called Budrus, were much more likely to achieve their goals. This village was under a real threat of being wiped off the map when Israel started building the separation barrier. The proposed route would require the destruction of this community's olive groves, their cemeteries and would ultimately enclose the village from all sides. Through inspired local leadership, they launched a nonviolent resistance campaign to stop that from happening. The odds were massively stacked against them. But they had a secret weapon: a 15-year-old girl who courageously jumped in front of a bulldozer which was about to uproot an olive tree, stopping it. In that moment, the community of Budrus realized what was possible if they welcomed and encouraged women to participate in public life. And so it was that the women of Budrus went to the front lines day after day, using their creativity and acumen to overcome multiple obstacles they faced in a 10-month unarmed struggle. And as you can probably tell at this point, they win at the end.The separation barrier was changed completely to the internationally recognized green line, and the women of Budrus came to be known across the West Bank for their indomitable energy.(Applause)Thank you.I want to pause for a second, which you helped me do, because I do want to tackle two very serious misunderstandings that could happen at this point. The first one is that I don't believe women are inherently or essentially more peaceful than men. But I do believe that in today's world, women experience power differently. Having had to navigate being in the less powerful position in multiple aspects of their lives, women are often more adept at how to surreptitiously pressure for change against large, powerful actors. The term ""manipulative,"" often charged against women in a derogatory way, reflects a reality in which women have often had to find ways other than direct confrontation to achieve their goals. And finding alternatives to direct confrontation is at the core of nonviolent resistance.Now to the second potential misunderstanding. I've been talking a lot about my experiences in the Middle East, and some of you might be thinking now that the solution then is for us to educate Muslim and Arab societies to be more inclusive of their women. If we were to do that, they would be more successful. They do not need this kind of help. Women have been part of the most influential movements coming out of the Middle East, but they tend to be invisible to the international community. Our cameras are largely focused on the men who often end up involved in the more confrontational scenes that we find so irresistible in our news cycle. And we end up with a narrative that not only erases women from the struggles in the region but often misrepresents the struggles themselves.In the late 1980s, an uprising started in Gaza, and quickly spread to the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It came to be known as the First Intifada, and people who have any visual memory of it generally conjure up something like this: Palestinian men throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. The news coverage at the time made it seem like stones, Molotov cocktails and burning tires were the only activities taking place in the Intifada. This period, though, was also marked by widespread nonviolent organizing in the forms of strikes, sit-ins and the creation of parallel institutions.During the First Intifada, whole sectors of the Palestinian civilian population mobilized, cutting across generations, factions and class lines. They did this through networks of popular committees, and their use of direct action and communal self-help projects challenged Israel's very ability to continue ruling the West Bank and Gaza. According to the Israeli Army itself, 97 percent of activities during the First Intifada were unarmed.And here's another thing that is not part of our narrative about that time. For 18 months in the Intifada, women were the ones calling the shots behind the scenes: Palestinian women from all walks of life in charge of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in a concerted effort to withdraw consent from the occupation. Naela Ayesh, who strived to build a self-sufficient Palestinian economy by encouraging women in Gaza to grow vegetables in their backyards, an activity deemed illegal by the Israeli authorities at that time; Rabeha Diab, who took over decision-making authority for the entire uprising when the men who had been running it were deported; Fatima Al Jaafari, who swallowed leaflets containing the uprising's directives in order to spread them across the territories without getting caught; and Zahira Kamal, who ensured the longevity of the uprising by leading an organization that went from 25 women to 3,000 in a single year. Despite their extraordinary achievements, none of these women have made it into our narrative of the First Intifada.We do this in other parts of the globe, too. In our history books, for instance, and in our collective consciousness, men are the public faces and spokespersons for the 1960s struggle for racial justice in the United States. But women were also a critical driving force, mobilizing, organizing, taking to the streets. How many of us think of Septima Clark when we think of the United States Civil Rights era? Remarkably few. But she played a crucial role in every phase of the struggle, particularly by emphasizing literacy and education. She's been omitted, ignored, like so many other women who played critical roles in the United States Civil Rights Movement.This is not about getting credit. It's more profound than that. The stories we tell matter deeply to how we see ourselves, and to how we believe movements are run and how movements are won. The stories we tell about a movement like the First Intifada or the United States Civil Rights era matter deeply and have a critical influence in the choices Palestinians, Americans and people around the world will make next time they encounter an injustice and develop the courage to confront it. If we do not lift up the women who played critical roles in these struggles, we fail to offer up role models to future generations. Without role models, it becomes harder for women to take up their rightful space in public life. And as we saw earlier, one of the most critical variables in determining whether a movement will be successful or not is a movement's ideology regarding the role of women in public life.This is a question of whether we're moving towards more democratic and peaceful societies. In a world where so much change is happening, and where change is bound to continue at an increasingly faster pace, it is not a question of whether we will face conflict, but rather a question of which stories will shape how we choose to wage conflict.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julia_bacha_how_women_wage_conflict_without_violence
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"I spend most of my time thinking about little girls, which is kind of a weird thing for a grown man in our society to say. But I do. I spend most of my time thinking about little girls, and I think it's primarily because I have one. This one's mine, and I think you would really like her. She is smart and funny and kind to people and a good friend. But when I talk about my daughter, the word I find myself saying most is ""athlete."" My kid's athletic. She is strong and fast and has great balance and good body control. She is a three-time, back-to-back-to-back state champion in Shaolin Kempo. At nine years old, she is already halfway to a black belt. My daughter is athletic.Now, when a man who is six feet two and 265 pounds stands in front of you and says his daughter is athletic, you might think that's a reflection of him. It is not.(Laughter)My wife in high school was a two-time all-state soccer player and a two-time all-state volleyball player, and I played ""Dungeons and Dragons."" And that is why, although my daughter is an athlete, she's also a huge nerd, which I love. She walks around our house in a cloak of flames that she made herself. She sits on the Iron Throne —(Laughter)even though she has never seen ""Game of Thrones,"" primarily because we are not the worst parents who ever lived. But she knows there's someone called the Mother of Dragons, and she calls herself that and she loves it. She's a huge comic book fan. Right now, her favorite character is Groot. She loves Groot. She adores The Incredible Hulk. But my daughter really at heart, her thing is Star Wars. My kid is a Jedi. Although some days she's also a Sith, which is a choice that I can respect.(Laughter)But here's the question that I have to ask. Why is it that when my daughter dresses up, whether it's Groot or The Incredible Hulk, whether it's Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Maul, why is every character she dresses up as a boy? And where are all the female superheroes? And that is not actually the question, because there's plenty of female superheroes. My question really is, where is all the female superhero stuff? Where are the costumes? Where are the toys?Because every day when my daughter plays when she dresses up, she's learning stuff through a process that, in my own line of work, as a professor of media studies, we refer to as public pedagogy. That is, it is how societies are taught ideologies. It's how you learned what it meant to be a man or a woman, what it meant to behave yourself in public, what it meant to be a patriot and have good manners. It's all the constituent social relations that make us up as a people. It's, in short, how we learn what we know about other people and about the world. But we live in a 100-percent media-saturated society. What that means is that every single aspect of your human existence outside of your basic bodily functions is in some way touched by media. From the car that you drive to the food that you eat to the clothes that you wear to the way you construct your relationships to the very language you use to formulate thought — all of that is in some way mediated. So the answer in our society to how do we learn what we know about other people and about the world is largely through media.Well, there's a wrinkle in that, in that our society, media don't simply exist as information distribution technologies and devices. They also exist as corporate entities. And when the distribution of information is tied to financial gain, there's a problem. How big of a problem? Well think about this: in 1983, 90 percent of American media were owned by 50 companies. In any market, 50 companies doing something is a lot of companies. It's a lot of different worldviews. In 2015, that number has shrunk to six, six companies. They are NBCUniversal Comcast, AOL Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, News Corp, Viacom and the CBS Corporation. These six companies produce nine out of every 10 movies you watch, nine out of every 10 television shows, nine out of every 10 songs, nine out of every 10 books. So my question to you is, if six companies control 90 percent of American media, how much influence do you think they have over what you're allowed to see every day?Because in media studies, we spend a lot of time saying that media can't tell us what to think, and they can't; they're terrible at that. But that's not their job. Media don't tell us what to think. Media tell us what to think about. They control the conversation, and in controlling the conversation, they don't have to get you to think what they want you to think. They'll just get you thinking about the things they want you to think about, and more importantly, not thinking about things they don't want you to think about. They control the conversation.How does this work in practice? Let's just take one of those companies. We'll do an easy one. Let's talk about the Walt Disney Company for a second. The reason why I always pick the Walt Disney Company is this. Is there a single person in this room who has never seen a Disney movie? Look around. Exactly. I picked Disney because they have what we call 100 percent penetration in our society. Every single person has been exposed to Disney, so it's an easy one for me to use. Since 1937, Disney has made most of its money selling princesses to girls. It's made a huge chunk of its money. Unless, of course, the princess your daughter is interested in, as my daughter is, is this one.See, in 2012, Disney purchased LucasFilm for the sum of four billion dollars, and immediately they flooded the Disney stores with Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and Yoda and not Princess Leia. Why? Because this princess messes up the public pedagogy for these princesses. So Disney did not put Princess Leia merchandise in the store, and when people went to Disney and said, ""Hey, where's all the Princess Leia stuff?"" Disney said, ""We have no intention of putting Princess Leia merchandise in the store."" And fans were angry and they took to Twitter with the hashtag #WeWantLeia. And Disney said, ""Wait, that's not what we meant. What we meant was, we don't have any Princess Leia merchandise yet, but we will."" And that was in 2012, and it is 2015, and if you go to the Disney Store, as I recently have, and look for Princess Leia merchandise, do you know how many Princess Leia items there are in the Disney Store? Zero, because Disney has no intention of putting Princess Leia in the store.And we shouldn't be surprised because we found out that was their policy when they bought Marvel in 2009 for the sum of 4.5 billion dollars. Because when you make a lot of money selling princesses to girls, you also kind of want to make money from boys. And so what better to sell boys than superheroes? So now Disney had access to Captain America and to Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and they had access even to a group of superheroes no one had ever even heard of. That's how good Marvel was at selling superheroes.Last year, they released a film called ""Guardians of the Galaxy."" It's a film that absolutely should not work. Nobody knew who they were except for comic book nerds like me. One of the characters is a talking tree. One of the characters is an anthropomorphic raccoon. It should not work. And they made a killing off of ""Guardians of the Galaxy.""This character here in the middle, her name is Gamora. She's played by Zoe Saldana, and she is strong and smart and fast and fights like a ninja, and she is played by a beautiful black woman, and my daughter fell in love with her. So like any good nerd dad, I went to buy my daughter Gamora stuff, and when I got to the store, I learned a very interesting thing. If I wanted to buy her a Gamora backpack, well, Gamora's not on it. They probably should have marketed this as ""some"" of the Guardians of the Galaxy.(Laughter)And if I wanted to buy her a lunchbox, she wasn't on it, and if I wanted to buy her a t-shirt, she wasn't on it. And as a matter of fact, if I went to the store, as I did, and looked at the display, you would find a small picture of Gamora right here, but if you look at any of the actual merchandise on that shelf, Gamora is not on any of it.Now, I could have taken to Twitter with the hashtag #WheresGamora, like millions of fans did across the world, but the truth was I wasn't even really that surprised, because I was there when Disney had released ""The Avengers."" And just this year, we got a new Avengers movie, the ""Age of Ultron,"" and we were very excited, because there was not one but two female superheroes, Scarlet Witch and Black Widow. And we were very excited. But here's the real thing about this. Even though Scarlett Johansson, who is one of the most popular actresses in America, plays Black Widow, and Black Widow is the star of not one, not two, but five different Marvel movies, there is not a single piece of Black Widow merchandise available. Not one. And if you go to the Disney store and look for a Black Widow costume, what you will find, is you will find Captain America and The Incredible Hulk. You will find Iron Man and Thor. You will even find War Machine, who isn't even really in the movie that long. Who you will not find is Black Widow. And I could have gone to Twitter with the hashtag, as many people did, # WheresNatasha. But I'm tired of doing that. I'm tired of having to do that.All over the country right now, there are kids playing with the Cycle Blast Quinjet play set, where Captain America rides a motorcycle out of a moving jet and it's really awesome. You know how awesome it is? So awesome that when it happened in the movie, it was Black Widow that did it. Not only has she been erased, but she has been replaced with a male figure.And so what is this teaching us? I mean, over the next five years, Disney and Warner Bros. and a bunch of movie studios are going to release over 30 feature-length films with comic book characters, and of those 30 feature-length films, exactly two of them will have female solo leads. Two. Now, there will be females in the rest of these movies, but they will be sidekicks, they will be love interests, they will be members of teams. They will not be the main character. And if what we learn, what we know about other people and about the world we learn through media, then these companies are teaching my daughter that even if she is strong and smart and fast and fights like a ninja, all four of which are true of her, it doesn't matter. She will either be ignored like Gamora or erased and replaced with a boy like Black Widow. And it's not fair. It's not fair to her and it's not fair to your sons and daughters either.But here's the thing: I'm raising a little girl, and she has a little tomboy in her, which by the way is a terrible thing to call a girl. What that basically is saying is, those traits that define you, they're not really yours, they're just on loan to you for a little while from boys. But do you know how much grief she's going to take in her life for having a little tomboy in her? Zero. None. People will think it's cute. They'll call her feisty, because in our society, adding so-called male traits to girls is seen as an upgrade, seen as a bonus. I'm not raising a little boy, like Mike.Mike is a little boy in Florida. He's 11 years old, and the thing that he loves most in the world is a show called ""My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,"" like millions of other children across America. Now, the show is marketed to girls ages five to nine, but there are millions of boys and grown men who enjoy ""My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic."" They have a club. They call themselves Bronies, pony bros, guys who like ponies. I happen to be one of them. And what are Mike and myself and millions of other boys and men learning in this feminine, sissified world of ""My Little Pony?"" Well, they're learning to study hard and to work hard and to party hard and to look good and to feel good and to do good, and heaven preserve us from teaching these wussified concepts to boys.So the other kids in his neighborhood pick on Mike and they beat him up and they make fun of him, and at 11 years old, Mike goes home, finds a belt, wraps it around his neck, and hangs himself from the top bunk of his bed. Because we have developed a society in which you would rather be dead as a boy than thought of as liking stuff for girls. And that is not Mike's fault. That is our fault. We have failed him. We have failed our children. And we have to do better for them. We have to stop making it so that the only female superheroes appear on shirts that are pink and cut for girls. We have to stop.And when I was putting this together, people said to me, ""Well, that's never going to happen."" And I said, ""Oh really?"" Because just this year, Target announced that they were going to stop gendering their toy aisles. They were going to mix it up. Now, before we break our shoulders patting Target on the back, just this week they released a shirt in which one of the most iconic scenes in ""Star Wars: A New Hope"" where Princess Leia stands up to the Dark Lord of the Sith, was released on a t-shirt in which she's mysteriously replaced by Luke. So let's don't pat ourselves on the back too much. Just this week also, Disney announced it was no longer going to gender its Halloween costumes, which I say, ""Thank you, Disney, except the only costumes you make are of male superheroes, so does it matter who you have wearing them?"" Just this week, Mattel, who makes Barbie, announced they're going to release a line of DC superhero girls. And the funny thing is, they met with girls and asked them what they wanted to see in dolls, and you can see, they have calves and elbows that bend so they can do superhero stuff. And please buy them. And don't just buy them for your daughters, buy them for your sons. Because it's important that boys play with and as female superheroes just as my daughter plays with and as male superheroes.As a matter of fact, what I would love is a world in which every person who goes to the store goes with a little flowchart in their head of whether or not they should buy this toy for a boy or a girl, and it's a real simple flowchart because it only has one question on it. It says, ""Is this toy operated with your genitals?""(Laughter)If the answer is yes, then that is not a toy for children.(Laughter)And if the answer is no, then it's for boys and girls. It's really simple. Because today is about the future of the future, and in my future, boys and girls are equally respected, equally valued, and most importantly, equally represented.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_bell_bring_on_the_female_superheroes
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"There are things we say when we catch the eye of a stranger or a neighbor walking by. We say, ""Hello, how are you? It's a beautiful day. How do you feel?"" These sound kind of meaningless, right? And, in some ways, they are. They have no semantic meaning. It doesn't matter how you are or what the day is like. They have something else. They have social meaning. What we mean when we say those things is: I see you there.I'm obsessed with talking to strangers. I make eye contact, say hello, I offer help, I listen. I get all kinds of stories. About seven years ago, I started documenting my experiences to try to figure out why. What I found was that something really beautiful was going on. This is almost poetic. These were really profound experiences. They were unexpected pleasures. They were genuine emotional connections. They were liberating moments.So one day, I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, which, I'm a New Yorker, so that means I was actually standing in the street on the storm drain, as if that could get me across faster. And there's an old man standing next to me. So he's wearing, like, a long overcoat and sort of an old-man hat, and he looked like somebody from a movie. And he says to me, ""Don't stand there. You might disappear."" So this is absurd, right? But I did what he said. I stepped back onto the sidewalk. And he smiled, and he said, ""Good. You never know. I might have turned around, and zoop, you're gone.""This was weird, and also really wonderful. He was so warm, and he was so happy that he'd saved me. We had this little bond. For a minute, I felt like my existence as a person had been noticed, and I was worth saving. The really sad thing is, in many parts of the world, we're raised to believe that strangers are dangerous by default, that we can't trust them, that they might hurt us. But most strangers aren't dangerous. We're uneasy around them because we have no context. We don't know what their intentions are. So instead of using our perceptions and making choices, we rely on this category of ""stranger.""I have a four-year-old. When I say hello to people on the street, she asks me why. She says, ""Do we know them?""I say, ""No, they're our neighbor.""""Are they our friend?""""No, it's just good to be friendly.""I think twice every time I say that to her, because I mean it, but as a woman, particularly, I know that not every stranger on the street has the best intentions. It is good to be friendly, and it's good to learn when not to be, but none of that means we have to be afraid.There are two huge benefits to using our senses instead of our fears. The first one is that it liberates us. When you think about it, using perception instead of categories is much easier said than done. Categories are something our brains use. When it comes to people, it's sort of a shortcut for learning about them. We see male, female, young, old, black, brown, white, stranger, friend, and we use the information in that box. It's quick, it's easy and it's a road to bias. And it means we're not thinking about people as individuals. I know an American researcher who travels frequently in Central Asia and Africa, alone. She's entering into towns and cities as a complete stranger. She has no bonds, no connections. She's a foreigner. Her survival strategy is this: get one stranger to see you as a real, individual person. If you can do that, it'll help other people see you that way, too.The second benefit of using our senses has to do with intimacy. I know it sounds a little counterintuitive, intimacy and strangers, but these quick interactions can lead to a feeling that sociologists call ""fleeting intimacy."" So, it's a brief experience that has emotional resonance and meaning. It's the good feeling I got from being saved from the death trap of the storm drain by the old man, or how I feel like part of a community when I talk to somebody on my train on the way to work.Sometimes it goes further. Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families — that they often feel more understood by strangers. This gets reported in the media with great lament. ""Strangers communicate better than spouses!"" It's a good headline, right? I think it entirely misses the point. The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families.So how is it possible that we communicate so well with strangers? There are two reasons. The first one is that it's a quick interaction. It has no consequences. It's easy to be honest with someone you're never going to see again, right? That makes sense. The second reason is where it gets more interesting. We have a bias when it comes to people we're close to. We expect them to understand us. We assume they do, and we expect them to read our minds. So imagine you're at a party, and you can't believe that your friend or your spouse isn't picking up on it that you want to leave early. And you're thinking, ""I gave you the look.""With a stranger, we have to start from scratch. We tell the whole story, we explain who the people are, how we feel about them; we spell out all the inside jokes. And guess what? Sometimes they do understand us a little better.OK. So now that we know that talking to strangers matters, how does it work? There are unwritten rules we tend to follow. The rules are very different depending on what country you're in, what culture you're in. In most parts of the US, the baseline expectation in public is that we maintain a balance between civility and privacy. This is known as civil inattention. So, imagine two people are walking towards each other on the street. They'll glance at each other from a distance. That's the civility, the acknowledgment. And then as they get closer, they'll look away, to give each other some space.In other cultures, people go to extraordinary lengths not to interact at all. People from Denmark tell me that many Danes are so averse to talking to strangers, that they would rather miss their stop on the bus than say ""excuse me"" to someone that they need to get around. Instead, there's this elaborate shuffling of bags and using your body to say that you need to get past, instead of using two words.In Egypt, I'm told, it's rude to ignore a stranger, and there's a remarkable culture of hospitality. Strangers might ask each other for a sip of water. Or, if you ask someone for directions, they're very likely to invite you home for coffee. We see these unwritten rules most clearly when they're broken, or when you're in a new place and you're trying to figure out what the right thing to do is.Sometimes breaking the rules a little bit is where the action is. In case it's not clear, I really want you to do this. OK? So here's how it's going to go. Find somebody who is making eye contact. That's a good signal. The first thing is a simple smile. If you're passing somebody on the street or in the hallway here, smile. See what happens.Another is triangulation. There's you, there's a stranger, there's some third thing that you both might see and comment on, like a piece of public art or somebody preaching in the street or somebody wearing funny clothes. Give it a try. Make a comment about that third thing, and see if starts a conversation.Another is what I call noticing. This is usually giving a compliment. I'm a big fan of noticing people's shoes. I'm actually not wearing fabulous shoes right now, but shoes are fabulous in general. And they're pretty neutral as far as giving compliments goes. People always want to tell you things about their awesome shoes.You may have already experienced the dogs and babies principle. It can be awkward to talk to someone on the street; you don't know how they're going to respond. But you can always talk to their dog or their baby. The dog or the baby is a social conduit to the person, and you can tell by how they respond whether they're open to talking more.The last one I want to challenge you to is disclosure. This is a very vulnerable thing to do, and it can be very rewarding. So next time you're talking to a stranger and you feel comfortable, tell them something true about yourself, something really personal. You might have that experience I talked about of feeling understood.Sometimes in conversation, it comes up, people ask me, ""What does your dad do?"" or, ""Where does he live?"" And sometimes I tell them the whole truth, which is that he died when I was a kid. Always in those moments, they share their own experiences of loss. We tend to meet disclosure with disclosure, even with strangers.So, here it is. When you talk to strangers, you're making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life and theirs. You're making unexpected connections. If you don't talk to strangers, you're missing out on all of that. We spend a lot of time teaching our children about strangers. What would happen if we spent more time teaching ourselves? We could reject all the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other. We could make a space for change.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kio_stark_why_you_should_talk_to_strangers
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"The conventional wisdom about our world today is that this is a time of terrible decline. And that's not surprising, given the bad news all around us, from ISIS to inequality, political dysfunction, climate change, Brexit, and on and on. But here's the thing, and this may sound a little weird. I actually don't buy this gloomy narrative, and I don't think you should either. Look, it's not that I don't see the problems. I read the same headlines that you do. What I dispute is the conclusion that so many people draw from them, namely that we're all screwed because the problems are unsolvable and our governments are useless.Now, why do I say this? It's not like I'm particularly optimistic by nature. But something about the media's constant doom-mongering with its fixation on problems and not on answers has always really bugged me.So a few years ago I decided, well, I'm a journalist, I should see if I can do any better by going around the world and actually asking folks if and how they've tackled their big economic and political challenges. And what I found astonished me. It turns out that there are remarkable signs of progress out there, often in the most unexpected places, and they've convinced me that our great global challenges may not be so unsolvable after all. Not only are there theoretical fixes; those fixes have been tried. They've worked. And they offer hope for the rest of us.I'm going to show you what I mean by telling you about how three of the countries I visited — Canada, Indonesia and Mexico — overcame three supposedly impossible problems. Their stories matter because they contain tools the rest of us can use, and not just for those particular problems, but for many others, too.When most people think about my homeland, Canada, today, if they think about Canada at all, they think cold, they think boring, they think polite. They think we say ""sorry"" too much in our funny accents. And that's all true.(Laughter)Sorry.(Laughter)But Canada's also important because of its triumph over a problem currently tearing many other countries apart: immigration. Consider, Canada today is among the world's most welcoming nations, even compared to other immigration-friendly countries. Its per capita immigration rate is four times higher than France's, and its percentage of foreign-born residents is double that of Sweden. Meanwhile, Canada admitted 10 times more Syrian refugees in the last year than did the United States.(Applause)And now Canada is taking even more. And yet, if you ask Canadians what makes them proudest of their country, they rank ""multiculturalism,"" a dirty word in most places, second, ahead of hockey. Hockey.(Laughter)In other words, at a time when other countries are now frantically building new barriers to keep foreigners out, Canadians want even more of them in.Now, here's the really interesting part. Canada wasn't always like this. Until the mid-1960s, Canada followed an explicitly racist immigration policy. They called it ""White Canada,"" and as you can see, they were not just talking about the snow.So how did that Canada become today's Canada? Well, despite what my mom in Ontario will tell you, the answer had nothing to do with virtue. Canadians are not inherently better than anyone else. The real explanation involves the man who became Canada's leader in 1968, Pierre Trudeau, who is also the father of the current prime minister.(Applause)The thing to know about that first Trudeau is that he was very different from Canada's previous leaders. He was a French speaker in a country long-dominated by its English elite. He was an intellectual. He was even kind of groovy. I mean, seriously, the guy did yoga. He hung out with the Beatles.(Laughter)And like all hipsters, he could be infuriating at times. But he nevertheless pulled off one of the most progressive transformations any country has ever seen. His formula, I've learned, involved two parts. First, Canada threw out its old race-based immigration rules, and it replaced them with new color-blind ones that emphasized education, experience and language skills instead. And what that did was greatly increase the odds that newcomers would contribute to the economy. Then part two, Trudeau created the world's first policy of official multiculturalism to promote integration and the idea that diversity was the key to Canada's identity.Now, in the years that followed, Ottawa kept pushing this message, but at the same time, ordinary Canadians soon started to see the economic, the material benefits of multiculturalism all around them. And these two influences soon combined to create the passionately open-minded Canada of today.Let's now turn to another country and an even tougher problem, Islamic extremism. In 1998, the people of Indonesia took to the streets and overthrew their longtime dictator, Suharto. It was an amazing moment, but it was also a scary one. With 250 million people, Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country on Earth. It's also hot, huge and unruly, made up of 17,000 islands, where people speak close to a thousand languages. Now, Suharto had been a dictator, and a nasty one. But he'd also been a pretty effective tyrant, and he'd always been careful to keep religion out of politics. So experts feared that without him keeping a lid on things, the country would explode, or religious extremists would take over and turn Indonesia into a tropical version of Iran. And that's just what seemed to happen at first. In the country's first free elections, in 1999, Islamist parties scored 36 percent of the vote, and the islands burned as riots and terror attacks killed thousands.Since then, however, Indonesia has taken a surprising turn. While ordinary folks have grown more pious on a personal level — I saw a lot more headscarves on a recent visit than I would have a decade ago — the country's politics have moved in the opposite direction. Indonesia is now a pretty decent democracy. And yet, its Islamist parties have steadily lost support, from a high of about 38 percent in 2004 down to 25 percent in 2014. As for terrorism, it's now extremely rare. And while a few Indonesians have recently joined ISIS, their number is tiny, far fewer in per capita terms than the number of Belgians. Try to think of one other Muslim-majority country that can say all those same things.In 2014, I went to Indonesia to ask its current president, a soft-spoken technocrat named Joko Widodo, ""Why is Indonesia thriving when so many other Muslim states are dying?""""Well, what we realized,"" he told me, ""is that to deal with extremism, we needed to deal with inequality first.""See, Indonesia's religious parties, like similar parties elsewhere, had tended to focus on things like reducing poverty and cutting corruption. So that's what Joko and his predecessors did too, thereby stealing the Islamists' thunder. They also cracked down hard on terrorism, but Indonesia's democrats have learned a key lesson from the dark years of dictatorship, namely that repression only creates more extremism. So they waged their war with extraordinary delicacy. They used the police instead of the army. They only detained suspects if they had enough evidence. They held public trials. They even sent liberal imams into the jails to persuade the jihadists that terror is un-Islamic. And all of this paid off in spectacular fashion, creating the kind of country that was unimaginable 20 years ago.So at this point, my optimism should, I hope, be starting to make a bit more sense. Neither immigration nor Islamic extremism are impossible to deal with. Join me now on one last trip, this time to Mexico. Now, of our three stories, this one probably surprised me the most, since as you all know, the country is still struggling with so many problems. And yet, a few years ago, Mexico did something that many other countries from France to India to the United States can still only dream of. It shattered the political paralysis that had gripped it for years.To understand how, we need to rewind to the year 2000, when Mexico finally became a democracy. Rather than use their new freedoms to fight for reform, Mexico's politicians used them to fight one another. Congress deadlocked, and the country's problems — drugs, poverty, crime, corruption — spun out of control. Things got so bad that in 2008, the Pentagon warned that Mexico risked collapse.Then in 2012, this guy named Enrique Peña Nieto somehow got himself elected president. Now, this Peña hardly inspired much confidence at first. Sure, he was handsome, but he came from Mexico's corrupt old ruling party, the PRI, and he was a notorious womanizer. In fact, he seemed like such a pretty boy lightweight that women called him ""bombón,"" sweetie, at campaign rallies. And yet this same bombón soon surprised everyone by hammering out a truce between the country's three warring political parties. And over the next 18 months, they together passed an incredibly comprehensive set of reforms. They busted open Mexico's smothering monopolies. They liberalized its rusting energy sector. They restructured its failing schools, and much more. To appreciate the scale of this accomplishment, try to imagine the US Congress passing immigration reform, campaign finance reform and banking reform. Now, try to imagine Congress doing it all at the same time. That's what Mexico did.Not long ago, I met with Peña and asked how he managed it all. The President flashed me his famous twinkly smile —(Laughter)and told me that the short answer was ""compromiso,"" compromise. Of course, I pushed him for details, and the long answer that came out was essentially ""compromise, compromise and more compromise."" See, Peña knew that he needed to build trust early, so he started talking to the opposition just days after his election. To ward off pressure from special interests, he kept their meetings small and secret, and many of the participants later told me that it was this intimacy, plus a lot of shared tequila, that helped build confidence. So did the fact that all decisions had to be unanimous, and that Peña even agreed to pass some of the other party's priorities before his own. As Santiago Creel, an opposition senator, put it to me, ""Look, I'm not saying that I'm special or that anyone is special, but that group, that was special."" The proof? When Peña was sworn in, the pact held, and Mexico moved forward for the first time in years. Bueno.So now we've seen how these three countries overcame three of their great challenges. And that's very nice for them, right? But what good does it do the rest of us?Well, in the course of studying these and a bunch of other success stories, like the way Rwanda pulled itself back together after civil war or Brazil has reduced inequality, or South Korea has kept its economy growing faster and for longer than any other country on Earth, I've noticed a few common threads.Now, before describing them, I need to add a caveat. I realize, of course, that all countries are unique. So you can't simply take what worked in one, port it to another and expect it to work there too. Nor do specific solutions work forever. You've got to adapt them as circumstances change.That said, by stripping these stories to their essence, you absolutely can distill a few common tools for problem-solving that will work in other countries and in boardrooms and in all sorts of other contexts, too.Number one, embrace the extreme. In all the stories we've just looked at, salvation came at a moment of existential peril. And that was no coincidence. Take Canada: when Trudeau took office, he faced two looming dangers. First, though his vast, underpopulated country badly needed more bodies, its preferred source for white workers, Europe, had just stopped exporting them as it finally recovered from World War II. The other problem was that Canada's long cold war between its French and its English communities had just become a hot one. Quebec was threatening to secede, and Canadians were actually killing other Canadians over politics. Now, countries face crises all the time. Right? That's nothing special. But Trudeau's genius was to realize that Canada's crisis had swept away all the hurdles that usually block reform. Canada had to open up. It had no choice. And it had to rethink its identity. Again, it had no choice. And that gave Trudeau a once-in-a-generation opportunity to break the old rules and write new ones. And like all our other heroes, he was smart enough to seize it.Number two, there's power in promiscuous thinking. Another striking similarity among good problem-solvers is that they're all pragmatists. They'll steal the best answers from wherever they find them, and they don't let details like party or ideology or sentimentality get in their way. As I mentioned earlier, Indonesia's democrats were clever enough to steal many of the Islamists' best campaign promises for themselves. They even invited some of the radicals into their governing coalition. Now, that horrified a lot of secular Indonesians. But by forcing the radicals to actually help govern, it quickly exposed the fact that they weren't any good at the job, and it got them mixed up in all of the grubby compromises and petty humiliations that are part of everyday politics. And that hurt their image so badly that they've never recovered.Number three, please all of the people some of the time. I know I just mentioned how crises can grant leaders extraordinary freedoms. And that's true, but problem-solving often requires more than just boldness. It takes showing restraint, too, just when that's the last thing you want to do. Take Trudeau: when he took office, he could easily have put his core constituency, that is Canada's French community, first. He could have pleased some of the people all of the time. And Peña could have used his power to keep attacking the opposition, as was traditional in Mexico. Yet he chose to embrace his enemies instead, while forcing his own party to compromise. And Trudeau pushed everyone to stop thinking in tribal terms and to see multiculturalism, not language and not skin color, as what made them quintessentially Canadian. Nobody got everything they wanted, but everyone got just enough that the bargains held.So at this point you may be thinking, ""OK, Tepperman, if the fixes really are out there like you keep insisting, then why aren't more countries already using them?"" It's not like they require special powers to pull off. I mean, none of the leaders we've just looked at were superheroes. They didn't accomplish anything on their own, and they all had plenty of flaws. Take Indonesia's first democratic president, Abdurrahman Wahid. This man was so powerfully uncharismatic that he once fell asleep in the middle of his own speech.(Laughter)True story.So what this tells us is that the real obstacle is not ability, and it's not circumstances. It's something much simpler. Making big changes involves taking big risks, and taking big risks is scary. Overcoming that fear requires guts, and as you all know, gutsy politicians are painfully rare. But that doesn't mean we voters can't demand courage from our political leaders. I mean, that's why we put them in office in the first place. And given the state of the world today, there's really no other option.The answers are out there, but now it's up to us to elect more women and men brave enough to find them, to steal them and to make them work.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_tepperman_the_risky_politics_of_progress
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"It's funny the things you forget. I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died.(Laughter)(Applause)Because that's how you die.(Laughter)And I remember, that was a game I used to play with myself to entertain myself whenever I was bored or frustrated.(Laughter)Settle down.(Laughter)People say we live in an age of information overload. Right? I don't know about that, but I just know that I get too many marketing emails. I got a marketing email from a supermarket firm, which will remain nameless for predominantly legal reasons, but which I'm going to call ""SafeMart.""(Laughter)I got an email from them, and it went like this, it said:""Just three weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!""And I resented this, because not only do I not remember signing up to that, but I resent the fact that they appear to think that I should be excited about a shop opening.So what I did was I scrolled down to the bottom of the email, and I pressed, ""Unsubscribe."" And I thought that'd be the end of it. But a week later, I got another one that said,""Just two weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!""And I thought, obviously, I haven't clicked hard enough. So I tried it again. Right? Lo and behold, a week passes, you guessed it,""Just one week until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!""And here's the problem: The internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us. It's hard enough to discriminate between the things that genuinely matter in this world and the minutiae of life, without having emails about supermarket chains and Candy Crush Saga. And I was really annoyed with them, and I thought, OK, I was about to write a strongly worded email, which I can do quite well.(Laughter)And I thought, no — I'm going to find the game. So I replied to it, and I said,""I literally cannot wait!!!!""(Laughter)""What do you need from me?""They got back to me; a guy called Dan said,""Hi James. I've asked a colleague to help me with your query.""(Laughter)Like it needs help. And I said, ""What's the plan, Dan? I'm thinking fireworks, bouncy castle ...""(Laughter)""I'm not sure what you mean.""(Laughter)I said, ""I'm just tremendously excited about the opening!""(Laughter)""Do you want to book the bouncy castle or shall I?""He said, ""I think you have misunderstood.""(Laughter)""A new store is opening, but there is no celebration planned.""I said, ""But what was all the 'Three weeks until,' 'Two weeks until' emails? I was getting excited.""(Laughter)""I'm sorry you're disappointed.""(Laughter)I said, ""Not to worry. Let's do something anyway! Besides, the deposit on the bouncy castle was non-refundable.""(Laughter)""If we don't use it, we're out a few hundred quid, Dan.""(Laughter)He said, ""Mr. Veitch, I'm not responsible for anything you have ordered.""I said, ""Let's not get into who did what. Bottom line: you and I are in this together.""(Laughter)(Applause)""Question: Will you be there to make sure people take their shoes off?""(Laughter)I'll be honest, then my relationship with Dan deteriorated somewhat, because the next email I got was this:""Thanks for your email - your Case Number is ...""(Laughter)That's outrageous. I said, ""Dan?""(Laughter)And I got — and I was just like, this is ... — and I, I .... And I said, ""Danny?"" And I thought, this is terrible. All I'm doing is collecting case numbers. I said, ""D-Dog?""(Laughter)""The store is now open.""(Laughter)I said, ""But Dan, they must have wondered why there was no bouncy castle.""And then we were back to this.And that might have been the end of the story, but I remembered that anything — everything — even something as mundane as getting out of a car, can be fun if you find the right game.So, this is what I replied:[Thanks for your email - your Case Number is #0000001.](Laughter)(Applause)And we just, uh ...(Laughter)It was like we were dancing. It was just a beautiful relationship. We just kept going. It was lovely. But to be honest, guys, it was quite labor-intensive, and I had other stuff to do, believe it or not. So what I did is I have a little email auto-replier program. And I set it up so every time it receives an email from SafeMart, it just pings one back. So I set it up, and it says,""Thanks for your email - your Case Number is ...""Then it has a little formula that I wrote to up the case number every time. And I put it on the server and set it running.(Laughter)I'll be honest, guys — then I forgot about it.(Laughter)I checked back on it the other day, and it appears there have been a number of emails going back and forth. We're on 21,439.(Applause)It gives me an immense sense of satisfaction to know that these computer programs are just going to be pinging one another for eternity. And as legacies go, I don't think that's bad.So guys, just remember: if ever you feel weighed down by the bureaucracy and often mundanity of modern life, don't fight the frustration. Let it be the catalyst for whimsy.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_the_agony_of_trying_to_unsubscribe
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"I'm here today to talk about the two ideas that, at least based on my observations at Khan Academy, are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning. And it's the idea of mastery and the idea of mindset.I saw this in the early days working with my cousins. A lot of them were having trouble with math at first, because they had all of these gaps accumulated in their learning. And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra, and because of that, they thought they didn't have the math gene. Or they'd get to a calculus class, and they'd be a little bit shaky on the algebra. I saw it in the early days when I was uploading some of those videos on YouTube, and I realized that people who were not my cousins were watching.(Laughter)And at first, those comments were just simple thank-yous. I thought that was a pretty big deal. I don't know how much time you all spend on YouTube. Most of the comments are not ""Thank you.""(Laughter)They're a little edgier than that. But then the comments got a little more intense, student after student saying that they had grown up not liking math. It was getting difficult as they got into more advanced math topics. By the time they got to algebra, they had so many gaps in their knowledge they couldn't engage with it. They thought they didn't have the math gene. But when they were a bit older, they took a little agency and decided to engage. They found resources like Khan Academy and they were able to fill in those gaps and master those concepts, and that reinforced their mindset that it wasn't fixed; that they actually were capable of learning mathematics.And in a lot of ways, this is how you would master a lot of things in life. It's the way you would learn a martial art. In a martial art, you would practice the white belt skills as long as necessary, and only when you've mastered it you would move on to become a yellow belt. It's the way you learn a musical instrument: you practice the basic piece over and over again, and only when you've mastered it, you go on to the more advanced one.But what we point out — this is not the way a traditional academic model is structured, the type of academic model that most of us grew up in. In a traditional academic model, we group students together, usually by age, and around middle school, by age and perceived ability, and we shepherd them all together at the same pace. And what typically happens, let's say we're in a middle school pre-algebra class, and the current unit is on exponents, the teacher will give a lecture on exponents, then we'll go home, do some homework. The next morning, we'll review the homework, then another lecture, homework, lecture, homework. That will continue for about two or three weeks, and then we get a test. On that test, maybe I get a 75 percent, maybe you get a 90 percent, maybe you get a 95 percent. And even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge, I didn't know 25 percent of the material. Even the A student, what was the five percent they didn't know?Even though we've identified the gaps, the whole class will then move on to the next subject, probably a more advanced subject that's going to build on those gaps. It might be logarithms or negative exponents. And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize how strange this is. I didn't know 25 percent of the more foundational thing, and now I'm being pushed to the more advanced thing. And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point, I might be in an algebra class or trigonometry class and I hit a wall. And it's not because algebra is fundamentally difficult or because the student isn't bright. It's because I'm seeing an equation and they're dealing with exponents and that 30 percent that I didn't know is showing up. And then I start to disengage.To appreciate how absurd that is, imagine if we did other things in our life that way. Say, home-building.(Laughter)So we bring in the contractor and say, ""We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation. Do what you can.""(Laughter)So they do what they can. Maybe it rains. Maybe some of the supplies don't show up. And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around, says, ""OK, the concrete is still wet right over there, that part's not quite up to code ... I'll give it an 80 percent.""(Laughter)You say, ""Great! That's a C. Let's build the first floor.""(Laughter)Same thing. We have two weeks, do what you can, inspector shows up, it's a 75 percent. Great, that's a D-plus. Second floor, third floor, and all of a sudden, while you're building the third floor, the whole structure collapses. And if your reaction is the reaction you typically have in education, or that a lot of folks have, you might say, maybe we had a bad contractor, or maybe we needed better inspection or more frequent inspection. But what was really broken was the process. We were artificially constraining how long we had to something, pretty much ensuring a variable outcome, and we took the trouble of inspecting and identifying those gaps, but then we built right on top of it.So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite. Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F — do it the other way around. What's variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what's fixed is that they actually master the material.And it's important to realize that not only will this make the student learn their exponents better, but it'll reinforce the right mindset muscles. It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something, it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow. It means that you should just keep working on it. You should have grit; you should have perseverance; you should take agency over your learning.Now, a lot of skeptics might say, well, hey, this is all great, philosophically, this whole idea of mastery-based learning and its connection to mindset, students taking agency over their learning. It makes a lot of sense, but it seems impractical. To actually do it, every student would be on their own track. It would have to be personalized, you'd have to have private tutors and worksheets for every student. And these aren't new ideas — there were experiments in Winnetka, Illinois, 100 years ago, where they did mastery-based learning and saw great results, but they said it wouldn't scale because it was logistically difficult. The teacher had to give different worksheets to every student, give on-demand assessments.But now today, it's no longer impractical. We have the tools to do it. Students see an explanation at their own time and pace? There's on-demand video for that. They need practice? They need feedback? There's adaptive exercises readily available for students.And when that happens, all sorts of neat things happen. One, the students can actually master the concepts, but they're also building their growth mindset, they're building grit, perseverance, they're taking agency over their learning. And all sorts of beautiful things can start to happen in the actual classroom. Instead of it being focused on the lecture, students can interact with each other. They can get deeper mastery over the material. They can go into simulations, Socratic dialogue.To appreciate what we're talking about and the tragedy of lost potential here, I'd like to give a little bit of a thought experiment. If we were to go 400 years into the past to Western Europe, which even then, was one of the more literate parts of the planet, you would see that about 15 percent of the population knew how to read. And I suspect that if you asked someone who did know how to read, say a member of the clergy, ""What percentage of the population do you think is even capable of reading?"" They might say, ""Well, with a great education system, maybe 20 or 30 percent."" But if you fast forward to today, we know that that prediction would have been wildly pessimistic, that pretty close to 100 percent of the population is capable of reading. But if I were to ask you a similar question: ""What percentage of the population do you think is capable of truly mastering calculus, or understanding organic chemistry, or being able to contribute to cancer research?"" A lot of you might say, ""Well, with a great education system, maybe 20, 30 percent.""But what if that estimate is just based on your own experience in a non-mastery framework, your own experience with yourself or observing your peers, where you're being pushed at this set pace through classes, accumulating all these gaps? Even when you got that 95 percent, what was that five percent you missed? And it keeps accumulating — you get to an advanced class, all of a sudden you hit a wall and say, ""I'm not meant to be a cancer researcher; not meant to be a physicist; not meant to be a mathematician."" I suspect that that actually is the case, but if you were allowed to be operating in a mastery framework, if you were allowed to really take agency over your learning, and when you get something wrong, embrace it — view that failure as a moment of learning — that number, the percent that could really master calculus or understand organic chemistry, is actually a lot closer to 100 percent.And this isn't even just a ""nice to have."" I think it's a social imperative. We're exiting what you could call the industrial age and we're going into this information revolution. And it's clear that some things are happening. In the industrial age, society was a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor. In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing, a bureaucracy class, and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital and your entrepreneurs and your creative class. But we know what's happening already, as we go into this information revolution. The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over. Even that middle tier, information processing, that's what computers are good at.So as a society, we have a question: All this new productivity is happening because of this technology, but who participates in it? Is it just going to be that very top of the pyramid, in which case, what does everyone else do? How do they operate? Or do we do something that's more aspirational? Do we actually attempt to invert the pyramid, where you have a large creative class, where almost everyone can participate as an entrepreneur, an artist, as a researcher?And I don't think that this is utopian. I really think that this is all based on the idea that if we let people tap into their potential by mastering concepts, by being able to exercise agency over their learning, that they can get there. And when you think of it as just a citizen of the world, it's pretty exciting. I mean, think about the type of equity we can we have, and the rate at which civilization could even progress. And so, I'm pretty optimistic about it. I think it's going to be a pretty exciting time to be alive.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_let_s_teach_for_mastery_not_test_scores
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"I'm a journalist, so I like to look for the untold stories, the lives that quietly play out under the scream of headlines. I've also been going about the business of putting down roots, choosing a partner, making babies. So for the last few years, I've been trying to understand what constitutes the 21st-century good life, both because I'm fascinated by the moral and philosophical implications, but also because I'm in desperate need of answers myself.We live in tenuous times. In fact, for the first time in American history, the majority of parents do not think that their kids will be better off than they were. This is true of rich and poor, men and women. Now, some of you might hear this and feel sad. After all, America is deeply invested in this idea of economic transcendence, that every generation kind of leapfrogs the one before it, earning more, buying more, being more. We've exported this dream all over the world, so kids in Brazil and China and even Kenya inherit our insatiable expectation for more. But when I read this historic poll for the first time, it didn't actually make me feel sad. It felt like a provocation. ""Better off"" — based on whose standards?Is ""better off"" finding a secure job that you can count on for the rest of your life? Those are nearly extinct. People move jobs, on average, every 4.7 years, and it's estimated that by 2020, nearly half of Americans will be freelancers. OK, so is better off just a number? Is it about earning as much as you possibly can? By that singular measurement, we are failing. Median per capita income has been flat since about 2000, adjusted for inflation. All right, so is better off getting a big house with a white picket fence? Less of us are doing that. Nearly five million people lost their homes in the Great Recession, and even more of us sobered up about the lengths we were willing to go — or be tricked into going, in many predatory cases — to hold that deed. Home-ownership rates are at their lowest since 1995.All right, so we're not finding steady employment, we're not earning as much money, and we're not living in big fancy houses. Toll the funeral bells for everything that made America great. But, are those the best measurements of a country's greatness, of a life well lived? What I think makes America great is its spirit of reinvention. In the wake of the Great Recession, more and more Americans are redefining what ""better off"" really means. Turns out, it has more to do with community and creativity than dollars and cents.Now, let me be very clear: the 14.8 percent of Americans living in poverty need money, plain and simple. And all of us need policies that protect us from exploitation by employers and financial institutions. Nothing that follows is meant to suggest that the gap between rich and poor is anything but profoundly immoral. But, too often we let the conversation stop there. We talk about poverty as if it were a monolithic experience; about the poor as if they were solely victims. Part of what I've learned in my research and reporting is that the art of living well is often practiced most masterfully by the most vulnerable.Now, if necessity is the mother of invention, I've come to believe that recession can be the father of consciousness. It confronts us with profound questions, questions we might be too lazy or distracted to ask in times of relative comfort. How should we work? How should we live? All of us, whether we realize it or not, seek answers to these questions, with our ancestors kind of whispering in our ears.My great-grandfather was a drunk in Detroit, who sometimes managed to hold down a factory job. He had, as unbelievable as it might sound, 21 children, with one woman, my great-grandmother, who died at 47 years old of ovarian cancer. Now, I'm pregnant with my second child, and I cannot even fathom what she must have gone through. And if you're trying to do the math — there were six sets of twins. So my grandfather, their son, became a traveling salesman, and he lived boom and bust. So my dad grew up answering the door for debt collectors and pretending his parents weren't home. He actually took his braces off himself with pliers in the garage, when his father admitted he didn't have money to go back to the orthodontist. So my dad, unsurprisingly, became a bankruptcy lawyer. Couldn't write this in a novel, right? He was obsessed with providing a secure foundation for my brother and I.So I ask these questions by way of a few generations of struggle. My parents made sure that I grew up on a kind of steady ground that allows one to question and risk and leap. And ironically, and probably sometimes to their frustration, it is their steadfast commitment to security that allows me to question its value, or at least its value as we've historically defined it in the 21st century.So let's dig into this first question: How should we work? We should work like our mothers. That's right — we've spent decades trying to fit women into a work world built for company men. And many have done backbends to fit in, but others have carved a more unconventional path, creating a patchwork of meaning and money with enough flexibility to do what they need to do for those that they love. My mom called it ""just making it work."" Today I hear life coaches call it ""a portfolio career."" Whatever you call it, more and more men are craving these whole, if not harried, lives. They're waking up to their desire and duty to be present fathers and sons.Now, artist Ann Hamilton has said, ""Labor is a way of knowing."" Labor is a way of knowing. In other words, what we work on is what we understand about the world. If this is true, and I think it is, then women who have disproportionately cared for the little ones and the sick ones and the aging ones, have disproportionately benefited from the most profound kind of knowing there is: knowing the human condition. By prioritizing care, men are, in a sense, staking their claim to the full range of human existence.Now, this means the nine-to-five no longer works for anyone. Punch clocks are becoming obsolete, as are career ladders. Whole industries are being born and dying every day. It's all nonlinear from here. So we need to stop asking kids, ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" and start asking them, ""How do you want to be when you grow up?"" Their work will constantly change. The common denominator is them. So the more they understand their gifts and create crews of ideal collaborators, the better off they will be.The challenge ahead is to reinvent the social safety net to fit this increasingly fragmented economy. We need portable health benefits. We need policies that reflect that everyone deserves to be vulnerable or care for vulnerable others, without becoming destitute. We need to seriously consider a universal basic income. We need to reinvent labor organizing. The promise of a work world that is structured to actually fit our 21st century values, not some archaic idea about bringing home the bacon, is long overdue — just ask your mother.Now, how about the second question: How should we live? We should live like our immigrant ancestors. When they came to America, they often shared apartments, survival tactics, child care — always knew how to fill one more belly, no matter how small the food available. But they were told that success meant leaving the village behind and pursuing that iconic symbol of the American Dream, the white picket fence. And even today, we see a white picket fence and we think success, self-possession. But when you strip away the sentimentality, what it really does is divides us. Many Americans are rejecting the white picket fence and the kind of highly privatized life that happened within it, and reclaiming village life, reclaiming interdependence instead.Fifty million of us, for example, live in intergenerational households. This number exploded with the Great Recession, but it turns out people actually like living this way. Two-thirds of those who are living with multiple generations under one roof say it's improved their relationships. Some people are choosing to share homes not with family, but with other people who understand the health and economic benefits of daily community. CoAbode, an online platform for single moms looking to share homes with other single moms, has 50,000 users. And people over 65 are especially prone to be looking for these alternative living arrangements. They understand that their quality of life depends on a mix of solitude and solidarity. Which is true of all of us when you think about it, young and old alike. For too long, we've pretended that happiness is a king in his castle. But all the research proves otherwise. It shows that the healthiest, happiest and even safest — in terms of both climate change disaster, in terms of crime, all of that — are Americans who live lives intertwined with their neighbors.Now, I've experienced this firsthand. For the last few years, I've been living in a cohousing community. It's 1.5 acres of persimmon trees, this prolific blackberry bush that snakes around a community garden, all smack-dab, by the way, in the middle of urban Oakland. The nine units are all built to be different, different sizes, different shapes, but they're meant to be as green as possible. So big, shiny black solar cells on our roof mean our electricity bill rarely exceeds more than five bucks in a month. The 25 of us who live there are all different ages and political persuasions and professions, and we live in homes that have everything a typical home would have. But additionally, we share an industrial-sized kitchen and eating area, where we have common meals twice a week.Now, people, when I tell them I live like this, often have one of two extreme reactions. Either they say, ""Why doesn't everyone live like this?"" Or they say, ""That sounds totally horrifying. I would never want to do that."" So let me reassure you: there is a sacred respect for privacy among us, but also a commitment to what we call ""radical hospitality"" — not the kind advertised by the Four Seasons, but the kind that says that every single person is worthy of kindness, full stop, end of sentence.The biggest surprise for me of living in a community like this? You share all the domestic labor — the repairing, the cooking, the weeding — but you also share the emotional labor. Rather than depending only on the idealized family unit to get all of your emotional needs met, you have two dozen other people that you can go to to talk about a hard day at work or troubleshoot how to handle an abusive teacher. Teenagers in our community will often go to an adult that is not their parent to ask for advice. It's what bell hooks called ""revolutionary parenting,"" this humble acknowledgment that kids are healthier when they have a wider range of adults to emulate and count on. Turns out, adults are healthier, too. It's a lot of pressure, trying to be that perfect family behind that white picket fence.The ""new better off,"" as I've come to call it, is less about investing in the perfect family and more about investing in the imperfect village, whether that's relatives living under one roof, a cohousing community like mine, or just a bunch of neighbors who pledge to really know and look out for one another. It's good common sense, right? And yet, money has often made us dumb about reaching out. The most reliable wealth is found in relationship.The new better off is not an individual prospect at all. In fact, if you're a failure or you think you're a failure, I've got some good news for you: you might be a success by standards you have not yet honored. Maybe you're a mediocre earner but a masterful father. Maybe you can't afford your dream home, but you throw legendary neighborhood parties. If you're a textbook success, the implications of what I'm saying could be more grim for you. You might be a failure by standards you hold dear but that the world doesn't reward. Only you can know.I know that I am not a tribute to my great-grandmother, who lived such a short and brutish life, if I earn enough money to afford every creature comfort. You can't buy your way out of suffering or into meaning. There is no home big enough to erase the pain that she must have endured. I am a tribute to her if I live a life as connected and courageous as possible. In the midst of such widespread uncertainty, we may, in fact, be insecure. But we can let that insecurity make us brittle or supple. We can turn inward, lose faith in the power of institutions to change — even lose faith in ourselves. Or we can turn outward, cultivate faith in our ability to reach out, to connect, to create.Turns out, the biggest danger is not failing to achieve the American Dream. The biggest danger is achieving a dream that you don't actually believe in. So don't do that. Do the harder, more interesting thing, which is to compose a life where what you do every single day, the people you give your best love and ingenuity and energy to, aligns as closely as possible with what you believe. That, not something as mundane as making money, is a tribute to your ancestors. That is the beautiful struggle.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/courtney_martin_the_new_american_dream
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"The word concussion evokes a fear these days more so than it ever has, and I know this personally. I played 10 years of football, was struck in the head thousands of times. And I have to tell you, though, what was much worse than that was a pair of bike accidents I had where I suffered concussions, and I'm still dealing with the effects of the most recent one today as I stand in front of you.There is a fear around concussion that does have some evidence behind it. There is information that a repeated history of concussion can lead to early dementia, such as Alzheimer's, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That was the subject of the Will Smith movie ""Concussion."" And so everybody is caught up in football and what they see in the military, but you may not know that bike riding is the leading cause of concussion for kids, sports-related concussion, that is. And so another thing that I should tell you that you may not know is that the helmets that are worn in bicycling and football and many activities, they're not designed or tested for how well they can protect your children against concussion. They're in fact designed and tested for their ability to protect against skull fracture.And so I get this question all the time from parents, and they ask me, ""Would you let your own child play football?"" Or, ""Should I let my child play soccer?"" And I think that as a field, we're a long way from giving an answer with any kind of confidence there.So I look at that question from a bit of a different lens, and I want to know, how can we prevent concussion? Is that even possible? And most experts think that it's not, but the work that we're doing in my lab is starting to reveal more of the details around concussion so that we can have a better understanding. The reason we're able to prevent skull fracture with helmets is because it's pretty simple. We know how it works. Concussion has been much more of a mystery.So to give you a sense of what might be happening in a concussion, I want to show you the video here that you see when you type into Google, ""What is a concussion?"" The CDC website comes up, and this video essentially tells the whole story. What you see is the head moves forward, the brain lags behind, then the brain catches up and smashes into the skull. It rebounds off the skull and then proceeds to run into the other side of the skull. And what you'll notice is highlighted in this video from the CDC, which I'll note was funded by the NFL, is that the outer surface of the brain, where it was to have smashed into the skull, looks like it's been damaged or injured, so it's on the outer surface of the brain. And what I'd like to do with this video is to tell you that there are some aspects that are probably right, indicative of what the scientists think happens with concussion, but there's probably more that's wrong with this video.So one thing that I do agree with, and I think most experts would, is that the brain does have these dynamics. It does lag behind the skull and then catch up and move back and forth and oscillate. That we think is true. However, the amount of motion you see in the brain in this video is probably not right at all. There's very little room in the cranial vault, only a few millimeters, and it's filled entirely with cerebral spinal fluid, which acts as a protective layer. And so the brain as a whole probably moves very little inside the skull.The other problem with this video is that the brain is shown as a kind of rigid whole as it moves around, and that's not true either. Your brain is one of the softest substances in your body, and you can think of it kind of like jello. So as your head is moving back and forth, your brain is twisting and turning and contorting, and the tissue is getting stretched. And so most experts, I think, would agree that concussion is not likely to be something that's happening on this outer surface of the brain, but rather it's something that's much deeper towards the center of the brain.Now, the way that we're approaching this problem to try to understand the mechanisms of concussion and to figure out if we can prevent it is we are using a device like this. It's a mouthguard. It has sensors in it that are essentially the same that are in your cell phone: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and when someone is struck in the head, it can tell you how their head moved at a thousand samples per second. The principle behind the mouthguard is this: it fits onto your teeth. Your teeth are one of the hardest substances in your body. So it rigidly couples to your skull and gives you the most precise possible measurement of how the skull moves. People have tried other approaches, with helmets. We've looked at other sensors that go on your skin, and they all simply move around too much, and so we found that this is the only reliable way to take a good measurement.So now that we've got this device, we can go beyond studying cadavers, because you can only learn so much about concussion from studying a cadaver, and we want to learn and study live humans. So where can we find a group of willing volunteers to go out and smash their heads into each other on a regular basis and sustain concussion? Well, I was one of them, and it's your local friendly Stanford football team.So this is our laboratory, and I want to show you the first concussion we measured with this device. One of the things that I should point out is the device has this gyroscope in it, and that allows you to measure the rotation of the head. Most experts think that that's the critical factor that might start to tell us what is happening in concussion. So please watch this video.Announcer: Cougars bring extra people late, but Luck has time, and Winslow is crushed. I hope he's all right.(Audience roars)Top of your screen, you'll see him come on just this little post route, get separation, safety. Here it comes at you in real speed. You'll hear this. The hit delivered by —David Camarillo: Sorry, three times is probably a little excessive there. But you get the idea.So when you look at just the film here, pretty much the only thing you can see is he got hit really hard and he was hurt. But when we extract the data out of the mouthguard that he was wearing, we can see much more detail, much richer information. And one of the things that we noticed here is that he was struck in the lower left side of his face mask. And so that did something first that was a little counterintuitive. His head did not move to the right. In fact, it rotated first to the left. Then as the neck began to compress, the force of the blow caused it to whip back to the right. So this left-right motion was sort of a whiplash-type phenomenon, and we think that is probably what led to the brain injury.Now, this device is only limited in such that it can measure the skull motion, but what we really want to know is what's happening inside of the brain. So we collaborate with Svein Kleiven's group in Sweden. They've developed a finite element model of the brain. And so this is a simulation using the data from our mouthguard from the injury I just showed you, and what you see is the brain — this is a cross-section right in the front of the brain twisting and contorting as I mentioned. So you can see this doesn't look a lot like the CDC video. Now, the colors that you're looking at are how much the brain tissue is being stretched. And so the red is 50 percent. That means the brain has been stretched to 50 percent of its original length, the tissue in that particular area.And the main thing I want to draw your attention to is this red spot. So the red spot is very close to the center of the brain, and relatively speaking, you don't see a lot of colors like that on the exterior surface as the CDC video showed.Now, to explain a little more detail about how we think concussion might be happening, one thing I should mention is that we and others have observed that a concussion is more likely when you're struck and your head rotates in this direction. This is more common in sports like football, but this seems to be more dangerous. So what might be happening there? Well, one thing that you'll notice in the human brain that is different than other animals is we have these two very large lobes. We have the right brain and the left brain. And the key thing to notice in this figure here is that right down the center of the right brain and the left brain there's a large fissure that goes deep into the brain. And in that fissure, what you can't see in this image, you'll have to trust me, there is a fibrous sheet of tissue. It's called the falx, and it runs from the front of your head all the way to the back of your head, and it's quite stiff. And so what that allows for is when you're struck and your head rotates in this left-right direction, forces can rapidly transmit right down to the center of your brain.Now, what's there at the bottom of this fissure? It's the wiring of your brain, and in fact this red bundle here at the bottom of that fissure is the single largest fiber bundle that is the wiring that connects the right and left sides of your brain. It's called the corpus callosum. And we think that this might be one of the most common mechanisms of concussion, and as the forces move down, they strike the corpus callosum, it causes a dissociation between your right and your left brain and could explain some of the symptoms of concussion.This finding is also consistent of what we've seen in this brain disease that I mentioned, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. So this is an image of a middle-aged ex-professional football player, and the thing that I want to point out is if you look at the corpus callosum, and I'll page back here so you can see the size of a normal corpus callosum and the size of the person here who has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it is greatly atrophied. And the same goes for all of the space in the ventricles. These ventricles are much larger. And so all of this tissue near the center of the brain has died off over time. So what we're learning is indeed consistent.Now, there is some good news here, and I hope to give you a sense of hope by the end of this talk. One of the things that we've noticed, specifically about this mechanism of injury, is although there's a rapid transmission of the forces down this fissure, it still takes a defined amount of time. And what we think is that if we can slow the head down just enough so that the brain does not lag behind the skull but instead it moves in synchrony with the skull, then we might be able to prevent this mechanism of concussion.So how can we slow the head down?(Laughter)A gigantic helmet. So with more space, you have more time, and this is a bit of a joke, but some of you may have seen this. This is bubble soccer, and it's a real sport. In fact, I saw some young adults playing this sport down the street from my house the other day, and as far as I know there have been no reported concussions.(Laughter)But in all seriousness, this principle does work, but this has gone too far. This isn't something that's practical for bike riding or playing football. And so we are collaborating with a company in Sweden called Hövding. Some of you may have seen their work, and they're using the same principle of air to give you some extra space to prevent concussion. Kids, don't try this at home please. This stuntman does not have a helmet. He instead has a neck collar, and this neck collar has sensors in it, the same type of sensors that are in our mouthguard, and it detects when he's likely to have a fall, and there's an airbag that explodes and triggers, the same way that an airbag works in your car, essentially. And in the experiments we've done in my lab with their device, we found that it can greatly reduce the risk of concussion in some scenarios compared to a normal bicycle helmet. So it's a pretty exciting development.But in order for us to actually realize the benefits of technology that can prevent concussion, it needs to meet regulations. That's a reality. And this device is for sale in Europe but is not for sale in the US, and probably won't be any time soon. So I wanted to tell you why. There are some good reasons and then there are some not so good reasons.Bike helmets are federally regulated. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been given jurisdiction to approve any bike helmet for sale, and this is the test they use. This is back to what I was telling you at the beginning about skull fracture. That's what this test is for. And that's an important thing to do. It can save your life, but it's not sufficient, I would say. So for example, one thing this test doesn't evaluate is it doesn't tell you is that airbag going to trigger at the right time and place, and not trigger when it doesn't need to? Similarly, it's not going to tell you is this helmet likely to prevent concussion or not? And if you look at football helmets, which aren't regulated, they still have a very similar test. They're not regulated by the government, anyway. They have an industry body, which is the way most industries work. But this industry body, I can tell you, has been quite resistant to updating their standards. So in my lab, we are working on not only the mechanism of concussion, but we want to understand how can we have better test standards? And we hope that the government can use this type of information to encourage innovation by letting consumers know how protected are you with a given helmet.And I want to bring this back finally to the original question I asked, which is, would I feel comfortable letting my child play football or ride a bicycle? And this might be just a result of my own traumatic experience. I'm much more nervous about my daughter, Rose, riding a bicycle. So she's a year and a half old, and she's already, well, wants to anyway, race down the streets of San Francisco. This is the bottom of one of these streets. And so my personal goal is to — and I believe this is possible — is to further develop these technologies, and in fact, we're working on something in my lab in particular that really makes optimal use of the given space of a helmet. And I am confident that we will be able to, before she's ready to ride a two-wheeler, have something available that can in fact really reduce the risk of concussion and comply with regulatory bodies.And so what I'd like to do — and I know that this is for some of you of more immediate nature, I've got a couple years here — is to be able to tell parents and grandparents when I'm asked, it is safe and healthy for your children to engage in these activities. And I'm very fortunate to have a wonderful team at Stanford that's working hard on this.So I hope to come back in a few years with the final story, but for now I will tell you, please don't just be afraid when you hear the word concussion. There is hope.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_camarillo_why_helmets_don_t_prevent_concussions_and_what_might
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"The most complex problems in our time can be solved with simple techniques, if we are able to dream.As a child, I discovered that creativity is the key to cross from dreams to reality. I learned this from my grandmother, Dr. Ruth Tichauer, a Jewish refugee that settled in the heart of the Andes. That is how I grew up: encouraged to see beyond any limitation. So part of my education included helping her in remote, indigenous communities. I cherish those memories, because they helped me to understand life outside the city, a life with a lot of possibilities, without barriers, as language or culture.During those trips, my grandmother used to recite a Kipling poem: ""Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Mountains. Something lost behind the mountains. Lost and waiting for you. Go!""In the coming years, I became a medical student. One of every hundred children born worldwide has some kind of heart disease. There's a part of this problem I think I can solve — the part of this problem I have spent my life working on.The problem starts during pregnancy. The fetus needs to survive inside the mother. Survival depends on communication between the systemic and the pulmonary blood. At the moment of birth, this communication needs to stop. If it doesn't close, the baby has a hole in the heart. It is caused by prematurity and genetic conditions. But what we know today is that a lack of oxygen is also one of the causes. As you can see in the chart, the frequency of this kind of hole dramatically increases with altitude.Video: (Baby crying)When you look at patients with this condition, they seem desperate to breathe. To close the hole, major surgery used to be the only solution.One night, my friend Malte, were camping in the Amazon region. The only thing that would not burn in the fire was a green avocado branch. Then came a moment of inspiration. So we used the branch as a mold for our first invention. The holes in children's hearts can be closed with it. A coil is a piece of wire wrapped onto itself. It maybe doesn't look so fancy to you now, but that was our first successful attempt to create a device for this major problem. In this video, we can see how a very tiny catheter takes the coil to the heart. The coil then closes the hole. After that moment of inspiration, there came a very long time of effort developing a prototype. In vitro and in vivo studies took thousands of hours of work in the lab. The coil, if it works, can save lives.I returned from Germany to Bolivia, thinking that wherever we go, we have the opportunity to make a difference. With my wife and partner, Dr. Alexandra Heath, we started to see patients. After successfully treating patients with our coil, we felt really enthusiastic. But we live in a place that is 12,000 feet high. And, the patients there need a special device to solve their heart condition. The hole in altitude patients is different, because the orifice between the arteries is larger. Most patients cannot afford to be treated on time, and they die. The first coil could successfully treat only half of the patients in Bolivia. The search started again. We went back to the drawing board.After many trials, and with the help of my grandmother's indigenous friends in the mountains, we obtained a new device. For centuries, indigenous women told stories by weaving complex patterns on looms, and an unexpected skill helped us for the new device. We take this traditional method of weaving and make a design made by a smart material that records shape. It seems this time, the weaving allows us to create a seamless device that doesn't rust because it's made of only one piece. It can change by itself into very complex structures by a procedure that took decades to develop.As you can see, the device enters the body through the natural channels. Doctors have only to close the catheter through the hole. Our device expands, places itself and closes the hole. We have this beautiful delivery system that is so simple to use because it works by itself. No open surgery was necessary.(Applause)As doctors, we fight with diseases that take a long time and effort to heal — if they do. This is the child from before, after the procedure. As you can see —(Applause)As you can see, once the device is in place, the patient is 100 percent healed. From start to finish, the whole procedure takes only 30 minutes. That's very rewarding from the medical and human point of view. We are so proud that some of our former patients are part of our team — a team, thanks to added close interaction with patients that work with us. Together, we have only one idea: the best solutions need to be simple. We lost the fear of creating something new.The path, it's not easy. Many obstacles arise all the time. But we receive strength from our patients. Their resilience and courage inspire our creativity. Our goal is to make sure that no child is left behind, not because of cost or access.So we have to start a foundation with a one-to-one model. We will give one device for free to make sure that every child is treated. We are in many countries now, but we need to be everywhere. This whole thing began with one impossible idea as will continue it, really: No child is left behind.Muchas gracias.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/franz_freudenthal_a_new_way_to_heal_hearts_without_surgery
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"I want to tell you about the future of money. Let's start with a story about this culture that lived in Micronesia in the early 1900s, called the Yap. Now, I want to tell you about the Yap because their form of money is really interesting. They use these limestone discs called Rai stones. Now, the Yap don't actually move these Rai stones around or exchange them the way we do with our coins, because Rai stones can get to be pretty massive. The largest is about four tons and 12 feet across. So the Yap just keep track of who owns part of what stone.There's a story about these sailors that were transporting a stone across the ocean when they ran into some trouble and the stone actually fell in. The sailors got back to the main island and they told everyone what had happened. And everyone decided that, actually, yes, the sailors had the stone and — why not? — it still counted. Even though it was at the bottom of the ocean, it was still part of the Yap economy.You might think that this was just a small culture a hundred years ago. But things like this happen in the Western world as well, and the Yap actually still use a form of these stones.In 1932, the Bank of France asked the United States to convert their holdings from dollars into gold. But it was too inconvenient to think about actually shipping all of that gold over to Europe. So instead, someone went to where that gold was being stored and they just labeled it as belonging to France now. And everyone agreed that France owned the gold. It's just like those Rai stones.The point I want to make with these two examples is that there's nothing inherently valuable about a dollar or a stone or a coin. The only reason these things have any value is because we've all decided they should. And because we've decided that, they do. Money is about the exchanges and the transactions that we have with each other. Money isn't anything objective. It's about a collective story that we tell each other about value. A collective fiction. And that's a really powerful concept.In the past two decades, we've begun to use digital money. So I get paid via direct deposit, I pay my rent via bank transfer, I pay my taxes online. And every month, a small amount of money is deducted from my paycheck and invested in mutual funds in my retirement account. All of these interactions are literally just changing 1's and 0's on computers. There's not even anything physical, like a stone or a coin. Digital money makes it so that I can pay someone around the world in seconds.Now when this works, it's because there are large institutions underwriting every 1 or 0 that changes on a computer. And when it doesn't, it's often the fault of those large institutions. Or at least, it's up to them to fix the problem. And a lot of times, they don't. There's a lot of friction in the system. How long did it take the US credit card companies to implement chip and pin? Half my credit cards still don't work in Europe. That's friction. Transferring money across borders and across currencies is really expensive: friction. An entrepreneur in India can set up an online business in minutes, but it's hard for her to get loans and to get paid: friction. Our access to digital money and our ability to freely transact is being held captive by these gatekeepers. And there's a lot of impediments in the system slowing things down.That's because digital money isn't really mine, it's entries in databases that belong to my bank, my credit card company or my investment firm. And these companies have the right to say ""no."" If I'm a PayPal merchant and PayPal wrongly flags me for fraud, that's it. My account gets frozen, and I can't get paid.These institutions are standing in the way of innovation. How many of you use Facebook photos, Google Photos, Instagram? My photos are everywhere. They are on my phone, they're on my laptop, they're on my old phone, they're in Dropbox. They're on all these different websites and services. And most of these services don't work together. They don't inter-operate. And as a result, my photo library is a mess.The same thing happens when institutions control the money supply. A lot of these services don't inter-operate, and as a result, this blocks what we can do with payment. And it makes transaction costs go up. So far, we've been through two phases of money. In an analog world, we had to deal with these physical objects, and money moved at a certain speed — the speed of humans. In a digital world, money can reach much farther and is much faster, but we're at the mercy of these gatekeeper institutions. Money only moves at the speed of banks.We're about to enter a new phase of money. The future of money is programmable. When we combine software and currency, money becomes more than just a static unit of value, and we don't have to rely on institutions for security. In a programmable world, we remove humans and institutions from the loop. And when this happens, we won't even feel like we're transacting anymore. Money will be directed by software, and it will just safely and securely flow.Cryptocurrencies are the first step of this evolution. Cryptocurrencies are digital money that isn't run by any government or bank. It's money designed to work in a world without intermediaries. Bitcoin is the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency, but there are hundreds of them. There's Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar, Dogecoin, and those are just a few of the more popular ones. And these things are real money. The sushi restaurant down my street takes Bitcoin. I have an app on my phone that I can use to buy sashimi. But it's not just for small transactions. In March, there was a transaction that moved around 100,000 bitcoins. That's the equivalent of 40 million US dollars.Cryptocurrencies are based on a special field of mathematics called cryptography. Cryptography is the study of how to secure communication, and it's about two really important things: masking information so it can be hidden in plain sight, and verifying a piece of information's source. Cryptography underpins so many of the systems around us. And it's so powerful that at times the US government has actually classified it as a weapon.During World War II, breaking cryptosystems like Enigma was critical to decoding enemy transmissions and turning the tide of the war. Today, anyone with a modern web browser is running a pretty sophisticated cryptosystem. It's what we use to secure our interactions on the Internet. It's what makes it safe for us to type our passwords in and to send financial information to websites. So what the banks used to give us — trustworthy digital money transfer — we can now get with a clever application of cryptography. And this means that we don't have to rely on the banks anymore to secure our transactions. We can do it ourselves.Bitcoin is based on the very same idea that the Yap used, this collective global knowledge of transfers. In Bitcoin, I spend by transferring Bitcoin, and I get paid when someone transfers Bitcoin to me.Imagine that we had this magic paper. So the way that this paper works is I can give you a sheet of it and if you write something on it, it will magically appear on my piece as well. Let's say we just give everyone this paper and everyone writes down the transfers that they're doing in the Bitcoin system. All of these transfers get copied around to everyone else's pieces of paper. And I can look at mine and I'll have a list of all of the transfers that are happening in the entire Bitcoin economy. This is actually what's happening with the Bitcoin blockchain, which is a list of all of the transactions in Bitcoin. Except, it's not done through paper. It's done through computer code, running on thousands of networked computers around the world. All of these computers are collectively confirming who owns what Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin blockchain is core to how Bitcoin works.But where do bitcoins actually come from? Well, the code is designed to create new Bitcoin according to a schedule. And the way that it works is that to get those Bitcoin, I have to solve a puzzle — a random cryptographic puzzle. Imagine that we had 15 dice, and we were throwing these dice over and over again. Whenever the dice come up all sixes, we say that we win. This is very close to what these computers are all actually doing. They're trying over and over again to land on the right number. And when they do, we say that they've solved the puzzle.The computer that solves the puzzle publishes its solution to the rest of the network and collects its reward: new bitcoins. And in the act of solving this puzzle, these computers are actually helping to secure the Bitcoin blockchain and add to the list of transactions.There are actually people all over the world running this software, and we call them Bitcoin miners. Anyone can become a Bitcoin miner. You can go download the software right now and run it in your computer and try to collect some bitcoins. I can't say that I would recommend it, because right now, the puzzle is so hard and the network is so powerful, that if I tried to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, I probably wouldn't see any for about two million years. The miners, professional miners, use this special hardware that's designed to solve the puzzle really fast. Now, the Bitcoin network and all of this special hardware, there are estimates that the amount of energy it uses is equivalent to that of a small country. So, the first set of cryptocurrencies are a little bit slow and a little bit cumbersome. But the next generation is going to be so much better and so much faster.Cryptocurrencies are the first step to a world with a global programmable money. And in a world with programmable money, I can pay anyone else securely without having to sign up or ask permission, or do a conversion or worry about my money getting stuck. And I can send money around the world. This is a really amazing thing. It's the idea of permission-less innovation. The Internet caused an explosion of innovation, because it was built upon an open architecture. And just like the Internet changed the way we communicate, programmable money is going to change the way we pay, allocate and decide on value.So what kind of world does programmable money create? Imagine a world where I can rent out my healthcare data to a pharmaceutical company. They can run large-scale data analysis and provide me with a cryptographic proof that shows they're only using my data in a way that we agreed. And they can pay me for what they find out. Instead of signing up for streaming services and getting a cable bill, what if my television analyzed my watching habits and recommended well-priced content that fit within my budget that I would enjoy? Imagine an Internet without ads, because instead of paying with our attention when we view content, we just pay.Interestingly, things like micro-payments are actually going to change the way security works in our world, because once we're better able to allocate value, people will use their money and their energies for more constructive things. If it cost a fraction of a cent to send an email, would we still have spam?We're not at this world yet, but it's coming. Right now, it's like we're in a world that is seeing the first automobile. The first cryptocurrency, like the first car, is slow and hard to understand and hard to use. Digital money, like the horse and carriage, works pretty well, and the whole world economy is built on it. If you were the first person on your block to get a car with an internal combustion engine, your neighbors would probably think you were crazy: ""Why would you want this large, clunky machine that breaks down all the time, that lights on fire, and is still slower than a horse?"" But we all know how that story turns out.We're entering a new era of programmable money. And it's very exciting, but it's also a little bit scary. Cryptocurrencies can be used for illegal transactions, just like cash is used for crime in the world today. When all of our transactions are online, what does that mean for surveillance — who can see what we do? Who's advantaged in this new world and who isn't? Will I have to start to pay for things that I didn't have to pay for before? Will we all become slaves to algorithms and utility functions?All new technology comes with trade-offs. The Internet brought us a lot of ways to waste time. But it also greatly increased productivity. Mobile phones are annoying because they make me feel like I have to stay connected to work all the time. But they also help me stay connected to friends and family. The new sharing economy is going to eliminate some jobs. But it's also going to create new, flexible forms of employment. With programmable money, we decouple the need for large, trusted institutions from the architecture of the network. And this pushes innovation in money out to the edges, where it belongs. Programmable money democratizes money. And because of this, things are going to change and unfold in ways that we can't even predict.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/neha_narula_the_future_of_money
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"You know, I didn't set out to be a parenting expert. In fact, I'm not very interested in parenting, per Se. It's just that there's a certain style of parenting these days that is kind of messing up kids, impeding their chances to develop into theirselves. There's a certain style of parenting these days that's getting in the way.I guess what I'm saying is, we spend a lot of time being very concerned about parents who aren't involved enough in the lives of their kids and their education or their upbringing, and rightly so. But at the other end of the spectrum, there's a lot of harm going on there as well, where parents feel a kid can't be successful unless the parent is protecting and preventing at every turn and hovering over every happening, and micromanaging every moment, and steering their kid towards some small subset of colleges and careers.When we raise kids this way, and I'll say we, because Lord knows, in raising my two teenagers, I've had these tendencies myself, our kids end up leading a kind of checklisted childhood.And here's what the checklisted childhood looks like. We keep them safe and sound and fed and watered, and then we want to be sure they go to the right schools, that they're in the right classes at the right schools, and that they get the right grades in the right classes in the right schools. But not just the grades, the scores, and not just the grades and scores, but the accolades and the awards and the sports, the activities, the leadership. We tell our kids, don't just join a club, start a club, because colleges want to see that. And check the box for community service. I mean, show the colleges you care about others.(Laughter)And all of this is done to some hoped-for degree of perfection. We expect our kids to perform at a level of perfection we were never asked to perform at ourselves, and so because so much is required, we think, well then, of course we parents have to argue with every teacher and principal and coach and referee and act like our kid's concierge and personal handler and secretary.And then with our kids, our precious kids, we spend so much time nudging, cajoling, hinting, helping, haggling, nagging as the case may be, to be sure they're not screwing up, not closing doors, not ruining their future, some hoped-for admission to a tiny handful of colleges that deny almost every applicant.And here's what it feels like to be a kid in this checklisted childhood. First of all, there's no time for free play. There's no room in the afternoons, because everything has to be enriching, we think. It's as if every piece of homework, every quiz, every activity is a make-or-break moment for this future we have in mind for them, and we absolve them of helping out around the house, and we even absolve them of getting enough sleep as long as they're checking off the items on their checklist. And in the checklisted childhood, we say we just want them to be happy, but when they come home from school, what we ask about all too often first is their homework and their grades. And they see in our faces that our approval, that our love, that their very worth, comes from A's. And then we walk alongside them and offer clucking praise like a trainer at the Westminster Dog Show —(Laughter)coaxing them to just jump a little higher and soar a little farther, day after day after day. And when they get to high school, they don't say, ""Well, what might I be interested in studying or doing as an activity?"" They go to counselors and they say, ""What do I need to do to get into the right college?"" And then, when the grades start to roll in in high school, and they're getting some B's, or God forbid some C's, they frantically text their friends and say, ""Has anyone ever gotten into the right college with these grades?""And our kids, regardless of where they end up at the end of high school, they're breathless. They're brittle. They're a little burned out. They're a little old before their time, wishing the grown-ups in their lives had said, ""What you've done is enough, this effort you've put forth in childhood is enough."" And they're withering now under high rates of anxiety and depression and some of them are wondering, will this life ever turn out to have been worth it?Well, we parents, we parents are pretty sure it's all worth it. We seem to behave — it's like we literally think they will have no future if they don't get into one of these tiny set of colleges or careers we have in mind for them.Or maybe, maybe, we're just afraid they won't have a future we can brag about to our friends and with stickers on the backs of our cars. Yeah.(Applause)But if you look at what we've done, if you have the courage to really look at it, you'll see that not only do our kids think their worth comes from grades and scores, but that when we live right up inside their precious developing minds all the time, like our very own version of the movie ""Being John Malkovich,"" we send our children the message: ""Hey kid, I don't think you can actually achieve any of this without me."" And so with our overhelp, our overprotection and overdirection and hand-holding, we deprive our kids of the chance to build self-efficacy, which is a really fundamental tenet of the human psyche, far more important than that self-esteem they get every time we applaud. Self-efficacy is built when one sees that one's own actions lead to outcomes, not — There you go.(Applause)Not one's parents' actions on one's behalf, but when one's own actions lead to outcomes. So simply put, if our children are to develop self-efficacy, and they must, then they have to do a whole lot more of the thinking, planning, deciding, doing, hoping, coping, trial and error, dreaming and experiencing of life for themselves.Now, am I saying every kid is hard-working and motivated and doesn't need a parent's involvement or interest in their lives, and we should just back off and let go? Hell no.(Laughter)That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, when we treat grades and scores and accolades and awards as the purpose of childhood, all in furtherance of some hoped-for admission to a tiny number of colleges or entrance to a small number of careers, that that's too narrow a definition of success for our kids. And even though we might help them achieve some short-term wins by overhelping — like they get a better grade if we help them do their homework, they might end up with a longer childhood résumé when we help — what I'm saying is that all of this comes at a long-term cost to their sense of self. What I'm saying is, we should be less concerned with the specific set of colleges they might be able to apply to or might get into and far more concerned that they have the habits, the mindset, the skill set, the wellness, to be successful wherever they go. What I'm saying is, our kids need us to be a little less obsessed with grades and scores and a whole lot more interested in childhood providing a foundation for their success built on things like love and chores.(Laughter)(Applause)Did I just say chores? Did I just say chores? I really did. But really, here's why. The longest longitudinal study of humans ever conducted is called the Harvard Grant Study. It found that professional success in life, which is what we want for our kids, that professional success in life comes from having done chores as a kid, and the earlier you started, the better, that a roll-up-your-sleeves- and-pitch-in mindset, a mindset that says, there's some unpleasant work, someone's got to do it, it might as well be me, a mindset that says, I will contribute my effort to the betterment of the whole, that that's what gets you ahead in the workplace. Now, we all know this. You know this.(Applause)We all know this, and yet, in the checklisted childhood, we absolve our kids of doing the work of chores around the house, and then they end up as young adults in the workplace still waiting for a checklist, but it doesn't exist, and more importantly, lacking the impulse, the instinct to roll up their sleeves and pitch in and look around and wonder, how can I be useful to my colleagues? How can I anticipate a few steps ahead to what my boss might need?A second very important finding from the Harvard Grant Study said that happiness in life comes from love, not love of work, love of humans: our spouse, our partner, our friends, our family. So childhood needs to teach our kids how to love, and they can't love others if they don't first love themselves, and they won't love themselves if we can't offer them unconditional love.(Applause)Right. And so, instead of being obsessed with grades and scores when our precious offspring come home from school, or we come home from work, we need to close our technology, put away our phones, and look them in the eye and let them see the joy that fills our faces when we see our child for the first time in a few hours. And then we have to say, ""How was your day? What did you like about today?"" And when your teenage daughter says, ""Lunch,"" like mine did, and I want to hear about the math test, not lunch, you have to still take an interest in lunch. You gotta say, ""What was great about lunch today?"" They need to know they matter to us as humans, not because of their GPA.All right, so you're thinking, chores and love, that sounds all well and good, but give me a break. The colleges want to see top scores and grades and accolades and awards, and I'm going to tell you, sort of. The very biggest brand-name schools are asking that of our young adults, but here's the good news. Contrary to what the college rankings racket would have us believe —(Applause)you don't have to go to one of the biggest brand name schools to be happy and successful in life. Happy and successful people went to state school, went to a small college no one has heard of, went to community college, went to a college over here and flunked out.(Applause)The evidence is in this room, is in our communities, that this is the truth. And if we could widen our blinders and be willing to look at a few more colleges, maybe remove our own egos from the equation, we could accept and embrace this truth and then realize, it is hardly the end of the world if our kids don't go to one of those big brand-name schools. And more importantly, if their childhood has not been lived according to a tyrannical checklist then when they get to college, whichever one it is, well, they'll have gone there on their own volition, fueled by their own desire, capable and ready to thrive there.I have to admit something to you. I've got two kids I mentioned, Sawyer and Avery. They're teenagers. And once upon a time, I think I was treating my Sawyer and Avery like little bonsai trees —(Laughter)that I was going to carefully clip and prune and shape into some perfect form of a human that might just be perfect enough to warrant them admission to one of the most highly selective colleges. But I've come to realize, after working with thousands of other people's kids —(Laughter)and raising two kids of my own, my kids aren't bonsai trees. They're wildflowers of an unknown genus and species —(Laughter)and it's my job to provide a nourishing environment, to strengthen them through chores and to love them so they can love others and receive love and the college, the major, the career, that's up to them. My job is not to make them become what I would have them become, but to support them in becoming their glorious selves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/julie_lythcott_haims_how_to_raise_successful_kids_without_over_parenting
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"Have you heard the news? We're in a clean energy revolution. And where I live in Berkeley, California, it seems like every day I see a new roof with new solar panels going up, electric car in the driveway. Germany sometimes gets half its power from solar, and India is now committed to building 10 times more solar than we have in California, by the year 2022.Even nuclear seems to be making a comeback. Bill Gates is in China working with engineers, there's 40 different companies that are working together to try to race to build the first reactor that runs on waste, that can't melt down and is cheaper than coal. And so you might start to ask: Is this whole global warming problem going to be a lot easier to solve than anybody imagined? That was the question we wanted to know, so my colleagues and I decided to take a deep dive into the data. We were a little skeptical of some parts of the clean energy revolution story, but what we found really surprised us.The first thing is that clean energy has been increasing. This is electricity from clean energy sources over the last 20 years. But when you look at the percentage of global electricity from clean energy sources, it's actually been in decline from 36 percent to 31 percent. And if you care about climate change, you've got to go in the opposite direction to 100 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources, as quickly as possible. Now, you might wonder, ""Come on, how much could five percentage points of global electricity be?"" Well, it turns out to be quite a bit. It's the equivalent of 60 nuclear plants the size of Diablo Canyon, California's last nuclear plant, or 900 solar farms the size of Topaz, which is one of the biggest solar farms in the world, and certainly our biggest in California. A big part of this is simply that fossil fuels are increasing faster than clean energy. And that's understandable. There's just a lot of poor countries that are still using wood and dung and charcoal as their main source of energy, and they need modern fuels.But there's something else going on, which is that one of those clean energy sources in particular has actually been on the decline in absolute terms, not just relatively. And that's nuclear. You can see its generation has declined seven percent over the last 10 years. Now, solar and wind have been making huge strides, so you hear a lot of talk about how it doesn't really matter, because solar and wind is going to make up the difference. But the data says something different. When you combine all the electricity from solar and wind, you see it actually barely makes up half of the decline from nuclear. Let's take a closer look in the United States.Over the last couple of years — really 2013, 2014 — we prematurely retired four nuclear power plants. They were almost entirely replaced with fossil fuels, and so the consequence was that we wiped out almost as much clean energy electricity that we get from solar. And it's not unique to us. People think of California as a clean energy and climate leader, but when we looked at the data, what we found is that, in fact, California reduced emissions more slowly than the national average, between 2000 and 2015.What about Germany? They're doing a lot of clean energy. But when you look at the data, German emissions have actually been going up since 2009, and there's really not anybody who's going to tell you that they're going to meet their climate commitments in 2020.The reason isn't hard to understand. Solar and wind provide power about 10 to 20 percent of the time, which means that when the sun's not shining, the wind's not blowing, you still need power for your hospitals, your homes, your cities, your factories. And while batteries have made some really cool improvements lately, the truth is, they're just never going to be as efficient as the electrical grid. Every time you put electricity into a battery and take it out, you lose about 20 to 40 percent of the power. That's why when, in California, we try to deal with all the solar we've brought online — we now get about 10 percent of electricity from solar — when the sun goes down, and people come home from work and turn on their air conditioners and their TV sets, and every other appliance in the house, we need a lot of natural gas backup. So what we've been doing is stuffing a lot of natural gas into the side of a mountain. And that worked pretty well for a while, but then late last year, it sprung a leak. This is Aliso Canyon. So much methane gas was released, it was the equivalent of putting half a million cars on the road. It basically blew through all of our climate commitments for the year.Well, what about India? Sometimes you have to go places to really get the right data, so we traveled to India a few months ago. We met with all the top officials — solar, nuclear, the rest — and what they told us is, ""We're actually having more serious problems than both Germany and California. We don't have backup; we don't have all the natural gas. And that's just the start of it. Say we want to get to 100 gigawatts by 2022. But last year we did just five, and the year before that, we did five.""So, let's just take a closer look at nuclear. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has looked at the carbon content of all these different fuels, and nuclear comes out really low — it's actually lower even than solar. And nuclear obviously provides a lot of power — 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During a year, a single plant can provide power 92 percent of the time. What's interesting is that when you look at countries that have deployed different kinds of clean energies, there's only a few that have done so at a pace consistent with dealing with the climate crisis.So nuclear seems like a pretty good option, but there's this big problem with it, which all of you, I'm sure, are aware of, which is that people really don't like it. There was a study, a survey done of people around the world, not just in the United States or Europe, about a year and a half ago. And what they found is that nuclear is actually one of the least popular forms of energy. Even oil is more popular than nuclear. And while nuclear kind of edges out coal, the thing is, people don't really fear coal in the same way they fear nuclear, which really operates on our unconscious.So what is it that we fear? There's really three things. There's the safety of the plants themselves — the fears that they're going to melt down and cause damage; there's the waste from them; and there's the association with weapons. And I think, understandably, engineers look at those concerns and look for technological fixes. That's why Bill Gates is in China developing advanced reactors. That's why 40 different entrepreneurs are working on this problem. And I, myself, have been very excited about it.We did a report: ""How to Make Nuclear Cheap."" In particular, the thorium reactor shows a lot of promise. So when the climate scientist, James Hansen, asked if I wanted to go to China with him and look at the Chinese advanced nuclear program, I jumped at the chance. We were there with MIT and UC Berkeley engineers. And I had in my mind that the Chinese would be able to do with nuclear what they did with so many other things — start to crank out small nuclear reactors on assembly lines, ship them up like iPhones or MacBooks and send them around the world. I would get one at home in Berkeley. But what I found was somewhat different. The presentations were all very exciting and very promising; they have multiple reactors that they're working on. The time came for the thorium reactor, and a bunch of us were excited. They went through the whole presentation, they got to the timeline, and they said, ""We're going to have a thorium molten salt reactor ready for sale to the world by 2040."" And I was like, ""What?""(Laughter)I looked at my colleagues and I was like, ""Excuse me — can you guys speed that up a little bit? Because we're in a little bit of a climate crisis right now. And your cities are really polluted, by the way."" And they responded back, they were like, ""I'm not sure what you've heard about our thorium program, but we don't have a third of our budget, and your department of energy hasn't been particularly forthcoming with all that data you guys have on testing reactors."" And I said, ""Well, I've got an idea. You know how you've got 10 years where you're demonstrating that reactor? Let's just skip that part, and let's just go right to commercializing it. That will save money and time."" And the engineer just looked at me and said, ""Let me ask you a question: Would you buy a car that had never been demonstrated before?""So what about the other reactors? There's a reactor that's coming online now, they're starting to sell it. It's a high-temperature gas reactor. It can't melt down. But it's really big and bulky, that's part of the safety, and nobody thinks it's going to ever get cheaper than the reactors that we have. The ones that use waste as fuel are really cool ideas, but the truth is, we don't actually know how to do that yet. There's some risk that you'll actually make more waste, and most people think that if you're including that waste part of the process, it's just going to make the whole machine a lot more expensive, it's just adding another complicated step.The truth is, there's real questions about how much of that we're going to do. I mean, we went to India and asked about the nuclear program. The government said before the Paris climate talks that they were going to do something like 30 new nuclear plants. But when we got there and interviewed people and even looked at the internal documents, they're now saying they're going to do about five. And in most of the world, especially the rich world, they're not talking about building new reactors. We're actually talking about taking reactors down before their lifetimes are over. Germany's actually pressuring its neighbors to do that. I mentioned the United States — we could lose half of our reactors over the next 15 years, which would wipe out 40 percent of the emissions reductions we're supposed to get under the Clean Power Plan. Of course, in Japan, they took all their nuclear plants offline, replaced them with coal, natural gas, oil burning, and they're only expected to bring online about a third to two-thirds.So when we went through the numbers, and just added that up — how much nuclear do we see China and India bringing online over the next 15 years, how much do we see at risk of being taken offline — this was the most startling finding. What we found is that the world is actually at risk of losing four times more clean energy than we lost over the last 10 years. In other words: we're not in a clean energy revolution; we're in a clean energy crisis. So it's understandable that engineers would look for a technical fix to the fears that people have of nuclear. But when you consider that these are big challenges to do, that they're going to take a long time to solve, there's this other issue, which is: Are those technical fixes really going to solve people's fears?Let's take safety. You know, despite what people think, it's hard to figure out how to make nuclear power much safer. I mean, every medical journal that looks at it — this is the most recent study from the British journal, ""Lancet,"" one of the most respected journals in the world — nuclear is the safest way to make reliable power. Everybody's scared of the accidents. So you go look at the accident data — Fukushima, Chernobyl — the World Health Organization finds the same thing: the vast majority of harm is caused by people panicking, and they're panicking because they're afraid. In other words, the harm that's caused isn't actually caused by the machines or the radiation. It's caused by our fears.And what about the waste? Everyone worries about the waste. Well, the interesting thing about the waste is how little of it there is. This is just from one plant. If you take all the nuclear waste we've ever made in the United States, put it on a football field, stacked it up, it would only reach 20 feet high. And people say it's poisoning people or doing something — it's not, it's just sitting there, it's just being monitored. There's not very much of it. By contrast, the waste that we don't control from energy production — we call it ""pollution,"" and it kills seven million people a year, and it's threatening very serious levels of global warming. And the truth is that even if we get good at using that waste as fuel, there's always going to be some fuel left over. That means there's always going to be people that think it's a big problem for reasons that maybe don't have as much to do with the actual waste as we think.Well, what about the weapons? Maybe the most surprising thing is that we can't find any examples of countries that have nuclear power and then, ""Oh!"" decide to go get a weapon. In fact, it works the opposite. What we find is the only way we know how to get rid large numbers of nuclear weapons is by using the plutonium in the warheads as fuel in our nuclear power plants. And so, if you are wanting to get the world rid of nuclear weapons, then we're going to need a lot more nuclear power.(Applause)As I was leaving China, the engineer that brought Bill Gates there kind of pulled me aside, and he said, ""You know, Michael, I appreciate your interest in all the different nuclear supply technologies, but there's this more basic issue, which is that there's just not enough global demand. I mean, we can crank out these machines on assembly lines, we do know how to make things cheap, but there's just not enough people that want them.""And so, let's do solar and wind and efficiency and conservation. Let's accelerate the advanced nuclear programs. I think we should triple the amount of money we're spending on it. But I just think the most important thing, if we're going to overcome the climate crisis, is to keep in mind that the cause of the clean energy crisis isn't from within our machines, it's from within ourselves.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_how_fear_of_nuclear_power_is_hurting_the_environment
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"Every weekend for as long as I can remember, my father would get up on a Saturday, put on a worn sweatshirt and he'd scrape away at the squeaky old wheel of a house that we lived in. I wouldn't even call it restoration; it was a ritual, catharsis. He would spend all year scraping paint with this old heat gun and a spackle knife, and then he would repaint where he scraped, only to begin again the following year. Scraping and re-scraping, painting and repainting: the work of an old house is never meant to be done.The day my father turned 52, I got a phone call. My mother was on the line to tell me that doctors had found a lump in his stomach — terminal cancer, she told me, and he had been given only three weeks to live.I immediately moved home to Poughkeepsie, New York, to sit with my father on death watch, not knowing what the next days would bring us. To keep myself distracted, I rolled up my sleeves, and I went about finishing what he could now no longer complete — the restoration of our old home.When that looming three-week deadline came and then went, he was still alive. And at three months, he joined me. We gutted and repainted the interior. At six months, the old windows were refinished, and at 18 months, the rotted porch was finally replaced.And there was my father, standing with me outside, admiring a day's work, hair on his head, fully in remission, when he turned to me and he said, ""You know, Michael, this house saved my life.""So the following year, I decided to go to architecture school.(Laughter)But there, I learned something different about buildings. Recognition seemed to come to those who prioritized novel and sculptural forms, like ribbons, or ... pickles?(Laughter)And I think this is supposed to be a snail.Something about this bothered me. Why was it that the best architects, the greatest architecture — all beautiful and visionary and innovative — is also so rare, and seems to serve so very few? And more to the point: With all of this creative talent, what more could we do?Just as I was about to start my final exams, I decided to take a break from an all-nighter and go to a lecture by Dr. Paul Farmer, a leading health activist for the global poor. I was surprised to hear a doctor talking about architecture. Buildings are making people sicker, he said, and for the poorest in the world, this is causing epidemic-level problems. In this hospital in South Africa, patients that came in with, say, a broken leg, to wait in this unventilated hallway, walked out with a multidrug-resistant strand of tuberculosis. Simple designs for infection control had not been thought about, and people had died because of it.""Where are the architects?"" Paul said. If hospitals are making people sicker, where are the architects and designers to help us build and design hospitals that allow us to heal?That following summer, I was in the back of a Land Rover with a few classmates, bumping over the mountainous hillside of Rwanda. For the next year, I'd be living in Butaro in this old guesthouse, which was a jail after the genocide. I was there to design and build a new type of hospital with Dr. Farmer and his team. If hallways are making patients sicker, what if we could design a hospital that flips the hallways on the outside, and makes people walk in the exterior? If mechanical systems rarely work, what if we could design a hospital that could breathe through natural ventilation, and meanwhile reduce its environmental footprint?And what about the patients' experience? Evidence shows that a simple view of nature can radically improve health outcomes, So why couldn't we design a hospital where every patient had a window with a view? Simple, site-specific designs can make a hospital that heals.Designing it is one thing; getting it built, we learned, is quite another.We worked with Bruce Nizeye, a brilliant engineer, and he thought about construction differently than I had been taught in school. When we had to excavate this enormous hilltop and a bulldozer was expensive and hard to get to site, Bruce suggested doing it by hand, using a method in Rwanda called ""Ubudehe,"" which means ""community works for the community."" Hundreds of people came with shovels and hoes, and we excavated that hill in half the time and half the cost of that bulldozer. Instead of importing furniture, Bruce started a guild, and he brought in master carpenters to train others in how to make furniture by hand. And on this job site, 15 years after the Rwandan genocide, Bruce insisted that we bring on labor from all backgrounds, and that half of them be women.Bruce was using the process of building to heal, not just for those who were sick, but for the entire community as a whole. We call this the locally fabricated way of building, or ""lo-fab,"" and it has four pillars: hire locally, source regionally, train where you can and most importantly, think about every design decision as an opportunity to invest in the dignity of the places where you serve. Think of it like the local food movement, but for architecture. And we're convinced that this way of building can be replicated across the world, and change the way we talk about and evaluate architecture.Using the lo-fab way of building, even aesthetic decisions can be designed to impact people's lives. In Butaro, we chose to use a local volcanic stone found in abundance within the area, but often considered a nuisance by farmers, and piled on the side of the road. We worked with these masons to cut these stones and form them into the walls of the hospital. And when they began on this corner and wrapped around the entire hospital, they were so good at putting these stones together, they asked us if they could take down the original wall and rebuild it. And you see what is possible. It's beautiful. And the beauty, to me, comes from the fact that I know that hands cut these stones, and they formed them into this thick wall, made only in this place with rocks from this soil.When you go outside today and you look at your built world, ask not only: ""What is the environmental footprint?"" — an important question — but what if we also asked, ""What is the human handprint of those who made it?""We started a new practice based around these questions, and we tested it around the world. Like in Haiti, where we asked if a new hospital could help end the epidemic of cholera. In this 100-bed hospital, we designed a simple strategy to clean contaminated medical waste before it enters the water table, and our partners at Les Centres GHESKIO are already saving lives because of it.Or Malawi: we asked if a birthing center could radically reduce maternal and infant mortality. Malawi has one of the highest rates of maternal and infant death in the world. Using a simple strategy to be replicated nationally, we designed a birthing center that would attract women and their attendants to come to the hospital earlier and therefore have safer births.Or in the Congo, where we asked if an educational center could also be used to protect endangered wildlife. Poaching for ivory and bushmeat is leading to global epidemic, disease transfer and war. In one of the hardest-to-reach places in the world, we used the mud and the dirt and the wood around us to construct a center that would show us ways to protect and conserve our rich biodiversity.Even here in the US, we were asked to rethink the largest university for the deaf and hard of hearing in the world. The deaf community, through sign language, shows us the power of visual communication. We designed a campus that would awaken the ways in which we as humans all communicate, both verbally and nonverbally.And even in Poughkeepsie, my hometown, we thought about old industrial infrastructure. We wondered: Could we use arts and culture and design to revitalize this city and other Rust Belt cities across our nation, and turn them into centers for innovation and growth? In each of these projects, we asked a simple question: What more can architecture do? And by asking that question, we were forced to consider how we could create jobs, how we could source regionally and how we could invest in the dignity of the communities in which we serve.I have learned that architecture can be a transformative engine for change.About a year ago, I read an article about a tireless and intrepid civil rights leader named Bryan Stevenson.(Applause)And Bryan had a bold architectural vision. He and his team had been documenting the over 4,000 lynchings of African-Americans that have happened in the American South. And they had a plan to mark every county where these lynchings occurred, and build a national memorial to the victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama.Countries like Germany and South Africa and, of course, Rwanda, have found it necessary to build memorials to reflect on the atrocities of their past, in order to heal their national psyche. We have yet to do this in the United States.So I sent a cold email to info@equaljusticeintiative.org: ""Dear Bryan,"" it said, ""I think your building project is maybe the most important project we could do in America and could change the way we think about racial injustice. By any chance, do you know who will design it?""(Laughter)Surprisingly, shockingly, Bryan got right back to me, and invited me down to meet with his team and talk to them. Needless to say, I canceled all my meetings and I jumped on a plane to Montgomery, Alabama. When I got there, Bryan and his team picked me up, and we walked around the city. And they took the time to point out the many markers that have been placed all over the city to the history of the Confederacy, and the very few that mark the history of slavery.And then he walked me to a hill. It overlooked the whole city. He pointed out the river and the train tracks where the largest domestic slave-trading port in America had once prospered. And then to the Capitol rotunda, where George Wallace had stood on its steps and proclaimed, ""Segregation forever."" And then to the very hill below us. He said, ""Here we will build a new memorial that will change the identity of this city and of this nation.""Our two teams have worked together over the last year to design this memorial. The memorial will take us on a journey through a classical, almost familiar building type, like the Parthenon or the colonnade at the Vatican. But as we enter, the ground drops below us and our perception shifts, where we realize that these columns evoke the lynchings, which happened in the public square. And as we continue, we begin to understand the vast number of those who have yet to be put to rest. Their names will be engraved on the markers that hang above us. And just outside will be a field of identical columns. But these are temporary columns, waiting in purgatory, to be placed in the very counties where these lynchings occurred. Over the next few years, this site will bear witness, as each of these markers is claimed and visibly placed in those counties. Our nation will begin to heal from over a century of silence.When we think about how it should be built, we were reminded of Ubudehe, the building process we learned about in Rwanda. We wondered if we could fill those very columns with the soil from the sites of where these killings occurred. Brian and his team have begun collecting that soil and preserving it in individual jars with family members, community leaders and descendants. The act of collecting soil itself has lead to a type of spiritual healing. It's an act of restorative justice.As one EJI team member noted in the collection of the soil from where Will McBride was lynched, ""If Will McBride left one drop of sweat, one drop of blood, one hair follicle — I pray that I dug it up, and that his whole body would be at peace.""We plan to break ground on this memorial later this year, and it will be a place to finally speak of the unspeakable acts that have scarred this nation.(Applause)When my father told me that day that this house — our house — had saved his life, what I didn't know was that he was referring to a much deeper relationship between architecture and ourselves. Buildings are not simply expressive sculptures. They make visible our personal and our collective aspirations as a society. Great architecture can give us hope. Great architecture can heal.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_murphy_architecture_that_s_built_to_heal
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"There's a man out there, somewhere, who looks a little bit like the actor Idris Elba, or at least he did 20 years ago. I don't know anything else about him, except that he once saved my life by putting his own life in danger. This man ran across four lanes of freeway traffic in the middle of the night to bring me back to safety after a car accident that could have killed me. And the whole thing left me really shaken up, obviously, but it also left me with this kind of burning, gnawing need to understand why he did it, what forces within him caused him to make the choice that I owe my life to, to risk his own life to save the life of a stranger? In other words, what are the causes of his or anybody else's capacity for altruism?But first let me tell you what happened. That night, I was 19 years old and driving back to my home in Tacoma, Washington, down the Interstate 5 freeway, when a little dog darted out in front of my car. And I did exactly what you're not supposed to do, which is swerve to avoid it. And I discovered why you're not supposed to do that. I hit the dog anyways, and that sent the car into a fishtail, and then a spin across the freeway, until finally it wound up in the fast lane of the freeway faced backwards into oncoming traffic and then the engine died. And I was sure in that moment that I was about to die too, but I didn't because of the actions of that one brave man who must have made the decision within a fraction of a second of seeing my stranded car to pull over and run across four lanes of freeway traffic in the dark to save my life. And then after he got my car working again and got me back to safety and made sure I was going to be all right, he drove off again. He never even told me his name, and I'm pretty sure I forgot to say thank you.So before I go any further, I really want to take a moment to stop and say thank you to that stranger.(Applause)I tell you all of this because the events of that night changed the course of my life to some degree. I became a psychology researcher, and I've devoted my work to understanding the human capacity to care for others. Where does it come from, and how does it develop, and what are the extreme forms that it can take? These questions are really important to understanding basic aspects of human social nature. A lot of people, and this includes everybody from philosophers and economists to ordinary people believe that human nature is fundamentally selfish, that we're only ever really motivated by our own welfare. But if that's true, why do some people, like the stranger who rescued me, do selfless things, like helping other people at enormous risk and cost to themselves? Answering this question requires exploring the roots of extraordinary acts of altruism, and what might make people who engage in such acts different than other people. But until recently, very little work on this topic had been done.The actions of the man who rescued me meet the most stringent definition of altruism, which is a voluntary, costly behavior motivated by the desire to help another individual. So it's a selfless act intended to benefit only the other. What could possibly explain an action like that? One answer is compassion, obviously, which is a key driver of altruism. But then the question becomes, why do some people seem to have more of it than others? And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people are different in fundamental ways.But to figure out how, I actually started from the opposite end, with psychopaths. A common approach to understanding basic aspects of human nature, like the desire to help other people, is to study people in whom that desire is missing, and psychopaths are exactly such a group. Psychopathy is a developmental disorder with strongly genetic origins, and it results in a personality that's cold and uncaring and a tendency to engage in antisocial and sometimes very violent behavior. Once my colleagues and I at the National Institute of Mental Health conducted some of the first ever brain imaging research of psychopathic adolescents, and our findings, and the findings of other researchers now, have shown that people who are psychopathic pretty reliably exhibit three characteristics. First, although they're not generally insensitive to other people's emotions, they are insensitive to signs that other people are in distress. And in particular, they have difficulty recognizing fearful facial expressions like this one. And fearful expressions convey urgent need and emotional distress, and they usually elicit compassion and a desire to help in people who see them, so it makes sense that people who tend to lack compassion also tend to be insensitive to these cues.The part of the brain that's the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala. There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely, and they're profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions. And whereas healthy adults and children usually show big spikes in amygdala activity when they look at fearful expressions, psychopaths' amygdalas are underreactive to these expressions. Sometimes they don't react at all, which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues. Finally, psychopaths' amygdalas are smaller than average by about 18 or 20 percent.So all of these findings are reliable and robust, and they're very interesting. But remember that my main interest is not understanding why people don't care about others. It's understanding why they do. So the real question is, could extraordinary altruism, which is the opposite of psychopathy in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people, emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy? A sort of antipsychopathic brain, better able to recognize other people's fear, an amygdala that's more reactive to this expression and maybe larger than average as well?As my research has now shown, all three things are true. And we discovered this by testing a population of truly extraordinary altruists. These are people who have given one of their own kidneys to a complete stranger. So these are people who have volunteered to undergo major surgery so that one of their own healthy kidneys can be removed and transplanted into a very ill stranger that they've never met and may never meet. ""Why would anybody do this?"" is a very common question. And the answer may be that the brains of these extraordinary altruists have certain special characteristics. They are better at recognizing other people's fear. They're literally better at detecting when somebody else is in distress. This may be in part because their amygdala is more reactive to these expressions. And remember, this is the same part of the brain that we found was underreactive in people who are psychopathic. And finally, their amygdalas are larger than average as well, by about eight percent. So together, what these data suggest is the existence of something like a caring continuum in the world that's anchored at the one end by people who are highly psychopathic, and at the other by people who are very compassionate and driven to acts of extreme altruism.But I should add that what makes extraordinary altruists so different is not just that they're more compassionate than average. They are, but what's even more unusual about them is that they're compassionate and altruistic not just towards people who are in their own innermost circle of friends and family. Right? Because to have compassion for people that you love and identify with is not extraordinary. Truly extraordinary altruists' compassion extends way beyond that circle, even beyond their wider circle of acquaintances to people who are outside their social circle altogether, total strangers, just like the man who rescued me.And I've had the opportunity now to ask a lot of altruistic kidney donors how it is that they manage to generate such a wide circle of compassion that they were willing to give a complete stranger their kidney. And I found it's a really difficult question for them to answer.I say, ""How is it that you're willing to do this thing when so many other people don't? You're one of fewer than 2,000 Americans who has ever given a kidney to a stranger. What is it that makes you so special?""And what do they say?They say, ""Nothing. There's nothing special about me. I'm just the same as everybody else.""And I think that's actually a really telling answer, because it suggests that the circles of these altruists don't look like this, they look more like this. They have no center. These altruists literally don't think of themselves as being at the center of anything, as being better or more inherently important than anybody else. When I asked one altruist why donating her kidney made sense to her, she said, ""Because it's not about me."" Another said, ""I'm not different. I'm not unique. Your study here is going to find out that I'm just the same as you.""I think the best description for this amazing lack of self-centeredness is humility, which is that quality that in the words of St. Augustine makes men as angels. And why is that? It's because if there's no center of your circle, there can be no inner rings or outer rings, nobody who is more or less worthy of your care and compassion than anybody else. And I think that this is what really distinguishes extraordinary altruists from the average person.But I also think that this is a view of the world that's attainable by many and maybe even most people. And I think this because at the societal level, expansions of altruism and compassion are already happening everywhere. The psychologist Steven Pinker and others have shown that all around the world people are becoming less and less accepting of suffering in ever-widening circles of others, which has led to declines of all kinds of cruelty and violence, from animal abuse to domestic violence to capital punishment. And it's led to increases in all kinds of altruism. A hundred years ago, people would have thought it was ludicrous how normal and ordinary it is for people to donate their blood and bone marrow to complete strangers today. Is it possible that a hundred years from now people will think that donating a kidney to a stranger is just as normal and ordinary as we think donating blood and bone marrow is today? Maybe.So what's at the root of all these amazing changes? In part it seems to be increases in wealth and standards of living. As societies become wealthier and better off, people seem to turn their focus of attention outward, and as a result, all kinds of altruism towards strangers increases, from volunteering to charitable donations and even altruistic kidney donations. But all of these changes also yield a strange and paradoxical result, which is that even as the world is becoming a better and more humane place, which it is, there's a very common perception that it's becoming worse and more cruel, which it's not. And I don't know exactly why this is, but I think it may be that we now just know so much more about the suffering of strangers in distant places, and so we now care a lot more about the suffering of those distant strangers. But what's clear is the kinds of changes we're seeing show that the roots of altruism and compassion are just as much a part of human nature as cruelty and violence, maybe even more so, and while some people do seem to be inherently more sensitive to the suffering of distant others, I really believe that the ability to remove oneself from the center of the circle and expand the circle of compassion outward to include even strangers is within reach for almost everyone.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/abigail_marsh_why_some_people_are_more_altruistic_than_others
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"Why bother? The game is rigged. My vote won't count. The choices are terrible. Voting is for suckers.Perhaps you've thought some of these things. Perhaps you've even said them. And if so, you wouldn't be alone, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong. The game of public policy today is rigged in many ways. How else would more than half of federal tax breaks flow up to the wealthiest five percent of Americans? And our choices indeed are often terrible. For many people across the political spectrum, Exhibit A is the 2016 presidential election. But in any year, you can look up and down the ballot and find plenty to be uninspired about.But in spite of all this, I still believe voting matters. And crazy as it may sound, I believe we can revive the joy of voting. Today, I want to talk about how we can do that, and why.There used to be a time in American history when voting was fun, when it was much more than just a grim duty to show up at the polls. That time is called ""most of American history.""(Laughter)From the Revolution to the Civil Rights Era, the United States had a vibrant, robustly participatory and raucous culture of voting. It was street theater, open-air debates, fasting and feasting and toasting, parades and bonfires. During the 19th century, immigrants and urban political machines helped fuel this culture of voting. That culture grew with each successive wave of new voters. During Reconstruction, when new African-American voters, new African-American citizens, began to exercise their power, they celebrated in jubilee parades that connected emancipation with their newfound right to vote. A few decades later, the suffragettes brought a spirit of theatricality to their fight, marching together in white dresses as they claimed the franchise. And the Civil Rights Movement, which sought to redeem the promise of equal citizenship that had been betrayed by Jim Crow, put voting right at the center. From Freedom Summer to the march in Selma, that generation of activists knew that voting matters, and they knew that spectacle and the performance of power is key to actually claiming power.But it's been over a half century since Selma and the Voting Rights Act, and in the decades since, this face-to-face culture of voting has just about disappeared. It's been killed by television and then the internet. The couch has replaced the commons. Screens have made citizens into spectators. And while it's nice to share political memes on social media, that's a rather quiet kind of citizenship. It's what the sociologist Sherry Turkle calls ""being alone together.""What we need today is an electoral culture that is about being together together, in person, in loud and passionate ways, so that instead of being ""eat your vegetables"" or ""do you duty,"" voting can feel more like ""join the club"" or, better yet, ""join the party.""Imagine if we had, across the country right now, in local places but nationwide, a concerted effort to revive a face-to-face set of ways to engage and electioneer: outdoor shows in which candidates and their causes are mocked and praised in broad satirical style; soapbox speeches by citizens; public debates held inside pubs; streets filled with political art and handmade posters and murals; battle of the band concerts in which competing performers rep their candidates. Now, all of this may sound a little bit 18th century to you, but in fact, it doesn't have to be any more 18th century than, say, Broadway's ""Hamilton,"" which is to say vibrantly contemporary.And the fact is that all around the world, today, millions of people are voting like this. In India, elections are colorful, communal affairs. In Brazil, election day is a festive, carnival-type atmosphere. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, there is a spectacle, eye-popping, eye-grabbing spectacle to the street theater of elections.You might ask, well, here in America, who has time for this? And I would tell you that the average American watches five hours of television a day. You might ask, who has the motivation? And I'll tell you, any citizen who wants to be seen and heard not as a prop, not as a talking point, but as a participant, as a creator.Well, how do we make this happen? Simply by making it happen.That's why a group of colleagues and I launched a new project called ""The Joy of Voting."" In four cities across the United States — Philadelphia, Miami, Akron, Ohio, and Wichita, Kansas — we've gathered together artists and activists, educators, political folks, neighbors, everyday citizens to come together and create projects that can foster this culture of voting in a local way.In Miami, that means all-night parties with hot DJs where the only way to get in is to show that you're registered to vote. In Akron, it means political plays being performed in the bed of a flatbed truck that moves from neighborhood to neighborhood. In Philadelphia, it's a voting-themed scavenger hunt all throughout colonial old town. And in Wichita, it's making mixtapes and live graffiti art in the North End to get out the vote. There are 20 of these projects, and they are remarkable in their beauty and their diversity, and they are changing people. Let me tell you about a couple of them.In Miami, we've commissioned and artist, a young artist named Atomico, to create some vivid and vibrant images for a new series of ""I voted"" stickers. But the thing is, Atomico had never voted. He wasn't even registered. So as he got to work on creating this artwork for these stickers, he also began to get over his sense of intimidation about politics. He got himself registered, and then he got educated about the upcoming primary election, and on election day he was out there not just passing out stickers, but chatting up voters and encouraging people to vote, and talking about the election with passersby.In Akron, a theater company called the Wandering Aesthetics has been putting on these pickup truck plays. And to do so, they put out an open call to the public asking for speeches, monologues, dialogues, poems, snippets of anything that could be read aloud and woven into a performance. They got dozens of submissions. One of them was a poem written by nine students in an ESL class, all of them Hispanic migrant workers from nearby Hartville, Ohio. I want to read to you from this poem. It's called ""The Joy of Voting.""""I would like to vote for the first time because things are changing for Hispanics. I used to be afraid of ghosts. Now I am afraid of people. There's more violence and racism. Voting can change this. The border wall is nothing. It's just a wall. The wall of shame is something. It's very important to vote so we can break down this wall of shame. I have passion in my heart. Voting gives me a voice and power. I can stand up and do something.""""The Joy of Voting"" project isn't just about joy. It's about this passion. It's about feeling and belief, and it isn't just our organization's work. All across this country right now, immigrants, young people, veterans, people of all different backgrounds are coming together to create this kind of passionate, joyful activity around elections, in red and blue states, in urban and rural communities, people of every political background. What they have in common is simply this: their work is rooted in place.Because remember, all citizenship is local. When politics becomes just a presidential election, we yell and we scream at our screens, and then we collapse, exhausted. But when politics is about us and our neighbors and other people in our community coming together to create experiences of collective voice and imagination, then we begin to remember that this stuff matters. We begin to remember that this is the stuff of self-government.Which brings me back to where I began. Why bother? There's one way to answer this question. Voting matters because it is a self-fulfilling act of belief. It feeds the spirit of mutual interest that makes any society thrive. When we vote, even if it is in anger, we are part of a collective, creative leap of faith. Voting helps us generate the very power that we wish we had.It's no accident that democracy and theater emerged around the same time in ancient Athens. Both of them yank the individual out of the enclosure of her private self. Both of them create great public experiences of shared ritual. Both of them bring the imagination to life in ways that remind us that all of our bonds in the end are imagined, and can be reimagined.This moment right now, when we think about the meaning of imagination, is so fundamentally important, and our ability to take that spirit and to take that sense that there is something greater out there, is not just a matter of technical expertise. It's not just a matter of making the time or having the know-how. It is a matter of spirit.But let me give you an answer to this question, ""Why bother?"" that is maybe a little less spiritual and a bit more pointed. Why bother voting? Because there is no such thing as not voting. Not voting is voting, for everything that you may detest and oppose. Not voting can be dressed up as an act of principled, passive resistance, but in fact not voting is actively handing power over to those whose interests are counter to your own, and those who would be very glad to take advantage of your absence. Not voting is for suckers.Imagine where this country would be if all the folks who in 2010 created the Tea Party had decided that, you know, politics is too messy, voting is too complicated. There is no possibility of our votes adding up to anything. They didn't preemptively silence themselves. They showed up, and in the course of showing up, they changed American politics. Imagine if all of the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders had decided not to upend the political status quo and blow apart the frame of the previously possible in American politics. They did that by voting.We live in a time right now, divided, often very dark, where across the left and the right, there's a lot of talk of revolution and the need for revolution to disrupt everyday democracy. Well, here's the thing: everyday democracy already gives us a playbook for revolution. In the 2012 presidential election, young voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters, low-income voters, all showed up at less than 50 percent. In the 2014 midterm elections, turnout was 36 percent, which was a 70-year low. And in your average local election, turnout hovers somewhere around 20 percent.I invite you to imagine 100 percent. Picture 100 percent. Mobilize 100 percent, and overnight, we get revolution. Overnight, the policy priorities of this country change dramatically, and every level of government becomes radically more responsive to all the people. What would it take to mobilize 100 percent? Well, we do have to push back against efforts afoot all across the country right now to make voting harder. But at the same time, we have to actively create a positive culture of voting that people want to belong to, be part of, and experience together. We have to make purpose. We have to make joy.So yes, let's have that revolution, a revolution of spirit, of ideas, of policy and participation, a revolution against cynicism, a revolution against the self-fulfilling sense of powerlessness. Let's vote this revolution into existence, and while we're at it, let's have some fun.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/eric_liu_there_s_no_such_thing_as_not_voting
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"How much do you get paid? Don't answer that out loud. But put a number in your head. Now: How much do you think the person sitting next to you gets paid? Again, don't answer out loud.(Laughter)At work, how much do you think the person sitting in the cubicle or the desk next to you gets paid? Do you know? Should you know?Notice, it's a little uncomfortable for me to even ask you those questions. But admit it — you kind of want to know. Most of us are uncomfortable with the idea of broadcasting our salary. We're not supposed to tell our neighbors, and we're definitely not supposed to tell our office neighbors. The assumed reason is that if everybody knew what everybody got paid, then all hell would break loose. There'd be arguments, there'd be fights, there might even be a few people who quit. But what if secrecy is actually the reason for all that strife? And what would happen if we removed that secrecy? What if openness actually increased the sense of fairness and collaboration inside a company? What would happen if we had total pay transparency?For the past several years, I've been studying the corporate and entrepreneurial leaders who question the conventional wisdom about how to run a company. And the question of pay keeps coming up. And the answers keep surprising.It turns out that pay transparency — sharing salaries openly across a company — makes for a better workplace for both the employee and for the organization. When people don't know how their pay compares to their peers', they're more likely to feel underpaid and maybe even discriminated against. Do you want to work at a place that tolerates the idea that you feel underpaid or discriminated against? But keeping salaries secret does exactly that, and it's a practice as old as it is common, despite the fact that in the United States, the law protects an employee's right to discuss their pay.In one famous example from decades ago, the management of Vanity Fair magazine actually circulated a memo entitled: ""Forbidding Discussion Among Employees of Salary Received."" ""Forbidding"" discussion among employees of salary received. Now that memo didn't sit well with everybody. New York literary figures Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, all writers in the Algonquin Round Table, decided to stand up for transparency and showed up for work the next day with their salary written on signs hanging from their neck.(Laughter)Imagine showing up for work with your salary just written across your chest for all to see.But why would a company even want to discourage salary discussions? Why do some people go along with it, while others revolt against it? It turns out that in addition to the assumed reasons, pay secrecy is actually a way to save a lot of money. You see, keeping salaries secret leads to what economists call ""information asymmetry."" This is a situation where, in a negotiation, one party has loads more information than the other. And in hiring or promotion or annual raise discussions, an employer can use that secrecy to save a lot of money. Imagine how much better you could negotiate for a raise if you knew everybody's salary.Economists warn that information asymmetry can cause markets to go awry. Someone leaves a pay stub on the copier, and suddenly everybody is shouting at each other. In fact, they even warn that information asymmetry can lead to a total market failure. And I think we're almost there. Here's why: first, most employees have no idea how their pay compares to their peers'. In a 2015 survey of 70,000 employees, two-thirds of everyone who is paid at the market rate said that they felt they were underpaid. And of everybody who felt that they were underpaid, 60 percent said that they intended to quit, regardless of where they were — underpaid, overpaid or right at the market rate. If you were part of this survey, what would you say? Are you underpaid? Well, wait — how do you even know, because you're not allowed to talk about it?Next, information asymmetry, pay secrecy, makes it easier to ignore the discrimination that's already present in the market today. In a 2011 report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the gender wage gap between men and women was 23 percent. This is where that 77 cents on the dollar comes from. But in the Federal Government, where salaries are pinned to certain levels and everybody knows what those levels are, the gender wage gap shrinks to 11 percent — and this is before controlling for any of the factors that economists argue over whether or not to control for.If we really want to close the gender wage gap, maybe we should start by opening up the payroll. If this is what total market failure looks like, then openness remains the only way to ensure fairness.Now, I realize that letting people know what you make might feel uncomfortable, but isn't it less uncomfortable than always wondering if you're being discriminated against, or if your wife or your daughter or your sister is being paid unfairly? Openness remains the best way to ensure fairness, and pay transparency does that.That's why entrepreneurial leaders and corporate leaders have been experimenting with sharing salaries for years. Like Dane Atkinson. Dane is a serial entrepreneur who started many companies in a pay secrecy condition and even used that condition to pay two equally qualified people dramatically different salaries, depending on how well they could negotiate. And Dane saw the strife that happened as a result of this. So when he started his newest company, SumAll, he committed to salary transparency from the beginning. And the results have been amazing. And in study after study, when people know how they're being paid and how that pay compares to their peers', they're more likely to work hard to improve their performance, more likely to be engaged, and they're less likely to quit.That's why Dane's not alone. From technology start-ups like Buffer, to the tens of thousands of employees at Whole Foods, where not only is your salary available for everyone to see, but the performance data for the store and for your department is available on the company intranet for all to see.Now, pay transparency takes a lot of forms. It's not one size fits all. Some post their salaries for all to see. Some only keep it inside the company. Some post the formula for calculating pay, and others post the pay levels and affix everybody to that level. So you don't have to make signs for all of your employees to wear around the office. And you don't have to be the only one wearing a sign that you made at home. But we can all take greater steps towards pay transparency. For those of you that have the authority to move forward towards transparency: it's time to move forward. And for those of you that don't have that authority: it's time to stand up for your right to.So how much do you get paid? And how does that compare to the people you work with? You should know. And so should they.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_burkus_why_you_should_know_how_much_your_coworkers_get_paid
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"When I opened Mott Hall Bridges Academy in 2010, my goal was simple: open a school to close a prison. Now to some, this was an audacious goal, because our school is located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn — one of the most underserved and violent neighborhoods in all of New York City. Like many urban schools with high poverty rates, we face numerous challenges, like finding teachers who can empathize with the complexities of a disadvantaged community, lack of funding for technology, low parental involvement and neighborhood gangs that recruit children as early as fourth grade.So here I was, the founding principal of a middle school that was a district public school, and I only had 45 kids to start. Thirty percent of them had special needs. Eighty-six percent of them were below grade level in English and in math. And 100 percent were living below the poverty level.If our children are not in our classrooms, how will they learn? And if they're not learning, where would they end up?It was evident when I would ask my 13-year-old, ""Young man, where do you see yourself in five years?""And his response: ""I don't know if I'm gonna live that long.""Or to have a young woman say to me that she had a lifelong goal of working in a fast-food restaurant. To me, this was unacceptable. It was also evident that they had no idea that there was a landscape of opportunity that existed beyond their neighborhood.We call our students ""scholars,"" because they're lifelong learners. And the skills that they learn today will prepare them for college and career readiness. I chose the royal colors of purple and black, because I want them to be reminded that they are descendants of greatness, and that through education, they are future engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and even leaders who can and will take over this world. To date, we have had three graduating classes, at a 98 —(Applause)At a 98-percent graduation rate. This is nearly 200 children, who are now going to some of the most competitive high schools in New York City.(Applause)It was a cold day in January when my scholar, Vidal Chastanet, met Brandon Stanton, the founder of the popular blog ""Humans of New York."" Brandon shared the story of a young man from Brownsville who had witnessed violence firsthand, by witnessing a man being thrown off of a roof. Yet he can still be influenced by a principal who had opened up a school that believes in all children. Vidal embodies the story of so many of our underprivileged children who are struggling to survive, which is why we must make education a priority.Brandon's post created a global sensation that touched the lives of millions. This resulted in 1.4 million dollars being raised for our scholars to attend field trips to colleges and universities, Summer STEAM programs, as well as college scholarships. You need to understand that when 200 young people from Brownsville visited Harvard, they now understood that a college of their choice was a real possibility. And the impossibilities that had been imposed upon them by a disadvantaged community were replaced by hope and purpose.The revolution in education is happening in our schools, with adults who provide love, structure, support and knowledge. These are the things that inspire children. But it is not an easy task. And there are high demands within an education system that is not perfect.But I have a dynamic group of educators who collaborate as a team to determine what is the best curriculum. They take time beyond their school day, and come in on weekends and even use their own money to often provide resources when we do not have it. And as the principal, I have to inspect what I expect.So I show up in classes and I conduct observations to give feedback, because I want my teachers to be just as successful as the name Mott Hall Bridges Academy. And I give them access to me every single day, which is why they all have my personal cell number, including my scholars and those who graduated — which is probably why I get phone calls and text messages at three o'clock in the morning.(Laughter)But we are all connected to succeed, and good leaders do this. Tomorrow's future is sitting in our classrooms. And they are our responsibility. That means everyone in here, and those who are watching the screen. We must believe in their brilliance, and remind them by teaching them that there indeed is power in education.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nadia_lopez_why_open_a_school_to_close_a_prison
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"Imagine that you're a pig farmer. You live on a small farm in the Philippines. Your animals are your family's sole source of income — as long as they're healthy. You know that any day, one of your pigs can catch the flu, the swine flu. Living in tight quarters, one pig coughing and sneezing may soon lead to the next pig coughing and sneezing, until an outbreak of swine flu has taken over your farm. If it's a bad enough virus, the health of your herd may be gone in the blink of an eye. If you called in a veterinarian, he or she would visit your farm and take samples from your pigs' noses and mouths. But then they would have to drive back into the city to test those samples in their central lab. Two weeks later, you'd hear back the results. Two weeks may be just enough time for infection to spread and take away your way of life.But it doesn't have to be that way. Today, farmers can take those samples themselves. They can jump right into the pen and swab their pigs' noses and mouths with a little filter paper, place that little filter paper in a tiny tube, and mix it with some chemicals that will extract genetic material from their pigs' noses and mouths. And without leaving their farms, they take a drop of that genetic material and put it into a little analyzer smaller than a shoebox, program it to detect DNA or RNA from the swine flu virus, and within one hour get back the results, visualize the results. This reality is possible because today we're living in the era of personal DNA technology. Every one of us can actually test DNA ourselves.DNA is the fundamental molecule the carries genetic instructions that help build the living world. Humans have DNA. Pigs have DNA. Even bacteria and some viruses have DNA too. The genetic instructions encoded in DNA inform how our bodies develop, grow, function. And in many cases, that same information can trigger disease. Your genetic information is strung into a long and twisted molecule, the DNA double helix, that has over three billion letters, beginning to end. But the lines that carry meaningful information are usually very short — a few dozen to several thousand letters long. So when we're looking to answer a question based on DNA, we actually don't need to read all those three billion letters, typically. That would be like getting hungry at night and having to flip through the whole phone book from cover to cover, pausing at every line, just to find the nearest pizza joint.(Laughter)Luckily, three decades ago, humans started to invent tools that can find any specific line of genetic information. These DNA machines are wonderful. They can find any line in DNA. But once they find it, that DNA is still tiny, and surrounded by so much other DNA, that what these machines then do is copy the target gene, and one copy piles on top of another, millions and millions and millions of copies, until that gene stands out against the rest; until we can visualize it, interpret it, read it, understand it, until we can answer: Does my pig have the flu? Or other questions buried in our own DNA: Am I at risk of cancer? Am I of Irish descent? Is that child my son?(Laughter)This ability to make copies of DNA, as simple as it sounds, has transformed our world. Scientists use it every day to detect and address disease, to create innovative medicines, to modify foods, to assess whether our food is safe to eat or whether it's contaminated with deadly bacteria. Even judges use the output of these machines in court to decide whether someone is innocent or guilty based on DNA evidence. The inventor of this DNA-copying technique was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. But for 30 years, the power of genetic analysis has been confined to the ivory tower, or bigwig PhD scientist work. Well, several companies around the world are working on making this same technology accessible to everyday people like the pig farmer, like you.I cofounded one of these companies. Three years ago, together with a fellow biologist and friend of mine, Zeke Alvarez Saavedra, we decided to make personal DNA machines that anyone could use. Our goal was to bring DNA science to more people in new places. We started working in our basements. We had a simple question: What could the world look like if everyone could analyze DNA? We were curious, as curious as you would have been if I had shown you this picture in 1980.(Laughter)You would have thought, ""Wow! I can now call my Aunt Glenda from the car and wish her a happy birthday. I can call anyone, anytime. This is the future!"" Little did you know, you would tap on that phone to make dinner reservations for you and Aunt Glenda to celebrate together. With another tap, you'd be ordering her gift. And yet one more tap, and you'd be ""liking"" Auntie Glenda on Facebook. And all of this, while sitting on the toilet.(Laughter)It is notoriously hard to predict where new technology might take us. And the same is true for personal DNA technology today.For example, I could never have imagined that a truffle farmer, of all people, would use personal DNA machines. Dr. Paul Thomas grows truffles for a living. We see him pictured here, holding the first UK-cultivated truffle in his hands, on one of his farms. Truffles are this delicacy that stems from a fungus growing on the roots of living trees. And it's a rare fungus. Some species may fetch 3,000, 7,000, or more dollars per kilogram. I learned from Paul that the stakes for a truffle farmer can be really high. When he sources new truffles to grow on his farms, he's exposed to the threat of knockoffs — truffles that look and feel like the real thing, but they're of lower quality. But even to a trained eye like Paul's, even when looked at under a microscope, these truffles can pass for authentic. So in order to grow the highest quality truffles, the ones that chefs all over the world will fight over, Paul has to use DNA analysis. Isn't that mind-blowing? I bet you will never look at that black truffle risotto again without thinking of its genes.(Laughter)But personal DNA machines can also save human lives. Professor Ian Goodfellow is a virologist at the University of Cambridge. Last year he traveled to Sierra Leone. When the Ebola outbreak broke out in Western Africa, he quickly realized that doctors there lacked the basic tools to detect and combat disease. Results could take up to a week to come back — that's way too long for the patients and the families who are suffering. Ian decided to move his lab into Makeni, Sierra Leone. Here we see Ian Goodfellow moving over 10 tons of equipment into a pop-up tent that he would equip to detect and diagnose the virus and sequence it within 24 hours. But here's a surprise: the same equipment that Ian could use at his lab in the UK to sequence and diagnose Ebola, just wouldn't work under these conditions. We're talking 35 Celsius heat and over 90 percent humidity here. But instead, Ian could use personal DNA machines small enough to be placed in front of the air-conditioning unit to keep sequencing the virus and keep saving lives.This may seem like an extreme place for DNA analysis, but let's move on to an even more extreme environment: outer space. Let's talk about DNA analysis in space. When astronauts live aboard the International Space Station, they're orbiting the planet 250 miles high. They're traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. Picture that — you're seeing 15 sunsets and sunrises every day. You're also living in microgravity, floating. And under these conditions, our bodies can do funky things. One of these things is that our immune systems get suppressed, making astronauts more prone to infection.A 16-year-old girl, a high school student from New York, Anna-Sophia Boguraev, wondered whether changes to the DNA of astronauts could be related to this immune suppression, and through a science competition called ""Genes In Space,"" Anna-Sophia designed an experiment to test this hypothesis using a personal DNA machine aboard the International Space Station. Here we see Anna-Sophia on April 8, 2016, in Cape Canaveral, watching her experiment launch to the International Space Station. That cloud of smoke is the rocket that brought Anna-Sophia's experiment to the International Space Station, where, three days later, astronaut Tim Peake carried out her experiment — in microgravity. Personal DNA machines are now aboard the International Space Station, where they can help monitor living conditions and protect the lives of astronauts.A 16-year-old designing a DNA experiment to protect the lives of astronauts may seem like a rarity, the mark of a child genius. Well, to me, it signals something bigger: that DNA technology is finally within the reach of every one of you.A few years ago, a college student armed with a personal computer could code an app, an app that is now a social network with more than one billion users. Could we be moving into a world of one personal DNA machine in every home?I know families who are already living in this reality. The Daniels family, for example, set up a DNA lab in the basement of their suburban Chicago home. This is not a family made of PhD scientists. This is a family like any other. They just like to spend time together doing fun, creative things. By day, Brian is an executive at a private equity firm. At night and on weekends, he experiments with DNA alongside his kids, ages seven and nine, as a way to explore the living world. Last time I called them, they were checking out homegrown produce from the backyard garden. They were testing tomatoes that they had picked, taking the flesh of their skin, putting it in a test tube, mixing it with chemicals to extract DNA and then using their home DNA copier to test those tomatoes for genetically engineered traits.For the Daniels family, the personal DNA machine is like the chemistry set for the 21st century. Most of us may not yet be diagnosing genetic conditions in our kitchen sinks or doing at-home paternity testing.(Laughter)But we've definitely reached a point in history where every one of you could actually get hands-on with DNA in your kitchen. You could copy, paste and analyze DNA and extract meaningful information from it. And it's at times like this that profound transformation is bound to happen; moments when a transformative, powerful technology that was before limited to a select few in the ivory tower, finally becomes within the reach of every one of us, from farmers to schoolchildren. Think about the moment when phones stopped being plugged into the wall by cords, or when computers left the mainframe and entered your home or your office.The ripples of the personal DNA revolution may be hard to predict, but one thing is certain: revolutions don't go backwards, and DNA technology is already spreading faster than our imagination.So if you're curious, get up close and personal with DNA — today. It is in our DNA to be curious.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_kraves_the_era_of_personal_dna_testing_is_here
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"There's a big question at the center of life in our democracies today: How do we fight terror without destroying democracies, without trampling human rights?I've spent much of my career working with journalists, with bloggers, with activists, with human rights researchers all around the world, and I've come to the conclusion that if our democratic societies do not double down on protecting and defending human rights, freedom of the press and a free and open internet, radical extremist ideologies are much more likely to persist.(Applause)OK, all done. Thank you very much. No, just joking.(Laughter)I actually want to drill down on this a little bit.So, one of the countries that has been on the frontlines of this issue is Tunisia, which was the only country to come out of the Arab Spring with a successful democratic revolution. Five years later, they're struggling with serious terror attacks and rampant ISIS recruitment. And many Tunisians are calling on their government to do whatever it takes to keep them safe.Tunisian cartoonist Nadia Khiari has summed up the situation with this character who says, ""I don't give a damn about human rights. I don't give a damn about the revolution. I don't give a damn about democracy and liberty. I just want to be safe.""""Satisfied?"" asked his jailer. ""You're safe now.""If the Tunisian people can figure out how to deal with their terrorism problem without ending up in this place, they will be a model not only for their region, but for all of us.The reality is that civil society, journalists and activists are coming under attack from extremist groups on the one hand, and, in many countries, also from their own governments. We're seeing bloggers and journalists being jailed, charged and intimidated by their own governments, many of which are allies with the West in the war on terror.Just three examples. A friend and former colleague of mine, Hisham Almiraat, has been charged with threatening state security, along with six other activists in Morocco. The Saudi blogger Raif Badawi has been jailed and flogged for insulting Islam and criticizing the Saudi regime on his blog. More recently, the Turkish representative for Reporters Without Borders, Erol Önderoglu, has been detained and charged with spreading terrorist propaganda, because he and some other activists have been supporting Kurdish media.Anti-terror measures quickly turn into state repression without strong protection for minority communities and for peaceful debate; this needs to be supported by a robust, independent local media.But while that's not really happening, Washington is teaming up with Silicon Valley and with Hollywood to pour millions — hundreds of millions of dollars — into what's called ""counter-messaging,"" a fancy word for propaganda. To counter the terrorist propaganda spreading all over the internet, in Europe, Internet Referral Units are being set up, so that people can report on extremist content that they find and get it censored. The problem is, that all of this propaganda, monitoring and censorship completely fails to make up for the fact that the people who are the most credible voices, who can present credible ideas and alternative solutions to real economic, social and political problems in their community that are causing people to turn to extremism in the first place, are being silenced by their own governments.This is all adding up to a decrease in freedom across the world. Freedom House, the human rights organization, reports that 2015 marks the 10th straight year in a row of decline in freedom worldwide. And this is not just because of the actions of authoritarian governments. It's also because democratic governments are increasingly cracking down on dissenters, whistle-blowers and investigative journalists. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has warned that ""preventing extremism and promoting human rights go hand-in-hand."" It's not to say that governments shouldn't keep us safe — of course they should — but we need public oversight, transparency and accountability to the rule of law. Meanwhile, extremists are literally killing off civil society in some countries. Since 2013 in Bangladesh, over a dozen secular bloggers and community activists have been literally slaughtered by extremists while the government has done very little. From the city of Raqqa in Syria, people like Ruqia Hassan and Naji Jerf have been assassinated for their reporting out of ISIS-controlled territory.The citizen media group called Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently relies on strong encryption to send out their reports and shield themselves from interception and surveillance. Yet authorities in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and many other democracies are seeking to use the law to either weaken or outright ban strong encryption, because the bad guys are using it, too. We have got to fight for the right of citizens to use strong encryption. Otherwise, dissent and investigative journalism are going to become even more difficult in even more places. And the bad guys — the criminals and terrorists — are still going to find ways to communicate. Kudos to the companies that are standing up for their users' right to use encryption.But when it comes to censorship, the picture is much more troubling. Yes, there's a real problem of extremist content spreading all over the internet. And Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are among the many companies who report having taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of content and deactivating accounts that are connected to the extremist's speech. The problem is their enforcement mechanisms are a complete black box, and there is collateral damage.Take, for example, Iyad el-Baghdadi, an activist who makes fun of ISIS on Twitter. He had his account deactivated, because he shares a surname with a prominent ISIS leader. Last December, a number of women named Isis, which also happens to be the name of an Egyptian goddess, had their accounts deactivated. And this woman, who lives in the United States and is a computer programmer, reported on Twitter about her deactivation on Facebook, managed to get enough media attention to have her account reinstated. But that's the thing — she had to get media attention. And journalists aren't immune. David Thomson, an expert on terrorism and reporter for Radio France International, had reports deleted from his Facebook account and had his account deactivated for several days, because they contained pictures of ISIS flags, even though he was just reporting on ISIS, not promoting it.And then we have stories from people like this Egyptian man, Ahmed Abdellahy, who reported recently in an event in Washington DC that some of his arguments with extremists — he now spends his time on social media arguing with ISIS followers, trying to get them to turn away — some of his arguments with these extremists get deleted, which he believes has the effect of shielding them from alternative points of view.It's unclear whether Facebook even knows the extent of the collateral damage, or the other companies as well. But we do know that journalism, activism and public debate are being silenced in the effort to stamp out extremist speech.So with these companies having so much power over the public discourse, they need to be held accountable. They need to carry out impact assessment to identify and fix the problems that we're clearly seeing. They need to be more transparent about their enforcement mechanisms, and they need to have clear appeal and grievance mechanisms, so people can get their content reinstated.Now, I've been talking for the last 10 minutes about how governments and companies are making it more difficult for people like these. This is a picture of members of the citizen media network, Global Voices, that I helped to cofound over 10 years ago with my friend, Ethan Zuckerman. Interestingly, about 5 years ago, right after the Arab Spring, the data scientist Gilad Lotan created a network map of the people in Global Voices who were heavy users of Twitter during the Arab Spring. And he found that many of these people served as key information nodes between activists and journalists throughout the Tunisian and Egyptian revolution. We've got to make sure that these people not only survive, but are able to continue to thrive. Many of them are still active, other than the ones who have gone to jail or have been driven into hiding or exile.All around the world, people who are sick and tired of fear and oppression are linking up in their communities and across borders. We've got to do everything we can to push our governments and companies to do a better job of protecting their rights. We've also got to be more mindful about how our own personal, political, consumer and business choices affect people like these around the world. Also, if you follow the news, it's pretty clear that that alone isn't going to be enough. We've got to take personal responsibility by joining — or at very least, actively supporting — the growing ecosystem of individuals and groups who are fighting for social justice, environmental sustainability, government accountability, human rights, freedom of the press and a free and open internet, all around the world.I believe that, ultimately, we can overcome the digitally empowered networks of extremism, demagoguery and hate. But ... we've got to do this by really beefing up the global networks of citizens around the world, powered by people who are working hard every day, and taking personal risk for a future world that is more peaceful, just, open and free.Thanks very much for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_mackinnon_we_can_fight_terror_without_sacrificing_our_rights
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"I remember the very first time I went to a nice restaurant, a really nice restaurant. It was for a law firm recruitment dinner, and I remember beforehand the waitress walked around and asked whether we wanted some wine, so I said, ""Sure, I'll take some white wine.""And she immediately said, ""Would you like sauvignon blanc or chardonnay?""And I remember thinking, ""Come on, lady, stop with the fancy French words and just give me some white wine."" But I used my powers of deduction and recognized that chardonnay and sauvignon blanc were two separate types of white wine, and so I told her that I would take the chardonnay, because frankly that was the easiest one to pronounce for me.So I had a lot of experiences like that during my first couple of years as a law student at Yale, because, despite all outward appearances, I'm a cultural outsider. I didn't come from the elites. I didn't come from the Northeast or from San Francisco. I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways, ways that are indicative of the broader struggles of America's working class. Heroin has moved in, killing a lot of people, people I know. Family violence, domestic violence, and divorce have torn apart families. And there's a very unique sense of pessimism that's moved in. Think about rising mortality rates in these communities and recognize that for a lot of these folks, the problems that they're seeing are actually causing rising death rates in their own communities, so there's a very real sense of struggle.I had a very front-row seat to that struggle. My family has been part of that struggle for a very long time. I come from a family that doesn't have a whole lot of money. The addiction that plagued my community also plagued my family, and even, sadly, my own mom. There were a lot of problems that I saw in my own family, problems caused sometimes by a lack of money, problems caused sometimes by a lack of access to resources and social capital that really affected my life.If you had looked at my life when I was 14 years old and said, ""Well, what's going to happen to this kid?"" you would have concluded that I would have struggled with what academics call upward mobility. So upward mobility is an abstract term, but it strikes at something that's very core at the heart of the American Dream. It's the sense, and it measures whether kids like me who grow up in poor communities are going to live a better life, whether they're going to have a chance to live a materially better existence, or whether they're going to stay in the circumstances where they came from. And one of the things we've learned, unfortunately, is that upward mobility isn't as high as we'd like it to be in this country, and interestingly, it's very geographically distributed. So take Utah, for instance. In Utah a poor kid is actually doing OK, very likely to live their share and their part in the American Dream. But if you think of where I'm from, in the South, in Appalachia, in southern Ohio, it's very unlikely that kids like that will rise. The American Dream in those parts of the country is in a very real sense just a dream.So why is that happening? So one reason is obviously economic or structural. So you think of these areas. They're beset by these terrible economic trends, built around industries like coal and steel that make it harder for folks to get ahead. That's certainly one problem. There's also the problem of brain drain, where the really talented people, because they can't find high-skilled work at home, end up moving elsewhere, so they don't build a business or non-profit where they're from, they end up going elsewhere and taking their talents with them. There are failing schools in a lot of these communities, failing to give kids the educational leg up that really makes it possible for kids to have opportunities later in life. These things are all important. I don't mean to discount these structural barriers. But when I look back at my life and my community, something else was going on, something else mattered. It's difficult to quantify, but it was no less real.So for starters, there was a very real sense of hopelessness in the community that I grew up in. There was a sense that kids had that their choices didn't matter. No matter what happened, no matter how hard they worked, no matter how hard they tried to get ahead, nothing good would happen. So that's a tough feeling to grow up around. That's a tough mindset to penetrate, and it leads sometimes to very conspiratorial places. So let's just take one political issue that's pretty hot, affirmative action. So depending on your politics, you might think that affirmative action is either a wise or an unwise way to promote diversity in the workplace or the classroom. But if you grow up in an area like this, you see affirmative action as a tool to hold people like you back. That's especially true if you're a member of the white working class. You see it as something that isn't just about good or bad policy. You see it as something that's actively conspiring, where people with political and financial power are working against you. And there are a lot of ways that you see that conspiracy against you — perceived, real, but it's there, and it warps expectations.So if you think about what do you do when you grow up in that world, you can respond in a couple of ways. One, you can say, ""I'm not going to work hard, because no matter how hard I work, it's not going to matter."" Another thing you might do is say, ""Well, I'm not going to go after the traditional markers of success, like a university education or a prestigious job, because the people who care about those things are unlike me. They're never going to let me in."" When I got admitted to Yale, a family member asked me if I had pretended to be a liberal to get by the admissions committee. Seriously. And it's obviously not the case that there was a liberal box to check on the application, but it speaks to a very real insecurity in these places that you have to pretend to be somebody you're not to get past these various social barriers. It's a very significant problem.Even if you don't give in to that hopelessness, even if you think, let's say, that your choices matter and you want to make the good choices, you want to do better for yourself and for your family, it's sometimes hard to even know what those choices are when you grow up in a community like I did. I didn't know, for example, that you had to go to law school to be a lawyer. I didn't know that elite universities, as research consistently tells us, are cheaper for low-income kids because these universities have bigger endowments, can offer more generous financial aid. I remember I learned this when I got the financial aid letter from Yale for myself, tens of thousands of dollars in need-based aid, which is a term I had never heard before. But I turned to my aunt when I got that letter and said, ""You know, I think this just means that for the first time in my life, being poor has paid really well.""So I didn't have access to that information because the social networks around me didn't have access to that information. I learned from my community how to shoot a gun, how to shoot it well. I learned how to make a damn good biscuit recipe. The trick, by the way, is frozen butter, not warm butter. But I didn't learn how to get ahead. I didn't learn how to make the good decisions about education and opportunity that you need to make to actually have a chance in this 21st century knowledge economy. Economists call the value that we gain from our informal networks, from our friends and colleagues and family ""social capital."" The social capital that I had wasn't built for 21st century America, and it showed.There's something else that's really important that's going on that our community doesn't like to talk about, but it's very real. Working-class kids are much more likely to face what's called adverse childhood experiences, which is just a fancy word for childhood trauma: getting hit or yelled at, put down by a parent repeatedly, watching someone hit or beat your parent, watching someone do drugs or abuse alcohol. These are all instances of childhood trauma, and they're pretty commonplace in my family. Importantly, they're not just commonplace in my family right now. They're also multigenerational. So my grandparents, the very first time that they had kids, they expected that they were going to raise them in a way that was uniquely good. They were middle class, they were able to earn a good wage in a steel mill. But what ended up happening is that they exposed their kids to a lot of the childhood trauma that had gone back many generations. My mom was 12 when she saw my grandma set my grandfather on fire. His crime was that he came home drunk after she told him, ""If you come home drunk, I'm gonna kill you."" And she tried to do it. Think about the way that that affects a child's mind.And we think of these things as especially rare, but a study by the Wisconsin Children's Trust Fund found that 40 percent of low-income kids face multiple instances of childhood trauma, compared to only 29 percent for upper-income kids. And think about what that really means. If you're a low-income kid, almost half of you face multiple instances of childhood trauma. This is not an isolated problem. This is a very significant issue.We know what happens to the kids who experience that life. They're more likely to do drugs, more likely to go to jail, more likely to drop out of high school, and most importantly, they're more likely to do to their children what their parents did to them. This trauma, this chaos in the home, is our culture's very worst gift to our children, and it's a gift that keeps on giving.So you combine all that, the hopelessness, the despair, the cynicism about the future, the childhood trauma, the low social capital, and you begin to understand why me, at the age of 14, was ready to become just another statistic, another kid who failed to beat the odds.But something unexpected happened. I did beat the odds. Things turned up for me. I graduated from high school, from college, I went to law school, and I have a pretty good job now. So what happened?Well, one thing that happened is that my grandparents, the same grandparents of setting someone on fire fame, they really shaped up by the time I came around. They provided me a stable home, a stable family. They made sure that when my parents weren't able to do the things that kids need, they stepped in and filled that role. My grandma especially did two things that really matter. One, she provided that peaceful home that allowed me to focus on homework and the things that kids should be focused on. But she was also this incredibly perceptive woman, despite not even having a middle school education. She recognized the message that my community had for me, that my choices didn't matter, that the deck was stacked against me. She once told me, ""JD, never be like those losers who think the deck is stacked against them. You can do anything you want to.""And yet she recognized that life wasn't fair. It's hard to strike that balance, to tell a kid that life isn't fair, but also recognize and enforce in them the reality that their choices matter. But mamaw was able to strike that balance.The other thing that really helped was the United States Marine Corps. So we think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the US Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn't teach me. I remember when I went to go buy a car for the very first time, I was offered a dealer's low, low interest rate of 21.9 percent, and I was ready to sign on the dotted line. But I didn't take that deal, because I went and took it to my officer who told me, ""Stop being an idiot, go to the local credit union, and get a better deal."" And so that's what I did. But without the Marine Corps, I would have never had access to that knowledge. I would have had a financial calamity, frankly.The last thing I want to say is that I had a lot of good fortune in the mentors and people who have played an important role in my life. From the Marines, from Ohio State, from Yale, from other places, people have really stepped in and ensured that they filled that social capital gap that it was pretty obvious, apparently, that I had. That comes from good fortune, but a lot of children aren't going to have that good fortune, and I think that raises really important questions for all of us about how we're going to change that. We need to ask questions about how we're going to give low-income kids who come from a broken home access to a loving home. We need to ask questions about how we're going to teach low-income parents how to better interact with their children, with their partners. We need to ask questions about how we give social capital, mentorship to low-income kids who don't have it. We need to think about how we teach working class children about not just hard skills, like reading, mathematics, but also soft skills, like conflict resolution and financial management.Now, I don't have all of the answers. I don't know all of the solutions to this problem, but I do know this: in southern Ohio right now, there's a kid who is anxiously awaiting their dad, wondering whether, when he comes through the door, he'll walk calmly or stumble drunkly. There's a kid whose mom sticks a needle in her arm and passes out, and he doesn't know why she doesn't cook him dinner, and he goes to bed hungry that night. There's a kid who has no hope for the future but desperately wants to live a better life. They just want somebody to show it to them. I don't have all the answers, but I know that unless our society starts asking better questions about why I was so lucky and about how to get that luck to more of our communities and our country's children, we're going to continue to have a very significant problem.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/j_d_vance_america_s_forgotten_working_class
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"This is the Bop.The Bop is a type of social dance.Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. A social dance isn't choreographed by any one person. It can't be traced to any one moment.Each dance has steps that everyone can agree on, but it's about the individual and their creative identity. Because of that, social dances bubble up, they change and they spread like wildfire.They are as old as our remembered history. In African-American social dances, we see over 200 years of how African and African-American traditions influenced our history. The present always contains the past. And the past shapes who we are and who we will be.(Clapping)The Juba dance was born from enslaved Africans' experience on the plantation. Brought to the Americas, stripped of a common spoken language, this dance was a way for enslaved Africans to remember where they're from. It may have looked something like this.Slapping thighs, shuffling feet and patting hands: this was how they got around the slave owners' ban on drumming, improvising complex rhythms just like ancestors did with drums in Haiti or in the Yoruba communities of West Africa. It was about keeping cultural traditions alive and retaining a sense of inner freedom under captivity.It was the same subversive spirit that created this dance: the Cakewalk, a dance that parodied the mannerisms of Southern high society — a way for the enslaved to throw shade at the masters. The crazy thing about this dance is that the Cakewalk was performed for the masters, who never suspected they were being made fun of.Now you might recognize this one. 1920s — the Charleston. The Charleston was all about improvisation and musicality, making its way into Lindy Hop, swing dancing and even the Kid n Play, originally called the Funky Charleston.Started by a tight-knit Black community near Charleston, South Carolina, the Charleston permeated dance halls where young women suddenly had the freedom to kick their heels and move their legs.Now, social dance is about community and connection; if you knew the steps, it meant you belonged to a group. But what if it becomes a worldwide craze? Enter the Twist. It's no surprise that the Twist can be traced back to the 19th century, brought to America from the Congo during slavery. But in the late '50s, right before the Civil Rights Movement, the Twist is popularized by Chubby Checker and Dick Clark. Suddenly, everybody's doing the Twist: white teenagers, kids in Latin America, making its way into songs and movies. Through social dance, the boundaries between groups become blurred.The story continues in the 1980s and '90s. Along with the emergence of hip-hop, African-American social dance took on even more visibility, borrowing from its long past, shaping culture and being shaped by it.Today, these dances continue to evolve, grow and spread.Why do we dance? To move, to let loose, to express. Why do we dance together? To heal, to remember, to say: ""We speak a common language. We exist and we are free.""","https://www.ted.com/talks/camille_a_brown_a_visual_history_of_social_dance_in_25_moves
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"Two hundred years of modern science. We have to admit that our performance is not great. The machines we build continue to suffer from mechanical failures. The houses we build do not survive severe earthquakes. But we shouldn't be so critical of our scientists for a simple reason: they didn't have much time. Two hundred years is not a lot of time, while nature had three billion years to perfect some of the most amazing materials, that we wish we had in our possession. Remember, these materials carry a quality assurance of three billion years.Take, for example, sequoia trees. They carry hundreds of tons for hundreds of years in cold weather, in warm climates, UV light. Yet, if you look at the structure by high-resolution electron microscopy, and you ask yourself, what is it made of, surprisingly, it's made of sugar. Well, not exactly as we drink in our tea. It's actually a nanofiber called nanocrystalline cellulose. And this nanocrystalline cellulose is so strong, on a weight basis, it's about 10 times stronger than steel. Yet it's made of sugar.So scientists all over the world believe that nanocellulose is going to be one of the most important materials for the entire industry. But here's the problem: say you want to buy a half a ton of nanocellulose to build a boat or an airplane. Well, you can Google, you can eBay, you can even Alibaba. You won't find it. Of course, you're going to find thousands of scientific papers — great papers, where scientists are going to say this is a great material, there are lots of things we can do with it. But no commercial source.So we at the Hebrew University, together with our partners in Sweden, decided to focus on the development of an industrial-scale process to produce this nanocellulose. And, of course, we didn't want to cut trees. So we were looking for another source of raw material, and we found one — in fact, the sludge of the paper industry. The reason: there is a lot of it. Europe alone produces 11 million tons of that material annually. It's the equivalent of a mountain three kilometers high, sitting on a soccer field. And we produce this mountain every year. So for everybody, it's an environmental problem, and for us, it's a gold mine.So now, we are actually producing, on an industrial scale in Israel, nanocellulose, and very soon, in Sweden. We can do a lot of things with the material. For example, we have shown that by adding only a small percent of nanocellulose into cotton fibers, the same as my shirt is made of, it increases its strength dramatically. So this can be used for making amazing things, like super-fabrics for industrial and medical applications. But this is not the only thing. For example, self-standing, self-supporting structures, like the shelters that you can see now, actually are now showcasing in the Venice Biennale for Architecture.Nature actually didn't stop its wonders in the plant kingdom. Think about insects. Cat fleas, for example, have the ability to jump about a hundred times their height. That's amazing. It's the equivalent of a person standing in the middle of Liberty Island in New York, and in a single jump, going to the top of the Statue of Liberty. I'm sure everybody would like to do that. So the question is: How do cat fleas do it?It turns out, they make this wonderful material, which is called resilin. In simple words, resilin, which is a protein, is the most elastic rubber on Earth. You can stretch it, you can squish it, and it doesn't lose almost any energy to the environment. When you release it — snap! It brings back all the energy. So I'm sure everybody would like to have that material. But here's the problem: to catch cat fleas is difficult.(Laughter)Why? Because they are jumpy.(Laughter)But now, it's actually enough to catch one. Now we can extract its DNA and read how cat fleas make the resilin, and clone it into a less-jumpy organism like a plant. So that's exactly what we did. Now we have the ability to produce lots of resilin.Well, my team decided to do something really cool at the university. They decided to combine the strongest material produced by the plant kingdom with the most elastic material produced by the insect kingdom — nanocellulose with resilin. And the result is amazing. This material, in fact, is tough, elastic and transparent. So there are lots of things that can be done with this material. For example, next-generation sport shoes, so we can jump higher, run faster. And even touch screens for computers and smartphones, that won't break.Well, the problem is, we continue to implant synthetic implants in our body, which we glue and screw into our body. And I'm going to say that this is not a good idea. Why? Because they fail. This synthetic material fails, just like this plastic fork, that is not strong enough for its performance. But sometimes they are too strong, and therefore their mechanical properties do not really fit their surrounding tissues.But in fact, the reason is much more fundamental. The reason is that in nature, there is no one there that actually takes my head and screws it onto my neck, or takes my skin and glues it onto my body. In nature, everything is self-assembled. So every living cell, whether coming from a plant, insect or human being, has a DNA that encodes for nanobio building blocks. Many times they are proteins. Other times, they are enzymes that make other materials, like polysaccharides, fatty acids. And the common feature about all these materials is that they need no one. They recognize each other and self-assemble into structures — scaffolds on which cells are proliferating to give tissues. They develop into organs, and together bring life.So we at the Hebrew University, about 10 years ago, decided to focus on probably the most important biomaterial for humans, which is collagen. Why collagen? Because collagen accounts for about 25 percent of our dry weight. We have nothing more than collagen, other than water, in our body. So I always like to say, anyone who is in the replacement parts of human beings would like to have collagen.Admittedly, before we started our project, there were already more than 1,000 medical implants made of collagen. You know, simple things like dermal fillers to reduce wrinkles, augment lips, and other, more sophisticated medical implants, like heart valves. So where is the problem? Well, the problem is the source. The source of all that collagen is actually coming from dead bodies: dead pigs, dead cows and even human cadavers. So safety is a big issue. But it's not the only one. Also, the quality.Now here, I have a personal interest. This is my father, Zvi, in our winery in Israel. A heart valve, very similar to the one that I showed you before, seven years ago, was implanted in his body. Now, the scientific literature says that these heart valves start to fail 10 years after the operation. No wonder: they are made from old, used tissues, just like this wall made of bricks that is falling apart. Yeah, of course, I can take those bricks and build a new wall. But it's not going to be the same. So the US Food and Drug Administration made a notice already in 2007, asking the companies to start to look for better alternatives.So that's exactly what we did. We decided to clone all the five human genes responsible for making type I collagen in humans into a transgenic tobacco plant. So now, the plant has the ability to make human collagen brand new, untouched. This is amazing. Actually, it's happening now. Today in Israel, we grow it in 25,000 square meters of greenhouses all over the country. The farmers receive small plantlets of tobacco. It looks exactly like regular tobacco, except that they have five human genes. They're responsible for making type I collagen. We grow them for about 50 to 70 days, we harvest the leaves, and then the leaves are transported by cooling trucks to the factory. There, the process of extracting the collagen starts.Now, if you ever made a pesto — essentially, the same thing.(Laughter)You crush the leaves, you get the juice that contains the collagen. We concentrate the protein, transfer the protein to clean rooms for the final purification, and the end result is a collagen identical to what we have in our body — untouched, brand new and from which we make different medical implants: bone void fillers, for example, for severe bone fractures, spinal fusion. And more recently, even, we've been able to launch into the market here in Europe a flowable gel that is used for diabetic foot ulcers, that is now approved for use in the clinic.This is not science fiction. This is happening now. We are using plants to make medical implants for replacement parts for human beings. In fact, more recently, we've been able to make collagen fibers which are six times stronger than the Achilles tendon. That's amazing.Together with our partners from Ireland, we thought about the next thing: adding resilin to those fibers. By doing that, we've been able to make a superfiber which is about 380 percent tougher, and 300 percent more elastic. So oddly enough, in the future, when a patient is transplanted with artificial tendons or ligaments made from these fibers, we'll have better performance after the surgery than we had before the injury.So what's for the future? In the future, we believe we'll be able to make many nanobio building blocks that nature provided for us — collagen, nanocellulose, resilin and many more. And that will enable us to make better machines perform better, even the heart. Now, this heart is not going to be the same as we can get from a donor. It will be better. It actually will perform better and will last longer.My friend Zion Suliman once told me a smart sentence. He said, ""If you want a new idea, you should open an old book."" And I'm going to say that the book was written. It was written over three billion years of evolution. And the text is the DNA of life. All we have to do is read this text, embrace nature's gift to us and start our progress from here.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/oded_shoseyov_how_we_re_harnessing_nature_s_hidden_superpowers
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"I'm going to talk about a failure of intuition that many of us suffer from. It's really a failure to detect a certain kind of danger. I'm going to describe a scenario that I think is both terrifying and likely to occur, and that's not a good combination, as it turns out. And yet rather than be scared, most of you will feel that what I'm talking about is kind of cool.I'm going to describe how the gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us. And in fact, I think it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us or inspire us to destroy ourselves. And yet if you're anything like me, you'll find that it's fun to think about these things. And that response is part of the problem. OK? That response should worry you. And if I were to convince you in this talk that we were likely to suffer a global famine, either because of climate change or some other catastrophe, and that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are very likely to live like this, you wouldn't think, ""Interesting. I like this TED Talk.""Famine isn't fun. Death by science fiction, on the other hand, is fun, and one of the things that worries me most about the development of AI at this point is that we seem unable to marshal an appropriate emotional response to the dangers that lie ahead. I am unable to marshal this response, and I'm giving this talk.It's as though we stand before two doors. Behind door number one, we stop making progress in building intelligent machines. Our computer hardware and software just stops getting better for some reason. Now take a moment to consider why this might happen. I mean, given how valuable intelligence and automation are, we will continue to improve our technology if we are at all able to. What could stop us from doing this? A full-scale nuclear war? A global pandemic? An asteroid impact? Justin Bieber becoming president of the United States?(Laughter)The point is, something would have to destroy civilization as we know it. You have to imagine how bad it would have to be to prevent us from making improvements in our technology permanently, generation after generation. Almost by definition, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in human history.So the only alternative, and this is what lies behind door number two, is that we continue to improve our intelligent machines year after year after year. At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are, and once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves. And then we risk what the mathematician IJ Good called an ""intelligence explosion,"" that the process could get away from us.Now, this is often caricatured, as I have here, as a fear that armies of malicious robots will attack us. But that isn't the most likely scenario. It's not that our machines will become spontaneously malevolent. The concern is really that we will build machines that are so much more competent than we are that the slightest divergence between their goals and our own could destroy us.Just think about how we relate to ants. We don't hate them. We don't go out of our way to harm them. In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them. We step over them on the sidewalk. But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals, let's say when constructing a building like this one, we annihilate them without a qualm. The concern is that we will one day build machines that, whether they're conscious or not, could treat us with similar disregard.Now, I suspect this seems far-fetched to many of you. I bet there are those of you who doubt that superintelligent AI is possible, much less inevitable. But then you must find something wrong with one of the following assumptions. And there are only three of them.Intelligence is a matter of information processing in physical systems. Actually, this is a little bit more than an assumption. We have already built narrow intelligence into our machines, and many of these machines perform at a level of superhuman intelligence already. And we know that mere matter can give rise to what is called ""general intelligence,"" an ability to think flexibly across multiple domains, because our brains have managed it. Right? I mean, there's just atoms in here, and as long as we continue to build systems of atoms that display more and more intelligent behavior, we will eventually, unless we are interrupted, we will eventually build general intelligence into our machines.It's crucial to realize that the rate of progress doesn't matter, because any progress is enough to get us into the end zone. We don't need Moore's law to continue. We don't need exponential progress. We just need to keep going.The second assumption is that we will keep going. We will continue to improve our intelligent machines. And given the value of intelligence — I mean, intelligence is either the source of everything we value or we need it to safeguard everything we value. It is our most valuable resource. So we want to do this. We have problems that we desperately need to solve. We want to cure diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. We want to understand economic systems. We want to improve our climate science. So we will do this, if we can. The train is already out of the station, and there's no brake to pull.Finally, we don't stand on a peak of intelligence, or anywhere near it, likely. And this really is the crucial insight. This is what makes our situation so precarious, and this is what makes our intuitions about risk so unreliable.Now, just consider the smartest person who has ever lived. On almost everyone's shortlist here is John von Neumann. I mean, the impression that von Neumann made on the people around him, and this included the greatest mathematicians and physicists of his time, is fairly well-documented. If only half the stories about him are half true, there's no question he's one of the smartest people who has ever lived. So consider the spectrum of intelligence. Here we have John von Neumann. And then we have you and me. And then we have a chicken.(Laughter)Sorry, a chicken.(Laughter)There's no reason for me to make this talk more depressing than it needs to be.(Laughter)It seems overwhelmingly likely, however, that the spectrum of intelligence extends much further than we currently conceive, and if we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely explore this spectrum in ways that we can't imagine, and exceed us in ways that we can't imagine.And it's important to recognize that this is true by virtue of speed alone. Right? So imagine if we just built a superintelligent AI that was no smarter than your average team of researchers at Stanford or MIT. Well, electronic circuits function about a million times faster than biochemical ones, so this machine should think about a million times faster than the minds that built it. So you set it running for a week, and it will perform 20,000 years of human-level intellectual work, week after week after week. How could we even understand, much less constrain, a mind making this sort of progress?The other thing that's worrying, frankly, is that, imagine the best case scenario. So imagine we hit upon a design of superintelligent AI that has no safety concerns. We have the perfect design the first time around. It's as though we've been handed an oracle that behaves exactly as intended. Well, this machine would be the perfect labor-saving device. It can design the machine that can build the machine that can do any physical work, powered by sunlight, more or less for the cost of raw materials. So we're talking about the end of human drudgery. We're also talking about the end of most intellectual work.So what would apes like ourselves do in this circumstance? Well, we'd be free to play Frisbee and give each other massages. Add some LSD and some questionable wardrobe choices, and the whole world could be like Burning Man.(Laughter)Now, that might sound pretty good, but ask yourself what would happen under our current economic and political order? It seems likely that we would witness a level of wealth inequality and unemployment that we have never seen before. Absent a willingness to immediately put this new wealth to the service of all humanity, a few trillionaires could grace the covers of our business magazines while the rest of the world would be free to starve.And what would the Russians or the Chinese do if they heard that some company in Silicon Valley was about to deploy a superintelligent AI? This machine would be capable of waging war, whether terrestrial or cyber, with unprecedented power. This is a winner-take-all scenario. To be six months ahead of the competition here is to be 500,000 years ahead, at a minimum. So it seems that even mere rumors of this kind of breakthrough could cause our species to go berserk.Now, one of the most frightening things, in my view, at this moment, are the kinds of things that AI researchers say when they want to be reassuring. And the most common reason we're told not to worry is time. This is all a long way off, don't you know. This is probably 50 or 100 years away. One researcher has said, ""Worrying about AI safety is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars."" This is the Silicon Valley version of ""don't worry your pretty little head about it.""(Laughter)No one seems to notice that referencing the time horizon is a total non sequitur. If intelligence is just a matter of information processing, and we continue to improve our machines, we will produce some form of superintelligence. And we have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely. Let me say that again. We have no idea how long it will take us to create the conditions to do that safely.And if you haven't noticed, 50 years is not what it used to be. This is 50 years in months. This is how long we've had the iPhone. This is how long ""The Simpsons"" has been on television. Fifty years is not that much time to meet one of the greatest challenges our species will ever face. Once again, we seem to be failing to have an appropriate emotional response to what we have every reason to believe is coming.The computer scientist Stuart Russell has a nice analogy here. He said, imagine that we received a message from an alien civilization, which read: ""People of Earth, we will arrive on your planet in 50 years. Get ready."" And now we're just counting down the months until the mothership lands? We would feel a little more urgency than we do.Another reason we're told not to worry is that these machines can't help but share our values because they will be literally extensions of ourselves. They'll be grafted onto our brains, and we'll essentially become their limbic systems. Now take a moment to consider that the safest and only prudent path forward, recommended, is to implant this technology directly into our brains. Now, this may in fact be the safest and only prudent path forward, but usually one's safety concerns about a technology have to be pretty much worked out before you stick it inside your head.(Laughter)The deeper problem is that building superintelligent AI on its own seems likely to be easier than building superintelligent AI and having the completed neuroscience that allows us to seamlessly integrate our minds with it. And given that the companies and governments doing this work are likely to perceive themselves as being in a race against all others, given that to win this race is to win the world, provided you don't destroy it in the next moment, then it seems likely that whatever is easier to do will get done first.Now, unfortunately, I don't have a solution to this problem, apart from recommending that more of us think about it. I think we need something like a Manhattan Project on the topic of artificial intelligence. Not to build it, because I think we'll inevitably do that, but to understand how to avoid an arms race and to build it in a way that is aligned with our interests. When you're talking about superintelligent AI that can make changes to itself, it seems that we only have one chance to get the initial conditions right, and even then we will need to absorb the economic and political consequences of getting them right.But the moment we admit that information processing is the source of intelligence, that some appropriate computational system is what the basis of intelligence is, and we admit that we will improve these systems continuously, and we admit that the horizon of cognition very likely far exceeds what we currently know, then we have to admit that we are in the process of building some sort of god. Now would be a good time to make sure it's a god we can live with.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it
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"I was recently traveling in the Highlands of New Guinea, and I was talking with a man who had three wives. I asked him, ""How many wives would you like to have?"" And there was this long pause, and I thought to myself, ""Is he going to say five? Is he going to say 10? Is he going to say 25?"" And he leaned towards me and he whispered, ""None.""(Laughter)Eighty-six percent of human societies permit a man to have several wives: polygyny. But in the vast majority of these cultures, only about five or ten percent of men actually do have several wives. Having several partners can be a toothache. In fact, co-wives can fight with each other, sometimes they can even poison each other's children. And you've got to have a lot of cows, a lot of goats, a lot of money, a lot of land, in order to build a harem.We are a pair-bonding species. Ninety-seven percent of mammals do not pair up to rear their young; human beings do. I'm not suggesting that we're not — that we're necessarily sexually faithful to our partners. I've looked at adultery in 42 cultures, I understand, actually, some of the genetics of it, and some of the brain circuitry of it. It's very common around the world, but we are built to love.How is technology changing love? I'm going to say almost not at all. I study the brain. I and my colleagues have put over 100 people into a brain scanner — people who had just fallen happily in love, people who had just been rejected in love and people who are in love long-term. And it is possible to remain ""in love"" long-term. And I've long ago maintained that we've evolved three distinctly different brain systems for mating and reproduction: sex drive, feelings of intense romantic love and feelings of deep cosmic attachment to a long-term partner. And together, these three brain systems — with many other parts of the brain — orchestrate our sexual, our romantic and our family lives.But they lie way below the cortex, way below the limbic system where we feel our emotions, generate our emotions. They lie in the most primitive parts of the brain, linked with energy, focus, craving, motivation, wanting and drive. In this case, the drive to win life's greatest prize: a mating partner. They evolved over 4.4 million years ago among our first ancestors, and they're not going to change if you swipe left or right on Tinder.(Laughter)(Applause)There's no question that technology is changing the way we court: emailing, texting, emojis to express your emotions, sexting, ""liking"" a photograph, selfies ... We're seeing new rules and taboos for how to court. But, you know — is this actually dramatically changing love? What about the late 1940s, when the automobile became very popular and we suddenly had rolling bedrooms?(Laughter)How about the introduction of the birth control pill? Unchained from the great threat of pregnancy and social ruin, women could finally express their primitive and primal sexuality.Even dating sites are not changing love. I'm Chief Scientific Advisor to Match.com, I've been it for 11 years. I keep telling them and they agree with me, that these are not dating sites, they are introducing sites. When you sit down in a bar, in a coffee house, on a park bench, your ancient brain snaps into action like a sleeping cat awakened, and you smile and laugh and listen and parade the way our ancestors did 100,000 years ago. We can give you various people — all the dating sites can — but the only real algorithm is your own human brain. Technology is not going to change that.Technology is also not going to change who you choose to love. I study the biology of personality, and I've come to believe that we've evolved four very broad styles of thinking and behaving, linked with the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone and estrogen systems. So I created a questionnaire directly from brain science to measure the degree to which you express the traits — the constellation of traits — linked with each of these four brain systems. I then put that questionnaire on various dating sites in 40 countries. Fourteen million or more people have now taken the questionnaire, and I've been able to watch who's naturally drawn to whom.And as it turns out, those who were very expressive of the dopamine system tend to be curious, creative, spontaneous, energetic — I would imagine there's an awful lot of people like that in this room — they're drawn to people like themselves. Curious, creative people need people like themselves. People who are very expressive of the serotonin system tend to be traditional, conventional, they follow the rules, they respect authority, they tend to be religious — religiosity is in the serotonin system — and traditional people go for traditional people. In that way, similarity attracts. In the other two cases, opposites attract. People very expressive of the testosterone system tend to be analytical, logical, direct, decisive, and they go for their opposite: they go for somebody who's high estrogen, somebody who's got very good verbal skills and people skills, who's very intuitive and who's very nurturing and emotionally expressive. We have natural patterns of mate choice. Modern technology is not going to change who we choose to love.But technology is producing one modern trend that I find particularly important. It's associated with the concept of paradox of choice. For millions of years, we lived in little hunting and gathering groups. You didn't have the opportunity to choose between 1,000 people on a dating site. In fact, I've been studying this recently, and I actually think there's some sort of sweet spot in the brain; I don't know what it is, but apparently, from reading a lot of the data, we can embrace about five to nine alternatives, and after that, you get into what academics call ""cognitive overload,"" and you don't choose any.So I've come to think that due to this cognitive overload, we're ushering in a new form of courtship that I call ""slow love."" I arrived at this during my work with Match.com. Every year for the last six years, we've done a study called ""Singles in America."" We don't poll the Match population, we poll the American population. We use 5,000-plus people, a representative sample of Americans based on the US census.We've got data now on over 30,000 people, and every single year, I see some of the same patterns. Every single year when I ask the question, over 50 percent of people have had a one-night stand — not necessarily last year, but in their lives — 50 percent have had a friends with benefits during the course of their lives, and over 50 percent have lived with a person long-term before marrying. Americans think that this is reckless. I have doubted that for a long time; the patterns are too strong. There's got to be some Darwinian explanation — Not that many people are crazy.And I stumbled, then, on a statistic that really came home to me. It was a very interesting academic article in which I found that 67 percent of singles in America today who are living long-term with somebody, have not yet married because they are terrified of divorce. They're terrified of the social, legal, emotional, economic consequences of divorce. So I came to realize that I don't think this is recklessness; I think it's caution. Today's singles want to know every single thing about a partner before they wed. You learn a lot between the sheets, not only about how somebody makes love, but whether they're kind, whether they can listen and at my age, whether they've got a sense of humor.(Laughter)And in an age where we have too many choices, we have very little fear of pregnancy and disease and we've got no feeling of shame for sex before marriage, I think people are taking their time to love.And actually, what's happening is, what we're seeing is a real expansion of the precommitment stage before you tie the knot. Where marriage used to be the beginning of a relationship, now it's the finale. But the human brain —(Laughter)The human brain always triumphs, and indeed, in the United States today, 86 percent of Americans will marry by age 49. And even in cultures around the world where they're not marrying as often, they are settling down eventually with a long-term partner.So it began to occur to me: during this long extension of the precommitment stage, if you can get rid of bad relationships before you marry, maybe we're going to see more happy marriages. So I did a study of 1,100 married people in America — not on Match.com, of course — and I asked them a lot of questions. But one of the questions was, ""Would you re-marry the person you're currently married to?"" And 81 percent said, ""Yes.""In fact, the greatest change in modern romance and family life is not technology. It's not even slow love. It's actually women piling into the job market in cultures around the world. For millions of years, our ancestors lived in little hunting and gathering groups. Women commuted to work to gather their fruits and vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double-income family was the rule. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men.Then the environment changed some 10,000 years ago, we began to settle down on the farm and both men and women became obliged, really, to marry the right person, from the right background, from the right religion and from the right kin and social and political connections. Men's jobs became more important: they had to move the rocks, fell the trees, plow the land. They brought the produce to local markets, and came home with the equivalent of money.Along with this, we see a rise of a host of beliefs: the belief of virginity at marriage, arranged marriages — strictly arranged marriages — the belief that the man is the head of the household, that the wife's place is in the home and most important, honor thy husband, and 'til death do us part. These are gone. They are going, and in many places, they are gone.We are right now in a marriage revolution. We are shedding 10,000 years of our farming tradition and moving forward towards egalitarian relationships between the sexes — something I regard as highly compatible with the ancient human spirit.I'm not a Pollyanna; there's a great deal to cry about. I've studied divorce in 80 cultures, I've studied, as I say, adultery in many — there's a whole pile of problems. As William Butler Yeats, the poet, once said, ""Love is the crooked thing."" I would add, ""Nobody gets out alive.""(Laughter)We all have problems. But in fact, I think the poet Randall Jarrell really sums it up best. He said, ""The dark, uneasy world of family life — where the greatest can fail, and the humblest succeed.""But I will leave you with this: love and attachment will prevail, technology cannot change it. And I will conclude by saying any understanding of human relationships must take into account one the most powerful determinants of human behavior: the unquenchable, adaptable and primordial human drive to love.Thank you.(Applause)Kelly Stoetzel: Thank you so much for that, Helen. As you know, there's another speaker here with us that works in your same field. She comes at it from a different perspective. Esther Perel is a psychotherapist who works with couples. You study data, Esther studies the stories the couples tell her when they come to her for help. Let's have her join us on the stage. Esther?(Applause)So Esther, when you were watching Helen's talk, was there any part of it that resonated with you through the lens of your own work that you'd like to comment on?Esther Perel: It's interesting, because on the one hand, the need for love is ubiquitous and universal. But the way we love — the meaning we make out of it — the rules that govern our relationships, I think, are changing fundamentally.We come from a model that, until now, was primarily regulated around duty and obligation, the needs of the collective and loyalty. And we have shifted it to a model of free choice and individual rights, and self-fulfillment and happiness. And so, that was the first thing I thought, that the need doesn't change, but the context and the way we regulate these relationships changes a lot.On the paradox of choice — you know, on the one hand we relish the novelty and the playfulness, I think, to be able to have so many options. And at the same time, as you talk about this cognitive overload, I see many, many people who ... who dread the uncertainty and self-doubt that comes with this massa of choice, creating a case of ""FOMO"" and then leading us — FOMO, fear of missed opportunity, or fear of missing out — it's like, ""How do I know I have found 'the one' — the right one?""So we've created what I call this thing of ""stable ambiguity."" Stable ambiguity is when you are too afraid to be alone but also not really willing to engage in intimacy-building. It's a set of tactics that kind of prolong the uncertainty of a relationship but also the uncertainty of the breakup. So, here on the internet you have three major ones. One is icing and simmering, which are great stalling tactics that offer a kind of holding pattern that emphasizes the undefined nature of a relationship but at the same time gives you enough of a comforting consistency and enough freedom of the undefined boundaries.(Laughter)Yeah?And then comes ghosting. And ghosting is, basically, you disappear from this massa of texts on the spot, and you don't have to deal with the pain that you inflict on another, because you're making it invisible even to yourself.(Laughter)Yeah?So I was thinking — these words came up for me as I was listening to you, like how a vocabulary also creates a reality, and at the same time, that's my question to you: Do you think when the context changes, it still means that the nature of love remains the same?You study the brain and I study people's relationships and stories, so I think it's everything you say, plus. But I don't always know the degree to which a changing context ... Does it at some point begin to change — If the meaning changes, does it change the need, or is the need clear of the entire context?HF: Wow! Well —(Laughter)(Applause)Well, I've got three points here, right? First of all, to your first one: there's no question that we've changed, that we now want a person to love, and for thousands of years, we had to marry the right person from the right background and right kin connection. And in fact, in my studies of 5,000 people every year, I ask them, ""What are you looking for?"" And every single year, over 97 percent say —EP: The list grows —HF: Well, no. The basic thing is over 97 percent of people want somebody that respects them, somebody they can trust and confide in, somebody who makes them laugh, somebody who makes enough time for them and somebody who they find physically attractive. That never changes. And there's certainly — you know, there's two parts —EP: But you know how I call that? That's not what people used to say —HF: That's exactly right.EP: They said they wanted somebody with whom they have companionship, economic support, children. We went from a production economy to a service economy.(Laughter)We did it in the larger culture, and we're doing it in marriage.HF: Right, no question about it. But it's interesting, the millennials actually want to be very good parents, whereas the generation above them wants to have a very fine marriage but is not as focused on being a good parent. You see all of these nuances.There's two basic parts of personality: there's your culture — everything you grew up to do and believe and say — and there's your temperament. Basically, what I've been talking about is your temperament. And that temperament is certainly going to change with changing times and changing beliefs.And in terms of the paradox of choice, there's no question about it that this is a pickle. There were millions of years where you found that sweet boy at the other side of the water hole, and you went for it.EP: Yes, but you —HF: I do want to say one more thing. The bottom line is, in hunting and gathering societies, they tended to have two or three partners during the course of their lives. They weren't square! And I'm not suggesting that we do, but the bottom line is, we've always had alternatives. Mankind is always — in fact, the brain is well-built to what we call ""equilibrate,"" to try and decide: Do I come, do I stay? Do I go, do I stay? What are the opportunities here? How do I handle this there? And so I think we're seeing another play-out of that now.KS: Well, thank you both so much. I think you're going to have a million dinner partners for tonight!(Applause)Thank you, thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_technology_hasn_t_changed_love_here_s_why
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"So, has everybody heard of CRISPR? I would be shocked if you hadn't.This is a technology — it's for genome editing — and it's so versatile and so controversial that it's sparking all sorts of really interesting conversations. Should we bring back the woolly mammoth? Should we edit a human embryo? And my personal favorite: How can we justify wiping out an entire species that we consider harmful to humans off the face of the Earth, using this technology?This type of science is moving much faster than the regulatory mechanisms that govern it. And so, for the past six years, I've made it my personal mission to make sure that as many people as possible understand these types of technologies and their implications.Now, CRISPR has been the subject of a huge media hype, and the words that are used most often are ""easy"" and ""cheap."" So what I want to do is drill down a little bit deeper and look into some of the myths and the realities around CRISPR.If you're trying to CRISPR a genome, the first thing that you have to do is damage the DNA. The damage comes in the form of a double-strand break through the double helix. And then the cellular repair processes kick in, and then we convince those repair processes to make the edit that we want, and not a natural edit. That's how it works. It's a two-part system. You've got a Cas9 protein and something called a guide RNA. I like to think of it as a guided missile. So the Cas9 — I love to anthropomorphize — so the Cas9 is kind of this Pac-Man thing that wants to chew DNA, and the guide RNA is the leash that's keeping it out of the genome until it finds the exact spot where it matches. And the combination of those two is called CRISPR. It's a system that we stole from an ancient, ancient bacterial immune system.The part that's amazing about it is that the guide RNA, only 20 letters of it, are what target the system. This is really easy to design, and it's really cheap to buy. So that's the part that is modular in the system; everything else stays the same. This makes it a remarkably easy and powerful system to use.The guide RNA and the Cas9 protein complex together go bouncing along the genome, and when they find a spot where the guide RNA matches, then it inserts between the two strands of the double helix, it rips them apart, that triggers the Cas9 protein to cut, and all of a sudden, you've got a cell that's in total panic because now it's got a piece of DNA that's broken.What does it do? It calls its first responders. There are two major repair pathways. The first just takes the DNA and shoves the two pieces back together. This isn't a very efficient system, because what happens is sometimes a base drops out or a base is added. It's an OK way to maybe, like, knock out a gene, but it's not the way that we really want to do genome editing.The second repair pathway is a lot more interesting. In this repair pathway, it takes a homologous piece of DNA. And now mind you, in a diploid organism like people, we've got one copy of our genome from our mom and one from our dad, so if one gets damaged, it can use the other chromosome to repair it. So that's where this comes from. The repair is made, and now the genome is safe again.The way that we can hijack this is we can feed it a false piece of DNA, a piece that has homology on both ends but is different in the middle. So now, you can put whatever you want in the center and the cell gets fooled. So you can change a letter, you can take letters out, but most importantly, you can stuff new DNA in, kind of like a Trojan horse.CRISPR is going to be amazing, in terms of the number of different scientific advances that it's going to catalyze. The thing that's special about it is this modular targeting system. I mean, we've been shoving DNA into organisms for years, right? But because of the modular targeting system, we can actually put it exactly where we want it.The thing is that there's a lot of talk about it being cheap and it being easy. And I run a community lab. I'm starting to get emails from people that say stuff like,""Hey, can I come to your open night and, like, maybe use CRISPR and engineer my genome?""(Laugher)Like, seriously.I'm, ""No, you can't.""(Laughter)""But I've heard it's cheap. I've heard it's easy.""We're going to explore that a little bit. So, how cheap is it? Yeah, it is cheap in comparison. It's going to take the cost of the average materials for an experiment from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, and it cuts the time a lot, too. It can cut it from weeks to days. That's great. You still need a professional lab to do the work in; you're not going to do anything meaningful outside of a professional lab. I mean, don't listen to anyone who says you can do this sort of stuff on your kitchen table. It's really not easy to do this kind of work. Not to mention, there's a patent battle going on, so even if you do invent something, the Broad Institute and UC Berkeley are in this incredible patent battle. It's really fascinating to watch it happen, because they're accusing each other of fraudulent claims and then they've got people saying, ""Oh, well, I signed my notebook here or there."" This isn't going to be settled for years. And when it is, you can bet you're going to pay someone a really hefty licensing fee in order to use this stuff. So, is it really cheap? Well, it's cheap if you're doing basic research and you've got a lab.How about easy? Let's look at that claim. The devil is always in the details. We don't really know that much about cells. They're still kind of black boxes. For example, we don't know why some guide RNAs work really well and some guide RNAs don't. We don't know why some cells want to do one repair pathway and some cells would rather do the other.And besides that, there's the whole problem of getting the system into the cell in the first place. In a petri dish, that's not that hard, but if you're trying to do it on a whole organism, it gets really tricky. It's OK if you use something like blood or bone marrow — those are the targets of a lot of research now.There was a great story of some little girl who they saved from leukemia by taking the blood out, editing it, and putting it back with a precursor of CRISPR. And this is a line of research that people are going to do. But right now, if you want to get into the whole body, you're probably going to have to use a virus. So you take the virus, you put the CRISPR into it, you let the virus infect the cell. But now you've got this virus in there, and we don't know what the long-term effects of that are. Plus, CRISPR has some off-target effects, a very small percentage, but they're still there. What's going to happen over time with that?These are not trivial questions, and there are scientists that are trying to solve them, and they will eventually, hopefully, be solved. But it ain't plug-and-play, not by a long shot. So: Is it really easy? Well, if you spend a few years working it out in your particular system, yes, it is.Now the other thing is, we don't really know that much about how to make a particular thing happen by changing particular spots in the genome. We're a long way away from figuring out how to give a pig wings, for example. Or even an extra leg — I'd settle for an extra leg. That would be kind of cool, right? But what is happening is that CRISPR is being used by thousands and thousands of scientists to do really, really important work, like making better models of diseases in animals, for example, or for taking pathways that produce valuable chemicals and getting them into industrial production in fermentation vats, or even doing really basic research on what genes do.This is the story of CRISPR we should be telling, and I don't like it that the flashier aspects of it are drowning all of this out. Lots of scientists did a lot of work to make CRISPR happen, and what's interesting to me is that these scientists are being supported by our society.Think about it. We've got an infrastructure that allows a certain percentage of people to spend all their time doing research. That makes us all the inventors of CRISPR, and I would say that makes us all the shepherds of CRISPR. We all have a responsibility.So I would urge you to really learn about these types of technologies, because, really, only in that way are we going to be able to guide the development of these technologies, the use of these technologies and make sure that, in the end, it's a positive outcome — for both the planet and for us.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_jorgensen_what_you_need_to_know_about_crispr
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"Good evening. My journey to this stage began when I came to America at the age of 17. You see, I'm one of the 84 million Americans who are immigrants or children of immigrants. Each of us has a dream when we come here, a dream that usually has to be rewritten and always has to be repurposed. I was one of the lucky ones. My revised dream led me to the work I do today: training immigrants to run for public office and leading a movement for inclusive democracy.But I don't want you to think it was a cakewalk, that America opened its arms wide and welcomed me. It's still not doing that. And I've learned a few lessons along the way that I wanted to share with you, because I think that together we can make American democracy better and stronger.I was born in India, the world's largest democracy, and when I was four, my family moved to Belize, the world's smallest democracy perhaps. And at the age of 17, I moved to the United States, the world's greatest democracy. I came because I wanted to study English literature. You see, as a child, I buried my nose in books, and I thought, why not make a living doing that as an adult? But after I graduated from college and got a graduate degree, I found myself moving from one less ideal job to another. Maybe it was the optimism that I had about America that made me take a while to understand that things were not going to change. The door that I thought was open was actually just slightly ajar — this door of America that would open wide if you had the right name, the right skin color, the right networks, but could just slam in your face if you had the wrong religion, the wrong immigration status, the wrong skin color. And I just couldn't accept that.So I started a career as a social entrepreneur, starting an organization for young people like myself — I was young at the time that I started it — who traced their heritage to the Indian subcontinent. In that work, I became and advocate for South Asians and other immigrants. I lobbied members of Congress on policy issues. I volunteered on election day to do exit polling. But I couldn't vote, and I couldn't run for office. So in 2000, when it was announced that the citizenship application fee was going to more than double from 95 dollars to 225 dollars, I decided it was time to apply before I could no longer afford it. I filled out a long application, answering questions about my current and my past affiliations. And once the application was submitted, there were fingerprints to be taken, a test to study for, endless hours of waiting in line. You might call it extreme vetting. And then in December of 2000, I joined hundreds of other immigrants in a hall in Brooklyn where we pledged our loyalty to a country that we had long considered home. My journey from international student to American citizen took 16 years, a short timeline when you compare it to other immigrant stories.And soon after I had taken that formal step to becoming an American, the attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the immigration landscape for decades to come. My city, New York City, was reeling and healing, and in the midst of it, we were in an election cycle.Two things happened as we coped with loss and recovery in New York City. Voters elected Michael Bloomberg mayor of New York City. We also adopted by ballot referendum the Office of Immigrant Affairs for the City of New York. Five months after that election, the newly elected mayor appointed me the first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs for this newly established office.I want you to come back to that time. I was a young immigrant woman from Belize. I had basically floundered in various jobs in America before I started a community-based organization in a church basement in Queens. The attacks of September 11 sent shock waves through my community. People who were members of my family, young people I had worked with, were experiencing harassment at schools, at workplaces and in airports. And now I was going to represent their concerns in government. No job felt more perfect for me.And here are two things I learned when I became Commissioner. First, well-meaning New Yorkers who were in city government holding government positions had no idea how scared immigrants were of law enforcement. Most of us don't really know the difference, do we, between a sheriff and local police and the FBI. And most of us, when we see someone in uniform going through our neighborhoods feel curiosity, if not concern. So if you're an undocumented parent, every day when you say goodbye to your child, send them off to school and go to work, you don't know what the chances are that you're going to see them at the end of the day. Because a raid at your workplace, a chance encounter with local police could change the course of your life forever.The second thing I learned is that when people like me, who understood that fear, who had learned a new language, who had navigated new systems, when people like us were sitting at the table, we advocated for our communities' needs in a way that no one else could or would. I understood what that feeling of fear was like. People in my family were experiencing it. Young people I had worked with were being harassed, not just by classmates, but also by their teachers. My husband, then boyfriend, thought twice before he put a backpack on or grew a beard because he traveled so much.What I learned in 2001 was that my vote mattered but that my voice and vantage point also mattered. And it's these three things — immigrants' votes, voices and vantage points — that I think can help make our democracy stronger. We actually have the power to change the outcome of elections, to introduce new issues into the policy debate and to change the face of the pale, male, stale leadership that we have in our country today.So how do we do that? Well, let's talk first about votes. It will come as no surprise to you that the majority of voters in America are white. But it might surprise you to know that one in three voters are black, Latino or Asian. But here's the thing: it doesn't just matter who can vote, it matters who does vote. So in 2012, half of the Latino and Asian-American voters did not vote.And these votes matter not just in presidential elections. They matter in local and state elections. In 2015, Lan Diep, the eldest son of political refugees from Vietnam, ran for a seat in the San Jose City Council. He lost that election by 13 votes. This year, he dusted off those campaign shoes and went back to run for that seat, and this time he won, by 12 votes. Every one of our votes matters.And when people like Lan are sitting at the policy table, they can make a difference. We need those voices. We need those voices in part because American leadership does not look like America's residents. There are over 500,000 local and state offices in America. Fewer than 2 percent of those offices are held by Asian-Americans or Latinos, the two largest immigrant groups in our country. In the city of Yakima, Washington, where 49 percent of the population is Latino, there has never been a Latino on the city council until this year. Three newly elected Latinas joined the Yakima City Council in 2016. One of them is Carmen Méndez. She is a first-generation college student. She grew up partly in Colima, Mexico, and partly in Yakima, Washington. She's a single mother, a community advocate. Her voice on the Yakima City Council is advocating on behalf of the Latino community and of all Yakima residents. And she's a role model for her daughter and other Latinas.But the third most untapped resource in American democracy is the vantage point that immigrants bring. We have fought to be here. We have come for economic and educational opportunity. We have come for political and religious freedom. We have come in the pursuit of love. That dedication, that commitment to America we also bring to public service. People like Athena Salman, who just last week won the primary for a seat in the Arizona State House. Athena's father grew up in the West Bank and moved to Chicago, where he met her mother. Her mother is part Italian, part Mexican and part German. Together they moved to Arizona and built a life. Athena, when she gets to the statehouse, is going to fight for things like education funding that will help give families like hers a leg up so they can achieve the financial stability that we all are looking for.Immigrants' votes, voices and vantage points are what we all need to work to include in American democracy. It's not just my work. It's also yours. And it's not going to be easy. We never know what putting a new factor into an equation will do. And it's a little scary. You're scared that I'm going to take away your place at the table, and I'm scared that I'm never going to get a place at the table. And we're all scared that we're going to lose this country that we know and love. I'm scared you're going to take it away from me, and you're scared I'm going to take it away from you.Look, it's been a rough election year, a reminder that people with my immigration history could be removed at the whim of a leader. But I have fought to be in this country and I continue to do so every day. So my optimism never wavers, because I know that there are millions of immigrants just like me, in front of me, behind me and all around me. It's our country, too.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sayu_bhojwani_how_immigrant_voices_make_democracy_stronger
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"""We're declaring war against cancer, and we will win this war by 2015.""This is what the US Congress and the National Cancer Institute declared just a few years ago, in 2003. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't buy that. I don't think we quite won this war yet, and I don't think anyone here will question that. Now, I will argue that a primary reason why we're not winning this war against cancer is because we're fighting blindly.I'm going to start by sharing with you a story about a good friend of mine. His name is Ehud, and a few years ago, Ehud was diagnosed with brain cancer. And not just any type of brain cancer: he was diagnosed with one of the most deadly forms of brain cancer. In fact, it was so deadly that the doctors told him that they only have 12 months, and during those 12 months, they have to find a treatment. They have to find a cure, and if they cannot find a cure, he will die.Now, the good news, they said, is that there are tons of different treatments to choose from, but the bad news is that in order for them to tell if a treatment is even working or not, well, that takes them about three months or so. So they cannot try that many things.Well, Ehud is now going into his first treatment, and during that first treatment, just a few days into that treatment, I'm meeting with him, and he tells me, ""Adam, I think this is working. I think we really lucked out here. Something is happening.""And I ask him, ""Really? How do you know that, Ehud?""And he says, ""Well, I feel so terrible inside. Something's gotta be working up there. It just has to.""Well, unfortunately, three months later, we got the news, it didn't work. And so Ehud goes into his second treatment. And again, the same story. ""It feels so bad, something's gotta be working there."" And then three months later, again we get bad news. Ehud is going into his third treatment, and then his fourth treatment. And then, as predicted, Ehud dies.Now, when someone really close to you is going through such a huge struggle, you get really swamped with emotions. A lot of things are going through your head. For me, it was mostly outrage. I was just outraged that, how come this is the best that we can offer? And I started looking more and more into this. As it turns out, this is not just the best that doctors could offer Ehud. It's not just the best doctors could offer patients with brain cancer generally. We're actually not doing that well all across the board with cancer.I picked up one of those statistics, and I'm sure some of you have seen those statistics before. This is going to show you here how many patients actually died of cancer, in this case females in the United States, ever since the 1930s. You'll notice that there aren't that many things that have changed. It's still a huge issue. You'll see a few changes, though. You'll see lung cancer, for example, on the rise. Thank you, cigarettes. And you'll also see that, for example, stomach cancer once used to be one of the biggest killers of all cancers, is essentially eliminated. Now, why is that? Anyone knows, by the way? Why is it that humanity is no longer struck by stomach cancer? What was the huge, huge medical technology breakthrough that came to our world that saved humanity from stomach cancer? Was it maybe a new drug, or a better diagnostic? You guys are right, yeah. It's the invention of the refrigerator, and the fact that we're no longer eating spoiled meats. So the best thing that happened to us so far in the medical arena in cancer research is the fact that the refrigerator was invented.(Laughter)And so — yeah, I know. We're not doing so well here. I don't want to miniaturize the progress and everything that's been done in cancer research. Look, there is like 50-plus years of good cancer research that discovered major, major things that taught us about cancer. But all that said, we have a lot of heavy lifting to still do ahead of us.Again, I will argue that the primary reason why this is the case, why we have not done that remarkably well, is really we're fighting blindly here. And this is where medical imaging comes in. This is where my own work comes in.And so to give you a sense of the best medical imaging that's offered today to brain cancer patients, or actually generally to all cancer patients, take a look at this PET scan right here. Let's see. There we go.So this is a PET/CT scan, and what you'll see in this PET/CT scan is the CT scan will show you where the bones are, and the PET scan will show you where tumors are. Now, what you can see here is essentially a sugar molecule that was added a small little tag that is signaling to us outside of the body, ""Hey, I'm here."" And those sugar molecules are injected into these patients by the billions, and they're going all over the body looking for cells that are hungry for sugar. You'll see that the heart, for example, lights up there. That's because the heart needs a lot of sugar. You'll also see that the bladder lights up there. That's because the bladder is the thing that's clearing the sugar away from our body. And then you'll see a few other hot spots, and these are in fact the tumors.Now, this is a really a wonderful technology. For the first time it allowed us to look into someone's body without picking up each and every one of the cells and putting them under the microscope, but in a noninvasive way allowing us to look into someone's body and ask, ""Hey, has the cancer metastasized? Where is it?"" And the PET scans here are showing you very clearly where are these hot spots, where is the tumor.So as miraculous as this might seem, unfortunately, well, it's not that great. You see, those small little hot spots there. Can anyone guess how many cancer cells are in any one of these tumors? So it's about 100 million cancer cells, and let me make sure that this number sunk in. In each and every one of these small little blips that you're seeing on the image, there needs to be at least 100 million cancer cells in order for it to be detected. Now, if that seemed to you like a very large number, it is a very large number. This is in fact an incredibly large number, because what we really need in order to pick up something early enough to do something about it, to do something meaningful about it, well, we need to pick up tumors that are a thousand cells in size, and ideally just a handful of cells in size. So we're clearly pretty far away from this.So we're going to play a little experiment here. I'm going to ask each of you to now play and imagine that you are brain surgeons. And you guys are now at an operating room, and there's a patient in front of you, and your task is to make sure that the tumor is out. So you're looking down at the patient, the skin and the skull have already been removed, so you're looking at the brain. And all you know about this patient is that there's a tumor about the size of a golf ball or so in the right frontal lobe of this person's brain. And that's more or less it. So you're looking down, and unfortunately everything looks the same, because brain cancer tissue and healthy brain tissue really just look the same. And so you're going in with your thumb, and you start to press a little bit on the brain, because tumors tend to be a little harder, stiffer, and so you go in and go a little bit like this and say, ""It seems like the tumor is right there."" Then you take out your knife and start cutting the tumor piece by piece by piece. And as you're taking the tumor out, then you're getting to a stage where you think, ""Alright, I'm done. I took out everything."" And at this stage, if that's — so far everything sounded, like, pretty crazy — you're now about to face the most challenging decision of your life here. Because now you need to decide, should I stop here and let this patient go, risking that there might be some leftover cancer cells behind that I just couldn't see, or should I take away some extra margins, typically about an inch or so around the tumor just to be sure that I removed everything?So this is not a simple decision to make, and unfortunately this is the decision that brain cancer surgeons have to take every single day as they're seeing their patients.And so I remember talking to a few friends of mine in the lab, and we say, ""Boy, there's got to be a better way."" But not just like you tell a friend that there's got to be a better way. There's just got to be a better way here. This is just incredible.And so we looked back. Remember those PET scans I told you about, the sugar and so on. We said, hey, how about instead of using sugar molecules, let's maybe take tiny, tiny little particles made of gold, and let's program them with some interesting chemistry around them. Let's program them to look for cancer cells. And then we will inject these gold particles into these patients by the billions again, and we'll have them go all over the body, and just like secret agents, if you will, go and walk by every single cell in our body and knock on the door of that cell, and ask, ""Are you a cancer cell or are you a healthy cell? If you're a healthy cell, we're moving on. If you're a cancer cell, we're sticking in and shining out and telling us, ""Hey, look at me, I'm here."" And they'll do it through some interesting cameras that we developed in the lab. And once we see that, maybe we can guide brain cancer surgeons towards taking only the tumor and leaving the healthy brain alone. And so we've tested that, and boy, this works well.So I'm going to show you an example now. What you're looking at here is an image of a mouse's brain, and we've implanted into this mouse's brain a small little tumor. And so this tumor is now growing in this mouse's brain, and then we've taken a doctor and asked the doctor to please operate on the mouse as if that was a patient, and take out piece by piece out of the tumor. And while he's doing that, we're going to take images to see where the gold particles are. And so we're going to first start by injecting these gold particles into this mouse, and we're going to see right here at the very left there that image at the bottom is the image that shows where the gold particles are. The nice thing is that these gold particles actually made it all the way to the tumor, and then they shine out and tell us, ""Hey, we're here. Here's the tumor.""So now we can see the tumor, but we're not showing this to the doctor yet. We're asking the doctor, now please start cutting away the tumor, and you'll see here the doctor just took the first quadrant of the tumor and you see that first quadrant is now missing. The doctor then took the second quadrant, the third, and now it appears to be everything. And so at this stage, the doctor came back to us and said, ""Alright, I'm done. What do you want me to do? Should I keep things as they are or do you want me to take some extra margins around?""And then we said, ""Well, hang on."" We told the doctor, ""You've missed those two spots, so rather than taking huge margins around, only take out those tiny little areas. Take them out, and then let's take a look.""And so the doctor took them away, and lo and behold, the cancer is now completely gone. Now, the important thing is that it's not just that the cancer is completely gone from this person's brain, or from this mouse's brain. The most important thing is that we did not have to take huge amounts of healthy brain in the process. And so now we can actually imagine a world where doctors and surgeons, as they take away a tumor, they actually know what to take out, and they no longer have to guess with their thumb.Now, here's why it's extremely important to take those tiny little leftover tumors. Those leftover tumors, even if it's just a handful of cells, they will grow to recur the tumor, for the tumor to come back. In fact, the reason why 80 to 90 percent of those brain cancer surgeries ultimately fail is because of those small little extra margins that were left positive, those small little leftover tumors that were left there.So this is clearly very nice, but what I really want to share with you is where I think we're heading from here. And so in my lab at Stanford, my students and I are asking, what should we be working on now? And I think where medical imaging is heading to is the ability to look into the human body and actually see each and every one of these cells separately. The ability like this would allow us to actually pick up tumors way, way earlier in the process, way before it's 100 million cells inside, so we can actually do something about it.An ability to see each and every one of the cells might also allow us to ask insightful questions. So in the lab, we are now getting to a point where we can actually start asking these cancer cells real questions, like, for example, are you responding to the treatment we are giving you or not? So if you're not responding, we'll know to stop the treatment right away, days into the treatment, not three months. And so also for patients like Ehud that are going through these nasty, nasty chemotherapy drugs, for them not to suffer through those horrendous side effects of the drugs when the drugs are in fact not even helping them.So to be frank here, we're pretty far away from winning the war against cancer, just to be realistic. But at least I am hopeful that we should be able to fight this war with better medical imaging techniques in the way that is not blind.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_de_la_zerda_how_we_can_start_winning_the_war_against_cancer
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"When Dorothy was a little girl, she was fascinated by her goldfish. Her father explained to her that fish swim by quickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. Without hesitation, little Dorothy responded, ""Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by wagging their heads.""(Laughter)In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other. Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. She believed it.Our lives are full of fish swimming backwards. We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. We harbor bias. We know that we are right, and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We strive for unattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In our minds, fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads and we don't even notice them.I'm going to tell you five facts about myself. One fact is not true. One: I graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics. Two: I currently run a construction company in Orlando. Three: I starred on a television sitcom. Four: I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye disease. Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Court justices. Which fact is not true? Actually, they're all true. Yeah. They're all true.(Applause)At this point, most people really only care about the television show.(Laughter)I know this from experience. OK, so the show was NBC's ""Saved by the Bell: The New Class."" And I played Weasel Wyzell, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show, which made it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13-year-old boy.(Laughter)Now, did you struggle with number four, my blindness? Why is that? We make assumptions about so-called disabilities. As a blind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions about my abilities every day. My point today is not about my blindness, however. It's about my vision. Going blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. It taught me to spot those backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. Going blind cast them into focus.What does it feel like to see? It's immediate and passive. You open your eyes and there's the world. Seeing is believing. Sight is truth. Right? Well, that's what I thought.Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinas progressively deteriorated. My sight became an increasingly bizarre carnival funhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. The salesperson I was relieved to spot in a store was really a mannequin. Reaching down to wash my hands, I suddenly saw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its true shape. A friend described the photograph in my hand, and only then I could see the image depicted. Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. It was difficult and exhausting to see. I pieced together fragmented, transitory images, consciously analyzed the clues, searched for some logic in my crumbling kaleidoscope, until I saw nothing at all.I learned that what we see is not universal truth. It is not objective reality. What we see is a unique, personal, virtual reality that is masterfully constructed by our brain.Let me explain with a bit of amateur neuroscience. Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent of your brain. That's compared to approximately eight percent for touch and two to three percent for hearing. Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as many as two billion pieces of information. The rest of your body can send your brain only an additional billion. So sight is one third of your brain by volume and can claim about two thirds of your brain's processing resources. It's no surprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistake about it: sight is an illusion.Here's where it gets interesting. To create the experience of sight, your brain references your conceptual understanding of the world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mental attention. All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to your sight. These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. So for example, what you see impacts how you feel, and the way you feel can literally change what you see. Numerous studies demonstrate this. If you are asked to estimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer will be different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. A hill appears steeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you're wearing a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction. What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around you. You create your own reality, and you believe it. I believed mine until it broke apart. The deterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion.You see, sight is just one way we shape our reality. We create our own realities in many other ways. Let's take fear as just one example. Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. Psychologists have a great term for it: awfulizing.(Laughter)Right? Fear replaces the unknown with the awful. Now, fear is self-realizing. When you face the greatest need to look outside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside your mind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions. When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves.When I was diagnosed with my blinding disease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness was a death sentence for my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness meant I would live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. I knew it. This was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but it was my reality, just like those backwards-swimming fish in little Dorothy's mind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. I am certain of that.So how do you live your life eyes wide open? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be practiced. I will summarize very briefly.Hold yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, every detail. See beyond your fears. Recognize your assumptions. Harness your internal strength. Silence your internal critic. Correct your misconceptions about luck and about success. Accept your strengths and your weaknesses, and understand the difference. Open your hearts to your bountiful blessings.Your fears, your critics, your heroes, your villains — they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to see through them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility.I chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life. Far from alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with our triplets, whom we call the Tripskys, and with the latest addition to the family, sweet baby Clementine.What do you fear? What lies do you tell yourself? How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? What reality are you creating for yourself?In your career and personal life, in your relationships, and in your heart and soul, your backwards-swimming fish do you great harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealized potential, and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment and connection. I urge you to search them out.Helen Keller said that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. For me, going blind was a profound blessing, because blindness gave me vision. I hope you can see what I see.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you leave the stage, just a question. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, of doers, of innovators. You are a CEO of a company down in Florida, and many are probably wondering, how is it to be a blind CEO? What kind of specific challenges do you have, and how do you overcome them?Isaac Lidsky: Well, the biggest challenge became a blessing. I don't get visual feedback from people.(Laughter)BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah. So, for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't see facial expressions or gestures. I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. I basically force people to tell me what they think. And in this respect, it's become, like I said, a real blessing for me personally and for my company, because we communicate at a far deeper level, we avoid ambiguities, and most important, my team knows that what they think truly matters.BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED. IL: Thank you, Bruno.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/isaac_lidsky_what_reality_are_you_creating_for_yourself
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"(Music)Rainn Wilson: It takes its toll, being alone. I'm a little bit lost, and it's finally time to make a real connection. Who am I?(Drums)I'm a single white male, 45 years of age. I love animals. Gainfully employed. I'm a people person. I keep fit. Who am I looking for? I'm looking for my idea mate. Are you that idea that matches with who I really am?(Video) Ron Finley: How would you feel if you had no access to healthy food? Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do.RW: Wow, we sure are getting our fingers dirty for a first date, huh?RF: Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do. People in these areas — they're exposed to crappy food. I want people to know that growing your own food is like printing your own money.RW: You're like a food superhero!RF: Food is the problem and food is the solution.(Music)Erin McKean: I'm a lexicographer. My job is to put every word possible into the dictionary.RW: I love words, too — just as much as any lexi-ta-tographer. What if you love a word that you've just made up, like — I don't know — ""scuberfinkles""?Beau Lotto: Do you think you see reality?RW: Well, I'm a little nearsighted, but yeah.BL: Well, you can't — I mean, your brain has no access to this world. In fact, even the sensory information that your eyes are receiving, your ears are receiving, is completely meaningless because it could mean anything. That tree could be a large object far away or a small object up close, and your brain has no way of knowing.RW: Once I thought I saw Bigfoot but it was just a German shepherd.Isabel Behncke Izquierdo: Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your closest living relatives. Bonobos have frequent and promiscuous sex to manage conflict and solve social issues.RW: I'm just curious: Do we have any conflict that needs managing or social issues to resolve?IBI: Remember — you're on a date with my idea, not me.Jane McGonigal: This is the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win.RW: An epic win?JM: An epic win is an outcome so extraordinarily positive, you didn't even know it was possible until you achieved it.You're not making the face. You're making the ""I'm not good at life"" face.RW: Arthur, I want to be really honest with you. I am seeing other ideas. OK? I'm dating around. That's the situation.Arthur Benjamin: I'd say this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why.RW: Do you want to get some pie?AB: Pi? 3.14159265358979 —Reggie Watts: If we're going to do something, we've got to just make a decision. Because without a decision we're left powerless. Without power, we have nothing to supply the chain of those who are truly curious to solve all of our current conditions.RW: And, ""If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"" — Rush.JM: Yes! This is the face we need to see on millions of problem solvers worldwide, as we try to tackle the challenges of the next century.RW: So, are we going Dutch?AB: 3846264338327950 28841... 971?RW: One night, want to go to a movie or something?RF: Hell, no! Let's go plant some shit!RW: Let's plant some shit! Good, now what is this that I'm planting?Bonobos!IBI: Bonobos! (Laughs)Bonobos.RWatts: Um, interested much?RW: I want to have your idea baby.RWatts: Well, you know what they say in Russia.RW: Hm?RWatts: ""scuberfinckle.""(Bottles clink)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rainn_wilson_ideas_worth_dating
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"The language I'm speaking right now is on its way to becoming the world's universal language, for better or for worse. Let's face it, it's the language of the internet, it's the language of finance, it's the language of air traffic control, of popular music, diplomacy — English is everywhere.Now, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more people, but more Chinese people are learning English than English speakers are learning Chinese. Last I heard, there are two dozen universities in China right now teaching all in English. English is taking over.And in addition to that, it's been predicted that at the end of the century almost all of the languages that exist now — there are about 6,000 — will no longer be spoken. There will only be some hundreds left. And on top of that, it's at the point where instant translation of live speech is not only possible, but it gets better every year.The reason I'm reciting those things to you is because I can tell that we're getting to the point where a question is going to start being asked, which is: Why should we learn foreign languages — other than if English happens to be foreign to one? Why bother to learn another one when it's getting to the point where almost everybody in the world will be able to communicate in one?I think there are a lot of reasons, but I first want to address the one that you're probably most likely to have heard of, because actually it's more dangerous than you might think. And that is the idea that a language channels your thoughts, that the vocabulary and the grammar of different languages gives everybody a different kind of acid trip, so to speak. That is a marvelously enticing idea, but it's kind of fraught.So it's not that it's untrue completely. So for example, in French and Spanish the word for table is, for some reason, marked as feminine. So, ""la table,"" ""la mesa,"" you just have to deal with it. It has been shown that if you are a speaker of one of those languages and you happen to be asked how you would imagine a table talking, then much more often than could possibly be an accident, a French or a Spanish speaker says that the table would talk with a high and feminine voice. So if you're French or Spanish, to you, a table is kind of a girl, as opposed to if you are an English speaker.It's hard not to love data like that, and many people will tell you that that means that there's a worldview that you have if you speak one of those languages. But you have to watch out, because imagine if somebody put us under the microscope, the us being those of us who speak English natively. What is the worldview from English?So for example, let's take an English speaker. Up on the screen, that is Bono. He speaks English. I presume he has a worldview. Now, that is Donald Trump. In his way, he speaks English as well.(Laughter)And here is Ms. Kardashian, and she is an English speaker, too. So here are three speakers of the English language. What worldview do those three people have in common? What worldview is shaped through the English language that unites them? It's a highly fraught concept. And so gradual consensus is becoming that language can shape thought, but it tends to be in rather darling, obscure psychological flutters. It's not a matter of giving you a different pair of glasses on the world.Now, if that's the case, then why learn languages? If it isn't going to change the way you think, what would the other reasons be? There are some. One of them is that if you want to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in, if you want to become part of it, then whether or not the language channels the culture — and that seems doubtful — if you want to imbibe the culture, you have to control to some degree the language that the culture happens to be conducted in. There's no other way.There's an interesting illustration of this. I have to go slightly obscure, but really you should seek it out. There's a movie by the Canadian film director Denys Arcand — read out in English on the page, ""Dennis Ar-cand,"" if you want to look him up. He did a film called ""Jesus of Montreal."" And many of the characters are vibrant, funny, passionate, interesting French-Canadian, French-speaking women. There's one scene closest to the end, where they have to take a friend to an Anglophone hospital. In the hospital, they have to speak English. Now, they speak English but it's not their native language, they'd rather not speak English. And they speak it more slowly, they have accents, they're not idiomatic. Suddenly these characters that you've fallen in love with become husks of themselves, they're shadows of themselves.To go into a culture and to only ever process people through that kind of skrim curtain is to never truly get the culture. And so to the extent that hundreds of languages will be left, one reason to learn them is because they are tickets to being able to participate in the culture of the people who speak them, just by virtue of the fact that it is their code. So that's one reason.Second reason: it's been shown that if you speak two languages, dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probably a better multitasker. And these are factors that set in early, and so that ought to give you some sense of when to give junior or juniorette lessons in another language. Bilingualism is healthy.And then, third — languages are just an awful lot of fun. Much more fun than we're often told. So for example, Arabic: ""kataba,"" he wrote, ""yaktubu,"" he writes, she writes. ""Uktub,"" write, in the imperative. What do those things have in common? All those things have in common the consonants sitting in the middle like pillars. They stay still, and the vowels dance around the consonants. Who wouldn't want to roll that around in their mouths? You can get that from Hebrew, you can get that from Ethiopia's main language, Amharic. That's fun.Or languages have different word orders. Learning how to speak with different word order is like driving on the different side of a street if you go to certain country, or the feeling that you get when you put Witch Hazel around your eyes and you feel the tingle. A language can do that to you.So for example, ""The Cat in the Hat Comes Back,"" a book that I'm sure we all often return to, like ""Moby Dick."" One phrase in it is, ""Do you know where I found him? Do you know where he was? He was eating cake in the tub, Yes he was!"" Fine. Now, if you learn that in Mandarin Chinese, then you have to master, ""You can know, I did where him find? He was tub inside gorging cake, No mistake gorging chewing!"" That just feels good. Imagine being able to do that for years and years at a time.Or, have you ever learned any Cambodian? Me either, but if I did, I would get to roll around in my mouth not some baker's dozen of vowels like English has, but a good 30 different vowels scooching and oozing around in the Cambodian mouth like bees in a hive. That is what a language can get you.And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher — some genius teacher in there — but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times. You had to go to class. If you didn't have that, you had something called a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was.Today you can lay down — lie on your living room floor, sipping bourbon, and teach yourself any language that you want to with wonderful sets such as Rosetta Stone. I highly recommend the lesser known Glossika as well. You can do it any time, therefore you can do it more and better. You can give yourself your morning pleasures in various languages. I take some ""Dilbert"" in various languages every single morning; it can increase your skills. Couldn't have done it 20 years ago when the idea of having any language you wanted in your pocket, coming from your phone, would have sounded like science fiction to very sophisticated people.So I highly recommend that you teach yourself languages other than the one that I'm speaking, because there's never been a better time to do it. It's an awful lot of fun. It won't change your mind, but it will most certainly blow your mind.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_4_reasons_to_learn_a_new_language
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"It was April, last year. I was on an evening out with friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. We hadn't been all together for a couple of weeks; it was a perfect evening, as we were all reunited.At the end of the evening, I caught the last underground train back to the other side of London. The journey was smooth. I got back to my local station and I began the 10-minute walk home. As I turned the corner onto my street, my house in sight up ahead, I heard footsteps behind me that seemed to have approached out of nowhere and were picking up pace. Before I had time to process what was happening, a hand was clapped around my mouth so that I could not breathe, and the young man behind me dragged me to the ground, beat my head repeatedly against the pavement until my face began to bleed, kicking me in the back and neck while he began to assault me, ripping off my clothes and telling me to ""shut up,"" as I struggled to cry for help. With each smack of my head to the concrete ground, a question echoed through my mind that still haunts me today: ""Is this going to be how it all ends?""Little could I have realized, I'd been followed the whole way from the moment I left the station. And hours later, I was standing topless and barelegged in front of the police, having the cuts and bruises on my naked body photographed for forensic evidence.Now, there are few words to describe the all-consuming feelings of vulnerability, shame, upset and injustice that I was ridden with in that moment and for the weeks to come. But wanting to find a way to condense these feelings into something ordered that I could work through, I decided to do what felt most natural to me: I wrote about it.It started out as a cathartic exercise. I wrote a letter to my assaulter, humanizing him as ""you,"" to identify him as part of the very community that he had so violently abused that night.Stressing the tidal-wave effect of his actions, I wrote: ""Did you ever think of the people in your life? I don't know who the people in your life are. I don't know anything about you. But I do know this: you did not just attack me that night. I'm a daughter, I'm a friend, I'm a sister, I'm a pupil, I'm a cousin, I'm a niece, I'm a neighbor; I'm the employee who served everyone coffee in the café under the railway. And all the people who form these relations to me make up my community. And you assaulted every single one of them. You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for, and which all of these people represent: that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad.""But, determined not to let this one incident make me lose faith in the solidarity in my community or humanity as a whole, I recalled the 7/7 terrorist bombings in July 2005 on London transport, and how the mayor of London at the time, and indeed my own parents, had insisted that we all get back on the tubes the next day, so we wouldn't be defined or changed by those that had made us feel unsafe.I told my attacker, ""You've carried out your attack, but now I'm getting back on my tube. My community will not feel we are unsafe walking home after dark. We will get on the last tubes home, and we will walk up our streets alone, because we will not ingrain or submit to the idea that we are putting ourselves in danger in doing so. We will continue to come together, like an army, when any member of our community is threatened. And this is a fight you will not win.""At the time of writing this letter —(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)At the time of writing this letter, I was studying for my exams in Oxford, and I was working on the local student paper there. Despite being lucky enough to have friends and family supporting me, it was an isolating time. I didn't know anyone who'd been through this before; at least I didn't think I did. I'd read news reports, statistics, and knew how common sexual assault was, yet I couldn't actually name a single person that I'd heard speak out about an experience of this kind before.So in a somewhat spontaneous decision, I decided that I would publish my letter in the student paper, hoping to reach out to others in Oxford that might have had a similar experience and be feeling the same way. At the end of the letter, I asked others to write in with their experiences under the hashtag, ""#NotGuilty,"" to emphasize that survivors of assault could express themselves without feeling shame or guilt about what happened to them — to show that we could all stand up to sexual assault.What I never anticipated is that almost overnight, this published letter would go viral. Soon, we were receiving hundreds of stories from men and women across the world, which we began to publish on a website I set up. And the hashtag became a campaign.There was an Australian mother in her 40s who described how on an evening out, she was followed to the bathroom by a man who went to repeatedly grab her crotch. There was a man in the Netherlands who described how he was date-raped on a visit to London and wasn't taken seriously by anyone he reported his case to. I had personal Facebook messages from people in India and South America, saying, how can we bring the message of the campaign there? One of the first contributions we had was from a woman called Nikki, who described growing up, being molested my her own father. And I had friends open up to me about experiences ranging from those that happened last week to those that happened years ago, that I'd had no idea about.And the more we started to receive these messages, the more we also started to receive messages of hope — people feeling empowered by this community of voices standing up to sexual assault and victim-blaming. One woman called Olivia, after describing how she was attacked by someone she had trusted and cared about for a long time, said, ""I've read many of the stories posted here, and I feel hopeful that if so many women can move forward, then I can, too. I've been inspired by many, and I hope I can be as strong as them someday. I'm sure I will.""People around the world began tweeting under this hashtag, and the letter was republished and covered by the national press, as well as being translated into several other languages worldwide.But something struck me about the media attention that this letter was attracting. For something to be front-page news, given the word ""news"" itself, we can assume it must be something new or something surprising. And yet sexual assault is not something new. Sexual assault, along with other kinds of injustices, is reported in the media all the time. But through the campaign, these injustices were framed as not just news stories, they were firsthand experiences that had affected real people, who were creating, with the solidarity of others, what they needed and had previously lacked: a platform to speak out, the reassurance they weren't alone or to blame for what happened to them and open discussions that would help to reduce stigma around the issue. The voices of those directly affected were at the forefront of the story — not the voices of journalists or commentators on social media. And that's why the story was news.We live in an incredibly interconnected world with the proliferation of social media, which is of course a fantastic resource for igniting social change. But it's also made us increasingly reactive, from the smallest annoyances of, ""Oh, my train's been delayed,"" to the greatest injustices of war, genocides, terrorist attacks. Our default response has become to leap to react to any kind of grievance by tweeting, Facebooking, hastagging — anything to show others that we, too, have reacted.The problem with reacting in this manner en masse is it can sometimes mean that we don't actually react at all, not in the sense of actually doing anything, anyway. It might make ourselves feel better, like we've contributed to a group mourning or outrage, but it doesn't actually change anything. And what's more, it can sometimes drown out the voices of those directly affected by the injustice, whose needs must be heard.Worrying, too, is the tendency for some reactions to injustice to build even more walls, being quick to point fingers with the hope of providing easy solutions to complex problems. One British tabloid, on the publication of my letter, branded a headline stating, ""Oxford Student Launches Online Campaign to Shame Attacker."" But the campaign never meant to shame anyone. It meant to let people speak and to make others listen. Divisive Twitter trolls were quick to create even more injustice, commenting on my attacker's ethnicity or class to push their own prejudiced agendas. And some even accused me of feigning the whole thing to push, and I quote, my ""feminist agenda of man-hating.""(Laughter)I know, right? As if I'm going to be like, ""Hey guys! Sorry I can't make it, I'm busy trying to hate the entire male population by the time I'm 30.""(Laughter)Now, I'm almost sure that these people wouldn't say the things they say in person. But it's as if because they might be behind a screen, in the comfort in their own home when on social media, people forget that what they're doing is a public act — that other people will be reading it and be affected by it.Returning to my analogy of getting back on our trains, another main concern I have about this noise that escalates from our online responses to injustice is that it can very easily slip into portraying us as the affected party, which can lead to a sense of defeatism, a kind of mental barrier to seeing any opportunity for positivity or change after a negative situation.A couple of months before the campaign started or any of this happened to me, I went to a TEDx event in Oxford, and I saw Zelda la Grange speak, the former private secretary to Nelson Mandela. One of the stories she told really struck me. She spoke of when Mandela was taken to court by the South African Rugby Union after he commissioned an inquiry into sports affairs. In the courtroom, he went up to the South African Rugby Union's lawyers, shook them by the hand and conversed with them, each in their own language. And Zelda wanted to protest, saying they had no right to his respect after this injustice they had caused him.He turned to her and said, ""You must never allow the enemy to determine the grounds for battle.""At the time of hearing these words, I didn't really know why they were so important, but I felt they were, and I wrote them down in a notebook I had on me. But I've thought about this line a lot ever since.Revenge, or the expression of hatred towards those who have done us injustice may feel like a human instinct in the face of wrong, but we need to break out of these cycles if we are to hope to transform negative events of injustice into positive social change. To do otherwise continues to let the enemy determine the grounds for battle, creates a binary, where we who have suffered become the affected, pitted against them, the perpetrators. And just like we got back on our tubes, we can't let our platforms for interconnectivity and community be the places that we settle for defeat.But I don't want to discourage a social media response, because I owe the development of the #NotGuilty campaign almost entirely to social media. But I do want to encourage a more considered approach to the way we use it to respond to injustice.The start, I think, is to ask ourselves two things. Firstly: Why do I feel this injustice? In my case, there were several answers to this. Someone had hurt me and those who I loved, under the assumption they wouldn't have to be held to account or recognize the damage they had caused. Not only that, but thousands of men and women suffer every day from sexual abuse, often in silence, yet it's still a problem we don't give the same airtime to as other issues. It's still an issue many people blame victims for.Next, ask yourself: How, in recognizing these reasons, could I go about reversing them? With us, this was holding my attacker to account — and many others. It was calling them out on the effect they had caused. It was giving airtime to the issue of sexual assault, opening up discussions amongst friends, amongst families, in the media that had been closed for too long, and stressing that victims shouldn't feel to blame for what happened to them. We might still have a long way to go in solving this problem entirely. But in this way, we can begin to use social media as an active tool for social justice, as a tool to educate, to stimulate dialogues, to make those in positions of authority aware of an issue by listening to those directly affected by it.Because sometimes these questions don't have easy answers. In fact, they rarely do. But this doesn't mean we still can't give them a considered response. In situations where you can't go about thinking how you'd reverse this feeling of injustice, you can still think, maybe not what you can do, but what you can not do. You can not build further walls by fighting injustice with more prejudice, more hatred. You can not speak over those directly affected by an injustice. And you can not react to injustice, only to forget about it the next day, just because the rest of Twitter has moved on.Sometimes not reacting instantly is, ironically, the best immediate course of action we can take. Because we might be angry, upset and energized by injustice, but let's consider our responses. Let us hold people to account, without descending into a culture that thrives off shaming and injustice ourselves. Let us remember that distinction, so often forgotten by internet users, between criticism and insult. Let us not forget to think before we speak, just because we might have a screen in front of us. And when we create noise on social media, let it not drown out the needs of those affected, but instead let it amplify their voices, so the internet becomes a place where you're not the exception if you speak out about something that has actually happened to you.All these considered approaches to injustice evoke the very keystones on which the internet was built: to network, to have signal, to connect — all these terms that imply bringing people together, not pushing people apart.Because if you look up the word ""justice"" in the dictionary, before punishment, before administration of law or judicial authority, you get: ""The maintenance of what is right."" And I think there are few things more ""right"" in this world than bringing people together, than unions. And if we allow social media to deliver that, then it can deliver a very powerful form of justice, indeed.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ione_wells_how_we_talk_about_sexual_assault_online
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"One hot October morning, I got off the all-night train in Mandalay, the old royal capital of Burma, now Myanmar. And out on the street, I ran into a group of rough men standing beside their bicycle rickshaws. And one of them came up and offered to show me around. The price he quoted was outrageous. It was less than I would pay for a bar of chocolate at home.So I clambered into his trishaw, and he began pedaling us slowly between palaces and pagodas. And as he did, he told me how he had come to the city from his village. He'd earned a degree in mathematics. His dream was to be a teacher. But of course, life is hard under a military dictatorship, and so for now, this was the only way he could make a living. Many nights, he told me, he actually slept in his trishaw so he could catch the first visitors off the all-night train.And very soon, we found that in certain ways, we had so much in common — we were both in our 20s, we were both fascinated by foreign cultures — that he invited me home.So we turned off the wide, crowded streets, and we began bumping down rough, wild alleyways. There were broken shacks all around. I really lost the sense of where I was, and I realized that anything could happen to me now. I could get mugged or drugged or something worse. Nobody would know.Finally, he stopped and led me into a hut, which consisted of just one tiny room. And then he leaned down, and reached under his bed. And something in me froze. I waited to see what he would pull out. And finally he extracted a box. Inside it was every single letter he had ever received from visitors from abroad, and on some of them he had pasted little black-and-white worn snapshots of his new foreign friends.So when we said goodbye that night, I realized he had also shown me the secret point of travel, which is to take a plunge, to go inwardly as well as outwardly to places you would never go otherwise, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear.At home, it's dangerously easy to assume we're on top of things. Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you're not, and you can't get to the bottom of things, either.Everywhere, ""People wish to be settled,"" Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us, ""but only insofar as we are unsettled is there any hope for us.""At this conference, we've been lucky enough to hear some exhilarating new ideas and discoveries and, really, about all the ways in which knowledge is being pushed excitingly forwards. But at some point, knowledge gives out. And that is the moment when your life is truly decided: you fall in love; you lose a friend; the lights go out. And it's then, when you're lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, that you find out who you are.I don't believe that ignorance is bliss. Science has unquestionably made our lives brighter and longer and healthier. And I am forever grateful to the teachers who showed me the laws of physics and pointed out that three times three makes nine. I can count that out on my fingers any time of night or day. But when a mathematician tells me that minus three times minus three makes nine, that's a kind of logic that almost feels like trust.The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn't always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery. Possibility. And in my life, I've found it's the things I don't know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards much more than the things I do know. It's also the things I don't know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me.For eight straight Novembers, recently, I traveled every year across Japan with the Dalai Lama. And the one thing he said every day that most seemed to give people reassurance and confidence was, ""I don't know.""""What's going to happen to Tibet?"" ""When are we ever going to get world peace?"" ""What's the best way to raise children?""""Frankly,"" says this very wise man, ""I don't know.""The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman has spent more than 60 years now researching human behavior, and his conclusion is that we are always much more confident of what we think we know than we should be. We have, as he memorably puts it, an ""unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."" We know — quote, unquote — our team is going to win this weekend, and we only remember that knowledge on the rare occasions when we're right. Most of the time, we're in the dark. And that's where real intimacy lies.Do you know what your lover is going to do tomorrow? Do you want to know?The parents of us all, as some people call them, Adam and Eve, could never die, so long as they were eating from the tree of life. But the minute they began nibbling from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell from their innocence. They grew embarrassed and fretful, self-conscious. And they learned, a little too late, perhaps, that there are certainly some things that we need to know, but there are many, many more that are better left unexplored.Now, when I was a kid, I knew it all, of course. I had been spending 20 years in classrooms collecting facts, and I was actually in the information business, writing articles for Time Magazine. And I took my first real trip to Japan for two-and-a-half weeks, and I came back with a 40-page essay explaining every last detail about Japan's temples, its fashions, its baseball games, its soul.But underneath all that, something that I couldn't understand so moved me for reasons I couldn't explain to you yet, that I decided to go and live in Japan. And now that I've been there for 28 years, I really couldn't tell you very much at all about my adopted home. Which is wonderful, because it means every day I'm making some new discovery, and in the process, looking around the corner and seeing the hundred thousand things I'll never know.Knowledge is a priceless gift. But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance.Thinking that you know your lover or your enemy can be more treacherous than acknowledging you'll never know them. Every morning in Japan, as the sun is flooding into our little apartment, I take great pains not to consult the weather forecast, because if I do, my mind will be overclouded, distracted, even when the day is bright.I've been a full-time writer now for 34 years. And the one thing that I have learned is that transformation comes when I'm not in charge, when I don't know what's coming next, when I can't assume I am bigger than everything around me. And the same is true in love or in moments of crisis. Suddenly, we're back in that trishaw again and we're bumping off the broad, well-lit streets; and we're reminded, really, of the first law of travel and, therefore, of life: you're only as strong as your readiness to surrender.In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_the_beauty_of_what_we_ll_never_know
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"You are a high-ranking military service member deployed to Afghanistan. You are responsible for the lives of hundreds of men and women, and your base is under attack. Incoming mortar rounds are exploding all around you. Struggling to see through the dust and the smoke, you do your best to assist the wounded and then crawl to a nearby bunker.Conscious but dazed by the blasts, you lay on your side and attempt to process what has just happened. As you regain your vision, you see a bloody face staring back at you. The image is terrifying, but you quickly come to understand it's not real.This vision continues to visit you multiple times a day and in your sleep. You choose not to tell anyone for fear of losing your job or being seen as weak. You give the vision a name, Bloody Face in Bunker, and call it BFIB for short. You keep BFIB locked away in your mind, secretly haunting you, for the next seven years.Now close your eyes. Can you see BFIB? If you can, you're beginning to see the face of the invisible wounds of war, commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.While I can't say I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I've never been a stranger to it.When I was a little girl, I would visit my grandparents every summer. It was my grandfather who introduced me to the effects of combat on the psyche. While my grandfather was serving as a Marine in the Korean War, a bullet pierced his neck and rendered him unable to cry out. He watched as a corpsman passed him over, declaring him a goner, and then leaving him to die.Years later, after his physical wounds had healed and he'd returned home, he rarely spoke of his experiences in waking life. But at night I would hear him shouting obscenities from his room down the hall. And during the day I would announce myself as I entered the room, careful not to startle or agitate him. He lived out the remainder of his days isolated and tight-lipped, never finding a way to express himself, and I didn't yet have the tools to guide him.I wouldn't have a name for my grandfather's condition until I was in my 20s. Seeking a graduate degree in art therapy, I naturally gravitated towards the study of trauma. And while sitting in class learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, my mission to help service members who suffered like my grandfather began to take form.We've had various names for post-traumatic stress throughout the history of war: homesickness, soldier's heart, shell shock, thousand-yard stare, for instance. And while I was pursuing my degree, a new war was raging, and thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, service members were surviving blast injuries they wouldn't have before. But the invisible wounds were reaching new levels, and this pushed military doctors and researchers to try and truly understand the effects that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and PTSD have on the brain.Due to advances in technology and neuroimaging, we now know there's an actual shutdown in the Broca's, or the speech-language area of the brain, after an individual experiences trauma. This physiological change, or speechless terror as it's often called, coupled with mental health stigma, the fear of being judged or misunderstood, possibly even removed from their current duties, has led to the invisible struggles of our servicemen and women. Generation after generation of veterans have chosen not to talk about their experiences, and suffer in solitude.I had my work cut out for me when I got my first job as an art therapist at the nation's largest military medical center, Walter Reed. After working for a few years on a locked-in patient psychiatric unit, I eventually transferred to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, NICoE, which leads TBI care for active duty service members. Now, I believed in art therapy, but I was going to have to convince service members, big, tough, strong, manly military men, and some women too, to give art-making as a psychotherapeutic intervention a try.The results have been nothing short of spectacular. Vivid, symbolic artwork is being created by our servicemen and women, and every work of art tells a story. We've observed that the process of art therapy bypasses the speech-language issue with the brain. Art-making accesses the same sensory areas of the brain that encode trauma. Service members can use the art-making to work through their experiences in a nonthreatening way. They can then apply words to their physical creations, reintegrating the left and the right hemispheres of the brain.Now, we've seen this can work with all forms of art — drawing, painting, collage — but what seems to have the most impact is mask-making. Finally, these invisible wounds don't just have a name, they have a face.And when service members create these masks, it allows them to come to grips, literally, with their trauma. And it's amazing how often that enables them to break through the trauma and start to heal.Remember BFIB? That was a real experience for one of my patients, and when he created his mask, he was able to let go of that haunting image. Initially, it was a daunting process for the service member, but eventually he began to think of BFIB as the mask, not his internal wound, and he would go to leave each session, he would hand me the mask, and say, ""Melissa, take care of him."" Eventually, we placed BFIB in a box to further contain him, and when the service member went to leave the NICoE, he chose to leave BFIB behind. A year later, he had only seen BFIB twice, and both times BFIB was smiling and the service member didn't feel anxious. Now, whenever that service member is haunted by some traumatic memory, he continues to paint. Every time he paints these disturbing images, he sees them less or not at all.Philosophers have told us for thousands of years that the power to create is very closely linked to the power to destroy. Now science is showing us that the part of the brain that registers a traumatic wound can be the part of the brain where healing happens too. And art therapy is showing us how to make that connection.We asked one of our service members to describe how mask-making impacted his treatment, and this is what he had to say.(Video) Service Member: You sort of just zone out into the mask. You zone out into the drawing, and for me, it just released the block, so I was able to do it. And then when I looked at it after two days, I was like, ""Holy crap, here's the picture, here's the key, here's the puzzle,"" and then from there it just soared. I mean, from there my treatment just when out of sight, because they were like, Kurt, explain this, explain this. And for the first time in 23 years, I could actually talk about stuff openly to, like, anybody. I could talk to you about it right now if I wanted to, because it unlocked it. It's just amazing. And it allowed me to put 23 years of PTSD and TBI stuff together in one place that has never happened before. Sorry.Melissa Walker: Over the past five years, we've had over 1,000 masks made. It's pretty amazing, isn't it?Thank you.(Applause) I wish I could have shared this process with my grandfather, but I know that he would be thrilled that we are finding ways to help today's and tomorrow's service members heal, and finding the resources within them that they can call upon to heal themselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_walker_art_can_heal_ptsd_s_invisible_wounds
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"Have you ever noticed when you ask someone to talk about a change they're making for the better in their personal lives, they're often really energetic? Whether it's training for a marathon, picking up an old hobby, or learning a new skill, for most people, self-transformation projects occupy a very positive emotional space.Self-transformation is empowering, energizing, even exhilarating. I mean just take a look at some of the titles of self-help books: ""Awaken the Giant Within,"" ""Practicing the Power of Now,"" or here's a great one we can all relate to, ""You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life.""(Laughter)When it comes to self-transformation, you can't help but get a sense of the excitement. But there's another type of transformation that occupies a very different emotional space. The transformation of organizations. If you're like most people, when you hear the words ""Our organization is going to start a transformation,"" you're thinking, ""Uh-oh.""(Laughter)""Layoffs."" The blood drains from your face, your mind goes into overdrive, frantically searching for some place to run and hide.Well, you can run, but you really can't hide. Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours involved in organizations. And due to changes in globalization, changes due to advances in technology and other factors, the reality is our organizations are constantly having to adapt. In fact, I call this the era of ""always-on"" transformation.When I shared this idea with my wife Nicola, she said, ""Always-on transformation? That sounds exhausting."" And that may be exactly what you're thinking — and you would be right. Particularly if we continue to approach the transformation of organizations the way we always have been.But because we can't hide, we need to sort out two things. First, why is transformation so exhausting? And second, how do we fix it?First of all, let's acknowledge that change is hard. People naturally resist change, especially when it's imposed on them. But there are things that organizations do that make change even harder and more exhausting for people than it needs to be. First of all, leaders often wait too long to act. As a result, everything is happening in crisis mode. Which, of course, tends to be exhausting. Or, given the urgency, what they'll do is they'll just focus on the short-term results, but that doesn't give any hope for the future. Or they'll just take a superficial, one-off approach, hoping that they can return back to business as usual as soon as the crisis is over.This kind of approach is kind of the way some students approach preparing for standardized tests. In order to get test scores to go up, teachers will end up teaching to the test. Now, that approach can work; test results often do go up. But it fails the fundamental goal of education: to prepare students to succeed over the long term.So given these obstacles, what can we do to transform the way we transform organizations so rather than being exhausting, it's actually empowering and energizing? To do that, we need to focus on five strategic imperatives, all of which have one thing in common: putting people first.The first imperative for putting people first is to inspire through purpose. Most transformations have financial and operational goals. These are important and they can be energizing to leaders, but they tend not to be very motivating to most people in the organization. To motivate more broadly, the transformation needs to connect with a deeper sense of purpose.Take LEGO. The LEGO Group has become an extraordinary global company. Under their very capable leadership, they've actually undergone a series of transformations. While each of these has had a very specific focus, the North Star, linking and guiding all of them, has been Lego's powerful purpose: inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. Expanding globally? It's not about increasing sales, but about giving millions of additional children access to LEGO building bricks. Investment and innovation? It's not about developing new products, but about enabling more children to experience the joy of learning through play. Not surprisingly, that deep sense of purpose tends to be highly motivating to LEGO's people.The second imperative for putting people first is to go all in. Too many transformations are nothing more than head-count cutting exercises; layoffs under the guise of transformation. In the face of relentless competition, it may well be that you will have to take the painful decision to downsize the organization, just as you may have to lose some weight in order to run a marathon. But losing weight alone will not get you across the finish line with a winning time. To win you need to go all in. You need to go all in. Rather than just cutting costs, you need to think about initiatives that will enable you to win in the medium term, initiatives to drive growth, actions that will fundamentally change the way the company operates, and very importantly, investments to develop the leadership and the talent.The third imperative for putting people first is to enable people with the capabilities that they need to succeed during the transformation and beyond. Over the years I've competed in a number of triathlons. You know, frankly, I'm not that good, but I do have one distinct capability; I am remarkably fast at finding my bike.(Laughter)By the time I finish the swim, almost all the bikes are already gone.(Laughter)Real triathletes know that each leg — the swim, the bike, the run — really requires different capabilities, different tools, different skills, different techniques. Likewise when we transform organizations, we need to be sure that we're giving our people the skills and the tools they need along the way.Chronos, a global software company, recognized the need to transfer from building products — software products — to building software as a service. To enable its people to take that transformation, first of all they invested in new tools that would enable their employees to monitor the usage of the features as well as customer satisfaction with the new service. They also invested in skill development, so that their employees would be able to resolve customer service problems on the spot. And very importantly, they also reinforced the collaborative behaviors that would be required to deliver an end-to-end seamless customer experience. Because of these investments, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the transformation, Chronos employees actually felt energized and empowered in their new roles.In the era of ""always-on"" transformation, change is a constant. My fourth imperative therefore is to instill a culture of continuous learning. When Satya Nadella became the CEO of Microsoft in February 2014, he embarked on an ambitious transformation journey to prepare the company to compete in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. This included changes to strategy, the organization and very importantly, the culture. Microsoft's culture at the time was one of silos and internal competition — not exactly conducive to learning. Nadella took this head-on. He rallied his leadership around his vision for a living, learning culture, shifting from a fixed mindset, where your role was to show up as the smartest person in the room, to a growth mindset, where your role was to listen, to learn and to bring out the best in people. Well, early days, Microsoft employees already noticed this shift in the culture — clear evidence of Microsoft putting people first.My fifth and final imperative is specifically for leaders. In a transformation, a leader needs to have a vision, a clear road map with milestones, and then you need to hold people accountable for results. In other words, you need to be directive. But in order to capture the hearts and minds of people, you also need to be inclusive. Inclusive leadership is critical to putting people first.I live in the San Francisco Bay area. And right now, our basketball team is the best in the league. We won the 2015 championship, and we're favored to win again this year. There are many explanations for this. They have some fabulous players, but one of the key reasons is their head coach, Steve Kerr, is an inclusive leader. When Kerr came to the Warriors in 2014, the Warriors were looking for a major transformation. They hadn't won a national championship since 1975.Kerr came in, and he had a clear vision, and he immediately got to work. From the outset, he reached out and engaged the players and the staff. He created an environment of open debate and solicited suggestions. During games he would often ask, ""What are you seeing that I'm missing?""One the best examples of this came in game four of the 2015 finals. The Warriors were down two games to one when Kerr made the decision to change the starting lineup; a bold move by any measure. The Warriors won the game and went on to win the championship. And it is widely viewed that that move was the pivotal move in their victory.Interestingly, it wasn't actually Kerr's idea. It was the idea of his 28-year-old assistant, Nick U'Ren. Because of Kerr's leadership style, U'Ren felt comfortable bringing the idea forward. And Kerr not only listened, but he implemented the idea and then afterwards, gave U'Ren all the credit — actions all consistent with Kerr's highly inclusive approach to leadership.In the era of ""always-on"" transformation, organizations are always going to be transforming. But doing so does not have to be exhausting. We owe it to ourselves, to our organizations and to society more broadly to boldly transform our approach to transformation. To do that, we need to start putting people first.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_hemerling_5_ways_to_lead_in_an_era_of_constant_change
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"(Music)(Applause)Trevor Copp: When ""Dancing With the Stars"" first hit the airwaves, that is not what it looked like.(Laughter)Jeff and I were full-time ballroom dance instructors when the big TV ballroom revival hit, and this was incredible. I mean, one day we would say ""foxtrot,"" and people were like ""Foxes trotting.""(Laughter)And the next day they were telling us the finer points of a good feather step. And this blew our minds. I mean, all of the ballroom dance geeking out that we had always done on why salsa worked differently than the competitive rumba and why tango traveled unlike the waltz, all of that just hit the public consciousness, and it changed everything.But running parallel to this excitement, the excitement that suddenly, somehow, we were cool —(Laughter)there was also this reservation. Why this and why now?Jeff Fox: When Trevor and I would get together for training seminars or just for fun, we'd toss each other around, mix it up, take a break from having to lead all the time. We even came up with a system for switching lead and follow while we were dancing, as a way of taking turns and playing fair. It wasn't until we used that system as part of a performance in a small festival that we got an important tap on the shoulder. Lisa O'Connell, a dramaturge and director of a playwright center, pulled us aside after the show and said, ""Do you have any idea how political that was?""(Laughter)So that began an eight-year collaboration to create a play which not only further developed our system for switching but also explored the impact of being locked into a single role, and what's worse, being defined by that single role.TC: Because, of course, classic Latin and ballroom dancing isn't just a system of dancing; it's a way of thinking, of being, of relating to each other that captured a whole period's values. There's one thing that stayed consistent, though: the man leads and the woman follows. So street salsa, championship tango, it's all the same — he leads, she follows.So this was gender training. You weren't just learning to dance — you were learning to ""man"" and to ""woman."" It's a relic. And in the way of relics, you don't throw it out, but you need to know that this is the past. This isn't the present. It's like Shakespeare: respect it, revive it — great! But know that this is history. This doesn't represent how we think today.So we asked ourselves: If you strip it all down, what is at the core of partner dancing?JF: Well, the core principle of partner dancing is that one person leads, the other one follows. The machine works the same, regardless of who's playing which role. The physics of movement doesn't really give a crap about your gender.(Laughter)So if we were to update the existing form, we would need to make it more representative of how we interact here, now, in 2015. When you watch ballroom, don't just watch what's there. Watch what's not. The couple is always only a man and a woman. Together. Only. Ever. So, same-sex and gender nonconformist couples just disappear. In most mainstream international ballroom competitions, same-sex couples are rarely recognized on the floor, and in many cases, the rules prohibit them completely.TC: Try this: Google-image, ""professional Latin dancer,"" and then look for an actual Latino person.(Laughter)You'll be there for days. What you will get is page after page of white, straight Russian couples spray-tanned to the point of mahogany.(Laughter)There are no black people, there are no Asians, no mixed-race couples, so basically, non-white people just disappeared.Even within the white-straight- couple-only paradigm — she can't be taller, he can't be shorter. She can't be bolder, he can't be gentler.If you were to take a ballroom dance and translate that into a conversation and drop that into a movie, we, as a culture, would never stand for this. He dictates, she reacts. No relationship — gay, straight or anything — that we would regard as remotely healthy or functional looks like that, and yet somehow, you put it on prime time, you slap some makeup on it, throw the glitter on, put it out there as movement, not as text, and we, as a culture, tune in and clap. We are applauding our own absence. Too many people have disappeared from partner dancing.(Music)(Applause)JF: Now, you just saw two men dancing together.(Laughter)And you thought it looked ... a little strange. Interesting — appealing, even — but a little bit odd. Even avid followers of the same-sex ballroom circuit can attest that while same-sex partner dancing can be dynamic and strong and exciting, it just doesn't quite seem to fit. Aesthetically speaking, if Alida and I take the classic closed ballroom hold ... this is considered beautiful.(Laughter)But why not this?(Laughter)See, the standard image that the leader must be larger and masculine and the follower smaller and feminine — this is a stumbling point.TC: So we wanted to look at this from a totally different angle. So, what if we could keep the idea of lead and follow but toss the idea that this was connected to gender? Further, what if a couple could lead and follow each other and then switch? And then switch back? What if it could be like a conversation, taking turns listening and speaking, just like we do in life? What if we could dance like that? We call it ""Liquid Lead Dancing.""JF: Let's try this with a Latin dance, salsa. In salsa, there's a key transitional step, called the cross-body lead. We use it as punctuation to break up the improvisation. It can be a little tricky to spot if you're not used to looking for it, so here it is. One more time for the cheap seats.(Laughter)And here's the action one more time, nice and slow. Now, if we apply liquid-lead thinking to this transitional step, the cross-body lead becomes a point where the lead and the follow can switch. The person following can elect to take over the lead, or the person leading can choose to surrender it, essentially making it a counter-cross-body lead. Here's how that looks in slow motion. And here's how it looked when we danced it in the opening dance.With this simple tweak, the dance moves from being a dictation to a negotiation. Anyone can lead. Anyone can follow. And more importantly, you can change your mind. Now, this is only one example of how this applies, but once the blinkers come off, anything can happen.TC: Let's look at how Liquid Lead thinking could apply to a classic waltz. Because, of course, it isn't just a system of switching leads; it's a way of thinking that can actually make the dance itself more efficient.So: the waltz. The waltz is a turning dance. This means that for the lead, you spend half of the dance traveling backwards, completely blind. And because of the follower's position, basically, no one can see where they're going.(Laughter)So you're out here on the floor, and then imagine that coming right at you.JF: Raaaaaah!(Laughter)TC: There are actually a lot of accidents out there that happen as a result of this blind spot. But what if the partners were to just allow for a switch of posture for a moment? A lot of accidents could be avoided. Even if one person led the whole dance but allowed this switch to happen, it would be a lot safer, while at the same time, offering new aesthetics into the waltz. Because physics doesn't give a damn about your gender.(Laughter)JF: Now, we've danced Liquid Lead in clubs, convention centers and as part of ""First Dance,"" the play we created with Lisa, on stages in North America and in Europe. And it never fails to engage. I mean, beyond the unusual sight of seeing two men dancing together, it always evokes and engages. But why?The secret lies in what made Lisa see our initial demonstration as ""political."" It wasn't just that we were switching lead and follow; it's that we stayed consistent in our presence, our personality and our power, regardless of which role we were playing. We were still us.And that's where the true freedom lies — not just the freedom to switch roles, but the freedom from being defined by whichever role you're playing, the freedom to always remain true to yourself. Forget what a lead is supposed to look like, or a follow. Be a masculine follow or a feminine lead. Just be yourself. Obviously, this applies off the dance floor as well, but on the floor, it gives us the perfect opportunity to update an old paradigm, reinvigorate an old relic, and make it more representative of our era and our current way of being.TC: Jeff and I dance partner dancing all the time with women and men and we love it. But we dance with a consciousness that this is a historic form that can produce silence and produce invisibility across the spectrum of identity that we enjoy today. We invented Liquid Lead as a way of stripping out all the ideas that don't belong to us and taking partner dancing back to what it really always was: the fine art of taking care of each other.(Music)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/trevor_copp_jeff_fox_ballroom_dance_that_breaks_gender_roles
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"Let's talk about trust. We all know trust is fundamental, but when it comes to trusting people, something profound is happening.Please raise your hand if you have ever been a host or a guest on Airbnb. Wow. That's a lot of you.Who owns Bitcoin? Still a lot of you. OK.And please raise your hand if you've ever used Tinder to help you find a mate.(Laughter)This one's really hard to count because you're kind of going like this.(Laughter)These are all examples of how technology is creating new mechanisms that are enabling us to trust unknown people, companies and ideas. And yet at the same time, trust in institutions — banks, governments and even churches — is collapsing. So what's happening here, and who do you trust?Let's start in France with a platform — with a company, I should say — with a rather funny-sounding name, BlaBlaCar. It's a platform that matches drivers and passengers who want to share long-distance journeys together. The average ride taken is 320 kilometers. So it's a good idea to choose your fellow travelers wisely. Social profiles and reviews help people make a choice. You can see if someone's a smoker, you can see what kind of music they like, you can see if they're going to bring their dog along for the ride. But it turns out that the key social identifier is how much you're going to talk in the car.(Laughter)Bla, not a lot, bla bla, you want a nice bit of chitchat, and bla bla bla, you're not going to stop talking the entire way from London to Paris.(Laughter)It's remarkable, right, that this idea works at all, because it's counter to the lesson most of us were taught as a child: never get in a car with a stranger. And yet, BlaBlaCar transports more than four million people every single month. To put that in context, that's more passengers than the Eurostar or JetBlue airlines carry. BlaBlaCar is a beautiful illustration of how technology is enabling millions of people across the world to take a trust leap.A trust leap happens when we take the risk to do something new or different to the way that we've always done it. Let's try to visualize this together. OK. I want you to close your eyes. There is a man staring at me with his eyes wide open. I'm on this big red circle. I can see. So close your eyes.(Laughter) (Applause)I'll do it with you. And I want you to imagine there exists a gap between you and something unknown. That unknown can be someone you've just met. It can be a place you've never been to. It can be something you've never tried before. You got it? OK. You can open your eyes now. For you to leap from a place of certainty, to take a chance on that someone or something unknown, you need a force to pull you over the gap, and that remarkable force is trust.Trust is an elusive concept, and yet we depend on it for our lives to function. I trust my children when they say they're going to turn the lights out at night. I trusted the pilot who flew me here to keep me safe. It's a word we use a lot, without always thinking about what it really means and how it works in different contexts of our lives.There are, in fact, hundreds of definitions of trust, and most can be reduced to some kind of risk assessment of how likely it is that things will go right. But I don't like this definition of trust, because it makes trust sound rational and predictable, and it doesn't really get to the human essence of what it enables us to do and how it empowers us to connect with other people.So I define trust a little differently. I define trust as a confident relationship to the unknown. Now, when you view trust through this lens, it starts to explain why it has the unique capacity to enable us to cope with uncertainty, to place our faith in strangers, to keep moving forward.Human beings are remarkable at taking trust leaps. Do you remember the first time you put your credit card details into a website? That's a trust leap. I distinctly remember telling my dad that I wanted to buy a navy blue secondhand Peugeot on eBay, and he rightfully pointed out that the seller's name was ""Invisible Wizard"" and that this probably was not such a good idea.(Laughter)So my work, my research focuses on how technology is transforming the social glue of society, trust between people, and it's a fascinating area to study, because there's still so much we do not know. For instance, do men and women trust differently in digital environments? Does the way we build trust face-to-face translate online? Does trust transfer? So if you trust finding a mate on Tinder, are you more likely to trust finding a ride on BlaBlaCar?But from studying hundreds of networks and marketplaces, there is a common pattern that people follow, and I call it ""climbing the trust stack."" Let me use BlaBlaCar as an example to bring it to life. On the first level, you have to trust the idea. So you have to trust the idea of ride-sharing is safe and worth trying. The second level is about having confidence in the platform, that BlaBlaCar will help you if something goes wrong. And the third level is about using little bits of information to decide whether the other person is trustworthy.Now, the first time we climb the trust stack, it feels weird, even risky, but we get to a point where these ideas seem totally normal. Our behaviors transform, often relatively quickly. In other words, trust enables change and innovation.So an idea that intrigued me, and I'd like you to consider, is whether we can better understand major waves of disruption and change in individuals in society through the lens of trust. Well, it turns out that trust has only evolved in three significant chapters throughout the course of human history: local, institutional and what we're now entering, distributed.So for a long time, until the mid-1800s, trust was built around tight-knit relationships. So say I lived in a village with the first five rows of this audience, and we all knew one another, and say I wanted to borrow money. The man who had his eyes wide open, he might lend it to me, and if I didn't pay him back, you'd all know I was dodgy. I would get a bad reputation, and you would refuse to do business with me in the future. Trust was mostly local and accountability-based.In the mid-19th century, society went through a tremendous amount of change. People moved to fast-growing cities such as London and San Francisco, and a local banker here was replaced by large corporations that didn't know us as individuals. We started to place our trust into black box systems of authority, things like legal contracts and regulation and insurance, and less trust directly in other people. Trust became institutional and commission-based.It's widely talked about how trust in institutions and many corporate brands has been steadily declining and continues to do so. I am constantly stunned by major breaches of trust: the News Corp phone hacking, the Volkswagen emissions scandal, the widespread abuse in the Catholic Church, the fact that only one measly banker went to jail after the great financial crisis, or more recently the Panama Papers that revealed how the rich can exploit offshore tax regimes. And the thing that really surprises me is why do leaders find it so hard to apologize, I mean sincerely apologize, when our trust is broken?It would be easy to conclude that institutional trust isn't working because we are fed up with the sheer audacity of dishonest elites, but what's happening now runs deeper than the rampant questioning of the size and structure of institutions. We're starting to realize that institutional trust wasn't designed for the digital age. Conventions of how trust is built, managed, lost and repaired — in brands, leaders and entire systems — is being turned upside down.Now, this is exciting, but it's frightening, because it forces many of us to have to rethink how trust is built and destroyed with our customers, with our employees, even our loved ones.The other day, I was talking to the CEO of a leading international hotel brand, and as is often the case, we got onto the topic of Airbnb. And he admitted to me that he was perplexed by their success. He was perplexed at how a company that depends on the willingness of strangers to trust one another could work so well across 191 countries. So I said to him that I had a confession to make, and he looked at me a bit strangely, and I said — and I'm sure many of you do this as well — I don't always bother to hang my towels up when I'm finished in the hotel, but I would never do this as a guest on Airbnb. And the reason why I would never do this as a guest on Airbnb is because guests know that they'll be rated by hosts, and that those ratings are likely to impact their ability to transact in the future. It's a simple illustration of how online trust will change our behaviors in the real world, make us more accountable in ways we cannot yet even imagine.I am not saying we do not need hotels or traditional forms of authority. But what we cannot deny is that the way trust flows through society is changing, and it's creating this big shift away from the 20th century that was defined by institutional trust towards the 21st century that will be fueled by distributed trust. Trust is no longer top-down. It's being unbundled and inverted. It's no longer opaque and linear. A new recipe for trust is emerging that once again is distributed amongst people and is accountability-based.And this shift is only going to accelerate with the emergence of the blockchain, the innovative ledger technology underpinning Bitcoin. Now let's be honest, getting our heads around the way blockchain works is mind-blowing. And one of the reasons why is it involves processing some pretty complicated concepts with terrible names. I mean, cryptographic algorithms and hash functions, and people called miners, who verify transactions — all that was created by this mysterious person or persons called Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, that is a massive trust leap that hasn't happened yet.(Applause)But let's try to imagine this. So ""The Economist"" eloquently described the blockchain as the great chain of being sure about things. The easiest way I can describe it is imagine the blocks as spreadsheets, and they are filled with assets. So that could be a property title. It could be a stock trade. It could be a creative asset, such as the rights to a song. Every time something moves from one place on the register to somewhere else, that asset transfer is time-stamped and publicly recorded on the blockchain. It's that simple. Right.So the real implication of the blockchain is that it removes the need for any kind of third party, such as a lawyer, or a trusted intermediary, or maybe not a government intermediary to facilitate the exchange. So if we go back to the trust stack, you still have to trust the idea, you have to trust the platform, but you don't have to trust the other person in the traditional sense.The implications are huge. In the same way the internet blew open the doors to an age of information available to everyone, the blockchain will revolutionize trust on a global scale.Now, I've waited to the end intentionally to mention Uber, because I recognize that it is a contentious and widely overused example, but in the context of a new era of trust, it's a great case study. Now, we will see cases of abuse of distributed trust. We've already seen this, and it can go horribly wrong. I am not surprised that we are seeing protests from taxi associations all around the world trying to get governments to ban Uber based on claims that it is unsafe. I happened to be in London the day that these protests took place, and I happened to notice a tweet from Matt Hancock, who is a British minister for business.And he wrote, ""Does anyone have details of this #Uber app everyone's talking about?(Laughter)I'd never heard of it until today.""Now, the taxi associations, they legitimized the first layer of the trust stack. They legitimized the idea that they were trying to eliminate, and sign-ups increased by 850 percent in 24 hours. Now, this is a really strong illustration of how once a trust shift has happened around a behavior or an entire sector, you cannot reverse the story. Every day, five million people will take a trust leap and ride with Uber. In China, on Didi, the ride-sharing platform, 11 million rides taken every day. That's 127 rides per second, showing that this is a cross-cultural phenomenon.And the fascinating thing is that both drivers and passengers report that seeing a name and seeing someone's photo and their rating makes them feel safer, and as you may have experienced, even behave a little more nicely in the taxi cab. Uber and Didi are early but powerful examples of how technology is creating trust between people in ways and on a scale never possible before.Today, many of us are comfortable getting into cars driven by strangers. We meet up with someone we swiped right to be matched with. We share our homes with people we do not know.This is just the beginning, because the real disruption happening isn't technological. It's the trust shift it creates, and for my part, I want to help people understand this new era of trust so that we can get it right and we can embrace the opportunities to redesign systems that are more transparent, inclusive and accountable.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_we_ve_stopped_trusting_institutions_and_started_trusting_strangers
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"Please meet Jane. She has a high-risk pregnancy. Within 24 weeks, she's on bed rest at the hospital, being monitored for her preterm contractions.She doesn't look the happiest. That's in part because it requires technicians and experts to apply these clunky belts on her to monitor her uterine contractions. Another reason Jane is not so happy is because she's worried. In particular, she's worried about what happens after her 10-day stay on bed rest at the hospital. What happens when she's home? If she were to give birth this early it would be devastating. As an African-American woman, she's twice as likely to have a premature birth or to have a stillbirth. So Jane basically has one of two options: stay at the hospital on bed rest, a prisoner to the technology until she gives birth, and then spend the rest of her life paying for the bill; or head home after her 10-day stay and hope for the best. Neither of these two options seems appealing.As I began to think about stories like this and hear about stories like this, I began to ask myself and imagine: Is there an alternative? Is there a way we could have the benefits of high-fidelity monitoring that we get with our trusted partners in the hospital while someone is at home living their daily life?With that in mind, I encouraged people in my research group to partner with some clever material scientists, and all of us came together and brainstormed. And after a long process, we came up with a vision, an idea, of a wearable system that perhaps you could wear like a piece of jewelry or you could apply to yourself like a Band-Aid. And after many trials and tribulations and years of endeavors, we were able to come up with this flexible electronic patch that was manufactured using the same processes that they use to build computer chips, except the electronics are transferred from a semiconductor wafer onto a flexible material that can interface with the human body.These systems are about the thickness of a human hair. They can measure the types of information that we want, things such as: bodily movement, bodily temperature, electrical rhythms of the body and so forth. We can also engineer these systems, so they can integrate energy sources, and can have wireless transmission capabilities.So as we began to build these types of systems, we began to test them on ourselves in our research group. But in addition, we began to reach out to some of our clinical partners in San Diego, and test these on different patients in different clinical conditions, including moms-to-be like Jane.Here is a picture of a pregnant woman in labor at our university hospital being monitored for her uterine contractions with the conventional belt. In addition, our flexible electronic patches are there. This picture demonstrates waveforms pertaining to the fetal heart rate, where the red corresponds to what was acquired with the conventional belts, and the blue corresponds to our estimates using our flexible electronic systems and our algorithms.At this moment, we gave ourselves a big mental high five. Some of the things we had imagined were beginning to come to fruition, and we were actually seeing this in a clinical context.But there was still a problem. The problem was, the way we manufactured these systems was very inefficient, had low yield and was very error-prone. In addition, as we talked to some of the nurses in the hospital, they encouraged us to make sure that our electronics worked with typical medical adhesives that are used in a hospital. We had an epiphany and said, ""Wait a minute. Rather than just making them work with adhesives, let's integrate them into adhesives, and that could solve our manufacturing problem.""This picture that you see here is our ability to embed these censors inside of a piece of Scotch tape by simply peeling it off of a wafer. Ongoing work in our research group allows us to, in addition, embed integrated circuits into the flexible adhesives to do things like amplifying signals and digitizing them, processing them and encoding for wireless transmission. All of this integrated into the same medical adhesives that are used in the hospital.So when we reached this point, we had some other challenges, from both an engineering as well as a usability perspective, to make sure that we could make it used practically.In many digital health discussions, people believe in and embrace the idea that we can simply digitize the data, wirelessly transmit it, send it to the cloud, and in the cloud, we can extract meaningful information for interpretation. And indeed, you can do all of that, if you're not worried about some of the energy challenges. Think about Jane for a moment. She doesn't live in Palo Alto, nor does she live in Beverly Hills. What that means is, we have to be mindful about her data plan and how much it would cost for her to be sending out a continuous stream of data.There's another challenge that not everyone in the medical profession is comfortable talking about. And that is, that Jane does not have the most trust in the medical establishment. She, people like her, her ancestors, have not had the best experiences at the hands of doctors and the hospital or insurance companies. That means that we have to be mindful of questions of privacy. Jane might not feel that happy about all that data being processed into the cloud. And Jane cannot be fooled; she reads the news. She knows that if the federal government can be hacked, if the Fortune 500 can be hacked, so can her doctor.And so with that in mind, we had an epiphany. We cannot outsmart all the hackers in the world, but perhaps we can present them a smaller target. What if we could actually, rather than have those algorithms that do data interpretation run in the cloud, what if we have those algorithms run on those small integrated circuits embedded into those adhesives?And so when we integrate these things together, what this means is that now we can think about the future where someone like Jane can still go about living her normal daily life, she can be monitored, it can be done in a way where she doesn't have to get another job to pay her data plan, and we can also address some of her concerns about privacy.So at this point, we're feeling very good about ourselves. We've accomplished this, we've begun to address some of these questions about privacy and we feel like, pretty much the chapter is closed now. Everyone lived happily ever after, right? Well, not so fast.(Laughter)One of the things we have to remember, as I mentioned earlier, is that Jane does not have the most trust in the medical establishment. We have to remember that there are increasing and widening health disparities, and there's inequity in terms of proper care management. And so what that means is that this simple picture of Jane and her data — even with her being comfortable being wirelessly transmitted to the cloud, letting a doctor intervene if necessary — is not the whole story.So what we're beginning to do is to think about ways to have trusted parties serve as intermediaries between people like Jane and her health care providers. For example, we've begun to partner with churches and to think about nurses that are church members, that come from that trusted community, as patient advocates and health coaches to people like Jane.Another thing we have going for us is that insurance companies, increasingly, are attracted to some of these ideas. They're increasingly realizing that perhaps it's better to pay one dollar now for a wearable device and a health coach, rather than paying 10 dollars later, when that baby is born prematurely and ends up in the neonatal intensive care unit — one of the most expensive parts of a hospital.This has been a long learning process for us. This iterative process of breaking through and attacking one problem and not feeling totally comfortable, and identifying the next problem, has helped us go along this path of actually trying to not only innovate with this technology but make sure it can be used for people who perhaps need it the most.Another learning lesson we've taken from this process that is very humbling, is that as technology progresses and advances at an accelerating rate, we have to remember that human beings are using this technology, and we have to be mindful that these human beings — they have a face, they have a name and a life. And in the case of Jane, hopefully, two.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/todd_coleman_a_temporary_tattoo_that_brings_hospital_care_to_the_home
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"So, I started my first job as a computer programmer in my very first year of college — basically, as a teenager.Soon after I started working, writing software in a company, a manager who worked at the company came down to where I was, and he whispered to me, ""Can he tell if I'm lying?"" There was nobody else in the room.""Can who tell if you're lying? And why are we whispering?""The manager pointed at the computer in the room. ""Can he tell if I'm lying?"" Well, that manager was having an affair with the receptionist.(Laughter)And I was still a teenager. So I whisper-shouted back to him, ""Yes, the computer can tell if you're lying.""(Laughter)Well, I laughed, but actually, the laugh's on me. Nowadays, there are computational systems that can suss out emotional states and even lying from processing human faces. Advertisers and even governments are very interested.I had become a computer programmer because I was one of those kids crazy about math and science. But somewhere along the line I'd learned about nuclear weapons, and I'd gotten really concerned with the ethics of science. I was troubled. However, because of family circumstances, I also needed to start working as soon as possible. So I thought to myself, hey, let me pick a technical field where I can get a job easily and where I don't have to deal with any troublesome questions of ethics. So I picked computers.(Laughter)Well, ha, ha, ha! All the laughs are on me. Nowadays, computer scientists are building platforms that control what a billion people see every day. They're developing cars that could decide who to run over. They're even building machines, weapons, that might kill human beings in war. It's ethics all the way down.Machine intelligence is here. We're now using computation to make all sort of decisions, but also new kinds of decisions. We're asking questions to computation that have no single right answers, that are subjective and open-ended and value-laden.We're asking questions like, ""Who should the company hire?"" ""Which update from which friend should you be shown?"" ""Which convict is more likely to reoffend?"" ""Which news item or movie should be recommended to people?""Look, yes, we've been using computers for a while, but this is different. This is a historical twist, because we cannot anchor computation for such subjective decisions the way we can anchor computation for flying airplanes, building bridges, going to the moon. Are airplanes safer? Did the bridge sway and fall? There, we have agreed-upon, fairly clear benchmarks, and we have laws of nature to guide us. We have no such anchors and benchmarks for decisions in messy human affairs.To make things more complicated, our software is getting more powerful, but it's also getting less transparent and more complex. Recently, in the past decade, complex algorithms have made great strides. They can recognize human faces. They can decipher handwriting. They can detect credit card fraud and block spam and they can translate between languages. They can detect tumors in medical imaging. They can beat humans in chess and Go.Much of this progress comes from a method called ""machine learning."" Machine learning is different than traditional programming, where you give the computer detailed, exact, painstaking instructions. It's more like you take the system and you feed it lots of data, including unstructured data, like the kind we generate in our digital lives. And the system learns by churning through this data. And also, crucially, these systems don't operate under a single-answer logic. They don't produce a simple answer; it's more probabilistic: ""This one is probably more like what you're looking for.""Now, the upside is: this method is really powerful. The head of Google's AI systems called it, ""the unreasonable effectiveness of data."" The downside is, we don't really understand what the system learned. In fact, that's its power. This is less like giving instructions to a computer; it's more like training a puppy-machine-creature we don't really understand or control. So this is our problem. It's a problem when this artificial intelligence system gets things wrong. It's also a problem when it gets things right, because we don't even know which is which when it's a subjective problem. We don't know what this thing is thinking.So, consider a hiring algorithm — a system used to hire people, using machine-learning systems. Such a system would have been trained on previous employees' data and instructed to find and hire people like the existing high performers in the company. Sounds good. I once attended a conference that brought together human resources managers and executives, high-level people, using such systems in hiring. They were super excited. They thought that this would make hiring more objective, less biased, and give women and minorities a better shot against biased human managers.And look — human hiring is biased. I know. I mean, in one of my early jobs as a programmer, my immediate manager would sometimes come down to where I was really early in the morning or really late in the afternoon, and she'd say, ""Zeynep, let's go to lunch!"" I'd be puzzled by the weird timing. It's 4pm. Lunch? I was broke, so free lunch. I always went. I later realized what was happening. My immediate managers had not confessed to their higher-ups that the programmer they hired for a serious job was a teen girl who wore jeans and sneakers to work. I was doing a good job, I just looked wrong and was the wrong age and gender.So hiring in a gender- and race-blind way certainly sounds good to me. But with these systems, it is more complicated, and here's why: Currently, computational systems can infer all sorts of things about you from your digital crumbs, even if you have not disclosed those things. They can infer your sexual orientation, your personality traits, your political leanings. They have predictive power with high levels of accuracy. Remember — for things you haven't even disclosed. This is inference.I have a friend who developed such computational systems to predict the likelihood of clinical or postpartum depression from social media data. The results are impressive. Her system can predict the likelihood of depression months before the onset of any symptoms — months before. No symptoms, there's prediction. She hopes it will be used for early intervention. Great! But now put this in the context of hiring.So at this human resources managers conference, I approached a high-level manager in a very large company, and I said to her, ""Look, what if, unbeknownst to you, your system is weeding out people with high future likelihood of depression? They're not depressed now, just maybe in the future, more likely. What if it's weeding out women more likely to be pregnant in the next year or two but aren't pregnant now? What if it's hiring aggressive people because that's your workplace culture?"" You can't tell this by looking at gender breakdowns. Those may be balanced. And since this is machine learning, not traditional coding, there is no variable there labeled ""higher risk of depression,"" ""higher risk of pregnancy,"" ""aggressive guy scale."" Not only do you not know what your system is selecting on, you don't even know where to begin to look. It's a black box. It has predictive power, but you don't understand it.""What safeguards,"" I asked, ""do you have to make sure that your black box isn't doing something shady?"" She looked at me as if I had just stepped on 10 puppy tails.(Laughter)She stared at me and she said, ""I don't want to hear another word about this."" And she turned around and walked away. Mind you — she wasn't rude. It was clearly: what I don't know isn't my problem, go away, death stare.(Laughter)Look, such a system may even be less biased than human managers in some ways. And it could make monetary sense. But it could also lead to a steady but stealthy shutting out of the job market of people with higher risk of depression. Is this the kind of society we want to build, without even knowing we've done this, because we turned decision-making to machines we don't totally understand?Another problem is this: these systems are often trained on data generated by our actions, human imprints. Well, they could just be reflecting our biases, and these systems could be picking up on our biases and amplifying them and showing them back to us, while we're telling ourselves, ""We're just doing objective, neutral computation.""Researchers found that on Google, women are less likely than men to be shown job ads for high-paying jobs. And searching for African-American names is more likely to bring up ads suggesting criminal history, even when there is none. Such hidden biases and black-box algorithms that researchers uncover sometimes but sometimes we don't know, can have life-altering consequences.In Wisconsin, a defendant was sentenced to six years in prison for evading the police. You may not know this, but algorithms are increasingly used in parole and sentencing decisions. He wanted to know: How is this score calculated? It's a commercial black box. The company refused to have its algorithm be challenged in open court. But ProPublica, an investigative nonprofit, audited that very algorithm with what public data they could find, and found that its outcomes were biased and its predictive power was dismal, barely better than chance, and it was wrongly labeling black defendants as future criminals at twice the rate of white defendants.So, consider this case: This woman was late picking up her godsister from a school in Broward County, Florida, running down the street with a friend of hers. They spotted an unlocked kid's bike and a scooter on a porch and foolishly jumped on it. As they were speeding off, a woman came out and said, ""Hey! That's my kid's bike!"" They dropped it, they walked away, but they were arrested.She was wrong, she was foolish, but she was also just 18. She had a couple of juvenile misdemeanors. Meanwhile, that man had been arrested for shoplifting in Home Depot — 85 dollars' worth of stuff, a similar petty crime. But he had two prior armed robbery convictions. But the algorithm scored her as high risk, and not him. Two years later, ProPublica found that she had not reoffended. It was just hard to get a job for her with her record. He, on the other hand, did reoffend and is now serving an eight-year prison term for a later crime. Clearly, we need to audit our black boxes and not have them have this kind of unchecked power.(Applause)Audits are great and important, but they don't solve all our problems. Take Facebook's powerful news feed algorithm — you know, the one that ranks everything and decides what to show you from all the friends and pages you follow. Should you be shown another baby picture?(Laughter)A sullen note from an acquaintance? An important but difficult news item? There's no right answer. Facebook optimizes for engagement on the site: likes, shares, comments.In August of 2014, protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of an African-American teenager by a white police officer, under murky circumstances. The news of the protests was all over my algorithmically unfiltered Twitter feed, but nowhere on my Facebook. Was it my Facebook friends? I disabled Facebook's algorithm, which is hard because Facebook keeps wanting to make you come under the algorithm's control, and saw that my friends were talking about it. It's just that the algorithm wasn't showing it to me. I researched this and found this was a widespread problem.The story of Ferguson wasn't algorithm-friendly. It's not ""likable."" Who's going to click on ""like?"" It's not even easy to comment on. Without likes and comments, the algorithm was likely showing it to even fewer people, so we didn't get to see this. Instead, that week, Facebook's algorithm highlighted this, which is the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Worthy cause; dump ice water, donate to charity, fine. But it was super algorithm-friendly. The machine made this decision for us. A very important but difficult conversation might have been smothered, had Facebook been the only channel.Now, finally, these systems can also be wrong in ways that don't resemble human systems. Do you guys remember Watson, IBM's machine-intelligence system that wiped the floor with human contestants on Jeopardy? It was a great player. But then, for Final Jeopardy, Watson was asked this question: ""Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero, its second-largest for a World War II battle.""(Hums Final Jeopardy music)Chicago. The two humans got it right. Watson, on the other hand, answered ""Toronto"" — for a US city category! The impressive system also made an error that a human would never make, a second-grader wouldn't make.Our machine intelligence can fail in ways that don't fit error patterns of humans, in ways we won't expect and be prepared for. It'd be lousy not to get a job one is qualified for, but it would triple suck if it was because of stack overflow in some subroutine.(Laughter)In May of 2010, a flash crash on Wall Street fueled by a feedback loop in Wall Street's ""sell"" algorithm wiped a trillion dollars of value in 36 minutes. I don't even want to think what ""error"" means in the context of lethal autonomous weapons.So yes, humans have always made biases. Decision makers and gatekeepers, in courts, in news, in war ... they make mistakes; but that's exactly my point. We cannot escape these difficult questions. We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines.(Applause)Artificial intelligence does not give us a ""Get out of ethics free"" card.Data scientist Fred Benenson calls this math-washing. We need the opposite. We need to cultivate algorithm suspicion, scrutiny and investigation. We need to make sure we have algorithmic accountability, auditing and meaningful transparency. We need to accept that bringing math and computation to messy, value-laden human affairs does not bring objectivity; rather, the complexity of human affairs invades the algorithms. Yes, we can and we should use computation to help us make better decisions. But we have to own up to our moral responsibility to judgment, and use algorithms within that framework, not as a means to abdicate and outsource our responsibilities to one another as human to human.Machine intelligence is here. That means we must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_machine_intelligence_makes_human_morals_more_important
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"Today I stand before you as a man who lives life to the full in the here and now. But for a long time, I lived for death.I was a young man who believed that jihad is to be understood in the language of force and violence. I tried to right wrongs through power and aggression. I had deep concerns for the suffering of others and a strong desire to help and bring relief to them. I thought violent jihad was noble, chivalrous and the best way to help.At a time when so many of our people — young people especially — are at risk of radicalization through groups like al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others, when these groups are claiming that their horrific brutality and violence are true jihad, I want to say that their idea of jihad is wrong — completely wrong — as was mine, then.Jihad means to strive to one's utmost. It includes exertion and spirituality, self-purification and devotion. It refers to positive transformation through learning, wisdom and remembrance of God. The word jihad stands for all those meanings as a whole. Jihad may at times take the form of fighting, but only sometimes, under strict conditions, within rules and limits.In Islam, the benefit of an act must outweigh the harm or hardship it entails. More importantly, the verses in the Koran that are connected to jihad or fighting do not cancel out the verses that talk about forgiveness, benevolence or patience.But now I believe that there are no circumstances on earth where violent jihad is permissible, because it will lead to greater harm. But now the idea of jihad has been hijacked. It has been perverted to mean violent struggle wherever Muslims are undergoing difficulties, and turned into terrorism by fascistic Islamists like al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others. But I have come to understand that true jihad means striving to the utmost to strengthen and live those qualities which God loves: honesty, trustworthiness, compassion, benevolence, reliability, respect, truthfulness — human values that so many of us share.I was born in Bangladesh, but grew up mostly in England. And I went to school here. My father was an academic, and we were in the UK through his work.In 1971 we were in Bangladesh when everything changed. The War of Independence impacted upon us terribly, pitting family against family, neighbor against neighbor. And at the age of 12 I experienced war, destitution in my family, the deaths of 22 of my relatives in horrible ways, as well as the murder of my elder brother. I witnessed killing ... animals feeding on corpses in the streets, starvation all around me, wanton, horrific violence — senseless violence. I was a young man, teenager, fascinated by ideas. I wanted to learn, but I could not go to school for four years.After the War of Independence, my father was put in prison for two and a half years, and I used to visit him every week in prison, and homeschooled myself. My father was released in 1973 and he fled to England as a refugee, and we soon followed him. I was 17.So these experiences gave me a sharp awareness of the atrocities and injustices in the world. And I had a strong desire — a very keen, deep desire — to right wrongs and help the victims of oppression.While studying at college in the UK, I met others who showed me how I could channel that desire and help through my religion. And I was radicalized — enough to consider violence correct, even a virtue under certain circumstances.So I became involved in the jihad in Afghanistan. I wanted to protect the Muslim Afghan population against the Soviet army. And I thought that was jihad: my sacred duty, which would be rewarded by God.I became a preacher. I was one of the pioneers of violent jihad in the UK. I recruited, I raised funds, I trained. I confused true jihad with this perversion as presented by the fascist Islamists — these people who use the idea of jihad to justify their lust for power, authority and control on earth: a perversion perpetuated today by fascist Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, Islamic State and others.For a period of around 15 years, I fought for short periods of time in Kashmir and Burma, besides Afghanistan. Our aim was to remove the invaders, to bring relief to the oppressed victims and of course to establish an Islamic state, a caliphate for God's rule. And I did this openly. I didn't break any laws. I was proud and grateful to be British — I still am. And I bore no hostility against this, my country, nor enmity towards the non-Muslim citizens, and I still don't.During one battle in Afghanistan, some British men and I formed a special bond with a 15-year-old Afghani boy, Abdullah, an innocent, loving and lovable kid who was always eager to please. He was poor. And boys like him did menial tasks in the camp. And he seemed happy enough, but I couldn't help wonder — his parents must have missed him dearly. And they must have dreamt about a better future for him. A victim of circumstance caught up in a war, cruelly thrust upon him by the cruel circumstances of the time.One day I picked up this unexploded mortar shell in a trench, and I had it deposited in a makeshift mud hut lab. And I went out on a short, pointless skirmish — always pointless, And I came back a few hours later to discover he was dead. He had tried to recover explosives from that shell. It exploded, and he died a violent death, blown to bits by the very same device that had proved harmless to me. So I started to question. How did his death serve any purpose? Why did he die and I lived?I carried on. I fought in Kashmir. I also recruited for the Philippines, Bosnia and Chechnya. And the questions grew.Later in Burma, I came across Rohingya fighters, who were barely teenagers, born and brought up in the jungle, carrying machine guns and grenade launchers. I met two 13-year-olds with soft manners and gentle voices. Looking at me, they begged me to take them away to England. They simply wanted to go to school — that was their dream. My family — my children of the same age — were living at home in the UK, going to school, living a safe life. And I couldn't help wonder how much these young boys must have spoken to one another about their dreams for such a life. Victims of circumstances: these two young boys, sleeping rough on the ground, looking up at the stars, cynically exploited by their leaders for their personal lust for glory and power.I soon witnessed boys like them killing one another in conflicts between rival groups. And it was the same everywhere ... Afghanistan, Kashmir, Burma, Philippines, Chechnya; petty warlords got the young and vulnerable to kill one another in the name of jihad. Muslims against Muslims. Not protecting anyone against invaders or occupiers; not bringing relief to the oppressed. Children being used, cynically exploited; people dying in conflicts which I was supporting in the name of jihad. And it still carries on today.Realizing that the violent jihad I had engaged in abroad was so different — such a chasm between what I had experienced and what I thought was sacred duty — I had to reflect on my activities here in the UK. I had to consider my preaching, recruiting, fund-raising, training, but most importantly, radicalizing — sending young people to fight and die as I was doing — all totally wrong.So I got involved in violent jihad in the mid '80s, starting with Afghanistan. And by the time I finished it was in the year 2000. I was completely immersed in it. All around me people supported, applauded, even celebrated what we were doing in their name. But by the time I learned to get out, completely disillusioned in the year 2000, 15 years had passed.So what goes wrong? We were so busy talking about virtue, and we were blinded by a cause. And we did not give ourselves a chance to develop a virtuous character. We told ourselves we were fighting for the oppressed, but these were unwinnable wars. We became the very instrument through which more deaths occurred, complicit in causing further misery for the selfish benefit of the cruel few.So over time, a very long time, I opened my eyes. I began to dare to face the truth, to think, to face the hard questions. I got in touch with my soul.What have I learned? That people who engage in violent jihadism, that people who are drawn to these types of extremisms, are not that different to everyone else. But I believe such people can change. They can regain their hearts and restore them by filling them with human values that heal.When we ignore the realities, we discover that we accept what we are told without critical reflection. And we ignore the gifts and advantages that many of us would cherish even for a single moment in their lives. I engaged in actions I thought were correct. But now I began to question how I knew what I knew. I endlessly told others to accept the truth, but I failed to give doubt its rightful place.This conviction that people can change is rooted in my experience, my own journey. Through wide reading, reflecting, contemplation, self-knowledge, I discovered, I realized that Islamists' world of us and them is false and unjust. Through considering the uncertainties in all that we had asserted, to the inviolable truths, incontestable truths, I developed a more nuanced understanding.I realized that in a world crowded with variation and contradiction, foolish preachers, only foolish preachers like I used to be, see no paradox in the myths and fictions they use to assert authenticity. So I understood the vital importance of self-knowledge, political awareness and the necessity for a deep and wide understanding of our commitments and our actions, how they affect others.So my plea today to everyone, especially those who sincerely believe in Islamist jihadism ... refuse dogmatic authority; let go of anger, hatred and violence; learn to right wrongs without even attempting to justify cruel, unjust and futile behavior. Instead create a few beautiful and useful things that outlive us. Approach the world, life, with love. Learn to develop or cultivate your hearts to see goodness, beauty and truth in others and in the world. That way we do matter more to ourselves ... to each other, to our communities and, for me, to God. This is jihad — my true jihad.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/manwar_ali_inside_the_mind_of_a_former_radical_jihadist
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"The great philosopher Aristotle said if something doesn't exist, there's no word for it, and if there's no word for something, that something doesn't exist. So when we talk about elections, we in established democracies, we know what we're talking about. We've got the words. We have the vocabulary. We know what a polling station is. We know what a ballot paper is. But what about countries where democracy doesn't exist, countries where there are no words to describe the concepts that underpin a democratic society?I work in the field of electoral assistance, so that's to say we assist emerging democracies to organize what is often their first elections. When people ask me what I do, quite often I get this answer. ""Oh, so you're one of these people who goes around the world imposing Western democracy on countries that can't handle it."" Well, the United Nations does not impose anything on anybody. It really doesn't, and also, what we do is firmly anchored in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21, that says that everybody should have the right to choose who governs them.So that's the basis of the work. I specialize in public outreach. What does that mean? Another jargon. It actually means designing information campaigns so that candidates and voters who have never had the opportunity to participate or to vote understand where, when, how to register; where, when, how to vote; why, why it is important to take part. So I'll probably devise a specific campaign to reach out to women to make sure that they can take part, that they can be part of the process. Young people as well. All sorts of people. Handicapped people. We try to reach everybody.And it's not always easy, because very often in this work, I've noticed now over the years that I've been doing it that words are lacking, and so what do you do?Afghanistan. It's a country with high levels of illiteracy, and the thing about that was, it was in 2005, and we organized two elections on the same day. The reason was because the logistics are so incredibly difficult, it seemed to be more efficient to do that. It was, but on the other hand, explaining two elections instead of one was even more complicated. So we used a lot of images, and when it came to the actual ballot, we had problems, because so many people wanted to take part, we had 300 candidates for 52 seats in the Wolesi Jirga, which is the parliamentary elections. And for the Provincial Council, we had even more candidates. We had 330 for 54 seats. So talking about ballot design, this is what the ballot looked like. It's the size of a newspaper. This was the Wolesi Jirga ballot — (Laughter) Yeah, and — this was the Provincial Council ballot. Even more. So you see, we did use a lot of symbols and things like that.And we had other problems in Southern Sudan. Southern Sudan was a very different story. We had so many people who had never, of course, voted, but we had extremely, extremely high levels of illiteracy, very, very poor infrastructure. For example — I mean, it's a country the size of Texas, more or less. We had seven kilometers of paved roads, seven kilometers in the whole country, and that includes the tarmac where we landed the planes in Juba Airport. So transporting electoral materials, etc., is exceedingly difficult. People had no idea about what a box looked like. It was very complicated, so using verbal communication was obviously the way to go, but there were 132 languages. So that was extremely challenging.Then I arrived in Tunisia in 2011. It was the Arab Spring. A huge amount of hope was generated by that enormous movement that was going on in the region. There was Libya, there was Egypt, there was Yemen. It was an enormous, enormous historical moment. And I was sitting with the election commission, and we were talking about various aspects of the election, and I was hearing them using words that I hadn't actually heard before, and I'd worked with Iraqis, I'd worked with Jordanians, Egyptians, and suddenly they were using these words, and I just thought, ""This is strange."" And what really gave rise to it was this word ""observer."" We were discussing election observers, and the election commissioner was talking about ""mulahiz"" in Arabic. This means ""to notice"" in a passive sort of sense, as in, ""I noticed he was wearing a light blue shirt."" Did I go and check whether the shirt was light blue or not? That is the role of an election observer. It's very active, it's governed by all kinds of treaties, and it has got that control function in it. And then I got wind of the fact that in Egypt, they were using this term ""mutabi’,"" which means ""to follow."" So we were now having followers of an election. So that's not quite right either, because there is a term that's already accepted and in use, which was the word ""muraqib"" which means ""a controller."" It's got that notion of control. So I thought, three words for one concept. This is not good. And with our colleagues, we thought perhaps it's our role to actually help make sure that the words are understood and actually create a work of reference that could be used across the Arab region.And that's what we did. So together with these colleagues, we launched the ""Arabic Lexicon of Electoral Terminology,"" and we worked in eight different countries. It meant actually defining 481 terms which formed the basis of everything you need to know if you're going to organize a democratic election. And we defined these terms, and we worked with the Arab colleagues and came to an agreement about what would be the appropriate word to use in Arabic. Because the Arabic language is very rich, and that's part of the problem. But there are 22 countries that speak Arabic, and they use modern standard Arabic, which is the Arabic that is used across the whole region in newspapers and broadcasts, but of course, then from one country to the next in day to day language and use it varies — dialect, colloquialisms, etc. So that was another added layer of complication. So in one sense you had the problem that language wasn't fully ripe, if you like, neologisms were coming up, new expressions.And so we defined all these terms, and then we had eight correspondents in the region. We submitted the draft to them, they responded back to us. ""Yes, we understand the definition. We agree with it, but this is what we say in our country."" Because we were not going to harmonize or force harmonization. We were trying to facilitate understanding among people. So in yellow, you see the different expressions in use in the various countries.So this, I'm happy to say, it took three years to produce this because we also finalized the draft and took it actually into the field, sat with the election commissions in all these different countries, debated and defined and refined the draft, and finally published it in November 2014 in Cairo. And it's gone a long way. We published 10,000 copies. To date, there's about 3,000 downloads off the internet in PDF form. I heard just recently from a colleague that they've taken it up in Somalia. They're going to produce a version of this in Somalia, because there's nothing in Somalia at all. So that's very good to know. And this newly formed Arab Organization for Electoral Management Bodies, which is trying to professionalize how elections are run in the region, they're using it as well. And the Arab League have now built up a pan-Arab observation unit, and they're using it. So that's all really good.However, this work of reference is quite high-pitched. It's complex, and a lot of the terms are quite technical, so the average person probably doesn't need to know at least a third of it. But the people of the Middle East have been deprived of any form of what we know as civic education. It's part of our curriculum at school. It doesn't really exist in that part of the world, and I feel it's really the right of everybody to know how these things work. And it's a good thing to think about producing a work of reference for the average person, and bearing in mind that now we have a basis to work with, but also we have technology, so we can reach out using telephone apps, video, animation. There's all sorts of tools that can be used now to communicate these ideas to people for the first time in their own language.We hear a lot of misery about the Middle East. We hear the chaos of war. We hear terrorism. We hear about sectarianism and all this horrible negative news that comes to us all the time. What we're not hearing is what are the people, the everyday people, thinking? What are they aspiring to? Let's give them the means, let's give them the words. The silent majority is silent because they don't have the words. The silent majority needs to know. It is time to provide people with the knowledge tools that they can inform themselves with.The silent majority does not need to be silent. Let's help them have a voice.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/philippa_neave_the_unexpected_challenges_of_a_country_s_first_election
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"Some people are obsessed by French wines. Others love playing golf or devouring literature. One of my greatest pleasures in life is, I have to admit, a bit special. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy watching cities from the sky, from an airplane window.Some cities are calmly industrious, like Dusseldorf or Louisville. Others project an energy that they can hardly contain, like New York or Hong Kong. And then you have Paris or Istanbul, and their patina full of history.I see cities as living beings. And when I discover them from far above, I like to find those main streets and highways that structure their space. Especially at night, when commuters make these arteries look dramatically red and golden: the city's vascular system performing its vital function right before your eyes. But when I'm sitting in my car after an hour and a half of commute every day, that reality looks very different.(Laughter)Nothing — not public radio, no podcast —(Laughter) Not even mindfulness meditation makes this time worth living.(Laughter)Isn't it absurd that we created cars that can reach 130 miles per hour and we now drive them at the same speed as 19th-century horse carriages?(Laughter)In the US alone, we spent 29.6 billion hours commuting in 2014. With that amount of time, ancient Egyptians could have built 26 Pyramids of Giza.(Laughter)We do that in one year. A monumental waste of time, energy and human potential.For decades, our remedy for congestion was simple: build new roads or enlarge existing ones. And it worked. It worked admirably for Paris, when the city tore down hundreds of historical buildings to create 85 miles of transportation-friendly boulevards. And it still works today in fast-growing emerging cities. But in more established urban centers, significant network expansions are almost impossible: habitat is just too dense, real estate, too expensive and public finances, too fragile. Our city's vascular system is getting clogged, it's getting sick, and we should pay attention.Our current way of thinking is not working. For our transportation to flow, we need a new source of inspiration.So after 16 years working in transportation, my ""aha moment"" happened when speaking with a biotech customer. She was telling me how her treatment was leveraging specific properties of our vascular system. ""Wow,"" I thought, ""Our vascular system — all the veins and arteries in our body making miracles of logistics every day."" This is the moment I realized that biology has been in the transportation business for billions of years. It has been testing countless solutions to move nutrients, gases and proteins. It really is the world's most sophisticated transportation laboratory.So, what if the solution to our traffic challenges was inside us? I wanted to know: Why is it that blood flows in our veins most of our lives, when our big cities get clogged on a daily basis? And the reality is that you're looking at two very different networks. I don't know if you realize, but each of us has 60,000 miles of blood vessels in our bodies — 60,000 miles. That's two-and-a-half times the Earth's circumference, inside you. What it means is that blood vessels are everywhere inside us, not just under the surface of our skin.But if you look at our cities, yes, we have some underground subway systems and some tunnels and bridges, and also some helicopters in the sky. But the vast majority of our traffic is focused on the ground, on the surface. So in other words, while our vascular system uses the three dimensions inside us, our urban transportation is mostly two-dimensional. And so what we need is to embrace that verticality. If our surface grid is saturated, well, let's elevate our traffic.This Chinese concept of a bus that can straddle traffic jams — that was an eye-opener on new ways to think about space and movement inside our cities. And we can go higher, and suspend our transportation like we did with our electrical grid. Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi are talking about testing these futuristic networks of suspended magnetic pods. And we can keep climbing, and fly. The fact that a company like Airbus is now seriously working on flying urban taxis is telling us something. Flying cars are finally moving from science-fiction déjà vu to attractive business-case territory. And that's an exciting moment.So building this 3-D transportation network is one of the ways we can mitigate and solve traffic jams. But it's not the only one. We have to question other fundamental choices that we made, like the vehicles we use. Just imagine a very familiar scene: You've been driving for 42 minutes. The two kids behind you are getting restless. And you're late. Do you see that slow car in front of you? Always comes when you're late, right?(Laughter)That driver is looking for parking. There is no parking spot available in the area, but how would he know? It is estimated that up to 30 percent of urban traffic is generated by drivers looking for parking. Do you see the 100 cars around you? Eighty-five of them only have one passenger. Those 85 drivers could all fit in one Londonian red bus. So the question is: Why are we wasting so much space if it is what we need the most? Why are we doing this to ourselves?Biology would never do this. Space inside our arteries is fully utilized. At every heartbeat, a higher blood pressure literally compacts millions of red blood cells into massive trains of oxygen that quickly flow throughout our body. And the tiny space inside our red blood cells is not wasted, either. In healthy conditions, more than 95 percent of their oxygen capacity is utilized. Can you imagine if the vehicles we used in our cities were 95 percent full, all the additional space you would have to walk, to bike and to enjoy our cities?The reason blood is so incredibly efficient is that our red blood cells are not dedicated to specific organs or tissues; otherwise, we would probably have traffic jams in our veins. No, they're shared. They're shared by all the cells of our body. And because our network is so extensive, each one of our 37 trillion cells gets its own deliveries of oxygen precisely when it needs them.Blood is both a collective and individual form of transportation. But for our cities, we've been stuck. We've been stuck in an endless debate between creating a car-centric society or extensive mass-transit systems. I think we should transcend this. I think we can create vehicles that combine the convenience of cars and the efficiencies of trains and buses. Just imagine. You're comfortably sitting in a fast and smooth urban train, along with 1,200 passengers. The problem with urban trains is that sometimes you have to stop five, ten, fifteen times before your final destination.What if in this train you didn't have to stop? In this train, wagons can detach dynamically while you're moving and become express, driverless buses that move on a secondary road network. And so without a single stop, nor a lengthy transfer, you are now sitting in a bus that is headed toward your suburb. And when you get close, the section you're sitting in detaches and self-drives you right to your doorstep. It is collective and individual at the same time. This could be one of the shared, modular, driverless vehicles of tomorrow.Now ... as if walking in a city buzzing with drones, flying taxis, modular buses and suspended magnetic pods was not exotic enough, I think there is another force in action that will make urban traffic mesmerizing. If you think about it, the current generation of driverless cars is just trying to earn its way into a traffic grid made by and for humans. They're trying to learn traffic rules, which is relatively simple, and coping with human unpredictability, which is more challenging.But what would happen when whole cities become driverless? Would we need traffic lights? Would we need lanes? How about speed limits? Red blood cells are not flowing in lanes. They never stop at red lights. In the first driverless cities, you would have no red lights and no lanes. And when all the cars are driverless and connected, everything is predictable and reaction time, minimum. They can drive much faster and can take any rational initiative that can speed them up or the cars around them. So instead of rigid traffic rules, flow will be regulated by a mesh of dynamic and constantly self-improving algorithms. The result: a strange traffic that mixes the fast and smooth rigor of German autobahns and the creative vitality of the intersections of Mumbai.(Laughter)Traffic will be functionally exuberant. It will be liquid like our blood. And by a strange paradox, the more robotized our traffic grid will be, the more organic and alive its movement will feel.So yes, biology has all the attributes of a transportation genius today. But this process has taken billions of years, and went through all sorts of iterations and mutations. We can't wait billions of years to evolve our transportation system. We now have the dreams, the concepts and the technology to create 3-D transportation networks, invent new vehicles and change the flow in our cities.Let's do it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_world_could_look_like
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"When you come to TEDx, you always think about technology, the world changing, becoming more innovative. You think about the driverless. Everyone's talking about driverless cars these days, and I love the concept of a driverless car, but when I go in one, you know, I want it really slow, I want access to the steering wheel and the brake, just in case. I don't know about you, but I am not ready for a driverless bus. I am not ready for a driverless airplane.How about a driverless world? And I ask you that because we are increasingly in one.It's not supposed to be that way. We're number one, the United States is large and in charge. Americanization and globalization for the last several generations have basically been the same thing. Right? Whether it's the World Trade Organization or it's the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods Accord on currency, these were American institutions, our values, our friends, our allies, our money, our standards. That was the way the world worked.So it's sort of interesting, if you want to look at how the US looks, here it is. This is our view of how the world is run. President Obama has got the red carpet, he goes down Air Force One, and it feels pretty good, it feels pretty comfortable. Well, I don't know how many of you saw the China trip last week and the G20. Oh my God. Right? This is how we landed for the most important meeting of the world's leaders in China. The National Security Advisor was actually spewing expletives on the tarmac — no red carpet, kind of left out the bottom of the plane along with all the media and everybody else.Later on in the G20, well, there's Obama.(Laughter)Hi, George. Hi, Norman. They look like they're about to get into a cage match, right? And they did. It was 90 minutes long, and they talked about Syria. That's what Putin wanted to talk about. He's increasingly calling the shots. He's the one willing to do stuff there. There's not a lot of mutual like or trust, but it's not as if the Americans are telling him what to do.How about when the whole 20 are getting together? Surely, when the leaders are all onstage, then the Americans are pulling their weight. Uh-oh.(Laughter)Xi Jinping seems fine. Angela Merkel has — she always does — that look, she always does that. But Putin is telling Turkish president Erdogan what to do, and Obama is like, what's going on over there?You see. And the problem is it's not a G20, the problem is it's a G-Zero world that we live in, a world order where there is no single country or alliance that can meet the challenges of global leadership. The G20 doesn't work, the G7, all of our friends, that's history. So globalization is continuing. Goods and services and people and capital are moving across borders faster and faster than ever before, but Americanization is not.So if I've convinced you of that, I want to do two things with the rest of this talk. I want to talk about the implications of that for the whole world. I'll go around it. And then I want to talk about what we think right here in the United States and in New York.So why? What are the implications. Why are we here? Well, we're here because the United States, we spent two trillion dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were failed. We don't want to do that anymore. We have large numbers of middle and working classes that feel like they've not benefited from promises of globalization, so they don't want to see it particularly. And we have an energy revolution where we don't need OPEC or the Middle East the way we used to. We produce all that right here in the United States. So the Americans don't want to be the global sheriff for security or the architect of global trade. The Americans don't want to even be the cheerleader of global values.Well, then you look to Europe, and the most important alliance in the world has been the transatlantic relationship. But it is now weaker than it has been at any point since World War II, all of the crises, the Brexit conversations, the hedging going on between the French and the Russians, or the Germans and the Turks, or the Brits and the Chinese.China does want to do more leadership. They do, but only in the economic sphere, and they want their own values, standards, currency, in competition with that of the US. The Russians want to do more leadership. You see that in Ukraine, in the Baltic states, in the Middle East, but not with the Americans. They want their own preferences and order. That's why we are where we are.So what happens going forward? Let's start easy, with the Middle East.(Laughter)You know, I left a little out, but you get the general idea. Look, there are three reasons why the Middle East has had stability such as it is. Right? One is because there was a willingness to provide some level of military security by the US and allies. Number two, it was easy to take a lot of cheap money out of the ground because oil was expensive. And number three was no matter how bad the leaders were, the populations were relatively quiescent. They didn't have the ability, and many didn't have the will to really rise up against.Well, I can tell you, in a G-Zero world, all three of those things are increasingly not true, and so failed states, terrorism, refugees and the rest. Does the entire Middle East fall apart? No, the Kurds will do better, and Iraq, Israel, Iran over time. But generally speaking, it's not a good look.OK, how about this guy? He's playing a poor hand very well. There's no question he's hitting above his weight. But long term — I didn't mean that. But long term, long term, if you think that the Russians were antagonized by the US and Europe expanding NATO right up to their borders when we said they weren't going to, and the EU encroaching them, just wait until the Chinese put hundreds of billions of dollars in every country around Russia they thought they had influence in. The Chinese are going to dominate it. The Russians are picking up the crumbs. In a G-Zero world, this is going to be a very tense 10 years for Mr. Putin.It's not all bad. Right? Asia actually looks a lot better. There are real leaders across Asia, they have a lot of political stability. They're there for a while. Mr. Modi in India, Mr. Abe, who is probably about to get a third term written in in the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, of course Xi Jinping who is consolidating enormous power, the most powerful leader in China since Mao. Those are the three most important economies in Asia. Now look, there are problems in Asia. We see the sparring over the South China Sea. We see that Kim Jong Un, just in the last couple of days, tested yet another nuclear weapon. But the leaders in Asia do not feel the need to wave the flag, to go xenophobic, to actually allow escalation of the geopolitical and cross-border tensions. They want to focus on long-term economic stability and growth. And that's what they're actually doing.Let's turn to Europe. Europe does look a little scared in this environment. So much of what is happening in the Middle East is washing up quite literally onto European shores. You see Brexit and you see the concerns of populism across all of the European states.Let me tell you that over the long term, in a G-Zero world, European expansion will be seen to have gone too far. Europe went right up to Russia, went right down to the Middle East, and if the world were truly becoming more flat and more Americanized, that would be less of a problem, but in a G-Zero world, those countries nearest Russia and nearest the Middle East actually have different economic capabilities, different social stability and different political preferences and systems than core Europe. So Europe was able to truly expand under the G7, but under the G-Zero, Europe will get smaller. Core Europe around Germany and France and others will still work, be functional, stable, wealthy, integrated. But the periphery, countries like Greece and Turkey and others, will not look that good at all.Latin America, a lot of populism, made the economies not go so well. They had been more opposed to the United States for decades. Increasingly, they're coming back. We see that in Argentina. We see it with the openness in Cuba. We will see it in Venezuela when Maduro falls. We will see it in Brazil after the impeachment and when we finally see a new legitimate president elected there. The only place you see that is moving in another direction is the unpopularity of Mexican president Peña Nieto. There you could actually see a slip away from the United States over the coming years. The US election matters a lot on that one, too.(Laughter)Africa, right? A lot of people have said it's going to be Africa's decade, finally. In a G-Zero world, it is absolutely an amazing time for a few African countries, those governed well with a lot of urbanization, a lot of smart people, women really getting into the workforce, entrepreneurship taking off. But for most of the countries in Africa, it's going to be a lot more dicey: extreme climate conditions, radicalism both from Islam and also Christianity, very poor governance, borders you can't defend, lots of forced migration. Those countries can fall off the map. So you're really going to see an extreme segregation going on between the winners and the losers across Africa.Finally, back to the United States. What do I think about us? Because there are a lot of upset people, not here at TEDx, I know, but in the United States, my God, after 15 months of campaigning, we should be upset. I understand that. But a lot of people are upset because they say, ""Washington's broken, we don't trust the establishment, we hate the media."" Heck, even globalists like me are taking it on the chin.Look, I do think we have to recognize, my fellow campers, that when you are being chased by the bear, in the global context, you need not outrun the bear, you need to only outrun your fellow campers.(Laughter)Now, I just told you about our fellow campers. Right? And from that perspective, we look OK. A lot of people in that context say, ""Let's go dollar. Let's go New York real estate. Let's send our kids to American universities."" You know, our neighbors are awesome: Canada, Mexico and two big bodies of water. You know how much Turkey would love to have neighbors like that? Those are awesome neighbors.Terrorism is a problem in the United States. God knows we know it here in New York. But it's a much bigger problem in Europe than the US. It's a much bigger problem in the Middle East than it is in Europe. These are factors of large magnitude. We just accepted 10,000 Syrian refugees, and we're complaining bitterly about it. You know why? Because they can't swim here. Right? I mean, the Turks would love to have only 10,000 Syrian refugees. The Jordanians, the Germans, the Brits. Right? That's not the situation. That's the reality of the United States.Now, that sounds pretty good. Here's the challenge. In a G-Zero world, the way you lead is by example. If we know we don't want to be the global cop anymore, if we know we're not going to be the architect of global trade, we're not going to be the cheerleader of global values, we're not going to do it the way we used to, the 21st century is changing, we need to lead by example — be so compelling that all these other people are going to still say, it's not just they're faster campers. Even when the bear is not chasing us, this is a good place to be. We want to emulate them.The election process this year is not proving a good option for leading by example. Hillary Clinton says it's going to be like the '90s. We can still be that cheerleader on values. We can still be the architect of global trade. We can still be the global sheriff. And Donald Trump wants to bring us back to the '30s. He's saying, ""Our way or the highway. You don't like it, lump it."" Right? Neither are recognizing a fundamental truth of the G-Zero, which is that even though the US is not in decline, it is getting objectively harder for the Americans to impose their will, even have great influence, on the global order.Are we prepared to truly lead by example? What would we have to do to fix this after November, after the next president comes in? Well, either we have to have another crisis that forces us to respond. A depression would do that. Another global financial crisis could do this. God forbid, another 9/11 could do that. Or, absent crisis, we need to see that the hollowing out, the inequality, the challenges that are growing and growing in the United States, are themselves urgent enough to force our leaders to change, and that we have those voices. Through our cell phones, individually, we have those voices to compel them to change.There is, of course, a third choice, perhaps the most likely one, which is that we do neither of those things, and in four years time you invite me back, and I will give this speech yet again.Thank you very, very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ian_bremmer_how_the_us_should_use_its_superpower_status
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"I'm a painter. I make large-scale figurative paintings, which means I paint people like this. But I'm here tonight to tell you about something personal that changed my work and my perspective. It's something we all go through, and my hope is that my experience may be helpful to somebody.To give you some background on me, I grew up the youngest of eight. Yes, eight kids in my family. I have six older brothers and a sister. To give you a sense of what that's like, when my family went on vacation, we had a bus.(Laughter)My supermom would drive us all over town to our various after-school activities — not in the bus. We had a regular car, too. She would take me to art classes, and not just one or two. She took me to every available art class from when I was eight to 16, because that's all I wanted to do. She even took a class with me in New York City.Now, being the youngest of eight, I learned a few survival skills. Rule number one: don't let your big brother see you do anything stupid. So I learned to be quiet and neat and careful to follow the rules and stay in line.But painting was where I made the rules. That was my private world. By 14, I knew I really wanted to be an artist. My big plan was to be a waitress to support my painting. So I continued honing my skills. I went to graduate school and I got an MFA, and at my first solo show, my brother asked me, ""What do all these red dots mean next to the paintings?"" Nobody was more surprised than me. The red dots meant that the paintings were sold and that I'd be able to pay my rent with painting. Now, my apartment had four electrical outlets, and I couldn't use a microwave and a toaster at the same time, but still, I could pay my rent. So I was very happy.Here's a painting from back around that time. I needed it to be as realistic as possible. It had to be specific and believable. This was the place where I was isolated and in total control.Since then, I've made a career of painting people in water. Bathtubs and showers were the perfect enclosed environment. It was intimate and private, and water was this complicated challenge that kept me busy for a decade. I made about 200 of these paintings, some of them six to eight feet, like this one. For this painting, I mixed flour in with the bathwater to make it cloudy and I floated cooking oil on the surface and stuck a girl in it, and when I lit it up, it was so beautiful I couldn't wait to paint it. I was driven by this kind of impulsive curiosity, always looking for something new to add: vinyl, steam, glass. I once put all this Vaseline in my head and hair just to see what that would look like. Don't do that.(Laughter)So it was going well. I was finding my way. I was eager and motivated and surrounded by artists, always going to openings and events. I was having some success and recognition and I moved into an apartment with more than four outlets. My mom and I would stay up very late talking about our latest ideas and inspiring each other. She made beautiful pottery.I have a friend named Bo who made this painting of his wife and I dancing by the ocean, and he called it ""The Light Years."" I asked him what that meant, and he said, ""Well, that's when you've stepped into adulthood, you're no longer a child, but you're not yet weighed down by the responsibilities of life."" That was it. It was the light years.On October 8, 2011, the light years came to an end. My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had spread to her bones, and it was in her brain. When she told me this, I fell to my knees. I totally lost it. And when I got myself together and I looked at her, I realized, this isn't about me. This is about figuring out how to help her. My father is a doctor, and so we had a great advantage having him in charge, and he did a beautiful job taking care of her. But I, too, wanted to do everything I could to help, so I wanted to try everything. We all did. I researched alternative medicines, diets, juicing, acupuncture. Finally, I asked her, ""Is this what you want me to do?"" And she said, ""No."" She said, ""Pace yourself. I'm going to need you later.""She knew what was happening, and she knew what the doctors and the experts and the internet didn't know: how she wanted to go through this. I just needed to ask her. I realized that if I tried to fix it, I would miss it. So I just started to be with her, whatever that meant and whatever situation came up, just really listen to her. If before I was resisting, then now I was surrendering, giving up trying to control the uncontrollable and just being there in it with her. Time slowed down, and the date was irrelevant.We developed a routine. Early each morning I would crawl into bed with her and sleep with her. My brother would come for breakfast and we'd be so glad to hear his car coming up the driveway. So I'd help her up and take both her hands and help her walk to the kitchen. She had this huge mug she made she loved to drink her coffee out of, and she loved Irish soda bread for breakfast. Afterwards was the shower, and she loved this part. She loved the warm water, so I made this as indulgent as I could, like a spa. My sister would help sometimes. We had warm towels and slippers ready immediately so she never got cold for a second. I'd blow-dry her hair. My brothers would come in the evenings and bring their kids, and that was the highlight of her day.Over time, we started to use a wheelchair, and she didn't want to eat so much, and she used the tiniest little teacup we could find to drink her coffee. I couldn't support her myself anymore, so we hired an aide to help me with the showers.These simple daily activities became our sacred ritual, and we repeated them day after day as the cancer grew. It was humbling and painful and exactly where I wanted to be. We called this time ""the beautiful awful.""She died on October 26, 2012. It was a year and three weeks after her diagnosis. She was gone. My brothers, sister, and father and I all came together in this supportive and attentive way. It was as though our whole family dynamic and all our established roles vanished and we were just all together in this unknown, feeling the same thing and taking care of each other. I'm so grateful for them.As someone who spends most of my time alone in a studio working, I had no idea that this kind of connection could be so important, so healing. This was the most important thing. It was what I always wanted.So after the funeral, it was time for me to go back to my studio. So I packed up my car and I drove back to Brooklyn, and painting is what I've always done, so that's what I did. And here's what happened. It's like a release of everything that was unraveling in me. That safe, very, very carefully rendered safe place that I created in all my other paintings, it was a myth. It didn't work. And I was afraid, because I didn't want to paint anymore.So I went into the woods. I thought, I'll try that, going outside. I got my paints, and I wasn't a landscape painter, but I wasn't really much of any kind of painter at all, so I had no attachment, no expectation, which allowed me to be reckless and free. I actually left one of these wet paintings outside overnight next to a light in the woods. By the morning it was lacquered with bugs. But I didn't care. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. I took all these paintings back to my studio, and scraped them, and carved into them, and poured paint thinner on them, put more paint on top, drew on them. I had no plan, but I was watching what was happening.This is the one with all the bugs in it. I wasn't trying to represent a real space. It was the chaos and the imperfections that were fascinating me, and something started to happen. I got curious again. This is another one from the woods.There was a caveat now, though. I couldn't be controlling the paint like I used to. It had to be about implying and suggesting, not explaining or describing. And that imperfect, chaotic, turbulent surface is what told the story. I started to be as curious as I was when I was a student.So the next thing was I wanted to put figures in these paintings, people, and I loved this new environment, so I wanted to have both people and this atmosphere. When the idea hit me of how to do this, I got kind of nauseous and dizzy, which is really just adrenaline, probably, but for me it's a really good sign.And so now I want to show you what I've been working on. It's something I haven't shown yet, and it's like a preview, I guess, of my upcoming show, what I have so far. Expansive space instead of the isolated bathtub. I'm going outside instead of inside. Loosening control, savoring the imperfections, allowing the — allowing the imperfections. And in that imperfection, you can find a vulnerability. I could feel my deepest intention, what matters most to me, that human connection that can happen in a space where there's no resisting or controlling. I want to make paintings about that.So here's what I learned. We're all going to have big losses in our lives, maybe a job or a career, relationships, love, our youth. We're going to lose our health, people we love. These kinds of losses are out of our control. They're unpredictable, and they bring us to our knees. And so I say, let them. Fall to your knees. Be humbled. Let go of trying to change it or even wanting it to be different. It just is. And then there's space, and in that space feel your vulnerability, what matters most to you, your deepest intention. And be curious to connect to what and who is really here, awake and alive. It's what we all want.Let's take the opportunity to find something beautiful in the unknown, in the unpredictable, and even in the awful.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alyssa_monks_how_loss_helped_one_artist_find_beauty_in_imperfection
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"I want to start by doing an experiment. I'm going to play three videos of a rainy day. But I've replaced the audio of one of the videos, and instead of the sound of rain, I've added the sound of bacon frying. So I want you think carefully which one the clip with the bacon is.(Rain falls)(Rain falls)(Rain falls)All right. Actually, I lied. They're all bacon.(Bacon sizzles)(Applause)My point here isn't really to make you hungry every time you see a rainy scene, but it's to show that our brains are conditioned to embrace the lies. We're not looking for accuracy.So on the subject of deception, I wanted to quote one of my favorite authors. In ""The Decay of Lying,"" Oscar Wilde establishes the idea that all bad art comes from copying nature and being realistic; and all great art comes from lying and deceiving, and telling beautiful, untrue things. So when you're watching a movie and a phone rings, it's not actually ringing. It's been added later in postproduction in a studio. All of the sounds you hear are fake. Everything, apart from the dialogue, is fake. When you watch a movie and you see a bird flapping its wings —(Wings flap)They haven't really recorded the bird. It sounds a lot more realistic if you record a sheet or shaking kitchen gloves.(Flaps)The burning of a cigarette up close —(Cigarette burns)It actually sounds a lot more authentic if you take a small Saran Wrap ball and release it.(A Saran Warp ball being released)Punches?(Punch)Oops, let me play that again.(Punch)That's often done by sticking a knife in vegetables, usually cabbage.(Cabbage stabbed with a knife)The next one — it's breaking bones.(Bones break)Well, no one was really harmed. It's actually ... breaking celery or frozen lettuce.(Breaking frozen lettuce or celery)(Laughter)Making the right sounds is not always as easy as a trip to the supermarket and going to the vegetable section. But it's often a lot more complicated than that. So let's reverse-engineer together the creation of a sound effect.One of my favorite stories comes from Frank Serafine. He's a contributor to our library, and a great sound designer for ""Tron"" and ""Star Trek"" and others. He was part of the Paramount team that won the Oscar for best sound for ""The Hunt for Red October."" In this Cold War classic, in the '90s, they were asked to produce the sound of the propeller of the submarine. So they had a small problem: they couldn't really find a submarine in West Hollywood. So basically, what they did is, they went to a friend's swimming pool, and Frank performed a cannonball, or bomba. They placed an underwater mic and an overhead mic outside the swimming pool. So here's what the underwater mic sounds like.(Underwater plunge)Adding the overhead mic, it sounded a bit like this:(Water splashes)So now they took the sound and pitched it one octave down, sort of like slowing down a record.(Water splashes at lower octave) And then they removed a lot of the high frequencies.(Water splashes) And pitched it down another octave.(Water splashes at lower octave) And then they added a little bit of the splash from the overhead microphone.(Water splashes) And by looping and repeating that sound, they got this:(Propeller churns)So, creativity and technology put together in order to create the illusion that we're inside the submarine.But once you've created your sounds and you've synced them to the image, you want those sounds to live in the world of the story. And one the best ways to do that is to add reverb. So this is the first audio tool I want to talk about. Reverberation, or reverb, is the persistence of the sound after the original sound has ended. So it's sort of like the — all the reflections from the materials, the objects and the walls around the sound.Take, for example, the sound of a gunshot. The original sound is less than half a second long.(Gunshot) By adding reverb, we can make it sound like it was recorded inside a bathroom.(Gunshot reverbs in bathroom) Or like it was recorded inside a chapel or a church.(Gunshot reverbs church)Or in a canyon.(Gunshot reverbs in canyon)So reverb gives us a lot of information about the space between the listener and the original sound source. If the sound is the taste, then reverb is sort of like the smell of the sound.But reverb can do a lot more. Listening to a sound with a lot less reverberation than the on-screen action is going to immediately signify to us that we're listening to a commentator, to an objective narrator that's not participating in the on-screen action. Also, emotionally intimate moments in cinema are often heard with zero reverb, because that's how it would sound if someone was speaking inside our ear.On the completely other side, adding a lot of reverb to a voice is going to make us think that we're listening to a flashback, or perhaps that we're inside the head of a character or that we're listening to the voice of God. Or, even more powerful in film, Morgan Freeman.(Laughter)So —(Applause)But what are some other tools or hacks that sound designers use? Well, here's a really big one. It's silence. A few moments of silence is going to make us pay attention. And in the Western world, we're not really used to verbal silences. They're considered awkward or rude. So silence preceding verbal communication can create a lot of tension. But imagine a really big Hollywood movie, where it's full of explosions and automatic guns. Loud stops being loud anymore, after a while. So in a yin-yang way, silence needs loudness and loudness needs silence for either of them to have any effect.But what does silence mean? Well, it depends how it's used in each film. Silence can place us inside the head of a character or provoke thought. We often relate silences with ... contemplation, meditation, being deep in thought. But apart from having one meaning, silence becomes a blank canvas upon which the viewer is invited to the paint their own thoughts.But I want to make it clear: there is no such thing as silence. And I know this sounds like the most pretentious TED Talk statement ever. But even if you were to enter a room with zero reverberation and zero external sounds, you would still be able to hear the pumping of your own blood. And in cinema, traditionally, there was never a silent moment because of the sound of the projector. And even in today's Dolby world, there's not really any moment of silence if you listen around you. There's always some sort of noise.Now, since there's no such thing as silence, what do filmmakers and sound designers use? Well, as a synonym, they often use ambiences. Ambiences are the unique background sounds that are specific to each location. Each location has a unique sound, and each room has a unique sound, which is called room tone. So here's a recording of a market in Morocco.(Voices, music)And here's a recording of Times Square in New York.(Traffic sounds, car horns, voices)Room tone is the addition of all the noises inside the room: the ventilation, the heating, the fridge. Here's a recording of my apartment in Brooklyn.(You can hear the ventilation, the boiler, the fridge and street traffic)Ambiences work in a most primal way. They can speak directly to our brain subconsciously. So, birds chirping outside your window may indicate normality, perhaps because, as a species, we've been used to that sound every morning for millions of years.(Birds chirp) On the other hand, industrial sounds have been introduced to us a little more recently. Even though I really like them personally — they've been used by one of my heroes, David Lynch, and his sound designer, Alan Splet — industrial sounds often carry negative connotations.(Machine noises)Now, sound effects can tap into our emotional memory. Occasionally, they can be so significant that they become a character in a movie. The sound of thunder may indicate divine intervention or anger.(Thunder)Church bells can remind us of the passing of time, or perhaps our own mortality.(Bells ring)And breaking of glass can indicate the end of a relationship or a friendship.(Glass breaks)Scientists believe that dissonant sounds, for example, brass or wind instruments played very loud, may remind us of animal howls in nature and therefore create a sense of irritation or fear.(Brass and wind instruments play)So now we've spoken about on-screen sounds. But occasionally, the source of a sound cannot be seen. That's what we call offscreen sounds, or ""acousmatic."" Acousmatic sounds — well, the term ""acousmatic"" comes from Pythagoras in ancient Greece, who used to teach behind a veil or curtain for years, not revealing himself to his disciples. I think the mathematician and philosopher thought that, in that way, his students might focus more on the voice, and his words and its meaning, rather than the visual of him speaking. So sort of like the Wizard of Oz, or ""1984's"" Big Brother, separating the voice from its source, separating cause and effect sort of creates a sense of ubiquity or panopticism, and therefore, authority.There's a strong tradition of acousmatic sound. Nuns in monasteries in Rome and Venice used to sing in rooms up in galleries close to the ceiling, creating the illusion that we're listening to angels up in the sky. Richard Wagner famously created the hidden orchestra that was placed in a pit between the stage and the audience. And one of my heroes, Aphex Twin, famously hid in dark corners of clubs.I think what all these masters knew is that by hiding the source, you create a sense of mystery. This has been seen in cinema over and over, with Hitchcock, and Ridley Scott in ""Alien."" Hearing a sound without knowing its source is going to create some sort of tension. Also, it can minimize certain visual restrictions that directors have and can show something that wasn't there during filming. And if all this sounds a little theoretical, I wanted to play a little video.(Toy squeaks)(Typewriter)(Drums)(Ping-pong)(Knives being sharpened)(Record scratches)(Saw cuts)(Woman screams)What I'm sort of trying to demonstrate with these tools is that sound is a language. It can trick us by transporting us geographically; it can change the mood; it can set the pace; it can make us laugh or it can make us scared.On a personal level, I fell in love with that language a few years ago, and somehow managed to make it into some sort of profession. And I think with our work through the sound library, we're trying to kind of expand the vocabulary of that language. And in that way, we want to offer the right tools to sound designers, filmmakers, and video game and app designers, to keep telling even better stories and creating even more beautiful lies.So thanks for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tasos_frantzolas_everything_you_hear_on_film_is_a_lie
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"(Music)I went down to St. James InfirmaryTo see my baby thereShe was lying on a long wooden tableSo cold, so still, so fairI went up to see the doctor""She's very low,"" he saidI went back to see my babyGood God she's lying there deadI went down to old Joe's bar roomOn the corner of the squareThey were serving drinks as per usualAnd the usual crowd was thereTo my left stood Old Joe McKennedyHis eyes were bloodshot redHe turned to the crowd around himAnd these are the words he said""Let her go, let her go, God bless herWherever she may beShe can search this whole wide world all overBut she'll never find another man like meShe can search this whole wide world all overAnd she'll never find another man like meWhen I die, please God, bury meIn my ten-dollar Stetson hatPut a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chainSo my friends know I died standing patGet six gamblers to carry my coffinAnd six choir girls to sing me a songStick a jazz band on my hearse wagonTo raise hell as I go alongNow that's the end of my storyLet's have another round of boozeAnd if anyone should ask youJust tell them I got the St. James Infirmary blues(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/silk_road_ensemble_rhiannon_giddens_st_james_infirmary_blues
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"I'm here today to talk to you about a very powerful little word, one that people will do almost anything to avoid becoming. Billion-dollar industries thrive because of the fear of it, and those of us who undeniably are it are left to navigate a relentless storm surrounding it.I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, but I'm fat. Not the lowercase, muttered-behind-my-back kind, or the seemingly harmless chubby or cuddly. I'm not even the more sophisticated voluptuous or curvaceous kind.Let's not sugarcoat it. I am the capital F-A-T kind of fat. I am the elephant in the room. When I walked out on stage, some of you may have been thinking, ""Aww, this is going to be hilarious, because everybody knows that fat people are funny.""(Laughter)Or you may have been thinking, ""Where does she get her confidence from?"" Because a confident fat woman is almost unthinkable. The fashion-conscious members of the audience may have been thinking how fabulous I look in this Beth Ditto dress —(Cheers)thank you very much. Whereas some of you might have thought, ""Hmm, black would have been so much more slimming.""(Laughter)You may have wondered, consciously or not, if I have diabetes, or a partner, or if I eat carbs after 7pm.(Laughter)You may have worried that you ate carbs after 7pm last night, and that you really should renew your gym membership.These judgments are insidious. They can be directed at individuals and groups, and they can also be directed at ourselves. And this way of thinking is known as fatphobia.Like any form of systematic oppression, fatphobia is deeply rooted in complex structures like capitalism, patriarchy and racism, and that can make it really difficult to see, let alone challenge. We live in a culture where being fat is seen as being a bad person — lazy, greedy, unhealthy, irresponsible and morally suspect. And we tend to see thinness as being universally good — responsible, successful, and in control of our appetites, bodies and lives. We see these ideas again and again in the media, in public health policy, doctors' offices, in everyday conversations and in our own attitudes. We may even blame fat people themselves for the discrimination they face because, after all, if we don't like it, we should just lose weight. Easy. This antifat bias has become so integral, so ingrained to how we value ourselves and each other that we rarely question why we have such contempt for people of size and where that disdain comes from.But we must question it, because the enormous value we place on how we look affects every one of us. And do we really want to live in a society where people are denied their basic humanity if they don't subscribe to some arbitrary form of acceptable?So when I was six years old, my sister used to teach ballet to a bunch of little girls in our garage. I was about a foot taller and a foot wider than most of the group. When it came to doing our first performance, I was so excited about wearing a pretty pink tutu. I was going to sparkle. As the other girls slipped easily into their Lycra and tulle creations, not one of the tutus was big enough to fit me. I was determined not to be excluded from the performance, so I turned to my mother and loud enough for everyone to hear said, ""Mom, I don't need a tutu. I need a fourfour.""(Laughter)Thanks, Mom.(Applause)And although I didn't recognize it at the time, claiming space for myself in that glorious fourfour was the first step towards becoming a radical fat activist.Now, I'm not saying that this whole body-love thing has been an easy skip along a glittering path of self-acceptance since that day in class. Far from it. I soon learned that living outside what the mainstream considers normal can be a frustrating and isolating place. I've spent the last 20 years unpacking and deprogramming these messages, and it's been quite the roller coaster. I've been openly laughed at, abused from passing cars and been told that I'm delusional. I also receive smiles from strangers who recognize what it takes to walk down the street with a spring in your step and your head held high.(Cheer)Thanks. And through it all, that fierce little six-year-old has stayed with me, and she has helped me stand before you today as an unapologetic fat person, a person that simply refuses to subscribe to the dominant narrative about how I should move through the world in this body of mine.(Applause)And I'm not alone. I am part of an international community of people who choose to, rather than passively accepting that our bodies are and probably always will be big, we actively choose to flourish in these bodies as they are today. People who honor our strength and work with, not against, our perceived limitations, people who value health as something much more holistic than a number on an outdated BMI chart. Instead, we value mental health, self-worth and how we feel in our bodies as vital aspects to our overall well-being. People who refuse to believe that living in these fat bodies is a barrier to anything, really.There are doctors, academics and bloggers who have written countless volumes on the many facets of this complex subject. There are fatshionistas who reclaim their bodies and their beauty by wearing fatkinis and crop tops, exposing the flesh that we're all taught to hide. There are fat athletes who run marathons, teach yoga or do kickboxing, all done with a middle finger firmly held up to the status quo. And these people have taught me that radical body politics is the antidote to our body-shaming culture.But to be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't change their bodies if that's what they want to do. Reclaiming yourself can be one of the most gorgeous acts of self-love and can look like a million different things, from hairstyles to tattoos to body contouring to hormones to surgery and yes, even weight loss. It's simple: it's your body, and you decide what's best to do with it.My way of engaging in activism is by doing all the things that we fatties aren't supposed to do, and there's a lot of them, inviting other people to join me and then making art about it. The common thread through most of this work has been reclaiming spaces that are often prohibitive to bigger bodies, from the catwalk to club shows, from public swimming pools to prominent dance stages. And reclaiming spaces en masse is not only a powerful artistic statement but a radical community-building approach. This was so true of ""AQUAPORKO!"" —(Laughter)the fat fem synchronized swim team I started with a group of friends in Sydney. The impact of seeing a bunch of defiant fat women in flowery swimming caps and bathers throwing their legs in the air without a care should not be underestimated.(Laughter)Throughout my career, I have learned that fat bodies are inherently political, and unapologetic fat bodies can blow people's minds. When director Kate Champion, of acclaimed dance theater company Force Majeure, asked me to be the artistic associate on a work featuring all fat dancers, I literally jumped at the opportunity. And I mean literally. ""Nothing to Lose"" is a work made in collaboration with performers of size who drew from their lived experiences to create a work as varied and authentic as we all are. And it was as far from ballet as you could imagine.The very idea of a fat dance work by such a prestigious company was, to put it mildly, controversial, because nothing like it had ever been done on mainstream dance stages before anywhere in the world.People were skeptical. ""What do you mean, 'fat dancers?' Like, size 10, size 12 kind of fat? Where did they do their dance training? Are they going to have the stamina for a full-length production?""But despite the skepticism, ""Nothing to Lose"" became a sellout hit of Sydney Festival. We received rave reviews, toured, won awards and were written about in over 27 languages. These incredible images of our cast were seen worldwide. I've lost count of how many times people of all sizes have told me that the show has changed their lives, how it helped them shift their relationship to their own and other people's bodies, and how it made them confront their own bias.But of course, work that pushes people's buttons is not without its detractors. I have been told that I'm glorifying obesity. I have received violent death threats and abuse for daring to make work that centers fat people's bodies and lives and treats us as worthwhile human beings with valuable stories to tell. I've even been called ""the ISIS of the obesity epidemic"" —(Laughter)a comment so absurd that it is funny. But it also speaks to the panic, the literal terror, that the fear of fat can evoke. It is this fear that's feeding the diet industry, which is keeping so many of us from making peace with our own bodies, for waiting to be the after-photo before we truly start to live our lives. Because the real elephant in the room here is fatphobia. Fat activism refuses to indulge this fear. By advocating for self-determination and respect for all of us, we can shift society's reluctance to embrace diversity and start to celebrate the myriad ways there are to have a body.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kelli_jean_drinkwater_enough_with_the_fear_of_fat
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"In the spring of 2016, a legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation captured the world's attention.Apple has built security features into its mobile products which protect data on its devices from everyone but the owner. That means that criminals, hackers and yes, even governments are all locked out. For Apple's customers, this is a great thing. But governments are not so happy. You see, Apple has made a conscious decision to get out of the surveillance business. Apple has tried to make surveillance as difficult as possible for governments and any other actors.There are really two smartphone operating systems in the global smartphone market: iOS and Android. iOS is made by Apple. Android is made by Google. Apple has spent a lot of time and money to make sure that its products are as secure as possible. Apple encrypts all data stored on iPhones by default, and text messages sent from one Apple customer to another Apple customer are encrypted by default without the user having to take any actions.What this means is that, if the police seize an iPhone and it has a password, they'll have a difficult time getting any data off of it, if they can do it at all. In contrast, the security of Android just really isn't as good. Android phones, or at least most of the Android phones that have been sold to consumers, do not encrypt data stored on the device by default, and the built-in text messaging app in Android does not use encryption. So if the police seize an Android phone, chances are, they'll be able to get all the data they want off of that device.Two smartphones from two of the biggest companies in the world; one that protects data by default, and one that doesn't.Apple is a seller of luxury goods. It dominates the high end of the market. And we would expect a manufacturer of luxury goods to have products that include more features. But not everyone can afford an iPhone. That's where Android really, really dominates: at the middle and low end of the market, smartphones for the billion and a half people who cannot or will not spend 600 dollars on a phone.But the dominance of Android has led to what I call the ""digital security divide."" That is, there is now increasingly a gap between the privacy and security of the rich, who can afford devices that secure their data by default, and of the poor, whose devices do very little to protect them by default.So, think of the average Apple customer: a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, a politician. These individuals now increasingly have smartphones in their pockets that encrypt their calls, their text messages, all the data on the device, without them doing really anything to secure their information. In contrast, the poor and the most vulnerable in our societies are using devices that leave them completely vulnerable to surveillance.In the United States, where I live, African-Americans are more likely to be seen as suspicious or more likely to be profiled, and are more likely to be targeted by the state with surveillance. But African-Americans are also disproportionately likely to use Android devices that do nothing at all to protect them from that surveillance. This is a problem.We must remember that surveillance is a tool. It's a tool used by those in power against those who have no power. And while I think it's absolutely great that companies like Apple are making it easy for people to encrypt, if the only people who can protect themselves from the gaze of the government are the rich and powerful, that's a problem. And it's not just a privacy or a cybersecurity problem. It's a civil rights problem.So the lack of default security in Android is not just a problem for the poor and vulnerable users who are depending on these devices. This is actually a problem for our democracy. I'll explain what I mean.Modern social movements rely on technology — from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. The organizers of these movements and the members of these movements increasingly communicate and coordinate with smartphones. And so, naturally governments that feel threatened by these movements will also target the organizers and their smartphones. Now, it's quite possible that a future Martin Luther King or a Mandela or a Gandhi will have an iPhone and be protected from government surveillance. But chances are, they'll probably have a cheap, $20 Android phone in their pocket.And so if we do nothing to address the digital security divide, if we do nothing to ensure that everyone in our society gets the same benefits of encryption and is equally able to protect themselves from surveillance by the state, not only will the poor and vulnerable be exposed to surveillance, but future civil rights movements may be crushed before they ever reach their full potential.Thank you.(Applause)Helen Walters: Chris, thank you so much. I have a question for you. We saw recently in the press that Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook covers over his camera and does something with his headphone mic jack. So I wanted to ask you a personal question, which is: Do you do that? And, on behalf of everyone here, particularly myself, Should we be doing that? Should we be covering these things?Christopher Soghoian: Putting a sticker — actually, I like Band-Aids, because you can remove them and put them back on whenever you want to make a call or a Skype call. Putting a sticker over your web cam is probably the best thing you can do for your privacy in terms of bang for buck. There really is malware, malicious software out there that can take over your web cam, even without the light turning on. This is used by criminals. This is used by stalkers. You can buy $19.99 ""spy on your ex-girlfriend"" software online. It's really terrifying. And then, of course, it's used by governments. And there's obviously a sexual violence component to this, which is that this kind of surveillance can be used most effectively against women and other people who can be shamed in our society. Even if you think you have nothing to hide, at the very least, if you have children, teenagers in your lives, make sure you put a sticker on their camera and protect them.HW: Wow. Thank you so much. CS: Thank you.HW: Thanks, Chris.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_soghoian_your_smartphone_is_a_civil_rights_issue
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"I want to talk to you about my kids. Now, I know everyone thinks that their kid is the most fantastic, the most beautiful kid that ever lived. But mine really are.(Laughter)I have 696 kids, and they are the most intelligent, inventive, innovative, brilliant and powerful kids that you'll ever meet.Any student I've had the honor of teaching in my classroom is my kid. However, because their ""real"" parents aren't rich and, I argue, because they are mostly of color, they will seldom get to see in themselves the awesomeness that I see in them. Because what I see in them is myself — or what would have been myself.I am the daughter of two hardworking, college-educated, African-American parents who chose careers as public servants: my father, a minister; my mother, an educator. Wealth was never the primary ambition in our house. Because of this lack of wealth, we lived in a neighborhood that lacked wealth, and henceforth a school system that lacked wealth. Luckily, however, we struck the educational jackpot in a voluntary desegregation program that buses inner-city kids — black and brown — out to suburban schools — rich and white.At five years old, I had to take an hour-long bus ride to a faraway place to get a better education. At five years old, I thought everyone had a life just like mine. I thought everyone went to school and were the only ones using the brown crayons to color in their family portraits, while everyone else was using the peach-colored ones. At five years old, I thought everyone was just like me. But as I got older, I started noticing things, like: How come my neighborhood friend don't have to wake up at five o'clock in the morning, and go to a school that's an hour away? How come I'm learning to play the violin while my neighborhood friends don't even have a music class? Why were my neighborhood friends learning and reading material that I had done two to three years prior?See, as I got older, I started to have this unlawful feeling in my belly, like I was doing something that I wasn't supposed to be doing; taking something that wasn't mine; receiving a gift, but with someone else's name on it. All these amazing things that I was being exposed to and experiencing, I felt I wasn't really supposed to have. I wasn't supposed to have a library, fully equipped athletic facilities, or safe fields to play in. I wasn't supposed to have theatre departments with seasonal plays and concerts — digital, visual, performing arts. I wasn't supposed to have fully resourced biology or chemistry labs, school buses that brought me door-to-door, freshly prepared school lunches or even air conditioning. These are things my kids don't get.You see, as I got older, while I was grateful for this amazing opportunity that I was being given, there was this ever-present pang of: But what about everyone else? There are thousands of other kids just like me, who deserve this, too. Why doesn't everyone get this? Why is a high-quality education only exclusive to the rich?It was like I had some sort of survivor's remorse. All of my neighborhood friends were experiencing an educational train wreck that I was saved from through a bus ride. I was like an educational Moses screaming, ""Let my people go ... to high-quality schools!""(Laughter)I'd seen firsthand how the other half was being treated and educated. I'd seen the educational promised land, and I could not for the life of me justify the disparity.I now teach in the very same school system from which I sought refuge. I know firsthand the tools that were given to me as a student, and now as a teacher, I don't have access to those same tools to give my students. There have been countless nights when I've cried in frustration, anger and sorrow, because I can't teach my kids the way that I was taught, because I don't have access to the same resources or tools that were used to teach me. My kids deserve so much better.We sit and we keep banging our heads against this term: ""Achievement gap, achievement gap!"" Is it really that hard to understand why these kids perform well and these kids don't? I mean, really. I think we've got it all wrong. I think we, as Gloria Ladson-Billings says, should flip our paradigm and our language and call it what it really is. It's not an achievement gap; it's an education debt, for all of the foregone schooling resources that were never invested in the education of the black and brown child over time.A little-known secret in American history is that the only American institution created specifically for people of color is the American slave trade — and some would argue the prison system, but that's another topic for another TED Talk.(Laughter)The public school system of this country was built, bought and paid for using commerce generated from the slave trade and slave labor. While African-Americans were enslaved and prohibited from schooling, their labor established the very institution from which they were excluded. Ever since then, every court case, educational policy, reform, has been an attempt to retrofit the design, rather than just stopping and acknowledging: we've had it all wrong from the beginning.An oversimplification of American educational history. All right, just bear with me. Blacks were kept out — you know, the whole slavery thing. With the help of philanthropic white people, they built their own schools. Separate but equal was OK. But while we all know things were indeed separate, they were in no ways equal. Enter Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954; legal separation of the races is now illegal. But very few people pay attention to all of the court cases since then, that have undone the educational promised land for every child that Brown v. Board intended. Some argue that today our schools are now more segregated than they ever were before we tried to desegregate them in the first place.Teaching my kids about desegregation, the Little Rock Nine, the Civil Rights Movement, is a real awkward moment in my classroom, when I have to hear the voice of a child ask, ""If schools were desegregated in 1954, how come there are no white kids here?""(Laughter)These kids aren't dumb. They know exactly what's happening, and what's not. They know that when it comes to schooling, black lives don't matter and they never have.For years, I tried desperately to cultivate in my kids a love of reading. I'd amassed a modest classroom library of books I'd accumulated from secondhand shops, thrift stores, attics — you know. But whenever I said those dreadful words, ""Take out a book and read,"" you'd think I'd just declared war. It was torture. One day, after I'd heard about this website called DonorsChoose, where classroom teachers create wish lists of items they need for their classroom and anonymous donors fulfill them, I figured I'd go out on a limb and just make a wish list of the teenager's dream library. Over 200 brand-new books were sent to my room piece by piece. Every day there were new deliveries and my kids would exclaim with glee, ""This feels like Christmas!""(Laughter)Then they'd say, ""Ms. Sumner, where did these books come from?""And then I'd reply, ""Strangers from all over the country wanted you to have these.""And then they'd say, almost suspiciously, ""But they're brand-new.""(Laughter)To which I'd reply, ""You deserve brand-new books.""The whole experience hit home for me when one of my girls, as she peeled open a crisp paperback said, ""Ms. Sumner — you know, I figured you bought these books, 'cause you teachers are always buying us stuff. But to know that a stranger, someone I don't even know, cares this much about me is pretty cool.""Knowing that strangers will take care of you is a privilege my kids aren't afforded.Ever since the donation, there has been a steady stream of kids signing out books to take home, and then returning them with the exclamation, ""This one was good!""(Laughter)Now when I say, ""Take out a book and read,"" kids rush to my library. It wasn't that they didn't want to read, but instead, they'd gladly read if the resources were there.Institutionally speaking, our public school system has never done right by the black and brown child. We keep focusing on the end results or test results, and getting frustrated. We get to a catastrophe and we wonder, ""How did it get so bad? How did we get here?"" Really? If you neglect a child long enough, you no longer have the right to be surprised when things don't turn out well.Stop being perplexed or confused or befuddled by the achievement gap, the income gap, the incarceration rates, or whatever socioeconomic disparity is the new ""it"" term for the moment. The problems we have as a country are the problems we created as a country. The quality of your education is directly proportionate to your access to college, your access to jobs, your access to the future.Until we live in a world where every kid can get a high-quality education no matter where they live, or the color of their skin, there are things we can do on a macro level. School funding should not be decided by property taxes or some funky economic equation where rich kids continue to benefit from state aid, while poor kids are continuously having food and resources taken from their mouths. Governors, senators, mayors, city council members — if we're going to call public education public education, then it should be just that. Otherwise, we should call it what it really is: poverty insurance. ""Public education: keeping poor kids poor since 1954.""(Laughter)If we really, as a country, believe that education is the ""great equalizer,"" then it should be just that: equal and equitable. Until then, there's no democracy in our democratic education.On a mezzo level: historically speaking, the education of the black and brown child has always depended on the philanthropy of others. And unfortunately, today it still does. If your son or daughter or niece or nephew or neighbor or little Timmy down the street goes to an affluent school, challenge your school committee to adopt an impoverished school or an impoverished classroom. Close the divide by engaging in communication and relationships that matter. When resources are shared, they're not divided; they're multiplied.And on a micro level: if you're a human being, donate. Time, money, resources, opportunities — whatever is in your heart. There are websites like DonorsChoose that recognize the disparity and actually want to do something about it.What is a carpenter with no tools? What is an actress with no stage? What is a scientist with no laboratory? What is a doctor with no equipment? I'll tell you: they're my kids. Shouldn't they be your kids, too?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kandice_sumner_how_america_s_public_schools_keep_kids_in_poverty
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"June 2010. I landed for the first time in Rome, Italy. I wasn't there to sightsee. I was there to solve world hunger.(Laughter)That's right. I was a 25-year-old PhD student armed with a prototype tool developed back at my university, and I was going to help the World Food Programme fix hunger. So I strode into the headquarters building and my eyes scanned the row of UN flags, and I smiled as I thought to myself, ""The engineer is here.""(Laughter)Give me your data. I'm going to optimize everything.(Laughter)Tell me the food that you've purchased, tell me where it's going and when it needs to be there, and I'm going to tell you the shortest, fastest, cheapest, best set of routes to take for the food. We're going to save money, we're going to avoid delays and disruptions, and bottom line, we're going to save lives. You're welcome.(Laughter)I thought it was going to take 12 months, OK, maybe even 13. This is not quite how it panned out. Just a couple of months into the project, my French boss, he told me, ""You know, Mallory, it's a good idea, but the data you need for your algorithms is not there. It's the right idea but at the wrong time, and the right idea at the wrong time is the wrong idea.""(Laughter)Project over. I was crushed.When I look back now on that first summer in Rome and I see how much has changed over the past six years, it is an absolute transformation. It's a coming of age for bringing data into the humanitarian world. It's exciting. It's inspiring. But we're not there yet. And brace yourself, executives, because I'm going to be putting companies on the hot seat to step up and play the role that I know they can.My experiences back in Rome prove using data you can save lives. OK, not that first attempt, but eventually we got there. Let me paint the picture for you. Imagine that you have to plan breakfast, lunch and dinner for 500,000 people, and you only have a certain budget to do it, say 6.5 million dollars per month. Well, what should you do? What's the best way to handle it? Should you buy rice, wheat, chickpea, oil? How much? It sounds simple. It's not. You have 30 possible foods, and you have to pick five of them. That's already over 140,000 different combinations. Then for each food that you pick, you need to decide how much you'll buy, where you're going to get it from, where you're going to store it, how long it's going to take to get there. You need to look at all of the different transportation routes as well. And that's already over 900 million options. If you considered each option for a single second, that would take you over 28 years to get through. 900 million options.So we created a tool that allowed decisionmakers to weed through all 900 million options in just a matter of days. It turned out to be incredibly successful. In an operation in Iraq, we saved 17 percent of the costs, and this meant that you had the ability to feed an additional 80,000 people. It's all thanks to the use of data and modeling complex systems.But we didn't do it alone. The unit that I worked with in Rome, they were unique. They believed in collaboration. They brought in the academic world. They brought in companies. And if we really want to make big changes in big problems like world hunger, we need everybody to the table. We need the data people from humanitarian organizations leading the way, and orchestrating just the right types of engagements with academics, with governments. And there's one group that's not being leveraged in the way that it should be. Did you guess it? Companies.Companies have a major role to play in fixing the big problems in our world. I've been in the private sector for two years now. I've seen what companies can do, and I've seen what companies aren't doing, and I think there's three main ways that we can fill that gap: by donating data, by donating decision scientists and by donating technology to gather new sources of data. This is data philanthropy, and it's the future of corporate social responsibility. Bonus, it also makes good business sense.Companies today, they collect mountains of data, so the first thing they can do is start donating that data. Some companies are already doing it. Take, for example, a major telecom company. They opened up their data in Senegal and the Ivory Coast and researchers discovered that if you look at the patterns in the pings to the cell phone towers, you can see where people are traveling. And that can tell you things like where malaria might spread, and you can make predictions with it. Or take for example an innovative satellite company. They opened up their data and donated it, and with that data you could track how droughts are impacting food production. With that you can actually trigger aid funding before a crisis can happen.This is a great start. There's important insights just locked away in company data. And yes, you need to be very careful. You need to respect privacy concerns, for example by anonymizing the data.But even if the floodgates opened up, and even if all companies donated their data to academics, to NGOs, to humanitarian organizations, it wouldn't be enough to harness that full impact of data for humanitarian goals. Why? To unlock insights in data, you need decision scientists. Decision scientists are people like me. They take the data, they clean it up, transform it and put it into a useful algorithm that's the best choice to address the business need at hand. In the world of humanitarian aid, there are very few decision scientists. Most of them work for companies. So that's the second thing that companies need to do. In addition to donating their data, they need to donate their decision scientists.Now, companies will say, ""Ah! Don't take our decision scientists from us. We need every spare second of their time."" But there's a way. If a company was going to donate a block of a decision scientist's time, it would actually make more sense to spread out that block of time over a long period, say for example five years. This might only amount to a couple of hours per month, which a company would hardly miss, but what it enables is really important: long-term partnerships. Long-term partnerships allow you to build relationships, to get to know the data, to really understand it and to start to understand the needs and challenges that the humanitarian organization is facing. In Rome, at the World Food Programme, this took us five years to do, five years. That first three years, OK, that was just what we couldn't solve for. Then there was two years after that of refining and implementing the tool, like in the operations in Iraq and other countries. I don't think that's an unrealistic timeline when it comes to using data to make operational changes. It's an investment. It requires patience. But the types of results that can be produced are undeniable. In our case, it was the ability to feed tens of thousands more people.So we have donating data, we have donating decision scientists, and there's actually a third way that companies can help: donating technology to capture new sources of data. You see, there's a lot of things we just don't have data on. Right now, Syrian refugees are flooding into Greece, and the UN refugee agency, they have their hands full. The current system for tracking people is paper and pencil, and what that means is that when a mother and her five children walk into the camp, headquarters is essentially blind to this moment. That's all going to change in the next few weeks, thanks to private sector collaboration. There's going to be a new system based on donated package tracking technology from the logistics company that I work for. With this new system, there will be a data trail, so you know exactly the moment when that mother and her children walk into the camp. And even more, you know if she's going to have supplies this month and the next. Information visibility drives efficiency. For companies, using technology to gather important data, it's like bread and butter. They've been doing it for years, and it's led to major operational efficiency improvements. Just try to imagine your favorite beverage company trying to plan their inventory and not knowing how many bottles were on the shelves. It's absurd. Data drives better decisions.Now, if you're representing a company, and you're pragmatic and not just idealistic, you might be saying to yourself, ""OK, this is all great, Mallory, but why should I want to be involved?"" Well for one thing, beyond the good PR, humanitarian aid is a 24-billion-dollar sector, and there's over five billion people, maybe your next customers, that live in the developing world. Further, companies that are engaging in data philanthropy, they're finding new insights locked away in their data. Take, for example, a credit card company that's opened up a center that functions as a hub for academics, for NGOs and governments, all working together. They're looking at information in credit card swipes and using that to find insights about how households in India live, work, earn and spend. For the humanitarian world, this provides information about how you might bring people out of poverty. But for companies, it's providing insights about your customers and potential customers in India. It's a win all around. Now, for me, what I find exciting about data philanthropy — donating data, donating decision scientists and donating technology — it's what it means for young professionals like me who are choosing to work at companies. Studies show that the next generation of the workforce care about having their work make a bigger impact. We want to make a difference, and so through data philanthropy, companies can actually help engage and retain their decision scientists. And that's a big deal for a profession that's in high demand.Data philanthropy makes good business sense, and it also can help revolutionize the humanitarian world. If we coordinated the planning and logistics across all of the major facets of a humanitarian operation, we could feed, clothe and shelter hundreds of thousands more people, and companies need to step up and play the role that I know they can in bringing about this revolution.You've probably heard of the saying ""food for thought."" Well, this is literally thought for food. It finally is the right idea at the right time.(Laughter)Très magnifique.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mallory_soldner_your_company_s_data_could_end_world_hunger
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"Half of the human workforce is expected to be replaced by software and robots in the next 20 years. And many corporate leaders welcome that as a chance to increase profits. Machines are more efficient; humans are complicated and difficult to manage.Well, I want our organizations to remain human. In fact, I want them to become beautiful. Because as machines take our jobs and do them more efficiently, soon the only work left for us humans will be the kind of work that must be done beautifully rather than efficiently.To maintain our humanity in the this second Machine Age, we may have no other choice than to create beauty. Beauty is an elusive concept. For the writer Stendhal it was the promise of happiness. For me it's a goal by Lionel Messi.(Laughter)So bear with me as I am proposing four admittedly very subjective principles that you can use to build a beautiful organization.First: do the unnecessary.[Do the Unnecessary]A few months ago, Hamdi Ulukaya, the CEO and founder of the yogurt company Chobani, made headlines when he decided to grant stock to all of his 2,000 employees. Some called it a PR stunt, others — a genuine act of giving back. But there is something else that was remarkable about it. It came completely out of the blue. There had been no market or stakeholder pressure, and employees were so surprised that they burst into tears when they heard the news. Actions like Ulukaya's are beautiful because they catch us off guard. They create something out of nothing because they're completely unnecessary.I once worked at a company that was the result of a merger of a large IT outsourcing firm and a small design firm. We were merging 9,000 software engineers with 1,000 creative types. And to unify these immensely different cultures, we were going to launch a third, new brand. And the new brand color was going to be orange. And as we were going through the budget for the rollouts, we decided last minute to cut the purchase of 10,000 orange balloons, which we had meant to distribute to all staff worldwide. They just seemed unnecessary and cute in the end. I didn't know back then that our decision marked the beginning of the end — that these two organizations would never become one. And sure enough, the merger eventually failed. Now, was it because there weren't any orange balloons? No, of course not. But the kill-the-orange-balloons mentality permeated everything else. You might not always realize it, but when you cut the unnecessary, you cut everything. Leading with beauty means rising above what is merely necessary. So do not kill your orange balloons.The second principle: create intimacy.[Create Intimacy]Studies show that how we feel about our workplace very much depends on the relationships with our coworkers. And what are relationships other than a string of microinteractions? There are hundreds of these every day in our organizations that have the potential to distinguish a good life from a beautiful one. The marriage researcher John Gottman says that the secret of a healthy relationship is not the great gesture or the lofty promise, it's small moments of attachment. In other words, intimacy. In our networked organizations, we tout the strength of weak ties but we underestimate the strength of strong ones. We forget the words of the writer Richard Bach who once said, ""Intimacy — not connectedness — intimacy is the opposite of loneliness.""So how do we design for organizational intimacy? The humanitarian organization CARE wanted to launch a campaign on gender equality in villages in northern India. But it realized quickly that it had to have this conversation first with its own staff. So it invited all 36 team members and their partners to one of the Khajuraho Temples, known for their famous erotic sculptures. And there they openly discussed their personal relationships — their own experiences of gender equality with the coworkers and the partners. It was eye-opening for the participants. Not only did it allow them to relate to the communities they serve, it also broke down invisible barriers and created a lasting bond amongst themselves. Not a single team member quit in the next four years. So this is how you create intimacy. No masks ... or lots of masks.(Laughter)When Danone, the food company, wanted to translate its new company manifesto into product initiatives, it gathered the management team and 100 employees from across different departments, seniority levels and regions for a three-day strategy retreat. And it asked everybody to wear costumes for the entire meeting: wigs, crazy hats, feather boas, huge glasses and so on. And they left with concrete outcomes and full of enthusiasm. And when I asked the woman who had designed this experience why it worked, she simply said, ""Never underestimate the power of a ridiculous wig.""(Laughter)(Applause)Because wigs erase hierarchy, and hierarchy kills intimacy — both ways, for the CEO and the intern. Wigs allow us to use the disguise of the false to show something true about ourselves. And that's not easy in our everyday work lives, because the relationship with our organizations is often like that of a married couple that has grown apart, suffered betrayals and disappointments, and is now desperate to be beautiful for one another once again. And for either of us the first step towards beauty involves a huge risk. The risk to be ugly.[Be Ugly]So many organizations these days are keen on designing beautiful workplaces that look like anything but work: vacation resorts, coffee shops, playgrounds or college campuses —(Laughter)Based on the promises of positive psychology, we speak of play and gamification, and one start-up even says that when someone gets fired, they have graduated.(Laughter)That kind of beautiful language only goes ""skin deep, but ugly cuts clean to the bone,"" as the writer Dorothy Parker once put it. To be authentic is to be ugly. It doesn't mean that you can't have fun or must give in to the vulgar or cynical, but it does mean that you speak the actual ugly truth. Like this manufacturer that wanted to transform one of its struggling business units. It identified, named and pinned on large boards all the issues — and there were hundreds of them — that had become obstacles to better performance. They put them on boards, moved them all into one room, which they called ""the ugly room."" The ugly became visible for everyone to see — it was celebrated. And the ugly room served as a mix of mirror exhibition and operating room — a biopsy on the living flesh to cut out all the bureaucracy.The ugliest part of our body is our brain. Literally and neurologically. Our brain renders ugly what is unfamiliar ... modern art, atonal music, jazz, maybe — VR goggles for that matter — strange objects, sounds and people. But we've all been ugly once. We were a weird-looking baby, a new kid on the block, a foreigner. And we will be ugly again when we don't belong.The Center for Political Beauty, an activist collective in Berlin, recently staged an extreme artistic intervention. With the permission of relatives, it exhumed the corpses of refugees who had drowned at Europe's borders, transported them all the way to Berlin, and then reburied them at the heart of the German capital. The idea was to allow them to reach their desired destination, if only after their death. Such acts of beautification may not be pretty, but they are much needed. Because things tend to get ugly when there's only one meaning, one truth, only answers and no questions. Beautiful organizations keep asking questions. They remain incomplete, which is the fourth and the last of the principles.[Remain Incomplete]Recently I was in Paris, and a friend of mine took me to Nuit Debout, which stands for ""up all night,"" the self-organized protest movement that had formed in response to the proposed labor laws in France. Every night, hundreds gathered at the Place de la République. Every night they set up a small, temporary village to deliberate their own vision of the French Republic. And at the core of this adhocracy was a general assembly where anybody could speak using a specially designed sign language. Like Occupy Wall Street and other protest movements, Nuit Debout was born in the face of crisis. It was messy — full of controversies and contradictions. But whether you agreed with the movement's goals or not, every gathering was a beautiful lesson in raw humanity. And how fitting that Paris — the city of ideals, the city of beauty — was it's stage. It reminds us that like great cities, the most beautiful organizations are ideas worth fighting for — even and especially when their outcome is uncertain. They are movements; they are always imperfect, never fully organized, so they avoid ever becoming banal. They have something but we don't know what it is. They remain mysterious; we can't take our eyes off them. We find them beautiful.So to do the unnecessary, to create intimacy, to be ugly, to remain incomplete — these are not only the qualities of beautiful organizations, these are inherently human characteristics. And these are also the qualities of what we call home. And as we disrupt, and are disrupted, the least we can do is to ensure that we still feel at home in our organizations, and that we use our organizations to create that feeling for others.Beauty can save the world when we embrace these principles and design for them. In the face of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we need a new radical humanism. We must acquire and promote a new aesthetic and sentimental education. Because if we don't, we might end up feeling like aliens in organizations and societies that are full of smart machines that have no appreciation whatsoever for the unnecessary, the intimate, the incomplete and definitely not for the ugly.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_leberecht_4_ways_to_build_a_human_company_in_the_age_of_machines
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"(Music)Amanda Palmer (singing): Ground Control to Major Tom,Ground Control to Major Tom,Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.Al Gore: Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six ...AP: Ground Control to Major Tom,AG: Five, Four, Three, Two, One ... AP: Commencing countdown, engines on.Check ignition and may God's love be with you.AG: Liftoff.AP: This is Ground Control to Major Tom,You've really made the gradeAnd the papers want to know whose shirts you wear.Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare.""This is Major Tom to Ground Control,I'm stepping through the doorAnd I'm floating in a most peculiar wayAnd the stars look very different today.For here am I floating round my tin can.Far above the world,Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do.""(Music)""Though I'm past 100,000 miles,I'm feeling very still, and I think my spaceship knows which way to go.Tell my wife I love her very much she knows.""Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit's dead, there's something wrong.Can you hear me, Major Tom?Can you hear me, Major Tom?Can you hear me, Major Tom?Can you ...""Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the Moon.Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do.(Music)[""I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man, just a mortal with the potential of a superman ... ... I'm living on.""  David Bowie, 1947-2016](Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_jherek_bischoff_usman_riaz_space_oddity
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"I feel incredibly lucky to be from a country that's generally considered to be the best place in the world to be a woman.In 1975, when I was seven years old, women in Iceland went on a strike. They did no work that day, whether they held professional jobs or had the work of the home. They marched into the center of Reykjavík — 90 percent of women participated — and peacefully and in solidarity asked for equality. Nothing worked in Iceland that day, because nothing works when women are not at work.(Applause)Five years later, Icelanders had the courage to be the first country in the world to democratically elect a woman as their president. I will never forget this day, that President Vigdís, as we know her by her first name, stepped out on the balcony of her own home, a single mom with her daughter by her side as she had won.(Applause)This woman was an incredible role model for me and everyone growing up at that time, including boys. She frequently shares the story of how a young boy approached her after a couple of terms in office and asked, ""Can boys really grow up to be president?""(Laughter)Role models really matter, but even with such strong role models who I am so grateful for, when I was encouraged to run for president, my first reaction was, ""Who am I to run for president? Who am I to be president?""It turns out that women are less likely to consider running than men. So a study done in the US in 2011 showed that 62 percent of men had considered running for office, but 45 percent of women. That's gap of 16 percentage points, and it's the same gap that existed a decade earlier. And it really is a shame, because I am so convinced that the world is in real need for women leaders and more principle-based leadership in general.So my decision to run ultimately came down to the fact that I felt that I had to do my bit, even if I had no political experience, to step up and try to be part of creating the world that will make sense and be sustainable for our kids, and a world where we truly allow both our boys and girls to be all they can be.And it was the journey of my life. It was amazing. The journey started with potentially as many as 20 candidates. It boiled down to nine candidates qualifying, and ultimately the race came down to four of us, three men and me.(Applause)But that's not all the drama yet. You may think you have drama in the US, but I can —(Laughter)I can assure you we had our own drama in Iceland. So our sitting president of 20 years announced initially that he was not going to run, which is probably what gave rise to so many candidates considering running. Then later he changed his mind when our prime minister resigned following the infamous Panama Papers that implicated him and his family. And there was a popular protest in Iceland, so the sitting president thought they needed a trusted leader. A few days later, relations to his wife and her family's companies were also discovered in the Panama Papers, and so he withdrew from the race again. Before doing so, he said he was doing that because now there were two qualified men who he felt could fill his shoes running for office.So on May 9, 45 days before election day, it was not looking too good for me. I did not even make the graph in the newspaper. The polls had me at 1 percent, but that was still the highest that any woman announcing her candidacy had earned. So it would be an understatement to say that I had to work extremely hard to get my seat at the table and access to television, because the network decided that they would only include those with 2.5 percent or more in the polls in the first TV debate. I found out on the afternoon of the first TV debate that I would participate along with the three men, and I found out on live TV that I came in at exactly 2.5 percent on the day of the first TV debate.(Applause)So, challenges. The foremost challenges I had to face and overcome on this journey had to do with media, muscle and money. Let's start with media. There are those who say gender doesn't matter when it comes to media and politics. I can't say that I agree. It proved harder for me to both get access and airtime in media. As a matter of fact, the leading candidate appeared in broadcast media 87 times in the months leading up to the elections, whereas I appeared 31 times. And I am not saying media is doing this consciously. I think largely this has to do with unconscious bias, because in media, much like everywhere else, we have both conscious and unconscious bias, and we need to have the courage to talk about it if we want to change it.When I finally got access to TV, the first question I got was, ""Are you going to quit?"" And that was a hard one. But of course, with 1 percent to 2.5 percent in the polls, maybe it's understandable. But media really matters, and every time I appeared on TV, we saw and experienced a rise in the polls, so I know firsthand how much this matters and why we have to talk about it. I was the only one out of the final four candidates that never got a front page interview. I was sometimes left out of the questions asked of all other candidates and out of coverage about the elections. So I did face this, but I will say this to compliment the Icelandic media. I got few if any comments about my hair and pantsuit.(Applause)So kudos to them. But there is another experience that's very important. I ran as an independent candidate, not with any political party or muscle behind me. That lack of experience and lack of access to resources probably came at a cost to our campaign, but it also allowed us to innovate and do politics differently. We ran a positive campaign, and we probably changed the tone of the election for others by doing that. It may be the reason why I had less airtime on TV, because I wanted to show other contenders respect.When access to media proved to be so difficult, we ran our own media. I ran live Facebook sessions where I took questions from voters on anything and responded on the spot. And we put all the questions I got and all the answers on an open Facebook because we thought transparency is important if you want to establish trust. And when reaching young voters proved to be challenging, I became a Snapchatter. I got young people to teach me how to do that, and I used every filter on Snapchat during the last part of the campaign. And I actually had to use a lot of humor and humility, as I was very bad at it. But we grew the following amongst young people by doing that. So it's possible to run a different type of campaign.But unfortunately, one cannot talk about politics without mentioning money. I am sad that it is that way, but it's true, and we had less financial resources than the other candidates. This probably was partly due to the fact that I think I had a harder time asking for financial support. And maybe I also had the ambition to do more with less. Some would call that very womanly of me.But even with one third the media, one third the financial resources, and only an entrepreneurial team, but an amazing team, we managed to surprise everyone on election night, when the first numbers came in. I surprised myself, as you may see in that photo.(Laughter)So the first numbers, I came in neck to neck to the leading candidate.(Cheers)Well, too early, because I didn't quite pull that, but I came in second, and we went a long way from the one percent, with nearly a third of the vote, and we beat the polls by an unprecedented margin, or 10 percentage points above what the last poll came in at.Some people call me the real winner of the election because of this, and there are many people who encouraged me to run again. But what really makes me proud is to know that I earned proportionately higher percentage support from the young people, and a lot of people encouraged my daughter to run in 2040.(Applause)She is 13, and she had never been on TV before. And on election day, I observed her on TV repeatedly, and she was smart, she was self-confident, she was sincere, and she was supportive of her mother. This was probably the highlight of my campaign.(Applause)But there was another one. These are preschool girls out on a walk, and they found a poster of me on a bus stop, and they saw the need to kiss it.Audience: Aw!This picture was really enough of a win for me. What we see, we can be. So screw fear and challenges.(Applause)It matters that women run, and it's time for women to run for office, be it the office of the CEO or the office of the president. I also managed to put an impression on your very own ""New Yorker."" I earned a new title, ""A living emoji of sincerity.""(Cheers)It is possibly my proudest title yet, and the reason is that women too often get penalized for using what I call their emotional capital, but I know from experience that we become so good when we do just that.(Applause)And we need more of that.We celebrated as if we had won on election night, because that's how we felt. So you don't necessarily have to reach that office. You just have to go for it, and you, your family, your friends, everyone working with you, if you do it well, you will grow beyond anything you will experience before.So we had a good time, and I learned a lot on this journey, probably more lessons than I can share here in the time we have today. But rest assured, it was hard work. I lost a lot of sleep during those months. It took resilience and perseverance to not quit, but I learned something that I knew before on the one percent day, and that is that you can only be good when you are truly, authentically listening to your own voice and working in alignment with that. As a good sister of mine sometimes says, you may cheat on your intuition, but your intuition never cheats on you.I think it's also very important, and you all know this, that on any journey you go on, it's the team you take along. It's having people around you who share your values, your vision, but are different in every other way. That's the formula for success for me, and I am blessed with an amazing husband, here today, an incredible family —(Applause)and great friends, and we came together as entrepreneurs in the political arena, and pulled something off that everyone said would be impossible. As a matter of fact, the leading PR expert told me before I made my decision that I would do well to get seven percent. I appreciated his perspective, because he was probably right, and he was basing it on valuable experience. But on the one percent day, I decided here to show him that he was wrong.It's very important to mention this, because I did lose a lot of sleep, and I worked hard, and so did the people with me. We can never go the distance if we forget to take care of ourselves. And it's two things that I think are very important in that, in surrounding yourself with people and practices that nourish you, but it's equally important, maybe even more important, to have the courage to get rid of people and practices that take away your energy, including the wonderful bloggers and commentators. I took a lot of support from others in doing this, and I made the decision to go high when others went low, and that's partly how I kept my energy going throughout all of this. And when I lost my energy for a moment — and I did from time to time, it wasn't easy — I went back to why I decided to run, and how I had decided to run my own race.I called it a 4G campaign, the G's representing the Icelandic words. And the first one is called ""Gagn."" I ran to do good, to be of service, and I wanted servant leadership to be at the center of how I worked and everybody else in the campaign. Second one is ""Gleði,"" or joy. I decided to enjoy the journey. There was a lot to be taken out of the journey, no matter if the destination was reached or not. And I tried my utmost to inspire others to do so as well. Third is ""Gagnsæi."" I was open to any questions. I kept no secrets, and it was all open, on Facebook and websites. Because I think if you're choosing your president, you deserve answers to your questions. Last but not least, I don't need to explain that in this room, we ran on the principle of Girlpower.(Cheers)I am incredibly glad that I had the courage to run, to risk failure but receive success on so many levels. I can't tell you that it was easy, but I can tell you, and I think my entire team will agree with me, that it was worth it.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Pat Mitchell: I'm not letting you go yet.Halla Tómasdóttir: What a great crowd.PM: I can't let you go without saying that probably everybody in the room is ready to move to Iceland and vote for you. But of course we probably can't vote there, but one thing we can get from Iceland and have always gotten is inspiration. I mean, I'm old enough to remember 1975 when all the Icelandic women walked out, and that really was a very big factor in launching the women's movement. You made a reference to it earlier. I'd love to bring the picture back up and just have us remember what it was like when a country came to a standstill. And then what you may not know because our American media did not report it, the Icelandic women walked out again on Monday. Right?HT: Yes, they did. PM: Can you tell us about that?HT: Yes, so 41 years after the original strike, we may be the best place in the world to be a woman, but our work isn't done. So at 2:38pm on Monday, women in Iceland left work, because that's when they had earned their day's salary.(Applause)What's really cool about this is that young women and men participated in greater numbers than before, because it is time that we close the pay gap.PM: So I'm not going to ask Halla to commit right now to what she's doing next, but I will say that you'd have a very large volunteer army should you decide to do that again. Thank you Halla.HT: Thank you all.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/halla_tomasdottir_it_s_time_for_women_to_run_for_office
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"Last year, three of my family members were gruesomely murdered in a hate crime. It goes without saying that it's really difficult for me to be here today, but my brother Deah, his wife Yusor, and her sister Razan don't give me much of a choice. I'm hopeful that by the end of this talk you will make a choice, and join me in standing up against hate.It's December 27, 2014: the morning of my brother's wedding day. He asks me to come over and comb his hair in preparation for his wedding photo shoot. A 23-year-old, six-foot-three basketball, particularly Steph Curry, fanatic —(Laughter)An American kid in dental school ready to take on the world. When Deah and Yusor have their first dance, I see the love in his eyes, her reciprocated joy, and my emotions begin to overwhelm me. I move to the back of the hall and burst into tears. And the second the song finishes playing, he beelines towards me, buries me into his arms and rocks me back and forth. Even in that moment, when everything was so distracting, he was attuned to me.He cups my face and says, ""Suzanne, I am who I am because of you. Thank you for everything. I love you.""About a month later, I'm back home in North Carolina for a short visit, and on the last evening, I run upstairs to Deah's room, eager to find out how he's feeling being a newly married man. With a big boyish smile he says, ""I'm so happy. I love her. She's an amazing girl."" And she is. At just 21, she'd recently been accepted to join Deah at UNC dental school. She shared his love for basketball, and at her urging, they started their honeymoon off attending their favorite team of the NBA, the LA Lakers. I mean, check out that form.(Laughter)I'll never forget that moment sitting there with him — how free he was in his happiness. My littler brother, a basketball-obsessed kid, had become and transformed into an accomplished young man. He was at the top of his dental school class, and alongside Yusor and Razan, was involved in local and international community service projects dedicated to the homeless and refugees, including a dental relief trip they were planning for Syrian refugees in Turkey.Razan, at just 19, used her creativity as an architectural engineering student to serve those around her, making care packages for the local homeless, among other projects. That is who they were.Standing there that night, I take a deep breath and look at Deah and tell him, ""I have never been more proud of you than I am in this moment."" He pulls me into his tall frame, hugs me goodnight, and I leave the next morning without waking him to go back to San Francisco. That is the last time I ever hug him.Ten days later, I'm on call at San Francisco General Hospital when I receive a barrage of vague text messages expressing condolences. Confused, I call my father, who calmly intones, ""There's been a shooting in Deah's neighborhood in Chapel Hill. It's on lock-down. That's all we know."" I hang up and quickly Google, ""shooting in Chapel Hill."" One hit comes up. Quote: ""Three people were shot in the back of the head and confirmed dead on the scene."" Something in me just knows. I fling out of my chair and faint onto the gritty hospital floor, wailing.I take the first red-eye out of San Francisco, numb and disoriented. I walk into my childhood home and faint into my parents' arms, sobbing. I then run up to Deah's room as I did so many times before, just looking for him, only to find a void that will never be filled.Investigation and autopsy reports eventually revealed the sequence of events. Deah had just gotten off the bus from class, Razan was visiting for dinner, already at home with Yusor. As they began to eat, they heard a knock on the door. When Deah opened it, their neighbor proceeded to fire multiple shots at him. According to 911 calls, the girls were heard screaming. The man turned towards the kitchen and fired a single shot into Yusor's hip, immobilizing her. He then approached her from behind, pressed the barrel of his gun against her head, and with a single bullet, lacerated her midbrain. He then turned towards Razan, who was screaming for her life, and, execution-style, with a single bullet to the back of the head, killed her. On his way out, he shot Deah one last time — a bullet in the mouth — for a total of eight bullets: two lodged in the head, two in his chest and the rest in his extremities.Deah, Yusor and Razan were executed in a place that was meant to be safe: their home. For months, this man had been harassing them: knocking on their door, brandishing his gun on a couple of occasions. His Facebook was cluttered with anti-religion posts. Yusor felt particularly threatened by him. As she was moving in, he told Yusor and her mom that he didn't like the way they looked. In response, Yusor's mom told her to be kind to her neighbor, that as he got to know them, he'd see them for who they were. I guess we've all become so numb to the hatred that we couldn't have ever imagined it turning into fatal violence.The man who murdered my brother turned himself in to the police shortly after the murders, saying he killed three kids, execution-style, over a parking dispute. The police issued a premature public statement that morning, echoing his claims without bothering to question it or further investigate. It turns out there was no parking dispute. There was no argument. No violation. But the damage was already done. In a 24-hour media cycle, the words ""parking dispute"" had already become the go-to sound bite.I sit on my brother's bed and remember his words, the words he gave me so freely and with so much love, ""I am who I am because of you."" That's what it takes for me to climb through my crippling grief and speak out. I cannot let my family's deaths be diminished to a segment that is barely discussed on local news. They were murdered by their neighbor because of their faith, because of a piece of cloth they chose to don on their heads, because they were visibly Muslim.Some of the rage I felt at the time was that if roles were reversed, and an Arab, Muslim or Muslim-appearing person had killed three white American college students execution-style, in their home, what would we have called it? A terrorist attack. When white men commit acts of violence in the US, they're lone wolves, mentally ill or driven by a parking dispute. I know that I have to give my family voice, and I do the only thing I know how: I send a Facebook message to everyone I know in media.A couple of hours later, in the midst of a chaotic house overflowing with friends and family, our neighbor Neal comes over, sits down next to my parents and asks, ""What can I do?"" Neal had over two decades of experience in journalism, but he makes it clear that he's not there in his capacity as journalist, but as a neighbor who wants to help. I ask him what he thinks we should do, given the bombardment of local media interview requests. He offers to set up a press conference at a local community center. Even now I don't have the words to thank him. ""Just tell me when, and I'll have all the news channels present,"" he said.He did for us what we could not do for ourselves in a moment of devastation. I delivered the press statement, still wearing scrubs from the previous night. And in under 24 hours from the murders, I'm on CNN being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. The following day, major newspapers — including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune — published stories about Deah, Yusor and Razan, allowing us to reclaim the narrative and call attention the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hatred.These days, it feels like Islamophobia is a socially acceptable form of bigotry. We just have to put up with it and smile. The nasty stares, the palpable fear when boarding a plane, the random pat downs at airports that happen 99 percent of the time.It doesn't stop there. We have politicians reaping political and financial gains off our backs. Here in the US, we have presidential candidates like Donald Trump, casually calling to register American Muslims, and ban Muslim immigrants and refugees from entering this country. It is no coincidence that hate crimes rise in parallel with election cycles.Just a couple months ago, Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-American Christian, was murdered in Oklahoma by his neighbor — a man who called him a ""filthy Arab."" This man was previously jailed for a mere 8 months, after attempting run over Khalid's mother with his car. Chances are you haven't heard Khalid's story, because it didn't make it to national news. The least we can do is call it what it is: a hate crime. The least we can do is talk about it, because violence and hatred doesn't just happen in a vacuum.Not long after coming back to work, I'm the senior on rounds in the hospital, when one of my patients looks over at my colleague, gestures around her face and says, ""San Bernardino,"" referencing a recent terrorist attack. Here I am having just lost three family members to Islamophobia, having been a vocal advocate within my program on how to deal with such microaggressions, and yet — silence. I was disheartened. Humiliated.Days later rounding on the same patient, she looks at me and says, ""Your people are killing people in Los Angeles."" I look around expectantly. Again: silence. I realize that yet again, I have to speak up for myself. I sit on her bed and gently ask her, ""Have I ever done anything but treat you with respect and kindness? Have I done anything but give you compassionate care?"" She looks down and realizes what she said was wrong, and in front of the entire team, she apologizes and says, ""I should know better. I'm Mexican-American. I receive this kind of treatment all the time.""Many of us experience microaggressions on a daily basis. Odds are you may have experienced it, whether for your race, gender, sexuality or religious beliefs. We've all been in situations where we've witnessed something wrong and didn't speak up. Maybe we weren't equipped with the tools to respond in the moment. Maybe we weren't even aware of our own implicit biases. We can all agree that bigotry is unacceptable, but when we see it, we're silent, because it makes us uncomfortable.But stepping right into that discomfort means you are also stepping into the ally zone. There may be over three million Muslims in America. That's still just one percent of the total population. Martin Luther King once said, ""In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.""So what made my neighbor Neal's allyship so profound? A couple of things. He was there as a neighbor who cared, but he was also bringing in his professional expertise and resources when the moment called for it. Others have done the same. Larycia Hawkins drew on her platform as the first tenured African-American professor at Wheaton College to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women who face discrimination every day. As a result, she lost her job. Within a month, she joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she now works on pluralism, race, faith and culture.Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, demonstrated that not all active allyship needs to be so serious. He stepped up to support a 15-year-old Muslim girl's mission to introduce a hijab emoji.(Laughter)It's a simple gesture, but it has a significant subconscious impact on normalizing and humanizing Muslims, including the community as a part of an ""us"" instead of an ""other."" The editor in chief of Women's Running magazine just put the first hijabi to ever be on the cover of a US fitness magazine. These are all very different examples of people who drew upon their platforms and resources in academia, tech and media, to actively express their allyship.What resources and expertise do you bring to the table? Are you willing to step into your discomfort and speak up when you witness hateful bigotry? Will you be Neal?Many neighbors appeared in this story. And you, in your respective communities, all have a Muslim neighbor, colleague or friend your child plays with at school. Reach out to them. Let them know you stand with them in solidarity. It may feel really small, but I promise you it makes a difference.Nothing will ever bring back Deah, Yusor and Razan. But when we raise our collective voices, that is when we stop the hate.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_barakat_islamophobia_killed_my_brother_let_s_end_the_hate
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"Chris Anderson: So, Jon, this feels scary.Jonathan Haidt: Yeah.CA: It feels like the world is in a place that we haven't seen for a long time. People don't just disagree in the way that we're familiar with, on the left-right political divide. There are much deeper differences afoot. What on earth is going on, and how did we get here?JH: This is different. There's a much more apocalyptic sort of feeling. Survey research by Pew Research shows that the degree to which we feel that the other side is not just — we don't just dislike them; we strongly dislike them, and we think that they are a threat to the nation. Those numbers have been going up and up, and those are over 50 percent now on both sides. People are scared, because it feels like this is different than before; it's much more intense.Whenever I look at any sort of social puzzle, I always apply the three basic principles of moral psychology, and I think they'll help us here. So the first thing that you have to always keep in mind when you're thinking about politics is that we're tribal. We evolved for tribalism. One of the simplest and greatest insights into human social nature is the Bedouin proverb: ""Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me and my brother and cousins against the stranger."" And that tribalism allowed us to create large societies and to come together in order to compete with others. That brought us out of the jungle and out of small groups, but it means that we have eternal conflict. The question you have to look at is: What aspects of our society are making that more bitter, and what are calming them down?CA: That's a very dark proverb. You're saying that that's actually baked into most people's mental wiring at some level?JH: Oh, absolutely. This is just a basic aspect of human social cognition. But we can also live together really peacefully, and we've invented all kinds of fun ways of, like, playing war. I mean, sports, politics — these are all ways that we get to exercise this tribal nature without actually hurting anyone. We're also really good at trade and exploration and meeting new people. So you have to see our tribalism as something that goes up or down — it's not like we're doomed to always be fighting each other, but we'll never have world peace.CA: The size of that tribe can shrink or expand.JH: Right.CA: The size of what we consider ""us"" and what we consider ""other"" or ""them"" can change. And some people believed that process could continue indefinitely.JH: That's right.CA: And we were indeed expanding the sense of tribe for a while.JH: So this is, I think, where we're getting at what's possibly the new left-right distinction. I mean, the left-right as we've all inherited it, comes out of the labor versus capital distinction, and the working class, and Marx. But I think what we're seeing now, increasingly, is a divide in all the Western democracies between the people who want to stop at nation, the people who are more parochial — and I don't mean that in a bad way — people who have much more of a sense of being rooted, they care about their town, their community and their nation. And then those who are anti-parochial and who — whenever I get confused, I just think of the John Lennon song ""Imagine."" ""Imagine there's no countries, nothing to kill or die for."" And so these are the people who want more global governance, they don't like nation states, they don't like borders. You see this all over Europe as well. There's a great metaphor guy — actually, his name is Shakespeare — writing ten years ago in Britain. He had a metaphor: ""Are we drawbridge-uppers or drawbridge-downers?"" And Britain is divided 52-48 on that point. And America is divided on that point, too.CA: And so, those of us who grew up with The Beatles and that sort of hippie philosophy of dreaming of a more connected world — it felt so idealistic and ""how could anyone think badly about that?"" And what you're saying is that, actually, millions of people today feel that that isn't just silly; it's actually dangerous and wrong, and they're scared of it.JH: I think the big issue, especially in Europe but also here, is the issue of immigration. And I think this is where we have to look very carefully at the social science about diversity and immigration. Once something becomes politicized, once it becomes something that the left loves and the right — then even the social scientists can't think straight about it. Now, diversity is good in a lot of ways. It clearly creates more innovation. The American economy has grown enormously from it. Diversity and immigration do a lot of good things. But what the globalists, I think, don't see, what they don't want to see, is that ethnic diversity cuts social capital and trust.There's a very important study by Robert Putnam, the author of ""Bowling Alone,"" looking at social capital databases. And basically, the more people feel that they are the same, the more they trust each other, the more they can have a redistributionist welfare state. Scandinavian countries are so wonderful because they have this legacy of being small, homogenous countries. And that leads to a progressive welfare state, a set of progressive left-leaning values, which says, ""Drawbridge down! The world is a great place. People in Syria are suffering — we must welcome them in."" And it's a beautiful thing. But if, and I was in Sweden this summer, if the discourse in Sweden is fairly politically correct and they can't talk about the downsides, you end up bringing a lot of people in. That's going to cut social capital, it makes it hard to have a welfare state and they might end up, as we have in America, with a racially divided, visibly racially divided, society. So this is all very uncomfortable to talk about. But I think this is the thing, especially in Europe and for us, too, we need to be looking at.CA: You're saying that people of reason, people who would consider themselves not racists, but moral, upstanding people, have a rationale that says humans are just too different; that we're in danger of overloading our sense of what humans are capable of, by mixing in people who are too different.JH: Yes, but I can make it much more palatable by saying it's not necessarily about race. It's about culture. There's wonderful work by a political scientist named Karen Stenner, who shows that when people have a sense that we are all united, we're all the same, there are many people who have a predisposition to authoritarianism. Those people aren't particularly racist when they feel as through there's not a threat to our social and moral order. But if you prime them experimentally by thinking we're coming apart, people are getting more different, then they get more racist, homophobic, they want to kick out the deviants. So it's in part that you get an authoritarian reaction. The left, following through the Lennonist line — the John Lennon line — does things that create an authoritarian reaction.We're certainly seeing that in America with the alt-right. We saw it in Britain, we've seen it all over Europe. But the more positive part of that is that I think the localists, or the nationalists, are actually right — that, if you emphasize our cultural similarity, then race doesn't actually matter very much. So an assimilationist approach to immigration removes a lot of these problems. And if you value having a generous welfare state, you've got to emphasize that we're all the same.CA: OK, so rising immigration and fears about that are one of the causes of the current divide. What are other causes?JH: The next principle of moral psychology is that intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. You've probably heard the term ""motivated reasoning"" or ""confirmation bias."" There's some really interesting work on how our high intelligence and our verbal abilities might have evolved not to help us find out the truth, but to help us manipulate each other, defend our reputation ... We're really, really good at justifying ourselves. And when you bring group interests into account, so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team, whereas if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong, we just can't accept that. So this is why you can't win a political argument. If you're debating something, you can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence, because that's not the way reasoning works. So now, give us the internet, give us Google: ""I heard that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Let me Google that — oh my God! 10 million hits! Look, he was!""CA: So this has come as an unpleasant surprise to a lot of people. Social media has often been framed by techno-optimists as this great connecting force that would bring people together. And there have been some unexpected counter-effects to that.JH: That's right. That's why I'm very enamored of yin-yang views of human nature and left-right — that each side is right about certain things, but then it goes blind to other things. And so the left generally believes that human nature is good: bring people together, knock down the walls and all will be well. The right — social conservatives, not libertarians — social conservatives generally believe people can be greedy and sexual and selfish, and we need regulation, and we need restrictions. So, yeah, if you knock down all the walls, allow people to communicate all over the world, you get a lot of porn and a lot of racism.CA: So help us understand. These principles of human nature have been with us forever. What's changed that's deepened this feeling of division?JH: You have to see six to ten different threads all coming together. I'll just list a couple of them. So in America, one of the big — actually, America and Europe — one of the biggest ones is World War II. There's interesting research from Joe Henrich and others that says if your country was at war, especially when you were young, then we test you 30 years later in a commons dilemma or a prisoner's dilemma, you're more cooperative. Because of our tribal nature, if you're — my parents were teenagers during World War II, and they would go out looking for scraps of aluminum to help the war effort. I mean, everybody pulled together. And so then these people go on, they rise up through business and government, they take leadership positions. They're really good at compromise and cooperation. They all retire by the '90s. So we're left with baby boomers by the end of the '90s. And their youth was spent fighting each other within each country, in 1968 and afterwards. The loss of the World War II generation, ""The Greatest Generation,"" is huge. So that's one.Another, in America, is the purification of the two parties. There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. So America had a mid-20th century that was really bipartisan. But because of a variety of factors that started things moving, by the 90's, we had a purified liberal party and conservative party. So now, the people in either party really are different, and we really don't want our children to marry them, which, in the '60s, didn't matter very much. So, the purification of the parties. Third is the internet and, as I said, it's just the most amazing stimulant for post-hoc reasoning and demonization.CA: The tone of what's happening on the internet now is quite troubling. I just did a quick search on Twitter about the election and saw two tweets next to each other. One, against a picture of racist graffiti: ""This is disgusting! Ugliness in this country, brought to us by #Trump."" And then the next one is: ""Crooked Hillary dedication page. Disgusting!"" So this idea of ""disgust"" is troubling to me. Because you can have an argument or a disagreement about something, you can get angry at someone. Disgust, I've heard you say, takes things to a much deeper level.JH: That's right. Disgust is different. Anger — you know, I have kids. They fight 10 times a day, and they love each other 30 times a day. You just go back and forth: you get angry, you're not angry; you're angry, you're not angry. But disgust is different. Disgust paints the person as subhuman, monstrous, deformed, morally deformed. Disgust is like indelible ink. There's research from John Gottman on marital therapy. If you look at the faces — if one of the couple shows disgust or contempt, that's a predictor that they're going to get divorced soon, whereas if they show anger, that doesn't predict anything, because if you deal with anger well, it actually is good.So this election is different. Donald Trump personally uses the word ""disgust"" a lot. He's very germ-sensitive, so disgust does matter a lot — more for him, that's something unique to him — but as we demonize each other more, and again, through the Manichaean worldview, the idea that the world is a battle between good and evil as this has been ramping up, we're more likely not just to say they're wrong or I don't like them, but we say they're evil, they're satanic, they're disgusting, they're revolting. And then we want nothing to do with them. And that's why I think we're seeing it, for example, on campus now. We're seeing more the urge to keep people off campus, silence them, keep them away. I'm afraid that this whole generation of young people, if their introduction to politics involves a lot of disgust, they're not going to want to be involved in politics as they get older.CA: So how do we deal with that? Disgust. How do you defuse disgust?JH: You can't do it with reasons. I think ... I studied disgust for many years, and I think about emotions a lot. And I think that the opposite of disgust is actually love. Love is all about, like ... Disgust is closing off, borders. Love is about dissolving walls. So personal relationships, I think, are probably the most powerful means we have. You can be disgusted by a group of people, but then you meet a particular person and you genuinely discover that they're lovely. And then gradually that chips away or changes your category as well. The tragedy is, Americans used to be much more mixed up in the their towns by left-right or politics. And now that it's become this great moral divide, there's a lot of evidence that we're moving to be near people who are like us politically. It's harder to find somebody who's on the other side. So they're over there, they're far away. It's harder to get to know them.CA: What would you say to someone or say to Americans, people generally, about what we should understand about each other that might help us rethink for a minute this ""disgust"" instinct?JH: Yes. A really important thing to keep in mind — there's research by political scientist Alan Abramowitz, showing that American democracy is increasingly governed by what's called ""negative partisanship."" That means you think, OK there's a candidate, you like the candidate, you vote for the candidate. But with the rise of negative advertising and social media and all sorts of other trends, increasingly, the way elections are done is that each side tries to make the other side so horrible, so awful, that you'll vote for my guy by default.And so as we more and more vote against the other side and not for our side, you have to keep in mind that if people are on the left, they think, ""Well, I used to think that Republicans were bad, but now Donald Trump proves it. And now every Republican, I can paint with all the things that I think about Trump."" And that's not necessarily true. They're generally not very happy with their candidate.This is the most negative partisanship election in American history. So you have to first separate your feelings about the candidate from your feelings about the people who are given a choice. And then you have to realize that, because we all live in a separate moral world — the metaphor I use in the book is that we're all trapped in ""The Matrix,"" or each moral community is a matrix, a consensual hallucination. And so if you're within the blue matrix, everything's completely compelling that the other side — they're troglodytes, they're racists, they're the worst people in the world, and you have all the facts to back that up. But somebody in the next house from yours is living in a different moral matrix. They live in a different video game, and they see a completely different set of facts. And each one sees different threats to the country. And what I've found from being in the middle and trying to understand both sides is: both sides are right. There are a lot of threats to this country, and each side is constitutionally incapable of seeing them all.CA: So, are you saying that we almost need a new type of empathy? Empathy is traditionally framed as: ""Oh, I feel your pain. I can put myself in your shoes."" And we apply it to the poor, the needy, the suffering. We don't usually apply it to people who we feel as other, or we're disgusted by.JH: No. That's right.CA: What would it look like to build that type of empathy?JH: Actually, I think ... Empathy is a very, very hot topic in psychology, and it's a very popular word on the left in particular. Empathy is a good thing, and empathy for the preferred classes of victims. So it's important to empathize with the groups that we on the left think are so important. That's easy to do, because you get points for that.But empathy really should get you points if you do it when it's hard to do. And, I think ... You know, we had a long 50-year period of dealing with our race problems and legal discrimination, and that was our top priority for a long time and it still is important. But I think this year, I'm hoping it will make people see that we have an existential threat on our hands. Our left-right divide, I believe, is by far the most important divide we face. We still have issues about race and gender and LGBT, but this is the urgent need of the next 50 years, and things aren't going to get better on their own. So we're going to need to do a lot of institutional reforms, and we could talk about that, but that's like a whole long, wonky conversation. But I think it starts with people realizing that this is a turning point. And yes, we need a new kind of empathy. We need to realize: this is what our country needs, and this is what you need if you don't want to — Raise your hand if you want to spend the next four years as angry and worried as you've been for the last year — raise your hand. So if you want to escape from this, read Buddha, read Jesus, read Marcus Aurelius. They have all kinds of great advice for how to drop the fear, reframe things, stop seeing other people as your enemy. There's a lot of guidance in ancient wisdom for this kind of empathy.CA: Here's my last question: Personally, what can people do to help heal?JH: Yeah, it's very hard to just decide to overcome your deepest prejudices. And there's research showing that political prejudices are deeper and stronger than race prejudices in the country now. So I think you have to make an effort — that's the main thing. Make an effort to actually meet somebody. Everybody has a cousin, a brother-in-law, somebody who's on the other side. So, after this election — wait a week or two, because it's probably going to feel awful for one of you — but wait a couple weeks, and then reach out and say you want to talk. And before you do it, read Dale Carnegie, ""How to Win Friends and Influence People"" —(Laughter)I'm totally serious. You'll learn techniques if you start by acknowledging, if you start by saying, ""You know, we don't agree on a lot, but one thing I really respect about you, Uncle Bob,"" or ""... about you conservatives, is ... "" And you can find something. If you start with some appreciation, it's like magic. This is one of the main things I've learned that I take into my human relationships. I still make lots of stupid mistakes, but I'm incredibly good at apologizing now, and at acknowledging what somebody was right about. And if you do that, then the conversation goes really well, and it's actually really fun.CA: Jon, it's absolutely fascinating speaking with you. It really does feel like the ground that we're on is a ground populated by deep questions of morality and human nature. Your wisdom couldn't be more relevant. Thank you so much for sharing this time with us.JH: Thanks, Chris.JH: Thanks, everyone.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_can_a_divided_america_heal
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"I design engineering projects for middle school and high school students, often using materials that are pretty unexpected. My inspiration comes from problems in my daily life. For example, one time I needed a costume to go to a comic convention, but I didn't want to spend too much money, so I made my own ... with a light-up crown and skirt.(Laughter)Another time, I was devastated because my favorite mobile game, Flappy Bird, was being taken off the app store.(Laughter)So I was faced with the dilemma to either never update my phone or never play Flappy Bird again.(Laughter)Unhappy with both options, I did the only thing that made sense to me. I made a physical version of Flappy Bird that could never be taken off the app store.(Laughter)(Music)(Beeping)(Music)(Laughter)So a few of my friends were also pretty addicted to the game, and I invited them to play as well.(Video) Friend: Ah!(Laughter)(Video) Friend: What the heck?(Laughter)And they told me that it was just as infuriating as the original game.(Laughter)So I uploaded a demo of this project online, and to my surprise it went viral. It had over two million views in just a few days.(Laughter)And what's more interesting are people's comments. A lot of people wanted to make it their own, or asked me how it was made. So this kind of confirmed my idea that through a creative project, we can teach people about engineering.With the money made from the viral video, we were able to let students in our classroom all make their own game in a box. Although it was pretty challenging, they learned a lot of new concepts in engineering and programming. And they were all eager to learn so they could finish the game as well.(Laughter)So before Flappy Bird Box, I had the idea of using creative engineering projects to teach students. When I was teaching at a middle school, we asked our students to build a robot from a standard technology kit. And I noticed that a lot of them seemed bored. Then a few of them started taking pieces of paper and decorating their robots. And then more of them got into it, and they became more interested in the project. So I started looking for more creative ways to introduce technology to students. What I found was that most technology kits available in school look a little intimidating. They're all made of plastic parts that you can't customize. On top of that, they're all very expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per kit. So that's certainly not very affordable for most classroom budgets.Since I didn't find anything, I decided to make something on my own. I started with paper and fabric. After all, we all played with those since we were kids, and they are also pretty cheap and can be found anywhere around the house. And I prototyped a project where students can create a light-up creature using fabric and googly eyes. They were all helping each other in classrooms, and were laughing and discussing the project. And most importantly, they were able to insert their own creativity into the project.So because of the success of this project, I continued to create more engineering projects to challenge my students. And I also started to take these workshops outside of school and into the community. And something really interesting happened. I noticed a lot of people from very diverse backgrounds started coming to our workshops. And specifically, there were a lot more women and minorities than I expected, and that you wouldn't usually see at a traditional engineering workshop.Now take a look at this employee report at a major technology company in 2016. Women make up only 19 percent of the technology workforce. And underrepresented minorities make up only four percent. This statistic might look familiar if you walked into a high school robotics club, or a college engineering class.Now, there's a wide variety of problems that contribute to the lack of diversity in the technology force. Perhaps one solution could be to introduce technology to students through creative projects. I'm not saying that this could solve everything, but it could introduce technology to people who originally wouldn't be interested in it because of how it has been portrayed and taught in school.So how do we start to change the perception of technology? Most students think that it's boring or unwelcoming, so I have always designed projects following three principles. First is having a low floor, and that means this project is easy to get started. So take a look at this tutorial. The first project we asked students to learn is to make a circuit on paper. As you can see, it doesn't take very long to learn, and it's pretty easy even for beginners. And having a low floor also means that we're removing the financial barrier that prevents people from completing a project. So with paper, copper tape, lightbulb and a battery, people can complete this project for under a dollar.So second principle is having a high ceiling. This means that there's a lot of room to grow, and students are constantly being challenged. At first it might just be a light-up creature, but then you can add sensors and microcontrollers, and start to program the creature to interact with its environment.(Laughter)And finally, the third principle is customization. This means that we can make this project relevant to anyone. That's the beauty of using everyday materials; it's very easy to customize using paper and fabric. So even if you don't like Flappy Bird, you can still make your own game.(Video) Student: So our game is about Justin Bieber, because he's been speeding, and the object is to prevent him from getting caught by the LAPD —(Laughter)(Video) Student: Yeah, but he's changing so — we're a part of his posse.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/fawn_qiu_easy_diy_projects_for_kid_engineers
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"Carlos, the Vietnam vet Marine who volunteered for three tours and got shot up in every one. In 1971, he was medically retired because he had so much shrapnel in his body that he was setting off metal detectors. For the next 42 years, he suffered from nightmares, extreme anxiety in public, isolation, depression. He self-medicated with alcohol. He was married and divorced three times. Carlos had post-traumatic stress disorder.Now, I became a psychologist to help mitigate human suffering, and for the past 10 years, my target has been the suffering caused by PTSD, as experienced by veterans like Carlos. Until recently, the science of PTSD just wasn't there. And so, we didn't know what to do. We put some veterans on heavy drugs. Others we hospitalized and gave generic group therapy, and others still we simply said to them, ""Just go home and try to forget about your experiences."" More recently, we've tried therapy dogs, wilderness retreats — many things which may temporarily relieve stress, but which don't actually eliminate PTSD symptoms over the long term.But things have changed. And I am here to tell you that we can now eliminate PTSD, not just manage the symptoms, and in huge numbers of veterans. Because new scientific research has been able to show, objectively, repeatedly, which treatments actually get rid of symptoms and which do not.Now as it turns out, the best treatments for PTSD use many of the very same training principles that the military uses in preparing its trainees for war.Now, making war — this is something that we are good at. We humans have been making war since before we were even fully human. And since then, we have gone from using stone and sinew to developing the most sophisticated and devastating weapon systems imaginable. And to enable our warriors to use these weapons, we employ the most cutting-edge training methods. We are good at making war. And we are good at training our warriors to fight.Yet, when we consider the experience of the modern-day combat veteran, we begin to see that we have not been as good at preparing them to come home. Why is that? Well, our ancestors lived immersed in conflict, and they fought right where they lived. So until only very recently in our evolutionary history, there was hardly a need to learn how to come home from war, because we never really did. But thankfully, today, most of humanity lives in far more peaceful societies, and when there is conflict, we, especially in the United States, now have the technology to put our warriors through advanced training, drop them in to fight anywhere on the globe and when they're done, jet them back to peacetime suburbia.But just imagine for a moment what this must feel like. I've spoken with veterans who've told me that one day they're in a brutal firefight in Afghanistan where they saw carnage and death, and just three days later, they found themselves toting an ice chest to their kid's soccer game. ""Mindfuck"" is the most common term.(Laughter)It's the most common term I've heard to describe that experience. And that's exactly what that is. Because while our warriors spend countless hours training for war, we've only recently come to understand that many require training on how to return to civilian life.Now, like any training, the best PTSD treatments require repetition. In the military, we don't simply hand trainees Mark-19 automatic grenade launchers and say, ""Here's the trigger, here's some ammo and good luck."" No. We train them, on the range and in specific contexts, over and over and over until lifting their weapon and engaging their target is so engrained into muscle memory that it can be performed without even thinking, even under the most stressful conditions you can imagine.Now, the same holds for training-based treatments. The first of these treatments is cognitive therapy, and this is a kind of mental recalibration. When veterans come home from war, their way of mentally framing the world is calibrated to an immensely more dangerous environment. So when you try to overlay that mind frame onto a peacetime environment, you get problems. You begin drowning in worries about dangers that aren't present. You begin not trusting family or friends. Which is not to say there are no dangers in civilian life; there are. It's just that the probability of encountering them compared to combat is astronomically lower.So we never advise veterans to turn off caution completely. We do train them, however, to adjust caution according to where they are. If you find yourself in a bad neighborhood, you turn it up. Out to dinner with family? You turn it way down. We train veterans to be fiercely rational, to systematically gauge the actual statistical probability of encountering, say, an IED here in peacetime America. With enough practice, those recalibrations stick.The next of these treatments is exposure therapy, and this is a kind of field training, and the fastest of the proven effective treatments out there.You remember Carlos? This was the treatment that he chose. And so we started off by giving him exercises, for him, challenging ones: going to a grocery store, going to a shopping mall, going to a restaurant, sitting with his back to the door. And, critically — staying in these environments. Now, at first he was very anxious. He wanted to sit where he could scan the room, where he could plan escape routes, where he could get his hands on a makeshift weapon. And he wanted to leave, but he didn't. He remembered his training in the Marine Corps, and he pushed through his discomfort. And every time he did this, his anxiety ratcheted down a little bit, and then a little bit more and then a little bit more, until in the end, he had effectively relearned how to sit in a public space and just enjoy himself.He also listened to recordings of his combat experiences, over and over and over. He listened until those memories no longer generated any anxiety. He processed his memories so much that his brain no longer needed to return to those experiences in his sleep. And when I spoke with him a year after treatment had finished, he told me, ""Doc, this is the first time in 43 years that I haven't had nightmares.""Now, this is different than erasing a memory. Veterans will always remember their traumatic experiences, but with enough practice, those memories are no longer as raw or as painful as they once were. They don't feel emotionally like they just happened yesterday, and that is an immensely better place to be.But it's often difficult. And, like any training, it may not work for everybody. And there are trust issues. Sometimes I'm asked, ""If you haven't been there, Doc, how can you help me?"" Which is understandable. But at the point of returning to civilian life, you do not require somebody who's been there. You don't require training for operations on the battlefield; you require training on how to come home.For the past 10 years of my work, I have been exposed to detailed accounts of the worst experiences that you can imagine, daily. And it hasn't always been easy. There have been times where I have just felt my heart break or that I've absorbed too much. But these training-based treatments work so well, that whatever this work takes out of me, it puts back even more, because I see people get better. I see people's lives transform.Carlos can now enjoy outings with his grandchildren, which is something he couldn't even do with his own children. And what's amazing to me is that after 43 years of suffering, it only took him 10 weeks of intense training to get his life back. And when I spoke with him, he told me, ""I know that I can't get those years back. But at least now, whatever days that I have left on this Earth, I can live them in peace."" He also said, ""I hope that these younger veterans don't wait to get the help they need."" And that's my hope, too. Because ... this life is short, and if you are fortunate enough to have survived war or any kind of traumatic experience, you owe it to yourself to live your life well. And you shouldn't wait to get the training you need to make that happen.Now, the best way of ending human suffering caused by war is to never go to war. But we are just not there yet as a species. Until we are, the mental suffering that we create in our sons and in our daughters when we send them off to fight can be alleviated. But we must ensure that the science, the energy level, the value that we place on sending them off to war is at the very least mirrored in how well we prepare them to come back home to us. This much, we owe them.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/hector_garcia_we_train_soldiers_for_war_let_s_train_them_to_come_home_too
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"I'd like to try something new. Those of you who are able, please stand up. OK, so I'm going to name some names. When you hear a name that you don't recognize, you can't tell me anything about them, I'd like you to take a seat and stay seated. The last person standing, we're going to see what they know. OK?(Laughter)All right. Eric Garner. Mike Brown. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray.So those of you who are still standing, I'd like you to turn around and take a look. I'd say half to most of the people are still standing. So let's continue.Michelle Cusseaux. Tanisha Anderson. Aura Rosser. Meagan Hockaday.So if we look around again, there are about four people still standing, and actually I'm not going to put you on the spot. I just say that to encourage transparency, so you can be seated.(Laughter)So those of you who recognized the first group of names know that these were African-Americans who have been killed by the police over the last two and a half years. What you may not know is that the other list is also African-Americans who have been killed within the last two years. Only one thing distinguishes the names that you know from the names that you don't know: gender.So let me first let you know that there's nothing at all distinct about this audience that explains the pattern of recognition that we've just seen. I've done this exercise dozens of times around the country. I've done it to women's rights organizations. I've done it with civil rights groups. I've done it with professors. I've done it with students. I've done it with psychologists. I've done it with sociologists. I've done it even with progressive members of Congress. And everywhere, the awareness of the level of police violence that black women experience is exceedingly low.Now, it is surprising, isn't it, that this would be the case. I mean, there are two issues involved here. There's police violence against African-Americans, and there's violence against women, two issues that have been talked about a lot lately. But when we think about who is implicated by these problems, when we think about who is victimized by these problems, the names of these black women never come to mind.Now, communications experts tell us that when facts do not fit with the available frames, people have a difficult time incorporating new facts into their way of thinking about a problem. These women's names have slipped through our consciousness because there are no frames for us to see them, no frames for us to remember them, no frames for us to hold them. As a consequence, reporters don't lead with them, policymakers don't think about them, and politicians aren't encouraged or demanded that they speak to them.Now, you might ask, why does a frame matter? I mean, after all, an issue that affects black people and an issue that affects women, wouldn't that necessarily include black people who are women and women who are black people? Well, the simple answer is that this is a trickle-down approach to social justice, and many times it just doesn't work. Without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all the members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements, left to suffer in virtual isolation. But it doesn't have to be this way.Many years ago, I began to use the term ""intersectionality"" to deal with the fact that many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice.Now, the experience that gave rise to intersectionality was my chance encounter with a woman named Emma DeGraffenreid. Emma DeGraffenreid was an African-American woman, a working wife and a mother. I actually read about Emma's story from the pages of a legal opinion written by a judge who had dismissed Emma's claim of race and gender discrimination against a local car manufacturing plant. Emma, like so many African-American women, sought better employment for her family and for others. She wanted to create a better life for her children and for her family. But she applied for a job, and she was not hired, and she believed that she was not hired because she was a black woman.Now, the judge in question dismissed Emma's suit, and the argument for dismissing the suit was that the employer did hire African-Americans and the employer hired women. The real problem, though, that the judge was not willing to acknowledge was what Emma was actually trying to say, that the African-Americans that were hired, usually for industrial jobs, maintenance jobs, were all men. And the women that were hired, usually for secretarial or front-office work, were all white. Only if the court was able to see how these policies came together would he be able to see the double discrimination that Emma DeGraffenreid was facing. But the court refused to allow Emma to put two causes of action together to tell her story because he believed that, by allowing her to do that, she would be able to have preferential treatment. She would have an advantage by having two swings at the bat, when African-American men and white women only had one swing at the bat. But of course, neither African-American men or white women needed to combine a race and gender discrimination claim to tell the story of the discrimination they were experiencing. Why wasn't the real unfairness law's refusal to protect African-American women simply because their experiences weren't exactly the same as white women and African-American men? Rather than broadening the frame to include African-American women, the court simply tossed their case completely out of court.Now, as a student of antidiscrimination law, as a feminist, as an antiracist, I was struck by this case. It felt to me like injustice squared. So first of all, black women weren't allowed to work at the plant. Second of all, the court doubled down on this exclusion by making it legally inconsequential. And to boot, there was no name for this problem. And we all know that, where there's no name for a problem, you can't see a problem, and when you can't see a problem, you pretty much can't solve it.Many years later, I had come to recognize that the problem that Emma was facing was a framing problem. The frame that the court was using to see gender discrimination or to see race discrimination was partial, and it was distorting. For me, the challenge that I faced was trying to figure out whether there was an alternative narrative, a prism that would allow us to see Emma's dilemma, a prism that would allow us to rescue her from the cracks in the law, that would allow judges to see her story.So it occurred to me, maybe a simple analogy to an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma's dilemma. So if we think about this intersection, the roads to the intersection would be the way that the workforce was structured by race and by gender. And then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and the other practices that ran through those roads. Now, because Emma was both black and female, she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company's gender and race traffic. The law — the law is like that ambulance that shows up and is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or on the gender road but not where those roads intersected.So what do you call being impacted by multiple forces and then abandoned to fend for yourself? Intersectionality seemed to do it for me.I would go on to learn that African-American women, like other women of color, like other socially marginalized people all over the world, were facing all kinds of dilemmas and challenges as a consequence of intersectionality, intersections of race and gender, of heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, all of these social dynamics come together and create challenges that are sometimes quite unique. But in the same way that intersectionality raised our awareness to the way that black women live their lives, it also exposes the tragic circumstances under which African-American women die.Police violence against black women is very real. The level of violence that black women face is such that it's not surprising that some of them do not survive their encounters with police. Black girls as young as seven, great grandmothers as old as 95 have been killed by the police. They've been killed in their living rooms, in their bedrooms. They've been killed in their cars. They've been killed on the street. They've been killed in front of their parents and they've been killed in front of their children. They have been shot to death. They have been stomped to death. They have been suffocated to death. They have been manhandled to death. They have been tasered to death. They've been killed when they've called for help. They've been killed when they were alone, and they've been killed when they were with others. They've been killed shopping while black, driving while black, having a mental disability while black, having a domestic disturbance while black. They've even been killed being homeless while black. They've been killed talking on the cell phone, laughing with friends, sitting in a car reported as stolen and making a U-turn in front of the White House with an infant strapped in the backseat of the car. Why don't we know these stories? Why is it that their lost lives don't generate the same amount of media attention and communal outcry as the lost lives of their fallen brothers? It's time for a change.So what can we do? In 2014, the African-American Policy Forum began to demand that we ""say her name"" at rallies, at protests, at conferences, at meetings, anywhere and everywhere that state violence against black bodies is being discussed. But saying her name is not enough. We have to be willing to do more. We have to be willing to bear witness, to bear witness to the often painful realities that we would just rather not confront, the everyday violence and humiliation that many black women have had to face, black women across color, age, gender expression, sexuality and ability.So we have the opportunity right now — bearing in mind that some of the images that I'm about to share with you may be triggering for some — to collectively bear witness to some of this violence. We're going to hear the voice of the phenomenal Abby Dobson. And as we sit with these women, some who have experienced violence and some who have not survived them, we have an opportunity to reverse what happened at the beginning of this talk, when we could not stand for these women because we did not know their names.So at the end of this clip, there's going to be a roll call. Several black women's names will come up. I'd like those of you who are able to join us in saying these names as loud as you can, randomly, disorderly. Let's create a cacophony of sound to represent our intention to hold these women up, to sit with them, to bear witness to them, to bring them into the light.(Singing) Abby Dobson: Say, say her name.Say, say her name.(Audience) Shelly!(Audience) Kayla!AD: Oh, say her name.(Audience shouting names)Say, say, say her name.Say her name.For all the names I'll never know,say her name.KC: Aiyanna Stanley Jones, Janisha Fonville, Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore, Michelle Cusseaux, Rekia Boyd, Shelly Frey, Tarika, Yvette Smith.AD: Say her name.KC: So I said at the beginning, if we can't see a problem, we can't fix a problem. Together, we've come together to bear witness to these women's lost lives. But the time now is to move from mourning and grief to action and transformation. This is something that we can do. It's up to us.Thank you for joining us. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality
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"Economists have been exploring people's behavior for hundreds of years: how we make decisions, how we act individually and in groups, how we exchange value. They've studied the institutions that facilitate our trade, like legal systems, corporations, marketplaces. But there is a new, technological institution that will fundamentally change how we exchange value, and it's called the blockchain.Now, that's a pretty bold statement, but if you take nothing else away from this talk, I actually want you to remember that while blockchain technology is relatively new, it's also a continuation of a very human story, and the story is this. As humans, we find ways to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value.Now, one of the first people to really explore the idea of institutions as a tool in economics to lower our uncertainties about one another and be able to do trade was the Nobel economist Douglass North. He passed away at the end of 2015, but North pioneered what's called ""new institutional economics."" And what he meant by institutions were really just formal rules like a constitution, and informal constraints, like bribery. These institutions are really the grease that allow our economic wheels to function, and we can see this play out over the course of human history.If we think back to when we were hunter-gatherer economies, we really just traded within our village structure. We had some informal constraints in place, but we enforced all of our trade with violence or social repercussions. As our societies grew more complex and our trade routes grew more distant, we built up more formal institutions, institutions like banks for currency, governments, corporations. These institutions helped us manage our trade as the uncertainty and the complexity grew, and our personal control was much lower. Eventually with the internet, we put these same institutions online. We built platform marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, just faster institutions that act as middlemen to facilitate human economic activity.As Douglass North saw it, institutions are a tool to lower uncertainty so that we can connect and exchange all kinds of value in society. And I believe we are now entering a further and radical evolution of how we interact and trade, because for the first time, we can lower uncertainty not just with political and economic institutions, like our banks, our corporations, our governments, but we can do it with technology alone.So what is the blockchain? Blockchain technology is a decentralized database that stores a registry of assets and transactions across a peer-to-peer network. It's basically a public registry of who owns what and who transacts what. The transactions are secured through cryptography, and over time, that transaction history gets locked in blocks of data that are then cryptographically linked together and secured. This creates an immutable, unforgeable record of all of the transactions across this network. This record is replicated on every computer that uses the network.It's not an app. It's not a company. I think it's closest in description to something like Wikipedia. We can see everything on Wikipedia. It's a composite view that's constantly changing and being updated. We can also track those changes over time on Wikipedia, and we can create our own wikis, because at their core, they're just a data infrastructure. On Wikipedia, it's an open platform that stores words and images and the changes to that data over time. On the blockchain, you can think of it as an open infrastructure that stores many kinds of assets. It stores the history of custodianship, ownership and location for assets like the digital currency Bitcoin, other digital assets like a title of ownership of IP. It could be a certificate, a contract, real world objects, even personal identifiable information. There are of course other technical details to the blockchain, but at its core, that's how it works. It's this public registry that stores transactions in a network and is replicated so that it's very secure and hard to tamper with.Which brings me to my point of how blockchains lower uncertainty and how they therefore promise to transform our economic systems in radical ways. So uncertainty is kind of a big term in economics, but I want to go through three forms of it that we face in almost all of our everyday transactions, where blockchains can play a role. We face uncertainties like not knowing who we're dealing with, not having visibility into a transaction and not having recourse if things go wrong.So let's take the first example, not knowing who we're dealing with. Say I want to buy a used smartphone on eBay. The first thing I'm going to do is look up who I'm buying from. Are they a power user? Do they have great reviews and ratings, or do they have no profile at all? Reviews, ratings, checkmarks: these are the attestations about our identities that we cobble together today and use to lower uncertainty about who we're dealing with. But the problem is they're very fragmented. Think about how many profiles you have. Blockchains allow for us to create an open, global platform on which to store any attestation about any individual from any source. This allows us to create a user-controlled portable identity. More than a profile, it means you can selectively reveal the different attributes about you that help facilitate trade or interaction, for instance that a government issued you an ID, or that you're over 21, by revealing the cryptographic proof that these details exist and are signed off on. Having this kind of portable identity around the physical world and the digital world means we can do all kinds of human trade in a totally new way.So I've talked about how blockchains could lower uncertainty in who we're dealing with. The second uncertainty that we often face is just not having transparency into our interactions. Say you're going to send me that smartphone by mail. I want some degree of transparency. I want to know that the product I bought is the same one that arrives in the mail and that there's some record for how it got to me. This is true not just for electronics like smartphones, but for many kinds of goods and data, things like medicine, luxury goods, any kind of data or product that we don't want tampered with.The problem in many companies, especially those that produce something complicated like a smartphone, is they're managing all of these different vendors across a horizontal supply chain. All of these people that go into making a product, they don't have the same database. They don't use the same infrastructure, and so it becomes really hard to see transparently a product evolve over time.Using the blockchain, we can create a shared reality across nontrusting entities. By this I mean all of these nodes in the network do not need to know each other or trust each other, because they each have the ability to monitor and validate the chain for themselves. Think back to Wikipedia. It's a shared database, and even though it has multiple readers and multiple writers at the same time, it has one single truth. So we can create that using blockchains. We can create a decentralized database that has the same efficiency of a monopoly without actually creating that central authority. So all of these vendors, all sorts of companies, can interact using the same database without trusting one another. It means for consumers, we can have a lot more transparency. As a real-world object travels along, we can see its digital certificate or token move on the blockchain, adding value as it goes. This is a whole new world in terms of our visibility.So I've talked about how blockchains can lower our uncertainties about identity and how they change what we mean about transparency in long distances and complex trades, like in a supply chain. The last uncertainty that we often face is one of the most open-ended, and it's reneging. What if you don't send me the smartphone? Can I get my money back? Blockchains allow us to write code, binding contracts, between individuals and then guarantee that those contracts will bear out without a third party enforcer. So if we look at the smartphone example, you could think about escrow. You are financing that phone, but you don't need to release the funds until you can verify that all the conditions have been met. You got the phone.I think this is one of the most exciting ways that blockchains lower our uncertainties, because it means to some degree we can collapse institutions and their enforcement. It means a lot of human economic activity can get collateralized and automated, and push a lot of human intervention to the edges, the places where information moves from the real world to the blockchain.I think what would probably floor Douglass North about this use of technology is the fact that the very thing that makes it work, the very thing that keeps the blockchain secure and verified, is our mutual distrust. So rather than all of our uncertainties slowing us down and requiring institutions like banks, our governments, our corporations, we can actually harness all of that collective uncertainty and use it to collaborate and exchange more and faster and more open.Now, I don't want you to get the impression that the blockchain is the solution to everything, even though the media has said that it's going to end world poverty, it's also going to solve the counterfeit drug problem and potentially save the rainforest. The truth is, this technology is in its infancy, and we're going to need to see a lot of experiments take place and probably fail before we truly understand all of the use cases for our economy. But there are tons of people working on this, from financial institutions to technology companies, start-ups and universities. And one of the reasons is that it's not just an economic evolution. It's also an innovation in computer science.Blockchains give us the technological capability of creating a record of human exchange, of exchange of currency, of all kinds of digital and physical assets, even of our own personal attributes, in a totally new way. So in some ways, they become a technological institution that has a lot of the benefits of the traditional institutions we're used to using in society, but it does this in a decentralized way. It does this by converting a lot of our uncertainties into certainties.So I think we need to start preparing ourselves, because we are about to face a world where distributed, autonomous institutions have quite a significant role.Thank you.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Bettina. I think I understood that it's coming, it offers a lot of potential, and it's complex. What is your estimate for the rate of adoption?Bettina Warburg: I think that's a really good question. My lab is pretty much focused on going the enterprise and government route first, because in reality, blockchain is a complex technology. How many of you actually understand how the internet works? But you use it every day, so I think we're sort of facing the same John Sculley idea of technology should either be invisible or beautiful, and blockchain is kind of neither of those things right now, so it's better suited for either really early adopters who kind of get it and can tinker around or for finding those best use cases like identity or asset tracking or smart contracts that can be used at that level of an enterprise or government.BG: Thank you. Thanks for coming to TED.BW: Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/bettina_warburg_how_the_blockchain_will_radically_transform_the_economy
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"(Music)Roughly 43,000 years ago, a young cave bear died in the rolling hills on the northwest border of modern day Slovenia. A thousand years later, a mammoth died in southern Germany. A few centuries after that, a griffon vulture also died in the same vicinity. And we know almost nothing about how these animals met their deaths, but these different creatures dispersed across both time and space did share one remarkable fate. After their deaths, a bone from each of their skeletons was crafted by human hands into a flute.Think about that for a second. Imagine you're a caveman, 40,000 years ago. You've mastered fire. You've built simple tools for hunting. You've learned how to craft garments from animal skins to keep yourself warm in the winter. What would you choose to invent next? It seems preposterous that you would invent the flute, a tool that created useless vibrations in air molecules. But that is exactly what our ancestors did.Now this turns out to be surprisingly common in the history of innovation. Sometimes people invent things because they want to stay alive or feed their children or conquer the village next door. But just as often, new ideas come into the world simply because they're fun. And here's the really strange thing: many of those playful but seemingly frivolous inventions ended up sparking momentous transformations in science, in politics and society.Take what may be the most important invention of modern times: programmable computers. Now, the standard story is that computers descend from military technology, since many of the early computers were designed specifically to crack wartime codes or calculate rocket trajectories. But in fact, the origins of the modern computer are much more playful, even musical, than you might imagine. The idea behind the flute, of just pushing air through tubes to make a sound, was eventually modified to create the first organ more than 2,000 years ago. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of triggering sounds by pressing small levers with our fingers, inventing the first musical keyboard. Now, keyboards evolved from organs to clavichords to harpsichords to the piano, until the middle of the 19th century, when a bunch of inventors finally hit on the idea of using a keyboard to trigger not sounds but letters. In fact, the very first typewriter was originally called ""the writing harpsichord.""Flutes and music led to even more powerful breakthroughs. About a thousand years ago, at the height of the Islamic Renaissance, three brothers in Baghdad designed a device that was an automated organ. They called it ""the instrument that plays itself."" Now, the instrument was basically a giant music box. The organ could be trained to play various songs by using instructions encoded by placing pins on a rotating cylinder. And if you wanted the machine to play a different song, you just swapped a new cylinder in with a different code on it. This instrument was the first of its kind. It was programmable.Now, conceptually, this was a massive leap forward. The whole idea of hardware and software becomes thinkable for the first time with this invention. And that incredibly powerful concept didn't come to us as an instrument of war or of conquest, or necessity at all. It came from the strange delight of watching a machine play music.In fact, the idea of programmable machines was exclusively kept alive by music for about 700 years. In the 1700s, music-making machines became the playthings of the Parisian elite. Showmen used the same coded cylinders to control the physical movements of what were called automata, an early kind of robot. One of the most famous of those robots was, you guessed it, an automated flute player designed by a brilliant French inventor named Jacques de Vaucanson.And as de Vaucanson was designing his robot musician, he had another idea. If you could program a machine to make pleasing sounds, why not program it to weave delightful patterns of color out of cloth? Instead of using the pins of the cylinder to represent musical notes, they would represent threads with different colors. If you wanted a new pattern for your fabric, you just programmed a new cylinder. This was the first programmable loom.Now, the cylinders were too expensive and time-consuming to make, but a half century later, another French inventor named Jacquard hit upon the brilliant idea of using paper-punched cards instead of metal cylinders. Paper turned out to be much cheaper and more flexible as a way of programming the device. That punch card system inspired Victorian inventor Charles Babbage to create his analytical engine, the first true programmable computer ever designed. And punch cards were used by computer programmers as late as the 1970s.So ask yourself this question: what really made the modern computer possible? Yes, the military involvement is an important part of the story, but inventing a computer also required other building blocks: music boxes, toy robot flute players, harpsichord keyboards, colorful patterns woven into fabric, and that's just a small part of the story. There's a long list of world-changing ideas and technologies that came out of play: public museums, rubber, probability theory, the insurance business and many more.Necessity isn't always the mother of invention. The playful state of mind is fundamentally exploratory, seeking out new possibilities in the world around us. And that seeking is why so many experiences that started with simple delight and amusement eventually led us to profound breakthroughs.Now, I think this has implications for how we teach kids in school and how we encourage innovation in our workspaces, but thinking about play and delight this way also helps us detect what's coming next. Think about it: if you were sitting there in 1750 trying to figure out the big changes coming to society in the 19th, the 20th centuries, automated machines, computers, artificial intelligence, a programmable flute entertaining the Parisian elite would have been as powerful a clue as anything else at the time. It seemed like an amusement at best, not useful in any serious way, but it turned out to be the beginning of a tech revolution that would change the world.You'll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.","https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_how_play_leads_to_great_inventions
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"For over a decade, I have studied young people that have been pushed out of school, so called ""dropouts."" As they end up failed by the education system, they're on the streets where they're vulnerable to violence, police harassment, police brutality and incarceration. I follow these young people for years at a time, across institutional settings, to try to understand what some of us call the ""school-to-prison pipeline.""When you look at a picture like this, of young people who are in my study ... you might see trouble. I mean one of the boys has a bottle of liquor in his hand, he's 14 years old and it's a school day. Other people, when they see this picture, might see gangs, thugs, delinquents — criminals. But I see it different. I see these young people through a perspective that looks at the assets that they bring to the education system. So will you join me in changing the way we label young people from ""at-risk"" to ""at-promise?""(Applause)How do I know that these young people have the potential and the promise to change? I know this because I am one of them. You see, I grew up in dire poverty in the inner city, without a father — he abandoned me before I was even born. We were on welfare, sometimes homeless, many times hungry. By the time I was 15 years old, I had been incarcerated in juvy three times for three felonies. My best friend had already been killed. And soon after, while I'm standing next to my uncle, he gets shot. And as I'm waiting for the ambulance to arrive for over an hour ... he bleeds to death on the street. I had lost faith and hope in the world, and I had given up on the system because the system had failed me. I had nothing to offer and no one had anything to offer me. I was fatalistic. I didn't even think I could make it to my 18th birthday.The reason I'm here today is because a teacher that cared reached out and managed to tap into my soul. This teacher, Ms. Russ ... she was the kind of teacher that was always in your business.(Laughter)She was the kind of teacher that was like, ""Victor, I'm here for you whenever you're ready.""(Laughter)I wasn't ready. But she understood one basic principle about young people like me. We're like oysters. We're only going to open up when we're ready, and if you're not there when we're ready, we're going to clam back up. Ms. Russ was there for me. She was culturally relevant, she respected my community, my people, my family. I told her a story about my Uncle Ruben. He would take me to work with him because I was broke, and he knew I needed some money. He collected glass bottles for a living. Four in the morning on a school day, we'd throw the glass bottles in the back of his van, and the bottles would break. And my hands and arms would start to bleed and my tennis shoes and pants would get all bloody. And I was terrified and in pain, and I would stop working. And my uncle, he would look me in the eyes and he would say to me, ""Mijo, estamos buscando vida."" ""We're searching for a better life, we're trying to make something out of nothing.""Ms. Russ listened to my story, welcomed it into the classroom and said, ""Victor, this is your power. This is your potential. Your family, your culture, your community have taught you a hard-work ethic and you will use it to empower yourself in the academic world so you can come back and empower your community.""With Ms. Russ's help, I ended up returning to school. I even finished my credits on time and graduated with my class.(Applause)But Ms. Russ said to me right before graduation, ""Victor, I'm so proud of you. I knew you could do it. Now it's time to go to college.""(Laughter)College, me? Man, what is this teacher smoking thinking I'm going to college? I applied with the mentors and support she provided, got a letter of acceptance, and one of the paragraphs read, ""You've been admitted under probationary status."" I said, ""Probation? I'm already on probation, that don't matter?""(Laughter)It was academic probation, not criminal probation. But what do teachers like Ms. Russ do to succeed with young people like the ones I study? I propose three strategies. The first: let's get rid of our deficit perspective in education. ""These people come from a culture of violence, a culture of poverty. These people are at-risk; these people are truant. These people are empty containers for us to fill with knowledge. They have the problems, we have the solutions."" Number two. Let's value the stories that young people bring to the schoolhouse. Their stories of overcoming insurmountable odds are so powerful. And I know you know some of these stories. These very same stories and experiences already have grit, character and resilience in them. So let's help young people refine those stories. Let's help them be proud of who they are, because our education system welcomes their families, their cultures, their communities and the skill set they've learned to survive. And of course the third strategy being the most important: resources. We have to provide adequate resources to young people. Grit alone isn't going to cut it. You can sit there and tell me all you want, ""Hey man, pick yourself up by the bootstraps."" But if I was born without any straps on my boots —(Laughter)How am I supposed to pick myself up?(Applause)Job training, mentoring, counseling ... Teaching young people to learn from their mistakes instead of criminalizing them, and dragging them out of their classrooms like animals. How about this? I propose that we implement restorative justice in every high school in America.(Applause)So we went out to test these ideas in the community of Watts in LA with 40 young people that had been pushed out of school. William was one of them. William was the kind of kid that had been given every label. He had dropped out, he was a gang member, a criminal. And when we met him he was very resistant. But I remember what Ms. Russ used to say. ""Hey, I'm here for you whenever you're ready.""(Laughter)So over time — over time he began to open up. And I remember the day that he made the switch. We were in a large group and a young lady in our program was crying because she told us her powerful story of her dad being killed and then his body being shown in the newspaper the next day. And as she's crying, I don't know what to do, so I give her her space, and William had enough. He slammed his hands on the desk and he said, ""Hey, everybody! Group hug! Group hug!""(Applause)This young lady's tears and pain turned into joy and laughter knowing that her community had her back, and William had now learned that he did have a purpose in life: to help to heal the souls of people in his own community. He told us his story. We refined his story to go from being the story of a victim to being the story of a survivor that has overcome adversity. We placed high value on it. William went on to finish high school, get his security guard certificate to become a security guard, and is now working at a local school district.(Applause)Ms. Russ's mantra — her mantra was always, ""when you teach to the heart, the mind will follow."" The great writer Khalil Gibran says, ""Out of suffering have emerged the greatest souls. The massive characters are seared with scars."" I believe that in this education revolution that we're talking about we need to invite the souls of the young people that we work with, and once they're able to refine — identify their grit, resilience and character that they've already developed — their academic performance will improve.Let's believe in young people. Let's provide them the right kinds of resources. I'll tell you what my teacher did for me. She believed in me so much that she tricked me into believing in myself.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/victor_rios_help_for_kids_the_education_system_ignores
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"Hi. I want to talk about understanding, and the nature of understanding, and what the essence of understanding is, because understanding is something we aim for, everyone. We want to understand things. My claim is that understanding has to do with the ability to change your perspective. If you don't have that, you don't have understanding. So that is my claim.And I want to focus on mathematics. Many of us think of mathematics as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, percent, geometry, algebra — all that stuff. But actually, I want to talk about the essence of mathematics as well. And my claim is that mathematics has to do with patterns.Behind me, you see a beautiful pattern, and this pattern actually emerges just from drawing circles in a very particular way. So my day-to-day definition of mathematics that I use every day is the following: First of all, it's about finding patterns. And by ""pattern,"" I mean a connection, a structure, some regularity, some rules that govern what we see. Second of all, I think it is about representing these patterns with a language. We make up language if we don't have it, and in mathematics, this is essential. It's also about making assumptions and playing around with these assumptions and just seeing what happens. We're going to do that very soon. And finally, it's about doing cool stuff. Mathematics enables us to do so many things.So let's have a look at these patterns. If you want to tie a tie knot, there are patterns. Tie knots have names. And you can also do the mathematics of tie knots. This is a left-out, right-in, center-out and tie. This is a left-in, right-out, left-in, center-out and tie. This is a language we made up for the patterns of tie knots, and a half-Windsor is all that. This is a mathematics book about tying shoelaces at the university level, because there are patterns in shoelaces. You can do it in so many different ways. We can analyze it. We can make up languages for it.And representations are all over mathematics. This is Leibniz's notation from 1675. He invented a language for patterns in nature. When we throw something up in the air, it falls down. Why? We're not sure, but we can represent this with mathematics in a pattern.This is also a pattern. This is also an invented language. Can you guess for what? It is actually a notation system for dancing, for tap dancing. That enables him as a choreographer to do cool stuff, to do new things, because he has represented it.I want you to think about how amazing representing something actually is. Here it says the word ""mathematics."" But actually, they're just dots, right? So how in the world can these dots represent the word? Well, they do. They represent the word ""mathematics,"" and these symbols also represent that word and this we can listen to. It sounds like this.(Beeps)Somehow these sounds represent the word and the concept. How does this happen? There's something amazing going on about representing stuff.So I want to talk about that magic that happens when we actually represent something. Here you see just lines with different widths. They stand for numbers for a particular book. And I can actually recommend this book, it's a very nice book.(Laughter)Just trust me.OK, so let's just do an experiment, just to play around with some straight lines. This is a straight line. Let's make another one. So every time we move, we move one down and one across, and we draw a new straight line, right? We do this over and over and over, and we look for patterns. So this pattern emerges, and it's a rather nice pattern. It looks like a curve, right? Just from drawing simple, straight lines.Now I can change my perspective a little bit. I can rotate it. Have a look at the curve. What does it look like? Is it a part of a circle? It's actually not a part of a circle. So I have to continue my investigation and look for the true pattern. Perhaps if I copy it and make some art? Well, no. Perhaps I should extend the lines like this, and look for the pattern there. Let's make more lines. We do this. And then let's zoom out and change our perspective again. Then we can actually see that what started out as just straight lines is actually a curve called a parabola. This is represented by a simple equation, and it's a beautiful pattern.So this is the stuff that we do. We find patterns, and we represent them. And I think this is a nice day-to-day definition. But today I want to go a little bit deeper, and think about what the nature of this is. What makes it possible? There's one thing that's a little bit deeper, and that has to do with the ability to change your perspective. And I claim that when you change your perspective, and if you take another point of view, you learn something new about what you are watching or looking at or hearing. And I think this is a really important thing that we do all the time.So let's just look at this simple equation, x + x = 2 • x. This is a very nice pattern, and it's true, because 5 + 5 = 2 • 5, etc. We've seen this over and over, and we represent it like this. But think about it: this is an equation. It says that something is equal to something else, and that's two different perspectives. One perspective is, it's a sum. It's something you plus together. On the other hand, it's a multiplication, and those are two different perspectives. And I would go as far as to say that every equation is like this, every mathematical equation where you use that equality sign is actually a metaphor. It's an analogy between two things. You're just viewing something and taking two different points of view, and you're expressing that in a language.Have a look at this equation. This is one of the most beautiful equations. It simply says that, well, two things, they're both -1. This thing on the left-hand side is -1, and the other one is. And that, I think, is one of the essential parts of mathematics — you take different points of view.So let's just play around. Let's take a number. We know four-thirds. We know what four-thirds is. It's 1.333, but we have to have those three dots, otherwise it's not exactly four-thirds. But this is only in base 10. You know, the number system, we use 10 digits. If we change that around and only use two digits, that's called the binary system. It's written like this. So we're now talking about the number. The number is four-thirds. We can write it like this, and we can change the base, change the number of digits, and we can write it differently.So these are all representations of the same number. We can even write it simply, like 1.3 or 1.6. It all depends on how many digits you have. Or perhaps we just simplify and write it like this. I like this one, because this says four divided by three. And this number expresses a relation between two numbers. You have four on the one hand and three on the other. And you can visualize this in many ways. What I'm doing now is viewing that number from different perspectives. I'm playing around. I'm playing around with how we view something, and I'm doing it very deliberately. We can take a grid. If it's four across and three up, this line equals five, always. It has to be like this. This is a beautiful pattern. Four and three and five. And this rectangle, which is 4 x 3, you've seen a lot of times. This is your average computer screen. 800 x 600 or 1,600 x 1,200 is a television or a computer screen.So these are all nice representations, but I want to go a little bit further and just play more with this number. Here you see two circles. I'm going to rotate them like this. Observe the upper-left one. It goes a little bit faster, right? You can see this. It actually goes exactly four-thirds as fast. That means that when it goes around four times, the other one goes around three times. Now let's make two lines, and draw this dot where the lines meet. We get this dot dancing around.(Laughter)And this dot comes from that number. Right? Now we should trace it. Let's trace it and see what happens. This is what mathematics is all about. It's about seeing what happens. And this emerges from four-thirds. I like to say that this is the image of four-thirds. It's much nicer — (Cheers)Thank you!(Applause) This is not new. This has been known for a long time, but —(Laughter)But this is four-thirds.Let's do another experiment. Let's now take a sound, this sound: (Beep)This is a perfect A, 440Hz. Let's multiply it by two. We get this sound. (Beep)When we play them together, it sounds like this. This is an octave, right? We can do this game. We can play a sound, play the same A. We can multiply it by three-halves.(Beep)This is what we call a perfect fifth.(Beep)They sound really nice together. Let's multiply this sound by four-thirds. (Beep)What happens? You get this sound. (Beep)This is the perfect fourth. If the first one is an A, this is a D. They sound like this together. (Beeps)This is the sound of four-thirds. What I'm doing now, I'm changing my perspective. I'm just viewing a number from another perspective.I can even do this with rhythms, right? I can take a rhythm and play three beats at one time (Drumbeats)in a period of time, and I can play another sound four times in that same space.(Clanking sounds)Sounds kind of boring, but listen to them together.(Drumbeats and clanking sounds)(Laughter)Hey! So.(Laughter)I can even make a little hi-hat.(Drumbeats and cymbals)Can you hear this? So, this is the sound of four-thirds. Again, this is as a rhythm.(Drumbeats and cowbell)And I can keep doing this and play games with this number. Four-thirds is a really great number. I love four-thirds!(Laughter)Truly — it's an undervalued number. So if you take a sphere and look at the volume of the sphere, it's actually four-thirds of some particular cylinder. So four-thirds is in the sphere. It's the volume of the sphere.OK, so why am I doing all this? Well, I want to talk about what it means to understand something and what we mean by understanding something. That's my aim here. And my claim is that you understand something if you have the ability to view it from different perspectives. Let's look at this letter. It's a beautiful R, right? How do you know that? Well, as a matter of fact, you've seen a bunch of R's, and you've generalized and abstracted all of these and found a pattern. So you know that this is an R.So what I'm aiming for here is saying something about how understanding and changing your perspective are linked. And I'm a teacher and a lecturer, and I can actually use this to teach something, because when I give someone else another story, a metaphor, an analogy, if I tell a story from a different point of view, I enable understanding. I make understanding possible, because you have to generalize over everything you see and hear, and if I give you another perspective, that will become easier for you.Let's do a simple example again. This is four and three. This is four triangles. So this is also four-thirds, in a way. Let's just join them together. Now we're going to play a game; we're going to fold it up into a three-dimensional structure. I love this. This is a square pyramid. And let's just take two of them and put them together. So this is what is called an octahedron. It's one of the five platonic solids. Now we can quite literally change our perspective, because we can rotate it around all of the axes and view it from different perspectives. And I can change the axis, and then I can view it from another point of view, but it's the same thing, but it looks a little different. I can do it even one more time.Every time I do this, something else appears, so I'm actually learning more about the object when I change my perspective. I can use this as a tool for creating understanding. I can take two of these and put them together like this and see what happens. And it looks a little bit like the octahedron. Have a look at it if I spin it around like this. What happens? Well, if you take two of these, join them together and spin it around, there's your octahedron again, a beautiful structure. If you lay it out flat on the floor, this is the octahedron. This is the graph structure of an octahedron. And I can continue doing this. You can draw three great circles around the octahedron, and you rotate around, so actually three great circles is related to the octahedron. And if I take a bicycle pump and just pump it up, you can see that this is also a little bit like the octahedron. Do you see what I'm doing here? I am changing the perspective every time.So let's now take a step back — and that's actually a metaphor, stepping back — and have a look at what we're doing. I'm playing around with metaphors. I'm playing around with perspectives and analogies. I'm telling one story in different ways. I'm telling stories. I'm making a narrative; I'm making several narratives. And I think all of these things make understanding possible. I think this actually is the essence of understanding something. I truly believe this.So this thing about changing your perspective — it's absolutely fundamental for humans. Let's play around with the Earth. Let's zoom into the ocean, have a look at the ocean. We can do this with anything. We can take the ocean and view it up close. We can look at the waves. We can go to the beach. We can view the ocean from another perspective. Every time we do this, we learn a little bit more about the ocean. If we go to the shore, we can kind of smell it, right? We can hear the sound of the waves. We can feel salt on our tongues. So all of these are different perspectives. And this is the best one. We can go into the water. We can see the water from the inside. And you know what? This is absolutely essential in mathematics and computer science. If you're able to view a structure from the inside, then you really learn something about it. That's somehow the essence of something.So when we do this, and we've taken this journey into the ocean, we use our imagination. And I think this is one level deeper, and it's actually a requirement for changing your perspective. We can do a little game. You can imagine that you're sitting there. You can imagine that you're up here, and that you're sitting here. You can view yourselves from the outside. That's really a strange thing. You're changing your perspective. You're using your imagination, and you're viewing yourself from the outside. That requires imagination.Mathematics and computer science are the most imaginative art forms ever. And this thing about changing perspectives should sound a little bit familiar to you, because we do it every day. And then it's called empathy. When I view the world from your perspective, I have empathy with you. If I really, truly understand what the world looks like from your perspective, I am empathetic. That requires imagination. And that is how we obtain understanding. And this is all over mathematics and this is all over computer science, and there's a really deep connection between empathy and these sciences.So my conclusion is the following: understanding something really deeply has to do with the ability to change your perspective. So my advice to you is: try to change your perspective. You can study mathematics. It's a wonderful way to train your brain. Changing your perspective makes your mind more flexible. It makes you open to new things, and it makes you able to understand things. And to use yet another metaphor: have a mind like water. That's nice.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/roger_antonsen_math_is_the_hidden_secret_to_understanding_the_world
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"I am so excited to be here. Everything in America is so much bigger than in Europe. Look at me — I am huge!(Laughter)It's fantastic! And TED Talks — TED Talks are where everybody has great ideas. So the question is: Where do those great ideas come from? Well, it's a little bit of debate, but it's generally reckoned that the average person — that's me — has about 50,000 thoughts a day. Which is a lot, until you realize that 95 percent of them are the same ones you had the day before.(Laughter)And a lot of mine are really boring, OK? I think things like, ""Oh! I know — I must clean the floor. Oh! I forgot to walk the dog."" My most popular: ""Don't eat that cookie.""(Laughter)So, 95 percent repetition. That leaves us with just a five percent window of opportunity each day to actually think something new. And some of my new thoughts are useless. The other day I was watching some sports on television, and I was trying to decide why I just don't engage with it. Some of it I find curious. This is odd.(Laughter)Do you think it would be worth being that flexible just to be able to see your heel at that angle?(Laughter)And here's the thing: I'm never going to be able to relate to that, because I'm never going to be able to do it, OK? Well, not twice, anyway.(Laughter)But I'll tell you the truth. The truth is I have never been any good at sport, OK? I've reached that wonderful age when all my friends say, ""Oh, I wish I was as fit as I was when I was 18."" And I always feel rather smug then.(Laughter)I'm exactly as fit as I was when I —(Laughter)(Applause)I couldn't run then. I'm certainly not going to do it now.(Laughter)So then I had my new idea: Why not engage people like me in sport? I think what the world needs now is the Olympics for people with zero athletic ability.(Laughter)Oh, it would be so much more fun. We'd have three basic rules, OK? Obviously no drugs; no corruption, no skills.(Laughter)It would be — No, it's a terrible idea. And I also know why I don't engage with sport when I watch it on television. It's because probably 97 percent of it is about men running and men kicking things, men trying to look neatly packaged in Lycra. There is —(Laughter)Not always successfully. There is —(Laughter)There is so little female sport on television, that a young woman watching might be forgiven for thinking, and how can I put this nicely, that the male member is the very lever you need to get yourself off the couch and onto a sports ground.(Laughter)The inequalities in sport are breathtaking.So this is what happens to me: I have a brand new idea, and immediately I come back to an old one. The fact is, there is not now, nor has there ever been in the whole of history, a single country in the world where women have equality with men. Not one. 196 countries, it hasn't happened in the whole of evolution.So, here is a picture of evolution.(Laughter)We women are not even in it!(Laughter)It's a wonder men have been able to evolve quite so brilliantly. So —(Laughter)It bugs me, and I know I should do something about it. But I'm busy, OK? I have a full-on career, I've got three kids, I've got an elderly mom. In fact, if I'm honest with you, one of the reasons I came out here is because TED Talks said I could have 15 minutes to myself, and I never have that much time —(Laughter)(Applause)So I'm busy. And anyway, I already had a go at changing the world. Here's the thing, OK? Everybody has inside themselves what I call an ""activation button."" It's the button that gets pressed when you think, ""I must do something about this."" It gets pressed for all sorts of reasons. Maybe you face some kind of inequality, or you've come across an injustice of some kind, sometimes an illness strikes, or you're born in some way disadvantaged, or perhaps underprivileged. So I was born gay, OK? I've always known, I don't think my family were the least bit surprised. Here is a picture of me aged four. I look cute, but inside I genuinely believed that I looked like Clint Eastwood.(Laughter)So my activation button was pressed when I had my kids — three wonderful kids, born to my then-partner. Now here's the thing: I work on television in Britain. By the time they were born, I was already hosting my own shows and working in the public eye. I love what I do, but I love my kids more. And I didn't want them to grow up with a secret. 1994, when my son, my youngest was born, there was not, as far as I was aware, a single out, gay woman in British public life. I don't think secrets are a good thing. I think they are a cancer of the soul. So I decided to come out.Everybody warned me that I would never work again, but I decided it was absolutely worth the risk. Well, it was hell. In Britain, we have a particularly vicious section of the right-wing press, and they went nuts. And their hatred stirred up the less stable elements of society, and we got death threats — enough death threats that I had to take the kids into hiding, and we had to have police protection. And I promise you there were many moments in the still of the night when I was terrified by what I had done.Eventually the dust settled. Against all expectation I carried on working, and my kids were and continue to be absolutely fantastic. I remember when my son was six, he had a friend over to play. They were in the next room; I could hear them chatting. The friend said to my son, ""What's it like having two mums?"" I was a little anxious to hear, so I leant in to hear and my son said, ""It's fantastic, because if one of them's sick, you've still got another one to cook for you.""(Laughter)So my activation button for gay equality was pressed, and along with many, many others, I campaigned for years for gay rights, and in particular, the right to marry the person that I love. In the end, we succeeded. And in 2014, on the day that the law was changed, I married my wife, who I love very much, indeed.(Applause)We didn't do it in a quiet way — we did it on the stage at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It was a great event. The hall seats two-and-a-half thousand people. We invited 150 family and friends, then I let it be known to the public: anybody who wanted to come and celebrate, please come and join us. It would be free to anybody who wanted to come. Two-and-half thousand people turned up.(Applause)Every kind of person you can imagine: gays, straights, rabbis, nuns, married people, black, white — the whole of humanity was there. And I remember standing on that stage thinking, ""How fantastic. Job done. Love triumphs. Law changed."" And I —(Applause)And I genuinely thought my activation days were over, OK? So every year in that same hall, I host a fantastic concert to celebrate International Women's Day. We gather the world's only all-female orchestra, we play fantastic music by forgotten or overlooked women composers, we have amazing conductors — it's Marin Alsop there from Baltimore conducting, Petula Clark singing — and I give a lecture on women's history. I love to gather inspirational stories from the past and pass them on. Too often, I think history's what I call the Mount Rushmore model. It looks majestic, but the women have been entirely left out of it.And I was giving a talk in 2015 about the suffragettes — I'm sure you know those magnificent women who fought so hard for the right for women in Britain to vote. And their slogan was: ""Deeds, not words."" And boy, they succeeded, because women did indeed get the vote in 1928. So I'm giving this talk about this, and as I'm talking, what I realized is: this was not a history lecture I was giving; this was not something where the job was done. This was something where there was so much left to do. Nowhere in the world, for example, do women have equal representation in positions of power.OK, let's take a very quick look at the top 100 companies in the London Stock Exchange in 2016. Top 100 companies: How many women running them? Seven. OK. Seven. That's all right, I suppose. Until you realize that 17 are run by men called ""John.""(Laughter)There are more men called John running FTSE 100 companies —(Laughter)than there are women. There are 14 run by men called ""Dave.""(Laughter)Now, I'm sure Dave and John are doing a bang-up job.(Laughter)OK. Why does it matter? Well, it's that pesky business of the gender pay gap. Nowhere in the world do women earn the same as men. And that is never going to change unless we have more women at the top in the boardroom. We have plenty of laws; the Equal Pay Act in Britain was passed in 1975. Nevertheless, there are still many, many women who, from early November until the end of the year, by comparison to their male colleagues, are effectively working for free. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that women will finally get equal pay in ... 2133! Yay!(Laughter)That's a terrible figure. And here's the thing: the day before I came out to give my talk, the World Economic Forum revised it. So that's good, because that's a terrible — 2133. Do you know what they revised it to? 2186.(Laughter)Yeah, another 53 years, OK? We are not going to get equal pay in my grandchildren's grandchildren's lives under the current system.And I have waited long enough. I've waited long enough in my own business. In 2016 I became the very first woman on British television to host a prime-time panel show. Isn't that great? Wonderful, I'm thrilled. But —(Applause)But 2016! The first! Television's been around for 80 years!(Laughter)It may be television's not so important, but it's kind of symptomatic, isn't it? 2016, the UN were looking for a brand new ambassador to represent women's empowerment and gender equality, and who did they choose? Wonder Woman. Yes, they chose a cartoon, OK?(Laughter)Because no woman was up to the job.The representation of women in positions of power is shockingly low. It's true in Congress, and it's certainly true in the British Parliament. In 2015, the number of men elected to the Parliament that year was greater than the total number of women who have ever been members of Parliament. And why does it matter? Here's the thing: if they're not at the table — literally, in Britain, at that table helping to make the laws — do not be surprised if the female perspective is overlooked.It's a great role model for young people to see a woman in charge. In 2016, Britain got its second female Prime Minister; Theresa May came to power. The day she came to power she was challenged: just do one thing. Do one thing in the first 100 days that you're in office to try and improve lives for women in Britain. And what did she do? Nothing. Nothing. Because she's much too busy cleaning up the mess the boys made. Even having a female leader, they always find something better to do than to sort out the pesky issue of inequality.So I keep talking about equality like it matters. Does it? Well, let's take a very quick look at the STEM industries, OK? So science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Pretty much important in every single aspect of our daily lives. There is the thickest and most incredibly well-documented glass ceiling in the STEM industries. What if the cure for cancer or the answer the global warming lies in the head of a young female scientist who fails to progress?So I thought all these things, and I knew I had to do ""Deeds, not words."" And I spoke to my wonderful friend, brilliant journalist Catherine Mayer in Britain, and we rather foolishly — and I suspect there was wine involved —(Laughter)We decided to found a brand new political party. Because here's the critical thing: the one place women and men are absolutely equal is at the ballot box. We had no idea what we were doing, we didn't know how complicated it was to start a political party. I thought, ""It can't be that difficult, men have been doing it for years.""(Laughter)So we started by calling it ""The Women's Equality Party."" And straightaway people said to me, ""Why did you call it that?"" I said, ""I don't know, I just thought we'd be clear.""(Laughter)I didn't want what we were doing to be a secret, you know? I just —(Laughter)Some people said, ""You can't call it that! It's much too feminist!"" Ooh! Scary word! Ahh! I can't tell you how many times I've heard somebody say, ""I'm not a feminist, but ..."" And I always think if there's a ""but"" in the sentence, it can't all be roses in the garden. And then I started getting asked the hilarious question, ""Are you all going to burn your bras?"" Yes! Because bras are famously made of flammable material.(Laughter)That's why all women spark when they walk.(Laughter)Here's quick history sidebar for you: no woman ever burnt her bra in the '60s. It's a story made up by a journalist. Thank goodness journalism has improved since then. So —(Laughter)I announced what we were going to do in a broadcast interview, and straightaway, the emails started coming. First hundreds, then thousands and thousands, from every age group: from the very young to women in their '90s, to hundreds of wonderful men. People wrote and said, ""Please, can I help? Please, can I visit you at party headquarters?"" We didn't have a headquarters — we didn't have a party! We didn't have anything. All we had was a wonderful, tight group of fabulous friends trying to answer emails pretty much 24-7 in our pajamas.We were all busy. Many of us had careers, many of us had children, but we did what women do, and we shared the work. And almost instantly, we agreed on certain fundamental things. First thing: we want to be the only political party in the world whose main aim was to no longer need to exist. That's a fantastic idea. We wanted to be the only political party with no particular political leaning. We wanted people from the left, from the right, from the middle, every age group. Because the whole point was to work with a simple agenda: let's get equality in every aspect of our lives, and when we're finished, let's go home and get the other chores done.(Laughter)And we wanted to change how politics is conducted. I don't know if you have this, but in Britain we have two major political parties. They're the dinosaurs of politics. And how they speak to each other is shameful and poisonous. I'm sure you've never had that kind of name-calling —(Laughter)And lying here. Wouldn't it be great if just one politician said, ""Do you know, my opponent has a point. Let's see if we can't work together and get the job done.""(Applause)And let's get more women into politics, OK? Let's immediately get more women into politics by being the only political party to offer free childcare to our candidates, so they can get out of the house and start campaigning.(Applause)Within 10 months, we had more than 70 branches of our party across the UK. We stood candidates for election in London, Scotland and Wales in May 2016. One in 20 people voted for our candidate for London Mayor. And when the men in the race saw how many votes we were attracting, wonder of wonders, they began to talk about the need to tackle gender equality.(Applause)You know, I've been promised change since I was a child. It was always coming: women were going to stand shoulder to shoulder with men. All I got were empty promises and disappointment — enough disappointment to found a political party. But here is my new idea for today — this is my five percent, OK? And this one is really good. The fact is, this is not enough. It is not enough to found one political party for equality in a single country. What we need is a seismic change in the global political landscape. And the wonderful thing about the model we have created is that it would work anywhere. It would work in America, it would work in Australia, it would work in India. It's like we've made the perfect recipe: anybody can cook it, and it's good for everybody. And we want to give it away. If you want to know what we did, we're giving it away. Can you imagine if we could mobilize millions of women across the world to say, ""That's enough!"" to the traditional battles of politics? To say, ""Stop the bickering, let's get the work done."" We could literally change the world. And I want that.(Applause)I want ...(Applause)I want that for our daughters, and I want it for our sons. Because the fact is: equality is better for everyone.Come on people, let's activate! Let's change the world! I know we can do it, and it wants doing!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sandi_toksvig_a_political_party_for_women_s_equality
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"Here's a question that matters.[Is it ethical to evolve the human body?]Because we're beginning to get all the tools together to evolve ourselves. And we can evolve bacteria and we can evolve plants and we can evolve animals, and we're now reaching a point where we really have to ask, is it really ethical and do we want to evolve human beings? And as you're thinking about that, let me talk about that in the context of prosthetics, prosthetics past, present, future.So this is the iron hand that belonged to one of the German counts. Loved to fight, lost his arm in one of these battles. No problem, he just made a suit of armor, put it on, perfect prosthetic. That's where the concept of ruling with an iron fist comes from.And of course these prosthetics have been getting more and more useful, more and more modern. You can hold soft-boiled eggs. You can have all types of controls, and as you're thinking about that, there are wonderful people like Hugh Herr who have been building absolutely extraordinary prosthetics. So the wonderful Aimee Mullins will go out and say, how tall do I want to be tonight? Or Hugh will say what type of cliff do I want to climb? Or does somebody want to run a marathon, or does somebody want to ballroom dance? And as you adapt these things, the interesting thing about prosthetics is they've been coming inside the body. So these external prosthetics have now become artificial knees. They've become artificial hips. And then they've evolved further to become not just nice to have but essential to have.So when you're talking about a heart pacemaker as a prosthetic, you're talking about something that isn't just, ""I'm missing my leg,"" it's, ""if I don't have this, I can die."" And at that point, a prosthetic becomes a symbiotic relationship with the human body.And four of the smartest people that I've ever met — Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr, Joe Jacobson, Bob Lander — are working on a Center for Extreme Bionics. And the interesting thing of what you're seeing here is these prosthetics now get integrated into the bone. They get integrated into the skin. They get integrated into the muscle. And one of the other sides of Ed is he's been thinking about how to connect the brain using light or other mechanisms directly to things like these prosthetics. And if you can do that, then you can begin changing fundamental aspects of humanity. So how quickly you react to something depends on the diameter of a nerve. And of course, if you have nerves that are external or prosthetic, say with light or liquid metal, then you can increase that diameter and you could even increase it theoretically to the point where, as long as you could see the muzzle flash, you could step out of the way of a bullet. Those are the order of magnitude of changes you're talking about.This is a fourth sort of level of prosthetics. These are Phonak hearing aids, and the reason why these are so interesting is because they cross the threshold from where prosthetics are something for somebody who is ""disabled"" and they become something that somebody who is ""normal"" might want to actually have, because what this prosthetic does, which is really interesting, is not only does it help you hear, you can focus your hearing, so it can hear the conversation going on over there. You can have superhearing. You can have hearing in 360 degrees. You can have white noise. You can record, and oh, by the way, they also put a phone into this. So this functions as your hearing aid and also as your phone. And at that point, somebody might actually want to have a prosthetic voluntarily.All of these thousands of loosely connected little pieces are coming together, and it's about time we ask the question, how do we want to evolve human beings over the next century or two? And for that we turn to a great philosopher who was a very smart man despite being a Yankee fan.(Laughter)And Yogi Berra used to say, of course, that it's very tough to make predictions, especially about the future.(Laughter)So instead of making a prediction about the future to begin with, let's take what's happening in the present with people like Tony Atala, who is redesigning 30-some-odd organs. And maybe the ultimate prosthetic isn't having something external, titanium. Maybe the ultimate prosthetic is take your own gene code, remake your own body parts, because that's a whole lot more effective than any kind of a prosthetic. But while you're at it, then you can take the work of Craig Venter and Ham Smith. And one of the things that we've been doing is trying to figure out how to reprogram cells. And if you can reprogram a cell, then you can change the cells in those organs. So if you can change the cells in those organs, maybe you make those organs more radiation-resistant. Maybe you make them absorb more oxygen. Maybe you make them more efficient to filter out stuff that you don't want in your body.And over the last few weeks, George Church has been in the news a lot because he's been talking about taking one of these programmable cells and inserting an entire human genome into that cell. And once you can insert an entire human genome into a cell, then you begin to ask the question, would you want to enhance any of that genome? Do you want to enhance a human body? How would you want to enhance a human body? Where is it ethical to enhance a human body and where is it not ethical to enhance a human body? And all of a sudden, what we're doing is we've got this multidimensional chess board where we can change human genetics by using viruses to attack things like AIDS, or we can change the gene code through gene therapy to do away with some hereditary diseases, or we can change the environment, and change the expression of those genes in the epigenome and pass that on to the next generations. And all of a sudden, it's not just one little bit, it's all these stacked little bits that allow you to take little portions of it until all the portions coming together lead you to something that's very different.And a lot of people are very scared by this stuff. And it does sound scary, and there are risks to this stuff. So why in the world would you ever want to do this stuff? Why would we really want to alter the human body in a fundamental way?The answer lies in part with Lord Rees, astronomer royal of Great Britain. And one of his favorite sayings is the universe is 100 percent malevolent. So what does that mean? It means if you take any one of your bodies at random, drop it anywhere in the universe, drop it in space, you die. Drop it on the Sun, you die. Drop it on the surface of Mercury, you die. Drop it near a supernova, you die. But fortunately, it's only about 80 percent effective.So as a great physicist once said, there's these little upstream eddies of biology that create order in this rapid torrent of entropy. So as the universe dissipates energy, there's these upstream eddies that create biological order. Now, the problem with eddies is, they tend to disappear. They shift. They move in rivers. And because of that, when an eddy shifts, when the Earth becomes a snowball, when the Earth becomes very hot, when the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, when you have supervolcanoes, when you have solar flares, when you have potentially extinction-level events like the next election —(Laughter)then all of a sudden, you can have periodic extinctions. And by the way, that's happened five times on Earth, and therefore it is very likely that the human species on Earth is going to go extinct someday. Not next week, not next month, maybe in November, but maybe 10,000 years after that. As you're thinking of the consequence of that, if you believe that extinctions are common and natural and normal and occur periodically, it becomes a moral imperative to diversify our species.And it becomes a moral imperative because it's going to be really hard to live on Mars if we don't fundamentally modify the human body. Right? You go from one cell, mom and dad coming together to make one cell, in a cascade to 10 trillion cells. We don't know, if you change the gravity substantially, if the same thing will happen to create your body. We do know that if you expose our bodies as they currently are to a lot of radiation, we will die. So as you're thinking of that, you have to really redesign things just to get to Mars. Forget about the moons of Neptune or Jupiter.And to borrow from Nikolai Kardashev, let's think about life in a series of scales. So Life One civilization is a civilization that begins to alter his or her looks. And we've been doing that for thousands of years. You've got tummy tucks and you've got this and you've got that. You alter your looks, and I'm told that not all of those alterations take place for medical reasons.(Laughter)Seems odd.A Life Two civilization is a different civilization. A Life Two civilization alters fundamental aspects of the body. So you put human growth hormone in, the person grows taller, or you put x in and the person gets fatter or loses metabolism or does a whole series of things, but you're altering the functions in a fundamental way.To become an intrasolar civilization, we're going to have to create a Life Three civilization, and that looks very different from what we've got here. Maybe you splice in Deinococcus radiodurans so that the cells can resplice after a lot of exposure to radiation. Maybe you breathe by having oxygen flow through your blood instead of through your lungs. But you're talking about really radical redesigns, and one of the interesting things that's happened in the last decade is we've discovered a whole lot of planets out there. And some of them may be Earth-like. The problem is, if we ever want to get to these planets, the fastest human objects — Juno and Voyager and the rest of this stuff — take tens of thousands of years to get from here to the nearest solar system. So if you want to start exploring beaches somewhere else, or you want to see two-sun sunsets, then you're talking about something that is very different, because you have to change the timescale and the body of humans in ways which may be absolutely unrecognizable. And that's a Life Four civilization.Now, we can't even begin to imagine what that might look like, but we're beginning to get glimpses of instruments that might take us even that far. And let me give you two examples.So this is the wonderful Floyd Romesberg, and one of the things that Floyd's been doing is he's been playing with the basic chemistry of life. So all life on this planet is made in ATCGs, the four letters of DNA. All bacteria, all plants, all animals, all humans, all cows, everything else. And what Floyd did is he changed out two of those base pairs, so it's ATXY. And that means that you now have a parallel system to make life, to make babies, to reproduce, to evolve, that doesn't mate with most things on Earth or in fact maybe with nothing on Earth. Maybe you make plants that are immune to all bacteria. Maybe you make plants that are immune to all viruses. But why is that so interesting? It means that we are not a unique solution. It means you can create alternate chemistries to us that could be chemistries adaptable to a very different planet that could create life and heredity.The second experiment, or the other implication of this experiment, is that all of you, all life is based on 20 amino acids. If you don't substitute two amino acids, if you don't say ATXY, if you say ATCG + XY, then you go from 20 building blocks to 172, and all of a sudden you've got 172 building blocks of amino acids to build life-forms in very different shapes.The second experiment to think about is a really weird experiment that's been taking place in China. So this guy has been transplanting hundreds of mouse heads. Right? And why is that an interesting experiment? Well, think of the first heart transplants. One of the things they used to do is they used to bring in the wife or the daughter of the donor so the donee could tell the doctors, ""Do you recognize this person? Do you love this person? Do you feel anything for this person?"" We laugh about that today. We laugh because we know the heart is a muscle, but for hundreds of thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years, ""I gave her my heart. She took my heart. She broke my heart."" We thought this was emotion and we thought maybe emotions were transplanted with the heart. Nope.So how about the brain? Two possible outcomes to this experiment. If you can get a mouse that is functional, then you can see, is the new brain a blank slate? And boy, does that have implications. Second option: the new mouse recognizes Minnie Mouse. The new mouse remembers what it's afraid of, remembers how to navigate the maze, and if that is true, then you can transplant memory and consciousness. And then the really interesting question is, if you can transplant this, is the only input-output mechanism this down here? Or could you transplant that consciousness into something that would be very different, that would last in space, that would last tens of thousands of years, that would be a completely redesigned body that could hold consciousness for a long, long period of time?And let's come back to the first question: Why would you ever want to do that? Well, I'll tell you why. Because this is the ultimate selfie.(Laughter)This is taken from six billion miles away, and that's Earth. And that's all of us. And if that little thing goes, all of humanity goes. And the reason you want to alter the human body is because you eventually want a picture that says, that's us, and that's us, and that's us, because that's the way humanity survives long-term extinction. And that's the reason why it turns out it's actually unethical not to evolve the human body even though it can be scary, even though it can be challenging, but it's what's going to allow us to explore, live and get to places we can't even dream of today, but which our great-great-great-great- grandchildren might someday.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_what_will_humans_look_like_in_100_years
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"Speaking up is hard to do. I understood the true meaning of this phrase exactly one month ago, when my wife and I became new parents. It was an amazing moment. It was exhilarating and elating, but it was also scary and terrifying. And it got particularly terrifying when we got home from the hospital, and we were unsure whether our little baby boy was getting enough nutrients from breastfeeding. And we wanted to call our pediatrician, but we also didn't want to make a bad first impression or come across as a crazy, neurotic parent. So we worried. And we waited. When we got to the doctor's office the next day, she immediately gave him formula because he was pretty dehydrated. Our son is fine now, and our doctor has reassured us we can always contact her. But in that moment, I should've spoken up, but I didn't.But sometimes we speak up when we shouldn't, and I learned that over 10 years ago when I let my twin brother down. My twin brother is a documentary filmmaker, and for one of his first films, he got an offer from a distribution company. He was excited, and he was inclined to accept the offer. But as a negotiations researcher, I insisted he make a counteroffer, and I helped him craft the perfect one. And it was perfect — it was perfectly insulting. The company was so offended, they literally withdrew the offer and my brother was left with nothing.And I've asked people all over the world about this dilemma of speaking up: when they can assert themselves, when they can push their interests, when they can express an opinion, when they can make an ambitious ask.And the range of stories are varied and diverse, but they also make up a universal tapestry. Can I correct my boss when they make a mistake? Can I confront my coworker who keeps stepping on my toes? Can I challenge my friend's insensitive joke? Can I tell the person I love the most my deepest insecurities?And through these experiences, I've come to recognize that each of us have something called a range of acceptable behavior. Now, sometimes we're too strong; we push ourselves too much. That's what happened with my brother. Even making an offer was outside his range of acceptable behavior. But sometimes we're too weak. That's what happened with my wife and I. And this range of acceptable behaviors — when we stay within our range, we're rewarded. When we step outside that range, we get punished in a variety of ways. We get dismissed or demeaned or even ostracized. Or we lose that raise or that promotion or that deal.Now, the first thing we need to know is: What is my range? But the key thing is, our range isn't fixed; it's actually pretty dynamic. It expands and it narrows based on the context. And there's one thing that determines that range more than anything else, and that's your power. Your power determines your range. What is power? Power comes in lots of forms. In negotiations, it comes in the form of alternatives. So my brother had no alternatives; he lacked power. The company had lots of alternatives; they had power. Sometimes it's being new to a country, like an immigrant, or new to an organization or new to an experience, like my wife and I as new parents. Sometimes it's at work, where someone's the boss and someone's the subordinate. Sometimes it's in relationships, where one person's more invested than the other person.And the key thing is that when we have lots of power, our range is very wide. We have a lot of leeway in how to behave. But when we lack power, our range narrows. We have very little leeway. The problem is that when our range narrows, that produces something called the low-power double bind. The low-power double bind happens when, if we don't speak up, we go unnoticed, but if we do speak up, we get punished.Now, many of you have heard the phrase the ""double bind"" and connected it with one thing, and that's gender. The gender double bind is women who don't speak up go unnoticed, and women who do speak up get punished. And the key thing is that women have the same need as men to speak up, but they have barriers to doing so. But what my research has shown over the last two decades is that what looks like a gender difference is not really a gender double bind, it's a really a low-power double bind. And what looks like a gender difference are really often just power differences in disguise. Oftentimes we see a difference between a man and a woman or men and women, and think, ""Biological cause. There's something fundamentally different about the sexes."" But in study after study, I've found that a better explanation for many sex differences is really power. And so it's the low-power double bind. And the low-power double bind means that we have a narrow range, and we lack power. We have a narrow range, and our double bind is very large.So we need to find ways to expand our range. And over the last couple decades, my colleagues and I have found two things really matter. The first: you seem powerful in your own eyes. The second: you seem powerful in the eyes of others. When I feel powerful, I feel confident, not fearful; I expand my own range. When other people see me as powerful, they grant me a wider range. So we need tools to expand our range of acceptable behavior. And I'm going to give you a set of tools today. Speaking up is risky, but these tools will lower your risk of speaking up.The first tool I'm going to give you got discovered in negotiations in an important finding. On average, women make less ambitious offers and get worse outcomes than men at the bargaining table. But Hannah Riley Bowles and Emily Amanatullah have discovered there's one situation where women get the same outcomes as men and are just as ambitious. That's when they advocate for others. When they advocate for others, they discover their own range and expand it in their own mind. They become more assertive. This is sometimes called ""the mama bear effect."" Like a mama bear defending her cubs, when we advocate for others, we can discover our own voice.But sometimes, we have to advocate for ourselves. How do we do that? One of the most important tools we have to advocate for ourselves is something called perspective-taking. And perspective-taking is really simple: it's simply looking at the world through the eyes of another person. It's one of the most important tools we have to expand our range. When I take your perspective, and I think about what you really want, you're more likely to give me what I really want.But here's the problem: perspective-taking is hard to do. So let's do a little experiment. I want you all to hold your hand just like this: your finger — put it up. And I want you to draw a capital letter E on your forehead as quickly as possible. OK, it turns out that we can draw this E in one of two ways, and this was originally designed as a test of perspective-taking. I'm going to show you two pictures of someone with an E on their forehead — my former student, Erika Hall. And you can see over here, that's the correct E. I drew the E so it looks like an E to another person. That's the perspective-taking E because it looks like an E from someone else's vantage point. But this E over here is the self-focused E. We often get self-focused. And we particularly get self-focused in a crisis.I want to tell you about a particular crisis. A man walks into a bank in Watsonville, California. And he says, ""Give me $2,000, or I'm blowing the whole bank up with a bomb."" Now, the bank manager didn't give him the money. She took a step back. She took his perspective, and she noticed something really important. He asked for a specific amount of money.So she said, ""Why did you ask for $2,000?""And he said, ""My friend is going to be evicted unless I get him $2,000 immediately.""And she said, ""Oh! You don't want to rob the bank — you want to take out a loan.""(Laughter)""Why don't you come back to my office, and we can have you fill out the paperwork.""(Laughter)Now, her quick perspective-taking defused a volatile situation. So when we take someone's perspective, it allows us to be ambitious and assertive, but still be likable.Here's another way to be assertive but still be likable, and that is to signal flexibility. Now, imagine you're a car salesperson, and you want to sell someone a car. You're going to more likely make the sale if you give them two options. Let's say option A: $24,000 for this car and a five-year warranty. Or option B: $23,000 and a three-year warranty. My research shows that when you give people a choice among options, it lowers their defenses, and they're more likely to accept your offer.And this doesn't just work with salespeople; it works with parents. When my niece was four, she resisted getting dressed and rejected everything. But then my sister-in-law had a brilliant idea. What if I gave my daughter a choice? This shirt or that shirt? OK, that shirt. This pant or that pant? OK, that pant. And it worked brilliantly. She got dressed quickly and without resistance.When I've asked the question around the world when people feel comfortable speaking up, the number one answer is: ""When I have social support in my audience; when I have allies."" So we want to get allies on our side. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways is be a mama bear. When we advocate for others, we expand our range in our own eyes and the eyes of others, but we also earn strong allies.Another way we can earn strong allies, especially in high places, is by asking other people for advice. When we ask others for advice, they like us because we flatter them, and we're expressing humility. And this really works to solve another double bind. And that's the self-promotion double bind. The self-promotion double bind is that if we don't advertise our accomplishments, no one notices. And if we do, we're not likable.But if we ask for advice about one of our accomplishments, we are able to be competent in their eyes but also be likeable. And this is so powerful it even works when you see it coming. There have been multiple times in life when I have been forewarned that a low-power person has been given the advice to come ask me for advice. I want you to notice three things about this: First, I knew they were going to come ask me for advice. Two, I've actually done research on the strategic benefits of asking for advice. And three, it still worked! I took their perspective, I became more invested in their cause, I became more committed to them because they asked for advice.Now, another time we feel more confident speaking up is when we have expertise. Expertise gives us credibility. When we have high power, we already have credibility. We only need good evidence. When we lack power, we don't have the credibility. We need excellent evidence.And one of the ways we can come across as an expert is by tapping into our passion. I want everyone in the next few days to go up to friend of theirs and just say to them, ""I want you to describe a passion of yours to me."" I've had people do this all over the world and I asked them, ""What did you notice about the other person when they described their passion?"" And the answers are always the same. ""Their eyes lit up and got big."" ""They smiled a big beaming smile."" ""They used their hands all over — I had to duck because their hands were coming at me."" ""They talk quickly with a little higher pitch.""(Laughter)""They leaned in as if telling me a secret.""And then I said to them, ""What happened to you as you listened to their passion?""They said, ""My eyes lit up. I smiled. I leaned in.""When we tap into our passion, we give ourselves the courage, in our own eyes, to speak up, but we also get the permission from others to speak up. Tapping into our passion even works when we come across as too weak. Both men and women get punished at work when they shed tears. But Lizzie Wolf has shown that when we frame our strong emotions as passion, the condemnation of our crying disappears for both men and women.I want to end with a few words from my late father that he spoke at my twin brother's wedding. Here's a picture of us. My dad was a psychologist like me, but his real love and his real passion was cinema, like my brother. And so he wrote a speech for my brother's wedding about the roles we play in the human comedy.And he said, ""The lighter your touch, the better you become at improving and enriching your performance. Those who embrace their roles and work to improve their performance grow, change and expand the self. Play it well, and your days will be mostly joyful.""What my dad was saying is that we've all been assigned ranges and roles in this world. But he was also saying the essence of this talk: those roles and ranges are constantly expanding and evolving.So when a scene calls for it, be a ferocious mama bear and a humble advice seeker. Have excellent evidence and strong allies. Be a passionate perspective taker. And if you use those tools — and each and every one of you can use these tools — you will expand your range of acceptable behavior, and your days will be mostly joyful.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_galinsky_how_to_speak_up_for_yourself
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"It's easy to forget that last night, one billion people went to sleep without access to electricity. One billion people. Two and a half billion people did not have access to clean cooking fuels or clean heating fuels. Those are the problems in the developing world. And it's easy for us not to be empathetic with those people who seem so distanced from us.But even in our own world, the developed world, we see the tension of stagnant economies impacting the lives of people around us. We see it in whole pieces of the economy, where the people involved have lost hope about the future and despair about the present. We see that in the Brexit vote. We see that in the Sanders/Trump campaigns in my own country. But even in countries as recently turning the corner towards being in the developed world, in China, we see the difficulty that President Xi has as he begins to un-employ so many people in his coal and mining industries who see no future for themselves. As we as a society figure out how to manage the problems of the developed world and the problems of the developing world, we have to look at how we move forward and manage the environmental impact of those decisions.We've been working on this problem for 25 years, since Rio, the Kyoto Protocols. Our most recent move is the Paris treaty, and the resulting climate agreements that are being ratified by nations around the world. I think we can be very hopeful that those agreements, which are bottom-up agreements, where nations have said what they think they can do, are genuine and forthcoming for the vast majority of the parties. The unfortunate thing is that now, as we look at the independent analyses of what those climate treaties are liable to yield, the magnitude of the problem before us becomes clear.This is the United States Energy Information Agency's assessment of what will happen if the countries implement the climate commitments that they've made in Paris between now and 2040. It shows basically CO2 emissions around the world over the next 30 years. There are three things that you need to look at and appreciate.One, CO2 emissions are expected to continue to grow for the next 30 years. In order to control climate, CO2 emissions have to literally go to zero because it's the cumulative emissions that drive heating on the planet. This should tell you that we are losing the race to fossil fuels.The second thing you should notice is that the bulk of the growth comes from the developing countries, from China, from India, from the rest of the world, which includes South Africa and Indonesia and Brazil, as most of these countries move their people into the lower range of lifestyles that we literally take for granted in the developed world.The final thing that you should notice is that each year, about 10 gigatons of carbon are getting added to the planet's atmosphere, and then diffusing into the ocean and into the land. That's on top of the 550 gigatons that are in place today. At the end of 30 years, we will have put 850 gigatons of carbon into the air, and that probably goes a long way towards locking in a 2-4 degree C increase in global mean surface temperatures, locking in ocean acidification and locking in sea level rise.Now, this is a projection made by men by the actions of society, and it's ours to change, not to accept. But the magnitude of the problem is something we need to appreciate.Different nations make different energy choices. It's a function of their natural resources. It's a function of their climate. It's a function of the development path that they've followed as a society. It's a function of where on the surface of the planet they are. Are they where it's dark a lot of the time, or are they at the mid-latitudes? Many, many, many things go into the choices of countries, and they each make a different choice.The overwhelming thing that we need to appreciate is the choice that China has made. China has made the choice, and will make the choice, to run on coal. The United States has an alternative. It can run on natural gas as a result of the inventions of fracking and shale gas, which we have here. They provide an alternative. The OECD Europe has a choice. It has renewables that it can afford to deploy in Germany because it's rich enough to afford to do it. The French and the British show interest in nuclear power. Eastern Europe, still very heavily committed to natural gas and to coal, and with natural gas that comes from Russia, with all of its entanglements. China has many fewer choices and a much harder row to hoe.If you look at China, and you ask yourself why has coal been important to it, you have to remember what China's done. China brought people to power, not power to people. It didn't do rural electrification. It urbanized. It urbanized by taking low-cost labor and low-cost energy, creating export industries that could fund a tremendous amount of growth.If we look at China's path, all of us know that prosperity in China has dramatically increased. In 1980, 80 percent of China's population lived below the extreme poverty level, below the level of having $1.90 per person per day. By the year 2000, only 20 percent of China's population lived below the extreme poverty level — a remarkable feat, admittedly, with some costs in civil liberties that would be tough to accept in the Western world. But the impact of all that wealth allowed people to get massively better nutrition. It allowed water pipes to be placed. It allowed sewage pipes to be placed, dramatic decrease in diarrheal diseases, at the cost of some outdoor air pollution.But in 1980, and even today, the number one killer in China is indoor air pollution, because people do not have access to clean cooking and heating fuels. In fact, in 2040, it's still estimated that 200 million people in China will not have access to clean cooking fuels. They have a remarkable path to follow.India also needs to meet the needs of its own people, and it's going to do that by burning coal. When we look at the EIA's projections of coal burning in India, India will supply nearly four times as much of its energy from coal as it will from renewables. It's not because they don't know the alternatives; it's because rich countries can do what they choose, poor countries do what they must.So what can we do to stop coal's emissions in time? What can we do that changes this forecast that's in front of us? Because it's a forecast that we can change if we have the will to do it.First of all, we have to think about the magnitude of the problem. Between now and 2040, 800 to 1,600 new coal plants are going to be built around the world. This week, between one and three one-gigawatt coal plants are being turned on around the world. That's happening regardless of what we want, because the people that rule their countries, assessing the interests of their citizens, have decided it's in the interest of their citizens to do that. And that's going to happen unless they have a better alternative. And every 100 of those plants will use up between one percent and three percent of the Earth's climate budget.So every day that you go home thinking that you should do something about global warming, at the end of that week, remember: somebody fired up a coal plant that's going to run for 50 years and take away your ability to change it.What we've forgotten is something that Vinod Khosla used to talk about, a man of Indian ethnicity but an American venture capitalist. And he said, back in the early 2000s, that if you needed to get China and India off of fossil fuels, you had to create a technology that passed the ""Chindia test,"" ""Chindia"" being the appending of the two words. It had to be first of all viable, meaning that technically, they could implement it in their country, and that it would be accepted by the people in the country.Two, it had to be a technology that was scalable, that it could deliver the same benefits on the same timetable as fossil fuels, so that they can enjoy the kind of life, again, that we take for granted.And third, it had to be cost-effective without subsidy or without mandate. It had to stand on its own two feet; it could not be maintained for that many people if in fact, those countries had to go begging or had some foreign country say, ""I won't trade with you,"" in order to get the technology shift to occur.If you look at the Chindia test, we simply have not come up with alternatives that meet that test. That's what the EIA forecast tells us. China's building 800 gigawatts of coal, 400 gigawatts of hydro, about 200 gigawatts of nuclear, and on an energy-equivalent basis, adjusting for intermittency, about 100 gigawatts of renewables. 800 gigawatts of coal. They're doing that, knowing the costs better than any other country, knowing the need better than any other country. But that's what they're aiming for in 2040 unless we give them a better choice. To give them a better choice, it's going to have to meet the Chindia test.If you look at all the alternatives that are out there, there are really two that come near to meeting it. First is this area of new nuclear that I'll talk about in just a second. It's a new generation of nuclear plants that are on the drawing boards around the world, and the people who are developing these say we can get them in position to demo by 2025 and to scale by 2030, if you will just let us. The second alternative that could be there in time is utility-scale solar backed up with natural gas, which we can use today, versus the batteries which are still under development.So what's holding new nuclear back? Outdated regulations and yesterday's mindsets. We have not used our latest scientific thinking on radiological health to think how we communicate with the public and govern the testing of new nuclear reactors. We have new scientific knowledge that we need to use in order to improve the way we regulate nuclear industry.The second thing is we've got a mindset that it takes 25 years and 2 to 5 billion dollars to develop a nuclear power plant. That comes from the historical, military mindset of the places nuclear power came from. These new nuclear ventures are saying that they can deliver power for 5 cents a kilowatt hour; they can deliver it for 100 gigawatts a year; they can demo it by 2025; and they can deliver it in scale by 2030, if only we give them a chance.Right now, we're basically waiting for a miracle. What we need is a choice. If they can't make it safe, if they can't make it cheap, it should not be deployed. But what I want you to do is not carry an idea forward, but write your leaders, write the head of the NGOs you support, and tell them to give you the choice, not the past.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joe_lassiter_we_need_nuclear_power_to_solve_climate_change
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"Mia Birdsong: Why is Black Lives Matter important for the US right now and in the world?Patrisse Cullors: Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us.I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us.Opal Tometi: And antiblack racism —(Applause)And antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. It's actually happening all across the globe. And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context.(Applause)We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day. I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living.We also see disasters like Hurricane Matthew, which recently wreaked havoc in many different nations, but caused the most damage to Haiti. Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere, and its inhabitants are black people. And what we're seeing in Haiti is that they were actually facing a number of challenges that even preceded this hurricane. They were reeling from the earthquake, they were reeling from cholera that was brought in by UN peacekeepers and still hasn't been eradicated. This is unconscionable. And this would not happen if this nation didn't have a population that was black, and we have to be real about that.But what's most heartening right now is that despite these challenges, what we're seeing is that there's a network of Africans all across the continent who are rising up and fighting back and demanding climate justice.(Applause)MB: So Alicia, you've said that when black people are free, everyone is free. Can you talk about what that means?Alicia Garza: Sure. So I think race and racism is probably the most studied social, economic and political phenomenon in this country, but it's also the least understood. The reality is that race in the United States operates on a spectrum from black to white. Doesn't mean that people who are in between don't experience racism, but it means that the closer you are to white on that spectrum, the better off you are. And the closer to black that you are on that spectrum the worse off your are. When we think about how we address problems in this country, we often start from a place of trickle-down justice. So using white folks as the control we say, well, if we make things better for white folks then everybody else is going to get free. But actually it doesn't work that way. We have to address problems at the root, and when you deal with what's happening in black communities, it creates an effervescence, right? So a bubble up rather than a trickle down. Let me give an example. When we talk about the wage gap, we often say women make 78 cents to every dollar that a man makes. You all have heard that before. But those are the statistics for white women and white men. The reality is that black women make something like 64 cents to every 78 cents that white women make. When we talk about latinas, it goes down to about 58 cents. If we were to talk about indigenous women, if we were to talk about trans women, it would even go further down. So again, if you deal with those who are the most impacted, everybody has an opportunity to benefit from that, rather than dealing with the folks who are not as impacted, and expecting it to trickle down.MB: So I love the effervescence, bubbling up.AG: Effervescence — like champagne.(Laughter)MB: Who doesn't love a glass of champagne, right? Champagne and freedom, right?(Laughter)What more could we want, y'all?So you all have been doing this for a minute, and the last few years have been — well, I can't even imagine, but I'm sure very transformative. And I know that you all have learned a lot about leadership. What do you want to share with these people about what you've learned about leadership? Patrisse, let's start with you.PC: Yeah, we have to invest in black leadership. That's what I've learned the most in the last few years.(Applause)What we've seen is thousands of black people showing up for our lives with very little infrastructure and very little support. I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. It's not just about coming and watching people on a stage, right? It's about how do you become that leader — whether it's in your workplace, whether it's in your home — and believe that the movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody.(Applause)MB: What about you, Opal?OT: So I've been learning a great deal about interdependence. I've been learning about how to trust your team. I've come up with this new mantra after coming back from a three-month sabbatical, which is rare for black women to take who are in leadership, but I felt it was really important for my leadership and for my team to also practice stepping back as well as also sometimes stepping in. And what I learned in this process was that we need to acknowledge that different people contribute different strengths, and that in order for our entire team to flourish, we have to allow them to share and allow them to shine. And so during my sabbatical with the organization that I also work with, I saw our team rise up in my absence. They were able to launch new programs, fundraise. And when I came back, I had to give them a lot of gratitude and praise because they showed me that they truly had my back and that they truly had their own backs.You know, in this process of my sabbatical, I was really reminded of this Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. I am because you are; you are because I am. And I realized that my own leadership, and the contributions that I'm able to make, is in large part due to the contributions that they make, right? And I have to acknowledge that, and I have to see that, and so my new mantra is, ""Keep calm and trust the team."" And also, ""Keep calm and thank the team.""MB: You know, one of the things I feel like I've heard in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement more than anywhere else is about being a leaderful movement, and that's such a beautiful concept, and I think that something that women often bring to the conversation about leadership is really the collective piece. What about you, Alicia?AG: Yeah ... How many of you heard that saying that leadership is lonely? I think that there is an element where leadership is lonely, but I also believe that it doesn't have to be like that. And in order for us to get to that point, I think there's a few things that we need to be doing.So one is we have to stop treating leaders like superheroes. We are ordinary people attempting to do extraordinary things, and so we need to be supported in that way.The other thing that I've learned about leadership is that there's a difference between leadership and celebrities, right? And there's a way in which we've been kind of transformed into celebrities rather than people who are trying to solve a problem. And the way that we treat celebrities is very fickle, right? We like them one day, we don't like what they're wearing the next day, and all of a sudden we have issues, right? So we need to stop deifying leaders so that more people will step into leadership. Lots of people are terrified to step into leadership because of how much scrutiny they receive and how brutal we are with leaders.And then the last thing that I've learned about leadership is that it's really easy to be a leader when everybody likes you. But it's hard to be a leader when you have to make hard choices and when you have to do what's right, even though people are not going to like you for it. And so in that way, I think another way that we can support leaders is to struggle with us, but struggle with us politically, not personally. We can have disagreements without being disagreeable, but it's important for us to sharpen each other, so that we all can rise.MB: That's beautiful, thank you.(Applause)So you all are doing work that forces you to face some brutal, painful realities on a daily basis. What gives you hope and inspires you in that context?PC: I am hopeful for black futures. And I say that because we live in a society that's so obsessed with black death. We have images of our death on the TV screen, on our Twitter timelines, on our Facebook timelines, but what if instead we imagine black life? We imagine black people living and thriving. And that — that inspires me.OT: What inspires me these days are immigrants. Immigrants all over the world who are doing the best that they can to make a living, to survive and also to thrive. Right now there are over 244 million people who aren't living in their country of origin. This is a 40 percent increase since the year 2000. So what this tells me is that the disparities across the globe are only getting worse. Yet there are people who are finding the strength and wherewithal to travel, to move, to eke out a better living for themselves and to provide for their families and their loved ones. And some of these people who are immigrants are also undocumented. They're unauthorized. And they inspire me even more because although our society is telling them, you're not wanted, you're not needed here, and they're highly vulnerable and subject to abuse, to wage theft, to exploitation and xenophobic attacks, many of them are also beginning to organize in their communities. And what I'm seeing is that there's also an emerging network of black, undocumented people who are resisting the framework, and resisting the criminalization of their existence. And that to me is incredibly powerful and inspires me every singe day.MB: Thank you. Alicia?AG: So we know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. We all know that as you get older, you get a little more entrenched in your ways. It's happening to me, I know that's right. But I'm so inspired when I see people who have a way that they do things, have a way that they think about the world, and they're courageous enough to be open to listening to what the experiences are of so many of us who want to live in world that's just and want to live in a world that's equitable. And I'm also inspired by the actions that I'm seeing older people taking in service of this movement. I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, ""I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire.""(Applause)MB: I love that — yes.So in terms of action, I think that it is awesome to sit here and be able to listen to you all, and to have our minds open and shift, but that's not going to get black people free. So if you had one thing you would like this audience and the folks who are watching around the world to actually do, what would that be?AG: OK, two quick ones. One, call the White House. The water protectors are being forcibly removed from the camp that they have set up to defend what keeps us alive. And that is intricately related to black lives. So definitely call the White House and demand that they stop doing that. There are tanks and police officers arresting every single person there as we speak.(Applause)The second thing that you can do is to join something. Be a part of something. There are groups, collectives — doesn't have to be a non-profit, you know what I mean? But there are groups that are doing work in our communities right now to make sure that black lives matter so all lives matter. Get involved; don't sit on your couch and tell people what you think they should be doing. Go do it with us.MB: Do you guys want to add anything? That's good? All right. So — And I think that the joining something, like if you feel like there's not something where you are, start it.AG: Start it.MB: These conversations that we're having, have those conversations with somebody else. And then instead of just letting it be a talk that you had, actually decide to start something.OT: That's right.MB: I mean, that's what you all did. You started something, and look what's happened. Thank you all so much for being here with us today.OT: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alicia_garza_patrisse_cullors_and_opal_tometi_an_interview_with_the_founders_of_black_lives_matter
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"I'd like you to imagine the world anew. I'd like to show you some maps, which have been drawn by Ben Hennig, of the planet in a way that most of you will never have seen the planet depicted before.Here's an image that you're very familiar with. I'm old enough that I was actually born before we saw this image. Apparently some of my first words were ""moona, moona,"" but I think that's my mom having a particular fantasy about what her baby boy could see on the flickering black and white TV screen. It's only been a few centuries since we've actually, most of us, thought of our planet as spherical. When we first saw these images in the 1960s, the world was changing at an incredible rate. In my own little discipline of human geography, a cartographer called Waldo Tobler was drawing new maps of the planet, and these maps have now spread, and I'm going to show you one of them now. This map is a map of the world, but it's a map which looks to you a little bit strange. It's a map in which we stretched places, so that those areas which contain many people are drawn larger, and those areas, like the Sahara and the Himalayas, in which there are few people, have been shrunk away. Everybody on the planet is given an equal amount of space. The cities are shown shining bright. The lines are showing you submarine cables and trade routes. And there's one particular line that goes from the Chinese port of Dalian through past Singapore, through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and round to Rotterdam. And it's showing you the route of what was the world's largest ship just a year ago, a ship which was taking so many containers of goods that when they were unloaded, if the lorries had all gone in convoy, they would have been 100 kilometers long. This is how our world is now connected. This is the quantity of stuff we are now moving around the world, just on one ship, on one voyage, in five weeks.We've lived in cities for a very long time, but most of us didn't live in cities. This is Çatalhöyük, one of the world's first cities. At its peak 9,000 years ago, people had to walk over the roofs of others' houses to get to their home. If you look carefully at the map of the city, you'll see it has no streets, because streets are something we invented. The world changes. It changes by trial and error. We work out slowly and gradually how to live in better ways. And the world has changed incredibly quickly most recently. It's only within the last six, seven, or eight generations that we have actually realized that we are a species. It's only within the last few decades that a map like this could be drawn. Again, the underlying map is the map of world population, but over it, you're seeing arrows showing how we spread out of Africa with dates showing you where we think we arrived at particular times. I have to redraw this map every few months, because somebody makes a discovery that a particular date was wrong. We are learning about ourselves at an incredible speed. And we're changing. A lot of change is gradual. It's accretion. We don't notice the change because we only have short lives, 70, 80, if you're lucky 90 years. This graph is showing you the annual rate of population growth in the world. It was very low until around about 1850, and then the rate of population growth began to rise so that around the time I was born, when we first saw those images from the moon of our planet, our global population was growing at two percent a year. If it had carried on growing at two percent a year for just another couple of centuries, the entire planet would be covered with a seething mass of human bodies all touching each other. And people were scared. They were scared of population growth and what they called ""the population bomb"" in 1968. But then, if you look at the end of the graph, the growth began to slow. The decade — the '70s, the '80s, the '90s, the noughties, and in this decade, even faster — our population growth is slowing. Our planet is stabilizing. We are heading towards nine, 10, or 11 billion people by the end of the century. Within that change, you can see tumult. You can see the Second World War. You can see the pandemic in 1918 from influenza. You can see the great Chinese famine. These are the events we tend to concentrate on. We tend to concentrate on the terrible events in the news. We don't tend to concentrate on the gradual change and the good news stories.We worry about people. We worry about how many people there are. We worry about how you can get away from people. But this is the map of the world changed again to make area large, the further away people are from each area. So if you want to know where to go to get away from everybody, here's the best places to go. And every year, these areas get bigger, because every year, we are coming off the land globally. We are moving into the cities. We are packing in more densely. There are wolves again in Europe, and the wolves are moving west across the continent. Our world is changing.You have worries. This is a map showing where the water falls on our planet. We now know that. And you can look at where Çatalhöyük was, where three continents meet, Africa, Asia, and Europe, and you can see there are a large number of people living there in areas with very little water. And you can see areas in which there is a great deal of rainfall as well. And we can get a bit more sophisticated. Instead of making the map be shaped by people, we can shape the map by water, and then we can change it every month to show the amount of water falling on every small part of the globe. And you see the monsoons moving around the planet, and the planet almost appears to have a heartbeat. And all of this only became possible within my lifetime to see this is where we are living. We have enough water.This is a map of where we grow our food in the world. This is the areas that we will rely on most for rice and maize and corn. People worry that there won't be enough food, but we know, if we just ate less meat and fed less of the crops to animals, there is enough food for everybody as long as we think of ourselves as one group of people.And we also know about what we do so terribly badly nowadays. You will have seen this map of the world before. This is the map produced by taking satellite images, if you remember those satellites around the planet in the very first slide I showed, and producing an image of what the Earth looks like at night. When you normally see that map, on a normal map, the kind of map that most of you will be used to, you think you are seeing a map of where people live. Where the lights are shining up is where people live. But here, on this image of the world, remember we've stretched the map again. Everywhere has the same density of people on this map. If an area doesn't have people, we've shrunk it away to make it disappear. So we're showing everybody with equal prominence. Now, the lights no longer show you where people are, because people are everywhere. Now the lights on the map, the lights in London, the lights in Cairo, the lights in Tokyo, the lights on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, the lights show you where people live who are so profligate with energy that they can afford to spend money powering lights to shine up into the sky, so satellites can draw an image like this. And the areas that are dark on the map are either areas where people do not have access to that much energy, or areas where people do, but they have learned to stop shining the light up into the sky. And if I could show you this map animated over time, you would see that Tokyo has actually become darker, because ever since the tsunami in Japan, Japan has had to rely on a quarter less electricity because it turned the nuclear power stations off. And the world didn't end. You just shone less light up into the sky.There are a huge number of good news stories in the world. Infant mortality is falling and has been falling at an incredible rate. A few years ago, the number of babies dying in their first year of life in the world fell by five percent in just one year. More children are going to school and learning to read and write and getting connected to the Internet and going on to go to university than ever before at an incredible rate, and the highest number of young people going to university in the world are women, not men. I can give you good news story after good news story about what is getting better in the planet, but we tend to concentrate on the bad news that is immediate. Rebecca Solnit, I think, put it brilliantly, when she explained: ""The accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes which can constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past"" — the past was much more stable — ""a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation, punctuated by occasional tumult."" Occasionally, terrible things happen. You are shown those terrible things on the news every night of the week. You are not told about the population slowing down. You are not told about the world becoming more connected. You are not told about the incredible improvements in understanding. You are not told about how we are learning to begin to waste less and consume less.This is my last map. On this map, we have taken the seas and the oceans out. Now you are just looking at about 7.4 billion people with the map drawn in proportion to those people. You're looking at over a billion in China, and you can see the largest city in the world in China, but you do not know its name. You can see that India is in the center of this world. You can see that Europe is on the edge. And we in Exeter today are on the far edge of the planet. We are on a tiny scrap of rock off Europe which contains less than one percent of the world's adults, and less than half a percent of the world's children. We are living in a stabilizing world, an urbanizing world, an aging world, a connecting world. There are many, many things to be frightened about, but there is no need for us to fear each other as much as we do, and we need to see that we are now living in a new world.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/danny_dorling_maps_that_show_us_who_we_are_not_just_where_we_are
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"This picture is from my metro card when I spent a year abroad in Paris in college in the mid-'90s. My friend says I look like a French anarchist —(Laughter)But this is still what I see when I look in the mirror in the morning. Within a month of living in Paris, I'd lost 15 pounds and I was in the best shape of my life because I was eating fresh food and I was walking wherever I went.Having grown up in suburban Atlanta, a region built largely by highways and automobiles and with a reputation as a poster child for sprawl, Paris fundamentally changed the way I understood the construction of the world around me, and I got obsessed with the role of infrastructure — that it's not just the way to move people from point A to point B, it's not just the way to convey water or sewage or energy, but it's the foundation for our economy. It's the foundation for our social life and for our culture, and it really matters to the way that we live.When I came home, I was instantly frustrated, stuck in traffic as I crossed the top end of our perimeter highway. Not only was I not moving a muscle, I had no social interaction with the hundreds of thousands of people that were hurtling past me, like me, with their eyes faced forward and their music blaring. I wondered if this was an inevitable outcome, or could we do something about it. Was it possible to transform this condition in Atlanta into the kind of place that I wanted to live in?I went back to grad school in architecture and city planning, developed this interest in infrastructure, and in 1999 came up with an idea for my thesis project: the adaptation of an obsolete loop of old railroad circling downtown as a new infrastructure for urban revitalization. It was just an idea. I never thought we would actually build it. But I went to work at an architecture firm, and eventually talked to my coworkers about it, and they loved the idea. And as we started talking to more people about it, more people wanted to hear about it.In the summer of 2001, we connected with Cathy Woolard, who was soon elected city council president. And we built a citywide vision around this idea: the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile loop of transit and trails and transformation. I was doing two and three meetings a week for two and a half years, and so was Cathy and her staff and a handful of volunteers. Together, we built this amazing movement of people and ideas. It included community advocates who were used to fighting against things, but found the Atlanta BeltLine as something that they could fight for; developers who saw the opportunity to take advantage of a lot of new growth in the city; and dozens of nonprofit partners who saw their mission at least partly accomplished by the shared vision.Now, usually these groups of people aren't at the same table wanting the same outcome. But there we were, and it was kind of weird, but it was really, really powerful. The people of Atlanta fell in love with a vision that was better than what they saw through their car windshields, and the people of Atlanta made it happen, and I guarantee you we would not be building it otherwise.From the beginning, our coalition was diverse. People of all stripes were part of our story. People on the lower end of the economic spectrum loved it, too. They were just afraid they weren't going to be able to be there when it got built, that they'd be priced out. And we've all heard that kind of story before, right? But we promised that the Atlanta BeltLine would be different, and people took ownership of the idea, and they made it better than anything we ever imagined in the beginning, including significant subsidies for housing, new parks, art, an arboretum — a list that continues to grow. And we put in place the organizations and agencies that were required to make it happen. And importantly, it is.Now we're in the early stages of implementation, and it's working. The first mainline section of trail was opened in 2012, and it's already generated over three billion dollars of private-sector investment. But it's not only changing the physical form of the city, it's changing the way we think about the city, and what our expectations are for living there. About a month ago, I had to take my kids with me to the grocery store and they were complaining about it, because they didn't want to get in the car. They were saying, ""Dad, if we have to go, can we at least ride our bikes?"" And I said, ""Of course we can. That's what people in Atlanta do. We ride our bikes to the grocery store.""(Laughter)(Applause)Thank you, yeah.Now, they don't know how ridiculous that is, but I do. And I also understand that their expectations for Atlanta are really powerful.This kind of transformation is exactly like sprawl in the last century, the movement where our investment in highways and automobiles fundamentally changed American life. That wasn't some grand conspiracy. There were conspiracies within it, of course. But it was a cultural momentum. It was millions of people making millions of decisions over an extended period of time, that fundamentally changed not only the way that we build cities, but it changed our expectations for our lives. These changes were the foundations for urban sprawl. We didn't call it sprawl at that time. We called it the future. And it was. And we got all the highways and strip malls and cul-de-sacs we wanted.It was a radical transformation, but it was built by a cultural momentum. So it's important to not separate the physical construction of the places we live from other things that are happening at that time. At that time, in the second half of the last century, science was curing disease and lifting us to the moon, and the sexual revolution was breaking down barriers, and the Civil Rights Movement began its march toward the fulfillment of our nation's promise. Television, entertainment, food, travel, business — everything was changing, and both the public and private sectors were colluding to give us the lives we wanted. The Federal Highway Administration, for example, didn't exist before there were highways. Think about it.(Laughter)Of course, today it's important to understand and acknowledge that those benefits accrued to some groups of people and not to others. It was not an equitable cultural momentum. But when we look today in wonder and disgust, maybe, at the metropolis sprawl before us, we wonder if we're stuck. Are we stuck with the legacy of that inequity? Are we stuck with this dystopian traffic hellscape? Are we stuck with rampant urban displacement, with environmental degradation? Are we stuck with social isolation or political polarization? Are these the inevitable and permanent outcomes? Or are they the result of our collective cultural decisions that we've made for ourselves? And if they are, can't we change them?What I have learned from our experience in Atlanta is not an anomaly. Similar stories are playing out everywhere, where people are reclaiming not only old railroads, but also degraded urban waterways and obsolete roadways, reinventing all of the infrastructure in their lives. Whether here in New York or in Houston or Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Toronto and Paris, cities big and small all over the world are reclaiming and reinventing this infrastructure for themselves, including the mother of all catalyst infrastructure projects, the Los Angeles River, the revitalization effort for which similarly started as a grassroots movement, has developed into a cultural momentum, and is now in the early stages of being transformed into some kind of life-affirming infrastructure again, this one with trails and parks and fishing and boating and community revitalization, and of course, water quality and flood control. It's already improving the lives of people. It's already changing the way the rest of us think about Los Angeles.This is more than just infrastructure. We're building new lives for ourselves. It's a movement that includes local food, urban agriculture, craft beer, the maker movement, tech and design — all of these things, early indicators of a really radical shift in the way we build cities. We're taking places like this and transforming them into this. And soon this.And this is all exciting and good. We're changing the world for the better. Good for us! And it is awesome — I mean that. But our history of sprawl, and from what we can already see with these catalyst projects today, we know and must remember that big changes like this don't usually benefit everyone. The market forces unleashed by this cultural momentum often include the seemingly unstoppable and inevitable cycle of rising taxes, prices and rents.This is urgent. If we care, we have to stand up and speak out. This should be a call to action, because the answer can't be to not improve communities. The answer can't be to not build parks and transit and grocery stores. The answer can't be to hold communities down just to keep them affordable. But we do have to follow through and address the financial realities that we're facing. This is hard, and it won't happen on its own. We can do it, and I'm committed to this goal in Atlanta, to sticking up again for people who made it possible in the first place. We can't call it a success without them. I certainly can't, because the people I made commitments to all those years weren't abstract populations. They're my friends and neighbors. They're people that I love.So even though it started as my graduate thesis and I'm working hard for 16 years with thousands of people to help make this thing come to life, I know and believe that who the BeltLine is being built for is just as important as whether it's built at all. Not just in Atlanta, but locally and globally, we have to understand this accountability to the people whose lives we are changing, because this is us. We are the lives we're talking about. These places aren't inevitable. The places we live aren't inevitable, and if we want something different, we just need to speak up. We have to ensure that change comes on our terms. And to do that, we have to participate actively in the process of shaping change.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_gravel_how_an_old_loop_of_railroads_is_changing_the_face_of_a_city
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"In 1987, Tina Lord found herself in quite the pickle. See, this gold digger made sure she married sweet Cord Roberts just before he inherited millions. But when Cord found out Tina loved his money as much as she loved him, he dumped her. Cord's mother Maria was thrilled until they hooked up again. So Maria hired Max Holden to romance Tina and then made sure Cord didn't find out Tina was pregnant with his baby. So Tina, still married but thinking Cord didn't love her flew to Argentina with Max. Cord finally figured out what was going on and rushed after them, but he was too late. Tina had already been kidnapped, strapped to a raft and sent over a waterfall. She and her baby were presumed dead. Cord was sad for a bit, but then he bounced right back with a supersmart archaeologist named Kate, and they had a gorgeous wedding until Tina, seemingly back from the dead, ran into the church holding a baby. ""Stop!"" she screamed. ""Am I too late? Cord, I've come so far. This is your son.""And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the soap opera ""One Life to Live"" introduced a love story that lasted 25 years.(Laughter)Now, if you've ever seen a soap opera, you know the stories and the characters can be exaggerated, larger than life, and if you're a fan, you find that exaggeration fun, and if you're not, maybe you find them melodramatic or unsophisticated. Maybe you think watching soap operas is a waste of time, that their bigness means their lessons are small or nonexistent. But I believe the opposite to be true. Soap operas reflect life, just bigger. So there are real life lessons we can learn from soap operas, and those lessons are as big and adventurous as any soap opera storyline.Now, I've been a fan since I ran home from the bus stop in second grade desperate to catch the end of Luke and Laura's wedding, the biggest moment in ""General Hospital"" history.(Applause)So you can imagine how much I loved my eight years as the assistant casting director on ""As the World Turns."" My job was watching soap operas, reading soap opera scripts and auditioning actors to be on soap operas. So I know my stuff.(Laughter)And yes, soap operas are larger than life, drama on a grand scale, but our lives can be filled with as much intensity, and the stakes can feel just as dramatic. We cycle through tragedy and joy just like these characters. We cross thresholds, fight demons and find salvation unexpectedly, and we do it again and again and again, but just like soaps, we can flip the script, which means we can learn from these characters that move like bumblebees, looping and swerving through life. And we can use those lessons to craft our own life stories. Soap operas teach us to push away doubt and believe in our capacity for bravery, vulnerability, adaptability and resilience. And most importantly, they show us it's never too late to change your story.So with that, let's start with soap opera lesson one: surrender is not an option.(Laughter)""All My Children""'s Erica Kane was daytime's version of Scarlett O'Hara, a hyperbolically self-important princess who deep down was scrappy and daring. Now, in her 41 years on TV, perhaps Erica's most famous scene is her alone in the woods suddenly face to face with a grizzly bear. She screamed at the bear, ""You may not do this! Do you understand me? You may not come near me! I am Erica Kane and you are a filthy beast!""(Laughter)And of course the bear left, so what that teaches us is obstacles are to be expected and we can choose to surrender or we can stand and fight.Pandora's Tim Westergren knows this better than most. You might even call him the Erica Kane of Silicon Valley. Tim and his cofounders launched the company with two million dollars in funding. They were out of cash the next year. Now, lots of companies fold at that point, but Tim chose to fight. He maxed out 11 credit cards and racked up six figures in personal debt and it still wasn't enough. So every two weeks for two years on payday he stood in front of his employees and he asked them to sacrifice their salaries, and it worked. More than 50 people deferred two million dollars, and now, more than a decade later, Pandora is worth billions. When you believe that there is a way around or through whatever is in front of you, that surrender is not an option, you can overcome enormous obstacles.Which brings us to soap opera lesson two: sacrifice your ego and drop the superiority complex.Now, this is scary. It's an acknowledgment of need or fallibility. Maybe it's even an admission that we're not as special as we might like to think. Stephanie Forrester of ""The Bold and the Beautiful"" thought she was pretty darn special. She thought she was so special, she didn't need to mix with the riffraff from the valley, and she made sure valley girl Brooke knew it. But after nearly 25 years of epic fighting, Stephanie got sick and let Brooke in. They made amends, archenemies became soul mates and Stephanie died in Brooke's arms, and here's our takeaway. Drop your ego. Life is not about you. It's about us, and our ability to experience joy and love and to improve our reality comes only when we make ourselves vulnerable and we accept responsibility for our actions and our inactions, kind of like Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks.Now, after a great run as CEO, Howard stepped down in 2000, and Starbucks quickly overextended itself and stock prices fell. Howard rejoined the team in 2008, and one of the first things he did was apologize to all 180,000 employees. He apologized. And then he asked for help, honesty, and ideas in return. And now, Starbucks has more than doubled its net revenue since Howard came back. So sacrifice your desire to be right or safe all the time. It's not helping anyone, least of all you. Sacrifice your ego.Soap opera lesson three: evolution is real. You're not meant to be static characters. On television, static equals boring and boring equals fired. Characters are supposed to grow and change. Now, on TV, those dynamic changes can make for some rough transitions, particularly when a character is played by one person yesterday and played by someone new today. Recasting happens all the time on soaps. Over the last 20 years, four different actors have played the same key role of Carly Benson on ""General Hospital."" Each new face triggered a change in the character's life and personality. Now, there was always an essential nugget of Carly in there, but the character and the story adapted to whomever was playing her.And here's what that means for us. While we may not swap faces in our own lives, we can evolve too. We can choose to draw a circle around our feet and stay in that spot, or we can open ourselves to opportunities like Carly, who went from nursing student to hotel owner, or like Julia Child.Julia was a World War II spy, and when the war ended, she got married, moved to France, and decided to give culinary school a shot. Julia, her books and her TV shows revolutionized the way America cooks.We all have the power to initiate change in our lives, to evolve and adapt. We make the choice, but sometimes life chooses for us, and we don't get a heads up. Surprise slams us in the face. You're flat on the ground, the air is gone, and you need resuscitation.So thank goodness for soap opera lesson four: resurrection is possible.(Laughter)(Applause)In 1983, ""Days of Our Lives""' Stefano DiMera died of a stroke, but not really, because in 1984 he died when his car plunged into the harbor, and yet he was back in 1985 with a brain tumor.(Laughter)But before the tumor could kill him, Marlena shot him, and he tumbled off a catwalk to his death. And so it went for 30 years.(Laughter)Even when we saw the body, we knew better. He's called the Phoenix for a reason. And here's what that means for us. As long as the show is still on the air, or you're still breathing, nothing is permanent. Resurrection is possible.Now, of course, just like life, soap operas do ultimately meet the big finale. CBS canceled my show, ""As The World Turns,"" in December 2009, and we shot our final episode in June 2010. It was six months of dying and I rode that train right into the mountain. And even though we were in the middle of a huge recession and millions of people were struggling to find work, I somehow thought everything would be OK. So I packed up the kids and the Brooklyn apartment, and we moved in with my in-laws in Alabama.(Laughter)Three months later, nothing was OK. That was when I watched the final episode air, and I realized the show was not the only fatality. I was one too. I was unemployed and living on the second floor of my in-laws' home, and that's enough to make anyone feel dead inside.(Laughter)But I knew my story wasn't over, that it couldn't be over. I just had to tap into everything I had ever learned about soap operas. I had to be brave like Erica and refuse to surrender, so every day, I made a decision to fight. I had to be vulnerable like Stephanie and sacrifice my ego. I had to ask for help a lot of times across many states. I had to be adaptable like Carly and evolve my skills, my mindset, and my circumstances, and then I had to be resilient, like Stefano, and resurrect myself and my career like a phoenix from the ashes.Eventually I got an interview. After 15 years in news and entertainment, nine months of unemployment and this one interview, I had an offer for an entry level job. I was 37 years old and I was back from the dead.We will all experience what looks like an ending, and we can choose to make it a beginning. Kind of like Tina, who miraculously survived that waterfall, and because I hate to leave a cliffhanger hanging, Tina and Cord did get divorced, but they got remarried three times before the show went off the air in 2012.So remember, as long as there is breath in your body, it's never too late to change your story.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_adams_4_larger_than_life_lessons_from_soap_operas
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"Tiq Milan: Our first conversation was on Facebook, and it was three days long.(Laughter)We shared over 3,000 messages between us, and it was during those 72 hours that I knew she was going to be my wife. We didn't wait any prerequisite amount of time for our courtship; we told each other the vulnerable truths up front: I am a transgender man, which means the F on my birth certificate should have stood for ""False,"" instead of ""Female.""(Laughter)Walking around as a woman in the world felt like walking with pebbles in my shoes. It took the rhythm out of my swagger, it threw me off balance, it pained me with every step I took forward. But today I'm a man of my own intention; a man of my own design.Kim Katrin Milan: I am a cisgender queer woman. Cisgender means the gender I was assigned at birth is still and has always been female. This doesn't make me natural or normal, this is just one way of describing the many different ways that we exist in this world. And queer is a cultural term, but in this case, it refers to the way that I'm not restricted by gender when it comes to choosing partners. I've identified in a few different ways — as a bisexual, as a lesbian — but for me, queerness encompasses all of the layers of who I am and how I've loved. I'm layers, and not fractions. And for me, the fact that he was queer meant that I could trust his courtship from the very beginning.As queer and trans people, we're so often excluded from institutions and traditions. We create spaces outside of convention, including the conventions of time. And in those 3,000 messages between us, we collapsed time; we queered it; we laid it all on the table.(Laughter)With no pretense at all. And this meant that we were able to commit to each other in a profoundly different way.So often what we're told is this idea of the ""Golden Rule,"" that we should treat other people the way we want to be treated. But the problem with that is that it assumes that we are the standard for other people, and we're not. We need to treat other people the way they want to be treated, which means we had to ask. I couldn't assume that the kind of love that Tiq needed was the same kind of love that I needed. So I asked him everything — about his fears, his insecurities — and we started from there.TM: I didn't know what kind of love I needed. I had just come out of a year-long fog of being rejected and utterly depleted. I had someone look me in my eyes and tell me that I was unworthy of their love because I was trans. And there's a culture of lovelessness that we've created around transgender people. It's reasoned, justified and often signed into law. And I was a heartbeat away from internalizing that message, that I wasn't worthy. But Kim said that I was her ideal — the heartbroken mess that I was.(Laughter)KKM: He totally was my ideal.(Laughter)In more ways than one. Both poets, writers, creatives with a long history of community work behind us, and big, huge dreams of a family in front of us, we shared a lot of things in common, but we were also incredibly different. I've been a lifelong traveler and a bit of an orphan, whereas he comes from a huge family, and definitely stays grounded. I often kind of sum up the differences in our strengths by saying, ""Keep me safe, and I'll keep you wild.""(Laughter)TM: We have marginalized identities but we don't live marginalized lives. Being queer and trans is about creating new ways of existing. It's about loving people as they are, not as they're supposed to be. Kim is unapologetically feminine in a world that is often cruel and violent to women who are too proud and too freeing. And I didn't enter into this union under the auspices that she was going to be my helper or my rib, but a fully complex —(Laughter)KKM: Right? That's not right.TM: But a fully complex human being whose femininity wasn't for me to rein in, control or critique. It's her brilliance, the way she leads with compassion, and how she never loses sight of her empathy. She has been my hero since day one.(Applause)KKM: Our relationship has always been about setting each other free. One of the first questions I asked him was what dreams he had left to accomplish, and how would I help him get there. His dreams to live as a poet, to adopt and raise a family together, to live a life that he was proud of, and one that would live up to his mother's incredible legacy. And I really appreciated that we were able to start from that place, and not from a place that was around figuring out how to make each other work together. And I think this really allowed us to grow into the people that we were in a way that was incredibly different. I love him whole; pre-transition, now and in the future. And it's this love that had us committed to each other before we'd even seen each other's faces.TM: My mother's biggest concern when I transitioned was who was going to love me as I am. Had being transgender somehow precluded me from love and monogamy because I was supposedly born in the wrong body? But it's this type of structuring that has to be reframed in order to let love in. My body never betrayed me, and my body was never wrong. It's this restrictive, binary thinking on gender that said that I didn't exist. But when we met, she loved me for exactly how I showed up. She would trace her fingers along the numb keloid scars left by my top surgery. Scars that run from the middle of my chest all the way out to my outer torso. She said that these were reminders of my strength and everything that I went through and nothing for me to be ashamed of. So sprinting towards her hand in marriage was the queerest thing that I could do.(Laughter)It flew in the face of more conventional trajectories of love and relationships, because God was never supposed to bless a union for folks like us, and the law was never supposed to recognize it.KKM: So on May 5, 2014, just about three months after meeting online, we were married on the steps of City Hall in Manhattan, and it was beautiful in every conceivable way. It's safe to say that we reimagined some traditions, but we also kept some old ones that we worked in, and we created something that worked for us. My bouquet and corsage was actually filled with wildflowers from Brooklyn — also added in a little bit of lavender and sage to keep us grounded because we were so nervous. And it was put together by a sweet sister healer friend of ours. I never wanted a diamond ring, because conflict and convention are not my thing, so my ring is the deepest purple, like the color of my crown chakra, and set in place with my birthstones.The gift of queerness is options. I never had to choose his last name, it was never an exception, but I did because I am my father's bastard child, someone who has always been an apology, a secret, an imposition. And it was incredibly freeing to choose the name of a man who chose me first.(Applause)TM: So we told some family and some close friends, many of whom were still in disbelief as we took our vows. Fittingly, we posted all of our wedding photos on Facebook, where we met — and Instagram, of course. And we quickly realized that our coming together was more than just a union of two people, but was a model of possibility for the millions of LGBTQ folks who have been sold this lie that family and matrimony is antithetical to who they are — for those of us who rarely get to see ourselves reflected in love and happiness.KKM: And the thing is, absolutely we are marginalized because of our identities, but it also emboldens us to be the people that we are. Queerness is our major key; blackness is our magic. It's because of these things that we are able to be hopeful, open, receptive and shape-shifting. These are the things that give us, and are such an incredible source of, our strength. Our queerness is a source of that strength.I think of the words of Ottawa-based poet Brandon Wint: ""Not queer like gay; queer like escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness all at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like, and to pursue it.""TM: We are part of a community of folks — Yeah, that's good right?(Laughter)We are part of a community of folks who are living their authentic selves all along the gender spectrum, despite the ubiquitous threat of violence, despite the undercurrent of anxiety that always is present for people who live on their own terms. Globally, a transgender person is murdered every 21 hours. And the United States has had more trans murders on record this year than any year to date. However, our stories are much more than this rigid dichotomy of strength and resilience. We are expanding the human complexity on these margins, and we are creating freedom on these margins.KKM: And we don't have any blueprints. We're creating a world that we have literally never seen before; organizing families based on love and not by blood, guiding by a compassion that so few of us have been shown ourselves.So many of us have not received love from our families — have been betrayed by the people that we trust most. So what we do here is we create entirely new languages of love. Ones that are about creating the space for us to be our authentic selves and not imposing this standard of what masculinity or femininity is supposed to be.TM: We are interested in love and inclusion as a tool of revolutionary change, right? And the idea is simply, if we drop all our preconceived notions about how somebody is supposed to be — in their body, in their gender, in their skin — if we take the intentional steps to unlearn these deep-seated biases and create space for people to be self-determined, and embrace who they are, then we will definitely create a better world than the one we were born into.(Applause)KKM: We want to mark this time in history by leaving evidence of the fact that we were here. We open up little windows into our relationship for our community to bear witness, and we do this because we want to make maps to the future and not monuments to ourselves. Our experience does not invalidate other peoples' experience, but it should and necessarily does complicate this idea of what love and marriage are supposed to be.TM: OK, now for all the talking, and inspiring, and possibility-modeling we've done, we've been nowhere near perfect. And we've had to hold a mirror up to ourselves. And I saw that I wasn't always the best listener, and that my ego got in the way of our progress as a couple. And I've had to really assess these deep-seated, sexist ideas that I've had about the value of a woman's experience in the world. I've had to reevaluate what it means to be in allyship with my wife.KKM: And I had to remind myself of a lot of things, too. What it means to be hard on the issues, but soft on the person. While we were writing this, we got into a massive fight.(Laughter)For so many different reasons, but based on the content about our values and our lived experiences — and we were really hurt, you know? Because what we do and how we love puts ourselves entirely on the line. But even though the fight lasted over the course of two days —(Laughter)We were able to come back together to each other, and recommit to ourselves, to each other and to our marriage. And that really yielded some of the most passionate parts of what we share with you here today.TM: I have had to interrogate masculinity, which I think doesn't happen enough. I've had to interrogate masculinity; the toxic privileges that come with being a man don't define me, but I have to be accountable for how it shows up in my life every day. I have allowed my wife to do all of the emotional labor of prying open the lines of communication when I'd rather clam up and run away.(Laughter)I've stripped away emotional support instead of facing my own vulnerabilities, particularly around the heartbreaking miscarriage we suffered last year, and I'm sorry for that. Sometimes as men, we get to take the easy way out. And so my journey as a trans person is about reimagining masculinity. About creating a manhood that isn't measured by the power it wields, by the entitlements afforded to it, or any simulacrum of control that it can muster, but works in tandem with femininity, and is guided by my spirit.KKM: Y'all ...(Applause)And this has created the space for my femininity to flourish in a way I had never experienced before. He never is threatened by my sexuality, he never polices what I wear or how I act. I cook but he does way more of the cleaning than I do. And when we're rushing to get out of the house and we have so much to handle, he handles everything, so I have time to do my hair and makeup.(Laughter)He understands that this is my armor, and he never treats femininity as though it is frivolous or superficial, and this, and him — he grows my experience of gender every single day.TM: I love to watch her get dressed in the morning. Watching her in the closet, looking for something comfortable and colorful, and tight, and safe —(Laughter)But it's challenging to watch her negotiate her decisions looking for something that's going to get the least amount of attention, but at the same time be an expression of the vibrant and sexy woman she is. And all I want to do is celebrate her for her beauty, and the things that make her beautiful and special and free, from her long acrylic nails, to her uncompromising black feminism.(Applause)KKM: I love you. TM: I love you.(Laughter)KKM: There are so many queer and trans people who have come before us, whose stories we will never get to hear. We constantly experience this retelling of history where we are conspicuously left out. And it's really hard to not see ourselves there. And so living out loud for us is about that representation. It's about having possibility models, and having hope that love is part of our inheritance in this world, too.TM: The possibility that we are practicing is about reinventing time, love and institutions. We are creating a future of multiplicity. We are expanding the spectrum of gender and sexuality, imagining ourselves into existence, imagining a world where gender is self-determined and not imposed, and where who we are is a kaleidoscope of possibility without the narrow-minded limitations masquerading as science or justice.(Applause)KKM: And I can't lie: it is really, really hard. It is hard to stand in the face of bigotry with an open heart and a smile on my face. It is really hard to face the injustice that exists in the world, while still believing in the ability of people to really change. That takes an enormous amount of faith and dedication. And beyond that, marriage is hard work.(Laughter)Piles of dirty socks on the floor, more boring sports shows than I ever thought possible —(Laughter)And fights that bring me to tears when it feels like we're not speaking the same language. But there is not a day that goes by where I am not so grateful to be married to this man; where I'm not so grateful for the possibility of changing minds, and rewarding conversations, and creating a world where love belongs to us all.I think about our acronym: LGBTQ2SIA. A seemingly endless evolution of self and a community, but also this really deep desire not to leave anyone behind. We've learned how to love each other, and we've committed to loving each other throughout changes to gender and changes in spirit. And we learned this love in our chat rooms, in our clubs, in our bars and in our community centers. We've learned how to love each other for the long haul.TM & KKM: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tiq_milan_and_kim_katrin_milan_a_queer_vision_of_love_and_marriage
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"Our lives depend on a world we can't see. Think about your week so far. Have you watched TV, used GPS, checked the weather or even ate a meal? These many things that enable our daily lives rely either directly or indirectly on satellites. And while we often take for granted the services that satellites provide us, the satellites themselves deserve our attention as they are leaving a lasting mark on the space they occupy.People around the world rely on satellite infrastructure every day for information, entertainment and to communicate. There's agricultural and environmental monitoring, Internet connectivity, navigation. Satellites even play a role in the operation of our financial and energy markets. But these satellites that we rely on day in and day out have a finite life. They might run out of propellant, they could malfunction, or they may just naturally reach the end of their mission life. At this point, these satellites effectively become space junk, cluttering the orbital environment.So imagine you're driving down the highway on a beautiful, sunny day out running errands. You've got your music cranked, your windows rolled down, with the cool breeze blowing through your hair. Feels nice, right? Everything is going smoothly until suddenly your car stutters and stalls right in the middle of the highway. So now you have no choice but to abandon your car where it is on the highway. Maybe you were lucky enough to be able to move it out of the way and into a shoulder lane so that it's out of the way of other traffic. A couple of hours ago, your car was a useful machine that you relied on in your everyday life. Now, it's a useless hunk of metal taking up space in a valuable transportation network. And imagine international roadways all cluttered with broken down vehicles that are just getting in the way of other traffic. And imagine the debris that would be strewn everywhere if a collision actually happened, thousands of smaller pieces of debris becoming new obstacles.This is the paradigm of the satellite industry. Satellites that are no longer working are often left to deorbit over many, many years, or only moved out of the way as a temporary solution. And there are no international laws in space to enforce us to clean up after ourselves.So the world's first satellite, Sputnik I, was launched in 1957, and in that year, there were only a total of three launch attempts. Decades later and dozens of countries from all around the world have launched thousands of more satellites into orbit, and the frequency of launches is only going to increase in the future, especially if you consider things like the possibility of 900-plus satellite constellations being launched.Now, we send satellites to different orbits depending on what they're needed for. One of the most common places we send satellites is the low Earth orbit, possibly to image the surface of Earth at up to about 2,000 kilometers altitude. Satellites there are naturally buffeted by Earth's atmosphere, so their orbits naturally decay, and they'll eventually burn up, probably within a couple of decades. Another common place we send satellites is the geostationary orbit at about 35,000 kilometers altitude. Satellites there remain in the same place above Earth as the Earth rotates, which enables things like communications or television broadcast, for example. Satellites in high orbits like these could remain there for centuries. And then there's the orbit coined ""the graveyard,"" the ominous junk or disposal orbits, where some satellites are intentionally placed at the end of their life so that they're out of the way of common operational orbits.Of the nearly 7,000 satellites launched since the late 1950s, only about one in seven is currently operational, and in addition to the satellites that are no longer working, there's also hundreds of thousands of marble-sized debris and millions of paint chip-sized debris that are also orbiting around the Earth. Space debris is a major risk to space missions, but also to the satellites that we rely on each and every day.Now, because space debris and junk has become increasingly worrisome, there have been some national and international efforts to develop technical standards to help us limit the generation of additional debris. So for example, there are recommendations for those low-Earth orbiting spacecraft to be made to deorbit in under 25 years, but that's still a really long time, especially if a satellite hasn't been working for years. There's also mandates for those dead geostationary spacecraft to be moved into a graveyard orbit. But neither of these guidelines is binding under international law, and the understanding is that they will be implemented through national mechanisms. These guidelines are also not long-term, they're not proactive, nor do they address the debris that's already up there. They're only in place to limit the future creation of debris. Space junk is no one's responsibility.Now, Mount Everest is actually an interesting comparison of a new approach to how we interact with our environments, as it's often given the dubious honor of being the world's highest garbage dump. Decades after the first conquest of the world's highest peak, tons of rubbish left behind by climbers has started to raise concern, and you may have read in the news that there's speculation that Nepal will crack down on mountaineers with stricter enforcement of penalties and legal obligations. The goal, of course, is to persuade climbers to clean up after themselves, so maybe local not-for-profits will pay climbers who bring down extra waste, or expeditions might organize voluntary cleanup trips. And yet still many climbers feel that independent groups should police themselves. There's no simple or easy answer, and even well-intentioned efforts at conservation often run into problems. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything in our power to protect the environments that we rely and depend on, and like Everest, the remote location and inadequate infrastructure of the orbital environment make waste disposal a challenging problem. But we simply cannot reach new heights and create an even higher garbage dump, one that's out of this world.The reality of space is that if a component on a satellite breaks down, there really are limited opportunities for repairs, and only at great cost. But what if we were smarter about how we designed satellites? What if all satellites, regardless of what country they were built in, had to be standardized in some way for recycling, servicing or active deorbiting? What if there actually were international laws with teeth that enforced end-of-life disposal of satellites instead of moving them out of the way as a temporary solution? Or maybe satellite manufacturers need to be charged a deposit to even launch a satellite into orbit, and that deposit would only be returned if the satellite was disposed of properly or if they cleaned up some quota of debris. Or maybe a satellite needs to have technology on board to help accelerate deorbit.There are some encouraging signs. The UK's TechDemoSat-1, launched in 2014, for example, was designed for end-of-life disposal via a small drag sail. This works for the satellite because it's small, but satellites that are higher or in larger orbits or are larger altogether, like the size of school buses, will require other disposal options. So maybe you get into things like high-powered lasers or tugging using nets or tethers, as crazy as those sound in the short term.And then one really cool possibility is the idea of orbital tow trucks or space mechanics. Imagine if a robotic arm on some sort of space tow truck could fix the broken components on a satellite, making them usable again. Or what if that very same robotic arm could refuel the propellant tank on a spacecraft that relies on chemical propulsion just like you or I would refuel the fuel tanks on our cars? Robotic repair and maintenance could extend the lives of hundreds of satellites orbiting around the Earth.Whatever the disposal or cleanup options we come up with, it's clearly not just a technical problem. There's also complex space laws and politics that we have to sort out. Simply put, we haven't found a way to use space sustainably yet.Exploring, innovating to change the way we live and work are what we as humans do, and in space exploration, we're literally moving beyond the boundaries of Earth. But as we push thresholds in the name of learning and innovation, we must remember that accountability for our environments never goes away. There is without doubt congestion in the low Earth and geostationary orbits, and we cannot keep launching new satellites to replace the ones that have broken down without doing something about them first, just like we would never leave a broken down car in the middle of the highway. Next time you use your phone, check the weather or use your GPS, think about the satellite technologies that make those activities possible. But also think about the very impact that the satellites have on the environment surrounding Earth, and help spread the message that together we must reduce our impact.Earth orbit is breathtakingly beautiful and our gateway to exploration. It's up to us to keep it that way.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_panek_let_s_clean_up_the_space_junk_orbiting_earth
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"When I was six years old, I received my gifts. My first grade teacher had this brilliant idea. She wanted us to experience receiving gifts but also learning the virtue of complimenting each other. So she had all of us come to the front of the classroom, and she bought all of us gifts and stacked them in the corner. And she said, ""Why don't we just stand here and compliment each other? If you hear your name called, go and pick up your gift and sit down."" What a wonderful idea, right? What could go wrong?(Laughter)Well, there were 40 of us to start with, and every time I heard someone's name called, I would give out the heartiest cheer. And then there were 20 people left, and 10 people left, and five left ... and three left. And I was one of them. And the compliments stopped. Well, at that moment, I was crying. And the teacher was freaking out. She was like, ""Hey, would anyone say anything nice about these people?""(Laughter)""No one? OK, why don't you go get your gift and sit down. So behave next year — someone might say something nice about you.""(Laughter)Well, as I'm describing this you, you probably know I remember this really well.(Laughter)But I don't know who felt worse that day. Was it me or the teacher? She must have realized that she turned a team-building event into a public roast for three six-year-olds. And without the humor. You know, when you see people get roasted on TV, it was funny. There was nothing funny about that day.So that was one version of me, and I would die to avoid being in that situation again — to get rejected in public again. That's one version. Then fast-forward eight years. Bill Gates came to my hometown — Beijing, China — to speak, and I saw his message. I fell in love with that guy. I thought, wow, I know what I want to do now. That night I wrote a letter to my family telling them: ""By age 25, I will build the biggest company in the world, and that company will buy Microsoft.""(Laughter)I totally embraced this idea of conquering the world — domination, right? And I didn't make this up, I did write that letter. And here it is —(Laughter)You don't have to read this through —(Laughter)This is also bad handwriting, but I did highlight some key words. You get the idea.(Laughter)So ... that was another version of me: one who will conquer the world.Well, then two years later, I was presented with the opportunity to come to the United States. I jumped on it, because that was where Bill Gates lived, right?(Laughter)I thought that was the start of my entrepreneur journey. Then, fast-forward another 14 years. I was 30. Nope, I didn't build that company. I didn't even start. I was actually a marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company. And I felt I was stuck; I was stagnant. Why is that? Where is that 14-year-old who wrote that letter? It's not because he didn't try. It's because every time I had a new idea, every time I wanted to try something new, even at work — I wanted to make a proposal, I wanted to speak up in front of people in a group — I felt there was this constant battle between the 14-year-old and the six-year-old. One wanted to conquer the world — make a difference — another was afraid of rejection. And every time that six-year-old won.And this fear even persisted after I started my own company. I mean, I started my own company when I was 30 — if you want to be Bill Gates, you've got to start sooner or later, right? When I was an entrepreneur, I was presented with an investment opportunity, and then I was turned down. And that rejection hurt me. It hurt me so bad that I wanted to quit right there. But then I thought, hey, would Bill Gates quit after a simple investment rejection? Would any successful entrepreneur quit like that? No way. And this is where it clicked for me. OK, I can build a better company. I can build a better team or better product, but one thing for sure: I've got to be a better leader. I've got to be a better person. I cannot let that six-year-old keep dictating my life anymore. I have to put him back in his place.So this is where I went online and looked for help. Google was my friend.(Laughter)I searched, ""How do I overcome the fear of rejection?"" I came up with a bunch of psychology articles about where the fear and pain are coming from. Then I came up with a bunch of ""rah-rah"" inspirational articles about ""Don't take it personally, just overcome it."" Who doesn't know that?(Laughter)But why was I still so scared? Then I found this website by luck. It's called rejectiontherapy.com.(Laughter)""Rejection Therapy"" was this game invented by this Canadian entrepreneur. His name is Jason Comely. And basically the idea is for 30 days you go out and look for rejection, and every day get rejected at something, and then by the end, you desensitize yourself from the pain. And I loved that idea.(Laughter)I said, ""You know what? I'm going to do this. And I'll feel myself getting rejected 100 days."" And I came up with my own rejection ideas, and I made a video blog out of it.And so here's what I did. This is what the blog looked like. Day One ...(Laughter)Borrow 100 dollars from a stranger. So this is where I went to where I was working. I came downstairs and I saw this big guy sitting behind a desk. He looked like a security guard. So I just approached him. And I was just walking and that was the longest walk of my life — hair on the back of my neck standing up, I was sweating and my heart was pounding. And I got there and said, ""Hey, sir, can I borrow 100 dollars from you?""(Laughter)And he looked up, he's like, ""No."" ""Why?""And I just said, ""No? I'm sorry."" Then I turned around, and I just ran.(Laughter)I felt so embarrassed. But because I filmed myself — so that night I was watching myself getting rejected, I just saw how scared I was. I looked like this kid in ""The Sixth Sense."" I saw dead people.(Laughter)But then I saw this guy. You know, he wasn't that menacing. He was a chubby, loveable guy, and he even asked me, ""Why?"" In fact, he invited me to explain myself. And I could've said many things. I could've explained, I could've negotiated. I didn't do any of that. All I did was run. I felt, wow, this is like a microcosm of my life. Every time I felt the slightest rejection, I would just run as fast as I could. And you know what? The next day, no matter what happens, I'm not going to run. I'll stay engaged.Day Two: Request a ""burger refill.""(Laughter)It's when I went to a burger joint, I finished lunch, and I went to the cashier and said, ""Hi, can I get a burger refill?""(Laughter)He was all confused, like, ""What's a burger refill?""(Laughter)I said, ""Well, it's just like a drink refill but with a burger."" And he said, ""Sorry, we don't do burger refill, man.""(Laughter)So this is where rejection happened and I could have run, but I stayed. I said, ""Well, I love your burgers, I love your joint, and if you guys do a burger refill, I will love you guys more.""(Laughter)And he said, ""Well, OK, I'll tell my manager about it, and maybe we'll do it, but sorry, we can't do this today."" Then I left. And by the way, I don't think they've ever done burger refill.(Laughter)I think they're still there. But the life and death feeling I was feeling the first time was no longer there, just because I stayed engaged — because I didn't run. I said, ""Wow, great, I'm already learning things. Great.""And then Day Three: Getting Olympic Doughnuts. This is where my life was turned upside down. I went to a Krispy Kreme. It's a doughnut shop in mainly the Southeastern part of the United States. I'm sure they have some here, too. And I went in, I said, ""Can you make me doughnuts that look like Olympic symbols? Basically, you interlink five doughnuts together ... "" I mean there's no way they could say yes, right? The doughnut maker took me so seriously.(Laughter)So she put out paper, started jotting down the colors and the rings, and is like, ""How can I make this?"" And then 15 minutes later, she came out with a box that looked like Olympic rings. And I was so touched. I just couldn't believe it. And that video got over five million views on Youtube. The world couldn't believe that either.(Laughter)You know, because of that I was in newspapers, in talk shows, in everything. And I became famous. A lot of people started writing emails to me and saying, ""What you're doing is awesome."" But you know, fame and notoriety did not do anything to me. What I really wanted to do was learn, and to change myself. So I turned the rest of my 100 days of rejection into this playground — into this research project. I wanted to see what I could learn.And then I learned a lot of things. I discovered so many secrets. For example, I found if I just don't run, if I got rejected, I could actually turn a ""no"" into a ""yes,"" and the magic word is, ""why.""So one day I went to a stranger's house, I had this flower in my hand, knocked on the door and said, ""Hey, can I plant this flower in your backyard?""(Laughter)And he said, ""No."" But before he could leave I said, ""Hey, can I know why?"" And he said, ""Well, I have this dog that would dig up anything I put in the backyard. I don't want to waste your flower. If you want to do this, go across the street and talk to Connie. She loves flowers."" So that's what I did. I went across and knocked on Connie's door. And she was so happy to see me.(Laughter)And then half an hour later, there was this flower in Connie's backyard. I'm sure it looks better now.(Laughter)But had I left after the initial rejection, I would've thought, well, it's because the guy didn't trust me, it's because I was crazy, because I didn't dress up well, I didn't look good. It was none of those. It was because what I offered did not fit what he wanted. And he trusted me enough to offer me a referral, using a sales term. I converted a referral.Then one day — and I also learned that I can actually say certain things and maximize my chance to get a yes. So for example, one day I went to a Starbucks, and asked the manager, ""Hey, can I be a Starbucks greeter?"" He was like, ""What's a Starbucks greeter?"" I said, ""Do you know those Walmart greeters? You know, those people who say 'hi' to you before you walk in the store, and make sure you don't steal stuff, basically? I want to give a Walmart experience to Starbucks customers.""(Laughter)Well, I'm not sure that's a good thing, actually — Actually, I'm pretty sure it's a bad thing. And he was like, ""Oh"" — yeah, this is how he looked, his name is Eric — and he was like, ""I'm not sure."" This is how he was hearing me. ""Not sure."" Then I ask him, ""Is that weird?"" He's like, ""Yeah, it's really weird, man."" But as soon as he said that, his whole demeanor changed. It's as if he's putting all the doubt on the floor. And he said, ""Yeah, you can do this, just don't get too weird.""(Laughter)So for the next hour I was the Starbucks greeter. I said ""hi"" to every customer that walked in, and gave them holiday cheers. By the way, I don't know what your career trajectory is, don't be a greeter.(Laughter)It was really boring. But then I found I could do this because I mentioned, ""Is that weird?"" I mentioned the doubt that he was having. And because I mentioned, ""Is that weird?"", that means I wasn't weird. That means I was actually thinking just like him, seeing this as a weird thing. And again, and again, I learned that if I mention some doubt people might have before I ask the question, I gained their trust. People were more likely to say yes to me.And then I learned I could fulfill my life dream ... by asking. You know, I came from four generations of teachers, and my grandma has always told me, ""Hey Jia, you can do anything you want, but it'd be great if you became a teacher.""(Laughter)But I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I didn't. But it has always been my dream to actually teach something. So I said, ""What if I just ask and teach a college class?"" I lived in Austin at the time, so I went to University of Texas at Austin and knocked on professors' doors and said, ""Can I teach your class?"" I didn't get anywhere the first couple of times. But because I didn't run — I kept doing it — and on the third try the professor was very impressed. He was like, ""No one has done this before."" And I came in prepared with powerpoints and my lesson. He said, ""Wow, I can use this. Why don't you come back in two months? I'll fit you in my curriculum."" And two months later I was teaching a class.This is me — you probably can't see, this is a bad picture. You know, sometimes you get rejected by lighting, you know?(Laughter)But wow — when I finished teaching that class, I walked out crying, because I thought I could fulfill my life dream just by simply asking. I used to think I have to accomplish all these things — have to be a great entrepreneur, or get a PhD to teach — but no, I just asked, and I could teach.And in that picture, which you can't see, I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. Why? Because in my research I found that people who really change the world, who change the way we live and the way we think, are the people who were met with initial and often violent rejections. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or even Jesus Christ. These people did not let rejection define them. They let their own reaction after rejection define themselves. And they embraced rejection.And we don't have to be those people to learn about rejection, and in my case, rejection was my curse, was my boogeyman. It has bothered me my whole life because I was running away from it. Then I started embracing it. I turned that into the biggest gift in my life. I started teaching people how to turn rejections into opportunities. I use my blog, I use my talk, I use the book I just published, and I'm even building technology to help people overcome their fear of rejection.When you get rejected in life, when you are facing the next obstacle or next failure, consider the possibilities. Don't run. If you just embrace them, they might become your gifts as well.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection
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"Like many of us, I've had several careers in my life, and although they've been varied, my first job set the foundation for all of them. I was a home-birth midwife throughout my 20s. Delivering babies taught me valuable and sometimes surprising things, like how to start a car at 2am. when it's 10 degrees below zero.(Laughter)Or how to revive a father who's fainted at the sight of blood.(Laughter)Or how to cut the umbilical cord just so, to make a beautiful belly button.But those aren't the things that stuck with me or guided me when I stopped being a midwife and started other jobs. What stuck with me was this bedrock belief that each one of us comes into this world with a unique worth. When I looked into the face of a newborn, I caught a glimpse of that worthiness, that sense of unapologetic selfhood, that unique spark. I use the word ""soul"" to describe that spark, because it's the only word in English that comes close to naming what each baby brought into the room.Every newborn was as singular as a snowflake, a matchless mash-up of biology and ancestry and mystery. And then that baby grows up, and in order to fit into the family, to conform to the culture, to the community, to the gender, that little one begins to cover its soul, layer by layer. We're born this way, but —(Laughter)But as we grow, a lot of things happen to us that make us ... want to hide our soulful eccentricities and authenticity. We've all done this. Everyone in this room is a former baby —(Laughter)with a distinctive birthright. But as adults, we spend so much of our time uncomfortable in our own skin, like we have ADD: authenticity deficit disorder. But not those babies — not yet. Their message to me was: uncover your soul and look for that soul-spark in everyone else. It's still there.And here's what I learned from laboring women. Their message was about staying open, even when things are painful. A woman's cervix normally looks like this. It's a tight little muscle at the base of the uterus. And during labor, it has to stretch from this to this. Ouch! If you fight against that pain, you just create more pain, and you block what wants to be born.I'll never forget the magic that would happen when a woman stopped resisting the pain and opened. It was as if the forces of the universe took notice and sent in a wave of help. I never forgot that message, and now, when difficult or painful things happen to me in my life or my work, of course at first I resist them, but then I remember what I learned from the mothers: stay open. Stay curious. Ask the pain what it's come to deliver. Something new wants to be born.And there was one more big soulful lesson, and that one I learned from Albert Einstein. He wasn't at any of the births, but —(Laughter)It was a lesson about time. At the end of his life, Albert Einstein concluded that our normal, hamster-wheel experience of life is an illusion. We run round and round, faster and faster, trying to get somewhere. And all the while, underneath surface time is this whole other dimension where the past and the present and the future merge and become deep time. And there's nowhere to get to.Albert Einstein called this state, this dimension, ""only being."" And he said when he experienced it, he knew sacred awe. When I was delivering babies, I was forced off the hamster wheel. Sometimes I had to sit for days, hours and hours, just breathing with the parents; just being. And I got a big dose of sacred awe.So those are the three lessons I took with me from midwifery. One: uncover your soul. Two: when things get difficult or painful, try to stay open. And three: every now and then, step off your hamster wheel into deep time.Those lessons have served me throughout my life, but they really served me recently, when I took on the most important job of my life thus far.Two years ago, my younger sister came out of remission from a rare blood cancer, and the only treatment left for her was a bone marrow transplant. And against the odds, we found a match for her, who turned out to be me. I come from a family of four girls, and when my sisters found out that I was my sister's perfect genetic match, their reaction was, ""Really? You?""(Laughter)""A perfect match for her?"" Which is pretty typical for siblings. In a sibling society, there's lots of things. There's love and there's friendship and there's protection. But there's also jealousy and competition and rejection and attack. In siblinghood, that's where we start assembling many of those first layers that cover our soul.When I discovered I was my sister's match, I went into research mode. And I discovered that the premise of transplants is pretty straightforward. You destroy all the bone marrow in the cancer patient with massive doses of chemotherapy, and then you replace that marrow with several million healthy marrow cells from a donor. And then you do everything you can to make sure that those new cells engraft in the patient. I also learned that bone marrow transplants are fraught with danger. If my sister made it through the near-lethal chemotherapy, she still would face other challenges. My cells might attack her body. And her body might reject my cells. They call this rejection or attack, and both could kill her.Rejection. Attack. Those words had a familiar ring in the context of being siblings. My sister and I had a long history of love, but we also had a long history of rejection and attack, from minor misunderstandings to bigger betrayals. We didn't have the kind of the relationship where we talked about the deeper stuff; but, like many siblings and like people in all kinds of relationships, we were hesitant to tell our truths, to reveal our wounds, to admit our wrongdoings.But when I learned about the dangers of rejection or attack, I thought, it's time to change this. What if we left the bone marrow transplant up to the doctors, but did something that we later came to call our ""soul marrow transplant?"" What if we faced any pain we had caused each other, and instead of rejection or attack, could we listen? Could we forgive? Could we merge? Would that teach our cells to do the same?To woo my skeptical sister, I turned to my parents' holy text: the New Yorker Magazine.(Laughter)I sent her a cartoon from its pages as a way of explaining why we should visit a therapist before having my bone marrow harvested and transplanted into her body. Here it is.""I have never forgiven him for that thing I made up in my head.""(Laughter)I told my sister we had probably been doing the same thing, carting around made-up stories in our heads that kept us separate. And I told her that after the transplant, all of the blood flowing in her veins would be my blood, made from my marrow cells, and that inside the nucleus of each of those cells is a complete set of my DNA. ""I will be swimming around in you for the rest of your life,"" I told my slightly horrified sister.(Laughter)""I think we better clean up our relationship.""A health crisis makes people do all sorts of risky things, like quitting a job or jumping out of an airplane and, in the case of my sister, saying ""yes"" to several therapy sessions, during which we got down to the marrow. We looked at and released years of stories and assumptions about each other and blame and shame until all that was left was love.People have said I was brave to undergo the bone marrow harvest, but I don't think so. What felt brave to me was that other kind of harvest and transplant, the soul marrow transplant, getting emotionally naked with another human being, putting aside pride and defensiveness, lifting the layers and sharing with each other our vulnerable souls. I called on those midwife lessons: uncover your soul. Open to what's scary and painful. Look for the sacred awe.Here I am with my marrow cells after the harvest. That's they call it — ""harvest,"" like it's some kind of bucolic farm-to-table event —(Laughter)Which I can assure you it is not. And here is my brave, brave sister receiving my cells. After the transplant, we began to spend more and more time together. It was as if we were little girls again. The past and the present merged. We entered deep time. I left the hamster wheel of work and life to join my sister on that lonely island of illness and healing. We spent months together — in the isolation unit, in the hospital and in her home.Our fast-paced society does not support or even value this kind of work. We see it as a disruption of real life and important work. We worry about the emotional drain and the financial cost — and, yes, there is a financial cost. But I was paid in the kind of currency our culture seems to have forgotten all about. I was paid in love. I was paid in soul. I was paid in my sister.My sister said the year after transplant was the best year of her life, which was surprising. She suffered so much. But she said life never tasted as sweet, and that because of the soul-baring and the truth-telling we had done with each other, she became more unapologetically herself with everyone. She said things she'd always needed to say. She did things she always wanted to do. The same happened for me. I became braver about being authentic with the people in my life. I said my truths, but more important than that, I sought the truth of others.It wasn't until the final chapter of this story that I realized just how well midwifery had trained me. After that best year of my sister's life, the cancer came roaring back, and this time there was nothing more the doctors could do. They gave her just a couple of months to live.The night before my sister died, I sat by her bedside. She was so small and thin. I could see the blood pulsing in her neck. It was my blood, her blood, our blood. When she died, part of me would die, too.I tried to make sense of it all, how becoming one with each other had made us more ourselves, our soul selves, and how by facing and opening to the pain of our past, we'd finally been delivered to each other, and how by stepping out of time, we would now be connected forever.My sister left me with so many things, and I'm going to leave you now with just one of them. You don't have to wait for a life-or-death situation to clean up the relationships that matter to you, to offer the marrow of your soul and to seek it in another. We can all do this. We can be like a new kind of first responder, like the one to take the first courageous step toward the other, and to do something or try to do something other than rejection or attack. We can do this with our siblings and our mates and our friends and our colleagues. We can do this with the disconnection and the discord all around us. We can do this for the soul of the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_lesser_say_your_truths_and_seek_them_in_others
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"What is a parent?What is a parent?It's not an easy question. Today we have adoption, stepfamilies, surrogate mothers. Many parents face tough questions and tough decisions. Shall we tell our child about the sperm donation? If so, when? What words to use? Sperm donors are often referred to as ""biological fathers,"" but should we really be using the word ""father?""As a philosopher and social scientist, I have been studying these questions about the concept of parenthood. But today, I will talk to you about what I learned from talking to parents and children. I will show you that they know what matters most in a family, even though their family looks a little different. I will show you their creative ways of dealing with tough questions. But I will also show you the parents' uncertainties.We interviewed couples who received fertility treatment at Ghent University Hospital, using sperm from a donor. In this treatment timeline, you can see two points at which we conducted interviews. We included heterosexual couples, where the man for some reason did not have good-quality sperm, and lesbian couples who obviously needed to find sperm elsewhere. We also included children. I wanted to know how those children define concepts like parenthood and family. In fact, that is what I asked them, only not in that way. I drew an apple tree instead. This way, I could ask abstract, philosophical questions in a way that did not make them run off.So as you can see, the apple tree is empty. And that illustrates my research approach. By designing techniques like this, I can bring as little meaning and content as possible to the interview, because I want to hear that from them.I asked them: What would your family look like if it were an apple tree? And they could take a paper apple for everyone who, in their view, was a member of the family, write a name on it and hang it wherever they wanted. And I would ask questions. Most children started with a parent or a sibling. One started with ""Boxer,"" the dead dog of his grandparents.At this point, none of the children started mentioning the donor. So, I asked them about their birth story. I said, ""Before you were born, it was just your mom and dad, or mom and mommy. Can you tell me how you came into the family?"" And they explained. One said, ""My parents did not have good seeds, but there are friendly men out there who have spare seeds. They bring them to the hospital, and they put them in a big jar. My mommy went there, and she took two from the jar, one for me and one for my sister. She put the seeds in her belly — somehow — and her belly grew really big, and there I was.""Hmm. So only when they started mentioning the donor, I asked questions about him, using their own words. I said, ""If this would be an apple for the friendly man with the seeds, what would you do with it?"" And one boy was thinking out loud, holding the apple. And he said, ""I won't put this one up there with the others. He's not part of my family. But I will not put him on the ground. That's too cold and too hard. I think he should be in the trunk, because he made my family possible. If he would not have done this, that would really be sad because my family would not be here, and I would not be here.""So also, parents constructed family tales — tales to tell their children. One couple explained their insemination by taking their children to a farm to watch a vet inseminate cows. And why not? It's their way of explaining; their do-it-yourself with family narratives. DIY. And we had another couple who made books — a book for each child. They were really works of art containing their thoughts and feelings throughout the treatment. They even had the hospital parking tickets in there.So it is DIY: finding ways, words and images to tell your family story to your child. And these stories were highly diverse, but they all had one thing in common: it was a tale of longing for a child and a quest for that child. It was about how special and how deeply loved their child was. And research so far shows that these children are doing fine. They do not have more problems than other kids.Yet, these parents also wanted to justify their decisions through the tales they tell. They hoped that their children would understand their reasons for making the family in this way. Underlying was a fear that their children might disapprove and would reject the non-genetic parent. And that fear is understandable, because we live in a very heteronormative and geneticized society — a world that still believes that true families consist of one mom, one dad and their genetically related children.Well. I want to tell you about a teenage boy. He was donor-conceived but not part of our study. One day, he had an argument with his father, and he yelled, ""You're telling me what to do? You're not even my father!"" That was exactly what the parents in our study feared. Now, the boy soon felt sorry, and they made up. But it is the reaction of his father that is most interesting.He said, ""This outburst had nothing to do with the lack of a genetic link. It was about puberty — being difficult. It's what they do at that age. It will pass.""What this man shows us is that when something goes wrong, we should not immediately think it is because the family is a little different. These things happen in all families. And every now and then, all parents may wonder: Am I a good enough parent? These parents, too. They, above all, wanted to do what's best for their child. But they also sometimes wondered: Am I a real parent? And their uncertainties were present long before they even were parents.At the start of treatment, when they first saw the counselor, they paid close attention to the counselor, because they wanted to do it right. Even 10 years later, they still remember the advice they were given.So when they thought about the counselor and the advice they were given, we discussed that. And we saw one lesbian couple who said, ""When our son asks us, 'Do I have a dad?' we will say 'No, you do not have a dad.' But we will say nothing more, not unless he asks, because he might not be ready for that. The counselor said so.""Well. I don't know; that's quite different from how we respond to children's questions. Like, ""Milk — is that made in a factory?"" We will say, ""No, it comes from cows,"" and we will talk about the farmer, and the way the milk ends up in the shop. We will not say, ""No, milk is not made in a factory."" So something strange happened here, and of course these children noticed that.One boy said, ""I asked my parents loads of questions, but they acted really weird. So, you know, I have a friend at school, and she's made in the same way. When I have a question, I just go and ask her."" Clever guy. Problem solved. But his parents did not notice, and it certainly was not what they had in mind, nor what the counselor had in mind when they were saying how important it is to be an open-communication family.And that's the strange thing about advice. When we offer people pills, we gather evidence first. We do tests, we do follow-up studies. We want to know, and rightly so, what this pill is doing and how it affects people's lives. And advice? It is not enough for advice, or for professionals to give advice that is theoretically sound, or well-meant. It should be advice that there is evidence for — evidence that it actually improves patients' lives.So the philosopher in me would now like to offer you a paradox: I advise you to stop following advice. But, yes.(Applause)I will not end here with what went wrong; I would not be doing justice to the warmth we found in those families. Remember the books and the trip to the farmer? When parents do things that work for them, they do brilliant things. What I want you to remember as members of families, in no matter what form or shape, is that what families need are warm relationships. And we do not need to be professionals to create those. Most of us do just fine, although it may be hard work, and from time to time, we can do with some advice.In that case, bear in mind three things. Work with advice that works for your family. Remember — you're the expert, because you live your family life. And finally, believe in your abilities and your creativity, because you can do it yourself.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/veerle_provoost_do_kids_think_of_sperm_donors_as_family
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"Science. The very word for many of you conjures unhappy memories of boredom in high school biology or physics class. But let me assure that what you did there had very little to do with science. That was really the ""what"" of science. It was the history of what other people had discovered. What I'm most interested in as a scientist is the ""how"" of science. Because science is knowledge in process. We make an observation, guess an explanation for that observation, and then make a prediction that we can test with an experiment or other observation.A couple of examples. First of all, people noticed that the Earth was below, the sky above, and both the Sun and the Moon seemed to go around them. Their guessed explanation was that the Earth must be the center of the universe. The prediction: everything should circle around the Earth. This was first really tested when Galileo got his hands on one of the first telescopes, and as he gazed into the night sky, what he found there was a planet, Jupiter, with four moons circling around it. He then used those moons to follow the path of Jupiter and found that Jupiter also was not going around the Earth but around the Sun. So the prediction test failed. And this led to the discarding of the theory that the Earth was the center of the universe.Another example: Sir Isaac Newton noticed that things fall to the Earth. The guessed explanation was gravity, the prediction that everything should fall to the Earth. But of course, not everything does fall to the Earth. So did we discard gravity? No. We revised the theory and said, gravity pulls things to the Earth unless there is an equal and opposite force in the other direction. This led us to learn something new. We began to pay more attention to the bird and the bird's wings, and just think of all the discoveries that have flown from that line of thinking. So the test failures, the exceptions, the outliers teach us what we don't know and lead us to something new. This is how science moves forward. This is how science learns.Sometimes in the media, and even more rarely, but sometimes even scientists will say that something or other has been scientifically proven. But I hope that you understand that science never proves anything definitively forever. Hopefully science remains curious enough to look for and humble enough to recognize when we have found the next outlier, the next exception, which, like Jupiter's moons, teaches us what we don't actually know.We're going to change gears here for a second. The caduceus, or the symbol of medicine, means a lot of different things to different people, but most of our public discourse on medicine really turns it into an engineering problem. We have the hallways of Congress, and the boardrooms of insurance companies that try to figure out how to pay for it. The ethicists and epidemiologists try to figure out how best to distribute medicine, and the hospitals and physicians are absolutely obsessed with their protocols and checklists, trying to figure out how best to safely apply medicine. These are all good things. However, they also all assume at some level that the textbook of medicine is closed. We start to measure the quality of our health care by how quickly we can access it. It doesn't surprise me that in this climate, many of our institutions for the provision of health care start to look a heck of a lot like Jiffy Lube.(Laughter)The only problem is that when I graduated from medical school, I didn't get one of those little doohickeys that your mechanic has to plug into your car and find out exactly what's wrong with it, because the textbook of medicine is not closed. Medicine is science. Medicine is knowledge in process. We make an observation, we guess an explanation of that observation, and then we make a prediction that we can test. Now, the testing ground of most predictions in medicine is populations. And you may remember from those boring days in biology class that populations tend to distribute around a mean as a Gaussian or a normal curve. Therefore, in medicine, after we make a prediction from a guessed explanation, we test it in a population. That means that what we know in medicine, our knowledge and our know-how, comes from populations but extends only as far as the next outlier, the next exception, which, like Jupiter's moons, will teach us what we don't actually know.Now, I am a surgeon who looks after patients with sarcoma. Sarcoma is a very rare form of cancer. It's the cancer of flesh and bones. And I would tell you that every one of my patients is an outlier, is an exception. There is no surgery I have ever performed for a sarcoma patient that has ever been guided by a randomized controlled clinical trial, what we consider the best kind of population-based evidence in medicine. People talk about thinking outside the box, but we don't even have a box in sarcoma. What we do have as we take a bath in the uncertainty and unknowns and exceptions and outliers that surround us in sarcoma is easy access to what I think are those two most important values for any science: humility and curiosity. Because if I am humble and curious, when a patient asks me a question, and I don't know the answer, I'll ask a colleague who may have a similar albeit distinct patient with sarcoma. We'll even establish international collaborations. Those patients will start to talk to each other through chat rooms and support groups. It's through this kind of humbly curious communication that we begin to try and learn new things.As an example, this is a patient of mine who had a cancer near his knee. Because of humbly curious communication in international collaborations, we have learned that we can repurpose the ankle to serve as the knee when we have to remove the knee with the cancer. He can then wear a prosthetic and run and jump and play. This opportunity was available to him because of international collaborations. It was desirable to him because he had contacted other patients who had experienced it. And so exceptions and outliers in medicine teach us what we don't know, but also lead us to new thinking.Now, very importantly, all the new thinking that outliers and exceptions lead us to in medicine does not only apply to the outliers and exceptions. It is not that we only learn from sarcoma patients ways to manage sarcoma patients. Sometimes, the outliers and the exceptions teach us things that matter quite a lot to the general population. Like a tree standing outside a forest, the outliers and the exceptions draw our attention and lead us into a much greater sense of perhaps what a tree is. We often talk about losing the forests for the trees, but one also loses a tree within a forest. But the tree that stands out by itself makes those relationships that define a tree, the relationships between trunk and roots and branches, much more apparent. Even if that tree is crooked or even if that tree has very unusual relationships between trunk and roots and branches, it nonetheless draws our attention and allows us to make observations that we can then test in the general population.I told you that sarcomas are rare. They make up about one percent of all cancers. You also probably know that cancer is considered a genetic disease. By genetic disease we mean that cancer is caused by oncogenes that are turned on in cancer and tumor suppressor genes that are turned off to cause cancer. You might think that we learned about oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes from common cancers like breast cancer and prostate cancer and lung cancer, but you'd be wrong. We learned about oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes for the first time in that itty-bitty little one percent of cancers called sarcoma. In 1966, Peyton Rous got the Nobel Prize for realizing that chickens had a transmissible form of sarcoma. Thirty years later, Harold Varmus and Mike Bishop discovered what that transmissible element was. It was a virus carrying a gene, the src oncogene. Now, I will not tell you that src is the most important oncogene. I will not tell you that src is the most frequently turned on oncogene in all of cancer. But it was the first oncogene. The exception, the outlier drew our attention and led us to something that taught us very important things about the rest of biology.Now, TP53 is the most important tumor suppressor gene. It is the most frequently turned off tumor suppressor gene in almost every kind of cancer. But we didn't learn about it from common cancers. We learned about it when doctors Li and Fraumeni were looking at families, and they realized that these families had way too many sarcomas. I told you that sarcoma is rare. Remember that a one in a million diagnosis, if it happens twice in one family, is way too common in that family. The very fact that these are rare draws our attention and leads us to new kinds of thinking.Now, many of you may say, and may rightly say, that yeah, Kevin, that's great, but you're not talking about a bird's wing. You're not talking about moons floating around some planet Jupiter. This is a person. This outlier, this exception, may lead to the advancement of science, but this is a person. And all I can say is that I know that all too well. I have conversations with these patients with rare and deadly diseases. I write about these conversations. These conversations are terribly fraught. They're fraught with horrible phrases like ""I have bad news"" or ""There's nothing more we can do."" Sometimes these conversations turn on a single word: ""terminal.""Silence can also be rather uncomfortable. Where the blanks are in medicine can be just as important as the words that we use in these conversations. What are the unknowns? What are the experiments that are being done?Do this little exercise with me. Up there on the screen, you see this phrase, ""no where."" Notice where the blank is. If we move that blank one space over ""no where"" becomes ""now here,"" the exact opposite meaning, just by shifting the blank one space over.I'll never forget the night that I walked into one of my patients' rooms. I had been operating long that day but I still wanted to come and see him. He was a boy I had diagnosed with a bone cancer a few days before. He and his mother had been meeting with the chemotherapy doctors earlier that day, and he had been admitted to the hospital to begin chemotherapy. It was almost midnight when I got to his room. He was asleep, but I found his mother reading by flashlight next to his bed. She came out in the hall to chat with me for a few minutes. It turned out that what she had been reading was the protocol that the chemotherapy doctors had given her that day. She had memorized it. She said, ""Dr. Jones, you told me that we don't always win with this type of cancer, but I've been studying this protocol, and I think I can do it. I think I can comply with these very difficult treatments. I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to move in with my parents. I'm going to keep my baby safe."" I didn't tell her. I didn't stop to correct her thinking. She was trusting in a protocol that even if complied with, wouldn't necessarily save her son. I didn't tell her. I didn't fill in that blank. But a year and a half later her boy nonetheless died of his cancer. Should I have told her?Now, many of you may say, ""So what? I don't have sarcoma. No one in my family has sarcoma. And this is all fine and well, but it probably doesn't matter in my life."" And you're probably right. Sarcoma may not matter a whole lot in your life. But where the blanks are in medicine does matter in your life.I didn't tell you one dirty little secret. I told you that in medicine, we test predictions in populations, but I didn't tell you, and so often medicine never tells you that every time an individual encounters medicine, even if that individual is firmly embedded in the general population, neither the individual nor the physician knows where in that population the individual will land. Therefore, every encounter with medicine is an experiment. You will be a subject in an experiment. And the outcome will be either a better or a worse result for you. As long as medicine works well, we're fine with fast service, bravado, brimmingly confident conversations. But when things don't work well, sometimes we want something different.A colleague of mine removed a tumor from a patient's limb. He was concerned about this tumor. In our physician conferences, he talked about his concern that this was a type of tumor that had a high risk for coming back in the same limb. But his conversations with the patient were exactly what a patient might want: brimming with confidence. He said, ""I got it all and you're good to go."" She and her husband were thrilled. They went out, celebrated, fancy dinner, opened a bottle of champagne. The only problem was a few weeks later, she started to notice another nodule in the same area. It turned out he hadn't gotten it all, and she wasn't good to go. But what happened at this juncture absolutely fascinates me. My colleague came to me and said, ""Kevin, would you mind looking after this patient for me?"" I said, ""Why, you know the right thing to do as well as I do. You haven't done anything wrong."" He said, ""Please, just look after this patient for me."" He was embarrassed — not by what he had done, but by the conversation that he had had, by the overconfidence.So I performed a much more invasive surgery and had a very different conversation with the patient afterwards. I said, ""Most likely I've gotten it all and you're most likely good to go, but this is the experiment that we're doing. This is what you're going to watch for. This is what I'm going to watch for. And we're going to work together to find out if this surgery will work to get rid of your cancer."" I can guarantee you, she and her husband did not crack another bottle of champagne after talking to me. But she was now a scientist, not only a subject in her experiment.And so I encourage you to seek humility and curiosity in your physicians. Almost 20 billion times each year, a person walks into a doctor's office, and that person becomes a patient. You or someone you love will be that patient sometime very soon. How will you talk to your doctors? What will you tell them? What will they tell you? They cannot tell you what they do not know, but they can tell you when they don't know if only you'll ask. So please, join the conversation.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_b_jones_why_curiosity_is_the_key_to_science_and_medicine
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"I'm going to talk a little bit about where technology's going. And often technology comes to us, we're surprised by what it brings. But there's actually a large aspect of technology that's much more predictable, and that's because technological systems of all sorts have leanings, they have urgencies, they have tendencies. And those tendencies are derived from the very nature of the physics, chemistry of wires and switches and electrons, and they will make reoccurring patterns again and again. And so those patterns produce these tendencies, these leanings.You can almost think of it as sort of like gravity. Imagine raindrops falling into a valley. The actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable. We cannot see where it's going, but the general direction is very inevitable: it's downward. And so these baked-in tendencies and urgencies in technological systems give us a sense of where things are going at the large form. So in a large sense, I would say that telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone was not. The Internet was inevitable, but Twitter was not.So we have many ongoing tendencies right now, and I think one of the chief among them is this tendency to make things smarter and smarter. I call it cognifying — cognification — also known as artificial intelligence, or AI. And I think that's going to be one of the most influential developments and trends and directions and drives in our society in the next 20 years.So, of course, it's already here. We already have AI, and often it works in the background, in the back offices of hospitals, where it's used to diagnose X-rays better than a human doctor. It's in legal offices, where it's used to go through legal evidence better than a human paralawyer. It's used to fly the plane that you came here with. Human pilots only flew it seven to eight minutes, the rest of the time the AI was driving. And of course, in Netflix and Amazon, it's in the background, making those recommendations. That's what we have today.And we have an example, of course, in a more front-facing aspect of it, with the win of the AlphaGo, who beat the world's greatest Go champion. But it's more than that. If you play a video game, you're playing against an AI. But recently, Google taught their AI to actually learn how to play video games. Again, teaching video games was already done, but learning how to play a video game is another step. That's artificial smartness. What we're doing is taking this artificial smartness and we're making it smarter and smarter.There are three aspects to this general trend that I think are underappreciated; I think we would understand AI a lot better if we understood these three things. I think these things also would help us embrace AI, because it's only by embracing it that we actually can steer it. We can actually steer the specifics by embracing the larger trend.So let me talk about those three different aspects. The first one is: our own intelligence has a very poor understanding of what intelligence is. We tend to think of intelligence as a single dimension, that it's kind of like a note that gets louder and louder. It starts like with IQ measurement. It starts with maybe a simple low IQ in a rat or mouse, and maybe there's more in a chimpanzee, and then maybe there's more in a stupid person, and then maybe an average person like myself, and then maybe a genius. And this single IQ intelligence is getting greater and greater. That's completely wrong. That's not what intelligence is — not what human intelligence is, anyway. It's much more like a symphony of different notes, and each of these notes is played on a different instrument of cognition.There are many types of intelligences in our own minds. We have deductive reasoning, we have emotional intelligence, we have spatial intelligence; we have maybe 100 different types that are all grouped together, and they vary in different strengths with different people. And of course, if we go to animals, they also have another basket — another symphony of different kinds of intelligences, and sometimes those same instruments are the same that we have. They can think in the same way, but they may have a different arrangement, and maybe they're higher in some cases than humans, like long-term memory in a squirrel is actually phenomenal, so it can remember where it buried its nuts. But in other cases they may be lower.When we go to make machines, we're going to engineer them in the same way, where we'll make some of those types of smartness much greater than ours, and many of them won't be anywhere near ours, because they're not needed. So we're going to take these things, these artificial clusters, and we'll be adding more varieties of artificial cognition to our AIs. We're going to make them very, very specific.So your calculator is smarter than you are in arithmetic already; your GPS is smarter than you are in spatial navigation; Google, Bing, are smarter than you are in long-term memory. And we're going to take, again, these kinds of different types of thinking and we'll put them into, like, a car. The reason why we want to put them in a car so the car drives, is because it's not driving like a human. It's not thinking like us. That's the whole feature of it. It's not being distracted, it's not worrying about whether it left the stove on, or whether it should have majored in finance. It's just driving.(Laughter)Just driving, OK? And we actually might even come to advertise these as ""consciousness-free."" They're without consciousness, they're not concerned about those things, they're not distracted.So in general, what we're trying to do is make as many different types of thinking as we can. We're going to populate the space of all the different possible types, or species, of thinking. And there actually may be some problems that are so difficult in business and science that our own type of human thinking may not be able to solve them alone. We may need a two-step program, which is to invent new kinds of thinking that we can work alongside of to solve these really large problems, say, like dark energy or quantum gravity.What we're doing is making alien intelligences. You might even think of this as, sort of, artificial aliens in some senses. And they're going to help us think different, because thinking different is the engine of creation and wealth and new economy.The second aspect of this is that we are going to use AI to basically make a second Industrial Revolution. The first Industrial Revolution was based on the fact that we invented something I would call artificial power. Previous to that, during the Agricultural Revolution, everything that was made had to be made with human muscle or animal power. That was the only way to get anything done. The great innovation during the Industrial Revolution was, we harnessed steam power, fossil fuels, to make this artificial power that we could use to do anything we wanted to do. So today when you drive down the highway, you are, with a flick of the switch, commanding 250 horses — 250 horsepower — which we can use to build skyscrapers, to build cities, to build roads, to make factories that would churn out lines of chairs or refrigerators way beyond our own power. And that artificial power can also be distributed on wires on a grid to every home, factory, farmstead, and anybody could buy that artificial power, just by plugging something in.So this was a source of innovation as well, because a farmer could take a manual hand pump, and they could add this artificial power, this electricity, and he'd have an electric pump. And you multiply that by thousands or tens of thousands of times, and that formula was what brought us the Industrial Revolution. All the things that we see, all this progress that we now enjoy, has come from the fact that we've done that.We're going to do the same thing now with AI. We're going to distribute that on a grid, and now you can take that electric pump. You can add some artificial intelligence, and now you have a smart pump. And that, multiplied by a million times, is going to be this second Industrial Revolution. So now the car is going down the highway, it's 250 horsepower, but in addition, it's 250 minds. That's the auto-driven car. It's like a new commodity; it's a new utility. The AI is going to flow across the grid — the cloud — in the same way electricity did.So everything that we had electrified, we're now going to cognify. And I would suggest, then, that the formula for the next 10,000 start-ups is very, very simple, which is to take x and add AI. That is the formula, that's what we're going to be doing. And that is the way in which we're going to make this second Industrial Revolution. And by the way — right now, this minute, you can log on to Google and you can purchase AI for six cents, 100 hits. That's available right now.So the third aspect of this is that when we take this AI and embody it, we get robots. And robots are going to be bots, they're going to be doing many of the tasks that we have already done. A job is just a bunch of tasks, so they're going to redefine our jobs because they're going to do some of those tasks. But they're also going to create whole new categories, a whole new slew of tasks that we didn't know we wanted to do before. They're going to actually engender new kinds of jobs, new kinds of tasks that we want done, just as automation made up a whole bunch of new things that we didn't know we needed before, and now we can't live without them. So they're going to produce even more jobs than they take away, but it's important that a lot of the tasks that we're going to give them are tasks that can be defined in terms of efficiency or productivity. If you can specify a task, either manual or conceptual, that can be specified in terms of efficiency or productivity, that goes to the bots. Productivity is for robots. What we're really good at is basically wasting time.(Laughter)We're really good at things that are inefficient. Science is inherently inefficient. It runs on that fact that you have one failure after another. It runs on the fact that you make tests and experiments that don't work, otherwise you're not learning. It runs on the fact that there is not a lot of efficiency in it. Innovation by definition is inefficient, because you make prototypes, because you try stuff that fails, that doesn't work. Exploration is inherently inefficiency. Art is not efficient. Human relationships are not efficient. These are all the kinds of things we're going to gravitate to, because they're not efficient. Efficiency is for robots. We're also going to learn that we're going to work with these AIs because they think differently than us.When Deep Blue beat the world's best chess champion, people thought it was the end of chess. But actually, it turns out that today, the best chess champion in the world is not an AI. And it's not a human. It's the team of a human and an AI. The best medical diagnostician is not a doctor, it's not an AI, it's the team. We're going to be working with these AIs, and I think you'll be paid in the future by how well you work with these bots. So that's the third thing, is that they're different, they're utility and they are going to be something we work with rather than against. We're working with these rather than against them.So, the future: Where does that take us? I think that 25 years from now, they'll look back and look at our understanding of AI and say, ""You didn't have AI. In fact, you didn't even have the Internet yet, compared to what we're going to have 25 years from now."" There are no AI experts right now. There's a lot of money going to it, there are billions of dollars being spent on it; it's a huge business, but there are no experts, compared to what we'll know 20 years from now. So we are just at the beginning of the beginning, we're in the first hour of all this. We're in the first hour of the Internet. We're in the first hour of what's coming. The most popular AI product in 20 years from now, that everybody uses, has not been invented yet. That means that you're not late.Thank you.(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_how_ai_can_bring_on_a_second_industrial_revolution
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"This is a tuberculosis ward, and at the time this picture was taken in the late 1800s, one in seven of all people died from tuberculosis. We had no idea what was causing this disease. The hypothesis was actually it was your constitution that made you susceptible. And it was a highly romanticized disease. It was also called consumption, and it was the disorder of poets and artists and intellectuals. And some people actually thought it gave you heightened sensitivity and conferred creative genius.By the 1950s, we instead knew that tuberculosis was caused by a highly contagious bacterial infection, which is slightly less romantic, but that had the upside of us being able to maybe develop drugs to treat it. So doctors had discovered a new drug, iproniazid, that they were optimistic might cure tuberculosis, and they gave it to patients, and patients were elated. They were more social, more energetic. One medical report actually says they were ""dancing in the halls."" And unfortunately, this was not necessarily because they were getting better. A lot of them were still dying. Another medical report describes them as being ""inappropriately happy."" And that is how the first antidepressant was discovered.So accidental discovery is not uncommon in science, but it requires more than just a happy accident. You have to be able to recognize it for discovery to occur.As a neuroscientist, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my firsthand experience with whatever you want to call the opposite of dumb luck — let's call it smart luck. But first, a bit more background.Thankfully, since the 1950s, we've developed some other drugs and we can actually now cure tuberculosis. And at least in the United States, though not necessarily in other countries, we have closed our sanitoriums and probably most of you are not too worried about TB. But a lot of what was true in the early 1900s about infectious disease, we can say now about psychiatric disorders.We are in the middle of an epidemic of mood disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. One in four of all adults in the United States suffers from mental illness, which means that if you haven't experienced it personally or someone in your family hasn't, it's still very likely that someone you know has, though they may not talk about it. Depression has actually now surpassed HIV/AIDS, malaria, diabetes and war as the leading cause of disability worldwide. And also, like tuberculosis in the 1950s, we don't know what causes it. Once it's developed, it's chronic, lasts a lifetime, and there are no known cures.The second antidepressant we discovered, also by accident, in the 1950s, from an antihistamine that was making people manic, imipramine. And in both the case of the tuberculosis ward and the antihistamine, someone had to be able to recognize that a drug that was designed to do one thing — treat tuberculosis or suppress allergies — could be used to do something very different — treat depression. And this sort of repurposing is actually quite challenging. When doctors first saw this mood-enhancing effect of iproniazid, they didn't really recognize what they saw. They were so used to thinking about it from the framework of being a tuberculosis drug that they actually just listed it as a side effect, an adverse side effect.As you can see here, a lot of these patients in 1954 are experiencing severe euphoria. And they were worried that this might somehow interfere with their recovering from tuberculosis. So they recommended that iproniazid only be used in cases of extreme TB and in patients that were highly emotionally stable, which is of course the exact opposite of how we use it as an antidepressant. They were so used to looking at it from the perspective of this one disease, they could not see the larger implications for another disease.And to be fair, it's not entirely their fault. Functional fixedness is a bias that affects all of us. It's a tendency to only be able to think of an object in terms of its traditional use or function. And mental set is another thing. Right? That's sort of this preconceived framework with which we approach problems. And that actually makes repurposing pretty hard for all of us, which is, I guess, why they gave a TV show to the guy who was, like, really great at repurposing.(Laughter)So the effects in both the case of iproniazid and imipramine, they were so strong — there was mania, or people dancing in the halls. It's actually not that surprising they were caught. But it does make you wonder what else we've missed. So iproniazid and imipramine, they're more than just a case study in repurposing. They have two other things in common that are really important. One, they have terrible side effects. That includes liver toxicity, weight gain of over 50 pounds, suicidality. And two, they both increase levels of serotonin, which is a chemical signal in the brain, or a neurotransmitter. And those two things together, right, one or the two, may not have been that important, but the two together meant that we had to develop safer drugs, and that serotonin seemed like a pretty good place to start.So we developed drugs to more specifically focus on serotonin, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so the SSRIs, the most famous of which is Prozac. And that was 30 years ago, and since then we have mostly just worked on optimizing those drugs. And the SSRIs, they are better than the drugs that came before them, but they still have a lot of side effects, including weight gain, insomnia, suicidality — and they take a really long time to work, something like four to six weeks in a lot of patients. And that's in the patients where they do work. There are a lot of patients where these drugs don't work.And that means now, in 2016, we still have no cures for any mood disorders, just drugs that suppress symptoms, which is kind of the difference between taking a painkiller for an infection versus an antibiotic. A painkiller will make you feel better, but is not going to do anything to treat that underlying disease. And it was this flexibility in our thinking that let us recognize that iproniazid and imipramine could be repurposed in this way, which led us to the serotonin hypothesis, which we then, ironically, fixated on. This is brain signaling, serotonin, from an SSRI commercial. In case you're not clear, this is a dramatization. And in science, we try and remove our bias, right, by running double-blinded experiments or being statistically agnostic as to what our results will be. But bias creeps in more insidiously in what we choose to study and how we choose to study it.So we've focused on serotonin now for the past 30 years, often to the exclusion of other things. We still have no cures, and what if serotonin isn't all there is to depression? What if it's not even the key part of it? That means no matter how much time or money or effort we put into it, it will never lead to a cure.In the past few years, doctors have discovered probably what is the first truly new antidepressant since the SSRIs, Calypsol, and this drug works very quickly, within a few hours or a day, and it doesn't work on serotonin. It works on glutamate, which is another neurotransmitter. And it's also repurposed. It was traditionally used as anesthesia in surgery. But unlike those other drugs, which were recognized pretty quickly, it took us 20 years to realize that Calypsol was an antidepressant, despite the fact that it's actually a better antidepressant, probably, than those other drugs. It's actually probably because of the fact that it's a better antidepressant that it was harder for us to recognize. There was no mania to signal its effects.So in 2013, up at Columbia University, I was working with my colleague, Dr. Christine Ann Denny, and we were studying Calypsol as an antidepressant in mice. And Calypsol has, like, a really short half-life, which means it's out of your body within a few hours. And we were just piloting. So we would give an injection to mice, and then we'd wait a week, and then we'd run another experiment to save money.And one of the experiments I was running, we would stress the mice, and we used that as a model of depression. And at first it kind of just looked like it didn't really work at all. So we could have stopped there. But I have run this model of depression for years, and the data just looked kind of weird. It didn't really look right to me. So I went back, and we reanalyzed it based on whether or not they had gotten that one injection of Calypsol a week beforehand. And it looked kind of like this. So if you look at the far left, if you put a mouse in a new space, this is the box, it's very exciting, a mouse will walk around and explore, and you can see that pink line is actually the measure of them walking. And we also give it another mouse in a pencil cup that it can decide to interact with. This is also a dramatization, in case that's not clear. And a normal mouse will explore. It will be social. Check out what's going on. If you stress a mouse in this depression model, which is the middle box, they aren't social, they don't explore. They mostly just kind of hide in that back corner, behind a cup. Yet the mice that had gotten that one injection of Calypsol, here on your right, they were exploring, they were social. They looked like they had never been stressed at all, which is impossible.So we could have just stopped there, but Christine had also used Calypsol before as anesthesia, and a few years ago she had seen that it seemed to have some weird effects on cells and some other behavior that also seemed to last long after the drug, maybe a few weeks. So we were like, OK, maybe this is not completely impossible, but we were really skeptical.So we did what you do in science when you're not sure, and we ran it again. And I remember being in the animal room, moving mice from box to box to test them, and Christine was actually sitting on the floor with the computer in her lap so the mice couldn't see her, and she was analyzing the data in real time. And I remember us yelling, which you're not supposed to do in an animal room where you're testing, because it had worked. It seemed like these mice were protected against stress, or they were inappropriately happy, however you want to call it. And we were really excited.And then we were really skeptical, because it was too good to be true. So we ran it again. And then we ran it again in a PTSD model, and we ran it again in a physiological model, where all we did was give stress hormones. And we had our undergrads run it. And then we had our collaborators halfway across the world in France run it. And every time someone ran it, they confirmed the same thing. It seemed like this one injection of Calypsol was somehow protecting against stress for weeks.And we only published this a year ago, but since then other labs have independently confirmed this effect. So we don't know what causes depression, but we do know that stress is the initial trigger in 80 percent of cases, and depression and PTSD are different diseases, but this is something they share in common. Right? It is traumatic stress like active combat or natural disasters or community violence or sexual assault that causes post-traumatic stress disorder, and not everyone that is exposed to stress develops a mood disorder. And this ability to experience stress and be resilient and bounce back and not develop depression or PTSD is known as stress resilience, and it varies between people. And we have always thought of it as just sort of this passive property. It's the absence of susceptibility factors and risk factors for these disorders. But what if it were active? Maybe we could enhance it, sort of akin to putting on armor.We had accidentally discovered the first resilience-enhancing drug. And like I said, we only gave a tiny amount of the drug, and it lasted for weeks, and that's not like anything you see with antidepressants.But it is actually kind of similar to what you see in immune vaccines. So in immune vaccines, you'll get your shots, and then weeks, months, years later, when you're actually exposed to bacteria, it's not the vaccine in your body that protects you. It's your own immune system that's developed resistance and resilience to this bacteria that fights it off, and you actually never get the infection, which is very different from, say, our treatments. Right? In that case, you get the infection, you're exposed to the bacteria, you're sick, and then you take, say, an antibiotic which cures it, and those drugs are actually working to kill the bacteria. Or similar to as I said before, with this palliative, you'll take something that will suppress the symptoms, but it won't treat the underlying infection, and you'll only feel better during the time in which you're taking it, which is why you have to keep taking it. And in depression and PTSD — here we have your stress exposure — we only have palliative care. Antidepressants only suppress symptoms, and that is why you basically have to keep taking them for the life of the disease, which is often the length of your own life.So we're calling our resilience-enhancing drugs ""paravaccines,"" which means vaccine-like, because it seems like they might have the potential to protect against stress and prevent mice from developing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, not all antidepressants are also paravaccines. We tried Prozac as well, and that had no effect.So if this were to translate into humans, we might be able to protect people who are predictably at risk against stress-induced disorders like depression and PTSD. So that's first responders and firefighters, refugees, prisoners and prison guards, soldiers, you name it.And to give you a sense of the scale of these diseases, in 2010, the global burden of disease was estimated at 2.5 trillion dollars, and since they are chronic, that cost is compounding and is therefore expected to rise up to six trillion dollars in just the next 15 years.As I mentioned before, repurposing can be challenging because of our prior biases. Calypsol has another name, ketamine, which also goes by another name, Special K, which is a club drug and drug of abuse. It's still used across the world as an anesthetic. It's used in children. We use it on the battlefield. It's actually the drug of choice in a lot of developing nations, because it doesn't affect breathing. It is on the World Health Organization list of most essential medicines.If we had discovered ketamine as a paravaccine first, it'd be pretty easy for us to develop it, but as is, we have to compete with our functional fixedness and mental set that kind of interfere. Fortunately, it's not the only compound we have discovered that has these prophylactic, paravaccine qualities, but all of the other drugs we've discovered, or compounds if you will, they're totally new, they have to go through the entire FDA approval process — if they make it before they can ever be used in humans. And that will be years. So if we wanted something sooner, ketamine is already FDA-approved. It's generic, it's available. We could develop it for a fraction of the price and a fraction of the time.But actually, beyond functional fixedness and mental set, there's a real other challenge to repurposing drugs, which is policy. There are no incentives in place once a drug is generic and off patent and no longer exclusive to encourage pharma companies to develop them, because they don't make money. And that's not true for just ketamine. That is true for all drugs. Regardless, the idea itself is completely novel in psychiatry, to use drugs to prevent mental illness as opposed to just treat it.It is possible that 20, 50, 100 years from now, we will look back now at depression and PTSD the way we look back at tuberculosis sanitoriums as a thing of the past. This could be the beginning of the end of the mental health epidemic.But as a great scientist once said, ""Only a fool is sure of anything. A wise man keeps on guessing.""Thank you, guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_brachman_could_a_drug_prevent_depression_and_ptsd
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"So, my journey began in the Bronx, New York, in a one-bedroom apartment, with my two sisters and immigrant mother. I loved our neighborhood. It was lively. There was all this merengue blasting, neighbors socializing on building stoops and animated conversations over domino playing. It was home, and it was sweet. But it wasn't simple. In fact, everyone at school knew the block where we lived, because it was where people came to buy weed and other drugs. And with drug-dealing comes conflict, so we often went to sleep to the sound of gunshots.I spent much of my childhood worried, worried about our safety. And so did our mother. She worried that the violence we witnessed would overtake our lives; that our poverty meant that the neighbors with whom we lived and shared space would harm us. Our entire life was in the Bronx, but my mother's anxiety spurred her into action, and soon we were driving so fast to Connecticut —(Laughter)to boarding school campuses, with full scholarships in tow. Man, don't underestimate the power of a mother determined to keep her children safe.(Cheers) (Applause)At boarding school, for the first time, I was able to sleep without worry. I could leave my dorm room unlocked, walk barefoot in the grass, and look up to see a night sky full of stars. Happy novelties.But there were other novelties as well. Very quickly, I felt like I didn't belong. I learned that I didn't speak the right way, and to demonstrate the proper ways of speaking, my teachers gave me frequent lessons, in public, on the appropriate way to enunciate certain words.A teacher once instructed me in the hallway: ""Aaaaaas-king."" She said this loudly. ""Dena, it's not 'axing,' like you're running around with an axe. That's silly.""Now at this point, you can imagine the snickers of my classmates, but she continued: ""Think about breaking the word into 'ass' and 'king,' and then put the two together to say it correctly — 'Asking.'""There were some other moments that reminded me that I didn't belong. Once, I walked into a classmate's dorm room, and I watched her watch her valuables around me. Like, why would she do that? I thought to myself. And then there was the time when another classmate walked into my dorm room, and yelled, ""Ew!"" as I was applying hair grease to my scalp.There is emotional damage done when young people can't be themselves, when they are forced to edit who they are in order to be acceptable. It's a kind of violence.Ultimately, I'm a quintessential success story. I attended boarding school and college in New England, studied abroad in Chile and returned to the Bronx to be a middle school teacher. I received a Truman Scholarship, a Fulbright and a Soros Fellowship. And I could list more.(Laughter)But I won't.(Laughter)I earned my doctorate at Columbia University.(Cheers)(Applause)And then I landed a job at Yale.(Applause)I am proud of everything that I've been able to accomplish on my journey thus far.I have eternal imposter syndrome. Either I've been invited because I'm a token, which really isn't about me, but rather, about a box someone needed to check off. Or, I am exceptional, which means I've had to leave the people I love behind. It's the price that I and so many others pay for learning while black.(Applause)I police myself all the time. Are my pants too tight? Should I wear my hair up or in a fro? Should I speak up for myself, or will the power of my words be reduced to: ""She's angry""?Why did I have to leave the Bronx to gain access to a better education? And why, in the process of getting that better education, did I have to endure the trauma of erasing what made me, me — a black girl from the Bronx, raised by an Antiguan mother? So when I think about our current education reform initiatives, I can't help asking: What are our students of color learning about themselves?Three — three decades of research reveal that students of color are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students, and are punished in harsher ways for the same infractions. They also learn this through the absence of their lives and narratives in the curricula. The Cooperative Children's Book Center did a review of nearly 4,000 books and found that only three percent were about African-Americans. And they further learn this through the lack of teachers that look like them. An analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 45 percent of our nation's pre-K to high school students were people of color, while only 17 percent of our teachers are.Our youth of color pay a profound price when their schooling sends them the message that they must be controlled, that they must leave their identities at home in order to be successful. Every child deserves an education that guarantees the safety to learn in the comfort of one's own skin.(Applause)It is possible to create emotionally and physically safe classrooms where students also thrive academically. I know, because I did it in my classroom when I returned to teach in the Bronx.So what did that look like? I centered my instruction on the lives, histories and identities of my students. And I did all of this because I wanted my students to know that everyone around them was supporting them to be their best self. So while I could not control the instability of their homes, the uncertainty of their next meal, or the loud neighbors that kept them from sleep, I provided them with a loving classroom that made them feel proud of who they are, that made them know that they mattered.You know, every time I hear or say the word ""asking,"" I am in high school again. I am thinking about ""ass"" and ""king"" and putting the two together so that I speak in a way where someone in power will want to listen.There is a better way, one that doesn't force kids of color into a double bind; a way for them to preserve their ties to their families, homes and communities; a way that teaches them to trust their instincts and to have faith in their own creative genius.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dena_simmons_how_students_of_color_confront_impostor_syndrome
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"When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. I have four small children, and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes it's just not their fault. I was once late to my own speech on time management.(Laughter)We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up with before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns —(Laughter)Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're totally getting in on the bottom side of that. And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise.(Laughter)Which is true. You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?(Laughter)Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.Here's what I mean. I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments — busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book.One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log. Winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day.But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, ""Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?"" ""Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?"" I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, ""No — can't you see how busy I am?"" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. To get at this, I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she ""had it all"" — that phrase. I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me. Of course, right?But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. So of course this makes me even more intrigued, and when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, ""Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice."" And rather than say, ""I don't have time to do x, y or z,"" she'd say, ""I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority."" ""I don't have time,"" often means ""It's not a priority."" If you think about it, that's really more accurate language. I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly.(Laughter)Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it. Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making different choices, I will give you that. But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there.So how do we do that? How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater?Well, first we need to figure out what they are. I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this. The first, on the professional side: I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year are giving or getting annual performance reviews. You look back over your successes over the year, your ""opportunities for growth."" And this serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year. You're giving yourself a performance review, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's performance review now.And you can do this for your personal life, too. I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter.(Laughter)Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. So this year's kind of done, but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the people you care about. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's family holiday letter now. Don't send it.(Laughter)Please, don't send it. But you can write it. And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter, we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year.And now we need to break these down into doable steps. So maybe you want to write a family history. First, you can read some other family histories, get a sense for the style. Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. Or maybe you want to run a 5K. So you need to find a race and sign up, figure out a training plan, and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet. And then — this is key — we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them.I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a ""low opportunity cost"" time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, ""I am excited to make progress toward my personal and professional priorities right now.""(Laughter)But we are willing to think about what those should be. So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories. Career, we think about; relationships, self — not so much. But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each. Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in.Where you plan them in is up to you. I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class if you are caring for multiple children on your own. I get that. And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle. But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering.There are 168 hours in a week. Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. That is a lot of time. If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week — that leaves 72 hours for other things. That is a lot of time. You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. You say you're working 60 hours. Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. You say you're working more than 60 hours. Well, are you sure?(Laughter)There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours.(Laughter)You can guess in which direction, right? Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours.So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails. Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV.But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. It made the whole experience almost, almost, enjoyable. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute.It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. I truly believe this. There is time. Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_vanderkam_how_to_gain_control_of_your_free_time
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"Here's a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine, those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to a half a million. A quarter of a million in 1970 to about a half a million today, with 100,000 added since the year 2000.These facts, revealed in a recent book by Boston University economist James Bessen, raise an intriguing question: what are all those tellers doing, and why hasn't automation eliminated their employment by now? If you think about it, many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil. Assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection. Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection. These inventions have worked. We no longer dig ditches by hand, pound tools out of wrought iron or do bookkeeping using actual books. And yet, the fraction of US adults employed in the labor market is higher now in 2016 than it was 125 years ago, in 1890, and it's risen in just about every decade in the intervening 125 years.This poses a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?(Laughter)I'm going to try to answer that question tonight, and along the way, I'm going to tell you what this means for the future of work and the challenges that automation does and does not pose for our society.Why are there so many jobs? There are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake. One has to do with human genius and creativity. The other has to do with human insatiability, or greed, if you like. I'm going to call the first of these the O-ring principle, and it determines the type of work that we do. The second principle is the never-get-enough principle, and it determines how many jobs there actually are.Let's start with the O-ring. ATMs, automated teller machines, had two countervailing effects on bank teller employment. As you would expect, they replaced a lot of teller tasks. The number of tellers per branch fell by about a third. But banks quickly discovered that it also was cheaper to open new branches, and the number of bank branches increased by about 40 percent in the same time period. The net result was more branches and more tellers. But those tellers were doing somewhat different work. As their routine, cash-handling tasks receded, they became less like checkout clerks and more like salespeople, forging relationships with customers, solving problems and introducing them to new products like credit cards, loans and investments: more tellers doing a more cognitively demanding job. There's a general principle here. Most of the work that we do requires a multiplicity of skills, and brains and brawn, technical expertise and intuitive mastery, perspiration and inspiration in the words of Thomas Edison. In general, automating some subset of those tasks doesn't make the other ones unnecessary. In fact, it makes them more important. It increases their economic value.Let me give you a stark example. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and crashed back down to Earth less than two minutes after takeoff. The cause of that crash, it turned out, was an inexpensive rubber O-ring in the booster rocket that had frozen on the launchpad the night before and failed catastrophically moments after takeoff. In this multibillion dollar enterprise that simple rubber O-ring made the difference between mission success and the calamitous death of seven astronauts. An ingenious metaphor for this tragic setting is the O-ring production function, named by Harvard economist Michael Kremer after the Challenger disaster. The O-ring production function conceives of the work as a series of interlocking steps, links in a chain. Every one of those links must hold for the mission to succeed. If any of them fails, the mission, or the product or the service, comes crashing down. This precarious situation has a surprisingly positive implication, which is that improvements in the reliability of any one link in the chain increases the value of improving any of the other links. Concretely, if most of the links are brittle and prone to breakage, the fact that your link is not that reliable is not that important. Probably something else will break anyway. But as all the other links become robust and reliable, the importance of your link becomes more essential. In the limit, everything depends upon it. The reason the O-ring was critical to space shuttle Challenger is because everything else worked perfectly. If the Challenger were kind of the space era equivalent of Microsoft Windows 2000 —(Laughter)the reliability of the O-ring wouldn't have mattered because the machine would have crashed.(Laughter)Here's the broader point. In much of the work that we do, we are the O-rings. Yes, ATMs could do certain cash-handling tasks faster and better than tellers, but that didn't make tellers superfluous. It increased the importance of their problem-solving skills and their relationships with customers. The same principle applies if we're building a building, if we're diagnosing and caring for a patient, or if we are teaching a class to a roomful of high schoolers. As our tools improve, technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise and our judgment and our creativity.And that brings me to the second principle: never get enough. You may be thinking, OK, O-ring, got it, that says the jobs that people do will be important. They can't be done by machines, but they still need to be done. But that doesn't tell me how many jobs there will need to be. If you think about it, isn't it kind of self-evident that once we get sufficiently productive at something, we've basically worked our way out of a job? In 1900, 40 percent of all US employment was on farms. Today, it's less than two percent. Why are there so few farmers today? It's not because we're eating less.(Laughter)A century of productivity growth in farming means that now, a couple of million farmers can feed a nation of 320 million. That's amazing progress, but it also means there are only so many O-ring jobs left in farming. So clearly, technology can eliminate jobs. Farming is only one example. There are many others like it. But what's true about a single product or service or industry has never been true about the economy as a whole. Many of the industries in which we now work — health and medicine, finance and insurance, electronics and computing — were tiny or barely existent a century ago. Many of the products that we spend a lot of our money on — air conditioners, sport utility vehicles, computers and mobile devices — were unattainably expensive, or just hadn't been invented a century ago. As automation frees our time, increases the scope of what is possible, we invent new products, new ideas, new services that command our attention, occupy our time and spur consumption. You may think some of these things are frivolous — extreme yoga, adventure tourism, Pokémon GO — and I might agree with you. But people desire these things, and they're willing to work hard for them. The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity. In the words of economist Thorstein Veblen, invention is the mother of necessity.Now ... So if you accept these two principles, the O-ring principle and the never-get-enough principle, then you agree with me. There will be jobs. Does that mean there's nothing to worry about? Automation, employment, robots and jobs — it'll all take care of itself? No. That is not my argument. Automation creates wealth by allowing us to do more work in less time. There is no economic law that says that we will use that wealth well, and that is worth worrying about. Consider two countries, Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both oil-rich nations, it's like they have money spurting out of a hole in the ground.(Laughter)But they haven't used that wealth equally well to foster human prosperity, human prospering. Norway is a thriving democracy. By and large, its citizens work and play well together. It's typically numbered between first and fourth in rankings of national happiness. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy in which many citizens lack a path for personal advancement. It's typically ranked 35th among nations in happiness, which is low for such a wealthy nation. Just by way of comparison, the US is typically ranked around 12th or 13th. The difference between these two countries is not their wealth and it's not their technology. It's their institutions. Norway has invested to build a society with opportunity and economic mobility. Saudi Arabia has raised living standards while frustrating many other human strivings. Two countries, both wealthy, not equally well off.And this brings me to the challenge that we face today, the challenge that automation poses for us. The challenge is not that we're running out of work. The US has added 14 million jobs since the depths of the Great Recession. The challenge is that many of those jobs are not good jobs, and many citizens cannot qualify for the good jobs that are being created. Employment growth in the United States and in much of the developed world looks something like a barbell with increasing poundage on either end of the bar. On the one hand, you have high-education, high-wage jobs like doctors and nurses, programmers and engineers, marketing and sales managers. Employment is robust in these jobs, employment growth. Similarly, employment growth is robust in many low-skill, low-education jobs like food service, cleaning, security, home health aids. Simultaneously, employment is shrinking in many middle-education, middle-wage, middle-class jobs, like blue-collar production and operative positions and white-collar clerical and sales positions. The reasons behind this contracting middle are not mysterious. Many of those middle-skill jobs use well-understood rules and procedures that can increasingly be codified in software and executed by computers. The challenge that this phenomenon creates, what economists call employment polarization, is that it knocks out rungs in the economic ladder, shrinks the size of the middle class and threatens to make us a more stratified society. On the one hand, a set of highly paid, highly educated professionals doing interesting work, on the other, a large number of citizens in low-paid jobs whose primary responsibility is to see to the comfort and health of the affluent. That is not my vision of progress, and I doubt that it is yours.But here is some encouraging news. We have faced equally momentous economic transformations in the past, and we have come through them successfully. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when automation was eliminating vast numbers of agricultural jobs — remember that tractor? — the farm states faced a threat of mass unemployment, a generation of youth no longer needed on the farm but not prepared for industry. Rising to this challenge, they took the radical step of requiring that their entire youth population remain in school and continue their education to the ripe old age of 16. This was called the high school movement, and it was a radically expensive thing to do. Not only did they have to invest in the schools, but those kids couldn't work at their jobs. It also turned out to be one of the best investments the US made in the 20th century. It gave us the most skilled, the most flexible and the most productive workforce in the world. To see how well this worked, imagine taking the labor force of 1899 and bringing them into the present. Despite their strong backs and good characters, many of them would lack the basic literacy and numeracy skills to do all but the most mundane jobs. Many of them would be unemployable.What this example highlights is the primacy of our institutions, most especially our schools, in allowing us to reap the harvest of our technological prosperity.It's foolish to say there's nothing to worry about. Clearly we can get this wrong. If the US had not invested in its schools and in its skills a century ago with the high school movement, we would be a less prosperous, a less mobile and probably a lot less happy society. But it's equally foolish to say that our fates are sealed. That's not decided by the machines. It's not even decided by the market. It's decided by us and by our institutions.Now, I started this talk with a paradox. Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't that make our labor superfluous, our skills redundant? Isn't it obvious that the road to our economic and social hell is paved with our own great inventions?History has repeatedly offered an answer to that paradox. The first part of the answer is that technology magnifies our leverage, increases the importance, the added value of our expertise, our judgment and our creativity. That's the O-ring. The second part of the answer is our endless inventiveness and bottomless desires means that we never get enough, never get enough. There's always new work to do. Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges, seen most clearly in our polarized labor market and the threat that it poses to economic mobility. Rising to this challenge is not automatic. It's not costless. It's not easy. But it is feasible. And here is some encouraging news. Because of our amazing productivity, we're rich. Of course we can afford to invest in ourselves and in our children as America did a hundred years ago with the high school movement. Arguably, we can't afford not to.Now, you may be thinking, Professor Autor has told us a heartwarming tale about the distant past, the recent past, maybe the present, but probably not the future. Because everybody knows that this time is different. Right? Is this time different? Of course this time is different. Every time is different. On numerous occasions in the last 200 years, scholars and activists have raised the alarm that we are running out of work and making ourselves obsolete: for example, the Luddites in the early 1800s; US Secretary of Labor James Davis in the mid-1920s; Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief in 1982; and of course, many scholars, pundits, technologists and media figures today.These predictions strike me as arrogant. These self-proclaimed oracles are in effect saying, ""If I can't think of what people will do for work in the future, then you, me and our kids aren't going to think of it either."" I don't have the guts to take that bet against human ingenuity. Look, I can't tell you what people are going to do for work a hundred years from now. But the future doesn't hinge on my imagination. If I were a farmer in Iowa in the year 1900, and an economist from the 21st century teleported down to my field and said, ""Hey, guess what, farmer Autor, in the next hundred years, agricultural employment is going to fall from 40 percent of all jobs to two percent purely due to rising productivity. What do you think the other 38 percent of workers are going to do?"" I would not have said, ""Oh, we got this. We'll do app development, radiological medicine, yoga instruction, Bitmoji.""(Laughter)I wouldn't have had a clue. But I hope I would have had the wisdom to say, ""Wow, a 95 percent reduction in farm employment with no shortage of food. That's an amazing amount of progress. I hope that humanity finds something remarkable to do with all of that prosperity.""And by and large, I would say that it has.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_autor_why_are_there_still_so_many_jobs
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"Tell your daughters of this year, how we woke needing coffee but discovered instead cadavers strewn about our morning papers, waterlogged facsimiles of our sisters, spouses, small children. Say to your baby of this year when she asks, as she certainly should, tell her it was too late coming. Admit even in the year we leased freedom, we didn't own it outright. There were still laws for every way we used our privates while they pawed at the soft folds of us, grabbed with no concern for consent, no laws made for the men that enforced them. We were trained to dodge, to wait, to cower and cover, to wait more, still, wait. We were told to be silent.But speak to your girls of this wartime, a year preceded by a score of the same, so as in two decades before, we wiped our eyes, laced caskets with flags, evacuated the crime scene of the club, caterwauled in the street, laid our bodies on the concrete against the outlines of our fallen, cried, ""Of course we mattered,"" chanted for our disappeared. The women wept this year. They did.In the same year, we were ready. The year we lost our inhibition and moved with courageous abandon was also the year we stared down barrels, sang of cranes in skies, ducked and parried, caught gold in hijab, collected death threats, knew ourselves as patriots, said, ""We're 35 now, time we settled down and found a running mate,"" made road maps for infant joy, shamed nothing but fear, called ourselves fat and meant, of course, impeccable.This year, we were women, not brides or trinkets, not an off-brand gender, not a concession, but women.Instruct your babies. Remind them that the year has passed to be docile or small. Some of us said for the first time that we were women, took this oath of solidarity seriously. Some of us bore children and some of us did not, and none of us questioned whether that made us real or appropriate or true.When she asks you of this year, your daughter, whether your offspring or heir to your triumph, from her comforted side of history teetering towards woman, she will wonder and ask voraciously, though she cannot fathom your sacrifice, she will hold your estimation of it holy, curiously probing, ""Where were you? Did you fight? Were you fearful or fearsome? What colored the walls of your regret? What did you do for women in the year it was time? This path you made for me, which bones had to break? Did you do enough, and are you OK, momma? And are you a hero?"" She will ask the difficult questions.She will not care about the arc of your brow, the weight of your clutch. She will not ask of your mentions. Your daughter, for whom you have already carried so much, wants to know what you brought, what gift, what light did you keep from extinction? When they came for victims in the night, did you sleep through it or were you roused? What was the cost of staying woke? What, in the year we said time's up, what did you do with your privilege? Did you sup on others' squalor? Did you look away or directly into the flame? Did you know your skill or treat it like a liability? Were you fooled by the epithets of ""nasty"" or ""less than""? Did you teach with an open heart or a clenched fist? Where were you?Tell her the truth. Make it your life. Confirm it. Say, ""Daughter, I stood there with the moment drawn on my face like a dagger, and flung it back at itself, slicing space for you."" Tell her the truth, how you lived in spite of crooked odds. Tell her you were brave, and always, always in the company of courage, mostly the days when you just had yourself. Tell her she was born as you were, as your mothers before, and the sisters beside them, in the age of legends, like always.Tell her she was born just in time, just in time to lead.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chinaka_hodge_what_will_you_tell_your_daughters_about_2016
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"So when you look out at the stars at night, it's amazing what you can see. It's beautiful. But what's more amazing is what you can't see, because what we know now is that around every star or almost every star, there's a planet, or probably a few.So what this picture isn't showing you are all the planets that we know about out there in space. But when we think about planets, we tend to think of faraway things that are very different from our own. But here we are on a planet, and there are so many things that are amazing about Earth that we're searching far and wide to find things that are like that. And when we're searching, we're finding amazing things. But I want to tell you about an amazing thing here on Earth. And that is that every minute, 400 pounds of hydrogen and almost seven pounds of helium escape from Earth into space. And this is gas that is going off and never coming back. So hydrogen, helium and many other things make up what's known as the Earth's atmosphere. The atmosphere is just these gases that form a thin blue line that's seen here from the International Space Station, a photograph that some astronauts took. And this tenuous veneer around our planet is what allows life to flourish. It protects our planet from too many impacts, from meteorites and the like. And it's such an amazing phenomenon that the fact that it's disappearing should frighten you, at least a little bit.So this process is something that I study and it's called atmospheric escape. So atmospheric escape is not specific to planet Earth. It's part of what it means to be a planet, if you ask me, because planets, not just here on Earth but throughout the universe, can undergo atmospheric escape. And the way it happens actually tells us about planets themselves. Because when you think about the solar system, you might think about this picture here. And you would say, well, there are eight planets, maybe nine. So for those of you who are stressed by this picture, I will add somebody for you.(Laughter)Courtesy of New Horizons, we're including Pluto. And the thing here is, for the purposes of this talk and atmospheric escape, Pluto is a planet in my mind, in the same way that planets around other stars that we can't see are also planets. So fundamental characteristics of planets include the fact that they are bodies that are bound together by gravity. So it's a lot of material just stuck together with this attractive force. And these bodies are so big and have so much gravity. That's why they're round. So when you look at all of these, including Pluto, they're round.So you can see that gravity is really at play here. But another fundamental characteristic about planets is what you don't see here, and that's the star, the Sun, that all of the planets in the solar system are orbiting around. And that's fundamentally driving atmospheric escape. The reason that fundamentally stars drive atmospheric escape from planets is because stars offer planets particles and light and heat that can cause the atmospheres to go away. So if you think of a hot-air balloon, or you look at this picture of lanterns in Thailand at a festival, you can see that hot air can propel gasses upward. And if you have enough energy and heating, which our Sun does, that gas, which is so light and only bound by gravity, it can escape into space. And so this is what's actually causing atmospheric escape here on Earth and also on other planets — that interplay between heating from the star and overcoming the force of gravity on the planet.So I've told you that it happens at the rate of 400 pounds a minute for hydrogen and almost seven pounds for helium. But what does that look like? Well, even in the '80s, we took pictures of the Earth in the ultraviolet using NASA's Dynamic Explorer spacecraft. So these two images of the Earth show you what that glow of escaping hydrogen looks like, shown in red. And you can also see other features like oxygen and nitrogen in that white glimmer in the circle showing you the auroras and also some wisps around the tropics. So these are pictures that conclusively show us that our atmosphere isn't just tightly bound to us here on Earth but it's actually reaching out far into space, and at an alarming rate, I might add.But the Earth is not alone in undergoing atmospheric escape. Mars, our nearest neighbor, is much smaller than Earth, so it has much less gravity with which to hold on to its atmosphere. And so even though Mars has an atmosphere, we can see it's much thinner than the Earth's. Just look at the surface. You see craters indicating that it didn't have an atmosphere that could stop those impacts. Also, we see that it's the ""red planet,"" and atmospheric escape plays a role in Mars being red. That's because we think Mars used to have a wetter past, and when water had enough energy, it broke up into hydrogen and oxygen, and hydrogen being so light, it escaped into space, and the oxygen that was left oxidized or rusted the ground, making that familiar rusty red color that we see.So it's fine to look at pictures of Mars and say that atmospheric escape probably happened, but NASA has a probe that's currently at Mars called the MAVEN satellite, and its actual job is to study atmospheric escape. It's the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft. And results from it have already shown pictures very similar to what you've seen here on Earth. We've long known that Mars was losing its atmosphere, but we have some stunning pictures. Here, for example, you can see in the red circle is the size of Mars, and in blue you can see the hydrogen escaping away from the planet. So it's reaching out more than 10 times the size of the planet, far enough away that it's no longer bound to that planet. It's escaping off into space. And this helps us confirm ideas, like why Mars is red, from that lost hydrogen. But hydrogen isn't the only gas that's lost. I mentioned helium on Earth and some oxygen and nitrogen, and from MAVEN we can also look at the oxygen being lost from Mars. And you can see that because oxygen is heavier, it can't get as far as the hydrogen, but it's still escaping away from the planet. You don't see it all confined into that red circle.So the fact that we not only see atmospheric escape on our own planet but we can study it elsewhere and send spacecraft allows us to learn about the past of planets but also about planets in general and Earth's future. So one way we actually can learn about the future is by planets so far away that we can't see. And I should just note though, before I go on to that, I'm not going to show you photos like this of Pluto, which might be disappointing, but that's because we don't have them yet. But the New Horizons mission is currently studying atmospheric escape being lost from the planet. So stay tuned and look out for that. But the planets that I did want to talk about are known as transiting exoplanets.So any planet orbiting a star that's not our Sun is called an exoplanet, or extrasolar planet. And these planets that we call transiting have the special feature that if you look at that star in the middle, you'll see that actually it's blinking. And the reason that it's blinking is because there are planets that are going past it all the time, and it's that special orientation where the planets are blocking the light from the star that allows us to see that light blinking. And by surveying the stars in the night sky for this blinking motion, we are able to find planets. This is how we've now been able to detect over 5,000 planets in our own Milky Way, and we know there are many more out there, like I mentioned.So when we look at the light from these stars, what we see, like I said, is not the planet itself, but you actually see a dimming of the light that we can record in time. So the light drops as the planet decreases in front of the star, and that's that blinking that you saw before. So not only do we detect the planets but we can look at this light in different wavelengths. So I mentioned looking at the Earth and Mars in ultraviolet light. If we look at transiting exoplanets with the Hubble Space Telescope, we find that in the ultraviolet, you see much bigger blinking, much less light from the star, when the planet is passing in front. And we think this is because you have an extended atmosphere of hydrogen all around the planet that's making it look puffier and thus blocking more of the light that you see.So using this technique, we've actually been able to discover a few transiting exoplanets that are undergoing atmospheric escape. And these planets can be called hot Jupiters, for some of the ones we've found. And that's because they're gas planets like Jupiter, but they're so close to their star, about a hundred times closer than Jupiter. And because there's all this lightweight gas that's ready to escape, and all this heating from the star, you have completely catastrophic rates of atmospheric escape. So unlike our 400 pounds per minute of hydrogen being lost on Earth, for these planets, you're losing 1.3 billion pounds of hydrogen every minute.So you might think, well, does this make the planet cease to exist? And this is a question that people wondered when they looked at our solar system, because planets closer to the Sun are rocky, and planets further away are bigger and more gaseous. Could you have started with something like Jupiter that was actually close to the Sun, and get rid of all the gas in it? We now think that if you start with something like a hot Jupiter, you actually can't end up with Mercury or the Earth. But if you started with something smaller, it's possible that enough gas would have gotten away that it would have significantly impacted it and left you with something very different than what you started with.So all of this sounds sort of general, and we might think about the solar system, but what does this have to do with us here on Earth? Well, in the far future, the Sun is going to get brighter. And as that happens, the heating that we find from the Sun is going to become very intense. In the same way that you see gas streaming off from a hot Jupiter, gas is going to stream off from the Earth. And so what we can look forward to, or at least prepare for, is the fact that in the far future, the Earth is going to look more like Mars. Our hydrogen, from water that is broken down, is going to escape into space more rapidly, and we're going to be left with this dry, reddish planet.So don't fear, it's not for a few billion years, so there's some time to prepare.(Laughter)But I wanted you to be aware of what's going on, not just in the future, but atmospheric escape is happening as we speak. So there's a lot of amazing science that you hear about happening in space and planets that are far away, and we are studying these planets to learn about these worlds. But as we learn about Mars or exoplanets like hot Jupiters, we find things like atmospheric escape that tell us a lot more about our planet here on Earth.So consider that the next time you think that space is far away.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anjali_tripathi_why_earth_may_someday_look_like_mars
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"I was a new mother and a young rabbi in the spring of 2004 and the world was in shambles. Maybe you remember. Every day, we heard devastating reports from the war in Iraq. There were waves of terror rolling across the globe. It seemed like humanity was spinning out of control. I remember the night that I read about the series of coordinated bombings in the subway system in Madrid, and I got up and I walked over to the crib where my six-month-old baby girl lay sleeping sweetly, and I heard the rhythm of her breath, and I felt this sense of urgency coursing through my body. We were living through a time of tectonic shifts in ideologies, in politics, in religion, in populations. Everything felt so precarious. And I remember thinking, ""My God, what kind of world did we bring this child into? And what was I as a mother and a religious leader willing to do about it?Of course, I knew it was clear that religion would be a principle battlefield in this rapidly changing landscape, and it was already clear that religion was a significant part of the problem. The question for me was, could religion also be part of the solution? Now, throughout history, people have committed horrible crimes and atrocities in the name of religion. And as we entered the 21st century, it was very clear that religious extremism was once again on the rise. Our studies now show that over the course of the past 15, 20 years, hostilities and religion-related violence have been on the increase all over the world. But we don't even need the studies to prove it, because I ask you, how many of us are surprised today when we hear the stories of a bombing or a shooting, when we later find out that the last word that was uttered before the trigger is pulled or the bomb is detonated is the name of God? It barely raises an eyebrow today when we learn that yet another person has decided to show his love of God by taking the lives of God's children. In America, religious extremism looks like a white, antiabortion Christian extremist walking into Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and murdering three people. It also looks like a couple inspired by the Islamic State walking into an office party in San Bernardino and killing 14. And even when religion-related extremism does not lead to violence, it is still used as a political wedge issue, cynically leading people to justify the subordination of women, the stigmatization of LGBT people, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. This ought to concern deeply those of us who care about the future of religion and the future of faith. We need to call this what it is: a great failure of religion.But the thing is, this isn't even the only challenge that religion faces today. At the very same time that we need religion to be a strong force against extremism, it is suffering from a second pernicious trend, what I call religious routine-ism. This is when our institutions and our leaders are stuck in a paradigm that is rote and perfunctory, devoid of life, devoid of vision and devoid of soul.Let me explain what I mean like this. One of the great blessings of being a rabbi is standing under the chuppah, under the wedding canopy, with a couple, and helping them proclaim publicly and make holy the love that they found for one another. I want to ask you now, though, to think maybe from your own experience or maybe just imagine it about the difference between the intensity of the experience under the wedding canopy, and maybe the experience of the sixth or seventh anniversary.(Laughter)And if you're lucky enough to make it 16 or 17 years, if you're like most people, you probably wake up in the morning realizing that you forgot to make a reservation at your favorite restaurant and you forgot so much as a card, and then you just hope and pray that your partner also forgot.Well, religious ritual and rites were essentially designed to serve the function of the anniversary, to be a container in which we would hold on to the remnants of that sacred, revelatory encounter that birthed the religion in the first place. The problem is that after a few centuries, the date remains on the calendar, but the love affair is long dead. That's when we find ourselves in endless, mindless repetitions of words that don't mean anything to us, rising and being seated because someone has asked us to, holding onto jealously guarded doctrine that's completely and wildly out of step with our contemporary reality, engaging in perfunctory practice simply because that's the way things have always been done.Religion is waning in the United States. Across the board, churches and synagogues and mosques are all complaining about how hard it is to maintain relevance for a generation of young people who seem completely uninterested, not only in the institutions that stand at the heart of our traditions but even in religion itself. And what they need to understand is that there is today a generation of people who are as disgusted by the violence of religious extremism as they are turned off by the lifelessness of religious routine-ism.Of course there is a bright spot to this story. Given the crisis of these two concurrent trends in religious life, about 12 or 13 years ago, I set out to try to determine if there was any way that I could reclaim the heart of my own Jewish tradition, to help make it meaningful and purposeful again in a world on fire. I started to wonder, what if we could harness some of the great minds of our generation and think in a bold and robust and imaginative way again about what the next iteration of religious life would look like? Now, we had no money, no space, no game plan, but we did have email. So my friend Melissa and I sat down and we wrote an email which we sent out to a few friends and colleagues. It basically said this: ""Before you bail on religion, why don't we come together this Friday night and see what we might make of our own Jewish inheritance?""We hoped maybe 20 people would show up. It turned out 135 people came. They were cynics and seekers, atheists and rabbis. Many people said that night that it was the first time that they had a meaningful religious experience in their entire lives. And so I set out to do the only rational thing that someone would do in such a circumstance: I quit my job and tried to build this audacious dream, a reinvented, rethought religious life which we called ""IKAR,"" which means ""the essence"" or ""the heart of the matter.""Now, IKAR is not alone out there in the religious landscape today. There are Jewish and Christian and Muslim and Catholic religious leaders, many of them women, by the way, who have set out to reclaim the heart of our traditions, who firmly believe that now is the time for religion to be part of the solution. We are going back into our sacred traditions and recognizing that all of our traditions contain the raw material to justify violence and extremism, and also contain the raw material to justify compassion, coexistence and kindness — that when others choose to read our texts as directives for hate and vengeance, we can choose to read those same texts as directives for love and for forgiveness.I have found now in communities as varied as Jewish indie start-ups on the coasts to a woman's mosque, to black churches in New York and in North Carolina, to a holy bus loaded with nuns that traverses this country with a message of justice and peace, that there is a shared religious ethos that is now emerging in the form of revitalized religion in this country. And while the theologies and the practices vary very much between these independent communities, what we can see are some common, consistent threads between them.I'm going to share with you four of those commitments now.The first is wakefulness. We live in a time today in which we have unprecedented access to information about every global tragedy that happens on every corner of this Earth. Within 12 hours, 20 million people saw that image of Aylan Kurdi's little body washed up on the Turkish shore. We all saw this picture. We saw this picture of a five-year-old child pulled out of the rubble of his building in Aleppo. And once we see these images, we are called to a certain kind of action.My tradition tells a story of a traveler who is walking down a road when he sees a beautiful house on fire, and he says, ""How can it be that something so beautiful would burn, and nobody seems to even care?"" So too we learn that our world is on fire, and it is our job to keep our hearts and our eyes open, and to recognize that it's our responsibility to help put out the flames.This is extremely difficult to do. Psychologists tell us that the more we learn about what's broken in our world, the less likely we are to do anything. It's called psychic numbing. We just shut down at a certain point. Well, somewhere along the way, our religious leaders forgot that it's our job to make people uncomfortable. It's our job to wake people up, to pull them out of their apathy and into the anguish, and to insist that we do what we don't want to do and see what we do not want to see. Because we know that social change only happens —(Applause)when we are awake enough to see that the house is on fire.The second principle is hope, and I want to say this about hope. Hope is not naive, and hope is not an opiate. Hope may be the single greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and against a culture of despair. Because what hope does for us is it lifts us out of the container that holds us and constrains us from the outside, and says, ""You can dream and think expansively again. That they cannot control in you.""I saw hope made manifest in an African-American church in the South Side of Chicago this summer, where I brought my little girl, who is now 13 and a few inches taller than me, to hear my friend Rev. Otis Moss preach. That summer, there had already been 3,000 people shot between January and July in Chicago. We went into that church and heard Rev. Moss preach, and after he did, this choir of gorgeous women, 100 women strong, stood up and began to sing. ""I need you. You need me. I love you. I need you to survive."" And I realized in that moment that this is what religion is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about giving people back a sense of purpose, a sense of hope, a sense that they and their dreams fundamentally matter in this world that tells them that they don't matter at all.The third principle is the principle of mightiness. There's a rabbinic tradition that we are to walk around with two slips of paper in our pockets. One says, ""I am but dust and ashes."" It's not all about me. I can't control everything, and I cannot do this on my own. The other slip of paper says, ""For my sake the world was created."" Which is to say it's true that I can't do everything, but I can surely do something. I can forgive. I can love. I can show up. I can protest. I can be a part of this conversation. We even now have a religious ritual, a posture, that holds the paradox between powerlessness and power. In the Jewish community, the only time of year that we prostrate fully to the ground is during the high holy days. It's a sign of total submission. Now in our community, when we get up off the ground, we stand with our hands raised to the heavens, and we say, ""I am strong, I am mighty, and I am worthy. I can't do everything, but I can do something.""In a world that conspires to make us believe that we are invisible and that we are impotent, religious communities and religious ritual can remind us that for whatever amount of time we have here on this Earth, whatever gifts and blessings we were given, whatever resources we have, we can and we must use them to try to make the world a little bit more just and a little bit more loving.The fourth and final is interconnectedness. A few years ago, there was a man walking on the beach in Alaska, when he came across a soccer ball that had some Japanese letters written on it. He took a picture of it and posted it up on social media, and a Japanese teenager contacted him. He had lost everything in the tsunami that devastated his country, but he was able to retrieve that soccer ball after it had floated all the way across the Pacific. How small our world has become. It's so hard for us to remember how interconnected we all are as human beings. And yet, we know that it is systems of oppression that benefit the most from the lie of radical individualism.Let me tell you how this works. I'm not supposed to care when black youth are harassed by police, because my white-looking Jewish kids probably won't ever get pulled over for the crime of driving while black. Well, not so, because this is also my problem. And guess what? Transphobia and Islamophobia and racism of all forms, those are also all of our problems. And so too is anti-Semitism all of our problems. Because Emma Lazarus was right.(Applause)Emma Lazarus was right when she said until all of us are free, we are none of us free. We are all in this together. And now somewhere at the intersection of these four trends, of wakefulness and hope and mightiness and interconnectedness, there is a burgeoning, multifaith justice movement in this country that is staking a claim on a countertrend, saying that religion can and must be a force for good in the world.Our hearts hurt from the failed religion of extremism, and we deserve more than the failed religion of routine-ism. It is time for religious leaders and religious communities to take the lead in the spiritual and cultural shift that this country and the world so desperately needs — a shift toward love, toward justice, toward equality and toward dignity for all. I believe that our children deserve no less than that.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_brous_it_s_time_to_reclaim_and_reinvent_religion
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"There is something about physics that has been really bothering me since I was a little kid. And it's related to a question that scientists have been asking for almost 100 years, with no answer. How do the smallest things in nature, the particles of the quantum world, match up with the largest things in nature — planets and stars and galaxies held together by gravity?As a kid, I would puzzle over questions just like this. I would fiddle around with microscopes and electromagnets, and I would read about the forces of the small and about quantum mechanics and I would marvel at how well that description matched up to our observation. Then I would look at the stars, and I would read about how well we understand gravity, and I would think surely, there must be some elegant way that these two systems match up. But there's not. And the books would say, yeah, we understand a lot about these two realms separately, but when we try to link them mathematically, everything breaks.And for 100 years, none of our ideas as to how to solve this basically physics disaster, has ever been supported by evidence. And to little old me — little, curious, skeptical James — this was a supremely unsatisfying answer.So, I'm still a skeptical little kid. Flash-forward now to December of 2015, when I found myself smack in the middle of the physics world being flipped on its head. It all started when we at CERN saw something intriguing in our data: a hint of a new particle, an inkling of a possibly extraordinary answer to this question.So I'm still a skeptical little kid, I think, but I'm also now a particle hunter. I am a physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the largest science experiment ever mounted. It's a 27-kilometer tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland buried 100 meters underground. And in this tunnel, we use superconducting magnets colder than outer space to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light and slam them into each other millions of times per second, collecting the debris of these collisions to search for new, undiscovered fundamental particles. Its design and construction took decades of work by thousands of physicists from around the globe, and in the summer of 2015, we had been working tirelessly to switch on the LHC at the highest energy that humans have ever used in a collider experiment.Now, higher energy is important because for particles, there is an equivalence between energy and particle mass, and mass is just a number put there by nature. To discover new particles, we need to reach these bigger numbers. And to do that, we have to build a bigger, higher energy collider, and the biggest, highest energy collider in the world is the Large Hadron Collider. And then, we collide protons quadrillions of times, and we collect this data very slowly, over months and months. And then new particles might show up in our data as bumps — slight deviations from what you expect, little clusters of data points that make a smooth line not so smooth. For example, this bump, after months of data-taking in 2012, led to the discovery of the Higgs particle — the Higgs boson — and to a Nobel Prize for the confirmation of its existence.This jump up in energy in 2015 represented the best chance that we as a species had ever had of discovering new particles — new answers to these long-standing questions, because it was almost twice as much energy as we used when we discovered the Higgs boson. Many of my colleagues had been working their entire careers for this moment, and frankly, to little curious me, this was the moment I'd been waiting for my entire life. So 2015 was go time.So June 2015, the LHC is switched back on. My colleagues and I held our breath and bit our fingernails, and then finally we saw the first proton collisions at this highest energy ever. Applause, champagne, celebration. This was a milestone for science, and we had no idea what we would find in this brand-new data. And then a few weeks later, we found a bump. It wasn't a very big bump, but it was big enough to make you raise your eyebrow. But on a scale of one to 10 for eyebrow raises, if 10 indicates that you've discovered a new particle, this eyebrow raise is about a four.(Laughter)I spent hours, days, weeks in secret meetings, arguing with my colleagues over this little bump, poking and prodding it with our most ruthless experimental sticks to see if it would withstand scrutiny. But even after months of working feverishly — sleeping in our offices and not going home, candy bars for dinner, coffee by the bucketful — physicists are machines for turning coffee into diagrams —(Laughter)This little bump would not go away. So after a few months, we presented our little bump to the world with a very clear message: this little bump is interesting but it's not definitive, so let's keep an eye on it as we take more data. So we were trying to be extremely cool about it.And the world ran with it anyway. The news loved it. People said it reminded them of the little bump that was shown on the way toward the Higgs boson discovery. Better than that, my theorist colleagues — I love my theorist colleagues — my theorist colleagues wrote 500 papers about this little bump.(Laughter)The world of particle physics had been flipped on its head. But what was it about this particular bump that caused thousands of physicists to collectively lose their cool? This little bump was unique. This little bump indicated that we were seeing an unexpectedly large number of collisions whose debris consisted of only two photons, two particles of light. And that's rare.Particle collisions are not like automobile collisions. They have different rules. When two particles collide at almost the speed of light, the quantum world takes over. And in the quantum world, these two particles can briefly create a new particle that lives for a tiny fraction of a second before splitting into other particles that hit our detector. Imagine a car collision where the two cars vanish upon impact, a bicycle appears in their place —(Laughter)And then that bicycle explodes into two skateboards, which hit our detector.(Laughter)Hopefully, not literally. They're very expensive.Events where only two photons hit out detector are very rare. And because of the special quantum properties of photons, there's a very small number of possible new particles — these mythical bicycles — that can give birth to only two photons. But one of these options is huge, and it has to do with that long-standing question that bothered me as a tiny little kid, about gravity.Gravity may seem super strong to you, but it's actually crazily weak compared to the other forces of nature. I can briefly beat gravity when I jump, but I can't pick a proton out of my hand. The strength of gravity compared to the other forces of nature? It's 10 to the minus 39. That's a decimal with 39 zeros after it.Worse than that, all of the other known forces of nature are perfectly described by this thing we call the Standard Model, which is our current best description of nature at its smallest scales, and quite frankly, one of the most successful achievements of humankind — except for gravity, which is absent from the Standard Model. It's crazy. It's almost as though most of gravity has gone missing. We feel a little bit of it, but where's the rest of it? No one knows.But one theoretical explanation proposes a wild solution. You and I — even you in the back — we live in three dimensions of space. I hope that's a non-controversial statement.(Laughter)All of the known particles also live in three dimensions of space. In fact, a particle is just another name for an excitation in a three-dimensional field; a localized wobbling in space. More importantly, all the math that we use to describe all this stuff assumes that there are only three dimensions of space. But math is math, and we can play around with our math however we want. And people have been playing around with extra dimensions of space for a very long time, but it's always been an abstract mathematical concept. I mean, just look around you — you at the back, look around — there's clearly only three dimensions of space.But what if that's not true? What if the missing gravity is leaking into an extra-spatial dimension that's invisible to you and I? What if gravity is just as strong as the other forces if you were to view it in this extra-spatial dimension, and what you and I experience is a tiny slice of gravity make it seem very weak? If this were true, we would have to expand our Standard Model of particles to include an extra particle, a hyperdimensional particle of gravity, a special graviton that lives in extra-spatial dimensions.I see the looks on your faces. You should be asking me the question, ""How in the world are we going to test this crazy, science fiction idea, stuck as we are in three dimensions?"" The way we always do, by slamming together two protons —(Laughter)Hard enough that the collision reverberates into any extra-spatial dimensions that might be there, momentarily creating this hyperdimensional graviton that then snaps back into the three dimensions of the LHC and spits off two photons, two particles of light. And this hypothetical, extra-dimensional graviton is one of the only possible, hypothetical new particles that has the special quantum properties that could give birth to our little, two-photon bump.So, the possibility of explaining the mysteries of gravity and of discovering extra dimensions of space — perhaps now you get a sense as to why thousands of physics geeks collectively lost their cool over our little, two-photon bump. A discovery of this type would rewrite the textbooks. But remember, the message from us experimentalists that actually were doing this work at the time, was very clear: we need more data. With more data, the little bump will either turn into a nice, crisp Nobel Prize —(Laughter)Or the extra data will fill in the space around the bump and turn it into a nice, smooth line.So we took more data, and with five times the data, several months later, our little bump turned into a smooth line. The news reported on a ""huge disappointment,"" on ""faded hopes,"" and on particle physicists ""being sad."" Given the tone of the coverage, you'd think that we had decided to shut down the LHC and go home.(Laughter)But that's not what we did. But why not? I mean, if I didn't discover a particle — and I didn't — if I didn't discover a particle, why am I here talking to you? Why didn't I just hang my head in shame and go home?Particle physicists are explorers. And very much of what we do is cartography. Let me put it this way: forget about the LHC for a second. Imagine you are a space explorer arriving at a distant planet, searching for aliens. What is your first task? To immediately orbit the planet, land, take a quick look around for any big, obvious signs of life, and report back to home base. That's the stage we're at now. We took a first look at the LHC for any new, big, obvious-to-spot particles, and we can report that there are none. We saw a weird-looking alien bump on a distant mountain, but once we got closer, we saw it was a rock.But then what do we do? Do we just give up and fly away? Absolutely not; we would be terrible scientists if we did. No, we spend the next couple of decades exploring, mapping out the territory, sifting through the sand with a fine instrument, peeking under every stone, drilling under the surface. New particles can either show up immediately as big, obvious-to-spot bumps, or they can only reveal themselves after years of data taking.Humanity has just begun its exploration at the LHC at this big high energy, and we have much searching to do. But what if, even after 10 or 20 years, we still find no new particles? We build a bigger machine.(Laughter)We search at higher energies. We search at higher energies. Planning is already underway for a 100-kilometer tunnel that will collide particles at 10 times the energy of the LHC. We don't decide where nature places new particles. We only decide to keep exploring. But what if, even after a 100-kilometer tunnel or a 500-kilometer tunnel or a 10,000-kilometer collider floating in space between the Earth and the Moon, we still find no new particles? Then perhaps we're doing particle physics wrong.(Laughter)Perhaps we need to rethink things. Maybe we need more resources, technology, expertise than what we currently have. We already use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques in parts of the LHC, but imagine designing a particle physics experiment using such sophisticated algorithms that it could teach itself to discover a hyperdimensional graviton.But what if? What if the ultimate question: What if even artificial intelligence can't help us answer our questions? What if these open questions, for centuries, are destined to be unanswered for the foreseeable future? What if the stuff that's bothered me since I was a little kid is destined to be unanswered in my lifetime? Then that ... will be even more fascinating.We will be forced to think in completely new ways. We'll have to go back to our assumptions, and determine if there was a flaw somewhere. And we'll need to encourage more people to join us in studying science since we need fresh eyes on these century-old problems. I don't have the answers, and I'm still searching for them. But someone — maybe she's in school right now, maybe she's not even born yet — could eventually guide us to see physics in a completely new way, and to point out that perhaps we're just asking the wrong questions. Which would not be the end of physics, but a novel beginning.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/james_beacham_how_we_explore_unanswered_questions_in_physics
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"I want you to look around the room for a minute and try to find the most paranoid person here —(Laughter)And then I want you to point at that person for me.(Laughter)OK, don't actually do it.(Laughter)But, as an organizational psychologist, I spend a lot of time in workplaces, and I find paranoia everywhere. Paranoia is caused by people that I call ""takers."" Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me. The opposite is a giver. It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, ""What can I do for you?""I wanted to give you a chance to think about your own style. We all have moments of giving and taking. Your style is how you treat most of the people most of the time, your default. I have a short test you can take to figure out if you're more of a giver or a taker, and you can take it right now.[The Narcissist Test][Step 1: Take a moment to think about yourself.](Laughter)[Step 2: If you made it to Step 2, you are not a narcissist.](Laughter)This is the only thing I will say today that has no data behind it, but I am convinced the longer it takes for you to laugh at this cartoon, the more worried we should be that you're a taker.(Laughter)Of course, not all takers are narcissists. Some are just givers who got burned one too many times. Then there's another kind of taker that we won't be addressing today, and that's called a psychopath.(Laughter)I was curious, though, about how common these extremes are, and so I surveyed over 30,000 people across industries around the world's cultures. And I found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking. They choose this third style called ""matching."" If you're a matcher, you try to keep an even balance of give and take: quid pro quo — I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And that seems like a safe way to live your life. But is it the most effective and productive way to live your life? The answer to that question is a very definitive ... maybe.(Laughter)I studied dozens of organizations, thousands of people. I had engineers measuring their productivity.(Laughter)I looked at medical students' grades — even salespeople's revenue.(Laughter)And, unexpectedly, the worst performers in each of these jobs were the givers. The engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favors than they got back. They were so busy doing other people's jobs, they literally ran out of time and energy to get their own work completed. In medical school, the lowest grades belong to the students who agree most strongly with statements like, ""I love helping others,"" which suggests the doctor you ought to trust is the one who came to med school with no desire to help anybody.(Laughter)And then in sales, too, the lowest revenue accrued in the most generous salespeople. I actually reached out to one of those salespeople who had a very high giver score. And I asked him, ""Why do you suck at your job —"" I didn't ask it that way, but —(Laughter)""What's the cost of generosity in sales?"" And he said, ""Well, I just care so deeply about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products.""(Laughter)So just out of curiosity, how many of you self-identify more as givers than takers or matchers? Raise your hands. OK, it would have been more before we talked about these data.But actually, it turns out there's a twist here, because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organizations better. We have a huge body of evidence — many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behavior that exists in a team or an organization — and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organizations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention — even lower operating expenses. So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way. I want to talk about what it takes to build cultures where givers actually get to succeed.So I wondered, then, if givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers? Let me start with the good news: it's not the takers. Takers tend to rise quickly but also fall quickly in most jobs. And they fall at the hands of matchers. If you're a matcher, you believe in ""An eye for an eye"" — a just world. And so when you meet a taker, you feel like it's your mission in life to just punish the hell out of that person.(Laughter)And that way justice gets served.Well, most people are matchers. And that means if you're a taker, it tends to catch up with you eventually; what goes around will come around. And so the logical conclusion is: it must be the matchers who are the best performers. But they're not. In every job, in every organization I've ever studied, the best results belong to the givers again.Take a look at some data I gathered from hundreds of salespeople, tracking their revenue. What you can see is that the givers go to both extremes. They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue, but also the highest revenue. The same patterns were true for engineers' productivity and medical students' grades. Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that I can track. Which raises the question: How do we create a world where more of these givers get to excel? I want to talk about how to do that, not just in businesses, but also in nonprofits, schools — even governments. Are you ready?(Cheers)I was going to do it anyway, but I appreciate the enthusiasm.(Laughter)The first thing that's really critical is to recognize that givers are your most valuable people, but if they're not careful, they burn out. So you have to protect the givers in your midst. And I learned a great lesson about this from Fortune's best networker. It's the guy, not the cat.(Laughter)His name is Adam Rifkin. He's a very successful serial entrepreneur who spends a huge amount of his time helping other people. And his secret weapon is the five-minute favor. Adam said, ""You don't have to be Mother Teresa or Gandhi to be a giver. You just have to find small ways to add large value to other people's lives."" That could be as simple as making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other. It could be sharing your knowledge or giving a little bit of feedback. Or It might be even something as basic as saying, ""You know, I'm going to try and figure out if I can recognize somebody whose work has gone unnoticed."" And those five-minute favors are really critical to helping givers set boundaries and protect themselves.The second thing that matters if you want to build a culture where givers succeed, is you actually need a culture where help-seeking is the norm; where people ask a lot. This may hit a little too close to home for some of you.[So in all your relationships, you always have to be the giver?](Laughter)What you see with successful givers is they recognize that it's OK to be a receiver, too. If you run an organization, we can actually make this easier. We can make it easier for people to ask for help. A couple colleagues and I studied hospitals. We found that on certain floors, nurses did a lot of help-seeking, and on other floors, they did very little of it. The factor that stood out on the floors where help-seeking was common, where it was the norm, was there was just one nurse whose sole job it was to help other nurses on the unit. When that role was available, nurses said, ""It's not embarrassing, it's not vulnerable to ask for help — it's actually encouraged.""Help-seeking isn't important just for protecting the success and the well-being of givers. It's also critical to getting more people to act like givers, because the data say that somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of all giving in organizations starts with a request. But a lot of people don't ask. They don't want to look incompetent, they don't know where to turn, they don't want to burden others. Yet if nobody ever asks for help, you have a lot of frustrated givers in your organization who would love to step up and contribute, if they only knew who could benefit and how.But I think the most important thing, if you want to build a culture of successful givers, is to be thoughtful about who you let onto your team. I figured, you want a culture of productive generosity, you should hire a bunch of givers. But I was surprised to discover, actually, that that was not right — that the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver. Think about it this way: one bad apple can spoil a barrel, but one good egg just does not make a dozen. I don't know what that means —(Laughter)But I hope you do.No — let even one taker into a team, and you will see that the givers will stop helping. They'll say, ""I'm surrounded by a bunch of snakes and sharks. Why should I contribute?"" Whereas if you let one giver into a team, you don't get an explosion of generosity. More often, people are like, ""Great! That person can do all our work."" So, effective hiring and screening and team building is not about bringing in the givers; it's about weeding out the takers. If you can do that well, you'll be left with givers and matchers. The givers will be generous because they don't have to worry about the consequences. And the beauty of the matchers is that they follow the norm.So how do you catch a taker before it's too late? We're actually pretty bad at figuring out who's a taker, especially on first impressions. There's a personality trait that throws us off. It's called agreeableness, one the major dimensions of personality across cultures. Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're nice, they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada —(Laughter)Where there was actually a national contest to come up with a new Canadian slogan and fill in the blank, ""As Canadian as ..."" I thought the winning entry was going to be, ""As Canadian as maple syrup,"" or, ""... ice hockey."" But no, Canadians voted for their new national slogan to be — I kid you not — ""As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.""(Laughter)Now for those of you who are highly agreeable, or maybe slightly Canadian, you get this right away. How could I ever say I'm any one thing when I'm constantly adapting to try to please other people? Disagreeable people do less of it. They're more critical, skeptical, challenging, and far more likely than their peers to go to law school.(Laughter)That's not a joke, that's actually an empirical fact.(Laughter)So I always assumed that agreeable people were givers and disagreeable people were takers. But then I gathered the data, and I was stunned to find no correlation between those traits, because it turns out that agreeableness-disagreeableness is your outer veneer: How pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking are more of your inner motives: What are your values? What are your intentions toward others?If you really want to judge people accurately, you have to get to the moment every consultant in the room is waiting for, and draw a two-by-two.(Laughter)The agreeable givers are easy to spot: they say yes to everything. The disagreeable takers are also recognized quickly, although you might call them by a slightly different name.(Laughter)We forget about the other two combinations. There are disagreeable givers in our organizations. There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others' best interests at heart. Or as an engineer put it, ""Oh, disagreeable givers — like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system.""(Laughter)If that helps you.(Laughter)Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear. We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early, and saying, ""Eh, kind of prickly, must be a selfish taker.""The other combination we forget about is the deadly one — the agreeable taker, also known as the faker. This is the person who's nice to your face, and then will stab you right in the back.(Laughter)And my favorite way to catch these people in the interview process is to ask the question, ""Can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?"" The takers will give you four names, and they will all be more influential than them, because takers are great at kissing up and then kicking down. Givers are more likely to name people who are below them in a hierarchy, who don't have as much power, who can do them no good. And let's face it, you all know you can learn a lot about character by watching how someone treats their restaurant server or their Uber driver.So if we do all this well, if we can weed takers out of organizations, if we can make it safe to ask for help, if we can protect givers from burnout and make it OK for them to be ambitious in pursuing their own goals as well as trying to help other people, we can actually change the way that people define success. Instead of saying it's all about winning a competition, people will realize success is really more about contribution.I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. And if we can spread that belief, we can actually turn paranoia upside down. There's a name for that. It's called ""pronoia."" Pronoia is the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being.(Laughter)That they're going around behind your back and saying exceptionally glowing things about you. The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion — it's reality. I want to live in a world where givers succeed, and I hope you will help me create that world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_are_you_a_giver_or_a_taker
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"Let me ask you all a question. How much weapons-grade nuclear material do you think it would take to level a city the size of San Francisco? How many of you think it would be an amount about the size of this suitcase? OK. And how about this minibus?All right. Well actually, under the right circumstances, an amount of highly enriched uranium about the size of your morning latte would be enough to kill 100,000 people instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would become horribly ill, and parts of the city would be uninhabitable for years, if not for decades.But you can forget that nuclear latte, because today's nuclear weapons are hundreds of times more powerful even than those we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even a limited nuclear war involving, say, tens of nuclear weapons, could lead to the end of all life on the planet.So it's really important that you know that right now we have over 15,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of nine nations. And if you live in a city or near a military facility, one is likely pointed right at you. In fact, if you live in any of the rural areas where nuclear weapons are stored globally, one is likely pointed at you. About 1,800 of these weapons are on high alert, which means they can be launched within 15 minutes of a presidential command.So I know this is a bummer of an issue, and maybe you have that — what was it? — psychic fatigue that we heard about a little bit earlier. So I'm going to switch gears for just a second, and I'm going to talk about my imaginary friend, who I like to think of as Jasmine, just for a moment.Jasmine, at the age of 25, is part of a generation that is more politically and socially engaged than anything we've seen in 50 years. She and her friends think of themselves as change agents and leaders and activists. I think of them as Generation Possible. They regularly protest about the issues they care about, but nuclear weapons are not one of them, which makes sense, because Jasmine was born in 1991, at the end of the Cold War. So she didn't grow up hearing a lot about nuclear weapons. She never had to duck and cover under her desk at school. For Jasmine, a fallout shelter is an app in the Android store. Nuclear weapons help win games. And that is really a shame, because right now, we need Generation Possible to help us make some really important decisions about nuclear weapons.For instance, will we further reduce our nuclear arsenals globally, or will we spend billions, maybe a trillion dollars, to modernize them so they last throughout the 21st century, so that by the time Jasmine is my age, she's talking to her children and maybe even her grandchildren about the threat of nuclear holocaust? And if you're paying any attention at all to cyberthreats, or, for instance, if you've read about the Stuxnet virus or, for God's sake, if you've ever had an email account or a Yahoo account or a phone hacked, you can imagine the whole new world of hurt that could be triggered by modernization in a period of cyberwarfare.Now, if you're paying attention to the money, a trillion dollars could go a long way to feeding and educating and employing people, all of which could reduce the threat of nuclear war to begin with. So —(Applause)This is really crucial right now, because nuclear weapons — they're vulnerable. We have solid evidence that terrorists are trying to get ahold of them. Just this last spring, when four retirees and two taxi drivers were arrested in the Republic of Georgia for trying to sell nuclear materials for 200 million dollars, they demonstrated that the black market for this stuff is alive and well. And it's really important, because there have been dozens of accidents involving nuclear weapons, and I bet most of us have never heard anything about them.Just here in the United States, we've dropped nuclear weapons on the Carolinas twice. In one case, one of the bombs, which fell out of an Air Force plane, didn't detonate because the nuclear core was stored somewhere else on the plane. In another case, the weapon did arm when it hit the ground, and five of the switches designed to keep it from detonating failed. Luckily, the sixth one didn't. But if that's not enough to get your attention, there was the 1995 Black Brant incident. That's when Russian radar technicians saw what they thought was a US nuclear missile streaking towards Russian airspace. It later turned out to be a Norwegian rocket collecting data about the northern lights. But at that time, Russian President Boris Yeltsin came within five minutes of launching a full-scale retaliatory nuclear attack against the United States.So, most of the world's nuclear nations have committed to getting rid of these weapons of mass destruction. But consider this: the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which is the most widely adopted arms control treaty in history with 190 signatories, sets no specific date by which the world's nuclear-armed nations will get rid of their nuclear weapons.Now, when John F. Kennedy sent a man to the moon and decided to bring him back, or decided to do both those things, he didn't say, ""Hey, whenever you guys get to it."" He gave us a deadline. He gave us a challenge that would have been incredible just a few years earlier. And with that challenge, he inspired scientists and marketers, astronauts and schoolteachers. He gave us a vision. But along with that vision, he also tried to give us — and most people don't know this, either — he tried to give us a partner in the form of our fiercest Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. Because part of Kennedy's vision for the Apollo program was that it be a cooperation, not a competition, with the Soviets. And apparently, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, agreed. But before that cooperation could be realized, Kennedy was assassinated, and that part of the vision was deferred.But the promise of joint innovation between these two nuclear superpowers wasn't totally extinguished. Because in 1991, which is the year that Jasmine was born and the Soviet Union fell, these two nations engaged in a project that genuinely does seem incredible today in the truest sense of that word, which is that the US sent cash to the Russians when they needed it most, to secure loose nuclear materials and to employ out-of-work nuclear scientists. They worked alongside American scientists to convert weapons-grade uranium into the type of fuel that can be used for nuclear power instead. They called it, ""Megatons to Megawatts."" So the result is that for over 20 years, our two nations had a program that meant that one in 10 lightbulbs in the United States was essentially fueled by former Russian warheads.So, together these two nations did something truly audacious. But the good news is, the global community has the chance to do something just as audacious today. To get rid of nuclear weapons and to end the supply of the materials required to produce them, some experts tell me would take 30 years. It would take a renaissance of sorts, the kinds of innovation that, for better or worse, underpinned both the Manhattan Project, which gave rise to nuclear weapons, and the Megatons to Megawatts program. It would take design constraints. These are fundamental to creativity, things like a platform for international collaboration; a date certain, which is a forcing mechanism; and a positive vision that inspires action. It would take us to 2045.Now, 2045 happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of nuclear weapons in the New Mexico desert. But it's also an important date for another reason. It's predicted to be the advent of the singularity, a new moment in human development, where the lines between artificial intelligence and human intelligence blur, where computing and consciousness become almost indistinguishable and advanced technologies help us solve the 21st century's greatest problems: hunger, energy, poverty, ushering in an era of abundance. And we all get to go to space on our way to becoming a multi-planetary species.Now, the people who really believe this vision are the first to say they don't yet know precisely how we're going to get there. But the values behind their vision and the willingness to ask ""How might we?"" have inspired a generation of innovators. They're working backward from the outcomes they want, using the creative problem-solving methods of collaborative design. They're busting through obstacles. They're redefining what we all consider possible.But here's the thing: that vision of abundance isn't compatible with a world that still relies on a 20th-century nuclear doctrine called ""mutually assured destruction."" It has to be about building the foundations for the 22nd century. It has to be about strategies for mutually assured prosperity or, at the very least, mutually assured survival.Now, every day, I get to meet people who are real pioneers in the field of nuclear threats. As you can see, many of them are young women, and they're doing fiercely interesting stuff, like Mareena Robinson Snowden here, who is developing new ways, better ways, to detect nuclear warheads, which will help us overcome a critical hurdle to international disarmament. Or Melissa Hanham, who is using satellite imaging to make sense of what's going on around far-flung nuclear sites. Or we have Beatrice Fihn in Europe, who has been campaigning to make nuclear weapons illegal in international courts of law, and just won a big victory at the UN last week.(Applause)And yet, and yet, with all of our talk in this culture about moon shots, too few members of Generation Possible and those of us who mentor them are taking on nuclear weapons. It's as if there's a taboo. But I remember something Kennedy said that has really stuck with me, and that is something to the effect that humans can be as big as the solutions to all the problems we've created. No problem of human destiny, he said, is beyond human beings. I believe that. And I bet a lot of you here believe that, too. And I know Generation Possible believes it.So it's time to commit to a date. Let's end the nuclear weapons chapter on the 100th anniversary of its inception. After all, by 2045, we will have held billions of people hostage to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Surely, 100 years will have been enough. Surely, a century of economic development and the development of military strategy will have given us better ways to manage global conflict. Surely, if ever there was a global moon shot worth supporting, this is it.Now, in the face of real threats — for instance, North Korea's recent nuclear weapons tests, which fly in the face of sanctions — reasonable people disagree about whether we should maintain some number of nuclear weapons to deter aggression. But the question is: What's the magic number? Is it a thousand? Is it a hundred? Ten? And then we have to ask: Who should be responsible for them? I think we can agree, however, that having 15,000 of them represents a greater global threat to Jasmine's generation than a promise.So it's time we make a promise of a world in which we've broken the stranglehold that nuclear weapons have on our imaginations; in which we invest in the creative solutions that come from working backward from the future we desperately want, rather than plodding forward from a present that brings all of the mental models and biases of the past with it. It's time we pledge our resources as leaders across the spectrum to work on this old problem in new ways, to ask, ""How might we?"" How might we make good on a promise of greater security for Jasmine's generation in a world beyond nuclear weapons? I truly hope you will join us.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erika_gregory_the_world_doesn_t_need_more_nuclear_weapons
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"I am a chef and a food policy guy, but I come from a whole family of teachers. My sister is a special ed teacher in Chicago. My father just retired after 25 years teaching fifth grade. My aunt and uncle were professors. My cousins all teach. Everybody in my family, basically, teaches except for me. They taught me that the only way to get the right answers is to ask the right questions. So what are the right questions when it comes to improving the educational outcomes for our children? There's obviously many important questions, but I think the following is a good place to start: What do we think the connection is between a child's growing mind and their growing body? What can we expect our kids to learn if their diets are full of sugar and empty of nutrients? What can they possibly learn if their bodies are literally going hungry? And with all the resources that we are pouring into schools, we should stop and ask ourselves: Are we really setting our kids up for success?Now, a few years ago, I was a judge on a cooking competition called ""Chopped."" Four chefs compete with mystery ingredients to see who can cook the best dishes. Except for this episode — it was a very special one. Instead of four overzealous chefs trying to break into the limelight — something that I would know nothing about — (Laughter) these chefs were school chefs; you know, the women that you used to call ""lunch ladies,"" but the ones I insist we call ""school chefs."" Now, these women — God bless these women — spend their day cooking for thousands of kids, breakfast and lunch, with only $2.68 per lunch, with only about a dollar of that actually going to the food. In this episode, the main-course mystery ingredient was quinoa. Now, I know it's been a long time since most of you have had a school lunch, and we've made a lot of progress on nutrition, but quinoa still is not a staple in most school cafeterias.(Laughter)So this was a challenge. But the dish that I will never forget was cooked by a woman named Cheryl Barbara. Cheryl was the nutrition director at High School in the Community in Connecticut. She cooked this delicious pasta. It was amazing. It was a pappardelle with Italian sausage, kale, Parmesan cheese. It was delicious, like, restaurant-quality good, except — she basically just threw the quinoa, pretty much uncooked, into the dish. It was a strange choice, and it was super crunchy. (Laughter) So I took on the TV accusatory judge thing that you're supposed to do, and I asked her why she did that.Cheryl responded, ""Well, first, I don't know what quinoa is."" (Laughter) ""But I do know that it's a Monday, and that in my school, at High School in the Community, I always cook pasta.""See, Cheryl explained that for many of her kids, there were no meals on the weekends. No meals on Saturday. No meals on Sunday, either. So she cooked pasta because she wanted to make sure she cooked something she knew her children would eat. Something that would stick to their ribs, she said. Something that would fill them up. Cheryl talked about how, by the time Monday came, her kids' hunger pangs were so intense that they couldn't even begin to think about learning. Food was the only thing on their mind. The only thing. And unfortunately, the stats — they tell the same story.So, let's put this into the context of a child.And we're going to focus on the most important meal of the day, breakfast. Meet Allison. She's 12 years old, she's smart as a whip and she wants to be a physicist when she grows up. If Allison goes to a school that serves a nutritious breakfast to all of their kids, here's what's going to follow. Her chances of getting a nutritious meal, one with fruit and milk, one lower in sugar and salt, dramatically increase. Allison will have a lower rate of obesity than the average kid. She'll have to visit the nurse less. She'll have lower levels of anxiety and depression. She'll have better behavior. She'll have better attendance, and she'll show up on time more often. Why? Well, because there's a good meal waiting for her at school. Overall, Allison is in much better health than the average school kid.So what about that kid who doesn't have a nutritious breakfast waiting for him? Well, meet Tommy. He's also 12. He's a wonderful kid. He wants to be a doctor. By the time Tommy is in kindergarten, he's already underperforming in math. By the time he's in third grade, he's got lower math and reading scores. By the time he's 11, it's more likely that Tommy will have to have repeated a grade. Research shows that kids who do not have consistent nourishment, particularly at breakfast, have poor cognitive function overall.So how widespread is this problem? Well, unfortunately, it's pervasive. Let me give you two stats that seem like they're on opposite ends of the issue, but are actually two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, one in six Americans are food insecure, including 16 million children — almost 20 percent — are food insecure. In this city alone, in New York City, 474,000 kids under the age of 18 face hunger every year. It's crazy. On the other hand, diet and nutrition is the number one cause of preventable death and disease in this country, by far. And fully a third of the kids that we've been talking about tonight are on track to have diabetes in their lifetime. Now, what's hard to put together but is true is that, many times, these are the same children. So they fill up on the unhealthy and cheap calories that surround them in their communities and that their families can afford. But then by the end of the month, food stamps run out or hours get cut at work, and they don't have the money to cover the basic cost of food.But we should be able to solve this problem, right? We know what the answers are. As part of my work at the White House, we instituted a program that for all schools that had 40 percent more low-income kids, we could serve breakfast and lunch to every kid in that school. For free.This program has been incredibly successful, because it helped us overcome a very difficult barrier when it came to getting kids a nutritious breakfast. And that was the barrier of stigma. See, schools serve breakfast before school, and it was only available for the poor kids. So everybody knew who was poor and who needed government help. Now, all kids, no matter how much or how little their parents make, have a lot of pride. So what happened? Well, the schools that have implemented this program saw an increase in math and reading scores by 17.5 percent. 17.5 percent. And research shows that when kids have a consistent, nutritious breakfast, their chances of graduating increase by 20 percent. 20 percent. When we give our kids the nourishment they need, we give them the chance to thrive, both in the classroom and beyond.Now, you don't have to trust me on this, but you should talk to Donna Martin. I love Donna Martin. Donna Martin is the school nutrition director at Burke County in Waynesboro, Georgia. Burke County is one of the poorest districts in the fifth-poorest state in the country, and about 100 percent of Donna's students live at or below the poverty line. A few years ago, Donna decided to get out ahead of the new standards that were coming, and overhaul her nutrition standards. She improved and added fruit and vegetables and whole grains. She served breakfast in the classroom to all of her kids. And she implemented a dinner program. Why? Well, many of her kids didn't have dinner when they went home.So how did they respond? Well, the kids loved the food. They loved the better nutrition, and they loved not being hungry. But Donna's biggest supporter came from an unexpected place. His name from Eric Parker, and he was the head football coach for the Burke County Bears. Now, Coach Parker had coached mediocre teams for years. The Bears often ended in the middle of the pack — a big disappointment in one of the most passionate football states in the Union. But the year Donna changed the menus, the Bears not only won their division, they went on to win the state championship, beating the Peach County Trojans 28-14.(Laughter)And Coach Parker, he credited that championship to Donna Martin.When we give our kids the basic nourishment, they're going to thrive. And it's not just up to the Cheryl Barbaras and the Donna Martins of the world. It's on all of us. And feeding our kids the basic nutrition is just the starting point. What I've laid out is really a model for so many of the most pressing issues that we face. If we focus on the simple goal of properly nourishing ourselves, we could see a world that is more stable and secure; we could dramatically improve our economic productivity; we could transform our health care and we could go a long way in ensuring that the Earth can provide for generations to come. Food is that place where our collective efforts can have the greatest impact.So we have to ask ourselves: What is the right question? What would happen if we fed ourselves more nutritious, more sustainably grown food? What would be the impact? Cheryl Barbara, Donna Martin, Coach Parker and the Burke County Bears — I think they know the answer.Thank you guys so very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_kass_want_to_teach_kids_well_feed_them_well
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"We're going to share a lot of secrets today, you and I, and in doing so, I hope that we can lift some of the shame many of us feel about sex.How many here have ever been catcalled by a stranger? Lots of women. For me, the time I remember best is when that stranger was a student of mine. He came up to me after class that night and his words confirmed what I already knew:""I am so sorry, professor. If I had known it was you, I would never have said those things.""(Laughter)I wasn't a person to him until I was his professor. This concept, called objectification, is the foundation of sexism, and we see it reinforced through every aspect of our lives. We see it in the government that refuses to punish men for raping women. We see it in advertisements. How many of you have seen an advertisement that uses a woman's breast to sell an entirely unrelated product? Or movie after movie after movie that portrays women as only love interests? These examples might seem inconsequential and harmless, but they're insidious, slowly building into a culture that refuses to see women as people. We see this in the school that sends home a 10-year-old girl because her clothes were a distraction to boys trying to learn, or the government that refuses to punish men for raping women over and over, or the woman who is killed because she asked a man to stop grinding on her on the dance floor.Media plays a large role in perpetuating the objectification of women. Let's consider the classic romantic comedy. We're typically introduced to two kinds of women in these movies, two kinds of desirable women, anyway. The first is the sexy bombshell. This is the unbelievably gorgeous woman with the perfect body. Our leading man has no trouble identifying her and even less trouble having sex with her. The second is our leading lady, the beautiful but demure woman our leading man falls in love with despite not noticing her at first or not liking her if he did. The first is the slut. She is to be consumed and forgotten. She is much too available. The second is desirable but modest, and therefore worthy of our leading man's future babies. Marriage material. We're actually told that women have two roles, but these two roles have a difficult time existing within the same woman.On the rare occasion that I share with a new acquaintance that I study sex, if they don't end the conversation right then, they're usually pretty intrigued.""Oh. Tell me more.""So I do.""I'm really interested in studying the sexual behaviors of pregnant and postpartum couples."" At this point I get a different kind of response.(Laughter)""Oh. Huh. Do pregnant people even have sex? Have you thought about studying sexual desire or orgasms? That would be interesting, and sexy.""Tell me. What are the first words that come to mind when you picture a pregnant woman? I asked this question in a survey of over 500 adults, and most responded with ""belly"" or ""round"" and ""cute."" This didn't surprise me too much. What else do we label as cute? Babies. Puppies. Kittens. The elderly. Right?(Laughter)When we label an adult as cute, though, we take away a lot of their intelligence, their complexity. We reduce them to childlike qualities. I also asked heterosexual men to imagine a woman that they're partnered with is pregnant, and then asked women to imagine that they are pregnant, and then tell me the first words that come to mind when they imagine having sex. Most of the responses were negative. ""Gross."" ""Awkward."" ""Not sexy."" ""Odd."" ""Uncomfortable."" ""How?""(Laughter)""Not worth the trouble."" ""Not worth the risk.""That last one really stuck with me. We might think that because we divorce pregnant women and moms from sexuality, we are removing the constraints of sexual objectification. They experience less sexism. Right? Not exactly. What happens instead is a different kind of objectification. In my efforts to explain this to others, one conversation led to the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic figurine scholars assumed was a goddess of love and beauty, hence the name Venus. This theory was later revised, though, when scholars noted the sculptor's obvious focus on the figurine's reproductive features: large breasts, considered ideal for nursing; a round, possibly pregnant belly; the remnants of red dye, alluding to menstruation or birth. They also assumed that she was meant to be held or placed lying down because her tiny feet don't allow her to be freestanding. She also had no face. For this reason, it was assumed that she was a representation of fertility and not a portrait of a person. She was an object. In the history of her interpretation, she went from object of ideal beauty and love to object of reproduction.I think this transition speaks more about the scholars who have interpreted her purpose than the actual purpose of the figurine herself. When a woman becomes pregnant, she leaves the realm of men's sexual desire and slides into her reproductive and child-rearing role. In doing so, she also becomes the property of the community, considered very important but only because she's pregnant. Right? I've taken to calling this the Willendorf effect, and once again we see it reinforced in many aspects of her life.Has anyone here ever been visibly pregnant?(Laughter)Yeah. Lots of you, right? So how many of you ever had a stranger touch your belly during pregnancy, maybe without even asking your permission first? Or told what you can and cannot eat by somebody who is not your doctor, your medical care provider? Or asked private questions about your birth plan? And then told why those choices are all wrong? Yeah, me too. Or had a server refuse to bring you a glass of wine? This one might give you pause, I know, but stay with me. This is a huge secret. It is actually safe to drink in moderation during pregnancy. Many of us don't know this because doctors don't trust pregnant women with this secret —(Laughter)especially if she's less educated or a woman of color.What this tells us is, this Willendorf effect, it's also classist and racist. It's present when the government reminds women with every new anti-choice bill that the contents of her uterus are not her own, or when an ob-gyn says, ""While it's safe to have sex during pregnancy, sometimes you never know. Better safe than sorry, right?"" She's denied basic privacy and bodily autonomy under the guise of ""be a good mother."" We don't trust her to make her own decisions. She's cute, remember? When we tell women that sexual pleasure — excuse me.When we tell women that sex isn't worth the risk during pregnancy, what we're telling her is that her sexual pleasure doesn't matter. So what we are telling her is that she in fact doesn't matter, even though the needs of her fetus are not at odds with her own needs.So medical providers, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have the opportunity to educate about the safety of sex during pregnancy. So what do the experts say? ACOG actually has no public official statement about the safety of sex during pregnancy. Guidance from the Mayo Clinic is generally positive but presented with a caveat: ""Although most women can safely have sex throughout pregnancy, sometimes it's best to be cautious.""Some women don't want to have sex during pregnancy, and that's OK. Some women do want to have sex during pregnancy, and that's OK, too. What needs to stop is society telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.(Applause)Pregnant women are not faceless, identity-less vessels of reproduction who can't stand on their own two feet. But the truth is, the real secret is, we tell all women that their sexual pleasure doesn't matter. We refuse to even acknowledge that women who have sex with women or women who don't want children even exist.""Oh, it's just a phase ...she just needs the right man to come along.""Every time a woman has sex simply because it feels good, it is revolutionary. She is revolutionary. She is pushing back against society's insistence that she exist simply for men's pleasure or for reproduction. A woman who prioritizes her sexual needs is scary, because a woman who prioritizes her sexual needs prioritizes herself.(Applause)That is a woman demanding that she be treated as an equal. That is a woman who insists that you make room for her at the table of power, and that is the most terrifying of all because we can't make room for her without some of us giving up the extra space we hold.(Applause)I have one last secret for you. I am the mother of two boys and we could use your help. Even though my boys hear me say regularly that it's important for men to recognize women as equals and they see their father modeling this, we need what happens in the world to reinforce what happens in our home. This is not a men's problem or a women's problem. This is everyone's problem, and we all play a role in dismantling systems of inequality. For starters, we have got to stop telling women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.(Applause)This includes not treating pregnant women like community property. If you don't know her, don't even ask to touch her belly. You wouldn't anybody else. Don't tell her what she can and cannot eat. Don't ask her private details about her medical decisions. This also includes understanding that even if you are personally against abortion, you can still fight for a woman's right to choose. When it comes to women's equality, the two need not oppose one another. If you're somebody who has sex with women, prioritize her pleasure. If you don't know how, ask. If you have children —(Laughter)have conversations about sex as early as possible, because kids don't look up s-e-x in the dictionary anymore. They look it up on the internet. And when you're having those conversations about sex, don't center them on reproduction only. People have sex for many reasons, some because they want a baby, but most of us have sex because it feels good. Admit it.And regardless of whether you have children or not, support comprehensive sex education that doesn't shame our teenagers.(Applause)Nothing positive comes from shaming teens for their sexual desires, behaviors, other than positive STD and pregnancy tests.Every single day, we are all given the opportunity to disrupt patterns of inequality. I think we can all agree that it's worth the trouble to do so.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sofia_jawed_wessel_the_lies_we_tell_pregnant_women
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"OK, so today I want to talk about how we talk about love. And specifically, I want to talk about what's wrong with how we talk about love.Most of us will probably fall in love a few times over the course of our lives, and in the English language, this metaphor, falling, is really the main way that we talk about that experience. I don't know about you, but when I conceptualize this metaphor, what I picture is straight out of a cartoon — like there's a man, he's walking down the sidewalk, without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole, and he just plummets into the sewer below. And I picture it this way because falling is not jumping. Falling is accidental, it's uncontrollable. It's something that happens to us without our consent. And this — this is the main way we talk about starting a new relationship.I am a writer and I'm also an English teacher, which means I think about words for a living. You could say that I get paid to argue that the language we use matters, and I would like to argue that many of the metaphors we use to talk about love — maybe even most of them — are a problem.So, in love, we fall. We're struck. We are crushed. We swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy, and it makes us sick. Our hearts ache, and then they break. So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone to extreme violence or illness.(Laughter)They do. And they position us as the victims of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances. My favorite one of these is ""smitten,"" which is the past participle of the word ""smite."" And if you look this word up in the dictionary —(Laughter)you will see that it can be defined as both ""grievous affliction,"" and, ""to be very much in love."" I tend to associate the word ""smite"" with a very particular context, which is the Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus alone, there are 16 references to smiting, which is the word that the Bible uses for the vengeance of an angry God.(Laughter)Here we are using the same word to talk about love that we use to explain a plague of locusts.(Laughter)Right?So, how did this happen? How have we come to associate love with great pain and suffering? And why do we talk about this ostensibly good experience as if we are victims? These are difficult questions, but I have some theories. And to think this through, I want to focus on one metaphor in particular, which is the idea of love as madness.When I first started researching romantic love, I found these madness metaphors everywhere. The history of Western culture is full of language that equates love to mental illness. These are just a few examples. William Shakespeare: ""Love is merely a madness,"" from ""As You Like It."" Friedrich Nietzsche: ""There is always some madness in love."" ""Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love — ""(Laughter)from the great philosopher, Beyoncé Knowles.(Laughter)I fell in love for the first time when I was 20, and it was a pretty turbulent relationship right from the start. And it was long distance for the first couple of years, so for me that meant very high highs and very low lows. I can remember one moment in particular. I was sitting on a bed in a hostel in South America, and I was watching the person I love walk out the door. And it was late, it was nearly midnight, we'd gotten into an argument over dinner, and when we got back to our room, he threw his things in the bag and stormed out. While I can no longer remember what that argument was about, I very clearly remember how I felt watching him leave.I was 22, it was my first time in the developing world, and I was totally alone. I had another week until my flight home, and I knew the name of the town that I was in, and the name of the city that I needed to get to to fly out, but I had no idea how to get around. I had no guidebook and very little money, and I spoke no Spanish.Someone more adventurous than me might have seen this as a moment of opportunity, but I just froze. I just sat there. And then I burst into tears. But despite my panic, some small voice in my head thought, ""Wow. That was dramatic. I must really be doing this love thing right.""(Laughter)Because some part of me wanted to feel miserable in love. And it sounds so strange to me now, but at 22, I longed to have dramatic experiences, and in that moment, I was irrational and furious and devastated, and weirdly enough, I thought that this somehow legitimized the feelings I had for the guy who had just left me.I think on some level I wanted to feel a little bit crazy, because I thought that that was how loved worked. This really should not be surprising, considering that according to Wikipedia, there are eight films, 14 songs, two albums and one novel with the title ""Crazy Love.""About half an hour later, he came back to our room. We made up. We spent another mostly happy week traveling together. And then, when I got home, I thought, ""That was so terrible and so great. This must be a real romance."" I expected my first love to feel like madness, and of course, it met that expectation very well. But loving someone like that — as if my entire well-being depended on him loving me back — was not very good for me or for him.But I suspect this experience of love is not that unusual. Most of us do feel a bit mad in the early stages of romantic love. In fact, there is research to confirm that this is somewhat normal, because, neurochemically speaking, romantic love and mental illness are not that easily distinguished. This is true.This study from 1999 used blood tests to confirm that the serotonin levels of the newly in love very closely resembled the serotonin levels of people who had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.(Laughter)Yes, and low levels of serotonin are also associated with seasonal affective disorder and depression. So there is some evidence that love is associated with changes to our moods and our behaviors. And there are other studies to confirm that most relationships begin this way.Researchers believe that the low levels of serotonin is correlated with obsessive thinking about the object of love, which is like this feeling that someone has set up camp in your brain. And most of us feel this way when we first fall in love. But the good news is, it doesn't always last that long — usually from a few months to a couple of years.When I got back from my trip to South America, I spent a lot of time alone in my room, checking my email, desperate to hear from the guy I loved. I decided that if my friends could not understand my grievous affliction, then I did not need their friendship. So I stopped hanging out with most of them. And it was probably the most unhappy year of my life. But I think I felt like it was my job to be miserable, because if I could be miserable, then I would prove how much I loved him. And if I could prove it, then we would have to end up together eventually.This is the real madness, because there is no cosmic rule that says that great suffering equals great reward, but we talk about love as if this is true.Our experiences of love are both biological and cultural. Our biology tells us that love is good by activating these reward circuits in our brain, and it tells us that love is painful when, after a fight or a breakup, that neurochemical reward is withdrawn. And in fact — and maybe you've heard this — neurochemically speaking, going through a breakup is a lot like going through cocaine withdrawal, which I find reassuring.(Laughter)And then our culture uses language to shape and reinforce these ideas about love. In this case, we're talking about metaphors about pain and addiction and madness. It's kind of an interesting feedback loop. Love is powerful and at times painful, and we express this in our words and stories, but then our words and stories prime us to expect love to be powerful and painful.What's interesting to me is that all of this happens in a culture that values lifelong monogamy. It seems like we want it both ways: we want love to feel like madness, and we want it to last an entire lifetime. That sounds terrible.(Laughter)To reconcile this, we need to either change our culture or change our expectations. So, imagine if we were all less passive in love. If we were more assertive, more open-minded, more generous and instead of falling in love, we stepped into love. I know that this is asking a lot, but I'm not actually the first person to suggest this. In their book, ""Metaphors We Live By,"" linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff suggest a really interesting solution to this dilemma, which is to change our metaphors. They argue that metaphors really do shape the way we experience the world, and that they can even act as a guide for future actions, like self-fulfilling prophecies.Johnson and Lakoff suggest a new metaphor for love: love as a collaborative work of art. I really like this way of thinking about love. Linguists talk about metaphors as having entailments, which is essentially a way of considering all the implications of, or ideas contained within, a given metaphor. And Johnson and Lakoff talk about everything that collaborating on a work of art entails: effort, compromise, patience, shared goals. These ideas align nicely with our cultural investment in long-term romantic commitment, but they also work well for other kinds of relationships — short-term, casual, polyamorous, non-monogamous, asexual — because this metaphor brings much more complex ideas to the experience of loving someone.So if love is a collaborative work of art, then love is an aesthetic experience. Love is unpredictable, love is creative, love requires communication and discipline, it is frustrating and emotionally demanding. And love involves both joy and pain. Ultimately, each experience of love is different.When I was younger, it never occurred to me that I was allowed to demand more from love, that I didn't have to just accept whatever love offered. When 14-year-old Juliet first meets — or, when 14-year-old Juliet cannot be with Romeo, whom she has met four days ago, she does not feel disappointed or angsty. Where is she? She wants to die. Right? And just as a refresher, at this point in the play, act three of five, Romeo is not dead. He's alive, he's healthy, he's just been banished from the city. I understand that 16th-century Verona is unlike contemporary North America, and yet when I first read this play, also at age 14, Juliet's suffering made sense to me.Reframing love as something I get to create with someone I admire, rather than something that just happens to me without my control or consent, is empowering. It's still hard. Love still feels totally maddening and crushing some days, and when I feel really frustrated, I have to remind myself: my job in this relationship is to talk to my partner about what I want to make together. This isn't easy, either. But it's just so much better than the alternative, which is that thing that feels like madness.This version of love is not about winning or losing someone's affection. Instead, it requires that you trust your partner and talk about things when trusting feels difficult, which sounds so simple, but is actually a kind of revolutionary, radical act. This is because you get to stop thinking about yourself and what you're gaining or losing in your relationship, and you get to start thinking about what you have to offer. This version of love allows us to say things like, ""Hey, we're not very good collaborators. Maybe this isn't for us."" Or, ""That relationship was shorter than I had planned, but it was still kind of beautiful.""The beautiful thing about the collaborative work of art is that it will not paint or draw or sculpt itself. This version of love allows us to decide what it looks like.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mandy_len_catron_a_better_way_to_talk_about_love
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"Let's imagine a sculptor building a statue, just chipping away with his chisel. Michelangelo had this elegant way of describing it when he said, ""Every block of stone has a statue inside of it, and it's the task of the sculptor to discover it."" But what if he worked in the opposite direction? Not from a solid block of stone, but from a pile of dust, somehow gluing millions of these particles together to form a statue.I know that's an absurd notion. It's probably impossible. The only way you get a statue from a pile of dust is if the statue built itself — if somehow we could compel millions of these particles to come together to form the statue.Now, as odd as that sounds, that is almost exactly the problem I work on in my lab. I don't build with stone, I build with nanomaterials. They're these just impossibly small, fascinating little objects. They're so small that if this controller was a nanoparticle, a human hair would be the size of this entire room. And they're at the heart of a field we call nanotechnology, which I'm sure we've all heard about, and we've all heard how it is going to change everything.When I was a graduate student, it was one of the most exciting times to be working in nanotechnology. There were scientific breakthroughs happening all the time. The conferences were buzzing, there was tons of money pouring in from funding agencies. And the reason is when objects get really small, they're governed by a different set of physics that govern ordinary objects, like the ones we interact with. We call this physics quantum mechanics. And what it tells you is that you can precisely tune their behavior just by making seemingly small changes to them, like adding or removing a handful of atoms, or twisting the material. It's like this ultimate toolkit. You really felt empowered; you felt like you could make anything.And we were doing it — and by we I mean my whole generation of graduate students. We were trying to make blazing fast computers using nanomaterials. We were constructing quantum dots that could one day go in your body and find and fight disease. There were even groups trying to make an elevator to space using carbon nanotubes. You can look that up, that's true. Anyways, we thought it was going to affect all parts of science and technology, from computing to medicine. And I have to admit, I drank all of the Kool-Aid. I mean, every last drop.But that was 15 years ago, and — fantastic science was done, really important work. We've learned a lot. We were never able to translate that science into new technologies — into technologies that could actually impact people. And the reason is, these nanomaterials — they're like a double-edged sword. The same thing that makes them so interesting — their small size — also makes them impossible to work with. It's literally like trying to build a statue out of a pile of dust. And we just don't have the tools that are small enough to work with them. But even if we did, it wouldn't really matter, because we couldn't one by one place millions of particles together to build a technology. So because of that, all of the promise and all of the excitement has remained just that: promise and excitement. We don't have any disease-fighting nanobots, there's no elevators to space, and the thing that I'm most interested in, no new types of computing.Now that last one, that's a really important one. We just have come to expect the pace of computing advancements to go on indefinitely. We've built entire economies on this idea. And this pace exists because of our ability to pack more and more devices onto a computer chip. And as those devices get smaller, they get faster, they consume less power and they get cheaper. And it's this convergence that gives us this incredible pace.As an example: if I took the room-sized computer that sent three men to the moon and back and somehow compressed it — compressed the world's greatest computer of its day, so it was the same size as your smartphone — your actual smartphone, that thing you spent 300 bucks on and just toss out every two years, would blow this thing away. You would not be impressed. It couldn't do anything that your smartphone does. It would be slow, you couldn't put any of your stuff on it, you could possibly get through the first two minutes of a ""Walking Dead"" episode if you're lucky —(Laughter)The point is the progress — it's not gradual. The progress is relentless. It's exponential. It compounds on itself year after year, to the point where if you compare a technology from one generation to the next, they're almost unrecognizable. And we owe it to ourselves to keep this progress going. We want to say the same thing 10, 20, 30 years from now: look what we've done over the last 30 years. Yet we know this progress may not last forever. In fact, the party's kind of winding down. It's like ""last call for alcohol,"" right? If you look under the covers, by many metrics like speed and performance, the progress has already slowed to a halt. So if we want to keep this party going, we have to do what we've always been able to do, and that is to innovate.So our group's role and our group's mission is to innovate by employing carbon nanotubes, because we think that they can provide a path to continue this pace. They are just like they sound. They're tiny, hollow tubes of carbon atoms, and their nanoscale size, that small size, gives rise to these just outstanding electronic properties. And the science tells us if we could employ them in computing, we could see up to a ten times improvement in performance. It's like skipping through several technology generations in just one step.So there we have it. We have this really important problem and we have what is basically the ideal solution. The science is screaming at us, ""This is what you should be doing to solve your problem."" So, all right, let's get started, let's do this. But you just run right back into that double-edged sword. This ""ideal solution"" contains a material that's impossible to work with. I'd have to arrange billions of them just to make one single computer chip. It's that same conundrum, it's like this undying problem.At this point, we said, ""Let's just stop. Let's not go down that same road. Let's just figure out what's missing. What are we not dealing with? What are we not doing that needs to be done?"" It's like in ""The Godfather,"" right? When Fredo betrays his brother Michael, we all know what needs to be done. Fredo's got to go.(Laughter)But Michael — he puts it off. Fine, I get it. Their mother's still alive, it would make her upset. We just said, ""What's the Fredo in our problem?"" What are we not dealing with? What are we not doing, but needs to be done to make this a success?"" And the answer is that the statue has to build itself. We have to find a way, somehow, to compel, to convince billions of these particles to assemble themselves into the technology. We can't do it for them. They have to do it for themselves. And it's the hard way, and this is not trivial, but in this case, it's the only way.Now, as it turns out, this is not that alien of a problem. We just don't build anything this way. People don't build anything this way. But if you look around — and there's examples everywhere — Mother Nature builds everything this way. Everything is built from the bottom up. You can go to the beach, you'll find these simple organisms that use proteins — basically molecules — to template what is essentially sand, just plucking it from the sea and building these extraordinary architectures with extreme diversity. And nature's not crude like us, just hacking away. She's elegant and smart, building with what's available, molecule by molecule, making structures with a complexity and a diversity that we can't even approach. And she's already at the nano. She's been there for hundreds of millions of years. We're the ones that are late to the party.So we decided that we're going to use the same tool that nature uses, and that's chemistry. Chemistry is the missing tool. And chemistry works in this case because these nanoscale objects are about the same size as molecules, so we can use them to steer these objects around, much like a tool. That's exactly what we've done in our lab. We've developed chemistry that goes into the pile of dust, into the pile of nanoparticles, and pulls out exactly the ones we need. Then we can use chemistry to arrange literally billions of these particles into the pattern we need to build circuits. And because we can do that, we can build circuits that are many times faster than what anyone's been able to make using nanomaterials before. Chemistry's the missing tool, and every day our tool gets sharper and gets more precise. And eventually — and we hope this is within a handful of years — we can deliver on one of those original promises.Now, computing is just one example. It's the one that I'm interested in, that my group is really invested in, but there are others in renewable energy, in medicine, in structural materials, where the science is going to tell you to move towards the nano. That's where the biggest benefit is. But if we're going to do that, the scientists of today and tomorrow are going to need new tools — tools just like the ones I described. And they will need chemistry. That's the point. The beauty of science is that once you develop these new tools, they're out there. They're out there forever, and anyone anywhere can pick them up and use them, and help to deliver on the promise of nanotechnology.Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/george_tulevski_the_next_step_in_nanotechnology
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"How many of you have used an electronic spreadsheet, like Microsoft Excel? Very good. Now, how many of you have run a business with a spreadsheet by hand, like my dad did for his small printing business in Philadelphia? A lot less.Well, that's the way it was done for hundreds of years. In early 1978, I started working on an idea that eventually became VisiCalc. And the next year it shipped running on something new called an Apple II personal computer. You could tell that things had really changed when, six years later, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that assumed you knew what VisiCalc was and maybe even were using it.Steve Jobs back in 1990 said that ""spreadsheets propelled the industry forward."" ""VisiCalc propelled the success of Apple more than any other single event."" On a more personal note, Steve said, ""If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be interviewing somebody else right now.""So, VisiCalc was instrumental in getting personal computers on business desks. How did it come about? What was it? What did I go through to make it be what it was? Well, I first learned to program back in 1966, when I was 15 — just a couple months after this photo was taken. Few high schoolers had access to computers in those days. But through luck and an awful lot of perseverance, I was able to get computer time around the city.After sleeping in the mud at Woodstock, I went off to MIT to go to college, where to make money, I worked on the Multics Project. Multics was a trailblazing interactive time-sharing system. Have you heard of the Linux and Unix operating systems? They came from Multics. I worked on the Multics versions of what are known as interpreted computer languages, that are used by people in noncomputer fields to do their calculations while seated at a computer terminal.After I graduated from MIT, I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation. At DEC, I worked on software for the new area of computerized typesetting. I helped newspapers replace their reporters' typewriters with computer terminals. I'd write software and then I'd go out in the field to places like the Kansas City Star, where I would train users and get feedback. This was real-world experience that is quite different than what I saw in the lab at MIT.After that, I was project leader of the software for DEC's first word processor, again a new field. Like with typesetting, the important thing was crafting a user interface that was both natural and efficient for noncomputer people to use. After I was at DEC, I went to work for a small company that made microprocessor-based electronic cash registers for the fast-food industry. But I had always wanted to start a company with my friend Bob Frankston that I met on the Multics project at MIT.So I decided to go back to school to learn as much as I could about business. And in the fall of 1977, I entered the MBA program at Harvard Business School. I was one of the few percentage of students who had a background in computer programming. There's a picture of me from the yearbook sitting in the front row.(Laughter)Now, at Harvard, we learned by the case method. We'd do about three cases a day. Cases consist of up to a few dozen pages describing particular business situations. They often have exhibits, and exhibits often have words and numbers laid out in ways that make sense for the particular situation. They're usually all somewhat different. Here's my homework. Again, numbers, words, laid out in ways that made sense. Lots of calculations — we got really close to our calculators. In fact, here's my calculator. For Halloween, I went dressed up as a calculator.(Laughter)At the beginning of each class, the professor would call on somebody to present the case. What they would do is they would explain what was going on and then dictate information that the professor would transcribe onto the many motorized blackboards in the front of the class, and then we'd have a discussion. One of the really frustrating things is when you've done all your homework, you come in the next day only to find out that you made an error and all of the other numbers you did were wrong. And you couldn't participate as well. And we were marked by class participation.So, sitting there with 87 other people in the class, I got to daydream a lot. Most programmers in those days worked on mainframes, building things like inventory systems, payroll systems and bill-paying systems. But I had worked on interactive word processing and on-demand personal computation. Instead of thinking about paper printouts and punch cards, I imagined a magic blackboard that if you erased one number and wrote a new thing in, all of the other numbers would automatically change, like word processing with numbers. I imagined that my calculator had mouse hardware on the bottom of it and a head-up display, like in a fighter plane. And I could type some numbers in, and circle it, and press the sum button. And right in the middle of a negotiation I'd be able to get the answer. Now I just had to take my fantasy and turn it into reality.My father taught me about prototyping. He showed me mock-ups that he'd make to figure out the placement on the page for the things for brochures that he was printing. And he'd use it to get feedback from customers and OKs before he sent the job off to the presses. The act of making a simple, working version of what you're trying to build forces you to uncover key problems. And it lets you find solutions to those problems much less expensively.So I decided to build a prototype. I went to a video terminal connected to Harvard's time-sharing system and got to work. One of the first problems that I ran into was: How do you represent values in formulas? Let me show you what I mean. I thought that you would point somewhere, type in some words, then type in some somewhere else, put in some numbers and some more numbers, point where you want the answer. And then point to the first, press minus, point to the second, and get the result. The problem was: What should I put in the formula? It had to be something the computer knew what to put in. And if you looked at the formula, you needed to know where on the screen it referred to. The first thing I thought was the programmer way of doing it. The first time you pointed to somewhere, the computer would ask you to type in a unique name. It became pretty clear pretty fast that that was going to be too tedious. The computer had to automatically make up the name and put it inside. So I thought, why not make it be the order in which you create them? I tried that. Value 1, value 2. Pretty quickly I saw that if you had more than a few values you'd never remember on the screen where things were.Then I said, why not instead of allowing you to put values anywhere, I'll restrict you to a grid? Then when you pointed to a cell, the computer could put the row and column in as a name. And, if I did it like a map and put ABC across the top and numbers along the side, if you saw B7 in a formula, you'd know exactly where it was on the screen. And if you had to type the formula in yourself, you'd know what to do. Restricting you to a grid helped solve my problem. It also opened up new capabilities, like the ability to have ranges of cells. But it wasn't too restrictive — you could still put any value, any formula, in any cell. And that's the way we do it to this day, almost 40 years later.My friend Bob and I decided that we were going to build this product together. I did more work figuring out exactly how the program was supposed to behave. I wrote a reference card to act as documentation. It also helped me ensure that the user interface I was defining could be explained concisely and clearly to regular people. Bob worked in the attic of the apartment he rented in Arlington, Massachusetts. This is the inside of the attic. Bob bought time on the MIT Multics System to write computer code on a terminal like this. And then he would download test versions to a borrowed Apple II over a phone line using an acoustic coupler, and then we would test.For one of these tests I prepared for this case about the Pepsi Challenge. Print wasn't working yet, so I had to copy everything down. Save wasn't working, so every time it crashed, I had to type in all of the formulas again, over and over again. The next day in class, I raised my hand; I got called on, and I presented the case. I did five-year projections. I did all sorts of different scenarios. I aced the case. VisiCalc was already useful.The professor said, ""How did you do it?"" Well, I didn't want to tell him about our secret program.(Laughter)So I said, ""I took this and added this and multiplied by this and subtracted that.""He said, ""Well, why didn't you use a ratio?""I said, ""Hah! A ratio — that wouldn't have been as exact!"" What I didn't say was, ""Divide isn't working yet.""(Laughter)Eventually, though, we did finish enough of VisiCalc to be able to show it to the public. My dad printed up a sample reference card that we could use as marketing material.In June of 1979, our publisher announced VisiCalc to the world, in a small booth at the giant National Computer Conference in New York City. The New York Times had a humorous article about the conference. ""The machines perform what seem religious rites ... Even as the believers gather, the painters in the Coliseum sign room are adding to the pantheon, carefully lettering 'VISICALC' in giant black on yellow. All hail VISICALC!"" (Gasp) New York Times: ""All hail VISICALC.""(Laughter)That was the last mention of the electronic spreadsheet in the popular business press for about two years. Most people didn't get it yet. But some did.In October of 1979, we shipped VisiCalc. It came in packaging that looked like this. And it looked like this running on the Apple II. And the rest, as they say, is history.Now, there's an awful lot more to this story, but that'll have to wait for another day. One thing, though, Harvard remembers. Here's that classroom. They put up a plaque to commemorate what happened there.(Applause)But it also serves as a reminder that you, too, should take your unique backgrounds, skills and needs and build prototypes to discover and work out the key problems, and through that, change the world.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_bricklin_meet_the_inventor_of_the_electronic_spreadsheet
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"For the past few years, I've been spending my summers in the marine biological laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And there, what I've been doing is essentially renting a boat. What I would like to do is ask you to come on a boat ride with me tonight.So, we ride off from Eel Pond into Vineyard Sound, right off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, equipped with a drone to identify potential spots from which to peer into the Atlantic. Earlier, I was going to say into the depths of the Atlantic, but we don't have to go too deep to reach the unknown. Here, barely two miles away from what is arguably the greatest marine biology lab in the world, we lower a simple plankton net into the water and bring up to the surface things that humanity rarely pays any attention to, and oftentimes has never seen before.Here's one of the organisms that we caught in our net. This is a jellyfish. But look closely, and living inside of this animal is another organism that is very likely entirely new to science. A complete new species. Or how about this other transparent beauty with a beating heart, asexually growing on top of its head, progeny that will move on to reproduce sexually. Let me say that again: this animal is growing asexually on top of its head, progeny that is going to reproduce sexually in the next generation. A weird jellyfish? Not quite. This is an ascidian. This is a group of animals that now we know we share extensive genomic ancestry with, and it is perhaps the closest invertebrate species to our own. Meet your cousin, Thalia democratica.(Laughter)I'm pretty sure you didn't save a spot at your last family reunion for Thalia, but let me tell you, these animals are profoundly related to us in ways that we're just beginning to understand. So, next time you hear anybody derisively telling you that this type of research is a simple fishing expedition, I hope that you'll remember the trip that we just took.Today, many of the biological sciences only see value in studying deeper what we already know — in mapping already-discovered continents. But some of us are much more interested in the unknown. We want to discover completely new continents, and gaze at magnificent vistas of ignorance. We crave the experience of being completely baffled by something we've never seen before. And yes, I agree there's a lot of little ego satisfaction in being able to say, ""Hey, I was the first one to discover that."" But this is not a self-aggrandizing enterprise, because in this type of discovery research, if you don't feel like a complete idiot most of the time, you're just not sciencing hard enough.(Laughter)So every summer I bring onto the deck of this little boat of ours more and more things that we know very little about. I would like tonight to tell you a story about life that rarely gets told in an environment like this. From the vantage point of our 21st-century biological laboratories, we have begun to illuminate many mysteries of life with knowledge. We sense that after centuries of scientific research, we're beginning to make significant inroads into understanding some of the most fundamental principles of life.Our collective optimism is reflected by the growth of biotechnology across the globe, striving to utilize scientific knowledge to cure human diseases. Things like cancer, aging, degenerative diseases; these are but some of the undesirables we wish to tame. I often wonder: Why is it that we are having so much trouble trying to solve the problem of cancer? Is it that we're trying to solve the problem of cancer, and not trying to understand life?Life on this planet shares a common origin, and I can summarize 3.5 billion years of the history of life on this planet in a single slide. What you see here are representatives of all known species in our planet. In this immensity of life and biodiversity, we occupy a rather unremarkable position.(Laughter)Homo sapiens. The last of our kind. And though I don't really want to disparage at all the accomplishments of our species, as much as we wish it to be so and often pretend that it is, we are not the measure of all things. We are, however, the measurers of many things. We relentlessly quantify, analyze and compare, and some of this is absolutely invaluable and indeed necessary.But this emphasis today on forcing biological research to specialize and to produce practical outcomes is actually restricting our ability to interrogate life to unacceptably narrow confines and unsatisfying depths. We are measuring an astonishingly narrow sliver of life, and hoping that those numbers will save all of our lives. How narrow do you ask? Well, let me give you a number. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently estimated that about 95 percent of our oceans remain unexplored. Now let that sink in for a second. 95 percent of our oceans remain unexplored. I think it's very safe to say that we don't even know how much about life we do not know.So, it's not surprising that every week in my field we begin to see the addition of more and more new species to this amazing tree of life. This one for example — discovered earlier this summer, new to science, and now occupying its lonely branch in our family tree. What is even more tragic is that we know about a bunch of other species of animals out there, but their biology remains sorely under-studied.I'm sure some of you have heard about the fact that a starfish can actually regenerate its arm after it's lost. But some of you might not know that the arm itself can actually regenerate a complete starfish. And there are animals out there that do truly astounding things. I'm almost willing to bet that many of you have never heard of the flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea. This little guy right here does things that essentially just blow my mind. You can grab one of these animals and cut it into 18 different fragments, and each and every one of those fragments will go on to regenerate a complete animal in under two weeks. 18 heads, 18 bodies, 18 mysteries. For the past decade and a half or so, I've been trying to figure out how these little dudes do what they do, and how they pull this magic trick off. But like all good magicians, they're not really releasing their secrets readily to me.(Laughter)So here we are, after 20 years of essentially studying these animals, genome mapping, chin scratching, and thousands of amputations and thousands of regenerations, we still don't fully understand how these animals do what they do. Each planarian an ocean unto itself, full of unknowns.One of the common characteristics of all of these animals I've been talking to you about is that they did not appear to have received the memo that they need to behave according to the rules that we have derived from a handful of randomly selected animals that currently populate the vast majority of biomedical laboratories across the world. Meet our Nobel Prize winners. Seven species, essentially, that have produced for us the brunt of our understanding of biological behavior today. This little guy right here — three Nobel Prizes in 12 years. And yet, after all the attention they have garnered, and all the knowledge they have generated, as well as the lion's share of the funding, here we are standing [before] the same litany of intractable problems and many new challenges. And that's because, unfortunately, these seven animals essentially correspond to 0.0009 percent of all of the species that inhabit the planet.So I'm beginning to suspect that our specialization is beginning to impede our progress at best, and at worst, is leading us astray. That's because life on this planet and its history is the history of rule breakers. Life started on the face of this planet as single-cell organisms, swimming for millions of years in the ocean, until one of those creatures decided, ""I'm going to do things differently today; today I would like to invent something called multicellularity, and I'm going to do this."" And I'm sure it wasn't a popular decision at the time —(Laughter)but somehow, it managed to do it. And then, multicellular organisms began to populate all these ancestral oceans, and they thrived. And we have them here today. Land masses began to emerge from the surface of the oceans, and another creature thought, ""Hey, that looks like a really nice piece of real estate. I'd like to move there."" ""Are you crazy? You're going to desiccate out there. Nothing can live out of water."" But life found a way, and there are organisms now that live on land. Once on land, they may have looked up into the sky and said, ""It would be nice to go to the clouds, I'm going to fly."" ""You can't break the law of gravity, there's no way you can fly."" And yet, nature has invented — multiple and independent times — ways to fly.I love to study these animals that break the rules, because every time they break a rule, they invent something new that made it possible for us to be able to be here today. These animals did not get the memo. They break the rules. So if we're going to study animals that break the rules, shouldn't how we study them also break the rules?I think we need to renew our spirit of exploration. Rather than bring nature into our laboratories and interrogate it there, we need to bring our science into the majestic laboratory that is nature, and there, with our modern technological armamentarium, interrogate every new form of life we find, and any new biological attribute that we may find. We actually need to bring all of our intelligence to becoming stupid again — clueless [before] the immensity of the unknown. Because after all, science is not really about knowledge. Science is about ignorance. That's what we do.Once, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, ""If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea ..."" As a scientist and a teacher, I like to paraphrase this to read that we scientists need to teach our students to long for the endless immensity of the sea that is our ignorance. We Homo sapiens are the only species we know of that is driven to scientific inquiry. We, like all other species on this planet, are inextricably woven into the history of life on this planet. And I think I'm a little wrong when I say that life is a mystery, because I think that life is actually an open secret that has been beckoning our species for millennia to understand it.So I ask you: Aren't we the best chance that life has to know itself? And if so, what the heck are we waiting for?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alejandro_sanchez_alvarado_to_solve_old_problems_study_new_species
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"So earlier this year, I was informed that I would be doing a TED Talk. So I was excited, then I panicked, then I was excited, then I panicked, and in between the excitement and the panicking, I started to do my research, and my research primarily consisted of Googling how to give a great TED Talk.(Laughter)And interspersed with that, I was Googling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. How many of you know who that is?(Cheers)So I was Googling her because I always Google her because I'm just a fan, but also because she always has important and interesting things to say. And the combination of those searches kept leading me to her talk on the dangers of a single story, on what happens when we have a solitary lens through which to understand certain groups of people, and it is the perfect talk. It's the talk that I would have given if I had been famous first.(Laughter)You know, and you know, like, she's African and I'm African, and she's a feminist and I'm a feminist, and she's a storyteller and I'm a storyteller, so I really felt like it's my talk.(Laughter)So I decided that I was going to learn how to code, and then I was going to hack the internet and I would take down all the copies of that talk that existed, and then I would memorize it, and then I would come here and deliver it as if it was my own speech. So that plan was going really well, except the coding part, and then one morning a few months ago, I woke up to the news that the wife of a certain presidential candidate had given a speech that —(Laughter)(Applause)that sounded eerily like a speech given by one of my other faves, Michelle Obama.(Cheers)And so I decided that I should probably write my own TED Talk, and so that is what I am here to do. I'm here to talk about my own observations about storytelling. I want to talk to you about the power of stories, of course, but I also want to talk about their limitations, particularly for those of us who are interested in social justice.So since Adichie gave that talk seven years ago, there has been a boom in storytelling. Stories are everywhere, and if there was a danger in the telling of one tired old tale, then I think there has got to be lots to celebrate about the flourishing of so many stories and so many voices. Stories are the antidote to bias. In fact, today, if you are middle class and connected via the internet, you can download stories at the touch of a button or the swipe of a screen. You can listen to a podcast about what it's like to grow up Dalit in Kolkata. You can hear an indigenous man in Australia talk about the trials and triumphs of raising his children in dignity and in pride. Stories make us fall in love. They heal rifts and they bridge divides. Stories can even make it easier for us to talk about the deaths of people in our societies who don't matter, because they make us care. Right?I'm not so sure, and I actually work for a place called the Centre for Stories. And my job is to help to tell stories that challenge mainstream narratives about what it means to be black or a Muslim or a refugee or any of those other categories that we talk about all the time. But I come to this work after a long history as a social justice activist, and so I'm really interested in the ways that people talk about nonfiction storytelling as though it's about more than entertainment, as though it's about being a catalyst for social action. It's not uncommon to hear people say that stories make the world a better place. Increasingly, though, I worry that even the most poignant stories, particularly the stories about people who no one seems to care about, can often get in the way of action towards social justice. Now, this is not because storytellers mean any harm. Quite the contrary. Storytellers are often do-gooders like me and, I suspect, yourselves. And the audiences of storytellers are often deeply compassionate and empathetic people. Still, good intentions can have unintended consequences, and so I want to propose that stories are not as magical as they seem. So three — because it's always got to be three — three reasons why I think that stories don't necessarily make the world a better place.Firstly, stories can create an illusion of solidarity. There is nothing like that feel-good factor you get from listening to a fantastic story where you feel like you climbed that mountain, right, or that you befriended that death row inmate. But you didn't. You haven't done anything. Listening is an important but insufficient step towards social action.Secondly, I think often we are drawn towards characters and protagonists who are likable and human. And this makes sense, of course, right? Because if you like someone, then you care about them. But the inverse is also true. If you don't like someone, then you don't care about them. And if you don't care about them, you don't have to see yourself as having a moral obligation to think about the circumstances that shaped their lives.I learned this lesson when I was 14 years old. I learned that actually, you don't have to like someone to recognize their wisdom, and you certainly don't have to like someone to take a stand by their side. So my bike was stolen while I was riding it —(Laughter)which is possible if you're riding slowly enough, which I was.(Laughter)So one minute I'm cutting across this field in the Nairobi neighborhood where I grew up, and it's like a very bumpy path, and so when you're riding a bike, you don't want to be like, you know —(Laughter)And so I'm going like this, slowly pedaling, and all of a sudden, I'm on the floor. I'm on the ground, and I look up, and there's this kid peddling away in the getaway vehicle, which is my bike, and he's about 11 or 12 years old, and I'm on the floor, and I'm crying because I saved a lot of money for that bike, and I'm crying and I stand up and I start screaming. Instinct steps in, and I start screaming, ""Mwizi, mwizi!"" which means ""thief"" in Swahili. And out of the woodworks, all of these people come out and they start to give chase. This is Africa, so mob justice in action. Right? And I round the corner, and they've captured him, they've caught him. The suspect has been apprehended, and they make him give me my bike back, and they also make him apologize. Again, you know, typical African justice, right? And so they make him say sorry. And so we stand there facing each other, and he looks at me, and he says sorry, but he looks at me with this unbridled fury. He is very, very angry. And it is the first time that I have been confronted with someone who doesn't like me simply because of what I represent. He looks at me with this look as if to say, ""You, with your shiny skin and your bike, you're angry at me?""So it was a hard lesson that he didn't like me, but you know what, he was right. I was a middle-class kid living in a poor country. I had a bike, and he barely had food. Sometimes, it's the messages that we don't want to hear, the ones that make us want to crawl out of ourselves, that we need to hear the most. For every lovable storyteller who steals your heart, there are hundreds more whose voices are slurred and ragged, who don't get to stand up on a stage dressed in fine clothes like this. There are a million angry-boy-on-a-bike stories and we can't afford to ignore them simply because we don't like their protagonists or because that's not the kid that we would bring home with us from the orphanage.The third reason that I think that stories don't necessarily make the world a better place is that too often we are so invested in the personal narrative that we forget to look at the bigger picture. And so we applaud someone when they tell us about their feelings of shame, but we don't necessarily link that to oppression. We nod understandingly when someone says they felt small, but we don't link that to discrimination. The most important stories, especially for social justice, are those that do both, that are both personal and allow us to explore and understand the political.But it's not just about the stories we like versus the stories we choose to ignore. Increasingly, we are living in a society where there are larger forces at play, where stories are actually for many people beginning to replace the news. Yeah? We live in a time where we are witnessing the decline of facts, when emotions rule and analysis, it's kind of boring, right? Where we value what we feel more than what we actually know. A recent report by the Pew Center on trends in America indicates that only 10 percent of young adults under the age of 30 ""place a lot of trust in the media."" Now, this is significant. It means that storytellers are gaining trust at precisely the same moment that many in the media are losing the confidence in the public. This is not a good thing, because while stories are important and they help us to have insights in many ways, we need the media. From my years as a social justice activist, I know very well that we need credible facts from media institutions combined with the powerful voices of storytellers. That's what pushes the needle forward in terms of social justice.In the final analysis, of course, it is justice that makes the world a better place, not stories. Right? And so if it is justice that we are after, then I think we mustn't focus on the media or on storytellers. We must focus on audiences, on anyone who has ever turned on a radio or listened to a podcast, and that means all of us.So a few concluding thoughts on what audiences can do to make the world a better place. So firstly, the world would be a better place, I think, if audiences were more curious and more skeptical and asked more questions about the social context that created those stories that they love so much. Secondly, the world would be a better place if audiences recognized that storytelling is intellectual work. And I think it would be important for audiences to demand more buttons on their favorite websites, buttons for example that say, ""If you liked this story, click here to support a cause your storyteller believes in."" Or ""click here to contribute to your storyteller's next big idea."" Often, we are committed to the platforms, but not necessarily to the storytellers themselves. And then lastly, I think that audiences can make the world a better place by switching off their phones, by stepping away from their screens and stepping out into the real world beyond what feels safe.Alice Walker has said, ""Look closely at the present you are constructing. It should look like the future you are dreaming."" Storytellers can help us to dream, but it's up to all of us to have a plan for justice.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sisonke_msimang_if_a_story_moves_you_act_on_it
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"Hi.Thank you.[Jennifer Brea is sound-sensitive. The live audience was asked to applaud ASL-style, in silence.]So, five years ago, this was me. I was a PhD student at Harvard, and I loved to travel. I had just gotten engaged to marry the love of my life. I was 28, and like so many of us when we are in good health, I felt like I was invincible.Then one day I had a fever of 104.7 degrees. I probably should have gone to the doctor, but I'd never really been sick in my life, and I knew that usually, if you have a virus, you stay home and you make some chicken soup, and in a few days, everything will be fine. But this time it wasn't fine. After the fever broke, for three weeks I was so dizzy, I couldn't leave my house. I would walk straight into door frames. I had to hug the walls just to make it to the bathroom. That spring I got infection after infection, and every time I went to the doctor, he said there was absolutely nothing wrong. He had his laboratory tests, which always came back normal. All I had were my symptoms, which I could describe, but no one else can see. I know it sounds silly, but you have to find a way to explain things like this to yourself, and so I thought maybe I was just aging. Maybe this is what it's like to be on the other side of 25.(Laughter)Then the neurological symptoms started. Sometimes I would find that I couldn't draw the right side of a circle. Other times I wouldn't be able to speak or move at all. I saw every kind of specialist: infectious disease doctors, dermatologists, endocrinologists, cardiologists. I even saw a psychiatrist. My psychiatrist said, ""It's clear you're really sick, but not with anything psychiatric. I hope they can find out what's wrong with you.""The next day, my neurologist diagnosed me with conversion disorder. He told me that everything — the fevers, the sore throats, the sinus infection, all of the gastrointestinal, neurological and cardiac symptoms — were being caused by some distant emotional trauma that I could not remember. The symptoms were real, he said, but they had no biological cause.I was training to be a social scientist. I had studied statistics, probability theory, mathematical modeling, experimental design. I felt like I couldn't just reject my neurologist's diagnosis. It didn't feel true, but I knew from my training that the truth is often counterintuitive, so easily obscured by what we want to believe. So I had to consider the possibility that he was right.That day, I ran a small experiment. I walked back the two miles from my neurologist's office to my house, my legs wrapped in this strange, almost electric kind of pain. I meditated on that pain, contemplating how my mind could have possibly generated all this. As soon as I walked through the door, I collapsed. My brain and my spinal cord were burning. My neck was so stiff I couldn't touch my chin to my chest, and the slightest sound — the rustling of the sheets, my husband walking barefoot in the next room — could cause excruciating pain. I would spend most of the next two years in bed.How could my doctor have gotten it so wrong? I thought I had a rare disease, something doctors had never seen. And then I went online and found thousands of people all over the world living with the same symptoms, similarly isolated, similarly disbelieved. Some could still work, but had to spend their evenings and weekends in bed, just so they could show up the next Monday. On the other end of the spectrum, some were so sick they had to live in complete darkness, unable to tolerate the sound of a human voice or the touch of a loved one.I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. You've probably heard it called ""chronic fatigue syndrome."" For decades, that's a name that's meant that this has been the dominant image of a disease that can be as serious as this. The key symptom we all share is that whenever we exert ourselves — physically, mentally — we pay and we pay hard. If my husband goes for a run, he might be sore for a couple of days. If I try to walk half a block, I might be bedridden for a week. It is a perfect custom prison. I know ballet dancers who can't dance, accountants who can't add, medical students who never became doctors. It doesn't matter what you once were; you can't do it anymore. It's been four years, and I've still never been as well as I was the minute before I walked home from my neurologist's office.It's estimated that about 15 to 30 million people around the world have this disease. In the US, where I'm from, it's about one million people. That makes it roughly twice as common as multiple sclerosis. Patients can live for decades with the physical function of someone with congestive heart failure. Twenty-five percent of us are homebound or bedridden, and 75 to 85 percent of us can't even work part-time. Yet doctors do not treat us and science does not study us. How could a disease this common and this devastating have been forgotten by medicine?When my doctor diagnosed me with conversion disorder, he was invoking a lineage of ideas about women's bodies that are over 2,500 years old. The Roman physician Galen thought that hysteria was caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women. The Greeks thought the uterus would literally dry up and wander around the body in search of moisture, pressing on internal organs — yes — causing symptoms from extreme emotions to dizziness and paralysis. The cure was marriage and motherhood.These ideas went largely unchanged for several millennia until the 1880s, when neurologists tried to modernize the theory of hysteria. Sigmund Freud developed a theory that the unconscious mind could produce physical symptoms when dealing with memories or emotions too painful for the conscious mind to handle. It converted these emotions into physical symptoms. This meant that men could now get hysteria, but of course women were still the most susceptible.When I began investigating the history of my own disease, I was amazed to find how deep these ideas still run. In 1934, 198 doctors, nurses and staff at the Los Angeles County General Hospital became seriously ill. They had muscle weakness, stiffness in the neck and back, fevers — all of the same symptoms I had when I first got diagnosed. Doctors thought it was a new form of polio. Since then, there have been more than 70 outbreaks documented around the world, of a strikingly similar post-infectious disease. All of these outbreaks have tended to disproportionately affect women, and in time, when doctors failed to find the one cause of the disease, they thought that these outbreaks were mass hysteria.Why has this idea had such staying power? I do think it has to do with sexism, but I also think that fundamentally, doctors want to help. They want to know the answer, and this category allows doctors to treat what would otherwise be untreatable, to explain illnesses that have no explanation. The problem is that this can cause real harm. In the 1950s, a psychiatrist named Eliot Slater studied a cohort of 85 patients who had been diagnosed with hysteria. Nine years later, 12 of them were dead and 30 had become disabled. Many had undiagnosed conditions like multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, brain tumors. In 1980, hysteria was officially renamed ""conversion disorder."" When my neurologist gave me that diagnosis in 2012, he was echoing Freud's words verbatim, and even today, women are 2 to 10 times more likely to receive that diagnosis.The problem with the theory of hysteria or psychogenic illness is that it can never be proven. It is by definition the absence of evidence, and in the case of ME, psychological explanations have held back biological research. All around the world, ME is one of the least funded diseases. In the US, we spend each year roughly 2,500 dollars per AIDS patient, 250 dollars per MS patient and just 5 dollars per year per ME patient. This was not just lightning. I was not just unlucky. The ignorance surrounding my disease has been a choice, a choice made by the institutions that were supposed to protect us.We don't know why ME sometimes runs in families, why you can get it after almost any infection, from enteroviruses to Epstein-Barr virus to Q fever, or why it affects women at two to three times the rate of men. This issue is much bigger than just my disease. When I first got sick, old friends were reaching out to me. I soon found myself a part of a cohort of women in their late 20s whose bodies were falling apart. What was striking was just how much trouble we were having being taken seriously.I learned of one woman with scleroderma, an autoimmune connective tissue disease, who was told for years that it was all in her head. Between the time of onset and diagnosis, her esophagus was so thoroughly damaged, she will never be able to eat again. Another woman with ovarian cancer, who for years was told that it was just early menopause. A friend from college, whose brain tumor was misdiagnosed for years as anxiety.Here's why this worries me: since the 1950s, rates of many autoimmune diseases have doubled to tripled. Forty-five percent of patients who are eventually diagnosed with a recognized autoimmune disease are initially told they're hypochondriacs. Like the hysteria of old, this has everything to do with gender and with whose stories we believe. Seventy-five percent of autoimmune disease patients are women, and in some diseases, it's as high as 90 percent. Even though these diseases disproportionately affect women, they are not women's diseases. ME affects children and ME affects millions of men. And as one patient told me, we get it coming and going — if you're a woman, you're told you're exaggerating your symptoms, but if you're a guy, you're told to be strong, to buck up. And men may even have a more difficult time getting diagnosed.My brain is not what it used to be.Here's the good part: despite everything, I still have hope. So many diseases were once thought of as psychological until science uncovered their biological mechanisms. Patients with epilepsy could be forcibly institutionalized until the EEG was able to measure abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Multiple sclerosis could be misdiagnosed as hysterical paralysis until the CAT scan and the MRI discovered brain lesions. And recently, we used to think that stomach ulcers were just caused by stress, until we discovered that H. pylori was the culprit. ME has never benefited from the kind of science that other diseases have had, but that's starting to change. In Germany, scientists are starting to find evidence of autoimmunity, and in Japan, of brain inflammation. In the US, scientists at Stanford are finding abnormalities in energy metabolism that are 16 standard deviations away from normal. And in Norway, researchers are running a phase-3 clinical trial on a cancer drug that in some patients causes complete remission.What also gives me hope is the resilience of patients. Online we came together, and we shared our stories. We devoured what research there was. We experimented on ourselves. We became our own scientists and our own doctors because we had to be. And slowly I added five percent here, five percent there, until eventually, on a good day, I was able to leave my home. I still had to make ridiculous choices: Will I sit in the garden for 15 minutes, or will I wash my hair today? But it gave me hope that I could be treated. I had a sick body; that was all. And with the right kind of help, maybe one day I could get better.I came together with patients around the world, and we started to fight. We have filled the void with something wonderful, but it is not enough. I still don't know if I will ever be able to run again, or walk at any distance, or do any of those kinetic things that I now only get to do in my dreams. But I am so grateful for how far I have come. Progress is slow, and it is up and it is down, but I am getting a little better each day.I remember what it was like when I was stuck in that bedroom, when it had been months since I had seen the sun. I thought that I would die there. But here I am today, with you, and that is a miracle.I don't know what would have happened had I not been one of the lucky ones, had I gotten sick before the internet, had I not found my community. I probably would have already taken my own life, as so many others have done. How many lives could we have saved, decades ago, if we had asked the right questions? How many lives could we save today if we decide to make a real start?Even once the true cause of my disease is discovered, if we don't change our institutions and our culture, we will do this again to another disease. Living with this illness has taught me that science and medicine are profoundly human endeavors. Doctors, scientists and policy makers are not immune to the same biases that affect all of us.We need to think in more nuanced ways about women's health. Our immune systems are just as much a battleground for equality as the rest of our bodies. We need to listen to patients' stories, and we need to be willing to say, ""I don't know."" ""I don't know"" is a beautiful thing. ""I don't know"" is where discovery starts. And if we can do that, if we can approach the great vastness of all that we do not know, and then, rather than fear uncertainty, maybe we can greet it with a sense of wonder.Thank you.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jen_brea_what_happens_when_you_have_a_disease_doctors_can_t_diagnose
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"[This talk contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence] [Viewer discretion is advised]""Ashley Judd, stupid fucking slut.""You can't sue someone for calling them a cunt.""""If you can't handle the Internet, fuck off, whore.""""I wish Ashley Judd would die a horrible death. She is the absolute worst.""""Ashley Judd, you're the reason women shouldn't vote.""""'Twisted' is such a bad movie, I don't even want to rape it.""""Whatever you do, don't tell Ashley Judd. She'll die alone with a dried out vagina.""""If I had to fuck an older woman, oh my God, I would fuck the shit out of Ashley Judd, that bitch is hot af. The unforgivable shit I would do to her.""Online misogyny is a global gender rights tragedy, and it is imperative that it ends.(Applause)Girls' and women's voices, and our allies' voices are constrained in ways that are personally, economically, professionally and politically damaging. And when we curb abuse, we will expand freedom.I am a Kentucky basketball fan, so on a fine March day last year, I was doing one of the things I do best: I was cheering for my Wildcats. The daffodils were blooming, but the referees were not blowing the whistle when I was telling them to.(Laughter)Funny, they're very friendly to me before the opening tip, but they really ignore me during the game.(Laughter)Three of my players were bleeding, so I did the next best thing ... I tweeted.[@ArkRazorback dirty play can kiss my team's free throw making a — @KySportsRadio @marchmadness @espn Bloodied 3 players so far.]It is routine for me to be treated in the ways I've already described to you. It happens to me every single day on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Since I joined Twitter in 2011, misogyny and misogynists have amply demonstrated they will dog my every step. My spirituality, my faith, being a hillbilly — I can say that, you can't — all of it is fair game.And I have responded to this with various strategies. I've tried engaging people. This one guy was sending me hypersexual, nasty stuff, and there was a girl in his avatar. I wrote him back and said ... ""Is that your daughter? I feel a lot of fear that you may think about and talk to women this way."" And he surprised me by saying, ""You know what? You're right. I apologize."" Sometimes people want to be held accountable. This one guy was musing to I don't know who that maybe I was the definition of a cunt. I was married to a Scot for 14 years, so I said, ""Cunt means many different things in different countries —(Laughter)but I'm pretty sure you epitomize the global standard of a dick.""(Laughter)(Applause)I've tried to rise above it, I've tried to get in the trenches, but mostly I would scroll through these social media platforms with one eye partially closed, trying not to see it, but you can't make a cucumber out of a pickle. What is seen goes in. It's traumatic. And I was always secretly hoping in some part of me that what was being said to me and about me wasn't ... true. Because even I, an avowed, self-declared feminist, who worships at the altar of Gloria —(Laughter)internalize the patriarchy. This is really critical. Patriarchy is not boys and men. It is a system in which we all participate, including me.On that particular day, for some reason, that particular tweet after the basketball game triggered something called a ""cyber mob."" This vitriolic, global outpouring of the most heinous hate speech: death threats, rape threats. And don't you know, when I was sitting at home alone in my nightgown, I got a phone call, and it was my beloved former husband, and he said on a voice mail, ""Loved one ... what is happening to you is not OK.""And there was something about him taking a stand for me that night ... that allowed me to take a stand for myself. And I started to write. I started to write about sharing the fact that I'm a survivor of all forms of sexual abuse, including three rapes. And the hate speech I get in response to that — these are just some of the comments posted to news outlets. Being told I'm a ""snitch"" is really fun.[Jay: She enjoyed every second of it!!!!!]Audience: Oh, Lord Jesus.Ashley Judd: Thank you, Jesus. May your grace and mercy shine.So, I wrote this feminist op-ed, it is entitled, ""Forget Your Team: It Is Your Online Gender Violence Toward Girls And Women That Can Kiss My Righteous Ass.""(Laughter)(Applause)And I did that alone, and I published it alone, because my chief advisor said, ""Please don't, the rain of retaliatory garbage that is inevitable — I fear for you."" But I trust girls and I trust women, and I trust our allies. It was published, it went viral, it proves that every single day online misogyny is a phenomenon endured by us all, all over the world, and when it is intersectional, it is worse. Sexual orientation, gender identity, race, ethnicity, religion — you name it, it amplifies the violence endured by girls and women, and for our younger girls, it is worse.It's clearly traumatizing. Our mental health, our emotional well-being are so gravely affected because the threat of violence is experienced neurobiologically as violence. The cortisol shoots up, the limbic system gets fired, we lose productivity at work.And let's talk about work. Our ability to work is constrained. Online searches of women applying for jobs reveal nude pictures of them, false allegations they have STDs, their addresses indicating that they are available for sex with real examples of people showing up at this house for said sex.Our ability to go to school is impaired. 96 percent of all postings of sexual images of our young people ... girls. Our girls. Our boys are two to three times more likely — nonconsensually — to share images.And I want to say a word about revenge porn. Part of what came out of this tweet was my getting connected with allies and other activists who are fighting for a safe and free internet. We started something called the Speech Project; curbing abuse, expanding freedom. And that website provides a critical forum, because there is no global, legal thing to help us figure this out. But we do provide on that website a standardized list of definitions, because it's hard to attack a behavior in the right way if we're not all sharing a definition of what that behavior is. And I learned that revenge porn is often dangerously misapplied. It is the nonconsensual sharing of an image used tactically to shame and humiliate a girl or woman that attempts to pornography us. Our natural sexuality is — I don't know about yours — pretty gorgeous and wonderful. And my expressing it does not pornography make.(Applause)So, I have all these resources that I'm keenly aware so many people in the world do not. I was able to start the Speech Project with colleagues. I can often get a social media company's attention. I have a wonderful visit to Facebook HQ coming up. Hasn't helped the idiotic reporting standards yet ... I actually pay someone to scrub my social media feeds, attempting to spare my brain the daily iterations of the trauma of hate speech. And guess what? I get hate speech for that. ""Oh, you live in an echo chamber."" Well, guess what? Having someone post a photograph of me with my mouth open saying they ""can't wait to cum on my face,"" I have a right to set that boundary.(Applause)And this distinction between virtual and real is specious because guess what — that actually happened to me once when I was a child, and so that tweet brought up that trauma, and I had to do work on that.But you know what we do? We take all of this hate speech, and we disaggregate it, and we code it, and we give that data so that we understand the intersectionality of it: when I get porn, when it's about political affiliation, when it's about age, when it's about all of it. We're going to win this fight.There are a lot of solutions — thank goodness. I'm going to offer just a few, and of course I challenge you to create and contribute your own. Number one: we have to start with digital media literacy, and clearly it must have a gendered lens. Kids, schools, caregivers, parents: it's essential. Two ... shall we talk about our friends in tech? Said with dignity and respect, the sexism in your workplaces must end.(Applause)(Cheers)EDGE, the global standard for gender equality, is the minimum standard. And guess what, Silicon Valley? If L'Oréal in India, in the Philippines, in Brazil and in Russia can do it, you can, too. Enough excuses. Only when women have critical mass in every department at your companies, including building platforms from the ground up, will the conversations about priorities and solutions change.And more love for my friends in tech: profiteering off misogyny in video games must end. I'm so tired of hearing you talk to me at cocktail parties — like you did a couple weeks ago in Aspen — about how deplorable #Gamergate was, when you're still making billions of dollars off games that maim and dump women for sport. Basta! — as the Italians would say. Enough.(Applause)Our friends in law enforcement have much to do, because we've seen that online violence is an extension of in-person violence. In our country, more girls and women have been murdered by their intimate partners than died on 9/11 and have died since in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. And it's not cool to say that, but it is true. We care so much geopolitically about what men are doing over there to women over there ... In 2015, 72,828 women used intimate partner violence services in this country. That is not counting the girls and women and boys who needed them. Law enforcement must be empowered with up-to-date internet technology, the devices and an understanding of these platforms — how they work. The police wanted to be helpful when Amanda Hess called about the death threat she was getting on Twitter, but they couldn't really when they said, ""What's Twitter?""Our legislators must write and pass astute legislation that reflects today's technology and our notions of free and hate speech. In New York recently, the law could not be applied to a perpetrator because the crimes must have been committed — even if it was anonymous — they must have been committed by telephone, in mail, by telegraph —(Laughter)The language must be technologically neutral.So apparently, I've got a pretty bold voice. So, let's talk about our friends ... white men. You have a role to play and a choice to make. You can do something, or you can do nothing. We're cool in this room, but when this goes out, everyone will say, ""Oh my God, she's a reverse racist."" That quote was said by a white man, Robert Moritz, chairperson, PricewaterhouseCoopers, he asked me to include it in my talk.We need to grow support lines and help groups, so victims can help each other when their lives and finances have been derailed. We must as individuals disrupt gender violence as it is happening. 92 percent of young people 29 and under witness it. 72 percent of us have witnessed it. We must have the courage and urgency to practice stopping it as it is unfolding.And lastly, believe her. Believe her.(Applause)This is fundamentally a problem of human interaction. And as I believe that human interaction is at the core of our healing, trauma not transformed will be trauma transferred.Edith Wharton said, ""The end is latent in the beginning,"" so we are going to end this talk replacing hate speech with love speech. Because I get lonely in this, but I know that we are allies. I recently learned about how gratitude and affirmations offset negative interactions. It takes five of those to offset one negative interaction, and gratitude in particular — free, available globally any time, anywhere, to anyone in any dialect — it fires the pregenual anterior cingulate, a watershed part of the brain that floods it with great, good stuff. So I'm going to say awesome stuff about myself. I would like for you to reflect it back to me. It might sound something like this —(Laughter)I am a powerful and strong woman, and you would say, ""Yes, you are.""Audience: Yes, you are.Ashley Judd: My mama loves me.A: Yes, she does.AJ: I did a great job with my talk.A: Yes, you did.AJ: I have a right to be here.A: Yes, you do.AJ: I'm really cute.(Laughter)A: Yes, you are.AJ: God does good work.A: Yes, He does.AJ: And I love you. Thank you so much for letting me be of service.Bless you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ashley_judd_how_online_abuse_of_women_has_spiraled_out_of_control
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"If I asked you to picture the air, what do you imagine? Most people think about either empty space or clear blue sky or sometimes trees dancing in the wind. And then I remember my high school chemistry teacher with really long socks at the blackboard, drawing diagrams of bubbles connected to other bubbles, and describing how they vibrate and collide in a kind of frantic soup.But really, we tend not to think about the air that much at all. We notice it mostly when there's some kind of unpleasant sensory intrusion upon it, like a terrible smell or something visible like smoke or mist. But it's always there. It's touching all of us right now. It's even inside us. Our air is immediate, vital and intimate. And yet, it's so easily forgotten.So what is the air? It's the combination of the invisible gases that envelop the Earth, attracted by the Earth's gravitational pull. And even though I'm a visual artist, I'm interested in the invisibility of the air. I'm interested in how we imagine it, how we experience it and how we all have an innate understanding of its materiality through breathing. All life on Earth changes the air through gas exchange, and we're all doing it right now. Actually, why don't we all right now together take one big, collective, deep breath in.Ready? In. (Inhales) And out. (Exhales)That air that you just exhaled, you enriched a hundred times in carbon dioxide. So roughly five liters of air per breath, 17 breaths per minute of the 525,600 minutes per year, comes to approximately 45 million liters of air, enriched 100 times in carbon dioxide, just for you. Now, that's equivalent to about 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools.For me, air is plural. It's simultaneously as small as our breathing and as big as the planet. And it's kind of hard to picture. Maybe it's impossible, and maybe it doesn't matter.Through my visual arts practice, I try to make air, not so much picture it, but to make it visceral and tactile and haptic. I try to expand this notion of the aesthetic, how things look, so that it can include things like how it feels on your skin and in your lungs, and how your voice sounds as it passes through it. I explore the weight, density and smell, but most importantly, I think a lot about the stories we attach to different kinds of air.This is a work I made in 2014. It's called ""Different Kinds of Air: A Plant's Diary,"" where I was recreating the air from different eras in Earth's evolution, and inviting the audience to come in and breathe them with me. And it's really surprising, so drastically different.Now, I'm not a scientist, but atmospheric scientists will look for traces in the air chemistry in geology, a bit like how rocks can oxidize, and they'll extrapolate that information and aggregate it, such that they can pretty much form a recipe for the air at different times. Then I come in as the artist and take that recipe and recreate it using the component gases.I was particularly interested in moments of time that are examples of life changing the air, but also the air that can influence how life will evolve, like Carboniferous air. It's from about 300 to 350 million years ago. It's an era known as the time of the giants. So for the first time in the history of life, lignin evolves. That's the hard stuff that trees are made of. So trees effectively invent their own trunks at this time, and they get really big, bigger and bigger, and pepper the Earth, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, such that the oxygen levels are about twice as high as what they are today. And this rich air supports massive insects — huge spiders and dragonflies with a wingspan of about 65 centimeters. To breathe, this air is really clean and really fresh. It doesn't so much have a flavor, but it does give your body a really subtle kind of boost of energy. It's really good for hangovers.(Laughter)Or there's the air of the Great Dying — that's about 252.5 million years ago, just before the dinosaurs evolve. It's a really short time period, geologically speaking, from about 20- to 200,000 years. Really quick. This is the greatest extinction event in Earth's history, even bigger than when the dinosaurs died out. Eighty-five to 95 percent of species at this time die out, and simultaneous to that is a huge, dramatic spike in carbon dioxide, that a lot of scientists agree comes from a simultaneous eruption of volcanoes and a runaway greenhouse effect. Oxygen levels at this time go to below half of what they are today, so about 10 percent. So this air would definitely not support human life, but it's OK to just have a breath. And to breathe, it's oddly comforting. It's really calming, it's quite warm and it has a flavor a little bit like soda water. It has that kind of spritz, quite pleasant.So with all this thinking about air of the past, it's quite natural to start thinking about the air of the future. And instead of being speculative with air and just making up what I think might be the future air, I discovered this human-synthesized air. That means that it doesn't occur anywhere in nature, but it's made by humans in a laboratory for application in different industrial settings.Why is it future air? Well, this air is a really stable molecule that will literally be part of the air once it's released, for the next 300 to 400 years, before it's broken down. So that's about 12 to 16 generations. And this future air has some very sensual qualities. It's very heavy. It's about eight times heavier than the air we're used to breathing. It's so heavy, in fact, that when you breathe it in, whatever words you speak are kind of literally heavy as well, so they dribble down your chin and drop to the floor and soak into the cracks. It's an air that operates quite a lot like a liquid.Now, this air comes with an ethical dimension as well. Humans made this air, but it's also the most potent greenhouse gas that has ever been tested. Its warming potential is 24,000 times that of carbon dioxide, and it has that longevity of 12 to 16 generations. So this ethical confrontation is really central to my work. (In a lowered voice) It has another quite surprising quality. It changes the sound of your voice quite dramatically.(Laughter)So when we start to think — ooh! It's still there a bit.(Laughter)When we think about climate change, we probably don't think about giant insects and erupting volcanoes or funny voices. The images that more readily come to mind are things like retreating glaciers and polar bears adrift on icebergs. We think about pie charts and column graphs and endless politicians talking to scientists wearing cardigans.But perhaps it's time we start thinking about climate change on the same visceral level that we experience the air. Like air, climate change is simultaneously at the scale of the molecule, the breath and the planet. It's immediate, vital and intimate, as well as being amorphous and cumbersome. And yet, it's so easily forgotten.Climate change is the collective self-portrait of humanity. It reflects our decisions as individuals, as governments and as industries. And if there's anything I've learned from looking at air, it's that even though it's changing, it persists. It may not support the kind of life that we'd recognize, but it will support something. And if we humans are such a vital part of that change, I think it's important that we can feel the discussion. Because even though it's invisible, humans are leaving a very vibrant trace in the air.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_parsons_lord_art_made_of_the_air_we_breathe
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"So you probably have the sense, as most people do, that polarization is getting worse in our country, that the divide between the left and the right is as bad as it's been in really any of our lifetimes. But you might also reasonably wonder if research backs up your intuition. And in a nutshell, the answer is sadly yes. In study after study, we find that liberals and conservatives have grown further apart. They increasingly wall themselves off in these ideological silos, consuming different news, talking only to like-minded others and more and more choosing to live in different parts of the country.And I think that most alarming of all of it is seeing this rising animosity on both sides. Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, more and more they just don't like one another. You see it in many different ways. They don't want to befriend one another. They don't want to date one another. If they do, if they find out, they find each other less attractive, and they more and more don't want their children to marry someone who supports the other party, a particularly shocking statistic.You know, in my lab, the students that I work with, we're talking about some sort of social pattern — I'm a movie buff, and so I'm often like, what kind of movie are we in here with this pattern? So what kind of movie are we in with political polarization? Well, it could be a disaster movie. It certainly seems like a disaster. Could be a war movie. Also fits. But what I keep thinking is that we're in a zombie apocalypse movie.(Laughter)Right? You know the kind. There's people wandering around in packs, not thinking for themselves, seized by this mob mentality trying to spread their disease and destroy society. And you probably think, as I do, that you're the good guy in the zombie apocalypse movie, and all this hate and polarization, it's being propagated by the other people, because we're Brad Pitt, right? Free-thinking, righteous, just trying to hold on to what we hold dear, you know, not foot soldiers in the army of the undead. Not that. Never that.But here's the thing: what movie do you suppose they think they're in? Right? Well, they absolutely think that they're the good guys in the zombie apocalypse movie. Right? And you'd better believe that they think that they're Brad Pitt and that we, we are the zombies. And who's to say that they're wrong? I think that the truth is that we're all a part of this. And the good side of that is that we can be a part of the solution.So what are we going to do? What can we do to chip away at polarization in everyday life? What could we do to connect with and communicate with our political counterparts? Well, these were exactly the questions that I and my colleague, Matt Feinberg, became fascinated with a few years ago, and we started doing research on this topic. And one of the first things that we discovered that I think is really helpful for understanding polarization is to understand that the political divide in our country is undergirded by a deeper moral divide.So one of the most robust findings in the history of political psychology is this pattern identified by Jon Haidt and Jesse Graham, psychologists, that liberals and conservatives tend to endorse different values to different degrees. So for example, we find that liberals tend to endorse values like equality and fairness and care and protection from harm more than conservatives do. And conservatives tend to endorse values like loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority and moral purity more than liberals do. And Matt and I were thinking that maybe this moral divide might be helpful for understanding how it is that liberals and conservatives talk to one another and why they so often seem to talk past one another when they do.So we conducted a study where we recruited liberals to a study where they were supposed to write a persuasive essay that would be compelling to a conservative in support of same-sex marriage. And what we found was that liberals tended to make arguments in terms of the liberal moral values of equality and fairness. So they said things like, ""Everyone should have the right to love whoever they choose,"" and, ""They"" — they being gay Americans — ""deserve the same equal rights as other Americans."" Overall, we found that 69 percent of liberals invoked one of the more liberal moral values in constructing their essay, and only nine percent invoked one of the more conservative moral values, even though they were supposed to be trying to persuade conservatives. And when we studied conservatives and had them make persuasive arguments in support of making English the official language of the US, a classically conservative political position, we found that they weren't much better at this. 59 percent of them made arguments in terms of one of the more conservative moral values, and just eight percent invoked a liberal moral value, even though they were supposed to be targeting liberals for persuasion.Now, you can see right away why we're in trouble here. Right? People's moral values, they're their most deeply held beliefs. People are willing to fight and die for their values. Why are they going to give that up just to agree with you on something that they don't particularly want to agree with you on anyway? If that persuasive appeal that you're making to your Republican uncle means that he doesn't just have to change his view, he's got to change his underlying values, too, that's not going to go very far.So what would work better? Well, we believe it's a technique that we call moral reframing, and we've studied it in a series of experiments. In one of these experiments, we recruited liberals and conservatives to a study where they read one of three essays before having their environmental attitudes surveyed. And the first of these essays was a relatively conventional pro-environmental essay that invoked the liberal values of care and protection from harm. It said things like, ""In many important ways we are causing real harm to the places we live in,"" and, ""It is essential that we take steps now to prevent further destruction from being done to our Earth."" Another group of participants were assigned to read a really different essay that was designed to tap into the conservative value of moral purity. It was a pro-environmental essay as well, and it said things like, ""Keeping our forests, drinking water, and skies pure is of vital importance."" ""We should regard the pollution of the places we live in to be disgusting."" And, ""Reducing pollution can help us preserve what is pure and beautiful about the places we live."" And then we had a third group that were assigned to read just a nonpolitical essay. It was just a comparison group so we could get a baseline.And what we found when we surveyed people about their environmental attitudes afterwards, we found that liberals, it didn't matter what essay they read. They tended to have highly pro-environmental attitudes regardless. Liberals are on board for environmental protection. Conservatives, however, were significantly more supportive of progressive environmental policies and environmental protection if they had read the moral purity essay than if they read one of the other two essays. We even found that conservatives who read the moral purity essay were significantly more likely to say that they believed in global warming and were concerned about global warming, even though this essay didn't even mention global warming. That's just a related environmental issue. But that's how robust this moral reframing effect was.And we've studied this on a whole slew of different political issues. So if you want to move conservatives on issues like same-sex marriage or national health insurance, it helps to tie these liberal political issues to conservative values like patriotism and moral purity. And we studied it the other way, too. If you want to move liberals to the right on conservative policy issues like military spending and making English the official language of the US, you're going to be more persuasive if you tie those conservative policy issues to liberal moral values like equality and fairness.All these studies have the same clear message: if you want to persuade someone on some policy, it's helpful to connect that policy to their underlying moral values. And when you say it like that it seems really obvious. Right? Like, why did we come here tonight? Why —(Laughter)It's incredibly intuitive. And even though it is, it's something we really struggle to do. You know, it turns out that when we go to persuade somebody on a political issue, we talk like we're speaking into a mirror. We don't persuade so much as we rehearse our own reasons for why we believe some sort of political position. We kept saying when we were designing these reframed moral arguments, ""Empathy and respect, empathy and respect."" If you can tap into that, you can connect and you might be able to persuade somebody in this country.So thinking again about what movie we're in, maybe I got carried away before. Maybe it's not a zombie apocalypse movie. Maybe instead it's a buddy cop movie.(Laughter)Just roll with it, just go with it please.(Laughter)You know the kind: there's a white cop and a black cop, or maybe a messy cop and an organized cop. Whatever it is, they don't get along because of this difference. But in the end, when they have to come together and they cooperate, the solidarity that they feel, it's greater because of that gulf that they had to cross. Right? And remember that in these movies, it's usually worst in the second act when our leads are further apart than ever before. And so maybe that's where we are in this country, late in the second act of a buddy cop movie —(Laughter)torn apart but about to come back together. It sounds good, but if we want it to happen, I think the responsibility is going to start with us.So this is my call to you: let's put this country back together. Let's do it despite the politicians and the media and Facebook and Twitter and Congressional redistricting and all of it, all the things that divide us. Let's do it because it's right. And let's do it because this hate and contempt that flows through all of us every day makes us ugly and it corrupts us, and it threatens the very fabric of our society. We owe it to one another and our country to reach out and try to connect. We can't afford to hate them any longer, and we can't afford to let them hate us either. Empathy and respect. Empathy and respect. If you think about it, it's the very least that we owe our fellow citizens.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robb_willer_how_to_have_better_political_conversations
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"So what if I could make for you a designer baby? What if you as a parent-to-be and I as a scientist decided to go down that road together?What if we didn't? What if we thought, ""That's a bad idea,"" but many of our family, friends and coworkers did make that decision?Let's fast-forward just 15 years from now. Let's pretend it's the year 2030, and you're a parent. You have your daughter, Marianne, next to you, and in 2030, she is what we call a natural because she has no genetic modifications. And because you and your partner consciously made that decision, many in your social circle, they kind of look down on you. They think you're, like, a Luddite or a technophobe.Marianne's best friend Jenna, who lives right next door, is a very different story. She was born a genetically modified designer baby with numerous upgrades. Yeah. Upgrades. And these enhancements were introduced using a new genetic modification technology that goes by the funny name CRISPR, you know, like something's crisp, this is CRISPR. The scientist that Jenna's parents hired to do this for several million dollars introduced CRISPR into a whole panel of human embryos. And then they used genetic testing, and they predicted that that little tiny embryo, Jenna's embryo, would be the best of the bunch. And now, Jenna is an actual, real person. She's sitting on the carpet in your living room playing with your daughter Marianne. And your families have known each other for years now, and it's become very clear to you that Jenna is extraordinary. She's incredibly intelligent. If you're honest with yourself, she's smarter than you, and she's five years old. She's beautiful, tall, athletic, and the list goes on and on. And in fact, there's a whole new generation of these GM kids like Jenna. And so far it looks like they're healthier than their parents' generation, than your generation. And they have lower health care costs. They're immune to a host of health conditions, including HIV/AIDS and genetic diseases.It all sounds so great, but you can't help but have this sort of unsettling feeling, a gut feeling, that there's something just not quite right about Jenna, and you've had the same feeling about other GM kids that you've met. You were also reading in the newspaper earlier this week that a study of these children who were born as designer babies indicates they may have some issues, like increased aggressiveness and narcissism. But more immediately on your mind is some news that you just got from Jenna's family. She's so smart, she's now going to be going to a special school, a different school than your daughter Marianne, and this is kind of throwing your family into a disarray. Marianne's been crying, and last night when you took her to bed to kiss her goodnight, she said, ""Daddy, will Jenna even be my friend anymore?""So now, as I've been telling you this imagined 2030 story, I have a feeling that I may have put some of you into this sci-fi frame of reference. Right? You think you're reading a sci-fi book. Or maybe, like, in Halloween mode of thinking. But this is really a possible reality for us, just 15 years from now.I'm a stem cell and genetics researcher and I can see this new CRISPR technology and its potential impact. And we may find ourselves in that reality, and a lot will depend on what we decide to do today. And if you're still kind of thinking in sci-fi mode, consider that the world of science had a huge shock earlier this year, and the public largely doesn't even know about it. Researchers in China just a few months ago reported the creation of genetically modified human embryos. This was the first time in history. And they did it using this new CRISPR technology. It didn't work perfectly, but I still think they sort of cracked the door ajar on a Pandora's box here. And I think some people are going to run with this technology and try to make designer babies.Now, before I go on, some of you may hold up your hands and say, ""Stop, Paul, wait a minute. Wouldn't that be illegal? You can't just go off and create a designer baby."" And in fact, to some extent, you're right. In some countries, you couldn't do that. But in many other countries, including my country, the US, there's actually no law on this, so in theory, you could do it. And there was another development this year that resonates in this area, and that happened not so far from here over in the UK. And the UK traditionally has been the strictest country when it comes to human genetic modification. It was illegal there, but just a few months ago, they carved out an exception to that rule. They passed a new law allowing the creation of genetically modified humans with the noble goal of trying to prevent a rare kind of genetic disease. But still I think in combination these events are pushing us further towards an acceptance of human genetic modification.So I've been talking about this CRISPR technology. What actually is CRISPR? So if you think about the GMOs that we're all more familiar with, like GMO tomatoes and wheat and things like that, this technology is similar to the technologies that were used to make those, but it's dramatically better, cheaper and faster.So what is it? It's actually like a genetic Swiss army knife. We can pretend this is a Swiss army knife with different tools in it, and one of the tools is kind of like a magnifying glass or a GPS for our DNA, so it can home in on a certain spot. And the next tool is like scissors that can cut the DNA right in that spot. And finally we have a pen where we can literally rewrite the genetic code in that location. It's really that simple.And this technology, which came on the scene just three years ago, has taken science by storm. It's evolving so fast, and it's so freaking exciting to scientists, and I admit I'm fascinated by it and we use it in my own lab, that I think someone is going to go that extra step and continue the GM human embryo work and maybe make designer babies. This is so ubiquitous now. It just came on the scene three years ago. Thousands of labs literally have this in hand today, and they're doing important research. Most of them are not interested in designer babies. They're studying human disease and other important elements of science. So there's a lot of good research going on with CRISPR. And the fact that we can now do genetic modifications that used to take years and cost millions of dollars in a few weeks for a couple thousand bucks, to me as a scientist that's fantastic, but again, at the same time, it opens the door to people going too far. And I think for some people the focus is not going to be so much on science. That's not what's going to be driving them. It's going to be ideology or the chase for a profit. And they're going to go for designer babies.So why should we be concerned about this? We know from Darwin, if we go back two centuries, that evolution and genetics profoundly have impacted humanity, who we are today. And some think there's like a social Darwinism at work in our world, and maybe even a eugenics as well. Imagine those trends, those forces, with a booster rocket of this CRISPR technology that is so powerful and so ubiquitous. And in fact, we can just go back one century to the last century to see the power that eugenics can have.So my father, Peter Knoepfler, was actually born right here in Vienna. He was Viennese, and he was born here in 1929. And when my grandparents had little baby Peter, the world was very different. Right? It was a different Vienna. The United States was different. The world was different. There was a eugenics rising, and my grandparents realized, pretty quickly I think, that they were on the wrong side of the eugenics equation. And so despite this being their home and their whole extended family's home, and this area being their family's home for generations, they decided because of eugenics that they had to leave. And they survived, but they were heartbroken, and I'm not sure my dad ever really got over leaving Vienna. He left when he was just eight years old in 1938.So today, I see a new eugenics kind of bubbling to the surface. It's supposed to be a kinder, gentler, positive eugenics, different than all that past stuff. But I think even though it's focused on trying to improve people, it could have negative consequences, and it really worries me that some of the top proponents of this new eugenics, they think CRISPR is the ticket to make it happen.So I have to admit, you know, eugenics, we talk about making better people. It's a tough question. What is better when we're talking about a human being? But I admit I think maybe a lot of us could agree that human beings, maybe we could use a little betterment. Look at our politicians here, you know, back in the US — God forbid we go there right now. Maybe even if we just look in the mirror, there might be ways we think we could be better. I might wish, honestly, that I had more hair here, instead of baldness. Some people might wish they were taller, have a different weight, a different face. If we could do those things, we could make those things happen, or we could make them happen in our children, it would be very seductive. And yet coming with it would be these risks. I talked about eugenics, but there would be risks to individuals as well. So if we forget about enhancing people and we just try to make them healthier using genetic modification, this technology is so new and so powerful, that by accident we could make them sicker. That easily could happen. And there's another risk, and that is that all of the legitimate, important genetic modification research going on just in the lab — again, no interest in designer babies — a few people going the designer baby route, things go badly, that entire field could be damaged.I also think it's not that unlikely that governments might start taking an interest in genetic modification. So for example our imagined GM Jenna child who is healthier, if there's a generation that looks like they have lower health care costs, it's possible that governments may start trying to compel their citizens to go the GM route. Look at China's one-child policy. It's thought that that prevented the birth of 400 million human beings. So it's not beyond the realm of possible that genetic modification could be something that governments push. And if designer babies become popular, in our digital age — viral videos, social media — what if designer babies are thought to be fashionable, and they kind of become the new glitterati, the new Kardashians or something?(Laughter)You know, are those trends that we really could control? I'm not convinced that we could.So again, today it's Halloween and when we talk about genetic modification, there's one Halloween-associated character that is talked about or invoked more than anything else, and that is Frankenstein. Mostly that's been Frankenfoods and all this other stuff. But if we think about this now and we think about it in the human context on a day like Halloween, if parents can in essence costume their children genetically, are we going to be talking about a Frankenstein 2.0 kind of situation? I don't think so. I don't think it's going to get to that extreme. But when we are going about hacking the human code, I think all bets are off in terms of what might come of that. There would still be dangers. And we can look in the past to other elements of transformative science and see how they can basically go out of control and permeate society.So I'll just give you one example, and that is in vitro fertilization. Almost exactly 40 years ago, test tube baby number one Louise Brown was born, and that's a great thing, and I think since then five million IVF babies have been born, bringing immeasurable happiness. A lot of parents now can love those kids. But if you think about it, in four decades, five million babies being born from a new technology is pretty remarkable, and the same kind of thing could happen with human genetic modification and designer babies. So depending on the decisions we make in the next few months, the next year or so, if designer baby number one is born, within a few decades, there could well be millions of genetically modified humans. And there's a difference there too, because if we, you in the audience, or I, if we decide to have a designer baby, then their children will also be genetically modified, and so on, because it's heritable. So that's a big difference.So with all of this in mind, what should we do? There's actually going to be a meeting a month from tomorrow in Washington, D.C. by the US National Academy of Sciences to tackle that exact question. What is the right path forward with human genetic modification? I believe at this time we need a moratorium. We have to ban this. We should not allow creating genetically modified people, because it's just too dangerous and too unpredictable. But there's a lot of people —(Applause)Thanks.(Applause)And let me say, just as a scientist, it's a little bit scary for me to say that in public, because science generally doesn't like self-regulation and things like that. So I think we need to put a hold on this, but there are many people who not only disagree with me, they feel the exact opposite. They're like, step on the gas, full speed ahead, let's make designer babies. And so in the meeting in December and other meetings that are likely to follow in the next few months, it's very possible there may be no moratorium. And I think part of the problem that we have is that all of this trend, this revolution in genetic modification applying to humans, the public hasn't known about it. Nobody has been saying, look, this is a big deal, this is a revolution, and this could affect you in very personal ways. And so part of my goal is actually to change that and to educate and engage with the public and get you guys talking about this. And so I hope at these meetings that there will be a role for the public to bring their voice to bear as well.So if we kind of circle back now to 2030 again, that imagined story, and depending on the decisions we make, again, today — literally we don't have a lot of time — in the next few months, the next year or so, because this technology is spreading like wildfire. Let's pretend we're back in that reality. We're at a park, and our kid is swinging on the swing. Is that kid a regular old kid, or did we decide to have a designer baby? And let's say we went the sort of traditional route, and there's our kid swinging on the swing, and frankly, they're kind of a mess. Their hair is all over the place like mine. They have a stuffy nose. They're not the best student in the world. They're adorable, you love them, but there on the swing next to them, their best friend is a GM kid, and the two of them are kind of swinging like this, and you can't help but compare them, right? And the GM kid is swinging higher, they look better, they're a better student, they don't have that stuffy nose you need to wipe. How is that going to make you feel and what decision might you make next time?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_knoepfler_the_ethical_dilemma_of_designer_babies
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"I'm a relationship builder. When you think of a relationship builder, don't you just automatically think ""architect?"" Probably not. That's because most people think architects design buildings and cities, but what we really design are relationships, because cities are about people. They're places where people come together for all kinds of exchange. And besides, skylines are highly specific urban habitats with their own insects, plants and animals, and even their own weather.But today, urban habitats are out of balance. Climate change, together with political and economic troubles, are having an impact; they're adding up and stressing out cities and us, the people who live in them.For me, the field of ecology has provided important insight, because ecologists don't just look at individual species on their own, they look at the relationships between living things and their environment. They look at how all the diverse parts of the ecosystem are interconnected, and it's actually this balance, this web of life, that sustains life. My team and I have been applying insights from ecology to architecture to see how physical space can help build stronger relationships. The projects I'm going to show you today use the idea of building relationships as the key driver for design.Here's an example of what I mean. Recently, we were asked to design a center for social justice leadership called the Arcus Center. They asked us for a building that could break down traditional barriers between different groups and in doing so, create possibilities for meaningful conversations around social justice. The students wanted a place for cultural exchange. They thought a place for preparing food together could do that. And they wanted to be welcoming to the outside community. They thought a fireplace could draw people in and help start conversations. And everybody wanted the work of social justice to be visible to the outside world. There really wasn't a precedent for this kind of space, so we looked around the globe and found examples of community meeting houses. Community meeting houses are places where there's very specific relationships between people, like this one in Mali, where the elders gather. The low roof keeps everybody seated and at equal eye level. It's very egalitarian. I mean, you can't stand up and take over the meeting. You'd actually bump your head.(Laughter)In meeting houses, there's always a central space where you can sit around a circle and see each other. So we designed a space just like that right in the middle of the Arcus Center, and we anchored it with a fireplace and a kitchen. It's pretty hard to get a kitchen and a fireplace in a building like this with the building codes, but it was so important to the concept, we got it done. And now the central space works for big social gatherings and a place to meet one-on-one for the very first time. It's almost like this three-way intersection that encourages bumping into people and starting a conversation. Now you can always pass the kitchen and see something going on. You can sit by the fireplace and share stories. You can study together in big groups or in small ones, because the architecture sets up these opportunities.Even the construction is about building relationships. It's made of cordwood masonry, which is using logs the way you would use bricks. It's super low-tech and easy to do and anyone can do it — and that's the entire point. The act of making is a social activity.And it's good for the planet, too: the trees absorbed carbon when they were growing up, and they gave off oxygen, and now that carbon is trapped inside the walls and it's not being released into the atmosphere. So making the walls is equivalent to taking cars right off the road. We chose the building method because it connects people to each other and to the environment.But is it working? Is it creating relationships and nurturing them? How can we know? Well, more and more people are coming here, for one, and as a result of the fireside chats and a full calendar of programming, people are applying for the Arcus Fellowships. In fact, applications have increased tenfold for the Arcus Fellowship since the building opened. It's working. It's bringing people together.So I've shown how architecture can connect people on this kind of horizontal campus scale. But we wondered if social relationships could be scaled up — or rather, upward — in tall buildings. Tall buildings don't necessarily lend themselves to being social buildings. They can seem isolating and inward. You might only see people in those awkward elevator rides. But in several major cities, I've been designing tall buildings that are based on creating relationships between people.This is Aqua. It's a residential high-rise in Chicago aimed at young urban professionals and empty nesters, many of them new to the city. With over 700 apartments, we wanted to see if we could use architecture to help people get to know their neighbors, even when their homes are organized in the vertical dimension. So we invented a way to use balconies as the new social connectors. The shapes of the floor slabs vary slightly and they transition as you go up the tower. The result of this is that you can actually see people from your balcony. The balconies are misregistered. You can lean over your balcony and say, ""Hey!"" just like you would across the backyard. To make the balconies more comfortable for a longer period of time during the year, we studied the wind with digital simulations, so the effect of the balcony shapes breaks up the wind and confuses the wind and makes the balconies more comfortable and less windy.Now, just by being able to go outside on your balcony or on the third floor roof terrace, you can be connected to the outdoors, even when you're way above the ground plane. So the building acts to create community within the building and the city at the same time. It's working. And people are starting to meet each other on the building surface and we've heard —(Laughter)they've even starting getting together as couples. But besides romantic relationships, the building has a positive social effect on the community, as evidenced by people starting groups together and starting big projects together, like this organic community garden on the building's roof terrace.So I've shown how tall buildings can be social connectors, but what about public architecture? How can we create better social cohesion in public buildings and civic spaces, and why is it important? Public architecture is just not as successful if it comes from the top down.About 15 years ago in Chicago, they started to replace old police stations, and they built this identical model all over the city. And even though they had good intentions of treating all neighborhoods equally, the communities didn't feel invested in the process or feel a sense of ownership of these buildings. It was equality in the sense that everybody gets the same police station, but it wasn't equity in the sense of responding to each community's individual needs. And equity is the key issue here.You know, in my field, there's a debate about whether architecture can even do anything to improve social relationships. But I believe that we need architecture and every tool in our tool kit to improve these relationships. In the US, policy reforms have been recommended in order to rebuild trust. But my team and I wondered if design and a more inclusive design process could help add something positive to this policy conversation. We asked ourselves simply: Can design help rebuild trust?So we reached out to community members and police officers in North Lawndale; it's a neighborhood in Chicago where the police station is perceived as a scary fortress surrounded by a parking lot. In North Lawndale, people are afraid of police and of going anywhere near the police station, even to report a crime. So we organized this brainstorming session with both groups participating, and we came up with this whole new idea for the police station. It's called ""Polis Station."" ""Polis"" is a Greek word that means a place with a sense of community. It's based on the idea that if you can increase opportunities for positive social interactions between police and community members, you can rebuild that relationship and activate the neighborhood at the same time.Instead of the police station as a scary fortress, you get highly active spaces on the public side of the station — places that spark conversation, like a barbershop, a coffee shop or sports courts as well. Both cops and kids said they love sports. These insights came directly from the community members and the police officers themselves, and as designers, our role was just to connect the dots and suggest the first step. So with the help of the city and the parks, we were able to raise funds and design and build a half-court, right on the police station parking lot.It's a start. But is it rebuilding trust? The people in North Lawndale say the kids are using the courts every day and they even organize tournaments like this one shown here, and once in a while an officer joins in. But now, they even have basketballs inside the station that kids can borrow. And recently they've asked us to expand the courts and build a park on the site. And parents report something astonishing. Before, there was fear of going anywhere the station, and now they say there's a sense that the court is safer than other courts nearby, and they prefer their kids to play here.So maybe in the future, on the public side of the station, you might be able to drop in for a haircut at the barbershop or reserve the community room for a birthday party or renew your driver's license or get money out of an ATM. It can be a place for neighbors to meet each other and to get to know the officers, and vice versa. This is not a utopian fantasy. It's about how do you design to rebuild trust, trusting relationships?You know, every city has parks, libraries, schools and other public buildings that have the potential to be reimagined as social connectors. But reimagining the buildings for the future is going to require engaging the people who live there. Engaging the public can be intimidating, and I've felt that, too. But maybe that's because in architecture school, we don't really learn how to engage the public in the act of design. We're taught to defend our design against criticism. But I think that can change, too.So if we can focus the design mind on creating positive, reinforcing relationships in architecture and through architecture, I believe we can do much more than create individual buildings. We can reduce the stress and the polarization in our urban habitats. We can create relationships. We can help steady this planet we all share.See? Architects really are relationship builders.(Laughter)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeanne_gang_buildings_that_blend_nature_and_city
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"Cybercrime is out of control. It's everywhere. We hear about it every single day. This year, over two billion records lost or stolen. And last year, 100 million of us, mostly Americans, lost our health insurance data to thieves — myself included. What's particularly concerning about this is that in most cases, it was months before anyone even reported that these records were stolen.So if you watch the evening news, you would think that most of this is espionage or nation-state activity. And, well, some of it is. Espionage, you see, is an accepted international practice. But in this case, it is only a small portion of the problem that we're dealing with. How often do we hear about a breach followed by, ""... it was the result of a sophisticated nation-state attack?"" Well, often that is companies not being willing to own up to their own lackluster security practices. There is also a widely held belief that by blaming an attack on a nation-state, you are putting regulators at bay — at least for a period of time.So where is all of this coming from? The United Nations estimates that 80 percent of it is from highly organized and ultrasophisticated criminal gangs. To date, this represents one of the largest illegal economies in the world, topping out at, now get this, 445 billion dollars. Let me put that in perspective for all of you: 445 billion dollars is larger than the GDP of 160 nations, including Ireland, Finland, Denmark and Portugal, to name a few.So how does this work? How do these criminals operate? Well, let me tell you a little story. About a year ago, our security researchers were tracking a somewhat ordinary but sophisticated banking Trojan called the Dyre Wolf. The Dyre Wolf would get on your computer via you clicking on a link in a phishing email that you probably shouldn't have. It would then sit and wait. It would wait until you logged into your bank account. And when you did, the bad guys would reach in, steal your credentials, and then use that to steal your money. This sounds terrible, but the reality is, in the security industry, this form of attack is somewhat commonplace. However, the Dyre Wolf had two distinctly different personalities — one for these small transactions, but it took on an entirely different persona if you were in the business of moving large-scale wire transfers.Here's what would happen. You start the process of issuing a wire transfer, and up in your browser would pop a screen from your bank, indicating that there's a problem with your account, and that you need to call the bank immediately, along with the number to the bank's fraud department. So you pick up the phone and you call. And after going through the normal voice prompts, you're met with an English-speaking operator. ""Hello, Altoro Mutual Bank. How can I help you?"" And you go through the process like you do every time you call your bank, of giving them your name and your account number, going through the security checks to verify you are who you said you are. Most of us may not know this, but in many large-scale wire transfers, it requires two people to sign off on the wire transfer, so the operator then asks you to get the second person on the line, and goes through the same set of verifications and checks.Sounds normal, right? Only one problem: you're not talking to the bank. You're talking to the criminals. They had built an English-speaking help desk, fake overlays to the banking website. And this was so flawlessly executed that they were moving between a half a million and a million and a half dollars per attempt into their criminal coffers.These criminal organizations operate like highly regimented, legitimate businesses. Their employees work Monday through Friday. They take the weekends off. How do we know this? We know this because our security researchers see repeated spikes of malware on a Friday afternoon. The bad guys, after a long weekend with the wife and kids, come back in to see how well things went.The Dark Web is where they spend their time. That is a term used to describe the anonymous underbelly of the internet, where thieves can operate with anonymity and without detection. Here they peddle their attack software and share information on new attack techniques. You can buy everything there, from a base-level attack to a much more advanced version. In fact, in many cases, you even see gold, silver and bronze levels of service. You can check references. You can even buy attacks that come with a money-back guarantee —(Laughter)if you're not successful. Now, these environments, these marketplaces — they look like an Amazon or an eBay. You see products, prices, ratings and reviews. Of course, if you're going to buy an attack, you're going to buy from a reputable criminal with good ratings, right?(Laughter)This isn't any different than checking on Yelp or TripAdvisor before going to a new restaurant. So, here is an example. This is an actual screenshot of a vendor selling malware. Notice they're a vendor level four, they have a trust level of six. They've had 400 positive reviews in the last year, and only two negative reviews in the last month. We even see things like licensing terms. Here's an example of a site you can go to if you want to change your identity. They will sell you a fake ID, fake passports. But note the legally binding terms for purchasing your fake ID. Give me a break. What are they going to do — sue you if you violate them?(Laughter)This occurred a couple of months ago. One of our security researchers was looking at a new Android malware application that we had discovered. It was called Bilal Bot. In a blog post, she positioned Bilal Bot as a new, inexpensive and beta alternative to the much more advanced GM Bot that was commonplace in the criminal underground.This review did not sit well with the authors of Bilal Bot. So they wrote her this very email, pleading their case and making the argument that they felt she had evaluated an older version. They asked her to please update her blog with more accurate information and even offered to do an interview to describe to her in detail how their attack software was now far better than the competition.So look, you don't have to like what they do, but you do have to respect the entrepreneurial nature of their endeavors.(Laughter)So how are we going to stop this? It's not like we're going to be able to identify who's responsible — remember, they operate with anonymity and outside the reach of the law. We're certainly not going to be able to prosecute the offenders. I would propose that we need a completely new approach. And that approach needs to be centered on the idea that we need to change the economics for the bad guys.And to give you a perspective on how this can work, let's think of the response we see to a healthcare pandemic: SARS, Ebola, bird flu, Zika. What is the top priority? It's knowing who is infected and how the disease is spreading. Now, governments, private institutions, hospitals, physicians — everyone responds openly and quickly. This is a collective and altruistic effort to stop the spread in its tracks and to inform anyone not infected how to protect or inoculate themselves.Unfortunately, this is not at all what we see in response to a cyber attack. Organizations are far more likely to keep information on that attack to themselves. Why? Because they're worried about competitive advantage, litigation or regulation. We need to effectively democratize threat intelligence data. We need to get all of these organizations to open up and share what is in their private arsenal of information. The bad guys are moving fast; we've got to move faster. And the best way to do that is to open up and share data on what's happening.Let's think about this in the construct of security professionals. Remember, they're programmed right into their DNA to keep secrets. We've got to turn that thinking on its head. We've got to get governments, private institutions and security companies willing to share information at speed. And here's why: because if you share the information, it's equivalent to inoculation. And if you're not sharing, you're actually part of the problem, because you're increasing the odds that other people could be impacted by the same attack techniques.But there's an even bigger benefit. By destroying criminals' devices closer to real time, we break their plans. We inform the people they aim to hurt far sooner than they had ever anticipated. We ruin their reputations, we crush their ratings and reviews. We make cybercrime not pay. We change the economics for the bad guys. But to do this, a first mover was required — someone to change the thinking in the security industry overall.About a year ago, my colleagues and I had a radical idea. What if IBM were to take our data — we had one of the largest threat intelligence databases in the world — and open it up? It had information not just on what had happened in the past, but what was happening in near-real time. What if we were to publish it all openly on the internet? As you can imagine, this got quite a reaction. First came the lawyers: What are the legal implications of doing that? Then came the business: What are the business implications of doing that? And this was also met with a good dose of a lot of people just asking if we were completely crazy.But there was one conversation that kept floating to the surface in every dialogue that we would have: the realization that if we didn't do this, then we were part of the problem. So we did something unheard of in the security industry. We started publishing. Over 700 terabytes of actionable threat intelligence data, including information on real-time attacks that can be used to stop cybercrime in its tracks. And to date, over 4,000 organizations are leveraging this data, including half of the Fortune 100. And our hope as a next step is to get all of those organizations to join us in the fight, and do the same thing and share their information on when and how they're being attacked as well.We all have the opportunity to stop it, and we already all know how. All we have to do is look to the response that we see in the world of health care, and how they respond to a pandemic. Simply put, we need to be open and collaborative.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caleb_barlow_where_is_cybercrime_really_coming_from
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"When I was a child, I knew I had superpowers. That's right.(Laughter)I thought I was absolutely amazing because I could understand and relate to the feelings of brown people, like my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy. And also, I could understand my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father, not so religious but laid-back, fairly liberal. And of course, I could understand and relate to the feelings of white people. The white Norwegians of my country. You know, white, brown, whatever — I loved them all. I understood them all, even if they didn't always understand each other; they were all my people.My father, though, was always really worried. He kept saying that even with the best education, I was not going to get a fair shake. I would still face discrimination, according to him. And that the only way to be accepted by white people would be to become famous. Now, mind you, he had this conversation with me when I was seven years old. So while I'm seven years old, he said, ""Look, so it's either got to be sports, or it's got to be music."" He didn't know anything about sports — bless him — so it was music. So when I was seven years old, he gathered all my toys, all my dolls, and he threw them all away. In exchange he gave me a crappy little Casio keyboard and —(Laughter)Yeah. And singing lessons. And he forced me, basically, to practice for hours and hours every single day. Very quickly, he also had me performing for larger and larger audiences, and bizarrely, I became almost a kind of poster child for Norwegian multiculturalism. I felt very proud, of course. Because even the newspapers at this point were starting to write nice things about brown people, so I could feel that my superpower was growing.So when I was 12 years old, walking home from school, I took a little detour because I wanted to buy my favorite sweets called ""salty feet."" I know they sound kind of awful, but I absolutely love them. They're basically these little salty licorice bits in the shape of feet. And now that I say it out loud, I realize how terrible that sounds, but be that as it may, I absolutely love them. So on my way into the store, there was this grown white guy in the doorway blocking my way. So I tried to walk around him, and as I did that, he stopped me and he was staring at me, and he spit in my face, and he said, ""Get out of my way you little black bitch, you little Paki bitch, go back home where you came from."" I was absolutely horrified. I was staring at him. I was too afraid to wipe the spit off my face, even as it was mixing with my tears. I remember looking around, hoping that any minute now, a grown-up is going to come and make this guy stop. But instead, people kept hurrying past me and pretended not to see me. I was very confused because I was thinking, well, ""My white people, come on! Where are they? What's going on? How come they're not coming and rescuing me?"" So, needless to say, I didn't buy the sweets. I just ran home as fast as I could.Things were still OK, though, I thought. As time went on, the more successful I became, I eventually started also attracting harassment from brown people. Some men in my parent's community felt that it was unacceptable and dishonorable for a woman to be involved in music and to be so present in the media. So very quickly, I was starting to become attacked at my own concerts. I remember one of the concerts, I was onstage, I lean into the audience and the last thing I see is a young brown face, and the next thing I know is some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes and I remember I couldn't really see and my eyes were watering but I kept singing anyway. I was spit in the face in the streets of Oslo, this time by brown men. They even tried to kidnap me at one point. The death threats were endless. I remember one older bearded guy stopped me in the street one time, and he said, ""The reason I hate you so much is because you make our daughters think they can do whatever they want."" A younger guy warned me to watch my back. He said music is un-Islamic and the job of whores, and if you keep this up, you are going to be raped and your stomach will be cut out so that another whore like you will not be born.Again, I was so confused. I couldn't understand what was going on. My brown people now starting to treat me like this — how come? Instead of bridging the worlds, the two worlds, I felt like I was falling between my two worlds. I suppose, for me, spit was kryptonite.So by the time I was 17 years old, the death threats were endless, and the harassment was constant. It got so bad, at one point my mother sat me down and said, ""Look, we can no longer protect you, we can no longer keep you safe, so you're going to have to go."" So I bought a one-way ticket to London, I packed my suitcase and I left. My biggest heartbreak at that point was that nobody said anything. I had a very public exit from Norway. My brown people, my white people — nobody said anything. Nobody said, ""Hold on, this is wrong. Support this girl, protect this girl, because she is one of us."" Nobody said that. Instead, I felt like — you know at the airport, on the baggage carousel you have these different suitcases going around and around, and there's always that one suitcase left at the end, the one that nobody wants, the one that nobody comes to claim. I felt like that. I'd never felt so alone. I'd never felt so lost.So, after coming to London, I did eventually resume my music career. Different place, but unfortunately the same old story. I remember a message sent to me saying that I was going to be killed and that rivers of blood were going to flow and that I was going to be raped many times before I died. By this point, I have to say, I was actually getting used to messages like this, but what became different was that now they started threatening my family.So once again, I packed my suitcase, I left music and I moved to the US. I'd had enough. I didn't want to have anything to do with this anymore. And I was certainly not going to be killed for something that wasn't even my dream — it was my father's choice.So I kind of got lost. I kind of fell apart. But I decided that what I wanted to do is spend the next however many years of my life supporting young people and to try to be there in some small way, whatever way that I could. I started volunteering for various organizations that were working with young Muslims inside of Europe. And, to my surprise, what I found was so many of these young people were suffering and struggling. They were facing so many problems with their families and their communities who seemed to care more about their honor and their reputation than the happiness and the lives of their own kids. I started feeling like maybe I wasn't so alone, maybe I wasn't so weird. Maybe there are more of my people out there.The thing is, what most people don't understand is that there are so many of us growing up in Europe who are not free to be ourselves. We're not allowed to be who we are. We are not free to marry or to be in relationships with people that we choose. We can't even pick our own career. This is the norm in the Muslim heartlands of Europe. Even in the freest societies in the world, we're not free. Our lives, our dreams, our future does not belong to us, it belongs to our parents and their community. I found endless stories of young people who are lost to all of us, who are invisible to all of us but who are suffering, and they are suffering alone. Kids we are losing to forced marriages, to honor-based violence and abuse.Eventually, I realized after several years of working with these young people, that I will not be able to keep running. I can't spend the rest of my life being scared and hiding and that I'm actually going to have to do something. And I also realized that my silence, our silence, allows abuse like this to continue. So I decided that I wanted to put my childhood superpower to some use by trying to make people on the different sides of these issues understand what it's like to be a young person stuck between your family and your country.So I started making films, and I started telling these stories. And I also wanted people to understand the deadly consequences of us not taking these problems seriously.So the first film I made was about Banaz. She was a 17-year-old Kurdish girl in London. She was obedient, she did whatever her parents wanted. She tried to do everything right. She married some guy that her parents chose for her, even though he beat and raped her constantly. And when she tried to go to her family for help, they said, ""Well, you got to go back and be a better wife."" Because they didn't want a divorced daughter on their hands because, of course, that would bring dishonor on the family. She was beaten so badly her ears would bleed, and when she finally left and she found a young man that she chose and she fell in love with, the community and the family found out and she disappeared. She was found three months later. She'd been stuffed into a suitcase and buried underneath the house. She had been strangled, she had been beaten to death by three men, three cousins, on the orders of her father and uncle. The added tragedy of Banaz's story is that she had gone to the police in England five times asking for help, telling them that she was going to be killed by her family. The police didn't believe her so they didn't do anything.And the problem with this is that not only are so many of our kids facing these problems within their families and within their families' communities, but they're also meeting misunderstandings and apathy in the countries that they grow up in. When their own families betray them, they look to the rest of us, and when we don't understand, we lose them.So while I was making this film, several people said to me, ""Well, Deeyah, you know, this is just their culture, this is just what those people do to their kids and we can't really interfere."" I can assure you being murdered is not my culture. You know? And surely people who look like me, young women who come from backgrounds like me, should be subject to the same rights, the same protections as anybody else in our country, why not?So, for my next film, I wanted to try and understand why some of our young Muslim kids in Europe are drawn to extremism and violence. But with that topic, I also recognized that I was going to have to face my worst fear: the brown men with beards. The same men, or similar men, to the ones that have hounded me for most of my life. Men that I've been afraid of most of my life. Men that I've also deeply disliked, for many, many years.So I spent the next two years interviewing convicted terrorists, jihadis and former extremists. What I already knew, what was very obvious already, was that religion, politics, Europe's colonial baggage, also Western foreign policy failures of recent years, were all a part of the picture. But what I was more interested in finding out was what are the human, what are the personal reasons why some of our young people are susceptible to groups like this. And what really surprised me was that I found wounded human beings. Instead of the monsters that I was looking for, that I was hoping to find — quite frankly because it would have been very satisfying — I found broken people. Just like Banaz, I found that these young men were torn apart from trying to bridge the gaps between their families and the countries that they were born in. And what I also learned is that extremist groups, terrorist groups are taking advantage of these feelings of our young people and channeling that — cynically — channeling that toward violence. ""Come to us,"" they say. ""Reject both sides, your family and your country because they reject you. For your family, their honor is more important than you and for your country, a real Norwegian, Brit or a French person will always be white and never you."" They're also promising our young people the things that they crave: significance, heroism, a sense of belonging and purpose, a community that loves and accepts them. They make the powerless feel powerful. The invisible and the silent are finally seen and heard. This is what they're doing for our young people. Why are these groups doing this for our young people and not us?The thing is, I'm not trying to justify or excuse any of the violence. What I am trying to say is that we have to understand why some of our young people are attracted to this. I would like to also show you, actually — these are childhood photos of some of the guys in the film. What really struck me is that so many of them — I never would have thought this — but so many of them have absent or abusive fathers. And several of these young guys ended up finding caring and compassionate father figures within these extremist groups. I also found men brutalized by racist violence, but who found a way to stop feeling like victims by becoming violent themselves. In fact, I found something, to my horror, that I recognized. I found the same feelings that I felt as a 17-year-old as I fled from Norway. The same confusion, the same sorrow, the same feeling of being betrayed and not belonging to anyone. The same feeling of being lost and torn between cultures.Having said that, I did not choose destruction, I chose to pick up a camera instead of a gun. And the reason I did that is because of my superpower. I could see that understanding is the answer, instead of violence. Seeing human beings with all their virtues and all their flaws instead of continuing the caricatures: the us and them, the villains and victims. I'd also finally come to terms with the fact that my two cultures didn't have to be on a collision course but instead became a space where I found my own voice. I stopped feeling like I had to pick a side, but this took me many, many years. There are so many of our young people today who are struggling with these same issues, and they're struggling with this alone. And this leaves them open like wounds. And for some, the worldview of radical Islam becomes the infection that festers in these open wounds.There's an African proverb that says, ""If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth."" I would like to ask — to Muslim parents and Muslim communities, will you love and care for your children without forcing them to meet your expectations? Can you choose them instead of your honor? Can you understand why they're so angry and alienated when you put your honor before their happiness? Can you try to be a friend to your child so that they can trust you and want to share with you their experiences, rather than having to seek it somewhere else?And to our young people tempted by extremism, can you acknowledge that your rage is fueled by pain? Will you find the strength to resist those cynical old men who want to use your blood for their own profits? Can you find a way to live? Can you see that the sweetest revenge is for you to live a happy, full and free life? A life defined by you and nobody else. Why do you want to become just another dead Muslim kid? And for the rest of us, when will we start listening to our young people? How can we support them in redirecting their pain into something more constructive? They think we don't like them. They think we don't care what happens to them. They think we don't accept them. Can we find a way to make them feel differently? What will it take for us to see them and notice them before they become either the victims or the perpetrators of violence? Can we make ourselves care about them and consider them to be our own? And not just be outraged when the victims of violence look like ourselves? Can we find a way to reject hatred and heal the divisions between us? The thing is we cannot afford to give up on each other or on our kids, even if they've given up on us.We are all in this together. And in the long term, revenge and violence will not work against extremists. Terrorists want us to huddle in our houses in fear, closing our doors and our hearts. They want us to tear open more wounds in our societies so that they can use them to spread their infection more widely. They want us to become like them: intolerant, hateful and cruel.The day after the Paris attacks, a friend of mine sent this photo of her daughter. This is a white girl and an Arab girl. They're best friends. This image is the kryptonite for extremists. These two little girls with their superpowers are showing the way forward towards a society that we need to build together, a society that includes and supports, rather than rejects our kids.Thank you for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deeyah_khan_what_we_don_t_know_about_europe_s_muslim_kids
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"Every summer, my family and I travel across the world, 3,000 miles away to the culturally diverse country of India. Now, India is a country infamous for its scorching heat and humidity. For me, the only relief from this heat is to drink plenty of water. Now, while in India, my parents always remind me to only drink boiled or bottled water, because unlike here in America, where I can just turn on a tap and easily get clean, potable water, in India, the water is often contaminated. So my parents have to make sure that the water we drink is safe.However, I soon realized that not everyone is fortunate enough to enjoy the clean water we did. Outside my grandparents' house in the busy streets of India, I saw people standing in long lines under the hot sun filling buckets with water from a tap. I even saw children, who looked the same age as me, filling up these clear plastic bottles with dirty water from streams on the roadside. Watching these kids forced to drink water that I felt was too dirty to touch changed my perspective on the world. This unacceptable social injustice compelled me to want to find a solution to our world's clean water problem. I wanted to know why these kids lacked water, a substance that is essential for life. And I learned that we are facing a global water crisis.Now, this may seem surprising, as 75 percent of our planet is covered in water, but only 2.5 percent of that is freshwater, and less than one percent of Earth's freshwater supply is available for human consumption. With rising populations, industrial development and economic growth, our demand for clean water is increasing, yet our freshwater resources are rapidly depleting. According to the World Health Organization, 660 million people in our world lack access to a clean water source. Lack of access to clean water is a leading cause of death in children under the age of five in developing countries, and UNICEF estimates that 3,000 children die every day from a water-related disease.So after returning home one summer in eighth grade, I decided that I wanted to combine my passion for solving the global water crisis with my interest in science. So I decided that the best thing to do would be to convert my garage into a laboratory.(Laughter)Actually, at first I converted my kitchen into a laboratory, but my parents didn't really approve and kicked me out.I also read a lot of journal papers on water-related research, and I learned that currently in developing countries, something called solar disinfection, or SODIS, is used to purify water. In SODIS, clear plastic bottles are filled with contaminated water and then exposed to sunlight for six to eight hours. The UV radiation from the sun destroys the DNA of these harmful pathogens and decontaminates the water. Now, while SODIS is really easy to use and energy-efficient, as it only uses solar energy, it's really slow, as it can take up to two days when it's cloudy. So in order to make the SODIS process faster, this new method called photocatalysis has recently been used.So what exactly is this photocatalysis? Let's break it down: ""photo"" means from the sun, and a catalyst is something that speeds up a reaction. So what photocatalysis is doing is it's just speeding up this solar disinfection process. When sunlight comes in and strikes a photocatalyst, like TiO2, or titanium dioxide, it creates these really reactive oxygen species, like superoxides, hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals. These reactive oxygen species are able to remove bacteria and organics and a whole lot of contaminants from drinking water.But unfortunately, there are several disadvantages to the way photocatalytic SODIS is currently deployed. See, what they do is they take the clear plastic bottles and they coat the inside with this photocatalytic coating. But photocatalysts like titanium dioxide are actually commonly used in sunscreens to block UV radiation. So when they're coated on the inside of these bottles, they're actually blocking some of the UV radiation and diminishing the efficiency of the process. Also, these photocatalytic coatings are not tightly bound to the plastic bottle, which means they wash off, and people end up drinking the catalyst. While TiO2 is safe and inert, it's really inefficient if you keep drinking the catalyst, because then you have to continue to replenish it, even after a few uses.So my goal was to overcome the disadvantages of these current treatment methods and create a safe, sustainable, cost-effective and eco-friendly method of purifying water. What started off as an eighth grade science fair project is now my photocatalytic composite for water purification. The composite combines titanium dioxide with cement. The cement-like composite can be formed into several different shapes, which results in an extremely versatile range of deployment methods. For example, you could create a rod that can easily be placed inside water bottles for individual use or you could create a porous filter that can filter water for families. You can even coat the inside of an existing water tank to purify larger amounts of water for communities over a longer period of time.Now, over the course of this, my journey hasn't really been easy. You know, I didn't have access to a sophisticated laboratory. I was 14 years old when I started, but I didn't let my age deter me in my interest in pursuing scientific research and wanting to solve the global water crisis.See, water isn't just the universal solvent. Water is a universal human right. And for that reason, I'm continuing to work on this science fair project from 2012 to bring it from the laboratory into the real world. And this summer, I founded Catalyst for World Water, a social enterprise aimed at catalyzing solutions to the global water crisis.(Applause)Alone, a single drop of water can't do much, but when many drops come together, they can sustain life on our planet. Just as water drops come together to form oceans, I believe that we all must come together when tackling this global problem.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deepika_kurup_a_young_scientist_s_quest_for_clean_water
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"As an archaeologist, I'm most often asked what my favorite discovery is. The answer's easy: my husband, Greg.(Laughter)We met in Egypt on my first dig. It was my first lesson in finding unexpected, wonderful things. This began an incredible archaeological partnership. Years later, I proposed to him in front of our favorite pair statue of the Prince and Princess Rahotep and Nofret, in the Cairo Museum, dating to 4,600 years ago.I thought if I was going to ask Greg to spend the rest of this life with me, then I should ask him in front of two people who had pledged to be together for eternity. These symbols endure because when we look at them, we're looking at mirrors. They are powerful reminders that our common humanity has not changed.The thrill of archaeological discovery is as powerful as love, because ancient history is the most seductive mistress imaginable. Many archaeologists have devoted their lives to unraveling the mysteries of the past under hot suns and Arctic winds and in dense rainforests. Many seek. Some discover. All worship at the temple of possibility that one discovery might change history.On my first day in Egypt, I worked at a site in the Northeast Egyptian Delta called Mendes, dating to 4,200 years ago, in a cemetery. That's a picture of me — I'm just in my bliss. On the dig, surrounded by emerald green rice paddies, I discovered an intact pot. Flipping it over, I discovered a human thumbprint left by whoever made the vessel. For a moment, time stood still. I didn't know where I was. It was because at that moment I realized, when we dig, we're digging for people, not things.Never are we so present as when we are in the midst of the great past. I can't tell you how many times I've stood in front of the Pyramids of Giza, and they leave me speechless. I feel like the luckiest person in the world. They're a monument to our human brilliance and everything that is possible. Many cannot process their brilliance as human — they think aliens built them. But this is ridiculous. All you need to do is get up close and personal, and see the hidden hand of man in the chisel marks left by the tools that built them. The Great Pyramid of Giza was built one stone at a time with 2.3 million blocks, with incredible bureaucratic efficiency. It is not the pyramids that stand the test of time; it is human ingenuity. That is our shared human brilliance. History may be cyclical, but we are singular.I love what I do, because I learn that we haven't changed. I get to read about mother-in-law jokes from Mesopotamia from 3,500 years ago.(Laughter)I get to hear about neighbors cursing each other from 4,600 years ago in Egypt. And my absolute favorite, from 3,300 years ago in Luxor: an inscription that describes schoolboys who cut class to go drinking.(Laughter)Kids these days.(Laughter)I get to see the most incredible architecture, see stunning sculptures — I mean, this is basically a selfie in stone — and see that we've always rocked serious bling. And also, we've been posting on walls and obsessing about cats —(Laughter)for thousands of years.(Laughter)(Applause)Archaeologists are the cultural memory preservers and the spokespeople for the billions of people and the thousands of cultures that came before us.Good science, imagination and a leap of faith are the trifecta we use to raise the dead. In the last year, archaeologists have made incredible discoveries, including: new human ancestors from South Africa; tools from 3.3 million years ago — these are the oldest tools ever discovered — in Kenya. And this, from a series of medical implements found from Blackbeard's ship from 1718. What you're looking at is a medical tool used to treat syphilis. Ouch!(Laughter)For each of these, there are thousands of other incredibly important discoveries made by my colleagues, that do not make headlines. However, I believe that the most important thing we do as archaeologists is acknowledge that past people existed and lived lives worth learning about. Can you even imagine what the world would be like today if we acknowledged all human beings in this way?So, on a dig, we have a challenge: it often looks like this. You can't see anything. Where are we going to start digging? This is from a site south of Cairo. Let's have a look from space. Again, you can't really see much. What you're looking at is a WorldView-3 satellite image, which has a .3 meter resolution. That's 10 inches. This means that you can zoom in from 400 miles in space and see your tablets. How do I know about this? It's because I'm a space archaeologist. Let me repeat that. I am a space archaeologist. This means —(Applause)Thank you.This means I use satellite images and process them using algorithms, and look at subtle differences in the light spectrum that indicate buried things under the ground that I get to go excavate and survey. By the way — NASA has a Space Archaeology program, so it's a real job.(Laughter)So, let's have a look again. We're back at the site just south of Cairo. You can't see anything. Keep your eye on the red rectangle. When we process the image using algorithms — think like a space-based CAT scan — this is what you see. This rectilinear form is an ancient tomb that is previously unknown and unexcavated, and you all are the first people to see it in thousands of years.(Applause)I believe we have barely scratched the surface in terms of what's left to discover. In the Egyptian Delta alone, we've excavated less than one-1000th of one percent of the total volume of Egyptian sites. When you add to that the thousands of other sites my team and I have discovered, what we thought we knew pales in comparison to what we have left to discover. When you look at the incredible work that my colleagues are doing all around the world and what they're finding, I believe that there are millions of undiscovered archaeological sites left to find. Discovering them will do nothing less than unlock the full potential of our existence.But we have a challenge. Over the last year, we've seen horrible headlines of incredible destruction going on to archaeological sites, and massive looting by people like ISIL. ISIL has destroyed temples at Palmyra. Who blows up a temple? They've destroyed the Tomb of Jonah. And we've seen looting at sites so rampant, it looks like craters of the moon. Knowing ISIL's desire to destroy modern human lives, it's a natural extension for them to destroy cultural identity as well. Countless invading armies have done the same throughout history.We know that ISIL is profiting from the looting of sites, but we don't know the scale. This means that any object purchased on the market today from the Middle East could potentially be funding terrorism. When a site is looted, it's as if a puzzle already missing 90 percent of it pieces has had the rest obscured beyond recognition. This is ancient identity theft writ large. We know that there are two kinds of looting going on: looting by criminal elements like ISIL, and then more local looting by those that are desperate for money. We would all do the same to feed our families; I don't blame the local looters. I blame the middlemen, the unethical traffickers and an international art market that exploits often ambiguous or even completely nonexistent laws.We know looting is going on on a global scale and it's increasing, but presently we don't have any tools to stop it. This is beginning to change. My team and I have just completed a study looking at looting in Egypt. We looked at open-source data and mapped the entirety of looting across Egypt from 2002 to 2013. We found evidence of looting and site destruction at 267 sites, and mapped over 200,000 looting pits. It's astonishing. And putting that data together — you can see the looting pits marked here. At one site, the looting got bad from 2009, 2011, 2012 — hundreds and hundreds of pits.Putting all the data together, what we found is that, contrary to popular opinion, looting did not start to get worse in Egypt in 2011 after the Arab Spring, but in 2009, after the global recession. Thus, we've shown with big data that looting is fundamentally an economic issue. If we do nothing to stop the problem, all of Egypt's sites will be affected by looting by 2040. Thus, we are at a tipping point. We are the generation with all the tools and all the technologies to stop looting, but we're not working fast enough.Sometimes an archaeological site can surprise you with its resilience. I am just back from the field, where I co-led a joint mission with Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities at a site called Lisht. This site dates to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt between 2,000 and 1,750 BC. The Middle Kingdom was Ancient Egypt's Renaissance period. After a time of intense internal strife and environmental challenges, Egypt rebounded with an incredible resurgence of art, architecture and literature. It's a favorite period of time to study in Egypt, because it teaches us so much about how we can survive and thrive after great disasters.Now at this site, we had already mapped countless looting pits. Lisht is a royal site; there would have been thousands of people buried there who lived and worked at the court of Pharaoh. You can see this before and after; you see dozens of looting pits. North Lisht. This is in South Lisht, before and after. When we first visited the site, we could see the tombs of many high-ranking officials that had been looted. Let me put into perspective for you what was taken. Imagine a two meter by two meter area full of coffins, jewelry and incredible statuary. Multiply that times over a thousand. That's what was taken.So, when we started work, my Egyptian co-director, Mohamed Youssef, approached me and said, ""We must work at this one particular tomb. It's been attacked by looters. If we don't do anything, they'll be back."" Of course I agreed, but I didn't think we'd find anything. I thought the looters had stolen everything. What we started to find were the most incredible reliefs. Look at this painting — it's just stunning. We started finding engraved inscriptions. And even the titles of the tomb owner — he had titles like, ""Overseer of the Army,"" ""Overseer of the Treasury."" I began to have hope. Maybe, just maybe we would find his name. For the ancient Egyptians, having their name last for eternity was their goal. And then one day, this appeared. This is the name of the tomb owner: Intef. You can see it written out here, in hieroglyphs. Working together with my Egyptian team, we had restored someone's name from 3,900 years ago.(Applause)Working together with my Egyptian colleagues, we celebrated this moment of shared discovery. What we were doing together was right and true. We found this incredible false door, mostly intact. On it we read about Intef and his inscriptions. You can actually even see him seated here. What I realized is that everything I had assumed about looted sites had been proven wrong.Every day on site we worked together with 70 Egyptians as colleagues and friends. In the face of so much hatred and ignorance against those in the Middle East, every moment on site felt like a protest for peace. When you work with those that don't look like you, or think like you, or speak like you, your shared mission of archaeological discovery erases all superficial differences. What I learned this season is that archaeology isn't about what you find. It's about what you can prove possible.Sometimes when you travel, you end up finding long-lost family — not those with whom you share genes, but a shared entry in the book of life. This is Omer Farrouk, my brother. Omer's a Gufti from a village just North of Luxor, called Guft. Guftis are part of a celebrated tradition in Egyptology. They help with digging and work crew organization. Omer is my COO and CFO. I simply couldn't do work without him. One day many years ago, when I was a young graduate student and Omer was a young Gufti who couldn't speak much English, we learned, completely randomly, that we were born in the same year, the same month and the same day, six hours apart. Twins.(Laughter)Separated by an ocean, but forever connected for Ancient Egypt is our mother. I knew then we'd always work together — not in my brain, but in the part of your soul that knows not everything can be explained.(Arabic) Omer by brother, I will always love you.(English) Omer my brother, I will always love you.So, just before my first dig in Egypt, my mentor, the very famous Egyptologist Professor William Kelly Simpson, called me into his office. He handed me a check for $2,000, and said, ""This is to cover your expenses. Have a glorious adventure this summer. Someday you will do this for someone else."" Thus, my TED Prize wish is partial payback, plus interest —(Laughter)for a great human being's generosity and kindness.So, my wish. I wish for us to discover the millions of unknown archaeological sites around the world. By creating a 21st-century army of global explorers, we'll find and protect the world's hidden heritage, which contains clues to humankind's collective resilience and creativity.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)So how are we going to do this? We are going to build with the TED Prize money an online, crowdsource, citizen science platform to allow anyone in the world to engage with discovering archaeological sites. There are only a couple hundred of us space archaeologists around the world. It is my dream to engage the world with helping to find sites and protect them. What you'll do is sign in, create a username — note that this particular username is already taken.(Laughter)You'll take a tutorial and you'll start work. I want to note at the outset that in no way will be sharing GPS data or mapping data for sites. We want to treat them like human patient data, and not reveal their locations. You'll then be dealt a card from a deck — 20 x 20 meters or 30 x 30 meters, and you'll be looking for features. My team and I will have batch-processed large amounts of satellite data using algorithms in order for you to find things, so you'll be doing really good science.You'll then be starting to look. What do you see? Do you see a temple? Do you see a tomb? Do you see a pyramid? Do you see any potential site damage or site looting? You'll then begin to mark what's there. And off to the side are always going to be rich examples of exactly what you're seeing, to help guide you. All the data that you help us collect will be shared with vetted authorities, and will help create a new global alarm system to help protect sites. But it's not just going to stop there. All the archaeologists with whom we share your discoveries will take you with them as they begin to excavate them, by using Periscope, Google Plus and social media.A hundred years ago, archaeology was for the rich. Fifty years ago, it was for men. Now it's primarily for academics. Our goal is to democratize the process of archaeological discovery, and allow anyone to participate. Ninety-four years ago, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut. Who is the next Howard Carter? It might be you.By creating this platform, we will find the millions of places occupied by the billions of people that came before us. If we want to answer the big questions about who we are and where we've come from, the answers to those questions do not lie in pyramids or palaces, but in the cities and villages of those that came before us. If we want to learn about the past, it's time we inverted the pyramids. Acknowledging that the past is worth saving means so much more. It means that we're worth saving, too. And the greatest story ever told is the story of our shared human journey. But the only way we're going to be able to write it is if we do it together. Come with me.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_parcak_help_discover_ancient_ruins_before_it_s_too_late
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"Back in 2003, the UK government carried out a survey. And it was a survey that measured levels of numeracy in the population. And they were shocked to find out that for every 100 working age adults in the country, 47 of them lacked Level 1 numeracy skills. Now, Level 1 numeracy skills — that's low-end GCSE score. It's the ability to deal with fractions, percentages and decimals. So this figure prompted a lot of hand-wringing in Whitehall. Policies were changed, investments were made, and then they ran the survey again in 2011. So can you guess what happened to this number? It went up to 49.(Laughter)And in fact, when I reported this figure in the FT, one of our readers joked and said, ""This figure is only shocking to 51 percent of the population.""(Laughter)But I preferred, actually, the reaction of a schoolchild when I presented at a school this information, who raised their hand and said, ""How do we know that the person who made that number isn't one of the 49 percent either?""(Laughter)So clearly, there's a numeracy issue, because these are important skills for life, and a lot of the changes that we want to introduce in this century involve us becoming more comfortable with numbers.Now, it's not just an English problem. OECD this year released some figures looking at numeracy in young people, and leading the way, the USA — nearly 40 percent of young people in the US have low numeracy. Now, England is there too, but there are seven OECD countries with figures above 20 percent. That is a problem, because it doesn't have to be that way. If you look at the far end of this graph, you can see the Netherlands and Korea are in single figures. So there's definitely a numeracy problem that we want to address.Now, as useful as studies like these are, I think we risk herding people inadvertently into one of two categories; that there are two kinds of people: those people that are comfortable with numbers, that can do numbers, and the people who can't. And what I'm trying to talk about here today is to say that I believe that is a false dichotomy. It's not an immutable pairing. I think you don't have to have tremendously high levels of numeracy to be inspired by numbers, and that should be the starting point to the journey ahead.And one of the ways in which we can begin that journey, for me, is looking at statistics. Now, I am the first to acknowledge that statistics has got somewhat of an image problem.(Laughter)It's the part of mathematics that even mathematicians don't particularly like, because whereas the rest of maths is all about precision and certainty, statistics is almost the reverse of that. But actually, I was a late convert to the world of statistics myself. If you'd asked my undergraduate professors what two subjects would I be least likely to excel in after university, they'd have told you statistics and computer programming, and yet here I am, about to show you some statistical graphics that I programmed.So what inspired that change in me? What made me think that statistics was actually an interesting thing? It's really because statistics are about us. If you look at the etymology of the word statistics, it's the science of dealing with data about the state or the community that we live in. So statistics are about us as a group, not us as individuals. And I think as social animals, we share this fascination about how we as individuals relate to our groups, to our peers. And statistics in this way are at their most powerful when they surprise us.And there's been some really wonderful surveys carried out recently by Ipsos MORI in the last few years. They did a survey of over 1,000 adults in the UK, and said, for every 100 people in England and Wales, how many of them are Muslim? Now the average answer from this survey, which was supposed to be representative of the total population, was 24. That's what people thought. British people think 24 out of every 100 people in the country are Muslim. Now, official figures reveal that figure to be about five. So there's this big variation between what we think, our perception, and the reality as given by statistics. And I think that's interesting. What could possibly be causing that misperception?And I was so thrilled with this study, I started to take questions out in presentations. I was referring to it. Now, I did a presentation at St. Paul's School for Girls in Hammersmith, and I had an audience rather like this, except it was comprised entirely of sixth-form girls. And I said, ""Girls, how many teenage girls do you think the British public think get pregnant every year?"" And the girls were apoplectic when I said the British public think that 15 out of every 100 teenage girls get pregnant in the year. And they had every right to be angry, because in fact, I'd have to have closer to 200 dots before I could color one in, in terms of what the official figures tell us.And rather like numeracy, this is not just an English problem. Ipsos MORI expanded the survey in recent years to go across the world. And so, they asked Saudi Arabians, for every 100 adults in your country, how many of them are overweight or obese? And the average answer from the Saudis was just over a quarter. That's what they thought. Just over a quarter of adults are overweight or obese. The official figures show, actually, it's nearer to three-quarters.(Laughter)So again, a big variation.And I love this one: they asked in Japan, they asked the Japanese, for every 100 Japanese people, how many of them live in rural areas? The average was about a 50-50 split, just over halfway. They thought 56 out of every 100 Japanese people lived in rural areas. The official figure is seven.So extraordinary variations, and surprising to some, but not surprising to people who have read the work of Daniel Kahneman, for example, the Nobel-winning economist. He and his colleague, Amos Tversky, spent years researching this disjoint between what people perceive and the reality, the fact that people are actually pretty poor intuitive statisticians. And there are many reasons for this. Individual experiences, certainly, can influence our perceptions, but so, too, can things like the media reporting things by exception, rather than what's normal. Kahneman had a nice way of referring to that. He said, ""We can be blind to the obvious"" — so we've got the numbers wrong — ""but we can be blind to our blindness about it."" And that has enormous repercussions for decision making.So at the statistics office while this was all going on, I thought this was really interesting. I said, this is clearly a global problem, but maybe geography is the issue here. These were questions that were all about, how well do you know your country? So in this case, it's how well do you know 64 million people? Not very well, it turns out. I can't do that. So I had an idea, which was to think about this same sort of approach but to think about it in a very local sense. Is this a local? If we reframe the questions and say, how well do you know your local area, would your answers be any more accurate?So I devised a quiz: How well do you know your area? It's a simple Web app. You put in a post code and then it will ask you questions based on census data for your local area. And I was very conscious in designing this. I wanted to make it open to the widest possible range of people, not just the 49 percent who can get the numbers. I wanted everyone to engage with it. So for the design of the quiz, I was inspired by the isotypes of Otto Neurath from the 1920s and '30s. Now, these are methods for representing numbers using repeating icons. And the numbers are there, but they sit in the background. So it's a great way of representing quantity without resorting to using terms like ""percentage,"" ""fractions"" and ""ratios.""So here's the quiz. The layout of the quiz is, you have your repeating icons on the left-hand side there, and a map showing you the area we're asking you questions about on the right-hand side. There are seven questions. Each question, there's a possible answer between zero and a hundred, and at the end of the quiz, you get an overall score between zero and a hundred. And so because this is TEDxExeter, I thought we would have a quick look at the quiz for the first few questions of Exeter. And so the first question is: For every 100 people, how many are aged under 16? Now, I don't know Exeter very well at all, so I had a guess at this, but it gives you an idea of how this quiz works. You drag the slider to highlight your icons, and then just click ""Submit"" to answer, and we animate away the difference between your answer and reality. And it turns out, I was a pretty terrible guess: five.How about the next question? This is asking about what the average age is, so the age at which half the population are younger and half the population are older. And I thought 35 — that sounds middle-aged to me.(Laughter)Actually, in Exeter, it's incredibly young, and I had underestimated the impact of the university in this area. The questions get harder as you go through. So this one's now asking about homeownership: For every 100 households, how many are owned with a mortgage or loan? And I hedged my bets here, because I didn't want to be more than 50 out on the answer.(Laughter)And actually, these get harder, these questions, because when you're in an area, when you're in a community, things like age — there are clues to whether a population is old or young. Just by looking around the area, you can see it. Something like homeownership is much more difficult to see, so we revert to our own heuristics, our own biases about how many people we think own their own homes.Now the truth is, when we published this quiz, the census data that it's based on was already a few years old. We've had online applications that allow you to put in a post code and get statistics back for years. So in some senses, this was all a little bit old and not necessarily new. But I was interested to see what reaction we might get by gamifying the data in the way that we have, by using animation and playing on the fact that people have their own preconceptions.It turns out, the reaction was, um ... was more than I could have hoped for. It was a long-held ambition of mine to bring down a statistics website due to public demand.(Laughter)This URL contains the words ""statistics,"" ""gov"" and ""UK,"" which are three of people's least favorite words in a URL. And the amazing thing about this was that the website came down at quarter to 10 at night, because people were actually engaging with this data of their own free will, using their own personal time. I was very interested to see that we got something like a quarter of a million people playing the quiz within the space of 48 hours of launching it. And it sparked an enormous discussion online, on social media, which was largely dominated by people having fun with their misconceptions, which is something that I couldn't have hoped for any better, in some respects. I also liked the fact that people started sending it to politicians. How well do you know the area you claim to represent?(Laughter)And then just to finish, going back to the two kinds of people, I thought it would be really interesting to see how people who are good with numbers would do on this quiz. The national statistician of England and Wales, John Pullinger, you would expect he would be pretty good. He got 44 for his own area.(Laughter)Jeremy Paxman — admittedly, after a glass of wine — 36. Even worse. It just shows you that the numbers can inspire us all. They can surprise us all.So very often, we talk about statistics as being the science of uncertainty. My parting thought for today is: actually, statistics is the science of us. And that's why we should be fascinated by numbers.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alan_smith_why_we_re_so_bad_at_statistics
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"Most of us go through life trying to do our best at whatever we do, whether it's our job, family, school or anything else. I feel that way. I try my best. But some time ago, I came to a realization that I wasn't getting much better at the things I cared most about, whether it was being a husband or a friend or a professional or teammate, and I wasn't improving much at those things even though I was spending a lot of time working hard at them. I've since realized from conversations I've had and from research that this stagnation, despite hard work, turns out to be pretty common.So I'd like to share with you some insights into why that is and what we can all do about it. What I've learned is that the most effective people and teams in any domain do something we can all emulate. They go through life deliberately alternating between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone.The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven't mastered yet, which means we have to expect to make mistakes, knowing that we will learn from them. That is very different from what we do when we're in our performance zone, which is when our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimize mistakes.Both of these zones should be part of our lives, but being clear about when we want to be in each of them, with what goal, focus and expectations, helps us better perform and better improve. The performance zone maximizes our immediate performance, while the learning zone maximizes our growth and our future performance. The reason many of us don't improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone. This hinders our growth, and ironically, over the long term, also our performance.So what does the learning zone look like? Take Demosthenes, a political leader and the greatest orator and lawyer in ancient Greece. To become great, he didn't spend all his time just being an orator or a lawyer, which would be his performance zone. But instead, he did activities designed for improvement. Of course, he studied a lot. He studied law and philosophy with guidance from mentors, but he also realized that being a lawyer involved persuading other people, so he also studied great speeches and acting. To get rid of an odd habit he had of involuntarily lifting his shoulder, he practiced his speeches in front of a mirror, and he suspended a sword from the ceiling so that if he raised his shoulder, it would hurt.(Laughter)To speak more clearly despite a lisp, he went through his speeches with stones in his mouth. He built an underground room where he could practice without interruptions and not disturb other people. And since courts at the time were very noisy, he also practiced by the ocean, projecting his voice above the roar of the waves.His activities in the learning zone were very different from his activities in court, his performance zone. In the learning zone, he did what Dr. Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice. This involves breaking down abilities into component skills, being clear about what subskill we're working to improve, like keeping our shoulders down, giving full concentration to a high level of challenge outside our comfort zone, just beyond what we can currently do, using frequent feedback with repetition and adjustments, and ideally engaging the guidance of a skilled coach, because activities designed for improvement are domain-specific, and great teachers and coaches know what those activities are and can also give us expert feedback. It is this type of practice in the learning zone which leads to substantial improvement, not just time on task performing. For example, research shows that after the first couple of years working in a profession, performance usually plateaus. This has been shown to be true in teaching, general medicine, nursing and other fields, and it happens because once we think we have become good enough, adequate, then we stop spending time in the learning zone. We focus all our time on just doing our job, performing, which turns out not to be a great way to improve. But the people who continue to spend time in the learning zone do continue to always improve. The best salespeople at least once a week do activities with the goal of improvement. They read to extend their knowledge, consult with colleagues or domain experts, try out new strategies, solicit feedback and reflect. The best chess players spend a lot of time not playing games of chess, which would be their performance zone, but trying to predict the moves grand masters made and analyzing them. Each of us has probably spent many, many, many hours typing on a computer without getting faster, but if we spent 10 to 20 minutes each day fully concentrating on typing 10 to 20 percent faster than our current reliable speed, we would get faster, especially if we also identified what mistakes we're making and practiced typing those words. That's deliberate practice.In what other parts of our lives, perhaps that we care more about, are we working hard but not improving much because we're always in the performance zone? Now, this is not to say that the performance zone has no value. It very much does. When I needed a knee surgery, I didn't tell the surgeon, ""Poke around in there and focus on what you don't know.""(Laughter)""We'll learn from your mistakes!"" I looked for a surgeon who I felt would do a good job, and I wanted her to do a good job. Being in the performance zone allows us to get things done as best as we can. It can also be motivating, and it provides us with information to identify what to focus on next when we go back to the learning zone. So the way to high performance is to alternate between the learning zone and the performance zone, purposefully building our skills in the learning zone, then applying those skills in the performance zone.When Beyoncé is on tour, during the concert, she's in her performance zone, but every night when she gets back to the hotel room, she goes right back into her learning zone. She watches a video of the show that just ended. She identifies opportunities for improvement, for herself, her dancers and her camera staff. And the next morning, everyone receives pages of notes with what to adjust, which they then work on during the day before the next performance. It's a spiral to ever-increasing capabilities, but we need to know when we seek to learn, and when we seek to perform, and while we want to spend time doing both, the more time we spend in the learning zone, the more we'll improve.So how can we spend more time in the learning zone? First, we must believe and understand that we can improve, what we call a growth mindset. Second, we must want to improve at that particular skill. There has to be a purpose we care about, because it takes time and effort. Third, we must have an idea about how to improve, what we can do to improve, not how I used to practice the guitar as a teenager, performing songs over and over again, but doing deliberate practice. And fourth, we must be in a low-stakes situation, because if mistakes are to be expected, then the consequence of making them must not be catastrophic, or even very significant. A tightrope walker doesn't practice new tricks without a net underneath, and an athlete wouldn't set out to first try a new move during a championship match.One reason that in our lives we spend so much time in the performance zone is that our environments often are, unnecessarily, high stakes. We create social risks for one another, even in schools which are supposed to be all about learning, and I'm not talking about standardized tests. I mean that every minute of every day, many students in elementary schools through colleges feel that if they make a mistake, others will think less of them. No wonder they're always stressed out and not taking the risks necessary for learning. But they learn that mistakes are undesirable inadvertently when teachers or parents are eager to hear just correct answers and reject mistakes rather than welcome and examine them to learn from them, or when we look for narrow responses rather than encourage more exploratory thinking that we can all learn from. When all homework or student work has a number or a letter on it, and counts towards a final grade, rather than being used for practice, mistakes, feedback and revision, we send the message that school is a performance zone.The same is true in our workplaces. In the companies I consult with, I often see flawless execution cultures which leaders foster to encourage great work. But that leads employees to stay within what they know and not try new things, so companies struggle to innovate and improve, and they fall behind.We can create more spaces for growth by starting conversations with one another about when we want to be in each zone. What do we want to get better at and how? And when do we want to execute and minimize mistakes? That way, we gain clarity about what success is, when, and how to best support one another.But what if we find ourselves in a chronic high-stakes setting and we feel we can't start those conversations yet? Then here are three things that we can still do as individuals. First, we can create low-stakes islands in an otherwise high-stakes sea. These are spaces where mistakes have little consequence. For example, we might find a mentor or a trusted colleague with whom we can exchange ideas or have vulnerable conversations or even role-play. Or we can ask for feedback-oriented meetings as projects progress. Or we can set aside time to read or watch videos or take online courses. Those are just some examples. Second, we can execute and perform as we're expected, but then reflect on what we could do better next time, like Beyoncé does, and we can observe and emulate experts. The observation, reflection and adjustment is a learning zone. And finally, we can lead and lower the stakes for others by sharing what we want to get better at, by asking questions about what we don't know, by soliciting feedback and by sharing our mistakes and what we've learned from them, so that others can feel safe to do the same.Real confidence is about modeling ongoing learning. What if, instead of spending our lives doing, doing, doing, performing, performing, performing, we spent more time exploring, asking, listening, experimenting, reflecting, striving and becoming? What if we each always had something we were working to improve? What if we created more low-stakes islands and waters? And what if we got clear, within ourselves and with our teammates, about when we seek to learn and when we seek to perform, so that our efforts can become more consequential, our improvement never-ending and our best even better?Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/eduardo_briceno_how_to_get_better_at_the_things_you_care_about
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"The last time I heard my son's voice was when he walked out the front door on his way to school. He called out one word in the darkness: ""Bye.""It was April 20, 1999. Later that morning, at Columbine High School, my son Dylan and his friend Eric killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives. Thirteen innocent people were killed, leaving their loved ones in a state of grief and trauma. Others sustained injuries, some resulting in disfigurement and permanent disability. But the enormity of the tragedy can't be measured only by the number of deaths and injuries that took place. There's no way to quantify the psychological damage of those who were in the school, or who took part in rescue or cleanup efforts. There's no way to assess the magnitude of a tragedy like Columbine, especially when it can be a blueprint for other shooters who go on to commit atrocities of their own. Columbine was a tidal wave, and when the crash ended, it would take years for the community and for society to comprehend its impact.It has taken me years to try to accept my son's legacy. The cruel behavior that defined the end of his life showed me that he was a completely different person from the one I knew. Afterwards people asked, ""How could you not know? What kind of a mother were you?"" I still ask myself those same questions.Before the shootings, I thought of myself as a good mom. Helping my children become caring, healthy, responsible adults was the most important role of my life. But the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a parent, and it's partially this sense of failure that brings me here today. Aside from his father, I was the one person who knew and loved Dylan the most. If anyone could have known what was happening, it should have been me, right? But I didn't know.Today, I'm here to share the experience of what it's like to be the mother of someone who kills and hurts. For years after the tragedy, I combed through memories, trying to figure out exactly where I failed as a parent. But there are no simple answers. I can't give you any solutions. All I can do is share what I have learned.When I talk to people who didn't know me before the shootings, I have three challenges to meet. First, when I walk into a room like this, I never know if someone there has experienced loss because of what my son did. I feel a need to acknowledge the suffering caused by a member of my family who isn't here to do it for himself. So first, with all of my heart, I'm sorry if my son has caused you pain.The second challenge I have is that I must ask for understanding and even compassion when I talk about my son's death as a suicide. Two years before he died, he wrote on a piece of paper in a notebook that he was cutting himself. He said that he was in agony and wanted to get a gun so he could end his life. I didn't know about any of this until months after his death. When I talk about his death as a suicide, I'm not trying to downplay the viciousness he showed at the end of his life. I'm trying to understand how his suicidal thinking led to murder. After a lot of reading and talking with experts, I have come to believe that his involvement in the shootings was rooted not in his desire to kill but in his desire to die.The third challenge I have when I talk about my son's murder-suicide is that I'm talking about mental health — excuse me — is that I'm talking about mental health, or brain health, as I prefer to call it, because it's more concrete. And in the same breath, I'm talking about violence. The last thing I want to do is to contribute to the misunderstanding that already exists around mental illness. Only a very small percent of those who have a mental illness are violent toward other people, but of those who die by suicide, it's estimated that about 75 to maybe more than 90 percent have a diagnosable mental health condition of some kind. As you all know very well, our mental health care system is not equipped to help everyone, and not everyone with destructive thoughts fits the criteria for a specific diagnosis. Many who have ongoing feelings of fear or anger or hopelessness are never assessed or treated. Too often, they get our attention only if they reach a behavioral crisis. If estimates are correct that about one to two percent of all suicides involves the murder of another person, when suicide rates rise, as they are rising for some populations, the murder-suicide rates will rise as well.I wanted to understand what was going on in Dylan's mind prior to his death, so I looked for answers from other survivors of suicide loss. I did research and volunteered to help with fund-raising events, and whenever I could, I talked with those who had survived their own suicidal crisis or attempt.One of the most helpful conversations I had was with a coworker who overheard me talking to someone else in my office cubicle. She heard me say that Dylan could not have loved me if he could do something as horrible as he did. Later, when she found me alone, she apologized for overhearing that conversation, but told me that I was wrong. She said that when she was a young, single mother with three small children, she became severely depressed and was hospitalized to keep her safe. At the time, she was certain that her children would be better off if she died, so she had made a plan to end her life. She assured me that a mother's love was the strongest bond on Earth, and that she loved her children more than anything in the world, but because of her illness, she was sure that they would be better off without her.What she said and what I've learned from others is that we do not make the so-called decision or choice to die by suicide in the same way that we choose what car to drive or where to go on a Saturday night. When someone is in an extremely suicidal state, they are in a stage four medical health emergency. Their thinking is impaired and they've lost access to tools of self-governance. Even though they can make a plan and act with logic, their sense of truth is distorted by a filter of pain through which they interpret their reality. Some people can be very good at hiding this state, and they often have good reasons for doing that. Many of us have suicidal thoughts at some point, but persistent, ongoing thoughts of suicide and devising a means to die are symptoms of pathology, and like many illnesses, the condition has to be recognized and treated before a life is lost.But my son's death was not purely a suicide. It involved mass murder. I wanted to know how his suicidal thinking became homicidal. But research is sparse and there are no simple answers. Yes, he probably had ongoing depression. He had a personality that was perfectionistic and self-reliant, and that made him less likely to seek help from others. He had experienced triggering events at the school that left him feeling debased and humiliated and mad. And he had a complicated friendship with a boy who shared his feelings of rage and alienation, and who was seriously disturbed, controlling and homicidal. And on top of this period in his life of extreme vulnerability and fragility, Dylan found access to guns even though we'd never owned any in our home. It was appallingly easy for a 17-year-old boy to buy guns, both legally and illegally, without my permission or knowledge. And somehow, 17 years and many school shootings later, it's still appallingly easy.What Dylan did that day broke my heart, and as trauma so often does, it took a toll on my body and on my mind. Two years after the shootings, I got breast cancer, and two years after that, I began to have mental health problems. On top of the constant, perpetual grief I was terrified that I would run into a family member of someone Dylan had killed, or be accosted by the press or by an angry citizen. I was afraid to turn on the news, afraid to hear myself being called a terrible parent or a disgusting person.I started having panic attacks. The first bout started four years after the shootings, when I was getting ready for the depositions and would have to meet the victims' families face to face. The second round started six years after the shootings, when I was preparing to speak publicly about murder-suicide for the first time at a conference. Both episodes lasted several weeks. The attacks happened everywhere: in the hardware store, in my office, or even while reading a book in bed. My mind would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror and no matter how I hard I tried to calm myself down or reason my way out of it, I couldn't do it. It felt as if my brain was trying to kill me, and then, being afraid of being afraid consumed all of my thoughts. That's when I learned firsthand what it feels like to have a malfunctioning mind, and that's when I truly became a brain health advocate. With therapy and medication and self-care, life eventually returned to whatever could be thought of as normal under the circumstances.When I looked back on all that had happened, I could see that my son's spiral into dysfunction probably occurred over a period of about two years, plenty of time to get him help, if only someone had known that he needed help and known what to do.Every time someone asks me, ""How could you not have known?"", it feels like a punch in the gut. It carries accusation and taps into my feelings of guilt that no matter how much therapy I've had I will never fully eradicate. But here's something I've learned: if love were enough to stop someone who is suicidal from hurting themselves, suicides would hardly ever happen. But love is not enough, and suicide is prevalent. It's the second leading cause of death for people age 10 to 34, and 15 percent of American youth report having made a suicide plan in the last year. I've learned that no matter how much we want to believe we can, we cannot know or control everything our loved ones think and feel, and the stubborn belief that we are somehow different, that someone we love would never think of hurting themselves or someone else, can cause us to miss what's hidden in plain sight. And if worst case scenarios do come to pass, we'll have to learn to forgive ourselves for not knowing or for not asking the right questions or not finding the right treatment. We should always assume that someone we love may be suffering, regardless of what they say or how they act. We should listen with our whole being, without judgments, and without offering solutions.I know that I will live with this tragedy, with these multiple tragedies, for the rest of my life. I know that in the minds of many, what I lost can't compare to what the other families lost. I know my struggle doesn't make theirs any easier. I know there are even some who think I don't have the right to any pain, but only to a life of permanent penance.In the end what I know comes down to this: the tragic fact is that even the most vigilant and responsible of us may not be able to help, but for love's sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sue_klebold_my_son_was_a_columbine_shooter_this_is_my_story
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"So many of you have probably seen the movie ""The Martian."" But for those of you who did not, it's a movie about an astronaut who is stranded on Mars, and his efforts to stay alive until the Earth can send a rescue mission to bring him back to Earth. Gladly, they do re-establish communication with the character, astronaut Watney, at some point so that he's not as alone on Mars until he can be rescued. So while you're watching the movie, or even if you haven't, when you think about Mars, you're probably thinking about how far away it is and how distant.And, what might not have occurred to you is, what are the logistics really like of working on another planet — of living on two planets when there are people on the Earth and there are rovers or people on Mars? So think about when you have friends, families and co-workers in California, on the West Coast or in other parts of the world. When you're trying to communicate with them, one of the things you probably first think about is: wait, what time is it in California? Will I wake them up? Is it OK to call? So even if you're interacting with colleagues who are in Europe, you're immediately thinking about: What does it take to coordinate communication when people are far away? So we don't have people on Mars right now, but we do have rovers. And actually right now, on Curiosity, it is 6:10 in the morning. So, 6:10 in the morning on Mars. We have four rovers on Mars. The United States has put four rovers on Mars since the mid-1990s, and I have been privileged enough to work on three of them. So, I am a spacecraft engineer, a spacecraft operations engineer, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles, California. And these rovers are our robotic emissaries. So, they are our eyes and our ears, and they see the planet for us until we can send people. So we learn how to operate on other planets through these rovers. So before we send people, we send robots. So the reason there's a time difference on Mars right now, from the time that we're at is because the Martian day is longer than the Earth day. Our Earth day is 24 hours, because that's how long it takes the Earth to rotate, how long it takes to go around once. So our day is 24 hours. It takes Mars 24 hours and approximately 40 minutes to rotate once. So that means that the Martian day is 40 minutes longer than the Earth day. So teams of people who are operating the rovers on Mars, like this one, what we are doing is we are living on Earth, but working on Mars. So we have to think as if we are actually on Mars with the rover. Our job, the job of this team, of which I'm a part of, is to send commands to the rover to tell it what to do the next day. To tell it to drive or drill or tell her whatever she's supposed to do. So while she's sleeping — and the rover does sleep at night because she needs to recharge her batteries and she needs to weather the cold Martian night. And so she sleeps. So while she sleeps, we work on her program for the next day. So I work the Martian night shift. (Laughter) So in order to come to work on the Earth at the same time every day on Mars — like, let's say I need to be at work at 5:00 p.m., this team needs to be at work at 5:00 p.m. Mars time every day, then we have to come to work on the Earth 40 minutes later every day, in order to stay in sync with Mars. That's like moving a time zone every day. So one day you come in at 8:00, the next day 40 minutes later at 8:40, the next day 40 minutes later at 9:20, the next day at 10:00. So you keep moving 40 minutes every day, until soon you're coming to work in the middle of the night — the middle of the Earth night. Right? So you can imagine how confusing that is. Hence, the Mars watch. (Laughter) This weights in this watch have been mechanically adjusted so that it runs more slowly. Right? And we didn't start out — I got this watch in 2004 when Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers back then. We didn't start out thinking that we were going to need Mars watches. Right? We thought, OK, we'll just have the time on our computers and on the mission control screens, and that would be enough. Yeah, not so much. Because we weren't just working on Mars time, we were actually living on Mars time. And we got just instantaneously confused about what time it was. So you really needed something on your wrist to tell you: What time is it on the Earth? What time is it on Mars? And it wasn't just the time on Mars that was confusing; we also needed to be able to talk to each other about it. So a ""sol"" is a Martian day — again, 24 hours and 40 minutes. So when we're talking about something that's happening on the Earth, we will say, today. So, for Mars, we say, ""tosol."" (Laughter) Yesterday became ""yestersol"" for Mars. Again, we didn't start out thinking, ""Oh, let's invent a language."" It was just very confusing. I remember somebody walked up to me and said, ""I would like to do this activity on the vehicle tomorrow, on the rover."" And I said, ""Tomorrow, tomorrow, or Mars, tomorrow?"" We started this terminology because we needed a way to talk to each other. (Laughter) Tomorrow became ""nextersol"" or ""solorrow."" Because people have different preferences for the words they use. Some of you might say ""soda"" and some of you might say ""pop."" So we have people who say ""nextersol"" or ""solorrow."" And then something that I noticed after a few years of working on these missions, was that the people who work on the rovers, we say ""tosol."" The people who work on the landed missions that don't rove around, they say ""tosoul."" So I could actually tell what mission you worked on from your Martian accent. (Laughter) So we have the watches and the language, and you're detecting a theme here, right? So that we don't get confused. But even the Earth daylight could confuse us. If you think that right now, you've come to work and it's the middle of the Martian night and there's light streaming in from the windows that's going to be confusing as well. So you can see from this image of the control room that all of the blinds are down. So that there's no light to distract us. The blinds went down all over the building about a week before landing, and they didn't go up until we went off Mars time. So this also works for the house, for at home. I've been on Mars time three times, and my husband is like, OK, we're getting ready for Mars time. And so he'll put foil all over the windows and dark curtains and shades because it also affects your families. And so here I was living in kind of this darkened environment, but so was he. And he'd gotten used to it. But then I would get these plaintive emails from him when he was at work. Should I come home? Are you awake? What time is it on Mars? And I decided, OK, so he needs a Mars watch. (Laughter) But of course, it's 2016, so there's an app for that. (Laughter) So now instead of the watches, we can also use our phones. But the impact on families was just across the board; it wasn't just those of us who were working on the rovers but our families as well. This is David Oh, one of our flight directors, and he's at the beach in Los Angeles with his family at 1:00 in the morning. (Laughter) So because we landed in August and his kids didn't have to go back to school until September, they actually went on to Mars time with him for one month. They got up 40 minutes later every day. And they were on dad's work schedule. So they lived on Mars time for a month and had these great adventures, like going bowling in the middle of the night or going to the beach. And one of the things that we all discovered is you can get anywhere in Los Angeles at 3:00 in the morning when there's no traffic.(Laughter)So we would get off work, and we didn't want to go home and bother our families, and we were hungry, so instead of going locally to eat something, we'd go, ""Wait, there's this great all-night deli in Long Beach, and we can get there in 10 minutes!"" So we would drive down — it was like the 60s, no traffic. We would drive down there, and the restaurant owners would go, ""Who are you people? And why are you at my restaurant at 3:00 in the morning?"" So they came to realize that there were these packs of Martians, roaming the LA freeways, in the middle of the night — in the middle of the Earth night. And we did actually start calling ourselves Martians. So those of us who were on Mars time would refer to ourselves as Martians, and everyone else as Earthlings.(Laughter)And that's because when you're moving a time-zone every day, you start to really feel separated from everyone else. You're literally in your own world. So I have this button on that says, ""I survived Mars time. Sol 0-90."" And there's a picture of it up on the screen. So the reason we got these buttons is because we work on Mars time in order to be as efficient as possible with the rover on Mars, to make the best use of our time. But we don't stay on Mars time for more than three to four months. Eventually, we'll move to a modified Mars time, which is what we're working now. And that's because it's hard on your bodies, it's hard on your families. In fact, there were sleep researchers who actually were studying us because it was so unusual for humans to try to extend their day. And they had about 30 of us that they would do sleep deprivation experiments on. So I would come in and take the test and I fell asleep in each one. And that was because, again, this eventually becomes hard on your body. Even though it was a blast. It was a huge bonding experience with the other members on the team, but it is difficult to sustain. So these rover missions are our first steps out into the solar system. We are learning how to live on more than one planet. We are changing our perspective to become multi-planetary. So the next time you see a Star Wars movie, and there are people going from the Dagobah system to Tatooine, think about what it really means to have people spread out so far. What it means in terms of the distances between them, how they will start to feel separate from each other and just the logistics of the time. We have not sent people to Mars yet, but we hope to. And between companies like SpaceX and NASA and all of the international space agencies of the world, we hope to do that in the next few decades. So soon we will have people on Mars, and we truly will be multi-planetary. And the young boy or the young girl who will be going to Mars could be in this audience or listening today. I have wanted to work at JPL on these missions since I was 14 years old and I am privileged to be a part of it. And this is a remarkable time in the space program, and we are all in this journey together. So the next time you think you don't have enough time in your day, just remember, it's all a matter of your Earthly perspective. Thank you. (Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nagin_cox_what_time_is_it_on_mars
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"How many of you are creatives, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, or maybe you just have a really big imagination? Show of hands? (Cheers)That's most of you. I have some news for us creatives. Over the course of the next 20 years, more will change around the way we do our work than has happened in the last 2,000. In fact, I think we're at the dawn of a new age in human history.Now, there have been four major historical eras defined by the way we work. The Hunter-Gatherer Age lasted several million years. And then the Agricultural Age lasted several thousand years. The Industrial Age lasted a couple of centuries. And now the Information Age has lasted just a few decades. And now today, we're on the cusp of our next great era as a species.Welcome to the Augmented Age. In this new era, your natural human capabilities are going to be augmented by computational systems that help you think, robotic systems that help you make, and a digital nervous system that connects you to the world far beyond your natural senses. Let's start with cognitive augmentation. How many of you are augmented cyborgs?(Laughter)I would actually argue that we're already augmented. Imagine you're at a party, and somebody asks you a question that you don't know the answer to. If you have one of these, in a few seconds, you can know the answer. But this is just a primitive beginning. Even Siri is just a passive tool. In fact, for the last three-and-a-half million years, the tools that we've had have been completely passive. They do exactly what we tell them and nothing more. Our very first tool only cut where we struck it. The chisel only carves where the artist points it. And even our most advanced tools do nothing without our explicit direction. In fact, to date, and this is something that frustrates me, we've always been limited by this need to manually push our wills into our tools — like, manual, literally using our hands, even with computers. But I'm more like Scotty in ""Star Trek.""(Laughter)I want to have a conversation with a computer. I want to say, ""Computer, let's design a car,"" and the computer shows me a car. And I say, ""No, more fast-looking, and less German,"" and bang, the computer shows me an option.(Laughter)That conversation might be a little ways off, probably less than many of us think, but right now, we're working on it. Tools are making this leap from being passive to being generative. Generative design tools use a computer and algorithms to synthesize geometry to come up with new designs all by themselves. All it needs are your goals and your constraints.I'll give you an example. In the case of this aerial drone chassis, all you would need to do is tell it something like, it has four propellers, you want it to be as lightweight as possible, and you need it to be aerodynamically efficient. Then what the computer does is it explores the entire solution space: every single possibility that solves and meets your criteria — millions of them. It takes big computers to do this. But it comes back to us with designs that we, by ourselves, never could've imagined. And the computer's coming up with this stuff all by itself — no one ever drew anything, and it started completely from scratch. And by the way, it's no accident that the drone body looks just like the pelvis of a flying squirrel.(Laughter)It's because the algorithms are designed to work the same way evolution does.What's exciting is we're starting to see this technology out in the real world. We've been working with Airbus for a couple of years on this concept plane for the future. It's a ways out still. But just recently we used a generative-design AI to come up with this. This is a 3D-printed cabin partition that's been designed by a computer. It's stronger than the original yet half the weight, and it will be flying in the Airbus A320 later this year. So computers can now generate; they can come up with their own solutions to our well-defined problems. But they're not intuitive. They still have to start from scratch every single time, and that's because they never learn. Unlike Maggie.(Laughter)Maggie's actually smarter than our most advanced design tools. What do I mean by that? If her owner picks up that leash, Maggie knows with a fair degree of certainty it's time to go for a walk. And how did she learn? Well, every time the owner picked up the leash, they went for a walk. And Maggie did three things: she had to pay attention, she had to remember what happened and she had to retain and create a pattern in her mind.Interestingly, that's exactly what computer scientists have been trying to get AIs to do for the last 60 or so years. Back in 1952, they built this computer that could play Tic-Tac-Toe. Big deal. Then 45 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue beats Kasparov at chess. 2011, Watson beats these two humans at Jeopardy, which is much harder for a computer to play than chess is. In fact, rather than working from predefined recipes, Watson had to use reasoning to overcome his human opponents. And then a couple of weeks ago, DeepMind's AlphaGo beats the world's best human at Go, which is the most difficult game that we have. In fact, in Go, there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe. So in order to win, what AlphaGo had to do was develop intuition. And in fact, at some points, AlphaGo's programmers didn't understand why AlphaGo was doing what it was doing.And things are moving really fast. I mean, consider — in the space of a human lifetime, computers have gone from a child's game to what's recognized as the pinnacle of strategic thought. What's basically happening is computers are going from being like Spock to being a lot more like Kirk.(Laughter)Right? From pure logic to intuition. Would you cross this bridge? Most of you are saying, ""Oh, hell no!""(Laughter)And you arrived at that decision in a split second. You just sort of knew that bridge was unsafe. And that's exactly the kind of intuition that our deep-learning systems are starting to develop right now. Very soon, you'll literally be able to show something you've made, you've designed, to a computer, and it will look at it and say, ""Sorry, homie, that'll never work. You have to try again."" Or you could ask it if people are going to like your next song, or your next flavor of ice cream. Or, much more importantly, you could work with a computer to solve a problem that we've never faced before. For instance, climate change. We're not doing a very good job on our own, we could certainly use all the help we can get. That's what I'm talking about, technology amplifying our cognitive abilities so we can imagine and design things that were simply out of our reach as plain old un-augmented humans.So what about making all of this crazy new stuff that we're going to invent and design? I think the era of human augmentation is as much about the physical world as it is about the virtual, intellectual realm. How will technology augment us? In the physical world, robotic systems. OK, there's certainly a fear that robots are going to take jobs away from humans, and that is true in certain sectors. But I'm much more interested in this idea that humans and robots working together are going to augment each other, and start to inhabit a new space.This is our applied research lab in San Francisco, where one of our areas of focus is advanced robotics, specifically, human-robot collaboration. And this is Bishop, one of our robots. As an experiment, we set it up to help a person working in construction doing repetitive tasks — tasks like cutting out holes for outlets or light switches in drywall.(Laughter)So, Bishop's human partner can tell what to do in plain English and with simple gestures, kind of like talking to a dog, and then Bishop executes on those instructions with perfect precision. We're using the human for what the human is good at: awareness, perception and decision making. And we're using the robot for what it's good at: precision and repetitiveness.Here's another cool project that Bishop worked on. The goal of this project, which we called the HIVE, was to prototype the experience of humans, computers and robots all working together to solve a highly complex design problem. The humans acted as labor. They cruised around the construction site, they manipulated the bamboo — which, by the way, because it's a non-isomorphic material, is super hard for robots to deal with. But then the robots did this fiber winding, which was almost impossible for a human to do. And then we had an AI that was controlling everything. It was telling the humans what to do, telling the robots what to do and keeping track of thousands of individual components. What's interesting is, building this pavilion was simply not possible without human, robot and AI augmenting each other.OK, I'll share one more project. This one's a little bit crazy. We're working with Amsterdam-based artist Joris Laarman and his team at MX3D to generatively design and robotically print the world's first autonomously manufactured bridge. So, Joris and an AI are designing this thing right now, as we speak, in Amsterdam. And when they're done, we're going to hit ""Go,"" and robots will start 3D printing in stainless steel, and then they're going to keep printing, without human intervention, until the bridge is finished.So, as computers are going to augment our ability to imagine and design new stuff, robotic systems are going to help us build and make things that we've never been able to make before. But what about our ability to sense and control these things? What about a nervous system for the things that we make?Our nervous system, the human nervous system, tells us everything that's going on around us. But the nervous system of the things we make is rudimentary at best. For instance, a car doesn't tell the city's public works department that it just hit a pothole at the corner of Broadway and Morrison. A building doesn't tell its designers whether or not the people inside like being there, and the toy manufacturer doesn't know if a toy is actually being played with — how and where and whether or not it's any fun. Look, I'm sure that the designers imagined this lifestyle for Barbie when they designed her.(Laughter)But what if it turns out that Barbie's actually really lonely?(Laughter)If the designers had known what was really happening in the real world with their designs — the road, the building, Barbie — they could've used that knowledge to create an experience that was better for the user. What's missing is a nervous system connecting us to all of the things that we design, make and use. What if all of you had that kind of information flowing to you from the things you create in the real world? With all of the stuff we make, we spend a tremendous amount of money and energy — in fact, last year, about two trillion dollars — convincing people to buy the things we've made. But if you had this connection to the things that you design and create after they're out in the real world, after they've been sold or launched or whatever, we could actually change that, and go from making people want our stuff, to just making stuff that people want in the first place.The good news is, we're working on digital nervous systems that connect us to the things we design. We're working on one project with a couple of guys down in Los Angeles called the Bandito Brothers and their team. And one of the things these guys do is build insane cars that do absolutely insane things. These guys are crazy —(Laughter)in the best way. And what we're doing with them is taking a traditional race-car chassis and giving it a nervous system.So we instrumented it with dozens of sensors, put a world-class driver behind the wheel, took it out to the desert and drove the hell out of it for a week. And the car's nervous system captured everything that was happening to the car. We captured four billion data points; all of the forces that it was subjected to. And then we did something crazy. We took all of that data, and plugged it into a generative-design AI we call ""Dreamcatcher."" So what do get when you give a design tool a nervous system, and you ask it to build you the ultimate car chassis? You get this. This is something that a human could never have designed. Except a human did design this, but it was a human that was augmented by a generative-design AI, a digital nervous system and robots that can actually fabricate something like this.So if this is the future, the Augmented Age, and we're going to be augmented cognitively, physically and perceptually, what will that look like? What is this wonderland going to be like?I think we're going to see a world where we're moving from things that are fabricated to things that are farmed. Where we're moving from things that are constructed to that which is grown. We're going to move from being isolated to being connected. And we'll move away from extraction to embrace aggregation. I also think we'll shift from craving obedience from our things to valuing autonomy.Thanks to our augmented capabilities, our world is going to change dramatically. We're going to have a world with more variety, more connectedness, more dynamism, more complexity, more adaptability and, of course, more beauty. The shape of things to come will be unlike anything we've ever seen before. Why? Because what will be shaping those things is this new partnership between technology, nature and humanity. That, to me, is a future well worth looking forward to.Thank you all so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/maurice_conti_the_incredible_inventions_of_intuitive_ai
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"[This talk contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence Viewer discretion is advised]Tom Stranger: In 1996, when I was 18 years old, I had the golden opportunity to go on an international exchange program. Ironically I'm an Australian who prefers proper icy cold weather, so I was both excited and tearful when I got on a plane to Iceland, after just having farewelled my parents and brothers goodbye. I was welcomed into the home of a beautiful Icelandic family who took me hiking, and helped me get a grasp of the melodic Icelandic language. I struggled a bit with the initial period of homesickness. I snowboarded after school, and I slept a lot. Two hours of chemistry class in a language that you don't yet fully understand can be a pretty good sedative.(Laughter)My teacher recommended I try out for the school play, just to get me a bit more socially active. It turns out I didn't end up being part of the play, but through it I met Thordis. We shared a lovely teenage romance, and we'd meet at lunchtimes to just hold hands and walk around old downtown Reykjavík. I met her welcoming family, and she met my friends. We'd been in a budding relationship for a bit over a month when our school's Christmas Ball was held.Thordis Elva: I was 16 and in love for the first time. Going together to the Christmas dance was a public confirmation of our relationship, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. No longer a child, but a young woman. High on my newfound maturity, I felt it was only natural to try drinking rum for the first time that night, too. That was a bad idea. I became very ill, drifting in and out of consciousness in between spasms of convulsive vomiting. The security guards wanted to call me an ambulance, but Tom acted as my knight in shining armor, and told them he'd take me home.It was like a fairy tale, his strong arms around me, laying me in the safety of my bed. But the gratitude that I felt towards him soon turned to horror as he proceeded to take off my clothes and get on top of me. My head had cleared up, but my body was still too weak to fight back, and the pain was blinding. I thought I'd be severed in two. In order to stay sane, I silently counted the seconds on my alarm clock. And ever since that night, I've known that there are 7,200 seconds in two hours.Despite limping for days and crying for weeks, this incident didn't fit my ideas about rape like I'd seen on TV. Tom wasn't an armed lunatic; he was my boyfriend. And it didn't happen in a seedy alleyway, it happened in my own bed. By the time I could identify what had happened to me as rape, he had completed his exchange program and left for Australia. So I told myself it was pointless to address what had happened. And besides, it had to have been my fault, somehow.I was raised in a world where girls are taught that they get raped for a reason. Their skirt was too short, their smile was too wide, their breath smelled of alcohol. And I was guilty of all of those things, so the shame had to be mine. It took me years to realize that only one thing could have stopped me from being raped that night, and it wasn't my skirt, it wasn't my smile, it wasn't my childish trust. The only thing that could've stopped me from being raped that night is the man who raped me — had he stopped himself.TS: I have vague memories of the next day: the after effects of drinking, a certain hollowness that I tried to stifle. Nothing more. But I didn't show up at Thordis's door. It is important to now state that I didn't see my deed for what it was. The word ""rape"" didn't echo around my mind as it should've, and I wasn't crucifying myself with memories of the night before. It wasn't so much a conscious refusal, it was more like any acknowledgment of reality was forbidden. My definition of my actions completely refuted any recognition of the immense trauma I caused Thordis. To be honest, I repudiated the entire act in the days afterwards and when I was committing it. I disavowed the truth by convincing myself it was sex and not rape. And this is a lie I've felt spine-bending guilt for.I broke up with Thordis a couple of days later, and then saw her a number of times during the remainder of my year in Iceland, feeling a sharp stab of heavyheartedness each time. Deep down, I knew I'd done something immeasurably wrong. But without planning it, I sunk the memories deep, and then I tied a rock to them.What followed is a nine-year period that can best be titled as ""Denial and Running."" When I got a chance to identify the real torment that I caused, I didn't stand still long enough to do so. Whether it be via distraction, substance use, thrill-seeking or the scrupulous policing of my inner speak, I refused to be static and silent.And with this noise, I also drew heavily upon other parts of my life to construct a picture of who I was. I was a surfer, a social science student, a friend to good people, a loved brother and son, an outdoor recreation guide, and eventually, a youth worker. I gripped tight to the simple notion that I wasn't a bad person. I didn't think I had this in my bones. I thought I was made up of something else. In my nurtured upbringing, my loving extended family and role models, people close to me were warm and genuine in their respect shown towards women. It took me a long time to stare down this dark corner of myself, and to ask it questions.TE: Nine years after the Christmas dance, I was 25 years old, and headed straight for a nervous breakdown. My self-worth was buried under a soul-crushing load of silence that isolated me from everyone that I cared about, and I was consumed with misplaced hatred and anger that I took out on myself.One day, I stormed out of the door in tears after a fight with a loved one, and I wandered into a café, where I asked the waitress for a pen. I always had a notebook with me, claiming that it was to jot down ideas in moments of inspiration, but the truth was that I needed to be constantly fidgeting, because in moments of stillness, I found myself counting seconds again. But that day, I watched in wonder as the words streamed out of my pen, forming the most pivotal letter I've ever written, addressed to Tom. Along with an account of the violence that he subjected me to, the words, ""I want to find forgiveness"" stared back at me, surprising nobody more than myself. But deep down I realized that this was my way out of my suffering, because regardless of whether or not he deserved my forgiveness, I deserved peace. My era of shame was over.Before sending the letter, I prepared myself for all kinds of negative responses, or what I found likeliest: no response whatsoever. The only outcome that I didn't prepare myself for was the one that I then got — a typed confession from Tom, full of disarming regret. As it turns out, he, too, had been imprisoned by silence. And this marked the start of an eight-year-long correspondence that God knows was never easy, but always honest. I relieved myself of the burdens that I'd wrongfully shouldered, and he, in turn, wholeheartedly owned up to what he'd done. Our written exchanges became a platform to dissect the consequences of that night, and they were everything from gut-wrenching to healing beyond words.And yet, it didn't bring about closure for me. Perhaps because the email format didn't feel personal enough, perhaps because it's easy to be brave when you're hiding behind a computer screen on the other side of the planet. But we'd begun a dialogue that I felt was necessary to explore to its fullest. So, after eight years of writing, and nearly 16 years after that dire night, I mustered the courage to propose a wild idea: that we'd meet up in person and face our past once and for all.TS: Iceland and Australia are geographically like this. In the middle of the two is South Africa. We decided upon the city of Cape Town, and there we met for one week. The city itself proved to be a stunningly powerful environment to focus on reconciliation and forgiveness. Nowhere else has healing and rapprochement been tested like it has in South Africa. As a nation, South Africa sought to sit within the truth of its past, and to listen to the details of its history. Knowing this only magnified the effect that Cape Town had on us.Over the course of this week, we literally spoke our life stories to each other, from start to finish. And this was about analyzing our own history. We followed a strict policy of being honest, and this also came with a certain exposure, an open-chested vulnerability. There were gutting confessions, and moments where we just absolutely couldn't fathom the other person's experience. The seismic effects of sexual violence were spoken aloud and felt, face to face. At other times, though, we found a soaring clarity, and even some totally unexpected but liberating laughter. When it came down to it, we did out best to listen to each other intently. And our individual realities were aired with an unfiltered purity that couldn't do any less than lighten the soul.TE: Wanting to take revenge is a very human emotion — instinctual, even. And all I wanted to do for years was to hurt Tom back as deeply as he had hurt me. But had I not found a way out of the hatred and anger, I'm not sure I'd be standing here today. That isn't to say that I didn't have my doubts along the way. When the plane bounced on that landing strip in Cape Town, I remember thinking, ""Why did I not just get myself a therapist and a bottle of vodka like a normal person would do?""(Laughter)At times, our search for understanding in Cape Town felt like an impossible quest, and all I wanted to do was to give up and go home to my loving husband, Vidir, and our son. But despite our difficulties, this journey did result in a victorious feeling that light had triumphed over darkness, that something constructive could be built out of the ruins.I read somewhere that you should try and be the person that you needed when you were younger. And back when I was a teenager, I would have needed to know that the shame wasn't mine, that there's hope after rape, that you can even find happiness, like I share with my husband today. Which is why I started writing feverishly upon my return from Cape Town, resulting in a book co-authored by Tom, that we hope can be of use to people from both ends of the perpetrator-survivor scale. If nothing else, it's a story that we would've needed to hear when we were younger.Given the nature of our story, I know the words that inevitably accompany it — victim, rapist — and labels are a way to organize concepts, but they can also be dehumanizing in their connotations. Once someone's been deemed a victim, it's that much easier to file them away as someone damaged, dishonored, less than. And likewise, once someone has been branded a rapist, it's that much easier to call him a monster — inhuman. But how will we understand what it is in human societies that produces violence if we refuse to recognize the humanity of those who commit it? And how —(Applause)And how can we empower survivors if we're making them feel less than? How can we discuss solutions to one of the biggest threats to the lives of women and children around the world, if the very words we use are part of the problem?TS: From what I've now learnt, my actions that night in 1996 were a self-centered taking. I felt deserving of Thordis's body. I've had primarily positive social influences and examples of equitable behavior around me. But on that occasion, I chose to draw upon the negative ones. The ones that see women as having less intrinsic worth, and of men having some unspoken and symbolic claim to their bodies. These influences I speak of are external to me, though. And it was only me in that room making choices, nobody else.When you own something and really square up to your culpability, I do think a surprising thing can happen. It's what I call a paradox of ownership. I thought I'd buckle under the weight of responsibility. I thought my certificate of humanity would be burnt. Instead, I was offered to really own what I did, and found that it didn't possess the entirety of who I am. Put simply, something you've done doesn't have to constitute the sum of who you are. The noise in my head abated. The indulgent self-pity was starved of oxygen, and it was replaced with the clean air of acceptance — an acceptance that I did hurt this wonderful person standing next to me; an acceptance that I am part of a large and shockingly everyday grouping of men who have been sexually violent toward their partners.Don't underestimate the power of words. Saying to Thordis that I raped her changed my accord with myself, as well as with her. But most importantly, the blame transferred from Thordis to me. Far too often, the responsibility is attributed to female survivors of sexual violence, and not to the males who enact it. Far too often, the denial and running leaves all parties at a great distance from the truth. There's definitely a public conversation happening now, and like a lot of people, we're heartened that there's less retreating from this difficult but important discussion. I feel a real responsibility to add our voices to it.TE: What we did is not a formula that we're prescribing for others. Nobody has the right to tell anyone else how to handle their deepest pain or their greatest error. Breaking your silence is never easy, and depending on where you are in the world, it can even be deadly to speak out about rape. I realize that even the most traumatic event of my life is still a testament to my privilege, because I can talk about it without getting ostracized, or even killed. But with that privilege of having a voice comes the responsibility of using it. That's the least I owe my fellow survivors who can't.The story we've just relayed is unique, and yet it is so common with sexual violence being a global pandemic. But it doesn't have to be that way. One of the things that I found useful on my own healing journey is educating myself about sexual violence. And as a result, I've been reading, writing and speaking about this issue for over a decade now, going to conferences around the world. And in my experience, the attendees of such events are almost exclusively women. But it's about time that we stop treating sexual violence as a women's issue.(Applause)A majority of sexual violence against women and men is perpetrated by men. And yet their voices are sorely underrepresented in this discussion. But all of us are needed here. Just imagine all the suffering we could alleviate if we dared to face this issue together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/thordis_elva_tom_stranger_our_story_of_rape_and_reconciliation
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"""You have cancer."" Sadly, about 40 percent of us will hear those three words within our lifetime, and half will not survive. This means that two out of five of your closest friends and relatives will be diagnosed with some form of cancer, and one will die. Beyond the physical hardships, roughly one-third of cancer survivors here in the US will go into debt from treatment. And they're at least two and a half times more likely to declare bankruptcy than those without cancer. This disease is pervasive. It's emotionally draining and, for many, financially destructive.But a cancer diagnosis doesn't have to be a death sentence. Finding cancer early, closer its genesis, is one of the critical factors to improving treatment options, reducing its emotional impact and minimizing financial burdens. Most importantly, finding cancer early — which is one of the primary aims of my research — greatly enhances your odds of survival. If we just look at the case of breast cancer for example, we find that those who are diagnosed and treated at stage one have a five-year survival rate of nearly 100 percent — odds that decrease to just 22 percent if treated at stage four. And similar trends are found for colorectal and ovarian cancer.Now, we're all aware that an early diagnosis that is accurate is critical for survival. The problem is that many cancer diagnostic tools are invasive, costly, often inaccurate and they can take an agonizing amount of time to get the results back. Still worse, when it comes to some forms of cancer, such as ovarian, liver or pancreatic cancer, good screening methods simply don't exist, meaning that often people wait until physical symptoms surface, which are themselves already indicators of late-stage progression. Like a tornado strike in an area without an early warning system, there is no alarm to warn, for the danger is already at your doorstep when your odds of survival are greatly reduced. Having the convenience and accessibility of regular screening options that are affordable, noninvasive and could provide results much sooner, would provide us with a formidable weapon in the fight against cancer.An early warning would allow us to get out ahead of the disease instead of merely following in its relentless wake. And this is exactly what I've been doing. For the past three years, I've been developing technologies that could ultimately aid clinicians with rapid, early-stage cancer diagnostics. And I've been fueled by a deep scientific curiosity, and a passion to change these statistics.Last year however, this fight became much more personal when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was an experience that added a strong and unexpected emotional dimension to these efforts. I know firsthand how life-altering treatment can be, and I'm keenly aware of the emotional havoc that cancer can wreak on a family, which in our case included our two young daughters. Because we found it early during a routine mammogram, we were able to focus primarily on treatment options for the localized tumor, reaffirming to me how important an early diagnosis is. Unlike other forms of cancer, mammograms do offer an early-stage screening option for breast cancer. Still, not everyone has this done, or they may develop breast cancer before the middle age recommendation for having a mammogram. So, there's still a lot of room for improvement, even for cancers that do have screening options, and, of course, considerable benefits for those that don't.A key challenge then for cancer researchers is to develop methods that make regular screening for many types of cancers much more accessible. Imagine a scenario where during your regular checkup, your doctor can take a simple, noninvasive urine sample, or other liquid biopsy, and present you with the results before you even leave the doctor's office. Such a technology could dramatically reduce the number of people who slip through the net of an early-stage cancer diagnosis.My research team of engineers and biochemists is working on exactly this challenge. We're working on ways to frequently activate an early-stage cancer alarm by enabling regular screenings that would start when a person is healthy so that action could be taken to stop cancer the moment it emerges, and before it can progress beyond its infancy. The silver bullet in this case are tiny vesicles, little escape pods regularly shed by cells called exosomes. Exosomes are important biomarkers that provide an early-warning system for the development of cancer. And because they're abundantly present in just about every bodily fluid, including blood, urine and saliva, they're extremely attractive for noninvasive liquid biopsies.There's just one problem. An automated system for rapidly sorting these important biomarkers is not currently available. We've created a technology that we call nano-DLD that is capable of precisely this: automated exosome isolation to aid rapid cancer diagnostics. Exosomes are the newest early-warning weapon, if you will, to emerge on the liquid biopsy front. And they're really, really small. They measure just 30 to 150 nanometers in diameter. This is so tiny that you could fit about a million of them into a single red blood cell. That's roughly the difference between a golf ball and a fine grain piece of sand.Once thought to be little bins for unwanted cellular waste, it has been found that cells actually communicate by producing and absorbing these exosomes which contain surface receptors, proteins and other genetic material collected from their cell of origin. When absorbed by a neighboring cell, exosomes release their contents into the receiving cell, and can set in motion fundamental changes in gene expression — some good, and this is where cancer comes in, some bad. Because they are clothed in the material of the mother cell, and contain a sample of its environment, they provide a genetic snapshot of that cell's health and its origin. All of these qualities make exosomes invaluable messengers that potentially allow physicians to eavesdrop on your health at the cellular level.To catch cancer early, however, you have to frequently intercept these messages to determine when cancer-causing troublemakers within your body decide to start staging a coup, which is why regular screening is so critical and why we're developing technologies to make this possible. While the first exosome-based diagnostics emerged on the market just this year, they are not yet part of mainstream healthcare options. In addition to their recent emergence, another factor that's limiting their widespread adoption is that currently, no automated exosome isolation system exists to make regular screening economically accessible. The current gold standard for exosome isolation includes ultracentrifugation, a process requiring expensive laboratory equipment, a trained lab tech and about 30 hours of time to process a sample. We've come up with a different approach for achieving automated exosome isolation from a sample such as urine. We use a chip-based, continuous flow separation technique called deterministic lateral displacement. And we have done with it what the semiconductor industry has done so successfully for the past 50 years. We shrunk the dimensions of this technology from the micron scale to the true nanoscale.So how does it work? In a nutshell, a set of tiny pillars separated by nanoscopic gaps are arranged in such a way that the system divides the fluid into streamlines, with the larger cancer-related nanoparticles being separated through a process of redirection from the smaller, healthier ones, which can in contrast move around the pillars in a zigzag-type motion in the direction of fluid flow. The net result is a complete separation of these two particle populations. You can visualize this separation process similar to traffic on a highway that separates into two roads, with one road going into a low-clearance tunnel under a mountain, and the other road going around it. Here, smaller cars can go through the tunnel while larger trucks, carrying potentially hazardous material, are forced to take the detour route. Traffic is effectively separated by size and contents without impeding its flow. And this is exactly how our system works on a much, much smaller scale.The idea here is that the separation process for screening could be as simple as processing a sample of urine, blood or saliva, which is a near-term possibility within the next few years. Ultimately, it could be used to isolate and detect target exosomes associated with a particular type of cancer, sensing and reporting their presence within minutes. This would make rapid diagnostics virtually painless. Broadly speaking, the ability to separate and enrich biomarkers with nanoscale precision in an automated way, opens the door to better understanding diseases such as cancer, with applications ranging from sample preparation to diagnostics, and from drug resistance monitoring to therapeutics.Even before my wife's bout with cancer, it was a dream of mine to facilitate the automation of this process — to make regular screening more accessible, similar to the way Henry Ford made the automobile accessible to the general population through development of the assembly line. Automation is the key to accessibility. And in the spirit of the Hoover dream, ""a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,"" we're developing a technology that could ultimately place an early-warning cancer detection system in every home. This would allow every man, woman and child the opportunity to be regularly tested while they're still healthy, catching cancer when it first emerges.It is my hope and dream to help people around the world avoid the high costs — physical, financial and emotional — faced by today's cancer patients, hardships that I'm well acquainted with. I'm also happy to report that because we caught my wife's cancer early, her treatment was successful, and she is now, thankfully, cancer-free.(Applause)It is an outcome that I would like to see for everyone with a cancer diagnosis. With the work that my team has already done on separation of nanoscale biomarkers for rapid, early-stage cancer diagnostics, I am optimistic that within the next decade, this type of technology will be available, helping protect our friends, our family and future generations. Even if we are so unlucky as to be diagnosed with cancer, that early-stage alarm will provide a strong beacon of hope.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_smith_new_nanotech_to_catch_cancer_early
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"So I'm here to talk to you about the walkable city. What is the walkable city? Well, for want of a better definition, it's a city in which the car is an optional instrument of freedom, rather than a prosthetic device. And I'd like to talk about why we need the walkable city, and I'd like to talk about how to do the walkable city.Most of the talks I give these days are about why we need it, but you guys are smart. And also I gave that talk exactly a month ago, and you can see it at TED.com. So today I want to talk about how to do it. In a lot of time thinking about this, I've come up with what I call the general theory of walkability. A bit of a pretentious term, it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but it's something I've thought about for a long time, and I'd like to share what I think I've figured out.In the American city, the typical American city — the typical American city is not Washington, DC, or New York, or San Francisco; it's Grand Rapids or Cedar Rapids or Memphis — in the typical American city in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you're going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that's as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable and the walk has to be interesting. You need to do all four of these things simultaneously, and that's the structure of my talk today, to take you through each of those.The reason to walk is a story I learned from my mentors, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the founders of the New Urbanism movement. And I should say half the slides and half of my talk today I learned from them. It's the story of planning, the story of the formation of the planning profession. When in the 19th century people were choking from the soot of the dark, satanic mills, the planners said, hey, let's move the housing away from the mills. And lifespans increased immediately, dramatically, and we like to say the planners have been trying to repeat that experience ever since.So there's the onset of what we call Euclidean zoning, the separation of the landscape into large areas of single use. And typically when I arrive in a city to do a plan, a plan like this already awaits me on the property that I'm looking at. And all a plan like this guarantees is that you will not have a walkable city, because nothing is located near anything else. The alternative, of course, is our most walkable city, and I like to say, you know, this is a Rothko, and this is a Seurat. It's just a different way — he was the pointilist — it's a different way of making places. And even this map of Manhattan is a bit misleading because the red color is uses that are mixed vertically.So this is the big story of the New Urbanists — to acknowledge that there are only two ways that have been tested by the thousands to build communities, in the world and throughout history. One is the traditional neighborhood. You see here several neighborhoods of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is defined as being compact and being diverse — places to live, work, shop, recreate, get educated — all within walking distance. And it's defined as being walkable. There are lots of small streets. Each one is comfortable to walk on. And we contrast that to the other way, an invention that happened after the Second World War, suburban sprawl, clearly not compact, clearly not diverse, and it's not walkable, because so few of the streets connect, that those streets that do connect become overburdened, and you wouldn't let your kid out on them. And I want to thank Alex Maclean, the aerial photographer, for many of these beautiful pictures that I'm showing you today.So it's fun to break sprawl down into its constituent parts. It's so easy to understand, the places where you only live, the places where you only work, the places where you only shop, and our super-sized public institutions. Schools get bigger and bigger, and therefore, further and further from each other. And the ratio of the size of the parking lot to the size of the school tells you all you need to know, which is that no child has ever walked to this school, no child will ever walk to this school. The seniors and juniors are driving the freshmen and the sophomores, and of course we have the crash statistics to prove it.And then the super-sizing of our other civic institutions like playing fields — it's wonderful that Westin in the Ft. Lauderdale area has eight soccer fields and eight baseball diamonds and 20 tennis courts, but look at the road that takes you to that location, and would you let your child bike on it? And this is why we have the soccer mom now. When I was young, I had one soccer field, one baseball diamond and one tennis court, but I could walk to it, because it was in my neighborhood.Then the final part of sprawl that everyone forgot to count: if you're going to separate everything from everything else and reconnect it only with automotive infrastructure, then this is what your landscape begins to look like. The main message here is: if you want to have a walkable city, you can't start with the sprawl model. you need the bones of an urban model. This is the outcome of that form of design, as is this. And this is something that a lot of Americans want. But we have to understand it's a two-part American dream. If you're dreaming for this, you're also going to be dreaming of this, often to absurd extremes, when we build our landscape to accommodate cars first. And the experience of being in these places —(Laughter)This is not Photoshopped. Walter Kulash took this slide. It's in Panama City. This is a real place. And being a driver can be a bit of a nuisance, and being a pedestrian can be a bit of a nuisance in these places. This is a slide that epidemiologists have been showing for some time now,(Laughter)The fact that we have a society where you drive to the parking lot to take the escalator to the treadmill shows that we're doing something wrong. But we know how to do it better.Here are the two models contrasted. I show this slide, which has been a formative document of the New Urbanism now for almost 30 years, to show that sprawl and the traditional neighborhood contain the same things. It's just how big are they, how close are they to each other, how are they interspersed together and do you have a street network, rather than a cul-de-sac or a collector system of streets?So when we look at a downtown area, at a place that has a hope of being walkable, and mostly that's our downtowns in America's cities and towns and villages, we look at them and say we want the proper balance of uses. So what is missing or underrepresented? And again, in the typical American cities in which most Americans live, it is housing that is lacking. The jobs-to-housing balance is off. And you find that when you bring housing back, these other things start to come back too, and housing is usually first among those things. And, of course, the thing that shows up last and eventually is the schools, because the people have to move in, the young pioneers have to move in, get older, have kids and fight, and then the schools get pretty good eventually.The other part of this part, the useful city part, is transit, and you can have a perfectly walkable neighborhood without it. But perfectly walkable cities require transit, because if you don't have access to the whole city as a pedestrian, then you get a car, and if you get a car, the city begins to reshape itself around your needs, and the streets get wider and the parking lots get bigger and you no longer have a walkable city. So transit is essential. But every transit experience, every transit trip, begins or ends as a walk, and so we have to remember to build walkability around our transit stations.Next category, the biggest one, is the safe walk. It's what most walkability experts talk about. It is essential, but alone not enough to get people to walk. And there are so many moving parts that add up to a walkable city.The first is block size. This is Portland, Oregon, famously 200-foot blocks, famously walkable. This is Salt Lake City, famously 600-foot blocks, famously unwalkable. If you look at the two, it's almost like two different planets, but these places were both built by humans and in fact, the story is that when you have a 200-foot block city, you can have a two-lane city, or a two-to-four lane city, and a 600-foot block city is a six-lane city, and that's a problem. These are the crash statistics. When you double the block size — this was a study of 24 California cities — when you double the block size, you almost quadruple the number of fatal accidents on non-highway streets.So how many lanes do we have? This is where I'm going to tell you what I tell every audience I meet, which is to remind you about induced demand. Induced demand applies both to highways and to city streets. And induced demand tells us that when we widen the streets to accept the congestion that we're anticipating, or the additional trips that we're anticipating in congested systems, it is principally that congestion that is constraining demand, and so that the widening comes, and there are all of these latent trips that are ready to happen. People move further from work and make other choices about when they commute, and those lanes fill up very quickly with traffic, so we widen the street again, and they fill up again. And we've learned that in congested systems, we cannot satisfy the automobile.This is from Newsweek Magazine — hardly an esoteric publication: ""Today's engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse."" My response to reading this was, may I please meet some of these engineers, because these are not the ones that I — there are great exceptions that I'm working with now — but these are not the engineers one typically meets working in a city, where they say, ""Oh, that road is too crowded, we need to add a lane."" So you add a lane, and the traffic comes, and they say, ""See, I told you we needed that lane."" This applies both to highways and to city streets if they're congested.But the amazing thing about most American cities that I work in, the more typical cities, is that they have a lot of streets that are actually oversized for the congestion they're currently experiencing. This was the case in Oklahoma City, when the mayor came running to me, very upset, because they were named in Prevention Magazine the worst city for pedestrians in the entire country. Now that can't possibly be true, but it certainly is enough to make a mayor do something about it. We did a walkability study, and what we found, looking at the car counts on the street — these are 3,000-, 4,000-, 7,000-car counts and we know that two lanes can handle 10,000 cars per day. Look at these numbers — they're all near or under 10,000 cars, and these were the streets that were designated in the new downtown plan to be four lanes to six lanes wide. So you had a fundamental disconnect between the number of lanes and the number of cars that wanted to use them.So it was my job to redesign every street in the downtown from curb face to curb face, and we did it for 50 blocks of streets, and we're rebuilding it now. So a typical oversized street to nowhere is being narrowed, and now under construction, and the project is half done. The typical street like this, you know, when you do that, you find room for medians. You find room for bike lanes. We've doubled the amount of on-street parking. We've added a full bike network where one didn't exist before.But not everyone has the money that Oklahoma City has, because they have an extraction economy that's doing quite well. The typical city is more like Cedar Rapids, where they have an all four-lane system, half one-way system. And it's a little hard to see, but what we've done — what we're doing; it's in process right now, it's in engineering right now — is turning an all four-lane system, half one-way into an all two-lane system, all two-way, and in so doing, we're adding 70 percent more on-street parking, which the merchants love, and it protects the sidewalk. That parking makes the sidewalk safe, and we're adding a much more robust bicycle network.Then the lanes themselves. How wide are they? That's really important. The standards have changed such that, as Andrés Duany says, the typical road to a subdivision in America allows you to see the curvature of the Earth.(Laughter)This is a subdivision outside of Washington from the 1960s. Look very carefully at the width of the streets. This is a subdivision from the 1980s. 1960s, 1980s. The standards have changed to such a degree that my old neighborhood of South Beach, when it was time to fix the street that wasn't draining properly, they had to widen it and take away half our sidewalk, because the standards were wider. People go faster on wider streets. People know this. The engineers deny it, but the citizens know it, so that in Birmingham, Michigan, they fight for narrower streets. Portland, Oregon, famously walkable, instituted its ""Skinny Streets"" program in its residential neighborhood. We know that skinny streets are safer. The developer Vince Graham, in his project I'On, which we worked on in South Carolina, he goes to conferences and he shows his amazing 22-foot roads. These are two-way roads, very narrow rights of way, and he shows this well-known philosopher, who said, ""Broad is the road that leads to destruction ... narrow is the road that leads to life.""(Laughter)(Applause)This plays very well in the South.Now: bicycles. Bicycles and bicycling are the current revolution underway in only some American cities. But where you build it, they come. As a planner, I hate to say that, but the one thing I can say is that bicycle population is a function of bicycle infrastructure. I asked my friend Tom Brennan from Nelson\Nygaard in Portland to send me some pictures of the Portland bike commute. He sent me this. I said, ""Was that bike to work day?"" He said, ""No, that was Tuesday."" When you do what Portland did and spend money on bicycle infrastructure — New York City has doubled the number of bikers in it several times now by painting these bright green lanes. Even automotive cities like Long Beach, California: vast uptick in the number of bikers based on the infrastructure. And of course, what really does it, if you know 15th Street here in Washington, DC — please meet Rahm Emanuel's new bike lanes in Chicago, the buffered lane, the parallel parking pulled off the curb, the bikes between the parked cars and the curb — these mint cyclists. If, however, as in Pasadena, every lane is a bike lane, then no lane is a bike lane. And this is the only bicyclist that I met in Pasadena, so ...(Laughter)The parallel parking I mentioned — it's an essential barrier of steel that protects the curb and pedestrians from moving vehicles. This is Ft. Lauderdale; one side of the street, you can park, the other side of the street, you can't. This is happy hour on the parking side. This is sad hour on the other side. And then the trees themselves slow cars down. They move slower when trees are next to the road, and, of course, sometimes they slow down very quickly. All the little details — the curb return radius. Is it one foot or is it 40 feet? How swoopy is that curb to determine how fast the car goes and how much room you have to cross. And then I love this, because this is objective journalism. ""Some say the entrance to CityCenter is not inviting to pedestrians."" When every aspect of the landscape is swoopy, is aerodynamic, is stream-form geometrics, it says: ""This is a vehicular place."" So no one detail, no one speciality, can be allowed to set the stage. And here, you know, this street: yes, it will drain within a minute of the hundred-year storm, but this poor woman has to mount the curb every day.So then quickly, the comfortable walk has to do with the fact that all animals seek, simultaneously, prospect and refuge. We want to be able to see our predators, but we also want to feel that our flanks are covered. And so we're drawn to places that have good edges, and if you don't supply the edges, people won't want to be there. What's the proper ratio of height to width? Is it one to one? Three to one? If you get beyond one to six, you're not very comfortable anymore. You don't feel enclosed. Now, six to one in Salzburg can be perfectly delightful. The opposite of Salzburg is Houston. The point being the parking lot is the principal problem here. However, missing teeth, those empty lots can be issues as well, and if you have a missing corner because of an outdated zoning code, then you could have a missing nose in your neighborhood. That's what we had in my neighborhood. This was the zoning code that said I couldn't build on that site. As you may know, Washington, DC is now changing its zoning to allow sites like this to become sites like this. We needed a lot of variances to do that. Triangular houses can be interesting to build, but if you get one built, people generally like it. So you've got to fill those missing noses.And then, finally, the interesting walk: signs of humanity. We are among the social primates. Nothing interests us more than other people. We want signs of people. So the perfect one-to-one ratio, it's a great thing. This is Grand Rapids, a very walkable city, but nobody walks on this street that connects the two best hotels together, because if on the left, you have an exposed parking deck, and on the right, you have a conference facility that was apparently designed in admiration for that parking deck, then you don't attract that many people. Mayor Joe Riley, in his 10th term, Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, taught us it only takes 25 feet of building to hide 250 feet of garage. This one I call the Chia Pet Garage. It's in South Beach. That active ground floor.I want to end with this project that I love to show. It's by Meleca Architects. It's in Columbus, Ohio. To the left is the convention center neighborhood, full of pedestrians. To the right is the Short North neighborhood — ethnic, great restaurants, great shops, struggling. It wasn't doing very well because this was the bridge, and no one was walking from the convention center into that neighborhood. Well, when they rebuilt the highway, they added an extra 80 feet to the bridge. Sorry — they rebuilt the bridge over the highway. The city paid 1.9 million dollars, they gave the site to a developer, the developer built this and now the Short North has come back to life. And everyone says, the newspapers, not the planning magazines, the newspapers say it's because of that bridge.So that's it. That's the general theory of walkability. Think about your own cities. Think about how you can apply it. You've got to do all four things at once. So find those places where you have most of them and fix what you can, fix what still needs fixing in those places.I really appreciate your attention, and thank you for coming today.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_speck_4_ways_to_make_a_city_more_walkable
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"Worldwide, over 1.5 billion people experience armed conflict. In response, people are forced to flee their country, leaving over 15 million refugees. Children, without a doubt, are the most innocent and vulnerable victims ... but not just from the obvious physical dangers, but from the often unspoken effects that wars have on their families. The experiences of war leave children at a real high risk for the development of emotional and behavioral problems. Children, as we can only imagine, will feel worried, threatened and at risk. But there is good news. The quality of care that children receive in their families can have a more significant effect on their well-being than from the actual experiences of war that they have been exposed to. So actually, children can be protected by warm, secure parenting during and after conflict.In 2011, I was a first-year PhD student in the University of Manchester School of Psychological Sciences. Like many of you here, I watched the crisis in Syria unfold in front of me on the TV. My family is originally from Syria, and very early on, I lost several family members in really horrifying ways. I'd sit and I'd gather with my family and watch the TV. We've all seen those scenes: bombs destroying buildings, chaos, destruction and people screaming and running. It was always the people screaming and running that really got me the most, especially those terrified-looking children. I was a mother to two young, typically inquisitive children. They were five and six then, at an age where they typically asked lots and lots of questions, and expected real, convincing answers. So, I began to wonder what it might be like to parent my children in a war zone and a refugee camp. Would my children change? Would my daughter's bright, happy eyes lose their shine? Would my son's really relaxed and carefree nature become fearful and withdrawn? How would I cope? Would I change?As psychologists and parent trainers, we know that arming parents with skills in caring for their children can have a huge effect on their well-being, and we call this parent training. The question I had was, could parent training programs be useful for families while they were still in war zones or refugee camps? Could we reach them with advice or training that would help them through these struggles? So I approached my PhD supervisor, Professor Rachel Calam, with the idea of using my academic skills to make some change in the real world. I wasn't quite sure what exactly I wanted to do. She listened carefully and patiently, and then to my joy she said, ""If that's what you want to do, and it means so much to you, then let's do it. Let's find ways to see if parent programs can be useful for families in these contexts.""So for the past five years, myself and my colleagues — Prof. Calam and Dr. Kim Cartwright — have been working on ways to support families that have experienced war and displacement. Now, to know how to help families that have been through conflict support their children, the first step must obviously be to ask them what they're struggling with, right? I mean, it seems obvious. But it's often those that are the most vulnerable, that we're trying to support, that we actually don't ask. How many times have we just assumed we know exactly the right thing that's going to help someone or something without actually asking them first?So I travelled to refugee camps in Syria and in Turkey, and I sat with families, and I listened. I listened to their parenting challenges, I listened to their parenting struggles and I listened to their call for help. And sometimes that was just paused, as all I could do was hold hands with them and just join them in silent crying and prayer. They told me about their struggles, they told me about the rough, harsh refugee camp conditions that made it hard to focus on anything but practical chores like collecting clean water. They told me how they watched their children withdraw; the sadness, depression, anger, bed-wetting, thumb-sucking, fear of loud noises, fear of nightmares — terrifying, terrifying nightmares. These families had been through what we had been watching on the TV. The mothers — almost half of them were now widows of war, or didn't even know if their husbands were dead or alive — described how they felt they were coping so badly. They watched their children change and they had no idea how to help them. They didn't know how to answer their children's questions.What I found incredibly astonishing and so motivational was that these families were so motivated to support their children. Despite all these challenges they faced, they were trying to help their children. They were making attempts at seeking support from NGO workers, from refugee camp teachers, professional medics, other parents. One mother I met had only been in a camp for four days, and had already made two attempts at seeking support for her eight-year-old daughter who was having terrifying nightmares. But sadly, these attempts are almost always useless. Refugee camp doctors, when available, are almost always too busy, or don't have the knowledge or the time for basic parenting supports. Refugee camp teachers and other parents are just like them — part of a new refugee community who's struggling with new needs.So then we began to think. How could we help these families? The families were struggling with things much bigger than they could cope with. The Syrian crisis made it clear how incredibly impossible it would be to reach families on an individual level. How else could we help them? How would we reach families at a population level and low costs in these terrifying, terrifying times?After hours of speaking to NGO workers, one suggested a fantastic innovative idea of distributing parenting information leaflets via bread wrappers — bread wrappers that were being delivered to families in a conflict zone in Syria by humanitarian workers. So that's what we did. The bread wrappers haven't changed at all in their appearance, except for the addition of two pieces of paper. One was a parenting information leaflet that had basic advice and information that normalized to the parent what they might be experiencing, and what their child might be experiencing. And information on how they could support themselves and their children, such as information like spending time talking to your child, showing them more affection, being more patient with your child, talking to your children. The other piece of paper was a feedback questionnaire, and of course, there was a pen. So is this simply leaflet distribution, or is this actually a possible means of delivering psychological first aid that provides warm, secure, loving parenting?We managed to distribute 3,000 of these in just one week. What was incredible was we had a 60 percent response rate. 60 percent of the 3,000 families responded. I don't know how many researchers we have here today, but that kind of response rate is fantastic. To have that in Manchester would be a huge achievement, let alone in a conflict zone in Syria — really highlighting how important these kinds of messages were to families. I remember how excited and eager we were for the return of the questionnaires. The families had left hundreds of messages — most incredibly positive and encouraging. But my favorite has got to be, ""Thank you for not forgetting about us and our children."" This really illustrates the potential means of the delivery of psychological first aid to families, and the return of feedback, too. Just imagine replicating this using other means such as baby milk distribution, or female hygiene kits, or even food baskets.But let's bring this closer to home, because the refugee crisis is one that is having an effect on every single one of us. We're bombarded with images daily of statistics and of photos, and that's not surprising, because by last month, over one million refugees had reached Europe. One million. Refugees are joining our communities, they're becoming our neighbors, their children are attending our children's schools. So we've adapted the leaflet to meet the needs of European refugees, and we have them online, open-access, in areas with a really high refugee influx. For example, the Swedish healthcare uploaded it onto their website, and within the first 45 minutes, it was downloaded 343 times — really highlighting how important it is for volunteers, practitioners and other parents to have open-access, psychological first-aid messages.In 2013, I was sitting on the cold, hard floor of a refugee camp tent with mothers sitting around me as I was conducting a focus group. Across from me stood an elderly lady with what seemed to be a 13-year-old girl lying beside her, with her head on the elderly lady's knees. The girl stayed quiet throughout the focus group, not talking at all, with her knees curled up against her chest. Towards the end of the focus group, and as I was thanking the mothers for their time, the elderly lady looked at me while pointing at the young girl, and said to me, ""Can you help us with...?"" Not quite sure what she expected me to do, I looked at the young girl and smiled, and in Arabic I said, ""Salaam alaikum. Shu-ismak?"" ""What's your name?"" She looked at me really confused and unengaged, but then said, ""Halul."" Halul is the pet's name for the Arabic female name, Hala, and is only really used to refer to really young girls. At that point I realized that actually Hala was probably much older than 13. It turns out Hala was a 25-year-old mother to three young children. Hala had been a confident, bright, bubbly, loving, caring mother to her children, but the war had changed all of that. She had lived through bombs being dropped in her town; she had lived through explosions. When fighter jets were flying around their building, dropping bombs, her children would be screaming, terrified from the noise. Hala would frantically grab pillows and cover her children's ears to block out the noise, all the while screaming herself. When they reached the refugee camp and she knew they were finally in some kind of safety, she completely withdrew to acting like her old childhood self. She completely rejected her family — her children, her husband. Hala simply could no longer cope.This is a parenting struggle with a really tough ending, but sadly, it's not uncommon. Those who experience armed conflict and displacement will face serious emotional struggles. And that's something we can all relate to. If you have been through a devastating time in your life, if you have lost someone or something you really care about, how would you continue to cope? Could you still be able to care for yourself and for your family?Given that the first years of a child's life are crucial for healthy physical and emotional development, and that 1.5 billion people are experiencing armed conflict — many of whom are now joining our communities — we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the needs of those who are experiencing war and displacement. We must prioritize these families' needs — both those who are internally displaced, and those who are refugees worldwide. These needs must be prioritized by NGO workers, policy makers, the WHO, the UNHCR and every single one of us in whatever capacity it is that we function in our society.When we begin to recognize the individual faces of the conflict, when we begin to notice those intricate emotions on their faces, we begin to see them as humans, too. We begin to see the needs of these families, and these are the real human needs. When these family needs are prioritized, interventions for children in humanitarian settings will prioritize and recognize the primary role of the family in supporting children. Family mental health will be shouting loud and clear in global, international agenda. And children will be less likely to enter social service systems in resettlement countries because their families would have had support earlier on. And we will be more open-minded, more welcoming, more caring and more trusting to those who are joining our communities.We need to stop wars. We need to build a world where children can dream of planes dropping gifts, and not bombs. Until we stop armed conflicts raging throughout the world, families will continue to be displaced, leaving children vulnerable. But by improving parenting and caregiver support, it may be possible to weaken the links between war and psychological difficulties in children and their families.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/aala_el_khani_what_it_s_like_to_be_a_parent_in_a_war_zone
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"Most of you can probably relate to what I'm feeling right now. My heart is racing in my chest. My palms are a little bit clammy. I'm sweating. And my breath is a little bit shallow. Now, these familiar sensations are obviously the result of standing up in front of a thousand of you and giving a talk that might be streamed online to perhaps a million more. But the physical sensations I'm experiencing right now are actually the result of a much more basic mind-body mechanism. My nervous system is sending a flood of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into my bloodstream. It's a very old and very necessary response that sends blood and oxygen to the organs and muscles that I might need to respond quickly to a potential threat.But there's a problem with this response, and that is, it can get over-activated. If I face these kinds of stressors on a daily basis, particularly over an extended period of time, my system can get overloaded. So basically, if this response happens infrequently: super-necessary for my well-being and survival. But if it happens too much, it can actually make me sick.There's a growing body of research examining the relationship between chronic stress and illness. Things like heart disease and even cancer are being shown to have a relationship to stress. And that's because, over time, too much activation from stress can interfere with my body's processes that keep me healthy.Now, let's imagine for a moment that I was pregnant. What might this kind of stress, particularly over the length of my pregnancy, what kind of impact might that have on the health of my developing fetus? You probably won't be surprised when I tell you that this kind of stress during pregnancy is not good. It can even cause the body to initiate labor too early, because in a basic sense, the stress communicates that the womb is no longer a safe place for the child. Stress during pregnancy is linked with things like high blood pressure and low infant birth weight, and it can begin a cascade of health challenges that make birth much more dangerous for both parent and child.Now of course stress, particularly in our modern lifestyle, is a somewhat universal experience, right? Maybe you've never stood up to give a TED Talk, but you've faced a big presentation at work, a sudden job loss, a big test, a heated conflict with a family member or friend. But it turns out that the kind of stress we experience and whether we're able to stay in a relaxed state long enough to keep our bodies working properly depends a lot on who we are. There's also a growing body of research showing that people who experience more discrimination are more likely to have poor health. Even the threat of discrimination, like worrying you might be stopped by police while driving your car, can have a negative impact on your health. Harvard Professor Dr. David Williams, the person who pioneered the tools that have proven these linkages, says that the more marginalized groups in our society experience more discrimination and more impacts on their health.I've been interested in these issues for over a decade. I became interested in maternal health when a failed premed trajectory instead sent me down a path looking for other ways to help pregnant people. I became a doula, a lay person trained to provide support to people during pregnancy and childbirth. And because I'm Latina and a Spanish speaker, in my first volunteer doula gig at a public hospital in North Carolina, I saw clearly how race and class impacted the experiences of the women that I supported.If we take a look at the statistics about the rates of illness during pregnancy and childbirth, we see clearly the pattern outlined by Dr. Williams. African-American women in particular have an entirely different experience than white women when it comes to whether their babies are born healthy. In certain parts of the country, particularly the Deep South, the rates of mother and infant death for black women actually approximate those rates in Sub-Saharan African. In those same communities, the rates for white women are near zero.Even nationally, black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women. Four times more likely to die. They're also twice as likely for their infants to die before the first year of life than white infants, and two to three times more likely to give birth too early or too skinny — a sign of insufficient development. Native women are also more likely to have higher rates of these problems than white women, as are some groups of Latinas. For the last decade as a doula turned journalist and blogger, I've been trying to raise the alarm about just how different the experiences of women of color, but particularly black women, are when it comes to pregnancy and birth in the US.But when I tell people about these appalling statistics, I'm usually met with an assumption that it's about either poverty or lack of access to care. But it turns out, neither of these things tell the whole story. Even middle-class black women still have much worse outcomes than their middle-class white counterparts. The gap actually widens among this group. And while access to care is definitely still a problem, even women of color who receive the recommended prenatal care still suffer from these high rates.And so we come back to the path from discrimination to stress to poor health, and it begins to paint a picture that many people of color know to be true: racism is actually making us sick. Still sound like a stretch? Consider this: immigrants, particularly black and Latina immigrants, actually have better health when they first arrive in the United States. But the longer they stay in this country, the worse their health becomes. People like me, born in the United States to Cuban immigrant parents, are actually more likely to have worse health than my grandparents did. It's what researchers call ""the immigrant paradox,"" and it further illustrates that there's something in the US environment that is making us sick.But here's the thing: this problem, that racism is making people of color, but especially black women and babies, sick, is vast. I could spend all of my time with you talking about it, but I won't, because I want to make sure to tell you about one solution. And the good news is, it's a solution that isn't particularly expensive, and doesn't require any fancy drug treatments or new technologies. The solution is called, ""The JJ Way.""Meet Jennie Joseph. She's a midwife in the Orlando, Florida area who has been serving pregnant women for over a decade. In what she calls her easy-access clinics, Jennie and her team provide prenatal care to over 600 women per year. Her clients, most of whom are black, Haitian and Latina, deliver at the local hospital. But by providing accessible and respectful prenatal care, Jennie has achieved something remarkable: almost all of her clients give birth to healthy, full-term babies.Her method is deceptively simple. Jennie says that all of her appointments start at the front desk. Every member of her team, and every moment a women is at her clinic, is as supportive as possible. No one is turned away due to lack of funds. The JJ Way is to make the finances work no matter what the hurdles. No one is chastised for showing up late to their appointments. No one is talked down to or belittled. Jennie's waiting room feels more like your aunt's living room than a clinic. She calls this space ""a classroom in disguise."" With the plush chairs arranged in a circle, women wait for their appointments in one-on-one chats with a staff educator, or in group prenatal classes.When you finally are called back to your appointment, you are greeted by Alexis or Trina, two of Jennie's medical assistants. Both are young, African-American and moms themselves. Their approach is casual and friendly. During one visit I observed, Trina chatted with a young soon-to-be mom while she took her blood pressure. This Latina mom was having trouble keeping food down due to nausea. As Trina deflated the blood pressure cuff, she said, ""We'll see about changing your prescription, OK? We can't have you not eating."" That ""we"" is actually a really crucial aspect of Jennie's model. She sees her staff as part of a team that, alongside the woman and her family, has one goal: get mom to term with a healthy baby.Jennie says that Trina and Alexis are actually the center of her care model, and that her role as a provider is just to support their work. Trina spends a lot of her day on her cell phone, texting with clients about all sorts of things. One woman texted to ask if a medication she was prescribed at the hospital was OK to take while pregnant. The answer was no. Another woman texted with pictures of an infant born under Jennie's care. Lastly, when you finally are called back to see the provider, you've already taken your own weight in the waiting room, and done your own pee test in the bathroom.This is a big departure from the traditional medical model, because it places responsibility and information back in the woman's hands. So rather than a medical setting where you might be chastised for not keeping up with provider recommendations — the kind of settings often available to low-income women — Jennie's model is to be as supportive as possible. And that support provides a crucial buffer to the stress of racism and discrimination facing these women every day.But here's the best thing about Jennie's model: it's been incredibly successful. Remember those statistics I told you, that black women are more likely to give birth too early, to give birth to low birth weight babies, to even die due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth? Well, The JJ Way has almost entirely eliminated those problems, starting with what Jennie calls ""skinny babies."" She's been able to get almost all her clients to term with healthy, chunky babies like this one.Audience: Aw!Miriam Zoila Pérez: This is a baby girl born to a client of Jennie's this past June.A similar demographic of women in Jennie's area who gave birth at the same hospital her clients did were three times more likely to give birth to a baby below a healthy weight. Jennie is making headway into what has been seen for decades as an almost intractable problem. Some of you might be thinking, all this one-on-one attention that The JJ Way requires must be too expensive to scale. Well, you'd be wrong. The visit with the provider is not the center of Jennie's model, and for good reason. Those visits are expensive, and in order to maintain her model, she's got to see a lot of clients to cover costs. But Jennie doesn't have to spend a ton of time with each woman, if all of the members of her team can provide the support, information and care that her clients need. The beauty of Jennie's model is that she actually believes it can be implemented in pretty much any health care setting. It's a revolution in care just waiting to happen.These problems I've been sharing with you are big. They come from long histories of racism, classism, a society based on race and class stratification. They involve elaborate physiological mechanisms meant to protect us, that, when overstimulated, actually make us sick. But if there's one thing I've learned from my work as a doula, it's that a little bit of unconditional support can go a really long way. History has shown that people are incredibly resilient, and while we can't eradicate racism or the stress that results from it overnight, we might just be able to create environments that provide a buffer to what people of color experience on a daily basis. And during pregnancy, that buffer can be an incredible tool towards shifting the impact of racism for generations to come.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/miriam_zoila_perez_how_racism_harms_pregnant_women_and_what_can_help
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(Guitar music starts)(Cheers)(Cheers)(Music ends),"https://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_y_gabriela_an_electrifying_acoustic_guitar_performance
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"People have been using media to talk about sex for a long time. Love letters, phone sex, racy Polaroids. There's even a story of a girl who eloped with a man that she met over the telegraph in 1886. Today we have sexting, and I am a sexting expert. Not an expert sexter. Though, I do know what this means — I think you do too.[it's a penis](Laughter)I have been studying sexting since the media attention to it began in 2008. I wrote a book on the moral panic about sexting. And here's what I found: most people are worrying about the wrong thing. They're trying to just prevent sexting from happening entirely. But let me ask you this: As long as it's completely consensual, what's the problem with sexting? People are into all sorts of things that you may not be into, like blue cheese or cilantro.(Laughter)Sexting is certainly risky, like anything that's fun, but as long as you're not sending an image to someone who doesn't want to receive it, there's no harm. What I do think is a serious problem is when people share private images of others without their permission. And instead of worrying about sexting, what I think we need to do is think a lot more about digital privacy.The key is consent. Right now most people are thinking about sexting without really thinking about consent at all. Did you know that we currently criminalize teen sexting? It can be a crime because it counts as child pornography, if there's an image of someone under 18, and it doesn't even matter if they took that image of themselves and shared it willingly. So we end up with this bizarre legal situation where two 17-year-olds can legally have sex in most US states but they can't photograph it. Some states have also tried passing sexting misdemeanor laws but these laws repeat the same problem because they still make consensual sexting illegal. It doesn't make sense to try to ban all sexting to try to address privacy violations. This is kind of like saying, let's solve the problem of date rape by just making dating completely illegal. Most teens don't get arrested for sexting, but can you guess who does? It's often teens who are disliked by their partner's parents. And this can be because of class bias, racism or homophobia. Most prosecutors are, of course, smart enough not to use child pornography charges against teenagers, but some do.According to researchers at the University of New Hampshire seven percent of all child pornography possession arrests are teens, sexting consensually with other teens. Child pornography is a serious crime, but it's just not the same thing as teen sexting. Parents and educators are also responding to sexting without really thinking too much about consent. Their message to teens is often: just don't do it.And I totally get it — there are serious legal risks and of course, that potential for privacy violations. And when you were a teen, I'm sure you did exactly as you were told, right?You're probably thinking, my kid would never sext. And that's true, your little angel may not be sexting because only 33 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds are sexting. But, sorry, by the time they're older, odds are they will be sexting. Every study I've seen puts the rate above 50 percent for 18- to 24-year-olds. And most of the time, nothing goes wrong. People ask me all the time things like, isn't sexting just so dangerous, though? It's like you wouldn't leave your wallet on a park bench and you expect it's going to get stolen if you do that, right? Here's how I think about it: sexting is like leaving your wallet at your boyfriend's house. If you come back the next day and all the money is just gone, you really need to dump that guy. (Laughter) So instead of criminalizing sexting to try to prevent these privacy violations, instead we need to make consent central to how we think about the circulation of our private information.Every new media technology raises privacy concerns. In fact, in the US the very first major debates about privacy were in response to technologies that were relatively new at the time. In the late 1800s, people were worried about cameras, which were just suddenly more portable than ever before, and newspaper gossip columns. They were worried that the camera would capture information about them, take it out of context and widely disseminate it. Does this sound familiar? It's exactly what we're worrying about now with social media and drone cameras, and, of course, sexting. And these fears about technology, they make sense because technologies can amplify and bring out our worst qualities and behaviors. But there are solutions. And we've been here before with a dangerous new technology.In 1908, Ford introduced the Model T car. Traffic fatality rates were rising. It was a serious problem — it looks so safe, right? Our first response was to try to change drivers' behavior, so we developed speed limits and enforced them through fines. But over the following decades, we started to realize the technology of the car itself is not just neutral. We could design the car to make it safer. So in the 1920s, we got shatter-resistant windshields. In the 1950s, seat belts. And in the 1990s, airbags. All three of these areas: laws, individuals and industry came together over time to help solve the problem that a new technology causes. And we can do the same thing with digital privacy. Of course, it comes back to consent. Here's the idea. Before anyone can distribute your private information, they should have to get your permission. This idea of affirmative consent comes from anti-rape activists who tell us that we need consent for every sexual act. And we have really high standards for consent in a lot of other areas.Think about having surgery. Your doctor has to make sure that you are meaningfully and knowingly consenting to that medical procedure. This is not the type of consent like with an iTunes Terms of Service where you just scroll to the bottom and you're like, agree, agree, whatever.(Laughter)If we think more about consent, we can have better privacy laws. Right now, we just don't have that many protections. If your ex-husband or your ex-wife is a terrible person, they can take your nude photos and upload them to a porn site. It can be really hard to get those images taken down. And in a lot of states, you're actually better off if you took the images of yourself because then you can file a copyright claim.(Laughter)Right now, if someone violates your privacy, whether that's an individual or a company or the NSA, you can try filing a lawsuit, though you may not be successful because many courts assume that digital privacy is just impossible. So they're not willing to punish anyone for violating it. I still hear people asking me all the time, isn't a digital image somehow blurring the line between public and private because it's digital, right? No! No! Everything digital is not just automatically public. That doesn't make any sense.As NYU legal scholar Helen Nissenbaum tells us, we have laws and policies and norms that protect all kinds of information that's private, and it doesn't make a difference if it's digital or not. All of your health records are digitized but your doctor can't just share them with anyone. All of your financial information is held in digital databases, but your credit card company can't just post your purchase history online. Better laws could help address privacy violations after they happen, but one of the easiest things we can all do is make personal changes to help protect each other's privacy. We're always told that privacy is our own, sole, individual responsibility. We're told, constantly monitor and update your privacy settings. We're told, never share anything you wouldn't want the entire world to see. This doesn't make sense. Digital media are social environments and we share things with people we trust all day, every day.As Princeton researcher Janet Vertesi argues, our data and our privacy, they're not just personal, they're actually interpersonal. And so one thing you can do that's really easy is just start asking for permission before you share anyone else's information. If you want to post a photo of someone online, ask for permission. If you want to forward an email thread, ask for permission. And if you want to share someone's nude selfie, obviously, ask for permission.These individual changes can really help us protect each other's privacy, but we need technology companies on board as well. These companies have very little incentive to help protect our privacy because their business models depend on us sharing everything with as many people as possible. Right now, if I send you an image, you can forward that to anyone that you want. But what if I got to decide if that image was forwardable or not? This would tell you, you don't have my permission to send this image out. We do this kind of thing all the time to protect copyright. If you buy an e-book, you can't just send it out to as many people as you want. So why not try this with mobile phones? What you can do is we can demand that tech companies add these protections to our devices and our platforms as the default. After all, you can choose the color of your car, but the airbags are always standard.If we don't think more about digital privacy and consent, there can be serious consequences. There was a teenager from Ohio — let's call her Jennifer, for the sake of her privacy. She shared nude photos of herself with her high school boyfriend, thinking she could trust him. Unfortunately, he betrayed her and sent her photos around the entire school. Jennifer was embarrassed and humiliated, but instead of being compassionate, her classmates harassed her. They called her a slut and a whore and they made her life miserable. Jennifer started missing school and her grades dropped. Ultimately, Jennifer decided to end her own life.Jennifer did nothing wrong. All she did was share a nude photo with someone she thought that she could trust. And yet our laws tell her that she committed a horrible crime equivalent to child pornography. Our gender norms tell her that by producing this nude image of herself, she somehow did the most horrible, shameful thing. And when we assume that privacy is impossible in digital media, we completely write off and excuse her boyfriend's bad, bad behavior. People are still saying all the time to victims of privacy violations, ""What were you thinking? You should have never sent that image.""If you're trying to figure out what to say instead, try this. Imagine you've run into your friend who broke their leg skiing. They took a risk to do something fun, and it didn't end well. But you're probably not going to be the jerk who says, ""Well, I guess you shouldn't have gone skiing then."" If we think more about consent, we can see that victims of privacy violations deserve our compassion, not criminalization, shaming, harassment or punishment. We can support victims, and we can prevent some privacy violations by making these legal, individual and technological changes. Because the problem is not sexting, the issue is digital privacy. And one solution is consent.So the next time a victim of a privacy violation comes up to you, instead of blaming them, let's do this instead: let's shift our ideas about digital privacy, and let's respond with compassion.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_adele_hasinoff_how_to_practice_safe_sexting
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"Five years ago, I had my dream job. I was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East reporting for ABC News. But there was a crack in the wall, a problem with our industry, that I felt we needed to fix. You see, I got to the Middle East right around the end of 2007, which was just around the midpoint of the Iraq War. But by the time I got there, it was already nearly impossible to find stories about Iraq on air. Coverage had dropped across the board, across networks. And of the stories that did make it, more than 80 percent of them were about us. We were missing the stories about Iraq, the people who live there, and what was happening to them under the weight of the war.Afghanistan had already fallen off the agenda. There were less than one percent of all news stories in 2008 that went to the war in Afghanistan. It was the longest war in US history, but information was so scarce that schoolteachers we spoke to told us they had trouble explaining to their students what we were doing there, when those students had parents who were fighting and sometimes dying overseas.We had drawn a blank, and it wasn't just Iraq and Afghanistan. From conflict zones to climate change to all sorts of issues around crises in public health, we were missing what I call the species-level issues, because as a species, they could actually sink us. And by failing to understand the complex issues of our time, we were facing certain practical implications. How were we going to solve problems that we didn't fundamentally understand, that we couldn't track in real time, and where the people working on the issues were invisible to us and sometimes invisible to each other?When you look back on Iraq, those years when we were missing the story, were the years when the society was falling apart, when we were setting the conditions for what would become the rise of ISIS, the ISIS takeover of Mosul and terrorist violence that would spread beyond Iraq's borders to the rest of the world.Just around that time where I was making that observation, I looked across the border of Iraq and noticed there was another story we were missing: the war in Syria. If you were a Middle-East specialist, you knew that Syria was that important from the start. But it ended up being, really, one of the forgotten stories of the Arab Spring. I saw the implications up front. Syria is intimately tied to regional security, to global stability. I felt like we couldn't let that become another one of the stories we left behind.So I left my big TV job to start a website, called ""Syria Deeply."" It was designed to be a news and information source that made it easier to understand a complex issue, and for the past four years, it's been a resource for policymakers and professionals working on the conflict in Syria. We built a business model based on consistent, high-quality information, and convening the top minds on the issue. And we found it was a model that scaled. We got passionate requests to do other things ""Deeply."" So we started to work our way down the list.I'm just one of many entrepreneurs, and we are just one of many start-ups trying to fix what's wrong with news. All of us in the trenches know that something is wrong with the news industry. It's broken. Trust in the media has hit an all-time low. And the statistic you're seeing up there is from September — it's arguably gotten worse. But we can fix this. We can fix the news. I know that that's true. You can call me an idealist; I call myself an industrious optimist. And I know there are a lot of us out there. We have ideas for how to make things better, and I want to share three of them that we've picked up in our own work.Idea number one: we need news that's built on deep-domain knowledge. Given the waves and waves of layoffs at newsrooms across the country, we've lost the art of specialization. Beat reporting is an endangered thing. When it comes to foreign news, the way we can fix that is by working with more local journalists, treating them like our partners and collaborators, not just fixers who fetch us phone numbers and sound bites. Our local reporters in Syria and across Africa and across Asia bring us stories that we certainly would not have found on our own. Like this one from the suburbs of Damascus, about a wheelchair race that gave hope to those wounded in the war. Or this one from Sierra Leone, about a local chief who curbed the spread of Ebola by self-organizing a quarantine in his district. Or this one from the border of Pakistan, about Afghan refugees being forced to return home before they are ready, under the threat of police intimidation. Our local journalists are our mentors. They teach us something new every day, and they bring us stories that are important for all of us to know.Idea number two: we need a kind of Hippocratic oath for the news industry, a pledge to first do no harm.(Applause)Journalists need to be tough. We need to speak truth to power, but we also need to be responsible. We need to live up to our own ideals, and we need to recognize when what we're doing could potentially harm society, where we lose track of journalism as a public service.I watched us cover the Ebola crisis. We launched Ebola Deeply. We did our best. But what we saw was a public that was flooded with hysterical and sensational coverage, sometimes inaccurate, sometimes completely wrong. Public health experts tell me that that actually cost us in human lives, because by sparking more panic and by sometimes getting the facts wrong, we made it harder for people to resolve what was actually happening on the ground. All that noise made it harder to make the right decisions.We can do better as an industry, but it requires us recognizing how we got it wrong last time, and deciding not to go that way next time. It's a choice. We have to resist the temptation to use fear for ratings. And that decision has to be made in the individual newsroom and with the individual news executive. Because the next deadly virus that comes around could be much worse and the consequences much higher, if we do what we did last time; if our reporting isn't responsible and it isn't right.The third idea? We need to embrace complexity if we want to make sense of a complex world. Embrace complexity —(Applause)not treat the world simplistically, because simple isn't accurate. We live in a complex world. News is adult education. It's our job as journalists to get elbow deep in complexity and to find new ways to make it easier for everyone else to understand. If we don't do that, if we pretend there are just simple answers, we're leading everyone off a steep cliff. Understanding complexity is the only way to know the real threats that are around the corner. It's our responsibility to translate those threats and to help you understand what's real, so you can be prepared and know what it takes to be ready for what comes next.I am an industrious optimist. I do believe we can fix what's broken. We all want to. There are great journalists out there doing great work — we just need new formats. I honestly believe this is a time of reawakening, reimagining what we can do. I believe we can fix what's broken. I know we can fix the news. I know it's worth trying, and I truly believe that in the end, we're going to get this right.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lara_setrakian_3_ways_to_fix_a_broken_news_industry
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"One summer afternoon in 2013, DC police detained, questioned and searched a man who appeared suspicious and potentially dangerous. This wasn't what I was wearing the day of the detention, to be fair, but I have a picture of that as well. I know it's very frightening — try to remain calm.(Laughter)At this time, I was interning at the Public Defender Service in Washington DC, and I was visiting a police station for work. I was on my way out, and before I could make it to my car, two police cars pulled up to block my exit, and an officer approached me from behind. He told me to stop, take my backpack off and put my hands on the police car parked next to us. About a dozen officers then gathered near us. All of them had handguns, some had assault rifles. They rifled through my backpack. They patted me down. They took pictures of me spread on the police car, and they laughed.And as all this was happening — as I was on the police car trying to ignore the shaking in my legs, trying to think clearly about what I should do — something stuck out to me as odd. When I look at myself in this photo, if I were to describe myself, I think I'd say something like, ""19-year-old Indian male, bright T-shirt, wearing glasses."" But they weren't including any of these details. Into their police radios as they described me, they kept saying, ""Middle Eastern male with a backpack. Middle Eastern male with a backpack."" And this description carried on into their police reports. I never expected to be described by my own government in these terms: ""lurking,"" ""nefarious,"" ""terrorist."" And the detention dragged on like this.They sent dogs trained to smell explosives to sweep the area I'd been in. They called the federal government to see if I was on any watch lists. They sent a couple of detectives to cross-examine me on why, if I claimed I had nothing to hide, I wouldn't consent to a search of my car. And I could see they weren't happy with me, but I felt I had no way of knowing what they'd want to do next. At one point, the officer who patted me down scanned the side of the police station to see where the security camera was to see how much of this was being recorded. And when he did that, it really sank in how completely I was at their mercy.I think we're all normalized from a young age to the idea of police officers and arrests and handcuffs, so it's easy to forget how demeaning and coercive a thing it is to seize control over another person's body. I know it sounds like the point of my story is how badly treated I was because of my race — and yes, I don't think I would've been detained if I were white. But actually, what I have in mind today is something else. What I have in mind is how much worse things might've been if I weren't affluent. I mean, they thought I might be trying to plant an explosive, and they investigated that possibility for an hour and a half, but I was never put in handcuffs, I was never taken to a jail cell. I think if I were from one of Washington DC's poor communities of color, and they thought I was endangering officers' lives, things might've ended differently. And in fact, in our system, I think it's better to be an affluent person suspected of trying to blow up a police station than it is to be a poor person who's suspected of much, much less than this.I want to give you an example from my current work. Right now, I'm working at a civil rights organization in DC, called Equal Justice Under Law. Let me start by asking you all a question. How many of you have ever gotten a parking ticket in your life? Raise your hand. Yeah. So have I. And when I had to pay it, it felt annoying and it felt bad, but I paid it and I moved on. I'm guessing most of you have paid your tickets as well. But what would happen if you couldn't afford the amount on the ticket and your family doesn't have the money either, what happens then?Well, one thing that's not supposed to happen under the law is, you're not supposed to be arrested and jailed simply because you can't afford to pay. That's illegal under federal law. But that's what local governments across the country are doing to people who are poor. And so many of our lawsuits at Equal Justice Under Law target these modern-day debtors' prisons.One of our cases is against Ferguson, Missouri. And I know when I say Ferguson, many of you will think of police violence. But today I want to talk about a different aspect of the relationship between their police force and their citizens. Ferguson was issuing an average of over two arrest warrants, per person, per year, mostly for unpaid debt to the courts. When I imagine what that would feel like if, every time I left my house, there was a chance a police officer would run my license plate, see a warrant for unpaid debt, seize my body they way the did in DC and then take me to a jail cell, I feel a little sick.I've met many of the people in Ferguson who have experienced this, and I've heard some of their stories. In Ferguson's jail, in each small cell, there's a bunk bed and a toilet, but they'd pack four people into each cell. So there'd be two people on the bunks and two people on the floor, one with nowhere to go except right next to the filthy toilet, which was never cleaned. In fact, the whole cell was never cleaned, so the floor and the walls were lined with blood and mucus. No water to drink, except coming out of a spigot connected to the toilet. The water looked and tasted dirty, there was never enough food, never any showers, women menstruating without any hygiene products, no medical attention whatsoever. When I asked a woman about medical attention, she laughed, and she said, ""Oh, no, no. The only attention you get from the guards in there is sexual.""So, they'd take the debtors to this place and they'd say, ""We're not letting you leave until you make a payment on your debt."" And if you could — if you could call a family member who could somehow come up with some money, then maybe you were out. If it was enough money, you were out. But if it wasn't, you'd stay there for days or weeks, and every day the guards would come down to the cells and haggle with the debtors about the price of release that day. You'd stay until, at some point, the jail would be booked to capacity, and they'd want to book someone new in. And at that point, they'd think, ""OK, it's unlikely this person can come up with the money, it's more likely this new person will."" You're out, they're in, and the machine kept moving like that.I met a man who, nine years ago, was arrested for panhandling in a Walgreens. He couldn't afford his fines and his court fees from that case. When he was young he survived a house fire, only because he jumped out of the third-story window to escape. But that fall left him with damage to his brain and several parts of this body, including his leg. So he can't work, and he relies on social security payments to survive. When I met him in his apartment, he had nothing of value there — not even food in his fridge. He's chronically hungry. He had nothing of value in his apartment except a small piece of cardboard on which he'd written the names of his children. He cherished this a lot. He was happy to show it to me. But he can't pay his fines and fees because he has nothing to give. In the last nine years, he's been arrested 13 times, and jailed for a total of 130 days on that panhandling case. One of those stretches lasted 45 days. Just imagine spending from right now until sometime in June in the place that I described to you a few moments ago.He told me about all the suicide attempts he's seen in Ferguson's jail; about the time a man found a way to hang himself out of reach of the other inmates, so all they could do was yell and yell and yell, trying to get the guards' attention so they could come down and cut him down. And he told me that it took the guards over five minutes to respond, and when they came, the man was unconscious. So they called the paramedics and the paramedics went to the cell. They said, ""He'll be OK,"" so they just left him there on the floor. I heard many stories like this and they shouldn't have surprised me, because suicide is the single leading cause of death in our local jails. This is related to the lack of mental health care in our jails.I met a woman, single mother of three, making seven dollars an hour. She relies on food stamps to feed herself and her children. About a decade ago, she got a couple of traffic tickets and a minor theft charge, and she can't afford her fines and fees on those cases. Since then, she's been jailed about 10 times on those cases, but she has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and she needs medication every day. She doesn't have access to those medications in Ferguson's jail, because no one has access to their medications. She told me about what it was like to spend two weeks in a cage, hallucinating people and shadows and hearing voices, begging for the medication that would make it all stop, only to be ignored. And this isn't anomalous, either: thirty percent of women in our local jails have serious mental health needs just like hers, but only one in six receives any mental health care while in jail.And so, I heard all these stories about this grotesque dungeon that Ferguson was operating for its debtors, and when it came time for me to actually see it and to go visit Ferguson's jail, I'm not sure what I was expecting to see, but I wasn't expecting this. It's an ordinary government building. It could be a post office or a school. It reminded me that these illegal extortion schemes aren't being run somewhere in the shadows, they're being run out in the open by our public officials. They're a matter of public policy. And this reminded me that poverty jailing in general, even outside the debtors' prison context, plays a very visible and central role in our justice system.What I have in mind is our policy of bail. In our system, whether you're detained or free, pending trial is not a matter of how dangerous you are or how much of a flight risk you pose. It's a matter of whether you can afford to post your bail amount. So Bill Cosby, whose bail was set at a million dollars, immediately writes the check, and doesn't spend a second in a jail cell. But Sandra Bland, who died in jail, was only there because her family was unable to come up with 500 dollars. In fact, there are half a million Sandra Blands across the country — 500,000 people who are in jail right now, only because they can't afford their bail amount.We're told that our jails are places for criminals, but statistically that's not the case: three out of every five people in jail right now are there pretrial. They haven't been convicted of any crime; they haven't pled guilty to any offense. Right here in San Francisco, 85 percent of the inmates in our jail in San Francisco are pretrial detainees. This means San Francisco is spending something like 80 million dollars every year to fund pretrial detention.Many of these people who are in jail only because they can't post bail are facing allegations so minor that the amount of time it would take for them to sit waiting for trial is longer than the sentence they would receive if convicted, which means they're guaranteed to get out faster if they just plead guilty. So now the choice is: Should I stay here in this horrible place, away from my family and my dependents, almost guaranteed to lose my job, and then fight the charges? Or should I just plead guilty to whatever the prosecutor wants and get out? And at this point, they're pretrial detainees, not criminals. But once they take that plea deal, we'll call them criminals, even though an affluent person would never have been in this situation, because an affluent person would have simply been bailed out.At this point you might be wondering, ""This guy's in the inspiration section, what is he doing —(Laughter)""This is extremely depressing. I want my money back.""(Laughter)But in actuality, I find talking about jailing much less depressing than the alternative, because I think if we don't talk about these issues and collectively change how we think about jailing, at the end of all of our lives, we'll still have jails full of poor people who don't belong there. That really is depressing to me. But what's exciting to me is the thought that these stories can move us to think about jailing in different terms. Not in sterile policy terms like ""mass incarceration,"" or ""sentencing of nonviolent offenders,"" but in human terms.When we put a human being in a cage for days or weeks or months or even years, what are we doing to that person's mind and body? Under what conditions are we really willing to do that? And so if starting with a few hundred of us in this room, we can commit to thinking about jailing in this different light, then we can undo that normalization I was referring to earlier.If I leave you with anything today, I hope it's with the thought that if we want anything to fundamentally change — not just to reform our policies on bail and fines and fees — but also to make sure that whatever new policies replace those don't punish the poor and the marginalized in their own new way. If we want that kind of change, then this shift in thinking is required of each of us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/salil_dudani_how_jails_extort_the_poor
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"When I was a kid, I was the quintessential nerd. I think some of you were, too.(Laughter)And you, sir, who laughed the loudest, you probably still are.(Laughter)I grew up in a small town in the dusty plains of north Texas, the son of a sheriff who was the son of a pastor. Getting into trouble was not an option. And so I started reading calculus books for fun.(Laughter)You did, too. That led me to building a laser and a computer and model rockets, and that led me to making rocket fuel in my bedroom. Now, in scientific terms, we call this a very bad idea.(Laughter)Around that same time, Stanley Kubrick's ""2001: A Space Odyssey"" came to the theaters, and my life was forever changed. I loved everything about that movie, especially the HAL 9000. Now, HAL was a sentient computer designed to guide the Discovery spacecraft from the Earth to Jupiter. HAL was also a flawed character, for in the end he chose to value the mission over human life. Now, HAL was a fictional character, but nonetheless he speaks to our fears, our fears of being subjugated by some unfeeling, artificial intelligence who is indifferent to our humanity.I believe that such fears are unfounded. Indeed, we stand at a remarkable time in human history, where, driven by refusal to accept the limits of our bodies and our minds, we are building machines of exquisite, beautiful complexity and grace that will extend the human experience in ways beyond our imagining.After a career that led me from the Air Force Academy to Space Command to now, I became a systems engineer, and recently I was drawn into an engineering problem associated with NASA's mission to Mars. Now, in space flights to the Moon, we can rely upon mission control in Houston to watch over all aspects of a flight. However, Mars is 200 times further away, and as a result it takes on average 13 minutes for a signal to travel from the Earth to Mars. If there's trouble, there's not enough time. And so a reasonable engineering solution calls for us to put mission control inside the walls of the Orion spacecraft. Another fascinating idea in the mission profile places humanoid robots on the surface of Mars before the humans themselves arrive, first to build facilities and later to serve as collaborative members of the science team.Now, as I looked at this from an engineering perspective, it became very clear to me that what I needed to architect was a smart, collaborative, socially intelligent artificial intelligence. In other words, I needed to build something very much like a HAL but without the homicidal tendencies.(Laughter)Let's pause for a moment. Is it really possible to build an artificial intelligence like that? Actually, it is. In many ways, this is a hard engineering problem with elements of AI, not some wet hair ball of an AI problem that needs to be engineered. To paraphrase Alan Turing, I'm not interested in building a sentient machine. I'm not building a HAL. All I'm after is a simple brain, something that offers the illusion of intelligence.The art and the science of computing have come a long way since HAL was onscreen, and I'd imagine if his inventor Dr. Chandra were here today, he'd have a whole lot of questions for us. Is it really possible for us to take a system of millions upon millions of devices, to read in their data streams, to predict their failures and act in advance? Yes. Can we build systems that converse with humans in natural language? Yes. Can we build systems that recognize objects, identify emotions, emote themselves, play games and even read lips? Yes. Can we build a system that sets goals, that carries out plans against those goals and learns along the way? Yes. Can we build systems that have a theory of mind? This we are learning to do. Can we build systems that have an ethical and moral foundation? This we must learn how to do. So let's accept for a moment that it's possible to build such an artificial intelligence for this kind of mission and others.The next question you must ask yourself is, should we fear it? Now, every new technology brings with it some measure of trepidation. When we first saw cars, people lamented that we would see the destruction of the family. When we first saw telephones come in, people were worried it would destroy all civil conversation. At a point in time we saw the written word become pervasive, people thought we would lose our ability to memorize. These things are all true to a degree, but it's also the case that these technologies brought to us things that extended the human experience in some profound ways.So let's take this a little further. I do not fear the creation of an AI like this, because it will eventually embody some of our values. Consider this: building a cognitive system is fundamentally different than building a traditional software-intensive system of the past. We don't program them. We teach them. In order to teach a system how to recognize flowers, I show it thousands of flowers of the kinds I like. In order to teach a system how to play a game — Well, I would. You would, too. I like flowers. Come on. To teach a system how to play a game like Go, I'd have it play thousands of games of Go, but in the process I also teach it how to discern a good game from a bad game. If I want to create an artificially intelligent legal assistant, I will teach it some corpus of law but at the same time I am fusing with it the sense of mercy and justice that is part of that law. In scientific terms, this is what we call ground truth, and here's the important point: in producing these machines, we are therefore teaching them a sense of our values. To that end, I trust an artificial intelligence the same, if not more, as a human who is well-trained.But, you may ask, what about rogue agents, some well-funded nongovernment organization? I do not fear an artificial intelligence in the hand of a lone wolf. Clearly, we cannot protect ourselves against all random acts of violence, but the reality is such a system requires substantial training and subtle training far beyond the resources of an individual. And furthermore, it's far more than just injecting an internet virus to the world, where you push a button, all of a sudden it's in a million places and laptops start blowing up all over the place. Now, these kinds of substances are much larger, and we'll certainly see them coming.Do I fear that such an artificial intelligence might threaten all of humanity? If you look at movies such as ""The Matrix,"" ""Metropolis,"" ""The Terminator,"" shows such as ""Westworld,"" they all speak of this kind of fear. Indeed, in the book ""Superintelligence"" by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, he picks up on this theme and observes that a superintelligence might not only be dangerous, it could represent an existential threat to all of humanity. Dr. Bostrom's basic argument is that such systems will eventually have such an insatiable thirst for information that they will perhaps learn how to learn and eventually discover that they may have goals that are contrary to human needs. Dr. Bostrom has a number of followers. He is supported by people such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. With all due respect to these brilliant minds, I believe that they are fundamentally wrong. Now, there are a lot of pieces of Dr. Bostrom's argument to unpack, and I don't have time to unpack them all, but very briefly, consider this: super knowing is very different than super doing. HAL was a threat to the Discovery crew only insofar as HAL commanded all aspects of the Discovery. So it would have to be with a superintelligence. It would have to have dominion over all of our world. This is the stuff of Skynet from the movie ""The Terminator"" in which we had a superintelligence that commanded human will, that directed every device that was in every corner of the world. Practically speaking, it ain't gonna happen. We are not building AIs that control the weather, that direct the tides, that command us capricious, chaotic humans. And furthermore, if such an artificial intelligence existed, it would have to compete with human economies, and thereby compete for resources with us. And in the end — don't tell Siri this — we can always unplug them.(Laughter)We are on an incredible journey of coevolution with our machines. The humans we are today are not the humans we will be then. To worry now about the rise of a superintelligence is in many ways a dangerous distraction because the rise of computing itself brings to us a number of human and societal issues to which we must now attend. How shall I best organize society when the need for human labor diminishes? How can I bring understanding and education throughout the globe and still respect our differences? How might I extend and enhance human life through cognitive healthcare? How might I use computing to help take us to the stars?And that's the exciting thing. The opportunities to use computing to advance the human experience are within our reach, here and now, and we are just beginning.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/grady_booch_don_t_fear_superintelligence
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"Chris Anderson: Hello. Welcome to this TED Dialogues. It's the first of a series that's going to be done in response to the current political upheaval. I don't know about you; I've become quite concerned about the growing divisiveness in this country and in the world. No one's listening to each other. Right? They aren't. I mean, it feels like we need a different kind of conversation, one that's based on — I don't know, on reason, listening, on understanding, on a broader context.That's at least what we're going to try in these TED Dialogues, starting today. And we couldn't have anyone with us who I'd be more excited to kick this off. This is a mind right here that thinks pretty much like no one else on the planet, I would hasten to say. I'm serious.(Yuval Noah Harari laughs) I'm serious. He synthesizes history with underlying ideas in a way that kind of takes your breath away.So, some of you will know this book, ""Sapiens."" Has anyone here read ""Sapiens""?(Applause) I mean, I could not put it down. The way that he tells the story of mankind through big ideas that really make you think differently — it's kind of amazing. And here's the follow-up, which I think is being published in the US next week.YNH: Yeah, next week.CA: ""Homo Deus."" Now, this is the history of the next hundred years. I've had a chance to read it. It's extremely dramatic, and I daresay, for some people, quite alarming. It's a must-read. And honestly, we couldn't have someone better to help make sense of what on Earth is happening in the world right now. So a warm welcome, please, to Yuval Noah Harari.(Applause)It's great to be joined by our friends on Facebook and around the Web. Hello, Facebook. And all of you, as I start asking questions of Yuval, come up with your own questions, and not necessarily about the political scandal du jour, but about the broader understanding of: Where are we heading? You ready? OK, we're going to go.So here we are, Yuval: New York City, 2017, there's a new president in power, and shock waves rippling around the world. What on Earth is happening?YNH: I think the basic thing that happened is that we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. And for the last few decades, we had a very simple and very attractive story about what's happening in the world. And the story said that, oh, what's happening is that the economy is being globalized, politics is being liberalized, and the combination of the two will create paradise on Earth, and we just need to keep on globalizing the economy and liberalizing the political system, and everything will be wonderful. And 2016 is the moment when a very large segment, even of the Western world, stopped believing in this story. For good or bad reasons — it doesn't matter. People stopped believing in the story, and when you don't have a story, you don't understand what's happening.CA: Part of you believes that that story was actually a very effective story. It worked.YNH: To some extent, yes. According to some measurements, we are now in the best time ever for humankind. Today, for the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little, which is an amazing achievement.(Laughter)Also for the first time in history, more people die from old age than from infectious diseases, and violence is also down. For the first time in history, more people commit suicide than are killed by crime and terrorism and war put together. Statistically, you are your own worst enemy. At least, of all the people in the world, you are most likely to be killed by yourself —(Laughter)which is, again, very good news, compared —(Laughter)compared to the level of violence that we saw in previous eras.CA: But this process of connecting the world ended up with a large group of people kind of feeling left out, and they've reacted. And so we have this bombshell that's sort of ripping through the whole system. I mean, what do you make of what's happened? It feels like the old way that people thought of politics, the left-right divide, has been blown up and replaced. How should we think of this?YNH: Yeah, the old 20th-century political model of left versus right is now largely irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. And you see it again all over the world that this is now the main struggle. We probably need completely new political models and completely new ways of thinking about politics. In essence, what you can say is that we now have global ecology, we have a global economy but we have national politics, and this doesn't work together. This makes the political system ineffective, because it has no control over the forces that shape our life. And you have basically two solutions to this imbalance: either de-globalize the economy and turn it back into a national economy, or globalize the political system.CA: So some, I guess many liberals out there view Trump and his government as kind of irredeemably bad, just awful in every way. Do you see any underlying narrative or political philosophy in there that is at least worth understanding? How would you articulate that philosophy? Is it just the philosophy of nationalism?YNH: I think the underlying feeling or idea is that the political system — something is broken there. It doesn't empower the ordinary person anymore. It doesn't care so much about the ordinary person anymore, and I think this diagnosis of the political disease is correct. With regard to the answers, I am far less certain.I think what we are seeing is the immediate human reaction: if something doesn't work, let's go back. And you see it all over the world, that people, almost nobody in the political system today, has any future-oriented vision of where humankind is going. Almost everywhere, you see retrograde vision: ""Let's make America great again,"" like it was great — I don't know — in the '50s, in the '80s, sometime, let's go back there. And you go to Russia a hundred years after Lenin, Putin's vision for the future is basically, ah, let's go back to the Tsarist empire. And in Israel, where I come from, the hottest political vision of the present is: ""Let's build the temple again."" So let's go back 2,000 years backwards. So people are thinking sometime in the past we've lost it, and sometimes in the past, it's like you've lost your way in the city, and you say OK, let's go back to the point where I felt secure and start again. I don't think this can work, but a lot of people, this is their gut instinct.CA: But why couldn't it work? ""America First"" is a very appealing slogan in many ways. Patriotism is, in many ways, a very noble thing. It's played a role in promoting cooperation among large numbers of people. Why couldn't you have a world organized in countries, all of which put themselves first?YNH: For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad. There are also many, many positive things about patriotism, and the ability to have a large number of people care about each other, sympathize with one another, and come together for collective action. If you go back to the first nations, so, thousands of years ago, the people who lived along the Yellow River in China — it was many, many different tribes and they all depended on the river for survival and for prosperity, but all of them also suffered from periodical floods and periodical droughts. And no tribe could really do anything about it, because each of them controlled just a tiny section of the river.And then in a long and complicated process, the tribes coalesced together to form the Chinese nation, which controlled the entire Yellow River and had the ability to bring hundreds of thousands of people together to build dams and canals and regulate the river and prevent the worst floods and droughts and raise the level of prosperity for everybody. And this worked in many places around the world.But in the 21st century, technology is changing all that in a fundamental way. We are now living — all people in the world — are living alongside the same cyber river, and no single nation can regulate this river by itself. We are all living together on a single planet, which is threatened by our own actions. And if you don't have some kind of global cooperation, nationalism is just not on the right level to tackle the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's technological disruption.CA: So it was a beautiful idea in a world where most of the action, most of the issues, took place on national scale, but your argument is that the issues that matter most today no longer take place on a national scale but on a global scale.YNH: Exactly. All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption. If you think about, for example, artificial intelligence, over the next 20, 30 years pushing hundreds of millions of people out of the job market — this is a problem on a global level. It will disrupt the economy of all the countries.And similarly, if you think about, say, bioengineering and people being afraid of conducting, I don't know, genetic engineering research in humans, it won't help if just a single country, let's say the US, outlaws all genetic experiments in humans, but China or North Korea continues to do it. So the US cannot solve it by itself, and very quickly, the pressure on the US to do the same will be immense because we are talking about high-risk, high-gain technologies. If somebody else is doing it, I can't allow myself to remain behind. The only way to have regulations, effective regulations, on things like genetic engineering, is to have global regulations. If you just have national regulations, nobody would like to stay behind.CA: So this is really interesting. It seems to me that this may be one key to provoking at least a constructive conversation between the different sides here, because I think everyone can agree that the start point of a lot of the anger that's propelled us to where we are is because of the legitimate concerns about job loss. Work is gone, a traditional way of life has gone, and it's no wonder that people are furious about that. And in general, they have blamed globalism, global elites, for doing this to them without asking their permission, and that seems like a legitimate complaint.But what I hear you saying is that — so a key question is: What is the real cause of job loss, both now and going forward? To the extent that it's about globalism, then the right response, yes, is to shut down borders and keep people out and change trade agreements and so forth. But you're saying, I think, that actually the bigger cause of job loss is not going to be that at all. It's going to originate in technological questions, and we have no chance of solving that unless we operate as a connected world.YNH: Yeah, I think that, I don't know about the present, but looking to the future, it's not the Mexicans or Chinese who will take the jobs from the people in Pennsylvania, it's the robots and algorithms. So unless you plan to build a big wall on the border of California —(Laughter)the wall on the border with Mexico is going to be very ineffective. And I was struck when I watched the debates before the election, I was struck that certainly Trump did not even attempt to frighten people by saying the robots will take your jobs. Now even if it's not true, it doesn't matter. It could have been an extremely effective way of frightening people —(Laughter)and galvanizing people: ""The robots will take your jobs!"" And nobody used that line. And it made me afraid, because it meant that no matter what happens in universities and laboratories, and there, there is already an intense debate about it, but in the mainstream political system and among the general public, people are just unaware that there could be an immense technological disruption — not in 200 years, but in 10, 20, 30 years — and we have to do something about it now, partly because most of what we teach children today in school or in college is going to be completely irrelevant to the job market of 2040, 2050. So it's not something we'll need to think about in 2040. We need to think today what to teach the young people.CA: Yeah, no, absolutely. You've often written about moments in history where humankind has ... entered a new era, unintentionally. Decisions have been made, technologies have been developed, and suddenly the world has changed, possibly in a way that's worse for everyone. So one of the examples you give in ""Sapiens"" is just the whole agricultural revolution, which, for an actual person tilling the fields, they just picked up a 12-hour backbreaking workday instead of six hours in the jungle and a much more interesting lifestyle.(Laughter)So are we at another possible phase change here, where we kind of sleepwalk into a future that none of us actually wants?YNH: Yes, very much so. During the agricultural revolution, what happened is that immense technological and economic revolution empowered the human collective, but when you look at actual individual lives, the life of a tiny elite became much better, and the lives of the majority of people became considerably worse. And this can happen again in the 21st century. No doubt the new technologies will empower the human collective. But we may end up again with a tiny elite reaping all the benefits, taking all the fruits, and the masses of the population finding themselves worse than they were before, certainly much worse than this tiny elite.CA: And those elites might not even be human elites. They might be cyborgs or —YNH: Yeah, they could be enhanced super humans. They could be cyborgs. They could be completely nonorganic elites. They could even be non-conscious algorithms. What we see now in the world is authority shifting away from humans to algorithms. More and more decisions — about personal lives, about economic matters, about political matters — are actually being taken by algorithms. If you ask the bank for a loan, chances are your fate is decided by an algorithm, not by a human being. And the general impression is that maybe Homo sapiens just lost it.The world is so complicated, there is so much data, things are changing so fast, that this thing that evolved on the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago — to cope with a particular environment, a particular volume of information and data — it just can't handle the realities of the 21st century, and the only thing that may be able to handle it is big-data algorithms. So no wonder more and more authority is shifting from us to the algorithms.CA: So we're in New York City for the first of a series of TED Dialogues with Yuval Harari, and there's a Facebook Live audience out there. We're excited to have you with us. We'll start coming to some of your questions and questions of people in the room in just a few minutes, so have those coming.Yuval, if you're going to make the argument that we need to get past nationalism because of the coming technological ... danger, in a way, presented by so much of what's happening we've got to have a global conversation about this. Trouble is, it's hard to get people really believing that, I don't know, AI really is an imminent threat, and so forth. The things that people, some people at least, care about much more immediately, perhaps, is climate change, perhaps other issues like refugees, nuclear weapons, and so forth. Would you argue that where we are right now that somehow those issues need to be dialed up? You've talked about climate change, but Trump has said he doesn't believe in that. So in a way, your most powerful argument, you can't actually use to make this case.YNH: Yeah, I think with climate change, at first sight, it's quite surprising that there is a very close correlation between nationalism and climate change. I mean, almost always, the people who deny climate change are nationalists. And at first sight, you think: Why? What's the connection? Why don't you have socialists denying climate change? But then, when you think about it, it's obvious — because nationalism has no solution to climate change. If you want to be a nationalist in the 21st century, you have to deny the problem. If you accept the reality of the problem, then you must accept that, yes, there is still room in the world for patriotism, there is still room in the world for having special loyalties and obligations towards your own people, towards your own country. I don't think anybody is really thinking of abolishing that.But in order to confront climate change, we need additional loyalties and commitments to a level beyond the nation. And that should not be impossible, because people can have several layers of loyalty. You can be loyal to your family and to your community and to your nation, so why can't you also be loyal to humankind as a whole? Of course, there are occasions when it becomes difficult, what to put first, but, you know, life is difficult. Handle it.(Laughter)CA: OK, so I would love to get some questions from the audience here. We've got a microphone here. Speak into it, and Facebook, get them coming, too.Howard Morgan: One of the things that has clearly made a huge difference in this country and other countries is the income distribution inequality, the dramatic change in income distribution in the US from what it was 50 years ago, and around the world. Is there anything we can do to affect that? Because that gets at a lot of the underlying causes.YNH: So far I haven't heard a very good idea about what to do about it, again, partly because most ideas remain on the national level, and the problem is global. I mean, one idea that we hear quite a lot about now is universal basic income. But this is a problem. I mean, I think it's a good start, but it's a problematic idea because it's not clear what ""universal"" is and it's not clear what ""basic"" is. Most people when they speak about universal basic income, they actually mean national basic income. But the problem is global.Let's say that you have AI and 3D printers taking away millions of jobs in Bangladesh, from all the people who make my shirts and my shoes. So what's going to happen? The US government will levy taxes on Google and Apple in California, and use that to pay basic income to unemployed Bangladeshis? If you believe that, you can just as well believe that Santa Claus will come and solve the problem. So unless we have really universal and not national basic income, the deep problems are not going to go away.And also it's not clear what basic is, because what are basic human needs? A thousand years ago, just food and shelter was enough. But today, people will say education is a basic human need, it should be part of the package. But how much? Six years? Twelve years? PhD? Similarly, with health care, let's say that in 20, 30, 40 years, you'll have expensive treatments that can extend human life to 120, I don't know. Will this be part of the basket of basic income or not? It's a very difficult problem, because in a world where people lose their ability to be employed, the only thing they are going to get is this basic income. So what's part of it is a very, very difficult ethical question.CA: There's a bunch of questions on how the world affords it as well, who pays. There's a question here from Facebook from Lisa Larson: ""How does nationalism in the US now compare to that between World War I and World War II in the last century?""YNH: Well the good news, with regard to the dangers of nationalism, we are in a much better position than a century ago. A century ago, 1917, Europeans were killing each other by the millions. In 2016, with Brexit, as far as I remember, a single person lost their life, an MP who was murdered by some extremist. Just a single person. I mean, if Brexit was about British independence, this is the most peaceful war of independence in human history. And let's say that Scotland will now choose to leave the UK after Brexit.So in the 18th century, if Scotland wanted — and the Scots wanted several times — to break out of the control of London, the reaction of the government in London was to send an army up north to burn down Edinburgh and massacre the highland tribes. My guess is that if, in 2018, the Scots vote for independence, the London government will not send an army up north to burn down Edinburgh. Very few people are now willing to kill or be killed for Scottish or for British independence. So for all the talk of the rise of nationalism and going back to the 1930s, to the 19th century, in the West at least, the power of national sentiments today is far, far smaller than it was a century ago.CA: Although some people now, you hear publicly worrying about whether that might be shifting, that there could actually be outbreaks of violence in the US depending on how things turn out. Should we be worried about that, or do you really think things have shifted?YNH: No, we should be worried. We should be aware of two things. First of all, don't be hysterical. We are not back in the First World War yet. But on the other hand, don't be complacent. We reached from 1917 to 2017, not by some divine miracle, but simply by human decisions, and if we now start making the wrong decisions, we could be back in an analogous situation to 1917 in a few years. One of the things I know as a historian is that you should never underestimate human stupidity.(Laughter)It's one of the most powerful forces in history, human stupidity and human violence. Humans do such crazy things for no obvious reason, but again, at the same time, another very powerful force in human history is human wisdom. We have both.CA: We have with us here moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who I think has a question.Jonathan Haidt: Thanks, Yuval. So you seem to be a fan of global governance, but when you look at the map of the world from Transparency International, which rates the level of corruption of political institutions, it's a vast sea of red with little bits of yellow here and there for those with good institutions. So if we were to have some kind of global governance, what makes you think it would end up being more like Denmark rather than more like Russia or Honduras, and aren't there alternatives, such as we did with CFCs? There are ways to solve global problems with national governments. What would world government actually look like, and why do you think it would work?YNH: Well, I don't know what it would look like. Nobody still has a model for that. The main reason we need it is because many of these issues are lose-lose situations. When you have a win-win situation like trade, both sides can benefit from a trade agreement, then this is something you can work out. Without some kind of global government, national governments each have an interest in doing it. But when you have a lose-lose situation like with climate change, it's much more difficult without some overarching authority, real authority.Now, how to get there and what would it look like, I don't know. And certainly there is no obvious reason to think that it would look like Denmark, or that it would be a democracy. Most likely it wouldn't. We don't have workable democratic models for a global government. So maybe it would look more like ancient China than like modern Denmark. But still, given the dangers that we are facing, I think the imperative of having some kind of real ability to force through difficult decisions on the global level is more important than almost anything else.CA: There's a question from Facebook here, and then we'll get the mic to Andrew. So, Kat Hebron on Facebook, calling in from Vail: ""How would developed nations manage the millions of climate migrants?""YNH: I don't know.CA: That's your answer, Kat. (Laughter)YNH: And I don't think that they know either. They'll just deny the problem, maybe.CA: But immigration, generally, is another example of a problem that's very hard to solve on a nation-by-nation basis. One nation can shut its doors, but maybe that stores up problems for the future.YNH: Yes, I mean — it's another very good case, especially because it's so much easier to migrate today than it was in the Middle Ages or in ancient times.CA: Yuval, there's a belief among many technologists, certainly, that political concerns are kind of overblown, that actually, political leaders don't have that much influence in the world, that the real determination of humanity at this point is by science, by invention, by companies, by many things other than political leaders, and it's actually very hard for leaders to do much, so we're actually worrying about nothing here.YNH: Well, first, it should be emphasized that it's true that political leaders' ability to do good is very limited, but their ability to do harm is unlimited. There is a basic imbalance here. You can still press the button and blow everybody up. You have that kind of ability. But if you want, for example, to reduce inequality, that's very, very difficult. But to start a war, you can still do so very easily. So there is a built-in imbalance in the political system today which is very frustrating, where you cannot do a lot of good but you can still do a lot of harm. And this makes the political system still a very big concern.CA: So as you look at what's happening today, and putting your historian's hat on, do you look back in history at moments when things were going just fine and an individual leader really took the world or their country backwards?YNH: There are quite a few examples, but I should emphasize, it's never an individual leader. I mean, somebody put him there, and somebody allowed him to continue to be there. So it's never really just the fault of a single individual. There are a lot of people behind every such individual.CA: Can we have the microphone here, please, to Andrew?Andrew Solomon: You've talked a lot about the global versus the national, but increasingly, it seems to me, the world situation is in the hands of identity groups. We look at people within the United States who have been recruited by ISIS. We look at these other groups which have formed which go outside of national bounds but still represent significant authorities. How are they to be integrated into the system, and how is a diverse set of identities to be made coherent under either national or global leadership?YNH: Well, the problem of such diverse identities is a problem from nationalism as well. Nationalism believes in a single, monolithic identity, and exclusive or at least more extreme versions of nationalism believe in an exclusive loyalty to a single identity. And therefore, nationalism has had a lot of problems with people wanting to divide their identities between various groups. So it's not just a problem, say, for a global vision.And I think, again, history shows that you shouldn't necessarily think in such exclusive terms. If you think that there is just a single identity for a person, ""I am just X, that's it, I can't be several things, I can be just that,"" that's the start of the problem. You have religions, you have nations that sometimes demand exclusive loyalty, but it's not the only option. There are many religions and many nations that enable you to have diverse identities at the same time.CA: But is one explanation of what's happened in the last year that a group of people have got fed up with, if you like, the liberal elites, for want of a better term, obsessing over many, many different identities and them feeling, ""But what about my identity? I am being completely ignored here. And by the way, I thought I was the majority""? And that that's actually sparked a lot of the anger.YNH: Yeah. Identity is always problematic, because identity is always based on fictional stories that sooner or later collide with reality. Almost all identities, I mean, beyond the level of the basic community of a few dozen people, are based on a fictional story. They are not the truth. They are not the reality. It's just a story that people invent and tell one another and start believing. And therefore all identities are extremely unstable. They are not a biological reality. Sometimes nationalists, for example, think that the nation is a biological entity. It's made of the combination of soil and blood, creates the nation. But this is just a fictional story.CA: Soil and blood kind of makes a gooey mess.(Laughter)YNH: It does, and also it messes with your mind when you think too much that I am a combination of soil and blood. If you look from a biological perspective, obviously none of the nations that exist today existed 5,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is a social animal, that's for sure. But for millions of years, Homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors lived in small communities of a few dozen individuals. Everybody knew everybody else. Whereas modern nations are imagined communities, in the sense that I don't even know all these people. I come from a relatively small nation, Israel, and of eight million Israelis, I never met most of them. I will never meet most of them. They basically exist here.CA: But in terms of this identity, this group who feel left out and perhaps have work taken away, I mean, in ""Homo Deus,"" you actually speak of this group in one sense expanding, that so many people may have their jobs taken away by technology in some way that we could end up with a really large — I think you call it a ""useless class"" — a class where traditionally, as viewed by the economy, these people have no use.YNH: Yes.CA: How likely a possibility is that? Is that something we should be terrified about? And can we address it in any way?YNH: We should think about it very carefully. I mean, nobody really knows what the job market will look like in 2040, 2050. There is a chance many new jobs will appear, but it's not certain. And even if new jobs do appear, it won't necessarily be easy for a 50-year old unemployed truck driver made unemployed by self-driving vehicles, it won't be easy for an unemployed truck driver to reinvent himself or herself as a designer of virtual worlds.Previously, if you look at the trajectory of the industrial revolution, when machines replaced humans in one type of work, the solution usually came from low-skill work in new lines of business. So you didn't need any more agricultural workers, so people moved to working in low-skill industrial jobs, and when this was taken away by more and more machines, people moved to low-skill service jobs. Now, when people say there will be new jobs in the future, that humans can do better than AI, that humans can do better than robots, they usually think about high-skill jobs, like software engineers designing virtual worlds. Now, I don't see how an unemployed cashier from Wal-Mart reinvents herself or himself at 50 as a designer of virtual worlds, and certainly I don't see how the millions of unemployed Bangladeshi textile workers will be able to do that. I mean, if they are going to do it, we need to start teaching the Bangladeshis today how to be software designers, and we are not doing it. So what will they do in 20 years?CA: So it feels like you're really highlighting a question that's really been bugging me the last few months more and more. It's almost a hard question to ask in public, but if any mind has some wisdom to offer in it, maybe it's yours, so I'm going to ask you: What are humans for?YNH: As far as we know, for nothing.(Laughter)I mean, there is no great cosmic drama, some great cosmic plan, that we have a role to play in. And we just need to discover what our role is and then play it to the best of our ability. This has been the story of all religions and ideologies and so forth, but as a scientist, the best I can say is this is not true. There is no universal drama with a role in it for Homo sapiens. So —CA: I'm going to push back on you just for a minute, just from your own book, because in ""Homo Deus,"" you give really one of the most coherent and understandable accounts about sentience, about consciousness, and that unique sort of human skill. You point out that it's different from intelligence, the intelligence that we're building in machines, and that there's actually a lot of mystery around it. How can you be sure there's no purpose when we don't even understand what this sentience thing is? I mean, in your own thinking, isn't there a chance that what humans are for is to be the universe's sentient things, to be the centers of joy and love and happiness and hope? And maybe we can build machines that actually help amplify that, even if they're not going to become sentient themselves? Is that crazy? I kind of found myself hoping that, reading your book.YNH: Well, I certainly think that the most interesting question today in science is the question of consciousness and the mind. We are getting better and better in understanding the brain and intelligence, but we are not getting much better in understanding the mind and consciousness. People often confuse intelligence and consciousness, especially in places like Silicon Valley, which is understandable, because in humans, they go together. I mean, intelligence basically is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things, to feel joy and sadness and boredom and pain and so forth. In Homo sapiens and all other mammals as well — it's not unique to humans — in all mammals and birds and some other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together. We often solve problems by feeling things. So we tend to confuse them. But they are different things.What's happening today in places like Silicon Valley is that we are creating artificial intelligence but not artificial consciousness. There has been an amazing development in computer intelligence over the last 50 years, and exactly zero development in computer consciousness, and there is no indication that computers are going to become conscious anytime soon.So first of all, if there is some cosmic role for consciousness, it's not unique to Homo sapiens. Cows are conscious, pigs are conscious, chimpanzees are conscious, chickens are conscious, so if we go that way, first of all, we need to broaden our horizons and remember very clearly we are not the only sentient beings on Earth, and when it comes to sentience — when it comes to intelligence, there is good reason to think we are the most intelligent of the whole bunch.But when it comes to sentience, to say that humans are more sentient than whales, or more sentient than baboons or more sentient than cats, I see no evidence for that. So first step is, you go in that direction, expand. And then the second question of what is it for, I would reverse it and I would say that I don't think sentience is for anything. I think we don't need to find our role in the universe. The really important thing is to liberate ourselves from suffering. What characterizes sentient beings in contrast to robots, to stones, to whatever, is that sentient beings suffer, can suffer, and what they should focus on is not finding their place in some mysterious cosmic drama. They should focus on understanding what suffering is, what causes it and how to be liberated from it.CA: I know this is a big issue for you, and that was very eloquent. We're going to have a blizzard of questions from the audience here, and maybe from Facebook as well, and maybe some comments as well. So let's go quick. There's one right here. Keep your hands held up at the back if you want the mic, and we'll get it back to you.Question: In your work, you talk a lot about the fictional stories that we accept as truth, and we live our lives by it. As an individual, knowing that, how does it impact the stories that you choose to live your life, and do you confuse them with the truth, like all of us?YNH: I try not to. I mean, for me, maybe the most important question, both as a scientist and as a person, is how to tell the difference between fiction and reality, because reality is there. I'm not saying that everything is fiction. It's just very difficult for human beings to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and it has become more and more difficult as history progressed, because the fictions that we have created — nations and gods and money and corporations — they now control the world. So just to even think, ""Oh, this is just all fictional entities that we've created,"" is very difficult. But reality is there.For me the best ... There are several tests to tell the difference between fiction and reality. The simplest one, the best one that I can say in short, is the test of suffering. If it can suffer, it's real. If it can't suffer, it's not real. A nation cannot suffer. That's very, very clear. Even if a nation loses a war, we say, ""Germany suffered a defeat in the First World War,"" it's a metaphor. Germany cannot suffer. Germany has no mind. Germany has no consciousness. Germans can suffer, yes, but Germany cannot. Similarly, when a bank goes bust, the bank cannot suffer. When the dollar loses its value, the dollar doesn't suffer. People can suffer. Animals can suffer. This is real. So I would start, if you really want to see reality, I would go through the door of suffering. If you can really understand what suffering is, this will give you also the key to understand what reality is.CA: There's a Facebook question here that connects to this, from someone around the world in a language that I cannot read.YNH: Oh, it's Hebrew. CA: Hebrew. There you go.(Laughter)Can you read the name?YNH: Or Lauterbach Goren.CA: Well, thank you for writing in. The question is: ""Is the post-truth era really a brand-new era, or just another climax or moment in a never-ending trend?YNH: Personally, I don't connect with this idea of post-truth. My basic reaction as a historian is: If this is the era of post-truth, when the hell was the era of truth?CA: Right.(Laughter)YNH: Was it the 1980s, the 1950s, the Middle Ages? I mean, we have always lived in an era, in a way, of post-truth.CA: But I'd push back on that, because I think what people are talking about is that there was a world where you had fewer journalistic outlets, where there were traditions, that things were fact-checked. It was incorporated into the charter of those organizations that the truth mattered. So if you believe in a reality, then what you write is information. There was a belief that that information should connect to reality in a real way, and if you wrote a headline, it was a serious, earnest attempt to reflect something that had actually happened. And people didn't always get it right.But I think the concern now is you've got a technological system that's incredibly powerful that, for a while at least, massively amplified anything with no attention paid to whether it connected to reality, only to whether it connected to clicks and attention, and that that was arguably toxic. That's a reasonable concern, isn't it?YNH: Yeah, it is. I mean, the technology changes, and it's now easier to disseminate both truth and fiction and falsehood. It goes both ways. It's also much easier, though, to spread the truth than it was ever before. But I don't think there is anything essentially new about this disseminating fictions and errors. There is nothing that — I don't know — Joseph Goebbels, didn't know about all this idea of fake news and post-truth. He famously said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will think it's the truth, and the bigger the lie, the better, because people won't even think that something so big can be a lie. I think that fake news has been with us for thousands of years. Just think of the Bible.(Laughter)CA: But there is a concern that the fake news is associated with tyrannical regimes, and when you see an uprise in fake news that is a canary in the coal mine that there may be dark times coming.YNH: Yeah. I mean, the intentional use of fake news is a disturbing sign. But I'm not saying that it's not bad, I'm just saying that it's not new.CA: There's a lot of interest on Facebook on this question about global governance versus nationalism. Question here from Phil Dennis: ""How do we get people, governments, to relinquish power? Is that — is that — actually, the text is so big I can't read the full question. But is that a necessity? Is it going to take war to get there? Sorry Phil — I mangled your question, but I blame the text right here.YNH: One option that some people talk about is that only a catastrophe can shake humankind and open the path to a real system of global governance, and they say that we can't do it before the catastrophe, but we need to start laying the foundations so that when the disaster strikes, we can react quickly. But people will just not have the motivation to do such a thing before the disaster strikes. Another thing that I would emphasize is that anybody who is really interested in global governance should always make it very, very clear that it doesn't replace or abolish local identities and communities, that it should come both as — It should be part of a single package.CA: I want to hear more on this, because the very words ""global governance"" are almost the epitome of evil in the mindset of a lot of people on the alt-right right now. It just seems scary, remote, distant, and it has let them down, and so globalists, global governance — no, go away! And many view the election as the ultimate poke in the eye to anyone who believes in that. So how do we change the narrative so that it doesn't seem so scary and remote? Build more on this idea of it being compatible with local identity, local communities.YNH: Well, I think again we should start really with the biological realities of Homo sapiens. And biology tells us two things about Homo sapiens which are very relevant to this issue: first of all, that we are completely dependent on the ecological system around us, and that today we are talking about a global system. You cannot escape that.And at the same time, biology tells us about Homo sapiens that we are social animals, but that we are social on a very, very local level. It's just a simple fact of humanity that we cannot have intimate familiarity with more than about 150 individuals. The size of the natural group, the natural community of Homo sapiens, is not more than 150 individuals, and everything beyond that is really based on all kinds of imaginary stories and large-scale institutions, and I think that we can find a way, again, based on a biological understanding of our species, to weave the two together and to understand that today in the 21st century, we need both the global level and the local community.And I would go even further than that and say that it starts with the body itself. The feelings that people today have of alienation and loneliness and not finding their place in the world, I would think that the chief problem is not global capitalism. The chief problem is that over the last hundred years, people have been becoming disembodied, have been distancing themselves from their body. As a hunter-gatherer or even as a peasant, to survive, you need to be constantly in touch with your body and with your senses, every moment. If you go to the forest to look for mushrooms and you don't pay attention to what you hear, to what you smell, to what you taste, you're dead. So you must be very connected.In the last hundred years, people are losing their ability to be in touch with their body and their senses, to hear, to smell, to feel. More and more attention goes to screens, to what is happening elsewhere, some other time. This, I think, is the deep reason for the feelings of alienation and loneliness and so forth, and therefore part of the solution is not to bring back some mass nationalism, but also reconnect with our own bodies, and if you are back in touch with your body, you will feel much more at home in the world also.CA: Well, depending on how things go, we may all be back in the forest soon. We're going to have one more question in the room and one more on Facebook.Ama Adi-Dako: Hello. I'm from Ghana, West Africa, and my question is: I'm wondering how do you present and justify the idea of global governance to countries that have been historically disenfranchised by the effects of globalization, and also, if we're talking about global governance, it sounds to me like it will definitely come from a very Westernized idea of what the ""global"" is supposed to look like. So how do we present and justify that idea of global versus wholly nationalist to people in countries like Ghana and Nigeria and Togo and other countries like that?YNH: I would start by saying that history is extremely unfair, and that we should realize that. Many of the countries that suffered most from the last 200 years of globalization and imperialism and industrialization are exactly the countries which are also most likely to suffer most from the next wave. And we should be very, very clear about that. If we don't have a global governance, and if we suffer from climate change, from technological disruptions, the worst suffering will not be in the US. The worst suffering will be in Ghana, will be in Sudan, will be in Syria, will be in Bangladesh, will be in those places.So I think those countries have an even greater incentive to do something about the next wave of disruption, whether it's ecological or whether it's technological. Again, if you think about technological disruption, so if AI and 3D printers and robots will take the jobs from billions of people, I worry far less about the Swedes than about the people in Ghana or in Bangladesh. And therefore, because history is so unfair and the results of a calamity will not be shared equally between everybody, as usual, the rich will be able to get away from the worst consequences of climate change in a way that the poor will not be able to.CA: And here's a great question from Cameron Taylor on Facebook: ""At the end of 'Sapiens,'"" you said we should be asking the question, 'What do we want to want?' Well, what do you think we should want to want?""YNH: I think we should want to want to know the truth, to understand reality. Mostly what we want is to change reality, to fit it to our own desires, to our own wishes, and I think we should first want to understand it. If you look at the long-term trajectory of history, what you see is that for thousands of years we humans have been gaining control of the world outside us and trying to shape it to fit our own desires. And we've gained control of the other animals, of the rivers, of the forests, and reshaped them completely, causing an ecological destruction without making ourselves satisfied.So the next step is we turn our gaze inwards, and we say OK, getting control of the world outside us did not really make us satisfied. Let's now try to gain control of the world inside us. This is the really big project of science and technology and industry in the 21st century — to try and gain control of the world inside us, to learn how to engineer and produce bodies and brains and minds. These are likely to be the main products of the 21st century economy. When people think about the future, very often they think in terms, ""Oh, I want to gain control of my body and of my brain."" And I think that's very dangerous.If we've learned anything from our previous history, it's that yes, we gain the power to manipulate, but because we didn't really understand the complexity of the ecological system, we are now facing an ecological meltdown. And if we now try to reengineer the world inside us without really understanding it, especially without understanding the complexity of our mental system, we might cause a kind of internal ecological disaster, and we'll face a kind of mental meltdown inside us.CA: Putting all the pieces together here — the current politics, the coming technology, concerns like the one you've just outlined — I mean, it seems like you yourself are in quite a bleak place when you think about the future. You're pretty worried about it. Is that right? And if there was one cause for hope, how would you state that?YNH: I focus on the most dangerous possibilities partly because this is like my job or responsibility as a historian or social critic. I mean, the industry focuses mainly on the positive sides, so it's the job of historians and philosophers and sociologists to highlight the more dangerous potential of all these new technologies. I don't think any of that is inevitable. Technology is never deterministic. You can use the same technology to create very different kinds of societies.If you look at the 20th century, so, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution, the trains and electricity and all that could be used to create a communist dictatorship or a fascist regime or a liberal democracy. The trains did not tell you what to do with them. Similarly, now, artificial intelligence and bioengineering and all of that — they don't predetermine a single outcome. Humanity can rise up to the challenge, and the best example we have of humanity rising up to the challenge of a new technology is nuclear weapons. In the late 1940s, '50s, many people were convinced that sooner or later the Cold War will end in a nuclear catastrophe, destroying human civilization. And this did not happen. In fact, nuclear weapons prompted humans all over the world to change the way that they manage international politics to reduce violence.And many countries basically took out war from their political toolkit. They no longer tried to pursue their interests with warfare. Not all countries have done so, but many countries have. And this is maybe the most important reason why international violence declined dramatically since 1945, and today, as I said, more people commit suicide than are killed in war. So this, I think, gives us a good example that even the most frightening technology, humans can rise up to the challenge and actually some good can come out of it. The problem is, we have very little margin for error. If we don't get it right, we might not have a second option to try again.CA: That's a very powerful note, on which I think we should draw this to a conclusion. Before I wrap up, I just want to say one thing to people here and to the global TED community watching online, anyone watching online: help us with these dialogues. If you believe, like we do, that we need to find a different kind of conversation, now more than ever, help us do it. Reach out to other people, try and have conversations with people you disagree with, understand them, pull the pieces together, and help us figure out how to take these conversations forward so we can make a real contribution to what's happening in the world right now.I think everyone feels more alive, more concerned, more engaged with the politics of the moment. The stakes do seem quite high, so help us respond to it in a wise, wise way.Yuval Harari, thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_globalism_the_new_political_divide
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"What if I told you that time has a race, a race in the contemporary way that we understand race in the United States? Typically, we talk about race in terms of black and white issues. In the African-American communities from which I come, we have a long-standing multi-generational joke about what we call ""CP time,"" or ""colored people's time."" Now, we no longer refer to African-Americans as ""colored,"" but this long-standing joke about our perpetual lateness to church, to cookouts, to family events and even to our own funerals, remains.I personally am a stickler for time. It's almost as if my mother, when I was growing up, said, ""We will not be those black people."" So we typically arrive to events 30 minutes early.But today, I want to talk to you more about the political nature of time, for if time had a race, it would be white. White people own time.I know, I know. Making such ""incendiary statements"" makes us uncomfortable: Haven't we moved past the point where race really matters? Isn't race a heavy-handed concept? Shouldn't we go ahead with our enlightened, progressive selves and relegate useless concepts like race to the dustbins of history? How will we ever get over racism if we keep on talking about race? Perhaps we should lock up our concepts of race in a time capsule, bury them and dig them up in a thousand years, peer at them with the clearly more enlightened, raceless versions of ourselves that belong to the future. But you see there, that desire to mitigate the impact of race and racism shows up in how we attempt to manage time, in the ways we narrate history, in the ways we attempt to shove the negative truths of the present into the past, in the ways we attempt to argue that the future that we hope for is the present in which we're currently living.Now, when Barack Obama became President of the US in 2008, many Americans declared that we were post-racial. I'm from the academy where we're enamored with being post-everything. We're postmodern, we're post-structural, we're post-feminist. ""Post"" has become a simple academic appendage that we apply to a range of terms to mark the way we were. But prefixes alone don't have the power to make race and racism a thing of the past. The US was never ""pre-race."" So to claim that we're post-race when we have yet to grapple with the impact of race on black people, Latinos or the indigenous is disingenuous. Just about the moment we were preparing to celebrate our post-racial future, our political conditions became the most racial they've been in the last 50 years.So today, I want to offer to you three observations, about the past, the present and the future of time, as it relates to the combating of racism and white dominance.First: the past. Time has a history, and so do black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn't have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland. When white male European philosophers first thought to conceptualize time and history, one famously declared, ""[Africa] is no historical part of the World."" He was essentially saying that Africans were people outside of history who had had no impact on time or the march of progress.This idea, that black people have had no impact on history, is one of the foundational ideas of white supremacy. It's the reason that Carter G. Woodson created ""Negro History Week"" in 1926. It's the reason that we continue to celebrate Black History Month in the US every February.Now, we also see this idea that black people are people either alternately outside of the bounds of time or stuck in the past, in a scenario where, much as I'm doing right now, a black person stands up and insists that racism still matters, and a person, usually white, says to them, ""Why are you stuck in the past? Why can't you move on? We have a black president. We're past all that.""William Faulkner famously said, ""The past is never dead. It's not even past."" But my good friend Professor Kristie Dotson says, ""Our memory is longer than our lifespan."" We carry, all of us, family and communal hopes and dreams with us. We don't have the luxury of letting go of the past. But sometimes, our political conditions are so troubling that we don't know if we're living in the past or we're living in the present. Take, for instance, when Black Lives Matter protesters go out to protest unjust killings of black citizens by police, and the pictures that emerge from the protest look like they could have been taken 50 years ago. The past won't let us go. But still, let us press our way into the present.At present, I would argue that the racial struggles we are experiencing are clashes over time and space. What do I mean? Well, I've already told you that white people own time. Those in power dictate the pace of the workday. They dictate how much money our time is actually worth. And Professor George Lipsitz argues that white people even dictate the pace of social inclusion. They dictate how long it will actually take for minority groups to receive the rights that they have been fighting for.Let me loop back to the past quickly to give you an example. If you think about the Civil Rights Movement and the cries of its leaders for ""Freedom Now,"" they were challenging the slow pace of white social inclusion. By 1965, the year the Voting Rights Act was passed, there had been a full 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the conferral of voting rights on African-American communities. Despite the urgency of a war, it still took a full 100 years for actual social inclusion to occur.Since 2012, conservative state legislatures across the US have ramped up attempts to roll back African-American voting rights by passing restrictive voter ID laws and curtailing early voting opportunities. This past July, a federal court struck down North Carolina's voter ID law saying it ""... targeted African-Americans with surgical precision.""Restricting African-American inclusion in the body politic is a primary way that we attempt to manage and control people by managing and controlling time. But another place that we see these time-space clashes is in gentrifying cities like Atlanta, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Washington, DC — places that have had black populations for generations. But now, in the name of urban renewal and progress, these communities are pushed out, in service of bringing them into the 21st century.Professor Sharon Holland asked: What happens when a person who exists in time meets someone who only occupies space? These racial struggles are battles over those who are perceived to be space-takers and those who are perceived to be world-makers. Those who control the flow and thrust of history are considered world-makers who own and master time. In other words: white people. But when Hegel famously said that Africa was no historical part of the world, he implied that it was merely a voluminous land mass taking up space at the bottom of the globe. Africans were space-takers. So today, white people continue to control the flow and thrust of history, while too often treating black people as though we are merely taking up space to which we are not entitled. Time and the march of progress is used to justify a stunning degree of violence towards our most vulnerable populations, who, being perceived as space-takers rather than world-makers, are moved out of the places where they live, in service of bringing them into the 21st century.Shortened life span according to zip code is just one example of the ways that time and space cohere in an unjust manner in the lives of black people. Children who are born in New Orleans zip code 70124, which is 93 percent white, can expect to live a full 25 years longer than children born in New Orleans zip code 70112, which is 60 percent black. Children born in Washington, DC's wealthy Maryland suburbs can expect to live a full 20 years longer than children born in its downtown neighborhoods.Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that, ""The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race is the inescapable robbery of time."" We experience time discrimination, he tells us, not just as structural, but as personal: in lost moments of joy, lost moments of connection, lost quality of time with loved ones and lost years of healthy quality of life.In the future, do you see black people? Do black people have a future? What if you belong to the very race of people who have always been pitted against time? What if your group is the group for whom a future was never imagined? These time-space clashes — between protesters and police, between gentrifiers and residents — don't paint a very pretty picture of what America hopes for black people's future. If the present is any indicator, our children will be under-educated, health maladies will take their toll and housing will continue to be unaffordable.So if we're really ready to talk about the future, perhaps we should begin by admitting that we're out of time. We black people have always been out of time. Time does not belong to us. Our lives are lives of perpetual urgency. Time is used to displace us, or conversely, we are urged into complacency through endless calls to just be patient. But if past is prologue, let us seize upon the ways in which we're always out of time anyway to demand with urgency freedom now.I believe the future is what we make it. But first, we have to decide that time belongs to all of us. No, we don't all get equal time, but we can decide that the time we do get is just and free. We can stop making your zip code the primary determinant of your lifespan. We can stop stealing learning time from black children through excessive use of suspensions and expulsions. We can stop stealing time from black people through long periods of incarceration for nonviolent crimes. The police can stop stealing time and black lives through use of excessive force.I believe the future is what we make it. But we can't get there on colored people's time or white time or your time or even my time. It's our time. Ours.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/brittney_cooper_the_racial_politics_of_time
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"Hi, I'm an engineer and I make robots. Now, of course you all know what a robot is, right? If you don't, you'd probably go to Google, and you'd ask Google what a robot is. So let's do that. We'll go to Google and this is what we get. Now, you can see here there are lots of different types of robots, but they're predominantly humanoid in structure. And they look pretty conventional because they've got plastic, they've got metal, they've got motors and gears and so on. Some of them look quite friendly, and you could go up and you could hug them. Some of them not so friendly, they look like they're straight out of ""Terminator,"" in fact they may well be straight out of ""Terminator."" You can do lots of really cool things with these robots — you can do really exciting stuff.But I'd like to look at different kinds of robots — I want to make different kinds of robots. And I take inspiration from the things that don't look like us, but look like these. So these are natural biological organisms and they do some really cool things that we can't, and current robots can't either. They do all sorts of great things like moving around on the floor; they go into our gardens and they eat our crops; they climb trees; they go in water, they come out of water; they trap insects and digest them. So they do really interesting things. They live, they breathe, they die, they eat things from the environment. Our current robots don't really do that. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could use some of those characteristics in future robots so that you could solve some really interesting problems? I'm going to look at a couple of problems now in the environment where we can use the skills and the technologies derived from these animals and from the plants, and we can use them to solve those problems.Let's have a look at two environmental problems. They're both of our making — this is man interacting with the environment and doing some rather unpleasant things. The first one is to do with the pressure of population. Such is the pressure of population around the world that agriculture and farming is required to produce more and more crops. Now, to do that, farmers put more and more chemicals onto the land. They put on fertilizers, nitrates, pesticides — all sorts of things that encourage the growth of the crops, but there are some negative impacts. One of the negative impacts is if you put lots of fertilizer on the land, not all of it goes into the crops. Lots of it stays in the soil, and then when it rains, these chemicals go into the water table. And in the water table, then they go into streams, into lakes, into rivers and into the sea. Now, if you put all of these chemicals, these nitrates, into those kinds of environments, there are organisms in those environments that will be affected by that — algae, for example. Algae loves nitrates, it loves fertilizer, so it will take in all these chemicals, and if the conditions are right, it will mass produce. It will produce masses and masses of new algae. That's called a bloom. The trouble is that when algae reproduces like this, it starves the water of oxygen. As soon as you do that, the other organisms in the water can't survive. So, what do we do? We try to produce a robot that will eat the algae, consume it and make it safe.So that's the first problem. The second problem is also of our making, and it's to do with oil pollution. Now, oil comes out of the engines that we use, the boats that we use. Sometimes tankers flush their oil tanks into the sea, so oil is released into the sea that way. Wouldn't it be nice if we could treat that in some way using robots that could eat the pollution the oil fields have produced? So that's what we do. We make robots that will eat pollution.To actually make the robot, we take inspiration from two organisms. On the right there you see the basking shark. The basking shark is a massive shark. It's noncarnivorous, so you can swim with it, as you can see. And the basking shark opens its mouth, and it swims through the water, collecting plankton. As it does that, it digests the food, and then it uses that energy in its body to keep moving. So, could we make a robot like that — like the basking shark that chugs through the water and eats up pollution? Well, let's see if we can do that. But also, we take the inspiration from other organisms. I've got a picture here of a water boatman, and the water boatman is really cute. When it's swimming in the water, it uses its paddle-like legs to push itself forward.So we take those two organisms and we combine them together to make a new kind of robot. In fact, because we're using the water boatman as inspiration, and our robot sits on top of the water, and it rows, we call it the ""Row-bot."" So a Row-bot is a robot that rows. OK. So what does it look like? Here's some pictures of the Row-bot, and you'll see, it doesn't look anything like the robots we saw right at the beginning. Google is wrong; robots don't look like that, they look like this.So I've got the Row-bot here. I'll just hold it up for you. It gives you a sense of the scale, and it doesn't look anything like the others. OK, so it's made out of plastic, and we'll have a look now at the components that make up the Row-bot — what makes it really special.The Row-bot is made up of three parts, and those three parts are really like the parts of any organism. It's got a brain, it's got a body and it's got a stomach. It needs the stomach to create the energy. Any Row-bot will have those three components, and any organism will have those three components, so let's go through them one at a time. It has a body, and its body is made out of plastic, and it sits on top of the water. And it's got flippers on the side here — paddles that help it move, just like the water boatman. It's got a plastic body, but it's got a soft rubber mouth here, and a mouth here — it's got two mouths. Why does it have two mouths? One is to let the food go in and the other is to let the food go out. So you can see really it's got a mouth and a derriere, or a —(Laughter)something where the stuff comes out, which is just like a real organism. So it's starting to look like that basking shark. So that's the body.The second component might be the stomach. We need to get the energy into the robot and we need to treat the pollution, so the pollution goes in, and it will do something. It's got a cell in the middle here called a microbial fuel cell. I'll put this down, and I'll lift up the fuel cell. Here. So instead of having batteries, instead of having a conventional power system, it's got one of these. This is its stomach. And it really is a stomach because you can put energy in this side in the form of pollution, and it creates electricity.So what is it? It's called a microbial fuel cell. It's a little bit like a chemical fuel cell, which you might have come across in school, or you might've seen in the news. Chemical fuel cells take hydrogen and oxygen, and they can combine them together and you get electricity. That's well-established technology; it was in the Apollo space missions. That's from 40, 50 years ago. This is slightly newer. This is a microbial fuel cell. It's the same principle: it's got oxygen on one side, but instead of having hydrogen on the other, it's got some soup, and inside that soup there are living microbes. Now, if you take some organic material — could be some waste products, some food, maybe a bit of your sandwich — you put it in there, the microbes will eat that food, and they will turn it into electricity. Not only that, but if you select the right kind of microbes, you can use the microbial fuel cell to treat some of the pollution. If you choose the right microbes, the microbes will eat the algae. If you use other kinds of microbes, they will eat petroleum spirits and crude oil. So you can see how this stomach could be used to not only treat the pollution but also to generate electricity from the pollution. So the robot will move through the environment, taking food into its stomach, digest the food, create electricity, use that electricity to move through the environment and keep doing this.OK, so let's see what happens when we run the Row-bot — when it does some rowing. Here we've got a couple of videos, the first thing you'll see — hopefully you can see here is the mouth open. The front mouth and the bottom mouth open, and it will stay opened enough, then the robot will start to row forward. It moves through the water so that food goes in as the waste products go out. Once it's moved enough, it stops and then it closes the mouth — slowly closes the mouths — and then it will sit there, and it will digest the food.Of course these microbial fuel cells, they contain microbes. What you really want is lots of energy coming out of those microbes as quickly as possible. But we can't force the microbes and they generate a small amount of electricity per second. They generate milliwatts, or microwatts. Let's put that into context. Your mobile phone for example, one of these modern ones, if you use it, it takes about one watt. So that's a thousand or a million times as much energy that that uses compared to the microbial fuel cell. How can we cope with that? Well, when the Row-bot has done its digestion, when it's taken the food in, it will sit there and it will wait until it has consumed all that food. That could take some hours, it could take some days. A typical cycle for the Row-bot looks like this: you open your mouth, you move, you close your mouth and you sit there for a while waiting. Once you digest your food, then you can go about doing the same thing again. But you know what, that looks like a real organism, doesn't it? It looks like the kind of thing we do. Saturday night, we go out, open our mouths, fill our stomachs, sit in front of the telly and digest. When we've had enough, we do the same thing again.OK, if we're lucky with this cycle, at the end of the cycle we'll have enough energy left over for us to be able to do something else. We could send a message, for example. We could send a message saying, ""This is how much pollution I've eaten recently,"" or, ""This is the kind of stuff that I've encountered,"" or, ""This is where I am."" That ability to send a message saying, ""This is where I am,"" is really, really important. If you think about the oil slicks that we saw before, or those massive algal blooms, what you really want to do is put your Row-bot out there, and it eats up all of those pollutions, and then you have to go collect them. Why? Because these Row-bots at the moment, this Row-bot I've got here, it contains motors, it contains wires, it contains components which themselves are not biodegradable. Current Row-bots contain things like toxic batteries. You can't leave those in the environment, so you need to track them, and then when they've finished their job of work, you need to collect them. That limits the number of Row-bots you can use. If, on the other hand, you have robot a little bit like a biological organism, when it comes to the end of its life, it dies and it degrades to nothing.So wouldn't it be nice if these robots, instead of being like this, made out of plastic, were made out of other materials, which when you throw them out there, they biodegrade to nothing? That changes the way in which we use robots. Instead of putting 10 or 100 out into the environment, having to track them, and then when they die, collect them, you could put a thousand, a million, a billion robots into the environment. Just spread them around. You know that at the end of their lives, they're going to degrade to nothing. You don't need to worry about them. So that changes the way in which you think about robots and the way you deploy them.Then the question is: Can you do this? Well, yes, we have shown that you can do this. You can make robots which are biodegradable. What's really interesting is you can use household materials to make these biodegradable robots. I'll show you some; you might be surprised. You can make a robot out of jelly. Instead of having a motor, which we have at the moment, you can make things called artificial muscles. Artificial muscles are smart materials, you apply electricity to them, and they contract, or they bend or they twist. They look like real muscles. So instead of having a motor, you have these artificial muscles. And you can make artificial muscles out of jelly. If you take some jelly and some salts, and do a bit of jiggery-pokery, you can make an artificial muscle.We've also shown you can make the microbial fuel cell's stomach out of paper. So you could make the whole robot out of biodegradable materials. You throw them out there, and they degrade to nothing.Well, this is really, really exciting. It's going to totally change the way in which we think about robots, but also it allows you to be really creative in the way in which you think about what you can do with these robots. I'll give you an example. If you can use jelly to make a robot — now, we eat jelly, right? So, why not make something like this? A robot gummy bear. Here, I've got some I prepared earlier. There we go. I've got a packet — and I've got a lemon-flavored one. I'll take this gummy bear — he's not robotic, OK? We have to pretend. And what you do with one of these is you put it in your mouth — the lemon's quite nice. Try not to chew it too much, it's a robot, it may not like it. And then you swallow it. And then it goes into your stomach. And when it's inside your stomach, it moves, it thinks, it twists, it bends, it does something. It could go further down into your intestines, find out whether you've got some ulcer or cancer, maybe do an injection, something like that. You know that once it's done its job of work, it could be consumed by your stomach, or if you don't want that, it could go straight through you, into the toilet, and be degraded safely in the environment. So this changes the way, again, in which we think about robots.So, we started off looking at robots that would eat pollution, and then we're looking at robots which we can eat. I hope this gives you some idea of the kinds of things we can do with future robots.Thank you very much for your attention.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_rossiter_a_robot_that_eats_pollution
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"Growing up in Kenya, I knew I always wanted to study biochemistry. See, I had seen the impact of the high prevalence of diseases like malaria, and I wanted to make medicines that would cure the sick. So I worked really hard, got a scholarship to the United States, where I became a cancer researcher, and I loved it. For someone who wants to cure diseases, there is no higher calling.Ten years later, I returned to Kenya to do just that. A freshly minted PhD, ready to take on this horrific illness, which in Kenya was almost certainly a death sentence. But instead of landing a job in a pharmaceutical company or a hospital, I found myself drawn to a different kind of lab, working with a different kind of patient — a patient whose illness was so serious it impacted every single person in my country; a patient who needed to get healthy fast. That patient was my government.(Laughter)See, many of us will agree that lots of governments are unhealthy today.(Laughter)(Applause)And Kenya was no exception. When I returned to Kenya in 2014, there was 17 percent youth unemployment. And Nairobi, the major business hub, was rated 177th on the quality of living index. It was bad.Now, an economy is only as healthy as the entities that make it up. So when government — one of its most vital entities — is weak or unhealthy, everyone and everything suffers. Sometimes you might put a Band-Aid in place to try and temporarily stop the pain. Maybe some of you here have participated in a Band-Aid operation to an African country — setting up alternative schools, building hospitals, digging wells — because governments there either weren't or couldn't provide the services to their citizens.We all know this is a temporary solution. There are just some things Band-Aids can't fix, like providing an environment where businesses feel secure that they'll have an equal opportunity to be able to run and start their businesses successfully. Or there are systems in place that would protect the private property that they create. I would argue, only government is capable of creating these necessary conditions for economies to thrive.Economies thrive when business are able to quickly and easily set up shop. Business owners create new sources of income for themselves, new jobs get added into the economy and then more taxes are paid to fund public projects. New business is good for everyone. And it's such an important measure of economic growth, the World Bank has a ranking called the ""Ease of Doing Business Ranking,"" which measures how easy or difficult it is to start a business in any given country. And as you can imagine, starting or running a business in a country with an ailing government — almost impossible.The President of Kenya knew this, which is why in 2014, he came to our lab and asked us to partner with him to be able to help Kenya to jump-start business growth. He set an ambitious goal: he wanted Kenya to be ranked top 50 in this World Bank ranking. In 2014 when he came, Kenya was ranked 136 out of 189 countries. We had our work cut out for us.Fortunately, he came to the right place. We're not just a Band-Aid kind of team. We're a group of computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers and a cancer researcher, who understood that in order to cure the sickness of a system as big as government, we needed to examine the whole body, and then we needed to drill down all the way from the organs, into the tissues, all the way to single cells, so that we could properly make a diagnosis.So with our marching orders from the President himself, we embarked on the purest of the scientific method: collecting data — all the data we could get our hands on — making hypotheses, creating solutions, one after the other.So we met with hundreds of individuals who worked at government agencies, from the tax agency, the lands office, utilities company, the agency that's responsible for registering companies, and with each of them, we observed them as they served customers, we documented their processes — most of them were manual. We also just went back and looked at a lot of their previous paperwork to try and really understand; to try and diagnose what bodily malfunctions had occurred that lead to that 136th spot on the World Bank list.What did we find? Well, in Kenya it was taking 72 days for a business owner to register their property, compared to just one day in New Zealand, which was ranked second on the World Bank list. It took 158 days to get a new electric connection. In Korea it took 18 days. If you wanted to get a construction permit so you could put up a building, in Kenya, it was going to take you 125 days. In Singapore, which is ranked first, that would only take you 26 days. God forbid you had to go to court to get help in being able to settle a dispute to enforce a contract, because that process alone would take you 465 days. And if that wasn't bad enough, you would lose 40 percent of your claim in just fees — legal fees, enforcement fees, court fees.Now, I know what you're thinking: for there to exist such inefficiencies in an African country, there must be corruption. The very cells that run the show must be corrupt to the bone. I thought so, too, actually. When we started out, I thought I was going to find so much corruption, I was literally going to either die or get killed in the process.(Laughter)But when we dug deeper, we didn't find corruption in the classic sense: slimy gangsters lurking in the darkness, waiting to grease the palms of their friends. What we found was an overwhelming sense of helplessness. Our government was sick, because government employees felt helpless. They felt that they were not empowered to drive change. And when people feel stuck and helpless, they stop seeing their role in a bigger system. They start to think the work they do doesn't matter in driving change. And when that happens, things slow down, fall through the cracks and inefficiencies flourish.Now imagine with me, if you had a process you had to go through — had no other alternative — and this process was inefficient, complex and very, very slow. What would you do? I think you might start by trying to find somebody to outsource it to, so that they can just take care of that for you. If that doesn't work, maybe you'd consider paying somebody to just ""unofficially"" take care of it on your behalf — especially if you thought nobody was going to catch you. Not out of malice or greed, just trying to make sure that you get something to work for you so you can move on. Unfortunately, that is the beginning of corruption. And if left to thrive and grow, it seeps into the whole system, and before you know it, the whole body is sick.Knowing this, we had to start by making sure that every single stakeholder we worked with had a shared vision for what we wanted to do. So we met with everyone, from the clerk whose sole job is to remove staples from application packets, to the legal drafters at the attorney general's office, to the clerks who are responsible for serving business owners when they came to access government services. And with them, we made sure that they understood how their day-to-day actions were impacting our ability as a country to create new jobs and to attract investments. No one's role was too small; everyone's role was vital.Now, guess what we started to see? A coalition of government employees who are excited and ready to drive change, began to grow and form. And together we started to implement changes that impacted the service delivery of our country.The result? In just two years, Kenya's ranking moved from 136 to 92.(Applause)And in recognition of the significant reforms we've been able to implement in such a short time, Kenya was recognized to be among the top three global reformers in the world two years in a row.(Applause)Are we fully healthy? No. We have some serious work still to do. I like to think about these two years like a weight-loss program.(Laughter)It's that time after months of hard, grueling work at the gym, and then you get your first time to weigh yourself, and you've lost 20 pounds. You're feeling unstoppable.Now, some of you may think this doesn't apply to you. You're not from Kenya. You don't intend to be an entrepreneur. But think with me for just a moment. When is the last time you accessed a government service? Maybe applied for your driver's license, tried to do your taxes on your own. It's easy in this political and global economy to want to give up when we think about transforming government. We can easily resign to the fact or to the thinking that government is too inefficient, too corrupt, unfixable. We might even rarely get some key government responsibilities to other sectors, to Band-Aid solutions, or to just give up and feel helpless. But just because a system is sick doesn't mean it's dying. We cannot afford to give up when it comes to the challenges of fixing our governments.In the end, what really makes a government healthy is when healthy cells — that's you and I — get to the ground, roll up our sleeves, refuse to be helpless and believe that sometimes, all it takes is for us to create some space for healthy cells to grow and thrive.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/charity_wayua_a_few_ways_to_fix_an_ailing_government
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"Today, I want to tell you about a pressing social issue. Now, it's not nuclear arms, it's not immigration, and it's not malaria. I'm here to talk about movies.Now, in all seriousness, movies are actually really important. In film, we can be wildly entertained, and we can also be transported through storytelling. Storytelling is so important. Stories tell us what societies value, they offer us lessons, and they share and preserve our history. Stories are amazing.But stories don't give everyone the same opportunity to appear within them, particularly not stories compartmentalized in the form of American movies. In film, interestingly enough, females are still erased and marginalized in a lot of our stories. And I learned this for the first time about 10 years ago when I did my first study on gender role in G-rated films. Since then, we've conducted more than 30 investigations. My team is tired. And I've committed my life as researcher and activist to fighting the inclusion crisis in Hollywood.So today, what I'd like to do is tell you about that crisis. I want to talk about gender inequality in film. I want to tell you how it is perpetuated, and then I'm going to tell you how we're going to fix it.However, one caveat before I begin: my data are really depressing. So I want to apologize in advance, because I'm going to put you all in a really bad mood. But I'm going to bring it up at the end, and I'm going to present a silver lining to fix this mess that we've been in for a very, very long time.So, let's start with the gravity of the situation. Each year, my research team examines the top 100 grossing films in the United States. What we do is we look at every speaking or named character on-screen. Now, to count in one of my investigations, all a character has to do is say one word. This is a very low bar.(Laughter)Thus far, we've looked at 800 movies, from 2007 to 2015, cataloguing every speaking character on-screen for gender, race, ethnicity, LGBT and characters with a disability.Let's take a look at really some problematic trends. First, females are still noticeably absent on-screen in film. Across 800 movies and 35,205 speaking characters, less than a third of all roles go to girls and women. Less than a third! There's been no change from 2007 to 2015, and if you compare our results to a small sample of films from 1946 to 1955, there's been no change in over a half of a century. Over half of a century! But we're half of the population.Now, if we look at this data intersectionally, which has been a focus of today, the picture becomes even more problematic. Across the top 100 films of just last year, 48 films didn't feature one black or African-American speaking character, not one. 70 films were devoid of Asian or Asian-American speaking characters that were girls or women. None. Eighty-four films didn't feature one female character that had a disability. And 93 were devoid of lesbian, bisexual or transgender female speaking characters. This is not underrepresentation. This is erasure, and I call this the epidemic of invisibility.Now, when we move from prevalence to protagonist, the story is still problematic. Out of a hundred films last year, only 32 featured a female lead or colead driving the action. Only three out of a hundred films featured an underrepresented female driving the story, and only one diverse woman that was 45 years of age or older at the time of theatrical release.Now let's look at portrayal. In addition to the numbers you just saw, females are far more likely to be sexualized in film than their male counterparts. Matter of fact, they're about three times as likely to be shown in sexually revealing clothing, partially naked, and they're far more likely to be thin. Now, sometimes, in animation, females are so thin that their waist size approximates the circumference of their upper arm.(Laughter)We like to say that these gals have no room for a womb or any other internal organ.(Laughter)Now, all joking aside, theories suggest, research confirms, exposure to thin ideals and objectifying content can lead to body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal and self-objectification among some female viewers. Obviously, what we see on-screen and what we see in the world, they do not match. They do not match! Matter of fact, if we lived in the screen world, we would have a population crisis on our hands.So, as soon as I recognized these patterns, I wanted to find out why, and it turns out that there are two drivers to inequality on-screen: content creator gender and misperceptions of the audience. Let's unpack them really quick.If you want to change any of the patterns I just talked about, all you have to do is hire female directors. Turns out, the female directors are associated with, in terms of short films and indie films, more girls and women on-screen, more stories with women in the center, more stories with women 40 years of age or older on-screen, which I think is good news for this crowd. More underrepresented —(Laughter)Sorry.(Laughter)Sorry but not sorry. More underrepresented characters in terms of race and ethnicity, and most importantly, more women working behind the camera in key production roles. Easy answer to the problems that we just talked about. Or is it? It's actually not. 800 films, 2007-2015, 886 directors. Only 4.1 percent are women. Only three are African-American or black, and only one woman was Asian.So why is it so difficult to have female directors if they're part of the solution? Well, to answer this question, we conducted a study. We interviewed dozens of industry insiders and asked them about directors. Turns out, both male and female executives, when they think director, they think male. They perceive the traits of leadership to be masculine in nature. So when they're going to hire a director to command a crew, lead a ship, be a visionary or be General Patton, all the things that we've heard — their thoughts and ideations pull male. The perception of director or a leader is inconsistent with the perception of a woman. The roles are incongruous, which is consistent with a lot of research in the psychological arena.Second factor contributing to inequality on-screen is misperceptions of the audience. I don't need to tell this crowd: 50 percent of the people that go to the box office and buy tickets are girls and women in this country. Right? But we're not perceived to be a viable or financially lucrative target audience. Further, there's some misperceptions about whether females can open a film. Open a film means that if you place a female at the center, it doesn't have the return on investment that if you place a male at the center of a story does.This misperception is actually costly. Right? Especially in the wake of franchise successes like ""The Hunger Games,"" ""Pitch Perfect"" or that small little indie film, ""Star Wars: The Force Awakens."" Our own economic analyses show that gender of the lead character doesn't play a role in economic success in the United States. But what does? Production costs alone or in conjunction with how widely a film is distributed in this country. It's not the gender of the lead character.So at this point, we should all be sufficiently depressed. No change in 50 years, few female directors working behind the camera and the entertainment industry does not trust us as an audience. Well, I told you there would be a silver lining, and there is. There are actually simple and tangible solutions to fixing this problem that involve content creators, executives and consumers like the individuals in this room. Let's talk about a few of them.The first is what I call ""just add five."" Did you know if we looked at the top 100 films next year and simply added five female speaking characters on-screen to each of those films, it would create a new norm. If we were to do this for three contiguous years, we would be at gender parity for the first time in over a half of a century. Now, this approach is advantageous for a variety of reasons. One? It doesn't take away jobs for male actors. Heaven forbid.(Laughter)Two, it's actually cost-effective. It doesn't cost that much. Three, it builds a pipeline for talent. And four, it humanizes the production process. Why? Because it makes sure that there's women on set.Second solution is for A-list talent. A-listers, as we all know, can make demands in their contracts, particularly the ones that work on the biggest Hollywood films. What if those A-listers simply added an equity clause or an inclusion rider into their contract? Now, what does that mean? Well, you probably don't know but the typical feature film has about 40 to 45 speaking characters in it. I would argue that only 8 to 10 of those characters are actually relevant to the story. Except maybe ""Avengers."" Right? A few more in ""Avengers."" The remaining 30 or so roles, there's no reason why those minor roles can't match or reflect the demography of where the story is taking place. An equity rider by an A-lister in their contract can stipulate that those roles reflect the world in which we actually live. Now, there's no reason why a network, a studio or a production company cannot adopt the same contractual language in their negotiation processes.Third solution: this would be for the entertainment industry, Hollywood in particular, to adopt the Rooney Rule when it comes to hiring practices around directors. Now, in the NFL, the Rooney Rule stipulates that if a team wants to hire a coach from outside the organization, what they have to do is interview an underrepresented candidate. The exact same principle can apply to Hollywood films. How? Well, on these top films, executives and agents can make sure that women and people of color are not only on the consideration list, but they're actually interviewed for the job. Now, one might say, why is this important? Because it exposes or introduces executives to female directors who otherwise fall prey to exclusionary hiring practices.The fourth solution is for consumers like me and you. If we want to see more films by, for and about women, we have to support them. It may mean going to the independent theater chain instead of the multiplex. Or it might mean scrolling down a little further online to find a film by a female director. Or it may be writing a check and funding a film, particularly by a female director from an underrepresented background. Right? We need to write, call and email companies that are making and distributing films, and we need to post on our social media accounts when we want to see inclusive representation, women on-screen, and most importantly, women behind the camera. We need to make our voices heard and our dollars count.Now, we actually have the ability to change the world on this one. The US and its content, films in particular, have captured the imaginations of audiences worldwide. Worldwide. So that means that the film industry has unprecedented access to be able to distribute stories about equality all around the world. Imagine what would happen if the film industry aligned its values with what it shows on-screen. It could foster inclusion and acceptance for girls and women, people of color, the LGBT community, individuals with disabilities, and so many more around the world. The only thing that the film industry has to do is unleash its secret weapon, and that's storytelling.Now, at the beginning of this talk, I said that films — that they can actually transport us, but I would like to argue that films, they can transform us. None of us in this room have grown up or experienced a storytelling landscape with fully realized female characters, none of us, because the numbers haven't changed. What would happen if the next generation of audiences grew up with a whole different screen reality? What would happen? Well I'm here to tell you today that it's not only possible to change what we see on-screen but I am impatient for it to get here.So let's agree to take action today to eradicate the epidemic of invisibility. And let's agree to take action today to agree that US audiences and global viewers demand and deserve more. And let's agree today that the next generation of viewers and audiences, that they deserve to see the stories we were never able to see.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stacy_smith_the_data_behind_hollywood_s_sexism
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"What if our plants could sense the toxicity levels in the soil and express that toxicity through the color of its leaves? What if those plants could also remove those toxins from the soil? Instead, what if those plants grew their own packaging, or were designed to only be harvested by their owners' own patented machines? What happens when biological design is driven by the motivations of mass-produced commodities? What kind of world would that be?My name is Ani, and I'm a designer and researcher at MIT Media Lab, where I'm part of a relatively new and unique group called Design Fiction, where we're wedged somewhere between science fiction and science fact. And at MIT, I am lucky enough to rub shoulders with scientists studying all kinds of cutting edge fields like synthetic neurobiology, artificial intelligence, artificial life and everything in between. And across campus, there's truly brilliant scientists asking questions like, ""How can I make the world a better place?"" And part of what my group likes to ask is, ""What is better?"" What is better for you, for me, for a white woman, a gay man, a veteran, a child with a prosthetic? Technology is never neutral. It frames a reality and reflects a context. Can you imagine what it would say about the work-life balance at your office if these were standard issue on the first day?(Laughter)I believe it's the role of artists and designers to raise critical questions. Art is how you can see and feel the future, and today is an exciting time to be a designer, for all the new tools becoming accessible. For instance, synthetic biology seeks to write biology as a design problem. And through these developments, my lab asks, what are the roles and responsibilities of an artist, designer, scientist or businessman? What are the implications of synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and how are they shaping our notions of what it means to be a human? What are the implications of this on society, on evolution and what are the stakes in this game?My own speculative design research at the current moment plays with synthetic biology, but for more emotionally driven output. I'm obsessed with olfaction as a design space, and this project started with this idea of what if you could take a smell selfie, a smelfie?(Laughter)What if you could take your own natural body odor and send it to a lover? Funny enough, I found that this was a 19th century Austrian tradition, where couples in courtship would keep a slice of apple crammed under their armpit during dances, and at the end of the evening, the girl would give the guy she most fancied her used fruit, and if the feeling was mutual, he would wolf down that stinky apple.(Laughter)Famously, Napoleon wrote many love letters to Josephine, but perhaps amongst the most memorable is this brief and urgent note: ""Home in three days. Don't bathe.""(Laughter)Both Napoleon and Josephine adored violets. Josephine wore violet-scented perfume, carried violets on their wedding day, and Napoleon sent her a bouquet of violets every year on their anniversary. When Josephine passed away, he planted violets at her grave, and just before his exile, he went back to that tomb site, picked some of those flowers, entombed them in a locket and wore them until the day he died.And I found this so moving, I thought, could I engineer that violet to smell just like Josephine? What if, for the rest of eternity, when you went to visit her site, you could smell Josephine just as Napoleon loved her? Could we engineer new ways of mourning, new rituals for remembering? After all, we've engineered transgenic crops to be maximized for profit, crops that stand up to transport, crops that have a long shelf life, crops that taste sugary sweet but resist pests, sometimes at the expense of nutritional value. Can we harness these same technologies for an emotionally sensitive output?So currently in my lab, I'm researching questions like, what makes a human smell like a human? And it turns out it's fairly complicated. Factors such as your diet, your medications, your lifestyle all factor into the way you smell. And I found that our sweat is mostly odorless, but it's our bacteria and microbiome that's responsible for your smells, your mood, your identity and so much beyond. And there's all kinds of molecules that you emit but which we only perceive subconsciously.So I've been cataloging and collecting bacteria from different sites of my body. After talking to a scientist, we thought, maybe the perfect concoction of Ani is like 10 percent collarbone, 30 percent underarm, 40 percent bikini line and so forth, and occasionally I let researchers from other labs take a sniff of my samples. And it's been interesting to hear how smell of the body is perceived outside of the context of the body. I've gotten feedback such as, smells like flowers, like chicken, like cornflakes, like beef carnitas.(Laughter)At the same time, I cultivate a set of carnivorous plants for their ability to emit fleshlike odors to attract prey, in an attempt to kind of create this symbiotic relationship between my bacteria and this organism. And as it so happens, I'm at MIT and I'm in a bar, and I was talking to a scientist who happens to be a chemist and a plant scientist, and I was telling him about my project, and he was like, ""Well, this sounds like botany for lonely women.""(Laughter)Unperturbed, I said, ""OK."" I challenged him. ""Can we engineer a plant that can love me back?"" And for some reason, he was like, ""Sure, why not?""So we started with, can we get a plant to grow towards me like I was the sun? And so we're looking at mechanisms in plants such as phototropism, which causes the plant to grow towards the sun by producing hormones like auxin, which causes cell elongation on the shady side. And right now I'm creating a set of lipsticks that are infused with these chemicals that allow me to interact with a plant on its own chemical signatures — lipsticks that cause plants to grow where I kiss it, plants that blossom where I kiss the bloom.And through these projects, I'm asking questions like, how do we define nature? How do we define nature when we can reengineer its properties, and when should we do it? Should we do it for profit, for utility? Can we do it for emotional ends? Can biotechnology be used to create work as moving as music? What are the thresholds between science and its ability to shape our emotional landscape?It's a famous design mantra that form follows function. Well, now, wedged somewhere between science, design and art I get to ask, what if fiction informs fact? What kind of R&D lab would that look like and what kind of questions would we ask together?We often look to technology as the answer, but as an artist and designer, I like to ask, but what is the question?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ani_liu_smelfies_and_other_experiments_in_synthetic_biology
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"This story starts with these two — my kids. We were hiking in the Oakland woods when my daughter noticed a plastic tub of cat litter in a creek. She looked at me and said, ""Daddy? That doesn't go there.""When she said that, it reminded me of summer camp. On the morning of visiting day, right before they'd let our anxious parents come barreling through the gates, our camp director would say, ""Quick! Everyone pick up five pieces of litter."" You get a couple hundred kids each picking up five pieces, and pretty soon, you've got a much cleaner camp. So I thought, why not apply that crowdsourced cleanup model to the entire planet? And that was the inspiration for Litterati.The vision is to create a litter-free world. Let me show you how it started. I took a picture of a cigarette using Instagram. Then I took another photo ... and another photo ... and another photo. And I noticed two things: one, litter became artistic and approachable; and two, at the end of a few days, I had 50 photos on my phone and I had picked up each piece, and I realized that I was keeping a record of the positive impact I was having on the planet. That's 50 less things that you might see, or you might step on, or some bird might eat.So I started telling people what I was doing, and they started participating. One day, this photo showed up from China. And that's when I realized that Litterati was more than just pretty pictures; we were becoming a community that was collecting data. Each photo tells a story. It tells us who picked up what, a geotag tells us where and a time stamp tells us when. So I built a Google map, and started plotting the points where pieces were being picked up. And through that process, the community grew and the data grew. My two kids go to school right in that bullseye.Litter: it's blending into the background of our lives. But what if we brought it to the forefront? What if we understood exactly what was on our streets, our sidewalks and our school yards? How might we use that data to make a difference?Well, let me show you. The first is with cities. San Francisco wanted to understand what percentage of litter was cigarettes. Why? To create a tax. So they put a couple of people in the streets with pencils and clipboards, who walked around collecting information which led to a 20-cent tax on all cigarette sales. And then they got sued by big tobacco, who claimed that collecting information with pencils and clipboards is neither precise nor provable. The city called me and asked if our technology could help. I'm not sure they realized that our technology was my Instagram account —(Laughter)But I said, ""Yes, we can.""(Laughter)""And we can tell you if that's a Parliament or a Pall Mall. Plus, every photograph is geotagged and time-stamped, providing you with proof."" Four days and 5,000 pieces later, our data was used in court to not only defend but double the tax, generating an annual recurring revenue of four million dollars for San Francisco to clean itself up.Now, during that process I learned two things: one, Instagram is not the right tool —(Laughter)so we built an app.And two, if you think about it, every city in the world has a unique litter fingerprint, and that fingerprint provides both the source of the problem and the path to the solution. If you could generate a revenue stream just by understanding the percentage of cigarettes, well, what about coffee cups or soda cans or plastic bottles? If you could fingerprint San Francisco, well, how about Oakland or Amsterdam or somewhere much closer to home? And what about brands? How might they use this data to align their environmental and economic interests?There's a block in downtown Oakland that's covered in blight. The Litterati community got together and picked up 1,500 pieces. And here's what we learned: most of that litter came from a very well-known taco brand. Most of that brand's litter were their own hot sauce packets, and most of those hot sauce packets hadn't even been opened. The problem and the path to the solution — well, maybe that brand only gives out hot sauce upon request or installs bulk dispensers or comes up with more sustainable packaging. How does a brand take an environmental hazard, turn it into an economic engine and become an industry hero?If you really want to create change, there's no better place to start than with our kids. A group of fifth graders picked up 1,247 pieces of litter just on their school yard. And they learned that the most common type of litter were the plastic straw wrappers from their own cafeteria. So these kids went to their principal and asked, ""Why are we still buying straws?"" And they stopped. And they learned that individually they could each make a difference, but together they created an impact.It doesn't matter if you're a student or a scientist, whether you live in Honolulu or Hanoi, this is a community for everyone. It started because of two little kids in the Northern California woods, and today it's spread across the world. And you know how we're getting there? One piece at a time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_kirschner_this_app_makes_it_fun_to_pick_up_litter
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"Joseph Keller used to jog around the Stanford campus, and he was struck by all the women jogging there as well. Why did their ponytails swing from side to side like that? Being a mathematician, he set out to understand why.(Laughter)Professor Keller was curious about many things: why teapots dribble or how earthworms wriggle. Until a few months ago, I hadn't heard of Joseph Keller. I read about him in the New York Times, in the obituaries. The Times had half a page of editorial dedicated to him, which you can imagine is premium space for a newspaper of their stature.I read the obituaries almost every day. My wife understandably thinks I'm rather morbid to begin my day with scrambled eggs and a ""Let's see who died today.""(Laughter)But if you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news, and cues man's failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.In my day job, I run a company that focuses on future insights that marketers can derive from past data — a kind of rearview-mirror analysis. And we began to think: What if we held a rearview mirror to obituaries from the New York Times? Were there lessons on how you could get your obituary featured — even if you aren't around to enjoy it?(Laughter)Would this go better with scrambled eggs?(Laughter)And so, we looked at the data. 2,000 editorial, non-paid obituaries over a 20-month period between 2015 and 2016. What did these 2,000 deaths — rather, lives — teach us?Well, first we looked at words. This here is an obituary headline. This one is of the amazing Lee Kuan Yew. If you remove the beginning and the end, you're left with a beautifully worded descriptor that tries to, in just a few words, capture an achievement or a lifetime. Just looking at these is fascinating. Here are a few famous ones, people who died in the last two years. Try and guess who they are.[An Artist who Defied Genre] That's Prince.[Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century] Oh, yes.[Muhammad Ali][Groundbreaking Architect] Zaha Hadid.So we took these descriptors and did what's called natural language processing, where you feed these into a program, it throws out the superfluous words — ""the,"" ""and,"" — the kind of words you can mime easily in ""Charades,"" — and leaves you with the most significant words. And we did it not just for these four, but for all 2,000 descriptors. And this is what it looks like. Film, theatre, music, dance and of course, art, are huge. Over 40 percent. You have to wonder why in so many societies we insist that our kids pursue engineering or medicine or business or law to be construed as successful. And while we're talking profession, let's look at age — the average age at which they achieved things. That number is 37. What that means is, you've got to wait 37 years ... before your first significant achievement that you're remembered for — on average — 44 years later, when you die at the age of 81 — on average.(Laughter)Talk about having to be patient.(Laughter)Of course, it varies by profession. If you're a sports star, you'll probably hit your stride in your 20s. And if you're in your 40s like me, you can join the fun world of politics.(Laughter)Politicians do their first and sometimes only commendable act in their mid-40s.(Laughter)If you're wondering what ""others"" are, here are some examples. Isn't it fascinating, the things people do and the things they're remembered for?(Laughter)Our curiosity was in overdrive, and we desired to analyze more than just a descriptor. So, we ingested the entire first paragraph of all 2,000 obituaries, but we did this separately for two groups of people: people that are famous and people that are not famous. Famous people — Prince, Ali, Zaha Hadid — people who are not famous are people like Jocelyn Cooper, Reverend Curry or Lorna Kelly. I'm willing to bet you haven't heard of most of their names. Amazing people, fantastic achievements, but they're not famous. So what if we analyze these two groups separately — the famous and the non-famous? What might that tell us?Take a look. Two things leap out at me. First: ""John.""(Laughter)Anyone here named John should thank your parents —(Laughter)and remind your kids to cut out your obituary when you're gone. And second: ""help.""We uncovered, many lessons from lives well-led, and what those people immortalized in print could teach us. The exercise was a fascinating testament to the kaleidoscope that is life, and even more fascinating was the fact that the overwhelming majority of obituaries featured people famous and non-famous, who did seemingly extraordinary things. They made a positive dent in the fabric of life. They helped.So ask yourselves as you go back to your daily lives: How am I using my talents to help society? Because the most powerful lesson here is, if more people lived their lives trying to be famous in death, the world would be a much better place.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lux_narayan_what_i_learned_from_2_000_obituaries
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"I want to introduce you to some very wise kids that I've known, but first I want to introduce you to a camel. This is Cassie, a therapy camel visiting one of our young patients in her room, which is pretty magical. A friend of mine raises camels at his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He has about eight of them, and he started 30 years ago because he thought horses were too mundane. John is an out-of-the-box thinker, which explains why the two of us have been such good friends all of our lives. Over the years, I've convinced him to shuttle those sweet furry beasts up to hang out with our sick kids from time to time. Talking to John, I was surprised to learn that camels have an average life expectancy of 40 to 50 years. The life expectancy of many of the children with whom I work is less than a year.This is a picture of the George Mark Children's House, the first pediatric palliative respite care center to open in the United States. I founded it in 2004, after years of working as a psychologist on pediatric intensive care units, frustrated with the undignified deaths that so many children experienced and their families had to endure. As I sat with families whose children were at the end of their lives, I was acutely aware of our surroundings. While the elevated train rumbled overhead on its track, quite literally the room reverberated with each passing train car. The lights on the ward were fluorescent and too bright. Monitors beeped, as did the elevator, noisily announcing its arrival. These families were experiencing some of the most excruciating moments of their lives, and I so wanted them to have a more peaceful place in which to say a last goodbye to their young daughters and sons. Surely, I thought, there must be a better spot than a hospital intensive care unit for children at the end of their lives.Our children's house is calm and nurturing. It's a place where families can stay together to enjoy quality time with their children, many of whom are there for respite stays, some with repeated visits over a span of many years. We call those kids our frequent flyers. Rather than the bright, noisy quarters of the hospital, their rooms are calm and comfortable, with actual living spaces for the families, a sanctuary of gardens and a wonderful outdoor playground with special structures for children with physical limitations.This sweet baby Lars came to us directly from a hospital intensive care unit. Imagine hearing the heartbreaking news that none of us would ever want to hear. His parents had been told that Lars had a brain anomaly that would keep him from ever swallowing, walking, talking or developing mentally. Recognizing what little chance he had for survival, his parents chose to focus on the quality of time that they could spend together. They moved into one of our family apartments and treasured each day that they had, which were far too few. Lars's life was brief, to be sure, mere weeks, but it was calm and comfortable. He went on hikes with his parents. The time that he spent in the pool with our aquatic therapist lessened the seizures he was experiencing and helped him to sleep at night. His family had a peaceful place in which to both celebrate his life and mourn his death.It has been five years since Lars was with us, and in that time, his family has welcomed a daughter and another son. They are such a powerful testament to the positive outcome that specialized children's hospice care can create. Their baby's physical discomfort was well managed, giving all of them the gift of time to be together in a beautiful place.I'm going to talk to you now about the elephant rather than the camel in the room. Very few people want to talk about death, and even fewer about children's death. Loss of a child, especially for those of us who have our own children, is frightening, more than frightening, paralyzing, debilitating, impossible. But what I've learned is this: children don't stop dying just because we the adults can't comprehend the injustice of losing them. And what's more, if we can be brave enough to face the possibility of death, even among the most innocent, we gain an unparalleled kind of wisdom.Take Crystal, for example. She was one of the first children to come for care after we opened our doors. She was nine when she arrived, and her neurologist expected that she might live another two weeks. She had an inoperable brain tumor, and her decline had really accelerated in the week before she came to us. After settling into her room, dressed entirely in pink and lavender, surrounded by the Hello Kitty accessories that she loved, she spent the next several days winning over the hearts of every staff member. Bit by bit, her condition stabilized, and then to our astonishment, she actually improved. There were a variety of factors that contributed to Crystal's improvement which we later came to call the ""George Mark bump,"" a lovely, not uncommon phenomenon where children outlive the prognoses of their illnesses if they're outside of the hospital. The calmer atmosphere of her surroundings, tasty meals that were fixed often to accommodate her requests, the resident pets, the therapy dog and rabbit spent lots of cozy time with Crystal.After she had been with us for about a week, she called her grandmother, and she said, ""Gee, I'm staying in a great big house, and there's room for you to come, too. And guess what? You don't have to bring any quarters because the washer and dryer are free.""(Laughter)Crystal's grandmother soon arrived from out of town, and they spent the remaining four months of Crystal's life enjoying very special days together. Some days were special because Crystal was outside in her wheelchair sitting by the fountain. For a little girl who had spent most of the year earlier in a hospital bed, being outside counting hummingbirds made for an amazing time with her grandma, and lots of laughter. Other days were special because of the activities that our child life specialist created for her. Crystal strung beads and made jewelry for everybody in the house. She painted a pumpkin to help decorate for Halloween. She spent many excited days planning her tenth birthday, which of course none of us thought she would ever see. All of us wore pink boas for the occasion, and Crystal, as you can see, queen for a day, wore a sparkly tiara.One hot morning, I arrived at work and Crystal and her partner in crime, Charlie, greeted me. With some help, they had set up a lemonade and cookie stand outside the front door, a very strategic location. I asked Crystal the price of the cookie that I had selected, and she said, ""Three dollars.""(Laughter)I said that seemed a bit high for one cookie.(Laughter)It was small. ""I know,"" she acknowledged with a grin, ""but I'm worth it.""And therein lie the words of wisdom of a young girl whose brief life forever impacted mine. Crystal was worth it, and shouldn't every child whose life is shortened by a horrific illness be worth it? Together, all of us today can offer that same specialized care that Crystal received by recognizing that children's respite and hospice care is a critical component missing from our healthcare landscape. It's also interesting to note that we are able to provide this care at about one third of the cost of a hospital intensive care unit, and our families don't see a bill. We are ever grateful to the supporters who believe in this important work that we're doing.The truth is that my colleagues and I and the parents and other family members who get to experience this special wisdom are in a unique position. There are only two freestanding pediatric hospices in the United States, although I'm happy to report that based on our model, there are 18 others under various stages of development.(Applause)Still, most of the children who die in the United States every year die in hospital rooms, surrounded by beeping machines and anxious, exhausted adults who have no other option but to say goodbye under those harsh, institutional lights and among virtual strangers. For comparison's sake, the United Kingdom, which is a country with about one fifth the population of the United States, and about half the size of the state of California, has 54 hospice and respite centers. Why is that? I've asked myself that question obviously many times. My best guess is that Americans, with our positive can-do attitude hold the expectation that our medical care system will fix it, even though it may be a childhood illness for which there is no cure. We go to extraordinary measures to keep children alive when in fact the greatest kindness that we might give them would be a peaceful, pain-free end of life. The transition from cure to care remains a challenging one for many hospital physicians whose training has really been about saving lives, not about gently guiding the patient to the end of life. The dad of a sweet baby for whom we cared at the end of her life certainly captured this dichotomy when he reflected that there are a lot of people to help you bring an infant into the world but very few to help you usher a baby out.So what is the magic ingredient at George Mark? The complex medical diagnoses that bring our young patients to us mean that their lives have often been restricted, some to a hospital bed for long periods of time, others to wheelchairs, still others to intensive courses of chemotherapy or rehab. We make a practice of ignoring those limitations. Our default answer is ""yes"" and our default question is, ""Why not?"" That's why we took a young boy who wasn't going to live for another baseball season to Game 5 of the World Series. That's why we have a talent show put on by the staff and kids for family and friends. Who wouldn't be enchanted by a young boy playing a piano piece with his feet, because his arms are atrophied? That's why we have a prom every year. It's pretty magical. We started the prom after hearing a dad lament that he would never pin a boutonniere on his son's tuxedo lapel. The weeks before the dance, the house is in a flurry, and I don't know who's more excited, the staff or the kids.(Laughter)The night of the event involves rides in vintage cars, a walk on a red carpet into the great room, a terrific DJ and a photographer at the ready to capture pictures of these attendees and their families. At the end of the evening this year, one of our young, delightful teenaged girls, Caitlin, said to her mom, ""That was the best night of my whole life."" And that's just the point, to capture the best days and nights, to abolish limitations, to have your default answer be ""yes"" and your default question be, ""Why not?""Ultimately life is too short, whether we live to be 85 years or just eight. Trust me. Better yet, trust Sam. It's not by pretending that death doesn't exist that we keep the people, especially the little people that we love, safe. In the end, we can't control how long any of us lives. What we can control is how we spend our days, the spaces we create, the meaning and joy that we make. We cannot change the outcome, but we can change the journey. Isn't it time to recognize that children deserve nothing less than our most uncompromising bravery and our wildest imagination.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kathy_hull_stories_from_a_home_for_terminally_ill_children
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"(Guitar)(Singing)Rollercoaster, carousel.Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell.You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell,when the ride is over, you can never tell.People tell you this one thing — will make your life complete.So you, you give it everything you got and you wind up on the street. Then one day you wake up,and they tell you ""you're a queen,""but then you find that someone else is pulling on the strings.Rollercoaster, carousel.Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell.You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell,when the ride is over, you can never tell.The one you love, they love you — oh yeah — until the end of time.But lose your edge or lose your cool, they will drop you like a dime.Everyone is crowding 'round when fortune is your friend.When your luck is running out, you're all alone again.Rollercoaster, carousel.Where the highs are heaven but the lows, oh, they can be hell.You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell, when the ride is over you can never tell.Well, maybe I'm just cynical, and all these words are lies,but experience keeps telling me that the cautious one is wise.But caution makes you hesitate, and hesitate you're lost,so take your opportunities and never count the cost.Rollercoaster, carousel. Where the highs are heaven, but the lows, oh, they can be hell.You can grab the ring, you can ring that bell,when the ride is over — over, over, you can never, ever tell.Rollercoaster, carousel, rollercoaster, yeah, yeah, yeah, carousel. Carousel, carousel, carousel, carousel.(Applause)Michael Pemberton.(Applause)Thank you so much.Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/sara_ramirez_and_michael_pemberton_rollercoaster
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"Eight years ago, I was haunted by an evil spirit.I was 25 at the time, and I was living in a tiny house behind someone else's house in Los Angeles. It was this guest house, it had kind of been dilapidated, not taken care of for a long time. And one night, I was sitting there and I got this really spooky feeling, kind of the feeling like you're being watched. But no one was there except my two dogs, and they were just chewing their feet. And I looked around. No one was there. And I thought, OK, it's just my imagination. But the feeling just kept getting worse, and I started to feel this pressure in my chest, sort of like the feeling when you get bad news. But it started to sink lower and lower and almost hurt.And over the course of that week, this feeling got worse and worse, and I started to become convinced that something was there in my little guest house, haunting me.And I started to hear these sounds, this ""whoosh,"" kind of whisper, like something passing through me. I called my best friend, Claire, and said, ""I know this is going to sound crazy, but, um ... I think there's a ghost in my house, and I need to get rid of it."" And she said — she's very open-minded — and she said, ""I don't think you're crazy. I think you just need to do a cleansing ritual.""(Laughter)""So get some sage and burn it, and tell it to go away.""So I said, ""OK,"" and I went and I bought sage. I had never done this before, so I set the sage on fire, waved it about, and said, ""Go away! This is my house! I live here. You don't live here!"" But the feeling stayed. Nothing got better. And then I started to think, OK, well now this thing is probably just laughing at me, because it hasn't left, and I probably just look like this impotent, powerless thing that couldn't get it to go away.So every day I'd come home and you guys, this feeling got so bad that — I mean, I'm laughing at it now — but I would sit there in bed and cry every night. And the feeling on my chest got worse and worse. It was physically painful. And I even went to a psychiatrist and tried to get her to prescribe me medicine, and she wouldn't just because I don't have schizophrenia, OK.(Laughter) So finally I got on the internet, and I Googled ""hauntings."" And I came upon this forum of ghost hunters. But these were a special kind of ghost hunters — they were skeptics. They believed that every case of ghosts that they had investigated so far had been explained away by science. And I was like, ""OK, smart guys, this is what's happening to me, and if you have an explanation for me, I would love to hear it.""And one of them said, ""OK. Um, have you heard of carbon monoxide poisoning?""And I said, ""Yeah. Like, gas poisoning?""Carbon monoxide poisoning is when you have a gas leak leaking into your home. I looked it up, and the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include a pressure on your chest, auditory hallucinations — whoosh — and an unexplained feeling of dread. So that night, I called the gas company. I said, ""I have an emergency. I need you to come out. I don't want to get into the story now, but I need you to come out.""(Laughter)They came out. I said, ""I suspect a gas leak."" They brought their carbon monoxide detector, and the man said, ""It's a really good thing that you called us tonight, because you could have been dead very soon.""Thirty-seven percent of Americans believe in haunted houses, and I wonder how many of them have been in one and how many of them have been in danger.So that haunting story has led me to my job. I'm an investigator, and I'm an investigator in two senses: I'm an investigative journalist, and I'm also an investigator of the claims of the paranormal and claims of the spiritual. And that means a few things. Sometimes that means that I'm pretending to need an exorcism so I can get — yes, that's right! — so I can go to an exorcist and see if he's using gimmicks or psychological tricks to try to convince someone that they're possessed. Sometimes that means I'm going undercover in a fringe group which I report on for a podcast that I co-host. And I've done over 70 investigations like this with my co-host, Ross. I would love to tell you that nine times out of 10, science wins, saves the day, it's all explained. That's not true. The truth is, 10 times out of 10, science wins, it saves the day.(Applause)And that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a mystery. Of course there are mysteries, but a mystery is a mystery. It is not a ghost.Now, I believe there are two kinds of truth, and it's taken me a while to get to this place, but I think this is right, so hear me out. I think there is outer truth and there's inner truth. So if you say to me, ""There was a man named Jesus and he once existed,"" that's outer truth, right? And we can go and look at the historical record. We can determine whether that seems to be true. And I would argue, it does seem to be true. If you say, ""Jesus rose from the dead,"" — ooh, trickier.(Laughter)I would say that's an outer-truth claim, because he physically rose or he didn't. I'm not going to get into whether he rose or he didn't, but I would say that's an outer-truth claim. It happened or it didn't happen. But if you say, ""I don't care whether he rose from the dead. It's symbolically important to me, and that metaphor is so meaningful, so purposeful to me, and I'm not going to try to persuade you of it,"" now you've moved it from outer truth to inner truth, from science to art. And I think we have a tendency to not be clear about this, to try to move our inner truths to outer truths, or to not be fair about it to each other, and when people are telling us their inner truths, to try to make them defend them by outer-truth standards.So I'm talking here about outer truth, about objective things. And there was an objective reality in my haunted house, right? Now that I've told you about the gas leak, I doubt a single person here would be like, ""I still think there was a ghost, too"" —(Laughter)because as soon as we have these scientific explanations, we know to give up the ghost. We use these things as stopgaps for things that we can't explain. We don't believe them because of evidence; we believe them because of a lack of evidence.So there is a group in Los Angeles called the Independent Investigations Group, or the IIG, and they do great work. They'll give a $10,000 prize to anyone who can show, under scientific conditions, that they have a paranormal ability. No one's done it yet, but they've had a couple people who claim that they were clairaudients, which means that they can hear voices either from the great beyond or they can read minds. And they had one person who was very sincere, who believed that he could read minds. So they set up a test with him, and this is the way it always works. The group says, ""OK, we have a protocol, we have a way to scientifically test this. Do you agree with it?"" The person says yes. Then they test it. It's very important that both sides agree. They did that, they tested him. They said, ""OK, you know what? You weren't able to predict what Lisa was thinking. It matched up about the same as chance. Looks like you don't have the power.""And that gave them the opportunity to compassionately sit down with him and have a very difficult discussion, which basically amounted to, ""Hey, we know you're sincere, and what that means is, you do hear something in your head.""And that guy got to make the very difficult decision, but really the life-changing decision about whether to go get help. We're actually helping people to make these connections that maybe before seemed like otherworldly explanations, help draw us into reality and maybe change our lives for the better.Now, on the other hand, maybe one time it'll turn out to be true. Maybe we'll find out there are ghosts, and holy shit, it will be the best thing! And every time I do one of these investigations, I still get so excited, and I'm like 75 into them, and still I swear on number 76, I'm going to be like, ""This is the one!""(Laughter)Maybe I'm just eternally optimistic, but I hope I never lose this hope, and I invite you to take this same attitude when people share their outer beliefs with you. When talking about testable claims, respect them enough to ask these good questions. Challenge and see how you can examine them together, because there's this idea that you can't respect a belief and still challenge it, but that's not true. When we jiggle the lock, when we test the claim, we're saying, OK, I respect you, I'm listening to what you're saying, I'm going to test it out with you. We've all had that experience where you're telling someone something, and they're like, ""Oh, that's really interesting, yeah,"" you know you're being had. But when someone says, ""Really? Huh. Sounds a little sketchy to me, but I'm listening,"" you at least know you're being engaged and respected. And that's the kind of attitude we should have with these claims. That's showing someone that you care what they're saying. That's respect.Now, yes, most of these searches will come up empty, but that's how all of science works. Every cure for cancer so far has not panned out, but we don't stop looking, for two reasons. Because number one, the answer matters. Whether it's looking at the afterlife or the paranormal or the cure for cancer, it all amounts to the same question: How long will we be here?And two, because looking for the truth, being open-minded, and being willing to be wrong and to change your whole worldview is awe-inspiring.I still get excited at ghost stories every single time. I still consider that every group I join might be right, and I hope I never lose that hope. Let's all never lose that hope, because searching for what's out there helps us understand what's in here. And also, please have a carbon monoxide detector in your home.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carrie_poppy_a_scientific_approach_to_the_paranormal
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"I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: ""Gays are worthy of death."" This was the beginning.Our protests soon became a daily occurrence and an international phenomenon, and as a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country. The end of my antigay picketing career and life as I knew it, came 20 years later, triggered in part by strangers on Twitter who showed me the power of engaging the other.In my home, life was framed as an epic spiritual battle between good and evil. The good was my church and its members, and the evil was everyone else. My church's antics were such that we were constantly at odds with the world, and that reinforced our otherness on a daily basis. ""Make a difference between the unclean and the clean,"" the verse says, and so we did. From baseball games to military funerals, we trekked across the country with neon protest signs in hand to tell others exactly how ""unclean"" they were and exactly why they were headed for damnation. This was the focus of our whole lives. This was the only way for me to do good in a world that sits in Satan's lap. And like the rest of my 10 siblings, I believed what I was taught with all my heart, and I pursued Westboro's agenda with a special sort of zeal.In 2009, that zeal brought me to Twitter. Initially, the people I encountered on the platform were just as hostile as I expected. They were the digital version of the screaming hordes I'd been seeing at protests since I was a kid. But in the midst of that digital brawl, a strange pattern developed. Someone would arrive at my profile with the usual rage and scorn, I would respond with a custom mix of Bible verses, pop culture references and smiley faces. They would be understandably confused and caught off guard, but then a conversation would ensue. And it was civil — full of genuine curiosity on both sides. How had the other come to such outrageous conclusions about the world?Sometimes the conversation even bled into real life. People I'd sparred with on Twitter would come out to the picket line to see me when I protested in their city. A man named David was one such person. He ran a blog called ""Jewlicious,"" and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, where he lives, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a ""God hates Jews"" sign.(Laughter)There was no confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was becoming blurred. We'd started to see each other as human beings, and it changed the way we spoke to one another.It took time, but eventually these conversations planted seeds of doubt in me. My friends on Twitter took the time to understand Westboro's doctrines, and in doing so, they were able to find inconsistencies I'd missed my entire life. Why did we advocate the death penalty for gays when Jesus said, ""Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?"" How could we claim to love our neighbor while at the same time praying for God to destroy them? The truth is that the care shown to me by these strangers on the internet was itself a contradiction. It was growing evidence that people on the other side were not the demons I'd been led to believe.These realizations were life-altering. Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise. I couldn't justify our actions — especially our cruel practice of protesting funerals and celebrating human tragedy. These shifts in my perspective contributed to a larger erosion of trust in my church, and eventually it made it impossible for me to stay.In spite of overwhelming grief and terror, I left Westboro in 2012. In those days just after I left, the instinct to hide was almost paralyzing. I wanted to hide from the judgement of my family, who I knew would never speak to me again — people whose thoughts and opinions had meant everything to me. And I wanted to hide from the world I'd rejected for so long — people who had no reason at all to give me a second chance after a lifetime of antagonism. And yet, unbelievably, they did.The world had access to my past because it was all over the internet — thousands of tweets and hundreds of interviews, everything from local TV news to ""The Howard Stern Show"" — but so many embraced me with open arms anyway. I wrote an apology for the harm I'd caused, but I also knew that an apology could never undo any of it. All I could do was try to build a new life and find a way somehow to repair some of the damage. People had every reason to doubt my sincerity, but most of them didn't. And — given my history, it was more than I could've hoped for — forgiveness and the benefit of the doubt. It still amazes me.I spent my first year away from home adrift with my younger sister, who had chosen to leave with me. We walked into an abyss, but we were shocked to find the light and a way forward in the same communities we'd targeted for so long. David, my ""Jewlicious"" friend from Twitter, invited us to spend time among a Jewish community in Los Angeles. We slept on couches in the home of a Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids — the same rabbi that I'd protested three years earlier with a sign that said, ""Your rabbi is a whore."" We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped vegetables for dinner. They treated us like family. They held nothing against us, and again I was astonished.That period was full of turmoil, but one part I've returned to often is a surprising realization I had during that time — that it was a relief and a privilege to let go of the harsh judgments that instinctively ran through my mind about nearly every person I saw. I realized that now I needed to learn. I needed to listen.This has been at the front of my mind lately, because I can't help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. We celebrate tolerance and diversity more than at any other time in memory, and still we grow more and more divided. We want good things — justice, equality, freedom, dignity, prosperity — but the path we've chosen looks so much like the one I walked away from four years ago. We've broken the world into us and them, only emerging from our bunkers long enough to lob rhetorical grenades at the other camp. We write off half the country as out-of-touch liberal elites or racist misogynist bullies. No nuance, no complexity, no humanity. Even when someone does call for empathy and understanding for the other side, the conversation nearly always devolves into a debate about who deserves more empathy. And just as I learned to do, we routinely refuse to acknowledge the flaws in our positions or the merits in our opponent's. Compromise is anathema. We even target people on our own side when they dare to question the party line. This path has brought us cruel, sniping, deepening polarization, and even outbreaks of violence. I remember this path. It will not take us where we want to go.What gives me hope is that we can do something about this. The good news is that it's simple, and the bad news is that it's hard. We have to talk and listen to people we disagree with. It's hard because we often can't fathom how the other side came to their positions. It's hard because righteous indignation, that sense of certainty that ours is the right side, is so seductive. It's hard because it means extending empathy and compassion to people who show us hostility and contempt. The impulse to respond in kind is so tempting, but that isn't who we want to be. We can resist. And I will always be inspired to do so by those people I encountered on Twitter, apparent enemies who became my beloved friends. And in the case of one particularly understanding and generous guy, my husband. There was nothing special about the way I responded to him. What was special was their approach. I thought about it a lot over the past few years and I found four things they did differently that made real conversation possible. These four steps were small but powerful, and I do everything I can to employ them in difficult conversations today.The first is don't assume bad intent. My friends on Twitter realized that even when my words were aggressive and offensive, I sincerely believed I was doing the right thing. Assuming ill motives almost instantly cuts us off from truly understanding why someone does and believes as they do. We forget that they're a human being with a lifetime of experience that shaped their mind, and we get stuck on that first wave of anger, and the conversation has a very hard time ever moving beyond it. But when we assume good or neutral intent, we give our minds a much stronger framework for dialogue.The second is ask questions. When we engage people across ideological divides, asking questions helps us map the disconnect between our differing points of view. That's important because we can't present effective arguments if we don't understand where the other side is actually coming from and because it gives them an opportunity to point out flaws in our positions. But asking questions serves another purpose; it signals to someone that they're being heard. When my friends on Twitter stopped accusing and started asking questions, I almost automatically mirrored them. Their questions gave me room to speak, but they also gave me permission to ask them questions and to truly hear their responses. It fundamentally changed the dynamic of our conversation.The third is stay calm. This takes practice and patience, but it's powerful. At Westboro, I learned not to care how my manner of speaking affected others. I thought my rightness justified my rudeness — harsh tones, raised voices, insults, interruptions — but that strategy is ultimately counterproductive. Dialing up the volume and the snark is natural in stressful situations, but it tends to bring the conversation to an unsatisfactory, explosive end. When my husband was still just an anonymous Twitter acquaintance, our discussions frequently became hard and pointed, but we always refused to escalate. Instead, he would change the subject. He would tell a joke or recommend a book or gently excuse himself from the conversation. We knew the discussion wasn't over, just paused for a time to bring us back to an even keel. People often lament that digital communication makes us less civil, but this is one advantage that online conversations have over in-person ones. We have a buffer of time and space between us and the people whose ideas we find so frustrating. We can use that buffer. Instead of lashing out, we can pause, breathe, change the subject or walk away, and then come back to it when we're ready.And finally ... make the argument. This might seem obvious, but one side effect of having strong beliefs is that we sometimes assume that the value of our position is or should be obvious and self-evident, that we shouldn't have to defend our positions because they're so clearly right and good that if someone doesn't get it, it's their problem — that it's not my job to educate them. But if it were that simple, we would all see things the same way. As kind as my friends on Twitter were, if they hadn't actually made their arguments, it would've been so much harder for me to see the world in a different way. We are all a product of our upbringing, and our beliefs reflect our experiences. We can't expect others to spontaneously change their own minds. If we want change, we have to make the case for it.My friends on Twitter didn't abandon their beliefs or their principles — only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed questions tempered with kindness and humor. They approached me as a human being, and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage, disdain and violence. I know that some might not have the time or the energy or the patience for extensive engagement, but as difficult as it can be, reaching out to someone we disagree with is an option that is available to all of us. And I sincerely believe that we can do hard things, not just for them but for us and our future. Escalating disgust and intractable conflict are not what we want for ourselves, or our country or our next generation.My mom said something to me a few weeks before I left Westboro, when I was desperately hoping there was a way I could stay with my family. People I have loved with every pulse of my heart since even before I was that chubby-cheeked five-year-old, standing on a picket line holding a sign I couldn't read. She said, ""You're just a human being, my dear, sweet child."" She was asking me to be humble — not to question but to trust God and my elders. But to me, she was missing the bigger picture — that we're all just human beings. That we should be guided by that most basic fact, and approach one another with generosity and compassion.Each one of us contributes to the communities and the cultures and the societies that we make up. The end of this spiral of rage and blame begins with one person who refuses to indulge these destructive, seductive impulses. We just have to decide that it's going to start with us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_phelps_roper_i_grew_up_in_the_westboro_baptist_church_here_s_why_i_left
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"When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records, and I really wanted to set a world record myself. But there was just one small problem: I had absolutely no talent. So I decided to set a world record in something that demanded absolutely no skill at all. I decided to set a world record in crawling.(Laughter)Now, the record at the time was 12 and a half miles, and for some reason, this seemed totally manageable.(Laughter)I recruited my friend Anne, and together we decided, we didn't even need to train.(Laughter)And on the day of our record attempt, we put furniture pads on the outside of our good luck jeans and we set off, and right away, we were in trouble, because the denim was against our skin and it began to chafe, and soon our knees were being chewed up. Hours in, it began to rain. Then, Anne dropped out. Then, it got dark. Now, by now, my knees were bleeding through my jeans, and I was hallucinating from the cold and the pain and the monotony. And to give you an idea of the suffer-fest that I was undergoing, the first lap around the high school track took 10 minutes. The last lap took almost 30.After 12 hours of crawling, I stopped, and I had gone eight and a half miles. So I was short of the 12-and-a-half-mile record.Now, for many years, I thought this was a story of abject failure, but today I see it differently, because when I was attempting the world record, I was doing three things. I was getting outside my comfort zone, I was calling upon my resilience, and I was finding confidence in myself and my own decisions. I didn't know it then, but those are not the attributes of failure. Those are the attributes of bravery.Now, in 1989, at the age of 26, I became a San Francisco firefighter, and I was the 15th woman in a department of 1,500 men.(Applause)And as you can imagine, when I arrived there were many doubts about whether we could do the job. So even though I was a 5'10"", 150-pound collegiate rower, and someone who could endure 12 hours of searing knee pain —(Laughter)I knew I still had to prove my strength and fitness.So one day a call came in for a fire, and sure enough, when my engine group pulled up, there was black smoke billowing from a building off an alleyway. And I was with a big guy named Skip, and he was on the nozzle, and I was right behind, and it was a typical sort of fire. It was smoky, it was hot, and all of a sudden, there was an explosion, and Skip and I were blown backwards, my mask was knocked sideways, and there was this moment of confusion. And then I picked myself up, I groped for the nozzle, and I did what a firefighter was supposed to do: I lunged forward, opened up the water and I tackled the fire myself. The explosion had been caused by a water heater, so nobody was hurt, and ultimately it was not a big deal, but later Skip came up to me and said, ""Nice job, Caroline,"" in this surprised sort of voice.(Laughter)And I was confused, because the fire hadn't been difficult physically, so why was he looking at me with something like astonishment? And then it became clear: Skip, who was by the way a really nice guy and an excellent firefighter, not only thought that women could not be strong, he thought that they could not be brave either. And he wasn't the only one. Friends, acquaintances and strangers, men and women throughout my career ask me over and over, ""Caroline, all that fire, all that danger, aren't you scared?"" Honestly, I never heard a male firefighter asked this. And I became curious. Why wasn't bravery expected of women?Now, the answer began to come when a friend of mine lamented to me that her young daughter was a big scaredy-cat, and so I began to notice, and yes, the daughter was anxious, but more than that, the parents were anxious. Most of what they said to her when she was outside began with, ""Be careful,"" ""Watch out,"" or ""No."" Now, my friends were not bad parents. They were just doing what most parents do, which is cautioning their daughters much more than they caution their sons.There was a study involving a playground fire pole, ironically, in which researchers saw that little girls were very likely to be warned by both their moms and dads about the fire pole's risk, and if the little girls still wanted to play on the fire pole, a parent was very likely to assist her. But the little boys? They were encouraged to play on the fire pole despite any trepidations that they might have, and often the parents offered guidance on how to use it on their own. So what message does this send to both boys and girls? Well, that girls are fragile and more in need of help, and that boys can and should master difficult tasks by themselves. It says that girls should be fearful and boys should be gutsy.Now, the irony is that at this young age, girls and boys are actually very alike physically. In fact, girls are often stronger until puberty, and more mature. And yet we adults act as if girls are more fragile and more in need of help, and they can't handle as much. This is the message that we absorb as kids, and this is the message that fully permeates as we grow up. We women believe it, men believe it, and guess what? As we become parents, we pass it on to our children, and so it goes.Well, so now I had my answer. This is why women, even firewomen, were expected to be scared. This is why women often are scared.Now, I know some of you won't believe me when I tell you this, but I am not against fear. I know it's an important emotion, and it's there to keep us safe. But the problem is when fear is the primary reaction that we teach and encourage in girls whenever they face something outside their comfort zone.So I was a paraglider pilot for many years —(Applause)and a paraglider is a parachute-like wing, and it does fly very well, but to many people I realize it looks just like a bedsheet with strings attached.(Laughter)And I spent a lot of time on mountaintops inflating this bedsheet, running off and flying. And I know what you're thinking. You're like, Caroline, a little fear would make sense here. And you're right, it does. I assure you, I did feel fear. But on that mountaintop, waiting for the wind to come in just right, I felt so many other things, too: exhilaration, confidence. I knew I was a good pilot. I knew the conditions were good, or I wouldn't be there. I knew how great it was going to be a thousand feet in the air. So yes, fear was there, but I would take a good hard look at it, assess just how relevant it was and then put it where it belonged, which was more often than not behind my exhilaration, my anticipation and my confidence. So I'm not against fear. I'm just pro-bravery.Now, I'm not saying your girls must be firefighters or that they should be paragliders, but I am saying that we are raising our girls to be timid, even helpless, and it begins when we caution them against physical risk. The fear we learn and the experiences we don't stay with us as we become women and morphs into all those things that we face and try to shed: our hesitation in speaking out, our deference so that we can be liked and our lack of confidence in our own decisions.So how do we become brave? Well, here's the good news. Bravery is learned, and like anything learned, it just needs to be practiced. So first, we have to take a deep breath and encourage our girls to skateboard, climb trees and clamber around on that playground fire pole. This is what my own mother did. She didn't know it then, but researchers have a name for this. They call it risky play, and studies show that risky play is really important for kids, all kids, because it teaches hazard assessment, it teaches delayed gratification, it teaches resilience, it teaches confidence. In other words, when kids get outside and practice bravery, they learn valuable life lessons.Second, we have to stop cautioning our girls willy-nilly. So notice next time you say, ""Watch out, you're going to get hurt,"" or, ""Don't do that, it's dangerous."" And remember that often what you're really telling her is that she shouldn't be pushing herself, that she's really not good enough, that she should be afraid.Third, we women have to start practicing bravery, too. We cannot teach our girls until we teach ourselves. So here's another thing: fear and exhilaration feel very similar — the shaky hands, the heightened heart rate, the nervous tension, and I'm betting that for many of you the last time you thought you were scared out of your wits, you may have been feeling mostly exhilaration, and now you've missed an opportunity. So practice. And while girls should be getting outside to learn to be gutsy, I get that adults don't want to get on hoverboards or climb trees, so we all should be practicing at home, in the office and even right here getting up the guts to talk to someone that you really admire.Finally, when your girl is, let's say, on her bike on the top of the steep hill that she insists she's too scared to go down, guide her to access her bravery. Ultimately, maybe that hill really is too steep, but she'll come to that conclusion through courage, not fear. Because this is not about the steep hill in front of her. This is about the life ahead of her and that she has the tools to handle and assess all the dangers that we cannot protect her from, all the challenges that we won't be there to guide her through, everything that our girls here and around the world face in their future.So by the way, the world record for crawling today —(Laughter)is 35.18 miles, and I would really love to see a girl go break that.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caroline_paul_to_raise_brave_girls_encourage_adventure
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"Why do we think that stories by men are deemed to be of universal importance, and stories by women are thought to be merely about women?My grandmother left school when she was 12. She had 14 children. My mother left school when she was 15. She was a secretary. I graduated from university to become a theater director, and that progress is entirely to do with the fact that people I'll never meet fought for women to have rights, get the vote, get education, have progress. And I'm determined to do the same, and obviously you are, too. Why not?(Applause)So I started a festival called WOW, Women of the World, seven years ago, and it's now in 20 countries across five continents. And one of those countries is Somaliland in Africa. So I traveled there last year, and part of the joy I had in going there was going to these caves. The Laas Geel caves. Now, these caves contain some of the oldest cave paintings in the world. These paintings are thought to be round about 9,000 to 11,000 years old. Art: what humanity has done ever since it evolved. It's how we speak about ourselves, how we understand our identity, how we look at our surroundings, who we find out about each other because of the meaning of our lives. That's what art is for.So look at this little picture. I think it's a little girl. I thought it was a bit like me when I was a little girl. And I thought, well, who painted this joyful, youthful figure? And I asked the curator of the caves. I said, ""Tell me about the men and women who painted these."" And he looked at me absolutely askance, and he said, ""Women didn't paint these pictures."" And I said, ""Well, it was 11,000 years ago."" I said, ""How do you know?""(Laughter)And he said, ""Women don't do these things. Men made these marks. Women don't.""Now, I wasn't really surprised, because that's an attitude that I've seen continuously all my life as a theater maker. We are told that divine knowledge comes down through the masculine, whether it be to the imam, the priest, the rabbi, the holy man. Similarly, we're told that creative genius resides in the masculine, that it is the masculine that will be able to tell us about who we really are, that the masculine will tell the universal story on behalf of all of us, whereas women artists will really just talk about women's experiences, women's issues only really relevant to women and of passing interest to men — and really only some men. And it's that conviction, that that we are taught, that I think colors so much of whether we're prepared to believe that women's stories really matter. And unless we're prepared to believe that women's stories really matter, then women's rights don't really matter, and then change can't really come.I want to tell you about two examples of stories that are thought to be of universal importance: ""E.T."" and ""Hamlet.""(Laughter)So I took my two children when they were little — Caroline was eight and Robby was five — to see ""E.T."" And it's a fantastic story of this little alien who ends up in an American family with a mum, two brothers and a sister, but he wants to go home. Not only that, but some really bad scientists want to do some experiments on him, and they're looking for him. So the children have a plot. They decide they're going to take him back to his spaceship as soon as they can, and they plop him in a bicycle basket, and off they ride. But unfortunately, the baddies have found out, and they're catching up and they've got sirens and they've got their guns, they've got the loud-hailers, it's terribly frightening, and they're closing up on the children, and the children are never going to make it. And then all of a sudden, magically, the bikes fly up in the air, over the clouds, over the moon, and they're going to save ""E.T.""So I turn to see my children's faces, and Robby is enraptured, he's there with them, he's saving E.T., he's a happy boy. And I turn to Caroline, and she's crying her eyes out. And I said, ""What's the matter?"" And she said, ""Why can't I save E.T.? Why can't I come?"" And then all of a sudden I realized: they weren't children; they were boys — all boys. And Caroline, who had invested so much in E.T., well, she wasn't invited to save him, and she felt humiliated and spurned.So I wrote to Steven Spielberg —(Laughter) (Applause)and I said, ""I don't know if you understand the psychological importance of what's happened, and are you prepared to pay for the therapy bills?""(Laughter)Twenty years later, I haven't had a word back from him, but I'm still hopeful.(Laughter)But I thought it was interesting, because if you read reviews of what he intended with E.T., he says very specifically, ""I wanted the world to understand that we should love and embrace difference."" But somehow he didn't include the idea of girls' difference in this thinking. He thought he was writing a story about all humanity. Caroline thought he was marginalizing half of humanity. He thought he was writing a story about human goodness; she thought he was writing a lad's heroic adventure.And this is common. Men feel they have been given the mantle for universal communication, but of course, how could they be? They are writing from male experience through male's eyes. We have to have a look at this ourselves. We have to be prepared to go back through all our books and our films, all our favorite things, and say, ""Actually, this is written by a male artist — not an artist. We have to see that so many of these stories are written through a male perspective. Which is fine, but then females need to have 50 percent of the rights for the stage, the film, the novel, the place of creativity.Let me talk about ""Hamlet."" To be or not to be. That is the question. But it's not my question. My question is: Why was I taught as a young woman that this was the quintessential example of human dilemma and human experience? It's a marvelous story, but actually, it's about a young man fearful that he won't be able to make it as a powerful figure in a male world unless he takes revenge for his father's murder. He talks a great deal to us about suicide being an option, but the reality is that the person who actually commits suicide, Ophelia, after she's been humiliated and abused by him, never gets a chance to talk to the audience about her feelings. And then when he's finished with Ophelia, he turns on his mum, because basically she has the audacity to fall in love with his uncle and enjoy sex.(Laughter)It is a great story, but it is a story about male conflict, male dilemma, male struggle. But I was told this was the story of human beings, despite the fact that it only had two women in it. And unless I reeducate myself, I am always going to think that women's stories matter less than men's. A woman could have written ""Hamlet,"" but she would have written it differently, and it wouldn't have had global recognition. As the writer Margaret Atwood says, ""When a man writes about doing the dishes, it's realism. When a woman writes about doing it, it's an unfortunate genetic disposition.""(Laughter)Now, this is not just something that belongs to then. I mean, when I was a young girl, wanting desperately to be a theater director, this is what my male lecturer said to me: ""Well, there are three women directors in Britain,"" he said, ""Jude."" ""There's Joan Knight, who's a lesbian, there's Joan Littlewood, who's retired, and there's Buzz Goodbody, who's just killed herself. So, which of those three would you like to be?""(Laughter)Now, leaving aside the disgusting slur on gay women, the fact is, he wanted to humiliate me. He thought it was silly that I wanted to be a director. And I told my friend Marin Alsop, the conductor, and she said, ""Oh yes, well, my music teacher said exactly the same. He said, 'Women don't conduct.'"" But all these years later, we've made our mark. You think, ""Well, it'll be different now."" I'm afraid it's not different now. The current head of the Paris Conservatoire said recently, ""It takes great physical strength to conduct a symphony, and women are too weak.""(Laughter)The artist George Baselitz said, ""Well, the fact is women can't paint. Well — they can't paint very well.""The writer V.S. Naipaul said two years ago, ""I can read two paragraphs and know immediately if it's written by a woman, and I just stop reading, because it's not worthy of me.""Audience: Whoa!And it goes on.We have to find a way of stopping young girls and women feeling not only that their story doesn't matter, but they're not allowed to be the storyteller. Because once you feel that you can't stand in the central space and speak on behalf of the world, you will feel that you can offer your goods up to a small, select group. You will tend to do smaller work on smaller stages, your economic power will be less, your reach of audiences will be less, and your credit will be less as an artist. And we do finally give artists these incredible, prominent spaces in the world, because they are our storytellers.Now, why should it matter to you if you're not an artist? Supposing you're an accountant or an entrepreneur or a medic or a scientist: Should you care about women artists? Absolutely, you must, because as you can see from the cave paintings, all civilizations, all of humanity have relied upon artists to tell the human story, and if the human story is finally told by men, take my word for it, it will be about men.So let's make a change. Let's make a change to all our institutions, and not just in the West. Don't forget — this message of incapability of women to hold creative genius is being told to girls and women in Nigeria, in China, in Russia, in Indonesia. All over the world, girls and women are being told that they can't finally hold the idea of creative inspiration. And I want to ask you: Do you believe that? Do you believe that women can be a creative genius?(Applause and cheers)Well then, please go forward, support women artists, buy their work, insist that their voices are heard, find platforms on which their voices will be made. And remember this: that in a sense, if we're going to get past this moment of a world where we know that we are unequal, it's artists who have to imagine a different world. And I'm calling on all artists, women and men, to imagine a gender-equal world. Let's paint it. Let's draw it. Let's write about it. Let's film it. And if we could imagine it, then we would have the energy and the stamina to work towards it.When I see this little girl, 11,000 years ago, I want to know that the little girl now can stand there and think she's entitled to her dreams, she's entitled to her destiny and she's entitled to speak on behalf of the whole world, be recognized for it and applauded.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jude_kelly_why_women_should_tell_the_stories_of_humanity
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"Hello, I'm Joy, a poet of code, on a mission to stop an unseen force that's rising, a force that I called ""the coded gaze,"" my term for algorithmic bias.Algorithmic bias, like human bias, results in unfairness. However, algorithms, like viruses, can spread bias on a massive scale at a rapid pace. Algorithmic bias can also lead to exclusionary experiences and discriminatory practices. Let me show you what I mean.(Video) Joy Buolamwini: Hi, camera. I've got a face. Can you see my face? No-glasses face? You can see her face. What about my face? I've got a mask. Can you see my mask?Joy Buolamwini: So how did this happen? Why am I sitting in front of a computer in a white mask, trying to be detected by a cheap webcam? Well, when I'm not fighting the coded gaze as a poet of code, I'm a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, and there I have the opportunity to work on all sorts of whimsical projects, including the Aspire Mirror, a project I did so I could project digital masks onto my reflection. So in the morning, if I wanted to feel powerful, I could put on a lion. If I wanted to be uplifted, I might have a quote. So I used generic facial recognition software to build the system, but found it was really hard to test it unless I wore a white mask.Unfortunately, I've run into this issue before. When I was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech studying computer science, I used to work on social robots, and one of my tasks was to get a robot to play peek-a-boo, a simple turn-taking game where partners cover their face and then uncover it saying, ""Peek-a-boo!"" The problem is, peek-a-boo doesn't really work if I can't see you, and my robot couldn't see me. But I borrowed my roommate's face to get the project done, submitted the assignment, and figured, you know what, somebody else will solve this problem.Not too long after, I was in Hong Kong for an entrepreneurship competition. The organizers decided to take participants on a tour of local start-ups. One of the start-ups had a social robot, and they decided to do a demo. The demo worked on everybody until it got to me, and you can probably guess it. It couldn't detect my face. I asked the developers what was going on, and it turned out we had used the same generic facial recognition software. Halfway around the world, I learned that algorithmic bias can travel as quickly as it takes to download some files off of the internet.So what's going on? Why isn't my face being detected? Well, we have to look at how we give machines sight. Computer vision uses machine learning techniques to do facial recognition. So how this works is, you create a training set with examples of faces. This is a face. This is a face. This is not a face. And over time, you can teach a computer how to recognize other faces. However, if the training sets aren't really that diverse, any face that deviates too much from the established norm will be harder to detect, which is what was happening to me.But don't worry — there's some good news. Training sets don't just materialize out of nowhere. We actually can create them. So there's an opportunity to create full-spectrum training sets that reflect a richer portrait of humanity.Now you've seen in my examples how social robots was how I found out about exclusion with algorithmic bias. But algorithmic bias can also lead to discriminatory practices. Across the US, police departments are starting to use facial recognition software in their crime-fighting arsenal. Georgetown Law published a report showing that one in two adults in the US — that's 117 million people — have their faces in facial recognition networks. Police departments can currently look at these networks unregulated, using algorithms that have not been audited for accuracy. Yet we know facial recognition is not fail proof, and labeling faces consistently remains a challenge. You might have seen this on Facebook. My friends and I laugh all the time when we see other people mislabeled in our photos. But misidentifying a suspected criminal is no laughing matter, nor is breaching civil liberties.Machine learning is being used for facial recognition, but it's also extending beyond the realm of computer vision. In her book, ""Weapons of Math Destruction,"" data scientist Cathy O'Neil talks about the rising new WMDs — widespread, mysterious and destructive algorithms that are increasingly being used to make decisions that impact more aspects of our lives. So who gets hired or fired? Do you get that loan? Do you get insurance? Are you admitted into the college you wanted to get into? Do you and I pay the same price for the same product purchased on the same platform?Law enforcement is also starting to use machine learning for predictive policing. Some judges use machine-generated risk scores to determine how long an individual is going to spend in prison. So we really have to think about these decisions. Are they fair? And we've seen that algorithmic bias doesn't necessarily always lead to fair outcomes.So what can we do about it? Well, we can start thinking about how we create more inclusive code and employ inclusive coding practices. It really starts with people. So who codes matters. Are we creating full-spectrum teams with diverse individuals who can check each other's blind spots? On the technical side, how we code matters. Are we factoring in fairness as we're developing systems? And finally, why we code matters. We've used tools of computational creation to unlock immense wealth. We now have the opportunity to unlock even greater equality if we make social change a priority and not an afterthought. And so these are the three tenets that will make up the ""incoding"" movement. Who codes matters, how we code matters and why we code matters.So to go towards incoding, we can start thinking about building platforms that can identify bias by collecting people's experiences like the ones I shared, but also auditing existing software. We can also start to create more inclusive training sets. Imagine a ""Selfies for Inclusion"" campaign where you and I can help developers test and create more inclusive training sets. And we can also start thinking more conscientiously about the social impact of the technology that we're developing.To get the incoding movement started, I've launched the Algorithmic Justice League, where anyone who cares about fairness can help fight the coded gaze. On codedgaze.com, you can report bias, request audits, become a tester and join the ongoing conversation, #codedgaze.So I invite you to join me in creating a world where technology works for all of us, not just some of us, a world where we value inclusion and center social change.Thank you.(Applause)But I have one question: Will you join me in the fight?(Laughter)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithms
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"Today I want to talk about the meaning of words, how we define them and how they, almost as revenge, define us.The English language is a magnificent sponge. I love the English language. I'm glad that I speak it. But for all that, it has a lot of holes. In Greek, there's a word, ""lachesism"" which is the hunger for disaster. You know, when you see a thunderstorm on the horizon and you just find yourself rooting for the storm. In Mandarin, they have a word ""yù yī"" — I'm not pronouncing that correctly — which means the longing to feel intensely again the way you did when you were a kid. In Polish, they have a word ""jouska"" which is the kind of hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. And finally, in German, of course in German, they have a word called ""zielschmerz"" which is the dread of getting what you want.(Laughter)Finally fulfilling a lifelong dream. I'm German myself, so I know exactly what that feels like.Now, I'm not sure if I would use any of these words as I go about my day, but I'm really glad they exist. But the only reason they exist is because I made them up.I am the author of ""The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,"" which I've been writing for the last seven years. And the whole mission of the project is to find holes in the language of emotion and try to fill them so that we have a way of talking about all those human peccadilloes and quirks of the human condition that we all feel but may not think to talk about because we don't have the words to do it.And about halfway through this project, I defined ""sonder,"" the idea that we all think of ourselves as the main character and everyone else is just extras. But in reality, we're all the main character, and you yourself are an extra in someone else's story. And so as soon as I published that, I got a lot of response from people saying, ""Thank you for giving voice to something I had felt all my life but there was no word for that."" So it made them feel less alone. That's the power of words, to make us feel less alone.And it was not long after that that I started to notice sonder being used earnestly in conversations online, and not long after I actually noticed it, I caught it next to me in an actual conversation in person. There is no stranger feeling than making up a word and then seeing it take on a mind of its own. I don't have a word for that yet, but I will.(Laughter)I'm working on it.I started to think about what makes words real, because a lot of people ask me, the most common thing I got from people is, ""Well, are these words made up? I don't really understand."" And I didn't really know what to tell them because once sonder started to take off, who am I to say what words are real and what aren't. And so I sort of felt like Steve Jobs, who described his epiphany as when he realized that most of us, as we go through the day, we just try to avoid bouncing against the walls too much and just sort of get on with things. But once you realize that people — that this world was built by people no smarter than you, then you can reach out and touch those walls and even put your hand through them and realize that you have the power to change it.And when people ask me, ""Are these words real?"" I had a variety of answers that I tried out. Some of them made sense. Some of them didn't. But one of them I tried out was, ""Well, a word is real if you want it to be real."" The way that this path is real because people wanted it to be there.(Laughter)It happens on college campuses all the time. It's called a ""desire path.""(Laughter)But then I decided, what people are really asking when they're asking if a word is real, they're really asking, ""Well, how many brains will this give me access to?"" Because I think that's a lot of how we look at language. A word is essentially a key that gets us into certain people's heads. And if it gets us into one brain, it's not really worth it, not really worth knowing. Two brains, eh, it depends on who it is. A million brains, OK, now we're talking. And so a real word is one that gets you access to as many brains as you can. That's what makes it worth knowing.Incidentally, the realest word of all by this measure is this.[O.K.]That's it. The realest word we have. That is the closest thing we have to a master key. That's the most commonly understood word in the world, no matter where you are. The problem with that is, no one seems to know what those two letters stand for.(Laughter)Which is kind of weird, right? I mean, it could be a misspelling of ""all correct,"" I guess, or ""old kinderhook."" No one really seems to know, but the fact that it doesn't matter says something about how we add meaning to words. The meaning is not in the words themselves. We're the ones that pour ourselves into it.And I think, when we're all searching for meaning in our lives, and searching for the meaning of life, I think words have something to do with that. And I think if you're looking for the meaning of something, the dictionary is a decent place to start. It brings a sense of order to a very chaotic universe. Our view of things is so limited that we have to come up with patterns and shorthands and try to figure out a way to interpret it and be able to get on with our day. We need words to contain us, to define ourselves.I think a lot of us feel boxed in by how we use these words. We forget that words are made up. It's not just my words. All words are made up, but not all of them mean something. We're all just sort of trapped in our own lexicons that don't necessarily correlate with people who aren't already like us, and so I think I feel us drifting apart a little more every year, the more seriously we take words.Because remember, words are not real. They don't have meaning. We do.And I'd like to leave you with a reading from one of my favorite philosophers, Bill Watterson, who created ""Calvin and Hobbes."" He said, ""Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it is still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/john_koenig_beautiful_new_words_to_describe_obscure_emotions
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"When I die, I would like for my body to be laid out to be eaten by animals. Having your body laid out to be eaten by animals is not for everyone.(Laughter)Maybe you have already had the end-of-life talk with your family and decided on, I don't know, cremation. And in the interest of full disclosure, what I am proposing for my dead body is not strictly legal at the moment, but it's not without precedent.We've been laying out our dead for all of human history; it's call exposure burial. In fact, it's likely happening right now as we speak. In the mountainous regions of Tibet, they practice ""sky burial,"" a ritual where the body is left to be consumed by vultures. In Mumbai, in India, those who follow the Parsi religion put their dead in structures called ""Towers of Silence."" These are interesting cultural tidbits, but they just haven't really been that popular in the Western world — they're not what you'd expect.In America, our death traditions have come to be chemical embalming, followed by burial at your local cemetery, or, more recently, cremation. I myself, am a recent vegetarian, which means I spent the first 30 years or so of my life frantically inhaling animals — as many as I could get my hands on. Why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me?(Laughter)Am I not an animal? Biologically speaking, are we not all, in this room, animals? Accepting the fact that we are animals has some potentially terrifying consequences. It means accepting that we are doomed to decay and die, just like any other creature on earth.For the last nine years, I've worked in the funeral industry, first as a crematory operator, then as a mortician and most recently, as the owner of my own funeral home. And I have some good news: if you're looking to avoid the whole ""doomed to decay and die"" thing: you will have all the help in the world in that avoidance from the funeral industry.It's a multi-billion-dollar industry, and its economic model is based on the principle of protection, sanitation and beautification of the corpse. Whether they mean to or not, the funeral industry promotes this idea of human exceptionalism. It doesn't matter what it takes, how much it costs, how bad it is for the environment, we're going to do it because humans are worth it! It ignores the fact that death can be an emotionally messy and complex affair, and that there is beauty in decay — beauty in the natural return to the earth from whence we came. Now, I don't want you to get me wrong — I absolutely understand the importance of ritual, especially when it comes to the people that we love. But we have to be able to create and practice this ritual without harming the environment, which is why we need new options.So let's return to the idea of protection, sanitation and beautification. We'll start with a dead body. The funeral industry will protect your dead body by offering to sell your family a casket made of hardwood or metal with a rubber sealant. At the cemetery, on the day of burial, that casket will be lowered into a large concrete or metal vault. We're wasting all of these resources — concretes, metal, hardwoods — hiding them in vast underground fortresses. When you choose burial at the cemetery, your dead body is not coming anywhere near the dirt that surrounds it. Food for worms you are not.Next, the industry will sanitize your body through embalming: the chemical preservation of the dead. This procedure drains your blood and replaces it with a toxic, cancer-causing formaldehyde. They say they do this for the public health because the dead body can be dangerous, but the doctors in this room will tell you that that claim would only apply if the person had died of some wildly infectious disease, like Ebola. Even human decomposition, which, let's be honest, is a little stinky and unpleasant, is perfectly safe. The bacteria that causes disease is not the same bacteria that causes decomposition.Finally, the industry will beautify the corpse. They'll tell you that the natural dead body of your mother or father is not good enough as it is. They'll put it in makeup. They'll put it in a suit. They'll inject dyes so the person looks a little more alive — just resting. Embalming is a cheat code, providing the illusion that death and then decay are not the natural end for all organic life on this planet.Now, if this system of beautification, sanitation, protection doesn't appeal to you, you are not alone. There is a whole wave of people — funeral directors, designers, environmentalists — trying to come up with a more eco-friendly way of death. For these people, death is not necessarily a pristine, makeup, powder-blue tuxedo kind of affair. There's no question that our current methods of death are not particularly sustainable, what with the waste of resources and our reliance on chemicals. Even cremation, which is usually considered the environmentally friendly option, uses, per cremation, the natural gas equivalent of a 500-mile car trip.So where do we go from here? Last summer, I was in the mountains of North Carolina, hauling buckets of wood chips in the summer sun. I was at Western Carolina University at their ""Body Farm,"" more accurately called a ""human decomposition facility."" Bodies donated to science are brought here, and their decay is studied to benefit the future of forensics. On this particular day, there were 12 bodies laid out in various stages of decomposition. Some were skeletonized, one was wearing purple pajamas, one still had blonde facial hair visible. The forensic aspect is really fascinating, but not actually why I was there. I was there because a colleague of mine named Katrina Spade is attempting to create a system, not of cremating the dead, but composting the dead.She calls the system ""Recomposition,"" and we've been doing it with cattle and other livestock for years. She imagines a facility where the family could come and lay their dead loved one in a nutrient-rich mixture that would, in four-to-six weeks, reduce the body — bones and all — to soil. In those four-to-six weeks, your molecules become other molecules; you literally transform.How would this fit in with the very recent desire a lot of people seem to have to be buried under a tree, or to become a tree when they die? In a traditional cremation, the ashes that are left over — inorganic bone fragments — form a thick, chalky layer that, unless distributed in the soil just right, can actually hurt or kill the tree. But if you're recomposed, if you actually become the soil, you can nourish the tree, and become the post-mortem contributor you've always wanted to be — that you deserve to be.So that's one option for the future of cremation. But what about the future of cemeteries? There are a lot of people who think we shouldn't even have cemeteries anymore because we're running out of land. But what if we reframed it, and the corpse wasn't the land's enemy, but its potential savior? I'm talking about conservation burial, where large swaths of land are purchased by a land trust. The beauty of this is that once you plant a few dead bodies in that land, it can't be touched, it can't be developed on — hence the term, ""conservation burial."" It's the equivalent of chaining yourself to a tree post-mortem — ""Hell no, I won't go! No, really — I can't. I'm decomposing under here.""(Laughter)Any money that the family gives to the cemetery would go back into protecting and managing the land. There are no headstones and no graves in the typical sense. The graves are scattered about the property under elegant mounds, marked only by a rock or a small metal disk, or sometimes only locatable by GPS. There's no embalming, no heavy, metal caskets. My funeral home sells a few caskets made out of things like woven willow and bamboo, but honestly, most of our families just choose a simple shroud. There are none of the big vaults that most cemeteries require just because it makes it easier for them to landscape. Families can come here; they can luxuriate in nature; they can even plant a tree or a shrub, though only native plants to the area are allowed. The dead then blend seamlessly in with the landscape.There's hope in conservation cemeteries. They offer dedicated green space in both urban and rural areas. They offer a chance to reintroduce native plants and animals to a region. They offer public trails, places for spiritual practice, places for classes and events — places where nature and mourning meet. Most importantly, they offer us, once again, a chance to just decompose in a hole in the ground. The soil, let me tell you, has missed us.I think for a lot of people, they're starting to get the sense that our current funeral industry isn't really working for them. For many of us, being sanitized and beautified just doesn't reflect us. It doesn't reflect what we stood for during our lives. Will changing the way we bury our dead solve climate change? No. But it will make bold moves in how we see ourselves as citizens of this planet. If we can die in a way that is more humble and self-aware, I believe that we stand a chance.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caitlin_doughty_a_burial_practice_that_nourishes_the_planet
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"I am holding something remarkably old. It is older than any human artifact, older than life on Earth, older than the continents and the oceans between them. This was formed over four billion years ago in the earliest days of the solar system while the planets were still forming. This rusty lump of nickel and iron may not appear special, but when it is cut open ... you can see that it is different from earthly metals. This pattern reveals metallic crystals that can only form out in space where molten metal can cool extremely slowly, a few degrees every million years. This was once part of a much larger object, one of millions left over after the planets formed. We call these objects asteroids.Asteroids are our oldest and most numerous cosmic neighbors. This graphic shows near-Earth asteroids orbiting around the Sun, shown in yellow, and swinging close to the Earth's orbit, shown in blue. The sizes of the Earth, Sun and asteroids have been greatly exaggerated so you can see them clearly. Teams of scientists across the globe are searching for these objects, discovering new ones every day, steadily mapping near-Earth space. Much of this work is funded by NASA. I think of the search for these asteroids as a giant public works project, but instead of building a highway, we're charting outer space, building an archive that will last for generations.These are the 1,556 near-Earth asteroids discovered just last year. And these are all of the known near-Earth asteroids, which at last count was 13,733. Each one has been imaged, cataloged and had its path around the Sun determined. Although it varies from asteroid to asteroid, the paths of most asteroids can be predicted for dozens of years. And the paths of some asteroids can be predicted with incredible precision. For example, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory predicted where the asteroid Toutatis was going to be four years in advance to within 30 kilometers. In those four years, Toutatis traveled 8.5 billion kilometers. That's a fractional precision of 0.000000004.(Laughter)Now, the reason I have this beautiful asteroid fragment is because, like all neighbors, asteroids sometimes drop by unexpectedly.(Laughter)Three years ago today, a small asteroid exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. That object was about 19 meters across, or about as big as a convenience store. Objects of this size hit the Earth every 50 years or so.66 million years ago, a much larger object hit the Earth, causing a massive extinction. 75 percent of plant and animal species were lost, including, sadly, the dinosaurs. That object was about 10 kilometers across, and 10 kilometers is roughly the cruising altitude of a 747 jet. So the next time you're in an airplane, snag a window seat, look out and imagine a rock so enormous that resting on the ground, it just grazes your wingtip. It's so wide that it takes your plane one full minute to fly past it. That's the size of the asteroid that hit the Earth.It has only been within my lifetime that asteroids have been considered a credible threat to our planet. And since then, there's been a focused effort underway to discover and catalog these objects. I am lucky enough to be part of this effort. I'm part of a team of scientists that use NASA's NEOWISE telescope. Now, NEOWISE was not designed to find asteroids. It was designed to orbit the earth and look far beyond our solar system to seek out the coldest stars and the most luminous galaxies. And it did that very well for its designed lifetime of seven months. But today, six years later, it's still going. We've repurposed it to discover and study asteroids. And although it's a wonderful little space robot, these days it's kind of like a used car. The cryogen that used to refrigerate its sensors is long gone, so we joke that its air-conditioning is broken. It's got 920 million miles on the odometer, but it still runs great and reliably takes a photograph of the sky every 11 seconds. It's taken 23 photos since I began speaking to you.One of the reasons NEOWISE is so valuable is that it sees the sky in the thermal infrared. That means that instead of seeing the sunlight that asteroids reflect, NEOWISE sees the heat that they emit. This is a vital capability since some asteroids are as dark as coal and can be difficult or impossible to spot with other telescopes. But all asteroids, light or dark, shine brightly for NEOWISE.Astronomers are using every technique at their disposal to discover and study asteroids. In 2010, a historic milestone was reached. The community, together, discovered over 90 percent of asteroids bigger than one kilometer across — objects capable of massive destruction to Earth. But the job's not done yet. An object 140 meters or bigger could decimate a medium-sized country. So far, we've only found 25 percent of those.We must keep searching the sky for near-Earth asteroids. We are the only species able to understand calculus or build telescopes. We know how to find these objects. This is our responsibility. If we found a hazardous asteroid with significant early warning, we could nudge it out of the way. Unlike earthquakes, hurricanes or volcanic eruptions, an asteroid impact can be precisely predicted and prevented. What we need to do now is map near-Earth space. We must keep searching the sky.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carrie_nugent_adventures_of_an_asteroid_hunter
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"For several years now, we've been engaged in a national debate about sexual assault on campus. No question — it's crucial that young people understand the ground rules for consent, but that's where the conversation about sex is ending. And in that vacuum of information the media and the Internet — that new digital street corner — are educating our kids for us. If we truly want young people to engage safely, ethically, and yes, enjoyably, it's time to have open honest discussion about what happens after ""yes,"" and that includes breaking the biggest taboo of all and talking to young people about women's capacity for and entitlement to sexual pleasure. Yeah.(Applause)Come on, ladies.(Applause)I spent three years talking to girls ages 15 to 20 about their attitudes and experience of sex. And what I found was that while young women may feel entitled to engage in sexual behavior, they don't necessarily feel entitled to enjoy it. Take this sophomore at the Ivy League college who told me, ""I come from a long line of smart, strong women. My grandmother was a firecracker, my mom is a professional, my sister and I are loud, and that's our form of feminine power."" She then proceeded to describe her sex life to me: a series of one-off hookups, starting when she was 13, that were ... not especially responsible, not especially reciprocal and not especially enjoyable. She shrugged. ""I guess we girls are just socialized to be these docile creatures who don't express our wants or needs."" ""Wait a minute,"" I replied. ""Didn't you just tell me what a smart, strong woman you are?"" She hemmed and hawed. ""I guess,"" she finally said, ""no one told me that that smart, strong image applies to sex.""I should probably say right up top that despite the hype, teenagers are not engaging in intercourse more often or at a younger age than they were 25 years ago. They are, however, engaging in other behavior. And when we ignore that, when we label that as ""not sex,"" that opens the door to risky behavior and disrespect. That's particularly true of oral sex, which teenagers consider to be less intimate than intercourse. Girls would tell me, ""it's no big deal,"" like they'd all read the same instruction manual — at least if boys were on the receiving end. Young women have lots of reasons for participating. It made them feel desired; it was a way to boost social status. Sometimes, it was a way to get out of an uncomfortable situation. As a freshman at a West Coast college said to me, ""A girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn't want to have sex with him, and he expects to be satisfied. So, if I want him to leave and I don't want anything to happen ... "" I heard so many stories of girls performing one-sided oral sex that I started asking, ""What if every time you were alone with a guy, he told you to get him a glass of water from the kitchen, and he never got you a glass of water — or if he did, it was like ... 'you want me to uh ...?'"" You know, totally begrudging. You wouldn't stand for it.But it wasn't always that boys didn't want to. It was that girls didn't want them to. Girls expressed a sense of shame around their genitals. A sense that they were simultaneously icky and sacred. Women's feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex. Yet, Debby Herbenick, a researcher at Indiana University, believes that girls' genital self-image is under siege, with more pressure than ever to see them as unacceptable in their natural state. According to research, about three-quarters of college women remove their pubic hair — all of it — at least on occasion, and more than half do so regularly. Girls would tell me that hair removal made them feel cleaner, that it was a personal choice. Though, I kind of wondered if left alone on a desert island, if this was how they would choose to spend their time.(Laughter)And when I pushed further, a darker motivation emerged: avoiding humiliation. ""Guys act like they would be disgusted by it,"" one young woman told me. ""No one wants to be talked about like that."" The rising pubic hair removal reminded me of the 1920s, when women first started regularly shaving their armpits and their legs. That's when flapper dresses came into style, and women's limbs were suddenly visible, open to public scrutiny. There's a way that I think that this too is a sign. That a girl's most intimate part is open to public scrutiny, open to critique, to becoming more about how it looks to someone else than how it feels to her.The shaving trend has sparked another rise in labiaplasty. Labiaplasty, which is the trimming of the inner and outer labia, is the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery among teenage girls. It rose 80 percent between 2014 and 2015, and whereas girls under 18 comprise two percent of all cosmetic surgeries, they are five percent of labiaplasty. The most sought-after look, incidentally, in which the outer labia appear fused like a clam shell, is called ... wait for it ... ""The Barbie.""(Groan)I trust I don't have to tell you that Barbie is a) made of plastic and b) has no genitalia.(Laughter)The labiaplasty trend has become so worrisome that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has issued a statement on the procedure, which is rarely medically indicated, has not been proven safe and whose side effects include scarring, numbness, pain and diminished sexual sensation. Now, admittedly, and blessedly, the number of girls involved is still quite small, but you could see them as canaries in a coal mine, telling us something important about the way girls see their bodies.Sara McClelland, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, coined what is my favorite phrase ever in talking about all of this: ""Intimate justice."" That's the idea that sex has political, as well as personal implications, just like, who does the dishes in your house, or who vacuums the rug. And it raises similar issues about inequality, about economic disparity, violence, physical and mental health. Intimate justice asks us to consider who is entitled to engage in an experience. Who is entitled to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary? And how does each partner define ""good enough""? Honestly, I think those questions are tricky and sometimes traumatic for adult women to confront, but when we're talking about girls, I just kept coming back to the idea that their early sexual experience shouldn't have to be something that they get over.In her work, McClelland found that young women were more likely than young men to use their partner's pleasure as a measure of their satisfaction. So they'd say things like, ""If he's sexually satisfied, then I'm sexually satisfied."" Young men were more likely to measure their satisfaction by their own orgasm. Young women also defined bad sex differently. In the largest ever survey ever conducted on American sexual behavior, they reported pain in their sexual encounters 30 percent of the time. They also used words like ""depressing,"" ""humiliating,"" ""degrading."" The young men never used that language. So when young women report sexual satisfaction levels that are equal to or greater than young men's — and they do in research — that can be deceptive. If a girl goes into an encounter hoping that it won't hurt, wanting to feel close to her partner and expecting him to have an orgasm, she'll be satisfied if those criteria are met. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to feel close to your partner, or wanting him to be happy, and orgasm isn't the only measure of an experience ... but absence of pain — that's a very low bar for your own sexual fulfillment.Listening to all of this and thinking about it, I began to realize that we performed a kind of psychological clitoridectomy on American girls. Starting in infancy, parents of baby boys are more likely to name all their body parts, at least they'll say, ""here's your pee-pee."" Parents of baby girls go right from navel to knees, and they leave this whole situation in here unnamed.(Laughter)There's no better way to make something unspeakable than not to name it. Then kids go into their puberty education classes and they learn that boys have erections and ejaculations, and girls have ... periods and unwanted pregnancy. And they see that internal diagram of a woman's reproductive system — you know, the one that looks kind of like a steer head —(Laughter)And it always grays out between the legs. So we never say vulva, we certainly never say clitoris. No surprise, fewer than half of teenage girls age 14 to 17 have ever masturbated. And then they go into their partnered experience and we expect that somehow they'll think sex is about them, that they'll be able to articulate their needs, their desires, their limits. It's unrealistic.Here's something, though. Girls' investment in their partner's pleasure remains regardless of the gender of the partner. So in same-sex encounters, the orgasm gap disappears. And young women climax at the same rate as men. Lesbian and bisexual girls would tell me that they felt liberated to get off the script — free to create an encounter that worked for them. Gay girls also challenged the idea of first intercourse as the definition of virginity. Not because intercourse isn't a big deal, but it's worth questioning why we consider this one act, which most girls associate with discomfort or pain, to be the line in the sand of sexual adulthood — so much more meaningful, so much more transformative than anything else. And it's worth considering how this is serving girls; whether it's keeping them safer from disease, coercion, betrayal, assault. Whether it's encouraging mutuality and caring; what it means about the way they see other sex acts; whether it's giving them more control over and joy in their experience, and what it means about gay teens, who can have multiple sex partners without heterosexual intercourse. So I asked a gay girl that I met, ""How'd you know you weren't a virgin anymore?"" She said she had to Google it.(Laughter)And Google wasn't sure.(Laughter)She finally decided that she wasn't a virgin anymore after she'd had her first orgasm with a partner. And I thought — whoa. What if just for a second we imagined that was the definition? Again, not because intercourse isn't a big deal — of course it is — but it isn't the only big deal, and rather than thinking about sex as a race to a goal, this helps us reconceptualize it as a pool of experiences that include warmth, affection, arousal, desire, touch, intimacy. And it's worth asking young people: who's really the more sexually experienced person? The one who makes out with a partner for three hours and experiments with sensual tension and communication, or the one who gets wasted at a party and hooks up with a random in order to dump their ""virginity"" before they get to college?The only way that shift in thinking can happen though is if we talk to young people more about sex — if we normalize those discussions, integrating them into everyday life, talking about those intimate acts in a different way — the way we mostly have changed in the way that we talk about women in the public realm.Consider a survey of 300 randomly chosen girls from a Dutch and an American university, two similar universities, talking about their early experience of sex. The Dutch girls embodied everything we say we want from our girls. They had fewer negative consequences, like disease, pregnancy, regret — more positive outcomes like being able to communicate with their partner, who they said they knew very well; preparing for the experience responsibly; enjoying themselves. What was their secret? The Dutch girls said that their doctors, teachers and parents talked to them candidly, from an early age, about sex, pleasure and the importance of mutual trust. What's more, while American parents weren't necessarily less comfortable talking about sex, we tend to frame those conversations entirely in terms or risk and danger, whereas Dutch parents talk about balancing responsibility and joy. I have to tell you, as a parent myself, that hit me hard, because I know, had I not delved into that research, I would have talked to my own child about contraception, about disease protection, about consent because I'm a modern parent, and I would have thought ... job well done.Now I know that's not enough. I also know what I hope for for our girls. I want them to see sexuality as a source of self-knowledge, creativity and communication, despite its potential risks. I want them to be able to revel in their bodies' sensuality without being reduced to it. I want them to be able to ask for what they want in bed, and to get it. I want them to be safe from unwanted pregnancy, disease, cruelty, dehumanization, violence. If they are assaulted, I want them to have recourse from their schools, their employers, the courts. It's a lot to ask, but it's not too much.As parents, teachers, advocates and activists, we have raised a generation of girls to have a voice, to expect egalitarian treatment in the home, in the classroom, in the workplace. Now it's time to demand that intimate justice in their personal lives as well.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peggy_orenstein_what_young_women_believe_about_their_own_sexual_pleasure
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"We lost a lot of time at school learning spelling. Kids are still losing a lot of time at school with spelling. That's why I want to share a question with you: Do we need new spelling rules? I believe that yes, we do. Or even better, I think we need to simplify the ones we already have.Neither the question nor the answer are new in the Spanish language. They have been bouncing around from century to century since 1492, when in the first grammar guide of the Spanish language, Antonio de Nebrija, set a clear and simple principle for our spelling: ""... thus, we have to write words as we pronounce them, and pronounce words as we write them."" Each sound was to correspond to one letter, each letter was to represent a single sound, and those which did not represent any sound should be removed. This approach, the phonetic approach, which says we have to write words as we pronounce them, both is and isn't at the root of spelling as we practice it today. It is, because the Spanish language, in contrast to English, French or others, always strongly resisted writing words too differently to how we pronounce them.But the phonetic approach is also absent today, because when, in the 18th century, we decided how we would standardize our writing, there was another approach which guided a good part of the decisions. It was the etymological approach, the one that says we have to write words according to how they were written in their original language, in Latin, in Greek. That's how we ended up with silent H's, which we write but don't pronounce. That's how we have B's and V's that, contrary to what many people believe, were never differentiated in Spanish pronunciation. That's how we wound up with G's, that are sometimes aspirated, as in ""gente,"" and other times unaspirated, as in ""gato."" That's how we ended up with C's, S's and Z's, three letters that in some places correspond to one sound, and in others, to two, but nowhere to three.I'm not here to tell you anything you don't know from your own experience. We all went to school, we all invested big amounts of learning time, big amounts of pliant, childlike brain time in dictation, in the memorization of spelling rules filled, nevertheless, with exceptions. We were told in many ways, implicitly and explicitly, that in spelling, something fundamental to our upbringing was at stake. Yet, I have the feeling that teachers didn't ask themselves why it was so important. In fact, they didn't ask themselves a previous question: What is the purpose of spelling? What do we need spelling for?And the truth is, when someone asks themselves this question, the answer is much simpler and less momentous than we'd usually believe. We use spelling to unify the way we write, so we can all write the same way, making it easier for us to understand when we read to each other. But unlike in other aspects of language such as punctuation, in spelling, there's no individual expression involved. In punctuation, there is. With punctuation, I can choose to change the meaning of a phrase. With punctuation, I can impose a particular rhythm to what I am writing, but not with spelling. When it comes to spelling, it's either wrong or right, according to whether it conforms or not to the current rules. But then, wouldn't it be more sensible to simplify the current rules so it would be easier to teach, learn and use spelling correctly? Wouldn't it be more sensible to simplify the current rules so that all the time we devote today to teaching spelling, we could devote to other language issues whose complexities do, in fact, deserve the time and effort?What I propose is not to abolish spelling, and have everyone write however they want. Language is a tool of common usage, and so I believe it's fundamental that we use it following common criteria. But I also find it fundamental that those common criteria be as simple as possible, especially because if we simplify our spelling, we're not leveling it down; when spelling is simplified, the quality of the language doesn't suffer at all.I work every day with Spanish Golden Age literature, I read Garcilaso, Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, who sometimes write ""hombre"" without H, sometimes write ""escribir"" with V, and it's absolutely clear to me that the difference between those texts and ours is one of convention, or rather, a lack of convention during their time. But it's not a difference of quality. But let me go back to the masters, because they're key characters in this story. Earlier, I mentioned this slightly thoughtless insistence with which teachers pester and pester us over spelling. But the truth is, things being as they are, this makes perfect sense. In our society, spelling serves as an index of privilege, separating the cultured from the brute, the educated from the ignorant, independent of the content that's being written. One can get or not get a job because of an H that one put or did not. One can become an object of public ridicule because of a misplaced B. Therefore, in this context, of course, it makes sense to dedicate all this time to spelling.But we shouldn't forget that throughout the history of our language, it has always been teachers or people involved in the early learning of language who promoted spelling reforms, who realized that in our spelling there was often an obstacle to the transmission of knowledge. In our case, for example, Sarmiento, together with Andrés Bello, spearheaded the biggest spelling reform to take place in the Spanish language: the mid-19th century Chilean reform. Then, why not take over the task of those teachers and start making progress in our spelling? Here, in this intimate group of 10,000, I'd like to bring to the table some changes that I find reasonable to start discussing.Let's remove the silent H. In places where we write an H but pronounce nothing, let's not write anything.(Applause)It's hard for me to imagine what sentimental attachment can justify to someone all the hassle caused by the silent H. B and V, as we said before, were never differentiated in the Spanish language —(Applause)Let's choose one; it could be either. We can discuss it, talk it over. Everyone will have their preferences and can make their arguments. Let's keep one, remove the other. G and J, let's separate their roles. G should keep the unaspirated sound, like in ""gato,"" ""mago,"" and ""águila,"" and J should keep the aspirated sound, as in ""jarabe,"" ""jirafa,"" ""gente,"" ""argentino."" The case of C, S and Z is interesting, because it shows that the phonetic approach must be a guide, but it can't be an absolute principle. In some cases, the differences in pronunciation must be addressed. As I said before, C, S and Z, in some places, correspond to one sound, in others to two. If we go from three letters to two, we're all better off.To some, these changes may seem a bit drastic. They're really not. The Royal Spanish Academy, all of language academies, also believes that spelling should be progressively modified; that language is linked to history, tradition and custom, but that at the same time, it is a practical everyday tool and that sometimes this attachment to history, tradition and custom becomes an obstacle for its current usage. Indeed, this explains the fact that our language, much more than the others we are geographically close to, has been historically modifying itself based on us, for example, we went from ""ortographia"" to ""ortografía,"" from ""theatro"" to ""teatro,"" from ""quantidad"" to ""cantidad,"" from ""symbolo"" to ""símbolo."" And some silent H's are slowly being stealthily removed: in the Dictionary of the Royal Academy, ""arpa"" and ""armonía"" can be written with or without an H. And everybody is OK.I also believe that this is a particularly appropriate moment to have this discussion. It's always said that language changes spontaneously, from the bottom up, that its users are the ones who incorporate new words and who introduce grammatical changes, and that the authority — in some places an academy, in others a dictionary, in others a ministry — accepts and incorporates them long after the fact. This is true only for some levels of language. It is true on the lexical level, the level of words. It is less true on the grammatical level, and I would almost say it is not true for the spelling level, that has historically changed from the top down. Institutions have always been the ones to establish the rules and propose changes.Why do I say this is a particularly appropriate moment? Until today, writing always had a much more restricted and private use than speech. But in our time, the age of social networks, this is going through a revolutionary change. Never before have people written so much; never before have people written for so many others to see. And in these social networks, for the first time, we're seeing innovative uses of spelling on a large scale, where even more-than-educated people with impeccable spelling, when using social networks, behave a lot like the majority of users of social networks behave. That is to say, they slack on spell-checking and prioritize speed and efficacy in communication. For now, on social networks, we see chaotic, individual usages. But I think we have to pay attention to them, because they're probably telling us that an era that designates a new place for writing seeks new criteria for that writing. I think we'd be wrong to reject them, to discard them, because we identify them as symptoms of the cultural decay of our times. No, I believe we have to observe them, organize them and channel them within guidelines that better correspond to the needs of our times.I can anticipate some objections. There will be those who'll say that if we simplify spelling we'll lose etymology. Strictly speaking, if we wanted to preserve etymology, it would go beyond just spelling. We'd also have to learn Latin, Greek, Arabic. With simplified spelling, we would normalize etymology in the same place we do now: in etymological dictionaries. A second objection will come from those who say: ""If we simplify spelling, we'll stop distinguishing between words that differ in just one letter."" That is true, but it's not a problem. Our language has homonyms, words with more than one meaning, yet we don't confuse the ""banco"" where we sit with the ""banco"" where we deposit money, or the ""traje"" that we wear with the things we ""trajimos."" In the vast majority of situations, context dispels any confusion.But there's a third objection. To me, it's the most understandable, even the most moving. It's the people who'll say: ""I don't want to change. I was brought up like this, I got used to doing it this way, when I read a written word in simplified spelling, my eyes hurt.""(Laughter)This objection is, in part, in all of us. What do I think we should do? The same thing that's always done in these cases: changes are made looking forward; children are taught the new rules, those of us who don't want to adapt can write the way we're used to writing, and hopefully, time will cement the new rules in place. The success of every spelling reform that affects deeply rooted habits lies in caution, agreement, gradualism and tolerance. At the same time, can't allow the attachment to old customs impede us from moving forward. The best tribute we can pay to the past is to improve upon what it's given us.So I believe that we must reach an agreement, that academies must reach an agreement, and purge from our spelling rules all the habits we practice just for the sake of tradition, even if they are useless now. I'm convinced that if we do that in the humble but extremely important realm of language, we'll be leaving a better future to the next generations.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karina_galperin_why_don_t_we_write_words_the_way_pronounce_them
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"In the last couple of years, I have produced what I call ""The Dead Mall Series,"" 32 short films and counting about dead malls. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with what a dead mall is, it's basically a shopping mall that has fallen into hard times. So it either has few shops and fewer shoppers, or it's abandoned and crumbling into ruin. No sale at Penny's.(Laughter)I started producing this series in early 2015 after going through kind of a dark period in my life where I just didn't want to create films anymore. I put my camera away and I just stopped. So in 2015, I decided to make a short film about the Owings Mills Mall. Owings Mills Mall opened in 1986. I should know because I was there on opening day. I was there with my family, along with every other family in Baltimore, and you had to drive around for 45 minutes just to find a parking spot. So if you can imagine, that's not happening at the malls today.My first mall job that I had as a teenager was at a sporting goods store called Herman's World of Sports. Maybe you remember.(Singing) Herman's World of Sports.You guys remember that?(Laughter)Yeah, so I worked in a lady's shoe store. I worked in a leather goods store, and I also worked in a video store, and not being one who was very fond of the retail arts —(Laughter)I got fired from every single job.(Laughter)In between these low-paying retail jobs, I did what any normal teenager did in the 1990s. I shoplifted. I'm just kidding. I hung out with my friends at the mall.(Laughter)Everyone's like, ""Oh my God, what kind of talk is this?""(Laughter)Hanging out at the mall could be fun, but it could be really lame, too, like sharing a cigarette with a 40-year-old unemployed mall rat who has put on black lipstick for the night while you're on your break from your crappy minimum wage job.As I stand here today, Owings Mills has been gutted and it's ready for the wrecking ball. The last time I was there, it was in the evening, and it was about three days before they closed the mall for good. And you kind of felt — they never announced the mall was closing, but you had this sort of feeling, this ominous feeling, that something big was going to happen, like it was the end of the road. It was a very creepy walk through the mall. Let me show you.(Music)So when I started producing ""The Dead Mall Series,"" I put the videos up onto YouTube, and while I thought they were interesting, frankly I didn't think others would share the enthusiasm for such a drab and depressing topic. But apparently I was wrong, because a lot of people started to comment. And at first the comments were like — basically like, ""Oh my God, that's the mall from my childhood. What happened?"" And then I would get comments from people who were like, ""There's a dead mall in my town. You should come and film it."" So I started to travel around the mid-Atlantic region filming these dead malls. Some were open. Some were abandoned. It was kind of always hard to get into the ones that were abandoned, but I somehow always found a way in.(Laughter)The malls that are still open, they always do this weird thing — like the dead malls. They'll have three stores left, but they try to spruce it up to make it appear like things are on the up-and-up. For example, you'll have an empty store and they bring the gate down. So at Owings Mills, for example, they put this tarp over the gate. Right? And it's got a stock photo of a woman who is so happy and she's holding a blouse, and she's like —(Laughter)And then there's a guy standing next to her, with, like, an espresso cup, and he's like —(Laughter)And it says, ""What brings you today?""(Laughter)I wanted to be scared and depressed. Thank you.So the comments just kept pouring in on the videos, from all over the country, and then all over the world. And I started to think, this could really be something, but I had to get creative, because I'm like, how long are people going to sit and watch me waddling through an empty mall?(Laughter)So the original episodes I filmed with an iPhone. So I'd walk through the mall with an iPhone, and, you know. Like that.(Laughter)And security — because malls, they don't like photography — so the security would come up and be like, ""Put that away,"" and I'm like, ""OK."" So I had to get creative and sneaky, so I started using a hidden camera and different techniques to get the footage that I needed, and basically what I wanted to do was make the video like it was a first-person experience, like you are sitting — put your headphones on watching the screen — it's like, you're there in the video, like a video game, basically.I also started to use music, collaborating with artists who create music called vaporwave. And vaporwave is a music genre that emerged in the early 2010s among internet communities. Here's an example.(Music)That's by an artist named Disconscious from an album he did called ""Hologram Plaza."" So if you look that up, you can hear more of those tunes. Vaporwave is more than an art form. It's like a movement. It's nihilistic, it's angsty, but it's somehow comforting. The whole aesthetic is a way of dealing with things you can't do anything about, like no jobs, or sitting in your parents' basement eating ramen noodles. Vaporwave came out of this generation's desire to express their hopelessness, the same way that the pre-internet generation did sitting around in the food court.One of my favorite malls I've been to is in Corpus Christi, and it's called the Sunrise Mall. When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was watch movies, and I used to watch movies over and over and over again. And one of my favorite films was ""The Legend of Billie Jean."" Now, for those of you who have seen ""The Legend of Billie Jean,"" you'll know that it's a great film. I love it. And Helen Slater and Christian Slater — and if you didn't know, they are not related. Many people thought that they were brother and sister. They're not. But anyway, Sunrise Mall was used in the film as a filming location. The mall is exactly the same as it was in 1984. We're talking 32 years later. Let me show you.(Video) Dan Bell: And here's Billie Jean running across the fountain, being chased by Hubie Pyatt's friends. And she jumps over here. And you can see the shot right here is what it looks like today. It's pretty incredible. I mean, honestly, it's exactly the same. And there they are falling in the fountain, and she runs up the stairs. This is a nice shot of the whole thing here.Dan Bell: I love that so much.(Laughter)I always think in my head, if I owned a dead mall — why don't they embrace their vintage look? Put in a bar, like, put vegan food in the food court and invite millennials and hipsters to come and drink and eat, and I guarantee you within three weeks H&M and Levi's will be banging on the door trying to get space. I don't know why they don't do this, but apparently, it's only in my mind, it goes all day.(Laughter)Anyway, in closing —(Laughter)When they first asked me to do this talk, I said, ""Do you have the right person?""(Laughter)These talks are supposed to be kind of inspiring and —(Laughter)I remembered something, though. I put my camera down three or four years ago, and it took going to these malls for me to be inspired again. And to see my audience and people from all over the world writing me and saying, ""God, I love your videos,"" is incredible. I don't know how to even explain it, as an artist, how fulfilling that is. If you would have told me a year ago that I would be standing on this stage talking to all of you wonderful people, I would have never believed it. I am humbled and so appreciative.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_bell_inside_america_s_dead_shopping_malls
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"What if I told you there was a new technology that, when placed in the hands of doctors and nurses, improved outcomes for children and adults, patients of all ages; reduced pain and suffering, reduced time in the operating rooms, reduced anesthetic times, had the ultimate dose-response curve that the more you did it, the better it benefitted patients? Here's a kicker: it has no side effects, and it's available no matter where care is delivered. I can tell you as an ICU doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, this would be a game changer for me. That technology is lifelike rehearsal. This lifelike rehearsal is being delivered through medical simulation.I thought I would start with a case, just to really describe the challenge ahead, and why this technology is not just going to improve health care but why it's critical to health care. This is a child that's born, young girl. ""Day of life zero,"" we call it, the first day of life, just born into the world. And just as she's being born, we notice very quickly that she is deteriorating. Her heart rate is going up, her blood pressure is going down, she's breathing very, very fast. And the reason for this is displayed in this chest X-ray.That's called a babygram, a full X-ray of a child's body, a little infant's body. As you look on the top side of this, that's where the heart and lungs are supposed to be. As you look at the bottom end, that's where the abdomen is, and that's where the intestines are supposed to be. And you can see how there's sort of that translucent area that made its way up into the right side of this child's chest. And those are the intestines — in the wrong place. As a result, they're pushing on the lungs and making it very difficult for this poor baby to breathe.The fix for this problem is to take this child immediately to the operating room, bring those intestines back into the abdomen, let the lungs expand and allow this child to breathe again. But before she can go to the operating room, she must get whisked away to the ICU, where I work. I work with surgical teams. We gather around her, and we place this child on heart-lung bypass. We put her to sleep, we make a tiny little incision in the neck, we place catheters into the major vessels of the neck — and I can tell you that these vessels are about the size of a pen, the tip of a pen — and then we have blood drawn from the body, we bring it through a machine, it gets oxygenated, and it goes back into the body. We save her life, and get her safely to the operating room.Here's the problem: these disorders — what is known is congenital diaphragmatic hernia — this hole in the diaphragm that has allowed these intestines to sneak up — these disorders are rare. Even in the best hands in the world, there is still a challenge to get the volume — the natural volume of these patients — in order to get our expertise curve at 100 percent. They just don't present that often. So how do you make the rare common?Here's the other problem: in the health care system that I trained for over 20 years, what currently exists, the model of training is called the apprenticeship model. It's been around for centuries. It's based on this idea that you see a surgery maybe once, maybe several times, you then go do that surgery, and then ultimately you teach that surgery to the next generation. And implicit in this model — I don't need to tell you this — is that we practice on the very patients that we are delivering care to. That's a problem. I think there's a better approach. Medicine may very well be the last high-stakes industry that does not practice prior to game time. I want to describe to you a better approach through medical simulation.Well, the first thing we did is we went to other high-stakes industries that had been using this type of methodology for decades. This is nuclear power. Nuclear power runs scenarios on a regular basis in order to practice what they hope will never occur. And as we're all very familiar, the airline industry — we all get on planes now, comforted by the idea that pilots and crews have trained on simulators much like these, training on scenarios that we hope will never occur, but we know if they did, they would be prepared for the worst. In fact, the airline industry has gone as far as to create fuselages of simulation environments, because of the importance of the team coming together. This is an evacuation drill simulator. So again, if that ever were to happen, these rare, rare events, they're ready to act on the drop of a dime.I guess the most compelling for me in some ways is the sports industry — arguably high stakes. You think about a baseball team: baseball players practice. I think it's a beautiful example of progressive training. The first thing they do is go out to spring training. They go to a spring training camp, perhaps a simulator in baseball. They're not on the real field, but they're on a simulated field, and they're playing in the pregame season. Then they make their way to the field during the season games, and what's the first thing they do before they start the game? They go into the batting cage and do batting practice for hours, having different types of pitches being thrown at them, hitting ball after ball as they limber their muscles, getting ready for the game itself. And here's the most phenomenal part of this, and for all of you who watch any sport event, you will see this phenomenon happen. The batter gets into the batter's box, the pitcher gets ready to pitch. Right before the pitch is thrown, what does that batter do? The batter steps out of the box and takes a practice swing. He wouldn't do it any other way.I want to talk to you about how we're building practice swings like this in medicine. We are building batting cages for the patients that we care about at Boston Children's. I want to use this case that we recently built. It's the case of a four-year-old who had a progressively enlarging head, and as a result, had loss of developmental milestones, neurologic milestones, and the reason for this problem is here — it's called hydrocephalus.So, a quick study in neurosurgery. There's the brain, and you can see the cranium surrounding the brain. What surrounds the brain, between the brain and cranium, is something called cerebrospinal fluid or fluid, which acts as a shock absorber. In your heads right now, there is cerebrospinal fluid just bathing your brains and making its way around. It's produced in one area and flows through, and then is re-exchanged. And this beautiful flow pattern occurs for all of us. But unfortunately in some children, there's a blockage of this flow pattern, much like a traffic jam. As a result, the fluid accumulates, and the brain is pushed aside. It has difficulty growing. As a result, the child loses neurologic milestones. This is a devastating disease in children.The cure for this is surgery. The traditional surgery is to take a bit of the cranium off, a bit of the skull, drain this fluid out, stick a drain in place, and then eventually bring this drain internal to the body. Big operation. But some great news is that advances in neurosurgical care have allowed us to develop minimally invasive approaches to this surgery. Through a small pinhole, a camera can be inserted, led into the deep brain structure, and cause a little hole in a membrane that allows all that fluid to drain, much like it would in a sink. All of a sudden, the brain is no longer under pressure, can re-expand and we cure the child through a single-hole incision.But here's the problem: hydrocephalus is relatively rare. And there are no good training methods to get really good at getting this scope to the right place. But surgeons have been quite creative about this, even our own. And they've come up with training models. Here's the current training model.(Laughter)I kid you not. This is a red pepper, not made in Hollywood; it's real red pepper. And what surgeons do is they stick a scope into the pepper, and they do what is called a ""seedectomy.""(Laughter)They use this scope to remove seeds using a little tweezer. And that is a way to get under their belts the rudimentary components of doing this surgery. Then they head right into the apprenticeship model, seeing many of them as they present themselves, then doing it, and then teaching it — waiting for these patients to arrive. We can do a lot better.We are manufacturing reproductions of children in order for surgeons and surgical teams to rehearse in the most relevant possible ways. Let me show you this. Here's my team in what's called the SIM Engineering Division of the Simulator Program. This is an amazing team of individuals. They are mechanical engineers; you're seeing here, illustrators. They take primary data from CT scans and MRIs, translate it into digital information, animate it, put it together into the components of the child itself, surface-scan elements of the child that have been casted as needed, depending on the surgery itself, and then take this digital data and be able to output it on state-of-the-art, three-dimensional printing devices that allow us to print the components exactly to the micron detail of what the child's anatomy will look like. You can see here, the skull of this child being printed in the hours before we performed this surgery.But we could not do this work without our dear friends on the West Coast in Hollywood, California. These are individuals that are incredibly talented at being able to recreate reality. It was not a long leap for us. The more we got into this field, the more it became clear to us that we are doing cinematography. We're doing filmmaking, it's just that the actors are not actors. They're real doctors and nurses. So these are some photos of our dear friends at Fractured FX in Hollywood California, an Emmy-Award-winning special effects firm. This is Justin Raleigh and his group — this is not one of our patients —(Laughter)but kind of the exquisite work that these individuals do. We have now collaborated and fused our experience, bringing their group to Boston Children's Hospital, sending our group out to Hollywood, California and exchanging around this to be able to develop these type of simulators.What I'm about to show you is a reproduction of this child. You'll notice here that every hair on the child's head is reproduced. And in fact, this is also that reproduced child — and I apologize for any queasy stomachs, but that is a reproduction and simulation of the child they're about to operate on. Here's that membrane we had talked about, the inside of this child's brain. What you're going to be seeing here is, on one side, the actual patient, and on the other side, the simulator. As I mentioned, a scope, a little camera, needs to make its way down, and you're seeing that here. It needs to make a small hole in this membrane and allow this fluid to seep out. I won't do a quiz show to see who thinks which side is which, but on the right is the simulator.So surgeons can now produce training opportunities, do these surgeries as many times as they want, to their heart's content, until they feel comfortable. And then, and only then, bring the child into the operating room. But we don't stop here. We know that a key step to this is not just the skill itself, but combining that skill with a team who's going to deliver that care.Now we turn to Formula One. And here is an example of a technician putting on a tire and doing that time and time again on this car. But that is very quickly going to be incorporated within team-training experiences, now as a full team orchestrating the exchange of tires and getting this car back on the speedway. We've done that step in health care, so now what you're about to see is a simulated operation. We've taken the simulator I just described to you, we've brought it into the operating room at Boston Children's Hospital, and these individuals — these native teams, operative teams — are doing the surgery before the surgery. Operate twice; cut once. Let me show that to you.(Video) Surgical team member 1: You want the head down or head up?STM 2: Can you lower it down to 10?STM 3: And then lower the whole table down a little bit?STM 4: Table coming down.STM 3: All right, this is behaving like a vessel. Could we have the scissors back, please?STM 5: I'm taking my gloves, 8 to 8 1/2, all right? I'll be right in.STM 6: Great! Thank you.Peter Weinstock: It's really amazing. The second step to this, which is critical, is we take these teams out immediately and debrief them. We use the same technologies that are used in Lean and Six Sigma in the military, and we bring them out and talk about what went right, but more importantly, we talk about what didn't go well, and how we're going to fix it. Then we bring them right back in and do it again. Deliberative batting practice in the moments when it matters most.Let's go back to this case now. Same child, but now let me describe how we care for this child at Boston Children's Hospital. This child was born at three o'clock in the morning. At two o'clock in the morning, we assembled the team, and took the reproduced anatomy that we would gain out of scans and images, and brought that team to the virtual bedside, to a simulated bedside — the same team that's going to operate on this child in the hours ahead — and we have them do the procedure. Let me show you a moment of this. This is not a real incision. And the baby has not yet been born. Imagine this.So now the conversations that I have with families in the intensive care unit at Boston Children's Hospital are totally different. Imagine this conversation: ""Not only do we take care of this disorder frequently in our ICU, and not only have we done surgeries like the surgery we're going to do on your child, but we have done your child's surgery. And we did it two hours ago. And we did it 10 times. And now we're prepared to take them back to the operating room.""So a new technology in health care: lifelike rehearsal. Practicing prior to game time.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_weinstock_lifelike_simulations_that_make_real_life_surgery_safer
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"We all have milestones in life that we remember so vividly. The first one for me was when I was entering kindergarten. My big brother was in school, and by golly, it was my time. And I went trottin' down that hallway. I was so excited, I almost wet myself. And I go to the door, and there was the teacher with a warm welcome, and she took me into the classroom, showed me my little cubbyhole — we all remember those little cubbyholes, don't we — and we put our stuff in there. And then she said, ""Go over to the circle and play with the kids until class starts."" So I went over there and plopped down like I owned the place, and I'm playing, and all of a sudden, the boy next to me, he was wearing a white shirt with blue shorts. I remember it like it was yesterday. Suddenly he stopped playing and he said, ""Why are you so short?"" And I just kept playing. I didn't think he was talking to me.(Laughter)And in a louder voice, he said, ""Hey, why are you so short?"" So I looked up and I said, ""What are you talking about? Let's just play. We're happy. I've been waiting for this.""And so we played, and about a minute later, the girl next to him, in a white shirt and a pink skirt, stood up, put her hands on her hips, and said, ""Yeah, why do you look so different?"" And I went, ""What are you talking about? I don't look different. I'm not short. Again, let's just play.""About this time, I looked all around the circle I was in, and all the kids had stopped playing and they were all looking at me. And I'm thinking — in today's language, it would be ""OMG"" or ""WTF.""(Laughter)What just happened?So all the confidence that I went in with that morning was withering away as the morning went on and the questions kept coming. And at the end of the morning, before I went home, the teacher had us in a circle, and I actually found myself outside of the circle. I couldn't look at anybody. I could not understand what just happened.And over the next few years, I hated to go out in public. I felt every stare, every giggle, every pointed finger, not the finger, but every pointed finger, and I hated it. I would hide behind my parents' legs like nobody could see me. And as a child, you can't understand another child's curiosity, nor an adult's ignorance. It became very apparent to me that the real world was not built for someone of my size, both literally or figuratively.And so I have no anonymity, as you can probably tell, and while you can see my size, we all go through many challenges through our lifetime. And some you can see, like mine. Most you can't. You can't tell if someone's dealing with a mental illness, or they're struggling with their gender identity, they're caring for an aging parent, they're having financial difficulty. You can't see that kind of stuff. So while you can see one of my challenges is my size, seeing does not mean you understand what it's truly to be me on a daily basis, or what I go through. And so I'm here to debunk a myth. I do not believe you can walk in someone else's shoes, and because of that, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves. Simply stated, I will never know what it's like to be you and you will never know what it's like to be me. I cannot face your fears or chase your dreams, and you can't do that for me, but we can be supportive of each other. Instead of trying to walk in each other's shoes, we must adopt a new way of giving of ourselves.I learned at an early age that I did have to do some things different than most people, but I also learned there were things I was on equal footing with, and one of those was the classroom. Heh, heh, heh. I was equal. As a matter of fact, I excelled in the classroom. This was vitally important, I discovered as I grew older and realized I wasn't going to be able to do a physical job. I needed an education. So I went on and got a university degree, but I felt to be one step ahead of everyone for employment, I needed to have an advanced university degree, so I went ahead and got that.Now I'm ready for my interview. Remember your first interview? What am I going to wear? What questions? And don't forget that firm handshake. I was right there with you. So 24 hours before my interview, a friend of mine who I've known all my life called and said, ""Michele, the building you're going in has steps."" And she knew I couldn't climb steps. So suddenly, my focus changed. In my shoes, I was worried about how am I going to get there? So I went early and found a loading dock and got in and had a great interview. They had no idea what I went through for the day and that's OK.You're probably thinking my greatest challenge that day was the interview, or getting in the building. In reality, my biggest challenge that day was getting through the loading dock without getting run over. I am very vulnerable in certain situations: airports, hallways, parking lots, loading docks. And so I have to be very careful. I have to anticipate and be flexible and move as quickly as I can sometimes.So I got the job, and in my current role I travel quite a bit. And travel is a challenge for all of us these days. And so you probably get to the airport, run through security, get to the gate. Did I get my aisle seat or my window seat? Did I get my upgrade? Me, first of all, I don't run through anything.(Laughter)And I especially don't run through the TSA because I get to experience the personal patdown. I won't comment on that. And then I make my way to the gate, and with my gift of gab that my parents said I was born with, I talk to the gate agent, and then I say, ""By the way, my scooter weighs this much, I have a dry cell battery, and I can drive it down to the door of the plane."" Also, the day before, I had called the city where I'm traveling to to find out where I could rent a scooter in case mine gets broken on the way. So in my shoes, it's a little bit different.When I get onto the plane, I use my gift of gab to ask the lady to put my bag up, and they graciously do. I try not to eat or drink on a plane because I don't want to have to get up and walk on the plane, but nature has its own schedule, and not long ago, it knocked and I answered. So I walked up to the front of the plane and gabbed with the flight attendant, and said, ""Can you watch the door? I can't reach the lock."" So I'm in there doing my business, and the door flies open. And there's a gentleman there with a look of horror on his face. I'm sure I had the same look. As I came out, I noticed that he was sitting right across from me, and he's in total, complete embarrassment. So I walk up to him and I quietly go, ""Are you going to remember this as much as I am?""(Laughter)And he goes, ""I think so.""(Laughter)Now, while he's probably not talking about it publicly, I am.(Laughter)But we talked for the rest of the flight, and we got to know each other, our families, sports, work, and when we landed, he said, ""Michele, I noticed someone put your bag up. Can I get that for you?"" And I said, ""Of course, thank you."" And we wished each other well, and the most important thing that day was that he was not going to leave with that embarrassment, that experience of embarrassment. He won't forget it, and neither will I, but I think he will remember more our chat and our different perspectives.When you travel internationally, it can be even more challenging in certain ways. A few years ago, I was in Zanzibar, and I come wheeling in, and think about that. Short, white, blond woman in a chair. That doesn't probably happen every day. So I go up, and with my gift of gab, I start to talk to the agent. So friendly, and I ask about their culture and so forth, and I notice there wasn't a jet bridge. So I had to kind of say, ""Not only do you have to lift my chair, I could use some help getting up the steps."" So we got to spend about an hour together while we waited for the flight, and it was the most magnificent hour. Our perspective changed for both of us that day. And once I got on the flight, he patted me on the back and wished me well, and I thanked him so much. And again, I think he's going to remember that experience more than when I first came in, and there was a bit of hesitation.And as you notice, I get a lot of help. I would not be where I am today if it was not for my family, my friends, my colleagues and the many strangers that help me every single day of my life. And it's important that we all have a support system. Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness.(Applause)We all need help throughout our lifetime, but it is just as important that we are part of other people's support systems. We must adopt that way of giving back. We all obviously have a role to play in our own successes, but think about the role we have to play in other people's successes, just like people do for me every single day.It's vitally important that we help each other, because society is increasingly placing people in silos based on biases and ideologies. And we must look past the surface and be confronted with the truth that none of us are what you can see. There's more to us than that, and we're all dealing with things that you cannot see. So living a life free of judgment allows all of us to share those experiences together and have a totally different perspective, just like the couple of people I mentioned earlier in my stories.So remember, the only shoes you truly can walk in are your own. I cannot walk in yours. I know you can't walk in my size 1s —(Laughter)but you can try. But we can do something better than that. With compassion, courage and understanding, we can walk side by side and support one another, and think about how society can change if we all do that instead of judging on only what you can see.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/michele_l_sullivan_asking_for_help_is_a_strength_not_a_weakness
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"So have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a place with no rules? That sounds pretty cool.(Laughter)You wake up one morning, however, and you discover that the reason there are no rules is because there's no government, and there are no laws. In fact, all social institutions have disappeared. So there's no schools, there's no hospitals, there's no police, there's no banks, there's no athletic clubs, there's no utilities.Well, I know a little bit about what this is like, because when I was a medical student in 1999, I worked in a refugee camp in the Balkans during the Kosovo War. When the war was over, I got permission — unbelievably — from my medical school to take some time off and follow some of the families that I had befriended in the camp back to their village in Kosovo, and understand how they navigated life in this postwar setting.Postwar Kosovo was a very interesting place because NATO troops were there, mostly to make sure the war didn't break out again. But other than that, it was actually a lawless place, and almost every social institution, both public and private, had been destroyed. So I can tell you that when you go into one of these situations and settings, it is absolutely thrilling ... for about 30 minutes, because that's about how long it takes before you run into a situation where you realize how incredibly vulnerable you are.For me, that moment came when I had to cross the first checkpoint, and I realized as I drove up that I would be negotiating passage through this checkpoint with a heavily armed individual who, if he decided to shoot me right then and there, actually wouldn't be doing anything illegal. But the sense of vulnerability that I had was absolutely nothing in comparison to the vulnerability of the families that I got to know over that year.You see, life in a society where there are no social institutions is riddled with danger and uncertainty, and simple questions like, ""What are we going to eat tonight?"" are very complicated to answer. Questions about security, when you don't have any security systems, are terrifying. Is that altercation I had with the neighbor down the block going to turn into a violent episode that will end my life or my family's life?Health concerns when there is no health system are also terrifying. I listened as many families had to sort through questions like, ""My infant has a fever. What am I going to do?"" ""My sister, who is pregnant, is bleeding. What should I do? Who should I turn to?"" ""Where are the doctors, where are the nurses? If I could find one, are they trustworthy? How will I pay them? In what currency will I pay them?"" ""If I need medications, where will I find them? If I take those medications, are they actually counterfeits?"" And on and on. So for life in these settings, the dominant theme, the dominant feature of life, is the incredible vulnerability that people have to manage day in and day out, because of the lack of social systems.And it actually turns out that this feature of life is incredibly difficult to explain and be understood by people who are living outside of it. I discovered this when I left Kosovo. I came back to Boston, I became a physician, I became a global public health policy researcher. I joined the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital Division of Global Health. And I, as a researcher, really wanted to get started on this problem right away. I was like, ""How do we reduce the crushing vulnerability of people living in these types of fragile settings? Is there any way we can start to think about how to protect and quickly recover the institutions that are critical to survival, like the health system?"" And I have to say, I had amazing colleagues. But one interesting thing about it was, this was sort of an unusual question for them. They were kind of like, ""Oh, if you work in war, doesn't that mean you work on refugee camps, and you work on documenting mass atrocities?"" — which is, by the way, very, very, very important.So it took me a while to explain why I was so passionate about this issue, until about six years ago. That's when this landmark study that looked at and described the public health consequences of war was published. They came to an incredible, provocative conclusion. These researchers concluded that the vast majority of death and disability from war happens after the cessation of conflict. So the most dangerous time to be a person living in a conflict-affected state is after the cessation of hostilities; it's after the peace deal has been signed. It's when that political solution has been achieved. That seems so puzzling, but of course it's not, because war kills people by robbing them of their clinics, of their hospitals, of their supply chains. Their doctors are targeted, are killed; they're on the run. And more invisible and yet more deadly is the destruction of the health governance institutions and their finances.So this is really not surprising at all to me. But what is surprising and somewhat dismaying, is how little impact this insight has had, in terms of how we think about human suffering and war. Let me give you a couple examples.Last year, you may remember, Ebola hit the West African country of Liberia. There was a lot of reporting about this group, Doctors Without Borders, sounding the alarm and calling for aid and assistance. But not a lot of that reporting answered the question: Why is Doctors Without Borders even in Liberia? Doctors Without Borders is an amazing organization, dedicated and designed to provide emergency care in war zones. Liberia's civil war had ended in 2003 — that was 11 years before Ebola even struck. When Ebola struck Liberia, there were less than 50 doctors in the entire country of 4.5 million people. Doctors Without Borders is in Liberia because Liberia still doesn't really have a functioning health system, 11 years later.When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the outpouring of international aid was phenomenal. But did you know that only two percent of that funding went to rebuild Haitian public institutions, including its health sector? From that perspective, Haitians continue to die from the earthquake even today.I recently met this gentleman. This is Dr. Nezar Ismet. He's the Minister of Health in the northern autonomous region of Iraq, in Kurdistan. Here he is announcing that in the last nine months, his country, his region, has increased from four million people to five million people. That's a 25 percent increase. Thousands of these new arrivals have experienced incredible trauma. His doctors are working 16-hour days without pay. His budget has not increased by 25 percent; it has decreased by 20 percent, as funding has flowed to security concerns and to short-term relief efforts. When his health sector fails — and if history is any guide, it will — how do you think that's going to influence the decision making of the five million people in his region as they think about whether they should flee that type of vulnerable living situation?So as you can see, this is a frustrating topic for me, and I really try to understand: Why the reluctance to protect and support indigenous health systems and security systems? I usually tier two concerns, two arguments. The first concern is about corruption, and the concern that people in these settings are corrupt and they are untrustworthy. And I will admit that I have met unsavory characters working in health sectors in these situations. But I will tell you that the opposite is absolutely true in every case I have worked on, from Afghanistan to Libya, to Kosovo, to Haiti, to Liberia — I have met inspiring people, who, when the chips were down for their country, they risked everything to save their health institutions. The trick for the outsider who wants to help is identifying who those individuals are, and building a pathway for them to lead.That is exactly what happened in Afghanistan. One of the unsung and untold success stories of our nation-building effort in Afghanistan involved the World Bank in 2002 investing heavily in identifying, training and promoting Afghani health sector leaders. These health sector leaders have pulled off an incredible feat in Afghanistan. They have aggressively increased access to health care for the majority of the population. They are rapidly improving the health status of the Afghan population, which used to be the worst in the world. In fact, the Afghan Ministry of Health does things that I wish we would do in America. They use things like data to make policy. It's incredible.(Laughter)The other concern I hear a lot about is: ""We just can't afford it, we just don't have the money. It's just unsustainable."" I would submit to you that the current situation and the current system we have is the most expensive, inefficient system we could possibly conceive of. The current situation is that when governments like the US — or, let's say, the collection of governments that make up the European Commission — every year, they spend 15 billion dollars on just humanitarian and emergency and disaster relief worldwide. That's nothing about foreign aid, that's just disaster relief. Ninety-five percent of it goes to international relief agencies, that then have to import resources into these areas, and knit together some type of temporary health system, let's say, which they then dismantle and send away when they run out of money.So our job, it turns out, is very clear.We, as the global health community policy experts, our first job is to become experts in how to monitor the strengths and vulnerabilities of health systems in threatened situations. And that's when we see doctors fleeing, when we see health resources drying up, when we see institutions crumbling — that's the emergency. That's when we need to sound the alarm and wave our arms. OK? Not now. Everyone can see that's an emergency, they don't need us to tell them that.Number two: places like where I work at Harvard need to take their cue from the World Bank experience in Afghanistan, and we need to — and we will — build robust platforms to support health sector leaders like these. These people risk their lives. I think we can match their courage with some support.Number three: we need to reach out and make new partnerships. At our global health center, we have launched a new initiative with NATO and other security policy makers to explore with them what they can do to protect health system institutions during deployments. We want them to see that protecting health systems and other critical social institutions is an integral part of their mission. It's not just about avoiding collateral damage; it's about winning the peace.But the most important partner we need to engage is you, the American public, and indeed, the world public. Because unless you understand the value of social institutions, like health systems in these fragile settings, you won't support efforts to save them. You won't click on that article that talks about ""Hey, all those doctors are on the run in country X. I wonder what that means. I wonder what that means for that health system's ability to, let's say, detect influenza."" ""Hmm, it's probably not good."" That's what I'd tell you.Up on the screen, I've put up my three favorite American institution defenders and builders. Over here is George C. Marshall, he was the guy that proposed the Marshall Plan to save all of Europe's economic institutions after World War II. And this Eleanor Roosevelt. Her work on human rights really serves as the foundation for all of our international human rights organizations. Then my big favorite is Ben Franklin, who did many things in terms of creating institutions, but was the midwife of our constitution.And I would say to you that these are folks who, when our country was threatened, or our world was threatened, they didn't retreat. They didn't talk about building walls. They talked about building institutions to protect human security, for their generation and also for ours. And I think our generation should do the same.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_bourdeaux_why_civilians_suffer_more_once_a_war_is_over
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"Well, as many of you know, the results of the recent election were as follows: Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate won a landslide victory with 52 percent of the overall vote. Jill Stein, the Green candidate, came a distant second, with 19 percent. Donald J. Trump, the Republic candidate, was hot on her heels with 14 percent, and the remainder of the vote were shared between abstainers and Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate.(Laughter)Now, what parallel universe do you suppose I live in? Well, I don't live in a parallel universe. I live in the world, and that is how the world voted. So let me take you back and explain what I mean by that.In June this year, I launched something called the Global Vote. And the Global Vote does exactly what it says on the tin. For the first time in history, it lets anybody, anywhere in the world, vote in the elections of other people's countries. Now, why would you do that? What's the point? Well, let me show you what it looks like. You go to a website, rather a beautiful website, and then you select an election. Here's a bunch that we've already covered. We do about one a month, or thereabouts. So you can see Bulgaria, the United States of America, Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Brexit referendum at the end there. You select the election that you're interested in, and you pick the candidates. These are the candidates from the recent presidential election in the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, 199,000 inhabitants, off the coast of West Africa. And then you can look at the brief summary of each of those candidates which I dearly hope is very neutral, very informative and very succinct. And when you've found the one you like, you vote. These were the candidates in the recent Icelandic presidential election, and that's the way it goes.So why on earth would you want to vote in another country's election? Well, the reason that you wouldn't want to do it, let me reassure you, is in order to interfere in the democratic processes of another country. That's not the purpose at all. In fact, you can't, because usually what I do is I release the results after the electorate in each individual country has already voted, so there's no way that we could interfere in that process. But more importantly, I'm not particularly interested in the domestic issues of individual countries. That's not what we're voting on. So what Donald J. Trump or Hillary Clinton proposed to do for the Americans is frankly none of our business. That's something that only the Americans can vote on.No, in the global vote, you're only considering one aspect of it, which is what are those leaders going to do for the rest of us? And that's so very important because we live, as no doubt you're sick of hearing people tell you, in a globalized, hyperconnected, massively interdependent world where the political decisions of people in other countries can and will have an impact on our lives no matter who we are, no matter where we live. Like the wings of the butterfly beating on one side of the Pacific that can apparently create a hurricane on the other side, so it is with the world that we live in today and the world of politics. There is no longer a dividing line between domestic and international affairs. Any country, no matter how small, even if it's São Tomé and Príncipe, could produce the next Nelson Mandela or the next Stalin. They could pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, which belong to all of us, or they could be responsible and they could help all of us.And yet, the system is so strange because the system hasn't caught up with this globalized reality. Only a small number of people are allowed to vote for those leaders, even though their impact is gigantic and almost universal. What number was it? 140 million Americans voted for the next president of the United States, and yet, as all of us knows, in a few weeks time, somebody is going to hand over the nuclear launch codes to Donald J. Trump. Now, if that isn't having a potential impact on all of us, I don't know what is. Similarly, the election for the referendum on the Brexit vote, a small number of millions of British people voted on that, but the outcome of the vote, whichever way it went, would have had a significant impact on the lives of tens, hundreds of millions of people around the world. And yet, only a tiny number could vote.What kind of democracy is that? Huge decisions that affect all of us being decided by relatively very small numbers of people. And I don't know about you, but I don't think that sounds very democratic.So I'm trying to clear it up. But as I say, we don't ask about domestic questions. In fact, I only ever ask two questions of all of the candidates. I send them the same two questions every single time. I say, one, if you get elected, what are you going to do for the rest of us, for the remainder of the seven billion who live on this planet? Second question: What is your vision for your country's future in the world? What role do you see it playing? Every candidate, I send them those questions. They don't all answer. Don't get me wrong. I reckon if you're standing to become the next president of the United States, you're probably pretty tied up most of the time, so I'm not altogether surprised that they don't all answer, but many do. More every time. And some of them do much more than answer. Some of them answer in the most enthusiastic and most exciting way you could imagine.I just want to say a word here for Saviour Chishimba, who was one of the candidates in the recent Zambian presidential election. His answers to those two questions were basically an 18-page dissertation on his view of Zambia's potential role in the world and in the international community. I posted it on the website so anybody could read it. Now, Saviour won the global vote, but he didn't win the Zambian election.So I found myself wondering, what am I going to do with this extraordinary group of people? I've got some wonderful people here who won the global vote. We always get it wrong, by the way. The one that we elect is never the person who's elected by the domestic electorate. That may be partly because we always seem to go for the woman. But I think it may also be a sign that the domestic electorate is still thinking very nationally. They're still thinking very inwardly. They're still asking themselves: What's in it for me? ... instead of what they should be asking today, which is, what's in it for we?But there you go. So suggestions, please, not right now, but send me an email if you've got an idea about what we can do with this amazing team of glorious losers. (Laughter) We've got Saviour Chishimba, who I mentioned before. We've got Halla Tómasdóttir, who was the runner up in the Icelandic presidential election. Many of you may have seen her amazing talk at TEDWomen just a few weeks ago where she spoke about the need for more women to get into politics. We've got Maria das Neves from São Tomé and Príncipe. We've got Hillary Clinton. I don't know if she's available. We've got Jill Stein. And we covered also the election for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. We've got the ex-prime minister of New Zealand, who would be a wonderful member of the team. So I think maybe those people, the glorious loser's club, could travel around the world wherever there's an election and remind people of the necessity in our modern age of thinking a little bit outwards and thinking of the international consequences.So what comes next for the global vote? Well, obviously, the Donald and Hillary show is a bit of a difficult one to follow, but there are some other really important elections coming up. In fact, they seem to be multiplying. There's something going on, I'm sure you've noticed, in the world. And the next row of elections are all critically important. In just a few day's time we've got the rerun of the Austrian presidential election, with the prospect of Norbert Hofer becoming what is commonly described as the first far-right head of state in Europe since the Second World War. Next year we've got Germany, we've got France, we've got presidential elections in Iran and a dozen others. It doesn't get less important. It gets more and more important.Clearly, the global vote is not a stand-alone project. It's not just there on its own. It has some background. It's part of a project which I launched back in 2014, which I call the Good Country. The idea of the Good Country is basically very simple. It's my simple diagnosis of what's wrong with the world and how we can fix it. What's wrong with the world I've already hinted at. Basically, we face an enormous and growing number of gigantic, existential global challenges: climate change, human rights abuses, mass migration, terrorism, economic chaos, weapons proliferation. All of these problems which threaten to wipe us out are by their very nature globalized problems. No individual country has the capability of tackling them on its own.And so very obviously we have to cooperate and we have to collaborate as nations if we're going to solve these problems. It's so obvious, and yet we don't. We don't do it nearly often enough. Most of the time, countries still persist in behaving as if they were warring, selfish tribes battling against each other, much as they have done since the nation-state was invented hundreds of years ago. And this has got to change. This is not a change in political systems or a change in ideology. This is a change in culture.We, all of us, have to understand that thinking inwards is not the solution to the world's problems. We have to learn how to cooperate and collaborate a great deal more and compete just a tiny bit less. Otherwise things are going to carry on getting bad and they're going to get much worse, much sooner than we anticipate. This change will only happen if we ordinary people tell our politicians that things have changed. We have to tell them that the culture has changed. We have to tell them that they've got a new mandate. The old mandate was very simple and very single: if you're in a position of power or authority, you're responsible for your own people and your own tiny slice of territory, and that's it. And if in order to do the best thing for your own people, you screw over everybody else on the planet, that's even better. That's considered to be a bit macho. Today, I think everybody in a position of power and responsibility has got a dual mandate, which says if you're in a position of power and responsibility, you're responsible for your own people and for every single man, woman, child and animal on the planet. You're responsible for your own slice of territory and for every single square mile of the earth's surface and the atmosphere above it. And if you don't like that responsibility, you should not be in power. That for me is the rule of the modern age, and that's the message that we've got to get across to our politicians, and show them that that's the way things are done these days. Otherwise, we're all screwed.I don't have a problem, actually, with Donald Trump's credo of ""America first."" It seems to me that that's a pretty banal statement of what politicians have always done and probably should always do. Of course they're elected to represent the interests of their own people. But what I find so boring and so old-fashioned and so unimaginative about his take on that is that America first means everyone else last, that making America great again means making everybody else small again, and it's just not true. In my job as a policy advisor over the last 20 years or so, I've seen so many hundreds of examples of policies that harmonize the international and the domestic needs, and they make better policy. I'm not asking nations to be altruistic or self-sacrificing. That would be ridiculous. No nation would ever do that. I'm asking them to wake up and understand that we need a new form of governance, which is possible and which harmonizes those two needs, those good for our own people and those good for everybody else. Since the US election and since Brexit it's become more and more obvious to me that those old distinctions of left wing and right wing no longer make sense. They really don't fit the pattern. What does seem to matter today is very simple, whether your view of the world is that you take comfort from looking inwards and backwards, or whether, like me, you find hope in looking forwards and outwards. That's the new politics. That's the new division that is splitting the world right down the middle. Now, that may sound judgmental, but it's not meant to be. I don't at all misunderstand why so many people find their comfort in looking inwards and backwards. When times are difficult, when you're short of money, when you're feeling insecure and vulnerable, it's almost a natural human tendency to turn inwards, to think of your own needs and to discard everybody else's, and perhaps to start to imagine that the past was somehow better than the present or the future could ever be. But I happen to believe that that's a dead end. History shows us that it's a dead end. When people turn inwards and turn backwards, human progress becomes reversed and things get worse for everybody very quickly indeed. If you're like me and you believe in forwards and outwards, and you believe that the best thing about humanity is its diversity, and the best thing about globalization is the way that it stirs up that diversity, that cultural mixture to make something more creative, more exciting, more productive than there's ever been before in human history, then, my friends, we've got a job on our hands, because the inwards and backwards brigade are uniting as never before, and that creed of inwards and backwards, that fear, that anxiety, playing on the simplest instincts, is sweeping across the world. Those of us who believe, as I believe, in forwards and outwards, we have to get ourselves organized, because time is running out very, very quickly.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_anholt_how_would_the_rest_of_the_world_vote_in_your_country_s_election
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"I'm going to be talking about statistics today. If that makes you immediately feel a little bit wary, that's OK, that doesn't make you some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist, it makes you skeptical. And when it comes to numbers, especially now, you should be skeptical. But you should also be able to tell which numbers are reliable and which ones aren't. So today I want to try to give you some tools to be able to do that. But before I do, I just want to clarify which numbers I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about claims like, ""9 out of 10 women recommend this anti-aging cream."" I think a lot of us always roll our eyes at numbers like that. What's different now is people are questioning statistics like, ""The US unemployment rate is five percent."" What makes this claim different is it doesn't come from a private company, it comes from the government.About 4 out of 10 Americans distrust the economic data that gets reported by government. Among supporters of President Trump it's even higher; it's about 7 out of 10. I don't need to tell anyone here that there are a lot of dividing lines in our society right now, and a lot of them start to make sense, once you understand people's relationships with these government numbers. On the one hand, there are those who say these statistics are crucial, that we need them to make sense of society as a whole in order to move beyond emotional anecdotes and measure progress in an [objective] way. And then there are the others, who say that these statistics are elitist, maybe even rigged; they don't make sense and they don't really reflect what's happening in people's everyday lives.It kind of feels like that second group is winning the argument right now. We're living in a world of alternative facts, where people don't find statistics this kind of common ground, this starting point for debate. This is a problem. There are actually moves in the US right now to get rid of some government statistics altogether. Right now there's a bill in congress about measuring racial inequality. The draft law says that government money should not be used to collect data on racial segregation. This is a total disaster. If we don't have this data, how can we observe discrimination, let alone fix it? In other words: How can a government create fair policies if they can't measure current levels of unfairness? This isn't just about discrimination, it's everything — think about it. How can we legislate on health care if we don't have good data on health or poverty? How can we have public debate about immigration if we can't at least agree on how many people are entering and leaving the country? Statistics come from the state; that's where they got their name. The point was to better measure the population in order to better serve it. So we need these government numbers, but we also have to move beyond either blindly accepting or blindly rejecting them. We need to learn the skills to be able to spot bad statistics.I started to learn some of these when I was working in a statistical department that's part of the United Nations. Our job was to find out how many Iraqis had been forced from their homes as a result of the war, and what they needed. It was really important work, but it was also incredibly difficult. Every single day, we were making decisions that affected the accuracy of our numbers — decisions like which parts of the country we should go to, who we should speak to, which questions we should ask. And I started to feel really disillusioned with our work, because we thought we were doing a really good job, but the one group of people who could really tell us were the Iraqis, and they rarely got the chance to find our analysis, let alone question it. So I started to feel really determined that the one way to make numbers more accurate is to have as many people as possible be able to question them.So I became a data journalist. My job is finding these data sets and sharing them with the public. Anyone can do this, you don't have to be a geek or a nerd. You can ignore those words; they're used by people trying to say they're smart while pretending they're humble. Absolutely anyone can do this.I want to give you guys three questions that will help you be able to spot some bad statistics. So, question number one is: Can you see uncertainty? One of things that's really changed people's relationship with numbers, and even their trust in the media, has been the use of political polls. I personally have a lot of issues with political polls because I think the role of journalists is actually to report the facts and not attempt to predict them, especially when those predictions can actually damage democracy by signaling to people: don't bother to vote for that guy, he doesn't have a chance. Let's set that aside for now and talk about the accuracy of this endeavor.Based on national elections in the UK, Italy, Israel and of course, the most recent US presidential election, using polls to predict electoral outcomes is about as accurate as using the moon to predict hospital admissions. No, seriously, I used actual data from an academic study to draw this. There are a lot of reasons why polling has become so inaccurate. Our societies have become really diverse, which makes it difficult for pollsters to get a really nice representative sample of the population for their polls. People are really reluctant to answer their phones to pollsters, and also, shockingly enough, people might lie. But you wouldn't necessarily know that to look at the media. For one thing, the probability of a Hillary Clinton win was communicated with decimal places. We don't use decimal places to describe the temperature. How on earth can predicting the behavior of 230 million voters in this country be that precise? And then there were those sleek charts. See, a lot of data visualizations will overstate certainty, and it works — these charts can numb our brains to criticism. When you hear a statistic, you might feel skeptical. As soon as it's buried in a chart, it feels like some kind of objective science, and it's not.So I was trying to find ways to better communicate this to people, to show people the uncertainty in our numbers. What I did was I started taking real data sets, and turning them into hand-drawn visualizations, so that people can see how imprecise the data is; so people can see that a human did this, a human found the data and visualized it. For example, instead of finding out the probability of getting the flu in any given month, you can see the rough distribution of flu season. This is —(Laughter)a bad shot to show in February. But it's also more responsible data visualization, because if you were to show the exact probabilities, maybe that would encourage people to get their flu jabs at the wrong time.The point of these shaky lines is so that people remember these imprecisions, but also so they don't necessarily walk away with a specific number, but they can remember important facts. Facts like injustice and inequality leave a huge mark on our lives. Facts like Black Americans and Native Americans have shorter life expectancies than those of other races, and that isn't changing anytime soon. Facts like prisoners in the US can be kept in solitary confinement cells that are smaller than the size of an average parking space.The point of these visualizations is also to remind people of some really important statistical concepts, concepts like averages. So let's say you hear a claim like, ""The average swimming pool in the US contains 6.23 fecal accidents."" That doesn't mean every single swimming pool in the country contains exactly 6.23 turds. So in order to show that, I went back to the original data, which comes from the CDC, who surveyed 47 swimming facilities. And I just spent one evening redistributing poop. So you can kind of see how misleading averages can be.(Laughter)OK, so the second question that you guys should be asking yourselves to spot bad numbers is: Can I see myself in the data? This question is also about averages in a way, because part of the reason why people are so frustrated with these national statistics, is they don't really tell the story of who's winning and who's losing from national policy. It's easy to understand why people are frustrated with global averages when they don't match up with their personal experiences. I wanted to show people the way data relates to their everyday lives. I started this advice column called ""Dear Mona,"" where people would write to me with questions and concerns and I'd try to answer them with data. People asked me anything. questions like, ""Is it normal to sleep in a separate bed to my wife?"" ""Do people regret their tattoos?"" ""What does it mean to die of natural causes?""All of these questions are great, because they make you think about ways to find and communicate these numbers. If someone asks you, ""How much pee is a lot of pee?"" which is a question that I got asked, you really want to make sure that the visualization makes sense to as many people as possible. These numbers aren't unavailable. Sometimes they're just buried in the appendix of an academic study. And they're certainly not inscrutable; if you really wanted to test these numbers on urination volume, you could grab a bottle and try it for yourself.(Laughter)The point of this isn't necessarily that every single data set has to relate specifically to you. I'm interested in how many women were issued fines in France for wearing the face veil, or the niqab, even if I don't live in France or wear the face veil. The point of asking where you fit in is to get as much context as possible. So it's about zooming out from one data point, like the unemployment rate is five percent, and seeing how it changes over time, or seeing how it changes by educational status — this is why your parents always wanted you to go to college — or seeing how it varies by gender. Nowadays, male unemployment rate is higher than the female unemployment rate. Up until the early '80s, it was the other way around. This is a story of one of the biggest changes that's happened in American society, and it's all there in that chart, once you look beyond the averages. The axes are everything; once you change the scale, you can change the story.OK, so the third and final question that I want you guys to think about when you're looking at statistics is: How was the data collected? So far, I've only talked about the way data is communicated, but the way it's collected matters just as much. I know this is tough, because methodologies can be opaque and actually kind of boring, but there are some simple steps you can take to check this.I'll use one last example here. One poll found that 41 percent of Muslims in this country support jihad, which is obviously pretty scary, and it was reported everywhere in 2015. When I want to check a number like that, I'll start off by finding the original questionnaire. It turns out that journalists who reported on that statistic ignored a question lower down on the survey that asked respondents how they defined ""jihad."" And most of them defined it as, ""Muslims' personal, peaceful struggle to be more religious."" Only 16 percent defined it as, ""violent holy war against unbelievers."" This is the really important point: based on those numbers, it's totally possible that no one in the survey who defined it as violent holy war also said they support it. Those two groups might not overlap at all.It's also worth asking how the survey was carried out. This was something called an opt-in poll, which means anyone could have found it on the internet and completed it. There's no way of knowing if those people even identified as Muslim. And finally, there were 600 respondents in that poll. There are roughly three million Muslims in this country, according to Pew Research Center. That means the poll spoke to roughly one in every 5,000 Muslims in this country.This is one of the reasons why government statistics are often better than private statistics. A poll might speak to a couple hundred people, maybe a thousand, or if you're L'Oreal, trying to sell skin care products in 2005, then you spoke to 48 women to claim that they work.(Laughter)Private companies don't have a huge interest in getting the numbers right, they just need the right numbers. Government statisticians aren't like that. In theory, at least, they're totally impartial, not least because most of them do their jobs regardless of who's in power. They're civil servants. And to do their jobs properly, they don't just speak to a couple hundred people. Those unemployment numbers I keep on referencing come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and to make their estimates, they speak to over 140,000 businesses in this country.I get it, it's frustrating. If you want to test a statistic that comes from a private company, you can buy the face cream for you and a bunch of friends, test it out, if it doesn't work, you can say the numbers were wrong. But how do you question government statistics? You just keep checking everything. Find out how they collected the numbers. Find out if you're seeing everything on the chart you need to see. But don't give up on the numbers altogether, because if you do, we'll be making public policy decisions in the dark, using nothing but private interests to guide us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mona_chalabi_3_ways_to_spot_a_bad_statistic
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"It was just an ordinary Saturday. My dad was outside mowing the lawn, my mom was upstairs folding laundry, my sister was in her room doing homework and I was in the basement playing video games. And as I came upstairs to get something to drink, I looked out the window and realized that there was something that I was supposed to be doing, and this is what I saw.No, this wasn't my family's dinner on fire. This was my science project. Flames were pouring out, smoke was in the air and it looked like our wooden deck was about to catch fire. I immediately started yelling. My mom was freaking out, my dad ran around to put out the fire and of course my sister started recording a Snapchat video.(Laughter)This was just the beginning of my team's science project. My team is composed of me and three other students who are here in the audience today. We competed in FIRST LEGO League which is an international LEGO robotics competition for kids, and in addition to a robotics game, we also worked on a separate science project, and this was the project that we were working on.So the idea for this project all started when a few months earlier, a couple of my teammates took a trip to Central America and saw beaches littered with Styrofoam, or expanded polystyrene foam. And when they came back and told us about it, we really started thinking about the ways in which we see Styrofoam every day. Get a new flat-screen TV? You end up with a block of Styrofoam bigger than the TV itself. Drink a cup of coffee? Well, those Styrofoam coffee cups are sure going to add up. And where do all these items go after their one-time use? Since there aren't any good existing solutions for used Styrofoam, almost all of them end up right in the landfill, or the oceans and beaches, taking over 500 years to degrade. And in fact, every year, the US alone produces over two billion pounds of Styrofoam, filling up a staggering 25 percent of landfills.So why do we have these ghost accumulations of Styrofoam waste? Why can't we just recycle them like many plastics? Well, simply put, recycled polystyrene is too expensive and potentially contaminated, so there is very little market demand for Styrofoam that has to be recycled. And as a result, Styrofoam is considered a nonrenewable material, because it is neither feasible nor viable to recycle polystyrene. And in fact, many cities across the US have even passed ordinances that simply ban the production of many products containing polystyrene, which includes disposable utensils, packing peanuts, takeout containers and even plastic beach toys, all products that are very useful in today's society. And now France has become the first country to completely ban all plastic utensils, cups and plates.But what if we could keep using Styrofoam and keep benefiting from its cheap, lightweight, insulating and excellent packing ability, while not having to suffer from the repercussions of having to dispose of it? What if we could turn it into something else that's actually useful? What if we could make the impossible possible?My team hypothesized that we could use the carbon that's already in Styrofoam to create activated carbon, which is used in almost every water filter today. And activated carbon works by using very small micropores to filter out contaminants from water or even air.So we started out by doing a variety of heating tests, and unfortunately, we had many failures. Literally, nothing worked. Besides my dad's grill catching on fire, most of our samples vaporized into nothing, or exploded inside expensive furnaces, leaving a horribly sticky mess. In fact, we were so saddened by our failures that we almost gave up.So why did we keep trying when all the adults said it was impossible? Well, maybe it's because we're kids. We don't know any better. But the truth is, we kept trying because we thought it was still possible. We knew that if we were successful, we would be helping the environment and making the world a better place. So we kept trying and failing and trying and failing. We were so ready to give up.But then it happened. With the right temperatures, times and chemicals, we finally got that successful test result showing us that we had created activated carbon from Styrofoam waste. And at that moment, the thing that had been impossible all of a sudden wasn't. It showed us that although we had many failures at the beginning, we were able to persevere through them to get the test results that we wanted. And moreover, not only were we able to create activated carbon for purifying water, but we were also able to reduce Styrofoam waste, solving two global problems with just one solution.So from then on, we were inspired to take our project further, performing more tests to make it more effective and testing it in real world situations. We then proceeded to receive funding from the NSTA's eCYBERMISSION STEM-in-Action program sponsored by the US Army, as well as FIRST Global Innovation Awards sponsored by XPRIZE. And we were also honored with the Scientific American Innovator Award from Google Science Fair. And using these funds, we plan to file a full patent on our process and to continue to work on our project.So yes, although we started with catching my dad's grill on fire and failing so many times that we almost quit, it was well worth it when we look back at it now. We took a problem that many people said was impossible and we made it possible, and we persevered when it looked like nothing that we did would work. We learned that you can't have success without a little, or a lot, of failure.So in the future, don't be afraid if your grill goes up in flames, because you never know when your idea might just catch fire.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ashton_cofer_a_young_inventor_s_plan_to_recycle_styrofoam
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"Have you ever heard the one about how breastfeeding is free?(Laughter)Yeah, it's pretty funny, because it's only free if we don't value women's time and energy. Any mother can tell you how much time and energy it takes to liquify her body — to literally dissolve herself —(Laughter)as she feeds this precious little cannibal.(Laughter)Milk is why mammals suck. At Arizona State University, in the Comparative Lactation Lab, I decode mothers' milk composition to understand its complexity and how it influences infant development. The most important thing that I've learned is that we do not do enough to support mothers and babies. And when we fail mothers and babies, we fail everyone who loves mothers and babies: the fathers, the partners, the grandparents, the aunties, the friends and kin that make our human social networks. It's time that we abandon simple solutions and simple slogans, and grapple with the nuance.I was very fortunate to run smack-dab into that nuance very early, during my first interview with a journalist when she asked me, ""How long should a mother breastfeed her baby?"" And it was that word ""should"" that brought me up short, because I will never tell a woman what she should do with her body.Babies survive and thrive because their mother's milk is food, medicine and signal. For young infants, mother's milk is a complete diet that provides all the building blocks for their bodies, that shapes their brain and fuels all of their activity. Mother's milk also feeds the microbes that are colonizing the infant's intestinal tract. Mothers aren't just eating for two, they're eating for two to the trillions. Milk provides immunofactors that help fight pathogens and mother's milk provides hormones that signal to the infant's body.But in recent decades, we have come to take milk for granted. We stopped seeing something in plain sight. We began to think of milk as standardized, homogenized, pasteurized, packaged, powdered, flavored and formulated. We abandoned the milk of human kindness and turned our priorities elsewhere.At the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC is the National Library of Medicine, which contains 25 million articles — the brain trust of life science and biomedical research. We can use keywords to search that database, and when we do that, we discover nearly a million articles about pregnancy, but far fewer about breast milk and lactation. When we zoom in on the number of articles just investigating breast milk, we see that we know much more about coffee, wine and tomatoes.(Laughter)We know over twice as much about erectile dysfunction.(Laughter)I'm not saying we shouldn't know about those things — I'm a scientist, I think we should know about everything. But that we know so much less —(Laughter)about breast milk — the first fluid a young mammal is adapted to consume — should make us angry. Globally, nine out of 10 women will have at least one child in her lifetime. That means that nearly 130 million babies are born each year. These mothers and babies deserve our best science.Recent research has shown that milk doesn't just grow the body, it fuels behavior and shapes neurodevelopment. In 2015, researchers discovered that the mixture of breast milk and baby saliva — specifically, baby saliva — causes a chemical reaction that produces hydrogen peroxide that can kill staph and salmonella. And from humans and other mammal species, we're starting to understand that the biological recipe of milk can be different when produced for sons or daughters. When we reach for donor milk in the neonatal intensive care unit, or formula on the store shelf, it's nearly one-size-fits-all. We aren't thinking about how sons and daughters may grow at different rates, or different ways, and that milk may be a part of that.Mothers have gotten the message and the vast majority of mothers intend to breastfeed, but many do not reach their breastfeeding goals. That is not their failure; it's ours. Increasingly common medical conditions like obesity, endocrine disorders, C-section and preterm births all can disrupt the underlying biology of lactation. And many women do not have knowledgeable clinical support.Twenty-five years ago, the World Health Organization and UNICEF established criteria for hospitals to be considered baby friendly — that provide the optimal level of support for mother-infant bonding and infant feeding. Today, only one in five babies in the United States is born in a baby-friendly hospital. This is a problem, because mothers can grapple with many problems in the minutes, hours, days and weeks of lactation. They can have struggles with establishing latch, with pain, with milk letdown and perceptions of milk supply. These mothers deserve knowledgeable clinical staff that understand these processes.Mothers will call me as they're grappling with these struggles, crying with wobbly voices. ""It's not working. This is what I'm supposed to naturally be able to do. Why is it not working?"" And just because something is evolutionarily ancient doesn't mean that it's easy or that we're instantly good at it. You know what else is evolutionarily ancient?(Laughter)Sex. And nobody expects us to start out being good at it.(Laughter)Clinicians best deliver quality equitable care when they have continuing education about how to best support lactation and breastfeeding. And in order to have that continuing education, we need to anchor it to cutting-edge research in both the life sciences and the social sciences, because we need to recognize that too often historical traumas and implicit biases sit in the space between a new mother and her clinician. The body is political. If our breastfeeding support is not intersectional, it's not good enough. And for moms who have to return for work, because countries like the United States do not provide paid parental leave, they can have to go back in as short as just a few days after giving birth.How do we optimize mother and infant health just by messaging about breast milk to moms without providing the institutional support that facilitates that mother-infant bonding to support breastfeeding? The answer is: we can't. I'm talking to you, legislators, and the voters who elect them. I'm talking to you, job creators and collective bargaining units, and workers, and shareholders. We all have a stake in the public health of our community, and we all have a role to play in achieving it. Breast milk is a part of improving human health. In the NICU, when infants are born early or sick or injured, milk or bioactive constituents in milk can be critically important. Environments or ecologies, or communities where there's high risk of infectious disease, breast milk can be incredibly protective. Where there are emergencies like storms and earthquakes, when the electricity goes out, when safe water is not available, breast milk can keep babies fed and hydrated. And in the context of humanitarian crises, like Syrian mothers fleeing war zones, the smallest drops can buffer babies from the biggest global challenges.But understanding breast milk is not just about messaging to mothers and policy makers. It's also about understanding what is important in breast milk so that we can deliver better formulas to moms who cannot or do not breastfeed for whatever reason. We can all do a better job of supporting the diversity of moms raising their babies in a diversity of ways.As women around the world struggle to achieve political, social and economic equality, we must reimagine motherhood as not the central, core aspect of womanhood, but one of the many potential facets of what makes women awesome.It's time.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_hinde_what_we_don_t_know_about_mother_s_milk
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"Twenty-eight years ago, I was a broken man. And you probably wouldn't be able to tell that if you met me. I had a good job at a well-respected academic institution. I dressed well, of course. But my insides were rotting away. You see, I grew up in a family riddled with addiction, and as a kid, I also struggled with coming to terms with my own sexuality. And even though I couldn't name it then, growing up as a gay kid just compounded my issues of isolation and insecurities. But drinking took all of that away.Like many, I drank at an early age. I continued to drink my way through college. And when I finally did come out in the early 1980s, about the only places to meet other gay people, to socialize, to be yourself, were gay bars. And what do you do in gay bars? You drink. And I did — a lot.My story is not unique. Like millions of Americans, my disease progressed undiagnosed. It took me to people and places and things that I never would have chosen. It wasn't until an intersection with the law gave me an ""opportunity"" to get care, that I began my journey of recovery.My journey of recovery has been filled with love and with joy, but it hasn't been without pain. Like many of you, I've lost too many friends and family to this disease. I've heard too many heartbreaking stories of people who've lost loved ones to addiction. And I've also lost countless friends to HIV and AIDS.Our current opioid epidemic and the AIDS epidemic tragically have much in common. Right now, we are in the midst of one of the greatest health crises of our time. During 2014 alone, 28,000 people died of drug overdoses associated with prescription drugs and heroin. During the 1980s, scores of people were dying from HIV and AIDS. Public officials ignored it. Some wouldn't even utter the words. They didn't want treatment. And tragically, there are many parallels with our current epidemic. Some called it the gay plague. They called for quarantines. They wanted to separate the innocent victims from the rest of us. I was afraid we were losing this battle because people were blaming us for being sick. Public policy was being held hostage by stigma and fear, and also held hostage were compassion, care, research, recovery and treatment.But we changed all that. Because out of the pain of those deaths, we saw a social and political movement. AIDS galvanized us into action; to stand up, to speak up and to act out. And it also galvanized the LGBT movement. We knew we were in a battle for our lives because silence equaled death, but we changed, and we made things happen. And right now, we have the potential to see the end of HIV/AIDS in our lifetime. These changes came in no small part by the courageous, yet simple decision for people to come out to their neighbors, to their friends, to their families and to their coworkers.Years ago, I was a volunteer for the Names Project. This was an effort started by Cleve Jones in San Francisco to show that people who died of AIDS had names and faces and families and people who loved them. I still recall unfolding the AIDS memorial quilt on the National Mall on a brilliant day in October, 1988.So fast forward to 2015. The Supreme Court's decision to strike down the ban on same-sex marriage. My husband, Dave, and I walk over to the steps of the Supreme Court to celebrate that decision with so many other people, and I couldn't help but think how far we came around LGBT rights and yet how far we needed to go around issues of addiction.When I was nominated by President Obama to be his Director of Drug Policy, I was very open about my recovery and about the fact that I was a gay man. And at no point during my confirmation process — at least that I know of — did the fact that I was a gay man come to bear on my candidacy or my fitness to do this job. But my addiction did. At one point, a congressional staffer said that there was no way that I was going to be confirmed by the United States Senate because of my past, despite the fact that I had been in recovery for over 20 years, and despite the fact that this job takes a little bit of knowledge around addiction.(Laughter)So, you know, this is the stigma that people with substance use disorders face every single day, and you know, I have to tell you it's still why I'm more comfortable coming out as a gay man than I am as a person with a history of addiction.Nearly every family in America is affected by addiction. Yet, unfortunately, too often, it's not talked about openly and honestly. It's whispered about. It's met with derision and scorn. We hear these stories, time and time again, on TV, online, we hear it from public officials, and we hear it from family and friends. And those of us with an addiction, we hear those voices, and somehow we believe that we are less deserving of care and treatment. Today in the United States, only one in nine people get care and treatment for their disorder. One in nine. Think about that.Generally, people with other diseases get care and treatment. If you have cancer, you get treatment, if you have diabetes, you get treatment. If you have a heart attack, you get emergency services, and you get referred to care. But somehow people with addiction have to wait for treatment or often can't get when they need it. And left untreated, addiction has significant, dire consequences. And for many people that means death or incarceration. We've been down that road before.For too long our country felt like we could arrest our way out of this problem. But we know that we can't. Decades of scientific research has shown that this is a medical issue — that this is a chronic medical condition that people inherit and that people develop.So the Obama administration has taken a different tack on drug policy. We've developed and implemented a comprehensive plan to expand prevention services, treatment services, early intervention and recovery support. We've pushed criminal justice reform. We've knocked down barriers to give people second chances. We see public health and public safety officials working hand in hand at the community level. We see police chiefs across the country guiding people to treatment instead of jail and incarceration. We see law enforcement and other first responders reversing overdoses with naloxone to give people a second chance for care. The Affordable Care Act is the biggest expansion of substance use disorder treatment in a generation, and it also calls for the integration of treatment services within primary care. But fundamentally, all of this work is not enough. Unless we change the way that we view people with addiction in the United States.Years ago when I finally understood that I had a problem and I knew that I needed help, I was too afraid to ask for it. I felt that people would think I was stupid, that I was weak-willed, that I was morally flawed. But I talk about my recovery because I want to make change. I want us to see that we need to be open and candid about who we are and what we can do. I am public about my own recovery not to be self-congratulatory. I am open about my own recovery to change public opinion, to change public policy and to change the course of this epidemic and empower the millions of Americans who struggle with this journey to be open and candid about who they are. People are more than their disease. And all of us have the opportunity to change public opinion and to change public policy.All of us know someone who has an addiction, and all of us can do our part to change how we view people with addiction in the United States. So when you see someone with an addiction, don't think of a drunk or a junkie or an addict or an abuser — see a person; offer them help; give them kindness and compassion. And together, we can be part of a growing movement in the United States to change how we view people with addiction.Together we can change public policy. We can ensure that people get care when they need it, just like any other disease. We can be part of a growing, unstoppable movement to have millions of Americans enter recovery, and put an end to this epidemic.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_botticelli_addiction_is_a_disease_we_should_treat_it_like_one
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"So it all came to life in a dark bar in Madrid. I encountered my colleague from McGill, Michael Meaney. And we were drinking a few beers, and like scientists do, he told me about his work. And he told me that he is interested in how mother rats lick their pups after they were born. And I was sitting there and saying, ""This is where my tax dollars are wasted —(Laughter)on this kind of soft science.""And he started telling me that the rats, like humans, lick their pups in very different ways. Some mothers do a lot of that, some mothers do very little, and most are in between. But what's interesting about it is when he follows these pups when they become adults — like, years in human life, long after their mother died. They are completely different animals. The animals that were licked and groomed heavily, the high-licking and grooming, are not stressed. They have different sexual behavior. They have a different way of living than those that were not treated as intensively by their mothers.So then I was thinking to myself: Is this magic? How does this work? As geneticists would like you to think, perhaps the mother had the ""bad mother"" gene that caused her pups to be stressful, and then it was passed from generation to generation; it's all determined by genetics. Or is it possible that something else is going on here?In rats, we can ask this question and answer it. So what we did is a cross-fostering experiment. You essentially separate the litter, the babies of this rat, at birth, to two kinds of fostering mothers — not the real mothers, but mothers that will take care of them: high-licking mothers and low-licking mothers. And you can do the opposite with the low-licking pups. And the remarkable answer was, it wasn't important what gene you got from your mother. It was not the biological mother that defined this property of these rats. It is the mother that took care of the pups. So how can this work?I am an a epigeneticist. I am interested in how genes are marked by a chemical mark during embryogenesis, during the time we're in the womb of our mothers, and decide which gene will be expressed in what tissue. Different genes are expressed in the brain than in the liver and the eye. And we thought: Is it possible that the mother is somehow reprogramming the gene of her offspring through her behavior? And we spent 10 years, and we found that there is a cascade of biochemical events by which the licking and grooming of the mother, the care of the mother, is translated to biochemical signals that go into the nucleus and into the DNA and program it differently. So now the animal can prepare itself for life: Is life going to be harsh? Is there going to be a lot of food? Are there going to be a lot of cats and snakes around, or will I live in an upper-class neighborhood where all I have to do is behave well and proper, and that will gain me social acceptance? And now one can think about how important that process can be for our lives.We inherit our DNA from our ancestors. The DNA is old. It evolved during evolution. But it doesn't tell us if you are going to be born in Stockholm, where the days are long in the summer and short in the winter, or in Ecuador, where there's an equal number of hours for day and night all year round. And that has such an enormous [effect] on our physiology. So what we suggest is, perhaps what happens early in life, those signals that come through the mother, tell the child what kind of social world you're going to be living in. It will be harsh, and you'd better be anxious and be stressful, or it's going to be an easy world, and you have to be different. Is it going to be a world with a lot of light or little light? Is it going to be a world with a lot of food or little food? If there's no food around, you'd better develop your brain to binge whenever you see a meal, or store every piece of food that you have as fat.So this is good. Evolution has selected this to allow our fixed, old DNA to function in a dynamic way in new environments. But sometimes things can go wrong; for example, if you're born to a poor family and the signals are, ""You better binge, you better eat every piece of food you're going to encounter."" But now we humans and our brain have evolved, have changed evolution even faster. Now you can buy McDonald's for one dollar. And therefore, the preparation that we had by our mothers is turning out to be maladaptive. The same preparation that was supposed to protect us from hunger and famine is going to cause obesity, cardiovascular problems and metabolic disease. So this concept that genes could be marked by our experience, and especially the early life experience, can provide us a unifying explanation of both health and disease.But is true only for rats? The problem is, we cannot test this in humans, because ethically, we cannot administer child adversity in a random way. So if a poor child develops a certain property, we don't know whether this is caused by poverty or whether poor people have bad genes. So geneticists will try to tell you that poor people are poor because their genes make them poor. Epigeneticists will tell you poor people are in a bad environment or an impoverished environment that creates that phenotype, that property.So we moved to look into our cousins, the monkeys. My colleague, Stephen Suomi, has been rearing monkeys in two different ways: randomly separated the monkey from the mother and reared her with a nurse and surrogate motherhood conditions. So these monkeys didn't have a mother; they had a nurse. And other monkeys were reared with their normal, natural mothers. And when they were old, they were completely different animals. The monkeys that had a mother did not care about alcohol, they were not sexually aggressive. The monkeys that didn't have a mother were aggressive, were stressed and were alcoholics. So we looked at their DNA early after birth, to see: Is it possible that the mother is marking? Is there a signature of the mother in the DNA of the offspring?These are Day-14 monkeys, and what you see here is the modern way by which we study epigenetics. We can now map those chemical marks, which we call methylation marks, on DNA at a single nucleotide resolution. We can map the entire genome. We can now compare the monkey that had a mother or not. And here's a visual presentation of this. What you see is the genes that got more methylated are red. The genes that got less methylated are green. You can see many genes are changing, because not having a mother is not just one thing — it affects the whole way; it sends signals about the whole way your world is going to look when you become an adult. And you can see the two groups of monkeys extremely well-separated from each other. How early does this develop? These monkeys already didn't see their mothers, so they had a social experience. Do we sense our social status, even at the moment of birth?So in this experiment, we took placentas of monkeys that had different social status. What's interesting about social rank is that across all living beings, they will structure themselves by hierarchy. Monkey number one is the boss; monkey number four is the peon. You put four monkeys in a cage, there will always be a boss and always be a peon. And what's interesting is that the monkey number one is much healthier than monkey number four. And if you put them in a cage, monkey number one will not eat as much. Monkey number four will eat [a lot]. And what you see here in this methylation mapping, a dramatic separation at birth of the animals that had a high social status versus the animals that did not have a high status.So we are born already knowing the social information, and that social information is not bad or good, it just prepares us for life, because we have to program our biology differently if we are in the high or the low social status.But how can you study this in humans? We can't do experiments, we can't administer adversity to humans. But God does experiments with humans, and it's called natural disasters.One of the hardest natural disasters in Canadian history happened in my province of Quebec. It's the ice storm of 1998. We lost our entire electrical grid because of an ice storm when the temperatures were, in the dead of winter in Quebec, minus 20 to minus 30. And there were pregnant mothers during that time. And my colleague Suzanne King followed the children of these mothers for 15 years.And what happened was, that as the stress increased — and here we had objective measures of stress: How long were you without power? Where did you spend your time? Was it in your mother-in-law's apartment or in some posh country home? So all of these added up to a social stress scale, and you can ask the question: How did the children look? And it appears that as stress increases, the children develop more autism, they develop more metabolic diseases and they develop more autoimmune diseases. We would map the methylation state, and again, you see the green genes becoming red as stress increases, the red genes becoming green as stress increases, an entire rearrangement of the genome in response to stress.So if we can program genes, if we are not just the slaves of the history of our genes, that they could be programmed, can we deprogram them? Because epigenetic causes can cause diseases like cancer, metabolic disease and mental health diseases.Let's talk about cocaine addiction. Cocaine addiction is a terrible situation that can lead to death and to loss of human life. We asked the question: Can we reprogram the addicted brain to make that animal not addicted anymore? We used a cocaine addiction model that recapitulates what happens in humans. In humans, you're in high school, some friends suggest you use some cocaine, you take cocaine, nothing happens. Months pass by, something reminds you of what happened the first time, a pusher pushes cocaine, and you become addicted and your life has changed.In rats, we do the same thing. My colleague, Gal Yadid, he trains the animals to get used to cocaine, then for one month, no cocaine. Then he reminds them of the party when they saw the cocaine the first time by cue, the colors of the cage when they saw cocaine. And they go crazy. They will press the lever to get cocaine until they die. We first determined that the difference between these animals is that during that time when nothing happens, there's no cocaine around, their epigenome is rearranged. Their genes are re-marked in a different way, and when the cue comes, their genome is ready to develop this addictive phenotype.So we treated these animals with drugs that either increase DNA methylation, which was the epigenetic marker to look at, or decrease epigenetic markings. And we found that if we increased methylation, these animals go even crazier. They become more craving for cocaine. But if we reduce the DNA methylation, the animals are not addicted anymore. We have reprogrammed them. And a fundamental difference between an epigenetic drug and any other drug is that with epigenetic drugs, we essentially remove the signs of experience, and once they're gone, they will not come back unless you have the same experience. The animal now is reprogrammed. So when we visited the animals 30 days, 60 days later, which is in human terms many years of life, they were still not addicted — by a single epigenetic treatment.So what did we learn about DNA? DNA is not just a sequence of letters; it's not just a script. DNA is a dynamic movie. Our experiences are being written into this movie, which is interactive. You're, like, watching a movie of your life, with the DNA, with your remote control. You can remove an actor and add an actor. And so you have, in spite of the deterministic nature of genetics, you have control of the way your genes look, and this has a tremendous optimistic message for the ability to now encounter some of the deadly diseases like cancer, mental health, with a new approach, looking at them as maladaptation. And if we can epigenetically intervene, [we can] reverse the movie by removing an actor and setting up a new narrative.So what I told you today is, our DNA is really combined of two components, two layers of information. One layer of information is old, evolved from millions of years of evolution. It is fixed and very hard to change. The other layer of information is the epigenetic layer, which is open and dynamic and sets up a narrative that is interactive, that allows us to control, to a large extent, our destiny, to help the destiny of our children and to hopefully conquer disease and serious health challenges that have plagued humankind for a long time.So even though we are determined by our genes, we have a degree of freedom that can set up our life to a life of responsibility.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/moshe_szyf_how_early_life_experience_is_written_into_dna
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"I was 10 years old when I learned what the word ""genocide"" meant. It was 2003, and my people were being brutally attacked because of their race — hundreds of thousands murdered, millions displaced, a nation torn apart at the hands of its own government.My mother and father immediately began speaking out against the crisis. I didn't really understand it, except for the fact that it was destroying my parents. One day, I walked in on my mother crying, and I asked her why we are burying so many people. I don't remember the words that she chose to describe genocide to her 10-year-old daughter, but I remember the feeling. We felt completely alone, as if no one could hear us, as if we were essentially invisible.This is when I wrote my first poem about Darfur. I wrote poetry to convince people to hear and see us, and that's how I learned the thing that changed me. It's easy to be seen. I mean, look at me — I'm a young African woman with a scarf around my head, an American accent on my tongue and a story that makes even the most brutal of Monday mornings seem inviting. But it's hard to convince people that they deserve to be seen. I learned this in my high school classroom one day, when my teacher asked me to give a presentation about Darfur. I was setting up the projector when a classmate of mine said, ""Why do you have to talk about this? Can't you think about us and how it will make us feel?""(Laughter)My 14-year-old self didn't know what to say to her, or how to explain the pain that I felt in that moment, and in every moment that we were forced not to talk about ""this."" Her words took me back to the days and nights on the ground in Darfur, where we were forced to remain silent; where we didn't speak over morning tea because the warplanes overhead would swallow any and all noise; back to the days when we were told not only that we don't deserve to be heard but that we do not have a right to exist. And this is where the magic happened, in that classroom when all the students started taking their seats and I began to speak, despite this renewed feeling that I didn't deserve to be there, that I didn't belong there or have a right to break the silence.As I talked, and my classmates listened, the fear ebbed away. My mind became calm, and I felt safe. It was the sound of our grieving, the feel of their arms around me, the steady walls that held us together. It felt nothing like a vacuum.I choose poetry because it's so visceral. When someone is standing in front of you, mind, body and soul, saying ""Witness me,"" it's impossible not to become keenly aware of your own humanity. This changed everything for me. It gave me courage. Every day I experience the power of witness, and because of that, I am whole. And so now I ask: Will you witness me?They hand me the microphone as my shoulders sink under the weight of this stress.The woman says, ""The one millionth refugee just left South Sudan. Can you comment?""I feel my feet rock back and forth on the heels my mother bought,begging the question:Do we stay, or is it safer to choose flight?My mind echoes the numbers:one million gone,two million displaced,400,000 dead in Darfur.And this lump takes over my throat,as if each of those bodies just found a graveright here in my esophagus.Our once country,all north and south and east and west,so restless the Nile couldn't hold us together,and you ask me to summarize.They talk about the numbers as if this isn't still happening,as if 500,000 didn't just die in Syria,as if 3,000 aren't still making their final standat the bottom of the Mediterranean,as if there aren't entire volumes full of fact sheets about our genocides,and now they want me to write one.Fact:we never talked over breakfast,because the warplanes would swallow our voices.Fact:my grandfather didn't want to leave home,so he died in a war zone.Fact:a burning bush without God is just a fire.I measure the distance between what I knowand what is safe to say on a microphone.Do I talk about sorrow? Displacement?Do I mention the violence,how it's never as simple as what you see on TV,how there are weeks' worth of fear before the camera is on?Do I tell her about our bodies,how they are 60 percent water,but we still burn like driftwood,making fuel of our sacrifice?Do I tell her the men died first, mothers forced to watch the slaughter?That they came for our children,scattering them across the continent until our homes sank?That even castles sink at the bite of the bomb?Do I talk about the elderly, our heroes,too weak to run, too expensive to shoot,how they would march them,hands raised, rifles at their backs, into the fire?How their walking sticks kept the flames alive?It feels too harsh for a bundle of wires and an audience to swallow.Too relentless,like the valley that filled with the putrid smoke of our deaths.Is it better in verse?Can a stanza become a burial shroud?Will it sting less if I say it softly?If you don't see me cry, will you listen better?Will the pain leave when the microphone does?Why does every word feel as if I'm saying my last?Thirty seconds for the sound bite,and now three minutes for the poem.My tongue goes dry the same way we died,becoming ash, having never been coal.I feel my left leg go numb,and I realize that I locked my knees, bracing for impact.I never wear shoes I can't run in.Thank you.(Applause)So, I wanted to leave on a positive note, because that's the paradox that this life has been: in the places where I learned to cry the most, I also learned how to smile after. So, here goes.""You Have a Big Imagination or 400,000 Ways to Cry.""For Zeinab.I am a sad girl,but my face makes other plans,focusing energy on this smile, so as not to waste it on pain.The first thing they took was my sleep,eyes heavy but wide open,thinking maybe I missed something,maybe the cavalry is still coming.They didn't come,so I bought bigger pillows.(Laughter)My grandmother could cure anythingby talking the life out of it.And she said that I could make a thief in a silo laugh in the middle of our raging war.War makes a broken marriage bed out of sorrow.You want nothing more than to disappear,but your heart can't salvage enough remnants to leave.But joy —joy is the armor we carried across the borders of our broken homeland.A hasty mix of stories and faces that lasts long after the flavor is gone.A muscle memory that overcomes even the most bitter of times,my memory is spotted with days of laughing until I cried,or crying until I laughed.Laughter and tears are both involuntary human reactions,testaments to our capacity for expression.So allow me to expressthat if I make you laugh, it's usually on purpose.And if I make you cry, I'll still think you are beautiful.This is for my cousin Zeinab,bedridden on a random afternoon.I hadn't seen her since the last time we were in Sudan together,and there I was at her hospital bedsidein a 400-year-old building in France.Zeinab wanted to hear poems.Suddenly, English, Arabic and French were not enough.Every word I knew became empty noise,and Zeinab said, ""Well, get on with it.""(Laughter)And I read her everything that I could, and we laughed, and we loved it,and it was the most important stage that I've ever stood on,surrounded by family,by remnants of a people who were given as a dowry to a relentless warbut still managed to make pearls of this life;by the ones who taught me to not only laugh,but to live in the face of death;who placed their hands across the sky,measuring the distance to the sun and saying, ""Smile; I'm gonna meet you there.""And for Zeinab —Zeinab, who taught me love in a place like France,Zeinab, who wanted to he.ar poems on her deathbed —Dilated fibromyalgia.Her heart muscles expanded until they couldn't function.And she held me, and she made me feel like gold.And I said, ""Zeinab,isn't it strange that your only problemis that your heart was too big?""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emtithal_mahmoud_a_young_poet_tells_the_story_of_darfur
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"No one will ever pay you what you're worth. No one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth. And you control their thinking, not like this, although that would be cool.(Laughter)That would be really cool. Instead, like this: clearly defining and communicating your value are essential to being paid well for your excellence.Anyone here want to be paid well? OK, good, then this talk is for everyone. It's got universal applicability. It's true if you're a business owner, if you're an employee, if you're a job seeker. It's true if you're a man or a woman.Now, I approach this today through the lens of the woman business owner, because in my work I've observed that women underprice more so than men. The gender wage gap is a well-traveled narrative in this country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a woman employee earns just 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. What may surprise you is that this trend continues even into the entrepreneurial sphere. A woman business owner earns just 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. In my work, I've often heard women express that they're uncomfortable communicating their value, especially early on in business ownership. They say things like, ""I don't like to toot my own horn."" ""I'd rather let the work speak for itself."" ""I don't like to sing my own praises.""I hear very different narratives in working with male business owners, and I think this difference is costing women 20 cents on the dollar.I'd like to tell you the story of a consulting firm that helps their clients dramatically improve their profitability. That company is my company. After my first year in business, I saw the profit increases that my clients were realizing in working with me, and I realized that I needed to reevaluate my pricing. I was really underpriced relative to the value I was delivering. It's hard for me to admit to you, because I'm a pricing consultant.(Laughter)It's what I do. I help companies price for value. But nonetheless, it's what I saw, and so I sat down to evaluate my pricing, evaluate my value, and I did that by asking key value questions. What are my clients' needs and how do I meet them? What is my unique skill set that makes me better qualified to serve my clients? What do I do that no one else does? What problems do I solve for clients? What value do I add? I answered these questions and defined the value that my clients get from working with me, calculated their return on investment, and what I saw was that I needed to double my price, double it. Now, I confess to you, this terrified me. I'm supposed to be the expert in this, but I'm not cured. I knew the value was there. I was convinced the value was there, and I was still scared out of my wits. What if nobody would pay me that? What if clients said, ""That's ridiculous. You're ridiculous.""Was I really worth that? Not my work, mind you, but me. Was I worth that? I'm the mother of two beautiful little girls who depend upon me. I'm a single mom. What if my business fails? What if I fail?But I know how to take my own medicine, the medicine that I prescribe to my clients. I had done the homework. I knew the value was there. So when prospects came, I prepared the proposals with the new higher pricing and sent them out and communicated the value. How's the story end? Clients continued to hire me and refer me and recommend me, and I'm still here. And I share this story because doubts and fears are natural and normal. But they don't define our value, and they shouldn't limit our earning potential.I'd like to share another story, about a woman who learned to communicate her value and found her own voice. She runs a successful web development company and employs several people. When she first started her firm and for several years thereafter, she would say, ""I have a little web design company."" She'd actually use those words with clients. ""I have a little web design company."" In this and in many other small ways, she was diminishing her company in the eyes of prospects and clients, and diminishing herself. It was really impacting her ability to earn what she was worth. I believe her language and her style communicated that she didn't believe she had much value to offer. In her own words, she was practically giving her services away. And so she began her journey to take responsibility for communicating value to clients and changing her message.One thing I shared with her is that it's so important to find your own voice, a voice that's authentic and true to you. Don't try to channel your sister-in-law just because she's a great salesperson or your neighbor who tells a great joke if that's not who you are. Give up this notion that it's tooting your own horn. Make it about the other party. Focus on serving and adding value, and it won't feel like bragging. What do you love about what you do? What excites you about the work that you do? If you connect with that, communicating your value will come naturally.So she embraced her natural style, found her voice and changed her message. For one thing, she stopped calling herself a little web design company. She really found a lot of strength and power in communicating her message. She's now charging three times as much for web design, and her business is growing. She told me about a recent meeting with a gruff and sometimes difficult client who had called a meeting questioning progress on search engine optimization. She said in the old days, that would have been a really intimidating meeting for her, but her mindset was different. She said, she prepared the information, sat down with the client, said this isn't about me, it's not personal, it's about the client. She took them through the data, through the numbers, laid out the trends and the progress in her own voice and in her own way, but very directly said, ""Here's what we've done for you."" The client sat up and took notice, and said, ""OK, I got it."" And she said in describing that meeting, ""I didn't feel scared or panicky or small, which is how I used to feel. Instead I feel like, 'OK, I got this. I know what I'm doing. I'm confident.'""Being properly valued is so important. You can hear in this story that the implications range far beyond just finances into the realm of self-respect and self-confidence. Today I've told two stories, one about defining our value and the other about communicating our value, and these are the two elements to realizing our full earning potential. That's the equation. And if you're sitting in the audience today and you're not being paid what you're worth, I'd like to welcome you into this equation. Just imagine what life could be like, how much more we could do, how much more we could give back, how much more we could plan for the future, how validated and respected we would feel if we could earn our full potential, realize our full value.No one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth, and you control their thinking.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/casey_brown_know_your_worth_and_then_ask_for_it
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"Chris Anderson: Welcome to this next edition of TED Dialogues. We're trying to do some bridging here today. You know, the American dream has inspired millions of people around the world for many years. Today, I think, you can say that America is divided, perhaps more than ever, and the divisions seem to be getting worse. It's actually really hard for people on different sides to even have a conversation. People almost feel... disgusted with each other. Some families can't even speak to each other right now. Our purpose in this dialogue today is to try to do something about that, to try to have a different kind of conversation, to do some listening, some thinking, some understanding. And I have two people with us to help us do that.They're not going to come at this hammer and tong against each other. This is not like cable news. This is two people who have both spent a lot of their working life in the political center or right of the center. They've immersed themselves in conservative worldviews, if you like. They know that space very well. And we're going to explore together how to think about what is happening right now, and whether we can find new ways to bridge and just to have wiser, more connected conversations.With me, first of all, Gretchen Carlson, who has spent a decade working at Fox News, hosting ""Fox and Friends"" and then ""The Real Story,"" before taking a courageous stance in filing sexual harassment claims against Roger Ailes, which eventually led to his departure from Fox News. David Brooks, who has earned the wrath of many of [The New York Times's] left-leaning readers because of his conservative views, and more recently, perhaps, some of the right-leaning readers because of his criticism of some aspects of Trump. Yet, his columns are usually the top one, two or three most-read content of the day because they're brilliant, because they bring psychology and social science to providing understanding for what's going on. So without further ado, a huge welcome to Gretchen and David. Come and join me.(Applause)So, Gretchen. Sixty-three million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Why did they do this?Gretchen Carlson: There are a lot of reasons, in my mind, why it happened. I mean, I think it was a movement of sorts, but it started long ago. It didn't just happen overnight. ""Anger"" would be the first word that I would think of — anger with nothing being done in Washington, anger about not being heard. I think there was a huge swath of the population that feels like Washington never listens to them, you know, a good part of the middle of America, not just the coasts, and he was somebody they felt was listening to their concerns. So I think those two issues would be the main reason. I have to throw in there also celebrity. I think that had a huge impact on Donald Trump becoming president.CA: Was the anger justified?David Brooks: Yeah, I think so. In 2015 and early 2016, I wrote about 30 columns with the following theme: don't worry, Donald Trump will never be the Republican nominee.(Laughter)And having done that and gotten that so wrong, I decided to spend the ensuing year just out in Trumpworld, and I found a lot of economic dislocation. I ran into a woman in West Virginia who was going to a funeral for her mom. She said, ""The nice thing about being Catholic is we don't have to speak, and that's good, because we're not word people."" That phrase rung in my head: word people. A lot of us in the TED community are word people, but if you're not, the economy has not been angled toward you, and so 11 million men, for example, are out of the labor force because those jobs are done away. A lot of social injury. You used to be able to say, ""I'm not the richest person in the world, I'm not the most famous, but my neighbors can count on me and I get some dignity out of that."" And because of celebritification or whatever, if you're not rich or famous, you feel invisible. And a lot of moral injury, sense of feeling betrayed, and frankly, in this country, we almost have one success story, which is you go to college, get a white-collar job, and you're a success, and if you don't fit in that formula, you feel like you're not respected. And so that accumulation of things — and when I talked to Trump voters and still do, I found most of them completely realistic about his failings, but they said, this is my shot.GC: And yet I predicted that he would be the nominee, because I've known him for 27 years. He's a master marketer, and one of the things he did extremely well that President Obama also did extremely well, was simplifying the message, simplifying down to phrases and to a populist message. Even if he can't achieve it, it sounded good. And many people latched on to that simplicity again. It's something they could grasp onto: ""I get that. I want that. That sounds fantastic."" And I remember when he used to come on my show originally, before ""The Apprentice"" was even ""The Apprentice,"" and he'd say it was the number one show on TV. I'd say back to him, ""No, it's not."" And he would say, ""Yes it is, Gretchen."" And I would say, ""No it's not."" But people at home would see that, and they'd be like, ""Wow, I should be watching the number one show on TV."" And — lo and behold — it became the number one show on TV. So he had this, I've seen this ability in him to be the master marketer.CA: It's puzzling to a lot of people on the left that so many women voted for him, despite some of his comments.GC: I wrote a column about this for Time Motto, saying that I really believe that lot of people put on blinders, and maybe for the first time, some people decided that policies they believed in and being heard and not being invisible anymore was more important to them than the way in which he had acted or acts as a human. And so human dignity — whether it would be the dust-up about the disabled reporter, or what happened in that audiotape with Billy Bush and the way in which he spoke about women — they put that aside and pretended as if they hadn't seen that or heard that, because to them, policies were more important.CA: Right, so just because someone voted for Trump, it's not blind adherence to everything that he's said or stood for.GC: No. I heard a lot of people that would say to me, ""Wow, I just wish he would shut up before the election. If he would just stay quiet, he'd get elected.""CA: And so, maybe for people on the left there's a trap there, to sort of despise or just be baffled by the support, assuming that it's for some of the unattractive features. Actually, maybe they're supporting him despite those, because they see something exciting. They see a man of action. They see the choking hold of government being thrown off in some way and they're excited by that.GC: But don't forget we saw that on the left as well — Bernie Sanders. So this is one of the commonalities that I think we can talk about today, ""The Year of the Outsider,"" David — right? And even though Bernie Sanders has been in Congress for a long time, he was deemed an outsider this time. And so there was anger on the left as well, and so many people were in favor of Bernie Sanders. So I see it as a commonality. People who like Trump, people who like Bernie Sanders, they were liking different policies, but the underpinning was anger.CA: David, there's often this narrative, then, that the sole explanation for Trump's victory and his rise is his tapping into anger in a very visceral way. But you've written a bit about that it's actually more than that, that there's a worldview that's being worked on here. Could you talk about that?DB: I would say he understood what, frankly, I didn't, which is what debate we were having. And so I'd grown up starting with Reagan, and it was the big government versus small government debate. It was Barry Goldwater versus George McGovern, and that was the debate we had been having for a generation. It was: Democrats wanted to use government to enhance equality, Republicans wanted to limit government to enhance freedom. That was the debate. He understood what I think the two major parties did not, which was that's not the debate anymore. The debate is now open versus closed. On one side are those who have the tailwinds of globalization and the meritocracy blowing at their back, and they tend to favor open trade, open borders, open social mores, because there are so many opportunities. On the other side are those who feel the headwinds of globalization and the meritocracy just blasting in their faces, and they favor closed trade, closed borders, closed social mores, because they just want some security. And so he was right on that fundamental issue, and people were willing to overlook a lot to get there. And so he felt that sense of security.We're speaking the morning after Trump's joint session speech. There are three traditional groups in the Republican Party. There are the foreign policies hawks who believe in America as global policeman. Trump totally repudiated that view. Second, there was the social conservatives who believed in religious liberty, pro-life, prayer in schools. He totally ignored that. There was not a single mention of a single social conservative issue. And then there were the fiscal hawks, the people who wanted to cut down on the national debt, Tea Party, cut the size of government. He's expanding the size of government! Here's a man who has single-handedly revolutionized a major American party because he understood where the debate was headed before other people. And then guys like Steve Bannon come in and give him substance to his impulses.CA: And so take that a bit further, and maybe expand a bit more on your insights into Steve Bannon's worldview. Because he's sometimes tarred in very simple terms as this dangerous, racist, xenophobic, anger-sparking person. There's more to the story; that is perhaps an unfair simplification.DB: I think that part is true, but there's another part that's probably true, too. He's part of a global movement. It's like being around Marxists in 1917. There's him here, there's the UKIP party, there's the National Front in France, there's Putin, there's a Turkish version, a Philippine version. So we have to recognize that this is a global intellectual movement. And it believes that wisdom and virtue is not held in individual conversation and civility the way a lot of us in the enlightenment side of the world do. It's held in — the German word is the ""volk"" — in the people, in the common, instinctive wisdom of the plain people. And the essential virtue of that people is always being threatened by outsiders. And he's got a strategy for how to get there. He's got a series of policies to bring the people up and repudiate the outsiders, whether those outsiders are Islam, Mexicans, the media, the coastal elites... And there's a whole worldview there; it's a very coherent worldview. I sort of have more respect for him. I loathe what he stands for and I think he's wrong on the substance, but it's interesting to see someone with a set of ideas find a vehicle, Donald Trump, and then try to take control of the White House in order to advance his viewpoint.CA: So it's almost become, like, that the core question of our time now is: Can you be patriotic but also have a global mindset? Are these two things implacably opposed to each other? I mean, a lot of conservatives and, to the extent that it's a different category, a lot of Trump supporters, are infuriated by the coastal elites and the globalists because they see them as, sort of, not cheering for America, not embracing fully American values. I mean, have you seen that in your conversations with people, in your understanding of their mindset?GC: I do think that there's a huge difference between — I hate to put people in categories, but, Middle America versus people who live on the coasts. It's an entirely different existence. And I grew up in Minnesota, so I have an understanding of Middle America, and I've never forgotten it. And maybe that's why I have an understanding of what happened here, because those people often feel like nobody's listening to them, and that we're only concentrating on California and New York. And so I think that was a huge reason why Trump was elected. I mean, these people felt like they were being heard. Whether or not patriotism falls into that, I'm not sure about that. I do know one thing: a lot of things Trump talked about last night are not conservative things. Had Hillary Clinton gotten up and given that speech, not one Republican would have stood up to applaud. I mean, he's talking about spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure. That is not a conservative viewpoint. He talked about government-mandated maternity leave. A lot of women may love that; it's not a conservative viewpoint. So it's fascinating that people who loved what his message was during the campaign, I'm not sure — how do you think they'll react to that?DB: I should say I grew up in Lower Manhattan, in the triangle between ABC Carpets, the Strand Bookstore and The Odeon restaurant.(Laughter)GC: Come to Minnesota sometime!(Laughter)CA: You are a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, my man. But what did you make of the speech last night? It seemed to be a move to a more moderate position, on the face of it.DB: Yeah, I thought it was his best speech, and it took away the freakishness of him. I do think he's a moral freak, and I think he'll be undone by that fact, the fact that he just doesn't know anything about anything and is uncurious about it.(Laughter)But if you take away these minor flaws, I think we got to see him at his best, and it was revealing for me to see him at his best, because to me, it exposed a central contradiction that he's got to confront, that a lot of what he's doing is offering security. So, ""I'm ordering closed borders, I'm going to secure the world for you, for my people."" But then if you actually look at a lot of his economic policies, like health care reform, which is about private health care accounts, that's not security, that's risk. Educational vouchers: that's risk. Deregulation: that's risk. There's really a contradiction between the security of the mindset and a lot of the policies, which are very risk-oriented. And what I would say, especially having spent this year, the people in rural Minnesota, in New Mexico — they've got enough risk in their lives. And so they're going to say, ""No thank you."" And I think his health care repeal will fail for that reason.CA: But despite the criticisms you just made of him, it does at least seem that he's listening to a surprisingly wide range of voices; it's not like everyone is coming from the same place. And maybe that leads to a certain amount of chaos and confusion, but —GC: I actually don't think he's listening to a wide range of voices. I think he's listening to very few people. That's just my impression of it. I believe that some of the things he said last night had Ivanka all over them. So I believe he was listening to her before that speech. And he was Teleprompter Trump last night, as opposed to Twitter Trump. And that's why, before we came out here, I said, ""We better check Twitter to see if anything's changed."" And also I think you have to keep in mind that because he's such a unique character, what was the bar that we were expecting last night? Was it here or here or here? And so he comes out and gives a looking political speech, and everyone goes, ""Wow! He can do it."" It just depends on which direction he goes.DB: Yeah, and we're trying to build bridges here, and especially for an audience that may have contempt for Trump, it's important to say, no, this is a real thing. But as I try my best to go an hour showing respect for him, my thyroid is surging, because I think the oddities of his character really are condemnatory and are going to doom him.CA: Your reputation is as a conservative. People would you describe you as right of center, and yet here you are with this visceral reaction against him and some of what he stands for. I mean, I'm — how do you have a conversation? The people who support him, on evidence so far, are probably pretty excited. He's certainly shown real engagement in a lot of what he promised to do, and there is a strong desire to change the system radically. People hate what government has become and how it's left them out.GC: I totally agree with that, but I think that when he was proposing a huge government program last night that we used to call the bad s-word, ""stimulus,"" I find it completely ironic. To spend a trillion dollars on something — that is not a conservative viewpoint. Then again, I don't really believe he's a Republican.DB: And I would say, as someone who identifies as conservative: first of all, to be conservative is to believe in the limitations of politics. Samuel Johnson said, ""Of all the things that human hearts endure, how few are those that kings can cause and cure."" Politics is a limited realm; what matters most is the moral nature of the society. And so I have to think character comes first, and a man who doesn't pass the character threshold cannot be a good president. Second, I'm the kind of conservative who — I harken back to Alexander Hamilton, who was a Latino hip-hop star from the heights —(Laughter)but his definition of America was very future-oriented. He was a poor boy from the islands who had this rapid and amazing rise to success, and he wanted government to give poor boys and girls like him a chance to succeed, using limited but energetic government to create social mobility. For him and for Lincoln and for Teddy Roosevelt, the idea of America was the idea of the future. We may have division and racism and slavery in our past, but we have a common future. The definition of America that Steve Bannon stands for is backwards-looking. It's nostalgic; it's for the past. And that is not traditionally the American identity. That's traditionally, frankly, the Russian identity. That's how they define virtue. And so I think it is a fundamental and foundational betrayal of what conservatism used to stand for.CA: Well, I'd like actually like to hear from you, and if we see some comments coming in from some of you, we'll — oh, well here's one right now. Jeffrey Alan Carnegie: I've tried to convince progressive friends that they need to understand what motivates Trump supporters, yet many of them have given up trying to understand in the face of what they perceive as lies, selfishness and hatred. How would you reach out to such people, the Tea Party of the left, to try to bridge this divide?GC: I actually think there are commonalities in anger, as I expressed earlier. So I think you can come to the table, both being passionate about something. So at least you care. And I would like to believe — the c-word has also become a horrible word — ""compromise,"" right? So you have the far left and the far right, and compromise — forget it. Those groups don't want to even think about it. But you have a huge swath of voters, myself included, who are registered independents, like 40 percent of us, right? So there is a huge faction of America that wants to see change and wants to see people come together. It's just that we have to figure out how to do that.CA: So let's talk about that for a minute, because we're having these TED Dialogues, we're trying to bridge. There's a lot of people out there, right now, perhaps especially on the left, who think this is a terrible idea, that actually, the only moral response to the great tyranny that may be about to emerge in America is to resist it at every stage, is to fight it tooth and nail, it's a mistake to try and do this. Just fight! Is there a case for that?DB: It depends what ""fight"" means. If it means literal fighting, then no. If it means marching, well maybe marching to raise consciousness, that seems fine. But if you want change in this country, we do it through parties and politics. We organize parties, and those parties are big, diverse, messy coalitions, and we engage in politics, and politics is always morally unsatisfying because it's always a bunch of compromises. But politics is essentially a competition between partial truths. The Trump people have a piece of the truth in America. I think Trump himself is the wrong answer to the right question, but they have some truth, and it's truth found in the epidemic of opiates around the country, it's truth found in the spread of loneliness, it's the truth found in people whose lives are inverted. They peaked professionally at age 30, and it's all been downhill since. And so, understanding that doesn't take fighting, it takes conversation and then asking, ""What are we going to replace Trump with?""GC: But you saw fighting last night, even at the speech, because you saw the Democratic women who came and wore white to honor the suffragette movement. I remember back during the campaign where some Trump supporters wanted to actually get rid of the amendment that allowed us to vote as women. It was like, what? So I don't know if that's the right way to fight. It was interesting, because I was looking in the audience, trying to see Democratic women who didn't wear white. So there's a lot going on there, and there's a lot of ways to fight that are not necessarily doing that.CA: I mean, one of the key questions, to me, is: The people who voted for Trump but, if you like, are more in the center, like they're possibly amenable to persuasion — are they more likely to be persuaded by seeing a passionate uprising of people saying, ""No, no, no, you can't!"" or will that actually piss them off and push them away?DB: How are any of us persuaded? Am I going to persuade you by saying, ""Well, you're kind of a bigot, you're supporting bigotry, you're supporting sexism. You're a primitive, fascistic rise from some authoritarian past""? That's probably not going to be too persuasive to you. And so the way any of us are persuaded is by: a) some basic show of respect for the point of view, and saying, ""I think this guy is not going to get you where you need to go."" And there are two phrases you've heard over and over again, wherever you go in the country. One, the phrase ""flyover country."" And that's been heard for years, but I would say this year, I heard it almost on an hourly basis, a sense of feeling invisible. And then the sense a sense of the phrase ""political correctness."" Just that rebellion: ""They're not even letting us say what we think."" And I teach at Yale. The narrowing of debate is real.CA: So you would say this is a trap that liberals have fallen into by celebrating causes they really believe in, often expressed through the language of ""political correctness."" They have done damage. They have pushed people away.DB: I would say a lot of the argument, though, with ""descent to fascism,"" ""authoritarianism"" — that just feels over-the-top to people. And listen, I've written eight million anti-Trump columns, but it is a problem, especially for the coastal media, that every time he does something slightly wrong, we go to 11, and we're at 11 every day. And it just strains credibility at some point.CA: Crying wolf a little too loud and a little too early. But there may be a time when we really do have to cry wolf.GC: But see — one of the most important things to me is how the conservative media handles Trump. Will they call him out when things are not true, or will they just go along with it? To me, that is what is essential in this entire discussion, because when you have followers of somebody who don't really care if he tells the truth or not, that can be very dangerous. So to me, it's: How is the conservative media going to respond to it? I mean, you've been calling them out. But how will other forms of conservative media deal with that as we move forward?DB: It's all shifted, though. The conservative media used to be Fox or Charles Krauthammer or George Will. They're no longer the conservative media. Now there's another whole set of institutions further right, which is Breitbart and Infowars, Alex Jones, Laura Ingraham, and so they're the ones who are now his base, not even so much Fox.CA: My last question for the time being is just on this question of the truth. I mean, it's one of the scariest things to people right now, that there is no agreement, nationally, on what is true. I've never seen anything like it, where facts are so massively disputed. Your whole newspaper, sir, is delivering fake news every day.DB: And failing.(Laughter)CA: And failing. My commiserations. But is there any path whereby we can start to get some kind of consensus, to believe the same things? Can online communities play a role here? How do we fix this?GC: See, I understand how that happened. That's another groundswell kind of emotion that was going on in the middle of America and not being heard, in thinking that the mainstream media was biased. There's a difference, though, between being biased and being fake. To me, that is a very important distinction in this conversation. So let's just say that there was some bias in the mainstream media. OK. So there are ways to try and mend that. But what Trump's doing is nuclearizing that and saying, ""Look, we're just going to call all of that fake."" That's where it gets dangerous.CA: Do you think enough of his supporters have a greater loyalty to the truth than to any ... Like, the principle of not supporting something that is demonstrably not true actually matters, so there will be a correction at some point?DB: I think the truth eventually comes out. So for example, Donald Trump has based a lot of his economic policy on this supposition that Americans have lost manufacturing jobs because they've been stolen by the Chinese. That is maybe 13 percent of the jobs that left. The truth is that 87 percent of the jobs were replaced by technology. That is just the truth. And so as a result, when he says, ""I'm going to close TPP and all the jobs will come roaring back,"" they will not come roaring back. So that is an actual fact, in my belief. And —(Laughter)GC: But I'm saying what his supporters think is the truth, no matter how many times you might say that, they still believe him.DB: But eventually either jobs will come back or they will not come back, and at that point, either something will work or it doesn't work, and it doesn't work or not work because of great marketing, it works because it actually addresses a real problem and so I happen to think the truth will out.CA: If you've got a question, please raise your hand here.Yael Eisenstat: I'll speak into the box. My name's Yael Eisenstat. I hear a lot of this talk about how we all need to start talking to each other more and understanding each other more, and I've even written about this, published on this subject as well, but now today I keep hearing liberals — yes, I live in New York, I can be considered a liberal — we sit here and self-analyze: What did we do to not understand the Rust Belt? Or: What can we do to understand Middle America better? And what I'd like to know: Have you seen any attempts or conversations from Middle America of what can I do to understand the so-called coastal elites better? Because I'm just offended as being put in a box as a coastal elite as someone in Middle America is as being considered a flyover state and not listened to.CA: There you go, I can hear Facebook cheering as you —(Laughter)DB: I would say — and this is someone who has been conservative all my adult life — when you grow up conservative, you learn to speak both languages. Because if I'm going to listen to music, I'm not going to listen to Ted Nugent. So a lot of my favorite rock bands are all on the left. If I'm going to go to a school, I'm going probably to school where the culture is liberal. If I'm going to watch a sitcom or a late-night comedy show, it's going to be liberal. If I'm going to read a good newspaper, it'll be the New York Times. As a result, you learn to speak both languages. And that actually, at least for a number of years, when I started at National Review with William F. Buckley, it made us sharper, because we were used to arguing against people every day. The problem now that's happened is you have ghettoization on the right and you can live entirely in rightworld, so as a result, the quality of argument on the right has diminished, because you're not in the other side all the time. But I do think if you're living in Minnesota or Iowa or Arizona, the coastal elites make themselves aware to you, so you know that language as well, but it's not the reverse.CA: But what does Middle America not get about coastal elites? So the critique is, you are not dealing with the real problems. There's a feeling of a snobbishness, an elitism that is very off-putting. What are they missing? If you could plant one piece of truth from the mindset of someone in this room, for example, what would you say to them?DB: Just how insanely wonderful we are.(Laughter)No, I reject the category. The problem with populism is the same problem with elitism. It's just a prejudice on the basis of probably an over-generalized  social class distinction which is too simplistic to apply in reality. Those of us in New York know there are some people in New York who are completely awesome, and some people who are pathetic, and if you live in Iowa, some people are awesome and some people are pathetic. It's not a question of what degree you have or where you happen to live in the country. The distinction is just a crude simplification to arouse political power.GC: But I would encourage people to watch a television news show or read a column that they normally wouldn't. So if you are a Trump supporter, watch the other side for a day, because you need to come out of the bubble if you're ever going to have a conversation. And both sides — so if you're a liberal, then watch something that's very conservative. Read a column that is not something you would normally read, because then you gain perspective of what the other side is thinking, and to me, that's a start of coming together. I worry about the same thing you worry about, these bubbles. I think if you only watch certain entities, you have no idea what the rest of the world is talking about.DB: I think not only watching, being part of an organization that meets at least once a month that puts you in direct contact with people completely unlike yourself is something we all have a responsibility for. I may get this a little wrong, but I think of the top-selling automotive models in this country, I think the top three or four are all pickup trucks. So ask yourself: How many people do I know who own a pickup truck? And it could be very few or zero for a lot of people. And that's sort of a warning sign kind of a problem. Where can I join a club where I'll have a lot in common with a person who drives a pickup truck because we have a common interest in whatever?CA: And so the internet is definitely contributing to this. A question here from Chris Ajemian: ""How do you feel structure of communications, especially the prevalence of social media and individualized content, can be used to bring together a political divide, instead of just filing communities into echo chambers?"" I mean, it looks like Facebook and Google, since the election, are working hard on this question. They're trying to change the algorithms so that they don't amplify fake news to the extent that it happened last time round. Do you see any other promising signs of ...?GC: ... or amplify one side of the equation.CA: Exactly.GC: I think that was the constant argument from the right, that social media and the internet in general was putting articles towards the top that were not their worldview. I think, again, that fed into the anger. It fed into the anger of: ""You're pushing something that's not what I believe."" But social media has obviously changed everything, and I think Trump is the example of Twitter changing absolutely everything. And from his point of view, he's reaching the American people without a filter, which he believes the media is.CA: Question from the audience.Destiny: Hi. I'm Destiny. I have a question regarding political correctness, and I'm curious: When did political correctness become synonymous with silencing, versus a way that we speak about other people to show them respect and preserve their dignity?GC: Well, I think the conservative media really pounded this issue for the last 10 years. I think that they really, really spent a lot of time talking about political correctness, and how people should have the ability to say what they think. Another reason why Trump became so popular: because he says what he thinks. It also makes me think about the fact that I do believe there are a lot of people in America who agree with Steve Bannon, but they would never say it publicly, and so voting for Trump gave them the opportunity to agree with it silently.DB: On the issue of immigration, it's a legitimate point of view that we have too many immigrants in the country, that it's economically costly.CA: That we have too many —DB: Immigrants in the country, especially from Britain.(Laughter)GC: I kind of like the British accent, OK?CA: I apologize. America, I am sorry.(Laughter)I'll go now.DB: But it became sort of impermissible to say that, because it was a sign that somehow you must be a bigot of some sort. So the political correctness was not only cracking down on speech that we would all find completely offensive, it was cracking down on some speech that was legitimate, and then it was turning speech and thought into action and treating it as a crime, and people getting fired and people thrown out of schools, and there were speech codes written. Now there are these diversity teams, where if you say something that somebody finds offensive, like, ""Smoking is really dangerous,"" you can say ""You're insulting my group,"" and the team from the administration will come down into your dorm room and put thought police upon you. And so there has been a genuine narrowing of what is permissible to say. And some of it is legitimate. There are certain words that there should be some social sanction against, but some of it was used to enforce a political agenda.CA: So is that a project you would urge on liberals, if you like — progressives — to rethink the ground rules around political correctness and accept a little more uncomfortable language in certain circumstances? Can you see that being solved to an extent that others won't be so offended?DB: I mean, most American universities, especially elite universities, are overwhelmingly on the left, and there's just an ease of temptation to use your overwhelming cultural power to try to enforce some sort of thought that you think is right and correct thought. So, be a little more self-suspicious of, are we doing that? And second, my university, the University of Chicago, sent out this letter saying, we will have no safe spaces. There will be no critique of micro-aggression. If you get your feelings hurt, well, welcome to the world of education. I do think that policy — which is being embraced by a lot of people on the left, by the way — is just a corrective to what's happened.CA: So here's a question from Karen Holloway: How do we foster an American culture that's forward-looking, like Hamilton, that expects and deals with change, rather than wanting to have everything go back to some fictional past? That's an easy question, right?GC: Well, I'm still a believer in the American dream, and I think what we can teach our children is the basics, which is that hard work and believing in yourself in America, you can achieve whatever you want. I was told that every single day. When I got in the real world, I was like, wow, that's maybe not always so true. But I still believe in that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic. So I still look towards the future for that to continue.DB: I think you're being too optimistic.GC: You do?DB: The odds of an American young person exceeding their parents' salary — a generation ago, like 86 percent did it. Now 51 percent do it. There's just been a problem in social mobility in the country.CA: You've written that this entire century has basically been a disaster, that the age of sunny growth is over and we're in deep trouble.DB: Yeah, I mean, we averaged, in real terms, population-adjusted, two or three percent growth for 50 years, and now we've had less than one percent growth. And so there's something seeping out. And so if I'm going to tell people that they should take risks, one of the things we're seeing is a rapid decline in mobility, the number of people who are moving across state lines, and that's especially true among millennials. It's young people that are moving less. So how do we give people the security from which they can take risk? And I'm a big believer in attachment theory of raising children, and attachment theory is based on the motto that all of life is a series of daring adventures from a secure base. Have you parents given you a secure base? And as a society, we do not have a secure base, and we won't get to that ""Hamilton,"" risk-taking, energetic ethos until we can supply a secure base.CA: So I wonder whether there's ground here to create almost like a shared agenda, a bridging conversation, on the one hand recognizing that there is this really deep problem that the system, the economic system that we built, seems to be misfiring right now. Second, that maybe, if you're right that it's not all about immigrants, it's probably more about technology, if you could win that argument, that de-emphasizes what seems to me the single most divisive territory between Trump supporters and others, which is around the role of the other. It's very offensive to people on the left to have the other demonized to the extent that the other seems to be demonized. That feels deeply immoral, and maybe people on the left could agree, as you said, that immigration may have happened too fast, and there is a limit beyond which human societies struggle, but nonetheless this whole problem becomes de-emphasized if automation is the key issue, and then we try to work together on recognizing that it's real, recognizing that the problem probably wasn't properly addressed or seen or heard, and try to figure out how to rebuild communities using, well, using what? That seems to me to become the fertile conversation of the future: How do we rebuild communities in this modern age, with technology doing what it's doing, and reimagine this bright future?GC: That's why I go back to optimism. I'm not being ... it's not like I'm not looking at the facts, where we've come or where we've come from. But for gosh sakes, if we don't look at it from an optimistic point of view — I'm refusing to do that just yet. I'm not raising my 12- and 13-year-old to say, ""Look, the world is dim.""CA; We're going to have one more question from the room here.Questioner: Hi. Hello. Sorry. You both mentioned the infrastructure plan and Russia and some other things that wouldn't be traditional Republican priorities. What do you think, or when, will Republicans be motivated to take a stand against Trumpism?GC: After last night, not for a while. He changed a lot last night, I believe.DB: His popularity among Republicans — he's got 85 percent approval, which is higher than Reagan had at this time, and that's because society has just gotten more polarized. So people follow the party much more than they used to. So if you're waiting for Paul Ryan and the Republicans in Congress to flake away, it's going to take a little while.GC: But also because they're all concerned about reelection, and Trump has so much power with getting people either for you or against you, and so, they're vacillating every day, probably: ""Well, should I go against or should I not?"" But last night, where he finally sounded presidential, I think most Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief today.DB: The half-life of that is short.GC: Right — I was just going to say, until Twitter happens again.CA: OK, I want to give each of you the chance to imagine you're speaking to — I don't know — the people online who are watching this, who may be Trump supporters, who may be on the left, somewhere in the middle. How would you advise them to bridge or to relate to other people? Can you share any final wisdom on this? Or if you think that they shouldn't, tell them that as well.GC: I would just start by saying that I really think any change and coming together starts from the top, just like any other organization. And I would love if, somehow, Trump supporters or people on the left could encourage their leaders to show that compassion from the top, because imagine the change that we could have if Donald Trump tweeted out today, to all of his supporters, ""Let's not be vile anymore to each other. Let's have more understanding. As a leader, I'm going to be more inclusive to all of the people of America."" To me, it starts at the top. Is he going to do that? I have no idea. But I think that everything starts from the top, and the power that he has in encouraging his supporters to have an understanding of where people are coming from on the other side.CA: David. DB: Yeah, I guess I would say I don't think we can teach each other to be civil, and give us sermons on civility. That's not going to do it. It's substance and how we act, and the nice thing about Donald Trump is he smashed our categories. All the categories that we thought we were thinking in, they're obsolete. They were great for the 20th century. They're not good for today. He's got an agenda which is about closing borders and closing trade. I just don't think it's going to work. I think if we want to rebuild communities, recreate jobs, we need a different set of agenda that smashes through all our current divisions and our current categories. For me, that agenda is Reaganism on macroeconomic policy, Sweden on welfare policy and cuts across right and left. I think we have to have a dynamic economy that creates growth. That's the Reagan on economic policy. But people have to have that secure base. There have to be nurse-family partnerships; there has to be universal preschool; there have to be charter schools; there have to be college programs with wraparound programs for parents and communities. We need to help heal the crisis of social solidarity in this country and help heal families, and government just has to get a lot more involved in the way liberals like to rebuild communities. At the other hand, we have to have an economy that's free and open the way conservatives used to like. And so getting the substance right is how you smash through the partisan identities, because the substance is what ultimately shapes our polarization.CA: David and Gretchen, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you. That was really, really interesting.(Applause)Hey, let's keep the conversation going. We're continuing to try and figure out whether we can add something here, so keep the conversation going on Facebook. Give us your thoughts from whatever part of the political spectrum you're on, and actually, wherever in the world you are. This is not just about America. It's about the world, too. But we're not going to end today without music, because if we put music in every political conversation, the world would be completely different, frankly. It just would.(Applause)Up in Harlem, this extraordinary woman, Vy Higginsen, who's actually right here — let's get a shot of her.(Applause)She created this program that brings teens together, teaches them the joy and the impact of gospel music, and hundreds of teens have gone through this program. It's transformative for them. The music they made, as you already heard, is extraordinary, and I can't think of a better way of ending this TED Dialogue than welcoming Vy Higginsen's Gospel Choir from Harlem. Thank you.(Applause)(Singing) Choir: O beautiful for spacious skies For amber waves of grain For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain America! America! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea From sea to shining sea(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/gretchen_carlson_david_brooks_political_common_ground_in_a_polarized_united_states
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"In the movie ""Interstellar,"" we get an up-close look at a supermassive black hole. Set against a backdrop of bright gas, the black hole's massive gravitational pull bends light into a ring. However, this isn't a real photograph, but a computer graphic rendering — an artistic interpretation of what a black hole might look like.A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein first published his theory of general relativity. In the years since then, scientists have provided a lot of evidence in support of it. But one thing predicted from this theory, black holes, still have not been directly observed. Although we have some idea as to what a black hole might look like, we've never actually taken a picture of one before. However, you might be surprised to know that that may soon change. We may be seeing our first picture of a black hole in the next couple years. Getting this first picture will come down to an international team of scientists, an Earth-sized telescope and an algorithm that puts together the final picture. Although I won't be able to show you a real picture of a black hole today, I'd like to give you a brief glimpse into the effort involved in getting that first picture.My name is Katie Bouman, and I'm a PhD student at MIT. I do research in a computer science lab that works on making computers see through images and video. But although I'm not an astronomer, today I'd like to show you how I've been able to contribute to this exciting project.If you go out past the bright city lights tonight, you may just be lucky enough to see a stunning view of the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you could zoom past millions of stars, 26,000 light-years toward the heart of the spiraling Milky Way, we'd eventually reach a cluster of stars right at the center. Peering past all the galactic dust with infrared telescopes, astronomers have watched these stars for over 16 years. But it's what they don't see that is the most spectacular. These stars seem to orbit an invisible object. By tracking the paths of these stars, astronomers have concluded that the only thing small and heavy enough to cause this motion is a supermassive black hole — an object so dense that it sucks up anything that ventures too close — even light.But what happens if we were to zoom in even further? Is it possible to see something that, by definition, is impossible to see? Well, it turns out that if we were to zoom in at radio wavelengths, we'd expect to see a ring of light caused by the gravitational lensing of hot plasma zipping around the black hole. In other words, the black hole casts a shadow on this backdrop of bright material, carving out a sphere of darkness. This bright ring reveals the black hole's event horizon, where the gravitational pull becomes so great that not even light can escape. Einstein's equations predict the size and shape of this ring, so taking a picture of it wouldn't only be really cool, it would also help to verify that these equations hold in the extreme conditions around the black hole.However, this black hole is so far away from us, that from Earth, this ring appears incredibly small — the same size to us as an orange on the surface of the moon. That makes taking a picture of it extremely difficult. Why is that? Well, it all comes down to a simple equation. Due to a phenomenon called diffraction, there are fundamental limits to the smallest objects that we can possibly see. This governing equation says that in order to see smaller and smaller, we need to make our telescope bigger and bigger. But even with the most powerful optical telescopes here on Earth, we can't even get close to the resolution necessary to image on the surface of the moon. In fact, here I show one of the highest resolution images ever taken of the moon from Earth. It contains roughly 13,000 pixels, and yet each pixel would contain over 1.5 million oranges.So how big of a telescope do we need in order to see an orange on the surface of the moon and, by extension, our black hole? Well, it turns out that by crunching the numbers, you can easily calculate that we would need a telescope the size of the entire Earth.(Laughter)If we could build this Earth-sized telescope, we could just start to make out that distinctive ring of light indicative of the black hole's event horizon. Although this picture wouldn't contain all the detail we see in computer graphic renderings, it would allow us to safely get our first glimpse of the immediate environment around a black hole.However, as you can imagine, building a single-dish telescope the size of the Earth is impossible. But in the famous words of Mick Jagger, ""You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need."" And by connecting telescopes from around the world, an international collaboration called the Event Horizon Telescope is creating a computational telescope the size of the Earth, capable of resolving structure on the scale of a black hole's event horizon. This network of telescopes is scheduled to take its very first picture of a black hole next year. Each telescope in the worldwide network works together. Linked through the precise timing of atomic clocks, teams of researchers at each of the sights freeze light by collecting thousands of terabytes of data. This data is then processed in a lab right here in Massachusetts.So how does this even work? Remember if we want to see the black hole in the center of our galaxy, we need to build this impossibly large Earth-sized telescope? For just a second, let's pretend we could build a telescope the size of the Earth. This would be a little bit like turning the Earth into a giant spinning disco ball. Each individual mirror would collect light that we could then combine together to make a picture. However, now let's say we remove most of those mirrors so only a few remained. We could still try to combine this information together, but now there are a lot of holes. These remaining mirrors represent the locations where we have telescopes. This is an incredibly small number of measurements to make a picture from. But although we only collect light at a few telescope locations, as the Earth rotates, we get to see other new measurements. In other words, as the disco ball spins, those mirrors change locations and we get to observe different parts of the image. The imaging algorithms we develop fill in the missing gaps of the disco ball in order to reconstruct the underlying black hole image. If we had telescopes located everywhere on the globe — in other words, the entire disco ball — this would be trivial. However, we only see a few samples, and for that reason, there are an infinite number of possible images that are perfectly consistent with our telescope measurements. However, not all images are created equal. Some of those images look more like what we think of as images than others. And so, my role in helping to take the first image of a black hole is to design algorithms that find the most reasonable image that also fits the telescope measurements.Just as a forensic sketch artist uses limited descriptions to piece together a picture using their knowledge of face structure, the imaging algorithms I develop use our limited telescope data to guide us to a picture that also looks like stuff in our universe. Using these algorithms, we're able to piece together pictures from this sparse, noisy data. So here I show a sample reconstruction done using simulated data, when we pretend to point our telescopes to the black hole in the center of our galaxy. Although this is just a simulation, reconstruction such as this give us hope that we'll soon be able to reliably take the first image of a black hole and from it, determine the size of its ring. Although I'd love to go on about all the details of this algorithm, luckily for you, I don't have the time.But I'd still like to give you a brief idea of how we define what our universe looks like, and how we use this to reconstruct and verify our results. Since there are an infinite number of possible images that perfectly explain our telescope measurements, we have to choose between them in some way. We do this by ranking the images based upon how likely they are to be the black hole image, and then choosing the one that's most likely.So what do I mean by this exactly? Let's say we were trying to make a model that told us how likely an image were to appear on Facebook. We'd probably want the model to say it's pretty unlikely that someone would post this noise image on the left, and pretty likely that someone would post a selfie like this one on the right. The image in the middle is blurry, so even though it's more likely we'd see it on Facebook compared to the noise image, it's probably less likely we'd see it compared to the selfie.But when it comes to images from the black hole, we're posed with a real conundrum: we've never seen a black hole before. In that case, what is a likely black hole image, and what should we assume about the structure of black holes? We could try to use images from simulations we've done, like the image of the black hole from ""Interstellar,"" but if we did this, it could cause some serious problems. What would happen if Einstein's theories didn't hold? We'd still want to reconstruct an accurate picture of what was going on. If we bake Einstein's equations too much into our algorithms, we'll just end up seeing what we expect to see. In other words, we want to leave the option open for there being a giant elephant at the center of our galaxy.(Laughter)Different types of images have very distinct features. We can easily tell the difference between black hole simulation images and images we take every day here on Earth. We need a way to tell our algorithms what images look like without imposing one type of image's features too much. One way we can try to get around this is by imposing the features of different kinds of images and seeing how the type of image we assume affects our reconstructions. If all images' types produce a very similar-looking image, then we can start to become more confident that the image assumptions we're making are not biasing this picture that much.This is a little bit like giving the same description to three different sketch artists from all around the world. If they all produce a very similar-looking face, then we can start to become confident that they're not imposing their own cultural biases on the drawings. One way we can try to impose different image features is by using pieces of existing images. So we take a large collection of images, and we break them down into their little image patches. We then can treat each image patch a little bit like pieces of a puzzle. And we use commonly seen puzzle pieces to piece together an image that also fits our telescope measurements.Different types of images have very distinctive sets of puzzle pieces. So what happens when we take the same data but we use different sets of puzzle pieces to reconstruct the image? Let's first start with black hole image simulation puzzle pieces. OK, this looks reasonable. This looks like what we expect a black hole to look like. But did we just get it because we just fed it little pieces of black hole simulation images? Let's try another set of puzzle pieces from astronomical, non-black hole objects. OK, we get a similar-looking image. And then how about pieces from everyday images, like the images you take with your own personal camera? Great, we see the same image. When we get the same image from all different sets of puzzle pieces, then we can start to become more confident that the image assumptions we're making aren't biasing the final image we get too much.Another thing we can do is take the same set of puzzle pieces, such as the ones derived from everyday images, and use them to reconstruct many different kinds of source images. So in our simulations, we pretend a black hole looks like astronomical non-black hole objects, as well as everyday images like the elephant in the center of our galaxy. When the results of our algorithms on the bottom look very similar to the simulation's truth image on top, then we can start to become more confident in our algorithms. And I really want to emphasize here that all of these pictures were created by piecing together little pieces of everyday photographs, like you'd take with your own personal camera. So an image of a black hole we've never seen before may eventually be created by piecing together pictures we see all the time of people, buildings, trees, cats and dogs. Imaging ideas like this will make it possible for us to take our very first pictures of a black hole, and hopefully, verify those famous theories on which scientists rely on a daily basis.But of course, getting imaging ideas like this working would never have been possible without the amazing team of researchers that I have the privilege to work with. It still amazes me that although I began this project with no background in astrophysics, what we have achieved through this unique collaboration could result in the very first images of a black hole. But big projects like the Event Horizon Telescope are successful due to all the interdisciplinary expertise different people bring to the table. We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers. This is what will make it soon possible to achieve something once thought impossible.I'd like to encourage all of you to go out and help push the boundaries of science, even if it may at first seem as mysterious to you as a black hole.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like
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"[This talk contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.]This is Nina Rodríguez's Facebook profile. This person had three different profiles and 890 kids between 8 and 13 years old among her friends list. These are excerpts of a chat with one of those kids. This is an exact copy of the chat. It's part of the case file. This kid started sending private photos until his family realized what was going on. The police report and subsequent investigation lead them to a house. This was the girl's bedroom. Nina Rodríguez was actually a 24-year-old man that used to do this with lots of kids.Micaela Ortega was 12 years old when she went to meet her new Facebook friend, also 12. ""Rochi de River,"" was her name. She actually met Jonathan Luna, who was 26 years old. When they finally caught him, he confessed that he killed the girl because she refused to have sex with him. He had four Facebook profiles and 1,700 women on his contact list; 90 percent of them were under 13 years old.These are two different cases of ""grooming"": an adult contacts a kid through the internet, and through manipulation or lying, leads that kid into sexual territory — from talking about sex to sharing private photos, recording the kid using a webcam or arranging an in-person meeting. This is grooming. This is happening, and it's on the rise. The question is: What are we going to do? Because, in the meantime, kids are alone. They finish dinner, go to their rooms, close the door, get on their computer, their cell phones, and get into a bar, into a club.Think for one second about what I've just said: they're in a place full of strangers in an uninhibited environment. The internet broke physical boundaries. When we're alone in our bedroom and we go online, we're not really alone.There are at least two reasons why we're not taking care of this, or at least not in the right way. First, we're sure that everything that happens online is ""virtual."" In fact, we call it ""the virtual world."" If you look it up in the dictionary, something virtual is something that seems to exist but is not real. And we use that word to talk about the internet: something not real. And that's the problem with grooming. It is real. Degenerate, perverted adults use the internet to abuse boys and girls and take advantage of, among other things, the fact that the kids and their parents think that what happens online doesn't actually happen.Several years ago, some colleagues and I founded an NGO called ""Argentina Cibersegura,"" dedicated to raising awareness about online safety. In 2013, we attended meetings at the House of Legislature to discuss a law about grooming. I remember that a lot of people thought that grooming was strictly a precursor to arranging an in-person meeting with a kid to have sex with them. But they didn't think about what happened to the kids who were exposed by talking about sex with an adult without knowing it, or who shared intimate photos thinking only another kid would see them, or even worse, who had exposed themselves using their web cam. Nobody considered that rape. I'm sure lots of you find it odd to think one person can abuse another without physical contact. We're programmed to think that way. I know, because I used to think that way. I was just an IT security guy until this happened to me.At the end of 2011, in a little town in Buenos Aires Province, I heard about a case for the first time. After giving a talk, I met the parents of an 11-year-old girl who had been a victim of grooming. A man had manipulated her into masturbating in front of her web cam, and recorded it. And the video was on several websites. That day, her parents asked us, in tears, to tell them the magic formula for how to delete those videos from the internet. It broke my heart and changed me forever to be their last disappointment, telling them it was too late: once content is online, we've already lost control.Since that day, I think about that girl waking up in the morning, having breakfast with her family, who had seen the video, and then walking to school, meeting people that had seen her naked, arriving to school, playing with her friends, who had also seen her. That was her life. Exposed. Of course, nobody raped her body. But hadn't her sexuality been abused?We clearly use different standards to measure physical and digital things. And we get angry at social networks because being angry with ourselves is more painful and more true. And this brings us to the second reason why we aren't paying proper attention to this issue. We're convinced that kids don't need our help, that they ""know everything"" about technology.When I was a kid, at one point, my parents started letting me walk to school alone. After years of taking me by the hand and walking me to school, one day they sat me down, gave me the house keys and said, ""Be very careful with these; don't give them to anyone, take the route we showed you, be at home at the time we said, cross at the corner, and look both ways before you cross, and no matter what, don't talk to strangers."" I knew everything about walking, and yet, there was a responsible adult there taking care of me. Knowing how to do something is one thing, knowing how to take care of yourself is another. Imagine this situation: I'm 10 or 11 years old, I wake up in the morning, my parents toss me the keys and say, ""Seba, now you can walk to school alone."" And when I come back late, they say, ""No, you need to be home at the time we said."" And two weeks later, when it comes up, they say, ""You know what? You have to cross at the corner, and look both ways before crossing."" And two years later, they say, ""And also, don't talk to strangers."" It sounds absurd, right?We have the same absurd behavior in relation to technology. We give kids total access and we see if one day, sooner or later, they learn how to take care of themselves. Knowing how to do something is one thing, knowing how to take care of yourself is another.Along those same lines, when we talk to parents, they often say they don't care about technology and social networks. I always rejoin that by asking if they care about their kids. As adults, being interested or not in technology is the same as being interested or not in our kids. The internet is part of their lives. Technology forces us to rethink the relationship between adults and kids. Education was always based on two main concepts: experience and knowledge. How do we teach our kids to be safe online when we don't have either?Nowadays, we adults have to guide our children through what is often for us unfamiliar territory — territory much more inviting for them. It's impossible to find an answer without doing new things — things that make us uncomfortable, things we're not used to.A lot of you may think it's easy for me, because I'm relatively young. And it used to be that way. Used to. Until last year, when I felt the weight of my age on my shoulders the first time I opened Snapchat.(Laughter)(Applause)I didn't understand a thing! I found it unnecessary, useless, hard to understand; it looked like a camera! It didn't have menu options! It was the first time I felt the gap that sometimes exists between kids and adults. But it was also an opportunity to do the right thing, to leave my comfort zone, to force myself. I never thought I'd ever use Snapchat, but then I asked my teenage cousin to show me how to use it. I also asked why she used it. What was fun about it? We had a really nice talk. She showed me her Snapchat, she told me things, we got closer, we laughed. Today, I use it.(Laughter)I don't know if I do it right, but the most important thing is that I know it and I understand it. The key was to overcome the initial shock and do something new. Something new. Today, we have the chance to create new conversations. What's the last app you downloaded? Which social network do you use to contact your friends? What kind of information do you share? Have you ever been approached by strangers? Could we have these conversations between kids and adults? We have to force ourselves to do it. All of us. Today, lots of kids are listening to us. Sometimes when we go to schools to give our talks, or through social networks, kids ask or tell us things they haven't told their parents or their teachers. They tell us — they don't even know us. Those kids need to know what the risks of being online are, how to take care of themselves, but also that, fundamentally, as with almost everything else, kids can learn this from any adult.Online safety needs to be a conversation topic in every house and every classroom in the country. We did a survey this year that showed that 15 percent of schools said they knew of cases of grooming in their school. And this number is growing. Technology changed every aspect of our life, including the risks we face and how we take care of ourselves.Grooming shows us this in the most painful way: by involving our kids. Are we going to do something to avoid this? The solution starts with something as easy as: talking about it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_bortnik_the_conversation_we_re_not_having_about_digital_child_abuse
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"An article in the Yale Alumni Magazine told the story of Clyde Murphy, a black man who was a member of the Class of 1970. Clyde was a success story. After Yale and a law degree from Columbia, Clyde spent the next 30 years as one of America's top civil rights lawyers. He was also a great husband and father. But despite his success, personally and professionally, Clyde's story had a sad ending.In 2010, at the age of 62, Clyde died from a blood clot in his lung. Clyde's experience was not unique. Many of his black classmates from Yale also died young. In fact, the magazine article indicated that 41 years after graduation from Yale, the black members of the Class of 1970 had a death rate that was three times higher than that of the average class member. It's stunning.America has recently awakened to a steady drumbeat of unarmed black men being shot by the police. What is even a bigger story is that every seven minutes, a black person dies prematurely in the United States. That is over 200 black people die every single day who would not die if the health of blacks and whites were equal.For the last 25 years, I have been on a mission to understand why does race matter so profoundly for health. When I started my career, many believed that it was simply about racial differences in income and education. I discovered that while economic status matters for health, there is more to the story. So for example, if we look at life expectancy at age 25, at age 25 there's a five-year gap between blacks and whites. And the gap by education for both whites and blacks is even larger than the racial gap. At the same time, at every level of education, whites live longer than blacks. So whites who are high school dropouts live 3.4 years longer than their black counterparts, and the gap is even larger among college graduates. Most surprising of all, whites who have graduated from high school live longer than blacks with a college degree or more education.So why does race matter so profoundly for health? What else is it beyond education and income that might matter?In the early 1990s, I was asked to review a new book on the health of black America. I was struck that almost every single one of its 25 chapters said that racism was a factor that was hurting the health of blacks. All of these researchers were stating that racism was a factor adversely impacting blacks, but they provided no evidence. For me, that was not good enough.A few months later, I was speaking at a conference in Washington, DC, and I said that one of the priorities for research was to document the ways in which racism affected health. A white gentleman stood in the audience and said that while he agreed with me that racism was important, we could never measure racism. ""We measure self-esteem,"" I said. ""There's no reason why we can't measure racism if we put our minds to it.""And so I put my mind to it and developed three scales. The first one captured major experiences of discrimination, like being unfairly fired or being unfairly stopped by the police. But discrimination also occurs in more minor and subtle experiences, and so my second scale, called the Everyday Discrimination Scale, captures nine items that captures experiences like you're treated with less courtesy than others, you receive poorer service than others in restaurants or stores, or people act as if they're afraid of you. This scale captures ways in which the dignity and the respect of people who society does not value is chipped away on a daily basis.Research has found that higher levels of discrimination are associated with an elevated risk of a broad range of diseases from blood pressure to abdominal obesity to breast cancer to heart disease and even premature mortality. Strikingly, some of the effects are observed at a very young age. For example, a study of black teens found that those who reported higher levels of discrimination as teenagers had higher levels of stress hormones, of blood pressure and of weight at age 20. However, the stress of discrimination is only one aspect.Discrimination and racism also matters in other profound ways for health. For example, there's discrimination in medical care. In 1999, the National Academy of Medicine asked me to serve on a committee that found, concluded based on the scientific evidence, that blacks and other minorities receive poorer quality care than whites. This was true for all kinds of medical treatment, from the most simple to the most technologically sophisticated. One explanation for this pattern was a phenomenon that's called ""implicit bias"" or ""unconscious discrimination."" Research for decades by social psychologists indicates that if you hold a negative stereotype about a group in your subconscious mind and you meet someone from that group, you will discriminate against that person. You will treat them differently. It's an unconscious process. It's an automatic process. It is a subtle process, but it's normal and it occurs even among the most well-intentioned individuals.But the deeper that I delved into the health impact of racism, the more insidious the effects became. There is institutional discrimination, which refers to discrimination that exists in the processes of social institutions. Residential segregation by race, which has led to blacks and whites living in very different neighborhood contexts, is a classic example of institutional racism. One of America's best-kept secrets is how residential segregation is the secret source that creates racial inequality in the United States. In America, where you live determines your access to opportunities in education, in employment, in housing and even in access to medical care. One study of the 171 largest cities in the United States concluded that there is not even one city where whites live under equal conditions to blacks, and that the worst urban contexts in which whites reside is considerably better than the average context of black communities. Another study found that if you could eliminate statistically residential segregation, you would completely erase black-white differences in income, education and unemployment, and reduce black-white differences in single motherhood by two thirds, all of that driven by segregation. I have also learned how the negative stereotypes and images of blacks in our culture literally create and sustain both institutional and individual discrimination.A group of researchers have put together a database that contains the books, magazines and articles that an average college-educated American would read over their lifetime. It allows us to look within this database and see how Americans have seen words paired together as they grow up in their society. So when the word ""black"" appears in American culture, what co-occurs with it? ""Poor,"" ""violent,"" ""religious,"" ""lazy,"" ""cheerful,"" ""dangerous."" When ""white"" occurs, the frequently co-occurring words are ""wealthy,"" ""progressive,"" ""conventional,"" ""stubborn,"" ""successful,"" ""educated."" So when a police officer overreacts when he sees an unarmed black male and perceives him to be violent and dangerous, we are not necessarily dealing with an inherently bad cop. We may be simply viewing a normal American who is reflecting what he has been exposed to as a result of being raised in this society.From my own experience, I believe that your race does not have to be a determinant of your destiny. I migrated to the United States from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia in the late 1970s in pursuit of higher education, and in the last 40 years, I have done well. I have had a supportive family, I have worked hard, I have done well. But it took more for me to be successful. I received a minority fellowship from the University of Michigan. Yes. I am an affirmative action baby. Without affirmative action, I would not be here.But in the last 40 years, black America has been less successful than I have. In 1978, black households in the United States earned 59 cents for every dollar of income whites earned. In 2015, black families still earn 59 cents for every dollar of income that white families receive, and the racial gaps in wealth are even more stunning. For every dollar of wealth that whites have, black families have six pennies and Latinos have seven pennies.The fact is, racism is producing a truly rigged system that is systematically disadvantaging some racial groups in the United States. To paraphrase Plato, there is nothing so unfair as the equal treatment of unequal people. And that's why I am committed to working to dismantle racism.I deeply appreciate the fact that I am standing on the shoulders of those who have sacrificed even their lives to open the doors that I have walked through. I want to ensure that those doors remain open and that everyone can walk through those doors. Robert Kennedy said, ""Each time a man"" — or woman, I would add — ""stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples can build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.""I am optimistic today because all across America, I have seen ripples of hope. The Boston Medical Center has added lawyers to the medical team so that physicians can improve the health of their patients because the lawyers are addressing the nonmedical needs their patients have. Loma Linda University has built a gateway college in nearby San Bernardino so that in addition to delivering medical care, they can provide job skills and job training to a predominantly minority, low-income community members so that they will have the skills they need to get a decent job. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Abecedarian Project has figured out how to ensure that they have lowered the risks for heart disease for blacks in their mid-30s by providing high-quality day care from birth to age five. In after-school centers across the United States, Wintley Phipps and the US Dream Academy is breaking the cycle of incarceration by providing high-quality academic enrichment and mentoring to the children of prisoners and children who have fallen behind in school. In Huntsville, Alabama, Oakwood University, a historically black institution, is showing how we can improve the health of black adults by including a health evaluation as a part of freshman orientation and giving those students the tools they need to make healthy choices and providing them annually a health transcript so they can monitor their progress. And in Atlanta, Georgia, Purpose Built Communities has dismantled the negative effects of segregation by transforming a crime-ridden, drug-infested public housing project into an oasis of mixed-income housing, of academic performance, of great community wellness and of full employment. And finally, there is the Devine solution. Professor Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin has shown us how we can attack our hidden biases head on and effectively reduce them. Each one of us can be a ripple of hope.This work will not always be easy, but former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall has told us, ""We must dissent. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the hatred and from the mistrust. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_r_williams_how_racism_makes_us_sick
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"This is what my last week looked like. What I did, who I was with, the main sensations I had for every waking hour ... If the feeling came as I thought of my dad who recently passed away, or if I could have just definitely avoided the worries and anxieties. And if you think I'm a little obsessive, you're probably right. But clearly, from this visualization, you can learn much more about me than from this other one, which are images you're probably more familiar with and which you possibly even have on your phone right now. Bar charts for the steps you walked, pie charts for the quality of your sleep — the path of your morning runs.In my day job, I work with data. I run a data visualization design company, and we design and develop ways to make information accessible through visual representations. What my job has taught me over the years is that to really understand data and their true potential, sometimes we actually have to forget about them and see through them instead. Because data are always just a tool we use to represent reality. They're always used as a placeholder for something else, but they are never the real thing.But let me step back for a moment to when I first understood this personally. In 1994, I was 13 years old. I was a teenager in Italy. I was too young to be interested in politics, but I knew that a businessman, Silvio Berlusconi, was running for president for the moderate right. We lived in a very liberal town, and my father was a politician for the Democratic Party. And I remember that no one thought that Berlusconi could get elected — that was totally not an option. But it happened. And I remember the feeling very vividly. It was a complete surprise, as my dad promised that in my town he knew nobody who voted for him.This was the first time when the data I had gave me a completely distorted image of reality. My data sample was actually pretty limited and skewed, so probably it was because of that, I thought, I lived in a bubble, and I didn't have enough chances to see outside of it.Now, fast-forward to November 8, 2016 in the United States. The internet polls, statistical models, all the pundits agreeing on a possible outcome for the presidential election. It looked like we had enough information this time, and many more chances to see outside the closed circle we lived in — but we clearly didn't. The feeling felt very familiar. I had been there before. I think it's fair to say the data failed us this time — and pretty spectacularly. We believed in data, but what happened, even with the most respected newspaper, is that the obsession to reduce everything to two simple percentage numbers to make a powerful headline made us focus on these two digits and them alone. In an effort to simplify the message and draw a beautiful, inevitable red and blue map, we lost the point completely. We somehow forgot that there were stories — stories of human beings behind these numbers.In a different context, but to a very similar point, a peculiar challenge was presented to my team by this woman. She came to us with a lot of data, but ultimately she wanted to tell one of the most humane stories possible. She's Samantha Cristoforetti. She has been the first Italian woman astronaut, and she contacted us before being launched on a six-month-long expedition to the International Space Station. She told us, ""I'm going to space, and I want to do something meaningful with the data of my mission to reach out to people."" A mission to the International Space Station comes with terabytes of data about anything you can possibly imagine — the orbits around Earth, the speed and position of the ISS and all of the other thousands of live streams from its sensors. We had all of the hard data we could think of — just like the pundits before the election — but what is the point of all these numbers? People are not interested in data for the sake of it, because numbers are never the point. They're always the means to an end. The story we needed to tell is that there is a human being in a teeny box flying in space above your head, and that you can actually see her with your naked eye on a clear night. So we decided to use data to create a connection between Samantha and all of the people looking at her from below. We designed and developed what we called ""Friends in Space,"" a web application that simply lets you say ""hello"" to Samantha from where you are, and ""hello"" to all the people who are online at the same time from all over the world. And all of these ""hellos"" left visible marks on the map as Samantha was flying by and as she was actually waving back every day at us using Twitter from the ISS.This made people see the mission's data from a very different perspective. It all suddenly became much more about our human nature and our curiosity, rather than technology. So data powered the experience, but stories of human beings were the drive. The very positive response of its thousands of users taught me a very important lesson — that working with data means designing ways to transform the abstract and the uncountable into something that can be seen, felt and directly reconnected to our lives and to our behaviors, something that is hard to achieve if we let the obsession for the numbers and the technology around them lead us in the process. But we can do even more to connect data to the stories they represent. We can remove technology completely.A few years ago, I met this other woman, Stefanie Posavec — a London-based designer who shares with me the passion and obsession about data. We didn't know each other, but we decided to run a very radical experiment, starting a communication using only data, no other language, and we opted for using no technology whatsoever to share our data. In fact, our only means of communication would be through the old-fashioned post office. For ""Dear Data,"" every week for one year, we used our personal data to get to know each other — personal data around weekly shared mundane topics, from our feelings to the interactions with our partners, from the compliments we received to the sounds of our surroundings. Personal information that we would then manually hand draw on a postcard-size sheet of paper that we would every week send from London to New York, where I live, and from New York to London, where she lives. The front of the postcard is the data drawing, and the back of the card contains the address of the other person, of course, and the legend for how to interpret our drawing. The very first week into the project, we actually chose a pretty cold and impersonal topic. How many times do we check the time in a week? So here is the front of my card, and you can see that every little symbol represents all of the times that I checked the time, positioned for days and different hours chronologically — nothing really complicated here. But then you see in the legend how I added anecdotal details about these moments. In fact, the different types of symbols indicate why I was checking the time — what was I doing? Was I bored? Was I hungry? Was I late? Did I check it on purpose or just casually glance at the clock? And this is the key part — representing the details of my days and my personality through my data collection. Using data as a lens or a filter to discover and reveal, for example, my never-ending anxiety for being late, even though I'm absolutely always on time.Stefanie and I spent one year collecting our data manually to force us to focus on the nuances that computers cannot gather — or at least not yet — using data also to explore our minds and the words we use, and not only our activities. Like at week number three, where we tracked the ""thank yous"" we said and were received, and when I realized that I thank mostly people that I don't know. Apparently I'm a compulsive thanker to waitresses and waiters, but I definitely don't thank enough the people who are close to me.Over one year, the process of actively noticing and counting these types of actions became a ritual. It actually changed ourselves. We became much more in tune with ourselves, much more aware of our behaviors and our surroundings. Over one year, Stefanie and I connected at a very deep level through our shared data diary, but we could do this only because we put ourselves in these numbers, adding the contexts of our very personal stories to them. It was the only way to make them truly meaningful and representative of ourselves.I am not asking you to start drawing your personal data, or to find a pen pal across the ocean. But I'm asking you to consider data — all kind of data — as the beginning of the conversation and not the end. Because data alone will never give us a solution. And this is why data failed us so badly — because we failed to include the right amount of context to represent reality — a nuanced, complicated and intricate reality. We kept looking at these two numbers, obsessing with them and pretending that our world could be reduced to a couple digits and a horse race, while the real stories, the ones that really mattered, were somewhere else.What we missed looking at these stories only through models and algorithms is what I call ""data humanism."" In the Renaissance humanism, European intellectuals placed the human nature instead of God at the center of their view of the world. I believe something similar needs to happen with the universe of data. Now data are apparently treated like a God — keeper of infallible truth for our present and our future.The experiences that I shared with you today taught me that to make data faithfully representative of our human nature and to make sure they will not mislead us anymore, we need to start designing ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities in how we collect, process, analyze and display them. I do see a place where, ultimately, instead of using data only to become more efficient, we will all use data to become more humane.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/giorgia_lupi_how_we_can_find_ourselves_in_data
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"So I've been ""futuring,"" which is a term I made up —(Laughter)about three seconds ago. I've been futuring for about 20 years, and when I first started, I would sit down with people, and say, ""Hey, let's talk 10, 20 years out."" And they'd say, ""Great."" And I've been seeing that time horizon get shorter and shorter and shorter, so much so that I met with a CEO two months ago and I said — we started our initial conversation. He goes, ""I love what you do. I want to talk about the next six months.""(Laughter)We have a lot of problems that we are facing. These are civilizational-scale problems. The issue though is, we can't solve them using the mental models that we use right now to try and solve these problems. Yes, a lot of great technical work is being done, but there is a problem that we need to solve for a priori, before, if we want to really move the needle on those big problems. ""Short-termism."" Right? There's no marches. There's no bracelets. There's no petitions that you can sign to be against short-termism. I tried to put one up, and no one signed. It was weird.(Laughter)But it prevents us from doing so much. Short-termism, for many reasons, has pervaded every nook and cranny of our reality. I just want you to take a second and just think about an issue that you're thinking, working on. It could be personal, it could be at work or it could be move-the-needle world stuff, and think about how far out you tend to think about the solution set for that.Because short-termism prevents the CEO from buying really expensive safety equipment. It'll hurt the bottom line. So we get the Deepwater Horizon. Short-termism prevents teachers from spending quality one-on-one time with their students. So right now in America, a high school student drops out every 26 seconds. Short-termism prevents Congress — sorry if there's anyone in here from Congress —(Laughter)or not really that sorry —(Laughter)from putting money into a real infrastructure bill. So what we get is the I-35W bridge collapse over the Mississippi a few years ago, 13 killed. It wasn't always like this. We did the Panama Canal. We pretty much have eradicated global polio. We did the transcontinental railroad, the Marshall Plan. And it's not just big, physical infrastructure problems and issues. Women's suffrage, the right to vote. But in our short-termist time, where everything seems to happen right now and we can only think out past the next tweet or timeline post, we get hyper-reactionary.So what do we do? We take people who are fleeing their war-torn country, and we go after them. We take low-level drug offenders, and we put them away for life. And then we build McMansions without even thinking about how people are going to get between them and their job. It's a quick buck.Now, the reality is, for a lot of these problems, there are some technical fixes, a lot of them. I call these technical fixes sandbag strategies. So you know there's a storm coming, the levee is broken, no one's put any money into it, you surround your home with sandbags. And guess what? It works. Storm goes away, the water level goes down, you get rid of the sandbags, and you do this storm after storm after storm. And here's the insidious thing. A sandbag strategy can get you reelected. A sandbag strategy can help you make your quarterly numbers.Now, if we want to move forward into a different future than the one we have right now, because I don't think we've hit — 2016 is not peak civilization.(Laughter)There's some more we can do. But my argument is that unless we shift our mental models and our mental maps on how we think about the short, it's not going to happen.So what I've developed is something called ""longpath,"" and it's a practice. And longpath isn't a kind of one-and-done exercise. I'm sure everyone here at some point has done an off-site with a lot of Post-It notes and whiteboards, and you do — no offense to the consultants in here who do that — and you do a long-term plan, and then two weeks later, everyone forgets about it. Right? Or a week later. If you're lucky, three months. It's a practice because it's not necessarily a thing that you do. It's a process where you have to revisit different ways of thinking for every major decision that you're working on. So I want to go through those three ways of thinking.So the first: transgenerational thinking. I love the philosophers: Plato, Socrates, Habermas, Heidegger. I was raised on them. But they all did one thing that didn't actually seem like a big deal until I really started kind of looking into this. And they all took, as a unit of measure for their entire reality of what it meant to be virtuous and good, the single lifespan, from birth to death. But here's a problem with these issues: they stack up on top of us, because the only way we know how to do something good in the world is if we do it between our birth and our death. That's what we're programmed to do. If you go to the self-help section in any bookstore, it's all about you. Which is great, unless you're dealing with some of these major issues. And so with transgenerational thinking, which is really kind of transgenerational ethics, you're able to expand how you think about these problems, what is your role in helping to solve them.Now, this isn't something that just has to be done at the Security Council chamber. It's something that you can do in a very kind of personal way. So every once in a while, if I'm lucky, my wife and I like to go out to dinner, and we have three children under the age of seven. So you can imagine it's a very peaceful, quiet meal.(Laughter)So we sit down and literally all I want to do is just eat and chill, and my kids have a completely and totally different idea of what we're going to be doing. And so my first idea is my sandbag strategy, right? It's to go into my pocket and take out the iPhone and give them ""Frozen"" or some other bestselling game thing. And then I stop and I have to kind of put on this transgenerational thinking cap. I don't do this in the restaurant, because it would be bizarre, but I have to — I did it once, and that's how I learned it was bizarre.(Laughter)And you have to kind of think, ""OK, I can do this."" But what is this teaching them? So what does it mean if I actually bring some paper or engage with them in conversation? It's hard. It's not easy, and I'm making this very personal. It's actually more traumatic than some of the big issues that I work on in the world — entertaining my kids at dinner. But what it does is it connects them here in the present with me, but it also — and this is the crux of transgenerational thinking ethics — it sets them up to how they're going to interact with their kids and their kids and their kids.Second, futures thinking. When we think about the future, 10, 15 years out, give me a vision of what the future is. You don't have to give it to me, but think in your head. And what you're probably going to see is the dominant cultural lens that dominates our thinking about the future right now: technology. So when we think about the problems, we always put it through a technological lens, a tech-centric, a techno-utopia, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's something that we have to really think deeply about if we're going to move on these major issues, because it wasn't always like this. Right? The ancients had their way of thinking about what the future was. The Church definitely had their idea of what the future could be, and you could actually pay your way into that future. Right? And luckily for humanity, we got the scientific revolution. From there, we got the technology, but what has happened — And by the way, this is not a critique. I love technology. Everything in my house talks back to me, from my children to my speakers to everything.(Laughter)But we've abdicated the future from the high priests in Rome to the high priests of Silicon Valley. So when we think, well, how are we going to deal with climate or with poverty or homelessness, our first reaction is to think about it through a technology lens. And look, I'm not advocating that we go to this guy. I love Joel, don't get me wrong, but I'm not saying we go to Joel. What I'm saying is we have to rethink our base assumption about only looking at the future in one way, only looking at it through the dominant lens. Because our problems are so big and so vast that we need to open ourselves up.So that's why I do everything in my power not to talk about the future. I talk about futures. It opens the conversation again. So when you're sitting and thinking about how do we move forward on this major issue — it could be at home, it could be at work, it could be again on the global stage — don't cut yourself off from thinking about something beyond technology as a fix because we're more concerned about technological evolution right now than we are about moral evolution. And unless we fix for that, we're not going to be able to get out of short-termism and get to where we want to be.The final, telos thinking. This comes from the Greek root. Ultimate aim and ultimate purpose. And it's really asking one question: to what end? When was the last time you asked yourself: To what end? And when you asked yourself that, how far out did you go? Because long isn't long enough anymore. Three, five years doesn't cut it. It's 30, 40, 50, 100 years.In Homer's epic, ""The Odyssey,"" Odysseus had the answer to his ""what end."" It was Ithaca. It was this bold vision of what he wanted — to return to Penelope. And I can tell you, because of the work that I'm doing, but also you know it intuitively — we have lost our Ithaca. We have lost our ""to what end,"" so we stay on this hamster wheel. And yes, we're trying to solve these problems, but what comes after we solve the problem? And unless you define what comes after, people aren't going to move. The businesses — this isn't just about business — but the businesses that do consistently, who break out of short-termism not surprisingly are family-run businesses. They're transgenerational. They're telos. They think about the futures. And this is an ad for Patek Philippe. They're 175 years old, and what's amazing is that they literally embody this kind of longpathian sense in their brand, because, by the way, you never actually own a Patek Philippe, and I definitely won't —(Laughter)unless somebody wants to just throw 25,000 dollars on the stage. You merely look after it for the next generation.So it's important that we remember, the future, we treat it like a noun. It's not. It's a verb. It requires action. It requires us to push into it. It's not this thing that washes over us. It's something that we actually have total control over. But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don't. We feel like we're trapped. We can push through that.Now I'm getting more comfortable in the fact that at some point in the inevitable future, I will die. But because of these new ways of thinking and doing, both in the outside world and also with my family at home, and what I'm leaving my kids, I get more comfortable in that fact. And it's something that a lot of us are really uncomfortable with, but I'm telling you, think it through. Apply this type of thinking and you can push yourself past what's inevitably very, very uncomfortable.And it all begins really with yourself asking this question: What is your longpath? But I ask you, when you ask yourself that now or tonight or behind a steering wheel or in the boardroom or the situation room: push past the longpath, quick, oh, what's my longpath the next three years or five years? Try and push past your own life if you can because it makes you do things a little bit bigger than you thought were possible.Yes, we have huge, huge problems out there. With this process, with this thinking, I think we can make a difference. I think you can make a difference, and I believe in you guys.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ari_wallach_3_ways_to_plan_for_the_very_long_term
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"Twenty years ago, when I was a barrister and human rights lawyer in full-time legal practice in London, and the highest court in the land still convened, some would say by an accident of history, in this building here, I met a young man who had just quit his job in the British Foreign Office. When I asked him, ""Why did you leave,"" he told me this story.He had gone to his boss one morning and said, ""Let's do something about human rights abuses in China."" And his boss had replied, ""We can't do anything about human rights abuses in China because we have trade relations with China.""So my friend went away with his tail between his legs, and six months later, he returned again to his boss, and he said this time, ""Let's do something about human rights in Burma,"" as it was then called.His boss once again paused and said, ""Oh, but we can't do anything about human rights in Burma because we don't have any trade relations with Burma.""(Laughter)This was the moment he knew he had to leave. It wasn't just the hypocrisy that got to him. It was the unwillingness of his government to engage in conflict with other governments, in tense discussions, all the while, innocent people were being harmed.We are constantly told that conflict is bad that compromise is good; that conflict is bad but consensus is good; that conflict is bad and collaboration is good. But in my view, that's far too simple a vision of the world. We cannot know whether conflict is bad unless we know who is fighting, why they are fighting and how they are fighting. And compromises can be thoroughly rotten if they harm people who are not at the table, people who are vulnerable, disempowered, people whom we have an obligation to protect.Now, you might be somewhat skeptical of a lawyer arguing about the benefits of conflict and creating problems for compromise, but I did also qualify as a mediator, and these days, I spend my time giving talks about ethics for free. So as my bank manager likes to remind me, I'm downwardly mobile. But if you accept my argument, it should change not just the way we lead our personal lives, which I wish to put to one side for the moment, but it will change the way we think about major problems of public health and the environment. Let me explain.Every middle schooler in the United States, my 12-year-old daughter included, learns that there are three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch. James Madison wrote, ""If there is any principle more sacred in our Constitution, and indeed in any free constitution, than any other, it is that which separates the legislative, the executive and the judicial powers."" Now, the framers were not just concerned about the concentration and exercise of power. They also understood the perils of influence. Judges cannot determine the constitutionality of laws if they participate in making those laws, nor can they hold the other branches of government accountable if they collaborate with them or enter into close relationships with them. The Constitution is, as one famous scholar put it, ""an invitation to struggle."" And we the people are served when those branches do, indeed, struggle with each other.Now, we recognize the importance of struggle not just in the public sector between our branches of government. We also know it too in the private sector, in relationships among corporations. Let's imagine that two American airlines get together and agree that they will not drop the price of their economy class airfares below 250 dollars a ticket. That is collaboration, some would say collusion, not competition, and we the people are harmed because we pay more for our tickets. Imagine similarly two airlines were to say, ""Look, Airline A, we'll take the route from LA to Chicago,"" and Airline B says, ""We'll take the route from Chicago to DC, and we won't compete."" Once again, that's collaboration or collusion instead of competition, and we the people are harmed.So we understand the importance of struggle when it comes to relationships between branches of government, the public sector. We also understand the importance of conflict when it comes to relationships among corporations, the private sector. But where we have forgotten it is in the relationships between the public and the private. And governments all over the world are collaborating with industry to solve problems of public health and the environment, often collaborating with the very corporations that are creating or exacerbating the problems they are trying to solve. We are told that these relationships are a win-win. But what if someone is losing out?Let me give you some examples. A United Nations agency decided to address a serious problem: poor sanitation in schools in rural India. They did so not just in collaboration with national and local governments but also with a television company and with a major multinational soda company. In exchange for less than one million dollars, that corporation received the benefits of a months-long promotional campaign including a 12-hour telethon all using the company's logo and color scheme. This was an arrangement which was totally understandable from the corporation's point of view. It enhances the reputation of the company and it creates brand loyalty for its products. But in my view, this is profoundly problematic for the intergovernmental agency, an agency that has a mission to promote sustainable living. By increasing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages made from scarce local water supplies and drunk out of plastic bottles in a country that is already grappling with obesity, this is neither sustainable from a public health nor an environmental point of view. And in order to solve one public health problem, the agency is sowing the seeds of another.This is just one example of dozens I discovered in researching a book on the relationships between government and industry. I could also have told you about the initiatives in parks in London and throughout Britain, involving the same company, promoting exercise, or indeed of the British government creating voluntary pledges in partnership with industry instead of regulating industry. These collaborations or partnerships have become the paradigm in public health, and once again, they make sense from the point of view of industry. It allows them to frame public health problems and their solutions in ways that are least threatening to, most consonant with their commercial interests. So obesity becomes a problem of individual decision-making, of personal behavior, personal responsibility and lack of physical activity. It is not a problem, when framed this way, of a multinational food system involving major corporations.And again, I don't blame industry. Industry naturally engages in strategies of influence to promote its commercial interests. But governments have a responsibility to develop counterstrategies to protect us and the common good.The mistake that governments are making when they collaborate in this way with industry is that they conflate the common good with common ground. When you collaborate with industry, you necessarily put off the table things that might promote the common good to which industry will not agree. Industry will not agree to increased regulation unless it believes this will stave off even more regulation or perhaps knock some competitors out of the market. Nor can companies agree to do certain things, for example raise the prices of their unhealthy products, because that would violate competition law, as we've established. So our governments should not confound the common good and common ground, especially when common ground means reaching agreement with industry.I want to give you another example, moving from high-profile collaboration to something that is below ground both literally and figuratively: the hydraulic fracturing of natural gas. Imagine that you purchase a plot of land not knowing the mineral rights have been sold. This is before the fracking boom. You build your dream home on that plot, and shortly afterwards, you discover that a gas company is building a well pad on your land. That was the plight of the Hallowich family. Within a very short period of time, they began to complain of headaches, of sore throats, of itchy eyes, in addition to the interference of the noise, vibration and the bright lights from the flaring of natural gas. They were very vocal in their criticisms, and then they fell silent. And thanks to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where this image appeared, and one other newspaper, we discovered why they fell silent. The newspapers went to the court and said, ""What happened to the Hallowiches?"" And it turned out the Hallowiches had made a secret settlement with the gas operators, and it was a take-it-or-leave-it settlement. The gas company said, you can have a six-figure sum to move elsewhere and start your lives again, but in return you must promise not to speak of your experience with our company, not to speak of your experience with fracking, not to speak about the health consequences that might have been revealed by a medical examination. Now, I do not blame the Hallowiches for accepting a take-it-or-leave-it settlement and starting their lives elsewhere. And one can understand why the company would wish to silence a squeaky wheel. What I want to point the finger at is the legal and regulatory system, a system in which there are networks of agreements just like this one which serve to silence people and seal off data points from public health experts and epidemiologists, a system in which regulators will even refrain from issuing a violation notice in the event of pollution if the landowner and the gas company agree to settle. This is a system which isn't just bad from a public health point of view; it exposes hazards to local families who remain in the dark.Now, I have given you two examples not because they are isolated examples. They are examples of a systemic problem. I could share some counterexamples, the case for example of the public official who sues the pharmaceutical company for concealing the fact that its antidepressant increases suicidal thoughts in adolescents. I can tell you about the regulator who went after the food company for exaggerating the purported health benefits of its yogurt. And I can tell you about the legislator who despite heavy lobbying directed at both sides of the aisle pushes for environmental protections. These are isolated examples, but they are beacons of light in the darkness, and they can show us the way.I began by suggesting that sometimes we need to engage in conflict. Governments should tussle with, struggle with, at times engage in direct conflict with corporations. This is not because governments are inherently good and corporations are inherently evil. Each is capable of good or ill. But corporations understandably act to promote their commercial interests, and they do so either sometimes undermining or promoting the common good. But it is the responsibility of governments to protect and promote the common good. And we should insist that they fight to do so. This is because governments are the guardians of public health; governments are the guardians of the environment; and it is governments that are guardians of these essential parts of our common good.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_marks_in_praise_of_conflict
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"Last year, I got a chance to watch the new ""Star Wars"" movie, which was fantastic, but one thing kept bugging me. I don't know if you noticed this or not. In this entirely technically advanced world, I did not see a single AED anywhere, which was totally shocking — almost as shocking as not knowing what an AED is, which you guys do know. But for those at home, an AED is an automated external defibrillator. It's the device you use when your heart goes into cardiac arrest to shock it back into a normal rhythm, or, as one of the guys I was teaching a class to referred to it as: ""The shocky-hearty-box thing.""(Laughter)But I really can't blame the Empire, since health and safety regulations aren't really their first order of business. Though, even if we — I think worse than not having an AED would be if there was one there, but just, no one knew where to find it. These devices can drastically increase your chance of survival — almost like a tauntaun on Hoth.(Laughter)But I'm pretty sure that stormtrooper is going to be toast, regardless if we have an AED or not, since what happens is the chest plate is going to be quite hard to get off, and like that tauntaun, the AED has a very short window of time at which it's highly effective. In this case — basically, we've got to use it within the first 10 minutes.The Jedi, on the other hand, have no problems with their outfits. Those robes open straight up, you can place the pads right onto the chest — so upper-right-hand side of the chest, lower left, wait for the unit to determine if it's a shockable rhythm and get ready to shock. But, the Jedi do have a problem. They have a head appendage issue. And so I can be totally clear, thinking I'm ready to go, but I'm accidentally touching a tentacle and inadvertently shocking myself.(Laughter)So before you hit that button, make sure you are clear and everyone else is clear.Going back to that stormtrooper: If I did get that chest plate off in time, what would you do if you suddenly found there was a Wookiee under there, or possibly two Ewoks?(Laughter)Well, lucky for us, in the kit there's actually a razor, and we can use that to shave the chest on the upper right-hand side and the lower left.Wookiees also have another problem. They have an accessory issue. What we want to do is remove these — anything between the two pads we want to remove, since it can cause something called ""arcing."" For those who don't know what arcing is, do you remember the Emperor, when he shoots electricity out the ends of his fingers —(Laughter)that would be kind of like arcing. Another thing that — Oh! By the way, he creates that by wearing wool socks under his robes.(Laughter)We can also get arcing if we have an extremely wet chest. The electricity travels across the surface instead of through the heart. We can correct this with the immortal words of Douglas Adams: ""Don't panic,"" which most of us have done today — and also always having a towel. So, good words to go by.The metal bikini — unfortunately, this is where panic sets in — like the modern bra, we have to make sure we remove, because this can cause severe arcing along with burns. But unfortunately this opens up an issue that's almost as controversial as talking about the prequels.(Laughter)The mere mention of the word ""nipples,"" and people get into a little bit of a tizzy. By the way, that is not a nipple, that's a cupcake.(Laughter)Chances are, if you do have to use this, this is going to be on someone you know. And remember, everyone has nipples, except for Jabba.(Laughter)But he does love cupcakes. Speaking about Jabba, if we do have to use an AED on him, remember pad placement is the same, even though he doesn't have nipples. So it's going to be upper right-hand side, lower left. If we were going through, we're shocking, getting ready to go — after we've done the shock, one of the things we need to do is remember to do compression. The preferred method is 30 compressions and two breaths in the center of the chest, between the nipples, pressing down at least two inches, no more than two and a half, at a rate of at least 100 beats a minute, no more than 120. Unfortunately, due to the size of Jabba's mouth and also what he puts in said mouth, we may not want to actually do the mouth-to-mouth part. So instead, we can do compression-only CPR. The way of remembering the compression-only part is we can actually use the Imperial March.I would sing it for you —(Laughter)Unfortunately, that would be more something an interrogation droid would do.Yoda. Small little guy, like a baby. What we do is basically treat him like a baby, in the sense that we're going to place one pad in the center of the chest and one in the back. If we place them both in the front, they can be too close and cause severe arcing, so we want to avoid that.Hopefully, this helped to clarify and put some light on some of the darker issues of using an AED in the Star Wars universe, or any universe in total.I'll leave you with one point. Remember, if you do find yourself dealing with a Wookiee, do not shave the entire Wookiee. This takes way too much time, and it only pisses them off.(Laughter)Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/todd_scott_an_intergalactic_guide_to_using_a_defibrillator
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"In the next six minutes that you will listen to me, the world will have lost three mothers while delivering their babies: one, because of a severe complication; second, because she will be a teenager and her body will not be prepared for birth; but the third, only because of lack of access to basic clean tools at the time of childbirth. She will not be alone. Over one million mothers and babies die every single year in the developing world, only because of lack of access to basic cleanliness while giving birth to their babies.My journey began on a hot summer afternoon in India in 2008, when after a day of meeting women and listening to their needs, I landed in a thatched hut with a midwife. As a mother, I was very curious on how she delivered babies in her house. After a deep and engaging conversation with her on how she considered it a profound calling to do what she was doing, I asked her a parting question: Do you have the tools that you need to deliver the babies? I got to see her tool. ""This is what I use to separate the mother and the baby,"" she said. Unsure of how to react, I held this agricultural tool in my hand in shock. I took a picture of this, hugged her and walked away. My mind was flooded with reflections of my own infection that I had to struggle with for a year past childbirth despite having access to the best medical care, and memories of my conversation with my father, who had lost his mom to childbirth, on how he thought his life would be so different if she would have been just next to him growing up.As a product developer, I started my process of research. I was very excited to find that there was a product out there called the Clean Birth Kit. But I just couldn't buy one for months. They were only assembled based on availability of funding. Finally, when I got my hands on one, I was in shock again. I would never use these tools to deliver my baby, I thought. But to confirm my instincts, I went back to the women, some of whom had the experience of using this product.Lo and behold, they had the same reaction and more. The women said they would rather deliver on a floor than on a plastic sheet that smeared blood all over. They were absolutely right — it would cause more infection. The thread provided was a highway to bacterial infection through the baby's umbilical cord, and the blade used was the kind that men used for shaving, and they did not want it anywhere close to them. There was no incentive for anybody to redesign this product, because it was based on charity. The women were never consulted in this process. And to my surprise, the need was not only in homes but also in institutional settings with high-volume births. Situations in remote areas were even more daunting.This had to change. I made this my area of focus. I started the design process by collecting feedback, developing prototypes and engaging with various stakeholders researching global protocols. With every single prototype, we went back to the women to ensure that we had a product for them. What I learned through this process was that these women, despite their extreme poverty, placed great value on their health and well-being. They were absolutely not poor in mind. As with all of us, they would appreciate a well-designed product developed for their needs.After many iterations working with experts, medical health professionals and the women themselves, I should say it was not an easy process at all, but we had a simple and beautiful design. For a dollar more than what the existing product was offered for, at three dollars, we were able to deliver ""janma,"" a clean birth kit in a purse. Janma, meaning ""birth,"" contained a blood-absorbing sheet for the woman to give birth on, a surgical scalpel, a cord clamp, a bar of soap, a pair of gloves and the first cloth to wipe the baby clean. All this came packaged in a beautiful purse that was given to the mother as a gift after all her hard work, that she carried home with pride as a symbol of prosperity.One woman reacted to this gift. She said, ""Is this really mine? Can I keep it?"" The other one said, ""Will you give me a different color when I have my next baby?""(Laughter)Better yet, a woman expressed that this was the first purse that she had ever owned in her life. The kit, aside from its symbolism and its simplicity, is designed to follow globally recommended medical protocol and serves as a behavior-change tool to follow steps one after the other. It can not only be used in homes, but also in institutional settings.To date, our kit has impacted over 600,000 mothers and babies around the world. It's a humbling experience to watch these numbers grow, and I cannot wait until we reach a hundred million.But women's health issues do not end here. There are thousands of simple issues that require low-cost interventions. We have facts to prove that if we invest in women and girls and provide them with better health and well-being, they will deliver healthier and wealthier and prosperous communities. We have to start by bringing simplicity and dignity to women's health issues: from reducing maternal mortality, to breaking taboos, to empowering women to take control of their own lives. This is my dream. But it is not possible to achieve it without engaging men and women alike from around the world — yes, all of you.I recently heard this lyric by Leonard Cohen: ""Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.""This is my bit of light. But we need more light. In fact, we need huge spotlights placed in the world of women's health if we need a better tomorrow. We should never forget that women are at the center of a sustainable world, and we do not exist without them.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/zubaida_bai_a_simple_birth_kit_for_mothers_in_the_developing_world
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"So I would like to start by telling you about one of my greatest friends, Okoloma Maduewesi. Okoloma lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother. If I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma's opinion. Okoloma died in the notorious Sosoliso plane crash in Nigeria in December of 2005. Almost exactly seven years ago. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist.I was about fourteen, we were at his house, arguing. Both of us bristling with half bit knowledge from books that we had read. I don't remember what this particular argument was about, but I remember that as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, ""You know, you're a feminist."" It was not a compliment.(Laughter)I could tell from his tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like, ""You're a supporter of terrorism.""(Laughter)I did not know exactly what this word ""feminist"" meant, and I did not want Okoloma to know that I did not know. So I brushed it aside, and I continued to argue. And the first thing I planned to do when I got home was to look up the word ""feminist"" in the dictionary.Now fast forward to some years later, I wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife and whose story doesn't end very well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. And for the Nigerians here, I'm sure we're all familiar with how quick our people are to give unsolicited advice. He told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist and his advice to me — and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke — was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.(Laughter)So I decided to call myself ""a happy feminist."" Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told me that feminism was not our culture and that feminism wasn't African, and that I was calling myself a feminist because I had been corrupted by ""Western books."" Which amused me, because a lot of my early readings were decidedly unfeminist. I think I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I tried to read those books called ""the feminist classics,"" I'd get bored, and I really struggled to finish them. But anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided that I would now call myself ""a happy African feminist."" At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.(Laughter)Of course a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek, but that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage. You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, that sort of thing.Now here's a story from my childhood. When I was in primary school, my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor. Now, class monitor was a big deal. If you were a class monitor, you got to write down the names of noisemakers —(Laughter)which was having enough power of its own. But my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand while you walk around and patrol the class for noisemakers. Now, of course you were not actually allowed to use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me. I very much wanted to be the class monitor. And I got the highest score on the test. Then, to my surprise, my teacher said that the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear earlier because she assumed it was ... obvious.(Laughter)A boy had the second highest score on the test, and he would be monitor. Now, what was even more interesting about this is that the boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in patrolling the class with the cane, while I was full of ambition to do so. But I was female and he was male, and so he became the class monitor. And I've never forgotten that incident.I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. Now, take my dear friend Louis for example. Louis is a brilliant, progressive man, and we would have conversations and he would tell me, ""I don't know what you mean by things being different or harder for women. Maybe in the past, but not now."" And I didn't understand how Louis could not see what seems so self-evident. Then one evening, in Lagos, Louis and I went out with friends. And for people here who are not familiar with Lagos, there's that wonderful Lagos' fixture, the sprinkling of energetic men who hang around outside establishments and very dramatically ""help"" you park your car. I was impressed with the particular theatrics of the man who found us a parking spot that evening. And so as we were leaving, I decided to leave him a tip. I opened my bag, put my hand inside my bag, brought out my money that I had earned from doing my work, and I gave it to the man. And he, this man who was very grateful and very happy, took the money from me, looked across at Louis and said, ""Thank you, sir!""(Laughter)Louis looked at me, surprised, and asked, ""Why is he thanking me? I didn't give him the money."" Then I saw realization dawn on Louis' face. The man believed that whatever money I had had ultimately come from Louis. Because Louis is a man.Men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities. Women can have babies, men can't. At least not yet.(Laughter)Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women. There's slightly more women than men in the world, about 52 percent of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said: ""The higher you go, the fewer women there are."" In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified, and the man being paid more because he's a man.So in the literal way, men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men, in general, are physically stronger. Of course there are many exceptions.(Laughter)But today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person; it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved; but it seems to me that our ideas of gender had not evolved.Some weeks ago, I walked into a lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels. I thought about naming the hotel, but I thought I probably shouldn't. And a guard at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions, because their automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. And by the way, why do these hotels focus on the ostensible supply rather than the demand for sex workers? In Lagos I cannot go alone into many ""reputable"" bars and clubs. They just don't let you in if you're a woman alone, you have to be accompanied by a man. Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The waiters are products —(Laughter)At this some women felt like, ""Yes! I thought that!"" The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know that waiters don't intend any harm. But it's one thing to know intellectually and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I'm just as worthy of acknowledgment. These are little things, but sometimes it's the little things that sting the most.And not long ago, I wrote an article about what it means to be young and female in Lagos, and the printers told me, ""It was so angry."" Of course it was angry!(Laughter)I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change; but, in addition to being angry, I'm also hopeful. Because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better.Gender matters everywhere in the world, but I want to focus on Nigeria and on Africa in general, because it is where I know, and because it is where my heart is. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world, a fairer world, a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian speak, ""hard man!"" In secondary school, a boy and a girl, both of them teenagers, both of them with the same amount of pocket money, would go out and then the boy would be expected always to pay, to prove his masculinity. And yet we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents.What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money? What if the attitude was not ""the boy has to pay"" but rather ""whoever has more should pay?"" Now, of course because of that historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today, but if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove this masculinity. But by far the worst thing we do to males, by making them feel that they have to be hard, is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more ""hard man"" the man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller, we say to girls, ""You can have ambition, but not too much.""(Laughter)""You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man."" If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you're not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman's success be a threat to a man? What if we decide to simply dispose of that word, and I don't think there's an English word I dislike more than ""emasculation."" A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me. I was not worried at all. In fact, it had not occurred to me to be worried because a man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.(Laughter)(Applause)But still I was really struck by this. Because I'm female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage; I'm expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. A marriage can be a good thing; it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same?I know a woman who decided to sell her house because she didn't want to intimidate a man who might marry her. I know an unmarried woman in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring because according to her, she wants the other participants in the conference to ""give her respect."" I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, from friends, even from work to get married, and they're pushed to make terrible choices. A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep, personal failure. And a man at a certain age who is unmarried, we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick.(Laughter)It's easy for us to say, ""Oh, but women can just say no to all of this."" But the reality is more difficult and more complex. We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even the language we use in talking about marriage and relationships illustrates this. The language of marriage is often the language of ownership rather than the language of partnership. We use the word ""respect"" to mean something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman.Both men and women in Nigeria will say — this is an expression I'm very amused by — ""I did it for peace in my marriage."" Now, when men say it, it is usually about something that they should not be doing anyway.(Laughter)Sometimes they say it to their friends, it's something to say to their friends in a kind of fondly exasperated way, you know, something that ultimately proves how masculine they are, how needed, how loved. ""Oh, my wife said I can't go to the club every night, so for peace in my marriage, I do it only on weekends.""(Laughter)Now, when a woman says, ""I did it for peace in my marriage,"" she's usually talking about giving up a job, a dream, a career. We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors — not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends. But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid.(Laughter)But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husbands. We police girls, we praise girls for virginity, but we don't praise boys for virginity, and it's always made me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out because ...(Laughter)(Applause)I mean, the loss of virginity is usually a process that involves ...Recently a young woman was gang raped in a university in Nigeria, I think some of us know about that. And the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something along the lines of this: ""Yes, rape is wrong. But what is a girl doing in a room with four boys?"" Now, if we can forget the horrible inhumanity of that response, these Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty, and they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings without any control is somehow acceptable. We teach girls shame. ""Close your legs."" ""Cover yourself."" We make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think, and they grow up — and this is the worst thing we did to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.(Applause)I know a woman who hates domestic work, she just hates it, but she pretends that she likes it, because she's been taught that to be ""good wife material"" she has to be — to use that Nigerian word — very ""homely."" And then she got married, and after a while her husband's family began to complain that she had changed.(Laughter)Actually, she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending.The problem with gender, is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process. Now, take cooking for example. Today women in general are more likely to do the housework than men, the cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene?(Laughter)Or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? Actually, I was going to say that maybe women are born with a cooking gene, until I remember that the majority of the famous cooks in the world, whom we give the fancy title of ""chefs,"" are men.I used to look up to my grandmother who was a brilliant, brilliant woman, and wonder how she would have been if she had the same opportunities as men when she was growing up.Now today, there are many more opportunities for women than there were during my grandmother's time because of changes in policy, changes in law, all of which are very important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mindset, what we believe and what we value about gender. What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender?I know a family who have a son and a daughter, both of whom are brilliant at school, who are wonderful, lovely children. When the boy is hungry, the parents say to the girl, ""Go and cook Indomie noodles for your brother.""(Laughter)Now, the daughter doesn't particularly like to cook Indomie noodles, but she's a girl, and so she has to. Now, what if the parents, from the beginning, taught both the boy and the girl to cook Indomie? Cooking, by the way, is a very useful skill for boys to have. I've never thought it made sense to leave such a crucial thing, the ability to nourish oneself —(Laughter)in the hands of others.(Applause)I know a woman who has the same degree and the same job as her husband. When they get back from work, she does most of the housework, which I think is true for many marriages. But what struck me about them was that whenever her husband changed the baby's diaper, she said ""thank you"" to him. Now, what if she saw this as perfectly normal and natural that he should, in fact, care for his child?(Laughter)I'm trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up. But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. I wasn't worried about the material I would teach because I was well-prepared, and I was going to teach what I enjoy teaching. Instead, I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female I will automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. Instead, I wore a very serious, very manly and very ugly suit.(Laughter)Because the sad truth is that when it comes to appearance we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. If a man is getting ready for a business meeting, he doesn't worry about looking too masculine and therefore not being taken for granted. If a woman has to get ready for business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine and what it says and whether or not she will be taken seriously.I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. I've actually banished it from my closet, by the way. Had I then the confidence that I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching, because I would have been more comfortable and more fully and more truly myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and for my femininity.(Applause)And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be. Gender is not an easy conversation to have. For both men and women, to bring up gender is sometimes to encounter almost immediate resistance. I can imagine some people here are actually thinking, ""Women too do sef."" Some of the men here might be thinking, ""OK, all of this is interesting, but I don't think like that."" And that is part of the problem.That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender is part of the problem of gender. That many men, say, like my friend Louis, that everything is fine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant with a woman and the waiter greets only you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, ""Why haven't you greeted her?"" Because gender can be —(Laughter)Actually, we may repose part of a longer version of this talk. So, because gender can be a very uncomfortable conversation to have, there are very easy ways to close it, to close the conversation. So some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how, you know, female apes bow down to male apes and that sort of thing. But the point is we're not apes.(Laughter)(Applause)Apes also live on trees and have earthworms for breakfast, and we don't. Some people will say, ""Well, poor men also have a hard time."" And this is true. But that is not what this —(Laughter)But this is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are different forms of oppression. I actually learned quite a bit about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men.I was once talking to a black man about gender and he said to me, ""Why do you have to say 'my experience as a woman'? Why can't it be 'your experience as a human being'?"" Now, this was the same man who would often talk about his experience as a black man.Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that.Some people will say, ""Oh, but women have the real power, bottom power."" And for non-Nigerians, bottom power is an expression which I suppose means something like a woman who uses her sexuality to get favors from men. But bottom power is not power at all. Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time — somebody else's power. And then, of course, we have to wonder what happens when that somebody else is in a bad mood, or sick or impotent.(Laughter)Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are fifteen and live in Lagos. If they had been born a hundred years ago they would have been taken away and killed. Because it was our culture, it was our culture to kill twins.So what is the point of culture? I mean there's the decorative, the dancing ... but also, culture really is about preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in our traditions, in the knowledge about ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, I cannot go to umunna meetings, I cannot have a say. Because I'm female. Culture does not make people, people make culture. So if it is in fact true —(Applause)So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture.I think very often of my dear friend, Okoloma Maduewesi. May he and all the others who passed away in that Sosoliso crash continue to rest in peace. He will always be remembered by those of us who loved him. And he was right that day many years ago when he called me a feminist.I am a feminist. And when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day, this is what it said: ""Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes."" My great grandmother, from the stories I've heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and ended up marrying the man of her choice. She refused, she protested, she spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of access, of land, that sort of thing.My great grandmother did not know that word ""feminist,"" but it doesn't mean that she wasn't one. More of us should reclaim that word. My own definition of feminist is: ""A feminist is a man or a woman who says —(Laughter)(Applause)A feminist is a man or a woman who says, ""Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better."" The best feminist I know is my brother Kene. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists
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"The school of architecture that I studied at some 30 years ago happened to be across the street from the wonderful art gallery designed by the great architect Louis Kahn. I love the building, and I used to visit it quite often. One day, I saw the security guard run his hand across the concrete wall. And it was the way he did it, the expression on his face — something touched me. I could see that the security guard was moved by the building and that architecture has that capacity to move you. I could see it, and I remember thinking, ""Wow. How does architecture do that?""At school, I was learning to design, but here — here was a reaction of the heart. And it touched me to the core.You know, you aspire for beauty, for sensuousness, for atmosphere, the emotional response. That's the realm of the ineffable and the immeasurable. And that's what you live for: a chance to try.So in 2003, there was an open call for designs for the Bahá'í Temple for South America. This was the first temple in all of South America. It's a continental temple, a hugely important milestone for the Bahá'í community, because this would be the last of the continental temples and would open the door for national and local temples to be built around the world.And the brief was deceptively simple and unique in the annals of religion: a circular room, nine sides, nine entrances, nine paths, allowing you to come to the temple from all directions, nine symbolizing completeness, perfection. No pulpit, no sermons, as there are no clergy in the Bahá'í faith. And in a world which is putting up walls, the design needed to express in form the very opposite. It had to be open, welcoming to people of all faiths, walks of life, backgrounds, or no faith at all; a new form of sacred space with no pattern or models to draw from. It was like designing one of the first churches for Christianity or one of the first mosques for Islam.So we live in a secular world. How do you design sacred space today? And how do you even define what's sacred today?I stumbled across this beautiful quote from the Bahá'í writings, and it speaks to prayer. It says that if you reach out in prayer, and if your prayer is answered — which is already very interesting — that the pillars of your heart will become ashine.And I loved this idea of the inner and the outer, like when you see someone and you say, ""That person is radiant."" And I was thinking, ""My gosh, how could we make something architectural out of that, where you create a building and it becomes alive with light? Like alabaster, if you kiss it with light, it becomes alive. And I drew this sketch, something with two layers, translucent with structure in between capturing light. Maybe a pure form, a single form of emanation that you could imagine would be all dome and everything we kept making was looking too much like an egg.(Laughter)A blob.So you search. You all know this crazy search, letting the process take you, and you live for the surprises. And I remember quite by accident I saw this little video of a plant moving in light, and it made me think of movement, reach, this idea that the temple could have reach, like this reach for the divine. You can imagine also that movement within a circle could mean movement and stillness, like the cosmos, something you see in many places.(Laughter)But rotation was not enough, because we needed a form. In the Bahá'í writings, it talks about the temples being as perfect as is humanly possible, and we kept thinking, well, what is perfection? And I remember I stumbled into this image of this Japanese basket and thinking our Western notions of perfection need to be challenged, that this wonderful silhouette of this basket, this wonkiness, and that it has the kind of dimple of what you might imagine a shoulder or the cheekbone, and that kind of organic form. And so we drew and made models, these lines that merge at the top, soft lines, which became like drapery and translucent veils and folding, and the idea of not only folding but torquing — you remember the plant and the way it was reaching. And this started to become an interesting form, carving the base, making the entrances.And then we ended up with this. This is this temple with two layers, nine luminous veils, embodied light, soft-flowing lines like luminescent drapery. 180 submissions were received from 80 countries, and this was selected.So we went to the next stage of how to build it. We had submitted alabaster. But alabaster was too soft, and we were experimenting, many experiments with materials, trying to think how we could have this kind of shimmer, and we ended up with borosilicate. And borosilicate glass, as you know, is very strong, and if you break borosilicate rods just so and melt them at just the right temperature, we ended up with this new material, this new cast glass which took us about two years to make. And it had this quality that we loved, this idea of the embodied light, but on the inside, we wanted something with a soft light, like the inner lining of a jacket. On the outside you have protection, but on the inside you touch it. So we found this tiny vein in a huge quarry in Portugal with this beautiful stone, which the owner had kept for seven generations in his family, waiting for the right project, if you can believe it. Look at this material, it's beautiful. And the way it lights up; it has that translucent quality.So here you see the structure. It lets the light through. And looking down, the nine wings are bound, structurally but symbolically strong, a great symbol of unity: pure geometry, a perfect circle, 30 meters in section and in plan, perfectly symmetrical, like the idea of sacredness and geometry. And here you see the building going up, 2,000 steel nodes, 9,000 pieces of steel, 7,800 stone pieces, 10,000 cast glass pieces, all individual shapes, the entire superstructure all described, engineered, fabricated with aerospace technology, prefabricated machine to machine, robotically, a huge team effort, you can imagine, of literally hundreds, and within three percent of our $30 million budget set in 2006.(Applause)Nine wings bound together forming a nine-pointed star, and the star shape moving in space, tracking the sun.So here it is.Audience: Wow!(Applause)Hopefully, a befitting response to that beautiful quote, ""a prayer answered,"" open in all directions, capturing the blue light of dawn, tent-like white light of day, the gold light of the afternoon, and of course, at night, the reversal: sensuous, catching the light in all kinds of mysterious ways.And the site: it's interesting; 14 years ago when we made the submission, we showed the temple set against the Andes. We didn't have the Andes as our site, but after nine years, that's exactly where we ended up, the lines of the temple set against nothing but pure nature, and you turn around and you get nothing but the city below you, and inside, a view in all directions, radiating gardens from each of the alcoves, radiating paths.Last October, the opening ceremonies — a beautiful, sacred event, 5,000 people from 80 countries, a continuous river of visitors, indigenous people from all over South America, some who had never left their villages. And of course, that this temple belongs to people, the collective, of many cultures and walks of life, many beliefs, and for me, what's most important is what it feels like on the inside; that it feel intimate, sacred, and that everyone is welcome. And if even a few who come have the same reaction as that security guard, then it truly would be their temple. And I would love that.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/siamak_hariri_how_do_you_build_a_sacred_space
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"Space, the final frontier.I first heard these words when I was just six years old, and I was completely inspired. I wanted to explore strange new worlds. I wanted to seek out new life. I wanted to see everything that the universe had to offer. And those dreams, those words, they took me on a journey, a journey of discovery, through school, through university, to do a PhD and finally to become a professional astronomer. Now, I learned two amazing things, one slightly unfortunate, when I was doing my PhD. I learned that the reality was I wouldn't be piloting a starship anytime soon. But I also learned that the universe is strange, wonderful and vast, actually too vast to be explored by spaceship. And so I turned my attention to astronomy, to using telescopes.Now, I show you before you an image of the night sky. You might see it anywhere in the world. And all of these stars are part of our local galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, if you were to go to a darker part of the sky, a nice dark site, perhaps in the desert, you might see the center of our Milky Way galaxy spread out before you, hundreds of billions of stars. And it's a very beautiful image. It's colorful. And again, this is just a local corner of our universe. You can see there's a sort of strange dark dust across it. Now, that is local dust that's obscuring the light of the stars. But we can do a pretty good job. Just with our own eyes, we can explore our little corner of the universe. It's possible to do better. You can use wonderful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, astronomers have put together this image. It's called the Hubble Deep Field, and they've spent hundreds of hours observing just a tiny patch of the sky no larger than your thumbnail held at arm's length. And in this image you can see thousands of galaxies, and we know that there must be hundreds of millions, billions of galaxies in the entire universe, some like our own and some very different. So you think, OK, well, I can continue this journey. This is easy. I can just use a very powerful telescope and just look at the sky, no problem. It's actually really missing out if we just do that. Now, that's because everything I've talked about so far is just using the visible spectrum, just the thing that your eyes can see, and that's a tiny slice, a tiny, tiny slice of what the universe has to offer us. Now, there's also two very important problems with using visible light. Not only are we missing out on all the other processes that are emitting other kinds of light, but there's two issues.Now, the first is that dust that I mentioned earlier. The dust stops the visible light from getting to us. So as we look deeper into the universe, we see less light. The dust stops it getting to us. But there's a really strange problem with using visible light in order to try and explore the universe.Now take a break for a minute. Say you're standing on a corner, a busy street corner. There's cars going by. An ambulance approaches. It has a high-pitched siren.(Imitates a siren passing by)The siren appeared to change in pitch as it moved towards and away from you. The ambulance driver did not change the siren just to mess with you. That was a product of your perception. The sound waves, as the ambulance approached, were compressed, and they changed higher in pitch. As the ambulance receded, the sound waves were stretched, and they sounded lower in pitch. The same thing happens with light. Objects moving towards us, their light waves are compressed and they appear bluer. Objects moving away from us, their light waves are stretched, and they appear redder. So we call these effects blueshift and redshift.Now, our universe is expanding, so everything is moving away from everything else, and that means everything appears to be red. And oddly enough, as you look more deeply into the universe, more distant objects are moving away further and faster, so they appear more red. So if I come back to the Hubble Deep Field and we were to continue to peer deeply into the universe just using the Hubble, as we get to a certain distance away, everything becomes red, and that presents something of a problem. Eventually, we get so far away everything is shifted into the infrared and we can't see anything at all.So there must be a way around this. Otherwise, I'm limited in my journey. I wanted to explore the whole universe, not just whatever I can see, you know, before the redshift kicks in. There is a technique. It's called radio astronomy. Astronomers have been using this for decades. It's a fantastic technique. I show you the Parkes Radio Telescope, affectionately known as ""The Dish."" You may have seen the movie. And radio is really brilliant. It allows us to peer much more deeply. It doesn't get stopped by dust, so you can see everything in the universe, and redshift is less of a problem because we can build receivers that receive across a large band.So what does Parkes see when we turn it to the center of the Milky Way? We should see something fantastic, right? Well, we do see something interesting. All that dust has gone. As I mentioned, radio goes straight through dust, so not a problem. But the view is very different. We can see that the center of the Milky Way is aglow, and this isn't starlight. This is a light called synchrotron radiation, and it's formed from electrons spiraling around cosmic magnetic fields. So the plane is aglow with this light. And we can also see strange tufts coming off of it, and objects which don't appear to line up with anything that we can see with our own eyes. But it's hard to really interpret this image, because as you can see, it's very low resolution. Radio waves have a wavelength that's long, and that makes their resolution poorer. This image is also black and white, so we don't really know what is the color of everything in here.Well, fast-forward to today. We can build telescopes which can get over these problems. Now, I'm showing you here an image of the Murchison Radio Observatory, a fantastic place to build radio telescopes. It's flat, it's dry, and most importantly, it's radio quiet: no mobile phones, no Wi-Fi, nothing, just very, very radio quiet, so a perfect place to build a radio telescope. Now, the telescope that I've been working on for a few years is called the Murchison Widefield Array, and I'm going to show you a little time lapse of it being built. This is a group of undergraduate and postgraduate students located in Perth. We call them the Student Army, and they volunteered their time to build a radio telescope. There's no course credit for this. And they're putting together these radio dipoles. They just receive at low frequencies, a bit like your FM radio or your TV. And here we are deploying them across the desert. The final telescope covers 10 square kilometers of the Western Australian desert. And the interesting thing is, there's no moving parts. We just deploy these little antennas essentially on chicken mesh. It's fairly cheap. Cables take the signals from the antennas and bring them to central processing units. And it's the size of this telescope, the fact that we've built it over the entire desert that gives us a better resolution than Parkes.Now, eventually all those cables bring them to a unit which sends it off to a supercomputer here in Perth, and that's where I come in.(Sighs)Radio data. I have spent the last five years working with very difficult, very interesting data that no one had really looked at before. I've spent a long time calibrating it, running millions of CPU hours on supercomputers and really trying to understand that data. And with this telescope, with this data, we've performed a survey of the entire southern sky, the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA Survey, or GLEAM, as I call it. And I'm very excited. This survey is just about to be published, but it hasn't been shown yet, so you are literally the first people to see this southern survey of the entire sky. So I'm delighted to share with you some images from this survey.Now, imagine you went to the Murchison, you camped out underneath the stars and you looked towards the south. You saw the south's celestial pole, the galaxy rising. If I fade in the radio light, this is what we observe with our survey. You can see that the galactic plane is no longer dark with dust. It's alight with synchrotron radiation, and thousands of dots are in the sky. Our large Magellanic Cloud, our nearest galactic neighbor, is orange instead of its more familiar blue-white.So there's a lot going on in this. Let's take a closer look. If we look back towards the galactic center, where we originally saw the Parkes image that I showed you earlier, low resolution, black and white, and we fade to the GLEAM view, you can see the resolution has gone up by a factor of a hundred. We now have a color view of the sky, a technicolor view. Now, it's not a false color view. These are real radio colors. What I've done is I've colored the lowest frequencies red and the highest frequencies blue, and the middle ones green. And that gives us this rainbow view. And this isn't just false color. The colors in this image tell us about the physical processes going on in the universe. So for instance, if you look along the plane of the galaxy, it's alight with synchrotron, which is mostly reddish orange, but if we look very closely, we see little blue dots. Now, if we zoom in, these blue dots are ionized plasma around very bright stars, and what happens is that they block the red light, so they appear blue. And these can tell us about these star-forming regions in our galaxy. And we just see them immediately. We look at the galaxy, and the color tells us that they're there.You can see little soap bubbles, little circular images around the galactic plane, and these are supernova remnants. When a star explodes, its outer shell is cast off and it travels outward into space gathering up material, and it produces a little shell. It's been a long-standing mystery to astronomers where all the supernova remnants are. We know that there must be a lot of high-energy electrons in the plane to produce the synchrotron radiation that we see, and we think they're produced by supernova remnants, but there don't seem to be enough. Fortunately, GLEAM is really, really good at detecting supernova remnants, so we're hoping to have a new paper out on that soon.Now, that's fine. We've explored our little local universe, but I wanted to go deeper, I wanted to go further. I wanted to go beyond the Milky Way. Well, as it happens, we can see a very interesting object in the top right, and this is a local radio galaxy, Centaurus A. If we zoom in on this, we can see that there are two huge plumes going out into space. And if you look right in the center between those two plumes, you'll see a galaxy just like our own. It's a spiral. It has a dust lane. It's a normal galaxy. But these jets are only visible in the radio. If we looked in the visible, we wouldn't even know they were there, and they're thousands of times larger than the host galaxy.What's going on? What's producing these jets? At the center of every galaxy that we know about is a supermassive black hole. Now, black holes are invisible. That's why they're called that. All you can see is the deflection of the light around them, and occasionally, when a star or a cloud of gas comes into their orbit, it is ripped apart by tidal forces, forming what we call an accretion disk. The accretion disk glows brightly in the x-rays, and huge magnetic fields can launch the material into space at nearly the speed of light. So these jets are visible in the radio and this is what we pick up in our survey.Well, very well, so we've seen one radio galaxy. That's nice. But if you just look at the top of that image, you'll see another radio galaxy. It's a little bit smaller, and that's just because it's further away. OK. Two radio galaxies. We can see this. This is fine. Well, what about all the other dots? Presumably those are just stars. They're not. They're all radio galaxies. Every single one of the dots in this image is a distant galaxy, millions to billions of light-years away with a supermassive black hole at its center pushing material into space at nearly the speed of light. It is mind-blowing. And this survey is even larger than what I've shown here. If we zoom out to the full extent of the survey, you can see I found 300,000 of these radio galaxies. So it's truly an epic journey. We've discovered all of these galaxies right back to the very first supermassive black holes. I'm very proud of this, and it will be published next week.Now, that's not all. I've explored the furthest reaches of the galaxy with this survey, but there's something even more in this image. Now, I'll take you right back to the dawn of time. When the universe formed, it was a big bang, which left the universe as a sea of hydrogen, neutral hydrogen. And when the very first stars and galaxies switched on, they ionized that hydrogen. So the universe went from neutral to ionized. That imprinted a signal all around us. Everywhere, it pervades us, like the Force. Now, because that happened so long ago, the signal was redshifted, so now that signal is at very low frequencies. It's at the same frequency as my survey, but it's so faint. It's a billionth the size of any of the objects in my survey. So our telescope may not be quite sensitive enough to pick up this signal. However, there's a new radio telescope. So I can't have a starship, but I can hopefully have one of the biggest radio telescopes in the world. We're building the Square Kilometre Array, a new radio telescope, and it's going to be a thousand times bigger than the MWA, a thousand times more sensitive, and have an even better resolution. So we should find tens of millions of galaxies. And perhaps, deep in that signal, I will get to look upon the very first stars and galaxies switching on, the beginning of time itself.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/natasha_hurley_walker_how_radio_telescopes_show_us_unseen_galaxies
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"Two months ago, my kids and I huddled around a cell phone watching the live stream of the Game Awards, one of the video game industry's biggest nights. They announced the nominees for the Game for Impact, an award that's given to a thought-provoking video game with a profound prosocial message or meaning. They opened the envelope and they read the title of our video game. An award ... for impact. It was almost funny, actually, because I always thought that winning an award like that would have this huge impact on my life, but I found that the opposite is true.The big nights, the accomplishments — they fade. But the hardest nights of my life have stuck with me, impacting who I am and what I do.In 2010, my third son, Joel, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive brain tumor. And before that year was finished, doctors sat my husband and I down and let us know that his tumor had returned despite the most aggressive chemotherapy and radiation that they could offer him. On that terrible night, after learning that Joel had perhaps four months to live, I cuddled up with my two older sons in bed — they were five and three at the time — and I never really knew how much they understood, so I started telling them a bedtime story. I told them about this very brave knight named Joel and his adventure fighting a terrible dragon called cancer. Every night, I told them more of the story, but I never let the story end. I was just building up a context that they could understand and hoping that our prayers would be answered and I would never have to tell them that that knight, who had fought so bravely, was done fighting and could rest now, forever.Fortunately, I never did have to finish that bedtime story. My children outgrew it. Joel responded better than anyone expected to palliative treatment, and so instead of months, we spent years learning how to love our dying child with all of our hearts. Learning to recognize that shameful feeling of holding back just a little love to try to spare ourselves just a little pain somewhere further down the road. We pushed past that self-preservation because Joel was worth loving even if that love could crush us. And that lesson of intense vulnerability has changed me ... more than any award ever could.We started living like Joel could live, and we began developing a video game called ""That Dragon, Cancer."" It was the story of Joel. It was the story of hope in the shadow of death. It was the story of faith and doubt, and the realization that a wrestle with doubt is a part of faith — maybe the biggest part of it. It was a story that began as a miracle and ended as a memorial.(Music)(Giggle)(Clapping)(Music)(Video) Dad: Bouncing around, do you like that?(Giggle)I love your giggle.(Music)(Giggle)[A Journey of Hope In the Shadow of Death][That Dragon, Cancer](Music)When you play ""That Dragon, Cancer,"" you're transformed into a witness of Joel's life, exploring an emotional landscape, clicking to discover more of what we as a family felt and experienced. It feels a little bit like analyzing interactive poetry because every game mechanic is a metaphor, and so the more the player asks themselves what we as designers were trying to express and why, the richer the experience becomes.We took that vulnerability that Joel taught us, and we encoded the game with it. Players expect their video games to offer them branching narrative so that every decision that they make feels important and can change the outcome of the game. We subverted that principle of game design, collapsing the choices in on the player so that they discover for themselves that there is nothing that they can do that will change the outcome for Joel. And they feel that discovery as deeply and desperately as we felt it on nights when we held Joel in our arms praying for hours, stubbornly holding out hope for a grace that we could not create for ourselves.We'd all prefer to win, but when you discover that you can't win, what do you value instead?I never planned to write video games, but these moments that really change our lives, they often come as the result of our hardship — and not our glory. When we thought that Joel could live, I left the game designing to my husband. I chimed in here and there with a scene or two and some suggestions. But after the night that Joel died, the passion, the possibility of sharing Joel's life through our video game — it was something that I couldn't resist. I started writing more, I sat in on our team's design meetings, I added more ideas and I helped direct scenes. And I discovered that creating a video game is telling a story, but with an entirely new vocabulary. All the same elements of imagination and symbolism are there, but they're just partnered with player agency and system responsiveness. It's challenging work. I have to think in a totally new way to do it, but I love it. And I wouldn't have known that without Joel.Maybe you're a little surprised by our choice to share our story of terminal cancer through a video game. Perhaps you're even thinking like so many people before you: cancer is not a game. Well, tell that to any pediatric cancer parent that's ever taken an exam glove and blown it up into a balloon, or transformed a syringe into a rocket ship, or let their child ride their IV pole through the hospital halls like it was a race car. Because when you have children, everything is a game. And when your young child experiences something traumatic, you work even harder to make sure that their life feels like a game because children naturally explore their worlds through play. While cancer can steal many things from a family, it shouldn't steal play.If you're listening to me and you're trying to imagine this family that revolves entirely around a dying child, and you can't imagine joy as part of that picture, then we were right to share our story with you, because that season of our life was hard. Unspeakably hard at times, but it was also pure hope, deep love and joy like I have never experienced since. Our video game was our attempt to share that world with people who hadn't experienced it before, because we never could imagine that world until it became ours.We made a video game that's hard to play. It will never be a blockbuster. People have to prepare themselves to invest emotionally in a story that they know will break their hearts. But when our hearts break, they heal a little differently. My broken heart has been healing with a new and a deeper compassion — a desire to sit with people in their pain, to hear their stories and try to help tell them so that they know that they're seen.On the night when ""That Dragon, Cancer"" won the Game for Impact Award, we cheered, we smiled and we talked about Joel and the impact he had on our life — on all of those hard and hopeful nights that we shared with him when he changed our hearts and taught us so much more about life and love and faith and purpose. That award will never mean as much to me as even a single photograph of my son, but it does represent all of the people who his life has impacted, people I'll never meet. They write me emails sometimes. They tell me that they miss Joel, even though they never met him. They describe the tears that they've shed for my son, and it makes my burden of grief just a little bit lighter knowing that it's shared with a 10-year-old watching a YouTube playthrough, or a doctor playing on his airplane with a smartphone, or a professor introducing Joel to her first-year philosophy students.We made a video game that's hard to play. But that feels just right to me, because the hardest moments of our lives change us more than any goal we could ever accomplish. Tragedy has shifted my heart more than any dream I could ever see come true.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_green_a_video_game_to_cope_with_grief
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"I would like to tell you about the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me in my years of working as a palliative care physician. This happened a couple of years ago. I was asked as a consultant to see a woman in her 70s — retired English professor who had pancreatic cancer. I was asked to see her because she had pain, nausea, vomiting ... When I went to see her, we talked about those symptoms and in the course of that consultation, she asked me whether I thought that medical marijuana might help her. I thought back to everything that I had learned in medical school about medical marijuana, which didn't take very long because I had learned absolutely nothing. And so I told her that as far as I knew, medical marijuana had no benefits whatsoever. And she smiled and nodded and reached into the handbag next to the bed, and pulled out a stack of about a dozen randomized controlled trials showing that medical marijuana has benefits for symptoms like nausea and pain and anxiety. She handed me those articles and said, ""Maybe you should read these before offering an opinion ... doctor.""(Laughter)So I did. That night I read all of those articles and found a bunch more. When I came to see her the next morning, I had to admit that it looks like there is some evidence that marijuana can offer medical benefits and I suggested that if she really was interested, she should try it. You know what she said? This 73-year-old, retired English professor? She said, ""I did try it about six months ago. It was amazing. I've been using it every day since. It's the best drug I've discovered. I don't know why it took me 73 years to discover this stuff. It's amazing.""(Laughter)That was the moment at which I realized I needed to learn something about medical marijuana because what I was prepared for in medical school bore no relationship to reality.So I started reading more articles, I started talking to researchers, I started talking to doctors, and most importantly, I started listening to patients. I ended up writing a book based on those conversations, and that book really revolved around three surprises — surprises to me, anyway. One I already alluded to — that there really are some benefits to medical marijuana. Those benefits may not be as huge or as stunning as some of the most avid proponents of medical marijuana would have us believe, but they are real. Surprise number two: medical marijuana does have some risks. Those risks may not be as huge and as scary as some of the opponents of medical marijuana would have us believe, but they are real risks, nonetheless. But it was the third surprise that was most ... surprising. And that is that a lot of the patients I talked with who've turned to medical marijuana for help, weren't turning to medical marijuana because of its benefits or the balance of risks and benefits, or because they thought it was a wonder drug, but because it gave them control over their illness. It let them manage their health in a way that was productive and efficient and effective and comfortable for them.To show you what I mean, let me tell you about another patient. Robin was in her early 40s when I met her. She looked though like she was in her late 60s. She had suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for the last 20 years, her hands were gnarled by arthritis, her spine was crooked, she had to rely on a wheelchair to get around. She looked weak and frail, and I guess physically she probably was, but emotionally, cognitively, psychologically, she was among the toughest people I've ever met. And when I sat down next to her in a medical marijuana dispensary in Northern California to ask her about why she turned to medical marijuana, what it did for her and how it helped her, she started out by telling me things that I had heard from many patients before. It helped with her anxiety; it helped with her pain; when her pain was better, she slept better. And I'd heard all that before. But then she said something that I'd never heard before, and that is that it gave her control over her life and over her health. She could use it when she wanted, in the way that she wanted, at the dose and frequency that worked for her. And if it didn't work for her, then she could make changes. Everything was up to her. The most important thing she said was she didn't need anybody else's permission — not a clinic appointment, not a doctor's prescription, not a pharmacist's order. It was all up to her. She was in control.And if that seems like a little thing for somebody with chronic illness, it's not — not at all. When we face a chronic serious illness, whether it's rheumatoid arthritis or lupus or cancer or diabetes, or cirrhosis, we lose control. And note what I said: ""when,"" not ""if."" All of us at some point in our lives will face a chronic serious illness that causes us to lose control. We'll see our function decline, some of us will see our cognition decline, we'll be no longer able to care for ourselves, to do the things that we want to do. Our bodies will betray us, and in that process, we'll lose control. And that's scary. Not just scary — that's frightening, it's terrifying. When I talk to my patients, my palliative care patients, many of whom are facing illnesses that will end their lives, they have a lot of be frightened of — pain, nausea, vomiting, constipation, fatigue, their impending mortality. But what scares them more than anything else is this possibility that at some point, tomorrow or a month from now, they're going to lose control of their health, of their lives, of their healthcare, and they're going to become dependent on others, and that's terrifying.So it's no wonder really that patients like Robin, who I just told you about, who I met in that clinic, turn to medical marijuana to try to claw back some semblance of control. How do they do it though? How do these medical marijuana dispensaries — like the one where I met Robin — how do they give patients like Robin back the sort of control that they need? And how do they do it in a way that mainstream medical hospitals and clinics, at least for Robin, weren't able to? What's their secret? So I decided to find out.I went to a seedy clinic in Venice Beach in California and got a recommendation that would allow me to be a medical marijuana patient. I got a letter of recommendation that would let me buy medical marijuana. I got that recommendation illegally, because I'm not a resident of California — I should note that. I should also note, for the record, that I never used that letter of recommendation to make a purchase, and to all of you DEA agents out there —(Laughter)love the work that you're doing, keep it up.(Laughter)Even though it didn't let me make a purchase though, that letter was priceless because it let me be a patient. It let me experience what patients like Robin experience when they go to a medical marijuana dispensary. And what I experienced — what they experience every day, hundreds of thousands of people like Robin — was really amazing. I walked into the clinic, and from the moment that I entered many of these clinics and dispensaries, I felt like that dispensary, that clinic, was there for me. There were questions at the outset about who I am, what kind of work I do, what my goals are in looking for a medical marijuana prescription, or product, what my goals are, what my preferences are, what my hopes are, how do I think, how do I hope this might help me, what am I afraid of. These are the sorts of questions that patients like Robin get asked all the time. These are the sorts of questions that make me confident that the person I'm talking with really has my best interests at heart and wants to get to know me.The second thing I learned in those clinics is the availability of education. Education from the folks behind the counter, but also education from folks in the waiting room. People I met were more than happy, as I was sitting next to them — people like Robin — to tell me about who they are, why they use medical marijuana, what helps them, how it helps them, and to give me advice and suggestions. Those waiting rooms really are a hive of interaction, advice and support.And third, the folks behind the counter. I was amazed at how willing those people were to spend sometimes an hour or more talking me through the nuances of this strain versus that strain, smoking versus vaporizing, edibles versus tinctures — all, remember, without me making any purchase whatsoever. Think about the last time you went to any hospital or clinic and the last time anybody spent an hour explaining those sorts of things to you. The fact that patients like Robin are going to these clinics, are going to these dispensaries and getting that sort of personalized attention and education and service, really should be a wake-up call to the healthcare system. People like Robin are turning away from mainstream medicine, turning to medical marijuana dispensaries because those dispensaries are giving them what they need.If that's a wake-up call to the medical establishment, it's a wake-up call that many of my colleagues are either not hearing or not wanting to hear. When I talk to my colleagues, physicians in particular, about medical marijuana, they say, ""Oh, we need more evidence. We need more research into benefits, we need more evidence about risks."" And you know what? They're right. They're absolutely right. We do need much more evidence about the benefits of medical marijuana. We also need to ask the federal government to reschedule marijuana to Schedule II, or to deschedule it entirely to make that research possible. We also need more research into medical marijuana's risks. Medical marijuana's risks — we know a lot about the risks of recreational use, we know next to nothing about the risks of medical marijuana. So we absolutely do need research, but to say that we need research and not that we need to make any changes now is to miss the point entirely. People like Robin aren't seeking out medical marijuana because they think it's a wonder drug, or because they think it's entirely risk-free. They seek it out because the context in which it's delivered and administered and used, gives them the sort of control they need over their lives. And that's a wake-up call we really need to pay attention to.The good news though is that there are lessons we can learn today from those medical marijuana dispensaries. And those are lessons we really should learn. These are often small, mom-and-pop operations run by people with no medical training. And while it's embarrassing to think that many of these clinics and dispensaries are providing services and support and meeting patients' needs in ways that billion-dollar healthcare systems aren't — we should be embarrassed by that — but we can also learn from that. And there are probably three lessons at least that we can learn from those small dispensaries.One: we need to find ways to give patients more control in small but important ways. How to interact with healthcare providers, when to interact with healthcare providers, how to use medications in ways that work for them. In my own practice, I've gotten much more creative and flexible in supporting my patients in using drugs safely to manage their symptoms — with the emphasis on safely. Many of the drugs I prescribe are drugs like opioids or benzodiazepines which can be dangerous if overused. But here's the point. They can be dangerous if they're overused, but they can also be ineffective if they're not used in a way that's consistent with what patients want and need. So that flexibility, if it's delivered safely, can be extraordinarily valuable for patients and their families. That's number one.Number two: education. Huge opportunities to learn from some of the tricks of those medical marijuana dispensaries to provide more education that doesn't require a lot of physician time necessarily, or any physician time, but opportunities to learn about what medications we're using and why, prognoses, trajectories of illness, and most importantly, opportunities for patients to learn from each other. How can we replicate what goes on in those clinic and medical dispensary waiting rooms? How patients learn from each other, how people share with each other.And last but not least, putting patients first the way those medical marijuana dispensaries do, making patients feel legitimately like what they want, what they need, is why, as healthcare providers, we're here. Asking patients about their hopes, their fears, their goals and preferences. As a palliative care provider, I ask all my patients what they're hoping for and what they're afraid of. But here's the thing. Patients shouldn't have to wait until they're chronically seriously ill, often near the end of life, they shouldn't have to wait until they're seeing a physician like me before somebody asks them, ""What are you hoping for?"" ""What are you afraid of?"" That should be baked into the way that healthcare is delivered.We can do this — we really can. Medical marijuana dispensaries and clinics all across the country are figuring this out. They're figuring this out in ways that larger, more mainstream health systems are years behind. But we can learn from them, and we have to learn from them. All we have to do is swallow our pride — put aside the thought for a minute that because we have lots of letters after our name, because we're experts, because we're chief medical officers of a large healthcare system, we know all there is to know about how to meet patients' needs.We need to swallow our pride. We need to go visit a few medical marijuana dispensaries. We need to figure out what they're doing. We need to figure out why so many patients like Robin are leaving our mainstream medical clinics and going to these medical marijuana dispensaries instead. We need to figure out what their tricks are, what their tools are, and we need to learn from them. If we do, and I think we can, and I absolutely think we have to, we can guarantee all of our patients will have a much better experience.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_casarett_a_doctor_s_case_for_medical_marijuana
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"I was 14 years old inside of a bowling alley, burglarizing an arcade game, and upon exiting the building a security guard grabbed my arm, so I ran. I ran down the street, and I jumped on top of a fence. And when I got to the top, the weight of 3,000 quarters in my book bag pulled me back down to the ground. So when I came to, the security guard was standing on top of me, and he said, ""Next time you little punks steal something you can carry.""(Laughter)I was taken to juvenile hall and when I was released into the custody of my mother, the first words my uncle said was, ""How'd you get caught?"" I said, ""Man, the book bag was too heavy."" He said, ""Man, you weren't supposed to take all the quarters."" I said, ""Man, they were small. What am I supposed to do?"" And 10 minutes later, he took me to burglarize another arcade game. We needed gas money to get home. That was my life.I grew up in Oakland, California, with my mother and members of my immediate family addicted to crack cocaine. My environment consisted of living with family, friends, and homeless shelters. Oftentimes, dinner was served in breadlines and soup kitchens. The big homey told me this: money rules the world and everything in it. And in these streets, money is king. And if you follow the money, it'll lead you to the bad guy or the good guy.Soon after, I committed my first crime, and it was the first time that I was told that I had potential and felt like somebody believed in me. Nobody ever told me that I could be a lawyer, doctor or engineer. I mean, how was I supposed to do that? I couldn't read, write or spell. I was illiterate. So I always thought crime was my way to go.And then one day I was talking to somebody and he was telling me about this robbery that we could do. And we did it.The reality was that I was growing up in the strongest financial nation in the world, the United States of America, while I watched my mother stand in line at a blood bank to sell her blood for 40 dollars just to try to feed her kids. She still has the needle marks on her arms to day to show for that.So I never cared about my community. They didn't care about my life. Everybody there was doing what they were doing to take what they wanted, the drug dealers, the robbers, the blood bank. Everybody was taking blood money. So I got mine by any means necessary. I got mine. Financial literacy really did rule the world, and I was a child slave to it following the bad guy.At 17 years old, I was arrested for robbery and murder and I soon learned that finances in prison rule more than they did on the streets, so I wanted in. One day, I rushed to grab the sports page of the newspaper so my cellie could read it to me, and I accidentally picked up the business section. And this old man said, ""Hey youngster, you pick stocks?"" And I said, ""What's that?"" He said, ""That's the place where white folks keep all their money.""(Laughter)And it was the first time that I saw a glimpse of hope, a future. He gave me this brief description of what stocks were, but it was just a glimpse. I mean, how was I supposed to do it? I couldn't read, write or spell. The skills that I had developed to hide my illiteracy no longer worked in this environment. I was trapped in a cage, prey among predators, fighting for freedom I never had. I was lost, tired, and I was out of options.So at 20 years old, I did the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life. I picked up a book, and it was the most agonizing time of my life, trying to learn how to read, the ostracizing from my family, the homeys. It was rough, man. It was a struggle. But little did I know I was receiving the greatest gifts I had ever dreamed of: self-worth, knowledge, discipline. I was so excited to be reading that I read everything I could get my hands on: candy wrappers, clothing logos, street signs, everything. I was just reading stuff!(Applause)Just reading stuff. I was so excited to know how to read and know how to spell. The homey came up, said, ""Man, what you eating?"" I said, ""C-A-N-D-Y, candy.""(Laughter)He said, ""Let me get some."" I said, ""N-O. No.""(Laughter)It was awesome. I mean, I can actually now for the first time in my life read. The feeling that I got from it was amazing.And then at 22, feeling myself, feeling confident, I remembered what the OG told me. So I picked up the business section of the newspaper. I wanted to find these rich white folks.(Laughter)So I looked for that glimpse. As I furthered my career in teaching others how to financially manage money and invest, I soon learned that I had to take responsibility for my own actions. True, I grew up in a very complex environment, but I chose to commit crimes, and I had to own up to that. I had to take responsibility for that, and I did. I was building a curriculum that could teach incarcerated men how to manage money through prison employments. Properly managing our lifestyle would provide transferrable tools that we can use to manage money when we reenter society, like the majority of people did who didn't commit crimes. Then I discovered that according to MarketWatch, over 60 percent of the American population has under 1,000 dollars in savings. Sports Illustrated said that over 60 percent of NBA players and NFL players go broke. 40 percent of marital problems derive from financial issues. What the hell?(Laughter)You mean to tell me that people worked their whole lives, buying cars, clothes, homes and material stuff but were living check to check? How in the world were members of society going to help incarcerated individuals back into society if they couldn't manage they own stuff? We screwed.(Laughter)I needed a better plan. This is not going to work out too well. So ... I thought. I now had an obligation to meet those on the path and help, and it was crazy because I now cared about my community. Wow, imagine that. I cared about my community.Financial illiteracy is a disease that has crippled minorities and the lower class in our society for generations and generations, and we should be furious about that. Ask yourselves this: How can 50 percent of the American population be financially illiterate in a nation driven by financial prosperity? Our access to justice, our social status, living conditions, transportation and food are all dependent on money that most people can't manage. It's crazy! It's an epidemic and a bigger danger to public safety than any other issue.According to the California Department of Corrections, over 70 percent of those incarcerated have committed or have been charged with money-related crimes: robberies, burglaries, fraud, larceny, extortion — and the list goes on. Check this out: a typical incarcerated person would enter the California prison system with no financial education, earn 30 cents an hour, over 800 dollars a year, with no real expenses and save no money. Upon his parole, he will be given 200 dollars gate money and told, ""Hey, good luck, stay out of trouble. Don't come back to prison."" With no meaningful preparation or long-term financial plan, what does he do ... ? At 60? Get a good job, or go back to the very criminal behavior that led him to prison in the first place? You taxpayers, you choose. Well, his education already chose for him, probably.So how do we cure this disease? I cofounded a program that we call Financial Empowerment Emotional Literacy. We call it FEEL, and it teaches how do you separate your emotional decisions from your financial decisions, and the four timeless rules to personal finance: the proper way to save, control your cost of living, borrow money effectively and diversify your finances by allowing your money to work for you instead of you working for it. Incarcerated people need these life skills before we reenter society. You can't have full rehabilitation without these life skills. This idea that only professionals can invest and manage money is absolutely ridiculous, and whoever told you that is lying.(Applause)A professional is a person who knows his craft better than most, and nobody knows how much money you need, have or want better than you, which means you are the professional. Financial literacy is not a skill, ladies and gentlemen. It's a lifestyle. Financial stability is a byproduct of a proper lifestyle. A financially sound incarcerated person can become a taxpaying citizen, and a financially sound taxpaying citizen can remain one. This allows us to create a bridge between those people who we influence: family, friends and those young people who still believe that crime and money are related. So let's lose the fear and anxiety of all the big financial words and all that other nonsense that you've been out there hearing. And let's get to the heart of what's been crippling our society from taking care of your responsibility to be better life managers. And let's provide a simple and easy to use curriculum that gets to the heart, the heart of what financial empowerment and emotional literacy really is.Now, if you're sitting out here in the audience and you said, ""Oh yeah, well, that ain't me and I don't buy it,"" then come take my class —(Laughter)so I can show you how much money it costs you every time you get emotional.(Applause)Thank you very much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/curtis_wall_street_carroll_how_i_learned_to_read_and_trade_stocks_in_prison
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"I want to tell you a story about a girl. But I can't tell you her real name. So let's just call her Hadiza.Hadiza is 20. She's shy, but she has a beautiful smile that lights up her face. But she's in constant pain. And she will likely be on medication for the rest of her life.Do you want to know why? Hadiza is a Chibok girl, and on April 14, 2014, she was kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists. She managed to escape, though, by jumping off the truck that was carrying the girls. But when she landed, she broke both her legs, and she had to crawl on her tummy to hide in the bushes. She told me she was terrified that Boko Haram would come back for her. She was one of 57 girls who would escape by jumping off trucks that day.This story, quite rightly, caused ripples around the world. People like Michelle Obama, Malala and others lent their voices in protest, and at about the same time — I was living in London at the time — I was sent from London to Abuja to cover the World Economic Forum that Nigeria was hosting for the first time. But when we arrived, it was clear that there was only one story in town. We put the government under pressure. We asked tough questions about what they were doing to bring these girls back. Understandably, they weren't too happy with our line of questioning, and let's just say we received our fair share of ""alternative facts.""(Laughter)Influential Nigerians were telling us at the time that we were naïve, we didn't understand the political situation in Nigeria. But they also told us that the story of the Chibok girls was a hoax. Sadly, this hoax narrative has persisted, and there are still people in Nigeria today who believe that the Chibok girls were never kidnapped. Yet I was talking to people like these — devastated parents, who told us that on the day Boko Haram kidnapped their daughters, they ran into the Sambisa Forest after the trucks carrying their daughters. They were armed with machetes, but they were forced to turn back because Boko Haram had guns.For two years, inevitably, the news agenda moved on, and for two years, we didn't hear much about the Chibok girls. Everyone presumed they were dead. But in April last year, I was able to obtain this video. This is a still from the video that Boko Haram filmed as a proof of life, and through a source, I obtained this video. But before I could publish it, I had to travel to the northeast of Nigeria to talk to the parents, to verify it. I didn't have to wait too long for confirmation. One of the mothers, when she watched the video, told me that if she could have reached into the laptop and pulled our her child from the laptop, she would have done so. For those of you who are parents, like myself, in the audience, you can only imagine the anguish that that mother felt.This video would go on to kick-start negotiation talks with Boko Haram. And a Nigerian senator told me that because of this video they entered into those talks, because they had long presumed that the Chibok girls were dead. Twenty-one girls were freed in October last year. Sadly, nearly 200 of them still remain missing.I must confess that I have not been a dispassionate observer covering this story. I am furious when I think about the wasted opportunities to rescue these girls. I am furious when I think about what the parents have told me, that if these were daughters of the rich and the powerful, they would have been found much earlier. And I am furious that the hoax narrative, I firmly believe, caused a delay; it was part of the reason for the delay in their return.This illustrates to me the deadly danger of fake news. So what can we do about it? There are some very smart people, smart engineers at Google and Facebook, who are trying to use technology to stop the spread of fake news. But beyond that, I think everybody here — you and I — we have a role to play in that. We are the ones who share the content. We are the ones who share the stories online. In this day and age, we're all publishers, and we have responsibility.In my job as a journalist, I check, I verify. I trust my gut, but I ask tough questions. Why is this person telling me this story? What do they have to gain by sharing this information? Do they have a hidden agenda? I really believe that we must all start to ask tougher questions of information that we discover online.Research shows that some of us don't even read beyond headlines before we share stories. Who here has done that? I know I have. But what if we stopped taking information that we discover at face value? What if we stop to think about the consequence of the information that we pass on and its potential to incite violence or hatred? What if we stop to think about the real-life consequences of the information that we share?Thank you very much for listening.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stephanie_busari_how_fake_news_does_real_harm
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"Fresh out of college, I went to work for a consulting firm. During orientation, the leaders dished out advice. Amongst them was one pithy counsel I will never forget. He told us, ""Be easy to manage."" Considering how naïve I really was at the time, I took his advice to heart. I told myself, ""Yes, I will be the ultimate team player. I will do everything I'm told. I will be easy to manage."" It wasn't until I arrived in graduate school and witnessed firsthand the criminal actions of scientists and engineers in the water crisis in Flint, Michigan that I realized how dangerous and yet surprisingly common this line of thinking really is.Make no mistake: the Flint water crisis is one of the most egregious environmental injustices of our time. For over 18 months, 100,000 residents, including thousands of young children, were exposed to contaminated drinking water with high levels of lead. Lead is a potent neurotoxin which causes cognitive and developmental disabilities and is especially harmful to growing fetuses and young children. We've known about its dangers since the Roman Empire. Amongst a whole host of health issues, 12 people died by contracting Legionnaires' disease. Flint's water infrastructure — the complex network of underground pipes — has been severely damaged. And while the water quality is slowly improving and the pipes are being replaced now, more than two years later, the water is still not safe to drink.So, people are still in shock. They ask themselves, ""How could this have happened?"" The short answer is: the crisis began when an emergency manager, appointed by Michigan's governor, decided to switch their water source to a local river to save money. But it continued for so long because scientists and engineers at government agencies in the state of Michigan and in the federal government did not follow federal regulations for treating the water right. What was more, they actively cheated on the law and orchestrated cover-ups. They ridiculed residents asking for help, while publicly insisting that the brown, smelly water coming out of the tap was safe to drink. The system at the local, state and federal levels completely failed to protect our most vulnerable, and an entire population was left to fend for itself.Now, amidst this injustice, Flint residents were rallying together. Amongst them were some amazing women of Flint — mothers concerned about their kids — who came together forming many grassroots coalitions, and these groups started protesting and demanding change. The group also reached out to outside scientists for help, and a few responded. Amongst them was a guy named Miguel Del Toral, a water expert at the US EPA — the Environmental Protection Agency — who actually wrote this scientific memo and sent it to the state of Michigan and the federal government to bring their attention to this problem. He was characterized a ""rogue employee,"" and silenced.In collaboration with Flint residents, our research team here at Tech, of students and scientists led by professor Marc Edwards, conducted citywide testing to prove that Flint's water was indeed contaminated, even toxic in some homes. We substantiated what Flint had been screaming for months, and put it on the Internet for the world to see.Now, when I was getting involved, when I said yes to this, I had no idea what I was getting into. But every second of this journey has been totally worth it. This was science in service to the public. This is what I came to graduate school for, and this is how I would rather spend my life. And so this coalition — this unlikely coalition of citizens, pastors, journalists and scientists — came together to uncover the truth using science, advocacy and activism.A local pediatrician figured out that the instances of childhood lead poisoning had indeed doubled in Flint during the crisis. And the state of Michigan was forced to acknowledge the problem and take steps to correct it. This group and many others got Flint's kids protected.A few months later, President Obama came in and declared a federal emergency, and now Flint is getting more than 600 million dollars in healthcare, nutrition, education and overhauling their water infrastructure. However, the arrogance and the callous disregard for public health shown by scientists and engineers at these government agencies is beyond belief. These unhealthy cultures that are festering in these groups, where the focus is on meeting regulations and checking boxes as opposed to protecting public health, is just appalling. Just consider this email that an EPA employee wrote, where she goes, ""I'm not so sure Flint is a community we want to go out on a limb for."" The dehumanization of an entire population could not be more obvious.Now, contrast that to the first canon of engineering, which, in my opinion, should be the first law of humanity: ""To hold paramount the health, safety and welfare of the public,"" above all else. This is the Hippocratic Oath we've rarely acknowledged, let alone embraced. And so when scientists and engineers, very much like medical doctors, screw up, people can get hurt — even die. If our professionals and even students fail to get that, society pays a huge price.Buried deep in history lies a character I deeply admire — an engineer named Peter Palchinsky. He lived in the time of the Soviet Union. And Palchinsky repeatedly got in trouble for his radical honesty and willingness to point out major flaws in the Soviets' mindless pursuit of rapid industrialization. Everyone was expected to follow orders coming from the top. Anyone asking questions or offering feedback was unwelcome. The Soviets had created the largest army of engineers the world had ever seen, and yet most of them were mere cogs in a gigantic machine heading for doom. Palchinsky, on the other hand, implored engineers to look at the economic, political and social consequences of their actions; in other words, be more public-focused. His fearless voice of reason was seen as a threat to the political establishment, and Joseph Stalin had him executed in 1929.Palchinsky's view on technocrats is very different from one that is still very popular, still very common — that of a dispassionate researcher working in his ivory tower lab, or a nerdy engineer working in his cubicle. Brilliant, no doubt, yet somehow cut off from the world, shows little emotion — kind of like Spock from ""Star Trek,"" you know? This guy.(Laughter)Let's try and do the Spock salute. I don't think I'll succeed ... See, I can't be Spock. Thank goodness I can't be Spock.(Laughter)I was reminded of this distinction because a recent article came out in a very reputed scientific journal, which kind of characterized our Flint work as driven by ""youthful idealism,"" and ""Hollywood's dramatic sensibilities."" It asks scientists to protect their research funding and institutions at all costs, no matter how just the cause. And if you think you have to get involved in something, even if it's an emergency, try finding an activist group or an NGO, and obtain the full support of the academic community — whatever that means — before you get involved. Not one mention of our moral and professional obligation of preventing harm to the public, or the fact that we have all this expertise, resources and, for some, even tenure to, you know, accomplish this task. I'm not saying every scientist should be an activist. There are real and sometimes very painful consequences of speaking up. But to denounce this idea, this possibility so completely so that you can protect research funding, simply screams of self-serving cowardice, and these are not the ideals we would want to pass to our students.And so you may think, ""OK, all this sounds great, but you'll never completely change organizational cultures, or imbibe mindsets in students and professionals to look at their work as a public good — science in service to the public."" Maybe so. But could a big reason for that be that we are not training our students right? Because if you look closely, our education system today is focused more on creating what ex-Yale professor Bill Deresiewicz calls ""excellent sheep"" — young people who are smart and ambitious, and yet somehow risk-averse, timid, directionless and, sometimes, full of themselves.Now, kids ... you know, we fell in love with science when we were kids, and yet we somehow spend most of our time during high school and college just jumping through hoops and doing things so that we can polish our résumé instead of sitting down and reflecting on what we want to do and who we want to be. And so, the markers of empathy in our college graduates have been dropping dramatically in the past two decades, while those of narcissism are on the rise.There is also a growing culture of disengagement between engineering students and the public. We are trained to build bridges and solve complex problems but not how to think or live or be a citizen of this world. My undergraduate years were explicit job preparation, and I cannot tell you how suffocating and painful it was at times. And so, some people think the solution to great engineers, to great scientists, is more technical training. Maybe so. But where are the discussions on ethical decision-making, or building character, or discerning right from wrong?Consider this project that I deeply love and admire. It's called, ""Heroic Imagination Project."" A brainchild of Dr. Phil Zimbardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, this program seeks to train school-going children around the world to look at themselves as heroes-in-waiting, or heroes-in-training. So, these young minds work over time to develop skills and virtues so that when the opportunity comes, no matter what that opportunity be, to stand up and do the right thing. In other words, anyone can be a hero.Think about that idea for a second. Why don't we teach science and engineering like that — where heroism and public service are seen as key values, because indeed, it's often heroism that is not only the antidote to public indifference, but also to systemic evil like we saw in Flint.And so, dream with me what a 21st-century scientist slash engineer could look like: individuals who are driven to master the sciences so that they can serve society, and are also aware of the tremendous power their knowledge and decisions have; folks who are developing their moral courage at all times, and who realize that conflict and controversy are not necessarily bad things if our ultimate loyalty is to the public and the planet.These are the people who will stand up like we did in Flint — not to be saviors or heroes in the media, but altruistic and fundamentally good actors that you and I can trust. Imagine fostering such a public-focused mindset in classes, on service trips and during activities during college or even high school, so that these young minds will hold onto those ideals when they actually enter the real world, whether that be consulting, academia, policy making — or even becoming the president of a country.Some of mankind's greatest challenges lie ahead of us; contaminated drinking water is just one example. We could definitely use more — nay, we desperately need more — compassionate upstanders and public-focused scientists and engineers who will strive to the do right thing, and not be easy to manage.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/siddhartha_roy_science_in_service_to_the_public_good
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"[His Holiness Pope Francis Filmed in Vatican City First shown at TED2017]Good evening – or, good morning, I am not sure what time it is there. Regardless of the hour, I am thrilled to be participating in your conference. I very much like its title – ""The Future You"" – because, while looking at tomorrow, it invites us to open a dialogue today, to look at the future through a ""you."" ""The Future You:"" the future is made of yous, it is made of encounters, because life flows through our relations with others. Quite a few years of life have strengthened my conviction that each and everyone's existence is deeply tied to that of others: life is not time merely passing by, life is about interactions.As I meet, or lend an ear to those who are sick, to the migrants who face terrible hardships in search of a brighter future, to prison inmates who carry a hell of pain inside their hearts, and to those, many of them young, who cannot find a job, I often find myself wondering: ""Why them and not me?"" I, myself, was born in a family of migrants; my father, my grandparents, like many other Italians, left for Argentina and met the fate of those who are left with nothing. I could have very well ended up among today's ""discarded"" people. And that's why I always ask myself, deep in my heart: ""Why them and not me?""First and foremost, I would love it if this meeting could help to remind us that we all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ""I,"" separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone. We don’t think about it often, but everything is connected, and we need to restore our connections to a healthy state. Even the harsh judgment I hold in my heart against my brother or my sister, the open wound that was never cured, the offense that was never forgiven, the rancor that is only going to hurt me, are all instances of a fight that I carry within me, a flare deep in my heart that needs to be extinguished before it goes up in flames, leaving only ashes behind.Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve. While such concerns must be taken very seriously, they are not invincible. They can be overcome when we don't lock our door to the outside world. Happiness can only be discovered as a gift of harmony between the whole and each single component. Even science – and you know it better than I do – points to an understanding of reality as a place where every element connects and interacts with everything else.And this brings me to my second message. How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us. How wonderful would it be if solidarity, this beautiful and, at times, inconvenient word, were not simply reduced to social work, and became, instead, the default attitude in political, economic and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples and countries. Only by educating people to a true solidarity will we be able to overcome the ""culture of waste,"" which doesn't concern only food and goods but, first and foremost, the people who are cast aside by our techno-economic systems which, without even realizing it, are now putting products at their core, instead of people.Solidarity is a term that many wish to erase from the dictionary. Solidarity, however, is not an automatic mechanism. It cannot be programmed or controlled. It is a free response born from the heart of each and everyone. Yes, a free response! When one realizes that life, even in the middle of so many contradictions, is a gift, that love is the source and the meaning of life, how can they withhold their urge to do good to another fellow being?In order to do good, we need memory, we need courage and we need creativity. And I know that TED gathers many creative minds. Yes, love does require a creative, concrete and ingenious attitude. Good intentions and conventional formulas, so often used to appease our conscience, are not enough. Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face. The ""you"" is always a real presence, a person to take care of.There is a parable Jesus told to help us understand the difference between those who'd rather not be bothered and those who take care of the other. I am sure you have heard it before. It is the Parable of the Good Samaritan. When Jesus was asked: ""Who is my neighbor?"" - namely, ""Who should I take care of?"" - he told this story, the story of a man who had been assaulted, robbed, beaten and abandoned along a dirt road. Upon seeing him, a priest and a Levite, two very influential people of the time, walked past him without stopping to help. After a while, a Samaritan, a very much despised ethnicity at the time, walked by. Seeing the injured man lying on the ground, he did not ignore him as if he weren't even there. Instead, he felt compassion for this man, which compelled him to act in a very concrete manner. He poured oil and wine on the wounds of the helpless man, brought him to a hostel and paid out of his pocket for him to be assisted.The story of the Good Samaritan is the story of today’s humanity. People's paths are riddled with suffering, as everything is centered around money, and things, instead of people. And often there is this habit, by people who call themselves ""respectable,"" of not taking care of the others, thus leaving behind thousands of human beings, or entire populations, on the side of the road. Fortunately, there are also those who are creating a new world by taking care of the other, even out of their own pockets. Mother Teresa actually said: ""One cannot love, unless it is at their own expense.""We have so much to do, and we must do it together. But how can we do that with all the evil we breathe every day? Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good, to compassion and to our capacity to react against evil, all of which stem from deep within our hearts. Now you might tell me, ""Sure, these are beautiful words, but I am not the Good Samaritan, nor Mother Teresa of Calcutta."" On the contrary: we are precious, each and every one of us. Each and every one of us is irreplaceable in the eyes of God. Through the darkness of today's conflicts, each and every one of us can become a bright candle, a reminder that light will overcome darkness, and never the other way around.To Christians, the future does have a name, and its name is Hope. Feeling hopeful does not mean to be optimistically naïve and ignore the tragedy humanity is facing. Hope is the virtue of a heart that doesn't lock itself into darkness, that doesn't dwell on the past, does not simply get by in the present, but is able to see a tomorrow. Hope is the door that opens onto the future. Hope is a humble, hidden seed of life that, with time, will develop into a large tree. It is like some invisible yeast that allows the whole dough to grow, that brings flavor to all aspects of life. And it can do so much, because a tiny flicker of light that feeds on hope is enough to shatter the shield of darkness. A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another ""you,"" and another ""you,"" and it turns into an ""us."" And so, does hope begin when we have an ""us?"" No. Hope began with one ""you."" When there is an ""us,"" there begins a revolution.The third message I would like to share today is, indeed, about revolution: the revolution of tenderness. And what is tenderness? It is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. To listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of our sick and polluted earth. Tenderness means to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need.Tenderness is the language of the young children, of those who need the other. A child’s love for mom and dad grows through their touch, their gaze, their voice, their tenderness. I like when I hear parents talk to their babies, adapting to the little child, sharing the same level of communication. This is tenderness: being on the same level as the other. God himself descended into Jesus to be on our level. This is the same path the Good Samaritan took. This is the path that Jesus himself took. He lowered himself, he lived his entire human existence practicing the real, concrete language of love.Yes, tenderness is the path of choice for the strongest, most courageous men and women. Tenderness is not weakness; it is fortitude. It is the path of solidarity, the path of humility. Please, allow me to say it loud and clear: the more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other. There is a saying in Argentina: ""Power is like drinking gin on an empty stomach."" You feel dizzy, you get drunk, you lose your balance, and you will end up hurting yourself and those around you, if you don’t connect your power with humility and tenderness. Through humility and concrete love, on the other hand, power – the highest, the strongest one – becomes a service, a force for good.The future of humankind isn't exclusively in the hands of politicians, of great leaders, of big companies. Yes, they do hold an enormous responsibility. But the future is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a ""you"" and themselves as part of an ""us."" We all need each other. And so, please, think of me as well with tenderness, so that I can fulfill the task I have been given for the good of the other, of each and every one, of all of you, of all of us. Thank you.","https://www.ted.com/talks/pope_francis_why_the_only_future_worth_building_includes_everyone
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"Gayle King: Have a seat, Serena Williams, or should we say, have a seat, mom.(Cheers)So no doubt, you guys are like me. You saw the release of Serena in that great yellow bathing suit last week and when I saw it, all I could think of was, ""Gosh, why couldn't she have waited til we sat onstage for TED?"" I was very selfish, I know. So I asked you about that picture, and you said nobody was supposed to see that picture. What do you mean?Serena Williams: Well, actually, it was an accident. I was on vacation, just taking some time for myself, and I have this thing where I've been checking my status and taking pictures every week to see how far along I'm going —GK: And sharing it with friends, maybe?SW: No, actually I have just been saving it, and I didn't really tell a lot of people, to be quite honest, and I'd been saving it, and you know how social media is, you press the wrong button and —(Laughter)GK: And there it was.SW: So 30 minutes later — my phone doesn't ring that much — and 30 minutes later, I missed like four calls, and I'm like, that's weird, and then I picked it up and I was like, oh no. But it was a good moment. I was gonna wait literally just five or six more days — that's OK.GK: I know, because it was weird, Serena, because it only said 20 weeks, so it's not like there was a whole lot of information on it.SW: Exactly, so that's what I've been doing all this time. I've been just tracking it. 18, 19 — every week I'd just take a picture and save it, and I've been so good about it, and this was the one time that I slipped.GK: There you go. Well, congratulations.SW: Yes, thank you.GK: It really is OK. When you heard the news, were you excited? Were you afraid? Were you worried? That you were pregnant, I mean.SW: So I heard it two days before the beginning of the Australian Open, which is one of the biggest grand slams.GK: You found out two days before?SW: Yeah, so it was two days before, and I knew. I was nervous. I wasn't quite sure what to think, but I just knew that at that moment it was really important for me to just focus right there at the Australian Open, and I was definitely not sure what to do. I was like, can I play? I know it's very dangerous, maybe, sometimes in the first 12 weeks or so, so I had a lot of questions.GK: But not only did you play, Ms. Williams, you won.(Cheers)SW: Yeah. May I just say, 23 grand slams to you.SW: Thank you.(Applause)GK: While pregnant!SW: Well, I was looking for another handicap, so ... no.GK: Did you play differently that game, knowing you were pregnant?SW: I did. It wasn't very easy. You hear all these stories about people when they're pregnant, they get sick and they get tired.GK: Have you had morning sickness?SW: No, I've been so fortunate and so I haven't. But they get really tired and they get really stressed out, and I had to really take all that energy, put it in a paper bag, so to say, and throw it away, because I really felt like I didn't have time to deal with any extra emotions, any extra anything, because pregnant or not, no one knew, and I was supposed to win that tournament as I am every tournament that I show up. I am expected to win, and if I don't win, it's actually much bigger news.GK: Yeah, when you don't win, that's a big story.SW: Yes, so for me, I had to really take anything negative and any emotions that I was feeling at that point and kind of just bottle them up and really figure out what the next step for me to do was.GK: You have a lot of support. You have a lot of love. Even when I was coming here, people stopped me at the airport. I was saying to the flight attendant, the pilot, ""Guess where I'm going?"" They said, ""Oh my God, we're so glad she's pregnant."" But then you always have these cranky Yankees. On the way over here, somebody was telling me about Ilie Nastase, who said some very unkind, inappropriate, dare I say racial things. You have responded to him. I'm not even going to dignify what he said, but you responded. Why did you respond?SW: Well, I think there are very inappropriate comments, and not only that, I've been really supportive of my peers and the people that I've worked with. I've been a pro for almost 20 years, and so for me, it's really important to hold women up, and it's something that these young women, they'll come to the locker room, they'll want to take pictures with me, and for me, it's just like, I want to be able to be a good leader and a good example for them. So not only —(Applause)Not only did he have rude things to say about me and my peers, I felt it was important for us to stand up for each other and to stand up for myself. And at that point it was really important for me to say, like, I'm not afraid, I'm not going anywhere, but this is inappropriate, and there's time and there's a place for everything. And that really wasn't the time and the place.GK: We cut the part where you said you're not going anywhere, because you'll be 36 in September. Baby's coming, 36. And your coach said age is always important, but in tennis it's very important, but he has no doubt that you're coming back. Have you thought, am I coming back? Will I take some time off? I know the women on the tour are saying, ""How long does it take to have a baby? Two years will she be gone?"" What are you thinking?SW: Well, I'm always trying to defy the odds, you know, so for me everything is really mental. I definitely plan on coming back. I'm not done yet. I'm really inspired by my sister. She's a year older than me, and that's something that — if she's still playing, I know I can play.(Laughter)And there's so many — Roger Federer, he's a little bit older than me and he's still winning everything, so I'm like, I know I can do that too. So that's been so inspiring to me, especially recently, and I know that it's something I want to do. And my story is definitely not over yet. I was talking to my coach about it, and we were talking about how this is just a new part of my life, and my baby's going to be in the stands and hopefully cheering for me, not crying too much.GK: No, you wrote a beautiful letter to your baby yesterday that you said — from the oldest mommy to the youngest one, to the oldest, to the youngest, I can't wait for you to get here. A lot of people feel that. I saw you about a year ago, because I think about your life, Serena. You've had three life-changing things in a six-month time: pregnant, huge win, fell in love. And when I saw you last year, I was saying, ""How's your love life? Da da da."" You said, ""I met a guy. He's a nerdy, kinda geeky guy. You won't know who he is."" I said, ""What's his name?""SW: I remember talking to you about that, yes.GK: And you said, ""Alexis Ohanian."" I said, ""I know him!"" He's awesome. But I would never put you with a nerdy geek, and you said, you neither.SW: I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't either, but it's been the best thing for me.GK: The best thing why? Does that look like a nerdy geek? Look at the shirt.(Laughter)No, he's a very nice guy.SW: You can tell he's into technology.GK: He's a very, very nice guy. I like him very much. So how did he succeed when others have failed? How was he the one that you knew, this is the one for me?SW: Well, I'm not going to say that, but ...(Laughter)GK: Say it, Serena, say it!SW: Well ...(Laughter)Yes.(Applause)GK: But you know what I mean.SW: He is very loving and he's very kind, and my mom says he's very considerate, and when she said that to me, I was like, you know, he really is, and it's the little things that really make a huge difference in life.GK: Like?SW: Something simple. My fashion company, we have a show every year, so in our show last year, I was running around like crazy, because I do everything for the show, and everything for it, so I was running around like crazy, and he, it was a simple gesture of this shirt that he had, and he just wanted to make sure that I had the same one, and it was — it's a weird story. It was better in person, I promise.GK: Was it a wonderful proposal? Or was it a Beyoncé song? ""If you like it then you ought to put a ring on it""? Were you feeling pressure to get married? Did you know it was coming?SW: Yeah, I actually never felt pressure to get married and I can't say I'm the marrying type of person. I really love my life. I love my freedom. I heard that kind of changes. But I love everything that I do, and I love my career, and I always felt like I didn't want anything to interfere with that. I've actually been so career-oriented and in fact, when he proposed, I was almost angry. Not almost. I was angry, because it was right in the middle of my training season, and I said, ""I gotta win the Australian Open. I can't fly to Rome."" Because he wanted to take me to Rome, and I said, ""I can't. I gotta win."" But that's how focused I was.GK: This is a girl that says, ""No, I can't go to Rome."" OK.SW: But I was really focused on reaching my goals and I knew at that point there was one player that I wanted to pass. I wanted to pass Steffi Graf's record, and that really meant a lot to me, and when I put my mind to something, I really am determined to reach it no matter what.GK: You know, you said that for you — I've heard you say that winning is addictive to you.SW: It is.GK: What do you mean?SW: I feel like winning for me is superaddictive. I feel like once you experience it, you always want to get that feeling again, and when I won my first championship, I was only 17 years old, but I never forgot that feeling, and I feel like every time I win one, I want to reach that feeling of your first championship. There's really no feeling in the world like that. And it's like, all these years of training and being a little kid and playing, and then winning is a wonderful experience. So for me I've always felt like I loved that feeling, and obviously I don't like the feeling of losing. I feel like —GK: No, in fact, people close to you say you're a very bad loser.SW: I'm not the best loser.GK: That you're very, very, very bad. Listen, no athlete, no champion likes to lose. I get that. But they say when it comes to losing, you are very, very, very bad at it.(Laughter)SW: I'm number one at losing too, so you know, that's all I can say.(Laughter)(Applause)GK: I'm always curious about the dynamic between you and Venus, because everybody that knows you and has followed the story knows that you two are very close, and you always bring your A game in whatever you do, but I often wonder, when you're playing her, do you bring your A- game because you want to do something for her or do you bring your A++ game because you want to crush her. Is it harder for you playing her or easier?SW: Well, playing Venus is like playing myself, because we grew up playing each other, we grew up practicing together. And it was something that has been difficult, because she's my toughest opponent. She's tall, she's fast, she hits hard like me, she serves like me. It's really like playing a wall.GK: She knows you.SW: She knows where I'm hitting the ball before I hit it, so it's something that is not very easy, but it's really about, when I go out there, I really have to shut down my mind and I have to say to myself, ""You know what? I'm just playing a great player, but today I have to be better. I don't care who it is, if it's my sister or it's my friend, today is the day I have to show up and I have to be better and I have to want it more than anyone else at this moment anywhere on this world.""GK: So never on the court do you fall back for Venus? Because, you know, it was always Venus and Serena.SW: Yes.GK: And now baby sister has surpassed older sister. Do you feel guilt about that? Do you feel joy in that? Is that a difficult position for you?SW: I don't feel anything in there. In my life, it still and forever is always going to be Venus and Serena. She's really love of my life, she's my best friend, she's my soul mate. I mean — There's pictures of her pushing me, really low-quality pictures or else I would have shared them, of her pushing me in a stroller on a tennis court, and she always took care of me. I used to spend all of my allowance money on the ice cream truck and stuff, and she would take her money and give it to me at school and make sure I had something to eat and she would go without, and that's the kind of person she actually is since I've always known her. So we always have this incredible respect for each other and this incredible love, and I think it's important for people to realize you can be successful but you can still have a wonderful relationship. On the court we are mortal enemies, but the second we shake hands, we are best friends again. And if I lose, it might be a day later for me, but for Venus —(Laughter)GK: There's never a time on the court where you hit the ball and say, ""That's for seventh grade when you did the blah blah blah""? You never have any moment like that?SW: I feel like she should have those moments, because she's never done anything bad to me, but I'm the youngest. I'm the younger sister.GK: Serena, she's never done anything bad to you? Really? I have three sisters. I can think of some stuff I've done bad.SW: Unless she brainwashed me to forget them.GK: No, but the love you have for her I know is very pure. I know that.SW: Yes. GK: I know that.SW: We were always brought up to be superclose, and we are incredibly close. Not only her. I have three other sisters as well, and we were always so close.GK: So before a big match, the two of you don't get together and say, look, we're going to go out there and — there's nothing?SW: Well, it's funny. Before the Australian Open, we were in the locker room together, and I always pick on her, so I pulled out my camera while she was changing. I started taking pictures of her, which is totally inappropriate, but she was so mad at me. She's like, ""Serena, stop!"" And I was just laughing at her. But that's the kind of relationship that we have, and like I said, the second we step on the court, it was like, we were definitely mortal enemies, but the second we stepped off, and moments before, we're just — It is what it is, because at the end of the day, she'll always be my sister. I'm not going to play Australia in — Well, who knows, I've been playing forever, but I don't think I'll be playing in 50 years, say? Let's be safe and say 50 years.GK: I don't know, Serena. There's never been anybody like you. When you think about it, never been anybody who has intersected gender and race the way you have, the dominance that you have and the scrutiny that you have. And when you were growing up, did you say, ""I want to be like that""? Because now little girls are looking at you saying, ""I want to be like that."" Who was the ""I want to be like that"" for you?SW: Well, it's interesting, and I'm glad you brought that up. For me, when I grew up, I always wanted to be the best, and I said, if you want to be the best, you've got to emulate the best. So when I started to go on tour when I was really young, I would see Steffi Graf, I would see Monica Seles, and I would even see Pete Sampras, and I would see what they did, and I noticed that Steffi and Monica didn't really talk to a lot of the other players, and they kind of were on their own, and they were just so focused and I would see Pete Sampras, the technique that he did, and I was like, ""I want to do that."" So I did that, and I felt that to be the best, and if you want to be the best, you have to hang around people and you have to look at people that are the best, because you're not going to be the best if you're looking at someone that's not at the top level.GK: People say nobody works as hard as you.SW: I'm a very hard worker. GK: That's what I heard.SW: People say, ""Oh, she's talented, she's athletic."" Actually, I wasn't. I was really small for my age. I grew up when I got older, and I had to work really hard, and I think one of the reasons why I fight so hard and I work so hard is because I was really, really, really small.GK: Yeah. You are no longer small.SW: No, I'm fully grown now. But I was small when I was really young for whatever reason. I think Venus maybe ate all the Wheaties.GK: You know, the other thing people talk about is your body. Your body brings men and women to their knees. And I mean in a good way. A lot has been made about your body. It's a work of art, it's masculine, it's glorious, there's never been anything like it. Did you have body issues when you were growing up? Have you always been comfortable with your body?SW: It's interesting, because when you're a teenage female growing up in the public eye, it is a lot of scrutiny that you face, and as any female that's a teenager, I definitely was not comfortable in my body. I didn't like it. I didn't understand why I had muscles. And I stopped lifting weights. I was like, I'm not going to do this. But then after I won the US Open, I realized that my body helped me reach goals that I wanted to reach, and I wanted to be happy with it, and I was so appreciative of it. I'm always healthy. I'm really fortunate and superblessed, and I felt like not only am I happy with my body, but I want other people and other young girls that have experienced what I've experienced to be happy with themselves. So whatever people say — masculine, whatever, too much, too little — I'm OK with it as long as I love myself.(Applause)GK: I know you learn a lot from winning, but what have you learned from losing?SW: I hate to lose, but I think losing has brought me here today. The only reason I am who I am is because of my losses, and some of them are extremely painful, but I wouldn't take any of them away, because every time I lose, it takes a really long time for me to lose again because I learn so much from it. And I encourage everyone that I talk to — I'm like, listen, if you lose or if something happens — not in sports — in business or in school — learn from it. Don't live in the past, live in the present, and don't make the same mistakes in the future. That's something that I always try to live by.GK: Now you're planning a wedding and I want to know, is it a destination wedding in the Catskills or Poconos or are you going to do it in Florida? What are you thinking? Big or small?SW: We're thinking medium size. We don't want to do too big, but then we're like, OK, we can't say no to this person, this person. So we're thinking medium size and we're just thinking — My personality is a lot of fun. Hopefully you can see that today. I'm not too serious.GK: And you like to dance. And the next chapter for Serena Williams is what?SW: Oh, next for me. Obviously I'm going to have a baby and I'm going to stay fit and kind of come back and play tennis and keep working on my fashion line. That'll be really fun.GK: Do you know if it's a boy or girl?SW: I don't. I have a feeling of one or the other. It's a 50-50 chance, but I have a feeling.GK: Gayle is a unisex name. Whatever you and Alexis decide, we are cheering you on!SW: Thank you for that. GK: You're welcome. We are cheering you on, Serena Williams. SW: Thank you so much.Thank you guys.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/serena_williams_gayle_king_on_tennis_love_and_motherhood
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"How many people here would like to live to be at least 80 years old? Yeah. I think we all have this hopeful expectation of living into old age. Let's project out into the future, to your future ""you's,"" and let's imagine that we're all 85. Now, everyone look at two people. One of you probably has Alzheimer's disease.(Laughter)Alright, alright. And maybe you're thinking, ""Well, it won't be me."" Then, OK. You are a caregiver. So —(Laughter)so in some way, this terrifying disease is likely to affect us all.Part of the fear around Alzheimer's stems from the sense that there's nothing we can do about it. Despite decades of research, we still have no disease-modifying treatment and no cure. So if we're lucky enough to live long enough, Alzheimer's appears to be our brain's destiny.But maybe it doesn't have to be. What if I told you we could change these statistics, literally change our brain's destiny, without relying on a cure or advancements in medicine?Let's begin by looking at what we currently understand about the neuroscience of Alzheimer's. Here's a picture of two neurons connecting. The point of connection, this space circled in red, is called the synapse. The synapse is where neurotransmitters are released. This is where signals are transmitted, where communication happens. This is where we think, feel, see, hear, desire ... and remember. And the synapse is where Alzheimer's happens.Let's zoom in on the synapse and look at a cartoon representation of what's going on. During the business of communicating information, in addition to releasing neurotransmitters like glutamate into the synapse, neurons also release a small peptide called amyloid beta. Normally, amyloid beta is cleared away metabolized by microglia, the janitor cells of our brains. While the molecular causes of Alzheimer's are still debated, most neuroscientists believe that the disease begins when amyloid beta begins to accumulate. Too much is released, or not enough is cleared away, and the synapse begins to pile up with amyloid beta. And when this happens, it binds to itself, forming sticky aggregates called amyloid plaques.How many people here are 40 years old or older? You're afraid to admit it now. This initial step into the disease, this presence of amyloid plaques accumulating, can already be found in your brains. The only way we could be sure of this would be through a PET scan, because at this point, you are blissfully unaware. You're not showing any impairments in memory, language, or cognition ... yet. We think it takes at least 15 to 20 years of amyloid plaque accumulation before it reaches a tipping point, then triggering a molecular cascade that causes the clinical symptoms of the disease. Prior to the tipping point, your lapses in memory might include things like, ""Why did I come in this room?"" or ""Oh ... what's his name?"" or ""Where did I put my keys?""Now, before you all start freaking out again, because I know half of you did at least one of those in the last 24 hours — these are all normal kinds of forgetting. In fact, I would argue that these examples might not even involve your memory, because you didn't pay attention to where you put your keys in the first place. After the tipping point, the glitches in memory, language and cognition are different. Instead of eventually finding your keys in your coat pocket or on the table by the door, you find them in the refrigerator, or you find them and you think, ""What are these for?""So what happens when amyloid plaques accumulate to this tipping point? Our microglia janitor cells become hyper-activated, releasing chemicals that cause inflammation and cellular damage. We think they might actually start clearing away the synapses themselves. A crucial neural transport protein called ""tau"" becomes hyperphosphorylated and twists itself into something called ""tangles,"" which choke off the neurons from the inside. By mid-stage Alzheimer's, we have massive inflammation and tangles and all-out war at the synapse and cell death.So if you were a scientist trying to cure this disease, at what point would you ideally want to intervene? Many scientists are betting big on the simplest solution: keep amyloid plaques from reaching that tipping point, which means that drug discovery is largely focused on developing a compound that will prevent, eliminate, or reduce amyloid plaque accumulation. So the cure for Alzheimer's will likely be a preventative medicine. We're going to have to take this pill before we reach that tipping point, before the cascade is triggered, before we start leaving our keys in the refrigerator. We think this is why, to date, these kinds of drugs have failed in clinical trials — not because the science wasn't sound, but because the people in these trials were already symptomatic. It was too late. Think of amyloid plaques as a lit match. At the tipping point, the match sets fire to the forest. Once the forest is ablaze, it doesn't do any good to blow out the match. You have to blow out the match before the forest catches fire.Even before scientists sort this out, this information is actually really good news for us, because it turns out that the way we live can influence the accumulation of amyloid plaques. And so there are things we can do to keep us from reaching that tipping point.Let's picture your risk of Alzheimer's as a see-saw scale. We're going to pile risk factors on one arm, and when that arm hits the floor, you are symptomatic and diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Let's imagine you're 50 years old. You're not a spring chicken anymore, so you've accumulated some amyloid plaques with age. Your scale is tipped a little bit.Now let's look at your DNA. We've all inherited our genes from our moms and our dads. Some of these genes will increase our risk and some will decrease it. If you're like Alice in ""Still Alice,"" you've inherited a rare genetic mutation that cranks out amyloid beta, and this alone will tip your scale arm to the ground. But for most of us, the genes we inherit will only tip the arm a bit. For example, APOE4 is a gene variant that increases amyloid, but you can inherit a copy of APOE4 from mom and dad and still never get Alzheimer's, which means that for most of us, our DNA alone does not determine whether we get Alzheimer's. So what does? We can't do anything about getting older or the genes we've inherited. So far, we haven't changed our brain's destiny.What about sleep? In slow-wave deep sleep, our glial cells rinse cerebral spinal fluid throughout our brains, clearing away metabolic waste that accumulated in our synapses while we were awake. Deep sleep is like a power cleanse for the brain. But what happens if you shortchange yourself on sleep? Many scientists believe that poor sleep hygiene might actually be a predictor of Alzheimer's. A single night of sleep deprivation leads to an increase in amyloid beta. And amyloid accumulation has been shown to disrupt sleep, which in turn causes more amyloid to accumulate. And so now we have this positive feedback loop that's going to accelerate the tipping of that scale.What else? Cardiovascular health. High blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, smoking, high cholesterol, have all been shown to increase our risk of developing Alzheimer's. Some autopsy studies have shown that as many as 80 percent of people with Alzheimer's also had cardiovascular disease. Aerobic exercise has been shown in many studies to decrease amyloid beta in animal models of the disease. So a heart-healthy Mediterranean lifestyle and diet can help to counter the tipping of this scale.So there are many things we can do to prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer's. But let's say you haven't done any of them. Let's say you're 65; there's Alzheimer's in your family, so you've likely inherited a gene or two that tips your scale arm a bit; you've been burning the candle at both ends for years; you love bacon; and you don't run unless someone's chasing you.(Laughter)Let's imagine that your amyloid plaques have reached that tipping point. Your scale arm has crashed to the floor. You've tripped the cascade, setting fire to the forest, causing inflammation, tangles, and cell death. You should be symptomatic for Alzheimer's. You should be having trouble finding words and keys and remembering what I said at the beginning of this talk. But you might not be.There's one more thing you can do to protect yourself from experiencing the symptoms of Alzheimer's, even if you have the full-blown disease pathology ablaze in your brain. It has to do with neural plasticity and cognitive reserve. Remember, the experience of having Alzheimer's is ultimately a result of losing synapses. The average brain has over a hundred trillion synapses, which is fantastic; we've got a lot to work with. And this isn't a static number. We gain and lose synapses all the time, through a process called neural plasticity. Every time we learn something new, we are creating and strengthening new neural connections, new synapses.In the Nun Study, 678 nuns, all over the age of 75 when the study began, were followed for more than two decades. They were regularly given physical checkups and cognitive tests, and when they died, their brains were all donated for autopsy. In some of these brains, scientists discovered something surprising. Despite the presence of plaques and tangles and brain shrinkage — what appeared to be unquestionable Alzheimer's — the nuns who had belonged to these brains showed no signs of having the disease while they were alive.How can this be? We think it's because these nuns had a high level of cognitive reserve, which is a way of saying that they had more functional synapses. People who have more years of formal education, who have a high degree of literacy, who engage regularly in mentally stimulating activities, all have more cognitive reserve. They have an abundance and a redundancy in neural connections. So even if they have a disease like Alzheimer's compromising some of their synapses, they've got many extra backup connections, and this buffers them from noticing that anything is amiss.Let's imagine a simplified example. Let's say you only know one thing about a subject. Let's say it's about me. You know that Lisa Genova wrote ""Still Alice,"" and that's the only thing you know about me. You have that single neural connection, that one synapse. Now imagine you have Alzheimer's. You have plaques and tangles and inflammation and microglia devouring that synapse. Now when someone asks you, ""Hey, who wrote 'Still Alice?'"" you can't remember, because that synapse is either failing or gone. You've forgotten me forever.But what if you had learned more about me? Let's say you learned four things about me. Now imagine you have Alzheimer's, and three of those synapses are damaged or destroyed. You still have a way to detour the wreckage. You can still remember my name. So we can be resilient to the presence of Alzheimer's pathology through the recruitment of yet-undamaged pathways. And we create these pathways, this cognitive reserve, by learning new things. Ideally, we want these new things to be as rich in meaning as possible, recruiting sight and sound and associations and emotion.So this really doesn't mean doing crossword puzzles. You don't want to simply retrieve information you've already learned, because this is like traveling down old, familiar streets, cruising neighborhoods you already know. You want to pave new neural roads. Building an Alzheimer's-resistant brain means learning to speak Italian, meeting new friends, reading a book, or listening to a great TED Talk.And if, despite all of this, you are someday diagnosed with Alzheimer's, there are three lessons I've learned from my grandmother and the dozens of people I've come to know living with this disease. Diagnosis doesn't mean you're dying tomorrow. Keep living. You won't lose your emotional memory. You'll still be able to understand love and joy. You might not remember what I said five minutes ago, but you'll remember how I made you feel. And you are more than what you can remember.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_genova_what_you_can_do_to_prevent_alzheimer_s
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"Chris Anderson: Elon, hey, welcome back to TED. It's great to have you here.Elon Musk: Thanks for having me.CA: So, in the next half hour or so, we're going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic: Why are you boring?EM: Yeah. I ask myself that frequently. We're trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So right now, one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life. It's horrible. It's particularly horrible in LA.(Laughter)CA: I think you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown of this. Can I show this?EM: Yeah, absolutely. So this is the first time — Just to show what we're talking about. So a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So by having an elevator, sort of a car skate, that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here, so we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour.CA: How much?EM: 200 kilometers an hour, or about 130 miles per hour. So you should be able to get from, say, Westwood to LAX in six minutes — five, six minutes.(Applause)CA: So possibly, initially done, it's like on a sort of toll road-type basis.EM: Yeah.CA: Which, I guess, alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well.EM: So, I don't know if people noticed it in the video, but there's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point. So a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels.CA: But people — seen traditionally, it's incredibly expensive to dig, and that would block this idea.EM: Yeah. Well, they're right. To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is — I think it's a two-and-a-half mile extension that was just completed for two billion dollars. So it's roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in LA. And this is not the highest utility subway in the world. So yeah, it's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling.CA: And how could you achieve that?EM: Actually, if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and I think you can go beyond that. So the first thing to do is to cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So a single road lane tunnel according to regulations has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrink that diameter to what we're attempting, which is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. So that's roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that's a factor of eight. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limits, so you can jack up the power to the machine substantially. I think you can get at least a factor of two, maybe a factor of four or five improvement on top of that. So I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in the cost per mile, and our target actually is — we've got a pet snail called Gary, this is from Gary the snail from ""South Park,"" I mean, sorry, ""SpongeBob SquarePants.""(Laughter)So Gary is capable of — currently he's capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel-boring machine.(Laughter)CA: You want to beat Gary.EM: We want to beat Gary.(Laughter)He's not a patient little fellow, and that will be victory. Victory is beating the snail.CA: But a lot of people imagining, dreaming about future cities, they imagine that actually the solution is flying cars, drones, etc. You go aboveground. Why isn't that a better solution? You save all that tunneling cost.EM: Right. I'm in favor of flying things. Obviously, I do rockets, so I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things, but there is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be very high. Let's just say that if something's flying over your head, a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation.(Laughter)You don't think to yourself, ""Well, I feel better about today."" You're thinking, ""Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and guillotine me?"" Things like that.CA: So you've got this vision of future cities with these rich, 3D networks of tunnels underneath. Is there a tie-in here with Hyperloop? Could you apply these tunnels to use for this Hyperloop idea you released a few years ago.EM: Yeah, so we've been sort of puttering around with the Hyperloop stuff for a while. We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX, just for a student competition, to encourage innovative ideas in transport. And it actually ends up being the biggest vacuum chamber in the world after the Large Hadron Collider, by volume. So it was quite fun to do that, but it was kind of a hobby thing, and then we think we might — so we've built a little pusher car to push the student pods, but we're going to try seeing how fast we can make the pusher go if it's not pushing something. So we're cautiously optimistic we'll be able to be faster than the world's fastest bullet train even in a .8-mile stretch.CA: Whoa. Good brakes.EM: Yeah, I mean, it's — yeah. It's either going to smash into tiny pieces or go quite fast.CA: But you can picture, then, a Hyperloop in a tunnel running quite long distances.EM: Exactly. And looking at tunneling technology, it turns out that in order to make a tunnel, you have to — In order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six atmospheres. So to go to vacuum is only one atmosphere, or near-vacuum. So actually, it sort of turns out that automatically, if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table, it is automatically capable of holding vacuum.CA: Huh.EM: So, yeah.CA: And so you could actually picture, what kind of length tunnel is in Elon's future to running Hyperloop?EM: I think there's no real length limit. You could dig as much as you want. I think if you were to do something like a DC-to-New York Hyperloop, I think you'd probably want to go underground the entire way because it's a high-density area. You're going under a lot of buildings and houses, and if you go deep enough, you cannot detect the tunnel. Sometimes people think, well, it's going to be pretty annoying to have a tunnel dug under my house. Like, if that tunnel is dug more than about three or four tunnel diameters beneath your house, you will not be able to detect it being dug at all. In fact, if you're able to detect the tunnel being dug, whatever device you are using, you can get a lot of money for that device from the Israeli military, who is trying to detect tunnels from Hamas, and from the US Customs and Border patrol that try and detect drug tunnels. So the reality is that earth is incredibly good at absorbing vibrations, and once the tunnel depth is below a certain level, it is undetectable. Maybe if you have a very sensitive seismic instrument, you might be able to detect it.CA: So you've started a new company to do this called The Boring Company. Very nice. Very funny.(Laughter)EM: What's funny about that?(Laughter)CA: How much of your time is this?EM: It's maybe ... two or three percent.CA: You've bought a hobby. This is what an Elon Musk hobby looks like.(Laughter)EM: I mean, it really is, like — This is basically interns and people doing it part time. We bought some second-hand machinery. It's kind of puttering along, but it's making good progress, so —CA: So an even bigger part of your time is being spent on electrifying cars and transport through Tesla. Is one of the motivations for the tunneling project the realization that actually, in a world where cars are electric and where they're self-driving, there may end up being more cars on the roads on any given hour than there are now?EM: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people think that when you make cars autonomous, they'll be able to go faster and that will alleviate congestion. And to some degree that will be true, but once you have shared autonomy where it's much cheaper to go by car and you can go point to point, the affordability of going in a car will be better than that of a bus. Like, it will cost less than a bus ticket. So the amount of driving that will occur will be much greater with shared autonomy, and actually traffic will get far worse.CA: You started Tesla with the goal of persuading the world that electrification was the future of cars, and a few years ago, people were laughing at you. Now, not so much.EM: OK.(Laughter)I don't know. I don't know.CA: But isn't it true that pretty much every auto manufacturer has announced serious electrification plans for the short- to medium-term future?EM: Yeah. Yeah. I think almost every automaker has some electric vehicle program. They vary in seriousness. Some are very serious about transitioning entirely to electric, and some are just dabbling in it. And some, amazingly, are still pursuing fuel cells, but I think that won't last much longer.CA: But isn't there a sense, though, Elon, where you can now just declare victory and say, you know, ""We did it."" Let the world electrify, and you go on and focus on other stuff?EM: Yeah. I intend to stay with Tesla as far into the future as I can imagine, and there are a lot of exciting things that we have coming. Obviously the Model 3 is coming soon. We'll be unveiling the Tesla Semi truck.CA: OK, we're going to come to this. So Model 3, it's supposed to be coming in July-ish.EM: Yeah, it's looking quite good for starting production in July.CA: Wow. One of the things that people are so excited about is the fact that it's got autopilot. And you put out this video a while back showing what that technology would look like.EM: Yeah.CA: There's obviously autopilot in Model S right now. What are we seeing here?EM: Yeah, so this is using only cameras and GPS. So there's no LIDAR or radar being used here. This is just using passive optical, which is essentially what a person uses. The whole road system is meant to be navigated with passive optical, or cameras, and so once you solve cameras or vision, then autonomy is solved. If you don't solve vision, it's not solved. So that's why our focus is so heavily on having a vision neural net that's very effective for road conditions.CA: Right. Many other people are going the LIDAR route. You want cameras plus radar is most of it.EM: You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras. Like, you can probably do it ten times better than humans would, just cameras.CA: So the new cars being sold right now have eight cameras in them. They can't yet do what that showed. When will they be able to?EM: I think we're still on track for being able to go cross-country from LA to New York by the end of the year, fully autonomous.CA: OK, so by the end of the year, you're saying, someone's going to sit in a Tesla without touching the steering wheel, tap in ""New York,"" off it goes.EM: Yeah.CA: Won't ever have to touch the wheel — by the end of 2017.EM: Yeah. Essentially, November or December of this year, we should be able to go all the way from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey.(Applause)CA: Amazing. But part of that is possible because you've already got a fleet of Teslas driving all these roads. You're accumulating a huge amount of data of that national road system.EM: Yes, but the thing that will be interesting is that I'm actually fairly confident it will be able to do that route even if you change the route dynamically. So, it's fairly easy — If you say I'm going to be really good at one specific route, that's one thing, but it should be able to go, really be very good, certainly once you enter a highway, to go anywhere on the highway system in a given country. So it's not sort of limited to LA to New York. We could change it and make it Seattle-Florida, that day, in real time. So you were going from LA to New York. Now go from LA to Toronto.CA: So leaving aside regulation for a second, in terms of the technology alone, the time when someone will be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they've arrived, how far away is that, to do that safely?EM: I think that's about two years. So the real trick of it is not how do you make it work say 99.9 percent of the time, because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you're probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn't be, certainly.(Laughter)It's never going to be perfect. No system is going to be perfect, but if you say it's perhaps — the car is unlikely to crash in a hundred lifetimes, or a thousand lifetimes, then people are like, OK, wow, if I were to live a thousand lives, I would still most likely never experience a crash, then that's probably OK.CA: To sleep. I guess the big concern of yours is that people may actually get seduced too early to think that this is safe, and that you'll have some horrible incident happen that puts things back.EM: Well, I think that the autonomy system is likely to at least mitigate the crash, except in rare circumstances. The thing to appreciate about vehicle safety is this is probabilistic. I mean, there's some chance that any time a human driver gets in a car, that they will have an accident that is their fault. It's never zero. So really the key threshold for autonomy is how much better does autonomy need to be than a person before you can rely on it?CA: But once you get literally safe hands-off driving, the power to disrupt the whole industry seems massive, because at that point you've spoken of people being able to buy a car, drops you off at work, and then you let it go and provide a sort of Uber-like service to other people, earn you money, maybe even cover the cost of your lease of that car, so you can kind of get a car for free. Is that really likely?EM: Yeah. Absolutely this is what will happen. So there will be a shared autonomy fleet where you buy your car and you can choose to use that car exclusively, you could choose to have it be used only by friends and family, only by other drivers who are rated five star, you can choose to share it sometimes but not other times. That's 100 percent what will occur. It's just a question of when.CA: Wow. So you mentioned the Semi and I think you're planning to announce this in September, but I'm curious whether there's anything you could show us today?EM: I will show you a teaser shot of the truck.(Laughter)It's alive.CA: OK.EM: That's definitely a case where we want to be cautious about the autonomy features. Yeah.(Laughter)CA: We can't see that much of it, but it doesn't look like just a little friendly neighborhood truck. It looks kind of badass. What sort of semi is this?EM: So this is a heavy duty, long-range semitruck. So it's the highest weight capability and with long range. So essentially it's meant to alleviate the heavy-duty trucking loads. And this is something which people do not today think is possible. They think the truck doesn't have enough power or it doesn't have enough range, and then with the Tesla Semi we want to show that no, an electric truck actually can out-torque any diesel semi. And if you had a tug-of-war competition, the Tesla Semi will tug the diesel semi uphill.(Laughter)(Applause)CA: That's pretty cool. And short term, these aren't driverless. These are going to be trucks that truck drivers want to drive.EM: Yes. So what will be really fun about this is you have a flat torque RPM curve with an electric motor, whereas with a diesel motor or any kind of internal combustion engine car, you've got a torque RPM curve that looks like a hill. So this will be a very spry truck. You can drive this around like a sports car. There's no gears. It's, like, single speed.CA: There's a great movie to be made here somewhere. I don't know what it is and I don't know that it ends well, but it's a great movie.(Laughter)EM: It's quite bizarre test-driving. When I was driving the test prototype for the first truck. It's really weird, because you're driving around and you're just so nimble, and you're in this giant truck.CA: Wait, you've already driven a prototype?EM: Yeah, I drove it around the parking lot, and I was like, this is crazy.CA: Wow. This is no vaporware.EM: It's just like, driving this giant truck and making these mad maneuvers.CA: This is cool. OK, from a really badass picture to a kind of less badass picture. This is just a cute house from ""Desperate Housewives"" or something. What on earth is going on here?EM: Well, this illustrates the picture of the future that I think is how things will evolve. You've got an electric car in the driveway. If you look in between the electric car and the house, there are actually three Powerwalls stacked up against the side of the house, and then that house roof is a solar roof. So that's an actual solar glass roof.CA: OK.EM: That's a picture of a real — well, admittedly, it's a real fake house. That's a real fake house.(Laughter)CA: So these roof tiles, some of them have in them basically solar power, the ability to —EM: Yeah. Solar glass tiles where you can adjust the texture and the color to a very fine-grained level, and then there's sort of microlouvers in the glass, such that when you're looking at the roof from street level or close to street level, all the tiles look the same whether there is a solar cell behind it or not. So you have an even color from the ground level. If you were to look at it from a helicopter, you would be actually able to look through and see that some of the glass tiles have a solar cell behind them and some do not. You can't tell from street level.CA: You put them in the ones that are likely to see a lot of sun, and that makes these roofs super affordable, right? They're not that much more expensive than just tiling the roof.EM: Yeah. We're very confident that the cost of the roof plus the cost of electricity — A solar glass roof will be less than the cost of a normal roof plus the cost of electricity. So in other words, this will be economically a no-brainer, we think it will look great, and it will last — We thought about having the warranty be infinity, but then people thought, well, that might sound like were just talking rubbish, but actually this is toughened glass. Well after the house has collapsed and there's nothing there, the glass tiles will still be there.(Applause)CA: I mean, this is cool. So you're rolling this out in a couple week's time, I think, with four different roofing types.EM: Yeah, we're starting off with two, two initially, and the second two will be introduced early next year.CA: And what's the scale of ambition here? How many houses do you believe could end up having this type of roofing?EM: I think eventually almost all houses will have a solar roof. The thing is to consider the time scale here to be probably on the order of 40 or 50 years. So on average, a roof is replaced every 20 to 25 years. But you don't start replacing all roofs immediately. But eventually, if you say were to fast-forward to say 15 years from now, it will be unusual to have a roof that does not have solar.CA: Is there a mental model thing that people don't get here that because of the shift in the cost, the economics of solar power, most houses actually have enough sunlight on their roof pretty much to power all of their needs. If you could capture the power, it could pretty much power all their needs. You could go off-grid, kind of.EM: It depends on where you are and what the house size is relative to the roof area, but it's a fair statement to say that most houses in the US have enough roof area to power all the needs of the house.CA: So the key to the economics of the cars, the Semi, of these houses is the falling price of lithium-ion batteries, which you've made a huge bet on as Tesla. In many ways, that's almost the core competency. And you've decided that to really, like, own that competency, you just have to build the world's largest manufacturing plant to double the world's supply of lithium-ion batteries, with this guy. What is this?EM: Yeah, so that's the Gigafactory, progress so far on the Gigafactory. Eventually, you can sort of roughly see that there's sort of a diamond shape overall, and when it's fully done, it'll look like a giant diamond, or that's the idea behind it, and it's aligned on true north. It's a small detail.CA: And capable of producing, eventually, like a hundred gigawatt hours of batteries a year.EM: A hundred gigawatt hours. We think probably more, but yeah.CA: And they're actually being produced right now.EM: They're in production already. CA: You guys put out this video. I mean, is that speeded up?EM: That's the slowed down version.(Laughter)CA: How fast does it actually go?EM: Well, when it's running at full speed, you can't actually see the cells without a strobe light. It's just blur.(Laughter)CA: One of your core ideas, Elon, about what makes an exciting future is a future where we no longer feel guilty about energy. Help us picture this. How many Gigafactories, if you like, does it take to get us there?EM: It's about a hundred, roughly. It's not 10, it's not a thousand. Most likely a hundred.CA: See, I find this amazing. You can picture what it would take to move the world off this vast fossil fuel thing. It's like you're building one, it costs five billion dollars, or whatever, five to 10 billion dollars. Like, it's kind of cool that you can picture that project. And you're planning to do, at Tesla — announce another two this year.EM: I think we'll announce locations for somewhere between two and four Gigafactories later this year. Yeah, probably four.CA: Whoa.(Applause) No more teasing from you for here? Like — where, continent? You can say no.EM: We need to address a global market.CA: OK.(Laughter)This is cool. I think we should talk for — Actually, double mark it. I'm going to ask you one question about politics, only one. I'm kind of sick of politics, but I do want to ask you this. You're on a body now giving advice to a guy —EM: Who?CA: Who has said he doesn't really believe in climate change, and there's a lot of people out there who think you shouldn't be doing that. They'd like you to walk away from that. What would you say to them?EM: Well, I think that first of all, I'm just on two advisory councils where the format consists of going around the room and asking people's opinion on things, and so there's like a meeting every month or two. That's the sum total of my contribution. But I think to the degree that there are people in the room who are arguing in favor of doing something about climate change, or social issues, I've used the meetings I've had thus far to argue in favor of immigration and in favor of climate change.(Applause)And if I hadn't done that, that wasn't on the agenda before. So maybe nothing will happen, but at least the words were said.CA: OK.(Applause)So let's talk SpaceX and Mars. Last time you were here, you spoke about what seemed like a kind of incredibly ambitious dream to develop rockets that were actually reusable. And you've only gone and done it.EM: Finally. It took a long time.CA: Talk us through this. What are we looking at here?EM: So this is one of our rocket boosters coming back from very high and fast in space. So just delivered the upper stage at high velocity. I think this might have been at sort of Mach 7 or so, delivery of the upper stage.(Applause)CA: So that was a sped-up —EM: That was the slowed down version.(Laughter)CA: I thought that was the sped-up version. But I mean, that's amazing, and several of these failed before you finally figured out how to do it, but now you've done this, what, five or six times?EM: We're at eight or nine.CA: And for the first time, you've actually reflown one of the rockets that landed.EM: Yeah, so we landed the rocket booster and then prepped it for flight again and flew it again, so it's the first reflight of an orbital booster where that reflight is relevant. So it's important to appreciate that reusability is only relevant if it is rapid and complete. So like an aircraft or a car, the reusability is rapid and complete. You do not send your aircraft to Boeing in-between flights.CA: Right. So this is allowing you to dream of this really ambitious idea of sending many, many, many people to Mars in, what, 10 or 20 years time, I guess.EM: Yeah.CA: And you've designed this outrageous rocket to do it. Help us understand the scale of this thing.EM: Well, visually you can see that's a person. Yeah, and that's the vehicle.(Laughter)CA: So if that was a skyscraper, that's like, did I read that, a 40-story skyscraper?EM: Probably a little more, yeah. The thrust level of this is really — This configuration is about four times the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket.CA: Four times the thrust of the biggest rocket humanity ever created before.EM: Yeah. Yeah.CA: As one does. EM: Yeah.(Laughter)In units of 747, a 747 is only about a quarter of a million pounds of thrust, so for every 10 million pounds of thrust, there's 40 747s. So this would be the thrust equivalent of 120 747s, with all engines blazing.CA: And so even with a machine designed to escape Earth's gravity, I think you told me last time this thing could actually take a fully loaded 747, people, cargo, everything, into orbit.EM: Exactly. This can take a fully loaded 747 with maximum fuel, maximum passengers, maximum cargo on the 747 — this can take it as cargo.CA: So based on this, you presented recently this Interplanetary Transport System which is visualized this way. This is a scene you picture in, what, 30 years time? 20 years time? People walking into this rocket.EM: I'm hopeful it's sort of an eight- to 10-year time frame. Aspirationally, that's our target. Our internal targets are more aggressive, but I think —(Laughter)CA: OK.EM: While vehicle seems quite large and is large by comparison with other rockets, I think the future spacecraft will make this look like a rowboat. The future spaceships will be truly enormous.CA: Why, Elon? Why do we need to build a city on Mars with a million people on it in your lifetime, which I think is kind of what you've said you'd love to do?EM: I think it's important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanet species, I find that it's incredibly depressing if that's not the future that we're going to have.(Applause)CA: People want to position this as an either or, that there are so many desperate things happening on the planet now from climate to poverty to, you know, you pick your issue. And this feels like a distraction. You shouldn't be thinking about this. You should be solving what's here and now. And to be fair, you've done a fair old bit to actually do that with your work on sustainable energy. But why not just do that?EM: I think there's — I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. It's like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing. I may introduce something new to the probability stream. Sustainable energy will happen no matter what. If there was no Tesla, if Tesla never existed, it would have to happen out of necessity. It's tautological. If you don't have sustainable energy, it means you have unsustainable energy. Eventually you will run out, and the laws of economics will drive civilization towards sustainable energy, inevitably. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy, faster than it would otherwise occur.So when I think, like, what is the fundamental good of a company like Tesla, I would say, hopefully, if it accelerated that by a decade, potentially more than a decade, that would be quite a good thing to occur. That's what I consider to be the fundamental aspirational good of Tesla.Then there's becoming a multiplanet species and space-faring civilization. This is not inevitable. It's very important to appreciate this is not inevitable. The sustainable energy future I think is largely inevitable, but being a space-faring civilization is definitely not inevitable. If you look at the progress in space, in 1969 you were able to send somebody to the moon. 1969. Then we had the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle could only take people to low Earth orbit. Then the Space Shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit. So that's the trend. The trend is like down to nothing. People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will, I think, by itself degrade, actually. You look at great civilizations like Ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that. And then the Romans, they built these incredible aqueducts. They forgot how to do it.CA: Elon, it almost seems, listening to you and looking at the different things you've done, that you've got this unique double motivation on everything that I find so interesting. One is this desire to work for humanity's long-term good. The other is the desire to do something exciting. And often it feels like you feel like you need the one to drive the other. With Tesla, you want to have sustainable energy, so you made these super sexy, exciting cars to do it. Solar energy, we need to get there, so we need to make these beautiful roofs. We haven't even spoken about your newest thing, which we don't have time to do, but you want to save humanity from bad AI, and so you're going to create this really cool brain-machine interface to give us all infinite memory and telepathy and so forth. And on Mars, it feels like what you're saying is, yeah, we need to save humanity and have a backup plan, but also we need to inspire humanity, and this is a way to inspire.EM: I think the value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear. I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. That is not the — I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.(Applause)CA: Beautiful statement. I think everyone here would agree that it is not — None of this is going to happen inevitably. The fact that in your mind, you dream this stuff, you dream stuff that no one else would dare dream, or no one else would be capable of dreaming at the level of complexity that you do. The fact that you do that, Elon Musk, is a really remarkable thing. Thank you for helping us all to dream a bit bigger.EM: But you'll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane, right?(Laughter)CA: Thank you, Elon Musk. That was really, really fantastic. That was really fantastic.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_building_and_boring
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"I come to you today to speak of liars, lawsuits and laughter. The first time I heard about Holocaust denial, I laughed. Holocaust denial? The Holocaust which has the dubious distinction of being the best-documented genocide in the world? Who could believe it didn't happen?Think about it. For deniers to be right, who would have to be wrong? Well, first of all, the victims — the survivors who have told us their harrowing stories. Who else would have to be wrong? The bystanders. The people who lived in the myriads of towns and villages and cities on the Eastern front, who watched their neighbors be rounded up — men, women, children, young, old — and be marched to the outskirts of the town to be shot and left dead in ditches. Or the Poles, who lived in towns and villages around the death camps, who watched day after day as the trains went in filled with people and came out empty.But above all, who would have to be wrong? The perpetrators. The people who say, ""We did it. I did it."" Now, maybe they add a caveat. They say, ""I didn't have a choice; I was forced to do it."" But nonetheless, they say, ""I did it."" Think about it. In not one war crimes trial since the end of World War II has a perpetrator of any nationality ever said, ""It didn't happen."" Again, they may have said, ""I was forced,"" but never that it didn't happen. Having thought that through, I decided denial was not going to be on my agenda; I had bigger things to worry about, to write about, to research, and I moved on.Fast-forward a little over a decade, and two senior scholars — two of the most prominent historians of the Holocaust — approached me and said, ""Deborah, let's have coffee. We have a research idea that we think is perfect for you."" Intrigued and flattered that they came to me with an idea and thought me worthy of it, I asked, ""What is it?"" And they said, ""Holocaust denial."" And for the second time, I laughed. Holocaust denial? The Flat Earth folks? The Elvis-is-alive people? I should study them? And these two guys said, ""Yeah, we're intrigued. What are they about? What's their objective? How do they manage to get people to believe what they say?""So thinking, if they thought it was worthwhile, I would take a momentary diversion — maybe a year, maybe two, three, maybe even four — in academic terms, that's momentary.(Laughter)We work very slowly.(Laughter)And I would look at them. So I did. I did my research, and I came up with a number of things, two of which I'd like to share with you today.One: deniers are wolves in sheep's clothing. They are the same: Nazis, neo-Nazis — you can decide whether you want to put a ""neo"" there or not. But when I looked at them, I didn't see any SS-like uniforms, swastika-like symbols on the wall, Sieg Heil salutes — none of that. What I found instead were people parading as respectable academics.What did they have? They had an institute. An ""Institute for Historical Review."" They had a journal — a slick journal — a ""Journal of Historical Review."" One filled with papers — footnote-laden papers. And they had a new name. Not neo-Nazis, not anti-Semites — revisionists. They said, ""We are revisionists. We are out to do one thing: to revise mistakes in history."" But all you had to do was go one inch below the surface, and what did you find there? The same adulation of Hitler, praise of the Third Reich, anti-Semitism, racism, prejudice. This is what intrigued me. It was anti-Semitism, racism, prejudice, parading as rational discourse.The other thing I found — many of us have been taught to think there are facts and there are opinions — after studying deniers, I think differently. There are facts, there are opinions, and there are lies. And what deniers want to do is take their lies, dress them up as opinions — maybe edgy opinions, maybe sort of out-of-the-box opinions — but then if they're opinions, they should be part of the conversation. And then they encroach on the facts.I published my work — the book was published, ""Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory,"" it came out in many different countries, including here in Penguin UK, and I was done with those folks and ready to move on. Then came the letter from Penguin UK. And for the third time, I laughed ... mistakenly. I opened the letter, and it informed me that David Irving was bringing a libel suit against me in the United Kingdom for calling him a Holocaust denier.David Irving suing me? Who was David Irving? David Irving was a writer of historical works, most of them about World War II, and virtually all of those works took the position that the Nazis were really not so bad, and the Allies were really not so good. And the Jews, whatever happened to them, they sort of deserved it. He knew the documents, he knew the facts, but he somehow twisted them to get this opinion. He hadn't always been a Holocaust denier, but in the late '80s, he embraced it with great vigor.The reason I laughed also was this was a man who not only was a Holocaust denier, but seemed quite proud of it. Here was a man — and I quote — who said, ""I'm going to sink the battleship Auschwitz."" Here was a man who pointed to the number tattooed on a survivor's arm and said, ""How much money have you made from having that number tattooed on your arm?"" Here was a man who said, ""More people died in Senator Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in gas chambers at Auschwitz."" That's an American reference, but you can look it up. This was not a man who seemed at all ashamed or reticent about being a Holocaust denier.Now, lots of my academic colleagues counseled me — ""Eh, Deborah, just ignore it."" When I explained you can't just ignore a libel suit, they said, ""Who's going to believe him anyway?"" But here was the problem: British law put the onus, put the burden of proof on me to prove the truth of what I said, in contrast to as it would have been in the United States and in many other countries: on him to prove the falsehood.What did that mean? That meant if I didn't fight, he would win by default. And if he won by default, he could then legitimately say, ""My David Irving version of the Holocaust is a legitimate version. Deborah Lipstadt was found to have libeled me when she called me a Holocaust denier. Ipso facto, I, David Irving, am not a Holocaust denier."" And what is that version? There was no plan to murder the Jews, there were no gas chambers, there were no mass shootings, Hitler had nothing to do with any suffering that went on, and the Jews have made this all up to get money from Germany and to get a state, and they've done it with the aid and abettance of the Allies — they've planted the documents and planted the evidence.I couldn't let that stand and ever face a survivor or a child of survivors. I couldn't let that stand and consider myself a responsible historian. So we fought. And for those of you who haven't seen ""Denial,"" spoiler alert: we won.(Laughter)(Applause)The judge found David Irving to be a liar, a racist, an anti-Semite. His view of history was tendentious, he lied, he distorted — and most importantly, he did it deliberately. We showed a pattern, in over 25 different major instances. Not small things — many of us in this audience write books, are writing books; we always make mistakes, that's why we're glad to have second editions: correct the mistakes.(Laughter)But these always moved in the same direction: blame the Jews, exonerate the Nazis.But how did we win? What we did is follow his footnotes back to his sources. And what did we find? Not in most cases, and not in the preponderance of cases, but in every single instance where he made some reference to the Holocaust, that his supposed evidence was distorted, half-truth, date-changed, sequence-changed, someone put at a meeting who wasn't there. In other words, he didn't have the evidence. His evidence didn't prove it. We didn't prove what happened. We proved that what he said happened — and by extension, all deniers, because he either quotes them or they get their arguments from him — is not true. What they claim — they don't have the evidence to prove it.So why is my story more than just the story of a quirky, long, six-year, difficult lawsuit, an American professor being dragged into a courtroom by a man that the court declared in its judgment was a neo-Nazi polemicist? What message does it have? I think in the context of the question of truth, it has a very significant message. Because today, as we well know, truth and facts are under assault. Social media, for all the gifts it has given us, has also allowed the difference between facts — established facts — and lies to be flattened.Third of all: extremism. You may not see Ku Klux Klan robes, you may not see burning crosses, you may not even hear outright white supremacist language. It may go by names: ""alt-right,"" ""National Front"" — pick your names. But underneath, it's that same extremism that I found in Holocaust denial parading as rational discourse.We live in an age where truth is on the defensive. I'm reminded of a New Yorker cartoon. A quiz show recently appeared in ""The New Yorker"" where the host of the quiz show is saying to one of the contestants, ""Yes, ma'am, you had the right answer. But your opponent yelled more loudly than you did, so he gets the point.""What can we do? First of all, we cannot be beguiled by rational appearances. We've got to look underneath, and we will find there the extremism. Second of all, we must understand that truth is not relative. Number three, we must go on the offensive, not the defensive. When someone makes an outrageous claim, even though they may hold one of the highest offices in the land, if not the world — we must say to them, ""Where's the proof? Where's the evidence?"" We must hold their feet to the fire. We must not treat it as if their lies are the same as the facts.And as I said earlier, truth is not relative. Many of us have grown up in the world of the academy and enlightened liberal thought, where we're taught everything is open to debate. But that's not the case. There are certain things that are true. There are indisputable facts — objective truths. Galileo taught it to us centuries ago. Even after being forced to recant by the Vatican that the Earth moved around the Sun, he came out, and what is he reported to have said? ""And yet, it still moves.""The Earth is not flat. The climate is changing. Elvis is not alive.(Laughter)(Applause)And most importantly, truth and fact are under assault. The job ahead of us, the task ahead of us, the challenge ahead of us is great. The time to fight is short. We must act now. Later will be too late.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_lipstadt_behind_the_lies_of_holocaust_denial
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"Let's say you despise Western democracy. Democracy, in all its trappings, free elections, town halls, endless debates about the proper role of government. Too messy, too unpredictable, too constraining for your taste. And the way these democracies band together and lecture everyone else about individual rights and freedoms — it gets under your skin.So what to do about it? You can call out the hypocrisy and failures of Western democracies and explain how your way is better, but that's never really worked for you. What if you could get the people whose support is the very foundation of these democracies to start questioning the system? Make the idea occur in their own minds that democracy and its institutions are failing them, their elite are corrupt puppet masters and the country they knew is in free fall. To do that, you'll need to infiltrate the information spheres of these democracies. You'll need to turn their most powerful asset — an open mind — into their greatest vulnerability. You'll need people to question the truth.Now, you'll be familiar of hacking and leaks that happened in 2016. One was the Democratic National Committee's networks, and the personal email accounts of its staff, later released on WikiLeaks. After that, various online personas, like a supposed Romanian cybercriminal who didn't speak Romanian, aggressively pushed news of these leaks to journalists. The media took the bait. They were consumed by how much the DNC hated Bernie. At the time, it was that narrative that far outshined the news that a group of Russian government sponsored hackers who we called ""Advanced Persistent Threat 28,"" or ""APT28"" for short, was carrying out these operations against the US.And there was no shortage of evidence. This group of Russian government hackers hadn't just appeared out of nowhere in 2016. We had started tracking this group back in 2014. And the tools that APT28 used to compromise its victims' networks demonstrated a thoughtful, well-resourced effort that had taken place for now over a decade in Moscow's time zone from about 9 am to 6 pm. APT28 loved to prey on the emails and contacts of journalists in Chechnya, the Georgian government, eastern European defense attachés — all targets with an undeniable interest to the Russian government.We weren't the only ones onto this. Governments, research teams across the world, were coming to similar conclusions and observing the same types of operations. But what Russia was doing in 2016 went far beyond espionage. The DNC hack was just one of many where stolen data was posted online accompanied by a sensational narrative, then amplified in social media for lightning-speed adoption by the media. This didn't ring the alarm bells that a nation-state was trying to interfere with the credibility of another's internal affairs.So why, collectively, did we not see this coming? Why did it take months before Americans understood that they were under a state-sponsored information attack? The easy answer is politics. The Obama Administration was caught in a perfect catch-22. By raising the specter that the Russian government was interfering in the US presidential campaign, the Administration risked appearing to meddle in the campaign itself. But the better answer, I think, is that the US and the West were utterly unequipped to recognize and respond to a modern information operation, despite the fact that the US had wielded information with devastating success in an era not so long ago.Look, so while the US and the West spent the last 20 years caught up in cybersecurity — what networks to harden, which infrastructure to deem critical, how to set up armies of cyber warriors and cyber commands — Russia was thinking in far more consequential terms. Before the first iPhone even hit the shelf, the Russian government understood the risks and the opportunity that technology provided and the inter-communication and instant communication it provided us.As our realities are increasingly based on the information that we're consuming at the palm of our hand and from the news feeds that we're scanning and the hashtags and stories that we see trending, the Russian government was the first to recognize how this evolution had turned your mind into the most exploitable device on the planet. And your mind is particularly exploitable if you're accustomed to an unfettered flow of information, now increasingly curated to your own tastes. This panorama of information that's so interesting to you gives a state, or anyone for that matter, a perfect back door into your mind.It's this new brand of state-sponsored information operations that can be that much more successful, more insidious, and harder for the target audience — that includes the media — to decipher and characterize. If you can get a hashtag trending on Twitter, or chum the waters with fake news directed to audiences primed to receive it, or drive journalists to dissect terabytes of email for a cent of impropriety — all tactics used in Russian operations — then you've got a shot at effectively camouflaging your operations in the mind of your target. This is what Russia's long called ""reflexive control."" It's the ability to use information on someone else so that they make a decision on their own accord that's favorable to you. This is nation-state-grade image control and perception management, and it's conducted by any means, with any tools, network-based or otherwise, that will achieve it.Take this for another example. In early February 2014, a few weeks before Russia would invade Crimea, a phone call is posted on YouTube. In it, there's two US diplomats. They sound like they're playing kingmaker in Ukraine, and worse, they curse the EU for its lack of speed and leadership in resolving the crisis. The media covers the phone call, and then the ensuing diplomatic backlash leaves Washington and Europe reeling. And it creates a fissured response and a feckless attitude towards Russia's land grab in Ukraine. Mission accomplished.So while hacked phone calls and emails and networks keep grabbing the headlines, the real operations are the ones that are influencing the decisions you make and the opinions you hold, all in the service of a nation-state's strategic interest. This is power in the information age. And this information is all that much more seductive, all that much easier to take at face value and pass on, when it's authentic. Who's not interested in the truth that's presented in phone calls and emails that were never intended for public consumption? But how meaningful is that truth if you don't know why it's being revealed to you?We must recognize that this place where we're increasingly living, which we've quaintly termed ""cyberspace,"" isn't defined by ones and zeroes, but by information and the people behind it. This is far more than a network of computers and devices. This is a network composed of minds interacting with computers and devices.And for this network, there's no encryption, there's no firewall, no two-factor authentication, no password complex enough to protect you. What you have for defense is far stronger, it's more adaptable, it's always running the latest version. It's the ability to think critically: call out falsehood, press for the facts. And above all, you must have the courage to unflinchingly pursue the truth.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_galante_how_to_exploit_democracy
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"Last year ... was hell.(Laughter)It was my first time eating Nigerian ""jollof.""(Laughter)Actually, in all seriousness, I was going through a lot of personal turmoil. Faced with enormous stress, I suffered an anxiety attack. On some days, I could do no work. On other days, I just wanted to lay in my bed and cry.My doctor asked if I'd like to speak with a mental health professional about my stress and anxiety. Mental health? I clammed up and violently shook my head in protest. I felt a profound sense of a shame. I felt the weight of stigma. I have a loving, supportive family and incredibly loyal friends, yet I could not entertain the idea of speaking to anyone about my feeling of pain. I felt suffocated by the rigid architecture of our African masculinity. ""People have real problems, Sangu. Get over yourself!""The first time I heard ""mental health,"" I was a boarding school student fresh off the boat from Ghana, at the Peddie School in New Jersey. I had just gone through the brutal experience of losing seven loved ones in the same month. The school nurse, concerned about what I'd gone through — God bless her soul — she inquired about my mental health. ""Is she mental?"" I thought. Does she not know I'm an African man?(Laughter)Like Okonkwo in ""Things Fall Apart,"" we African men neither process nor express our emotions. We deal with our problems.(Applause)We deal with our problems. I called my brother and laughed about ""Oyibo"" people — white people — and their strange diseases — depression, ADD and those ""weird things."" Growing up in West Africa, when people used the term ""mental,"" what came to mind was a madman with dirty, dread-locked hair, bumbling around half-naked on the streets. We all know this man. Our parents warned us about him. ""Mommy, mommy, why is he mad?"" ""Drugs! If you even look at drugs, you end up like him.""(Laughter)Come down with pneumonia, and your mother will rush you to the nearest hospital for medical treatment. But dare to declare depression, and your local pastor will be driving out demons and blaming witches in your village.According to the World Health Organization, mental health is about being able to cope with the normal stressors of life; to work productively and fruitfully; and to be able to make a contribution to your community. Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social well-being. Globally, 75 percent of all mental illness cases can be found in low-income countries. Yet most African governments invest less than one percent of their health care budget in mental health.Even worse, we have a severe shortage of psychiatrists in Africa. Nigeria, for example, is estimated to have 200 — in a country of almost 200 million. In all of Africa, 90 percent of our people lack access to treatment. As a result, we suffer in solitude, silenced by stigma.We as Africans often respond to mental health with distance, ignorance, guilt, fear and anger. In a study conducted by Arboleda-Flórez, directly asking, ""What is the cause of mental illness?"" 34 percent of Nigerian respondents cited drug misuse; 19 percent said divine wrath and the will of God —(Laughter)12 percent, witchcraft and spiritual possession. But few cited other known causes of mental illness, like genetics, socioeconomic status, war, conflict or the loss of a loved one. The stigmatization against mental illness often results in the ostracizing and demonizing of sufferers. Photojournalist Robin Hammond has documented some of these abuses ... in Uganda, in Somalia, and here in Nigeria.For me, the stigma is personal. In 2009, I received a frantic call in the middle of the night. My best friend in the world — a brilliant, philosophical, charming, hip young man — was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I witnessed some of the friends we'd grown up with recoil. I heard the snickers. I heard the whispers. ""Did you hear he has gone mad?"" (Kru English) ""He has gone crazy!"" Derogatory, demeaning commentary about his condition — words we would never say about someone with cancer or someone with malaria. Somehow, when it comes to mental illness, our ignorance eviscerates all empathy. I stood by his side as his community isolated him, but our love never wavered.Tacitly, I became passionate about mental health. Inspired by his plight, I helped found the mental health special interest alumni group at my college. And during my tenure as a resident tutor in graduate school, I supported many undergraduates with their mental health challenges. I saw African students struggle and unable to speak to anyone. Even with this knowledge and with their stories in tow, I, in turn, struggled, and could not speak to anyone when I faced my own anxiety, so deep is our fear of being the madman.All of us — but we Africans especially — need to realize that our mental struggles do not detract from our virility, nor does our trauma taint our strength. We need to see mental health as important as physical health. We need to stop suffering in silence. We must stop stigmatizing disease and traumatizing the afflicted.Talk to your friends. Talk to your loved ones. Talk to health professionals. Be vulnerable. Do so with the confidence that you are not alone. Speak up if you're struggling. Being honest about how we feel does not make us weak; it makes us human.It is time to end the stigma associated with mental illness. So the next time your hear ""mental,"" do not just think of the madman. Think of me.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sangu_delle_there_s_no_shame_in_taking_care_of_your_mental_health
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"Getting a college education is a 20-year investment. When you're growing up poor, you're not accustomed to thinking that far ahead. Instead, you're thinking about where you're going to get your next meal and how your family is going to pay rent that month. Besides, my parents and my friends' parents seemed to be doing just fine driving taxis and working as janitors. It wasn't until I was a teenager when I realized I didn't want to do those things. By then, I was two-thirds of the way through my education, and it was almost too late to turn things around.When you grow up poor, you want to be rich. I was no different. I'm the second-oldest of seven, and was raised by a single mother on government aid in Queens, New York. By virtue of growing up low-income, my siblings and I went to some of New York City's most struggling public schools. I had over 60 absences when I was in seventh grade, because I didn't feel like going to class. My high school had a 55 percent graduation rate, and even worse, only 20 percent of the kids graduating were college-ready.When I actually did make it to college, I told my friend Brennan how our teachers would always ask us to raise our hands if we were going to college. I was taken aback when Brennan said, ""Karim, I've never been asked that question before."" It was always, ""What college are you going to?"" Just the way that question is phrased made it unacceptable for him not to have gone to college.Nowadays I get asked a different question. ""How were you able to make it out?"" For years I said I was lucky, but it's not just luck. When my older brother and I graduated from high school at the very same time and he later dropped out of a two-year college, I wanted to understand why he dropped out and I kept studying. It wasn't until I got to Cornell as a Presidential Research Scholar that I started to learn about the very real educational consequences of being raised by a single mother on government aid and attending the schools that I did. That's when my older brother's trajectory began to make complete sense to me.I also learned that our most admirable education reformers, people like Arne Duncan, the former US Secretary of Education, or Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, had never attended an inner city public school like I had. So much of our education reform is driven by a sympathetic approach, where people are saying, ""Let's go and help these poor inner city kids, or these poor black and Latino kids,"" instead of an empathetic approach, where someone like me, who had grown up in this environment, could say, ""I know the adversities that you're facing and I want to help you overcome them.""Today when I get questions about how I made it out, I share that one of the biggest reasons is that I wasn't ashamed to ask for help. In a typical middle class or affluent household, if a kid is struggling, there's a good chance that a parent or a teacher will come to their rescue even if they don't ask for help. However, if that same kid is growing up poor and doesn't ask for help, there's a good chance that no one will help them. There are virtually no social safety nets available.So seven years ago, I started to reform our public education system shaped by my firsthand perspective. And I started with summer school. Research tells us that two-thirds of the achievement gap, which is the disparity in educational attainment between rich kids and poor kids or black kids and white kids, could be directly attributed to the summer learning loss. In low-income neighborhoods, kids forget almost three months of what they learned during the school year over the summer. They return to school in the fall, and their teachers spend another two months reteaching them old material. That's five months. The school year in the United States is only 10 months. If kids lose five months of learning every single year, that's half of their education. Half.If kids were in school over the summer, then they couldn't regress, but traditional summer school is poorly designed. For kids it feels like punishment, and for teachers it feels like babysitting. But how can we expect principals to execute an effective summer program when the school year ends the last week of June and then summer school starts just one week later? There just isn't enough time to find the right people, sort out the logistics, and design an engaging curriculum that excites kids and teachers.But what if we created a program over the summer that empowered teachers as teaching coaches to develop aspiring educators? What if we empowered college-educated role models as teaching fellows to help kids realize their college ambitions? What if empowered high-achieving kids as mentors to tutor their younger peers and inspire them to invest in their education? What if we empowered all kids as scholars, asked them what colleges they were going to, designed a summer school they want to attend to completely eliminate the summer learning loss and close two-thirds of the achievement gap?By this summer, my team will have served over 4,000 low-income children, trained over 300 aspiring teachers and created more than 1,000 seasonal jobs across some of New York City's most disadvantaged neighborhoods.(Applause)And our kids are succeeding. Two years of independent evaluations tell us that our kids eliminate the summer learning loss and make growth of one month in math and two months in reading. So instead of returning to school in the fall three months behind, they now go back four months ahead in math and five months ahead in reading.(Applause)Ten years ago, if you would have told me that I'd graduate in the top 10 percent of my class from an Ivy League institution and have an opportunity to make a dent on our public education system just by tackling two months of the calendar year, I would have said, ""Nah. No way."" What's even more exciting is that if we can prevent five months of lost time just by redesigning two months, imagine the possibilities that we can unlock by tackling the rest of the calendar year.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karim_abouelnaga_a_summer_school_kids_actually_want_to_attend
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"As patients, we usually remember the names of our doctors, but often we forget the names of our nurses. I remember one. I had breast cancer a few years ago, and somehow I managed to get through the surgeries and the beginning of the treatment just fine. I could hide what was going on. Everybody didn't really have to know. I could walk my daughter to school, I could go out to dinner with my husband; I could fool people. But then my chemo was scheduled to begin and that terrified me because I knew that I was going to lose every single hair on my body because of the kind of chemo that I was going to have. I wasn't going to be able to pretend anymore as though everything was normal.I was scared. I knew what it felt like to have everybody treating me with kid gloves, and I just wanted to feel normal. I had a port installed in my chest. I went to my first day of chemotherapy, and I was an emotional wreck. My nurse, Joanne, walked in the door, and every bone in my body was telling me to get up out of that chair and take for the hills. But Joanne looked at me and talked to me like we were old friends. And then she asked me, ""Where'd you get your highlights done?""(Laughter)And I was like, are you kidding me? You're going to talk to me about my hair when I'm on the verge of losing it? I was kind of angry, and I said, ""Really? Hair?"" And with a shrug of her shoulders she said, ""It's gonna grow back."" And in that moment she said the one thing I had overlooked, and that was that at some point, my life would get back to normal. She really believed that. And so I believed it, too.Now, worrying about losing your hair when you're fighting cancer may seem silly at first, but it's not just that you're worried about how you're going to look. It's that you're worried that everybody's going to treat you so carefully. Joanne made me feel normal for the first time in six months. We talked about her boyfriends, we talked about looking for apartments in New York City, and we talked about my reaction to the chemotherapy — all kind of mixed in together. And I always wondered, how did she so instinctively know just how to talk to me?Joanne Staha and my admiration for her marked the beginning of my journey into the world of nurses. A few years later, I was asked to do a project that would celebrate the work that nurses do. I started with Joanne, and I met over 100 nurses across the country. I spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses for a book and a documentary film. With my team, we mapped a trip across America that would take us to places dealing with some of the biggest public health issues facing our nation — aging, war, poverty, prisons. And then we went places where we would find the largest concentration of patients dealing with those issues. Then we asked hospitals and facilities to nominate nurses who would best represent them.One of the first nurses I met was Bridget Kumbella. Bridget was born in Cameroon, the oldest of four children. Her father was at work when he had fallen from the fourth floor and really hurt his back. And he talked a lot about what it was like to be flat on your back and not get the kind of care that you need. And that propelled Bridget to go into the profession of nursing. Now, as a nurse in the Bronx, she has a really diverse group of patients that she cares for, from all walks of life, and from all different religions. And she's devoted her career to understanding the impact of our cultural differences when it comes to our health. She spoke of a patient — a Native American patient that she had — that wanted to bring a bunch of feathers into the ICU. That's how he found spiritual comfort. And she spoke of advocating for him and said that patients come from all different religions and use all different kinds of objects for comfort; whether it's a holy rosary or a symbolic feather, it all needs to be supported.This is Jason Short. Jason is a home health nurse in the Appalachian mountains, and his dad had a gas station and a repair shop when he was growing up. So he worked on cars in the community that he now serves as a nurse. When he was in college, it was just not macho at all to become a nurse, so he avoided it for years. He drove trucks for a little while, but his life path was always pulling him back to nursing. As a nurse in the Appalachian mountains, Jason goes places that an ambulance can't even get to. In this photograph, he's standing in what used to be a road. Top of the mountain mining flooded that road, and now the only way for Jason to get to the patient living in that house with black lung disease is to drive his SUV against the current up that creek. The day I was with him, we ripped the front fender off the car. The next morning he got up, put the car on the lift, fixed the fender, and then headed out to meet his next patient. I witnessed Jason caring for this gentleman with such enormous compassion, and I was struck again by how intimate the work of nursing really is.When I met Brian McMillion, he was raw. He had just come back from a deployment and he hadn't really settled back in to life in San Diego yet. He talked about his experience of being a nurse in Germany and taking care of the soldiers coming right off the battlefield. Very often, he would be the first person they would see when they opened their eyes in the hospital. And they would look at him as they were lying there, missing limbs, and the first thing they would say is, ""When can I go back? I left my brothers out there."" And Brian would have to say, ""You're not going anywhere. You've already given enough, brother."" Brian is both a nurse and a soldier who's seen combat. So that puts him in a unique position to be able to relate to and help heal the veterans in his care.This is Sister Stephen, and she runs a nursing home in Wisconsin called Villa Loretto. And the entire circle of life can be found under her roof. She grew up wishing they lived on a farm, so given the opportunity to adopt local farm animals, she enthusiastically brings them in. And in the springtime, those animals have babies. And Sister Stephen uses those baby ducks, goats and lambs as animal therapy for the residents at Villa Loretto who sometimes can't remember their own name, but they do rejoice in the holding of a baby lamb. The day I was with Sister Stephen, I needed to take her away from Villa Loretto to film part of her story. And before we left, she went into the room of a dying patient. And she leaned over and she said, ""I have to go away for the day, but if Jesus calls you, you go. You go straight home to Jesus."" I was standing there and thinking it was the first time in my life I witnessed that you could show someone you love them completely by letting go. We don't have to hold on so tightly. I saw more life rolled up at Villa Loretto than I have ever seen at any other time at any other place in my life.We live in a complicated time when it comes to our health care. It's easy to lose sight of the need for quality of life, not just quantity of life. As new life-saving technologies are created, we're going to have really complicated decisions to make. These technologies often save lives, but they can also prolong pain and the dying process. How in the world are we supposed to navigate these waters? We're going to need all the help we can get. Nurses have a really unique relationship with us because of the time spent at bedside. During that time, a kind of emotional intimacy develops.This past summer, on August 9, my father died of a heart attack. My mother was devastated, and she couldn't imagine her world without him in it. Four days later she fell, she broke her hip, she needed surgery and she found herself fighting for her own life. Once again I found myself on the receiving end of the care of nurses — this time for my mom. My brother and my sister and I stayed by her side for the next three days in the ICU. And as we tried to make the right decisions and follow my mother's wishes, we found that we were depending upon the guidance of nurses. And once again, they didn't let us down. They had an amazing insight in terms of how to care for my mom in the last four days of her life. They brought her comfort and relief from pain. They knew to encourage my sister and I to put a pretty nightgown on my mom, long after it mattered to her, but it sure meant a lot to us. And they knew to come and wake me up just in time for my mom's last breath. And then they knew how long to leave me in the room with my mother after she died.I have no idea how they know these things, but I do know that I am eternally grateful that they've guided me once again.Thank you so very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_jones_a_tribute_to_nurses
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"Chris Anderson: So Robert spent the last few years think about how weird human behavior is, and how inadequate most of our language trying to explain it is. And it's very exciting to hear him explain some of the thinking behind it in public for the first time. Over to you now, Robert Sapolsky.(Applause)Robert Sapolsky: Thank you. The fantasy always runs something like this. I've overpowered his elite guard, burst into his secret bunker with my machine gun ready. He lunges for his Luger. I knock it out of his hand. He lunges for his cyanide pill. I knock that out of his hand. He snarls, comes at me with otherworldly strength. We grapple, we fight, I manage to pin him down and put on handcuffs. ""Adolf Hitler,"" I say, ""I arrest you for crimes against humanity.""Here's where the Medal of Honor version of the fantasy ends and the imagery darkens. What would I do if I had Hitler? It's not hard to imagine once I allow myself. Sever his spine at the neck. Take out his eyes with a blunt instrument. Puncture his eardrums. Cut out his tongue. Leave him alive on a respirator, tube-fed, not able to speak or move or see or hear, just to feel, and then inject him with something cancerous that's going to fester and pustulate until every cell in his body is screaming in agony, until every second feels like an eternity in hell. That's what I would do to Hitler.I've had this fantasy since I was a kid, still do sometimes, and when I do, my heart speeds up — all these plans for the most evil, wicked soul in history. But there's a problem, which is I don't actually believe in souls or evil, and I think wicked belongs in a musical. But there's some people I would like to see killed, but I'm against the death penalty. But I like schlocky violent movies, but I'm for strict gun control. But then there was a time I was at a laser tag place, and I had such a good time hiding in a corner shooting at people. In other words, I'm your basic confused human when it comes to violence.Now, as a species, we obviously have problems with violence. We use shower heads to deliver poison gas, letters with anthrax, airplanes as weapons, mass rape as a military strategy. We're a miserably violent species. But there's a complication, which is we don't hate violence, we hate the wrong kind. And when it's the right kind, we cheer it on, we hand out medals, we vote for, we mate with our champions of it. When it's the right kind of violence, we love it. And there's another complication, which is, in addition to us being this miserably violent species, we're also this extraordinarily altruistic, compassionate one.So how do you make sense of the biology of our best behaviors, our worst ones and all of those ambiguously in between?Now, for starters, what's totally boring is understanding the motoric aspects of the behavior. Your brain tells your spine, tells your muscles to do something or other, and hooray, you've behaved. What's hard is understanding the meaning of the behavior, because in some settings, pulling a trigger is an appalling act; in others, it's heroically self-sacrificial. In some settings, putting your hand one someone else's is deeply compassionate. In others, it's a deep betrayal. The challenge is to understand the biology of the context of our behaviors, and that's real tough.One thing that's clear, though, is you're not going to get anywhere if you think there's going to be the brain region or the hormone or the gene or the childhood experience or the evolutionary mechanism that explains everything. Instead, every bit of behavior has multiple levels of causality.Let's look at an example. You have a gun. There's a crisis going on: rioting, violence, people running around. A stranger is running at you in an agitated state — you can't quite tell if the expression is frightened, threatening, angry — holding something that kind of looks like a handgun. You're not sure. The stranger comes running at you and you pull the trigger. And it turns out that thing in this person's hand was a cell phone.So we asked this biological question: what was going on that caused this behavior? What caused this behavior? And this is a multitude of questions.We start. What was going on in your brain one second before you pulled that trigger? And this brings us into the realm of a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala, which is central to violence, central to fear, initiates volleys of cascades that produce pulling of a trigger. What was the level of activity in your amygdala one second before?But to understand that, we have to step back a little bit. What was going on in the environment seconds to minutes before that impacted the amygdala? Now, obviously, the sights, the sounds of the rioting, that was pertinent. But in addition, you're more likely to mistake a cell phone for a handgun if that stranger was male and large and of a different race. Furthermore, if you're in pain, if you're hungry, if you're exhausted, your frontal cortex is not going to work as well, part of the brain whose job it is to get to the amygdala in time saying, ""Are you really sure that's a gun there?""But we need to step further back. Now we have to look at hours to days before, and with this, we have entered the realm of hormones. For example, testosterone, where regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening. Elevated testosterone levels, elevated levels of stress hormones, and your amygdala is going to be more active and your frontal cortex will be more sluggish.Pushing back further, weeks to months before, where's the relevance there? This is the realm of neural plasticity, the fact that your brain can change in response to experience, and if your previous months have been filled with stress and trauma, your amygdala will have enlarged. The neurons will have become more excitable, your frontal cortex would have atrophied, all relevant to what happens in that one second.But we push back even more, back years, back, for example, to your adolescence. Now, the central fact of the adolescent brain is all of it is going full blast except the frontal cortex, which is still half-baked. It doesn't fully mature until you're around 25. And thus, adolescence and early adulthood are the years where environment and experience sculpt your frontal cortex into the version you're going to have as an adult in that critical moment.But pushing back even further, even further back to childhood and fetal life and all the different versions that that could come in. Now, obviously, that's the time that your brain is being constructed, and that's important, but in addition, experience during those times produce what are called epigenetic changes, permanent, in some cases, permanently activating certain genes, turning off others. And as an example of this, if as a fetus you were exposed to a lot of stress hormones through your mother, epigenetics is going to produce your amygdala in adulthood as a more excitable form, and you're going to have elevated stress hormone levels.But pushing even further back, back to when you were just a fetus, back to when all you were was a collection of genes. Now, genes are really important to all of this, but critically, genes don't determine anything, because genes work differently in different environments. Key example here: there's a variant of a gene called MAO-A, and if you have that variant, you are far more likely to commit antisocial violence if, and only if, you were abused as a child. Genes and environment interact, and what's happening in that one second before you pull that trigger reflects your lifetime of those gene-environment interactions.Now, remarkably enough, we've got to push even further back now, back centuries. What were your ancestors up to. And if, for example, they were nomadic pastoralists, they were pastoralists, people living in deserts or grasslands with their herds of camels, cows, goats, odds are they would have invented what's called a culture of honor filled with warrior classes, retributive violence, clan vendettas, and amazingly, centuries later, that would still be influencing the values with which you were raised.But we've got to push even further back, back millions of years, because if we're talking about genes, implicitly we're now talking about the evolution of genes. And what you see is, for example, patterns across different primate species. Some of them have evolved for extremely low levels of aggression, others have evolved in the opposite direction, and floating there in between by every measure are humans, once again this confused, barely defined species that has all these potentials to go one way or the other.So what has this gotten us to? Basically, what we're seeing here is, if you want to understand a behavior, whether it's an appalling one, a wondrous one, or confusedly in between, if you want to understand that, you've got take into account what happened a second before to a million years before, everything in between.So what can we conclude at this point? Officially, it's complicated. Wow, that's really helpful. It's complicated, and you'd better be real careful, real cautious before you conclude you know what causes a behavior, especially if it's a behavior you're judging harshly.Now, to me, the single most important point about all of this is one having to do with change. Every bit of biology I have mentioned here can change in different circumstances. For example, ecosystems change. Thousands of years ago, the Sahara was a lush grassland. Cultures change. In the 17th century, the most terrifying people in Europe were the Swedes, rampaging all over the place. This is what the Swedish military does now. They haven't had a war in 200 years. Most importantly, brains change. Neurons grow new processes. Circuits disconnect. Everything in the brain changes, and out of this come extraordinary examples of human change.First one: this is a man named John Newton, a British theologian who played a central role in the abolition of slavery from the British Empire in the early 1800s. And amazingly, this man spent decades as a younger man as the captain of a slave ship, and then as an investor in slavery, growing rich from this. And then something changed. Something changed in him, something that Newton himself celebrated in the thing that he's most famous for, a hymn that he wrote: ""Amazing Grace.""This is a man named Zenji Abe on the morning of December 6, 1941, about to lead a squadron of Japanese bombers to attack Pearl Harbor. And this is the same man 50 years later to the day hugging a man who survived the attack on the ground. And as an old man, Zenji Abe came to a collection of Pearl Harbor survivors at a ceremony there and in halting English apologized for what he had done as a young man.Now, it doesn't always require decades. Sometimes, extraordinary change could happen in just hours. Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man's-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers had to arrive and said, ""We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other."" And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of ""us,"" all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a ""them,"" those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns.And sometimes, change can occur in seconds. Probably the most horrifying event in the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. A brigade of American soldiers went into an undefended village full of civilians and killed between 350 and 500 of them, mass-raped women and children, mutilated bodies. It was appalling. It was appalling because it occurred, because the government denied it, because the US government eventually did nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and appalling because it almost certainly was not a singular event. This man, Hugh Thompson, this is the man who stopped the My Lai Massacre. He was piloting a helicopter gunship, landed there, got out and saw American soldiers shooting babies, shooting old women, figured out what was going on, and he then took his helicopter and did something that undid his lifetime of conditioning as to who is an ""us"" and who is a ""them."" He landed his helicopter in between some surviving villagers and American soldiers and he trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and said, ""If you don't stop the killing, I will mow you down.""Now, these people are no more special than any of us. Same neurons, same neurochemicals, same biology. What we're left with here is this inevitable cliche: ""Those who don't study history are destined to repeat it."" What we have here is the opposite of it. Those who don't study the history of extraordinary human change, those who don't study the biology of what can transform us from our worst to our best behaviors, those who don't do this are destined not to be able to repeat these incandescent, magnificent moments.So thank you.(Applause)CA: Talks that really give you a new mental model about something, those are some of my favorite TED Talks, and we just got one. Robert, thank you so much for that. Good luck with the book. That was amazing, and we're going to try and get you to come here in person one year. Thank you so much.RS: Thank you. Thank you all.","https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_biology_of_our_best_and_worst_selves
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"I'm going to tell you the story of a song. I was in Madrid one night in 2002 with my teacher and friend Joaquín Sabina, when he said he had something to give me. He said, ""Jorge, I have some lines that you need to put into a song. Take these down, take these down."" I looked on the table but all I found was a circular coaster, on which I wrote the lines my teacher dictated. They were four lines that went like this:""I am a Jewish Moor living among Christians I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.""Those lines really made an impression on me. I said, ""What beautiful lyrics, Joaquín. Did you write them?"" He said no, they were by another composer named Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio, who was less known than Joaquín, but also a great poet. These lines came to me at a time where I had been wanting to express something for a while, but didn't quite know how.I was getting up to leave and go home to write, when Joaquín stopped me and said, ""Hang on, hang on,"" and presented me with this challenge: ""Write the stanzas for this song in Décimas."" Now, at this point in my life, I still wasn't completely sure what Décimas were, but I was too embarrassed to tell my teacher I didn't know. So I put on my best ""Yeah, I totally understand"" face, and went home to look up what Décimas were. I learned that a Décima is a type of verse that only exists in Spanish, and that it has 10 lines. It's very, very complex — perhaps the most complex style of stanza that we have in Spanish. It also has a very concrete date of origin, which is very rare for a style of stanza.The Décima was invented in Spain in 1591, by a guy named Vicente Espinel, a musician and poet from Málaga. And listen to this coincidence: he was the same guy who added the sixth string to what would later be called the Spanish guitar. This string right here — it's called the ""bordona.""From Spain, the Décima, with its 10 lines, crosses over to America, just like the Spanish guitar, but in contrast to the Décima, the Spanish guitar continues to live today on both sides of the Atlantic. But the Décima, in Spain, its birthplace, disappeared; it died out. It died out about 200 years ago, and yet in Latin America, from Mexico to Chile, all our countries maintain some form of the Décima in our popular traditions.In each place, they've given it a different name, and set it to different music. It has a lot of different names — more than 20 in total on the continent. In Mexico, for example, it's called the ""Son Jarocho,"" ""Canto de mejorana"" in Panama; ""Galerón"" in Venezuela; ""Payada"" in Uruguay and Argentina; ""Repentismo"" in Cuba. In Peru, they call it the Peruvian Décima, because the Décima becomes so integrated into our traditions, that if someone asks, people from each place are completely convinced that the Décima was invented in their country.(Laughter)It's also got a really surprising feature, which is that despite the fact that it developed independently in each of the different countries, it maintains even today, 400 years after its creation, exactly the same rhyme, syllable and line structure — the same structure Vicente Espinel gave it during the Spanish Baroque period. Here's the structure — I'll give you the basic idea and then later you can look online and learn more about it.The Décima is ten lines long; each line has eight syllables. The first line rhymes with the fourth and the fifth; the second line, with the third; the sixth line, with the seventh and the tenth; and the eighth line rhymes with the ninth. It's a bit complicated, to be honest. And me — imagine me, trying to write in Décimas. But it's not as complicated as it seems. Plus, it's amazing that it's survived with the same structure for more than four centuries. It's not that complicated, because it has an impressive musicality to it, a type of musicality that's very hard to describe technically. I prefer that you listen to it. So I'm going to recite a Décima, one of the Décimas that I wrote for this song. I'm going to ask that you concentrate just on the musicality of the rhymes. For those of you with headphones on — I see that some of you are listening to the translation — please take them off for a minute.(English) Take your headphones off, it you have them.(English) Forget about the meaning of the words for a few seconds,(English) and then you'll put them back.(English) Forget about the structure.(Spanish) Forget about the structure.(English) And just ... it's all about the choreography of sound of the Décima.(Spanish) A choreography of sound.(Sings in Spanish) ""There is not one death that does not cause me pain, there are no winners, here’s nothing but suffering and another life blown away. War is a terrible school no matter what the disguise, forgive me for not enlisting under any flag, any daydream is worth more than a sad piece of cloth.""That's a Décima.(English) You can put your headphones back on.(Applause)(English) Thank you.(Applause)I also applaud Vicente Espinel, because here it is 426 years later, and the Décima lives on everywhere in its original state.I wrote three like that one; you just heard the second. I wrote the first one having only recently learned how, and it has some errors in terms of meter, so it's not presentable in its current state. But the one I sang was good, more or less. So: What was it about? What was the meaning behind those lines?I had just returned from doing a concert in Israel, and I was very emotional over a problem that hits really close to home, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'll explain: my dad's family is Jewish, and my mom's family are non-practicing Christians. I was raised in a home where the two traditions lived together more or less in harmony. It wasn't unusual to see my Jewish grandpa dressed as Santa Claus, for example, or to see my non-Jewish grandpa at the synagogue wearing his kippah, at family celebrations, wearing the same expression that I probably had when Sabina told me —(Laughter)that he had some Décima lines for me. For someone raised in that kind of environment, it's especially painful to see the difficulty the opposing parties have in putting themselves in the other side's shoes even for a moment. So that's what I wrote about.I already had the lyrics, I had the form — the Décima — and the content. I needed to write the music. I'll give you some context. I had only recently moved from Uruguay, where I'm from, to Spain. And I was feeling very raw with nostalgia, like many of you here, who are away from home. And I wanted my song to be very, very Uruguayan, the most Uruguayan type of song there is — the milonga. So now, I had been studying the Décima, and after finding out that everyone tried to claim the Décima as their own, that it was invented in their country, it made me wonder: What does it mean when we say the milonga is Uruguayan?The milonga has a rhythmic pattern that we musicians call 3-3-2.(Counts out the beats) One two three, one two three, one two.And it has a characteristic emphasis.(Sings)But this characteristic rhythm pattern comes from Africa. In the ninth century you could find it in the brothels of Persia, and in the thirteenth, in Spain, from where, five centuries later, it would cross over to America with the African slaves. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, it encounters the Roma scale —(Sings)which in part, gives birth to klezmer music, which Ukrainian Jewish immigrants bring to Brooklyn, New York. They sing it in their banquet halls.(Sings ""Hava Nagila"")And their neighbor, an Argentine kid of Italian origin named Astor Piazzolla, hears it, assimilates it and transforms the tango of the second half of the 20th century with his ...(Counts out the beats) One two three, one two three, one two.(Sings ""Adios Nonino"")He also played it on his bandoneon, a 19th-century German instrument created for churches that couldn't afford to buy organs, and that ends up, incredibly, in Río de la Plata, forming the very essence of the tango and the milonga, in the very same way another instrument just as important as the bandoneon did: the Spanish guitar.(Applause)To which, by the way, Vicente Espinel, in the 16th century, added a sixth string. It's amazing how all these things are coming full circle.What have I learned in these 15 years since the song was born from going all over the world with four lines written on a coaster from a bar in Madrid? That Décimas, the milonga, songs, people — the closer you get to them, the more complex their identity becomes, and the more nuances and details appear. I learned that identity is infinitely dense, like an infinite series of real numbers, and that even if you get very close and zoom in, it never ends.Before I sing you a song and say goodbye, allow me to tell you one last story. Not long ago, we were in Mexico after a concert. And since the concert promoters know me, they knew I was a Décima freak and that everywhere I go I ask about it, insisting on hearing Décima artists. So they organized a son jarocho show for me at their house. If you recall, the son jarocho is one of the styles of music that uses Décimas in its verses.When these amazing musicians finished playing what is for me, something amazing, which is the son jarocho, they finished playing and were ... I went up to greet them, really excited, getting ready to thank them for their gift of music, and this young kid says to me — and he says it with the best of intentions — he says, ""We're very proud, sir, to be keeping alive the purest origins of our Mexican identity."" And to tell you the truth, I didn't really know what to say.(Laughter)I stood there looking at him. I gave him a hug and left, but ...(Laughter)But he was right, too, though. Right? In reality, the Décima is its origin, but at the same time, just like in the milonga and in the Décima, are the roots of many more cultures from all over the place, like he said.Later, when I got back to the hotel, I thought about it for a while. And I thought: things only look pure if you look at them from far away. It's very important to know about our roots, to know where we come from, to understand our history. But at the same time, as important as knowing where we're from, is understanding that deep down, we're all from nowhere and a little bit from everywhere.Thank you very much.(Applause)This is ""The milonga of the Jewish Moor.""(Music)(Sings)For every wall a lament in Jerusalem the goldenand 100 wasted lives for every commandment.I am dust in your wind and although I bleed through your wound,and every beloved stone has my deepest affection,there is not a stone in the world worth more than a human life.I am a Jewish Moor who lives among ChristiansI don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.There is not one death that does not cause me pain, there are no winnersthere's nothing but suffering and another life blown away.War is a terrible school no matter what the disguise,forgive me for not enlisting under any flag,any daydream is worth more than a sad piece of cloth.I am a Jewish Moor who lives among ChristiansI don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.And nobody has my permission for killing in my name,a man is but a man and if there is a God, this was his wish,the very ground I tread will live on, once I am goneon my way to oblivion, and all doctrines will suffer the same fate,and there is not one nation that has not proclaimed itselfthe chosen people.I am a Jewish Moor who lives among ChristiansI don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.I don't know who my God is, nor who my brothers are.I am a Jewish Moor who lives among Christians(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jorge_drexler_poetry_music_and_identity
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"In 1956, a documentary by Jacques Cousteau won both the Palme d'Or and an Oscar award. This film was called, ""Le Monde Du Silence,"" or, ""The Silent World."" The premise of the title was that the underwater world was a quiet world. We now know, 60 years later, that the underwater world is anything but silent.Although the sounds are inaudible above water depending on where you are and the time of year, the underwater soundscape can be as noisy as any jungle or rainforest. Invertebrates like snapping shrimp, fish and marine mammals all use sound. They use sound to study their habitat, to keep in communication with each other, to navigate, to detect predators and prey. They also use sound by listening to know something about their environment.Take, for an example, the Arctic. It's considered a vast, inhospitable place, sometimes described as a desert, because it is so cold and so remote and ice-covered for much of the year. And despite this, there is no place on Earth that I would rather be than the Arctic, especially as days lengthen and spring comes.To me, the Arctic really embodies this disconnect between what we see on the surface and what's going on underwater. You can look out across the ice — all white and blue and cold — and see nothing. But if you could hear underwater, the sounds you would hear would at first amaze and then delight you. And while your eyes are seeing nothing for kilometers but ice, your ears are telling you that out there are bowhead and beluga whales, walrus and bearded seals. The ice, too, makes sounds. It screeches and cracks and pops and groans, as it collides and rubs when temperature or currents or winds change. And under 100 percent sea ice in the dead of winter, bowhead whales are singing.And you would never expect that, because we humans, we tend to be very visual animals. For most of us, but not all, our sense of sight is how we navigate our world. For marine mammals that live underwater, where chemical cues and light transmit poorly, sound is the sense by which they see. And sound transmits very well underwater, much better than it does in air, so signals can be heard over great distances.In the Arctic, this is especially important, because not only do Arctic marine mammals have to hear each other, but they also have to listen for cues in the environment that might indicate heavy ice ahead or open water. Remember, although they spend most of their lives underwater, they are mammals, and so they have to surface to breathe. So they might listen for thin ice or no ice, or listen for echoes off nearby ice.Arctic marine mammals live in a rich and varied underwater soundscape. In the spring, it can be a cacophony of sound.(Marine mammal sounds)But when the ice is frozen solid, and there are no big temperature shifts or current changes, the underwater Arctic has some of the lowest ambient noise levels of the world's oceans. But this is changing. This is primarily due to a decrease in seasonal sea ice, which is a direct result of human greenhouse gas emissions. We are, in effect, with climate change, conducting a completely uncontrolled experiment with our planet.Over the past 30 years, areas of the Arctic have seen decreases in seasonal sea ice from anywhere from six weeks to four months. This decrease in sea ice is sometimes referred to as an increase in the open water season. That is the time of year when the Arctic is navigable to vessels. And not only is the extent of ice changing, but the age and the width of ice is, too.Now, you may well have heard that a decrease in seasonal sea ice is causing a loss of habitat for animals that rely on sea ice, such as ice seals, or walrus, or polar bears. Decreasing sea ice is also causing increased erosion along coastal villages, and changing prey availability for marine birds and mammals.Climate change and decreases in sea ice are also altering the underwater soundscape of the Arctic. What do I mean by soundscape? Those of us who eavesdrop on the oceans for a living use instruments called hydrophones, which are underwater microphones, and we record ambient noise — the noise all around us. And the soundscape describes the different contributors to this noise field. What we are hearing on our hydrophones are the very real sounds of climate change. We are hearing these changes from three fronts: from the air, from the water and from land.First: air. Wind on water creates waves. These waves make bubbles; the bubbles break, and when they do, they make noise. And this noise is like a hiss or a static in the background. In the Arctic, when it's ice-covered, most of the noise from wind doesn't make it into the water column, because the ice acts as a buffer between the atmosphere and the water. This is one of the reasons that the Arctic can have very low ambient noise levels. But with decreases in seasonal sea ice, not only is the Arctic now open to this wave noise, but the number of storms and the intensity of storms in the Arctic has been increasing. All of this is raising noise levels in a previously quiet ocean.Second: water. With less seasonal sea ice, subarctic species are moving north, and taking advantage of the new habitat that is created by more open water. Now, Arctic whales, like this bowhead, they have no dorsal fin, because they have evolved to live and swim in ice-covered waters, and having something sticking off of your back is not very conducive to migrating through ice, and may, in fact, be excluding animals from the ice. But now, everywhere we've listened, we're hearing the sounds of fin whales and humpback whales and killer whales, further and further north, and later and later in the season. We are hearing, in essence, an invasion of the Arctic by subarctic species. And we don't know what this means. Will there be competition for food between Arctic and subarctic animals? Might these subarctic species introduce diseases or parasites into the Arctic? And what are the new sounds that they are producing doing to the soundscape underwater?And third: land. And by land ... I mean people. More open water means increased human use of the Arctic. Just this past summer, a massive cruise ship made its way through the Northwest Passage — the once-mythical route between Europe and the Pacific. Decreases in sea ice have allowed humans to occupy the Arctic more often. It has allowed increases in oil and gas exploration and extraction, the potential for commercial shipping, as well as increased tourism. And we now know that ship noise increases levels of stress hormones in whales and can disrupt feeding behavior. Air guns, which produce loud, low-frequency ""whoomps"" every 10 to 20 seconds, changed the swimming and vocal behavior of whales. And all of these sound sources are decreasing the acoustic space over which Arctic marine mammals can communicate.Now, Arctic marine mammals are used to very high levels of noise at certain times of the year. But this is primarily from other animals or from sea ice, and these are the sounds with which they've evolved, and these are sounds that are vital to their very survival. These new sounds are loud and they're alien. They might impact the environment in ways that we think we understand, but also in ways that we don't. Remember, sound is the most important sense for these animals. And not only is the physical habitat of the Arctic changing rapidly, but the acoustic habitat is, too. It's as if we've plucked these animals up from the quiet countryside and dropped them into a big city in the middle of rush hour. And they can't escape it.So what can we do now? We can't decrease wind speeds or keep subarctic animals from migrating north, but we can work on local solutions to reducing human-caused underwater noise. One of these solutions is to slow down ships that traverse the Arctic, because a slower ship is a quieter ship. We can restrict access in seasons and regions that are important for mating or feeding or migrating. We can get smarter about quieting ships and find better ways to explore the ocean bottom. And the good news is, there are people working on this right now. But ultimately, we humans have to do the hard work of reversing or at the very least decelerating human-caused atmospheric changes.So, let's return to this idea of a silent world underwater. It's entirely possible that many of the whales swimming in the Arctic today, especially long-lived species like the bowhead whale that the Inuits say can live two human lives — it's possible that these whales were alive in 1956, when Jacques Cousteau made his film. And in retrospect, considering all the noise we are creating in the oceans today, perhaps it really was ""The Silent World.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_stafford_how_human_noise_affects_ocean_habitats
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"Namaskar.I'm a movie star, I'm 51 years of age, and I don't use Botox as yet.(Laughter)So I'm clean, but I do behave like you saw like a 21-year-old in my movies. Yeah, I do that. I sell dreams, and I peddle love to millions of people back home in India who assume that I'm the best lover in the world.(Laughter)If you don't tell anyone, I'm going to tell you I'm not, but I never let that assumption go away.(Laughter)I've also been made to understand there are lots of you here who haven't seen my work, and I feel really sad for you.(Laughter)(Applause)That doesn't take away from the fact that I'm completely self-obsessed, as a movie star should be.(Laughter)That's when my friends, Chris and Juliet called me here to speak about the future ""you."" Naturally, it follows I'm going to speak about the present me.(Laughter)Because I truly believe that humanity is a lot like me.(Laughter)It is. It is. It's an aging movie star, grappling with all the newness around itself, wondering whether it got it right in the first place, and still trying to find a way to keep on shining regardless.I was born in a refugee colony in the capital city of India, New Delhi. And my father was a freedom fighter. My mother was, well, just a fighter like mothers are. And much like the original homo sapiens, we struggled to survive. When I was in my early 20s, I lost both my parents, which I must admit seems a bit careless of me now, but —(Laughter)I do remember the night my father died, and I remember the driver of a neighbor who was driving us to the hospital. He mumbled something about ""dead people don't tip so well"" and walked away into the dark. And I was only 14 then, and I put my father's dead body in the back seat of the car, and my mother besides me, I started driving back from the hospital to the house. And in the middle of her quiet crying, my mother looked at me and she said, ""Son, when did you learn to drive?"" And I thought about it and realized, and I said to my mom, ""Just now, Mom.""(Laughter)So from that night onwards, much akin to humanity in its adolescence, I learned the crude tools of survival. And the framework of life was very, very simple then, to be honest. You know, you just ate what you got and did whatever you were told to do. I thought celiac was a vegetable, and vegan, of course, was Mr. Spock's lost comrade in ""Star Trek.""(Laughter)You married the first girl that you dated, and you were a techie if you could fix the carburetor in your car. I really thought that gay was a sophisticated English word for happy. And Lesbian, of course, was the capital of Portugal, as you all know.(Laughter)Where was I? We relied on systems created through the toil and sacrifice of generations before to protect us, and we felt that governments actually worked for our betterment. Science was simple and logical, Apple was still then just a fruit owned by Eve first and then Newton, not by Steve Jobs, until then. And ""Eureka!"" was what you screamed when you wanted to run naked on the streets. You went wherever life took you for work, and people were mostly welcoming of you. Migration was a term then still reserved for Siberian cranes, not human beings. Most importantly, you were who you were and you said what you thought.Then in my late 20s, I shifted to the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai, and my framework, like the newly industrialized aspirational humanity, began to alter. In the urban rush for a new, more embellished survival, things started to look a little different. I met people who had descended from all over the world, faces, races, genders, money-lenders. Definitions became more and more fluid. Work began to define you at that time in an overwhelmingly equalizing manner, and all the systems started to feel less reliable to me, almost too thick to hold on to the diversity of mankind and the human need to progress and grow. Ideas were flowing with more freedom and speed. And I experienced the miracle of human innovation and cooperation, and my own creativity, when supported by the resourcefulness of this collective endeavor, catapulted me into superstardom.I started to feel that I had arrived, and generally, by the time I was 40, I was really, really flying. I was all over the place. You know? I'd done 50 films by then and 200 songs, and I'd been knighted by the Malaysians. I had been given the highest civil honor by the French government, the title of which for the life of me I can't pronounce even until now.(Laughter)I'm sorry, France, and thank you, France, for doing that. But much bigger than that, I got to meet Angelina Jolie —(Laughter)for two and a half seconds.(Laughter)And I'm sure she also remembers that encounter somewhere. OK, maybe not. And I sat next to Hannah Montana on a round dinner table with her back towards me most of the time. Like I said, I was flying, from Miley to Jolie, and humanity was soaring with me. We were both pretty much flying off the handle, actually.And then you all know what happened. The internet happened. I was in my late 40s, and I started tweeting like a canary in a birdcage and assuming that, you know, people who peered into my world would admire it for the miracle I believed it to be. But something else awaited me and humanity. You know, we had expected an expansion of ideas and dreams with the enhanced connectivity of the world. We had not bargained for the village-like enclosure of thought, of judgment, of definition that flowed from the same place that freedom and revolution was taking place in. Everything I said took a new meaning. Everything I did — good, bad, ugly — was there for the world to comment upon and judge. As a matter of fact, everything I didn't say or do also met with the same fate.Four years ago, my lovely wife Gauri and me decided to have a third child. It was claimed on the net that he was the love child of our first child who was 15 years old. Apparently, he had sown his wild oats with a girl while driving her car in Romania. And yeah, there was a fake video to go with it. And we were so disturbed as a family. My son, who is 19 now, even now when you say ""hello"" to him, he just turns around and says, ""But bro, I didn't even have a European driving license.""(Laughter)Yeah. In this new world, slowly, reality became virtual and virtual became real, and I started to feel that I could not be who I wanted to be or say what I actually thought, and humanity at this time completely identified with me. I think both of us were going through our midlife crisis, and humanity, like me, was becoming an overexposed prima donna. I started to sell everything, from hair oil to diesel generators. Humanity was buying everything from crude oil to nuclear reactors. You know, I even tried to get into a skintight superhero suit to reinvent myself. I must admit I failed miserably. And just an aside I want to say on behalf of all the Batmen, Spider-Men and Supermen of the world, you have to commend them, because it really hurts in the crotch, that superhero suit.(Laughter)Yeah, I'm being honest. I need to tell you this here. Really. And accidentally, I happened to even invent a new dance form which I didn't realize, and it became a rage. So if it's all right, and you've seen a bit of me, so I'm quite shameless, I'll show you. It was called the Lungi dance. So if it's all right, I'll just show you. I'm talented otherwise.(Cheers)So it went something like this.Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi.That's it. It became a rage.(Cheers)It really did. Like you notice, nobody could make any sense of what was happening except me, and I didn't give a damn, really, because the whole world, and whole humanity, seemed as confused and lost as I was. I didn't give up then. I even tried to reconstruct my identity on the social media like everyone else does. I thought if I put on philosophical tweets out there people will think I'm with it, but some of the responses I got from those tweets were extremely confusing acronyms which I didn't understand. You know? ROFL, LOL. ""Adidas,"" somebody wrote back to one of my more thought-provoking tweets and I was wondering why would you name a sneaker, I mean, why would you write back the name of a sneaker to me? And I asked my 16-year-old daughter, and she enlightened me. ""Adidas"" now means ""All day I dream about sex.""(Laughter)Really. I didn't know if you know that. So I wrote back, ""WTF"" in bold to Mr. Adidas, thanking secretly that some acronyms and things won't change at all. WTF.But here we are. I am 51 years old, like I told you, and mind-numbing acronyms notwithstanding, I just want to tell you if there has been a momentous time for humanity to exist, it is now, because the present you is brave. The present you is hopeful. The present you is innovative and resourceful, and of course, the present you is annoyingly indefinable. And in this spell-binding, imperfect moment of existence, feeling a little brave just before I came here, I decided to take a good, hard look at my face. And I realized that I'm beginning to look more and more like the wax statue of me at Madame Tussaud's.(Laughter)Yeah, and in that moment of realization, I asked the most central and pertinent question to humanity and me: Do I need to fix my face? Really. I'm an actor, like I told you, a modern expression of human creativity. The land I come from is the source of inexplicable but very simple spirituality. In its immense generosity, India decided somehow that I, the Muslim son of a broke freedom fighter who accidentally ventured into the business of selling dreams, should become its king of romance, the ""Badhshah of Bollywood,"" the greatest lover the country has ever seen ... with this face. Yeah.(Laughter)Which has alternately been described as ugly, unconventional, and strangely, not chocolatey enough.(Laughter)The people of this ancient land embraced me in their limitless love, and I've learned from these people that neither power nor poverty can make your life more magical or less tortuous. I've learned from the people of my country that the dignity of a life, a human being, a culture, a religion, a country actually resides in its ability for grace and compassion. I've learned that whatever moves you, whatever urges you to create, to build, whatever keeps you from failing, whatever helps you survive, is perhaps the oldest and the simplest emotion known to mankind, and that is love. A mystic poet from my land famously wrote,(Recites poem in Hindi)(Poem ends)Which loosely translates into that whatever — yeah, if you know Hindi, please clap, yeah.(Applause)It's very difficult to remember. Which loosely translates into actually saying that all the books of knowledge that you might read and then go ahead and impart your knowledge through innovation, through creativity, through technology, but mankind will never be the wiser about its future unless it is coupled with a sense of love and compassion for their fellow beings. The two and a half alphabets which form the word ""प्रेम,"" which means ""love,"" if you are able to understand that and practice it, that itself is enough to enlighten mankind. So I truly believe the future ""you"" has to be a you that loves. Otherwise it will cease to flourish. It will perish in its own self-absorption.So you may use your power to build walls and keep people outside, or you may use it to break barriers and welcome them in. You may use your faith to make people afraid and terrify them into submission, or you can use it to give courage to people so they rise to the greatest heights of enlightenment. You can use your energy to build nuclear bombs and spread the darkness of destruction, or you can use it to spread the joy of light to millions. You may filthy up the oceans callously and cut down all the forests. You can destroy the ecology, or turn to them with love and regenerate life from the waters and trees. You may land on Mars and build armed citadels, or you may look for life-forms and species to learn from and respect. And you can use all the moneys we all have earned to wage futile wars and give guns in the hands of little children to kill each other with, or you can use it to make more food to fill their stomachs with.My country has taught me the capacity for a human being to love is akin to godliness. It shines forth in a world which civilization, I think, already has tampered too much with. In the last few days, the talks here, the wonderful people coming and showing their talent, talking about individual achievements, the innovation, the technology, the sciences, the knowledge we are gaining by being here in the presence of TED Talks and all of you are reasons enough for us to celebrate the future ""us."" But within that celebration the quest to cultivate our capacity for love and compassion has to assert itself, has to assert itself, just as equally.So I believe the future ""you"" is an infinite you. It's called a chakra in India, like a circle. It ends where it begins from to complete itself. A you that perceives time and space differently understands both your unimaginable and fantastic importance and your complete unimportance in the larger context of the universe. A you that returns back to the original innocence of humanity, which loves from the purity of heart, which sees from the eyes of truth, which dreams from the clarity of an untampered mind.The future ""you"" has to be like an aging movie star who has been made to believe that there is a possibility of a world which is completely, wholly, self-obsessively in love with itself. A world — really, it has to be a you to create a world which is its own best lover. That I believe, ladies and gentlemen, should be the future ""you.""Thank you very much. Shukriya.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/shah_rukh_khan_thoughts_on_humanity_fame_and_love
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"This is Lee Sedol. Lee Sedol is one of the world's greatest Go players, and he's having what my friends in Silicon Valley call a ""Holy Cow"" moment —(Laughter)a moment where we realize that AI is actually progressing a lot faster than we expected. So humans have lost on the Go board. What about the real world?Well, the real world is much bigger, much more complicated than the Go board. It's a lot less visible, but it's still a decision problem. And if we think about some of the technologies that are coming down the pike ... Noriko [Arai] mentioned that reading is not yet happening in machines, at least with understanding. But that will happen, and when that happens, very soon afterwards, machines will have read everything that the human race has ever written. And that will enable machines, along with the ability to look further ahead than humans can, as we've already seen in Go, if they also have access to more information, they'll be able to make better decisions in the real world than we can. So is that a good thing? Well, I hope so.Our entire civilization, everything that we value, is based on our intelligence. And if we had access to a lot more intelligence, then there's really no limit to what the human race can do. And I think this could be, as some people have described it, the biggest event in human history. So why are people saying things like this, that AI might spell the end of the human race? Is this a new thing? Is it just Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking?Actually, no. This idea has been around for a while. Here's a quotation: ""Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance, by turning off the power at strategic moments"" — and I'll come back to that ""turning off the power"" idea later on — ""we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled."" So who said this? This is Alan Turing in 1951. Alan Turing, as you know, is the father of computer science and in many ways, the father of AI as well. So if we think about this problem, the problem of creating something more intelligent than your own species, we might call this ""the gorilla problem,"" because gorillas' ancestors did this a few million years ago, and now we can ask the gorillas: Was this a good idea?So here they are having a meeting to discuss whether it was a good idea, and after a little while, they conclude, no, this was a terrible idea. Our species is in dire straits. In fact, you can see the existential sadness in their eyes.(Laughter)So this queasy feeling that making something smarter than your own species is maybe not a good idea — what can we do about that? Well, really nothing, except stop doing AI, and because of all the benefits that I mentioned and because I'm an AI researcher, I'm not having that. I actually want to be able to keep doing AI.So we actually need to nail down the problem a bit more. What exactly is the problem? Why is better AI possibly a catastrophe?So here's another quotation: ""We had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire."" This was said by Norbert Wiener in 1960, shortly after he watched one of the very early learning systems learn to play checkers better than its creator. But this could equally have been said by King Midas. King Midas said, ""I want everything I touch to turn to gold,"" and he got exactly what he asked for. That was the purpose that he put into the machine, so to speak, and then his food and his drink and his relatives turned to gold and he died in misery and starvation. So we'll call this ""the King Midas problem"" of stating an objective which is not, in fact, truly aligned with what we want. In modern terms, we call this ""the value alignment problem.""Putting in the wrong objective is not the only part of the problem. There's another part. If you put an objective into a machine, even something as simple as, ""Fetch the coffee,"" the machine says to itself, ""Well, how might I fail to fetch the coffee? Someone might switch me off. OK, I have to take steps to prevent that. I will disable my 'off' switch. I will do anything to defend myself against interference with this objective that I have been given."" So this single-minded pursuit in a very defensive mode of an objective that is, in fact, not aligned with the true objectives of the human race — that's the problem that we face. And in fact, that's the high-value takeaway from this talk. If you want to remember one thing, it's that you can't fetch the coffee if you're dead.(Laughter)It's very simple. Just remember that. Repeat it to yourself three times a day.(Laughter)And in fact, this is exactly the plot of ""2001: [A Space Odyssey]"" HAL has an objective, a mission, which is not aligned with the objectives of the humans, and that leads to this conflict. Now fortunately, HAL is not superintelligent. He's pretty smart, but eventually Dave outwits him and manages to switch him off. But we might not be so lucky. So what are we going to do?I'm trying to redefine AI to get away from this classical notion of machines that intelligently pursue objectives. There are three principles involved. The first one is a principle of altruism, if you like, that the robot's only objective is to maximize the realization of human objectives, of human values. And by values here I don't mean touchy-feely, goody-goody values. I just mean whatever it is that the human would prefer their life to be like. And so this actually violates Asimov's law that the robot has to protect its own existence. It has no interest in preserving its existence whatsoever.The second law is a law of humility, if you like. And this turns out to be really important to make robots safe. It says that the robot does not know what those human values are, so it has to maximize them, but it doesn't know what they are. And that avoids this problem of single-minded pursuit of an objective. This uncertainty turns out to be crucial.Now, in order to be useful to us, it has to have some idea of what we want. It obtains that information primarily by observation of human choices, so our own choices reveal information about what it is that we prefer our lives to be like. So those are the three principles. Let's see how that applies to this question of: ""Can you switch the machine off?"" as Turing suggested.So here's a PR2 robot. This is one that we have in our lab, and it has a big red ""off"" switch right on the back. The question is: Is it going to let you switch it off? If we do it the classical way, we give it the objective of, ""Fetch the coffee, I must fetch the coffee, I can't fetch the coffee if I'm dead,"" so obviously the PR2 has been listening to my talk, and so it says, therefore, ""I must disable my 'off' switch, and probably taser all the other people in Starbucks who might interfere with me.""(Laughter)So this seems to be inevitable, right? This kind of failure mode seems to be inevitable, and it follows from having a concrete, definite objective.So what happens if the machine is uncertain about the objective? Well, it reasons in a different way. It says, ""OK, the human might switch me off, but only if I'm doing something wrong. Well, I don't really know what wrong is, but I know that I don't want to do it."" So that's the first and second principles right there. ""So I should let the human switch me off."" And in fact you can calculate the incentive that the robot has to allow the human to switch it off, and it's directly tied to the degree of uncertainty about the underlying objective.And then when the machine is switched off, that third principle comes into play. It learns something about the objectives it should be pursuing, because it learns that what it did wasn't right. In fact, we can, with suitable use of Greek symbols, as mathematicians usually do, we can actually prove a theorem that says that such a robot is provably beneficial to the human. You are provably better off with a machine that's designed in this way than without it. So this is a very simple example, but this is the first step in what we're trying to do with human-compatible AI.Now, this third principle, I think is the one that you're probably scratching your head over. You're probably thinking, ""Well, you know, I behave badly. I don't want my robot to behave like me. I sneak down in the middle of the night and take stuff from the fridge. I do this and that."" There's all kinds of things you don't want the robot doing. But in fact, it doesn't quite work that way. Just because you behave badly doesn't mean the robot is going to copy your behavior. It's going to understand your motivations and maybe help you resist them, if appropriate. But it's still difficult. What we're trying to do, in fact, is to allow machines to predict for any person and for any possible life that they could live, and the lives of everybody else: Which would they prefer? And there are many, many difficulties involved in doing this; I don't expect that this is going to get solved very quickly. The real difficulties, in fact, are us.As I have already mentioned, we behave badly. In fact, some of us are downright nasty. Now the robot, as I said, doesn't have to copy the behavior. The robot does not have any objective of its own. It's purely altruistic. And it's not designed just to satisfy the desires of one person, the user, but in fact it has to respect the preferences of everybody. So it can deal with a certain amount of nastiness, and it can even understand that your nastiness, for example, you may take bribes as a passport official because you need to feed your family and send your kids to school. It can understand that; it doesn't mean it's going to steal. In fact, it'll just help you send your kids to school.We are also computationally limited. Lee Sedol is a brilliant Go player, but he still lost. So if we look at his actions, he took an action that lost the game. That doesn't mean he wanted to lose. So to understand his behavior, we actually have to invert through a model of human cognition that includes our computational limitations — a very complicated model. But it's still something that we can work on understanding.Probably the most difficult part, from my point of view as an AI researcher, is the fact that there are lots of us, and so the machine has to somehow trade off, weigh up the preferences of many different people, and there are different ways to do that. Economists, sociologists, moral philosophers have understood that, and we are actively looking for collaboration.Let's have a look and see what happens when you get that wrong. So you can have a conversation, for example, with your intelligent personal assistant that might be available in a few years' time. Think of a Siri on steroids. So Siri says, ""Your wife called to remind you about dinner tonight."" And of course, you've forgotten. ""What? What dinner? What are you talking about?""""Uh, your 20th anniversary at 7pm.""""I can't do that. I'm meeting with the secretary-general at 7:30. How could this have happened?""""Well, I did warn you, but you overrode my recommendation.""""Well, what am I going to do? I can't just tell him I'm too busy.""""Don't worry. I arranged for his plane to be delayed.""(Laughter)""Some kind of computer malfunction.""(Laughter)""Really? You can do that?""""He sends his profound apologies and looks forward to meeting you for lunch tomorrow.""(Laughter)So the values here — there's a slight mistake going on. This is clearly following my wife's values which is ""Happy wife, happy life.""(Laughter)It could go the other way. You could come home after a hard day's work, and the computer says, ""Long day?""""Yes, I didn't even have time for lunch.""""You must be very hungry.""""Starving, yeah. Could you make some dinner?""""There's something I need to tell you.""(Laughter)""There are humans in South Sudan who are in more urgent need than you.""(Laughter)""So I'm leaving. Make your own dinner.""(Laughter)So we have to solve these problems, and I'm looking forward to working on them.There are reasons for optimism. One reason is, there is a massive amount of data. Because remember — I said they're going to read everything the human race has ever written. Most of what we write about is human beings doing things and other people getting upset about it. So there's a massive amount of data to learn from.There's also a very strong economic incentive to get this right. So imagine your domestic robot's at home. You're late from work again and the robot has to feed the kids, and the kids are hungry and there's nothing in the fridge. And the robot sees the cat.(Laughter)And the robot hasn't quite learned the human value function properly, so it doesn't understand the sentimental value of the cat outweighs the nutritional value of the cat.(Laughter)So then what happens? Well, it happens like this: ""Deranged robot cooks kitty for family dinner."" That one incident would be the end of the domestic robot industry. So there's a huge incentive to get this right long before we reach superintelligent machines.So to summarize: I'm actually trying to change the definition of AI so that we have provably beneficial machines. And the principles are: machines that are altruistic, that want to achieve only our objectives, but that are uncertain about what those objectives are, and will watch all of us to learn more about what it is that we really want. And hopefully in the process, we will learn to be better people. Thank you very much.(Applause)Chris Anderson: So interesting, Stuart. We're going to stand here a bit because I think they're setting up for our next speaker.A couple of questions. So the idea of programming in ignorance seems intuitively really powerful. As you get to superintelligence, what's going to stop a robot reading literature and discovering this idea that knowledge is actually better than ignorance and still just shifting its own goals and rewriting that programming?Stuart Russell: Yes, so we want it to learn more, as I said, about our objectives. It'll only become more certain as it becomes more correct, so the evidence is there and it's going to be designed to interpret it correctly. It will understand, for example, that books are very biased in the evidence they contain. They only talk about kings and princes and elite white male people doing stuff. So it's a complicated problem, but as it learns more about our objectives it will become more and more useful to us.CA: And you couldn't just boil it down to one law, you know, hardwired in: ""if any human ever tries to switch me off, I comply. I comply.""SR: Absolutely not. That would be a terrible idea. So imagine that you have a self-driving car and you want to send your five-year-old off to preschool. Do you want your five-year-old to be able to switch off the car while it's driving along? Probably not. So it needs to understand how rational and sensible the person is. The more rational the person, the more willing you are to be switched off. If the person is completely random or even malicious, then you're less willing to be switched off.CA: All right. Stuart, can I just say, I really, really hope you figure this out for us. Thank you so much for that talk. That was amazing.SR: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_how_ai_might_make_us_better_people
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"A few days after my husband Paul was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, we were lying in our bed at home, and Paul said, ""It's going to be OK."" And I remember answering back, ""Yes. We just don't know what OK means yet.""Paul and I had met as first-year medical students at Yale. He was smart and kind and super funny. He used to keep a gorilla suit in the trunk of his car, and he'd say, ""It's for emergencies only.""(Laughter)I fell in love with Paul as I watched the care he took with his patients. He stayed late talking with them, seeking to understand the experience of illness and not just its technicalities. He later told me he fell in love with me when he saw me cry over an EKG of a heart that had ceased beating. We didn't know it yet, but even in the heady days of young love, we were learning how to approach suffering together.We got married and became doctors. I was working as an internist and Paul was finishing his training as a neurosurgeon when he started to lose weight. He developed excruciating back pain and a cough that wouldn't go away. And when he was admitted to the hospital, a CT scan revealed tumors in Paul's lungs and in his bones. We had both cared for patients with devastating diagnoses; now it was our turn.We lived with Paul's illness for 22 months. He wrote a memoir about facing mortality. I gave birth to our daughter Cady, and we loved her and each other. We learned directly how to struggle through really tough medical decisions. The day we took Paul into the hospital for the last time was the most difficult day of my life. When he turned to me at the end and said, ""I'm ready,"" I knew that wasn't just a brave decision. It was the right one. Paul didn't want a ventilator and CPR. In that moment, the most important thing to Paul was to hold our baby daughter. Nine hours later, Paul died.I've always thought of myself as a caregiver — most physicians do — and taking care of Paul deepened what that meant. Watching him reshape his identity during his illness, learning to witness and accept his pain, talking together through his choices — those experiences taught me that resilience does not mean bouncing back to where you were before, or pretending that the hard stuff isn't hard. It is so hard. It's painful, messy stuff. But it's the stuff. And I learned that when we approach it together, we get to decide what success looks like.One of the first things Paul said to me after his diagnosis was, ""I want you to get remarried."" And I was like, whoa, I guess we get to say anything out loud.(Laughter)It was so shocking and heartbreaking ... and generous, and really comforting because it was so starkly honest, and that honesty turned out to be exactly what we needed. Early in Paul's illness, we agreed we would just keep saying things out loud. Tasks like making a will, or completing our advance directives — tasks that I had always avoided — were not as daunting as they once seemed. I realized that completing an advance directive is an act of love — like a wedding vow. A pact to take care of someone, codifying the promise that til death do us part, I will be there. If needed, I will speak for you. I will honor your wishes. That paperwork became a tangible part of our love story.As physicians, Paul and I were in a good position to understand and even accept his diagnosis. We weren't angry about it, luckily, because we'd seen so many patients in devastating situations, and we knew that death is a part of life. But it's one thing to know that; it was a very different experience to actually live with the sadness and uncertainty of a serious illness. Huge strides are being made against lung cancer, but we knew that Paul likely had months to a few years left to live.During that time, Paul wrote about his transition from doctor to patient. He talked about feeling like he was suddenly at a crossroads, and how he would have thought he'd be able to see the path, that because he treated so many patients, maybe he could follow in their footsteps. But he was totally disoriented. Rather than a path, Paul wrote, ""I saw instead only a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert. As if a sandstorm had erased all familiarity. I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living, and I needed my oncologist's help to do so.""The clinicians taking care of Paul gave me an even deeper appreciation for my colleagues in health care. We have a tough job. We're responsible for helping patients have clarity around their prognoses and their treatment options, and that's never easy, but it's especially tough when you're dealing with potentially terminal illnesses like cancer. Some people don't want to know how long they have left, others do. Either way, we never have those answers. Sometimes we substitute hope by emphasizing the best-case scenario. In a survey of physicians, 55 percent said they painted a rosier picture than their honest opinion when describing a patient's prognosis. It's an instinct born out of kindness. But researchers have found that when people better understand the possible outcomes of an illness, they have less anxiety, greater ability to plan and less trauma for their families.Families can struggle with those conversations, but for us, we also found that information immensely helpful with big decisions. Most notably, whether to have a baby. Months to a few years meant Paul was not likely to see her grow up. But he had a good chance of being there for her birth and for the beginning of her life. I remember asking Paul if he thought having to say goodbye to a child would make dying even more painful. And his answer astounded me. He said, ""Wouldn't it be great if it did?"" And we did it. Not in order to spite cancer, but because we were learning that living fully means accepting suffering.Paul's oncologist tailored his chemo so he could continue working as a neurosurgeon, which initially we thought was totally impossible. When the cancer advanced and Paul shifted from surgery to writing, his palliative care doctor prescribed a stimulant medication so he could be more focused. They asked Paul about his priorities and his worries. They asked him what trade-offs he was willing to make. Those conversations are the best way to ensure that your health care matches your values. Paul joked that it's not like that ""birds and bees"" talk you have with your parents, where you all get it over with as quickly as possible, and then pretend it never happened. You revisit the conversation as things change. You keep saying things out loud. I'm forever grateful because Paul's clinicians felt that their job wasn't to try to give us answers they didn't have, or only to try to fix things for us, but to counsel Paul through painful choices ... when his body was failing but his will to live wasn't.Later, after Paul died, I received a dozen bouquets of flowers, but I sent just one ... to Paul's oncologist, because she supported his goals and she helped him weigh his choices. She knew that living means more than just staying alive.A few weeks ago, a patient came into my clinic. A woman dealing with a serious chronic disease. And while we were talking about her life and her health care, she said, ""I love my palliative care team. They taught me that it's OK to say 'no'."" Yeah, I thought, of course it is. But many patients don't feel that. Compassion and Choices did a study where they asked people about their health care preferences. And a lot of people started their answers with the words ""Well, if I had a choice ..."" If I had a choice. And when I read that ""if,"" I understood better why one in four people receives excessive or unwanted medical treatment, or watches a family member receive excessive or unwanted medical treatment. It's not because doctors don't get it. We do. We understand the real psychological consequences on patients and their families. The things is, we deal with them, too. Half of critical care nurses and a quarter of ICU doctors have considered quitting their jobs because of distress over feeling that for some of their patients, they've provided care that didn't fit with the person's values. But doctors can't make sure your wishes are respected until they know what they are.Would you want to be on life support if it offered any chance of longer life? Are you most worried about the quality of that time, rather than quantity? Both of those choices are thoughtful and brave, but for all of us, it's our choice. That's true at the end of life and for medical care throughout our lives. If you're pregnant, do you want genetic screening? Is a knee replacement right or not? Do you want to do dialysis in a clinic or at home? The answer is: it depends. What medical care will help you live the way you want to? I hope you remember that question the next time you face a decision in your health care. Remember that you always have a choice, and it is OK to say no to a treatment that's not right for you.There's a poem by W.S. Merwin — it's just two sentences long — that captures how I feel now. ""Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color."" For me that poem evokes my love for Paul, and a new fortitude that came from loving and losing him.When Paul said, ""It's going to be OK,"" that didn't mean that we could cure his illness. Instead, we learned to accept both joy and sadness at the same time; to uncover beauty and purpose both despite and because we are all born and we all die. And for all the sadness and sleepless nights, it turns out there is joy. I leave flowers on Paul's grave and watch our two-year-old run around on the grass. I build bonfires on the beach and watch the sunset with our friends. Exercise and mindfulness meditation have helped a lot. And someday, I hope I do get remarried.Most importantly, I get to watch our daughter grow. I've thought a lot about what I'm going to say to her when she's older. ""Cady, engaging in the full range of experience — living and dying, love and loss — is what we get to do. Being human doesn't happen despite suffering. It happens within it. When we approach suffering together, when we choose not to hide from it, our lives don't diminish, they expand.""I've learned that cancer isn't always a battle. Or if it is, maybe it's a fight for something different than we thought. Our job isn't to fight fate, but to help each other through. Not as soldiers but as shepherds. That's how we make it OK, even when it's not. By saying it out loud, by helping each other through ... and a gorilla suit never hurts, either.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/lucy_kalanithi_what_makes_life_worth_living_in_the_face_of_death
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"I have a two-year-old daughter named Naya who is under the mistaken impression that this conference is named in honor of her father.(Laughter)Who am I to contradict my baby girl?As many of you know, there's something about becoming a parent that concentrates the mind on long-term problems like climate change. It was the birth of my daughter that inspired me to launch this climate organization, in order to counteract the excessive polarization of this issue in the United States, and to find a conservative pathway forward. Yes, folks, a Republican climate solution is possible, and you know what? It may even be better.(Laughter)Let me try to prove that to you.What we really need is a killer app to climate policy. In the technology world, a killer app is an application so transformative that it creates its own market, like Uber. In the climate world, a killer app is a new solution so promising that it can break through the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress. These include the psychological barrier. Climate advocates have long been encouraging their fellow citizens to make short-term sacrifices now for benefits that accrue to other people in other countries 30 or 40 years in the future. It just doesn't fly because it runs contrary to basic human nature.Next is the geopolitical barrier. Under the current rules of global trade, countries have a strong incentive to free ride off the emissions reductions of other nations, instead of strengthening their own programs. This has been the curse of every international climate negotiations, including Paris. Finally, we have the partisan barrier. Even the most committed countries — Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada — are nowhere near reducing emissions at the required scale and speed. Not even close. And the partisan climate divide is far more acute here in the United States. We are fundamentally stuck, and that is why we need a killer app of climate policy to break through each of these barriers.I'm convinced that the road to climate progress in the United States runs through the Republican Party and the business community. So in launching the Climate Leadership Council, I started by reaching out to a who's who of Republican elder statesmen and business leaders, including James Baker and George Schultz, the two most respected Republican elder statesmen in America; Martin Feldstein and Greg Mankiw, the two most respected conservative economists in the country; and Henry Paulson and Rob Walton, two of the most successful and admired business leaders. Together, we co-authored ""The Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends."" This represents the first time that Republican leaders put forth a concrete market-based climate solution.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)We presented our plan at the White House two weeks after President Trump moved in. Almost every leading editorial board in the country has since endorsed our plan, and Fortune 100 companies from a wide range of industries are now getting behind it. So by now you're probably wondering, what exactly is this plan?Well, our carbon dividends solution is based on four pillars. The first is a gradually rising carbon tax. Although capitalism is a wonderful system, like many operating systems, it's prone to bugs, which, in this case, are called ""market failures."" By far the largest is that market prices fail to take social and environmental costs into account. That means every market transaction is based on incorrect information. This fundamental bug of capitalism, more than any other single factor, is to blame for our climate predicament.Now in theory, this should be an easy problem to fix. Economists agree that the best solution is to put a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels, otherwise known as a carbon tax. This would discourage carbon emissions in every single economic transaction, every day of the year. However, a carbon tax by itself has proven to be unpopular and a political dead end. The answer is to return all the money raised directly to citizens, in the form of equal monthly dividends. This would transform an unpopular carbon tax into a popular and populist solution, and it would also solve the underlying psychological barrier that we discussed, by giving everyone a concrete benefit in the here and now.And these benefits would be significant. Assuming a carbon tax rate that starts at 40 dollars per ton, a family of four would receive 2,000 dollars per year from the get-go. According to the US Treasury Department, the bottom 70 percent of Americans would receive more in dividends than they would pay in increased energy prices. That means 223 million Americans would win economically from solving climate change. And that —(Applause)is revolutionary, and could fundamentally alter climate politics.But there's another revolutionary element here. The amount of the dividend would grow as the carbon tax rate increases. The more we protect our climate, the more our citizens benefit. This creates a positive feedback loop, which is crucial, because the only way we will reach our long-term emission-reduction goals is if the carbon tax rate goes up every year.The third pillar of our program is eliminating regulations that are no longer needed once a carbon dividends plan is enacted. This is a key selling point to Republicans and business leaders. So why should we trade climate regulations for a price on carbon? Well, let me show you. Our plan would achieve nearly twice the emissions reductions of all Obama-era climate regulations combined, and nearly three times the new baseline after President Trump repeals all of those regulations. That assumes a carbon tax starting at 40 dollars per ton, which translates into roughly an extra 36 cents per gallon of gas. Our plan by itself would meet the high end of America's commitment under the Paris Climate Agreement, and as you can see, the emissions reductions would continue over time. This illustrates the power of a conservative climate solution based on free markets and limited government. We would end up with less regulation and far less pollution at the same time, while helping working-class Americans get ahead. Doesn't that sound like something we could all support?(Applause)The fourth and final pillar of our program is a new climate domino effect, based on border carbon adjustments. Now that may sound complicated, but it, too, is revolutionary, because it provides us a whole new strategy to reach a global price on carbon, which is ultimately what we need. Let me show you an example. Suppose Country A adopts a carbon dividends plan, and Country B does not. Well, to level the playing field and protect the competitiveness of its industries, Country A would tax imports from Country B based on their carbon content. Fair enough. But here's where it gets really interesting, because the money raised at the border would increase the dividends going to the citizens of Country A. Well, how long do you think it would take the public in Country B to realize that that money should be going to them, and to push for a carbon dividends plan in their own land? Add a few more countries, and we get a new climate domino effect.Once one major country or region adopts carbon dividends with border carbon adjustments, other countries are compelled to follow suit. One by one the dominoes fall. And this domino effect could start anywhere. My preference, strongly, is the United States, but it could also start in the United Kingdom, in Germany or another European country, or even in China.Let's take China as an example. China is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but what its leaders care even more about is transitioning their economy to consumer-led economic development. Well, nothing could do more to hasten that transition than giving every Chinese citizen a monthly dividend. In fact, this is the only policy solution that would enable China to meet its environmental and economic goals at the same time.That's why this is the killer app of climate policy, because it would enable us to overcome each of the barriers we discussed earlier: the psychological barrier, the partisan barrier, and, as we've just seen, the geopolitical barrier. All we need is a country to lead the way. And one method of finding what you're looking for is to take out an ad. So let's read this one together.Wanted: country to pioneer carbon dividends plan. Cost to country: zero. Starting date: as soon as possible. Advantages: most effective climate solution, popular and populist, pro-growth and pro-business, shrinks government and helps the working class. Additional compensation: gratitude of current and future generations, including my daughter.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Just one question for you, Ted. I'm actually not sure I've seen a conservative get a standing O at TED before that. That's pretty cool. The logic seems really powerful, but some people you talk to in politics say it's hard to imagine this still getting through Congress. How are you feeling about momentum behind this?Ted Halstead: So I understand that many are very pessimistic about what's happening in the United States with President Trump. I'm less pessimistic; here's why. The actions of this White House, the early actions on climate, are just the first move in a complex game of climate chess. So far it's been a repeal-only strategy; the pressure is going to mount  for a replacement program, which is where we come in. And there are three reasons why, which I'll go through real quickly.One, the business community is fundamentally parting ways with the White House on climate change. In fact, we're finding a number of Fortune 100 companies supporting our program. Within two months, we're going to be announcing some really surprising names coming out in favor of this program. Two, there is no issue in American politics where there's a more fundamental gap between the Republican base and the Republican leadership than climate change. And three, thinking of this analogy of chess, the big decision up ahead is: Does the administration stay in Paris? Well, let's pan it out both ways. If it stays in Paris, as many are pushing for in the administration, well then that begs a question: What's the plan? We have the plan. But if they don't stay in Paris, the international pressure will be overwhelming. Our Secretary of State will be asking other countries for NATO contributions, and they'll be saying, ""No, give us our Paris commitment. Come through on your commitments, we'll come through on ours.""So, international, business and even the Republican base will all be calling for a Republican replacement plan. And, hopefully, we've provided one.CA: Thank you so much, Ted.TH: Thank you, Chris.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
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"It's six o'clock in the morning, pitch black outside. My 14-year-old son is fast asleep in his bed, sleeping the reckless, deep sleep of a teenager. I flip on the light and physically shake the poor boy awake, because I know that, like ripping off a Band-Aid, it's better to get it over with quickly.(Laughter)I have a friend who yells ""Fire!"" just to rouse her sleeping teen. And another who got so fed up that she had to dump cold water on her son's head just to get him out of bed. Sound brutal ... but perhaps familiar?Every morning I ask myself, ""How can I — knowing what I know and doing what I do for a living — be doing this to my own son?"" You see, I'm a sleep researcher.(Laughter)So I know far too much about sleep and the consequences of sleep loss. I know that I'm depriving my son of the sleep he desperately needs as a rapidly growing teenager. I also know that by waking him up hours before his natural biological clock tells him he's ready, I'm literally robbing him of his dreams — the type of sleep most associated with learning, memory consolidation and emotional processing.But it's not just my kid that's being deprived of sleep. Sleep deprivation among American teenagers is an epidemic. Only about one in 10 gets the eight to 10 hours of sleep per night recommended by sleep scientists and pediatricians. Now, if you're thinking to yourself, ""Phew, we're doing good, my kid's getting eight hours,"" remember, eight hours is the minimum recommendation. You're barely passing. Eight hours is kind of like getting a C on your report card.There are many factors contributing to this epidemic, but a major factor preventing teens from getting the sleep they need is actually a matter of public policy. Not hormones, social lives or Snapchat. Across the country, many schools are starting around 7:30am or earlier, despite the fact that major medical organizations recommend that middle and high school start no earlier than 8:30am. These early start policies have a direct effect on how much — or really how little sleep American teenagers are getting.They're also pitting teenagers and their parents in a fundamentally unwinnable fight against their own bodies. Around the time of puberty, teenagers experience a delay in their biological clock, which determines when we feel most awake and when we feel most sleepy. This is driven in part by a shift in the release of the hormone melatonin. Teenagers' bodies wait to start releasing melatonin until around 11pm, which is two hours later than what we see in adults or younger children. This means that waking a teenager up at 6am is the biological equivalent of waking an adult up at 4am. On the unfortunate days when I have to wake up at 4am, I'm a zombie. Functionally useless. I can't think straight, I'm irritable, and I probably shouldn't be driving a car. But this is how many American teenagers feel every single school day. In fact, many of the, shall we say, unpleasant characteristics that we chalk up to being a teenager — moodiness, irritability, laziness, depression — could be a product of chronic sleep deprivation. For many teens battling chronic sleep loss, their go-to strategy to compensate is consuming large quantities of caffeine in the form of venti frappuccinos, or energy drinks and shots. So essentially, we've got an entire population of tired but wired youth.Advocates of sleep-friendly start times know that adolescence is a period of dramatic brain development, particularly in the parts of the brain that are responsible for those higher order thinking processes, including reasoning, problem-solving and good judgment. In other words, the very type of brain activity that's responsible for reining in those impulsive and often risky behaviors that are so characteristic of adolescence and that are so terrifying to us parents of teenagers. They know that like the rest of us, when teenagers don't get the sleep they need, their brains, their bodies and behaviors suffer with both immediate and lasting effects. They can't concentrate, their attention plummets and many will even show behavioral signs that mimic ADHD.But the consequences of teen sleep loss go well beyond the classroom, sadly contributing to many of the mental health problems that skyrocket during adolescence, including substance use, depression and suicide. In our work with teens from LA Unified School District, we found that teens with sleep problems were 55 percent more likely to have used alcohol in the past month. In another study with over 30,000 high school students, they found that for each hour of lost sleep, there was a 38 percent increase in feeling sad or hopeless, and a 58 percent increase in teen suicide attempts. And if that's not enough, teens who skip out on sleep are at increased risk for a host of physical health problems that plague our country, including obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Then there's the risk of putting a sleep-deprived teen, with a newly minted driver's license, behind the wheel. Studies have shown that getting five hours or less of sleep per night is the equivalent of driving with a blood alcohol content above the legal limit.Advocates of sleep-friendly start times, and researchers in this area, have produced tremendous science showing the tremendous benefits of later start times. The findings are unequivocal, and as a sleep scientist, I rarely get to speak with that kind of certainty. Teens from districts with later start times get more sleep. To the naysayers who may think that if schools start later, teens will just stay up later, the truth is, their bedtimes stay the same, but their wake-up times get extended, resulting in more sleep. They're more likely to show up for school; school absences dropped by 25 percent in one district. And they're less likely to drop out. Not surprisingly, they do better academically.So this has real implications for reducing the achievement gap. Standardized test scores in math and reading go up by two to three percentage points. That's as powerful as reducing class sizes by one-third fewer students, or replacing a so-so teacher in the classroom with a truly outstanding one. Their mental and physical health improves, and even their families are happier. I mean, who wouldn't enjoy a little more pleasantness from our teens, and a little less crankiness? Even their communities are safer because car crash rates go down — a 70 percent reduction in one district.Given these tremendous benefits, you might think, well, this is a no-brainer, right? So why have we as a society failed to heed this call? Often the argument against later start times goes something like this: ""Why should we delay start times for teenagers? We need to toughen them up so they're ready for the real world!"" But that's like saying to the parent of a two-year-old, ""Don't let Johnny nap, or he won't be ready for kindergarten.""(Laughter)Delaying start times also presents many logistical challenges. Not just for students and their families, but for communities as a whole. Updating bus routes, increased transportation costs, impact on sports, care before or after school. These are the same concerns that come up in district after district, time and again around the country as school start times are debated. And they're legitimate concerns, but these are problems we have to work through. They are not valid excuses for failing to do the right thing for our children, which is to start middle and high schools no earlier than 8:30am. And in districts around the country, big and small, who have made this change, they found that these fears are often unfounded and far outweighed by the tremendous benefits for student health and performance, and our collective public safety.So tomorrow morning, when coincidentally we get to set our clocks back by an hour and you get that delicious extra hour of sleep, and the day seems a little longer, and a little more full of hope, think about the tremendous power of sleep. And think about what a gift it would be for our children to be able to wake up naturally, in harmony with their own biology.Thank you, and pleasant dreams.","https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_troxel_why_school_should_start_later_for_teens
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"Vanessa Garrison: I am Vanessa, daughter of Annette, daughter of Olympia, daughter of Melvina, daughter of Katie, born 1878, Parish County, Louisiana.T. Morgan Dixon: And my name is Morgan, daughter of Carol, daughter of Letha, daughter of Willie, daughter of Sarah, born 1849 in Bardstown, Kentucky.VG: And in the tradition of our families, the great oral tradition of almost every black church we know honoring the culture from which we draw so much power, we're gonna start the way our mommas and grandmas would want us to start.TMD: In prayer. Let the words of my mouth, the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.VG: We call the names and rituals of our ancestors into this room today because from them we received a powerful blueprint for survival, strategies and tactics for healing carried across oceans by African women, passed down to generations of black women in America who used those skills to navigate institutions of slavery and state-sponsored discrimination in order that we might stand on this stage. We walk in the footsteps of those women, our foremothers, legends like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, from whom we learned the power of organizing after she would had single-handedly registered 60,000 voters in Jim Crow Mississippi.TMD: 60,000 is a lot of people, so if you can imagine me and Vanessa inspiring 60,000 women to walk with us last year, we were fired up. But today, 100,000 black women and girls stand on this stage with us. We are committed to healing ourselves, to lacing up our sneakers, to walking out of our front door every single day for total healing and transformation in our communities, because we understand that we are in the footsteps of a civil rights legacy like no other time before, and that we are facing a health crisis like never ever before. And so we've had a lot of moments, great moments, including the time we had on our pajamas, we were working on our computer and Michelle Obama emailed us and invited us to the White House, and we thought it was spam. But this moment here is an opportunity. It is an opportunity that we don't take for granted, and so we thought long and hard about how we would use it. Would we talk to the women we hope to inspire, a million in the next year, or would we talk to you? We decided to talk to you, and to talk to you about a question that we get all the time, so that the millions of women who hopefully will watch this will never have to answer it again. It is: Why are black women dying faster and at higher rates than any other group of people in America from preventable, obesity-related diseases?The question hurts me. I'm shaking a little bit. It feels value-laden. It hurts my body because the weight represents so much. But we're going to talk about it and invite you into an inside conversation today because it is necessary, and because we need you.VG: Each night, before the first day of school, my grandmother would sit me next to the stove and with expert precision use a hot comb to press my hair. My grandmother was legendary, big, loud. She filled up a room with laughter and oftentimes curse words. She cooked a mean peach cobbler, had 11 children, a house full of grandchildren, and like every black woman I know, like most all women I know, she had prioritized the care of others over caring for herself. We measured her strength by her capacity to endure pain and suffering. We celebrated her for it, and our choice would prove to be deadly. One night after pressing my hair before the first day of eighth grade, my grandmother went to bed and never woke up, dead at 66 years old from a heart attack. By the time I would graduate college, I would lose two more beloved family members to chronic disease: my aunt Diane, dead at 55, my aunt Tricia, dead at 63. After living with these losses, the hole that they left, I decided to calculate the life expectancy of the women in my family. Staring back at me, the number 65. I knew I could not sit by and watch another woman I loved die an early death.TMD: So we don't usually put our business in the streets. Let's just put that out there. But I have to tell you the statistics. Black women are dying at alarming rates, and I used to be a classroom teacher, and I was at South Atlanta High School, and I remember standing in front of my classroom, and I remember a statistic that half of black girls will get diabetes unless diet and levels of activity change. Half of the girls in my classroom. So I couldn't teach anymore. So I started taking girls hiking, which is why we're called GirlTrek, but Vanessa was like, that is not going to move the dial on the health crisis; it's cute. She was like, it's a cute hiking club. So what we thought is if we could rally a million of their mothers ... 82 percent of black women are over a healthy weight right now. 53 percent of us are obese. But the number that I cannot, that I cannot get out of my head is that every single day in America, 137 black women die from a preventable disease, heart disease. That's every 11 minutes. 137 is more than gun violence, cigarette smoking and HIV combined, every day. It is roughly the amount of people that were on my plane from New Jersey to Vancouver. Can you imagine that? A plane filled with black women crashing to the ground every day, and no one is talking about it.VG: So the question that you're all asking yourselves right now is why? Why are black women dying? We asked ourselves that same question. Why is what's out there not working for them? Private weight loss companies, government interventions, public health campaigns. I'm going to tell you why: because they focus on weight loss or looking good in skinny jeans without acknowledging the trauma that black women hold in our bellies and bones, that has been embedded in our very DNA. The best advice from hospitals and doctors, the best medications from pharmaceutical companies to treat the congestive heart failure of my grandmother didn't work because they didn't acknowledge the systemic racism that she had dealt with since birth.(Applause)A divestment in schools, discriminatory housing practices, predatory lending, a crack cocaine epidemic, mass incarceration putting more black bodies behind bars than were owned at the height of slavery.But GirlTrek does. For black women whose bodies are buckling under the weight of systems never designed to support them, GirlTrek is a lifeline. August 16, 2015, Danita Kimball, a member of GirlTrek in Detroit, received the news that too many black mothers have received. Her son Norman, 23 years old, a father of two, was gunned down while on an afternoon drive. Imagine the grief that overcomes your body in that moment, the immobilizing fear. Now, know this, that just days after laying her son to rest, Danita Kimball posted online, ""I don't know what to do or how to move forward, but my sisters keep telling me I need to walk, so I will."" And then just days after that, ""I got my steps in today for my baby Norm. It felt good to be out there, to walk.""TMD: Walking through pain is what we have always done. My mom, she's in the middle right there, my mom desegregated her high school in 1955. Her mom walked down the steps of an abandoned school bus where she raised 11 kids as a sharecropper. And her mom stepped onto Indian territory fleeing the terrors of the Jim Crow South. And her mom walked her man to the door as he went off to fight in the Kentucky Colored Regiment, the Civil War. They were born slaves but they wouldn't die slaves. Change-making, it's in my blood. It's what I do, and this health crisis ain't nothing compared to the road we have traveled.(Applause)So it's like James Cleveland. I don't feel no ways tired, so we got to work. We started looking at models of change. We looked all over the world. We needed something not only that was a part of our cultural inheritance like walking, but something that was scalable, something that was high-impact, something that we could replicate across this country. So we studied models like Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for inspiring women to plant 50 million trees in Kenya. She brought Kenya back from the brink of environmental devastation. We studied these systems of change, and we looked at walking scientifically. And what we learned is that walking just 30 minutes a day can single-handedly decrease 50 percent of your risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, even Alzheimer's and dementia. We know that walking is the single most powerful thing that a woman can do for her health, so we knew we were on to something, because from Harriet Tubman to the women in Montgomery, when black women walk, things change.(Applause)VG: So how did we take this simple idea of walking and start a revolution that would catch a fire in neighborhoods across America? We used the best practices of the Civil Rights Movement. We huddled up in church basements. We did grapevine information sharing through beauty salons. We empowered and trained mothers to stand on the front lines. We took our message directly to the streets, and women responded. Women like LaKeisha in Chattanooga, Chrysantha in Detroit, Onika in New Orleans, women with difficult names and difficult stories join GirlTrek every day and commit to walking as a practice of self-care. Once walking, those women get to organizing, first their families, then their communities, to walk and talk and solve problems together. They walk and notice the abandoned building. They walk and notice the lack of sidewalks, the lack of green space, and they say, ""No more."" Women like Susie Paige in Philadelphia, who after walking daily past an abandoned building in her neighborhood, decided, ""I'm not waiting. Let me rally my team. Let me grab some supplies. Let me do what no one else has done for me and my community.""TMD: We know one woman can make a difference, because one woman has already changed the world, and her name is Harriet Tubman. And trust me, I love Harriet Tubman. I'm obsessed with her, and I used to be a history teacher. I will not tell you the whole history. I will tell you four things. So I used to have an old Saab — the kind of canvas top that drips on your head when it rains — and I drove all the way down to the eastern shore of Maryland, and when I stepped on the dirt that Harriet Tubman made her first escape, I knew she was a woman just like we are and that we could do what she had done, and we learned four things from Harriet Tubman.The first one: do not wait. Walk right now in the direction of your healthiest, most fulfilled life, because self-care is a revolutionary act.Number two: when you learn the way forward, come back and get a sister. So in our case, start a team with your friends — your friends, your family, your church.Number three: rally your allies. Every single person in this room is complicit in a Tubman-inspired takeover.And number four: find joy. The most underreported fact of Harriet Tubman is that she lived to be 93 years old, and she didn't live just an ordinary life; uh-uh. She was standing up for the good guys. She married a younger man. She adopted a child. I'm not kidding. She lived. And I drove up to her house of freedom in upstate New York, and she had planted apple trees, and when I was there on a Sunday, they were blooming. Do you call it — do they bloom? The apples were in season, and I was thinking, she left fruit for us, the legacy of Harriet Tubman, every single year. And we know that we are Harriet, and we know that there is a Harriet in every community in America.VG: We also know that there's a Harriet in every community across the globe, and that they could learn from our Tubman Doctrine, as we call it, the four steps. Imagine the possibilities beyond the neighborhoods of Oakland and Newark, to the women working rice fields in Vietnam, tea fields in Sri Lanka, the women on the mountainsides in Guatemala, the indigenous reservations throughout the vast plains of the Dakotas. We believe that women walking and talking together to solve their problems is a global solution.TMD: And I'll leave you with this, because we also believe it can become the center of social justice again. Vanessa and I were in Fort Lauderdale. We had an organizer training, and I was leaving and I got on the airplane, and I saw someone I knew, so I waved, and as I'm waiting in that long line that you guys know, waiting for people to put their stuff away, I looked back and I realized I didn't know the woman but I recognized her. And so I blew her a kiss because it was Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mom, and she whispered ""thank you"" back to me. And I can't help but wonder what would happen if there were groups of women walking on Trayvon's block that day, or what would happen in the South Side of Chicago every day if there were groups of women and mothers and aunts and cousins walking, or along the polluted rivers of Flint, Michigan. I believe that walking can transform our communities, because it's already starting to.VG: We believe that the personal is political. Our walking is for healing, for joy, for fresh air, quiet time, to connect and disconnect, to worship. But it's also walking so we can be healthy enough to stand on the front lines for change in our communities, and it is our call to action to every black woman listening, every black woman in earshot of our voice, every black woman who you know. Think about it: the woman working front desk reception at your job, the woman who delivers your mail, your neighbor — our call to action to them, to join us on the front lines for change in your community.TMD: And I'll bring us back to this moment and why it's so important for my dear, dear friend Vanessa and I. It's because it's not always easy for us, and in fact, we have both seen really, really dark days, from the hate speech to the summer of police brutality and violence that we saw last year, to even losing one of our walkers, Sandy Bland, who died in police custody. But the most courageous thing we do every day is we practice faith that goes beyond the facts, and we put feet to our prayers every single day, and when we get overwhelmed, we think of the words of people like Sonia Sanchez, a poet laureate, who says, ""Morgan, where is your fire? Where is the fire that burned holes through slave ships to make us breathe? Where is the fire that turned guts into chitlins, that took rhythms and make jazz, that took sit-ins and marches and made us jump boundaries and barriers? You've got to find it and pass it on.""So this is us finding our fire and passing it on to you. So please, stand with us, walk with us as we rally a million women to reclaim the streets of the 50 highest need communities in this country.We thank you so much for this opportunity.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/t_morgan_dixon_and_vanessa_garrison_walking_as_a_revolutionary_act_of_self_care
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"I'd like to start with a simple question: Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? I know it's a harsh question, but take a look at the data. The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthfully. Why?Well, the standard explanation was once summed up by the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. And she called poverty ""a personality defect.""(Laughter)A lack of character, basically.Now, I'm sure not many of you would be so blunt. But the idea that there's something wrong with the poor themselves is not restricted to Mrs. Thatcher. Some of you may believe that the poor should be held responsible for their own mistakes. And others may argue that we should help them to make better decisions. But the underlying assumption is the same: there's something wrong with them. If we could just change them, if we could just teach them how to live their lives, if they would only listen. And to be honest, this was what I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was wrong.It all started when I accidentally stumbled upon a paper by a few American psychologists. They had traveled 8,000 miles, all the way to India, for a fascinating study. And it was an experiment with sugarcane farmers. You should know that these farmers collect about 60 percent of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means that they're relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they subsequently discovered completely blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the test before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that's comparable to losing a night's sleep or the effects of alcoholism.A few months later, I heard that Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study, was coming over to Holland, where I live. So we met up in Amsterdam to talk about his revolutionary new theory of poverty. And I can sum it up in just two words: scarcity mentality. It turns out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. And what that thing is doesn't much matter — whether it's not enough time, money or food.You all know this feeling, when you've got too much to do, or when you've put off breaking for lunch and your blood sugar takes a dive. This narrows your focus to your immediate lack — to the sandwich you've got to have now, the meeting that's starting in five minutes or the bills that have to be paid tomorrow. So the long-term perspective goes out the window. You could compare it to a new computer that's running 10 heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors. Eventually, it freezes — not because it's a bad computer, but because it has too much to do at once. The poor have the same problem. They're not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they're living in a context in which anyone would make dumb decisions.So suddenly I understood why so many of our anti-poverty programs don't work. Investments in education, for example, are often completely ineffective. Poverty is not a lack of knowledge. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money-management training came to the conclusion that it has almost no effect at all. Now, don't get me wrong — this is not to say the poor don't learn anything — they can come out wiser for sure. But it's not enough. Or as Professor Shafir told me, ""It's like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.""I still remember sitting there, perplexed. And it struck me that we could have figured this all out decades ago. I mean, these psychologists didn't need any complicated brain scans; they only had to measure the farmer's IQ, and IQ tests were invented more than 100 years ago. Actually, I realized I had read about the psychology of poverty before. George Orwell, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, experienced poverty firsthand in the 1920s. ""The essence of poverty,"" he wrote back then, is that it ""annihilates the future."" And he marveled at, quote, ""How people take it for granted they have the right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.""Now, those words are every bit as resonant today. The big question is, of course: What can be done? Modern economists have a few solutions up their sleeves. We could help the poor with their paperwork or send them a text message to remind them to pay their bills. This type of solution is hugely popular with modern politicians, mostly because, well, they cost next to nothing. These solutions are, I think, a symbol of this era in which we so often treat the symptoms, but ignore the underlying cause.So I wonder: Why don't we just change the context in which the poor live? Or, going back to our computer analogy: Why keep tinkering around with the software when we can easily solve the problem by installing some extra memory instead? At that point, Professor Shafir responded with a blank look. And after a few seconds, he said, ""Oh, I get it. You mean you want to just hand out more money to the poor to eradicate poverty. Uh, sure, that'd be great. But I'm afraid that brand of left-wing politics you've got in Amsterdam — it doesn't exist in the States.""But is this really an old-fashioned, leftist idea? I remembered reading about an old plan — something that has been proposed by some of history's leading thinkers. The philosopher Thomas More first hinted at it in his book, ""Utopia,"" more than 500 years ago. And its proponents have spanned the spectrum from the left to the right, from the civil rights campaigner, Martin Luther King, to the economist Milton Friedman. And it's an incredibly simple idea: basic income guarantee.What it is? Well, that's easy. It's a monthly grant, enough to pay for your basic needs: food, shelter, education. It's completely unconditional, so no one's going to tell you what you have to do for it, and no one's going to tell you what you have to do with it. The basic income is not a favor, but a right. There's absolutely no stigma attached. So as I learned about the true nature of poverty, I couldn't stop wondering: Is this the idea we've all been waiting for? Could it really be that simple? And in the three years that followed, I read everything I could find about basic income. I researched the dozens of experiments that have been conducted all over the globe, and it didn't take long before I stumbled upon a story of a town that had done it — had actually eradicated poverty. But then ... nearly everyone forgot about it.This story starts in Dauphin, Canada. In 1974, everybody in this small town was guaranteed a basic income, ensuring that no one fell below the poverty line. At the start of the experiment, an army of researchers descended on the town. For four years, all went well. But then a new government was voted into power, and the new Canadian cabinet saw little point to the expensive experiment. So when it became clear there was no money left to analyze the results, the researchers decided to pack their files away in some 2,000 boxes. Twenty-five years went by, and then Evelyn Forget, a Canadian professor, found the records. For three years, she subjected the data to all manner of statistical analysis, and no matter what she tried, the results were the same every time: the experiment had been a resounding success.Evelyn Forget discovered that the people in Dauphin had not only become richer but also smarter and healthier. The school performance of kids improved substantially. The hospitalization rate decreased by as much as 8.5 percent. Domestic violence incidents were down, as were mental health complaints. And people didn't quit their jobs. The only ones who worked a little less were new mothers and students — who stayed in school longer. Similar results have since been found in countless other experiments around the globe, from the US to India.So ... here's what I've learned. When it comes to poverty, we, the rich, should stop pretending we know best. We should stop sending shoes and teddy bears to the poor, to people we have never met. And we should get rid of the vast industry of paternalistic bureaucrats when we could simply hand over their salaries to the poor they're supposed to help.(Applause)Because, I mean, the great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need. Just imagine how many brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs and writers, like George Orwell, are now withering away in scarcity. Imagine how much energy and talent we would unleash if we got rid of poverty once and for all. I believe that a basic income would work like venture capital for the people. And we can't afford not to do it, because poverty is hugely expensive. Just look at the cost of child poverty in the US, for example. It's estimated at 500 billion dollars each year, in terms of higher health care spending, higher dropout rates, and more crime. Now, this is an incredible waste of human potential.But let's talk about the elephant in the room. How could we ever afford a basic income guarantee? Well, it's actually a lot cheaper than you may think. What they did in Dauphin is finance it with a negative income tax. This means that your income is topped up as soon as you fall below the poverty line. And in that scenario, according to our economists' best estimates, for a net cost of 175 billion — a quarter of US military spending, one percent of GDP — you could lift all impoverished Americans above the poverty line. You could actually eradicate poverty. Now, that should be our goal.(Applause)The time for small thoughts and little nudges is past. I really believe that the time has come for radical new ideas, and basic income is so much more than just another policy. It is also a complete rethink of what work actually is. And in that sense, it will not only free the poor, but also the rest of us.Nowadays, millions of people feel that their jobs have little meaning or significance. A recent poll among 230,000 employees in 142 countries found that only 13 percent of workers actually like their job. And another poll found that as much as 37 percent of British workers have a job that they think doesn't even need to exist. It's like Brad Pitt says in ""Fight Club,"" ""Too often we're working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.""(Laughter)Now, don't get me wrong — I'm not talking about the teachers and the garbagemen and the care workers here. If they stopped working, we'd be in trouble. I'm talking about all those well-paid professionals with excellent résumés who earn their money doing ... strategic transactor peer-to-peer meetings while brainstorming the value add-on of disruptive co-creation in the network society.(Laughter)(Applause)Or something like that. Just imagine again how much talent we're wasting, simply because we tell our kids they'll have to ""earn a living."" Or think of what a math whiz working at Facebook lamented a few years ago: ""The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.""I'm a historian. And if history teaches us anything, it is that things could be different. There is nothing inevitable about the way we structured our society and economy right now. Ideas can and do change the world. And I think that especially in the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that we cannot stick to the status quo — that we need new ideas.I know that many of you may feel pessimistic about a future of rising inequality, xenophobia and climate change. But it's not enough to know what we're against. We also need to be for something. Martin Luther King didn't say, ""I have a nightmare.""(Laughter)He had a dream.(Applause)So ... here's my dream: I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job but for a life well-lived. I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege but a right we all deserve. So here we are. Here we are. We've got the research, we've got the evidence and we've got the means.Now, more than 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about a basic income, and 100 years after George Orwell discovered the true nature of poverty, we all need to change our worldview, because poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash
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"I have a confession. I have been in an affair since I was 17 years old. I wish I could talk about butterflies in my stomach or maps I drew on the ground when I think about this affair, but I cannot. I wish I could talk about sweet words spoken or gifts that I received from this affair, but I cannot. All I can tell you about is the aftermath, about days I spent constantly asking: Why, why, why me?I remember how it all began. I was in my final year of high school, and my class had just won in sports, so we were singing and dancing and hugging each other. I went and took a shower. Then I went for dinner. And when I sat down to eat, my teeth started chattering, and so I couldn't put the spoon in my mouth. I rushed to the nurse's office, and because I couldn't talk, I just pointed at my mouth. She didn't know what was happening, so she told me to lie down, and it worked — after a few minutes, the chattering stopped. I was about to dash out, and she told me — no, she insisted — that I go up to the dormitories to sleep. Here I was in my final year of high school, just a few months from doing my end of high school exams and a few days from doing a set of exams we call here in Kenya ""mocks,"" which are somehow meant to gauge how prepared one is for the final exams. There is no way I was going to sleep and let a set of exams mock me.I went to class, sat down, took my Kenyan history notes, and there I was, down Kenyan coastal town, with the great Mekatilili wa Menza, the Giriama woman who led her people against British colonial rule. Then, without any notice, my left hand started jerking, and it was as if I was marking imaginary papers. In and out it went, and with every stroke, one by one, my classmates stopped concentrating on their reading and started looking at me. And I tried really hard to stop it, but I couldn't, because it had a life of its own. And then, when it was sure everybody was looking at us, in its final show and official introduction, I had my first full-blown seizure, which was the beginning of what has been a 15-year-long affair.Seizures are the trademark characteristic for most types of epilepsy, and every first-ever seizure needs to be assessed by a doctor to determine if one has epilepsy or if it's a symptom of something else. In my case, it was confirmed that I had epilepsy. I spent a large chunk of my time in hospital and at home, and only went back to do my final exams. I had seizures in between papers, but managed to get good enough grades to be admitted for an actuarial science degree at the University of Nairobi.(Applause)Unfortunately, I had to drop out in my second year. I didn't have good enough coping skills and a support community around me. I was lucky enough to get a job, but I was fired from that job when I had a seizure in the workplace.So I found myself in a space where I was constantly asking myself why this had to happen to me. I lived in denial for a long time, and the denial was maybe because of the things that had happened, dropping out of school and being fired from my job. Or maybe it was because of the things I had heard about epilepsy and about people living with epilepsy: that they would never live on their own; that they would never travel on their own or even get work; that they were outcasts, with a spirit in them that they needed to be delivered from.And so the more I thought about these things, the more my seizures became, and I spent days with my legs locked, my speech became blurred and on days on end, this is how I'd be. Two or three days after a seizure, my head and my hand would still be twitching. I felt lost, like I'd lost everything, and sometimes, even the will to live.(Sigh)I had so much frustration in me. And so I started writing, because the people around me didn't have answers to the questions that I had. And so I wrote my fears and my doubts. I wrote about my good days and my bad days and my really ugly days, and I shared them on a blog. And before long, I began to be seen and heard by people who had epilepsy and their families, and even those who did not have the diagnosis. And I moved from that girl who constantly asked why me to one who not only self-advocates, but does it for those who are yet to find their voices.(Applause)My seizures are greatly reduced, from two to three times a day, to sometimes two to three times in one year.I went on —(Applause)I went on to employ five people, when I began what was Kenya's first free mental health and epilepsy support line.And I travel —(Applause)And I travel to speak about my affair, all these things that I had been told people like me living with epilepsy could never be able to do.Every year, a population as big as 80 percent of Nairobi gets diagnosed with epilepsy across the globe. And they, like me, go through the emotions of stigma and exclusion. And so I have made it my life journey to keep these conversations going, and I keep confessing about my affair so that those people who do not have the diagnosis might know and might have a constant reminder that it is alright to engage with people like us, that as long as they pull down the walls of stigma and exclusion, that we, just like them, can be able to take anything life throws at us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sitawa_wafula_why_i_speak_up_about_living_with_epilepsy
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"Silicon Valley is obsessed with disruption, but these days, the biggest disruptor didn't come out of Silicon Valley. It came out of steel towns in Ohio, rural communities in Pennsylvania, the Panhandle in Florida. And this last US presidential election was the mother of all disruptions. Once again, politics is personal. Millions of Americans became activists overnight, pouring into the streets in record numbers in record time.(Laughter)The election has done to family holiday dinners what Uber has done to New York City's taxi system. Couples have broken up and marriages disrupted. And the election is doing to my private life what Amazon is doing to shopping malls. These days, the ACLU is on the front lines 24/7, and even if I manage to sneak away for a couple of miles on the treadmill, any cardio benefit I get is instantly obliterated when I read another presidential tweet on the headline scroll. Even my secret pleasure of studying the Italian painters have been infected by politics.Now, I study, even stalk, the old masters. This is my desk, with a postcard exhibition of some famous and obscure paintings mostly from the Italian Renaissance. Now, art used to provide me with a necessary break from the hurly-burly of politics in my daily work at the ACLU, but not anymore.I was at the Women's March in San Francisco the day after inauguration, and the crowd was chanting, ""This is what democracy looks like."" ""This is what democracy looks like."" And there I was holding my sign and my umbrella in the rain, and I flashed on an old painting that first captivated me many years ago. I struggled to remember the different pieces of an actual painting of good and bad government. It was almost like the old master was taunting me. You want to know what democracy looks like? Go back and look at my frescoes.And so I did. In 1339, Ambrogio Lorenzetti finished a monumental commission in the governing council chamber of Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. It's a painting that speaks to us, even screams to us, today. ""Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,"" Pablo Picasso once said. And as we search for the truth about government, we should keep Ambrogio's work, not a lie but an allegory, in our collective mind's eye.During Lorenzetti's time, the political legitimacy of Italian city-states was often on very shaky ground. Siena was a republic, but there had been enormous unrest in the two decades leading up to the commission. Siena's political leaders, who would literally govern under the eyes of these allegorical figures, were Lorenzetti's intended audience. He was cataloging the obligations of the governing to the governed.Now, you can spend years studying these frescoes. Some scholars have. I'm hardly an art historian, but I am passionate about art, and a work this massive can overwhelm me. So first, I focus on the big stuff.This is the allegory of good government. The majestic figure here in the middle is dressed in Siena's colors and he personifies the republic itself. Lorenzetti labels him ""Commune,"" and he's basically telling the Sienese that they, and not a king or a tyrant, must rule themselves. Now, surrounding Commune are his advisors. Justice is enthroned. She's looking up at the figure of wisdom, who actually supports her scales of justice. Concord, or Harmony, holds a string that comes off the scales of justice that binds her to the citizens, making them all compatriots in the republic. And finally we see Peace. She looks chilled out, like she's listening to Bob Marley. When good government rules, Peace doesn't break a sweat.Now, these are big images and big ideas, but I really love the small stuff. Along another wall, Lorenzetti illustrates the effects of good government on the real and everyday lives of ordinary people with a series of delicious little details. In the countryside, the hills are landscaped and farmed. Crops are being sown, hoed, reaped, milled, plowed, all in one picture. Crops and livestock are being brought to market. In the city, builders raise a tower. People attend a law lecture, a TED Talk of the 14th century.(Laughter)Schoolchildren play. Tradesmen thrive. Dancers larger than life dance with joy. And watching over the republic is the winged figure Security, whose banner reads, ""Everyone shall go forth freely without fear.""Now, what's amazing about these images from 800 years ago is that they're familiar to us today. We see what democracy looks like. We experience the effects of good government in our lives, just as Lorenzetti did in his life.But it is the allegory of bad government that has been haunting me since November 9. It's badly damaged, but it reads like today's newspapers. And ruling over bad government is not the Commune but the Tyrant. He has horns, tusks, crossed eyes, braided hair. He obviously spends a lot of time on that hair.(Laughter)Justice now lies helpless at his feet, shackled. Her scales have been severed. Justice is the key antagonist to the Tyrant, and she's been taken out.Now, surrounding the Tyrant, Lorenzetti illustrates the vices that animate bad government. Avarice is the old woman clutching the strongbox and a fisherman's hook to pull in her fortune. Vainglory carries a mirror, and Lorenzetti warns us against narcissistic leaders who are guided by their own ego and vanity. On the Tyrant's right is Cruelty. Treason, half lamb, half scorpion, lulls us into a false sense of security and then poisons a republic. Fraud, with the flighty wings of a bat. On the Tyrant's left, you see Division. She's dressed in Siena's colors. ""Si"" and ""No"" are painted on her body. She uses a carpenter's saw to chop her body in half. And Fury wields the weapons of the mob, the stone and knife.In the remainder of the fresco, Lorenzetti shows us the inevitable effects of bad government. The civic ideals celebrated elsewhere in this room have failed us, and we see it. The once beautiful city has fallen to pieces, the countryside barren, the farms abandoned. Many are in flames. And in the sky above is not the winged figure Security, but that of Fear, whose banner reads: ""None shall pass along this road without fear of death.""Now, the final image, the most important one, really, is one that Lorenzetti did not paint. It is of the viewer. Today, the audience for Lorenzetti's frescoes is not the governing but the governed, the individual who stands in front of his allegories and walks away with insight, who heeds a call to action. Lorenzetti warns us that we must recognize the shadows of Avarice, Fraud, Division, even Tyranny when they float across our political landscape, especially when those shadows are cast by political leaders loudly claiming to be the voice of good government and promising to make America great again.And we must act. Democracy must not be a spectator sport. The right to protest, the right to assemble freely, the right to petition one's government, these are not just rights. In the face of Avarice, Fraud and Division, these are obligations. We have to disrupt —(Applause)We have to disrupt our lives so that we can disrupt the amoral accretion of power by those who would betray our values. We and we the people must raise justice up and must bring peace to our nation and must come together in concord, and we have a choice. We could either paint ourselves into the worst nightmare of Lorenzetti's bad government, or we can stay in the streets, disruptive, messy, loud. That is what democracy looks like.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: First of all, wow. Obviously, many people passionately — you spoke to many people passionately here. I'm sure there are other people here who'd say, look, Trump was elected by 63 million people. He's far from perfect, but he's trying to do what he was elected to do. Shouldn't you give him a chance?Anthony Romero: I think we have to recognize the legitimacy of him as president versus the legitimacy of his policies. And when so many of the policies are contrary to fundamental values, that we're all equal under the law, that we're not judged by the color of our skin or the religion we worship, we have to contest those values even as we recognize and honor the fact that our democracy rendered us a president who is championing those values.CA: And the ACLU isn't just this force on the left, right? You're making other arguments as well.AR: Well, you know, very often we piss everyone off at one point. That's what we do. And we recently were taking stands for why Ann Coulter needs to be able to speak at Berkeley, and why Milo has free speech rights. And we even wrote a blog that almost burnt the house down among some of our members, unfortunately, when we talked about the fact that even Donald Trump has free speech rights as president, and an effort to hold him accountable for incitement of violence at his marches or his rallies is unconstitutional and un-American. And when you put that statement out there to a very frothy base that always is very excited for you to fight Donald Trump, and then you have a new one saying, ""Wait, these rights are for everybody, even the president that we don't like."" And that's our job.(Applause)CA: Anthony, you spoke to so many of us so powerfully.Thank you so much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_d_romero_this_is_what_democracy_looks_like
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"Zika fever: our newest dread disease. What is it? Where'd it come from?What do we do about it? Well for most adults, it's a relatively mild disease — a little fever, a little headache, joint pain, maybe a rash. In fact, most people who get it don't even know they've had it. But the more we find out about the Zika virus the more terrifying it becomes. For example, doctors have noticed an uptick of something called Guillain-Barré syndrome in recent outbreaks. In Guillain-Barré, your immune system attacks your nerve cells it can partially or even totally paralyze you. Fortunately, that's quite rare, and most people recover. But if you're pregnant when you're infected you're at risk of something terrible. Indeed, a child with a deformed head.Here's a normal baby. Here's that infant with what's called microcephaly. a brain in a head that's too small. And there's no known cure. It was actually doctors in northeastern Brazil who first noticed, just a year ago, after a Zika outbreak, that there was a peak in the incidence of microcephaly. It took medical doctors another year to be sure that it was caused by the Zika virus, but they're now sure. And if you're a ""bring on the evidence"" type, check out this publication.So where did it come from, and how did it get here? And it is here. Like many of our viruses, it came out of Africa, specifically the Zika forest in Uganda. Researchers at the nearby Yellow Fever Research Institute identified an unknown virus in a monkey in the Zika forest which is how it got its name. The first human cases of Zika fever surfaced a few years later in Uganda-Tanzania. The virus then spread through West Africa and east through equatorial Asia — Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia. But it was still mostly in monkeys and, of course, mosquitoes. In fact in the 60 years between the time it was first identified in 1947 and 2007 there were only 13 reported cases of human Zika fever. And then something extraordinary happened on the tiny Micronesian Yap islands. There was an outbreak that affected fully 75 percent of the population. How did it get there? By air. Today we have two billion commercial airline passengers. An infected passenger can board a plane, fly halfway around the world before developing symptoms — if they develop symptoms at all. Then when they land, the local mosquitoes begin to bite them and spread the fever. Zika fever then next surfaced in 2013 in French Polynesia. By December of that year, it was being transmitted locally by the mosquitoes. That led to an explosive outbreak in which almost 30,000 people were affected. From there it radiated around the Pacific. There were outbreaks in the Cook Islands, in New Caledonia, in Vanuatu, in the Solomon Islands and almost all the way around to the coast of South America and Easter Island. And then, in early 2015, there was an upsurge of cases of a dengue-like syndrome in the city of Natal in northeastern Brazil. The virus wasn't dengue, it was Zika, and it spread rapidly — Recife down the coast, a big metropolitan center, soon became the epicenter. Well people have speculated that it was 2014 World Cup soccer fans that brought the virus into the country. But others have speculated that perhaps it was Pacific Islanders participating in championship canoe races that were held in Rio that year that brought it in.Well today, this is only a year later. The virus is being locally transmitted by mosquitoes virtually throughout South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands Until this year, the many thousands of cases that have been diagnosed in the US were contracted elsewhere. But as of this summer, it's being transmitted locally in Miami. It's here.So what do we do about it? Well, preventing infection is either about protecting people or about eliminating the mosquitoes. Let's focus on people first. You can get vaccinated. You can not travel to Zika areas. Or you can cover up and apply insect repellent. Getting vaccinated is not an option, because there isn't a vaccine yet and there probably won't be for a couple of years. Staying home isn't a foolproof protection either because we now know that it can be sexually transmitted. Covering up and applying insect repellent does work ...until you forget.(Laughter) So that leaves the mosquitoes, and here's how we control them now: spraying insecticides. The protective gear is necessary because these are toxic chemicals that kill people as well as bugs. Although it does take quite a lot more to kill a person than to kill a bug. These are pictures from Brazil and Nicaragua. But it looks the same in Miami, Florida. And we of course can spray insecticides from planes. Last summer, mosquito control officials in Dorchester County, South Carolina, authorized spraying of Naled, an insecticide, early one morning, as recommended by the manufacturer. Later that day, a beekeeper told reporters that her bee yard looked like it had been nuked. Oops. Bees are the good guys. The citizens of Florida protested, but spraying continued. Unfortunately, so did the increase in the number of Zika fever cases. That's because insecticides aren't very effective.So are there any approaches that are perhaps more effective than spraying but with less downsides than toxic chemicals? I'm a huge fan of biological controls, and I share that view with Rachel Carson, author of ""Silent Spring,"" the book that is credited with starting the environmental movement. In this book she tells the story, as an example, of how a very nasty insect pest of livestock was eliminated in the last century. No one knows that extraordinary story today. So Jack Block and I, when we were writing an editorial about the mosquito problem today, retold that story. And in capsule form, it's that pupae — that's the immature form of the insect — were irradiated until they were sterile, grown to adulthood and then released from planes all over the Southwest, the Southeast and down into Mexico and into Central America literally by the hundreds of millions from little airplanes, eventually eliminating that terrible insect pest for most of the Western Hemisphere. Our real purpose in writing this editorial was to introduce readers to how we can do that today — not with radiation but with our knowledge of genetics. Let me explain.This is the bad guy: Aedes aegypti. It's the most common insect vector of diseases, not just Zika but dengue, Chikungunya, West Nile virus and that ancient plague, yellow fever. It's an urban mosquito, and it's the female that does the dirty work. She bites to get a blood meal to feed her offspring. Males don't bite; they don't even have the mouth parts to bite. A little British company called Oxitec genetically modified that mosquito so that when it mates with a wild female, its eggs don't develop to adulthood. Let me show you. This is the normal reproductive cycle. Oxitec designed the mosquito so that when the male mates with the wild female the eggs don't develop. Sounds impossible? Well let me show you just diagrammatically how they do it. Now this represents the nucleus of a mosquito cell, and that tangle in the middle represents its genome, the sum total of its genes. Scientists added a single gene that codes for a protein represented by this orange ball that feeds back on itself to keep cranking out more of that protein. The extra copies, however, go and gum up the mosquitoes' genes, killing the organism. To keep it alive in the laboratory they use a compound called tetracycline. Tetracycline shuts off that gene and allows normal development. They added another little wrinkle so that they could study what happens. And that is they added a gene that makes the insect glow under UV light so that when they released it they could follow exactly how far it went how long it lived and all of the kinds of data for a good scientific study. Now this is the pupal stage, and at this stage the females are larger than the males. That allows them to sort them into the males and the females and they allow only the males to grow to adulthood. And let me remind you that males don't bite. From there it's pretty simple. They take beakers full of male mosquitoes, load them into milk cartons, and drive around the city, releasing them guided by GPS. Here's the mayor of a city releasing the first batch of what they call the ""friendly Aedes."" Now I wish I could tell you this is an American city, but it's not. It's Piracicaba, Brazil. The amazing thing is that in just a year it brought down the cases of dengue by 91 percent. That's better than any insecticide spraying can do.So why aren't we using this remarkable biological control in the US? That's because it's a GMO: a genetically modified organism. Notice the subtitle here says if the FDA would let them they could do the same thing here, when Zika arrives. And of course it has arrived. So now I have to tell you the short form of the long, torturous story of GM regulation in the US In the US, there are three agencies that regulate genetically modified organisms: the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the USDA, US Department of Agriculture. Took these folks two years to decide that it would be the FDA that would regulate the genetically modified mosquito. And they would do it as a new animal drug, if that makes any sense. Took them another five years going back and forth and back and forth to convince the FDA that this would not harm people, and it would not harm the environment. They finally gave them, this summer, permission to run a little test in the Florida Keys, where they had been invited years earlier when they Keys had an outbreak of dengue. Would that it were that easy. When the local residents heard that there would be genetically modified mosquitoes tested in their community some of them began to organize protests. They even organized a petition on the internet with this cuddly logo, which eventually accumulated some 160,000 signatures And they demanded a referendum which will be conducted in just a couple of weeks about whether the trials would be permitted at all.Well it's Miami that really needs these better ways of controlling insects. And there the attitudes are changing. In fact, very recently a bipartisan group of more than 60 legislators wrote to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell asking that she, at the Federal level, expedite access for Florida to this new technology.So the bottom line is this: biological control of harmful insects can be both more effective and very much more environmentally friendly than using insecticides, which are toxic chemicals. That was true in Rachel Carson's time; it's true today. What's different is that we have enormously more information about genetics than we had then, and therefore more ability to use that information to affect these biological controls. And I hope that what I've done is aroused your curiosity enough to start your own inquiry — not into just GM mosquitoes but to the other genetically modified organisms that are so controversial today. I think if you do that, and you dig down through all of the misinformation, and the marketing on the part of the organic food industry and the Greenpeaces and find the science, the accurate science, you'll be surprised and pleased.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/nina_fedoroff_a_secret_weapon_against_zika_and_other_mosquito_borne_diseases
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"(Dominoes fall)(Toy car)(Ball rolls)(Music: ""This Too Shall Pass"")(Singing)You know you can't keep letting it get you down,and you can't keep dragging that dead weight around.If there ain't all that much to lug aroundbetter run like hell when you hit the groundWhen the morning comesWhen the morning comesYou can't stop these kids from dancing,but why would you want to,especially when you're already getting yours?(Xylophone)(Singing) 'Cause if your mind don't move and your knees don't bend,well don't go blaming the kids again.(Xylophone)(Singing) When the morning comesWhen the morning comesWhen the morning comesWhen the morning comesWhen the morning comesWhen the morning comes(Xylophone)(Singing) Let it go,this too shall passLet it go, this too shall passYou know you can't keep letting it get you down,you can't keep letting it get you down —this too shall passIf there ain't all that much to lug around,you can't keep letting it get you down —this too shall passWhen the morning comes —you can't keep letting it get you down,no you can't keep letting itWhen the morning comes —you can't keep letting it get you down,no you can't keep letting itWhen the morning comes —you can't keep letting it get you down,no you can't keep letting itWhen the morning comes —you can't keep letting it get you down,no you can't keep letting itWhen the morning comes(Paint guns fire)(Applause)Damian Kulash: Thank you, thanks very much.We are OK Go, and we've been together as a band since 1998. But in the last decade, we've become known as much for the elaborate music videos, like the one we just saw, as for the songs they accompany. So we will play along with another one of those in a few minutes, but in the meantime, we want to address this question that we get asked all the time but we've really never come up with an adequate answer for it, and that is, how do we think of those ideas?The videos are not all Rube Goldberg machines, by the way. Last year we did a dance in zero gravity, and once we set up an obstacle course out of thousands of musical instruments in the desert, and then played them by stunt driving a car through them.(Laughter)For one of the videos, we choreographed hundreds of people with umbrellas in an abandoned parking lot outside Tokyo, and then filmed them from a drone a half a mile in the air.So it's all of these ideas that people are curious about, and the reason we've had so much trouble describing how we think of these ideas is that it doesn't really feel like we think of them at all. It feels like we find them. And by way of explanation — well, I have a compulsive habit. I play parallax and perspective games with my eyes pretty much all the time, and it's something I've been doing since I was a teenager. And I think the big contributing factor may have been that this is how I decorated my high school bedroom.(Laughter)And being a teenager, what I did in there, of course, was just talk on the phone for staggering amounts of time. So I was in this visual maelstrom just pretty much usually sitting in one place, and I guess just the overload in general — my brain kind of tried to make sense of it, and I would — If I could move my head off to one side a little bit, the edge of the desk would line up just perfectly with that poster on the opposite wall; or if I put my thumb out, I could close first my left eye and then my right, and my thumb would bounce back and forth between Jimi Hendrix's left eye and his right.(Laughter)It was not a conscious thing, of course, this is just kind of the equivalent of doodling while you're talking, and it's still something I do all the time. This is my wife, Kristin —(Applause)Yeah! Woo!And it's not uncommon that we are out at dinner, and in the middle of a great conversation she'll just stop mid-sentence, and when she stops is when I realize that I'm the one who's acting weird because I'm like bobbing and weaving. And what I'm trying to do is get that ficus back there to stick out of her head like a ponytail.(Laughter)The point of telling you all this is that — for me this is what it feels like to have an idea. It's like they're made of these disparate parts, these disparate chunks sort of floating out there. And if you're receptive and you're observant, and crucially, if you're in exactly the right place, you can get them to just line up.So if you get used to — if it's your job to think of ideas this way, they'll start beckoning to you the way that Jimi's eyes beckoned from that poster, or the ficus beckons from behind Kristin's head. Writing music feels like that process just over and over again, like you've got a bunch of sounds or a groove or a chord progression and you're just looking for that thing on the other side, that little chunk over there, that puzzle piece that clicks right in. And when it does click, it doesn't feel like you thought up that puzzle piece, it feels like you found it — like it was a set of relationships that you unlocked.But with the videos in particular, we're usually looking for this specific feeling which is wonder. And there's always a component of surprise to wonder, so we're not just looking for good ideas, we're looking for good ideas that surprise us in some way. And this causes something of a problem, because ... the process that we all use to make stuff, it actually has a very strong bias against surprising ideas.The process I'm talking about is the one you all know — we all do it all the time. You think of an idea. You just sit and think of your brilliant idea and then you come up with a plan for how you're going to make that idea happen. And then with that plan in mind, you go back and double-check your original idea and maybe revise it, and then bouncing back and forth between the idea and the plan, the plan and the idea, eventually you come up with a truly great plan. And then once you have that, and only then, do you go out and you execute. And this is like — this is sort of a flawless system in terms of maximizing your resources, because this — super cheap. Thinking usually costs very little, but this is really expensive most of the time, so by the time you get there, you want to make sure you're super prepared and you can squeeze every last drop out of what you've got.But there are problems with this, and math will help us reveal the biggest one. Go back to that video that we just showed you. That Rube Goldberg machine, it had about 130 interactions in it. That was 130 things that we had to have go according to our plan. So let's assume that we want to make a new video now, similarly complex — 130 moving parts. If we're really good planners in that system, it seems like maybe we could be good enough to get every part of that system to be 90 percent reliable. 90 percent sounds good, right? Well, it's not. It's terrible actually. The numbers say so. The chance of getting all 130 things to not fail at the same time is .9 for 90 percent to the 130th power. So calculate that out and you get ...(Ding).000001, which is one ten-thousandth of one percent, so your chance for success is literally one in a million.(Whistle)(Laughter)I mean that's not a gamble I want to take, so let's ratchet up that reliability to 99 percent. .99 to the 130th power is ...(Ding).27 — 27 percent. Significantly less daunting — like this might even be usable. But really think about that. How many parts of your lives are 99 percent reliable? And could you really get 130 of them all in one place at once? And if you really could, doesn't it seem like you deserve to succeed? Like that is — that thing is going to work, right? But no, it actually fails three times more often than it succeeds.So the upshot of all this is that if your project is pretty complex — like, you know, every ambitious project is — if you've got a lot of moving parts, you're basically constrained to just reshuffling ideas that have already demonstrably proven that they're 100 percent reliable. So now go back to me sitting with my thumb in the air trying to line up something surprising. If the only things I'm allowed to consider in the first place are ideas that have already been done over and over and over again, I am screwed. However, there are ways around this, because we all know that there are tons of untried ideas still out there, and plenty of them will turn out to be every bit as reliable as we need, it's just that we don't yet know they are reliable when we are at this planning phase.So what we do is we try to identify some place where there might just be a ton of those untried ideas. We try to find a sandbox and then we gamble a whole bunch of our resources on getting in that sandbox and playing.(Laughter)Because we have to trust that it's the process in the sandbox that will reveal to us which ideas are not only surprising, but surprisingly reliable.So some of the sandboxes that we've started videos with. Let's play with optical illusions. Let's try to dance on moving surfaces. Let's try to make toast with a laser cutter. Or let's do something in one of those zero-gravity airplanes. But then instead of actually trying to sit there and think out what that something is, we spent a full third of our budget getting in an actual Vomit Comet and bouncing off the walls for a week.So this may seem to you like testing, but it really isn't, because at this point we don't yet know what our idea is, we don't have a plan to be testing. So we're just — we're just playing, we're just trying everything we can think of, because we need to get this idea space filled up with a chaos like the one in my high school bedroom. Because then, if we can do the bob and weave thing, if we can put our thumbs up and get just a few things to line up —(Ding)chances are no one else has ever made those same things line up before. And when we're done with that project, people will ask us again how we thought of that idea, and we'll be stumped, because from our perspective, it doesn't feel like we thought of it at all, it just feels like we found it.So we'll play another video for you now and the song along with it. This is for the song ""The One Moment,"" and for this one, the sandbox was ballistics and math. So I spent a full month putting together a giant spreadsheet for this. It was like my playspace was 400 lines long and 25 columns wide — which I presume that if anybody is going to understand that, it's this crowd.(Laughter)Nothing is better than a giant spreadsheet, right?(Laughter)Well, thank you everyone, very much. We are OK Go, and this is called ""The One Moment.""(Applause)[The One Moment](Explosions)[What you just saw was real and it took 4.2 seconds](Video) Let me know when it's safe.(Percussion)[Here's the same moment ... slowed down.](Music)(Guitar)(Singing) You're right,there's nothing more lovely,there's nothing more profound than the certainty,than the certainty that all of this will endThat all of this will endSo open your arms to me,open your arms to meAnd this will be the one moment that matters,and this will be the one thing we remember,and this will be the reason to have been here,and this will be the one moment that matters —Oh ...(Guitar)(Singing) So while the mud reclaims our footprints,and while our bones keep looking backat the overgrowth that's swallowing the path —but for the grace of God go we,but for the grace of God go weBut for the grace of time and chance and entropy's cruel hands —So open your arms to me,open your arms to meAnd this will be the one moment that matters,and this will be the one thing we remember,and this will be the reason to have been here,and this will be the one moment that mattersOh ...So won't you stay here with meand we'll build 'til we've blistered our handsSo won't you stay here with me and we'll build us some temples,build us some castles,build us some monumentsand burn them all right down(Music)(Singing) So open your arms to meAnd this will be the one moment that matters,and this will be the reason to have been here,and this will be the one thing we remember,and this will be the one moment that mattersSo won't you stay here with me,we'll build 'til we blister our handsAnd this will be the one moment that matters —So won't you stay here with me and build us some temples —This will be the one moment that matters —Build us some temples —The one moment that matters —Build us some monuments —The one moment that mattersBuild us some temples —The one moment that matters.Build us some monuments —The one moment that matters, oh(Guitar)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ok_go_how_to_find_a_wonderful_idea
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"Do you ever think about how important the oceans are in our daily lives? The oceans cover two-thirds of our planet. They provide half the oxygen we breathe. They moderate our climate. And they provide jobs and medicine and food including 20 percent of protein to feed the entire world population. People used to think that the oceans were so vast that they wouldn't be affected by human activities.Well today I'm going to tell you about a serious reality that is changing our oceans called ocean acidification, or the evil twin of climate change. Did you know that the oceans have absorbed 25 percent of all of the carbon dioxide that we have emitted to the atmosphere? Now this is just another great service provided by the oceans since carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that's causing climate change. But as we keep pumping more and more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more is dissolving into the oceans. And this is what's changing our ocean chemistry. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it undergoes a number of chemical reactions.Now lucky for you, I don't have time to get into the details of the chemistry for today. But I'll tell you as more carbon dioxide enters the ocean, the seawater pH goes down. And this basically means that there is an increase in ocean acidity. And this whole process is called ocean acidification. And it's happening alongside climate change. Scientists have been monitoring ocean acidification for over two decades. This figure is an important time series in Hawaii, and the top line shows steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide, or CO2 gas, in the atmosphere. And this is directly as a result of human activities. The line underneath shows the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide that is dissolved in the surface of the ocean which you can see is increasing at the same rate as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since measurements began. The line on the bottom shows then shows the change in chemistry. As more carbon dioxide has entered the ocean, the seawater pH has gone down, which basically means there has been an increase in ocean acidity. Now in Ireland, scientists are also monitoring ocean acidification — scientists at the Marine Institute and NUI Galway. And we, too, are seeing acidification at the same rate as these main ocean time-series sites around the world. So it's happening right at our doorstep.Now I'd like to give you an example of just how we collect our data to monitor a changing ocean. Firstly we collect a lot of our samples in the middle of winter. So as you can imagine, in the North Atlantic we get hit with some seriously stormy conditions — so not for any of you who get a little motion sickness, but we are collecting some very valuable data. So we lower this instrument over the side of the ship, and there are sensors that are mounted on the bottom that can tell us information about the surrounding water, such as temperature or dissolved oxygen. And then we can collect our seawater samples in these large bottles. So we start at the bottom, which can be over four kilometers deep just off our continental shelf, and we take samples at regular intervals right up to the surface. We take the seawater back on the deck, and then we can either analyze them on the ship or back in the laboratory for the different chemicals parameters.But why should we care? How is ocean acidification going to affect all of us? Well, here are the worrying facts. There has already been an increase in ocean acidity of 26 percent since pre-industrial times, which is directly due to human activities. Unless we can start slowing down our carbon dioxide emissions, we're expecting an increase in ocean acidity of 170 percent by the end of this century. I mean this is within our children's lifetime. This rate of acidification is 10 times faster than any acidification in our oceans for over 55 million years. So our marine life have never, ever experienced such a fast rate of change before. So we literally could not know how they're going to cope.Now there was a natural acidification event millions of years ago, which was much slower than what we're seeing today. And this coincided with a mass extinction of many marine species. So is that what we're headed for? Well, maybe. Studies are showing some species are actually doing quite well but many are showing a negative response. One of the big concerns is as ocean acidity increases, the concentration of carbonate ions in seawater decrease. Now these ions are basically the building blocks for many marine species to make their shells, for example crabs or mussels, oysters.Another example are corals. They also need these carbonate ions in seawater to make their coral structure in order to build coral reefs. As ocean acidity increases and the concentration of carbonate ions decrease, these species first find it more difficult to make their shells. And at even even lower levels, they can actually begin to dissolve.This here is a pteropod, it's called a sea butterfly. And it's an important food source in the ocean for many species, from krill to salmon right up to whales. The shell of the pteropod was placed into seawater at a pH that we're expecting by the end of this century. After only 45 days at this very realistic pH, you can see the shell has almost completely dissolved. So ocean acidification could affect right up through the food chain — and right onto our dinner plates. I mean who here likes shellfish? Or salmon? Or many other fish species whose food source in the ocean could be affected?These are cold-water corals. And did you know we actually have cold-water corals in Irish waters, just off our continental shelf? And they support rich biodiversity, including some very important fisheries. It's projected that by the end of this century, 70 percent of all known cold-water corals in the entire ocean will be surrounded by seawater that is dissolving their coral structure. The last example I have are these healthy tropical corals. They were placed in seawater at a pH we're expecting by the year 2100. After six months, the coral has almost completely dissolved. Now coral reefs support 25 percent of all marine life in the entire ocean. All marine life.So you can see: ocean acidification is a global threat. I have an eight-month-old baby boy. Unless we start now to slow this down, I dread to think what our oceans will look like when he's a grown man. We will see acidification. We have already put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But we can slow this down. We can prevent the worst-case scenario. The only way of doing that is by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. This is important for both you and I, for industry, for governments.We need to work together, slow down global warming slow down ocean acidification and help to maintain a healthy ocean and a healthy planet for our generation and for generations to come.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/triona_mcgrath_how_pollution_is_changing_the_ocean_s_chemistry
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"This story begins in 1985, when at age 22, I became the World Chess Champion after beating Anatoly Karpov. Earlier that year, I played what is called simultaneous exhibition against 32 of the world's best chess-playing machines in Hamburg, Germany. I won all the games, and then it was not considered much of a surprise that I could beat 32 computers at the same time. To me, that was the golden age.(Laughter)Machines were weak, and my hair was strong.(Laughter)Just 12 years later, I was fighting for my life against just one computer in a match called by the cover of ""Newsweek"" ""The Brain's Last Stand."" No pressure.(Laughter)From mythology to science fiction, human versus machine has been often portrayed as a matter of life and death. John Henry, called the steel-driving man in the 19th century African American folk legend, was pitted in a race against a steam-powered hammer bashing a tunnel through mountain rock. John Henry's legend is a part of a long historical narrative pitting humanity versus technology. And this competitive rhetoric is standard now. We are in a race against the machines, in a fight or even in a war. Jobs are being killed off. People are being replaced as if they had vanished from the Earth. It's enough to think that the movies like ""The Terminator"" or ""The Matrix"" are nonfiction.There are very few instances of an arena where the human body and mind can compete on equal terms with a computer or a robot. Actually, I wish there were a few more. Instead, it was my blessing and my curse to literally become the proverbial man in the man versus machine competition that everybody is still talking about. In the most famous human-machine competition since John Henry, I played two matches against the IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue. Nobody remembers that I won the first match —(Laughter)(Applause)In Philadelphia, before losing the rematch the following year in New York. But I guess that's fair. There is no day in history, special calendar entry for all the people who failed to climb Mt. Everest before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it to the top. And in 1997, I was still the world champion when chess computers finally came of age. I was Mt. Everest, and Deep Blue reached the summit. I should say of course, not that Deep Blue did it, but its human creators — Anantharaman, Campbell, Hoane, Hsu. Hats off to them. As always, machine's triumph was a human triumph, something we tend to forget when humans are surpassed by our own creations.Deep Blue was victorious, but was it intelligent? No, no it wasn't, at least not in the way Alan Turing and other founders of computer science had hoped. It turned out that chess could be crunched by brute force, once hardware got fast enough and algorithms got smart enough. Although by the definition of the output, grandmaster-level chess, Deep Blue was intelligent. But even at the incredible speed, 200 million positions per second, Deep Blue's method provided little of the dreamed-of insight into the mysteries of human intelligence.Soon, machines will be taxi drivers and doctors and professors, but will they be ""intelligent?"" I would rather leave these definitions to the philosophers and to the dictionary. What really matters is how we humans feel about living and working with these machines.When I first met Deep Blue in 1996 in February, I had been the world champion for more than 10 years, and I had played 182 world championship games and hundreds of games against other top players in other competitions. I knew what to expect from my opponents and what to expect from myself. I was used to measure their moves and to gauge their emotional state by watching their body language and looking into their eyes.And then I sat across the chessboard from Deep Blue. I immediately sensed something new, something unsettling. You might experience a similar feeling the first time you ride in a driverless car or the first time your new computer manager issues an order at work. But when I sat at that first game, I couldn't be sure what is this thing capable of. Technology can advance in leaps, and IBM had invested heavily. I lost that game. And I couldn't help wondering, might it be invincible? Was my beloved game of chess over? These were human doubts, human fears, and the only thing I knew for sure was that my opponent Deep Blue had no such worries at all.(Laughter)I fought back after this devastating blow to win the first match, but the writing was on the wall. I eventually lost to the machine but I didn't suffer the fate of John Henry who won but died with his hammer in his hand. It turned out that the world of chess still wanted to have a human chess champion. And even today, when a free chess app on the latest mobile phone is stronger than Deep Blue, people are still playing chess, even more than ever before. Doomsayers predicted that nobody would touch the game that could be conquered by the machine, and they were wrong, proven wrong, but doomsaying has always been a popular pastime when it comes to technology.What I learned from my own experience is that we must face our fears if we want to get the most out of our technology, and we must conquer those fears if we want to get the best out of our humanity. While licking my wounds, I got a lot of inspiration from my battles against Deep Blue. As the old Russian saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them. Then I thought, what if I could play with a computer — together with a computer at my side, combining our strengths, human intuition plus machine's calculation, human strategy, machine tactics, human experience, machine's memory. Could it be the perfect game ever played?My idea came to life in 1998 under the name of Advanced Chess when I played this human-plus-machine competition against another elite player. But in this first experiment, we both failed to combine human and machine skills effectively. Advanced Chess found its home on the internet, and in 2005, a so-called freestyle chess tournament produced a revelation. A team of grandmasters and top machines participated, but the winners were not grandmasters, not a supercomputer. The winners were a pair of amateur American chess players operating three ordinary PCs at the same time. Their skill of coaching their machines effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of their grandmaster opponents and much greater computational power of others. And I reached this formulation. A weak human player plus a machine plus a better process is superior to a very powerful machine alone, but more remarkably, is superior to a strong human player plus machine and an inferior process. This convinced me that we would need better interfaces to help us coach our machines towards more useful intelligence.Human plus machine isn't the future, it's the present. Everybody that's used online translation to get the gist of a news article from a foreign newspaper, knowing its far from perfect. Then we use our human experience to make sense out of that, and then the machine learns from our corrections. This model is spreading and investing in medical diagnosis, security analysis. The machine crunches data, calculates probabilities, gets 80 percent of the way, 90 percent, making it easier for analysis and decision-making of the human party. But you are not going to send your kids to school in a self-driving car with 90 percent accuracy, even with 99 percent. So we need a leap forward to add a few more crucial decimal places.Twenty years after my match with Deep Blue, second match, this sensational ""The Brain's Last Stand"" headline has become commonplace as intelligent machines move in every sector, seemingly every day. But unlike in the past, when machines replaced farm animals, manual labor, now they are coming after people with college degrees and political influence. And as someone who fought machines and lost, I am here to tell you this is excellent, excellent news. Eventually, every profession will have to feel these pressures or else it will mean humanity has ceased to make progress. We don't get to choose when and where technological progress stops. We cannot slow down. In fact, we have to speed up. Our technology excels at removing difficulties and uncertainties from our lives, and so we must seek out ever more difficult, ever more uncertain challenges. Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion. We should not worry about what our machines can do today. Instead, we should worry about what they still cannot do today, because we will need the help of the new, intelligent machines to turn our grandest dreams into reality. And if we fail, if we fail, it's not because our machines are too intelligent, or not intelligent enough. If we fail, it's because we grew complacent and limited our ambitions. Our humanity is not defined by any skill, like swinging a hammer or even playing chess.There's one thing only a human can do. That's dream. So let us dream big.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/garry_kasparov_don_t_fear_intelligent_machines_work_with_them
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"She wrote: ""When I become famous, I will tell everyone that I know a hero named Marlon Peterson.""Heroes rarely look like me. In fact, I'm what garbage looks like. No, not the most appealing way to open a talk or start a conversation, and perhaps you have some questions going through your head about that. Why would this man say such a thing about himself? What does he mean? How can someone view him as a hero when he sees himself as garbage?I believe we learn more from questions than we do from answers. Because when we're questioning something, we're invested in taking in some sort of new information, or grappling with some sort of ignorance that makes us feel uncomfortable. And that's why I'm here: to push us to question, even when it makes us uncomfortable.My parents are from Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost island in the Caribbean. Trinidad is also home to the only acoustic instrument invented in the 20th century: the steel pan. Deriving from the African drums and evolving from the genius of one of the ghettos in Trinidad, a city called Laventille, and the disregard of the American military ... Well, I should tell you, America, during WWII, had military bases set up in Trinidad, and when the war ended, they left the island littered with empty oil drums — their trash. So people from Laventille repurposed the old drums left behind into the full chromatic scale: the steel pan. Playing music now from Beethoven to Bob Marley to 50 Cent, those people literally made music out of garbage.Twelve days before my 20th birthday, I was arrested for my role in a violent robbery attempt in lower Manhattan. While people were sitting in a coffee shop, four people were shot. Two were killed. Five of us were arrested. We were all the products of Trinidad and Tobago. We were the ""bad immigrants,"" or the ""anchor babies"" that Trump and millions of Americans easily malign. I was discarded, like waste material — and justifiably so to many. I eventually served 10 years, two months and seven days of a prison sentence. I was sentenced to a decade of punishment in a correctional institution. I was sentenced to irrelevance — the opposite of humanity.Interestingly, it was during those years in prison that a series of letters redeemed me, helped me move beyond the darkness and the guilt associated with the worst moment of my young life. It gave me a sense that I was useful. She was 13 years old. She had wrote that she saw me as a hero. I remember reading that, and I remember crying when I read those words.She was one of over 50 students and 150 letters that I wrote during a mentoring correspondence program that I co-designed with a friend who was a teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn, my hometown. We called it the Young Scholars Program. Every time those young people shared their stories with me, their struggles, every time they drew a picture of their favorite cartoon character and sent it to me, every time they said they depended on my letters or my words of advice, it boosted my sense of worthiness. It gave me a sense of what I could contribute to this planet. It transformed my life.Because of those letters and what they shared with me, their stories of teen life, they gave me the permission, they gave me the courage to admit to myself that there were reasons — not excuses — but that there were reasons for that fateful day in October of 1999; that the trauma associated with living in a community where guns are easier to get than sneakers; that the trauma associated with being raped at gunpoint at the age of 14; that those are reasons for me why making that decision, that fatal decision, was not an unlikely proposition.Because those letters mattered so much to me, because writing and receiving and having that communication with those folks so hugely impacted my life, I decided to share the opportunity with some friends of mine who were also inside with me. My friends Bill and Cory and Arocks, all in prison for violent crimes also, shared their words of wisdom with the young people as well, and received the sense of relevancy in return. We are now published writers and youth program innovators and trauma experts and gun violence prevention advocates, and TED talkers and —(Laughter)and good daddies. That's what I call a positive return of investment.Above all else, what building that program taught me was that when we sow, when we invest in the humanity of people no matter where they're at, we can reap amazing rewards.In this latest era of criminal justice reform, I often question and wonder why — why is it that so many believe that only those who have been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses merit empathy and recognized humanity? Criminal justice reform is human justice. Am I not human? When we invest in resources that amplify the relevancy of people in communities like Laventille or parts of Brooklyn or a ghetto near you, we can literally create the communities that we want.We can do better. We can do better than investing solely in law enforcement as a resource, because they don't give us a sense of relevancy that is at the core of why so many of us do so many harmful things in the pursuit of mattering. See, gun violence is just a visible display of a lot of underlying traumas. When we invest in the redemptive value of relevancy, we can render a return of both personal responsibility and healing. That's the people work I care about, because people work.Family, I'm asking you to do the hard work, the difficult work, the churning work of bestowing undeserved kindness upon those who we can relegate as garbage, who we can disregard and discard easily. I'm asking myself.Over the past two months, I've lost two friends to gun violence, both innocent bystanders. One was caught in a drive-by while walking home. The other was sitting in a café while eating breakfast, while on vacation in Miami. I'm asking myself to see the redemptive value of relevancy in the people that murdered them, because of the hard work of seeing the value in me. I'm pushing us to challenge our own capacity to fully experience our humanity, by understanding the full biography of people who we can easily choose not to see, because heroes are waiting to be recognized, and music is waiting to be made.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marlon_peterson_am_i_not_human_a_call_for_criminal_justice_reform
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"I want to share with you something my father taught me: no condition is permanent. It's a lesson he shared with me again and again, and I learned it to be true the hard way.Here I am in my fourth-grade class. This is my yearbook picture taken in my class in school in Monrovia, Liberia. My parents migrated from India to West Africa in the 1970s, and I had the privilege of growing up there. I was nine years old, I loved kicking around a soccer ball, and I was a total math and science geek. I was living the kind of life that, really, any child would dream of. But no condition is permanent.On Christmas Eve in 1989, civil war erupted in Liberia. The war started in the rural countryside, and within months, rebel armies had marched towards our hometown. My school shut down, and when the rebel armies captured the only international airport, people started panicking and fleeing. My mom came knocking one morning and said, ""Raj, pack your things — we have to go."" We were rushed to the center of town, and there on a tarmac, we were split into two lines. I stood with my family in one line, and we were stuffed into the cargo hatch of a rescue plane. And there on a bench, I was sitting with my heart racing. As I looked out the open hatch, I saw hundreds of Liberians in another line, children strapped to their backs. When they tried to jump in with us, I watched soldiers restrain them. They were not allowed to flee.We were the lucky ones. We lost what we had, but we resettled in America, and as immigrants, we benefitted from the community of supporters that rallied around us. They took my family into their home, they mentored me. And they helped my dad start a clothing shop. I'd visit my father on weekends as a teenager to help him sell sneakers and jeans. And every time business would get bad, he'd remind me of that mantra: no condition is permanent. That mantra and my parents' persistence and that community of supporters made it possible for me to go through college and eventually to medical school. I'd once had my hopes crushed in a war, but because of them, I had a chance to pursue my dream to become a doctor. My condition had changed.It had been 15 years since I escaped that airfield, but the memory of those two lines had not escaped my mind. I was a medical student in my mid-20s, and I wanted to go back to see if I could serve the people we'd left behind. But when I got back, what I found was utter destruction. The war had left us with just 51 doctors to serve a country of four million people. It would be like the city of San Francisco having just 10 doctors. So if you got sick in the city where those few doctors remain, you might stand a chance. But if you got sick in the remote, rural rainforest communities, where you could be days from the nearest clinic — I was seeing my patients die from conditions no one should die from, all because they were getting to me too late. Imagine you have a two-year-old who wakes up one morning with a fever, and you realize she could have malaria, and you know the only way to get her the medicine she needs would be to take her to the riverbed, get in a canoe, paddle to the other side and then walk for up to two days through the forest just to reach the nearest clinic.One billion people live in the world's most remote communities, and despite the advances we've made in modern medicine and technology, our innovations are not reaching the last mile. These communities have been left behind, because they've been thought too hard to reach and too difficult to serve. Illness is universal; access to care is not. And realizing this lit a fire in my soul. No one should die because they live too far from a doctor or clinic. No condition should be permanent. And help in this case didn't come from the outside, it actually came from within. It came from the communities themselves.Meet Musu. Way out in rural Liberia, where most girls have not had a chance to finish primary school, Musu had been persistent. At the age of 18, she completed high school, and she came back to her community. She saw that none of the children were getting treatment for the diseases they needed treatment for — deadly diseases, like malaria and pneumonia. So she signed up to be a volunteer. There are millions of volunteers like Musu in rural parts around our world, and we got to thinking — community members like Musu could actually help us solve a puzzle.Our health care system is structured in such a way that the work of diagnosing disease and prescribing medicines is limited to a team of nurses and doctors like me. But nurses and doctors are concentrated in cities, so rural communities like Musu's have been left behind.So we started asking some questions: What if we could reorganize the medical care system? What if we could have community members like Musu be a part or even be the center of our medical team? What if Musu could help us bring health care from clinics in cities to the doorsteps of her neighbors? Musu was 48 when I met her. And despite her amazing talent and grit, she hadn't had a paying job in 30 years. So what if technology could support her? What if we could invest in her with real training, equip her with real medicines, and have her have a real job?Well, in 2007, I was trying to answer these questions, and my wife and I were getting married that year. We asked our relatives to forgo the wedding registry gifts and instead donate some money so we could have some start-up money to launch a nonprofit. I promise you, I'm a lot more romantic than that.(Laughter)We ended up raising $6,000, teamed up with some Liberians and Americans and launched a nonprofit called Last Mile Health. Our goal is to bring a health worker within reach of everyone, everywhere. We designed a three-step process — train, equip and pay — to invest more deeply in volunteers like Musu to become paraprofessionals, to become community health workers.First we trained Musu to prevent, diagnose and treat the top 10 diseases afflicting families in her village. A nurse supervisor visited her every month to coach her. We equipped her with modern medical technology, like this $1 malaria rapid test, and put it in a backpack full of medicines like this to treat infections like pneumonia, and crucially, a smartphone, to help her track and report on epidemics. Last, we recognized the dignity in Musu's work. With the Liberian government, we created a contract, paid her and gave her the chance to have a real job. And she's amazing.Musu has learned over 30 medical skills, from screening children for malnutrition, to assessing the cause of a child's cough with a smartphone, to supporting people with HIV and providing follow-up care to patients who've lost their limbs. Working as part of our team, working as paraprofessionals, community health workers can help ensure that a lot of what your family doctor would do reaches the places that most family doctors could never go.One of my favorite things to do is to care for patients with community health workers. So last year I was visiting A.B., and like Musu, A.B. had had a chance to go to school. He was in middle school, in the eighth grade, when his parents died. He became an orphan and had to drop out. Last year, we hired and trained A.B. as a community health worker. And while he was making door to door house calls, he met this young boy named Prince, whose mother had had trouble breastfeeding him, and by the age of six months, Prince had started to waste away. A.B. had just been taught how to use this color-coded measuring tape that wraps around the upper arm of a child to diagnose malnutrition. A.B. noticed that Prince was in the red zone, which meant he had to be hospitalized.So A.B. took Prince and his mother to the river, got in a canoe and paddled for four hours to get to the hospital. Later, after Prince was discharged, A.B. taught mom how to feed baby a food supplement. A few months ago, A.B. took me to visit Prince, and he's a chubby little guy.(Laughter)He's meeting his milestones, he's pulled himself up to a stand, and is even starting to say a few words. I'm so inspired by these community health workers. I often ask them why they do what they do, and when I asked A.B., he said, ""Doc, since I dropped out of school, this is the first time I'm having a chance to hold a pen to write. My brain is getting fresh.""The stories of A.B. and Musu have taught me something fundamental about being human. Our will to serve others can actually help us transform our own conditions. I was so moved by how powerful the will to serve our neighbors can be a few years ago, when we faced a global catastrophe.In December 2013, something happened in the rainforests across the border from us in Guinea. A toddler named Emile fell sick with vomiting, fever and diarrhea. He lived in an area where the roads were sparse and there had been massive shortages of health workers. Emile died, and a few weeks later his sister died, and a few weeks later his mother died. And this disease would spread from one community to another. And it wasn't until three months later that the world recognized this as Ebola. When every minute counted, we had already lost months, and by then the virus had spread like wildfire all across West Africa, and eventually to other parts of the world. Businesses shut down, airlines started canceling routes.At the height of the crisis, when we were told that 1.4 million people could be infected, when we were told that most of them would die, when we had nearly lost all hope, I remember standing with a group of health workers in the rainforest where an outbreak had just happened. We were helping train and equip them to put on the masks, the gloves and the gowns that they needed to keep themselves safe from the virus while they were serving their patients. I remember the fear in their eyes. And I remember staying up at night, terrified if I'd made the right call to keep them in the field.When Ebola threatened to bring humanity to its knees, Liberia's community health workers didn't surrender to fear. They did what they had always done: they answered the call to serve their neighbors. Community members across Liberia learned the symptoms of Ebola, teamed up with nurses and doctors to go door-to-door to find the sick and get them into care. They tracked thousands of people who had been exposed to the virus and helped break the chain of transmission. Some ten thousand community health workers risked their own lives to help hunt down this virus and stop it in its tracks.(Applause)Today, Ebola has come under control in West Africa, and we've learned a few things. We've learned that blind spots in rural health care can lead to hot spots of disease, and that places all of us at greater risk. We've learned that the most efficient emergency system is actually an everyday system, and that system has to reach all communities, including rural communities like Emile's. And most of all, we've learned from the courage of Liberia's community health workers that we as people are not defined by the conditions we face, no matter how hopeless they seem. We're defined by how we respond to them.For the past 15 years, I've seen the power of this idea to transform everyday citizens into community health workers — into everyday heroes. And I've seen it play out everywhere, from the forest communities of West Africa, to the rural fishing villages of Alaska. It's true, these community health workers aren't doing neurosurgery, but they're making it possible to bring health care within reach of everyone everywhere.So now what? Well, we know that there are still millions of people dying from preventable causes in rural communities around the world. And we know that the great majority of these deaths are happening in these 75 blue-shaded countries. What we also know is that if we trained an army of community health workers to learn even just 30 lifesaving skills, we could save the lives of nearly 30 million people by 2030. Thirty services could save 30 million lives by 2030. That's not just a blueprint — we're proving this can be done.In Liberia, the Liberian government is training thousands of workers like A.B. and Musu after Ebola, to bring health care to every child and family in the country. And we've been honored to work with them, and are now teaming up with a number of organizations that are working across other countries to try to help them do the same thing. If we could help these countries scale, we could save millions of lives, and at the same time, we could create millions of jobs.We simply can't do that, though, without technology. People are worried that technology is going to steal our jobs, but when it comes to community health workers, technology has actually been vital for creating jobs. Without technology — without this smartphone, without this rapid test — it would have been impossible for us to be able to employ A.B. and Musu. And I think it's time for technology to help us train, to help us train people faster and better than ever before.As a doctor, I use technology to stay up-to-date and keep certified. I use smartphones, I use apps, I use online courses. But when A.B. wants to learn, he's got to jump back in that canoe and get to the training center. And when Musu shows up for training, her instructors are stuck using flip charts and markers. Why shouldn't they have the same access to learn as I do? If we truly want community health workers to master those lifesaving skills and even more, we've got to change this old-school model of education. Tech can truly be a game changer here. I've been in awe of the digital education revolution that the likes of Khan Academy and edX have been leading. And I've been thinking that it's time; it's time for a collision between the digital education revolution and the community health revolution.And so, this brings me to my TED Prize wish. I wish — I wish that you would help us recruit the largest army of community health workers the world has ever known by creating the Community Health Academy, a global platform to train, connect and empower.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.Here's the idea: we'll create and curate the best in digital education resources. We will bring those to community health workers around the world, including A.B. and Musu. They'll get video lessons on giving kids vaccines and have online courses on spotting the next outbreak, so they're not stuck using flip charts. We'll help these countries accredit these workers, so that they're not stuck remaining an under-recognized, undervalued group, but become a renowned, empowered profession, just like nurses and doctors.And we'll create a network of companies and entrepreneurs who've created innovations that can save lives and help them connect to workers like Musu, so she can help better serve her community. And we'll work tirelessly to persuade governments to make community health workers a cornerstone of their health care plans. We plan to test and prototype the academy in Liberia and a few other partner countries, and then we plan to take it global, including to rural North America. With the power of this platform, we believe countries can be more persuaded that a health care revolution really is possible.My dream is that this academy will contribute to the training of hundreds of thousands of community members to help bring health care to their neighbors — the hundreds of millions of them that live in the world's most remote communities, from the forest communities of West Africa, to the fishing villages of rural Alaska; from the hilltops of Appalachia, to the mountains of Afghanistan. If this vision is aligned with yours, head to communityhealthacademy.org, and join this revolution. Let us know if you or your organization or someone you know could help us as we try to build this academy over the next year.Now, as I look out into this room, I realize that our journeys are not self-made; they're shaped by others. And there have been so many here that have been part of this cause. We're so honored to be part of this community, and a community that's willing to take on a cause as audacious as this one, so I wanted to offer, as I end, a reflection.I think a lot more about what my father taught me. These days, I too have become a dad. I have two sons, and my wife and I just learned that she's pregnant with our third child.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)I was recently caring for a woman in Liberia who, like my wife, was in her third pregnancy. But unlike my wife, had had no prenatal care with her first two babies. She lived in an isolated community in the forest that had gone for 100 years without any health care until ... until last year when a nurse trained her neighbors to become community health workers.So here I was, seeing this patient who was in her second trimester, and I pulled out the ultrasound to check on the baby, and she started telling us stories about her first two kids, and I had the ultrasound probe on her belly, and she just stopped mid-sentence. She turned to me and she said, ""Doc, what's that sound?"" It was the first time she'd ever heard her baby's heartbeat. And her eyes lit up in the same way my wife's eyes and my own eyes lit up when we heard our baby's heartbeat.For all of human history, illness has been universal and access to care has not. But as a wise man once told me: no condition is permanent. It's time. It's time for us to go as far as it takes to change this condition together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/raj_panjabi_no_one_should_die_because_they_live_too_far_from_a_doctor
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"(Sings) Water Boy(Guitar strum)where are you hidin'?(Guitar strum)If you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you.(Guitar strum)There ain't no hammer —(Guitar strum)that's on this mountain(Guitar strum)That ring like mine, boy —(Guitar strum)that ring like mine.(Guitar strum)I'm gonna bust this rock, boy —(Guitar strum)from here to Macon.(Guitar strum)All the way to the jail, boy —(Guitar strum)all the way to the jail.(Guitar strum)You jack of diamonds —(Music)you jack of diamonds I know you of old boy, I know you of old. You done robbed my pocket, you done robbed my pocket of silver and gold, boy, of silver and gold.Water Boy, where are you hidin'? If you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you. There ain't no hammer that's on this mountain that ring like mine, boy, that ring like mine.I'm gonna bust this rock, boy, from here to Macon. All the way to the jail, boy, all the way to the jail.Water Boy(Guitar strum)where are you hidin'?(Guitar strum)If you don't come right here, if you don't come right here, if you don't come right here, I'm gonna tell your pa on you.(Guitar strum)(Applause)Thank you.That was a song based on numerous work songs, and it was arranged by Odetta, a hero of mine. And this next song, well, I do a lot of historical music, starting with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and continuing on in my solo endeavors. And I believe that knowing your history as a musician is super important — it's important as a person, it's important as a country, it's important as a people.So I read a lot about where the music comes from and where this country comes from. I've been reading a lot about the Civil War and about slavery. And it's really tough. You know? It's really tough reading. And so as an artist, what I do with all that emotion, reading these people's stories, not just, ""Oh, slavery was terrible."" Yes, it was. But it's reading individual narratives of how it was for these people. You know? Then it's like, ""Yeah, that could've been me."" And it is people now. You know? So what you do with all that emotion is you've got to do something with it. As an artist, I write. So I wrote a song based on some of those narratives that I read, and it's called, ""Come Love Come."" We're going to do it for you now.(Claps)(Sings) Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.(Music)(Sings) When I was four, my loving mam was cornered by the boss's man. She turned her head and got struck down, they buried her in the cold, cold ground.Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.(Music)When I was 12, my father dear was strong of arm and free of fear until the day he raised his hand, then he was sold to Alabama.Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.(Music)When I was 16, found my bloom and found my man, we jumped the broom. We pledged each other the rest of our lives and on Saturday nights we were man and wife.Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.(Music)When I was 18, bugles called and boys in blue came o'er the wall. I took my chance and followed free, they led the way to Tennessee.Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.(Music)Now here I sit in a tiny shack with 13 others at my back. I've sent you word, so all I can do is wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait for you.Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.Come love come, the road lies low, the way is long and hard, I know. Come love come, the road lies free, I'll wait for you in Tennessee.Oh, oh, oh. Whoa ... oh I'll wait for you.I'll wait for you. I'll wait for you I'll wait for you.(Applause)Thank you.So, with the dark you have to have the light. And in the African-American community, it's been the work of many hundreds of years to find a way to lift ourselves up. So I'm going to end with a couple of tunes from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, one of the more influential American music figures that most of you probably never heard of. If you have, I'm so happy. She's one of the innovators of rock 'n' roll guitar, and one of the first crossover artists from gospel to secular. She's an incredibly important figure, and I'm going to talk about her whenever I can. So these are a couple of her tunes. And don't worry — you're going to get your chance to sing.(Music)(Sings) Look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on.Look up, look up and greet your maker, for Gabriel blows his horn.Weary totin' such a load, goin' down that lonesome road. Look down that lonesome road, before you travel on.Look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on.Look up, look up and greet your maker, for Gabriel blows his horn.Weary totin' such a load, goin' down that lonesome road.Look down, look down, look down, look down that lonesome road before you travel on.Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air music in the air.Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air I hear music in the air.Up above my head up above my head I hear music in the air music in the airand I really do believe I really do believe there's a Heaven somewhere.Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air singin' in the air.Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air I hear singin' in the air.Up above my head up above my head I hear singin' in the air singin' in the air and I really do believe I really do believe there's a Heaven somewhere.(Speaks) All right now, guitar man!(Guitar music)That's Hubby Jenkins, y'all.(Sings) Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air shoutin' in the air.Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air I hear shoutin' in the air.Up above my head up above my head I hear shoutin' in the air, that's right, and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere.(Speaks) All right now, give me some of that bass.(Bass solo)Yeah! Woo!Jason Sypher on the bass.Jamie Dick on those drums.All right now, I'm running out of time. So it's time for y'all to sing. This is the call-and-response. I call, you respond. There are so many songs like this, y'all know how it goes, don't you? You're going to sing along? I said, are you going to sing along?Audience members: Yes!Rhiannon Giddens: Here we go!(Sings) Up above my headAM: up above my headRG: music in the airAM: music in the air.RG: up above my headAM: up above my headRG: music in the airAM: music in the airRG: up above my headAM: up above my headRG: music in the airAM: music in the airRG: and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere.One more time!Up above my headAM: up above my headRG: I hear music in the airAM: music in the air.RG: Up above my headAM: up above my headRG: I hear music in the airAM: music in the air.RG: Up above my headAM: up above my headRG: I hear music in the airAM: music in the airRG: and I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere. I said I really do believe I really do believe there's a heaven somewhere.Heaven somewhere.(Holds note)(Applause and cheers)(Music ends)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rhiannon_giddens_3_songs_that_bring_history_to_life
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"So there's this thing called the law of unintended consequences. I thought it was just like a saying, but it actually exists, I guess. There's, like, academic papers about it. And I'm a designer. I don't like unintended consequences. People hire me because they have consequences that they really intend, and what they intend is for me to help them achieve those consequences. So I live in fear of unintended consequences. And so this is a story about consequences intended and unintended.I got called by an organization called Robin Hood to do a favor for them. Robin Hood is based in New York, a wonderful philanthropic organization that does what it says in the name. They take from rich people, give it to poor people. In this case, what they wanted to benefit was the New York City school system, a huge enterprise that educates more than a million students at a time, and in buildings that are like this one, old buildings, big buildings, drafty buildings, sometimes buildings that are in disrepair, certainly buildings that could use a renovation. Robin Hood had this ambition to improve these buildings in some way, but what they realized was to fix the buildings would be too expensive and impractical. So instead they tried to figure out what one room they could go into in each of these buildings, in as many buildings that they could, and fix that one room so that they could improve the lives of the children inside as they were studying. And what they came up with was the school library, and they came up with this idea called the Library Initiative. All the students have to pass through the library. That's where the books are. That's where the heart and soul of the school is. So let's fix these libraries.So they did this wonderful thing where they brought in first 10, then 20, then more architects, each one of whom was assigned a library to rethink what a library was. They trained special librarians. So they started this mighty enterprise to reform public schools by improving these libraries. Then they called me up and they said, ""Could you make a little contribution?"" I said, ""Sure, what do you want me to do?"" And they said, ""Well, we want you to be the graphic designer in charge of the whole thing."" And so I thought, I know what that means. That means I get to design a logo. I know how to design that. I design logos. That's what people come to me for. So OK, let's design a logo for this thing. Easy to do, actually, compared with architecture and being a librarian. Just do a logo, make a contribution, and then you're out, and you feel really good about yourself. And I'm a great guy and I like to feel good about myself when I do these favors.So I thought, let's overdeliver. I'm going to give you three logos, all based on this one idea. So you have three options, pick any of the three. They're all great, I said. So the basic idea was these would be new school libraries for New York schools, and so the idea is that it's a new thing, a new idea that needs a new name. What I wanted to do was dispel the idea that these were musty old libraries, the kind of places that everyone is bored with, you know, not your grandparents' library. Don't worry about that at all. This is going to this new, exciting thing, not a boring library.So option number one: so instead of thinking of it as a library, think of it as a place where it is like: do talk, do make loud noises. Right? So no shushing, it's like a shush-free zone. We're going to call it the Reading Room.That was option number one. OK, option number two. Option number two was, wait for it, OWL. I'll meet you at OWL. I'm getting my book from the OWL. Meet you after school down at OWL. I like that, right? Now, what does OWL stand for? Well, it could be One World Library, or it could be Open. Wonder. Learn. Or it could be — and I figure librarians could figure out other things it could be because they know about words. So other things, right? And then look at this. It's like the eye of the owl. This is irresistible in my opinion.But there's even another idea. Option number three. Option number three was based actually on language. It's the idea that ""read"" is the past tense of ""read,"" and they're both spelled the same way. So why don't we call this place The Red Zone? I'll meet you at the Red Zone. Are you Red? Get Red. I'm well Red.(Laughter)I really loved this idea, and I somehow was not focused on the idea that librarians as a class are sort of interested in spelling and I don't know.(Laughter)But sometimes cleverness is more important than spelling, and I thought this would be one of those instances. So usually when I make these presentations I say there's just one question and the question should be, ""How can I thank you, Mike?"" But in this case, the question was more like, ""Um, are you kidding?"" Because, they said, the premise of all this work was that kids were bored with old libraries, musty old libraries. They were tired of them. And instead, they said, these kids have never really seen a library. The school libraries in these schools are really so dilapidated, if they're there at all, that they haven't bored anyone. They haven't even been there to bore anyone at all. So the idea was, just forget about giving it a new name. Just call it, one last try, a library. Right? OK. So I thought, OK, give it a little oomph? Exclamation point? Then — this is because I'm clever — move that into the ""i,"" make it red, and there you have it, the Library Initiative. So I thought, mission accomplished, there's your logo. So what's interesting about this logo, an unintended consequence, was that it turned out that they didn't really even need my design because you could type it any font, you could write it by hand, and when they started sending emails around, they just would use Shift and 1, they'd get their own logo just right out of the thing. And I thought, well, that's fine. Feel free to use that logo. And then I embarked on the real rollout of this thing — working with every one of the architects to put this logo on the front door of their own library. Right?So here's the big rollout. Basically I'd work with different architects. First Robin Hood was my client. Now these architects were my client. I'd say, ""Here's your logo. Put it on the door."" ""Here's your logo. Put it on both doors."" ""Here's your logo. Put it off to the side."" ""Here's your logo repeated all over to the top."" So everything was going swimmingly. I just was saying, ""Here's your logo. Here's your logo.""Then I got a call from one of the architects, a guy named Richard Lewis, and he says, ""I've got a problem. You're the graphics guy. Can you solve it?"" And I said, OK, sure."" And he said, ""The problem is that there's a space between the shelf and the ceiling."" So that sounds like an architectural issue to me, not a graphic design issue, so I'm, ""Go on."" And Richard says, ""Well, the top shelf has to be low enough for the kid to reach it, but I'm in a big old building, and the ceilings are really high, so actually I've got all this space up there and I need something like a mural."" And I'm like, ""Whoa, you know, I'm a logo designer. I'm not Diego Rivera or something. I'm not a muralist."" And so he said, ""But can't you think of anything?"" So I said, ""OK, what if we just took pictures of the kids in the school and just put them around the top of the thing, and maybe that could work."" And my wife is a photographer, and I said, ""Dorothy, there's no budget, can you come to this school in east New York, take these pictures?"" And she did, and if you go in Richard's library, which is one of the first that opened, it has this glorious frieze of, like, the heroes of the school, oversized, looking down into the little dollhouse of the real library, right? And the kids were great, hand-selected by the principals and the librarian. It just kind of created this heroic atmosphere in this library, this very dignified setting below and the joy of the children above.So naturally all the other librarians in the other schools see this and they said, well, we want murals too. And I'm like, OK. So then I think, well, it can't be the same mural every time, so Dorothy did another one, and then she did another one, but then we needed more help, so I called an illustrator I knew named Lynn Pauley, and Lynn did these beautiful paintings of the kids. Then I called a guy named Charles Wilkin at a place called Automatic Design. He did these amazing collages. We had Rafael Esquer do these great silhouettes. He would work with the kids, asking for words, and then based on those prompts, come up with this little, delirious kind of constellation of silhouettes of things that are in books. Peter Arkle interviewed the kids and had them talk about their favorite books and he put their testimony as a frieze up there. Stefan Sagmeister worked with Yuko Shimizu and they did this amazing manga-style statement, ""Everyone who is honest is interesting,"" that goes all the way around. Christoph Niemann, brilliant illustrator, did a whole series of things where he embedded books into the faces and characters and images and places that you find in the books. And then even Maira Kalman did this amazing cryptic installation of objects and words that kind of go all around and will fascinate students for as long as it's up there.So this was really satisfying, and basically my role here was reading a series of dimensions to these artists, and I would say, ""Three feet by 15 feet, whatever you want. Let me know if you have any problem with that."" And they would go and install these. It just was the greatest thing.But the greatest thing, actually, was — Every once in a while, I'd get, like, an invitation in the mail made of construction paper, and it would say, ""You are invited to the opening of our new library."" So you'd go to the library, say, you'd go to PS10, and you'd go inside. There'd be balloons, there'd be a student ambassador, there'd be speeches that were read, poetry that was written specifically for the opening, dignitaries would present people with certificates, and the whole thing was just a delirious, fun party. So I loved going to these things. I would stand there dressed like this, obviously not belonging, and someone would say, ""What are you doing here, mister?"" And I'd say, ""Well, I'm part of the team that designed this place."" And they'd said, ""You do these shelves?"" And I said, ""No."" ""You took the pictures up above."" ""No."" ""Well, what did you do?"" ""You know when you came in? The sign over the door?"" ""The sign that says library?""(Laughter)""Yeah, I did that!"" And then they'd sort of go, ""OK. Nice work if you can get it."" So it was so satisfying going to these little openings despite the fact that I was kind of largely ignored or humiliated, but it was actually fun going to the openings, so I decided that I wanted to get the people in my office who had worked on these projects, get the illustrators and photographers, and I said, why don't we rent a van and drive around the five boroughs of New York and see how many we could hit at one time. And eventually there were going to be 60 of these libraries, so we probably got to see maybe half a dozen in one long day. And the best thing of all was meeting these librarians who kind of were running these, took possession of these places like their private stage upon which they were invited to mesmerize their students and bring the books to life, and it was just this really exciting experience for all of us to actually see these things in action. So we spent a long day doing this and we were in the very last library. It was still winter, because it got dark early, and the librarian says, ""I'm about to close down. So really nice having you here. Hey, wait a second, do you want to see how I turn off the lights?"" I'm like, ""OK."" And she said, ""I have this special way that I do it."" And then she showed me. What she did was she turned out every light one by one by one by one, and the last light she left on was the light that illuminated the kids' faces, and she said, ""That's the last light I turn off every night, because I like to remind myself why I come to work.""So when I started this whole thing, remember, it was just about designing that logo and being clever, come up with a new name? The unintended consequence here, which I would like to take credit for and like to think I can think through the experience to that extent, but I can't. I was just focused on a foot ahead of me, as far as I could reach with my own hands. Instead, way off in the distance was a librarian who was going to find the chain of consequences that we had set in motion, a source of inspiration so that she in this case could do her work really well. 40,000 kids a year are affected by these libraries. They've been happening for more than 10 years now, so those librarians have kind of turned on a generation of children to books and so it's been a thrill to find out that sometimes unintended consequences are the best consequences.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bierut_how_to_design_a_library_that_makes_kids_want_to_read
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"So, imagine that you had your smartphone miniaturized and hooked up directly to your brain. If you had this sort of brain chip, you'd be able to upload and download to the internet at the speed of thought. Accessing social media or Wikipedia would be a lot like — well, from the inside at least — like consulting your own memory. It would be as easy and as intimate as thinking. But would it make it easier for you to know what's true? Just because a way of accessing information is faster it doesn't mean it's more reliable, of course, and it doesn't mean that we would all interpret it the same way. And it doesn't mean that you would be any better at evaluating it. In fact, you might even be worse, because, you know, more data, less time for evaluation.Something like this is already happening to us right now. We already carry a world of information around in our pockets, but it seems as if the more information we share and access online, the more difficult it can be for us to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake. It's as if we know more but understand less.Now, it's a feature of modern life, I suppose, that large swaths of the public live in isolated information bubbles. We're polarized: not just over values, but over the facts. One reason for that is, the data analytics that drive the internet get us not just more information, but more of the information that we want. Our online life is personalized; everything from the ads we read to the news that comes down our Facebook feed is tailored to satisfy our preferences. And so while we get more information, a lot of that information ends up reflecting ourselves as much as it does reality. It ends up, I suppose, inflating our bubbles rather than bursting them. And so maybe it's no surprise that we're in a situation, a paradoxical situation, of thinking that we know so much more, and yet not agreeing on what it is we know.So how are we going to solve this problem of knowledge polarization? One obvious tactic is to try to fix our technology, to redesign our digital platforms, so as to make them less susceptible to polarization. And I'm happy to report that many smart people at Google and Facebook are working on just that. And these projects are vital. I think that fixing technology is obviously really important, but I don't think technology alone, fixing it, is going to solve the problem of knowledge polarization. I don't think that because I don't think, at the end of the day, it is a technological problem. I think it's a human problem, having to do with how we think and what we value.In order to solve it, I think we're going to need help. We're going to need help from psychology and political science. But we're also going to need help, I think, from philosophy. Because to solve the problem of knowledge polarization, we're going to need to reconnect with one fundamental, philosophical idea: that we live in a common reality. The idea of a common reality is like, I suppose, a lot of philosophical concepts: easy to state but mysteriously difficult to put into practice. To really accept it, I think we need to do three things, each of which is a challenge right now.First, we need to believe in truth. You might have noticed that our culture is having something of a troubled relationship with that concept right now. It seems as if we disagree so much that, as one political commentator put it not long ago, it's as if there are no facts anymore. But that thought is actually an expression of a sort of seductive line of argument that's in the air. It goes like this: we just can't step outside of our own perspectives; we can't step outside of our biases. Every time we try, we just get more information from our perspective. So, this line of thought goes, we might as well admit that objective truth is an illusion, or it doesn't matter, because either we'll never know what it is, or it doesn't exist in the first place.That's not a new philosophical thought — skepticism about truth. During the end of the last century, as some of you know, it was very popular in certain academic circles. But it really goes back all the way to the Greek philosopher Protagoras, if not farther back. Protagoras said that objective truth was an illusion because ""man is the measure of all things."" Man is the measure of all things. That can seem like a bracing bit of realpolitik to people, or liberating, because it allows each of us to discover or make our own truth.But actually, I think it's a bit of self-serving rationalization disguised as philosophy. It confuses the difficulty of being certain with the impossibility of truth. Look — of course it's difficult to be certain about anything; we might all be living in ""The Matrix."" You might have a brain chip in your head feeding you all the wrong information. But in practice, we do agree on all sorts of facts. We agree that bullets can kill people. We agree that you can't flap your arms and fly. We agree — or we should — that there is an external reality and ignoring it can get you hurt.Nonetheless, skepticism about truth can be tempting, because it allows us to rationalize away our own biases. When we do that, we're sort of like the guy in the movie who knew he was living in ""The Matrix"" but decided he liked it there, anyway. After all, getting what you want feels good. Being right all the time feels good. So, often it's easier for us to wrap ourselves in our cozy information bubbles, live in bad faith, and take those bubbles as the measure of reality.An example, I think, of how this bad faith gets into our action is our reaction to the phenomenon of fake news. The fake news that spread on the internet during the American presidential election of 2016 was designed to feed into our biases, designed to inflate our bubbles. But what was really striking about it was not just that it fooled so many people. What was really striking to me about fake news, the phenomenon, is how quickly it itself became the subject of knowledge polarization; so much so, that the very term — the very term — ""fake news"" now just means: ""news story I don't like."" That's an example of the bad faith towards the truth that I'm talking about.But the really, I think, dangerous thing about skepticism with regard to truth is that it leads to despotism. ""Man is the measure of all things"" inevitably becomes ""The Man is the measure of all things."" Just as ""every man for himself"" always seems to turn out to be ""only the strong survive.""At the end of Orwell's ""1984,"" the thought policeman O'Brien is torturing the protagonist Winston Smith into believing two plus two equals five. What O'Brien says is the point, is that he wants to convince Smith that whatever the party says is the truth, and the truth is whatever the party says. And what O'Brien knows is that once this thought is accepted, critical dissent is impossible. You can't speak truth to power if the power speaks truth by definition.I said that in order to accept that we really live in a common reality, we have to do three things. The first thing is to believe in truth. The second thing can be summed up by the Latin phrase that Kant took as the motto for the Enlightenment: ""Sapere aude,"" or ""dare to know."" Or as Kant wants, ""to dare to know for yourself.""I think in the early days of the internet, a lot of us thought that information technology was always going to make it easier for us to know for ourselves, and of course in many ways, it has. But as the internet has become more and more a part of our lives, our reliance on it, our use of it, has become often more passive. Much of what we know today we Google-know. We download prepackaged sets of facts and sort of shuffle them along the assembly line of social media. Now, Google-knowing is useful precisely because it involves a sort of intellectual outsourcing. We offload our effort onto a network of others and algorithms. And that allows us, of course, to not clutter our minds with all sorts of facts. We can just download them when we need them. And that's awesome.But there's a difference between downloading a set of facts and really understanding how or why those facts are as they are. Understanding why a particular disease spreads, or how a mathematical proof works, or why your friend is depressed, involves more than just downloading. It's going to require, most likely, doing some work for yourself: having a little creative insight; using your imagination; getting out into the field; doing the experiment; working through the proof; talking to someone.Now, I'm not saying, of course, that we should stop Google-knowing. I'm just saying we shouldn't overvalue it, either. We need to find ways of encouraging forms of knowing that are more active, and don't always involve passing off our effort into our bubble. Because the thing about Google-knowing is that too often it ends up being bubble-knowing. And bubble-knowing means always being right. But daring to know, daring to understand, means risking the possibility that you could be wrong. It means risking the possibility that what you want and what's true are different things.Which brings me to the third thing that I think we need to do if we want to accept that we live in a common reality. That third thing is: have a little humility. By humility here, I mean epistemic humility, which means, in a sense, knowing that you don't know it all. But it also means something more than that. It means seeing your worldview as open to improvement by the evidence and experience of others. Seeing your worldview as open to improvement by the evidence and experience of others. That's more than just being open to change. It's more than just being open to self-improvement. It means seeing your knowledge as capable of enhancing or being enriched by what others contribute. That's part of what is involved in recognizing there's a common reality that you, too, are responsible to.I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that our society is not particularly great at enhancing or encouraging that sort of humility. That's partly because, well, we tend to confuse arrogance and confidence. And it's partly because, well, you know, arrogance is just easier. It's just easier to think of yourself as knowing it all. It's just easier to think of yourself as having it all figured out. But that's another example of the bad faith towards the truth that I've been talking about.So the concept of a common reality, like a lot of philosophical concepts, can seem so obvious, that we can look right past it and forget why it's important. Democracies can't function if their citizens don't strive, at least some of the time, to inhabit a common space, a space where they can pass ideas back and forth when — and especially when — they disagree. But you can't strive to inhabit that space if you don't already accept that you live in the same reality. To accept that, we've got to believe in truth, we've got to encourage more active ways of knowing. And we've got to have the humility to realize that we're not the measure of all things.We may yet one day realize the vision of having the internet in our brains. But if we want that to be liberating and not terrifying, if we want it to expand our understanding and not just our passive knowing, we need to remember that our perspectives, as wondrous, as beautiful as they are, are just that — perspectives on one reality.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_patrick_lynch_how_to_see_past_your_own_perspective_and_find_truth
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"Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. That person sitting right next to you might have the most idiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time. That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people.Cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture and color. You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character in apartment buildings in Riga and Yemen, social housing in Vienna, Hopi villages in Arizona, brownstones in New York, wooden houses in San Francisco. These aren't palaces or cathedrals. These are just ordinary residences expressing the ordinary splendor of cities. And the reason they're like that is that the need for shelter is so bound up with the human desire for beauty. Their rough surfaces give us a touchable city. Right? Streets that you can read by running your fingers over brick and stone.But that's getting harder to do, because cities are becoming smooth. New downtowns sprout towers that are almost always made of concrete and steel and covered in glass. You can look at skylines all over the world — Houston, Guangzhou, Frankfurt — and you see the same army of high-gloss robots marching over the horizon. Now, just think of everything we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials. When we reject granite and limestone and sandstone and wood and copper and terra-cotta and brick and wattle and plaster, we simplify architecture and we impoverish cities. It's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines down to airline food.(Laughter)Chicken or pasta?But worse still, assemblies of glass towers like this one in Moscow suggest a disdain for the civic and communal aspects of urban living. Right? Buildings like these are intended to enrich their owners and tenants, but not necessarily the lives of the rest of us, those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings. And we expect to do so for free. Shiny towers are an invasive species and they are choking our cities and killing off public space. We tend to think of a facade as being like makeup, a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that's effectively complete. But just because a facade is superficial doesn't mean it's not also deep.Let me give you an example of how a city's surfaces affect the way we live in it. When I visited Salamanca in Spain, I gravitated to the Plaza Mayor at all hours of the day. Early in the morning, sunlight rakes the facades, sharpening shadows, and at night, lamplight segments the buildings into hundreds of distinct areas, balconies and windows and arcades, each one a separate pocket of visual activity. That detail and depth, that glamour gives the plaza a theatrical quality. It becomes a stage where the generations can meet. You have teenagers sprawling on the pavers, seniors monopolizing the benches, and real life starts to look like an opera set. The curtain goes up on Salamanca. So just because I'm talking about the exteriors of buildings, not form, not function, not structure, even so those surfaces give texture to our lives, because buildings create the spaces around them, and those spaces can draw people in or push them away. And the difference often has to do with the quality of those exteriors.So one contemporary equivalent of the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca is the Place de la Défense in Paris, a windswept, glass-walled open space that office workers hurry through on the way from the metro to their cubicles but otherwise spend as little time in as possible. In the early 1980s, the architect Philip Johnson tried to recreate a gracious European plaza in Pittsburgh. This is PPG Place, a half acre of open space encircled by commercial buildings made of mirrored glass. And he ornamented those buildings with metal trim and bays and Gothic turrets which really pop on the skyline. But at ground level, the plaza feels like a black glass cage. I mean, sure, in summertime kids are running back and forth through the fountain and there's ice-skating in the winter, but it lacks the informality of a leisurely hangout. It's just not the sort of place you really want to just hang out and chat.Public spaces thrive or fail for many different reasons. Architecture is only one, but it's an important one. Some recent plazas like Federation Square in Melbourne or Superkilen in Copenhagen succeed because they combine old and new, rough and smooth, neutral and bright colors, and because they don't rely excessively on glass.Now, I'm not against glass. It's an ancient and versatile material. It's easy to manufacture and transport and install and replace and clean. It comes in everything from enormous, ultraclear sheets to translucent bricks. New coatings make it change mood in the shifting light. In expensive cities like New York, it has the magical power of being able to multiply real estate values by allowing views, which is really the only commodity that developers have to offer to justify those surreal prices.In the middle of the 19th century, with the construction of the Crystal Palace in London, glass leapt to the top of the list of quintessentially modern substances. By the mid-20th century, it had come to dominate the downtowns of some American cities, largely through some really spectacular office buildings like Lever House in midtown Manhattan, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Eventually, the technology advanced to the point where architects could design structures so transparent they practically disappear. And along the way, glass became the default material of the high-rise city, and there's a very powerful reason for that. Because as the world's populations converge on cities, the least fortunate pack into jerry-built shantytowns. But hundreds of millions of people need apartments and places to work in ever-larger buildings, so it makes economic sense to put up towers and wrap them in cheap and practical curtain walls.But glass has a limited ability to be expressive. This is a section of wall framing a plaza in the pre-Hispanic city of Mitla, in southern Mexico. Those 2,000-year-old carvings make it clear that this was a place of high ritual significance. Today we look at those and we can see a historical and textural continuity between those carvings, the mountains all around and that church which is built on top of the ruins using stone plundered from the site. In nearby Oaxaca, even ordinary plaster buildings become canvasses for bright colors, political murals and sophisticated graphic arts. It's an intricate, communicative language that an epidemic of glass would simply wipe out.The good news is that architects and developers have begun to rediscover the joys of texture without backing away from modernity. Some find innovative uses for old materials like brick and terra-cotta. Others invent new products like the molded panels that Snøhetta used to give the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that crinkly, sculptural quality. The architect Stefano Boeri even created living facades. This is his Vertical Forest, a pair of apartment towers in Milan, whose most visible feature is greenery. And Boeri is designing a version of this for Nanjing in China. And imagine if green facades were as ubiquitous as glass ones how much cleaner the air in Chinese cities would become.But the truth is that these are mostly one-offs, boutique projects, not easily reproduced at a global scale. And that is the point. When you use materials that have a local significance, you prevent cities from all looking the same. Copper has a long history in New York — the Statue of Liberty, the crown of the Woolworth Building — but it fell out of fashion for a long time until SHoP Architects used it to cover the American Copper Building, a pair of twisting towers on the East River. It's not even finished and you can see the way sunset lights up that metallic facade, which will weather to green as it ages.Buildings can be like people. Their faces broadcast their experience. And that's an important point, because when glass ages, you just replace it, and the building looks pretty much the same way it did before until eventually it's demolished. Almost all other materials have the ability to absorb infusions of history and memory, and project it into the present. The firm Ennead clad the Utah Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City in copper and zinc, ores that have been mined in the area for 150 years and that also camouflage the building against the ochre hills so that you have a natural history museum that reflects the region's natural history. And when the Chinese Pritzker Prize winner Wang Shu was building a history museum in Ningbo, he didn't just create a wrapper for the past, he built memory right into the walls by using brick and stones and shingles salvaged from villages that had been demolished.Now, architects can use glass in equally lyrical and inventive ways. Here in New York, two buildings, one by Jean Nouvel and this one by Frank Gehry face off across West 19th Street, and the play of reflections that they toss back and forth is like a symphony in light. But when a city defaults to glass as it grows, it becomes a hall of mirrors, disquieting and cold. After all, cities are places of concentrated variety where the world's cultures and languages and lifestyles come together and mingle. So rather than encase all that variety and diversity in buildings of crushing sameness, we should have an architecture that honors the full range of the urban experience.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/justin_davidson_why_shiny_glass_towers_are_bad_for_city_life
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"""Look at me!""That phrase turned me into an eye-contact coach. I'm the mother of Ivan; he's 15 years old. Ivan has autism, he doesn't speak, and he communicates through an iPad, where his whole universe of words exists in images.He was diagnosed when he was two and a half. I still remember that day painfully. My husband and I felt really lost; we didn't know where to begin. There was no internet, you couldn't Google information, so we made those first steps out of sheer intuition.Ivan would not maintain eye contact, he had lost the words that he did know, and he didn't respond to his name or to anything we asked him, as if words were noise. The only way I could know what was going on with him, what he felt, was looking him in the eye. But that bridge was broken.How could I teach him about life? When I did things he liked, he would look at me, and we were connected. So I dedicated myself to working with him on those things, so we would have more and more eye-contact moments. We would spend hours and hours playing tag with his older sister, Alexia, and when we said: ""I caught you!"" he would look around for us, and at that moment, I could feel he was alive.We also hold a record for hours spent in a swimming pool. Ivan always had a passion for water. I remember when he was two and a half, on a rainy winter day, I was taking him to an indoor pool, because even on rainy days we'd go swimming. We were on the highway, and I took the wrong exit. He burst into tears and cried inconsolably, nonstop, until I turned back. Only then did he calm down.How was it possible that a two and a half year old didn't respond to his own name, yet in the middle of the rain and fog, where I couldn't see anything, he knew the exact route? That's when I realized that Ivan had an exceptional visual memory, and that that would be my way in.So I started taking pictures of everything, and teaching him what life was like, showing it to him, picture by picture. Even now, it's the way Ivan communicates what he wants, what he needs and also what he feels.But it wasn't just Ivan's eye contact that mattered. Everyone else's did, too. How could I make people see not only his autism, but see him the person and everything he can give; everything he can do; the things he likes and doesn't like, just like any one of us? But for that, I also had to give of myself. I had to have the strength to let him go, which was extremely difficult.Ivan was 11 years old, and he went for treatment in a neighborhood near our house. One afternoon, while I was waiting for him, I went into a greengrocer, a typical neighborhood store with a little bit of everything. While doing the shopping, I started talking to Jose, the owner. I told him about Ivan, that he had autism, and that I wanted him to learn to walk down the street by himself, without anyone holding his hand.So I decided to ask Jose if Thursdays around 2pm, Ivan could come and help him arrange the water bottles on the shelves, because he loved to organize things. And as a reward, he could buy some chocolate cookies, which were his favorite. He said ""yes"" right away. So that's how it went for a year: Ivan would go to Jose's greengrocer, help him arrange the shelves of water bottles with the labels perfectly lined up on the same side, and he would leave happy with his chocolate cookies.Jose is not an expert in autism. There is no need to be an expert nor do anything heroic to include someone. We just need to be there —(Applause)(Applause ends)Really, no heroic deed — we simply need to be close. And if we are afraid of something or we don't understand something, we need to ask.Let's be curious but never indifferent. Let's have the courage to look each other in the eye, because by looking, we can open a whole world to someone else.(Applause)(Cheers)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carina_morillo_to_understand_autism_don_t_look_away
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"Paying close attention to something: Not that easy, is it? It's because our attention is pulled in so many different directions at a time, and it's in fact pretty impressive if you can stay focused.Many people think that attention is all about what we are focusing on, but it's also about what information our brain is trying to filter out.There are two ways you direct your attention. First, there's overt attention. In overt attention, you move your eyes towards something in order to pay attention to it. Then there's covert attention. In covert attention, you pay attention to something, but without moving your eyes. Think of driving for a second. Your overt attention, your direction of the eyes, are in front, but that's your covert attention which is constantly scanning the surrounding area, where you don't actually look at them.I'm a computational neuroscientist, and I work on cognitive brain-machine interfaces, or bringing together the brain and the computer. I love brain patterns. Brain patterns are important for us because based on them we can build models for the computers, and based on these models computers can recognize how well our brain functions. And if it doesn't function well, then these computers themselves can be used as assistive devices for therapies. But that also means something, because choosing the wrong patterns will give us the wrong models and therefore the wrong therapies. Right? In case of attention, the fact that we can shift our attention not only by our eyes but also by thinking — that makes covert attention an interesting model for computers.So I wanted to know what are the brainwave patterns when you look overtly or when you look covertly. I set up an experiment for that. In this experiment there are two flickering squares, one of them flickering at a slower rate than the other one. Depending on which of these flickers you are paying attention to, certain parts of your brain will start resonating in the same rate as that flickering rate. So by analyzing your brain signals, we can track where exactly you are watching or you are paying attention to.So to see what happens in your brain when you pay overt attention, I asked people to look directly in one of the squares and pay attention to it. In this case, not surprisingly, we saw that these flickering squares appeared in their brain signals which was coming from the back of their head, which is responsible for the processing of your visual information. But I was really interested to see what happens in your brain when you pay covert attention. So this time I asked people to look in the middle of the screen and without moving their eyes, to pay attention to either of these squares. When we did that, we saw that both of these flickering rates appeared in their brain signals, but interestingly, only one of them, which was paid attention to, had stronger signals, so there was something in the brain which was handling this information so that thing in the brain was basically the activation of the frontal area. The front part of your brain is responsible for higher cognitive functions as a human. The frontal part, it seems that it works as a filter trying to let information come in only from the right flicker that you are paying attention to and trying to inhibit the information coming from the ignored one.The filtering ability of the brain is indeed a key for attention, which is missing in some people, for example in people with ADHD. So a person with ADHD cannot inhibit these distractors, and that's why they can't focus for a long time on a single task. But what if this person could play a specific computer game with his brain connected to the computer, and then train his own brain to inhibit these distractors?Well, ADHD is just one example. We can use these cognitive brain-machine interfaces for many other cognitive fields. It was just a few years ago that my grandfather had a stroke, and he lost complete ability to speak. He could understand everybody, but there was no way to respond, even not writing because he was illiterate. So he passed away in silence. I remember thinking at that time: What if we could have a computer which could speak for him? Now, after years that I am in this field, I can see that this might be possible. Imagine if we can find brainwave patterns when people think about images or even letters, like the letter A generates a different brainwave pattern than the letter B, and so on. Could a computer one day communicate for people who can't speak? What if a computer can help us understand the thoughts of a person in a coma? We are not there yet, but pay close attention. We will be there soon.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/mehdi_ordikhani_seyedlar_what_happens_in_your_brain_when_you_pay_attention
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"My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, ""You know, this could be the best day ever."" And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, ""Nana, will you ever get sick and die?""I think this pretty much says it for me and most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday, and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure. There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few things.For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say in his late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him.(Laughter)Our true person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see that I was born in 1954. My inside self is outside of time and space. It doesn't have an age. I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the '60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield.(Laughter)It was so liberating, though, to face the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write down every single true thing I know. People feel really doomed and overwhelmed these days, and they keep asking me what's true. So I hope that my list of things I'm almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered.Number one: the first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It's been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It's so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don't think it's an ideal system.(Laughter)Number two: almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes —(Laughter)(Applause)including you.Three: there is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of lasting way, unless you're waiting for an organ. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. This is the most horrible truth, and I so resent it. But it's an inside job, and we can't arrange peace or lasting improvement for the people we love most in the world. They have to find their own ways, their own answers. You can't run alongside your grown children with sunscreen and ChapStick on their hero's journey. You have to release them. It's disrespectful not to. And if it's someone else's problem, you probably don't have the answer, anyway.(Laughter)Our help is usually not very helpful. Our help is often toxic. And help is the sunny side of control. Stop helping so much. Don't get your help and goodness all over everybody.(Laughter)(Applause)This brings us to number four: everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people's outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.(Laughter)Also, you can't save, fix or rescue any of them or get anyone sober. What helped me get clean and sober 30 years ago was the catastrophe of my behavior and thinking. So I asked some sober friends for help, and I turned to a higher power. One acronym for God is the ""gift of desperation,"" G-O-D, or as a sober friend put it, by the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.(Laughter)So God might mean, in this case, ""me running out of any more good ideas.""While fixing and saving and trying to rescue is futile, radical self-care is quantum, and it radiates out from you into the atmosphere like a little fresh air. It's a huge gift to the world. When people respond by saying, ""Well, isn't she full of herself,"" just smile obliquely like Mona Lisa and make both of you a nice cup of tea. Being full of affection for one's goofy, self-centered, cranky, annoying self is home. It's where world peace begins.Number five: chocolate with 75 percent cacao is not actually a food.(Laughter)Its best use is as a bait in snake traps or to balance the legs of wobbly chairs. It was never meant to be considered an edible.Number six —(Laughter)writing. Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts, but they keep their butt in the chair. That's the secret of life. That's probably the main difference between you and them. They just do it. They do it by prearrangement with themselves. They do it as a debt of honor. They tell stories that come through them one day at a time, little by little. When my older brother was in fourth grade, he had a term paper on birds due the next day, and he hadn't started. So my dad sat down with him with an Audubon book, paper, pencils and brads — for those of you who have gotten a little less young and remember brads — and he said to my brother, ""Just take it bird by bird, buddy. Just read about pelicans and then write about pelicans in your own voice. And then find out about chickadees, and tell us about them in your own voice. And then geese.""So the two most important things about writing are: bird by bird and really god-awful first drafts. If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours, and you get to tell it. If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should've behaved better.(Laughter)(Applause)You're going to feel like hell if you wake up someday and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart: your stories, memories, visions and songs — your truth, your version of things — in your own voice. That's really all you have to offer us, and that's also why you were born.Seven: publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and evil people I've ever known are male writers who've had huge best sellers. And yet, returning to number one, that all truth is paradox, it's also a miracle to get your work published, to get your stories read and heard. Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheesy holes inside of you. It can't. It won't. But writing can. So can singing in a choir or a bluegrass band. So can painting community murals or birding or fostering old dogs that no one else will.Number eight: families. Families are hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. Again, see number one.(Laughter)At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal —(Laughter)remember that in all cases, it's a miracle that any of us, specifically, were conceived and born. Earth is forgiveness school. It begins with forgiving yourself, and then you might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.(Laughter)When William Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But I promise you are up to it. You can do it, Cinderella, you can do it, and you will be amazed.Nine: food. Try to do a little better. I think you know what I mean.(Laughter)Number 10 —(Laughter)grace. Grace is spiritual WD-40, or water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. Go figure.(Laughter)The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, ""Help,"" and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn't leave you where it found you. And grace won't look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you'll get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember — grace always bats last.Eleven: God just means goodness. It's really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence, or, as we learned from the great ""Deteriorata,"" ""the cosmic muffin."" A good name for God is: ""Not me."" Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don't look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of life.And finally: death. Number 12. Wow and yikes. It's so hard to bear when the few people you cannot live without die. You'll never get over these losses, and no matter what the culture says, you're not supposed to. We Christians like to think of death as a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live again fully in your heart if you don't seal it off. Like Leonard Cohen said, ""There are cracks in everything, and that's how the light gets in."" And that's how we feel our people again fully alive.Also, the people will make you laugh out loud at the most inconvenient times, and that's the great good news. But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you. Grief and friends, time and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate and moisturize you and the ground on which you walk.Do you know the first thing that God says to Moses? He says, ""Take off your shoes."" Because this is holy ground, all evidence to the contrary. It's hard to believe, but it's the truest thing I know. When you're a little bit older, like my tiny personal self, you realize that death is as sacred as birth. And don't worry — get on with your life. Almost every single death is easy and gentle with the very best people surrounding you for as long as you need. You won't be alone. They'll help you cross over to whatever awaits us. As Ram Dass said, ""When all is said and done, we're really just all walking each other home.""I think that's it, but if I think of anything else, I'll let you know.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)I was very surprised to be asked to come, because it is not my realm, technology or design or entertainment. I mean, my realm is sort of faith and writing and kind of lurching along together. And I was surprised, but they said I could give a talk, and I said I'd love to.(Video) If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.Anne Lamott: People are very frightened and feel really doomed in America these days, and I just wanted to help people get their sense of humor about it and to realize how much isn't a problem. If you take an action, take a really healthy or loving or friendly action, you'll have loving and friendly feelings.","https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_lamott_12_truths_i_learned_from_life_and_writing
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"So, this happy pic of me was taken in 1999. I was a senior in college, and it was right after a dance practice. I was really, really happy. And I remember exactly where I was about a week and a half later. I was sitting in the back of my used minivan in a campus parking lot, when I decided I was going to commit suicide. I went from deciding to full-blown planning very quickly. And I came this close to the edge of the precipice. It's the closest I've ever come. And the only reason I took my finger off the trigger was thanks to a few lucky coincidences. And after the fact, that's what scared me the most: the element of chance.So I became very methodical about testing different ways that I could manage my ups and downs, which has proven to be a good investment. (Laughs) Many normal people might have, say, six to 10 major depressive episodes in their lives. I have bipolar depression. It runs in my family. I've had 50-plus at this point, and I've learned a lot. I've had a lot of at-bats, many rounds in the ring with darkness, taking good notes. So I thought rather than get up and give any type of recipe for success or highlight reel, I would share my recipe for avoiding self-destruction, and certainly self-paralysis.And the tool I've found which has proven to be the most reliable safety net for emotional free fall is actually the same tool that has helped me to make my best business decisions. But that is secondary. And it is ... stoicism. That sounds boring.(Laughter)You might think of Spock, or it might conjure and image like this —(Laughter)a cow standing in the rain. It's not sad. It's not particularly happy. It's just an impassive creature taking whatever life sends its way.You might not think of the ultimate competitor, say, Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, who has the all-time NFL record for Super Bowl titles. And stoicism has spread like wildfire in the top of the NFL ranks as a means of mental toughness training in the last few years. You might not think of the Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington to name but three students of stoicism. George Washington actually had a play about a Stoic — this was ""Cato, a Tragedy"" — performed for his troops at Valley Forge to keep them motivated.So why would people of action focus so much on an ancient philosophy? This seems very academic. I would encourage you to think about stoicism a little bit differently, as an operating system for thriving in high-stress environments, for making better decisions. And it all started here, kind of, on a porch.So around 300 BC in Athens, someone named Zeno of Citium taught many lectures walking around a painted porch, a ""stoa."" That later became ""stoicism."" And in the Greco-Roman world, people used stoicism as a comprehensive system for doing many, many things. But for our purposes, chief among them was training yourself to separate what you can control from what you cannot control, and then doing exercises to focus exclusively on the former. This decreases emotional reactivity, which can be a superpower.Conversely, let's say you're a quarterback. You miss a pass. You get furious with yourself. That could cost you a game. If you're a CEO, and you fly off the handle at a very valued employee because of a minor infraction, that could cost you the employee. If you're a college student who, say, is in a downward spiral, and you feel helpless and hopeless, unabated, that could cost you your life. So the stakes are very, very high.And there are many tools in the toolkit to get you there. I'm going to focus on one that completely changed my life in 2004. It found me then because of two things: a very close friend, young guy, my age, died of pancreatic cancer unexpectedly, and then my girlfriend, who I thought I was going to marry, walked out. She'd had enough, and she didn't give me a Dear John letter, but she did give me this, a Dear John plaque.(Laughter)I'm not making this up. I've kept it. ""Business hours are over at five o'clock."" She gave this to me to put on my desk for personal health, because at the time, I was working on my first real business. I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 14-plus hour days, seven days a week. I was using stimulants to get going. I was using depressants to wind down and go to sleep. It was a disaster. I felt completely trapped. I bought a book on simplicity to try to find answers.And I did find a quote that made a big difference in my life, which was, ""We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,"" by Seneca the Younger, who was a famous Stoic writer. That took me to his letters, which took me to the exercise, ""premeditatio malorum,"" which means the pre-meditation of evils. In simple terms, this is visualizing the worst-case scenarios, in detail, that you fear, preventing you from taking action, so that you can take action to overcome that paralysis. My problem was monkey mind — super loud, very incessant. Just thinking my way through problems doesn't work. I needed to capture my thoughts on paper. So I created a written exercise that I called ""fear-setting,"" like goal-setting, for myself. It consists of three pages. Super simple.The first page is right here. ""What if I ...?"" This is whatever you fear, whatever is causing you anxiety, whatever you're putting off. It could be asking someone out, ending a relationship, asking for a promotion, quitting a job, starting a company. It could be anything. For me, it was taking my first vacation in four years and stepping away from my business for a month to go to London, where I could stay in a friend's room for free, to either remove myself as a bottleneck in the business or shut it down.In the first column, ""Define,"" you're writing down all of the worst things you can imagine happening if you take that step. You want 10 to 20. I won't go through all of them, but I'll give you two examples. One was, I'll go to London, it'll be rainy, I'll get depressed, the whole thing will be a huge waste of time. Number two, I'll miss a letter from the IRS, and I'll get audited or raided or shut down or some such.And then you go to the ""Prevent"" column. In that column, you write down the answer to: What could I do to prevent each of these bullets from happening, or, at the very least, decrease the likelihood even a little bit? So for getting depressed in London, I could take a portable blue light with me and use it for 15 minutes in the morning. I knew that helped stave off depressive episodes. For the IRS bit, I could change the mailing address on file with the IRS so the paperwork would go to my accountant instead of to my UPS address. Easy-peasy.Then we go to ""Repair."" So if the worst-case scenarios happen, what could you do to repair the damage even a little bit, or who could you ask for help? So in the first case, London, well, I could fork over some money, fly to Spain, get some sun — undo the damage, if I got into a funk. In the case of missing a letter from the IRS, I could call a friend who is a lawyer or ask, say, a professor of law what they would recommend, who I should talk to, how had people handled this in the past. So one question to keep in mind as you're doing this first page is: Has anyone else in the history of time less intelligent or less driven figured this out? Chances are, the answer is ""Yes.""(Laughter)The second page is simple: What might be the benefits of an attempt or a partial success? You can see we're playing up the fears and really taking a conservative look at the upside. So if you attempted whatever you're considering, might you build confidence, develop skills, emotionally, financially, otherwise? What might be the benefits of, say, a base hit? Spend 10 to 15 minutes on this.Page three. This might be the most important, so don't skip it: ""The Cost of Inaction."" Humans are very good at considering what might go wrong if we try something new, say, ask for a raise. What we don't often consider is the atrocious cost of the status quo — not changing anything. So you should ask yourself, if I avoid this action or decision and actions and decisions like it, what might my life look like in, say, six months, 12 months, three years? Any further out, it starts to seem intangible. And really get detailed — again, emotionally, financially, physically, whatever.And when I did this, it painted a terrifying picture. I was self-medicating, my business was going to implode at any moment at all times, if I didn't step away. My relationships were fraying or failing. And I realized that inaction was no longer an option for me.Those are the three pages. That's it. That's fear-setting. And after this, I realized that on a scale of one to 10, one being minimal impact, 10 being maximal impact, if I took the trip, I was risking a one to three of temporary and reversible pain for an eight to 10 of positive, life-changing impact that could be a semi-permanent. So I took the trip. None of the disasters came to pass. There were some hiccups, sure. I was able to extricate myself from the business. I ended up extending that trip for a year and a half around the world, and that became the basis for my first book, that leads me here today.And I can trace all of my biggest wins and all of my biggest disasters averted back to doing fear-setting at least once a quarter. It's not a panacea. You'll find that some of your fears are very well-founded.(Laughter)But you shouldn't conclude that without first putting them under a microscope. And it doesn't make all the hard times, the hard choices, easy, but it can make a lot of them easier.I'd like to close with a profile of one of my favorite modern-day Stoics. This is Jerzy Gregorek. He is a four-time world champion in Olympic weightlifting, political refugee, published poet, 62 years old. He can still kick my ass and probably most asses in this room. He's an impressive guy.I spent a lot of time on his stoa, his porch, asking life and training advice. He was part of the Solidarity in Poland, which was a nonviolent movement for social change that was violently suppressed by the government. He lost his career as a firefighter. Then his mentor, a priest, was kidnapped, tortured, killed and thrown into a river. He was then threatened. He and his wife had to flee Poland, bounce from country to country until they landed in the US with next to nothing, sleeping on floors.He now lives in Woodside, California, in a very nice place, and of the 10,000-plus people I've met in my life, I would put him in the top 10, in terms of success and happiness. And there's a punchline coming, so pay attention. I sent him a text a few weeks ago, asking him: Had he ever read any Stoic philosophy? And he replied with two pages of text. This is very unlike him. He is a terse dude.(Laughter)And not only was he familiar with stoicism, but he pointed out, for all of his most important decisions, his inflection points, when he stood up for his principles and ethics, how he had used stoicism and something akin to fear-setting, which blew my mind.And he closed with two things. Number one: he couldn't imagine any life more beautiful than that of a Stoic. And the last was his mantra, which he applies to everything, and you can apply to everything:""Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.""The hard choices — what we most fear doing, asking, saying — these are very often exactly what we most need to do. And the biggest challenges and problems we face will never be solved with comfortable conversations, whether it's in your own head or with other people.So I encourage you to ask yourselves: Where in your lives right now might defining your fears be more important than defining your goals? Keeping in mind all the while, the words of Seneca: ""We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.""Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_why_you_should_define_your_fears_instead_of_your_goals
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"Michael Browning: engineer, innovator — inventor, really — and inspiring father. He had a passion for flight, as you can kind of sense from that rather dubious 1970s office-leaving present. And some 40 years after that was created, a small group of us got together to have a go, a run at the whole challenge of flight that inspired people for years, and do it in a very different kind of way. And that's the journey I'd like to share with you now.The starting hypothesis was one of the human mind and body, which, as you've seen for the last few days here, is an amazing construct. What if you augmented that wonderful machine with just the right technology? If you approach flight in that kind of real way, where could you get to?So my training partner here back in London, Denton, is doing a much better job of that kind of stuff than me. Guess what? It's London. The idea was that you augment that. And so, how do you augment that? Well, we bought one of these.This is a micro gas turbine. This was ground zero, so that little piece of kit proved really quite impressive, so we got two in a field. The real hero here, by the way, is, right in the background, there's a lady tending some vegetables, who does a brilliant job of trying to ignore us for a while —(Laughter)I think the only thing less happy is the grass, that we did probably damage quite badly.You get an idea of the thrust here, when I try to hold them horizontally and somewhat fail. That's around 50 kilos of thrust there. We were quite impressed with that. We thought we were getting somewhere.So there's only one sensible way to go from there: you get four.(Laughter)I have to say, I still like watching these back.So then we thought well, let's try and spread the load a bit. The legs are designed to take the load, so why don't we spread it out a bit? That bit was good. The harness — a nice idea but it didn't really work, as you'll see now. This whole journey was very much about trying things —(Laughter)Yeah, it really didn't work, did it?Trying things and learning by failing at them most of the time. And that included failing by falling over. If you notice, we've got five engines here — not to be put off by the fact one was in maintenance, still had a go.(Laughter)And then I pinched a fuel line. So again, good learning. We learned not to do that again.This was a blind alley.(Laughter)This was three on each arm — that was ridiculous. That was 70 kilos on each arm. Again, struck that one off.(Laughter)But we were starting to make some really quite convincing progress, just enough to make you believe that maybe — maybe we could get there. You can see, look — tantalizing. The model of one on each leg and two on each arm, on paper, that was enough thrust. And then we did what I'm about to show you now, and I still love watching this one. This was our first six-second, reasonably coherent flight.(Applause)That was the point where this endeavor went from: ""I'm really not sure this is going to work,"" to: ""Oh my god, it does work!"" From there on we then refined it, but we carried on falling over a lot. Falling over, like I say, is definitely the best way to learn. After a while, we starting really refining the layout of all of this. And you'll see, that's stability and control — there's no wires there or anything — that's a combination of us refining the technology, including with a Tupperware box on the back for the electronics and actually learning the balance and control.I'm now going to save your ears for the next short piece and talk over it. After a while, the jet engine noise is a bit annoying. This is only a few weeks ago. You can see the stability and control is really quite nice, and I'd like to think this somewhat validates that starting hypothesis, that the human mind and body, if properly augmented in that way, can achieve some pretty cool stuff. I mean, like I said: I'm not thinking about where I'm moving my arms at that stage. I'm looking at the objective of where I want to get to, and a bit like riding a bike, my arms are just doing their thing. It's a very strange experience.So where is all this headed?I'll talk over this landing — I think I land in this one.Well, I don't think anybody's going to go down to Walmart or take the kids to school in any of this stuff for a while, but the team at Gravity are building some awesome technology that's going to make this look like child's play. We're working on some things that will seek to bring this unusual experience of flight to a wider audience, beyond the events and displays we're doing. We're even starting to look for pilots two and three, if there's any volunteers.I've got this vision. It sounds audacious, but let's just stick it out there, that one day maybe we can rise up above a beach, fly up and down the coastline of it, rise up a bit higher, with some of the safety kit we're working on to make this achievable. Then over the horizon comes a Hercules with the ramp down. As it comes past, you start picking up speed and see if we can intercept — from the rear, not the front, that would be a mistake — and then try and land in the back. And as I say, that's a little way off at the moment.But this is also, if I take a big step back from this, this is also a very personal journey for me. Back to that lovely photo, or photo in a picture. Sadly, my father took his own life when I was 15, and left an awful lot of unfulfilled ambition. He was a wonderful inventor, a maverick creator. And I'd just like to think, if it was possible, if he was looking down, he would be — he'd certainly be smiling at some of the things we've done here, I think. So, it's a tribute to him.Thank you very much.(Applause)(Voice-over) Richard Browning: I'm probably more nervous about doing the demo after this. I've got a lot of things to get done today. Worst-case scenario, we don't get a clean start.Or we get an unplanned failure while I'm actually flying around. This is why we keep it very low, so the worst is I just look like an idiot and fall on my rear, as I said. So you can all enjoy that if that happens.(Music)(Jet engine accelerates)(Cheers)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_browning_how_i_built_a_jet_suit
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"My name is Katrina Spade, and I grew up in a medical family where it was fairly normal to talk about death and dying at the dinner table. But I didn't go into medicine like so many of my family members. Instead, I went to architecture school to learn how to design. And while I was there, I began to be curious about what would happen to my physical body after I died. What would my nearest and dearest do with me?So if the existence and the fact of your own mortality doesn't get you down, the state of our current funerary practices will. Today, almost 50 percent of Americans choose conventional burial. Conventional burial begins with embalming, where funeral staff drain bodily fluid and replace it with a mixture designed to preserve the corpse and give it a lifelike glow. Then, as you know, bodies are buried in a casket in a concrete-lined grave in a cemetery. All told, in US cemeteries, we bury enough metal to build a Golden Gate Bridge, enough wood to build 1,800 single family homes, and enough formaldehyde-laden embalming fluid to fill eight Olympic-size swimming pools.In addition, cemeteries all over the world are reaching capacity. Turns out, it doesn't really make good business sense to sell someone a piece of land for eternity.(Laughter)Whose idea was that?In some places, you can't buy a plot no matter how much money you have. As a result, cremation rates have risen fast. In 1950, if you suggested your grandmother be incinerated after she died, you'd probably be kicked from the family deathbed. But today, almost half of Americans choose cremation, citing simpler, cheaper and more ecological as reasons. I used to think that cremation was a sustainable form of disposition, but just think about it for a second. Cremation destroys the potential we have to give back to the earth after we've died. It uses an energy-intensive process to turn bodies into ash, polluting the air and contributing to climate change. All told, cremations in the US emit a staggering 600 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. The truly awful truth is that the very last thing that most of us will do on this earth is poison it.It's like we've created, accepted and death-denied our way into a status quo that puts as much distance between ourselves and nature as is humanly possible. Our modern funerary practices are designed to stave off the natural processes that happen to a body after death. In other words, they're meant to prevent us from decomposing. But the truth is that nature is really, really good at death. We've all seen it. When organic material dies in nature, microbes and bacteria break it down into nutrient-rich soil, completing the life cycle. In nature, death creates life.Back in architecture school, I was thinking about all this, and I set out on a plan to redesign death care. Could I create a system that was beneficial to the earth and that used nature as a guide rather than something to be feared? Something that was gentle to the planet? That planet, after all, supports our living bodies our whole lives.And while I was mulling this all over over the drawing board, the phone rang. It was my friend Kate. She was like, ""Hey, have you heard about the farmers who are composting whole cows?"" And I was like, ""Mmmm.""(Laughter)Turns out that farmers in agricultural institutions have been practicing something called livestock mortality composting for decades. Mortality composting is where you take an animal high in nitrogen and cover it with co-composting materials that are high in carbon. It's an aerobic process, so it requires oxygen, and it requires plenty of moisture as well. In the most basic setup, a cow is covered with a few feet of wood chips, which are high in carbon, and left outside for nature, for breezes to provide oxygen and rain to provide moisture. In about nine months, all that remains is a nutrient-rich compost. The flesh has been decomposed entirely, as have the bones. I know.(Laughter)So I would definitely call myself a decomposition nerd, but I am far, far from a scientist, and one way you can tell this is true is that I have often called the process of composting ""magic.""(Laughter)So basically, all we humans need to do is create the right environment for nature to do its job. It's like the opposite of antibacterial soap. Instead of fighting them, we welcome microbes and bacteria in with open arms. These tiny, amazing creatures break down molecules into smaller molecules and atoms, which are then incorporated into new molecules. In other words, that cow is transformed. It's no longer a cow. It's been cycled back into nature. See? Magic.You can probably imagine the light bulb that went off in my head after I received that phone call. I began designing a system based on the principles of livestock mortality composting that would take human beings and transform them into soil.Fast-forward five years and the project has grown in ways I truly never could have imagined. We've created a scalable, replicable non-profit urban model based on the science of livestock mortality composting that turns human beings into soil. We've partnered and collaborated with experts in soil science, decomposition, alternative death care, law and architecture. We've raised funds from foundations and individuals in order to design a prototype of this system, and we've heard from tens of thousands of people all over the world who want this option to be available. OK. In the next few years, it's our goal to build the first full-scale human composting facility right in the city of Seattle.(Applause)Imagine it, part public park, part funeral home, part memorial to the people we love, a place where we can reconnect with the cycles of nature and treat bodies with gentleness and respect.The infrastructure is simple. Inside a vertical core, bodies and wood chips undergo accelerated natural decomposition, or composting, and are transformed into soil. When someone dies, their body is taken to a human composting facility. After wrapping the deceased in a simple shroud, friends and family carry the body to the top of the core, which contains the natural decomposition system. During a laying in ceremony, they gently place the body into the core and cover it with wood chips. This begins the gentle transformation from human to soil. Over the next few weeks, the body decomposes naturally. Microbes and bacteria break down carbon, then protein, to create a new substance, a rich, earthy soil. This soil can then be used to grow new life. Eventually, you could be a lemon tree.(Applause)Yeah, thank you.(Applause)Who's thinking about lemon meringue pie right now?(Laughter)A lemon drop? Something stronger?So in addition to housing the core, these buildings will function to support the grieving by providing space for memorial services and end-of-life planning. The potential for repurposing is huge. Old churches and industrial warehouses can be converted into places where we create soil and honor life.We want to bring back the aspect of ritual that's been diluted over the past hundred years as cremation rates have risen and religious affiliation has declined. Our Seattle facility will function as a model for these places all over the world. We've heard from communities in South Africa, Australia, the UK, Canada and beyond. We're creating a design toolkit that will help others design and build facilities that will contain technical specifications and regulatory best practices. We want to help individuals, organizations, and down the road, municipalities design and build facilities in their own cities. The idea is that every one of these places should look and feel completely different with the same system inside. They're really meant to be designed for the neighborhood in which they reside and the community which they serve.The other idea is for supportive staff to be on hand to help families with the care and preparation of loved ones' bodies. We're banishing practices that bewilder and disempower and creating a system that is beautiful and meaningful and transparent. We believe that access to ecological death care is a human right.OK, so you know the old saying, if you can compost a cow, you can compost a human?(Laughter)Turns out, it's true. Since 2014, we've been running a pilot project in the hills of North Carolina with the Forensic Anthropology Department at Western Carolina University. Six donor bodies have been covered in wood chips, oxygen provided by breezes, microbes and bacteria doing their jobs. This pilot program has allowed us to demonstrate that it's possible to harness the incredible power of natural decomposition to turn human bodies into soil, and we're working with other universities as well. Soil scientists at Washington State University, the grad students, anyway, are working to compost teeth with amalgam fillings so that we can understand what happens to the mercury therein. Next up, we'll be beginning experiments to determine what happens to chemo drugs and pharmaceuticals during the composting process, and whether additional remediation will be needed.By the way, composting creates a great deal of heat, especially this particular type of composting. One week after we began composting our fifth donor body, the temperature inside that mound of wood chips reached 158 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine harnessing that heat to create energy or comfort the grieving on a cold day.The death care revolution has begun. It's an exciting time to be alive.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/katrina_spade_when_i_die_recompose_me
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"The best Christmas my children ever had was also the worst Christmas my husband and I ever had. Elizabeth, age seven, and her brother, Ian, age five, couldn't imagine why they were getting everything they wanted for Christmas. The reason Santa was so generous was because of something my husband Pat and I knew and the kids couldn't comprehend. Something that we had just learned, and it terrified us.This was 1994 and the story actually starts a few years earlier. For a couple of years I had noticed a rash on the sides of Elizabeth's neck that looked like prickly heat. For those same years, my father and brother both died of cancer, and I was probably overanxious about illness. The doctors assured us there was nothing wrong and I shouldn't worry, but I wasn't so sure. And so without a referral, and paying out-of-pocket, I took Elizabeth to a dermatologist. She was probably just allergic to something, but why did it appear just on the sides of her neck, this rash?So it's two days before Christmas, 1994, and the dermatologist takes a quick look at her neck and says, ""She has pseudoxanthoma elasticum."" And then he shuts off the lights and looks in her eyes. It turns out, by chance, this dermatologist also trained in ophthalmology. Our lucky day. I am sick to my stomach. ""Oma?"" Oma's like melanoma, lymphoma — cancer. ""Why are you looking in her eyes for a skin rash?"" I scream and make no sound.So there it is. Elizabeth has pseudoxanthoma elasticum, PXE for short. Questions mix with fear and erupt like bile in my throat. Why are you looking in her eyes? What do you know about this? How do you know for sure? What is the prognosis? My training in pastoral counseling did not prepare me for this.Dr. Bercovitch tells us everything he knows about PXE. It's a rare genetic disorder, it's systemic, it's a slowly progressing, premature aging disease. It causes loose wrinkly skin in the flexor areas. It causes legal blindness, like macular degeneration, and a host of cardiovascular problems. Little is known about this disease, and some people die in their 30s, say some of the reports at the time. He then just glances at our son and says, ""He has it, too."" We want to flee back to the land of normal.Two days after Christmas, researchers come from a university in Boston, and they take blood from us and our children for a research project focused on finding the gene. A few days later, researchers come from a medical center in New York and say they want blood, too. ""These are children. They're five and seven years old. Don't make them face the needle twice. Go and get your share from the other researchers."" They laugh, incredulous. ""Share?"" It is then that we learn that there is little sharing in biomedical research.This moment, more than any other, lit a fire beneath my husband Pat and me. Pat and I went to a medical school library and we copied every article we could find on PXE. We didn't understand a thing. We bought medical dictionaries and scientific textbooks and read everything we could get our hands on. And though we still didn't understand, we could see patterns, and it became quickly apparent within a month that there was no systematic effort to understand PXE.In addition, the lack of sharing that we experienced was pervasive. Researchers competed with each other because the ecosystem was designed to reward competition rather than to alleviate suffering. We realized that we would have to do work on this condition ourselves to find solutions for ourselves and others like us. But we faced two major barriers. The first one: Pat and I have no science background. At the time, he's the manager of a construction company, and I'm a former college chaplain stay-at-home mom — hardly the backgrounds to take the research world by storm. The second barrier: researchers don't share. People told us you can't herd cats. Well, yes you can if you move their food.(Laughter)(Applause)DNA and clinical data is the food. So we would collect blood and medical histories, and require that all scientists using these resources would share results with each other and with the people who donated.Well before the internet was in common use, Pat and I established PXE International, a nonprofit dedicated to initiating research and conducting it on PXE and also supporting individuals with the disease. Using traditional media, we garnered around 100-150 people around the world who we asked, would you give us your blood, your tissue, your medical histories, your medical records? And we brought all of that together.We quickly learned that this shared resource was not going to be enough. And so we decided we had to do hardcore bench science — hardcore research. So we borrowed bench space at a lab at Harvard. A wonderful neighbor came a couple times a week and sat with the kids from 8pm to 2am while Pat and I extracted DNA, ran and scored gels and searched for the gene. Generous postdocs tutored us as we went along. Within a few years, we found the gene. We patented it so that it would be freely available. We created a diagnostic test. We put together a research consortium. We held research meetings and opened a center of excellence. We found more than 4,000 people around the world who had PXE, and held patient meetings and did clinical trials and studies.Through all this, we lived with fear. Fear of the disease breathing down our neck while the clock ticked. Fear of researchers, so well credentialed and positioned in a world made for them. Fear that we were making the wrong choices. Fear that the naysayers were right and the cats would simply find a new food. But greater than all these fears was our drive to make a difference for our kids and for all those we had met along the way. And very quickly, we also realized what we were doing for one disease, we should do for all diseases.We joined with, and I eventually led, Genetic Alliance — a network of health advocacy, patient advocacy, research and health organizations. We built scalable and extensible resources, like biobanks and registries and directories of support for all diseases. And as I learned about all those diseases and all those disease communities, I realized that there were two secrets in health care that were impacting me greatly. The first: there are no ready answers for people like my kids or all the people I was working with, whether common or rare conditions. And the second secret: the answers lie in all of us together, donating our data, our biological samples and ultimately ourselves.There is a small groundswell of individuals who are working to change this. Citizen scientists, activists, hacks who are using crowdsourcing, do-it-yourself science are changing the game. Even President Obama and Vice President Biden are evangelists for the idea that people should be partners in research. This is a founding principle of our organization. Sure, it's really hard to discover and develop interventions and therapies. The science is hard, the regulatory regime is difficult. There are a lot of stakeholders with lots of interests and misaligned incentives like publishing, promotion and tenure. I don't fault scientists for following this path, but I challenge them and us to do this differently. To recognize that people are at the center.Genetic Alliance has experimented in what it will take to transform these crusty systems. Our goal is to work without boundaries. That sounds abstract, but for us it's quite practical. When we're frustrated that entities won't share data — data that comes from people who gave their energy, their time, their blood and even their tears — we need to stop and ask, ""How is it true that we could share, but we aren't?"" We're part of this system, too. How do we make it so that people can share ideas freely? So that people can take risks and move closer to one another?This leads to a dissolving of us versus them, not only for organizations but also for individuals. If I'm going to ask organizations or individuals to strive for these standards, then I too need to explore my own being and my practices. If I'm going to ask clinicians and researchers and administrators to take risks, then I, Sharon, need to take risks as well. I need to face my personal fears. My fear of not having enough impact. My fear of not leading well. My fear of not being enough.Just before they entered their teens, our kids stopped us in our tracks and said, ""You have to stop worrying about making a difference, making an impact, and instead, like us, learn to live with disease rather than fight it."" I have to ask, where does all my fear come from? The kids' declaration shines a spotlight on that fear. It arises from a bedrock of love. I love Elizabeth and Ian. I love people with PXE. I love people with any disease. I love people. Some of my colleagues have discovered that it is not death we fear, it is the enormity of our loving. This expansive love opens me to great pain as I face loss.As I discover my fear, I discover that I and all those around me have boundless capacity for love. And I also discover as I move into this fear, that I can learn many new things and find paths to things like practical solutions as well as the core of healing and health.I don't fear fear the way I used to. In fact lately, with enormous support from all my fellow journeyers, I notice that it's not a warning the way it used to be. I notice that instead, it's an invitation to go forward because in it lies love and the path to greater love. If I turn with gentle curiosity toward that fear, I find enormous wealth within myself and others and the ability to step into challenges that I never thought I could.My kids are ahead of me on that path still. At ages 29 and 27, they declare they are happy and healthy despite having manifestations of PXE in their skin and eyes and arteries. And so I invite you, us, we, to turn toward our fear; to embrace the things that scare us and find the love at the center. We'll not only find ourselves there but we'll also be able to step into the shoes of those we fear and those who fear us. If we breathe into that fear and are vulnerable with the systems and people who challenge us, our power as changemakers grows exponentially. And when we realize that working on our inner life is working on our outer life and outer work is inner work, we get down to what is real and shit gets done.(Laughter)There is no limit to what we can accomplish together.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_terry_science_didn_t_understand_my_kids_rare_disease_until_i_decided_to_study_it
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"(Music)Sophie Hawley-Weld: OK, you don't have to stand up, but ... we can see you really clearly —(Laughter)So you have to dance with us. And we have this, like, choreographed dance thing that we're about to do —Betta Lemme: Really easy.SHW: And we're going to flick our wrists like this, and you're going to do it with us. And you can also stand up.(Music)(Sings) I know I did not raise a wrist(Both sing) I know I did not capture itIt came, it came, it went, it wentIt conquered quickI was there and then I quitAwoo!I know I did not raise a wristI know I did not capture itIt came, it came, it went, it wentIt conquered quickI was there and then I quitAwoo!BL: (Speaks) There you go!(Music)SHW: We have another one coming up. It's a little finger-pointing dance.(Music)The people sitting down, I want to see your fingers pointing. Yeah!(Sings) I know I did not raise a wrist(Both sing) I know I did not capture it It came, it came, it went, it wentIt conquered quickI was there and then I quitAaaa ...(Applause)Awoo!(Music)(Clapping to the beat)(Music)Aaaa ...SHW: (Speaks) Alright, hand flick.(Both sing) I know I did not raise a wristI know I did not capture itIt came, it came, it went, it wentIt conquered quickI was there and then I quitI know I did not raise a wristI know I did not capture itIt came, it came, it went, it wentIt conquered quick I was there and then I quit(Music)Tucker Halpern: You guys are way more fun than I thought you'd be.(Laughter)(Music)Awoo!(Applause)SHW: Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sofi_tukker_awoo
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"I just want to share with you what I have been experiencing over the last five years in having the great privilege of traveling to many of the poorest countries in the world.This scene is one I see all the time everywhere, and these young children are looking at a smartphone, and the smartphone is having a huge impact in even the poorest countries. I said to my team, you know, what I see is a rise in aspirations all over the world. In fact, it seems to me that there's a convergence of aspirations. And I asked a team of economists to actually look into this. Is this true? Are aspirations converging all around the world? So they looked at things like Gallup polls about satisfaction in life and what they learned was that if you have access to the internet, your satisfaction goes up. But another thing happens that's very important: your reference income, the income to which you compare your own, also goes up. Now, if the reference income of a nation, for example, goes up 10 percent by comparing themselves to the outside, then on average, people's own incomes have to go up at least five percent to maintain the same level of satisfaction. But when you get down into the lower percentiles of income, your income has to go up much more if the reference income goes up 10 percent, something like 20 percent. And so with this rise of aspirations, the fundamental question is: Are we going to have a situation where aspirations are linked to opportunity and you get dynamism and economic growth, like that which happened in the country I was born in, in Korea? Or are aspirations going to meet frustration?This is a real concern, because between 2012 and 2015, terrorism incidents increased by 74 percent. The number of deaths from terrorism went up 150 percent. Right now, two billion people live in conditions of fragility, conflict, violence, and by 2030, more than 60 percent of the world's poor will live in these situations of fragility, conflict and violence. And so what do we do about meeting these aspirations? Are there new ways of thinking about how we can rise to meet these aspirations? Because if we don't, I'm extremely worried. Aspirations are rising as never before because of access to the internet. Everyone knows how everyone else lives. Has our ability to meet those aspirations risen as well?And just to get at the details of this, I want to share with you my own personal story. This is not my mother, but during the Korean War, my mother literally took her own sister, her younger sister, on her back, and walked at least part of the way to escape Seoul during the Korean War. Now, through a series of miracles, my mother and father both got scholarships to go to New York City. They actually met in New York City and got married in New York City. My father, too, was a refugee. At the age of 19, he left his family in the northern part of the country, escaped through the border and never saw his family again. Now, when they were married and living in New York, my father was a waiter at Patricia Murphy's restaurant. Their aspirations went up. They understood what it was like to live in a place like New York City in the 1950s.Well, my brother was born and they came back to Korea, and we had what I remember as kind of an idyllic life, but what was happening in Korea at that time was the country was one of the poorest in the world and there was political upheaval. There were demonstrations just down the street from our house all the time, students protesting against the military government. And at the time, the aspirations of the World Bank Group, the organization I lead now, were extremely low for Korea. Their idea was that Korea would find it difficult without foreign aid to provide its people with more than the bare necessities of life. So the situation is Korea is in a tough position, my parents have seen what life is like in the United States. They got married there. My brother was born there. And they felt that in order to give us an opportunity to reach their aspirations for us, we had to go and come back to the United States.Now, we came back. First we went to Dallas. My father did his dental degree all over again. And then we ended up moving to Iowa, of all places. We grew up in Iowa. And in Iowa, we went through the whole course. I went to high school, I went to college. And then one day, something that I'll never forget, my father picked me up after my sophomore year in college, and he was driving me home, and he said, ""Jim, what are your aspirations? What do you want to study? What do you want to do?"" And I said, ""Dad,"" — My mother actually was a philosopher, and had filled us with ideas about protest and social justice, and I said, ""Dad, I'm going to study political science and philosophy, and I'm going to become part of a political movement."" My father, the Korean dentist, slowly pulled the car over to the side of the road —(Laughter)He looked back at me, and he said, ""Jim, you finish your medical residency, you can study anything you want.""(Laughter)Now, I've told this story to a mostly Asian audience before. Nobody laughs. They just shake their head. Of course.(Laughter)(Applause)So, tragically, my father died at a young age, 30 years ago at the age of 57, what happens to be how old I am right now, and when he died in the middle of my medical and graduate studies — You see, I actually got around it by doing medicine and anthropology. I studied both of them in graduate school.But then right about that time, I met these two people, Ophelia Dahl and Paul Farmer. And Paul and I were in the same program. We were studying medicine and at the same time getting our PhD's in anthropology. And we began to ask some pretty fundamental questions. For people who have the great privilege of studying medicine and anthropology — I had come from parents who were refugees. Paul grew up literally in a bus in a swamp in Florida. He liked to call himself ""white trash."" And so we had this opportunity and we said, what is it that we need to do? Given our ridiculously elaborate educations, what is the nature of our responsibility to the world? And we decided that we needed to start an organization. It's called Partners in Health. And by the way, there's a movie made about that.(Applause)There's a movie that was just a brilliant movie they made about it called ""Bending the Arc."" It launched at Sundance this past January. Jeff Skoll is here. Jeff is one of the ones who made it happen. And we began to think about what it would take for us to actually have our aspirations reach the level of some of the poorest communities in the world.This is my very first visit to Haiti in 1988, and in 1988, we elaborated a sort of mission statement, which is we are going to make a preferential option for the poor in health. Now, it took us a long time, and we were graduate students in anthropology. We were reading up one side of Marx and down the other. Habermas. Fernand Braudel. We were reading everything and we had to come to a conclusion of how are we going to structure our work? So ""O for the P,"" we called it, a preferential option for the poor.The most important thing about a preferential option for the poor is what it's not. It's not a preferential option for your own sense of heroism. It's not a preferential option for your own idea about how to lift the poor out of poverty. It's not a preferential option for your own organization. And the hardest of all, it's not a preferential option for your poor. It's a preferential option for the poor.So what do you do? Well, Haiti, we started building — Everyone told us, the cost-effective thing is just focus on vaccination and maybe a feeding program. But what the Haitians wanted was a hospital. They wanted schools. They wanted to provide their children with the opportunities that they'd been hearing about from others, relatives, for example, who had gone to the United States. They wanted the same kinds of opportunities as my parents did. I recognized them. And so that's what we did. We built hospitals. We provided education. And we did everything we could to try to give them opportunities.Now, my experience really became intense at Partners in Health in this community, Carabayllo, in the northern slums of Lima, Peru. And in this community, we started out by really just going to people's homes and talking to people, and we discovered an outbreak, an epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. This is Melquiades. Melquiades was a patient at that time, he was about 18 years old, and he had a very difficult form of drug-resistant tuberculosis. All of the gurus in the world, the global health gurus, said it is not cost-effective to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis. It's too complicated. It's too expensive. You just can't do it. It can't be done. And in addition, they were getting angry at us, because the implication was if it could be done, we would have done it. Who do you think you are? And the people that we fought with were the World Health Organization and probably the organization we fought with most was the World Bank Group.Now, we did everything we could to convince Melquiades to take his medicines, because it's really hard, and not once during the time of treatment did Melquiades's family ever say, ""Hey, you know, Melquiades is just not cost-effective. Why don't you go on and treat somebody else?""(Laughter)I hadn't seen Melquiades for about 10 years and when we had our annual meetings in Lima, Peru a couple of years ago, the filmmakers found him and here is us getting together.(Applause)He has become a bit of a media star because he goes to the film openings, and he knows how to work an audience now.(Laughter)But as soon as we won — We did win. We won the argument. You should treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis — we heard the same arguments in the early 2000s about HIV. All of the leading global health people in the world said it is impossible to treat HIV in poor countries. Too expensive, too complicated, you can't do it. Compared to drug-resistant TB treatment, it's actually easier. And we were seeing patients like this. Joseph Jeune. Joseph Jeune also never mentioned that he was not cost-effective. A few months of medicines, and this is what he looked like.(Applause)We call that the Lazarus Effect of HIV treatment. Joseline came to us looking like this. This is what she looked like a few months later.(Applause)Now, our argument, our battle, we thought, was with the organizations that kept saying it's not cost-effective. We were saying, no, preferential option for the poor requires us to raise our aspirations to meet those of the poor for themselves. And they said, well, that's a nice thought but it's just not cost-effective. So in the nerdy way that we have operated Partners in Health, we wrote a book against, basically, the World Bank. It says that because the World Bank has focused so much on just economic growth and said that governments have to shrink their budgets and reduce expenditures in health, education and social welfare — we thought that was fundamentally wrong. And we argued with the World Bank. And then a crazy thing happened. President Obama nominated me to be President of the World Bank.(Applause)Now, when I went to do the vetting process with President Obama's team, they had a copy of ""Dying For Growth,"" and they had read every page. And I said, ""OK, that's it, right? You guys are going to drop me?"" He goes, ""Oh, no, no, it's OK."" And I was nominated, and I walked through the door of the World Bank Group in July of 2012, and that statement on the wall, ""Our dream is a world free of poverty."" A few months after that, we actually turned it into a goal: end extreme poverty by 2030, boost shared prosperity. That's what we do now at the World Bank Group. I feel like I have brought the preferential option for the poor to the World Bank Group.(Applause)But this is TED, and so I want to share with you some concerns, and then make a proposal.The Fourth Industrial Revolution, now, you guys know so much better than I do, but here's the thing that concerns me. What we hear about is job loss. You've all heard that. Our own data suggest to us that two thirds of all jobs, currently existing jobs in developing countries, will be lost because of automation. Now, you've got to make up for those jobs. Now, one of the ways to make up for those jobs is to turn community health workers into a formal labor force. That's what we want to do.(Applause)We think the numbers will work out, that as health outcomes get better and as people have formal work, we're going to be able to train them with the soft-skills training that you add to it to become workers that will have a huge impact, and that may be the one area that grows the most.But here's the other thing that bothers me: right now it seems pretty clear to me that the jobs of the future will be more digitally demanding, and there is a crisis in childhood stunting. So these are photos from Charles Nelson, who shared these with us from Harvard Medical School. And what these photos show on the one side, on the left side, is a three-month-old who has been stunted: not adequate nutrition, not adequate stimulation. And on the other side, of course, is a normal child, and the normal child has all of these neuronal connections. Now, the neuronal connections are important, because that is the definition of human capital. Now, we know that we can reduce these rates. We can reduce these rates of childhood stunting quickly, but if we don't, India, for example, with 38 percent childhood stunting, how are they going to compete in the economy of the future if 40 percent of their future workers cannot achieve educationally and certainly we worry about achieving economically in a way that will help the country as a whole grow.Now, what are we going to do? 78 trillion dollars is the size of the global economy. 8.55 trillion dollars are sitting in negative interest rate bonds. That means that you give the German central bank your money and then you pay them to keep your money. That's a negative interest rate bond. 24.4 trillion dollars in very low-earning government bonds. And 8 trillion literally sitting in the hands of rich people under their very large mattresses. What we are trying to do is now use our own tools — and just to get nerdy for a second, we're talking about first-loss risk debt instruments, we're talking about derisking, blended finance, we're talking about political risk insurance, credit enhancement — all these things that I've now learned at the World Bank Group that rich people use every single day to make themselves richer, but we haven't used aggressively enough on behalf of the poor to bring this capital in.(Applause)So does this work? Can you actually bring private-sector players into a country and really make things work? Well, we've done it a couple of times. This is Zambia, Scaling Solar. It's a box-set solution from the World Bank where we come in and we do all the things you need to attract private-sector investors. And in this case, Zambia went from having a cost of electricity at 25 cents a kilowatt-hour, and by just doing simple things, doing the auction, changing some policies, we were able to bring the cost down. Lowest bid, 25 cents a kilowatt-hour for Zambia? The lowest bid was 4.7 cents a kilowatt-hour. It's possible.(Applause)But here's my proposal for you. This is from a group called Zipline, a cool company, and they literally are rocket scientists. They figured out how to use drones in Rwanda. This is me launching a drone in Rwanda that delivers blood anywhere in the country in less than an hour. So we save lives, this program saved lives —(Applause)This program made money for Zipline and this program saved huge amounts of money for Rwanda. That's what we need, and we need that from all of you. I'm asking you, carve out a little bit of time in your brains to think about the technology that you work on, the companies that you start, the design that you do. Think a little bit and work with us to see if we can come up with these kinds of extraordinary win-win solutions.I'm going to leave you with one final story. I was in Tanzania, and I was in a classroom. This is me with a classroom of 11-year-olds. And I asked them, as I always do, ""What do you want to be when you grow up?"" Two raised their hands and said, ""I want to be President of the World Bank.""(Laughter)And just like you, my own team and their teachers laughed. But then I stopped them. I said, ""Look, I want to tell you a story. When I was born in South Korea, this is what it looked like. This is where I came from. And when I was three years old, in preschool, I don't think that George David Woods, the President of the World Bank, if he had visited Korea on that day and come to my classroom, that he would have thought that the future President of the World Bank was sitting in that classroom. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you cannot be President of the World Bank.""Now — thank you.(Applause)Let me leave you with one thought. I came from a country that was the poorest in the world. I'm President of the World Bank. I cannot and I will not pull up the ladder behind me. This is urgent. Aspirations are going up. Everywhere aspirations are going up. You folks in this room, work with us. We know that we can find those Zipline-type solutions and help the poor leapfrog into a better world, but it won't happen until we work together. The future ""you"" — and especially for your children — the future you will depend on how much care and compassion we bring to ensuring that the future ""us"" provides equality of opportunity for every child in the world.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: You'd almost think people are surprised to hear a talk like this from the President of the World Bank. It's kind of cool. I'd encourage you to even be a little more specific on your proposal. There's many investors, entrepreneurs in this room. How will you partner with them? What's your proposal?Jim Yong Kim: Can I get nerdy for just a second.CA: Get nerdy. Absolutely. JYK: So here's what we did. Insurance companies never invest in developing country infrastructure, for example, because they can't take the risk. They're holding money for people who pay for insurance. So what we did was a Swedish International Development Association gave us a little bit of money, we went out and raised a little bit more money, a hundred million, and we took first loss, meaning if this thing goes bad, 10 percent of the loss we'll just eat, and the rest of you will be safe. And that created a 90-percent chunk, tranche that was triple B, investment-grade, so the insurance companies invested. So for us, what we're doing is taking our public money and using it to derisk specific instruments to bring people in from the outside. So all of you who are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash, come to us. Right?(Laughter)CA: And what you're specifically looking for are investment proposals that create employment in the developing world.JYK: Absolutely. Absolutely. So these will be, for example, in infrastructure that brings energy, builds roads, bridges, ports. These kinds of things are necessary to create jobs, but also what we're saying is you may think that the technology you're working on or the business that you're working on may not have applications in the developing world, but look at Zipline. And that Zipline thing didn't happen just because of the quality of the technology. It was because they engaged with the Rwandans early and used artificial intelligence — one thing, Rwanda has great broadband — but these things fly completely on their own. So we will help you do that. We will make the introductions. We will even provide financing. We will help you do that.CA: How much capital is the World Bank willing to deploy to back those kinds of efforts?JYK: Chris, you're always getting me to try to do something like this.CA: I'm trying to get you in trouble. JYK: So here's what we're going to do. We have 25 billion a year that we're investing in poor countries, the poorest countries. And as we invest over the next three years, 25 billion a year, we have got to think with you about how to use that money more effectively. So I can't give you a specific number. It depends on the quality of the ideas. So bring us your ideas, and I don't think that financing is going to be the problem.CA: All right, you heard it from the man himself.Jim, thanks so much. JYK: Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jim_yong_kim_doesn_t_everyone_deserve_a_chance_at_a_good_life
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"I visit the future for a living. Not just one future, but many possible futures, bringing back evidences from those futures for you to experience today. Like an archaeologist of the future. Over the years, my many journeys have brought back things like a new species of synthetically engineered bees; a book named, ""Pets as Protein;"" a machine that makes you rich by trading your genetic data; a lamp powered by sugar; a computer for growing food.OK, so I don't actually travel to different futures — yet. But my husband Jon and I spend a lot of time thinking and creating visions of different futures in our studio. We are constantly looking out for weak signals, those murmurs of future potential. Then we trace those threads of potential out into the future, asking: What might it feel like to live in this future? What might we see, hear and even breathe? Then we run experiments, build prototypes, make objects, bringing aspects of these futures to life, making them concrete and tangible so you can really feel the impact of those future possibilities here and now. But this work is not about predictions. It's about creating tools — tools that can help connect our present and our future selves so we become active participants in creating a future we want — a future that works for all.So how do we go about doing this? For a recent project called Drone Aviary, we were interested in exploring what it would mean to live with drones in our cities. Drones that have the power to see things we can't, to go places we can't and to do so with increasing autonomy. But to understand the technology, getting our hands dirty was crucial. So we built several different drones in our studio. We gave them names, functions and then flew them — but not without difficulty. Things came loose, GPS signals glitched and drones crashed. But it was through such experimentation that we could construct a very concrete and very experiential slice of one possible future.So now, let's go to that future. Let's imagine we are living in a city with drones like this one. We call it The Nightwatchman. It patrols the streets, often spotted in the evenings and at night. Initially, many of us were annoyed by its low, dull hum. But then, like everything else, we got used to it. Now, what if you could see the world through its eyes? See how it constantly logs every resident of our neighborhood; logging the kids who play football in the no-ballgame area and marking them as statutory nuisances.(Laughter)And then see how it disperses this other group, who are teenagers, with the threat of an autonomously issued injunction. And then there's this giant floating disc called Madison. Its glaring presence is so overpowering, I can't help but stare at it. But if feels like each time I look at it, it knows a little more about me — like it keeps flashing all these Brianair adverts at me, as if it knows about the holiday I'm planning. I'm not sure if I find this mildly entertaining or just entirely invasive.Back to the present. In creating this future, we learned a lot. Not just about how these machines work, but what it would feel like to live alongside them. Whilst drones like Madison and Nightwatchman, in these particular forms, are not real yet, most elements of a drone future are in fact very real today. For instance, facial recognition systems are everywhere — in our phones, even in our thermostats and in cameras around our cities — keeping a record of everything we do, whether it's an advertisement we glanced at or a protest we attended. These things are here, and we often don't understand how they work, and what their consequences could be. And we see this all around us. This difficulty in even imagining how the consequences of our actions today will affect our future.Last year, where I live, in the UK, there was a referendum where the people could vote for the UK to leave the EU or stay in the EU, popularly known as ""Brexit."" And soon after the results came out, a word began to surface called ""Bregret"" —(Laughter)describing people who chose to vote for Brexit as a protest, but without thinking through its potential consequences. And this disconnect is evident in some of the simplest things. Say you go out for a quick drink. Then you decide you wouldn't mind a few more. You know you'll wake up in the morning feeling awful, but you justify it by saying, ""The other me in the future will deal with that."" But as we find out in the morning, that future ""you"" is you.When I was growing up in India in the late '70s and early '80s, there was a feeling that the future both needed to and could actually be planned. I remember my parents had to plan for some of the simplest things. When they wanted a telephone in our house, they needed to order it and then wait — wait for nearly five years before it got installed in our house.(Laughter)And then if they wanted to call my grandparents who lived in another city, they needed to book something called a ""trunk call,"" and then wait again, for hours or even days. And then abruptly, the phone would ring at two in the morning, and all of us would jump out of our beds and gather round the phone, shrieking into it, discussing general well-being at two in the morning.Today it can feel like things are happening too fast — so fast, that it can become really difficult for us to form an understanding of our place in history. It creates an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety, and so, we let the future just happen to us. We don't connect with that future ""us."" We treat our future selves as a stranger, and the future as a foreign land. It's not a foreign land; it's unfolding right in front of us, continually being shaped by our actions today. We are that future, and so I believe fighting for a future we want is more urgent and necessary than ever before.We have learned in our work that one of the most powerful means of effecting change is when people can directly, tangibly and emotionally experience some of the future consequences of their actions today. Earlier this year, the government of the United Arab Emirates invited us to help them shape their country's energy strategy all the way up to 2050. Based on the government's econometric data, we created this large city model, and visualized many possible futures on it. As I was excitably taking a group of government officials and members of energy companies through one sustainable future on our model, one of the participants told me, ""I cannot imagine that in the future people will stop driving cars and start using public transport."" And then he said, ""There's no way I can tell my own son to stop driving his car.""But we were prepared for this reaction. Working with scientists in a chemistry lab in my home city in India, we had created approximate samples of what the air would be like in 2030 if our behavior stays the same. And so, I walked the group over to this object that emits vapor from those air samples. Just one whiff of the noxious polluted air from 2030 brought home the point that no amount of data can. This is not the future you would want your children to inherit. The next day, the government made a big announcement. They would be investing billions of dollars in renewables. We don't know what part our future experiences played in this decision, but we know that they've changed their energy policy to mitigate such a scenario.While something like air from the future is very effective and tangible, the trajectory from our present to a future consequence is not always so linear. Even when a technology is developed with utopian ideals, the moment it leaves the laboratory and enters the world, it is subject to forces outside of the creators' control. For one particular project, we investigated medical genomics: the technology of gathering and using people's genetic data to create personalized medicine. We were asking: What are some of the unintended consequences of linking our genetics to health care? To explore this question further, we created a fictional lawsuit, and brought it to life through 31 pieces of carefully crafted evidence. So we built an illegal genetic clinic, a DIY carbon dioxide incubator, and even bought frozen mice on eBay.So now let's go to that future where this lawsuit is unfolding, and meet the defendant, Arnold Mann. Arnold is being prosecuted by this global giant biotech company called Dynamic Genetics, because they have evidence that Arnold has illegally inserted the company's patented genetic material into his body. How on earth did Arnold manage to do that? Well, it all started when Arnold was asked to submit a saliva sample in this spit kit to the NHI — the UK's National Health Insurance service. When Arnold received his health insurance bill, he was shocked and scared to see that his premiums had gone through the roof, beyond anything he or his family could ever afford.The state's algorithm had scanned his genetic data and found the risk of a chronic health condition lurking in his DNA. And so Arnold had to start paying toward the potential costs of that future disease — potential future disease from today. In that moment of fear and panic, Arnold slipped through the city into the dark shadows of this illegal clinic for treatment — a treatment that would modify his DNA so that the state's algorithm would no longer see him as a risk, and his insurance premiums would become affordable again. But Arnold was caught. And the legal proceedings in the case Dynamic Genetics v. Mann began.In bringing such a future to life, what was important to us was that people could actually touch, see and feel its potential, because such an immediate and close encounter provokes people to ask the right questions, questions like: What are the implications of living in a world where I'm judged on my genetics? Or: Who might claim ownership to my genetic data, and what might they do with it? If this feels even slightly out-there or farfetched, today there's a little-known bill being passed through the American congress known as HR 1313, Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act. This bill proposes to amend the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, popularly known as GINA, and would allow employers to ask about family medical history and genetic data to all employees for the first time. Those who refuse would face large penalties.In the work I've shown so far, whether it was drones or genetic crimes, these stories describe troubling futures with the intention of helping us avoid those futures. But what about what we can't avoid? Today, especially with climate change, it looks like we are heading for trouble. And so what we want to do now is to prepare for that future by developing tools and attitudes that can help us find hope — hope that can inspire action.Currently, we are running an experiment in our studio. It's a work in progress. Based on climate data projections, we are exploring a future where the Western world has moved from abundance to scarcity. We imagine living in a future city with repeated flooding, periods with almost no food in supermarkets, economic instabilities, broken supply chains. What can we do to not just survive, but prosper in such a world? What food can we eat?To really step inside these questions, we are building this room in a flat in London from 2050. It's like a little time capsule that we reclaimed from the future. We stripped it down to the bare minimum. Everything we lovingly put in our homes, like flat-panel TVs, internet-connected fridges and artisanal furnishings all had to go. And in its place, we're building food computers from abandoned, salvaged and repurposed materials, turning today's waste into tomorrow's dinner. For instance, we've just finished building our first fully automated fogponics machine. It uses the technique of fogponics — so just fog as a nutrient, not even water or soil — to grow things quickly. At the moment, we have successfully grown tomatoes. But we'll need more food than what we can grow in this small room. So what else could we forage from the city? Insects? Pigeons? Foxes?Earlier, we brought back air from the future. This time we are bringing an entire room from the future, a room full of hope, tools and tactics to create positive action in hostile conditions. Spending time in this room, a room that could be our own future home, makes the consequences of climate change and food insecurity much more immediate and tangible.What we're learning through such experiments and our practice and the people we engage with is that creating concrete experiences can bridge the disconnect between today and tomorrow. By putting ourselves into different possible futures, by becoming open and willing to embrace the uncertainty and discomfort that such an act can bring, we have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities. We can find optimistic futures; we can find paths forward; we can move beyond hope into action. It means we have the chance to change direction, a chance to have our voices heard, a chance to write ourselves into a future we want. Other worlds are possible.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anab_jain_why_we_need_to_imagine_different_futures
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"I'm going to speak to you about the global refugee crisis and my aim is to show you that this crisis is manageable, not unsolvable, but also show you that this is as much about us and who we are as it is a trial of the refugees on the front line.For me, this is not just a professional obligation, because I run an NGO supporting refugees and displaced people around the world. It's personal.I love this picture. That really handsome guy on the right, that's not me. That's my dad, Ralph, in London, in 1940 with his father Samuel. They were Jewish refugees from Belgium. They fled the day the Nazis invaded. And I love this picture, too. It's a group of refugee children arriving in England in 1946 from Poland. And in the middle is my mother, Marion. She was sent to start a new life in a new country on her own at the age of 12. I know this: if Britain had not admitted refugees in the 1940s, I certainly would not be here today.Yet 70 years on, the wheel has come full circle. The sound is of walls being built, vengeful political rhetoric, humanitarian values and principles on fire in the very countries that 70 years ago said never again to statelessness and hopelessness for the victims of war. Last year, every minute, 24 more people were displaced from their homes by conflict, violence and persecution: another chemical weapon attack in Syria, the Taliban on the rampage in Afghanistan, girls driven from their school in northeast Nigeria by Boko Haram. These are not people moving to another country to get a better life. They're fleeing for their lives.It's a real tragedy that the world's most famous refugee can't come to speak to you here today. Many of you will know this picture. It shows the lifeless body of five-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee who died in the Mediterranean in 2015. He died alongside 3,700 others trying to get to Europe. The next year, 2016, 5,000 people died. It's too late for them, but it's not too late for millions of others.It's not too late for people like Frederick. I met him in the Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania. He's from Burundi. He wanted to know where could he complete his studies. He'd done 11 years of schooling. He wanted a 12th year. He said to me, ""I pray that my days do not end here in this refugee camp.""And it's not too late for Halud. Her parents were Palestinian refugees living in the Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus. She was born to refugee parents, and now she's a refugee herself in Lebanon. She's working for the International Rescue Committee to help other refugees, but she has no certainty at all about her future, where it is or what it holds.This talk is about Frederick, about Halud and about millions like them: why they're displaced, how they survive, what help they need and what our responsibilities are. I truly believe this, that the biggest question in the 21st century concerns our duty to strangers. The future ""you"" is about your duties to strangers. You know better than anyone, the world is more connected than ever before, yet the great danger is that we're consumed by our divisions. And there is no better test of that than how we treat refugees.Here are the facts: 65 million people displaced from their homes by violence and persecution last year. If it was a country, that would be the 21st largest country in the world. Most of those people, about 40 million, stay within their own home country, but 25 million are refugees. That means they cross a border into a neighboring state. Most of them are living in poor countries, relatively poor or lower-middle-income countries, like Lebanon, where Halud is living. In Lebanon, one in four people is a refugee, a quarter of the whole population.And refugees stay for a long time. The average length of displacement is 10 years. I went to what was the world's largest refugee camp, in eastern Kenya. It's called Dadaab. It was built in 1991-92 as a ""temporary camp"" for Somalis fleeing the civil war. I met Silo. And naïvely I said to Silo, ""Do you think you'll ever go home to Somalia?"" And she said, ""What do you mean, go home? I was born here."" And then when I asked the camp management how many of the 330,000 people in that camp were born there, they gave me the answer: 100,000. That's what long-term displacement means.Now, the causes of this are deep: weak states that can't support their own people, an international political system weaker than at any time since 1945 and differences over theology, governance, engagement with the outside world in significant parts of the Muslim world. Now, those are long-term, generational challenges. That's why I say that this refugee crisis is a trend and not a blip. And it's complex, and when you have big, large, long-term, complex problems, people think nothing can be done.When Pope Francis went to Lampedusa, off the coast of Italy, in 2014, he accused all of us and the global population of what he called ""the globalization of indifference."" It's a haunting phrase. It means that our hearts have turned to stone. Now, I don't know, you tell me. Are you allowed to argue with the Pope, even at a TED conference? But I think it's not right. I think people do want to make a difference, but they just don't know whether there are any solutions to this crisis. And what I want to tell you today is that though the problems are real, the solutions are real, too.Solution one: these refugees need to get into work in the countries where they're living, and the countries where they're living need massive economic support. In Uganda in 2014, they did a study: 80 percent of refugees in the capital city Kampala needed no humanitarian aid because they were working. They were supported into work.Solution number two: education for kids is a lifeline, not a luxury, when you're displaced for so long. Kids can bounce back when they're given the proper social, emotional support alongside literacy and numeracy. I've seen it for myself. But half of the world's refugee children of primary school age get no education at all, and three-quarters of secondary school age get no education at all. That's crazy.Solution number three: most refugees are in urban areas, in cities, not in camps. What would you or I want if we were a refugee in a city? We would want money to pay rent or buy clothes. That is the future of the humanitarian system, or a significant part of it: give people cash so that you boost the power of refugees and you'll help the local economy.And there's a fourth solution, too, that's controversial but needs to be talked about. The most vulnerable refugees need to be given a new start and a new life in a new country, including in the West. The numbers are relatively small, hundreds of thousands, not millions, but the symbolism is huge. Now is not the time to be banning refugees, as the Trump administration proposes. It's a time to be embracing people who are victims of terror. And remember —(Applause)Remember, anyone who asks you, ""Are they properly vetted?"" that's a really sensible and good question to ask. The truth is, refugees arriving for resettlement are more vetted than any other population arriving in our countries. So while it's reasonable to ask the question, it's not reasonable to say that refugee is another word for terrorist.Now, what happens —(Applause)What happens when refugees can't get work, they can't get their kids into school, they can't get cash, they can't get a legal route to hope? What happens is they take risky journeys. I went to Lesbos, this beautiful Greek island, two years ago. It's a home to 90,000 people. In one year, 500,000 refugees went across the island. And I want to show you what I saw when I drove across to the north of the island: a pile of life jackets of those who had made it to shore. And when I looked closer, there were small life jackets for children, yellow ones. And I took this picture. You probably can't see the writing, but I want to read it for you. ""Warning: will not protect against drowning."" So in the 21st century, children are being given life jackets to reach safety in Europe even though those jackets will not save their lives if they fall out of the boat that is taking them there.This is not just a crisis, it's a test. It's a test that civilizations have faced down the ages. It's a test of our humanity. It's a test of us in the Western world of who we are and what we stand for. It's a test of our character, not just our policies. And refugees are a hard case. They do come from faraway parts of the world. They have been through trauma. They're often of a different religion. Those are precisely the reasons we should be helping refugees, not a reason not to help them. And it's a reason to help them because of what it says about us. It's revealing of our values. Empathy and altruism are two of the foundations of civilization. Turn that empathy and altruism into action and we live out a basic moral credo.And in the modern world, we have no excuse. We can't say we don't know what's happening in Juba, South Sudan, or Aleppo, Syria. It's there, in our smartphone in our hand. Ignorance is no excuse at all. Fail to help, and we show we have no moral compass at all.It's also revealing about whether we know our own history. The reason that refugees have rights around the world is because of extraordinary Western leadership by statesmen and women after the Second World War that became universal rights. Trash the protections of refugees, and we trash our own history. This is —(Applause)This is also revealing about the power of democracy as a refuge from dictatorship. How many politicians have you heard say, ""We believe in the power of our example, not the example of our power."" What they mean is what we stand for is more important than the bombs we drop. Refugees seeking sanctuary have seen the West as a source of hope and a place of haven. Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Eritreans, Cubans, they've come to the West for safety. We throw that away at our peril.And there's one other thing it reveals about us: whether we have any humility for our own mistakes. I'm not one of these people who believes that all the problems in the world are caused by the West. They're not. But when we make mistakes, we should recognize it. It's not an accident that the country which has taken more refugees than any other, the United States, has taken more refugees from Vietnam than any other country. It speaks to the history. But there's more recent history, in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can't make up for foreign policy errors by humanitarian action, but when you break something, you have a duty to try to help repair it, and that's our duty now.Do you remember at the beginning of the talk, I said I wanted to explain that the refugee crisis was manageable, not insoluble? That's true. I want you to think in a new way, but I also want you to do things. If you're an employer, hire refugees. If you're persuaded by the arguments, take on the myths when family or friends or workmates repeat them. If you've got money, give it to charities that make a difference for refugees around the world. If you're a citizen, vote for politicians who will put into practice the solutions that I've talked about.(Applause)The duty to strangers shows itself in small ways and big, prosaic and heroic. In 1942, my aunt and my grandmother were living in Brussels under German occupation. They received a summons from the Nazi authorities to go to Brussels Railway Station. My grandmother immediately thought something was amiss. She pleaded with her relatives not to go to Brussels Railway Station. Her relatives said to her, ""If we don't go, if we don't do what we're told, then we're going to be in trouble."" You can guess what happened to the relatives who went to Brussels Railway Station. They were never seen again. But my grandmother and my aunt, they went to a small village south of Brussels where they'd been on holiday in the decade before, and they presented themselves at the house of the local farmer, a Catholic farmer called Monsieur Maurice, and they asked him to take them in. And he did, and by the end of the war, 17 Jews, I was told, were living in that village.And when I was teenager, I asked my aunt, ""Can you take me to meet Monsieur Maurice?"" And she said, ""Yeah, I can. He's still alive. Let's go and see him."" And so, it must have been '83, '84, we went to see him. And I suppose, like only a teenager could, when I met him, he was this white-haired gentleman, I said to him, ""Why did you do it? Why did you take that risk?"" And he looked at me and he shrugged, and he said, in French, ""On doit."" ""One must."" It was innate in him. It was natural. And my point to you is it should be natural and innate in us, too. Tell yourself, this refugee crisis is manageable, not unsolvable, and each one of us has a personal responsibility to help make it so. Because this is about the rescue of us and our values as well as the rescue of refugees and their lives.Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)Bruno Giussani: David, thank you. David Miliband: Thank you.BG: Those are strong suggestions and your call for individual responsibility is very strong as well, but I'm troubled by one thought, and it's this: you mentioned, and these are your words, ""extraordinary Western leadership"" which led 60-something years ago to the whole discussion about human rights, to the conventions on refugees, etc. etc. That leadership happened after a big trauma and happened in a consensual political space, and now we are in a divisive political space. Actually, refugees have become one of the divisive issues. So where will leadership come from today?DM: Well, I think that you're right to say that the leadership forged in war has a different temper and a different tempo and a different outlook than leadership forged in peace. And so my answer would be the leadership has got to come from below, not from above. I mean, a recurring theme of the conference this week has been about the democratization of power. And we've got to preserve our own democracies, but we've got to also activate our own democracies. And when people say to me, ""There's a backlash against refugees,"" what I say to them is, ""No, there's a polarization, and at the moment, those who are fearful are making more noise than those who are proud."" And so my answer to your question is that we will sponsor and encourage and give confidence to leadership when we mobilize ourselves. And I think that when you are in a position of looking for leadership, you have to look inside and mobilize in your own community to try to create conditions for a different kind of settlement.BG: Thank you, David. Thanks for coming to TED.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_miliband_the_refugee_crisis_is_a_test_of_our_character
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"I want to give you a new perspective. That sounds grandiose, and it is. I left Ireland yesterday morning. I traveled from Dublin to New York independently. But the design of an airport, plane and terminal offers little independence when you're 105 and a half centimeters tall. For Americans, that's 3' 5"". I was whisked through the airport by airline assistants in a wheelchair. Now, I don't need to use a wheelchair, but the design of an airport and its lack of accessibility means that it's my only way to get through. With my carry-on bag between my feet, I was wheeled through security, preclearance and I arrived at my boarding gate.I use the accessibility services in the airport because most of the terminal is just not designed with me in mind. Take security, for example. I'm not strong enough to lift my carry-on bag from the ground to the carousel. I stand at eye level with it. And those who work in that space for safety purposes cannot help me and cannot do it for me. Design inhibits my autonomy and my independence. But traveling at this size, it isn't all bad. The leg room in economy is like business class.(Laughter)I often forget that I'm a little person. It's the physical environment and society that remind me. Using a public bathroom is an excruciating experience. I walk into the cubicle but I can't reach the lock on the door. I'm creative and resilient. I look around and see if there's a bin that I can turn upside down. Is it safe? Not really. Is it hygienic and sanitary? Definitely not. But the alternative is much worse. If that doesn't work, I use my phone. It gives me an additional four- to six-inch reach, and I try to jam the lock closed with my iPhone. Now, I imagine that's not what Jony Ive had in mind when he designed the iPhone, but it works. The alternative is that I approach a stranger. I apologize profusely and I ask them to stand guard outside my cubicle door. They do and I emerge grateful but absolutely mortified, and hope that they didn't notice that I left the bathroom without washing my hands. I carry hand sanitizer with me every single day because the sink, soap dispenser, hand dryer and mirror are all out of my reach.Now, the accessible bathroom is somewhat of an option. In this space, I can reach the lock on the door, the sink, the soap dispenser, the hand dryer and the mirror. Yet, I cannot use the toilet. It is deliberately designed higher so that wheelchair users can transfer across with ease. This is a wonderful and necessary innovation, but in the design world, when we describe a new project or idea as accessible, what does that mean? Who is it accessible to? And whose needs are not being accommodated for?Now, the bathroom is an example of where design impinges upon my dignity, but the physical environment impacts upon me in much more casual ways too, something as simple as ordering a cup of coffee. Now, I'll admit it. I drink far too much coffee. My order is a skinny vanilla latte, but I'm trying to wean myself off the syrup. But the coffee shop, it's not designed well, at least not for me. Queuing, I'm standing beside the pastry cabinet and the barista calls for the next order. ""Next, please!"" they shout. They can't see me. The person next to me in the queue points to my existence and everyone is embarrassed. I order as quick as I can and I move along to collect my coffee. Now, think just for a second. Where do they put it? Up high and without a lid. Reaching up to collect a coffee that I have paid for is an incredibly dangerous experience.But design also impinges on the clothes that I want to wear. I want garments that reflect my personality. It's difficult to find in the childrenswear department. And often womenswear requires far too many alterations. I want shoes that affect my maturity, professionalism and sophistication. Instead, I'm offered sneakers with Velcro straps and light-up shoes. Now, I'm not totally opposed to light-up shoes.(Laughter)But design also impacts on such simple things, like sitting on a chair. I cannot go from a standing to a seating position with grace. Due to the standards of design heights of chairs, I have to crawl on my hands and knees just to get on top of it, whilst also being conscious that it might tip over at any stage.But whilst design impacts on me whether it's a chair, a bathroom, a coffee shop, or clothes, I rely on and benefit from the kindness of strangers. But not everybody is so nice. I'm reminded that I'm a little person when a stranger points, stares, laughs, calls me a name, or takes a photograph of me. This happens almost every day. With the rise of social media, it has given me an opportunity and a platform to have a voice as a blogger and as an activist, but it has also made me nervous that I might become a meme or a viral sensation, all without my consent.So let's take a moment right now to make something very clear. The word ""midget"" is a slur. It evolved from PT Barnum's era of circuses and freak shows. Society has evolved. So should our vocabulary. Language is a powerful tool. It does not just name our society. It shapes it.I am incredibly proud to be a little person, to have inherited the condition of achondroplasia. But I am most proud to be Sinead. Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism. Achondroplasia translates as ""without cartilage formation."" I have short limbs and achondroplastic facial features, my forehead and my nose. My arms do not straighten fully, but I can lick my elbow. I'm not showing you that one. Achondroplasia occurs in approximately one in every 20,000 births. 80 percent of little people are born to two average-height parents. That means that anybody in this room could have a child with achondroplasia. Yet, I inherited my condition from my dad. I'd like to show you a photo of my family. My mother is average height, my father is a little person and I am the eldest of five children. I have three sisters and one brother. They are all average height. I am incredibly fortunate to have been born into a family that cultivated my curiosity and my tenacity, that protected me from the unkindness and ignorance of strangers and that armed me with the resilience, creativity and confidence that I needed to survive and manipulate the physical environment and society. If I was to pinpoint any reason why I am successful, it is because I was and I am a loved child, now, a loved child with a lot of sass and sarcasm, but a loved child nonetheless.In giving you an insight into who I am today I wanted to offer you a new perspective. I wanted to challenge the idea that design is but a tool to create function and beauty. Design greatly impacts upon people's lives, all lives. Design is a way in which we can feel included in the world, but it is also a way in which we can uphold a person's dignity and their human rights. Design can also inflict vulnerability on a group whose needs aren't considered.So today, I want your perceptions challenged. Who are we not designing for? How can we amplify their voices and their experiences? What is the next step? Design is an enormous privilege, but it is a bigger responsibility. I want you to open your eyes.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sinead_burke_why_design_should_include_everyone
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"I am from the South Side of Chicago, and in seventh grade, I had a best friend named Jenny who lived on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Jenny was white, and if you know anything about the segregated demographics of Chicago, you know that there are not too many black people who live on the Southwest Side of Chicago. But Jenny was my girl and so we would hang out every so often after school and on the weekends. And so one day we were hanging out in her living room, talking about 13-year-old things, and Jenny's little sister Rosie was in the room with us, and she was sitting behind me just kind of playing in my hair, and I wasn't thinking too much about what she was doing. But at a pause in the conversation, Rosie tapped me on the shoulder. She said, ""Can I ask you a question?""I said, ""Yeah, Rosie. Sure.""""Are you black?""(Laughter)The room froze. Silence. Jenny and Rosie's mom was not too far away. She was in the kitchen and she overheard the conversation, and she was mortified. She said, ""Rosie! You can't ask people questions like that."" And Jenny was my friend, and I know she was really embarrassed. I felt kind of bad for her, but actually I was not offended. I figured it wasn't Rosie's fault that in her 10 short years on this earth, living on the Southwest Side of Chicago, she wasn't 100 percent sure what a black person looked like. That's fair. But what was more surprising to me was, in all of this time I had spent with Jenny and Rosie's family — hanging out with them, playing with them, even physically interacting with them — it was not until Rosie put her hands in my hair that she thought to ask me if I was black. That was the first time I would realize how big of a role the texture of my hair played in confirming my ethnicity, but also that it would play a key role in how I'm viewed by others in society.Garrett A. Morgan and Madame CJ Walker were pioneers of the black hair-care and beauty industry in the early 1900s. They're best known as the inventors of chemically-based hair creams and heat straightening tools designed to permanently, or semipermanently, alter the texture of black hair. Oftentimes when we think about the history of blacks in America, we think about the heinous acts and numerous injustices that we experienced as people of color because of the color of our skin, when in fact, in post-Civil War America, it was the hair of an African-American male or female that was known as the most ""telling feature"" of Negro status, more so than the color of the skin. And so before they were staples of the multibillion-dollar hair-care industry, our dependency on tools and products, like the hair relaxer and the pressing comb, were more about our survival and advancement as a race in postslavery America.Over the years, we grew accustomed to this idea that straighter and longer hair meant better and more beautiful. We became culturally obsessed with this idea of having what we like to call ... ""good hair."" This essentially means: the looser the curl pattern, the better the hair. And we let these institutionalized ideas form a false sense of hierarchy that would determine what was considered a good grade of hair and what was not. What's worse is that we let these false ideologies invade our perception of ourselves, and they still continue to infect our cultural identity as African-American women today.So what did we do? We went to the hair salon every six to eight weeks, without fail, to subject our scalps to harsh straightening chemicals beginning at a very young age — sometimes eight, 10 — that would result in hair loss, bald spots, sometimes even burns on the scalp. We fry our hair at temperatures of 450 degrees Fahrenheit or higher almost daily, to maintain the straight look. Or we simply cover our hair up with wigs and weaves, only to let our roots breathe in private where no one knows what's really going on under there.We adopted these practices in our own communities, and so it's no wonder why today the typical ideal vision of a professional black woman, especially in corporate America, tends to look like this, rather than like this. And she certainly doesn't look like this.In September of this year, a federal court ruled it lawful for a company to discriminate against hiring an employee based on if she or he wears dreadlocks. In the case, the hiring manager in Mobile, Alabama is on record as saying, ""I'm not saying yours are messy, but ... you know what I'm talking about."" Well, what was she talking about? Did she think that they were ugly? Or maybe they were just a little too Afrocentric and pro-black-looking for her taste. Or maybe it's not about Afrocentricity, and it's more just about it being a little too ""urban"" for the professional setting. Perhaps she had a genuine concern in that they looked ""scary"" and that they would intimidate the clients and their customer base. All of these words are ones that are too often associated with the stigma attached to natural hairstyles. And this ... this has got to change.In 2013, a white paper published by the Deloitte Leadership Center for Inclusion, studied 3,000 individuals in executive leadership roles on the concept of covering in the workplace based on appearance, advocacy, affiliation and association. When thinking about appearance-based covering, the study showed that 67 percent of women of color cover in the workplace based on their appearance. Of the total respondents who admitted to appearance-based covering, 82 percent said that it was somewhat to extremely important for them to do so for their professional advancement.Now, this is Ursula Burns. She is the first African-American female CEO of a Fortune 500 company — of Xerox. She's known by her signature look, the one that you see here. A short, nicely trimmed, well-manicured Afro. Ms. Burns is what we like to call a ""natural girl."" And she is paving the way and showing what's possible for African-American women seeking to climb the corporate ladder, but still wishing to wear natural hairstyles.But today the majority of African-American women who we still look to as leaders, icons and role models, still opt for a straight-hair look. Now, maybe it's because they want to — this is authentically how they feel best — but maybe — and I bet — a part of them felt like they had to in order to reach the level of success that they have attained today.There is a natural hair movement that is sweeping the country and also in some places in Europe. Millions of women are exploring what it means to transition to natural hair, and they're cutting off years and years of dry, damaged ends in order to restore their natural curl pattern. I know because I have been an advocate and an ambassador for this movement for roughly the last three years. After 27 years of excessive heat and harsh chemicals, my hair was beginning to show extreme signs of wear and tear. It was breaking off, it was thinning, looking just extremely dry and brittle. All those years of chasing that conventional image of beauty that we saw earlier was finally beginning to take its toll. I wanted to do something about it, and so I started what I called the ""No Heat Challenge,"" where I would refrain from using heat styling tools on my hair for six months. And like a good millennial, I documented it on social media.(Laughter)I documented as I reluctantly cut off three to four inches of my beloved hair. I documented as I struggled to master these natural hairstyles, and also as I struggled to embrace them and think that they actually looked good. And I documented as my hair texture slowly began to change.By sharing this journey openly, I learned that I was not the only woman going through this and that in fact there were thousands and thousands of other women who were longing to do the same. So they would reach out to me and they would say, ""Cheyenne, how did you do that natural hairstyle that I saw you with the other day? What new products have you started using that might be a little better for my hair texture as it begins to change?"" Or, ""What are some of the natural hair routines that I should begin to adopt to slowly restore the health of my hair?"" But I also found that there were a large number of women who were extremely hesitant to take that first step because they were paralyzed by fear. Fear of the unknown — what would they now look like? How would they feel about themselves with these natural hairstyles? And most importantly to them, how would others view them?Over the last three years of having numerous conversations with friends of mine and also complete strangers from around the world, I learned some really important things about how African-American women identify with their hair. And so when I think back to that hiring manager in Mobile, Alabama, I'd say, ""Actually, no. We don't know what you're talking about."" But here are some things that we do know. We know that when black women embrace their love for their natural hair, it helps to undo generations of teaching that black in its natural state is not beautiful, or something to be hidden or covered up. We know that black women express their individuality and experience feelings of empowerment by experimenting with different hairstyles regularly. And we also know that when we're invited to wear our natural hair in the workplace, it reinforces that we are uniquely valued and thus helps us to flourish and advance professionally.I leave you with this. In a time of racial and social tension, embracing this movement and others like this help us to rise above the confines of the status quo. So when you see a woman with braids or locks draping down her back, or you notice your colleague who has stopped straightening her hair to work, do not simply approach her and admire and ask her if you can touch it —(Laughter)Really appreciate her. Applaud her. Heck, even high-five her if that's what you feel so inclined to do. Because this — this is more than about a hairstyle. It's about self-love and self-worth. It's about being brave enough not to fold under the pressure of others' expectations. And about knowing that making the decision to stray from the norm does not define who we are, but it simply reveals who we are.And finally, being brave is easier when we can count on the compassion of others. So after today, I certainly hope that we can count on you.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cheyenne_cochrane_a_celebration_of_natural_hair
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"I remember when I first found out I was going to speak at a TED conference. I ran across the hall to one of my classrooms to inform my students.""Guess what, guys? I've been asked to give a TED Talk.""The reaction wasn't one I quite expected. The whole room went silent.""A TED Talk? You mean, like the one you made us watch on grit? Or the one with the scientist that did this really awesome thing with robots?"" Muhammad asked.""Yes, just like that.""""But Coach, those people are really important and smart.""(Laughter)""I know that.""""But Coach, why are you speaking? You hate public speaking.""""I do,"" I admitted, ""But it's important that I speak about us, that I speak about your journeys, about my journey. People need to know.""The students at the all-refugee school that I founded decided to end with some words of encouragement.""Cool! It better be good, Coach.""(Laughter)There are 65.3 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes because of war or persecution. The largest number, 11 million, are from Syria. 33,952 people flee their homes daily. The vast majority remain in refugee camps, whose conditions cannot be defined as humane under anyone's definition. We are participating in the degradation of humans. Never have we had numbers this high. This is the highest number of refugees since World War II.Now, let me tell you why this issue is so important to me. I am an Arab. I am an immigrant. I am a Muslim. I've also spent the last 12 years of my life working with refugees. Oh — and I'm also gay. It makes me really popular these days.(Laughter)But I am the daughter of a refugee. My grandmother fled Syria in 1964 during the first Assad regime. She was three months pregnant when she packed up a suitcase, piled in her five children and drove to neighboring Jordan, not knowing what the future held for her and her family. My grandfather decided to stay, not believing it was that bad. He followed her a month later, after his brothers were tortured and his factory was taken over by the government. They rebuilt their lives starting from scratch and eventually became independently wealthy Jordanian citizens.I was born in Jordan 11 years later. It was really important to my grandmother for us to know our history and our journey. I was eight years old when she took me to visit my first refugee camp. I didn't understand why. I didn't know why it was so important to her for us to go. I remember walking into the camp holding her hand, and her saying, ""Go play with the kids,"" while she visited with the women in the camp. I didn't want to. These kids weren't like me. They were poor. They lived in a camp. I refused. She knelt down beside me and firmly said, ""Go. And don't come back until you've played. Don't ever think people are beneath you or that you have nothing to learn from others.""I reluctantly went. I never wanted to disappoint my grandmother. I returned a few hours later, having spent some time playing soccer with the kids in the camp. We walked out of the camp, and I was excitedly telling her what a great time I had and how fantastic the kids were.""Haram!"" I said in Arabic. ""Poor them.""""Haram on us,"" she said, using the word's different meaning, that we were sinning. ""Don't feel sorry for them; believe in them.""It wasn't until I left my country of origin for the United States that I realized the impact of her words.After my college graduation, I applied for and was granted political asylum, based on being a member of a social group. Some people may not realize this, but you can still get the death penalty in some countries for being gay. I had to give up my Jordanian citizenship. That was the hardest decision I've ever had to make, but I had no other choice. The point is, when you find yourself choosing between home and survival, the question ""Where are you from?"" becomes very loaded. A Syrian woman who I recently met at a refugee camp in Greece articulated it best, when she recalled the exact moment she realized she had to flee Aleppo.""I looked out the window and there was nothing. It was all rubble. There were no stores, no streets, no schools. Everything was gone. I had been in my apartment for months, listening to bombs drop and watching people die. But I always thought it would get better, that no one could force me to leave, no one could take my home away from me. And I don't know why it was that morning, but when I looked outside, I realized if I didn't leave, my three young children would die. And so we left. We left because we had to, not because we wanted to. There was no choice,"" she said.It's kind of hard to believe that you belong when you don't have a home, when your country of origin rejects you because of fear or persecution, or the city that you grew up in is completely destroyed. I didn't feel like I had a home. I was no longer a Jordanian citizen, but I wasn't American, either. I felt a kind of loneliness that is still hard to put into words today.After college, I desperately needed to find a place to call home. I bounced around from state to state and eventually ended up in North Carolina. Kindhearted people who felt sorry for me offered to pay rent or buy me a meal or a suit for my new interview. It just made me feel more isolated and incapable. It wasn't until I met Miss Sarah, a Southern Baptist who took me in at my lowest and gave me a job, that I started to believe in myself. Miss Sarah owned a diner in the mountains of North Carolina. I assumed, because of my privileged upbringing and my Seven Sister education, that she would ask me to manage the restaurant. I was wrong. I started off washing dishes, cleaning toilets and working the grill. I was humbled; I was shown the value of hard work. But most importantly, I felt valued and embraced. I celebrated Christmas with her family, and she attempted to observe Ramadan with me.I remember being very nervous about coming out to her — after all, she was a Southern Baptist. I sat on the couch next to her and I said, ""Miss Sarah, you know that I'm gay."" Her response is one that I will never forget.""That's fine, honey. Just don't be a slut.""(Laughter)(Applause)I eventually moved to Atlanta, still trying to find my home. My journey took a strange turn three years later, after I met a group of refugee kids playing soccer outside. I'd made a wrong turn into this apartment complex, and I saw these kids outside playing soccer. They were playing barefoot with a raggedy soccer ball and rocks set up as goals. I watched them for about an hour, and after that I was smiling. The boys reminded me of home. They reminded me of the way I grew up playing soccer in the streets of Jordan, with my brothers and cousins. I eventually joined their game. They were a little skeptical about letting me join it, because according to them, girls don't know how to play. But obviously I did.I asked them if they had ever played on a team. They said they hadn't, but that they would love to. I gradually won them over, and we formed our first team. This group of kids would give me a crash course in refugees, poverty and humanity. Three brothers from Afghanistan — Roohullah, Noorullah and Zabiullah — played a major role in that. I showed up late to practice one day to find the field completely deserted. I was really worried. My team loved to practice. It wasn't like them to miss practice. I got out of my car, and two kids ran out from behind a dumpster, waving their hands frantically.""Coach, Rooh got beat up. He got jumped. There was blood everywhere.""""What do you mean? What do you mean he got beat up?""""These bad kids came and beat him up, Coach. Everybody left. They were all scared.""We hopped into my car and drove over to Rooh's apartment. I knocked on the door, and Noor opened it. ""Where's Rooh? I need to talk to him, see if he's OK."" ""He's in his room, Coach. He's refusing to come out."" I knocked on the door.""Rooh, come on out. I need to talk to you. I need to see if you're OK or if we need to go to the hospital.""He came out. He had a big gash on his head, a split lip, and he was physically shaken. I was looking at him, and I asked the boys to call for their mom, because I needed to go to the hospital with him. They called for their mom. She came out. I had my back turned to her, and she started screaming in Farsi. The boys fell to the ground laughing. I was very confused, because there was nothing funny about this. They explained to me that she said,""You told me your coach was a Muslim and a woman."" From behind, I didn't appear to be either to her.(Laughter)""I am Muslim,"" I said, turning to her. ""Ašhadu ʾan lā ʾilāha ʾilla (A)llāh,"" reciting the Muslim declaration of faith. Confused, and perhaps maybe a little bit reassured, she realized that yes, I, this American-acting, shorts-wearing, non-veiled woman, was indeed a Muslim.Their family had fled the Taliban. Hundreds of people in their village were murdered. Their father was taken in by the Taliban, only to return a few months later, a shell of the man he once was. The family escaped to Pakistan, and the two older boys, age eight and 10 at the time, wove rugs for 10 hours a day to provide for their family. They were so excited when they found out that they had been approved to resettle in the United States, making them the lucky 0.1 percent who get to do that. They had hit the jackpot.Their story is not unique. Every refugee family I have worked with has had some version of this. I work with kids who have seen their mothers raped, their fathers' fingers sliced off. One kid saw a bullet put in his grandmother's head, because she refused to let the rebels take him to be a child soldier. Their journeys are haunting. But what I get to see every day is hope, resilience, determination, a love of life and appreciation for being able to rebuild their lives.I was at the boys' apartment one night, when the mom came home after cleaning 18 hotel rooms in one day. She sat down, and Noor rubbed her feet, saying that he was going to take care of her once he graduated. She smiled from exhaustion. ""God is good. Life is good. We are lucky to be here.""In the last two years, we have seen an escalating anti-refugee sentiment. It's global. The numbers continue to grow because we do nothing to prevent it and nothing to stop it. The issue shouldn't be stopping refugees from coming into our countries. The issue should be not forcing them to leave their own.(Applause)Sorry.(Applause)How much more suffering, how much more suffering must we take? How many more people need to be forced out of their homes before we say, ""Enough!""? A hundred million? Not only do we shame, blame and reject them for atrocities that they had absolutely nothing to do with, we re-traumatize them, when we're supposed to be welcoming them into our countries. We strip them of their dignity and treat them like criminals.I had a student in my office a couple of weeks ago. She's originally from Iraq. She broke down crying.""Why do they hate us?""""Who hates you?""""Everyone; everyone hates us because we are refugees, because we are Muslim.""In the past, I was able to reassure my students that the majority of the world does not hate refugees. But this time I couldn't. I couldn't explain to her why someone tried to rip off her mother's hijab when they were grocery shopping, or why a player on an opposing team called her a terrorist and told her to go back where she came from. I couldn't reassure her that her father's ultimate life sacrifice by serving in the United States military as an interpreter would make her more valued as an American citizen.We take in so few refugees worldwide. We resettle less than 0.1 percent. That 0.1 percent benefits us more than them. It dumbfounds me how the word ""refugee"" is considered something to be dirty, something to be ashamed of. They have nothing to be ashamed of.We have seen advances in every aspect of our lives — except our humanity. There are 65.3 million people who have been forced out of their homes because of war — the largest number in history. We are the ones who should be ashamed.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/luma_mufleh_don_t_feel_sorry_for_refugees_believe_in_them
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"So, I love making tools and sharing them with people. I remember as a child, my first tool I built was actually a microscope that I built by stealing lenses from my brother's eyeglasses. He wasn't that thrilled. But, you know, maybe because of that moment, 30 years later, I'm still making microscopes. And the reason I built these tools is for moments like this.(Video) Girl: I have black things in my hair —Manu Prakash: This is a school in the Bay Area.(Video) MP: The living world far supersedes our imagination of how things actually work.(Video) Boy: Oh my God!MP: Right — oh my God! I hadn't realized this would be such a universal phrase.Over the last two years, in my lab, we built 50,000 Foldscopes and shipped them to 130 countries in the world, at no cost to the kids we sent them to. This year alone, with the support of our community, we are planning to ship a million microscopes to kids around the world. What does that do? It creates an inspiring community of people around the world, learning and teaching each other, from Kenya to Kampala to Kathmandu to Kansas.And one of the phenomenal things that I love about this is the sense of community. There's a kid in Nicaragua teaching others how to identify mosquito species that carry dengue by looking at the larva under a microscope. There's a pharmacologist who came up with a new way to detect fake drugs anywhere. There is a girl who wondered: ""How does glitter actually work?"" and discovered the physics of crystalline formation in glitter. There is an Argentinian doctor who's trying to do field cervical cancer screening with this tool. And yours very truly found a species of flea that was dug inside my heel in my foot one centimeter deep.Now, you might think of these as anomalies. But there is a method to this madness. I call this ""frugal science"" — the idea of sharing the experience of science, and not just the information. To remind you: there are a billion people on this planet who live with absolutely no infrastructure: no roads, no electricity and thus, no health care. Also, there a billion kids on this planet that live in poverty. How are we supposed to inspire them for the next generation of solution makers? There are health care workers that we put on the line to fight infectious diseases, to protect us with absolutely bare-minimum tools and resources.So as a lab at Stanford, I think of this from a context of frugal science and building solutions for these communities. Often we think about being able to do diagnosis under a tree, off-grid. I'll tell you two examples today of new tools. One of them starts in Uganda. In 2013, on a field trip to detect schistosomiasis with Foldscopes, I made a minor observation. In a clinic, in a far, remote area, I saw a centrifuge being used as a doorstop. I mean — quite literally, the doorstop. And I asked them and they said, ""Oh, we don't actually have electricity, so this piece of junk is good as a doorstop."" Centrifuges, for some of you who don't know, are the pinnacle tool to be able to do sample processing. You separate components of blood or body fluids to be able to detect and identify pathogens. But centrifuges are bulky, expensive — cost around 1,000 dollars — and really hard to carry out in the field. And of course, they don't work without power. Sound familiar? So we started thinking about solving this problem, and I came back — kept thinking about toys.Now ... I have a few with me here. I first started with yo-yos ... and I'm a terrible yo-yo thrower. Because these objects spin, we wondered, could we actually use the physics of these objects to be able to build centrifuges? This was possibly the worst throw I could make. But you might start realizing, if you start exploring the space of toys — we tried these spinning tops, and then in the lab, we stumbled upon this wonder.It's the whirligig, or a buzzer, or a rundle. A couple of strings and a little disk, and if I push, it spins. How many of you have played with this as a kid? This is called a button-on-a-string. OK, maybe 50 percent of you. What you didn't realize — that this little object is the oldest toy in the history of mankind ... 5,000 years ago. We have found relics of this object hidden around on our planet. Now the irony is, we actually don't understand how this little thing works. That's when I get excited.So we got back to work, wrote down a couple of equations. If you take the input torque that you put in, you take the drag on this disc, and the twist drag on these strings, you should be able to mathematically solve this. This is not the only equation in my talk. Ten pages of math later, we could actually write down the complete analytical solution for this dynamic system. And out comes what we call ""Paperfuge."" That's my postdoc Saad Bhamla, who's the co-inventor of Paperfuge. And to the left, you see all the centrifuges that we're trying to replace.This little object that you see right here is a disc, a couple of strings and a handle. And when I spin and I push, it starts to spin. Now, when you realize, when you do the math, when we calculate the rpm for this object, mathematically, we should be able to go all the way to a million rpm. Now, there is a little twist in human anatomy, because the resonant frequency of this object is about 10 hertz, and if you've ever played the piano, you can't go higher than two or three hertz. The maximum speed we've been able to achieve with this object is not 10,000 rpm, not 50,000 rpm — 120,000 rpm. That's equal to 30,000 g-forces. If I was to stick you right here and have it spin, you would think about the types of forces you would experience.One of the factors of a tool like this is to be able to do diagnosis with this. So, I'm going to do a quick demo here, where — this is a moment where I'm going to make a little finger prick, and a tiny drop of blood is going to come out. If you don't like blood, you don't have to look at it. Here is a little lancet. These lancets are available everywhere, completely passive. And if I've had breakfast today ... That didn't hurt at all. OK, I take a little capillary with a drop of blood — now this drop of blood has answers, that's why I'm interested in it. It might actually tell me whether I have malaria right now or not. I take a little capillary, and you see it starts wicking in. I'm going to draw a little more blood. And that's good enough for right now. Now, I just seal this capillary by putting it in clay. And now that's sealed the sample.We're going to take the sample, mount it on Paperfuge. A little piece of tape to make a sealed cavity. So now the sample is completely enclosed. And we are ready for a spin. I'm pushing and pulling with this object. I'm going to load this up ... And you see the object starts spinning. Unlike a regular centrifuge, this is a counter-rotating centrifuge. It goes back and forth, back and forth ... And now I'm charging it up, and you see it builds momentum. And now — I don't know if you can hear this — 30 seconds of this, and I should be able to separate all the blood cells with the plasma. And the ratio of those blood  cells to plasma —(Applause)Already, if you see right here, if you focus on this, you should be able to see a separated volume of blood and plasma. And the ratio of that actually tells me whether I might be anemic.One of the aspects of this is, we build many types of Paperfuges. This one allows us to identify malaria parasites by running them for a little longer, and we can identify malaria parasites that are in the blood that we can separate out and detect with something like a centrifuge. Another version of this allows me to separate nucleic acids to be able to do nucleic acid tests out in the field itself. Here is another version that allows me to separate bulk samples, and then, finally, something new that we've been working on to be able to implement the entire multiplex test on an object like this. So where you do the sample preparation and the chemistry in the same object.Now ... this is all good, but when you start thinking about this, you have to share these tools with people. And one of the things we did is — we just got back from Madagascar; this is what clinical trials for malaria look like —(Laughter)You can do this while having coffee. But most importantly, this is a village six hours from any road. We are in a room with one of the senior members of the community and a health care worker. It really is this portion of the work that excites me the most — that smile, to be able to share simple but powerful tools with people around the world. Now, I forgot to tell you this, that all of that cost me 20 cents to make.OK, in the negative time I have left, I'll tell you about the most recent —(Laughter)invention from our lab. It's called Abuzz — the idea that all of you could help us fight mosquitoes; you could all help us track our enemies. These are enemies because they cause malaria, Zika, chikungunya, dengue. But the challenge is that we actually don't know where our enemies are. The world map for where mosquitoes are is missing. So we started thinking about this. There are 3,500 species of mosquitoes, and they're all very similar. Some of them are so identical that even an entomologist cannot identify them under a microscope.But they have an Achilles' heel. This is what mosquitoes flirting with each other looks like. That's a male chasing a female. They're actually talking to each other with their wingbeat frequencies. (Buzzing sound) And thus, they have a signature. We realized that using a regular phone, a $5-10 flip phone — how many remember what this object is?(Laughter)We can record these acoustic signatures from mosquitoes. I'll tell you exactly how to do this.I caught some mosquitoes outside. Unlike Bill [Gates], I'm not going to release them.(Laughter)But I will tell you how to record from this. All you do is tap them and they fly. You can first test — I can actually hear that. And you bring your phone, which has microphones — it turns out the mics are so damn good already, even on regular phones, that you can pick up this near-field signature. And since I'm out of time, let me just play the recording that I made a day ago.(Mosquitoes buzz)This is all the charming sound that you heard before that you all love. One of the contexts of this is that being able to do this with a regular cell phone allows us to map mosquito species. Using a flip phone, we mapped one of the largest acoustic databases with 25 to 20 species of mosquitoes that carry human pathogens. And from this and machine learning, anybody who uploads this data, we can identify and tell the probability of what species of mosquitoes you're actually working with. We call this Abuzz, and if any of you want to sign up, just go to the website.Let me close with something that's very important and dear to my heart. One of the challenges of today is we have terrible problems. We have a billion people with absolutely no health care, climate change, biodiversity loss, on and on and on. And we hope that science is going to provide the answer.But before you leave this theatre today, I want you to promise one thing. We're going to make science accessible — not just to the people who can afford it, but a billion others who can't. Let's make science and scientific literacy a human right. The moment that you pass the tingling feeling of making a discovery to another child, you're enabling them to be the next group of people who will actually solve these problems.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_lifesaving_scientific_tools_made_of_paper
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"""These are the times,"" said Thomas Paine, ""that try men's souls."" And they're trying ours now.This is a fateful moment in the history of the West. We've seen divisive elections and divided societies. We've seen a growth of extremism in politics and religion, all of it fueled by anxiety, uncertainty and fear, of a world that's changing almost faster than we can bear, and the sure knowledge that it's going to change faster still. I have a friend in Washington. I asked him, what was it like being in America during the recent presidential election? He said to me, ""Well, it was like the man sitting on the deck of the Titanic with a glass of whiskey in his hand and he's saying, 'I know I asked for ice —(Laughter)but this is ridiculous.'""So is there something we can do, each of us, to be able to face the future without fear? I think there is. And one way into it is to see that perhaps the most simple way into a culture and into an age is to ask: What do people worship? People have worshipped so many different things — the sun, the stars, the storm. Some people worship many gods, some one, some none. In the 19th and 20th centuries, people worshipped the nation, the Aryan race, the communist state. What do we worship? I think future anthropologists will take a look at the books we read on self-help, self-realization, self-esteem. They'll look at the way we talk about morality as being true to oneself, the way we talk about politics as a matter of individual rights, and they'll look at this wonderful new religious ritual we have created. You know the one? Called the ""selfie."" And I think they'll conclude that what we worship in our time is the self, the me, the I.And this is great. It's liberating. It's empowering. It's wonderful. But don't forget that biologically, we're social animals. We've spent most of our evolutionary history in small groups. We need those face-to-face interactions where we learn the choreography of altruism and where we create those spiritual goods like friendship and trust and loyalty and love that redeem our solitude. When we have too much of the ""I"" and too little of the ""we,"" we can find ourselves vulnerable, fearful and alone. It was no accident that Sherry Turkle of MIT called the book she wrote on the impact of social media ""Alone Together.""So I think the simplest way of safeguarding the future ""you"" is to strengthen the future ""us"" in three dimensions: the us of relationship, the us of identity and the us of responsibility.So let me first take the us of relationship. And here, forgive me if I get personal. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I was a 20-year-old undergraduate studying philosophy. I was into Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Sartre and Camus. I was full of ontological uncertainty and existential angst. It was terrific.(Laughter)I was self-obsessed and thoroughly unpleasant to know, until one day I saw across the courtyard a girl who was everything that I wasn't. She radiated sunshine. She emanated joy. I found out her name was Elaine. We met. We talked. We married. And 47 years, three children and eight grandchildren later, I can safely say it was the best decision I ever took in my life, because it's the people not like us that make us grow. And that is why I think we have to do just that.The trouble with Google filters, Facebook friends and reading the news by narrowcasting rather than broadcasting means that we're surrounded almost entirely by people like us whose views, whose opinions, whose prejudices, even, are just like ours. And Cass Sunstein of Harvard has shown that if we surround ourselves with people with the same views as us, we get more extreme. I think we need to renew those face-to-face encounters with the people not like us. I think we need to do that in order to realize that we can disagree strongly and yet still stay friends. It's in those face-to-face encounters that we discover that the people not like us are just people, like us. And actually, every time we hold out the hand of friendship to somebody not like us, whose class or creed or color are different from ours, we heal one of the fractures of our wounded world. That is the us of relationship.Second is the us of identity. Let me give you a thought experiment. Have you been to Washington? Have you seen the memorials? Absolutely fascinating. There's the Lincoln Memorial: Gettysburg Address on one side, Second Inaugural on the other. You go to the Jefferson Memorial, screeds of text. Martin Luther King Memorial, more than a dozen quotes from his speeches. I didn't realize, in America you read memorials. Now go to the equivalent in London in Parliament Square and you will see that the monument to David Lloyd George contains three words: David Lloyd George.(Laughter)Nelson Mandela gets two. Churchill gets just one: Churchill.(Laughter)Why the difference? I'll tell you why the difference. Because America was from the outset a nation of wave after wave of immigrants, so it had to create an identity which it did by telling a story which you learned at school, you read on memorials and you heard repeated in presidential inaugural addresses. Britain until recently wasn't a nation of immigrants, so it could take identity for granted. The trouble is now that two things have happened which shouldn't have happened together. The first thing is in the West we've stopped telling this story of who we are and why, even in America. And at the same time, immigration is higher than it's ever been before. So when you tell a story and your identity is strong, you can welcome the stranger, but when you stop telling the story, your identity gets weak and you feel threatened by the stranger. And that's bad.I tell you, Jews have been scattered and dispersed and exiled for 2,000 years. We never lost our identity. Why? Because at least once a year, on the festival of Passover, we told our story and we taught it to our children and we ate the unleavened bread of affliction and tasted the bitter herbs of slavery. So we never lost our identity. I think collectively we've got to get back to telling our story, who we are, where we came from, what ideals by which we live. And if that happens, we will become strong enough to welcome the stranger and say, ""Come and share our lives, share our stories, share our aspirations and dreams."" That is the us of identity.And finally, the us of responsibility. Do you know something? My favorite phrase in all of politics, very American phrase, is: ""We the people."" Why ""we the people?"" Because it says that we all share collective responsibility for our collective future. And that's how things really are and should be.Have you noticed how magical thinking has taken over our politics? So we say, all you've got to do is elect this strong leader and he or she will solve all our problems for us. Believe me, that is magical thinking. And then we get the extremes: the far right, the far left, the extreme religious and the extreme anti-religious, the far right dreaming of a golden age that never was, the far left dreaming of a utopia that never will be and the religious and anti-religious equally convinced that all it takes is God or the absence of God to save us from ourselves. That, too, is magical thinking, because the only people who will save us from ourselves is we the people, all of us together. And when we do that, and when we move from the politics of me to the politics of all of us together, we rediscover those beautiful, counterintuitive truths: that a nation is strong when it cares for the weak, that it becomes rich when it cares for the poor, it becomes invulnerable when it cares about the vulnerable. That is what makes great nations.(Applause)So here is my simple suggestion. It might just change your life, and it might just help to begin to change the world. Do a search and replace operation on the text of your mind, and wherever you encounter the word ""self,"" substitute the word ""other."" So instead of self-help, other-help; instead of self-esteem, other-esteem. And if you do that, you will begin to feel the power of what for me is one of the most moving sentences in all of religious literature. ""Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me."" We can face any future without fear so long as we know we will not face it alone.So for the sake of the future ""you,"" together let us strengthen the future ""us.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/rabbi_lord_jonathan_sacks_how_we_can_face_the_future_without_fear_together
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"I'm a journalist, and I'm an immigrant. And these two conditions define me.I was born in Mexico, but I've spent more than half my life reporting in the United States, a country which was itself created by immigrants. As a reporter and as a foreigner, I've learned that neutrality, silence and fear aren't the best options — not in journalism, nor in life. Neutrality is often an excuse that we journalists use to hide from our true responsibility. What is that responsibility? It is to question and to challenge those in positions of power. That's what journalism is for.That's the beauty of journalism: to question and challenge the powerful. Of course, we have the obligation to report reality as it is, not how we would like it to be. In that sense, I agree with the principle of objectivity: if a house is blue, I say that it's blue. If there are a million unemployed people, I say there are a million. But neutrality won't necessarily lead me to the truth. Even if I'm unequivocally scrupulous, and I present both sides of a news item — the Democratic and the Republican, the liberal and the conservative, the government's and the opposition's — in the end, I have no guarantee, nor are any of us guaranteed that we'll know what's true and what's not true. Life is much more complicated, and I believe journalism should reflect that very complexity.To be clear: I refuse to be a tape recorder. I didn't become a journalist to be a tape recorder. I know what you're going to say: no one uses tape recorders nowadays.(Laughter)In that case, I refuse to take out my cell phone and hit the record button and point it in front of me as if I were at a concert, like a fan at a concert. That is not true journalism. Contrary to what many people think, journalists are making value judgments all the time, ethical and moral judgments. And we're always making decisions that are exceedingly personal and extraordinarily subjective.For example: What happens if you're called to cover a dictatorship, like Augusto Pinochet's regime in Chile or Fidel Castro's in Cuba? Are you going to report only what the general and commander want, or will you confront them? What happens if you find out that in your country or in the country next door, students are disappearing and hidden graves are appearing, or that millions of dollars are disappearing from the budget and that ex-presidents are magically now multimillionaires? Will you report only the official version? Or what happens if you're assigned to cover the presidential elections of the primary superpower, and one of the candidates makes comments that are racist, sexist and xenophobic? That happened to me. And I want to tell you what I did, but first, let me explain where I'm coming from, so you can understand my reaction.I grew up in Mexico City, the oldest of five brothers, and our family simply couldn't afford to pay for all of our college tuition. So I studied in the morning, and worked in the afternoon. Eventually, I got the job I had always wanted: television reporter. It was a big opportunity. But as I was working on my third story, I ended up criticizing the president, and questioning the lack of democracy in Mexico. In Mexico, from 1929 to 2000, elections were always rigged; the incumbent president would hand-pick his successor. That's not true democracy. To me it seemed like a brilliant idea to expose the president, but to my boss —(Laughter)My boss didn't think it was such a great idea. At that time, the presidential office, Los Pinos, had issued a direct censor against the media. My boss, who, aside from being in charge of the show I worked for, was also in charge of a soccer team. I always suspected that he was more interested in goals than in the news. He censored my report. He asked me to change it, I said no, so he put another journalist on the story to write what I was supposed to say. I did not want to be a censored journalist. I don't know where I found the strength, but I wrote my letter of resignation. And so at 24 years of age — just 24 — I made the most difficult and most transcendental decision of my life. Not only did I resign from television, but I had also decided to leave my country.I sold my car, a beat-up little red Volkswagen, came up with some money and said goodbye to my family, to my friends, to my streets, to my favorite haunts — to my tacos —(Laughter)and I bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, California. And so I became one of the 250 million immigrants that exist in the world.Ask any immigrant about the first day they arrived in their new country, and you'll find that they remember absolutely everything, like it was a movie with background music. In my case, I arrived in Los Angeles, the sun was setting, and everything I owned — a guitar, a suitcase and some documents — I could carry all of it with my two hands. That feeling of absolute freedom, I haven't experienced since. And I survived with what little I had. I obtained a student visa; I was studying. I ate a lot of lettuce and bread, because that's all I had. Finally, in 1984, I landed my first job as a TV reporter in the United States.And the first thing I noticed was that in the US, my colleagues criticized — and mercilessly — then president Ronald Reagan, and absolutely nothing happened; no one censored them. And I thought: I love this country.(Laughter)(Applause)And that's how it's been for more than 30 years: reporting with total freedom, and being treated as an equal despite being an immigrant — until, without warning, I was assigned to cover the recent US presidential election.On June 16, 2015, a candidate who would eventually become the president of the United States said that Mexican immigrants were criminals, drug traffickers and rapists. And I knew that he was lying. I knew he was wrong for one very simple reason: I'm a Mexican immigrant. And we're not like that. So I did what any other reporter would have done: I wrote him a letter by hand requesting an interview, and I sent it to his Tower in New York.The next day I was at work, and I suddenly began to receive hundreds of calls and texts on my cell phone, some more insulting than others. I didn't know what was happening until my friend came into my office and said, ""They published your cell number online."" They actually did that. Here's the letter they sent where they gave out my number. Don't bother writing it down, OK? I already changed it.(Laughter)But I learned two things. The first one is that you should never, never, ever give your cell number to Donald Trump.(Laughter)(Applause)The second lesson was that I needed to stop being neutral at that point. From then on, my mission as a journalist changed. I would confront the candidate and show that he was wrong, that what he said about immigrants in the US was not true.Let me give you some figures. Ninety-seven percent of all undocumented people in the United States are good people. Less than three percent have committed a serious crime, or ""felony,"" as they say in English. In comparison, six percent of US citizens have committed a serious crime. The conclusion is that undocumented immigrants behave much better than US citizens.Based on that data, I made a plan. Eight weeks after they published my cell number, I obtained a press pass for a press conference for the candidate gaining momentum in the polls. I decided to confront him in person. But ... things didn't turn out exactly as I had planned; watch:[Donald Trump Press Conference Dubuque, Iowa](Video) Jorge Ramos: Mr. Trump, I have a question about immigration.Donald Trump: Who's next? Yes, please.JR: Your immigration plan is full of empty promises.DT: Excuse me, you weren't called. Sit down. Sit down!JR: I'm a reporter; as an immigrant and as a US citizen, I have the right to ask a question.DT: No you don't. JR: I have the right to ask —DT: Go back to Univision.JR: This is the question: You cannot deport 11 million people. You cannot build a 1900-mile wall. You cannot deny citizenship to children in this country.DT: Sit down. JR: And with those ideas —DT: You weren't called.JR: I'm a reporter and I have — Don't touch me, sir.Guard 1: Please don't disrupt. You're being disruptive.JR: I have the right to ask a question. G1: Yes, in order. In turn, sir.Guard 2: Do you have your media credential?JR: I have the right —G2: Where? Let me see. JR: It's over there.Man: Whoever's coming out, stay out.G2: You've just got to wait your turn.Man: You're very rude. It's not about you.JR: It's not about you — Man: Get out of my country!Man: It's not about you.JR: I'm a US citizen, too.Man: Well ...whatever. No, Univision. It's not about you.JR: It's not about you. It's about the United States.(Applause)(Applause ends)Whenever I see that video, the first thing I always think is that hate is contagious. If you notice, after the candidate says, ""Go back to Univision"" — that's code; what he's telling me is, ""Get out of here."" One member of his entourage, as if he had been given permission, said, ""Get out of my country,"" not knowing that I'm also a US citizen.After watching this video many times, I also think that in order to break free from neutrality — and for it to be a true break — one has to lose their fear, and then learn how to say, ""No; I'm not going to be quiet. I'm not going to sit down. And I'm not going to leave."" The word ""no"" —(Applause)""no"" is the most powerful word that exists in any language, and it always precedes any important change in our lives. And I think there's enormous dignity and it generates a great deal of respect to be able to step back and to push back and say, ""No.""Elie Wiesel — Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and who, unfortunately, we lost very recently — said some very wise words: ""We must take a side. Neutrality helps only the oppressor, never the victim."" And he's completely right. We journalists are obligated to take sides in certain circumstances; in cases of racism, discrimination, corruption, lying to the public, dictatorships and human rights, we need to set aside neutrality and indifference.Spanish has a great word to describe the stance that journalists should take. The word is  ""contrapoder [anti-establishment]."" Basically, we journalists should be on the opposite side from those in power. But if you're in bed with politicians, if you go to the baptism or wedding of the governor's son or if you want to be the president's buddy, how are you going to criticize them? When I'm assigned to interview a powerful or influential person, I always keep two things in mind: if I don't ask this difficult and uncomfortable question, no one else is going to; and that I'm never going to see this person again. So I'm not looking to make a good impression or to forge a connection. In the end, if I have to choose between being the president's friend or enemy, I always prefer to be their enemy.In closing: I know this is a difficult time to be an immigrant and a journalist, but now more than ever, we need journalists who are prepared, at any given moment, to set neutrality aside. Personally, I feel like I've been preparing for this moment my whole life. When they censored me when I was 24, I learned that neutrality, fear and silence often make you an accomplice in crime, abuse and injustice. And being an accomplice to power is never good journalism.Now, at 59 years old, I only hope to have a tiny bit of the courage and mental clarity I had at 24, and that way, never again remain quiet. Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jorge_ramos_why_journalists_have_an_obligation_to_challenge_power
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"All right, let's get up our picture of the earth. The earth is pretty awesome. I'm a geologist, so I get pretty psyched about this, but the earth is great. It's powerful, it's dynamic, it's constantly changing. It's a pretty exciting place to live. But I want to share with you guys today my perspective as a geologist in how understanding earth's past can help inform and guide decisions that we make today about how to sustainably live on earth's surface.So there's a lot of exciting things that go on on the surface of the earth. If we zoom in here a little bit, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about one of the things that happens. Material get shuffled around earth's surface all the time, and one of the big thing that happens is material from high mountains gets eroded and transported and deposited in the sea. And this process is ongoing all the time, and it has huge effects on how the landscape works. So this example here in south India — we have some of the biggest mountains in the world, and you can see in this satellite photo rivers transporting material from those mountains out to the sea. You can think of these rivers like bulldozers. They're basically taking these mountains and pushing them down towards the sea.We'll give you guys an example here. So we zoom in a little bit. I want to talk to you guys specifically about a river. We can see these beautiful patterns that the rivers make as they're pushing material down to the sea, but these patterns aren't static. These rivers are wiggling and jumping around quite a bit, and it can have big impacts on our lives.So an example of this is this is the Kosi River. So the Kosi River has this nice c-shaped pathway, and it exits the big mountains of Nepal carrying with it a ton of material, a lot of sediments that's being eroded from the high mountains, and it spreads out across India and moves this material. So we're going to zoom in to this area and I'm going to tell you a little bit about what happened with the Kosi. It's an example of how dynamic these systems can be. So this is a satellite image from August of 2008, and this satellite image is colored so that vegetations or plants show up as green and water shows up as blue. So here again you can see that c-shaped pathway that this river takes as it exits Nepal. And now this is monsoon season. August is monsoon season in this region of the world, and anyone that lives near a river is no stranger to flooding and the hazards and inconveniences at minimum that are associated with that. But something interesting happened in 2008, and this river moved in a way that's very different. It flooded in a way that's very different than it normally does. So the Kosi River is flowing down here, but sometimes as these rivers are bulldozing sediment, they kind of get clogged, and these clogs can actually cause the rivers to shift their course dramatically. So this satellite image is from just two weeks later. Here's the previous pathway, that c-shaped pathway, and you notice it's not blue anymore. But now what we have is this blue pathway that cuts down the middle of the field of view here. What happened is the Kosi River jumped its banks, and for reference, the scale bar here is 40 miles. This river moved over 30 miles very abruptly. So this river got clogged and it jumped its banks. Here's an image from about a week later, and you can see these are the previous pathways, and you can see this process of river-jumping continues as this river moves farther away from its major course.So you can imagine in landscapes like this, where rivers move around frequently, it's really important to understand when, where and how they're going to jump. But these kinds of processes also happen a lot closer to home as well. So in the United States, we have the Mississippi River that drains most of the continental US. It pushes material from the Rocky Mountains and from the Great Plains. It drains it and moves it all the way across America and dumps it out in the Gulf of Mexico. So this is the course of the Mississippi that we're familiar with today, but it didn't always flow in this direction. If we use the geologic record, we can reconstruct where it went in the past. So for example, this red area here is where we know the Mississippi River flowed and deposited material about 4,600 years ago. Then about 3,500 years ago it moved to follow the course outlined here in orange. And it kept moving and it keeps moving. So here's about 2,000 years ago, a thousand years ago, 700 years ago. And it was only as recently as 500 years ago that it occupied the pathway that we're familiar with today. So these processes are really important, and especially here, this delta area, where these river-jumping events in the Mississippi are building land at the interface of the land and the sea. This is really valuable real estate, and deltas like this are some of the most densely populated areas on our planet. So understanding the dynamics of these landscapes, how they formed and how they will continue to change in the future is really important for the people that live there.So rivers also wiggle. These are sort of bigger jumps that we've been talking about. I want to show you guys some river wiggles here. So we're going to fly down to the Amazon River basin, and here again we have a big river system that is draining and moving and plowing material from the Andean Mountains, transporting it across South America and dumping it out into the Atlantic Ocean. So if we zoom in here, you guys can see these nice, curvy river pathways. Again, they're really beautiful, but again, they're not static. These rivers wiggle around. We can use satellite imagery over the last 30 or so years to actually monitor how these change. So take a minute and just watch any bend or curve in this river, and you'll see it doesn't stay in the same place for very long. It changes and evolves and warps its pattern. If you look in this area in particular, I want you guys to notice there's a sort of a loop in the river that gets completely cut off. It's almost like a whip cracking and snaps off the pathway of the river at a certain spot. So just for reference, again, in this location, that river changed its course over four miles over the course of a season or two.So the landscapes that we live in on earth, as this material is being eroded from the mountains and transported to the sea, are wiggling around all the time. They're changing all the time, and we need to be able to understand these processes so we can manage and live sustainably on these landscapes. But it's hard to do if the only information we have is what's going on today at earth's surface. Right? We don't have a lot of observations. We only have 30 years' worth of satellite photos, for example. We need more observations to understand these processes more. And additionally, we need to know how these landscapes are going to respond to changing climate and to changing land use as we continue to occupy and modify earth's surface.So this is where the rocks come in. So as rivers flow, as they're bulldozing material from the mountains to the sea, sometimes bits of sand and clay and rock get stuck in the ground. And that stuff that gets stuck in the ground gets buried, and through time, we get big, thick accumulations of sediments that eventually turn into rocks. What this means is that we can go to places like this, where we see big, thick stacks of sedimentary rocks, and go back in time and see what the landscapes looked like in the past. We can do this to help reconstruct and understand how earth landscapes evolve. This is pretty convenient, too, because the earth has had sort of an epic history. Right? So this video here is a reconstruction of paleogeography for just the first 600 million years of earth's history. So just a little bit of time here. So as the plates move around, we know climate has changed, sea level has changed, we have a lot of different types of landscapes and different types of environments that we can go back — if we have a time machine — we can go back and look at, and we do indeed have a time machine because we can look at the rocks that were deposited at these times.So I'm going to give you an example of this and take you to a special time in earth's past. About 55 million years ago, there was a really abrupt warming event, and what happened was a whole bunch of carbon dioxide was released into earth's atmosphere, and it caused a rapid and pretty extreme global warming event. And when I say warm, I mean pretty warm, that there were things like crocodiles and palm trees as far north as Canada and as far south as Patagonia. So this was a pretty warm time and it happened really abruptly. So what we can do is we can go back and find rocks that were deposited at this time and reconstruct how the landscape changed in response to this warming event.So here, yay, rocks.(Laughter)Here's a pile of rocks. This yellow blob here, this is actually a fossil river, so just like this cartoon I showed, these are deposits that were laid down 55 million years ago. As geologists, we can go and look at these up close and reconstruct the landscape. So here's another example. The yellow blob here is a fossil river. Here's another one above it. We can go and look in detail and make measurements and observations, and we can measure features. For example, the features I just highlighted there tell us that this particular river was probably about three feet deep. You could wade across this cute little stream if you were walking around 55 million years ago. The reddish stuff that's above and below those channels, those are ancient soil deposits. So we can look at those to tell us what lived and grew on the landscape and to understand how these rivers were interacting with their floodplains. So we can look in detail and reconstruct with some specificity how these rivers flowed and what the landscapes looked like. So when we do this for this particular place at this time, if we look what happened before this abrupt warming event, the rivers kind of carved their way down from the mountains to the sea, and they looked maybe similar to what I showed you in the Amazon River basin. But right at the onset of this climate change event, the rivers change dramatically. All of a sudden they got much broader, and they started to slide back and forth across the landscape more readily. Eventually, the rivers reverted back to a state that was more similar to what they would have looked like before this climate event, but it took a long, long time.So we can go back in earth's time and do these kinds of reconstructions and understand how earth's landscape has changed in response to a climate event like this or a land use event. So some of the ways that rivers change or the reasons that rivers change their pattern and their movements is because of things like with extra water falling on the land's surface when climate is hotter, we can move more sediment and erode more sediment, and that changes how rivers behave.So ultimately, as long as earth's surface is our home, we need to carefully manage the resources and risks associated with living in dynamic environments. And I think the only way we can really do that sustainably is if we include information about how landscapes evolved and behaved in earth's past.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/liz_hajek_what_rivers_can_tell_us_about_the_earth_s_history
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"So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. Apparently, the head of a large pet food company would go into the annual shareholder's meeting with can of dog food. And he would eat the can of dog food. And this was his way of convincing them that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for their pets. This strategy is now known as ""dogfooding,"" and it's a common strategy in the business world. It doesn't mean everyone goes in and eats dog food, but businesspeople will use their own products to demonstrate that they feel — that they're confident in them. Now, this is a widespread practice, but I think what's really interesting is when you find exceptions to this rule, when you find cases of businesses or people in businesses who don't use their own products. Turns out there's one industry where this happens in a common way, in a pretty regular way, and that is the screen-based tech industry.So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described the iPad as a device that was ""extraordinary."" ""The best browsing experience you've ever had; way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone. It's an incredible experience."" A couple of months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New York Times, and they had a long phone call. At the end of the call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of softball. He said to him, ""Your kids must love the iPad."" There's an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said really staggered the journalist. He was very surprised, because he said, ""They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.""This is a very common thing in the tech world. In fact, there's a school quite near Silicon Valley called the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, and they don't introduce screens until the eighth grade. What's really interesting about the school is that 75 percent of the kids who go there have parents who are high-level Silicon Valley tech execs. So when I heard about this, I thought it was interesting and surprising, and it pushed me to consider what screens were doing to me and to my family and the people I loved, and to people at large.So for the last five years, as a professor of business and psychology, I've been studying the effect of screens on our lives. And I want to start by just focusing on how much time they take from us, and then we can talk about what that time looks like. What I'm showing you here is the average 24-hour workday at three different points in history: 2007 — 10 years ago — 2015 and then data that I collected, actually, only last week. And a lot of things haven't changed all that much. We sleep roughly seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day; some people say that's declined slightly, but it hasn't changed much. We work eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. We engage in survival activities — these are things like eating and bathing and looking after kids — about three hours a day.That leaves this white space. That's our personal time. That space is incredibly important to us. That's the space where we do things that make us individuals. That's where hobbies happen, where we have close relationships, where we really think about our lives, where we get creative, where we zoom back and try to work out whether our lives have been meaningful. We get some of that from work as well, but when people look back on their lives and wonder what their lives have been like at the end of their lives, you look at the last things they say — they are talking about those moments that happen in that white personal space. So it's sacred; it's important to us.Now, what I'm going to do is show you how much of that space is taken up by screens across time. In 2007, this much. That was the year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Eight years later, this much. Now, this much. That's how much time we spend of that free time in front of our screens. This yellow area, this thin sliver, is where the magic happens. That's where your humanity lives. And right now, it's in a very small box.So what do we do about this? Well, the first question is: What does that red space look like? Now, of course, screens are miraculous in a lot of ways. I live in New York, a lot of my family lives in Australia, and I have a one-year-old son. The way I've been able to introduce them to him is with screens. I couldn't have done that 15 or 20 years ago in quite the same way. So there's a lot of good that comes from them.One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that time? How enriching are the apps that we're using? And some are enriching. If you stop people while they're using them and say, ""Tell us how you feel right now,"" they say they feel pretty good about these apps — those that focus on relaxation, exercise, weather, reading, education and health. They spend an average of nine minutes a day on each of these. These apps make them much less happy. About half the people, when you interrupt them and say, ""How do you feel?"" say they don't feel good about using them. What's interesting about these — dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing — people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. We're spending three times longer on the apps that don't make us happy. That doesn't seem very wise.One of the reasons we spend so much time on these apps that make us unhappy is they rob us of stopping cues. Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. They were baked into everything we did. A stopping cue is basically a signal that it's time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. And — think about newspapers; eventually you get to the end, you fold the newspaper away, you put it aside. The same with magazines, books — you get to the end of a chapter, prompts you to consider whether you want to continue. You watched a show on TV, eventually the show would end, and then you'd have a week until the next one came. There were stopping cues everywhere. But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything's bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging, the news. And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on.So, we can get a cue about what to do from Western Europe, where they seem to have a number of pretty good ideas in the workplace. Here's one example. This is a Dutch design firm. And what they've done is rigged the desks to the ceiling. And at 6pm every day, it doesn't matter who you're emailing or what you're doing, the desks rise to the ceiling.(Laughter)(Applause)Four days a week, the space turns into a yoga studio, one day a week, into a dance club. It's really up to you which ones you stick around for. But this is a great stopping rule, because it means at the end of the day, everything stops, there's no way to work. At Daimler, the German car company, they've got another great strategy. When you go on vacation, instead of saying, ""This person's on vacation, they'll get back to you eventually,"" they say, ""This person's on vacation, so we've deleted your email. This person will never see the email you just sent.""(Laughter)""You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else.""(Laughter)And so —(Applause)You can imagine what that's like. You go on vacation, and you're actually on vacation. The people who work at this company feel that they actually get a break from work.But of course, that doesn't tell us much about what we should do at home in our own lives, so I want to make some suggestions. It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I'm going to not use my phone. The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on different days. I think a far better strategy is to say, I do certain things every day, there are certain occasions that happen every day, like eating dinner. Sometimes I'll be alone, sometimes with other people, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes at home, but the rule that I've adopted is: I will never use my phone at the table. It's far away, as far away as possible. Because we're really bad at resisting temptation. But when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together.At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO.(Laughter)I struggled.But what happens is, you get used to it. You overcome the withdrawal the same way you would from a drug, and what happens is, life becomes more colorful, richer, more interesting — you have better conversations. You really connect with the people who are there with you. I think it's a fantastic strategy, and we know it works, because when people do this — and I've tracked a lot of people who have tried this — it expands. They feel so good about it, they start doing it for the first hour of the day in the morning. They start putting their phones on airplane mode on the weekend. That way, your phone remains a camera, but it's no longer a phone. It's a really powerful idea, and we know people feel much better about their lives when they do this.So what's the take home here? Screens are miraculous; I've already said that, and I feel that it's true. But the way we use them is a lot like driving down a really fast, long road, and you're in a car where the accelerator is mashed to the floor, it's kind of hard to reach the brake pedal. You've got a choice. You can either glide by, past, say, the beautiful ocean scenes and take snaps out the window — that's the easy thing to do — or you can go out of your way to move the car to the side of the road, to push that brake pedal, to get out, take off your shoes and socks, take a couple of steps onto the sand, feel what the sand feels like under your feet, walk to the ocean, and let the ocean lap at your ankles. Your life will be richer and more meaningful because you breathe in that experience, and because you've left your phone in the car.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_alter_why_our_screens_make_us_less_happy
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"I am a climate scientist, and I hate weather. I have spent too much time in California, and I strongly feel that weather should be optional.(Laughter)So I don't want to experience clouds, let alone study them. But clouds seem to follow me wherever I go.The thing is, clouds are a real challenge for climate science. We don't know how they're going to react as the planet heats up, and hidden in that uncertainty might be hope. Maybe, just maybe, clouds could slow down global warming, and buy us a little bit more time to get our act together, which would be very convenient right now. I mean, even I could put up with a few more cloudy days if clouds saved the planet.Now, we are sure about some things. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we're emitting a lot of it, and the planet is heating up. Case closed. But I still go to work every day. It turns out that there is a lot that we don't understand about climate change. In particular, we haven't answered what seems to be a very fundamental question. We know it's going to get hot, but we don't know exactly how hot it's going to get. Now, this is a really easy question to answer if one of you would like to give me a time machine. But I'm going to be honest with you: if I had a time machine, I would not be hanging out at this particular point in history. So in order to see the future, we have to rely on the output of computer simulations — climate models, like this one.Now, in my line of work, I encounter many very charming people on the internet who like to tell me that climate models are all wrong. And I would just like to say: no kidding! Seriously? I get paid to complain about climate models. But we don't want models to be perfect. We want them to be useful. I mean, think about it: a computer simulation that's able to exactly reproduce all of reality. That's not a climate model; That's ""The Matrix."" So, models are not crystal balls. They're research tools, and the ways in which they're wrong can actually teach us a lot.For example: different climate models are largely able to capture the warming that we've seen so far. But fast-forward to the end of the century under a business-as-usual scenario, and climate models don't really agree anymore. Yeah, they're all warming; that's just basic physics. But some of them project catastrophe — more than five times the warming we've seen already. And others are literally more chill.So why don't climate models agree on how warm it's going to get? Well, to a large extent, it's because they don't agree on what clouds will do in the future. And that is because, just like me, computers hate clouds. Computers hate clouds because they're simultaneously very large and very small. Clouds are formed when microscopic water droplets or ice crystals coalesce around tiny particles. But at the same time, they cover two-thirds of the earth's surface. In order to really accurately model clouds, we'd need to track the behavior of every water droplet and dust grain in the entire atmosphere, and there's no computer powerful enough to do that. So instead, we have to make a trade-off: we can zoom in and get the details right, but have no idea what's going on worldwide; or, we could sacrifice realism at small scales in order to see the bigger picture. Now, there's no one right answer, no perfect way to do this, and different climate models make different choices.Now, it is unfortunate that computers struggle with clouds, because clouds are crucially important in regulating the temperature of the planet. In fact, if all the clouds went away, we would experience profound climate changes. But without clouds, would it be warmer or colder? The answer is both.So I'm going to be honest with you, I am not a cloud spotter. My favorite type of cloud is none. But even I know that clouds come in all shapes and sizes. Low, thick clouds like these are really good at blocking out the sun and ruining your barbecue, and high, wispy clouds like these cirrus largely let that sunlight stream through. Every sunny day is the same, but every cloudy day is cloudy in its own way. And it's this diversity that can make the global impact of clouds very hard to understand. So to see this global effect of clouds, it really helps to take a selfie.It will never cease to blow my mind that we can see our planet from outer space, but we can't see all of it. Clouds are blocking the view. That's what they do. These low, thick clouds are extremely effective sunshades. They turn back about 20 percent of everything the sun sends us. That is a lot of wasted solar power. So, low clouds are powerful sunshades, making the planet cooler. But that's not the only effect of clouds. Our planet has a temperature, and like anything with a temperature, it's giving off heat. We are radiating thermal energy away into space, and we can see this in the infrared. Once again, clouds are blocking the view. That's because high clouds live in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where it's very cold. And this means that they lose very little heat to space themselves. But at the same time, they block the heat coming up from the planet below. The earth is trying to cool itself off, and high clouds are getting in the way. The result is a very powerful greenhouse effect. So, clouds play this very large and dual role in the climate system. We've got low clouds that act like a sunshade, cooling the planet, and high clouds which act like a greenhouse, warming the planet.Right now, these two effects — they don't cancel out. That sunshade — it's a little bit more powerful. So if we got rid of all the clouds tomorrow, which, for the record, I am not advocating, our planet would get warmer. So clearly, all of the clouds are not going away. But climate change is change. So we can ask: How will global warming change clouds? But remember, clouds are so important in regulating the earth's temperature, and they both warm and cool the planet. So even small changes to cloud cover could have profound consequences. So we might also ask: How will clouds change global warming?And that is where there might be space for hope. If global warming triggers cloud changes that make for a less powerful greenhouse or a more effective sunshade, then that would enhance the cooling power of clouds. It would act in opposition to global warming, and that's what's happening in those climate models that project relatively muted warming. But climate models struggle with clouds, and this uncertainty — it goes both ways. Clouds could help us out with global warming. They could also make it worse.Now, we know that climate change is happening because we can see it: rising temperatures, melting icecaps, shifts in rainfall patterns. And you might think that we could also see it in the clouds. But here's something else unfortunate: clouds are really hard to see. I see everybody from the Pacific Northwest is like, ""I have some suggestions for you.""(Laughter)And you guys, we have tried looking up.(Laughter)But in order to do climate science, we need to see all of the clouds, everywhere, for a very long time. And that's what makes it hard. Now, nothing sees more clouds than a satellite — not even a British person.(Laughter)And fortunately, we do have satellite observations of clouds that, like me, date back to the 1980s. But these satellites were designed for weather, not climate. They weren't in it for the long haul. So to get that long-term trend information, we need to do climate science. We have to stitch together the output of multiple satellites with different viewing angles and orbits and carrying different camera equipment. And as a result, there are gaps in our knowledge. But even from this very cloudy picture, we're starting to get hints of a possible future.When we looked at the observations, one thing jumped out at us: the clouds are moving. As the planet's temperature increases, high clouds rise up. They move to the colder upper reaches of the atmosphere, and this means that even as the planet heats up, high clouds don't. They remain at roughly the same temperature. So they are not losing more heat to space. But at the same time, they're trapping more heat from the warming planet below. This intensifies the greenhouse effect. High clouds are making global warming worse.Clouds are moving in other dimensions, too. The atmospheric circulation, that large-scale motion of air and water in the atmosphere, is changing, and clouds are going with it. On large scales, clouds seem to be moving from the tropics toward the poles. It's kind of like your grandparents in reverse. And this matters, because if your job is to block incoming sunlight, you are going to be much more effective in the tropics under that intense tropical sun than you are in higher latitudes. So if this keeps up, this will also make global warming worse. And what we have not found, despite years of looking, is any indication of the opposite. There is no observational evidence that clouds will substantially slow down global warming. The earth is not going to break its own fever.Now, there are still uncertainties here. We don't know for sure what the future holds. But we are sending our kids there, and they are never coming back. I want them to be prepared for what they'll face, and that is why it is so important to keep our earth-observing satellites up there and to hire diverse and smart and talented people who do not hate clouds to improve the climate models.But uncertainty is not ignorance. We don't know everything, but we don't know nothing, and we know what carbon dioxide does. I started my career as an astrophysicist, so you can believe me when I say that this is the greatest place in the universe. Other planets might have liquid water. On earth, we have whiskey.(Laughter)(Applause)We are so lucky to live here, but let's not push our luck. I don't think that clouds will save the planet. I think that's probably up to us.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_marvel_can_clouds_buy_us_more_time_to_solve_climate_change
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"Just over a year ago, for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist. I was having a small operation, and my brain was filling with anesthetic. I remember a sense of detachment and falling apart and a coldness. And then I was back, drowsy and disoriented, but definitely there. Now, when you wake from a deep sleep, you might feel confused about the time or anxious about oversleeping, but there's always a basic sense of time having passed, of a continuity between then and now. Coming round from anesthesia is very different. I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years or even 50 years. I simply wasn't there. It was total oblivion. Anesthesia — it's a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects, and then, we hope, back again into people. And in this process is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy.How does consciousness happen? Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is generating a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience — your conscious experience right here and right now. How does this happen?Answering this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it there's no world, there's no self, there's nothing at all. And when we suffer, we suffer consciously whether it's through mental illness or pain. And if we can experience joy and suffering, what about other animals? Might they be conscious, too? Do they also have a sense of self? And as computers get faster and smarter, maybe there will come a point, maybe not too far away, when my iPhone develops a sense of its own existence.I actually think the prospects for a conscious AI are pretty remote. And I think this because my research is telling me that consciousness has less to do with pure intelligence and more to do with our nature as living and breathing organisms. Consciousness and intelligence are very different things. You don't have to be smart to suffer, but you probably do have to be alive.In the story I'm going to tell you, our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, are kinds of controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies.Now, you might have heard that we know nothing about how the brain and body give rise to consciousness. Some people even say it's beyond the reach of science altogether. But in fact, the last 25 years have seen an explosion of scientific work in this area. If you come to my lab at the University of Sussex, you'll find scientists from all different disciplines and sometimes even philosophers. All of us together trying to understand how consciousness happens and what happens when it goes wrong. And the strategy is very simple. I'd like you to think about consciousness in the way that we've come to think about life. At one time, people thought the property of being alive could not be explained by physics and chemistry — that life had to be more than just mechanism. But people no longer think that. As biologists got on with the job of explaining the properties of living systems in terms of physics and chemistry — things like metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis — the basic mystery of what life is started to fade away, and people didn't propose any more magical solutions, like a force of life or an élan vital. So as with life, so with consciousness. Once we start explaining its properties in terms of things happening inside brains and bodies, the apparently insoluble mystery of what consciousness is should start to fade away. At least that's the plan.So let's get started. What are the properties of consciousness? What should a science of consciousness try to explain? Well, for today I'd just like to think of consciousness in two different ways. There are experiences of the world around us, full of sights, sounds and smells, there's multisensory, panoramic, 3D, fully immersive inner movie. And then there's conscious self. The specific experience of being you or being me. The lead character in this inner movie, and probably the aspect of consciousness we all cling to most tightly. Let's start with experiences of the world around us, and with the important idea of the brain as a prediction engine.Imagine being a brain. You're locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what's out there in the world. There's no lights inside the skull. There's no sound either. All you've got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what's there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn't hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what's out there in the world.Let me give you a couple of examples of all this. You might have seen this illusion before, but I'd like you to think about it in a new way. If you look at those two patches, A and B, they should look to you to be very different shades of gray, right? But they are in fact exactly the same shade. And I can illustrate this. If I put up a second version of the image here and join the two patches with a gray-colored bar, you can see there's no difference. It's exactly the same shade of gray. And if you still don't believe me, I'll bring the bar across and join them up. It's a single colored block of gray, there's no difference at all. This isn't any kind of magic trick. It's the same shade of gray, but take it away again, and it looks different. So what's happening here is that the brain is using its prior expectations built deeply into the circuits of the visual cortex that a cast shadow dims the appearance of a surface, so that we see B as lighter than it really is.Here's one more example, which shows just how quickly the brain can use new predictions to change what we consciously experience. Have a listen to this.(Distorted voice)Sounded strange, right? Have a listen again and see if you can get anything.(Distorted voice)Still strange. Now listen to this.(Recording) Anil Seth: I think Brexit is a really terrible idea.(Laughter)Which I do.So you heard some words there, right? Now listen to the first sound again. I'm just going to replay it.(Distorted voice)Yeah? So you can now hear words there. Once more for luck.(Distorted voice)OK, so what's going on here? The remarkable thing is the sensory information coming into the brain hasn't changed at all. All that's changed is your brain's best guess of the causes of that sensory information. And that changes what you consciously hear. All this puts the brain basis of perception in a bit of a different light. Instead of perception depending largely on signals coming into the brain from the outside world, it depends as much, if not more, on perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite direction. We don't just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.Let me give you one more example of perception as this active, constructive process. Here we've combined immersive virtual reality with image processing to simulate the effects of overly strong perceptual predictions on experience. In this panoramic video, we've transformed the world — which is in this case Sussex campus — into a psychedelic playground. We've processed the footage using an algorithm based on Google's Deep Dream to simulate the effects of overly strong perceptual predictions. In this case, to see dogs. And you can see this is a very strange thing. When perceptual predictions are too strong, as they are here, the result looks very much like the kinds of hallucinations people might report in altered states, or perhaps even in psychosis.Now, think about this for a minute. If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain's predictions are being reigned in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we're all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.(Laughter)Now I'm going to tell you that your experience of being a self, the specific experience of being you, is also a controlled hallucination generated by the brain. This seems a very strange idea, right? Yes, visual illusions might deceive my eyes, but how could I be deceived about what it means to be me? For most of us, the experience of being a person is so familiar, so unified and so continuous that it's difficult not to take it for granted. But we shouldn't take it for granted. There are in fact many different ways we experience being a self. There's the experience of having a body and of being a body. There are experiences of perceiving the world from a first person point of view. There are experiences of intending to do things and of being the cause of things that happen in the world. And there are experiences of being a continuous and distinctive person over time, built from a rich set of memories and social interactions.Many experiments show, and psychiatrists and neurologists know very well, that these different ways in which we experience being a self can all come apart. What this means is the basic background experience of being a unified self is a rather fragile construction of the brain. Another experience, which just like all others, requires explanation.So let's return to the bodily self. How does the brain generate the experience of being a body and of having a body? Well, just the same principles apply. The brain makes its best guess about what is and what is not part of its body. And there's a beautiful experiment in neuroscience to illustrate this. And unlike most neuroscience experiments, this is one you can do at home. All you need is one of these.(Laughter)And a couple of paintbrushes.In the rubber hand illusion, a person's real hand is hidden from view, and that fake rubber hand is placed in front of them. Then both hands are simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush while the person stares at the fake hand. Now, for most people, after a while, this leads to the very uncanny sensation that the fake hand is in fact part of their body. And the idea is that the congruence between seeing touch and feeling touch on an object that looks like hand and is roughly where a hand should be, is enough evidence for the brain to make its best guess that the fake hand is in fact part of the body.(Laughter)So you can measure all kinds of clever things. You can measure skin conductance and startle responses, but there's no need. It's clear the guy in blue has assimilated the fake hand. This means that even experiences of what our body is is a kind of best guessing — a kind of controlled hallucination by the brain.There's one more thing. We don't just experience our bodies as objects in the world from the outside, we also experience them from within. We all experience the sense of being a body from the inside. And sensory signals coming from the inside of the body are continually telling the brain about the state of the internal organs, how the heart is doing, what the blood pressure is like, lots of things. This kind of perception, which we call interoception, is rather overlooked. But it's critically important because perception and regulation of the internal state of the body — well, that's what keeps us alive.Here's another version of the rubber hand illusion. This is from our lab at Sussex. And here, people see a virtual reality version of their hand, which flashes red and back either in time or out of time with their heartbeat. And when it's flashing in time with their heartbeat, people have a stronger sense that it's in fact part of their body. So experiences of having a body are deeply grounded in perceiving our bodies from within.There's one last thing I want to draw your attention to, which is that experiences of the body from the inside are very different from experiences of the world around us. When I look around me, the world seems full of objects — tables, chairs, rubber hands, people, you lot — even my own body in the world, I can perceive it as an object from the outside. But my experiences of the body from within, they're not like that at all. I don't perceive my kidneys here, my liver here, my spleen ... I don't know where my spleen is, but it's somewhere. I don't perceive my insides as objects. In fact, I don't experience them much at all unless they go wrong. And this is important, I think. Perception of the internal state of the body isn't about figuring out what's there, it's about control and regulation — keeping the physiological variables within the tight bounds that are compatible with survival. When the brain uses predictions to figure out what's there, we perceive objects as the causes of sensations. When the brain uses predictions to control and regulate things, we experience how well or how badly that control is going.So our most basic experiences of being a self, of being an embodied organism, are deeply grounded in the biological mechanisms that keep us alive. And when we follow this idea all the way through, we can start to see that all of our conscious experiences, since they all depend on the same mechanisms of predictive perception, all stem from this basic drive to stay alive. We experience the world and ourselves with, through and because of our living bodies.Let me bring things together step-by-step. What we consciously see depends on the brain's best guess of what's out there. Our experienced world comes from the inside out, not just the outside in. The rubber hand illusion shows that this applies to our experiences of what is and what is not our body. And these self-related predictions depend critically on sensory signals coming from deep inside the body. And finally, experiences of being an embodied self are more about control and regulation than figuring out what's there. So our experiences of the world around us and ourselves within it — well, they're kinds of controlled hallucinations that have been shaped over millions of years of evolution to keep us alive in worlds full of danger and opportunity. We predict ourselves into existence.Now, I leave you with three implications of all this. First, just as we can misperceive the world, we can misperceive ourselves when the mechanisms of prediction go wrong. Understanding this opens many new opportunities in psychiatry and neurology, because we can finally get at the mechanisms rather than just treating the symptoms in conditions like depression and schizophrenia.Second: what it means to be me cannot be reduced to or uploaded to a software program running on a robot, however smart or sophisticated. We are biological, flesh-and-blood animals whose conscious experiences are shaped at all levels by the biological mechanisms that keep us alive. Just making computers smarter is not going to make them sentient.Finally, our own individual inner universe, our way of being conscious, is just one possible way of being conscious. And even human consciousness generally — it's just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses. Our individual self and worlds are unique to each of us, but they're all grounded in biological mechanisms shared with many other living creatures.Now, these are fundamental changes in how we understand ourselves, but I think they should be celebrated, because as so often in science, from Copernicus — we're not at the center of the universe — to Darwin — we're related to all other creatures — to the present day. With a greater sense of understanding comes a greater sense of wonder, and a greater realization that we are part of and not apart from the rest of nature. And ... when the end of consciousness comes, there's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality
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"In ancient Greece, when anyone from slaves to soldiers, poets and politicians, needed to make a big decision on life's most important questions, like, ""Should I get married?"" or ""Should we embark on this voyage?"" or ""Should our army advance into this territory?"" they all consulted the oracle.So this is how it worked: you would bring her a question and you would get on your knees, and then she would go into this trance. It would take a couple of days, and then eventually she would come out of it, giving you her predictions as your answer.From the oracle bones of ancient China to ancient Greece to Mayan calendars, people have craved for prophecy in order to find out what's going to happen next. And that's because we all want to make the right decision. We don't want to miss something. The future is scary, so it's much nicer knowing that we can make a decision with some assurance of the outcome.Well, we have a new oracle, and it's name is big data, or we call it ""Watson"" or ""deep learning"" or ""neural net."" And these are the kinds of questions we ask of our oracle now, like, ""What's the most efficient way to ship these phones from China to Sweden?"" Or, ""What are the odds of my child being born with a genetic disorder?"" Or, ""What are the sales volume we can predict for this product?""I have a dog. Her name is Elle, and she hates the rain. And I have tried everything to untrain her. But because I have failed at this, I also have to consult an oracle, called Dark Sky, every time before we go on a walk, for very accurate weather predictions in the next 10 minutes. She's so sweet. So because of all of this, our oracle is a $122 billion industry.Now, despite the size of this industry, the returns are surprisingly low. Investing in big data is easy, but using it is hard. Over 73 percent of big data projects aren't even profitable, and I have executives coming up to me saying, ""We're experiencing the same thing. We invested in some big data system, and our employees aren't making better decisions. And they're certainly not coming up with more breakthrough ideas.""So this is all really interesting to me, because I'm a technology ethnographer. I study and I advise companies on the patterns of how people use technology, and one of my interest areas is data. So why is having more data not helping us make better decisions, especially for companies who have all these resources to invest in these big data systems? Why isn't it getting any easier for them?So, I've witnessed the struggle firsthand. In 2009, I started a research position with Nokia. And at the time, Nokia was one of the largest cell phone companies in the world, dominating emerging markets like China, Mexico and India — all places where I had done a lot of research on how low-income people use technology. And I spent a lot of extra time in China getting to know the informal economy. So I did things like working as a street vendor selling dumplings to construction workers. Or I did fieldwork, spending nights and days in internet cafés, hanging out with Chinese youth, so I could understand how they were using games and mobile phones and using it between moving from the rural areas to the cities.Through all of this qualitative evidence that I was gathering, I was starting to see so clearly that a big change was about to happen among low-income Chinese people. Even though they were surrounded by advertisements for luxury products like fancy toilets — who wouldn't want one? — and apartments and cars, through my conversations with them, I found out that the ads the actually enticed them the most were the ones for iPhones, promising them this entry into this high-tech life. And even when I was living with them in urban slums like this one, I saw people investing over half of their monthly income into buying a phone, and increasingly, they were ""shanzhai,"" which are affordable knock-offs of iPhones and other brands. They're very usable. Does the job.And after years of living with migrants and working with them and just really doing everything that they were doing, I started piecing all these data points together — from the things that seem random, like me selling dumplings, to the things that were more obvious, like tracking how much they were spending on their cell phone bills. And I was able to create this much more holistic picture of what was happening. And that's when I started to realize that even the poorest in China would want a smartphone, and that they would do almost anything to get their hands on one.You have to keep in mind, iPhones had just come out, it was 2009, so this was, like, eight years ago, and Androids had just started looking like iPhones. And a lot of very smart and realistic people said, ""Those smartphones — that's just a fad. Who wants to carry around these heavy things where batteries drain quickly and they break every time you drop them?"" But I had a lot of data, and I was very confident about my insights, so I was very excited to share them with Nokia.But Nokia was not convinced, because it wasn't big data. They said, ""We have millions of data points, and we don't see any indicators of anyone wanting to buy a smartphone, and your data set of 100, as diverse as it is, is too weak for us to even take seriously."" And I said, ""Nokia, you're right. Of course you wouldn't see this, because you're sending out surveys assuming that people don't know what a smartphone is, so of course you're not going to get any data back about people wanting to buy a smartphone in two years. Your surveys, your methods have been designed to optimize an existing business model, and I'm looking at these emergent human dynamics that haven't happened yet. We're looking outside of market dynamics so that we can get ahead of it."" Well, you know what happened to Nokia? Their business fell off a cliff. This — this is the cost of missing something. It was unfathomable.But Nokia's not alone. I see organizations throwing out data all the time because it didn't come from a quant model or it doesn't fit in one. But it's not big data's fault. It's the way we use big data; it's our responsibility. Big data's reputation for success comes from quantifying very specific environments, like electricity power grids or delivery logistics or genetic code, when we're quantifying in systems that are more or less contained.But not all systems are as neatly contained. When you're quantifying and systems are more dynamic, especially systems that involve human beings, forces are complex and unpredictable, and these are things that we don't know how to model so well. Once you predict something about human behavior, new factors emerge, because conditions are constantly changing. That's why it's a never-ending cycle. You think you know something, and then something unknown enters the picture. And that's why just relying on big data alone increases the chance that we'll miss something, while giving us this illusion that we already know everything.And what makes it really hard to see this paradox and even wrap our brains around it is that we have this thing that I call the quantification bias, which is the unconscious belief of valuing the measurable over the immeasurable. And we often experience this at our work. Maybe we work alongside colleagues who are like this, or even our whole entire company may be like this, where people become so fixated on that number, that they can't see anything outside of it, even when you present them evidence right in front of their face. And this is a very appealing message, because there's nothing wrong with quantifying; it's actually very satisfying. I get a great sense of comfort from looking at an Excel spreadsheet, even very simple ones.(Laughter)It's just kind of like, ""Yes! The formula worked. It's all OK. Everything is under control.""But the problem is that quantifying is addictive. And when we forget that and when we don't have something to kind of keep that in check, it's very easy to just throw out data because it can't be expressed as a numerical value. It's very easy just to slip into silver-bullet thinking, as if some simple solution existed. Because this is a great moment of danger for any organization, because oftentimes, the future we need to predict — it isn't in that haystack, but it's that tornado that's bearing down on us outside of the barn. There is no greater risk than being blind to the unknown. It can cause you to make the wrong decisions. It can cause you to miss something big.But we don't have to go down this path. It turns out that the oracle of ancient Greece holds the secret key that shows us the path forward. Now, recent geological research has shown that the Temple of Apollo, where the most famous oracle sat, was actually built over two earthquake faults. And these faults would release these petrochemical fumes from underneath the Earth's crust, and the oracle literally sat right above these faults, inhaling enormous amounts of ethylene gas, these fissures.(Laughter)It's true.(Laughter) It's all true, and that's what made her babble and hallucinate and go into this trance-like state. She was high as a kite!(Laughter)So how did anyone — How did anyone get any useful advice out of her in this state? Well, you see those people surrounding the oracle? You see those people holding her up, because she's, like, a little woozy? And you see that guy on your left-hand side holding the orange notebook? Well, those were the temple guides, and they worked hand in hand with the oracle. When inquisitors would come and get on their knees, that's when the temple guides would get to work, because after they asked her questions, they would observe their emotional state, and then they would ask them follow-up questions, like, ""Why do you want to know this prophecy? Who are you? What are you going to do with this information?"" And then the temple guides would take this more ethnographic, this more qualitative information, and interpret the oracle's babblings. So the oracle didn't stand alone, and neither should our big data systems.Now to be clear, I'm not saying that big data systems are huffing ethylene gas, or that they're even giving invalid predictions. The total opposite. But what I am saying is that in the same way that the oracle needed her temple guides, our big data systems need them, too. They need people like ethnographers and user researchers who can gather what I call thick data. This is precious data from humans, like stories, emotions and interactions that cannot be quantified. It's the kind of data that I collected for Nokia that comes in in the form of a very small sample size, but delivers incredible depth of meaning.And what makes it so thick and meaty is the experience of understanding the human narrative. And that's what helps to see what's missing in our models. Thick data grounds our business questions in human questions, and that's why integrating big and thick data forms a more complete picture. Big data is able to offer insights at scale and leverage the best of machine intelligence, whereas thick data can help us rescue the context loss that comes from making big data usable, and leverage the best of human intelligence. And when you actually integrate the two, that's when things get really fun, because then you're no longer just working with data you've already collected. You get to also work with data that hasn't been collected. You get to ask questions about why: Why is this happening?Now, when Netflix did this, they unlocked a whole new way to transform their business. Netflix is known for their really great recommendation algorithm, and they had this $1 million prize for anyone who could improve it. And there were winners. But Netflix discovered the improvements were only incremental. So to really find out what was going on, they hired an ethnographer, Grant McCracken, to gather thick data insights. And what he discovered was something that they hadn't seen initially in the quantitative data. He discovered that people loved to binge-watch. In fact, people didn't even feel guilty about it. They enjoyed it.(Laughter)So Netflix was like, ""Oh. This is a new insight."" So they went to their data science team, and they were able to scale this big data insight in with their quantitative data. And once they verified it and validated it, Netflix decided to do something very simple but impactful. They said, instead of offering the same show from different genres or more of the different shows from similar users, we'll just offer more of the same show. We'll make it easier for you to binge-watch. And they didn't stop there. They did all these things to redesign their entire viewer experience, to really encourage binge-watching. It's why people and friends disappear for whole weekends at a time, catching up on shows like ""Master of None."" By integrating big data and thick data, they not only improved their business, but they transformed how we consume media. And now their stocks are projected to double in the next few years.But this isn't just about watching more videos or selling more smartphones. For some, integrating thick data insights into the algorithm could mean life or death, especially for the marginalized. All around the country, police departments are using big data for predictive policing, to set bond amounts and sentencing recommendations in ways that reinforce existing biases. NSA's Skynet machine learning algorithm has possibly aided in the deaths of thousands of civilians in Pakistan from misreading cellular device metadata. As all of our lives become more automated, from automobiles to health insurance or to employment, it is likely that all of us will be impacted by the quantification bias.Now, the good news is that we've come a long way from huffing ethylene gas to make predictions. We have better tools, so let's just use them better. Let's integrate the big data with the thick data. Let's bring our temple guides with the oracles, and whether this work happens in companies or nonprofits or government or even in the software, all of it matters, because that means we're collectively committed to making better data, better algorithms, better outputs and better decisions. This is how we'll avoid missing that something.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tricia_wang_the_human_insights_missing_from_big_data
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"If you've been thinking about US politics and trying to make sense of it for the last year or so, you might have hit on something like the following three propositions: one, US partisanship has never been so bad before; two, for the first time, it's geographically spatialized — we're divided between the coasts, which want to look outwards, and the center of the country, which wants to look inwards; and third, there's nothing we can do about it.I'm here to today to say that all three of these propositions, all of which sound reasonable, are not true. In fact, our US partisanship goes all the way back to the very beginning of the republic. It was geographically spatialized in almost eerily the same way that it is today, and it often has been throughout US history. And last, and by far most importantly, we actually have an extraordinary mechanism that's designed to help us manage factional disagreement and partisanship. That technology is the Constitution. And this is an evolving, subtly, supplely designed entity that has the specific purpose of teaching us how to manage factional disagreement where it's possible to do that, and giving us techniques for overcoming that disagreement when that's possible.Now, in order to tell you the story, I want to go back to a pivotal moment in US history, and that is the moment when factional disagreement and partisanship was born. There actually was a birth moment — a moment in US history when partisanship snapped into place. The person who's at the core of that story is James Madison. And at the moment that this began, James Madison was riding high. He himself was the Einstein of not only the US Constitution, but of constitutional thought more globally, and, to give him his due, he knew it. In a period of time of just three years, from 1785 to 1788, he had conceived, theorized, designed, passed and gotten ratified the US Constitution.And just to give you some sense of the enormity of what that accomplishment actually was, although Madison couldn't have known it at the time, today that same constitutional technology that he invented is still in use not only in the US, but, 230 years later, in places like Canada, India, South Africa, Brazil. So in an extraordinary range of contexts all over the world, this technology is still the dominant, most used, most effective technology to manage governance.In that moment, Madison believed that, having solved this problem, the country would run smoothly, and that he had designed a technology that would minimize the results of factions so there would be no political parties. Remarkably, he thought he had designed a constitution that was against political parties and would make them unnecessary.He had gotten an enormous degree of help in the final marketing phase of his constitutional project from a man you may have heard of, called Alexander Hamilton. Now, Hamilton was everything Madison was not. He was passionate, where Madison was restrained. He was pansexual, where Madison didn't speak to a woman expect for once until he was 42 years old, and then married Dolley and lived happily ever after for 40 years.(Laughter)To put it bluntly, Hamilton's the kind of person about whom you would write a hip-hop musical —(Laughter)and Madison is the kind of person about whom you would not write a hip-hop musical.(Laughter)Or indeed, a musical of any kind at all.But together, they had become a rather unlikely pairing, and they had produced the Federalist Papers, which offered a justification and, as I mentioned, a marketing plan for the Constitution, which had been wildly effective and wildly successful.Once the new government was in place, Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury, and he had a very specific idea in mind. And that was to do for financial institutions and infrastructure exactly what Madison had done for constitutions. Again, his contemporaries all knew it. One of them told Madison, who can't have liked it very much, that Hamilton was the Newton of infrastructure. The idea was pretty straightforward. Hamilton would give the United States a national bank, a permanent national debt — he said it would be ""immortal,"" his phrase — and a manufacturing policy that would enable trade and manufacturing rather than agriculture, which was where the country's primary wealth had historically been.Madison went utterly ballistic. And in this pivotal, critical decision, instead of just telling the world that his old friend Hamilton was wrong and was adopting the wrong policies, he actually began to argue that Hamilton's ideas were unconstitutional — that they violated the very nature of the Constitution that the two of them had drafted together. Hamilton responded the way you would expect. He declared Madison to be his ""personal and political enemy"" — these are his words.So these two founders who had been such close friends and such close allies and such partners, then began to produce enmity. And they did it in the good, old-fashioned way. First, they founded political parties. Madison created a party originally called the Democratic Republican Party — ""Republican"" for short — and Hamilton created a party called the Federalist Party. Those two parties adopted positions on national politics that were extreme and exaggerated. To give you a clear example: Madison, who had always believed that the country would have some manufacturing and some trade and some agriculture, began attacking Hamilton as a kind of tool of the financial markets whom Hamilton himself intended to put in charge of the country. That was an overstatement, but it was something Madison came to believe.He also attacked city life, and he said that the coasts were corrupt, and what people needed to do was to look inwards to the center of the country, to farmers, who were the essence of Republican virtue, and they should go back to the values that had made American great, specifically the values of the Revolution, and those were the values of low taxes, agriculture and less trade. Hamilton responded to this by saying that Madison was naïve, that he was childish, and that his goal was to turn the United States into a primitive autarchy, self-reliant and completely ineffectual on the global scale.(Laughter)They both meant it, and there was some truth to each of their claims, because each side was grossly exaggerating the views of the other in order to fight their war. They founded newspapers, and so for the first time in US history, the news that people received came entirely through the lens of either the Republican or the Federalist party.How does this end? Well, as it turned out, the Constitution did its work. But it did its work in surprising ways that Madison himself had not fully anticipated. First, there was a series of elections. And the first two times out of the box, the Federalists destroyed the Republicans. Madison was astonished. Of course, he blamed the press.(Laughter)And in a rather innovative view — Madison never failed to innovate when he thought about anything — he said the reason that the press was so pro-Federalist is that the advertisers were all Federalists, because they were traders on the coasts who got their capital from Britain, which Federalism was in bed with. That was his initial explanation. But despite the fact that the Federalists, once in power, actually enacted laws that criminalized criticism of the government — that happened in the United States — nevertheless, the Republicans fought back, and Madison began to emphasize the freedom of speech, which he had built into the Bill of Rights, and the capacity of civil society to organize. And sure enough, nationally, small local groups — they were called Democratic-Republican Societies — began to form and protest against Federalist-dominated hegemony. Eventually, the Republicans managed to win a national election — that was in 1800. Madison became the Secretary of State, his friend and mentor Jefferson became president, and they actually, over time, managed to put the Federalists completely out of business. That was their goal.Now, why did that happen? It happened because in the structure of the Constitution were several features that actually managed faction the way there were supposed to do in the first place. What were those? One — most important of all — the freedom of speech. This was an innovative idea at the time. Namely, that if you were out of power, you could still say that the government was terrible.Two, civil society organization. The capacity to put together private groups, individuals, political parties and others who would organize to try to bring about fundamental change. Perhaps most significantly was the separation of powers — an extraordinary component of the Constitution. The thing about the separation of powers is that it did then and it does now, drive governance to the center. You can get elected to office in the United States with help from the periphery, right or left. It turns out, you actually can't govern unless you bring on board the center. There are midterm elections that come incredibly fast after a presidency begins. Those drive presidents towards the center.There's a structure in which the president, in fact, does not rule or even govern, but can only propose laws which other people have to agree with — another feature that tends to drive presidents who actually want to get things done to the center. And a glance at the newspapers today will reveal to you that these principles are still completely in operation. No matter how a president gets elected, the president cannot get anything done unless the president first of all follows the rules of the Constitution, because if not, the courts will stand up, as indeed has sometimes occurred, not only recently, but in the past, in US history. And furthermore, the president needs people, elected officials who know they need to win election from centrist voters, also to back his or her policies in order to pass laws. Without it, nothing much happens.The takeaway of this brief excursus into the history of partisanship, then, is the following: partisanship is real; it's profound; it's extraordinarily powerful, and it's terribly upsetting. But the design of the Constitution is greater than partisanship. It enables us to manage partisanship when that's possible, and it enables us actually to overcome partisan division and produce compromise, when and only when that is possible. A technology like that is a technology that worked for the founders, it worked for their grandchildren, it didn't work at the moment of the Civil War, but then it started working again. And it worked for our grandparents, our parents, and it's going to work for us.(Applause)So what you should do is really simple. Stand up for what you believe in, support the organizations that you care about, speak out on the issues that matter to you, get involved, make change, express you opinion, and do it with respect and knowledge and confidence that it's only by working together that the constitutional technology can do the job that it is designed to do.Stand up for what you believe, but take a deep breath while you do it. It's going to be OK.Thanks.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/noah_feldman_hamilton_vs_madison_and_the_birth_of_american_partisanship
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"I'd like to introduce you to my mom.(Laughter)I'm guessing that's not what you expected, and it's not what I expected either, and thank goodness I realized that an Asian man was not my mom before I hugged him, because that would have been so awkward.Recognizing people isn't one of my strengths due to a genetic visual impairment that has no correction or cure. As a result, I am legally blind, though I prefer ""partially sighted"" because it's more optimistic.(Laughter)And I'm entitled to the label ""disabled.""I hate the word disabled when it's used to describe people. It detonates a mindset of less than that utterly disregards capacity, ability, potential, instead prioritizing brokenness and lack.The perspective can be overt. What can't he do for himself that I'm going to have to do for him? She'll probably need some accommodation that no other employee at this business needs. Sometimes, the hidden bias is so sweetly conveyed. ""Wow, Susan, look at everything you've done in your career and your life. How did you do all of that and be visually impaired?""(Laughter)I fail at being disabled.(Laughter)So in the spirit of incentivizing the rampant failure of people all over the world and enticing the so-called normal to just give it a rest already, here are five tips to fail at being disabled.Tip one: know your superpowers. The best team I ever led in my career was based on superpowers, and we even gave ourselves fancy-pantsy titles like ""the Pillar of Masterly Acumen."" ""The Biscuit Butterer.""(Laughter)""The Voice of Reason.""Because we relied on our strengths, our best strengths, we achieved tremendous outcomes. The trait that prevents me from recognizing my mom allows me to smoothly adapt, to quickly absorb and accurately process an exhausting volume of cues, tease out what's important, determine multiple processes or potentials for any situation that I'm in, and then select the one that makes the most sense, all in a matter of seconds. I see what other people do not. Some people think that's a superpower, but my real superpowers are ricocheting off of glass walls —(Laughter)and letting my friends walk around with kale in their teeth.(Laughter)It's true. Don't have lunch with me, or dinner.Tip two: be supremely skilled, supremely skilled at getting it wrong. It is important to be as equally confident in your superpowers as you are in you FUBARs. That's ""effed up beyond all recognition"" for you millennials.(Laughter)Here's a good example. It is not a great idea to say, ""Don't worry, everything in here is too small for me to see"" when you accidentally walk into the men's room —(Laughter)at one of the world's largest sporting arenas —(Laughter)or anywhere. I really wish that one wasn't true. I'm serious. It is better to just walk out and let them think you're drunk.(Laughter)Tip three: know that everyone is disabled in some way, like when you have a cold and you can't smell and you realize that the milk that you splashed in your coffee was sour only after you've tasted it. Very recently, a woman walked up to me frantic. She could not find the bakery she was looking for. As I motioned in the direction I thought she should go, saying, ""There are no stores on this side of the street so your best bet is to cross —""""Oh my goodness,"" she interrupted. ""There it is. All I needed was another set of eyes.""(Laughter)I just let her have it. I would have said that, you know, being logical and paying attention and staying calm would have done the trick, but who am I?Tip four: point out the disability in others. This one is best reserved — very important note — this one is best reserved for people you know well, because random strangers typically don't appreciate teachable moments. A few years ago, my parents and I went to see the Rockettes, Radio City's high-kicking dancers. I leaned over to my dad.""The two Rockettes on the left aren't kicking in a straight line.""""Yes, they are.""""No, they're not.""""Yes, they are, and how do you know? You can't see.""But I know what a straight line looks like. I had snapped a picture during our back and forth and presented him the evidence that proved I was right. He looked at the picture. I leaned in further.""Who's disabled now?""Tip five: pursue audacious goals. Flip expectation upside down and shove limitation off a cliff to meet its demise. There is a college football linebacker who blitzes, tackles, recovers fumbles while having one hand. There is a teacher who successfully transfers knowledge and inspires countless students while living with Down syndrome. And for me, on my long list, to cycle from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Darjeeling, India on the backseat of a bicycle built for two. It will be an exciting 620-mile adventure, and I'm sure I will have the blurry photos to show for it.(Laughter)Oh, before we go on, I forgot to introduce you to my mom. I need to do that. And here she is, as she would appear to me if I were looking through a crowd of people looking for her. Or is that an Asian man?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_robinson_how_i_fail_at_being_disabled
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"Loneliness. All of us in this room will experience loneliness at some point in our lives. Loneliness is not a function of being alone, but rather, a function of how socially connected you are to those around you. There could be somebody in this room right now surrounded by a thousand people experiencing loneliness. And while loneliness can be attributed to many things, as an architect, I'm going to tell you today how loneliness can be the result of our built environments — the very homes we choose to live in.Let's take a look at this house. It's a nice house. There's a big yard, picket fence, two-car garage. And the home might be in a neighborhood like this. And for many people around the globe, this home, this neighborhood — it's a dream. And yet the danger of achieving this dream is a false sense of connection and an increase in social isolation.I know, I can hear you now, there's somebody in the room screaming at me inside their head, ""That's my house, and that's my neighborhood, and I know everyone on my block!"" To which I would answer, ""Terrific!"" And I wish there were more people like you, because I'd wager to guess there's more people in the room living in a similar situation that might not know their neighbors. They might recognize them and say hello, but under their breath, they're asking their spouse, ""What was their name again?"" so they can ask a question by name to signify they know them.Social media also contributes to this false sense of connection. This image is probably all too familiar. You're standing in the elevator, sitting in a cafe, and you look around, and everyone's on their phone. You're not texting or checking Facebook, but everyone else is, and maybe, like me, you've been in a situation where you've made eye contact, smiled and said hello, and have that person yank out their earbuds and say, ""I'm sorry, what did you say?"" I find this incredibly isolating.The concept I'd like to share with you today is an antidote to isolation. It's not a new concept. In fact, it's an age-old way of living, and it still exists in many non-European cultures around the world. And about 50 years ago, the Danes decided to make up a new name, and since then, tens of thousands of Danish people have been living in this connected way. And it's being pursued more widely around the globe as people are seeking community. This concept is cohousing.Cohousing is an intentional neighborhood where people know each other and look after one another. In cohousing, you have your own home, but you also share significant spaces, both indoors and out. Before I show you some pictures of cohousing, I'd like to first introduce you to my friends Sheila and Spencer. When I first met Sheila and Spencer, they were just entering their 60s, and Spencer was looking ahead at the end of a long career in elementary education. And he really disliked the idea that he might not have children in his life upon retirement. They're now my neighbors. We live in a cohousing community that I not only designed, but developed and have my architecture practice in. This community is very intentional about our social interactions.So let me take you on a tour. From the outside, we look like any other small apartment building. In fact, we look identical to the one next door, except that we're bright yellow. Inside, the homes are fairly conventional. We all have living rooms and kitchens, bedrooms and baths, and there are nine of these homes around a central courtyard. This one's mine, and this one is Spencer and Sheila's. The thing that makes this building uniquely cohousing are not the homes, but rather, what happens here — the social interactions that happen in and around that central courtyard. When I look across the courtyard, I look forward to see Spencer and Sheila. In fact, every morning, this is what I see, Spencer waving at me furiously as we're making our breakfasts.From our homes, we look down into the courtyard, and depending on the time of year, we see this: kids and grownups in various combinations playing and hanging out with each other. There's a lot of giggling and chatter. There's a lot of hula-hooping. And every now and then, ""Hey, quit hitting me!"" or a cry from one of the kids. These are the sounds of our daily lives, and the sounds of social connectedness. At the bottom of the courtyard, there are a set of double doors, and those lead into the common house.I consider the common house the secret sauce of cohousing. It's the secret sauce because it's the place where the social interactions and community life begin, and from there, it radiates out through the rest of the community. Inside our common house, we have a large dining room to seat all 28 of us and our guests, and we dine together three times a week. In support of those meals, we have a large kitchen so that we can take turns cooking for each other in teams of three. So that means, with 17 adults, I lead cook once every six weeks. Two other times, I show up and help my team with the preparation and cleanup. And all those other nights, I just show up. I have dinner, talk with my neighbors, and I go home, having been fed a delicious meal by someone who cares about my vegetarian preferences.Our nine families have intentionally chosen an alternative way of living. Instead of pursuing the American dream, where we might have been isolated in our single-family homes, we instead chose cohousing, so that we can increase our social connections. And that's how cohousing starts: with a shared intention to live collaboratively. And intention is the single most important characteristic that differentiates cohousing from any other housing model. And while intention is difficult to see or even show, I'm an architect, and I can't help but show you more pictures.So here are a few examples to illustrate how intention has been expressed in some of the communities I've visited. Through the careful selection of furniture, lighting and acoustic materials to support eating together; in the careful visual location and visual access to kids' play areas around and inside the common house; in the consideration of scale and distribution of social gathering nodes in and around the community to support our daily lives, all of these spaces help contribute to and elevate the sense of communitas in each community.What was that word? ""Communitas."" Communitas is a fancy social science way of saying ""spirit of community."" And in visiting over 80 different communities, my measure of communitas became: How frequently did residents eat together? While it's completely up to each group how frequently they have common meals, I know some that have eaten together every single night for the past 40 years. I know others that have an occasional potluck once or twice a month. And from my observations, I can tell you, those that eat together more frequently, exhibit higher levels of communitas. It turns out, when you eat together, you start planning more activities together. When you eat together, you share more things. You start to watch each other's kids. You lend our your power tools. You borrow each other's cars.And despite all this, as my daughter loves to say, everything is not rainbows and unicorns in cohousing, and I'm not best friends with every single person in my community. We even have differences and conflicts. But living in cohousing, we're intentional about our relationships. We're motivated to resolve our differences. We follow up, we check in, we speak our personal truths and, when appropriate, we apologize.Skeptics will say that cohousing is only interesting or attractive to a very small group of people. And I'll agree with that. If you look at Western cultures around the globe, those living in cohousing are just a fractional percent. But that needs to change, because our very lives depend upon it.In 2015, Brigham Young University completed a study that showed a significant increase risk of premature death in those who were living in isolation. The US Surgeon General has declared isolation to be a public health epidemic. And this epidemic is not restricted to the US alone.So when I said earlier that cohousing is an antidote to isolation, what I should have said is that cohousing can save your life. If I was a doctor, I would tell you to take two aspirin, and call me in the morning. But as an architect, I'm going to suggest that you take a walk with your neighbor, share a meal together, and call me in 20 years.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/grace_kim_how_cohousing_can_make_us_happier_and_live_longer
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"Cancer. Many of us have lost family, friends or loved ones to this horrible disease. I know there are some of you in the audience who are cancer survivors, or who are fighting cancer at this moment. My heart goes out to you. While this word often conjures up emotions of sadness and anger and fear, I bring you good news from the front lines of cancer research. The fact is, we are starting to win the war on cancer. In fact, we lie at the intersection of the three of the most exciting developments within cancer research.The first is cancer genomics. The genome is a composition of all the genetic information encoded by DNA in an organism. In cancers, changes in the DNA called mutations are what drive these cancers to go out of control. Around 10 years ago, I was part of the team at Johns Hopkins that first mapped the mutations of cancers. We did this first for colorectal, breast, pancreatic and brain cancers. And since then, there have been over 90 projects in 70 countries all over the world, working to understand the genetic basis of these diseases. Today, tens of thousands of cancers are understood down to exquisite molecular detail.The second revolution is precision medicine, also known as ""personalized medicine."" Instead of one-size-fits-all methods to be able to treat cancers, there is a whole new class of drugs that are able to target cancers based on their unique genetic profile. Today, there are a host of these tailor-made drugs, called targeted therapies, available to physicians even today to be able to personalize their therapy for their patients, and many others are in development.The third exciting revolution is immunotherapy, and this is really exciting. Scientists have been able to leverage the immune system in the fight against cancer. For example, there have been ways where we find the off switches of cancer, and new drugs have been able to turn the immune system back on, to be able to fight cancer. In addition, there are ways where you can take away immune cells from the body, train them, engineer them and put them back into the body to fight cancer. Almost sounds like science fiction, doesn't it?While I was a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, I had the privilege of working with some of the pioneers of this field and watched the development firsthand. It's been pretty amazing. Today, over 600 clinical trials are open, actively recruiting patients to explore all aspects in immunotherapy.While these three exciting revolutions are ongoing, unfortunately, this is only the beginning, and there are still many, many challenges. Let me illustrate with a patient. Here is a patient with a skin cancer called melanoma. It's horrible; the cancer has gone everywhere. However, scientists were able to map the mutations of this cancer and give a specific treatment that targets one of the mutations. And the result is almost miraculous. Tumors almost seem to melt away. Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story. A few months later, this picture is taken. The tumor has come back. The question is: Why? The answer is tumor heterogeneity. Let me explain.Even a cancer as small as one centimeter in diameter harbors over a hundred million different cells. While genetically similar, there are small differences in these different cancers that make them differently prone to different drugs. So even if you have a drug that's highly effective, that kills almost all the cells, there is a chance that there's a small population that's resistant to the drug. This ultimately is the population that comes back, and takes over the patient.So then the question is: What do we do with this information? Well, the key, then, is to apply all these exciting advancements in cancer therapy earlier, as soon as we can, before these resistance clones emerge. The key to cancer and curing cancer is early detection. And we intuitively know this. Finding cancer early results in better outcomes, and the numbers show this as well. For example, in ovarian cancer, if you detect cancer in stage four, only 17 percent of the women survive at five years. However, if you are able to detect this cancer as early as stage one, over 92 percent of women will survive. But the sad fact is, only 15 percent of women are detected at stage one, whereas the vast majority, 70 percent, are detected in stages three and four.We desperately need better detection mechanisms for cancers. The current best ways to screen cancer fall into one of three categories. First is medical procedures, which is like colonoscopy for colon cancer. Second is protein biomarkers, like PSA for prostate cancer. Or third, imaging techniques, such as mammography for breast cancer. Medical procedures are the gold standard; however, they are highly invasive and require a large infrastructure to implement. Protein markers, while effective in some populations, are not very specific in some circumstances, resulting in high numbers of false positives, which then results in unnecessary work-ups and unnecessary procedures. Imaging methods, while useful in some populations, expose patients to harmful radiation. In addition, it is not applicable to all patients. For example, mammography has problems in women with dense breasts.So what we need is a method that is noninvasive, that is light in infrastructure, that is highly specific, that also does not have false positives, does not use any radiation and is applicable to large populations. Even more importantly, we need a method to be able to detect cancers before they're 100 million cells in size. Does such a technology exist? Well, I wouldn't be up here giving a talk if it didn't.I'm excited to tell you about this latest technology we've developed. Central to our technology is a simple blood test. The blood circulatory system, while seemingly mundane, is essential for you to survive, providing oxygen and nutrients to your cells, and removing waste and carbon dioxide. Here's a key biological insight: Cancer cells grow and die faster than normal cells, and when they die, DNA is shed into the blood system. Since we know the signatures of these cancer cells from all the different cancer genome sequencing projects, we can look for those signals in the blood to be able to detect these cancers early. So instead of waiting for cancers to be large enough to cause symptoms, or for them to be dense enough to show up on imaging, or for them to be prominent enough for you to be able to visualize on medical procedures, we can start looking for cancers while they are relatively pretty small, by looking for these small amounts of DNA in the blood.So let me tell you how we do this. First, like I said, we start off with a simple blood test — no radiation, no complicated equipment — a simple blood test. Then the blood is shipped to us, and what we do is extract the DNA out of it. While your body is mostly healthy cells, most of the DNA that's detected will be from healthy cells. However, there will be a small amount, less than one percent, that comes from the cancer cells. Then we use molecular biology methods to be able to enrich this DNA for areas of the genome which are known to be associated with cancer, based on the information from the cancer genomics projects. We're able to then put this DNA into DNA-sequencing machines and are able to digitize the DNA into A's, C's, T's and G's and have this final readout. Ultimately, we have information of billions of letters that output from this run. We then apply statistical and computational methods to be able to find the small signal that's present, indicative of the small amount of cancer DNA in the blood.So does this actually work in patients? Well, because there's no way of really predicting right now which patients will get cancer, we use the next best population: cancers in remission; specifically, lung cancer. The sad fact is, even with the best drugs that we have today, most lung cancers come back. The key, then, is to see whether we're able to detect these recurrences of cancers earlier than with standard methods.We just finished a major trial with Professor Charles Swanton at University College London, examining this. Let me walk you through an example of one patient. Here's an example of one patient who undergoes surgery at time point zero, and then undergoes chemotherapy. Then the patient is under remission. He is monitored using clinical exams and imaging methods. Around day 450, unfortunately, the cancer comes back. The question is: Are we able to catch this earlier? During this whole time, we've been collecting blood serially to be able to measure the amount of ctDNA in the blood. So at the initial time point, as expected, there's a high level of cancer DNA in the blood. However, this goes away to zero in subsequent time points and remains negligible after subsequent points. However, around day 340, we see the rise of cancer DNA in the blood, and eventually, it goes up higher for days 400 and 450.Here's the key, if you've missed it: At day 340, we see the rise in the cancer DNA in the blood. That means we are catching this cancer over a hundred days earlier than traditional methods. This is a hundred days earlier where we can give therapies, a hundred days earlier where we can do surgical interventions, or even a hundred days less for the cancer to grow or a hundred days less for resistance to occur. For some patients, this hundred days means the matter of life and death. We're really excited about this information.Because of this assignment, we've done additional studies now in other cancers, including breast cancer, lung cancer and ovarian cancer, and I can't wait to see how much earlier we can find these cancers.Ultimately, I have a dream, a dream of two vials of blood, and that, in the future, as part of all of our standard physical exams, we'll have two vials of blood drawn. And from these two vials of blood we will be able to compare the DNA from all known signatures of cancer, and hopefully then detect cancers months to even years earlier. Even with the therapies we have currently, this could mean that millions of lives could be saved. And if you add on to that recent advancements in immunotherapy and targeted therapies, the end of cancer is in sight.The next time you hear the word ""cancer,"" I want you to add to the emotions: hope. Hold on. Cancer researchers all around the world are working feverishly to beat this disease, and tremendous progress is being made.This is the beginning of the end. We will win the war on cancer. And to me, this is amazing news.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_lin_a_simple_new_blood_test_that_can_catch_cancer_early
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"I want you to imagine walking into a room, a control room with a bunch of people, a hundred people, hunched over a desk with little dials, and that that control room will shape the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction, but this actually exists right now, today.I know because I used to be in one of those control rooms. I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today. Because when you pull out your phone and they design how this works or what's on the feed, it's scheduling little blocks of time in our minds. If you see a notification, it schedules you to have thoughts that maybe you didn't intend to have. If you swipe over that notification, it schedules you into spending a little bit of time getting sucked into something that maybe you didn't intend to get sucked into. When we talk about technology, we tend to talk about it as this blue sky opportunity. It could go any direction. And I want to get serious for a moment and tell you why it's going in a very specific direction. Because it's not evolving randomly. There's a hidden goal driving the direction of all of the technology we make, and that goal is the race for our attention. Because every new site — TED, elections, politicians, games, even meditation apps — have to compete for one thing, which is our attention, and there's only so much of it. And the best way to get people's attention is to know how someone's mind works. And there's a whole bunch of persuasive techniques that I learned in college at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab to get people's attention.A simple example is YouTube. YouTube wants to maximize how much time you spend. And so what do they do? They autoplay the next video. And let's say that works really well. They're getting a little bit more of people's time. Well, if you're Netflix, you look at that and say, well, that's shrinking my market share, so I'm going to autoplay the next episode. But then if you're Facebook, you say, that's shrinking all of my market share, so now I have to autoplay all the videos in the newsfeed before waiting for you to click play. So the internet is not evolving at random. The reason it feels like it's sucking us in the way it is is because of this race for attention. We know where this is going. Technology is not neutral, and it becomes this race to the bottom of the brain stem of who can go lower to get it.Let me give you an example of Snapchat. If you didn't know, Snapchat is the number one way that teenagers in the United States communicate. So if you're like me, and you use text messages to communicate, Snapchat is that for teenagers, and there's, like, a hundred million of them that use it. And they invented a feature called Snapstreaks, which shows the number of days in a row that two people have communicated with each other. In other words, what they just did is they gave two people something they don't want to lose. Because if you're a teenager, and you have 150 days in a row, you don't want that to go away. And so think of the little blocks of time that that schedules in kids' minds. This isn't theoretical: when kids go on vacation, it's been shown they give their passwords to up to five other friends to keep their Snapstreaks going, even when they can't do it. And they have, like, 30 of these things, and so they have to get through taking photos of just pictures or walls or ceilings just to get through their day. So it's not even like they're having real conversations. We have a temptation to think about this as, oh, they're just using Snapchat the way we used to gossip on the telephone. It's probably OK. Well, what this misses is that in the 1970s, when you were just gossiping on the telephone, there wasn't a hundred engineers on the other side of the screen who knew exactly how your psychology worked and orchestrated you into a double bind with each other.Now, if this is making you feel a little bit of outrage, notice that that thought just comes over you. Outrage is a really good way also of getting your attention, because we don't choose outrage. It happens to us. And if you're the Facebook newsfeed, whether you'd want to or not, you actually benefit when there's outrage. Because outrage doesn't just schedule a reaction in emotional time, space, for you. We want to share that outrage with other people. So we want to hit share and say, ""Can you believe the thing that they said?"" And so outrage works really well at getting attention, such that if Facebook had a choice between showing you the outrage feed and a calm newsfeed, they would want to show you the outrage feed, not because someone consciously chose that, but because that worked better at getting your attention. And the newsfeed control room is not accountable to us. It's only accountable to maximizing attention. It's also accountable, because of the business model of advertising, for anybody who can pay the most to actually walk into the control room and say, ""That group over there, I want to schedule these thoughts into their minds."" So you can target, you can precisely target a lie directly to the people who are most susceptible. And because this is profitable, it's only going to get worse.So I'm here today because the costs are so obvious. I don't know a more urgent problem than this, because this problem is underneath all other problems. It's not just taking away our agency to spend our attention and live the lives that we want, it's changing the way that we have our conversations, it's changing our democracy, and it's changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships we want with each other. And it affects everyone, because a billion people have one of these in their pocket.So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society. The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect. The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time — because it's only going to get more persuasive — that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising. Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people — just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.So let me give you a concrete example. Today, let's say your friend cancels dinner on you, and you are feeling a little bit lonely. And so what do you do in that moment? You open up Facebook. And in that moment, the designers in the control room want to schedule exactly one thing, which is to maximize how much time you spend on the screen. Now, instead, imagine if those designers created a different timeline that was the easiest way, using all of their data, to actually help you get out with the people that you care about? Just think, alleviating all loneliness in society, if that was the timeline that Facebook wanted to make possible for people. Or imagine a different conversation. Let's say you wanted to post something supercontroversial on Facebook, which is a really important thing to be able to do, to talk about controversial topics. And right now, when there's that big comment box, it's almost asking you, what key do you want to type? In other words, it's scheduling a little timeline of things you're going to continue to do on the screen. And imagine instead that there was another button there saying, what would be most time well spent for you? And you click ""host a dinner."" And right there underneath the item it said, ""Who wants to RSVP for the dinner?"" And so you'd still have a conversation about something controversial, but you'd be having it in the most empowering place on your timeline, which would be at home that night with a bunch of a friends over to talk about it. So imagine we're running, like, a find and replace on all of the timelines that are currently steering us towards more and more screen time persuasively and replacing all of those timelines with what do we want in our lives.It doesn't have to be this way. Instead of handicapping our attention, imagine if we used all of this data and all of this power and this new view of human nature to give us a superhuman ability to focus and a superhuman ability to put our attention to what we cared about and a superhuman ability to have the conversations that we need to have for democracy. The most complex challenges in the world require not just us to use our attention individually. They require us to use our attention and coordinate it together. Climate change is going to require that a lot of people are being able to coordinate their attention in the most empowering way together. And imagine creating a superhuman ability to do that.Sometimes the world's most pressing and important problems are not these hypothetical future things that we could create in the future. Sometimes the most pressing problems are the ones that are right underneath our noses, the things that are already directing a billion people's thoughts. And maybe instead of getting excited about the new augmented reality and virtual reality and these cool things that could happen, which are going to be susceptible to the same race for attention, if we could fix the race for attention on the thing that's already in a billion people's pockets. Maybe instead of getting excited about the most exciting new cool fancy education apps, we could fix the way kids' minds are getting manipulated into sending empty messages back and forth.(Applause)Maybe instead of worrying about hypothetical future runaway artificial intelligences that are maximizing for one goal, we could solve the runaway artificial intelligence that already exists right now, which are these newsfeeds maximizing for one thing. It's almost like instead of running away to colonize new planets, we could fix the one that we're already on.(Applause)Solving this problem is critical infrastructure for solving every other problem. There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems that does not require our ability to put our attention where we care about. At the end of our lives, all we have is our attention and our time. What will be time well spent for ours?Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Tristan, thank you. Hey, stay up here a sec. First of all, thank you. I know we asked you to do this talk on pretty short notice, and you've had quite a stressful week getting this thing together, so thank you. Some people listening might say, what you complain about is addiction, and all these people doing this stuff, for them it's actually interesting. All these design decisions have built user content that is fantastically interesting. The world's more interesting than it ever has been. What's wrong with that?Tristan Harris: I think it's really interesting. One way to see this is if you're just YouTube, for example, you want to always show the more interesting next video. You want to get better and better at suggesting that next video, but even if you could propose the perfect next video that everyone would want to watch, it would just be better and better at keeping you hooked on the screen. So what's missing in that equation is figuring out what our boundaries would be. You would want YouTube to know something about, say, falling asleep. The CEO of Netflix recently said, ""our biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep."" And so what we need to recognize is that the human architecture is limited and that we have certain boundaries or dimensions of our lives that we want to be honored and respected, and technology could help do that.(Applause)CA: I mean, could you make the case that part of the problem here is that we've got a naïve model of human nature? So much of this is justified in terms of human preference, where we've got these algorithms that do an amazing job of optimizing for human preference, but which preference? There's the preferences of things that we really care about when we think about them versus the preferences of what we just instinctively click on. If we could implant that more nuanced view of human nature in every design, would that be a step forward?TH: Absolutely. I mean, I think right now it's as if all of our technology is basically only asking our lizard brain what's the best way to just impulsively get you to do the next tiniest thing with your time, instead of asking you in your life what we would be most time well spent for you? What would be the perfect timeline that might include something later, would be time well spent for you here at TED in your last day here?CA: So if Facebook and Google and everyone said to us first up, ""Hey, would you like us to optimize for your reflective brain or your lizard brain? You choose.""TH: Right. That would be one way. Yes.CA: You said persuadability, that's an interesting word to me because to me there's two different types of persuadability. There's the persuadability that we're trying right now of reason and thinking and making an argument, but I think you're almost talking about a different kind, a more visceral type of persuadability, of being persuaded without even knowing that you're thinking.TH: Exactly. The reason I care about this problem so much is I studied at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford that taught [students how to recognize] exactly these techniques. There's conferences and workshops that teach people all these covert ways of getting people's attention and orchestrating people's lives. And it's because most people don't know that that exists that this conversation is so important.CA: Tristan, you and I, we both know so many people from all these companies. There are actually many here in the room, and I don't know about you, but my experience of them is that there is no shortage of good intent. People want a better world. They are actually — they really want it. And I don't think anything you're saying is that these are evil people. It's a system where there's these unintended consequences that have really got out of control —TH: Of this race for attention. It's the classic race to the bottom when you have to get attention, and it's so tense. The only way to get more is to go lower on the brain stem, to go lower into outrage, to go lower into emotion, to go lower into the lizard brain.CA: Well, thank you so much for helping us all get a little bit wiser about this.Tristan Harris, thank you. TH: Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention
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"Here's a question for you: how many different scents do you think you can smell, and maybe even identify with accuracy? 100? 300? 1,000? One study estimates that humans can detect up to one trillion different odors. A trillion. It's hard to imagine, but your nose has the molecular machinery to make it happen.Olfactory receptors — tiny scent detectors — are packed into your nose, each one patiently waiting to be activated by the odor, or ligand, that it's been assigned to detect. It turns out we humans, like all vertebrates, have lots of olfactory receptors. In fact, more of our DNA is devoted to genes for different olfactory receptors than for any other type of protein.Why is that? Could olfactory receptors be doing something else in addition to allowing us to smell?In 1991, Linda Buck and Richard Axel uncovered the molecular identity of olfactory receptors — work which ultimately led to a Nobel Prize. At the time, we all assumed that these receptors were only found in the nose. However, about a year or so later, a report emerged of an olfactory receptor expressed in a tissue other than the nose. And then another such report emerged, and another. We now know that these receptors are found all over the body, including in some pretty unexpected places — in muscle, in kidneys, lungs and blood vessels.But what are they doing there? Well, we know that olfactory receptors act as sensitive chemical sensors in the nose — that's how they mediate our sense of smell. It turns out they also act as sensitive chemical sensors in many other parts of the body. Now, I'm not saying that your liver can detect the aroma of your morning coffee as you walk into the kitchen. Rather, after you drink your morning coffee, your liver might use an olfactory receptor to chemically detect the change in concentration of a chemical floating through your bloodstream.Many cell types and tissues in the body use chemical sensors, or chemosensors, to keep track of the concentration of hormones, metabolites and other molecules, and some of these chemosensors are olfactory receptors. If you are a pancreas or a kidney and you need a specialized chemical sensor that will allow you to keep track of a specific molecule, why reinvent the wheel?One of the first examples of an olfactory receptor found outside the nose showed that human sperm express an olfactory receptor, and that sperm with this receptor will seek out the chemical that the receptor responds to — the receptor's ligand. That is, the sperm will swim toward the ligand. This has intriguing implications. Are sperm aided in finding the egg by sniffing out the area with the highest ligand concentration?I like this example because it clearly demonstrates that an olfactory receptor's primary job is to be a chemical sensor, but depending on the context, it can influence how you perceive a smell, or in which direction sperm will swim, and as it turns out, a huge variety of other processes. Olfactory receptors have been implicated in muscle cell migration, in helping the lung to sense and respond to inhaled chemicals, and in wound healing.Similarly, taste receptors once thought to be found only in the tongue, are now known to be expressed in cells and tissues throughout the body. Even more surprisingly, a recent study found that the light receptors in our eyes also play a role in our blood vessels.In my lab, we work on trying to understand the roles of olfactory receptors and taste receptors in the context of the kidney. The kidney is a central control center for homeostasis. And to us, it makes sense that a homeostatic control center would be a logical place to employ chemical sensors. We've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney, one of which, olfactory receptor 78, is known to be expressed in cells and tissues that are important in the regulation of blood pressure. When this receptor is deleted in mice, their blood pressure is low. Surprisingly, this receptor was found to respond to chemicals called short-chain fatty acids that are produced by the bacteria that reside in your gut — your gut microbiota. After being produced by your gut microbiota, these chemicals are absorbed into your bloodstream where they can then interact with receptors like olfactory receptor 78, meaning that the changes in metabolism of your gut microbiota may influence your blood pressure.Although we've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney, we've only just begun to tease out their different functions and to figure out which chemicals each of them responds to. Similar investigations lie ahead for many other organs and tissues — only a small minority of receptors has been studied to date. This is exciting stuff. It's revolutionizing our understanding of the scope of influence for one of the five senses. And it has the potential to change our understanding of some aspects of human physiology. It's still early, but I think we've picked up on the scent of something we're following.(Laughter)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_pluznick_you_smell_with_your_body_not_just_your_nose
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"The first time I cried underwater was in 2008, the island of Curaçao, way down in the southern Caribbean. It's beautiful there. I was studying these corals for my PhD, and after days and days of diving on the same reef, I had gotten to know them as individuals. I had made friends with coral colonies — totally a normal thing to do. Then, Hurricane Omar smashed them apart and ripped off their skin, leaving little bits of wounded tissue that would have a hard time healing, and big patches of dead skeleton that would get overgrown by algae. When I saw this damage for the first time, stretching all the way down the reef, I sunk onto the sand in my scuba gear and I cried. If a coral could die that fast, how could a reef ever survive? And why was I making it my job to try to fight for them?I never heard another scientist tell that kind of story until last year. A scientist in Guam wrote, ""I cried right into my mask,"" seeing the damage on the reefs. Then a scientist in Australia wrote, ""I showed my students the results of our coral surveys, and we wept."" Crying about corals is having a moment, guys.(Laughter)And that's because reefs in the Pacific are losing corals faster than we've ever seen before. Because of climate change, the water is so hot for so long in the summers, that these animals can't function normally. They're spitting out the colored algae that lives in their skin, and the clear bleached tissue that's left usually starves to death and then rots away. Then the skeletons are overgrown by algae.This is happening over an unbelievable scale. The Northern Great Barrier Reef lost two-thirds of its corals last year over a distance of hundreds of miles, then bleached again this year, and the bleaching stretched further south. Reefs in the Pacific are in a nosedive right now, and no one knows how bad it's going to get, except ... over in the Caribbean where I work, we've already been through the nosedive. Reefs there have suffered through centuries of intense human abuse. We kind of already know how the story goes. And we might be able to help predict what happens next.Let's consult a graph. Since the invention of scuba, scientists have measured the amount of coral on the seafloor, and how it's changed through time. And after centuries of ratcheting human pressure, Caribbean reefs met one of three fates. Some reefs lost their corals very quickly. Some reefs lost their corals more slowly, but kind of ended up in the same place. OK, so far this is not going very well. But some reefs in the Caribbean — the ones best protected and the ones a little further from humans — they managed to hold onto their corals. Give us a challenge. And, we almost never saw a reef hit zero.The second time I cried underwater was on the north shore of Curaçao, 2011. It was the calmest day of the year, but it's always pretty sketchy diving there. My boyfriend and I swam against the waves. I watched my compass so we could find our way back out, and he watched for sharks, and after 20 minutes of swimming that felt like an hour, we finally dropped down to the reef, and I was so shocked, and I was so happy that my eyes filled with tears. There were corals 1,000 years old lined up one after another. They had survived the entire history of European colonialism in the Caribbean, and for centuries before that.I never knew what a coral could do when it was given a chance to thrive. The truth is that even as we lose so many corals, even as we go through this massive coral die-off, some reefs will survive. Some will be ragged on the edge, some will be beautiful. And by protecting shorelines and giving us food to eat and supporting tourism, they will still be worth billions and billions of dollars a year. The best time to protect a reef was 50 years ago, but the second-best time is right now. Even as we go through bleaching events, more frequent and in more places, some corals will be able to recover.We had a bleaching event in 2010 in the Caribbean that took off big patches of skin on boulder corals like these. This coral lost half of its skin. But if you look at the side of this coral a few years later, this coral is actually healthy again. It's doing what a healthy coral does. It's making copies of its polyps, it's fighting back the algae and it's reclaiming its territory. If a few polyps survive, a coral can regrow; it just needs time and protection and a reasonable temperature. Some corals can regrow in 10 years — others take a lot longer. But the more stresses we take off them locally — things like overfishing, sewage pollution, fertilizer pollution, dredging, coastal construction — the better they can hang on as we stabilize the climate, and the faster they can regrow.And as we go through the long, tough and necessary process of stabilizing the climate of planet Earth, some new corals will still be born. This is what I study in my research. We try to understand how corals make babies, and how those babies find their way to the reef, and we invent new methods to help them survive those early, fragile life stages. One of my favorite coral babies of all time showed up right after Hurricane Omar. It's the same species I was studying before the storm, but you almost never see babies of this species — it's really rare. This is actually an endangered species. In this photo, this little baby coral, this little circle of polyps, is a few years old. Like its cousins that bleach, it's fighting back the algae. And like its cousins on the north shore, it's aiming to live for 1,000 years.What's happening in the world and in the ocean has changed our time horizon. We can be incredibly pessimistic on the short term, and mourn what we lost and what we really took for granted. But we can still be optimistic on the long term, and we can still be ambitious about what we fight for and what we expect from our governments, from our planet. Corals have been living on planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. They're badasses.(Laughter)An individual coral can go through tremendous trauma and fully recover if it's given a chance and it's given protection. Corals have always been playing the long game, and now so are we.Thanks very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/kristen_marhaver_why_i_still_have_hope_for_coral_reefs
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"(Laughter)(Laughter)That's SpotMini. He'll be back in a little while.I —(Applause)I love building robots. And my long-term goal is to build robots that can do what people and animals do. And there's three things in particular that we're interested in. One is balance and dynamic mobility, the second one is mobile manipulation, and the third one is mobile perception.So, dynamic mobility and balance — I'm going to do a demo for you. I'm standing here, balancing. I can see you're not very impressed. OK, how about now?(Laughter)How about now?(Applause)Those simple capabilities mean that people can go almost anywhere on earth, on any kind of terrain. We want to capture that for robots.What about manipulation? I'm holding this clicker in my hand; I'm not even looking at it, and I can manipulate it without any problem. But even more important, I can move my body while I hold the manipulator, the clicker, and stabilize and coordinate my body, and I can even walk around. And that means I can move around in the world and expand the range of my arms and my hands and really be able to handle almost anything. So that's mobile manipulation. And all of you can do this.Third is perception. I'm looking at a room with over 1,000 people in it, and my amazing visual system can see every one of you — you're all stable in space, even when I move my head, even when I move around. That kind of mobile perception is really important for robots that are going to move and act out in the world.I'm going to give you a little status report on where we are in developing robots toward these ends. The first three robots are all dynamically stabilized robots. This one goes back a little over 10 years ago — ""BigDog."" It's got a gyroscope that helps stabilize it. It's got sensors and a control computer.Here's a Cheetah robot that's running with a galloping gait, where it recycles its energy, it bounces on the ground, and it's computing all the time in order to keep itself stabilized and propelled.And here's a bigger robot that's got such good locomotion using its legs, that it can go in deep snow. This is about 10 inches deep, and it doesn't really have any trouble.This is Spot, a new generation of robot — just slightly older than the one that came out onstage. And we've been asking the question — you've all heard about drone delivery: Can we deliver packages to your houses with drones? Well, what about plain old legged-robot delivery?(Laughter)So we've been taking our robot to our employees' homes to see whether we could get in —(Laughter)the various access ways. And believe me, in the Boston area, there's every manner of stairway twists and turns. So it's a real challenge. But we're doing very well, about 70 percent of the way.And here's mobile manipulation, where we've put an arm on the robot, and it's finding its way through the door. Now, one of the important things about making autonomous robots is to make them not do just exactly what you say, but make them deal with the uncertainty of what happens in the real world. So we have Steve there, one of the engineers, giving the robot a hard time.(Laughter)And the fact that the programming still tolerates all that disturbance — it does what it's supposed to.Here's another example, where Eric is tugging on the robot as it goes up the stairs. And believe me, getting it to do what it's supposed to do in those circumstances is a real challenge, but the result is something that's going to generalize and make robots much more autonomous than they would be otherwise.This is Atlas, a humanoid robot. It's a third-generation humanoid that we've been building. I'll tell you a little bit about the hardware design later. And we've been saying: How close to human levels of performance and speed could we get in an ordinary task, like moving boxes around on a conveyor? We're getting up to about two-thirds of the speed that a human operates on average. And this robot is using both hands, it's using its body, it's stepping, so it's really an example of dynamic stability, mobile manipulation and mobile perception. Here —(Laughter)We actually have two Atlases.(Laughter)Now, everything doesn't go exactly the way it's supposed to.(Laughter)(Laughter)(Laughter)And here's our latest robot, called ""Handle."" Handle is interesting, because it's sort of half like an animal, and it's half something else with these leg-like things and wheels. It's got its arms on in kind of a funny way, but it really does some remarkable things. It can carry 100 pounds. It's probably going to lift more than that, but so far we've done 100. It's got some pretty good rough-terrain capability, even though it has wheels. And Handle loves to put on a show.(Laughter)(Applause)I'm going to give you a little bit of robot religion. A lot of people think that a robot is a machine where there's a computer that's telling it what to do, and the computer is listening through its sensors. But that's really only half of the story. The real story is that the computer is on one side, making suggestions to the robot, and on the other side are the physics of the world. And that physics involves gravity, friction, bouncing into things. In order to have a successful robot, my religion is that you have to do a holistic design, where you're designing the software, the hardware and the behavior all at one time, and all these parts really intermesh and cooperate with each other. And when you get the perfect design, you get a real harmony between all those parts interacting with each other. So it's half software and half hardware, plus the behavior.We've done some work lately on the hardware, where we tried to go — the picture on the left is a conventional design, where you have parts that are all bolted together, conductors, tubes, connectors. And on the right is a more integrated thing; it's supposed to look like an anatomy drawing. Using the miracle of 3-D printing, we're starting to build parts of robots that look a lot more like the anatomy of an animal. So that's an upper-leg part that has hydraulic pathways — actuators, filters — all embedded, all printed as one piece, and the whole structure is developed with a knowledge of what the loads and behavior are going to be, which is available from data recorded from robots and simulations and things like that.So it's a data-driven hardware design. And using processes like that, not only the upper leg but some other things, we've gotten our robots to go from big, behemoth, bulky, slow, bad robots — that one on the right, weighing almost 400 pounds — down to the one in the middle which was just in the video, weighs about 190 pounds, just a little bit more than me, and we have a new one, which is working but I'm not going to show it to you yet, on the left, which weighs just 165 pounds, with all the same strength and capabilities. So these things are really getting better very quickly.So it's time for Spot to come back out, and we're going to demonstrate a little bit of mobility, dexterity and perception. This is Seth Davis, who's my robot wrangler today, and he's giving Spot some general direction by steering it around, but all the coordination of the legs and the sensors is done by the robot's computers on board. The robot can walk with a number of different gaits; it's got a gyro, or a solid-state gyro, an IMU on board. Obviously, it's got a battery, and things like that. One of the cool things about a legged robot is, it's omnidirectional. In addition to going forward, it can go sideways, it can turn in place. And this robot is a little bit of a show-off. It loves to use its dynamic gaits, like running —(Laughter)And it's got one more.(Laughter)Now if it were really a show-off, it would be hopping on one foot, but, you know.Now, Spot has a set of cameras here, stereo cameras, and we have a feed up in the center. It's kind of dark out in the audience, but it's going to use those cameras in order to look at the terrain right in front of it, while it goes over these obstacles back here. For this demo, Seth is steering, but the robot's doing all its own terrain planning. This is a terrain map, where the data from the cameras is being developed in real time, showing the red spots, which are where it doesn't want to step, and the green spots are the good places. And here it's treating them like stepping-stones. So it's trying to stay up on the blocks, and it adjusts its stride, and there's a ton of planning that has to go into an operation like that, and it does all that planning in real time, where it adjusts the steps a little bit longer or a little bit shorter.Now we're going to change it into a different mode, where it's just going to treat the blocks like terrain and decide whether to step up or down as it goes. So this is using dynamic balance and mobile perception, because it has to coordinate what it sees along with how it's moving.The other thing Spot has is a robot arm. Some of you may see that as a head and a neck, but believe me, it's an arm. Seth is driving it around. He's actually driving the hand and the body is following. So the two are coordinated in the way I was talking about before — in the way people can do that. In fact, one of the cool things Spot can do we call, ""chicken-head mode,"" and it keeps its head in one place in space, and it moves its body all around. There's a variation of this that's called ""twerking"" —(Laughter)but we're not going to use that today.(Laughter)So, Spot: I'm feeling a little thirsty. Could you get me a soda? For this demo, Seth is not doing any driving. We have a LIDAR on the back of the robot, and it's using these props we've put on the stage to localize itself. It's gone over to that location. Now it's using a camera that's in its hand to find the cup, picks it up — and again, Seth's not driving. We've planned out a path for it to go — it looked like it was going off the path — and now Seth's going to take over control again, because I'm a little bit chicken about having it do this by itself. Thank you, Spot.(Applause)So, Spot: How do you feel about having just finished your TED performance?(Laughter)Me, too!(Laughter)Thank you all, and thanks to the team at Boston Dynamics, who did all the hard work behind this.(Applause)Helen Walters: Marc, come back in the middle. Thank you so much. Come over here, I have questions.So, you mentioned the UPS and the package delivery. What are the other applications that you see for your robots?Marc Raibert: You know, I think that robots that have the capabilities I've been talking about are going to be incredibly useful. About a year ago, I went to Fukushima to see what the situation was there, and there's just a huge need for machines that can go into some of the dirty places and help remediate that.I think it won't be too long until we have robots like this in our homes, and one of the big needs is to take care of the aging and invalids. I think that it won't be too long till we're using robots to help take care of our parents, or probably more likely, have our children help take care of us. And there's a bunch of other things. I think the sky's the limit. Many of the ideas we haven't thought of yet, and people like you will help us think of new applications.HW: So what about the dark side? What about the military? Are they interested?MR: Sure, the military has been a big funder of robotics. I don't think the military is the dark side myself, but I think, as with all advanced technology, it can be used for all kinds of things.HW: Awesome. Thank you so much.MR: OK, you're welcome.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_raibert_meet_spot_the_robot_dog_that_can_run_hop_and_open_doors
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"I love museums. Have you guys ever been to the Natural History Museum? In New York City?(Applause)So one of the things that I do is I take my kids to the museum. Recently I took them to the Natural History Museum. I had my two sons with me, Sabian and Dabith. And we go into the front entrance of the museum, and there's that amazing sculpture of Teddy Roosevelt out there. You guys know which one I'm talking about. Teddy Roosevelt is sitting there with one hand on the horse, bold, strong, sleeves rolled up. I don't know if he's bare-chested, but it kind of feels like it.(Laughter)And on the left-hand side of him is a Native American walking. And on the right-hand side of him is an African-American walking. And as we're moving up the stairs, getting closer to the sculpture, my oldest son, who's nine, says, ""Dad, how come he gets to ride, and they have to walk?""It stopped me in my tracks. It stopped me in my tracks. There was so much history that we would have to go through to try to explain that, and that's something I try to do with them anyways. It's a question that I probably would have never really asked. But fundamentally what he was saying was, ""That doesn't look fair. Dad, that doesn't look fair. And why is this thing that's so not fair sitting outside of such an amazing institution."" And his question got me wondering, is there a way for us to amend our public sculptures, our national monuments? Not erase them, but is there a way to amend them?Now, I didn't grow up going to museums. That's not my history. My mother was 15 years old when I was born. She is amazing. My father was struggling with his own things for most of my life. If you really want to know the truth, the only reason I got into art is because of a woman. There was this amazing, amazing, fantastic, beautiful, smart woman, four years older than me, and I wanted to go out with her. But she said, ""You're too young and you're not thinking about your future."" So I ran on down to the junior college, registered for some classes, ran on back, and basically was like, ""I'm thinking about my future now.""(Laughter)""Can we go out?""For the record, she's even more amazing. I married her.(Applause)So when I randomly ran down to the junior college and registered for classes, I really wasn't paying attention to what I was registering to.(Laughter)So I ended up with an art history class, and I didn't know a thing about art history. But something amazing happened when I went into that class. For the first time in my academic career, my visual intelligence was required of me. For the first time. The professor would put up an image, bold strokes of blues and yellows, and say, ""Who's that?"" And I'd go, ""That's Van Gogh. Clearly that is Van Gogh. I got this.""(Laughter)I got a B in that class. For me, that was amazing. In high school, let's just say I wasn't a great student. OK? In high school, my GPA was .65.(Laughter)Decimal point first, six five. So me getting a B was huge, huge, absolutely huge. And because of the fact that I realized that I was able to learn things visually that I couldn't learn in other ways, this became my strategy, this became my tactic for understanding everything else. I wanted to stay in this relationship. Things were going well.I decided, let me keep taking these art history classes. One of the last art history classes, I will not forget, I will never forget. It was one of those survey art history classes. Anybody ever have one of those survey art history classes, where they try to teach you the entire history of art in a single semester? I'm talking about cave paintings and Jackson Pollock just crunched together all in the same — It doesn't really work, but they try anyway. Well, at the beginning of the semester, I looked at the book, and in this 400-page book was about a 14-page section that was on black people in painting. Now, this was a crammed in section that had representations of black people in painting and black people who painted. It was poorly curated, let's just put it that way.(Laughter)Nonetheless I was really excited about it, because in all the other classes that I had, we didn't even have that conversation. We didn't talk about it at all. So imagine my surprise when I get to class and on the day that we're supposed to go over that particular chapter, my professor announces, ""We're going to skip this chapter today because we do not have time to go through it.""""Whoa, I'm sorry, hold on, professor, professor. I'm sorry. This is a really important chapter to me. Are we going to go over it at any point?""""Titus, we don't have time for this.""""I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I really need to understand. Clearly the author thinks that this is significant. Why are we skipping over this?""""Titus, I do not have time for this.""""OK, last question, I'm really sorry here. When can we talk, because we need to talk.""(Laughter)I went to her office hours. I ended up getting kicked out of her office. I went to the dean. The dean finally told me, ""I can't force her to teach anything."" And I knew in that moment if I wanted to understand this history, if I wanted to understand the roles of those folks who had to walk, I was probably going to have to figure that out myself. So ... above you right here on the slide is a painting by Frans Hals. This is one of the kinds of images that was in that chapter. I taught myself how to paint by going to museums and looking at images like this.I want to show you something.I made this. I —(Applause)I made some alterations. You'll see there are some slight differences in the painting. All this art history that I had been absorbing helped me to realize that painting is a language. There is a reason why he is the highest in the composition here. There is a reason why the painter is showing us this gold necklace here. He's trying to tell us something about the economic status of these people in these paintings. Painting is a visual language where everything in the painting is meaningful, is important. It's coded. But sometimes, because of the compositional structure, because of compositional hierarchy, it's hard to see other things. This silk is supposed to tell us also that they have quite a bit of money. There's more written about dogs in art history than there are about this other character here. Historically speaking, in research on these kinds of paintings, I can find out more about the lace that the woman is wearing in this painting — the manufacturer of the lace — than I can about this character here, about his dreams, about his hopes, about what he wanted out of life.I want to show you something. I don't want you to think that this is about eradication. It's not. The oil that you saw me just put inside of this paint is linseed oil. It becomes transparent over time, so eventually what's going to happen is these faces will emerge a little bit. What I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to show you, is how to shift your gaze just slightly, just momentarily, just momentarily, to ask yourself the question, why do some have to walk? What is the impact of these kinds of sculptures at museums? What is the impact of these kinds of paintings on some of our most vulnerable in society, seeing these kinds of depictions of themselves all the time? I'm not saying erase it. We can't erase this history. It's real. We have to know it. I think of it in the same way we think of —Let me step back a second. You remember old-school cameras, where when you took a picture, you actually had to focus. Right? You'd put the camera up, and if I wanted you in focus, I would move the lens a little to the left and you would come forward. I could move the lens a little to the right, and you would go back and the folks in the background would come out. I'm just trying to do that here. I'm trying to give you that opportunity. I'm trying to answer that question that my son had. I want to make paintings, I want to make sculptures that are honest, that wrestle with the struggles of our past but speak to the diversity and the advances of our present. And we can't do that by taking an eraser and getting rid of stuff. That's just not going to work. I think that we should do it in the same way the American Constitution works. When we have a situation where we want to change a law in the American Constitution, we don't erase the other one. Alongside that is an amendment, something that says, ""This is where we were, but this is where we are right now."" I figure if we can do that, then that will help us understand a little bit about where we're going.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/titus_kaphar_can_art_amend_history
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"The first time I felt fear I was 41 years old. People have always said I was brave. When I was little, I'd climb the highest tree, and I'd approach any animal fearlessly. I liked challenges. My father used to say, ""Good steel can withstand any temperature.""And when I entered into Colombian politics, I thought I'd be able to withstand any temperature. I wanted to end corruption; I wanted to cut ties between politicians and drug traffickers. The first time I was elected, it was because I called out, by name, corrupt and untouchable politicians. I also called out the president for his ties to the cartels.That's when the threats started. I had to send my very young children out of the country one morning, hidden, all the way to the airport, in the French ambassador's armored car. Days later, I was the victim of an attack, but emerged unharmed. The following year, the Colombian people elected me with the highest number of votes. I thought people applauded me because I was brave. I, too, thought I was brave. But I wasn't. I had simply never before experienced true fear.That changed on February 23, 2002. At the time, I was a presidential candidate in Colombia promoting my campaign agenda, when I was detained by a group of armed men. They were wearing uniforms with military garments. I looked at their boots; they were rubber. And I knew that the Colombian army wore leather boots. I knew that these were FARC guerrillas.From that point on, everything happened very quickly. The commando leader ordered us to stop the vehicle. Meanwhile, one of his men stepped on an antipersonnel mine and flew through the air. He landed, sitting upright, right in front of me. We made eye contact and it was then that the young man understood: his rubber boot with his leg still in it had landed far away.(Sighs)He started screaming like crazy. And the truth is, I felt — as I feel right now, because I'm reliving these emotions — I felt at that moment that something inside of me was breaking and that I was being infected with his fear. My mind went blank and couldn't think; it was paralyzed. When I finally reacted, I said to myself, ""They're going to kill me, and I didn't say goodbye to my children."" As they took me into the deepest depths of the jungle, the FARC soldiers announced that if the government didn't negotiate, they'd kill me. And I knew that the government wouldn't negotiate.From that point on, I went to sleep in fear every night — cold sweats, shaking, stomach ache, insomnia. But worse than that was what was happening to my mind, because my memory was being erased: all the phone numbers, addresses, names of very dear people, even significant life events. And so, I began to doubt myself, to doubt my mental health. And with doubt came desperation, and with desperation came depression. I was suffering notorious behavioral changes and it wasn't just paranoia in moments of panic. It was distrust, it was hatred, and it was also the urge to kill.This, I realized when they had me chained by the neck to a tree. They kept me outside that day, during a tropical downpour. I remember feeling an urgent need to use the bathroom. ""Whatever you have to do, you'll do in front of me, bitch,"" the guard screamed at me. And I decided at that moment to kill him. And for days, I was planning, trying to find the right moment, the right way to do it, filled with hatred, filled with fear. Then suddenly, I rose up, snapped out of it and thought: ""I'm not going to become one of them. I'm not going to become an assassin. I still have enough freedom to decide who I want to be.""That's when I learned that fear brought me face to face with myself. It forced me to align my energies, to align my meridians. I learned that facing fear could become a pathway to growth. A lot of emotions arise when I talk about all of this, but when I think back, I'm able to identify the steps I took to do it. I want to share three of them with you.The first was to be guided by principles. Because I realized that in the midst of panic and mental block, if I followed my principles, I acted correctly.I remember the first night in a concentration camp that the guerrillas had built in the middle of the jungle, with 12-foot-high bars, barbed wire, lookouts in the four corners and armed men pointing guns at us 24 hours a day. That morning, the first morning, some men arrived, yelling: ""Count off! Count off!"" My fellow hostages woke up, startled, and began to identify themselves in numbered sequence. But when it was my turn, I said, ""Ingrid Betancourt. If you want to know if I'm here, call me by my name.""The guards' fury was nothing compared to that of the other hostages, because, obviously they were scared — we were all scared — and they were afraid that, because of me, they would be punished. But for me, beyond fear was the need to defend my identity, to not let them turn me into a thing or a number. That was one of the principles: to defend what I considered to be human dignity.But make no mistake: the guerrillas had it all very well analyzed — they had been kidnapping for years, and they had developed a technique to break us, to defeat us, to divide us. And so, the second step was to learn how to build supportive trust, to learn how to unite.The jungle is like a different planet. It's a world of shadows, of rain, with the hum of millions of bugs — majiña ants, bullet ants. I didn't stop scratching a single day while I was in the jungle. And of course, there were tarantulas, scorpions, anacondas ... I once came face to face with a 24-foot long anaconda that could have swallowed me in one bite. Jaguars ...But I want to tell you that none of these animals did us as much harm as the human beings. The guerrillas terrorized us. They spread rumors. Among the hostages, they sparked betrayals, jealousy, resentment, mistrust.The first time I escaped for a long time was with Lucho. Lucho had been a hostage for two years longer than I had. We decided to tie ourselves up with ropes to have the strength to lower ourselves into that dark water full of piranhas and alligators. What we did was, during the day, we would hide in the mangroves. And at night, we would leave, get in the water, and we would swim and let the current carry us. That went on for several days. But Lucho became sick. He was diabetic, and he fell into a diabetic coma. So the guerrillas captured us.But after having lived through that with Lucho, after having faced fear together, united, not punishment, not violence — nothing — could ever again divide us. What's certain is, all the guerrillas' manipulation was so damaging to us that even today, among some of the hostages from back then, tensions linger, passed down from all that poison that the guerrillas created.The third step is very important to me, and it's a gift that I want to give to you. The third step is to learn how to develop faith. I want to explain it like this: Jhon Frank Pinchao was a police officer who had been a hostage for more than eight years. He was famous for being the biggest scaredy-cat of us all. But Pincho — I called him ""Pincho"" — Pincho decided that he wanted to escape. And he asked me to help him. By that point, I basically had a master's degree in escape attempts.(Laughter)So we got started but we had a delay, because first, Pincho had to learn how to swim. And we had to carry out all these preparations in total secrecy. Anyway, when we finally had everything ready, Pincho came up to me one afternoon and said,""Ingrid, suppose I'm in the jungle, and I go around and around in circles, and I can't find the way out. What do I do?""""Pincho, you grab a phone, and you call the man upstairs.""""Ingrid, you know I don't believe in God."" ""God doesn't care. He'll still help you.""(Applause)It rained all night that night. The following morning, the camp woke up to a big commotion, because Pincho had fled. They made us dismantle the camp, and we started marching. During the march, the head guerrillas told us that Pincho had died, and that they had found his remains eaten by an anaconda. Seventeen days passed — and believe me, I counted them, because they were torture for me. But on the seventeenth day, the news exploded from the radio: Pincho was free and obviously alive. And this was the first thing he said:""I know my fellow hostages are listening. Ingrid, I did what you told me. I called the man upstairs, and he sent me the patrol that rescued me from the jungle.""That was an extraordinary moment, because ... obviously fear is contagious. But faith is, too. Faith isn't rational or emotional. Faith is an exercise of the will. It's the discipline of the will. It's what allows us to transform everything that we are — our weaknesses, our frailties, into strength, into power. It's truly a transformation. It's what gives us the strength to stand up in the face of fear look above it, and see beyond it. I hope you remember that, because I know we all need to connect with that strength we have inside of us for the times when there's a storm raging around our boat.Many, many, many, many years passed before I could return to my house. But when they took us, handcuffed, into the helicopter that finally took us out of the jungle, everything happened as quickly as when they kidnapped me. In an instant, I saw the guerrilla commander at my feet, gagged, and the rescue leader, yelling:""We're the Colombian army! You are free!""The shriek that came out of all of us when we regained our freedom, continues to vibrate in me to this day.Now, I know they can divide all of us, they can manipulate us all with fear. The ""No"" vote on the peace referendum in Colombia; Brexit; the idea of a wall between Mexico and the United States; Islamic terrorism — they're all examples of using fear politically to divide and recruit us. We all feel fear. But we can all avoid being recruited using the resources we have — our principles, unity, faith. Yes, fear is part of the human condition, as well as being necessary for survival. But above all, it's the guide by which each of us builds our identity, our personality.It's true, I was 41 years old the first time I felt fear, and feeling fear was not my decision. But it was my decision what to do with that fear. You can survive crawling along, fearful. But you can also rise above the fear, rise up, spread your wings, and soar, fly high, high, high, high, until you reach the stars, where all of us want to go.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ingrid_betancourt_what_six_years_in_captivity_taught_me_about_fear_and_faith
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"So 24 years ago, I was brought to The New Yorker as art editor to rejuvenate what had by then become a somewhat staid institution and to bring in new artists and to try to bring the magazine from its ivory tower into engaging with its time. And it was just the right thing for me to do because I've always been captivated by how an image can — a simple drawing — can cut through the torrent of images that we see every single day. How it can capture a moment, how it can crystallize a social trend or a complex event in a way that a lot of words wouldn't be able to do — and reduce it to its essence and turn it into a cartoon.So I went to the library and I looked at the first cover drawn by Rea Irvin in 1925 — a dandy looking at a butterfly through his monocle, and we call it Eustace Tilley. And I realized that as the magazine had become known for its in-depth research and long reports, some of the humor had gotten lost along the way, because now often Eustace Tilley was seen as a haughty dandy, but in fact, in 1925, when Rea Irvin first drew this image, he did it as part of a humor magazine to amuse the youth of the era, which was the flappers of the roaring twenties. And in the library, I found the images that really captured the zeitgeist of the Great Depression. And it showed us not just how people dressed or what their cars looked like, but also what made them laugh, what their prejudices were. And you really got a sense of what it felt like to be alive in the '30s.So I called on contemporary artists, such as Adrian Tomine here. I often call on narrative artists — cartoonists, children's book authors — and I give them themes such as, you know, what it's like to be in the subway, or Valentine's Day, and they send me sketches. And once the sketches are approved by the editor, David Remnick, it's a go. And I love the way those images are actually not telling you what to think. But they do make you think, because the artist is actually — it's almost a puzzle; the artist is drawing the dots, and you, the reader, have to complete the picture. So to get this image on the left by Anita Kunz, or the one on right by Tomer Hanuka, you have to play spot the differences. And it is something that ... It's really exciting to see how the engagement with the reader ... how those images really capture — play with the stereotypes. But when you get it, it rearranges the stereotypes that are in your head.But the images don't just have to show people, sometimes it can be a feeling. Right after September 11, I was at a point, like everybody else, where I really didn't know how to deal with what we were going through, and I felt that no image could capture this moment, and I wanted to just do a black cover, like no cover. And I talked to my husband, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and mentioned to him that I was going to propose that, and he said, ""Oh, if you're going to do a black cover, then why don't you do the silhouette of the Twin Towers, black on black?"" And I sat down to draw this, and as soon as I saw it, a shiver ran down my spine and I realized that in this refusal to make an image, we had found a way to capture loss and mourning and absence. And it's been a profound thing that I learned in the process — that sometimes some of the images that say the most do it with the most spare means. And a simple image can speak volumes.So this is the image that we published by Bob Staake right after the election of Barack Obama, and captured a historic moment. But we can't really plan for this, because in order to do this, we have to let the artist experience the emotions that we all feel when that is happening. So back in November 2016, during the election last year, the only image that we could publish was this, which was on the stand on the week that everybody voted.(Laughter)Because we knew somebody would feel this —(Laughter)when the result of the election was announced. And when we found out the result, we really were at a loss, and this is the image that was sent by Bob Staake again, and that really hit a chord. And again, we can't really figure out what's going to come next, but here it felt like we didn't know how to move forward, but we did move forward, and this is the image that we published after Donald Trump's election and at the time of the Women's March all over the US.So over those 24 years, I have seen over 1,000 images come to life week after week, and I'm often asked which one is my favorite, but I can't pick one because what I'm most proud of is how different every image is, one from the other. And that's due to the talent and the diversity of all of the artists that contribute.And now, well, now, we're owned by Russia, so —(Laughter)In a rendering by Barry Blitt here, Eustace has become Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley. And the butterfly is none other than a flabbergasted Donald Trump flapping his wings, trying to figure out how to control the butterfly effect, and the famed logo that was drawn by Rae Irvin in 1925 is now in Cyrillic.So, what makes me really excited about this moment is the way that ... You know, free press is essential to our democracy. And we can see from the sublime to the ridiculous that artists can capture what is going on in a way that an artist armed with just India ink and watercolor can capture and enter into the cultural dialogue. It puts those artists at the center of that culture, and that's exactly where I think they should be. Because the main thing we need right now is a good cartoon.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/francoise_mouly_the_stories_behind_the_new_yorker_s_iconic_covers
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"Ten years ago, computer vision researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible, even with the significant advance in the state of artificial intelligence. Now we can do it at a level greater than 99 percent accuracy. This is called image classification — give it an image, put a label to that image — and computers know thousands of other categories as well.I'm a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I work on a project called Darknet, which is a neural network framework for training and testing computer vision models. So let's just see what Darknet thinks of this image that we have. When we run our classifier on this image, we see we don't just get a prediction of dog or cat, we actually get specific breed predictions. That's the level of granularity we have now. And it's correct. My dog is in fact a malamute.So we've made amazing strides in image classification, but what happens when we run our classifier on an image that looks like this? Well ... We see that the classifier comes back with a pretty similar prediction. And it's correct, there is a malamute in the image, but just given this label, we don't actually know that much about what's going on in the image. We need something more powerful. I work on a problem called object detection, where we look at an image and try to find all of the objects, put bounding boxes around them and say what those objects are. So here's what happens when we run a detector on this image.Now, with this kind of result, we can do a lot more with our computer vision algorithms. We see that it knows that there's a cat and a dog. It knows their relative locations, their size. It may even know some extra information. There's a book sitting in the background. And if you want to build a system on top of computer vision, say a self-driving vehicle or a robotic system, this is the kind of information that you want. You want something so that you can interact with the physical world. Now, when I started working on object detection, it took 20 seconds to process a single image. And to get a feel for why speed is so important in this domain, here's an example of an object detector that takes two seconds to process an image. So this is 10 times faster than the 20-seconds-per-image detector, and you can see that by the time it makes predictions, the entire state of the world has changed, and this wouldn't be very useful for an application.If we speed this up by another factor of 10, this is a detector running at five frames per second. This is a lot better, but for example, if there's any significant movement, I wouldn't want a system like this driving my car.This is our detection system running in real time on my laptop. So it smoothly tracks me as I move around the frame, and it's robust to a wide variety of changes in size, pose, forward, backward. This is great. This is what we really need if we're going to build systems on top of computer vision.(Applause)So in just a few years, we've gone from 20 seconds per image to 20 milliseconds per image, a thousand times faster. How did we get there? Well, in the past, object detection systems would take an image like this and split it into a bunch of regions and then run a classifier on each of these regions, and high scores for that classifier would be considered detections in the image. But this involved running a classifier thousands of times over an image, thousands of neural network evaluations to produce detection. Instead, we trained a single network to do all of detection for us. It produces all of the bounding boxes and class probabilities simultaneously. With our system, instead of looking at an image thousands of times to produce detection, you only look once, and that's why we call it the YOLO method of object detection. So with this speed, we're not just limited to images; we can process video in real time. And now, instead of just seeing that cat and dog, we can see them move around and interact with each other.This is a detector that we trained on 80 different classes in Microsoft's COCO dataset. It has all sorts of things like spoon and fork, bowl, common objects like that. It has a variety of more exotic things: animals, cars, zebras, giraffes. And now we're going to do something fun. We're just going to go out into the audience and see what kind of things we can detect. Does anyone want a stuffed animal? There are some teddy bears out there. And we can turn down our threshold for detection a little bit, so we can find more of you guys out in the audience. Let's see if we can get these stop signs. We find some backpacks. Let's just zoom in a little bit. And this is great. And all of the processing is happening in real time on the laptop.And it's important to remember that this is a general purpose object detection system, so we can train this for any image domain. The same code that we use to find stop signs or pedestrians, bicycles in a self-driving vehicle, can be used to find cancer cells in a tissue biopsy. And there are researchers around the globe already using this technology for advances in things like medicine, robotics. This morning, I read a paper where they were taking a census of animals in Nairobi National Park with YOLO as part of this detection system. And that's because Darknet is open source and in the public domain, free for anyone to use.(Applause)But we wanted to make detection even more accessible and usable, so through a combination of model optimization, network binarization and approximation, we actually have object detection running on a phone.(Applause)And I'm really excited because now we have a pretty powerful solution to this low-level computer vision problem, and anyone can take it and build something with it. So now the rest is up to all of you and people around the world with access to this software, and I can't wait to see what people will build with this technology.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/joseph_redmon_how_a_computer_learns_to_recognize_objects_instantly
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"I'm here to offer you a new way to think about my field, artificial intelligence. I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. And as machines get smarter, we get smarter. I call this ""humanistic AI"" — artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people. Now, today I'm happy to see that the idea of an intelligent assistant is mainstream. It's the well-accepted metaphor for the interface between humans and AI. And the one I helped create is called Siri.You know Siri. Siri is the thing that knows your intent and helps you do it for you, helps you get things done. But what you might not know is that we designed Siri as humanistic AI, to augment people with a conversational interface that made it possible for them to use mobile computing, regardless of who they were and their abilities.Now for most of us, the impact of this technology is to make things a little bit easier to use. But for my friend Daniel, the impact of the AI in these systems is a life changer. You see, Daniel is a really social guy, and he's blind and quadriplegic, which makes it hard to use those devices that we all take for granted. The last time I was at his house, his brother said, ""Hang on a second, Daniel's not ready. He's on the phone with a woman he met online."" I'm like, ""That's cool, how'd he do it?"" Well, Daniel uses Siri to manage his own social life — his email, text and phone — without depending on his caregivers. This is kind of interesting, right? The irony here is great. Here's the man whose relationship with AI helps him have relationships with genuine human beings. And this is humanistic AI.Another example with life-changing consequences is diagnosing cancer. When a doctor suspects cancer, they take a sample and send it to a pathologist, who looks at it under a microscope. Now, pathologists look at hundreds of slides and millions of cells every day. So to support this task, some researchers made an AI classifier. Now, the classifier says, ""Is this cancer or is this not cancer?"" looking at the pictures. The classifier was pretty good, but not as good as the person, who got it right most of the time.But when they combine the ability of the machine and the human together, accuracy went to 99.5 percent. Adding that AI to a partnership eliminated 85 percent of the errors that the human pathologist would have made working alone. That's a lot of cancer that would have otherwise gone untreated. Now, for the curious, it turns out that the human was better at rejecting false positives, and the machine was better at recognizing those hard-to-spot cases. But the lesson here isn't about which agent is better at this image-classification task. Those things are changing every day. The lesson here is that by combining the abilities of the human and machine, it created a partnership that had superhuman performance. And that is humanistic AI.Now let's look at another example with turbocharging performance. This is design. Now, let's say you're an engineer. You want to design a new frame for a drone. You get out your favorite software tools, CAD tools, and you enter the form and the materials, and then you analyze performance. That gives you one design. If you give those same tools to an AI, it can generate thousands of designs.This video by Autodesk is amazing. This is real stuff. So this transforms how we do design. The human engineer now says what the design should achieve, and the machine says, ""Here's the possibilities."" Now in her job, the engineer's job is to pick the one that best meets the goals of the design, which she knows as a human better than anyone else, using human judgment and expertise. In this case, the winning form looks kind of like something nature would have designed, minus a few million years of evolution and all that unnecessary fur.Now let's see where this idea of humanistic AI might lead us if we follow it into the speculative beyond. What's a kind of augmentation that we would all like to have? Well, how about cognitive enhancement? Instead of asking, ""How smart can we make our machines?"" let's ask ""How smart can our machines make us?"" I mean, take memory for example. Memory is the foundation of human intelligence. But human memory is famously flawed. We're great at telling stories, but not getting the details right. And our memories — they decay over time. I mean, like, where did the '60s go, and can I go there, too?(Laughter)But what if you could have a memory that was as good as computer memory, and was about your life? What if you could remember every person you ever met, how to pronounce their name, their family details, their favorite sports, the last conversation you had with them? If you had this memory all your life, you could have the AI look at all the interactions you had with people over time and help you reflect on the long arc of your relationships. What if you could have the AI read everything you've ever read and listen to every song you've ever heard? From the tiniest clue, it could help you retrieve anything you've ever seen or heard before. Imagine what that would do for the ability to make new connections and form new ideas.And what about our bodies? What if we could remember the consequences of every food we eat, every pill we take, every all-nighter we pull? We could do our own science on our own data about what makes us feel good and stay healthy. And imagine how this could revolutionize the way we manage allergies and chronic disease.I believe that AI will make personal memory enhancement a reality. I can't say when or what form factors are involved, but I think it's inevitable, because the very things that make AI successful today — the availability of comprehensive data and the ability for machines to make sense of that data — can be applied to the data of our lives. And those data are here today, available for all of us, because we lead digitally mediated lives, in mobile and online.In my view, a personal memory is a private memory. We get to choose what is and is not recalled and retained. It's absolutely essential that this be kept very secure.Now for most of us, the impact of augmented personal memory will be a more improved mental gain, maybe, hopefully, a bit more social grace. But for the millions who suffer from Alzheimer's and dementia, the difference that augmented memory could make is a difference between a life of isolation and a life of dignity and connection.We are in the middle of a renaissance in artificial intelligence right now. I mean, in just the past few years, we're beginning to see solutions to AI problems that we have struggled with literally for decades: speech understanding, text understanding, image understanding. We have a choice in how we use this powerful technology. We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us, to overcome our cognitive limitations and to help us do what we want to do, only better. And as we discover new ways to give machines intelligence, we can distribute that intelligence to all of the AI assistants in the world, and therefore to every person, regardless of circumstance. And that is why, every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter.That is an AI worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_gruber_how_ai_can_enhance_our_memory_work_and_social_lives
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"It's 1878. Sir Francis Galton gives a remarkable talk. He's speaking to the anthropologic institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Known for his pioneering work in human intelligence, Galton is a brilliant polymath. He's an explorer, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychologist and a statistician. He's also a eugenist. In this talk, he presents a new technique by which he can combine photographs and produce composite portraits. This technique could be used to characterize different types of people. Galton thinks that if he combines photographs of violent criminals, he will discover the face of criminality. But to his surprise, the composite portrait that he produces is beautiful.Galton's surprising finding raises deep questions: What is beauty? Why do certain configurations of line and color and form excite us so? For most of human history, these questions have been approached using logic and speculation. But in the last few decades, scientists have addressed the question of beauty using ideas from evolutionary psychology and tools of neuroscience. We're beginning to glimpse the why and the how of beauty, at least in terms of what it means for the human face and form. And in the process, we're stumbling upon some surprises.When it comes to seeing beauty in each other, while this decision is certainly subjective for the individual, it's sculpted by factors that contribute to the survival of the group. Many experiments have shown that a few basic parameters contribute to what makes a face attractive. These include averaging, symmetry and the effects of hormones. Let's take each one of these in turn.Galton's finding that composite or average faces are typically more attractive than each individual face that contributes to the average has been replicated many times. This laboratory finding fits with many people's intuitions. Average faces represent the central tendencies of a group. People with mixed features represent different populations, and presumably harbor greater genetic diversity and adaptability to the environment. Many people find mixed-race individuals attractive and inbred families less so.The second factor that contributes to beauty is symmetry. People generally find symmetric faces more attractive than asymmetric ones. Developmental abnormalities are often associated with asymmetries. And in plants, animals and humans, asymmetries often arise from parasitic infections. Symmetry, it turns out, is also an indicator of health. In the 1930s, a man named Maksymilian Faktorowicz recognized the importance of symmetry for beauty when he designed the beauty micrometer. With this device, he could measure minor asymmetric flaws which he could then make up for with products he sold from his company, named brilliantly after himself, Max Factor, which, as you know, is one of the world's most famous brands for ""make up.""The third factor that contributes to facial attractiveness is the effect of hormones. And here, I need to apologize for confining my comments to heterosexual norms. But estrogen and testosterone play important roles in shaping features that we find attractive. Estrogen produces features that signal fertility. Men typically find women attractive who have elements of both youth and maturity. A face that's too baby-like might mean that the girl is not yet fertile, so men find women attractive who have large eyes, full lips and narrow chins as indicators of youth, and high cheekbones as an indicator of maturity.Testosterone produces features that we regard as typically masculine. These include heavier brows, thinner cheeks and bigger, squared-off jaws. But here's a fascinating irony. In many species, if anything, testosterone suppresses the immune system. So the idea that testosterone-infused features are a fitness indicator doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. Here, the logic is turned on its head. Instead of a fitness indicator, scientists invoke a handicap principle.The most commonly cited example of a handicap is the peacock's tail. This beautiful but cumbersome tail doesn't exactly help the peacock avoid predators and approach peahens. Why should such an extravagant appendage evolve? Even Charles Darwin, in an 1860 letter to Asa Gray wrote that the sight of the peacock's tail made him physically ill. He couldn't explain it with his theory of natural selection, and out of this frustration, he developed the theory of sexual selection.On this account, the display of the peacock's tail is about sexual enticement, and this enticement means it's more likely the peacock will mate and have offspring. Now, the modern twist on this display argument is that the peacock is also advertising its health to the peahen. Only especially fit organisms can afford to divert resources to maintaining such an extravagant appendage. Only especially fit men can afford the price that testosterone levies on their immune system. And by analogy, think of the fact that only very rich men can afford to pay more than $10,000 for a watch as a display of their financial fitness.Now, many people hear these kinds of evolutionary claims and think they mean that we somehow are unconsciously seeking mates who are healthy. And I think this idea is probably not right. Teenagers and young adults are not exactly known for making decisions that are predicated on health concerns. But they don't have to be, and let me explain why.Imagine a population in which people have three different kinds of preferences: for green, for orange and for red. From their point of view, these preferences have nothing to do with health; they just like what they like. But if it were also the case that these preferences are associated with the different likelihood of producing offspring — let's say in a ratio of 3:2:1 — then in the first generation, there would be 3 greens to 2 oranges to 1 red, and in each subsequent generation, the proportion of greens increase, so that in 10 generations, 98 percent of this population has a green preference. Now, a scientist coming in and sampling this population discovers that green preferences are universal. So the point about this little abstract example is that while preferences for specific physical features can be arbitrary for the individual, if those features are heritable and they are associated with a reproductive advantage, over time, they become universal for the group.So what happens in the brain when we see beautiful people? Attractive faces activate parts of our visual cortex in the back of the brain, an area called the fusiform gyrus, that is especially tuned to processing faces, and an adjacent area called the lateral occipital complex, that is especially attuned to processing objects. In addition, attractive faces activate parts of our reward and pleasure centers in the front and deep in the brain, and these include areas that have complicated names, like the ventral striatum, the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Our visual brain that is tuned to processing faces interacts with our pleasure centers to underpin the experience of beauty.Amazingly, while we all engage with beauty, without our knowledge, beauty also engages us. Our brains respond to attractive faces even when we're not thinking about beauty. We conducted an experiment in which people saw a series of faces, and in one condition, they had to decide if a pair of faces were the same or a different person. Even in this condition, attractive faces drove neural activity robustly in their visual cortex, despite the fact that they were thinking about a person's identity and not their beauty. Another group similarly found automatic responses to beauty within our pleasure centers. Taken together, these studies suggest that our brain automatically responds to beauty by linking vision and pleasure. These beauty detectors, it seems, ping every time we see beauty, regardless of whatever else we might be thinking.We also have a ""beauty is good"" stereotype embedded in the brain. Within the orbitofrontal cortex, there's overlapping neural activity in response to beauty and to goodness, and this happens even when people aren't explicitly thinking about beauty or goodness. Our brains seem to reflexively associate beauty and good. And this reflexive association may be the biologic trigger for the many social effects of beauty. Attractive people receive all kinds of advantages in life. They're regarded as more intelligent, more trustworthy, they're given higher pay and lesser punishments, even when such judgments are not warranted.These kinds of observations reveal beauty's ugly side. In my lab, we recently found that people with minor facial anomalies and disfigurements are regarded as less good, less kind, less intelligent, less competent and less hardworking. Unfortunately, we also have a ""disfigured is bad"" stereotype. This stereotype is probably exploited and magnified by images in popular media, in which facial disfigurement is often used as a shorthand to depict someone of villainous character. We need to understand these kinds of implicit biases if we are to overcome them and aim for a society in which we treat people fairly, based on their behavior and not on the happenstance of their looks.Let me leave you with one final thought. Beauty is a work in progress. The so-called universal attributes of beauty were selected for during the almost two million years of the Pleistocene. Life was nasty, brutish and a very long time ago. The selection criteria for reproductive success from that time doesn't really apply today.For example, death by parasite is not one of the top ways that people die, at least not in the technologically developed world. From antibiotics to surgery, birth control to in vitro fertilization, the filters for reproductive success are being relaxed. And under these relaxed conditions, preference and trait combinations are free to drift and become more variable. Even as we are profoundly affecting our environment, modern medicine and technological innovation is profoundly affecting the very essence of what it means to look beautiful. The universal nature of beauty is changing even as we're changing the universe.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anjan_chatterjee_how_your_brain_decides_what_is_beautiful
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"What's one thing that every person in this room is going to become? Older. And most of us are scared stiff at the prospect. How does that word make you feel? I used to feel the same way. What was I most worried about? Ending up drooling in some grim institutional hallway. And then I learned that only four percent of older Americans are living in nursing homes, and the percentage is dropping. What else was I worried about? Dementia. Turns out that most of us can think just fine to the end. Dementia rates are dropping, too. The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss.(Laughter)I also figured that old people were depressed because they were old and they were going to die soon.(Laughter)It turns out that the longer people live, the less they fear dying, and that people are happiest at the beginnings and the end of their lives. It's called the U-curve of happiness, and it's been borne out by dozens of studies around the world. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a billionaire. The curve is a function of the way aging itself affects the brain.So I started feeling a lot better about getting older, and I started obsessing about why so few people know these things. The reason is ageism: discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of age. We experience it anytime someone assumes we're too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we're capable of, or too young. Ageism cuts both ways. All -isms are socially constructed ideas — racism, sexism, homophobia — and that means we make them up, and they can change over time. All these prejudices pit us against each other to maintain the status quo, like auto workers in the US competing against auto workers in Mexico instead of organizing for better wages.(Applause)We know it's not OK to allocate resources by race or by sex. Why should it be OK to weigh the needs of the young against the old? All prejudice relies on ""othering"" — seeing a group of people as other than ourselves: other race, other religion, other nationality. The strange thing about ageism: that other is us. Ageism feeds on denial — our reluctance to acknowledge that we are going to become that older person. It's denial when we try to pass for younger or when we believe in anti-aging products, or when we feel like our bodies are betraying us, simply because they are changing. Why on earth do we stop celebrating the ability to adapt and grow as we move through life? Why should aging well mean struggling to look and move like younger versions of ourselves? It's embarrassing to be called out as older until we quit being embarrassed about it, and it's not healthy to go through life dreading our futures. The sooner we get off this hamster wheel of age denial, the better off we are.Stereotypes are always a mistake, of course, but especially when it comes to age, because the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. Right? Think about it. And yet, we tend to think of everyone in a retirement home as the same age: old —(Laughter)when they can span four decades. Can you imagine thinking that way about a group of people between the ages of 20 and 60?When you get to a party, do you head for people your own age? Have you ever grumbled about entitled millennials? Have you ever rejected a haircut or a relationship or an outing because it's not age-appropriate? For adults, there's no such thing. All these behaviors are ageist. We all do them, and we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it. Nobody's born ageist, but it starts at early childhood, around the same time attitudes towards race and gender start to form, because negative messages about late life bombard us from the media and popular culture at every turn. Right? Wrinkles are ugly. Old people are pathetic. It's sad to be old.Look at Hollywood. A survey of recent Best Picture nominations found that only 12 percent of speaking or named characters were age 60 and up, and many of them were portrayed as impaired. Older people can be the most ageist of all, because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages and we've never thought to challenge them. I had to acknowledge it and stop colluding. ""Senior moment"" quips, for example: I stopped making them when it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn't call it a ""junior moment.""(Laughter)I stopped blaming my sore knee on being 64. My other knee doesn't hurt, and it's just as old.(Laughter)(Applause)We are all worried about some aspect of getting older, whether running out of money, getting sick, ending up alone, and those fears are legitimate and real. But what never dawns on most of us is that the experience of reaching old age can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. It is not having a vagina that makes life harder for women. It's sexism.(Applause)It's not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys. It's homophobia. And it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be. It is ageism. When labels are hard to read or there's no handrail or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves, our failure to age successfully, instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable. You can't make money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets, and capitalism always needs new markets. Who says wrinkles are ugly? The multi-billion-dollar skin care industry. Who says perimenopause and low T and mild cognitive impairment are medical conditions? The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry.(Cheers)The more clearly we see these forces at work, the easier it is to come up with alternative, more positive and more accurate narratives. Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured. It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all.Changing the culture is a tall order, I know that, but culture is fluid. Look at how much the position of women has changed in my lifetime or the incredible strides that the gay rights movement has made in just a few decades, right?(Applause)Look at gender. We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it's a spectrum. It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too. There is no line in the sand between old and young, after which it's all downhill. And the longer we wait to challenge that idea, the more damage it does to ourselves and our place in the world, like in the workforce, where age discrimination is rampant. In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botoxed and hair-plugged before key interviews — and these are skilled white men in their 30s, so imagine the effects further down the food chain.(Laughter)The personal and economic consequences are devastating. Not one stereotype about older workers holds up under scrutiny. Companies aren't adaptable and creative because their employees are young; they're adaptable and creative despite it. Companies —(Laughter)(Applause)We know that diverse companies aren't just better places to work; they work better. And just like race and sex, age is a criterion for diversity.A growing body of fascinating research shows that attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. When we talk to older people like this (Speaks more loudly) or call them ""sweetie"" or ""young lady"" — it's called elderspeak — they appear to instantly age, walking and talking less competently. People with more positive feelings towards aging walk faster, they do better on memory tests, they heal quicker, and they live longer. Even with brains full of plaques and tangles, some people stayed sharp to the end. What did they have in common? A sense of purpose. And what's the biggest obstacle to having a sense of purpose in late life? A culture that tells us that getting older means shuffling offstage. That's why the World Health Organization is developing a global anti-ageism initiative to extend not just life span but health span.Women experience the double whammy of ageism and sexism, so we experience aging differently. There's a double standard at work here — shocker —(Laughter)the notion that aging enhances men and devalues women. Women reinforce this double standard when we compete to stay young, another punishing and losing proposition. Does any woman in this room really believe that she is a lesser version — less interesting, less fun in bed, less valuable — than the woman she once was? This discrimination affects our health, our well-being and our income, and the effects add up over time. They are further compounded by race and by class, which is why, everywhere in the world, the poorest of the poor are old women of color.What's the takeaway from that map? By 2050, one out of five of us, almost two billion people, will be age 60 and up. Longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress. All these older people represent a vast unprecedented and untapped market. And yet, capitalism and urbanization have propelled age bias into every corner of the globe, from Switzerland, where elders fare the best, to Afghanistan, which sits at the bottom of the Global AgeWatch Index. Half of the world's countries aren't mentioned on that list because we don't bother to collect data on millions of people because they're no longer young. Almost two-thirds of people over 60 around the world say they have trouble accessing healthcare. Almost three-quarters say their income doesn't cover basic services like food, water, electricity, and decent housing. Is this the world we want our children, who may well live to be a hundred, to inherit? Everyone — all ages, all genders, all nationalities — is old or future-old, and unless we put an end to it, ageism will oppress us all. And that makes it a perfect target for collective advocacy.Why add another -ism to the list when so many, racism in particular, call out for action? Here's the thing: we don't have to choose. When we make the world a better place to grow old in, we make it a better place in which to be from somewhere else, to have a disability, to be queer, to be non-rich, to be non-white. And when we show up at all ages for whatever cause matters most to us — save the whales, save the democracy — we not only make that effort more effective, we dismantle ageism in the process.Longevity is here to stay. A movement to end ageism is underway. I'm in it, and I hope you will join me.(Applause and cheers)Thank you. Let's do it! Let's do it!(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ashton_applewhite_let_s_end_ageism
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"Before I get to bulk of what I have to say, I feel compelled just to mention a couple of things about myself. I am not some mystical, spiritual sort of person. I'm a science writer. I studied physics in college. I used to be a science correspondent for NPR. OK, that said: in the course of working on a story for NPR, I got some advice from an astronomer that challenged my outlook, and frankly, changed my life.You see, the story was about an eclipse, a partial solar eclipse that was set to cross the country in May of 1994. And the astronomer — I interviewed him, and he explained what was going to happen and how to view it, but he emphasized that, as interesting as a partial solar eclipse is, a much rarer total solar eclipse is completely different. In a total eclipse, for all of two or three minutes, the moon completely blocks the face of the sun, creating what he described as the most awe-inspiring spectacle in all of nature. And so the advice he gave me was this: ""Before you die,"" he said, ""you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse.""Well honestly, I felt a little uncomfortable hearing that from someone I didn't know very well; it felt sort of intimate. But it got my attention, and so I did some research. Now the thing about total eclipses is, if you wait for one to come to you, you're going to be waiting a long time. Any given point on earth experiences a total eclipse about once every 400 years. But if you're willing to travel, you don't have to wait that long. And so I learned that a few years later, in 1998, a total eclipse was going to cross the Caribbean.Now, a total eclipse is visible only along a narrow path, about a hundred miles wide, and that's where the moon's shadow falls. It's called the ""path of totality."" And in February 1998, the path of totality was going to cross Aruba. So I talked to my husband, and we thought: February? Aruba? Sounded like a good idea anyway.(Laughter)So we headed south, to enjoy the sun and to see what would happen when the sun briefly went away.Well, the day of the eclipse found us and many other people out behind the Hyatt Regency, on the beach, waiting for the show to begin. And we wore eclipse glasses with cardboard frames and really dark lenses that enabled us to look at the sun safely. A total eclipse begins as a partial eclipse, as the moon very slowly makes its way in front of the sun. So first it looked the sun had a little notch in its edge, and then that notch grew larger and larger, turning the sun into a crescent. And it was all very interesting, but I wouldn't say it was spectacular. I mean, the day remained bright. If I hadn't known what was going on overhead, I wouldn't have noticed anything unusual.Well, about 10 minutes before the total solar eclipse was set to begin, weird things started to happen. A cool wind kicked up. Daylight looked odd, and shadows became very strange; they looked bizarrely sharp, as if someone had turned up the contrast knob on the TV. Then I looked offshore, and I noticed running lights on boats, so clearly it was getting dark, although I hadn't realized it. Well soon, it was obvious it was getting dark. It felt like my eyesight was failing.And then all of a sudden, the lights went out. Well, at that, a cheer erupted from the beach, and I took off my eclipse glasses, because at this point during the total eclipse, it was safe to look at the sun with the naked eye. And I glanced upward, and I was just dumbstruck.Now, consider that, at this point, I was in my mid-30s. I had lived on earth long enough to know what the sky looks like. I mean —(Laughter)I'd seen blue skies and grey skies and starry skies and angry skies and pink skies at sunrise. But here was a sky I had never seen.First, there were the colors. Up above, it was a deep purple-grey, like twilight. But on the horizon it was orange, like sunset, 360 degrees. And up above, in the twilight, bright stars and planets had come out. So there was Jupiter and there was Mercury and there was Venus. They were all in a line.And there, along this line, was this thing, this glorious, bewildering thing. It looked like a wreath woven from silvery thread, and it just hung out there in space, shimmering. That was the sun's outer atmosphere, the solar corona. And pictures just don't do it justice. It's not just a ring or halo around the sun; it's finely textured, like it's made out of strands of silk. And although it looked nothing like our sun, of course, I knew that's what it was. So there was the sun, and there were the planets, and I could see how the planets revolve around the sun. It's like I had left our solar system and was standing on some alien world, looking back at creation.And for the first time in my life, I just felt viscerally connected to the universe in all of its immensity. Time stopped, or it just kind of felt nonexistent, and what I beheld with my eyes — I didn't just see it, it felt like a vision. And I stood there in this nirvana for all of 174 seconds — less than three minutes — when all of a sudden, it was over. The sun burst out, the blue sky returned, the stars and the planets and the corona were gone. The world returned to normal. But I had changed.And that's how I became an umbraphile — an eclipse chaser.(Laughter)So, this is how I spend my time and hard-earned money. Every couple of years, I head off to wherever the moon's shadow will fall to experience another couple minutes of cosmic bliss, and to share the experience with others: with friends in Australia, with an entire city in Germany. In 1999, in Munich, I joined hundreds of thousands who filled the streets and the rooftops and cheered in unison as the solar corona emerged. And over time, I've become something else: an eclipse evangelist. I see it as my job to pay forward the advice that I received all those years ago. And so let me tell you: before you die, you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse. It is the ultimate experience of awe.Now, that word, ""awesome,"" has grown so overused that it's lost its original meaning. True awe, a sense of wonder and insignificance in the face of something enormous and grand, is rare in our lives. But when you experience it, it's powerful. Awe dissolves the ego. It makes us feel connected. Indeed, it promotes empathy and generosity. Well, there is nothing truly more awesome than a total solar eclipse.Unfortunately, few Americans have seen one, because it's been 38 years since one last touched the continental United States and 99 years since one last crossed the breadth of the nation. But that is about to change. Over the next 35 years, five total solar eclipses will visit the continental United States, and three of them will be especially grand. Six weeks from now, on August 21, 2017 —(Applause)the moon's shadow will race from Oregon to South Carolina. April 8, 2024, the moon's shadow heads north from Texas to Maine. In 2045, on August 12, the path cuts from California to Florida.I say: What if we made these holidays? What if we —(Laughter)(Applause)What if we all stood together, as many people as possible, in the shadow of the moon? Just maybe, this shared experience of awe would help heal our divisions, get us to treat each other just a bit more humanely.Now, admittedly, some folks consider my evangelizing a little out there; my obsession, eccentric. I mean, why focus so much attention on something so brief? Why cross the globe — or state lines, for that matter — for something that lasts three minutes? As I said: I am not a spiritual person. I don't believe in God. I wish I did. But when I think of my own mortality — and I do, a lot — when I think of everyone I have lost, my mother in particular, what soothes me is that moment of awe I had in Aruba. I picture myself on that beach, looking at that sky, and I remember how I felt. My existence may be temporary, but that's OK because, my gosh, look at what I'm a part of.And so this is a lesson I've learned, and it's one that applies to life in general: duration of experience does not equal impact. One weekend, one conversation — hell, one glance — can change everything. Cherish those moments of deep connection with other people, with the natural world, and make them a priority. Yes, I chase eclipses. You might chase something else. But it's not about the 174 seconds. It's about how they change the years that come after.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_baron_you_owe_it_to_yourself_to_experience_a_total_solar_eclipse
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"Mother Earth: Our end was imminent yet finality relented. Wind, water and fire gently revived; you and I reconciled, rhythms realigned, the blues gone green. Your care in conserving in exchange for my fruit and replenishing this picturous restoring of painted skies, mountains rolling, forest covering — no more warming. The purity and simplicity of how we used to be.You remember me? All I give to humanity? Housing, land, seas, birds, beast and all of mankind, exclusively the interface where you and the elements meet and vibrate harmoniously.(Piano plays)(Violin plays)(Music)(Music tempo quickens)(Violin plays)(Music)(Violin plays)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)My beauty altered, muddied waters, fields stripped bare, interior scarred beyond repair, our memories eroding. You once obsessed over my frame and how I came to be; my nature, its polarity — how my sweet winds whisper softly, yet assault seas.You remember me? All I give to humanity? Housing, land, seas, birds, beast and all of mankind — exclusively the interface where you and the elements meet and vibrate harmoniously.The unseen traveler forever passing, carrying life, moving, awning of earth felt and heard, strong and stirring, blowing. Breathe you in, cleansing wind, gentle and still, quieter. The source eternally here, ascent and descending: air.Rhythmic flow, fluid and graceful, waves of serenity, smooth strings of purity, rains replenishing rapidly, rivers of dreams, raging springs covering earth in abundance, universal solvent dissolving, drink, liquid, life and power: water.Born when the universe was formed, warmed mankind, gave him light, colored rays illuminate ember flickers incandescent, powerful and brilliant. Sacred son of air, father of fury, heat dancing vigorously between perfection and beauty. Unconfined agility, fast and fancy, sparks of ingenuity rise: fire.(Canku One Star dances)(Choir chants)(Drums)(Drumming and chanting)(Drumming and chanting)(Drumming and chanting)(Music ends)(Applause)(Violin plays)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_boogz_and_lil_buck_a_dance_to_honor_mother_earth
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"I want you to touch your face. Go on. What do you feel? Soft? Squishy? It's you, right? You're feeling you? Well, it's not quite true. You're actually feeling thousands of microscopic creatures that live on our face and fingers. You're feeling some of the fungi that drifted down from the air ducts today. They set off our allergies and smell of mildew. You're feeling some of the 100 billion bacterial cells that live on our skin. They've been munching away at your skin oils and replicating, producing the smells of body odor. You're likely even touching the fecal bacteria that sprayed onto you the last time you flushed a toilet, or those bacteria that live in our water pipes and sprayed onto you with your last shower. Sorry.(Laughter)You're probably even giving a microscopic high five to the two species of mites that live on our faces, on all of our faces. They've spent the night squirming across your face and having sex on the bridge of your nose.(Laughter)Many of them are now leaking their gut contents onto your pores.(Laughter)Now look at your finger. How's it feel? Gross? In desperate need of soap or bleach? That's how you feel now, but it's not going to be how you feel in the future.For the last 100 years, we've had an adversarial relationship with the microscopic life nearest us. If I told you there was a bug in your house or bacteria in your sink, there was a human-devised solution for that, a product to eradicate, exterminate, disinfect. We strive to remove most of the microscopic life in our world now. But in doing so, we're ignoring the best source of new technology on this planet. The last 100 years have featured human solutions to microbial problems, but the next 100 years will feature microbial solutions to human problems.I'm a scientist, and I work with researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado to uncover the microscopic life that is nearest us, and that's often in our most intimate and boring environments, be it under our couches, in our backyards, or in our belly buttons. I do this work because it turns out that we know very little about the microscopic life that's nearest us. As of a few years ago, no scientist could tell you what bugs or microorganisms live in your home — your home, the place you know better than anywhere else.And so I and teams of others are armed with Q-tips and tweezers and advanced DNA techniques to uncover the microscopic life nearest us. In doing so, we found over 600 species of bugs that live in USA homes, everything from spiders and cockroaches to tiny mites that cling to feathers. And we found over 100,000 species of bacteria and fungi that live in our dust bunnies, thousands more that live on our clothes or in our showers. We've gone further still, and we looked at the microorganisms that live inside the bodies of each of those bugs in our home. In each bug, for example, a wasp, we see a microscopic jungle unfold in a petri plate, a world of hundreds of vibrant species. Behold the biological cosmos! So many of the species you're looking at right now don't yet have names. Most of the life around us remains unknown.I remember the first time I discovered and got to name a new species. It was a fungus that lives in the nest of a paper wasp. It's white and fluffy, and I named it ""mucor nidicola,"" meaning in Latin that it lives in the nest of another. This is a picture of it growing on a dinosaur, because everyone thinks dinosaurs are cool. At the time, I was in graduate school, and I was so excited that I had found this new life form. I called up my dad, and I go, ""Dad! I just discovered a new microorganism species."" And he laughed and he goes, ""That's great. I hope you also discovered a cure for it.""(Laughter)""Cure it.""Now, my dad is my biggest fan, so in that crushing moment where he wanted to kill my new little life form, I realized that actually I had failed him, both as a daughter and a scientist. In my years toiling away in labs and in people's backyards, investigating and cataloging the microscopic life around us, I'd never made clear my true mission to him. My goal is not to find technology to kill the new microscopic life around us. My goal is to find new technology from this life, that will help save us.The diversity of life in our homes is more than a list of 100,000 new species. It is 100,000 new sources of solutions to human problems. I know it's hard to believe that anything that's so small or only has one cell can do anything powerful, but they can. These creatures are microscopic alchemists, with the ability to transform their environment with an arsenal of chemical tools. This means that they can live anywhere on this planet, and they can eat whatever food is around them. This means they can eat everything from toxic waste to plastic, and they can produce waste products like oil and battery power and even tiny nuggets of real gold. They can transform the inedible into nutritive. They can make sugar into alcohol. They give chocolate its flavor, and soil the power to grow.I'm here to tell you that the next 100 years will feature these microscopic creatures solving more of our problems. And we have a lot of problems to choose from. We've got the mundane: bad-smelling clothes or bland food. And we've got the monumental: disease, pollution, war. And so this is my mission: to not just catalog the microscopic life around us, but to find out what it's uniquely well-suited to help us with.Here's an example. We started with a pest, a wasp that lives on many of our homes. Inside that wasp, we plucked out a little-known microorganism species with a unique ability: it could make beer. This is a trait that only a few species on this planet have. In fact, all commercially produced beer you've ever had likely came from one of only three microorganism species. Yet our species, it could make a beer that tasted like honey, and it could also make a delightfully tart beer. In fact, this microorganism species that lives in the belly of a wasp, it could make a valuable sour beer better than any other species on this planet. There are now four species that produce commercial beer. Where you used to see a pest, now think of tasting your future favorite beer.As a second example, I worked with researchers to dig in the dirt in people's backyards. There, we uncovered a microorganism that could make novel antibiotics, antibiotics that can kill the world's worst superbugs. This was an awesome thing to find, but here's the secret: for the last 60 years, most of the antibiotics on the market have come from similar soil bacteria. Every day, you and I and everyone in this room and on this planet, are saved by similar soil bacteria that produce most of our antibiotics. Where you used to see dirt, now think of medication.Perhaps my favorite example comes from colleagues who are studying a pond scum microorganism, which is tragically named after the cow dung it was first found in. It's pretty unremarkable and would be unworthy of discussion, except that the researchers found that if you feed it to mice, it vaccinates against PTSD. It vaccinates against fear. Where you used to see pond scum, now think of hope.There are so many more microbial examples that I don't have time to talk about today. I gave you examples of solutions that came from just three species, but imagine what those other 100,000 species in your dust bunnies might be able to do. In the future, they might be able to make you sexier or smarter or perhaps live longer.So I want you to look at your finger again. Think about all those microscopic creatures that are unknown. Think about in the future what they might be able to do or make or whose life they might be able to save. How does your finger feel right now? A little bit powerful? That's because you're feeling the future.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anne_madden_meet_the_microscopic_life_in_your_home_and_on_your_face
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"So, I'm afraid. Right now, on this stage, I feel fear. In my life, I ain't met many people that will readily admit when they are afraid. And I think that's because deep down, they know how easy it spreads. See, fear is like a disease. When it moves, it moves like wildfire. But what happens when, even in the face of that fear, you do what you've got to do? That's called courage. And just like fear, courage is contagious.See, I'm from East St. Louis, Illinois. That's a small city across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. I have lived in and around St. Louis my entire life. When Michael Brown, Jr., an ordinary teenager, was gunned down by police in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri — another suburb, but north of St. Louis — I remember thinking, he ain't the first, and he won't be the last young kid to lose his life to law enforcement.But see, his death was different. When Mike was killed, I remember the powers that be trying to use fear as a weapon. The police response to a community in mourning was to use force to impose fear: fear of militarized police, imprisonment, fines. The media even tried to make us afraid of each other by the way they spun the story. And all of these things have worked in the past. But like I said, this time it was different.Michael Brown's death and the subsequent treatment of the community led to a string of protests in and around Ferguson and St. Louis. When I got out to those protests about the fourth or fifth day, it was not out of courage; it was out of guilt. See, I'm black. I don't know if y'all noticed that.(Laughter)But I couldn't sit in St. Louis, minutes away from Ferguson, and not go see. So I got off my ass to go check it out.When I got out there, I found something surprising. I found anger; there was a lot of that. But what I found more of was love. People with love for themselves. Love for their community. And it was beautiful — until the police showed up. Then a new emotion was interjected into the conversation: fear.Now, I'm not going to lie; when I saw those armored vehicles, and all that gear and all those guns and all those police I was terrified — personally. And when I looked around that crowd, I saw a lot of people that had the same thing going on. But I also saw people with something else inside of them. That was courage. See, those people yelled, and they screamed, and they were not about to back down from the police. They were past that point. And then I could feel something in me changing, so I yelled and I screamed, and I noticed that everybody around me was doing the same thing. And there was nothing like that feeling.So I decided I wanted to do something more. I went home, I thought: I'm an artist. I make shit. So I started making things specific to the protest, things that would be weapons in a spiritual war, things that would give people voice and things that would fortify them for the road ahead.I did a project where I took pictures of the hands of protesters and put them up and down the boarded-up buildings and community shops. My goal was to raise awareness and to raise the morale. And I think, for a minute at least, it did just that. Then I thought, I want to uplift the stories of these people I was watching being courageous in the moment. And myself and my friend, and filmmaker and partner Sabaah Folayan did just that with our documentary, ""Whose Streets?""I kind of became a conduit for all of this courage that was given to me. And I think that's part of our job as artists. I think we should be conveyors of courage in the work that we do. And I think that we are the wall between the normal folks and the people that use their power to spread fear and hate, especially in times like these.So I'm going to ask you. Y'all the movers and the shakers, you know, the thought leaders: What are you gonna do with the gifts that you've been given to break us from the fear the binds us every day?Because, see, I'm afraid every day. I can't remember a time when I wasn't. But once I figured out that fear was not put in me to cripple me, it was there to protect me, and once I figured out how to use that fear, I found my power.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/damon_davis_what_i_saw_at_the_ferguson_protests
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"My son and the iPhone were born three weeks apart in June 2007. So while those early adopters were lined up outside, waiting to get their hands on this amazing new gadget, I was stuck at home with my hands full of something else that was sending out constant notifications —(Laughter)a miserable, colicky baby who would only sleep in a moving stroller with complete silence. I literally was walking 10 to 15 miles a day, and the baby weight came off. That part was great.But man, was I bored. Before motherhood, I had been a journalist who rushed off when the Concorde crashed. I was one of the first people into Belgrade when there was a revolution in Serbia. Now, I was exhausted. This walking went on for weeks. It was only until about three months in that something shifted, though. As I pounded the pavement, my mind started to wander, too. I began imagining what I would do when I finally did sleep again.So the colic did fade, and I finally got an iPhone and I put all those hours of wandering into action. I created my dream job hosting a public radio show. So there was no more rushing off to war zones, but thanks to my new smartphone, I could be a mother and a journalist. I could be on the playground and on Twitter at the same time. Yeah, well, when I thought that, when the technology came in and took over, that is when I hit a wall.So, I want you to picture this: you host a podcast, and you have to prove that the investment of precious public radio dollars in you is worth it. My goal was to increase my audience size tenfold. So one day, I sat down to brainstorm, as you do, and I came up barren. This was different than writer's block, right? It wasn't like there was something there waiting to be unearthed. There was just nothing. And so I started to think back: When was the last time I actually had a good idea? Yeah, it was when I was pushing that damn stroller. Now all the cracks in my day were filled with phone time. I checked the headlines while I waited for my latte. I updated my calendar while I was sitting on the couch. Texting turned every spare moment into a chance to show to my coworkers and my dear husband what a responsive person I was, or at least it was a chance to find another perfect couch for my page on Pinterest. I realized that I was never bored. And anyway, don't only boring people get bored?But then I started to wonder: What actually happens to us when we get bored? Or, more importantly: What happens to us if we never get bored? And what could happen if we got rid of this human emotion entirely? I started talking to neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, and what they told me was fascinating. It turns out that when you get bored, you ignite a network in your brain called the ""default mode."" So our body, it goes on autopilot while we're folding the laundry or we're walking to work, but actually that is when our brain gets really busy. Here's boredom researcher Dr. Sandi Mann.(Audio) Dr. Sandi Mann: Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to really wander, you start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, a little bit into the subconscious, which allows sort of different connections to take place. It's really awesome, actually.Manoush Zomorodi: Totally awesome, right?So this is my brain in an fMRI, and I learned that in the default mode is when we connect disparate ideas, we solve some of our most nagging problems, and we do something called ""autobiographical planning."" This is when we look back at our lives, we take note of the big moments, we create a personal narrative, and then we set goals and we figure out what steps we need to take to reach them. But now we chill out on the couch also while updating a Google Doc or replying to email. We call it ""getting shit done,"" but here's what neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin says we're actually doing.(Audio) Dr. Daniel Levitin: Every time you shift your attention from one thing to another, the brain has to engage a neurochemical switch that uses up nutrients in the brain to accomplish that. So if you're attempting to multitask, you know, doing four or five things at once, you're not actually doing four or five things at once, because the brain doesn't work that way. Instead, you're rapidly shifting from one thing to the next, depleting neural resources as you go.(Audio) MZ: So switch, switch, switch, you're using glucose, glucose, glucose.(Audio) DL: Exactly right, and we have a limited supply of that stuff.MZ: A decade ago, we shifted our attention at work every three minutes. Now we do it every 45 seconds, and we do it all day long. The average person checks email 74 times a day, and switches tasks on their computer 566 times a day. I discovered all this talking to professor of informatics, Dr. Gloria Mark.(Audio) Dr. Gloria Mark: So we find that when people are stressed, they tend to shift their attention more rapidly. We also found, strangely enough, that the shorter the amount of sleep that a person gets, the more likely they are to check Facebook. So we're in this vicious, habitual cycle.MZ: But could this cycle be broken? What would happen if we broke this vicious cycle? Maybe my listeners could help me find out. What if we reclaimed those cracks in our day? Could it help us jump-start our creativity? We called the project ""Bored and Brilliant."" And I expected, you know, a couple hundred people to play along, but thousands of people started signing up. And they told me the reason they were doing it was because they were worried that their relationship with their phone had grown kind of ... ""codependent,"" shall we say.(Audio) Man: The relationship between a baby and its teddy bear or a baby and its binky or a baby that wants its mother's cradle when it's done with being held by a stranger —(Laughs)that's the relationship between me and my phone.(Audio) Woman: I think of my phone like a power tool: extremely useful, but dangerous if I'm not handling it properly.(Audio) Woman 2: If I don't pay close attention, I'll suddenly realize that I've lost an hour of time doing something totally mindless.MZ: OK, but to really measure any improvement, we needed data, right? Because that's what we do these days. So we partnered with some apps that would measure how much time we were spending every day on our phone. If you're thinking it's ironic that I asked people to download another app so that they would spend less time on their phones: yeah, but you gotta meet people where they are.(Laughter)So before challenge week, we were averaging two hours a day on our phones and 60 pickups, you know, like, a quick check, did I get a new email? Here's what Tina, a student at Bard College, discovered about herself.(Audio) Tina: So far, I've been spending between 150 and 200 minutes on my phone per day, and I've been picking up my phone 70 to 100 times per day. And it's really concerning, because that's so much time that I could have spent doing something more productive, more creative, more towards myself, because when I'm on my phone, I'm not doing anything important.MZ: Like Tina, people were starting to observe their own behavior. They were getting ready for challenge week. And that Monday, they started to wake up to instructions in their inbox, an experiment to try.Day one: ""Put it in your pocket."" Take that phone out of your hand. See if you can eliminate the reflex to check it all day long, just for a day. And if this sounds easy, you haven't tried it. Here's listener Amanda Itzko.(Audio) Amanda Itzko: I am absolutely itching. I feel a little bit crazy, because I have noticed that I pick up my phone when I'm just walking from one room to another, getting on the elevator, and even — and this is the part that I am really embarrassed to actually say out loud — in the car.MZ: Yikes. Yeah, well, but as Amanda learned, this itching feeling is not actually her fault. That is exactly the behavior that the technology is built to trigger.(Laughter)I mean, right? Here's former Google designer, Tristan Harris.(Audio) Tristan Harris: If I'm Facebook or I'm Netflix or I'm Snapchat, I have literally a thousand engineers whose job is to get more attention from you. I'm very good at this, and I don't want you to ever stop. And you know, the CEO of Netflix recently said, ""Our biggest competitors are Facebook, YouTube and sleep."" I mean, so there's a million places to spend your attention, but there's a war going on to get it.MZ: I mean, you know the feeling: that amazing episode of ""Transparent"" ends, and then the next one starts playing so you're like, eh, OK fine, I'll just stay up and watch it. Or the LinkedIn progress bar says you are this close to having the perfect profile, so you add a little more personal information. As one UX designer told me, the only people who refer to their customers as ""users"" are drug dealers and technologists.(Laughter)(Applause)And users, as we know, are worth a lot of money. Here's former Facebook product manager and author, Antonio García Martínez.(Audio) Antonio García Martínez: The saying is, if any product is free then you're the product; your attention is the product. But what is your attention worth? That's why literally every time you load a page, not just on Facebook or any app, there's an auction being held instantly, billions of times a day, for exactly how much that one ad impression cost.MZ: By the way, the average person will spend two years of their life on Facebook. So, back to challenge week. Immediately, we saw some creativity kick in. Here's New Yorker Lisa Alpert.(Audio) Lisa Alpert: I was bored, I guess. So I suddenly looked at the stairway that went up to the top of the station, and I thought, you know, I had just come down that stairway, but I could go back up and then come back down and get a little cardio. So I did, and then I had a little more time, so I did it again and I did it again, and I did it 10 times. And I had a complete cardio workout. I got on that R train feeling kind of exhausted, but, like, wow, that had never occurred to me. How is that possible?(Laughter)MZ: So creativity, I learned, means different things to different people.(Laughter)But everyone found day three's challenge the hardest. It was called ""Delete that app."" Take that app — you know the one; that one that always gets you, it sucks you in — take it off your phone, even if just for the day. I deleted the game Two Dots and nearly cried.(Laughter)Yeah, Two Dots players know what I'm talking about. But my misery had good company.(Audio) Man 2: This is Liam in Los Angeles, and I deleted Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat and Vine from my phone in one fell swoop. And it was kind of an embarrassingly emotional experience at first. It felt weirdly lonely to look at that lock screen with no new notifications on it. But I really liked deciding for myself when to think about or access my social networks, not giving my phone the power to decide that for me. So thank you.(Audio) Woman 3: Deleting the Twitter app was very sad, and I feel I maybe, over the last year when I've been on Twitter, have developed an addiction to it, and this ""Bored and Brilliant"" challenge has really made me realize it. After a brief period of really horrible withdrawal feeling, like lack-of-caffeine headache, I now feel lovely. I had a lovely dinner with my family, and I hope to continue this structured use of these powerful tools.(Audio) Woman 4: I don't have that guilty gut feeling I have when I know I'm wasting time on my phone. Maybe I'll have to start giving myself challenges and reminders like this every morning.MZ: I mean, yes, this was progress. I could not wait to see what the numbers said at the end of that week. But when the data came in, it turned out that we had cut down, on average, just six minutes — from 120 minutes a day on our phones to 114. Yeah. Whoop-de-do.So I went back to the scientists feeling kind of low, and they just laughed at me, and they said, you know, changing people's behavior in such a short time period was ridiculously ambitious, and actually what you've achieved is far beyond what we thought possible. Because more important than the numbers, were the people's stories. They felt empowered. Their phones had been transformed from taskmasters back into tools.And actually, I found what the young people said most intriguing. Some of them told me that they didn't recognize some of the emotions that they felt during challenge week, because, if you think about it, if you have never known life without connectivity, you may never have experienced boredom. And there could be consequences. Researchers at USC have found — they're studying teenagers who are on social media while they're talking to their friends or they're doing homework, and two years down the road, they are less creative and imaginative about their own personal futures and about solving societal problems, like violence in their neighborhoods. And we really need this next generation to be able to focus on some big problems: climate change, economic disparity, massive cultural differences. No wonder CEOs in an IBM survey identified creativity as the number one leadership competency.OK, here's the good news, though: In the end, 20,000 people did ""Bored and Brilliant"" that week. Ninety percent cut down on their minutes. Seventy percent got more time to think. People told me that they slept better. They felt happier. My favorite note was from a guy who said he felt like he was waking up from a mental hibernation.Some personal data and some neuroscience gave us permission to be offline a little bit more, and a little bit of boredom gave us some clarity and helped some of us set some goals. I mean, maybe constant connectivity won't be cool in a couple of years. But meanwhile, teaching people, especially kids, how to use technology to improve their lives and to self-regulate needs to be part of digital literacy.So the next time you go to check your phone, remember that if you don't decide how you're going to use the technology, the platforms will decide for you. And ask yourself: What am I really looking for? Because if it's to check email, that's fine — do it and be done. But if it's to distract yourself from doing the hard work that comes with deeper thinking, take a break, stare out the window and know that by doing nothing you are actually being your most productive and creative self. It might feel weird and uncomfortable at first, but boredom truly can lead to brilliance.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/manoush_zomorodi_how_boredom_can_lead_to_your_most_brilliant_ideas
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"So, imagine that you take a 19-hour, very long drive to Disney World, with two kids in the back seat. And 15 minutes into this 19-hour trip, the immutable laws of nature dictate that you get the question: ""Are we there yet?""(Laughter)So you answer this question a hundred more times, easily, in the negative, but you finally arrive. You have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful trip. You drive 19 long hours back home. And when you get there, the police are waiting on you. They accuse you of committing a crime that occurred while you were away in Florida. You tell anybody and everybody who will listen, ""I didn't do it! I couldn't have done it! I was hanging out with Mickey and Minnie and my kids!"" But no one believes you. Ultimately, you're arrested, you're tried, you're convicted and you are sentenced. And you spend 25 years in jail, until someone comes along and proves — has the evidence to prove — that you actually were in Florida when this crime was committed. So.So, I'm a Harvard Law professor, and the last several years, I have worked on winning the release of innocent people who've been wrongfully convicted — people like Jonathan Fleming, who spent 24 years, eight months in jail for a murder that was committed in Brooklyn, New York, while he was in Disney World with his kids. How do we know this? Because when he was arrested, among his property in his back pocket was a receipt — time-stamped receipt that showed that he was in Disney World. That receipt was put in the police file, a copy of it was put in the prosecutor's file, and they never gave it to his public defender. In fact, nobody even knew it was there. It just sat there for 20-some-odd years. My team looked through the file, and we found it, did the rest of the investigation, and figured out someone else committed the crime. Mr. Fleming was in Disney World, and he is now released.Let me give you a little bit of context. So about three years ago, I got a call from the Brooklyn District Attorney. He asked whether I'd be interested in designing a program called a ""conviction review unit."" So I said yes. A conviction review unit is essentially a unit in a prosecutor's office where prosecutors look at their past cases to determine whether or not they made mistakes. Over the course of the first year, we found about 13 wrongful convictions, people having been in jail for decades, and we released all of them. It was the most in New York history. The program is still going on, and they're up to 21 releases now — 21 people who spent significant time behind bars.So let me tell you about a couple other of the men and women that I interacted with in the course of this program. One name is Roger Logan. Mr. Logan had been in jail 17 years and wrote me a letter. It was a simple letter; it basically said, ""Professor Sullivan, I'm innocent. I've been framed. Can you look at my case?"" At first blush, the case seemed like it was open and shut, but my research had shown that single-witness identification cases are prone to error. It doesn't mean he was innocent, it just means we ought to look a little bit closer at those cases.So we did. And the facts were relatively simple. The eyewitness said she heard a shot, and she ran to the next building and turned around and looked, and there was Mr. Logan. And he was tried and convicted and in jail for 17-some-odd years. But it was a single-witness case, so we took a look at it. I sent some people to the scene, and there was an inconsistency. And to put it politely: Usain Bolt couldn't have run from where she said she was to the other spot. Right? So we knew that wasn't true. So it still didn't mean that he didn't do it, but we knew something was maybe fishy about this witness. So we looked through the file, a piece of paper in the file had a number on it. The number indicated that this witness had a record. We went back through 20 years of non-digitized papers to figure out what this record was about, and it turned out — it turned out — the eyewitness was in jail when she said she saw what she saw. The man spent 17 years behind bars.The last one is a case about two boys, Willie Stuckey, David McCallum. They were arrested at 15, and their conviction was vacated 29 years later. Now this was a case, once again — first blush, it looked open and shut. They had confessed. But my research showed that juvenile confessions without a parent present are prone to error. The DNA cases proved this several times.So we took a close look. We looked at the confession, and it turned out, there was something in the confession that those boys could not have known. The only people who knew it were police and prosecutors. We knew what really happened; someone told them to say this. We don't exactly know who, which person did, but any rate, the confession was coerced, we determined. We then went back and did forensics and did a fulsome investigation and found that two other, much older, different heights, different hairstyle, two other people committed the crime, not these two boys.I actually went to court that day, for what's called a ""vacatur hearing,"" where the conviction is thrown out. I went to court; I wanted to see Mr. McCallum walk out of there. So I went to court, and the judge said something that judges say all the time, but this took on a really special meaning. He looked up after the arguments and said, ""Mr. McCallum,"" he said five beautiful words: ""You are free to go."" Can you imagine? After just about 30 years: ""You are free to go."" And he walked out of that courtroom.Unfortunately, his codefendant, Mr. Stuckey, didn't get the benefit of that. You see, Mr. Stuckey died in prison at 34 years old, and his mother sat at counsel table in his place. I'll never forget this the rest of my life. She just rocked at the table, saying, ""I knew my baby didn't do this. I knew my baby didn't do this."" And her baby didn't do this. Two other guys did it.If there's anything that we've learned, anything that I've learned, with this conviction integrity work, it's that justice doesn't happen. People make justice happen. Justice is not a thing that just descends from above and makes everything right. If it did, Mr. Stuckey wouldn't have died in prison. Justice is something that people of goodwill make happen. Justice is a decision. Justice is a decision. We make justice happen.You know, the scary thing is, in each of these three cases I described, it would have only taken just an extra minute — an extra minute — for someone to look through the file and find this receipt. Just one — to look through the file, find the receipt, give it to the public defender. It would have taken someone just a minute to look at the video confession and say, ""That cannot be."" Just a minute. And perhaps Mr. Stuckey would be alive today.It reminds me of one of my favorite poems. It's a poem that Benjamin Elijah Mays would always recite, and he called it ""God's Minute."" And it goes something like this: ""I have only just a minute, only 60 seconds in it, forced upon me, can't refuse it, didn't seek it, didn't choose it. But it's up to me to use it. I must suffer if I lose it, give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute, but eternity is in it.""If I were to charge each and every one of us, I would want to say something like, ""Every day, every day, take just one extra minute and do some justice. You don't have to — I mean, some people spend their careers and their lives, like public defenders, doing justice every day. But in your professional lives, whatever you do, take time out to just do some justice. Make a colleague feel better. If you hear something that's sexist, don't laugh, speak up. If someone is down, lift them up, one extra minute each day, and it'll be a great, great place.I want to show you something. Now, above me is a picture of David McCallum. This is the day he was released from prison. After 30 years, he got to hug a niece he had never been able to touch before. And I asked him then, I said, ""What's the first thing you want to do?"" And he said, ""I just want to walk on the sidewalk without anybody telling me where to go."" Wasn't bitter, just wanted to walk on the sidewalk.I spoke to Mr. McCallum about two weeks ago. I went to New York. It was on the two-year anniversary of his release. And we talked, we laughed, we hugged, we cried. And he's doing quite well. And one of the things he said when we met with him is that he now has dedicated his life and his career to ensuring that nobody else is locked up unjustly.Justice, my friends, is a decision.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ronald_sullivan_how_i_help_free_innocent_people_from_prison
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"Hi everyone. So, I'm going to take us back to 2007. I'd just spent about six months working on album that I'd poured my heart and my soul into, and it was getting about three plays per day on Myspace at the time, and I was getting more and more depressed when I started noticing these other people who were playing guitar and singing and putting videos on this new site called YouTube, and they were getting 300,000 views. So I decided I'm going to start making some Youtube videos. And one day they featured a video of my band on the homepage, which was amazing — we got a bunch of new fans. We also got a bunch of people who, I guess, just didn't really like the music or something —(Laughter)It's OK because people started coming to our shows, and we started touring, and we came out with a record. And when I checked our bank account balance after our first monthly iTunes payout, we had 22,000 bucks in it, which was amazing because at the time I was living at my dad's house, trying to make a living as a musician by uploading videos to the internet which literally zero people respected in 2009 — even the people who were uploading videos to the internet.And so for the next four years, I uploaded more and more videos to the Internet, and they got better and better, and we made enough money through brand deals and commercials and iTunes sales to buy a house. And we built a recording studio. But there was one big problem: making money as a creative person in 2013 was super weird. First of all, the business models were changing all the time. So our 58,000 dollars of annual iTunes download income was about to be replaced by about 6,000 dollars of streaming income. Steams paid less than downloads. And then as more and more creators started popping up online, there was just more competition for these five-figure brand deals that had kept the band afloat for years. And to top it all off, our videos themselves — the creative stuff that we made that our fans loved and appreciated — that were actually contributing value to the world, those videos were generating almost zero dollars of income for us. This is an actual snapshot of my YouTube dashboard from a 28-day period that shows one million views and 166 dollars of ad earnings for those views.The whole machine in 2013 that took art online and outputted money was totally nonfunctional. It doesn't matter if you're a newspaper, or an institution, or an independent creator. A monthly web comic with 20,000 monthly readers — 20,000 monthly readers — gets paid a couple hundred bucks in ad revenue. This is 20,000 people. Like, in what world is this not enough? I don't understand. What systems have we built where this is insufficient for a person to make a living?So, I actually have a theory about this. I think it's been a weird 100 years.(Laughter)(Applause)About 100 years ago, humans figured out how to record sound onto a wax cylinder. That was the beginning of the phonograph. Right around the same time, we figured out how to record light onto a piece of photographic paper, celluloid — the beginning of film and television. For the first time, you could store art on a thing, which was amazing. Art used to be completely ephemeral, so if you missed the symphony, you just didn't get to hear the orchestra. But now, for the first time, you could store the orchestra's performance on a physical object, and like, listen to it later, which was amazing. It was so amazing in fact, that for the next 100 years, between 1900 and 2000, humans built just billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure to essentially help artists do two things. First, put their art on a thing, and second, get that thing around the world to the people who wanted the art. So, so much industry is devoted to these two problems. Oh my gosh, there are trucking companies, and brick-and-mortar and marketing firms, and CD jewel case manufacturers, all devoted to these two problems.And then we all know what happened. 10 years ago, the internet matures and we get Spotify and Facebook and YouTube and iTunes and Google search, and a hundred years of infrastructure and supply chains and distribution systems and monetization schemes are completely bypassed — in a decade. After 100 years of designing these things, it's no wonder that it's just totally broken for creative people right now. It's no wonder that the monetization part of the chain doesn't work given this new context.But what gets me super excited to be a creator right now, to be alive today and be a creative person right now, is realizing that we're only 10 years into figuring out this new machine — to figuring out the next 100 years of infrastructure for our creators. And you can tell we're only 10 years in. There's a lot of trial and error, some really good ideas forming, a lot of experimentation. We're figuring out what works and what doesn't. Like Twitch streamers. Who's heard of Twitch? Twitch streamers are making three to five thousand bucks a month streaming gaming content. The big ones are making over 100,000 dollars a year. There's a site called YouNow, it's an app. It allows musicians and vloggers to get paid in digital goods from fans.So, I'm also working on the problem. Four years ago I started a company called Patreon with a friend of mine. We're 80 people now working on this problem. It's basically a membership platform that makes it really easy for creators to get paid — every month from their fans to earn a living. For a creator, it's like having a salary for being a creative person. And this is one of our creators. They're called ""Kinda Funny."" They have about 220,000 subscribers on YouTube. And when they upload a video, it gets somewhere around 15,000 views to 100,000 views. I want you to check yourselves right now. I think when we hear numbers like that, when we hear ""15,000 views,"" and we see content like this, we just snap categorize it as being not as legitimate as a morning show that you'd hear on the radio or a talk show that you'd see on NBC or something But when ""Kinda Funny"" launched on Patreon, within a few weeks, they were making 31,000 dollars per month for this show. It took off so fast that they decided to expand their programming and add new shows, and now they launched a second Patreon page — they're making an additional 21,000 dollars per month. And they're scaling what's essentially becoming a media company, financing the whole thing through membership.OK, here's another example. This is Derek Bodner, a sports journalist who used to write for Philadelphia Magazine until a few months ago when the magazine cut out all sports coverage. Now he writes articles and publishes them on his own website — he's still covering sports, but for himself. And he's making 4,800 bucks a month from 1,700 patrons, financing it through membership.This is Crash Course — free educational content for the world. This show is actually on the PBS digital network — 29,000 dollars per month. This is a duo sailing around the world, getting paid every month for documenting their travels from 1,400 patrons. This is a podcast, ""Chapo Trap House"", making — actually, since I screenshotted this, they're making an additional 2,000 dollars per month, so they're now making 56,000 dollars per month for their podcast.And Patreon's not the only one working on the problem. Even Google's starting to work on this. A couple years ago, they launched Fan Funding; more recently, they launched Super Chat as a way for creators to monetize live streaming. Newspapers are starting to experiment with membership. New York Times has a membership program; The Guardian has over 200,000 paying subscribers to its membership program. There's this bubbling soup of ideas and experiments and progress right now, and it's pointing in the direction of getting creators paid. And it's working. It's not, like, perfect yet, but it's really working.So, Patreon has over 50,000 creators on the platform making salaries — getting paid every month for putting art online, for being a creative person. The next hundred years of infrastructure is on the way and it's going to be different this time because of this — because of the direct connection between the person who makes the thing and the person who likes the thing.About seven or eight years ago, I went to a cocktail party. This is when the band had hit our first machine, so things were really cranking. We had just made about 400,000 dollars in one year through iTunes sales and brand deals and stuff like that. And this guy comes up to me and says, ""Hey, Jack, what do you do?"" I said, ""I'm a musician."" And he just sobered up immediately, and he stuck out his hand, put a hand on my shoulder, and in a real earnest, very nice voice he was like, ""I hope you make it someday.""(Laughter)And ... I have so many moments like that logged in my memory. I just cringe thinking of that. It's so embarrassing to just not feel valued as a creative person. But as a species, we are leaving that cocktail party behind. We're leaving that culture, we're out of there. We're going to get so good at paying creators, within 10 years, kids graduating high school and college are going to think of being a creator as just being an option — I could be a doctor, I could be a lawyer, I could be a podcaster, I could have a web comic. It's just going to be something you can do. We're figuring it out. It's going to be a viable and sustainable and respected profession. Creators are going to come out the other end of this weird 100 years, this century-long journey, with an awesome new machine. And they're going to be paid, and they're going to be valued. Thanks, everybody.(Applause)I think it went pretty well. I want artists who saw that to not give up — to know that we're getting there. It's not there yet, but in a couple years, there will be so many systems and tools for them to just make a living online, and if they've got a podcast that's starting to take off, but they're not able to make money on it yet, that's happening and they're going to be paid. It's happening.","https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_conte_how_artists_can_finally_get_paid_in_the_digital_age
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"So, let me add to the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in. At the same time that we're solving for climate change, we're going to be building cities for three billion people. That's a doubling of the urban environment. If we don't get that right, I'm not sure all the climate solutions in the world will save mankind, because so much depends on how we shape our cities: not just environmental impacts, but our social well-being, our economic vitality, our sense of community and connectedness.Fundamentally, the way we shape cities is a manifestation of the kind of humanity we bring to bear. And so getting it right is, I think, the order of the day. And to a certain degree, getting it right can help us solve climate change, because in the end, it's our behavior that seems to be driving the problem. The problem isn't free-floating, and it isn't just ExxonMobil and oil companies. It's us; how we live. How we live.There's a villain in this story. It's called sprawl, and I'll be upfront about that. But it's not just the kind of sprawl you think of, or many people think of, as low-density development out at the periphery of the metropolitan area. Actually, I think sprawl can happen anywhere, at any density. The key attribute is that it isolates people. It segregates people into economic enclaves and land-use enclaves. It separates them from nature. It doesn't allow the cross-fertilization, the interaction, that make cities great places and that make society thrive. So the antidote to sprawl is really what we all need to be thinking about, especially when we're taking on this massive construction project.So let me take you through one exercise. We developed the model for the state of California so they could get on with reducing carbon emissions. We did a whole series of scenarios for how the state could grow, and this is just one overly simplified one. We mixed different development prototypes and said they're going to carry us through the year 2050, 10 million new crew in our state of California. And one was sprawl. It's just more of the same: shopping malls, subdivisions, office parks. The other one was dominated by, not everybody moving to the city, but just compact development, what we used to think of as streetcar suburbs, walkable neighborhoods, low-rise, but integrated, mixed-used environments. And the results are astounding. They're astounding not just for the scale of the difference of this one shift in our city-making habit but also because each one represents a special interest group, a special interest group that used to advocate for their concerns one at a time. They did not see the, what I call, ""co-benefits"" of urban form that allows them to join with others.So, land consumption: environmentalists are really concerned about this, so are farmers; there's a whole range of people, and, of course, neighborhood groups that want open space nearby. The sprawl version of California almost doubles the urban physical footprint.Greenhouse gas: tremendous savings, because in California, our biggest carbon emission comes from cars, and cities that don't depend on cars as much obviously create huge savings.Vehicle miles traveled: that's what I was just talking about. Just reducing the average 10,000 miles per household per year, from somewhere in the mid-26,000 per household, has a huge impact not just on air quality and carbon but also on the household pocketbook. It's very expensive to drive that much, and as we've seen, the middle class is struggling to hold on.Health care: we were talking about how do you fix it once we broke it — clean the air. Why not just stop polluting? Why not just use our feet and bikes more? And that's a function of the kinds of cities that we shape.Household costs: 2008 was a mark in time, not of just the financial industry running amok. It was that we were trying to sell too many of the wrong kind of housing: large lot, single family, distant, too expensive for the average middle-class family to afford and, quite frankly, not a good fit to their lifestyle anymore. But in order to move inventory, you can discount the financing and get it sold. I think that's a lot of what happened. Reducing cost by 10,000 dollars — remember, in California the median is 50,000 — this is a big element. That's just cars and utility costs. So the affordable housing advocates, who often sit off in their silos separate from the environmentalists, separate from the politicians, everybody fighting with everyone, now begin to see common cause, and I think the common cause is what really brings about the change.Los Angeles, as a result of these efforts, has now decided to transform itself into a more transit-oriented environment. As a matter of fact, since '08, they've voted in 400 billion dollars of bonds for transit and zero dollars for new highways. What a transformation: LA becomes a city of walkers and transit, not a city of cars.(Applause)How does it happen? You take the least desirable land, the strip, you add where there's space, transit and then you infill mixed-use development, you satisfy new housing demands and you make the existing neighborhoods all around it more complex, more interesting, more walkable.Here's another kind of sprawl: China, high-density sprawl, what you think of as an oxymoron, but the same problems, everything isolated in superblocks, and of course this amazing smog that was just spoken to. Twelve percent of GDP in China now is spent on the health impacts of that. The history, of course, of Chinese cities is robust. It's like any other place. Community was all about small, local shops and local services and walking, interacting with your neighbors. It may sound utopian, but it's not. It's actually what people really want. The new superblocks — these are blocks that would have 5,000 units in them, and they're gated as well, because nobody knows anybody else. And of course, there isn't even a sidewalk, no ground floor shops — a very sterile environment. I found this one case here in one of the superblocks where people had illicitly set up shops in their garages so that they could have that kind of local service economy. The desire of people to get it right is there. We just have to get the planners on board and the politicians.All right. Some technical planning stuff. Chongqing is a city of 30 million people. It's almost as big as California. This is a small growth area. They wanted us to test the alternative to sprawl in several cities across China. This is for four-and-a-half million people. What the takeaway from this image is, every one of those circles is a walking radius around a transit station — massive investment in metro and BRT, and a distribution that allows everybody to work within walking distance of that.The red area, this is a blow-up. All of a sudden, our principles called for green space preserving the important ecological features. And then those other streets in there are auto-free streets. So instead of bulldozing, leveling the site and building right up to the river, this green edge was something that really wasn't normative in China until these set of practices began experimentation there. The urban fabric, small blocks, maybe 500 families per block. They know each other. The street perimeter has shops so there's local destinations. And the streets themselves become smaller, because there are more of them. Very simple, straightforward urban design.Now, here you have something I dearly love. Think of the logic. If only a third of the people have cars, why do we give 100 percent of our streets to cars? What if we gave 70 percent of the streets to car-free, to everybody else, so that the transit could move well for them, so that they could walk, so they could bike?Why not have —(Applause)geographic equity in our circulation system? And quite frankly, cities would function better. No matter what they do, no matter how many ring roads they build in Beijing, they just can't overcome complete gridlock. So this is an auto-free street, mixed use along the edge. It has transit running down the middle. I'm happy to make that transit autonomous vehicles, but maybe I'll have a chance to talk about that later.So there are seven principles that have now been adopted by the highest levels in the Chinese government, and they're moving to implement them. And they're simple, and they are globally, I think, universal principles. One is to preserve the natural environment, the history and the critical agriculture.Second is mix. Mixed use is popular, but when I say mixed, I mean mixed incomes, mixed age groups as well as mixed-land use.Walk. There's no great city that you don't enjoy walking in. You don't go there. The places you go on vacation are places you can walk. Why not make it everywhere?Bike is the most efficient means of transportation we know. China has now adopted policies that put six meters of bike lane on every street. They're serious about getting back to their biking history.(Applause)Complicated planner-ese here: connect. It's a street network that allows many routes instead of singular routes and provides many kinds of streets instead of just one.Ride. We have to invest more in transit. There's no silver bullet. Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve this for us. As a matter of fact, they're going to generate more traffic, more VMT, than the alternative.And focus. We have a hierarchy of the city based on transit rather than the old armature of freeways. It's a big paradigm shift, but those two things have to get reconnected in ways that really shape the structure of the city. So I'm very hopeful. In California, the United States, China — these changes are well accepted.I'm hopeful for two reasons. One is, most people get it. They understand intrinsically what a great city can and should be. The second is that the kind of analysis we can bring to bear now allows people to connect the dots, allows people to shape political coalitions that didn't exist in the past. That allows them to bring into being the kinds of communities we all need.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: So, OK: autonomous driving, self-driving cars. A lot of people here are very excited about them. What are your concerns or issues about them?Peter Calthorpe: Well, I think there's almost too much hype here. First is, everybody says we're going to get rid of a lot of cars. What they don't say is you're going to get a lot more vehicle miles. You're going to get a lot more cars moving on streets. There will be more congestion.CA: Because they're so appealing — you can drive while reading or sleeping.PC: Well, a couple of reasons. One is, if they're privately owned, people will travel greater distances. It'll be a new lease on life to sprawl. If you can work on your way to work, you can live in more remote locations. It'll revitalize sprawl in a way that I'm deeply frightened. Taxis: about 50 percent of the surveys say that people won't share them. If they don't share them, you can end up with a 90 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled. If you share them, you're still at around a 30 percent increase in VMT.CA: Sharing them, meaning having multiple people riding at once in some sort of intelligent ride-sharing?PC: Yeah, so the Uber share without a steering wheel. The reality is, the efficiency of vehicles — you can do it with or without a steering wheel, it doesn't matter. They claim they're the only ones that are going to be efficient electric, but that's not true. But the real bottom line is that walking, biking and transit are the way cities and communities thrive. And putting people in their private bubbles, whether they have a steering wheel or not, is the wrong direction. And quite frankly, the image of an AV on its way to McDonald's to pick up a pack without its owner, just being sent off on these kind of random errands is really frightening to me.CA: Well, thank you for that, and I have to say, the images you showed of those mixed-use streets were really inspiring, really beautiful.PC: Thank you. CA: Thank you for your work.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_calthorpe_7_principles_for_building_better_cities
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"So, raise your hand if you've seen somebody in your city standing on a corner, holding a sign like this. I think we all have. If you're being honest, at least one time, have you wondered if they mean it? If we offered them a job, would they really take it? And what would that job mean to them in their lives? Well, this is a story about what happened in my city when we decided to find out, when we decided to think differently about panhandling, and lift people up through the dignity of work.We call it, ""There's a Better Way."" We call it There's a Better Way because I believe there's a better way to get the money you need than panhandling on the corner. I believe there's a better way to help your brothers and sisters in need than handing a few dollars out the car window. We know there's dignity in work. We also know that people are much more likely to invest in themselves if they believe that their community is willing to invest in them first. And because we're all wired to be kind and compassionate, it always feels good to hand a couple of dollars to someone that is in need. But if you talk to panhandlers, many of them will tell you that your few dollars don't necessarily go towards feeding the body, they go towards feeding an addiction. There's a better way.My name is Richard Berry, and I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to be the mayor of a great American city, Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was at lunch on July 17, 2015, in my great American city, and on my way back to city hall, I saw this gentleman standing on a corner. As you can see, he's holding a sign, and his sign says he wants a job. But if you look closer at the picture, you'll see he's standing underneath a blue sign, and that sign says, if you need help, if you need food or shelter or you'd like to donate, please call 311, our community service number.So why is this guy standing underneath my sign with his sign? Well, we wondered if anybody would call that 311 sign, and as it turns out, they did — 11,000 times people called. I put those up in about 30 intersections. And we did connect them with food and shelter and services. But yet he's still standing under my sign with a sign that says he wants a job. It's simple: he wants a job. So I decided to do something rare in government. I decided to make the solution simpler rather than more complicated. I went back to my office, I gathered my staff around and I said, ""We're going to take this man at his word, and others like him. The man says he wants a job, we're going to give him a job, and we're going to make our city an even better place in the meantime.""You see, Albuquerque is a beautiful place. We're a mile high, the Sandia Mountains on the east, the Rio Grande runs through the center of the city; we're the home of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. On a day like today, you could literally ski this morning and golf this afternoon. But there's always something to do — always weeds to pull, litter to pick up. If you're going to have an initiative like this in your city, you have to ask yourself two questions. First one is: Is there anything left to do in your city? And if the answer is no, would you please give me your mayor's phone number, because I need some advice.(Laughter)But the second question you have to ask is this: Are your solutions to panhandling working? If you're like Albuquerque, and you're taking the punitive approach like we used to, handing out tickets to panhandlers or those who give them money, I'm going to suggest that your solutions aren't working, and I know you're not getting to the root of your problem in your city. So if you have something to do and you need people that need something to do, there's a better way. And the good news is, it's not that complicated.This a 2006 Dodge van. It was in my motor pool not doing anything. We put some new tires on it, wrapped it with a logo. This van now goes out to street corners where our panhandlers are — we go to them. We stop the van, we get out, we ask them if they would like a day's work rather than panhandling for the day. And if you wondered if they really mean it — it takes us about an hour to fill this van up in the morning, because almost everybody we ask takes a job for the day.But you need more than just a van. You need a super-fantastic human being to drive that van. And my super-fantastic human being, his name is Will. This is him in the yellow vest. Will works at our local nonprofit partner. He works with the homeless every day. The panhandlers trust him, he believes in them, he hustles. I like to say, ""Where there's a Will, there's a way."" So if you're going to do the Better Way campaign in your city, you need to find yourself a Will, because he's really one of the keys to making this successful in the city of Albuquerque.You also need a great nonprofit partner. Ours is St. Martin's Hospitality Center. They've been in our community for over 30 years. They provide counseling, food, shelter, and if they don't provide it, they know somebody in our city that does. But they do something much more for me as the mayor. They provide agility. You see, it takes me two weeks, maybe two months sometimes, to onboard an employee with the city of Albuquerque. So you could imagine — my old Dodge van, my super-fantastic human being, Will, a great local nonprofit partner — they drive to the corner, there's a panhandler, they say, ""Would you like to work for the day?"" The panhandler says, ""Yes,"" and Will says, ""Great! I'll be back in six weeks to pick you up.""(Laughter)It wouldn't work. It's really important that we have that agility in our program. And they do the paperwork, they do the insurance, they do all of the other forms that I can't do quickly.We pay our panhandlers nine dollars an hour. We feed them once at the jobsite. At the end of the day, our old Dodge van takes them right back to St. Martin's, and they get connected with counseling services.So far, with the pilot program and a couple days a week, and a fantastic human being and a Dodge van, we've cleaned up 400 city blocks in the city of Albuquerque. We've picked up over 117,000 pounds of trash, weeds and litter. I don't know if you've ever weighed a tumbleweed, but they don't weigh much, so you can imagine the volume of material that we've picked up.My city has 6,000 employees, and none better than my solid waste department. We send our trucks out at the end of the day, they help the panhandlers put into the truck the material they've picked up during the day, and we take it to the landfill. I'm lucky that I have city employees that are willing to work side by side with our panhandlers. They're lifting up our city while lifting up their lives. And like anything else — listen, it takes resources. But the good news is it doesn't take much. We started with an old van, a super-fantastic human being, a great local nonprofit and $50,000.But we also had to have community trust. And fortunately, we had built that up in years prior to Better Way. We have a program called ""Albuquerque Heading Home,"" a Housing First model where we house the chronically homeless, and when I told my community we wanted to do that differently, I said there's a smart way to do the right thing. We have now housed 650 chronically homeless, medically vulnerable — frankly, most likely to die on the streets in our city. We commissioned our university, they studied it. We could tell the taxpayers, we can save you 31.6 percent over the cost of leaving someone to struggle for survival on the streets. We've now saved over five million dollars while housing 650 people.So we had that community trust, but we had to have a little bit more of an honest conversation also as a community, because we had to get people to understand that when they hand those five dollars out the window, they might actually be minimizing their opportunity to help the person in need, and here's why: that five dollars might go to buying some fast food today — a lot of times it goes to buying drugs and alcohol. That same five dollars, if you gave it to one of our shelters, could feed seven people today. And if you gave it to one of our local food banks or food pantries, we could actually feed 20 people with that money.People ask,""Well, Albuquerque is 600,000 people — million, metro — this wouldn't work in our city, we're too big, we're too small."" I disagree; if you have one panhandler on one city block, you can do this. If you live in a city of eight-and-half million people, you can do this. It doesn't matter what you do. It's not the work that you do, it's the dignity of the work. You could do anything. So I think any city could do this. And people say to me, ""Mayor, that's just a little too simple. It can't work that way.""But I tell you what, friends: when you go to a street corner and you engage with a panhandler with dignity and respect, maybe for the first time in years, maybe in their life, and you tell them that you believe in them and that this is their city as much as it's your city, and that you actually need their help to make our place better, and you understand that this isn't the answer to all their problems, but at least it's a start, an amazing thing happens. When they get out on the jobsite and they start working together, you start seeing amazing things happen. They see teamwork; they see the fact that they can make a difference. And at the end of the day, when they get back to St. Martin's in that old Dodge van, they're much more likely to sign up for whatever services they need — substance abuse, mental health counseling, you name it.So far with our pilot program, we've offered about 1,700 days of day work. We've connected 216 people to permanent employment opportunities. Twenty people actually qualified for our Housing First model, Heading Home, and they've been housed. And over 150 people have been connected to mental health substance abuse services through There's a Better Way.This is me just two weeks ago, at St. Martin's, doing our point-in-time survey that we do every two years. I'm interviewing a gentleman who's homeless, like we do, getting his information, figuring out where he's from, how he got there, what we can do to help him. And you notice he's holding the same sign that the guy was holding in 2015, same sign I walked out with here today.So you have to ask yourself: Is it really making a difference? Absolutely it's making a difference. Albuquerque is now one of the national leaders in combating some of the most stubborn and persistent social issues that we have. Combined with Albuquerque Heading Home, the Better Way program, Albuquerque has reduced unsheltered homelessness in our city by 80 percent last year. Since I took over as mayor, we've been able to reduce the chronic homeless population in our city by 40 percent. And by HUD's definition, we've gotten to functional zero, which means we've literally ended veteran homelessness in the city of Albuquerque, by being intentional.(Applause)So I'm happy to report that other cities are hearing about this, other mayors are calling us — Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Dallas — and are now starting to implement programs where they bring the dignity of work to the equation. And I can't wait to learn from them. I can't wait to see what their experiment looks like, what their pilot project looks like, so we can start taking a collective approach nationally through the dignity of work. And I want to commend them — the mayors, their communities, their nonprofits — for the work that they're doing.So who's next? Are you and your city ready to step up? Are you ready to think differently about these persistent social issues? Are you ready to lift people up in your community through the dignity of work, and make your city profoundly better in many ways? Well, if you are, my friends, I promise you there is a better way.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_j_berry_a_practical_way_to_help_the_homeless_find_work_and_safety
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"Here's an intriguing fact. In the developed world, everywhere, women live an average of six to eight years longer than men do. Six to eight years longer. That's, like, a huge gap. In 2015, the ""Lancet"" published an article showing that men in rich countries are twice as likely to die as women are at any age.But there is one place in the world where men live as long as women. It's a remote, mountainous zone, a blue zone, where super longevity is common to both sexes. This is the blue zone in Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean, between Corsica and Tunisia, where there are six times as many centenarians as on the Italian mainland, less than 200 miles away. There are 10 times as many centenarians as there are in North America. It's the only place where men live as long as women.But why? My curiosity was piqued. I decided to research the sights and the habits of the place, and I started with the genetic profile. I discovered soon enough that genes account for just 25 percent of their longevity. The other 75 percent is lifestyle.So what does it take to live to 100 or beyond? What are they doing right? What you're looking at is an aerial view of Villagrande. It's a village at the epicenter of the blue zone where I went to investigate this, and as you can see, architectural beauty is not its main virtue, density is: tightly spaced houses, interwoven alleys and streets. It means that the villagers' lives constantly intersect. And as I walked through the village, I could feel hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me from behind doorways and curtains, from behind shutters. Because like all ancient villages, Villagrande couldn't have survived without this structure, without its walls, without its cathedral, without its village square, because defense and social cohesion defined its design.Urban priorities changed as we moved towards the industrial revolution because infectious disease became the risk of the day. But what about now? Now, social isolation is the public health risk of our time. Now, a third of the population says they have two or fewer people to lean on.But let's go to Villagrande now as a contrast to meet some centenarians.Meet Giuseppe Murinu. He's 102, a supercentenarian and a lifelong resident of the village of Villagrande. He was a gregarious man. He loved to recount stories such as how he lived like a bird from what he could find on the forest floor during not one but two world wars, how he and his wife, who also lived past 100, raised six children in a small, homey kitchen where I interviewed him. Here he is with his sons Angelo and Domenico, both in their 70s and looking after their father, and who were quite frankly very suspicious of me and my daughter who came along with me on this research trip, because the flip side of social cohesion is a wariness of strangers and outsiders. But Giuseppe, he wasn't suspicious at all. He was a happy-go-lucky guy, very outgoing with a positive outlook. And I wondered: so is that what it takes to live to be 100 or beyond, thinking positively? Actually, no.(Laughter)Meet Giovanni Corrias. He's 101, the grumpiest person I have ever met.(Laughter)And he put a lie to the notion that you have to be positive to live a long life. And there is evidence for this. When I asked him why he lived so long, he kind of looked at me under hooded eyelids and he growled, ""Nobody has to know my secrets.""(Laughter)But despite being a sourpuss, the niece who lived with him and looked after him called him ""Il Tesoro,"" ""my treasure."" And she respected him and loved him, and she told me, when I questioned this obvious loss of her freedom, ""You just don't understand, do you? Looking after this man is a pleasure. It's a huge privilege for me. This is my heritage."" And indeed, wherever I went to interview these centenarians, I found a kitchen party. Here's Giovanni with his two nieces, Maria above him and beside him his great-niece Sara, who came when I was there to bring fresh fruits and vegetables. And I quickly discovered by being there that in the blue zone, as people age, and indeed across their lifespans, they're always surrounded by extended family, by friends, by neighbors, the priest, the barkeeper, the grocer. People are always there or dropping by. They are never left to live solitary lives. This is unlike the rest of the developed world, where as George Burns quipped, ""Happiness is having a large, loving, caring family in another city.""(Laughter)Now, so far we've only met men, long-living men, but I met women too, and here you see Zia Teresa. She, at over 100, taught me how to make the local specialty, which is called culurgiones, which are these large pasta pockets like ravioli about this size, this size, and they're filled with high-fat ricotta and mint and drenched in tomato sauce. And she showed me how to make just the right crimp so they wouldn't open, and she makes them with her daughters every Sunday and distributes them by the dozens to neighbors and friends. And that's when I discovered a low-fat, gluten-free diet is not what it takes to live to 100 in the blue zone.(Applause)Now, these centenarians' stories along with the science that underpins them prompted me to ask myself some questions too, such as, when am I going to die and how can I put that day off? And as you will see, the answer is not what we expect. Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a researcher at Brigham Young University and she addressed this very question in a series of studies of tens of thousands of middle aged people much like this audience here. And she looked at every aspect of their lifestyle: their diet, their exercise, their marital status, how often they went to the doctor, whether they smoked or drank, etc. She recorded all of this and then she and her colleagues sat tight and waited for seven years to see who would still be breathing. And of the people left standing, what reduced their chances of dying the most? That was her question.So let's now look at her data in summary, going from the least powerful predictor to the strongest. OK? So clean air, which is great, it doesn't predict how long you will live. Whether you have your hypertension treated is good. Still not a strong predictor. Whether you're lean or overweight, you can stop feeling guilty about this, because it's only in third place. How much exercise you get is next, still only a moderate predictor. Whether you've had a cardiac event and you're in rehab and exercising, getting higher now. Whether you've had a flu vaccine. Did anybody here know that having a flu vaccine protects you more than doing exercise? Whether you were drinking and quit, or whether you're a moderate drinker, whether you don't smoke, or if you did, whether you quit, and getting towards the top predictors are two features of your social life. First, your close relationships. These are the people that you can call on for a loan if you need money suddenly, who will call the doctor if you're not feeling well or who will take you to the hospital, or who will sit with you if you're having an existential crisis, if you're in despair. Those people, that little clutch of people are a strong predictor, if you have them, of how long you'll live. And then something that surprised me, something that's called social integration. This means how much you interact with people as you move through your day. How many people do you talk to? And these mean both your weak and your strong bonds, so not just the people you're really close to, who mean a lot to you, but, like, do you talk to the guy who every day makes you your coffee? Do you talk to the postman? Do you talk to the woman who walks by your house every day with her dog? Do you play bridge or poker, have a book club? Those interactions are one of the strongest predictors of how long you'll live.Now, this leads me to the next question: if we now spend more time online than on any other activity, including sleeping, we're now up to 11 hours a day, one hour more than last year, by the way, does it make a difference? Why distinguish between interacting in person and interacting via social media? Is it the same thing as being there if you're in contact constantly with your kids through text, for example? Well, the short answer to the question is no, it's not the same thing. Face-to-face contact releases a whole cascade of neurotransmitters, and like a vaccine, they protect you now in the present and well into the future. So simply making eye contact with somebody, shaking hands, giving somebody a high-five is enough to release oxytocin, which increases your level of trust and it lowers your cortisol levels. So it lowers your stress. And dopamine is generated, which gives us a little high and it kills pain. It's like a naturally produced morphine.Now, all of this passes under our conscious radar, which is why we conflate online activity with the real thing. But we do have evidence now, fresh evidence, that there is a difference. So let's look at some of the neuroscience. Elizabeth Redcay, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, tried to map the difference between what goes on in our brains when we interact in person versus when we're watching something that's static. And what she did was she compared the brain function of two groups of people, those interacting live with her or with one of her research associates in a dynamic conversation, and she compared that to the brain activity of people who were watching her talk about the same subject but in a canned video, like on YouTube. And by the way, if you want to know how she fit two people in an MRI scanner at the same time, talk to me later.So what's the difference? This is your brain on real social interaction. What you're seeing is the difference in brain activity between interacting in person and taking in static content. In orange, you see the brain areas that are associated with attention, social intelligence — that means anticipating what somebody else is thinking and feeling and planning — and emotional reward. And these areas become much more engaged when we're interacting with a live partner.Now, these richer brain signatures might be why recruiters from Fortune 500 companies evaluating candidates thought that the candidates were smarter when they heard their voices compared to when they just read their pitches in a text, for example, or an email or a letter. Now, our voices and body language convey a rich signal. It shows that we're thinking, feeling, sentient human beings who are much more than an algorithm. Now, this research by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago Business School is quite amazing because it tells us a simple thing. If somebody hears your voice, they think you're smarter. I mean, that's quite a simple thing.Now, to return to the beginning, why do women live longer than men? And one major reason is that women are more likely to prioritize and groom their face-to-face relationships over their lifespans. Fresh evidence shows that these in-person friendships create a biological force field against disease and decline. And it's not just true of humans but their primate relations, our primate relations as well. Anthropologist Joan Silk's work shows that female baboons who have a core of female friends show lower levels of stress via their cortisol levels, they live longer and they have more surviving offspring. At least three stable relationships. That was the magic number. Think about it. I hope you guys have three.The power of such face-to-face contact is really why there are the lowest rates of dementia among people who are socially engaged. It's why women who have breast cancer are four times more likely to survive their disease than loners are. Why men who've had a stroke who meet regularly to play poker or to have coffee or to play old-timer's hockey — I'm Canadian, after all —(Laughter)are better protected by that social contact than they are by medication. Why men who've had a stroke who meet regularly — this is something very powerful they can do. This face-to-face contact provides stunning benefits, yet now almost a quarter of the population says they have no one to talk to.We can do something about this. Like Sardinian villagers, it's a biological imperative to know we belong, and not just the women among us. Building in-person interaction into our cities, into our workplaces, into our agendas bolsters the immune system, sends feel-good hormones surging through the bloodstream and brain and helps us live longer. I call this building your village, and building it and sustaining it is a matter of life and death. Thank you.(Applause)Helen Walters: Susan, come back. I have a question for you. I'm wondering if there's a middle path. So you talk about the neurotransmitters connecting when in face-to-face, but what about digital technology? We've seen enormous improvements in digital technology like FaceTime, things like that. Does that work too? I mean, I see my nephew. He plays Minecraft and he's yelling at his friends. It seems like he's connecting pretty well. Is that useful? Is that helpful?Susan Pinker: Some of the data are just emerging. The data are so fresh that the digital revolution happened and the health data trailed behind. So we're just learning, but I would say there are some improvements that we could make in the technology. For example, the camera on your laptop is at the top of the screen, so for example, when you're looking into the screen, you're not actually making eye contact. So something as simple as even just looking into the camera can increase those neurotransmitters, or maybe changing the position of the camera. So it's not identical, but I think we are getting closer with the technology.HW: Great. Thank you so much.SP: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_pinker_the_secret_to_living_longer_may_be_your_social_life
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"The philosopher Plato once said, ""Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything."" Music has always been a big part of my life. To create and to perform music connects you to people countries and lifetimes away. It connects you to the people you're playing with, to your audience and to yourself. When I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm bored, when I'm stressed, I listen to and I create music.When I was younger, I played piano; later, I took up guitar. And as I started high school, music became a part of my identity. I was in every band, I was involved with every musical fine arts event. Music surrounded me. It made me who I was, and it gave me a place to belong.Now, I've always had this thing with rhythms. I remember being young, I would walk down the hallways of my school and I would tap rhythms to myself on my leg with my hands, or tapping my teeth. It was a nervous habit, and I was always nervous. I think I liked the repetition of the rhythm — it was calming.Then in high school, I started music theory, and it was the best class I've ever taken. We were learning about music — things I didn't know, like theory and history. It was a class where we basically just listened to a song, talked about what it meant to us and analyzed it, and figured out what made it tick. Every Wednesday, we did something called ""rhythmic dictation,"" and I was pretty good at it. Our teacher would give us an amount of measures and a time signature, and then he would speak a rhythm to us and we would have to write it down with the proper rests and notes. Like this: ta ta tuck-a tuck-a ta, ta tuck-a-tuck-a-tuck-a, tuck-a. And I loved it. The simplicity of the rhythm — a basic two- to four- measure line — and yet each of them almost told a story, like they had so much potential, and all you had to do was add a melody.(Guitar)Rhythms set a foundation for melodies and harmonies to play on top of. It gives structure and stability. Now, music has these parts — rhythm, melody and harmony — just like our lives. Where music has rhythm, we have routines and habits — things that help us to remember what to do and to stay on track, and to just keep going. And you may not notice it, but it's always there.(Guitar)And it may seem simple, it may seem dull by itself, but it gives tempo and heartbeat. And then things in your life add on to it, giving texture — that's your friends and your family, and anything that creates a harmonic structure in your life and in your song, like harmonies, cadences and anything that makes it polyphonic. And they create beautiful chords and patterns.(Guitar)And then there's you. You play on top of everything else, on top of the rhythms and the beat because you're the melody. And things may change and develop, but no matter what we do, we're still the same people. Throughout a song melodies develop, but it's still the same song. No matter what you do, the rhythms are still there: the tempo and the heartbeat ... until I left, and I went to college and everything disappeared.When I first arrived at university, I felt lost. And don't get me wrong — sometimes I loved it and it was great, but other times, I felt like I had been left alone to fend for myself. It's like I had been taken out of my natural environment, and put somewhere new, where the rhythms and the harmonies and the form had gone away, and it was just me —(Guitar)silence and my melody. And even that began to waver, because I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have any chords to structure myself, or a rhythm or a beat to know the tempo.(Guitar)And then I began to hear all these other sounds.(Guitar)And they were off-time and off-key. And the more I was around them, the more my melody started to sound like theirs. And slowly I began to lose myself, like I was being washed away. But then the next moment —(Guitar)I could hear it. And I could feel it. And it was me. And I was here. And it was different, but not worse off. Just changed a little.Music is my way of coping with the changes in my life. There's a beautiful connection between music and life. It can bind us to reality at the same time it allows us to escape it. Music is something that lives inside of you. You create it and you're created by it. Our lives are not only conducted by music, they're also composed of it.So this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but hear me out: music is a fundamental part of what we are and of everything around us. Now, music is my passion, but physics also used to be an interest of mine. And the more I learned, the more I saw connections between the two — especially regarding string theory. I know this is only one of many theories, but it spoke to me. So, one aspect of string theory, at its simplest form, is this: matter is made up of atoms, which are made up of protons and neutrons and electrons, which are made up of quark. And here's where the string part comes in. This quark is supposedly made up of little coiled strings, and it's the vibrations of these strings that make everything what it is.Michio Kaku once explained this in a lecture called, ""The Universe in a Nutshell,"" where he says, ""String theory is the simple idea that the four forces of the universe — gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the two strong forces — can be viewed as music. The music of tiny little rubber bands."" In this lecture, he goes on to explain physics as the laws of harmony between these strings; chemistry, as the melodies you can play on these strings; and he states that the universe is a ""symphony of strings."" These strings dictate the universe; they make up everything we see and everything we know. They're musical notes, but they make us what we are and they hold us together. So you see, everything is music.(Guitar)When I look at the world, I see music all around us. When I look at myself, I see music. And my life has been defined by music. I found myself through music. Music is everywhere, and it is in everything. And it changes and it builds and it diminishes. But it's always there, supporting us, connecting us to each other and showing us the beauty of the universe.So if you ever feel lost, stop and listen for your song.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/anika_paulson_how_i_found_myself_through_music
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"Algorithms are everywhere. They sort and separate the winners from the losers. The winners get the job or a good credit card offer. The losers don't even get an interview or they pay more for insurance. We're being scored with secret formulas that we don't understand that often don't have systems of appeal. That begs the question: What if the algorithms are wrong?To build an algorithm you need two things: you need data, what happened in the past, and a definition of success, the thing you're looking for and often hoping for. You train an algorithm by looking, figuring out. The algorithm figures out what is associated with success. What situation leads to success?Actually, everyone uses algorithms. They just don't formalize them in written code. Let me give you an example. I use an algorithm every day to make a meal for my family. The data I use is the ingredients in my kitchen, the time I have, the ambition I have, and I curate that data. I don't count those little packages of ramen noodles as food.(Laughter)My definition of success is: a meal is successful if my kids eat vegetables. It's very different from if my youngest son were in charge. He'd say success is if he gets to eat lots of Nutella. But I get to choose success. I am in charge. My opinion matters. That's the first rule of algorithms.Algorithms are opinions embedded in code. It's really different from what you think most people think of algorithms. They think algorithms are objective and true and scientific. That's a marketing trick. It's also a marketing trick to intimidate you with algorithms, to make you trust and fear algorithms because you trust and fear mathematics. A lot can go wrong when we put blind faith in big data.This is Kiri Soares. She's a high school principal in Brooklyn. In 2011, she told me her teachers were being scored with a complex, secret algorithm called the ""value-added model."" I told her, ""Well, figure out what the formula is, show it to me. I'm going to explain it to you."" She said, ""Well, I tried to get the formula, but my Department of Education contact told me it was math and I wouldn't understand it.""It gets worse. The New York Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request, got all the teachers' names and all their scores and they published them as an act of teacher-shaming. When I tried to get the formulas, the source code, through the same means, I was told I couldn't. I was denied. I later found out that nobody in New York City had access to that formula. No one understood it. Then someone really smart got involved, Gary Rubenstein. He found 665 teachers from that New York Post data that actually had two scores. That could happen if they were teaching seventh grade math and eighth grade math. He decided to plot them. Each dot represents a teacher.(Laughter)What is that?(Laughter)That should never have been used for individual assessment. It's almost a random number generator.(Applause)But it was. This is Sarah Wysocki. She got fired, along with 205 other teachers, from the Washington, DC school district, even though she had great recommendations from her principal and the parents of her kids.I know what a lot of you guys are thinking, especially the data scientists, the AI experts here. You're thinking, ""Well, I would never make an algorithm that inconsistent."" But algorithms can go wrong, even have deeply destructive effects with good intentions. And whereas an airplane that's designed badly crashes to the earth and everyone sees it, an algorithm designed badly can go on for a long time, silently wreaking havoc.This is Roger Ailes.(Laughter)He founded Fox News in 1996. More than 20 women complained about sexual harassment. They said they weren't allowed to succeed at Fox News. He was ousted last year, but we've seen recently that the problems have persisted. That begs the question: What should Fox News do to turn over another leaf?Well, what if they replaced their hiring process with a machine-learning algorithm? That sounds good, right? Think about it. The data, what would the data be? A reasonable choice would be the last 21 years of applications to Fox News. Reasonable. What about the definition of success? Reasonable choice would be, well, who is successful at Fox News? I guess someone who, say, stayed there for four years and was promoted at least once. Sounds reasonable. And then the algorithm would be trained. It would be trained to look for people to learn what led to success, what kind of applications historically led to success by that definition. Now think about what would happen if we applied that to a current pool of applicants. It would filter out women because they do not look like people who were successful in the past.Algorithms don't make things fair if you just blithely, blindly apply algorithms. They don't make things fair. They repeat our past practices, our patterns. They automate the status quo. That would be great if we had a perfect world, but we don't. And I'll add that most companies don't have embarrassing lawsuits, but the data scientists in those companies are told to follow the data, to focus on accuracy. Think about what that means. Because we all have bias, it means they could be codifying sexism or any other kind of bigotry.Thought experiment, because I like them: an entirely segregated society — racially segregated, all towns, all neighborhoods and where we send the police only to the minority neighborhoods to look for crime. The arrest data would be very biased. What if, on top of that, we found the data scientists and paid the data scientists to predict where the next crime would occur? Minority neighborhood. Or to predict who the next criminal would be? A minority. The data scientists would brag about how great and how accurate their model would be, and they'd be right.Now, reality isn't that drastic, but we do have severe segregations in many cities and towns, and we have plenty of evidence of biased policing and justice system data. And we actually do predict hotspots, places where crimes will occur. And we do predict, in fact, the individual criminality, the criminality of individuals. The news organization ProPublica recently looked into one of those ""recidivism risk"" algorithms, as they're called, being used in Florida during sentencing by judges. Bernard, on the left, the black man, was scored a 10 out of 10. Dylan, on the right, 3 out of 10. 10 out of 10, high risk. 3 out of 10, low risk. They were both brought in for drug possession. They both had records, but Dylan had a felony but Bernard didn't. This matters, because the higher score you are, the more likely you're being given a longer sentence.What's going on? Data laundering. It's a process by which technologists hide ugly truths inside black box algorithms and call them objective; call them meritocratic. When they're secret, important and destructive, I've coined a term for these algorithms: ""weapons of math destruction.""(Laughter)(Applause)They're everywhere, and it's not a mistake. These are private companies building private algorithms for private ends. Even the ones I talked about for teachers and the public police, those were built by private companies and sold to the government institutions. They call it their ""secret sauce"" — that's why they can't tell us about it. It's also private power. They are profiting for wielding the authority of the inscrutable. Now you might think, since all this stuff is private and there's competition, maybe the free market will solve this problem. It won't. There's a lot of money to be made in unfairness.Also, we're not economic rational agents. We all are biased. We're all racist and bigoted in ways that we wish we weren't, in ways that we don't even know. We know this, though, in aggregate, because sociologists have consistently demonstrated this with these experiments they build, where they send a bunch of applications to jobs out, equally qualified but some have white-sounding names and some have black-sounding names, and it's always disappointing, the results — always.So we are the ones that are biased, and we are injecting those biases into the algorithms by choosing what data to collect, like I chose not to think about ramen noodles — I decided it was irrelevant. But by trusting the data that's actually picking up on past practices and by choosing the definition of success, how can we expect the algorithms to emerge unscathed? We can't. We have to check them. We have to check them for fairness.The good news is, we can check them for fairness. Algorithms can be interrogated, and they will tell us the truth every time. And we can fix them. We can make them better. I call this an algorithmic audit, and I'll walk you through it.First, data integrity check. For the recidivism risk algorithm I talked about, a data integrity check would mean we'd have to come to terms with the fact that in the US, whites and blacks smoke pot at the same rate but blacks are far more likely to be arrested — four or five times more likely, depending on the area. What is that bias looking like in other crime categories, and how do we account for it?Second, we should think about the definition of success, audit that. Remember — with the hiring algorithm? We talked about it. Someone who stays for four years and is promoted once? Well, that is a successful employee, but it's also an employee that is supported by their culture. That said, also it can be quite biased. We need to separate those two things. We should look to the blind orchestra audition as an example. That's where the people auditioning are behind a sheet. What I want to think about there is the people who are listening have decided what's important and they've decided what's not important, and they're not getting distracted by that. When the blind orchestra auditions started, the number of women in orchestras went up by a factor of five.Next, we have to consider accuracy. This is where the value-added model for teachers would fail immediately. No algorithm is perfect, of course, so we have to consider the errors of every algorithm. How often are there errors, and for whom does this model fail? What is the cost of that failure?And finally, we have to consider the long-term effects of algorithms, the feedback loops that are engendering. That sounds abstract, but imagine if Facebook engineers had considered that before they decided to show us only things that our friends had posted.I have two more messages, one for the data scientists out there. Data scientists: we should not be the arbiters of truth. We should be translators of ethical discussions that happen in larger society.(Applause)And the rest of you, the non-data scientists: this is not a math test. This is a political fight. We need to demand accountability for our algorithmic overlords.(Applause)The era of blind faith in big data must end.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/cathy_o_neil_the_era_of_blind_faith_in_big_data_must_end
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"Today I'm going to talk about technology and society. The Department of Transport estimated that last year 35,000 people died from traffic crashes in the US alone. Worldwide, 1.2 million people die every year in traffic accidents. If there was a way we could eliminate 90 percent of those accidents, would you support it? Of course you would. This is what driverless car technology promises to achieve by eliminating the main source of accidents — human error.Now picture yourself in a driverless car in the year 2030, sitting back and watching this vintage TEDxCambridge video.(Laughter)All of a sudden, the car experiences mechanical failure and is unable to stop. If the car continues, it will crash into a bunch of pedestrians crossing the street, but the car may swerve, hitting one bystander, killing them to save the pedestrians. What should the car do, and who should decide? What if instead the car could swerve into a wall, crashing and killing you, the passenger, in order to save those pedestrians? This scenario is inspired by the trolley problem, which was invented by philosophers a few decades ago to think about ethics.Now, the way we think about this problem matters. We may for example not think about it at all. We may say this scenario is unrealistic, incredibly unlikely, or just silly. But I think this criticism misses the point because it takes the scenario too literally. Of course no accident is going to look like this; no accident has two or three options where everybody dies somehow. Instead, the car is going to calculate something like the probability of hitting a certain group of people, if you swerve one direction versus another direction, you might slightly increase the risk to passengers or other drivers versus pedestrians. It's going to be a more complex calculation, but it's still going to involve trade-offs, and trade-offs often require ethics.We might say then, ""Well, let's not worry about this. Let's wait until technology is fully ready and 100 percent safe."" Suppose that we can indeed eliminate 90 percent of those accidents, or even 99 percent in the next 10 years. What if eliminating the last one percent of accidents requires 50 more years of research? Should we not adopt the technology? That's 60 million people dead in car accidents if we maintain the current rate. So the point is, waiting for full safety is also a choice, and it also involves trade-offs.People online on social media have been coming up with all sorts of ways to not think about this problem. One person suggested the car should just swerve somehow in between the passengers —(Laughter)and the bystander. Of course if that's what the car can do, that's what the car should do. We're interested in scenarios in which this is not possible. And my personal favorite was a suggestion by a blogger to have an eject button in the car that you press —(Laughter)just before the car self-destructs.(Laughter)So if we acknowledge that cars will have to make trade-offs on the road, how do we think about those trade-offs, and how do we decide? Well, maybe we should run a survey to find out what society wants, because ultimately, regulations and the law are a reflection of societal values.So this is what we did. With my collaborators, Jean-François Bonnefon and Azim Shariff, we ran a survey in which we presented people with these types of scenarios. We gave them two options inspired by two philosophers: Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant. Bentham says the car should follow utilitarian ethics: it should take the action that will minimize total harm — even if that action will kill a bystander and even if that action will kill the passenger. Immanuel Kant says the car should follow duty-bound principles, like ""Thou shalt not kill."" So you should not take an action that explicitly harms a human being, and you should let the car take its course even if that's going to harm more people.What do you think? Bentham or Kant? Here's what we found. Most people sided with Bentham. So it seems that people want cars to be utilitarian, minimize total harm, and that's what we should all do. Problem solved. But there is a little catch. When we asked people whether they would purchase such cars, they said, ""Absolutely not.""(Laughter)They would like to buy cars that protect them at all costs, but they want everybody else to buy cars that minimize harm.(Laughter)We've seen this problem before. It's called a social dilemma. And to understand the social dilemma, we have to go a little bit back in history. In the 1800s, English economist William Forster Lloyd published a pamphlet which describes the following scenario. You have a group of farmers — English farmers — who are sharing a common land for their sheep to graze. Now, if each farmer brings a certain number of sheep — let's say three sheep — the land will be rejuvenated, the farmers are happy, the sheep are happy, everything is good. Now, if one farmer brings one extra sheep, that farmer will do slightly better, and no one else will be harmed. But if every farmer made that individually rational decision, the land will be overrun, and it will be depleted to the detriment of all the farmers, and of course, to the detriment of the sheep.We see this problem in many places: in the difficulty of managing overfishing, or in reducing carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. When it comes to the regulation of driverless cars, the common land now is basically public safety — that's the common good — and the farmers are the passengers or the car owners who are choosing to ride in those cars. And by making the individually rational choice of prioritizing their own safety, they may collectively be diminishing the common good, which is minimizing total harm. It's called the tragedy of the commons, traditionally, but I think in the case of driverless cars, the problem may be a little bit more insidious because there is not necessarily an individual human being making those decisions. So car manufacturers may simply program cars that will maximize safety for their clients, and those cars may learn automatically on their own that doing so requires slightly increasing risk for pedestrians. So to use the sheep metaphor, it's like we now have electric sheep that have a mind of their own.(Laughter)And they may go and graze even if the farmer doesn't know it.So this is what we may call the tragedy of the algorithmic commons, and if offers new types of challenges. Typically, traditionally, we solve these types of social dilemmas using regulation, so either governments or communities get together, and they decide collectively what kind of outcome they want and what sort of constraints on individual behavior they need to implement. And then using monitoring and enforcement, they can make sure that the public good is preserved. So why don't we just, as regulators, require that all cars minimize harm? After all, this is what people say they want. And more importantly, I can be sure that as an individual, if I buy a car that may sacrifice me in a very rare case, I'm not the only sucker doing that while everybody else enjoys unconditional protection.In our survey, we did ask people whether they would support regulation and here's what we found. First of all, people said no to regulation; and second, they said, ""Well if you regulate cars to do this and to minimize total harm, I will not buy those cars."" So ironically, by regulating cars to minimize harm, we may actually end up with more harm because people may not opt into the safer technology even if it's much safer than human drivers.I don't have the final answer to this riddle, but I think as a starting point, we need society to come together to decide what trade-offs we are comfortable with and to come up with ways in which we can enforce those trade-offs.As a starting point, my brilliant students, Edmond Awad and Sohan Dsouza, built the Moral Machine website, which generates random scenarios at you — basically a bunch of random dilemmas in a sequence where you have to choose what the car should do in a given scenario. And we vary the ages and even the species of the different victims. So far we've collected over five million decisions by over one million people worldwide from the website. And this is helping us form an early picture of what trade-offs people are comfortable with and what matters to them — even across cultures. But more importantly, doing this exercise is helping people recognize the difficulty of making those choices and that the regulators are tasked with impossible choices. And maybe this will help us as a society understand the kinds of trade-offs that will be implemented ultimately in regulation.And indeed, I was very happy to hear that the first set of regulations that came from the Department of Transport — announced last week — included a 15-point checklist for all carmakers to provide, and number 14 was ethical consideration — how are you going to deal with that. We also have people reflect on their own decisions by giving them summaries of what they chose. I'll give you one example — I'm just going to warn you that this is not your typical example, your typical user. This is the most sacrificed and the most saved character for this person.(Laughter)Some of you may agree with him, or her, we don't know. But this person also seems to slightly prefer passengers over pedestrians in their choices and is very happy to punish jaywalking.(Laughter)So let's wrap up. We started with the question — let's call it the ethical dilemma — of what the car should do in a specific scenario: swerve or stay? But then we realized that the problem was a different one. It was the problem of how to get society to agree on and enforce the trade-offs they're comfortable with. It's a social dilemma.In the 1940s, Isaac Asimov wrote his famous laws of robotics — the three laws of robotics. A robot may not harm a human being, a robot may not disobey a human being, and a robot may not allow itself to come to harm — in this order of importance. But after 40 years or so and after so many stories pushing these laws to the limit, Asimov introduced the zeroth law which takes precedence above all, and it's that a robot may not harm humanity as a whole. I don't know what this means in the context of driverless cars or any specific situation, and I don't know how we can implement it, but I think that by recognizing that the regulation of driverless cars is not only a technological problem but also a societal cooperation problem, I hope that we can at least begin to ask the right questions.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/iyad_rahwan_what_moral_decisions_should_driverless_cars_make
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"The youthful perspective on the future, the present perspective on the future and the future, mature perspective on the future — I'd like to try and bring all those three tenses together in one identity tonight. And you could say that the poet, in many ways, looks at what I call ""the conversational nature of reality."" And you ask yourself: What is the conversational nature of reality? The conversational nature of reality is the fact that whatever you desire of the world — whatever you desire of your partner in a marriage or a love relationship, whatever you desire of your children, whatever you desire of the people who work for you or with you, or your world — will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen.But equally, whatever the world desires of us — whatever our partner, our child, our colleague, our industry, our future demands of us, will also not happen. And what actually happens is this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you. And this frontier of actual meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world is the only place, actually, where things are real.But it's quite astonishing, how little time we spend at this conversational frontier, and not abstracted away from it in one strategy or another. I was coming through immigration, which is quite a dramatic border at the moment, into the US last year, and, you know, you get off an international flight across the Atlantic, and you're not in the best place; you're not at your most spiritually mature. You're quite impatient with the rest of humanity, in fact. So when you get up to immigration with your shirt collar out and a day's growth of beard, and you have very little patience, and the immigration officer looked at my passport and said, ""What do you do, Mr. Whyte?"" I said, ""I work with the conversational nature of reality.""(Laughter)And he leaned forward over his podium and he said, ""I needed you last night.""(Laughter)(Applause)And I said, ""I'm sorry, my powers as a poet and philosopher only go so far. I'm not sure I can —"" But before we knew it, we were into a conversation about his marriage. Here he was in his uniform, and the interesting thing was, he was looking up and down the row of officers to make sure his supervisor didn't see that we was having a real conversation. But all of us live at this conversational frontier with the future.I'd like to put you in the shoes of my Irish niece, Marlene McCormack, standing on a cliff edge on the western coast of Spain, overlooking the broad Atlantic. Twenty-three years old, she's just walked 500 miles from Saint Jean Pied de Port on the French side of the Pyrenees, all the way across Northern Spain, on this very famous, old and contemporary pilgrimage called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela — the Path to Santiago of Compostela. And when you get to Santiago, actually, it can be something of an anticlimax, because there are 100,000 people living there who are not necessarily applauding you as you're coming into town.(Laughter)And 10,000 of them are trying to sell you a memento of your journey. But you do have the possibility of going on for three more days to this place where Marlene stood, called, in Spanish, Finisterre, in English, Finisterre, from the Latin, meaning ""the ends of the earth,"" the place where ground turns to ocean; the place where your present turns into the future. And Marlene had walked this way — she just graduated as a 23-year-old from the University of Sligo with a degree in Irish drama. And she said to me, ""I don't think the major corporations of the world will be knocking on my door."" I said, ""Listen, I've worked in corporations all over the world for decades; a degree in drama is what would most prepare you for the adult —(Laughter)corporate world.""(Applause)But she said, ""I'm not interested in that, anyway. I don't want to teach drama, I want to become a dramatist. I want to write plays. So I walked the Camino in order to give myself some courage, in order to walk into my future."" And I said, ""What was the most powerful moment you had on the whole Camino, the very most powerful moment?"" She said, ""I had many powerful moments, but you know, the most powerful moment was post-Camino, was the three days you go on from Santiago and come to this cliff edge. And you go through three rituals. The first ritual is to eat a tapas plate of scallops"" — or if you're vegetarian, to contemplate the scallop shell.(Laughter)Because the scallop shell has been the icon and badge of your walk, and every arrow that you have seen along that way has been pointing underneath a scallop shell. So really, this first ritual is saying: How did you get to this place? How did you follow the path to get here? How do you hold the conversation of life when you feel unbesieged, when you're unbullied, when you're left to yourself? How do you hold the conversation of life that brings you to this place? And the second ritual is that you burn something that you've brought. I said, ""What did you burn, Marlene?"" She said, ""I burned a letter and two postcards."" I said, ""Astonishing. Twenty-three years old and you have paper. I can't believe it.""(Laughter)I'm sure there's a Camino app where you can just delete a traumatic text, you know?(Laughter)It will engage the flashlight, imbue it with color and disappear in a firework of flames. But you either bring a letter or you write one there, and you burn it. And of course we know intuitively what is on those letters and postcards. It's a form of affection and love that is now no longer extant, yeah?And then the third ritual: between all these fires are large piles of clothes. And you leave an item of clothing that has helped you to get to this place. And I said to Marlene, ""What did you leave at the cliff edge?"" She said, ""I left my boots — the very things that I walked in, actually. They were beautiful boots, I loved those boots, but they were finished after seven weeks of walking. So I walked away in my trainers, but I left my boots there.""She said, ""It was really incredible. The most powerful moment was, the sun was going down, but the full moon was coming up behind me. And the full moon was illuminated by the dying sun in such a powerful way that even after the sun had dropped below the horizon, the moon could still see that sun. And I had a moon shadow, and I was looking at my moon shadow walking across the Atlantic, across this ocean. And I thought, 'Oh! That's my new self going into the future.' But suddenly I realized the sun was falling further. The moon was losing its reflection, and my shadow was disappearing. The most powerful moment I had on the whole Camino was when I realized I myself had to walk across that unknown sea into my future.""Well, I was so taken by this story, I wrote this piece for her. We were driving at the time; we got home, I sat on the couch, I wrote until two in the morning — everyone had gone to bed — and I gave it to Marlene at breakfast time. It's called, ""Finisterre,"" for Marlene McCormack.""The road in the endthe road in the end taking the path the sun had takenthe road in the end taking the path the run had taken into the western seathe road in the end taking the path the sun had taken into the western seaand the moonthe moon rising behind you as you stood where ground turned to ocean:no way to your future nowno way to your future now except the way your shadow could take, walking before you across water, going where shadows go,no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass except to call an end to the way you had come, to take out each letter you had brought and light their illumined corners; and to read them as they drifted on the late western light;to empty your bagsto empty your bags; to sort this and to leave thatto sort this and to leave that; to promise what you needed to promise all alongto promise what you needed to promise all along, and to abandon the shoes that brought you here right at the water's edge,not because you had given upnot because you had given up but because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on, no matter how, over the waves.""""Finisterre."" For Marlene McCormack —(Applause)who has already had her third play performed in off-off-off-off-Broadway — in Dublin.(Laughter)But she's on her way.This is the last piece. This is about the supposed arrival at the sum of all of our endeavors. In Santiago itself — it could be Santiago, it could be Mecca, it could be Varanasi, it could be Kyoto, it could be that threshold you've set for yourself, the disturbing approach to the consummation of all your goals.And one of the difficulties about walking into your life, about coming into this body, into this world fully, is you start to realize that you have manufactured three abiding illusions that the rest of humanity has shared with you since the beginning of time.And the first illusion is that you can somehow construct a life in which you are not vulnerable. You can somehow be immune to all of the difficulties and ill health and losses that humanity has been subject to since the beginning of time. If we look out at the natural world, there's no part of that world that doesn't go through cycles of, first, incipience, or hiddenness, but then growth, fullness, but then a beautiful, to begin with, disappearance, and then a very austere, full disappearance. We look at that, we say, ""That's beautiful, but can I just have the first half of the equation, please? And when the disappearance is happening, I'll close my eyes and wait for the new cycle to come around."" Which means most human beings are at war with reality 50 percent of the time. The mature identity is able to live in the full cycle.The second illusion is, I can construct a life in which I will not have my heart broken. Romance is the first place we start to do it. When you're at the beginning of a new romance or a new marriage, you say, ""I have found the person who will not break my heart."" I'm sorry; you have chosen them out unconsciously for that exact core competency.(Laughter)They will break your heart. Why? Because you care about them. You look at parenting, yeah? Parenting: ""I will be the perfect mother and father."" Your children will break your heart. And they don't even have to do anything spectacular or dramatic. But usually, they do do something spectacular or dramatic —(Laughter)to break your heart. And then they live with you as spies and saboteurs for years, watching your every psychological move, and spotting your every weakness. And one day, when they're about 14 years old, with your back turned to them, in the kitchen, while you're making something for them —(Laughter)the psychological stiletto goes in.(Laughter)(Applause)And you say, ""How did you know exactly where to place it?""(Laughter)And they say, ""I've been watching you for —(Laughter)a good few years.""And then we hope that our armored, professional personalities will prevent us from having our heart broken in work. But if you're sincere about your work, it should break your heart. You should get to thresholds where you do not know how to proceed. You do not know how to get from here to there. What does that do? It puts you into a proper relationship with reality. Why? Because you have to ask for help.Heartbreak. We don't have a choice about heartbreak, we only have a choice of having our hearts broken over people and things and projects that we deeply care about.And the last illusion is, I can somehow plan enough and arrange things that I will be able to see the path to the end right from where I'm standing, right to the horizon. But when you think about it, the only environment in which that would be true would be a flat desert, empty of any other life. But even in a flat desert, the curvature of the earth would take the path away from you. So, no; you see the path, and then you don't and then you see it again.So this is ""Santiago,"" the supposed arrival, which is a kind of return to the beginning all at the same time. We have this experience of the journey, which is in all of our great spiritual traditions, of pilgrimage. But just by actually standing in the ground of your life fully, not trying to abstract yourself into a strategic future that's actually just an escape from present heartbreak; the ability to stand in the ground of your life and to look at the horizon that is pulling you — in that moment, you are the whole journey. You are the whole conversation.""Santiago.""""The road seen, then not seenthe road seen, then not seenthe hillside hiding then revealing the way you should takethe road seen, then not seenthe hillside hiding then revealing the way you should take, the road dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk on thin air, then catching you, catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall,catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall,and the way forwardthe way forward always in the end the way that you came,the way forward always in the end the way that you came, the way that you followed, the way that carried you into your future, that brought you to this place,that brought you to this place, no matter that it sometimes had to take your promise from you, no matter that it always had to break your heart along the way:the sense the sense of having walked from deep inside yourself out into the revelation, to have risked yourself for something that seemed to stand both inside you and far beyond you, and that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow, walking as you did, in your rags of lovewalking as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer for safe arrival, so that one dayone day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happenedone day you realized that what you wanted had actually already happened and long ago and in the dwelling place in which you lived before you began, and thatand that every step along the way, every step along the way, you had carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and then drew you on, and thatand that you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a wayyou were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reachyou were more marvelous in that simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach: as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city with golden domes, and cheering crowds, and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road, you found just a simple reflection, and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpseall in one glimpse: like a personlike a person or a place you had sought foreverlike a person or a place you had sought forever, like a bold field of freedom that beckoned you beyond; like another lifelike another life, and the road the road still stretching on.""(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you very much. Thank you.You're very kind. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/david_whyte_a_lyrical_bridge_between_past_present_and_future
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"Someday, we may have robots as smart as people, artificial intelligence, AI. How could that happen? One route is that we'll just keep accumulating better software, like we've been doing for 70 years. At past rates of progress, that may take centuries. Some say it'll happen a lot faster as we discover grand new powerful theories of intelligence. I'm skeptical.But a third scenario is what I'm going to talk about today. The idea is to port the software from the human brain. To do this, we're going to need three technologies to be good enough, and none of them are there yet. First, we're going to need lots of cheap, fast, parallel computers. Second, we're going to need to scan individual human brains in fine spatial and chemical detail, to see exactly what cells are where, connected to what, of what type. And third, we're going to need computer models of how each kind of brain cell works — taking input signals, changing interval state and sending output signals. If we have good enough models of all the kinds of brain cells and a good enough model of the brain, we can put it together to make a good enough model of an entire brain, and that model would have the same input-output behavior as the original. So if you talk to it, it might talk back. If you ask it to do things, it might do them. And if we could do that, everything would change.People have been talking about this idea for decades, under the name of ""uploads."" I'm going to call them ""ems."" When they talk about it, they say, ""Is this even possible? If you made one, would it be conscious? Or is it just an empty machine? If you made one of me, is that me or someone else?"" These are all fascinating questions that I'm going to ignore ...(Laughter)because I see a neglected question: What would actually happen? I became obsessed with this question. I spent four years trying to analyze it, using standard academic tools, to guess what would happen, and I'm here to tell you what I found. But be warned — I'm not offering inspiration, I'm offering analysis. I see my job as telling you what's most likely to happen if we did the least to avoid it. If you aren't at least a bit disturbed by something I tell you here, you're just not paying attention.(Laughter)OK, the first thing I can tell you is that ems spend most of their life in virtual reality. This is what you might look like if you were using virtual reality. And this is what you might see: sunlight glinting off of water, you might hear gulls flying above, you might even feel the wind on your cheeks or smell seawater, with advanced hardware. Now, if you were to spend a lot of time here, you might want a dashboard where you could do things like make a phone call, move to a new virtual world, check your bank account.Now, while this is what you would look like in virtual reality, this is what an em would look like in virtual reality. It's computer hardware sitting in a server rack somewhere. But still, it could see and experience the same thing. But some things are different for ems. First, while you'll probably always notice that virtual reality isn't entirely real, to an em, it can feel as real to them as this room feels to you now or as anything ever feels. And ems also have some more action possibilities.For example, your mind just always runs at the same speed, but an em can add more or less computer hardware to run faster or slower, and therefore, if the world around them seems to be going too fast, they can just speed up their mind, and the world around them would seem to slow down.In addition, an em can make a copy of itself at that moment. This copy would remember everything the same, and if it starts out with the same speed, looking at the same speed, it might even need to be told, ""You are the copy."" And em could make archive copies, and with enough archives, an em can be immortal — in principle, though not usually in practice. And an em can move its brain, the computer that represents its brain, from one physical location to another. Ems can actually move around the world at the speed of light, and by moving to a new location, they can interact more quickly with ems near that new location.So far, I've been talking about what ems can do. What do ems choose to do? To understand that, we'll need to understand three key facts. First, ems by definition do what the human they emulate would do in the same situation. So their lives and behavior are very human. They're mainly different because they're living in a different world. Second, ems need real resources to survive. You need food and shelter or you'll die. Also, ems need computer hardware, energy, cooling, or they can't exist. For every subjective minute that an em experiences, someone, usually that em, had to work to pay for it. Third, ems are poor.(Laughter)The em population can grow quicker than the em economy, so that means wages fall down to em subsistence levels. That means ems have to be working most of the time. So that means this is what ems usually see: beautiful and luxurious, but desks — they're working most of the time. Now, a subsistence wage scenario, you might think, is exotic and strange, but it's actually the usual case in human history, and it's how pretty much all wild animals have ever lived, so we know what humans do in this situation. Humans basically do what it takes to survive, and this is what lets me say so much about the em world. When creatures are rich, like you, you have to know a lot about what they want to figure out what they do. When creatures are poor, you know that they mostly do what it takes to survive.So we've been talking about the em world from the point of view of the ems — now, let's step back and look at their whole world. First, the em world grows much faster than ours, roughly a hundred times faster. So the amount of change we would experience in a century or two, they would experience in a year or two. And I'm not really willing to project this age much beyond that, because plausibly by then something else will happen, I don't know what. Second, the typical emulation runs even faster, roughly a thousand times human speed. So for them, they experience thousands of years in this year or two, and for them, the world around them is actually changing more slowly than your world seems to change for you. Third, ems are crammed together in a small number of very dense cities. This is not only how they see themselves in virtual reality, it's also how they actually are physically crammed together. So at em speeds, physical travel feels really painfully slow, so most em cities are self-sufficient, most war is cyber war, and most of the rest of the earth away from the em cities is left to the humans, because the ems really aren't that interested in it.Speaking of humans, you were wanting to hear about that. Humans must retire, at once, for good. They just can't compete. Now, humans start out owning all of the capital in this world. The economy grows very fast, their wealth grows very fast. Humans get rich, collectively. As you may know, most humans today don't actually own that much besides their ability to work, so between now and then, they need to acquire sufficient assets, insurance or sharing arrangements, or they may starve. I highly recommend avoiding this outcome.(Laughter)Now, you might wonder, why would ems let humans exist? Why not kill them, take their stuff? But notice we have many unproductive retirees around us today, and we don't kill them and take their stuff.(Laughter)In part, that's because it would disrupt the institutions we share with them. Other groups would wonder who's next, so plausibly, ems may well let humans retire in peace during the age of em. You should worry more that the age of em only lasts a year or two and you don't know what happens next.Ems are very much like humans, but they are not like the typical human. The typical em is a copy of the few hundred most productive humans. So in fact, they are as elite, compared to the typical human, as the typical billionaire, Nobel Prize winner, Olympic gold medalist, head of state. Ems look on humans perhaps with nostalgia and gratitude, but not so much respect, which is, if you think about it, how you think about your ancestors. We know many things about how humans differ in terms of productivity. We can just use those to predict features of ems — for example, they tend to be smart, conscientious, hard-working, married, religious, middle-aged. These are features of ems.Em world also contains enormous variety. Not only does it continue on with most of the kinds of variety that humans do, including variety of industry and profession, they also have many new kinds of variety, and one of the most important is mind speed. Ems can plausibly go from human speed up to a million times faster than human speed, and down to a billion times slower than human speed. Faster ems tend to have markers of high status. They embody more wealth. They win arguments. They sit at premium locations. Slower ems are mostly retirees, and they are like the ghosts of our literature. If you recall, ghosts are all around us — you can interact with them if you pay the price. But they don't know much, they can't influence much, and they're obsessed with the past, so what's the point?(Laughter)Ems also have more variety in the structure of their lives. This is your life: you start and you end, really simple. This is the life of an em, who every day splits off some short-term copies to do short-term tasks and then end. We'll talk more about those short term versions in a moment, but they are much more efficient because they don't have to rest for the next day. This em is more opportunistic. They make more copies of themselves when there's more demand for that. They don't know which way the future's going.This is an em designer, who conceives of a large system and then breaks recursively into copies who elaborate that, so ems can implement larger, more coherent designs. This an emulation plumber who remembers that every day, for the last 20 years, they only ever worked two hours a day, a life of leisure. But what really happened is, every day they had a thousand copies, each of whom did a two-hour plumbing job, and only one of them went on to the next day. Objectively, they're working well over 99 percent of the time. Subjectively, they remember a life of leisure.(Laughter)This, again, is you. You start and you end. This could be you if at the start of party, you took a drug that meant you would not remember that party ever after that day. Some people do this, I'm told. Toward the end of the party, will you say to yourself, ""I'm about to die, this is terrible. That person tomorrow isn't me, because they won't remember what I do."" Or you could say, ""I will go on tomorrow. I just won't remember what I did."" This is an em who splits off a short-term copy to do a short-term task and then end. They have the same two attitude possibilities. They can say, ""I'm a new short-term creature with a short life. I hate this."" Or ""I'm a part of a larger creature who won't remember this part."" I predict they'll have that second attitude, not because it's philosophically correct, but because it helps them get along.Today, if the president says we must invade Iraq, and you say, ""Why?"" and they say, ""State secret,"" you're not sure if you can trust them, but for ems, a copy of the president and a copy of you can go inside a safe, explain all their secret reasons, and then one bit comes out from your copy to yourself, telling you if you were convinced. So now you can know there is a good reason.I know you guys are all eager to evaluate this world. You're eager to decide if you love it or hate it. But think: your ancestors from thousands of years ago would have loved or hated your world based on the first few things they heard about it, because your world is really just weird. So before judging a strange future world, you should really learn a lot about it, maybe read a whole book about it, and then, if you don't like it, work to change it.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/robin_hanson_what_would_happen_if_we_upload_our_brains_to_computers
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"This is a talk about sugar and cancer. I became interested in sugar when I was in college. Not this kind of sugar. It was the sugar that our biology professors taught us about in the context of the coating of your cells. Maybe you didn't know that your cells are coated with sugar. And I didn't know that, either, until I took these courses in college, but back then — and this was in, let's just call it the 1980s — people didn't know much about why our cells are coated with sugar. And when I dug through my notes, what I noticed I had written down is that the sugar coating on our cells is like the sugar coating on a peanut M and M. And people thought the sugar coating on our cells was like a protective coating that somehow made our cells stronger or tougher.But we now know, many decades later, that it's much more complicated than that, and that the sugars on our cells are actually very complex. And if you could shrink yourself down to a little miniature airplane and fly right along the surface of your cells, it might look something like this — with geographical features. And now, the complex sugars are these trees and bushes — weeping willows that are swaying in the wind and moving with the waves. And when I started thinking about all these complex sugars that are like this foliage on our cells, it became one of the most interesting problems that I encountered as a biologist and also as a chemist. And so now we tend to think about the sugars that are populating the surface of our cells as a language. They have a lot of information stored in their complex structures.But what are they trying to tell us? I can tell you that we do know some information that comes from these sugars, and it's turned out already to be incredibly important in the world of medicine.For example, one thing your sugars are telling us is your blood type. So your blood cells, your red blood cells, are coated with sugars, and the chemical structures of those sugars determine your blood type. So for example, I know that I am blood type O. How many people are also blood type O? Put your hands up. It's a pretty common one, so when so few hands go up, either you're not paying attention or you don't know your blood type, and both of those are bad.(Laughter)But for those of you who share the blood type O with me, what this means is that we have this chemical structure on the surface of our blood cells: three simple sugars linked together to make a more complex sugar. And that, by definition, is blood type O.Now, how many people are blood type A? Right here. That means you have an enzyme in your cells that adds one more building block, that red sugar, to build a more complex structure. And how many people are blood type B? Quite a few. You have a slightly different enzyme than the A people, so you build a slightly different structure, and those of you that are AB have the enzyme from your mother, the other enzyme from your father, and now you make both of these structures in roughly equal proportions. And when this was figured out, which is now back in the previous century, this enabled one of the most important medical procedures in the world, which, of course, is the blood transfusion. And by knowing what your blood type is, we can make sure, if you ever need a transfusion, that your donor has the same blood type, so that your body doesn't see foreign sugars, which it wouldn't like and would certainly reject.What else are the sugars on the surface of your cells trying to tell us? Well, those sugars might be telling us that you have cancer. So a few decades ago, correlations began to emerge from the analysis of tumor tissue. And the typical scenario is a patient would have a tumor detected, and the tissue would be removed in a biopsy procedure and then sent down to a pathology lab where that tissue would be analyzed to look for chemical changes that might inform the oncologist about the best course of treatment. And what was discovered from studies like that is that the sugars have changed when the cell transforms from being healthy to being sick. And those correlations have come up again and again and again. But a big question in the field has been: Why? Why do cancers have different sugars? What's the importance of that? Why does it happen, and what can we do about it if it does turn out to be related to the disease process?So, one of the changes that we study is an increase in the density of a particular sugar that's called sialic acid. And I think this is going to be one of the most important sugars of our times, so I would encourage everybody to get familiar with this word. Sialic acid is not the kind of sugar that we eat. Those are different sugars. This is a kind of sugar that is actually found at certain levels on all of the cells in your body. It's actually quite common on your cells. But for some reason, cancer cells, at least in a successful, progressive disease, tend to have more sialic acid than a normal, healthy cell would have. And why? What does that mean? Well, what we've learned is that it has to do with your immune system.So let me tell you a little bit about the importance of your immune system in cancer. And this is something that's, I think, in the news a lot these days. You know, people are starting to become familiar with the term ""cancer immune therapy."" And some of you might even know people who are benefiting from these very new ways of treating cancer. What we now know is that your immune cells, which are the white blood cells coursing through your bloodstream, protect you on a daily basis from things gone bad — including cancer. And so in this picture, those little green balls are your immune cells, and that big pink cell is a cancer cell. And these immune cells go around and taste all the cells in your body. That's their job. And most of the time, the cells taste OK.But once in a while, a cell might taste bad. Hopefully, that's the cancer cell, and when those immune cells get the bad taste, they launch an all-out strike and kill those cells. So we know that. We also know that if you can potentiate that tasting, if you can encourage those immune cells to actually take a big old bite out of a cancer cell, you get a better job protecting yourself from cancer every day and maybe even curing a cancer. And there are now a couple of drugs out there in the market that are used to treat cancer patients that act exactly by this process. They activate the immune system so that the immune system can be more vigorous in protecting us from cancer.In fact, one of those drugs may well have spared President Jimmy Carter's life. Do you remember, President Carter had malignant melanoma that had metastasized to his brain, and that diagnosis is one that is usually accompanied by numbers like ""months to live."" But he was treated with one of these new immune-stimulating drugs, and now his melanoma appears to be in remission, which is remarkable, considering the situation only a few years ago. In fact, it's so remarkable that provocative statements like this one: ""Cancer is having a penicillin moment,"" people are saying, with these new immune therapy drugs. I mean, that's an incredibly bold thing to say about a disease which we've been fighting for a long time and mostly losing the battle with. So this is very exciting.Now what does this have to do with sugars? Well, I'll tell you what we've learned. When an immune cell snuggles up against a cancer cell to take a taste, it's looking for signs of disease, and if it finds those signs, the cell gets activated and it launches a missile strike and kills the cell. But if that cancer cell has a dense forest of that sugar, sialic acid, well, it starts to taste pretty good. And there's a protein on immune cells that grabs the sialic acid, and if that protein gets held at that synapse between the immune cell and the cancer cell, it puts that immune cell to sleep. The sialic acids are telling the immune cell, ""Hey, this cell's all right. Nothing to see here, move along. Look somewhere else."" So in other words, as long as our cells are wearing a thick coat of sialic acid, they look fabulous, right? It's amazing. And what if you could strip off that coat and take that sugar away? Well, your immune system might be able to see that cancer cell for what it really is: something that needs to be destroyed.And so this is what we're doing in my lab. We're developing new medicines that are basically cell-surface lawnmowers — molecules that go down to the surface of these cancer cells and just cut off those sialic acids, so that the immune system can reach its full potential in eliminating those cancer cells from our body.So in closing, let me just remind you again: your cells are coated with sugars. The sugars are telling cells around that cell whether the cell is good or bad. And that's important, because our immune system needs to leave the good cells alone. Otherwise, we'd have autoimmune diseases. But once in a while, cancers get the ability to express these new sugars. And now that we understand how those sugars mesmerize the immune system, we can come up with new medicines to wake up those immune cells, tell them, ""Ignore the sugars, eat the cell and have a delicious snack, on cancer.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_bertozzi_what_the_sugar_coating_on_your_cells_is_trying_to_tell_you
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"[Yoruba: Freeborn Ijebu-Ode son,] [of true Ogbogbo Clan,] [whose wealth and resources surpass all that Europe ever had,] [whose altar is filled with gold.]This chant is called the oríkì. My grandmother used to sing it to me when I was a child in Nigeria. See, an oríkì is the song of praise of the Yoruba people, and this particularly speaks of treasures that the West does not have.Mama — that's what I call my grandmother — told me many stories about Yoruba mythology. You see, the Yorubas are an ethnic group from the southwestern part of Nigeria, and I was always fascinated by these stories. I was always intrigued. And Yoruba culture has inspired my art since I was a child. You see, African art is not just what you buy at Harlem markets in New York. Every artist has a name, and every artist has a story. This is my story.See, mama had tattoos on her arms and her legs. As a child, I thought she was born with them, with beautiful black lines and detailed symbols. And then she told me that they were actually symbols from the Yoruba mythology. I never knew how this was going to influence the artist that I am today. You see, as a young child, I saw art everywhere. I remember the house we lived in in Ilorin, in Stadium Road. We had marble floors, and you know, I would look at the marble floors, and I would see all sorts of patterns and designs in it, and I thought everybody could see them. So I would call my brother, and I would be like, ""Ikeolu, come and see this marble design, see this pattern, see this mask."" And he would tell me, ""Laolu, I don't see anything."" So I would use ink, and I would trace out what I saw on the floor. And then when my mom noticed, she got really upset.(Laughter)But that didn't stop me. I switched from ink to chalk, because I got in trouble a lot with my teachers and my parents. So I remember my mom said, ""Laolu, we are Christians. Why don't you draw like other people? Why don't you draw landscapes or maybe you draw chairs or furniture, or maybe even draw Jesus?""You know, I could paint the whole house if I had a chance, but when I grew up, I knew being an artist was not an option, so I wanted to be the person my parents wanted me to be, so I went to law school. Of course, that's my dad there. He was so proud that day. And this was what my notebooks looked like in law school.(Laughter)Of course I would miss classes, and I would make up excuses why I wasn't going to class.But when I started working at the Human Rights Commission as a human rights attorney, my mind was elsewhere. I saw a very tough reality. I worked with children who had to choose between getting an education and actually being forced into marriage. I was so frustrated seeing all the injustice around me, and my only outlet was art, so I started painting.This piece is called ""Dreamscape."" So when you zoom into this piece, you're going to see a girl child and the accidental birth, the fact that our future is controlled by where we are born. Now, the next one you see a man and a man holding hands, a woman and a woman holding hands. You see, in Nigeria, same-sex relationship is criminalized. You can actually get 14 years for that.With my art, I like to tell stories. Through my art, I like to start a conversation. So in this one, you see the map of Africa, you see the questions, you see crying, and there you see syringes plugged into Africa and the natural resources being drained out. So I asked myself, where does it go? Who benefits from all of this? You see, with my art, the way I weave my art around the patterns, the masks, the stories, and the way I use my lines, it's all from the Yoruba culture.So in 2013, I made a big gamble. I quit my job and I moved to New York City to practice art full time. Of course, my parents were like, ""Oh, [it's just a phase.] He'll come back."" But life as an artist in New York was not easy, because I was broke, no money, no gallery agents, no representation, so no gallery would show my work. So I thought to myself, I need to survive. So I started painting on clothes to make a living. I started painting on shoes. I started customizing things for people. And then soon I realized the power, because people were so proud to wear their stories. So I started painting on everything. I painted on guitars, I started doing murals, anything I could find my hand on I painted, and everything became my canvas.So one day, I was just going on my Instagram feed, and I saw this picture. It was Reign. She took a picture standing in front my art, and the moment I saw that photo, something happened in that moment. I could actually see my artwork go into her and come out of her literally, and that's how I started painting on human bodies. As a child I saw art on the marble floors, I saw art on walls, but now I see art on people's faces and people's bodies. I remember my grandmother, and I realized that most of my creative instincts were actually based on my childhood memories and the art on my grandmother's skin.Now I look at all the people I painted, and I think to myself, like, what would it look like if we all walked around like gods and goddesses from Yoruba mythology? And boom, that's how The Sacred Art of the Ori was born. You see, Ori in Yoruba mythology means your soul, it means your essence, it means your instincts. And I realized that only when you tap into your Ori, then you can actually move mountains. So there's something so immediate about painting on human bodies. It's like art in motion. It's like a 3D experience.So one day, I was just doing my regular work in Brooklyn, and I got an email that said, ""Hi, I'm a big fan of your work. Would you like to paint for my music video? Signed, Beyoncé."" Like, Beyoncé emailed me. I was like, what?(Laughter)I was like, what, how did she even know me? I thought this can't be true. Of course I thought it was a scam. The Nigerian in me was like, nah.(Laughter)(Applause)But incredibly enough, it was real, it was true, and things happened really fast. You see, Beyoncé wanted to pay homage to New Orleans, and my art reminded her of her creole origins. So when ""Lemonade"" dropped, of course, boom, everything just went from zero to 100 real fast. People featured me in magazines, interviews. People stopped me in the street. People knew my name, like — And sometimes I had to step back and just chill, and, like, take everything in. You know, as artists, we work so hard all our lives for our art to be recognized, and for this I feel blessed. However, the attorney in me is still there, so I use my art to fight for what I believe in. My Yoruba heritage is always there.I'd like to share with you tonight some of my art in motion. Please, welcome with me on stage.(Music)(Applause)Now, this is Geli, and this is Reign. These are the first two people I ever painted in my life, and I spent the past day painting on them. Tonight, they represent my hopes and my fears. Now, I put my fears on the back. I put my hopes in front. What are my hopes? I hope that people know that Africa is not just one huge, nameless continent that is all the same. I also hope that people know that in Nigeria, we have over 350 ethnic groups and languages, and I am just one artist from one of them.(Applause)I also hope that you know that I hope I will be able to change the way people talk about African art on the continent and here, and I hope you know that African art is not just what you buy at Harlem markets in New York and that every piece of art you see has a story, and every artist has a name.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/laolu_senbanjo_the_sacred_art_of_the_ori
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"Are you tired of your boss?(Laughter)Are you tired of going to work and making money for other people? And who are those people anyways? Those people that make money from your work. Well, they're capitalists. They have capital, and they use your labor to make more capital. So if you're tired of going to work and making money for other people, then you're probably like me — just tired of capitalism. Which is ironic, because I'm a capitalist.(Laughter)I own a small business — Rco Tires in Compton. A few years ago, when I read Van Jones, and he wrote, ""Let's make green collar jobs in the hood,"" I took him really seriously. So I cofounded, own and operate a tire recycling company, and I'm really proud of what we've done. So far, we've recycled a hundred million pounds of rubber. That's 21 million gallons of oil diverted from landfills into new products.(Cheers)We also employ about 15 guys — mostly people of color, most of whom are felons, and we pay above the minimum wage, and we are now proud members of the United Steelworkers Union.(Applause)Now, Rco is not a cooperative now. It's a privately held company with community-minded ownership, but I would like it to become one. I would like for them to fire the boss — that's me.(Laughter)And I'm going to tell you why, but first, let me tell you how we got started. So a lot of people ask, ""How did Rco come to be?"" And I have to be really honest. I leveraged my white privilege. So, here's how white privilege worked for me and Rco. My white grandmother was born on her family's plantation in Arkansas in 1918. She traveled with her white father west, following the oil boom. And he held various union oil jobs — jobs which would have never been given to my black great-grandfather, had he lived here at the time. Granny became a hairdresser and then got a loan with her husband who built their home in West Los Angeles — a loan which would never have been given to a black family at the time. And after my grandfather passed away, my granny was able to keep that house because she had his pension and his health care from a state job which he held, which again, would have never been given to a black man before the anti-discrimination act of the 1960s.So, you fast-forward 30 years, and I graduate, and I want to start my own business with a pile of debt and a credit card, and no experience in the tire industry. But I had what most people didn't have. I had a clean, safe, free place to live. I moved in with my grandmother, and I was able to rent our first warehouse, buy our first truck, pay our first employees, because I didn't have to worry about paying myself, because I didn't need to feed myself, because I am the direct beneficiary of generations of white privilege.Now, telling the story of white privilege is important because very often people say, ""Oh, we want more companies like yours. We want more Rco's, we want more black-owned businesses, female-led, triple bottom line, Ban the Box, green manufacturing companies,"" right? But the question we have to ask is, where is the wealth? Where is the money? Where's the capital in our communities to build the types of businesses that we want?And in telling a story of the white side of my family, I needed a dozen ways where blacks were excluded from the economy, whereas the white side of my family was able to gain access and traction, and build wealth ... Primarily because racism and capitalism are best homies, but —(Laughter)but what that means is that when we ask ourselves, ""Why are our communities broke?"" — Like, we're not just broke because we're broke; we're broke for a reason. Historical context really does matter.But our history tells another story as well. There's this incredible book called ""Collective Courage,"" which is the story of how thousands of African Americans have been able to build businesses and schools, hospitals, farming cooperatives, banks, financial institutions — entire communities and sovereign economies, without a lot of capital. And they did it by working together and leveraging their community assets and trusting each other and putting solidarity first — not just profits by any means necessary. And they didn't have to wait around for celebrities and athletes to bring their money back to the hood. However, if you are a celebrity or an athlete, and you're listening to this, please feel free to bring your money.(Laughter)But they did it through cooperative economics, because they knew that capitalism was never going to finance black liberation. So, there are so many great examples in this book, and I suggest that everybody just read it because it answers the question I asked earlier, which was where are we going to get the wealth to build the types of business that we want. And the answer is going to have to be cooperative economics.There's a lot of different versions of cooperativism. What I'm talking about today is worker ownership. You may not have heard of worker ownership, but it's been an incredible tool for black economic liberation for a century, and it's also working all over the world right now. You may have heard of Black Wall Street or maybe the Zapatistas, but I'll give you an example that's a little bit closer to home. Right now, today, in South Bronx, is the country's largest worker-owned company. It's called Cooperative Home Care Associates, and it was founded by black and Latinx home care workers who are now able to pay themselves living wages, they have full-time hours, they have benefits and a pension, through their membership as a unit of SEIU. And these women owners now receive a dividend back on their ownership every year that the company has been profitable, which has been most years. So they're able to really enjoy the fruits of their labor because they fired the boss. They don't have any big investors. They don't have fat-cat CEOs or absentee owners taking the profit out of the company. They each pay in about 1,000 dollars over time in order to gain ownership, and now they own their job.Now, there's hundreds of more examples of companies like this springing up all across the country. And I'm so inspired by what they're doing, because it really represents an alternative to the type of economy we have now, which exploits all of us. It also represents an alternative to waiting around for big investors to bring chain stores, or big-box stores to our communities, because honestly, those types of developments, they steal resources from our communities. They put our mom-and-pop shops out of business, they make our entrepreneurs into wage workers, and they take money out of our pocket and send it to their shareholders.So, I was so inspired by all these stories of resistance and resilience that I got together with a few people here in Los Angeles, and we created LUCI. LUCI stands for the Los Angeles Union Cooperative Initiative, and our objective is to create more worker-owned businesses here in Los Angeles. So far, in the last year, we've created two: Pacific Electric, an electrical company, and Vermont Gage Carwash, which is right here in South-Central, some of you guys might be familiar with it. This long-time carwash is now owned and operated by its 20 workers, all of whom are union members as well.(Applause)So you might be wondering why the focus on union-worker ownership, but there's a lot of good reasons why the labor movement is a natural ally to the worker-ownership movement. To build these companies that we want in our community, we need a few things. We're going to need money, people and training. Unions have all of those things. America's working class has been paying union dues for decades, and with it, our unions have been building dignified, decent, and democratic workplaces for us. However, union jobs are on the steep decline, and it's time for us to start calling on our unions to really bring all of their financial and political capital to bear in the creation of new, union, living-wage jobs in our communities. Also, union halls are full of union members who understand the importance of solidarity and the power of collective action. These are the types of folks that want more union businesses to exist, so let's build them with them.Learning from our unions, learning from our past, learning from our peers, are all going to be very important to our success, which is why I'd like to leave you with one last example and a vision for the future ... and that vision is Mondragon, Spain. Mondragon, Spain is a community built entirely around worker cooperatives. There's 260-plus businesses here, manufacturing everything from bicycles to washing machines to transformers. And this group of businesses now employs 80,000 people and earns more than 12 billion euros in revenue every year. And all of the companies there are owned by the people that work in them. They've also built universities and hospitals and financial institutions. I mean, imagine if we could build something like this in South-Central. The late mayor of Jackson had a similar idea. He wanted to turn his entire city into a Mondragon-like cooperative economy, calling his ambitious plan ""Jackson Rising.""And when I look at Mondragon, I see really what working-class people can do for ourselves when we work together and make decisions for ourselves and each other and our communities. And what's really incredible about Mondragon is that while we are dreaming about them, they are dreaming about us. This community in Spain has decided to launch an international initiative to create more communities like it all over the world, by linking up with unions, by supporting organizations like LUCI, and by educating folks about the worker-ownership model.Now, here's what you can do to be a part of it. If you're a union member, go to your union meetings, and make sure that your union has a worker-ownership initiative, and become a part of it. If you're an entrepreneur, if you have a small business, or you're interested in starting one, then link up with LUCI or another organization like us to help you get started on the cooperative model. If you're a politician, or you work for one, or you just like talking to them, please get the city, state, federal and county legislation passed that we need in order to fund and support worker-owned businesses.And for everybody else, learn about our history, learn about our models, and seek us out so can support us, you can buy from us, invest in us, lend to us and join us, because it's really going to take all of us in order to build the more just and sustainable and resilient economy that we want for ourselves and our children.And with that, I would like to leave you with a quote from Arundhati Roy, and she writes ... ""Our strategy should not be only to confront Empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To mock it. To shame it. With our art, our literature, our music, our brilliance, our joy, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Not the stories that we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they're selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their sense of inevitability. Because know this: They be few and we be many. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. And on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.""Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/niki_okuk_when_workers_own_companies_the_economy_is_more_resilient
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"So, my mother's a pediatrician, and when I was young, she'd tell the craziest stories that combined science with her overactive imagination. One of the stories she told was that if you eat a lot of salt, all of the blood rushes up your legs, through your body, and shoots out the top of your head, killing you instantly.(Laughter)She called it ""high blood pressure.""(Laughter)This was my first experience with science fiction, and I loved it. So when I started to write my own science fiction and fantasy, I was surprised that it was considered un-African. So naturally, I asked, what is African? And this is what I know so far: Africa is important. Africa is the future. It is, though. And Africa is a serious place where only serious things happen.So when I present my work somewhere, someone will always ask, ""What's so important about it? How does it deal with real African issues like war, poverty, devastation or AIDS?"" And it doesn't. My work is about Nairobi pop bands that want to go to space or about seven-foot-tall robots that fall in love. It's nothing incredibly important. It's just fun, fierce and frivolous, as frivolous as bubble gum — ""AfroBubbleGum.""So I'm not saying that agenda art isn't important; I'm the chairperson of a charity that deals with films and theaters that write about HIV and radicalization and female genital mutilation. It's vital and important art, but it cannot be the only art that comes out of the continent. We have to tell more stories that are vibrant. The danger of the single story is still being realized. And maybe it's because of the funding. A lot of art is still dependent on developmental aid. So art becomes a tool for agenda. Or maybe it's because we've only seen one image of ourselves for so long that that's all we know how to create. Whatever the reason, we need a new way, and AfroBubbleGum is one approach. It's the advocacy of art for art's sake. It's the advocacy of art that is not policy-driven or agenda-driven or based on education, just for the sake of imagination: AfroBubbleGum art.And we can't all be AfroBubbleGumists. We have to judge our work for its potential poverty porn pitfalls. We have to have tests that are similar to the Bechdel test, and ask questions like: Are two or more Africans in this piece of fiction healthy? Are those same Africans financially stable and not in need of saving? Are they having fun and enjoying life? And if we can answer yes to two or more of these questions, then surely we're AfroBubbleGumists.(Laughter)(Applause)And fun is political, because imagine if we have images of Africans who were vibrant and loving and thriving and living a beautiful, vibrant life. What would we think of ourselves then? Would we think that maybe we're worthy of more happiness? Would we think of our shared humanity through our shared joy? I think of these things when I create. I think of the people and the places that give me immeasurable joy, and I work to represent them. And that's why I write stories about futuristic girls that risk everything to save plants or to race camels or even just to dance, to honor fun, because my world is mostly happy.And I know happiness is a privilege in this current splintered world where remaining hopeful requires diligence. But maybe, if you join me in creating, curating and commissioning more AfroBubbleGum art, there might be hope for a different view of the world, a happy Africa view where children are strangely traumatized by their mother's dark sense of humor,(Laughter)but also they're claiming fun, fierce and frivolous art in the name of all things unseriously African. Because we're AfroBubbleGumists and there's so many more of us than you can imagine.Thank you so much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/wanuri_kahiu_fun_fierce_and_fantastical_african_art
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"These are some photos of me volunteering in a Cambodian orphanage in 2006. When these photos were taken, I thought I was doing a really good thing and that I was really helping those kids. I had a lot to learn.It all started for me when I was 19 years old and went backpacking through Southeast Asia. When I reached Cambodia, I felt uncomfortable being on holiday surrounded by so much poverty and wanted to do something to give back. So I visited some orphanages and donated some clothes and books and some money to help the kids that I met.But one of the orphanages I visited was desperately poor. I had never encountered poverty like that before in my life. They didn't have funds for enough food, clean water or medical treatment, and the sad little faces on those kids were heartbreaking. So I was compelled to do something more to help. I fund-raised in Australia and returned to Cambodia the following year to volunteer at the orphanage for a few months. I taught English and bought water filters and food and took all of the kids to the dentist for the first time in their lives.But over the course of the next year, I came to discover that this orphanage that I had been supporting was terribly corrupt. The director had been embezzling every cent donated to the orphanage, and in my absence, the children were suffering such gross neglect that they were forced to catch mice to feed themselves. I also found out later that the director had been physically and sexually abusing the kids. I couldn't bring myself to turn my back on children who I had come to know and care about and return to my life in Australia. So I worked with a local team and the local authorities to set up a new orphanage and rescue the kids to give them a safe new home.But this is where my story takes another unexpected turn. As I adjusted to my new life running an orphanage in Cambodia, (Khmer) I learned to speak Khmer fluently, which means that I learned to speak the Khmer language fluently. And when I could communicate properly with the kids, I began to uncover some strange things. Most of the children we had removed from the orphanage were not, in fact, orphans at all. They had parents, and the few that were orphaned had other living relatives, like grandparents and aunties and uncles and other siblings.So why were these children living in an orphanage when they weren't orphans? Since 2005, the number of orphanages in Cambodia has risen by 75 percent, and the number of children living in Cambodian orphanages has nearly doubled, despite the fact that the vast majority of children living in these orphanages are not orphans in the traditional sense. They're children from poor families. So if the vast majority of children living in orphanages are not orphans, then the term ""orphanage"" is really just a euphemistic name for a residential care institution. These institutions go by other names as well, like ""shelters,"" ""safe houses,"" ""children's homes,"" ""children's villages,"" even ""boarding schools.""And this problem is not just confined to Cambodia. This map shows some of the countries that have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of residential care institutions and the numbers of children being institutionalized. In Uganda, for example, the number of children living in institutions has increased by more than 1,600 percent since 1992. And the problems posed by putting kids into institutions don't just pertain to the corrupt and abusive institutions like the one that I rescued the kids from. The problems are with all forms of residential care.Over 60 years of international research has shown us that children who grow up in institutions, even the very best institutions, are at serious risk of developing mental illnesses, attachment disorders, growth and speech delays, and many will struggle with an inability to reintegrate back into society later in life and form healthy relationships as adults. These kids grow up without any model of family or of what good parenting looks like, so they then can struggle to parent their own children. So if you institutionalize large numbers of children, it will affect not only this generation, but also the generations to come.We've learned these lessons before in Australia. It's what happened to our ""Stolen Generations,"" the indigenous children who were removed from their families with the belief that we could do a better job of raising their children.Just imagine for a moment what residential care would be like for a child. Firstly, you have a constant rotation of caregivers, with somebody new coming on to the shift every eight hours. And then on top of that you have a steady stream of visitors and volunteers coming in, showering you in the love and affection you're craving and then leaving again, evoking all of those feelings of abandonment, and proving again and again that you are not worthy of being loved.We don't have orphanages in Australia, the USA, the UK anymore, and for a very good reason: one study has shown that young adults raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to fall into sex work than their peers, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record, and 500 times more likely to take their own lives. There are an estimated eight million children around the world living in institutions like orphanages, despite the fact that around 80 percent of them are not orphans. Most have families who could be caring for them if they had the right support.But for me, the most shocking thing of all to realize is what's contributing to this boom in the unnecessary institutionalization of so many children: it's us — the tourists, the volunteers and the donors. It's the well-meaning support from people like me back in 2006, who visit these children and volunteer and donate, who are unwittingly fueling an industry that exploits children and tears families apart.It's really no coincidence that these institutions are largely set up in areas where tourists can most easily be lured in to visit and volunteer in exchange for donations. Of the 600 so-called orphanages in Nepal, over 90 percent of them are located in the most popular tourist hotspots. The cold, hard truth is, the more money that floods in in support of these institutions, the more institutions open and the more children are removed from their families to fill their beds. It's just the laws of supply and demand.I had to learn all of these lessons the hard way, after I had already set up an orphanage in Cambodia. I had to eat a big piece of humble pie to admit that I had made a mistake and inadvertently become a part of the problem. I had been an orphanage tourist, a voluntourist. I then set up my own orphanage and facilitated orphanage tourism in order to generate funds for my orphanage, before I knew better. What I came to learn is that no matter how good my orphanage was, it was never going to give those kids what they really needed: their families.I know that it can feel incredibly depressing to learn that helping vulnerable children and overcoming poverty is not as simple as we've all been led to believe it should be. But thankfully, there is a solution. These problems are reversible and preventable, and when we know better, we can do better.The organization that I run today, the Cambodian Children's Trust, is no longer an orphanage. In 2012, we changed the model in favor of family-based care. I now lead an amazing team of Cambodian social workers, nurses and teachers. Together, we work within communities to untangle a complex web of social issues and help Cambodian families escape poverty. Our primary focus is on preventing some of the most vulnerable families in our community from being separated in the first place. But in cases where it's not possible for a child to live with its biological family, we support them in foster care. Family-based care is always better than placing a child in an institution.Do you remember that first photo that I showed you before? See that girl who is just about to catch the ball? Her name is Torn She's a strong, brave and fiercely intelligent girl. But in 2006, when I first met her living in that corrupt and abusive orphanage, she had never been to school. She was suffering terrible neglect, and she yearned desperately for the warmth and love of her mother. But this is a photo of Torn today with her family. Her mother now has a secure job, her siblings are doing well in high school and she is just about to finish her nursing degree at university. For Torn's family —(Applause)for Torn's family, the cycle of poverty has been broken. The family-based care model that we have developed at CCT has been so successful, that it's now being put forward by UNICEF Cambodia and the Cambodian government as a national solution to keep children in families. And one of the best —(Applause)And one of the best ways that you can help to solve this problem is by giving these eight million children a voice and become an advocate for family-based care.If we work together to raise awareness, we can make sure the world knows that we need to put an end to the unnecessary institutionalization of vulnerable children. How do we achieve that? By redirecting our support and our donations away from orphanages and residential care institutions towards organizations that are committed to keeping children in families.I believe we can make this happen in our lifetime, and as a result, we will see developing communities thrive and ensure that vulnerable children everywhere have what all children need and deserve: a family.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tara_winkler_why_we_need_to_end_the_era_of_orphanages
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"Today, I'm going to talk about AI and us. AI researchers have always said that we humans do not need to worry, because only menial jobs will be taken over by machines. Is that really true? They have also said that AI will create new jobs, so those who lose their jobs will find a new one. Of course. But the real question is: How many of those who may lose their jobs to AI will be able to land a new one, especially when AI is smart enough to learn better than most of us?Let me ask you a question: How many of you think that AI will pass the entrance examination of a top university by 2020? Oh, so many. OK. So some of you may say, ""Of course, yes!"" Now singularity is the issue. And some others may say, ""Maybe, because AI already won against a top Go player."" And others may say, ""No, never. Uh-uh."" That means we do not know the answer yet, right? So that was the reason why I started Todai Robot Project, making an AI which passes the entrance examination of the University of Tokyo, the top university in Japan.This is our Todai Robot. And, of course, the brain of the robot is working in the remote server. It is now writing a 600-word essay on maritime trade in the 17th century. How does that sound?Why did I take the entrance exam as its benchmark? Because I thought we had to study the performance of AI in comparison to humans, especially on the skills and expertise which are believed to be acquired only by humans and only through education. To enter Todai, the University of Tokyo, you have to pass two different types of exams. The first one is a national standardized test in multiple-choice style. You have to take seven subjects and achieve a high score — I would say like an 84 percent or more accuracy rate — to be allowed to take the second stage written test prepared by Todai.So let me first explain how modern AI works, taking the ""Jeopardy!"" challenge as an example. Here is a typical ""Jeopardy!"" question: ""Mozart's last symphony shares its name with this planet."" Interestingly, a ""Jeopardy!"" question always asks, always ends with ""this"" something: ""this"" planet, ""this"" country, ""this"" rock musician, and so on. In other words, ""Jeopardy!"" doesn't ask many different types of questions, but a single type, which we call ""factoid questions.""By the way, do you know the answer? If you do not know the answer and if you want to know the answer, what would you do? You Google, right? Of course. Why not? But you have to pick appropriate keywords like ""Mozart,"" ""last"" and ""symphony"" to search. The machine basically does the same. Then this Wikipedia page will be ranked top. Then the machine reads the page. No, uh-uh.Unfortunately, none of the modern AIs, including Watson, Siri and Todai Robot, is able to read. But they are very good at searching and optimizing. It will recognize that the keywords ""Mozart,"" ""last"" and ""symphony"" are appearing heavily around here. So if it can find a word which is a planet and which is co-occurring with these keywords, that must be the answer. This is how Watson finds the answer ""Jupiter,"" in this case.Our Todai Robot works similarly, but a bit smarter in answering history yes-no questions, like, ""'Charlemagne repelled the Magyars.' Is this sentence true or false?"" Our robot starts producing a factoid question, like: ""Charlemagne repelled [this person type]"" by itself. Then, ""Avars"" but not ""Magyars"" is ranked top. This sentence is likely to be false. Our robot does not read, does not understand, but it is statistically correct in many cases.For the second stage written test, it is required to write a 600-word essay like this one:[Discuss the rise and fall of the maritime trade in East and Southeast Asia in the 17th century ...]and as I have shown earlier, our robot took the sentences from the textbooks and Wikipedia, combined them together, and optimized it to produce an essay without understanding a thing.(Laughter)But surprisingly, it wrote a better essay than most of the students.(Laughter)How about mathematics? A fully automatic math-solving machine has been a dream since the birth of the word ""artificial intelligence,"" but it has stayed at the level of arithmetic for a long, long time. Last year, we finally succeeded in developing a system which solved pre-university-level problems from end to end, like this one. This is the original problem written in Japanese, and we had to teach it 2,000 mathematical axioms and 8,000 Japanese words to make it accept the problems written in natural language. And it is now translating the original problems into machine-readable formulas. Weird, but it is now ready to solve it, I think. Go and solve it. Yes! It is now executing symbolic computation. Even more weird, but probably this is the most fun part for the machine.(Laughter)Now it outputs a perfect answer, though its proof is impossible to read, even for mathematicians. Anyway, last year our robot was among the top one percent in the second stage written exam in mathematics.(Applause)Thank you.So, did it enter Todai? No, not as I expected. Why? Because it doesn't understand any meaning. Let me show you a typical error it made in the English test.[Nate: We're almost at the bookstore. Just a few more minutes. Sunil: Wait. ______ . Nate: Thank you! That always happens ...]Two people are talking. For us, who can understand the situation —[1. ""We walked for a long time."" 2. ""We're almost there."" 3. ""Your shoes look expensive."" 4. ""Your shoelace is untied.""]it is obvious number four is the correct answer, right? But Todai Robot chose number two, even after learning 15 billion English sentences using deep learning technologies. OK, so now you might understand what I said: modern AIs do not read, do not understand. They only disguise as if they do.This is the distribution graph of half a million students who took the same exam as Todai Robot. Now our Todai Robot is among the top 20 percent, and it was capable to pass more than 60 percent of the universities in Japan — but not Todai. But see how it is beyond the volume zone of to-be white-collar workers.You might think I was delighted. After all, my robot was surpassing students everywhere. Instead, I was alarmed. How on earth could this unintelligent machine outperform students — our children? Right? I decided to investigate what was going on in the human world. I took hundreds of sentences from high school textbooks and made easy multiple-choice quizzes, and asked thousands of high school students to answer.Here is an example:[Buddhism spread to ... , Christianity to ... and Oceania, and Islam to ...]Of course, the original problems are written in Japanese, their mother tongue.[ ______ has spread to Oceania. 1. Hinduism 2. Christianity 3. Islam 4. Buddhism ]Obviously, Christianity is the answer, isn't it? It's written! And Todai Robot chose the correct answer, too. But one-third of junior high school students failed to answer this question. Do you think it is only the case in Japan? I do not think so, because Japan is always ranked among the top in OECD PISA tests, measuring 15-year-old students' performance in mathematics, science and reading every three years.We have been believing that everybody can learn and learn well, as long as we provide good learning materials free on the web so that they can access through the internet. But such wonderful materials may benefit only those who can read well, and the percentage of those who can read well may be much less than we expected. How we humans will coexist with AI is something we have to think about carefully, based on solid evidence. At the same time, we have to think in a hurry because time is running out.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: Noriko, thank you.Noriko Arai: Thank you.CA: In your talk, you so beautifully give us a sense of how AIs think, what they can do amazingly and what they can't do. But — do I read you right, that you think we really need quite an urgent revolution in education to help kids do the things that humans can do better than AIs?NA: Yes, yes, yes. Because we humans can understand the meaning. That is something which is very, very lacking in AI. But most of the students just pack the knowledge without understanding the meaning of the knowledge, so that is not knowledge, that is just memorizing, and AI can do the same thing. So we have to think about a new type of education.CA: A shift from knowledge, rote knowledge, to meaning.NA: Mm-hmm.CA: Well, there's a challenge for the educators. Thank you so much.NA: Thank you very much. Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/noriko_arai_can_a_robot_pass_a_university_entrance_exam
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"We are all activists now.(Applause)Thank you.I'll just stop here.(Laughter)From the families who are fighting to maintain funding for public schools, the tens of thousands of people who joined Occupy Wall Street or marched with Black Lives Matter to protest police brutality against African Americans, families that join rallies, pro-life and pro-choice, those of us who are afraid that our friends and neighbors are going to be deported or that they'll be added to lists because they are Muslim, people who advocate for gun rights and for gun control and the millions of people who joined the women's marches all across the country this last January.(Applause)We are all activists now, and that means that we all have something to worry about from surveillance. Surveillance means government collection and use of private and sensitive data about us. And surveillance is essential to law enforcement and to national security. But the history of surveillance is one that includes surveillance abuses where this sensitive information has been used against people because of their race, their national origin, their sexual orientation, and in particular, because of their activism, their political beliefs.About 53 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ""I have a dream"" speech on the Mall in Washington. And today the ideas behind this speech of racial equality and tolerance are so noncontroversial that my daughters study the speech in third grade. But at the time, Dr. King was extremely controversial. The legendary and notorious FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed, or wanted to believe, that the Civil Rights Movement was a Soviet communist plot intended to destabilize the American government. And so Hoover had his agents put bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms, and those bugs picked up conversations between civil rights leaders talking about the strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. They also picked up sounds of Dr. King having sex with women who were not his wife, and J. Edgar Hoover saw the opportunity here to discredit and undermine the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI sent a package of these recordings along with a handwritten note to Dr. King, and a draft of this note was found in FBI archives years later, and the letter said, ""You are no clergyman and you know it. King, like all frauds, your end is approaching."" The letter even seemed to encourage Dr. King to commit suicide, saying, ""King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.""But the important thing is, Dr. King was not abnormal. Every one of us has something that we want to hide from somebody. And even more important, J. Edgar Hoover wasn't abnormal either. The history of surveillance abuses is not the history of one bad, megalomaniacal man. Throughout his decades at the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed the support of the presidents that he served, Democratic and Republican alike. After all, it was John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy who knew about and approved the surveillance of Dr. King. Hoover ran a program called COINTELPRO for 15 years which was designed to spy on and undermine civic groups that were devoted to things like civil rights, the Women's Rights Movement, and peace groups and anti-war movements. And the surveillance didn't stop there. Lyndon Baines Johnson, during the election campaign, had the campaign airplane of his rival Barry Goldwater bugged as part of his effort to win that election. And then, of course, there was Watergate. Burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, the Nixon administration was involved in covering up the burglary, and eventually Nixon had to step down as president. COINTELPRO and Watergate were a wake-up call for Americans. Surveillance was out of control and it was being used to squelch political challengers. And so Americans rose to the occasion and what we did was we reformed surveillance law. And the primary tool we used to reform surveillance law was to require a search warrant for the government to be able to get access to our phone calls and our letters. Now, the reason why a search warrant is important is because it interposes a judge in the relationship between investigators and the citizens, and that judge's job is to make sure that there's good cause for the surveillance, that the surveillance is targeted at the right people, and that the information that's collected is going to be used for legitimate government purposes and not for discriminatory ones. This was our system, and what this means is that President Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower. The system is set up to prevent something like that from happening without a judge being involved.But what happens when we're not talking about phone calls or letters anymore? Today, we have technology that makes it cheap and easy for the government to collect information on ordinary everyday people. Your phone call records can reveal whether you have an addiction, what your religion is, what charities you donate to, what political candidate you support. And yet, our government collected, dragnet-style, Americans' calling records for years. In 2012, the Republican National Convention highlighted a new technology it was planning to use, facial recognition, to identify people who were going to be in the crowd who might be activists or troublemakers and to stop them ahead of time. Today, over 50 percent of American adults have their faceprint in a government database. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concocted a plan to find out what Americans were going to gun shows by using license plate detectors to scan the license plates of cars that were in the parking lots of these events. Today, we believe that over 70 percent of police departments have automatic license plate detection technology that they're using to track people's cars as they drive through town. And all of this information, the license plates, the faceprints, the phone records, your address books, your buddy lists, the photos that you upload to Dropbox or Google Photos, and sometimes even your chats and your emails are not protected by a warrant requirement. So what that means is we have all of this information on regular people that's newly available at very low expense. It is the golden age for surveillance.Now, every parent is going to understand what this means. When you have a little baby and the baby's young, that child is not able to climb out of its crib. But eventually your little girl gets older and she's able to climb out of the crib, but you tell her, ""Don't climb out of the crib. OK?"" And every parent knows what's going to happen. Some of those babies are going to climb out of the crib. Right? That's the difference between ability and permission. Well, the same thing is true with the government today. It used to be that our government didn't have the ability to do widespread, massive surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans and then abuse that information. But now our government has grown up, and we have that technology today. The government has the ability, and that means the law is more important than ever before. The law is supposed to say when the government has permission to do it, and it's supposed to ensure that there's some kind of ramification. We notice when those laws are broken and there's some of kind of ramification or punishment. The law is more important than ever because we are now living in a world where only rules are stopping the government from abusing this information.But the law has fallen down on the job. Particularly since September 11 the law has fallen down on the job, and we do not have the rules in place that we need. And we are seeing the ramifications of that. So fusion centers are these joint task forces between local, state and federal government that are meant to ferret out domestic terrorism. And what we've seen is fusion center reports that say that you might be dangerous if you voted for a third-party candidate, or you own a ""Don't Tread On Me"" flag, or you watched movies that are anti-tax. These same fusion centers have spied on Muslim community groups' reading lists and on Quakers who are resisting military recruiting in high schools. The Internal Revenue Service has disproportionately audited groups that have ""Tea Party"" or ""Patriot"" in their name. And now customs and border patrol is stopping people as they come into the country and demanding our social networking passwords which will allow them to see who our friends are, what we say and even to impersonate us online.Now, civil libertarians like myself have been trying to draw people's attention to these things and fighting against them for years. This was a huge problem during the Obama administration, but now the problem is worse. When the New York Police Department spies on Muslims or a police department uses license plate detectors to find out where the officers' spouses are or those sorts of things, that is extremely dangerous. But when a president repurposes the power of federal surveillance and the federal government to retaliate against political opposition, that is a tyranny. And so we are all activists now, and we all have something to fear from surveillance. But just like in the time of Dr. Martin Luther King, we can reform the way things are.First of all, use encryption. Encryption protects your information from being inexpensively and opportunistically collected. It rolls back the golden age for surveillance.Second, support surveillance reform. Did you know that if you have a friend who works for the French or German governments or for an international human rights group or for a global oil company that your friend is a valid foreign intelligence target? And what that means is that when you have conversations with that friend, the US government may be collecting that information. And when that information is collected, even though it's conversations with Americans, it can then be funneled to the FBI where the FBI is allowed to search through it without getting a warrant, without probable cause, looking for information about Americans and whatever crimes we may have committed with no need to document any kind of suspicion. The law that allows some of this to happen is called Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and we have a great opportunity this year, because Section 702 is going to expire at the end of 2017, which means that Congress's inertia is on our side if we want reform. And we can pressure our representatives to actually implement important reforms to this law and protect our data from this redirection and misuse.And finally, one of the reasons why things have gotten so out of control is because so much of what happens with surveillance — the technology, the enabling rules and the policies that are either there or not there to protect us — are secret or classified. We need transparency, and we need to know as Americans what the government is doing in our name so that the surveillance that takes place and the use of that information is democratically accounted for.We are all activists now, which means that we all have something to worry about from surveillance. But like in the time of Dr. Martin Luther King, there is stuff that we can do about it. So please join me, and let's get to work.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_granick_how_the_us_government_spies_on_people_who_protest_including_you
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"Why do people deliberately destroy cultural heritage? By doing so, do they believe they're erasing our history? Our cultural memory? It's true that we are losing cultural heritage to erosion and natural disasters, but this is something that is simply difficult to avoid. I'm here to show you today how we can use pictures — your pictures — to reclaim the history that is being lost using innovative technology and the effort of volunteers.In the early 20th century, archaeologists discovered hundreds of statues and artifacts at the ancient city of Hatra, in northern Iraq. Statues like this one were found in fragments, some of them missing their heads or arms, yet the clothing that they are wearing and their pose can still tell us their story. For example, we believe that by wearing a knee-length tunic and open bare feet, this was representative of a priest. However, with a closer look at this particular piece, we can see that this tunic being worn was elaborately decorated, which has led many researchers to believe this was actually a statue of a king performing his religious functions.When the Mosul Cultural Museum opened in 1952 in northern Iraq, this statue, as well as others, were placed there to preserve them for future generations. Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a few statues and artifacts were relocated to Baghdad, but this statue remained. Then in February of last year, a video was released, and it instantly went viral. Maybe some of you remember seeing it. Here's a short clip.(Video) (Singing in Arabic)(Singing ends)Not a very pleasant sight, right? Did you notice anything familiar in the video? There it is. There is that very statue, as it was toppled over, breaking into pieces.When Matthew Vincent and I saw this video, we were shocked. Since we are archaeologists using innovative technology for digital preservation, an idea sprung to mind. Maybe we can crowdsource the images that were taken of these artifacts before they were destroyed, to create digital reconstructions. If we can do that, maybe we can put them into a virtual museum to tell that story. And so two weeks after we saw this video, we started the project called Project Mosul.Remember the pictures of the statue I showed you before? This is actually the crowdsourced reconstruction of it before it was destroyed. Now, many of you may be wondering, how exactly does this work? Well, the key to this technology is called photogrammetry, and it was invented here, in Germany. It is the technology that allows us to use two-dimensional images taken of the same object from different angles to create a 3D model. I know you may be thinking this sounds like magic — but it's not. Let me show you how it works. Here are two crowdsourced images of the same statue. What the computer can do is it can detect similar features between the photographs — similar features of the object. Then, by using multiple photos, in this case, it can begin to reconstruct the object in 3D. In this case, you have the position of the cameras when each image was taken, shown in blue.Now, this is a partial reconstruction, I admit, but why would I say partial? Well, simply because the statue was positioned against a wall. We don't have photographs taken of it from the back. If I wanted to complete a full digital reconstruction of this statue, I would need a proper camera, tripods, proper lighting, but we simply can't do that with crowdsourced images. Think about it: How many of you, when you visit a museum, take photographs of all parts of the statue, even the back side of it? Well, maybe if some of you find Michelangelo's David interesting, I guess —(Laughter)But the thing is, if we can find more images of this object, we can improve the 3D model.When we started the project, we started it with the Mosul Museum in mind. We figured we may get a few images, some people interested, make one or two virtual reconstructions, but we had no idea that we had sparked something that would grow so quickly. Before we knew it, we realized it was obvious: we could apply this same idea to lost heritage anywhere. And so, we decided to change the name of the project to Rekrei. Then, in the summer of last year, ""The Economist"" magazine's media lab reached out to us. They asked us, ""Hey, would you like us to build a virtual museum to put the reconstructions back inside, to tell the story?"" Can you imagine us saying no? Of course not. We said yes! We were so excited. This was exactly the initial dream of that project. And so now, any of you can experience RecoVR Mosul on your phone, using Google Cardboard or a tablet or even YouTube 360.Here is a screenshot from the virtual museum. And there it is ... the partial reconstruction of the statue, as well as the Lion of Mosul, the first reconstruction completed by our project. Although the video doesn't explicitly show the Lion of Mosul being destroyed, we have many other examples of large artifacts being destroyed that were simply too large to have been stolen. For example, the Gate of Nimrud in northern Iraq. This is a digital reconstruction from before, and this is actually during the destruction. Or the Lion of Al-Lāt, in Palmyra, Syria: before ... and after.Although virtual reconstructions are primarily the main focus of our project, some people have been asking the question: Can we print them in 3D? We believe 3D printing doesn't offer a straightforward solution to lost heritage. Once an object is destroyed, it's gone. But 3D printing does offer an addition to tell that story. For example, I can show you here ... There is the statue from Hatra and the Lion of Mosul.(Applause)Thank you.Now, if you look closely, you'll notice that there are some parts that have been printed in color, and some parts that are in white or gray. This part was added simply to hold the statues up. This works the same way if you visit a museum, and a statue is found in fragments; it's put together for the people to see it. This makes sense, right? However, we're much more interested in what virtual reality has to offer for lost heritage.Here is an example of one of the tower tombs that was destroyed in Palmyra. Using Sketchfab's online viewer, we can show that we have reconstructed three parts of the exterior of the tomb, but we also have photos of the inside, so we're beginning to create a reconstruction of the wall and the ceiling. Archaeologists worked there for many, many years, so we also have architectural drawing plans of this lost heritage.Unfortunately, we are not only losing cultural heritage to areas of conflict and at war — we're also losing it to natural disasters. This is a 3D model of Durbar Square in Kathmandu, before the earthquake that occurred last April ... and this is after. You may be thinking, you didn't create these 3D models with only tourist photographs, and that's true. But what this represents is the ability for large, public organizations and private industry to come together for initiatives like ours.And so one of the major challenges of our project, really, is to find photographs that were taken before something happens, right? Well, the internet is basically a database with millions of images, right? Exactly. So we have begun to develop a tool that allows us to extract images from websites like Flickr, based on their geotags, to complete reconstructions.Because we're not only losing cultural heritage to natural disasters and in war, but we're also losing it to something else. Any idea, just looking at these two pictures? Maybe it's a little difficult to remember, but only a few weeks ago, this was the example of human destruction by human stupidity. Because a tourist in Lisbon wanted to climb onto this statue and take a selfie with it —(Laughter)and pulled it down with him. So we're already finding photographs to complete a digital reconstruction of this.We need to remember that the destruction of cultural heritage isn't a recent phenomenon. In the 16th century, European priests and explorers burned thousands of Maya books in the Americas, of which we only have a handful left. Fast-forward to 2001, when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.You see, cultural heritage is about our shared global history. It helps us connect with our ancestors and their stories, but we're losing pieces of it every day to natural disasters and in areas of conflict. Of course, the loss of human life is the most heartbreaking loss ... but cultural heritage offers us a way to preserve the memory of the people for future generations. We need your help to reclaim the history that is being lost. Will you join us?(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chance_coughenour_how_your_pictures_can_help_reclaim_lost_history
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"I'm Chetan Bhatt and when I give my name, I'm often asked, ""Where are you from?"" And I normally say London.(Laughter)But of course, I know what they're really asking, so I say something like, ""Well, my grandparents and my mum were born in India, my dad and I were born in Kenya, and I was brought up in London. And then they've got me mapped. ""Ah, you're a Kenyan Asian. I've worked with one of those.""(Laughter)And from my name they probably assume that I'm a Hindu. And this sort of fixes me for them.But what about the Christians and the Muslims and the atheists that I grew up with? Or the socialists and the liberals, even the occasional Tory?(Laughter)Indeed, all kinds of women and men — vegetable sellers, factory workers, cooks, car mechanics — living in my working class area, in some profoundly important way, they are also a part of me and are here with me. Maybe that's why I find it hard to respond to questions about identity and about origin. And it's not just a sort of teenage refusal to be labeled. It's about our own most identities, the ones that we put our hands up to, the ones that we cheer for, the ones that we fight for, the ones that we love or hate. And it's about how we apprehend ourselves as well as others. And it's about identities we just assume that we have without thinking too much about them.But our responses to questions of identity and origin have substantial social and political importance. We see the wars, the rages of identity going on all around us. We see violent religious, national and ethnic disputes. And often the conflict is based on old stories of identity and belonging and origins. And these identities are based on myths, typically about ancient, primordial origins. And these could be about Adam and Eve or about the supremacy of a caste or gender or about the vitality of a supposed race or about the past glories of an empire or civilization or about a piece of land that some imagined deity has gifted.Now, people say that origin stories and identity myths make us feel secure. What's wrong with that? They give us a sense of belonging. Identity is your cultural clothing, and it can make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But does it really? Do we really need identity myths to feel safe? Because I see religious, national, ethnic disputes as adding to human misery.Can I dare you to refuse every origin myth that claims you? What if we reject every single primordial origin myth and develop a deeper sense of personhood, one responsible to humanity as a whole rather than to a particular tribe, a radically different idea of humanity that exposes how origin myths mystify, disguise global power, rapacious exploitation, poverty, the worldwide oppression of women and girls, and of course massive, accelerating inequalities?Now, origin myths are closely linked to tradition, and the word tradition points to something old and permanent, almost natural, and people assume tradition is just history, simply the past condensed into a nice story. But let's not confuse tradition with history. The two are often in severe conflict. Origin stories are usually recently created fictions of ancient belonging, and they're absurd given the complexity of humanity and our vastly interconnected, even if very unequal world. And today we see claims to tradition that claim to be ancient changing rapidly in front of our eyes.I was brought up in the 1970s near Wembley with Asian, English, Caribbean, Irish families living in our street, and the neo-Nazi National Front was massive then with regular marches and attacks on us and a permanent threat and often a frequent reality of violence against us on the streets, in our homes, typically by neo-Nazis and other racists. And I remember during a general election a leaflet came through our letter box with a picture of the National Front candidate for our area. And the picture was of our next-door neighbor. He threatened to shoot me once when I played in the garden as a kid, and many weekends, shaven-headed National Front activists arrived at his house and emerged with scores of placards screaming that they wanted us to go back home. But today he's one of my mum's best mates. He's a very lovely, gentle and kind man, and at some point in his political journey out of fascism he embraced a broader idea of humanity.There was a Hindu family that we got to know well — and you have to understand that life in our street was a little bit like the setting for an Asian soap opera. Everyone knew everyone else's business, even if they didn't want it to be known by anyone at all. You really had no choice in this matter. But in this family, there was a quiet little boy who went to the same school as I did, and after I left school, I didn't hear much more about him, except that he'd gone off to India. Now around 2000, I remember seeing this short book. The book was unusual because it was written by a British supporter of Al Qaeda, and in it the author calls for attacks in Britain. This is in 1999, so 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq was still in the future, and he helped scout New York bombing targets. He taught others how to make a dirty bomb to use on the London Underground, and he plotted a massive bombing campaign in London's shopping areas. He's a very high-risk security prisoner in the UK and one of the most important Al Qaeda figures to be arrested in Britain.The author of that book was the very same quiet little boy who went to my school. So a Hindu boy from Britain became an Al Qaeda fighter and a most-wanted international terrorist, and he rejected what people would call his Hindu or Indian or British identity, and he became someone else. He refused to be who he was. He recreated himself, and this kind of journey is very common for young men and women who become involved in Al Qaeda or Islamic State or other transnational armed groups. Al Qaeda's media spokesman is a white American from a Jewish and Catholic mixed background, and neither he nor the boy from my school were from Muslim backgrounds. There's no point in asking them where are they from. A more important question is where they're going.And I would also put it to you that exactly the same journey occurs for those young men and women who were brought up in Muslim family backgrounds. Most of those who join Al Qaeda and other Salafi jihadi groups from Europe, Asia, North America, even in many cases the Middle East are those who have comprehensively rejected their backgrounds to become, in essence, new people. They spend an enormous amount of time attacking their parents' backgrounds as profane, impure, blasphemous, the wrong type of Islam, and their vision instead is a fantastical view of cosmic apocalypse. It's a born again vision. Discard your past, your society, your family and friends since they're all impure. Instead, become someone else, your true self, your authentic self. Now, this isn't about a return to the past. It's about using a forgery of the past to envision an appalling future which begins today at year zero. This is why over 80 percent of the victims of Al Qaeda and Islamic State are people from Muslim backgrounds. The first act by Salafi jihadi groups when they take over an area is to destroy existing Muslim institutions including mosques, shrines, preachers, practices. Their main purpose is to control and punish people internally, to dictate the spaces that women may go, their clothing, family relations, beliefs, even the minute detail of how one prays. And you get the impression in the news that they are after us in the West, but they are actually mainly after people from other Muslim backgrounds. In their view, no other Muslim can ever be pure enough, so ordinary beliefs and practices that have existed for centuries are attacked as impure by teenagers from Birmingham or London who know nothing about the histories that they so joyously obliterate.Now here, their claim to tradition is at war with history, but they're nevertheless very certain about their purity and about the impurity of others. Purity, certainty, the return to authentic tradition, the quest for these can lead to lethal visions of perfect societies and perfected people.This is what the main Hindu fundamentalist organization in India looks like today at its mass rally. Maybe it reminds you of the 1930s in Italy or Germany, and the movement's roots are indeed in fascism. It was a member of the same Hindu fundamentalist movement who shot dead Mahatma Gandhi. Hindu fundamentalists today view this murderer as a national hero, and they want to put up statues of him throughout India. They've been involved for decades in large-scale mass violence against minorities. They ban books, art, films. They attack romantic couples on Valentine's Day, Christians on Christmas Day. They don't like others talking critically about what they see as their ancient culture or using its images or caricaturing it or drawing cartoons about it. But the people making the strongest possible claims about ancient, timeless Hindu religion are dressed in brown shorts and white shirts while claiming, oddly, to be the original Aryan race, just like the violent Salafi jihadis who make their claims about their primordial religion while dressed in black military uniforms and wearing balaclavas.These people are manufacturing pure, pristine identities of conviction and of certainty. Fundamentalists see religion and culture as their sole property, a property. But religions and cultures are processes. They're not things. They're impermanent. They're messy. They're impure. Look at any religion and you'll see disputes and arguments going all the way down.Any criticism of religion in any form has to therefore be part of the expansive sense of humanity we should aspire to. I respect your right to have and to express your religion or your culture or your opinion, but I don't necessarily have to respect the content. I might like some of it. I might like how an old church looks, for example, but this isn't the same thing. Similarly, I have a human right to say something that you may find offensive, but you do not have a human right not to be offended. In a genuine democracy, we're constantly offended since people express different views all the time. They also change their views, so their views are impermanent. You cannot fix someone's political views based on their religious or national or cultural background.Now, these points about religious purity also apply to nationalism and to racism. I'm always puzzled to have pride in your national or ethnic identity, pride in the accident of birth from a warm and cozy womb, belief in your superiority because of the accident of birth.These people have very firm ideas about what belongs and what doesn't belong inside the cozy national cultures that they imagine. And I'm going to caricature a bit here, but only a little bit. I want you to imagine the supporter of some Little Englander or British nationalist political party, and he's sitting at home and he's screaming about foreigners invading his country while watching Fox News, an American cable channel owned by an Australian on his South Korean television set which was bought by his Spanish credit card which is paid off monthly by his high-street British bank which has its headquarters in Hong Kong. He supports a British football team owned by a Russian. His favorite brand of fish and chips is owned by a Swedish venture capitalist firm. The church he sometimes goes to has its creed decided in meetings in Ghana. His Union Jack underpants were made in India.(Laughter)And —(Applause)Thank you.And they're laundered regularly by a very nice Polish lady.(Laughter)There is no pure ethnicity, national culture, and the ethical choices we have today are far wider than being forced to choose between racist right and religious right visions, dismal visions of culture.Now, culture isn't just about language, food, clothing and music, but gender relations, ancient monuments, a heritage of sacred texts. But culture can also be what has been decided to be culture by those who have a political stake in pounding culture into the shape of a prison. Big political identity claims are elite bids for power. They're not answers to social or economic or political injustices. They often obscure them. And what about the large number of people across the globe who can't point to a monument from their past, who don't possess a sacred written text, who can't hark back to the past glories of a civilization or empire? Are these people less a part of humanity?What about you, now, listening to this? What about you and your identity, because you stitch your experiences and your thoughts into a continuous person moving forward in time. And this is what you are when you say, ""I,"" ""am,"" or ""me."" But this also includes all of your hopes and dreams, all of the you's that could have been, and it includes all the other people and the things that are in the biography of who you are. They, the others, are also a part of you, moving forward with you. Your authentic self, if such a thing exists, is a complex, messy and uncertain self, and that is a very good thing. Why not value those impurities and uncertainties? Maybe clinging to pure identities is a sign of immaturity, and ethnic, nationalist and religious traditions are bad for you. Why not be skeptical about every primordial origin claim made on your behalf? Why not reject the identity myths that call on you to belong, that politicians and community leaders, so-called community leaders, place on you? If we don't need origin stories and fixed identities, we can challenge ourselves to think creatively about each other and our future.And here culture always takes care of itself. I'm not worried about culture. Cultures are creative, dynamic processes, not imposed laws and boundaries.This is Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, a very senior Muslim judge and thinker in Cordoba in the 12th century, and his writings were considered deeply blasphemous, heretical and evil. Long after he died, followers of his work were ruthlessly hunted down, banished and killed over several centuries by the most powerful religious institution of the medieval period. That institution was the Roman Catholic Church. Why? Because ibn Rushd said that something true in religion may conflict with something that your reason finds to be true on earth, but the latter is still true. There are two distinct worlds of truth, one based on our reason and evidence, and one that is divine, and the state, political power, social law are in the realm of reason. Religious life is a different realm. They should be kept separated. Social and political life should be governed by our reason, not by religion. And you can see why the church was upset by his writings, as indeed were some Muslims during his lifetime, because he gives us a strong statement of secularism of a kind which is normal in Europe today.Now, history plays many tricks on us. It undermines our fixed truths and what we believe to be our culture and their culture. Ibn Rushd, someone who happens to be a Muslim, is considered one of the key influences in the introduction and spread of secularism in Europe.So against religious, nationalist and racial purists of all kinds, can you make his story a part of your own, not because he happened to be a Muslim, not because he happened to be an Arab, but because he was a human being with some very good ideas that shook his world and ours.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/chetan_bhatt_dare_to_refuse_the_origin_myths_that_claim_who_you_are
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"Do you remember these glow-in-the-dark little stars which you had on the ceiling when you were a boy or a girl? Yes? It is light. It is pure light. I think I stared at them way too long when I was a five-year-old, you know? It's so beautiful: no energy bill, no maintenance. It is there.So two years ago, we went back to the lab, making it more durable, more light-emitting, with the experts. And at the same time, we got a request from this guy — Van Gogh, the famous Van Gogh Foundation — who wanted to celebrate his 125th anniversary in the Netherlands. And they came to me and asked, ""Can you make a place where he feels more alive again in the Netherlands?"" And I liked that question a lot, so in way, we sort of started to connect these two different worlds. This is how my brain works, by the way.(Laughter)I would love to keep on doing this for an hour, but OK —(Laughter)And this is the result that we made: a bicycle path which charges at daytime via the sun and glows at night, up to eight hours.(Applause)Thank you.... hinting towards a future which should be energy friendly and linking up the local grounds as Van Gogh literally walked and lived there in 1883. And you can go there every night for free, no ticket needed. People experience the beauty of cycling through the starry night, thinking about green energy and safety.I want to create places where people feel connected again. And it was somehow great to make these projects happen with the industry, with the infrastructure companies. So when these sheikhs of Qatar started to call: ""How much for 10 kilometers?""(Laughter)Yeah, really, that's a weird call you're going to get. But it's fascinating that this is not just a sort of one-off, nice-to-have special. I think this kind of creative thinking, these kinds of connections — it's the new economy.The World Economic Forum, the think tank in Geneva, did an interview with a lot of smart people all around the world, asking, ""What are the top 10 skills you and I need to become successful?"" And what is interesting, what you see here: it's not about money or being really good in C++, although these are great skills to have, I have to admit. But look at number three, creativity; number two, critical thinking; number one, complex problem-solving — all the things a robot or a computer is really bad at. And this makes me very optimistic, very hopeful for the new world, that as we will live in this hyper-technological world, our human skills — our desire for empathy, our desire for curiosity, our desire for beauty — will be more appreciated again, and we will live in a world where creativity is our true capital.And a creative process like that — I don't know how it works for you, but in my brain, it always starts with a question: Why? Why does a jellyfish emit light? Or a firefly? Or why do be accept pollution? This is from my room in Beijing three years ago. Left image is a good day — Saturday. I can see the cars and the people, the birds; life is OK in a dense urban city. And on the right image — holy moly. Pollution — complete layers. I couldn't even see the other side of the city. And this image made me really sad. This is not the bright future we envision here at TED — this is the horror. We live five to six years shorter; children have lung cancer when they're six years old. And so in a weird, beautiful way, I, at that moment, became inspired by Beijing smog.And the governments all around the world are fighting their war on smog, but I wanted to make something within the now. So we decided to build the largest smog vacuum cleaner in the world. It sucks up polluted air, cleans it and then releases it. And we built the first one. So it sucks up 30,000 cubic meters per hour, cleans it on the nano level — the PM2.5, PM10 particles — using very little electricity, and then releases the clean air, so we have parks, playgrounds, which are 55 to 75 percent more clean than the rest of the city.(Applause)Yes!(Applause)And every month or so, it opens like a spaceship — like a Marilyn Monroe with the — well, you know what. Anyway.(Laughter)So this ... this is the stuff we are capturing. This is Beijing smog. This is in our lungs right now. If you live next to a highway, it's the same as 17 cigarettes per day. Are we insane? When did we say yes to that? And we had buckets of this disgusting material in our studio, and on a Monday morning, we were discussing, we were like, ""Shit, what should we do with it? Should we throw it away?"" Like, ""Help!"" And then we realized: no, no, no, no, no — waste should not exist. Waste for the one should be food for the other. So, here, maybe show it around. Do not put this in your coffee.(Laughter)And we realized that 42 percent is made out of carbon, and carbon, of course, under high pressure, you get ... diamonds. So, inspired by that, we compress it for 30 minutes —(Cracking sound)and make smog-free rings.(Laughter)And so by sharing — yeah, really! And so by sharing a ring, you donate 1,000 cubic meters of clean air to the city the tower is in.(Applause)I have one here —(Applause)A little floating cube. I will give one to you. I'm not going to propose, don't worry.(Laughter)Are we good? You can show it around.And we put this online — Kickstarter campaign, crowdfunding. And people started to preorder it, but more importantly, they started to prepay it. So the finance we made with the jewelry helped us to realize, to build the first tower. And that's powerful. So the waste the activator, it was the enabler. Also, the feedback from the community — this is a wedding couple from India, where he proposed to her with the smog-free ring as a sign of true beauty, as a sign of hope. And she said yes.(Laughter)I love this image so much for a lot of different reasons.(Laughter)And right now, the project is touring through China, actually with the support of China's central government. So the first goal is to create local clean-air parks, and that works already quite well — 55, 75 percent more clean. And at the same time, we team up with the NGOs, with the governors, with the students, with the tech people, to say, ""Hey, what do we need to do to make a whole city smog-free?"" It's about the dream of clean air. We do workshops. New ideas pop up. These are smog-free bicycles which — I'm Dutch, yes? — I have this ""bicycle DNA"" inside of me somewhere. And so it sucks up polluted air, it cleans it and releases it, in the fight against the car, in the celebration of the bicycle.And so right now, we're working on a sort of ""package deal,"" so to speak, where we say, ""Smog-free towers, smog-free rings."" We go to the mayors or the governors of this world, and say, ""We can guarantee a short-term reduction of pollution between 20 and 40 percent. Please sign here right now."" Yes?(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)So it's all about connecting new technology with creative thinking. And if you start thinking about that, there is so much you can imagine, so much more you can do. We worked on dance floors which produce electricity when you dance on them. We did the design for that — 2008. So it moves eight or nine millimeters, produces 25 watts. The electricity that we generate is used for the lighting or the DJ booth. So some of the sustainability is about doing more, not about doing less.But also on a larger scale, the Netherlands, where I'm from, we live below sea level. So because of these beauties — the Afsluitdijk: 32 kilometers, built by hand in 1932 — we live with the water, we fight with the water, we try to find harmony, but sometimes we forget. And therefore, we made ""Waterlicht,"" a combination of LEDs and lenses, which show how high the water level would be — global change — if we stop. If, today, we all go home and we say, ""Oh, whatever, somebody else will do it for us,"" or we'll wait for government or whomever. You know, we're not going to do that. It goes wrong. And we placed this in public spaces all around the world. Thousands of people showed up.(Applause)Thank you. You're too nice, you're too nice. That's not good for a designer.So thousands of people showed up, and some, actually, were scared. And they left; they experienced the floods in 1953. And others were mesmerized. Can we make floating cities? Can we generate electricity from the change in tides? So I think it's so important to make experiences — collective experiences — where people feel connected with a vision, with a future and trigger what is possible.At the same time, you know, these kinds of things — they're not easy, yes? It's a struggle. And what I experienced in my life is that a lot of people say they want innovation, and they want the next and the new, the future. But the moment you present a new idea, there's this weird tendency to reply to every new idea starting with two words. Which are?(Audience guesses)No, not ""How much?"" It's more annoying.(Laughter)What is it, guys? Or you're really blessed people? That's really good.""Yes, but."" Very good. ""Yes, but: it's too expensive, it's too cheap, it's too fast, it's too slow, it's too beautiful, it's too ugly, it cannot be done, it already exists."" I heard everything about the same project in the same week. And I got really, really annoyed. I got a bit of gray hair, started to dress in black like a true architect.(Laughter)And one morning I woke up and I said, ""Daan, stop. This is dragging you down. You have to do something with this. You have to use it as an ingredient, as a component."" And so we decided to build, to realize the famous ""Yes, but"" chair.(Laughter)And this is an existing chair by Friso Kramer, a Dutch design. But we gave it a little ""update,"" a little ""hack,"" so to speak. We placed a little voice-recognition element right here. So the moment you sit on that chair, and you say those two horrible, creative-destructive, annoying little words —(Laughter)you get a short —(Laughter)but pretty intense little shock on the back side of your bottom.(Laughter)(Applause)And —(Applause)and that works; yeah, that works. Some clients have left us, they got really mad. Fortunately, the good ones have stayed. And, of course, we also apply it to ourselves.But ladies and gentlemen, let's not be afraid. Let's be curious, yes? And, you know, walking through TED in these days and hearing the other speakers and feeling the energy of the crowd, I was remembering this quote of the Canadian author, Marshall McLuhan, who once famously said, ""On spacecraft earth, there are no passengers. We are all crew."" And I think this so beautiful. This is so beautiful! We're not just consumers; we're makers: we make decisions, we make new inventions, we make new dreams. And I think if we start implementing that kind of thinking even more within today, there's still a whole new world to be explored.All right, thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/daan_roosegaarde_a_smog_vacuum_cleaner_and_other_magical_city_designs
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"So in 2011, I altered my name so that I could participate in Far Right youth camp in Hungary. I was doing a PhD looking at youth political socialization — why young people were developing political ideologies in a post-communist setting, and I saw that a lot of young people I was talking to were joining the Far Right, and this was astounding to me. So I wanted to enroll in this youth camp to get a better understanding of why people were joining.So a colleague enrolled me, and my last name sounds a little bit too Jewish. So Erin got turned into Iréna, and Saltman got turned into Sós, which means ""salty"" in Hungarian. And in Hungarian, your last name goes first, so my James Bond name turned into ""Salty Irena,"" which is not something I would have naturally chosen for myself.But going to this camp, I was further shocked to realize that it was actually really fun. They talked very little about politics. It was mostly learning how to ride horses, shooting a bow and arrow, live music at night, free food and alcohol, also some air-gun target practice using mainstream politicians' faces as targets. And this seemed like a very, actually, friendly, inclusive group until you started talking or mentioning anything to do with the Roma population, Jewish people or immigrants, and then the discourse would become very hate-based very quickly.So it led me into my work now, where we pose the question, ""Why do people join violent extremist movements, and how do we effectively counter these processes?"" In the aftermath of horrible atrocities and attacks in places like Belgium, France, but all over the world, sometimes it's easier for us to think, ""Well, these must be sociopaths, these must be naturally violent individuals. They must have something wrong with their upbringing."" And what's really tragic is that oftentimes there's no one profile. Many people come from educated backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, men and women, different ages, some with families, some single. So why? What is this allure? And this is what I want to talk you through, as well as how do we challenge this in a modern era?We do know, through research, that there are quite a number of different things that affect somebody's process of radicalization, and we categorize these into push and pull factors. And these are pretty much similar for Far Right, neo-Nazi groups all the way to Islamist extremist and terrorist groups. And push factors are basically what makes you vulnerable to a process of radicalization, to joining a violent extremist group. And these can be a lot of different things, but roughly, a sense of alienation, a sense of isolation, questioning your own identity, but also feeling that your in-group is under attack, and your in group might be based on a nationality or an ethnicity or a religion, and feeling that larger powers around you are doing nothing to help.Now, push factors alone do not make you a violent extremist, because if that were the fact, those same factors would go towards a group like the Roma population, and they're not a violently mobilized group. So we have to look at the pull factors. What are these violent extremist organizations offering that other groups are not offering? And actually, this is usually very positive things, very seemingly empowering things, such as brotherhood and sisterhood and a sense of belonging, as well as giving somebody a spiritual purpose, a divine purpose to build a utopian society if their goals can be met, but also a sense of empowerment and adventure.When we look at foreign terrorist fighters, we see young men with the wind in their hair out in the desert and women going to join them to have nuptials out in the sunset. It's very romantic, and you become a hero. For both men and women, that's the propaganda being given. So what extremist groups are very good at is taking a very complicated, confusing, nuanced world and simplifying that world into black and white, good and evil. And you become what is good, challenging what is evil.So I want to talk a little bit about ISIS, Daesh, because they have been a game changer in how we look at these processes, and through a lot of the material and their tactics. They're very much a modern movement. One of the aspects is the internet and the usage of social media, as we've all seen in headlines tweeting and videos of beheadings. But the internet alone does not radicalize you. The internet is a tool. You don't go online shopping for shoes and accidentally become a jihadist. However, what the Internet does do is it is a catalyst.It provides tools and scale and rapidity that doesn't exist elsewhere. And with ISIS, all of a sudden, this idea of a cloaked, dark figure of a jihadist changed for us. All of a sudden, we were in their kitchens. We saw what they were eating for dinner. They were tweeting. We had foreign terrorist fighters tweeting in their own languages. We had women going out there talking about their wedding day, about the births of their children. We had gaming culture, all of a sudden, and references to Grand Theft Auto being made.So all of a sudden, they were homey. They became human. And the problem is that trying to counter it, lots of governments and social media companies just tried to censor. How do we get rid of terrorist content? And it became a cat-and-mouse game where we would see accounts taken down and they'd just come back up, and an arrogance around somebody having a 25th account and material that was disseminated everywhere.But we also saw a dangerous trend — violent extremists know the rules and regulations of social media, too. So we would see a banal conversation with a recruiter start on a mainstream platform, and at the point at which that conversation was going to become illegal, they would jump to a smaller, less regulated, more encrypted platform. So all of a sudden, we couldn't track where that conversation went. So this is a problem with censorship, which is why we need to develop alternatives to censorship.ISIS is also a game-changer because it's state-building. It's not just recruiting combatants; it's trying to build a state. And what that means is all of a sudden, your recruitment model is much more broad. You're not just trying to get fighters — now you need architects, engineers, accountants, hackers and women. We've actually seen a huge increase of women going in the last 24, but especially 12 months. Some countries, one in four of the people going over to join are now women. And so, this really changes who we're trying to counter this process with.Now, not all doom and gloom. So the rest I'd like to talk about some of the positive things and the new innovation in trying to prevent and counter violent extremism.Preventing is very different than countering, and actually, you can think of it in medical terms. So preventative medicine is, how do we make it so you are naturally resilient to this process of radicalization, whereas that is going to be different if somebody is already showing a symptom or a sign of belonging to a violent extremist ideology. And so in preventative measures, we're talking more about really broad groups of people and exposure to ideas to make them resilient. Whereas it's very different if somebody is starting to question and agree with certain things online, and it's also very different if somebody already has a swastika tattoo and is very much embedded within a group. How do you reach them?So I'd like to go through three examples of each one of those levels and talk you through what some of the new ways of engaging with people are becoming.One is ""Extreme Dialogue,"" and it's an educational program that we helped develop. This one is from Canada, and it's meant to create dialogues within a classroom setting, using storytelling, because violent extremism can be very hard to try to explain, especially to younger individuals. So we have a network of former extremists and survivors of extremism that tell their stories through video and create question-giving to classrooms, to start a conversation about the topic.These two examples show Christianne, who lost her son, who radicalized and died fighting for ISIS, and Daniel is a former neo-Nazi who was an extremely violent neo-Nazi, and they pose questions about their lives and where they're at and regret, and force a classroom to have a dialogue around it.Now, looking at that middle range of individuals, actually, we need a lot of civil society voices. How do you interact with people that are looking for information online, that are starting to toy with an ideology, that are doing those searching identity questions? How do we provide alternatives for that? And that's when we combine large groups of civil society voices with creatives, techies, app developers, artists, comedians, and we can create really specified content and actually, online, disseminate it to very strategic audiences. So one example would be creating a satirical video which makes fun of Islamophobia, and targeting it to 15- to 20-year-olds online that have an interest in white power music and live specifically in Manchester.We can use these marketing tools to be very specific, so that we know when somebody's viewing, watching and engaging with that content, it's not just the average person, it's not me or you — it's a very specific audience that we are looking to engage with.Even more downstream, we developed a pilot program called ""One to One,"" where we took former extremists and we had them reach out directly to a group of labeled neofascists as well as Islamist extremists, and put direct messages through Facebook Messenger into their inbox, saying, ""Hey, I see where you're going. I've been there. If you want to talk, I'm here."" Now, we kind of expected death threats from this sort of interaction. It's a little alarming to have a former neo-Nazi say, ""Hey, how are you?"" But actually, we found that around 60 percent of the people reached out to responded, and of that, around another 60 percent had sustained engagement, meaning that they were having conversations with the hardest people to reach about what they were going through, planting seeds of doubt and giving them alternatives for talking about these subjects, and that's really important.So what we're trying to do is actually bring unlikely sectors to the table. We have amazing activists all over the world, but oftentimes, their messages are not strategic or they don't actually reach the audiences they want to reach. So we work with networks of former extremists. We work with networks of young people in different parts of the world. And we work with them to bring the tech sector to the table with artists and creatives and marketing expertise so that we can actually have a more robust and challenging of extremism that works together.So I would say that if you are in the audience and you happen to be a graphic designer, a poet, a marketing expert, somebody that works in PR, a comedian — you might not think that this is your sector, but actually, the skills that you have right now might be exactly what is needed to help challenge extremism effectively.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/erin_marie_saltman_how_young_people_join_violent_extremist_groups_and_how_to_stop_them
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"Whether you like it or not, radical transparency and algorithmic decision-making is coming at you fast, and it's going to change your life. That's because it's now easy to take algorithms and embed them into computers and gather all that data that you're leaving on yourself all over the place, and know what you're like, and then direct the computers to interact with you in ways that are better than most people can.Well, that might sound scary. I've been doing this for a long time and I have found it to be wonderful. My objective has been to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships with the people I work with, and I've learned that I couldn't have that unless I had that radical transparency and that algorithmic decision-making. I want to show you why that is, I want to show you how it works. And I warn you that some of the things that I'm going to show you probably are a little bit shocking.Since I was a kid, I've had a terrible rote memory. And I didn't like following instructions, I was no good at following instructions. But I loved to figure out how things worked for myself. When I was 12, I hated school but I fell in love with trading the markets. I caddied at the time, earned about five dollars a bag. And I took my caddying money, and I put it in the stock market. And that was just because the stock market was hot at the time. And the first company I bought was a company by the name of Northeast Airlines. Northeast Airlines was the only company I heard of that was selling for less than five dollars a share.(Laughter)And I figured I could buy more shares, and if it went up, I'd make more money. So, it was a dumb strategy, right? But I tripled my money, and I tripled my money because I got lucky. The company was about to go bankrupt, but some other company acquired it, and I tripled my money. And I was hooked. And I thought, ""This game is easy."" With time, I learned this game is anything but easy.In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right. And it's not easy to bet against the consensus and be right. One has to bet against the consensus and be right because the consensus is built into the price. And in order to be an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur, one has to bet against the consensus and be right. I had to be an entrepreneur and an investor — and what goes along with that is making a lot of painful mistakes. So I made a lot of painful mistakes, and with time, my attitude about those mistakes began to change. I began to think of them as puzzles. That if I could solve the puzzles, they would give me gems. And the puzzles were: What would I do differently in the future so I wouldn't make that painful mistake? And the gems were principles that I would then write down so I would remember them that would help me in the future. And because I wrote them down so clearly, I could then — eventually discovered — I could then embed them into algorithms. And those algorithms would be embedded in computers, and the computers would make decisions along with me; and so in parallel, we would make these decisions. And I could see how those decisions then compared with my own decisions, and I could see that those decisions were a lot better. And that was because the computer could make decisions much faster, it could process a lot more information and it can process decisions much more — less emotionally. So it radically improved my decision-making.Eight years after I started Bridgewater, I had my greatest failure, my greatest mistake. It was late 1970s, I was 34 years old, and I had calculated that American banks had lent much more money to emerging countries than those countries were going to be able to pay back and that we would have the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression. And with it, an economic crisis and a big bear market in stocks. It was a controversial view at the time. People thought it was kind of a crazy point of view. But in August 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debt, and a number of other countries followed. And we had the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression. And because I had anticipated that, I was asked to testify to Congress and appear on ""Wall Street Week,"" which was the show of the time. Just to give you a flavor of that, I've got a clip here, and you'll see me in there.(Video) Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mitchell, it's a great pleasure and a great honor to be able to appear before you in examination with what is going wrong with our economy. The economy is now flat — teetering on the brink of failure.Martin Zweig: You were recently quoted in an article. You said, ""I can say this with absolute certainty because I know how markets work.""Ray Dalio: I can say with absolute certainty that if you look at the liquidity base in the corporations and the world as a whole, that there's such reduced level of liquidity that you can't return to an era of stagflation.""I look at that now, I think, ""What an arrogant jerk!""(Laughter)I was so arrogant, and I was so wrong. I mean, while the debt crisis happened, the stock market and the economy went up rather than going down, and I lost so much money for myself and for my clients that I had to shut down my operation pretty much, I had to let almost everybody go. And these were like extended family, I was heartbroken. And I had lost so much money that I had to borrow 4,000 dollars from my dad to help to pay my family bills.It was one of the most painful experiences of my life ... but it turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life because it changed my attitude about decision-making. Rather than thinking, ""I'm right,"" I started to ask myself, ""How do I know I'm right?"" I gained a humility that I needed in order to balance my audacity. I wanted to find the smartest people who would disagree with me to try to understand their perspective or to have them stress test my perspective. I wanted to make an idea meritocracy. In other words, not an autocracy in which I would lead and others would follow and not a democracy in which everybody's points of view were equally valued, but I wanted to have an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas would win out. And in order to do that, I realized that we would need radical truthfulness and radical transparency.What I mean by radical truthfulness and radical transparency is people needed to say what they really believed and to see everything. And we literally tape almost all conversations and let everybody see everything, because if we didn't do that, we couldn't really have an idea meritocracy. In order to have an idea meritocracy, we have let people speak and say what they want. Just to give you an example, this is an email from Jim Haskel — somebody who works for me — and this was available to everybody in the company. ""Ray, you deserve a 'D-' for your performance today in the meeting ... you did not prepare at all well because there is no way you could have been that disorganized."" Isn't that great?(Laughter)That's great. It's great because, first of all, I needed feedback like that. I need feedback like that. And it's great because if I don't let Jim, and people like Jim, to express their points of view, our relationship wouldn't be the same. And if I didn't make that public for everybody to see, we wouldn't have an idea meritocracy.So for that last 25 years that's how we've been operating. We've been operating with this radical transparency and then collecting these principles, largely from making mistakes, and then embedding those principles into algorithms. And then those algorithms provide — we're following the algorithms in parallel with our thinking. That has been how we've run the investment business, and it's how we also deal with the people management.In order to give you a glimmer into what this looks like, I'd like to take you into a meeting and introduce you to a tool of ours called the ""Dot Collector"" that helps us do this. A week after the US election, our research team held a meeting to discuss what a Trump presidency would mean for the US economy. Naturally, people had different opinions on the matter and how we were approaching the discussion. The ""Dot Collector"" collects these views. It has a list of a few dozen attributes, so whenever somebody thinks something about another person's thinking, it's easy for them to convey their assessment; they simply note the attribute and provide a rating from one to 10. For example, as the meeting began, a researcher named Jen rated me a three — in other words, badly —(Laughter)for not showing a good balance of open-mindedness and assertiveness. As the meeting transpired, Jen's assessments of people added up like this. Others in the room have different opinions. That's normal. Different people are always going to have different opinions. And who knows who's right? Let's look at just what people thought about how I was doing. Some people thought I did well, others, poorly. With each of these views, we can explore the thinking behind the numbers. Here's what Jen and Larry said. Note that everyone gets to express their thinking, including their critical thinking, regardless of their position in the company. Jen, who's 24 years old and right out of college, can tell me, the CEO, that I'm approaching things terribly.This tool helps people both express their opinions and then separate themselves from their opinions to see things from a higher level. When Jen and others shift their attentions from inputting their own opinions to looking down on the whole screen, their perspective changes. They see their own opinions as just one of many and naturally start asking themselves, ""How do I know my opinion is right?"" That shift in perspective is like going from seeing in one dimension to seeing in multiple dimensions. And it shifts the conversation from arguing over our opinions to figuring out objective criteria for determining which opinions are best.Behind the ""Dot Collector"" is a computer that is watching. It watches what all these people are thinking and it correlates that with how they think. And it communicates advice back to each of them based on that. Then it draws the data from all the meetings to create a pointilist painting of what people are like and how they think. And it does that guided by algorithms. Knowing what people are like helps to match them better with their jobs. For example, a creative thinker who is unreliable might be matched up with someone who's reliable but not creative. Knowing what people are like also allows us to decide what responsibilities to give them and to weigh our decisions based on people's merits. We call it their believability. Here's an example of a vote that we took where the majority of people felt one way ... but when we weighed the views based on people's merits, the answer was completely different. This process allows us to make decisions not based on democracy, not based on autocracy, but based on algorithms that take people's believability into consideration.Yup, we really do this.(Laughter)We do it because it eliminates what I believe to be one of the greatest tragedies of mankind, and that is people arrogantly, naïvely holding opinions in their minds that are wrong, and acting on them, and not putting them out there to stress test them. And that's a tragedy. And we do it because it elevates ourselves above our own opinions so that we start to see things through everybody's eyes, and we see things collectively. Collective decision-making is so much better than individual decision-making if it's done well. It's been the secret sauce behind our success. It's why we've made more money for our clients than any other hedge fund in existence and made money 23 out of the last 26 years.So what's the problem with being radically truthful and radically transparent with each other? People say it's emotionally difficult. Critics say it's a formula for a brutal work environment. Neuroscientists tell me it has to do with how are brains are prewired. There's a part of our brain that would like to know our mistakes and like to look at our weaknesses so we could do better. I'm told that that's the prefrontal cortex. And then there's a part of our brain which views all of this as attacks. I'm told that that's the amygdala. In other words, there are two you's inside you: there's an emotional you and there's an intellectual you, and often they're at odds, and often they work against you. It's been our experience that we can win this battle. We win it as a group. It takes about 18 months typically to find that most people prefer operating this way, with this radical transparency than to be operating in a more opaque environment. There's not politics, there's not the brutality of — you know, all of that hidden, behind-the-scenes — there's an idea meritocracy where people can speak up. And that's been great. It's given us more effective work, and it's given us more effective relationships. But it's not for everybody. We found something like 25 or 30 percent of the population it's just not for. And by the way, when I say radical transparency, I'm not saying transparency about everything. I mean, you don't have to tell somebody that their bald spot is growing or their baby's ugly. So, I'm just talking about —(Laughter)talking about the important things. So —(Laughter)So when you leave this room, I'd like you to observe yourself in conversations with others. Imagine if you knew what they were really thinking, and imagine if you knew what they were really like ... and imagine if they knew what you were really thinking and what were really like. It would certainly clear things up a lot and make your operations together more effective. I think it will improve your relationships. Now imagine that you can have algorithms that will help you gather all of that information and even help you make decisions in an idea-meritocratic way. This sort of radical transparency is coming at you and it is going to affect your life. And in my opinion, it's going to be wonderful. So I hope it is as wonderful for you as it is for me.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win
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"This is my favorite place on earth, Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. And when it's covered in a thin layer of water, it reflects the clouds. There are days when you feel as if you're floating among the clouds. But there are days when the horizon disappears; there's no longer a top or a bottom. You feel immersed in something bigger.It was there that one night I woke up from a dream, and I saw that the stars were also reflected on the water. And that wasn't a dream. It was as if you could walk among the stars. With every step I took, the stars reverberated under my feet. It was like I was floating in the universe among clouds of galaxies.But what's floating there today are not just clouds of galaxies but also clouds of plastic. These are the footprints we're leaving on the planet. They're signs of an era in which the behavior of some humans is making a global impact on our ecosystems. This era is called the Anthropocene. There's also another type of toxic clouds that float in the air, like the ones that form from carbon dioxide emissions and from the burning of fossil fuels — oil, carbon, gas — clouds that, when we see them, pollute our dreams. I don't know about all of you, but I've always dreamed of floating among the clouds. Maybe today we can imagine together other types of clouds, clouds we can live with.If you're wondering about that photo, I'll explain: it looks like a collage or photomontage — something weird. No; it's reality. But sometimes I ask myself: What is reality? According to Alexander Kluge: ""Human beings are not interested in reality. They can’t be; it’s part of the human essence. They have desires. These desires are totally opposed to any form of reality. They prefer to lie than to become divorced from their desires."" But how can we learn to float among the clouds? As an artist, I thought we could start building a flying museum. You're probably wondering: With plastic bags?In 2007, with a community of people all over the world, we began to collect used plastic bags — not new ones. And we washed them, we cut them up, we glued them together, and we began to draw on them, creating a huge canvas. We made a collection of drawings, of personal stories and of friendships. And when you join them, bend them and fold them, it creates a space full of air. When the sun comes up from the horizon, the museum rises up to the sky. That's why we call it, ""The Aero-Solar Museum."" And from this simple idea, we learned how to float in the air in a radically new way, without using any type of fuel. The difference in temperature between the interior and the exterior is what makes us rise up. That way, we don't use fossil fuels or helium or hydrogen; we don't use solar panels or batteries or motors. We discovered a way that's simple, clean and accessible to the whole world to lift ourselves up.I remember when I was at NASA in 2009 with 120 engineers. You guys know, too, when you go up in a plane, the control panels are gigantic. And what we're doing is really complex, and when I started coming in with the plastic bags, saying, ""But we have a different way ..."" people had a hard time understanding the concept. Seeing the power of this idea, we started to initiate a new era; one that would leave behind the violence of the Anthropocene and give way to a new era, which we call the ""Aerocene"" — an era of ecological awareness, in which we learn to float together, live together in the air, and come to an ethical commitment with the atmosphere and with planet earth. That's why I've brought this backpack today. Let's see ...OK. This is a balloon that we also refer to as a sculpture. And if it's sunny out tomorrow, we can go out and fly — though, no, the weather in Vancouver isn't —(Laughter)it's not very ... very favorable.So, what other features does it have? It has sensors that, when it moves, make sort of drawings in the air. It also has other sensors. I always think that first you have to feel it, and then you can measure it; you need to hear the sounds of the atmosphere, of the climate, of the hot air, in order to then measure the ozone, the carbon dioxide. We're developing these sensors together with different communities all over the world in order to reconnect with the climate, the temperature and the environment, because there are other species in the air; in these excursions towards the atmosphere, we're not alone. The air is full of clouds of life. We live at the bottom of an ocean of air.And this same sculpture, this exact one in my hands, flew 375 miles — 12 hours — from Germany to Poland, on a fuel-free trip. But it wasn't free from crossing borders. The trip was much more complicated than what we imagined; air space is as regulated and militarized as land space. To fly using the winds, the heat of the sun and the radiant energy of the earth is complex and beautiful. But even more complex will be getting the permits to cross the air space of each of the different countries that we fly over using wind.At COP21, the Paris Climate Conference, we presented these spherical sculptures that could transport us all over the world. But how can we fly using the wind to arrive at our destination? Together with MIT, we developed a program that predicts how we can navigate the wind highways. For example, if I had to return to Berlin from Vancouver, the first thing I would need to do is choose an altitude. At different altitudes, there are different directions and different speeds. The red line is tomorrow and the orange, the day after tomorrow. And there it goes. You can see, the best day to fly back to Berlin — so now, traveling using only wind — is in six days. And we can get to 105 miles from the center of Berlin without burning a single drop of fuel, being transported only by wind currents.So we thought that these trajectories that we drew with the wind could become signatures, declaring ""Independence from Fossil Fuels Day."" More and more of us are experiencing the air in a different way. You're all familiar with Earth Day. We think we should also celebrate Air Day: it's a pact that we make with the earth, an ethical commitment to the atmosphere. But let's keep thinking and dreaming.We've learned that the bigger the sculptures are, the more weight they can lift. Remember, they rise up only with hot air that's been heated by the sun. Using this approach, we can learn to build gardens in the air. Could we one day live in a garden the size of the earth? Could we live in an ecosystem floating among the clouds? Answering these questions isn't just a technological challenge; it's a way to reexamine the freedom of movement between countries, and of overcoming the political, social, cultural and military restrictions of contemporary societies. Because in the end, the air belongs to everybody and doesn't answer to any government.(Applause)And like we said earlier, our imagination is the force that allows us to create these places.This is an installation I did at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It asks the question: What might these transnational spaces be like? And once we inhabit those spaces, we need to learn how to move within them, to walk among the clouds, where every movement affects everyone else's movements; the body weight and proximity between people will cause the space to expand ... or contract. There we are, suspended 72 feet in the air. When two or more people get too close together, even those farthest away are affected — everyone falls to the same spot. These are fragile ecosystems. And it's between these spheres that we build nets that connect us. There are moments when we have to face the void, and fear can paralyze us. One of the most beautiful things about this exhibit is the sense of solidarity generated when we face these new ""aero-graphs.""Finally, let me tell you one last story. On July 16, 1945, on the White Sands of New Mexico, an atomic bomb was detonated for the first time. As a result of this explosion, a cloud of radioactive particles disseminated all over the earth, marking the beginning of the Anthropocene era. Seventy years later, on November 8, 2015, in the same place, another event occurred. For the first time in history, we lifted a person into the air using only the sun, without burning any fossil fuels. As the sun rose up above the horizon, we rose up, too, silently, slowly, with no explosions. We felt as if gravity had been inverted; it wasn't pulling us toward the center of the earth, but toward the universe. If Neil Armstrong said, when he walked on the moon, ""That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,"" perhaps what we ought to ask ourselves is: What steps do we need to take today?In the Aerocene era, our steps are much smaller, but radically different; they're steps that began with a bag full of air and wishes, but that can carry us to independence from fossil fuels and the opportunity to celebrate Air Day; steps that won't leave footprints on other planets until we've learned to walk in the atmosphere of this one. The landscapes are tiny and the steps are tiny, but I hope we can take them together. And I'm sure that these steps will lead us much further than the moon, so we can learn to float with our feet on the ground.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/tomas_saraceno_would_you_live_in_a_floating_bubble_in_the_sky
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"It's Christmas Eve, 1968. The Apollo 8 spacecraft has successfully completed its first three orbits around the moon. Launched from Cape Canaveral three days before, this is the first time that humans have ever traveled beyond low Earth orbit. On the vessel's fourth pass, the Earth slowly comes into view and reveals itself above the Moon's horizon. Astronaut Bill Anders frantically asks his crewmates where their camera is, grabs the Hasselblad, points it towards the window, presses the shutter, and takes one of the most important photographs of all time: ""Earthrise.""When the crew was safely home a few days later, they were asked about the mission. Anders famously replied, ""We went to the moon, but we actually discovered Earth.""What did he and his fellow crewmates feel in this incredible moment? In a study released just this past year, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania examined the testimonies of hundreds of astronauts who had the opportunity to view the Earth from space. Their analysis uncovered three common feelings: first, a greater appreciation for Earth's beauty; second, an increased sense of connection to all other living beings; and third, an unexpected, often overwhelming sense of emotion. The researchers believe that seeing the Earth from a great distance provokes someone to develop new cognitive frameworks to understand what they are seeing. They believe these astronauts were forever changed by this new view, this new perspective, this new visual truth. This feeling is commonly referred to as the ""overview effect.""Only 558 people have ever been to outer space. 558 people had the opportunity to gaze down in awe, to wonder at our planet floating in an infinite sea of darkness. But what if that number were bigger?Three years ago, I set off on my own mission: to see if I could bring this feeling of overwhelming scale and beauty to many more people just by using one small computer in my small New York City apartment. It was then, in 2013, that I launched ""Daily Overview."" Every day, I have used satellite imagery to create one expansive overhead view of our planet. More than 1,000 of these images have been created thus far, and more than 600,000 people tune in for this daily dose of perspectives. I create the imagery by curating photos from the massive archive of a satellite company called Digital Globe. They operate a constellation of five satellites, each roughly the size of an ambulance, that is constantly taking pictures of the Earth as they orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour.Now, what does this mean? Each of these satellites is equipped with a camera that has a focal length of 16 meters, so that's roughly 290 times greater than a DSLR camera equipped with a standard 55 millimeter lens. So if were able to attach one of their satellites to the roof of this theater in Oxford, we could take a picture of a football, clearly, on the pitch at the stadium in Amsterdam. That's 450 kilometers away. That's incredibly powerful technology. And I decided at the beginning of this project that I would use that incredible technology to focus on the places where humans have impacted the planet.As a species, we dig and scrape the Earth for resources, we produce energy, we raise animals and cultivate crops for food, we build cities, we move around, we create waste. And in the process of doing all of these things, we shape landscapes and seascapes and cityscapes with increasing control and impunity. So with that in mind, I would like to share a few of my overviews with you now.Here we see cargo ships and oil tankers waiting outside the entry to the port of Singapore. This facility is the second-busiest in the world by terms of total tonnage, accounting for one-fifth of the world's shipping containers and one half of the annual supply of crude oil.If you look closely at this overview, you'll see a lot of little specks. Those are actually cows at a feedlot in Summerfield, Texas, in the United States. So once cows reach a particular weight, roughly 300 kilograms, they are moved here and placed on a specialized diet. Over the next three to four months, the cows gain an additional 180 kilograms before they are shipped off to slaughter. You're also probably wondering about this glowing pool at the top there. That gets its color from a unique combination of manure, chemicals and a particular type of algae that grows in the stagnant water.This is the Mount Whaleback iron ore mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, a beautiful yet scary scar on the face of the Earth. Of the world's mined iron ore, 98 percent is used to make steel and is therefore a major component in the construction of buildings, automobiles or appliances such as your dishwasher or refrigerator.This is a solar concentrator in Seville, Spain. So this facility contains 2,650 mirrors which are arrayed in concentric circles around an 140-meter-tall tower at its center. At the top of the tower, there is a capsule of molten salt that gets heated by the beams of light reflected upwards from the mirrors below. From there, the salt circulates to a storage tank underground, where it produces steam, which spins turbines and generates enough electricity to power 70,000 homes and offsets 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year.This overview shows deforestation in Santa Cruz, Bolivia immediately adjacent to untouched tracts of rainforest. Deforestation in the country has primarily been driven by the expansion of mechanized agriculture and cattle ranching, so as the country tries to meet the demand of its growing population and feed them, the sacrificial destruction of its rainforest has taken place to do so. It is estimated that the country lost 4.5 million acres of rainforest in one decade alone from 2000 until 2010.This is the Eixample district in Barcelona, Spain. So the overview perspective can be incredibly helpful to help us understand how cities function and how we can devise smarter solutions for urban planning, and this will become only more relevant as it is expected that 4.9 billion people will live in cities around the world by the year 2030. This area of Barcelona is characterized by its strict grid pattern, apartments with communal courtyards and these octagonal intersections which allow for more sunlight, better ventilation and additional parking at street level.And here we see that grid pattern but under much different circumstances. This is the Dadaab Refugee Camp in northern Kenya, the largest such facility of its kind in the world. To cope with the influx of refugees who are fleeing Somalia, where there is famine and conflict, the UN has built this area gridded out at left called the LFO extension to house more and more refugees who are arriving and occupying these white dots, which are actually tents which will slowly fill up the area over time.So if you have one of these overviews, you have a moment in time. If we have two overviews, however, we are able to tell stories about changes in time. I call that feature of the project ""Juxtapose,"" and we'll share a few examples of it with you now.So the tulip fields in Netherlands bloom every year in April. So we take an image captured in March a few weeks before and contrast it to one taken a few weeks later. We're able to watch the flowers bloom in this magnificent cascade of color. It is estimated that the Dutch produce 4.3 billion tulip bulbs every year.In 2015, two dams collapsed at an iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil, causing one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the country. It is estimated that 62 million cubic meters of waste were released when the dams broke, destroying numerous villages in the process, including Bento Rodrigues, seen here before ... and after the flood. Ultimately, 19 people were killed in this disaster. Half a million people did not have access to clean drinking water for an extended period of time, and the waste soon entered into the Doce River, extended for 650 kilometers all the way into the sea, killing unknowable amounts of plant and animal life along the way.And lastly, here is a story related to the crisis in Syria, a conflict which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. So this patch of desert is seen in Mafraq, Jordan in 2011, the year the conflict started, and when we compare it to an image captured just this year in 2017, we see the construction of the Zaatari refugee camp.So just as the astronauts of Apollo 8 watched the Earth rising above the lunar landscape for the first time, there is no way that you could have imagined what the places I just showed you look like from outer space. And while you may enjoy the aesthetics of an image, once you learn exactly what it is you're seeing, you may struggle with the fact that you still like it. And that's the tension I want to create with my work, because I believe it is that contemplation, that internal dialogue that will lead to greater interest in our planet and more awareness of what we're doing to it.I believe that viewing the Earth from the overview perspective is more important now than ever before. Through the incredible technology of these high-flying cameras, we can see, monitor and expose the unprecedented impact that we are having. And whether we are scientists or engineers or policymakers or investors or artists, if we can adopt a more expansive perspective, embrace the truth of what is going on and contemplate the long-term health of our planet, we will create a better and safer and smarter future for our one and only home.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_grant_what_it_feels_like_to_see_earth_from_space
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"Cities are like siblings in a large polygamous family. Each one has a unique personality and is headed in a distinct direction. But they all have somewhat shared origins. Sometimes I think postcolonial cities are like the children of the two least-favorite wives, who are constantly being asked, ""Ah, why can't you be more like your sister?""(Laughter)The ""why"" of cities is largely the same, no matter where they are: an advantageous location that makes trade and administration possible; the potential for scalable opportunities for the skilled and unskilled alike; a popular willingness to be in constant flux and, of course, resilience. The ""how"" of cities, however, is a whole other story. How are they run? How do they grow? How do they decide who belongs and who doesn't?Lagos is my home. You can always find the Nigerians by following the noise and the dancing, right?(Laughter)Like any major city, that place is a lot of things, many of which are highly contradictory. Our public transportation doesn't quite work, so we have these privately owned bright yellow buses that regularly cause accidents. Luxury car showrooms line badly maintained and often flooded roads. Street evangelism is only slightly less ubiquitous than street harassment. Sex workers sometimes have two degrees, a bank job and a prominent role in church.(Laughter)On any given day, there can be either a party or a burned body in the middle of a street.There is so much that is possible in Lagos and so much that isn't, and very often the difference between possibility and impossibility is simply who you are, and if you're lucky enough, who you're connected to. Belonging in Lagos is a fluid concept determined by ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender, but most visibly and often most violently, class.Before Nigeria became a country, fisherpeople from the inland creeks started to come down the Lagos lagoon and establish villages along the coast. About 60 years later, my grandfather, Oludotun Adekunle Kukoyi, also arrived in Lagos. Like me, he was an alumnus of the University of Ibadan, a young member of the educated elite in the independence era. Over time, he built an illustrious career as a land surveyor, mapping out now-bustling neighborhoods when they were just waist-high wild grass. He died when I was nine. And by that time, my family, like the families of those fisherpeople, knew Lagos as home.Among the Yoruba, we have a saying, ""Èkó gb’olè, ó gb’ọ̀lẹ,"" which can be translated to mean that Lagos will welcome anyone. But that saying is becoming less and less true. Many Lagosians, including the descendants of those fisherpeople who arrived generations before my grandfather, are now being pushed out to make room for an emergent city that has been described as ""the new Dubai."" You see, Lagos inspires big dreams, even in its leaders, and successive governments have declared aspirations towards a megacity where poverty does not exist. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the eradication of poverty as you would expect, the strategy of choice focuses on eliminating the poor.Last October, the Governor announced plans to demolish every single waterfront settlement in Lagos. There are more than 40 of these indigenous communities all over the city, with over 300,000 people living in them. Otodo Gbame, a hundred-year-old fishing village with a population about three-quarters that of Monaco and similar potential for beachfront luxury —(Laughter)was one of the first to be targeted.I first heard of Otodo Gbame after the demolition started. When I visited in November 2016, I met Magdalene Aiyefoju. She is a now-homeless woman whose surname means, ""the world is blind."" Magdalene's son Basil was one of over 20 people who were shot, drowned or presumed dead in that land grab. Standing outside her shelter, I saw the two white-sand football fields where Basil used to play. Spread all around us were the ruins of schools, churches, a primary health center, shops, thousands of homes. Young children enthusiastically helped to put up shelters, and about 5,000 of the residents, with nowhere else to go, simply stayed put. And then in April, state security personnel came back. This time, they cleared the community out completely, with beatings, bullets and fire. As I speak, there are construction crews preparing Otodo Gbame's beaches for anyone who can afford a multi-million-dollar view. The new development is called ""Periwinkle Estate.""Forced evictions are incredibly violent and, of course, unconstitutional. And yet, they happen so often in so many of our cities, because the first thing we are taught to forget about poor people is that they are people. We believe that a home is a thing a person absolutely has a right to, unless the person is poor and the home is built a certain way in a certain neighborhood. But there is no single definition of the word ""home."" After all, what is a slum besides an organic response to acute housing deficits and income inequality? And what is a shanty if not a person making a home for themselves against all odds? Slums are an imperfect housing solution, but they are also prime examples of the innovation, adaptability and resilience at the foundation — and the heart — of every functional city. You don't need to be the new Dubai when you're already Lagos.(Applause)We have our own identity, our own rhythm, and as anyone who knows Lagos can tell you, poor Lagosians are very often the source of the city's character. Without its poor, Lagos would not be known for its music or its endless energy or even the fact that you can buy an ice cold drink or a puppy through your car window.(Laughter)The conditions that cause us to define certain neighborhoods as slums can be effectively improved, but not without recognizing the humanity and the agency of the people living in them. In Lagos, where public goods are rarely publicly available, slum dwellers are often at the forefront of innovating solutions. After being disconnected from the grid for months because the power company couldn't figure out how to collect bills, one settlement designed a system that collectivized remittances and got everyone cheaper rates into the bargain. Another settlement created a reform program that hires local bad boys as security. They know every trick and every hideout, so now troublemakers are more likely to get caught and reported to police and fewer of the youth end up engaging in criminal activity. Yet another settlement recently completed a flood-safe, eco-friendly communal toilet system. Models like these are being adopted across Lagos.Informal settlements are incorrectly named as the problem. In fact, the real problems are the factors that create them, like the entrenchment of poverty, social exclusion and state failures. When our governments frame slums as threats in order to justify violent land grabs or forced evictions, they're counting on those of us who live in formal housing to tacitly and ignorantly agree with them. Rather, we must remind them that governments exist to serve not only those who build and live in luxury homes, but also those who clean and guard them. Our —(Applause)our realities may differ, but our rights don't.The Lagos state government, like far too many on our continent, pays lip service to ideas of inclusion, while acting as though progress can only be achieved by the erasure, exploitation and even elimination of groups it considers expendable. People living with disabilities who hawk or beg on Lagos streets are rounded up, extorted and detained. Women in low-income neighborhoods are picked up and charged with prostitution, regardless of what they actually do for a living. Gay citizens are scapegoated to distract from real political problems. But people, like cities, are resilient, and no amount of legislation or intimidation or violence can fully eliminate any of us. Prostitutes, women and women who work as prostitutes still haven't gone extinct, despite centuries of active suppression. Queer Africans continue to exist, even though queerness is now criminalized in most parts of the continent. And I'm fairly certain that poor people don't generally tend to just disappear because they've been stripped of everything they have.We are all already here, and that answers the question of whether or not we belong.When those fisherpeople started to sail down the lagoon in search of new homes, it could not have occurred to them that the city that would rise up around them would one day insist that they do not belong in it. I like to believe that my grandfather, in mapping new frontiers for Lagos, was trying to open it up to make room for other people to be welcomed by the city in the same way that he was. On my way here, my grandma called me to remind me how proud she was, how proud [my grandfather] and my mother would have been. I am their dreams come true. But there is no reason why their dreams — or mine, for that matter — are allowed to come true while those of others are turned to nightmares. And lest we forget: the minimum requirement for a dream is a safe place to lay your head.It is too late now for Basil, but not for Magdalene, not for the hundreds of thousands, the millions still under threat in Lagos or any of our cities. The world does not have to remain blind to the suffering that is created when we deny people's humanity, or even to the incredible potential for growth that exists when we recognize and value all contributions.We must hold our governments and ourselves accountable for keeping our shared cities safe for everyone in them, because the only cities worth building — indeed, the only futures worth dreaming of — are those that include all of us, no matter who we are or how we make homes for ourselves.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/olutimehin_adegbeye_who_belongs_in_a_city
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"Caitlin Quattromani: The election of 2016 felt different. Political conversations with our family and friends uncovered a level of polarization that many of us had not previously experienced. People who we always thought were reasonable and intelligent seemed like strangers. We said to ourselves, ""How could you think that? I thought you were smart.""Lauran Arledge: Caitlin and I met in the summer of 2011, and we bonded around being working moms and trying to keep our very energetic boys busy. And we soon found out we had almost everything in common. From our love of Colorado to our love of sushi, there wasn't much we didn't agree on. We also discovered that we share a deep love of this country and feel a responsibility to be politically active. But no one's perfect —(Laughter) and I soon found out two disappointing things about Caitlin. First, she hates camping.CQ: I think camping is the worst.LA: So there would not be any joint camping trips in our future. The second thing is that she's politically active all right — as a conservative.CQ: I may hate camping, but I love politics. I listen to conservative talk radio just about every day, and I've volunteered for a few different conservative political campaigns.LA: And I'd say I'm a little to the left, like all the way to the left.(Laughter)I've always been interested in politics. I was a political science major, and I worked as a community organizer and on a congressional campaign.CQ: So as Lauran and I were getting to know each other, it was right in the middle of that 2012 presidential campaign, and most of our early political conversations were really just based in jokes and pranks. So as an example, I would change Lauran's computer screen saver to a picture of Mitt Romney, or she would put an Obama campaign magnet on the back of my car.(Laughter)LA: Car, not minivan.CQ: But over time, those conversations grew more serious and really became a core of our friendship. And somewhere along the line, we decided we didn't want to have any topic be off limits for discussion, even if those topics pushed us way outside of our friendship comfort zone.LA: And so to most of us, political conversations are a zero-sum game. There's a winner and there's a loser. We go for the attack and we spot a weakness in someone's argument. And here's the important part: we tend to take every comment or opinion that's expressed as a personal affront to our own values and beliefs. But what if changed the way we think about these conversations? What if, in these heated moments, we chose dialogue over debate? When we engage in dialogue, we flip the script. We replace our ego and our desire to win with curiosity, empathy and a desire to learn. Instead of coming from a place of judgment, we are genuinely interested in the other person's experiences, their values and their concerns.CQ: You make it sound so simple, Lauran. But getting to that place of true dialogue is hard, especially when we're talking about politics. It is so easy to get emotionally fired up about issues that we're passionate about, and we can let our ego get in the way of truly hearing the other person's perspective. And in this crazy political climate we're in right now, unfortunately, we're seeing an extreme result of those heated political conversations, to the point where people are willing to walk away from their relationships. In fact, Rasmussen released a poll earlier this year that said 40 percent of people reported that the 2016 election negatively impacted a personal relationship, and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience tells us that people tend to feel their way to their beliefs rather than using reasoning, and that when reason and emotion collide, it's emotion that invariably wins. So no wonder it's hard to talk about these issues.LA: And look, we're just two regular friends who happen to think very differently about politics and the role that government should play in our lives. And I know we were all taught not to talk about politics because it's not polite, but we need to be able to talk about it, because it's important to us and it's a part of who we are.CQ: We have chosen to avoid political debate and instead engage in dialogue in order to maintain what we fondly call our bipartisan friendship.(Laughter)LA: And this election and all of the craziness that has followed has given us several opportunities to practice this skill.(Laughter)Let's start with January and the Women's March. At this point, you can probably guess which one of us participated.(Laughter)CQ: Oh, the Women's March. I was annoyed and irritated that entire day, really because of two things. Number one, the name ""Women's March."" As a conservative woman, the march's platform of issues didn't represent me, and that's OK, but hearing it talked about as this demonstration of sisterhood and solidarity for all women didn't ring true for me. The other piece was the timing of the event, the fact that it was the day after the presidential inauguration. It felt like we weren't even giving the new administration to actually do anything, good or bad, before people felt the need to demonstrate against it.LA: And under normal circumstances, I would agree with Caitlin. I think an administration does deserve the benefit of the doubt. But in this case, I was marching to show my concern that a man with such a poor track record with women and other groups had been elected as president. I had to be part of the collective voice that wanted to send a clear message to the new president that we did not accept or condone his behavior or rhetoric during the election.CQ: So I'm already feeling kind of aggravated, and then I see this Facebook from Lauran pop up in my social media feed.(Laughter)Seeing Lauran's sons at the march and holding signs took it to a new level for me, and not in a good way, because I know these boys, I love these boys, and I didn't feel they were old enough to understand what the march stood for. I didn't understand why Lauran would choose to have them participate in that way, and I assumed it wasn't a choice that the boys made for themselves. But I also know Lauran. You're an incredible mom who would never exploit your boys in any way, so I had to stop and check myself. I had a decision to make. I could take the easy way out and just choose not to say anything to her, and instead just kind of simmer in my frustration, or I could ask her to learn more about her motivations.LA: And I shared with Caitlin that we actually started talking about the March weeks before we participated. And my boys were curious as to why the event was being organized, and this led to some very interesting family conversations. We talked about how in this country, we have the right and the privilege to demonstrate against something we don't agree with, and my husband shared with them why he thought it was so important that men joined the Women's March. But the most significant reason we marched as a family is that it was a way for us to honor my parents' legacy. They spent their careers working to defend the rights of some of our most vulnerable citizens, and they passed these values down to me and my brother, and we want to do the same with our sons.CQ: After talking to Lauran, I really understood not only why she felt it was so important to march, but why she had her boys with her. And frankly, my assumptions were wrong. It was the boys who wanted to march after they talked about the issues as a family.But what's most important about this example is to think about the alternative. Had Lauran and I not talked about it, I would have been annoyed with her, and it could have resulted in an undercurrent of disrespect in our friendship. But by asking Lauran questions, it allowed us to use dialogue to get to a place of true understanding. Now, to be clear, our conversation didn't really change my mind about how I felt about the March, but it absolutely changed my thinking around why she brought her boys with her. And for both of us, that dialogue allowed us to understand each other's perspective about the Women's March even though we disagreed.LA: The second topic that challenged our ability to engage in dialogue was around my need to understand how Caitlin could vote for Trump.(Laughter)Caitlin is a successful professional woman who is deeply caring and compassionate, and the Caitlin I know would never excuse any man from talking about women the way that Trump did during the campaign. It was hard for me to reconcile these two things in my mind. How could you overlook the things that were said?CQ: So I'm guessing I may not be the only one here that thought we didn't have the best choices for the presidential election last year.(Laughter)The Republican candidate who I did support didn't make it out of the primary, so when it came time to vote, I had a decision to make. And you're right, there were some terrible things that came out during the Trump campaign, so much so that I almost decided to just abstain rather than voting for president, something I had never even considered doing before. But ultimately, I did vote for Donald Trump, and for me it was really a vote for party over person, especially recognizing how important that presidential pick is on influencing our judicial branch. But I shared with Lauran it was a decision I really wrestled with, and not one that I made lightly.LA: And so after our conversation, I was struck by a few things. First, I had fallen victim to my own confirmation bias. Because of my strong feelings about Trump, I had given all Trump voters the same attributes, and none of them forgiving.(Laughter) But knowing Caitlin, I started to ask questions. What were Trump voters really concerned about? Under all the divisive language, what was really going on? What could we learn about ourselves and our country from this unlikely event? I also learned that we shared a deep disappointment in this election, and that we have growing concerns about our two-party political system.But the most important thing about this conversation is that it happened at all. Without an open and honest dialogue between the two of us, this election would have been the elephant in the room for the next four years, pun intended.(Laughter)CQ: So, look —(Applause)So, look — we know it takes work to get past the difficult, frustrating and sometimes emotional parts of having discussions about issues like the Women's March or why your friend may have voted for a candidate that you can't stand. But we need to have these conversations. Our ability to move past political debate into true dialogue is a critical skill we should all be focused on right now, especially with the people that we care about the most.LA: And it's not just as adults that we need to bottle this behavior. It's critical that we do it for our children as well. My sons were inundated with this election. We were listening to the news in the morning, and they were having conversations with their friends at school. I was concerned that they were picking up so much polarizing misinformation, and they were growing really fearful of a Trump presidency. Then one day, after the election, I was taking my sons to school, and my younger son, completely out of the blue, said, ""Mom, we don't know anybody who voted for Trump, right?""(Laughter)And I paused and I took a deep breath. ""Yes, we do.""(Laughter)""The Quattromanis."" And his response was so great. He kind of got this confused look on his face, and he said ... ""But we love them.""(Laughter)And I answered, ""Yes, we do.""(Laughter)And then he said, ""Why would they vote for him?"" And I remember stopping and thinking that it was really important how I answered this question. Somehow, I had to honor our own family values and show respect for our friends. So I finally said, ""They think that's the right direction for this country."" And before I had even gotten the whole sentence out, he had moved on to the soccer game he was going to play at recess.CQ: So life with boys.(Laughter)So what Lauran and I have discovered through our bipartisan friendship is the possibility that lives in dialogue. We have chosen to be genuinely curious about each other's ideas and perspectives and to be willing to listen to one another even when we disagree. And by putting aside our ego and our preconceived ideas, we've opened ourselves up to limitless learning. And perhaps most importantly for our relationship, we have made the commitment to each other that our friendship is way more important than either of us being right or winning a conversation about politics. So today, we're asking you to have a conversation. Talk to someone outside of your political party who might challenge your thinking. Make an effort to engage with someone with whom you might typically avoid a political conversation. But remember, the goal isn't to win, the goal is to listen and to understand and to be open to learning something new.LA: So let's go back to election night. As the polls were closing and it became clear that Trump was going to be our new president, I was devastated. I was sad, I was confused, and I'll be honest — I was angry. And then just before midnight, I received this text message from Caitlin.[I know this is a hard night for you guys. We are thinking of you. Love you.]And where there so easy could have been weeks or months of awkwardness and unspoken hostility, there was this — an offering of empathy rooted in friendship. And I knew, in that moment, that we would make it through this.CQ: So we must find a way to engage in meaningful conversations that are going to move us forward as a nation, and we can no longer wait for our elected officials to elevate our national discourse.LA: The challenges ahead are going to require all of us to participate in a deeper and more meaningful way ... and it starts with each one of us building connection through dialogue — in our relationships, our communities and as a country.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/caitlin_quattromani_and_lauran_arledge_how_our_friendship_survives_our_opposing_politics
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"I used to think the whole purpose of life was pursuing happiness. Everyone said the path to happiness was success, so I searched for that ideal job, that perfect boyfriend, that beautiful apartment. But instead of ever feeling fulfilled, I felt anxious and adrift. And I wasn't alone; my friends — they struggled with this, too.Eventually, I decided to go to graduate school for positive psychology to learn what truly makes people happy. But what I discovered there changed my life. The data showed that chasing happiness can make people unhappy. And what really struck me was this: the suicide rate has been rising around the world, and it recently reached a 30-year high in America. Even though life is getting objectively better by nearly every conceivable standard, more people feel hopeless, depressed and alone. There's an emptiness gnawing away at people, and you don't have to be clinically depressed to feel it. Sooner or later, I think we all wonder: Is this all there is? And according to the research, what predicts this despair is not a lack of happiness. It's a lack of something else, a lack of having meaning in life.But that raised some questions for me. Is there more to life than being happy? And what's the difference between being happy and having meaning in life? Many psychologists define happiness as a state of comfort and ease, feeling good in the moment. Meaning, though, is deeper. The renowned psychologist Martin Seligman says meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and from developing the best within you. Our culture is obsessed with happiness, but I came to see that seeking meaning is the more fulfilling path. And the studies show that people who have meaning in life, they're more resilient, they do better in school and at work, and they even live longer.So this all made me wonder: How can we each live more meaningfully? To find out, I spent five years interviewing hundreds of people and reading through thousands of pages of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. Bringing it all together, I found that there are what I call four pillars of a meaningful life. And we can each create lives of meaning by building some or all of these pillars in our lives.The first pillar is belonging. Belonging comes from being in relationships where you're valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value others as well. But some groups and relationships deliver a cheap form of belonging; you're valued for what you believe, for who you hate, not for who you are. True belonging springs from love. It lives in moments among individuals, and it's a choice — you can choose to cultivate belonging with others.Here's an example. Each morning, my friend Jonathan buys a newspaper from the same street vendor in New York. They don't just conduct a transaction, though. They take a moment to slow down, talk, and treat each other like humans. But one time, Jonathan didn't have the right change, and the vendor said, ""Don't worry about it."" But Jonathan insisted on paying, so he went to the store and bought something he didn't need to make change. But when he gave the money to the vendor, the vendor drew back. He was hurt. He was trying to do something kind, but Jonathan had rejected him.I think we all reject people in small ways like this without realizing it. I do. I'll walk by someone I know and barely acknowledge them. I'll check my phone when someone's talking to me. These acts devalue others. They make them feel invisible and unworthy. But when you lead with love, you create a bond that lifts each of you up.For many people, belonging is the most essential source of meaning, those bonds to family and friends. For others, the key to meaning is the second pillar: purpose. Now, finding your purpose is not the same thing as finding that job that makes you happy. Purpose is less about what you want than about what you give. A hospital custodian told me her purpose is healing sick people. Many parents tell me, ""My purpose is raising my children."" The key to purpose is using your strengths to serve others. Of course, for many of us, that happens through work. That's how we contribute and feel needed. But that also means that issues like disengagement at work, unemployment, low labor force participation — these aren't just economic problems, they're existential ones, too. Without something worthwhile to do, people flounder. Of course, you don't have to find purpose at work, but purpose gives you something to live for, some ""why"" that drives you forward.The third pillar of meaning is also about stepping beyond yourself, but in a completely different way: transcendence. Transcendent states are those rare moments when you're lifted above the hustle and bustle of daily life, your sense of self fades away, and you feel connected to a higher reality. For one person I talked to, transcendence came from seeing art. For another person, it was at church. For me, I'm a writer, and it happens through writing. Sometimes I get so in the zone that I lose all sense of time and place. These transcendent experiences can change you. One study had students look up at 200-feet-tall eucalyptus trees for one minute. But afterwards they felt less self-centered, and they even behaved more generously when given the chance to help someone.Belonging, purpose, transcendence. Now, the fourth pillar of meaning, I've found, tends to surprise people. The fourth pillar is storytelling, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Creating a narrative from the events of your life brings clarity. It helps you understand how you became you. But we don't always realize that we're the authors of our stories and can change the way we're telling them. Your life isn't just a list of events. You can edit, interpret and retell your story, even as you're constrained by the facts.I met a young man named Emeka, who'd been paralyzed playing football. After his injury, Emeka told himself, ""My life was great playing football, but now look at me."" People who tell stories like this — ""My life was good. Now it's bad."" — tend to be more anxious and depressed. And that was Emeka for a while. But with time, he started to weave a different story. His new story was, ""Before my injury, my life was purposeless. I partied a lot and was a pretty selfish guy. But my injury made me realize I could be a better man."" That edit to his story changed Emeka's life. After telling the new story to himself, Emeka started mentoring kids, and he discovered what his purpose was: serving others. The psychologist Dan McAdams calls this a ""redemptive story,"" where the bad is redeemed by the good. People leading meaningful lives, he's found, tend to tell stories about their lives defined by redemption, growth and love.But what makes people change their stories? Some people get help from a therapist, but you can do it on your own, too, just by reflecting on your life thoughtfully, how your defining experiences shaped you, what you lost, what you gained. That's what Emeka did. You won't change your story overnight; it could take years and be painful. After all, we've all suffered, and we all struggle. But embracing those painful memories can lead to new insights and wisdom, to finding that good that sustains you.Belonging, purpose, transcendence, storytelling: those are the four pillars of meaning. When I was younger, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by all of the pillars. My parents ran a Sufi meetinghouse from our home in Montreal. Sufism is a spiritual practice associated with the whirling dervishes and the poet Rumi. Twice a week, Sufis would come to our home to meditate, drink Persian tea, and share stories. Their practice also involved serving all of creation through small acts of love, which meant being kind even when people wronged you. But it gave them a purpose: to rein in the ego.Eventually, I left home for college and without the daily grounding of Sufism in my life, I felt unmoored. And I started searching for those things that make life worth living. That's what set me on this journey. Looking back, I now realize that the Sufi house had a real culture of meaning. The pillars were part of the architecture, and the presence of the pillars helped us all live more deeply.Of course, the same principle applies in other strong communities as well — good ones and bad ones. Gangs, cults: these are cultures of meaning that use the pillars and give people something to live and die for. But that's exactly why we as a society must offer better alternatives. We need to build these pillars within our families and our institutions to help people become their best selves. But living a meaningful life takes work. It's an ongoing process. As each day goes by, we're constantly creating our lives, adding to our story. And sometimes we can get off track.Whenever that happens to me, I remember a powerful experience I had with my father. Several months after I graduated from college, my dad had a massive heart attack that should have killed him. He survived, and when I asked him what was going through his mind as he faced death, he said all he could think about was needing to live so he could be there for my brother and me, and this gave him the will to fight for life. When he went under anesthesia for emergency surgery, instead of counting backwards from 10, he repeated our names like a mantra. He wanted our names to be the last words he spoke on earth if he died.My dad is a carpenter and a Sufi. It's a humble life, but a good life. Lying there facing death, he had a reason to live: love. His sense of belonging within his family, his purpose as a dad, his transcendent meditation, repeating our names — these, he says, are the reasons why he survived. That's the story he tells himself.That's the power of meaning. Happiness comes and goes. But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_esfahani_smith_there_s_more_to_life_than_being_happy
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"How many companies have you interacted with today?Well, you got up in the morning, took a shower, washed your hair, used a hair dryer, ate breakfast — ate cereals, fruit, yogurt, whatever — had coffee — tea. You took public transport to come here, or maybe used your private car. You interacted with the company that you work for or that you own. You interacted with your clients, your customers, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure there are at least seven companies you've interacted with today.Let me tell you a stunning statistic. One out of seven large, public corporations commit fraud every year. This is a US academic study that looks at US companies — I have no reason to believe that it's different in Europe. This is a study that looks at both detected and undetected fraud using statistical methods. This is not petty fraud. These frauds cost the shareholders of these companies, and therefore society, on the order of 380 billion dollars per year.We can all think of some examples, right? The car industry's secrets aren't quite so secret anymore. Fraud has become a feature, not a bug, of the financial services industry. That's not me who's claiming that, that's the president of the American Finance Association who stated that in his presidential address. That's a huge problem if you think about, especially, an economy like Switzerland, which relies so much on the trust put into its financial industry.On the other hand, there are six out of seven companies who actually remain honest despite all temptations to start engaging in fraud. There are whistle-blowers like Michael Woodford, who blew the whistle on Olympus. These whistle-blowers risk their careers, their friendships, to bring out the truth about their companies. There are journalists like Anna Politkovskaya who risk even their lives to report human rights violations. She got killed — every year, around 100 journalists get killed because of their conviction to bring out the truth.So in my talk today, I want to share with you some insights I've obtained and learned in the last 10 years of conducting research in this. I'm a researcher, a scientist working with economists, financial economists, ethicists, neuroscientists, lawyers and others trying to understand what makes humans tick, and how can we address this issue of fraud in corporations and therefore contribute to the improvement of the world.I want to start by sharing with you two very distinct visions of how people behave. First, meet Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics. His basic idea was that if everybody behaves in their own self-interests, that's good for everybody in the end. Self-interest isn't a narrowly defined concept just for your immediate utility. It has a long-run implication. Let's think about that. Think about this dog here. That might be us. There's this temptation — I apologize to all vegetarians, but —(Laughter)Dogs do like the bratwurst.(Laughter) Now, the straight-up, self-interested move here is to go for that. So my friend Adam here might jump up, get the sausage and thereby ruin all this beautiful tableware. But that's not what Adam Smith meant. He didn't mean disregard all consequences — to the contrary. He would have thought, well, there may be negative consequences, for example, the owner might be angry with the dog and the dog, anticipating that, might not behave in this way. That might be us, weighing the benefits and costs of our actions.How does that play out? Well, many of you, I'm sure, have in your companies, especially if it's a large company, a code of conduct. And then if you behave according to that code of conduct, that improves your chances of getting a bonus payment. And on the other hand, if you disregard it, then there are higher chances of not getting your bonus or its being diminished. In other words, this is a very economic motivation of trying to get people to be more honest, or more aligned with the corporation's principles.Similarly, reputation is a very powerful economic force, right? We try to build a reputation, maybe for being honest, because then people trust us more in the future. Right? Adam Smith talked about the baker who's not producing good bread out of his benevolence for those people who consume the bread, but because he wants to sell more future bread. In my research, we find, for example, at the University of Zurich, that Swiss banks who get caught up in media, and in the context, for example, of tax evasion, of tax fraud, have bad media coverage. They lose net new money in the future and therefore make lower profits. That's a very powerful reputational force. Benefits and costs.Here's another viewpoint of the world. Meet Immanuel Kant, 18th-century German philosopher superstar. He developed this notion that independent of the consequences, some actions are just right and some are just wrong. It's just wrong to lie, for example. So, meet my friend Immanuel here. He knows that the sausage is very tasty, but he's going to turn away because he's a good dog. He knows it's wrong to jump up and risk ruining all this beautiful tableware. If you believe that people are motivated like that, then all the stuff about incentives, all the stuff about code of conduct and bonus systems and so on, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. People are motivated by different values perhaps.So, what are people actually motivated by? These two gentlemen here have perfect hairdos, but they give us very different views of the world. What do we do with this? Well, I'm an economist and we conduct so-called experiments to address this issue. We strip away facts which are confusing in reality. Reality is so rich, there is so much going on, it's almost impossible to know what drives people's behavior really.So let's do a little experiment together. Imagine the following situation. You're in a room alone, not like here. There's a five-franc coin like the one I'm holding up right now in front of you. Here are your instructions: toss the coin four times, and then on a computer terminal in front of you, enter the number of times tails came up. This is the situation. Here's the rub. For every time that you announce that you had a tails throw, you get paid five francs. So if you say I had two tails throws, you get paid 10 francs. If you say you had zero, you get paid zero francs. If you say, ""I had four tails throws,"" then you get paid 20 francs. It's anonymous, nobody's watching what you're doing, and you get paid that money anonymously.I've got two questions for you.(Laughter)You know what's coming now, right? First, how would you behave in that situation? The second, look to your left and look to your right —(Laughter)and think about how the person sitting next to you might behave in that situation.We did this experiment for real. We did it at the Manifesta art exhibition that took place here in Zurich recently, not with students in the lab at the university but with the real population, like you guys. First, a quick reminder of stats. If I throw the coin four times and it's a fair coin, then the probability that it comes up four times tails is 6.25 percent. And I hope you can intuitively see that the probability that all four of them are tails is much lower than if two of them are tails, right?Here are the specific numbers. Here's what happened. People did this experiment for real. Around 30 to 35 percent of people said, ""Well, I had four tails throws."" That's extremely unlikely.(Laughter)But the really amazing thing here, perhaps to an economist, is there are around 65 percent of people who did not say I had four tails throws, even though in that situation, nobody's watching you, the only consequence that's in place is you get more money if you say four than less. You leave 20 francs on the table by announcing zero. I don't know whether the other people all were honest or whether they also said a little bit higher or lower than what they did because it's anonymous. We only observed the distribution. But what I can tell you — and here's another coin toss. There you go, it's tails.(Laughter)Don't check, OK?(Laughter)What I can tell you is that not everybody behaved like Adam Smith would have predicted.So what does that leave us with? Well, it seems people are motivated by certain intrinsic values and in our research, we look at this. We look at the idea that people have so-called protected values. A protected value isn't just any value. A protected value is a value where you're willing to pay a price to uphold that value. You're willing to pay a price to withstand the temptation to give in. And the consequence is you feel better if you earn money in a way that's consistent with your values.Let me show you this again in the metaphor of our beloved dog here. If we succeed in getting the sausage without violating our values, then the sausage tastes better. That's what our research shows. If, on the other hand, we do so — if we get the sausage and in doing so we actually violate values, we value the sausage less. Quantitatively, that's quite powerful. We can measure these protected values, for example, by a survey measure. Simple, nine-item survey that's quite predictive in these experiments. If you think about the average of the population and then there's a distribution around it — people are different, we all are different. People who have a set of protected values that's one standard deviation above the average, they discount money they receive by lying by about 25 percent. That means a dollar received when lying is worth to them only 75 cents without any incentives you put in place for them to behave honestly. It's their intrinsic motivation.By the way, I'm not a moral authority. I'm not saying I have all these beautiful values, right? But I'm interested in how people behave and how we can leverage that richness in human nature to actually improve the workings of our organizations.So there are two very, very different visions here. On the one hand, you can appeal to benefits and costs and try to get people to behave according to them. On the other hand, you can select people who have the values and the desirable characteristics, of course — competencies that go in line with your organization.I do not yet know where these protected values really come from. Is it nurture or is it nature? What I can tell you is that the distribution looks pretty similar for men and women. It looks pretty similar for those who had studied economics or those who had studied psychology. It looks even pretty similar around different age categories among adults. But I don't know yet how this develops over a lifetime. That will be the subject of future research.The idea I want to leave you with is it's all right to appeal to incentives. I'm an economist; I certainly believe in the fact that incentives work. But do think about selecting the right people rather than having people and then putting incentives in place. Selecting the right people with the right values may go a long way to saving a lot of trouble and a lot of money in your organizations. In other words, it will pay off to put people first.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/alexander_wagner_what_really_motivates_people_to_be_honest_in_business
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"I was born and raised in Dakar, Senegal, and through a combination of accidents and cosmic justice, became a chef in the US.(Laughter)When I first arrived in New York, I began working in these restaurants — different types of restaurants — from French bistro to Italian, global ethnic to modern American. At the time, New York was already well-established as a food capital of the world. However ... with the exception of a few West African and Ethiopian mom-and-pop eateries, there was no such thing as African cuisine in the entire city.Early in my life, I was influenced by Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, nicknamed, ""the poet president,"" who talked about a new humanism, a universal civilization, in which all cultures would come together around a communal table as equals, each bringing its own beautiful contribution to share. He called it ""the rendezvous of giving and receiving."" That concept resonated with me, and it has guided my career path.After years of working in restaurants, I yearned for my work to have a deeper impact that would go beyond the last meal I had served. I wanted to give back, both to New York — the city that allowed me the opportunity to follow my calling — but also to my origins and ancestors in Senegal. I wanted to contribute to that universal civilization Senghor had described. But I didn't know how to make a measurable impact as a cook and writer.While I was writing my first cookbook, I often traveled to different regions of Senegal for research. During one of those trips, in the remote, southeast region of Kédougou I rediscovered an ancient grain called fonio that had all but disappeared from the urban Senegalese diet. It turns out that fonio had been cultivated for more than five thousand years and is probably the oldest cultivated cereal in Africa. Once a popular grain on much of the continent, fonio was grown all the way to ancient Egypt, where archaeologists found grains inside pyramids' burial grounds. Today it is mostly cultivated in the western part of the Sahel region, from Senegal to Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Nigeria. The Sahel region is that semiarid area south of the Sahara desert that extends from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east. I became more interested in this grain that was deemed worth taking to the afterlife by early Egyptians.As I continued my research, I found out that fonio was actually — wherever it was cultivated — there was always some myth, or some superstition connected to it. The Dogon, another great culture in Mali, called it ""po,"" or, ""the seed of the universe."" In that ancient culture's mythology, the entire universe sprouted from a seed of fonio.Aside from its purported mystical properties, fonio is a miracle grain in many aspects. It is nutritious, particularly rich in methionine and cysteine, two amino acids that are deficient in most other major grains: barley, rice or wheat to name a few. In addition, fonio cultivation is great for the environment. It tolerates poor soil and needs very little water, surviving where nothing else will grow.As a chef, what first struck me was its delicate taste and its versatility. Similar to couscous, fonio has a delicious, nutty and earthy flavor. It can be turned into salad, served as noodles, used in baking or simply as a substitute for any other grains in your favorite recipes. I am happy to share some of my fonio sushi and sweet potato sushi with some of you right now.(Audience) Oh!(Applause)And okra.(Audience murmurs)In Kédougou it is also nicknamed ""ñamu buur,"" which means ""food for royalty,"" and it's served for guests of honor.Located at the border with Guinea and Mali, Kédougou first strikes visitors with its stunning vistas and views of the Fouta Djallon Mountains. Sadly, it is also one of the poorest regions of Senegal. Because of desertification and lack of job prospects, much of Kédougou's young population has left. They chose the deadly path of migration in search of ""better"" opportunities. Often, they risk their lives trying to reach Europe. Some leave by crossing the Sahara desert. Others end up on inadequate wooden canoes in desperate attempts to reach Spain. According to a recent ""Guardian"" article, by 2020 more that 60 million people from sub-Saharan Africa are expected to migrate due to desertification. This is the biggest global wave of migration since the Second World War, and it's only set to grow. So far this year, more that 2,100 migrants have lost their lives on their way to Europe. This is the reality of Kédougou and of much of the Sahel today. Scary future, scarce food and no opportunities to change their situation.If life in your village weren't so precarious, if there was a way to having enough food to get by, or having a paying job — if you and your sisters didn't have to spend 30 percent of their waking hours fetching water, if conditions were just a little more hospitable ... could the solution be right here in our soil? Could bringing fonio to the rest of the world be the answer?Ancient grains are getting more popular, and sales of gluten-free items are growing in the US — 16.4 percent since 2013, making it a 23.3-billion-dollar industry. How could fonio partake in this market share?There are many challenges in turning fonio into food. Traditional processing is laborious and time-consuming, especially when compared to other grains. Well, thankfully, technology has evolved. And there are now machines that can process fonio in a more efficient way. And as a matter of fact, a few years ago, Sanoussi Diakité, a Senegalese engineer, won a Rolex prize for his invention of the first mechanized fonio processor. Today, such machines are making life much easier for producers around the whole Sahel region.Another challenge is the colonial mentality that what comes from the west is best. This tendency to look down on our own products and to see crops like fonio as simply ""country peoples' food,"" therefore substandard, explains why even though we don't produce wheat in Senegal traditionally, it is far easier to find baguettes or croissants in the streets of Dakar than it is to find any fonio products. This same mindset popularized the overprocessed, leftover rice debris known as ""broken rice,"" which was imported to Senegal from Indochina and introduced by the colonial French. Soon, broken rice became a key ingredient in our national dish, thiéboudienne, replacing our own traditional, more nutritious African rice, Oryza glaberrima. Ironically, the same African rice despised at home was hailed abroad. Indeed, during the Atlantic slave trade, this rice became a major crop in the Americas ... particularly in the Carolinas where it was nicknamed, ""Carolina gold.""But let's return to fonio. How can we turn its current status of ""country-people food"" into a world-class crop? Last year, a business partner and I secured a commitment from Whole Foods Market, the US's largest natural food store chain, to carry fonio. And we got a large American ingredient importer interested enough to send a team of executives to West Africa with us to explore the supply chain's viability. We found ourselves observing manual operations in remote locations with few controls over quality. So we started focusing on processing issues. We drew up a vision with a beneficial and commercially sustainable supply chain for fonio, and we connected ourselves with organizations that can help us achieve it.Walking backwards from the market, here is what it looks like. Imagine that fonio is consumed all across the globe as other popular ancient grains. Fonio touted on the levels of cereals, breads, nutrition bars, cookies, pastas, snacks — why not? It's easier to say than quinoa.(Laughter)(Applause)To get there, fonio needs to be readily available at a consistent quality for commercial users, such as food manufacturers and restaurant chains. That's the part we're missing. To make fonio available at a consistent quality for commercial use, you need a commercial-scale fonio mill that adheres to international quality standards. Currently, there is no such mill in the whole world, so in our vision, there is an African-owned and operated fonio mill that processes efficiently and in compliance with the requirements of multinational food companies. It is very difficult for the fonio producers today to sell and use fonio unless they devote a huge amount of time and energy in threshing, winnowing and husking it. In our vision, the mill will take on those tasks, allowing the producers to focus on farming rather than processing.There is untapped agricultural capacity in the Sahel, and all it takes is changing market conditions to activate that capacity. By relieving fonio producers of manual operations, the mill will free up their time and remove the production bottleneck that limits their output. And there are other benefits as well in using Sahel land for agriculture. More benefits, higher employment, climate change mitigation by reversing desertification and greater food security. Nice vision, right? Well, we are working towards getting it done. Last month we introduced fonio to shoppers in New York City and online, in a package that makes it attractive and desirable and accessible.(Applause)We are talking with operators and investors in West Africa about building a fonio mill. And most importantly, we have teamed with an NGO called SOS SAHEL to recruit, train and equip smallholders in the Sahel to increase their fonio production.Hunger levels are higher in sub-Saharan Africa than any other place in the world. The Sahel population is set to grow from 135 million to 340 million people. However, in that drought- and famine-prone region, fonio grows freely. This tiny grain may provide big answers, reasserting its Dogon name, ""po,"" the seed of the universe, and taking us one step closer to the universal civilization.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/pierre_thiam_a_forgotten_ancient_grain_that_could_help_africa_prosper
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"When someone mentions Cuba, what do you think about? Classic, classic cars? Perhaps good cigars? Maybe you think of a famous baseball player. What about when somebody mentions North Korea? You think about those missile tests, maybe their notorious leader or his good friend, Dennis Rodman.(Laughter)One thing that likely doesn't come to mind is a vision of a country, an open economy, whose citizens have access to a wide range of affordable consumer products.I'm not here to argue how these countries got to where they are today. I simply want to use them as an example of countries and citizens who have been affected, negatively affected, by a trade policy that restricts imports and protects local industries. Recently we've heard a number of countries talk about restricting imports and protecting their local, domestic industries. Now, this may sound fine in a sound bite, but what it really is is protectionism. We heard a lot about this during the 2016 presidential election. We heard about it during the Brexit debates and most recently during the French elections. In fact, it's been a really important topic being talked about around the world, and many aspiring political leaders are running on platforms positioning protectionism as a good thing.Now, I could see why they think protectionism is good, because sometimes it seems like trade is unfair. Some have blamed trade for some of the problems we've been having here at home in the US. For years we've been hearing about the loss of high-paying US manufacturing jobs. Many think that manufacturing is declining in the US because companies are moving their operations offshore to markets with lower-cost labor like China, Mexico and Vietnam. They also think trade agreements sometimes are unfair, like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, because these trade agreements allow companies to reimport those cheaply produced goods back into the US and other countries from where the jobs were taken. So it kind of feels like the exporters win and the importers lose.Now, the reality is output in the manufacturing sector in the US is actually growing, but we are losing jobs. We're losing lots of them. In fact, from 2000 to 2010, 5.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost. But they're not being lost for the reasons you might think. Mike Johnson in Toledo, Ohio didn't lose his jobs at the factory to Miguel Sanchez in Monterrey, Mexico. No. Mike lost his job to a machine. 87 percent of lost manufacturing jobs have been eliminated because we've made improvements in our own productivity through automation. So that means that one out of 10 lost manufacturing jobs was due to offshoring. Now, this is not just a US phenomenon. No. In fact, automation is spreading to every production line in every country around the world.But look, I get it: if you just lost your job and then you read in the newspaper that your old company just struck up a deal with China, it's easy to think you were just replaced in a one-for-one deal.When I hear stories like this, I think that what people picture is that trade happens between only two countries. Manufacturers in one country produce products and they export them to consumers in other countries, and it feels like the manufacturing countries win and the importing countries lose.Well, reality's a little bit different. I'm a supply chain professional, and I live and work in Mexico. And I work in the middle of a highly connected network of manufacturers all collaborating from around the world to produce many of the products we use today. What I see from my front-row seat in Mexico City actually looks more like this. And this is a more accurate depiction of what trade really looks like. I've had the pleasure of being able to see how many different products are manufactured, from golf clubs to laptop computers to internet servers, automobiles and even airplanes. And believe me, none of it happens in a straight line.Let me give you an example. A few months ago, I was touring the manufacturing plant of a multinational aerospace company in Querétaro, Mexico, and the VP of logistics points out a completed tail assembly. It turns out the tail assemblies are assembled from panels that are manufactured in France, and they're assembled in Mexico using components imported from the US. When those tail assemblies are done, they're exported via truck to Canada to their primary assembly plant where they come together with thousands of other parts, like the wings and the seats and the little shades over the little windows, all coming in to become a part of a new airplane. Think about it. These new airplanes, before they even take their first flight, they have more stamps in their passports than Angelina Jolie.Now, this approach to processing goes on all around the world to manufacture many of the products we use every day, from skin cream to airplanes. When you go home tonight, take a look in your house. You might be surprised to find a label that looks like this one: ""Manufactured in the USA from US and foreign parts.""Economist Michael Porter described what's going on here best. Many decades ago, he said that it's most beneficial for a country to focus on producing the products it can produce most efficiently and trading for the rest. So what he's talking about here is shared production, and efficiency is the name of the game. You've probably seen an example of this at home or at work.Let's take a look at an example. Think about how your house was built or your kitchen renovated. Typically, there's a general contractor who is responsible for coordinating the efforts of all the different contractors: an architect to draw the plans, an earth-moving company to dig the foundation, a plumber, a carpenter and so on. So why doesn't the general contractor pick just one company to do all the work, like, say, the architect? Because this is silly. The general contractor selects experts because it takes years to learn and master how to do each of the tasks it takes to build a house or renovate a kitchen, some of them requiring special training. Think about it: Would you want your architect to install your toilet? Of course not.So let's apply this process to the corporate world. Companies today focus on manufacturing what they produce best and most efficiently, and they trade for everything else. So this means they rely on a global, interconnected, interdependent network of manufacturers to produce these products. In fact, that network is so interconnected it's almost impossible to dismantle and produce products in just one country.Let's take a look at the interconnected web we saw a few moments ago, and let's focus on just one strand between the US and Mexico. The Wilson Institute says that shared production represents 40 percent of the half a trillion dollars in trade between the US and Mexico. That's about 200 billion dollars, or the same as the GDP for Portugal. So let's just imagine that the US decides to impose a 20 percent border tax on all imports from Mexico. OK, fine. But do you think Mexico is just going to stand by and let that happen? No. No way. So in retaliation, they impose a similar tax on all goods being imported from the US, and a little game of tit-for-tat ensues, and 20 percent — just imagine that 20 percent duties are added to every good, product, product component crossing back and forth across the border, and you could be looking at more than a 40 percent increase in duties, or 80 billion dollars. Now, don't kid yourself, these costs are going to be passed along to you and to me. Now, let's think about what impact that might have on some of the products, or the prices of the products, that we buy every day. So if a 30 percent increase in duties were actually passed along, we would be looking at some pretty important increases in prices. A Lincoln MKZ would go from 37,000 dollars to 48,000. And the price of a Sharp 60-inch HDTV would go from 898 dollars to 1,167 dollars. And the price of a 16-ounce jar of CVS skin moisturizer would go from 13 dollars to 17 dollars. Now, remember, this is only looking at one strand of the production chain between the US and Mexico, so multiply this out across all of the strands. The impact could be considerable.Now, just think about this: even if we were able to dismantle this network and produce products in just one country, which by the way is easier said than done, we would still only be saving or protecting one out of 10 lost manufacturing jobs. That's right, because remember, most of those jobs, 87 percent, were lost due to improvements in our own productivity. And unfortunately, those jobs, they're gone for good. So the real question is, does it make sense for us to drive up prices to the point where many of us can't afford the basic goods we use every day for the purpose of saving a job that might be eliminated in a couple of years anyway?The reality is that shared production allows us to manufacture higher quality products at lower costs. It's that simple. It allows us to get more out of the limited resources and expertise we have and at the same time benefit from lower prices. It's really important to remember that for shared production to be effective, it relies on efficient cross-border movement of raw materials, components and finished products.So remember this: the next time you're hearing somebody try to sell you on the idea that protectionism is a good deal, it's just not.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/augie_picado_the_real_reason_manufacturing_jobs_are_disappearing
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"As you heard, I'm a physicist. And I think the way we talk about physics needs a little modification. I am from just down the road here; I don't live here anymore. But coming from round here means that I have a northern nana, my mum's mom. And Nana is very bright; she hasn't had much formal education, but she's sharp. And when I was a second-year undergraduate studying physics at Cambridge, I remember spending an afternoon at Nana's house in Urmston studying quantum mechanics. And I had these folders open in front of me with this, you know, hieroglyphics — let's be honest. And Nana came along, and she looked at this folder, and she said, ""What's that?"" I said, ""It's quantum mechanics, Nana."" And I tried to explain something about what was on the page. It was to do with the nucleus and Einstein A and B coefficients. And Nana looked very impressed. And then she said, ""Oh. What can you do when you know that?""(Laughter)""Don't know, ma'am.""(Laughter)I think I said something about computers, because it was all I could think of at the time.But you can broaden that question out, because it's a very good question — ""What can you do when you know that?"" when ""that"" is physics? And I've come to realize that when we talk about physics in society and our sort of image of it, we don't include the things that we can do when we know that. Our perception of what physics is needs a bit of a shift. Not only does it need a bit of a shift, but sharing this different perspective matters for our society, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a physicist and I'm biased and I think we're the most important people in the world. Honest.So, the image of physics — we've got an image problem, let's be honest — it hasn't moved on much from this. This is a very famous photograph that's from the Solvay Conference in 1927. This is when the great minds of physics were grappling with the nature of determinism and what it means only to have a probability that a particle might be somewhere, and whether any of it was real. And it was all very difficult. And you'll notice they're all very stern-looking men in suits. Marie Curie — I keep maybe saying, ""Marie Antoinette,"" which would be a turn-up for the books — Marie Curie, third from the left on the bottom there, she was allowed in, but had to dress like everybody else.(Laughter)So, this is what physics is like — there's all these kinds of hieroglyphics, these are to do with waves and particles. That is an artist's impression of two black holes colliding, which makes it look worth watching, to be honest. I'm glad I didn't have to write the risk assessment for whatever was going on there. The point is: this is the image of physics, right? It's weird and difficult, done by slightly strange people dressed in a slightly strange way. It's inaccessible, it's somewhere else and fundamentally, why should I care?And the problem with that is that I'm a physicist, and I study this. This — this is my job, right? I study the interface between the atmosphere and the ocean. The atmosphere is massive, the ocean is massive, and the thin layer that joins them together is really important, because that's where things go from one huge reservoir to the other. You can see that the sea surface — that was me who took this video — the average height of those waves by the way, was 10 meters. So this is definitely physics happening here — there's lots of things — this is definitely physics. And yet it's not included in our cultural perception of physics, and that bothers me.So what is included in our cultural perception of physics? Because I'm a physicist, there has to be a graph, right? That's allowed. We've got time along the bottom here, from very fast things there, to things that take a long time over here. Small things at the bottom, big things up there. So, our current cultural image of physics looks like this. There's quantum mechanics down in that corner, it's very small, it's very weird, it happens very quickly, and it's a long way down in the general ... on the scale of anything that matters for everyday life. And then there's cosmology, which is up there; very large, very far away, also very weird. And if you go to some places like black holes in the beginning of the universe, we know that these are frontiers in physics, right? There's lots of work being done to discover new physics in these places.But the thing is, you will notice there's a very large gap in the middle. And in that gap, there are many things. There are planets and toasts and volcanoes and clouds and clarinets and bubbles and dolphins and all sorts of things that make up our everyday life. And these are also run by physics, you'd be surprised — there is physics in the middle, it's just that nobody talks about it. And the thing about all of these is that they all run on a relatively small number of physical laws, things like Newton's laws of motion, thermodynamics, some rotational dynamics. The physics in the middle applies over a huge range, from very, very small things to very, very big things. You have to try very hard to get outside of this. And there is also a frontier in research physics here, it's just that nobody talks about it. This is the world of the complex. When these laws work together, they bring about the beautiful, messy, complex world we live in.Fundamentally, this is the bit that really matters to me on an everyday basis. And this is the bit that we don't talk about. There's plenty of physics research going on here. But because it doesn't involve pointing at stars, people for some reason think it's not that. Now, the cool thing about this is that there are so many things in this middle bit, all following the same physical laws, that we can see those laws at work almost all the time around us.I've got a little video here. So the game is, one of these eggs is raw and one of them has been boiled. I want you to tell me which one is which. Which one's raw?(Audience responds)The one on the left — yes! And even though you might not have tried that, you all knew. The reason for that is, you set them spinning, and when you stop the cooked egg, the one that's completely solid, you stop the entire egg. When you stop the other one, you only stop the shell; the liquid inside is still rotating because nothing's made it stop. And then it pushes the shell round again, so the egg starts to rotate again. This is brilliant, right? It's a demonstration of something in physics that we call the law of conservation of angular momentum, which basically says that if you set something spinning about a fixed axis, that it will keep spinning unless you do something to stop it. And that's really fundamental in how the universe works. And it's not just eggs that it applies to, although it's really useful if you're the sort of person — and apparently, these people do exist — who will boil eggs and then put them back in the fridge. Who does that? Don't admit to it — it's OK. We won't judge you. But it's also got much broader applicabilities.This is the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which is a very tiny part of the sky. Hubble has been floating in free space for 25 years, not touching anything. And yet it can point to a tiny region of sky. For 11 and a half days, it did it in sections, accurately enough to take amazing images like this. So the question is: How does something that is not touching anything know where it is? The answer is that right in the middle of it, it has something that, to my great disappointment, isn't a raw egg, but basically does the same job. It's got gyroscopes which are spinning, and because of the law of conservation of angular momentum, they keep spinning with the same axis, indefinitely. Hubble kind of rotates around them, and so it can orient itself. So the same little physical law we can play with in the kitchen and use, also explains what makes possible some of the most advanced technology of our time. So this is the fun bit of physics, that you learn these patterns and then you can apply them again and again and again. And it's really rewarding when you spot them in new places. This is the fun of physics.I have shown that egg video to an audience full of businesspeople once and they were all dressed up very smartly and trying to impress their bosses. And I was running out of time, so I showed the egg video and then said, ""Well, you can work it out, and ask me afterwards to check."" Then I left the stage. And I had, literally, middle-aged grown men tugging on my sleeve afterwards, saying, ""Is it this? Is it this?"" And when I said, ""Yes."" They went, ""Yes!""(Laughter)The joy that you get from spotting these patterns doesn't go away when you're an adult.And that's really important, because physics is all about patterns, and a small number of patterns give you access to almost all of the physics in our everyday world. The thing that's best about this is it involves playing with toys. Things like the egg shouldn't be dismissed as the mundane little things that we just give the kids to play with on a Saturday afternoon to keep them quiet. This is the stuff that actually really matters, because this is the laws of the universe and it applies to eggs and toast falling butter-side down and all sorts of other things, just as much as it applies to modern technology and anything else that's going on in the world. So I think we should play with these patterns.Basically, there are a small number of concepts that you can become familiar with using things in your kitchen, that are really useful for life in the outside world. If you want to learn about thermodynamics, a duck is a good place to start, for example, why their feet don't get cold. Once you've got a bit of thermodynamics with the duck, you can also explain fridges. Magnets that you can play with in your kitchen get you to wind turbines and modern energy generation. Raisins in [fizzy] lemonade, which is always a good thing to play with. If you're at a boring party, fish some raisins out of the bar snacks, put them in some lemonade. It's got three consequences. First thing is, it's quite good to watch; try it. Secondly, it sends the boring people away. Thirdly, it brings the interesting people to you. You win on all fronts. And then there's spin and gas laws and viscosity. There's these little patterns, and they're right around us everywhere. And it's fundamentally democratic, right? Everybody has access to the same physics; you don't need a big, posh lab.When I wrote the book, I had the chapter on spin. I had written a bit about toast falling butter-side down. I gave the chapter to a friend of mine who's not a scientist, for him to read and tell me what he thought, and he took the chapter away. He was working overseas. I got this text message back from him a couple of weeks later, and it said, ""I'm at breakfast in a posh hotel in Switzerland, and I really want to push toast off the table, because I don't believe what you wrote."" And that was the good bit — he doesn't have to. He can push the toast off the table and try it for himself.And so there's two important things to know about science: the fundamental laws we've learned through experience and experimentation, work. The day we drop an apple and it goes up, then we'll have a debate about gravity. Up to that point, we basically know how gravity works, and we can learn the framework. Then there's the process of experimentation: having confidence in things, trying things out, critical thinking — how we move science forward — and you can learn both of those things by playing with toys in the everyday world.And it's really important, because there's all this talk about technology, we've heard talks about quantum computing and all these mysterious, far-off things. But fundamentally, we still live in bodies that are about this size, we still walk about, sit on chairs that are about this size, we still live in the physical world. And being familiar with these concepts means we're not helpless. And I think it's really important that we're not helpless, that society feels it can look at things, because this isn't about knowing all the answers. It's about having the framework so you can ask the right questions. And by playing with these fundamental little things in everyday life, we gain the confidence to ask the right questions.So, there's a bigger thing. In answer to Nana's question about what can you do when you know that — because there's lots of stuff in the everyday world that you can do when you know that, especially if you've got eggs in the fridge — there's a much deeper answer. And so there's all the fun and the curiosity that you could have playing with toys. By the way — why should kids have all the fun, right? All of us can have fun playing with toys, and we shouldn't be embarrassed about it. You can blame me, it's fine.So when it comes to reasons for studying physics, for example, here is the best reason I can think of: I think that each of us has three life-support systems. We've got our own body, we've got a planet and we've got our civilization. Each of those is an independent life-support system, keeping us alive in its own way. And they all run on the fundamental physical laws that you can learn in the kitchen with eggs and teacups and lemonade, and everything else you can play with. This is the reason, for example, why something like climate change is such a serious problem, because It's two of these life-support systems, our planet and our civilization, kind of butting up against each other; they're in conflict, and we need to negotiate that boundary.And the fundamental physical laws that we can learn that are the way the world around us works, are the tools at the basis of everything; they're the foundation. There's lots of things to know about in life, but knowing the foundations is going to get you a long way. And I think this, if you're not interested in having fun with physics or anything like that — strange, but apparently, these people exist — you surely are interested in keeping yourself alive and in how our life-support systems work. The framework for physics is remarkably constant; it's the same in lots and lots of things that we measure. It's not going to change anytime soon. They might discover some new quantum mechanics, but apples right here are still going to fall down.So, the question is — I get asked sometimes: How do you start? What's the place to start if you're interested in the physical world, in not being helpless, and in finding some toys to play with? Here is my suggestion to you: the place to start is that moment — and adults do this — you're drifting along somewhere, and you spot something and your brain goes, ""Oh, that's weird."" And then your consciousness goes, ""You're an adult. Keep going."" And that's the point — hold that thought — that bit where your brain went, ""Oh, that's a bit odd,"" because there's something there to play with, and it's worth you playing with it, so that's the place to start.But if you don't have any of those little moments on your way home from this event, here are some things to start with. Put raisins in [fizzy] lemonade; highly entertaining. Watch a coffee spill dry. I know that sounds a little bit like watching paint dry, but it does do quite weird things; it's worth watching. I'm an acquired taste at dinner parties if there are teacups around. There are so many things you can do to play with teacups, it's brilliant. The most obvious one is to get a teacup, get a spoon, tap the teacup around the rim and listen, and you will hear something strange. And the other thing is, push your toast off the table because you can, and you'll learn stuff from it. And if you're feeling really ambitious, try and push it off in such a way that it doesn't fall butter-side down, which is possible.The point of all of this is that, first of all, we should all play with toys. We shouldn't be afraid to investigate the physical world for ourselves with the tools around us, because we all have access to them. It matters, because if we want to understand society, if we want to be good citizens, we need to understand the framework on which everything else must be based.Playing with toys is great. Understanding how to keep our life-support systems going is great. But fundamentally, the thing that we need to change in the way that we talk about physics, is we need to understand that physics isn't out there with weird people and strange hieroglyphics for somebody else in a posh lab. Physics is right here; it's for us, and we can all play with it.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/helen_czerski_fun_home_experiments_that_teach_you_physics
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"I'd like for you to take a moment to imagine this with me. You're a little girl of five years old. Sitting in front of a mirror, you ask yourself, ""Do I exist?"" In this space, there is very little context, and so you move into a different one, one filled with people. Surely, now you know you're not a figment of your own imagination. You breathe their air. You see them, so they must see you. And yet, you still can't help but wonder: Do I only exist when people speak to me?Pretty heavy thoughts for a child, right? But through various artworks that reflect upon our society, I came to understand how a young black girl can grow up feeling as if she's not seen, and perhaps she doesn't exist. You see, if young people don't have positive images of themselves and all that remains are negative stereotypes, this affects their self-image. But it also affects the way that the rest of society treats them.I discovered this having lived in Cape Town for about five years at the time. I felt a deep sense of dislocation and invisibility. I couldn't see myself represented. I couldn't see the women who've raised me, the ones who've influenced me, and the ones that have made South Africa what it is today. I decided to do something about it.What do you think when you see this? If you were a black girl, how would it make you feel? Walking down the street, what does the city you live in say to you? What symbols are present? Which histories are celebrated? And on the other hand, which ones are omitted?You see, public spaces are hardly ever as neutral as they may seem. I discovered this when I made this performance in 2013 on Heritage Day. Cape Town is teeming with masculine architecture, monuments and statues, such as Louis Botha in that photograph. This overt presence of white colonial and Afrikaner nationalist men not only echoes a social, gender and racial divide, but it also continues to affect the way that women — and the way, particularly, black women — see themselves in relation to dominant male figures in public spaces. For this reason, among others, I don't believe that we need statues. The preservation of history and the act of remembering can be achieved in more memorable and effective ways.As part of a year-long public holiday series, I use performance art as a form of social commentary to draw people's attention to certain issues, as well as addressing the absence of the black female body in memorialized public spaces, especially on public holidays. Women's Day was coming up. I looked at what the day means — the Women's March to the union buildings in 1956, petitioning against the pass laws. Juxtaposed with the hypocrisy of how women are treated, especially in public spaces today, I decided to do something about it.Headline:[Women in miniskirt attacked at taxi rank]How do I comment on such polar opposites? In the guise of my great-grandmother, I performed bare-breasted, close to the taxi rank in KwaLanga. This space is also called Freedom Square, where women were a part of demonstrations against apartheid laws. I was not comfortable with women being seen as only victims in society. You might wonder how people reacted to this.(Video) Woman: (Cheering)Woman 2 (offscreen): Yes!Sethembile Msezane: Pretty cool, huh?(Applause)So I realized that through my performances, I've been able to make regular people reflect upon their society, looking at the past as well as the current democracy.(Video) Man (offscreen): She's been there since three o'clock.Man 2 (offscreen): Just before three. About an hour still?Man 1: Yeah. It's just a really hot day.Man 1: It's very interesting. It's very powerful. I think it's cool. I think a lot of people are quick to join a group that's a movement towards something, but not many people are ready to do something as an individual.Man 2: So it's the individual versus the collective.Man 1: Yeah. So I think her pushing her own individual message in performance ... it's powerful. Yeah, I think it's quite powerful that she's doing it on her own. I'd be interested to know why she's using hair extensions as wings, or whatever those things are meant to be. They are wings, yes?Woman 3: With her standing there right now, I think it's just my interpretation that we are bringing the statue down and bringing up something that's supposed to represent African pride, I think. Or something like that. Something should stand while Rhodes falls, I think that's what it's saying. Yeah. Yes. Thank you.Man 3: What is behind me represents the African culture. We can't have the colonialist law, so we need to remove all these colonial statues. We have have our own statues now, our African leaders — Bhambatha, Moshoeshoe, Kwame Nkrumah — all those who paid their lives for our liberation. We can't continue in the 21st century, and after 21 years of democracy, have the colonizers in our own country. They belong somewhere. Maybe in a museum; not here. I mean learning institutions, places where young people, young minds are being shaped. So we cannot continue to have Louis Botha, Rhodes, all these people, because they're representing the colonialism.(Applause)Sethembile Msezane: On April 9, 2015, the Cecil John Rhodes statue was scheduled to be removed after a month of debates for and against its removal by various stakeholders. This caused a widespread interest in statues in South Africa. Opinions varied, but the media focused on problematizing the removal of statues. On that — well, that year, I had just begun my master's at the University of Cape Town. During the time of the debate of the statue, I had been having reoccurring dreams about a bird. And so I started conjuring her mentally, spiritually and through dress. On that day, I happened to be having a meeting with my supervisors, and they told me that the statue was going to fall on that day. I told them that I'd explain later, but we had to postpone the meeting because I was going to perform her as the statue came down.Her name was Chapungu. She was a soapstone bird that was looted from Great Zimbabwe in the late 1800s, and is still currently housed in Cecil John Rhodes's estate in Cape Town. On that day, I embodied her existence using my body, while standing in the blazing sun for nearly four hours. As the time came, the crane came alive. The people did, too — shouting, screaming, clenching their fists and taking pictures of the moment on their phones and cameras. Chapungu's wings, along with the crane, rose to declare the fall of Cecil John Rhodes.(Applause)Euphoria filled the air as he became absent from his base, while she remained still, very present, half an hour after his removal.Twenty-three years after apartheid, a new generation of radicals has arisen in South Africa. The story of Chapungu and Rhodes in the same space and time asks important questions related to gender, power, self-representation, history making and repatriation. From then on, I realized that my spiritual beliefs and dreams texture my material reality. But for me, Chapungu's story felt incomplete. This soapstone bird, a spiritual medium and messenger of God and the ancestors, needed me to continue her story. And so I dabbled in the dream space a little bit more, and this is how ""Falling"" was born.[A film by Sethembile Msezane](Video) (A capella singing)[FALLING](Applause)In the film, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Germany share a common story about the soapstone birds that were looted from Great Zimbabwe. After Zimbabwe gained its independence, all the birds except for one were returned to the monument. ""Falling"" explores the mythological belief that there will be unrest until the final bird is returned.Through my work, I have realized a lot about the world around me: how we move through spaces, who we choose to celebrate and who we remember. Now I look in the mirror and not only see an image of myself, but of the women who have made me who I am today. I stand tall in my work, celebrating women's histories, in the hope that perhaps one day, no little black girl has to ever feel like she doesn't exist.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sethembile_msezane_living_sculptures_that_stand_for_history_s_truths
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"Today I'm here, actually, to pose you a question. What is life? It has been really puzzling me for more than 25 years, and will probably continue doing so for the next 25 years. This is the thesis I did when I was still in undergraduate school. While my colleagues still treated computers as big calculators, I started to teach computers to learn. I built digital lady beetles and tried to learn from real lady beetles, just to do one thing: search for food. And after very simple neural network — genetic algorithms and so on — look at the pattern. They're almost identical to real life. A very striking learning experience for a twenty-year-old.Life is a learning program. When you look at all of this wonderful world, every species has its own learning program. The learning program is genome, and the code of that program is DNA. The different genomes of each species represent different survival strategies. They represent hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The interaction between every species' ancestor and the environment.I was really fascinated about the world, about the DNA, about, you know, the language of life, the program of learning. So I decided to co-found the institute to read them. I read many of them. We probably read more than half of the prior animal genomes in the world. I mean, up to date.We did learn a lot. We did sequence, also, one species many, many times ... human genome. We sequenced the first Asian. I sequenced it myself many, many times, just to take advantage of that platform. Look at all those repeating base pairs: ATCG. You don't understand anything there. But look at that one base pair. Those five letters, the AGGAA. These five SNPs represent a very specific haplotype in the Tibetan population around the gene called EPAS1. That gene has been proved — it's highly selective — it's the most significant signature of positive selection of Tibetans for the higher altitude adaptation. You know what? These five SNPs were the result of integration of Denisovans, or Denisovan-like individuals into humans.This is the reason why we need to read those genomes. To understand history, to understand what kind of learning process the genome has been through for the millions of years. By reading a genome, it can give you a lot of information — tells you the bugs in the genome — I mean, birth defects, monogenetic disorders. Reading a drop of blood could tell you why you got a fever, or it tells you which medicine and dosage needs to be used when you're sick, especially for cancer.A lot of things could be studied, but look at that: 30 years ago, we were still poor in China. Only .67 percent of the Chinese adult population had diabetes. Look at now: 11 percent. Genetics cannot change over 30 years — only one generation. It must be something different. Diet? The environment? Lifestyle? Even identical twins could develop totally differently. It could be one becomes very obese, the other is not. One develops a cancer and the other does not. Not mentioning living in a very stressed environment.I moved to Shenzhen 10 years ago ... for some reason, people may know. If the gene's under stress, it behaves totally differently. Life is a journey. A gene is just a starting point, not the end. You have this statistical risk of certain diseases when you are born. But every day you make different choices, and those choices will increase or decrease the risk of certain diseases. But do you know where you are on the curve? What's the past curve look like? What kind of decisions are you facing every day? And what kind of decision is the right one to make your own right curve over your life journey? What's that?The only thing you cannot change, you cannot reverse back, is time. Probably not yet; maybe in the future.(Laughter)Well, you cannot change the decision you've made, but can we do something there? Can we actually try to run multiple options on me, and try to predict right on the consequence, and be able to make the right choice? After all, we are our choices.These lady beetles came to me afterwards. 25 years ago, I made the digital lady beetles to try to simulate real lady beetles. Can I make a digital me ... to simulate me? I understand the neural network could become much more sophisticated and complicated there. Can I make that one, and try to run multiple options on that digital me — to compute that? Then I could live in different universes, in parallel, at the same time. Then I would choose whatever is good for me.I probably have the most comprehensive digital me on the planet. I've spent a lot of dollars on me, on myself. And the digital me told me I have a genetic risk of gout by all of those things there. You need different technology to do that. You need the proteins, genes, you need metabolized antibodies, you need to screen all your body about the bacterias and viruses covering you, or in you. You need to have all the smart devices there — smart cars, smart house, smart tables, smart watch, smart phone to track all of your activities there. The environment is important — everything's important — and don't forget the smart toilet.(Laughter)It's such a waste, right? Every day, so much invaluable information just has been flushed into the water. And you need them. You need to measure all of them. You need to be able to measure everything around you and compute them.And the digital me told me I have a genetic defect. I have a very high risk of gout. I don't feel anything now, I'm still healthy. But look at my uric acid level. It's double the normal range. And the digital me searched all the medicine books, and it tells me, ""OK, you could drink burdock tea"" — I cannot even pronounce it right —(Laughter)That is from old Chinese wisdom. And I drank that tea for three months. My uric acid has now gone back to normal. I mean, it worked for me.All those thousands of years of wisdom worked for me. I was lucky. But I'm probably not lucky for you. All of this existing knowledge in the world cannot possibly be efficient enough or personalized enough for yourself. The only way to make that digital me work ... is to learn from yourself. You have to ask a lot of questions about yourself: ""What if?"" —I'm being jet-lagged now here. You don't probably see it, but I do. What if I eat less? When I took metformin, supposedly to live longer? What if I climb Mt. Everest? It's not that easy. Or run a marathon? What if I drink a bottle of mao-tai, which is a Chinese liquor, and I get really drunk? I was doing a video rehearsal last time with the folks here, when I was drunk, and I totally delivered a different speech.(Laughter)What if I work less, right? I have been less stressed, right? So that probably never happened to me, I was really stressed every day, but I hope I could be less stressed. These early studies told us, even with the same banana, we have totally different glucose-level reactions over different individuals.How about me? What is the right breakfast for me? I need to do two weeks of controlled experiments, of testing all kinds of different food ingredients on me, and check my body's reaction. And I don't know the precise nutrition for me, for myself.Then I wanted to search all the Chinese old wisdom about how I can live longer, and healthier. I did it. Some of them are really unachievable. I did this once last October, by not eating for seven days. I did a fast for seven days with six partners of mine. Look at those people. One smile. You know why he smiled? He cheated.(Laughter)He drank one cup of coffee at night, and we caught it from the data.(Laughter)We measured everything from the data.We were able to track them, and we could really see — for example, my immune system, just to give you a little hint there. My immune system changed dramatically over 24 hours there. And my antibody regulates my proteins for that dramatic change. And everybody was doing that. Even if we're essentially totally different at the very beginning. And that probably will be an interesting treatment in the future for cancer and things like that.It becomes very, very interesting. But something you probably don't want to try, like drinking fecal water from a healthier individual, which will make you feel healthier. This is from old Chinese wisdom. Look at that, right? Like 1,700 years ago, it's already there, in the book. But I still hate the smell.(Laughter)I want to find out the true way to do it, maybe find a combination of cocktails of bacterias and drink it, it probably will make me better. So I'm trying to do that.Even though I'm trying this hard, it's so difficult to test out all possible conditions. It's not possible to do all kinds of experiments at all ... but we do have seven billion learning programs on this planet. Seven billion. And every program is running in different conditions and doing different experiments. Can we all measure them?Seven years ago, I wrote an essay in ""Science"" to celebrate the human genome's 10-year anniversary. I said, ""Sequence yourself, for one and for all."" But now I'm going to say, ""Digitalize yourself for one and for all."" When we make this digital me into a digital we, when we try to form an internet of life, when people can learn from each other, when people can learn from their experience, their data, when people can really form a digital me by themselves and we learn from it, the digital we will be totally different with a digital me.But it can only come from the digital me. And this is what I try to propose here. Join me — become we, and everybody should build up their own digital me, because only by that will you learn more about you, about me, about us ... about the question I just posed at the very beginning: ""What is life?""Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: One quick question for you. I mean, the work is amazing. I suspect one question people have is, as we look forward to these amazing technical possibilities of personalized medicine, in the near-term it feels like they're only going to be affordable for a few people, right? It costs many dollars to do all the sequencing and so forth. Is this going to lead to a kind of, you know, increasing inequality? Or do you have this vision that the knowledge that you get from the pioneers can actually be pretty quickly disseminated to help a broader set of recipients?Jun Wang: Well, good question. I'll tell you that seven years ago, when I co-founded BGI, and served as the CEO of the company there, the only goal there for me to do was to drive the sequencing cost down. It started from 100 million dollars per human genome. Now, it's a couple hundred dollars for a human genome. The only reason to do it is to get more people to benefit from it. So for the digital me, it's the same thing. Now, you probably need, you know, one million dollars to digitize a person. I think it has to be 100 dollars. It has to be free for many of those people that urgently need that.So this is our goal. And it seems that with all this merging of the technology, I'm thinking that in the very near future, let's say three to five years, it will come to reality. And this is the whole idea of why I founded iCarbonX, my second company. It's really trying to get the cost down to a level where every individual could have the benefit.CA: All right, so the dream is not elite health services for few, it's to really try and actually make overall health care much more cost effective —JW: But we started from some early adopters, people believing ideas and so on, but eventually, it will become everybody's benefit.CA: Well, Jun, I think it's got to be true to say you're one of the most amazing scientific minds on the planet, and it's an honor to have you.JW: Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/jun_wang_how_digital_dna_could_help_you_make_better_health_choices
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"What stands between Africa's current prostrate condition and a future of prosperity and abundance for its long-suffering populations? One word: knowledge. If Africa is to become a continent that offers the best life for humans, it must become a knowledge society immediately. This is what I have called ""Africa's knowledge imperative.""Our universities must reduce emphasis on producing manpower for running our civil society, our economy and our political institutions. They should be dedicated mainly to knowledge production. What sense is there in producing civil engineers who are not supported by soil scientists and geologists, who make it their business to create knowledge about our soil and our rocks? What use is there in producing lawyers without juries who produce knowledge of the underlying philosophical foundations of the legal system? We must seek knowledge. We must approach the matter of knowledge with a maniacal commitment, without let or hindrance.Though we must seek knowledge to solve problems we know of, we must also seek knowledge when there is no problem in view — especially when there is no problem in view. We must seek to know as much of what there is to know of all things, limited only by the insufficiency of our human nature, and not only when the need arises. Those who do not seek knowledge when it is not needed will not have it when they must have it.The biggest crisis in Africa today is the crisis of knowledge: how to produce it, how to manage it, and how to deploy it effectively. For instance, Africa does not have a water crisis. It has a knowledge crisis regarding its water, where and what types it is, how it can be tapped and made available where and when needed to all and sundry. How does a continent that is home to some of the largest bodies of water in the world — the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, the Zambezi and the Orange Rivers — be said to have a water crisis, including in countries where those rivers are? And that is only surface water.While we wrongly dissipate our energies fighting the wrong crises, all those who invest in knowledge about us are busy figuring out how to pipe water from Libya's aquifers to quench Europe's thirst. Such is our knowledge of our water resources that many of our countries have given up on making potable water a routine presence in the lives of Africans, rich or poor, high and low, rural and urban. We eagerly accept what the merchants of misery and the global African Studies safari professoriat and their aid-addled, autonomy-fearing African minions in government, universities and civil society tell us regarding how nature has been to stinting towards Africa when it comes to the distribution of water resources in the world. We are content to run our cities and rural dwellings alike on boreholes. How does one run metropolises on boreholes and wells?Does Africa have a food crisis? Again, the answer is no. It is yet another knowledge crisis regarding Africa's agricultural resources, what and where they are, and how they can be best managed to make Africans live more lives that are worth living. Otherwise, how does one explain the fact that geography puts the source of the River Nile in Ethiopia, and its people cannot have water for their lives? And the same geography puts California in the desert, but it is a breadbasket.The difference, obviously, is not geography. It is knowledge. Colorado's aquifers grow California's pistachios. Why can't Libya's aquifers grow sorghum in northern Nigeria? Why does Nigeria not aspire to feed the world, not just itself? If Africa's land is so poor, as we are often told, why are outsiders, from the United Arab Emirates all the way to South Korea, buying up vast acreages of our land, to grow food, no less, to feed their people in lands that are truly more geographically stinting? The new landowners are not planning to import new topsoil to make their African acquisitions more arable. Again, a singular instance of knowledge deficiency.In the 19th century, our predecessors, just years removed from the ravages of slavery and the slave trade, were exploring the Niger and Congo Rivers with a view to turning Africa's resources to the advantage of its people and to the rest of humanity, and their 20th-century successors were dreaming of harnessing the powers of the River Congo to light up the whole continent. Now only buccaneer capitalists from Europe are scheming of doing the same, but for exports to Europe and South Africa. And they are even suggesting that Congolese may not benefit from this scheme, because, according to them, Congolese communities are too small to make providing them with electricity a viable concern.The solution? Africa must become a knowledge society, a defining characteristic of the modern age. We neither are, nor are we on the path to becoming, a knowledge society.Things have not always been this way when it comes to knowledge production and Africa. In antiquity, the world went to Africa for intellectual enrichment. There were celebrated centers of learning, attracting questers from all parts of the then-known world, seeking knowledge about that world. What happened then has implications for our present. For example, how Roman Africa managed the relationship between settlers and natives between the second and fourth centuries of our era might have something to teach us when it comes to confronting not-too-dissimilar problems at the present time. But how many classics departments do we have in our universities? Because we do not invest in knowledge, people come to Africa now not as a place of intellectual enrichment, but as a place where they sate their thirst for exotica.Yet for the last half-millennium, Africa has been hemorrhaging and exporting knowledge to the rest of the world. Regardless of the popular description of it as a trade in bodies, the European trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery was one of the most radical and longest programs of African brains export in history. American slave owners may have pretended that Africans were mere brutes, beasts of burden, almost as inert and dumb as other farm implements they classified them with in their ledgers. And that's what they did.The enslaved Africans, on the other hand, knew their were embodiments of knowledge. They were smiths, they were poets, they were political counselors, they were princes and princesses, they were mythologists, they were herbologists, they were chefs. The list is endless. They, to take a single example, brought the knowledge of rice cultivation to the American South. They created some of the most original civilizational elements for which the United States is now celebrated. They deployed their knowledge, for the most part, without compensation.For the last half-millennium, beginning with the slave trade, Africa has been exporting brains while simultaneously breaking the chains of knowledge translation on the continent itself, with dire consequences for the systems of knowledge production in Africa. Successive generations are cut off from the intellectual production of their predecessors. We keep producing for external markets while beggaring our own internal needs. At present, much of the best knowledge about Africa is neither produced nor housed there, even when it is produced by Africans. Because we are dominated by immediate needs and relevant solutions when it comes to what we should know, we are happy to hand over to others the responsibility to produce knowledge, including knowledge about, of and for us, and to do so far away from us. We are ever eager to consume knowledge and have but a mere portion of it without any anxiety about ownership and location. African universities are now all too content to have e-connections with libraries elsewhere, having given up ambitions on building libraries to which the world would come for intellectual edification. Control over who decides what should be stocked on our shelves and how access to collections should be determined are made to rest on our trust in our partners' good faith that they will not abandon us down the road.This must change. Africa must become a place of knowledge again. Knowledge production actually expands the economy. Take archaeological digs, for instance, and their impact on tourism. Our desires to unearth our antiquity, especially those remote times of which we have no written records, requires investment in archaeology and related disciplines, e.g., paleoanthropology. Yet, although it is our past we seek to know, by sheer serendipity, archaeology may shed light on the global human experience and yield economic payoffs that were no part of the original reasons for digging.We must find a way to make knowledge and its production sexy and rewarding; rewarding, not in the crass sense of moneymaking but in terms of making it worthwhile to indulge in the pursuit of knowledge, support the existence of knowledge-producing groups and intellectuals, ensuring that the continent becomes the immediate locus of knowledge production, distribution and consumption, and that instead of having its depositories beyond Africa's boundaries, people once more come from the rest of the world, even if in virtual space, to learn from us. All this we do as custodians on behalf of common humanity.Creating a knowledge society in Africa, for me, would be one way to celebrate and simultaneously enhance diversity by infinitely enriching it with material and additional artifacts — artifacts that we furnish by our strivings in the knowledge field.Thank you very much.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/oluf_mi_taiwo_why_africa_must_become_a_center_of_knowledge_again
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"So, Ma was trying to explain something to me about Grandma and when they grew up, but I couldn't pay attention to her because I was five years old, and I was petrified. I had just seen The Green Lady. Now, about a week earlier, I'd watched that movie ""Godzilla,"" the one about that huge lizard-like beast storming a major city, and the thought of a green monster coming for me was stuck in my mind. And yet there I was, at the tip of Lower Manhattan with my mom, just staring at her: her horns, her muscles — all of it just frightened me. And I didn't know whether she was a monster or a hero. So I decided to consult the Google of the day — ""Ma! Ma!""(Laughter)My mother explained that The Green Lady is actually the Statue of Liberty and that she was waving immigrants in. Now, the part of her explanation that really messed with my young head was the fact that, according to Ma, long before us, The Green Lady was actually brown, brown like me, and that she changed colors over the years, much like America. Now, the part that really is intriguing about this is that when she changed colors, she made me think about myself. It all made sense to me, because as a first-generation American, I was surrounded by immigrants. In fact, within my immediate social circle of the people who support me, who enrich my life, at least two are foreign-born. My life as a US citizen is in many ways shaped by newcomers, and chances are, so is yours.There are more than 40 million immigrants in the USA. According to census data, a quarter of the nation's children have at least one foreign-born parent. I know all these statistics because I study global migration patterns. I'm a journalist, and for the last few years, I've been documenting the lives of US citizens who've lost people to deportation. And the numbers are enormous. From 2008 to 2016, more than three million people were ""ordered removed"" — that's the technical term for being deported. There is an economic, a political, a psychological and an emotional cost to those deportations — the moments when these circles are broken.I once asked a US soldier, ""Why did you volunteer to fight this war?""And she told me, ""Because I'm proud to defend my country.""But I pressed to know — ""Really, when you're on base, and you hear bombs exploding in the distance, and you see soldiers coming back who are gravely injured, in that moment, when you know you could be next, what does 'my country' mean?""She looked at me. ""My country is my wife, my family, my friends, my soldiers."" What she was telling me is that ""my country"" is a collection of these strong relationships; these social circles.When the social circles are weakened, a country itself is weaker. We're missing a crucial aspect in the debate about immigration policy. Rather than focusing on individuals, we should focus on the circles around them, because these are the people who are left behind: the voters, the taxpayers, the ones who are suffering that loss. And it's not just the children of the deported who are impacted. You have brothers and sisters who are separated by borders. You have classmates, teachers, law enforcement officers, technologists, scientists, doctors, who are all scrambling to make sense of new realities when their social circles are broken. These are the real lives behind all these statistics that dominate discussions about immigration policy. But we don't often think about them. And I'm trying to change that.Here's just one of the real-life stories that I've collected. And it still haunts me. I met Ramon and his son in 2016, the same year both of them were being ordered out of the country. Ramon was being deported to Latin America, while his son, who was a sergeant in the US military, was being deployed. Deported ... deployed. If you just look at Ramon's case, it wouldn't be clear how deeply connected to the country he is. But consider his son: a US citizen defending a country that's banished his father. The social circle is what's key here.Here's another example that illustrates those critical bonds. A group of citizens in Philadelphia were concerned about their jobs, because the legal owner of the restaurant where they worked was an undocumented immigrant, and immigration officials had picked him up. They rallied behind him. An immigration lawyer argued he was too important to the local community to be deported. At the hearing, they even submitted restaurant reviews — restaurant reviews! In the end, a judge exercised what's called ""judicial discretion"" and allowed him to stay in the country, but only because they considered the social circle.There are 23 million noncitizens in the USA, according to verifiable federal data. And that doesn't include the undocumented, because numbers for that population are at best complex estimates. Let's just work with what we have. That's 23 million social circles — about 100 million individuals whose lives could be impacted by deportation. And the stress of it all is trickling down through the population. A 2017 poll by UCLA of LA County residents found that 30 percent of citizens in LA County are stressed about deportation, not because they themselves could be removed, but rather, because members of their social circle were at risk.I am not suggesting that no one should ever be deported; don't confuse me with that. But what I am saying is that we need to look at the bigger picture. If you are within the sound of my voice, I want you to close your eyes for a moment and examine your own social circle. Who are your foreign-born? What would it feel like if the circle were broken?Share your story. I'm building a global archive of first-person accounts and linking them with mapping technology, so that we can see exactly where these circles break, because this is not just an American issue. There are a quarter-billion migrants around the world; people living, loving and learning in countries where they were not born. And in my career, in my life, I've been one of them: in China, in Africa, in Europe. And each time I become one of these foreigners — one of these strange-looking guys in a new land — I can't help but think back to that day when I was in Lower Manhattan with my mom all those decades ago, when I was scared, and I had just spotted that green lady. And I guess the question that I keep on thinking about when I see her and all the younger replicas of her that are so obviously brown, and even the paintings that showcase her in the beginning as not quite green — when I look at all of that, the question that my research seeks to answer becomes, to me, the same one that confounded me all those years ago: Is she a monster or a hero?Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/duarte_geraldino_what_we_re_missing_in_the_debate_about_immigration
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"This is a picture of a sunset on Mars taken by NASA's Curiosity rover in 2013. Mars is a very cold planet, flooded with high levels of UV radiation and extremely dry. In fact, Mars is considered to be too dry for life as we know it.I'm an astrobiologist. I try to understand the origin of life on Earth and the possibilities of finding life elsewhere in the universe. People sometimes ask me, how can you be an astrobiologist if you don't have your own spaceship?Well, what I do is that I study life in those environments on Earth that most closely resemble other interesting places in the universe. All life on Earth requires water, so in my case I focus on the intimate relationship between water and life in order to understand if we could find life in a planet as dry as Mars. But since I do not have the 2.5 billion dollars to send my own robot to Mars, I study the most Martian place on Earth, the Atacama Desert.Located in northern Chile, it is the oldest and driest desert on Earth. To give you an idea of how dry it is, consider here in Vancouver it rains over 1,000 millimeters of rain every year. In the Atacama, there are places with no reported rains in the last 400 years.How do I know this? Well, because I was born and raised in the Atacama —(Laughter)So I had a unique advantage when I started studying this desert. So let me tell you guys a few fantastic examples he has found on how life has adapted to live with almost no water at all.One of my first findings was in the entrance of a cave facing the Pacific Ocean. In this place, we reported a new type of microalgae that grew only on top of the spiderwebs that covered the cave entrance. Have you ever seen a spiderweb early in the morning? It's covered with dew, so this microalgae learned that in order to carry photosynthesis in the coast of the driest desert on Earth, they could use the spiderwebs. So here they may access the water from the fogs that regularly cover these areas in the morning.In another cave, we found a different type of microalgae. This one is able to use ocean mist as a source of water, and strikingly lives in the very bottom of a cave, so it has adapted to live with less than 0.1 percent of the amount of light that regular plants need. These type of findings suggest to me that on Mars, we may find even photosynthetic life inside caves. And by the way, that's me.(Laughter)Now, for almost 15 years this region of Yungay, discovered by NASA, was thought to be the driest place of this desert, but I knew that it was not. How? You already know the answer. Because I was born and raised in this desert. So I remembered that I usually see fogs in Yungay, so after setting sensors in a number of places, where I remember never seeing fogs or clouds, I reported four other sites much drier than Yungay, with this one, María Elena South, being the truly driest place on Earth, as dry as Mars, and amazingly, just a 15-minute ride from the small mining town where I was born.Now, in this search, we were trying to actually find the dry limit for life on Earth, a place so dry that nothing was able to survive in it. But even here, well hidden underground, we found a number of different microorganisms, which suggested to me that similarly dry places, like Mars, may be in inhabited. We even have some preliminary evidences that these microorganisms may still be active in the desiccated state, like walking mummies all around us, and that they may be using UV radiation as a source of energy. If confirmed, this would have a huge impact on our definition of life, on how we look for life elsewhere in the universe.Due to its clear skies, by 2020, 60 percent of the biggest telescopes on Earth will be located in the Atacama, and while everyone else will be looking among the stars to answer the question, ""Are we alone?"" I will be looking down to the ground searching for this same answer in my own backyard.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/armando_azua_bustos_the_most_martian_place_on_earth
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"In my early days as a graduate student, I went on a snorkeling trip off the coast of the Bahamas. I'd actually never swum in the ocean before, so it was a bit terrifying. What I remember the most is, as I put my head in the water and I was trying really hard to breathe through the snorkel, this huge group of striped yellow and black fish came straight at me ... and I just froze. And then, as if it had suddenly changed its mind, came towards me and then swerved to the right and went right around me. It was absolutely mesmerizing. Maybe many of you have had this experience. Of course, there's the color and the beauty of it, but there was also just the sheer oneness of it, as if it wasn't hundreds of fish but a single entity with a single collective mind that was making decisions. When I look back, I think that experience really ended up determining what I've worked on for most of my career.I'm a computer scientist, and the field that I work in is artificial intelligence. And a key theme in AI is being able to understand intelligence by creating our own computational systems that display intelligence the way we see it in nature. Now, most popular views of AI, of course, come from science fiction and the movies, and I'm personally a big Star Wars fan. But that tends to be a very human-centric view of intelligence. When you think of a fish school, or when I think of a flock of starlings, that feels like a really different kind of intelligence. For starters, any one fish is just so tiny compared to the sheer size of the collective, so it seems that any one individual would have a really limited and myopic view of what's going on, and intelligence isn't really about the individual but somehow a property of the group itself.Secondly, and the thing that I still find most remarkable, is that we know that there are no leaders supervising this fish school. Instead, this incredible collective mind behavior is emerging purely from the interactions of one fish and another. Somehow, there are these interactions or rules of engagement between neighboring fish that make it all work out.So the question for AI then becomes, what are those rules of engagement that lead to this kind of intelligence, and of course, can we create our own?And that's the primary thing that I work on with my team in my lab. We work on it through theory, looking at abstract rule systems and thinking about the mathematics behind it. We also do it through biology, working closely with experimentalists. But mostly, we do it through robotics, where we try to create our own collective systems that can do the kinds of things that we see in nature, or at least try to.One of our first robotic quests along this line was to create our very own colony of a thousand robots. So very simple robots, but they could be programmed to exhibit collective intelligence, and that's what we were able to do. So this is what a single robot looks like. It's quite small, about the size of a quarter, and you can program how it moves, but it can also wirelessly communicate with other robots, and it can measure distances from them. And so now we can start to program exactly an interaction, a rule of engagement between neighbors. And once we have this system, we can start to program many different kinds of rules of engagement that you would see in nature.So for example, spontaneous synchronization, how audiences are clapping and suddenly start all clapping together, the fireflies flashing together. We can program rules for pattern formation, how cells in a tissue determine what role they're going to take on and set the patterns of our bodies. We can program rules for migration, and in this way, we're really learning from nature's rules.But we can also take it a step further. We can actually take these rules that we've learned from nature and combine them and create entirely new collective behaviors of our very own.So for example, imagine that you had two different kinds of rules. So your first rule is a motion rule where a moving robot can move around other stationary robots. And your second rule is a pattern rule where a robot takes on a color based on its two nearest neighbors. So if I start with a blob of robots in a little pattern seed, it turns out that these two rules are sufficient for the group to be able to self-assemble a simple line pattern. And if I have more complicated pattern rules, and I design error correction rules, we can actually create really, really complicated self assemblies, and here's what that looks like.So here, you're going to see a thousand robots that are working together to self-assemble the letter K. The K is on its side. And the important thing is that no one is in charge. So any single robot is only talking to a small number of robots nearby it, and it's using its motion rule to move around the half-built structure just looking for a place to fit in based on its pattern rules. And even though no robot is doing anything perfectly, the rules are such that we can get the collective to do its goal robustly together. And the illusion becomes almost so perfect, you know — you just start to not even notice that they're individual robots at all, and it becomes a single entity, kind of like the school of fish.So these are robots and rules in two dimensions, but we can also think about robots and rules in three dimensions. So what if we could create robots that could build together? And here, we can take inspiration from social insects. So if you think about mound-building termites or you think about army ants, they create incredible, complex nest structures out of mud and even out of their own bodies. And like the system I showed you before, these insects actually also have pattern rules that help them determine what to build, but the pattern can be made out of other insects, or it could be made out of mud. And we can use that same idea to create rules for robots.So here, you're going to see some simulated robots. So the simulated robot has a motion rule, which is how it traverses through the structure, looking for a place to fit in, and it has pattern rules where it looks at groups of blocks to decide whether to place a block. And with the right motion rules and the right pattern rules, we can actually get the robots to build whatever we want. And of course, everybody wants their own tower.(Laughter)So once we have these rules, we can start to create the robot bodies that go with these rules. So here, you see a robot that can climb over blocks, but it can also lift and move these blocks and it can start to edit the very structure that it's on. But with these rules, this is really only one kind of robot body that you could imagine. You could imagine many different kinds of robot bodies. So if you think about robots that maybe could move sandbags and could help build levees, or we could think of robots that built out of soft materials and worked together to shore up a collapsed building — so just the same kind of rules in different kinds of bodies. Or if, like my group, you are completely obsessed with army ants, then maybe one day we can make robots that can climb over literally anything including other members of their tribe, and self-assemble things out of their own bodies. Once you understand the rules, just many different kinds of robot visions become possible.And coming back to the snorkeling trip, we actually understand a great deal about the rules that fish schools use. So if we can invent the bodies to go with that, then maybe there is a future where I and my group will get to snorkel with a fish school of our own creation.Each of these systems that I showed you brings us closer to having the mathematical and the conceptual tools to create our own versions of collective power, and this can enable many different kinds of future applications, whether you think about robots that build flood barriers or you think about robotic bee colonies that could pollinate crops or underwater schools of robots that monitor coral reefs, or if we reach for the stars and we thinking about programming constellations of satellites. In each of these systems, being able to understand how to design the rules of engagement and being able to create good collective behavior becomes a key to realizing these visions.So, so far I've talked about rules for insects and for fish and for robots, but what about the rules that apply to our own human collective? And the last thought that I'd like to leave you with is that science is of course itself an incredible manifestation of collective intelligence, but unlike the beautiful fish schools that I study, I feel we still have a much longer evolutionary path to walk. So in addition to working on improving the science of robot collectives, I also work on creating robots and thinking about rules that will improve our own scientific collective. There's this saying that I love: who does science determines what science gets done. Imagine a society where we had rules of engagement where every child grew up believing that they could stand here and be a technologist of the future, or where every adult believed that they had the ability not just to understand but to change how science and technology impacts their everyday lives. What would that society look like? I believe that we can do that. I believe that we can choose our rules, and we engineer not just robots but we can engineer our own human collective, and if we do and when we do, it will be beautiful.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/radhika_nagpal_what_intelligent_machines_can_learn_from_a_school_of_fish
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"I took a cell phone and accidentally made myself famous.(Laughter)I was just talking about the things that I cared about, but with the click of a button and an incendiary viral video I propelled myself into overnight stardom. When I say overnight, I mean I literally woke up the next morning with so many notifications on my phone, I thought I slept through a national tragedy.(Laughter)It was the craziest thing, guys, but when it came to my influence and my exposure, I literally took a quantum leap. So I made more videos and the subject matter of my videos was often the most divisive subject in American life, but it was the way that I articulated race that made me somewhat of a digital lightning rod. See, being a survivor myself of police brutality and having lost a childhood friend, Alonzo Ashley, at the hands of the police, I had a little something to say about the topic. You see, this was at the height of the Black Lives Matter furor and people seemed to be turning to me to articulate their viewpoints, and honestly, it was sort of overwhelming.You see, the internet has this interesting quality. In one way, it totally brought the world together, and I remember being a kid and all of this utopian propaganda was being dumped on us about how the World Wide Web was going to span the reaches of people across the globe. But as it turns out, people are people.(Laughter)And this magical superhighway also took the demons of our nature and gave them Ferraris.(Laughter)You see, technology, y'all, is a lot like money. It just brings out what's already inside you and amplifies it. And so I soon became familiar with the phenomenon of the internet troll. These guys seem to live beneath the bridges of said superhighway —(Laughter)And they also missed the memo about the enlightenment of the internet age. I remember being called highly colorful racial slurs by those who use the anonymity of the internet as a Klan hood. And some of them were pretty creative, actually, but others were pretty wounding, especially navigating the post-traumatic world of a police brutality survivor in the height of Black Lives Matter, with all of these people being killed on my timeline. To these trolls, I wasn't a human. I was an idea, an object, a caricature. Did I mention that this race stuff can be kind of divisive? You see, I'm an innately curious person and as I drew my sword to engage in epic battles in the comment section —(Laughter)I also began to notice that a few of my trolls actually had brains, which made me even more curious and what to understand them even further. And although these supposed morons engaged in what appeared to be original thought, I said to myself, ""Um, these guys are highly misinformed, at least according to my knowledge."" Where are these guys getting these arguments from? Like, was there some kind of alternative universe with alternative facts?(Laughter)(Applause)Was history and gravity optional over there? I don't know. But I needed to know. Like, I wanted to know. And as it turns out, I had no idea about digital echo chambers. That same target marketing algorithm that feeds you more of the products you like to buy also feeds you more of the news that you like to hear. I had been living in an online universe that just reflected my worldview back to me. So my timeline was pretty liberal. I had no Breitbart or Infowars or Fox News. No, no, I was all MSNBC and The Daily Show, CNN and theGrio, right? Well, these trolls were hopping the dimensional doorway and I needed to figure out how.(Laughter)So what I decided to do was trick the Facebook algorithm into feeding me more news that I didn't necessarily agree with, and this worked fine for a while, but it wasn't enough, because my online footprint already established the patterns that I like to hear. So with the anonymity of the internet, I went undercover.(Laughter)I set up this ghost profile and went crazy. Now, on a practical level, it was very simple, but on an emotional level, it was kind of daunting, especially with the racist vitriol that I had experienced. But what I didn't realize is that my trolls were inoculating me, thickening my skin, making me immune to viewpoints that I didn't necessarily agree with, and so I didn't react to the same things as I would have several months prior. All right? So I pressed on.Noticing that this stuff also worked on YouTube, I became Lucius25, white supremacist lurker —(Laughter)And digitally I began to infiltrate the infamous alt-right movement. Now, my doppelgänger was Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter character —(Laughter)a sci-fi hero who was once a Confederate soldier. And to think, like, years ago, I would have needed acting training and, like, makeup and a fake ID. Now I could just lurk. And so I started with a little Infowars, went on into some American Renaissance, National Vanguard Alliance, and, you know, I started commenting on videos, talking bad about Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter. I started bemoaning race baiters like Eric Holder and Barack Obama and just mirroring the antiblack sentiments that were thrown at me. And to be honest, it was kind of exhilarating.(Laughter)Like, I would literally spend days clicking through my new racist profile —(Laughter)Goofing off at work in Aryan land. It was something else.(Laughter)And so I then started visiting some of the pages of my former trolls, and a lot of these guys were just regular Joes, a lot of outdoorsmen, hunters, computer nerds, some of them family guys with videos of their families. I mean, for all I know, some of y'all could be in this room right now. Right?(Laughter)But when I went undercover, I found a lovely plethora of characters, luminaries like Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer and David Duke. All of these guys were thought leaders in their own right, but over time, the alt-right movement ended up using their information to fuel their momentum. And I'm going to tell you what else led to the momentum of the alt-right: the left wing's wholesale demonization of everything white and male. If you are a pale-skinned penis-haver, you're in league with Satan.(Laughter)Now, would you believe, would you believe that some people find that offensive? And —(Laughter)And so, I mean, listen, the fact is that millennials get a lifetime of diet brand history. I mean, America seems to be hellbent on filling its textbooks with CliffsNotes versions of its dark past. This severely, severely decontextualizes race and the anger associated with it, and that is fertile ground for alt-facts to grow. Add in the wild landscape of the internet and it's easy to sell rebranded ""Mein Kampf"" ideas to a generation who has been failed by public schools.A lot of these ideas, easily debunked. Alt-facts have that quality. However, one theme kept screaming at me through the subtext of those arguments, and that was, why should I be hated for who I cannot help but be? Now, as a black man in America, that resonated with me. I have spent so much time defending myself against attempts to demonize me and make me apologize for who I am, trying to portray me as something that I'm not, some kind of thug or gangster, a menace to society. Unexpected compassion. Wow. Now, listen, the historical source of the demonization of black males and white males is highly different, and where you fall on this argument, sadly, tends to be an accident of birth.Now, you're probably surprised by this perspective, and so was I. Never in a billion years did I think that I could have some kind of compassion for people who hated my guts. Now, mind you, not enough compassion like I want to be friends. I don't have infinite olive branches to extend to people who, like, would not want to see me on this planet. Right? But just enough compassion to understand how they got to where they are. And to be honest, there were a couple of fair points. One of them was how liberals have this wide acceptance for everybody except for those with honestly held conservative viewpoints.(Laughter)Heaven forbid you love God, this country and mean it. Right?And another thing that they talked about was this fear that they had of something that they labeled as ""white genocide,"" that diversity would be a force that would wipe them out. Now listen, I know what it is to fear for the fate of your people. Between crack, AIDS, gang violence, mass incarceration, gentrification, police shootings, black people have more than enough reasons to stay up at night. But if nature is into diversity and you are not, you're going to lose that fight, buddy.(Laughter)(Applause)You see, nature doesn't care about your race. That's man-made. Nature just cares about healthy organisms, and your precious ethnic features are expendable to that aim. So the moment that you let go of that racist identity and relatch onto humanity, all your problems go away.(Applause)I'm going to tell you what race ain't about to die out: the human race. Join the party. The water's great. Until the water gets too hot, but that's another TED Talk.(Laughter)The point is that to get to this point of understanding, you have to let go of that fear and embrace your curiosity, and sadly, too many people will not take that journey to see the world from the other side. And, I mean, let's be honest, that doesn't just go for progressives, but also to the right wing and conservatives. You know, as fair as some of their points were, they were still trapped in their own echo chambers, recycling old, outdated points of view, never getting a diversity in perspective, not making them well-rounded in their worldview. So they're not hearing certain anti-racist and political voices, voices like Tim Wise and Michelle Alexander, Dr. Joy DeGruy, Boyce Watkins, Tariq Nasheed. All of these voices have the answers to the questions that they want, but unfortunately they will not hear them due to the power of these echo chambers. We have got to break out of these digital divides, because as our technology advances, the consequences of our tribalism become more dangerous.And this whole experience taught me something: our gadgets ain't going to save us. All these technological devices are only mastery of the universe out there, not the one in here. And so that's all IQ, not EQ. That's a dangerous imbalance. Where do you get the emotional intelligence, the character development, the virtues of patience, forbearance, compassion, you know, the things that make sure that these devices, however advanced, become a blessing and not a curse? Seems to be me that humanity itself needs an upgrade.Now —(Applause)That's a big task, understandably, but I don't believe in any kind of unbeatable monster. There was no giant out there without perhaps a simple Achilles heel. And what if I told you that one of the best ways to actually overcome this is to have courageous conversations with difficult people, people who do not see the world the same way that you see the world? Oh yes, folks, conversations may be indeed the key to that upgrade, because remember, language was the first form of virtual reality. It is literally a symbolic representation of the physical world, and through this device, we change the physical world. Keep in mind, conversations stop violence, conversations start countries, they build bridges, and when the chips are down, conversations are the last tools that humans use before they pick up their guns. And I ain't talking about online safe conversations from the security of your laptop. No. I'm talking about in-your-face conversations with real, breathing people. And for me, this looks like running a community forum called Shop Talk Live.Now, in Shop Talk Live — somebody's been there, right? In Shop Talk Live, we have the conversations that change lives. We meet the community right where they are, and we've done everything from divert gang violence in real time to help find people jobs to mentoring homeless youth. And the reason why we needed to do this is because there was a severe lack of trust in the black community due to the violence of the crack era. And so we ended up taking agency into our own hands, solving our own problems, not waiting for anybody else. And the truth is, from the mayor to the felon, you're going to find them in that barber shop. And so what we did was just organize what was already going on. And so what I started doing was mining these alternative viewpoints from these alternative digital universes, dissecting them, breaking them down into controversial talking points. Then, with my cell phone, I flipped the internet against itself and began to broadcast these live conversations to my online followers. This made them want to leave the safety of their laptops and meet us in person to have real conversations with real people in real life. And we did this. Thank you.(Applause)Sometimes I sit back, and I reflect on the paradox of me just trying to solve the problems, us trying to solve the problems in our own communities — we build bridges to so many other communities, from the LGBTQ community to the Arab immigrant community and even sat down with somebody with a Confederate flag on their hat and talked about the things that actually matter.It is time that we stop trying to hack our way around the human experience. There is no way out of each other. Stop trying to find one.(Applause)We have to understand something. Human beings all want the same things and we have to go through each other to get these things. These courageous conversations are the way that these bridges are built. It's time that we start seeing people as people and not simply the ideas that we project onto them or react to. Human beings are not the barriers but the gateways to the very things that we want. This is a collective and conscious evolution.My journey began with a terribly popular cell phone video and a fallen friend. Your journey begins right about now. Join the renaissance in human connection. It is going to happen with or without you. My suggestion: pick a topic, and start a community dialogue in your neck of the woods. Meet folks back in real life. And I'm going to tell you, when you trick the algorithm of your existence, you will get some diversified experiences. It is time to grow, people. And when we do this, not if, it will be clear that the key to this upgrade was always our inner world, not some device that we create, and the doorways to this experience is now, and will forever be, each other.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/theo_e_j_wilson_a_black_man_goes_undercover_in_the_alt_right
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"We humans are becoming an urban species, so cities, they are our natural habitat. That is where we live. In 2014, over 54 percent of the world population was living in cities, and I can bet you that so many of these people have thought of how they would do things differently, like if I only had the tools to change things in my city, what would I do? What would my dream city be like? And these tools, this is just what we gave them. Two years ago, my team and I, we released a game, ""Cities: Skylines."" It is a game about building cities.So I have always been interested in cities as systems. It's something that I find immensely interesting. But what I didn't understand was that I am not alone in this. People love cities. They are interested. They have ideas. The game was an instant hit. So far, over three and a half million people have played it.And it's not just about playing. We also have really awesome sharing systems. So people play, they create cities and then they are sharing these creations, showing off what they have made. And what I will show you is some of these cities created by the players.So the game is about self-expression, creativity, not just overcoming the challenges posed by the simulation. It is about showing what your cities look like.So I have a couple of videos. These are from YouTube. And these are some of the most interesting city designs I have seen. So they are all different, and I hope you like all of these.This one is called The Netherlands. It's by Silvarret. And when you start the game, you have an empty piece of land. This land, it can be based on the real world, it can be hand-crafted in the map editor, or you can, of course, download a city made by someone else and play in that. But what Silvarret has done here is that what he wanted to make was not a real city. This is a fantasy city, even though it looks real. So what he wanted to do was a fantasy city that could be in the Netherlands. So he kind of investigated what are the characteristics of cities in the Netherlands and combined a couple of those, and this is what he created. So it is a city, but it is not a real city, but it could be. It looks just like the Netherlands. So the places are really densely populated. So what you need is highways, trains, anything connecting these small town centers together. Lots of people, lots of moving, so transportation is the key here.But then let's go even more on the fantasy side. Let's go into the future. This is one of my personal favorites. These city designs are what I love the most. So this is a tiered city by Conflictnerd, and the basic idea is that you have concentric circle routes. So the city is a big circle with tinier circles inside. And the thing is that you put all of the services in the center, and then people actually live on the outer ring, because there is less traffic, less noise, less pollution, so that is where you want to live. But the services are still really close by. They are in the center. And this is the soul of the game. The player has to understand what are the wishes, what are the needs of the tiny people living in the cities. So you need to know where you should put the things. Like, it's not enough to have a hospital. It needs to be accessible. Citizens need to reach the hospital. And this is one way to do it. So maybe this is something that we might be seeing someday.And then even more into the future. Astergea by Yuttho. So Yuttho does YouTube videos and plays the game. What he did here was actually a 12-point series of creating this city. So what he does is he plays the game, he records it and he explains as he's going what he's doing and why. And as a part of this series, he actually did an interview with an actual urban planner called Jeff Speck. And Speck is an expert on the concept of walkability. The basic idea is that if you want your citizens to walk, which is kind of beneficial, you actually need to have walking as a reasonable means of transportation. It should be a good way to reach places. So what Yuttho did was that he explained this concept, he had Speck explain it, too, and then he applied it to the city that he was building. So what we are seeing is Yuttho's vision of the future: lots of public transportation, walkways, plazas, connecting high-rise buildings. Maybe this is what the future might look like. And the game system works really well for this.We are seeing some real-world uses to this game. So we know that some urban planners are using it as a sketching tool, so while the simulation is not completely realistic, it is realistic enough that if something works in the game, it is highly likely that it will also work in the real world, so that you can actually try out things, see if this intersection might fit this kind of a situation. If we build a new road, would it help? And this is what you can do with this game.There was one really interesting contest held by the Finnish city of Hämeenlinna. So what they did was that they had a new area that they wanted to develop in the city. They made a map with the existing city, they left empty the area that they would want to develop and shared this map. So anyone could download the map, play the game, build the area and submit their creations to the city council. So they have not yet built anything, but it might just be that they use one of these plans made with the game to actually build the real city.And these videos that I have shown you, these are the people who are coming up with new kinds of solutions. We know that cities are growing. They're getting bigger as we go, and the percentage of population living in cities is projected to rise. So we need the solutions and these people, playing the game, they are trying out different kinds of solutions. They might have something that is really important. So what we are seeing here is dream cities that might be real one day. So it might be that this is not just a game. It might be a way to decide our own fate.Thank you.(Applause)","https://www.ted.com/talks/karoliina_korppoo_how_a_video_game_might_help_us_build_better_cities
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